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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-049
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
New Cold War:
Julian Assange:
Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled – 21:35 UTC · Jun 26, 2021
Great reporting by @GunnarHrafnJ on the FBI’s key witness—a serial child molester, fraudster & embezzler who was granted immunity to work as an informant & continued his crime spree while under FBI protection — to build their case against Assange.
Covid-19 – Spread:
Two Delta variant cases in Sydney were traced back to a man who had only passed those he infected and had kept some two feet away from them. That is a measles level of infectiousness, way higher than older variants.
Covid-19 Therapeutics:
Covid-19 Social consequences:
> Results: Between 2010 and 2018, the gap in life expectancy between the US and the peer country average increased from 1.88 years (78.66 v 80.54 years, respectively) to 3.05 years (78.74 v 81.78 years). Between 2018 and 2020, life expectancy in the US decreased by 1.87 years (to 76.87 years), 8.5 times the average decrease in peer countries (0.22 years), widening the gap to 4.69 years. Life expectancy in the US decreased disproportionately among racial and ethnic minority groups between 2018 and 2020, declining by 3.88, 3.25, and 1.36 years in Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic White populations, respectively. In Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black populations, reductions in life expectancy were 15 and 18 times the average in peer countries, respectively. <
Use as open thread …
The imaginary question over Stalin’s legacy continues:
For all the talk of ‘Stalin’s successes,’ the Soviet Union smashed the Nazis in spite of his harsh leadership, not because of it
This RT op-ed is from professor Tarik Cyril Amar, from Koç University in Istanbul, and it is written he’s a specialist in “Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory”.
Let me jump to the core of his argument:
And rightly so. Stalin’s mistakes before and during the war against Nazi Germany were terrible and too numerous to be fully spelled out. Perhaps the single most bizarre instance was his initial disbelief towards the scores of credible warnings of the German attack. But there was more: Stalin decimated the Soviet officer corps in his prewar purges, thereby psychologically hobbling those who were left. He meddled in military questions he did not understand, such as how best to deploy tanks. In international politics, he bizarrely misinterpreted the Spanish Civil War as, most of all, yet another place to fight the shadow of Trotskyism. And, moreover, he was decisive in the insane Comintern policy of targeting other socialists as “social fascists,” thereby sabotaging broad anti-fascist coalitions until it was too late.
During the first trying days of collapse and rout that followed the start of Nazi Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, Stalin almost gave up. He retreated to one of his dachas and, apparently, expected his inner circle to remove, punish, and quite likely kill him. Yet, instead, they asked him to return to the helm, which he did. After that though, he continued to meddle in military decisions, creating more costly mistakes.
But, over time, he also seems to have done one thing that his chief opponent Hitler signally failed to do. Stalin came to tacitly accept the expertise of generals who knew better than he did, as long as they were politically submissive and provided he could claim the laurels of victory. That is very little to say in his defense, and there really isn’t much else to add to his credit – even if some historians, both in the West and the former Soviet Union, have said otherwise. They risk committing the fallacy of mistaking archival evidence supporting the fact Stalin was there to lead for proof that he was “indispensable” to the war effort. Remaining at the helm and steering the ship in the right direction are two very different skills.
This narrative – the Stalin was a tin pot dictator who was forced to come down to reality by the horrors of war (and a real threat to his own life) and started to trust his young talented generals and then, because of that, the USSR suddenly started winning – is a very outdated myth.
I don’t know any works by prof. Amar. I don’t know which is his real expertise (the description in the op-ed is too wide – he obviously isn’t an expert in all of those areas). But he’s clearly well out of his depth here; if he’s an expert in WWII, he certainly isn’t specialized in military history, and his replication of this old narrative is a sign he may well have been stuck in time (a historian must always keep himself updated to the newest discoveries; this is true even for Ancient History, where archaeological discoveries come out every year, depending on your area).
For the subject he writes about, we have to resort to the authority of the military historians. The main authority on the Eastern Front of WWII we have nowadays is David M. Glantz. Glantz is a retired colonel from the Pentagon, and, if I’m not mistaken, he was commissioned by the Pentagon itself to do research about Soviet military strategy during WWII. Besides, he had access to the opened archives of the USSR after its fall in the 1990s. That makes him the closest to the ideal observer of the phenomenon.
In “When Titans Clashed” – which is Glantz’s simplified, shortened version of the history of the Eastern Front – there’s no mention to any of the points prof. Amar talks about. Glantz is an American working for the Pentagon, so, if any of those points about Stalin were true, there would be no reason for him not to point those out in the most commercial version of his history.
The closest we can come from prof. Amar’s narrative in Glantz’s book is Tukhachevsky’s show trial and execution at the gates of WWII. Tukhachevsky is the father of the now famous strategic depths operation doctrine – the doctrine that gave the USSR victory over the Third Reich. Glantz speculates that, had Tukhachevsky not been executed, the USSR could in theory have adopted it from the very beginning and won much easier, without the painful first two years of the war.
However, the same Glantz later ponders that the reason Tukhachevsky was condemned at the time was his doctrine was too advanced for the actual development of the Red Army at the time, not because Stalin thought he was outright wrong. It was only when the Red Army finished its reforms – during the heat of WWII – that it was materially able to apply Tukhachevsky’s doctrine to satisfaction. Even then, we have to see the fact that all of his young generals who won WWII were disciples of Tukhachevsky, therefore the problem Stalin had with Tukhachevsky wasn’t with his military genius.
