How the official data on the losses of the USSR changed

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 figures. 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 the Second World War are more than 19 million military personnel.

Despite many years of well-paid sabotage and all sorts of efforts by generals and politicians to hide the true price of our Victory over fascism, on February 14, 2017, at the State Duma, at the parliamentary hearings “Patriotic education of Russian citizens: the Immortal Regiment”, the numbers closest to the truth were finally declassified :

“According to the declassified data of the State Planning Committee of the USSR, 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 decline in the population of the USSR in 1941-1945 was more than 52 million 812 thousand people. Of these, irretrievable losses as a result of the action 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 original documents, authoritative publications and testimonies (details - on the Immortal Regiment website and other resources).

The history of the matter is

In March 1946, in an interview with the Pravda newspaper, I.V. Stalin announced: "As a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union irretrievably lost about seven million people in battles with the Germans, as well as due 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 unleashed 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 the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the final number of casualties was announced: "Almost 27 million people."

In 1993, a team of military historians led by Colonel General G.F. Krivosheeva published a statistical study “Secrecy has been removed. Losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR in wars, hostilities and military conflicts. It indicates the amount of total losses - 26.6 million people, including combat losses published for the first time: 8,668,400 soldiers and officers.

In 2001, a reprint of the book was published under the editorship of G.F. Krivosheev “Russia and the USSR in the wars of the XX century. Losses of the Armed Forces: A Statistical Study". One of her tables stated that the irretrievable losses of the Soviet Army and Navy alone during the Great Patriotic War were 11,285,057 people. (See page 252.) In 2010, in the next edition of the Great Patriotic War without a secrecy stamp. The Book of Losses, again edited by G.F. Krivosheev, the data on the losses of the armies fighting in 1941-1945 were specified. Demographic losses reduced to 8,744,500 troops (p. 373):

A natural question arises: where was the mentioned “data of the State Planning Committee of the USSR” 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 years of World War II: 34,476,700 people (p. 596.).

If we take on faith the official figure of 8,744 thousand people, 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 that a resident of any settlement of the former USSR will not agree with this. In every village or aul there are plates with the names of the dead fellow countrymen. At best, only half of those who went to the front 70 years ago wear them.

Statistics of Tatarstan

Let's see what the statistics are in our Tatarstan, on the territory of which there were no battles.

In the book of Professor Z.I. Gilmanov “Workers of Tataria on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War”, published in Kazan in 1981, it was 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 the head of the working group of the editorial board of the Book of Memory of the Republic of Tatarstan from 1990 to 2007, I can clarify: taking into account the natives called up 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 the irretrievable losses of the republic, on whose territory not a single bomb or shell of the enemy fell!

Are the losses of other regions of the former USSR even less than the national average?

Time will tell. And our task is to wrest from obscurity and enter into the database of the losses of the Republic of Tatarstan, presented in the Victory Park of Kazan, if possible, the names of all fellow countrymen.

And this should be done not only by single 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 the battlefields in all Memory Watches. This requires massive and constant work in the archives published on the websites of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and other thematic resources of the Internet.

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 Association "Club of Military Glory"; 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. IN AND. Ulyanov-Lenin with a degree 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 who died during the Second World War, 19 volumes of the Book of Memory of Victims of Political Repressions of the Republic of Tatarstan, etc.
• Creator of the electronic Book of Memory of the Republic of Tatarstan (a list of natives and residents of Tatarstan who died during the Second World War).
• Author of thematic lectures from the cycle "Tatarstan during the war years", thematic excursions "Feat of countrymen on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War".
• Co-author of the concept of the virtual museum "Tatarstan - Fatherland".
• Member of 60 search expeditions to bury the remains of soldiers who fell in the Great Patriotic War (since 1980), board member of the Union of Search Teams of Russia.
• Author of more than 100 scientific and educational articles, books, participant of all-Russian, regional and international conferences. Columnist of Realnoe Vremya.

About losses in the Second World War and the Immortal Regiment

On February 14, the State Duma held parliamentary hearings “Patriotic Education of Russian Citizens: The Immortal Regiment”. Deputies of the State Duma, co-chairs of the All-Russian public movement "Immortal Regiment of Russia" and representatives of other public organizations discussed the importance of patriotic education for the citizens of the country!

At the hearings, the co-chairman of the Immortal Regiment of Russia movement presented the report “Documentary Basis of the People’s Project “Establishing the Fates of the Missing Defenders of the Fatherland”, within the framework of which studies were carried out on the decline in the population of the USSR in 1941-45. He changed the idea of ​​the scale of the losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War.

According to the declassified data of the State Planning Committee of the USSR, the losses of the Soviet Union in World War II amount to 41 million 979 thousand, and not 27 million, as previously thought. This is almost one third of the modern population of the Russian Federation. Behind this terrible figure are our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers. Those who gave their lives for our future. (Paphos! Applause turning into an ovation!)

