The new generation of historians prefer to concentrate their attention on the workings of the Soviet system as a whole, as opposed to blaming the disasters of 1941 on single individuals like Stalin and his cronies. It is important to study the system as a whole including the political economy and the social psychology of the Red Army soldiers in particular and the Soviet people in general.

The following is a raw-material essay based on the article cited below.

Von Hagen, Mark. “Soviet Soldiers and Officers on the Eve of the German Invasion: Towards a Description of Social Psychology and Political Attitudes.” Operation Barbarossa (1993, Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher) ed. Joseph L. Wieczynski

“Under Michel Foucault's influence, Gabor Rittersporn and Stephen Kotkin have analyzed the political economy of the 1930s by revealing its unspoken rules, assumptions, blindspots, and dysfunctional aspects. See Rittersporn's Simplifications staliniennes et complications sovietiques: Tensions sociales et conflitspolitiqu.es en URSS 1933-1953 (Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 1988); and Kotkin's dissertation and forthcoming book on the construction of Magnitogorsk.”
“Among Soviet historians, until recently, the orthodox view held that despite the traumatic shocks of the 1930s, the Soviet people were ‘united in spirit’ and this unity was a major source of Soviet victory. Curiously, this position unites historians who otherwise differ on their assessment of Stalin. On one side of the argument, those critical of Stalin highlight the spiritual unity of the Soviet people to deprive Stalin of any credit for winning the war; that is, the Soviet people, not the Soviet system, won the war in spite of Stalin. See Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, and Kirshin, "Dukhovnoe edinstvo." On the other side are those who, while acknowledging the damage done by the purges, yet still want to give Stalin primary credit for preparing the country for the war; they explain the "spiritual unity" of the people as one of the perhaps paradoxical consequences of Soviet educational, cultural, social, and economic policies. These latter point to the social mobility of workers and peasants, the increased access to cultural goods, the dedication to socialist ideals, and the further unifying effect of the growing threat of fascism and imperialism to the Soviet people.” (Von Hagen 63)

“Political-Moral Condition.”
The definition of the term “political-moral condition” was originally thought of by the Soviet political officers who meant by it information about the socio-economic status, level of education, ethnicity and party membership of the soldiers and officers. Von Hagen’s translation of the term is “political attitudes and social psychology” of the Soviet servicemen.

Army and Society.
Up until very recently, historians have tended to treat the armed forces and the society as distinct from each other. Using such an approach it was possible to contrast social developments against the supposedly unchanged face of the army. Omer Bartov has done a particularly impressive amount of work in connecting the society of the Nazi Germany to its armed forces.
“Certainly after 1934, however, when the Red Army grew steadily to a genuinely mass force (reaching 5,500,000 by mid-1941), life in the military could not help but reflect most, if not all, of the social conflicts and tensions that characterized the everyday world of Soviet civilians. But even before the mid-1930s, indeed beginning during the Civil War, the Bolshevik leadership very deliberately tried to fashion a new form of civil-military relations that would insure the revolutionary regime a loyal armed force by preventing military men from recreating the isolated caste relations of the Imperial Army.11" (Von Hagen 65)

It is , therefore, very important to study the psychology of the Red Army soldiers within the context of the Soviet society to which they belonged.

Reforms, Purges, Expansion and Training.

By the summer of 1940, Soviet officials had realized that a major reform in the army was necessary to prepare it for future wars. Marshal Timoshenko, the People’s Commissariat of Defense, started his own campaign of reform, yet it was not complete before the German invasion. Increasingly, more scholars agree that these reforms could not have succeeded because they did not target the Soviet society itself. Basically, to change “the institutional and political principles” of the Army, one had to reform “the entire political, economic, and social system” within which the Army existed. (Von Hagen 68) This, however, was not in the competency of the military officials, nor did political leaders like Stalin himself understand the workings of their own system.

“Defenders both of the Stalinist order and the non-Stalinist military alternative, each for different reasons, assert that the German invasion in June 1941 caught the Red Army in the midst of the S. K. Timoshenko reforms, which, therefore, were not given an adequate chance to remedy the primary ills of the preceding period. The Stalinists thereby demonstrate that the Stalin system was flexible in devising self-correcting mechanisms once a sober analysis was made of the situation; the anti-Stalinists assert that once the Stalinist clique of Voroshilov and his cohort were removed from power, the Army was able to put its own house in order, but that Stalin's errors in judging the German threat once again undermined the military's ability to do this in time to prevent further disaster.” (Von Hagen 68)

Training and Discipline.

