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Comment by AllegedAlec | Hacker News Reader

Although it was immensely efficient, I cannot help but wonder if it was a circular reasoning: they wanted cheap, mass produced tanks, which means you're going to hand in on quality, which means that they break down faster and are less resilient, so your research shows that tanks don't last long, so you spend less on each individual tank, etc. etc.

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Russian strategic thinking in the 1930s was "we don't fight wars of attrition, we fight wars of annihilation" (not 100% sure on the exact quote but the words "attrition" and "annihilation" were used and that was the gist of it). The biggest advantage they brought to the table was sheer manpower (the second biggest arguably being the Russian winter). They specifically intended to fight Verdun type engagements where both sides take massive losses because they could replenish the losses but all their potential enemies could not. They fought exactly kind of war they had been planning to fight. Once you've committed to that on a strategic and tactical level throwing in many lower quality but still good enough to hold their own tanks is exactly what you want to do.

I think you're being rather generous here. By all accounts, Stalin did not wake up to the seriousness of the German threat and the unpreparedness of the Soviet Army until the Winter War against Finland in late 1939, and even this didn't stop him from purging the Red Army to the tune of executing 30,000 officers until the Germans finally invaded.

The one foresighted move that really saved their bacon was moving most military production including tanks deep into the Russian heartland, safe from the German advance.

Yeah, the start of the war was totally botched but all the management types knew what the plan was. This stuff was basically settled in the 1930s. The problem was that half the people who knew how to actually execute on it were in the gulag and the other half were dead. Once they got over that problem and actually followed the plan that they had laid out for themselves they steamrolled the Germans.

You would also need to look at the causes of decommisioning to avoid this.

Other people are smart, too.

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