Louise Hay - one of the first masters of our time began to talk about ...
8.01.2018 17:48
The destroyed cities were rebuilt by prisoners of war
We know that the victory over Hitlerite Germany went to our people at an incredibly high price. In 1945, a significant part of the European part of the USSR lay in ruins. It was necessary to restore the destroyed economy, and in the shortest possible time. But the country at that time experienced an acute shortage of workers and smart minds, because millions of our fellow citizens, including a huge number of highly qualified specialists, perished on the war fronts and in the rear.
After the Potsdam Conference, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a closed resolution. According to him, when restoring the industry of the USSR, its destroyed cities and villages, it was supposed to use the labor of German prisoners of war to the maximum extent. At the same time, it was decided to take all qualified German engineers and workers from the Soviet occupation zone of Germany to the enterprises of the USSR.
According to the official Soviet history, in March 1946, the first session of the USSR Supreme Soviet of the second convocation adopted the fourth five-year plan for restoration and development National economy country. In the first post-war five-year plan, it was necessary to completely restore the regions of the country that suffered from the occupation and military operations, and in industry and agriculture reach the pre-war level, and then surpass it.
For the development of the economy of the Kuibyshev region, about three billion rubles were allocated from the state budget in the prices of that time. In the vicinity of post-war Kuibyshev, several camps were organized for former soldiers of the defeated Nazi armies. The Germans who survived in the Stalingrad cauldron were then widely used at various Kuibyshev construction sites.
The hands of workers at that time were also needed for the development of industry. Indeed, according to official Soviet plans, in the last war years and immediately after the war, several new plants were planned to be built in Kuibyshev, including an oil refinery, a drill bit, a ship repair plant and a metalwork plant. It also turned out to be urgently necessary to reconstruct the 4th GPP, KATEK (later the AM Tarasov plant), the Avtotraktorodetal plant (later the valve plant), the Srednevolzhsky machine-tool plant and some others. It was here that German prisoners of war were sent to work. But as it turned out later, they were not the only ones.
The internationally recognized term "collaboration" refers to collaboration local population occupied territories with the Nazis during the Second World War. In Ukraine, for almost a quarter of a century of "independent" existence, attempts are being made to justify the traitors. In this series - decrees on the liquidation of Soviet monuments and their destruction without any decrees, on honoring Hauptman Shukhevych and Bandera, on recognizing UPA warriors as veterans, on withdrawing from libraries for the destruction of "communal chauvinist literature", etc. All this is accompanied by incessant attempts to whitewash "on the scientific level"Ukrainian nationalists, up to the complete denial of such a phenomenon as Ukrainian collaborationism, in the works of V. Kosik, O. Romaniv, M. Koval, V. Sergiychuk and others.
We have to remind about well-known facts. All the leaders of the OUN Wire - E. Konovalets, A. Melnik, S. Bandera, J. Stetsko - have been agents of the German special services since the 1930s. This is confirmed by the same testimony of Colonel Abwehr E. Stolze: “In order to attract broad masses for subversive activities against the Poles, we recruited the leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Colonel of the Petliura army, the White emigrant KONOVALETS ... Soon Konovalets was killed. The OUN was headed by Andrey MELNIK, whom, like Konovalets, we attracted to cooperate with German intelligence ... at the end of 1938 or at the beginning of 1939 Lahuzen had a meeting with Melnik, during which the latter was recruited and received the nickname "Consul" ... Germany was strenuously preparing for a war against the USSR, and therefore measures were taken along the line of Abwehr to intensify subversive activities, tk. those measures that were carried out through Melnik and other agents seemed insufficient. For this purpose, a prominent Ukrainian nationalist Stepan BANDERA was recruited, who was freed from prison by the Germans during the war, where he was imprisoned by the Polish authorities for participating in a terrorist act against the leaders of the Polish government. "
Almost all the commanders of the Bandera UPA (not to be confused with the UPA Bulba-Borovets destroyed by the Bandera with the help of the Nazis at the end of 1942-1943) are former officers of German units. 1939: "Ukrainian Legion", it is also the special unit "Bergbauerhalfe" (R. Sushko, I. Korachevsky, E. Lotovich), who fought as part of the Wehrmacht against Poland. 1939 - 1941: battalions of the Abwehr "Roland" and "Nachtigall" (Hauptmann R. Shukhevych, Sturmbannfuehrer E. Pobigushchiy, Hauptmans I. Grinokh and V. Sidor, Oberst Lieutenants Y. Lopatinsky and A. Lutsky, Lieutenants of the Abwehr L. Ortynsky, M. Andrusyak, P. Melnik) - all of them subsequently moved to the police "Schutzmannschaft Battalion-201", and from it to the UPA. The commander of the "Bukovinsky kuren" and military assistant of the OUN (M) P. Voinovsky - Sturmbannfuehrer and commander of a separate SS punitive battalion in Kiev. P. Dyachenko, V. Gerasimenko, M. Soltys - commanders of the "Ukrainian Legion of Self-Defense" of the OUN (M) in Volyn, aka "Schutzmanschaft Battalion-31", who suppressed the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. And also B. Konik (shb-45), I. Kedyumich (shb-303) - executioners Babi Yar; K. Smovsky (schb-118) - Khatyn is on his conscience; wb number 3 - Cortelis. And also the numerous "Ukrainian auxiliary police" (K. Zvarych, G. Zakhvalinsky, D. Kupyak), in 1943 in full force joined the SS division "Galicia". This is not counting the various teams "Abverstelle" (M. Kostyuk, I. Onufrik, P. Glyn). One cannot but agree with the thesis of the famous Canadian scientist V.V. Polishchuk, that "the OUN lost its virginity to the Great Mechchina until May 9, 1945. Tilki in the OUN Bandery was small - up to 3 months - there was a break at the spіvdіya with the occupants - even though they got up to the" power "1943 - 1943 -
For 1942, the map shows the maximum progress fascist troops deep into the Soviet Union. On the scale of the Soviet Union, this is a small part, but what were the victims in the occupied territories.
If you look closely, in the north the Germans stopped in the area of the present Republic of Karelia, then Leningrad, Kalinin, Moscow, Voronezh, Stalingrad. In the south we reached the region of the city of Grozny. You cannot describe it in a nutshell.
From school course history we know that the fascists in the USSR reached such cities as Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad (now Volgograd), Grozny, Kalinin, Voronezh. After 1942, when the Nazis advanced as much as possible across the territory of the USSR, they began to retreat. You can see the progress of their promotion on the map in more detail:
The Germans advanced quite deep into the territory of the Soviet Union. But they did not manage to take strategically important cities: neither Moscow nor Leningrad submitted. In the Leningrad direction, they were stopped in the area of the city of Tikhvin. In the Kalinin direction - near the village of Mednoe. At Stalingrad we reached the Volga, the last outpost - the village of Kuporosnoye. On the western front, near the city of Rzhev, the Germans were knocked out at the cost of incredible efforts (remember famous poem Tvardovsky I was killed near Rzhev). They also fought furiously for the Caucasus, which was of strategic importance - access to the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. We stopped in the area of the city of Maykop.
