Martial law
The experience of the state defense committee is needed to solve new problems.
Work begins on a unique historical and documentary work "State Defense Committee of the USSR 1941 – 1945." Materials are introduced into scientific circulation, most of which were classified as “Top Secret” and sometimes “Special Importance”. Vladimir Zolotarev, the deputy head of the main editorial commission and scientific director of the fundamental multi-volume work “The Great Patriotic War of 1941 – 1945”, talks about the tasks facing historians.
- You began to use the term “historiosophy” in articles and interviews. What is its modern definition?
- Modern historiosophy is a complex branch of science that synthesizes the study historical (military-historical) knowledge, philosophy of history, history of historiography, science of war. Examines the laws and the spiritual and moral essence of the historical process.
Modern historiosophy also uses the methodological and factual potentials of sociology, demography, social psychology, applied mathematics, statistics, and a number of natural sciences.
From the point of view of epistemology, modern historiosophy is a new level of knowledge. In simple words, the task of modern historiosophy is to give the most convincing answers to the questions: how was it, or how most likely could be, and why, what mattered for historical development.
- What source bases and whose opinions, judgments were collective especially important in the process of working on 12-heavy work?
- First, documents and materials more than 50 domestic and foreign archives. 29 volumes of the Russian Archive. Periodic editions of 1941 – 1945's. The Great Patriotic War 1941 – 1945's, created and published in 90. Collections of documents and materials of the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (USSR), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (USSR), the KGB of the USSR (FSBRF), the Russian Academy of Sciences (Academy of Sciences of the USSR), the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (USSR), “Chronography of War” in five volumes. Multivolume publications on the history of war: “Operations of the Soviet Armed Forces” in four volumes, “History of the Great Patriotic War 1941 – 1945” in six volumes, “History of the Second World War 1939 – 1945” in twelve volumes, “Great Patriotic War 1941– 1945. Military history essays "in four volumes. The multivolume series “The Fatherland's Faithful Sons” of the publishing house “Patriot”. Scientific monographic research. Memories and assessments of the remaining great cohort of front-line soldiers. Multi-volume Book of Memory, materials of regional conferences and events.
Deputy Chairman of the Main Editorial Board - Scientific Supervisor of the Fundamental Multi-Volume Labor “The Great Patriotic War of 1941 – 1945” Vladimir Zolotarev
Andrei Sedykh collage
Andrei Sedykh collage
Memoirs of commanders and military leaders, epistolary sources, front-line film and photo chronicles, painting, fiction, fiction and documentary and chronicle films, both domestic and foreign. Information museums and in the first place the Central Museum of the Armed Forces. Candidate and doctoral dissertations, publications of materials of scientific conferences and symposia, scientific journalism. The analysis of brief points of view was also important. All 12 volumes and two Documents and Materials applications have been published today. The re-release of labor began, the first and second volumes were released. The first and second volumes of World War 1914 – 1918 have been published.
- Vladimir Antonovich, recently it became known that the Research Center of the scientific leader of the fundamental multi-volume work “The Great Patriotic War of 1941 – 1945” begins work on a new major scientific task. It is intended to prepare and publish a large-scale documentary study on the State Defense Committee. What is this project for? What scientific and practical value does it have?
- The fundamental historical and documentary work “The USSR State Defense Committee 1941 – 1945” is created under the supervision of President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, under the leadership of Defense Minister of the Russian Federation Army General Sergei Shoigu, and should lead to a significant expansion of the national historical base in the interests of objective and pragmatic lessons in public administration.
Introduction to the scientific circulation of unique GKO documents, most of which were classified as “Top Secret”, and sometimes “Special Importance”, a detailed review of the reasons for their development and adoption, as well as the results of implementation, a study on the example of GKO evolutionary processes. government, development of its military power and defense complex are extremely relevant, have great government, managerial and political-ideological significance.
