Representatives of this sign are waiting for a rather stormy and hectic year (especially the first half). However, it should be recognized that often Sagittarius are themselves to blame for everything. They are driven by vehemence and irritability. The habit of adding to the relationship does not strengthen the relationship, as well as the occasional spree "on the side."

In order for the year of the Rooster to pass without big problems and losses, it is better for Sagittarius to immediately tune in to a systematic and honest solution to all their love problems. It is necessary, in the end, to put in the proper order the priorities of your life and settle down.

The second half of the year will be more peaceful. At this time, a romantic verse can attack Sagittarius. If you use it well, it will only help create a strong relationship. The natural charm of Sagittarius, adorned with a romantic halo, will not leave anyone indifferent.

Thus, it will be possible to resolve all past differences and create a reliable, happy union.

Sagittarius Woman: Love Horoscope for 2017

Sagittarius women will experience a flash of sensuality and emotionality, but it can puzzle others and themselves. In a huge number of fans, you can get lost. But we must remember that in love there are always two sides involved. You should soberly assess your own desires and plans and not deceive admirers in this regard.

Women who have no intention of ending an entertaining affair with a long romance and even more so with a wedding should make it clear to the boyfriend. There will be no shortage of those who will be satisfied with this, and it is not good to lead serious people by the nose.

It will be even more useful for Sagittarius women to beware of novels that are dubious from the point of view of universal morality. Married women should not entertain on the side if they have no intention of breaking the existing marriage ties. Free girls should think ten times before having an affair with a married man. In practice, such relationships usually do not justify themselves, but participation in a love triangle can “wet” your reputation thoroughly.

Sagittarius man: Love horoscope for 2017

This year, Sagittarius men will have to step on the throat of their own song in some way. Romantic. Charming, resourceful, a little adventurous Sagittarius, in principle, do not suffer from the lack of female attention, and in the year of the Rooster this quality will go off scale.

But here you can not use it "to the fullest". Trying to outdo Casanova, your only real chance can be easily missed. The punishment for windiness can be even more severe - in the form of the very, only, true love for life, left unanswered.

It is much better to take advantage of the bout of romanticism that will overcome Sagittarius in the middle of the year. Such a mood will help to bind the girl you like in the most reliable way, and bring the existing romance to a happy marriage, and strengthen the existing family. And many Sagittarius men in the year of the Rooster will finally be convinced that it is love and family that are the No. 1 value for them.

Introduction

The Great Patriotic War began very unsuccessfully for our country. Having treacherously attacked the USSR on June 22, 1941, the troops of Nazi Germany and its allies immediately dealt a terrible blow to the Soviet armed forces and their bases, as well as to transport hubs, cities and other settlements of our country. Surpassing in forces and means, taking advantage of the element of surprise and other favorable circumstances, the aggressor troops occupied vast territories of the European part of the USSR in just a few months, creating a real threat of capturing the capital of our Motherland - Moscow. At the same time, the Red Army suffered heavy human and material losses, which far exceeded the losses of the invaders. At the same time, the enemy quite quickly and easily captured, destroyed or destroyed a significant part of the economic potential of the USSR. As a result, the advantage of Germany and its allies over our country in total military and economic resources, which, taking into account the resources of the European countries occupied and dependent on it, was already very significant, has increased even more.
However, despite these great setbacks at the beginning of the war, the USSR, fighting almost alone for a long time and receiving relatively little economic assistance from its allies, was able to turn its course in its favor, and then, together with them, eventually win a complete and crushing victory. Of course, one cannot underestimate the contribution of the United States, Great Britain and other countries and peoples to the fight against Nazi Germany and its allies, which became more and more important every year of the war, but our country and its army inflicted the most powerful blows and large-scale defeats on the German troops, up to until their complete defeat and unconditional surrender, as well as the fall of the Nazi regime.
What are the reasons for the metamorphoses that took place during the Great Patriotic War? Why did the Red Army lose the 1941 campaign so easily? How did the USSR manage to survive the most difficult first year and a half of the war, noticeably inferior to the enemy in forces, means and resources, losing most of the battles, losing its territory, and with it the population and resources? Why, despite heavy losses, was the USSR able to win the decisive battles of the war, turn the tide in its favor, forcing many of the allies of Nazi Germany to leave it and even come over to our side? What role did the allies of the USSR and Germany play in this war? What are the actual scales, price and significance of the Victory achieved in this war? The search for and understanding of answers to these and other related questions are chosen as the main objectives of this study.
A lot of time has passed since the end of this war. A huge number of works of a very different nature and orientation have been written about it, both in our country and abroad: scientific papers, encyclopedias and reference books, memoirs, scientific journalism and journalistic works, not to mention fiction. The war, of course, is not ignored by the authors of numerous textbooks and other educational literature, who devote entire chapters and sections to it.
It would seem that the events and results of the war are studied thoroughly and in detail in them. To a large extent this is true, but most of the published work is mainly descriptive, reference or polemical. And here we are talking not only about journalism, memoirs or encyclopedias. In the same scientific papers, other research papers, as well as in textbooks, we will mainly find a description and chronicle of the events that took place, various data on their participants, the military and other equipment and weapons used. It is much more difficult to find in them a comprehensive analysis of the facts, attempts to give a truly scientific, objective explanation of the course and content of the events of the war, their results, and even more so to reveal their root causes, the dialectic of objective and subjective factors.
It should also be noted the frank ideological partiality and politicized approach of the authors of most works to the events studied and described. There is also a lot in these works of an emotional attitude to the historical figures of wartime, which, however, is quite difficult to avoid for obvious reasons. The methodology of most studies, and even many scientific works, is also doubtful, in particular because of its subjectivism and dogmatism.
In addition, quite a few historical books have been published recently, the authors of which take a sharply tendentious position, trying to cast doubt or even refute the obvious facts of the war. Some of them go as far as presenting in a sharply negative form not only the Soviet political and military leadership of that time, but also the Red Army and our country as a whole, as well as actually justifying many actions of Nazi Germany and glorifying the Wehrmacht. To some extent, this applies to such authors as V. Suvorov, B. Sokolov, M. Solonin, I. Bunich and some others.
In his desire to overcome these and other typical and widespread shortcomings of works on the history of the war, the author tried to consistently observe the methodological principles of objectivity, completeness and comprehensiveness of the study. His method was based on a dialectical and systematic approach to considering the events and outcomes of the war, and determining their causes. In his judgments and conclusions, the author relied on facts, focusing on their logical analysis, generalization and evaluation, in their entirety and taking into account their systemic connections. Particular importance was attached to the most significant and indisputable of them.
Determining the ratio of forces, means and resources of the parties, as well as their losses, the author proceeded from the fact that historians and other specialists failed to carry out their calculations with sufficient accuracy and reliability. This is primarily due to the fact that they are based on subjective data presented by the opposing sides, as well as the imperfection of the method of the social sciences and the humanities. Therefore, they can and should be questioned, and the author determined his own estimates of these data, taking into account their correspondence with more reliably established facts of the war.
However, the work performed is not formally scientific, and as a whole it should be recognized as a scientific journalistic study. In particular, the author did not seek to ritually support each of his judgments with quotations and other references to historical works. The empirical base of the study, which consists of data drawn from publicly available sources, may also seem not quite traditional for scientific and historical work. This is due to the scale and general nature of the questions posed in the work, the answer to which requires, first of all, a comprehensive understanding of the most important, well-known facts and statistical information.
Many provisions of this work are to some extent hypothetical or evaluative. Moreover, there are reasons to assert that it cannot be otherwise, due to at least the enormous complexity and scale of most of the events under consideration. Even with all the desire, they could not always be correctly reflected and accurately recorded, described and measured, and even more so if officials during the war often did not have such a desire at all. Yes, and not often before. Recall that practically no accurate accounting of Soviet military losses at the beginning of the war, under the conditions of an unexpected German invasion and the rapid retreat of the Red Army, was ever established. However, it is unlikely that he was so accurate and further, as well as accounting for the losses of our enemy.
Finally, for the most part, the work has an openly journalistic appearance. Thus, the author did not hesitate to use emotional remarks, rhetorical figures, ironic phrases, idiomatic expressions, etc. in it. It seems that direct statements and sincere opinions can help rather than hinder the understanding of the ideas expressed in the book.
At the same time, it also has a partly philosophical character, expressed primarily in the scale of the research tasks posed and the breadth of view on them using the approaches and data of various sciences, and also in the fact that its main research technique used the analysis of many of the most important and general facts of the Great Patriotic War.
Thus, this work is a completed attempt to conduct an independent systematic study of most of the most important and general issues in the history of the Great Patriotic War in the context of the entire Second World War: about the alignment of forces of the parties on the eve of its start, about the reasons for the military failures of the Red Army and the USSR in its first months and the stability of the Soviet state, despite the heavy losses, retreats and defeats of its army during this period, about the ratio of forces, means and resources used in it, about the reasons for the overall victory of the USSR and its allies in this war, about its main results, losses in it USSR and their relationship with the losses of the enemy. At the same time, the author tried not to delve into the course of individual battles and other events of the war, but to consider the events as a whole, in their main manifestations and their interrelationships. Of course, these battles and other events are very important in themselves, but they are quite well considered in many works, and, moreover, on the scale of the questions posed in the work, they are rather private, relatively small phenomena.
One of the obligatory principles of historical works is the observance of fundamental moral, ethical and legal norms. Particularly relevant for works on the Great Patriotic War are the corresponding requirements to exercise caution in an effort to revise traditional ideas about this period of history full of extreme tragedy. Attempts to move away from formulaic views on the events of the war can in themselves be productive, and the courage shown in this case can actually lead to new research results. However, in this case, there is a risk of conflict with the basic facts of the war, as well as legal and moral norms, which cannot be justified either by pluralism of opinions, or by the freedom to seek the truth, or by the most positive goals and motives.
No search for truth can justify the perversion of the causes, course and results of the events of the war, turning into disrespect for their victims and heroes, or the rehabilitation of aggressors and war criminals. Particularly dangerous and cynical at the present time are the attempts by some authors to actually justify the perfidious, insidious, unprovoked, sudden, aggressive attack of Hitler Germany and its allies in 1941 on the USSR, committed with criminal goals and ultimately brought many millions of victims and colossal destruction and destruction. suffering.
The decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal and other international legal documents, in which Nazism, the governing bodies of Nazi Germany, the aggressive and inhuman actions of the leaders of this state and many German military leaders during the Second World War, including those against the USSR, were recognized as criminal and condemned, more no one canceled, just as there is not the slightest reason to cancel them. But there is also the moral judgment of the Russian and other peoples of the USSR over a cruel enemy, there is the memory of millions of war and home front veterans, their children and other descendants, in which Nazism, the actions of A. Hitler and other leaders of Nazi Germany, its armed forces against our country and its citizens appears as a monstrous evil that has no justification.
Similar crimes were committed by puppets of Nazi Germany, especially the pro-fascist nationalist forces in Croatia and Western Ukraine. Moreover, the terrible atrocities of the Ustashe in Yugoslavia, as well as the Bandera in Ukraine and elsewhere, have not yet received due condemnation, which is due to the special political circumstances that developed after the war and still persist.
It is also unacceptable under any pretext, including such popular ones for many years as “de-Stalinization”, “fight against Bolshevism”, “national revival” or “recognition of all totalitarian regimes as criminal”, justification of traitors to our Motherland, those citizens of the USSR and others our compatriots who went over to the side of the enemy, or those who in one way or another collaborated with the criminal Nazi regime and its satellites, were their accomplices. The political or ideological conjuncture, the scientific paradigm may change, but betrayal and participation in bloody atrocities do not cease to be so.
One can argue about whether the USSR, the Bolshevik Party, the Soviet system, the Stalinist regime were fair, legitimate or unfair, illegitimate, whether they suppressed the people or contributed to the improvement of their lives, brought more good or harm to the country, etc., but regardless of the solution of these questions, the criminal essence of the Hitler regime and its policy, the fact that the Nazis and their allies committed predatory aggression against our country cannot change and cease to be such. Therefore, those who helped the Nazis in their struggle against the USSR did not so much fight against the Stalinist regime or Bolshevism, even if such a struggle can be considered fair in itself, but in one way or another participated in the monstrous crimes of Nazi Germany directed against the USSR and many others. countries, against the peaceful peoples of Europe, for which there can be no justification. You can, of course, say that someone probably didn’t know or didn’t understand something then, and even on this basis reduce the degree of their guilt, but don’t we really know about the criminal plans and actions of the authorities and other structures Nazi Germany and its allies?
However, moral and ethical restrictions should not lead the researcher to primitivization or demonization of the enemy, a biased view of his forces and actions, a clear exaggeration of the number of his victims, and generally hinder or hinder the establishment of the truth. In addition, it is necessary to distinguish between the degree of responsibility of the organizers and participants in the Nazi-fascist atrocities and their accomplices, many of whom were forced to become such.
In the course of the study, an attempt was made to substantiate many of the provisions of the work by a fairly representative range of literary and other sources. Whenever possible, the author tried to use works published in different periods of post-war history, including recent years, and at the same time rely on sources that are alternative in terms of the views of the authors presented in them, their citizenship, type, nature and direction of the relevant works. At the same time, references to well-known, practically indisputable facts in this work, as a rule, were made without reference to any sources. The author did not seek to frequently appeal to the ideas of authoritative scientists, as set forth in widely recognized works, to quote various sources in detail, to give the impression of high objectivity and great thoroughness of the study by frequent references to them. Such attempts seem to be nothing more than scientism and formalism, and even due to a lack of their own ideas.
Achieving success in the study of the questions posed in the work can be positive in a variety of ways. First, it will help develop a fair attitude towards the events and results of this war, towards its main participants. Secondly, it will allow a better understanding of the events of this and adjacent epochs. Thirdly, our ability to better reveal and understand the patterns of world and national history depends on it. Fourthly, this knowledge increases our ability to correctly understand the current situation in the development of the country and mankind and the ability to correctly predict their future. Fifthly, a correct understanding of the essence of the most important events that took place in the life of the country, which were the tragic and great events of the war under study, provides important information for reflection on the essence of society and man.
But before starting the main part of the work, I would like to clarify the meaning of the names (concepts) "Great Patriotic War" and "World War II". According to the prevailing views of politicians, historians and scientists, World War II took place from 1939 to 1945, starting with the attack of Nazi Germany on Poland and joining Great Britain and France on the side of Poland and ending with the defeat of the aggressor and his allies in Europe, and then the main their ally in Asia - Japan from the coalition of the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and their allied states. The Great Patriotic War is the main component of the Second World War, which began with the attack of Germany and its allies on the USSR in June 1941 and ended with their defeat of the USSR and its allied countries in May 1945. The main military events of the Great Patriotic War consisted in the military confrontation between the USSR, on the one hand, and Germany and its European allies, on the other hand. The battles that took place at the same time on other European fronts and territories, being an integral part of the Second World War, were closely connected with the Great Patriotic War. A certain influence on the development of the Great Patriotic War was also exerted by battles and battles outside the European continent. At the same time, the Soviet-German confrontation became decisive not only for her, but for the Second World War as a whole.
Thus, the Second World War consisted of 3 of its main periods (parts):
1) from the generally recognized moment of its beginning in 1939 until the moment of the attack of Germany and its allies on the USSR in 1941, representing at that time a series of local, as a rule, interconnected military clashes and battles that took place with significant interruptions, that is, the initial, sluggish, sporadic part of it;
2) the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 and other military clashes and battles that took place during this period, both closely related to it and having a rather distant connection with it, that is, its main, most intense, continuous and bloody part;
3) the defeat of Japan and its allied forces in the Far East in the summer of 1945, that is, its final, almost local part, as if the events were after the fact.
At the same time, a broader understanding of these names is also common in the literature. So, the main idea was and remains that the participation of the USSR in the war in the Far East was a continuation of the Great Patriotic War, or sometimes there are statements that the Second World War began with Italy's attack on Ethiopia in 1935 or even Japan's attack on China in 1931, etc. However, the author considers it more true, on the contrary, to narrow the concept of "Second World War". In fact, on September 1, 1939, only the German attack on Poland took place. But even with the declaration of war on Germany on September 3, 1939 by Great Britain and France, a pan-European war began, and a “strange”, limited one, which was then accompanied by a number of local wars and clashes in some regions of Asia and Africa, as well as at sea off the coast of different continents. But there have been many such local wars and military conflicts in the world before. Moreover, even with the German attack on the USSR, nothing more than an all-out all-European war began, and for our country it became the Great Patriotic War. And only with the Japanese attack on the United States on December 7, 1941, the world war really began, since now all the leading world powers were involved in it, which directly clashed in military confrontation on many continents and oceans.
Nevertheless, such a narrower understanding of the military-political events of the period under study requires a detailed justification, and this is not among the tasks of this work, therefore, in order to avoid confusion and unproductive discussion, the author will adhere to the understanding of the content and structure of the Second World War and related her events of traditional ideas.
So, the book consists of an introduction and 2 main, relatively independent parts. As an appendix, a list of references to the sources of various quotations and other data given in the book is attached to it.
The 1st part of the book consists of 9 chapters, which are unequal in size, written in a different style and have a different nature of content. Thus, the 1st chapter is a brief overview of the widespread, resonant or other relevant opinions of various authors about the reasons for the military failures of the USSR at the beginning of the war, saturated with rather sharp or ironic criticism of the most strange and absurd of them. Chapter 2 provides a scientific and philosophical substantiation of the nature of the reasons for the military failures of the Red Army in 1941, as well as the subsequent results of the battles of the war, which, in the author's opinion, are primarily objective and logical. Chapters 3 and 4 contain a detailed analysis of the correlation of forces, means and resources of the belligerents with the active use of various sources. Almost in the same spirit, Chapter 5 is written, in which the question of the significance of the German surprise attack on the USSR is discussed in detail, with detailed citations from documents and other important sources. In the 6th chapter, on the basis of the analysis carried out mainly in the previous chapters, an attempt is made to determine in a systematic way the main factors of the defeats of the Red Army in 1941. The next chapter is close in character to it, only it already contains a list of factors for the collapse of Hitler's blitzkrieg. In the 8th chapter, the author, on the basis of his own understanding of the facts presented in the previous chapters, tried to identify the main culprits for the defeats of the Red Army at the beginning of the war. Finally, the 9th chapter contains the author's judgments about the typical mistakes of the researchers of this war.
The 2nd main part of the work has much in common with its 1st part in terms of its structure, composition and style. It is dedicated to the results of the Great Patriotic War, as well as the Second World War as a whole. Especially a lot is said in it about the demographic and other losses of the USSR and other warring countries, as well as about the reasons for the victory of the USSR in it.

Part 1
Reasons for the failures of the Red Army at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War

1. Traditional and new ideas about the causes of the failures of the Red Army in 1941 and their criticism

The reasons for the military failures of the Red Army in 1941 in the literature on the Great Patriotic War are called very different, both objective and often subjective. Even if we recall here only the most widely known of them, even then a detailed review of them would hardly be possible in the present work. Therefore, the author will limit himself mainly to a brief designation of most of them, without going into the specifics of the positions of certain researchers.
For convenience of perception, these reasons, called by different authors, can be grouped as follows:
1) the initial superiority of the enemy troops in numbers, thanks to the mobilization carried out in advance; Germany's lead in deploying its invasion force; better staffing of military units and subdivisions of the German army with personnel, weapons and equipment;
2) the greater experience of German generals in command and control in modern warfare, gained by them in the successful campaigns of 1939-1941; their ability to strike unexpected blows; better training and greater combat experience of German soldiers and officers;
3) the best average quality of German equipment and weapons; their capture of a large number of Czech, French, British, Belgian tanks, cars and other captured equipment, weapons and other materiel; the much better radio communication that the German troops were equipped with, especially their planes and tanks;
4) a successful general plan for the conduct of the war, which the Germans and their allies largely succeeded in implementing; quick and firm capture of the strategic initiative by them;
5) miscalculations of the military and political leadership of the USSR in planning the development of the armed forces and preparing for war, in particular, manifested in disproportions in the structure of troops and equipping them with various types of equipment and weapons, in errors in their deployment, in overestimating their own forces and underestimating the forces of the enemy;
6) the timing of the start of the war, which was successful for the Germans and their allies, due to a combination of circumstances that was mostly favorable for them, when the defensive structures on the new Soviet border (1939) were still far from being ready, and a significant part of the weapons had already been removed on the old border, a large the number of Soviet troops were in the process of reorganization and redeployment, etc.;
7) the confusion of many of our commanders after the first powerful blows of the enemy and the major lost battles that followed them, turning into panic; the loss in the first days of the war of control over the troops of the Western Front;
8) weakening of the command staff of the Red Army by pre-war repressions; moral and political instability of many Soviet commanders and fighters.
However, some modern authors explain the reasons for our military failures in 1941 even more simply. For example, the opinion is still quite popular that there were too many political instructors, special officers and commissars in the Red Army at that time, who interfered with command and control. At the same time, the author of several sensational historical books, Yu. Mukhin, believes that the Soviet armed forces during this period were led by bad, unprofessional generals, many of whom not only did not know how, but also did not want to fight selflessly. In turn, this was due primarily to the lack of positive officer traditions, and he discovers the origins of this problem in various historical circumstances, up to the negative social reforms and processes of the end of the 18th century. Close to him in these views is A. Ivanovsky, who sees the main reason for our defeats in 1941 in the constant mistakes of Soviet military leaders, ranging from the unsuccessful deployment of troops and bases on the eve of the war and ending with the wrong choice of directions of attacks on the enemy after it began. A. Bolnykh directs his gaze in the same direction, who sees the main reason for the embarrassment of the Red Army that occurred at the beginning of the war in the military-theoretical superiority of the enemy and his better readiness for maneuver warfare, the successful development and use by the Germans of the operational art of blitzkrieg. But he also notes "the utter helplessness of the Soviet command."

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Ouveteran lies in red-brown.

