One of the most notable primary sources of myths about the Great Patriotic War was Khrushchev's report to the 20th Congress of the CPSU. But there were others, ranging from cinema and literature, passed off as historiography, to outright fantasies born for purely propaganda purposes. On the day of the Great Victory Day, it is worth refuting the most common of them again.
Every year, exactly by May 9, a lot of historical falsifications and unfair interpretations emerge in the Russian-language information space, aimed at belittling this significant date and the most important event for our society - Victory in the Great Patriotic War. It would be useful to mark the loudest of them in order to once again separate the truth from fiction.
"The USSR sided with Hitler"
“The difference in the demographic losses of servicemen is monstrous - 8.6 million for the USSR and 5 million for Germany and its allies. The explanation for this fact is no less monstrous"
In early May, on the Belarusian-Polish border, the correspondent of the supposedly “Belarusian”, but in fact created by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland and the Polish Public TV channel “BelSat” tried to ask a question to the leader of “Night Wolves” Alexander “Surgeon” Zaldostanov: “When the Second World War began, The USSR sided with Hitler …"
- Who spoke? - specified Zaldostanov.
- USSR, - confirmed the TV man.
The surgeon answered the journalist very emotionally, but a few words should be said to the essence of the question. So, facts and only facts.
In 1919, Poland, having decided to profit from the territories of the former Russian Empire, against the background of the Civil War and with the support of the Entente countries, intervened against Soviet Russia, Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine. As a result of the Soviet-Polish war, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus fell under the control of Warsaw.
In September 1938, the great powers Great Britain and France, following the policy of appeasing Hitler, ordered Czechoslovakia to transfer the Sudetenland to Germany. The agreement was secured in Munich on September 30 and went down in history as the Munich Agreement. Hitler did not limit himself to the Sudetenland, occupying the whole of Czechoslovakia, except for the Cieszyn region. It, having presented an ultimatum to the Czech authorities, was occupied by Poland. The great powers did not react to the division of the country.
It should be noted that since 1935 there have been mutual assistance pacts between the USSR and France, the USSR and Czechoslovakia, this triple alliance could well have stopped Hitler. But France preferred to close its eyes to its obligations, and Poland's offer to send troops torpedoed, categorically refusing to let them pass through its territory.
On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. On September 3, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, but it was a "Strange War" - the powers did not undertake any military actions. On September 4, France and Poland signed a mutual assistance agreement that had no development. Poles' requests for military support went unanswered. On September 9, the Polish leadership began negotiations for asylum in neighboring countries, on September 13, they evacuated the gold reserves abroad, and on September 17 fled to Romania. On the same day, having stated that the Polish state had actually ceased to exist, the USSR began to send its troops into the territory of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.
Yes, earlier the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But Poland itself signed a similar treaty, known as the Hitler-Piłsudski Pact, back in 1934.
"Intelligence reported"
Keywords: Great Patriotic War, Joseph Stalin, history of the USSR, intelligence, falsification of history, May 9, Nikita Khrushchev
According to popular belief, Stalin knew about the upcoming attack by Nazi Germany, he was warned more than once, intelligence even called a specific date, but the "leader of the peoples" did not trust anyone and did nothing. We owe the birth of this thesis to Nikita Khrushchev and his report to the 20th Congress of the CPSU. It is extremely curious what arguments the first secretary himself cited in support of the charges brought forward. For example, according to him, Churchill had repeatedly warned Stalin about Germany's preparations for a war against the USSR. Khrushchev further declares: “It goes without saying that Churchill did this by no means out of good feelings for the Soviet people. He pursued his imperialist interests here: to play off Germany and the USSR in a bloody war …”I wonder if Stalin could have thought the same? The theses of the first secretary are clearly inconsistent.
“In a report from Berlin on May 6, 1941, the naval attaché in Berlin reported:“Soviet citizen Bozer informed the assistant of our naval attaché that, according to a German officer from Hitler's headquarters, the Germans are preparing to invade the USSR through Finland by May 14, The Baltics and Latvia. At the same time, powerful air raids on Moscow and Leningrad and the landing of parachute troops are planned …”- these are also the words of Khrushchev. And again it is not clear how Stalin was supposed to react to such a "serious" report. Moreover, as we know from history, the real war did not start on May 14 and developed in a completely different way.