The content of work that has, once again, I want to emphasize this, is historical and documentary in nature, should objectively reflect all areas of GKO activity, give a complete systematic historical and scientific understanding of government in the 1941 – 1945 period.
It is important to study in detail the decision-making mechanisms, management methods, ways and means of achieving the goals set, to assess the effectiveness of state administration in the field of the country's security and defense, state and military construction, and foreign policy. The study of historical experience, drawing lessons from it will serve as an objective scientific basis for developing recommendations for the formation of rational approaches to solving modern problems of state building.
This knowledge will bring great benefits not only of state-patriotic, educational, educational and scientific importance, but also in matters of state and military construction, security of the Fatherland.
The preparatory period clearly demonstrated that without previous painstaking archeographic, source-study, research and organizational work on the 12-volume fundamental work “The Great Patriotic War 1941 – 1945 years”, as well as the work “The First World War 1914 – 1918 years” »The task of creating the project" State Defense Committee "would be extremely difficult, and maybe just utilitarian-historical.
Important are experience, generalizations, conclusions, comments, scientific reference and personalized apparatus, lessons on the implementation of T-bills decisions, etc.
I would like to emphasize here that the experience of working on fundamental projects is an important contribution to the development of Russian military history as a relatively independent branch of historical knowledge. An important stage of knowledge and the foundation for numerous scientific research in the future, the creation of textbooks, manuals, lecture courses, solving the problems of patriotic education of citizens of Russia.
- What place did the State Defense Committee occupy in the general system of power of the Soviet Union and what did it represent, so to speak, structurally?
- The State Committee for Defense of the USSR (GKO) was established on 30 on June 1941, as the highest emergency state and party authority. The entire period of World War 1941 – 1945 and up to the end of World War II its decisions had the force of martial law and were obligatory for execution by citizens, government, party, economic bodies, public organizations.
What specifically concerns the structure of the GKO and the main points of its interaction with other state institutions, I want to draw your attention to the scheme.
- What are the role and importance of the USSR GKO as an emergency state authority in achieving Victory in the Great Patriotic War?
- From the moment 30 was established on June 1941 and until 4 was completed on September 1945, the State Defense Committee adopted 9971 resolution and decree, which mainly determined the mobilization of the national economy to the needs of the front: transfer of enterprises to the production of military products technology.
The STB controlled the production of metal, fuel, and electric power, adjusted the work of transport, and promptly supervised the evacuation, and then the re-evacuation.
Much attention was paid to the formation of new units and formations of the Red Army, the selection and appointment of leading cadres at the front and in the rear and many other issues. The tasks were concretized down to the smallest details, which were formulated in the annexes to the GKO resolutions.
- About 10 thousands of GKO orders, not including related sources, scientific comments, reference materials ... How many volumes will include such large-scale work and what forces are planned to use in its preparation?
- It seems to us that, considering the really very significant amount of available documents and analytical materials, it is advisable to publish the work in one hundred volumes, each with an 50 copy of sheets, with a circulation of three thousand copies. The estimated total volume of this unique archival collection is a thousand 131 samples.
Martial law
The work will be based on archival documents, including decrees, orders and mandates (or certificates of mandates) for the entire period of T-bills with the materials attached, on the basis of which they were taken, with explanations and comments, revealing in detail the historical situation, content and features of decisions. It also assumes a wide reliance on research materials analyzing the activities of the T-bills as an emergency authority. Along with explanations and commentaries to the documents, a significant amount of materials will be devoted to comprehensive consideration of issues of state management based on the analysis of history events and decisions of the State Defense Committee on the organization of warfare, activities in the political, economic and social spheres to achieve the strategic goals of war, preservation and further development of the state.
The work is carried out in close cooperation with the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History - the main custodian of the GKO documents, the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
It is proposed to involve scientific organizations of a number of federal ministries and departments, the Russian Academy of Sciences, on a contractual basis, to include prominent historians and specialists in authors' groups as a co-executor of labor.
