By the end of the Great Patriotic War, all the leaders of the allied states - Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle - highly appreciated Stalin's role in the war, admired him through clenched teeth and set Hitler and Goebbels as examples. The whole world knows what Churchill said after the death of Joseph Vissarionovich: "Stalin accepted Russia with a plow, and left with an atomic bomb." I would like to note that by March 5, 1953, preparations for testing the hydrogen bomb, detonated 4 months after the death of the leader, were being completed, and full-scale work was underway on the R-7 rocket, with which Yuri Gagarin was launched into space, and its modernization is still being launched all domestic manned spacecraft.
Alas, for half a century, Russophobes of all stripes have been claiming that Stalin brought only harm to the Red Army in 1941-1945. He de beheaded the Red Army, he de concluded the Moscow Treaty of 1939 and thus unleashed the Second World War, he de ignored the scouts' warnings about the start of the war.
DECAPPING THE ARMY
For two years (1938-1939), the Red Army received 158 thousand commanders, political workers and other military specialists. In the three pre-war years (1939-1941), 48 thousand people graduated from military schools, and 80 thousand graduated from advanced training courses. In the first half of 1941, another 70 thousand officers were sent from schools and academies to the troops. In total, on January 1, 1941, the payroll of the commanding officers of the army and navy was 579,581 people. In addition, over four years (from 1937 to 1940), 448 thousand reserve officers were trained.
Arrested in 1937-1938 was (according to various authors) no more than 10 thousand commanders and political workers.
The very modest shortage of command personnel (13% as of January 1, 1941) was not caused by repressions at all, but by a threefold increase in the number and a huge increase in the technical equipment of the Armed Forces in three years.
The thesis that in 1937 “the best were shot, and in their place were appointed mediocrities and crooks” is false. Judging by such a formal criterion as the level of education, then from 1937 to 1941 the number of officers with a higher and secondary military education not only did not decrease, but doubled - from 164 to 385 thousand people. In positions of battalion commander and above, the share of command personnel without military education was only 0.1% on the eve of the war. Among the commanders of divisions, as of January 1, 1941, 40% had a higher military education, 60% had a secondary military education. Among the corps commanders, respectively, 52 and 48%.
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Another question is what was the "efficiency" of the then military education, if the Military Academy. Frunze in the 1920s - early 1930s received commanders with two classes of the parish school. Unfortunately, there is no exaggeration in these words. It was with this “education” that People's Commissar of Defense Voroshilov and Timoshenko, who replaced him as People's Commissar, Zhukov, Commander of the Kiev Military District, and Kirponos, who replaced him, rose to the very top of the military hierarchy. Against such a background, Zhukov's predecessor as chief of the General Staff Meretskov looks simply indecently intelligent - he had four classes in a rural school and an evening school for adults in Moscow.
The "brilliant strategist" Marshal Tukhachevsky graduated only from the infantry school and did not study anywhere else, but preferred to teach others. Marshal Blucher finished 1 (one!) Class of the parish school and did not study anywhere else.
As for the People's Commissar of Heavy Industry Sergo Ordzhonikidze and his deputy Ivan Petrovich Pavlunovsky, they did not graduate from military schools either. Ordzhonikidze studied at the paramedic school in 1901-1905 and, apparently, never finished it. And Pavlunovsky did not study anywhere except in the parish school. But Pavlunovsky was also in charge of the mobilization department of the Red Army. It was these glorious dilettantes in the 1920s – 1930s who decided the fate of the Red Army.
I would like to note that every civil war is a disaster for the army, in the leadership of which bawlers, "ideologists" and "partisans" fall. Let us recall that in 1789-1793 several thousand lawyers, grooms, artists, etc. were appointed generals in France. They spoke at rallies and meetings, and successfully killed their own citizens in Vendée, Brittany, Lyon and Marseille. But during the siege of the strongly fortified fortress of Toulon, three commanders were replaced in a month. And then, at the council of war, a puny 24-year-old captain with an olive face squeezed through the revolutionary generals. “This is where Toulon is,” he pointed at Fort Aiguillette, 8 km from the city. “And the guy is not good at geography,” the generals laughed. Only the Commissioner Augustin Robespierre, the brother of the all-powerful dictator, appreciated the guy.