Where the Nazis reached, this is already a well-known business, and every historian can accurately tell everything in detail, about every point, about every city and village in which there were fierce battles, everything is especially well described and remained in memory in books that can be for many years just pick up and read.
And this is how the map looks like:
A lot of maps are shown, but I will say in words: during the Great Patriotic War, the Nazis came close to Moscow, they had only 30 km to Moscow, but they were stopped there. Naturally, I know everything about the blockade of Leningrad, Battle of Kursk, Rzhevskoe direction. Here is a map of the battle for Moscow.
http://dp60.narod.ru/image/maps/330.jpg
This is the line of maximum advancement of the Germans &; Co deep into Soviet territory.
There are many types of cards.
To be honest, I don't really trust the Internet, I trust history books more.
I myself live in Belarus and therefore the card may not be much different.
But here's a photo I took, just for you!
The Nazis went far, but, as you know, they failed to capture Moscow. Not so long ago I was interested in information when the Nazis began to retreat. We managed to find only a few facts of the events near Moscow. You can quote:
The map shows the territory of the USSR, which the Germans managed to pass before November 15, 1942 (after which they went a little further inland and began to retreat):
The German offensive on the USSR was in 1941, they almost achieved their goal, and the Nazis had only about thirty kilometers left to reach Moscow, but they still did not succeed, but here is a map where everything is described in detail
They were near Moscow - 30 km, and there they were defeated, you better read it in Wikipedia, everything is described in detail there and the dates are from the video, see here. And here is the map in the pictures below, everything is marked by black arrows.
During the Great Patriotic War Nazi Germany captured a significant territory of the former USSR.
The troops of the Third Reich occupied many of the republics of the then union. Among them are part of the RSFSR, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, the Baltic republics.
Below on the map you can see the border (bold red line) where the Nazis entered during the hostilities:
, "The cruelty of the occupation regime was such that, according to the most conservative estimates, every fifth of the seventy million Soviet citizens who were under occupation did not live to see Victory."
The inscription on the blackboard: "Russian must die so that we can live." Occupied territory of the USSR, October 10, 1941
According to Taylor, the US prosecution representative at the Nuremberg Trials, “the atrocities committed by the armed forces and other organizations of the Third Reich in the East were so shockingly monstrous that the human mind can hardly comprehend them ... I think the analysis will show that they were not just madness and bloodlust. On the contrary, there was a method and a goal. These atrocities took place as a result of carefully calculated orders and directives issued before or during the attack on the Soviet Union and constitute a coherent logical system. "
As the Russian historian G. A. Bordyugov points out, in the affairs of the Extraordinary State Commission "for the establishment and investigation of the atrocities of the German fascist invaders and their accomplices" (June 1941 - December 1944), 54784 acts of atrocities against civilians in the occupied Soviet territories were recorded ... Among them - such crimes as "the use of civilians in the course of hostilities, the forcible mobilization of civilians, the execution of civilians and the destruction of their homes, rape, the hunt for people - slaves for the German industry."
| Additional images online |
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| In the occupied territory, the thematic catalog of photographic documents of the Federal Archives. | |
The fascist German occupation of the USSR and its initiators were publicly condemned by an international tribunal during the Nuremberg trials.
War goals
As the German historian Dr. Wolfrem Werte noted in 1999, “the war of the Third Reich against the Soviet Union was from the very beginning aimed at seizing territory up to the Urals, exploiting natural resources USSR and long-term subordination of Russia to German domination. Not only the Jews, but also the Slavs who inhabited the Soviet territories captured by Germany in 1941-1944 were facing a direct threat of systematic physical destruction ... The Slavic population of the USSR ... along with the Jews, was proclaimed an “inferior race” and was also subject to destruction. "
The military-political and ideological goals of the "war in the East" are evidenced, in particular, by the following documents:
The chief of staff of the OKW operational leadership, after the appropriate amendments, returned the draft document "Instructions on special problems Directive No. 21 (version of the Barbarossa plan) ", making a note that this project can be reported to the Fuehrer after revision in accordance with the following provision:
“The upcoming war will be not only an armed struggle, but at the same time a struggle between two worldviews. To win this war in conditions when the enemy has a huge territory, it is not enough to defeat him military establishment, this territory should be divided into several states, headed by their own governments, with which we could conclude peace treaties.
The creation of such governments requires a great deal of political skill and the development of well thought out general principles.
Every revolution large scale brings to life such phenomena that cannot be simply thrown aside. Socialist ideas in today's Russia can no longer be eradicated. These ideas can serve as an internal political basis for the creation of new states and governments. The Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia, which is the oppressor of the people, must be removed from the scene. The former bourgeois-aristocratic intelligentsia, if it still exists, primarily among the emigrants, should also not be allowed to power. She will not be accepted by the Russian people and, moreover, she is hostile towards the German nation. This is especially noticeable in the former Baltic states. In addition, we must under no circumstances allow the replacement of the Bolshevik state by a nationalist Russia, which ultimately (as history shows) will once again confront Germany.
Our task is to create these socialist states dependent on us as quickly as possible with the least expenditure of military efforts.
This task is so difficult that one army is not able to solve it. "
03/30/1941 ... 11.00. A big meeting with the Fuhrer. Almost 2.5-hour speech ...
The struggle between two ideologies ... The great danger of communism for the future. We must proceed from the principle of soldier's comradeship. A communist has never been and never will be our comrade. It's about the fight to destroy. If we do not look like that, then, although we will defeat the enemy, in 30 years the communist danger will again arise. We are not waging a war in order to mothball our adversary.
Future political map of Russia: Northern Russia belongs to Finland, protectorates in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus.
Struggle against Russia: the destruction of the Bolshevik commissars and the communist intelligentsia. The new states must be socialist, but without their own intelligentsia. A new intelligentsia should not be allowed to form. Here, only a primitive socialist intelligentsia will suffice. The fight must be waged against the poison of demoralization. This is far from a military-judicial issue. The commanders of units and subunits must know the goals of the war. They must lead in the struggle ..., firmly hold the troops in their hands. The commander must give his orders, taking into account the mood of the troops.
The war will be very different from the war in the West. In the East, cruelty is a boon for the future. Commanders must make sacrifices and overcome their hesitation ...
Diary of the Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces F. Halder
The economic goals are formulated in the directive of Reichsmarschall Goering (written no later than June 16, 1941):
I. According to the orders of the Fuehrer, it is necessary to take all measures for the immediate and fullest possible use of the occupied areas in the interests of Germany. All activities that could hinder the achievement of this goal should be postponed or completely abandoned.