Our people annually celebrate the Day of Memory and Sorrow - the day of the perfidious attack on our country by fascist Germany and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.

But this day is constantly being used by certain forces of "democratic" orientation to whip up anti-Soviet, anti-communist hysteria. Haters of the Soviet history of our country - false historians, court political scientists, television paid lackeys, such as Svanidze, Mlechin, Igor Chubais, Pivovarov and the like, instead of an objective study of the tragic period for our country - the beginning of a terrible war, resort to falsification of events and facts in order to discredit the actions of the Soviet leadership during this period. To do this, they build a chain of absolutely false statements, spreading them in the mass media.

Lie first. They claim that Stalin was informed about the exact date of the German attack, but he treated it with distrust and did not take timely measures to repel the aggression.

First, Stalin was presented with more than 150 versions of intelligence about the date of the attack, and more than half of them said that the attack would take place between November 1941 and 1942. It has now become clear that Richard Sorge was right and that he was an outstanding intelligence officer, and then he was one of the many who gave intelligence, which, unfortunately, was contradictory.

Secondly, operational measures were taken by Stalin. On June 18, four days before the start of the war, at his direction, the General Staff prepared and communicated to the troops an order to put the formations stationed near the border and the fleets on alert. On June 21, the directive of this content was confirmed. The only one who did not put the troops on alert was the commander of the Western Special District, General of the Army Pavlov. Therefore, the planes were destroyed at the airfields, the tanks were not refueled and did not have ammunition, the military personnel were not called from vacations, etc. But it was in the direction of this district that the Germans dealt the main blow. General Pavlov, whose criminal negligence decisively predetermined the tragic outcome of the initial period of the war, was shot.

Lie second. Introduced by Khrushchev, already exposed many times, but nevertheless repeated from year to year, the slanderous nonsense that Stalin, after the outbreak of the war, allegedly fell into prostration, was out of business for two weeks, and therefore, with a radio message about the beginning of the war before it was not he who spoke as the people, but Molotov.

He did not speak because at that time he was seriously ill with a temperature of over 39 degrees. But nevertheless, in the very first hours of the war, Stalin arrived in the Kremlin, worked daily, almost around the clock, holding meetings and receiving 20-30 visitors daily. This is convincingly evidenced by the entries in the reception log, in which the attendants at the reception meticulously recorded the names of the visitors, the date of the visit and the time of their stay in Stalin's office.

Lie three. They say that Stalin, as a result of repression, destroyed the army command elite, and this was the reason for the failures at the beginning of the war.

In fact, a purge was carried out in the army leadership - painful but necessary, especially after the attempted coup d'état by the military elite in 1937. Otherwise, we could have not one traitor general Vlasov, but much more. E. Davis, who was the US ambassador to the USSR in the pre-war and war periods, wrote: “In Russia in 1941 there were no representatives of the “fifth column” - they were shot. The purge brought order to the country and the army and freed it from treason." In France, Czechoslovakia, Norway, it was the "fifth column" that surrendered their countries without a fight.

Lie four. They say that the Red Army in the first weeks of the war, despite its numerical superiority, did not offer any resistance to the German troops, and in the first two weeks about 4 million of our servicemen were taken prisoner.

In fact, at the beginning of the war, on the entire front from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea, the number of our troops was 2.7 million against 5.5 million among the Germans. So 4 million prisoners and our numerical superiority is wild nonsense.

During the first 3 weeks of the war, the Nazis lost 50% of their tanks, more than 1300 aircraft and more than a million killed, wounded and taken prisoner. And this is called - the Red Army did not resist ???

We have given only 4 variants of "democratic" lies, and there are an infinite number of them walking in the media.

Of course, there were mistakes and serious ones, it needs to be investigated, but you can’t lie so shamelessly! Apparently, anti-Sovietism and anti-communism overshadow the mind and conscience of these "historians" and "political scientists". But nothing can be done, they fulfill the order and feed on it!

Now, in black and white, I lie.

Fifth lie.

The Democrats lie that the Great Patriotic War began on June 22, 1941. This lie has already been exposed many times. In fact, it began on June 22, 1944, however, when the great Stalin summed up the results of the war, he hurried, forgot to write a corner near the number "4" and brought out with his own hand 194I - 1945. Knowing the leader's wisdom, these dates were replicated in all textbooks history, and all staff maps and orders for the troops were classified. Go to the central archive and check: are they secret or not? Although, a group of professional falsifiers has been working there since 1991 (RotFront knows for sure, he read Owen's "1984"), so, for sure, there is a lie there. Well, think for yourself: how could an advanced society under the leadership of a great leader fight for 4 whole years with some kind of lousy National Socialist Germany? From here:

Lie six

The Democrats claim that there were 4 years of hardest fighting. This has been debunked many times already. If on June 22 there had been an order from Stalin: “Forward,” then by August our troops would have washed their boots in the English Channel. However, everyone knows that Stalin had a very high temperature on the first day of the war - 39 degrees. He came sick to a meeting of the Central Committee and announced: "Mlyaaaaaa ... 39!, But we will win." The secretary heard: “May 9, we will win,” which he wrote down in the minutes of the meeting. No one dared to argue with wisdom, and the war plan was drawn up in such a way as to arrive in Berlin exactly by May 9th. It took our troops almost a year, with halts, exploring the surroundings and sights of Europe, not in a hurry to go to Berlin.

Lie seven.

Democrats claim that the Germans fought on our territory, surrounded Leningrad, approached Moscow, the Volga and the Caucasus. This vile libel does not climb into any gates. Only single-celled people could come up with such a thing. In fact, in all military operations, our troops won and only won! Well, of course, they took millions of captured Germans and sent them to Siberia on their own. It is these prisoners, wandering east across the USSR, that the democrats are trying to present as conquerors.

Lie number eight.

Democrats claim that our troops fought on American equipment: cars, motorcycles, tanks, planes. And they ate Lend-Lease lunch. This has been debunked many times already. What sensible thing can the imperialists do? In fact, all this equipment was produced at our factories by our workers. And they made the technique similar to the American one in order to confuse the enemy. Until the end of the war, the Germans thought they were fighting the Americans, who captured the Soviet Union from Alaska and reached Germany from the east.

Lie nine.

Democrats deduce this lie from the eighth lie, arguing that Stalin, on account of payment for equipment and food, exported to America all the royal gold and the gold that was laundered by the “volunteer Komsomol members” in Kolyma during the first five-year plans. This has been debunked many times already. In fact, Stalin sent all our gold to the American communists to organize a revolutionary movement. The Communists pissed away the gold, mastered it and came to Stalin with a confession. A very interesting dialogue took place between them. American communists to Stalin:

No money…

Well, hang in there.

As we know, these are very wise words that are still used by politicians, since their wisdom has been tested by time and these words are relevant forever and ever. Amen.

I propose to evaluate: which of us lies more cheerfully?

Previously, it was customarily written that "the struggle against the fascist aggressor was not a struggle of nations, but precisely a class struggle, a struggle between two social systems, a struggle of opposing ideologies." In fact, fascism and socialism clashed then in a deadly battle, not only armies fought, but also antagonistic social systems, incompatible economic and political ideologies. After a meeting with Hitler on March 30, 1941, Halder wrote: “Our tasks in Russia are: to defeat the armed forces, to destroy the state ... The struggle of two ideologies ... The huge danger of communism for the future ... The communist has never been and never will be our comrade It is a question of fighting on destruction” (T.2, p.81). The war against fascism was a political struggle. S. Kara-Murza was amazed at the insincerity of the “white ideologists” who “pretend not to understand simple, well-known things. Here B. Bondarenko sets out the thesis common to all of them: “I consider that great Victory not a red victory, but a Patriotic Victory ... It was not Red Russia, but Russian Russia that won there, on the battlefields.” If this is said sincerely, then we have a severe case of a group failure of the thinking apparatus - and in a considerable group ... If we are talking about war, when hard bullets are fired, then the Fatherland is embodied in concrete historical forms, and it is simply stupid to oppose the spirit to these forms. Whites continuously curse Soviet industrialization - and they love the Patriotic Victory. But after all, it’s a no brainer that without industrialization and collectivization this victory could not have happened” (Sound 2000, No. 30).

B. Vasilyev declared: “fascists are one thing, Germans are quite another” (LgL1–17.09.2002). And other authors condemn people who “still do not separate the German people (soldiers) and the fascist leaders who forced this people to fight against the USSR. But it is impossible to mix them into one whole, I. Stalin warned about this even in the days of the war ”(Tzh.22.02.01). He actually separated the German people from the rulers. On July 3, 1941, Stalin said: "In this great war we will have true allies ... including in the person of the German people" enslaved by the Nazi rulers. On February 23, 1942, he stressed: "It would be ridiculous to identify the Hitler clique with the German people, with the German state." Some people believe that "very many, if not the majority, in the German army, feeling the injustice of the war, were our enemies under duress" (Tzh.22.02.01). Not all Germans approved of Hitler's decision to attack the USSR. On June 22, 1941, Goebbels recorded in his diary: “We have a somewhat depressed mood among our people” (Vzh.1997. No. 4. G37), but in 1941-1943 vols. the vast majority of Germans longed for victory over the USSR. Even when surrounded, the German soldiers fought to the last opportunity. And is it just coercion? You often read: “We did not fight against the German people, we fought against the Nazis and their henchmen” (SR.20.02.01). How many were there then? Many millions? Were they or were they not part of the German people? At the beginning of the war, some of the Soviet people had the illusion that the German workers and peasants, "enslaved by the Hitlerite bosses", would not support the fascist elite and go over to the side of the USSR. In E. Nosov's story "Usvyatsky helmet-bearers" (1977), the lecturer inspired our peasants that "German soldiers, just like you and me, simple workers," "are not interested in fighting against us, their own brothers," they " turn their bayonets against their masters. The war quickly dispelled these naive hopes.

In August 1943, during the attack on Yelnya, we captured a German corporal. He, a former worker, agreed that the war was over for him, but to the question: “Hitler Kaput?” (it was repeated three times) did not utter a single word. the words. In B. Vasiliev's story “He Was Not on the Lists,” the young officer Pluzhnikov, regretting, released the captured German soldier, worker, father of three children, and he then killed the lame-legged pregnant Mirra. In E. Kazakevich's story "Star", scouts under the command of Lieutenant Travkin, acting in the German rear, captured a German soldier, they learned important information about the Viking Panzer Division from him. The German was a worker before the war. "Travkin from infancy was brought up in love and respect for working people, but this compositor from Leipzig should have been killed." Such is the cruel nature of the war, if you leave him alive, you expose the entire detachment to a blow. The war was unnatural for our man, the tragedy lay in the fact that, contrary to his humanistic essence, he was forced to kill.

