I would simply have assumed he had the Church under his thumb when he let it come back.

Yeah, I understood.
I forgot about that.
What about Tukachevsky? The man all but invented Soviet tank doctrine. And as a counter-example, Kulik or Budyony? Unless I'm getting confused here, you are saying that Stalin weeded out the stick-in-the-mud cavalry generals, who preferred horses to tanks, but not only to Kulik and Budyony fit that description very well (In fact, both of the two Marshals who survived the purge better fit that description than the three who were killed), they survived their failures and retained Stalin's favor. Tukachevsky, meanwhile, was the Russian equivalent of Fuller or Liddell-Hart, and while he might not have been quite as good a general as Soviet propaganda made him out to be (he got his ass kicked by the Poles and was frequently outfought by the Whites), he was probably the best they had near the top until Zhukov came along. And Stalin purged him. I think I read somewhere that the original copy of his signed "confession" has visible bloodstains.
How would that work? It might make a good excuse for the general incompetence demonstrated by Soviet forces as a whole in the war, but I don't see how claiming that Stalin had killed your best generals clears you of the charge of plotting world conquest.
Why would they have anti-tank guns to fight an opponent who had not even invented tanks? They might have had field guns of that particular caliber, but the guns I was referring to were interwar designs, that were used as both anti-tank artillery and a variant as the main armament for the T-34 & the KV series. Kulik or Budyony was the one who quelled their production, I am pretty sure. I can't think of any other Russian generals with whom I would have been so familiar.

Actually, I was talking about the utility of tanks that remained in Soviet hands. The Germans did just fine with them, because they were better at converting Soviet equipment. They were problematic in Russian hands because of the ineptitude of the Soviet supply services and manufacturing priorities. They made tanks, but not tank parts, and the tanks were assembled in communist factories, so many of them were not very functional even fresh off the assembly line. The ones the Germans got their hands on would have been the working ones, and suitable for refurbishment.
I wasn't disputing the numbers of captured Soviet equipment or the efficacy of some Soviet designs, but rather making the point that in the USSR, under communist production methods and economics, mere stats on the total number of vehicles or guns produced have little bearing on the efficacy of the military. Not all tanks and planes performed up to spec, many that did were not well enough made to keep up standards of performance for very long, and in the Red Army itself, general incompetence and lack of true understanding of the realities of mechanized combat made keeping the vehicles operational for very long problematic at best. Stalin was the one most responsible by that point for the USSR having such horrible manufacturing capabilities, as well as the mindset where it was safer to conceal technical problems, because bringing them to someone's attention could cause you to be shot as a wrecker. All those
But it's largely a due to Stalin's leadership that it was NOT sustainable, and that the Soviets were taking too many casualties. After his little sulk in his dacha to force the leadership to come begging to him, rather than question his infallibility at being caught by surprise, Stalin ordered an ongoing series of attacks, refused to permit tactical withdrawals and had men who were encircled but fought their way out sent to camps or shot outright as deserters. Given the manpower, natural resources, potential industrial capacity and number of excellent hardware designs available, a halfway decent leader could have crafted a much more successful defense of the country, rather than letting the best part of the USSR be repeatedly devastated by armies moving back and forth across it. Certainly he should have done better against the ramshackle shadow of the Kaiser's army that was the Nazi Wehrmacht.

But Stalin had little or nothing to do with that, and what they did have was rendered less effective by the context in which it was produced and deployed, said context being a prison-camp of a country that made Carroll's Wonderland look rational. Stalin directly contributed to the suspicion of modern tactics, the inefficiencies of supply and production and the degradation of the armed force's capabilities. People like to give the communists credit for industrializing Russia, but Niall Ferguson said Czarist Russia was industrializing rapidly (which was one of Germany's rationales for giving Austria the "blank check" - they wanted to put down Russia before they got too strong), and it actually slowed down with the Soviet takeover. And Stalin's "four legs good; tank treads bad" cronies at the top of the Red Army certainly didn't help matters.
Well, warfare is not a duel of like weapons, and Germany's anti-tank guns were sufficient for the shitty 1941 tanks to get nearly to Moscow, and to capture those vaunted stores of Soviet equipment. All the cleverly sloped frontal armor and superior guns on a tank doesn't help when they are ordered into mindless frontal assaults, and get shot in the rear by flanking and enveloping forces, because Hitler let his officers use tactics.

Fuck off. I'm pretty sure NO ONE posts things to allow you to start pissing matches over minutiae of foreign languages, and yet...

My point about the "minutiae" was attempting to point out that Stalin, in the interests of securing his position against even imaginary enemies, debilitated the functionality of the state and military apparatus. Pointing out that he ordered lots of weapons produced and planned an attack on Germany (because his last attack, on a country totally devoid of modern weapons, with a fraction of Germany's manpower and industrial capacity went SOOOO well) does not prove he was acting out of devotion to world revolution instead of the usual motives of tyrants bent on conquest. And his particular approach of cronyism and chopping off any heads that stuck up through merit, and engendering a climate of terror in the country meant that much of his military preparations were completely undermined by the debased condition of the citizenry and government.

I never said he did. I simply believe that he was acting more out of personal desire for power, for which lip service to the Revolution served as a useful camouflage, much the way religion served the Borgias.
Absolutely.

In action, and in results, no. My point was just a casual observation that he seemed much more cynical than they, and more of an opportunist who was using communism as his vehicle for power, whereas Lenin and Trotsky might have conflated their own success with that of the Revolution, perhaps even seeing themselves as necessary to it. I certainly never meant to even imply that in any way excuses their actions or morally redeems them to any degree.

I don't know. I still think he's more of a Borgia pope when it comes to socialist ideology, than say, a John Calvin, who imposed tyranny and took power with what appears to be real belief in his version. It's an admittedly flawed analogy, but explaining a personal perception is difficult. I wasn't actually trying to argue, merely offer my perception of a minor aspect of the characters of the men involved. It's entirely possible that had Trotsky succeeded Lenin, maybe Tukachevsky would have survived and been able to successfully modernize the Red Army, or maybe Trotsky would have screwed things up in a different way. I wouldn't put it past the guy who tried to play Zor and Zam to the German Empire. On the other hand, in Lenin's shoes, Stalin would definitely have purged Stalin. Maybe that just makes him a smarter example of the breed