On the eve of Victory Day, I would like to raise several important, fundamental issues. I'll try in general outline characterize the pre-war potential of the USSR and Nazi Germany, and also provide data on human losses on both sides, including the latest. There is also the latest data on the number of dead Yakut residents.
The issue of losses in the Second World War has been discussed throughout the world for several years. Exist various estimates, including sensational ones. Quantitative indicators are influenced not only various methods calculations, but also ideology, a subjective approach.
Western countries, led by the USA and England, tirelessly repeat the mantra that victory was “forged” by them in the sands of North Africa, Normandy, on the sea routes of the North Atlantic and through the bombing of industrial facilities in Germany and its allies.
The USSR’s war against Germany and its allies is presented to the Western public as “unknown.” Some residents of Western countries, judging by polls, claim in all seriousness that the USSR and Germany were allies in that war.
The second favorite saying of some Westerners and home-grown “Western-style” liberal democrats is that the Victory over fascism was “littered with the corpses of Soviet soldiers,” “one rifle for four,” “the command threw its soldiers at machine guns, the retreating detachments were shot,” “ millions of prisoners,” without the help of the allied troops, the Red Army’s victory over the enemy would have been impossible.
Unfortunately, after N.S. Khrushchev came to power, some of the Soviet military leaders, in order to elevate their role in the battle against the “brown plague” of the 20th century, described in their memoirs the implementation of orders from the Headquarters of Commander-in-Chief I.V. Stalin, as a result of which Soviet troops suffered unreasonably high losses.
And few people pay attention to the fact that during the period of active defensive, and even offensive battles, the main task was and is to achieve replenishment - additional troops from the reserve. And in order to satisfy the request, you need to provide such a combat note about the large losses of personnel of a particular military unit in order to receive replenishment.
As always, the truth is in the middle!
At the same time, official data on the losses of Nazi armies on the Soviet side were often clearly underestimated or, conversely, overestimated, which led to a complete distortion of statistical data on the military losses of Nazi Germany and its direct allies.
Captured documents available in the USSR, in particular, 10-day reports from OKW (the highest military command of the Wehrmacht), were classified, and only recently have military historians gained access to them.
For the first time, I.V. Stalin announced the losses of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War in 1946. He said that as a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union irretrievably lost about seven million people in battles with the Germans, as well as as a result of the German occupation and the deportation of Soviet people to German penal servitude.
Then N.S. Khrushchev, in 1961, having debunked Stalin’s personality cult, in a conversation with the Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium, mentioned that 20 million people died in the war.
And finally, a group of researchers led by G.F. Krivosheev estimates the total human losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War determined by the demographic balance method, 26.6 million people. This includes all those killed as a result of military and other enemy actions, those who died as a result of military and other enemy actions, those who died as a result higher level mortality during the war in the occupied territory and in the rear, as well as persons who emigrated from the USSR during the war and did not return after its end.
Data on the losses of G. Krivosheev’s group are considered official. In 2001, the updated figures were as follows. USSR casualties:
- 6.3 million military personnel were killed or died from wounds,
- 555 thousand died from illnesses, as a result of accidents, incidents, were sentenced to death,
- 4.5 million– were captured and disappeared;
General demographic losses – 26.6 million Human.
German casualties:
- 4.046 million military personnel were killed, died of wounds, or went missing.
At the same time, the irretrievable losses of the armies of the USSR and Germany (including prisoners of war) are 11.5 million and 8.6 million (not counting 1.6 million prisoners of war after May 9, 1945), respectively.
However, new data is now emerging.
The beginning of the war is June 22, 1941. What was the balance of power between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union? What forces and capabilities did Hitler count on when preparing an attack on the USSR? How feasible was the “Barbarossa” plan prepared by the Wehrmacht General Staff?
It should be noted that in June 1941 the total population of Germany, including its direct allies, was 283 million people, and in the USSR - 160 million. Germany's direct allies at that time were: Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Croatia. In the summer of 1941, the Wehrmacht personnel numbered 8.5 million people; four army groups with a total number of 7.4 million people were concentrated on the border with the USSR. Nazi Germany was armed with 5,636 tanks, more than 61,000 guns of various calibers, and over 10,000 aircraft (excluding the weapons of allied military formations).
General characteristics of the Red Army of the USSR for June 1941. The total number was 5.5 million military personnel. The number of divisions of the Red Army is 300, of which 170 divisions were concentrated on the western borders (3.9 million people), the rest were stationed on Far East(that's why Japan didn't attack) Central Asia, Transcaucasia. It must be said that the Wehrmacht divisions were staffed according to wartime levels, and each had 14-16 thousand people. Soviet divisions were staffed according to peacetime levels and consisted of 7-8 thousand people.
The Red Army was armed with 11,000 tanks, of which 1,861 were T-34 tanks and 1,239 were KV tanks (the best in the world at that time). The rest of the tanks - BT-2, BT-5, BT-7, T-26, SU-5 with weak weapons, many vehicles were idle due to lack of spare parts. Most of the tanks had to be replaced with new vehicles. More than 60% of the tanks were in the troops of the western border districts.
Soviet artillery provided powerful firepower. On the eve of the war, the Red Army had 67,335 guns and mortars. Katyusha multiple launch rocket systems began to arrive. In terms of combat qualities, Soviet field artillery was superior to German, but was poorly equipped with mechanized traction. The needs for special artillery tractors were met by 20.5%.
In the western military districts of the Red Army Air Force, there were 7,009 fighters, and long-range aviation had 1,333 aircraft.
So, at the first stage of the war, qualitative and quantitative characteristics were on the side of the enemy. The Nazis had a significant advantage in manpower, automatic weapons, and mortars. And thus, Hitler’s hopes to carry out a “blitzkrieg” against the USSR were calculated taking into account real conditions and the distribution of available armed forces and means. In addition, Germany already had practical military experience gained as a result of military operations in other European countries. Surprise, aggressiveness, coordination of all forces and means, precise execution of orders from the Wehrmacht General Staff, the use of armored forces on a relatively small section of the front - this was a proven, fundamental tactic of action by military formations of Nazi Germany.
This tactic performed exceptionally well in military operations in Europe; Wehrmacht casualties were small. For example, in France 27,074 were killed German soldiers a, 111,034 injured. At the same time, the German army captured 1.8 million French soldiers. The war ended in 40 days. The victory was absolute.
In Poland, the Wehrmacht lost 16,843 soldiers, Greece - 1,484, Norway - 1,317, and another 2,375 died en route. These “historic” victories of German weapons incredibly inspired Adolf Hitler, and they were given the order to develop the “Barbarossa” plan - a war against the USSR.
It should also be noted that the question of surrender was never raised by Supreme Commander-in-Chief I.V. Stalin; Headquarters quite soberly analyzed and calculated the current military situation. In any case, in the first months of the war there was no panic at the army headquarters; panickers were shot on the spot.