Toulon fell in one day. And across Europe, large battalions marched, led by the "little corporal." But among his marshals there was not a single revolutionary general. Generals of the 1789-1793 model were executed, expelled from the country, sent to their estates grabbed during the revolutionary years, or, at best, occupied administrative positions in the War Ministry. And the capitals of Europe were taken by lieutenants and privates who went to the attack on Fort Egillet and on the Arkolsky bridge.
So everything repeated itself in Russia. The elimination of the "heroes of the Civil War" was not a disaster, but a boon for the Red Army.
Stalin overslept the war
Khrushchev and others shamelessly lied that Stalin had to be woken up to report the beginning of the war. Well, then he did not receive anyone for 7 days, he locked himself in the country. But let's look at the log of the records of the persons received by Stalin: on June 21, 1941, from 18.27 to 23.00, he received 13 people. Beria was in Stalin's office from 19.05 to 23.00, Voroshilov from 19.05 to 23.00. Molotov did not leave Stalin's office at all from 18.23 to 23.00.
Well, on June 22, Stalin from 5.45 (!) To 4.45 received 29 people, including almost all the leadership of the USSR.
On June 23 at 3.20 (!) Molotov and Voroshilov entered, after 5 minutes - Beria, after another 5 minutes - Tymoshenko. A total of 21 visitors were received. The latter came out at 1.25, that is, on June 24th.
Anyone can compare this data with the diary of Nicholas II for the first weeks of the First World War.
Stalin received several dozen messages from Soviet intelligence officers with the dates of the beginning of the war from May 15 to July 1941, among them was June 22.
In terms of military strategy, Barbarossa's plan was a gamble. For nine weeks of hostilities, the Wehrmacht was supposed to reach the Arkhangelsk-Kazan line, and further along the Volga - to Astrakhan.
Let's assume for a second that the Germans, even if not in nine weeks, but by the end of the year, reached this line. But even then it would not be the end of the war, but only its new phase. There the Germans would have run up against the "Eastern Wall of Stalin" (my name), which passed through Gorky, Kazan, Saratov, Stalingrad and Astrakhan. Already in September 1941, the construction of fortifications began there. By the end of 1941, 39 thousand fire structures, 5.7 thousand km of non-explosive anti-tank barriers, 15 thousand dugouts were built there. The volume of earthworks amounted to 78 million cubic meters. m.
Note that the construction of URs (fortified areas) went not only along the Volga, but also along the Sura River. Let me remind you that the Sura flows from south to north parallel to the Volga at a distance of 300-450 km for 1200 km, and the UR on its banks covered the Volga cities of Cheboksary, Kazan, Ulyanovsk and Kuibyshev.
On the territory of the Chuvash Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Sursk border passed along the Sura along the line of the village of Zasurskoe of the Yadrinsky region - the village of Pandikovo of the Krasnochetaysky region - the village of Sursky Maidan of the Alatyr region - Alatyr to the border with the Ulyanovsk region. Tens of thousands of residents of the Chuvash ASSR took part in the construction of the facility. The Sur border was built in 45 days.
By the decree of the State Defense Committee and the order of the People's Commissar of the Navy on October 23, 1941, the training detachment of the Volga River ships was reorganized into the Volga Flotilla. And on November 6 of the same year, the composition, organization and basing of its forces were determined.
It was planned to form six brigades of river ships with the inclusion of 54 gunboats, 30 armored boats, 90 minesweeping boats, patrol boats and 60 boats - sea hunters, as well as 6 air squadrons (36 aircraft), 6 separate battalions of marines, 6 torpedo battalions boats. These organizational measures were scheduled to be completed by April 1, 1942.