- What exactly is supposed to do?
- During the development of labor is planned:
-to open the full array of GKO documents, conduct their archeographic description, find the source and complementary documents accompanying them, revealing the course of preparation and implementation of the decisions made;
- to trace the history of the occurrence of conditions and problem situations for each of the considered documents, to analyze the course of discussion and elaboration of the necessary measures and their reflection in the resolutions and decisions of the T-bills;
- to formulate goals and tasks that each document is aimed at, to analyze the features of decision-making mechanisms and ways to implement them:
- to study the main forms and methods of interaction of state short-term bonds and state and party government bodies in solving urgent problems in the field of military, economic and social activities of the state;
identify the most important, key areas of T-bills for various historical periods and assess the effectiveness of the management of state institutions in these areas;
- reliably highlight the activities of the GKO and its influence on the course of warfare and economic confrontation in the Great Patriotic War of 1941 – 1945, as well as the role of the GKO in mobilizing and evacuating the military industry during the initial period of the war and deploying work to put the country on a peaceful footing at the final stage ;
- to investigate the historical necessity and justification of the maximum concentration and centralization of the functions of government in an emergency period, to identify and show with concrete examples the advantages and disadvantages of this form of government;
-to evaluate the effectiveness of centralized control and specific management decisions of the State Defense Committee in the field of military construction, strategic planning, mobilization and deployment of troops, improvement of the structure of the Armed Forces and the activities of military control bodies, comprehensive support of troops, development of the military industry and weapons systems;
- to study the methodology of making management decisions, to analyze the experience of their implementation, to draw lessons and recommendations on the formation of rational approaches to managing the state in crisis situations;
- to outline the prospects for further in-depth studies of various aspects of state activity in the field of managing military construction processes, the development of the defense complex and the economy as a whole, and interaction with foreign countries.
- There is another question that does not directly concern the GKO project, but I cannot ask it. The most difficult and painful topic associated with the war - the loss. There are different, including frankly speculative figures. Could you comment on this problem?
- In the analysis of military losses distinguish irrecoverable and demographic losses. The irretrievable military losses consist of the total number of dead, dead from wounds and diseases, missing and non-combat losses, plus the total number of servicemen captured. Demographic military casualties are the portion of the irretrievable military casualties, which is made up of the total number of dead, dead from wounds and diseases, missing and non-combat casualties, plus the total number of military personnel who died in captivity.
In this respect, a group of specialists led by Colonel-General GF Krivosheev did a tremendous and very necessary work. Her results are published and available. For example, “The Great Patriotic War without secrecy. Book of losses "(M.," Veche ", 2010). Professor B. I. Nigmatulin did a great job in this direction: “The Great Patriotic War of 1941 – 1945. Victims of nations. The battle of the economies of the Soviet Union and Germany "(M., Geotar-Media, 2015). The given data give a fairly objective picture.
Analyzing the demographic losses of the population of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich during the war, it is important to compare them with the similar losses of other countries - the main participants of the Second World War. For the USSR, it is important to consider both the cumulative and demographic losses of the population of individual Soviet republics, now independent states, primarily under occupation.
Modern domestic and foreign scientific data (see, for example, V. Erlikhman. “Population losses in the XX century.” M., “Russian Panorama”, 2004) show that many European countries, even in 2015, did not reach 10 percent of the excess of population relative to the pre-war level (1939 – 1941). These are Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Hungary, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic and Slovakia).
The largest share of demographic losses in relation to the population of the country at the beginning of the war is Belarus - 25,2 percent, that is, every fourth of its inhabitants died during the Great Patriotic War. Poland - 17,3 percent, Ukraine - 16,3, Germany (within the boundaries of 1939) - 15,7, Soviet Union and Russia - 13,5, Lithuania - 12,5, Latvia - 12,2 percent ...
The average loss rate of the population of all countries - the main participants in the Second World War - is about five percent of the population of these countries at the beginning of the war.
Information