The detachments of Stalin: an order to save the Fatherland?

On the threshold is the anniversary of the next turning point of the Great Patriotic War. On July 28, 1942, People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin signed order No. 227 - "On measures to strengthen discipline and order in the Red Army and the prohibition of unauthorized withdrawal from combat positions." He went down in history under the title "Not a Step Back!" - according to the most important quotation from the document, most fully expounding its meaning and essence.





This decision of the leadership of the country and the army, unequivocally, played a huge role in achieving Victory, not contested by even the most stubborn of liberal "historians." At the same time, it was they who invariably raised them “to the shield” when trying to prove that we took the upper hand over Nazi Germany “at too high a price”. It is order No. 227 and its consequences that are some of the favorite arguments of the throaty and ignorant adherents of the sect "filled up with corpses." Where is the truth? Let's get it right.

The anger and shame of the Supreme

As you know, initially the text of the historical order was prepared by Marshal Vasilevsky - the then chief of the General Staff of the Red Army. However, Stalin, who took him for editing, literally did not leave the marshal’s version of stone on stone, rewriting almost from the first to the last letter. Accordingly, Order No. 227 is more a political document than a military one. The fierce spirit of the Supreme is there in every line, making us more than half a century later feel the intensity of passions that reigned in those truly fateful days for our Motherland. We must pay tribute to Stalin - courage and frankness in his address to the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army showed incredible. Firstly, the head of state, party and army openly admitted: the country is on the verge of destruction. There is nowhere to retreat, for further - only collapse and complete rout. Secondly, for the first time, perhaps from the start of the war, he loudly and clearly declared the superiority of the enemy. Having suffered tremendous territorial losses, the USSR lost most of its resource and food base, which now fell into the hands of the enemy, and has no more advantage in either people or reserves. Moreover, Stalin did not keep silent about the fact that the Wehrmacht has superiority over the Red Army - in "order and discipline in the troops."

Well, and finally, in the third, the Supreme voiced a bitter truth, which it was considered impossible to speak out loud until then: the Soviet people are not just “disappointed” in their defenders, “flowing to the East” - sometimes he “curses” them. Stalin not only demanded that everyone who stood up for the defense of the Homeland stand death in the very literal sense of the word, he tried to inform and shame those who, as he wrote, tried to justify their shameful behavior at the front with thoughts that , they say, the country is large and there are many people in it. The USSR is not a desert! - the Supreme alarmists and cowards reminded angrily. These are the people whom, retreating, we surrender to the yoke of the German oppressors - our wives and mothers, children, brothers and sisters. Say what you want, but I never met Stalin's phrases so saturated with violent pain and burning shame ... Yes, he also said that while continuing to roll back under the pressure of the Nazis: we would be left without bread, metal, factories and railways losing which war never win.

However, people still stood in the first place. Stalin demanded self-sacrifice from the war veterans? Yes! However, let's be honest - the soldier at the forefront had weapons, there was a chance to survive even in the most terrible battle. But civilians who found themselves in the occupied territory did not have these chances - they could not defend themselves from a bullet, a loop or hijacking into Nazi slavery. In the end, this is the military share in all centuries and times - to defend the native land and the people living on it. After this, the Stalinist order can be called "hateful" and "cannibalistic" only by gentlemen with a completely incurable brain liberoid syndrome.

Was there any way to retreat?

But how it all began well! In May Day order No. 130 of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief from 1942, it was clearly and unequivocally stated that this year the Hitlerite bastards should be completely defeated and expelled from Soviet soil.

It would seem that everything went to that - the war machine of the Third Reich for the first time in its entire existence suffered a crushing defeat near Moscow. The soldiers and commanders of the Red Army were convinced that the Nazis could and should be beaten. The horror and shame of the first months of the war were erased, when it seemed that the Wehrmacht was indestructible and it would not be possible to stop its blitzkrieg. One after another, military enterprises evacuated from the Urals, operating at the limit of strength and giving the front the necessary weapons, entered into service machineryammunition. The call made it possible not only to restore the bloodless units and formations of the Red Army in 1941, but also to create as many as 9 reserve armies of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command. It was time to launch a decisive attack in order to crush the fascist reptile once and for all! The offensive and struck - in the Kharkov direction. But only in the end it turned into one of the most terrible catastrophes of the Red Army during the entire Great Patriotic War. More than a quarter of a million dead, wounded and prisoners! The Nazis took Crimea and Sevastopol, reached the Volga and the Caucasus, captured Voronezh and Rostov-on-Don, advanced to Stalingrad. Everything hung in the balance ...

