Soviet Union in World War II

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This page about the history of the USSR during WWII. For the main article of this character, see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

“”If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

— Winston Churchill

The Soviet Union's participation in World War II was an era that is part of the Stalinist Era, playing an important role in defeating the Axis Powers. His activities in the conflict was multifaceted and impactful on several fronts. Initially allies with the German Third Reich to split up Poland, he became in inspired by the Nazi to go on his own Blitzkrieg streak on his neighbors. USSR switched teams when Germany betrayed him by invading him. Then, he used "fighting Nazis" as an excuse to spread Soviet imperialism, which was way more successful.

Many people claim the Soviets liberated Europe from the Nazis. But the reality is, the Soviet Union's communism is as brutal as Nazism if not more. While the Nazis aim to eliminate a certain group of people (such as the Jews), communism aims at the total destruction of all people, including their own, physically and spiritually.

History

In the late 1930s, before the "Great Patriotic War", Stalin purged his army brutally. Later, a bunch of failed and useless military campaigns added more to the unnecessary loss of life.

Stalin wanted to catch up to the capitalist world, since his communist state was far behind. USSR came up with a plan, as in 1933 the Nazis came to power: he would cause the Nazis and the Capitalists to go to war with each other, and while they did, Soviet can develop himself. And when the war ended, the capitalists would be weak, leaving Soviet as the sole world superpower. USSR tried allying himself with the capitalists in order to stir up war, but they refused due to a lack of trust. So, the USSR decided to ally with the Nazis instead, as to throw them into war was the primary goal, while who he allied with was secondary.

Invasion of Poland

On 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, a non-aggression treaty that included secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe, negotiated by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. This established a " Berlin-Moscow Axis".

When Germany requested Soviet Union to invade Poland, he first hesitated. Soviet Union believed that Poland was more ready for war then he actually is, plus, Soviet's army were still fighting Japan. But everything would resolve itself when the Japan heard about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Japan was hoping on allying with the German Third Reich against the Soviet Union, but the non-aggression pact made it not possible, thus Japan decided to not fight anymore. As a result, on 17 September 1939, Soviet invaded Poland from the east shortly after Germany's invasion from the west, effectively annexing territory according to the pact's provisions. Soviet Union annexed Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia into their respective Soviet republics . Hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians were captured or deported to the Soviet interior.

Winter War

On 30 November 1939, Soviet Union invaded Finland since he didn't want to give up clay to him. USSR was confident that he could win against puny little Finland. But, the bright uniforms of the Red Army made Soviet easy targets in the white snowy Finnish environment for the native Finns, who wore white camouflage. Despite being very much outnumbered, the Finnish forces used clever tactics and the harsh winter to slow down the Soviet advance. The snipers of Finland are known for taking out huge amounts of Soviet troops. Soviet soldiers asked their superiors for more camouflaged clothing, but they denied.

The war ended with the Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940, where Finland had to give up 11% of his land but kept his independence. Still, Soviet Union was humiliated because no one ever thought that tiny Finland would cause so much Soviet casualties.

“”If we keep throwing men at bullets, they will run out of bullets.

— Soviet Union’s strategy during the Winter War, probably

Soviet Blitzkrieg: Baltic Occupations & Expansion of 1940

Between April and May 1940, Soviet Union used his NKVD to genocide 21,000+ Polish generals and intellectuals for Sovietization reasons. This series of killings was known as the Katyn Massacre, and the order to execute captive members of the Polish officer corps was secretly issued by the Soviet Politburo led by Stalin. When a Polish general came requesting information about missing Polish officers, Stalin falsely told him that all of the Poles were freed and escaped East, and that not all could be accounted because the Soviets "lost track" of them in Manchuria.

The Soviet Union realized that his plan of throwing the capitalist world into war has failed when Germany invaded and conquered France in June. As it turns out, the Nazis would become powerful as the sole superpower, not USSR. Feeling inspired by Germany's lightning war, USSR decided to go on his own Blitzkrieg. In June 1940, while the Allies were busy dealing with Germany, USSR forced Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to allow his troops into their clay. Shortly afterward, the USSR organized rigged elections and installed communist governments. By August 1940, all three countries were formally annexed into the Soviet Union as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, and Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.

At the same time, the Soviet Union pressured Romania to hand over Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Romania, fearing both the USSR and Germany, agreed to the Soviet demands in June 1940. These lands were then incorporated mainly into the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Through these expansions, the Soviet Union significantly increased his territory and pushed his western borders further away from Moscow. However, the aggressive expansion also alarmed many neighbouring countries and increased tensions with Germany.

