To begin with, I would like to present you an article by the search engine Alexei Krivopustov “The Fallen. Lost”, and at the same time express my gratitude to him. This man showed civic courage and was not afraid to speak out against the accepted public opinion about the Great Patriotic War, and to tell the hard-hitting truth about its tragic pages.
“I do not pretend to be sensational. I don’t want to accuse, expose, scourge, call for account. The information and information that I will present is aimed exclusively at ensuring that those who are looking for their relatives, missing in the war, killed, buried, have an idea, learn the truth. Let it be unsightly, albeit sometimes cruel, but - the truth. Basically, we will talk about the Tuapse region, but the overall situation is not much different from the entire Kuban, from the whole of Russia.
We have been working with citizens' appeals for a long time. Basically, in them, the same main question for each family, each person, sounds - where is our soldier buried, help me find the burial place. And in this matter, we are the most competent. Local search engines. It just so happened. The state does not really need it.
Military commissariats can only give information on the names of military graves registered with the state. Local administrations are the same at best. In the last ten years, the documents of the Memorial WBS, the People's Exploit and the People's Memory databases have become available on the Internet. The main source of information in them is lists of irrecoverable losses and awards. It is difficult to overestimate these documents containing millions of names and destinies of those who perished in the war. But you need to know that not everything has been published, a lot of information is still classified as "secret", or not digitized. In addition, you need to have experience in order to work with these documents, to correctly evaluate the information contained in them.
And then I come to the main column in the lists of irrecoverable losses - "where is buried." Sometimes there are three words - "missing", sometimes - additional information - "missing at a height …", quite often quite specific information - "killed, buried at a height …". The latter, falls into the HBS card, is indicated as the primary burial place.
Lists of irrecoverable losses were compiled in parts by people. Commanders and their deputies. Sometimes it is irresponsible, sometimes it is illiterate, in conditions of heavy battles and retreats, military confusion. Often, they are lost, or not compiled at all. Although there was a strict order, indicate the places of death and burial of soldiers and officers. So they wrote practically everything that came across. Very rarely, the column "where he is buried" carries valid information corresponding to reality.
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Working with such lists, sometimes you are simply amazed at what is indicated in them. For example, in the lists of irrecoverable losses for the fourth battalion of the 9th rifle brigade that disappeared almost completely near Tuapse, in the column “where he is buried” it is indicated “Tuapse region, southeast of Tuapse”. Was the list made by an irresponsible person, or simply did not know geography? I dont know. All hostilities were fought north and north-east of Tuapse, and to the south-east - just the Black Sea …
In the lists of losses for October 1942 for the 119th Rifle Brigade - only two dozen names. Although, according to a report to the headquarters of the 18th Army, only during the period of October 13-15, the brigade lost about 2500 people killed and missing! Unfortunately, there are a lot of such examples from the lists.
Nevertheless, a person who is looking for his soldier, who received information from the list of irrecoverable losses, for example, “was buried at the height of 388.3”, asks us to establish the burial place. To find the same mass grave, lost in the wilds of the mountains, where, in addition to his soldier, according to the lists, there are two dozen more soldiers. To kneel so that this place is known and remembered by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
We collect everything we can. The same lists, we compare information from combat reports, analyze the schemes of combat actions we received in the archives, evaluate the surviving memories of veterans by a miracle. We are recovering the events bit by bit, and quite often we can answer the person who contacted us that yes, your soldier fought and died there, these days, at this height, or near this village. But we cannot find a burial place, find the same mass grave that people imagine. Not because we are not competent or do not want to. But because it is not. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, it never happened.
During the terrible battles in the Kuban, the retreat of 1942 and the offensive of 1943, the fallen soldiers were not buried. At all. With very few exceptions. Solitary graves are officers, those who simply could not be buried. Group - these are usually just sanitary discharges. In funnels and trenches. And then - at best. Most of those killed, not to mention missing, simply remained on the battlefield. If they interfered with the Germans, then their sanitary teams very rarely buried our soldiers, more often they simply threw them into a hollow or ravine. I found such information among German documents.
Ours, in the winter they were called "snowdrops", in the summer - "cucumbers". Because after a couple of days in the heat, the bodies swelled a lot. And bypassed. This is not cynicism. This is the truth of the war. The neighborhood of death was familiar, and there was no way to bury. I had to think about the living, and survive, and fight. And only this was enough human strength.
You cannot condemn soldiers and commanders, teams responsible for burials. And there were practically no funeral teams as such. The companies have a quarter of the personnel. Hunger and cold autumn, stone earth entwined with roots. Lack of shovels, which were not enough to carve a trench in the mountainous earth. Not to open a grave. And the forgotten soldiers remained lying on the slopes and meadows. To this day, we are raising such - "riding". Only slightly covered with foliage that has rotted for decades, and the rains wash out the yellowed soldiers' bones into the light of day.
Sometimes, in the rear of the units, burials were actually made. In addition to the information in the lists of irrecoverable losses, burial schemes with reference to the area, drawn up by responsible officers, were attached to them. With surnames, dates. But in many cases, and these names, these fighters are gone forever. How this could have happened, I will describe below.
According to the most conservative data, in the mountains near Tuapse, about 100,000 soldiers and officers of the Red Army died and went missing. If we add up all the figures of the officially buried and reburied soldiers in the memorials of the Tuapse region, there will be only about ten thousand of them. An obvious question arises - where are the others? Where are they buried, where are they?
I talked with old residents of villages and farmsteads, eyewitnesses, old people who were still children during the war. With different generations of search engines, just with knowledgeable people. It is not possible, within the framework of one article, to tell everything that I managed to hear and record. For example, to my question - do you know the forgotten burial places of Russian soldiers, the old people of villages and farmsteads answered almost the same: “There were German crosses, yes, we know, there were crosses. Yes, they have all been excavated. And ours - no, we do not know, have not seen. These answers were true, but there was also something that people do not want to remember and talk about to this day.
One of the old men of the Ostrovskaya Shchel farm: “Moreover, in 1944, as the south wind blows from the pass, it was impossible to breathe like that. Dead meat … And the northern one too. From the Karatyansky ridge … . The fighting in that area ended in the winter of 1942. Tens of thousands of soldiers lay abandoned in the mountains, within walking distance from villages, farms, collective farms.
But even then, when the war had rolled back far, there was no one to bury these soldiers. Only women, old people, children remained in the villages. And the first task was to restore the economy, to work for the front. In the spring of 1943, the chairmen of collective farms, by order from the military, sometimes allocated carts and horses, with "funeral teams" - children and old people. But what could they do? And what was left of the soldiers who had lain in the forest since the fall? According to the testimony of the old people - those that are closer, they were tied with barbed wire, dragged to the nearest pits or funnels, and often, they were simply folded into gullies and streams to be carried away by melt water and floods …
There was a war going on. The country needed everything. It was the same in the post-war years. In addition, in the late 50s, after the war, orders were already circulating around the People's Commissariat of Defense and local military enlistment offices that the remains of the fallen, in addition, should be removed. And this was less human attitude towards the dead. More than that, it was necessary to hide the enormous human losses. Those who are older, remember. How from decade to decade the official figure of total losses in the Great Patriotic War was growing …
I will tell you about flour mills. In the war and the first post-war period, such were created or restored. Small ones. They were in Tuapse and Apsheron districts. These are only those that I know about from the old people. Seven decades ago, the country did not know modern chemical fertilizers. The fields were fertilized with bone meal. Animals, less often fish.
Tens of thousands of soldiers became rye and bread, their bones were scattered in the Soviet fields. From the forests and mountains, bones were brought and brought, surrendered to procurement points. In the early 2000s, one very old woman died. In the 50s and 60s, she did not work as a receptionist at a procurement point at the Goyth station. Before her death, not wanting to carry such a burden with her, she talked about such surrenders.
According to her, there were always two carriages at the station - for bones. They were sent once a month, or even more often, to flour mills. It was understood that these were animal bones. But everyone knew whose bones they were. In order not to blaspheme at all, only the skulls were not accepted. Strong confirmation of this is the work of search engines.
As a teenager, working with a detachment on the Shahumyan pass, we and I were surprised that among our finds were solid skulls and small bones. There were no large ones. It's the same to this day. The mounted soldiers we found in August 2015 are completely missing large skeletal bones.
Another old man, a former resident of the non-existent Perevalnoye, added details. Then everyone wanted to survive. And there is. An airplane duralumin was rented to procurement points - it cost 25 kopecks. The boys collected cartridges, plucked bullets out of them, and smelted lead from the bullets. A kilogram of lead cost 12 kopecks at the store. A kilogram of bones is four kopecks. The soldiers were cheaper than lead …
And I have dozens of similar stories. Names. Most of the names that could be saved are also gone forever. According to the order, all the soldier's medallions found must have been handed over to police stations or village councils. Then they went to military commissariats. And there they were simply thrown out or destroyed. The country did not need the dead - for them it was necessary to pay compensation to families … I'm not talking about the lost or deliberately destroyed lists of irrecoverable losses, war reports.
