Novikova Inna 06/22/2016 at 15:56

June 22 marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the Great Patriotic War.Now, more than ever, it is important to know the truth about how once again the world was divided.Chief Editorour edition Inna Novikova invited the author of the book "The Great Patriotic War - Truth Against Myths", rector of the Moscow University for the Humanities, Doctor of Philosophy, sociologist, historian Igor Ilyinsky, to speak.

"History is politics overturned into the past"

- Where do myths about war come from?

Myth-making is necessary for every state. Any - political, historical - must be treated with the understanding that they are created by the current government in order to put certain attitudes into the minds of people. Especially when it comes to military action.

With the beginning of perestroika in the Soviet Union, a huge number of different kinds of opinions about the events and personalities of that time spilled onto the pages of print publications, TV screens and cinemas. For the sake of objectivity, it must be said: some of what was said was true, which was revealed thanks to archival materials. And something - an outright lie, pursuing very specific political goals. Indeed, for many, "history is politics overturned into the past."

How much has already been said in the post-Soviet years that the feat of Alexander Matrosov is an "exception to the rule"! That there was no mass heroism during the Great Patriotic War, that millions of people surrendered to the Germans in order to fight against the communists later! But the truth is that - this is, in general, an exceptional case. Not every soldier individually was a hero in the war.

At the same time, it is also true that on the battlefields the whole nation was manifested, who defended, firstly, their homeland. Secondly - today some do not want to admit this - he defended the Soviet power, the system, which by that time was firmly established in the country and gave a lot to people. People believed in him and went to battle to save him.

- In this regard, the recent sensational story immediately comes to mind that in fact there were no Panfilov heroes. Sort of,it was just a propaganda "duck" invented by military journalists ...

And there was no feat of Alexander Matrosov, and Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and Liza Chaikina died for no one knows why - there was no one and nothing! But in fact, it was all. Another thing is that Soviet myths, being also a propaganda tool, placed certain accents. Therefore, something may be a little exaggerated. But the main thing is still that Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya died heroically, and Alexander Matrosov closed the embrasure, and Viktor Talalikhin made a ram. And there were Krasnodontsy. And many, many others. To deny it is senseless and immoral.

How much has already been written and rewritten today about our "terrible" Soviet past, against which the people "revolted" during the war: both "dictatorship", and "totalitarianism", and the devil knows what else. But I, for example, myself was born in 1936, grew up in this very "totalitarian" society, managed to get two secondary technical, and then two higher educations - one technical, the second humanitarian. He defended his candidate's, then his doctoral dissertation without any "length" of the arm. I was a normal, completely normal guy. And he always said what he wanted, and wrote what he wanted. Another thing is that I had no hatred, anger towards the then social system. Yes, I saw its shortcomings, problems, but I also wrote about them as a scientist, a researcher. And today, as a researcher, I affirm: our world is consistently becoming dumber, going crazy.

"We must once and for all stop presenting Stalin as a half-wit"

- Let us turn to the history of the military, or rather the pre-war period.How do you commentthe myth that Stalin and Hitler sympathized with each other?Allegedly, the most terrible war began almost by misunderstanding: it’s just that two tyrants didn’t share something between themselves ...

This is complete nonsense. Hitler, as evidenced by German archival materials, at some point treated Stalin with respect - as a person capable of leading such a vast country. The Fuhrer called Churchill a "little animal", and Stalin - a "tiger". Stalin was indifferent to the Fuhrer, simply despised him. When the participants of the Potsdam conference were invited to go and see the place where Hitler's corpse was burned, he said that he was not interested in it, and made such a grimace that everyone immediately realized that it was not necessary to approach him with offers of "excursions".

- But what about his toast "to Hitler" at a Moscow dinner with Ribbentrop? His Stalin is commemorated by all and sundry.

Politics is a cynical thing. Do you really believe that Stalin, who by that time had long understood that war with Nazi Germany was inevitable, spoke it from the bottom of his heart? For several years before this, Stalin had unsuccessfully tried to put together an anti-Hitler coalition. Even 10 days before the aforementioned dinner, delegations from Great Britain and France arrived in Moscow. Negotiations went on with them, but did not move a single step!

The very idea of ​​a non-aggression pact came from Hitler, not from Stalin. By that time, the Soviet Union was already systematically preparing for the coming war. Another thing is that he still needed time. We received it - as much as 22 months. Isn't that worth one toast?

- In the West, now more and more often they say that in 1939 Stalin and Hitler "divided" Europe, that Stalin, thanks to this treaty, enslaved the Baltic states, snatched away part of poor Poland, Romania ...

