Stalin and Victory

By Oleg Kolesnikov

Young communists marked the 75th anniversary of the Victory of the USSR and its allies in the Second World War with a picket outside the city administration block in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk in central Siberia.

Although limited in size by the strict regulations imposed to contain the coronavirs pandemic, the people of the city supported the picket organised by the Komsomol of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF).

The main theme of the picket was the significance and role of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief J V Stalin in the victory of the USSR over fascism.

When monuments to Soviet soldiers and commanders are being demolished in Poland and monuments to the collaborationist ‘Russian Liberation Army’ of  the traitor Vlasov are going up in the Czech republic; when the governments of Western countries ‘forget’ to mention the USSR as the main force that defeated fascism, the Komsomol of the Krasnoyarsk Territory remembers who was the supreme commander of the Red Army during the Second World War.

From the very first hours of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people, Stalin had to resolve the most complicated problems of conducting armed struggle. The real situation on the front required an immediate and radical revision of previous plans and views on the methods of waging war and armed struggle. It was necessary resolutely to abandon the old military dogma that had been considered unshakable, to find new, unorthodox solutions. And all this had to be done with a desperate lack of time in the face of a swift attack by the enemy.

Stalin was the leader during this critical, difficult period of the war – but the commander who does not allow for the defeat of his troops at the beginning of the war can already be said to have won it. The first massive strikes of the Nazis failed to defeat the Red Army.

Stalin was not just a well-educated man. He was a creative Marxist who knew how to deal with fundamental military issues and the pressing problems of military theory and science. He studied seriously the works of the greatest bourgeois military theorist Karl Clausewitz. He knew the works of Suvorov and Napoleon, and those of Dragomirov and Moltke, as well as the military writings of Engels and Franz Mehring, as well as many other military authors.

Stalin studied the work of contemporary Soviet historians and theoreticians of military affairs, primarily EV Tarle and BM Shaposhnikov. Stalin's role in solving these difficult tasks that the Soviet Union faced during the war cannot be underestimated. Not a single important decision was made without his participation.

Stalin, the Supreme Commander, played a large role in disrupting the German blitzkrieg and organising the counter-offensive of the Red Army in the most difficult conditions of the battle for Moscow.

During the war, Stalin repeatedly demonstrated the ability to brilliantly solve complex problems when military-political, strategic, diplomatic and psychological factors were intertwined. One should surely agree with Churchill, who said: “It is very fortunate for Russia in her agony to have this great rugged war chief at her head. He is a man of massive outstanding personality, suited to the sombre and stormy times in which his life has been cast; a man of inexhaustible courage and will-power, and a man direct and even blunt in speech, which, having been brought up in the House of Commons, I do not mind at all, especially when I have something to say of my own.”