We all change with age. Not only our appearance is changing, but also the attitudes about the boundaries of bad and good, the picture of the surrounding world is refined and complicated. The society is changing in the same way, the point of view is shifting and it is not always easy to catch these changes, being in a modern twitter-like flow of information. You can understand them only by looking from the side for a sufficiently long period of time.
Sometimes the changes are so serious that it is very difficult for different generations to imagine the other’s thinking. In fact, the “fools” were Komsomol members, they threw warm, cozy parent apartments and drove volunteers to uninhabited areas to “shock Komsomol constructions”. Bloody totalitarian regime completely powdered brains. And if we take that Komsomol member and show him a modern social network, he will not believe that he has fallen into the same country. Indeed, the country is completely different, the model of development and values have changed. And this is not good or bad, it is natural. But let's still see where and where we go. And for this we are going to 50 years ago in the sixties.
The end of the Khrushchev thaw and the beginning of the era of stagnation in the USSR, the first man in space, the Soviet dudes, the end of the hippie era and the first Woodstock, created ARPANET - a small jellyfish that will grow into a giant spit called INTERNET. In the west, the economic miracle is unprecedented economic growth in West Germany and France, as well as in Greece, Italy and Japan. They will not pay their price for the miracle soon. At the very beginning of the sixties, the construction of the Berlin Wall draws a line between the Soviet bloc and the west.
Now it is not even believed that our troops and special services then stood in the very center of Europe. The sixties saw the height of the Cold War, the Caribbean crisis showed how close humanity is to repeating recent mistakes on a new scale.
But even then, everyone remembered the last war and the Nuremberg trial, remembered Churchill's speech, and the ceremonial ceremonial Sword of Stalingrad, which before the transfer to the Soviet Union was exhibited with religious honors in several temples in Great Britain, including Westminster Abbey.
It is in 60 that the wonderful book by Alexander Vert “Russia in the 1941-1945 War” is published in the west. Werth was in the USSR from July 1941 to 1946 year as a correspondent for the Sunday Times newspaper and the BBC radio company. In the book, he without any dill and political bias tells about the feat of the Russian people and the war on the eastern front. For the first time the book was published in the USA in 1964, then in England, France, Germany and other countries. And strength was still alive in the memory of people, grinding the Wehrmacht military machine. This power was there, very close, behind the wall.
The Red Army defeated 507 Nazi and 100 divisions of its allies, almost 3,5 times more than the allies on all fronts of World War II. On the Soviet-German front, the German armed forces suffered more than 73% of losses. Here the bulk of the military equipment of the Wehrmacht was destroyed: more than 75% of aircraft (over 70 thousand), up to 75% tanks and assault guns (about 50 thousand), 74% of artillery guns (167 thousand).
For three long years, we fought 3 / 4 of the fascist troops virtually one-on-one, and after breaking and opening the second front, it was 2 / 3.
From 1 418 days active battles were coming 1 320. On the North African front, respectively, from 1 068 - 309; Italian from 663 - 49. The spatial range was: on the front of 4 - 6 thousand km, which is 4 times more North African, Italian and Western European fronts together;
Estimates of losses on our part are very different - the losses of the civilian population are estimated by different authors from 15 to 30 millions. War losses (including those killed in captivity) from official 8,6 to 13 millions.
We will not analyze now who calculated more precisely the causes of these losses. Consider only one indicator from a comparative statistical analysis. Namely, the resistance of the troops is the ratio of the number of killed to the number of prisoners, how many must be killed in order to demoralize the rest. Not to say that the coefficient is absolutely accurate, but when adjusting official losses in a big way, it only increases. For Soviet troops, this is the ratio of 1,7, for Germany and Italy, 0,9, and for the French troops, for example, this ratio was 0,05 - we kill 5 and 100 are thrown weapon. If our grandfathers fought like the French then, there would be no loss of 9 millions, but judging by the numbers, this is not a battle, it is a little more serious than field exercises. I do not detract now the feat of the French resistance, but who would de Gaulle be, would we not defeat Hitler? Now he would be considered an ordinary separatist, sympathizing with the Communists and opposing the legitimate government of Pétain.
And even at the height of the cold war, political scientists and historians of the Western bloc did not equate socialism and fascism, and the inadmissibility of Nazism lay in the laws of many countries.
Let's go back in our days. In the European media you will not hear that every fourth Belarusian died in the war, they don’t recall the blood-drenched land of Ukraine or the millions of Russians who died of diseases, famine, bombings. The genocide and mass destruction of the Orthodox Serbian population is forgotten. But in the Estonian city of Pärnu, a monument to the legionaries of the Estonian Waffen SS division was opened, and in Latvia in Latvia marches of SS legionnaires are held. And in parallel with this, the Balts, together with the Poles, are actively continuing to demand some incomprehensible repentance from Russia.