But let us digress from the report to the XX Congress. After all, intelligence did report, Richard Sorge named the date. Much later, historians and publicists repeatedly turned to this issue and, in support of Stalin's distrust of intelligence, cited a real document - a report by an agent under the pseudonym "Sergeant Major" with Stalin's own handwritten resolution: "Maybe send our" source "from the German headquarters. aviation to e … mother. This is not a "source", but a disinformer …"
With all due respect to the feat of our intelligence, it should be noted that if we arrange the reports of agents in chronological order, we get the following. In March 1941, agents "Sergeant Major" and "Corsican" report that the attack will take place in the area of May 1. April 2 - that the war will begin on April 15, and on April 30 - that "from day to day." May 9 named the date "May 20 or June". Finally, on June 16, a report arrives: "A strike can be expected at any time." In total, Richard Sorge from March to June 1941 named at least seven different dates for the start of the war, and in March he assured that Hitler would attack England first, and in May he announced that "this year the danger can pass." On June 20, his own report arrives that "war is inevitable." The analytical service in intelligence did not yet exist at that time. All these messages fell on Stalin's table. The result is not difficult to predict.
On the whole, it was already clear that war was impending. The rearmament of the Red Army was underway. Under the guise of large training camps, a hidden mobilization of reservists was carried out. But the intelligence service could not give an exhaustive answer about the date of the start of the confrontation. The decision to mobilize did not simply mean the withdrawal of workers' hands, tractors, and cars from the national economy. It meant the immediate start of the war, mobilization is not carried out just like that. The Soviet leadership in this situation rightly believed that it was better later than before, the rearmament of the Red Army should have been completed in 1942.
"Stalin bled the Red Army"
Another common explanation for the catastrophic development of the events of the summer and winter of 1941 is the repression against the command staff of the Red Army on the eve of the war. Again, we are dealing with the thesis originally put forward by Khrushchev in his report to the XX Congress: commanders and political workers. During these years, several layers of command cadres were repressed, starting literally from the company and battalion to the highest army centers."
Subsequently, these words were overgrown with factology, for example, in publicistic works one can find the following data: in 1940, out of 225 commanders of the Red Army regiments, only 25 people graduated from military schools, the remaining 200 people are people who graduated from the courses of junior lieutenants and came from the reserve. It is alleged that on January 1, 1941, 12% of the command staff of the Red Army did not have a military education, in the Ground Forces this number reached 16%. Consequently, Stalin "drained" the army on the eve of the war.
Indeed, in the 1930s and 1940s, a wave of repression swept through the Red Army as well. According to documents declassified today, from 1934 to 1939 more than 56 thousand command personnel left the army. Of these, 10 thousand were arrested. 14 thousand people were dismissed for drunkenness and moral decay. The rest were dismissed for other reasons: illness, disability, and so on. Moreover, in the same period 6600 previously dismissed commanders were reinstated in the army and positions after additional proceedings.
To understand the scale of the army "cleansing", let us note that in 1937 Voroshilov declared: "The army has 206 thousand commanding personnel in its staff." The total number of the Red Army in 1937 was 1.5 million people.
However, the poor training of the commanders of the Red Army was indeed recorded, but it was not caused by repression. Already in 1939, the number of the Red Army had grown to 3.2 million soldiers, by January 1941 - to 4.2 million people. By the beginning of the war, the number of command personnel had reached almost 440 thousand commanders. The country was preparing for war, the army was growing, rearmament was underway, but the training of command personnel was really late.
"Filled with corpses"
Myths and truth about the Great Patriotic War
According to modern Russian data, the total number of irrecoverable losses of the armed forces of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War, including the hostilities in the Far East in 1945, is 11,444,000 people. According to official German data, the human losses of the Wehrmacht are 4 million 193 thousand people. The ratio is so monstrous that the phrase of Viktor Astafyev: “We simply did not know how to fight, we just drenched our blood, filled up the Nazis with our corpses” - does not look surprising.
