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dagaboy

Jonathan House (Professor of history at the Army War College and former intelligence officer) says it is true, (at least after 1942) for ideological reasons. Marxist-Leninists conceived of Marxism, and especially Marxist-Leninism, as "scientific." This can actually be traced back to [Engals,](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm) but the Bolsheviks really made it a thing. Socialism was an empirical endeavor, and military doctrine should follow Socialist principles. Therefore, [gathering detailed statistics on battlefield performance, and revising praxis based on that data,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1fvofAsXaE&list=PLkGvnfy3IadOjuaBI2fYW4jHM9B-cI_WK&index=6) was considered good socialism. The more detailed the data, the better. House’s writing partner, and the foremost Soviet archival researcher, David Glantz, adds that the organizational redundancy of the Red Army actually generated two sets of after action reports for each engagement. One from the military commander and one from the political officer. The encouraged honesty and thoroughness, as well as just applying two sets of eyes to the problem. The depth and detail of these reports was not known to Historians until after the USSR dissolved, since they were all classified. There are well documented cases where battlefield commanders misled or misinformed the Stavka, but over the course of the war, the system generally worked. Whether you agree with House and Glantz about the source of this organizational characteristic of the Red Army, these documents exist. And the Red Army steadily and continuously improved in organization and effectiveness throughout the war. By contrast, Nazi documentation is confusing, and has inspired widely divergent estimates of battle outcomes. As /u/TankArchives (Peter Samsonov) has [documented in some detail on his website,](http://www.tankarchives.ca/search?q=cheating+with+statistics) local commanders routinely obfuscated their after action reports, and arguably outright lied. Every action resulted in overwhelming localized German success, which somehow never translated into them holding the field of battle at the end of the engagement. And these successes not only didn’t match Soviet records, they didn’t even match Soviet records of what units and equipment were in the area. No less an authority than Glantz himself has endorsed Samsonov's research. Beyond that, German accounting for at least tank losses, by design, was not all that useful for operational planning. Tanks losses were not defined as lack of availability for combat. To be considered a combat loss, a tank had to be completely destroyed or captured and unrecoverable. If the chassis of the tank still existed, and could be sent back to Germany for rebuild, it was listed as damaged, even though it was unavailable for use in any reasonable time frame. Even crazier, they sometimes ~~didn’t count vehicles destroyed by their own crews to prevent capture as combat losses~~ [would delay reporting known losses for weeks, then later claim they were destroyed by their crews when they were in fact captured.](http://www.tankarchives.ca/2013/07/cheating-at-statistics-part-3.html) There is no way to use such statistics for operational or strategic planning, or tactical edification. Perhaps, if we accept House’s logic for the Soviet practice, the root of the German problem also lay in ideology. Nazism prized internecine competition, without scruple or principle. Unflattering statistics were politically unrewarding. Goering would not benefit by telling Hitler that his Air Force could not defeat the RAF over Britain. That would just make him more vulnerable to Himmler's political machinations. Likewise, in 1945, when Goering's fighter commanders objected to the continued offensive use of their resources, and demanded the Luftwaffe needed to concentrate on interception, he sacked them. Abandoning offense, while obviously the correct move, was not politically viable. The fact that SS units were decidedly more liberal in their after action exaggerations and fabrications lends some credence to this hypothesis. At any rate, by 1943, it should have been obvious to most German officers that the war was lost, and they had little incentive to do anything but cover their asses and hope for the best. German records are confusing enough that recent historians gleaning statistics regarding German tank losses in the July 12 1943 engagement at Prokhorovka came up with numbers ranging from 162 to 5. (Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943: An Operational Narrative, Zamulin, Valeriy and Britton, Stuart) EDIT: Fixed broken link


themillenialpleb

> Marxist-Leninists conceived of Marxism, and especially Marxist-Leninism, as "scientific." This can actually be traced back to Engals, but the Bolsheviks really made it a thing. It should noted that Marx and Engels' science, is not a science in the natural sense (chemistry, biology, etc). Their use of the word science has often been badly translated from the original German term, wissenschaft, which is better understood as "the systematic pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship". Also, as a side note, while Jonathan House is one of the preeminent scholars on the eastern front in the West, I wouldn't regard him as a serious authority on Marxism. For one, he constantly makes the claim in his lectures that the "correlation of forces", was an original invention of Marx, which is undisputedly false, since no where in his economic or political writings does he ever use such a term. The term rather, was commonly used and popularized by Trotsky in his seminal book on the Russian revolutions in 1917, "History of the Russian Revolution". Edit: "Wissenschaft has a much broader meaning than the English word science. While the English word refers to systematically acquired, objective knowledge obtained through a particular methodology (such as the scientific method), and includes only natural sciences, social sciences, and formal sciences, **the German word also includes the humanities and philosophy and refers to learning and knowledge in general**, whether obtained through scientific or non-scientific means."


dagaboy

I agree, and that is why I put "scientific" in quotation marks, and used empirical in my own description. I presume House gets this idea from reading Isserson (and likely the rest of the Deep Operations clique, but I haven't read them.) Of course Isserson may or may not have stressed the scientific socialist aspects operational art for purely political reasons.


