Two wars

Russia is doubtlessly the world’s only country where V-E Day is celebrated [on May 9] as the most important event of the year, the decade, as the only historical event that unites Russia and serves as a basis for Russian national identity. One can only sympathize with a country and people whose history has no other events as important as the “Day of the Great Victory.”

This year’s jubilee was preceded by a thorough censoring of historical memory. For example, authorities in Bryansk banned local history photo exhibits relating to the 1941-43 Nazi occupation after a patriotically concerned citizen voiced his outrage at the photos with smiling children, insisting it was propaganda of Nazism. All the publishing houses and bookstores were warned against displaying books about Hitler and other Nazi leaders, ditto memoirs by Wehrmacht generals and field marshals. For good measure, all copies of the comic book Holocaust were removed from the shelves because the front cover depicted a swastika.

The jubilee picture of the war appears quite simple, with the invincible Soviet warriors in the center, crushing the treacherous enemy and unfurling the Flag of Victory on top of the Reichstag; with the Germans acting like clumsy extras on location. In a word, a picture that contains every Soviet propaganda stereotype, with the Allies being allowed at best the status of assistants.

There is also a trend to make the “Great Patriotic War” a family tradition, make it part of family memory like they do in the West. In fact, Vladimir Putin set an example when he published an article in the magazine Russky pioner [The Russian Pioneer] in which he wrote about his father who was gravely wounded near Nevskaya Dubrovka in the fall of 1941, his mother who nearly starved to death during the Nazi siege [of Leningrad], his little brother who died of diphtheria at an orphanage, and how his mother miraculously survived. She was saved by his father who “had six brothers, five of whom were dead. That was a disaster for the family. All of my mother’s relatives were also dead. I was a late child. She gave birth to me in 1941… They had no hatred for the enemy, that’s what I find amazing. I cannot to this day, frankly, understand their goodness. My mother, she was so very gentle, so kind…. And she told me, ‘Why should we hate those soldiers? They are simple people too, and we also killed them in the war.’ It’s utterly amazing. We were brought up with Soviet books, and movies… And there was hatred. But in my mother this somehow did not exist. Her words I’ll always remember: ‘What can we do? They are just as hardworking as we are. They were just driven to the front to fight.’”

This excerpt from his article sounds sincere, humane, although one can tell that the author never forgets about the existing political situation. Putin considers friendship with Germany as a strategic means of destroying the united stand of the West in the matter of Ukraine. Germans as extras, as dummies could perfectly serve this purpose. Indeed, no one hates them. Whereas the war crimes of the SS and Wehrmacht are often discussed, the atrocities of the Red Army, the NKVD in Europe, remain a taboo topic. In Germany, the leftist and liberal forces are still influential and their persistent calls for further repentance to Nazi crimes are heard, as evidenced by speeches made during the opening of jubilee exhibits in that country. Few if any are left in Germany’s elites who remember WWII and the Nazi regime even as children. Germany’s constant repentance, meanwhile, is very good for Moscow, considering that German politicians are loath to pressure Putin too much with sanctions and diplomatically, reminding themselves of how many were killed in Russia (the notion still refers to the entire former Soviet Union) by the Nazis.

In fact, writing about his parents, Putin isn’t quite truthful, probably to keep up the good Cheka family tradition (or maybe his father wasn’t entirely straightforward). He claims his father was assigned to an NKVD sabotage unit. However, http://www.podvignaroda.mil.ru/ reads that Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, b. 1911, member of the VKP(b) [Russ. abbr., All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)], private of the Red Army’s 330th Infantry Regiment, 86th Infantry Division, sustained a grave crippling wound at Nevskaya Dubrovka, November 17, 1941. On June 22, 1945, he was awarded the medal “For Service in Battle” as a disabled veteran. Not a word about the NKVD sabotage unit. Also, his recollections of the sufferings and deaths of his relatives do not quite tally with the myth about the Red Army that defeated the enemy “not with number but with skill” [a quote from tsarist Russia’s legendary military leader Alexander Suvorov’s book The Art of Winning], never with countless dead bodies.

The Ribbon of St. George remains the key symbol of the Victory Day celebrations. Copies of it are made and sold everywhere, for good reason or no reason at all. It is traditionally regarded in all post-Soviet countries as a symbol of the Russian World and Putin’s determination to restore the Soviet Union. The man in the street in Russia is brainwashed into believing that it was with St. George’s Ribbon that Soviet Russia defeated the Nazis back in 1945, and that it will be with this ribbon that Russia will defeat today the Ukrainian fascist Banderaites in the Donbas and then all over Ukraine. Needless to say, Ukraine is denied any part in destroying the Third Reich. Russia is supposed to have actually gotten the better of Hitler single-handedly and all those Ukrainian Banderaites only got in the way and helped the Nazis. Could Soviet Russia have defeated Nazi Germany without Ukraine and the Allies?

