The second imperialist war is a way to assess the scale of Bolshevik modernization

Submitted by meerov21 on December 9, 2020

Stalin's victory over Hitler during world war II is often cited as an example of the success of Bolshevik modernization. But how justified is this?

The main problem is that the war between the USSR and Germany was not isolated from other participants.
According to a widespread misconception, the United States became a superpower in 1945 - but this is not true; the US became the absolute leader of the world economy much earlier. By the end of the 1920s, America's industrial output exceeded that of great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan combined. Steel production of the USA is 1.4 times higher than England, France and Germany, power generation by 1.7 times, In 1930 U.S. produce cars 3 times higher than the rest of the world.

The huge economic potential of America, many times exceeding the capabilities of other participants in the world war, allowed it to launch the production of a wide variety of weapons, and in staggering numbers. Some of this also went to the Soviet Union. In particular: 18 thousand combat aircraft, 12 thousand tanks and self-propelled guns etc. In addition, lend-lease (not only military, but also industrial, medical and food) played a huge role, because for example, workers in the rear of the USSR were dying of hunger. It brings half of all aviation gasoline, engines for part of tanks t-34 and american machines that made possible to make guns for these tanks that can fight the German "Panther".

...The total tonage of submarines produced by Germany exceeds the total tonage of all tanks produced by it during the world war 2 (despite the fact that the submarine is a more complex and expensive technology). Almost all of German fleet was intended to fight the United States and Britain.

In 1943-1944, 3 \ 4 of Germany's fighter aircraft tried to protect Germany from US and British raids (and about a third of the artillery). They lost. Only in the second half of 1944, 100 kilotons of bombs were dropped on Germany every month (5 Hiroshima, but the destructive effect is 10 times more due to the peculiarities of the energy output - the effect of 50 Hiroshima). Even earlier, for example, in the summer of 1943, during the battles on the Kursk bulge, British aircraft destroyed Hamburg in three days, killing 20 thousand and destroying thousand buildings.

All modern German equipment -radio-controlled missiles, jet aircraft of various types, cruise and ballistic missiles, revolutionary submarines, and much more - was directed against the allies - the USSR simply had no analogues of such weapons.

The United States and great Britain took at least half of Germany's economic resources for war, then reduced Germany to rubble, liquidated the German industry and took over the entire naval war and the majority of the war in the air, as well as about a quarter of all land forces of Germany.

Without the war with the United States and Britain, Germany would have been able to concentrate all its main resources on the Eastern front, build a huge corps of Panther tanks (in our reality, tanks of this type, together with Tigers, made up only a small part of the German tank corps), jet planes and other weapons, transfer all the artillery to the East, and also get an additional 25 percent manpower. At the same time, the USSR would have been significantly weaker if it had not received a lend-lease and if German industry work good. Germany would have destroyed the USSR with a 99 percent probability.
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Of course, the industrial potential created during Stalin's industrialization was great. It allowed to produce a huge number of tanks and guns. This fact, along with the monstrous cruelty (Stalin's army devastated the cities left to the Germans, destroying their industry and infrastructure and condemning their population to death, Stalin's military tribunals during world war II convicted 2.5 million people, and 200 thousand were shot) helped the USSR win the war.

However, we cannot consider the war of the USSR in isolation. Victory was achieved by a broad imperialist coalition that included three powerful empires - the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union - whose combined human, scientific, and industrial resources outnumbered nazi Germany.

It is almost impossible for the USSR to stand alone against the powerful economy of capitalist Germany.
Surely the USSR would have been destroyed thanks to the qualitative superiority of the mighty German industry. The Soviet victory was not won alone, but it was nevertheless effectively used by Soviet propaganda and allowed the Soviet system to be positioned as effective, which brought a lot of dividends in Asia. Various regimes, from Mao Zedong to Gamal Abdel Nasser, began to copy it, wanting to gain advantages in the field of technology, especially the military. After a while, disillusionment overtook these countries...