First, the declassified data of the Ministry of Defense appeared, then the declassified data of the long-abolished State Planning Committee became.

What was it?

Where is this nonsense from?

What does it have to do with patriotic education?

That's what it is and what's going on with the "Immortal Regiment" - I'll tell you briefly.
First, let's talk about losses.

The main thing is that there were no “declassified data on losses”. That is, it was not at all.

It’s just that someone Igor Ivanovich Ivlev, the creator and moderator of the site soldier.ru, decided to raise the topic of “monstrous losses” again and started juggling numbers, oh, calculations (!). He's not the first. There were many rascals who did the same. The most odious and ignorant is Boris Sokolov, who at one time counted 60 million.

So, the basic postulates of calculations.

The decline in the population of the USSR in 1941-1945. Those who have eyes will see. If you take a calculator, let it count.
I. By 1941, there are only 2 categories of persons included in the calculations:

1. Civilians included in the document of the State Planning Committee of the USSR - 199.920.100 hours (scan).
2. Servicemen of the USSR Armed Forces, taken into account in the publication of M.V. Zakharov, document of the RGVA (NKVD troops) - 5.082.305 hours (scan).
3. Total - 205.002.405 hours

What can be said here? The author is either a fool or a swindler. There are many reports from the State Planning Committee indicating the population in 1941. And all according to the documents, the scans of which are on the Internet. All data are calculated, because there was no census, and the population changed a lot. Figures appear from 192 to 199 million.

But there are also calculation methods. There is a census for 1939 - 170.5 million citizens. There is a population of territories annexed before the war - 22.5 million people.

Total: 193 million + natural increase. It was in this way that the most reliable figure was obtained - 196 million.

Now - what is the stupidity of the author. The author, as befits an idiot, decided that the army, it is not part of the population, but above it. And he simply added to the largest calculated figure, having received 205 million.
And at the same time, he "received" a fourfold (!) Increase in natural growth in the prewar years. Like, they began to give birth more often, and only triplets !!!

II. By 1945, there are 3 categories of persons included in the calculations:

3. The number of civilians as of 01.07.45 - 151.165.200 hours, together with surviving children under the age of 4 years 11.859.776 hours (see paragraph 9 below and documents of the State Planning Committee of the USSR). Without civilian children born in the war, by 01.07.45 - 139.305.424 h.
4. The strength of the USSR Armed Forces on the same date - 12.839.800 hours (documents of TsAMO RF).
5. The number of displaced persons - people who were not part of the civilian population at the time of the submission of calculations by the territorial departments of the State Planning Commission and were not part of the USSR Armed Forces - 5.804.524 hours (GARF documents in the publication of V.N. Zemskov).
6. Total - 169.809.524 hours (151.165.200 + 12.839.800 + 5.804.524).

The population of the USSR at the end of the war was 170 million. If we add, according to the author's method, the army, then we, lo and behold, will get 183 million and the losses will be much less than the official ones !!!

Profit! What miracles can be done by juggling with initially correct numbers.

III. Born in 1941-1945 children and overall mortality:

7. Children were born in 4 years - 17.619.776 hours (scans 1 and 2).
8. Died - 5.760.000 hours (scans 1, 2, 3).
9. Children under 4 years of age survived by 01.07.45 - 11.859.776 hours (17.619.776 - 5.760.000).
10. In total, citizens of the USSR died in 4 years (the level of "natural" mortality in 1941, multiplied by 4 years) - 10.833.240 hours, incl. 5.760.000 children (scans 1, 2, 3).
IV. The number of those who survived the war who lived by 06/22/41:
11. By 07/01/45, those who were alive on 06/22/41 remained - 157.949.748 hours (169.809.524 - 17.619.776 + 5.760.000).

Anyone who goes to the site and looks at the scans will suddenly find that these are not documents, but Ivlev's calculations! This is understandable, since keeping records of the birth rate during the war was difficult, especially considering that up to a third of the population was under occupation.

About natural mortality. We look at his "scans" and see that these are again the author's calculations. The author boldly extrapolates pre-war mortality to the war years and unoccupied territories to occupied ones! Yes, and applying all this to an overestimated population. It's so convenient - immediately the natural increase grows, and with it the losses that the author needs anyway. Here the author again wins back several million.

And, of course, the author does not take into account such nuances as the transfer of the Bialystok region with the population to Poland after the war.

Attention! We have already found 14-16 million people of defamatory losses.

That is, there are no 42 million. There are real losses of 27 million and juggling with numbers in order to overestimate these losses.

Now let's move on to the Immortal Regiment. I have already informed the leadership of this organization that they are throwing in fraudulent, anti-Soviet figures, covering them up with the authority of their organization. But they prefer to believe jugglers.

Then they wonder:

But what was our surprise when we learned that now a number of opposition publications are starting to use this information for their own purposes, as well as manipulate it, generalize it and thus try to harm our state, - said Nikolai Zemtsov at a press conference.

What happens to this action?

Everything seemed to be fine two years ago.