In mid-July 1941 it ended initial period war. Due to a number of subjective and objective factors, Soviet troops suffered serious losses in manpower and equipment. As a result of heavy fighting, using air supremacy, the German armed forces by this time reached the borders of the Western Dvina and the middle reaches of the Dnieper, advancing to a depth of 300 to 600 km and inflicting major defeats on the Red Army, especially on the formations of the Western Front. In other words, the Wehrmacht’s priority tasks were completed. But the “blitzkrieg” tactics still failed.
The Germans met fierce resistance from the retreating troops. The NKVD troops and border guards especially distinguished themselves. Here, for example, is the testimony of a former German sergeant major who participated in the attacks on the 9th outpost of the border city of Przemysl: “...The fire was terrible! We left a lot of corpses on the bridge, but we never took possession of it right away. Then the commander of my battalion gave the order to ford the river to the right and left in order to surround the bridge and capture it intact. But as soon as we rushed into the river, the Russian border guards began to pour fire on us here too. The losses were terrible... Seeing that the plan was failing, the battalion commander ordered fire from 80-mm mortars. Only under their cover did we begin to infiltrate the Soviet shore... We could not advance further as quickly as our command wanted. The Soviet border guards had firing points along the coastline. They sat in them and shot literally until the last cartridge... Nowhere, never have we seen such stamina, such military perseverance... They preferred death to the possibility of captivity or withdrawal...”
Heroic actions made it possible to gain time for the 99th to approach rifle division Colonel N.I. Dementyev. Active resistance to the enemy continued.
As a result of stubborn battles, according to US intelligence services, as of December 1941, Germany lost 1.3 million people killed in the war against the USSR, and by March 1943, Wehrmacht losses already amounted to 5.42 million people (information has been declassified by the American side in our time ).
Yakutia 1941. What was the contribution of the peoples of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to the fight against Nazi Germany? Our losses. Heroic fighters of the Olonkho Land.
As you know, the scientific work “History of Yakutia” has been prepared since 2013. Researcher at the Institute for Humanitarian Research and Problems of Indigenous Peoples of the North SB RAS Marianna Gryaznukhina, author of this chapter scientific work, which talks about the human losses of the Yakut people during the Great Patriotic War, kindly provided the following data: the population of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1941, on the eve of the war, was 419 thousand Human. 62 thousand people were drafted and went to the front as volunteers.
However, this cannot be called the exact number of Yakuts who fought for their Motherland. At the beginning of the war, several hundred people were doing military service in the army, and a number were studying at military schools. Therefore, the number of Yakuts who fought can be considered from 62 to 65 thousand people.
Now about the human losses. IN last years the figure is called 32 thousand Yakutians, but it also cannot be considered accurate. According to the demographic formula, they did not return to the regions from the war; about 30% of those who fought died. It should be taken into account that 32 thousand did not return to the territory of Yakutia, but some soldiers and officers remained to live in other regions of the country, some returned late, until the 1950s. Therefore, the number of residents of Yakutia who died at the front is approximately 25 thousand people. Of course, for the small population of the republic this is a huge loss.
In general, the contribution of the Yakut people to the fight against the “brown plague” is enormous and has not yet been fully studied. Many became combat commanders, demonstrated military training, dedication, and courage in battles, for which they were awarded high military awards. Residents of the Khangalassky district of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) remember the general with warmth Prituzov (Pripuzov) Andrey Ivanovich. Participant of the First World War, commander of the 61st Guards Slavic Red Banner Division. The division fought through Romania, part of Austria and ended its journey in Bulgaria. The military general found his eternal rest in his native Pokrovsk.
How can one not remember on the eve of Victory Day about the Yakut snipers - two of whom were included in the legendary top ten snipers of the Second World War. This is a Yakut Fedor Matveevich Okhlopkov, on whose personal account there are 429 killed Nazis. Before becoming a sniper, he destroyed several dozen fascists with a machine gun and machine gun. A Hero Soviet Union Fyodor Matveevich received it only in 1965. Legendary person!
The second one is Evenk Ivan Nikolaevich Kulbertinov- 489 killed Nazis. He taught sniper training to young Red Army soldiers. Originally from the village of Tyanya, Olekminsky district.
It should be noted that until the end of 1942, the Wehrmacht command missed the opportunity of sniper warfare, for which it paid dearly. During the war, the Nazis began hastily learning sniper art using captured Soviet military equipment. educational films and instructions for snipers. At the front they used the same Soviet captured Mosin and SVT rifles. Only by 1944 did the Wehrmacht military units include trained snipers.
Our colleague, lawyer, Honored Lawyer of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), has passed the worthy path of a front-line soldier. Yuri Nikolaevich Zharnikov. He began his military career as an artilleryman, in 1943 he retrained as a T-34 driver, his tank was hit twice, and the hero himself received severe concussions. He has dozens of military victories, hundreds of killed enemies, and a large number of broken and burned enemy heavy equipment, including German tanks. As Yuri Nikolaevich recalled, the calculation of enemy losses was carried out by the commander of the tank unit, and his concern was the constant maintenance of the mechanical part of the combat vehicle. For military exploits, Yu.N. Zharnikov was awarded many orders and medals, of which he was proud. Today Yuri Nikolaevich is not among us, but we, the lawyers of Yakutia, keep his memory in our hearts.
Results of the Great Patriotic War. Losses of the German armed forces. Loss ratio Hitler's Germany and its direct allies with the losses of the Red Army
Let us turn to the latest publications of a prominent Russian military historian Igor Ludvigovich Garibyan, who did a tremendous amount of statistical work, studying not only Soviet sources, but also captured archival documents of the Wehrmacht General Staff.
According to the Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht High Command - OKW, Wilhelm Keitel, Germany lost 9 million soldiers killed on the Eastern Front, 27 million were seriously wounded (without the possibility of returning to duty), went missing, were captured, all of this is united by the concept of “irretrievable losses.” "
Historian Gharibyan calculated German losses based on 10-day OKW reports, and the following data was obtained:
Germans and Austrians killed during hostilities - 7,541,401 people (data as of April 20, 1945);
Missing – 4,591,511 people.
The total irretrievable losses are 17,801,340 people, including disabled people, prisoners, and those who died from diseases.
These figures concern only two countries – Germany and Austria. The losses of Romania, Hungary, Finland, Slovakia, Croatia and other countries that fought against the USSR are not taken into account here.
Thus, Hungary, with its population of nine million, lost only 809,000 soldiers and officers killed in the war against the Red Army, mostly young people aged 20 to 29 years. 80,000 civilians died in the fighting. Meanwhile, in the same Hungary in 1944, on the eve of the collapse of the fascist regime, 500,000 Hungarian Jews and Gypsies were exterminated, according to Western media mass media they prefer to remain “bashfully” silent.
To sum up, we must admit that the USSR had to fight virtually one-on-one (in 1941-1943) with all of Europe, except England. All factories in France, Poland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Italy worked for the war. The Wehrmacht was provided not only with military materials, but also with the human resources of Germany's direct allies.
