80th Anniversary: Red Army smashed Nazis

On June 22, 1941, in the middle of World War II, more than 3,000,000 Nazi troops invaded the Soviet Union. Fascist troops from Finland, Rumania, Hungary, Italy and Spain  later joined them. This, the largest military attack in history on any country, was a second attempt by the capitalists to smash the world’s first workers’ state. Only 18 years earlier in 1917, right after the Russian Revolution, imperialist troops from 14 countries, including the U.S., Britain and France had invaded the Soviet Union to "strangle the socialist infant in its cradle." The Bolsheviks (communist revolutionaries) organized to defend their revolution. Though 4.5 million Soviet workers lost their lives, the communist-led Red Army defeated them. Now Adolf Hitler’s armies would meet a similar fate.
Virtually all Western military experts predicted Hitler would be in Moscow in six weeks. Capitalists in the U.S. and Western Europe didn’t care. They wanted the socialist Soviet Union weakened or even defeated by the Nazis. But less than four years later, Soviet troops marched triumphantly into Berlin, having smashed the "invincible" Nazi war machine.
About 80 percent of Hitler’s armies were tied down in Russia on the 2,000-mile-long Eastern Front. By the time the allies launched the D-Day invasion of France in 1944, the Red Army had already swept the Nazis out of all of occupied Russia and part of Eastern Europe and Soviet tanks were rolling towards Germany at 40 miles a day.
Today a flood of movies, books and TV specials tell us how the U.S. single-handedly won World War II, saving "Private Ryan" and the world. In fact, U.S. rulers were worried that if they didn’t invade France when they did, the Red Army would liberate all of Western Europe by itself.
Even Western historians agree the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the battle against Hitler and the Soviet victory at Stalingrad was the turning point of WWII. The USSR lost over 20 million lives defeating the Nazis (75 times the 300,000 U.S. deaths). And 75 to 80 percent of Nazi WWII casualties were inflicted by the Soviet Army. In the Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, "about two-thirds of the houses and productive capacity was destroyed." Not one bomb fell on the U.S. during the entire war. [All figures from The World Almanac of World War II.]
U.S. and British imperialists conspire against the Soviet Union
The imperialist conspiracy to smash the Soviet Union began long before WWII. The British and French rejected five separate Soviet proposals for an alliance against Hitler in the 1930s. The West supplied Hitler with oil, rubber and bank loans for his war machine. They hoped Hitler would move east and crush the Soviet Union and thereby prevent the spread of the overthrow of the capitalist profit system. When Hitler marched into Poland, Britain and France "declared war," but it was a "Phony War," because 110 Western divisions did nothing while the Nazis mopped up in Poland, hoping Hitler would continue to move eastward and invade the Soviet Union, the workers’ state.
But before they took on the Soviets, the Germans occupied Holland, Belgium and Norway. Hitler then invaded France. The French high command went over to Hitler’s side, allowing him to march into Paris in three weeks, driving British troops into the sea at Dunkirk.
Communist underground leads resistance against the Nazis
In almost all of Europe, the communist underground led the resistance that helped defeat the Nazis over the next four years. Communist-led partisans behind enemy lines in the Soviet Union alone destroyed one million Nazi troops, more than the combined total destroyed by the U.S. and British in the entire war.
When Hitler finally invaded the Soviet Union, the predicted "six weeks" victory never happened. German troops found total destruction and desolation in every captured Russian city or town — the "scorched earth" policy. Soviet defenders burned everything to the ground that could be useful to the Nazis and that they could not take with them. Then they organized armed resistance behind enemy lines. Over 6,000 factories were dismantled and moved east of the Ural Mountains, then re-assembled to produce weapons again, a feat requiring total unity and support of Soviet workers, unmatched by any country, before or since.
By December  2, 1941, the Nazis were just 20 miles from Moscow and the Kremlin (headquarters of the Soviet government). Joseph Stalin stayed in Moscow throughout this period and rallied the Soviet workers and Red Army. On December  6 (the day before Pearl Harbor), the Soviets launched a counter-attack on a 500-mile front and drove the fascists from the gates of Moscow. Hitler was forced to halt this offensive.
Battle of Stalingrad: Turning point of World War II
By September 1942, the Nazis had begun another offensive, reaching the outskirts of Stalingrad. They planned to take that city and then seize the oil of the Caucasus region to the south (bordering oil-rich Iran) and drive on Moscow to the north. But it was not to be. Soviet soldiers and workers fought for Stalingrad block-by-block, house-by-house and room-by-room to halt the "unbeatable" Nazi invaders. Workers in arms factories produced weapons for the Red Army working 24 hours a day. When Nazi troops captured factories, heroic Soviet workers and soldiers would take them back.
The entire German Sixth Army and 24 of Hitler’s generals were surrounded and killed or captured in the battle of Stalingrad. Never again would the Nazis mount an offensive against the Red Army. Stalingrad was truly the turning point of the Second World War. The communist-led Soviet Union smashed the largest and most powerful army ever mounted by a capitalist power.
Internal weaknesses and reforms eventually destroyed the first workers’ state. Socialism retained too many capitalist concepts, especially wages and money, and the Soviet Union reverted to capitalism. But as a British general remarked in introducing a documentary about the Battle of Russia, "if it were not for the heroism of the Soviet workers, if Hitler had conquered the Soviet Union, millions of citizens in Britain and the United States would be dead today." We are slowly learning the hard lessons from the defeat of the old communist movement. But emulating the mass heroism and determination they displayed in defeating fascism is the goal of Progressive Labor Party in our fight for communist revolution.