The history of the Old Believers is inextricably linked with the history of Russia. During the massive political repression of the 1930s. the first to suffer were the "counter-revolutionary classes": the clergy, the peasantry, the Cossacks. Almost all the Old Believer bishops were repressed, in 1938 only one bishop remained at large. It seemed that a little more, and the Old Believer hierarchy in Russia would disappear.

Despite the persecution and repression, the Old Believers have always remained patriots of their homeland. Already in the first days of the war, the Old Believer Archdiocese appeals to its children with an appeal to stand up for the defense of the Fatherland. Old Believers with weapons in their hands defended the Motherland, worked in the rear and collected donations for the defense of the country.

2015 marks 70 years since the end of the bloodiest military conflict of all times and peoples - World War II... It was attended by 72 states, and hostilities were conducted on the territory of 40 countries. During the fighting, about 70 million people died from bombing, shelling, starvation and in camps. The losses of the Soviet Union, according to official data, amounted to 26.6 million people, and a significant part of the dead, more than half, belongs to the civilian population.

For comparison, the decline in the population of Russia in the First World War (losses of servicemen and civilians) amounted to 4.5 million people, and a similar decline in the Civil War - 8 million people.

Such great losses of the country, especially in the first years of the war, were caused not only by the extreme brutality of hostilities, but also, as it turned out, by the lack of preparedness of the Soviet Union for a military conflict of this magnitude. In the pre-war years, there were massive political repressions in the country. They hit not only the so-called "counter-revolutionary classes": the peasantry, clergy, Cossacks, but also the very Soviet administrative, party and military institutions. So, for example, from 1937 to the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, 40 thousand commanders of all levels were repressed. Mass arrests and executions gave rise to the lack of confidence in the command staff, the fear of making responsible decisions on their own. It is no coincidence that in the first hours and even days of the war, the unit commanders could not make decisions adequate to the military situation, waiting for orders from higher authorities. Marshal Vasilevsky later wrote:

Without the thirty-seventh year, perhaps there would have been no war at all in the forty-first year. In the fact that Hitler decided to start a war in 1941, an assessment of the degree of defeat of military personnel that took place in our country played a large role.

Of course, the repressions affected not only the military and party officials, but also representatives of all other strata of the population. In the second half of the 30s, most of the Old Believer priests were repressed, and in 1937-1938 a campaign of closing and destroying churches swept across the country. To make this process irreversible, church buildings were usually blown up. In 1938, the only Old Believer bishop who remained at large was the aged Bishop of Kaluga-Smolensk Sava(Simeon Ananiev), consecrated in 1922. The ancient Orthodox hierarchy on the territory of the USSR was under the threat of complete extinction. Trying to avoid this, every day expecting arrest and execution, Vladyka of Sava single-handedly ordains a bishop in 1939 Paisia(Petrov) as his successor to the Kaluga-Smolensk diocese. However, no arrest followed, and in 1941, in the period between Easter and Trinity, the Bishop of Samara (Parfyonov), who had returned from prison, was elevated by Vladyka Savoy to the dignity of archbishop at the request of the Rogozhian Old Believers, taking over the management of the Church.

I did not occupy the orphaned primate throne of my own accord, ”said Archbishop Irinarchus later. - I was very embarrassed by this post, I trembled in my soul to accept such a great responsibility. I did not look for it, but it was found, because at that time I was only one single bishop. The second bishop, Sava of Kaluga, was ill. So, by the will of God, I came to you on the Moscow throne. He did not come to serve me, but to serve you, according to the word of the Lord: "Although he may be the first in you, let him be a servant to all" (Matt. XX, 26).

The following year, 1942, the bishop (Lakomkin) returned from imprisonment, who became an assistant to the archbishop.

In 1940, the USSR annexes the territory of Moldova, occupied by Romania, where a large number of Old Believers lived. The Old Believer Bishop of Kishinev (Usov), who had fled from Soviet Russia at one time, moved to Romania. Belaya Krinitsa after the annexation of Bessarabia and Bukovina ceased to be the residence of the Belokrinitsa metropolitans. The chair was moved to Braila. In order to establish diocesan administration in Moldova, the Moscow Archdiocese had neither the time nor the opportunity: the Great Patriotic War soon began. May 8, 1941 at the Consecrated Cathedral in Brail, Vladyka Innokenty (Usov) was elected Archbishop Belokrinitsky and all ancient Orthodox Christians by the Metropolitan(died in 1942).

After the German attack on the USSR and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the Old Believers, as in 1812 and 1914, rose to defend the Fatherland. Already in the first days of the war, the Old Believer Archdiocese appeals to its children with an appeal to stand up for the defense of the Fatherland:

In the stillness of the night, when the peaceful Russian people were sleeping, locusts attacked him. Free and peace-loving small peoples of European countries drowned in blood, turned into slaves, and given over to the scorn of evil spirits. Great sorrow, crying of old people, children and mothers shake the whole world ...

The time has come, the hour has come for every believing Old Believer to direct all his energies and thoughts to the fight against the invading enemy and, without sparing his belly, stand up for his friends sincerely, to defend his great, peaceful and beautiful Motherland with his breast!

Let us create the sign of the cross in the name of the honest and life-giving cross, the holy and indivisible Trinity, and according to the examples of past years, according to the examples of our holy warriors, with the blessings and prayers of all the saints, and I bless you for feats of arms.

May the sword of victory be in your hands, smashing a foreign enemy!

In the fall of 1941, when the Germans approached Moscow, the state authorities decided to evacuate the leadership of religious confessions. Archbishop Irinarkh of Moscow and All Russia is evacuated to Ulyanovsk.

However, the Old Believer archpastors did not stay away from the tragic events of the war. In 1942, during one of the most difficult periods of the war, the Primate of the Church, Archbishop Irinarkh, addressed the inhabitants of the occupied territories with a message. In it he said:

Beloved children of the Old Believer Church of Christ, who are in German captivity and occupation ... From the center of the Old Believers - from glorious Moscow, from the Rogozhskaya outpost - I, your archpastor and pilgrim, appeal to you with words of consolation and hope and an appeal to offer every possible resistance to the enemy.

Help the partisans, join their ranks, be worthy of your ancestors who fought for their holy Russia. Remember how our glorious ancestors, driven by love for their homeland, all, as one, with pitchforks and spears destroyed and drove from their land twelve languages ​​of the proud conqueror. And how many of them left Russia? A pitiful bunch! The liberation of our motherland from the primordial enemy and destroyer of the Russian people - the German - is a nationwide holy cause.

Help our army to exterminate and drive the enemy from our sacred land and thereby bring the joyous hour of union with you closer. We, however, offer unceasing prayers to the Lord God so that he will save you from evil and destruction and give you the strength of our ancestors in the struggle to free our homeland from the invaders.

In July 1942, the bishop returns from prison Gerontius(Lakomkin), Petrogradsky and Tverskoy. In the fall, he arrives in the Kostroma region (lives in Strelnikov and Durasov) and begins to rule the Yaroslavl-Kostroma diocese.

One million two hundred thousand rubles was collected by the Archdiocese of Moscow and All Russia for the defense of the country; the amount may be small, but we remember how highly Christ praised the widow's contribution. " It was touching to tears to see how readily, with what ardent impulse, hands were stretched out to the plate "For the Defense of the Motherland" in order to put on it their feasible labor contribution", - recalls the secretary of the archdiocese, Galina Marinicheva, about the services during the war years.

During the war years, many thousands of Old Believers fell on the battlefield defending the Fatherland, died of hunger and disease. In the winter of 1942/43. Bishop died of typhus Paisius(Petrov), and the archpriest Andrey Popov was shot in occupied Rzhev by the German invaders. Old Believers Bishop of Kiev-Vinnitsa (Vologzhanin), archpriests Markel Kuznetsov(Kaluga), Lazar Turchenkov(Ivanovo, Rzhev) and others were awarded medals " For valiant labor in the Great Patriotic War", Bishop Alexander(Chunin) Volga-Don and Caucasian - medals " For the defense of Stalingrad" and " For the victory over Germany". Legendary Scout Nikolay Kuznetsov was a native of an Old Believer family ...

Having barely finished school, he worked 16 hours a day as a welder at the Yaroslavl steam locomotive repair plant, where armored trains were produced and repaired, the future archbishop (Vitushkin). The incessant work with welding made the future archbishop lose his sight. At the age of 24, he became disabled of the second group, and only through prayers to the Lord was the young man healed.

Many, very many did not return from the fronts. All four years archbishop Irinarkh(Parfenov) and the bishop Gerontius(Lakomkin) addressed the flock with a patriotic sermon. It was oral, from the pulpit of the temple, and flew in the form of leaflets to the communities liberated and captured by the enemy. Saints Alexander Nevsky, Sergius of Radonezh, Patriarch Hermogenes, Dimitry Donskoy, Minin, Pozharsky - these names, with which the Old Believers are closely connected, inspired to military labor and military feat.

In 1943, changes began in the attitude of the Soviet government to religious associations. Last but not least, this was played by the patriotism shown by the believers during the most difficult period of the war. On September 14, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR adopted a resolution on the formation of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church. Somewhat later, on October 7, the Regulation “ On the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR". These organizations were in charge of the affairs of the New Believers. By order of the General Secretary of the CPSU (b) I. Stalin, an episcopal council was convened and a patriarch was elected. Renovation and Sergian church organizations, as well as a number of smaller religious groups were united under the auspices of the newly formed Moscow Patriarchate.

In 1944, Soviet troops liberated Ukraine, Bessarabia, Bukovina and crossed the pre-war border of the USSR. Belaya Krinitsa ended up on the territory of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, this led to the destruction of this ancient monastery and the devastation of the surrounding Old Believer villages. Metropolitan Belokrinitsky was forced to leave the primacy's cathedra and go to the inner regions of Romania.

In May 1944, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR decided to create another state body - Council for Religious Cults under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, which was entrusted with the task of carrying out communications " between the Government of the USSR and the leaders of religious associations: Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Armenian Gregorian, Old Believer, Greek Catholic, Catholic and Lutheran churches and sectarian organizations on these cults, requiring permission from the Government of the USSR". Thus, the ancient Orthodox Church came under the control of the Council for Religious Affairs.

However, there were also small indulgences in relation to the Old Believer Church. By the end of the war, some priests were released from prison. In 1945, the publication of the RPSTs church calendar was resumed. It was supposed to start the release of the magazine " Bulletin of the Moscow Archdiocese”, However, this plan was not implemented. On September 9, 1945, actually a week after the end of World War II, the first post-war episcopal consecration took place in the Intercession Cathedral in Moscow: a monk (Ivan Mikhailovich Morzhakov) was ordained a bishop in the Chisinau-Odessa diocese.

Page 4 of 6

Part 3
Stalinist repressions during the Second World War

Chapter 17
A few words about Khrushchev's globe

The Great Patriotic War has undergone total mythologization in the last 60 years. The multi-stage and multi-level formation of the black myth of the Stalinist repressions is fully characteristic of the display of the events of the Great Patriotic War as a key stage of Stalin's rule. These processes were started, as we noted, by N.S. Khrushchev on the wave of exposure of the personality cult. The tasks facing Khrushchev did not require deep study by ideologists and their correlation with historical reality or even common sense. So, to the praises of Stalin's genius, he opposed the statement made from the rostrum of the XX Congress of the CPSU that Stalin led the troops across the globe.

“I will allow myself to cite in this connection one characteristic fact that shows how Stalin led the fronts. [...] And I must say that Stalin planned the operations on the globe. (Animation in the hall.) Yes, comrades, he will take the globe and show the front line on it. "

Before us is a document of direct front control, establishing the lines of the offensive and the line of demarcation between the armies of the armies. Take any globe and try to find the settlements indicated in the directive on it.

To complete the picture, I will only note that Stalin did not plan any operations at all - there is a General Staff for this.

From the report "On the cult of personality ..." and the memoirs of Khrushchev originates the widely known today myth that Stalin fell into prostration in the first days of the war, did not lead the country until members of the Politburo came to him with the intention of almost arresting ...

Even with an appeal to the peoples of the USSR in connection with the beginning of the Second World War, Molotov was forced to speak.

In Khrushchev's memoirs, this episode looks like this (Khrushchev faced a serious problem, since he personally could not participate in the events described; he cites them from the words of Beria, already shot for "anti-Stalinism"):

“Beria said the following: when the war began, members of the Politburo gathered at Stalin's. I do not know, all or just a certain group, which most often gathered at Stalin's. Stalin was morally completely depressed and made the following statement: “The war has begun, it is developing catastrophically. Lenin left us the proletarian Soviet state, and we fucked it up. " I literally put it that way. “I,” he says, “refuse the leadership,” and left. He left, got into the car and drove to a nearby dacha. "

According to this legend, Stalin was removed from work for a long period, did not appear in the Kremlin and did not lead anything until the members of the Politburo decided to go to him and ask him to return to governing the country. Khrushchev continues:

“When we arrived at his dacha, I (says Beria) saw in his face that Stalin was very frightened. I believe that Stalin wondered if we had come to arrest him for giving up his role and doing nothing to organize a rebuff to the German invasion? " ...

In the memoirs of Mikoyan complementing the Khrushchev version, we read:

“We arrived at Stalin’s dacha. They found him in a small dining room sitting in an armchair. Seeing us, he seemed to shrink into a chair and looked inquiringly at us. Then he asked: "Why did you come?" He looked wary, somehow strange, no less strange was the question he asked. After all, in fact, he himself had to call us. I had no doubts: he decided that we had come to arrest him.

Molotov said on our behalf that it was necessary to concentrate power in order to put the country on its feet. To do this, create the State Defense Committee. "Who is in charge?" Stalin asked. When Molotov replied that he, Stalin, was in charge, he looked surprised, but did not express any considerations. "

Mikoyan has a big plus - he was personally present at this meeting and does not need references to Beria or anyone else from Stalin's entourage. It would seem that Anastas Ivanovich with personal memories fully confirms the version of N.S. Khrushchev. However, it should be noted that his official memoirs have undergone serious "literary processing" in order to better match the party line. The two-volume collection of documents "1941", prepared by the Democracy Foundation of A. Yakovlev, contains the original text of A. Mikoyan's memoirs:

“We arrived at Stalin’s dacha. They found him in a small dining room sitting in an armchair. He looks at us inquiringly and asks: why did they come? He looked calm, but somehow strange, no less strange was the question he asked. After all, in fact, he himself had to call us.

Molotov, on behalf of us, said that it was necessary to concentrate power, so that everything would be resolved quickly, in order to put the country on its feet. Stalin should be at the head of such a body. "

To the original, as we can see, “just” added a couple of phrases “pressed into a chair” and “I had no doubts: he decided that we had come to arrest him” ...

These statements have become firmly established in modern literature and journalism. Following them, we can conclude that the prostration of Stalin lasted from the first day of the war until the creation of the State Defense Committee, that is, from June 22 to June 30, 1941. Fortunately, the archives have kept for us journals of visits to Stalin's Kremlin office. The duty officer in the waiting room scrupulously noted who, when and what time entered the office and what time he left it.

For comparison, here are the records of the pre-war period:

On March 1, 1941, Stalin received Timoshenko, Zhukov, Kulik, Rychagov, Zhigarev, Goremykin in his office. The reception lasted from 20:05 to 23:00.

The next entry is dated March 8, the reception of Timoshenko, Kulik, Zhukov, Meretskov, Rychagov took place, the reception lasted from 20:05 to 23:30.

On March 17, Stalin heard reports from Timoshenko, Zhukov, Budyonny, Rychagov and Zhigarev from 17:15 to 23:10.

The last reception day in March is the 18th. From 19:05 to 21:10, Stalin listened to Timoshenko, Zhukov, Rychagov and Kulik.

In total, in March 1941, Stalin had 4 reception days in his Kremlin office, and he received up to 6 people a day - exclusively in the evening and even at night.

Let's turn to the logs of visits to Stalin's office in June 1941:

Until June 22, Stalin's reception days were June 3, 6, 9, 11, 17, 19, 20 and 21. The reception was traditionally held in the evening, the maximum number of visitors was in the office on June I - 8 people, and on June 21 - 12 people. This day ended for Stalin, according to the visit log, at 23:00. Directive No. 1 was signed to the Western Border Military Districts.

