Since I have all this extra time because my dumbass was late to my lecture, here's a thread on Stalin's Order 227, "not one step back".

Order 227 is infamous within anti-communist circles for its sheer cruelty, as Joseph Stalin declares that not a single soldier may take a step back or risk being gunned down by the NKVD at the back. Here's the first thing, the order was directed at commanders and not the infantry

A good example of this the unauthorised route of commander tarasov and his commissar as they abandoned their positions and retreated, setting up on an island in the volga rather than at the front where they would be most effective.

In a position where the Soviets are fighting a war they were initially unprepared for, losing men to cowardice is the last thing anyone would want to see. Especially if those men were commanders abandoning their men and their position.

In addition to this, the scale of mass execution witnessed in movies such as Enemy at the Gates is unheard of, due to the simple fact that executing that many men is of no use to the Soviets, as they would be executing something close to a division worth of men.

This myth, which was popularised by anti-communist anti-Russian propagandists helped play into the brutality of the Soviets against their own men, attempting to paint the image of the red army as unwilling to fight unless they have a rifle at their back.

Nothing could be farther from the truth, as even in designated penal battalions wounded men had a very good chance of surviving. Cowards and deserters were thrown into these battalions to redeem themselves with their blood, and once they were wounded in combat they would be -

allowed to return to normal service. This is also reinforced by the fact that penal battalions were lead by experienced, battle hardened commanders with every intent of bringing the men back in one piece, because again, a dead man cannot fight a war.

It is true that penal battalions fought in the deadliest parts of the war, but somebody had to. And being "underequipped" is also an anti-communist myth, because again, sending men without rifles is a stupid strategy that nobody would enact. With Mosins being so cheap -

It was hard NOT to find one in the hands of a red army soldier. While valid criticisms and observations can be made of the state and outdated designs of said equipment (like the T26 light tank or the BTR), that was also mostly due to the fact that the Soviet Union -

had about five years to modernise an entire army on the back of a nation that just barely got out of civil war. In any case, the order 227 was more of a threat directed towards cowards, and a morale booster for those who were fighting on the front.

The reason that Stalin gave out this order, BTW, is because sections of the Red Army were carried by panic-mongers into retreat. Those who ran made the reasoning that since Russia was so big, they would have endless terrain to retreat on. Their commanders fed into this -

And gave the order to retreat, which is why operation Barbarossa proved so successful in the first few months. Once the red army held their ground, the tides turned as the thinly stretched Wehrmacht struggled to carry momentum to Moscow. Order 227 quite literally stuck a wrench -

In the cogs of the Nazi war machine. The glorious Red Army, guided by the now unafraid generals and the will of the people began a counter offensive that would continue to decimate the fascists that encroached on the motherland. It was the beginning of the end -

As nazi Germany was encircled by a fist of steel. Had the Red Army not stood their ground, the Motherland would have lost the oil fields in the caucuses, and when that happened there would have been near no hope for a counteroffensive.

In the end, order 227 was a warning to coward generals and officers who would take advantage of their men and their positions to escape the fighting. In a war of annihilation there is no room for cowardice, and as such Comrade Stalin issued this order to help the Motherland live.

Comrade Stalin believed in the will of the people, and his actions throughout the war and after show this undoubtedly. He knew full well that if the people did not wish to fight for the Soviet Union, then the war will not be won. No amount of machine gun NKVD could offset that.

Oh, and something I forgot to add. Order 227 forbade leaving general combat areas, not front lines. So for example, a soldier group may retreat to their lines if an attack failed, but a soldier and their commander could not leave Stalingrad undefended for example.