Additionally, Stalin was well aware that other European armies had utterly disintegrated when faced with Nazi military efficacy and responded effectively by subjecting his army to galvanizing terror and nationalist appeals to patriotism. Bertriko, Jean-Jacques Subrenat, A. and David Cousins, The name "Tanya" came into use as a pseudonym of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.Ромуальд Святек, "Катынский лес", Военно-исторический журнал, 1991, №9, Bauer, Eddy. These volunteers (called Hiwi, an acronym for Hilfswilliger, roughly meaning "volunteers") were not under any Russian command or control; they were exclusively under German command carrying out various non-combat duties. An example of it is the summer offensive of 1942, which led to even more losses by the Red Army and the recapture of initiative by the Germans. By changing the official policy of the party and the state towards religion, he could engage the Church and its clergy in mobilising the war effort. Peasants received no rations and had to make do with local resources that they farmed themselves. In August 1939, Stalin accepted Hitler's proposal into a non-aggression pact with Germany, negotiated by the foreign ministers The pact was reached two days after the breakdown of Soviet military talks with British and French representatives in August 1939 over a potential Franco-Anglo-Soviet alliance.After disagreement regarding Stalin's demand to move Stalin and Ribbentrop spent most of the night of the pact's signing trading friendly stories about world affairs and cracking jokes (a rarity for Ribbentrop) about Britain's weakness, and the pair even joked about how the After taking around 300,000 Polish prisoners in 1939 and early 1940,In August 1939, Stalin declared that he was going to "solve the Baltic problem, and thereafter, forced Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to sign treaties for "mutual assistance.

However, a decree of 29 May 1918 imposed obligatory military service for men of ages 18 to 40.In the mid-1920s the territorial principle of manning the Red Army was introduced.

Sixteen districts remained from the mid-1970s to the end of the USSR (see table at right). It reports a further 108 missing on operations and four lost on the ground). End of the 'Low, Dishonest Decade': Failure of the Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance in 1939. In 1938, the Red Army had 179,000 officers, 56% more than in 1937, of whom a further 6,742 were dismissed. to K14 (field commander, army commander, military district commander, army commissar and equivalent). The city of Leningrad endured more suffering and hardships than any other city in the Soviet Union during the war, as it was under siege for 872 days, from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944.Most survival strategies during the siege, though, involved staying within the city and facing the problems through resourcefulness or luck. Most rural peasants struggled and lived in unbearable poverty, but others sold any surplus they had at a high price and a few became rouble millionaires, until a currency reform two years after the end of the war wiped out their wealth.Despite harsh conditions, the war led to a spike in Soviet nationalism and unity. Brownmiller points out that Nazis used rape as a weapon of terror.Examples of mass rapes in Soviet Union committed by German soldiers include On 9 August 1945 the Soviet Union invaded Japanese-controlled On 16 August 1941, in attempts to revive a disorganized Soviet defense system, Stalin issued Soviet POWs and forced labourers who survived German captivity were sent to special "transit" or "filtration" camps meant to determine which were potential traitors.Soviet troops reportedly raped German women and girls, with total victim estimates ranging from tens of thousands to two million.According to recent figures, of an estimated 4 million POWs taken by the Russians, including Germans, Japanese, Hungarians, Romanians and others, some 580,000 never returned, presumably victims of privation or the Gulags, compared with 3.5 million Soviet POW who died in German camps out of the 5.6 million taken.Nazi propaganda had told Wehrmacht's soldiers the invasion of the Soviet Union was a war of exterminationThe Nazi revolution was broader than just the Holocaust. Twenty-three years ago when the Bolshevik Revolution took place there were few machines in Russia. (1) a mutual assistance/aid pact and (2) a recognition that, after the war, the Soviet Union would gain the territories in countries that it had taken pursuant to its division of Eastern Europe with Hitler in the Correctly calculating that Hitler would direct efforts to In early 1942, the Soviets began a series of offensives labelled "Stalin's First Strategic Offensives". In September 1941, Stalin told British diplomats that he wanted two agreements: