[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
|
War, War, War See other War, War, War Articles Title: The Price of Victory and the Price of the Defeat The Price of Victory and the Price of the Defeat By Dmitry Babich Russia Profile Print this Print this Print this E-mail this Print this Send us your feedback Most Popular Stories The Price of Victory and the Price of the Defeat, By Dmitry Babich A New Start or an Old Song? By Dmitry Babich A Year Without A Great Breakthrough, Comment by Alexander Arkhangelsky Other stories: Outlawed Disagreement A Year Without A Great Breakthrough A Dreadful Future Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Lessons From Sochi Free, but not Really Portrait of a Nationalist Medvedev’s Mixed Messages The Deputies Revolt A New Start or an Old Song? Historians Try to Put a Final Number on Russia’s War Dead As Victory Day approaches, former orthodoxies about the Soviet Union’s role in the Second World War are being revised. An exhaustive survey of records at the Russian ministry of defense suggests that fewer servicemen died than was previously thought. Although that challenges the long-held view that Soviet troops were used as cannon fodder, it still leaves millions of civilians and others unaccounted for. As Russia nears Victory day, the annual celebration of the end of the Second World War, discussions on the most painful issue – the terrible loss of life that the country had to endure in the name of common victory – are becoming more heated. No one is disputing the main figure first made public in the late 80s, under the liberal rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, of 27 million dead. The question is how many of these people died as a result of combat action and how many became victims of Nazi atrocities on occupied Soviet territory, or died for other reasons not directly related to the Soviet military’s habit of “burying the enemy under soldiers’ corpses.” Work on the creation of an electronic database which would include the war victims’ names, personal data and circumstances of death, which started back in Gorbachev’s time, is slowly nearing its end, and a more or less final list is expected to be published next year. “In fact, this list will never be final, because it will always be open for the inclusion of new names and other new data. Hundreds of thousands of new names may still surface,” explained Alexander Kirilin, the head of the memorial department of the Russian defense ministry. “But so far our research has revealed that the army’s losses in combat, enemy bombing raids etc. is just 8, 668, 400 people. Of course, as new facts come to our attention, this list may get longer, but even in its present form it denies many stereotypes.” According to Kirilin, the figure of 8,668, 400 includes the soldiers who were killed in German bombing raids against the trains transporting troops to the frontline, people who were listed as missing in action and whose death was later confirmed, and even the 103,000 deserters who were executed by firing squads on Stalin’s infamous orders. If true, this figure puts in doubt the stereotypical vision of the Soviet-German war being won by the Soviet Union mostly thanks to the indiscriminate sacrifice of its soldiers’ lives. German combat losses have always been estimated at a much lower level than the Soviet ones. In the 1950s, when the last German POWs returned from the Soviet Union, the official German estimate was just 3,050,000 soldiers killed in combat in all of World War II. The total number of German losses, including civilian victims, was estimated at about 6.5 million dead. German historians always stressed that this number was not complete, and it had a tendency to get bigger, not smaller. But even in its present form, the gap between the number of German dead and Soviet dead is striking. “My suspicion is that the German side had a tendency to underestimate its losses, while the Soviet officials overestimated our casualties, listing, for example, all the soldiers from the units encircled by the enemy in 1941 as dead,” Kirilin explains. “For Russians, the time of great disorder in military statistics was the year 1941, when the army was retreating to Moscow and whole divisions were lost, not necessarily in action but sometimes only on paper due to the ensuing chaos. For the Germans, the time of chaos was 1944-1945, when their data becomes hectic and unreliable.” Since the 1970s and 1980s, when fiction writers of the war generation with a prevalent tragic view of the conflict set the tone for discussions on the war, the general view in Russia was that the Soviet army had good soldiers, but bad generals (with a few glorious exceptions), indiscriminately throwing soldiers into sometimes hopeless missions on orders from Stalin. Today’s historians argue that although this pattern of events was indeed widespread, the bigger picture was much more varied. “The phrase about ‘burying the enemy under our soldiers’ corpses’ was coined by the Soviet writer Viktor Astafyev, who I respect a lot,” said Nikolay Poroskov, a former colonel of the Russian army currently working as a military expert at Vremya Novosti daily. “In 1941, when German armies were nearing Moscow, this was very often the case. But what would happen if we had ceded Moscow and Leningrad to the Nazis? The Jewish population in these cities was estimated at several hundreds of thousands. Later on, when the Soviet generals were in a better position, they stopped using the tactics of 1941.” Alexei Isayev, an independent military historian specializing on the problem of Soviet military casualties during the war, does not support the negative view of Soviet military tactics during the war. “At most stages of the war, the proportion of German and Soviet combat losses was 1:2, at the worst moments it was 1:3 and 1:4,” Isayev said. “But there is the price of victory and the price of defeat. I am afraid, in 1941 and 1942, Russia just could not afford the defeat.”
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
|
||
|
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
|
||