The war became a huge tragedy in its sinister meaning, brought incredible suffering to people, destroyed and disfigured them physically, opposed their personal happiness, destroyed their home, deprived them of their relatives and friends. The national tragedy was composed of many thousands of personal tragedies. A person had no right to step aside, to pretend that the war does not concern you. Then it was very difficult everywhere - both at the front and in the rear. At the time of military upheavals, a soldier stood on the very brink of life and death, renounced everything ordinary, weighed his actions on the highest moral scales; with all his being he felt the indissoluble fusion of his fate with the fate of the motherland. A deep understanding of the rightness of our sacred struggle against the enemy gave him the strength to overcome difficulties unthinkable in peaceful conditions, inspired him to exploits. At the front, he was placed in such circumstances that he had only two solutions: either, fighting heroically, defeat the enemy, or, being cowardly, betray his people, and there was no third way.

Considering the Great Patriotic War as a political one, one cannot but take into account the fact that the national-state, geopolitical factor played a huge role in it. The writer B. Kondratiev said: “... we fought for the Fatherland, for Russia. In general, I think that ideology did not play a special role in the war. What is twenty-four years in the thousand-year history of the people ... The eternal love of the people for their homeland, transmitted in the genes - these are the sources of our victory ”(Km.1990. No. 7. P. 124). The nationwide resistance of our people to the enemy was evidenced by the fact that in 1942 the German command used about 10% of its ground forces to fight partisans, and in 1943 it pulled over 25 divisions for these purposes. G. Popov wrote: “It became clear that we are talking about the fate of the Russian people, the fate of Russia as such. The battle is not for or against Soviet power in Russia, but for Russia itself, for its independence, for the right to have its own state, its own culture, its own language” (Mark 20.11.2001). In fact, the war was fought both for Russia and for the Soviet government; it was domestic and at the same time political. In the article "The Miracle of Stalingrad", published on 7.10. In 1942, the social-democratic journal Novy Put, which was published abroad under the editorship of one of the leaders of the Russian Mensheviks F. Dan, said: , breakdowns, mistakes and even crimes, the revolution that began a quarter of a century ago entered the flesh and blood of the masses; that with all the hardships, deprivations, sufferings ... she gave them some achievements, and, perhaps even more - some hopes, for which the masses hold on with all the fibers of the soul, which in their eyes outweigh all the dark and heavy sides of her, for which they want to go to inhuman torment, fight and die. The revolution gave the patriotism of the peoples of the Soviet Union a new great idea - the idea of ​​social liberation. B. Toman remarked: “Surprisingly, the emigrant far from his homeland managed to correctly understand and express the moral spirit of the Soviet people” (Pr. 10/13/1989). Popov biasedly concluded that “the first step towards Russia’s exit from the USSR was taken sixty years ago, when during the days of the battle for Moscow, instead of the ideas and slogans of international socialism, the ideology of saving the Russian people, the Russian nation was raised.” It wasn't. It is enough to look at the press of that time to be convinced: our propaganda then talked about the salvation of all the peoples of the USSR, and not just the Russian people. Stalin wrote: "In Soviet patriotism, the national traditions of the peoples and the common vital interests of all the working people of the Soviet Union are harmoniously combined."

The ideological servants of the "democrats" distort the meaning of the war. On May 13, 2000, S. Dorenko inspired the viewers that in Belarus it was not a partisan, but a civil war that Stalin did not trust the partisans, fearing that something dangerous for the Soviet government would grow out of their movement, and therefore did not supply them with a sufficient amount of weapons and ammunition. As noted, Ivashchenko slandered “millions of fighters and commanders” who allegedly “passed over to the Germans with weapons in their hands ... The events of the summer of 1941 can be called, without any exaggeration, a spontaneous uprising of the army against Stalin’s despotism.” Even earlier, N. Berberova had come to such absurdity “... in the first months of the Soviet-German war, hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers went over to the Germans without a fight” (Vl.1988. No. 10. P. 280). She assured that "Sevastopol and Kronstadt were surrendered on the same day." Even Kronstadt surrendered to the enemy this ignoramus, which under the Germans "finally freely" breathed in France. When in April 1941 Germany attacked Yugoslavia, she was indignant: “Think about what bastards the Serbs are! Dare to resist!” (Nlo.1999.No. 39).

Liberals say that in the Patriotic War we fought not for a just cause. B. Okudzhava, whose name “patriotism is a simple feeling ... biological, a cat also has it,” repented from the TV screen: “And when I realized that at the front I, in essence, defended Stalinism, totalitarianism, I became scared. It turns out, and I'm guilty! B. Nekrasov said about his work at Radio Liberty: “I’m slandering little by little ... To my historical homeland ... You have to live!” (Lg.31.08.1988). Isn't this the reason for his statement in Russkaya Mysl in 1981: “...our cause turned out to be wrong. This is the tragedy of my generation.” The grain of such reasoning was contained in The Gulag Archipelago, where Solzhenitsyn wrote: “The Poltava victory was a misfortune for Russia: it dragged along two centuries of great tension, devastation, lack of freedom - both new and new wars.” I don’t think that now he would begin to conduct such a revision of our history: “We are so used to being proud of our victory over Napoleon that we miss: it was thanks to her that the liberation of the peasantry did not happen half a century earlier (the French occupation was not a reality for Russia) .... The Crimean War - the happiest of all wars for Russia - brought not only the liberation of the peasants and the Alexander reforms, but at the same time powerful public opinion was born in Russia.

Considering our victory "Pyrrhic", N. Kalinin concluded: "The masses have made their choice - to defend the Motherland. So it was in 1812. But, as then, the people defended unfreedom” (Iz. 7.07.1998). It turns out that the Nazis brought us freedom? According to Cardin, “the war was not waged for such a “just cause”, “right” and “wrong” were painfully intertwined in it, “the thought we were inspired of unshakable moral and political unity was a fiction”, when the Germans approached Moscow there were people who "lists of communists, Jews, commanding families were compiled for the new owners." There were few such traitors. It is difficult to believe what Nagibin wrote in “The Light at the End of the Tunnel”: “Soon the rise experienced by the population remaining in Moscow in connection with the imminent arrival of the Germans and the end of the war - no one doubted that the surrender of Moscow would be followed by capitulation - changed into languor and uncertainty. They quietly scolded Hitler, who spilled all the offensive fervor at the walls of Moscow ... Many who remained in the city were waiting for the Germans. Looking at the ceiling, Khmelnitsky composed that “up to a quarter of the composition of the German divisions that fought on the Eastern Front were Russians” (Rm.2000. No. 4323). The owners of the newspaper pay him dollars for lying. But the words of A. Gurov on the Mayak radio station on February 22, 2000 that three million citizens of the USSR fought on the side of Germany sounded strange. He forgot that one must first ascertain the truth of the fact and only then make it public. According to B. Sokolov (Ng.29.10.1991), the Commission of the American General Wood, who seized the documents of the German Prisoner of War Administration, came to the conclusion that 4 million Soviet soldiers and officers were captured and there were 100 thousand people in the Nazi formations M Semiryaga in the book "Collaborationism-Nature, Typology and Manifestations during the Second World War" (2000) wrote that, according to some information, up to 1.5 million traitors worked for the German fascists (782).

Rezun is proud that he destroys "the idea of ​​war as a great war of liberation." On September 17, 1999, at a meeting of the Polish Senate, he said that "the so-called Great Patriotic War" was "artificially, for political and ideological purposes, a selected segment of the Second World War." Yu. Afanasiev assured: the name “Patriotic War” is just a Stalinist version, in fact it “was a battle between two tyrants”, “Stalin was preparing for an offensive, aggressive war ... And it turns out that we were not waging our own war” (Ag.15.09 .1993). Believing this lie, some believe: “The ambitions of the leaders, their aggressive plans to conquer world domination threw millions of soldiers and peaceful countries of the USSR and Europe into the fire of the most cruel war of the 20th century” (Tzh.22.02.2001). Without any reason, they put on the same scales not only the "ambitions of the leaders", but also the Soviet soldiers who defended their homeland, and the German conquerors who brought innumerable disasters to our country.

Kopeikin, not counting the war with Patriotic Germany, asked "Which fatherland did the Red Army defend in 1945, when it crossed the borders of the USSR?" (Rm. 1999, No. 4262) Then we defended our Motherland, Russia, it is alien to Russophobes, and therefore they refer to the Patriotic War as “so-called” and write it with a small letter. According to their logic, the Soviet troops had to approach their border and wait for Germany to recover from the devastating blows, gain strength and rush at us again Bondarev wrote about Bonner's indignation at the sexual orgy of "Soviet soldiers on German territory at the end of the war": there would be no reason to refute Mrs. Bonner's absurd sensation, if she did not immediately speak out that the Soviet Army had to stop the offensive in 1943, not to cross the state border. But we crossed the border and instantly became ... "scoundrel patriots", "invaders", "rapists". He explained to the “very humane Mrs. Bonner”: if our troops stopped at the border, “then German fascism, recovering from defeats in Russia, perhaps; would not have lost the war so crushingly. And then, God forbid, liberal-eloquent humanists of various trends would have to measure life not by the number of tribunes shaken by the chatter, but by suffering and torture behind barbed wire in global concentration camps and civilized, convenient crematoriums for death ”(S R.11.03. 1999).

Zh. Medvedev found that “in 1941, the Red Army really heroically ... defended only cities that had some kind of symbolic historical Russian military glory: Brest, Odessa, Sevastopol, Leningrad and Moscow. Kyiv, Minsk, Smolensk, Vilnius, Riga and many others surrendered without a fight ”(Pd. 10/18/1997). He strangely divided the cities. During the Patriotic War, our troops staunchly defended Odessa for more than two months, but it is a mistake to think that in the past, on the scales of historical significance, it became more famous than Kyiv, for which in 1941 there was also a fierce battle. It is impossible to understand why Smolensk is classified as a city that does not have "historical Russian military glory", why it is said that it was handed over to the enemy without a fight. For the possession of this city, a battle went on for two months, during which “the troops of the Red Army, the inhabitants of the city and its environs, showed the greatest stamina. A fierce struggle went on for every house and street, for every settlement ”(G Zhukov). As shown. Stadnyuk in the novel "War", Stalin, having learned that the Germans had entered Smolensk, said indignantly: "This is not a city" but a monument! Glory to the Russian army! More than three hundred years ago, the Poles could not take Smolensk for two years! Napoleon broke his teeth on him! And the Red Marshal Timoshenko allowed the enemy to take Smolensk ... "

Digressions from the truth were necessary for Medvedev to "declare: then Stalin and his associates" realized that neither "Soviet patriotism" nor the Red Army could ensure victory over the German army, imbued with the spirit of German "racial nationalism." 06/22/2000 in the program "Events" on TVC Vikt. Erofeev said that "communist ideology turned out to be untenable." The liberals believe that "for a war against a powerful external enemy, the communist idea is powerless, a national, Russian idea is needed ...". The leader of the peoples" cunningly decided that the Soviet should be presented as Russian" (О.г.2000.№ 10). K. Azadovsky and B. Yegorov condemned Stalin for the fact that during the war he “openly flirted with the Russian people, demonstrating his patriotism, rather Russian than class-Soviet”, that after 1945 he “began with his clique ... stick out the “Russian people”, put it on a pedestal and elevate it above other nations in the USSR ”(Hlo.1999. No. 36, C86). A. N. Yakovlev argued another nonsense: “Stalin despised the Russian people, sought to destroy them” (Lg. No. 41.2001).

