A Soviet Blunder That Led to Catastrophe
The Soviets suffered horrific losses at the start of the German invasion in 1941. The seeds were planted years earlier, in Stalin’s Military Purge, which began in 1937. It plunged the Soviet military into chaos because it removed its most experienced commanders. 13 of 15 army commanders, 8 of 9 admirals, 50 of 57 corps commanders, all 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars were executed or imprisoned or fired. The Purge also decimated the best middle rank officers. Until 1937, the Soviet military had been known for its innovation. The intellectual ferment within the Red Army, such as the Theory of Deep Operations, was as creative as what the wehrmacht was doing at the time. The Soviets had their equivalents of Guderians and Mannsteins, bright officers who brimmed with new ideas and were confident that they would revolutionize warfare. They suffered the most.
The Purge fell heaviest on the most creative officers, since they stood out and were thus prime suspects of harboring the deviationist tendencies Stalin wanted stamped out. Thus, when Hitler attacked, the Soviet military was poorly officered and poorly led. Stalin also failed to heed warnings that the Germans were about to invade. Those who raised the alarm were punished, as Stalin insisted it was a plot engineered by the British to instigate a war between the USSR and Germany. In what turned out to be a huge blunder, Soviet commanders were not allowed to take even precautionary measures, lest they provoke the Germans. Indeed, hours after the invasion began, Stalin disbelieved Soviet commanders who reported that they were being overrun. He insisted that they were experiencing isolated border incidents, not a full-blown war.