Unity of command is a fundamental principle of warfare, reintroducing a dual command system is dumb regardless of the competence. Local initative was a key strength of the Whermacht, something suppressed when Soviet commanders are too afraid to disagree on pain of death to their families.
It is again something of a centerpiece of mythology about Red Army. Soviet commanders had plenty of local initiative and freedom and they were rather fond of utilizing it for good and ill. Which was entire purpose behind system of the commissars - to keep that
initiative in check. Not that it helped much. It required truly monumental achievement (in a very negative meaning of the word) for a Soviet commander to get before a firing squad.
The new officers were way out of their depth. One example from When Titans Clashed was that they did not choose the best terrain to set up defensive positions. Many officers were too green to know how so just looked in field manuals. Lack of such basic knowledge is only the beginning of the problems they had.
Purges were essentially random. They weren't performed on the criteria of experience or competence. And of course the elephant in the room here is that old crop of commanders was in no way more experienced or practiced than a new one. Red Army never fought a real war through its entire existence prior to WW2. Civil War was a giant skirmish in comparison that did preciously little to prepare Red Army leadership to a truly industrial scale of warfare. Which is aptly demonstrated by very
varied performance of officer cadre with Civil War experience that do not indicate that older generation of the officers were on average anymore competent than a new one. Arguably, it is the opposite. A new younger generation had less trouble with adapting and accumulating actual experience.
If it was only that, sure. However in my apparently flawed understanding I was also talking about the confused mess he left behind by disappearing for a time and the total freeze of local initiative because of the mental impact of the purges.
Stalin didn't disappear anywhere. He continued to work through the first week on the invasion without leave. He indeed left the Kremlin during June 29 and didn't come back until late June 30, but people were aware where he was and were meeting with him in his country home. And I seriously doubt that you can really blame the guy for trying to manage his workload under such conditions.
And of course there was no 'freeze' of local initiative of any kind. Orders were given and were executed with a lot of
flexibility of interpretation by front and below level of command. That
flexibility bitten some of them in the ass later. The problem was not in Stalin's giving or not giving orders. Problem was that Soviet pre-war preparations were entirely inadequate against the scale and rapidness of German attack. So command structure began to unravel very quickly and ability of Stalin to influence any of that (for good or ill) was minimal.
So according to the flawed source Wiki, between 3.7 - 7.7% of the Red Army was purged. With about 30% of that later being allowed to return. That is still a huge number, plus a relative high number were at the top. Sure it's no replacement for proper training, but having those people there means others can learn from them and additionally, it will also mean not about one in twelve people you know will have been purged (again the mental aspect).
By June 1941 the Red Army was short for about
one hundred thousand officers of the rank of Junior Lieutenant and higher. Just to fill out their existing organizational structure for the wartime order of battle. The Purges did have an effect on that number but it was not significant and was mostly in the disruption of the training process during and after the Purges that costed the Soviets maybe several thousand of young officers who were unable to go through their training in that period.
Effect on the higher level is even less clear. Not only because purged crop of high officers had very
variable track record in terms of their ability. but simply because of the sheer scale of Red Army expansion. Most of them were already way over-promoted for their level of practical experience in command they had. Expansion in number of divisional, corps and army level commands in 1939-41 simply drowned out the losses of the officers of that rank to the Purges.
Purges or not, you will still have people who were captains or even lieutenants two years ago commanding divisions in 1941. There was no avoiding that.
But it might have more experienced people setting up more patrols, less production outage because key people were purged, more support & moral of the people because between the famines and this I'm pretty sure the effect was massive on the willingness to see the Nazis as a better alternative
These people already had all their orders to disperse the aircraft, to camouflage the airfields and so on. In fact such orders were given on the regular basis for two years by the time of German invasion. Degree of compliance to these orders was let's say again
very varied. Which was obviously (it is sarcasm) demonstrated how well cowed into submission the Red Army was. Or maybe it is just a demonstration of how short on everything these people were and that higher echelons of leadership understood that and so didn't try to force the issue.
As for willingness to resist the Nazis. There is a neat fact: Soviet resistance was the strongest in the June-August period of 1941 when no one really had a clue about Nazi intentions. It is during the autumn when things became much more clear when Soviet resistance began to falter and overall performance decreased. Basically, the Germans were lost more men in July 1941 than they lost in any other month of the war (against Soviets or anyone else) before final months of Stalingrad.
So the theory that Purges somehow affected willingness of the Soviet military to fight the Nazis is not supported by anything solid really. By all the metrics Soviets were fighting the hardest when they should be at their weakest according to that theory.
If that is true, it's plenty of time to disrupt things.
But again, it had preciously little to do with immediate Soviet response to Barbarossa. Red Army was under unitary command during that time.