Victory in the name of Victory

(On the 77th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War)

In our Bolshevik press, on behalf of the Central Committee of the AUCPB, a number of articles were published under the general title “The USSR in the Great Patriotic War and World War II”, in which the Bolshevik position on the causes of the war and the decisions of the Soviet leadership at various stages: from the beginning to victory The tragic events for the Soviet Union in 1941 are devoted to the articles “How the preparation of German aggression began,” “USSR on the eve of World War II”, “The Barbarossa Fascist Plan,” “Time of Severe Testing. Birth of the Soviet Guard ”,“ Battle for Moscow ”, etc. These articles can be found in the AUCPB website.

In the article below, the author suggests that readers take a look at the question of the beginning of the war from the other side: the timeliness and wisdom of the decision taken by Comrade Stalin about the transfer of Soviet military factories and enterprises providing them to the east.

What value orientation ultimately determined the outcome of the struggle in the summer of 1941?

Any war in that part, as regards only the means of violence to achieve a general political goal, solves three tasks separately or simultaneously:

- destruction (defeat) of the armed forces of the enemy;

- the seizure of its territory as the exclusion of its resources from the struggle;

- destruction (undermining) of the military-economic potential.

Starting the war, the Wehrmacht’s main goal of its actions was to destroy the Armed Forces of the USSR, that is, the regular army and navy. The achievement of the other two was supposed to be a consequence of the first, while the third task was hardly considered. The implication was that the seizure of the territory meant the seizure of its military-economic potential. This was completely justified in the West, moreover - special strikes by aviation on the economic centers of the defeated enemy were perceived as harmful to themselves - after all, it would still get the winner. Measures to destroy the military-economic potential of the enemy were theoretically recognized only to the extent that the prospect of a long war, which was previously declared excluded, arose, as long as the struggle is continental in nature and does not concern the United States.

Therefore, in the first hours of the war, the German command was in extreme alarm - would not the Russians begin withdrawing troops from the frontier, removing them from the strike of the Wehrmacht? And with what relief, even exultation, it took on massive counterstrikes of the Soviet troops on the afternoon of June 22 and the whole week until June 28. Everything went even better than planned! The Russians, who were thrown into battle by the petrified will, did not leave - attacked under Shaulyaev, Bialystok, Brest, Calvary, Rovno, Lutsk, Kovel, Vladimir-Volynsky, Peremyshl, in a fierce rush wedging into the disposition of German troops, more and more covered with iron pincers of tank wedges. It was an exciting war - dangerous and at the same time triumphantly entrancing!

The enemy was strong, struck by the abundance of technology - but everything happened in accordance with the canons of the classic military science of Clausewitz - Schlieffen! Already at the end of the second week of the war, General G. Halder, Chief of Staff of the Ground Forces, wrote down a phrase stating that France was defeated in 40 days, Russia should be expected to collapse in even shorter terms!

What was behind the desperate counterattacks of the doomed associations and corps of Khacklevich, Mikushev, Puganov, Petrovsky, Karpezo? What compared with the total death of cavalry divisions near Bialystok?

Immediately disappears the assumption of vain attempts to prevent a deep invasion, to save the territory. If the hostilities of the first two or three days were determined by the “offensive” content of the General Staff’s emergency packages, opened on alert, then on June 25, the announced directive on the creation of a state defense zone along the Western Dvina-Dnieper-Sinyukha line would be canceled, recognizing the entire territory west of its potential loss!

Along with this, the circumstances indicated already reject the assumption of special concern for the maintenance of a cadre army in peacetime. The directive of June 25 meant the recognition of the defeat of the army in the border battle. And if the purely military side of events was recognized as the main one (and what else could have been in the war?), We should simultaneously give the troops a directive on a quick exit from the blow by an eastward retreat, doubling the pace of retreat and proceeding to damage the roads, bridges, ferries Full motorization "in the European version" tied the German army to the roads and made it particularly sensitive to such actions that do not require much time and effort. There is a completely opposite picture: the army can quickly retreat - it is forced to counterattack, holding on to certain areas, it can be saved - it is being killed! Indicative in this respect is the tragic fate of the commander of the 4th Army of the Western Front, General Klimovsky, who militarily carried out the feat of valor - on the edge of the strike of the southern region for four weeks



Leading the Army Group “Center”, again and again collecting the army units that were being cut by tank wedges of the Wehrmacht, he opposed the Guderian group and the 4th Kluge army. I never allowed the entourage or let Guderian to the operational space eastward, which was an outstanding achievement, an instructive example of active defense against the territory’s sacrifice - but shot because he OCCURED while his comrades Boldin, Golubev, Kurochkin, Kurasov boldly, but from a military point of view, they unproductively attacked, were surrounded, quickly lost troops, but served impassively!

