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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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huh. weird thing to use as propaganda. where did this originate from?
~~The USSR actually killed deserters, but it was rare and in deseperation~~ (read salad), the rifles thing was explained in the video I think, what happened was the soviet soldiers got put in a place with half the required rifles then later more rifles came and they all had rifles
The USSR did not actually kill retreating men in the field. Blocking detachments were mainly made up of the worst soldiers in a unit and were primarily used to round up malingerers and send them back to the front. There were also roughly 100-250 men in each blocking detachment, and each group was expected to enforce no-retreat orders on a regiment of roughly 40,000-50,000 men. The primary politcal goal of blocking detachments was to persuade officers from ordering panicked retreats in order to prevent the front line from collapsing. If individual units needed to fall back, they would be allowed to.
If a solider was suspected of serious desertion, they would be arrested and tried under court martial, not shot on the spot.
The only caveat to this is that Penal troops were followed by armed NKVD officers which would kill them on the spot for attempting to either surrender to the Germans, or escape from captivity.
yeah
Early in the war, Germany overran many Soviet divisions and their armament stockpiles leaving many troops without ammunition and oftentimes even rifles. This led to many Soviet divisions that survived the initial invasion being woefully under-equipped and significantly weaker then they appeared on paper; which in turn, led to further military disasters, notably around Minsk and Kiev.
However, by the start of the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, these logistical failures had been fixed for months and no longer plagued Soviet front line units. In fact, the Southern front had an overabundance of weapons and ammunition, and a severe lack of manpower due to the fighting around Leningrad and Moscow sucking up all available reserves.
In addition to what other people posted, WWI was a source of the "1 rifle, 2 men" myth. Because WWI was fucking awful. Multiple countries had logistical problems. Sometimes your daily rations would be a bullet and a slice of bread. This was especially true for Russia, who managed to lose despite being on the winning side of the war.
One of the catalysts for the Russian Revolution were the conditions of WWI. It was the second major war the Romanovs dragged their country into where they weren't prepared and were defeated within living memory (the Crimean War being the other).
There were often supply shortages during that time, but western filmmakers are derpshits and got it confused with things in WWII because it was convenient post-war as Cold War propaganda. This was made worse by Germans being the only sources of information regarding the Eastern front prior to the collapse of the USSR and opening of the soviet archives to Western historians. Nazis being nazis came up with all kinds of excuses as to why they lost while insisting their enemies were weaklings.