II. The use of the areas subject to occupation should be carried out primarily in the field of food and oil sectors of the economy. Getting as much food and oil as possible for Germany is the main economic goal of the campaign. Along with this, German industry should be provided with other raw materials from the occupied areas, as far as technically possible and taking into account the preservation of industry in these areas. As for the genus and volume industrial production occupied areas, which must be preserved, restored or reorganized, this should also be determined first and foremost in accordance with the requirements that the use of agriculture and the oil industry poses for the German war economy.
German propaganda poster "Hitler's Warriors - Friends of the People."
This clearly expresses the guidelines for managing the economy in the occupied regions. This applies both to the main goals and to individual tasks that help to achieve them. In addition, this also suggests that tasks that do not agree with the main goal setting or prevent them from maintaining it should be abandoned, even if their implementation in certain cases seems desirable. The point of view that the occupied regions should be put in order as soon as possible, and their economy restored, is completely inappropriate. On the contrary, the attitude towards individual parts of the country should be differentiated. Economic development and maintenance of order should be carried out only in those areas where we can extract significant reserves of agricultural products and oil. And in the rest of the country, which cannot feed themselves, that is, in the Middle and Northern Russia, economic activity should be limited to the use of discovered reserves.
Main economic challenges
Baltic region
Caucasus
In the Caucasus, it was supposed to create autonomous region(Reichskommissariat) as part of the Third Reich. The capital is Tbilisi. The territory would cover the entire Soviet Caucasus from Turkey and Iran to the Don and Volga. It was planned to create national formations as part of the Reichskommissariat. The economy of this region was to be based on oil production and agriculture.
Preparation for war and the initial period of hostilities
As the Russian historian Gennady Bordyugov writes, “the political and military leadership of Germany from the very beginning ... demanded that the soldiers be prepared for illegal, criminal, in fact, actions. Hitler's views on this matter were a consistent development of those political principles that he set out in his books written back in the 1920s ... As mentioned above, on March 30, 1941, at a secret meeting, Hitler, speaking to 250 generals whose troops were to participate in Operation Barbarossa, called Bolshevism a manifestation of “ social crime“. He stated that “ it's about the fight to destroy“».
According to the order of the Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal Keitel of May 13, 1941 "On military jurisdiction in the Barbarossa area and on special powers of the troops", signed by him on the basis of Hitler's orders, a regime of unlimited terror was actually declared on the territory of the USSR occupied by German troops ... The order contained a clause that actually exempted the occupiers from responsibility for crimes against the civilian population: “ The initiation of prosecution for acts committed by military personnel and service personnel in relation to hostile civilians is not mandatory, even in cases where these acts simultaneously constitute a military crime or misdemeanor.».
Gennady Bordyugov also points to the existence of other documentary evidence of the attitude of the German military leaders to the civilian population who found themselves in the combat zone - for example, the commander of the 6th Army von Reichenau demands (July 10, 1941) to shoot “ plainclothes soldier easily recognizable by their short hair", and " civilians whose demeanor and behavior appear to be hostile", General G. Hot (November 1941) -" immediately and ruthlessly suppress every step of active or passive resistance", The commander of the 254th division, Lieutenant General von Veschnitt (December 2, 1941) -" shoot without warning any civilian of any age or gender who approaches the front line" and " immediately shoot anyone suspected of spying».
Administration of the occupied territories
The occupation authorities did not supply the population with food, and the city dwellers found themselves in especially difficult conditions. In the occupied territories, fines, corporal punishment, in kind and monetary taxes were established everywhere, the amount of which for the most part were installed the occupying authorities arbitrarily. The invaders used various repressions against tax evaders, including executions and large-scale punitive operations.
Nazi demonstration at Freedom Square in Minsk, 1943.
Repression
The operation took place in a planned manner, excluding the shifts of some of its stages in time. Their main reason was as follows. On the map, the settlement of Borki is shown as a compactly located village. In fact, it turned out that this village stretches 6-7 km in length and width. When I established this at dawn, I widened the cordon on the eastern side and organized the coverage of the village in the form of ticks while increasing the distance between the posts. As a result, I managed to capture and deliver to the gathering place all the inhabitants of the village, without exception. It turned out to be favorable that the purpose for which the population was driven away was unknown to him until the last moment. At the gathering place, calm reigned, the number of posts was reduced to a minimum, and the released forces could be used in the further course of the operation. The team of gravediggers received shovels only at the place of execution, thanks to which the population remained in the dark about what was to come. Imperceptibly installed light machine guns suppressed the panic that arose from the very beginning, when the first shots sounded from the place of execution, located 700 meters from the village. Two men tried to escape, but after a few steps fell, struck by machine-gun fire. The shooting began at 9 o'clock. 00 minutes and ended at 18 o'clock. 00 minutes Of the 809 driven away 104 people (politically trustworthy families) were released, among them were the workers' estates of Mokrana. The execution took place without any complications, preparatory activities proved to be very useful.
The confiscation of grain and implements took place, apart from a shift in time, in a planned manner. The number of feeds turned out to be sufficient, since the amount of grain was not large and the points of unmilled grain were not located very far ...
Household utensils and agricultural implements were taken away with carts of bread.
Here is the numerical result of the execution. 705 people were shot, including 203 men, 372 women, 130 children.
The number of collected livestock can be determined only approximately, since at the collection point the registration was not carried out: horses - 45, large cattle- 250, calves - 65, pigs and piglets - 450 and sheep - 300. Poultry could only be found in isolated cases. What they managed to find was transferred to the released residents.
From the inventory collected: 70 carts, 200 plows and harrows, 5 winnowing machines, 25 straw choppers and other small inventory.
All confiscated grain, inventory and livestock were handed over to the manager of the state estate Mokrana ...
During the operation in Borki, the following items were consumed: rifle cartridges - 786, cartridges for machine guns - 2496 pieces. There were no losses in the company. One watchmaster with suspicion of jaundice was sent to a hospital in Brest.
Deputy company commander, chief lieutenant of the security police Müller
In the occupied territory of the USSR, the destruction of Soviet prisoners of war, who fell into the hands of the advancing German troops, was going on.
Exposure and punishment
In art
- "Come and See" (1985) is a Soviet feature film directed by Elem Klimov, which recreates the eerie atmosphere of the occupation, the "everyday life" of the "Ost" plan, which assumed the cultural devastation of Belarus and the physical destruction of most of its population.
- Checking the roads of Alexei German.
The destroyed cities were rebuilt by prisoners of war
We know that the victory over Hitlerite Germany went to our people at an incredibly high price. In 1945, a significant part of the European part of the USSR lay in ruins. It was necessary to restore the destroyed economy, and in the shortest possible time. But the country at that time experienced an acute shortage of workers and smart minds, because millions of our fellow citizens, including a huge number of highly qualified specialists, perished on the war fronts and in the rear.