The secret protocol attached to the treaty determined the zones of interests of Germany and the USSR. And its zone included Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia and the Western part of Poland.

There is such a thing as geostrategy. The geographical picture at the time of the signing of the agreement was as follows: Leningrad was located 30 kilometers from the border with Finland. It was 35 kilometers from the Polish border to Minsk. And on the threshold of a real war loomed.

Now they say that the Non-Aggression Pact untied Hitler's hands and he started the war. But it was signed in 1939! And a year before, Hitler's troops occupied Czechoslovakia; at the request of Germany, Slovakia declared itself independent, and Poland and Hungary grabbed a piece from Czechoslovakia, and the country ceased to exist. Isn't this a war?

On March 11, 1938, England and France gave their guarantees to Poland, and exactly a month later, on April 11, Hitler signs the Weiss plan - a plan for an attack on Poland, which should take place no later than September 1, 1939. Stalin was well aware of this plan.

In other words, everything was predetermined even before the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact. Russia was ready to join the anti-Hitler coalition, negotiated this in Moscow until August 21, 1939, but they ended in nothing. On August 22, Hitler found out about this. He sent a telegram to Stalin, and Ribbentrop immediately flew to Moscow. On the night of August 23-24, an agreement and a protocol to it were signed. There was nothing left for us to do. In Europe, I repeat, there was already a war going on. On September 1, 1939, Hitler attacked Poland, England and France declared war on Germany.

They also say that Stalin believed Hitler and did not prepare for war with him. In fact, the Non-Aggression Pact was one of the components of this preparation. As for the suddenness of the German attack on the USSR, which Molotov spoke about in his speech, for us the main element of this surprise was what power Hitler concentrated on the border and what a massive attack the Soviet Union was subjected to simultaneously from the air, from the sea and on land. Subsequently, Marshal Zhukov himself confirmed: it was really unexpected.

- Before the war, Stalin carried out a large-scale "cleansing" of the command staff of the Red Army. As a result, according to some researchers, the new commanders turned out to be insufficiently prepared.

Indeed, the repression "knocked out" a lot of people. But I have a table in my book: the number of those arrested, the number of those sentenced to prison terms, the number of those who were shot and the number of those released and returned to the troops. The figures indicate the following: up to 40 percent of the total number of those arrested before the war were returned to the troops.

- They also say that the Germans at the beginning of the war did not have an advantage in armaments, that we had a sufficient number of aircraft, tanks, artillery.

By June 1941, we really had a lot of everything: both tanks and aircraft. Another thing is whether this was enough to conduct a full-scale motorized war and how this technique met the requirements of the moment. For example, we had 19,000 aircraft. This is a lot, but it was necessary twice as much. There were already IL 2, and Katyushas, ​​and KV and T-34 tanks, but they did not manage to produce them in the right quantity. The equipment that was often placed on the wrong lines. For all that, the Soviet Union did not have any superiority in the amount of equipment, this is an indisputable fact. Just as it was not the fact that the Red Army in the first days of the war went with checkers against tanks.

Stalin himself said that the coming war would be a war of motors. In general, it is necessary once and for all to stop presenting Stalin as some kind of half-wit in military affairs. Read the transcript of his speech, in which he analyzed the results of the Finnish campaign: point by point, Stalin analyzes absolutely all military operations. When I read it, I thought, "Who thought of calling him paranoid?"

This, by the way, is a very important question - Stalin is still virtually absent in the history of the Great Patriotic War. Unless in the movies he is shown in the form of an old monster with a mustache and a pipe in his hands. But in fact, look at the photos from the Potsdam conference: slender, without a tube, even handsome. What did Churchill say about him? When Stalin entered the hall, we involuntarily stood up and wanted to stretch our arms at the seams. Commander-in-Chief, he commanded not companies, but fronts. And there were once 14, when 15. Today they say: the Soviet people won the war. But someone was the commander-in-chief of this Soviet people!

Non-combat losses

- Another thesis:Pthe dinner was not worth the price the country paid for it.

The price of Victory is the main point of all current mythology. Why, some ask, was it necessary to pay such a price? It was necessary to surrender Leningrad, surrender Moscow. Paris surrendered - and nothing. True, the French prime minister was later shot for treason, but that's okay. Bloodthirstiness today is mainly attributed to Marshal Zhukov - "women still give birth." But it is enough to analyze the numbers, and everything becomes clear. The combat losses of the Red Army amounted to 10.1 million people - a figure comparable to the losses of the Germans. The remaining 14.1 million people who died were non-combat losses. That is, they are mainly people killed in the occupied territories. The Nazis were not humanists at all. An instruction was even issued, I quote: "If you meet Russians, it doesn't matter a girl, a boy, an old man - kill him." They did kill.

