I would trust Glantz on the Red Army performance. If you read a bit of Glantz, many of his works are massively detailed and massively sited in Russian documentation and in German.

Portraying Glantz as a guy who is just out to extol the success of the Red Army is just not a fair assessment of his works. I would say instead that Glantz is making the information within of Soviet sources available to English speaking audiences often in formidable detail. I don't read Russian, but I've never heard of Glantz having been shown to have misused or misunderstood his Soviet source material, (he's probably made some mistakes just because who could write so much without a mistep, but overall he's considered reliable). Also, Glantz doesn't seem to pull punches critiquing the Red Army, just look at his titles and subtitles! "Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War", "Kharkov 1942: Anatomy of a Military Disaster", "Zhukov's Greatest Defeat: The Red Army's Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, 1942 ", "Red Storm Over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944 " Do these titles sound like a man who is out to Whitewash the Red Army?

In the video, Kotkin claimed to own a number of Glantz's works, but Glantz is massive and can be a tough read, so I can understand why Kotkin would have difficulty summarizing him.

In any case, Kotkin's critique of Glantz seems wrong to me. I sort of suspect Kotkin is out of his depth on military issues generally. He has not written any specifically military history and so I'm not sure he can claim to be an expert on the military of the Soviet union, his works seem to be more about Soviet politics.

There are two major thrusts to his criticism: one, that the Red Army as a fighting force and particularly its officer corps was more incompetent than the 'revisionist' authors have argued (Glantz at the lead in terms of impact, but not to exclude Richard Simpkin, Chris Bellamy, CJ Dick, John Erickson, Jacob Kipp, Bruce Menning, Shimon Naveh, and many many others); two, that Glantz specifically is overly uncritical of the Red Army's performance. I will address each of these thrusts in turn, because while Kotkin is an outstanding diplomatic historian he is not a military historian and in this lecture it shows.

Kotkin opens the first front with what the kids these days call a hot take at the 12:45 mark.

[In this lecture] we're not going to hear about Stalin's supposed failure on the eve of the war to move troops up to the front in order to be ready for the German onslaught. He was urged to do this by his two top commanders, Zhukov and Timoshenko, and that's because they were idiots. [Emphasis added] They didn't understand Blitzkrieg. Blitzkrieg was not about capturing territory, it was about destroying the fighting capacity of your enemy. So the more troops you move to the frontier, the more of those troops are destroyed in the initial onslaught, the less fighting capacity you have, and the more likely you'll be defeated.

This is not intended as a slight against Kotkin, but - in this particular case he does not know what he is talking about, or else he is being very intentionally provocative. It is true that Stalin did not allow the manning of the security zone on the border, as he was quite nervous about giving the Wehrmacht even the slightest provocation; this was also the rationale for his refusal to let NKVD border troops conduct serious counter-reconnaissance patrols and his refusal to let the PVO (air defense forces) engage German recce flights.^(1) As you may note, this does not reflect any particular desire to avoid the mass encirclement and destruction of the so-called Blitzkrieg. Indeed, at the outset of the war, efforts were underway to bring forward the materiel from the defensive belts along the old Soviet border (the so-called "Stalin Line") and construct a new defensive belt along the borders of the territories annexed in 1939-1940 (the so-called "Molotov Line"). Stalin's intent was clearly to defend the new Soviet territory at or near the borders, rather than trade space for time.^(2) In addition to flying in the face of Kotkin's claim that Zhukov & Timoshenko foolishly requested this only to be rejected by Stalin, this was entirely consistent with the Soviet military doctrine of the time, which called for prompt counteroffensives. Red Army forces in the frontier regions were, as per Defense Plan 41, organized in two strategic echelons. The first strategic echelon consisted of two operational echelons, which were deployed relatively forward towards the border for defensive operations. The second strategic echelon was placed some 700km back from the border, so as to remain safe from enemy air attack, and was intended to counterattack and carry the fight into enemy territory once the invading offensive had been worn down & culminated under the resistance of the first echelon. Again, this was doctrinally consistent with prewar planning (both before and after the general doctrinal turmoil of the Purges and the Winter War with Finland, actually).^(3) More importantly, though, for our refutation of Kotkin: this was a coherent and militarily reasonable approach for defeating the rapid, mobile and encirclement-focused style of modern warfare which characterized the "Blitzkrieg".

END PART ONE, CONTINUED BELOW