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Was there an anti-Stalinist opposition in the USSR and a conspiracy in the Red Army in 1941? (what the anti-Stalinist opposition was going to organize in 1937 against the "counter-revolutionary" Stalin and what was going on in the pre-war days in the border districts) difficult question in the study of causes

100 years of the creation of the Red Army and the RKKF ( Soviet army and Navy)!

Dedicated to the blessed memory of G. A. Sokolova ...

“Russia is our fatherland: its fate, both in glory and in humiliation, is equally memorable for us,” Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, the father of Russian history, once wrote. The events of the summer of 1941 can hardly be attributed to the glorious pages of our history. Rather, to the tragic, but in this tragedy, in addition to the bitterness of defeat, there was something even more bitter - the panic and demoralization of the army. This phenomenon was not exactly hidden in the Soviet historiography of the war - its scale was too large for this - but it was mentioned as if in passing, reluctantly, they say, yes, there was panic, but there were those who heroically fulfilled their duty ... And the story went on about the heroism of the brave. This is understandable - to talk about the heroes, albeit lost battles, is much more instructive and interesting than about those who, leaving their positions and weapons, fled wherever they look ... But without this story, without considering this phenomenon, its causes and consequences, we will never we will not be able to fully understand what happened in the fateful June 1941. Therefore, the time has come to lift the veil of secrecy from one of the most bitter pages of our history.

The surprise that wasn't there

One of the main reasons that Soviet historiography explained the unsuccessful start of the war was the notorious "surprise attack." We will dwell on this issue in detail, because it was the suddenness of the attack in Soviet historiography that was considered almost the only reason for those facts of panic that were reluctantly recognized.

You can trace the evolution of this version from 1941 to the present day.

For the first time, none other than Comrade Stalin himself spoke of the suddenness of the attack as one of the reasons for the defeat of the Soviet Army in the border battles. Speaking about the reasons for the failures of the Red Army, he said: “The circumstance that fascist Germany unexpectedly and treacherously violated the non-aggression pact concluded in 1939 between it and the USSR was of no small importance here ... She achieved this some advantageous position for her troops ... "

However, after some time, they began to see the reason for the success of the German attack in the activities of ... Comrade Stalin himself. Stalin's successor at the head of the Soviet state, N. S. Khrushchev, from the rostrum of the XX Party Congress, denounced the leader who had gone into the world, considering the thesis of surprise as an attempt to justify Stalin: “During the war and after it, Stalin put forward such a thesis that the tragedy that our people experienced in the initial period of the war was supposedly the result of the “sudden” attack of the Germans on the Soviet Union. But this, comrades, is completely untrue.”

The real reasons for the success of the Germans, according to Khrushchev, were "carelessness and ignorance of obvious facts" from Stalin himself.

But after Khrushchev left power, the thesis of “suddenness” again returned to its place as the main factor in the success of the German army in the summer of 1941, while “miscalculations of the Soviet leadership and Stalin personally” occupied one of the first places as the reasons for achieving surprise by the Germans.

In numerous journalistic articles and historical studies of the late Soviet period, theses appeared that Stalin “did not believe in the possibility of an attack on the USSR” or “was afraid of Hitler”, etc. In general, the thesis about the “surprise” of the German attack turned out to be very tenacious.

However, the publication at the very end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century of many documents and uncensored memoirs allows us not only to treat it critically, but also to completely reject it.

Consider the situation based on what we know now. In the fall of 1939, the Soviet leadership decided on the neutrality of the country in the outbreak of World War II. This decision had obvious advantages (they were described in detail by Soviet historiography, so we will not consider them here), but there were also very serious disadvantages, the main of which was the extremely unfavorable situation for the Soviet Army in the event of a conflict with Germany.

Having started the war, the Germans carried out a full mobilization and staffed the army according to the wartime states. The Soviet armed forces after the end Polish campaign and winter war returned to peacetime. To bring them to combat readiness, it was necessary to mobilize, concentrate and deploy according to pre-developed plans. All this takes time, and the Germans get a significant head start - their troops are already mobilized, and they need much less time to concentrate and deploy than the Soviet troops, thanks to the presence of a more developed transport infrastructure and shorter distances.

Initially, the Soviet leadership believed that they had a sufficient supply of time, but the rapid defeat of the French army and the British expeditionary force by the Germans dramatically changed the situation. The starting point, apparently, was the Berlin talks between the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V. M. Molotov and the Nazi leadership. It was after them that Hitler signed his Directive No. 18, known as the Barbarossa plan. The Soviet leadership also began to assume the possibility of a worst-case scenario.

In January 1941, at the General Staff of the Red Army, with active interest from the political leadership of the country, a series of staff games on cards was held with the participation of the highest command staff of the army. It is noteworthy that all the games were devoted to the possible development of events on the Soviet-German frontier of contact. As a result of this event, significant personnel changes were made in the highest echelon of the army.

In the spring of 1941, the foreign intelligence of the USSR began to inform the Soviet military and political leadership of Germany's intention to solve all problems in relations with the USSR by military means. Of course, the information was very fragmentary, unreliable, and sometimes chaotic, but quite definite conclusions were drawn from it.

Apparently, at the end of March, the war began to be considered quite probable, in April-May, under the guise of "Great training camps", about 800 thousand reservists were called up to the troops - that is, covert mobilization began. At the same time, the transfer of troops from the rear districts to the border districts began - that is, the hidden concentration of Soviet troops.

Not later than May 15, 1941, the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR and the Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army submit to Stalin considerations on the possible conduct of a war with Germany. This document, published in the 90s of the XX century, shows that at least the military leadership of the USSR, the war with Germany in the summer of 1941 was perceived as a very likely event. Modern historians suggest that the submitted document was not approved by Stalin, however, no later than the 20th of May, the General Staff of the Red Army issues directives to the border districts to develop precise plans for covering the state border by May 25, 1941.

On June 19, the People's Commissariat of Defense issues an order to disperse aviation and camouflage field airfields.

At the same time, an order was issued to move the district headquarters to specially equipped command posts.

On June 21, the Politburo decides on the appointment of front commanders, and on the same day in the evening the People's Commissariat of Defense issues Directive No. 1 on the dispersal of aviation, the occupation of firing points of border fortified areas, etc.

The documents show that the Soviet leadership expected the war at the end of June or the beginning of July 1941, and in their calculations they were not at all wrong.

As the studies of M. Meltyukhov show, as a result of partial mobilization and the transfer of troops from the rear districts, the Soviet command was able to concentrate forces comparable to the invasion army near the western border.

As we can see, the Germans have only a slight advantage in personnel.

Thus, the currently published documents allow us to assert that the German attack was not unexpected for the Soviet military and political leadership, it was expected, they were preparing for it. We do not undertake to assess the quality of this preparation, the adequacy and thoughtfulness of the decisions taken, but the very fact of their adoption does not allow us to talk about the “suddenness” of the war for the top leadership of the USSR.

And the beginning of the war does not cause panic or absent-mindedness among the Soviet leadership. Directives No. 2 and No. 3 are promptly sent to the troops, clearly arising from pre-war plans, representatives of the Supreme Command - G. K. Zhukov, G. I. Kulik, K. A. Meretskov, went to the troops to coordinate the actions of the troops and help the front commanders the first reports from the fronts were encouraging, but ... But soon the situation deteriorated sharply, and one of the reasons for this was the panic that had begun in the troops.

Panic like it was

As we mentioned above, this phenomenon was practically not considered in Soviet historiography. Only sometimes it was mentioned: “Yes, there was a panic, but ...”, followed by a story about the courage of those who did not succumb to panic. Only a few mentions in memoirs and documents published today have brought us a description of the terrible tragedy.

From the memoirs of Marshal of the Soviet Union K.K. Rokossovsky:

“There were cases when even entire units that fell under a sudden flank attack by a small group of enemy tanks and aircraft were subjected to panic ... Fear of encirclement and fear of imaginary enemy paratroopers for a long time was a real scourge. And only where there were strong cadres of command and political staff, people fought confidently in any situation, providing an organized rebuff to the enemy.

As an example, I will cite a case that took place in the area occupied by the corps. In the afternoon, a general was delivered to the corps command post without weapons, in a torn tunic, exhausted and exhausted, who said that, following the instructions of the front headquarters to the headquarters of the 5th army to clarify the situation, he saw to the west of Rovno headlong rushing east one after another cars with our fighters. In a word, the general caught the panic and, in order to find out the reason that gave rise to it, decided to detain one of the cars. In the end, he succeeded. There were up to 20 people in the car. Instead of answering questions about where they were running and what unit they were, the general was dragged into the back and began to be interrogated in unison. Then, without hesitation, they declared him a saboteur in disguise, took away his documents and weapons, and immediately pronounced a death sentence. Having contrived, the general jumped out on the move, rolled off the road into thick rye. Forest reached our CP.

Cases of shelling of people who tried to detain the alarmists also took place in other areas. Those who fled from the front did so, apparently out of fear that they would not be returned back. They themselves explained their behavior by various reasons: their parts died and they were left alone; escaping from the encirclement, they were attacked by paratroopers who landed in the rear; before reaching the unit, they were fired upon in the forest by “cuckoos”, and the like.

A very typical case is the suicide of an officer of one of the regiments of the 20th TD. The words of his posthumous note stuck in my memory. “The feeling of fear that haunts me that I can not resist in battle,” it announced, “forced me to commit suicide.”

Cases of cowardice and instability took various forms. What they have acquired a unique character, worried the commanding and political staff, party and Komsomol organizations, forced to take emergency measures to prevent these phenomena ".

From the memoirs of Lieutenant General Popel:

“When there were fifteen or twenty kilometers left to Yavorov, in a narrow passage between broken trucks and overturned wagons, my “emka” collided face to face with a staff car. It's impossible to miss. I went out to the road. Tractors pulled howitzers behind an oncoming car.

I was interested in what part, where it should be. A major with a carefully curled hussar mustache and a small, round captain jumped out of the car. They introduced themselves: regiment commander, chief of staff.

- What is the task?

The Major hesitated.

- Save the materiel...

- That is, how - save? Did you receive such an order?

- We have no order to receive from anyone - the headquarters of the corps in Yavoriv remained, and there are already Nazis. So we decided to save the equipment. At the old border it will come in handy ...

For the second time in an hour and a half I heard about the old frontier. The idea of ​​it as a frontier to which you can retreat, and then give battle, firmly entrenched in the brains of many Red Army soldiers and commanders. Such an idea reconciled with the retreat from the new state border. About this - I noticed in my notebook - it will be necessary to warn the political workers at the first opportunity.

As for the howitzer regiment, it became clear to me: the gunners arbitrarily abandoned their firing positions. I ordered to stop, contact the nearest headquarters of the infantry unit and turn the guns to the north.

The mustachioed major was in no hurry to carry out the order. I had to threaten

“If you try to ‘save the materiel’ again, you will go to court.”.

From the protocol of the interrogation of the former commander of the Western Front, General of the Army D. G. Pavlov:

“... Lithuanian units were placed who did not want to fight. After the first pressure on the left wing of the Balts, the Lithuanian units shot down their commanders and fled ... ".

From the memoirs of Army General A. V. Gorbatov: “During that period of the war, especially in the first month, one could often hear:“ We were bypassed ”,“ We ​​are surrounded ”,“ Paratroopers have been dropped in our rear, ”etc. Not only soldiers, but also unfired commanders were overly susceptible to such facts common in the course of modern warfare; many were inclined to believe exaggerated, and often simply ridiculous rumors.

Before reaching three kilometers to the front line of defense, I saw a general disorderly withdrawal along the highway of the three thousandth regiment. Confused commanders of various ranks walked in the thick of the soldiers. Enemy shells occasionally burst on the field without causing harm. Getting off the car, I shouted loudly: “Stop, stop, stop!” - and after everyone stopped, I ordered: “Everyone turn around.” Turning people to face the enemy, I gave the command: “Lie down!” After that, I ordered the commanders to come up to me. He began to find out the reason for the departure. Some answered that they had received a command transmitted through the chain, others answered: “We see that everyone is moving away, we began to move away too.” A voice was heard from a group of soldiers lying nearby: “Look what kind of fire the Germans opened, but our artillery is silent.” Others supported this remark.

It became clear to me that the first reason for the retreat was the impact of artillery fire on the unfired fighters, the second reason was the provocative transmission of the order to withdraw, not given by the senior commander. The main reason was the weakness of the commanders, who failed to stop the panic and themselves submitted to the elements of withdrawal.

Soon we began to catch up with scattered groups going east to the stations of Liozno and Rudnya. When I stopped them, I shamed them, scolded them, ordered them back, watched them reluctantly return, and again caught up with the next groups. I will not hide the fact that in a number of cases, approaching the head of a large group, I got out of the car and ordered those who rode in front on horseback to dismount. In relation to the oldest, I sometimes transgressed the boundaries of what was permitted. I scolded myself strongly, even felt remorse, but sometimes kind words are powerless..

Alexander Vasilyevich Gorbatov was the deputy commander of the 25th Rifle Corps of the Red Army. Recently published documents describe the tragic fate of this compound:

“On July 10-20 of this year, units of the 25th sk, occupying the defense in the area of ​​​​the city of Vitebsk, Surazh-Vitebsky, shamefully fled, opened the way for the enemy to advance to the East, and subsequently, being surrounded, lost most of the personnel and materiel.

By 17.00 on the same day, Major General Chestokhvalov reported that enemy mechanized units had broken through in the Vitebsk area and were moving along the Vitebsk-Surazh highway, "headquarters is surrounded." He ordered the corps units to withdraw to the east, abandoning the units of the 134th Rifle Division, which were on the defensive on the western bank of the Western Dvina.

After the order of the corps commander Chestokhvalov to retreat, a stampede to the east began. The first to run were the headquarters of the corps and the 2nd echelon of the headquarters of the 134th Rifle Division, led by the chief of staff of the division, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny, who had been absent from the command post since July 9 - “behind” and only by the time of withdrawal on July 12 arrived in the village of Prudniki.(For the full text of the document, see the Appendix.)

The result was the capture by the enemy of most of the fighters of the three divisions that were part of the corps, including General Chestokhvalov himself.

The 25th Rifle Corps was not the only formation of the Red Army that fled from the battlefield:

“On July 6, near Novy Miropol, the 199th Infantry Division was defeated, suffering heavy losses in people and materiel. In connection with this, a special department of the Southwestern Front conducted an investigation, as a result of which it was established: on July 3, the commander of the Southwestern Front ordered the 199th Infantry Division to occupy and firmly hold the southern front of the Novograd-Volyn fortified area by the morning of July 5. The command of the division complied with this order belatedly. Parts of the division took up defense later than the specified period, in addition, during the march, food was not organized for the soldiers. People, especially the 617th Infantry Regiment, arrived at the defense area exhausted. After occupying the defense area, the command of the division did not conduct reconnaissance of the enemy forces, did not take measures to blow up the bridge across the river. An accident in this sector of defense, which made it possible for the enemy to transfer tanks and motorized infantry. Due to the fact that the command did not establish a connection between the division headquarters and the regiments, on July 6 the 617th and 584th rifle regiments acted without any guidance from the division command. During the panic created in the units during the enemy offensive, the command failed to prevent the flight that had begun. The divisional headquarters fled. Division commander Alekseev, deputy. commander for political affairs Korzhev and the chief of staff of the division German left the regiments and fled to the rear with the remnants of the headquarters.

"Parts of the 199th Infantry Division were found in Olshany (40 km southeast of Bila Tserkva)."

The modern historian is forced to state: “In 6 days, the connection traveled 300 km, 50 (!!!) km a day. This is a pace that exceeds the standards for a forced march of a rifle division. The unpleasant word "escape" comes to mind".

From the Gomel Regional Committee of the Party, they reported to the Kremlin: “…demoralizing behavior very significant the number of commanders: the departure of commanders from the front under the pretext of escorting evacuated families, a group flight from the unit has a corrupting effect on the population and sows panic in the rear ".

Other examples can be cited from other fronts and directions where the same phenomena took place, however, the above quotations are enough to understand that the panic of the first weeks of the war was massive and covered hundreds of thousands of people. The panic was massive and became one of the reasons for the crushing defeat of the Red Army in the border battle - of course, superiority in organization, technology, command level gave the Nazi troops considerable advantages, but they could at least partially be offset by the courage and stamina of the Red Army, but alas - in the summer of 1941 only a few showed courage and stamina.

One can note a number important features the phenomenon we are considering.

The mechanized (tank) units, sailors and troops of the NKVD were the least affected by panic. In the course of working on the topic, the author was not able to find a single mention of panic among the fighters of the border troops of the NKVD;

The air force, artillery and cavalry are in second place in terms of durability;

The least resistant was the "queen of the fields" - the infantry.

Not only and not so much the newly mobilized reservists, but also the personnel units of the Red Army were subject to panic. And this in itself is of particular interest. From military history, we know that personnel units that have undergone good military training in peacetime, staffed with the most optimal peacetime conscription soldiers in terms of their age and psychological data, are, as a rule, the most persistent in battle. And the commanders of mass armies tried to use this feature of theirs.

So, during the Civil War in the United States, the command of the northern states, forming a large volunteer army, deliberately left a few personnel units intact, using them as the most reliable and trained reserves at the decisive moments of the battles.

