1941: in search of an alternative

The battlefield events that followed the tragic outbreak of the Great Patriotic War have long acquired the quality of a “sore spot” in the historical memory of contemporary Russian society, and have driven scholars to seek the causes of the appalling defeats suffered by the Red Army in 1941. The establishment in Russian historiography of an interpretative model, which attributes these defeats to a complex of objective factors, has brought to the fore the question of whether the tragedy of June 22 might have been avoided. The author of this article proceeds from the premise that finding an answer to this question is only possible within the framework of alternative history. Determining the possibility or impossibility that the decisions and actions of the Soviet military-political leadership on the eve of the war could have repelled or, at least, minimized the damage of a surprise attack will not only resolve the trauma inflicted on historical memory, but will also expand the field of research, directing it to identify the motivation of key actors engaged in military-political decision making on the eve of the war. This article employs an original methodology for searching and justifying alternative situations in the period 1939-1941 within the framework of a retrospective movement that moves from the proposed ideal situation to the one that actually obtained. It is based on determining the conditions that would have been necessary to repel the German invasion. The use of the historical analogy method made it possible to identify a historical situation that, in its particulars, came closest to actual events, one in which the resolution of a complex of problems resulted in the repulse of a large-scale German attack. The Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 serves as just such a situation. The extrapolation of the ratio of forces of the two sides made it possible to determine the composition of Red Army forces which would have been necessary on the western border to repel the German attack of June 22, 1941. Adjusting these indicators while taking into account the level of training of the two armies made it possible to establish the number of Soviet troops required on the border at 6-6.5 million soldiers. The decisive condition for achieving this number was no less than the partial or even the full mobilization of Soviet armed forces. Projecting this condition onto pre-war circumstances enabled the author to substantiate the existence of three periods in the historical reality of autumn 1939 - summer 1940 within which an alternative to avoid the tragedy of 1941 presented itself.