After the Potsdam Conference, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a closed resolution. According to him, when restoring the industry of the USSR, its destroyed cities and villages, it was supposed to use the labor of German prisoners of war to the maximum extent. At the same time, it was decided to take all qualified German engineers and workers from the Soviet occupation zone of Germany to the enterprises of the USSR.
According to the official Soviet history, in March 1946, the first session of the USSR Supreme Soviet of the second convocation adopted the fourth five-year plan for restoration and development National economy country. In the first post-war five-year plan, it was necessary to completely restore the regions of the country that suffered from the occupation and military operations, and in industry and agriculture reach the pre-war level, and then surpass it.
For the development of the economy of the Kuibyshev region, about three billion rubles were allocated from the state budget in the prices of that time. In the vicinity of post-war Kuibyshev, several camps were organized for former soldiers of the defeated Nazi armies. The Germans who survived in the Stalingrad cauldron were then widely used at various Kuibyshev construction sites.
The hands of workers at that time were also needed for the development of industry. Indeed, according to official Soviet plans, in the last war years and immediately after the war, several new plants were planned to be built in Kuibyshev, including an oil refinery, a drill bit, a ship repair plant and a metalwork plant. It also turned out to be urgently necessary to reconstruct the 4th GPP, KATEK (later the AM Tarasov plant), the Avtotraktorodetal plant (later the valve plant), the Srednevolzhsky machine-tool plant and some others. It was here that German prisoners of war were sent to work. But as it turned out later, they were not the only ones.
Six hours to get ready
Before the war, both the USSR and Germany were actively developing fundamentally new aircraft engines - gas turbine. However, German specialists were then noticeably ahead of their Soviet colleagues. The backlog increased after, in 1937, all the leading Soviet scientists dealing with the problems of jet propulsion fell under the Yezhovsko-Berievsky skating rink of repression. Meanwhile, in Germany, at the BMW and Junkers factories, the first samples of gas turbine engines were already being prepared for serial production.
In the spring of 1945, the Junkers and BMW factories and design bureaus found themselves in the Soviet occupation zone. And in the fall of 1946, a significant part of the qualified personnel of Junkers, BMWs and some other aircraft plants in Germany, in the strictest secrecy in specially equipped trains, was taken to the territory of the USSR, or rather to Kuibyshev, in the village of Upravlenchesky. In the shortest possible time, 405 German engineers and technicians, 258 highly qualified workers, 37 employees, as well as a small group of service personnel were delivered here. Family members of these specialists arrived with them. As a result, at the end of October 1946 in the village of Administrative, there were more Germans than Russians.
Not so long ago, a former German electrical engineer Helmut Breuninger came to Samara, who was part of the very group of German technical specialists that was secretly taken to the Upravlenchesky village more than 60 years ago. In the late autumn of 1946, when the train with the Germans arrived in the city on the Volga, Mr. Breuninger was only 30 years old. Although by the time of his visit to Samara he was already 90 years old, he still decided on such a trip, however, in the company of his daughter and grandson. 
Helmut Breuninger with his grandson
In 1946 I worked as an engineer at state enterprise“Askania,” Mr. Breuninger recalled. - At that time it was very difficult for even a qualified specialist to find a job in defeated Germany. Therefore, when at the beginning of 1946, under the control of the Soviet administration, several large factories were launched, there were a lot of people who wanted to get a job there. And in the early morning of October 22, the doorbell rang at my apartment. On the threshold stood a Soviet lieutenant and two soldiers. The lieutenant said that I and my family are given six hours to get ready for the subsequent dispatch to the Soviet Union. He did not tell us any details, we only learned that we would work in our specialty at one of the Soviet defense enterprises.
On the evening of the same day, under heavy guard, a train with technicians departed from Berlin station. When loading the train, I saw many familiar faces. They were experienced engineers from our enterprise, as well as some of my colleagues from the Junkers and BMW factories. For a whole week the train went to Moscow, where several engineers with their families unloaded. But we drove on. I knew a little the geography of Russia, but I had never heard of a city called Kuibyshev before. Only when they explained to me that it was called Samara before, I remembered that there really is such a city on the Volga.
Worked for the USSR
Most of the Germans taken to Kuibyshev worked at the experimental plant No. 2 (later - the engine-building plant]. At the same time, OKB-1 was staffed by 85 percent of Junkers specialists, in OKB-2, up to 80 percent of the staff were former BMW personnel, and 62 percent of the OKB-3 personnel were specialists from the Askania plant.
At first, the secret factory where the Germans worked was run exclusively by the military. In particular, from 1946 to 1949 it was headed by Colonel Olekhnovich. However, in May 1949, an unknown engineer came here to replace the military, almost immediately appointed the responsible manager of the enterprise. For many decades this person was classified in about the same way as Igor Kurchatov, Sergei Korolev, Mikhail Yangel, Dmitry Kozlov. That unknown engineer was Nikolai Dmitrievich Kuznetsov, later an academician and twice Hero of Socialist Labor.
Kuznetsov immediately sent everything creative forces subordinate design bureaus for the development of a new turboprop engine, which was based on the German model "YUMO-022". This engine was designed in Dessau and developed up to 4000 horsepower. It was modernized, its capacity was increased even more and it was put into series. In subsequent years, not only turboprop, but also turbojet bypass engines for bomber aviation came out of the Kuznetsov Design Bureau. German specialists were directly involved in the creation of almost each of them. Their work at the engine plant in the Upravlenchesky settlement continued until the mid-50s.
As for Helmut Breuninger, he got into the first wave of moving from Kuibyshev, when some German specialists, along with their families, were transferred to Moscow factories. The last such group left the banks of the Volga in 1954, but the surviving German specialists only returned home to Germany in 1958. Since that time, the graves of many of these visiting engineers and technicians have remained in the old cemetery of the Upravlenchesky village. In those years when Kuibyshev was a closed city, no one looked after the cemetery. But now these graves are always well-groomed, the paths between them are covered with sand, and surnames in German are written on the monuments.
The Germans in November 1941 did not enter Moscow because the dams of the reservoirs surrounding Moscow were blown up. On November 29, Zhukov reported on the flooding of 398 settlements, without warning the local population, in a 40-degree frost ... the water level rose to 6 meters ... no one counted people ...
Vitaly Dymarsky: Good evening, dear listeners. On air "Echo of Moscow" another program from the cycle "Price of Victory". Today I'm leading it, Vitaly Dymarsky. And I will immediately introduce you to our guest - journalist, historian Iskander Kuzeev. Hello Iskander.
Iskander Kuzeev: Hello.
