Why did the USSR win WWII but Imperial Russia collapse in WWI?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Here because there's no way this discussion doesn't turn political in a hurry.

The root of this question is a very simple one: V-E Day in 1945 saw the Hammer and Sickle raised over the Reichstag in a gutted, burned out, hollowed Berlin. The Soviet army had from the first fought and both won and lost battles that included some of the greatest victories by one side over another, and the most appalling defeats any state has survived to win a war at all, let alone as decisively as the USSR did. But in WWI, by comparison, at the time of Brest-Litovsk Russia fell into a civil war and the Germans were able to roam at will wherever they wanted to without anything particular that Russians could do to stop them.

So this is the question at the heart of this OP: how did the USSR survive defeats in 1941-2 that were much more shattering than any others in military history, while the Tsarist regime, which actually had a fair set of victories to its credit by WWI standards disintegrated so totally that that Russia went through two more governments and a phase when the strongest military forces in Russia were Czechoslovaks and the Latvian Riflemen?

It can't be defeats suffered on the battlefield, as the 1941-2 phase saw worse Soviet defeats than any suffered by Nicholas II's army. It can't really be reliance on foreign aid as the USSR ground up Nazi offensive capability before Lend-Lease mattered (though the later Soviet offensives were never going to happen without all those trucks and railroads). Nor is it necessarily people seeking to undermine Russia more in WWI, as in practice this really kicked in once the Russian Revolutions began. And while Stalin may have been better able to rally Russia than Nicholas II, Stalin's cruelty and callousness played no small part in the horrific Soviet disasters of 1941-2 and also in Third Kharkov, for that matter.

So what made the difference between the Russia of WWI and the USSR of WWII?

I think at the crudest level the difference is that Stalin was a ruthless, evil man able to make the USSR work in a life or death crisis and Nicholas II was a blithering idiot who would not be believable as a leader in terms of his overall malignant influence were he not real and the consequences of his incompetence not also real. At the flip side, the Kaiser and his army were no different than their neighbors, while the Nazis just had to be Nazis to create a Soviet Rally Round The Flag mentality.

Comments

[fierceleaf.livejournal.com]

It is true. According to what war veterans told me, the moral was incredible, despite the horrible things I wrote in the parallel thread.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that in both cases the Imperial Russian regime and the Soviet Union actually lost their best and strongest armies in the very first stage of the fighting. The bulk of WWI in the Eastern Front was fought on Russian soil as far as their war with Germany went (now whenever Russia fought the Ottomans or the Austro-Hungarians the lopsided defeats went the other way around, admittedly). So when the two have the exact same pattern replicate themselves, this is hardly a difference.

[taurus-1.livejournal.com]

By the way, according to historical sources, "Russian soils" are situated from Finland over Poland to Bulgaria and Serbia.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, yes. The only WWII campaign fought for a prolonged period of time in the Great Russian heartland was the Siege of Leningrad. The Stalingrad Campaign unfolded as this but the actual intent was to capture the non-Russian Caucasus. From a modern nationalist POV very little of WWI *or* WWII were actually fought *in Russia*. They were fought instead in the European areas of the Soviet and Romanov empires. Thus the claim that losing Warsaw is less morale-impacting than losing Minsk doesn't quite hold water when most of WWII in the USSR was fought in non-Russian territory also. The cause must thus be more than Germans fighting on non-European parts of the Russian Empire. Likewise the savage approach of the Tsars to human life means that what failed for them had zero guarantee to work with the Soviets being the ones doing it, and their approach had to be at least somewhat more nuanced than that as Stalin in particular was obsessive about real and imagined threats to his power base. Of which sheer stupid brutality is a very obvious one in his direct memory.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, there's not exact, and there's comparing the steamroller to the blundering conduct of say, the Leningrad battles when the Soviets threw riflemen against panzers hoping that enough dead bodies would slow them down. The moreso when we factor in how much of the Red Army officer corps got its combat training in the army of Nicholas II. In which case we can question if that's not so much difference as the same people repeating the same folly.