June 22, on the day of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, I.V. Stalin begins the reception in his Kremlin office at 5:45 am. Until 16:45, he received 28 people.

On June 23, Stalin's reception begins at 3:20 am and continues until 0:55 the next day. During this time, 21 people visited Stalin.

On June 24, 1941, Stalin begins the reception in his Kremlin office at 4:20 pm and continues until 9:30 pm. It accommodates 20 people.

On June 25, the reception starts at 1 am and lasts until 1 am the next day. 29 people passed through Stalin's office.

On June 27 from 16:30 to 2:35 on June 28 he received 29 people, including Mikoyan at 19:30 and Beria at 21:25.

On June 28, the reception was resumed at 19:35, ended at 00:15 on the 29th, “only” 25 people passed through the office, including Beria and Mikoyan.

After that, I.V. Stalin, who, according to Mikoyan's recollections, seemed to him "somehow strange" on the 30th, should not be surprised. It is not clear at what time Stalin slept on these days, with the exception of the 29th, when there are no entries in the book of visits to his office. It should be noted that Stalin's work was not limited to a reception in the Kremlin office, he visited, in particular, the People's Commissariat of Defense, one of these visits ended with a notorious sharp conversation with G. Zhukov.

It is interesting to correlate the descriptions of this episode with Khrushchev's recollections. As we remember, when the war began, Stalin was allegedly completely suppressed and made the following statement: “The war has begun, it is developing catastrophically. Lenin left us the proletarian Soviet state, and we fucked it up. " “I,” he says, “give up leadership,” and left for a nearby dacha. ”

And here is how A. Mikoyan describes Stalin's visit to the People's Commissariat of Defense in his memoirs:

“On the evening of June 29, Molotov, Malenkov, me and Beria gathered in the Kremlin at Stalin's. Detailed data on the situation in Belarus had not yet been received ... Alarmed by this course of affairs, Stalin invited all of us to go to the People's Commissariat of Defense ... ".

“The People's Commissariat was Tymoshenko, Zhukov, Vatutin. Stalin kept calm, asking where the command of the Belarusian Military District was, what kind of connection was there.

Zhukov reported that the connection was lost and for the whole day they could not restore it. [...]

We talked for about half an hour, rather calmly. Then Stalin exploded: what kind of General Staff, what kind of chief of staff, who was so confused, has no connection with the troops, does not represent anyone and does not command anyone [...]

Zhukov, of course, was no less worried about the state of affairs than Stalin, and such a shout from Stalin was insulting to him. And this courageous man burst into tears like a woman and ran into another room. Molotov followed him ...

After 5-10 minutes, Molotov brought outwardly calm Zhukov.

When we left the People's Commissariat, he (Stalin. - Author) said this phrase: "Lenin left us a great legacy, we - his heirs - pissed away all this."

Khrushchev, referring to the words of Beria, from which you can no longer ask, moved this episode to the day the war began, placed the events in Stalin's Kremlin office and added details about leaving for a nearby dacha.

As we can see, there was no prostration either in the first or in the following days of the war. Beria could not tell Khrushchev about prostration in any way, since all these days he visited Stalin's office several times. The same applies to Anastas Mikoyan. The story of Stalin's prostration, refusal of management, the fear that they came to arrest him is a fiction from beginning to end.

As for the allegations about Molotov, who was forced to act instead of Stalin with an appeal to the peoples of the USSR about the beginning of the war. First of all, Stalin, who finished work at 23:00 on June 21 and began at 5 a.m. on 22nd, simply did not have time for such a speech.

Secondly, the necessity of Stalin's speech on the day of the start of the war is usually explained by the fact that the head of state needed to address the people in connection with the tragedy that befell the country. This is the transfer of today's knowledge about the entire period of 1941-1945 to the events of the morning of June 22nd. There is no reason to believe that from the first hours of the war I.V. Stalin could define it as a great tragedy. There was still no complete information about the situation on the border, about the development of the German offensive. The situation could turn in any direction.

Thirdly, the candidacy of Molotov instead of Stalin looks strange only from the point of view of modern politics. Stalin was not public. His radio speeches for the entire period of his reign can be counted on one hand. He was not too eager to speak and just in front of a large audience, party events do not count. Stalin did not need to increase the popularity rating by appeals to the people, and the funds for such an appeal at a time when newspapers were the main carrier of information were clearly lacking. Stalin was not a great orator either. It is enough to listen to his speech on the radio on July 3, 1941.

Military myths about Stalin are of the same nature as myths about Stalinist repression in general. Fiction and historical research that came out after 1956 could not ignore the emerging "party line", which added confusion to the issue of the events of the Second World War.

Further layering of myths led to the formation of a post-perestroika image of the Great Patriotic War, filled with barriers, penal battalions, special officers, former prisoners of war and entourage going to the Gulag, as well as mass exterminated Cossacks and Vlasovites.

A number of serious studies that have appeared literally in recent years are devoted to the topic of mythologizing military history. In this book, we will focus only on those moments that are directly related to the image of Stalinist repressions.

Chapter 18
Deportation of Germans

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, ethnic Germans (the Volga region, Crimea) underwent a massive resettlement from the western regions into the interior of the country. There are no domestic laws or international legal norms regulating such actions, due to which some modern researchers (the same Memorial society or Academician Yakovlev's Democracy Foundation) unambiguously record them as victims of political repression.

As a rule, it is forgotten that the war itself is very different from the usual relations of peacetime, including in the legal field. During the war period, you can find many phenomena that are unacceptable from the point of view of ordinary law and generally accepted morality. Is it legal, is it justified to introduce a 12-hour working day in factories and plants? And what about the mass exploitation of female and child labor in workshops in the period 1941-1945?

It is even strange that Stalin has not yet been charged with this along with other crimes. After all, 12-year-old children also worked at the machine for one factory soup.

Another thing is that without this work, the survival of both children and the country as a whole would be questionable. But the legal formalities would have been fully complied with.

In the conditions of war, incredible, from the point of view of a peaceful society, changes take place. The right of the personal fades into the background, yielding to the requirements of the general. The basic human right - the right to life - is also called into question. The state can require everyone to give their lives to save the lives of many others.

Sometimes giving your life is required in a senseless attack on an unnamed skyscraper. And only decades later, it turns out that this completely "senseless" attack on foot on machine guns, repeated several times, was part of the offensive plan, which will occur 300 kilometers away and will be successful due to the fact that the attack fettered the enemy forces. Thousands of lives will be saved at the cost of hundreds - such is the arithmetic of war.

Wartime deportations were not a Soviet invention. The closest analogue from Russian history is the resettlement of Russian Germans from the front-line zone of the First World War. The campaign that took place in 1914 has little to do with modern understanding of humanism. Suffice it to mention that the Germans were deported at their own expense. Further, in 1915, followed by decrees "On the elimination of land ownership of subjects and immigrants from hostile states" and "On the liquidation of enterprises with the participation of German capital."

During the Second World War, expulsions, deportations and arrests were applied to representatives of the belligerent states or natives of them throughout Europe. Britain, having arrested the "unwanted elements", deported them to Canada. Belgium and France isolated in camps all refugees and emigrants from Germany, along with citizens of the Third Reich. The Netherlands took similar measures.

The most famous ethnic deportation in the history of World War II was carried out in 1942 by the United States. February 19, 1942 F. D. Roosevelt signed an emergency decree according to which all ethnic Japanese living in the United States (120 thousand people) were placed in ten specially created concentration camps, from where they were released only in 1946-1947 and sent, as we would call it, "for special settlement." ... The "special legal status" was removed from them only in 1952.

Deportation or restriction of freedom, being extrajudicial repression and illegal, from the point of view of peaceful law, measure, nevertheless, was actively used by all countries throughout the conflicts of the 20th century. In the modern world, the situation has not changed much. In the British educational film "Threads" (Threads, 1984), which demonstrates one of the scenarios for the start of a thermonuclear war, one of the natural measures of the pre-war period is explained - the preventive arrest of all unreliable elements in the country. How broadly this concept is interpreted can be inferred from the fact that they include participants in anti-war demonstrations.

In the Soviet Union of 1941, the evictions of Germans from the western regions began from the first days of the war, however, due to the rapid advance of the Nazi troops, this campaign was not fully completed, many ethnic Germans of Belarus and Ukraine fell under occupation.

The first mass resettlement was the deportation of the Crimean Germans, which began on August 20, 1941. Interestingly, it was carried out under the pretext of evacuation in connection with the approaching front line. More than 30 thousand people were taken by sea through the Kerch Strait to the Krasnodar Territory, and from there to Kazakhstan.

The most massive operation to resettle Soviet Germans took place in September - November 1941. The Volga Germans (446,480 people) were evicted, the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was liquidated. The Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 28, 1941 "On the resettlement of Germans living in the Volga region" said:

“According to reliable data obtained by the military authorities, among the German population living in the Volga region, there are thousands and tens of thousands of saboteurs and spies, who, on a signal from Germany, are to make explosions in the areas inhabited by the Volga region Germans. None of the Germans living in the Volga region reported to the Soviet authorities about the presence of such a large number of saboteurs and spies among the Volga Germans, therefore, the German population of the Volga regions hides in their midst the enemies of the Soviet people and Soviet power. In the event that acts of sabotage, initiated at the behest of Germany by German saboteurs and spies in the republic of the Volga Germans and adjacent regions, take place, and bloodshed will take place.

In order to avoid such undesirable phenomena and to prevent serious bloodsheds, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR recognized it necessary to relocate the entire German population living in the Volga region to other areas so that the resettled people would be allotted land and so that they would receive state assistance in settling in new areas.

For resettlement, areas of the Novosibirsk, Omsk regions, Altai Territory, Kazakhstan and other neighboring areas, abounding with arable land, have been allocated. In this regard, the State Defense Committee was ordered to urgently resettle all the Germans of the Volga region and endow the resettled Germans of the Volga region with land and lands in new areas. "

How substantiated are the suspicions of hiding thousands of saboteurs by the population of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Volga Germans? There is still no answer to this question. Due to the established practice of rejecting all accusations of the Soviet government as far-fetched, studies in this direction were simply not carried out. On the one hand, the Great Patriotic War really began for the USSR with a wave of acts of sabotage that disrupted communications, railroad communications, etc., and not all such excesses can be attributed to sabotage groups just abandoned from Germany. On the other hand, it turns out that during the deportation of the Soviet Germans, thousands of hypothetical accomplices of the enemy were simply deported with the bulk of the population?

Logic suggests that the accusations of the Volga Germans were only a pretext for the standard procedure of isolation or deportation of the war period. Earlier, the Crimean Germans were resettled without any charges, and these are clearly elements of one process. But the unpleasant figure of silence in this case is still present.

We are not talking here about violating the presumption of innocence, the Soviet Germans do not need to prove that they did not commit crimes. It would be nice for us, for a comprehensive understanding of the problem, to answer this question for ourselves.

In the same period, in the western regions of the USSR, there was a mass evacuation of the population and industrial enterprises beyond the Urals and to Central Asia. Hundreds of thousands of people stormed the retreating echelons in the hope of escaping the bombing and fleeing away from the front line. In 1941-1942, a total of 17 million people were evacuated, 60-70 million fell under occupation.

The conditions in which the evacuation took place can be imagined from the article "War and evacuation in the USSR 1941 -

1942 " Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences G.A. Kumaneva. In particular, he cites the memoirs of the first secretary of the Chelyabinsk regional committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) N.S. Patolicheva:

“It happened that people were driving in open gondola cars or on platforms. It would be good if there was a tarp with which to hide from the rain. Sometimes this was not the case. There are also machines or materials, some of the things of the evacuees. Exactly something. People were fleeing from the invasion of barbarians, and, of course, there was no time for things. In a more favorable environment, two or three covered carriages were allocated for women with children. Instead of 36 people, 80-100 were packed in them. Nobody, of course, grumbled - the grief united the people, whose shelter had been seized by the Nazis. "

Among the rest of those evacuated into the interior of the country were the deported Soviet Germans. It is unlikely that the conditions of their transportation were very different from the conditions in which all the others were selected from the front-line zone. One undoubted plus in their situation was nevertheless present - they were taken in an organized manner to a new place of residence, while thousands and thousands of Soviet people were forced by hook or by crook to seek a place in the echelons departing to the east.

Chapter 19
GULAG during the Second World War

In 1941, the GULAG of the NKVD was in charge of labor camps (ITL), correctional labor colonies (ITK), and prisons. Also, under the Gulag in 1940, BIRs were formed - the Bureau of Correctional Works, in charge of the execution of sentences under the article "truancy". These convicts, although formally and were under the jurisdiction of the Main Directorate, were not nevertheless prisoners, serving their sentences at the place of work with withholding 25 percent of their earnings. To avoid further confusion, they should not be attributed to the Gulag contingent on a par, for example, with those convicted under the same article to six months' imprisonment for unauthorized abandonment of the enterprise.

In the camps and colonies of the Gulag, according to V. Zemskov, in 1941 there were 1 929 729 people, in prisons - 487 739 people (at the beginning of the year). In 1942, the number of prisoners in camps and colonies was reduced - to 1,777,043 people. The most indicative is the twofold reduction of prisoners in prisons during 1941 - in July their number dropped to 216,223 people.

On July 12 and November 24, 1941, decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were issued on the early release of certain categories of prisoners, with the transfer of persons of draft age to the Red Army. In accordance with the decrees, 420 thousand prisoners were released, including those convicted of truancy (with serving a sentence in prisons), domestic and minor official and economic crimes.

In the period 1942-1943, early release of another 157 thousand people was carried out, all in all, during the Second World War, 975 thousand prisoners were transferred to the Red Army (including those released after serving their sentences). For military exploits displayed on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, former GULAG prisoners Breusov, Efimov, Otstavnoe, Sergeant and others were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

In 1942, by a decree of the State Defense Committee (April 11, 1942), conscription for military service, including special settlers, was allowed. The order of the NKVD of the USSR of October 22 established the norm on the restoration of civil rights and deregistration not only of the special settlers called up into the army, but also of their family members. More than 60 thousand people, who were in special settlements before the war, were drafted into the ranks of the Red Army and construction battalions.

Contrary to popular belief, no specific “black” units were formed from the early released GULAG prisoners and special settlers, just as they were not sent straight to the penal battalions. If only for the reason that penal battalions and companies appeared in the Red Army only in July 1942, and the first and most massive wave of liberations fell on 1941. Former prisoners entered either regular combat units or specialty production.

The aforementioned GKO decree of April 11, 1942 on conscription into the army, including special settlers, says: front of rifle divisions, as well as the formation of tank and other special units. "

In contrast to the prisoners of the indicated categories, who did not pose a serious social danger, the situation was completely different with those convicted of grave and especially grave crimes. Already on June 22, 1941, a joint directive of the NKVD of the USSR and the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR No. 221 was adopted, ordering to stop the release of bandits, repeat offenders and other dangerous criminals from places of detention (even after serving a sentence), including those convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes under Article 58 of the Criminal Code ... It was ordered to take this category under increased protection, to stop using it at work without escorting.

In this regard, V. Zemskov notes: “During the war in the Gulag, the number of those convicted of counter-revolutionary and other especially dangerous crimes increased by more than 1.5 times. [...] The total number of those detained with release before December 1, 1944 was about 26 thousand people. In addition, about 60 thousand people who had ended their term of imprisonment were forcibly detained at the camps for "free employment."

The popular topic in mass culture today about the mass of "thieves" on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, as we can see, is completely unfounded. First of all, about a million former prisoners who passed the camps were transferred to the ranks of the Red Army during the entire war, while the number of the active army in 1944 was 6.7 million people (the total composition of the army and navy by the end of the war was 12,839,800 people).

The "contingent of the GULAG" in the troops was thus less than 1/6.