- And what is the picture with prisoners of war on both sides? Were there really millions of those who surrendered to the German troops in order to then go to war with the hated communists?

37 percent of all prisoners of war of the Red Army (and there were a total of 4 million 727 thousand of them in German captivity) got there in the first days of the war. The number of German prisoners of war is about the same - 4 million 570 thousand. At the same time, the Germans destroyed approximately 2 million 800 thousand of our prisoners of war. In our camps, 579,000 found their end - five times less.

- And what do you think, how likely is the repeat of June 22 today?

We recently discussed this issue at our university. War was not ruled out in previous years, and now. And now more than ever. Russia has no other choice but to pump up the muscles. If you want peace, prepare for war, the old banal truth. The whole American philosophy regarding our country is built on one idea: the Russians recognize only strength, we must be strong, then we will defeat the Russians. In the collection of published secret documents on US foreign policy and strategy in 1940-1950, "The Main Enemy", it is directly stated: The Cold War is, in practice, a real war. We did not perceive it as such, and it was a tragic mistake of our leadership.

In fact, the Cold War unleashed by the US against the USSR continues now against Russia. The guys just rested a little, robbed, hung medals on their chests for the victory in the Cold War and told everyone: "That's it, the war is over!" In fact, no one stopped her. But I think that we will still win, as we won in 1945. So that everyone remembers: to meddle with us.

Interview prepared for publication by Sergey Valentinov

For decades, the truth about the Nazi-Bolshevik war of 1941-1945 was distorted by the totalitarian regime of the USSR in Ukraine. And today, many residents of Slavyansk are accustomed to believing that Germany treacherously attacked the peaceful Soviet Union. But the truth is that the Soviet Union until June 22, 1941 - was an ally of Nazi Germany. - In fact, he was one of the Axis countries.

While in 1940 German bombs were raining down on London and Paris with might and main, the USSR supplied the Nazis with oil, grain, copper, timber and other raw materials necessary for the German military industry. In the Murmansk region, "Nord Bases" were created for the German naval forces. German ships were also based here, sinking British convoys in the North Atlantic, and Soviet icebreakers escorted German ships across the Arctic to the Pacific Ocean. Do you think it's not true because you didn't learn it in school? - But it's true. This is evidenced by facts and documents.

Historian Viktor Suvorov claims that Stalin was preparing the so-called "liberation campaign" of the Red Army in Europe to realize the Bolshevik idea of ​​a world revolution. But Hitler attacked first.

The historical fact is indisputable - on May 29, 1941, the first seemingly strange Russian-German phrase book was published with a circulation of 6 million copies.

The second edition was released on June 6th. These phrasebooks are remarkable in that they contain phrases such as: "You have nothing to fear, the Red Army will come soon." Or: "What is the name of this river?".

We present to your attention the RUSSIAN-GERMAN MILITARY PHRASEBOOK (signed for printing on May 29, 1941)

Brief information about German pronunciation

Halt! Hyundai ho!

You can't help but know!

Name your regiment number!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let's start with the preface:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A good memoirist should still speak only for himself!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you volunteer?

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

“Yeah,” laughed the other.

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

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

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

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

We understand, we understand...

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

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

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

The authors would like to thank Artem Drabkin for help with the review. on the book of memoirs of Nikolai Nikolaevich Nikulin, a researcher at the Hermitage, a former font specialist. I strongly recommend to all those who sincerely want to know the truth about the Patriotic War to get acquainted with it.
In my opinion, this is a unique work, it is difficult to find the likes of it in military libraries. It is remarkable not only for its literary merits, which I, not being a literary critic, cannot objectively judge, but for the descriptions of military events that are accurate to naturalism, revealing the disgusting essence of war with its brutal inhumanity, filth, senseless cruelty, criminal disregard for people's lives by commanders of all ranks. from battalion commanders to supreme commander in chief. This is a document for those historians who study not only the movements of troops in the theaters of operations, but are also interested in the moral and humanistic aspects of the war.

