The other day, parliamentary hearings “Patriotic education of Russian citizens: “Immortal Regiment” were held in the Duma. They were attended by deputies, senators, representatives of legislative and supreme executive bodies of state power of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, the Ministries of Education and Science, Defense, Foreign Affairs, Culture, members of public associations, organizations of foreign compatriots... There were, however, no those who took part in the action came up with journalists from Tomsk TV-2, no one even remembered them. And, in general, there was really no need to remember. The “Immortal Regiment,” which by definition did not have any staffing schedule, no commanders or political officers, has already completely transformed into the sovereign “box” of the parade squad, and its main task today is to learn to march in step and maintain alignment in the ranks.
“What is a people, a nation? “This is, first of all, respect for victories,” the chairman of the parliamentary committee, Vyacheslav Nikonov, admonished the participants when opening the hearing. — Today, when there is a new war, which someone calls “hybrid,” our Victory is becoming one of the main targets for attacks on historical memory. There are waves of falsification of history, which should make us believe that it was not us, but someone else who won the victory, and also make us apologize...” For some reason, the Nikonovs are seriously confident that it was they, long before their own birth, who won the Great A victory for which, moreover, someone is trying to force them to apologize. But they weren’t the ones attacked! And the aching note of the ongoing national misfortune, the phantom pain of the third generation of descendants of the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War is drowned out by a cheerful, thoughtless cry: “We can repeat it!”
Really - can we?
It was at these hearings that a terrible figure was mentioned casually, but for some reason no one noticed, and did not make us stop in horror as we ran to understand WHAT we were told after all. Why this was done right now, I don’t know.
At the hearing, the co-chairman of the “Immortal Regiment of Russia” movement, State Duma deputy Nikolai Zemtsov, presented a report “Documentary basis of the People’s Project “Establishing the fate of missing defenders of the Fatherland,” within the framework of which studies of population decline were conducted, which changed the understanding of the scale of losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War.
“The total decline in the population of the USSR in 1941-1945 was more than 52 million 812 thousand people,” Zemtsov said, citing declassified data from the USSR State Planning Committee. — Of these, irretrievable losses as a result of war factors are more than 19 million military personnel and about 23 million civilians. The total natural mortality of military personnel and civilians during this period could have amounted to more than 10 million 833 thousand people (including 5 million 760 thousand deaths of children under the age of four). The irretrievable losses of the population of the USSR as a result of war factors amounted to almost 42 million people.
Can we... repeat?!
Back in the 60s of the last century, the then young poet Vadim Kovda wrote a short poem in four lines: “ If there are only three elderly disabled people walking through my front door, / does that mean how many were wounded? / Was it killed?
Nowadays, due to natural reasons, these elderly disabled people are noticeable less and less. But Kovda understood the scale of losses absolutely correctly; it was enough to simply multiply the number of front doors.
Stalin, based on considerations inaccessible to a normal person, personally determined the losses of the USSR at 7 million people - slightly less than the losses of Germany. Khrushchev - 20 million. Under Gorbachev, a book was published, prepared by the Ministry of Defense under the editorship of General Krivosheev, “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed,” in which the authors named and in every possible way justified this very figure - 27 million. Now it turns out that she was also untrue.
Estimates of the losses of Soviet citizens in the Great Patriotic War have a huge range: from 19 to 36 million. The first detailed calculations were made by the Russian emigrant, demographer Timashev in 1948 - he came up with 19 million. The maximum figure was called by B. Sokolov - 46 million. The latest calculations show that the USSR military alone lost 13.5 million people, but the total losses were over 27 million.
At the end of the war, long before any historical and demographic studies, Stalin named the figure: 5.3 million military losses. He also included missing persons (obviously, in most cases, prisoners). In March 1946, in an interview with a correspondent of the Pravda newspaper, the generalissimo estimated the human losses at 7 million. The increase was due to civilians who died in the occupied territory or were deported to Germany.