There really was nowhere to retreat! Modern “humanists”, liberal “strategists”, marshals of armchairs, their feet and the fence, love to be clever: “We had to protect people! To leave the Urals, to form new armies there, and already from there to beat the Germans! ” Yeah, how ... They would give us a move, and even more so, to form something. With the loss of Stalingrad, the USSR would lose vital communications. Having given the Nazis the Lower Volga region, the country and the army would have been left without bread and oil from the Caspian. And with the Caucasus it is even worse - it was there that at least 95% of Soviet oil was produced. What kind of war is fuelless ?! Moreover, the capture of the Caucasus and Stalingrad by the Wehrmacht would mean the absolutely imminent entry into the war of Turkey and Japan - on the side of the Third Reich, of course. The Turks simply would have no choice but to choose: to become Hitler satellites or to be occupied. And, of course, Istanbul’s eternal desire to “cut its own lands” in the Caucasus would play a role. Something like the Germans, persuading the Turks to war against the USSR, they were promised.

Retreat beyond the Urals, speak? It’s just that the millionth Kwantung army would flood into the Far East. It was later, in 1945, that we threw the samurai on the ears, one might say, without any particular problems. In 1942, there is no doubt that everything would be somewhat different. Allies? Oh, yes, they were preparing ... to bomb the oil fields of Baku, Grozny and Maykop so that they would not go to Germany. And what did you think - were you planning to land troops there to help our troops? Line two ... The option of separate negotiations between London and Washington with Hitler if the Red Army continued the retreat, many historians also do not dismiss. There was nowhere to retreat, which is already there - here Stalin did not dissemble and did not exaggerate. Indeed, the terrible order No. 227 did not stop the withdrawal of our troops in one fell swoop, like a magic wand. But he changed something elusively in people, made someone think, some were ashamed, and someone simply scared to frost between the shoulder blades. In war, this is sometimes necessary.

About penal battalions and detachments

Reprimanding the Supreme for some “fanatical fabrications” introduced by the frenzied “Not a step back!”, Our (and not only) liberals once again demonstrate an abhorrent knowledge of military history - both domestic and world. And in fact, what is so unprecedentedly cruel that Stalin introduced by this order? Shooting for leaving combat positions without an order? So for this they were against the wall as far back as 1941 - and not only the “green lieutenants” and “emaciated battalions,” as again the “sad people’s people”, but the commanders of the divisions, armies and fronts, are trying to present. In my article on June 22, the list is also given - the truth is very, very incomplete. You might think that deserters, defeatists, and alarmists, before order No. 227, gently smoked and transferred to reinforced rations to correct shaky health ... What else? Oh yes - the penalty units! It is for this "Stalinist fiction" that our "progressive public" has grasped at one time with the stubbornness of a brainless tick, and to this day cannot fall off. After all, the whole mythology was erected on human blood, bastards! Only the film of the same name, in which the historical truth is less than 0.0001% of what it costs. Everything there is a lie: from the “Tverdokhlebov’s penal battalion commander” (such units were commanded exclusively by combat officers, the best of them), to seasoned criminals with “political"Convicts in one trench. Yes, there were none of those in the penal battalions! As there were no cases where a fighter who was injured three times returned again and again to the “penalty” system. Delirium, delirium and delirium ...

And there were no penal battalions, companies and squadrons made up by the Supreme. After all, he honestly speaks in the order that generated them - this idea is drawn from the Germans. There similar units appeared back in 1940 and were a hundred times worse than ours. At least by the fact that the period of stay in the Soviet penal battalion was calculated at a maximum of three months - or until the first injury. In the Wehrmacht, this was practically a “life sentence”. It was just that this life was far from short-lived - the Nazis didn’t solder their fines with Bavarian sausages either, but threw them over and over again into the heat. And no injuries or heroism counted! How many were there? The cunning Fritzs did not leave accurate statistics, but given that according to the German archives, only during the winter campaign of 1941-1942, the Wehrmacht military tribunals condemned (including those sent to the penal units) more than 60 thousand people ... Think for yourself . Today, a mass of genuine memoirs of veterans of the Great Patriotic War is available (including - in the form of quite good films), past penal battles and considering them good - naturally, in comparison with the execution on the spot or the camp. The penalty allowed to "wash away the blood" with guilt and start everything from the place where the fighter or officer stumbled. And here's another thing - for the entire Great Patriotic War, about 428 thousand people fought in penal units. This is just over 1.2% of all warriors who passed through her crucible. All the talk that “they won the war by filling up the Germans with the corpses of fines” is not just a blatant lie, but one of the most vile speculations on a holy topic.