The country needed nameless. Missing. But they were also treated beastly. What the old men did not like to remember, nevertheless broke through in their stories. Yes. There were military graves, mass graves near villages and farms. These were military, hospital, and additional burials of the first post-war years. Again, in order to hide the scale of the losses, and I cannot give any other explanation for this, in the 70s the Ministry of Defense organized a "great reshuffle", otherwise you cannot name it.
With the help of equipment and soldiers, such a grave, say near the village of Gunayka, was opened. The remains, together with the earth, were loaded onto dump trucks and transported to another place. All this was dumped into prepared pits. It fell asleep and leveled out. The known mass grave became unknown.
Artem Karapetyan, 65th, conscript soldier: “Our company was sent to unearth soldiers on the river bank near Maikop. There were already quite thick trees growing there, but they had been cut down before us, and only stumps remained. We uprooted the stumps and then dug holes. There were both soldiers and civilians in them - this was evident from the shoes and the preserved clothes. The coffins, however, were brought. Packed packed. The officer thought that we dug up almost 2,500 people. One soldier found a gold coin. The officer took it."
I asked, what happened to them then? “Nothing, Artem answered. They were transported, and we buried them, right at the Maikop airfield”. Now take a look at the list of burials in Maykop. At the airfield - there are no official mass graves. There is also not a single grave with so many people buried. This is just one of these stories … Most of the mass graves, even those that are accurately reflected in the WDS documents, simply no longer exist.
The lack of leadership and organization for perpetuating the memory of the fallen by the Ministry of Defense in the post-war decades, except for absolutely blasphemous actions, left its mark on the work of search engines, which, by and large, was not particularly controlled and organized by anyone.
The detachments worked in the forests and mountains, finding the fallen, dozens, hundreds. Sometimes - with names in medallions and on personal belongings. Reburials were carried out where they were allowed, often even in memorials in other areas. Most of such information was sent by conscientious search engines to where it should be - to military commissariats. Further, it must have been included in the documents and archives of the Ministry of Defense that are being published today. But as they say now - "something went wrong."
On my desk and on my shelves there are several folders with reports of detachments, protocols of exhumation, starting from the 90s. I dare to assure the readers. Most of the information about such burials is not available either in military enlistment offices or in the Ministry of Defense. And you won't find her anywhere. This is only in terms of the number of unnamed soldiers. But the main tragedy is with those who managed to get their names back.
Most of these names, these found and buried soldiers, you will not find anywhere else. Not in the archives of the Ministry of Defense or by contacting the military registration and enlistment office, not even on boards with lists of soldiers buried in such a memorial. Because local administrations do not have enough money to renew them. But this is already a sorrowful tribute to modernity.
The lack of any systematization and centralized collection of reports from search units, exchange of information also left its mark. Not everyone is conscientious and responsible in their work. The reports were not compiled, and if they were, then they were not transferred, and if they were transferred, then they were already dead and non-existent "higher" organizations. In addition, over the past decades, hundreds of detachments from other regions working, say, in our Tuapse region, simply took the discovered remains of soldiers to their cities for burial there. Without leaving any information about the places of discovery, names.
This needed the "results of expeditions", reports, PR, show. It is impossible not to mention all sorts of self-proclaimed "search" groups, school teams of the 80s, gray and compassionate diggers. They also found the remains. Often, they were simply buried anywhere, often without any designation of burial places, places of discovery.
You can go on with what happened to the soldiers for a long time. In the next article I will tell you about the tragic picture with official memorials, names on them, hospital graves. Summing up what we know, what I have outlined in this article, I can unequivocally say to those who are looking for their dead and missing, even if I take away hope: There is simply no overwhelming number of those killed, buried, missing. And no trace of them remained. Only our memory. We and you, those who are looking, are collecting, bit by bit, what is left of the state machine. Fallen. Missing."
2015 year. Alexey Krivopustov, "Kuban Bridgehead"
So, there is a shocking fact: the history of the Great Patriotic War, which we know from school textbooks, documentary and feature films and from the memoirs of front-line soldiers, is strikingly different from the picture that has been revealed to us over the past decade, thanks to the enthusiasm of search engines: people with a heightened sense of conscience and justice.
