May 9, 1992 Germany. The town of Vitstock. Military unit 52029.
- Be equal! Attention!
This was the last Victory Day that Soviet soldiers and officers celebrated in the former territory of the GDR. Military unit 52029 had several months left before being sent home, to the east. They saluted the flag of a country that had no longer existed for six months. A small island of the collapsed empire lived out its last days in the suburbs of Berlin. Six months later, these soldiers, warrant officers and officers will be transferred to Tambov, or rather, thrown into an open field without housing, food and monetary allowance. But now, on May 9, 1992, they do not know about it yet. Their grandfathers were returning home from the front, their grandchildren will return to nowhere.
August 31, 1994. Berlin. Since that time, it is customary to talk about our group of Western forces in Germany only in the past tense.
For a long time, the Western Group of Forces was a state within a state.
Today, few people know that during the Potsdam Conference, Joseph Stalin urged not to divide Germany into different states and considered the partition of Germany to be almost his main political mistake.
The conference began in mid-July, it was hot not only outside, but also around the round table where the participants gathered. World politics is often compared to a game of chess. This is partly true. After all, each player seeks to gain an advantage over the enemy. But politics is more cunning and cunning than an ordinary chess game. In each game there are several grandmasters, each of whom plays out his own opening, his own plan for the ultimate victory.
Also, few people know that the so-called military liaison missions of the groups of the occupying forces arrived in Potsdam. Their functions included the quick communication of important information for solving joint tasks. And many interesting and often curious facts are connected with these communication missions.
The British occupation group began to play football on the territory of the historic site. This was reported to Zhukov. He called Field Marshal Montgomery and said that we didn’t liberate Germany for that, so that we could destroy it later. The staff of the British military communications mission could not forgive such interference and on New Year's Day decided to take revenge: they planted a pig with the inscription "USSR" on the side on the territory where the representation of the Soviet communications mission was located.
Teutonic militancy did not die out after the defeat in World War II. Many generals of the German Wehrmacht donned military uniforms again. In 1949, in violation of the agreements of the Potsdam Conference, a new state was created - the FRG.
And on October 7, 1949, together with the formation of the GDR, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSVG) was born. Over the next 45 years, about 8 million Soviet soldiers and officers will serve in it. The GSVG, which will later be renamed the Western Group of Forces (WGV), will be the largest military group in the world from among those that were located abroad.
Service in the Western Group of Forces was considered prestigious. For example, Gennady Zyuganov ended up in the intelligence service, was engaged in the fight against atomic, chemical and bacteriological weapons.
Mikhail Yakovlevich Shkurin lived to see the remarkable 70th anniversary. He was born on August 28, 1945, victorious for our Motherland, on the Gormilovsky farm, into a family of rural workers. Like many farm boys, Misha, after the age of eight, studied at a vocational school to become a tractor driver-machinist of a wide profile. Before the army, he managed to work in the fields of the local collective farm named after Lenin on a tracked DT-54. Before the service itself, Shkurin was sent from the military registration and enlistment office to the Chertkovsky auto club for driver courses. Since then, the driving profession has become the main one for him for many years.
Today, he fondly recalls not only his industrial activities, but also his service in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, which took place from September 1964 to December 1967. The starting point was the town of Uryupinsk, where the recruits were given a brand new uniform and sent to the west in warfare. Nine days later, Shkurin and his colleagues landed in Frankfurt an der Oder. Mikhail, who had a six-month driving experience, was assigned to the only automobile regiment of the GSVG, which served the headquarters of the group of forces stationed in the Kummersdorf Gut garrison.
After the course of a young fighter, a driver's retraining and a 500-kilometer march, a truck tractor based on the ZIL-164 was assigned to the driver Shkurin.
During the service, he established himself as an exemplary soldier, became an excellent student in combat and political training. As a result, he was entrusted with a GAZ-63 reference car with a kun, equipped for the transportation of the unit's banner. According to the results of the final check for the exemplary maintenance of equipment and weapons, Mikhail Shkurin was rewarded with a 10-day leave to his homeland. During his service, he was often expressed gratitude and encouraged by excursion trips to the sights of Berlin. Mikhail remembered very much the solemn rewarding in 1965 with the jubilee medal "Twenty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945".
“After the service, I dreamed for a long time about army everyday life, evening walks with songs, roll call before the lights out, fellow soldiers with whom I endured all the hardships and deprivations of service,” recalls Mikhail Yakovlevich. “During the years of our service, representatives of many nationalities were friends and comrades among themselves.
Today he has someone to share his memories with during the joint events of the GSVG veterans.
Let's turn to history again.
Initially, the tasks of the western Soviet front were formulated very clearly - preparation for conducting combat operations of an offensive nature. It was a powerful military fist. This fist, even in an autonomous mode, was capable of demolishing all NATO battle formations on the way to the English Channel. In the event of war, this was the main task of the Soviet troops.
In the summer of 1945, the Soviet occupation troops, as they were officially called then, began to rebuild destroyed Berlin: factories, bakeries, and residential buildings were rebuilt. Soviet troops were simultaneously a construction brigade, medical personnel, and a peacekeeping army. Although once an order was given to use military force. On June 17, 1953, when an uprising of German workers broke out in the eastern sector of Berlin, Soviet tanks were moved to combat positions. It would take 10 minutes to clear the area from the rioting people. But the command of the GSVG refused to shoot at the workers. The reaction from Moscow followed immediately: Soviet officers who did not obey the Kremlin's orders were shot at the personal instructions of Lavrenty Beria. A modest tombstone will be installed at the site of their brotherly burial only 40 years later.
