I'm not saying they will, but I am noticing some attempts to change the goal posts or the subject. What do you think the response will be like?
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The height of its mobilized power, yes. The height of its potential power? No. The USSR lost enormous amounts of manpower, enough to demographically warp the country for generations. Russia also suffered enormous GDP and economic damage: "As result of the German invasion of World War II, the Economy of the Soviet Union suffered punishing blows, with Soviet GDP falling 34% between 1940 and 1942.[3] Industrial output did not recover to its 1940 level for almost a decade."
Just because the USSR hit peak tank production in 1944, doesn't mean it was at the "height of its power". Mobilization is cannibalistic, it is the conversion of sustainable civilian economic power to temporary warmaking power. Communists are uniquely good at full mobilization. The United States was able to mobilize to a far lesser degree than the USSR, so its economy recovered faster.
Also worth mentioning (because its forgotten by many people talking about WW2 Soviet Union): They were a major recipient of Lend Lease. Over half of their locomotives and rolling stock, almost 3/4 of their trucks, most of their uniforms, and almost all of their aviation-grade fuel was made by the US. Zhukov is on record on multiple occasions saying that he could only do things like Deep Battle because his army was moving with American trucks. Hell, one of their most iconic weapons of the war was typically mounted on an American truck. Guess what Russia doesnt have anymore, and hasnt since 1945. And this is before we get to some of the heavier shit (like Soviet pilots preferring the American P-39/63, and loving the British Valentine and American Sherman tanks).
The simple fact of the matter is, A lot of people, on both sides of the old Iron Curtain, still base their view of Russia off of a combination of bad Soviet propaganda and misremembered facts. And considering that Russias latest attempt at a mobilization resulted in mass citizen flight and a failure to meet the mobilization goal, call me skeptical that Russia can do another "Throw bodies at the problem" solution to the war.
Excellent point! However, it shows what a juggernaut Russia/USSR is when it is mobilized. My only worry is that they will pussy out and not mobilize sufficiently to take down te West's prostitute as thoroughly as I'd like.
I mean, 34% is shockingly low, considering that the Germans controlled what were the most productive and populated areas of the USSR, even accounting for the insane transportation of factories to the Urals.
The US had nothing to recover from. It also had a little to do with not losing 27 million people and not having the entire West of your country devastated.
Putin's Russia 2022 is nothing compared to Stalin's Russia of 1941. Stalin had total, absolute power over the whole Soviet population. Putin's power is very weak by comparison. The dissent seen against Putin would be unthinkable under Stalin. Putin would have called for total mobilization from the start if he could. The reason he did not isn't because he was a nice guy, or because he was so overconfident, it was because he lacked the power to do so.
Putin was unable to call for mobilization until after Ukraine's successful offensives. This means it took clear proof Russia was losing before Putin could sell his elites on partial mobilization and obtain their consent to it.
They won't because they can't, not because Putin lacks the intent or will to do so. He doesn't do it because his elites are telling him that if he does, they won't support him, and if they don't support him, the people will begin to be allowed to rise up, cracks will appear in state propaganda, and so on. Putin is not Stalin. He cannot simply make a list of a million people he suspects and have them all Gulaged. His order to do so would not be obeyed if he tried. Putin sits at the top of a whole corrupt apparatus of oligarch elites who he needs and relies on to control the country. It's more like a weak King and his court of corrupt Nobles, than an absolute dictator.
Putin basically conned his Oligarchs into support for his war because he tricked them into thinking it would be an easy win, with tons of opportunities for profit. Instead, it's been a quagmire and the Oligarchs want off, but are stuck in the same mindset the US had under Nixon in Vietnam where they want it to be over, but they don't want to lose. So they agree to allow Putin to escalate just enough to stave off defeat, but not enough to win.
Well Germany took all the best agricultural areas, but not the best industrial & resource areas, never having taken the oil fields, mines, etc. And as you said, the Soviets did everything they could to strip the area under threat of all of its industrial resources (and a lot of its skilled population) before Germany could occupy it.
The US still have some mobilization which meant a lot of civilian factories got gutted and repurposed to military production, all of which needed to switch back after the war, which is expensive. But since the US had a far more limited transformation than the USSR (or Japan), it could switch back to a civilian economy much, much faster.
To use your own terminology, you're only taking mobilized power rather than potential power. And I find it quite amusing that whenever you talk about Stalin, you sound like a hardcore Stalinist of the highest order. I would almost believe that you are Russian, given the reverence Russians now have for Stalin...
NO WAY! A successful politicians wasn't a nice guy? Dekachin is learning stuff!
So he is not a 'dictator' but just an oligarch, just like Western leaders. Only a good deal more competent and with better effects for his country. Good to know.
Sounds pretty dumb. But here you accept that if Russia counter-escalates enough, it will win, because it outclasses your corrupt puppet shithole non-country by orders of magnitude.
As far as I know, the most industrialized areas of the USSR (at least in tsarist times) were the Ukraine and the Baltic area. All areas lost very early on. How much of this was salvaged, I don't know, but only a 1/3 decline is pretty incredible. That's about the same as the decline Russia suffered under the USAID-written constitution in the 1990s.
Sure, but it's way different from having half of your country be wrecked, and in fact, wrecked to such an extent that people were starving even after the war (while Stalin was exporting food).
Not at all. Stalin is the worst mass murderer in human history. Hitler is only in 3rd place, behind both Stalin and Mao, but because modern leftists have secret sympathies for communism, they elevate Hitler to #1 and downplay the greater evils of Stalin and Mao.
Stalin was very powerful. The most powerful leader in the history of Russia. He gained that power through mass murder and extreme fear.
Modern Russia lacks both. Potential power is GDP and technological base, which Russia lacks now compared to the West. WW2 Russia had parity there and was individually economically stronger than any other country in the world except the US. Now Russia is a glorified gas station with a relatively low GDP per capita. And in mobilized power, there is obviously no comparison to Stalin's Russia, which was more fully mobilized than any nation on earth has ever been.
Putin has certainly put a max effort into rehabilitating Stalin. Even in 2016 he wasn't particularly popular in Russia, yet his polling numbers keep improving. It's a sad state of affairs for a broken people willing to give up anything to a return to imagined glory.
Putin is a dictator. Not all dictators have absolute power like Stalin did. We judge dictatorship as the power relationship versus the people, not versus their own ruling class of elites.
It is dumb, but no, you're wrong. Even if Russia went all-out, it would lose. It would lose because the people in Russia would revolt and it would collapse internally like Germany in WW1. Even if they did not happen, the weak Russian industrial base simply cannot do more than it already is, so throwing more people at Ukraine doesn't help much if you can't properly equip them. Finally, the West would simply sent Ukraine more weapons if Russia tried to escalate more.
Had Russia gone all-out from the start it probably would have won. It didn't though.