What was it in a belligerent country that Stalin put for some time above the fate of the army in the field?

On June 25, the troops received a directive to exit the strike - the day before, on June 24, a discreet Evacuation Council (Chairman Shvernik, Deputy Kosygin) was quietly created.

Some strange aberrations begin when you get closer to this advice:

- “eyewitnesses claim” that Stalin, in the first days of the war, expressed unjustified optimism about the imminent turning point in the course of hostilities — but this Council was “declared” on the 24th, i.e. “Resolved” on the 23rd, i.e. no later than the first 48 hours (!) of war;

- “eyewitnesses claim” that Stalin was depressed in the first days of the war, did little to do business - and the gigantic instantaneous deployment of this Council’s activity raised the industry of 7 republics at once, 60 regions without hitch, without a single question!

Omnipotent Organs, Gosplan, Gossnab, VosO, a dozen first-rank commissariats in unconditional subordination and to whom? - “Council”, and even somehow not “important”. Who is Schwernik? Do you know Schwernik? Trade unionist, secretary of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions! And Kosygin? Who is Kosygin? Commissar of the textile industry! Even the People's Commissariat of water transport was better known. And suddenly Voznesensky, Beria, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Khrushchev bowed before them ?!

Yes fullness, wake up! “By the claws I recognize the lion!” Leibniz would exclaim. Who, except for Stalin, embodied in the all-powerful VKP (b), the most effective structure of management and rule, of known history, could carry out this work, the unheard of difficulty and the enormous consequences of which are already obvious to us? Whose captain-cap would have been able to unleash any obstacle, knock off any ambition, put a swan, a crab and a pike in one cart? - even if it comes from A. N. Kosygin ...

And who, besides this professional revolutionary-conspirator, could obscure her so much that neither allies, nor enemies, nor we, living more than seven decades later, and knowing its weight, can in no way determine her rank among other tasks solved by him in 1941 as important among the important ...

The very sequence of decision making - the 24th about evacuation and the 25th about strategic defense - indicates that Stalin considered the most important in the conditions of an extremely unfavorable start of war: to preserve the military-economic potential, according to the conditions of the 30s 80% west of the Volga, the preliminary work on the movement of which had already begun in 1939 under the conveniently incomprehensible sign “the construction of doublers”. The creation of the Evacuation Council meant that no later than the morning of the 23rd, and, most likely, in the second half of the 22nd, I. Stalin came to the conclusion that the army was defeated in a border battle - perhaps he considered the initial task in 1941 to be inevitable , although it was extremely difficult to put up with it and delayed the final decision ...

Somewhere in the twilight hours from the evening of the 22nd until the morning of the 24th, Kutuzov's dilemma in all its form in cruelty appeared in a new form - which is more important for the fate of the country: the preservation of the personnel army of peacetime, which came under a compelling blow, or the salvation of the military industry en masse in the invasion zone?

The outcome of the war, the fate of the world ultimately depended on the correctness of his choice:

- to throw industry and quickly withdraw deep into the country to save the 4.7 million peacetime army as the basis for the deployment of massive Armed Forces ... that's just what they will go into battle in 5-6 months when the mobilization reserves begin to dry up;

- or, by donating the cadre army, to evacuate the industry and, relying on the 20–25 million conscription contingent in the country, recreate it again ... but will not the death of cadre parts fall into a dam, after which the roaring element will absorb everything? How to prevent this threat?

On June 24, the visible part of the decision was cast into the directive on the creation of the Council for Evacuation - Stalin decided a dilemma in favor of the industry! The cadre army was supposed to sacrifice itself ... but not to the last soldier!

In that enormous maneuver with military potential through space and time, the territory typologically partly coinciding with the maneuver in 1812, the cadre army played not the main and exclusive melody, but a tune connected to a common symphony:

- it did not allow the enemy to move quickly into the interior of the military-industrial centers;

- attracted air strikes, including long-range bomber, removing them from highways, industrial sites,


run racks;

- bleeding, kept in itself a reserve of the last term, by December reduced to forty Far-Eastern divisions;

- served as bait, teased the general-Prussian arsenal by the number of prisoners, the numbers of destroyed corps and divisions, the shower of the Iron Crosses, Berlin radio fans, for the silver spills of which hundreds of factories rising from their place were not heard!

It was the army that paid with its blood the transfer through the space of 1,523 factories and 10 million personnel - but the price turned out to be terrible: out of 4 million 200 thousand fighters and commanders of the Red Army who took part in defensive battles against the superior forces of the Wehrmacht, many died a brave or captivity!