As a result, the Soviet people, showing the will to Victory and mass heroism both on the battlefield and in the rear, defeated the enemy and defended the Fatherland from the “brown plague” of the 20th century.
The article is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather - Stroev Gavril Egorovich, a resident of the village of Batamai, Ordzhonikidze district of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the chairman of the Zarya collective farm, who died heroically in the Great Patriotic War in 1943, and all the Yakut residents who did not return from the war.
Yuri PRIPUZOV,
President of the Yakut Republican
Bar Association "Petersburg"
Honored Lawyer of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).
How did official data on USSR losses change?
Recently, the State Duma announced new figures for the human losses of the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War - almost 42 million people. An additional 15 million people were added to the previous official data. The head of the Museum-Memorial of the Great Patriotic War of the Kazan Kremlin, our columnist Mikhail Cherepanov, in the author's column of Realnoe Vremya talks about the declassified losses of the USSR and Tatarstan.
The irretrievable losses of the Soviet Union as a result of the factors of World War II are more than 19 million military personnel.
Despite many years of well-paid sabotage and all possible efforts of generals and politicians to hide the true cost of our Victory over fascism, on February 14, 2017 in State Duma at parliamentary hearings " Patriotic education citizens of Russia: the “Immortal Regiment” finally declassified the figures closest to the truth:
“According to declassified data from the USSR State Planning Committee, the losses of the Soviet Union in World War II amount to 41 million 979 thousand, and not 27 million, as previously thought. The total population decline of the USSR in 1941-1945 was more than 52 million 812 thousand people. Of these, irretrievable losses as a result of war factors are more than 19 million military personnel and about 23 million civilians.”
As stated in the report, this information is confirmed by a large number of authentic documents, authoritative publications and evidence (details on the Immortal Regiment website and other resources).
The history of the issue is as follows
In March 1946, in an interview with the newspaper Pravda, I.V. Stalin announced: “As a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union irrevocably lost about seven million people in battles with the Germans, as well as thanks to the German occupation and the deportation of Soviet people to German penal servitude.”
In 1961 N.S. Khrushchev, in a letter to the Prime Minister of Sweden, wrote: “The German militarists launched a war against the Soviet Union, which claimed two tens of millions of lives of Soviet people.”
On May 8, 1990, at a meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in honor of the 45th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the total number of human losses was announced: “Almost 27 million people.”
In 1993, a team of military historians under the leadership of Colonel General G.F. Krivosheeva published statistical research“The secrecy has been lifted. Losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR in wars, hostilities and military conflicts.” It shows the amount total losses- 26.6 million people, including combat losses published for the first time: 8,668,400 soldiers and officers.
In 2001, a reissue of the book was published under the editorship of G.F. Krivosheev “Russia and the USSR in the wars of the 20th century. Losses of the Armed Forces: A Statistical Study." One of her tables stated that deadweight losses are only Soviet army and the fleet during the Great Patriotic War - 11,285,057 people. (See page 252.) 
In 2010, in the next publication “The Great Patriotic War Without Classification. The Book of Loss”, again edited by G.F. Krivosheev clarified the data on the losses of the armies fighting in 1941-1945. Demographic losses reduced to 8,744,500 military personnel (p. 373):
A natural question arises: where were the mentioned “data from the USSR State Planning Committee” on the combat losses of our Army stored, if even the heads of the special commissions of the Ministry of Defense could not study them for more than 70 years? How true are they?
Everything is relative. It is worth remembering that it was in the book “Russia and the USSR in the Wars of the 20th Century” that we were finally allowed to find out in 2001 how many of our compatriots were mobilized into the ranks of the Red (Soviet) Army during the Second World War: 34,476,700 people (p. . 596.).
If we take the official figure of 8,744 thousand people on faith, then the share of our military losses will be 25 percent. That is, according to the commission of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, only every fourth Soviet soldier and officer did not return from the front.
I think any resident would disagree with this settlement former USSR. In every village or aul there are slabs with the names of their fallen fellow countrymen. At best, they represent only half of those who went to the front 70 years ago.
Statistics of Tatarstan
Let's see what the statistics are in our Tatarstan, on whose territory there were no battles.
In the book of Professor Z.I. Gilmanov’s “Workers of Tatarstan on the Fronts of the Great Patriotic War,” published in Kazan in 1981, stated that the military registration and enlistment offices of the republic sent 560 thousand citizens to the front and 87 thousand of them did not return.
In 2001, Professor A.A. Ivanov in his doctoral dissertation “Combat losses of the peoples of Tatarstan during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.” announced that from 1939 to 1945, about 700 thousand citizens were drafted into the army from the territory of the Tatar Republic, and 350 thousand of them did not return.
As a leader working group editors of the Book of Memory of the Republic of Tatarstan from 1990 to 2007, I can clarify: taking into account natives drafted from other regions of the country, the losses of our Tatarstan during the Second World War amounted to at least 390 thousand soldiers and officers.
And these are irreparable losses for the republic, on whose territory not a single enemy bomb or shell fell!
Are the losses of other regions of the former USSR even less than the national average?
Time will show. And our task is to pull out of obscurity and enter, if possible, the names of all fellow countrymen into the database of losses of the Republic of Tatarstan, presented in the Victory Park of Kazan.
And this should be done not only by individual enthusiasts on their own initiative, but also by professional search engines on behalf of the state itself.
It is physically impossible to do this only in excavations at battle sites in all Memory Watches. This requires massive and constant work in archives published on the websites of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and other thematic Internet resources.
But that's a completely different story...
Mikhail Cherepanov, illustrations provided by the author
Reference
Mikhail Valerievich Cherepanov- Head of the Museum-Memorial of the Great Patriotic War of the Kazan Kremlin; Chairman of the Military Glory Club association; Honored Worker of Culture of the Republic of Tatarstan, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Military historical sciences, laureate of the State Prize of the Republic of Tatarstan.
- Born in 1960.
- Graduated from Kazan State University them. IN AND. Ulyanov-Lenin, majoring in Journalism.
- Since 2007 he has been working at the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan.
- One of the creators of the 28-volume book “Memory” of the Republic of Tatarstan about those killed during the Second World War, 19 volumes of the Book of Memory of Victims of Political Repression of the Republic of Tatarstan, etc.
- Creator eBook in memory of the Republic of Tatarstan (list of natives and residents of Tatarstan who died during the Second World War).
- Author of thematic lectures from the series “Tatarstan during the war years”, thematic excursions “The feat of fellow countrymen on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War”.
- Co-author of the concept of the virtual museum “Tatarstan - to the Fatherland”.
- Participant of 60 search expeditions to bury the remains of soldiers who died in the Great Patriotic War (since 1980), member of the board of the Union of Search Teams of Russia.
- Author of more than 100 scientific and educational articles, books, participant in All-Russian, regional, international conferences. Columnist of Realnoe Vremya.
Calculating the losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War remains one of the scientific problems unsolved by historians. Official statistics– 26.6 million dead, including 8.7 million military personnel – underestimates losses among those who were at the front. Contrary to popular belief, the bulk of the dead were military personnel (up to 13.6 million), and not the civilian population of the Soviet Union.