Great Patriotic War: Fight Against the Axis

Operation Barbarossa

Germany decided that he needed more living space, so on 22 June 1941, he launched the largest invasion ever, Operation Barbarossa, against the Soviet Union, opening a huge front and breaking their pact. Millions of armed men ushered in at the Soviet border, surprising USSR.

The attack caught the Soviet leadership largely unprepared. The earlier purges of the Red Army officer corps had weakened Soviet command, and German forces advanced rapidly through Soviet territory. Within months Germany captured huge swaths of clay, including parts of Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia. Millions of Soviet soldiers were killed or captured in the opening months of the invasion.

German forces advanced toward major Soviet cities such as Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad. The invasion marked the beginning of what the Soviet Union called the "Great Patriotic War". USSR knew he had to join the Allied Powers now, and an official Anglo-Soviet agreement was signed on 12 July 1941 which pledged mutual support. As such, he also invaded Iran in August 1941 with the British. In addition to mutual support, USSR also wanted a promise to gain the clay he was supposed to have under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Britain refused to accept the territorial gain agreements, which Stalin accepted months later as the military situation had deteriorated somewhat by mid-1942.

War at the Russian Cities

By the autumn of 1941, German forces had advanced deep into Soviet territory and began Operation Typhoon, the offensive aimed at capturing the capital Moscow, the political and logistical center of the Soviet Union, and the fall of such city would be catastrophic. Panic spread in the streets of Moscow, and government offices began evacuating eastward. Despite the danger, Stalin chose to remain. Soviet Union mobilized enormous resources for the defense of the capital. Civilians helped dig trenches and anti-tank ditches, while factories were dismantled and moved east to the Ural Mountains and Siberia, where they could continue producing weapons beyond German reach. The losses of the Germans and Russians were quite equal throughout, but the Soviets had the largest assembled army in history.

Meanwhile, on 8 September 1941, German and Finnish forces surrounded Leningrad. Rather than storm the city directly, Germany chose to blockade, cutting off food and supplies. The Siege of Leningrad would become one of the longest, deadliest and most brutal sieges in history. It was not classified as a war crime at the time, but since then, some historians have classified it as a genocide due to the intentional destruction of the city and the systematic starvation of the civilian population.

Under the Lend-Lease Act, from October 1941 to September 1945, with initial deliveries starting shortly after the German invasion in June 1941, the United States sent the USSR $11 billion in goods (approx. $180 billion in 2016 dollars), including 400,000 jeeps/trucks, 14,000 aircraft, and massive quantities of food and raw materials. This is contrary to what USSR simps' claim that the Communists defeated the Nazis all by themselves.

The Red Army also received crucial reinforcements from Siberian divisions that had been stationed near the border with Japan. Soviet intelligence had learned that Japan did not intend to attack the USSR at that moment, allowing Stalin to move these well-trained troops westward. When winter arrived, the German forces were unprepared for the extreme cold and began to stall outside Moscow. In December 1941, the Soviet Union launched a massive counteroffensive, pushing German forces back from the city. This marked the first major strategic defeat of Nazi Germany in the war, proving that the German army was not invincible.

In early 1942, Soviet began a series of offensives labelled "Stalin's First Strategic Offensives". The counteroffensive bogged down, in part due to mud from rain in the spring of 1942. Stalin's attempt to retake Kharkov in Ukraine ended in the disastrous encirclement of Soviet forces, with over 200,000 Soviet casualties suffered, leading Stalin to attack the competence of the generals involved. General Georgy Zhukov and others subsequently revealed that some of those generals had wished to remain in a defensive posture in the region, but Stalin and others had pushed for the offensive.

At the same time, Hitler was worried about American popular support after the U.S. entry into the war following the Attack on Pearl Harbor, and a potential Anglo-American invasion on the Western Front in 1942 (which did not occur until 1944). He changed his primary goal from an immediate victory in the East to the more long-term goal of securing the southern Soviet Union in order to protect oil fields vital to the long-term German war effort. While Red Army generals correctly judged the evidence that Hitler would shift his efforts south, Stalin thought it a flanking move in the German attempt to take Moscow.

The German southern campaign began with a push to capture the Crimea, which ended in disaster for the Red Army. Stalin publicly criticised his generals' leadership. In his southern campaigns, Germany took 625,000 Red Army prisoners in July and August 1942 alone. At the same time, in a meeting in Moscow, Churchill privately told Stalin that the British and Americans were not yet prepared to make an amphibious landing against a fortified Nazi-held French coast in 1942, and would direct their efforts to invading German-held North Africa. He pledged a campaign of massive strategic bombing, to include German civilian targets.