So in the fantastic version of the Wehrmacht's exit to the Volga from Gorky to Astrakhan, the Germans would have found a powerful line of defense.
Hitler had a perfectly reasonable alternative to do away with England in 1941, to take control of the entire Mediterranean basin, including the Middle East and Turkey. Incidentally, the latter could have been done without Churchill's surrender. The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarines could put England on the brink of collapse by interrupting sea traffic across the Atlantic. And in the spring of 1942, with much greater potential than in June 1941, Hitler could start a war or negotiations with the USSR.
The main reason for the Red Army's failures in the first months of the war is that the German army mobilized back in August-September 1939, and even defeating the armies of dozens of European states in a year and a half, faced the unmobilized and generally not ready for war Red Army.
So why didn't Stalin begin mobilization in May 1941? He hoped for Hitler's common sense, that he would start the war in 1942, and in every possible way tried to delay it.
Let us recall that in 1914 Germany declared war on Russia precisely in response to the beginning of the mobilization of its army.
Therefore, Stalin led a hidden mobilization. In late May - early June 1941, a partial mobilization was carried out under the guise of training reserve training, which made it possible to call in over 800 thousand people used to replenish divisions located mainly in the west of the country. From mid-May, four armies (16th, 19th, 21st and 22nd) and one rifle corps began to move from the internal military districts to the line of the Dnieper and Western Dvina rivers. From mid-June, a covert regrouping of the formations of the westernmost border districts began: under the guise of entering the camps, more than half of the divisions that make up the reserve of these districts were set in motion. From June 14 to June 19, the command of the western border districts received instructions to withdraw the front-line directorates to field command posts. Personnel leave was canceled from mid-June.
I found a curious top secret document dated June 16, 1941 on the transfer of machine guns to the western URs: 2700 Degtyarev machine guns at the expense of the emergency reserve of the internal districts, 3 thousand Degtyarev machine guns and 2 thousand Maxim from the Far Eastern Front reserves. The latter were ordered to return to the Far East in the IV quarter of 1941 - no one will fight with Russia in winter.
It seems that many commanders of the western districts ignored the instructions of the Center. For example, the order to camouflage airfields, disperse aircraft, and take command personnel families for summer holidays was not fulfilled.
Back in 1940, Stalin literally became furious: "Our air towns in the western districts resemble gypsy camps!" Indeed, in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus, where there were relatively good living conditions, wives, children, mother-in-law, aunts, etc. rushed in droves. A rhetorical question: at the Luftwaffe airbases in the General Government, did children also run and scandalize their wives?
And why were there orders from Moscow to the border districts "not to give in to provocations"?
What kind of provocation could have been - synchronous with a massive attack by the Wehrmacht or spaced out in time by several hours or days? To be afraid of a synchronized provocation is complete idiocy. Then there remains a variant of provocation, which gives Germany a reason to declare itself a victim of aggression and start a war. However, Hitler made lightning attacks long ago without any provocations - Norway, Holland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Greece, etc.
So why did the Fuehrer now need to deprive himself of the factor of surprise at least for a few hours and give the USSR the opportunity to bring the troops to full combat readiness, begin general mobilization, etc.? Surely, without provocations, Goebbels would not have been able to explain to the Germans the reasons for the attack on the USSR?
So, maybe a handful of German officers, without the sanction of the leadership, would have decided on a provocation in order to unleash a war with the USSR? Alas, this is out of the question. By June 22, a general conspiracy against Hitler had already taken shape, but its purpose was not to expand the war, but to eliminate the Fuhrer and conclude peace.
WAR WITH POLAND … NOT ENDED
Few people know that by June 22, the USSR was already at war with … Poland. When on September 17, 1939, parts of the Red Army crossed the Polish border, the Polish government was already scrambling to Romania and was more puzzled by finding a new permanent residence for itself. The Polish ministers had no time to declare war on the USSR, the main thing was to hold on to more gold.
