One of the major improvements to the Soviet armed forces that came out of the Winter War was the replacement of Kliment Voroshilov by Semyon Timoshenko as People’s Commissar for Defence. Voroshilov had helped Stalin carry out the Great Purge by denouncing some of his military colleagues, and (as I recall) he reversed some of the army reforms that his predecessors had carried out. He also bungled the opening phases of the Winter War, and was eventually turfed out in favour of the more competent Timoshenko. After the Soviets won in Finland, Timoshenko set about modernizing the Red Army.
U.S.S.R and Lend-Lease supplies?
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@Herr:
So we’re not just talking about a blockade to most of the land-lease supplies that would reach the Soviet Union. In this scenario, there’s also a Japanese force fighting the USSR in the east, the Germans would actually have captured Stalingrad (which they did not do in reality - they captured most of it but the fight in that city never stopped), and the with Murmansk in Axis hands, German and Finnish troops from the far north could have wheeled in to cut the supply lines that Leningrad so desperately needed. I think those strategic factors would be at least as important as the loss of the lend-lease supplies as such.
And another way of framing the question would be to ask: how many variables (and which specific variables) would you need to change to set up a situation in which the USSR had no hope of winning?
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Thanks for the maps IL, that’s some interesting information.
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@Imperious:
Great maps!!!