In terms of the level of reliability and sincerity of the presentation, I can only compare it with Shumilin's memoirs "Vanka company".
Reading it is as hard as looking at the mutilated corpse of a person who had just stood nearby ...
While reading this book, my memory involuntarily restored almost forgotten analogous pictures of the past.
Nikulin "drank" in the war disproportionately more than I did, having survived it from beginning to end, having visited one of the bloodiest sections of the front: in the Tikhvin swamps, where our "glorious strategists" laid down more than one army, including the 2nd Shock. .. And yet I dare to say that many of his experiences and sensations are very similar to mine.
Some statements of Nikolai Nikolaevich prompted me to comment on them, which I do below, quoting from the book.
The main question that arises explicitly or implicitly when reading books about the war is what made companies, battalions and regiments resignedly go towards almost inevitable death, sometimes even obeying the criminal orders of their commanders? In numerous volumes of jingoistic literature, this is explained in an elementary simple way: inspired by the love for their socialist homeland and hatred for the perfidious enemy, they were ready to give their lives for the victory over him and unanimously went on the attack at the call “Hurrah! For motherland for Stalin!"

N.N. Nikulin:

“Why did they go to death, although they clearly understood its inevitability? Why did they go, although they did not want to? They walked, not just fearing death, but terrified, and yet they walked! Then there was no need to think and justify their actions. It wasn't before. They just got up and walked, because it was NECESSARY!
They politely listened to the parting words of the political instructors - an illiterate transcription of oak and empty newspaper editorials - and walked on. Not at all inspired by some ideas or slogans, but because it is NECESSARY. So, apparently, our ancestors also went to die on the Kulikovo field or near Borodino. It is unlikely that they thought about the historical prospects and the greatness of our people ... Having entered the neutral zone, they did not at all shout “For the Motherland! For Stalin!”, as they say in novels. A hoarse howl and thick obscene language were heard over the front line, until bullets and shrapnel plugged the screaming throats. Was it before Stalin when death was near. Where, now, in the sixties, did the myth again arise that they won only thanks to Stalin, under the banner of Stalin? I have no doubts about this. Those who won either perished on the battlefield or drank themselves, overwhelmed by the post-war hardships. After all, not only the war, but also the restoration of the country took place at their expense. Those of them who are still alive are silent, broken.
Others remained in power and retained their strength - those who drove people into camps, those who drove them into senseless bloody attacks in the war. They acted in the name of Stalin, and they are now shouting about it. Was not at the forefront: "For Stalin!". The commissars tried to hammer it into our heads, but there were no commissars in the attacks. All this scum ... "

And I remember.

In October 1943, our 4th Guards Cavalry Division was urgently moved to the front line in order to close the gap that had formed after an unsuccessful attempt to break through the front by infantry. For about a week, the division held the defense in the area of ​​the Belarusian city of Khoiniki. At that time I worked at the divisional radio station "RSB-F" and I could only judge the intensity of hostilities by the number of wounded people riding in carts and walking to the rear of the wounded.
I am receiving a radiogram. After a long cipher-tsifiri in plain text the words "Change of linen." The encoded text will go to the headquarters cipher, and these words are intended by the corps radio operator for me, who is receiving the radiogram. They mean that the infantry is coming to replace us.
And indeed, rifle units were already walking past the walkie-talkie standing on the side of the forest road. It was some kind of battle-worn division, withdrawn from the front for a short rest and replenishment. Not observing the formation, soldiers walked with the floors of their overcoats tucked under the belt (there was an autumn thaw), which seemed humpbacked because of raincoats thrown over knapsacks.
I was struck by their downcast, doomed appearance. I realized that in an hour or two they would be at the forefront ...

Writes to N.N. Nikulin:

“Noise, roar, rattle, howl, bang, hoot - a hell of a concert. And along the road, in the gray haze of dawn, the infantry wanders to the front line. Row after row, regiment after regiment. Faceless figures hung with weapons, covered with humpbacked capes. Slowly but inexorably they marched forward to their own destruction. A generation going to eternity. There was so much generalizing meaning in this picture, so much apocalyptic horror that we acutely felt the fragility of being, the pitiless pace of history. We felt like pitiful moths destined to burn without a trace in the hellish fire of war.

The dull obedience and conscious doom of Soviet soldiers attacking fortified positions inaccessible to a frontal assault amazed even our opponents. Nikulin cites the story of a German veteran who fought on the same sector of the front, but on the other side.

