Grigory Kulik - Artillery Directorate Chief

Artillery Directorate Chief

Kulik's continued close ties to Voroshilov, one of only two of the original five Marshals to survive the Great Purge, led to him being appointed chief of the Main Artillery Directorate in 1935. Responsible for overseeing the development and production of new tanks, tank guns and artillery pieces, Kulik's fundamental ignorance in his field of expertise—coupled with his abusive, bumbling personality and tendency to condemn technological advancements as "bourgeois sabotage"—would prove a serious hindrance to the Red Army's ability to modernize itself prior to the war with Germany.

Kulik clung stubbornly to a vision of the Red Army as it was in 1918, the last time he had held a field command; he condemned almost every major advancement in technology or doctrine beyond that point, many of which were later adopted anyway and proved invaluable to the Soviet victory against the Axis. He bitterly denounced Marshal Tukhachevsky's campaign to redevelop the Red Army's mechanized forces into independent units like the Wehrmacht's Panzerkorps; the creation of separate divisions allowed them to use their greater maneuverability for Deep Battle-style maneuver warfare, rapidly exploiting breakthroughs rather than simply supporting the infantry. Correctly sensing that Stalin viewed new ideas as potential threats to his power, Kulik successfully argued against the change, suggesting in a letter to Stalin that such attitudes showed an unhealthy ideological sympathy with the "degenerate fascist ideology" of favoring feint and deception over aggressive frontal attack. Tukhachevsky's unorthodox ideas eventually cost him his life during the Great Purge, but in less than a decade Marshal Georgi Zhukov was using the same techniques to great effect in Manchuria against the Japanese, eventually convincing Stalin of their value and using them to outstanding effect during Operation Bagration.

It also did not help that Kulik personally despised tanks and armored vehicles altogether, arguing that they were inferior to horses and would "never replace them". He even criticized his friend Marshal Voroshilov's support for the production of the T-34 and (his namesake) KV-1 tanks, both of which later proved instrumental to the survival of the Soviet Union. After he was overruled by Stalin and ordered to produce the tanks anyway, he began deliberately dragging his feet on production of shells and guns, resulting in a drastic shortage of 76.2mm shells; at the start of war, no more than 12% of the T-34 and KV-1 tanks had a full ammo load, with few having any anti-tank rounds, most having no more than a few HE shells, and a shocking number having to rely solely on their coaxial machine guns, having no 76.2mm rounds at all. Many T-34 and KV-1 tanks were sent into battle underarmed then had to be abandoned by their crews when they ran out of ammunition.

Of particular note was Kulik's meddling in the armament of the T-34 and KV-1 tanks prior to and in the early period of the war with Germany. Already opposed to tanks, Kulik deliberately opposed the adoption of the superior F-34 gun, designed by P. Muraviev of Vasiliy Grabin's design bureau at the Joseph Stalin Factory No. 92 in Gorky. The F-34 had proven in testing to be both considerably more effective and cheaper than the Leningrad Kirov Plant's L-11 76.2mm gun, but Kulik's status as political patron for the Leningrad Factory resulted in the relevant armament diplomats being too frightened of being arrested to approve the production of the better gun. This short-sighted decision eventually necessitated a rushed retrofit of the KV-1 and T-34's gun in the midst of the German invasion when it became apparent that the L-11 could not reliably penetrate even the lightly armored Panzer III which was being faced in large numbers. The crisis was mitigated only by Grabin's disobedience; with the support of Kulik's political enemies, he had secretly ordered the fabrication of a reserve stock of F-34 guns, predicting correctly that they would shortly be needed and the decision would be ultimately supported by Stalin once it had proven itself in battle. Grabin turned out to be correct; Kulik was reportedly furious for having been countermanded and attempted to denounce the F-34's designers to Stalin after the fact, but was silenced by a flood of letters from Soviet tank crewmen to Stalin writing in support of the new gun.

He also disparaged using minefields as a defensive measure, considering it at odds with a properly aggressive strategy and calling it "a weapon of the weak." This disastrous decision allowed for essentially free movement of German forces across Russian defensive lines during Operation Barbarossa, with static defensive strongpoints being easily bypassed by Panzer spearheads and surrounded by infantry, forcing the defenders to surrender. He also zealously supported Stalin's exhortations against retreat, allowing whole divisions to be encircled and annihilated or starved into surrendering en masse. Eventually, after Kulik's demotion, it was only the laying of multiple layers of anti-tank mines that allowed for both the successful defense of Leningrad during the German siege and the successful trap sprung on the much stronger German armored forces at the Battle of Kursk.

Kulik similarly scorned the German issuance of the MP-40 submachine gun to their shock troops as a "bourgeois fascist affectation", stating that it encouraged inaccuracy and excessive ammo consumption among the rank and file. He forbade issuance of the PPD-40 to his units, stating it was only suitable as a "pure police weapon". It was not until 1941, after widespread demand for a weapon to match the MP-40 again overruled Kulik's restrictions, that a simple modification of the manufacturing process for the PPD-40 produced the PPSh-41, which proved to be amongst the most widely produced, inexpensive and effective small arms of the war, considered by many German infantrymen to be superior to the MP-40, with whole companies of Russian infantrymen eventually being issued the weapon for house-to-house fighting.

Lastly, he refused to support the production of the innovative Katyusha rocket artillery system for no other reason than he did not trust anything other than World War I-era horse-drawn artillery. Although it could have been produced much earlier in the war without his meddling, like the rest of Kulik's rejected innovations the "Stalin organ" eventually proved to be one of the most effective Soviet inventions of the war and a major advancement in artillery technology.