In the West, this figure was perceived with skepticism. Already at the end of the 1940s, the first calculations of the demographic balance of the USSR during the war years appeared, contradicting Soviet data. An illustrative example is the calculations of the Russian emigrant, demographer N.S. Timashev, published in the New York “New Journal” in 1948. Here is his method:
The All-Union Population Census of the USSR in 1939 determined its population at 170.5 million. The increase in 1937-1940 reached, according to his assumption, almost 2% for each year. Consequently, the population of the USSR by mid-1941 should have reached 178.7 million. But in 1939-1940, Western Ukraine and Belarus, three Baltic states, the Karelian lands of Finland were annexed to the USSR, and Romania returned Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Therefore, excluding the Karelian population who went to Finland, the Poles who fled to the west, and the Germans who were repatriated to Germany, these territorial acquisitions gave a population increase of 20.5 million. Considering that the birth rate in the annexed territories was no more than 1% per year, that is, lower than in the USSR, and also taking into account the short time period between their entry into the USSR and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the author determined the population growth for these territories by mid-1941 at 300 thousand. By sequentially adding the above figures, he received 200 .7 million living in the USSR on the eve of June 22, 1941.
Timashev further divided 200 million into three age groups, again relying on data from the 1939 All-Union Census: adults (over 18 years old) -117.2 million, teenagers (from 8 to 18 years old) - 44.5 million, children ( under 8 years old) - 38.8 million. At the same time, he took into account two important circumstances. First: in 1939-1940, two very weak annual streams, born in 1931-1932, moved from childhood to the adolescent group, during the famine that covered large areas of the USSR and negatively affected the size of the adolescent group. Second: in the former Polish lands and Baltic states there were more people over 20 years of age than in the USSR.
Timashev supplemented these three age groups with the number of Soviet prisoners. He did it in the following way. By the time of the elections of deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in December 1937, the population of the USSR reached 167 million, of which voters made up 56.36% of the total figure, and the population over 18 years of age, according to the All-Union Census of 1939, reached 58.3%. The resulting difference of 2%, or 3.3 million, in his opinion, was the population of the Gulag (including the number of those executed). This turned out to be close to the truth.
Next, Timashev moved on to post-war figures. The number of voters included in the voting lists for the elections of deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the spring of 1946 amounted to 101.7 million. Adding to this figure the 4 million Gulag prisoners he calculated, he received 106 million adult population in the USSR at the beginning of 1946. Calculating the teenage group, he took as a basis 31.3 million primary and secondary school students in the 1947/48 school year, compared them with data from 1939 (31.4 million schoolchildren within the borders of the USSR until September 17, 1939) and obtained a figure of 39 million When calculating the children's group, he proceeded from the fact that at the beginning of the war the birth rate in the USSR was approximately 38 per thousand, in the second quarter of 1942 it decreased by 37.5%, and in 1943-1945 - by half.
Subtracting from each year group the percentage calculated according to the normal mortality table for the USSR, he received 36 million children at the beginning of 1946. Thus, according to his statistical calculations, in the USSR at the beginning of 1946 there were 106 million adults, 39 million adolescents and 36 million children, and a total of 181 million. Timashev’s conclusion is as follows: the population of the USSR in 1946 was 19 million less than in 1941.
Other Western researchers came to approximately the same results. In 1946, under the auspices of the League of Nations, F. Lorimer’s book “The Population of the USSR” was published. According to one of his hypotheses, during the war the population of the USSR decreased by 20 million.
In the article “Human Losses in the Second World War,” published in 1953, the German researcher G. Arntz came to the conclusion that “20 million people is the closest figure to the truth for the total losses of the Soviet Union in the Second World War.” The collection including this article was translated and published in the USSR in 1957 under the title “Results of the Second World War.” Thus, four years after Stalin’s death, Soviet censorship released the figure of 20 million into the open press, thereby indirectly recognizing it as correct and making it available to at least specialists - historians, international affairs experts, etc.
Only in 1961, Khrushchev, in a letter to Swedish Prime Minister Erlander, admitted that the war against fascism “claimed two tens of millions of lives of Soviet people.” Thus, compared to Stalin, Khrushchev increased Soviet casualties by almost 3 times.
In 1965, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Victory, Brezhnev spoke of “more than 20 million” human lives lost by the Soviet people in the war. In the 6th and final volume of the fundamental “History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union,” published at the same time, it was stated that of the 20 million dead, almost half “were military and civilians killed and tortured by the Nazis in occupied Soviet territory.” In fact, 20 years after the end of the war, the USSR Ministry of Defense recognized the death of 10 million Soviet military personnel.
Four decades later, the head of the Center for Military History of Russia at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor G. Kumanev, in a line-by-line commentary, told the truth about the calculations that military historians carried out in the early 1960s when preparing the “History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union”: “Our losses in the war were then determined at 26 million. But high authorities turned out to accept the figure “over 20 million.”