A certain Mr. Erwin X., whom he met in Bavaria, says:

What kind of strange people? We laid a rampart of corpses about two meters high under Sinyavino, and they keep climbing and climbing under the bullets, climbing over the dead, and we keep hitting and hitting, and they keep climbing and climbing ... And what dirty prisoners were! Snotty boys are crying, and the bread in their bags is disgusting, it is impossible to eat!
And what did yours do in Courland? he continues. - Once the masses of Russian troops went on the attack. But they were met with friendly fire from machine guns and anti-tank guns. The survivors began to roll back. But then dozens of machine guns and anti-tank guns hit from the Russian trenches. We saw how rushing about, dying, in the neutral zone of the crowd of your soldiers distraught with horror!

This is about detachments.

In a discussion at the military-historical forum "VIF-2 NE "None other than V. Karpov himself - a hero of the Soviet Union, in the past ZEK, a reconnaissance penitentiary, the author of well-known biographical novels about commanders, said that there were no and could not be cases of shooting retreating Red Army soldiers by detachments. “Yes, we would shoot them ourselves,” he said. I had to object, despite the high authority of the writer, referring to my meeting with these warriors on the way to the medical squadron. As a result, he received a lot of offensive remarks. You can find a lot of evidence of how courageously the NKVD troops fought on the fronts. But about their activities as detachments, it was not necessary to meet.
In the comments to my statements and in the guest book of my site ( http://ldb1.people. en ) often there are words that veterans - relatives of the authors of the comments categorically refuse to remember their participation in the war and, moreover, write about it. I think the book of N.N. Nikulina explains this quite convincingly.
On the website of Artem Drabkin "I remember" ( www.iremember.ru ) a huge collection of memoirs of war veterans. But it is extremely rare to find sincere stories about what a comfrey soldier experienced at the forefront on the verge of life and inevitable, as it seemed to him, death.
In the 60s of the last century, when N.N. Nikulin, in the memory of the soldiers who miraculously survived after being at the forefront of the front, the experience was still as fresh as an open wound. Naturally, remembering this was painful. And I, to whom fate was more merciful, was able to force myself to take up a pen only in 1999.

N.N. Nikulin:

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

In the stories of real comfrey soldiers, there is often a pronounced hostility, bordering on hostility, towards the inhabitants of various headquarters and rear services. This is read by both Nikulin and Shumilin, who contemptuously called them "regimental".

Nikulin:

« A striking difference exists between the front line, where blood is shed, where there is suffering, where there is death, where one cannot raise one's head under bullets and shrapnel, where there is hunger and fear, overwork, heat in summer, frost in winter, where it is impossible to live, and the rear. Here, in the rear, another world. Here are the authorities, here are the headquarters, there are heavy guns, warehouses, medical battalions are located. Occasionally, shells fly here or a plane drops a bomb. The dead and wounded are rare here. Not a war, but a resort! Those on the front line are not residents. They are doomed. Their salvation is only a wound. Those in the rear will remain alive if they are not moved forward when the ranks of the attackers dry out. They will stay alive, come home, and eventually form the backbone of veterans' organizations. They will grow bellies, get bald heads, decorate their chests with commemorative medals, orders and will tell how heroically they fought, how they defeated Hitler. And they themselves will believe in it!
It is they who will bury the bright memory of those who died and who really fought! They will present a war about which they themselves know little, in a romantic halo. How good everything was, how wonderful! What heroes we are! And the fact that war is horror, death, hunger, meanness, meanness and meanness will fade into the background. The real front-line soldiers, of which there are one and a half people left, and even those crazy, spoiled ones, will be silent as a rag. And the authorities, who will also largely survive, will be mired in squabbles: who fought well, who fought badly, but if only they had listened to me!

Harsh words, but largely justified. I had to serve for some time at the headquarters of the division in the communications squadron, I had seen enough of smart staff officers. It is possible that due to a conflict with one of them, I was sent to the communications platoon of the 11th cavalry regiment (http://ldb1.narod.ru/simple39_.html )
I have already had to speak on a very painful topic about the terrible fate of women in the war. And again, this turned out to be an insult to me: the young relatives of the mothers and grandmothers who fought, felt that I had outraged their military merits.
When, even before leaving for the front, I saw how, under the influence of powerful propaganda, young girls enthusiastically enrolled in courses for radio operators, nurses or snipers, and then at the front - how they had to part with illusions and girlish pride, I, a boy inexperienced in life it hurt a lot for them. I recommend M. Kononov's novel "The Naked Pioneer", it's about the same thing.

And here is what N.N. Nikulin.