The bulk of the prisoners released and transferred to the Red Army were sentenced for petty crimes (in particular, for absenteeism) for short periods of time and could not establish "camp order" in the units. Particularly dangerous criminals, including recidivist criminals, were not subject to release and transfer to the troops, like political prisoners. The stories that serve as the leitmotif of modern films about the Great Patriotic War, where a good "political" prisoner comes into confrontation with a mass lesson in an echelon going to the front, are pure, uncomplicated fiction. Neither one nor the other could be in the echelon.

Separately, it should be noted the morale of the GULAG prisoners during the Great Patriotic War. “In the reports of the GULAG on the mood of the prisoners, it was noted that only an insignificant part of them hoped to be released with the help of the Nazis,” V. Zemskov notes in his work. - The majority of them were dominated by patriotic sentiments.

In 1944, labor competition covered 95% of the working prisoners of the Gulag, the number of "refuseniks" from work in comparison with 1940 decreased five times and amounted to only 0.25% of the total number of able-bodied prisoners. "

Chapter 20
Stalin, commissars and modern democrats

As is known from the late Soviet and post-Soviet mythology, the commanders of the Red Army were distinguished by their incompetence, the commissars - by disregard for human life, the soldiers - by a general unwillingness to fight for the regime that brought them so much evil.

The officers were massively repressed before the war by Stalin. The commissars were inherently brutal. The soldiers, whose families were subjected to persecution, repression and Bolshevik experiments for long 24 years, hated Stalin and the Soviet system with all their hearts.

Naturally, order in the troops under these conditions could only be maintained by mass terror. Barrage detachments allocated for this purpose from the ranks of the NKVD lined up behind the ranks of the advancing armies and fired in the back from Maxim machine guns. This image is three-dimensional traced, for example, in the iconic for its time film "Enemy at the Gates" directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (2001).

It is understood that the NKVD troops were recruited from some completely different people, fundamentally different from ordinary Soviet ones.

These statements are woven into such a tight tangle of myths that it is hardly rational to separate them. Their main feature is still the demonic figure of Stalin, the image of Stalinist repressions and their continuation on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. In the following chapters, we will consider their components in more detail.

Analyzing the defeat of 1941, Vadim Belotserkovsky, an analyst with Novaya Gazeta and a correspondent for Radio Liberty, notes in his article “War. Hitler. Stalin ":

“The defeat was the result of the rottenness of the Stalinist dictatorial regime. The military leaders and all officials were paralyzed by the fear of responsibility towards Stalin ...

A weighty reason for the defeat was probably the fact that in 1937-1938 Stalin's "strong hand" knocked out more than 70 percent of the top and middle command personnel, including the most talented commanders ...

The third most important reason for German victories is the hardest for leavened patriots to admit. It is that the huge mass of the population of the Soviet Union had no desire to fight for the regime that brought them so much suffering. Indisputable proof of this is the more than two million soldiers who surrendered in the first two or three months of the war. History did not know this, if you do not climb into hoary antiquity!

No less striking proof is the creation of barrage detachments in the summer of 1941, which were supposed to shoot at the retreating soldiers. The fact is as unique as the mass surrender. "

Here we see the entire array of statements, set out literally in a couple of paragraphs. There are no commissars in it, however, and in other works they appear as personified expressions of the "putrid" Stalinist regime of the Second World War, its visible embodiment at the front.

It is interesting that the descriptions of this regime in the modern democratic press practically coincide with the propaganda from the fascist leaflets of the Great Patriotic War. The most famous of them is "Beat the Jew - the political instructor, the muzzle asks for a brick!" just portrayed the commissar, hiding with a revolver behind the backs of the soldiers, whom he drives into the attack. “Commissars and political instructors are forcing you to resist senselessly,” reads the text of the leaflet. - Drive the commissars and go to us! "

This is an exceptional example, by no means all Hitler's leaflets were so stupidly straightforward. Much attention was paid to the "enlightenment" of the Red Army soldiers about the essence of the regime, the commissars were only a close and visible manifestation of it. Much more instructive is the leaflet signed by the Russian Committee: ROA:

“Friends and brothers!

In 1932, the Judo-Bolshevik government drove the best peasants into exile, camps and prisons, and the rest of the peasantry was herded into collective farms. There was still a lot of bread in the country. Stalin and his solicitors sent convoys all over Russia, they pumped out bread from deep points and took it to the cities on the square, fenced off the walls from sacks of grain on a large square and poured bread there. It rained, bread was lost in tens of thousands of tons, and the GPU was looking for the culprits.

For the economic counterrevolution, they drove into prisons "scapegoats", and the culprits were: Stalin himself and the Jews.

Have you, comrades, forgotten this? No! You remember this well and are in solidarity with me, but your trouble is that Stalin knows how to keep you at bay and sends you to die for the system you hate. "

If we discard the Jewish question, which is painful for fascist propaganda, is it not surprisingly familiar words? Another leaflet explains to the soldiers of the Red Army that the offensive of the Red Army is a temporary phenomenon, achieved at the cost of incredible losses. “The Germans are very strong and very far from exhaustion. They do not attack just because it is more profitable for them to have the Red Army attack and incur huge losses. " It also explains the reason why the Soviet regime is nevertheless driving the soldiers into the offensive: “Stalin, throwing his regiments over and over again on the German defense line, disregarding any losses, pursues not military, but political goals. The fact is that Stalin does not need a victory over the Germans in general, but he needs a victory in which he and his clique will preserve their dominance. "

Needless to say, reading in 2005 in the newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets" an article by Alexander Minkin "Whose Victory?"

"We won. On reflection, you understand: Stalin won. He didn't even lose a hair from his head, neither barbecue, nor "Khvanchkara", nor "Herzegovina-Flor" disappeared from the ration. He didn't care about the millions who died (including his own son). This is certain; and he himself confirmed this: to the millions who died in the war with Hitler, he added our prisoners, now killed in their native concentration camps. There was such a term "displaced persons" - almost enemies of the people.

On account of Stalin ... 30,000,000 victims of the war, another 20-30 million - camps and executions. Total: more than 60 million. Our military sacrifices are entirely on Stalin's account. "

You see how easy it is to withdraw 60 million victims of Stalinism. It is enough to declare that all the victims of the Great Patriotic War are on his account. The Nazis have nothing to do with it.

But even this is still in bloom. The next ROA leaflet (1943, Smolensk, personally signed by the "Chairman of the Russian Committee, Lieutenant General" A. Vlasov) says:

“The Russian people are an equal member of the family of free peoples of New Europe!

The Russian people should know the truth about what awaits them after the overthrow of Stalin's rule and the establishment of peace. The Bolsheviks, in order to force the Russian people to fight for other people's interests, falsely assert that Germany is bringing slavery to the peoples of the USSR ...

What is the truth about New Europe, which Great Germany seeks to build together with other peoples? .. All the peoples of Europe are members of one big family. In one of his speeches in the German Reichstag, the leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, said:

“How many worries would humanity, and especially the peoples of Europe, have avoided if natural, self-evident life principles were respected in the political structure of modern living space, as well as in economic cooperation. Compliance with these principles seems to me absolutely necessary if we want to achieve greater results in the future than we do now. First of all, this applies to Europe. The peoples of Europe are one family ”...

There is only one choice - either the European family of free, equal peoples, or slavery under the rule of Stalin. "

70 years ago, the Soviet people did not believe in the promises of a common European home (they believed them later, in the late 80s and early 90s). Too obviously horrible was this "family of equal peoples" who came to Soviet soil with execution ditches, ubiquitous gallows and villages burned to the ground. Goebbels and Vlasov tried in vain, what was happening was obvious to a Soviet person.

Today it is again not obvious to A. Minkin. In the article already cited, he asks:

“What if it would have been better if not Stalin defeated Hitler, but Hitler - Stalin?

It wasn't Germany that died in 1945. Fascism died.

Likewise: it would not be Russia that would die, but the regime. Stalinism.

Maybe it would be better if Nazi Germany defeated the USSR in 1945. Better yet - in 1941! We would not have lost our either 22 or 30 million people. And this is not counting the post-war "Beria" millions.

We liberated Germany. Maybe it would be better to free us?

Previously, such defeatist reasoning (if it did arise) was immediately interrupted by a spiritual protest: no! Better Stalin than Hitler's thousand-year slavery!

It is a myth. This is a false choice made by propaganda. "

The study of fascist leaflets during the Great Patriotic War is very instructive. We must pay tribute to the Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his works find admirers to this day, and admirers in completely unexpected places. It seems that it is not for nothing that in one of his interviews, the rector of the Russian State Humanitarian University, a well-known democrat of the first wave, Yuri Afanasyev, said: "Fascism is hypertrophied liberalism."

The incompetence of the commanders of the Red Army, who "filled up the enemy with corpses", is explained by the Stalinist repressions, during which all talented officers were destroyed. The tone of this campaign, as usual, was set by N.S. Khrushchev from the rostrum of the XX Congress:

“Very grave consequences, especially for the initial period of the war, were also caused by the fact that during 1937-1941, as a result of Stalin's suspicion, on slanderous accusations, numerous cadres of army commanders and political workers were exterminated. Over the years, several layers of command cadres were repressed, starting literally from the company and battalion to the highest army centers, including those command cadres who had gained some experience of waging war in Spain and the Far East were almost completely destroyed. "

For material confirmation of these words, the statements of V. Anfilov, a professor at MGIMO, previously a senior researcher of the General Staff, published in the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda on June 22, 1988, are usually issued. writes:

“The last check carried out by an infantry inspector,” said Lieutenant General V. Kurdyumov, the head of the combat training department at a meeting in December 1940, “showed that out of 225 regimental commanders involved in the training, only 25 people turned out to have graduated from military schools, the remaining 200 people are people who graduated from the courses of junior lieutenants and came from the reserve. "

The incident happened in 1993, when the materials of the meeting were declassified and published, to which V. Anfilov refers. The modern historian I. Pykhalov notes that if you look at the transcript of the meeting of the highest command and political staff of the Red Army held on December 23 - 31, 1940, it turns out that Lieutenant General V.N. Kurdyumov said nothing of the kind. If we take the official data of the Main Directorate of the Red Army Personnel, it turns out that as of January 1, 1941, out of 1,833 regiment commanders, 14% graduated from military academies, 60% from military schools, and only 26% had an accelerated military education.

The writer Viktor Rezun (Suvorov) is deservedly considered a treasure trove of myths on this topic. Here are the data of speeches, and officers who had an accelerated training course for junior lieutenants, and it is not clear where they came from in the first period of the war, corps corps and army commanders - after all, by that time general ranks had been introduced in the Red Army. Although what does "not understand" mean? Naturally, with the beginning of the war, they were released from the camps in order to somehow compensate for the consequences of the repressions of the command staff of the Red Army.

The "historian", in accordance with the method of research adopted by him, "forgets" that the army of the USSR was rapidly growing. From the 30s to the beginning of the 40s, its number increased several times. The authoritative military historian M. Meltyukhov in the study “Stalin's Lost Chance. The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Europe: 1939-1941 "Despite the expansion of the network of military educational institutions, it was not possible to significantly increase the educational level of command personnel, since in the conditions of its shortage, reserve officers had to be used, mostly without higher military education. Therefore, the number of officers with higher and secondary military education decreased from 79.5% on January 1, 1937 to 63% on January 1, 1941.

True, in absolute terms, with an increase in the officer corps by 2.8 times, the number of officers with higher and secondary military education increased by 2.2 times - from 164,309 to 385,136 people. "

The "researcher" also forgets about the practice of introducing general ranks in the Red Army in 1940. Everything, however, is much more prosaic and has nothing to do with Stalinist repressions. The introduction of new titles did not mean automatic renaming in accordance with the position held. The assignment of general ranks was carried out personally, the decision on each issue was made by a special commission - the commission of the Main Military Council of the Red Army on the nomination of candidates for the assignment of military ranks. Moreover, individual commanders were denied the assignment of a general's rank.

The reasons for the appearance on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War of officers with archaic ranks were, therefore, not at all the GULAG camps (at most, not only the GULAG camps), but the fact that they did not disappear anywhere at the beginning of the Second World War.

"Research" by Viktor Suvorov is a separate large topic, a massive layer of anti-Soviet ideology. Unfortunately, here we cannot dwell on them in more detail, although some of its methods of operation are worth noting for the future. For all their internal illogicality, they nevertheless have an amazing effect on the masses. What is even worth the thesis about offensive weapons and the Soviet tank industry: why did the USSR mass-produce wheeled tanks? After all, it was impossible to use them inside the country, we did not have roads. It is clear that Stalin was targeting the German autobahns.

Even if we ignore the fact that the Autobahns in Germany appeared later than wheeled tanks in the USSR, it remains unclear why the Soviet Union, among other things, mass-produced wheeled vehicles, wheeled tractors and even wheeled bicycles. After all, we had no roads.

Let us return to the assessment of the scale of the repressions in the Red Army in the 1930s and 1940s, and try to find out what impact they had on the combat capability of the army on the eve of the war. Fortunately, the archives open to researchers make it possible to assess not only the scale of the pre-war purges in the army, but also the reasons that gave rise to them.

I. Pykhalov notes the confusion that developed around the concept of purges in the Red Army in 1930-1940. Some authors, speaking about tens of thousands of officers repressed during this period, do not take into account their further fate. Colonel-General D. Volkogonov claims that “according to available data, from May 1937 to September 1938, that is, within a year and a half, 36,761 people were repressed in the army, and more than 3 thousand in the navy. " However, he honestly notes that "some of them, however, were only fired from the Red Army." In other publications, such clarifications are not found. Nevertheless, I. Pykhalov emphasizes, it is already obvious that "the number of" repressed "includes not only those who were shot or at least arrested, but also those who were simply dismissed from the army."

The question of the reasons for the purges in the Red Army stands apart; if it is considered, it is only in the specialized literature. An idea of ​​them is given by the following document, which is also cited by I. Pykhalov:

"REFERENCE

Over the past five years (from 1934 to October 25, 1939), the following number of command personnel were annually dismissed from the personnel of the Red Army:

In 1934, 6,596 people were dismissed, or 5.9% of the payroll, of which:

a) for drunkenness and moral decay - 1513;

b) due to illness, disability, death, etc. - 4604;

c) as arrested and convicted - 479. In total - 6596.

In 1935, 8,560 people were dismissed, or 7.2% of the payroll, of which:

a) for political and moral reasons, official inconsistency, at will, etc. - 6719;

b) due to illness and death - 1492;

c) as convicted - 349. In total - 8560;

In 1936, 4918 people were dismissed, or 3.9% of the payroll, of which:

a) for drunkenness and political and moral inconsistency - 1942;

b) due to illness, disability and death - 1937;

c) for political reasons (expulsion from the party) - 782;

d) as arrested and convicted - 257. In total - 4918.

In 1937, 18 658 people were dismissed, or 13.6% of the payroll, of which:

a) for political reasons (expulsion from the party, connection with the enemies of the people) - 11,104;

b) arrested - 4474;

c) for drunkenness and moral decay - 1139;

d) due to illness, disability, death - 1941.

In total - 18 658.

In 1938, 16,362 people were dismissed, or 11.3% of the payroll, of which:

a) for political reasons - expelled from the CPSU (b), who, according to the directive of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b), were subject to dismissal from the Red Army and for communication with the conspirators - 3580;

b) foreigners (Latvians - 717, Poles - 1099, Germans - 620, Estonians - 312, Koreans, Lithuanians and others), natives of abroad and those associated with it, who were dismissed in accordance with the directive of the People's Commissar of Defense of 24.6.1938 No. 200 / sh ... - 4138;

c) arrested - 5032;

d) for drunkenness, waste, embezzlement, moral decay - 2671;

e) due to illness, disability, death - 941.

In total - 16 362.

In 1939, at 25.10, 1691 people were dismissed, or 0.6% of the payroll, of which:

a) for political reasons (expulsion from the party, connection with the conspirators) - 277;

b) arrested - 67;

c) for drunkenness and moral decay - 197;

d) due to illness, disability - 725;

e) excluded for death - 425.

The total number of those laid off for 6 years is 56 785 people.