The “decimation of the talented officer corps” thesis is pure nonsense. This myth comes from the extrapolation of the fact that Hitler used WWI veteran generals and was very successful until Stalingrad (when, allegedly, Soviet sheer numbers won the day). The thing is: Hitler didn’t use WWI veterans because he thought they were the best, but because they were the only available. The Versailles Treaty forbade Germany to educate and graduate officers. That left Germany with a lost generation of high officers (generals included). The Third Reich was initially successful for many reasons that were completely out of control of its generals; it is very simplistic to attribute it solely to a postulated talent and experience of WWI generals.
Experience in WWI didn’t translate into WWII success. One famous case of that was a general who survived Stalin’s purge and was a WWI veteran. He used ossified tactics and was victim of the greatest encirclement in history in the southern front. He was fired by Stalin during the war. In the USA itself, general Eisenhower fired his old generals after the Louisiana Maneuvers, because they were too outdated to perform in the new era. No doubt Hitler would have done the same if he could.
Nowadays, it is a consensus among military historians that the world during the 1920s-1930s was a world in flux thanks to the brand new technologies that came into place. The USSR was simply the last of the great players to finish its transition for the simple fact it was the poorest of them and because it had to do it on the largest scale of them all. It is also a consensus that Hitler, whether by accident or by pure genius, chose the perfect time to attack the USSR: had he attacked some years earlier, he would have been defeated in the West because the Wehrmacht wasn’t ready; had he attacked even one year later, he would have been easily defeated by a ready or much closer to be ready Red Army in the East.
The purges of the officers were also very popular among the soldiers according to documentation. There’s no evidence of any mutiny or protest or revolt by the Soviet soldiers during the purges, at least not to my knowledge. Every dictator’s power emanates from his full support of the military; it would be counterintuitive to think Stalin would’ve been purging his officers because those officers were talented. Talented officers get you closer, not more distant, to victory (and absolute power), and this is a universal truth that transcends ideology. To think Stalin jeopardized his own nation for the sake of his own political preservation is a paradox, because, without the USSR, there’s no political power to be held to begin with.
The reason why Stalin refused to counterattack during the first weeks of the war is very well documented. The Non-Aggression Pact was still valid, and Stalin had to consider the possibility Hitler was just doing some border clash in order to appease/fool the Western imperialist powers. Besides, communication was heavily hurt at this time because the Soviets were being overrun, and the Germans were obviously destroying the communications infrastructure first, before they advanced on the terrain. Another factor was the surreal aspect of the war: Stalin couldn’t believe immediately Hitler was really going to exterminate the entire Soviet people. It took some months before it downed to him the Nazis were really serious about the extermination of the Slavs. Glantz writes about this.
The story of Stalin retreating to “one of his dachas” also seems to be a complete fabrication. There’s no mention about this in Glantz. It is also the first time I’ve ever read this. I would like prof. Amar to quote his source on this, because I’m curious. According to Glantz, Stalin never left Moscow and immediately formed the Stavka when the war begun, working tirelessly. Glantz also highlights the fact that Stalin was actually very able militarily, and didn’t commit any serious mistakes on his decisions and discussions to his generals. Just to give one example, Glantz pointed out that Stalin, being a Marxist, correctly foresaw the Nazis would prioritize the natural resources in the Caucasus and the Ukraine in the very beginning of the war, when all of his young generals insisted the Nazis would focus on Moscow. Stalin didn’t interfered in operational aspects of the war (which wasn’t his job anyway).
The “social fascists” and Spanish Civil War extrapolation are absurd. It was the social-democrats who betrayed the Second International and supported the efforts of their respective bourgeoisies in WWI. The anti-communist character of the social-democrats during the interwar period was a public and notorious fact that everybody knew and took for granted. The social-democrats who purged the trade unions from its communist members during the 1920s, and refused every offer of united front against fascism by the Comintern. By 1925, the word “Trotskyism” had already completely lost its original meaning; it was just a term used to designate everybody not aligned with the CPSU/Comintern line (the same way “Marxist” is an American term used to designate everybody on the Left nowadays). The social-democrats continued to be anti-communists during and after WWII. Either way, none of this had anything to do with Stalin, who was notoriously absent in the international/Comintern debate during the 1920s, when all of this took shape. By the end of the 1930s, the Comintern was already de facto dead. It is pure anachronism to relate both of these cases to WWII.
I’ve already talked here about Krushchev’s famous speech. Evidence indicates he came out with this speech under duress, maybe even for his very survival, during the deadly days of the battle for succession of Stalin. This is a biased source, that should be interpreted carefully.
We should not let the petty catfight between modern-day Stalinists and Trotskyists stain scientific historical analysis. We also should not fall for the post-war liberal myth that equated Hitler with Stalin. Hitler was a tragedy of humanity, a circus freak, a completely unnecessary and disproportional measure by the Western capitalist class at a moment when the very existence of capitalism was on the table (it couldn’t recover from the 1929 crisis until WWII saved it). Stalin, as I’ve said here many times, was simply the man of the circumstance.
Posted by: vk | Jun 30 2021 17:10 utc | 270
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