Translation: A Pity the Nazis didn’t Make Lampshades out of Today’s Liberals

This , about History, tagged , , , was written by for on May 15, 2013

In one of the most scandalous op-eds of the year, KP’s Ulyana Skoybeda takes the liberal Leonid Gozman to task for equating SMERSH with the SS. The original byline was later toned down, and the author offered a partial – and some insist, halfhearted – apology.

The Politician Leonid Gozman Says: “A Nice Uniform is the Sole Difference between the SS and SMERSH.”

At times, one regrets that the Nazis didn’t make lampshades out of the ancestors of today’s liberals – there’d be fewer problems. Liberals are revising history so as to knock the rug out from under our country’s feet.

“The federal channels are releasing a new serial about the war. On the roles of the SS. Our heroes aren’t the butchers of Auschwitz; they are not sadists or rapists… In the terrible meat-grinder of war, they honestly fight the enemy, performing deeds of great bravery, and self-sacrifice on behalf of their comrades. Many of them die, but they die with honor…

I made all this up, of course. Sorry. A film like that will never be shown on our screens. Likewise in Germany – even those Germans born many years after that nightmare are still ashamed of the SS uniform.

But in the past few days of Victory celebration, our screens have played host to a serial about SMERSH. They did not have handsome uniforms, but that is their only significant distinction from the SS.”

This post was published yesterday by the prominent liberal Leonid Gozman at his blog on the radio station Echo of Moscow’s website. He surely chose the appropriate time to compare a combat unit of Soviet military counterintelligence with the armed guardians of fascist concentration camps. Not just to compare them, in fact, but to equate them.

He must have waited for the moment, in all likelihood. So as to make it sting all the more.

You can just about imagine what started going down in the Internet.

Heated arguments and fights at Echo of Moscow and dozens of other sites. Blood, dirt, the gnashing of teeth.

I will advance one of the most representative discussions.

“SMERSH’s task was to catch saboteurs,” say a few outraged commentators. “The SS, on the other hand, was the chief organizer of terror and the destruction of peoples on racial criteria. How could you possible compare them?”

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Translation: The Red Army “Rape of Germany” was Invented by Goebbels

This about History, tagged , , , , was written by for on May 9, 2013

In an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russian history professor Elena Sinyavskaya in a discussion with Alexey Ovchinnikov disputes the factual provenance of the Red Army rape of Germany.

The Myth of the “Rape of Germany” was Invented by Goebbels

In recent years, Victory Day has unfortunately acquired a not very pleasant tradition: the closer the holiday comes, the more do all sorts of “researchers” begin to broadcast the myth of “raped Germany.”

In this way, over the years the number of German maidens, allegedly victims of the Red Army, simply grows. But for whom is it necessary that the Russian soldier remain in the national memory not as a liberator and protector, but as a rapist and a robber? This is something that we have talked about to a leading researcher at the Institute of Russian History, the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Elena Sinyavskaya.

“The Nazis intimidated people to the point that they committed suicide”

Elena Spartakovna, is all this the result of restructuring? Those years generated a lot of rubbish …

Not really. This nasty story began much earlier, with Goebbels’ propaganda, when it was announced to the population that the Red Army was brutally raping all German women between the ages of 8 to 80 years. And the people were really intimidated to the limit, to the extent that Nazi party activists firstly killed their families and then themselves.

So why was such an Image necessary?

Firstly, to increase resistance against the advancing Red Army, and secondly, so that the population would leave the lost territories and could be of no assistance to the Soviet armed forces.

Goebbels’ line was then continued in the same year of 1945 by the allies, when the first publications appeared in which it was attempted to represent the Red Army as an army of looters and rapists and with absolutely nothing said about the outrages that were happening in the western zone of occupation. With the start of the “cold war” the theme was exaggerated, but not so aggressively and massively as has begun to occur in the last twenty years. The numbers “raped” were initially modest: from 20,000 to 150,000 in Germany. But in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Germany there was published a book by two feminists, Helga Zander and Barbara Jor, “The Liberators and Liberated,” where for the first time a figure of 2 million was arrived at. Moreover, it was derived from a completely flawed premise: statistical data for 1945-1946 were collected in a Berlin hospital in which there were born somewhere around 500 children per year and approximately 15-20 people were listed under “nationality of father” as “Russian”. Moreover, two or three such cases were classified as “raped”. What did these “researchers” do? They arrived at the conclusion that all the cases where the father was Russian were the result of being raped. Then Goebbel’s formula from “8 to 80” was simply factored in. However, the mass distribution of this figure took place in 2002 with the publication of Anthony Beevor’s book “The Fall of Berlin”, which was published here in 2004, and the mythical figure of “2 million” was then taken out for a stroll by the Western mass media on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Victory.

