>
> It sticks in my craw to assign any of that debt to Marshall Stalin or
> to the CPSU, however. With sane initial deployments, a failure to
> offer Hitler the chance to end the Western front before fighting
> began on the Eastern, and with Tukhachevsky commanding and his
> officer corps to hand, the War in the East would have been much, much
> shorter. As it was, it was a near-run thing--even with the GULAG
> being opened up for officers to return after June 21. Didn't
> Rokossovsky and Vatutin go straight from prison camps to Front
> command?lantz
Up to this point, I was so impressed by your acknowledgment of Soviet heroism in WW2 that I nearly subbed you to the CrashList, in that fascistic compulsory-labour-service way of mine. But as usual you go off the rails half way thru, it's so disappointing. If you know half the history, why not know the whole?
Well, never mind, half an orgasm better than none I suppose.
>
> ?Stephen? Glantz has been writing some very fine books about the
> Great Patriotic War. He has a new one on Kursk that I have not read
David M Glantz. He's actually a serving officer in your army.
>
> There was a third argument in _The Age of Extremes_: that the threat
> of really existing socialism eliminated wholesale repression of the
> working class as a possibility: because the political allegiance of
> the workers needed to be maintained, the only possible forms of
> regime in western Europe after World War II were mixed-economy
> social-democratic ones. This argument seemed to me to make no sense
> at all--
Ah, that's more the Brad I've come to love if not to know.
Mark