[fierceleaf.livejournal.com]

IMO, both Stalin and Nikolai II were incompetent bastards. But Stalin's regime allowed him to throw hundreds of thousands of people into the slaughterhouse. There is a clean evidence that marshal Zhukov ordered recruits to march through mine fields in order to clean the road for tanks. The another evidence is the usage of machine guns to prevent retreats from futile attacks. "Burnt by the Sun 2" by Nikita Mikhalkov is a good depiction of such practice.

[fierceleaf.livejournal.com]

Sorry, my fault, my statement was not exactly true. I've mindlessly repeated the war myth. But I was close:

«There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a mine field our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of with mine fields. The attacking infantry does not set off the vehicular mines, so after they have penetrated to the far side of the field they form a bridgehead, after which the engineers come up and dig out channels through which our vehicles can go.»

Marshal Zhukov. Eisenhower memoirs.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No different than Hitler's orders for things like his army being *REQUIRED* to shoot people and to loot and rape and destroy as basic military objectives. The Soviets were within ordinary morality enough to cover up these crimes and to lie about them. In 1943 when Odilo Globocnik told Adolf Hitler that if people did not cheer the Nazi Holocaust then all of National Socialism had been in vain, Hitler agreed with him. Which is more horrifying? The cruel criminals who engage in barbarism behind closed doors or the ones that cheerfully and willfully machine gun women and children in the back?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I would for another reason: The Russian Steamroller of WWI *was* the concept that Russia would win its war by burying Germans amidst a mountain of Russian corpses. The degree to which it worked can be gauged by the Tsar that used that idea being deposed in 1917. The Imperial Russian and Soviet regimes *both* spent lives like candy, so if we say the one succeeded with it, the question remains why the even cruder idea of the first version utterly failed.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except Nicholas II's sole concept of strategy was what was known as the Steamroller. Which is pretty much the exact same concept but without tanks or air power. When Nicholas II did this, it took less than 3 years for the Russian Empire to shatter. Stalin does this and he smashes Germany's logistics in the first six months of the war and by eighteen months into it shattered Germany's strategic offensive power, and a little over three years into it Germany's tactical offensive power, at least where its war with the USSR was concerned, died a horrible death at Kursk. Nobody will ever accuse Nicholas II of caring about human life, so it can't be that factor, either.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Not probably, this was a guarantee.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

Overstretched german supplies routes and cold-cold russian winter? Just like in the first Great Patriotic War :D

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that in the case of WWI Russia actually didn't do all that terribly in terms of the actual fighting. In Galicia Russian armies were able to make the greatest advances and actual strategic victories on the Allied side, while in the war with the Ottomans Russia had all of one major defeat and it was a pittance of a defeat, where the British didn't win a major battle with the Ottomans until 1917. By comparison the Soviet Union in 1941-2 underwent much more disastrous catastrophes than did the Tsar, or even Kerensky. Yet the Soviet disasters culminated in Rokossovsky meeting Ike on the Elbe, where the Tsar's victories in Galicia and the Caucasus led to the rise of Lenin.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

German mistakes and not so much what the Soviets did right: e.g. Nazi mistreatment of native populations in the Soviet territory they liberated was a huge logistical mistake.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to add that. Especially that this population already had to meet and greet german army some 25 years before.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

There was a documentary a few years ago that interviewed key personnel that were in Hitler's inner circle and they talked about a lot of key mistakes he made. If you haven't seen this yet, it's available on Youtube now. How Hitler Lost the War



This issue of abusing native populations was a specific item and a key one cited in the documentary.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

thanks, i'll check it out

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

I disagree. I think the crudest answer is that a monarchy is a terribly conservative and enfeebled regime by which to run a country, or fight a war. Communism was incredibly revolutionary and powerful regime by which to industrialize a nation and put everyone on a war footing. Monarchies always have to strike a balance between war-time efficacy, and peace-time dangers of risible peasants liable to revolt and waste a good year of harvest over some silly thing like subsidies (in the old sense of the word).

