History of shooting your generals

In Simon Sebag Montefiore's chatty/horrifying biography Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar from 2003, built largely from the remarkable wealth of first-person anecdote and memoir that survives from Stalin and his circles, there's a brief account of the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland in October 1939. The comparisons to Putin's invasion of Ukraine are striking.

The plan was to reduce Finland to a Soviet satellite state, as had just been done to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In this case, however, the Finns did not surrender, and an invasion was required. Ten to twelve days were allotted to the task: five Soviet armies attacking across an 800-mile frontier.  

It went much like Putin's strike at Kyiv in February 2022: "the ingenious Finns were slaughtering the Russians." By mid-December Stalin had lost about 25,000 men. His divisions ran out of food and ammunition, and either scattered or froze where they were. Finally in March 1940, a truce was reached in which the Finns conceded territory but preserved their independence. The Soviet Union lost over 125,000 troops. "The Red Army was good for nothing," Stalin later told Churchill and Roosevelt.

Remember all those senior advisors to Putin, who died by "falling out of windows" after the strike on Kyiv collapsed? During the "Winter War" in Finland, Stalin had a similar response but was more direct about it.

Mekhlis arrived in Suomussalmi to find chaotic scenes which he made worse. He confirmed the losses and shot the whole command. The sentence of shooting was performed publicly.

This is the horrifying part of Montefiore's book: the scale of Stalin's endless slaughter, which does indeed seem to put Putin's killings in the shade. And Stalin's went on for decades, in peace as in war. Montefiore makes the case that it was a matter of policy for Stalin that executing vast numbers of people really did motivate the survivors. Even with the German army at the gates of Moscow, Stalin was killing his own troops almost as fast as the Germans were.

There is a myth that the only time Stalin ceased the war against his own people was during 1941 and 1942, but during this period 994,000 servicemen were condemned, and 157,000 shot, more than fifteen divisions.  

By 1942, Stalin began to grasp he should leave military and logistical planning to his generals, and the Soviet Union began to turn the tide against Germany. There's not much evidence for Putin and Pregoryn having learned this, but it might yet start to happen. But unlike Putin, Stalin had an enormous flow of American armaments on his side, not against him.