As a result, “20 Million” not only took root in historical literature for decades, but also became part of the national consciousness.
In 1990, M. Gorbachev announced a new figure for losses obtained as a result of research by demographers - “almost 27 million people.”
In 1991, B. Sokolov’s book “The Price of Victory” was published. The Great Patriotic War: the unknown about the known.” In it, direct military losses of the USSR were estimated at approximately 30 million, including 14.7 million military personnel, and “actual and potential losses” at 46 million, including 16 million unborn children.”
A little later, Sokolov clarified these figures (he added new losses). He obtained the loss figure as follows. From the size of the Soviet population at the end of June 1941, which he determined to be 209.3 million, he subtracted 166 million who, in his opinion, lived in the USSR on January 1, 1946 and received 43.3 million dead. Then, from the resulting number, I subtracted the irretrievable losses of the armed forces (26.4 million) and received the irretrievable losses of the civilian population - 16.9 million.
“We can name the number of Red Army soldiers killed during the entire war, which is close to reality, if we determine the month of 1942, when the losses of the Red Army in the dead were taken into account most fully and when it had almost no losses in prisoners. For a number of reasons, we chose November 1942 as such a month and extended the ratio of the number of dead and wounded obtained for it to the entire period of the war. As a result, we came to a figure of 22.4 million Soviet military personnel who were killed in battle and died from wounds, illnesses, accidents and executed by the verdict of tribunals.”
To the 22.4 million received in this way, he added 4 million soldiers and commanders of the Red Army who died in enemy captivity. And so it turned out that 26.4 million irretrievable losses suffered by the armed forces.
In addition to B. Sokolov, similar calculations were carried out by L. Polyakov, A. Kvasha, V. Kozlov and others. The methodological weakness of this kind of calculations is obvious: the researchers proceeded from the difference in the size of the Soviet population in 1941, which is known very approximately, and the size of the post-war population of the USSR, which is almost impossible to accurately determine. It was this difference that they considered the total human losses.
In 1993, a statistical study “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed: Losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR in Wars, Combat Actions and Military Conflicts” was published, prepared by a team of authors headed by General G. Krivosheev. The main source of statistical data was previously secret archival documents, primarily the reporting materials of the General Staff. However, the losses of entire fronts and armies in the first months, and the authors specifically stipulated this, were obtained by calculation. In addition, the reporting of the General Staff did not include the losses of units that were not organizationally part of the Soviet armed forces (army, navy, border and internal troops of the NKVD of the USSR), but were directly involved in the battles - the people's militia, partisan detachments, groups of underground fighters.
Finally, the number of prisoners of war and missing in action is clearly underestimated: this category of losses, according to the reports of the General Staff, totals 4.5 million, of which 2.8 million remained alive (were repatriated after the end of the war or again drafted into the ranks of the Red Army in the territory liberated from the occupiers), and, accordingly, the total number of those who did not return from captivity, including those who did not want to return to the USSR, amounted to 1.7 million.
As a result, the statistical data in the “Classified as Classified” directory was immediately perceived as requiring clarification and additions. And in 1998, thanks to V. Litovkin’s publication “During the war years, our army lost 11 million 944 thousand 100 people,” these data were replenished by 500 thousand reservists drafted into the army, but not yet included in the lists of military units and who died along the way to the front.
V. Litovkin’s study states that from 1946 to 1968, a special commission of the General Staff, headed by General S. Shtemenko, prepared a statistical reference book on losses in 1941-1945. At the end of the commission’s work, Shtemenko reported to the Minister of Defense of the USSR, Marshal A. Grechko: “Taking into account that the statistical collection contains information of national importance, the publication of which in the press (including closed ones) or in any other way is currently not necessary and undesirable, the collection is intended to be kept at the General Staff as a special document, to which a strictly limited circle of persons will be allowed to become familiar.” And the prepared collection was kept under seven seals until the team under the leadership of General G. Krivosheev made its information public.
V. Litovkin’s research sowed even greater doubts about the completeness of the information published in the collection “Classified as Classified”, because a logical question arose: were all the data contained in the “statistics collection of the Shtemenko Commission” declassified?
For example, according to the data given in the article, during the war years, military justice authorities convicted 994 thousand people, of which 422 thousand were sent to penal units, 436 thousand to places of detention. The remaining 136 thousand were apparently shot.