But on December 18, 1939, the emigrant government of Vladislav Sikorsky, formed by the Anglo-French in October 1939 in France, in full compliance with all formalities, declared war on the USSR. And, I will tell you a secret, since no peace has been concluded with Poland, formally Russia is still in a state of war with Poland, which is now considered the legal successor of Sikorski's emigrant government.
And at the beginning of 1941, the Soviet government received information from the NKVD that the Home Army was preparing a major provocation on the Soviet-German border. Imagine the breakthrough of hundreds, if not thousands, of armed men, dressed in German uniforms, across our border. A battle would begin with the use of artillery and aviation. Our planes would shoot down German planes heading for the conflict area to clarify the situation, and, as they say, "off we go." By the way, Polish politicians and generals in 1940-1941 openly blurted out their dreams of playing off Germany and the USSR, so that “only tails would be left of both”.
It was this provocation that the Soviet leadership feared in June 1941. Well, if any liberal dismisses it, it’s not serious, they say, let them take an interest in Operation Tempest, launched by the London government in 1944. According to him, units of the Home Army were to occupy large cities when the Germans retreated, creating civil administrations there subordinate to London, and to meet the Soviet troops in the role of masters, that is, legal authorities. To implement the plan, it was supposed to attract up to 80 thousand members of the Home Army, located mainly in the eastern and southeastern voivodeships of Poland and in the territories of Lithuania, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.
The Home Army's attempt to seize Vilnius and Lviv turned into a farce, and the Warsaw Uprising turned into a tragedy. Needless to say, if Operation Tempest succeeded, an area controlled by the Home Army would emerge in the center of Europe, which could lead to the escalation of World War II into a third. In fact, the émigré government made no secret of the fact that Operation Tempest was not intended to defeat Germany, but to create a conflict between the USSR and the Western allies.
ALL WINE PERSONAL PROBLEM
On the night of June 22, complacency reigned in dozens of units and garrisons on the border. Someone contrived to locate the training center for artillery regiments of the High Command 8 km from the border. The authorities liked the comfortable houses of Polish officers in their military town. By June 22, 400 new 152-mm ML-20 guns were delivered to the training center, but the personnel never arrived. As a result, on the morning of June 22, the Germans captured 400 howitzers-guns intact and later used them intensively both on the Eastern Front and on the batteries of the Atlantic Wall.
Did Stalin make the commander of the Western Front, Dmitry Grigorievich Pavlov, go to the theater on the evening of June 21, 1941, and the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Admiral Philip Sergeevich Oktyabrsky, to a concert at the theater. Lunacharsky, and then throw a party with friends?
From the outrageous outrage that took place in Sevastopol on the night of June 22, Admiral Oktyabrsky and the People's Commissar of the Navy Nikolai Gerasimovich Kuznetsov later made a feat. So, Kuznetsov claims in his memoirs that he gave the order to open fire on German planes in Sevastopol contrary to Stalin's orders and took great risks.
But what really happened in Sevastopol?
At about three o'clock in the morning, the officer on duty at the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet was informed that the SNIS and VNOS posts, equipped with sound detectors, heard the noise of aircraft engines.
Shooting was opened only when the planes were over the Sevastopol Bay. At 3.48, the first bomb exploded on Primorsky Boulevard, 4 minutes later another bomb exploded on the shore opposite the Monument to the Scuttled Ships. But this is not so bad. At the headquarters of the fleet, the operational officer on duty from communications posts, from batteries and ships was informed that parachutists being dropped were visible in the beams of searchlights.
Panic began in the city. Sailors and NKVD officers, raised by alarm, rushed to look for paratroopers. And not only in Sevastopol, but throughout Crimea. In the city there was indiscriminate shooting all night.
The next morning it turned out that there were no parachutists, and on the streets, only among civilians, 30 people were picked up dead and over 200 wounded. It is clear that this is not a case of two bombs.
In fact, the raid was carried out by five He-111 aircraft from the 6th detachment of the KG4 squadron, based at the Cilistria airfield in Romania. They dropped 8 magnetic mines with parachutes, two of which hit the land, and self-liquidators worked. According to Soviet data, anti-aircraft gunners shot down two Henkels, but in reality all German aircraft returned to their airfield.