And it is no coincidence that he was invited to us today, since it was precisely today that Iskander Kuzeev's article entitled “The Moscow Flood” was published in the Top Secret newspaper, which deals with the secret operation of the autumn of 1941. The author of the article himself will tell in more detail, and I will make one digression and just tell you that, you see, life has its own way, and I repeat, Dmitry Zakharov and I are trying to go to chronological order on the events of World War II, but when something interesting comes along, we go back, maybe we will even get ahead of ourselves. And today we are going back, in the autumn of 1941, when the events that were investigated and about which our guest Iskander Kuzeev wrote about. Iskander, what are you talking about? What kind of secret operation took place in the fall of 1941 and why are we talking about the flood?
Let me start with some preface. I have always been interested in the episode of November 1941, which I have become quite familiar with from memoirs, in particular, the recently published memoirs in Russian by Guderian, who fought south of Moscow. Guderian's troops, 2nd Panzer Army, have practically completed the encirclement of Moscow from the south. Tula was surrounded, the troops approached Kashira, moved in the direction of Kolomna and Ryazan. And at this time, Soviet troops, which were repelling Guderian's attacks, received reinforcements from the north of the Moscow region, where there were practically no clashes. In the north of the Moscow region and further along the Tver region, Kalinin was taken, the troops were stationed in the vicinity of Rogachevo and Konakovo, and clashes there took place practically only at two points: near the village of Kryukovo and on the Permilov heights between Yakhroma and Dmitrov, where the troops of the Army Group Center were opposed in fact, one NKVD armored train, which happened to be there - it was going from Zagorsk towards Krasnaya Gorka, where German artillery was already stationed. And there were no other clashes in this region. At the same time, already when I began to get acquainted with this topic, I became aware that individual, literally units of German military equipment penetrated the territory of Moscow.
This famous case, when some motorcyclists drove almost to the "Falcon"?
Yes, yes, they were stopped at the second bridge over railroad, which later became known as the Victory Bridge. There, two of our machine gunners were guarding this bridge, and they were guarding it from air raids. Motorcyclists passed the first bridge over the canal and in the area of the current metro station "Rechnoy Vokzal", there was bad weather, and as the researchers who were working on this topic told me, they went down to the ice to kick a ball, at that time 30 motorcyclists passed, and they have already stopped at the last bridge in front of the Sokol station. And there was one German tank between the present metro stations "Skhodnenskaya" and "Tushinskaya".
Volokolamsk direction.
Yes. This is the Western Bridge over the diversion canal in the Tushino area. And as the people who were doing this research told me, they told me this in the management of the Moscow-Volga channel, as it is now called, the FSUE Moscow Canal, the most high building on a hill between the 7th and 8th locks, and such a story was passed from generation to generation, it was clearly visible from there: some lost German tank came out, stopped on the bridge, a German officer looked out, looked back and forth, something I wrote it down in a notebook and drove off somewhere in the opposite direction towards the Aleshkinsky forest. And third, there was German large-caliber artillery on Krasnaya Gorka, which was already ready to shell the Kremlin, it was to this point that an armored train was moving from the north, and the locals crossed the canal and reported this to the leadership, to the Ministry of Defense, and after that the shelling of this point began where the large-caliber artillery was stationed. But there were no troops in this place. When I began to deal with this topic, I found out what was happening - exactly the event took place, which in this publication is called "The Moscow Flood".
So what was this flood? They just flooded a large area in order to prevent the advance of the German troops, do I understand correctly?
Yes. Exactly. In the Volokolamsk direction, the dam of the Istra hydroelectric complex was blown up, which is called the Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Complex. Moreover, drainages were blown up below the level of the so-called "dead mark", when the water descends to discharge the spring flood. Huge streams of water in the place where the German troops were advancing fell on the area of the offensive and several villages were washed away, and the stream reached almost to the Moskva River. There, the level is 168 meters above sea level, the mark of the Istra reservoir, and below its mark is 143, that is, it turns out more than 25 meters. Imagine, this is such a waterfall of water that washes away everything in its path, floods houses and villages. Naturally, no one was warned about this, the operation was secret.
Who performed this operation? Troops or some civilian service?
In Istra it was a military operation, that is, the engineering department of the Western Front. But there was also another operation, which was carried out jointly by the leadership of the Moscow-Volga canal, now called the Moscow Canal, and by the same engineering department of the Western Front, moreover ...
What other operation?
Another, in another place.
And, there was one more.
There was also a second, or rather, even two, since the second operation was carried out at two points. When the Germans occupied Kalinin and came close to the line of the Moscow-Volga canal and there were no forces to repel these attacks, the evacuation was already being prepared, Stalin was already preparing to evacuate to Kuibyshev, now Samara, a meeting was held at the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, at which it was decided to drain water from all six reservoirs to the north of Moscow - Khimkinskoye, Ikshinskoye, Pyalovskoye, Pestovskoye, Pirogovskoye, Klyazminskoye, and to drain water from the Ivankovskoye reservoir, which was then called the Moscow Sea, from a dam near the city of Dubna. This was done in order to break the ice and thus the troops and heavy equipment would not be able to cross the Volga and the Moscow Sea and would not be able to cross this line of six reservoirs near Moscow.
The first operation on the Istra reservoir, is it November 1941?
Yes, the end of November.
And the others?
That is, all these operations were carried out one after another at the end of November. And what is the result, if I may say so? What did the Soviet command sacrifice in order to stop the German troops?
There were two options for draining water - from the Ivankovskoye reservoir downstream of the Volga, and draining water from the reservoirs towards Moscow. But a completely different option was adopted. To the west of the canal flows the Sestra River, it passes through Klin-Rogachevo and flows into the Volga below Dubna, where the canal runs high above the surrounding area. It passes in a tunnel under the canal. And the Yakhroma River flows into the Sestra River, which also flows much below the level of the canal. There is the so-called Emergency Yakhroma spillway, which, in case of any renovation works allows water from the canal to be discharged into the Yakhroma River. And where the Sestra river flows under the canal, there are emergency hatches, which are also provided for the repair of engineering structures, which allow water from the canal to be discharged into the Sestra river. And the following decision was made: through pumping stations, which raise water to the Moscow reservoirs, they all stand at the same elevation of 162 meters above sea level, it was decided to start up these pumping stations in the opposite, so-called generator mode, when they rotate in the other direction and do not consume, but generate electric current, therefore this is called the generator mode, and the water was released through these pumping stations, all the gate valves were opened and a huge stream of water rushed through this Yakhroma spillway, flooding villages, there are various villages at a very low level above the water, there are peat enterprises, experimental farms , the mass of irrigation canals in this triangle - the canal, the Yakhroma River and the Sestra River, and the mass of small villages, which are located almost at the water level. And in the fall of 1941, frost of 40 degrees, ice broke, and streams of water flooded the entire surrounding area. All this was done in an atmosphere of secrecy, so people ...
No precautions were taken.
