Igor Garin, "Who Really Won World War II?". Lies and truth about the second world war Another truth about the second world war part 1

On May 8, 1945, Wilhelm Keitel, Colonel General Stumpf and Admiral von Friedeburg, who had the appropriate authority from Dönitz, signed the Act of Germany's unconditional surrender, which entered into force on May 9 from 01:00 Moscow time.

Over the next 20 years, festive events in the USSR were limited mainly to fireworks..
- 3rd most important national holiday (after the anniversaries of October and May Day)
- this day became only in 1965 and
- Since then, the scale of celebrations has continuously increased
- But why did it take 20 long years?
- The answer is simple: the victory went to the USSR at such a grandiose, I would say - monstrous - price,
- that both the upper and lower classes simply did not want to open up wounds, limiting themselves to fireworks and the most modest events,
- especially since May 9 was not even a day off for many years.

As we moved away from the horrors and incalculable losses of the 2nd World War, the official books about it more and more resembled victorious reports and fanfare.
- According to the writer Mikhail Veller, the varnish on the history of the Second World War (an example of Ozerov's epic film "Liberation") was merged by historians in barrels.
- One of the Ukrainian historians said:
--- “We - historians - are like a guild of fakirs. We know all the secret pages, we know how it really was.
--- And society should be given a digestible and useful product.
--- They should know only what they know - and no more.
- On May 9, 2016, Russia celebrated Victory Day in a military way:
- with saber-rattling, threats against neighbors, portraits of the ghoul Stalin, who killed millions of people,
- with fake veterans, the “youngest” of whom are over 90.
- And no one during the celebration remembered the infernal price of the victory of the USSR over Nazi Germany.

Without going into the details of this price,
I will confine myself to the most striking evidence and mean figures, which are more eloquent than all salutes and loud speeches.

Marshal Konev testifies:
- “In 3 days, by June 25, 1941, the enemy advanced 250 kilometers inland.
- June 28 took the capital of Belarus Minsk. In a roundabout maneuver, it is rapidly approaching Smolensk.
- By mid-July, out of 170 Soviet divisions, 28 were completely surrounded, and 70 suffered catastrophic losses.
- In September of the same 41st near Vyazma were surrounded by:
--- 37 divisions, 9 tank brigades, 31 artillery regiment of the High Command Reserve and field directorates of 4 armies.
- In the Bryansk cauldron found themselves:
--- 27 divisions, 2 tank brigades, 19 artillery regiments and field directorates of 3 armies.
- All in all, in 1941, they got into the environment and did not leave it:
--- 92 out of 170 Soviet divisions, 50 artillery regiments, 11 tank brigades and field directorates of 7 armies.

Candidate of Historical Sciences Alexandrov testifies:
- “In the summer and autumn of 1941, the Red Army suffered a crushing defeat,
- having lost in less than 5 months:
--- about 18 thousand aircraft,
--- 25 thousand tanks,
--- more than 100 thousand guns and mortars.
--- 2.2 million fighters and commanders died and died,
--- 1.2 million deserted, remaining in the occupied territory,
--- 3.8 million were captured.
--- Wehrmacht defeated 248 Soviet divisions, including:
--- 61 tank, the enemy captured Kyiv, blockaded Leningrad and went to Moscow.

But the crushing results of the "turning point" Battle of Stalingrad:
- more than 200,000 civilians killed in Stalingrad, more than in Hiroshima
- (for comparison, the death rate of the blockade in Leningrad sometimes reached 10,000 people a day).
- The exact number of victims of the terrible battle on the Volga cannot be determined with absolute certainty.
- It is, according to various estimates, in the range from 700,000 to 2 million military personnel and civilians,
- moreover, the grandiosity of this interval itself is a clear evidence of the attitude of the Bolsheviks to people as to cattle.
- The average life expectancy of a Soviet soldier in the battle of Stalingrad did not exceed a day.
- That is, every day a huge number of soldiers were sent to Stalingrad, and almost all of them - one way.
- They were even sent more than the number of dead, because in addition to the dead, it was necessary to replace the wounded.
- There was no time for the civilian population ...
- During the Battle of Stalingrad alone, 13,500 Soviet soldiers were sentenced by a military tribunal to death penalty.
- Shot for desertion, defection to the side of the enemy, "self-shooting" wounds, looting, anti-Soviet agitation, retreat without an order.

Alexander Paskhover in the article “Shadow of Victory” gives such statistics about our losses:
- 20,869 people on average per day were out of action by the Red Army.
- Of these, about 8 thousand people - irrevocably.
- The number of civilians of the Soviet Union, exterminated by the Nazis in the occupied territory - 7.4 million.
- including more than 216.4 thousand children.
- 5,269,513 Soviet citizens forcibly taken to work in Germany.
- 2 million sq. km of Soviet territory were occupied by Germany.
- 73 million people (37% of the population of the USSR) were left under occupation.
- 8.5 million people - died during the occupation
- (if we subtract from this number the 6% decline in the population of the occupied areas, calculated for peacetime conditions,
- 4.4 million, - the number of premature deaths from the brutal impact of the occupation regime will be at least 4.1 million people).
- As we moved away from the horrors of the Second World War, official books about her more and more resembled victorious reports
- 13.7 million people - the total number of casualties among the civilian population.
- Official data on demographic losses - 26.6 million people,
- Of these, men - about 20 million people.

A few figures from the book of Colonel General Grigory Krivosheev:
- 376.5 thousand Soviet soldiers were convicted by their own for desertion
- 212.4 thousand deserters could not be found
- About 1 million Red Army servicemen were convicted for various violations during the war years
- 135 thousand of them were shot
- 436.6 thousand people ended up in Soviet concentration camps
- 422.7 thousand - sent to penal battalions
- 233.4 thousand prisoners of war of the Red Army, "liberated" from Nazi concentration camps, were transferred to Soviet concentration camps
- From 1.2 million to 1.5 million Soviet citizens served in the Wehrmacht, in the SS and police forces

Colonel-General Stepan Kashurko, President of the International Center for Tracing and Perpetuating the Memory of Defenders of the Fatherland
- in the article "Suffered Victory" he cites the following data:
- Wounded 46 million 250 thousand
- 775 thousand front-line soldiers returned home with broken skulls
- One-eyed 155 thousand
- blind 54 thousand
- With disfigured faces 501,342
- Crooked necks 157,565
- With torn bellies 444,046
- With damaged spines 143,241
- With wounds in the pelvic area 630,259
- With severed genitals 28,648
- One-handed 3 million 147 thousand
- Handless 1 million 10 thousand
- One-legged 3 million 255 thousand
- Legless 1 million 121 thousand
- Partially torn off arms and legs 418,905
- The so-called "samovars", armless and legless - 85,942

B. Sokolov in the article "Settlement of accounts" (Around the World, No. 1, 2012) cites the following terrifying statistics
ratio of losses of the USSR and Germany in World War II:
- Total number of deaths and deaths
--- USSR - 43,448,000
--- Germany - 5,950,000
---Ratio - 7.3:1
- including civilians:
--- USSR - 16,900,000
--- Germany - 2,000,000
--- Ratio - 8.5:1
- including in the armed forces:
--- USSR - 26,548,000
--- Germany - 3,950,000
---Ratio - 6.7:1

And now the post-war statistics
- GDP per capita (2016):
--- Germany - $41,895,
--- RF - $7,742
---Ratio - 5.4:1
- The ratio of pensions of German and Russian veterans of World War II - 12: 1
--- not to mention other incommensurable benefits of German old people
- Average life expectancy:
--- Russia - 69.8 years
--- Germany - 79.1 years
- Cumulative mortality rate (per 1000 people):
--- Russia - 13.5
--- Germany - 10.7
- Number of suicides (2012):
--- Russia - 31,997
--- Germany - 10,745 people
--- Russia topped the list of European countries in terms of the number of suicides among children and adolescents
--- Behind last years the number of child suicides and suicide attempts increased by 35-37%
--- About 800,000 suicides were registered in Russia between 1990 and 2010
--- There are about 21.4 suicides per 100,000 adolescents in the country
--- According to Rospotrebnadzor, this is 3 times more than the world indicator and 2.3 times more than in Germany
- The Russian Federation ranks first in the world in terms of the number of children abandoned by their parents
--- Every year in Russia, 50,000 fathers and mothers are deprived of parental rights, while
--- 44,000 out of the 50,000 identified lose children due to alcoholism or drug addiction
--- From 4,000 to 7,000 Russian mothers annually refuse newborns directly in maternity hospitals
--- That's why there are about 650,000 homeless people in the country
--- 84% of them with living parents
--- Orphanages are gradually falling out of fashion in Germany
--- Orphans and children from disadvantaged families (50,000 children), who were taken care of by the state, live in foster families or children's communes
- Russia ranks 1st in the world in mortality from cardiovascular diseases:
--- for men - 1,555 people per 100 thousand population per year
--- in women - 659
--- In Germany, these figures are 5.8 times lower
- cancer patients per capita
--- Russia ranks 1st in the world - about 2.5 million
--- In Germany - about 5-6 times less
- by the number of abortions:
--- Russia ranks 1st in the world (about 300 abortions occur in the country every hour)
--- According to this indicator, Russia is 7 times ahead of Germany
- in terms of intentional homicides:
--- Russia ranks 1st in Europe - 14.9 cases per 100,000 population
--- in Germany - 0.86, i.e. 17 times lower

________________________________________ __________
So who won in the end?
- This question was answered by Arkady Babchenko in the article “We can repeat”:
- “In Moscow, there was a collection of products for the villages.
- Including for veterans living in the villages of the Tver and Leningrad regions.
- Gathering. products. For villages. And veterans. Leningrad.
- Well, Happy Victory Day.
____________________________________________________
Igor Garin - writer, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics. Sciences

Choking with delight, snatching a bunch of St. George ribbons with his teeth; by inviting former enemies and all allies of the former mortal enemy to the parade; disfiguring the streets and transport with the head of the people's executioner; The Russians are getting ready for the great booze called May 9th. We will also add a spoonful of truth to their barrel of sour honey.

We offer readers an article-research in the form of an interview with the St. Petersburg historian Kirill Mikhailovich Aleksandrov about various issues in the history of the Second World War.

Doomed to feat

For many years it was believed that 20 million of “ours” died in the war, and approx. 11 million. Are there reliable statistics now? How many citizens of the USSR died during the Second World War (civilians and military)? How many German citizens (civilian and military) died?

There is no single point of view and generally accepted statistics. A reliable assessment of the human losses of the Soviet Union during the war with Germany and its allies is one of the most difficult problems in modern historical science. Representatives of official departments and organizations, scientists and publicists, who for the last two decades have been naming a variety of figures and offering their own calculation methods, agree with each other on only one thing - that their opponents are guided by ideological predilections, and not by the desire to get closer to historical truth.

For almost half a century, our compatriot was forced to look at the war between Germany and the Soviet Union not only exclusively on the scale of one (Eastern, let's call it that for clarity) front, but also outside the events that took place before June 22, 1941 during World War II. When, for example, the Soviet Union entered the Second world war?... In September 1939, the Polish state disappeared.

Do we not forget that during this undeclared Soviet-Polish war, 1,475 soldiers and commanders of the Red Army were killed? That's hundreds of lives in just two and a half weeks. By the way, let me remind the reader that the first courageous defense of the Brest Fortress from the Wehrmacht troops in mid-September 1939 was led by Brigadier General Konstantin Plisovsky, the once brave Akhtyrsky hussar, staff captain and officer of the Russian Imperial Army, who was shot by the NKVD in 1940.

As a result of the defeat of Poland, a common border arose between Germany and the USSR. From the point of view of the defense capability of the USSR, was it good or bad? This fact cannot be ignored when discussing the tragedy of the summer of 1941... Next. Soviet irretrievable losses (dead, dead and missing) during the bloody Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940 are today estimated at between 131,000 and 160,000 servicemen. From the requests of relatives on the basis of the funeral notices received, it is clear that not all the names of the dead were included in the books of the names of losses in this theater of operations.

This is the equivalent of about 12-13 divisions. The irretrievable losses of the Finns are 24.5 thousand military personnel. Is the Winter War part of World War II? Is it possible to forget its causes, course and military-political consequences when we talk, for example, about the blockade of Leningrad? Obviously not.

But then why did the just past 70th anniversary of this "not famous war", which claimed tens of thousands of lives, remain generally unnoticed in modern Russia against the backdrop of another triumphant campaign? The war in Finland does not fit into the Stalinist concept of a “local” war between the peaceful socialist Soviet Union and aggressive National Socialist Germany, which is still dominant in the mass consciousness. Therefore, neither the authorities nor the society found any words or means to mark the sad anniversary of the Winter War and honor the memory of its victims.

But the problem is not only that the drama of 1939-1940 is inextricably linked with the tragedy of subsequent years. In my opinion, it is generally impossible to talk about the war with Germany outside the context of the history of the Soviet state. June 22, 1941 is direct consequence events that took place on October 25, 1917, no matter how paradoxical it may seem to someone.

Many human actions and behavior during the war years were the result of the ongoing civil war since 1917, terror and repression, collectivization, artificial famine, Yezhovism, the creation of a system of forced labor on a state scale, and the physical destruction by the Bolsheviks of the largest Local Orthodox Church in the world.

Since the late 1920s, the authorities have stubbornly and consistently forced people who lived in deprivation, fear and poverty to lie, dodge, and adapt. The Stalinist system by 1941 led to a complete devaluation of human life and personality. Slavery became a daily form of socio-economic relations, and the general hypocrisy destroyed the spirit and soul. Can we forget about this when we talk, for example, about the ratio of losses?

Last year in St. Petersburg, Nikolai Nikulin, an outstanding St. Petersburg art historian, a front-line order bearer, passed away. He was wounded many times, fought in the 311th Infantry Division, went through the entire war and ended it in Berlin as a sergeant, miraculously surviving. His courageous "Memories of the War" is one of the most piercing, honest and ruthless memoirs in terms of plausibility. Here is what, in particular, Nikolai Nikolaevich wrote about our losses, based on his own experience of fighting on the Volkhov and near the Pogostye station:

“The meanness of the Bolshevik system was especially clearly manifested in the war. Just as the most hard-working, honest, intelligent, active and intelligent people were arrested and executed in peacetime, the same thing happened at the front, but in an even more open, disgusting form. I'll give you an example. An order comes from the higher spheres: to take the height. The regiment storms it week after week, losing a thousand men a day. Replenishment is continuous, there is no shortage of people.

But among them are swollen dystrophics from Leningrad, to whom doctors have just attributed bed rest and enhanced nutrition for three weeks. Among them are babies born in 1926, that is, fourteen-year-olds who are not subject to conscription into the army ... “Vperrred !!!”, and that's it. Finally, some soldier, or lieutenant, platoon commander, or captain, company commander (which is less common), seeing this blatant disgrace, exclaims: “You can’t ruin people! There, at a height, a concrete pillbox! And we only have a 76 mm fluff! She won’t break through!”... The political instructor, SMERSH and the tribunal immediately join in.

One of the informers, who are full in every unit, testifies: "Yes, in the presence of soldiers he doubted our victory." Immediately, they fill out a ready-made form, where you just need to enter the last name and it’s ready: “Shoot before the ranks!” or “Send to the penal company!”, which is the same. So the most honest people, who felt their responsibility to society, perished.

And the rest - “Forward, attack!” “There are no fortresses that the Bolsheviks could not take!” And the Germans dug into the ground, creating a whole labyrinth of trenches and shelters. Go get them! There was a stupid, senseless killing of our soldiers. One must think that this selection of the Russian people is a time bomb: it will explode in several generations, in the 21st or 22nd century, when the mass of scum selected and nurtured by the Bolsheviks will give rise to new generations of their own kind.

Scary?... Try to object. In any case, it seems to me that there is a direct connection between the number of victims suffered by our people during the Second World War, starting from September 1939, and the irreversible changes that took place in the country and society after the October Revolution of 1917.

For example, it is enough to recall the consistent destruction of the Russian officer corps by the Bolsheviks. Of the 276 thousand Russian officers as of the autumn of 1917, by June 1941, there were hardly more than a few hundred in the army, and then, mainly - commanders from former ensigns and second lieutenants.

Therefore, to consider the war outside the context of the national history of the previous twenty years means again deceiving ourselves and justifying the all-Russian self-destruction of the twentieth century, as a result of which our people are steadily declining. The irretrievable military losses of Germany today, in general, are sufficiently established and systematized in one of the last fundamental research Rüdiger Overmans.

The third edition of his book German Military Losses in World War II was held in Munich in 2004. In total, the German Armed Forces in all theaters of military operations in 1939-1945 lost 4.13 million people, including on the Eastern Front - from 2.8 million to 3.1 million people. The fluctuation in the estimates of losses in the East is due to the continuing uncertainty about the fate of some of the missing and prisoners of war.

There is some controversy in the estimates of German military losses. Some researchers argue about whether the total number of irretrievable losses includes another 250-300 thousand dead from among the citizens of the USSR who served on the side of the enemy. Others believe that to the figure of 4.13 million, it is necessary to add 600-700 thousand people from among the allies of Germany (Hungary, Italy, Romania, Finland, etc.), who died mainly on the Eastern Front and in Soviet captivity.