Underscoring this point is the Napoleonic revolution of warfare in the face of recalcitrant European monarchies. Later on, the German military establishment was a holdout of Prussian imperial conservatism, unwilling and unable to fight Russia on modern terms. Germany has always been fatalistically conservative in war, even when they're controlled by a fascist establishment.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that by WWI standards Russia's armies hardly performed worse than others. The 1914 offensive in Galicia was a masterpiece of conventional maneuver war of the time, the Siege of Premyzl brought a massive prisoner haul, and the Brusilov Offensive was the swansong of the Habsburg Empire, it died there even if its zombie-like hulk lasted another 2 years. If we contrast this relatively better performance with the complete catastrophes of the first Soviet phase of WWII, it raises the question of how one regime survived so many disasters and another survived its own to triumph?

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

I'm sure the monarchy was impressively conventional.

If we contrast this relatively better performance with the complete catastrophes of the first Soviet phase of WWII, it raises the question of how one regime survived so many disasters and another survived its own to triumph?
Because the levels of mobilization seen in the USSR far outstripped whatever the Tsars could do in their wildest dreams. You can be impressively conventional with a limited effort. It's the difference between a forced industrialization and the old ho-hum way of doing things in the last Great Hurrah of 1914.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

It's a very complicated issue...as much as I have a certain sentimentality for Imperial Russia, and a complete and utter loathing of all things Bolshevik, Russia had very similar problems to the other huge, multi-ethnic continental empires of the day, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, only magnified ten times, compounded with a thoroughly corrupt and inefficient administrative system that failed at all levels and made Kafka's vaguely Austro-Hungarian system from The Trial look benign in comparison. Add to that the fact that Nicholas II was apparently a nice guy in person, but a terrible ruler.

Not to say that the other Allies were better than Russia (until my dying day I will fight valiantly against the ridiculous notion that the Great War was about "defending democracy," as so many of my more ignorant countrymen persist on believing), when Britain and France (and even Brave Little Belgium) ran their global empires every bit as brutally as Germany and Austria-Hungary, but Russia was just a revolutionary disaster waiting to happen. Free the serfs? Sure...but then put them under a crushing system of redemption payments that left many serfs arguably worse off than they had been before. Losing big wars, failing to modernize, a broken administration, incompetence at the top and petty corruption at the bottom....

Also, the Soviet Union was (yes, I dare say it) evil, from top to bottom, cold, calculating, and organized evil. Destined to fail? Yes. Only spared the odious distinction of "murdered the most people, ever" by Red China's even more diabolical regime? Yes. But capable of organized ruthlessness (e.g. forced collectivization, engineered famines, massive purges, the complete transplantation of entire industries in a short time period, production of war materiel in numbers hitherto unseen) on a scale undreamed of by even the nastiest of the Tsars.

Of course, taking the long view, the Russian Empire under the Romanovs lasted four times as long as the Soviet Union did. :P

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, the problems with this are several from a strictly historical POV: in too many ways Nicholas II's regime, with its concept of the Steamroller, its use of Blocking Detachments, and its tendency to reward failure with more manpower directly resembles the Soviet Union. Too, Nicholas II at least against the Germans spent almost all of his war with them fighting on Russian territory, just like Stalin did (given how much of the USSR's experience in WWII was in Ukraine and Belarus the same factor of fighting in non-Great Russian territory applies to both). And there's hardly much to compare in terms of Soviet blunders with Tsarist ones, the battles like Second Kharkov and the Siniavo battles are as gruesome as any of Nicholas II's mistakes.

So there have to be reasons why identical patterns with the Commies worked for them and failed under the Tsar.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

IAWTC

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

I think you're right and that a lot of it was Stalin's control over his own government and his ability to function (at least somewhat) in a crisis better than Nicholas II.

Part of it was probably also Stalin's pre-war political organization. The Tsar's secret police had been unable to remove most of the dissent against the regime in the heart of Russia, Stalin was much more effective in the USSR. There was nobody to rally around at the center, so the peripheral rebels, like the Ukranian separatists, were forced to ally with foreigners. Stalin's draconian policies reduced his military readiness, but increased his political stability for the moment.