And at the third point, where the Sestra river passes under the canal, there were still built - there is a book by Valentin Barkovsky, a veteran of the Moscow-Volga canal, there is such a researcher Mikhail Arkhipov, he has a website on the Internet where he is in detail about this says - there were welded metal gates that did not allow water from the Sestra River to flow into the Volga, and all the water that was dumped, imagine, a huge body of water from the Ivankovskoye reservoir went into the Sestra River and flooded everything around. According to Arkhipov, the level of the Yakhroma River rose by 4 meters, the level of the Sestra River rose by 6 meters.
Explain, as you just said, according to all the testimonies - we did not see with our own eyes and did not feel with our skin - it was very heavy and Cold winter, the frosts were terrible. This water, which was poured out in huge quantities on the earth's surface, was supposed to turn into ice.
Almost yes. First, the ice broke ...
But then, in the cold, it all turned, probably, into ice?
But this does not happen immediately. I was interested in how a person can be saved in such a situation. And the professor of anesthesiology, with whom I spoke, told me that it is enough to stand for half an hour knee-deep in such water and the person simply dies.
How many villages were flooded in this way?
In all these operations, somewhere in the order of 30-40.
But if I am not mistaken, there was an order from the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Comrade Stalin to flood, in my opinion, more than 300 villages around Moscow in order to stop the German offensive?
There was an order. It was not talking about flooding, it was talking about destruction.
Villages. As a matter of fact, one story is very famous. This is where Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was caught, these sabotage groups ...
Yes, this is in accordance with this order 0428 of November 17 at the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. And in accordance with this order, all villages in the depths of the front at a distance of 40-60 kilometers were to be destroyed. Well, there is such a florid wording that this is an operation, as it were, against the German troops. And there was even such a formulation "to take away the Soviet population".
That is, sabotage groups had to take the Soviet population with them before burning the village?
No, the retreating troops had to withdraw. But since they had already retreated and since there was an order to burn exactly those villages that were behind the front line, this postscript was simply fiction. This postscript is now for those who defend Stalin. When certain excerpts from these materials were published in different blogs, a lot of Stalinists appeared in the comments, who quoted this phrase.
As an example of humanism.
Yes Yes. But this phrase means absolutely nothing, we know. And then, when the offensive began, there were a lot of newsreels about the burned down villages. Naturally, the question did not arise who burned them. The Germans were there, so the operators came and filmed the burned villages.
That is, wherever the Germans were, to this depth, as Comrade Stalin ordered, all these villages where the Germans stood had to be destroyed in one way or another.
Did they report to Stalin?
Yes. For two weeks, they reported that 398 settlements were destroyed. And so these 30-40 flooded villages are a drop in the ocean ...
One tenth, 10 percent.
Yes, and few people paid attention to this. And here in the report Zhukov and Shaposhnikov write that the artillery was allocated for this, and aviation, and the mass of these saboteurs, 100 thousand Molotov cocktails, and so on, and so on.
Is this a genuine document?
Yes, this is an absolutely authentic document, there is even data where, in what archive it is located, the fund, the inventory.
In full - no.
I have never met. Do you include it in the article?
We will have an addition in the next issue and we will talk about it, we will publish order 0428 and the report, the report of the Military Council of the Western Front to the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command on November 29, 1941. This immediately clarifies the whole picture.
You know what else interests me in this whole story. History, diplomatically speaking, is little known. And if more frankly, it is practically not known at all. We have nowhere, as I understand it, nor in military literature, neither in the memoir literature about this story of the flooding has been told anywhere or was it somewhere, but under some sort of heading "top secret", as the newspaper is called, in fact, where you published?
The only thing that I managed to find from published in previous years is a book edited by Marshal Shaposhnikov, which was published in 1943, devoted to the defense of Moscow, and it came out with the stamp "secret" and already in last years The “secret” stamp was removed and the “chipboard” stamp was, and it was only declassified in 2006. And in this book it was said about the explosion of waterways in Istra. And nothing was said about the operation on the channel. I managed to find this only in the book that was published for the anniversary of the Moscow-Volga channel, last year the 70th anniversary was celebrated, and a book by Valentin Barkovsky was published with a circulation of only 500 copies. And there it is described in detail.
And this book, edited by Shaposhnikov, had all the stamps removed from it, but apparently it is just in the libraries.
Well, yes, it was no longer reprinted.
I knew, of course, that many documents were stamped, but in order to publish a book and immediately under the heading “secret”, what circulation could it have and for whom was it intended then?
The circulation is very small. Well, for the management team.
And then here's the question. Did the Germans know about this operation and was it described somewhere in German military literature?
Unfortunately, I couldn't find it. When I had doubts that everything was really flooded and people were dying there, I traveled all this territory in the Yakhroma-Rogachevo-Konakovo-Dubna square, and I met a lot of people there, well, not that a lot of people, it very elderly people who remembered this, who told, and this story was passed down from generation to generation. I was told by a resident of the village named after May 1, this is a working village right at the level of irrigation canals that flow into Yakhroma, and he told me how my grandmother survived all this, she survived. Many did not survive, and those who survived left memories. She said that they hid in a potato storage, and several soldiers who crossed Yakhroma and the irrigation canal, they simply rescued them. Firstly, there artillery hit from all sides. There were completely low panel houses, even below the peasant huts, and naturally, the artillery hit on what was visible, and could be seen with a high chimney potato storage. And so they say: “Why are you sitting here? They will kill you now. " And the water began to flow, they got out and managed to get out along the road that went along the embankment just above the canal and go in the direction of Dmitrov.
Iskander, tell me, is it known whether someone made such calculations how many people died as a result of the flooding of these villages?
I have not been able to find these calculations anywhere. And when they published on blogs, I gave my friends excerpts, there were a lot of objections from Stalinist people, it was clear from their blogs in Live Journal that they were ardent admirers of Stalin, they said that no one could die there, that at home stand high above the level of the river, and that there is still an attic, there is still a roof. But when I talked to the doctors, they said that there was little chance of being saved in such a situation.
Is it known at least what was the approximate population of these villages before the flood?
There are no such calculations for specific villages. It is known that out of 27 million, now this figure is considered, the staff of the Red Army accounts for only one third of this number.
Even less.
Two thirds are civilians. The military told me that there was no need to raise this topic at all, because any shelling would mean the death of civilians.
Iskander, I will interrupt you and interrupt our program for a few minutes while the news is broadcast, after which we will continue our conversation.
Good evening again, dear listeners. We continue the program "The Price of Victory", which I, Vitaly Dymarsky, lead today. Let me remind you that our guest is journalist, historian Iskander Kuzeev, author of the article "The Moscow Flood", published in today's issue of the newspaper "Top Secret". And we talk with our guest about the events of the fall of 1941 described by Iskander Kuzeev. So, we stopped at the fact that we tried to find out how many people lived and how many died in those 30-40 villages that were flooded by special order of the Supreme High Command by dumping water from the Istra and other reservoirs at the end of 1941. It is clear that such calculations are difficult, we are unlikely to find the exact number. And you were not interested in how many of these villages were later revived? Do they exist now or nothing is left of them and everything was built in a new place?