They were dismissed in total in 1937 and 1938. - 35,020 people, of which:

a) natural loss (dead, dismissed due to illness, disability, drunkards, etc.) is 6692, or 19.1% of the number of dismissed;

b) arrested - 9506, or 27.2% of the number of those dismissed;

c) those dismissed for political reasons (expelled from the AUCP (b) - according to the directive of the Central Committee of the AUCP (b) - 14,684, or 41.9% of the dismissed;

d) foreigners dismissed by the directive of the People's Commissar of Defense - 4138 people, or 11.8% of those dismissed.

Thus, in 1938, 7,718 people were dismissed by the directive of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the People's Commissar of Defense, or 41% of those dismissed in 1938.

Along with clearing the army of hostile elements, part of the command personnel was dismissed for unreasonable reasons. After reinstatement in the party and the establishment of the unjustified dismissal, 6,650 people were returned to the Red Army, mainly captains, senior lieutenants, lieutenants and their peers, accounting for 62% of this number.

In place of the dismissed, verified cadres came to the army from the reserve of 8154 people, from one-year-olds - 2572 people, from the political staff of the reserve - 4000 people, which covers the number of dismissed.

The dismissal in 1939 is due to the natural attrition and cleaning of the army from drunks, whom the People's Commissar of Defense, by his order of December 28, 1938, demands to be mercilessly expelled from the Red Army.

Thus, in two years (1937 and 1938), the army was seriously cleared of politically hostile elements, drunks and foreigners who did not inspire political confidence.

As a result, we have a much stronger political and moral state. The rise of discipline, the rapid advancement of cadres, promotion in military ranks, as well as an increase in salaries of maintenance raised the interest and confidence of cadres and<обусловили>high political upsurge in the Red Army, shown in practice in the historic victories in the area of ​​Lake Khasan and the r. Khalkhin-Gol, for the distinction in which the Government awarded 96 people with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and 23,728 people with orders and medals.

As we can see, by no means all servicemen were dismissed for political reasons, far from all were arrested, from among those illegally accused in 1939, 6,650 people were reinstated in the party and returned to the Red Army. A considerable part of the officer corps was dismissed (and, apparently, partially convicted) for service inconsistency, drunkenness, moral decay, embezzlement, and embezzlement.

A certain idea of ​​the scale of the problem is given by an excerpt from the order of the People's Commissar of Defense K.E. Voroshilov No. 0219 of December 28, 1938 on the fight against drunkenness in the Red Army:

“Here are some examples of the most serious crimes committed in a drunken state by people who, due to a misunderstanding, are dressed in military uniform. On October 15, in Vladivostok, four lieutenants, who were drunk to the point of losing their human appearance, staged a riot in a restaurant, opened fire and wounded two citizens. On September 18, two lieutenants of the railway regiment under the same circumstances in a restaurant, having quarreled among themselves, shot themselves. A political instructor of one of the units of the 3rd rifle division, a drunkard and a brawler, fraudulently collected 425 rubles from junior commanders, stole a watch and a revolver and deserted from the unit, and a few days later he raped and killed a 13-year-old girl.

Military historian I. Meltyukhov gives cautious assessments of the scale of the purges in the Red Army. In the cited study “Stalin's Lost Chance. The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Europe: 1939-1941 (Documents, Facts, Judgments) "he notes:

“The greatest disagreement was caused by the question of the scale of repression in the Red Army. So, V.S. Koval believes that the entire officer corps died, and L.A. Kirchner believes that only 50% of the officers were repressed. According to V.G. Klevtsov, in 1937-1938. 35.2 thousand officers were physically destroyed. YES. Volkogonov and D.M. The projector writes about 40 thousand repressed, A.M. Samsonov - about 43 thousand, N.M. Ramanichev - about 44 thousand, Yu.A. Bitter - about 48 773, G.A. Kumanev increases this figure to 50 thousand, and A.N. Yakovlev - up to 70 thousand

In the book of V.N. Rapoport and Yu.A. Geller says about 100 thousand officers, however, personal information is provided only about 651 repressed officers, who accounted for 64.8% of the highest command personnel as of January 1, 1937. Souvenirov first published a list of 749 people, and then expanded it to 1,669 officers who died in 1936-1941. There is still no information about the rest of the repressed. "

The problem with the overall assessment of the number of victims of repression, as we can see, is completely repeated in the question of the Stalinist purges in the Red Army. The number of repressed inevitably increases from author to author. However, attempts to create lists of victims lead to the emergence of databases with a negligible number of names in comparison with the previously announced data.

The historian in his research notes the inadmissibility of mixing the concepts of “dismissed” and “repressed” and makes, like Zemskov, an attempt to introduce a definition of the concept of “repression”. These, according to Meltyukhov, should include only those arrested and dismissed for political reasons. True, he notes, officers were arrested for various crimes, which should also be taken into account.

Speaking about the quantitative assessment of repressions in the Red Army, I. Meltyukhov notes: "A.T. Ukolov and V.I. Ivkin, on the basis of data from the judicial authorities of the Red Army, note that in 1937-1939. approximately 8,624 people were convicted of political crimes, indicating that it is hardly worth counting those convicted of criminal and moral offenses among the repressed. In his latest research, O.F. Souvenirov writes about 1634 dead and about 3682 convicted by military tribunals in 1936-1941. for counter-revolutionary crimes to officers.

So far, the limited source base does not allow to unambiguously resolve this key issue. Available materials show that in 1937-1939. more than 45 thousand people were dismissed from the armed forces (36 898 in the ground forces, 5616 in the air force and over 3 thousand in the navy). However, the repressed include only those dismissed for ties with the conspirators and on ethnic grounds, as well as those arrested for political reasons. But, unfortunately, the exact data on the reasons for the layoffs are still not known for sure. "

I. Meltyukhov is extremely cautious in assessing the consequences of the purges in the Red Army:

“Many authors believe that the repressions affected the level of military scientific developments and this led to the rejection of many provisions of military theory developed in the late 1920s and 1930s. So, D.M. Proektor believes that the repressions led to the abandonment of the theory of "deep offensive operation", to which they returned only in 1940. The author not only does not explain why this turn occurred, but does not provide any evidence that it took place at all. After all, if this were really so, then the army would receive new military regulations and instructions, radically different from those adopted before 1937 [...]

L.A. Kirchner argues that the rejection of the theory of "deep operation" led to a hypertrophied position of the cavalry in the Red Army. But from these positions, the reduction of cavalry from 32 cavalry divisions on January 1, 1937 to 26 on January 1, 1939 is completely inexplicable.Moreover, by the beginning of the war there were only 13 cavalry divisions in the Red Army, allegations of the prevalence of cavalry look somewhat strange.

Other authors in support of their point of view provide only general reasoning. The most serious argument is the indication that the military-scientific works of "enemies of the people" were withdrawn from libraries. However, one should not forget that the troops are trained not according to the works of individual military leaders, even if they are brilliant, but according to military regulations and instructions, which have not been canceled. [...] "

“A comprehensive examination of studies on the issue of repressions in the Red Army shows that the widespread version of their catastrophic consequences for the army has not been proven and requires further careful study,” the historian sums up.

The most difficult, from the point of view of evidence (both on the one and on the other), is the thesis put forward by propagandists that "the huge mass of the population of the Soviet Union had no desire to fight for the regime that brought them so much suffering." For apologists of the topic of hundreds of millions of victims of Stalinist repressions, it seems self-evident:

“We are united by common sacrifices. As in almost every Russian family someone died during the Great Patriotic War, so in almost every Russian family someone suffered from the Great Terror, - Novaya Gazeta reports in its February 21, 2008 issue.

“There is practically not a single family in Russia that has not suffered from the Stalinist repressions. According to historical documents, millions of people went through the GULAG system, millions died in camps and special settlements, about a million were executed, "- echoed her in June 2008, the intelligentsia in an appeal for the creation of a national memorial to the victims of Stalinist repressions. Among those who signed it were poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina, ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev, writers Daniil Granin, Boris Strugatsky, actor Yuri Solomin.

And again let us pay attention to the formulation of the question.

The first quote easily equates the Stalinist repressions with the tragedy of the Great Patriotic War. The second contains the traditional statement about millions, millions and millions - those executed, who went through the GULAG, etc. No attempt is made to divide the entire mass of prisoners, to single out at least those convicted under Article 58 (although this will not be entirely accurate, nevertheless). Unfortunately, in recent years this technique has been used so often (better to say, everywhere) that it should apparently be considered used deliberately.

If the repressions have touched every family, every person, there can be no doubt about the brutality of society. Confirmation is the numerous "camp prose", memoirs of the intelligentsia, books by A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, followed by A. Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, and similar ones telling about the Stalinist period.

How all the years of Stalin's rule managed to hide this bitterness, presenting the world with the blissful picture of the film "Volga, Volga" is a separate question. However, he also receives authoritative answers: in the country there was a classic, according to Orwell, doublethink (everyone knew everything, but did not notice). Moreover, people were intimidated by terror.

Yegor Gaidar writes in an article for the New Times magazine: “The threat of reprisals forces tens of millions of people who are not in the Gulag ... provision of life, it can be withdrawn that they cannot even dream of rights and freedoms and perceive this as an inevitable reality. "

These statements already contradict the reaction of the delegates of the 20th Congress of the CPSU to the report by N.S. Khrushchev. It is scrupulously indicated in the transcript. People who allegedly existed all previous years in fear of terror are sincerely amazed and indignant at the “facts” that the First Secretary reads out. But we are not talking about ordinary citizens, they are party members, delegates to the central party body. Could they be in fear and at the same time not be aware of its existence?

The bias in the vision of the events of the Stalinist period is very much due to the formation of his image precisely through the perception of events by the intelligentsia. First, through "camp prose", then, already in the late Soviet period, under the influence of NS's revelations. Khrushchev. Millions sat in the Gulag, only a few described their misadventures, but it was their point of view that prevailed in public opinion. It is difficult to say what those events would look like today if someone decided to experiment with the publication of memories of people representing a more or less representative sample of the "camp population" of the 1930s-1940s. Obviously, along with the reflection of the intelligentsia, we would have read many interesting lines from authors who hold different positions.

We are not necessarily talking about criminals for whom the "zone" is their home, although they should not be discounted either. The author knows the opinions of people who, having been repressed in the Stalinist period on the basis of accusations that today would accurately designate as "political", did not consider themselves political prisoners or repressed (as in the case of dispossession, for example). Objectively examining the life they lived, they paid tribute to the Soviet government, which provided housing, medicine, education and position in society for their children.

The situation was similar with the representation of the processes taking place in society. And here the main tone in the post-Stalinist period was set by the "ruler of thoughts" intelligentsia - with articles, literature, and subsequently television broadcasts. A peasant or worker with eight grades of education, as a rule, did not participate in this process, and his voice practically did not survive.

We see the image of the Stalinist period through the prism of a limited number of authors and experts who hardly represent a representative cut of the society of that time.

Not wanting to offend anyone, I would nevertheless note an unpleasant feature of the domestic "educated stratum", which is subject to a kind of intellectual "herd feeling" - much larger than the bulk of the population. Moreover, their potential is directed, as a rule, in a destructive channel: the intelligentsia creatively destroyed the cult of personality in the Khrushchev "thaw", in the Brezhnev stagnation in the kitchens it lamented the horrors of the regime. Having risen with Gorbachev, she began to violently destroy the Soviet Union. It did not stop even when nothing remained of the USSR, the phrase that was born at that time "They were aiming at communism, but ended up in Russia" is indicative. Since the early 2000s, these people have been lamenting again. One wonders if they can, just in case, do something else?

Despite the objective difficulties, we will make an attempt to analyze the mood of Soviet society in the pre-war period. First of all, let's try to understand the attitude of people to the dominant ideology. Were they "Soviet people", communists or remained "pre-revolutionary" - outwardly mimicking the demands of the authorities and ideology, but with a cookie in their pocket, just waiting for the opportunity to go to the capitalist paradise - even if they surrendered to Hitler's troops in the first days of the war.

We are generally aware of the anger of the part of society that went through the Gulag. Let's try to define more generally the moods of the intelligentsia of the 1930s-1940s. Find out for yourself whether there was an understanding of the processes taking place in the country in this environment, whether opposition to Stalin was possible, on what it was based.

It is known that a world-renowned physicist, Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Hero of Socialist Labor L. Landau was repressed in 1938 on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and the creation of an anti-Soviet organization (according to Article 58). Only the intervention of Academician P. Kapitsa and Danish physicist N. Bohr, who took him on bail, allowed Landau to be saved from the camps. He was released in 1939.

Much less is known (and this is also a common feature of reports of repressions) for what exactly L. Landau was arrested. The fact is that in his case there really was anti-Soviet agitation and the creation of an anti-Soviet organization. The project "Social History of Russian Science" cites the text of leaflets produced and distributed by L. Landau in 1938:

“Workers of all countries, unite!

Comrades!

The great cause of the October Revolution has been basely betrayed. The country is flooded with streams of blood and mud. Millions of innocent people are thrown into prisons, and no one can know when their turn will come. The farm is falling apart. Hunger is coming. Don't you see, comrades, that the Stalinist clique has carried out a fascist coup. Socialism remained only on the pages of the newspapers that were completely lying. In his furious hatred of real socialism, Stalin was compared to Hitler and Mussolini. Destroying the country for the sake of preserving his power, Stalin turns it into an easy prey for brutal German fascism. The only way out for the working class and all the working people of our country is a decisive struggle against Stalinist and Hitlerite fascism, the struggle for socialism.

Comrades, get organized! Do not be afraid of the executioners from the NKVD. They are capable of beating only defenseless prisoners, catching unsuspecting innocent people, plundering people's property and inventing ridiculous lawsuits about non-existent conspiracies.

Comrades, join the Anti-Fascist Labor Party. Make contact with her Moscow Committee.

Organize at the enterprises of the ARP group. Build underground technology. Prepare the mass movement for socialism with agitation and propaganda.

Stalin's fascism rests only on our disorganization. The proletariat of our country, having overthrown the power of the tsar and the capitalists, will be able to overthrow the fascist dictator and his clique.

Moscow Committee of the Antifascist Workers' Party ".

This is an interesting document. A number of important features should be noted: Landau does not dispute communism at all, on the contrary, he appeals to the fact that "the cause of the October Revolution is despicable." He strives for "true socialism", which, in his opinion, was perverted by Stalin.

The leaflet is filled with Trotskyist ideologemes. The reader may think that it differs little from the statements of modern democrats, but this is not so. First of all, Landau does not speak about the identity of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. According to him, Stalin, "in his furious hatred of real socialism ... was compared with Hitler and Mussolini." And at the same time "destroying the country for the sake of preserving his power, Stalin turns it into an easy prey for brutal German fascism."

The statements that Stalin abandoned real socialism, the cause of the October Revolution is betrayed, the mentions of Hitler and Mussolini clearly indicate his rejection of the Stalinist course of building socialism in a single country.

It is important that in 1938 the comparison with Hitler and Mussolini did not have the negative connotations that appeared after the Great Patriotic War. Hitler has not yet become a monster and a murderer, remaining quite a respectable European politician (World War II has not even begun yet). Here Landau only draws analogies between Stalin's concept of building socialism in a single country and the concept of building National Socialism in Germany or fascism in Italy. And he contrasts them with Trotsky's idea of ​​permanent revolution, the idea of ​​a world revolution.

This is the essence of the statements "The great cause of the October Revolution has been basely betrayed." Following orthodox Marxism, only with the victory of the revolution of the working people all over the world can a socialist and communist state be built. This is "real socialism".

As for the phrase about millions of people thrown into prisons, I don’t think that young Landau had any objective data on the scale of repression. The same applies to the very interesting phrase in the anti-Stalinist leaflet "invent ridiculous lawsuits about non-existent conspiracies." Obviously, L. Landau considered his organization to be truly Soviet and did not attribute these words to his own account.

In any case, the physicist belonged to the intelligentsia who "knew everything." The more interesting is his example. We see his obvious communist sentiments, so vivid that for "true socialism" he is ready to fight Stalin's distortions of the idea.