The brief military campaigns before the Great Patriotic War, largely showed the unpreparedness of the Red Army for a major military conflict. Although, certainly, there were a few bright spots in the Spanish Civil War, the Lake Khassan and Khalkhin-Gol incidents, the Winter War, and the subsequent occupations of the Baltics, Eastern Poland and Bessarabia.

Frequently the Red Army troops and junior officers panicked in difficult situations because of the lack of basic preparedness for combat conditions.
“Soldiers and officers had little experience in digging trenches, conducting camouflage operations, crossing rivers, and, especially crucial during the Finnish campaign, skiing. As a consequence, soldiers and officers were simply unfamiliar with many basic tasks that would confront them in a real war.” (Von Hagen 71)
Similarly, a general tendency of carelessness undermined the effectiveness of the army in battle conditions.
“The confusion that characterized most army life was the consequence of all sectors of the army falling down on the job, from supply organs who failed to deliver necessary goods to engineering units who had not thought through such basic matters as how to get across minefields.31" (Von Hagen 71)
According to the economical Russian and subsequently Soviet military practice, most army units were kept at low strengths, especially in the support units. The purges made this weakness of the Red Army even more severe, which combined with a general expansion of the armed forces led to a disaster.

“As of Nov. 12, 1940, the shortfall was determined to be 21 percent of desired staffing levels. By the eve of the war, more than 102,000 officers' positions were unstaffed, including a 17-25 percent shortfall in the western frontier districts.
See "Akt o prieme NKO," Nov. 12, 1940, TsAMO, f. 72, op. 173022, d. 3, 11. 208-374, cited in Kirshin, "Die sowjetischen Streitkrafte am Vorabend des Grossen Vaterlandischen Krieges," in Bernd Wegner, ed., Zwei Wege nach Moskau (Munchen and Zurich: Piper, 1991), p. 390. See also Roger Reese, "A Note on a Consequence of the Expansion of the Red Army on the Eve of World War II," Soviet Studies, 41, No. 1 (Jan. 1989), 135-40, in which the author argues that the rapid expansion and the transition to a more technologically sophisticated army played a crucial role in the poor performance of the second half of 1941.” (Von Hagen 74)

“By the beginning of 1940 as many as 70 percent of regimental commanders and more than 70 percent of divisional commanders held their positions for all of one year.” (Von Hagen 74)

Also important to the effectiveness of the Red Army was the curious relationship between the soldiers and their officers. The Red Army was created on January 15th, 1918 as a revolutionary army meant to defend the people’s revolution against its enemies. In contrast to the pro-Czarist forces, there were no shoulder boards in the Red Army (rank was told by other insignia), overall the army was supposed to have some sort of quasi-democratic nature in which the officers and the soldiers were equal comrades.
While this attitude did, in fact, improve the close relationships between junior officers and soldiers, overall it was harmful to the cohesion of the army. Strict discipline (especially in stopping drunkenness) was hard to attain, at the same time that abuse and use of excessive force by commanders and political officers was hard to avoid.
Finally, the Soviet society itself turned out to be quite different from the one envisioned during the Russian Revolution. Increasingly, the gap between the common peasant-soldiers and the high ranking officers was hard to neglect.
“Kirshin, "Die sowjetischen Streitkrafte," p. 291, cites TsGASA figures from the Administrative-Economic Sector of the Main Administration of the Commissariat. For example, at the end of 1936 and beginning of 1937, tens of thousands of rubles were allocated to purchase furniture for the high command. Tukhachevskii was allocated 67,363 rubles for furnishings, Gamarnik 46,451 rubles, Lakir 33,235 rubles.” (Von Hagen 73)

The NKVD’s influence also played a crucial role to the state of the Red Army. Firstly, during the rapid expansion of the armed forces, the best of the available conscripts went to the NKVD forces. Also, the political officers were given increasingly more authority to interfere (usually with negative results) in the military affairs. Still, probably the greatest impact of the Great Purges was not in the simple elimination of about 40,000 Red Army officers, but in the general atmosphere left as a legacy. The remaining soldiers and officers were not exactly broken by the purges, but highly disoriented nonetheless. A lot of soldiers did not know whom to trust, even the political officers feared for their lives. A good example is the unwillingness of officers to conduct necessary exercises for the fear of punishment for “sabotage” in case if an accident occurred.
This atmosphere of distrust and suspicion “extended into the first months of the war itself, when officers denounced one another” and punished their soldiers by blocking detachments for the defeats suffered by a strong enemy. (Von Hagen 75)
Finally, despair and defeatism were widespread when the soldiers realized the wide gap between the Red Army’s capabilities in theory and in practice.

