ABSTRACT
Stalin, frustrated by the failure to consolidate an anti-fascist collective security pact in Europe during the 1930s, signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 as a means of buying the Soviet Union precious space and time for a war he still regarded as inevitable – a policy reversal correctly interpreted by all the leading commentators at the time as an act of pure political cynicism. When war itself came, however, the Soviet Union remained horrifically underprepared to repel the massive Axis force (nearly 4 million men had been assembled) which smashed across the western frontier along three main axes in June 1941. Even though the Soviet Union itself by then possessed the largest standing tank park in the world, with a paper strength of 11,000 machines in its western border districts alone, the hectic pace of peacetime expansion and industrialization, taken in conjunction with swinging political purges within the pre-war armed forces, also rendered these raw figures alone deeply deceptive. If the pace of modernization and industrialization achieved by the Soviet Union after 1928 had been historically unprecedented, it was also in many ways still a remarkably fragile achievement, as the Red Army of 1941 found itself condemned to demonstrate.