Many villages, which stood almost at the water level, were rebuilt. Those villages that were on a higher place, they were flooded and survived. But there it is also difficult to say how much they were flooded. Here I must answer opponents who have already spoken out about the fact that there might not have been flooding at all, that the villages on the Sestra River are very low above the water level. This is due to the fact that there was no flood inundation. This is where I have to do small digression historical. The Sestra River is located on the route of the old canal, which began to be built in the time of Catherine, there is such a village on the Istra River Catherine Ramparts, and the canal passes through the city of Solnechnogorsk, it was not completed due to the fact that there was no longer a need. Almost all structures were already ready. This canal is actually on the Moscow-Petersburg highway. And when the Nikolaev railway was built, the construction of the canal stopped, but all were built hydraulic structures- sluices, mills. And the river Sestra to Solnechnogorsk, it was all, as the river workers say, locked, there were a lot of locks and mills. And all these old hydraulic structures did not allow floods to spread, so the villages on this route are navigable. One village where I visited, for example, is called Ust-Pristan, this is at the place where Yakhroma flows into Istra, and the houses are very low, it is clear that if the rise was 6 meters, then all this could have been flooded.
It's clear. In front of me is your article and I want to read the dialogue between Zhukov and Stalin. When Stalin says that everything should be ready in two days, Zhukov objects to him: "Comrade Stalin, we must evacuate the population from the flooded zone." To which follows the following answer of the Supreme Commander: “So that information leaks out to the Germans and that they send their reconnaissance company to you? This is a war, comrade Zhukov, we are fighting for victory at any cost. I have already given the order to blow up the Istra Dam. He didn’t even regret his dacha in Zubatovo. It could have been covered with a wave, too. " Well, as I understand it, this is not a real dialogue? Not fictional, but reconstructed?
This is a reconstruction, yes.
Reconstruction based on some separate evidence, apparently?
Yes. After all, the flow from the Istra reservoir practically reached the Moskva River and could flood all these summer cottages, summer cottages in Zubatovo, which are on Rublevka and up to the Rublevskaya dam. The level there is 124 meters, and the level of Istra ...
And, tell me, Iskander, have you talked with any military leaders, our strategists, specialists in military affairs? Victims, the cost of Victory is a question that we are constantly discussing. As for purely military effectiveness, was it an effective measure to stop the Germans?
In general, yes. After all, the front line from Kalinin to Moscow was actually reduced to two points - the village of Kryukovo, known even from songs, and Permilovskie heights, where there is a monument, by the way, the only monument in Russia to General Vlasov.
Is it still worth it?
Yes. His name is engraved there, he commanded the 20th Army there.
And, well, as one of, not a separate monument to him.
Yes. Then Kuznetsov's shock army appeared there, when the offensive began, an armored train of the 73rd NKVD, some other military units, including the 20th army.
But the same operation can be presented in a different way, that there was no other way out?
Well, yes, and this operation was not the only one of its kind. After all, there was another dictator on the other side ...
We will talk about this later, I'm just interested in this situation. You can also say so, this is how those Stalinists who object to you, well, they dispute the very fact, but why should they dispute the fact itself, because we can say that there was no other way out, yes, it was difficult, it was fraught with huge victims, but it nevertheless proved to be effective.
At the same time, yes, there was a risk that the war would end in 1941, Guderian had already received an order to move towards Gorky. Troops from the north and south were supposed to close up somewhere in the Petushki area ...
Well, yes, it is a well-known thing that Hitler had already decided that Moscow had actually fallen and that it was possible to transfer troops to other directions.
I want to come back to the question of the number of victims once again. I will once again refer to your article, where you write that when they tried to find out the flood zone and at least the approximate number of victims, the villagers drew your attention to something else. I will quote again, in in this case the quote is accurate, since you yourself heard it: “Do you see that hill? There are just skeletons in bulk. " And they pointed to a small mound on the banks of the Sestra River. "There are Canal Army soldiers." Apparently, these are the people, the Gulag people, who built this channel. I’m asking this. Apparently, there, in addition to villages, in addition to living souls, there were some graves, cemeteries and so on, which were also all flooded?
Most likely, the cemeteries were on the right side. In the village of Karmanovo, where I was told about the canal army, I still thought that I had misheard, I asked: "Red Army men?" - "No, the canal army." There, after all, the canal became a fortification and, in fact, all the builders of the canal can also be considered people who became victims of this war, the defense of Moscow. According to various sources, in the city of Dmitrov, scientists in the local museum counted, there, according to their calculations, from 700 thousand to 1.5 million people died.
Killed or were employed in construction?
They died during construction, there are mass graves. I was told in the village of Test Pilot, on the banks of the Ikshinskoye reservoir, where some structures have occupied the last collective farm field, they began to build cottages on a small mound, and there they stumbled upon mass graves. Recently, the builders reconstructed the Volokolamskoe highway, the third string of the tunnel and the junction at the intersection of Svoboda and Volokolamskoe highway were being built, there are a lot of skeletons under each support, there was a cemetery, and there were a lot of skeletons already under the canals themselves. There, if a person fell, he simply stumbled, there was an order not to stop any concrete work, everything at a continuous pace, and people simply died. Described in the literature is such a case at the construction of the 3rd sluice, when just in front of everyone's eyes, a man fell into the concrete.
Iskander, one more question. There is a version that when the Soviet leadership was preparing to evacuate from Moscow and when it was believed that Moscow would have to be surrendered to the Germans, was there a plan to actually flood the city of Moscow itself?
Yes, I was also told about this by researchers who are associated with this topic. There is such a Khimki dam between the Leningradskoye Highway and the current Pokrovskoye-Glebovo cottage village in the Pokrovskoye-Glebovo park. This dam holds the entire cascade of reservoirs north of Moscow - Khimkinskoye, Pirogovskoye, Klyazminskoye, Pestovskoye, Uchinskoye and Ikshinskoye, is located at 162 meters, like all reservoirs, the water in the Moscow River is located in the city center at 120 meters, that is a drop of 42 meters, and there, as I was told, a ton of explosives was laid, including this dam and its dead volume, which is already below the discharge of flood waters, below the discharge of that Khimka river that flows out of it, and this stream could simply collapse on the capital. I spoke with the veteran, the former head of the canal, we were sitting on the third floor of the building next to the 7th gateway at the intersection of Volokolamskoye Highway and Svoboda Street, he says: “Here, we are sitting on the third floor, the flow is just, according to our calculations , it was up to this level that I could rise. " And then the mass of even high-rise buildings would practically be flooded.
But there is no documentary evidence of these plans, as I understand it? Is there only such oral testimony of people?