Before the First World War, the French military command deliberately did not include reservists in peacetime personnel units, believing that this could undermine their "elan vital" - morale.

And the very strategy of the parties at the beginning of the First World War was designed for quick strikes, using the strength and morale of the army personnel. Therefore, the panic behavior of the personnel units of the Red Army is at least not typical of military history.

It is important to note that panic seized not only the rank and file, but also the command staff. Moreover, the Soviet leadership believed that it was the commanding staff that became the source of panic, which they directly announced to the troops in the decree of the State Defense Committee of the USSR No. GOKO-169ss of July 16, 1941, which spoke of the trial of the military tribunal of 9 top generals of the Western Front, including the commander of the front, General of the Army D. G. Pavlov.

The same motive can be traced in the order to introduce the institution of military commissars (introduced on the same day), and in order No. 270, which actually undermined the foundations of one-man command and required subordinates to control the activities of commanders:

“To oblige every soldier, regardless of his official position, to demand from a higher commander, if part of him is surrounded, to fight to the last opportunity in order to break through to his own, and if such a commander or part of the Red Army men, instead of organizing a rebuff to the enemy, prefer to surrender - destroy them by all means, both ground and air, and deprive the families of Red Army soldiers who have surrendered of state benefits and assistance..

The Soviet leadership had some grounds for concern - in total, 86 Soviet generals were captured during the war years, with 72 of them in 1941. The same number - 74 generals died on the battlefield, 4 commanders, not wanting to surrender, shot themselves in a hopeless situation. Another 3 put a bullet in their foreheads, unable to bear the burden of responsibility and the shock of failure.

However, that the generals - history has preserved for us the mention of the panicked Marshal of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the war, Marshal Kulik was appointed representative of the Stavka on the Western Front. Arriving at the troops, the commander was by no means a model of vivacity:

“Unexpectedly, Marshal of the Soviet Union G. N. Kulik arrives at the command post. He is wearing a dusty overalls, cap. Kind of tired. I report on the position of the troops and the measures taken to repel enemy attacks.

Kulik listens, then spreads his arms, says indefinitely: "Yes-a." By all appearances, flying out of Moscow, he did not expect to meet such a serious situation here.

At noon, the marshal left our command post. Saying goodbye, he told me to try to do something.

I looked after Kulik's departing car, never understanding why he had come.

Meeting, talking with Kulik in peacetime, he considered him a strong-willed, energetic person. But when the immediate danger loomed over the Motherland and each required special self-control and fortitude, it seemed to me that Kulik lost his nerve..

Once surrounded, the marshal changed into peasant clothes and crossed the front line alone. He was not trusted with more responsible posts, but even in less responsible ones he behaved in such a way that he became the subject of a special order of the Supreme Commander himself:

“Kulik, upon arrival on November 12, 1941, in the city of Kerch, not only did not take decisive measures on the spot against the panic moods of the command of the Crimean troops, but with his defeatist behavior in Kerch only increased the panic and demoralization among the command of the Crimean troops.

This behavior of Kulik is not accidental, since his similar defeatist behavior also took place during the unauthorized surrender of the city of Rostov in November 1941, without the sanction of the Headquarters and contrary to the order of the Headquarters.

Kulik's crime lies in the fact that he did not use the available opportunities to defend Kerch and Rostov in any way, did not organize their defense and behaved like a coward, frightened by the Germans, like a defeatist who had lost perspective and did not believe in our victory over the German invaders..

The marshal of the USSR, who sows panic and defeatist moods, is a unique case in military history.

One of the main results of the panic was the catastrophic losses of the Red Army. According to the commission of S. V. Krivosheev, in the third quarter of 1941, the Red Army irretrievably lost 2,067,801 people, which amounted to 75.34% of the total number of troops that entered the battle, and our army suffered most of these losses as prisoners. In total, 2,335,482 fighters and commanders of the Red Army were captured in 1941, which is more than half of the number of prisoners of war for all the years of the war, and most of these people were captured in the first weeks of the war. For one killed in June-August 1941, there are 4 prisoners. And here it’s not so important whether the fighter raised his hands himself or, fleeing in a panic, became an easy prey for the soldiers of the victorious Wehrmacht, the end was the same - a camp behind barbed wire ...

The second secret associated with panic, silence about the causes

As we mentioned above, the Soviet historiography of the war tried to avoid the topic of the panic of 1941. The issue was covered somewhat more widely in fiction - it is enough to recall such works as “The Living and the Dead”, “War in the Western Direction”, “Green Gate”, where the topic of interest to us was touched upon, and sometimes touched upon in great detail. The main reason for the panic voiced in the literature remained the same notorious "suddenness". This is how the protagonist of the novel The Living and the Dead, brigade commander Serpilin, explains the reasons for the panic.

“Yes, there are a lot of alarmists,” he agreed. - What do you want from people? They are scared in battle, but without a fight - twice! Where does it begin? He goes in his rear along the road - and a tank is on him! He rushed to another - and another to him! He lay down on the ground - and on him from the sky! Here are the alarmists! But one must look at this soberly: nine out of ten are not alarmists for life. Give them a break, put them in order, then put them in normal combat conditions, and they will work out their job. And so, of course, your eyes are on the penny, your lips are shaking, there is little joy from this, you just look and think: if only they all passed through your positions as soon as possible. No, they go and go. It’s good, of course, that they are coming, they will still fight, but our situation is difficult!

Such an explanation was simple and understandable to a simple layman, but it does not explain the facts cited above by us. Both the 25th Rifle Corps and the 199th Rifle Division met the enemy not in the forest or on the road, but at positions prepared in advance (the 199th Rifle Division - even in a fortified area!) And fled from the first contact with the enemy. The Germans could be taken by surprise by individual units, but by no means the entire Red Army on all active fronts.

General A.V. Gorbatov, excerpts from whose memoirs we cited above, tried to comprehend the reasons for what happened in his own way:

“To me, who had just returned to the army, it all seemed like a bad dream. I couldn't believe what my eyes saw. I tried to drive away obsessive thought: “Did the years 1937–1938 really undermine the soldiers’ faith in their commanders so much that they still think that they are not being commanded by ‘enemies of the people’”? No, it can't be. Or rather, another thing: inexperienced and unfired commanders timidly and ineptly take up the performance of their high duties..

The general himself explained the low quality of the commanders by the consequences of the repressions of 1937-1938.

This version at first glance looks more logical. She explains the panic by the inexperience of the commanders (which, in turn, has its own reasons), who simply failed to cope with the troops entrusted to them. But why did the commanders themselves panic? Personnel military, those for whom the defense of the Fatherland is the meaning of life, who have chosen for themselves a difficult but honorable profession - to defend the Motherland? In addition, we have already noted above that different types of troops of the Red Army were to varying degrees prone to panic. The level of training of the commanders was approximately the same, but the tank and mechanized units, even with illiterate and incompetent leadership, showed stamina and courage in battle even in hopeless situations, and the infantry divisions abandoned their positions and retreated randomly.

No, and this reason cannot satisfy us.

And yet, why did Soviet historians, for almost half a century of studying the Great Patriotic War, not offer us an adequate version? After all, despite all the shortcomings and problems of Soviet historical science, it nevertheless shed light on many aspects of the war. But she never approached the topic of the mass panic of 1941. Why? But without an answer to this question, we cannot understand another one - how was the Soviet leadership able to cope with the phenomenon of mass panic? Why did the divisions, hastily formed from mobilized reservists, manage to stop the Germans already in the autumn of 1941, frustrating plans to capture Moscow and Leningrad? Did the Soviet commanders so quickly gain combat experience and the ability to work with personnel, and the Germans lost the art of sudden strikes? No, we know that such changes did not happen. But in order to understand how the Soviet leadership managed to cope with the panic, we must know its true causes, and for this we need to delve into the social Land of the Soviets. Why in the social? Because it is necessary to remember the ancient axiom military science- not weapons fight, people fight. And if war is only a continuation of politics by other means, then the army is only a reflection of the society that it is called upon to defend. Therefore, the key to the riddle lies in the history of Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s.

We will destroy the old world...

It is no coincidence that we used a line from the Bolshevik party anthem in the title of this subsection. The fact is that the word "peace" in the old Russian language, which was spoken in the Russian Empire, meant not only peace, as a state of absence of war, and not only peace as the Universe, but also peace in the sense of "society". In our time, only in the church language has the concept of "worldly" survived - that is, non-church. Therefore, now the line from the party anthem sounds simply apocalyptic, but at the time of its writing, or rather, its translation into Russian, it had a different and very specific meaning - it was about the destruction of the old society and the creation of a new society. Consider how the Bolsheviks put their plans into practice.

As a result of the Civil War, the country suffered great losses in population: entire regions separated - Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, part of the Russian lands proper was seized by neighbors (Western Belarus, Bessarabia, etc.), millions of people ended up in a foreign land as a result of emigration, millions died of starvation, hundreds of thousands became victims of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary terror. In general, experts estimate the country's human losses as a result of the revolution and the Civil War at 10–15 million people, i.e., about 10% of the population of the Russian Empire in 1913.

However, no matter how unexpected it sounds, there have been no significant changes in Russian society. The social structure changed, the Apparatus came to the place of the former titled and service elite, and the top leadership was in the hands of the revolutionaries. The old elite was deprived of political rights and property, but at that moment the question of its physical destruction was not yet raised. Moreover, with the introduction of the New Economic Policy, a significant part of the former merchant class was able to regain their property and resume entrepreneurial activities. A significant part of the old specialists retained their posts (there were simply no others), and not only retained, but forced the new government to reckon with itself. The peasantry, having got rid of the landowners and becoming the de facto monopoly owner of the land, retained their usual way of life...

The power of the Bolshevik leadership rested on a compromise - society recognized the new government, and she, in turn, tried to avoid drastic social changes.

Such “humility” of the authorities was due to two reasons - on the one hand, the authorities simply did not feel enough strength in themselves to transform society, on the other hand, there was a desperate debate in the ranks of the Bolshevik Party on the issue of the further development of the country, the revolution and society. We will not consider in detail the course of this struggle, it is quite well covered by our modern historians, we will only point out that as a result of a cruel and uncompromising battle, I.V. Stalin and his supporters won. The paradigm advocated by this group was the transformation of the Soviet state into the foothold of a new socialist society, and then the gradual expansion of this foothold to the size of the entire the globe. The basic principles of this society were reflected in the Constitution of the USSR of 1936, which was a kind of application for a code of a new, socialist era, a powerful ideological and legislative argument in the arsenal of the builders of world communion.

It is noteworthy that for the first time a number of the main provisions of the new Constitution were publicly announced by Stalin not at a party congress or conference, but in an interview with Roy William Howard, head of one of the largest American newspaper associations, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, on May 1, 1936. Thus, from the very beginning, the main theses of the new constitution were voiced not only for the Soviet (Stalin's interview was reprinted four days later by all leading Soviet newspapers), but also for the Western audience.

The purpose of the new Constitution was not a secret for the Soviet society either - the secret documents of the NKVD, marking the moods of citizens, recorded the following review of the new basic law - “con the constitution was written not for us, but for the international proletariat".

The creation of such a document had a historical precedent in the past, in the era of the establishment of the ideas of liberalism in Europe. Then such a document, which became a kind of quintessence of the doctrine of the Great French Revolution, was the famous Napoleonic Code. There is a lot in common between the historical destinies of these documents - both of them were created as a summing up of the results of revolutionary processes, both bore the imprint of the personality of the creators - dictators who came to power during the revolutionary processes, and the international significance of both documents was no less than the internal, both documents left a deep mark on history - the Napoleonic Code in a modified form and to this day serves as the basis of the civil legislation of the majority European states, and the concept of the welfare state, which is now so common in Western Europe, originates from the Stalinist Constitution. It is no coincidence that it was during the development and adoption of the Constitution of the USSR in the Soviet Union that one of the most notable works in world historiography dedicated to the French emperor, “Napoleon” by academician E. V. Tarle, was created and published. And apparently, it is by no means accidental that the “father of peoples” himself, who highly appreciated this work, shows interest in this work.

But before moving on to building a new society, the Bolsheviks needed to destroy the old society that they had inherited from the Russian Empire. Destroy, of course, not in physical sense(although terror was one of the important tools of social engineering), but to destroy it as a structure, destroy stereotypes of behavior, a system of values, social relations, and then build a “new world” in the cleared place.

A number of targeted blows were dealt to the old society.

The first blow - the peasantry

The largest part of society, which kept the traditional way of life and, accordingly, traditional values, was the peasantry, which, according to some estimates, made up to 80% of the country's population. It was on him that the Bolsheviks dealt the main blow, starting forced collectivization.

In the works of modern historical publicists and some historians, who aim to justify the actions of the Stalinist regime, the economic aspect is put forward as the most important aspect of collectivization - an increase in the production of marketable bread. So, the famous modern historian M. I. Meltyukhov writes: “The implementation of accelerated industrialization depended on a stable supply of food to the population, which required a state monopoly not only in the grain market, but in all agriculture. This problem was called upon to solve the collectivization that began in 1929, which sharply raised the marketability of agriculture by lowering the standard of living in the countryside..

So here it is - by lowering the standard of living. Below we will see what the assertions about "a stable supply of food to the population" are worth and what is hidden behind the words "decrease in living standards in the countryside."

The total offensive against the peasantry began with the Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, held on November 10-17, 1929, deciding to switch to the policy of "eliminating the kulaks as a class on the basis of complete collectivization." Specific mechanisms for the implementation of this decision were developed by the commission of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, created on December 5 of the same year, chaired by People's Commissar for Agriculture Ya. A. Yakovlev (Epshtein).

“Firstly, in areas of complete collectivization, on the basis of decisions of village assemblies and local congresses of Soviets, expropriate all the means of production of dispossessed peasant farms and transfer them to the indivisible fund of collective farms.

Secondly, to expel and evict, by decision of rural assemblies and village councils, those peasants who will actively resist the establishment of new orders.

Thirdly, to include in the composition of the collective farms as a labor force and without granting the right to vote those dispossessed peasants who agree to submit and voluntarily fulfill the duties of members of the collective farm..

This resolution immediately draws attention to the prevalence of ideological criteria over economic ones. Not only the kulaks were to be repressed, but also all those who resisted the establishment of a new order. Meanwhile, for the "conscious" kulaks, ready to promote collectivization, there remained the opportunity to perform the duties of members of the collective farm without the right to vote.

Another important aspect is that collectivization in the party document is only a means of combating the kulaks, who in 1926-1927 were more than three times as large as the collective farms in terms of the amount of marketable grain they produced. That is, collectivization at first was supposed to lead to a decrease in the amount of marketable grain and agricultural products in the country. (Whether this is true or not, we will see below.)

Rural communists (of which by 1929 there were 340 thousand people for 25 million peasant households) did not enjoy the confidence of the party leadership. To implement the collectivization program, significant forces of party cadres from the cities were sent to the countryside. After the 15th Party Congress, 11,000 party workers were sent to the countryside for temporary and permanent work. After the November plenum of 1929, another 27,000 party members (they were called "25-thousanders") were sent to the village, who were to become chairmen of the newly formed collective farms. During 1930, about 180,000 urban communists and "conscious workers" were sent to the countryside for a period of several months.

It is noteworthy that the adherents of the collective farm system began their activities not even with dispossession, but with the struggle against religion. As a modern communist historian notes, “They saw in the religiosity of the peasants a manifestation of wild superstitions and tried to direct believers on the“ true path ”by closing churches, mosques or other premises of religious worship. To prove the absurdity of religion, the sent townspeople often mocked the faith of people, removing crosses from churches or committing other blasphemy..

Although the economic criteria of the kulak were quite precisely formulated in the resolution of the Central Committee, party emissaries in the countryside were guided not so much by the economic situation of the peasant as by his ideological orientation. For peasants who did not meet the formal definitions of a kulak, but who did not agree with the policy of collectivization, a special term was even coined - "sub-kulak" or "kulak accomplice", to whom the same measures were applied as to kulaks.

Collectivization proceeded at an accelerated pace. So, if by the beginning of 1929 the level of collectivization was 7.6%, then by February 20, 1930 this figure had reached the level of 50%.

How did this process look on the ground? Consider eyewitness accounts:

"We've got a meeting. Without any explanation, they began to say that it is imperative now to sign up for the collective farm, one and all. But the peasant does not know anything and thinks - where will I write to? So they didn't sign up. They began to intimidate with weapons, but still no one began to sign, because no one knows where. Then the chairman of the village council, there was also the secretary of the district committee and another party member, began to threaten: “Whoever does not go to the collective farm, we will put him by the river and shoot him with a machine gun,” and then they began to vote for the collective farm; but they didn’t say so - “who is against the collective farm”, but “who is against the Soviet regime”. Of course, no one will go against the Soviet regime.”. This is how the communists acted in the countryside - by deceit and threats. One can agree with the Soviet researcher Yu. V. Emelyanov that the communists sent to the countryside felt themselves "like white colonialists stranded in lands inhabited by savages."

It cannot be said that the peasantry passively endured such mockery of themselves. Caught on the verge of death, the peasants took up arms in a desperate attempt, if not to avert misfortune, then at least to die with honor. “Thousands of people took part in the armed uprisings. So, in the Siberian region, only from January to March 1930, 65 mass peasant uprisings were registered. In the Middle Volga Territory, 718 group and mass demonstrations of peasants took place during the year, in the Central Black Earth Region - 1170 ".