Largely thanks to the presence of this powerful group, it was possible to keep the world from a military catastrophe.
Wünsdorf was the "heart" of the western group of forces. A quiet German town often found itself on the cutting edge of military history: it was predicted to be the capital of imperial Germany even before the First World War, then they wanted to make it the capital of the Weimar Republic under the aged Reich President Hindenburg. And when the Nazis came, they fell in love with this remote city for the fact that it was possible to hold sports and military games here. The 1936 Olympics were also developed here. But the Fuhrer is remembered not by the number of medals, but by completely different commemorative signs.
The city was surrounded by a high wall and became closed to prying eyes. The territory of Wünsdorf was divided into military towns - the first, the second, the third. The Wünsdorf garrison is five kilometers long and two kilometers wide. There were more than 500 different buildings here at the time of the departure of the Soviet troops. It was home to 30,000 people, and at the end of November 1995 there were about 15,000 left. The garrison was autonomous: its own bakery, its medical facilities equipped with the latest equipment, spacious bright schools and even its own railway station. Every day a train left for Moscow.
The headquarters of the Western Group of Forces was based here, which built relations with the leadership of the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic and with other government missions. The Holy of Holies of the headquarters was located deep underground, where six more underground floors, built in the 30s, were hidden. The concrete turned into a single crystal and practically did not succumb to destruction. It was here that the German ground headquarters was located, where a plan was developed to prepare an attack on the USSR "Barbarossa". But it can be seen that fate decreed, but it was in this building that the headquarters of the winners of that war was located. And after the withdrawal of the western group of troops, two German businessmen created a "Garrison Museum" here, where excursions are regularly held. Tourists especially like the mysterious Zeppelin bunker, which was the brain center of the German army.
The graves of the Second World War, which we won in 1945, and the graves of the Cold War, which we lost in 1989, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, remain scattered throughout Germany in memory of half a century of Soviet presence in Eastern Europe. And also - monuments.
Everyone is well aware of the famous song dedicated to the fallen pilots in the western group of forces, Yuri Yanov and Boris Kapustin, who took the falling plane away from western Berlin. The plane crashed into Lake Stoessensee. And when our curious allies decided to check what equipment was installed on the crashed plane, they discovered that this equipment had already been removed by someone. According to sources, this was done by military communications missions.
Several years ago, the Germans erected a monument to two Soviet pilots who died. There are always fresh flowers in front of him.
The selfless act shocked the Germans. At the cost of their own lives, Soviet pilots saved those with whom they recently fought on the fields of the Great Patriotic War. But the German public was amazed at the news of the withdrawal of troops.
The airfield of the 16th Air Army, where Yanov and Kaputin served, was one of the last to be emptied. How and why did the troops of the victorious power leave the defeated country?
Who made the decision to withdraw the troops? What was the reason for this decision, which led to the betrayal of national interests?
“We discussed it at the Politburo,” Mikhail Gorbachev says in one of his interviews today. - All spoke in favor, in favor, - he repeats twice.
On January 26, 1990, at a closed meeting that lasted about two hours, a death sentence was actually signed in the office of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Western Group of Forces. Also at this meeting, suddenly, a proposal was made to unite Germany. And in the resolution of this decision it was written that it was necessary to prepare for the withdrawal of troops. Logically, this question should have been raised by the Germans, either from the GDR or the FRG, but not by the Soviet government headed by Gorbachev. Only a few people attended the discussion of the so-called German problem. There were no employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the Ministry of Defense, or the Soviet ambassador to the GDR. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was in direct contact with Gorbachev. Gorbachev told him: "Give me 40.5 billion marks, I have nothing to feed the people, and tomorrow you will get everything you want." This phrase was especially clearly remembered by one of the employees of the secretariat of the Soviet government.
Moscow's unilateral decision to withdraw troops from the GDR, without exaggeration, surprised the whole world. The Kremlin agreed to withdraw 600,000 people in just four years. While the United States agreed to remove only 60 thousand over seven years.
Arkhyz. A small resort in the Stavropol Territory. It was there that on July 16, 1990, negotiations should continue between the teams of the President of the USSR and the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. But for this it was necessary to end the bargaining. The Soviet Union was ready to exchange political influence for economic aid from the alliance of a uniting Germany. The main role in the auction was played by the USSR Minister of Foreign Affairs. When Shevardnadze came to the negotiations, he asked for a large loan to the country - 20 billion. How could you keep a tough position in the negotiations and at the same time ask for loans ?! The amount of compensation for the withdrawal of the western group of forces was taken practically from the ceiling. The Soviet side asked for 40 billion German marks in the hope of getting 10 billion, but as soon as possible.
The day of negotiations in Arkhyz has come. The main question is how long it takes to technically withdraw the troops, to build apartments for officers and command personnel and barracks for military personnel. The Germans agreed to finance a construction program in the amount of 14 billion marks. Although today the Soviet negotiators argue that if the Soviet side had asked ten times more, it would have received so much.
All property of military units - airfields, bases, communication centers, buildings, residential buildings, sanatoriums - remained to the German side free of charge. According to rough estimates, at the end of the 90s, the property of the western group of forces included about one thousand airfields, training grounds, of a huge length, and dozens of military hospitals.
An interesting detail. The amount of the deal is still unknown. The agreement was concluded so hastily in the Kremlin that the participants call the amount completely different: 14 billion German marks, 13 billion or 80 billion.