What does a fleet commander do? Orders to put 4 thousand anchor mines on the approaches to Sevastopol. After that, from the Caucasus to the main base of the fleet, the ships could go only along one narrow fairway, and even accompanied by minesweepers with lowered trawls, that is, with a course of 2-4 knots. On the mines of Oktyabrsky, 12 of their ships and not a single enemy were blown up. And is Stalin to blame for this?
So, the secretary general had no mistakes? Yes, dozens! Here are just two examples. By June 1941, Stalin, unfortunately, still remained an internationalist-Leninist. He was sure that the divisions, formed from the "Westerners" in the Ukraine, the Balts and the Crimean Tatars, would fight to the death with the Germans. As a result, about 20 such divisions fled without accepting the battle, and most of the personnel went to serve in the Wehrmacht and SS.
Did Stalin have an alternative? Yes, I would send them all, with the exception of the communists and Jews, to the rear railway and construction units, labor armies, etc. You see, they would be useful to the USSR.
During the three years of the war, Stalin, having received a few slaps in the face from mother history, changed the philosophy of the internationalist-Leninist to the philosophy of Russian monarchs and began the forcible resettlement of minorities, the vast majority of whose men fought on Hitler's side.
On this occasion, the liberals are fighting in hysterics: "He could unleash his sovereign wrath on entire peoples!" Pay attention - it is the sovereign! All Russian monarchs, from Ivan III to the end of the reign of Nicholas II, carried out mass relocations along ethnic, religious and other grounds.
And here is another gross mistake of Stalin. On August 19, 1945, the 1st Far Eastern Front and the Pacific Fleet were ordered to capture the island of Hokkaido. The 87th Rifle Corps assigned to the landing began loading onto the ships. And then Stalin ordered to cancel the landing in Hokkaido. A number of historians claim that after the war, Stalin sadly reprimanded the commander-in-chief of the Soviet troops in the Far East, Marshal Vasilevsky: "You could have shown independence."
SO WHO WAS THE WAR
Denouncing Stalin, Khrushchev argued that the country was led by the party during the war. Nobody dared to object to him then. But the CPSU collapsed, and for 50 years, no "conspiratorial party members" leading the war were found.
A number of truth-lovers like Svanidze argued that in 1941-1945 no one was in charge of the country and the Red Army at all - “the people won the war in spite of Stalin”.
The current leadership still cannot clearly explain to the people who won the war. But, judging by the fact that monuments to Stalin's marshals and generals are being massively built in the Russian Federation and their cult is actually being created, and a ban has been imposed on the monuments to Stalin, Volgograd has not been renamed, it turns out that Stalin's marshals won the war.
Alas, "Marshal of Victory" G. K. Zhukov did not participate at all in a number of major battles in the Second World War, for example, in the Battle of Stalingrad. Instead, he failed Operation Mars. Zhukov did not participate in the liberation of Leningrad from the German half of the blockade ring in January 1944 and the Finnish half in June 1944, in the defeat of Japan in August 1945, etc.
None of the marshals took part in the leadership of the partisan movement, in the deployment of unprecedented amounts of weapons production in history, in the successful evacuation of military and civilian enterprises in 1941-1942.
Back in 1830, General Karl von Clausewitz formulated the axiom: "War is the continuation of politics by other means." That is, a war can be considered completely successful only if a profitable peace is concluded. Otherwise, the war turns into a bloody fight.
Alas, in the last three centuries, only three rulers ended the wars with a successful peace: Peter I, Catherine II and Stalin. The marshals did not participate in the diplomatic war. The new world order was created by Stalin, Malenkov and Lavrenty Beria. A little bit more Sergo Beria helped - put a "wiretap" in Tehran and Yalta.
The marshals were not involved in the restoration of the USSR economy in 1946-1949. Moreover, Stalin actually removed them from work on nuclear and missile weapons. The marshals were in pleasant ignorance until they were informed: the Berkut air defense system had been created, an atomic bomb had been tested, work had begun on the first atomic submarine, etc.