Contrary to the ideological guidelines of the communists, the middle peasants and poor peasants almost everywhere took part in the mass demonstrations. In defending their traditional way of life, the peasantry was united, which caused extreme concern among the party members. “I am extremely concerned about the fact that during these speeches we were actually left with a very thin layer of rural activists, and the farm laborers and the poor masses, who were supposed to be our support, were not seen, they stood at best on the sidelines, and in many places even in the forefront of all events,- wrote a responsible party worker of the Ukrainian SSR.

The uprisings were suppressed with the utmost cruelty - special detachments of party workers were created to fight them, units of the OGPU and even the Red Army were involved. Participants in the uprisings were arrested and imprisoned.

It cannot be said that peasant resistance was senseless. Frightened by the scale of the "All-Union Jacquerie", the Soviet leadership took a "step back" - on March 2, 1930, I. Stalin's article "Dizziness from Success" appeared in Pravda, where the most odious actions of local authorities were condemned. The pace of collectivization slowed down, more than half of the already created collective farms collapsed miserably - by May 1, 1930, the level of collectivization had dropped to 23.4%. But the concession on the part of the authorities was nothing more than a tactical move, from November 1930 the party launched a new attack on the peasantry, and by mid-1931 the level of collectivization again amounted to 52.7%, and a year later it reached 62.6%.

How many peasants were repressed during these years? In historical literature and near-historical journalism, different numbers are called. The limiting value can be considered the number of 15 million people repressed during collectivization, indicated by A. I. Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. However, the author in his work did not provide any statistical or documentary data to support his calculations.

More reasonable figures are given in his study by Professor V. N. Zemskov. According to him, in 1930-1931, 381,173 families with a total number of 1,803,392 people were sent to the special settlement, and in 1932-1940 another 2,176,000 people were added to them. Thus, the total number of repressed was about 4 million people. In reality, this figure was even higher, since it did not take into account those who were dispossessed in the third category - those sent to a special settlement within the borders of their region or territory, as well as the number of those who died on the way to exile. That is, we can talk about about 5-6 million peasants who suffered in the course of collectivization. Is it a lot or a little? According to the 1926 census, rural population USSR was 120,713,801 people. Since not all who live in the countryside are peasants, we can estimate the size of the Soviet peasantry at about 100 million people. According to our estimates (very approximate, of course), every twentieth peasant was repressed during collectivization. At the same time, it should be taken into account that the main blow was dealt to the most economical, hardworking, educated peasants - it was through their labor that they achieved a level of well-being that allowed them to be written into "kulaks".

The level of professional training in the field of agriculture of the newly-minted heads of collective farms was, to put it mildly, very low.

“I grew up in the city and had no idea about agriculture. With all my heart devoted to the Soviet regime, I quickly advanced and took a high place in the district committee as a major party worker. Last spring, a complaint came to the district committee that the peasants of one village were refusing to go out into the fields and sow the land. I was sent to investigate the matter and arrange the sowing. I came from the city as a representative of the authorities, called the peasants together and asked:

- What's the matter? Why don't you sow the fields?

- No sowing, - I hear.

- Show me the barns.

The barn gates were opened. I look - mountains of bags.

- And what's that? - I ask.

- Millet.

- Tomorrow, a little light, take it out of here into the field and sow it! - sounded my team.

The men smiled and looked at each other.

- Okay. No sooner said than done! - cheerfully responded someone. - Get to work, guys!

Having signed the papers on the issuance of millet to the peasants, I calmly went to bed. I woke up late, had breakfast and went to the barns to find out if they were working. And the shed is already empty, everything has been taken out under the broom. In the evening I appoint another meeting. The people converge cheerful, tipsy, somewhere the accordion plays, ditties sing. “Why are they walking?” I wonder. Finally, the men came, laughing.

- Well, did you sow the millet? - I ask.

- Everything is fine! - answer. - Arrange, tomorrow what to sow?

- And what do you have in the second barn?

- Flour! Let's plant it tomorrow! - the drunk man laughs.

- Do not laugh, - I say, - do not sow flour!

Why don't they sow? Since we have sown porridge today, it means that tomorrow we will sow flour.

It hit me like a butt on the head:

- How did you sow the porridge? Is millet porridge?

- And you thought - sowing? The peeled grain is porridge, and you ordered to sow it into the ground .... " The author deliberately did not shorten such a long quote so that the reader could imagine for a moment what was happening then in the village. In addition to the tragic incident with the sowing of porridge (tragic, because for the author of the memoirs it ended in arrest on charges of sabotage), this passage well shows the psychology of a communist in relation to the peasants. Pay attention to the moment when the author of the memoirs first felt something was wrong: this is the appearance in the village of fun. Contrary to the bravura slogans "life has become better, life has become happier" for a communist, the peasants' merriment is an alarming signal.

And now let's try to answer the question - could the policy of collectivization achieve the economic goals that were declared at the beginning of it? Recall that as a result of collectivization, kulak farms were liquidated, which in 1929 supplied more marketable grain than collective farms, the most competent and hardworking peasants were sent to special settlements, new farms were headed by "ideologically savvy", but little understanding of agricultural production, communists - 25 -thousanders. Could these measures give an increase in agricultural production? Any sane person will answer this: of course not.

The situation was aggravated by another factor: not wanting to give their livestock to the common economy, the peasants began to massively slaughter it, which led to a general reduction in the country's food stock. The writer Oleg Volkov recalled those times: “In the villages, the peasants, hiding from each other, hastily and stupidly slaughtered their cattle. Without need and calculation, and so - all the same, they say, they will take away or exact for him. They ate meat to satiety, as never before in peasant life. They didn’t salt for the future, not hoping to live on. Another, succumbing to the fad, slaughtered the breadwinner of the family - the only cow, a thoroughbred heifer raised with great difficulty. They were like in a frenzy or waiting for the Last Judgment ".

In numbers, it looked like this: “In January and February 1930 alone, 14 million heads of cattle were slaughtered. During 1928-1934, the number of horses in the country decreased from 32 million to 15.5 million, cattle - from 60 million to 33.5 million, pigs - from 22 to 11.5 million, sheep from 97.3 million to 32. .9 million".

Despite the loud slogans about the "iron horse that will replace the peasant horse", collectivization was not ensured by the development of agricultural technology. So, in 1932, agriculture was provided with machines only by 19%, and MTS served only 34% of collective farms. And where they were, the sown area was also reduced. “Having visited my village, I myself was convinced that the real life of the peasants has become more difficult, people are more silent, even from childhood it is not possible to talk to a peasant I know right away and certainly only face to face. So much was taken from the village in the autumn by obligatory deliveries that there was very little left for a living. I saw that the farms were “brought down”, they were all resettled in the village, and the distant fields of the farmers were overgrown with shrubs. Despite the appearance of MTS with tractors, they did not have time to sow and cultivate the former wedge, and, moreover, they did not have time to harvest,” - recalled the mid-30s, Vice-Admiral B. F. Petrov.

As a result, the economic result of collectivization was a decrease in agricultural production in the country, which, with the growth of the urban population, could not but lead to difficulties in providing food. The new system of management turned out to be much less efficient than the old one. And the collectivization itself led to a massive decline in food production and, as a result, to the famine of the early 30s.

This famine was not recognized by government statistics, and therefore some Stalinist historians still dispute its magnitude. Demographers estimate, based on a comparison of the results of the 1926 and 1939 censuses, that the number of deaths from starvation in 1932–1933 was between 4.5 and 5.5 million. The country has never known such a terrible loss of population in peacetime. This is what lies behind the euphemism of historians - "decrease in the living standards of the peasants."

However, maybe the townspeople began to live better? We remember that modern Soviet historians believe that the goal of collectivization was the stable provision of cities with food and an increase in the production of marketable bread. Reality shows that both of these tasks were not solved - collectivization provoked a general decrease in agricultural production, in the cities it was necessary to introduce a card system (this was in peacetime), which was canceled only in 1934. But even after the cancellation of the cards, "Stalin's abundance" came only in cities classified as the first category of supply (and there were very few of them). In other places, food was much worse.

Here, for example, is data on the supply of food to aviation plant No. 126 in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, that is, one of the most important industrial facilities of the second five-year plan:

“There was no white bread at all. The need for black bread was 25 tons/day, and only 16-18 were baked, which led to the formation of huge queues. The list of products that factory workers only remembered in July is striking: pasta has not been on sale since March 1, fresh fish - since June 1(and this is in a city standing on a full-flowing river! - A.M.) , sugar from June 10, "and it is not known when it will be." Regarding flour and milk, there is only information that they are not on sale, without indicating how long ago ".

Contrary to the claims of Soviet propagandists that collectivization put an end to the threat of famine from crop failures, the crop failure of 1936–1937 provoked yet another food shortage.

“Since January 1, 1937, groceries and flour, as well as oats and barley, have disappeared from stores in our city, but we put up with this situation, difficulties must be endured, but in relation to bread, this is a nightmare. In order to get 2 kilograms of bread, we need to stand in line near the bakery from 9 pm and wait until 7 am until it opens, and then with great effort we can get 2 kilograms of bread. If you arrive at 4 o'clock in the morning to any bread shop, then there is a queue near them, ”- wrote to M. I. Kalinin, a resident of the city of Novozybkov, Western Region.

“... Bread is sold in small quantities, so that more than half of the population is left without bread every day. The queues increase daily and wait for bread around the clock, and if any citizen decides to get bread today, he will receive it 2 days later. And such a phenomenon exists in a number of regions of the Azov-Black Sea Territory, ”- the secretary of the city council from the south of Russia echoes him.

In addition to problems with the supply of bread to the cities, there were problems with the import of grain abroad, which was an important source of financing for industrialization. The American historian Gleb Baraev analyzed the volume of Soviet grain exports on the basis of figures published in the collections "Foreign Trade of the USSR":

(by years in thousand tons)

Thus, it can be noted that even after the record harvest for the Soviet collective farm in 1937, the volume of grain exports was more than two times lower than those in 1930, when bread harvested on the eve of collectivization was exported abroad. Subsequently, despite the expansion of the technical equipment of agriculture, the expansion of arable land at the expense of virgin lands, etc., the USSR was unable to provide itself with food and from the 1960s acted on the world market as one of the major grain importers. Such was the economic "efficiency" of the collective farm system.

Meanwhile, neither I. Stalin nor other representatives of the top party leadership considered collectivization their failure. On the contrary, they considered it as one of the greatest achievements. The answer lies in the fact that the social meaning of the transformations that took place was much more significant and more important for the narrow leadership than the economic one. The transformation of the peasantry from a "class of petty-bourgeois proprietors" into collective working people on the land was the main thing. Instead of the keepers of traditional values ​​and the traditional way of life, a new layer of society appeared with the Soviet way of life and Soviet values. Of course, changes in mass consciousness could not have happened so quickly, but from a Marxist point of view, the sphere of mass consciousness is only a “superstructure” over the economic basis, and once the basis has been changed, then the change in value attitudes was a matter of time.

The collectivization of the peasantry was a prerequisite for building a new society. It is no coincidence that in the resolution of the VII Congress of Soviets of the USSR, which served as the basis for the development of a new Constitution, it was emphasized: "Collectivized by more than 75%, the peasantry has turned into a multi-million organized mass". Stalin called this "organized mass" "completely new peasantry" fundamentally different in their motivation and in their position from the previous one. Whether he was right or not, we will see later, but for now let's turn to the consideration of other actions of the "builders of the new society."

Second blow. specialism

If the peasantry was the guardian of the values ​​of the traditional society in the countryside, then in the cities this role was played by representatives of the technical intelligentsia. Russian engineers. A Russian engineer is not just a person with a diploma from a higher educational institution, he is the bearer of a special Russian technical culture that has now completely disappeared, which included not only a technical part, but also a culture of managing people, a culture of life and was a harmonious part of the old society .

The attitude of the Bolsheviks towards the Russian engineering corps was twofold - on the one hand, engineers (“specialists” - in the terminology of the 20s) were considered “servants of the bourgeoisie”, “class enemies of the proletariat”, but on the other hand, they needed their services, because to replace there was no one, and without qualified management and engineering personnel, any production would have crumbled. At first, the rational aspect prevailed over the class aspect.

However, in the late 1920s, the situation changed dramatically. A real persecution of "specialists" began throughout the country, which received the name "special eating" in the historical literature.

From the outside, this looks paradoxical - the state sets the task of accelerated development of industry, there are few engineering personnel in the country, their role in the country is growing, and, in a good way, the state should, on the contrary, show increased attention to these people. But for the Soviet leaders, the main thing was that under these conditions, not only the technical, but also the social role of the technical intelligentsia increased. And since this layer was in no hurry to become socialist, but, on the contrary, stubbornly adhered to its traditions, the authorities saw this as a threat to the social task of building a new society. The authorities in this area were strongly supported by the apparatus, which saw in the growing role of engineers a threat to its monopoly position in the management and distribution of material wealth.

The first blow to the old engineering corps was the so-called Shakhty case - a case concocted by the OGPU about "sabotage by specialists" in the city of Shakhty. It was followed by a much larger case of the Industrial Party. Historians loyal to the Stalinist regime usually point out that the total number of engineers killed and repressed in these cases was small. But what they usually don't say is that these cases served as the basis for a massive propaganda campaign against the old engineering corps, deployed throughout the country with all the might of the communist propaganda apparatus.

The main goal of this campaign was the elimination of the engineering corps as a single corporation, playing not only technical, but also social role, firstly, as management personnel, and secondly, as the guardians of the cultural layer of the traditional society, who have their own point of view on the development of the country and society.

The method of reprisal against the engineering corps was strikingly different from those applied to the peasantry - in any case, there was no one to replace valuable specialists, so they even tried to use convicted engineers according to their specialty, organizing the so-called "sharashki" under the control of the NKVD. The main thing was not the physical extermination of specialists, but their moral humiliation and discredit. As M. Yu. Mukhin notes in his study on the history of the national aviation industry, “The press in those years was full of numerous “anti-specialist” publications. Articles devoted to exposing the next "pest" appeared regularly. In prominent places, on the front pages, materials were published with biting headlines “On the smartness of the engineer Gosrybtrest Kolesov” in “Machinist Lebedev wiped his nose to specialists”, etc. ”. In the second half of the 1920s, cases of workers beating specialists and even directors became more frequent, they did not even stop at the murder of "saboteurs".

The authorities fully supported this campaign, which by the beginning of the 1930s had become universal. At each enterprise, working commissions "for the elimination of sabotage" were created.

In modern historical journalism, the point of view has become somewhat widespread that certain facts of sabotage really took place, and therefore the fight against sabotage cannot be considered as a social phenomenon. However, none of these authors dared to confirm the thesis of Soviet propaganda about the mass and universal nature of sabotage, an objective analysis shows that in most cases the consequences of marriage and low production culture were taken for "sabotage".

It is also important to note this aspect: in the Soviet ideological guidelines of the 1920s and 1930s, sabotage was associated almost exclusively with "specialists" - those who, from the point of view of Soviet ideologists, could harm for class reasons. However, as historians note, often the campaign to accuse the “specialists” of wrecking took place as part of covering up the flaws of the workers. M. Yu. Mukhin cites in his study a characteristic episode of that time:

“Thus, while inspecting the fuselage of one of the aircraft under construction, the qualifier noticed double holes in the rivets - a defect that threatened the aircraft with a catastrophe in flight. It turned out that the workers who made this marriage covered up the extra holes and inserted fake rivets. When they were put on the lookout, they began to write complaints to all instances, accusing the master and their administration of all mortal sins. Proceedings, commissions began. The situation was aggravated by the fact that one of the scammers was an old Bolshevik. Even when the guilt of the workers was proven, they continued to repeat in different voices: “I am not to blame for the marriage, but the master is to blame, the master is a bad organizer” ”.

The campaign against the specialists was not a manifestation of "initiative on the ground", but had as its source the position of the country's top leadership, which is confirmed by the frank statements of one of Stalin's closest associates, V. M. Molotov. Speaking about the arrest of A. N. Tupolev, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks noted that these people (engineers. - A. M.) “The Soviet state really needs them, but in their hearts they are against it, and along the line of personal ties they carried out dangerous and corrupting work, and even if they didn’t, they breathed it. Yes, they couldn't help it. To a large extent, our Russian intelligentsia was closely connected with the prosperous peasantry, which had pro-kulak sentiments, a peasant country .... The same Tupolev could become a dangerous enemy. He has great connections with the intelligentsia that is hostile to us ... Tupolevs - they were a very serious issue for us ”.

It is noteworthy that in this statement Molotov links the repression against the technical intelligentsia with the struggle against the peasantry. At the same time, for a member of the Politburo it doesn’t matter at all whether people like Tupolev did “dangerous and corrupting work” or did not do it because of their position in production and their origin - these people were dangerous, and the Soviet government actively fought them.

The use of a wide range of measures by the state - from propaganda to repressive ones - led to the destruction of the old engineering corps, the loss of production management traditions, and the "specialists" losing their place in society.

What did this lead to in terms of industrialization? Moreover, from the very beginning, Soviet industry began to be pursued by such vices as a low level of production culture and production discipline, which most negatively affected the quality of products.