This picture leads to the inevitable conclusions:
1. The remains of millions of Soviet soldiers, neither during the war, nor after it, no one betrayed, and they still lie in the open air, becoming trees and grass.
This means that there were no funeral teams in the Red Army, which cannot exist in principle. Someone is obliged to collect mortal medallions, weapons, to bury bodies? I'm not even talking about the rigorous ceremony of giving military honors to the fallen, accepted in any army in the world: with a bowed banner, farewell speeches and three-fold rifle salvo - even if it was not always possible.
A paradoxical situation arises: it turns out that in the post-war USSR no one knew about the millions of unburied soldiers, otherwise the language does not turn out to be called the post-war generations grateful descendants.
2. Many of the fallen have a mortal medallion and personal belongings with them, which means that after the battle no one examined the dead: neither their own, nor the Germans.
3. It is striking that most of the fighters are found with personal weapons and ammunition, which, at times, is not even used up. Moreover, both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht soldiers. That is, there is still a huge amount of weapons in our forests and fields, which were absolutely functional during the first post-war decades.
But the criminal chronicle from 1945 to the present day is silent on this matter. Although, according to the logic of things, these weapons were obliged to migrate to attics, vegetable gardens and to the basements of enterprising citizens. And from there - into the hands of dashing people, who have never been lacking in Russia, especially in the hungry post-war years. What is the "Black Cat" of the Weiner brothers ?! "Forest brothers" on the Baltic model would be provided for us!
Well, at worst, all these mines, shells, rifles, machine guns, helmets, machine guns and cartridges had to end up at the scrap metal collection points. But no, they are lying where they were!
The active collection of weapons and metal began only with the appearance of metal detectors among citizens.
It turns out that almost no one knew about this weapon for almost 70 years. Why?
This fact also shatters the conventional wisdom about the shortage of weapons in the early years of the war due to the loss of armories and factories as a result of the rapid German offensive. Remember those tearful stories about one rifle for two soldiers ?!
This means that there was no shortage if after the battle no one collected weapons and ammunition from the fallen. There were many weapons! Where from?
4. The commanders of the subunits, whose duties included submitting information about the losses, could not know in principle which of their subordinates was killed and who was missing. And therefore, all that the headquarters wrote in the reports of losses, and then in the funerals, that is, all the military statistics, can be wiped off.
5. Memories of rank-and-file front-line soldiers and memoirs of generals (including GK Zhukov) are worthless - they have never been in a war, which is now being raised from the ground by search engines!
6. Yes, I was a child, but I remember: in the 60s, the city was ridden by rags, collecting rags, scrap metal and … bones from the population. In return, they presented the children with toys: I liked the pistols that “shoot” with pistons. Now I understand that the economic effect from the junkers was zero and even negative, but for some reason they were! Maybe in this way the Power cleaned up after the Creator?
One cannot but surprise the cynicism of the state, which spends huge sums of money on the celebration of Victory Day with mumbled "veterans", a mausoleum boarded up with plywood (one plywood is worth it …) and a military parade, erecting giant monuments to its defenders throughout the country, forming "Immortal regiments", but so far it has not bothered to adopt a legislative act on the burial of the remains of these same defenders lying in the forests and fields. After all, search engines (low bow to them) work, practically, on sheer enthusiasm.
So why did the citizens of the USSR, during and after the war, not armed to the teeth? Why did the inevitable surge of banditry and separatism not follow? After all, the psychology of a person with a gun is completely different from that of a person without a gun.
And this happened because the population of the USSR knew nothing about the Great Patriotic War! I believed that the "loading" (reboot) of civilization took place in the region of the 50s of the twentieth century. Now the question arises: didn't people in those years go to the forests, plow the fields? Haven't seen the battlefield, the rotting remains of soldiers, abandoned weapons and equipment? Even if the Creator, when loading, did not put us memories of the war, what he saw could not but shock the population. The echoes of this shock, in any form, were bound to reach our days.
They started talking about the Great Patriotic War in the USSR only in 1965, when May 9 again became a holiday. By that time, the broken military equipment had disappeared from the battlefields, and the remains of the soldiers were overgrown with a young forest. People, including front-line soldiers, had only abrupt information about the war. Nobody (perhaps in the Central Committee of the CPSU) suspected what kind of "evidence" of war the Creator threw into our forests.
This is precisely the systemic contradiction, when the whole country, on a patriotic upsurge, rushed about with the Great Victory, and at the same time, mushroom rains bleached the bones of those who won this Victory!
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