Accordingly, opponents believe that the irretrievable losses of Germany's allies are included in the mentioned 4.13 million. In general, I am inclined to agree with this thesis now, but I believe that far from all the losses of Eastern volunteers from among the citizens of the USSR were taken into account here and included in the total - just the record of these servicemen was incomplete. Research and debate on these issues continues. But in general, the picture is quite presentable.

I think that the total number of military irretrievable losses of Germany and its allies, including the Eastern volunteers, can be estimated on average within the range of 4.1-5.1 million people, including 3-3.6 million on the Eastern Front. The irretrievable losses of the civilian population of Germany are estimated in Germany at about 2 million people, including the victims of allied bombing (about 500 thousand). Thus, it seems to me that the total figure of irretrievable German losses is approximately 6-7 million, of which military losses, including the German allies, account for the most part.

The issue of irretrievable losses of the Soviet Union is much less clear. The resulting spread of figures is amazing - from 27 million to 43 million people. I’ll make a reservation right away, the upper figures, which, for example, B. V. Sokolov called back in the 1990s, do not seem convincing and reliable to me. On the contrary, the figure of 27-28 million total losses seems quite realistic.

I believe that the calculation methods used by a group of demographers headed by the well-known researcher Evgeny Mikhailovich Andreev are more perfect and fair than Sokolov's methods. Back in 1993, Andreev's group determined the total number of irretrievable losses of the population of the USSR in 1941-1945 at 27 million people - and this, which is significant, is consistent with the 1959 census data.

The problem, however, is that, in my opinion, as in the case of German losses, the main share is not the losses of the civilian population, but the losses of the Soviet Armed Forces. And from this point of view, the official figure insisted on by the Ministry of Defense - 8 million 668 thousand 400 people - does not hold water. Suffice it to mention that, in all likelihood, the figure (7 million), which Stalin had once reported in 1946, was taken as the basis for the losses, passing it off as the total figure of irretrievable losses of the entire population.

It was obtained by mechanically summing up various unreliable information from official reports and summaries. The most surprising thing is that the real figure is estimated at hundreds of people (!), Although the members of the team of authors of Colonel-General G.F. Krivosheev, who introduced it into scientific circulation, frankly admitted that from many divisions, corps and armies in 1941 alone year there were no documents left that would allow to determine the loss of personnel at least approximately.

It seems to me that a more or less close to reality idea of ​​​​the irretrievable military losses of the USSR can be drawn up by two sources.

Firstly, these are card indexes of personal records of irretrievable losses of privates, sergeants and officers, which are stored in the funds of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense (TsAMO) in Podolsk. After selfless and painstaking work on the withdrawal of duplicate cards for privates and sergeants, which was completed by employees at the beginning of the new century, 12.6 million people were registered. Back in the 1960s, approximately 1 million people were counted among the officers, including political workers, for a total of 13.6 million dead.

The real figure was introduced into wide scientific circulation by the courageous historian, Colonel Vladimir Trofimovich Eliseev, a senior researcher at TsAMO, who boldly defended the results of his research at various scientific conferences, despite the displeasure that he caused.

Apparently, the group of General Krivosheev, who “counted” losses from the end of the 1980s, did not take personal records into account at all. 13.6 million dead - this is without the loss of conscripted reservists called up, but not counted until June 22, as well as without the loss of the fleet, border guards, troops and bodies of the NKVD, various paramilitary formations, partisans, and most importantly - the conscription contingent that poured into the troops The active army in the territories liberated from occupation and immediately rushed into battle.

According to various recollections and testimonies, in the liberated territories, the relevant authorities often took literally all men capable of holding weapons, and, regardless of age, both 16-17-year-olds and 50-year-olds as marching replenishment. There were cases when they were sent to the front line even in civilian clothes. For most, the first fight was also the last.

This was especially widely practiced in 1943-1944. The army went to the West, the political agencies urged on, and the "liberators" were not spared, especially since they long time were under occupation and looked suspicious by definition. Accounting for the losses of fighters of various militia formations in 1941-1942 was also unsatisfactory.

Therefore, when the historian D. A. Volkogonov published in one of his works the total figure of irretrievable military losses of the USSR at 16.2 million people, referring to some secret document addressed to Stalin, it seems to me that he was very close to the truth. Secondly, back in 1995, work was almost completed on the introduction into the Central Data Bank of personal records of the dead, missing, dead in captivity and from the wounds of soldiers, primarily on the basis of information received from relatives. There were approximately 19 million such records.

It must be said that the mentioned group of E. M. Andreev estimated the total number of men of military age who died in 1941-1945 at 17 million people.

Based on all the above data, it seems to me that the irretrievable military losses of the USSR in 1941-1945 can be estimated at no less than 16-17 million people, including the losses of women liable for military service, as well as men and youths of non-conscription age, nevertheless, de- de facto in military service.

The remaining irretrievable losses of the civilian population can be distributed as follows: approximately 1 million - victims of the Leningrad blockade, up to 2.2 million - victims of Nazi terror in the occupation, 300 thousand - excess mortality during the Stalinist deportations of peoples, 1.3 million - increased child mortality in the rest of the USSR, more than 5 million - increased adult mortality as a result of worsening living conditions due to wartime circumstances in the rest of the USSR (including prisoners who died in the Gulag, where the annual mortality rate in 1942-1943 was 20-25%!) .

The last two categories of civilian casualties of war are especially rarely mentioned and accounted for. The authorities concealed the fact that during the war years there were, for example, mass deaths from starvation in the Vologda region, in Yakutia and some other regions of the Soviet Union.

It is possible that approximately 450 thousand Soviet citizens who actually remained after 1945 in the West and ended up in emigration (including refugees from the Baltic States, Western Ukraine and Belarus) are also considered dead and missing during the war years. Such a sad order of numbers. The exact irretrievable losses of our people during the Second World War, I'm afraid, will never be known.

Is it possible to compare military losses during the hostilities of the German and Russian armies?

First, a fundamental disclaimer. Let's still take into account that the Russian Imperial or Russian Army, which originates from the regiments of the foreign system of the first Romanovs, and the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army, created in 1918 by L. D. Trotsky, are still completely different armies. Therefore, to identify Russian army and the Red Army is wrong.

The losses you are asking about can only be imagined approximately. From the above, we take the average figures: the Armed Forces of the USSR - 16.5 million, Germany and its allies on the Eastern Front - 3.3 million. The ratio of irretrievable losses is 1:5. This is strikingly close to the ratio of deadweight losses in the Finnish war - 1:6.

Are there other examples in world history when a victorious country loses several times more people than a defeated state?

As a result of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the ratio of losses turned out to be in favor of Russia. The total irretrievable losses of the Russian troops and fleet amounted to 52.5 thousand ranks, the enemy - 88 thousand. But several times ... It is difficult for me to give such an example right away.

How many of our prisoners died?

In the Russian Imperial Army, captivity was not considered a crime; public opinion treated prisoners as sufferers. They retained ranks, awards, monetary allowance, captivity was counted in the length of service. With the active participation of Nicholas II and Russian diplomats, the famous Hague Convention of 1907 "On the Laws and Customs of War on Land" appeared, which determined the rights of prisoners of war. In 1914-1917, 2.4 million officials of the Russian army were captured, of which no more than 5% died.

In 1941-1945, according to the enemy, about 6.2 million Soviet servicemen were captured. Of these, until November 13, 1941, almost 320 thousand people were released and released in the occupied territories - mainly those who called themselves "Ukrainians" or "Belarusians". By the way, a very large figure, in fact, the equivalent of the size of two armies.

Of the remaining 5.8 million (excluding defectors, of whom there were 315 thousand during all the years of the war - two more armies in number) died of starvation and deprivation, and 3.3 million (60%) died from Nazi repressions. Of the surviving 2.4 million Soviet prisoners, approximately 950 thousand entered the service in various anti-Soviet armed formations (ROA and others), about 500 thousand fled or were released in 1943-1944 Soviet troops and allies, the rest (about 1 million) waited until the spring of 1945. But their suffering didn't end there.

The words of I. V. Stalin are known: we have no prisoners, but there are traitors. He refused to give them any help. How much did this affect the mortality rate of our prisoners in German camps (compared to prisoners of other countries)?

It's not just the well-known Stalinist position. For example, even V. I. Lenin believed that the Hague Convention of 1907 "creates a selfish psychology in soldiers." As a result, approximately 15-20 thousand Red Army soldiers captured during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920 died in Polish camps, abandoned by the Council of People's Commissars to their fate. JV Stalin in 1925 called the work of the Hague Conference "an example of the unparalleled hypocrisy of bourgeois diplomacy."

It is interesting that in 1927 the plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks recognized: "The non-working elements that make up the majority of our army - the peasants, will not voluntarily fight for socialism." Therefore, the authorities were not interested in protecting the rights of their own prisoners of war. Their mass death in captivity by the enemy would reduce the likelihood of the formation of a Russian anti-Bolshevik army on the side of the enemy.

As a result, the Soviet Union, by Stalin's decision, refused to join the 1929 Geneva Convention "On the Treatment of Prisoners of War" and de jure refused to protect the rights of its citizens if they were captured by the enemy during hostilities. The recognition of the USSR in 1931 of the convention "On the improvement of the lot of the wounded and sick in active armies", as well as the well-known Soviet note of July 17, 1941 on joining the convention "On the Treatment of Prisoners of War" de facto, did not fundamentally change the situation.

Hitler considered that this state of affairs unties the hands of the National Socialists and authorizes arbitrariness in relation to Soviet prisoners of war. Their mass death would allow "to deprive Russia of its vitality." On March 30, 1941, speaking to his generals, the Fuhrer frankly stated: in the coming war, "a Red Army soldier will not be a comrade."

Taking advantage of the refusal of the USSR government to protect the rights of its citizens in captivity, the Nazis doomed them to methodical extinction from hunger and disease, to bullying and repression. Political workers and Jews taken prisoner were subject to destruction. True, at the end of 1941, the repressive policy of the Nazis in relation to political workers taken prisoner began to change.

In turn, in order No. 270 of August 16, 1941, I. V. Stalin, G. K. Zhukov and other members of the Headquarters proposed to destroy the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army captured by the enemy “by all means, both ground and air, and families of surrendered Red Army soldiers to be deprived of state benefits and assistance. On September 28, 1941, in special directive No. 4976 on the troops of the Leningrad Front, Zhukov demanded that the families of Soviet prisoners of war also be shot. Fortunately, probably, the real directive was not implemented and such terrible facts are not known to historians. But evidence of the bombing of prisoner-of-war camps by our own aircraft, especially in 1941, exists.

In 1941-1942, prisoners were kept in inhuman conditions, dying in the hundreds of thousands, primarily from starvation and typhus. In the winter of 1941-1942, about 2.2 million prisoners of war died. The tragedy of these people, betrayed by their government and fallen victim to Nazi policies, is not inferior in scale to the Holocaust.

Individual officers of the Wehrmacht (Admiral V. Canaris, Count G.D. von Moltke, Major Count K. von Stauffenberg and others) already in the autumn of 1941 protested against the nightmare that was happening, considering such a practice incompatible with the code of honor and traditions of the old German army. Some commandants, guided by personal Christian feelings, tried at their private level to somehow alleviate the suffering of the unfortunate. But such cases were still isolated.

By the way, mass mortality was also simply connected with the unpreparedness of the Wehrmacht to receive millions of prisoners of war in the first months of the war. No one expected that there would be so many of them, and there were no elementary conditions for their maintenance and reception.

It was an objective factor that influenced the fate of our prisoners. But evil will - the principled position of Stalin and the ideological attitudes of the Nazis - still played a more significant role here. Only in the autumn of 1942 did the situation begin to improve somewhat. In 1942, the Nazis became interested in the prisoners as a labor force, and in the spring of 1943, the development of the Vlasov movement began. In general, if the mortality rate among the prisoners of war of the armies of the Western Allies ranged from 0.3% to 1.6%, then among the Soviet military personnel, as I said, it was 60%.

Stalin was clearly not stupid. Why were we absolutely defenseless before Germany in the first months of the war? Catastrophe: our aviation was destroyed in one fell swoop, more than 3 million citizens were taken prisoner. Couldn't this have been foreseen? There were no anti-aircraft guns, air defense, a mobilization plan, border protection? And intelligence warned. Is the whole tragedy - from the "mad leader" who blindly trusted Hitler? The topic is worn out, and yet - how could this happen?

You have raised an issue around which there has been a fierce controversy for decades. Objectively, this is good, since the discussion contributes to the discovery of new knowledge. Unfortunately, the scope of our conversation forces me to confine myself to theses. Of course, this is just my vision of the situation as a researcher.

Firstly, we were not at all defenseless against Germany in June 1941 - rather, on the contrary, the forces and means allocated by Hitler to implement the Barbarossa plan turned out to be clearly insufficient. If the Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army overestimated the possible forces of the enemy, then the Abwehr, on the contrary, made a huge miscalculation in the assessment of the Soviet forces and means concentrated by the beginning of the campaign in the western military districts.

So, for example, the Germans believed that in the West the forces of the Red Army by June 11 consisted of 7 tank divisions, while there were 44. In total, the forces of the Red Army were defined by the Germans as 215 divisions, while in reality there were 303. In August, during a visit to the headquarters of Army Group Center in Borisov, Hitler grimly declared: "If I had known that Stalin had so many tanks, I would never have attacked the Soviet Union."

On June 22, 1941, the balance of power between the enemy (including Germany's allies) and the troops of the Red Army in the West (five military districts) looked like this: in terms of settlement divisions - 166 and 190, in terms of personnel - 4.3 million and 3.3 million people, for guns and mortars - 42.6 thousand and 59.7 thousand units, for tanks and assault guns - 4.1 thousand and 15.6 thousand units, for aircraft - 4.8 thousand and 10 .7 thousand units. The enemy could allocate only 2.1 thousand flight crews to participate in hostilities, while the Red Army Air Force in the West had more than 7.2 thousand crews.

In terms of quantity and quality, Soviet tanks were superior to enemy tanks. The Red Army had 51 divisions in the strategic reserve (including 16 tank and motorized), while the Wehrmacht and the allies had only 28 (including only 2 tank and motorized). How were we defenseless?

"Blind gullibility" or "madness" of Stalin is a myth of the Khrushchev era. Stalin was such a sophisticated politician, such a perfect "master of power" and political intrigue, that he did not trust anyone, including Hitler. Hitler, most likely, at the first stage of the Soviet-Nazi friendship trusted Stalin, but no later than the summer of 1940, he intuitively began to feel the danger posed by the Kremlin "partner".

And the results of Molotov's visit to Berlin in November 1940 turned this feeling into confidence. By the end of 1940, Germany was in such a position that no matter what move Hitler made, his situation worsened anyway. Therefore, "Barbarossa" is a step out of despair. I think that in fact Stalin knew on the eve of the war that the Red Army was stronger than the Wehrmacht in terms of forces and means. That's why he behaved so confidently and serenely. Perhaps Stalin even assumed that Hitler was afraid of him. Hitler was afraid.

But who could have imagined that the Fuhrer would decide to put an end to his fears about the intentions of the USSR in such a specific way? Don't forget also that Germany continued to wage a hopeless war against Great Britain. 40% of Luftwaffe forces were tied up in other theaters of operations. Put yourself in Stalin's place. Under the conditions described, could you believe that Hitler would also decide on such an adventure as an attack on the Soviet Union? Intelligence reported, right, but how much was involuntary disinformation in its reports? Hitler, having attacked the USSR, from the point of view of Stalin, made a move at that moment completely illogical and unpredictable.

The reasons for our "defencelessness" lie elsewhere - in the vices of the Stalinist social system, which was built on the spot Russian state after the physical extermination by the Bolsheviks of the historical estates of traditional Russian society and the unprecedented enslavement of the peasantry. In the atmosphere of general fear, lies and hypocrisy in which this system existed. Of course, the Wehrmacht had a certain superiority - in the deployment and concentration of troops in the main directions, in the initiative, in the quality of training soldiers, officer corps and generals.

Among the staff officers and generals of the Wehrmacht, many had important experience of the First World War and service in the Reichswehr, which in the 1920s was a highly professional army. And how many, for example, commanders of Soviet divisions served in the old Russian army? Did you have a Russian military academic education and upbringing, a level of outlook and culture? Let's be honest: whom did our commanders fear more - a potential enemy or party-political bodies and NKVD bodies? By June 22, 1941, the average fighter of the Red Army was a collective farmer ...

And who could be brought up by the impoverished Stalinist collective farm with its hopeless forced labor? Today we can’t even imagine the realities of a “happy collective farm life” in the pre-war USSR, when one workday was paid on average at the rate of one ruble, and with inhuman exertion of forces, a collective farmer rarely worked out about two workdays per day. Moreover, the annual tax for a hut was 20 rubles, compulsory insurance (against fire, etc.) - 10 rubles, for 0.5 hectares of household plots - 100 rubles, for a cow - 5 kg of meat or 30 rubles, as well as 100 liters of milk or 15 rubles; for a piglet - 1 kg of meat or 5 rubles, compulsory subscription to a "voluntary" loan - 25-50 rubles. etc. Then such a collective farmer went to serve in the army ...