There is a lot of literature on this problem, and perhaps some people get the impression that it has been sufficiently researched. Yes, indeed, there is a lot of literature, but many questions and doubts remain. There is too much here that is unclear, controversial and clearly unreliable. Even the reliability of the current official data on the human losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War (about 27 million people) raises serious doubts.
History of calculation and official state recognition of losses
The official figure for the demographic losses of the Soviet Union has changed several times. In February 1946, the figure of losses of 7 million people was published in the Bolshevik magazine. In March 1946, Stalin, in an interview with the Pravda newspaper, stated that the USSR lost 7 million people during the war: “As a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union irretrievably lost in battles with the Germans, as well as thanks to the German occupation and the deportation of Soviet people to German hard labor about seven million people." The report “The Military Economy of the USSR during the Patriotic War” published in 1947 by the Chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee Voznesensky did not indicate human losses.
In 1959, the first post-war census of the USSR population was carried out. In 1961, Khrushchev, in a letter to the Prime Minister of Sweden, reported 20 million dead: “Can we sit back and wait for a repeat of 1941, when the German militarists launched a war against the Soviet Union, which claimed the lives of two tens of millions of Soviet people?” In 1965, Brezhnev, on the 20th anniversary of the Victory, announced more than 20 million dead.
In 1988–1993 a team of military historians under the leadership of Colonel General G.F. Krivosheev conducted a statistical study of archival documents and other materials containing information about human losses in the army and navy, border and internal troops of the NKVD. The result of the work was the figure of 8,668,400 casualties of the USSR security forces during the war.
Since March 1989, on behalf of the CPSU Central Committee, a state commission has been working to study the number of human losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War. The commission included representatives of the State Statistics Committee, the Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Defense, the Main Archival Directorate under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the Committee of War Veterans, the Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The commission did not count losses, but estimated the difference between the estimated population of the USSR at the end of the war and the estimated population that would have lived in the USSR if there had been no war. The commission first announced its figure of demographic losses of 26.6 million people at the ceremonial meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on May 8, 1990.
May 5, 2008 President Russian Federation signed the order “On the publication of the fundamental multi-volume work “The Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.” On October 23, 2009, the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation signed the order “On the Interdepartmental Commission for Calculating Losses during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.” The commission included representatives of the Ministry of Defense, FSB, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosstat, and Rosarkhiv. In December 2011, a representative of the commission announced the country’s overall demographic losses during the war period 26.6 million people, of which losses of active armed forces 8668400 people.
Military personnel
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense irrecoverable losses during the fighting on the Soviet-German front from June 22, 1941 to May 9, 1945, there were 8,860,400 Soviet troops. The source was data declassified in 1993 and data obtained during the search work of the Memory Watch and in historical archives.
According to declassified data from 1993: killed, died from wounds and illnesses, non-combat losses - 6 885 100 people, including
- Killed - 5,226,800 people.
- Died from wounds - 1,102,800 people.
- Died from various reasons and accidents, shot - 555,500 people.
On May 5, 2010, the head of the Department of the Russian Ministry of Defense for perpetuating the memory of those killed in defense of the Fatherland, Major General A. Kirilin, told RIA Novosti that the figures for military losses are 8 668 400 , will be reported to the country's leadership so that they are announced on May 9, the 65th anniversary of the Victory.
According to G.F. Krivosheev, during the Great Patriotic War, a total of 3,396,400 military personnel went missing and were captured (about another 1,162,600 were attributed to unaccounted combat losses in the first months of the war, when combat units did not provide any data for these losses reports), that is, in total
- missing, captured and unaccounted for combat losses - 4,559,000;
- 1,836,000 military personnel returned from captivity, 1,783,300 did not return (died, emigrated) (that is, the total number of prisoners was 3,619,300, which is more than together with the missing);
- previously considered missing and were called up again from the liberated territories - 939,700.
So the official irrecoverable losses(6,885,100 dead, according to declassified 1993 data, and 1,783,300 who did not return from captivity) amounted to 8,668,400 military personnel. But from them we must subtract 939,700 re-callers who were considered missing. We get 7,728,700.
The error was pointed out, in particular, by Leonid Radzikhovsky. The correct calculation is as follows: the figure 1,783,300 is the number of those who did not return from captivity and those who went missing (and not just those who did not return from captivity). Then official irrecoverable losses (killed 6,885,100, according to declassified data in 1993, and those who did not return from captivity and missing 1,783,300) amounted to 8 668 400 military personnel.
According to M.V. Filimoshin, during the Great Patriotic War, 4,559,000 Soviet military personnel and 500 thousand persons liable for military service, called up for mobilization, but not included in the lists of troops, were captured and went missing. From this figure, the calculation gives the same result: if 1,836,000 returned from captivity and 939,700 were re-called from those listed as unknown, then 1,783,300 military personnel were missing and did not return from captivity. So the official irrecoverable losses (6,885,100 died, according to declassified data from 1993, and 1,783,300 went missing and did not return from captivity) are 8 668 400 military personnel.
Additional data
Civilian population
A group of researchers led by G. F. Krivosheev estimated the losses of the civilian population of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War at approximately 13.7 million people.
The final number is 13,684,692 people. consists of the following components:
- were exterminated in the occupied territory and died as a result of military operations (from bombing, shelling, etc.) - 7,420,379 people.
- died as a result of a humanitarian catastrophe (famine, infectious diseases, absence medical care etc.) – 4,100,000 people.
- died in forced labor in Germany - 2,164,313 people. (another 451,100 people according to various reasons did not return and became emigrants).
According to S. Maksudov, about 7 million people died in the occupied territories and in besieged Leningrad (of which, 1 million in besieged Leningrad, 3 million were Jews, victims of the Holocaust), and about 7 million more people died as a result of increased mortality in non-occupied territories.
The total losses of the USSR (together with the civilian population) amounted to 40–41 million people. These estimates are confirmed by comparing data from the 1939 and 1959 censuses, since there is reason to believe that in 1939 there was a very significant undercount of male conscripts.
In general, during the Second World War, the Red Army lost 13 million 534 thousand 398 soldiers and commanders killed, missing, died from wounds, diseases and in captivity.