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Jaan Kaplinski – From Confrontation To Reconciliation

This , about History, tagged , , , , , was written by for on June 2, 2012

Two weeks back, the distinguished Estonian poet and linguist Jaan Kaplinski in a comment on this blog linked to his article in the Russian-Estonian paper День за Днем lamenting the state of Estonian – Russian relations, especially as they were apparently really good back in the Tsarist days. In that article from От противостояния к примирению (From Confrontation to Reconciliation), which is translated below, Jaan argues that it is long past time to bury the hatchet.

In my view, it is a very good article as it avoids the moral preening and victimization complexes typical of Baltic nationalists while also decisively calling out hardcore Russian Stalinists for their lies and mendacity. I also note with approval that he uses the historically correct term “annexation” to describe the coercive incorporation of the Baltics into the USSR as opposed to the propagandistic term “occupation”.

From Confrontation to Reconciliation

Jaan Kaplinski

I know of no Estonian who defected to the Germans during the First World War. On the other hand, I do know the names of many senior Estonian officers, who fought valiantly against the Germans in the ranks of the Tsar’s troops.

Later many of them became commanders in the newborn Estonian Army. Without their knowledge, acquired in the Imperial Nicholas Military Academy and other higher military schools, Estonia’s victory against the Red Army and the German Landeswehr would have hardly been possible.

I remember a conversation long ago with an old man, who participated in the Liberation War. He told me that when it came time for Estonian guys like him to fight against the Reds on Pskov territory, they did so without enthusiasm, and sometimes even expressing discontent: It had nothing to do with them, fighting Russians in Russia. At that time there was no Russophobia among Estonians. There was however an age-old hatred towards the German landlords, about which, by the way, one can read aplenty in the memoirs of the Estonian-Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki. This hate flared up in 1905, when Estonian peasants burned down many German myzy [AK: Gutshof, or manor houses, specific to the Baltic region].

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Reconciling Stalin with Victory

This about History, tagged , , , , was written by for on May 9, 2010

За нас за вас и за десант и за спецназ! I would like to start off by expressing my deepest respects to the Red Army veterans who fought and died so that (literally) hundreds of millions of their Slavic brethren could live. Вечная слава героям!

Last year I discussed four myths about the Eastern Front, and Fedia Kriukov unraveled a fifth in the comments. This year, I’m going to comment on one of the most contradictory, even harrowing, debates in Russia. How to reconcile Stalin, the despotic Messiah, and Victory 1945, now emerging as the primary national myth consolidating the Russian nation-state. I don’t intend to resolve this debate (I don’t believe that’s even possible), but I do believe it is necessary for people on all sides – Westerners, ordinary Russians, Russian liberals, and Stalinists alike – to understand it a bit better. This is my humble hope in writing this.

First, the facts. Russians are not hardcore Stalinists. Neither is the Russian government. President Medvedev unequivocally condemned Stalin, saying there is “no justification for the repressions”, and spoke out against Moscow mayor Luzhkov’s initiative to publicly display a few Stalin posters (amongst thousands) during the Victory celebrations. He was backed in this sentiment by 51% of Russians, while only 12% fully supported Luzhkov. Today, most Russians are either conflicted on or indifferent to Stalin. Neither for, nor fully against. Ambiguous.

