For 30 years, professional historians obediently repeated: "20 million." It sounded with confidence, "The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea," but they knew that Khrushchev took the numbers from the sky. Are they not cheating now? And they didn’t believe it.
Other figures appeared in the newspapers: 40 million, 50 million and even 100 million! Later monographs appeared. Their authors argued with official military historians, reproached them for dishonesty. True, talking about good faith in such a dispute is like calling on the market players to be non-acquisitive. Boris Sokolov, the most consistent critic of the official history of the Great Patriotic War, considered the Soviet losses either illiterate or dishonest. Next to his "calculation", the military's calculations seem to be a model of rigorous science.
The General Staff and its staff historians defend the official figures: 26,600,000 total losses and 8,668,400 losses of the army and navy. But few people already trust them. Every second reader will tell you: in fact, we have lost even more, much more. It's pointless to argue. You're worse off. The liberal will decide that you are justifying the Stalinist regime, and the patriot will accuse you of trying to play down the Soviet Union's contribution to the victory over fascism.
But I don’t trust not only Boris Sokolov and his admirers-liberals, but also military historians.
How dead souls count
Where do these 26.6 million come from, again from the ceiling? No, there is a very simple method. We take the population of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and compare it with the population on May 9, 1945. The difference will be the same 26, 6. Everything is fine, but we just don't know the actual size of the Soviet population either in 1941 or in 1945. The last pre-war census was carried out in 1939, and all further calculations are based on its data: 170.6 million + the population of the annexed Baltic states, the Karelian Isthmus, Bessarabia, Western Belarus and Ukraine. Add to this all those born between 1939 and 1941 and subtract the dead, it turns out 196 million 700 thousand.
But all these calculations are worth absolutely nothing, because the 1939 census is false.
Comrade Stalin said that under socialism life is getting better and more fun, and Soviet women are giving birth to more and more from this fun life. Therefore, the population must grow and grow. Back in 1934, at the 17th Congress, he announced that 168 million people live in the USSR. By the 1937 census, when life became even better and definitely more fun, and the population was supposed to increase, as expected, to 180 million. But the census, organized brilliantly, by the way, showed killer numbers: 162 million. It was a disaster. So, Comrade Stalin lied? Or did the population of the Soviet country not grow, but died out? Be that as it may, the organizers of the census were arrested and soon shot.
Unsurprisingly, in 1939, statistics went out of their way to reach the desired numbers. Where they could - they attributed, counted "dead souls", the same families could rewrite twice. The results of the new census were more optimistic: 170 million 600 thousand. Also not enough, but still better than in 1937. Therefore, the statisticians did not begin to repress.
These very data with millions of "dead souls" attributed to it became the basis for statistical calculations.
But that's not all. The population of the lands annexed in 1939-1940 is also completely unknown to us. Lithuanians and Latvians had nowhere to go, but all the Finns from the Karelian Isthmus during the Winter War moved together to free Finland. It's hard to imagine what happened in Bessarabia, Belarus and Ukraine. K. K. Rokossovsky, then serving in Western Ukraine, described the real migration of peoples: some fled from the Soviet Union to Poland occupied by the Germans, others from Poland to the Soviet Union. For several months the border did not seem to exist.
The population of the USSR in 1941 is UNKNOWN to us. But the number in 1945 is also unknown. After the war, a new census was carried out only in 1959, relying on its data is risky. In 1946, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR was elected, and voter lists were drawn up. According to these data, at the very least, the population was calculated not in 1945, but at least in 1946. But after all, children under 18 were not included in these lists, the large population of the Gulag, including the exiles, also did not vote, so the data is very approximate. As in 1941, the difference between demographers' data and the real population can be several million!
Conclusion: The Soviet Union lost not 26.6 million, but several million less, but we do not know and will never know the exact data.
SS men from the Red Army
Let us put the question differently: is it worth including all the perished Soviet citizens in the losses of the Soviet Union?
Some historians consider the Great Patriotic War a new Civil War, because hundreds of thousands, if not millions (there are no reliable statistics), fought on the side of Germany against the Soviet regime, Russians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Crimean Tatars. The list of armed formations that fought in the ranks of the Wehrmacht and the SS alone will take up many pages: ROA (Vlasovites) and RONA (Kamintsy), SS Division Galicia (Galicia) and Belorussian Regional Defense, Highlander Battalion and Tatar Mountain SS Jaeger Brigade, Cossack and Kalmyk Cavalry Corps. And what about the "eastern battalions" and "eastern regiments", and what about the national legions?
“After all, we are more at war with our own people,” said the hero of Georgy Vladimov’s novel “The General and His Army”. This is an exaggeration, and a significant one, but Soviet citizens fought against Soviet power, there were a lot of them. Some died, others emigrated to the West. All of them were taken into account as irrecoverable losses of the Soviet Union, moreover, many were attributed to the losses of the armed forces. If they were captured, deserted, or simply did not have time to appear at the assembly point, and then fought for Germany with weapons in their hands - they are still considered losses of the Red Army!
But even here our story does not end. The Soviet Union is a large country inhabited by many peoples. These peoples were far from always being friends. In 1941-1945, in addition to the Great Patriotic War, there were also smaller wars. In the Carpathians, for example, Polish and Ukrainian nationalists fought with each other. How many Bandera soldiers died there, and how many soldiers of the Home Army were not known for sure, but something else is known: all the dead were included in the losses of the Soviet Union.
Formally, these are Soviet citizens, but is it fair to consider the Russian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian SS and policemen perished in the fight against Nazism? Is it worth considering the "dead souls" born of the 1939 census? To exaggerate the already enormous losses of the Soviet Union?