Secondly, our aviation was by no means "destroyed in one fell swoop", this is another myth. For every pair of German fighters (mostly new Bf-109s), there were almost two new (MiG-3, Yak-1) and six old (I-16, I-153) fighters of Soviet models. Only 66 out of 470 airfields were hit. Only 800 aircraft were damaged or destroyed on the ground, another 322 were shot down by the Germans in air battles, losing 114 aircraft. But what did happen to our aviation in the first weeks of the war, or rather, to its crews? This topic is still waiting for its researchers. Regarding air defense systems, I note that the enemy also allocated only 17% of air defense forces to participate in the war against the USSR.

In the summer - autumn of 1941, the Red Army suffered a crushing defeat, losing in less than five months about 18 thousand aircraft, 25 thousand tanks, more than 100 thousand guns and mortars. 2.2 million fighters and commanders were killed and died, 1.2 million deserted, remaining in the occupied territory, 3.8 million were captured. The Wehrmacht defeated 248 Soviet divisions, including 61 tank divisions, the enemy captured Kyiv, blockaded Leningrad and went to Moscow.

I believe that the main reasons for this catastrophe lie not only in the temporary retention of the initiative by the Germans, operational superiority or higher professionalism of the Wehrmacht, but also in the unwillingness of a significant part of the fighters and commanders of the Red Army to defend collective farms and power based on fear and forced labor.

At the same time, the vast expanses, mobilization capabilities and human resources of the Soviet Union, as well as the help of the allies, played an important objective role in holding the front. After the outbreak of war in 1941, more than 500 (!) formations were reorganized or re-formed in the Red Army, and the Wehrmacht traveled a long distance from Brest to Rostov in an unchanged state, having exhausted its capabilities by December.

Bogomolov writes that 37 thousand Russians fought in the ROA of General Vlasov, Wikipedia says that about 120 thousand people, and you said that more than a million citizens of the USSR were on the side of the enemy. Why such a discrepancy?

In fact, there is no discrepancy. Unfortunately, Bogomolov is simply incompetent in this matter. He mechanically summarized the strength of some units and formations of the Vlasov army - the troops of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR), which were formed from the autumn of 1944 to the spring of 1945. Indeed, most often they use the abbreviation ROA to designate them. However, this is wrong. The name "Russian Liberation Army" in 1943-1945, the Germans designated the Russian eastern battalions and some other formations in the Wehrmacht, staffed by Russians.

Not all of them were transferred to the KONR troops in 1944-1945. In addition, the abbreviation "ROA" was actively used in special propaganda. Adding up the number of the 1st and 2nd divisions, the reserve brigade and the officer school of the Vlasovites, Bogomolov received a figure of 37 thousand people. But this is less than a third of the total number of military personnel who were under the command of Lieutenant General A. A. Vlasov by April 21-22, 1945.

General Vlasov eventually submitted to the central headquarters and service units, the 1st and 2nd infantry divisions, the 3rd division (in the recruitment stage, without weapons), a reserve brigade, an officer school, a separate Varyag regiment, a separate brigade in the Salzburg area (in the recruitment stage), the white émigré Russian Corps, two Cossack corps, units and subunits of the KONR Air Force, as well as some other formations - a total of 120-125 thousand military personnel, of which about 16 thousand had no weapons.

So the Wikipedia figure you mention is generally correct. The problem is that by the end of the war, the unification and reorganization of the Vlasov army according to the plan of the former teacher of the Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army, Major General F. I. Trukhin, did not happen. There wasn't enough time. The Vlasovites were forced to surrender to the Western allies in parts.

Indeed, approximately 1.24 million citizens of the Soviet Union carried out military service on the side of the enemy in 1941-1945: 400 thousand Russians (including 80 thousand in Cossack formations), 250 thousand Ukrainians, 180 thousand representatives of the peoples of the Middle Asia, 90 thousand Latvians, 70 thousand Estonians, 40 thousand representatives of the peoples of the Volga region, 38.5 thousand Azerbaijanis, 37 thousand Lithuanians, 28 thousand representatives of the peoples of the North Caucasus, 20 thousand Belarusians, 20 thousand Georgians, 20 thousand Crimean Tatars, 20 thousand Soviet Germans and Volksdeutsche, 18 thousand Armenians, 5 thousand Kalmyks, 4.5 thousand Ingrians.

The latter mainly served on the side of the Finns. I do not have exact data on the number of Moldovans. In the ranks of the Vlasov army - the troops of the KONR - in 1944-1945, not only Russians, but also representatives of all other peoples, including Jews and Karaites, served. However, the Vlasovites made up only 10% of the total number of citizens of the USSR who served on the side of Germany and its allies. There is no reason to call them all "Vlasovites", as was done in the USSR.

Was there a similar example of such massive collaborationism in the history of Russia? What motivated people to betray (and can the transition to the side of the aggressor always be called betrayal)?

There is a widespread point of view, according to which the number of Soviet citizens who served in the military on the side of the enemy is not so significant relative to the population of the USSR as a whole. This is the wrong approach.

Firstly, an incomparably smaller part of the Soviet population, especially in the RSFSR, found itself under occupation in 1941-1942. It is still unknown how many "voluntary assistants" the Wehrmacht would have if the Germans, for example, reached the Tambov region.

Secondly, the recruitment of volunteers from prisoners of war began only in the spring of 1942, when more than half of those who were captured in 1941 had already died during the first military winter. No matter how one regards this tragic phenomenon and the motives of the actions of these people, it remains a fact that the citizens of the USSR, who were in the military service of the enemy, made up for his irretrievable losses on the Eastern Front by 35-40% or more than a quarter - irretrievable losses incurred in the years war in general. Citizens of the USSR accounted for approximately 6-8% of the total human resources used by Germany in military service.

Approximately every 16th or 17th enemy soldier had Soviet citizenship by June 22, 1941. Not all of them fought. But they replaced the German servicemen, who were sent, for example, from service positions to the ranks. Therefore, it is difficult to dispute the thesis of the German military historian K. G. Pfeffer, who called the help and participation of the Soviet population important conditions that determined the Wehrmacht's ability to conduct military operations on the Eastern Front for a long time.

There was nothing like this in any war waged by the Russian Empire. There was no other. Cases of high treason by Russian officers during the First Patriotic War of 1812 are rare and practically unknown during the Eastern War of 1853-1856, Russian-Turkish 1877-1878 and Russian-Japanese 1904-1905.

Of the 14 thousand officer and civilian ranks of the Russian Imperial Army captured by the enemy in 1914-1917, with the rarest exception, almost all of them remained faithful to the oath, not to mention the fact that none of them tried to create a combined arms army to participate in hostilities on side of Germany or Austria-Hungary. The enemy officers in Russian captivity behaved in the same way.

During the Second World War, the facts of high treason became noticeable only among Wehrmacht officers in Soviet captivity and representatives of the commanding staff of the Red Army in German captivity. 300-400 Wehrmacht officers took part in the activities of the anti-Nazi Union of German Officers General of Artillery V. A. von Seidlitz-Kurzbach in Soviet captivity. In the Vlasov movement in 1943-1945, by name, more than 1000 representatives of the commanding and political staff of the Red Army participated.

Only Vlasov in the spring of 1945 served 5 major generals, 1 brigade commander, 1 brigade commissar, 42 colonels and lieutenant colonels of the Red Army, 1 captain of the first rank of the Navy, more than 40 majors of the Red Army, etc. On such a scale, nothing like this was noted among prisoners of war officers, for example, Poland, Yugoslavia, Great Britain or the USA.

It seems to me that regardless of motivation, the causes of mass treason are always associated with the characteristics of the state to which a citizen is cheating, if you like, a consequence of state ill health. Hitler doomed entire nations to destruction, plunged Germany into a hopeless war, put the German people on the brink of existence. Could the Fuhrer count on the unconditional loyalty of his officers and generals? The Bolsheviks exterminated entire estates in Russia, destroyed the Church and the old moral and religious basis of the military oath, introduced a new serfdom and forced labor throughout the country, unleashed mass repressions and, moreover, abandoned their own citizens who were captured. Could Stalin count on the unconditional loyalty of his fighters and commanders?...

So treason - both to Hitler and Stalin - was a natural and inevitable result of their practical policy. Another thing is that in modern Russia and Germany there is not, and there will hardly be a unanimous attitude towards those who committed this betrayal. It is interesting, for example, that in 1956 General Seidlitz was officially rehabilitated in Germany. The federal court overturned the Nazi death sentence against Seidlitz in 1944, reasoning that the general had committed treason "primarily out of his hostility to National Socialism."

In Berlin there is Stauffenbergstrasse - in honor of one of the leaders of the anti-Hitler conspiracy. Many, but still far from all, Germans agree with this. Probably even more, they believe that it is impossible to compare the actions of General Seidlitz and Colonel K. F. von Stauffenberg. It is clear that talking about General Vlasov and his like-minded people in Russia is even more difficult. This topic is probably the most painful.

The generally accepted point of view: General Vlasov is a traitor, not an ideological fighter against Bolshevism and Stalin's tyranny.

It is true that such an assessment objectively dominates contemporary Russian society. And, nevertheless, it seems to me that over the past twenty years the number of those who, under the influence of new knowledge about the history of their own country in the first half of the twentieth century, has changed their attitude towards Vlasov, or at least agree that this the topic is more complex than it seemed to us in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the study of this topic is not facilitated by the incredible number of myths about Vlasov, which have become widespread in just the last few years, thanks to the work of some ignorant publicists and lovers of cheap sensations.

There are two arguments in favor of this. First, he was in the Bolshevik Party for many years and made a brilliant career in our army. And only when he was captured did he become “an ideological fighter against the Stalinist system” (unlike some white emigrants who also supported Hitler: they did not like the Nazis, but they hated the Bolsheviks even more, so they were sincerely mistaken).

Party membership and Vlasov's career is only the external, visible side of his life in the Soviet Union, however, like many other of our compatriots. What Vlasov really thought, honestly serving the authorities that dispossessed his fellow villagers, no one knows. You look how many millions of members of the CPSU, employees of state security agencies, military of all ranks and branches of service we had. And how many of them came out to defend Soviet power and the Soviet Union in 1991 and were ready to die for the words they uttered at party meetings?... So party membership and a career are far from an indicator of personal devotion to the Soviet state.

I would like to draw your attention to another aspect of the problem. You say - only after being captured did he become "an ideological fighter against the Stalinist system." That's right: only after being captured. It is obvious that the system of general denunciation, fear, suppression, which Stalin so skillfully and methodically built in the USSR in the 1930s for a reason, ruled out the possibility of any not only protest actions, but often even opposition plans. The future commander of the 2nd Vlasov division, Colonel of the Red Army G. A. Zverev, had a personal adjutant on the eve of the war who was the sex officer of the NKVD. What kind of struggle is there ... they were afraid of each other.

By the way, in Nazi Germany, in the Wehrmacht, Hitler failed to create such an atmosphere. As a result, he received half a dozen assassination attempts in 1943-1944. So. We completely forget that nothing threatened Vlasov in July 1942 in German captivity. No one forced him to cooperate, no one forced him to speak out against Stalin under the threat of execution or a concentration camp. The Nazis generally did not need Vlasov, they were not interested in the appearance of such a figure.

Vlasov, as a political figure, was only interested in the opponents of Hitler and his occupation policy, and this was a very narrow circle of people. Therefore, Vlasov, having become "an ideological fighter against the Stalinist system," as you said, made his decision completely freely. Unlike some other captured Soviet generals, the NKVD did not have any compromising evidence on Vlasov. At the end of June - July 1942, Stalin was very concerned about the fate of Vlasov and demanded that he be taken out of the encirclement on the Volkhov, rescued at any cost, the corresponding radiograms were preserved.

In 1941-1944, 82 generals and commanders of the Red Army, whose ranks can be equated to those, were captured on the Eastern Front (including two generals and a corps commissar who died directly on the battlefield and were not captured). Of these, 25 people (30%) died and died, and if we exclude the three above-mentioned persons, then 22 people (27%). Interestingly, out of 167 Wehrmacht generals and persons equated to them who fell into Soviet captivity from June 22, 1941 to May 8, 1945, 60 people (36%) died.

62 Soviet generals and commanders in equivalent ranks refused any cooperation with the enemy. As a result, 10 people (16%) of them died from wounds, illnesses and hardships, 12 (19%) were killed under various circumstances (including 8 generals, the Germans shot for "active patriotic activity" - attempts to escape or for pro-Soviet agitation) , and the majority (40 people, or 65%, almost two-thirds) returned to the Soviet Union.

Of the generals who returned to their homeland, who remained loyal to the Soviet state in captivity, 9 people (less than a quarter) died as a result of repressions - those on whom the leaders of the SMERSH Main Directorate of Control had indisputable compromising evidence, despite their passive behavior. The rest waited for rehabilitation and pension provision.

Vlasov could well have been among them - he just had to stay in the camp and behave quite passively, without committing any drastic actions. But Vlasov, of his own free will, made a choice that dramatically increased his life risks. And this choice eventually forced him to sacrifice not only his life, but also his name. In Russian history, there were enough individuals who voluntarily sacrificed their lives in the name of a specific goal. But those who also sacrificed their own name are incomparably fewer.

By the way, very few people know that Generals Vlasov, Trukhin, Malyshkin and their other associates were convicted not by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, but by a preliminary decision of the Stalinist Politburo, the highest party body that adopted many repressive decisions in the 1920s-1940s.

All members of the Military Collegium, chaired by the infamous Colonel-General V. V. Ulrich, were members of the CPSU (b) and on the night of August 1, 1946, they simply announced the verdict of the Politburo. Let me remind you that a number of senior officials of the MGB who conducted the “investigation” in the “Vlasov case” were shot in the 1950s (Leonov, Komarov) or dismissed from the bodies (Kovalenko, Sokolov) for “gross violations of socialist legality” and the use torture on those under investigation.

The second argument, the main one: Vlasov's struggle set a utopian goal - a free and strong Russia without Stalin and his clique.

Now, after 65 years, it is obvious that the Vlasovites had almost no chance of success. I think a lot of people understood this. One of them, co-author of the Prague Manifesto, Lieutenant A. N. Zaitsev wrote in 1943 to his future wife: “30% for Hitler hanging us, 30% for Stalin hanging us, 30% for shoot the allies. And only 10% - the possibility of success. But still, you have to take the risk." Personally, it seems to me that the very attempt to challenge Stalin, whether it succeeded or not, was of undoubted importance.

About 130 thousand of our compatriots, who can be considered participants in the Vlasov movement, connected their fate with this attempt. And their attempt, whether it was utopian or not, and their fate became a tragedy. But she showed that Stalin could not suppress the will to resist. Even if this resistance originated behind the barbed wire of German prisoner of war camps. However, I agree that this view is shared by a minority today. But it has the right to exist - especially against the backdrop of unsuccessful attempts to turn Stalin into a national hero.

At the same time, Vlasov and his army marched along with the Nazis, who did not at all plan to make Russia strong and free.

Formally, you are right, of course. But there is important nuances and shades that can not be ignored.

The action of Vlasov in the fall of 1942 and the Vlasov movement in the winter - in the spring of 1943 were supported and tried to popularize not by the Nazis (it would be more correct to say that the Nazis were only in Italy), but by their opponents in the opposition circles of the Wehrmacht. In February - March 1943, Major General H. von Treskov organized the arrival of Vlasov in the rear area of ​​Army Group Center, hoping that after the assassination of Hitler, which was to take place on March 13, Vlasov would become the head of the Russian government in Smolensk and character war will change immediately.

The bomb's detonator is known to have failed. Hitler survived, and Vlasov, on his orders, went under house arrest in June 1943 for his own public patriotic statements in the occupied territories. At the very end of the war, when Vlasov and his associates really had their own army (or its prototype), their goal was only to form as many units as possible in a short time, attract and arm as many as possible compatriots, subjugate all the Eastern volunteers ... and transfer these people to the side of the Western allies in order to save the opponents of Soviet power and the enemies of Stalin. And there were still enough of them in 1945. Violent renditions, of course, no one could have foreseen.

They write that the soldiers of the ROA took the oath to Hitler.

The soldiers of the eastern units in the Wehrmacht in 1942-1944 took the usual German oath, which meant loyalty to the Fuhrer. It's true. But before that, let me remind you, the vast majority of Eastern volunteers took the Soviet oath. I think that at the same time they were as loyal to Hitler as they were to Stalin before.

The servicemen of the Vlasov army, the troops of the KONR, in 1944-1945 did not take an oath of loyalty to Hitler. It was only about KONR and Vlasov. But in the text, at the request of representatives of the Main Directorate of the SS, a clause was introduced about loyalty to the alliance with those peoples of Europe who are fighting under the supreme leadership of Hitler. As soon as Hitler committed suicide, this paragraph automatically lost its meaning.

