I’ve read a bit about Stalin and I’ve never heard of these letters. A quick search hasn’t turned anything up—does anyone know where this comes from?
I’d like to be able to say something more substantial than “you’re wrong and don’t have sources.”
I’ve read a bit about Stalin and I’ve never heard of these letters. A quick search hasn’t turned anything up—does anyone know where this comes from?
I’d like to be able to say something more substantial than “you’re wrong and don’t have sources.”
I mean, Stalin literally retreated to his dacha and basically had a mental breakdown due to how much the invasion shocked him. For whatever reason, he felt certain that Hitler would not invade until the following spring. Other members of the government had wanted to make more defensive preparations but he refused.
And yeah, they didn't literally invade during the winter, but they did invade late enough in the summer that they were guaranteed to still be fighting in the winter, and the winter did end up being a hugely decisive factor in the war.
I'm sorry but Gkalaitza is right, this is reddit-tier history. There's so many other factors more important than the winter of 41/42. There was a huge logistics deficit in the form of trucks, trains, and rail before the invasion, which were only exacerbated by the invasion itself. The Red Army's ability to create new armies very rapidly to slow down breakthroughs was also a huge factor. Germany's view of the Red Army as an inferior military also played a huge role in how the invasion was planned and prepped for. This notion that the winter was hugely decisive implies that losing Moscow would've meant the surrender of the Soviet Union, which was never going to happen. The winter was certainly a contributing factor but it was not this miraculous event that saved the eastern front.
I apologize if I'm maybe coming off too aggressive but the "russian winter" meme is so often used to erase the efforts of the Soviet people and places undue credit on the weather stopping the Wehrmacht instead of the millions of Red Army soldiers and Soviet partisans who actually did stop them.
I think those other factors are less relevant to my point though. My point is about Stalin's misreading of Hitler's character and his disillusionment when the Germans invaded. Soviet strategists made much of the fact that a winter war would be brutal for the invaders (as did German strategists), and as far as I know, this is the primary reason why Stalin felt sure that Hitler would not invade as far into the summer as he did. Stalin did not think Hitler would place so many stakes on concluding the war so unrealistically rapidly. In reality, Hitler was known to stall decisions until the very last minute, then make a dramatic choice and refuse to change it. Stalin apparently thought he was more coldly rational than that.
Do people really interpret it that way though? If they are, that seems like a separate problem, not anything inherently to do with the "invaded in winter" framing. I mean, would the Soviets have been able to drive the Germans all the way back to Berlin like they did without the onset of the winter? I don't think there's any problem with pointing to winter conditions as the thing that broke the brutal eastward grinding part of the war and reversed it in fairly spectacular fashion. If people are interpreting weather as magic, isolated from any broader historical analysis, that seems like a problem of historical illiteracy, not problematic framing.