> 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?
No.
N. F. Vatutin had been Deputy Chief of the General Staff since at least the fall of 1940. According to the authoritative John Erickson ("The Soviet High Command" p.508), he had been "undergoing training in the staff academy" at the time of the 1937-8 purges. If anything, it seems he is an instance of an immensely competent officer who reached senior command level as a *result* of the purge.
Rokossovsky, who of course had been arrested, had long since been exonerated. He had been promoted Major General in June 1940, and by the fall of 1940 given command of one of the newly created mechanized corps. (Erickson, "The Road to Stalingrad" p.19). Nor does his case support Brad's unnuanced coldwar antisovietism. Rokossovsky did not confess, but successfully defended himself at his trial (see Erickson,id).
Brad says: " ... It sticks in my craw to assign any of that debt [for the defeat of the Nazis] to Marshall Stalin or to the CPSU... " This is very unfair. The CPSU were a large section of "the people of Russia" and without question constituted the section that led the resistance to the Nazis in the military, among the partizans, in the factories. (And, if Jews, they were executed on sight if captured by the Wehrmacht - the infamous "commissar order") And were the section that suffered most from the Yezhovschina and the crimes of Stalin. By my book they are among (even foremost among) the true heroes of the 20th century.
john mage