He does not look like a person intimidated by a repressive machine, just as he did not look like after his release in 1939. Landau never returned to political activity, he focused on science and for many years worked fruitfully in the Soviet state, received recognition, in 1946 he became an academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a laureate of the USSR State Prize for 1946, 1949 and 1953, in 1954 he was awarded the title Hero of Socialist Labor.

An important conclusion from the case of Lev Landau, whom modern researchers present as a “democrat” of his time, the predecessor of Academician Sakharov, is the deep communism of his views. He was not a secret White Guard or a hidden liberal, he was precisely a Soviet man. His disagreement with the current party line did not mean denying the state of workers and peasants or Lenin's line. Landau's desire to correct mistakes on the path of the country's development (as he saw them) in no way means his unwillingness to fight for the fatherland or his desire to go over to the Nazis at the first opportunity.

It is much more difficult to give the modern reader an idea of ​​the social relations of that time. How did people perceive the events taking place in the pre-war period? Preparations for war were underway, goods disappeared from the shelves, responsibility for absenteeism was introduced, employees were assigned to enterprises.

How did people react to the repression? Did they believe that there were enemies around? Everyone understood, but were silent? How was their relationship with the Soviet government built?

A certain idea of ​​this is given by citizens' written appeals to the leaders of the state. They are stored in the Russian State Archives of Economics (RGAE). These letters are quoted in his research "Soviet Civilization" by S.G. Kara-Murza.

Unlike other sources, they have not undergone literary revisions and are direct evidence of the late 1930s, which makes them invaluable sources of information. Here are some of these references with reasonable abbreviations where it is permissible without losing the general meaning. In addition to the idea of ​​people's lives, the difficulties that they had to face, about the life of the pre-war period, they represent a profound material for the analysis of the worldview of people. S.G. Kara-Murza writes: "The letters show well that the Soviet system was precisely native to people, and they expected relief of their difficult situation with a sense of their right." Let's leave it to the reader to judge:

"WITH. Abuladze - V.M. Molotov.

Dear Vyacheslav Mikhailovich!

Again, someone's criminal paw upset the supply of Moscow. Again queues from the night for fats, potatoes disappeared, no fish at all. There is everything on the market, but also a little and at a fourfold price. As for consumer goods, more and more unemployed people, some flint uncles and janitors, early cleaners or unemployed, stand in endless queues. Now there are collective farmers who often put what they have bought into chests as currency. How to be a servant person? We don't have time to stand in lines for hours or pay exorbitant prices in the market. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich! Is it really impossible to regulate the supply of food and consumer goods? We ask you, as our deputy, to help eliminate any fraud and lack of culture in the supply, because queues develop the worst qualities in people: envy, anger, rudeness, and exhaust people with their whole souls.

With perfect respect, S. Abuladze.

"G.S. Bastynchuk - I.V. Stalin.

Dear Joseph Vissarionovich!

Sorry to bother you, but let me tell you my point.

It is possible that it is wrong, but I think that free trade in the country of the Soviets does not correspond to the socialist structure, especially with the current consumer demand.

I think that it is no secret for you that many of us are shouting at the top of their lungs that we have a lot and everything can be bought in any store in our Union. In fact, it is not entirely correct, and, in my opinion, these exclamations come from those criminal elements for whom free trade is a profitable item of riotous life. The question is why about gr. Bastynchuk is a worker since the age of 14, with a production experience of 17 years, with a small family of 3 people, with a salary of 500-600 rubles a month, not a drunkard, not a gambler - he cannot buy at least a meter in free trade for four years chintz or woolen material! Doesn't he need it? Or not able to? No, that's not the point. The reason lies in free trade, from which honest workers in the queues suffocate in vain, and the underworld is intertwined with trading elements, and although “hidden”, but freely - indiscriminately, they squander everything that comes at their disposal for free trade. And on this criminal speculation - they arrange for themselves all the blessings of life.

It seems to me that the issue of free Soviet trade must be dealt with immediately and built and organized on a socialist basis - planning and accurate accounting, so that we, citizens of the Soviet Union, can have effective workers' control and correct reporting in the distribution of human life needs.

Let the enemies of the people, the servants of capitalism, be ashamed, for in the capitalist system this cannot be done, but in our country of Soviets, a country building a communist society, on the basis of planning, equality and accurate accounting, everything can be done, not excluding Soviet trade, which is feasible with a card or like its systems.

Let the apparatus of distribution and trading organizations increase for this purpose, but we will be sure that we will remove thousands of speculators and thousands of criminal workers associated with them in today's free trade. In addition, we will be sure that every citizen of the USSR will receive as much as he needs and should receive for such and such a period of time. And we will not have the fact that some make a reserve for 20 years in advance, while others need it today.

For such a guaranteed planned distribution Soviet accounting trade, I am more than sure, all honest workers of our Soviet Union will raise their hands. Hopefully, upon receipt of the letter, notify.

4.1.1940. The worker of the mechanic shop number 2 of the Autozavod im. Molotova Bastynchuk Grigory Saverianovich. Address: Gorky, 4, Komsomolskaya street, 11-a, apt. 1".

“P.S. Klementyev to J.V. Stalin.

Dear Joseph Vissarionovich!

I am a housewife. Currently I live in the city of Nizhniy Tagil on the street. Dzerzhinskaya, 45 sq. 10. Praskovya Stepanovna Klementyeva. I have a husband and two sons, age 3.5 years and 9 months. The husband before the elections to the deputies of the Soviets worked in the Stalin district council in the position of head. dep. frames. After the elections, they found that the position could be abolished - they were fired. But that's okay. Now he, that is, from 25.1-40, got a job at Osoaviakhim as an instructor. This is also not bad, I am very pleased that he is at military work. All my life I have been striving to study military affairs, but my situation is not good, two little children, except for their husband, have no relatives and relatives, which means that there is absolutely no one to leave the guys to. True, my older son goes to kindergarten No. 4, where he recovered well and is developing well, but with the smaller Borenka, the situation is very serious. There is absolutely nothing to feed the child. Earlier, though during the consultation, a dairy kitchen worked. It is now closed. There is nothing to cook from. All shops are empty, with the exception of a small amount of herring, occasionally if sausage appears, then into a fight. Sometimes there is such a crush in the store that they endure unconsciousness.

Joseph Vissarionovich, something terrible has begun. Bread, and even then, you have to go at 2 am to stand until 6 am and you will get 2 kg of rye and white is very difficult to get. I do not speak for people any more, but I will speak for myself. I was already so exhausted that I don't know what will happen next to me. I became very weak, all day long salt with bread and water, and the baby is only on one breast, milk is nowhere to be found. If anyone can handle it, then it’s not a turn to approach. The meat is the worst - 15 rubles, better - 24 rubles. from collective farmers. Just live as you want. Not enough for existence, for life. Already pushes for the bad. It's hard to look at a hungry child. What in the dining room, and even then you can not buy lunch at home, but only eat in the dining room. And that works intermittently - there is nothing to cook from. Iosif Vissarionovich, from many mothers we hear that they want to destroy the children. They say I'll light the stove, close the chimney, let them fall asleep and not get up. There is absolutely nothing to feed. I already think about it. Well, how to get out of this situation I can no longer think. It's very scary, because I really want to raise two sons. And you only strive for this - to educate, to learn. My husband and I set ourselves a task - the elder Valery should be a pilot, the younger Borenka - a lieutenant. But food is scary and very serious. Joseph Vissarionovich, why did it become so bad with nutrition? In addition, even today it was announced that the dumplings were 7 rubles. now there will be 14 rubles, the sausage was 7 rubles, now - 14 rubles. How are we going to live now? In my opinion, Joseph Vissarionovich, there is something like that here. After all, recently there was everything, and suddenly for a few time there was nothing, nothing to exist further. Joseph Vissarionovich, it would have been better from books. At least I would have received a little, but I would have received everything, but you will not get it for speculators. They disappear in stores all day long.

Iosif Vissarionovich, maybe there are still some bad people and here you have to suffer like that. Write to me, Joseph Vissarionovich, is it really going to be such a life. There is absolutely nothing to eat. For 12 hours already, and I have not eaten anything yet, I ran through all the shops and came with nothing. Iosif Vissarionovich, I am waiting for an answer, do not refuse to write.

Klementyeva P.S.

"NS. Neugasov - People's Commissariat of Trade of the USSR.

Dear comrades! Alapaevsk of the Sverdlovsk region is experiencing a crisis in grain and flour supply, unprecedented in history. People, children - the flowers of the future freeze in lines from evening to morning in 40-degree frosts for two or 4 kilograms of bread.

Who will believe! If you don’t believe it, then I assure you. We are told by the local authorities that according to the plan everything has been used up and that they are feeding the cattle with bread, and the center cannot let go anymore. We, the workers of the mountains. Alapaevsk, in no case do we believe and will not believe that the center has not been notified of this fraud to the local authorities. I sent on 15 / XII - 39 a letter personally to Comrade Stalin, but it did not reach, because I have no answer. Neither bread nor flour is thrown into Alapaevsk enough to destroy the queues. I am sure that the Government of the USSR, represented by Comrade Stalin will respond to this letter and take urgent measures, that is, he will throw flour into flour shops and baked bread will be baked as much as necessary, and the people in charge of this business will be brought to harsh responsibility, as was the case in 1937.

My address: mountains. Alapaevsk, Sverdlovsk region. Workers' town, barrack number 11, apt. 73. Nick Neugasov (olay) Sem (enovich).

I am sure that the party and the government will not allow anyone to mock the working class in the way they mock here, and I want to know if my first letter has reached it.

"Workers' artel" Nasha Tekhnika "- Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

This decision, of the government or of the Tula regional workers, is sabotage for the complete indignation of the masses. In Tula, a card system was introduced, no worse than the cards were. What is currently being done in the mountains. Thule, it’s even awful to think about it, let alone talk about it. First, from the 23rd, all the shops in Tula were given to the workers of the arms factory, to the workers of the cartridge factory, etc. In the artel, as well as to other institutions, they did not give books at all. And the children go around and ask, standing near the store: "Uncle, let me get at least some bread."

“Anonymous - People's Commissar of Bargaining of the USSR.

We have a large account of the Soviet country. All people are equal. This is one of the basics. Was it only Moscow or Kiev workers who fought for Soviet power? Other cities also fought against the bourgeoisie. Why should they now suffer for lack of bread? In the Short Course on Party History, we read that the Soviet government gave the land to the peasants, and the factories to the workers, and that everyone's situation would be improved. No matter how before the workers and peasants were oppressed, he had bread. Now in a young Soviet country, which is rich in bread, so that people die of hunger? Anyone who works gets 1 kilo of bread.

What is to be done for a worker who has 3 or 4 children? Everyone cares about his children, who now all want to grow up as engineers and pilots, and he gives them bread. How can such a worker work when he is hungry? In Berdichev, no money can buy bread. People queue up all night long, and then a lot of people get nothing. You also have to stand in line for 1 kilo of potatoes so that the worker, when he comes home, can at least eat something. Indeed, the time is now military. The country is quite dear to all of us. You need to deny yourself a lot. Let there be no sugar, salty. But so that there is no bread? We must give bread to the Germans, but first we need to feed our people so that they do not starve, so that if they attack us, we can fight back. It is necessary to introduce cards so that everyone who has children can receive bread on them. And not so that old people dry up from hunger, and children grow up with tuberculosis.

Now the worker cannot change jobs at will in order to find better earnings. Before introducing this law, it was necessary to do so to provide for every family person. It is necessary to improve the situation of the workers, not by agitation, which will be good, but so that it becomes better now. After the introduction of the 8-hour working day, many were cut and now they cannot get even a kilo of bread. Where can they take their families with them? But they are not guilty of anything. Where can I get bread for the elderly who are dependent on children?

It's also difficult in the artel. The norms are the same for young and old. Stalin said that from each according to his ability and to each according to his work, and the old cannot keep up with the young. Why don't they need to live in their old age?

Translation from Hebrew ".

Chapter 24
Other "repressive" elements of the Second World War

Historical falsifications are rarely built on fiction from start to finish. As a rule, to construct a myth, a few revelations from the number of traditional silences (which they try not to remember) are enough, a few facts, followed by their large-scale interpretations. And far-reaching conclusions are made, stunning ideological foundations.

“The more we learn about the war, the more inexplicable the Victory. In 1964 - almost twenty years after the war - I first heard about the detachments - about the ingenious system of selfless bravery. You go on the attack - maybe you're lucky, the Germans won't kill you. If you retreat, they will surely kill your own "(A. Minkin. "Whose victory?" MK. 22.06.2005.)

The existence of detachments is an element of silence, a "revelation" that Minkin carries. “They will surely kill their own” is a fact. “That makes the Victory inexplicable” is a far-reaching conclusion that casts doubt on both the heroism of the veterans and the victory itself at such a price. Minkin writes: “Maybe it would be better if Nazi Germany defeated the USSR in 1945. Better yet, in 1941 ”.

Ideologues, bringing out the dirty linen of history, do not say everything. Informing is not their responsibility, their task is demonization. In order not to complicate the picture (the myth must be simple, otherwise people will not be drawn to it), they are silent about a significant part of the facts, creating a picture that is convenient and easy to understand.

In recent years, solid works have been written about detachments and penal battalions, as separate elements of the repressive machine of the Great Patriotic War, which are based on archival documents and memoirs of participants in the events. A certain catalyst for the interest of researchers in this topic was the release on screens already in the 2000s of a number of films presenting the events of the Great Patriotic War in a quite definite way. The most odious of them should be recognized as the "Penal Battalion" series, an ideological artifice that brought together all the imaginable and inconceivable myths of our time.

Works with a detailed analysis of this "film masterpiece", studies that recreate the true state of affairs are available to the general reader. To avoid unnecessary repetitions, we will dwell only on the basic facts and documents that regulated the actions of the barrage detachments and penal units during the Second World War. Already these facts make it possible to understand how mythologized the modern idea of ​​them is.

In the case of the barrage detachments, there is an obvious confusion in the mass consciousness, combining together two concepts - the barrage detachments of the NKVD and similar army structures. The first were created at the beginning of the war. On June 27, 1941, the Third Directorate (counterintelligence) of the USSR People's Commissariat of Defense issued a directive on the work of its bodies in wartime. They, in particular, were instructed to organize mobile control and barrage detachments on roads, railway junctions, for clearing forests, etc. Also, the duty of the barrage detachments included the detention of deserters, the arrest of all suspicious elements that penetrated the front line, a preliminary investigation and the transfer of materials along with those detained by jurisdiction.

A certain confusion arises in the question of the subordination of the barrage detachments of the first days of the war. In February 1941, the USSR state security system underwent a reform, as a result of which the People's Commissariat of State Security (NKGB) was separated from the single NKVD, and military intelligence and counterintelligence were transferred from the NKVD subordination to the People's Commissariat of Defense (this is how the Third Directorate of the NKO). Again, these structures were merged under the jurisdiction of the NKVD in July 1941, the Third Directorate was transformed into Special Departments.

The defensive detachments, originally created by the Third Directorate of the USSR People's Commissariat of Defense, were almost immediately re-incorporated into the structure of the NKVD and then were under the jurisdiction of Special Departments.

The activities of the NKVD barrage detachments were finally regulated by the order of the NKVD of the USSR dated July 19, 1941, which ordered the formation of separate rifle platoons under the Special Divisions of Divisions and Corps, and separate rifle brigades from the NKVD troops under the Special Divisions of armies - companies, fronts. Their immediate tasks were, acting in the rear of the troops, to set up barriers on the military roads, the paths of movement of refugees, to identify the enemy saboteurs abandoned in the rear, alarmists, servicemen and deserters who had lagged behind their units.

If the lagging behind the units of the military were ordered to be sent by port and platoon, under the command of a verified commander, in columns to the location of their units, then deserters and alarmists were arrested, an early investigation (the time of it was limited to 12 hours) and their transfer to the courts of the military tribunal. In exceptional cases, when the situation required it, deserters and alarmists were allowed to be shot, but each such case was considered extraordinary, it was required to immediately report it to the head of the Special Department of the front.