My estimates, using the techniques I detailed in the book The USSR and Russia in the Slaughterhouse. Manpower Losses in the Wars of the 20th Century (in Russian, Moscow, 2013) show that the Red Army lost 26.9 million officers and men during the “Great Patriotic War.” The total number of losses, including civilians, ranges from 40.1 to 40.9 million. The population of Ukraine before the war, within the existing frontiers, constituted 20.8 percent of that of the USSR. Ukraine’s share in the losses, therefore, amounts to at least 8-8.5 million, including not less than 5.6 million servicemen. It should be noted that the Red Army showed a markedly ineffective performance in the battlefield, so its manpower losses were on the average 10 times those of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. In 1941-42, the average ratio was even worse: 20 times or over. During the day, September 18, 1942, the Soviet 258th Infantry Division lost 978 killed and 2,030 wounded in action at Stalingrad, whereas the 6th Army of the Wehrmacht sustained comparables losses over ten days, September 11-20: 1,538 killed, 5,846 wounded, and 223 missing in action, with all 16 divisions of the 6th Army conducting active combat operations over the decade.

Now let us imagine that Ukraine somehow was not involved in the war. In that case during four years of hostilities the Red Army’s losses would have been 5.6 million less and those of the Wehrmacht would have been down by 0.5 million killed and some 1.5 million wounded. Accordingly, the Wehrmacht would have had a million more men on the Eastern Front in 1945 and the Red Army considerably less manpower. As it was, by July 1, 1945, the Red Army had 11,390,600 officers and men, not counting 1,046,000 wounded and ill in the hospitals. By the end of the war Ukraine’s share must have been higher, up to 25 percent of all Red Army men.

For example, Ukrainians constituted the majority of privates of the 60th Army that liberated Auschwitz. Add here ethnic Russians from Ukraine who fought in the Red Army. In 1945 most Red Army men were draftees from the populace who sustained the heaviest losses. Among them were future soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army who would continue fighting the Soviets after demobilization. In other words, without Ukraine the Red Army would have been some 8.5-million strong by the end of the war, with not more than 5 million on the front. The Nazi ground forces would have been 3.1-million strong by the beginning of 1945 (compared to the actual number: 2.1 million). Given this alignment of forces and with the 1941-42 combat experience, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht would have stopped the Red Army’s offensive. Also, without Ukraine’s production capacities and manpower, mostly evacuated to the east of Russia, the Red Army would have been denied one-fourth of materiel. The fact remains that by the spring of 1945 practically all of Soviet Russia’s manpower resources had been exhausted, so the lack of several million men from Ukraine would have meant disaster for the Red Army, let alone the consequences had the Fuehrer waged a more rational Ostpolitik and agreed to the formation of an independent Ukrainian state as Germany’s ally. In that case the Wehrmacht would have been reinforced by a 1-2-million-strong Ukrainian army in the east. This would have sufficed to crush the Red Army.

In fact, the Soviet Union would have been unable to defeat Nazi Germany without Ukraine and without the Allies. Under the Land-Lease Act, the Soviet Union was supplied 1.5 times more trucks than it had manufactured. The UK, US, and Canada supplied most railroad rails, almost all steam and electric locomotives. This prevented the paralysis of railroad transportation, something that had caused tsarist Russia’ defeat in WWI. The Allies provided more than one-third of all explosives, 45 percent of copper, over 50 percent of aluminum, some 60 percent of aviation fuel, most radios, let alone food, lathes, tanks, aircraft, antiaircraft guns, and so on and so forth. Without these supplies the Soviet Union would have produced two times less aircraft (and there would have been two times fewer combat missions), considerably fewer tanks, and one-third less shells.

There was more than the Land-Lease Act. In 1945 the Allies were fighting against 40 percent of the Wehrmacht divisions. Some two-thirds of the Luftwaffe aircraft and almost the entire German Navy were destroyed on the Western Front. I might as well point out that for a German pilot the risk of being shot out of the sky in the West was 8 times higher than in the East. Otherwise Hitler would have overpowered Stalin with his warplanes, tanks, and divisions.

Without the Allies the Soviet Union would not have fought the war until 1945. It would have collapsed sometime in 1943. In contrast, the UK and the US would have won even if the worse had come to worst, if the Red Army had been defeated in 1942 and this would have sharply decreased the Soviet resistance. In that case the Allies would have sped on the way to victory by dropping a dozen A-bombs on Germany toward the end of 1945.

Today’s war in the Donbas is a sequel to WWII (or the “Great Patriotic War”) for both Russia and Ukraine, although this time Russia is the aggressor, the way Nazi Germany did back then. All Russian and Ukrainian generals, as well as many officers are graduates of the Soviet military school. They are fighting using WWII standards, seemingly oblivious to the fact that today’s warfare, weapons, and manpower are quite different. Unlike Stalin’s Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia cannot dump heaps of dead bodies on the enemy the way it was done in 1941-45. Moscow can’t get enough volunteers and Russia’s WWII Allies are now on the side of Ukraine.

Kyiv, however, appears scared to fight the Russian Army for real, just as it seems to be afraid to launch even local offensives lest they trigger off a full-scale war with Russia, even though Putin is in no position to start this war, among other things because there aren’t enough men prepared to die in the Donbas. This is a patriotic war – for Ukrainians, not for Russians most of whom care little about the Russian World.

Boris SOKOLOV is a Moscow-based historian and journalist