[lbo-talk] re: Red Army purge: Reply Part Two_ What Was Going On?

Hari Kumar hari.kumar at sympatico.ca
Sun Feb 8 16:30:02 PST 2004


On Wed, 4 Feb 2004: "Grant Lee" <grantlee at iinet.net.au> wrote: Subject: [lbo-talk] to Red Army purge: Reply Part Two_ What Was Going On? Dear Grant, In part One I tried to answer as accurately as I could my sense of the numbers. Those are quite important of course. However, at least as important if not more so, is context. I will here offer three main contextual matters, that I submit are critical to solve the many remaining equations surrounding the role of JVS in the Second WW. i) I submit the overall context is that surrounding the wish of the UK & French imperialists to turn the Hitler engine against the Soviets. Carr, not a notable apologist for Stalin, says this: "The most striking feature of the Soviet-German negotiations . . . is the extreme caution with which they were conducted from the Soviet side, and the prolonged Soviet resistance to close the doors on the Western negotiations". (E. H. Carr: 'From Munich to Moscow: II', in: 'Soviet Studies', Volume 1, No. 12 (October 1949); p. 104). The goal of Turning Hitler East  was the name of the Appeasement game, and the deliciously named Drax delegation epitomizes the Allies real intentions: Admiral Reginald Plunkett-Ernie-Erle-Drax was appointed to head the British delegation. No one, apparently, had informed the British government that the aeroplane had been invented, and the delegation left Tilbury by a slow boat to Leningrad, from where they proceeded by train to Moscow. When the delegation finally arrived in Moscow on 11 August, the Soviet side discovered that it had no powers to negotiate, only to 'hold talks'. Furthermore, the British delegation was officially instructed to: "Go very slowly with the conversations"; ('Documents on British Foreign Policy;', 3rd Series, Volume 6; London; 1953; Appendix 5; p. 763).

I forbear to write in more detail on this, preferring to refer the reader to our views on this matter at http://www.allianceML.com/AllianceIssues/AllJVS2WWNSC.htm http://www.allianceML.com/AllianceIssues/WBBJVSNaziPact.htm

ii) Claims that JVS was blind; that he thought against hope that Hitler would never turn against the R-Molotov Pact; etc etc are Just So

stories. Again  perhaps recent scholarship might inject some glimpses. Thus another pair of non-apologists for JVS  Bryan Fulgate & Lev Dvoretsky, in Thunder on the Dnepr ; California 1997, write of very little known War Games that were held in the Soviet Union. These essentially pitted the offensive strategy against the defensive strategy. Even hostile writers such as Glantz & House point out that very careful thinking was going on in the USSR, recognising that it was beleaguered as Socialism in one Country was being built - & that this had to entail notions of defence. These led to serious thought regarding offensive versus defensive strategies. During the 1920s the experience of the Civil War led Soviet military writers to review all their concepts for waging war. The former Tsarist officer A.A.Sevchin led the strategic debate, while M.V.Frunze tried to formulate a uniform military doctrine appropriate to a socialist state. Perhaps most importantly the brilliant Civil War Commander M.N.Tuhkachevsky and the military theorist V.K.Triandafillov developed a strategic theory of successive operations based on the Soviet military failure against Poland in 1920, and the failed German offensive against France in 1918. Put simply, they believed that modern armies were too large and resilient to be defeated in one cataclysmic battle. Instead the attacker would have to fight a series of offensive battles, each followed by a rapid exploitation into the enemy rear and then another battle when the defender reorganized his forces. To place these battles in a common strategic context, Soviet soldiers began to think of a new level of warfare, midway between the tactics of individual battles & the strategy of an entire war. This intermediate level became know as Operational Art (operativnaia iskusstva). Operational Art may be thought of as the realm of senior commanders who plan and coordinate operations of large formations within the context of a strategic operation or an entire campaign, that is a series of actions culminating in the achievement of a strategic objective . Glantz DM & House J: When Titans Clashed  How the Red Army Stopped Hitler ; Kansas 1995; p. 7. These discussions revolved around the concept that actually won the war for the Soviets. Fugate & Dvoretsky draw on the opened Defense Ministry & Zhukovs memoirs & correspondence that explicate the nature of war game planning , and the timing of new Games in the knowledge that the Hitler-ites were going to launch an attack in the spring. There is no dearth of information that such news was getting through to the USSR (e.g. Richard Sorges testimony form Japan etc). The prevailing paradigm has been that Stalin was so stupid &/or blind etc, that he did not countenance & credit this data. While others previously have shown that this is nonsense, Fugate & D bring new data to the field:

War gaming in the Soviet military was considered the ultimate form of strategic planning& The same was not true in the West... The intelligence information made available to Stalin by this tie shows that by the end of December 1940, there was complete information regarding German intentions to invade the Soviet Union in the paring of 1941. Statements in a Soviet historical journal claim that the Soviet attaché in Berlin came into possession of either a detailed document describing the Barbarossa directive which was signed by Hitler on Dec 18, 1940, or a draft copy of the plan itself. .. What probably happened was that the Soviet (dictator - HK) called together his closest military & security advisors after the conference and told them in general terms what he knew.. & asked for their opinion&&& Zhukov & Timoshenko, out of sheer frustration, offered a compromise  put the current situation on a amp board & play it out & it was obvious to Stalin that this was the only way that he could ever know if the strategy needed to be revised&.. Stalin ordered Meretskov to revise the game plan & The victor was Zhukov . Pp. 43-44.

iii) Briefly, I want to suggest that the Third contextual matter to raise, is that of the usual paradigm. Notwithstanding Plekhanovs Role of the Individual in History, many who call themselves Marxists [In this instance naturally these tend to be Trotskys followers] usually adopt the usual paradigm of the bourgeoisie. This goes: Stalin was mad, or, was bad; or was a sadist .. with numerous permutations of this to the power 10 superscript n=155. Whatever the precise mix of these scripts goes, they do devolve down to the common theme, that Stalin was a dictator (As noted by Fugate & D despite their attempts at revision  see above quotation) who was in control. It is this paradigm that I believe is incorrect, & this paradigm that I believe the new data being put out by the so-called revisionist historians is still being digested  but is in need of urgent appraisal. Well  urgent that is for the ML-ist movement if no one else! Our own theses have been informed, but not initiated, by the work of an earlier scholar  W.O. McCagg and his Stalin Embattled 1943-1948 ; Detroit 1978 . This is probably all that is necessary to say at this stage. Sincerely, Hari Kumar. END



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