Machine gun in the back as a political myth
There's a song that's been sung to guitar accompaniment in Moscow kitchens since the Khrushchev thaw. The lyrics are simple, terrifying, and memorable:
"This company was advancing through the swamp,
And then she was ordered and she went back.
This company in forty-third
"He shot at the barrier detachment with machine guns."
And then she was ordered and she went back.
This company in forty-third
"He shot at the barrier detachment with machine guns."
Good song for the kitchen. Bad. story for the archive.
Where does myth come from?
Any myth is fueled not by pure invention, but by half-truths. Blocking detachments existed. Executions existed. Order 227 of July 28, 1942, known in history as "Not one step back!", existed. From these three facts, it's easy to piece together a picture of total terror behind the backs of Soviet soldiers. The only question is how much of this picture is true, and how much was added later, from memory, hatred, or political necessity.
Summer 1942. The Germans broke through to the Volga. Rostov fell in two days. Stalingrad was under threat. People's Commissar of Defense Stalin signed an order that was read aloud in all units, before the formation. The order was harsh, almost desperate in its tone. It contained a phrase that would be cited for decades: barrier detachments were instructed "in the event of panic and disorderly withdrawal of units, to shoot panickers and cowards on the spot."
An entire mythology has grown out of this phrase. The mythology works simply: an official permit to shoot is taken and inflated into a picture of machine gunners methodically mowing down retreating regiments. The further from the archives, the more terrifying the picture.
But let's take the documents.
What does the General Staff report say?
From August 1 to October 15, 1942, that is, over two and a half months of operation amidst the fiercest fighting near Stalingrad, blocking detachments detained 140,755 soldiers who had fled from the front lines. This is a significant number. Of these:
Arrested: 3,980 people.
Shot: 1,189 people.
Sent to penal companies: 2,776 people.
Sent to penal battalions: 185 people.
131,094 people were returned to their units and transit points.
131,094 out of 140,755 sent back to fight. Not to be expelled. Not to be court-martialed. Back to the front, with weapons in their hands. This is 93 percent of those detained.
1,189 people were executed. That's 0,84 percent. Less than one in a hundred.
Numbers don't make war look better or humane. The war was brutal. People were shot. There were penal battalions where people were sent to die. But the "blocking detachments in the back" as a system of mass destruction of one's own troops, as a mechanism that ground down entire companies and battalions with machine-gun fire, doesn't stand up to even a second of exposure to the original document.
Let's return once again to the period from the beginning of the war to October 10, 1941. Special departments of the NKVD and blocking detachments detained 657,364 military personnel. Of these, 25,878 were arrested. The remaining 632,486, almost all, were formed into units and sent to the front. 10,201 were executed by order of special departments and tribunals. 3,321 were executed in front of the formation, as a deterrent.
War is war, and I won't pretend that 10 executed people don't exist. They do. It's a tragedy. But not the tragedy they sang about in the kitchen.
What is a barrier detachment really?
The very word "zagrad" has become inexorably attached to the image of a punitive detachment standing behind soldiers with machine guns at the ready. It's an image from a movie. A bad movie.
The directive of the Third Directorate of the People's Commissariat of Defense of June 27, 1941, issued on the fourth day of the war, describes the tasks of the barrier detachments as follows: to detain deserters, detain suspicious elements near the front line, conduct a preliminary investigation within one to two days, and hand over those detained to the appropriate authorities.
No machine guns fired at our own. Detention. Investigation. Trial.
As the situation worsened, their powers were expanded. Special departments were given the authority to arrest deserters and, if necessary, execute them on the spot. But in military reality, "necessary circumstances" meant not a company fleeing its positions, but a specific individual caught under specific circumstances.
The history of the barrier detachment of the 3rd Division of the Red Banner Baltic is indicative. fleetFrom the beginning of the war until November 22, 1941, this detachment detained over 900 people. 77 were arrested and convicted. Eleven were shot on the spot or in front of the line. The rest were sent back.
