Hot answers tagged soviet-union
37
I'm not sure there is any direct evidence that it was strategically a bad idea. Strategically it made sense to attack the Soviet Union while they were weak and unprepared for war. Hitler knew that as he made progress on the Western front that Stalin grew more and more nervous everyday about the growing power of Nazi Germany.
What must be remembered is ...
34
We have to delve into two spheres to address this question, the political and the military.
Militarily, the Japanese fought a series of border skirmishes with the Soviet Union at Khalkhin Gol (located along the Manchurian - Mongolian border, Mongolia then being a "People's Republic" and puppet of the Soviet Union) through early summer to early autumn 1939, ...
27
First of all, the Soviet Union had three seats, not five. An addition to the Soviet Union itself, two of the Soviet republics had seats in the UN: Ukraine and Belarus. This obviously didn't make much sense given that neither of them was an independent state at the time. So it can only be viewed as a way for the Soviet Union to increase its weight in the UN.
...
20
By this time, Germany controlled the entire European peninsula, and it was very hard to see the Allied forces coming back from that.
Hitler told one of his generals in June 1940 that the victories in western Europe "finally freed his hands for his important real task: the showdown with Bolshevism" [from here].
Reasons to attack the Soviet Union ...
15
No! The Cold War was the standoff between the Capitalistic USA and Communistic USSR. Communism lost. What remains is corruption within the former communist country (Russia). The War in Ossetia was over oil (a distinctly capitalistic move) not ideology (spreading Communism) as it would have been were the Cold War still ongoing.
14
TL;DR
Khrushchev wanted to (1) test his political power, and (2) to please the Ukrainian population, and (3) to shift the rebuilding cost to the Ukrainian republic.
Khrushchev wanted to test his political power
If anyone would wanted to challenge Khrushchev, just rising to power, his controversial idea and hollow arguments would be a perfect occasion. The ...
13
Germany always wanted to attack and defeat Soviet Russia. There is an ideological battle between Fascism and Communism. Germany really thought that Russia was the enemy of the world. Some Germans believed, such was the evil of Communism, that when they started the eastern front, the English would come over to there side to fight Communism rather than ...
13
Churchill was not Prime Minister when the MRP was announced or when it went into effect. He wasn't even in the government at all. He was in Parliment, but mostly an exile due to his bellicose views. It was the war that forced the Conservative government to take him in, and he didn't become Prime Minister until after France was invaded, well after the ...
13
I thought for sure he had actually killed someone himself, and early on around the Tflis bank robbery period there were times he almost did.
But Simon Sebag Montefiore recently wrote a biography on Stalin's earlier years (Young Stalin, 2007, Vintage Books), and he states a few times that Stalin himself never pulled a trigger during his whole life (that ...
11
Lenin was never a military leader so never had a uniform.
For the first half of his rule, Stalin was at war with Germany and the uniform was a sign of their joint struggle against the invaders etc. After the war it was a good reminder of the struggle they had faced together.
Krushchev was never really a soldier and didn't wear a uniform.
I don't remember ...
10
The original source for the stories you heard is apparently the book "Scorpion Down" by Ed Offley. The book's statements are questionable to say the least and this book review makes a good point.
I checked what the Russian sources say about K-129. This 2008 interview with Viktor A. Dygalo, the commander of the division that K-129 belonged to, covers this ...
10
As I understand it, the ratio of Soviet to Axis losses was something like 6 or 7 to 1 in 1941, perhaps 2 to 1 in 1942, and (close to) 1 to 1 in the latter part of the war. This includes not only German losses, but those of allies (principally Hungarians, Romanians, and Italians.) So Soviet to German totals would be higher.
The Germans got off to a strong ...
10
There were in fact several domestic attempts to assassinate Stalin.
Source
November 16, 1931. Ogaryov met Stalin on the Ilyinka str. near house 5/2 and tried to pull out his gun, but was stopped by a member of pre-KGB.
In early 1930-s, there was a society of people who called themselves "Klubok" (something like "a roll, a ball" if translated into ...
10
Sometimes it deliberately wasn't kept secret from the enemy. This is from William Taubman's Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, about the Cuban missile crisis in 1962:
At 10:00 A.M., Washington time, when the quarantine went into full
effect, the U.S. strategic Command moved from Defense Condition 3 to
DEFCON 2, one level below that of general war. For ...
9
Japan was interested in extending its influence in Asia and for that it had to confront either USSR or USA. While I don't think that the exact reason for choosing USA is known, Japan was at a clear disadvantage when battling USSR: while the Soviet Union had established overland supply line for its troops in the far east (Trans-Siberian Railway) the Japanese ...
