Recent content by Julian

Regarding the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, one under-discussed consequence is the USSR's state of quasi-mobilization on the economy. Increased defense expenditures and conscription into the Red Army led to extreme hidden inflation '38-41 in the non-defense sector, much of the costs of which...

The struggle to balance between investment in heavy industry and light industry/infrastructure/agriculture is, I would say, the most persistent problem in the second half of the 40s. Stalin overwhelmingly favored the former, and it created serious challenges even for favored enterprises. Take...

Zhdanov was in Leningrad until his return to Moscow in November '45. I think his ability to operate independently of Stalin was limited, as do Khlevniuk and Gorlizki: I think Zhdanov can retain control of the Leningrad party organization, and this would be an impressive power base that he...

What does non-Stalinist reconstruction look like? Removing the foundation of Stalin’s system - mass labor coercion - means that the basic strategy of forcibly moving contingents of indentured and unfree labor around to priority “heavy” industries (coal, metallurgy, defense, etc) is DOA...

I don't think that was ever on the agenda. The senior leaders of the Red Army were communists, if not necessarily Stalinists, and owed their reputations and careers to the Party and Stalin's patronage. Stalin's over-reliance on repression obscures the fact that, like Hitler, he had a keen...

Avoiding the Kirov assassination and Terror in the Party also opens the door to a much larger membership base. An understated aspect of the Red Army’s rapid growth was the dilution of Party membership in its ranks, declining from 24% in 1932 to 13% on the eve of war. During the war, it...

Funny enough, I ran into a couple examples recently of rifle units botching their deployment from march columns in ‘44! You also had the problem of political officers transferred to regular officer positions starting in Fall’42, which introduced a lot of uneven quality in the ‘43 Red Army. The...

As others already correctly noted, poor junior leadership is still an enormous issue for the Red Army. Even without the Terror this can’t be fixed given the rapid ‘39-41 expansion. At the same time, the Red Army made do with inadequate and poorly trained junior leaders until the end of the...

Instructions on how to command higher HQs (Corps, Armies, Fronts, etc.) and service manuals for HQ departments (Operations does this, procurement does that) were entirely absent. The memoirs of contemporaries confirm the complete absence of “how to” instructions for higher HQs and the General...

In terms of doctrine, the Terror paralyzed efforts to update manuals and other instructions until it was over (with aftershocks continuing for years). Many pieces drafted or published by repressed individuals were withdrawn from circulation or limited to a narrow circle of leaders. Timoshenko...

Zhukov commented in a 1944 memo that: A much deeper pool of high-ranking, educated officers would be very beneficial. The Terror was also disastrous for military education, especially higher military education. Many skilled and experienced instructors were lost, and the remainder were quite...

Another interesting facet of the postwar era is the rapid growth of the Party just as ideological standards/education were significantly relaxed. The Party dropped from 3.8 million members in ‘41 before declining to 2.7 million in ‘42, then climbing again to per 6 million by the end of the war...

I imagine Molotov will be Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, as he was up until May ‘41. Malenkov could do the job, but will likely be responsible for running the Central Committee Secretariat. He was heavily involved in this body in the first half of ‘41. Beria could too, but...

Re-upping with some additional thoughts. In 1947-48 you had a string of electoral revolts by the Party aktiv against regional first secretaries and other local leaders, led by district Party leaders. The vast majority of regional leaders hadn’t stood for election since before the war and had...

Hagenloh does a good job connecting wider trends in Soviet policing to the launch of the mass operations in Summer '37: Stalin's Police, page 242. Removing Yezhov from the equation helps. Yezhov was a career Party functionary, not a Chekist. He was brought into the post by Stalin as a...