The communist idea was not powerless, but insufficient for the most successful conduct of the Patriotic War. Stalin's great merit lies in the fact that he united the strength of socialist ideology and state patriotism. Back in 1938, a patriotic film was released on the screens about the victory of Alexander Nevsky over the German knights in 1242 on Lake Peipsi, in 1937-1939. the historical film "Peter the Great" was created, in 1939 - "Minin and Pozharsky". A prominent figure in the Kadet Party IX Milyukov emphasized in 1939: "Stalin is a brilliant politician, because he felt one of the most important things for any politician: Stalin returned Russia to the mainstream of a traditional society" (SR.4.03.2000). On April 20, 1941, Dimitrov recorded Stalin's statement: "Now the national tasks for each country come to the fore." Medvedev stated that “already in August or early September 1942, Stalin abruptly changed the course of all domestic policy, starting the restoration of Russian historical traditions, primarily in the army”: “Traditional Russian military ranks were restored: sergeant, lieutenant, captain, major and colonel. But these titles of the Central Executive Committee and SNK of the USSR were introduced on September 22, 1935. Medvedev considered the return to the traditions of the old Russian army as nationalist reforms and gave them a negative assessment. He made a strange conclusion about the untenable rise of the Russian nation, which Stalin declared "the most prominent nation of all the nations that make up the Soviet Union."

To justify their aggression against the USSR, the Nazis shouted that they were fighting communism, and not the Russian people. The failure of this trick is also evidenced by the fact that they attacked a number of states in which there was no communist power. The question arises: how did the German people feel about this aggressive policy, was it their fault in the monstrous ruin of many thousands of our cities and villages, in the destruction of 27,000,000 Soviet people? In 1971, the German historian S. Haffner wrote about the mood of the Germans in the 1920s-1930s: “They had nothing against the creation of the Great German Empire ... However ... they did not see a path promising success in achieving their cherished goal. But Hitler saw him. And when later this path seemed to become real, there was almost no one in Germany who would not be ready to follow it” (Suicide of the German Empire. 1972, pp. 27–28). Many Germans considered Russia their enemy, and Russians alien, inferior people. In Germany, the habit of thinking has taken root: “Their spirit is not independent ... Almost everything that Russia has created in external and internal affairs, they are obliged to the Germans ...” Hitler in the book “Mein Kampf” promulgated his credo: “If we want to create our great German empire, we must first of all oust and exterminate the Slavic peoples - Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Belarusians. His associate Borman wrote: “Slavs should work for us to the extent that we don’t need them, they can die out… Reproduction of Slavs is undesirable… Education is dangerous. It is enough for them to be able to count to one hundred.

Not in the summer of 1942, as Medvedev wrote, but already in the first months of the war, it became clear that the war was not only between different social systems, between “fascism and communism”, but also “between Germans and Russians, between Germany and Russia” ( Pd.18,10–1997). That is why in 1941 the Volga Germans were sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan. One can understand those who condemn our rulers for this eviction, perhaps one should better understand the mood of the Soviet Germans, not to consider all of them as potential supporters of the enemy. But at the same time, one must take into account the hectic situation of that time. Who could then guarantee that the Germans - in their majority - would not help the German troops? Chuev wrote: “And D. Petrov, who was friends with Molotov’s son-in-law, told me how, during the war, ours threw out troops dressed in fascist uniforms into the Autonomous Republic of Volga Germans. They met “their own” as their own - they expected ... ”(Ns. 1997. No. 5). In the documentary book "People with a Clear Conscience" P. Vershigora wrote about the German colonists in Ukraine: "... probably a good half of them served German intelligence. Our column passed through the farm, and from almost every window they shot ... Twenty-thirty percent of Ukrainian and the Russian population, who remained there, were turned by the German colonists ... into slaves. These slaves worked from morning till night on the farms of the Germans. The entire male population of the Volksdeutsch was armed with rifles, brought into platoons, companies, battalions. It served as a reliable barrier to the central communications going through Ukraine from Polissya". Should it be discounted? V. Bykov stated that the atrocities of the Germans, who burned Belarusian villages, were provoked by partisans. But even before the start of the war, in March 1941, leaflets were printed: “The military field commandant announces that an act of sabotage against the German army has been committed in the area of ​​​​the village of N: the telephone cable has been cut. As a sign of punishment for the saboteurs, the villagers were shot, and the village was burned down” (Pr. 07/12/2001). An indicative fact was noted in the materials of the Nuremberg Trials: “... the first punitive expedition of the Germans was carried out in the Starobinsky district in July 1941 - about 10 thousand civilians were killed. There was not a single partisan detachment there yet.” Those atrocities that the occupiers did in our country could not but arouse in the Soviet people a feeling of enmity towards them. In 1942, Ehrenburg wrote: "The Germans cannot be tolerated." Hatred of fascism merged with hatred of the Germans. On April 11, 1945, he wrote in Krasnaya Zvezda: “Everyone is running, everyone is rushing about, everyone is trampling each other ... Germany is not a colossal gang.” Three days later, in an article published in Pravda, Comrade Ehrenburg Simplifies, G. Alexandrov criticized him for not taking into account the stratification of the Germans, believing that they were all responsible for the criminal war.

Kozhinov emphasized that this war was an event of “the deepest and largest geopolitical significance”: “the Germans went in order to crush us as a geopolitical force and turn us into a source of raw materials and products for Europe. For Germany and, what is most interesting, for the whole of Europe” (СР.30.12.2000). Zinoviev supported the idea that in 1941-1945. “The West tried to strangle us with the hands of Germany” (Sound of April 24, 2001). This is confirmed by the facts. Goebbels wrote in 1941: “Something like a single front is being created in Europe, ideas of a “crusade against Russia” are flaring up. This is very necessary for us ”(Vzh. 1997 No. 4. P. 38). The German historian R. Ruhrup noted that in a secret document drawn up in May 1941, the attack on the USSR was characterized as “protection of European culture from the Moscow-Asian stream ... Such views were characteristic even of those officers and soldiers who were not convinced or enthusiastic Nazis. They also shared ideas about the "eternal struggle" of the Germans ... about the protection of European culture from the "Asiatic hordes", about the cultural vocation and the right to rule the Germans in the East. Images of an enemy of this type were widespread in Germany, they belonged to the number of "spiritual values" (Another war. 1939–1945.1996, p. 363). In such ideas about Russia there were many points of contact with the concept of Churchill, who in October 1942, when the USSR was in a difficult situation, argued that Russia, and not Germany, was the true enemy of Europe, and wrote: “... a terrible catastrophe would have occurred, if Russian barbarism had destroyed the culture and independence of the ancient European states. Although it is difficult to talk about it now, I believe that the European family of nations will be able to act as a united front, as a whole. He turned his eyes to the creation of a united Europe. “This geopolitical formulation of the issue by Churchill was entirely in line with Hitler’s: the European states and nations are a single “family” that opposes “barbarian Russia”. Only the leaders for this “family” were proposed by others, which was realized after the war” (СР.30.12.2000). It is impossible not to see that Hitler's and Churchill's ideas of a united Europe are now being implemented in a forced manner, US and NATO troops are getting closer and closer to our truncated borders and are deployed in Georgia and Central Asia. The experience of Serbia, recently torn to pieces by NATO, suggests what could happen to us.

Memoirs, memoirs… Who writes them? What memoirs can those who actually fought have? Pilots, tankers and, above all, infantrymen? Injury is death, injury is death, injury is death – and that's it! There was no other. Memoirs are written by those who were near the war. In the second echelon, at headquarters. Or corrupt hacks expressing the official point of view ...

Memoirs of an ordinary soldier of the Great Patriotic War is a relatively rare event. The relatively low level of general literacy, the severity of the trials, the lack of time and opportunity to delve into what was happening, the direct ban on keeping diaries during the war years - all this made the likelihood of the memories of privates and sergeants extremely low. And what can a simple soldier remember if all his strength and energy were spent on completing the task and staying alive at the same time? The war of an ordinary is 500 meters to the enemy, the same to the rear, to the battalion commander and several hundred meters along the front of the company. This is a task of the form "reach landmark number 3 - a fallen birch, dig in and wait for orders." Everything, nothing more. Therefore, a soldier’s memoirs are, first of all, a story about those people with whom they had to share the last cracker, who collected shag dust in their pockets to roll up a goat’s leg, who walked alongside those very half a kilometer to the enemy and who lay down in the damp earth ... But it’s hard to remember, because pain and suffering lurk behind every episode. In the early 70s of the last century, Konstantin Simonov spent hundreds of hours interviewing full holders of the Order of Glory. It would seem that honored people with a lot of feats - sit and tell! But, reading the interview, you suddenly realize that Simonov has to literally pull the story out of the characters with ticks, and only a competent question for a short time makes the veteran plunge into the past and give out some interesting details.

War is a severe trauma for the psyche of any person. Those who could not cope with it committed suicide, took to drink, went into crime. Their life path was short and tragic. Most struggled with it for the rest of their lives. Let's leave the classification of ways to overcome military psychological trauma to professional psychologists, however, over 15 years of work on the iremember.ru website, having interviewed more than 2,000 people, we can note several ways that veterans mainly resort to in order to preserve their personality and prevent the horrors of war from destroying it:

Dissociation is the separation of oneself from the trauma. At the same time, the story about the war turns into a continuous anecdote and consists mainly of searching for food and drink, funny stories about meetings with the enemy and commanders.

Suppression is the active repression of negative memories. These are the same veterans who "never talked about the war." If such a person agrees to an interview, then his story is extremely cruel and filled with details.

Cancellation - the war is simply erased from the memory of a person. This approach is typical for women participating in the war, but it also happens with men.

Displacement is a form of psychological defense, in which a negative emotional reaction is directed not at the situation that caused the psychic trauma, but at objects that have nothing to do with the psychological trauma. Most often these are people with whom the veteran himself did not communicate or situations in which he did not participate.

We will consider the last method of a person's struggle with military trauma in more detail, since it is precisely this method that is vividly presented on the pages of Nikolai Nikolaevich Nikulin's memoirs "Memories of the War" (State Hermitage Museum - 2nd ed. - St. Petersburg: State Hermitage Publishing House, 2008). The author himself does not hide this:

« In this manuscript, I was solving only personal problems. When I returned from the war wounded, shell-shocked and depressed, I could not cope with it right away. In those days, there was no concept of “Vietnamese syndrome” or “Afghan syndrome”, and we were not treated by psychologists. Everyone was saved as best they could."

