Soviet production of tanks, planes, and many types of field weapons at that time exceeded the production of all the major Western countries combined! That is, of course, before U.S. arms production had made the United States by 1942–43 the “arsenal of democracy.” But even during World War II, the USSR far outproduced the United States in machine guns and mortars as well as cannons and tanks. Also, the unique, multiple-rocket firing “Katyusha” (or mobile “organ” artillery, so named because of its resemblance to a nest of organ pipes) was coming on line as the Great Fatherland War began. Like other new, world-class weaponry just starting to come off Soviet assembly lines in 1941, the Katyusha ultimately played a major role in Soviet victories.
Among the new Soviet tanks was the low-profile, diesel-driven, semiamphibious (fording) T-34, developed in the late 1930s. This was the only such tank of its kind in battle in 1941 and was the envy of the Wehrmacht. Early Soviet artillery likewise was impressive, as were several other types of ground-force weaponry, including mortars and infantry guns and vehicles (the hardiness of the latter under Russia’s severe winter conditions became a crucial factor). Moreover, the Soviet aircraft industry was developing apace. Many innovations, and some flight world records, were chalked up by the Red Air Force in the 1930s. (Pre-1917 Russian progress in aviation is, of course, well known to anyone who has ever heard the names Mozhaisky, Tsiolkovsky, or Sikorsky.)
Not the least of the impressive new Soviet aircraft were the twin- and four-engine, medium- and long-range bombers and transport aircraft. The latter especially would be used for transporting airborne troops. The long-range heavy bomber TB-3, to cite one example, could carry four light aircraft mounted atop its wings or slung below them and the fuselage. Such Red Air Force planes, powered by impressive engines, could carry more weight than any foreign equivalent. In some ways the power plants of these planes were the forerunners of the powerful rocket engines developed in the USSR in the 1950s.
From 1940 to mid-1941, the Soviet aviation industry was mass producing the MiG-3, Yak-1, LaGG-3, 11-2, Pe-2, and other aircraft. In that mere one-and-a-half-year period, the total fighters and bombers produced in the USSR came to 1,200 MiG-3s, 400 Yak-1s, 250 Il-2s, and 460 Pe-2s. According to British and other military analysts, the Soviet planes in some cases were, indeed, world class. Too, the rate of their production in the USSR in the late 1930s, even before Operation Barbarossa was launched against the USSR in summer 1941, exceeded German aircraft production by four to one. These machines included the Ilyushin-2, or “Shturmovik” air-ground support fighter; the heavily armed fighter Polikarpov (“Po-2”), which saw service in the Spanish Civil War; and the flyushin-16, Version 17, a Polikarpov design appearing in 1938, an outstanding aircraft with ShKAS machine guns mounted atop the engine cowling plus two 20-millimeter cannons mounted in the wings, firing 1,600 rounds/minute with a muzzle velocity of 2,700 feet/second. These were exceptional specs for its time. The 11-16’s armament and ordnance weight exceeded that of the Messerschmidt 109-E1 by double and that of the British Spitfire by three times.
The specs of several other types of Soviet planes also led their equivalents worldwide. Some broke records in long-distance flight and in the power of their engines. Red Air Force fighters could attain speeds of up to 260 miles/hour and outclassed in several respects the German single- and twin-engine Me-109, FW-190, and Ju-87 and -88.
By mid-1941, the total Red Air Force fleet consisted of 10,000 planes, with a monthly production rate of 1,630 aircraft. By 1942, this latter figure had risen to 2,120 on the production base already established during the two preceding years. The designers of such world-class aircraft included A. S. Yakovlev, S. A. Lavochkin, A. I. Mikoyan, N. E. Zhukovsky, V. M., Petlyakov, N. N. Polikarpov, S. V. Ilyushin, G. M. Beriyev, A. N. Zhuravchenko, D. A. Ventsel’, V. S. Pugachev, and G. I. Pokrovsky.
Soviet defense-production organization and experience became vital when the German penetration of the industrial Ukraine in the opening weeks of the Great Fatherland War in June-July 1941 forced the Soviets to step up the movement of their production facilities to the rear to the Ural Mountains industrial region, the easternmost boundary of European Russia. At this time the Soviet’s own production of war matériel rather dwarfed subsequent Lend-Lease aid—as vitally important, however, as the latter was, as per Stalin’s public postwar admission to U.S. Lend-Lease administrator Eric Johnston.
TRAIL OF BROKEN “FRIENDSHIP” TREATIES
As the Soviets built up their industrial and military strength, their diplomatic relations with the outside world appeared confusing. In the pre-World War II years, the “dialectical” twists, turns, and zigzags of Soviet tactics became standbys in Soviet diplomacy.6 Some Western analysts even thought that the Soviets were using such mind-boggling on-again /off-again tactics as a form of psychological warfare to baffle and “wear down” the adversary. Soviet policy toward the League of Nations is one of many examples of this zigzagging. The “Nazi-Soviet honeymoon,” suddenly inaugurated in August 1939, to the world’s surprise and certainly to that of the world’s Communist Party apparatuses, was only the latest of a string of such policy gyrations.
At times, such zigzag behavior profoundly disoriented foreign observers, especially pro-Soviet ones and fellow travelers. Why, some might ask, would Stalin and the Soviet Union conclude a friendship treaty with each of the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—while at the same time using Communist Party legals and illegals in those same countries to overturn their capitalist system, private ownership of property, and political order? Indeed, as early as 1918 as well as in the 1920s Lenin followed a policy of attempting to sovietize countries as far to the west as Hungary and Germany. Was this merely old-fashioned Realpolitik based on the basic Russian geopolitical situation? Or did the regime’s expansionist ideology serve as more than a contributing factor to such behavior?
The same could be asked about Moscow’s overtures to and agreements with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and other nation-states with which Moscow made nonaggression, friendship, or mutual-assistance treaties in the 1930s while at the same time fomenting unrest in those same countries or eventually in the postwar period even taking them over. In fact, a U.S. Senate staff study, compiled in 1959, found that in thirty-eight short years after 1917, the USSR
had broken its word to virtually every country to which it ever gave a signed promise. It signed treaties of nonaggression with neighboring countries then absorbed these states. It signed promises to refrain from revolutionary activity inside the countries with which it sought “friendship.” [One may] seriously doubt whether during the whole history of civilization any great nation has ever made as perfidious a record as this in so short a time.
Trade was a strong motivating factor in such diplomatic intercourse, to be sure, although not the only one. Not even trade—say, as embodied in the Anglo-Soviet trade pact of 1921—was allowed to interfere with Moscow’s pursuit of world revolution and subversion in all of the countries without exception with which it had diplomatic and other dealings.7