Battle of Stalingrad

Estimating that the Russians were "finished," Germany began another southern operation in the autumn of 1942, toward the Caucasus oil fields and the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River. The battle that followed became one of the most brutal urban battles in history. Stalingrad was a key industrial city that held strategic importance for both sides. German forces entered the city in late summer 1942, and fighting quickly devolved into street-to-street and close-quarters combat. Entire buildings changed hands multiple times in a single day. Soviet troops were ordered to hold their ground at all costs.

In November 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a massive encirclement attack targeting the weaker Romanian and Hungarian units protecting the German flanks. The maneuver made the battle reach the climax, trapping the German 6th Army inside Stalingrad, cut off from supplies and reinforcements and facing dire conditions, including harsh winter weather and Soviet bombardment. After months of starvation and fighting, the surrounded German forces surrendered in February 1943 despite Hitler's refusal to allow a retreat. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad marked a major turning point of the war, shifting the strategic initiative to the Soviet Union, halting the German advance and boosting Allied morale while inflicting heavy casualties on the Axis Powers.

Battle of Kursk

In 1943, after the defeat at Stalingrad, Stalin ceded to his generals' call for the Soviet Union to take a defensive stance because Soviet forces had suffered disappointing losses at Stalingrad, they lacked reserves for new offensives, and commanders believed that the Germans would likely attack the bulge in the Soviet front at Kursk. Preparing defensive positions there would allow USSR to use his resources more effectively. And sure enough, Germany attempted one final major offensive on the Eastern Front against USSR at the Battle of Kursk in July 1943. The battle centered around a large Soviet salient in the front lines. Both sides prepared massive forces, including thousands of tanks. The clash became the largest tank battle in history, particularly during the fighting near Prokhorovka.

However, the Soviet Union had extensive defensive preparations, including minefields, anti-tank positions, and deep defensive layers. When the German offensive stalled, the Red Army launched powerful counterattacks. Hitler cancelled the attack due to the Allied invasion of Sicily. After Kursk, Germany permanently lost the ability to launch large-scale offensives in the east. From this point forward, the Soviet Union remained largely on the offensive.

Soviet Advance into Eastern Europe

Following Kursk, the Red Army began pushing Nazi forces westward across Eastern Europe. Major operations "liberated" large parts of Soviet territory and later advanced into Axis-occupied countries. What these territories didn't know was that they'll be under worse rule after the war.

After Polish railroad workers found the mass grave from the Katyn killings from 1940, the Nazis used the massacre to attempt to drive a wedge between Stalin and the other Allies, including bringing in a European commission of investigators from twelve countries to examine the graves. In 1943, as the Soviets prepared to retake Poland, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels correctly guessed that Stalin would attempt to falsely claim that the Germans massacred the victims. As Goebbels predicted, the Soviets had a "commission" investigate the matter, falsely concluding that the Germans had killed the PoWs. The Soviets did not admit responsibility until 1990.

In 1944, Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration, named after Russian general Pyotr Bagration of the Napoleonic Wars, and it was one of the most successful offensives of the war. The operation destroyed much of Germany's Army Group Centre and retook Belarus, while Soviet forces also advanced into Poland and the Baltic region. As the Red Army advanced, Soviet influence expanded across Eastern Europe. Communist governments were set up in several of the territories "liberated" by Soviet forces. Meanwhile, in June 1944, the Western Allies launched the D-Day invasion of Normandy, opening a second front against Nazi Germany.

On 12 January 1945, the Soviet Union launched the Vistula-Oder Offensive, pushing deep into German territory and capturing Warsaw, reviving Poland as his puppet.

On 30 January 1945, over 10,000 German civilian refugees, wounded soldiers, and crew tried to escape the hands of the advancing and brutal Soviets through the Baltic Sea on the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. USSR didn't let that slide and torpedoed the ship three times, leading to an estimated 9,000+ deaths, primarily women and children, in freezing waters. It was the deadliest maritime disaster in history, killing far more than even the RMS Titanic.

Fall of Berlin

By April 1945, German Third Reich was close to defeat. On the Eastern Front, about 1.9 million German soldiers were fighting 6.4 million soldiers of the Soviet Red Army. On the Western Front, about 1 million German soldiers were facing 4 million Western Allied troops. Although there had been early discussions about a race between the Allies to capture Berlin, the situation changed after Joseph Stalin persuaded the Allies at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 that eastern Germany would fall under Soviet influence. Because of this agreement, the Western Allies did not plan a ground assault to capture the city.

