How is that Stalin's fault. That's like blaming Admiral Kanaris for the British decryption of their secret messages.
t.liberal
Prove this was done. Unlike with Khruschev and his tampering prior to the de-stalinization, there is no concrete evidence of Stalin doing that to documents concerning the Polish-Soviet war, not to mention that the military effectiveness of the Red Army compared to before and after the purges of 1937 is an obvious improvement.
between 1934 and 1939, the Red Army's command lost over than 56,000 people, 10,000 of them arrested. Another 14,000 were dismissed for drunkenness and 'moral degradation'; the rest were dismissed for other reasons – illness, disability, etc. In the same period, 6,600 of the officers previously dismissed were reinstated after further proceedings. These repressions were not without reason Part of the reason the USSR lost initial fights was because several commanders did not destroy key large sections of the soviet infrastructure before retreating, giving the Nazis an easier path and available resources, these were not light mistake especially in war time. For example the famous “martyr” Tukachevsky was proven to be directly involved with the Nazis, and this was disregarding several idiotic decisions in the past (such as losing the Soviet-Polish war of 1922 by exposing his flank to the Poles and thus letting them cut the Red Army to pieces). Despite this attempt to remove such traitors, the strike on July 22, 1941 came as a "surprise" to the generals at the border, who had ignored Stalin's exact order to be at the ready for possible invasion. In short it was negligence of the commanders that led to a wide-spread cracking of the front despite superior forces over-all.
To understand the scale of the purge, it's worth recalling that in 1937, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov said that, “the army had a total of 206,000 persons in the command structure”. The total size of the Red Army in 1937 was 1.5 million men at the time.
Admittedly, poor training of the commanders of the Red Army was a problem in the mid-30s, but not one caused by repression, but rather the rapid increase of men in the armed force. Already in 1939 the army had grown to 3.2 million men, and by January 1941 – to 4.2 million. By the beginning of the war the command staff amounted to nearly 440,000 officers and staff, but training of officers is longer than of ordinary soldiers and thus it was out of proportion. The country was preparing for war, the army was growing, Being re-organized with new unit systems, undergoing rearmament, and the training of officers really did come too little, too late. 29% of Soviet military personnel had a higher education before the repressions. After them, the number became 38%. By 1941, the number had risen to 52%. Note that for the decade before the repressions, the number had remained stagnant at around 20-30%.
>colonelcassad.livejournal.com/1246858.html
>cas1961.livejournal.com/1204240.html
Poland provoked it by aggressively repressing any and all ethnicities that weren't Polish: Jews, Ukrainians, Belorusians, Russians etc. Also repressing communists, with the help of the Anglos and French.