Finally, let's note one more new trend in studying the demographic results of the Second World War. Before the collapse of the USSR, there was no need to estimate human losses for individual republics or nationalities. And only at the end of the twentieth century L. Rybakovsky tried to calculate the approximate amount of human losses of the RSFSR within its then borders. According to his estimates, it amounted to approximately 13 million people - slightly less than half of the total losses of the USSR.
| Nationalitydead military personnel | Number of losses (thousand people) | % to total irrecoverable losses |
| Russians | 5 756.0 | 66.402 |
| Ukrainians | 1 377.4 | 15.890 |
| Belarusians | 252.9 | 2.917 |
| Tatars | 187.7 | 2.165 |
| Jews | 142.5 | 1.644 |
| Kazakhs | 125.5 | 1.448 |
| Uzbeks | 117.9 | 1.360 |
| Armenians | 83.7 | 0.966 |
| Georgians | 79.5 | 0.917 |
| Mordva | 63.3 | 0.730 |
| Chuvash | 63.3 | 0.730 |
| Yakuts | 37.9 | 0.437 |
| Azerbaijanis | 58.4 | 0.673 |
| Moldovans | 53.9 | 0.621 |
| Bashkirs | 31.7 | 0.366 |
| Kyrgyz | 26.6 | 0.307 |
| Udmurts | 23.2 | 0.268 |
| Tajiks | 22.9 | 0.264 |
| Turkmens | 21.3 | 0.246 |
| Estonians | 21.2 | 0.245 |
| Mari | 20.9 | 0.241 |
| Buryats | 13.0 | 0.150 |
| Komi | 11.6 | 0.134 |
| Latvians | 11.6 | 0.134 |
| Lithuanians | 11.6 | 0.134 |
| Peoples of Dagestan | 11.1 | 0.128 |
| Ossetians | 10.7 | 0.123 |
| Poles | 10.1 | 0.117 |
| Karelians | 9.5 | 0.110 |
| Kalmyks | 4.0 | 0.046 |
| Kabardians and Balkars | 3.4 | 0.039 |
| Greeks | 2.4 | 0.028 |
| Chechens and Ingush | 2.3 | 0.026 |
| Finns | 1.6 | 0.018 |
| Bulgarians | 1.1 | 0.013 |
| Czechs and Slovaks | 0.4 | 0.005 |
| Chinese | 0.4 | 0.005 |
| Assyrians | 0,2 | 0,002 |
| Yugoslavs | 0.1 | 0.001 |
The greatest losses on the battlefields of the Second World War were suffered by Russians and Ukrainians. Many Jews were killed. But the most tragic was the fate of the Belarusian people. In the first months of the war, the entire territory of Belarus was occupied by the Germans. During the war, the Belarusian SSR lost up to 30% of its population. In the occupied territory of the BSSR, the Nazis killed 2.2 million people. (The latest research data on Belarus is as follows: the Nazis destroyed civilians - 1,409,225 people, killed prisoners in German death camps - 810,091 people, drove into German slavery - 377,776 people). It is also known that in percentage terms - the number of dead soldiers / the number of population, among the Soviet republics Georgia suffered great damage. Of the 700 thousand residents of Georgia called up to the front, almost 300 thousand did not return.
Losses of the Wehrmacht and SS troops
To date, there are no sufficiently reliable loss figures. German army, obtained by direct statistical calculation. This is explained by the lack of reliable initial data for various reasons. statistical materials O German losses. The picture is more or less clear regarding the number of Wehrmacht prisoners of war on the Soviet-German front. According to Russian sources, Soviet troops 3,172,300 Wehrmacht soldiers were captured, of which 2,388,443 Germans were in NKVD camps. According to German historians, there were about 3.1 million German military personnel in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps.
The discrepancy is approximately 0.7 million people. This discrepancy is explained by differences in estimates of the number of Germans who died in captivity: according to Russian archival documents, 356,700 Germans died in Soviet captivity, and according to German researchers, approximately 1.1 million people. It seems that the Russian figure of Germans killed in captivity is more reliable, and the missing 0.7 million Germans who went missing and did not return from captivity actually died not in captivity, but on the battlefield.
There is another statistics of losses - statistics of burials of Wehrmacht soldiers. According to the annex to the German law “On the Preservation of Burial Sites”, the total number of German soldiers located in recorded burial sites on the territory of the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries is 3 million 226 thousand people. (in the territory of the USSR alone - 2,330,000 burials). This figure can be taken as a starting point for calculating the demographic losses of the Wehrmacht, however, it also needs to be adjusted.
- Firstly, this figure takes into account only the burials of Germans, and a large number of soldiers of other nationalities fought in the Wehrmacht: Austrians (of which 270 thousand people died), Sudeten Germans and Alsatians (230 thousand people died) and representatives of other nationalities and states (357 thousand people died). Of the total number of dead Wehrmacht soldiers of non-German nationality, the Soviet-German front accounts for 75-80%, i.e. 0.6–0.7 million people.
- Secondly, this figure dates back to the early 90s of the last century. Since then, the search for German burials in Russia, the CIS countries and Eastern European countries has continued. And the messages that appeared on this topic were not informative enough. For example, Russian Association war memorials, established in 1992, reported that in the 10 years of its existence it had transferred German Confederation on the care of military graves, information about the burials of 400 thousand Wehrmacht soldiers. However, whether these were newly discovered burials or whether they had already been taken into account in the figure of 3 million 226 thousand is unclear. Unfortunately, it was not possible to find generalized statistics of newly discovered burials of Wehrmacht soldiers. Tentatively, we can assume that the number of graves of Wehrmacht soldiers newly discovered over the past 10 years is in the range of 0.2–0.4 million people.
- Thirdly, many graves of dead Wehrmacht soldiers on Soviet soil have disappeared or were deliberately destroyed. Approximately 0.4–0.6 million Wehrmacht soldiers could have been buried in such disappeared and unmarked graves.
- Fourthly, these data do not include the burials of German soldiers killed in battles with Soviet troops on the territory of Germany and Western European countries. According to R. Overmans, in the last three spring months of the war alone, about 1 million people died. (minimum estimate 700 thousand) In general, approximately 1.2–1.5 million Wehrmacht soldiers died on German soil and in Western European countries in battles with the Red Army.
- Finally, fifthly, the number of those buried also included Wehrmacht soldiers who died a “natural” death (0.1–0.2 million people)
An approximate procedure for calculating the total human losses in Germany
- The population in 1939 was 70.2 million people.
- The population in 1946 was 65.93 million people.
- Natural mortality 2.8 million people.
- Natural increase (birth rate) 3.5 million people.
- Emigration influx of 7.25 million people.
- Total losses ((70.2 – 65.93 – 2.8) + 3.5 + 7.25 = 12.22) 12.15 million people.
conclusions
Let us remember that disputes about the number of deaths continue to this day.
During the war, almost 27 million USSR citizens died (the exact number is 26.6 million). This amount included:
- killed and died from wounds of military personnel;
- those who died from disease;
- those executed by firing squad (based on the results of various denunciations);
- missing and captured;
- representatives of the civilian population, both in the occupied territories of the USSR and in other regions of the country, in which, due to the ongoing hostilities in the state, there was an increased mortality rate from hunger and disease.
This also includes those who emigrated from the USSR during the war and did not return to their homeland after the victory. The vast majority of those killed were men (about 20 million). Modern researchers claim that by the end of the war, of the men born in 1923. (i.e. those who were 18 years old in 1941 and could be drafted into the army) about 3% remained alive. By 1945, there were twice as many women in the USSR as men (data for people aged 20 to 29 years).