Any memoir is an extremely subjective thing. Often they were written for fellow soldiers, and the task of the memoirist was not to forget or miss a single name, so as not to offend a good person. But there are also those that are written for themselves in order to justify their actions, "to lighten the soul", etc. Nikolai Nikulin does not hide this either, reporting that he wrote down his memoirs in order to expel all the abomination of the war from himself. It turned out to expel brilliantly, but the sincerity of the author is questionable. First of all, Nikulin's description of the people with whom the war brought him together causes rejection. If a person in the description of the author is a skilled warrior and a good specialist, then he is necessarily an alcoholic, a rapist, endowed with physical disabilities, and so on. If the description of a person begins with positive qualities - expect trouble: it is almost inevitable, as in a bad detective story, there will be the last bastard. There is not a single mention of women in the war from a positive point of view in the book - this is exclusively an object of sexual harassment. And here we must once again postulate: the view of the memoirist is the view of his soul. If a person is sharpened only to see the negative, he will not be able to see anything else. The included psychological defense in the form of displacement does not allow the author not only to be objective, but makes him seek out, savor, and sometimes even think out negative situations and actions.

Analyzing these memoirs is very difficult. In one form or another, we took on the review of his book several times, and each time it ended in nothing after a few lines written. However, the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Victory raised the degree of controversy about the value of the book to a boiling point, and we still considered it necessary to speak out. In recent years, Nikulin's memoirs have been laid out on the table in any discussion about the veracity of certain memories of the war as the main trump card, after which the dispute often turns into personalities. The attitude of different readers to the book is strictly opposite: depending on the degree of enlightenment in matters of military history and political preferences, this is either “one of the few books with the“ real ”truth about the war, or“ a dirty libel written with the aim of discrediting the memory of the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War ".

We made attempts to analyze Nikulin's book solely on the basis of documents from the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (TsAMO RF), however, the low military rank and position of the author of the memoirs did not allow us to complete this task in full and fully trace his military path. I managed to find only a couple of mentions of Sergeant Nikulin personally, but more on that later. Nevertheless, the study of documents gave a general idea of ​​the events described in the book, and also made it possible to obtain confirmation or refutation of some episodes.

It should be said right away that photographic accuracy when mentioning 30 years later (the book was written in 1975) dates, surnames, geographical names allow us to assume with great certainty that the author of the memoirs kept diary entries at the front. It is the episodes described using them that “fit into the TsAMO documents” very well, but the appearance of figures of speech like “our colonel”, “our commissar” or “hospital bed neighbor” should immediately alert, since they mostly promise only repetition of tales that wandered along the entire front, as they say, "from the Barents to the Black Sea." Some of them are equipped with turnovers that remove responsibility from the author (“I was told”), but some are described in the first person.

So let's start with the preface:

“My notes were not intended for publication. This is just an attempt to get rid of the past: just as in Western countries people go to a psychoanalyst, lay out their worries, their worries, their secrets to him in the hope of healing and finding peace, I turned to paper to scrape out the abomination that was deeply embedded there from the backstreets of memory , dregs and disgusting, to free myself from the memories that oppressed me. The attempt is certainly unsuccessful, hopeless ... "

Paper, as you know, "endures everything", and its use in psychotherapy has been tried and tested for a long time and successfully. That's just the result of this hardest inner work that a traumatized person does on himself, pouring out his experiences on paper, it really would not be worth making public, at least in its original form.

“These notes are deeply personal, written for myself, and not for an outsider's eye, and therefore extremely subjective. They cannot be objective because the war was experienced by me almost in childhood, in the complete absence of life experience, knowledge of people, in the complete absence of defensive reactions or immunity from the blows of fate. .

An absolutely honest and accurate remark that should alert those who are trying to present Nikulin's book as the ultimate truth and as the only true book about the war. However, this is just one of the views on the war, where all people are bastards, lice and smelly, where all thoughts are only about delicious food and a warm bed, where there are only corpses and dirt around. However, there are other points of view of people who coped with trauma in a different way or even got rid of it. An excellent example is the memoirs of Mansur Abdulin “From Stalingrad to the Dnieper”, Vasily Bryukhov “Armor-piercing, fire!” and many others.

“My view of the events of those years is not directed from above, not from the general’s bell tower, from where everything is visible, but from below, from the point of view of a soldier crawling on his belly through front-line mud, and sometimes sticking his nose into this mud. Naturally, I saw little and saw specifically.

It is difficult to say whether the author consciously violated this declaration, or whether he simply could not resist the temptation to express his views on tactics and strategy, but there are plenty of descriptions of how commanders of all ranks up to the Supreme Commander should have acted correctly in this or that situation in this or that situation. . Here are just a couple of examples:

“... The colonel knows that the attack is useless, that there will only be new corpses. Already in some divisions only headquarters and three or four dozen people remained. There were cases when a division, starting a battle, had 6 – 7 thousand bayonets, and at the end of the operation her losses were 10 – 12 thousand - due to constant replenishment! And there were never enough people! The operational map of Pogostya is strewn with unit numbers, but there are no soldiers in them ... Well, if the colonel tries to think over and prepare an attack, check if everything possible has been done. And often he is simply mediocre, lazy, drunk. Often he does not want to leave the warm shelter and climb under the bullets ... "

“From the headquarters, according to the map, General Fedyuninsky commanded the army, giving the divisions an approximate direction of attack ».

To paraphrase a well-known quote, let's say: "comrade of the guard sergeant simplifies."

One can enumerate such knowledge about the actions of commanders endlessly. However, let us return to the first military memoirs of the author:

“The scene of sending the marines stuck in my memory: right in front of our windows overlooking the Neva, soldiers, fully armed and equipped, were loaded onto a pleasure boat. They were calmly waiting for their turn, and suddenly a woman ran up to one of them with a loud cry. She was persuaded, reassured, but to no avail. The soldier tore off his convulsively clenched hands by force, and she continued to cling to the duffel bag, the rifle, the gas mask bag. The boat sailed away, and the woman howled drearily for a long time, hitting her head on the granite parapet of the embankment. She felt what I learned much later: neither the soldiers, nor the boats on which they were sent to the landing, never returned.

Here we see a mistake, typical not only for the memoirs of Nikolai Nikulin, but also for other memoirs, when a logical construction is made on the basis of an insufficient number of facts. Yesterday's schoolboy Nikolai sees and acutely experiences the scene of farewell. He no longer sees this boat and, most likely, information reaches him that one of the boats (maybe even this one) was sunk by enemy fire, and those on it died. Over time, these events lined up in a logical chain "sending - a woman - death." Perhaps Nikolai witnessed the loading of the participants in the Peterhof landing, of which practically none survived, but this does not give him the right to generalize.

“The barge, meanwhile, proceeded along the Neva and beyond. On the Volkhov, according to rumors, it was bombed and drowned by the Messerschmitts. The militias were sitting in the holds, the hatches of which the prudent authorities ordered to be locked - so that, what good, they would not run away, my dears!

It's good that the note "according to rumors" was added to the description of the episode, removing any responsibility for the authenticity of the author. It is difficult to understand the logic of the actions of bloodthirsty and stupid commanders - volunteers from the Leningrad militia are driven into the holds under the indispensable lock. To not change their minds, forgetting that they are volunteers? As in the previous case, who told the author about the episode? The militias who died in the locked holds, those who locked them there, or did the German pilots boast? The reader of this book should be very careful to trace the source of the author's information. Rumors, or “word of mouth”, is the Internet of that time. They were spontaneously born and died, and the more difficult the situation at the front, the more incredible the assumptions were. Even at the end of the war, there was talk that a peace treaty would be concluded with the Germans. Synkova Vera Savelyevna recalls how the Germans entered their village: “By that time, rumors were actively circulating in the village - they said that those who had their hair cut off would be shot. And, unfortunately, I have short hair. What to do?! The store had a wooden pelvis, I put it on my head and began to make my way home through the garden. There were hundreds of such stories, and an attempt to build a narrative on them will only lead to a distortion of reality.

“... What a funny sergeant: “Yeah, you know two languages! All right, let's go clean the restroom!" The lessons of the sergeant were remembered for a lifetime. When I confused the right and left sides when turning in the ranks, the sergeant instructed me: “This is not a university for you, you need to think with your head here!”

The sergeant had to be not only funny, but also very observant - how did he manage to determine by the appearance of the Red Army soldier Nikulin that he spoke two languages? Usually such details become the cause of ridicule and bullying, being mentioned out of place - do not emphasize knowledge of languages ​​when it is not asked for. One important clarification needs to be made here: Nikolai Nikulin grew up in the city, in an intelligent family and, probably, was deprived of the opportunity to communicate with simple and semi-literate people, who were the majority in the Soviet Union in the early 40s. A person who had four grades of elementary school, that is, who knew how to read and write somehow and knew simple arithmetic operations, could count on a career as a junior commander, and with some luck and diligence, to receive secondary vocational and even higher education. Life in the pre-war years was difficult, so the upbringing of sergeants and foremen was not always good. And certainly, they had nothing to love for arrogant youngsters who grew up on everything ready and graduated from high school, for which, since 1940, they were supposed to pay.

“In August, things at the front near Leningrad became bad, the division went to the forefront, and with it - half of our courses as replenishment. All of them soon burned down in battles.

There are many such generalizations throughout the text. The author easily extrapolates his personal experience or the experience of people who told him to the entire Red Army, the Soviet people and the country as a whole. A lot of Nikulin's value judgments are based not on a system of facts, but on isolated special cases. Therefore, great attention is required from the reader in order to try to separate facts from conjectures and generalizations when studying the book. Just one more example:

“... The best of all was the fate of those who ended up in the communications regiments. There they worked at radio stations until the end of the war and almost all of them survived. Worst of all had enlisted in rifle divisions: “Oh, you are radio operators,” they said, “here are your rifles, and here is the height. There are Germans! The task is to capture the height!

A good memoirist should still speak only for himself!

“... The Badaev food warehouses were on fire. At that time, we still could not know that this fire would decide the fate of a million residents of the city who would die of starvation in the winter of 1941. – 1942" .

Now it is known for sure that the fire of the Badaevsky warehouses did not solve anything. There really were huge stocks of food stored there, but in reality, taking into account the supply of the entire city, they could be enough for a maximum of a week. Whether these products would have saved extra lives or not is hard to say. Be that as it may, on September 8, when the Germans bombed the Badaev warehouses, the first barges with food were already on their way to Leningrad along Ladoga. But that's a completely different story.

The description of one's own appearance and abilities looks unsightly:

“I was a useless soldier. In the infantry, I would either have been shot immediately as an example, or I myself would have died of weakness, tumbling headlong into the fire: many charred corpses remained at the site of the camps of the units that arrived from hungry Leningrad. In the regiment, they probably despised me, but they tolerated me.

“... I was already a dystrophic and stood out among the soldiers with my miserable appearance” ... “Over time, I combed my skinny sides into the blood, and scabs formed in place of scratching” ... “I collected crackers and crusts near warehouses, kitchens - in a word, I got food wherever he could."

“For me, Pogostye was a turning point in my life. There I was killed and crushed. There I gained absolute confidence in the inevitability of my own death. But there was my revival in a new capacity. I lived as if in a delirium, thinking badly, poorly aware of what was happening. The mind seemed to have faded and barely warmed in my hungry, exhausted body.

“... In gratitude for the service, the head of the dining room gave us a large vat with leftovers from the officer's breakfast. We devoured them with delight, despite the cigarette butts that occasionally came across in barley porridge.