Ukrainian veterans of the OUN-UPA by decree of President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko of January 29 2010 were recognized as a belligerent and fighters for the independence of Ukraine. There are specific heroes - Roman Shukhevych was the deputy commander in the Nachtigall special unit formed and trained by the Abwehr for operations as part of the Brandenburg 800 commando unit, since May 1943 has been the head of the OUN. October 12 2007 Shukhevych was awarded the honorary title of Hero of Ukraine.
At the international round table "Slave Labor under Nazism. Exploiters and Victims", held in January 27 1999, the former "Ostarbeiter" and Dachau prisoner Boris Grigoryevich Yelchenko voiced a very interesting point - workers from Western countries, unlike ours, were paid , and the French, for example, went home on vacation. Despite this, the compensation paid to the "Westerners" in 7-10 times ours, and since the same 1999, our citizens who worked at German factories are denied the right to compensation. Among these plants are BMW, Bosch, Opel, Siemens and others.
What happened to the world? How did the winners turn into losers in 50 years, and why is it now completely considered normal to equate socialism and fascism? Why are compensations distributed so selectively? Why in some countries are the fascist accomplices called heroes?
There are many reasons. One of them is that we actually fought not just with Germany, in fact it was a war with all continental Europe, and it is simply impossible to forgive our victory, it’s easiest to just forget and replace it with something else. And the second, whether the reason, or the consequence - in the modern media space there is only one crime of fascism. It monopolized and eclipsed almost all that is said about the war. This crime is called the special word "burnt offering" aka Holocaust.
I don’t want to go into conspiracy theories, I don’t have doubts about the murder of many Jews, there are doubts in specific figures, and there are serious complaints about the political dance of Israel on the bones of concentration camp prisoners. I do not understand why, on the one hand, Nazi accomplices are declared heroes and participate in marches, but on the other hand, scientists who do not deny, but simply call for dialogue and express their points of view on exact numbers of murdered Jews are subject to criminal prosecution forfeiting academic ranks and planted for real terms.
A.Magidovich spoke most accurately on this topic, analyzing the adoption of the UN General Assembly resolution 2007 of the year: “Despite the fact that very few people really deny the fact of the Jewish genocide during the Second World War, many people don’t understand why it’s up to the responsibility of denying it ? If the Holocaust is an obvious fact? stories, then why do we need responsibility for denying the obvious? Why would the UN not introduce then the responsibility for denial and other obvious things, say, the sphericity of the earth or the multiplication table? If in the history of the Holocaust there are unobvious moments that are controversial for historians, then again, why is it necessary to legally forbid anyone to doubt? This is reminiscent of the medieval inquisition, which also punished for denying the "obvious" thing - that the earth is flat and stands on three pillars. "
And now, actually, why I even raised this topic. This was prompted by a visit to two places in Berlin: at home near Checkpoint Charlie (Haus am Checkpoint Charlie) and Zeughaus (Zeughaus). The first is the Museum of the Berlin Wall, and the second is the German Historical Museum.
The Berlin Wall Museum is a museum of two ideas - the personal tragedy of people for whom the Cold War was not just an abstraction, and the Iron Curtain is not just a beautiful allegory, but a concrete concrete wall. The second idea of the museum is to show "what evil" the Soviet Union was. The victorious Western bloc once again "kicks" the loser - in the museum, for example, you can see a bunch of medals with the title "scrap metal" or a red flag with the signature "crimes were committed under this flag." So that everyone understands the continuity of the USSR and this Russia, there is a separate room about the bloody deeds of the new regime.
The German Historical Museum gave me the quintessence of everything written above, as usual, in the guidebook - because they are written in such a way as to simply and in a few words convey the necessary thought, the most important thing about a particular epoch or event.
So, the 15-30 of the millions of "Soviet functionaries" are listed last in the list of victims after Jews and Gypsies. And they were killed, it turns out, not even on a racial basis, so in principle there is no question of genocide. Yes, and not particularly sorry for them, because, having visited the previous museum, we remember that crimes were committed under the Soviet flag. And the national socialist state, it turns out, fought not for paradise for the separately chosen Aryan race, but for the sake of exterminating the Jews, to which it applied all its forces.
I want to note another important detail - modern media and the fullness of museums do not always correspond to public opinion, in one of the articles I mentioned the cognitive crisis of school textbooks that absolutely do not express public opinion. The same with the media, they express only the point of view of the capital behind them, or the ruling elite, and not the point of view of the population of a particular country. People still can read and think for themselves. Those who saw the sixties with their own eyes are also alive.
The revision of the results of the Second World War is already obvious to everyone. The UN suffers from a severe form of impotence, which is probably incurable. Does anyone else remember the League of Nations? Unshakable once borders have already been revised, once forgotten territorial claims taken out from under the cloth. Will reconsider such a result of the Second World War, like Israel, I can not judge.
In the museum of the Berlin Wall there is Khodorkovsky, who is not related to it, but for some reason I did not find an exposition about the modern twin - the Israeli security wall in Jerusalem. After all, as historical experience has shown - the walls that passed by the fate of people sooner or later collapse. But how it will be, and whether it will be at all - only time will tell.