“This is not a woman's business - war. No doubt, there were many heroines who can be set as an example for men. But it is too cruel to force women to suffer the torment of the front. And if only this! It was hard for them to be surrounded by men. True, the hungry soldiers had no time for women, but the authorities achieved their goal by any means, from rough pressure to the most exquisite courtship. Among the many cavaliers there were daredevils for every taste: to sing, and to dance, and to talk eloquently, and for the educated - to read Blok or Lermontov ... And the girls went home with the addition of a family. It seems that this was called in the language of the military offices "to leave by order of 009." In our unit, out of fifty who arrived in 1942, only two soldiers of the fair sex remained by the end of the war. But “leave on order 009” is the best way out.
It's been worse. I was told how a certain Colonel Volkov lined up female reinforcements and, passing along the line, selected the beauties he liked. Such became his PPZH (Field mobile wife. The abbreviation PPZH had a different meaning in the soldier's lexicon. This is how hungry and emaciated soldiers called an empty, watery stew: “Goodbye, sex life”), and if they resisted - on the lip, in a cold dugout, on bread and water! Then the baby went from hand to hand, got to different mothers and deputies. In the best Asian traditions!”

Among my brother-soldiers was a wonderful brave woman medical officer of the squadron Masha Samoletova. About her on my website is the story of Marat Shpilyov “Her name was Moscow”. And at a meeting of veterans in Armavir, I saw how the soldiers she pulled from the battlefield were crying. She came to the front at the Komsomol call, leaving the ballet, where she began to work. But she also could not resist the pressure of the army Don Juan, as she herself told me.

And the last thing to talk about.

N.N. Nikulin:

“Everything seemed to be tested: death, hunger, shelling, overwork, cold. So no! There was something else very terrible, almost crushing me. On the eve of the transition to the territory of the Reich, agitators arrived in the troops. Some are in high ranks.
- Death for death! Blood for blood!!! Let's not forget!!! We won't forgive!!! Let's take revenge!!! - and so on...
Prior to this, Ehrenburg had thoroughly tried, whose crackling, biting articles everyone read: “Dad, kill the German!” And it turned out Nazism on the contrary.
True, they behaved outrageously according to plan: a network of ghettos, a network of camps. Accounting and compilation of lists of loot. A register of punishments, planned executions, etc. With us, everything went spontaneously, in the Slavic way. Bay, guys, burn, wilderness!
Spoil their women! Moreover, before the offensive, the troops were abundantly supplied with vodka. And it's gone, and it's gone! As always, the innocent suffered. The bosses, as always, fled ... Indiscriminately burned houses, killed some random old women, aimlessly shot herds of cows. A joke invented by someone was very popular: “Ivan is sitting near a burning house. "What are you doing?" they ask him. “Yes, the footcloths had to be dried, the fire was lit” ... Corpses, corpses, corpses. The Germans, of course, are scum, but why be like them? The army has humiliated itself. The nation has humiliated itself. It was the worst thing in the war. Corpses, corpses...
At the railway station of the city of Allenstein, which the valiant cavalry of General Oslikovsky captured unexpectedly for the enemy, several echelons with German refugees arrived. They thought they were going to their rear, but they got there ... I saw the results of the reception that they received. The station platforms were covered with heaps of gutted suitcases, bundles, trunks. Everywhere clothes, children's things, ripped pillows. All this in pools of blood...

“Everyone has the right to send a parcel home once a month weighing twelve kilograms,” the authorities officially announced. And it's gone, and it's gone! Drunk Ivan burst into the bomb shelter, fucked the machine on the table and, terribly bulging eyes, yelled: “URRRRR! ( Uhr- hours) Reptiles! Trembling German women carried watches from all sides, which they raked into the "sidor" and carried away. One soldier became famous for forcing a German woman to hold a candle (there was no electricity) while he rummaged through her chests. Rob! Grab it! Like an epidemic, this scourge swept over everyone ... Then they came to their senses, but it was too late: the devil flew out of the bottle. Kind, affectionate Russian men have turned into monsters. They were terrible alone, but in the herd they became such that it is impossible to describe!

Here, as they say, comments are superfluous.

We will soon celebrate a wonderful national holiday, Victory Day. It carries not only joy in connection with the anniversary the end of a terrible war that claimed every 8th inhabitant of our country (on average!), but also tears for those who did not return from there ... I would also like to remember the exorbitant price that the people had to pay under the "wise leadership" of the greatest commander of all times and peoples " . After all, it has already been forgotten that he endowed himself with the title of Generalissimo and this title!

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Ouveteran lies in red-brown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, in black and white, I lie.

Fifth lie.

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

Lie six

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

Lie seven.

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

Lie number eight.

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

Lie nine.

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

No money…

Well, hang in there.

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

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