And yet, the reference book “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed” significantly expanded and supplemented the ideas not only of historians, but also of the entire Russian society about the cost of the Victory of 1945. It is enough to refer to the statistical calculation: from June to November 1941, the Armed Forces of the USSR lost 24 thousand people every day, of which 17 thousand killed and up to 7 thousand wounded, and from January 1944 to May 1945 - 20 thousand people, of which 5.2 thousand were killed and 14.8 thousand wounded.
In 2001, a significantly expanded statistical publication appeared - “Russia and the USSR in the wars of the twentieth century. Losses of the armed forces." The authors supplemented the General Staff materials with reports from military headquarters about losses and notifications from military registration and enlistment offices about the dead and missing, which were sent to relatives at their place of residence. And the figure of losses he received increased to 9 million 168 thousand 400 people. These data were reproduced in volume 2 of the collective work of employees of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Population of Russia in the 20th century. Historical essays”, published under the editorship of academician Yu. Polyakov.
In 2004, the second, corrected and expanded, edition of the book by the head of the Center for Military History of Russia at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor G. Kumanev, “Feat and Forgery: Pages of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945,” was published. It provides data on losses: about 27 million Soviet citizens. And in the footnote comments to them, the same addition mentioned above appeared, explaining that the calculations of military historians back in the early 1960s gave a figure of 26 million, but the “high authorities” preferred to accept something else as the “historical truth”: “over 20 million."
Meanwhile, historians and demographers continued to look for new approaches to determining the magnitude of the USSR's losses in the war.
The historian Ilyenkov, who served in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, followed an interesting path. He tried to calculate the irretrievable losses of the Red Army personnel based on the files of irretrievable losses of privates, sergeants and officers. These files began to be created when, on July 9, 1941, a department for recording personal losses was organized as part of the Main Directorate for the Formation and Recruitment of the Red Army (GUFKKA). The responsibilities of the department included personal accounting of losses and compiling an alphabetical card index of losses.
The records were kept in the following categories: 1) dead - according to reports from military units, 2) dead - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 3) missing in action - according to reports from military units, 4) missing - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 5) dead in German captivity , 6) those who died from diseases, 7) those who died from wounds - according to reports from military units, those who died from wounds - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices. At the same time, the following were taken into account: deserters; military personnel sentenced to forced labor camps; those sentenced to capital punishment - execution; removed from the register of irretrievable losses as survivors; those on suspicion of having served with the Germans (the so-called “signals”) and those who were captured but survived. These military personnel were not included in the list of irretrievable losses.
After the war, the card files were deposited in the Archive of the USSR Ministry of Defense (now the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation). Since the early 1990s, the archive began counting registration cards by letters of the alphabet and categories of losses. As of November 1, 2000, 20 letters of the alphabet were processed; for the remaining 6 letters that were not counted, a preliminary count was carried out, with fluctuations up or down by 30-40 thousand persons.
The calculated 20 letters for 8 categories of losses of privates and sergeants of the Red Army gave the following figures: 9 million 524 thousand 398 people. At the same time, 116 thousand 513 people were removed from the register of irretrievable losses, as they turned out to be alive according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices.
A preliminary calculation based on 6 uncounted letters gave 2 million 910 thousand people as irretrievable losses. The result of the calculations was as follows: 12 million 434 thousand 398 Red Army soldiers and sergeants were lost by the Red Army in 1941-1945 (Remember that this does not include the losses of the Navy, internal and border troops of the NKVD of the USSR.)
Using the same methodology, the alphabetical card index of irretrievable losses of officers of the Red Army was calculated, which is also stored in the TsAMO of the Russian Federation. They amounted to about 1 million 100 thousand people.
Thus, during the Great Patriotic War, the Red Army lost 13 million 534 thousand 398 soldiers and commanders killed, missing, died from wounds, diseases and in captivity.
These data are 4 million 865 thousand 998 people higher than the irretrievable losses of the USSR Armed Forces (payroll) according to the General Staff, which included the Red Army, sailors, border guards, and internal troops of the NKVD of the USSR.
Finally, we note another new trend in the study of the demographic results of the Great Patriotic War. Before the collapse of the USSR, there was no need to estimate human losses for individual republics or nationalities. And only at the end of the twentieth century L. Rybakovsky tried to calculate the approximate amount of human losses of the RSFSR within its then borders. According to his estimates, it amounted to approximately 13 million people - slightly less than half of the total losses of the USSR.