“Work discipline is low. Workers drink, and sometimes it’s great when they come to work, especially after pay, in a drunken state,”- reported in a report on one of the aircraft factories. “We went around three-quarters of the jobs ... you open a table at any machine - there is a roll, dirty rags, etc. Wire is lying on the machines, scraps, like a pig ... A number of machines are broken due to the fact that they are treated ugly ... "- the commission from another plant echoes him.

And this happened in the "elite" aviation industry - the most prestigious branch of the Soviet military-industrial complex of the 30s, the development of which was given priority attention by the state. What happened in less controlled factories is even scary to imagine.

The vices we have mentioned were characteristic of Soviet industry until the very end of its existence, and in many respects they are the reason for the technical and technological backwardness of our country that we are dealing with at the present time. This is the result of the social policy of the Soviet leadership in the field of regulation of production relations.

Another consequence of "specialism" was the flourishing in the pre-war USSR of various forms of technical charlatanism. This phenomenon is still waiting to be described by historical science, so we will talk about it in the most general terms, since its influence on the development of the USSR in the 1930s was quite significant.

Its essence lay in the fact that numerous and diverse charlatans tried to offer incompetent, but "ideologically savvy" Soviet leaders alternative forms of solving complex technical problems. The skill level of the "red directors" did not allow one to immediately understand the absurdity of the proposed projects, and the charlatans responded to the competent conclusions of specialists with accusations of sabotage and "rubbing" on the part of "bourgeois engineers".

The scale of this phenomenon was colossal. Under the leadership of charlatans, entire organizations were created that were engaged in the creation of all kinds of "miracle weapons", for the maintenance of which huge amounts of money were spent. The effect of their activities was, as a rule, negligible, and sometimes brought significant harm, because much more promising developments conducted by honest specialists were curtailed.

In order to present a clear picture to the reader, we will give several examples of the most prominent charlatans of that time. In 1921, a Special Technical Bureau (Ostekhbyuro) was created in Petrograd under the leadership of engineer Bekauri. This organization was engaged in the development of a wide variety of naval weapons - from mines and torpedoes to remote-controlled torpedo boats. They did not spare money for it (in some years the budget of the Ostekhburo exceeded the budget of all the Navy of the Red Army), but the only thing that its employees succeeded in was “rubbing points” with the leadership and intrigues against competitors. It is amazing, but of all the samples of the "miracle weapon", which was developed by the specialists of the bureau, only one (!!!) was put into service. As a result, according to modern historians, in the development of mine-torpedo and mine-sweeping and anti-submarine weapons, the Soviet Navy lagged far behind foreign fleets, remaining at the level of the First World War. The leadership of the Navy saw the reasons for such a plight in the activities of the Ostekhbyuro, but until 1938 they could not do anything. Only at the end of the 1930s did the competent authorities become interested in the activities of this office, as a result of which a significant part of the leadership of the Ostekhburo was repressed, and the bureau itself was transformed into an ordinary research institute.

Another outstanding technical adventurer of that time was L. V. Kurchevsky. Being a talented inventor and no less talented adventurer, he, without a higher technical education, in 1916 headed the design bureau of the Moscow military-industrial committee. Under the new government, Kurchevsky headed a laboratory created especially for him at the Commission for Inventions. True, in 1924 the adventurer was convicted "for embezzlement of state property", but thanks to his high patronage, he got away with it and returned to his activities. In 1930, he became the chief designer of OKB-1 at the GAU, and since 1934 he headed his own structure - the Office of the Commissioner for Special Works. The work of this structure was personally supervised by Deputy People's Commissar of Defense M.N. Tukhachevsky. Using his patronage, Kurchevsky launched a wide range of activities for the creation and production of the so-called dynamo-reactive (recoilless) artillery pieces. He planned to put his miracle guns on tanks, planes, ships, submarines. The problem was that Kurchevsky's guns were inferior to traditional artillery systems in all respects, except for their low weight, and in terms of their execution they turned out to be unsuitable for use in the army.

This is how the attempts to use Kurchevsky guns in aviation ended.

On December 26, 1938, Colonel Shevchenko, head of the NIP AB Air Force, wrote a letter to the head of the Special Department: “I am reporting some data on the state of the aircraft armament of the Air Force ... What reasons, in my opinion, have led to the fact that we still do not have large-caliber machine guns in service with the Air Force and are significantly behind in this respect compared to the advanced capitalist armies: The work of the enemies of the people is up to In 1936, in terms of large-caliber weapons for aviation, it boiled down to the fact that they were working on unusable cannons of the Kurchevsky type "DRP". A live shell was not given to this gun, so it was very difficult to judge its qualities. When in 1934 the 4th department of the Air Force Research Institute raised the question of the unsuitability of this gun, Tukhachevsky, Efimov and others convened the employees of the Air Force Research Institute, invited Kurchevsky, Grokhovsky and a number of others, including Zakhader, Zheleznyakov, Bulin, and staged something similar to a trial over us, they gave Kurchevsky the opportunity to state what he wanted, arguments and curses, without letting anyone speak ... guns. And only in 1936 these works were stopped.

The quote from the document gives a visual representation of both the miracle guns themselves and the methods by which Kurchevsky imposed his inventions.

A lot of money was spent on the creation and production of small batches of these guns, and the result was zero. The end of Kurchevsky was the same as that of many other charlatans - after the arrest of Tukhachevsky, the designer deprived of high patronage was arrested by the NKVD and died in the camps.

Another outstanding adventurer was A. N. Asafov, who worked in the same Ostekhbyuro. Asafov - "a man with great aplomb, but meager special education", his main trump card was considered to be many years of work in the design bureau under the leadership of the creator of the first Russian submarines I. G. Bubnov.

It was he who proposed to build a series of large (“cruising”) submarines for the Soviet fleet and presented the finished project. Experts say that the basis for the "squadron boat of the IV series" (this designation was given to Asafov's submarine) was the project of the 950-ton Bubnov submarine developed back in 1914-1915. Of course, over the past decade and a half, Bubnov's drawings have already become hopelessly outdated, but Asafov neglected this obvious fact, which led to the failure of the project as a whole.

The project caused sharp criticism from the command of the submarine forces of the Baltic Fleet and shipbuilding engineers. However, the adventurer managed to get patronage not just anywhere, but in the OGPU, and the construction of boats was started.

The command of the Navy hardly managed to study these ships by a competent commission, which found that their combat qualities correspond to the level ... of the beginning of the First World War, and these ships do not represent any real value for the Red Army Navy. Emergency measures to finalize the submarines already under construction made it possible to use them only as training ones. The creation of these monsters cost the Soviet state 19 million rubles (in 1926-1927 prices), which corresponded to the price of about six much more modern and efficient Shch-class submarines.

The construction of three submarines was not Asafov's only "contribution" to Soviet shipbuilding. Without waiting for the completion of work on the boats of the "P" series, he puts forward a new project - this time a small submarine that can be transported by rail in an unassembled form. The tests of these boats (the first version of the "M" type boats) completely failed, the fleet refused to accept absolutely incompetent ships, and the patronage of the competent authorities was replaced by their professional interest in the activities of the inventor.

Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s, various charlatans (we mentioned only the largest ones) squandered significant funds from the country's budget (the exact amount of which has yet to be estimated by historians). The very funds that were obtained from the robbery of the peasantry, the Church, which the Russian people paid for with their sweat, with their lives. Of course, quackery was not the goal of the Soviet leadership and was, in the end, almost completely destroyed by the repressive machine of the Soviet state, but this phenomenon itself would have been impossible if it were not for the targeted struggle against the old engineering corps, "specialism".

Third blow. Case "Spring"

In the 1920s, there was another sphere of the country's life where representatives of the old society played a very important role. It's about the Armed Forces. Although officially the Armed Forces of the Soviet state were called the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army (RKKA), a really huge role in its formation was played by former tsarist officers, or, in the terminology of that time, military experts. The former commander-in-chief of the armed forces of southern Russia, General Denikin, assessed the role of military experts in the creation of the Red Army as follows:

“The Red Army was created solely by the mind and experience of the old tsarist generals. The participation in this work of commissars Trotsky and Podvoisky, comrades Aralov, Antonov, Stalin and many others was at first purely fictitious. They played only the role of overseers ... All the organs of the central military administration were headed by specialist generals - the general staff was especially widely represented - working under the unrelenting control of the communists. Almost all fronts and most of the Red armies were led by senior commanders of the old army ... "

Indeed, if we turn to the history of the Civil War, we can note that the military successes of the Reds began only after the creation of the regular Red Army (instead of the volunteer, in fact, the Red Guard) and forced mobilization. This process has gone very far. Suffice it to say that at the culminating moment of Denikin's attack on Moscow, on the key sector of the front near Kromy, a greater number of former tsarist generals turned out to be in the Red Army than in the volunteer army of General Mai-Maevsky!

According to modern historians, by the end of the Civil War, about 75 thousand former generals served in the Red Army as military specialists. Naturally, these people did not inspire confidence in the new leadership of the country, and a significant part of them were dismissed from the ranks of the Armed Forces during the reduction of the army in the 20s.

However, by the end of the 1920s, former generals and officers still made up a significant part of the command staff of the Red Army. A particularly important role was played by career officers who managed to get a professional military, and even higher military education before the First World War and were, in fact, the only professionals of this kind in the ranks of the Soviet Armed Forces.

Modern researchers note that the former royal officers did not represent a single group, based on political or social criteria. However, two aspects common to the majority of representatives of this group can be singled out - these are service motivation and cultural level.

Few of the former generals were ardent supporters of the communist idea. And the main motives for serving in the Red Army for them were a sense of professional honor and patriotism. Not without reason in the Soviet film "Officers" the famous words "There is such a profession - to defend the Motherland" is pronounced by a former tsarist officer. It should be noted that this motivation was fundamentally at odds with the ideology of the world revolution, which could not but arouse concern among the communist authorities. A characteristic dialogue revealing this contradiction took place during the interrogation of the arrested naval officer Georgy Nikolaevich Chetvertukhin:

“- In the name of what are you, a former officer and nobleman, serving the Soviet government from the moment it was proclaimed, although it has deprived you of all your former privileges?

- This is not an easy question. I am a regular military man who devoted his life to defending the Fatherland... I had a real opportunity to go to the other side of the barricades, but I did not. In the years of devastation and chaos, when an external enemy threatened my Motherland, and Lenin addressed everyone with the appeal “The socialist fatherland is in danger!”, I responded to this call, realizing that for the Bolsheviks there is also the concept of the Motherland. And that was the bridge that connected me to them. I began to honestly serve the Soviet government.

- Yes, but Karl Marx teaches that the proletarians have no fatherland!

- It is possible that Karl Marx - a representative of a people who lost their fatherland almost 2000 years ago and scattered across many countries - has lost the concept of Motherland for himself and believes that it is where it is good to live. Perhaps, although I doubt that the proletarians have also lost this concept, but for me, Chetvertukhin, the concept of Motherland has been preserved, and by it I understand the feeling of responsibility to it, love for its centuries-old history and culture of my people, for its identity, shrines , surrounding nature ".

In this dialogue, we see the answer to the source of suspicion and distrust that the Soviet authorities felt towards the former officers - they were devoted to their country, but by no means to the cause of the world revolution.

Former officers served to defend their homeland, but were by no means eager to "bring freedom to the world on bayonets." And so they all fell under suspicion from the punishing sword of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

“In the Red Army, mainly in higher institutions, a significant number of former career officers are in the service. This category of military experts is, in terms of their former and social status, the most alien to Soviet power ... All of them are waiting for the fall of Soviet power ”, - a modern historian quotes the NKVD document of those years.

In 1930, the Soviet leadership moved from suspicions and individual actions to mass repressions against the former. As part of the Vesna case, more than 3,000 former and generals, soldiers of the Red Army were arrested alone. The figure at first glance seems insignificant, but we remind the reader that in 1928 the Red Army had 529 thousand people, of which 48 thousand were officers. Thus, no less than one in sixteen was subjected to repression. Moreover, as noted above, the main blow was dealt to the top leadership of the army, to the most competent and experienced part of the officer corps.

What made the country's leadership resort to such drastic measures? In our opinion, the answer lies in two factors: firstly, in the detente of the international situation in the early 30s - in the conditions of the world economic crisis, the "imperialist powers" were clearly not up to attacking the USSR, therefore, the need for military specialists weakened. Secondly, at this time, as we mentioned above, massive collectivization was going on throughout the country. Moreover, just in 1930, the peak of peasant uprisings (including armed ones) against the collective farms falls. Obviously, the Soviet leadership was afraid that these actions might find support in the army, and hastened to deprive the peasantry of potential military leaders.

Researchers note the relative "softness" of the repressions of 1930 - most of those arrested got off with short (by Soviet standards) prison terms, many then returned to continue their service. Such gentleness can be explained by only one thing - there were no other military specialists of this level at the disposal of the Soviet government, and there was nowhere to take them over the next ten years.

But even such "soft" repressions caused serious damage to the combat capability of the Red Army, expressed primarily in the weakening of the level of staff work and in the training of personnel.

According to the modern historian M.E. Morozov, the real reason for the failures of the Soviet Army during the Great Patriotic War was “The unsatisfactory quality of training of military personnel in the USSR throughout the entire interwar period. The roots of this situation were hidden in the loss of continuity with the old military school ".

The continuity that the Soviet leadership will try to restore in the last pre-war and war years. The modern historian A. Isaev, noting the successes of military construction in the 30s, writes: “The caste of people whose profession is to defend the Motherland was recreated”. This would have been a real success if this same caste had not been deliberately destroyed in the early 1930s.

Fourth blow. The domes rolled like heads...

Strictly speaking, the struggle of the Soviet authorities against the Church did not stop for a single day in the period from 1917 to 1991. However, it was conducted by different methods and with different intensity. So, after the bloody excesses of the Civil War, the 1920s look relatively calm - during this period, the authorities make their main bet on the split of the Church from within and its self-discredit. With the active participation of the organs of the OGPU, renovationist and living church schisms are created in the church. The main measure against the clergy during this period is exile. (Although the authorities did not forget about the arrests either.)

The declaration of Metropolitan Sergius published in 1927, although it provoked an ambiguous reaction from the clergy, but its result was the recognition by the state of the canonical synod of the Russian Orthodox Church as a legally operating religious organization (before that, the authorities recognized only the Renovationist "synod").

It is obvious that, moving in 1929 to the implementation of plans for the accelerated transformation of society, the Soviet leadership could not help starting hostile actions against the Church, which was the core institution of traditional Russian society. The Bolsheviks acted, as always, resolutely. According to a modern church historian, “These years, in terms of the ferocity of the persecution of the Orthodox Church, are comparable only to the bloody events of 1922, and far surpassed them in scale”.

This persecution began with a directive letter from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On measures to strengthen anti-religious work,” signed by the secretary of the Central Committee of the party, L. M. Kaganovich. It is no coincidence that we draw the reader's attention to the signer of the letter. The fact is that among some of the historical publicists there is a myth about the supposedly benevolent attitude of I.V. Stalin towards the Russian Church. These authors attribute all the persecution of the Church to the internationalists, who until the very war did not give the leader of the nations the opportunity to show his true attitude towards the Church. The facts strikingly contradict this myth. Under the letter is the signature of one of Stalin's most faithful comrades-in-arms, who never acted contrary to the will of the leader.

In this document, the clergy was declared by L. M. Kaganovich a political opponent of the CPSU (b), carrying out the task of mobilizing all "reactionary and semi-literate elements" for a "counter-offensive against the activities of the Soviet government and the Communist Party."

On April 8, 1929, the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted a resolution "On Religious Associations" in development of party instructions, according to which religious communities were only allowed to "exercise worship" within the walls of "prayer houses", and any educational and charitable activities were strictly prohibited. Private teaching of religion, permitted by the decree of 1918 "On the separation of the Church from the state and the school from the Church", could now exist only as the right of parents to teach religion to their children.

In the same year, the XIV All-Russian Congress of Soviets amended the 4th article of the Constitution, the new edition of which spoke of "freedom of religious confession and anti-religious propaganda."

Across the country began a massive closure and destruction of temples. So, if in 1928 354 churches were closed in the RSFSR, then in 1929 already 1119, that is, three times more, and 322 churches were not only closed, but also destroyed. If on January 1, 1930 there were 224 parishes of the Moscow Patriarchate in Moscow, then two years later there were only 87 of them.

The closure of churches took place at the “requests of the working people” inspired from below under ridiculous urban planning pretexts - “blocking the passage of pedestrians”, or even simply for no reason. The new rulers hated even the very buildings of churches, which by their appearance testify to God. And explosions thundered across the country - ancient churches were ruthlessly broken. The bells were melted down for non-ferrous metal, icons, liturgical books (including manuscripts, which were several centuries old) were burned and buried. Church utensils were melted down.

Basically it was destruction. historical heritage, wealth of the country. Moreover, wealth is not only spiritual, but also material. Modern Stalinist historians, who love to talk about the necessary sacrifices in the name of industrialization, for some reason do not consider what this self-criticism cost the state. But the simplest calculation shows that the destruction of a capital stone building, which was the majority of the destroyed temples, requires considerable costs. Considerable costs were also required for the adaptation of church buildings for "national economic purposes."