9
A widely cited figure is "500,000 sq mi of Russian territory" occupied by Nazi Germany, but it does not seem plausible because of the imprecise choice of wording.
Wikipedia says (without providing a reference), that in course of Operation Barbarossa Germany captured 1.3 mln km2 until the end of 1941 plus a maximum of 0.65 mln km2 later. That would be a ...
9
Yes, in 1944 there was operation Zeppelin, a German plot to assassinate Stalin. Also, Beria supposedly claimed to have killed Stalin, although it's more likely that this is a reference to him delaying treatment after Stalin had a stroke.
While Stalin was responsible for the imprisonment and executions of many Russians, it is also worth remembering that ...
8
They had a treaty beginning in 1941, after a few skirmishes along the area in question. They were also a member of the Tripartite Pact, which they remainded a member of even after Germany attacked the Soviet Union
references: Wikipedia
8
Unfortunately, we cannot ask Hitler about that and he didn't leave any written notices about his reasons. So every answer to that question is a speculation and I've seen a number of such speculations.
The official Soviet version states an ideological war between fascism and communism that prompted Hitler to attack the Soviet Union without considering ...
8
The Red Army was not an effective fighting force in the beginning, for many reasons. (Including the fact that Stalin had just slaughtered the officer corps) The early days of the war were largely a one-sided affair, where the German Army's biggest challenge was dealing with tens or hundreds of thousands of surrendering Soviet troops. As time progressed, the ...
8
NKVD means Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennih Del, that is People's Comissariat of Internal Affairs. It was just a general internal affairs department. Although it included law enforcement agencies, it on the other hand included firefighters and civil registry services too.
Now GPU/OGPU was the secret police which sometimes was a part of NKVD, and sometimes was ...
8
Baltic fleet:
There were a whole bunch of mines laid by Germany and their co-belligerents Finland and Sweden shortly before the Great Patriotic War began, which did not help the naval forces in Leningrad. This and the fast German advance up the Baltic coast prevented the Russians making my use of their surface fleet in open water. See the wikipedia page.
...
8
Unlike Soviet ground forces the fleet was well prepared at the beginning of German invasion and did not panic or wait for orders.
For example as early as August 1941 Baltic fleet air force bombed Berlin from the island Ezel. In 1941 Baltic fleet placed 12047 mines.
In 1943 the Finns together with the Germans successfully placed a net across the Gulf of ...
8
The Panama Canal was closed to Soviet warships for the duration of the Cold War. On December 6, 2008, the destroyer *Admiral Chabanenko" became the first Russian or Soviet military vessel to transit the Canal since 1944.
Soviet-flagged civilian vessels seem to have been permitted, at least for a while. A Canberra Times article from 22 April 1948 reports ...
8
I trust David Remnick's Lenins's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire as a source, which includes this passage:
To begin with, Gorbachev himself was still convinced of what he called
the "rightness of socialist choice." He continued to see Lenin as his
guiding intellectual and historical model. There is absolutely no
evidence to suggest that ...
7
One reason was that the Prague Spring leaders paid "lip service" to Communism and Soviet rule throughout. In essence, they weren't (officially) trying to overthrow the Soviet regime so much as they were trying to "modify" it. This had some acquiescence of the Soviet Union, who was trying a modest series of reforms (post Khrushchev), until things "got out of ...
7
Hitler turned his attention from Britain to the Soviet Union because he lost the Battle of Britain and because Nazi ideology left him no other choice.
In the summer of 1940, Hitler launched a massive air campaign to destroy the RAF and pave the way for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain. Hitler believed that to get past the Royal Navy he needed ...
7
The secret protocol was known to the US government as early as 24 August 1939. It was passed to US diplomat Charles Bohlen by Hans von Herwath, a German diplomat.
The US ambassador in Moscow Laurence Steinhardt passed that information to US secretary of state Cordell Hull on the same day.
Hull immediately informed British minister of foreign affairs Edward ...
7
I think your information is incorrect. I think Khrushchev very rarely wore military uniform when he became a leader.
The son of Nikita Khrushchev tells in his memoirs http://lib.rtg.su/memor/35/84.html that until 1958 Khrushchev had only WWII front-line uniform. In 1958 for the 40-years jubilee of the Soviet Army he sewed a new uniform for the occasion, in ...
7
The Review Article, Antony Kalashnikov (2012) "Differing Interpretations: Causes of the Collapse of the Soviet Union" Constellations:
"there is a correlation between mediums of writing and the "factor of collapse" they tend to espouse."
"that the historiography is best classified by "factors for collapse", and that these are: economic, nationalities, ...
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