A killer loved by a very sick people. And the war itself -
the work of his hands, and the millions killed are the work of this serial killer
The Second World War is still rightly considered the bloodiest conflict in the history of mankind, the victims of which were tens of millions of people around the world, and especially in Europe. The Soviet Union, as one of the largest powers of that time, suffered enormous losses during this war.
If you search carefully, you can find a variety of data about how many people the Soviet Union lost. The fact is that even in our time of information technology and developed documentation, it is not always possible to calculate the number of war victims, and then it was quite difficult to accurately count the population, not to mention the fact that a significant part of the collected information was never published. In 1946, Stalin spoke about 7 million dead citizens of the Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians), and a decade and a half later, Khrushchev named the figure at 20 million. In our time, it is generally accepted that the Soviet Union lost about 27 million people during the war years, of which 8 million were Soviet soldiers, and the rest died due to various reasons related to the war.
But here it is even more difficult to calculate the number of losses. There are at least three reasons preventing such a calculation. First, it is not always possible to accurately determine the nationality of a particular deceased person. Secondly, in the pre-war Soviet Union it was a common custom to register as Russian even citizens who were not Russians. Finally, the third, which many Russian historians really don’t like to mention, is the fact that the Russians fought not only for the Soviet Union, but also against it, and it is precisely the losses of the opponents of the Soviet Union that are extremely difficult to calculate, because the best way to destroy the enemy is don't mention it.
According to the most common opinion, more than 5.5 million Soviet soldiers of Russian nationality died during the Second World War. The German occupation did not affect most of the territory of Russia, so casualties among civilians are somewhat lower here - for example, Ukraine, which has a much smaller population, lost the same amount of population only among civilians. As for the Russians who were opponents of the Soviet Union, they fought mainly as part of the so-called Russian Liberation Army, the number of which in Russian sources is usually listed as 120-130 thousand people, and in foreign sources the number of 600 thousand volunteers is mentioned.
In preparation for the 65th anniversary of the Great Victory, the problem of military losses, which has never been removed from the agenda all these decades, is being discussed with new urgency in the media. And the Soviet component of losses always stands out. The most common ideology is this: the price of Victory in the Second World War “turned out to be too great” for our country. When making decisions to conduct major military operations, the leaders and generals of the USA and Great Britain, they say, took care of their people and, as a result, suffered minimal losses, while in our country they did not spare the blood of soldiers.
In Soviet times, it was believed that the USSR lost 20 million people - both military and civilian - in the Great Patriotic War. During the perestroika period, this figure increased to 46 million, while the justifications, to put it mildly, suffered from obvious ideologization. What are the true losses? For several years now he has been clarifying them Center for the History of Wars and Geopolitics of the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Historians have not yet come to a consensus on this issue,” he told our correspondent Head of the Center, Doctor of Historical Sciences Mikhail Myagkov. — Our Center, like most scientific institutions, adheres to the following estimates: Great Britain lost 370 thousand military personnel killed, the USA - 400 thousand. Our greatest losses are 11.3 million soldiers and officers who died at the front and were tortured in captivity, as well as more than 15 million civilians who died in the occupied territories. The losses of the Nazi coalition amount to 8.6 million military personnel. That is, 1.3 times less than ours. This ratio was a consequence of the most difficult initial period of the war for the Red Army, as well as the genocide that the Nazis carried out against Soviet prisoners of war. It is known that more than 60 percent of our captured soldiers and officers were killed in Nazi camps.
“SP”: — Some “advanced” historians pose the question this way: wouldn’t it have been wiser to fight like the British and Americans in order to win, like them, with “little bloodshed”?
— It’s incorrect to pose the question like that. When the Germans developed the Barbarossa plan, they set the task of reaching Astrakhan and Arkhangelsk - that is, conquering living space. Naturally, this meant the “liberation” of this gigantic territory from the majority of the Slavic population, the total extermination of Jews and Gypsies. This cynical, misanthropic task was solved quite consistently.
Accordingly, the Red Army fought for the basic survival of its people and simply could not use the principle of self-preservation.
“SP”: — There are also such “humane” proposals: shouldn’t the Soviet Union, like France, for example, capitulate after 40 days in order to preserve human resources?
— Of course, the French blitz surrender saved lives, property, and financial savings. But, according to the plans of the fascists, what awaited the French, we note, was not extermination, but Germanization. And France, or rather its then leadership, essentially agreed to this.