They did not disdain simply pogroms of temples. For these purposes, detachments of the "Komsomol light cavalry" or members of the Union of Militant Atheists were used. These thugs broke into the temple during worship, beat the clergy and parishioners, robbed and damaged church property, and often set fire to church buildings. At the same time, any attempt to resist the hooligans was considered by the Soviet authorities as "counter-revolutionary activity" and was punished accordingly.

Mass arrests of clergymen and actively believing laity began. Under the conditions of famine and the introduction of a food rationing system in the country, the “disenfranchised” (and all the clergy automatically belonged to them) did not receive food cards, and alms became their only source of livelihood. The authorities extended their persecution even to the children of clergy - according to the instructions of the People's Commissariat of Education, they could receive only a primary 4-grade education.

The persecution of Christians in the USSR took on such a scale that it provoked an international reaction. They were condemned by the head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Pope Pius XI.

Along with the repressive organs, the Union of Militant Atheists, headed by a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Emelyan Yaroslavsky (Gubelman), became an important tool of the authorities in the fight against the Church. By 1932, this organization had 5.7 million members in its ranks (mainly Komsomol youth), controlled anti-religious museums and exhibitions, and massively published anti-religious brochures, books and magazines. For the maintenance of this "voluntary" society, the state spent considerable funds, which, if we proceed from the point of view of the country's national interests, could have been spent much more sensibly.

In May 1932, this Union adopted the so-called godless five-year plan - in fact, a five-year plan for the destruction of religion in the Soviet state.

In the first year, close all theological schools (the Renovationists still had them, but the Patriarchal Orthodox Church had not had them for a long time).

In the second - to conduct a massive closure of churches, to ban the publication of religious writings and the manufacture of religious objects.

In the third - to send all clergymen abroad (which was actually a very threatening euphemism - the fact is that in the USSR criminal legislation in force at that time, expulsion abroad was a form capital punishment along with shooting).

In the fourth - to close the remaining temples of all religions.

Fifth - fix progress made, by May 1, 1937 "the name of God must be forgotten throughout the USSR."

It is noteworthy that this plan relies on repressive and administrative measures that can be expected from the state, and not from a public organization, which formally was the SVB. Without a doubt, such plans could not be created or made public without the sanction of the top party leadership and personally I. Stalin. And like any "Stalinist task" these plans were accepted for immediate execution.

However, it should be noted that in the 30s the "successes" of the godless army were very small (compared, of course, with the allocated funds). Thus, the 1937 census showed that 57% of the population aged 16 years and older consider themselves believers and, which was especially alarming for the country's leadership, among the "peers of October", young people aged 20 to 29, there were 44 of them, four %. This caused a sharp reaction from the authorities, which resulted in a frenzied terror against the clergy in 1937.

Fifth strike. Shot into the past...

The Bolsheviks were well aware that the basis of the old society is not only the people themselves, but historical memory. And in addition to social engineering, they announced real war past - Russian history. Many modern researchers underestimate the importance of this topic, considering it either as "excesses on the ground" or as something of little importance. Just think, they demolished some historical monument, these people argue, here is the tractor plant that was built - yes, this is important, this is the main thing.

Meanwhile, the Soviet leadership paid great attention to the fight against Russian history. The decision on the fate of other historical monuments was made at the level of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. And the all-powerful Soviet dictator I. Stalin found time and opportunity to familiarize himself with the history courses in educational institutions and personally edited them, obviously considering this work as important as making decisions on the production of tanks or the construction of factories.

The first blow was dealt on April 12, 1918, when the signatures of Lenin, Lunacharsky and Stalin came out Decree on the removal of monuments erected in honor of the tsars and their servants, and the development of projects for monuments to the Russian socialist revolution ("On the Monuments of the Republic"). According to this decree “monuments erected in honor of the kings and their servants and not of interest either from the historical or artistic side, are to be removed from the squares and streets and partly transferred to warehouses, partly used for a utilitarian nature.” Evaluate, reader, the spring of 1918, the Soviet Republic in the ring of fronts, it would seem that the Council of People's Commissars should have many more important things to do, but no, they found the time.

Massacre with monuments began throughout the country. They destroyed monuments to sovereigns, commanders, statesmen. By the end of 1918, monuments to Alexander II, Alexander III, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, General M. D. Skobelev, etc. were demolished in Moscow. The leaders of the Soviet state and the “leader of the world proletariat” himself took part in the demolition of the monuments.

The scale of destruction was colossal. So, in 1940, a special commission of the Academy of Architecture of the USSR stated that in the capital of the Soviet Union for 1917-1940 “50 percent of the architectural and historical monuments of national architecture were destroyed”. At the same time, the commission considered only those objects that were officially given the status of a monument. And how many have not been given this status?

Living evidence of the history of Russia were geographical names- cities, streets, settlements, etc. In the 20-30s, according to the instructions of the Soviet leadership, a total renaming began. Old names that carried a historical meaning disappeared, but the names of Bolshevik leaders, leaders of the world revolutionary movement, etc. appeared on the map of the country. Thus, the historical geography of Russia was erased. The Bolsheviks easily renamed entire cities, naming them after "themselves beloved." This is how Kalinin, Molotov, Stalino, Ordzhonikidze, Kirov, etc. appeared on the map of the USSR.

Unfortunately, most of these renames that disfigure ours and our cities have survived to this day. The campaign to return historical names to streets and cities that began in the 90s of the XX century has begun to decline ... Interestingly, one of the most common and, admittedly, reasonable motives against returning old names these days is the motive of financial savings - each renaming the state for a pretty penny. It can be imagined how much the massive change in the names of settlements and their parts in the 1920s and 1930s required. But in the fight against Russian history, the Bolsheviks were not afraid of spending.

In 1919, the teaching of history was discontinued in educational institutions of the USSR. "Eight or nine years ago,- M. N. Pokrovsky, a prominent fighter against historical science, wrote with satisfaction in 1927, - history has been almost completely expelled from our school - a phenomenon characteristic of more than one of our revolutions. Children and adolescents were occupied exclusively with modernity ... "

This item has been removed from curriculum and replaced by the study of the history of the party and the world liberation movement. At the end of this process, the Soviet leadership staged a reprisal against domestic historical science. On November 5, 1929, at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, a decision was made to prosecute employees of the USSR Academy of Sciences on a completely ridiculous charge. Let us draw the reader's attention to the fact that the initiative for the reprisals against historians did not come from the state security agencies, as one might expect, but from the country's top leadership. Fulfilling the decision of the leadership, the bodies of the OGPU concocted a whole “Academic Case” (Case of Historians), within the framework of which arrests of outstanding domestic scientists were carried out. In total, 4 academicians of the USSR Academy of Sciences (S.F. Platonov, E.V. Tarle, N.P. Likhachev and M.K. Lyubavsky), 9 corresponding members of the USSR Academy of Sciences, including S.F. Rozhdestvensky, D.N. Egorov, Yu.V. Gotye, A.I. Yakovlev, and more than 100 scientists of lesser rank. The vast majority of them were historians. The names of S. F. Platonov, E. V. Tarle, M. K. Lyubavsky speak for themselves.

On February 10, 1931, the troika of the OGPU PP in the Leningrad Military District passed a sentence on the first batch of those arrested in the "Academic Case": 29 people were sentenced to death, 53 to imprisonment in labor camps for a period of 3 to 10 years, two - to deportation for 2 years. The decision of the troika was revised by the OGPU board on May 10, 1931. Capital punishment was retained in relation to the former A. S. Putilov, A. A. Kovanko, V. F. Puzitsky, Ya. P. Kupriyanov, P. I. Zisserman, Yu. A. Verzhbitsky. 10 people were sentenced to death, replaced by imprisonment for 10 years, 8 - to imprisonment for 10 years, 3 - to imprisonment for 10 years, replaced by deportation for the same period, 3 - to imprisonment for 3 of the year. During the investigation, 43 people were released.

The sentencing of those arrested who were referred to as the "leading group" was delayed. It was issued by the OGPU board on August 8, 1931 - 18 people were sentenced to deportation to remote places in the USSR for a period of 5 years. Among them were Academicians Platonov, Tarle, Likhachev, Lyubavsky. Five people were sentenced to 5 years in a camp, 4 - to 3 years in a camp, one - to deportation to Western Siberia for 3 years. The flower of national historical science was crushed...

The teaching of history as an academic subject was restored in the USSR only in 1934. Such a break was necessary for the Bolshevik leadership to destroy the traditions of teaching the history of the Fatherland, because in 1934 a completely different history began to be studied in educational institutions.

The decision to restore the teaching of history was made at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on March 20, 1934. By the same decree, the top leadership of the USSR approved the group of authors for the creation of a school textbook on the history of the USSR. Perhaps for the first time in Russian history, a school textbook was approved by the country's top leadership. In the same 1934, three members of the Politburo - Stalin, Kirov and Zhdanov - personally read and reviewed the abstracts of new school textbooks proposed by the authors' teams. It is very important for our topic to see what shortcomings our leaders found in the draft textbook presented to them.

According to senior reviewers, the group of authors “I did not complete the task and did not even understand my task. She made a summary Russian history, but not history of the USSR, that is, the history of Russia, but without the history of the peoples that became part of the USSR. The abstract did not highlight "annexionist-colonial role of Russian tsarism", nor "counter-revolutionary role of Russian tsarism in foreign policy".

It is this difference between Russian history and the history of the USSR that is the main thing for understanding what kind of history began to be taught in Soviet schools and other educational institutions. The main thing was that the historical path of Russia as a national state of the Russian people, created by the Russian people, was denied. Now, according to the leaders, the Russian people had to take the place in their country of only one of several "fraternal peoples" (many of which were only artificially created at that time), and in the future - with the expansion of the USSR to world limits - the role of the Russians was to decrease even more.

Contrary to the opinion of individual publicists and researchers that since 1934, the Soviet government began to be guided in domestic and foreign policy by the national interests of the country, in reality, the Soviet leaders at that time were preoccupied with the problem of ... the destruction of Russian historical monuments. So, at that time, as many as three members of the Politburo - Stalin, Voroshilov and Kaganovich - paid attention to the fate of such a remarkable monument of Russian history as Moscow's Sukharev Tower.

The initial decision of the authorities to demolish the monument, motivated by "concern for the development of traffic", provoked protests from scientists and urban architects. In response to these protests, on September 18, 1933, Stalin sent a handwritten letter to Kaganovich, in which he writes: "We(Stalin and Voroshilov, - A. M) studied the issue of the Sukharev Tower and came to the conclusion that it must be demolished. Architects who object to demolition are blind and hopeless.".

Speaking to communist architects, Lazar Kaganovich spoke about the demolition of the monument: “In architecture, we continue a fierce class struggle ... An example can be taken at least from the facts of recent days - the protest of a group of old architects against the demolition of the Sukharev Tower. I don't get into the essence of these arguments, but it's typical that it doesn't work with a single church that has been overwhelmed so that a protest is not written about this. It is clear that these protests are not caused by concern for the protection of ancient monuments, but by political motives ... ". That's really true - whoever hurts, he talks about it. In reality, it was the activity of the Soviet leadership in the demolition of monuments of Russian history that was caused by political motives.

In that terrible year, not only the Sukharev Tower perished. On the Borodino field, the "monument to the tsarist satraps" was blown up - the main monument in honor of the battle in which the fate of Russia was decided. In Leningrad, a memorial temple in honor of the sailors who died in the Russo-Japanese War was destroyed, in Kostroma - a monument to Ivan Susanin ... etc.

We are ours, we will build a new world...

Unfortunately, the topic of creating a new Soviet society has not yet attracted the attention of historians. This time period turned out to be too saturated with events in domestic and foreign political life, and historians simply did not get around to studying changes in society. Only recently have studies begun to appear on the life of people of that time and social relations. Therefore, when analyzing that era, we are forced to resort to such unreliable sources as memoirs, notes, legal documents, analysis of works of art, etc.

It is important to note that from the very beginning, the Soviet leadership paid much less attention to the work of creating a new society than to destroying the old one. And it's not a lack of energy or a lack of understanding of the importance of the task. Simply, according to Marxist teaching, social relations were only a derivative of socio-economic relations, with the change of which, according to the leaders of the party, society was bound to change as well. On the other hand, although the social transformation of society was task No. 1 for the Kremlin leadership, numerous problems of internal and foreign policy The 1930s also required an immediate solution, so there were often simply no resources and forces left to build a new society.

Nevertheless, the main features of the new Soviet man and Soviet society can be distinguished. The worldview of the new Soviet man was based on "three pillars" - atheism, internationalism and collectivism.

Internationalism. The fundamentally new character of the society was fixed in its name. The word "Soviet" did not have any connection with the historically established ethnonym, and it was not an ethnonym in the strict sense of the word, since it denoted not a nationality, but an ideological orientation. National self-identification - this cornerstone of traditional society - faded into the background here, but, contrary to popular belief, it was not completely destroyed, at the initial stage it was preserved and gradually emasculated. In their dreams, the apologists of world communion pictured a society of people completely devoid of national characteristics.

Collectivism. One of the important features of the new society was the widespread dissemination of collectivism. The cult of the team was caused not so much by the needs of management (it is easier to manage a team than individuals), but it was a tool of social engineering. The construction of a communist society according to the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” required not only an increase in production volumes, but also the education in people of self-limitation of needs. The Bolsheviks, for obvious reasons, could not take advantage of the vast experience of Christian asceticism, and they had to "reinvent the wheel." If in Christianity self-restraint is a form of service to God, then for the Soviet person the service to the collective has become an idol. According to the new one, a person did not exist on his own, but had value only as a member of a particular team. Ideology built a hierarchy of collectives from the smallest - a link or a brigade - to a huge one, including the workers of the entire globe. A conscious member of the new society had to completely subordinate his interests to the interests of the collective and realize his abilities only within the framework of this collective. They began to accustom the team from childhood, and the very name of the leaders of children's and youth groups (pioneer leader, Komsomol leader) killed any thought of the independence of its members.

From our point of view, the most important feature of the consciousness of the new Soviet man was atheism. The cultivation of conscious godlessness and theomachism - and a Soviet atheist is not just an unbeliever, but a conscious fighter against religion - could not but lead to changes in the moral sphere of society. We remind the reader that the system of moral foundations of a religious society consists of three levels:

1. The moral law formulated by God and expressed by the conscience of man. At the same time, although conscience is the property of every person, by its nature, it, like any other part of a person, needs development, without which conscience atrophies or takes on ugly forms. The religious paradigm includes the development of conscience, moreover, puts this task in one of the first places in the spiritual development of man.

2. Moral. Morality is formed by society and, accordingly, reflects the state of this society. In a religious, highly moral society, morality approaches moral laws, but still differs from them. In some ways, moral norms are tougher than moral ones, in some ways they are softer. It is important that moral norms are created by people, and "what one person created, another can always break."

3. Legal. Here, the state acts as a source of norms and fixes them in the form of legislative acts. Legal norms may or may not be a reflection of moral norms.

In the Soviet type of worldview, the moral level was abolished and actually identified with the moral. In order to be convinced of this, it is enough to open the Big Soviet encyclopedia on the article "morality" and see that this article consists of one line of the following content: "morality" - see the article "Moral".

But the very process of forming moral norms in Soviet society could not be left to chance, it was placed under the strict control of the ideological organs of the party. The latter in their work were guided not by the realities of life, but by ideas of an ideal communist society and class consciousness.

As a result, the moral norms of Soviet society turned out to be difficult to implement not only for the bearers of traditional, Christian morality, but also for Soviet people proper.

In the future, this led to the formation by society of its own moral system and the emergence of the so-called double morality in late Soviet society.

The main problem was that the grassroots morality, which was created by society in addition to the one imposed by the regime, also did not rely on Christian moral norms, about which a significant part of Soviet people, due to the struggle against religion carried out by the authorities, had the most approximate idea. As a result, the laws and ideas of the criminal world became one of the sources of the grassroots, second morality of Soviet society. This is terrible in itself, but even more terrible is the fact that it did not cause rejection and rejection in society. However, in the late 1930s, these processes were just beginning.

War and Peace

As a result, the process of social transformation of Russian society by the end of the 30s of the XX century was very far from completion. In fact, in the USSR there were two societies - the new Soviet and the old "unfinished" traditional. At the same time, a new society was just beginning to take shape, while the old one was in the process of destruction, so a significant part of the citizens of the USSR was in an intermediate state between the two societies. Let's explain what this means. As you know, members of society are linked by written and unwritten norms of public morality, stereotypes of behavior, but thanks to the efforts of the Soviet government, the traditional foundations of society were largely eroded, and the moral principles of the new society imposed by the authorities had not yet been strengthened. Moreover, those few who remained faithful to the traditions and principles of the old society, by virtue of this, were already in opposition to the authorities and did not consider it their own.

Interestingly, this division of the society of the Land of Soviets was noticed by employees of the White Guard organization ROVS based on communication with captured soldiers of the Red Army during the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940. Analyzing the attitude of military personnel towards the Soviet government, they concluded that the party apparatus (among the prisoners there were representatives of an exclusively grassroots apparatus) “is unconditionally loyal to the Soviet government and Stalin,” which “The ranks of the special forces, pilots, tankers and partly artillerymen, among whom there is a high percentage of communists, are also devoted to the Soviet regime ... They fought very well and often, being surrounded, they preferred to commit suicide rather than surrender.”

