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The Soviet-German war of 1941–45 — known in Russian historiography as the Great Patriotic War (Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna) — was the largest and most destructive armed conflict in modern history. It began on 22 June 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, and ended on 9 May 1945 with the Soviet capture of Berlin. In those four years the Soviet Union sustained an estimated 27 million deaths, of whom approximately 17 million were civilians; it absorbed more than three-quarters of the Wehrmacht's operational strength; and it emerged, despite near-catastrophic initial defeats, as one of the two victor powers of the Second World War. This lesson examines the origins of the conflict in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Soviet expansion of 1939–40, the collapse of the summer of 1941, the turning points at Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk, the mechanics of Soviet wartime mobilisation, and the place of the war in the legitimising myth of the Soviet regime.
Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s had oscillated between two strategies. Maxim Litvinov, Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1930 to 1939, had pursued "collective security" — alliance with the Western democracies against Nazi Germany, culminating in the Franco-Soviet and Soviet-Czechoslovak pacts of 1935. The policy failed. The Munich Agreement of September 1938, from which the Soviet Union was excluded, persuaded Stalin that Britain and France would prefer a German expansion eastward to a confrontation over Eastern Europe. Litvinov, who was Jewish, was dismissed on 3 May 1939; Vyacheslav Molotov replaced him.
On 23 August 1939, in Moscow, Molotov and the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Publicly it was a ten-year agreement not to attack each other or to join coalitions against the other. Its substance lay in the Secret Protocols that accompanied it, which divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence: Finland, Estonia and Latvia were assigned to the Soviet sphere, Lithuania initially to the German (transferred to the Soviet sphere in a further protocol of 28 September); eastern Poland along the Narew, Vistula and San rivers was assigned to the Soviet sphere; Bessarabia (then Romanian) was recognised as a Soviet interest.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 23 August 1939 | Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in Moscow (Molotov-Ribbentrop) |
| 1 September 1939 | Germany invades Poland |
| 17 September 1939 | Soviet Union invades eastern Poland |
| 30 November 1939 | Soviet Union invades Finland — Winter War begins |
| 12 March 1940 | Winter War ends; Finland cedes Karelia |
| June 1940 | Soviet Union occupies Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania |
| June–July 1940 | Soviet Union annexes Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania |
On 17 September 1939 the Red Army invaded eastern Poland, meeting the Wehrmacht on the demarcation line; a joint Soviet-German parade was held at Brest-Litovsk. The Katyn Massacre of April–May 1940, in which approximately 22,000 Polish officers, police officials and intelligentsia were shot by the NKVD at Katyn Forest and other sites, was the most notorious consequence of the occupation. The Winter War with Finland (November 1939 – March 1940) was launched to secure the approaches to Leningrad but exposed grave weaknesses in the purge-damaged Red Army: approximately 126,000 Soviet soldiers were killed for the gain of the Karelian Isthmus, a casualty ratio that confirmed to foreign military attachés, and probably to Hitler, that the Red Army of 1940 was a professionally degraded instrument. The occupations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in June 1940, followed by rigged elections and formal incorporation into the Soviet Union in August, completed the Soviet absorption of the territories assigned by the Secret Protocols.
The Pact bought the Soviet Union twenty-two months in which to continue industrial expansion and rearmament, and it shifted the Soviet western frontier between 150 and 400 kilometres westward. It also, however, left the Soviet Union facing the Wehrmacht directly along a new and unfortified border, and it placed Soviet doctrine, dispositions and political assumptions on an assumption that Hitler would not attack in the near term.
At 03:15 on Sunday 22 June 1941, without declaration of war, approximately 3.3 million Axis troops — German, with Romanian, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian and Slovak contingents — crossed the Soviet frontier along a line stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The invasion, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, was the largest military operation in history. The German order of battle was organised in three Army Groups, each assigned a strategic objective.
| Army Group | Commander | Axis | Objective |
|---|---|---|---|
| Army Group North | Field Marshal von Leeb | Baltic states → Leningrad | Capture Leningrad, link with Finns |
| Army Group Centre | Field Marshal von Bock | Minsk → Smolensk → Moscow | Destroy Soviet western forces, advance on Moscow |
| Army Group South | Field Marshal von Rundstedt | Kiev → Donbas → Caucasus | Seize Ukrainian grain, Donbas industry, Caucasus oil |
Stalin's response in the first days of the invasion is among the most-studied episodes of his career. Persistent intelligence warnings through the spring of 1941 — from Richard Sorge in Tokyo, from the British, from defectors on the frontier — had been dismissed as provocations. When the invasion began, Stalin appears to have suffered a brief period of political paralysis. He did not address the Soviet public; the 22 June radio announcement was delivered by Molotov. For approximately a week from 28 June Stalin withdrew to his dacha at Kuntsevo and was not seen by the Politburo. He resumed public leadership on 3 July 1941 with a radio address that opened, unusually, "Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and Sisters!" and that invoked the language of patriotic defence — "great patriotic war" — in preference to the language of class struggle.
