While transportation remained insufficient for Red Army forces,
when Operation Barbarossa kicked off, they possessed some 33,000 pieces of artillery, a number
far greater than the Germans had at their disposal.
[143]
[n]
The Soviet Union had some 23,000 tanks available of which only 14,700 were combat-ready.
[145]
Around 11,000 tanks were in the western military districts that faced the German invasion force.

[11]
Hitler later declared to some of his generals, "If I had known about the Russian tank strength
in 1941 I would not have attacked".
[146]
However, maintenance and readiness standards were very
poor; ammunition and radios were in short supply, and many armoured units lacked the trucks
for supplies.
[147]
[148]
The most advanced Soviet tank models – the
KV-1
and
T-34
– which were
superior to all current German tanks, as well as all designs still in development as of the summer
1941,
[149]
were not available in large numbers at the time the invasion commenced.
[150]
Furthermore, in the autumn of 1939, the Soviets disbanded their
mechanized corps
and partly
dispersed their tanks to infantry divisions;
[151]
but following their observation of the German
campaign in France, in late-1940 they began to reorganize most of their armored assets back into
mechanized corps with a target strength of 1,031 tanks each.
[127]
But these large armoured
formations were unwieldy, and moreover they were spread out in scattered garrisons, with their
subordinate divisions up to 100 kilometres (62 miles) apart.
[127]
The reorganization was still in
progress and incomplete when Barbarossa commenced.
[152]
[151]
Soviet tank units were rarely well
equipped, and they lacked training and logistical support. Units were sent into combat with no
arrangements in place for refueling, ammunition resupply, or personnel replacement. Often, after
a single engagement, units were destroyed or rendered ineffective.
[142]
The Soviet numerical
advantage in heavy equipment was thoroughly offset by the superior training and organization of
the Wehrmacht.
[126]
The Soviet Air Force (
VVS
) held the numerical advantage with a total of approximately 19,533
aircraft, which made it the largest air force in the world in the summer of 1941.
[153]
About 7,133–
9,100 of these were deployed in the five western military districts,
[l]
[153]
[11]
[12]
and an additional
1445 were under naval control.
[154]
Development of the Soviet Armed Forces
Compiled by Russian military historian
Mikhail Meltyukhov
from various sources
[155]
1 January 1939
22 June 1941
Increase
Divisions calculated
131.5
316.5
140.7%
Personnel
2,485,000
5,774,000
132.4%
Guns and mortars
55,800
117,600
110.7%
Tanks
21,100
25,700
21.8%
Aircraft
7,700
18,700
142.8%

Historians
have debated
whether Stalin was planning an invasion of German territory in the
summer of 1941. The debate began in the late-1980s when
Viktor Suvorov
published a journal
article and later the book
Icebreaker
in which he claimed that Stalin had seen the outbreak of war
in Western Europe as an opportunity to spread communist revolutions throughout the continent,
and that the Soviet military was being deployed for an imminent attack at the time of the German
invasion.
[156]
This view had also been advanced by former German generals following the war.


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- Spring '15
- Sociology, The Republic, Operation Barbarossa