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Radio War Nerd EP #555 — Operation Barbarossa, pt. 3: Soviet Military Preparations, feat. Annibale (Patreon)

Published:
2025-10-17 00:30:33
Imported:
2025-10
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Guest: AnnibaleRecorded: October 14, 2025

In part 3 of our series on Operation Barbarossa, Annibale sorts through fact from fiction regarding Soviet preparations in the lead-up to Nazi Germany's invasion of the USSR in June 1941.

Listen to Annibale's Operation Barbarossa series:-Operation Barbarossa, pt 1: German Military Mindset (EP #552)-Operation Barbarossa, pt 2: Germany's Allies & Poland (EP #554)

Reading:

David M. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War. University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Alexey V. Isaev, Вторжение. 22 июня 1941 года Moscow: Яуза, Эксмо, 2021 (rev. ed.). (standard recent Russian study on preparation and the beginning of the war from the Soviet side)

Mark Harrison - Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-1945. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies)

Alexander Hill, The Red Army and the Second World War - Cambridge University Press, 2017.  (In particular, chapter 9 “Reforms and the Road to War”)

John Erickson, The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History 1918–1941 Routledge (reprint of Cambridge original 1962, updated ed. 2001)

Total time: 1:25:02Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

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Comments

Doug Cartel

I took one class in college about the eastern front and it gave me a special grudge against Enemy At The Gates

Maggie+Al

So when are we getting the RWN trail of Antony Beevor?

Soda enthusiast

In Australia my WWII school education was largely about Japan, China, and Singapore and Australia's involvement in them

Colin McCarthy

Part one was better then part two, so excited for part 3! Love all RWN!!

Terry Dunk

Annibale, if you're lurking : I'm curious if you've read any of Kotkin's three volume biography of Stalin and where you come down on his portrayal of Iosif Vissarionovich and Soviet state capacity before/during WWII

triplevalaska

Beside the scene of one man falls grab his gun and shoot. That was a good movie. It came out when I was in 6th grade and I thought was so cool and you got to see that girl racheal butt, awesome movie. I would have probably gone my teens never knowing of stalingrad without that movie

Laynie

I hate to use the radio war nerd chats for group therapy, but I’m curious how others are doing. I have a childhood friend who is an ardent Trump supporter. Whenever I talk to her, she always brings up her love for Trump, like she's part of a cult. I’m the kind of person who can listen to anyone. We’re from Massachusetts, and her family’s roots are in the party, so it's like she’s rooting for the home team, like someone would root for the Red Sox. It's naive ignorance combined with a lack of humility or curiosity to see things from a new perspective in adulthood. I struggle so much at this point to keep the friendship out of moral disgust. I hardly call anymore. The genocide and the shocking corruption on display have frayed my tolerance. I really don’t want to be on a high horse or have righteous indignation against someone who holds little power like myself. But it feels beyond the pale now—even if you’re naive, the moment has turned you into a fascist apologist. I don’t know. On one hand, it seems extreme to lose friendships over politics; on the other, it feels like there must be some boundary because so many are being harmed. How are other people managing this?

Annibale

The first volume is excellent, more as an in-depth analysis of Russia during that age than as a straightforward biography of Stalin. I think the second and the third are less exceptional (in other words, I think they somehow align with the consensus on Stalin and the Soviet Union before and during the war, which may not be a bad thing per se, but they lack the punch of the first volume).

Annibale

Enemy At the Gates is terrible. In practice, there's not even one element of the initial scene that refers to historical reality. We should do an episode only on deconstructing all the myths portrayed there

JoR

You’re doing the right thing by just slowly cutting them off lol. This goes for any relationship (whether the issue is politics, social stuff, drugs, money, combinations of this) , you can only argue or “debate” so much. At a certain point you’re just stressing yourself out. Most of my family is liberal, and I also feel a bit disconnected with talking current events. For them there’s this general sense that “oh trump wins because liberals are too radical!”. I guess related to social issues? But again instead of debating I just try to talk less to them especially when they like to bring up politics

Aidan Coffey

To Annibales point - James Coburn and his elite German recon squad in Cross of Iron seem to prefer the russian submachine gun with the drum magazine over german weapons.