In addition to the actual deaths, human losses include a sharp drop in the birth rate. Thus, according to official estimates, if the birth rate in the state had remained at least at the same level, the population of the Union by the end of 1945 should have been 35–36 million more people than it was in reality. Despite numerous studies and calculations, the exact number of those killed during the war is unlikely to ever be known.
The Soviet Union suffered into the Second world war the most significant losses were about 27 million people. At the same time, dividing the dead along ethnic lines has never been welcomed. Nevertheless, such statistics exist.
Counting history
For the first time, the total number of victims among Soviet citizens in World War II was named by the Bolshevik magazine, which published the figure of 7 million people in February 1946. A month later, Stalin cited the same figure in an interview with the Pravda newspaper.
In 1961, at the end of the post-war population census, Khrushchev announced the corrected data. “Can we sit with our hands folded and wait for a repeat of 1941, when the German militarists launched a war against the Soviet Union, which claimed two tens of millions of lives of Soviet people?” wrote the Soviet Secretary General to Swedish Prime Minister Fridtjof Erlander.
In 1965, on the 20th anniversary of the Victory, the new head of the USSR, Brezhnev, stated: “Such a brutal war that the Soviet Union endured has never befallen any nation. The war claimed more than twenty million lives of Soviet people.”
However, all these calculations were approximate. Only at the end of the 1980s, a group of Soviet historians under the leadership of Colonel General Grigory Krivosheev was allowed to access the materials of the General Staff, as well as the main headquarters of all branches of the Armed Forces. The result of the work was the figure of 8 million 668 thousand 400 people, reflecting the losses of the security forces of the USSR during the entire war.
The final data on all human losses of the USSR for the entire period of the Great Patriotic War was published by a state commission working on behalf of the CPSU Central Committee. 26.6 million people: this figure was announced at the ceremonial meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on May 8, 1990. This figure remained unchanged, despite the fact that the methods for calculating the commission were repeatedly called incorrect. In particular, it was noted that the final figure included collaborators, “Hiwis” and other Soviet citizens who collaborated with the Nazi regime.
By nationality
Counting those killed in the Great Patriotic War by nationality for a long time no one was doing it. Such an attempt was made by historian Mikhail Filimoshin in the book “Human Losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR.” The author noted that the work was significantly complicated by the lack of a personal list of the dead, dead or missing, indicating nationality. Such a practice was simply not provided for in the Table of Urgent Reports.
Filimoshin substantiated his data using proportionality coefficients, which were calculated on the basis of reports on the number of military personnel of the Red Army according to socio-demographic characteristics for 1943, 1944 and 1945. At the same time, the researcher was unable to establish the nationality of approximately 500 thousand conscripts who were called up for mobilization in the first months of the war and went missing along the way to their units.
1. Russians – 5 million 756 thousand (66.402% of the total number of irretrievable losses);
2. Ukrainians – 1 million 377 thousand (15.890%);
3. Belarusians – 252 thousand (2.917%);
4. Tatars – 187 thousand (2.165%);
5. Jews – 142 thousand (1.644%);
6. Kazakhs – 125 thousand (1.448%);
7. Uzbeks – 117 thousand (1.360%);
8. Armenians – 83 thousand (0.966%);
9. Georgians – 79 thousand (0.917%)
10. Mordovians and Chuvashs – 63 thousand each (0.730%)
Demographer and sociologist Leonid Rybakovsky, in his book “Human Losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War,” separately counts civilian casualties using the ethnodemographic method. This method includes three components:
1. Death of civilians in combat areas (bombing, artillery shelling, punitive operations, etc.).
2. Failure to return part of the ostarbeiters and other population who served the occupiers voluntarily or under duress;
3. increase in population mortality beyond normal level from hunger and other deprivations.
According to Rybakovsky, the Russians lost 6.9 million civilians in this way, the Ukrainians - 6.5 million, and the Belarusians - 1.7 million.
Alternative estimates
Historians of Ukraine present their methods of calculation, which relate primarily to the losses of Ukrainians in the Great Patriotic War. Researchers on Square refer to the fact that Russian historians adhere to certain stereotypes when counting victims, in particular, they do not take into account the contingent of correctional labor institutions, where a significant part of the dispossessed Ukrainians were kept, whose serving their sentences was replaced by being sent to penal companies.
Head of the research department of the Kyiv “National Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945” Lyudmila Rybchenko refers to the fact that Ukrainian researchers have collected a unique fund documentary materials on accounting of human military losses of Ukraine during the Great Patriotic War - funerals, lists of missing persons, correspondence on the search for the dead, loss accounting books.
In total, according to Rybchenko, more than 8.5 thousand archival files were collected, in which about 3 million personal certificates about dead and missing soldiers called up from the territory of Ukraine. However, the museum worker does not pay attention to the fact that representatives of other nationalities also lived in Ukraine, who could well have been included in the number of 3 million victims.
Belarusian experts also provide estimates of the number of losses during the Second World War, independent of Moscow. Some believe that every third resident of the 9 million population of Belarus became a victim of Hitler's aggression. One of the most authoritative researchers on this topic is considered to be a professor at the State University pedagogical university Doctor of Historical Sciences Emmanuel Ioffe.
The historian believes that in total in 1941-1944, 1 million 845 thousand 400 inhabitants of Belarus died. From this figure he subtracts 715 thousand Belarusian Jews who became victims of the Holocaust. Among the remaining 1 million 130 thousand 155 people, in his opinion, about 80% or 904 thousand people are ethnic Belarusians.
Editor's note. For 70 years, first the top leadership of the USSR (by rewriting history), and later the government of the Russian Federation, supported a monstrous and cynical lie about the greatest tragedy of the 20th century - World War II
Editor's note . For 70 years, first the top leadership of the USSR (by rewriting history), and later the government of the Russian Federation, supported a monstrous and cynical lie about the greatest tragedy of the 20th century - World War II, mainly by privatizing victory in it and keeping silent about its cost and the role of other countries in the outcome war. Now in Russia they have made a ceremonial picture out of victory, they support victory at all levels, and the cult St. George ribbon reached such an ugly form that it actually grew into outright mockery of the memory of millions of fallen people. And while the whole world mourns for those who died fighting Nazism or became its victims, eReFiya is organizing a blasphemous Sabbath. And over these 70 years, the exact number of losses of Soviet citizens in that war has not been finally clarified. The Kremlin is not interested in this, just as it is not interested in publishing statistics on the deaths of Russian military personnel in the Donbass, in the Russian-Ukrainian war, which it unleashed. Only a few who did not succumb to the influence of Russian propaganda are trying to find out the exact number of losses in WWII.
In the article that we bring to your attention, the most important thing is that the Soviet and Russian authorities did not care about the fate of how many millions of people, while promoting their feat in every possible way.
Estimates of the losses of Soviet citizens in World War II have a huge range: from 19 to 36 million. The first detailed calculations were made by the Russian emigrant, demographer Timashev in 1948 - he came up with 19 million. The maximum figure was called by B. Sokolov - 46 million. The latest calculations show , that the USSR military alone lost 13.5 million people, but the total losses were over 27 million.
