No, they did not. Just to use an example: civilians in Leningrad suburbs that were occupied by Germans subsisted on less amount of food than Leningrad proper, a city under siege.
As a general rule of thumb: Germans did jack shit to supply occupied areas of the Soviet Union with food and...
Hitler will still attack France right after Poland because French were his primary target for the immediate future. Invasion of USSR was long-term project of his.
As I already said - under that definition pretty much anything other than Western liberal democracy is a 'dictatorship'. Which makes the definition entirely useless.
In the same way they reacted OTL. No one really gave a fuck.
Not a single person on this list was a dictator. They all were in power solely because Party consensus.
USSR lacked a dictator since Stalin's death. So it was only a dictatorship in a sense when the word is used to call out anything that is 'not Western liberal democracy' which is kinda meaningless use of the word.
There was no solution to avoid strategic exchange in the scenario of all-out Soviet-NATO war in Europe. The only ones are unrealistic ones like NATO essentially surrendering after initial engagement.
No, they weren't. It is some sort of Cold War mythology that was never confirmed by any Soviet...
There was only one way for the Soviet tactical nuclear weapons usage in Germany wouldn't escalate to at least limited strategic exchange. It is if NATO would throw West Germany under the bus and essentially give up. Because Netherlands will be nuked within the first week. Denmark will be nuked...
Again, the idea of conventional World War 3 is a popular chimera that never actually planned for by either side. So French posturing about 'if the Soviet come close to our border we will use nukes' was utterly irrelevant back then and it is still now.
Soviets were planning to use nuclear...
Also this Erenburg quote was looking weird to me, so I decided to look for the original article. It actually doesn't have anything like that. There is a direct translation of the piece:
The article lacks "Have no mercy on the women, children, or the aged! Kill every German--wipe them out!"...
Stalin indeed wielded an absurd amount of power personally. He just used this power not to control what other people do. He used that power to appoint people who did things for him. Stalin was almost a definition of macro-managing dictator.
Yeah, this particular piece belongs to Ilya Erenburg...
Does it come from Tito after Yugoslav-Soviet split? I very much doubt that Stalin would have said something like that. It is just stupid mustache twirling villain shit.
It is another fine example of memetic Stalin being quite different from the real one. Stalin was many things but definitely...
Stalin did exactly that. There is no indication that Stalin ever wanted 'to exact revenge' or somehow encouraged such behaviors or gave orders to military leadership to not react. While the orders to do the exact opposite actually exist and documented to be enforced. There are military tribunal...
Tukhachevsky wasn't popular either in the army nor among the wider populace. It is Stalin who actually was popular and it is the reason why he was able to get away with a lot of the shit he did.
You misunderstood my point. Moral qualms were real. People didn't like the after-effects of chemical weapon usage and considered it horrific. But it was not the main factor behind refusal to use it. The main factor was that chemical weapons do not do much that you cannot do with conventional...