Today we will try to take an objective look at the myth of the mediocrity of the military leadership of the Red Army - the Soviet Army, introduced into the public consciousness during the years of perestroika. Hundreds of times we have heard that the cannibalistic Stalinist regime bombarded the valiant German troops with crowds of unarmed Soviet soldiers, because, of course, in the cannibalistic Soviet Union no one considered people to be people.
This is evidenced by the "intelligent" cream of society - the democrats, the crazy Novodvorskys, the cunning Svanidze, the sentimental multi-part films like "Penal Battalion" are shot about this, in general, this myth has firmly taken root in the minds of the contingent processed by the domestic media.
Let's try to figure out whether the leadership of the Red Army and the Russian soldiers were so mediocre.
But not with the help of Novodvorskaya's curses and Radzinsky's howling, but with the help of archival documents, figures and facts.
One of the most widespread black myths about our history today is the myth of the allegedly exorbitant price of Victory.
Say, the Germans were overwhelmed with corpses - and they won
Ask almost anyone - and in response you will hear the cliches on duty that there are ten of ours for one killed German, that people were not spared, that the mediocre and vile leadership compensated for their ineptitude with soldiers' sacrifices. So, my dear reader, this is a lie. It is regrettable that these lies still confuse the minds of people. It got to the point that ridiculous statements about allegedly forty or even sixty million of our victims in the war periodically emerge - so film director Stanislav Govorukhin publicly voiced this figure. This is generally complete nonsense - and this nonsense, as befits a nonsense, is generated not by knowledge, but by problems in the brain of a delusional. To date, the most complete study of the statistics of our losses is the work of a group of military historians led by Colonel-General GF Krivosheev, which is now available to the general reader [1]. Why can this work be trusted? Firstly, this is a work recognized among historians, a scientific work - in contrast to the revelations of Govorukhin and others. Secondly, this paper sets out the calculation methods - so that you can understand the origin of the information and assess possible inaccuracies or omissions, as well as cross-check the data and results - demographic, as well as losses in the framework of individual operations.
By the way, about the techniques. This is the first thing that needs to be dealt with when studying such issues, because, as a rule, our ideas about the methods of accounting for military losses are completely untrue, which serves as a ground for doubts and ridiculous speculations around the issue of losses. The human brain is so arranged that even if it is not familiar with any issue in detail, then on the basis of life experience, a number of terms heard and some of its model ideas, a person still has a certain judgment on this issue. This judgment is intuitive, leading to a distorted perception - while the person himself, at the same time, is poorly aware that in reality he knows too little about it to judge. That is, the problem is that a person too often does not think about the fact that he does not know enough - while the scattered information available in his head creates the illusion of knowledge.
This is precisely why it turns out that when it comes to calculating casualties, an inexperienced person who has never thought about this topic usually imagines that each dead soldier found by search engines is added to the number of dead, and this number grows from year to year. In fact, this is not the case. Such a soldier has already been recorded as dead or missing - since the count is not based on the number of graves or medallions found, but on the basis of data on the payroll of units. And sometimes directly from the commanders' reports on losses in their units, sometimes by calculation method in conditions when it was not possible to compile such reports.
The data obtained is subjected to comprehensive cross-checking - for example, verification at the request of relatives in military enlistment offices and demographic verification. The enemy's information is also used. And the problem here is not the establishment of the absolute number of irrecoverable losses, which is known with a sufficient degree of accuracy - but the exact establishment of the fate of those who are recorded as missing, as well as those who are counted twice or more times. After all, a person could get into the environment with a part, be recorded as missing - and he could die there, or he could escape from the cauldron or escape from captivity and fight again, and die in another place, or be commissioned.
So it is absolutely impossible to know the death toll with certainty - it will still be inaccurate due to such ambiguities. However, in order to assess the nature of combat losses, such accuracy is more than enough. In addition, this method of accounting for losses is generally accepted, therefore, in a comparative analysis of losses, when it is important to estimate whether these losses are higher or lower than in the armies of other countries, the same methodology allows these comparisons to be made correctly.