The situation in Great Britain was also incomparable with ours. Take the so-called Battle of Britain in 1940. Churchill himself said that then “the few saved the many.” This means that the small number of pilots who fought over London and the English Channel made it impossible for the Fuhrer's troops to land on the British Isles. It is clear to anyone that the losses of aviation and naval forces are always significantly less than the number of those killed in land battles, which mainly took place on the territory of the USSR.
By the way, before the attack on our country, Hitler conquered almost all of Western Europe in 141 days. At the same time, the ratio of losses of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany, on the other, was 1:17 in favor of the Nazis. But in the West they don’t talk about “the mediocrity” of their generals. And they like to lecture us more, although the ratio of military losses of the USSR and the Hitlerite coalition was 1: 1.3.
Member Association of Historians of the Second World War, academician Yuri Rubtsov believes that our losses would have been lower if the allies had opened a second front in a timely manner.
“In the spring of 1942,” he said, “during the visits of the Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Molotov to London and Washington, the allies promised to land in continental Europe in a few months. But they did not do this either in 1942 or in 1943, when we suffered especially heavy losses. From May 1942 to June 1944, while the Allies delayed opening a second front, more than 5.5 million Soviet troops died in fierce battles. Here it is probably appropriate to talk about the price of a certain egoism of the allies. It is worth recalling that it was in 1942, after the collapse of the Blitzkrieg, that mass executions and deportations of the Soviet population began. That is, the Germans began to actually carry out a plan to destroy the life force of the USSR. If the second front had been opened, as agreed, in 1942, naturally, we could have avoided such terrible losses. Another nuance is also important. If for us the problem of the second front was a matter of life and death for many millions of Soviet people, then for the Allies it was a problem of strategy: when would it be more expedient to land? They landed in Europe, hoping to better determine the post-war map of the world. Moreover, it was already obvious that the Red Army could independently end the war and reach the English Channel coast, providing the USSR with the rights of a winner a leading role in the process of post-war development of Europe. What the allies could not allow.
Such a moment cannot be discounted. After the Allied landings, the largest and best part of the Nazi forces remained on the Eastern Front. And the Germans resisted our troops much more fiercely. In addition to political motives, fear played a huge role here. The Germans were afraid of retribution for the atrocities committed on the territory of the USSR. After all, it is well known that the Nazis surrendered entire cities to the Allies without firing a shot, and on both sides, losses in sluggish battles were almost “symbolic.” With us they put hundreds of their soldiers, clinging with all their strength to some village.
“The seemingly low losses of the allies also have purely “arithmetic” explanations,” continues Mikhail Myagkov. “They really fought on the German front for only 11 months—more than 4 times less than we did.” If we fight ours, the total losses of the British and Americans can, according to some experts, be predicted at a level of at least 3 million people. The Allies destroyed 176 enemy divisions. The Red Army is almost 4 times larger - 607 enemy divisions. If Great Britain and the USA had to defeat the same forces, then we can expect that their losses would have increased by about 4 times... That is, it is possible that the losses would have been even more serious than ours. This is about the ability to fight. Of course, the Allies took care of themselves, and such tactics brought results: losses decreased. If our people often continued to fight until the last bullet, even when surrounded, because they knew that there would be no mercy for them, then the Americans and the British acted “more rationally” in similar situations.
Let us remember the siege of Singapore by Japanese troops. A British garrison held the defense there. He was superbly armed. But after a few days, in order to avoid losses, he capitulated. Tens of thousands of British soldiers were taken into captivity. Ours also surrendered. But most often in conditions when it was impossible to continue the fight, and there was nothing with which to continue. And in 1944, at the final stage of the war, it was incredible to imagine a situation like in the Ardennes (where many allies were captured) on the Soviet-German front. Here we are talking not only about fighting spirit, but also about the values that people directly defended.
I want to emphasize that if the USSR had fought Hitler as “prudently” as our allies, the war would probably have ended with the Germans reaching the Urals. Then Britain would inevitably fall, since it was then limited in resources. And the English Channel would not have saved. Hitler, using the resource base of Europe and the USSR, would strangle the British economically. As for the USA, at least they would not have acquired those real advantages that they received thanks to the selfless feat of the peoples of the USSR: access to markets for raw materials, superpower status. Most likely, the United States would have to make an unpredictable compromise with Hitler. In any case, if the Red Army had fought based on “self-preservation” tactics, it would have brought the world to the brink of disaster.