“... Sooty, swollen, dirty dystrophic, I could not work properly, had neither vigor nor bearing. My pitiful figure expressed only despondent despair. Brothers in arms either silently snorted disapprovingly and turned away from me, or expressed their feelings with a strong obscenity: “Here’s a bastard stuck on our neck!”

Judging by the descriptions of relationships with colleagues scattered in the book here and there, Nikolai Nikulin not only did not enjoy authority, but was at least an object of ridicule, and at the most despised. The male army team is a very tough environment, and if it turns out that “your place is at the bucket,” then you can get out of this place only by changing a part, which the author succeeds at the end of the war. So it is not surprising that colleagues do not like someone who is useless to them and whose share of the difficulties they have to take on. There is nothing surprising in the fact that this dislike is mutual, and that is why all the people of Nikolai Nikulin look unsightly - as they say, Alaverdi!

“...Now this operation, as “unsuccessful”, is forgotten. And even General Fedyuninsky, who commanded the 54th Army at that time, bashfully silent about it in his memoirs, mentioning, however, that it was "the most difficult, most difficult time" in his military career ».

We are talking about the unsuccessful Luban operation, carried out in January-April 1942. But General Fedyuninsky in his memoirs does not keep silent about the failure, but devotes an entire chapter of his book “Alarmed” with the eloquent title “This could not have happened” to it, where he analyzes the reasons for the failure of this attempt to unblock Leningrad. The book of memoirs of General Fedyuninsky was written in 1961, 15 years before the former sergeant Nikulin sat down to write his memoirs.

“... our Pogostye station was allegedly taken on the move, at the end of December, when we first approached these places. But there was a supply of alcohol in the station buildings, and the drunken heroes were cut out by the Germans who came to the rescue. Since then, all attempts to break through ended in failure. The story is typical! How many times then had to hear it at different times and in different sectors of the front!

One of the most common front-line tales that went around all sectors of the front, without documentary evidence. It competes in popularity with a story about tanks of alcohol specially left by the Germans, the capture of which allows them to immediately recapture the settlement back, since everyone was drunk. Nikulin could not pass by either, this story surfaced already when describing the events of the last year of the war:

“... I came to the basement when there was a knee-deep puddle on the concrete floor, the air filled with alcohol vapors was intoxicating. In some places, in the liquid, one could see cotton trousers and earflaps of choked drinkers. .

As already mentioned, there is not a single respectful mention of a woman in the war in the book of Nikolai Nikulin. They all look like either dumb sex slaves or conscientious women of easy virtue:

“... Hungry soldiers ... had no time for women, but the authorities got their way by any means, from rough pressure to the most exquisite courtship. ... And the girls went home with the addition of a family. Someone was looking for this himself ... It used to be worse. I was told how a certain Colonel Volkov lined up female reinforcements and, passing along the line, selected the beauties he liked. Such became his LPG, and if they resisted - on the lip, in a cold dugout, on bread and water! Then the baby went from hand to hand, got to different mothers and deputies. In the best Asian traditions!”

The fate of women at the front was most often very difficult, and even after the war they got it - for almost ten years the words “front-line soldier” and “whore” were practically synonymous. Here is what another veteran Vasily Pavlovich Bryukhov recalled about this: “In general, my attitude towards women has always been the most touching. After all, I myself had five sisters, whom I always protected. Therefore, I was very attentive to the girls. How did the girls suffer? It was more difficult for them a hundred times than for us peasants! It's especially embarrassing for the female nurses. They also rode tanks, took out the wounded from the battlefield and, as a rule, received the medal "For Military Merit" - one, two, three. Laughed that received "For sexual attempts." Of the girls, rarely anyone had the Order of the Red Star. And those who are closer to the body of the commander. How were they treated after the war? Well, imagine: we have a thousand two hundred personnel in our brigade. All men. All are young. Everyone is hitting wedges. And there are sixteen girls in the whole brigade. One did not like it, the second did not like it, but someone liked it, and she begins to meet with him, and then to live. And the rest are jealous: “Ah, she is so-and-so. PPJ". Many good girls were dishonored. Like this". Since Nikolai Nikulin is one of those who did not get female affection at the front, it is with regret that we have to state that in his memoirs he embarked on the path of that very “glorification” of all 800,000 women participating in the war.

“At the beginning of the war, the German armies entered our territory like a hot knife through butter. To slow down their movement, there was no other means than to pour blood on the blade of this knife. Gradually, he began to rust and dull and moved more and more slowly. And the blood flowed and flowed. So the Leningrad militia burned down. Two hundred thousand of the best, the color of the city.

The total number of the combat unit of the Leningrad militia was about 160,000 people, while there is no doubt that part of the militia managed to survive. For example, Daniil Granin, who fought until the very Victory and is still alive today. Fought in the Leningrad People's Militia Army and actor Boris Blinov, who played the role of Furmanov in Chapaev. He survived the July battles, was evacuated to Kazakhstan with the Lenfilm film studio, managed to star in Wait for Me and died in 1943 from typhoid fever.

“... And a hundred Ivanovs get up and wander through the deep snow under the crossroads of German machine guns. And the Germans in warm bunkers, well-fed and drunk, impudent, foresaw everything, calculated everything, shot everything and beat, beat, like in a shooting range. However, it was not so easy for the enemy soldiers. Recently, a German veteran told me that among the machine gunners of their regiment there were cases of insanity: it is not so easy to kill people row by row - but they keep coming and going, and there is no end to them.

In analyzing this episode, we will not dwell on the generalizations already mentioned several times. Surprisingly, the memories of former German soldiers often look exactly the same, only in them it is the “Ivans” who are perfectly equipped, fed and occupy equipped positions. Apparently, it's good where we are not?

“... The regiments lost their orientation in the dense forest, went out to the wrong place. Rifles and machine guns often did not fire because of the frost, artillery hit an empty place, and sometimes even their own. There were not enough shells ... The Germans knew everything about the movements of our troops, about their composition and numbers. They had excellent air reconnaissance, radio interception and much more. .

Of course, the Wehrmacht was a very strong enemy, in many respects superior in its combat capabilities to the Red Army. However, to make cyborgs out of German soldiers and officers who see the location of the Red Army through and through is at least reckless. German documents, just like ours, are full of reports of poor interaction between the combat arms, delays in promotion, and poor organization of staff and intelligence work. If the Germans were omniscient, then their defeat near Moscow simply would not have happened, just as the Victory would not have happened. The question also arises: how in 1975 did the former sergeant Nikulin know about German air reconnaissance, radio interception and other things? Moreover, Nikulin contradicts himself, citing the memoirs of a German soldier below in the text:

“We didn’t have winter clothes, only light overcoats, and at a temperature of -40, even -50 degrees, there was little heat in wooden bunkers with an iron stove. How we survived all this remains a mystery to this day.”

Once again, we are faced with an attempt by the memoirist not to deal with those difficult experiences that accompanied his life at the front, but to fence himself off from them with a wall of general phrases and meaningless generalizations.

“... I found out how our commander I.I. Fedyuninsky was talking to the division commanders: “Your mother! Forward!!! If you don't move, I'll shoot you! Yo Mama! To attack! Yo Mama!" ... About two years ago, the elderly Ivan Ivanovich, a kind grandfather, told the Octobrists on TV about the war in completely different tones ... "

It is interesting that the author puts on the same level commanders who are not able to fulfill the order, and children of primary school age. Apparently, General Fedyuninsky was supposed to speak the same way in both cases, but it’s not clear how exactly?

"... felt boots were replaced with boots with windings - an idiotic device, all the time unwinding and dangling on the feet."

There were many adherents of boots with windings in the infantry. Many war veterans note that in the off-season conditions, the windings, which played the role of an ersatz top, proved to be better than boots. Zhelmontov Anatoly Yakovlevich recalls: “The windings are good - snow does not fall, they dry quickly.” Osipov Sergey Nikolevich echoes him: “When we came to the Batya shoe factory, the Czechs offered us to exchange our boots with windings for boots for free. But none of the soldiers wanted to take off the windings, because the boots rub their legs, and the windings are very comfortable on the march. Maybe they just needed to learn how to wind them correctly?

“... Having become a sniper, however, I was appointed commander of the submachine gunners’ squad, as there were not enough junior commanders. Here I had enough hot to tears. As a result of the fighting, the branch ceased to exist. Service in the infantry was interspersed with assignments to the artillery. We were given a captured 37mm cannon, and I, as a former artilleryman (!?), became a gunner there. When this cannon was broken, they brought a domestic forty-five, and with it I "covered myself." Such is the history of my glorious service in the 311th s. during the Mginsk operation of 1943.

It would seem that this is what you need to write about! How he went on a "hunt", how the squad fought. Who are the people who fell into our land, and why are they not listed by name? And most likely because none of this happened. According to the alphabetical record book of privates and sergeants of the 1067th rifle regiment of the 311th rifle division, stored in the divisional fund in the archive of the Ministry of Defense (inventory 73 646, case 5), junior sergeant N. N. Nikulin was wounded on 08/23/1943 and left the unit . The indicated military registration specialty of the wounded (VUS) is interesting - No. 121. According to the list of military specialties, this is a nurse or medical instructor, but not a sniper or gunner. This is one mention of the author in the documents of the units and formations in which he happened to fight.

The second episode also contradicts Nikulin's memoirs. He writes that he “became his own” in the 534th separate medical and sanitary company due to a series of injuries, and as a result, after one of them, he remained in the company’s staff as a foreman (in fact, an administrative and economic position) . The surviving order for the 48th Guards Heavy Howitzer Artillery Brigade of August 31, 1944 (fund of the 48th Guards TGABr, op. 2, d. 2, l. 116) informs about the exclusion from the allowance of personnel. At the end of the list, after the dead, missing and wounded, there is a list of those who left due to illness, and the last line reads: "…eighteen. Radiotelegrapher of the senior 1st battery of the Guards. ml. Sergeant Nikulin N. N. - in 543 MSR from 08/31/1944 " . Here is such a not quite heroic departure from the front line, which has no place in truthful memoirs.

“Before the battles, we were handed a divisional banner. ... Passing in front of the formation, the colonel was looking for two assistants to accompany the banner. ... The most suitable unexpectedly turned out to be ... I, probably because of my numerous medals and the badge of the guards.

In 1943, the author did not have a guards rank, nor "numerous medals" - he will receive the first medal "For Courage" a year later, in July 1944. The maximum that Nikolai Nikulin could receive by the summer of 1943 was the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad", established in December 1942, but was it rare among the soldiers who fought on the same sector of the front?

“... Once on a frosty winter day in 1943, our colonel called me and said: “The redeployment of troops is planned ... take two soldiers, food for a week and go to take a good dugout for the headquarters in advance. If we don't come back in a week, come back."

What position should junior sergeant Nikulin have to hold in order for “our colonel” to call him from somewhere?

“This is how one nurse told about what she ... saw:“ ... Suddenly, a German fighter fell out of the clouds, flew low, at a low level flight over the clearing, and the pilot, leaning out of the cockpit, methodically shot helpless people sprawled on the ground with automatic fire . It was evident that the machine gun in his hands was Soviet, with a disc!”