So, to assess whether our army fought well or filled up the Germans with corpses, we need to find out the number of our irrecoverable losses of the army - and compare with similar data on the Germans and their allies on the Eastern Front. It is the irretrievable losses of the armies that should be analyzed - and not compared our total losses with the German combat losses, as unscrupulous amateurs usually do to shout about being filled up with corpses - since we started counting corpses. What is deadweight loss? These are those who died in battles, disappeared at the front without a trace, who died of wounds, who died from diseases received at the front, or who died at the front from other causes, who were taken prisoner.
So, the German irrecoverable losses on the Soviet-German front for the period from 06/22/41 to 05/09/45 amounted to 7,181, 1 thousand, and together with their allies - 8 649, 2 thousand people.. Of these prisoners - 4 376, 3 thousand people.. Soviet losses and the losses of our allies on the Soviet-German front amounted to 11,520, 2 thousand people.. Of these, prisoners - 4,559 thousand people.. [2] These numbers did not include German losses after May 9, 1945, when the German army surrendered (although, perhaps, the 860 thousandth Prague German grouping should have been added to this number, which continued resistance after May 9 and defeated only on the 11th - they too should be counted as defeated in battle, since they did not surrender - but nevertheless they are not considered to be, or rather, of them, only those who died and were captured before May 9 are probably counted). And the losses of the people's militia and partisans from our side, as well as the Volkssturm from the German side, did not include here. In essence, they are roughly equivalent.
I would also like to highlight the fate of the prisoners. More than 2.5 million of ours did not return from German captivity, while only 420 thousand Germans died in Soviet captivity [2]. This statistic, which is instructive for those screaming about the inhumanity and crime of the communist regime, does not affect the ratio of irrecoverable losses of interest to us, since the prisoners - whether they survived or not, whether they returned after the war or even before its end - are taken into account as irrecoverable losses. Their number serves as the same measure of the effectiveness of the army's actions as those killed. In fact, war is not just a skirmish, who will shoot whom more, as some think. War, from the point of view of losses, is, first of all, the cauldrons into which the enemy groupings are taken during offensive operations. The fate of those taken into the cauldron, as a rule, is either death or captivity - few people leave the encirclement. It was the Second World War, thanks to the presence of highly mobile motorized troops and previously unprecedented destructive weapons, that gave such a number of boilers - and, accordingly, such large combat losses in comparison with previous wars.
As you can see, the ratio of military losses is 1: 1.3, it does not smell of any ten of ours for one Fritz, it does not smell of any kind of 'filling up with corpses'. And you have to understand - it is impossible to simply overwhelm such a powerful army that instantly defeated France and Poland, the army for which the whole continental Europe worked. To defeat such an enemy requires tremendous perseverance and courage of soldiers, a high level of their motivation, excellent weapons, excellent command, powerful industry and agriculture.
Yes, at the beginning of the war, our army suffered heavy losses, but later our army won many outstanding victories. Let us recall the Stalingrad offensive operation - 22 German divisions and 8 Romanian divisions were eliminated in that cauldron, plus huge losses of the German army outside the cauldron. And in 1944, ours carried out a number of brilliant strategic offensive operations known as the "Ten Stalinist Strikes of 1944", which led to the liquidation of a number of German groups of the same order. And of course, we must not forget about the Berlin operation - when at the cost of the lives of 78,000 of our soldiers [3] more than a million German group was eliminated. Those who howl about 'corpse-crushing' in their howls completely lose sight of the fact that the Berlin operation is not at all the capture of the city of Berlin itself for the sake of political games, as they like to imagine, but first of all it is precisely the defeat of a million-strong group of German troops, this is a blow, finished the war. That is, by the end of the war, a mirror situation took place - already the Germans and their allies suffered heavy losses under the blows of the Red Army, which had recovered from the first defeats.