The Red Army "mass", according to the representatives of the EMRO who worked with it, was "spoiled by Soviet propaganda and education shallowly" and, in general, remained the same as their fathers and grandfathers were.

Let's explain the above difference. We know that until September 1, 1939, when a new law on universal conscription was adopted, the Red Army was recruited exclusively from "ideologically savvy" conscripts, and the selection for technical troops - tank and especially aviation - was exceptionally strict.

On the other hand, a significant part of the inhabitants of the Land of Soviets was completely in limbo with violated stereotypes of behavior - without ready-made solutions, not at all knowing how to behave in a given situation.

Thus, before the war, the population of the USSR consisted of three main groups:

New Soviet Society;

Old traditional Russian society;

Restless - those who have already ceased to live, as their fathers and grandfathers lived, but did not begin to live in a new way.

How did this division affect the reflection of society - the army? To begin with, we note that the distribution of representatives of different social groups among different branches of the military was uneven. In the 1930s, the development of aviation and mechanized troops was considered a priority. Personnel for them underwent a special selection, not only traditional medical or educational, but also ideological. As an example of the criteria for such a selection, one can cite an excerpt from the order of the GLAVPUR of the Red Army on the selection of military personnel for manning tank crews:

"one. The crew should include servicemen who are infinitely devoted to our Motherland, the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government, fearless, resolute, with an iron character, capable of exploits and self-sacrifice, people who will never, under any circumstances, surrender a tank to the enemy.

2. The crews should be selected mainly from workers in industry, transport and agriculture, as well as students from industrial universities and technical schools. Select people who speak Russian well (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians).

3. The crew must consist of communists, Komsomol members and non-party Bolsheviks, brought up in the spirit of hatred for the enemy and an unshakable will to win ".

Following the tank troops and aviation, recruits were selected for the NKVD troops, cavalry, artillery, but everyone who did not pass such a selection was sent to recruit infantry. “It turns out that the youth of our country comes to this difficult service in the infantry after dropping out from the recruitment of aviation, artillery, tank units, cavalry, engineering units, local security units, etc. As a result, a weak, undersized fighter”, - the Soviet general stated in December 1940.

Thus, the best representatives of the new Soviet society were grouped in elite, selected troops, representatives of the old, traditional society, considered unreliable, were often sent to auxiliary units, and the bulk of the infantry were representatives of the "bog".

The social division was also reflected in the relations between the servicemen. If in the elite troops good commanders managed to put together strong and even friendly teams, then in the infantry everything was different - the Red Army men avoided each other, there was often some alienation from the command and especially from the political composition. This created an atmosphere of mutual distrust, which did nothing to strengthen the stamina of the troops.

Since the Soviet and traditional societies were based on different value systems, their perception of the war was different. Below we will consider in detail the features of this perception in each of the groups, but for now we will point out that this difference, generated by the difference in worldview, in itself carried a danger, because it did not allow a single understanding of such an event as a war to appear. People dressed in the same uniform, standing in the same ranks, perceived the war in completely different ways, which did not allow achieving unanimity, a single fighting spirit - a necessary condition for successful combat.

State Soviet society was described by Konstantin Simonov on the first pages of his famous novel The Living and the Dead:

“It would seem that everyone has been waiting for a war for a long time, and yet at the last minute it fell like snow on their heads; Obviously, it is impossible to fully prepare for such a huge misfortune at all..

Among the younger generation, the idea of ​​the coming war dominated as a war, first of all, a class, revolutionary one. The enemy was considered precisely from this point of view - as an ideological enemy, hence such names of enemies as White Finns and White Poles. Therefore, the soldiers of the imperialist powers were seen primarily as "brothers in the class" who needed liberation, and, moreover, were waiting for it. It is in this spirit that Nikolai Shpanov's novel The First Strike, popular in those years, is sustained. In accordance with this paradigm, the war was supposed to be short-lived and take place "with little bloodshed and on foreign territory."

In January 1941, the head of the Chief political administration The Red Army Zaporozhets wrote a voluminous memorandum addressed to the People's Commissar of Defense, in which, characterizing the mood of the Red Army, he noted:

“A harmful prejudice is deeply rooted that, in the event of war, the population of the countries at war with us will necessarily and almost without exception rise up against their bourgeoisie, and the Red Army will only have to walk through the enemy’s country in a triumphal march and establish Soviet power”.

At the beginning of the war, these sentiments flourished:

“One of the tankers asked the German proletariat whether he had rebelled against fascism. They argued heatedly about the timing of the war. The one who said “half a year” was laughed at and called a lack of faith.”

“Of course, they argued about the fate of Germany, about how soon the German working class would overthrow Hitler; about how quickly, in the event of a German attack on the Soviet Union, German soldiers - "workers and peasants in soldier's overcoats" - will turn their weapons against their class enemies. Yes, exactly how quickly, and not at all - whether they will turn or not. They argued about this even in June and July 1941 (emphasis mine. - A. M.)».

As is known, the "German workers in soldiers' overcoats" did not show any signs of "class solidarity" ....

There was another important aspect. As we mentioned above, one of the bases of the Soviet was atheism, and in those years, as a rule, militant atheism. An important difference between atheism and almost any religion is a purely biological understanding of such a phenomenon as death. Meanwhile, war and death are inseparable concepts, and one of the necessary components of the moral and psychological preparation of a soldier for war and for battle was preparation for death. If we turn to the history of the Russian pre-revolutionary army, we will see that the theme of death in battle, death for the sovereign was one of the main topics in the then, in modern terms, political and educational work. The easiest way to see this is to look at the texts of Russian military songs. The basic principle of attitude towards death is clearly expressed in the soldier's song of the middle of the 19th century - “He alone is worthy of life, who is always ready for death.” Death in battle was considered probable, moreover, almost inevitable. A soldier of the tsarist army went into battle to die:

"We boldly face the enemy for the Russian Tsar to death let's go forward, not sparing our lives"(song of the Pavlovsk cadet school).

“We are ready for the tsar and for Russia die» (soldier song).

"Forward march! Death waiting for us! Pour the spell…”(song of the Alexandria Hussars).

"Under him will die careless dragoon who laid down his head in battle "(song of the 12th Starodubovsky Dragoon Regiment).

"Kol will kill on the battlefield, so they will be buried with glory, but without glory, yes, involuntarily, everything will someday will die» (song of the Life Guards Horse Grenadier Regiment).

Such songs (we cited only a small fraction) accustomed the soldiers to the idea of ​​the possibility of death in battle, taught them not to be afraid of death, and prepared for it. This training was based on the Orthodox teaching on death and the afterlife. The soldier of the Russian army fought for the faith, the tsar and the Fatherland, and death in battle was considered not only as a military, but also as a religious feat.

We see something completely different in the educational work of the pre-war Soviet Army. Courage and contempt for dangers were seen as a civic virtue, the inalienable qualities of a Soviet person, but ... we will not see the theme of death, including death in battle, in Soviet pre-war songs.

Such military songs as: “If there is war tomorrow”, “Regiments with loud glory walked across the steppe”, “Fighting Stalinist” (“We take victory after victory”), “Aviamarch”, “March of tankmen” (“Armor is strong”) , “On the Zbruch”, “Katyusha”, “Take us, Suomi-beauty”, “Into the battle for Stalin” - are full of optimism, thoughts about the coming victory and never consider the possibility of the death of the hero in battle.

Moreover, even the old songs of the Civil War period, in which the theme of death in battle was one of the main ones, was slightly changed in the 30s, brushing the theme of death aside. For example, in a song:

Chapaev the hero walked around the Urals,
He rushed like a falcon with regiments to fight.
Forward, comrades, do not dare to retreat!
The Chapayevites are boldly accustomed to dying.

The word "die" was changed to "win", and in this version the song has been preserved in most sources.

If death was present in the song, then it was the death of the enemy - "the samurai flew to the ground" or "We bring victory to the Motherland and death to its enemies."

This charge of optimism, of course, impressed the Soviet youth, but did not prepare for the main thing - for a serious war, where they can and will kill. The reason for this approach is understandable - the ideology of atheism perceives death as the final point, non-existence, beyond which only the memory of a person can be preserved, but not the person himself.

At the same time, each Red Army soldier, receiving military weapons in his hands and learning military affairs "in a real way", one way or another came to thoughts about his own possible death. And here official, ideological training could not help him in any way, leaving a person alone with his fears ... An example of how the fear of death takes possession of a person’s soul and dooms him to panic and death, we find in the book of front-line writer Boris Vasilyev “A the dawns here are quiet…”:

“But Galya didn’t even remember this lead. Another stood before my eyes: Sonya's gray, pointed face, her half-closed, dead eyes, and her tunic hardened with blood. And ... two holes on the chest. Narrow as a blade. She did not think about Sonya, nor about death - she physically, to the point of faintness, felt the knife penetrating the tissues, heard the crunch of torn flesh, felt the heavy smell of blood. She always lived in an imaginary world more actively than in the real one, and now she would like to forget it, cross it out - and could not. And this gave rise to a dull, cast-iron horror, and she walked under the yoke of this horror, no longer understanding anything.

Fedot Evgrafych, of course, did not know about this. He did not know that his fighter, with whom he now weighed life and death with identical weights, had already been killed. He was killed without reaching the Germans, never firing at the enemy ... "

For the rest of the Russian traditional society, the beginning of the German war against the communist USSR became a kind of temptation, a temptation. In their propaganda, the Nazis constantly emphasized that they were fighting not against Russia, but against the "yoke of the Jews and communists", and many people had a question - is it necessary to defend Soviet power? The same power that diligently and methodically destroyed the old society.

Such doubts arose among many, and not only among the elderly - the young tanker Arsenty Rodkin recalled: “To be honest, I didn’t want to fight, and if it were possible not to fight, I wouldn’t fight, because it was not in my interests to defend this Soviet power”.

It is now well known that for the German side, the motive of "saving Russia from the Jews and the Communists" was only a propaganda move aimed at weakening the ability of the Soviet state to defend itself, and the Russian anti-Bolshevik liberation movement was not included in the plans of the Germans. But then…

Then it was clear only to a few, among whom was the locum tenens of the patriarchal throne, Bishop Sergius (Stargorodsky). Already on June 22, 1941, he addressed an appeal to the flock, urging the Orthodox to stand up for the defense of the Fatherland. The Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church was well aware of the doubts that hundreds of thousands of Orthodox people across the country were experiencing. Unlike the internationalists, he had no illusions about the behavior of "German workers in soldiers' overcoats", he knew about the true, pagan background of German Nazism and knew how it would turn out for the Russians.

But the metropolitan's message was not broadcast over the radio, and in June 1941 most of the Orthodox soldiers in the ranks of the Red Army remained unaware of its content and were forced to fight the temptation one on one.

For the representatives of the “bog”, the ordeal of the war was the most difficult. At the moment when a person was required to exert all his spiritual and physical forces, they, who do not have a solid system of values, turned out to be the most vulnerable to panic moods and became their main source.

Let's summarize - the beginning of the war was a shock for all ideological groups of the population of the USSR (and the personnel of the Red Army), representatives of two polar value systems - communists and traditionalists - were at a loss (and different reasons), and not having a strong ideological anchor "swamp" became a generator of panic, which, like a forest fire, engulfed the army.

Where there were few representatives of the "bog" - in tank troops, aviation and other elite branches of the military - there was no mass panic (although isolated cases are noted by sources). This is what allowed the Soviet mechanized formations to inflict a series of desperate counterattacks on the Germans. In an environment of general collapse, incompetent leadership, without the support of the infantry, Soviet tankers could not achieve even partial success, but their strikes were able to disrupt the plans of the German command, if not by much, but slowed down the pace of the German offensive, winning a small but significant amount of time for the country. And what is no less important than military significance - with their desperate courage they saved the honor of their generation. And in the Russian mass consciousness, the generation that met the war on the border remained in memory as a generation of dead, but not conquered fighters, and not crowds of prisoners of war, although the latter were four times more.

Having examined the causes of the panic, we reveal the secret of Soviet history's silence about the causes of this phenomenon. As we can see, the cause of this catastrophic phenomenon was not the “suddenness” and not the mistakes of individuals (even Stalin himself), but the entire course towards the transformation of society pursued by the Soviet leadership since the late 1920s and which constituted the main meaning of its activities. To admit that it was the main direction of the social policy of the Communist Party that became (unintentionally, of course) the cause of the instability of the Red Army and the catastrophic defeats of 1941 - Soviet historians could not agree to such a thing.

overcoming

The results of the border battle shocked the all-powerful Soviet dictator. Realizing the scale of the defeat, Stalin leaves Moscow and locks himself up at his dacha in Kuntsevo for two days. (Contrary to popular myth, this did not happen at the start of the war - June 22, but after the end of the border battle - June 29.) The leader had something to think about. The main blow for him was not so much military failures, but precisely this panic and the moral instability of the Red Army he had raised, the entire system of Soviet society. It was obvious that the nascent Soviet society could not stand the test of resilience in an emergency.

And in this situation, the communist leader found a solution that was very non-trivial, unexpected for everyone - from the Nazi leadership to the citizens of the Soviet Union. Stalin decides to do what seemed impossible only yesterday - to conclude peace between the new Soviet and the unfinished Russian society. He understands that only by uniting all forces against an external enemy, this invasion can be repelled.

But this decision also meant at least a temporary renunciation of activities to build a new Soviet society and destroy the traditional society. The leader understood that in order to reach an agreement, it would be necessary to make serious concessions to Russian society. And these concessions can seriously impede, if not make impossible, the final victory of communism in the USSR. However, Stalin quite logically reasoned that if he did not take the step he had planned, then with a high degree of probability the Land of Soviets would fall under the blow of an external enemy.

The solution has been found. The leader returned to the Kremlin, and on July 3, 1941, the whole country, clinging to the black plates of radio horns, heard Stalin's most unexpected speech. Since this performance is programmatic for the whole period national history and very important for our topic, let us consider its text in detail.

Let's start with the appeal. After the traditional "comrades" and "citizens" it sounded unexpected - brothers and sisters. This customary Orthodox address was addressed to people with whom the Soviet authorities had until now spoken almost exclusively in the language of interrogations.

Further, Stalin called the war itself against the Germans Patriotic. For the modern reader, the phrase "patriotic war" evokes a continuation - 1812. But Stalin's contemporaries remembered that the Second Patriotic War was called the First World War in Tsarist Russia.

It is noteworthy that in this speech, Stalin used the word "Motherland" 7 times and only once mentioned the words "Bolshevik" and "party".

Both the modern pro-communist historian Yu. V. Emelyanov and the church historian Fr. Vladislav Tsypin note the presence in Stalin's speech of textual borrowings from an appeal written on June 22 to the faithful by Metropolitan Sergius.

Thus, Stalin's July 3 speech was not just the leader's first address to the people after the start of a military confrontation with Nazi Germany, but the proclamation of a new program - to achieve a compromise and an alliance between Soviet and Russian society.

Stalin's speech of July 3, 1941 was an important milestone in the history of Russia. For the first time, the communist government was forced not only to recognize the right of Russian society to exist, but also to turn to it for assistance, to conclude a kind of “civil consent pact” in the name of victory over an external enemy.

An important milestone is the leader's public speeches dedicated to such a date as the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution. Speaking to the troops on Red Square on November 7, 1941, Stalin, on the one hand, recalled the victory in the Civil War, which was supposed to inspire the Soviet part of society, and on the other, called on the soldiers to be inspired "the courage of great ancestors - Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov". These names could hardly inspire an "ideologically savvy" Komsomol member, but they were dear to the heart of every Russian person.

Concessions to the traditionalists continued further - at the end of 1942, the institution of military commissars was abolished in the army, at the same time a historical form similar to the form of the Russian imperial army during the First World War was introduced, in 1943 the Soviet state recognized the right of the Orthodox Church to legal existence, a patriarch was elected, the activity of the union of militant atheists was suspended, in 1944 a reform of family law and the education system was underway, and in the course of these transformations, emphasis was placed on continuity with historical Russia (at least in external forms).

Stalin's new platform made possible cooperation between polar worldview groups - communists and traditionalists, which confused the maps of the political leadership of Germany, which in its propaganda relied on the presence of two societies in our country. The main line of German propaganda - "we are fighting not with the Russians, but with the Bolsheviks" - was opposed to the course of national unity and reconciliation.

However, the new political platform of the Soviet leadership, although it became the basis of social harmony and created the basis for overcoming the split in society, was not the only measure taken to combat panic. In addition to the carrot, the Bolsheviks were not slow to put the whip into action.

On July 16, 1941, the institution of military commissars with very broad powers was introduced in the army, which actually abolished the principle of one-man command. The reason for this step was the lack of confidence on the part of the political leadership in the command staff of the Red Army. The usual stereotype worked - since things are bad, it could not have done without “treason” on the part of “enemies of the people”. And the enemies were immediately found, on the same day, by a decree of the State Defense Committee, the command of the Western Front, headed by General of the Army Pavlov, was put on trial for "dishonoring the rank of commander is cowardice, inaction of the authorities, the collapse of command and control, the surrender of weapons to the enemy without a fight and the unauthorized abandonment of military positions." 9 generals were shot.