Well, and finally, detachments. Stalin invented them too ?! But didn’t Xenophon write about the special teams of soldiers who were called to instill greater fear in cowards than enemies and punish the faint-hearted death that existed in the ancient army? And in the Russian Imperial Army, during the First World War, there were such units - albeit under a different name. Read Brusilov - very lucidly stated. And if we take a “humane and enlightened Europe” ... the Prussians, the distant ancestors of Hitler’s future “Aryans”, had the so-called “wing companies”, ruthlessly shooting those who tried to escape. No one other than Frederick the Great wrote about a soldier risking his life halfway, going forward and losing it for sure, turning back. The French have exactly the same story - they started firing at buckshot in the back with flailing units under Napoleon, at least. And continued into the First World War. In the Second, they preferred to “tilt up” their legs “civilized” and lie under the Germans - well, that’s their business ... By the way, the creation of detachments in the Red Army in no way can be attributed to Stalin. Such units from the NKVD fighters a month after the start of the war were created by order of Lorenius Beria. In the army, the initiative was shown by the commander of the Bryansk Front, General Eremenko (asking for permission from the Supreme) in early September 1941. It turned out to be extremely useful practice took root and quickly spread throughout the Red Army.

By the way, directing depicting fighters of detachments in liberoidal “historical” films exclusively in the form of “Beria’s cutthroats” in cornflower-blue caps, the directors either deliberately breshet or simply don’t know a damn story. The army barrage detachments, created in pursuance of Order No. 227, consisted of the most common "blue-legged infantry", and had nothing to do with the NKVD - with the exception of commanders. They obeyed the command of the respective armies, "closing" to a special department. “Who cares how they were dressed up ?! - I foresee ardent objections, the main thing is that they were punishers and murderers who were only engaged in this, that they shot poor soldiers and planted heroic “fines” from machine guns in the back! And here's a shish, gentlemen are good! One of the remarkable features of the NKVD, brought to perfection by Lavrentiy Beria, was very accurate and detailed statistics. Here are the numbers from the certificate of this department on the activities of the barrage detachments created, according to order No. 227, on October 15, 1942. Those were detained more than 140 thousand (!) Of the Red Army, who arbitrarily left the front. What do you think has become of these fugitives? Shot, of course? Or, no, it’s not so - they shot half of them, and they trapped the second in penal battalions and companies, “for slaughter”, right ?! And no! Less than 1200 deserters were shot. Less than 3 thousand got into fines. Rest? “Sent to their units and to transit points for further service” ...

So much for the "atrocities". How do you like that? On September 13, 1942, the 112th Infantry Division rolled back from its positions “under enemy pressure”. What does the detachment of the 62nd Army, standing in its rear, do? Mercilessly shoots the retreating? No - his fighters occupy the defense at the abandoned line, and, reflecting the attacks of superior enemy forces and inflicting heavy losses on him, they held positions for 4 days until the regular units replaced them. Another detachment of the same army two days later fights in the vicinity of the railway station of Stalingrad, and despite its small number, leaves its position only after the approach of units of the 10th rifle division. Or one more thing: taking part in one of the attacks, a detachment detachment of the 29th Army of the Western Front of 118 personnel lost 109 people killed and wounded ... detachments of the 6th Army of the Voronezh Front were brought into battle on September 4, 1942, as a result of which they lost up to 70% of the personnel ... It looks like “punishers who shot in the back” ?! Or is it not so?

Perhaps brighter than all, one of the best writers of the Great Patriotic War, Konstantin Simonov, said about the effect and significance of order No. 227. He recalled that after reading "Not a step back!" everyone was seized by the feeling of the abyss widening ahead - “either to jump over or perish."

The Red Army managed to stop on the edge of this abyss: it kept the Caucasus (although, following historical truth, this battle was won not so much by the Red Army as the NKVD, with the enormous personal participation of Lavrenty Beria), tightly clung to the frozen soaked land of Stalingrad and it was there that it began jump ”to victory, which ended at the walls of the Reichstag. And the beginning of everything was order No. 227 ...