Well, the fact that there are still more veterans among the Germans to this day is not because they fought so well compared to us, but because they were spared in captivity, unlike our prisoners of war, 2.5 million of whom were killed by the Germans. Let us also remember that it was on the Soviet-German front that 72% of the total number of fascist formations acted [4] - that is, it was ours who bore the brunt of the war with Hitler, and therefore it is not necessary to point the finger at our allies from the USA and England, for whom the war was much easier and, because of this, cannot be considered the standard of respect for their soldiers. They could afford to sit out across the sea and play for time while Ivan fought for them.
What, then, are the stories about the 'rifle for three' and the 'waves of soldiers thrown at machine guns'. The war of multi-million dollar armies is always a colossal mess, which was enough for both us and the Germans. In such conditions, anything could happen - including cases when a newly formed unit, still under-armed and understaffed, could collide with the Germans who had broken through. Or such a unit could have been abandoned to plug a breakthrough when there was no time and nothing else at hand, and when the price of such a breakthrough was a cauldron that a huge group could fall into, and when everything could be decided by literally one company that plugged the breakthrough in time. Likewise, sometimes a local assault with great casualties, such as the storming of Sapun Mountain, leads to great military success.
Hence, there could well be the notorious cases with a 'rifle for three' - as incidents (in contrast to the First World War, when the lack of small arms in the Russian army was a rampant phenomenon). Also, quite some of the front-line soldiers could see unjustified (from his point of view) casualties in local operations, without seeing the overall picture. Anything can happen - but can a private judge the entire front? Either his commander was a fool, or the meaning of the losses was hidden for him. And the Germans have had such cases - in any case, the stories of how ours mowed chains of drunken Fritzes out of machine guns, apparently, also have grounds.
But these are just cases, but it is not worth raising them into a system, while an idea of the overall picture can be obtained by comparing the final results. Which, as we can see, are very worthy. It is a pity that many of our people succumbed to the howls of a number of writers and other masters of minds who surfaced on the perestroika wave of self-flagellating hysteria, like V. Astafiev, who was a driver during the war, who did not see either the front line or anything further than his car, but speculating with his self there was' and on that basis, regardless of his true knowledge, judging about everything - from penal companies and to Headquarters.
Now let's discuss general demographic losses.
Cit. Krivosheev [5]:
The total loss (dead, deceased, missing and ended up outside the country) during the war years amounted to 37, 2 million people (the difference between 196, 7 and 159, 5 million people). However, all this value cannot be attributed to the human losses caused by the war, since in peacetime (for 4, 5 years) the population would have undergone natural decline due to ordinary mortality. If the mortality rate of the population of the USSR in 1941-1945. take the same as in 1940, the number of deaths would have amounted to 11, 9 million people. Subtracting the indicated value, the human losses among citizens born before the start of the war are 25.3 million people. To this figure it is necessary to add the loss of children born during the war years and who died at the same time due to increased infant mortality (1.3 million people). As a result, the total human losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War, determined by the demographic balance method, are equal to 26.6 million people.
An interesting detail. If we look at the column 'Total population decline from those who lived on 1941-22-06', we see 37, 2 million people. Obviously, it was this number that formed the basis of the manipulations on the issue of losses. Taking advantage of the inattention of the average reader, who does not usually ask the question 'but what about natural mortality? Which Hid From Them. '
As for the total enemy losses, their number is 11, 9 million [2]. So, 11.9 million Germans and their allies versus 26.6 million of our lives. Yes, we have lost much more people than the Germans. What is the difference between general and military losses? These are the dead civilians. Killed during the occupation, during the bombing and shelling, killed in concentration camps, killed in besieged Leningrad. Compare this number with the death toll of German civilians. The fascists were such scum. Eternal memory and glory to those who gave their lives for this plague to leave our world! We are proud of you, grandfathers. And we will not allow anyone to steal your Victory from you, we will not allow anyone to seize with their greasy fingers, to belittle your great feat.
[5] ibid, p. 229