The problem, however, is that modern Russian and German sources use different methods of calculating losses. In one case (the Russian methodology), the concept of "irrecoverable losses" includes those who died at the fronts, who died from wounds in hospitals, who went missing, who were taken prisoner, as well as non-combat losses - who died from diseases, as a result of accidents, and so on. Moreover, the statistical calculations are based on the data of the operational registration of losses according to monthly reports from the troops.
The very concept of "irrecoverable losses", as it is easy to see, is not equivalent to the concept of "lost". War has its own laws, records are kept of those who can join the ranks. For example, servicemen who were surrounded at the beginning of the war are also included in the irrecoverable losses, despite the fact that more than 939 thousand of them were subsequently recruited into the army in the liberated territories. After the war, 1 million 836 thousand servicemen returned from captivity. In total, excluding 2 million 775 thousand people from the number of irrecoverable losses, we get demographic losses of the Soviet armed forces - 8 million 668 thousand people.
The German methodology takes into account the number of those killed, those who died from wounds and did not return from captivity, that is, it was the deaths, demographic losses. Irrecoverable losses of Germany on the Soviet-German front amounted to 7 million 181 thousand, and this is only Germany, and taking into account the allies - 8 million 649 thousand servicemen. Thus, the ratio of German and Soviet irrecoverable losses is 1: 1, 3.
The difference in the demographic losses of servicemen is monstrous - 8.6 million for the USSR and 5 million for Germany and its allies. The explanation for this fact is no less monstrous: during the Great Patriotic War, 4 million 559 thousand Soviet servicemen were taken prisoner by the Nazis, 4 million 376 thousand Wehrmacht soldiers were taken prisoner. More than 2.5 million of our soldiers died in Nazi camps. 420 thousand German prisoners of war died in Soviet captivity.
"We won in spite of …"
It is practically impossible to cover the entire array of "black myths" about the Great Patriotic War in one publication. Here are the criminals from the penal battalions, who, according to the cinema, have decided the outcome of several battles. And one rifle for three ("You will get the weapon in battle!"), Which can be easily transformed into shovel cuttings. And detachments shooting in the back. And tanks with welded hatches and a crew walled up alive. And street children, from whom they trained suicide bombers-saboteurs. And many many others. All these myths add up to a global statement, expressed in one phrase: “We won in spite of”. Contrary to the illiterate commanders, mediocre and bloodthirsty generals, the totalitarian Soviet system and personally to Joseph Stalin.
History knows many examples when a well-trained and equipped army lost battles because of incompetent commanders. But for the country to win the global war of attrition in spite of the state leadership - this is something fundamentally new. After all, war is not only a front, not only questions of strategy and not only problems of supplying troops with food and ammunition. This is the rear, this is agriculture, this is industry, this is logistics, these are issues of providing the population with medicines and medical care, bread and housing.
Soviet industry from the western regions in the first months of the war was evacuated beyond the Urals. Was this titanic logistics operation carried out by enthusiasts against the will of the country's leadership? In the new places, the workers stood up to the machines in the open field, while the new buildings of the shops were laid - was it really only out of fear of reprisals? Millions of citizens were evacuated beyond the Urals, to Central Asia and Kazakhstan, the inhabitants of Tashkent in one night dismantled everyone who remained at the station square to their homes - is it really in spite of the cruel customs of the Soviet country?
When Leningrad held out, in spite of everything, hungry women and children stood for 12 hours at the machines, grinding shells, the poet Dzhambul from distant Kazakhstan wrote to them: “Leningraders, my children! / Leningraders, my pride! - and from these verses they cried in the Far East. Didn't this mean that the whole country was held together by a moral core of unprecedented strength from top to bottom?
Is all this possible if society is fragmented, if it lives in a state of cold civil war with the authorities, if it does not trust the leadership? The answer is actually obvious.
The Soviet country, the Soviet people - each in his place, through solidarity efforts - performed an incredible feat unprecedented in history. We remember. We are proud.