In general, the barrage detachments of the NKVD were engaged in counterintelligence support for the rear of the troops, preventing panic and confusion during the movement of units and columns of refugees, identifying deserters and sending servicemen lagging behind their units to the duty stations. Of course, there is no talk of any kind of shooting in the back of the advancing troops - at times more than a hundred kilometers of front rear services were separated from the advancing soldiers by detachments that were solving completely different tasks.

The allegations about the NKVD troops, which were hiding in the rear, are also incorrect. Providing the rear of the active army was the most important task. It is not easy for the average person to imagine a huge infrastructure, whose efforts are aimed at creating the conditions for successful action on the front line. Planning of operations, communications, delivery of ammunition, clothing, food, logistics and linking transport routes to the nearest railway junctions, medical and sanitary support - an incomplete list of problems facing the rear units of the active army. The disorganization of this most complex mechanism has always been a tidbit for the enemy, who did not miss the opportunity to make the troops of the other side incapable of fighting without a single shot.

In the difficult months of 1941, the NKVD barrage detachments were often used as ordinary army units, they were thrown into the front line to eliminate the next breakthrough of the Germans.

The second type of barrage detachments - army - appeared somewhat later. It traces its history back to September 12, 1941. On this day, a directive of the Supreme Command headquarters was issued on the creation of barrage detachments of rifle divisions. It, in particular, said:

“The experience of fighting German fascism has shown that in our rifle divisions there are many panicky and outright hostile elements, which, at the very first pressure from the enemy, drop their weapons and begin to shout:“ We are surrounded! ” and carry away the rest of the fighters. As a result of such actions of these elements, the division takes to flight, throws the material part and then begins to leave the forest alone. Similar phenomena are taking place on all fronts. If the commanders and commissars of such divisions were at the height of their task, alarmist and hostile elements could not have gained the upper hand in the division. But the trouble is that we do not have many firm and stable commanders and commissars.

In order to prevent the above undesirable phenomena at the front, the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command orders:

1. In each rifle division, have a defensive detachment of reliable fighters, no more than a battalion in number (in the calculation of 1 company per rifle regiment), subordinate to the division commander and having at his disposal, in addition to conventional weapons, vehicles in the form of trucks and several tanks or armored vehicles.

2. The tasks of the barrage detachment are to consider direct assistance to the command personnel in maintaining and establishing firm discipline in the division, stopping the flight of servicemen obsessed with panic, without stopping before using weapons, eliminating the initiators of panic and flight, supporting honest and fighting elements of the division, not subject to panic, but carried away by the general escape ... "

Army barrage detachments, as we can see, were not formed from some selected cutthroats, but from the soldiers of the same units in which they were supposed to act. Their tasks included personal example, and when by force of arms to prevent panic among the soldiers. From the order it is clear that the soldiers of the army barrage detachments were empowered to use weapons against individual alarmists who could demoralize the advancing troops. This required their direct participation in the offensive.

The closest the activity of the blocking detachments came close to the myth exploited in the mass consciousness in 1942 in connection with the events on the Stalingrad front. The famous order of I.V. Stalin No. 227, also known as "Not a Step Back", ordered to create within the armies of 3 - 5 well-armed barrage detachments of 200 people each, put them in the immediate rear of unstable units and oblige, in case of panic and indiscriminate flight, to shoot on the spot alarmists and cowards "and thus help the honest fighters of the divisions to fulfill their duty to the Motherland." These detachments were subordinate to the Special Departments of the armies, that is, the structures of the NKVD, but were formed from the soldiers of the armies in which they acted.

The report of the Special Department of the NKVD of the Stalingrad Front to the Directorate of Special Departments of the NKVD of the USSR dated August 14, 1942 "On the progress of the implementation of order No. 227 and the response of the personnel of the 4th Panzer Army to it" gives a presentation on the practice of using the detachments formed in accordance with Order No. 227:

“In total, 24 people were shot during the specified period. So, for example, the commanders of the 414th SP, 18th SD, Styrkov and Dobrnin, cowed during the battle, abandoned their squads and fled from the battlefield, both were detained by the barriers. by a detachment and a resolution of the Special Division, they were shot in front of the formation. "

In total, by October 15, 1942, 193 army barrage detachments were formed, including 16 on the Stalingrad front. At the same time, from August 1 to October 15, 1942, 140,755 servicemen were detained by detachments. 3980 of those arrested were arrested. 1189 people were shot, 2,776 people were sent to penal companies, 185 penal battalions, 131,094 people were returned to their units.

The stories about mass executions of Soviet units by barrage detachments do not correspond to reality, proceeding from both their general practice and the essence of the tasks being solved, and from the correlation of the number of barrage detachments with the number of armies in operation. That, of course, does not exclude individual excesses, which were, apparently, subsequently inflated to the extent of a general phenomenon. * * *

No less confusion accompanies the history of the penal units of the Red Army. Their appearance is associated with the already mentioned order of I.V. Stalin number 227. It prescribed:

"1. To the military councils of the fronts and, above all, to the commanders of the fronts:

c) to form within the front from one to three (depending on the situation) penal battalions (800 people each), where to send middle and senior commanders and relevant political workers of all branches of the military, guilty of violating discipline due to cowardice or instability, and put them on more difficult sectors of the front, to give them the opportunity to atone for their crimes against the Motherland with blood.

2. To the Military Councils of the armies and, above all, to the commanders of the armies:

c) form within the army from five to ten (depending on the situation) penal companies (from 150 to 200 people in each), where to send ordinary soldiers and junior commanders, guilty of violating discipline due to cowardice or instability, and put them in difficult areas army to give them the opportunity to atone for their crimes against the Motherland with blood. "

The states of the penal battalion and company, as well as the practice of their formation and use, were detailed by the order of the Deputy People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR G. Zhukov of September 26, 1942. The objectives of the formation of penal units were indicated in it as follows:

"Penal battalions are intended to enable persons of the middle and senior command, political and commanding personnel of all branches of the armed forces who are guilty of violating discipline due to cowardice or instability to atone with blood for their crimes before the Motherland by bravely fighting the enemy in a more difficult sector of hostilities."

"Penalty companies are aimed at enabling ordinary soldiers and junior commanders of all branches of the armed forces, who are guilty of violating discipline through cowardice or instability, to atone for their guilt before the Motherland by bravely fighting the enemy in a difficult sector of hostilities."

The order established the time spent by a serviceman in a penal unit - from one to three months. Officers sent to penal battalions were subject to demotion to the rank and file. Orders and medals were taken from the penalties for the time they were in the penal battalion and were transferred to the front personnel department for safekeeping.

Penalties could be assigned to the posts of junior command personnel with the assignment of the ranks of corporal, junior sergeant and sergeant. In this case, they were paid salaries for their positions. The rest of the penalties were paid in the amount of 8 rubles. 50 kopecks per month. The payment of money to the family according to the financial certificate of the demoted to rank-and-file officer was stopped, the family was transferred to the allowance established for the families of the Red Army soldiers and junior commanders.

The release from the penalty section took place for one of three reasons: for a particularly outstanding military distinction (in this case, the penalty box, in addition, was presented with a government award), for injury (atoned for his guilt in blood), and upon the expiration of the sentence. Upon release from the penalty area, the former penalty boxers were reinstated in rank and in all rights, they were returned military awards, and references to a criminal record were removed from the personal file.

Penalties who received disabilities were assigned a pension from the salary of their last position, the families of the deceased penalties were assigned a pension on a general basis, like all the families of dead servicemen.

There was nothing fundamentally punitive or deliberately cruel in the formed penalty units. The command in their creation proceeded from the highest possible humanity in the conditions of total war. It is interesting that the clothing and food allowance of the penal units, according to the recollections of the veterans, was better than the average for the army. This situation arose as a result of several curious circumstances: penal companies and penal battalions had army subordination and were supplied directly from army warehouses, while front units were supplied along a chain from army warehouses and further, up to the commissariat of a particular unit. In a longer chain, there was, of course, a certain "shrinkage", and not so much because of theft, although it did take place, but because in the process of distribution the best things could be disassembled.

Until now, little-known is the feat of the permanent composition of penal companies and penal battalions. For some reason, it is generally accepted that the same penalty boxes commanded the penalty box and the convicts were stewed in their own juice. This is not true. Penalties did not stay in the units for more than a few months, while the officers of these units were constant and changed, mainly due to the death of the commander who fought along with the penalties.

In the order of G.K. Zhukov dated September 26, 1942, it is said about the permanent composition of penal units

... the defendant TONKONOGOV, remaining to live in the territory temporarily seized by the enemy, voluntarily entered the service of the German punitive authorities in the police and worked from April 1942 to August 1942 as an inspector of the city police, an adjutant to the chief of police, and then was appointed for the post of chief of police with. Budylki.

Working in these positions, TONKONOGOV carried out arrests of Soviet citizens, as follows: in the summer of 1942, he arrested the Kostyanenko family for contacting a partisan detachment. During the arrest of Kostyanenko and his family - Maria Kostyanenko, TONKONOGOV personally severely beat both [...] In August 1942, he arrested 20 people. women who were taken into custody ... Repeatedly interrogated detained Soviet citizens, while mocking and beating them and threatening to be shot. So, in April 1942, while interrogating an unknown detained Soviet citizen, together with the Germans, he took him to execution. In July 1942, he beat an unknown citizen with a ramrod, who turned to him about the fishing nets taken from her. "

This is the kind of "Major Pugachev" that appears before us in the book of the Magadan journalist A. Biryukov. In the summer of 1948, he really accomplished his last "feat". The Soviet government saved his life - only in order to shoot him with new victims, pursuing him during his escape.

Chapter 27
Exploitation of the myth: "raped germany", or what is the point of falsifying history?

Having considered the most popular myths of military history, let us digress for a while from the question of Stalinist repressions and take a broader look at the problem.

What is the meaning of historical falsifications, and in particular falsifications of the history of the Great Patriotic War? What technologies are used by propagandists and to what extent are their statements true? Before our eyes, a major operation is being carried out to introduce the myth of "raped Germany" into the mass consciousness. It goes by clearly, without unnecessary mystery, it is a sin not to use it as educational material.

What kind of threat do these myths pose to us? Let me give you an example that is important for understanding the problem. Not long ago, I witnessed an online discussion about the partition of Poland in 1939. The dispute went on intelligently, with references to documents, agreements and norms of international law. At a certain stage, the interlocutors realized that they were operating with the same texture, but differed in their assessments. A question, unique in its completeness, was raised here: “Legally, everything is clear. Moral consideration is unacceptable on the assumption that for the Poles it will be a stab in the back, for the Ukrainians and Belarusians - liberation, but what for us? For the citizens of modern Russia? "

This is a very accurately and naturally formulated question of self-identification. Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians have a national, if you will, generally accepted view of the issue. We don't have it. Numerous works of historians-falsifiers support this state of society.

It is not surprising that special attention of propagandists of all stripes is concentrated on the theme of the Second World War. Even the Victory itself is contested. A striking example is one of the "last" questions that supporters of the rewriting of history like to ask: "Why then do the winners live worse than the losers?"

In response, one can hear arguments about the Marshall Plan, a comparison of the economies of the USSR and the Western Bloc, even an absurd reasoning to a large extent "because we are the vanquished."

This does not attract a full-fledged answer, which is not surprising. There is a catch in the very formulation of the question; it does not imply an analysis of the competition between economic systems of the second half of the 20th century. The concepts of "winner" and "loser" set strict boundaries for the field of reasoning, reducing it to the period of the end of the Second World War - on the one hand, and an abstract "standard of living" - on the other.

In general, it is obvious that the Soviet Union, ravaged by total war on its territory, physically could not live better than defeated Germany. At most, both devastated countries could be in approximately equal conditions of devastation.

There are, however, conditions under which the victorious USSR could dramatically raise the standard of living of its citizens as a result of the Victory. Having plundered Germany, taking out valuables, livestock and crops, leaving the Germans to swell with hunger on potato peelings. But this is the motive of the fascists, who planned to “live better than the vanquished” (and most of the vanquished were not supposed to live at all).

The Soviet Union, on the contrary, set the supply of the local population as one of the main tasks in the occupied territories. On May 2, 1945 (let me remind you that the fighting for the Reich Chancellery ceased only at 15:00 on May 2), a member of the Military Council of the 5th Shock Army, Lieutenant General Bokov, determined the main tasks of the military commandant's offices in Berlin:

“Identification and accounting of food supplies for supplying the population of the region, putting into operation municipal and food enterprises: water pipelines, power plants, sewerage systems, mills, bakeries, bakeries, canneries, confectioneries, etc., organization of trade in bread, potatoes, meat and light industry products to meet the needs of the population, the opening of baths, hairdressers, hospitals, pharmacies, sewing and shoe workshops [...] Food products are sold to the population through shops on cards issued by the mayors of the districts (bread 150 g, potatoes 300 g per person) ".

On May 11, a decree of the Military Council of the 1st Belorussian Front appeared on the supply of food to the population of Berlin. It, in particular, said:

"1. Based on the standards of food supply established by the GOCO for the city of Berlin on average per person per day: bread - 400 - 450 g, cereals - 50 g, meat - 60 g, fat - 15 g, sugar - 20 g, natural coffee - 50 g (ed. author), tea - 20 g, potatoes and vegetables, dairy products, salt and other food products - according to the norms established on the spot, depending on the availability of resources ...

2. To the front quartermaster by 20.00 on May 14 with. d. to report to the Military Council their views on the possible norms and procedure for issuing dairy products to the population of Berlin, as well as on the possibility of transferring the dairy cattle from the number of trophy cattle, which is the minimum necessary for the self-government of Berlin (issued by the author) "(hereinafter, unless otherwise indicated, documents are cited by).

Did the USSR have an intention to plunder Germany? Was there a motive in the Great Patriotic War to raise the living standard of the population at the expense of enslaved or robbed Germans?

It is significant that this cleverly formulated question uses precisely the fascist, and not the Soviet, motivation. The truth is hidden in it under several layers of meaning and remains unnoticed at first glance.

There are many similar examples. Before our eyes, a multi-stage campaign is unfolding under the code name "Soviet soldiers in the occupied territories committed atrocities no less than the Wehrmacht in the USSR." Particular attention within the framework of this topic is paid to the mass rapes of German women, which allegedly took place in Germany in 1945.

The influence of the topic of mass rapes on public opinion has long been known to propagandists; it demonizes the enemy, taking him beyond the framework of morality, ethics, and the concept of “man” in general. It was not for nothing that Goebbels' department actively exploited this particular topic, and quite recently we could personally observe the use of the same argument in the course of preparing the bombings of Yugoslavia.

But in this case, our grandfathers, warriors-liberators, are taken out of the framework of morality and humanity.

"The Red Army men, mostly poorly educated, were characterized by complete ignorance about sex and a rude attitude towards women ..." - writes in an article with the telling title "They raped all German women between the ages of 8 to 80", the famous British proponent of the topic Anthony Beevor ...

The article is replete with eerie details about the violence within the walls of the monastery, the maternity hospital (“pregnant women and those who have just given birth were all raped without mercy”), statistics: “Although at least 2 million German women were raped, a significant part, if not most, became victims of group rape ".

The work of Mr. Beevor is not distinguished by references to documents, and the above figures appear in his work with the following preface: “One doctor calculated that ...” This, however, does not prevent the media from widely disseminating his fabrications.

The fact that they achieve their goal is evident from contemporary Russian-language Internet discussions of Beevor's work. Here you can find a very patriotic, at first glance, position: "I don't care about the sufferings of the Germans during the victorious march of the Soviet troops!" Or this one: “I am convinced that this was of a systemic nature. And I don't see anything special in this. A war of gigantic proportions ... "And even:" Why pity the Germans? And there is no particular need to discuss this, and Russia has nothing to repent for ... "

These words already contain justifications, and the most unreasonable plan. Deprived of concrete historical knowledge, young people say: "The Germans are to blame!" If you think about it for a second, it means an automatic recognition of the massive violence that our grandfathers did. “Yes, they raped, but for the cause” - this is how this thesis sounds, if you reformulate it. Justification turns into recognition.

But was there the very fact on which these statements are based? Let's try to figure it out. First, we will find out who entered the territory of Germany, who are these "mostly poorly educated" Red Army soldiers, how they were brought up, what values ​​they profess, what they consider to be proper and what is unacceptable.