Stalin directed the Red Army to move rapidly in a broad front into Germany because he did not believe the Western Allies would hand over territory they occupied, while he made capturing Berlin the overriding objective. As the Soviets massacred and raped without discrimination in Hungary and Prussia, the people in Berlin knew what was coming for them, and many tried to flee to the more merciful hands of USA or UK.

The Red Army's match into Germany was filled with massacres, looting, and unspeakable amounts of rape.

“”The Russian soldiers were raping every girl- from 8 to 80. It was an army of rapists.

— Antony Beevor

By April, Soviet troops encircled , leading to the Battle of Berlin and subsequent Fall of Berlin, becoming an iconic Soviet victory. Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on 30 April as Soviet troops banged on his bunker, and they disposed of his body. Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May, ending World War II in Europe. Soviet Union emerged as one of the victorious Allied Powers, but war left the country devastated, with over 20 million lives lost. Still, the USSR established puppet states and a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe from the remains of Nazi Germany, and took in many Nazi scientists as part of his Operation Osoaviakhim.

The victory of the Soviets in WWII, propaganda tells you, was a noble victory, as the mighty Soviets have saved Europe from the evil Nazis. The truth was that it was far from noble.

War on Japan

Although Germany had surrendered, Japan was still going and Soviet Union still had a neutrality pact with him. At the Yalta Conference, however, Stalin agreed to join the war against Japan once the European war ended. On 8 August 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and launched a massive invasion of Manchuria, defeating the Japanese Kwantung Army in a rapid campaign known as the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation. Soviet forces also occupied South Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and parts of northern Korea.

Shortly afterward, Japan surrendered in September 1945 after being nuked by 'Murica, ending the Second World War. The USSR left the Chinese commies to inherit the Manchuria he occupied.

The Great Patriotic War had finally ended, but the USSR experienced a staggering amount of devastation and suffering. Soviet men born in 1923 are called the lost generation: they were 18 when Germany invaded, and by 1945, 4 out of 5 were dead.

Trivia

• The famous photo of the unnamed Russian soldier raising the Soviet flag over the ruins of Hitler's chancellory had to be retaken a few days later because someone at the Soviet propaganda department realized while examining the original photos that the soldier in question was wearing six stolen watches.

Quotes

“”I am the man who arranges the tanks, that will make all the Nazis keep away! THE FÜHRER IS DEAD! AND EUROPE IS RED! And let's all point our guns to the U.S.A!

— Complete History of the Soviet Union, Arranged to the Melody of Tetris

Relationships

Friends

• United States - Thanks for sending me loads of supplies. Even if our opposing ideologies cause tension, we still have to act like we're united and like each other in public.
• United Kingdom - Also, thank your ships.
• Republic of China - Saved your butt by making him work with you instead of killings you.
• Provisional Government of National Unity - I liberated Poland!
  • *Looks for where the Polish prisoners went* Uhm, do you have any, well, live people?
  • Uh, no, only dead ones.

Enemies

• Finland - I will crush you in two weeks- HOW? YUO LITTLE RAT! YUO THINK YUO SO SLICK WHILE SNIPING! MORE TROOPS MORE TROOPS MORE TROOPS!! I STILL DEFEATED YUO!!
  • Look at the number of casualties. How humiliating!
• German Third Reich - YUO TRAITOR! I THOUGHT WE HAD NON-AGGRESSION PACT!! YUO KILLED 20 MILLION OF MY PEOPLE not that I care about them or anything, 1945 BEST YEAR OF MY LIFE!!!
• Polish Underground State - So what if I massacre your peoples, huh? Poland is must be into communist!
• Berlin - Yuo need to be liberated, I will rape all your women.

How to draw

Flag of USSR, 5 December 1936 – 19 August 1955.

Soviet Union in World War II has a drawing rating of intermediate.

1. Draw a ball.
2. Fill it with red.
3. Draw the emblem of the sickle and hammer in the top left of the ball in yellow.
4. Draw the eyes and you are done!
5. Draw a ushanka or general's hat with the communist star or hammer and sickle on it (optional)

Color Name		HEX
	Red	#BC0000
	Yellow	#FCD116

Gallery

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  On Magma’s Art Jam
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  ALLIES
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See Also

• Stalinist Era
• Union of Soviet Socialist Republics