And, by the way, a few days later, the 1st division of the KONR troops under the command of Major General S.K. Bunyachenko intervened in the Prague uprising. Vlasov did not take an oath to Hitler, there are no documents about this. It is curious that in the 1950s and 1960s in Germany, A. Kh. Billenberg, with whom Vlasov married in April 1945, tried to achieve a general's pension, as the widow of a general. However, the federal authorities refused to do so. The relevant authorities explained that the Russian General Vlasov was not in the German military service and his widow had no pension rights. For the same reasons, as a rule, in the FRG, pensions were also denied to servicemen of the Vlasov army, whose status was considered as an allied one.

The Nazis used Vlasov as a tool to form a fifth column inside the enemy country ...

Sorry, I can't agree with you. The “fifth column” in the Soviet state was stubbornly and consistently created not by Vlasov and the Nazis, but by Lenin, Stalin and the Bolsheviks over the course of twenty pre-war years. Moreover, they created quite stubbornly and successfully. Without their efforts, there was neither Vlasov, at least in the form in which he went down in history, nor the Vlasov movement, nor the Prague Manifesto, nor the KONR troops. Vlasov became only a symbol, a leader for these people. And if he had died in 1942 on the Volkhov, some other general would have been found - but this movement would have taken place anyway. Only it would probably be associated with a different name.

- ... and if they had won - Russia would not have been reborn (Hitler would not have allowed this), but would have turned out to be a fragmented colony, a source of resources for the Reich. Do you disagree with these arguments?

You know, back in August 1942, Vlasov frankly stated during interrogations that Germany would not be able to defeat the Soviet Union - and this was at the moment when the Wehrmacht was approaching the Volga. Today, we can say that Hitler had no chance at all to win the Second World War, the resources of Germany and its opponents turned out to be too incomparable.

Vlasov did not at all connect his plans with Hitler's victory in the East - just in this case, Hitler would not need him. At first, he sincerely hoped that he would be able to create a sufficiently strong and independent Russian army in the rear of the Germans. Then hopes were associated with the activity of the conspirators and plans for a radical change in the occupation policy, as a result of which such a Russian army was about to appear. Since the summer of 1943, Vlasov had pinned his hopes on the Western allies. With any outcome, as it seemed to Vlasov, options were possible - the main thing was to get their own significant armed force. But, as history has shown, there were no options.

As for Vlasov's personal sentiments and his assessments of the prospects for turning Russia into a colony of the Reich, I will quote a German document that I found a few years ago in an American archive. This is a departmental report from a representative of Rosenberg's special headquarters in the rear area of ​​Army Group Center dated March 14, 1943.

The day before, Vlasov was in Mogilev. Frankly developing his views in a narrow circle of German listeners, Vlasov emphasized that among Stalin's opponents there are many people "with a strong character, ready to give their lives for the liberation of Russia from Bolshevism, but rejecting German bondage." However, "they are ready to cooperate closely with the German people, without prejudice to their freedom and honor." “The Russian people lived, lives and will live, they will never become a colonial people,” the former captive general firmly stated. In conclusion, according to a German source, Vlasov expressed hope "for a healthy renewal of Russia and for an explosion of the national pride of the Russian people."

I have nothing to add to this confidential report on Vlasov's moods.

What is the real contribution of our allies to the defeat of Germany?

From the loss figures cited at the beginning of our conversation, it follows that more than two-thirds of the irretrievable losses in manpower were inflicted on the common enemy by the Soviet Armed Forces, defeating and capturing 607 enemy divisions. This characterizes the main contribution of the USSR to the victory over Nazi Germany.

The Western allies made a decisive contribution to the military-industrial superiority of the anti-Hitler coalition in the economy and mobilized resources, to the victory over the common enemy at sea and in the air, and in general they destroyed about a third of manpower, defeating and capturing 176 enemy divisions.

Therefore, in my private opinion, the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition became really common. The proud attempt to single out the "Soviet" or "American" contribution from it, declaring it "decisive" or "predominant", is of a political nature and has nothing to do with history. Dividing the efforts of the allies into "major" and "secondary" is wrong.

However, it seems to me that 65 years after such a terrible war, when its extremely ruthless nature, which violated all the norms of Christian morality, is no longer in doubt, triumphalism should give way to compassion and grief for the millions of victims. Why did all this happen? ... State policy should be primarily aimed at perpetuating the memory of the dead, and providing real and tangible assistance to the very few survivors of its participants and contemporaries.

We love military parades so much, we spend multimillion-dollar funds on them, but how many soldiers' bones do we still have scattered through the forests and swamps?

We have been trumpeting our victory for 65 years, but how did the defeated live during these decades, and how did the winners live?

For our country and people, the war was a national disaster comparable only to collectivization and the artificial famine of 1932-1933. And we, as proof of our national greatness, are all talking about how many millions we have lost ... That's how wonderful we are, we did not stand up for the price. In fact, here it is not to be proud and rejoice, but to cry and pray. And if you rejoice, then only the fact that at least someone, thank God, returned home to the family alive. And, finally, it is necessary to present the historical account of the Stalinist authorities, which paid such a monstrous price not only for coming to Berlin, but also for their self-preservation.

However, these are already emotions from which the historian should refrain.

Many believe that we could have managed without them, and that they began to help us more out of fear that Stalin, having won, would not make all of Europe socialist.

Let's remember this first. Between the autumn of 1939 and the spring of 1941, Germany successfully fought in Europe. In 1940, 59% of all German imports and 49% of exports passed through the territory of the USSR, and before June 22, 1941, 72% and 64%, respectively. Thus, at the first stage of the war in Europe, the Reich successfully overcame the economic blockade with the help of the Soviet Union. Did such a position of the USSR contribute to Nazi aggression in Europe or hinder it? In 1940, Germany accounted for 52% of all Soviet exports, including 50% of exports of phosphates, 77% of asbestos, 62% of chromium, 40% of manganese, 75% of oil, 77% of grains. After the defeat of France, Great Britain courageously resisted the Nazis almost single-handedly for a whole year.

In this difficult year, when the Luftwaffe bombed British cities, who was objectively helped by the Soviet Union?

And who did the Allies help after June 22, 1941?

During the years of the war with Germany, under the famous lend-lease, the USSR received supplies from the allies for a total of 11 billion dollars (at their cost in 1945). The Allies supplied the USSR with 22,150 aircraft, 12.7 thousand tanks, 8 thousand anti-aircraft guns, 132 thousand machine guns, 427 thousand vehicles, 8 thousand tractors, 472 million shells, 11 thousand wagons, 1.9 thousand vehicles. steam locomotives and 66 diesel-electric locomotives, 540 thousand tons of rails, 4.5 million tons of food, etc. It is impossible to name the entire range of supplies here.

The main deliveries of tanks and aircraft from the allies fall on the period from the end of 1941 to 1943 - that is, during the most difficult period of the war. Western deliveries of strategic materials amounted to Soviet production for the entire war period: for gunpowder and explosives - 53%, for aviation gasoline - more than 55%, for copper and aluminum - more than 70%, for armor plates - 46%. During the war years, the USSR produced 115.4 thousand metal-cutting machine tools. The Allies delivered another 44.6 thousand - and more high-quality and expensive. The Allies diverted almost the entire fleet of the enemy, almost two-thirds of the Luftwaffe, and after landing in Europe, about 40% of the enemy's ground forces.

So would we have managed without the help and participation of the allies?

I don't think so.

Was it military necessity that the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Japan? Many of us believe that there was not so much concern for victory over the enemy as a demonstration of strength and an attempt to put pressure on the USSR. How do you assess that bombing - a crime or an expedient military action?

Let me remind you that the United States turned out to be the side attacked by Japan. Formally, they had the right to defend themselves in any way they could. Of course, from a humanitarian and Christian point of view, the use of atomic weapons, the victims of which were primarily the civilian population, makes a terrible impression. As well as the unmotivated famous Allied bombing of Dresden.

But, I confess, no more terrible than, for example, medical experiments on civilians, which were carried out in the Japanese special detachment No. 731 in Manchuria. The purpose of these experiments was to develop means by which it would be possible to carry out a bacteriological attack on the American coast, for example, in California. He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind.

Undoubtedly, the atomic bombings in the first place were to force Emperor Hirohito to lay down his arms. It is likely that the Allied invasion of the Japanese islands would have claimed even more human lives. In Europe, in the summer of 1945, the Allies had sufficient forces to show Stalin their advantage and capabilities by demonstrating their numerous bomber aircraft. It is most difficult to answer your last question, since it is necessary to proceed not from the experience and knowledge we have acquired throughout the post-war period, but from the realities of August 1945.

And it's hard to get away.

And what would happen if in the summer of 1945 such a bomb would not have been in the hands of the Americans, but only at the disposal of the leadership of the USSR? What is the most likely scenario for the behavior of Stalin and his entourage?

This is not a question for a historian. Still, I think that Stalin in any of his political steps throughout his career in the Bolshevik Party could only be stopped by questions of expediency or the threat of, let's say, an asymmetric response.

Marshal Zhukov - a brilliant commander or a man who "did not count people", that is, he won battles not by skill, but by numbers?

The ideas that I have about Marshal G.K. Zhukov and his operations allow me to agree with the last judgment. Of course, I am familiar with both the opposite point of view and the arguments of opponents, A. V. Isaev, for example.

But to be honest, they don't convince me.

We know from Russian history that sovereigns often interfered with generals. Did Stalin interfere with the military? Or was he smart enough to agree with the professionals at the right time?

Not so often. In the Moscow period, it seems to me, Ivan IV intervened most of all, but the tsars Mikhail Fedorovich and Alexei Mikhailovich behaved quite restrained in this regard. In the Petersburg period, Peter I himself considered himself a commander. Catherine II and Paul I completely trusted the professionals in the theaters of operations, although the monarchs had difficult relations with some of them.

Alexander I did not interfere so much himself as he was sometimes inclined to fall under the influence of others and defend someone else's point of view as his own. Nicholas I and Alexander II trusted professionals. Nicholas II, contrary to popular belief, having become in 1915 at the head of the Army in the field, entrusted the control of the troops to General Alekseev, who was then the best representative of the Russian Military Academy. The sovereign carefully delved into all issues, but appreciated the experience and knowledge of Alekseev, agreeing with his point of view.

Stalin was a talented self-taught. It is undeniable that he was very teachable and constantly updated his military knowledge, striving to understand complex issues. But, having brought Lenin's political plan to its logical end, Stalin created a mobilization system that existed only through violence and constant human sacrifice. There was no place for professionalism and free creativity, by definition.

Unlike Nazi Germany, in the USSR the military became part of the party nomenklatura, the collective will of which was expressed by Stalin. And relations within the nomenklatura were built on the basis of fear and personal devotion to the leader. It seems to me that Stalin did not interfere with the military, as they served him and the system he created. The executions of certain generals, practiced from time to time, were only a good educational measure: no one could feel safe, even if he seemed to enjoy the trust of the Master.

How can one assess the role of Stalin in the Second World War in general? I would like to get away from extremes, from politicized judgments. It is clear that for many people the Soviet period of history is sacred, their life, memory, ideals, and to overturn, stigmatize all this means to cross out, devalue the meaning of their life ...

From the moment he was elected General Secretary of the Central Committee in 1922, Stalin was preparing for a big war, the victory in which was supposed to elevate the nomenklatura of the Bolshevik Party to unprecedented heights. For the sake of maintaining the power of the nomenclature of the CPSU (b), he sacrificed millions of peasants during the years of collectivization and then turned the country into one large workshop for the production of military products.

For the sake of consolidating the regime and concealing the consequences of collectivization, he unleashed the Yezhovshchina. In order to enter the war at the most advantageous moment for the Soviet Union, Stalin, to the amazement of the whole world, approached Hitler and gave him freedom of action in Europe in 1939-1940.

In the end, the system that Stalin created allowed him to again make incredible sacrifices during the war years, to preserve the Leninist state and the power of that “new class”, the party bureaucracy, whose collective will he personified. The war allowed Stalin to spread similar one-party regimes far beyond the borders of the USSR - otherwise the socialist experiment would have ended ingloriously decades earlier. It was Stalin who made lies and self-deception at all levels the most important basis for the existence of Soviet society.

The Soviet Union collapsed precisely because of the lie, which was no longer believed by those who uttered it, nor those for whom it was intended. As a result, the holy ideals of the Soviet period, which you mentioned, turned out to be similar to those pagan idols that the people of Kiev easily threw into the Dnieper, having adopted Christianity in 988. Nobody defended them.

But are we able to return to Christ again? Or are we increasingly drawn to Stalin?

I don't have an answer to this question.

Why is the Russian Defense Ministry still hiding so many documents on the history of the Second World War? Embarrassed to open? Will some things come up that can become a stain on the descendants of many famous people then?

No, I believe that in fact the problem is more serious and is not related to concern for the state and possible experiences of the descendants of individual famous generals and marshals. I believe that if unhindered access to all TsAMO documents is opened, including those that are stored outside the actual archive in Podolsk, the version of the war that Stalin created for us will turn out to be completely untenable. This applies to many sore topics and issues - for example, operational planning in the first half of 1941, the circumstances of Finland's entry into the war, losses in individual operations, the battle for Rzhev, the partisan movement, military operations in Eastern Europe etc.

But the main question will be - why did we pay such a terrible price for the victory and who is responsible for this? Although, of course, I think that many documents of the army political departments, for example, concerning the moral side of the war, will make a heavy impression. The truth will not contribute to the preservation of triumphalism in society.

There is a lot of talk in the West about the atrocities of our army in Germany.

Unfortunately, not without reason.

Individual atrocities, rapes and looting are probably inevitable in such a situation, but usually they are restrained by the most severe bans and executions.

I got the impression that it was a flow that could not be stopped by any repression. And lately I've been wondering - did they try to stop him?

We also had executions of rapists and marauders, but, they say, in East Prussia a “relaxation” was given, which became a temptation for many “morally unstable” fighters. Is it so? Can it be said that in our treatment of the civilian population in Europe (and especially in Germany) we differed unfavorably from the Allies?

“Petrov, as the postman was called, who seemed so nice to me at the beginning, at the end of the war revealed himself as a criminal, marauder and rapist. In Germany, as an old friend, he told me how many gold watches and bracelets he managed to rob, how many German women he ruined. It was from him that I heard the first of an endless series of stories on the topic “ours abroad”. This story at first seemed to me a monstrous fiction, outraged me and therefore forever stuck in my memory: “I come to the battery, and there the old firemen are preparing a feast. They cannot move away from the gun, they are not supposed to.

Right on the bed, they spin dumplings from trophy flour, and at the other bed, they take turns playing with a German woman who was dragged from somewhere. The foreman disperses them with a stick: “Stop, you old fools! Do you want to bring the infection to your grandchildren!?” He takes the German woman away, leaves, and in twenty minutes everything starts again. Another story of Petrov about himself: “I am walking past a crowd of Germans, looking after a prettier woman and suddenly I look, there is a Frau with a daughter of fourteen years old. Pretty, and on her chest, like a sign, it says: “Syphilis”, which means for us not to be touched. Oh, you bastards, I think, I take the girl by the hand, my mother with a machine gun in the snout, and into the bushes. Let's check what kind of syphilis you have! The girl turned out to be appetizing...”

Troops meanwhile crossed the German border. Now the war turned to me with another of its unexpected faces. Everything seemed to be tested: death, hunger, shelling, overwork, cold. So no! There was something else very terrible, almost crushing me. On the eve of the transition to the territory of the Reich, agitators arrived in the troops. Some are in high ranks. "Death for death!!! Blood for blood!!! Let's not forget!!! We won't forgive!!! Let's take revenge!!!” and so on... Prior to this, Ehrenburg had thoroughly tried, whose crackling, biting articles everyone read: "Daddy, kill the German!" And it turned out Nazism on the contrary.

True, they behaved outrageously according to plan: a network of ghettos, a network of camps. Accounting and compilation of lists of loot. A register of punishments, planned executions, etc. With us, everything went spontaneously, in the Slavic way. Bay, guys, burn, wilderness! Spoil their women! Moreover, before the offensive, the troops were abundantly supplied with vodka. And it's gone, and it's gone! As always, the innocent suffered. The bosses, as always, fled ... Indiscriminately burned houses, killed some random old women, aimlessly shot herds of cows. A joke invented by someone was very popular: “Ivan is sitting near a burning house. "What are you doing?" they ask him. - “Yes, the footcloths had to be dried, the fire was lit” ...

Corpses, corpses, corpses. The Germans, of course, are scum, but why be like them? The army has humiliated itself. The nation has humiliated itself. It was the worst thing in the war. Corpses, corpses... At the railway station of the city of Allenstein, which the valiant cavalry of General Oslikovsky captured unexpectedly for the enemy, several echelons with German refugees arrived. They thought they were going to their rear, but they got there ... I saw the results of the reception that they received. The station platforms were covered with heaps of gutted suitcases, bundles, trunks. Everywhere clothes, children's things, ripped pillows. All this in pools of blood...

“Everyone has the right to send a parcel home once a month weighing twelve kilograms,” the authorities officially announced. And it's gone, and it's gone! Drunk Ivan burst into the bomb shelter, fucked the machine on the table and terribly popped his eyes, yelled: “URRRRRRA! You bastards!”