The report of the head of the Political Directorate of the 1st Ukrainian Front on political and educational work with a new replenishment from among the citizens freed from Nazi captivity on April 7, 1945 shows how things were with the education of the Red Army soldiers:

“During the fighting on the territory of Germany, the formations and units of the front somewhat made up for their combat losses in men at the expense of Soviet citizens of draft age, freed from German captivity. On March 20, more than 40,000 people were sent to the unit. [...] Almost all young fighters have incomplete or complete secondary education and only a small part with higher and primary education. The illiterate or semi-literate are very few. Among the 3870 people who entered in February to replenish the units of the compound, where the head of the political department is Major General Voronov, 873 former military personnel, 2997 people were recruited into the army, including 784 women. By age: up to 25 years old - 1922, up to 30 years old - 780, up to 35 years old - 523, up to 40 years old - 422 and over 40 years old - 223 people. By nationality: Ukrainians - 2014, Russians - 1173, Azerbaijanis - 221, Belarusians - 125, Armenians - 10, Uzbeks - 50 and other nationalities - 125 people. "

40 thousand people of different ages and nationalities is a fairly representative cut in order to form an opinion about the education of Soviet people in the 1940s. However, education is not decisive. The Nazis committed unthinkable atrocities on the territory of the USSR - although there is a general secondary education in

Germany since the time of Bismarck. It is important what moral guidelines a person follows, what is behind his soul, if you like.

We meet words that are important for our topic in the order of I.V. Stalin, dedicated to the 24th anniversary of the founding of the Red Army (order No. 55 of 23.02.42). It says:

“Sometimes they talk in the foreign press that the Red Army has as its goal the extermination of the German people and the destruction of the German state. This is, of course, stupid nonsense and stupid slander against the Red Army. [...] it would be ridiculous to identify Hitler's clique with the German people, with the German state. The experience of history says that Hitlers come and go, but the German people, and the German state remains.

The strength of the Red Army lies, finally, in the fact that it does not and cannot have racial hatred for other peoples, including the German people, that it was brought up in the spirit of equality of all peoples and races, in the spirit of respect for the rights of other peoples. " .

But maybe these are just words? Did Stalin know the Red Army well or did he wishful thinking? In the memoirs of the veteran of the Second World War, Zimakov Vladimir Matveyevich, we read:

“In Austria, not far from Munich, Germany, we met with the Americans and the British. At first they drunk for 3-4 days, and then an episode occurred. Our guys fought with them because of the negro. They saw how one of them hit the negro, and let's crap. [...] Our commandant platoon took them all apart and drew the border, leading the troops from the village into the forest. "

Indeed, now it is difficult to imagine such behavior (upbringing has since changed significantly), but we must pay tribute - with regard to the moral character of the Red Army soldiers, Stalin as a whole was not mistaken. Actually, there is nothing surprising in this, given the volume and thoroughness of the reports of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army about the "political and moral state of the soldiers." I think today's sociologists would also envy them.

Considering the topic of “atrocities on German territory”, it is important to remember how “overorganized” (as they would call it now) structure the Red Army was. The observance of military discipline, the moral and political state of the fighters was monitored by both direct commanders and political workers. Compliance with the rule of law was controlled by special departments and bodies of the military prosecutor's office. In addition, the units operated party and Komsomol organizations.

The workers of the rear assigned serious responsibility to the fighters. “We showed our discipline, the workers of the South Urals gave us an order: no looting. And nothing like that happened, because our army, the corps was watched, the first secretary of the Chelyabinsk regional committee came to the front, ”recalls the veteran Pavel Pavlovich Kuleshov.

The age composition of units and formations also had an influence on the morale of the fighters. Fathers, sons and grandfathers found themselves in some trenches at the front. Many veterans remember the kind of "uncles" in the presence of soldiers. Artilleryman Nikolai Dmitrievich Markov says:

“With this replenishment came to us a soldier named Pyotr Andreevich Peretyatko, 13th year of birth, from the farm Dubrovka, Chernihiv region ... It was really a warrior. A real gunman! He says to me: “Katsap you! I will teach you how to fight! " And really, he taught us boys how to fight ...

There was such a case. Petrov, a soldier from Gorky, a nimble kid, had his boots worn out, and there were many Germans lying there. He went and took off the boots of the killed German. He comes and says: "Found the boots!" Petya asks him: "Where did you get it?" - "I took it off the German." And then Petya pointed a machine gun at him: “Where you took it, put it there. Do you know what it's called? Marauding! Walk barefoot, but don't take it. "

Basically, veterans in their memoirs agree that the relationship between the Red Army and the civilian population in the occupied territories was developing normally - as far as it is generally possible in conditions of hostilities. The artilleryman Boris Vasilievich Nazarov recalls: “The logisticians were engaged in looting and violence ... Those who were at the forefront, the population, as a rule, did not offend, and the population treated us well ...” “Around our batteries there were a lot of German refugees, unarmed German soldiers who had lost their parts. The relationship with them was peaceful, they even fed us. "

Tankman Arsentiy Konstantinovich Rodkin recalls how in January 1945 a German came to their unit and brought boxes with unmade New Year's gifts. And Pyotr Ilyich Kirichenko recalls an incident that happened to him in Prussia: “I go down to the basement. At first it’s dark, I don’t see anything. When my eyes got used to it a little, I saw that these Germans were sitting in a huge room, the rumble was going on, the kids were crying. They saw me, everyone was quiet and looked with horror - the Bolshevik beast came, now he will rape us, shoot, kill us. I feel that the situation is tense, I address them in German, I said a couple of phrases. How happy they were! They reached out to me, some kind of watch, gifts. I think: “Unhappy people, what have you brought yourself to. The proud German nation, which spoke of its superiority, but here is such servility. " There was a mixed feeling of pity and dislike. "

There were also curious cases. For example, the report of the head of the political department of the 8th Guards Army on the behavior of the German population in the occupied suburbs of Berlin on April 25, 1945 says: “There are restaurants in the settlements of Wilhelmshagen and Ransdorf where alcoholic drinks, beer and snacks are on sale. Moreover, restaurant owners willingly sell all this to our soldiers and officers for occupation marks. On April 22nd, some soldiers and officers went to restaurants and bought alcoholic drinks and snacks. Some of them acted carefully - in one of the restaurants in Ransdorf, the tankers, before drinking wine, asked the owner of the restaurant to drink it first. But some members of the military are clearly doing the wrong thing, throwing around occupation stamps. For example, a liter of beer costs 1 mark, and some military personnel pay 10-20 marks, and one of the officers gave a banknote of 100 marks for a liter of beer. Head of the political department of the 28th Guards. ck Colonel Borodin ordered the owners of Ransdorf's restaurants to close the restaurants for a while until the battle is over. "

Of course, the topic of relations between Soviet soldiers and the German population is by no means so unambiguous. In the report of a member of the Military Council of the 1st Ukrainian Front on April 4, 1945, we read: “The attitude of the German population towards the Red Army in the previously occupied territory of Germany remains hostile. They commit acts of sabotage and help to hide the German soldiers who remained behind the front lines. So, during the battles, the German population of the city of Strengau in every possible way harmed our units ... "

From the report of the head of the political department of the 7th Guards Cavalry Corps dated April 30, 1945: “In the city of Rathenov, where the 14th Guards. cavalry division, there were many cases of clearly hostile attitude of the Germans from the civilian population to our servicemen. [...]

April 27, deputy. commander of the 54th Guards. Cavalry Regiment for Political Affairs, Guards. Major Yakunin ... went out into the street. From the attic of a neighboring house, a burst of automatic weapons was heard. A German woman was shooting from a machine gun. Yakunin was seriously wounded in the arm, after which he died. [...]

On April 28, the battery commander of the 76-mm guns of the 54th Guards. cavalry regiment of the 14th Guards. cavalry division of the guards. Art. Lieutenant Sibirtsev, being ... in the liberated part of Rathenov, was killed by a 58-year-old German by a shot from the attic. On the same day, the Red Army soldier 318 HMN Karpov and Guards. foreman m / s Malchikov (54th Guards Cavalry Regiment) under the following circumstances: ... from behind, from the house, a burst of automatic weapons was heard, as a result of which Karpov and Malchikov were wounded. During a search of the house, a German family was found. The owner of the house, an old man, was captured with a submachine gun in his hands.

It cannot be denied that there were individual crimes committed by the soldiers of the Red Army. I.V. On January 19, 1945, Stalin signed an order, which demanded not to allow rude treatment of the local population. This order dealt mainly with the problem of "robbery and flippancy", as it was then called, but Stalin's attention to the problem is quite indicative.

On April 20, 1945, signed by Stalin, the Supreme Command Headquarters Directive was issued to change the attitude towards German prisoners of war and the civilian population. In it, the commanders of the troops and members of the Military Councils were required to “change the attitude towards the Germans, both to prisoners of war and to civilians. It is better to treat the Germans. The harsh treatment of the Germans makes them afraid and makes them stubbornly resist. "

Similar, but more detailed directives were sent to the troops from the Military Councils of the fronts.

The Supreme Command Headquarters had serious reasons for such orders. Here is an excerpt from the memoirs of Mikhail Fedorovich Borisov, a veteran: “There was a desire to take revenge when we entered German territory. The guys sometimes come into the house, give a line from a machine gun at various portraits, cupboards with dishes ... And at the same time, I saw with my own eyes how the field kitchens fed the local residents. [...] Soon after crossing the German border, an order was issued regulating behavior in the occupied territory. Although before that we knew one thing - kill the German, and for four years we lived that way. This transition was very difficult. Many were tried. "

His words are confirmed by the report of the military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front on the implementation of the Supreme Command Headquarters directive on changing the attitude towards the German population of May 2, 1945: “In the attitude of our servicemen towards the German population, a significant turning point has undoubtedly been achieved. The facts of aimless and [unjustified] shootings of Germans, looting and rape of German women have significantly decreased, however, even after the issuance of the directives of the Supreme Command Headquarters and the Military Council of the Front, a number of such cases were still recorded.

If the shootings of Germans are now almost not observed at all, and cases of robbery are sporadic, then violence against women still takes place; the hoarseness, which consists in walking our servicemen in abandoned apartments, collecting all sorts of things and objects, etc., has not stopped yet. "

At the same time, the military prosecutor's office, and, consequently, the Headquarters were not inclined to complacency or self-deception. The continuation of the report states:

“I consider it necessary to emphasize a number of points:

1. The commanders of the formations and the Military Councils of the armies are taking serious measures to eliminate the facts of the ugly behavior of their subordinates, nevertheless, some commanders are complacent that a certain turning point has been reached, completely forgetting that only a part of the violence reaches their attention , robberies and other outrages committed by their subordinates [...] ”.

It was also noted here:

"2. Repatriated people going to the repatriation points, and especially Italians, Dutchmen and even Germans, are widely engaged in violence, and especially robbery and fleecing. Moreover, all these outrages are blamed on our servicemen.

3. There are cases when the Germans are engaged in a provocation, claiming rape, when this was not the case. I have established two such cases myself.

It is no less interesting that our people sometimes, without checking, report to the instance about the violence and murders that have taken place, while when checked, it turns out to be fiction. "

Indeed, in the occupied territory, the soldiers of the Red Army committed crimes. For example, in the above-cited report of the military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front, 6 such cases are cited, revealed during the period from 22 to 25 April. “A whole series of such facts can also be cited about other connections,” he writes.

Veteran Vasily Pavlovich Bryukhov recalls a very indicative case that gives an idea of ​​the measures to combat crimes committed by military personnel. He tells about the fate of his colleague, tank commander Lieutenant Ivanov from the Belgorod region. The Romanians burned down his village, and Ivanov's wife and two small children were killed in the burning shed.

Part ended up on the territory of Romania, in the city of Craiovo: “We drank and went with the mechanic to look for the pullet ... We went into the house, in the room a young girl of about twenty-five is sitting, drinking tea. She has a one and a half year old baby in her arms. The lieutenant handed the child over to his parents, he said to her: "Go to the room", and to the mechanic: "You go, fuck her, and then I." He went, but the boy himself had no connection with the girl. He began to rustle with her. Seeing such a thing, she jumped out the window and ran. And Ivanov heard a knock ... Well, he gave her a burst from a machine gun after her. She fell. They paid no attention and left ...

The next day her parents come with the local authorities to our brigade. And a day later, the authorities found them and took them - "SMERSH" worked well ... On the third day, the trial. The entire brigade was built in the clearing, the burgomaster and father and mother were brought in ... The verdict was announced: “Shoot in front of the line. Build a brigade. Execute the verdict "...

The brigade special officer, the colonel, says to our battalion special officer standing in the ranks of the brigade: "Comrade Morozov, carry out the sentence." He does not come out. "I order you!" ... He went. He went up to the convict ... he said to him: "Get on your knees" ... He got down on his knees, folded his cap behind his belt: "Bend your head." And when he bowed his head, the special officer shot him in the back of the head. The lieutenant's body fell and convulsed ... "

In this quote, the scheme is well traced: after receiving a message from the local authorities, the special department conducted an investigation, identifying the culprit. The court sentenced him to be shot in front of the formation, despite his title, authority (Vasily Pavlovich emphasizes that Ivanov enjoyed great authority in the unit), awards and heroism shown in battles. The veteran, recounting this episode, describes what a depressing impression the execution made on the brigade.

“Of course, there have been manifestations of cruelty, including sexual violence. They simply could not but be after what the fascists have done on our land. But such cases were resolutely suppressed and punished. And they did not become widespread "- General of the Army, President of the Academy of Military Sciences Mahmut Gareev says in an interview with the Trud newspaper.

The problem of the relationship between the soldiers of the Red Army and the civilian population of Germany is no less multifaceted and complex than assessments of other stages of our history. In the above examples, we see how easily propagandists from history bring huge, complex phenomena to one denominator and stick labels on them: Stalinism, repression, poorly educated Red Army soldiers, winners don't live like that, etc.

It is easy to see that the methods are used in all cases the same, and the myths of military history quite often intersect with myths from the history of the country, and vice versa. The black myth, which we regard as “Stalinist”, is in fact much broader, it is aimed at de-monizing much larger chunks of history. Extremely important elements of our life, around which the worldview of society is built, come under attack. And this should not be forgotten.

The consequences of such demonization are serious. The blows to the history of the Second World War, like the blow to the Stalinist period, caused irreparable damage to the elements that held us together as a people. We will consider in detail the essence of these processes and their consequences in the following chapters.

NOTES

1. Report "On the personality cult and its consequences." Cit. by http://www.hrono.ru/dokum/doklad20.htinl

2. Collection of military documents of the Great Patriotic War. M., Military Publishing. 1947-1960. Vol.28. P. 12.

3.N.S. Khrushchev. "Time. People. Power (Memories) ". Book 1. M., Moscow news. 1999.S. 300-301.

5. L.I. Mikoyan. "It was". M., Vagrius. 1999, cit. but email book.

6. "1941". M., International Fund "Democracy". 1998. T. 2, with reference to RCKHIDNI. F. 84. He. 3.D. 187.L. 118-126, op. by email version.

7. Yu.A. Bitter, “The Kremlin. Bid. General Staff ". Tver. 1995, cit. by http://militera.lib.ru/research/gorkov2/

8. A.I. Mikoyan. "It was". M., Vagrius. 1999.

9. "1941". M., International Fund "Democracy". 1998. T. 2, with reference to RCKHIDNI. F. 84. He. 3.D. 187.L. 118-126.

10. Quoted. on the Internet project "Russian Germans" http://www.rdinfo.ru/article.php? mode = view & own_menu_id = 33041

11. "New and Contemporary History", 2006, No. 6.

12.V. Zemskoe. "GULAG (historical and sociological aspect)".

14. "Russia and the USSR in the wars of the XX century, the loss of the armed forces." Ed. G.F. Krivosheeva. M., Olma-Press, 2001.