A month later, on August 16, 1941, Order No. 270 was issued, calling for a resolute fight against manifestations of panic, abandonment of positions, surrender and desertion. The document spelled out severe punishments not only for those who surrendered and deserters, but also for their families. It should be noted that, by issuing such orders at the highest level, the Soviet leadership indicated the scale of the phenomenon, once again confirming that the panic was not isolated.

In addition to the carrot and the stick, conclusions were drawn regarding the system of troop training. Moreover, they were made both at the level of senior military leadership and at the level of command staff. The officers, who hastily prepared new units recruited from reservists and mobilized in the rear, knew that their enemy was not only a German, their enemy was “General Fear” advancing ahead of the German army. Fans of military history are well aware of the book by Alexander Beck "Volokolamsk Highway". It clearly and in detail shows how an officer of the Panfilov division prepares his battalion for battle, and he considers his first enemy not so much the enemy as fear, which can put the soldiers to flight. The very awareness of panic as a threat forced Soviet commanders to look differently at the priorities in training troops.

And in the "snow-white fields near Moscow," Soviet troops did the impossible - they inflicted the first defeat of the German land army in World War II. "General Fear" was defeated.

To summarize: the panic of the summer of 1941, which played such a detrimental role in the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, was the result of complex processes of social transformation of society carried out by the Soviet leadership in an attempt to realize a communist utopia. However, at a critical moment, I. V. Stalin was able to make the only right decision, to drastically change the policy of the Soviet state and create an opportunity to unite all forces to repel external aggression.

As the subsequent course of events showed, the course of not only the military, but also the social history of our country has changed radically. The serious concessions made by the Soviet leadership to the Russian traditional society made it possible to preserve the values ​​of this society in the conditions of a socialist state and thereby actually frustrated plans to create a society of a fundamentally new type - socialist.

The panic of 1941 was a clear confirmation of the gospel truth - If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand (Mark 3:24). Then a way out was found, isn't this a lesson for our society, torn apart by social and ideological and other contradictions and conflicts?

Application

Naked truth of war

GVP to the Deputy People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR

On July 10-20 of this year, units of the 25th Rifle Corps, occupying the defenses in the area of ​​​​the city of Vitebsk, Surazh-Vitebsky, disgracefully fled, opened the way for the enemy to advance to the east, and subsequently, being surrounded, lost most of the personnel and materiel.

The result of this investigation was as follows:

The 25th sk, consisting of the 127th, 134th and 162nd sd, at the end of June 1941 from the city of Stalino - Donbass - was transferred to the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe city of Kyiv, where it arrived by July 1.

From Kyiv, by order of the commander of the 19th Army, the corps was transferred to the Smolensk region to engage in defense along the Western Dvina River near the city of Vitebsk and the city of Surazh-Vitebsky, about 70 kilometers long.

The loading and dispatch of parts by rail from Kyiv took place on July 2–4. There was no management of the loading and promotion of units; as a result, the arrival of echelons was not coordinated with the upcoming performance of combat missions, in connection with which the arriving units were brought into battle without organized concentration.

On July 11, in the area where the corps was located: 442nd Cap, 263rd Det. baht. communications, 515th, 738th joint venture and 410th paws of the 134th SD, 501st joint venture of the 162nd SD, 1st battalion and howitzer artillery regiment division of the 127th SD.

Slightly to the right of the corps headquarters in the area of ​​the village of Prudniki was the headquarters of the 134th Rifle Division, which included two battalions of the 629th Rifle Regiment, two battalions of the 738th Rifle Regiment, a communications battalion, and anti-aircraft artillery. division, one division of howitzer art. shelf.

By order of the shtakor, two battalions of the 501st Rifle Regiment of the 162nd Rifle Division took up defensive positions on the western bank of the Zapadnaya Dvina River, north of the city of Vitebsk. Parts of the 134th Rifle Division, consisting of 2 battalions of the 629th Rifle Regiment and one battalion of the 738th Rifle Regiment, took up defense along the western bank of the Western Dvina near the village of Prudniki, between the cities of Vitebsk and Surazh-Vitebsk. The remaining units were located on the eastern bank of the Western Dvina River.

On the afternoon of July 11, in the defense sector occupied by two battalions of the 501st Rifle Regiment, enemy motorized mechanized units of unknown size (reconnaissance was absent) broke through the Western Dvina to the Vitebsk-Smolensk and Vitebsk-Surazh highways.

The indicated two battalions of the 501st Rifle Regiment, having no proper leadership, fled in a panic. Overwhelmed by the panic of the "encirclement", on the night of July 12, the corps headquarters began to change its location.

By 4:00 pm on July 12, the corps commander, Major General Chestokhvalov, with a group of staff commanders and a communications battalion, having abandoned part of the vehicles, arrived at the checkpoint of the 134th rifle division in the village of Prudniki.

Their arrival immediately caused panic in parts of the division, as those who arrived, including Chestokhvalov himself, spoke in panic about the losses allegedly inflicted by the Germans on units of the 162nd Rifle Division, their bombing from the air, etc.

By 17.00 on the same day, Major General Chestokhvalov reported that enemy mechanized units had broken through in the Vitebsk area and were moving along the Vitebsk-Surazh highway, "the headquarters was surrounded." He ordered the corps units to withdraw to the east, abandoning the units of the 134th Rifle Division, which were on the defensive on the western bank of the Western Dvina. Only the commander of the 134th rifle brigade commander Bazarov and the commissar of the division Kuznetsov, contrary to the instructions of the corps commander, remained in place near the village of Prudniki and led the units of the 629th and 728th joint ventures that were on the defensive, helping them to cross the Western Dvina River back, and then exit the environment.

After the order of the corps commander Chestokhvalov to retreat, a stampede to the east began. The first to run were the headquarters of the corps and the 2nd echelon of the headquarters of the 134th SD, led by the chief of staff of the division, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny, who had been absent from the command post since July 9 - "lag behind" and only by the time of withdrawal on July 12 arrived in the village of Prudniki.

Cars without management in a panic rushed east to the town of Yanovichi. The stampede of the staff commanders had a disastrous effect on the units and local Soviet organs, which abandoned everything and fled to the east, still not seeing any enemy and not even hearing the shooting.

On July 13, the corps headquarters stopped at the town of Yanovichi, but on July 14 it moved into the forest near the village of Ponizovye, giving up all control of the corps and losing contact with the army headquarters.

Following the example of the headquarters of the corps, military units scattered, without offering any resistance to the enemy, leaving their materiel and equipment.

On July 14, afraid to move on without cover and protection, the corps commander Chestokhvalov singled out several commanders and ordered to collect at least a small group of troops scattered in a circle along country roads in order to organize a further retreat to the east under their cover.

By the end of the day on July 14, the following were concentrated in the forest: the 515th joint venture, the 410th paws, a battalion of the 738th joint venture of the 134th rifle division, two divisions of the 567th paws of the 127th rifle division, one battalion of the 395th joint venture of the 162nd sd and small units of other units, about 4000 people in total, armed with rifles, machine guns, grenades, artillery, mortars with ammunition supplies.

At the headquarters of the corps were: 1) the commander of the corps, Major General Chestokhvalov; 2) Commissar Brigadier Commissar Kofanov; 3) head of the political department, regimental commissar Lavrentiev; 4) Chief of Staff Colonel Vinogradov; 5) Assistant Chief of Staff Colonel Stulov; 6) head of the special department, senior lieutenant of state security Bogatko and others, about 30 people.

From the headquarters of the 134th SD - the head of the political department, battalion commissar Khrustalev, the head of artillery, Lieutenant Colonel Glushkov and others. On the evening of July 14, the chief of staff of the 134th Rifle Division, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny, ran here in the forest, disguised in civilian clothes, without personal weapons.

The corps commander Chestokhvalov made a decision: without waiting for the rest of the corps to approach, continue to retreat to the east, advancing only by forests and only at night, without coming into contact with the enemy, categorically forbidding to shoot at the Germans.

The cowardice of the corps command reached the extreme. By order of the corps commander, Colonel Vinogradov tried to shoot the driver of one of the motor vehicles of the convoy, who accidentally had a horn from a short circuit. Immediately, he personally beat the signal horns in all the vehicles so that a random beep would not be repeated and would not give the enemy the location of the headquarters column. So they moved on July 14, 15 and 16. After passing 60–70 kilometers, they concentrated in the forest near the village of Bukine.

On July 16, in this forest, the commander of the corps, Chestokhvalov, held a meeting of the commanding staff and ordered that all property be abandoned, leaving only what was worn with oneself. The following were thrown: personal belongings of the commanding staff, two walkie-talkies, lubricants, a lot of gas masks, machine-gun disks and boxes, documents, part of the convoy, horses and other property.

Here Chestokhvalov announced a further route of retreat to the east in the direction of the village of Ovsyankino. The movement from Bukine was planned in two columns at 20.00 on July 16, and a column of 10-12 cars of the corps headquarters, together with an armored guard car, was supposed to move at the tail of the right column. For reconnaissance along the planned route, a cavalry detachment of 25 people was sent at 18.00.

However, the corps commander did not wait for the results of the reconnaissance, changed his previous decision and at 19.00 ordered the columns to move along the intended route, while he himself, with a column of staff vehicles, left the units behind and left in the direction of the village of Ovsyankino.

At the entrance to the village of Rypshevo at 23.00, the headquarters column was greeted with shouts of “Stop!” and indiscriminate shooting by an insignificant detachment of German intelligence, according to eyewitnesses, there were about 10 scouts.

Heading the convoy in the first car, the chief of staff of the corps, Colonel Vinogradov, without stopping the car, drove through and jumped out of the village. The commander of the corps, Major General Chestokhvalov, who followed him in the second car, stopped the car, threw down his personal weapon, raised his hands and went to the Germans.

Lieutenant Colonel Yegorov, the head of the engineering service of the headquarters of the corps, who was with him in the car, jumped out of the car and rushed in the other direction, through the vegetable gardens into the forest. The rest of the commanders and political workers of the corps headquarters did the same; and the gunner of the armored car, and the drivers who were following in their cars, abandoned the cars, documents and everything that was, without a single shot, they scattered through the bushes.

Colonel Vinogradov, having driven 1-1.5 km outside the village, was afraid to go further, abandoned the car and went into the forest with the driver, and from there he made his way towards the Red Army units from the so-called encirclement.

Commissars Kofanov and Lavrentyev, colonels Vinogradov and Stulov and other staff commanders, who fled from the cars, knowing that parts of the corps were moving along this road and could be ambushed by the Germans, did not warn the unit commanders about this.

On July 17, when the units approached the indicated place, the Germans, pulling up their forces, met them with heavy fire. The formation commanders, on their own initiative, entered into a battle that lasted 2-3 hours, losing 130 people killed and wounded, under the cover of artillery of the 410th and 567th paws, they brought their units back into the forest.

On July 18, a group of commanders of the corps headquarters, who fled near the village of Rypshevo from German intelligence, in the amount of 12-13 people, led by the assistant chief of staff of the corps, Lieutenant Colonel Stulov, approached the corps units located in the forest. These units were headed by Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny, Assistant Chief of Staff of the 134th Rifle Division, and Khrustalev, Head of the Division's Political Department.

Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny turned to Stulov and the commanders of the corps headquarters who were with him with a proposal to join the units and lead the leadership in withdrawing them from the encirclement.

Colonel Stulov and the commanders of the corps headquarters who were with him rejected this proposal and stated that it would be easier for them to get through to the side of the Soviet troops in a smaller group, and after a couple of days they left alone.

Being surrounded, under the influence of cowardice, some commanders and political workers, in order to hide their belonging to the command staff of the Red Army, tore off insignia and buttonholes, exchanged their military uniforms for civilian suits, and some of them even destroyed personal and party documents.

The head of the political department of the corps, regimental commissar Lavrentiev, destroyed the party card, exchanged his command uniforms for a torn suit of a "prisoner", let go of his beard, hung his knapsack over his shoulders and, like a coward and a loafer, moved for several days behind the units, doing nothing, demoralizing the personnel with his outward appearance. view.

When he was offered a military uniform, he refused and went east in his "prisoner" costume.

Also, Brigadier Commissar Kofanov, Colonel Stulov, the head of the special department of the corps, senior lieutenant of state security Bogatko, made their way through the military commissar of the corps. The latter, together with his typist, dressed in the costumes of collective farmers, posing as "refugees", made their way to the city of Vyazma.

Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny, who led the units of the 134th Rifle Division after the employees of the corps headquarters fled, despite the presence of a sufficient number of firepower and people, continuing the criminal "tactics" of the command of the headquarters of the 25th Rifle Division, led the units only at night and only through forests.

Fearing that the sound of carts would not reveal the location of the division's units, and faced with the difficulties of night movements, on July 19 of this year, Svetlichny ordered carts, horses, and other property to be thrown into the forest as "unnecessary."

On the same day, he divided the remaining units into three detachments: the 1st detachment - from the 515th joint venture with a battery of regimental artillery and artillery of the 410th paws under the command of Captain Tsulai; 2nd detachment - from the 378th joint venture with regimental artillery and a division of the 567th paws, the detachment commander is Captain Solovtsev.

The 3rd detachment included the rest of the division with two batteries of the 410th paws under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny.

By order of Svetlichny, on the night of July 20, the detachments marched along the route he had planned to the east: the 1st and 2nd detachments in the left column under the general command of the division’s artillery chief, Lieutenant Colonel Glushkov, and the 3rd detachment, under the leadership of Svetlichny, on the right. No reconnaissance and communications between the detachments were organized during the movement.

Having traveled 10-12 kilometers, the right column, noticing a rocket fired by the enemy in front, turned back to its original position on the orders of Svetlichny. Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny himself left the units. Panic and flight began.

All day on July 20, units of the 3rd detachment were without leadership and without communication with the 1st and 2nd detachments. Only in the evening Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny appeared from the forest and single fighters and commanders from the 1st and 2nd detachments began to approach without weapons.

Upon clarification, it turned out that during the movement on the night of July 20, the leaders of the 1st and 2nd detachments, having heard the noise of engines in the distance, considered them to be enemy tanks. In fright, the head of the artillery of the 134th division, Lieutenant Colonel Glushkov, ordered that the material part of the detachments be abandoned, and the people should be saved as best they could.

On July 21, a group of fighters was singled out, one gun was handed over to Glushkov and ordered to pick up the materiel left by him. However, this time too he became afraid, abandoned the men and horses, and hid himself in the forest and did not approach the units again.

As a result of the criminal cowardice of Lieutenant Colonels Svetlichny and Glushkov, on the night of July 20 of this year, units of the 134th Rifle Division, which were surrounded, lost: about 2,000 personnel (who fled from the 1st and 2nd detachments), some of them fell into captivity to the enemy; two divisions of artillery, two batteries of regimental artillery, a lot of artillery shells, more than 10 machine guns, about 100 horses and weapons left to the Germans.

On July 27 of this year, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny, with a small group of 60-70 people, broke through to the side of the Red Army, left surrounded by 1000 personnel, wounded and the remains of the property of the 134th rifle division, which was headed by the head of the 5th department of the headquarters of the 134th rifle division, captain Barinov, and was with them in the forest until the arrival of Lieutenant General Boldin, under whose leadership they left the encirclement on August 11.

For the committed crimes, I consider it necessary to bring to court a military tribunal:

1. The former commander of the 25th sk, Major General Chestokhvalov, as a traitor to the Motherland in absentia;

2. Chief of staff of the corps, Colonel Vinogradov;

3. Assistant to the chief of staff of the corps, Colonel Stulov;

4. Military commissar of the corps brigade commissar Kofanov;

5. The head of the political department of the corps, regimental commissar Lavrentiev - for their cowardice, inaction, stampede from the units and the prohibition of the units to resist;

6. Chief of Staff of the 134th Rifle Division Svetlichny;

7. Chief of artillery of the division, Lieutenant Colonel Glushkov - for their cowardice, forbidding units to come into contact with the enemy and leaving the material part of the division to the enemy.

Chief Military Prosecutor

Publication by N. Geyets

TsAMO. F. 913, op. 11309, d. 70, ll. 160–165.

Interrogations of prisoners of the Smolensk battle. Documents of the 3rd Panzer Group of the Wehrmacht

NARA, T 313, R 224, f.f. 816 - 896

One soldier from the 166th regiment, who lived in Molotov (before and after - Perm), said the following:

His regiment suffered heavy losses at Polotsk and around July 4th came to the Nevel area. Responsibility for this retreat was assigned to the commander of the regiment, Major S. (Tatar by origin), and 05.07. he was shot personally by the commander of the division, major general G. (regiment number, division number, commander's surname are the same - M.S.). The mood in the troops is very tense. One mention of the possibility of being captured (surrendered) is enough for execution. Letters home are prohibited.

This testimony was confirmed by another prisoner from this regiment. In addition, he said that it was forbidden to listen to the regimental radio. During the German broadcasts in Russian, everyone was expelled from the premises.

From the same regiment, a political instructor of the reserve directly subordinate to the division was also taken prisoner. It was not possible to find out his last name, because. he threw away all the papers. According to him, he was supposed to teach history and geography in the company. He was shot (underlined by me - M.S.).

Another part of the prisoners was from the 19th regiment, formed in Zhytomyr and 19.07. who arrived in the Velikiye Luki region (a rifle regiment with such a number does not correspond to these circumstances - M.S.). This regiment was commanded by a senior lieutenant. The real commander of the regiment, together with the political commissar, fell behind (remained in Zhytomyr?). The regiment was broken. Lack of weapons and ammunition. Divisional affiliation is unknown. The commanders told the interrogated that the Germans treated the prisoners very badly. Therefore, one of them said that before his capture, he wanted to commit suicide.