T

Interested to know what years you were educated in Oz? I was in school 90-01 and we got all that plus a lot on North Africa, especially the Rats of Torbruk

Laynie

Yeah that's what I mean. It's an embodied shift in the US and I am navigating it. Politics used to feel like something outside of us and we could continue on in our lives and relationships with bitter differences about the Iraq war from the comfort of our safe lives, for instance (not right but the reality we lived in). But now people are being hunted and disappeared off Boston streets by masked ICE agents for things like signing an Op-Ed calling Israels genocide a genocide in a university newspaper. People grow apart but now I am questioning her character. I am grieving a friendship I thought I would have for my life.

parker

I've read the first two and I've always viewed the second volume as having alot more weird clarifications. (Aka kotkin is trying to really hard not scare off the western kremlinology wannabes who got into the first pretty great one) Have you read Micheal Carley's works detailing the diplomatic work the various Soviet ambassadors did. I'm currently working on the second and I think it's a pretty good detailed account of how France and Britain screwed up and basically made the Molotov ribbontropp pact much more likely

parker

Personally my biggest pet peeve is how they rewrite Vasily to kind of be this idiotic peasant boy who barely understands politics. In real life he was a stalinist crusader basically There's a reason he was used in propaganda because he was seen as a reliable communist. The movie even glosses over the fact he volunteered for Stalingrad with his entire naval group effectively and that he got his marksmanship from that time. Obviously his politics and heroism is why that movie chose to rewrite him to be the victim of a ego driven political officer who somehow loses confidence in communism after they've killed like a million Germans in his area.

Annibale

Thanks for reminding me about Carley, I should had mentioned him in the last episode

Kevin Hickey

Has anyone seen the Canadian Television adaptation of The First Circle starring F Murray Abraham as Stalin?

SB

Such a great episode! Thank you Annibale! I could sense that it wasn’t easy for him to listen to Mark’s reading of Solzhenitsyn. But he was too polite to not throw him into the same basket as “Icebreaker.” 😀

Kevin Hickey

…aaaand it turns out it blows.

Gabe Raulet

Would be interesting if you all had any responses to Philip O'Brien's book on World War 2? It seems like he goes out of his way to deny USSR's role in Allied victory and claims that land battles are somehow irrelevant when compared to Air and Sea. I find this kind of argument really annoying and it seems to go along with the modern NATO-friendly sentiment that seems to even forget that USSR and China were Allied countries (*cough* Kaja Kallas)

Annibale

O'Brien argument is based on a simple statistical fallacy. Basically, he argues that because the hardware involved in the Battle of the Atlantic was much more expensive than the one used in Russia, and the value of the shipping threatened by the Uboot fleet (in theory) much bigger, winning the battle of the Atlantic "saved" a larger part of the Allied effort than "useless" Soviet land/resources/lives. Too bad the Battle of the Atlantic never threatened Allied production in any serious way, because the numbers do not add up to that. It's useless to say "but a U-boat costs more than an entire panzer division" if the entire U-boat fleet, even at its peak efficiency, couldn't threaten more than 10% of British shipping in total (and of that 10% only 10% was lost).

Annibale

As for the "worthless" Soviet territory, here's the crude oil production for each country in in 1940. Germany depended entirely from Romania USA 182.657 Mt USSR 29.700 Mt Venezuela 27.443 Mt Iran 10.426 Mt Indonesia 7.939 Mt Mexico 6.721 Mt Romania 5.764 Mt Columbia 3.636 Mt Iraq 3.438 Mt Argentina 2.871 Mt Trinidad 2.844 Mt Peru 1.776 Mt Burma 1.088 Mt Canada 1.082 Mt Egypt 0.929 Mt

Alberto Panerai

Grazie Annibale! So the icebreaker theory is looney ok. Anyways, I wonder what do you think of Sean Mc Meekin’s argument in Stalin’s war that FDR got basically played (if not compromised) and helped the Soviets a great deal in not only defeating Germany as they did but in becoming the next big superpower?

Annibale

Read Geoffrey Robert's "Stalin' Wars" (same title as MacMeekin but a fat better book). It turns out that FDR was the one suspicious on Stalin while Churchill was the one who wanted to make concessions in order to "share Europe". Also the economic role of Lend-Lease is routinely inflated out of proportions. It helped shortening the war but had hardly any impact on Soviet Union post war status. SU became a superpower because they filled a gargantuan vacuum left by the collapse of European imperialism, and had the political and industrial structure to play the role. Great Britain got a larger share of L-L than SU and a fraction of SU losses, and still never recovered their former status, despite their "special partnership" with SU

Achim Detjen

This series on Barbarossa has inspired me to watch a lot of old Soviet war movies (freely available from MosFilm on YouTube) out of sheer Ostalgia. Looking very much forward to the next episodes, and hoping this series include Operation Typhoon as well.

Achim Detjen

Indeed, and you will see elements of this in the rather terrible, but oddly popular Sven Hazel/Hassel books as well.

Annibale

Yes, likely it will include Kiev and "Taifun", it depends much on how current events may require more "emergency episodes" :)

Annibale

Soon to be deployed!

Jason Edmiston

HOT SNOW- (Chesto Nebo) is really, really good.

Annibale

Sven Hassel's books are trash from a historical perspective, but they really nail down the way German veterans after the war wanted to see themselves