Why did we win? The detailed answers to this question are dimensionless, as are the answers to the question why we could not help but win. We are not the first, we are not the last. By the way, elementary conscientiousness prompts us to refer our reader to the previous (at the time of our issue) issue of the Expert magazine, which published an unusually sensible series of materials on this topic. Trying to grasp the immensity, we will restrict ourselves to theses.
1. Germany could not win a war on two fronts under any circumstances. Neither Germany nor its allies possessed the resources - both human and material - that were in any way comparable to the resources of its opponents, not only all together, but each separately.
2. Why did Hitler, who undoubtedly possessed strategic thinking and undoubtedly considered a war on two fronts to be a German nightmare, did it himself, as if on his own, by attacking the USSR? As General Blumentritt wrote, "By making this fateful decision, Germany lost the war." There is every reason to believe that this decision was dictated by force majeure circumstances. The Barbarossa directive was an improvisation, a forced move, and hence a deliberate gamble.
3. The Western powers consistently and steadily pushed Hitler towards a clash with the USSR, surrendering Czechoslovakia (the most powerful industrial resource of pre-war Europe) to him and substituting Poland. Without the surrender of Poland, a frontal clash between Germany and Russia was technically impossible - due to the absence of a common border.
4. All actions of Stalin, with all tactical mistakes and miscalculations, were absolutely rational preparation for a global clash with Germany. Starting from attempts to create a system of collective security in Europe and defend Czechoslovakia and ending with the notorious Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. By the way, no matter what the "critics" of this pact may say, an elementary unbiased look at the map with knowledge of the circumstances of the first months of the war is sufficient to understand what consequences these circumstances could lead to if Germany's military operations began from the "old" border.
5. The events of 1939-1940 clearly indicate the preparation of Hitler in coordination with Japan for a large-scale operation against British positions in Central Asia and India. This was a completely rational attempt to avoid the "resource curse" and in the future - a war on two fronts. "British oil in the Middle East is a more valuable prize than Russian oil in the Caspian" - Admiral Raeder, September 1940. (Moreover, circumstances and well-known historical documents show that Hitler did not set himself the goal of the complete defeat and destruction of Britain. And, first of all, military defeat and coercion into an alliance.) Outside this context, no large-scale plans for Rommel's advance in the Middle East can be explained., neither German military-political activity in Persia and India, nor the actual coercion of Japan to sign the Non-Aggression Pact with the USSR. Which deprived Germany of the only chance of success in the protracted confrontation with the USSR.
6. If this operation was successful, at least the "neutralization" of the British Empire and at the same time the encirclement of the USSR from the south by the combined forces of Japan and Germany was ensured. The subsequent blow to the USSR in the "soft underbelly" deprived it of the strategic depth of defense, which was and remained our main material advantage.
7. There is reason to believe that Stalin understood this, in fact, the only rational logic of Hitler and proceeded from this in his planning. It was on this basis that he was skeptical about analytical and intelligence information about Hitler's preparations for an imminent attack on the USSR, regarding this as purposeful British disinformation.
8. The British, who found themselves in this situation on the brink of disaster, had no choice but to drag the USSR into the war with Germany as soon as possible. Britain found it much easier to convince Hitler of the potential threat of a strike from Stalin at a time when the Germans were deeply involved in the operation in the Middle East than to convince Stalin of an imminent threat from Hitler. This was all the more easy, since to a large extent it corresponded to both common sense and reality. As well as the broad opportunities of British agents in the upper echelons of the Third Reich.
9. The only chance to avoid a protracted war on two fronts, a war of resource depletion, was a blitzkrieg. Relying on the capabilities of the world's most effective military machine, relying not so much on the complete military defeat of the USSR as on the collapse of the Soviet state, which, as you know, did not collapse. After the breakdown of the blitzkrieg, Germany was unable to form any intelligible strategy.
10. The unexpected, from the point of view of Stalin's plans, Hitler's attack on the USSR, in fact, saved Britain from defeat. It also deprived Stalin of the chances of becoming an absolute winner in World War II. In a true sense, World War II had a single winner. And this, of course, is not Britain, which did a lot for this, but eventually lost its empire. The sole winner was the United States, which turned the anti-Hitler coalition into a huge market for its industry and its loans. As a result of the war, the United States amassed a share of the world's wealth that the history of mankind has never known. Which, in fact, is the most important thing for the Americans. As a result of the war, the Soviet Union found itself face to face with a united front of all the developed countries of the world. As General Bill Odom, the former chief of the US NSA, noted, "Under these conditions, the West would have to play extremely ineptly to give the Soviets any chance of winning the Cold War." He didn’t give it. This is all a prelude, a context. The Soviet Union, as you know, achieved both a military turning point and enormous military-technical superiority in the course of the war. By the way, it is interesting that Germany, which bet on lightning victories, initially refused to mobilize its economy by military means. In the same 1941, military production in Germany increased by 1% - less than the production of consumer goods. The Germans switched to total mobilization, including economic mobilization, when it was already too late - when the allied aviation simply bombed the German industry into the ground. But the main turning point of the war was 1941 from July to December. The Soviet army and the Soviet economy suffered such losses that any of the other belligerent countries would consider themselves defeated. The USSR not only refused to consider itself defeated - it did not crumble and did not go at the seams. The war between states has turned into a people's war, in which defeat is tantamount to the complete extermination of the people. The enemy of the human race was embodied in Hitler. And this holy war was organized and headed by the Stalinist regime. I was able to lead and I was able to organize. Even earlier, it was this regime that performed a historically unprecedented miracle, preparing the material prerequisites for such a war. On February 4, 1931, Stalin made a speech: “We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us. " During these ten years, the Soviet economy grew at the fastest rate in history. At what cost and by what means this was achieved, it is extremely important. This price is the massive expropriation of material resources and the massive use of forced labor. And when it comes to our military victory and in the context of the bravura reports about the outstanding successes of the Soviet economy, the question of price is of key importance. And not in order to condemn and stigmatize, but in order to understand. Including how the system, which is able to pay any price for the result, works or does not work. And to answer the question: why then did the country not collapse, and in 1991 collapsed from a light breeze? And what to do next with this?
