Very interesting, though I do think “Glantz thinks Soviet victory wasn’t inevitable anymore” is a bit of an exaggeration. Doesn’t seem like a huge revision of his previous works, just that good intelligence is always useful and that it helped prevent the capital from being taken which would have made the situation worse, but that happening doesn’t mean the Soviets were gonna throw in the towel.
Just now saw this.
Glantz had previously stated the Soviets
were always predestined to win, including taking the position that Lend Lease only shortened WWII in the ETO by about three years in the early 2000s. He's since backtracked on both, as I noted here but also in terms of the articles his Journal has been putting out in the last decade or so. As for whether it's an exaggeration or not, in his own words the USSR could collapse as a result of this:
Finally, the actions Stalin took in reaction to the intelligence he received had a major impact on the course and outcome of military actions during the first year of the Soviet-German War. Although they did not lessen the disastrous immediate impact the Barbarossa invasion had on the Soviet Armed Forces, that is the outright destruction of three armies and much of the Red Air Force on the ground, Stalin’s actions, which covertly deployed more than four reserve armies to the Smolensk region by early July, put paid to the German assumption it would win the war if it could destroy the bulk of the Red Army west of the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers. Likewise, Stalin’s decision in October 1941 to transfer large forces from the Far East to the West had a significant impact on the course and outcome of the battle for Moscow. In short, this decision ultimately played a major role in staving off a Red Army defeat at the gates of Moscow and helped prevent German seizure of the Soviet capital, if not the collapse of the Soviet Union as a whole. Furthermore, but to a lesser extent, it also facilitated the subsequent successful Red Army counteroffensive.
What changed? In the 2010s, Glantz did his
Barbarossa Derailed series which argued the German operational plan came undone during the prolonged battle for Smolensk. The necessary Soviet ingredients for that defensive success was the partial mobilization of Soviet reserves starting in April on the basis of Zorge's intelligence work, as well as the transfer of forces from the Far East. Without those, the Germans would not have been derailed and the delayed Soviet mobilization would've enabled the Germans to overrun enough of the Soviet strategic space that their aims would've been achieved.
This is a pretty big case in point of what my initial post was about; a lot of mainstream historians changed their opinions on the basis of new evidence in the last 20 years. I do not feel Alternate History, as a genre, has kept up with that change for a variety of reasons.
Plus, I’ve heard lots of people scoff at the claim about how bad it would be, the Germans would be absurdly overextended and Moscow isn’t the only important city in the USSR, they’ll still have a shitload of resources to kick them out of the country.
I think this is another example,
in particular because of access to Soviet archival data that is increasingly available over the last 15 years that has challenged a lot of conventional wisdom about the Eastern Front in particular:
What is noteworthy is that the share of Moscow agglomeration in industrial output throughout the war was bigger than the two biggest agglomerations in Urals - Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk (famous Tankograd) and West Siberia's Novosibirsk agglomeration combined (19 vs. 18.4%). Together with Gorky agglomeration, the share of just these two Western cities and their surrounding areas was bigger than Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk combined (25,7 vs. 20,6%). Overall, the share of economic regions on Volga and West of the river in Soviet industrial output during the Great Patriotic War was about 58-60%, with the 40-42% share of Eastern regions, led by the Urals. What's more, the total share of Central (Moscow) and Volga-Vyatka (Gorky) economic regions (33,3% of the whole country's industrial output) was higher than Ural and West Siberia regions together (31,9%).
And table:
You can also see the importance of Moscow in terms of categories of military goods:
1) all of IL-2's and IL-10's were produced in Western regions of Soviet Union - in Moscow (no. 30 and no. 381) and Kuybyshev factories (no. 1 and no. 18).
2) 97,51% of truck production took place in Moscow (ZIS) and Gorky (GAZ) factories.
3) at least 72,49% of total aircraft production took place in Western regions of USSR. At least, because I can not precisely locate the places of production of the remaining 13088 pieces (9,16%). Thus, this share might actually increase.
4) Ya. M. Sverdlov plant in Dzerzhinsk (Gorky region) was the main supplier of explosives during the Great Patriotic War - every second projectile and every third air bomb manufactured in the USSR was fired by the Ya. M. Sverdlov plant. More than 148 million artillery shells, mines and other items were fired at the plant (
source).
5) all of BA-64 light armored cars (8216 pieces in years 1942-1945) were produced by GAZ (
source).
6) plants of Gorky produced alone 65,82% of all light tanks and 21,26% of medium tanks and 35,20% of SPGs.
7) around 43% of all tank and SPG production took place in Western regions of Soviet Union in years 1941-1945.
In short, yes, the loss of the Moscow-Gorky region would be fatal for the Soviet effort. Perhaps not a quick collapse as envisioned by Barbarossa's planners, but definitely the end result of the loss of so much economic output.