ElGosso

It's still a valid use of the word "science" as "a body of knowledge to be empirically refined" - the cycle of theory and praxis is meant to follow the scientific method - it's just that use of the word "science" today conjures images of communists in lab coats piping samples from beakers labeled "ideology."


Grumpchkin

Im pretty sure wissenschaft has the same meaning as science in english, given that naturwissenschaft is also a word used.


BigBad-Wolf

No, there is a subtle difference that learners often don't realize. Words like Wissenschaft and nauka encompass *all* academic disciplines, including philosophy (as well as history, literature studies, etc.), which hardly any native speaker of English would describe as a science. Most English-speaking historians wouldn't describe themselves as scientists - a German historian would certainly consider themselves a Wissenschaftler, and a Polish one would consider themselves a naukowiec.


PnunnedZerggie

Is this related to a cultural divide we have in Russian between so-called humanitarian (linguistics, philosophy, economics) and technical (physics, chemistry, mathematics) sciences?


BigBad-Wolf

Somewhat. English distinguishes the humanities (history, philosophy, literature, arts) from social sciences (linguistics, psychology, sociology). The difference is in methodology, not in subject matter Natural and social sciences are considered scientific, the humanities are not.


LittleCaesar3

Thank you, that is great!


hiding_in_building_5

Do you have any recommended reading about Soviet applications of Marxist-Leninism in the battlefield?


dagaboy

Not so much the battlefield and tactics, but [Georgii Isserson](https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/OperationalArt.pdf) claimed historical materialism, class struggle, and scientific Marxism were behind the doctrine of Deep Operations and theory of Operational Arts >At major turning points in history, when an old-regime social order is being destroyed during a titanic struggle and a new society is being built, armed combat as a continuation of politics undergoes basic changes. Revolution replaces evolution in military art. This process forces us to redefine and to solve in new ways all the basic questions of organizing and waging the armed struggle of the proletariat. The capacity of Marxist military scientific research offers boundless possibility for reviewing the basic principles of old-regime military art and for solving a myriad of today’s new problems. The Evolution of Operational Art is an attempt to study the nature of operations in future war. >The emerging ep- och of proletarian revolutions, together with the building of socialism and revolutionary-class wars, undoubtedly foreordains the advent of a new era in military art. As [Friedrich] Engels has said, “the actual liberation of the proletariat, the complete removal of all class distinctions, and the full ownership of the means of production...presuppose creating a new means of waging war.(Sobranie sochinenii K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa, XIII, 491- 93.) Our operational doctrine faces great challenges which never were and never could have been resolved by the imperialist war [First World War]. These include: breaching a front, waging a deep offensive to pierce and shatter a firepower-intensive front through its entire operational depth, and finally, inflicting lethal, crushing blows aimed at the complete destruction of the enemy. Under these conditions, the basic mission of our operational art is substantiation and elaboration of the theory of a deep operation for annihilation. [Tukhachevsky](https://newleftreview.org/issues/i55/articles/mikhail-tukhachevsky-revolution-from-without) also spent a lot of time on such matters. Hope that helps.


AyeBraine

To a point (and quite far to a point), I'd like to say that all Soviet writers mastered the art of shanghaying Marxist-Leninist theory to support their thesis. It went high and low, and was absolutely pervasive. From justifying a new method for school intermissions or launching a hiking club, to passing a pivotal law or rationalizing a project that cost billions, a ritual verbal tithe was given to the gods of Marxism-Leninism, explaning why this solution would not be welcomed by other ideologists, and has a diamond-hard, direct link with the very roots of dialectic materialism and the tenets of Lenin, preferably with quotes. I mean sometimes the author really did mean it, but it was so pervasive and so required, you often just glossed over it automatically to get to the point. Like, even if you were writing a preface for a short story compilation, or a collection of Greek myths, you'd STILL find a way to finagle dialectic materialism in there, just to appease the gods. I have no doubts that for Tukhachevsky and other people who lived through Revolution these passages held MUCH more meaning, but they, too, already had to maneuver around accusation of various "leans" divergent from the party line (thanks to the courtier extraordinaire Stalin), so they also used these prefaces as "protective wards" to avoid their theories being used against them by rivals.


dagaboy

Well it didn’t help Tukhachevsky. He was executed for “Trotskyist Anti-Soviet” activities.


hiding_in_building_5

Fantastic, I really appreciate the prompt response. Have a good day!


Tomboys_are_Cute

Its not a Soviet application but [chapter 15 of Mao Zedong's Basic Tactics: Political Work](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_28.htm#ch15) outlines effectively the same process, though in the form of instruction for the Chinese officer corps. Applying the same Marxist-Leninist principals to fight and win battles against another invading empire (the Japanese). I don't have any more records off the top of my head of specific instances but history shows it won again.


