Russia still follows Stalin's World War II templates

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia was supposed to become the dawn of post-Soviet democracy. Instead, it became an improved version of a totalitarian monster despite numerous Western investments, joint projects and cultural collaborations. Russia has inherited the most despicable practices of the USSR: terror, corruption, and violence. And this is how the Kremlin is waging its war of aggression. The methods of "warlord" Putin seem to have been "copied" from the notebook of "warlord" Stalin. So how is the Russian army of 2023 similar to the Soviet army of 1939?  

Instructions for an aggressive invasion

The "Winter War" against Finland in 1939 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were justified by the same Russian propaganda thesis. In both cases, the Kremlin was "defending itself against a potential aggressor" that did not actually exist. However, this is hardly the only analogy.

On November 26, 1939, Moscow reported the shelling of the Soviet border village of Mainila allegedly killing four Soviet soldiers. The USSR accused Finland of the shelling.

Western powers did not believe the Soviet version of events, knowing well that for several months now, Moscow had been unsuccessfully seeking from Helsinki a border revision, territorial concessions, and the creation of Soviet military bases on Finnish territory.

On November 30, 1939, without declaring war, the 500,000-strong army of the Soviet Union invaded Finland. This was the beginning of the so-called "Winter War".

Moscow fired incendiary cluster bombs at wooden settlements of Finland. Meanwhile, the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov claimed that the planes were dropping "not bombs, but merely food supplies for starving Finns."

Soviet propaganda justified the invasion by the need to save the Finnish people from the oppression of the capitalist government. According to one of the Soviet prisoners, the command urged the soldiers to fulfill their "duty" and "liberate our Finnish worker friends from capitalism." The soldier soon realized that no one in Finland was waiting to be rescued: "I can feel in my own skin how we were welcomed by those we came to 'free.'"

The Soviet generals planned to take Helsinki in 20 days, install a puppet government in the country, and hold a festive parade on December 21, the day of Joseph Stalin's 60th birthday. However, the undeclared war of the USSR giant with a population of over 170 million against a small country of 3.7 million Finns went awry.

Soviet armored columns were stuck in the thickets of Finnish forests. They became easy targets against the white winter landscape. The Red Army soldiers often wore only summer uniforms dying of hypothermia in temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius. The Finnish ski troops, on the other hand, were well equipped, moved quickly in small groups, and could effectively destroy combat vehicles and personnel.

Although the Red Army would eventually manage to capture 11% of Finnish territory - including the second largest city of Viipuri, which would be renamed Vyborg by Russia after the occupation - this "victory" would be a "Pyrrhic victory."

During the "Winter War" more than 25 thousand Finns died, and the Soviet losses exceeded 126 thousand soldiers.

The result at any cost

The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies describes the "human wave" tactics used by the Russian army during the battle for the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut. "In the attack, disposable infantry are the first to be employed," the report says. Unarmed and poorly trained people go into battle to die. But at the expense of their own lives, they are preparing a foothold for the offensive of more trained soldiers from the second and third echelons.

A "disposable" infantry team is "sent from the position", advances to contact and "skirmish with Ukrainian defensive positions, until killed". According to eyewitnesses, soldiers of the "disposable infantry" often "continue to advance, even after being wounded," which may indicate that they are under the influence of psychotropic substances. As one team is destroyed, Russian commanders will commit "successive teams forward by the same line of approach."

Ukrainian troops must continuously defend their positions against "human waves", expending ammunition, "exposing the location of their defensive positions and exhausting their personnel".

The Soviet Union also employed a similar "throwing bodies" tactic.

In 1943, Stalin ordered the Soviet army to take Kyiv by October Revolution Day at any cost. The Kremlin ordered the soldiers to cross the Dnipro River by swimming, alone, with light weapons. At least 400,000 soldiers died in the cold water under enemy fire, 70-80 percent constituting Ukrainians newly mobilized from the Left Bank.

Similar offensive tactics were used in other parts of the front. In his memoirs, one of the Wehrmacht soldiers described the Soviet attack as follows: "At first, the minefield is stormed by Bolsheviks of Asian appearance, every single one of them dies from mines, and then the tank attack begins."

Both during the Second World War and today, during the Russian war in Ukraine, the military command is trying to win with the masses. And despite all the horror, it works. According to experts, the tactic of "human waves" widely used by the Russian army is effective because it is "a cynical but coherent solution to the problem facing the Russian Ground Forces; they are able to mobilize large numbers of personnel, but most units are poor quality and suffer from a chronic lack of training capacity," the RUSI report says.

Filtration camps

The practices of establishing NKVD screening and filtration camps, special institutions for screening "unreliable persons," were widely used in the USSR during the Red Terror. More than 4 million USSR citizens were filtered only after being in German captivity or in the occupied territories. People were subjected to brutal vetting: tortured, interrogated, imprisoned in isolation wards, mutilated, and often killed.

Today, Russians are using the same tactics in the occupied territories of Ukraine organizing filtration camps in every settlement under occupation, as well as torture chambers for civilians and prisoners of war. Filtration camps are concentration camps in the modern world, when men and women are stripped naked and looked for tattoos, primarily of a patriotic nature, and traces of weapons," says Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights.

Ukrainian citizens are being put in torture chambers for the slightest hint of a pro-Ukrainian position. Thousands of people have been killed. The camps are also used to forcibly deport Ukrainian citizens to economically depressed regions of Russia, including Sakhalin and the Far East.

The analogies in the practices of warfare organized by the Kremlin are obvious, and remain the same over 84 years since the beginning of World War II. The set of basic markers is consistent and revealing: deception, unprovoked aggression, and a staggering disregard for the value of human life.