Trembling German women carried watches from all sides, which they raked into the “sidor” and carried away. One soldier became famous for forcing a German woman to hold a candle (there was no electricity), while he was rummaging through her chests. Rob! Grab it! Like an epidemic, this scourge swept over everyone ... Then they came to their senses, but it was too late: the devil flew out of the bottle. Kind, affectionate Russian men have turned into monsters. They were terrible alone, but in the herd they became such that it is impossible to describe!

I think comments are unnecessary.

Two mythological views of Stalin remain in the mass consciousness: either he is the source of all victories (cult), or a “serial killer” (demonization). Is an objective, impartial view possible today?

It all depends on the criteria you use and the value system. For example, some consider the state to be the highest value, whose greatness and interests of the state apparatus prevail over the interests of society and individuals. A citizen is a necessary consumable. And if Stalin littered his own people, it was solely for the sake of his good and the ultimate victorious goal.

Others consider each person to be God's Creation, inimitable and unique. From this point of view, the essence of elementary politics is to create such conditions in which the well-being of citizens would increase, their life, safety and property would be protected. The main criterion for waging war is the desire to minimize casualties among our own population and servicemen. Healthy selfishness.

It is clear that with such differences in values, it is impossible to agree on Stalin's diametrically opposed assessments.

How do you feel about the fact that many in today's Russia consider him an "effective manager"? At the same time, starting from some facts: industrialization, great construction projects, the military industry, victory in the Second World War, rapid recovery after the war, the atomic bomb, etc. And yes, the prices have come down...

I am negative. Lenin, and even more Stalin, so devastated the country that, as a result, by the end of the Soviet period, we could not make up for the demographic losses incurred, which amounted to approximately 52-53 million people in 1917-1953 (together with the military, of course). All Stalin's achievements are ephemeral - in a civilized Russian state, much more could have been achieved, and with an increase, not a decrease in the population.

So, for example, industrialization was successfully carried out from the last third of the 19th century, and by 1913 Russia in terms of industrial production occupied a stable 5-6 place in the world, and in terms of economic growth it was one of the first and was part of a group of such developing countries at that time as USA, Japan and Sweden. At the same time, 100 years ago, successful industrialization and the formation of private peasant ownership of land were not accompanied by mass repressions, the creation of a system of forced labor and the death of millions of peasants.

As of January 1, 1911, 174,733 people were held in places of detention in Russia (including only 1,331 political ones) - this was 0.1% of the country's population. As of January 1, 1939, 3 million people (including 1.6 million political people) were in camps and special settlements in the USSR - this was 1.6% of the country's population. The total difference is 16 times (and according to the political ones - the difference is more than 1200 times!).

Without the Bolsheviks, Lenin and Stalin, Russia would have become one of the most densely populated and highly developed countries, and its level of well-being would hardly be inferior to at least modern Finland, which 100 years ago was part of the Russian Empire. The highly skilled engineering elite and the industrial class that the country lost after the October Revolution of 1917 would successfully complete industrialization.

I believe that there would have been no union of the historical Russian state with Hitler, and, accordingly, the conditions that allowed him to successfully wage war in Europe against the Western allies in 1939-1940. But the main thing is that the Church and Russian culture would have been preserved, such a spiritual devastation of the nation would not have taken place as a result of decades of constant lies, cynicism, self-deception and poverty.

"Prices were reduced", but at the same time the collective farm village was degraded. And as a result of Stalin's depeasantization of Russia, we have long been dependent on food imports.

Are there generally accepted objective criteria by which one can judge the effectiveness of a particular state leader?

Take a look at neighboring Finland, which does not have such natural resources, such fertile land as Russia. In 1917 Finland became independent. In 1918, the whites won the local civil war. During the Second World War, Finland twice fought off Stalin's claims. Accurately paid all reparations to the USSR. Does it make sense today to compare the standard of living of an average Finn and a resident Russian Federation? Or at least the cleanliness of the streets of Helsinki and St. Petersburg?

The well-being of society and citizens, their safety and security - these are the simplest criteria. Probably, the Finnish politicians followed them, therefore they managed to preserve the independence of the country, albeit at the cost of expensive territorial losses, and the national identity of their small people.

If we take the growth of political and military power, world influence, victories in wars and expansion of territory as criteria, then Stalin was a genius.

The price just turned out to be outrageous. And what is left of this for us 50 years after Stalin's death? No power, no influence, no territory...

As for Stalin's victories, their obvious result in recent decades is the population decline. And demographic forecasts for the next quarter of a century are not very optimistic. And where is Stalin and his politics abroad now popular? Only, perhaps.

This is who we have left from the Stalinist legacy.

If we take the growth of the birth rate, the decline in mortality, social policy, the development of culture, science, education, then under Stalin, everything was far from smooth.

Let's put it mildly.

If political and economic rights and freedoms, then Stalin is a villain. It turns out: there are no universal criteria, and everyone judges from their own bell tower? (And in general, not so long history - it seems to be not so much science as politics).

You see, history is still a descriptive science. Even if its subject is not so old events. The task of the historian is the reconstruction of events, the collection, systematization, study of facts, the restoration of the mosaic of the past from small, disparate fragments. And he must collect as many of them as possible. Naturally, the folded picture can be perceived and evaluated in different ways. And it really depends on the criteria.

But understanding the cause-and-effect relationships of interrelated events is an even more difficult and responsible task. And in order to resolve it, competition, competitiveness, and free discussion are needed. Therefore, I am very grateful to you for the opportunity to express my not very popular points of view on various issues of such importance. As I hope - not only for the past, but also for the future.

The war is not over until the whole truth about it is told.

I was born in 1937 and, according to the law of Ukraine dated November 18, 2004, I belong to the category of “children of war”. My childhood impressions of the war are completely insufficient to create any complete picture of the world tragedy, but, having learned to read and write, I realized quite early that even the little that I had a chance to see and experience then is in blatant contradiction with pathos and heroism. domestic military literature. By the way, this literature itself did not begin to appear immediately after 1945, and even in Stalin’s times the war was hushed up rather than glorified: the memory was too fresh, too bitter and terrible, too painful ... And then, two decades later, it was as if the skies and a squall, a tornado, a typhoon of greatness and heroism fell ...

L. Ulitskaya: "The pathos that blooms around our victory is so great that it is forgotten at what cost it was given and what price was paid for many years after." But war, any war, is not only and not so much heroism, pathos, fanfare, victories, but dirt, blood, stupidity, betrayal, lies, violence, suffering, fear, death, seas of blood, thousands and millions of deaths ... According to Nikolai Nikulina, "war is death and meanness, meanness, meanness. And disgusting."

We are told that true story World War II is impossible at all, because it undermines the feeling of patriotism, lowers the level of group self-esteem, and denigrates the country and people. “But a person is disgusted, unacceptable to reduce group self-esteem. All military histories (and indeed all histories of all peoples) are idealized. Every nation idealizes itself. This applies to any nation." This is true, but not the whole truth. Because the historical truth sooner or later triumphs anyway, and the historical lie will forever remain a lie. I do not believe in the theory of "two truths" - positive and negative, general and soldier. The truth is not only multi-faceted and multi-level, but evolutionary: time peels off everything servile, serviceable, pretentious from it, and in the end, humanity will find out who the people who fought on the vile principle “War will write everything off” really were.

I'm not talking about the long-forgotten attack of the USSR on little Finland (1939-40), when the ratio of the victims of a grandiose and militarized country and a small unarmed Finland was 7.5:1, and the USSR, as a military aggressor, was expelled from the League of Nations ...

What is the historical truth, when even the diaries of the Leningrad siege survivors are still locked in special stores and actually withdrawn from circulation ... How do we know that the death rate of the siege sometimes reached 10 thousand people a day? As long as history is in the hands of falsifiers, pathos will completely replace tragedy and horrendous losses. Neglecting all this, according to the historian N. Sokolov, nowhere in the world did victory in this war become perhaps the only bond of civil society, as we have now.

The official military history of the USSR was a branch of the ideological department of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Therefore, it is natural that it is woven from military-patriotic mythology, that is, it is parahistory, like most Soviet literature on the war is paraliterature. Why did V. Suvorov and M. Solonin infuriate, I would say - into a frenzy - the official Soviet historical school, this kind of division of the Ministry of Defense? Because she regularly and vilely carried out the military-political order. Because parahistory was written not by historians, but by fraudulent falsifiers who did what they were told. And when they ordered something else, they wrote something else. It is difficult for me to judge whether Suvorov's version of Stalin's preparation for war is correct or not, although I know that many Western historians support it. Personally, I mean something else: after the "general purge" of the senior officers of the Red Army, Stalin was terribly afraid of the outbreak of war in 1941, and it seems that Hitler used this fear to his advantage.

In wartime, this false mythology was created by war correspondents, and then by biased writers. The servility, service, and venality of our historians and writers over the many years that have passed since 1945 led to the strongest, most grandiose deformation of the events of the war years, made the war almost parade, domestic, victorious, heroic. In fact, it was a painting on unburied corpses, on seas of blood, on the suffering of millions and millions of people - views from the Kremlin, from generals and marshals' offices, from Peredelkino dachas and Tsekovsky "distributors" ... Worse than that, the war against Nazism was not a war for freedom, and this was not even hidden by the authorities, one of whose representatives (Molotov) bluntly admitted: “The war against Hitlerism under the flag of a false struggle for democracy is not only senseless, but criminal.”

As we moved away from the horrors of the Second World War, official books about it more and more resembled victorious reports and fanfare. According to the writer M. Weller, the varnish on the history of the Second World War (an example of Ozerov's epic film "Liberation") was poured by our historians with barrels. One of the Ukrainian historians said: “We, historians, are like a guild of fakirs. We know all the secret pages, we know how it really was. And society should be given a digestible and useful product. They should only know what they know and no more.” So in the end it turned out that in fact everything was not even quite like that, but not at all like that. And only occasionally in this sea of ​​deceptions, party cries and memoirs of a general did droplets of soldier's and popular truth fall ... I tried to assess the ratio of truth and heroism, bitterness and fanfare, sincere confessions and general historical pathos, "soldier and lieutenant prose" and views from the Kremlin - it turned out something incredible, unthinkable, incomparable: for thousands and thousands of books, generals' memoirs, heroic novels and stories, biased works of historians - only a few dozen really truthful books, immediately branded "patriots" from "SMERSH" and "blockade detachments" treacherous, Russophobic, paid for by the West. By the way, why did they have to pay for the West, where the sea of ​​literature about the Second World War was dominated by historical truth and honesty. But the Bolshevik-KGBist zombification of the population of the USSR did its job: it was precisely those forces that made the war so mediocre, bloody, destructive, and disastrous that now accused the honest authors of betrayal, Russophobia, and being paid from abroad.

I agree that historical truth is complex and multi-level, that it cannot be simplified or covered one-sidedly, but it was the Soviet history of the Second World War that became a vivid example of one-sidedness and universal lies. An attempt by Mark Solonin to debunk the Military Lies on a grand scale made the devotee an outcast and a "traitor", whose goal is to "justify the fascist aggression against the USSR, discredit, and even refute the victory of the Soviet Union." Faithful Ruslans from Soviet history, all these Gavrilovs, Telmans, Nikiforovs, Kumanevs, Ermolaevs, Isaevs are modern falsifiers. Meanwhile, it was Mark Solonin who radically revised the origins of the defeat of the Red Army at the beginning of the war, showing that it was not caused by the inequality of forces, but by the full-scale collapse of the army, expressed in mass desertion and surrender: “Mass desertion and mass surrender were simultaneously and cause, and effect, and the main content of the process of turning the Red Army into an uncontrollable crowd. Another reason was the sharply negative attitude of a significant part of the population towards the Soviet government, which deceived the people, turned the collective farmers into new serf slaves, staged dispossession and famine. The mass repressions of 1937-1938 in the army, according to M. Solonin, “turned a significant part of the command personnel of the Red Army into mortally and life-threatening people”, who were afraid to take any initiative and were only gears” of the great commander”: “... The participation of Comrade Stalin in the war is something similar to the fact that a drunken hanyga got drunk, set fire to a house in a drunken stupor, then woke up, rushed to extinguish it ... "

M. Weller testifies: “It is impossible to write a lie about the war. It is extremely vile, among other things. When Nikulin says: “The most harm was from these editors of divisional newspapers, who were sitting somewhere in the corps army headquarters 50 kilometers from the front line and they wrote their articles - pink water, unrelated to reality and a complete lie. "The correspondents themselves got used to this lie. And when Konstantin Simonov in his diaries "Different days of the war" is one of the best books that we published in the post-war Soviet decades - wrote that his photographer Yasha Khalip, in order to have the right pictures, always had a helmet, a razor with soap and a shaving brush, a white collar (a white cloth) and a thread with a needle... Because the fighter who was filming ... He personally sometimes he shaved him, put a helmet on him. The fighter hemmed the collar and sat in the photo in this form. But in fact it was all a quiet horror ... All this abomination, all this dirt, all this torment and horror - this is the war that must be seen in order not to want."

The war is not a false military correspondence and not a myth about 28 Panfilov’s men, invented by the Krasnaya Zvezda correspondent Alexander Krivitsky and corrected by the editor-in-chief David Ortenberg, but, say, the truth that almost the entire civilian population of Stalingrad died and was doomed to death , because the command carried out the order to transport only the wounded across the Volga. "And all the books about Stalingrad were written about the battles that took place as if on the moon. As if the people, residents, civilians - children, old people, were not there." Releasing the book “My Lieutenant” 60 years after the war, Daniil Granin admitted: “I used to not want to write about the war, I thought that there were already many wonderful books about it. But they don't have MY war, and it was special."

In the winter of 1941-42. The registry offices of Leningrad not only did not register deaths during the siege of the city, but allowed mass burials "according to the lists." Officials not only put into circulation a false number of victims of the Leningrad blockade of 191 thousand people, but instructed historians not to deviate from this figure. And to everyone who had the courage to “depart”, that is, to tell the truth about a million who died from starvation, a tag of falsifiers of history was immediately hung. There were bans on many topics of the blockade - the true mortality of the civilian population, the extent of cannibalism, desertion, betrayal, the letter supply of party bonds, responsibility for the miscalculations and crimes of the latter, even on the publication of "living history", "siege diaries", "siege records", etc. etc., etc. I only recently learned that it was at that very terrible moment of the blockade, when dependents were supposed to have 125 grams of “bread”, that at that very moment 346 tons of meat, smoked meats, 51 tons of chocolate, 18 tons of butter, 9 tons of cheese were brought to Leningrad by plane. Guess who? In the winter of 1941-42.

The scale of the bans and falsifications is evidenced even by the title of one of the recent scientific conferences - "Blockade declassified" ... I'm not talking about other "forbidden topics" or regular "cleansing" of archives (the destruction of many regrettable or shocking documents and the classification of less "dangerous") . Also, about the speeches of the head of state on the topics of history, which become a “guide” for historians or a warning against “ideological garbage” (the terminology of the head himself) ...

By the way, about archives and historical documents. I strongly recommend readers to read Valery Lebedev's wonderful article "The Blind Archives of Russia" published in the Independent Boston Almanac (http://lebed.com/2015/art6715.htm). You will discover a fascinating detective story of Russian history as a whole, illustrated by unique examples, for example, those related to the stories of the murder of Stalin and Beria. I guarantee great pleasure and novelty.

Here it is, the truth about the war: the average life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the front line in the battle of Stalingrad did not exceed a day ... That is, every day a huge number of soldiers were sent to Stalingrad, and almost all of them - one way. They were even sent more than the number of dead, because in addition to the dead, the wounded had to be replaced on the front line. There was no time for the civilian population ...

The level of horrors of the Battle of Stalingrad was such that even non-classified historical documents from the time of the war are now almost completely withdrawn from circulation. Even according to official figures, during the Battle of Stalingrad, the losses of the Red Army amounted to 1,347,214 people (excluding the troops of the NKVD, the people's militia and the civilian population). According to unofficial data, this figure may be one and a half times more.

Of the 750,000 civilians (residents and evacuees) by February 1943, only 28,000 people remained in Stalingrad… Moreover, no one accurately counted the number of evacuees, and the figure of 250,000 is more ideological than real. It is very possible that the Germans evacuated even more residents of the city to Belaya Kalitva than the Stalingrad district party committees.

During the Battle of Stalingrad alone, 13,500 Soviet servicemen were sentenced to death by a military tribunal. They were shot for desertion, defection to the side of the enemy, "self-shooting" wounds, looting, anti-Soviet agitation, retreat without an order. Soldiers were considered guilty if they did not open fire on a deserter or a fighter intending to surrender. The huge number of defectors in the first phase of the battle inspired unjustified optimism in the Germans.

Viktor Nekrasov, as soon as they didn’t scribble and spread rot, but as soon as he, contrary to everything, told the truth about the war, he immediately turned out to be persona non grata and then could only speak inaudibly from Paris. Once in exile, Viktor Nekrasov wrote an article "Soviet literature and tightrope walking" - in a sense, almost all literature about the war turned out to be just like that. And long before that, the writer, with his mouth clamped by power, wrote: “Untruth is the main scourge of art. It can be different - in the desire to see what is not, or not to see what is. I don't know which is worse."

