Six decades have passed since the end of the greatest war in the history of mankind. The great-grandsons of the victors bring flowers to their mass graves. Those veterans who are still alive receive all kinds of greetings and praise from politicians, other veterans and people they never knew. It seems that "no one and nothing has been forgotten". Unfortunately, these words, like rhetorical admonishments from the Bible, are really pleas or demands addressed to the living. They have little to do with the actual events of the day. Life is always more complicated than the most perfect of sermons.
Respect thy enemy
First of all, society simply cannot fathom all the acts of heroism performed by millions of different people. The heroism of our defenders was enormous from the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War. We now know about the first air-ram attacks in the early hours of the war, about pitched battles between men and tanks, and about the first suicide bombers. These are not only testimonies by our people or reports by our national mass media, but events from the memories of our enemies. There is nothing unusual about this, because the soldiers of the attacking Wermacht divisions personally encountered the heroism displayed by Red Army warriors. Often, they were the only witnesses to these immortal exploits.
In his memoirs, Marshal Zhukov cites an article printed in Hitler's central newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter: "The Russian soldier excels over our Western enemies because he disdains death. Commitment and fanaticism force him to fight till he is shot in a trench or falls dead in hand-to-hand combat. The German soldier is facing an opponent who obstinately sticks to his political creed and totally resists German blitzkrieg tactics". (G. Zhukov / Memories and Thoughts, M., 1969, p. 320)
As always, one's enemies are usually sparse in their praise. And thus many thousands of heroic deeds remain in oblivion - especially those performed during the beginning of the war (June 1941 - November of 1942). This was a time of retreat and defense. When the whole front falls back, rearguard battles are inevitable. Somebody must stay to cover the retreat of major forces, and often these people are captured or even killed. We will unlikely learn everything about the heroism of these doomed souls, because no witnesses have survived. Their relatives just got letters in the post reading "Missing in Action".
Posthumous recognition
Six decades have already passed, but even now these nameless heroes are returning from the dark past.
Of course, during the war, the country knew heroes whose exploits were witnessed and whose deeds were recorded. These accounts of bravery relate primarily to major turning points. Such was the case with Ivan Panfilov's heroes, who stopped the advance of German tanks at the gates of Moscow. They died, but we learned about what happened when we saw the battlefield. However, there were many more battles with German tanks during the period of the Red Army retreat, which were not immediately recorded.
We learned about the heroic defense of the frontier Brest fortress only 10 years after the war, when a few repressed defenders came back from the gulag, and well-known writer Sergey Smirnov wrote a book about the event. We found out that the commander who led the defense of the Brest fortress, Major Pavel Gavrilyuk, was honored as an example of military valor and patriotic commitment by the Germans themselves, which is why he was arrested after he returned to his regiment. The defenders of the Brest fortress, who were later declared heroes, held out for almost six months, long after the front had already retreated hundreds of kilometers behind them. A magnificent memorial was built in Brest to perpetuate the bravery of these soldiers.
The names of other heroes and the details of their exploits were learned after the war. These took place during the initial retreat of the Red Army, which was also the time of the country's most painful defeats and biggest strategic errors - made by Soviet commanders as well as Joseph Stalin personally. On the other hand, this was a time when the anti-Hitler allied forces were being born. The Soviet army incurred colossal losses in the first twenty months of the war, when it retreated from the country's western borders all the way to Stalingrad. Nobody knows exactly how many soldiers there were in Soviet formations, but the Germans often exaggerated the numbers killed or taken prisoner to boast their victories. Many Soviet captives in fact were able to hide in local woods or villages if they managed to escape.
If there was no resistance, why did the Germans get stuck near Odessa, Kyiv, Sevastopol? Why did they never conquer Leningrad or Moscow? Only 20-40% of them reached Moscow region, from which they ended up retreating.
The German army was already weakened when it reached Stalingrad, which according to Winston Churchill "broke the backbone of the Germans". In Kursk, the aggressor's army was wiped out, without a hope of victory.
Postwar persecution
One must also say a few words about the fantastic prejudice of the Soviet authorities towards those Red Army soldiers who had survived German captivity or just escaped from battlefield encirclement. All the people who risked their lives coming back home through enemy lines were sent to filtration camps, and very few managed to return to the front, much less go home. Most of them were later sent to the gulag for high treason.
The Odessa guerillas who fought NAZI occupation for three years in the city's catacombs were executed as traitors a few days after the city was freed. There are even instances of former military captives revolting at a northern gulag camp. After World War I, soldiers who managed to escape from captivity were awarded and given higher ranks. But Stalin and his comrades regarded such people as traitors, which is why, after WWII, many Soviet captives chose to stay in the American and British occupation zones of West Germany.
Sometimes information about heroism was censored due to the national origin of the war hero himself, or more specifically their suspected lack of loyalty to the Soviet regime. The scene of the hoisting of the Soviet flag above the Reichstag is well known. This was done by a small group of soldiers headed by Lieutenant Oleksey Berest, who was a Ukrainian. The continuing struggle of Ukrainian nationalists against rule from Moscow well after 1945 was enough to have his name excluded from the list of those who climbed on to the German parliament. One more name is Alexander Marinesko,
a legendary submariner who was only given the title of hero posthumously.
The unknown soldier
Heroism is heroism. However, heroism without witnesses and thus a hope of being remembered and appreciated by a grateful posterity (as was the case at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War) makes us respect our unknown soldiers even more, especially the martyrs.
There is a saying that public death is beautiful; however, millions of defenders could not have expected that their sacrifice would be appreciated, but still they performed their exploits, which is why their heroic deeds are especially remembered by older people during the hardest of times.
I remember the celebration of the first anniversary of Victory Day, in 1946. A small group of young men from my village erected crosses on the graves of those who had died during the retreat of 1941. Five years had passed since the burials, and the makeshift graves needed to be somehow preserved until a proper memorial site could be constructed. We decided to cut crosses from oak trees. Very soon I was called in to the district administration (I was already a member of the Komsomol), where I was asked why we had put up a rickety graveyard along the road. I explained that we hadn't had the money to build a real cemetery. I was then forgiven for being young, but I was denied a labor medal for the work I'd performed. Ten years later, during the Khrushchev era, the same official I had dealt with from the district administration met me and apologized. He must have felt pangs of remorse for his attitude to the graves of the heroes.
There is something sad and epic in the exploits of the heroes
of 1941.
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