Meanwhile, in the battle for Tallinn, this same barrier detachment lost over 60 percent of its personnel, including almost all of its commanders. First, they held back the retreating troops and returned them to their positions. Then, they took up defensive positions themselves. Then, they died. This doesn't fit the image of cowardly executioners behind someone else's back.
During the defense of Stalingrad, a barrier detachment of the 62nd Army, commanded by Lieutenant of State Security Khlystov, held the line on the approaches to a key height for four days, repelling attacks by German machine gunners. On September 15-16, another barrier detachment fought for two days against superior enemy forces near the Stalingrad railway station. It only withdrew when units of the 10th Rifle Division arrived.
Regular unit commanders viewed the barrier detachments as combat units and sent them into attacks alongside line infantry. For this, they were reprimanded: the barrier detachments lost up to 70 percent of their strength, were reorganized, and their barrier duties were abandoned. The army commanders' logic was clear: they were dealing with seasoned, proven fighters. They used them as best they could.
Voices from the other shore
Army General and Hero of the Soviet Union Pavel Lashchenko stated this directly:
"Yes, there were barrier detachments. But I don't know of any of them firing on their own, at least not on our section of the front. I've already requested archival documents on this matter, but none have been found. The barrier detachments were stationed at a distance from the front lines, covering the troops from the rear against saboteurs and enemy landings, detaining deserters, which, unfortunately, existed; they maintained order at the crossings, and directed soldiers separated from their units to assembly points."
Academician Kirill Kondratyev, a front-line soldier, spoke even more briefly:
"I'm really shocked by such lies. I don't know of any blocking units. I've never seen anything like that in my experience. We pushed forward ourselves, and no one pushed us."
Mansur Abdulin fought at Stalingrad as a volunteer in the 293rd Rifle Division. His memoirs are interesting because he doesn't deny the existence of barrier detachments or executions. But he also describes something else:
"What if ours Tanks, and behind them, the skiers—the blocking detachment. Well, I think, here it is, death! A young Estonian captain comes up to me. "Take the greatcoat from the dead man," he says, "you'll catch a cold..."
Death turned out to be a captain with a greatcoat.
Why were food stations organized at the barrier detachments?
There's one document in the archives that, in my opinion, speaks volumes beyond any argument. A decree of the Leningrad Front Military Council dated September 18, 1941, signed by Zhukov and Zhdanov, ordered the establishment of "feeding stations" within the barrier detachments.
Feeding stations at barrier detachments. If the goal was to execute, why feed the detainees? The answer is obvious to anyone looking at the document without a predetermined verdict: most of the detainees were supposed to be fed, checked, and returned to fight. And so it was.
Providing food for people who were about to be shot in the next few hours isn't just illogical. It's pointless from the perspective of the war effort, which was under mortal strain in 1941-1942. Every kilogram of flour was counted.
What happened to the myth after 1956?
After Stalin's death and Khrushchev's 1956 speech, a rethinking of the war began. This rethinking was necessary and appropriate. But, as often happens, the pendulum swung further than it should. The barrier detachments became the main symbol of Stalin's terror against his own army. The image took root in kitchen folklore, entered fiction, and then Western historiography.
The power of the myth is clear. It explained the catastrophe of 1941-1942 not by military and strategic failures, not by the army's lack of readiness, not by the Wehrmacht's tactical superiority, but by the moral failure of the regime. The soldiers, it was said, were unwilling to fight for Stalin, and executioners stood behind them. Victory was achieved despite, not because of.
This concept is convenient for several reasons. It exonerates everyone who fought poorly. It explains defeats as political, not military, in nature. And it fits into the narrative of total Soviet violence, which was very much needed by certain audiences during the Cold War.
The problem is that the numbers don't support the concept. At all.
How did filtration work?