“In July 1937 a political worker in the Kiev District reported to Borisov that soldiers were expressing outright defeatist sentiments. "Why should we do exercises if the fascists will defeat us anyway?" one asked. Another from the same district concluded that "there's no way we can do anything now anyway. They know our military plans and documents, and they will win the war." Punitive measures were often taken against soldiers and commanders who dared to doubt the invincibility of the Red Army and who predicted defeat by the Germans.48" (Von Hagen 76)
During the war itself, objective evaluation of military conditions and even self-criticism was also frequently punished by NKVD as defeatism. Clearly, general improvement of the Red Army and the Soviet society in general was very hard to accomplish under conditions when no efficient framework for democratic feedback and representation was present.

Politics, Propaganda and Psychology.

In the best ‘socialist-realist’ terms, an official mythology about the Red Army was created in the USSR, just like for the rest of the society. The myth of the invincibility of the Red Army was very strongly advocated and, naturally, popularly accepted.

“This myth was elaborated in films, songs, and all patriotic education. Most damaging of all was the military doctrine that seemed to flow logically from these official delusions: Defense Commissar Voroshilov's insistence that a future war would be fought on the enemy's territory and victory would be swift and with minimal bloodshed.51 During the 1930s the predominant image of future war was one in which the Soviet Union was attacked by lightning forces of a probably German army, but within minutes Soviet forces would respond with overwhelming force and destroy the enemy.52 Of course, the reverse side of the myth was a systematic belittling of all potential enemies' strengths, but especially the Germans'. German commanders were portrayed as incompetent and arrogant, whereas German soldiers, as members of the international proletariat, were believed to be ready to rise up against their bourgeois overlords and join their allies, the Soviet people.53 Any alternative vision of a future war that was predicated on even minimal Soviet difficulties was denounced by other writers as "defeatism" and often followed up by NKVD harrassment or persecution.54"
52. The most succinct expression of Voroshilov's doctrine in literature was a short story by Nikolai Shpanov, "The First Blow: A Story About the Future War ("Pervyi udar: povest' o budushchei voine") Znamia, 1 (1939), 36-119. A German air assault begins at 5 p.m., but Soviet airspace is completely freed of German airplanes within a half-hour. Within another eleven hours the land battle ends victoriously for the Soviet forces. Shpanov's view of a swift and clean Soviet victory with virtually no Soviet bloodshed was repeated in songs, poems, and army political work.”
54. When E. Genri predicted, in his book Hitler Over Europe, not only the German invasion of the USSR, but also the direction of the major blows, a reviewer retorted that the author had erred in his assumption that the Red Army and the Soviet people would permit the enemy into the frontiers of the motherland. He reminded Genri that the Red Army would strike the enemy on his own territory. See Literaturnoe obozrenie, No. 3 (1989), p. 69.” (Von Hagen 77)

Naturally, when the gap between the officially promoted myths and the inescapable reality was realized by many soldiers, defeatist sentiments increased greatly.

“In July 1940, after the fall of France, cadets and soldiers in the Kiev District feared that Germany would defeat the Soviet Union because German military technology was superior to Soviet technology and because the German soldiers had such good morale.” (Von Hagen 79)

Disillusionment was also very common during the pre-war campaigns. During the Bessarabian campaign in summer 1940, an educated soldier was arrested for the following statement: “the policy of the Soviet state is peaceful only in words; in fact it is aggressive and annexationist. It forced a war on Poland, Finland, and now Romania. We are cannon fodder.” (Von Hagen 79)
The Ribbentrop-Molotov pact also had a disillusioning and a disorienting effect on the Soviet soldiers and officers.

“‘Now,’ complained one instructor at the Military Engineering Academy, ‘you don't know what to write or how to write; before we were instructed in the anti-fascist spirit, and now the opposite.’ Another officer was overheard by the NKVD to have said, ‘Germany is the country of fascism. We Communists are waging a struggle against fascism, and all information coming from the newspapers is on the side of Germany.’ Still other soldiers wondered how Stalin and Molotov could permit themselves to be photographed next to the ‘most evil enemies of the people,’ Ribbentrop and Gauss. Now that the Soviet Union supported fascism, Germany would be able to seize all the little countries and the hands of the Soviet Union would be tied. The NKVD registered a great many such reactions to the new course in foreign policy.64 The glaring contradictions between pre-pact and post-pact political education also induced outright cynicism. When a soldier asked his political worker, ‘What sort of war is this we have now, the second [imperialist] or some other kind?’ the political worker answered, ‘there's no point in counting imperialist wars... When the war's over, a [Party] congress will convene, and they'll tell us what type of war it was.’65" (Von Hagen 80)
Finally, disillusionment was widespread on the very personal level as well when the soldiers were surprised to find out how well were the “non-socialist” states doing economically.