In the afternoon of 20.07. near Savenka, the 19th TD repulsed an attack (314?) of the enemy division. The division formed in the Urals with an unknown number (314th?) arrived by train to Velikiye Luki, from there on foot to (...) and back. The division has not yet participated in the battles, it is very tired of the marches, it is armed with grenades against tanks, because. it was known that there were German tanks near Velikie Luki.

From noon 16.07. before noon on July 17, 152 prisoners were captured (most of them were defectors), among them 53 Ukrainians. Captured in the area of ​​Usviaty...

The testimonies of the prisoners agree that the German leaflets have a great effect. It is necessary, however, to drop many more leaflets, because officers and political commissars burn everything they find. It is advised to drop leaflets in the rear in order to eliminate the fear of the German soldiers among the population.

In Verechye, about 7 km west of Lake Cösta, 6-7 thousand liters of fuel were captured.

A prisoner from 102 joint ventures showed:

08/01/41 the division was involved in the river. Howl at Yartsevo. They were told that there was only one German regiment there that needed to be driven out, Smolensk was in the hands of the Russians, the Germans had retreated far back, the German regiment located in Yartsevo was completely surrounded.

During the attack, the division suffered heavy losses. the regiment advanced along with a company of tanks, some of which were knocked out immediately during the first attack. The regiment supposedly had no anti-tank guns, but only 30-40 machine guns. Each received 90 rifle rounds.

During the attack, a chain of politically reliable people was created behind the attackers, who urged the attackers on with weapons. Therefore, it is difficult to surrender. they are shooting from behind.

The junior lieutenant from the 30th joint venture showed:

The regiment is part of the 64th Rifle Division (correctly - M.S.) Apparently, even before the current battles on the river. Vop south of the motorway, the regiment suffered heavy losses in the Vitebsk region and was replenished between Smolensk and Vyazma. There this lieutenant got into the regiment. There are very few active (real) officers in the regiment. He himself was a non-commissioned officer in the Lithuanian army and after several short courses was promoted to junior lieutenant.

The order for the new commissioning of the regiment said that on the river. Vop are the weak forces of the German airborne paratroopers, which must be destroyed. The regiment had to make at least 3 attacks. If they failed, they were threatened with execution. The deterrent and urging element are the communists. Unexpected pocket checks are often carried out in search of German leaflets. During a march without contact with the enemy, officers and commissars are at the end of the column to keep everything in hand. Officers and commissars went ahead in the attack (emphasis mine - M.S.). They acted selflessly.

The mood is depressed, there is no trust in the command. The battalion was provided with uniforms only by 50%. Some did not have boots or overcoats. Arming with rifles happened in the last hour. The machine gun company did not wait for its machine guns and was used as a rifle company.

The command transmits the testimony of the quartermaster (chief of logistics?) of the 25th rifle corps, taken prisoner in the sector of the 19th TD. The prisoner said:

Initially, he was a company commander, and then quartermaster for 11 years. He was accused of counter-revolution and sentenced for this to 10 years in prison, of which he served 3 years in a Kharkov prison, then was again taken into the army to his former position. Has the rank of major.

The 25th sk is part of the 19th Army. The 25th SC includes the 134th, 162nd and 127th Rifle Divisions (that's right - M.S.).

134th SD: formed in Mariupol before the Polish campaign as part of the 515th, 738th, 629th regiments of the 534th artillery howitzer. regiment (without one division), 410th light. artillery regiment, as well as one reconnaissance battalion, one btl. communications, one sapper and one autobtl.

There were no tanks in this or the other two divisions.

162nd Rifle Division: Formed in Artyomovsk in August 1939 as part of the 501st Rifle Regiment and one division of the 534th Art Howitzer. shelf. Other units of this division are unknown to the prisoner.

127th Rifle Division: formed in Kharkov this year (1941) as part of the 395th Regiment. Other units of this division are unknown to the prisoner.

For mobilization to wartime states, all divisions between 01.-03.06. left the formation area and after 16 days on foot arrived in the replenishment areas: Zolotonosha, Lubny, Rzhishchev (that's right; the 19th Army, formed on the basis of the administration and troops of the North Caucasian Military District, was concentrated there, the Army headquarters in Cherkasy - M .FROM.). After replenishment of the entire body between 27.6. and 05.07. by rail was sent to the Smolensk region, the main part of the trains was sent from Darnitsa. There 05.07. unloading began and then marches on foot to the concentration area around Vitebsk. Corps command post in Yanovichi, 19th Army command post in Rudnya.

In addition, the corps includes the 248th light corps artillery regiment, the 248th sapper btl. and 263rd btl. connections.

Motor transport units are only in divisions, they are not in the corps. According to the state, the army should have a motor regiment. Since this regiment was never used, the prisoner believes that it de facto did not exist.

Food bases of 25 UK are located in Kyiv and Kremenchug. Food for 10 days (including for railway transport) was taken at the base. The missing should have been obtained at the army warehouses in Smolensk and Vitebsk. Because Smolensk and Vitebsk were repeatedly attacked by German aircraft, army food stores were moved to Liozno and Rudnya on the railway line Vitebsk - Smolensk (10.07.41). Food bases of the corps contain a stock of long-term stored products up to 14 days; perishable products are taken locally.

Military units have with them a supply of food for 4 days (according to the plan for 5 days), namely, a soldier for 1 day (iron ration) and one daily dacha in a company, battalion and regiment. The slaughter platoon had one vehicle with slaughtering equipment and one with a refrigerator. Live cattle for slaughter in the next 2 days chase after the part. In the future, livestock was received at the location. The baking company has a supply of flour for only one day, and then receives flour at the bases, which are provided with supplies for 3-4 days.

Commander of the 19th Army: Lieutenant General Konev.

Commander of the 25th Rifle Corps: Major General Chestokhvalov, who was allegedly taken prisoner in the battle on July 16-17. In any case, the corps from that moment was controlled only by the chief of staff Vinogradov. In the forest, 40 km south of Belaya, he is trying to collect and reorganize the remaining parts of the corps broken between Vitebsk and Smolensk.

Captive with his driver and passenger car left the corps on 07/20/41. Since then, he knows nothing about his corps. He moved through the forests to observe the attitude of the Germans towards the civilian population. On the basis of his, as he said, reassuring observations, he decided to surrender.

The mood in the troops during his departure was very gloomy. Desertion is common, as for soldiers, their own lives are more precious than the struggle for a misunderstood idea. Therefore, harsh measures are applied to deserters. Due to the flow of refugees and retreating military units in places, all conventional and railway lines are completely clogged. The departing trains with the civilian population also led to congestion on the railways, and in addition, they have a morally overwhelming effect on the troops they meet. Movement [of the civilian population] from place to place within the country is prohibited under the threat of severe punishment.

The German air and tank attacks have been especially terrifying for troops coming in from Siberia lately. The daily reports on the Russian radio about the increase in labor productivity, which have been heard recently, are a propaganda device to support the mood, while in the German-occupied section of the Smolensk [region] there is a real increase in the harvest (income?)

Our leaflets dropped over the Russian front, in his opinion, are somewhat unsuccessfully worded. The arguments about Jewish power in Russia are not very impressive. In his opinion, a hint of a future solution of the agrarian question and a mention of the freedom of workers with better wages would have had a much greater success.

Those who are able to think independently and even most of the common people do not believe the information transmitted by radio about Russian losses.

The system of denunciations among commanders is especially highly developed. After a major "purge" among the commanders of the troops, reserve officers are placed in the vacant positions, even those who were previously considered politically unreliable, as in the case of himself.

Before making such a decision to surrender, he personally convinced himself in the villages occupied by us that the reports of Russian propaganda about the [cruel] behavior of the German troops and terror are false.

He does not believe in an imminent uprising of the Russian people, even in the event of further major setbacks [at the front]. Rather, there will be a [final] collapse of the Russian army.

12th TD reports:

The interrogation of the prisoners taken by the advance detachment of the 25th Infantry Division on August 4 revealed that the losses of the 89th Infantry Division had recently been very high. Only 300-400 people allegedly remained in the 400th regiment. The 390th and 400th regiments received reinforcements three times, in recent days, 30 people per company, and received officers. The reinforcements are made up of communists of all ages, mainly chairmen of collective farms, executive committees, and so on. Everything that is trustworthy has been collected. The Russians are allegedly waiting for the German offensive in order to be able to surrender.

translated by Vasily Risto

At one time, after reading the military memoirs of Zhukov, Rodimtsev, Eremenko, Poppel and others, I got the impression of the mass heroic resistance of the Red Army to the German invasion in 1941. However, the truth turned out to be ambiguous and more complicated. Recently, with the declassification of the archives of those years and the emergence of access to them by modern historians, a completely different and ugly picture of the events of those distant years has appeared.
Panic and flight in the Red Army in the first months of the war was a mass phenomenon. For this reason, already seven days after the start of the war, Minsk was taken, the troops of the ZOVO (Western Special Military District) were surrounded and defeated. And there were the best parts of the Red Army and three powerful mechanized corps. No wonder the archives were banned for researchers of the history of the war. Interesting books with rich factography have recently appeared. Here are two of them:
1. "SCORE OF THE SECOND WORLD WORLD. WHO AND WHEN STARTED THE WAR?" The book is written
a group of historians and published by the Historical Perspective Foundation in cooperation with the Commission under the President of the Russian Federation on countering attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests with the participation of the Historical Memory Foundation.
2. "DOUBLE MYSTERY OF 1941 - PANIC IN THE RKKA - CAUSES, CONSEQUENCES, MYSTERIES". The author of the book is Alexander Muzafarov, historian, director of information and analytical programs of the Historical Perspective Foundation.

Of course, there are many false patriots who will accuse this author of being Russophobic and unpatriotic, but he presented only bare facts with references to sources and authors who were participants in the war. But this will not stop the critics, they will still scream - slander! This is how they are arranged (zombified), they accept only what they want as the truth - what they like is habitual and does not spoil the mood.
The general conclusion for those difficult years of the war suggests this - where there were skillful commanders who enjoyed authority, the soldiers did not panic and courageously repelled the enemy's rebuff and retreated only on orders.
But, unfortunately, a depressing picture is emerging - such commanders were an exception, regular commanders were repressed and dismissed by Stalin and Voroshilov. They are the "enemies of the people". The worst harm to the army could not be imagined. And the court of the Soviet people was avoided - the people were weaned from this. I just had to approve.
Panic arose objectively - because of the unexpectedness of the attack of the "German ally", his tank "pincers". Psychological shock - the Germans were counting on this. And he worked in the 41st, not only in the troops, but also in the leadership of the country.
Most of the units of the Red Army in 1941 did not know how to fight on the defensive and, when rumors of encirclement appeared, fled in panic to the east along with commanders, headquarters and political workers.

Below are some facts from Muzafarov's book confirming what has been said.
* Panic, as it were. As we mentioned above, this phenomenon was practically not considered in Soviet historiography. Only sometimes it was mentioned: “Yes, there was a panic, but ...”, followed by a story about the courage of those who did not succumb to panic. Only a few mentions in memoirs and documents published today have conveyed to us a description of a terrible tragedy.
* From the memoirs of Army General A.V. Gorbatov: “During that period of the war, especially in the first month, one could often hear:“ We were bypassed ”,“ We ​​are surrounded ”,“ Paratroopers were thrown out in our rear, ”etc. only the soldiers, but also the commanders who had not been fired upon, were overly receptive to such facts, common in the course of modern warfare; many were inclined to believe exaggerated, and often simply ridiculous rumors.
* From the memoirs of Marshal of the Soviet Union K.K. Rokossovsky:
“There were cases when even entire units that fell under a sudden flank attack by a small group of enemy tanks and aircraft were subjected to panic ... Fear of encirclement and fear of imaginary enemy paratroopers for a long time was a real scourge. And only where there were strong cadres of command and political staff, people fought confidently in any situation, providing an organized rebuff to the enemy. As an example, I will cite a case that took place in the area occupied by the corps. In the afternoon, a general was delivered to the corps command post without weapons, in a torn tunic, exhausted and exhausted, who said that, following the instructions of the front headquarters to the headquarters of the 5th army to clarify the situation, he saw to the west of Rovno headlong rushing east one after another cars with our fighters. In a word, the general caught the panic and, in order to find out the reason that gave rise to it, decided to detain one of the cars. In the end, he succeeded. There were up to 20 people in the car. Instead of answering questions about where they were running and what unit they were, the general was dragged into the back and began to be interrogated in unison. Then, without hesitation, they declared him a saboteur in disguise, took away his documents and weapons, and immediately pronounced a death sentence. Having contrived, the general jumped out on the move, rolled off the road into thick rye. Forest reached our CP.
* A modern historian is forced to state: “In 6 days, the military unit traveled 300 km to the east, 50 (!!!) km a day. This is a pace that exceeds the standards for a forced march of a rifle division. The unpleasant word "escape" comes to mind"
* From the Gomel regional party committee, the Kremlin was informed: "... the demoralizing behavior of a very significant number of command personnel: the departure of commanders from the front under the pretext of escorting evacuated families, group flight from the unit has a corrupting effect on the population and sows panic in the rear."
* It is important to note that panic seized not only the rank and file, but also the command staff. Moreover, the Soviet leadership believed that it was the commanding staff that became the source of panic, which they directly announced to the troops in the decree of the State Defense Committee of the USSR No. GOKO-169ss of July 16, 1941, which spoke of the trial of the military tribunal of 9 top generals of the Western Front, including the commander of the front, General of the Army D. G. Pavlov.
* Lieutenant Colonel Svetlichny, who led the units of the 134th Rifle Division after the flight of the staff of the corps headquarters, despite the presence of a sufficient number of firepower and people, continuing the criminal "tactics" of the command of the headquarters of the 25th Rifle Division, led the units to the east only at night and only through forests. It was strictly forbidden to come into contact with the enemy. All the time he praised the power of the German army, declaring the inability of the Red Army to defeat the Germans.

My personal opinion:
The confusion of command and rank and file is quite understandable - this is the result of Stalin's disorienting policy and propaganda dogmas - "On friendship with Germany", "If there is war, then we will beat the enemy on his territory."
Stalin kept repeating to military experts until the last days - "Hitler will not dare to wage war on two fronts and will not start a war against the USSR in 1941." Where did he see this second front, when all of Europe was in the hands of Hitler, and England was sitting quietly across the strait after the shock at Dunkirk?
The confusion and shock of the command on June 22 after such "political-psychological and military preparation of the army" is not surprising. After the war, General Petrov, military historian Meltyukhov analyzed the missed opportunities. In their opinion, if the enemy was met in 1941, fully and in a timely manner, the front would not have advanced further than the Dnieper. Khrushchev, a former representative of the Headquarters, also wrote about this.
The Red Army became fully capable of fighting only by the end of 1942, and then after order No. 227 "Not a step back" and the creation of detachments with machine guns. The Rzhev-Vyazemsky battles and the Battle of Stalingrad were not in vain.
Stalin, in his speeches after the war, justified his fatal strategic and political blunder by the "suddenness and treachery" of Hitler. There was no suddenness - Hitler concentrated his divisions near our borders for a whole year - every border guard saw this, and Stalin also knew about it very well. But he did not take into account Hitler's adventurism - to carry out the Blitzkrieg in six weeks.
It is still a mystery - how did he, Stalin, this cunning politician, not foresee Hitler's plans and lull the country with the impossibility of war in 1941? Or did he know about it and did not want to cause premature fear-mongering in the country? Rather, he did not believe in the possibility of war, as evidenced by the shock that he experienced after June 22 and retired to the country. Maybe he was thinking about suicide? Hitler outplayed him psychologically and strategically as a boy, and the "boy" was already over 60 years old. Unforgivable.
Everyone was perplexed after the outbreak of the war about this sudden reversal of the situation with the exact opposite.
The General Staff, the Politburo and the whole country were in a stupor. But intelligence about a possible attack by Hitler was enough. Some blinkers closed Stalin's eyes to reality - he did not trust anyone, even his personal intelligence. Psychopathology or crime?

But there was no trial of the people over the culprit, the intimidated Soviet people were not capable of this. And those who dared to criticize him (General Gordov, Marshal Kulik and others) paid with their lives. The leader must be infallible like Caesar's wife - "beyond suspicion." Such is the logic of any dictatorship.
With vain sacrifices, a sea of ​​blood and colossal material losses, the Soviet people paid for this myopia of the leader of the peoples and his servile entourage. This pain still sits in the soul of the people. The archives will reveal many more secrets of that terrible catastrophe of 1941.
Sad analogies arise with 1905, when the half-witted Tsar Nikolashka II wanted to "throw the Japs" and 1914 - "we will give these Germans." Then Russia, unprepared for war, came up against mighty Germany. The half-wit ruined Russia and his family. But many close associates dissuaded, including the chief of staff, General Alekseev. Even Rasputin was against the war - "there will be the death of Russia."
The history of Orthodox Russia is sad. Could this be God's punishment? But glory to the Almighty - he taught us a hard lesson twice in one century and left a chance for correction. Will we justify the trust?