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Book Review: Alexander Werth – Moscow War Diary

This about History, tagged , , was written by for , on October 16, 2009

Review of “Moscow War Diary” (A. Werth)
Werth, Alexander – Moscow War Diary (1942)
Category: history, Soviet Union, WW2; Rating: 4/5

Soviet Resilience under Fire

On 22nd June 1941, the armed columns of Nazi Germany began rolling into Russia, heralding the start of the Great Patriotic War. For Alexander Werth, a correspondent for the British Sunday Times paper who had spent his childhood in imperial Russia, this was a deeply emotional event, stirring him ‘perhaps more deeply than any event since the war began’. Spurred by these sentiments and realizing that with the bulk of the Wehrmacht diverted to the USSR, how ‘the Russian people would resist Hitler’ would determine the outcome of this ‘totalitarian war’, he decided to go to Moscow. There, he observed how the military and the material, the media and the morale, aspects of the war interacted, wrote articles about it for readers in Britain (and occasionally the USSR) and recorded his impressions in a diary at ground zero that he edited for readability and published early 1942.

Werth considered the attitudes of some of his fellow journalists towards this war as just another ‘big story’ detestable. ‘Even more irritating, for its cold-hearted non-belligerent objectivity’ – for instance, the intention of an American journalist, Angelina, to remain in Moscow even should the Germans capture it, justifying it with, “You bet I’ll stay here; don’t you think it’ll be a swell story? Who’s to stop me? Aren’t we nootrals?” [sic]. He also lambasted another American journalist, Ingersoll, for whom the ‘war is an opportunity for a scoop’, as opposed to the ‘millions of Russians’ for whom it is a ‘matter of life and death’ .

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Victory Day Special: The Poisonous Myths of the Eastern Front

This about History, tagged , , , , , , , , was written by for on May 9, 2009

За нас за вас и за десант и за спецназ! The Red Army was the single greatest contributor to the defeat of Nazi Germany sixty-four years ago, a truly evil empire based on slavery and oppression, and responsible for the genocide of millions of Slav civilians, Jews, Soviet POW’s and Roma by gas, bullets and starvation.

Yet ever since the first days of the Cold War, there has been a concerted campaign to whitewash the Wehrmacht of participation in war crimes and to rehabilitate the generals who participated in it as enthusiastically as Hitler and the upper echelons of the Nazi Party. This resulted in the promulgation of many poisonous myths about the Eastern Front that are only now being laid to rest. I already wrote about several of these myths in my Top 10 Russophobe Myths

MYTH I: Heroic Americans with their British sidekicks won World War Two, while the Russian campaign was a sideshow.

REALITY: Although Western Lend-Lease and strategic bombing was highly useful, the reality is that the vast majority of German soldiers and airmen fought and died on the Eastern Front throughout the war.

Rüdiger Overmans in Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg estimates that from the Polish campaign to the end of 1944, 75-80% of all German armed forces personnel died or went missing in action on the Eastern Front up to the end of 1944. According to Krivosheev’s research, throughout the war, the vast majority of German divisions were concentrated against the Soviet Union – in 1942, for instance, there were 240 fighting in the East and 15 in North Africa, in 1943 there were 257 in the East and up to 26 in Italy and even in 1944 there were more than 200 in the East compared to just 50 understrength and sub-par divisions in the West. From June 1941 to June 1944, 507 German (and 607 German and Allied) divisions and 77,000 fighters were destroyed in the East, compared to 176 divisions and 23,000 fighters in the West. The two pivotal battles, Stalingrad and El Alamein, differed in scale by a factor of about ten.

This is not to disparage the Western Allied soldiers who fought and died to free the world from Nazism. In particular, the seamen who enabled Lend-Lease, at high risk of lethal submarine attack, to transport indispensables like canned food, trucks and aviation fuel to Russia, possibly played a crucial role in preventing its collapse in 1941-42. And the bomber crews massively disrupted Germany’s war potential at the cost of horrid fatality ratios, significantly shortening the war (albeit it is currently fashionable to castigate them for killing 600,000 people who by and large had no problem with waging a war of extermination responsible for tens of millions of deaths on the Eastern Front).

MYTH II: The Russians just threw billions of soldiers without rifles in front of German machine guns.

REALITY: The vast majority of German soldiers were killed, taken POW or otherwise incapacitated on the Eastern front. The Soviet to Axis loss ratio was 1.3:1 and the USSR outproduced Germany in every weapons system throughout the war.

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