Summarizing the opinions of military scientists, I would like to suggest that the current loss figures, or rather, the data on their ratio, require some correction. When calculating, the formal division of combatants into two camps is always taken into account: the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition and the allies of Nazi Germany. Let me remind you that it is believed that the Nazis and their allies lost 8.6 million people. Fascist allies traditionally include Norway, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, and Japan. But large military contingents from France, Poland, Belgium, Albania, etc., which are classified as countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, fought against the USSR. Their losses are not taken into account. But, let’s say, France lost 600 thousand troops in the war. At the same time, 84 thousand were killed in combat while defending national territory. 20 thousand are in the Resistance. Where did about 500 thousand die? It will become clear if we remember that almost the entire French Air Force and Navy, as well as about 20 ground divisions, went over to Hitler’s side. The situation is similar with Poland, Belgium and other “fighters against fascism.” Part of their losses must be attributed to the side opposing the USSR. Then the ratio will become slightly different. So let the “black” myths about corpse dumping, which Soviet military leaders allegedly committed, remain on the conscience of overly ideological politicians.
The other day, parliamentary hearings “Patriotic education of Russian citizens: “Immortal Regiment” were held in the Duma. They were attended by deputies, senators, representatives of legislative and supreme executive bodies of state power of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, the Ministries of Education and Science, Defense, Foreign Affairs, Culture, members of public associations, organizations of foreign compatriots... There were, however, no those who took part in the action came up with journalists from Tomsk TV-2, no one even remembered them. And, in general, there was really no need to remember. The “Immortal Regiment,” which by definition did not have any staffing schedule, no commanders or political officers, has already completely transformed into the sovereign “box” of the parade squad, and its main task today is to learn to march in step and maintain alignment in the ranks.
“What is a people, a nation? “This is, first of all, respect for victories,” the chairman of the parliamentary committee, Vyacheslav Nikonov, admonished the participants when opening the hearing. — Today, when there is a new war, which someone calls “hybrid,” our Victory is becoming one of the main targets for attacks on historical memory. There are waves of falsification of history, which should make us believe that it was not us, but someone else who won the victory, and also make us apologize...” For some reason, the Nikonovs are seriously confident that it was they, long before their own birth, who won the Great A victory for which, moreover, someone is trying to force them to apologize. But they weren’t the ones attacked! And the aching note of the ongoing national misfortune, the phantom pain of the third generation of descendants of the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War is drowned out by a cheerful, thoughtless cry: “We can repeat it!”
Really - can we?
It was at these hearings that a terrible figure was mentioned casually, but for some reason no one noticed, and did not make us stop in horror as we ran to understand WHAT we were told after all. Why this was done right now, I don’t know.
At the hearing, the co-chairman of the “Immortal Regiment of Russia” movement, State Duma deputy Nikolai Zemtsov, presented a report “Documentary basis of the People’s Project “Establishing the fate of missing defenders of the Fatherland,” within the framework of which studies of population decline were conducted, which changed the understanding of the scale of losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War.
“The total decline in the population of the USSR in 1941-1945 was more than 52 million 812 thousand people,” Zemtsov said, citing declassified data from the USSR State Planning Committee. — Of these, irretrievable losses as a result of war factors are more than 19 million military personnel and about 23 million civilians. The total natural mortality of military personnel and civilians during this period could have amounted to more than 10 million 833 thousand people (including 5 million 760 thousand deaths of children under the age of four). The irretrievable losses of the population of the USSR as a result of war factors amounted to almost 42 million people.
Can we... repeat?!
Back in the 60s of the last century, the then young poet Vadim Kovda wrote a short poem in four lines: “ If there are only three elderly disabled people walking through my front door, / does that mean how many were wounded? / Was it killed?
Nowadays, due to natural reasons, these elderly disabled people are noticeable less and less. But Kovda understood the scale of losses absolutely correctly; it was enough to simply multiply the number of front doors.
Stalin, based on considerations inaccessible to a normal person, personally determined the losses of the USSR at 7 million people - slightly less than the losses of Germany. Khrushchev - 20 million. Under Gorbachev, a book was published, prepared by the Ministry of Defense under the editorship of General Krivosheev, “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed,” in which the authors named and in every possible way justified this very figure - 27 million. Now it turns out that she was also untrue.
