Russia at war 1941-1945

opportunity to attack our state. In such conditions there can, of course, be no

question of any withering-away of the State...In 1919 our Party programme

provided for the transformation of the Red Army into a People's Militia. But

conditions have changed, and we cannot build up a mighty army on a militia basis.

In these conditions our Party and our Government have built up a mighty Red

Army and Red Navy, and a mighty armaments industry, and have lined with steel

and concrete the frontiers of this land of triumphant socialism. The Soviet Union, which was weak and unprepared for defence, is now ready for all emergencies; it is capable, as Comrade Stalin said, of producing modern weapons of defence on a

mass scale, and of supplying our Army with them in the event of a foreign attack.

The Party and the Government are maintaining our people in a state of military

preparedness, and no enemy can catch us unawares.

Shcherbakov recalled how, only a few months before, "the Japanese Samurai had felt on their own skin the might of Soviet arms; there, at Lake Hassan, where the Japanese

militarists had tried to provoke us into war, our air force and artillery turned the Japanese guns into litter and their pillboxes into dust".

This clash with the Japanese had, in fact, been the Red Army's only real experience of war for many years past, and it was, a little rashly, being held up as a stern warning to all other aggressors. At the same time, there still seemed to be a certain muddleheadedness about modern warfare—an attitude curiously reminiscent of certain French military

theorists at the time, who pooh-poohed the concept of the blitzkrieg. Thus Pravda wrote on February 6, 1939, in connection with the twentieth birthday of the Frunze Military Academy:

In the land of triumphant socialism, the working class, under the leadership of the Party of Lenin and Stalin, is building up new military concepts. Following the

directives of the Party and Comrade Stalin, the Frunze Academy has discarded a

good number of old fetishes, cast aside quite a few mouldy traditions, and liquidated the enemies of the people who had tried to interfere with the training of Bolshevik military cadres devoted to the Party.

Was this intended as a nebulous reference to Tukhachevsky and the thousands of other purges of the Red Army? Anyway, Stalin and the present Red Army leadership knew

best:

Military thought in the capitalist world has got into a blind alley. The dashing

"theories" about a lightning war ( blitzkrieg), or about small select armies of technicians, or about the air war which can replace all other military operations—

all these theories arise from the bourgeoisie's deathly fear of the proletarian

revolution. In its mechanical way, the imperialist bourgeoisie overrates equipment and underrates man.

This debunking of the blitzkrieg and the primary reliance on "man" seems, looking back on it, about as incongruous as the alleged deadly fear of the "proletarian revolution" by which Hitler in particular was supposed to be obsessed.

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