In the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense of Russia, the diaries of Marshal of the Soviet Union Rodion Malinovsky were found, in which the commander named one of the main reasons for the defeats of the USSR at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the illiteracy of the senior command staff. This was announced on Thursday, February 21, by the candidate of historical sciences Alexander Yasakov at a round table in memory of Malinovsky in the Public Chamber, RIA Novosti reports.
Malinovsky's diaries are dedicated to the events from March 1941 to February 1943.
According to Yasakov, the theme of the inability of a part of the Soviet generals to solve combat missions is a common thread in his memoirs. It was about the command personnel of the divisional, corps, army and front-line units. Malinovsky writes that such phenomena took place everywhere.
“And the commander connected this aspect not with the personal qualities of individual commanders, but directly with the low professional level of the command staff as a whole, including himself,” Yasakov said.
The historian cited a quote from Malinovsky's diaries, in which he talks about the poor training of commanders: “All of us in those years had to go through youth, lack of experience in conducting operations on an army and front-line scale … All command on all fronts went through this stage, learned to fight, through defeat, suffering and blood received the experience necessary for conquest. We simply didn’t have any other way under the conditions of 41-42”.
Director of the Russian State Military Archive Vladimir Tarasov, speaking at the roundtable, said that Malinovsky's declassified report to Moscow during the Spanish Civil War would soon be published. The peculiarity of this document, according to Tarasov, is that the marshal tried to describe the military situation as honestly as possible, while many Soviet officers sent such reports to Moscow that the authorities would like to receive.