When Marshal S.K. Timoshenko raised the question of the evacuation of the civilian population and refugees in Stalingrad before the Supreme High Command, Stalin not only did not give way to this proposal, but warned of strict responsibility for the spread of defeatist and evacuation sentiments. At the same time, Stalin's phrase went down in history: "Soldiers do not defend empty cities." Although there was no order to ban the evacuation of civilians from Stalingrad, in Stalin's time, after what the leader had said, it was redundant. In addition, the transports plying through the Volga in the blockaded Stalingrad could only carry military cargo. All sentiments were discarded, the soldiers and the civilian population received a warning: "Those who do not help the Red Army in every possible way, do not observe discipline and order, are traitors and must be ruthlessly destroyed." The result is known - more than 200,000 (according to other sources - almost twice as many) civilians killed in Stalingrad. In one case or another, more than in Hiroshima. The exact number of victims of this terrible battle cannot be determined with absolute certainty. It, according to various sources, is in the range from 700,000 to 2 million military personnel and civilians, and the grandeur of this interval itself is clear evidence of the attitude of the Bolsheviks to people as to cattle. By the way, about livestock: according to some reports, the Bolsheviks were much more attentive to the evacuation of livestock during the war than to the evacuation of people: for non-evacuated cattle, one could get punished, and for non-evacuated people, nothing threatened anyone ...

Mark Solonin: “The country in which from the 17th to the 41st year they broke society through the knee, exterminating entire social groups, and that artificial purposeful negative selection that was made at all levels of the managerial ladder could not defeat Hitler without monstrous colossal human losses. This is how it was, this country, made, and in this state it came to the moment of the outbreak of the war.

Documents of the top leadership of the country during the Second World War are classified to this day and are almost 100%. I'm not even talking about the millions of classified cases in Podolsk and the exclusions from these documents that continue to this day. This is the true story...

A sacramental question: why is the Russian Ministry of Defense still hiding a huge array of documents on the history of the Second World War? Embarrassed to open? Will some things come up that can become a stain on the descendants of many famous people then? if free access to all TsAMO documents is opened, including those stored outside the actual archive in Podolsk, will the version of the war that Stalin created for us turn out to be completely untenable?

The most amazing thing about the war is the total concealment of historical documents about the most important moments of the war, giving rise to the most extravagant versions of its beginning. The situation here is literally such that the Second World War began before the new era.

Serving and engaged historians to this day crawl and grind Stalin's crap about the military and technical superiority of the Wehrmacht over the Red Army on the eve of the war. Why crap? - Because under the Treaty of Versailles, the armed forces of Germany were limited to a 100,000-strong land army, compulsory military service was abolished, the main part of the surviving navy was to be transferred to the winners, and Germany was forbidden to have many modern types of weapons. The mobilization into the army and the rearmament of the country by Hitler were not even started after the latter came to power, but only 3-4 years (!!!) before the start of World War II. There really was superiority, but - the Red Army over the Wehrmacht ...

How, then, to explain its crushing defeat, one might say, the defeat of 1941-early 1942? The fact is that Hitler tricked Stalin around his finger like a sucker: he divorced him not only with a non-aggression pact, but with a deeply inspired idea that England was Germany's main enemy and that they needed to unite to defeat it. And the "great commander" not only believed the "brother", but even on the day of the German attack on June 22, he forbade his soldiers to shoot at the enemy. Until July 12, Stalin generally believed that it was not a war that was going on on the western border of the country, but a distracting conflict and hoped to resolve it through negotiations.

On the eve of the war, our troops were not on the border. They were concentrated in a zone from 30 to 300 kilometers from it, while the Wehrmacht before the strike was at a distance of 800 meters from the borders of the USSR ... How could such military savagery even occur in the atmosphere, when only the blind and deaf could not know about the approach of war ? I'm not talking about the fact that on the eve of the war, German specialists were taken to our military factories, showing in detail the production lines for creating the latest weapons. The historian testifies: “Here are the registers of the German aviation delegation, which goes around our aircraft factories, and they are shown only two aircraft, their full cycle, the Pe-2, our best, so to speak, dive bomber, and the MiG-3, the highest, which can get planes flying at an altitude where the Germans do not fly, but the British fly. They are allowed everywhere."

Understanding that Germany alone could not defeat England, Hitler ahead of time "dissolved" Stalin, offering to participate in the war against the British. The Berlin negotiations in November 1940, which allegedly ended in nothing, most likely ended in a secret agreement between the Soviet and German leadership on the joint conduct of this operation. From that moment on, Stalin's main idea was to bring his armies to the shores of the North Sea with the help of the Germans, and then decide where to hit: London - along with the Germans - or Berlin - along with the British.

On the eve of the invasion of the USSR, Hitler, through Ambassador Dekanozov, handed over to Stalin the plan for Operation Barbarossa (!), suggesting to the "friend" that this plan was only a distracting fake created to deceive the British. And the "ally" fell for this hook, perceiving all the data of his own intelligence about the preparation of the war by the Germans as British sabotage. He believed in Hitler, but not in his own agents!

Such was the dictatorial style of leadership: the leader knows everything, the “fake” plan of Operation Barbarossa lies on his desk, a friend-ally will not let you down, and all the rest are traitors and pests. Even Lavrenty Beria did not know then what Stalin's plans were for the 41st year ...

Germany suffered a crushing defeat in the First World War due to the fact that it fought a battle on two fronts. "Brother" Hitler would never repeat this mistake, Stalin believed. It simply did not fit in the head of the "Marxist" that the "genius of Hitler" - that is how he perceived the "brother" - is capable of such a deadly mistake.

The historian testifies:
And something happened that never happened in history: the Russians were utterly defeated. For the 41st year, 3.8 million people were captured, a million died, this is 4.8. Our entire army at the beginning of the war was 5.2 million. That is, in fact, the entire army was defeated ... The most striking second thing is that Germany, starting from the 19th year, did not have an army. She was forbidden to have an army, and she became ... Hitler issued a law on military service in the 35th year only. And therefore, Germany in the 39th year, in 4 years, could not create an army superior to the colossal army of the USSR, in principle.
If you put it on two palms, on one on June 22, and what happened, well, of course, with consequences, on this day, and on the second - all the other days of the war, I'm still not sure which hand will win. Because 50% of all our stocks that were brought to the border were captured or blown up, blown up, disappeared. That is, it was an unheard-of defeat ... A thousand aircraft on the first day, in two days - two and a half thousand aircraft. This is generally unheard of in history.

I am not a professional historian, but I know for sure that no one has ever managed to hide the hard truth, especially when it came to great historical events. The truth can be kept secret, hidden in archives, deformed, destroyed, but not a single tyrant has yet been able to go down in history in the mantle of a "happy-maker" and not a single necrophile can appear in a humanist's toga. The truth about the monstrous crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Himmler, Mao, Pol Pot cannot be hidden precisely because of their enormity, and no amount of lies and violence can turn blood into “champagne splashes” ... Similarly, no state-Bolshevik policy of zombifying the population , no pretentious books and films can hide the terrible realities of the Second World War, the complete unpreparedness of the country and the army for it, the bombardment of enemies with the corpses of our boys, grandiose, sky-high losses, mediocrity of newly minted commanders (when divisions were commanded by former captains, because the highest ranks were arrested) or, in short, the terrible, inhuman cost of victory.

What is worth only one terrible fact: by the end of October 1941, that is, 4 months after the start of the war, only 8% (!) Of the participants in the battles remained in the Red Army on June 21, 1941. The army lost only prisoners in three months of fighting over 3 million. The total losses of the Red Army from June 22, 1941 to April 1, 1942 amounted to 6.328.592 people, including irretrievable - 3.812.988 people. For comparison, I will give the total losses of Germany from June 22 to the end of February 1942 - 1.005.636 people, the ratio is 6:1.

By the way, the new pro-Putin history textbook does not reflect A SINGLE TRUE FACT of the war from the new books about it. The Medvedev-Putin concept of “heroic” history actually forces teachers to openly lie, say, to falsify the history of the Second World War, that is, from an early age it teaches them to normalize state lies. I leave behind the brackets the forced engagement of history teachers.

When the Wehrmacht captured the western regions of the USSR, mass executions began everywhere - it was the NKVD troops that destroyed the "political" so that the enemy would not capture the latter. And why has no one ever demanded an investigation of the military atrocities in East Prussia, so vividly described by Leonid Rabichev in the book “War will write everything off”?.. And is the word “holy revenge” enough to justify them? The monstrous crimes of Nazism were condemned by the Nuremberg trials, but who and when condemned the barbarity of the carpet bombing of Dresden, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the mass rape and murder of German women and children on the territory of Germany itself? ..

I had planned the book “Another Truth about the Second World War” for a long time, but the realities of life pushed back and pushed back the fulfillment of the plan: intensive scientific work, scientific monographs, many books on the restoration of layers of culture destroyed by totalitarianism ... In short, when I returned to my plan and began to accumulate material, I quickly realized that “my train has left”: there is no point in repeating what was written. But since the material for the book had already been collected to a large extent, one fine day I realized that there was no need to write a book for another reason: what I had collected in itself was already a book to which I had nothing to add. It only remained to arrange the collected material into some conditional headings - and the result was an anthology, which I give to the severe judgment of the reader. Why harsh? Because the Russian reader, brought up on the pathos and heroism of the war, has already managed to express himself on the essence of honest coverage of the war, and this statement is absolutely certain: vicious slander, paid for from abroad. Since I didn’t get anything from abroad, as well as from my own country, I find consolation in the fact that the only thing that spiteful critics cannot accuse me of is voluntarily accepting the upcoming slander, vilification and slander.

The book includes four sections of different sizes: DOCUMENTS, ART AND MEMOIR LITERATURE, PUBLICISTICS AND POETRY.

Before turning to the actual documents, I would like to bring to the attention of the readers two documentary materials written by caring and honest people.

President of the Center for the Search and Perpetuation of Missing and Dead Defenders of the Fatherland, Academician, Colonel General, Admiral Stepan Savelyevich Kashurko.

VICTORY
"ENOUGH JOYING!", OR VICTORY IN THE EYES OF THE COMMANDER

In your declining years, it is strange to peer into those distant times when you still did not understand many things that later became clear with all merciless obviousness. Could it really be possible not to see point-blank what is before your eyes, not to realize the undeniable truth?
Can. This is a simple matter. Such is human nature: we are often blind and deaf to what we do not want to know. Other knowledge causes such pain that the soul hastens to instinctively fence itself off from it. But that doesn't stop the truth from being true. Trusting optimism, preserved at the cost of self-deception, is worthless; in the final analysis, it only multiplies evil. We must say thanks to those who deliver us from cowardly blindness, no matter how bitter the insight. As for me, I want to bring this tribute of gratitude to the memory of the famous military leader, Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev. And so it was.

