Different Soviet actions 1939-41
- Thread starter Uruk
- Start date
Curiousone
Banned
The S.U has less strategic depth (less space to trade for time while mobilizing), less battle experience to get their forces back in shape after the purges.
They may be less of a perceived 'known quantity' to the Germans if they haven't watched them floundering in the Winter War.
It takes a little longer for the Germans to complete the war against Poland. Not sure if the Poles can re-group, hold on for anything more than another few weeks. France had hoped for four months originally I think. Poland has less to whine about being betrayed post-war.
The Baltic countries probably fight in the Axis, get less sympathy post war.
They may be less of a perceived 'known quantity' to the Germans if they haven't watched them floundering in the Winter War.
It takes a little longer for the Germans to complete the war against Poland. Not sure if the Poles can re-group, hold on for anything more than another few weeks. France had hoped for four months originally I think. Poland has less to whine about being betrayed post-war.
The Baltic countries probably fight in the Axis, get less sympathy post war.
That doesn't really fit with his overarching strategic goal, which was to acquire a buffer region which would be used to absorb the main blow of a future German invasion, instead of fighting on Soviet territory. Creating puppet governments would needlessly over complicate things.
This...
And this. Although Stalin would be compelled to station a significant quantities of troops in the new puppet states to defend them anyways.
Cook
Banned
Militarily it would not have made a great deal of difference; Soviet forces marched into the Baltic states it the ‘invitation’ of their respective governments after the signing of mutual assistance pacts with Moscow (Estonia signed on 28 September, Lithuania on 10 October and Latvia 11 October 1939). From then on they were effectively puppet regimes with a rapidly declining independence, their annexing by the Soviet Union in June for 1940 was little more than a formality. The presence of the Red Army on their territory would have been just as ‘welcomed’ by governments that remained ‘independent’ if required.
In terms of international politics it would have had some advantages since Soviet expansion would have been less blatant. Doubtless the Baltic states would have formed integral members of the Warsaw Pact in the post-war world. Since all three states would have had seats in the new United Nations it would have given the Soviets a stronger voting block, three more votes in the General assembly than they had. (Historically the Soviet Union had three votes: Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia all had a seat and a vote in the General Assembly)
A puppet eastern Poland is less likely; the territory had been lost to Poland twenty years earlier in Russo-Polish war and was considered Belorussian territory that was being ‘liberated’. Most of it was east of the Curzon Line; the line defined by the League of Nations in 1919 as the natural eastern border of Poland. Stalin also had a deep seated hatred of the Poles and wanted to thoroughly extinguish all signs of Polish national aspirations, even a puppet Poland wasn’t sufficiently subservient for his interests; prior to the conquest of Poland, Hitler’s inclination was to leave a puppet Polish state as a Reich Protectorate, this idea was abandoned at the urging of the Soviets. The territory that would have formed the Polish protectorate became instead the region of the General Government.
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They'll be sitting firm on the Stalin Line though, which would surely slow the Germans up a bit.