“The invasion of Eastern Poland in the fall of 1939 threatened that fragile and largely illusory worldview. Instead of the backward economy they had been led to expect, they saw abundant consumer goods and foodstuffs of considerably higher quality than they knew from the Soviet Union. Among the negative phenomena that alarmed the Ukrainian front command was the feverish purchase by officers and soldiers of nonessential goods in large amounts, including alarm clocks, tablecloths, and ladies' shoes.66" (Von Hagen 80)

These attitudes were even more widespread in 1944-45 when the Red Army advanced into the heart of Europe. Shock and confusion were common as the Soviet soldiers found it hard to grasp why the Germans, who seemed to have everything desirable, marched with war into their motherland.

“Preliminary Conclusions and Considerations: The evidence from the Red Army's campaigns before the German invasion suggests a far more complex picture than has been previously presented. It is difficult to determine how widespread was the erosion of myths and the emergence of defeatist or anti-Soviet attitudes during this period for several reasons. The evidence for the erosion comes almost exclusively from political workers' reports and military men's denunciations of one another to the NKVD. Still, these reports were taken seriously by the political and military high command when they convened their emergency meetings after the Finnish War. A more fundamental difficulty in assessing how political attitudes evolved during the final prewar years is our general ignorance about Soviet popular attitudes both during the 1930s and in the initial war years. What were the elements of Soviet patriotism and how were those elements understood, adapted, or rejected by diverse groups in the Soviet population?
By way of preliminary and altogether unsurprising conclusion, I propose that the soldiers who met the initial German onslaught were a heterogenous group. The majority of Red Army men, the Russians and Ukrainians, shared some degree of Soviet patriotism and commitment to the political and social order of the Soviet state. Of course, an officer who had chosen for himself a lifelong career in the Soviet Army was likely to have a far greater attachment to the political and social system than would a common conscript who was also typically younger than the officers; however, it was the officer corps and political workers who fell in the greatest numbers during the purges so that their confidence in their futures had been considerably shaken.
As conscription was extended more widely in the second half of the 1930s to include many more non-Russians and non-Ukrainians, as well as Ukrainians and Belorussians who recently had lived under Polish or Romanian rule, the type of patriotism that had been devised by the political workers for an earlier, smaller, more ethnically homogeneous Red Army, found less effective resonance. Furthermore, when military commissariats began almost immediately to conscript local youth in the annexed provinces for service in the Red Army, they encountered not only large numbers of unwilling new citizens, but they also quickly discovered that even those who were willing had dramatically different notions about politics and the Soviet Union.68 In general, political workers were skeptical about the loyalty of soldiers recruited from the recently annexed territories of former Eastern Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. These recruits had been exposed to years of anti-Soviet attitudes in their local communities and in state propaganda; moreover, they had not been brought up in the agencies of socialization common for Soviet youth by the mid-1930s, i.e., the Young Pioneers, Komsomol, and Soviet school system.69
Finally, judgments about patriotism and combat readiness based on the wars of annexation that were waged on non-Soviet territory (Finland, Eastern Poland, Northern Romania) can be extended only with great caution to the type of war that Soviet soldiers fought on their own territory when Germany invaded in June 1941.
69. The large issue of Soviet patriotism requires a great deal more investigation. When political instructors in the Red Army and Soviet school teachers turned to the recent past for inspirational material, they most obviously could point to the period of heroic struggle during the Revolution and Civil War. But civil wars are not ultimately reliable founts of patriotic lessons, especially in a multinational state such as the Soviet Union. When the army expanded its recruitment pool to include more and more non-Slavs, the patriotism of the Civil War found less and less resonance. Not only did Russians often fight other Russians as we might expect from a genuine civil war, but whole peoples seceded from the Russian centralized state and existed as independent, albeit short-lived and often compromised, states; furthermore, the ‘regathering of the Russian lands’ was in large measure a military reconquest, with the Red Army repeating the work of centuries of tsarist generals. As long as the popular memory of the civil war survived, that formative period of the Soviet state could have but an extremely circumscribed appeal. True, historians could point to examples of multinational unity against foreign or "class-alien" elements, but the greater truth was interethnic hatred and violence during the early years.” (Von Hagen 81)