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Victory, Marshal Konev asked me to help him write a commissioned article for Komsomolskaya Pravda. Surrounded by all sorts of literature, I quickly sketched out the “framework” of the expected “Komsomolskaya Pravda” victorious report in the spirit of that time and the next day I went to the commander. It was evident from everything that he was not in a good mood today.
“Read,” Konev muttered, and he walked nervously around the spacious office. It seemed that he was tormented by the thought of something sore.
Proudly drawing myself up, I began with pathos, hoping to hear praise: “Victory is a great holiday. A day of national celebration and rejoicing. This is..."
- Enough! the marshal interrupted angrily. - Stop rejoicing! Tired of listening. You'd better tell me, did everyone in your family come from the war? Is everyone back in good health?
- Not. We missed nine people, five of them were missing, - I muttered, wondering what he was getting at. - And three more hobbled on crutches.
How many orphans are left? - he did not let up.
- Twenty-five young children and six infirm old people.
- Well, how did they live? Did the state provide them?
- They did not live, but vegetated, - I admitted. - Yes, and now is not better. Money is not supposed to be paid for the missing breadwinners ... Their mothers and widows cried out their eyes, and everyone hopes: suddenly at least someone will return. Completely gone…
- So why the hell are you jubilant when your relatives are grieving! And can the families of thirty million dead and forty million maimed and mutilated soldiers rejoice? They suffer, they suffer along with the cripples who receive a penny from the state ...
I was stunned. This is the first time I've seen Konev. Later I learned that he was infuriated by the reaction of Brezhnev and Suslov, who refused the marshal, who tried to get the state to take proper care of the unfortunate front-line soldiers, who were fussing about benefits for the poor families of the missing.
Ivan Stepanovich took out a memorandum from his desk, apparently the same one with which he unsuccessfully went to the future marshal, four times Hero of the Soviet Union, holder of the Order of Victory and three times the ideologist of the Soviet Union. Handing me this document, he grumbled reproachfully:
- Get to know what it is like for the defenders of the Motherland. And how their loved ones are doing. Is it up to IM jubilation ?!
The paper marked "Top Secret" was full of numbers. The more I delved into them, the more painfully my heart ached: “... 46 million 250 thousand were wounded. 775 thousand front-line soldiers returned home with broken skulls. One-eyed 155 thousand, blind 54 thousand. With mutilated faces 501342. With crooked necks 157565. With torn bellies 444046. With damaged spines 143241. With wounds in the pelvic area 630259. With severed genitals 28648. One-armed 3 million 147. Armless 1 million 10 thousand. One-legged 3 million 255 thousand. Legless 1 million 121 thousand. With partially torn off arms and legs - 418905. The so-called "samovars", armless and legless - 85942.
“Well, now look at this,” Ivan Stepanovich continued to enlighten me.
“In three days, by June 25, the enemy advanced 250 kilometers inland. June 28 took the capital of Belarus Minsk. In a roundabout maneuver, it is rapidly approaching Smolensk. By mid-July, out of 170 Soviet divisions, 28 were completely surrounded, and 70 suffered catastrophic losses. In September of the same 1941, 37 divisions, 9 tank brigades, 31 artillery regiments of the High Command Reserve and field directorates of four armies were surrounded near Vyazma.
27 divisions, 2 tank brigades, 19 artillery regiments and field directorates of three armies ended up in the Bryansk pocket.
In total, in 1941, 92 out of 170 Soviet divisions, 50 artillery regiments, 11 tank brigades and field directorates of 7 armies were surrounded and did not leave it.
On the day of the attack of fascist Germany on the Soviet Union, June 22, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR announced the mobilization of 13 ages liable for military service - 1905-1918. Over 10 million people were instantly mobilized.
From 2 and a half million volunteers, 50 militia divisions and 200 separate rifle regiments were formed, which were thrown into battle without uniforms and practically without proper weapons. Of the two and a half million militias, a little over 150 thousand survived.
There was also talk of prisoners of war. In particular, that in 1941 they were captured by Hitler: near Grodno-Minsk - 300 thousand Soviet soldiers, in the Vitebsk-Mogilev-Gomel cauldron - 580 thousand, in Kiev-Uman - 768 thousand. Near Chernigov and in the region of Mariupol - another 250 thousand. 663,000 people ended up in the Bryansk-Vyazemsky cauldron, and so on.
If you gather your courage and put it all together, it turned out that, as a result, during the years of the Great Patriotic War in fascist captivity, about four million Soviet soldiers and commanders, who were declared enemies and deserters by Stalin, died of hunger, cold and hopelessness.
It is appropriate to remember those who, having given their lives for an ungrateful fatherland, did not even wait for a worthy burial. Indeed, due to the fault of Stalin, there were no funeral teams in regiments and divisions - the leader, with the aplomb of a braggart, claimed that we did not need them: the valiant Red Army would smash the enemy on his territory, crush him with a mighty blow, but she herself would cost little blood. The retribution for this self-satisfied nonsense turned out to be cruel, but not for the generalissimo, but for the fighters and commanders, whose fate he cared so little about. Through the forests, fields and ravines of the country, more than two million heroes were left to decay without burial of the bones. In official documents, they were listed as missing - not a bad savings for the state treasury, if you remember how many widows and orphans were left without benefits.
In that long-standing conversation, the marshal also touched upon the causes of the catastrophe that befell our "invincible and legendary" Red Army at the beginning of the war. It was doomed to a shameful retreat and monstrous losses by the pre-war Stalinist purge of the ranks of the army command staff. Nowadays, everyone knows this, except for the incurable admirers of the Generalissimo (and even those, perhaps, are in the know, they only pretend to be simpletons), and such a statement shocked that era. And it opened my eyes to many things. What was to be expected from a decapitated army, where experienced military commanders up to battalion commanders were sent to camps or to be shot, and young lieutenants and political officers who did not smell gunpowder were appointed in their place ... "
- Enough! - the marshal sighed, taking away from me a terrible document, the numbers of which did not fit in my head. - Now it is clear what's what? Well, how shall we rejoice? What to write about in the newspaper, about what Victory? Stalinist? Or maybe Pyrrhic? After all, there is no difference!
- Comrade Marshal, I am completely at a loss. But, I think, it is necessary to write in Soviet .., - stammering, I clarified: - in good conscience. Only now you yourself write, or rather, dictate, and I will write down.
- Write, record on a tape recorder, another time you will not hear such a thing from me!
And with my hand shaking with excitement, I began to hurriedly scribble:
“What is victory? Konev said. - Our Stalinist victory? First of all, this is a national problem. Day of mourning of the Soviet people for the great multitude of the dead. These are rivers of tears and a sea of ​​blood. Millions are crippled. Millions of orphaned children and helpless old people. These are millions of distorted destinies, failed families, unborn children. Millions of patriots of the Fatherland tortured in fascist and then in Soviet camps. Then the self-written pen, as if alive, slipped out of my trembling fingers.
- Comrade Marshal, no one will print this! I pleaded.
- You know, write, not now, but our descendants will print. They must know the truth, not sweet lies about this Victory! About this bloody massacre! In order to be vigilant in the future, not to allow devils in human form, masters of inciting wars, to break through to the heights of power.
“And don’t forget something else,” Konev continued. - What boorish nicknames in post-war usage were awarded to all disabled people! Especially in social services and medical institutions. Cripples with torn nerves and a disturbed psyche were not favored there. Speakers shouted from the stands that the people would not forget the feat of their sons, and in these institutions, former soldiers with disfigured faces were nicknamed “quasi-mods” (“Hey, Nina, your quasi-fashion has come!” - aunts from the staff called to one another without hesitation), one-eyed ones - “flounders ”, disabled people with a damaged spine - “paralytics”, with injuries to the pelvic area - “crooked”. One-legged people on crutches were called "kangaroos". The armless were called "wingless", and the legless on roller makeshift carts were called "scooters". Those who had partially severed limbs were given the nickname "turtles". It doesn't fit in my head! - with each word Ivan Stepanovich inflamed more and more.
- What kind of stupid cynicism? These people didn't seem to realize who they were offending! The damned war threw out a gigantic wave of mutilated front-line soldiers among the people, the state was obliged to create at least tolerable living conditions for them, surround them with attention and care, provide them with medical care and financial support. Instead, the post-war government, headed by Stalin, by assigning penny benefits to the unfortunate, doomed them to the most miserable existence. Moreover, in order to save budgetary funds, they subjected cripples to systematic humiliating re-examinations in VTECs (medical and labor expert commissions): they say, let's check if the severed arms or legs have grown back?! Everyone strove to transfer the injured defender of the motherland, already a beggar, to a new disability group, if only to cut the pension benefit ...
The marshal talked about many things that day. And that poverty and fundamentally undermined health, coupled with poor living conditions, gave rise to hopelessness, drunkenness, reproaches from exhausted wives, scandals and an intolerable situation in families. Ultimately, this led to the exodus of physically handicapped front-line soldiers from their homes to the streets, squares, train stations and markets, where they often descended into begging and unbridled behavior. Driven to despair, the heroes gradually found themselves at the bottom, but they should not be blamed for this.
By the end of the forties, in search of a better life, a stream of destitute military invalids from the periphery poured into Moscow. The capital was overflowing with these now useless people. In a vain hope for protection and justice, they began to rally, to annoy the authorities with reminders of their merits, to demand, to disturb. This, of course, did not please the officials of the capital and government agencies. Statesmen began to puzzle over how to get rid of the annoying burden.
And in the summer of 1949, Moscow began to prepare for the celebration of the anniversary of the adored leader. The capital was waiting for guests from abroad: it was cleaning, washing. And then these front-line soldiers - crutches, wheelchairs, crawlers, all sorts of "turtles" there - became so "impudent" that they staged a demonstration in front of the Kremlin. The leader of the peoples did not like it terribly. And he said: "Clear Moscow from the "garbage"!"
Those in power were just waiting for that. A mass round-up of annoying, "spoiling the view of the capital" disabled people began. Hunting like stray dogs, law enforcement agencies, escort troops, party and non-party activists, in a matter of days, caught on the streets, markets, train stations and even cemeteries and took them out of Moscow before the anniversary of "dear and beloved Stalin" thrown into the dustbin of history, the crippled defenders of this the most festive Moscow.
And the exiled soldiers of the victorious army began to die. It was a fleeting death: not from wounds - from resentment, blood boiling in the hearts, with a question torn through clenched teeth: “For what, Comrade Stalin?”
So, they wisely and easily solved the seemingly insoluble problem with the victorious warriors who shed their blood “For the Motherland! For Stalin!".
- Yes, something, and our leader skillfully did these things. Here he had no resoluteness - he even evicted entire nations, - bitterly concluded the famous commander Ivan Konev.
The ominous word "war" has been familiar to our people since ancient times. We have a special attitude to the defense of the Fatherland. With whom our ancestors did not fight! They had a chance to defend themselves from the ancient Huns, Avars, Khazars, Pechenegs, Cumans, Swedish feudal lords, German dog-knights, Tatar-Mongols, Poles, who for many centuries smashed and ruined Russia. All this could not but affect the formation of the national character or, in the old fashioned way, the Russian spirit.
But why exactly Russian? Our people are multinational, they did not become so yesterday, and at all times, as soon as a time of danger comes, this people showed an unprecedented determination to unite, rally. And if its leaders turned out to be weak-willed, unable to lead the army, to lead the fight against the enemy, people took the fate of the country into their own hands. They confirmed their determination to fight foreign invaders with an oral oath, an oath on weapons and before the Lord God. But this was the case in the old days, when the people felt themselves to be the masters of their land. And now the new time has come. Stalinskoe. No need to explain what. Everyone knows very well what happened then. And a new war broke out - the Great Patriotic War. The people started up, ready to give a crushing rebuff to the fascist hordes. People were sure that Stalin would lead them to victory...
But what is the obsession? In just three days, Hitler's regiments broke through 250 kilometers deep into the country, and the leader hid, did not show his eyes, and even his voice was not heard. Three more days passed. The Germans are already in Minsk, they have captured half of Belarus, and the leader - his own father - is keeping quiet. Old and young are rushing into battle, attacking military registration and enlistment offices, besieging recruiting offices, and those, of course, mobilize day and night, drive hastily put together, sometimes almost unarmed teams to the front, which practically no longer exists. The people are perplexed, the people are in confusion: but where is he, where is the beloved and wise intercessor of all mankind? Where did the idol, sung in songs and epics, go?
The deceived masses did not know what a secret lay behind this sovereign silence. If only they knew that the great leader of a great country turned out to be a great coward! That for ten whole days, like a shy bunny in the bushes, he sat out at his dacha near Moscow, in a panic awaited arrest from his entourage, whom he did not have time to call enemies of the people and shoot, as he shot Rykov, Kosior, Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Blucher and another one and a half million people who once conquered Soviet power and fostered this thug on their heads.
“Oh, if only they knew who Stalin was…” He said and immediately caught himself. Nothing special would have happened. No one would take, as in the good old days, the fate of the country into their own hands. Why? Didn't we have talented people, brave and intelligent? Of course there were. But it was they who were the first to die in the pre-war purges: some were bigger, more conspicuous, some stood out in the gray crowd. So there are few of them left, and those who survived from them either learned not to stick out, or during the ten years of Stalin's rule allowed themselves to be fooled, as they would later say - to zombie with an unrestrained campaign of exaltation of a small man, but a big tyrant, "father of peoples", ruthlessly devouring his "sons". Apparently, his vaunted wisdom came down to an impudent bandit saying: “Beat your own so that strangers are afraid!”
Strangers were not afraid, and the disenfranchised Soviet people were capable of only one thing: shed blood without a murmur. Go again and again, obeying the commands, into a deadly battle. Didn't think - weaned. What came of it? Exactly what the figures of the memorandum of Marshal Konev say. The vast expanses and inexhaustible human resources, which the command did not spare, saved the Soviet Union from complete defeat. And, of course, the irresistible desire of the people to expel the Nazi invaders from their native land - when it came to the point, not loud enthusiasm, not love for the leader imposed from outside, but this natural feeling led and supported.
Meanwhile, Stalin, barely recovering from the shock, finally spoke on the radio on July 3. Well, thank God, alive! The people also came to life, perked up, having heard the appeal necessary at that time to the mind and heart: “Brothers and sisters, go to battle. The motherland will not forget you! And the people from whom this power stole faith in the Heavenly Father went, looking for support in the name of the one who, with the impudence of an impostor, replaced him with his own mustachioed person. There is no immortal God, but the mortal idol called himself their brother, he promised not to forget ... The Chechen-Ingush people also went. The small Caucasian republic sent more than 40,000 best sons and daughters to protect a huge multinational power, who looked at this as the fulfillment of their sacred duty. When fighting, they showed the highest military prowess. And here is irrefutable evidence, the same stubborn figures: in Checheno-Ingushetia, 96 Chechens and 24 Ingush were nominated for the title of Hero of the Soviet Union - there were not so many Heroes in any republic (as a percentage of the total population).
So, Stalin was convinced that the danger had passed, the post of general secretary remained with him. After recovering, he returned to his old ways. As soon as it became clear that victory was not far off, he took it into his head to quench his bloodthirstiness by reprisals against small nations. Now it was possible to do without them, but he could not manage without terror. Didn't own this art. Insidious by nature, the leader deceived the soldiers of Checheno-Ingushetia, and - for the umpteenth time! - frozen country. Yes, because she did not prevent him from cynically distorting the meaning of the recent oath: “Go into battle, the Motherland will not forget you!”
It would be better if she forgot about them ...
Simultaneously with the expulsion of the civilian population, sent, in fact, to hard labor, the valiant sons of the Chechen-Ingush Republic were expelled from the army. Yes, they didn’t expel them - they threw them away like smoked cigarettes - tens of thousands of soldiers turned out to be overboard, regardless of their military merits. Such was the reward for loyalty, courage and shed blood. The leader vilely spat in the soul of all Chechens and Ingush, declaring them traitors and cowards. And who declared - the first coward, a liar, and if you look deeper, then a traitor. After all, while he ruled the country, he killed as many millions of people in it as Hitler killed in concentration camps and on the battlefields. What a truly unfortunate Soviet people! It was destroyed simultaneously by two executioners - one murdered under the fascist banner, the other under the communist one.
It is difficult for me and all those who hold dear the good name of the Chechens and Ingush to fully restore justice, to pay tribute to everyone who accomplished a feat on the fronts of the Great War. Why? Yes, because, on the orders of Stalin, evidence of the heroism of Caucasian soldiers was seized and destroyed from military archives. Fortunately, there were decent people in the country, doing everything they could to preserve front-line documents. Of those that managed to save, it is clear that many heroically dead Chechens and Ingush were deliberately called missing. Forgery as a political measure: after all, it was necessary to justify the massacre, to prove that they were duly declared traitors (it is true that in no self-respecting army a missing person is equated with a traitor, but who was embarrassed?).
I learned about how much heinous injustice was committed against the repressed peoples during the search for the missing defenders of the Motherland, which I took up both at the behest of my conscience and according to the order (perhaps it would be more accurate to say here - on behalf) of the same Marshal Konev. When he headed the Central Headquarters of the All-Union Campaign along the roads of the Great Patriotic War, which had just been created for the 20th anniversary of the Victory, I became his guarantor and, as was said at the beginning, I am grateful to fate to this day for meeting such an honest and courageous person. By the way, only thanks to him I was able to defend myself against the insinuations of some high officials who tried to accuse me of sympathy for "traitors: Chechens and Ingush." The famous commander told me:
- Your duty is to help a small people get rid of unworthy attacks and humiliating stigma.
They have not died out to this day, bureaucratic jingoistic patriots, ready to endlessly insult this long-suffering people, hanging foul labels. The threat of "soaking in the toilet" is close to their worldview, they strive to understand it as broadly as possible ...

Only by keeping the truth about the war, protecting it from any falsifications, we acquire the right, despite the tragedy of what happened after all, to celebrate the Victory. And no one has the right to forget about its price.

Viktor Glikman
WHERE DID THE CAPITALS GO AFTER WWII?

In 1950, by decree of the Supreme Council of the Karelian-Finnish SSR, a House for the Disabled of War and Labor was established on Valaam and placed in the monastery buildings. This was the establishment!
Probably not an idle question: why is it here, on the island, and not somewhere on the mainland? After all, it is easier to supply and maintain cheaper. The formal explanation is that there is a lot of housing, utility rooms, utility rooms (one farm is worth something), arable land for subsidiary farming, orchards, berry nurseries, but the informal, true reason is that hundreds of thousands of disabled people were too prickly on the eyes of the victorious Soviet people: armless, legless, restless, living begging at stations, on trains, on the streets, and you never know where else. Well, judge for yourself: the chest is in orders (!), And he is asking for alms near the bakery. Doesn't fit anywhere! Get rid of them, by all means get rid of them. But where to put them? And to the former monasteries, to the islands! Out of sight, out of mind. Within a few months, the victorious country cleared its streets of this disgrace! This is how these almshouses arose in Kirillo-Belozersky, Goritsky, Alexander-Svirsky, Valaam and other monasteries. Or rather, on the ruins of monasteries, on the pillars of Orthodoxy crushed by the Soviet regime. The country of the Soviets punished its disabled victors for their injuries, for the loss of their families, shelter, native nests devastated by the war. Punished by poverty of content, loneliness, hopelessness. Anyone who came to Valaam instantly realized that this was it! Next is a dead end. Further silence in an unknown grave in an abandoned monastery cemetery.
Can we understand today the measure of the boundless despair of invincible grief that seized these people at the moment when they set foot on this earth. In prison, in the terrible Gulag camp, the prisoner always has a glimmer of hope to get out of there, to find freedom, a different, less bitter life. From there, there was no outcome. From here only to the grave, as condemned to death. Well, imagine what kind of life flowed within these walls. I have seen it all up close for many years. But it's hard to describe. Especially when their faces, eyes, hands, their indescribable smiles, the smiles of beings appear before my mind's eye, as if they were guilty of something forever, as if asking for forgiveness for something. No, it's impossible to describe. It is probably also impossible because when you remember all this, your heart simply stops, your breath catches and an impossible confusion arises in your thoughts, some kind of clot of pain! Sorry...
AI&PIISRAEL

A year ago, Putin's Russia solemnly celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. The main event is the parade on Red Square in Moscow. Tanks rumbled on the cobblestones, warplanes swept by, fireworks died down. The parade is over, but questions remain...

One of the most important questions of the post-war period, the answers to which were diligently hushed up or distorted by Soviet, and now Putin's propaganda - what served as a prerequisite and reason for the outbreak of World War II, which, as you know, began with the perfidious invasion of Hitler's troops into Poland on September 1, 1939 ?

Perhaps the first who, relying on a mass of factual material, gave exhaustive answers more than a quarter of a century ago, was hated by the Russian authorities and official historiography, a former officer of the GRU General Staff of the USSR, and now a military historian and writer Vladimir Rezun, who publishes his books under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov.

In order to get an idea of ​​the processes that were the forerunner and catalyst of the Second World War, one does not have to rummage through libraries and archives - Suvorov did this titanic work long ago and now it is enough to read at least The Icebreaker - one of his key books that expose Soviet myths about World War II and the so-called Great Patriotic War. I took the liberty of inserting excerpts from this book into the text as the material is presented.

According to Suvorov, the fathers of the theory of the necessity of a world war as a harbinger of a world revolution are the classics of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The authors of the "Communist Manifesto" did not recognize the evolutionary ways of changing the existing world order, therefore they called on the proletariat, as the most organized protest structure of society, not to prevent wars, but, on the contrary, to initiate them in every possible way. For Marx and Engels, a world war is desirable and necessary: ​​"War is the mother of revolution, world war is the mother of world revolution." The results of the world war, Engels believed, would be: "general exhaustion and the creation of conditions for the final victory of the working class."

Marx and Engels did not live to see the world war, but they found an ardent admirer and follower, a professional fanatic revolutionary Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin, who led a gang of cynical adventurers like himself. Brought from Europe to Russia in a sealed wagon, these troublemakers, with money received from the German General Staff, were to develop a vigorous propaganda activity in order to destabilize the existing system and serve as a catalyst in the preparation and implementation of a coup d'état.

Viktor Suvorov:

“Actively advocating the defeat of the Russian Empire in the First World War, Lenin in his speeches persistently called for turning it into a civil war. Let the enemy destroy and destroy the country, let him overthrow the government, let him trample on national shrines - the proletariat has no fatherland. And in a devastated, defeated country, it is much easier to seize the power to which he so aspired. So let the storm rage on!

Putting forward a minimum program on the seizure of power in one country, Lenin did not forget about the future. For him, as for Marx, the world revolution remains a guiding star. But, according to the minimum program, as a result of the First World War, the revolution was possible only in one country. How then will the world revolution take place? Lenin gives a clear answer: “As a result of the SECOND imperialist war” (“The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution”).”

Joseph Stalin, who replaced Lenin as the “leader of the world proletariat”, was the most diligent Marxist-Leninist, therefore he took a principled position in matters of war and peace, justified by his teachers, and exterminated those who disagreed with his doctrine, guided by his own invented formula: “There is no man - no problem".

