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Re: Could the Soviets defeat Nazi Germany alone?
I would say no - if the USSR had been required to "go it alone" against Nazi Germany from 1941 without aid in any form from the Allies, basically boiling down to the United States (which was all that was keeping Britain in the game at that point) then my guess would be a much sorrier outcome for the Russians than historically occurred.
The reasons for this answer
stem
from the question of
why the Russians were able to achieve a decisive (if costly) military victory over the Germans on the Eastern Front. One could say a lot about the differences in manpower, quality of generalship on either side, etc - but before one can get to all that one must consider that the brand of war waged by the two nations from '41 to '45 was a war that was based on industry, wartime economies, and logistics. These the Soviets were able to excel at thanks primarily to Lend-Lease. The contribution that Lend-Lease made to the Russian War Effort was, in a word, enormous. Without it it is quite concievable to picture Stalin's war effort collapsing around his ears - he himself would later acknowledge that WWII had been a war of industry, and that without the aid of the Americans, Russia would have been hard-pressed indeed to survive, let alone achieve victory. It was more than a matter of supplying the Soviets with tanks - they could as noted build those for themselves exceedingly well. Far more important than supplying them with tanks was supplying them with
jeeps and trucks, that were the true back-bone of the military in the most unappreciated of all aspects of warfare: the logistics. The tanks that crushed the German armies on the Eastern Front might have been Russian-manufactured, but the trucks that were hauling supplies, the jeeps that the officers were driving around in - these were provided courtesy of Uncle Sam.
And what the Russians did manufacture for themselves, from tanks on down, they owed to the Americans as well. It is no exagerration to say that the Russian wartime
economy was as much American engineered as the jeeps. Prior to recieving foreign aid, the Soviet attempts to put together a functioning war economy were, pure and simple, a shambles that if left to their own devices could and probably would have proved disastrous to any notions of a sustained conflict with Germany. Thanks to Lend-Lease however, it was not merely American supplies, raw materials, and equipment that were rolling in - so was American know-how. Yankee advisors (many of them with experience in overseeing large-scale projects in a time of economic uncertainty from their work in carrying out the New Deal in the 1930s) helped the Russian economy make the transition from a rickety shambles on the verge of complete collapse to a powerful, thrumming engine of wartime production and industry that would win the respect even of Adolf Hitler in the military effort that it was able to sustain.
Historically, the USSR deserves to be credited with having achieved a great part of the military success against Nazi Germany in WWII, crushing the
Wermacht on the Eastern Front at great cost to themselves. But behind those military successes lay aid from Russia's allies, above all the United States, and without this aid, to say nothing of the numerous other factors brought about by the American and British efforts against Hitler, it is very hard to see the Russians being able to do anywhere near as well as they did in WWII.
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