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BlazingDemon69420 t1_iu9vxyr wrote

why was the Soviet union considered strong?

The Soviets only won against the germans because of the winter and had also lost to the Finnish and japanese previously. So why were they feared so much? Its weird because even during the coalition wars they only won because of the winter. Am I missing something due to which they were feared by Europeans and Americans? They also lost to Germany and Poland in ww1 too.

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GrantMK2 t1_iua5j9s wrote

Performance in the 1900s and 1910s isn't going to impact much analysis of them post-World War II.

For why:

  1. Ability to raise pretty large armies.
  2. After WWII they controlled (or at least had controlled by aligned governments who couldn't afford too much of a breach with them) a vast amount of land and its resources, much more of Europe than any Russian empire ever had.
  3. A lot of nuclear weapons and the ability to deploy them at a lot of targets.
  4. They had considerable ideological appeal to a lot of the world.
  5. They did inflict a lot of casualties on Germans and their allies.

Now it's not as though failures didn't get noticed. In fact, Finland was so embarrassing that they weren't expected to put up a good defense against the Nazis. That they could push Germany back, even if it required a lot of logistical support from the US and came about alongside invasions of Italy and France, goes to show that a weak military doesn't necessarily stay that way if there are the right motivations and it has time to change.

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jezreelite t1_iua5thq wrote

Your question is based on a false premise.

The Russo-Japanese War and World War I didn't involve the Soviet Union (they involved the Russian Empire, which was a very different beast from the USSR); Poland didn't take part in World War I (I think you're thinking of the Polish–Soviet War, a separate war and took place during the Russian Civil War); the Soviets WON the war against Finland; and the Soviets didn't defeat Nazj Germany because of the winter. At most, it can be said that the winter caused the failure of Operation Barbarossa, but that's not remotely the same thing as helping them successfully take Berlin.

That being said, much of the perception of Westerners during the Cold War of the perceived invincibility of the USSR was incorrect, but that had little to do with their military power and everything to do with their economy. Collectivization during the 1930s basically destroyed Soviet agriculture and premiers after Stalin were forced to buy grain from abroad to prevent starvation. These problems were later compounded by the high price tag of the Soviet War in Afghanistan and the cleanup after the Chernobyl disaster coupled with revolts by the Baltic states.

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