“In relation to those who want revenge and war, for example, in relation to the German Nazis, Stalin's position is just as principled: they must be supported. Let the Nazis and fascists destroy the Social Democrats and pacifists, let them start a new war. Everyone knows what follows a great war: “The fact that the capitalist governments are being fascistized, it is precisely this fact that leads to an aggravation of the internal situation in the capitalist countries and to revolutionary actions of the workers” (Speech at the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in August 1927). At the same time, Stalin, repeating Lenin, declared that the Second Imperialist War was completely inevitable, just as the entry of the USSR into this war was inevitable: “We will go out, but we will go out last in order to throw a weight on the scales that could outweigh” (Collection of Op. ., Volume 7).

Supporting the Nazis, who are striving for power in Germany, the Bolsheviks will then push them to war with all their might. Having staked on Hitler, Stalin in June 1932 forbade the German communists to form a coalition with the Social Democrats after the elections to the Reichstag, thanks to which the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, led by Hitler, received a majority of votes and was able to proceed to form a government, and Hitler himself soon became Chancellor and Fuhrer of the German people. The genie is out of the bottle...

Stalin was prudent, cunning, treacherous, vindictive and cruel - a typical example of a tyrannical ruler. It was not difficult for him in the few years that have passed since the death of his predecessor to become the absolute dictator of a vast country, and to turn the peoples who inhabited it into a gigantic mass of obedient slaves.

Fanatically devoted to the idea of ​​realizing the world revolution through a world war, Stalin surrounded himself with sycophants and did everything possible to realize this diabolical plan. For what, having first enslaved his own people, he launched the flywheel of industrialization, the fruit of which was a colossal military-industrial complex in terms of its scale and productivity, which produced military products on an unthinkable scale.

What kind of beast is this - industrialization - and how did it turn out for the peoples of the USSR? Here is how Viktor Suvorov describes this process:

“1927 is the year when Stalin finally and firmly took his place at the very top of power ... 1927 is the beginning of the industrialization of the Soviet Union.

Industrialization was planned in five-year plans, and the first five-year plan began precisely in 1927. Why the five-year plans were needed can be judged by this fact.

At the beginning of the first five-year plan, the Red Army had 92 tanks, and at the end of it - more than four thousand. But still, the military trend in the first five-year plan is not yet so noticeable. The main attention was paid to the creation of an industrial base, which would then produce these weapons.

The second five-year plan is the continuation of the development of the industrial base. The production of weapons is not the main thing yet. Although Comrade Stalin does not forget about him either - for the first two five-year plans, for example, 24,708 aircraft were produced.

But the third five-year plan, which was supposed to end in 1942, is the production of military products on a gigantic scale and of high quality.

German Colonel Heinz Guderian testifies, who, together with his colleagues, studied military affairs in Soviet educational institutions and at Soviet tank training grounds and airfields, kindly provided by Stalin, since Germany, under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, did not have anything like that then (the knowledge and skills gained by German officers then successfully used on the battlefield). So... In 1933, Guderian visited the Kharkov locomotive-tractor building plant. He was struck not by tractors and locomotives, but by-products - BT tanks, produced in the amount of 22 pieces a day! Moreover, the tanks are not just any, but the designs of the brilliant American Christie, which have no equal in any country in the world! In Germany at that time there were no tanks at all.

Viktor Suvorov continues:

“Industrialization was bought at a great price. Stalin paid for it with the standard of living of the population, lowering it very low. Stalin sold titanic reserves of gold, platinum, diamonds on the foreign market, robbed churches and monasteries, imperial storehouses and museums ... Stalin exported timber and coal, nickel and manganese, oil and cotton, caviar, furs, bread and much, much more. But that wasn't enough. And then in 1930, Stalin began a bloody collectivization. The peasants were driven by force into the collective farms, so that later they would take their bread for nothing ... ".

As you know, the result of collectivization and the so-called dispossession, which began two years earlier, was the ruin of millions of peasant farms, the eviction of "kulak" families from their own homes, expulsion and complete loss of rights. As a result, over several years of genocide, from 13 to 16 million peasants were exterminated - the most hard-working and productive segment of the country's population (according to official data, only the famine of 1932-33 was the cause of death: in Ukraine, according to various estimates, from 4.6 to 7, 2 million people, 2 million in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and 2.5 million in the RSFSR). All other peasants, who were lucky not to fall into the Stalinist meat grinder, were driven to collective farms and stayed there in the position of serfs.

Thus, Stalin, using the example of the peasantry humiliated and partially exterminated by him, suppressed any opposition manifestations and brought his power to the absolute. The Soviet people set about building "barracks socialism", and Stalin's strategy of "great change" in the interests of the coming world revolution became dominant. In essence, it was a voluntaristic policy aimed at the speedy implementation of plans to increase the pace of industrialization at any cost, as a result of which the country was on the verge of a comprehensive economic crisis and an unprecedented drop in the living standards of the population.

Viktor Suvorov:

“In a personal conversation with Winston Churchill, which took place during the visit of the British delegation in August 1942 to the USSR, in response to Churchill’s remark that the Soviet leadership at the turn of the 20s and 30s during the period of collectivization had to fight with “millions of little people”, Stalin replied - with ten million. And after a short pause, he added - many of them agreed to go with us, but the main part was unpopular, and they were destroyed by their laborers.

In fact, Stalin had to "fight" with almost the entire peasantry, i.e., with three-quarters of the country's population, and by "farm laborers" he meant thugs from the punitive organs and fighters of the Red Army, who brutally suppressed any manifestations of dissatisfaction with the existing government.

In connection with the above, the following questions arise:

1. Why did Stalin need to create a huge army, a monstrous military-industrial complex and produce a lot of weapons at such a cost?

The answer is obvious - to win the world war, in the unleashing of which the Stalinist clique took an active part. Having thoroughly prepared for the war, Stalin was not going to take the initiative, but was waiting for an opportunity, doing everything possible to ensure that European countries were the first to enter it. He saw himself as a "liberator" who waited for the right moment when the warring parties were sufficiently weakened.

2. Given that Stalin had no doubts about the entry of the USSR into the world war, it would be interesting to know how he planned the timing of its implementation, and even subject to the condition - not to be branded as an aggressor?

Here, Stalin and his comrades needed to play a complex game of chess.

First of all. Launch into orbit Hitler, whom the Bolsheviks called the "Icebreaker of the Revolution", taking into account his ideological fanaticism, aggressiveness and perseverance in achieving goals.

Secondly. Help him create his own military-industrial complex and an army capable of successfully resisting the armies of other European states.

And thirdly. To push heads against Hitler and the leaders of those very states in the most right moment, believing that Hitler would definitely play the role of a trigger in unleashing a big war.

The game was brilliantly played by Stalin, problems arose somewhat later.

Accusing the Stalinist regime of being the initiator of the outbreak of World War II, Viktor Suvorov exposes Kremlin pseudo-historians who have been trying throughout the post-war period to distort the facts, in particular, to make the USSR a victim of the treacherous attack of Nazi Germany and hide the truth about the date of its entry into this war. war:

“Among the many terrible secrets, there is one especially guarded one - the date of the USSR's entry into World War II. In order to hide the truth, the communists put into circulation a fake date - June 22, 1941. To make the version about June 22 seem plausible, Soviet propaganda strengthened this date with special props: on the one hand, by inventing a “pre-war period”, which included the two years preceding June 22; on the other hand, the figure of 1418 days of war is invented. This is just in case someone decides to independently calculate the date of its start ...

But debunking the myth of June 22 is very simple. To do this, it is enough to lightly tap on one support - on the "pre-war period", for example. And the whole structure will collapse along with the fateful date and 1418 days of the "Great Patriotic War".

The "pre-war period" never existed. Suffice it to recall that during the so-called "pre-war period" ALL European neighbors of the USSR became victims of Soviet aggression...

In September 1939, the USSR declared itself a neutral state and seized the territories of six countries with a population of more than 23 million people during the “pre-war period”. Isn't it too much for a neutral state?..

The actions of the Red Army in the "pre-war period" are officially referred to as "strengthening the security of the western borders." It is not true. The frontiers were safe when the neighbors of the USSR were the neutral states of Europe, as long as there were no common borders with Germany and, therefore, Hitler could not attack the USSR at all, not to mention a surprise attack ...

Therefore, June 22, 1941 is just the day the offensive began. armed forces of one state against the armed forces of another state already in the course of a war in which both states have long been involved.

Having pushed Hitler with the help of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to attack Poland on September 1, 1939, sixteen days later Stalin himself invaded its territory, “chopping off” his share, motivating aggression by the desire to ensure the safety of Ukrainians and Belarusians living there (in modern realities, Putin’s seizure of Crimea and the war unleashed by him in the Donbass under the pretext of defending the “Russian world”, one to one resemble Stalin’s “liberation campaigns”).

Moreover, what is interesting ... Acting on parallel courses, Germany and the USSR captured most of Europe even before June 22, 1941. And all the time, until the very end of World War II, Hitler was considered the aggressor, and his colleague Stalin was the victim of a "treacherous attack", and then - the liberator of Europe. True, there is one caveat. For the brazen invasion of the Red Army into Finland and the occupation of a significant part of its territory, the Soviet Union in 1940 was condemned by the international community and even expelled from the League of Nations, but this did not affect the overall picture of the war in any way - Stalin wanted to spit on the opinion of this very public, just like that just like the Russian president is doing now.

Separately, it is worth noting how the Stalinist "liberators" behaved in the countries they captured. The guardsmen from the NKVD, who immediately flooded the annexed territories after the Red Army, immediately began arrests and interrogations of everyone they could only suspect of being disloyal to the Soviet regime. There is a mass of testimonies about the atrocities committed by the punitive organs against the civilian population.

So, for example, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were exiled from Western Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in less than two years of Soviet occupation to the North and Siberia, many of whom died on the way, and tens of thousands ended up in prisons. and cellars of the NKVD. The apogee of terror fell on the first days of the offensive of the Nazi troops in June 1941.

Before hitting the run, the Chekists killed thousands of unfortunate prisoners, shooting them, piercing them with bayonets and throwing grenades, and many were subjected to monstrous torture before destruction. It is impossible to read the testimonies of the survivors by chance without a shudder. 22 thousand mutilated bodies were found in the dungeons of the NKVD and hastily dug pits in the "Sovietized" regions of Western Ukraine. The same thing happened in Western Belarus and the Baltic countries. This is the kind of “happiness” that the population of the territories “liberated” by the Red Army from the “bourgeois and capitalists” managed to sip. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the Nazi troops met an enthusiastic reception there.

Having fallen into the web of Stalin's political intricacies, Hitler quickly realized that he could not avoid a war on two fronts, where on the one hand was impregnable Great Britain with the United States behind him, and on the other, the Soviet Union loomed with its gigantic military machine and inexhaustible resources. It remained only to rely on Lady Luck and she accompanied him for some time.

But, in the end, Germany, under the onslaught of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, collapsed even despite the fact that on June 22, 1941, Hitler preempted Stalin and attacked him first, practically crushing the "invincible" Red Army in the first few weeks of the war. To the arguments of the generals from his inner circle, who warned Hitler about the inexpediency of a war with the Soviet Union until the end of the campaign in Western Europe, Hitler replied that he was forced to do this, because he considered it completely unacceptable to give the initiative to the perfidious Stalin, who had accumulated colossal offensive potential on his western borders.

Viktor Suvorov:

“They say that Stalin won only thanks to the help of Great Britain and the United States. Holy truth! That is the greatness of Stalin, that he, the main enemy of the West, was able to use the West to protect and strengthen his dictatorship. This is the genius of Stalin, that he managed to divide his opponents and push them head-on ... Stalin played neutrality in words, but in reality he was the most important and most insidious instigator and participant in the war.

The assistance received by the USSR throughout the war from the capitalist allied countries under the lend-lease agreement included a huge list of items: from clothing and food to fuels and lubricants, ammunition, barbed wire, rental, ships, locomotives, cars , tanks (12700 units) and aircraft (22150 units). In total, more than 17.5 million tons of various products were delivered. The Soviet Union, modestly hushing up the size and significance of this assistance, never paid for it.

The main outcome of every war is not the victory or defeat of any of the opposing sides, but the losses incurred. First of all - human.

The victory of the USSR over Nazi Germany is the clearest example of what is called a "Pyrrhic victory". This is when the winner of the people decreased many times more than the vanquished. The human losses of the Soviet Union in World War II are beyond common sense, if the term "common sense" applies to war at all.

Stalin quickly eliminated the post-war devastation, largely due to the slave labor of Gulag prisoners and prisoners of war, and as for the population ... When you start to delve into the numbers of losses, your hair stands on end. For clarity, I will cite the data published in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Vol. 9, No 1 (March 1996). The publication is called "The human losses of the USSR and Germany in 1939-45":

THE USSR. Total irretrievable losses (killed, dead from wounds and diseases, missing

Missing, not returning from captivity) amounted to:

The military - 26.4 million people;

The civilian population has 16.9 million people.

TOTAL - 43.3 million people.

Germany. The total number of all irretrievable losses, taking into account civilian

Population - 5.95 million people.

These calculations almost completely coincide with the number of irretrievable losses of the USSR given in the book of the military historian Boris Sokolov "Combat losses of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht in 1939-45." (26.9 million for the military and 15.8 million for the civilian population). Sokolov, when writing the book, used the data of the Central Statistical Bureau, according to which the population of the USSR in 1945 was 166.6 million people, while the pre-war population (taking into account 9.2 million born during the war) was 209, 3 million As they say - feel the difference.

This is how the Bolsheviks fought, having a monstrous army and a myriad of weapons ... "With little blood and on foreign territory," as they liked to brag, starting from the 20s. And it turned out - exactly the opposite.

Why could this happen? Yes, because in the Bolshevik empire, human life was never worth anything.

In the tradition of the Bolsheviks, the practice of significantly underestimating human losses has always been applied.

During the years of the war - it is said in the 5th volume of the "History of the CPSU" - about two million communists gave their lives for the sake of victory. While it is known for certain that the losses of the communists amounted to 7,296,248 people. True, there were many fighters in the army who joined the party on the eve of the upcoming battles, in which they died. Apparently, these were not taken into account, considering them "inferior" communists.

The official Soviet historiography stated that "During the blockade in Leningrad, more than 641 thousand inhabitants died." In reality, “in Leningrad, at least 2.3 million people died from hunger, cold, shelling and bombing” (Pervyshin V. G. “Casual losses in the Second World War”). Judge for yourself. Before the war, 3.2 million people lived in Leningrad, and after the blockade was lifted, only 560 thousand remained (different sources give a wide spread in the number of evacuees, Pervyshin believes that there were about 200 thousand).

Very indicative are the figures of the losses of the Red Army on the so-called "Nevsky Piglet" - a piece of the coastal strip with an area of ​​​​2 square meters. km on the left bank of the Neva, where for several months the command continuously drove wave after wave of Red Army units to slaughter. Soviet propaganda claims that the number of dead soldiers there does not exceed 50 thousand, while the actual losses are at least 3 times higher than this number. Moreover, their number did not include those who died during the movement of troops from one bank of the river to another.

And there are a great many similar examples throughout the entire period of the war, when the mediocre command strewn the battlefields with corpses. “Marshal of Victory” Georgy Zhukov was especially successful in this, on whose account there is not a single military operation that ended without grandiose losses that boggle the imagination. No wonder his colleagues awarded him the nickname "The Butcher".

The main arguments of Stalin's defenders are that he won the war and helped a backward country make the path from a peasant plow to an atomic bomb, and it was impossible to do without casualties along this path. This cheating argument does not stand up to scrutiny, and here's why:

1. On the eve of the First World War Russian empire occupied one of the first places in the world in terms of economic growth and the production of gross domestic product, which tripled in 13 pre-war years, and large volumes of goods were sold profitably abroad. So she was not so poor and backward.

2. Stalin "won" the war, which he himself organized. A victory in its consequences was more terrible than any defeat.

3. Other countries came to the atomic bomb almost simultaneously with the USSR, and without any casualties and shocks for the population and economy.

4. Were the successes attributed to the Bolsheviks and Stalin personally paid too high a price? And what kind of successes are these, if a priori - revolutions, terror, civil and predatory wars - are the greatest evil in history.

Therefore, parades on May 9 in honor of the so-called Victory Day look absolutely ridiculous and defiant in Russian cities. Victory over whom and over what?

If over fascism and Nazism, then it must be said that the Bolshevik regime was even more monstrous and bloodthirsty (as the historian Dmitry Volkogonov said, Hitler exterminated foreign peoples, and Stalin also his own).

If over their own people, who were destined for the role of camp dust and cannon fodder, then the logic is present.

But certainly not over Germany, which is now the locomotive of the European economy and one of the richest countries in the world, unlike Russia, which ranks at the bottom of the list in all parameters of human existence.

And finally, a few amazing lines from the publication of the writer Alexei Varlamov in Literaturnaya Gazeta, in order to more fully characterize the results of the catastrophe of 1939-45:

“The outcome of the war is visible in any village. In the countryside, because everything is more naked, more vulnerable than in the city. And no matter how much grief the revolution brings us, Civil War and collectivization, finally finished off the village, and hence Russia, the "victorious" World War II.