You wouldn’t guess it from listening to the British coverage of VE Day, but it was the Soviet Union which made the defeat of Nazi Germany possible. An estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died in the conflict, including 11 million soldiers. The United States lost 408,000 troops in the wars in Europe and the Pacific and Britain lost 244,000 soldiers and 60,000 civilians.

Three quarters of German losses were to the Red Army. Soviet casualties comprised 95% of the Allied total. The Red Army confronted 157 Nazi divisions.  The British and American armies in the west faced 60.

These extracts from Ernest Mandel’s book The Meaning of the Second World War is a contribution to our understanding of the Soviet contribution by someone who was lifelong opponent of Stalinism

A new leadership emerges from disaster

The Soviet bureaucracy entered the war with its military forces wholly unprepared for what was to come. The disastrous Finnish campaign of 1939-40 confirmed the terrible state of the Soviet armed forces and encouraged some rethinking and reorganization.

This had been brought about largely by Stalin’s criminal purge of the Red Army, which compounded the effects of the bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy and society.” Totally surprised by Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet leadership did not recover the initiative until the autumn of 1942.  It was able to do so because the tremendous increase in its industrial potential and productive reserve created by the October Revolution and the planned economy – in sharp contrast to the military débâcle of Tsarism in WWI. A new echelon of field commanders soon emerged from the tough school of battle and Stalin’s instinct for self-preservation was sufficiently strong to allow them considerable scope for independent strategic initiative. This led to the victories at Stalingrad, Kursk, Minsk, of the Pruth and Vistula which broke the backbone of the Germany army.

At the end of the war crude attempts were made to present the Red Army’s defeats of 1941-42 as the products of a strategy of calculated retreat, deliberately drawing the Wehrmacht into the Russian interior only to destroy it in a series of counteroffensives. There is no substance whatsoever in such claims. Indeed, Stalin himself vigorously denounced such rumours at the time; they were militarily counterproductive since they encouraged the troops to go on the defensive and fostered defeatism in the ranks.  Once the battle for sheer survival was won, however, and the war had switched from the defensive to the offensive, military strategy began to be influenced by the Kremlin’s plans for a post-war settlement, themselves a reflection of the bureaucracy’s fundamentally contradictory political objectives…

Industry and war

In general, Soviet efforts in weapons production during the war were tremendous, as can be seen from the following figures (which slightly underestimate German output):

	USSR (from July 1941 till August 1945)	Germany (from January 1941 till April 1945)
Tanks and armoured gun carriers	102.8	43.4
Military aircraft	112.1	80.6
Guns of all calibres	482.2	311.5
Grenade throwers	351.8	73.0
Machine-guns	1,515.9	1,096.6
Machine-pistols	6,173.9	1,097.9

Weapons Output during the German Soviet War (1000s)

These figures are all the more impressive as the total industrial potential of German imperialism was greater than the Soviet Union’s atter the conquest of a large proportion of Soviet Western provinces. Soviet success suggests the superiority of a planned economy in centralizing and mobilizing resources as well as the existence of considerable morale among the workforce and the fighting men and women. To be sure, one should not forget that valuable military aid was extended to the Soviet Union by its allies. (The relative and absolute value of this aid has always been in dispute). However, one should bear two factors in mind. Firstly, that Soviet military successes were based primarily and unmistakably on the efforts and sacrifices of the Soviet people themselves, and not on the external aid given to them by the United States. Secondly, that the amount of aid extended by the USA through Lend Lease and otherwise to all its allies was relatively small: some fifteen per cent of its military output and an even smaller percentage of its food production.

Soviet military aircraft design, largely obsolete before the war, advanced steadily, especially under the impact of talented designers like Tupolev, Ilyshin, Yakovlev and Lavochkin; several of these specialists had to be brought out of the Gulag to work in the war industry. Soviet air defence was very successful in defending the capital; whereas the Allies, and especially the Western Allies, could inflict heavy damage on the German cities, the Luftwaffe never succeeded in overcoming Moscow’s air defence.

Stalingrad

… Unable to provide for its security via an enduring alliance with Britain and the United States, the Soviet leadership chose instead to transform the East European border states into a strategic glacis designed to protect the country’s western flank against possible future German revanchism. Given the revolutionary possibilities present in the last phase of the war and the immense sacrifice of the Soviet people themselves, this was a modest enough aim. But it encountered increasing hostility from the erstwhile allies, leading directly to the Cold War…

… The key battle of 1942-43 was the battle of Stalingrad. The attack of the German Sixth Army under Von Paulus commenced on 28 June 1942 and reached the outskirts of Stalingrad exactly one month later. The Red Army’s defence of the Volga metropolis was improvised under conditions of near panic. But with the participation of the workers of that great industrial city, it rapidly assumed epic proportions. Wave after wave of German assaults came within an inch of taking the whole city and were stopped each time as the Red Army and the Stalingrad workers counter-attacked and kept a sector of their city – a factory, a bridgehead – free. Their long and heroic resistance enabled the Soviet General Staff (Stavka) to prepare a counter-offensive. A considerable reserve force had assembled behind the Volga-Don front, concealed from the enemy. While General Halder was becoming increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of the long flank north and south of Stalingrad, Stavka had succeeded in assembling forces which assured it of superiority in numbers and fire power…

… By the end of the Soviet counter-offensive the Wehrmacht had lost a quarter of a million soldiers, the Luftwaffe most of its reserves on the Eastern front, and a huge quantity of tanks, guns and ammunitions.’ The political and psychological gains of the liberation of Stalingrad extended far beyond the immediate military results. Thereafter, an important part of the German officer corps and the German bourgeoisie, not to speak of a broad section of the German people, lost the belief that the Third Reich could still win the war.

The scale of the battle of Stalingrad can perhaps be grasped better if one recalls that Soviet losses in this single encounter were larger than those of the United States in the whole of World War II.

Aftermath – ‘revolutions from above’

From the standpoint of the long-term interests of the working class, not to mention the interests of world socialism it would of course have been preferable if the masses of Rumania and the other Bast European countries had been able to liberate themselves, through their own forms of struggle. The Soviet bureaucracy’s ‘revolutions from above’ bequeathed an ugly political legacy, which has profoundly marked the post-war situation, not only in this part of Europe, but throughout the world. But this issue in turn had been largely pre-determined by what happened in the twenties and thirties, i.e. by the internal crisis of the Comintern and the growing passivity of the labouring masses. Moreover, the ruthless anti-working class and anti-Communist repression of the East European and Balkan ruling classes had contributed to the negative choice made in the international Communist movement, which resulted in the victory of the social revolution conducted through a military-bureaucratic apparatus instead of authentic popular revolutions.