[Ruatha]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
I'm sorry Oleg. It's normal for people to feel pride and all in their country. But realistically the war came very close to being a disaster for Russia. Our discussion was not meant to insult you or your country. There is no shame in admiting it. In fact you can be that much more proud that despite how bad things were they prevailed.

The loss of Stalingrad wouldn't actually have been as devastating as the loss of the soldiers defending it. Moscow is the same way. Once you capture the armies and the cities in a war, it's over. You said yourself, there was nothing east of Stalingrad. The Soviet government may not have offically capitulated, but with no more armies or or industrial capacity west of the Kamchatka peninsula, and no effective means of transportation accross the vast middle of the country except for a few easily defended or destroyed roads and railways, they would have been irrelevant to the events of the rest of the war in europe.

Likely there would have been resistance movements and pockets of figthing, as there were in all the occupied countries. But without outside support those are merely distractions.

Geoschmo

Was there any industrial capacity left in Moscow?
I thought it was all moved east in case Moscow would fall.
Wasn't the Soviet army bad trained and under equipped? In that case it wouldn't be very hard for Soviet to fill the ranks again as they had a vast population to recruit from.

So I also belive that even if Stalingrad and Moscow had fallen the Russians would have eventually recaptured it.

(We've fought them all our history until we stopped fighting almost 200 years ago (our Last war was with Russia, and when they set foot on Swedish soil we realized war wasn't for us....) , and they've always retaken everything we've occupied, even if it took them hundreds of years to do it sometimes!)

[ July 27, 2003, 14:48: Message edited by: Ruatha ]