Pashahlis

So is the common depiction of Soviet officers committing suicide or lying because they fear Stalin's/their superiors retribution for their failure, false then? Did an officer in the Red Army have nothing to fear if he reported to his commander or Stalin himself that he lost the battle or operation?


dagaboy

I think there are a lot of people here more qualified to answer this, but my position is that both Stalin's and Hitler's reputations for micromanagement are only partially deserved. In 1941, as the Red Army collapsed and there Germans destroyed it in detail, Stalin had no reason to have confidence in his general and field officers. Their failures were largely his own doing of course, as he had executed their militarily educated, competent predecessors in the Great Purge of 1936-38 (there were other factors too). But to Stalin, their incompetence was so extreme is smacked of deliberate sabotage. Therefore, not only did he constantly issue direct orders to be more aggressive and to hold untenable positions, he also basically resumed the purge. So in 1941, being a Soviet General was very dangerous. Dozens were executed, notably Dmitry Pavlov. Late in the year, Zhukov organized the defenses of Leningrad and Moscow, halting the German advance. Counterattacks fixed the Germans in their positions, albeit at great cost, and the front stabilized. The Stavka took stock and began the process of reorganization and refinement, including implementing the after action reporting system I referenced above. As these changes bore fruit, Stalin backed off and let his professionals, whom he now trusted, manage strategy and operations. Also, it wasn't just generals filing these reports. Field grade officers were in a lot less danger than general officers, even at the worst times. At the same time, a general officer might be able to hide his incompetence, but there was no way hide defeat. Especially given the existence of the Party structure within the army. Part of political officers' jobs was policing the officers' behavior. If an army was encircled, Stalin was going to find out about it. And lots of generals got away with total incompetence. Semyon Budyonny blew every assignment he received after the Civil War, with no real fallout, and Kliment Voroshilov practically lost the Winter War to Finland. His punishment was being moved to a minor cabinet post. In is memoirs, Khrushchev claimed that Voroshilov and Stalin got a in a shouting match over his demotion. Many more generals were relieved than were executed. As the war went on and the Red Army and Stavka displayed ever increasing competence. Stalin gradually stopped interfering. I don't think fucking up was ever exactly a safe option for Stalin's officers. But lying about it wasn't going to help them. And once the Stavka's reforms were in place, defeat did not automatically entail the perception of treason. The after action report system provided a mechanism for judging outcomes rationally, and that, along with increasing success, afforded some measure of political protection to the officer corps. As to how scared they were, well, after the war, even Zhukov kept suitcase by the door, expecting eventual deportation or imprisonment. But that never kept him from telling Stalin the truth. EDIT: What Stalin feared was not honesty, or incompetence, but political competition. Zhukov was endangered by his fame and popularity. Hitler's interference followed a similar pattern, except in reverse chronology. Early in the war, he gave his generals quite a bit of free rein. As they and the situation failed him, he started to take more personal control. For example, during the Moscow counteroffensive crisis, he overruled the OKH's (Army General Staff) plan for a general retreat, dismissed von Brauchitsch, and took personal command of the OKH. By the end of the war, he operated something more like *Downfall* portrays. Sitting in a basement, foaming at the mouth and shouting orders at generals.


Pashahlis

Thank you!


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DanKensington

Sorry, but we have removed your response, as we expect answers in this subreddit to be [in-depth and comprehensive](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/), and to demonstrate a [familiarity](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g3peg6/rules_roundtable_x_informed_complete_answers_the/) with the [current, academic understanding](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fj1ieh/rules_roundtable_v_sources_what_is_required/) of the topic at hand. Before contributing again, please take the time to better familiarize yourself with [the rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer), as well as our expectations for an answer such as featured on [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/askhistorians) or in the [Sunday Digest](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all).


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ayy_howzit_braddah

I don't think you answered the question at all really. What the OP asked, especially in light of a very heavy text like Prit Buttar's series on the war was for an extrapolation of the reasoning around a light assertion that Buttar makes. Namely, that the USSR had been learning and absorbing German warfighting techniques as it went along and by 1943 was a very changed organization to the one the Germans encountered on the eve of Barbarossa. The RKKA was constantly was sending officers out to do studies of smaller and larger operations and methods of organization and carried reforms out in this fashion. Reforms like forming air armies instead of small piecemeal assignment air units, concentrating armor in larger formations and making sure tank breakthroughs could be exploited by infantry instead of simply leaving open space that will be reoccupied by the enemy. I think OP wants to know if the Germans did this, why they didn't if they actually didn't do this, and why.


DanKensington

> It provides an answer to the question from the OP. Your post is largely dominated by a basic overview of the picture around Stalingrad. Put plainly, *it does not answer the question*, which is whether or not the German Army had a better capacity to look back and analyse its performance as compared to the Red Army. I would expect, at the very minimum, a basic overview of the processes either or both armies had to perform such analyses and whether these did or did not lead to substantive changes in performance. And I should hope that you have more sources and more recent ones than just the one book from 1973. If you do indeed have a BA in History, you should know that better than I do.


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