Another part might be time. From the beginning of World War I to the February Revolution is about two and a half years. Two and a half years from the start of Operation Barbarossa would have been about the beginning of the year in 1944. By that time the Soviets had pushed the Germans from the Volga over the Donets and all the way to the Dnieper along the southern front. Although the Russians had several victories in WWI, most notably against the Austrians, Stalingrad was a much more decisive and morale-raising affair, largely thanks to the USSR's propaganda team. Meanwhile, the Germans were losing on other fronts, and Italy, Germany's partner, had already lost a significant amount of territory to allied invasion. It was probably clear (or could be spun as such) to the soldiers on the ground that things were going forward. They were expanding their territory, not going back and forth, and the Germans were retreating. It was easier for Stalin to spin this as him doing a good job than it was for Nicholas, which dramatically reduces internal tensions.

One wonders what a strict German-Russian war would have looked like, and what the USSR would have done if the war had lasted several more years. But it didn't, so we'll never get to know.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

With the caveats to this that almost every member of the Bolshevik Politburo but Stalin himself was in exile at the start of WWI, while the Tsar's dissidents were openly financed by Germany more than they relied on their own strength. With Nicholas II winning more clear-cut victories than Stalin did for some time in WWII. The first Soviet parallel to the Galician Offensive didn't come until 1942 in terms of a clear-cut victory as opposed to a more ambiguous recapture of territory. By comparison to this the Tsar won major victories right out of the starting gate.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Victories and defeats both depending on how you count Tannenburg, but it's interesting the way that the two seesawed when compared over time. The Imperial Russian army seems to have been doing better in 1914 (in terms of moving over ground) than in late 1916. On the other hand, the Soviet Army was doing much better by 1944 than it had been in 1941 (or most of 1942). It's probably better for a country to be winning later on than at the beginning politically speaking - maybe a version of the "first hundred days" or so.

It's also interesting that the Tsar's war increased the number of dissidents in the Russian industrial heartland, while the Nazi offensive actually cut off huge swaths of anti-Soviet sentiment. That might have something to do with the difference in the way the two opposition movements evolved. The Tsar's failure, however, to root out or drown in fear all of the communist groups had a much greater impact though than Stalin's inability to completely crush all national pride on the Soviet periphery. Maybe that's a lesson in putting your geographical center of power in secure territory...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually it was a pretty consistent mixture. At Premyzl and in the Brusilov Offensive Russia's the only Ally to make great prisoner hauls. Against the Germans the Russians did win some battles when they were on the defensive, not when they attacked. Against the Ottomans Russia was an unstoppable force against a very movable object. It's worth noting that the biggest Allied victory of the war was in 1916 and came from Russia. Militarily speaking, given this is WWI we're talking about, Russia had almost no military reason to collapse in terms of defeats, it didn't spend months capturing a few woods and hills for several hundred thousand dead like on the Somme or the endless savagery for no purpose on the Isonzo. By comparison to that, the collapse of the Soviet Union in the wake of Barbarossa was expected by everybody but Stalin, and Hitler actually was more generous to Soviet abilities to fight than FDR's Administration was (I am actually serious about this. Hitler expected a three month war, we gave it one month).

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

I'm actually sort of curious about how the average soldier saw it. The Brusilov offensives were potent, but we know this because we have access to information from both sides of the battle and know that it broke the Austrian army. For the Russian soldiers in the trenches it must have looked like a series of short advances, followed by a headlong collision with a strong enemy. Meanwhile the German successes pushed the Russian front hundreds of kilometers, and took cities that they could brag about. I wonder how different the morale effect was between an offensive that worked, but only gained a small strip of land, and one that had failed and forced Russia to give up Russian Poland. Winning by killing the enemy is valid, but if you do it without some metric to measure it (like captured territory), soldiers may began to think the affair is endless (like in guerrilla warfare, where it seems like no matter how many 'guerrillas' you kill there are always more, which in turn causes some moral exhaustion).