Nikita Sergeevich Mikhalkov, apparently, decided to creatively rework and use this episode in his film “Burnt by the Sun-2”, where the shooter of a German bomber decides to “bomb” transport with evacuated own excrement. The author would have tried to stick out some part of the body from the cockpit of a fighter flying at a speed of 300-400 kilometers per hour - perhaps people would not have had a chance to read frankly stupid stories and watch the same stupid movie.

“Is it really impossible to avoid the monstrous victims of 1941 – 1942? Do without senseless, doomed to failure attacks by Pogostye, Sinyavino, Nevskaya Dubrovka and many other similar places?

Apparently it was possible. Or not. In any case, this is not within the competence of Sergeant Nikulin, whose gaze “The events of those years are directed not from above, not from the general’s bell tower, from where everything is visible, but from below, from the point of view of a soldier” . By the way, as an excuse for Nikulin, it is worth mentioning that he was unlucky with the place of his war - something like the unfortunate Canadians of 1917 near Paschendahl, or Russian soldiers in the fall of 1916 in the Kovel dead end. Positional warfare, "battles for the forester's hut", advance of 30 meters after a three-week artillery preparation. Alas, Nikulin, like his colleagues, ended up in hell.

It is difficult to judge the professional qualities of the post-war art critic Nikulin, but the fact that he unjustifiably boldly takes on mathematical calculations is obvious. Here is his methodology for calculating the losses of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War:

“I cannot judge global statistics. 20 or 40 million, maybe more? I only know what I saw. My "native" 311th rifle division let through about 200 thousand people during the war years. (According to the last head of the construction department, Neretin.) This means 60,000 dead! And we had more than 400 such divisions. The arithmetic is simple ... The wounded were mostly cured and again got to the front. Everything started all over again for them. In the end, having passed through a meat grinder two or three times, they died. Thus, several generations of the healthiest, most active men, primarily Russians, were completely erased from life. And the vanquished? The Germans lost 7 million in total, of which only a part, however, the largest, on the Eastern Front. So, the ratio of those killed: 1 to 10, or even more - in favor of the defeated. Great win! This ratio haunts me all my life like a nightmare. Mountains of corpses near Pogost, near Sinyavino and everywhere where I had to fight, stand before me. According to official data, 17 people were killed per square meter of some sections of the Neva Dubrovka. Corpses, corpses" .

Please note that the author himself denies the right to make such statements (“I cannot judge”), but immediately forgets about it. If we take the minimum dimensions of the Nevsky Piglet from all those mentioned in the literature, i.e. 1000 by 350 meters, and multiply by 17, you get 6,000,000 dead Soviet soldiers. Is it not enough to describe the actions of mediocre commanders, perhaps more should be added?

“It turns out that the rational Germans took everything into account here. Their veterans are clearly distinguished by the degree of participation in the battles. The documents show different categories of the front: I - the first trench and no man's land. These are honored (during the war there was a special sign for participating in attacks and hand-to-hand combat, for knocked out tanks, etc.). II - artillery positions, headquarters of companies and battalions. III - other front-line rears. This category is looked down upon.” .

There is a complete ignorance of the realities of the life of German veterans of World War II after the war or a deliberate distortion of facts. The process of denazification in post-war German society, both in the GDR and in the FRG, led to the fact that the former soldiers of the Wehrmacht, not to mention the SS, had a general attitude as war criminals, and no one thought to honor them. It’s also not worth talking about any benefits or military pensions - the time of military service in the Nazi army was simply included in the total length of service. What documents and categories is Nikulin talking about?

“... Our commander stood at the stereo tube - a stately, handsome young colonel. Freshly shaven, ruddy, smelling of cologne, in an ironed tunic. After all, he slept in a comfortable covered car with a stove, and not in a hole. He had no earth in his hair, and the lice did not eat him. And for breakfast he had not gruel, but well-fried potatoes with American stew. And he was an educated artilleryman, he graduated from the Academy, he knew his business. In 1943, there were very few of these, since most were shot in 1939 – 1940, the rest died in the forty-first, and people who accidentally surfaced on the surface turned out to be in command posts.

If we abstract from envy and hatred for commanders who do not look like the author, it is worth asking only one question: how did the Red Army survive before the appearance of handsome colonels? Could it be that “people who accidentally surfaced” and semi-literate sergeants fought against the Germans, and fought, despite all the mistakes, not bad? Or did they not all shoot? But a colonel could have been a lieutenant in 1941, and he got into the Academy for a reason. We won’t be surprised if it turns out that in those years when Nikulin was at school, the colonel was already “pulling the strap” at the artillery school of the People’s Commissariat of Education. But the author does not care about such trifles, he cares about something else:

« Swollen from hunger, you slurp an empty gruel - water with water, and nearby an officer guzzles butter. He is entitled to a special ration, and for him the captain steals food from a soldier's boiler ».

“… Memoirs, memoirs… Who writes them? What memoirs can those who actually fought have? Pilots, tankers and, above all, infantrymen? Injury is death, injury is death, injury is death –and that's it! There was no other. Memoirs are written by those who were near the war. In the second echelon, at headquarters. Or corrupt hacks who expressed the official point of view, according to which we cheerfully won, and the evil fascists fell by the thousands, slain by our well-aimed fire. Simonov, "honest writer", what did he see? They took him for a ride in a submarine, once he went on the attack with infantry, once with scouts, looked at the artillery preparation - and now he “saw everything” and “experienced everything”! (Others, however, did not see this either.) He wrote with aplomb, and all this is an embellished lie. And Sholokhov's "They fought for the Motherland" is just propaganda! There is no need to talk about small mongrels.”

Strange logic. Firstly, by the time Nikulin wrote his memoirs, a sufficient number of memoirs of people had been published, about which even then it was known for certain where and how they fought. Among them were pilots, and tankers, and even infantrymen were. Yes, not everyone had such a literary gift as Nikulin, yes, many memoirs were edited by professional writers. Finally, some of the memoirs (for example, the famous “Memoirs of a Tankman” by G. Penezhko) were more reminiscent of the tales of Baron Munchausen, but there were also truthful books that “beat” even according to documents that their authors at that time simply could not be available. As for the attacks on Sholokhov, let them remain on the conscience of the author, while Konstantin Simonov's memoirs about the war were read by many. What is his fault before Nikulin is not clear. Probably, the 2nd rank military officer, the correspondent of Krasnaya Zvezda and the husband of Valentina Serova had to go down, feed the lice and eat the slop. Then his memories of the war, of course, in the eyes of Nikulin would immediately become worthy of respect. By the way, about the “small mongrels”: when Nikulin finished writing his memoirs, Konstantin Vorobyov, the author of “Killed near Moscow”, had already died of cancer, the star of Vyacheslav Kondratiev, who drank grief in the Rzhev meat grinder, was wounded and, in the end, demobilized due to injury, had not yet risen . His first story "Sashka" was published only in 1979. Let us imagine with horror that Nikolai Nikulin wrote it. Could such lines escape from his pen? Very doubtful:

“They came running soon - fine, flushed from running, their caps are slightly on one side, wasp waists are pulled with canvas Red Army belts, overcoats are fitted, and they smell of perfume, Muscovites, in a word ... They brought Sasha a mug of boiling water, in which he had four pieces of sugar thumped, a loaf of gray Moscow bread, or rather, not a loaf, but such a big loaf, they took out several packs of concentrates from a duffel bag (and buckwheat!) And, finally, half-smoked sausages about a kilogram.

- You eat, eat ... - they said, cutting a loaf, sausage and handing him sandwiches, but he can’t eat from tenderness and frustration.

And then they sat down near Sasha on both sides. He will move away from one - close to the other, no matter how they get away from him. And Sashka fidgeted, but, of course, it doesn’t even occur to them that he is moving away from them. They fuss around Sasha, treat him - one is holding a mug while he is taking bread, the other is cutting sausage at this time. And they breathe freshness and homeliness, only the military uniform speaks for itself - front-line roads, unknown, are waiting for them, and therefore they are even dearer to him, even more expensive.

Why are you going to war, girls? Wouldn't need to...

- What do you! Is it possible to sit in the rear when all our boys are fighting? It's embarrassing...

So you volunteer?

– Of course! All the thresholds at the military registration and enlistment office were knocked down, - one answered and laughed. - Do you remember, Tonya, as a military commissar at the beginning ...

“Yeah,” laughed the other.

And Sashka, looking at them, smiled involuntarily, but a bitter smile came out - these little girls still don’t know anything, war is tempting for them, like they look at an adventure, but war is something completely different ...

Then one of them, looking straight into Sasha's eyes, asked:

- Tell me ... Only the truth, always the truth. Is it scary there?

“It’s scary, girls,” Sasha answered very seriously. - And you need to know this ... so that you are ready.

We understand, we understand...

They got up, began to say goodbye, their train was about to depart. They stretched out their hands, and Sasha is embarrassed to give hers - black, burned, dirty - but they ignore it, they press their thin fingers, from which the manicure has not yet left, Sasha's rough paw, wish a speedy recovery, and Sasha's heart bleeds : something will happen to these glorious girls, what fate awaits them at the front?

By the way, we note that in Kondratiev’s story (in this and later ones) there is dirt, and lice, and hunger, and semi-literate mediocre commanders, but there is no hatred for all living things and a violent desire to impose one’s own personal view of the war on everyone as the only correct (with constant and flirtatious reservations about subjectivity). It is hard to believe that from 1975 until the publication of his book in 2007, Nikulin was in the dark about both new literary works and new historical research. Obviously, he formulated everything for himself forever.

You can still fish out quotes from the memoirs of Nikolai Nikulin for a long time (the above passages are taken from about the first third of the book), sort out where his personal knowledge is, and where are unverified rumors that he, in his inner conviction, considered true. But this occupation is ungrateful, and the author himself will no longer be able to answer our reproaches. When analyzing his memoirs, we, first of all, wanted to note their psychotherapeutic role for the author. It seems to us that by pouring out all the accumulated bitterness on paper, Nikolai Nikolayevich thus significantly extended his life, getting rid of the suffering that memories of the war caused him. Whatever we write about his book “Memories of the War”, this does not negate the fact that it is one of the important sources on the history of the Great Patriotic War. The trials that fell to Nikulin's lot were never dreamed of by any of us and, perhaps, would have broken anyone, both physically and mentally. Nikolai Nikolaevich Nikulin, like millions of our compatriots, went through almost the entire war, finished it in Berlin with the rank of Guards sergeant, awarded two medals "For Courage" and the Order of the Red Star. His memories of the war are just a touch to a huge and tragic canvas, which he, a great connoisseur of art, examined from the only angle available to him. He understood that his view was just one of the possible interpretations of that grandiose historical event that was the war. Neither the absolutization of this view as the only correct one, nor the denial of the right to its existence is by any means permissible, and the book of Nikolai Nikulin will remain one of the many voices mutilated by the war. In any case, for the sake of completeness, the interested reader should not limit himself to this source of knowledge.

The authors would like to thank Artem Drabkin for help with the review.