The military results of the first six months were catastrophic. By December 1941 the Wehrmacht had advanced to the outskirts of Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov. Approximately 3 million Soviet soldiers had been taken prisoner in the great encirclement battles — Minsk (late June), Smolensk (July–September), Kiev (September, c. 665,000 prisoners), Vyazma-Bryansk (October, c. 660,000 prisoners). Soviet dead by December were approximately 1 million; the Red Army had lost more than 20,000 tanks and most of its forward-deployed air force. The proximate causes of the collapse lay in the destruction of the officer corps in the 1937 purge, the doctrinal preference for forward defence (which exposed armies to encirclement), and the refusal, until it was too late, to authorise withdrawal.
Leningrad was encircled on 8 September 1941, when Army Group North and Finnish forces to the north closed the ring of land communications. The siege lasted 872 days, until 27 January 1944. The city, containing approximately 2.5 million civilians at the start of the siege, was sustained through the winter of 1941–42 by an "Ice Road" (the Doroga Zhizni — "Road of Life") across the frozen Lake Ladoga. The winter of 1941–42 was the most deadly: the bread ration fell to 125 grams per day for dependents; deaths from starvation, cold and disease reached approximately 100,000 per month in the worst period. Estimates of civilian deaths during the siege vary between 800,000 and 1.1 million. The siege is the longest, and in absolute terms the most lethal to a civilian population, of any city in the modern history of war.
The Battle of Moscow (September 1941 – April 1942) was the first major German strategic defeat of the war. Operation Typhoon, launched on 2 October, produced the Vyazma-Bryansk encirclements and reached the Moscow suburbs by late November; in the first week of December, with daytime temperatures below minus 25 degrees Celsius, German lead elements were within 25 kilometres of the Kremlin. General Georgy Zhukov, recalled from Leningrad in October and given command of the Western Front, organised the defence. The counter-offensive of 5 December 1941, supported by Siberian divisions released from the Far East after Tokyo's commitment to the Pacific was confirmed, drove the Wehrmacht back between 100 and 250 kilometres and removed the immediate threat to the capital by January 1942. The Blitzkrieg strategy of a single-campaign victory had failed; the Soviet Union would not be defeated in 1941.
flowchart TD
A[Nazi-Soviet Pact<br/>23 Aug 1939] --> B[Soviet invasion of Poland<br/>17 Sep 1939]
A --> C[Winter War<br/>Nov 1939 – Mar 1940]
A --> D[Occupation of Baltic states<br/>June 1940]
D --> E[Operation Barbarossa<br/>22 June 1941]
E --> F[Encirclements 1941<br/>Minsk Smolensk Kiev Vyazma]
E --> G[Siege of Leningrad begins<br/>8 Sep 1941]
F --> H[Battle of Moscow<br/>Oct 1941 – Apr 1942<br/>Zhukov]
H --> I[Stalingrad<br/>Aug 1942 – Feb 1943<br/>Chuikov Paulus]
I --> J[Kursk<br/>July 1943]
J --> K[Liberation of USSR<br/>1943–44]
K --> L[Red Army into Eastern Europe<br/>1944–45]
L --> M[Fall of Berlin<br/>May 1945]
The industrial response to Barbarossa was the single most impressive logistical operation of the war. Between July and December 1941, under the Council for Evacuation headed by Nikolai Shvernik, approximately 1,523 large industrial plants were dismantled, loaded on to freight trains, moved east of the Volga (many to the Urals, western Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Kuznetsk basin) and reassembled. Roughly 16 million workers were relocated with them. The Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk and Nizhny Tagil complexes became the arsenal of the Soviet war effort. Tank production, effectively suspended during the relocation, reached 24,700 units in 1942 and 29,000 in 1944 — outproducing Germany by approximately two to one through most of the war.
Political command was concentrated on the State Defence Committee (Gosudarstvennyi Komitet Oborony — GKO), formed on 30 June 1941. Chaired by Stalin, it originally comprised Molotov, Beria, Voroshilov and Malenkov, and exercised unlimited authority over the war economy, the military, the NKVD and the civilian administration. Military operational authority lay with the Stavka (Supreme High Command), formally chaired by Stalin, with Zhukov as his deputy supreme commander from August 1942. Political officers (politruki), suspended in 1940, were restored across the Red Army in July 1941; Order No. 270 (16 August 1941) declared any soldier who surrendered a deserter and subjected his family to arrest; Order No. 227 — "Not a Step Back!" (28 July 1942), issued at the nadir of the Stalingrad campaign, established "blocking detachments" behind front lines and punitive battalions for officers and soldiers who retreated without permission.
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