Yes. And they told me there, when they dismantled the bridge across the Klyazminskoye reservoir, the old one, now built there new bridge on Dmitrovskoe highway, and there already in the 80s they found explosives in huge quantities.
Which, apparently, was intended precisely for the explosion.
To blow up the bridge. And here this territory is closed, back in the 80s it was possible to drive along this dam, and there was a “brick” and it was written from “20.00 to 8.00”, that is, the road was only closed in the evening, but now it is completely closed, it is surrounded by a fence, barbed wire and this area is absolutely inaccessible.
Actually, when we say that there is no documentary evidence, documentary evidence, one can also assume that we simply do not have access to all documents, because, as you know, our archives are being opened, but very lazily, I would say.
And this story in the form of a legend has been circulating for a long time and it was attributed that it was Hitler's idea to flood Moscow after the arrival of the Germans. Andrei Vishnevsky had a play like this "Moscau zee", "Moscow Sea". Such a reconstruction, when after the victory of Hitler they walk on boats ...
It was, as it were, a purely propaganda move that Hitler was going to flood.
Or maybe it was some kind of preparation for what they themselves could flood.
Yes, transformation of real events.
By the way, Comrade Hitler himself also started a similar operation in Berlin.
Yes, here, from these operations, it is clear that there is very little difference between two such dictators when it comes to salvation. own life, then the dictator is ready to sacrifice the lives of his own people. In the movie "Liberation" there was such an episode when the sluices on the Spree River and the flaps were opened ...
Yes, and the actor Olyalin, who played Captain Tsvetaev there.
Who died there heroically. You can treat this film in different ways, which is also largely propaganda, but there was an amazing scene when the Germans, who were just five minutes ago, were opponents, they carried out the wounded together, together they held the cordon line so that women and children could be the first to come out, this is on station "Unter den Linden", right next to the Reichstag.
By the way, about the film "Liberation", I could say that, yes, it is indeed perceived and quite, probably, rightly, as a first and foremost propaganda film, but there are quite a lot of real events of the war, from which every unbiased person can draw their own conclusions. ... I remember, for example, a lot of episodes from the movie "Liberation", which suggested to me completely, maybe not the ones that the filmmakers were counting on. And about how Comrade Stalin gave orders to take certain cities at any cost, and so on. Therefore, this also has its own, so to speak, perhaps, even historical value, this film. By the way, in my opinion, the flooding was being prepared not only in Berlin. It seems to me that somewhere else, in my opinion, in Poland there was an option of flooding the city? No, there was an explosion there, I think they wanted to blow up Krakow completely.
As for Krakow, I think it's more likely also from the realm of legend, because Krakow is very high ...
There really was no flooding there. Firstly, thank you for opening, although perhaps not completely yet, but opening yet another page of the history of the war. To what extent did it seem to you that you opened it a little, and how much else is closed in this page?
Oh, a lot of closed ones. In general, a very interesting topic is the attitude of the military leadership to the civilian population. Just the other day, the memoirs of the director of the Meyerhold theater Alexander Nesterov were published. This is such a titanic feat of the Moscow poet German Lukomnikov, who had decayed, literally collected in scraps, diary entries from the times of the war, 1941-42, in Taganrog. And when I read these diary entries of Nesterov, my hair just stood on end. It seemed to me that I was reading excerpts from Orwell's 1984, when bombs were systematically dropped on the city of London, people were killed in shelling. Russian people were killed, fired on throughout the winter of 1941 and in the summer of 1942, the city and its residential quarters were shelled, people were killed, bombs were shelled and dropped on residential buildings. The front-line city of Rostov surrendered several times and was engaged again Soviet troops... And from these diary entries you can see the attitude of people to this: "The Bolsheviks dropped bombs, the Bolsheviks shelled the city."
That is, both sides who fought with the civilian population did not take into account, we can draw the following conclusion, I think. By the way, if you look at the losses in World War II, not only of the Soviet Union, but also of all the participants on both sides, both the anti-Hitler coalition and Germany's supporters, then you can see that purely military losses are the ratio, of course, in each country its own, it all depends on the degree of participation in the war - but civilians died much more than on the battlefields.
Yes. At the same time, I did not hear that, for example, the Germans bombed Konigsberg, which was occupied by Soviet troops. This was not the case.
Well, there are, of course, examples of such human saving. You can probably treat them differently too. Many, for example, believe that the same French, having yielded to Hitler quickly enough, we know that there was practically no resistance there, that by doing so they simply saved people's lives and saved cities, the same Paris, relatively speaking, occupied by the Germans, it remained so as it was. And there are still many discussions about the blockade of Leningrad. This is a difficult topic. There is an insane amount of people there. First, that this blockade could have been avoided if they had pursued a wiser, perhaps, more rational policy in relations with Finland, on the one hand.
Well, yes, there is a complicated story.
And none of the occupied cities had such a situation as in Leningrad. In Guderian's memoirs, I read his notes, where he talked about the supply of food, that there were advertisements that there was enough food so that the population would not be worried in Oryol, for example.
So people were sacrificed without looking back, without any, without counting. And I really do, maybe even answering indirectly to many of our listeners, who often write to us why we are about this, about this, about this, I want to remind once again that we have a program about the price of Victory. The price of Victory, I emphasize the word “price”, could have been different, in our opinion. And the price of Victory, which is primarily expressed by the number of those killed, the number of human lives given and laid on the altar of this Victory. And just to figure it out, because a victory at any cost is very often, it seems to me, a Pyrrhic victory. In any case, you need to be able to critically look at your past and somehow understand it. Iskander, as we say in interviews with writers, what are your creative plans? Will you continue this theme? Will you still be engaged in it, some kind of investigation, research?
In the next issue, we plan to continue this topic in the Moscow region. I think that those memoirs of Nesterov, which were just recently published on the Internet, they deserve to be discussed separately. It is very interesting. It is a miracle that such records have survived. It was dangerous to keep them. There is, for example, the following entry: "Residents of Taganrog celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of the city from the Bolsheviks." It is a miracle that such records have survived.
It is a miracle that they have survived in the hands of private individuals, because I think that there is a lot of such evidence. Another thing is that they all got there, as they once said “where they should”. I think that many listeners will probably remember that I have now conducted several programs with a researcher from Veliky Novgorod who is engaged in collaboration during the war. And there are a lot of documents. I even went to Veliky Novgorod and saw that there are a lot of documents that have survived from that time, where there is a lot of evidence of how all this happened. Occupation is also a very difficult topic. So there are some documents, evidence.
After all, Novgorod is a city that has been occupied for almost four years.
Smaller, there Pskov, in my opinion, was under German occupation the longest. Well, okay, I thank Iskander Kuzeev for our conversation today. And with you, dear listeners, we say goodbye to our next program. Goodbye, goodbye.
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