At the end of the war, long before any historical and demographic studies, Stalin named the figure - 5.3 million military losses. He also included missing persons (obviously, in most cases, prisoners). In March 1946, in an interview with a correspondent of the Pravda newspaper, the generalissimo estimated the human losses at 7 million. The increase was due to civilians who died in the occupied territory or were deported to Germany.
In the West, this figure was perceived with skepticism. Already at the end of the 1940s, the first calculations of the demographic balance of the USSR during the war years appeared, contradicting Soviet data. An illustrative example is the calculations of the Russian emigrant, demographer N. S. Timashev, published in the New York “New Journal” in 1948. Here is his technique.
The All-Union Population Census of the USSR in 1939 determined its number at 170.5 million. Growth in 1937-1940. reached, according to his assumption, almost 2% for each year. Consequently, the population of the USSR by mid-1941 should have reached 178.7 million. But in 1939-1940. were annexed to the USSR Western Ukraine and Belarus, the three Baltic states, the Karelian lands of Finland, and Romania returned Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Therefore, minus the Karelian population who went to Finland, the Poles who fled to the West, and the Germans repatriated to Germany, these territorial acquisitions gave a population increase of 20.5 million. Considering that the birth rate in the annexed territories was no more than 1% in year, that is, lower than in the USSR, and also taking into account the short time period between their entry into the USSR and the beginning of World War II, the author determined the population growth for these territories by mid-1941 at 300 thousand. Consistently adding up the above figures, he received 200.7 million who lived in the USSR on the eve of June 22, 1941.
Next, Timashev divided 200 million into three age groups, again based on data from the 1939 All-Union Census: adults (over 18 years old) - 117.2 million, adolescents (from 8 to 18 years old) - 44.5 million, children (under 8 years old) - 38.8 million. In this he took into account two important circumstances. First: in 1939-1940. from childhood Two very weak annual streams, born in 1931-1932, moved into the group of teenagers during the famine, which covered large areas of the USSR and negatively affected the size of the teenage group. Second: in the former Polish lands and Baltic states there were more people over 20 years of age than in the USSR.
Timashev supplemented these three age groups with the number of Soviet prisoners. He did it in the following way. By the time of the elections of deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in December 1937, the population of the USSR reached 167 million, of which voters made up 56.36% of the total figure, and the population over 18 years of age, according to the All-Union Census of 1939, reached 58.3%. The resulting difference of 2%, or 3.3 million, in his opinion, was the population of the Gulag (including the number of those executed). This turned out to be close to the truth.
Next, Timashev moved on to post-war figures. The number of voters included in the voting lists for the elections of deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the spring of 1946 amounted to 101.7 million. Adding to this figure the 4 million Gulag prisoners he calculated, he received 106 million adult population in the USSR at the beginning of 1946. When calculating the teenage group, he took as a basis the 31.3 million primary and secondary school students in 1947/48 academic year, compared with data from 1939 (31.4 million schoolchildren within the borders of the USSR before September 17, 1939) and arrived at a figure of 39 million. When calculating the children’s group, he proceeded from the fact that by the beginning of the war the birth rate in the USSR was approximately 38 per 1000, in the second quarter of 1942 it decreased by 37.5%, and in 1943-1945. - half.
Subtracting from each year group the percentage due according to normal table mortality rate for the USSR, it received 36 million children at the beginning of 1946. Thus, according to his statistical calculations, in the USSR at the beginning of 1946 there were 106 million adults, 39 million adolescents and 36 million children, and a total of 181 million. Timashev’s conclusion is as follows: the population of the USSR in 1946 was 19 million less than in 1941.
Other Western researchers came to approximately the same results. In 1946, under the auspices of the League of Nations, F. Lorimer’s book “The Population of the USSR” was published. According to one of his hypotheses, during the war the population of the USSR decreased by 20 million.
In the article “Human Losses in the Second World War,” published in 1953, the German researcher G. Arntz came to the conclusion that “20 million people is the closest figure to the truth of the total losses of the Soviet Union in the Second World War.” The collection including this article was translated and published in the USSR in 1957 under the title “Results of the Second World War.” Thus, four years after Stalin’s death, Soviet censorship released the figure of 20 million into the open press, thereby indirectly recognizing it as correct and making it available, at least, to specialists: historians, international affairs experts, etc.
Only in 1961, Khrushchev, in a letter to Swedish Prime Minister Erlander, admitted that the war against fascism “claimed two tens of millions of lives of Soviet people.” Thus, compared to Stalin, Khrushchev increased Soviet casualties by almost 3 times.
In 1965, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Victory, Brezhnev spoke of “more than 20 million” human lives lost by the Soviet people in the war. In the 6th, final, volume of the fundamental “History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union” published at the same time, it was stated that of the 20 million dead, almost half “were military and civilians killed and tortured by the Nazis in the occupied Soviet territory" In fact, 20 years after the end of the war, the USSR Ministry of Defense recognized the death of 10 million Soviet troops.
Four decades later, the head of the Institute's Center for Military History of Russia Russian history RAS Professor G. Kumanev, in a line-by-line commentary, told the truth about the calculations carried out by military historians in the early 1960s when preparing the “History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union”: “Our losses in the war were then determined at 26 million. But the highest authorities turned out to be accepted the figure is “over 20 million.”
As a result, “20 Million” not only took root in historical literature for decades, but also became part of the national consciousness.
In 1990, M. Gorbachev announced a new figure for losses obtained as a result of research by demographers - “almost 27 million people.”
In 1991, B. Sokolov’s book “The Price of Victory” was published. The Great Patriotic War: the unknown about the known.” It estimated direct military losses of the USSR at approximately 30 million, including 14.7 million military personnel, and “actual and potential losses” at 46 million, including 16 million unborn children.”
A little later, Sokolov clarified these figures (he added new losses). He obtained the loss figure as follows. From the size of the Soviet population at the end of June 1941, which he determined to be 209.3 million, he subtracted 166 million who, in his opinion, lived in the USSR on January 1, 1946, and received 43.3 million dead. Then, from the resulting number, I subtracted the irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces (26.4 million) and received the irretrievable losses of the civilian population - 16.9 million.
“We can name the number of Red Army soldiers killed during the entire war, which is close to reality, if we determine the month of 1942, when the losses of the Red Army in the dead were taken into account most fully and when it had almost no losses in prisoners. For a number of reasons, we chose November 1942 as such a month and extended the ratio of the number of dead and wounded obtained for it to the entire period of the war. As a result, we came to a figure of 22.4 million Soviet military personnel killed in battle and died from wounds, illnesses, accidents and executed by tribunals.”
To the 22.4 million received in this way, he added 4 million soldiers and commanders of the Red Army who died in enemy captivity. This is how it turned out to be 26.4 million irretrievable losses suffered by the Armed Forces.
In addition to B. Sokolov, similar calculations were carried out by L. Polyakov, A. Kvasha, V. Kozlov and others. The methodological weakness of this kind of calculations is obvious: the researchers proceeded from the difference between the size of the Soviet population in 1941, which is known very approximately, and the size of the post-war population USSR, which is almost impossible to accurately determine. It was this difference that they considered the total human losses.
