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As we know, Stalin basically had his head up his read end in the period December 1940-June 1941 about the growing ominous build-up on his border, screaming 'it's not happening', basically. Stalin didn't believe Hitler would fight a two-front war and refused to believe that his own political games had backfired on him because he knew that he was likely to lose a war.

Suppose he had done something with the intelligence reports that were almost literally flooding in not only from the NKVD, but also the British and even the Swedes who gave him the exact date of the invasion. He had months to clear out the western military districts for more defensive lines that would favour the Red Army. Stalin knew as well as any of his generals that his army was in a bad state in June 1941. He also could have removed the Red Air Force from airstrips in eastern Poland and spread them out over facilities across the western Soviet Union. They could also have mobilized and/or hold military exercises to let the Germans know they know of Barbarossa. This way, many units would not have been surrounded and hundreds of thousands would have survived those first six months to fight again later. Similarly, the Red Air Force wouldn't have suffered the loss of 3922 planes (most of them on the ground) on the first day of combat.

What would the effect have been? Would the war end earlier, perhaps in the winter of 1944-'45? How far would the Germans get? Would we still see a Battle of Moscow or Stalingrad or could they be held on a Leningrad-Minsk-Dnieper line? How would the post-war world shape up with a relatively stronger USSR, possibly with the iron curtain extending further west.
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