STALIN AND HITLER STARTED A WAR?
Now dozens of politicians and journalists claim that Stalin is as much a criminal as Hitler, and together they unleashed the Second World War. Let's assume they are right. What follows from this?
It is necessary to destroy all the monuments to Stalin's commanders. Indeed, in Germany, no one will allow to erect monuments to Goering, Doenitz, Kesselring, Keitel, etc.
All international treaties concluded from 1939 to 1953, including the treaty on borders, must be declared null and void. Part of Karelia, part of the Leningrad region, the entire Kaliningrad region, half of Sakhalin, Kuril Islands, etc. we must give to our lovely neighbors.
Russia should start paying reparations to at least a dozen countries. How much? Well, just like Germany. After all, Stalin and Hitler started a war together.
All citizens of the Russian Federation must amicably repent for Stalin and their ancestors. Imagine an Evenk or Dolgan, obliged to repent for their ancestors, who from 1917 to 1953 peacefully grazed reindeer in Taimyr.
I will note that collective repentance does not correspond to the canons of Christianity, and Orthodoxy in particular. From the 1st century AD, repentance was only personified, that is, each person can repent only for himself and only for his sins.
Why is collective repentance imposed on the Russian people and other peoples of Russia? To instill in us all an inferiority complex.
As we can see, defamation of Stalin and calls for collective repentance are aimed at the complete collapse of Russia.
All attempts by some politicians to find a middle ground between Russophobia and patriotism look very much like schizophrenia. Let me remind you that schizophrenia comes from the Greek words "splitting of the mind", when a person thinks in two or more non-intersecting planes.
For example, Stalin is a villain, unworthy of monuments, and all his generals and marshals, who unquestioningly carried out all his orders, are heroes worthy of admiration. And it is imperative to throw a tantrum if their monuments are destroyed in Poland, Ukraine and other countries.
The Moscow Treaty of 1939 is the criminal Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But the boundaries established by this agreement are sacred and inviolable.
Tens of millions of rubles are spent annually to hold a parade on November 7 in honor of the 1941 parade, but at the same time the Mausoleum on which Stalin stood is carefully disguised from the people.
A rhetorical question: is there a future for the people if they finally get a similar schizophrenia? How to get rid of schizophrenia? Take as a model the attitude to history in the United States and Western Europe.
Let me be given at least one example, when Soviet aviation in 1941-1945 deliberately attacked the civilian population. This was not and could not be. But the aviation of the United States and England in 1939-1945 destroyed over 6 million civilians, specially bombing cities where there were no military units and military factories, such as Dresden, Hiroshima and hundreds of others.
In the twentieth century, only during the local (colonial) wars, the troops of the United States, Britain and France killed up to 20 million women and children.
We can learn about all this by visiting the open archives of the West and studying highly specialized, but open literature. There, no one hides war crimes, the horrors of colonial convict prisons, etc. But there is no mention of this in the mass media and cannot be.
In our country, for 25 years, central television and other media have been defaming Stalin every day. Of the other rulers of Russia, only Ivan the Terrible gets it. And we really gradually develop feelings of inferiority and guilt for our ancestors.
But what if tomorrow someone also begins, and strictly documented, to prove that Ivan III, Vasily III and Peter I were no less bloody tyrants than Ivan IV and Stalin? So far, our population is not aware that during the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich, Peter I and Anna Ioannovna in Russia, over a million people were killed for the faith of Old Believers, Muslims and other infidels. For comparison, I will say that under the "cult of personality" there was not a single verdict that spoke of religion. Right or wrong, but they were tried exclusively for anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to violently overthrow the government, terrorism, false denunciations, etc.
To survive, Russia needs to stop self-flagellation and accept Russian history as it is. And we will console ourselves with the fact that “beyond the hill” everything was much worse - in the west, in the east.
Alexander Shirokorad