In 1993, a statistical study “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed: Losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR in Wars, Combat Actions and Military Conflicts” was published, prepared by a team of authors headed by General G. Krivosheev. The main source of statistical data was previously secret archival documents, primarily reports of the General Staff. However, the losses of entire fronts and armies in the first months, and the authors specifically stipulated this, were obtained by calculation. In addition, the reporting of the General Staff did not include the losses of units that were not organizationally part of the Soviet Armed Forces (army, navy, border and internal troops of the NKVD of the USSR), but were directly involved in the battles: people's militia, partisan detachments, groups of underground fighters.
Finally, the number of prisoners of war and missing in action is clearly underestimated: this category of losses, according to the reports of the General Staff, totals 4.5 million, of which 2.8 million remained alive (were repatriated after the end of the war or again drafted into the ranks of the Red Army in the liberated from the occupiers of the territory), and, accordingly, the total number of those who did not return from captivity, including those who did not want to return to the USSR, amounted to 1.7 million.
As a result, the statistical data in the “Classified as Classified” directory was immediately perceived as requiring clarification and additions. And in 1998, thanks to the publication of V. Litovkin “During the war years, our army lost 11 million 944 thousand 100 people,” these data were replenished by 500 thousand reservists drafted into the army, but not yet included in the lists military units and those who died on the way to the front.
The study by V. Litovkin states that from 1946 to 1968, a special commission of the General Staff, headed by General S. Shtemenko, prepared a statistical reference book on losses in 1941-1945. At the end of the commission’s work, Shtemenko reported to the Minister of Defense of the USSR, Marshal A. Grechko: “Taking into account that the statistical collection contains information of national importance, the publication of which in the press (including closed ones) or in any other way is currently not necessary and undesirable, the collection is intended to be kept at the General Staff as a special document, to which a strictly limited circle of persons will be allowed to become familiar.” And the prepared collection was kept under seven seals until the team under the leadership of General G. Krivosheev made its information public.
V. Litovkin’s research sowed even greater doubts about the completeness of the information published in the collection “Classified as Classified”, because a logical question arose: were all the data contained in the “statistics collection of the Shtemenko Commission” declassified?
For example, according to the data given in the article, during the war years, military justice authorities convicted 994 thousand people, of whom 422 thousand were sent to penal units, 436 thousand to places of detention. The remaining 136 thousand were apparently shot.
And yet, the reference book “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed” significantly expanded and complemented the ideas not only of historians, but of everyone Russian society about the price of the Victory of 1945. It is enough to refer to the statistical calculation: from June to November 1941, the Armed Forces of the USSR lost 24 thousand people every day, of which 17 thousand were killed and up to 7 thousand wounded, and from January 1944 to May 1945 - 20 thousand people , of which 5.2 thousand were killed and 14.8 thousand were wounded.
In 2001, a significantly expanded statistical publication appeared - “Russia and the USSR in the wars of the twentieth century. Losses of the armed forces." The authors supplemented the General Staff materials with reports from military headquarters about losses and notifications from military registration and enlistment offices about the dead and missing, which were sent to relatives at their place of residence. And the figure of losses he received increased to 9 million 168 thousand 400 people. These data were reproduced in volume 2 of the collective work of employees of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Population of Russia in the 20th century. Historical essays", published under the editorship of academician Yu. Polyakov.
In 2004, the second, corrected and expanded, edition of the book by the head of the Center for Military History of Russia at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor G. Kumanev, “Feat and Forgery: Pages of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945,” was published. It provides data on losses: about 27 million Soviet citizens. And in the footnote comments to them, the same addition mentioned above appeared, explaining that the calculations of military historians back in the early 1960s gave a figure of 26 million, but the “high authorities” preferred to accept something else as the “historical truth”: “over 20 million."
Meanwhile, historians and demographers continued to look for new approaches to determining the magnitude of the USSR's losses in the war.
The historian Ilyenkov, who served in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, followed an interesting path. He tried to calculate the irretrievable losses of the Red Army personnel based on the files of irretrievable losses of privates, sergeants and officers. These files began to be created when, on July 9, 1941, a department for recording personal losses was organized as part of the Main Directorate for the Formation and Recruitment of the Red Army (GUFKKA). The responsibilities of the department included personal accounting of losses and compiling an alphabetical card index of losses.
The records were kept in the following categories: 1) dead - according to reports from military units, 2) dead - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 3) missing in action - according to reports from military units, 4) missing - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 5) dead in German captivity , 6) those who died from illnesses, 7) those who died from wounds - according to reports from military units, those who died from wounds - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices. At the same time, the following were taken into account: deserters; military personnel sentenced to forced labor camps; sentenced to capital punishment - execution; removed from the register of irretrievable losses as survivors; those on suspicion of having served with the Germans (the so-called “signals”), and those who were captured but survived. These military personnel were not included in the list of irretrievable losses.
After the war, the card files were deposited in the Archive of the USSR Ministry of Defense (now the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation). Since the early 1990s, the archive began counting registration cards by letters of the alphabet and categories of losses. As of November 1, 2000, 20 letters of the alphabet were processed; a preliminary calculation was carried out using the remaining 6 uncounted letters, which had fluctuations up or down by 30-40 thousand persons.
The calculated 20 letters for 8 categories of losses of privates and sergeants of the Red Army gave the following figures: 9 million 524 thousand 398 people. At the same time, 116 thousand 513 people were removed from the register of irretrievable losses as those who turned out to be alive according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices.
A preliminary calculation based on 6 uncounted letters gave 2 million 910 thousand people as irretrievable losses. The result of the calculations was as follows: 12 million 434 thousand 398 Red Army soldiers and sergeants were lost by the Red Army in 1941-1945. (Recall that this is without losses of the Navy, internal and border troops of the NKVD of the USSR.)
Using the same methodology, the alphabetical card index of irretrievable losses of officers of the Red Army was calculated, which is also stored in the TsAMO of the Russian Federation. They amounted to about 1 million 100 thousand people.
Thus, during the Second World War, the Red Army lost 13 million 534 thousand 398 soldiers and commanders killed, missing, died from wounds, diseases and in captivity.
These data are 4 million 865 thousand 998 people higher than the irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR (payroll) according to the General Staff, which included the Red Army, sailors, border guards, and internal troops of the NKVD of the USSR.
Finally, we note another new trend in the study of the demographic results of the Second World War. Before the collapse of the USSR, there was no need to estimate human losses for individual republics or nationalities. And only at the end of the twentieth century L. Rybakovsky tried to calculate the approximate amount of human losses of the RSFSR within its then borders. According to his estimates, it amounted to approximately 13 million people - slightly less than half of the total losses of the USSR.
(Quotes: S. Golotik and V. Minaev - “Demographic losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War: history of calculations”, “New Historical Bulletin”, No. 16, 2007.)