16. "Moskovsky Komsomolets", 22.06.2005, quoted from http://www.mk.ru/ blogs / idmk / 2005/06/22 / mk-daily / 56220 /

17. See Mikhail Remizov's interview with the rector of the Russian State Humanitarian University Yuri Afanasyev. Russian Journal, 13.02.2001, http://old.russ.ru/politics/ interview / 20010212_af-pr.html

18.I. Pykhalov. "The Great Slandered War". M., Yauza, Eksmo. 2005, cit. by email versions http://militera.lib.ru/research/pyhalov_i/02.html

19.M. Meltyukhov. Stalin's missed chance. The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Europe: 1939-1941 (Documents, Facts, Judgments). M., Veche. 2000, cit. by http://militera.lib.ru/research/meltvukhov/index.html

20. Ibid.

21. I. Pykhalov. "The Great Slandered War", op. by email versions http://militera.lib.ru/research/pyhalov_i/02.html

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. The New Times, 19.11.2007, op. by http://www.gaidar.org/ smi / 2007_l l_19_nt.htm

25. "Social history of domestic science", http://www.ihst.ru/ projects / sohist / with reference to "Izvestia of the Central Committee of the KPSS". 1991. No. 3. P.146-147.

26.S.G. Kara-Murza. "Soviet Civilization" (Volume I), op. but http://www.kara-murza.rU/books/sc_a/sc_allO.htm#hdr_156

27. I. Pykhalov. Great slandered war, op. by email versions http://militera.lib.ru/research/pyhalov_i/02.html

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Russian archive: Great Patriotic War: Orders of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR June 22, 1941 - 1942 M., Terra. 1997, cit. by email versions http://militera.lib.ru/docs/da/nko/index.html

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. See I. Pykhalov. Great slandered war. With reference to TSKHIDK. F. 1 / P. He. 23a. D. 2.L. 27.

34. See V. Zemskoe. "GULAG", (historical and sociological aspect). Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. V. Zemskoe. "Repatriation of Soviet Citizens and Their Further Destiny." Sociological research. May 1995. No. 5. S. 3-13, op. by email versions http://www.ecsocman.edu.ru/socis/msg/210092.html

37. See I. Pykhalov. Great slandered war.

38. Ibid.

39. I. Sukhikh. Life after the Kolyma. Zvezda, No. 6, 2001, cit. by email versions http://magazines.rHss.ru/zvezda/2001/6/suhuh.html

41. A.M. Biryukov. Kolyma stories: essays. Novosibirsk. 2004.

42.http: //vif2ne.ru/nvk/forum/archive/1392/1392332.htm

43. Russian archive: Great Patriotic War: Battle for Berlin (Red Army in defeated Germany). M., Terra, 1995, op. by http://militera.lib.ru/docs/da/berlin_45/index.html

44. "The Guardian", 05/01/02, op. available at http://www.inosmi.ru/stories/ 01/12/06/3034 / 140671.html.

45. Russian archive: Great Patriotic War: Orders of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR June 22, 1941 - 1942 M., Terra, 1997, op. by http://militera.lib.ru/docs/da/nko/index.html

46. ​​A. Drabkin. I fought with Panzerwaffe, M “Yauza, EKSMO. 2007.S. 213.

47. A. Drabkin. I fought on the "T-34", Book. 2. M., Yauza, EKSMO. 2008.S., 32.

48. A. Drabkin. I fought the Panzerwaffe. S. 85 - 86.

49. A. Drabkin. I fought the Panzerwaffe. S. 147, 152.

50. A. Drabkin. I fought in a T-34. S. 175-176.

Golovinov, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, has not yet received housing. Moreover, before the holidays in a newspaper (!), He learned that his queue had changed from the second to the sixth. The fact that he was pushed aside in the queue in a peculiar way interpreted the president's words about the poor, deeply offended the Veteran!

AND THIS IS BEFORE VICTORY DAY!

The fact is that some Veterans were denied apartments with the reference that they were not poor. The President corrected this and the order, as I understand it, to provide an apartment, regardless of property status. Officials understood this in a peculiar way and decided to adjust the queues. Is that called? That is, there are precedents when they pushed aside poor Veterans and put ahead of those who belong to the low-income group, but should also be provided with housing? As a result, the Veteran had the following impression: “. Well, for some reason, the authorities do not like the former repressed ... Probably all the same on their part - this is revenge for the fact that I so actively defend my rights "

Veteran has sent more photos. I had no idea that things were so bad. After the holidays I will put them on my website "Rus and Swans"www. yaroslavova. ru

Hello, dear Natalia Borisovna. I have news. In the last issue of the newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets" in Novosibirsk (No. 17 of 04/21/2010) under the heading "Ask the authorities a question" (material by Vladimir Ivanov) http://www.mk.ru/regions/novosib/article/2010/04/27/476909-v-poiskah-otvetov.html
my short letter was published in which I told how they do not give me medals, housing, a car. The newspaper's editorial board published a response from the administration of the Bolotninsky District, Novosibirsk Region. In which the head of the district Viktor Frank said: - In the first quarter, the Bolotninsky district received funds from the federal budget to provide housing for three veterans, we have already purchased housing for two veterans. Housing for the third veteran is under construction. These veterans were registered in 2009 as living in dilapidated (emergency) housing. Pavel Ivanovich Golovinov was registered with those in need of better housing conditions on January 11, 2010 (Resolution of the Administration of the Kunchuruk Village Council of the Bolotninsky District of January 11, 2010 No. 1) after the entry into force of the Federal Law of December 21, 2009 No. 327-FZ "On Amendments to the Federal Law "On veterans", according to which after 03.01.2010, when registering veterans of the Great Patriotic War by local authorities, taking into account paragraph 3 of Article 49 of the Housing Code of the Russian Federation, the attribution of WWII veterans to poor citizens is not taken into account. That is, the previous stage, in which Golovinov was second, turned out to be revised, allegedly strictly in accordance with the law.
In accordance with the minutes of the meeting on adjusting the priority for improving housing conditions for veterans of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 in the Bolotninsky District, P.I. No. 6. A total of 19 people were put in the queue. As funds are received from the regional budget, all war veterans will be provided with housing. Well, for some reason, the authorities do not like the former repressed.
The administration of the Bolotninsky district deliberately misled the newspaper's correspondent V. Ivanov that supposedly I have good living conditions and prosperous material well-being. At one time, the prosecutor's office established that throughout my life in the Russian state I did not have any housing at all. And I currently live in a house with stove heating, without running water (there is running water in the village), which my son, having retired from the service, illegally set up for himself in my garden from the point of view of the authorities (therefore they do not carry out running water), and from the front part, that is, from the street, there is a dilapidated house that once belonged to my late mother-in-law. Why didn't the authorities inform me in writing against signature that they had moved me to the queue? Probably all the same on their part - this is revenge for the fact that I so actively defend my rights.
I am also sending photographs of the mother-in-law's house, which has a sign stating that a veteran of the Great Patriotic War lives in this house. And on the fence there is a sign No. 47 nailed. For some reason, the authorities did not begin to nail this sign on the house of their son in the garden.
Respectfully repressed and rehabilitated, invalid of the Second World War, awarded three orders, Pavel Ivanovich Golovinov and his son Mikhail.

»Documents about the repressed

I asked my good friend Vitaly Sosnitsky to write this section, who was engaged in the search for information on his repressed relatives, and now helps other people a lot in search of information on the IOP and SVRT forums.

The thirty-seventh year has forever remained in the memory of people, especially the older generation. For some he brought grief at the loss of family and friends, for others he was remembered for the atmosphere of fear and oppressive foreboding of trouble. Of course, the repressions did not arise under Stalin - they began immediately after the October coup, but it was 1937 that became the year of mass terror. During 1937-1938, more than 1.7 million people were arrested on political charges. And together with the victims of deportations and convicted "socially harmful elements" the number of repressed exceeds two million.

Any loss of rights and benefits, legal restrictions related to illegal prosecution, imprisonment, unjustified conviction, sending children to orphanages after the arrest of their parents, illegal use of compulsory medical measures is considered repression.

I. The first mass category - people arrested by the state security organs (VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB) on political charges and sentenced by judicial or quasi-judicial (CCO, "troika", "deuce", etc.) instances to death or to various terms of imprisonment in camps and prisons or to exile. According to preliminary estimates, between 1921 and 1985, between 5 and 5.5 million people fall into this category. Most often, the memory books included information about people who suffered in the period 1930-1953. This is explained not only by the fact that during this period the most massive repressive operations were carried out, but also by the fact that the process of rehabilitation, which began in the Khrushchev era and resumed during perestroika, primarily affected the victims of the Stalinist terror. Victims of repressions of the earlier (before 1929) and later (after 1954) periods are found less frequently in the databases: their cases have been reviewed to a much lesser extent.

The earliest repressions of Soviet power (1917-1920), dating back to the era of the revolution and the Civil War, are so fragmentary and contradictory documented that even their scale has not yet been established (and can hardly be established correctly, since during this period mass extrajudicial reprisals against "class enemies", which, of course, was never recorded in the documents). The available estimates of the victims of the "red terror" range from several tens of thousands (50-70) to over a million people.

II. Another mass category of repressed for political reasons - peasants, administratively expelled from their place of residence during the campaign "to destroy the kulaks as a class." In total for 1930-1933, according to various estimates, from 3 to 4.5 million people were forced to leave their native villages. A minority of them were arrested and sentenced to be shot or imprisoned in a camp. 1.8 million became "special settlers" in uninhabited regions of the European North, the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan. The rest were deprived of their property and resettled within their own regions, in addition, a significant part of the "kulaks" fled from repression to big cities and industrial construction sites. The consequence of the Stalinist agrarian policy was a massive famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, which claimed the lives of 6 or 7 million people (average estimate), but neither those who fled from collectivization, nor those who died of hunger are formally considered victims of repression and are not included in the books of memory. The number of dispossessed "special settlers" in the books of memory is growing, although at the same time they are sometimes registered both in the regions from which they were deported and in those where they were deported.

III. The third mass category of victims of political repression are peoples who were completely deported from places of traditional settlement to Siberia, Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The most large-scale administrative deportations were during the war, in 1941-1945. Some were evicted preemptively, as potential accomplices of the enemy (Koreans, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Italians, Romanians), others were accused of collaborating with the Germans during the occupation (Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Caucasian peoples). The total number of those sent and mobilized into the "labor army" reached 2.5 million people. To date, there are almost no books of memory dedicated to deported national groups (as a rare exception, one can name the Kalmyk book of memory, which was compiled not only from documents, but also from oral interviews).

All these repressions were reflected in various documents, archival and investigation files, which are now kept in the departmental archives of law enforcement agencies and special services. Only a small part of them was deposited in the state archives.

In order to preserve the memory of the victims of repressions and help people restore the history of their families, in 1998 the Memorial Society began work on creating a unified database, bringing together information from the Memory Books already printed or just prepared for publication in different regions of the former THE USSR.

The result of this work was the 1 album "Victims of Political Terror in the USSR" released in early 2004, where more than 1,300,000 names of victims of repression from 62 regions of Russia, from all regions of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, two regions of Ukraine - Odessa and Kharkov were presented.

Despite the tremendous changes that have taken place in recent years in all countries on the territory of the former USSR, the problem of perpetuating the memory of victims of state terror remains unresolved.

This applies to all aspects of the problem - whether it is the rehabilitation of illegally convicted persons, or the publication of documents related to repressions, their scale and causes, or the identification of the burial places of the executed, or the creation of museums and the installation of monuments. The issue of publishing the lists of terror victims has not yet been resolved either. Hundreds of thousands of people in different regions of the former USSR (and in many countries of the world where our compatriots live) want to find out the fate of their relatives. But even if a person's biography is included in one of the books in memory of the victims of political repression, it is very difficult to find out about this: such books are usually published in small editions and almost never go on sale - even the main libraries of Russia do not have a complete set of published martyrologists.

There are several on-line databases on the web. As practice shows, these databases contain information that is absent in Memorial's publication “Victims of Political Terror in the USSR”.

Here is some of them:

1) Project "Returned names" http://visz.nlr.ru:8101

2) List of citizens repressed in the 1920s on the territory of the Ryazan province, rehabilitated by the prosecutor's office of the Ryazan region http://www.hro.org/ngo/memorial/1920/book.htm. There is information on the convicted conditionally or released.

3) Site of Krasnodar "Memorial" http://www.kubanmemo.ru

5) The names of those shot at the Stele of the Central Cemetery in Khabarovsk http://vsosnickij.narod.ru/news.html, http://vsosnickij.narod.ru/DSC01230.JPG.

6) Site of the Lviv Memorial- http://www.poshuk-lviv.org.ua

7) Books in memory of victims of political repression of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, volume 1 (A-B), volume 2 (C-D) http://www.memorial.krsk.ru

8) New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Orthodox Church of the XX century, http://193.233.223.18/bin/code....html?/ans

9) St. Petersburg Martyrology of the Clergy and the Miryan, http://petergen.com/bovkalo/mart.html

10) The project "Open Archive", which the newspaper "Moskovskaya Pravda" has been implementing with the Directorate of the FSB of the Russian Federation in Moscow and the Moscow Region, for nine years

11) Project "Repressed Russia" - 1422570 persons, http://rosagr.natm.ru

12) Thematic database on the repressed Poles who lived in the Altai Territory and were convicted in 1919-1945. under article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, http://www.archiv.ab.ru/r-pol/repr.htm

What does such a variety of sources indicate? First of all, that many thousands of surnames of the repressed still, in spite of everything, remain unknown. You, and only you, can find out the unknown pages of the life of your relatives and restore their honest name from oblivion.

Search procedure (a general case, from my own experience and using the site recommendations www.memo.ru) :

1) If you unknown where the relative lived at the time of arrest. In this case, you must send a request to the Main Information Center (GIC) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (117418, Moscow, Novocheremushkinskaya st., 67).

In the request, you must indicate: the last name, first name, patronymic of the repressed, year and place of his birth, date of arrest, place of residence at the time of arrest. The request must contain a request to inform the place where the investigation file is kept.

After receiving the answer, you should write to the institution where this most investigative file is kept. In this request, it will already be necessary to indicate what you want - to receive some specific certificate, extract or the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the investigation file.

2) If you known where the relative was born (and / or lived) at the time of arrest.

In this case, you need to send a request to the FSB Directorate of the region where your relative was born and / or lived at the time of arrest.

The request indicates the same data of the repressed person as in the previous case.

It does not matter whether this region is now part of Russia or not - the mechanism is the same throughout the territory of the former USSR. The only difference is that if the file is stored on the territory of Russia, then it can be forwarded to the FSB of the region where you live, so that you can familiarize yourself with it on the spot.

From abroad, cases are not sent (although there are exceptions), but a certificate or extract is made. Alternatively, you can ask the holders of the case to send it for review to the regional city closest to your place of residence.

If the answer from the FSB is negative (that is, they do not have such a person), then you should write to the Information Center (IC) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the same region. If the answer is negative there too, write to the Main Information Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.

Remember that according to the law, you have the right to “receive preserved manuscripts, photographs and other personal documents” of your repressed relatives.

If your situation is special and goes beyond this general case - please ask questions, we will try to help you. Requests can be posted on the forum www.vgd.ru (section "Repressed") or on the website http://www.vsosnickij.narod.ru.

Here are examples of what can be learned from the archive-investigative files of the repressed:

- Date and place of birth (questionnaire of the arrested person, interrogation protocols);

- Patronymic (there was a case when even the daughter of a repressed person believed that her father's patronymic was Andreevich, but from his profile it turned out - Andronovich);

- Composition of the family, place of residence and composition of property before 1917 (questionnaire of the arrested person, interrogation protocols, certificates, metrics and other documents of a personal nature, attached to the case);

- Composition of the family, place of residence and composition of property up to repression;

- Information about the arrested person (height, color of eyes, hair), information about the family, place of work, composition of property and place of residence in the special settlement and / or arrest (questionnaire of the arrested person);

- Information about the place (places) and nature of work in custody, fingerprints, date and cause of death (personal file of the prisoner);

- Photos, letters from relatives, metrics, birth (death) certificates, autobiography, information about training, sending to the active army, removal from a special settlement and other documents.

Friends, please click on the social media buttons, this will help the development of the project!