Whatever the case, the Russian Army was exhausted by 1917 - Brusilov noted this in his build-up to the Kerensky offensive. Soldiers, who mostly had stayed out of the revolution while on the front line (too busy being shot at), just wanted everything to be over and go home. One wonders if WWI was just harder psychologically on the men then WWII was, something about fighting from fixed positions instead of moving. Or maybe it was just leadership that didn't care (one thing Stalin's reign of terror did was make people very interested in performing well enough to not be shot). The fall of the Tsar just brought that exhaustion into the open.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Before the Great War, the Russians had been demoralized by their defeat at the hands of the Japanese. There was a civil conflict brewing that undermined military morale. The Red Army proved more effective in deterring Japanese aggression.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The 1905 Revolution had a more complex rule than the Russo-Japanese War alone, but it certainly played a factor in why Nicholas II's regime was ultimately as fragile as it was. By the same token the USSR had the Finland debacle.....

[jolly-roger.livejournal.com]

Much before. 10 years. Russian military morale was extremely high immediately before Greate War.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Not to overly simplify things, but when were the Lake Baikul oil fields tapped? If they were developed before the Nazis invaded, the fuel would have allowed the Soviets industrial capacity the coal-cracking Germans could only dream of.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Technically speaking the USSR had two advantages in this regard: 1) free logistics thanks to Lend-Lease, 2) thanks to Lend-Lease it spammed the Nazis with firepower and armor to which the shoddy Nazi industrial system was never going to respond well to.

[taurus-1.livejournal.com]

As I said earlier, there was the global historical challenge named "who will rise the 3rd Rome Empire". It was Russia who took the flag since tha last crash of the Rome Empire in 800-900s. There were a lot of ambiguity throughout past 10 centuries having Germany princesses over Russian throne, for example. The new era of democracy in 19th century have made world governments to align their visions with the constantly widening freedom of the single person. There were a strong challenge to the DMP's personality to meet the new era's requirements of flexibility of the government strategies. Unfortunately, Nicolas II was not able to accept this challenge due to his personal inabilities, while Josef Stalin was.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And yet Stalin's Empire didn't even make it out of the 20th Century.....

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And yet militarily speaking there's a more credible record for Nicholas II's Army than there is for Stalin's for much of Nicholas II's war......

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

The same nationalism that allowed communism to happen. What now. :P

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

I'd say two things:

First, Marshal Zhukov was a briliant commander. He was able to come up with ways to counter the Germans on every level and constantly one step ahead of his German counterparts.

Second, the Soviets had a complete disregard for human life. If there was a minefield, US or German troops would be slowed down, the Soviets would simply advance and take the losses, or be shot by the NKVD. The Soviet Union had a population that was two and a half times the size of Germany, so they could afford the defeats of 1941-1942 in terms of population and they simply didn't matter in terms of morale.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except the Tsars had even less regard for human life. The Soviets *intended* to wage a war of machines, not men. What they got was a war of men against machines, but it wasn't their actual goal, and by the last two years of the war the Soviets were rolling over the Germans and relying on firepower as much as the USA did. The Tsar's concept of the Steamroller amounted to exactly "Germans may be superior to 3 Russians, but we have 6." And it didn't work at all. It can't be disregard for human life that leads to victory for the Soviets when it was a big part of why the Tsar lost popularity and any kind of respect at all in Russia after a certain point.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Just because Tsar Nicholas II was able to lose wars because of his disregard for human life doesn't mean the Soviets weren't able to use it to win a war. Stalin's application of ruthlessness was simply more effective and complete.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, Nicholas II's was more ruthless, which is why he failed. Stalin's was *smarter* and relied on massive applications of firepower *also* which is why his was more effective, and even then attrition in Leningrad never delivered a real Soviet victory in a strategic sense at any point. Attrition doesn't work in an age of firepower and it debatably worked in the pre-firepower age.