← Back to the front page

Historical Figures with Unforeseen Downfall and Misfortune

Khalid Elhassan April 9, 2020 33 min

Silver Thursday - United States — Nelson Bunker Hunt. Express News

28. Destroying the Talent

Soviet light tanks advancing into Finland in 1939. Wikimedia

Stalin’s Military Purge also decimated the Soviet Union’s best middle-rank officers. Until 1937, the Soviet military had been innovative, and the intellectual ferment within the Red Army, such as the Theory of Deep Operations, was as creative as what the Wehrmacht was doing at the time. The Soviets had their equivalents of Guderians and Mannsteins, brimming with ideas and confident that they would revolutionize warfare.

Those innovative soldiers suffered the most. The Military Purge fell heaviest on the most creative and free-thinking officers, since they stood out and were thus prime suspects of harboring the deviationist tendencies Stalin wanted to be stamped out. Thus, when Hitler attacked, the Soviet military was poorly officered and poorly led.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.