When a blocking detachment detained a soldier, a process known in documents as filtration began. The detainee was questioned. The circumstances of his departure from his unit were determined. The answers were categorized: escaped encirclement, straggler, lost unit, fled the battlefield, returned from captivity, and self-inflicted rifleman.
This is an important detail. Breaking out of encirclement and fleeing the battlefield are listed as different things in 1942 documents. A person who escaped the German encirclement was checked for enemy agents and then sent to a unit or a special camp. A person who simply fell behind in the chaos of battle was most often sent back immediately.
From a report from the Special Department of the NKVD of the Stalingrad Front, dated August 14, 1942, regarding the 4th Tank Army: of the 363 detained, 93 escaped encirclement, 146 were separated from their units, 52 lost their units, 12 were captured, 54 fled the battlefield, and two had questionable wounds. As a result of the investigation, 187 were sent back to their units, 43 to the recruitment department, 73 to special camps, 27 to penal companies, two to a medical examination, six were arrested, and 24 were executed in front of the formation.
Of the 363 men, 24 were executed. Just under seven percent, and this was during the most brutal fighting, in an army that had just been retreating for several months. Of those 363, more than half returned to duty immediately, and the rest after being refitted.
Legend versus report
There is something I want to say directly, without hiding behind neutral constructions.
The legend of the barrier detachments as a machine for exterminating their own army isn't built on falsifying facts. It's built on a selective interpretation. They take a real order, take a real fact of executions, take the real cruelty of wartime, and from this they assemble a picture in which everything else disappears. The 131,094 men who returned to duty disappear. The barrier detachments that held the heights near Stalingrad for four days disappear. The Estonian captain with the greatcoat disappears.
The war was monstrous. The Soviet system of army command had its harsh characteristics. This requires no justification or mitigation. But history demands precision. Precision tells us this: the blocking detachments were detained first, checked, and returned to their units. They were executed last, and the statistics confirm this with such clarity that the archival document allows for no other interpretation.
General Lashchenko requested documents confirming friendly fire. None were found. Neither he nor other researchers found a single documented case in Soviet archives of a blocking detachment opening fire to kill on retreating units as a mass target.
November 1944 years
On October 29, 1944, People's Commissar of Defense Stalin signed Order No. 0349 on the disbandment of separate barrier detachments. The wording is succinct:
“Due to the change in the general situation on the fronts, the need to further maintain barrier detachments has disappeared.”
By then, the army was advancing. There was no one to detain. Several months before their official disbandment, the barrier detachments had long been guarding headquarters, patrolling roads, and repairing boots for rear-echelon officers, for which they were criticized in a special report from the Political Directorate of the 3rd Baltic Front in August 1944. The formidable military institution quietly transformed into commandant companies.
This in itself is eloquent. If the blocking detachments had been a terror machine, organically necessary to the regime to keep the army in obedience through fear, they would not have been disbanded amidst victories. They were disbanded because they were solving a specific military problem under the specific conditions of a catastrophic retreat. The problem was solved. The detachments left.
What remains
I'm not in the business of rehabilitation. It's impossible to rehabilitate war. We can only understand it more precisely.
Order 227 was issued at a time when the Soviet army was retreating to the Volga, when Rostov fell almost without a fight, and when the command understood that a few more weeks of this and the defense would collapse completely. Under these circumstances, the order demanding that positions be held under penalty of death was not a whim, but a desperate tool of military command, similar to those used by various armies of different countries in various wars.
The question isn't whether the barrier detachments were a humane institution. They weren't. The question is whether they were what the kitchen legend portrays them to be. The answer, as the archival documents reveal, is unequivocal: no.
Of the 140,755 detained soldiers, 131,094 were returned to fight. They weren't hunted down. They were stopped, checked, fed at transit points, and sent back to the front lines. It was these men, many of whom had been held captive by the barrier detachments, who reached Berlin.
A song about a company machine-gunned by its own blocking detachment fits well with three chords. An archival report from the General Staff doesn't fit chords at all. But it tells the story of what really happened. And that, I think, is worth more.
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