Was it possible to avoid such victims?

A simple calculation shows that in order to withdraw the troops of the West and South-West directions from the strike of the Wehrmacht, it was necessary to carry out a strategic retreat with an average speed of 25-30 km per day instead of 12-15 km of real, i.e. The entry of German troops into the industrial centers of the South would have begun 25-30 days earlier. What does this mean, says the example of Krivorozhie, the admission of the enemy in which began in mid-August. Even with the utmost exertion of forces, only the equipment of the aircraft engine factories and the Dneprovsky aluminum plant were taken out by this time, with the last echelons leaving when German tanks entered industrial zones. The lack of time was so severe that we had to leave the equipment of the artillery factories, without which it could have been done to the extreme. They did not even have time to destroy the technical documentation, according to which the Germans in 1942 started the production of Shevyrin’s very valuable 120-mm mortar. What would we have taken out if the Germans had entered a month earlier?

The picture of the development under the “army priority” is the following fact: the “released” Soviet troops left the city of Raisin so quickly that the Germans did not occupy it for two days; during this time, the party-Soviet apparatus of the Council for Evacuation managed to take out the only production of optical glass in the USSR ... For other things, this example shows once again that, technically, the army in 1941 could get away from the blow - and in 1942 in a strategic retreat, with the same degree of motorization, she never allowed herself to surround herself; the rate of the German offensive of 1942 from Kharkov to the Caucasus was approximately equal to the summer of 1941.

And here we must digress and emphasize one very important fact that many current historians do not always talk about: none of the capitalist countries in the world could in principle provide such high rates of industry evacuation as the Soviet Union showed even if it wanted to. Any capitalist state, having fallen into such extremely unfavorable conditions as the Soviet state fell into, was doomed to certain death. The presence of private property, when each enterprise has its own owner, binds relationships between enterprises and does not allow them to be managed quickly according to a single plan. Modern capitalist reality in the territory of the USSR is proof of this: at present, the solution of many operational issues between enterprises due to the lack of money for consumers of services stretches for many days and even months, because First of all, an advance payment is required for a product or service, and only then is the work done. In the Soviet Union, where national property prevailed, relations between enterprises were simplified: it was often enough to call one leader to another so that work would begin and decisions of higher authorities would be carried out without question.

Finally, it remains to say when I. Stalin changed the distribution of the ranks of his tasks of the Supreme Commander, in October 1941, calling G. K. Zhukov on the command post of the Western Front, he asked if it was possible to keep Moscow without answering a counter-demand, like was in the case of Mogilev, Smolensk, Bryansk, Kiev, Kharkov, Tikhvin, Rostov-on-Don, i.e. putting military priority on a place independent of other circumstances, freeing it from the conditionality of saving the military-industrial potential, which has already moved beyond the Volga. The first great task of the war was solved - the Army now became the Main, but not the Only.

Great choice

The decision of I. V. Stalin in 1941 was foreshadowed in 1945 and the greatest take-off of the USSR in the 1950s – 1980s - another one alienated our death as a great power until the autumn of 1942, with a very likely prospect of complete destruction ...

World history does not know the decision so hard and so significant that Joseph Stalin made and implemented in the summer of 1941, a decision that put forward him as the Greatest Supreme Commander, who realized the war not as a game with chips of armies and fleets, but as a great concentration of Economics, Politics, Ideology , Space, Time, Will, Spirit, Armed Forces. The victory of 1945 put him at immeasurable height above any domestic military figure. Sometimes they try to shield him from G. K. Zhukov — an untenable attempt. Georgy Konstantinovich was only a strategist, a troop driver, a talented commander who did not feel at all, for example, the political side of the war, and in a purely military field, limited by his land horizons and lack of understanding of the role of the fleet in the global military picture, which affected not as Minister of Defense of the USSR in the 50s.

The appointment of G. K. Zhukov to the post of Commander-in-Chief of the ground forces in 1945 was the ceiling for the First Marshal of that Stalinist cohort of generals, such as Rokossovsky, Vasilevsky, Shaposhnikov, Meretskov, Govorov, Tolbukhin, Timoshenko, Sokolovsky, Malinovsky, with his hands and mind which the great commander committed the war.

By the great efforts of a nation, of many generations before living, a great leader is born, a great leader! Four or five generations of Russian revolutionaries created the fusion from which Joseph Stalin was cast! Such an alloy was forged by a wise Bolshevik party, armed with the most advanced ideology — revolutionary Marxism-Leninism.

V. Tishurov, Minsk