But now the prosecutor (now a deputy) Poklonskaya arranges a vile trick by going to the action with the icon of the king-rag, while telling some kind of fairy tale for the mentally mournful. And the leadership of the Immortal Regiment is silent.

An emblem is proposed, where the Soviet symbols are replaced by George the Victorious with a cross on a spear. How so? The victory in the Great Patriotic War was won not by the Orthodox army over the filthy Germans, but by the Soviet multinational and multi-confessional (and in the mass and atheistic) people. But the leadership of the "Immortal Regiment" accepts the emblem.

In the Russian Orthodox Church, the organizers of the Immortal Regiment movement were offered to allow the participants in the procession to honor the memory of the heroes of not only the Great Patriotic War (WWII), but also other wars. For example, the First World War and the Patriotic War of 1812. Dmitry Roshchin, head of the department for work with public organizations of the Synodal department for relations between the church, society and the media, told the Moscow city news agency about this. And the leadership of the Immortal Regiment agrees.

Initially, the "Immortal Regiment" was created by liberals as an act of oblivion. It was forbidden to use Soviet symbols, and they tried to make it not a holiday, but a day of mourning. I already wrote about it.
Thanks to the position of our fellow citizens, the action was pulled out from under the liberals and made a day of triumph for the victorious people.

But the action immediately began to crush the government. Government officials diligently direct it in the "right" direction. In anti-Soviet. Our major government officials have such a property as King Midas. But for him, everything that he did not touch turned into gold, and for government officials - into shit.

And so they reached out to the "Immortal Regiment" and diligently disfigure this action, again turning it into an action of oblivion.

I do not call not to go to this action. Comrades, when you go to it, remember that it depends on you what this action will be. It will be a procession of the descendants of Soviet victorious soldiers. The winners in the Greatest War, who broke the back of fascism and Nazism. And will the descendants remember who fought, for what and under whose command.

Or it will be a jingoistic procession with icons in honor of all the victories under the auspices of the king-rag.

All in your hands. And you have the power to wrest the action from the clutches of officials and leave it to the people.

They suffered it with misrepresentation: instead of the original "Gosplan declassified data" (also stupidity) -> "The Ministry of Defense declassified the data" -> "The Ministry of Defense recognized the fact."

As a trolling, this may be good, but the sad thing here is that people are so easily led - and begin to either earnestly believe, or just as earnestly disbelieve, instead of just checking the facts. Namely, it is worth paying attention to the sources in the article. They are not there:
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(a) "According to the declassified data of the State Planning Committee of the USSR"
(b) "The given information is confirmed by a huge number of original documents, authoritative publications and testimonies. All of them are a severe embodiment of the deep pain of our people, who suffered incredible losses and achieved victory over a cruel enemy."
===
You can check anything from these "source links". Me not. I am even surprised that Gosplan had anything to do with such statistics, because Gosplan was not a source, but only a consumer of statistics. The source was Goskomstat.

And other "a huge number of original documents, authoritative publications and testimonies" - what is it? I know the most authoritative source - the work of the State Statistics Committee demographers Andreev, Darsky Kharkov 1990 and 1993 on knocking out demography in the USSR (). This source just relied on all available demographic data, original documents, etc. Here is the result from there:
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(1, p. 77) "The total human losses of the population of the USSR as a result of the Great Patriotic War, estimated by the demographic balance method, amount to approximately 26.6 million people."
===
Also in the "quote from the report" there is an operation with concepts:
* Total population loss 52.812 million
* irretrievable losses as a result of the factors of war (separately military personnel 19 million and separately population 23 million)
* Total natural mortality of military personnel and civilians 10.833 million
* Irretrievable losses of the population of the USSR as a result of the factors of war 42 million
How one gets from the other is not explained, because it is not at all a fact that these sets are correctly calculated, that they are about the same thing, and that they can generally be subtracted and added. If from one work (Krivosheev) we take inflated losses of civilians (my opinion: Krivosheev adjusted the losses of the army so that they did not look much higher than the German ones), and from another work, inflated losses for the army (the maximum estimate, more adequately I came across ~ 14-16 million ) and add them up - it turns out that in both initial sources they relied on 27 million total losses, and after such an incorrect addition, 42 million came out.

What can be concluded from this? For example, I believe that the authors of the text are either not aware of the topic and do not know how to work with sets - to add and subtract them (and therefore they are conscientiously mistaken), or they are in the know (and then they deliberately lie).

I think too well about people and I think that they deliberately lie (at least the author of the article on the site) - in order to troll. But I'm afraid I'm wrong here, and the inability to compare, add and subtract is the main reason for such shock content.
===
Links:

(1) http://demoscope.ru/weekly/knigi/naselenie/naselenie_1922-1991.html
E.M. Andreev, L.E. Darsky, T.L. Kharkov
Population of the Soviet Union: 1922-1991
M., Nauka, 1993, 143 pages
Scan: http://demoscope.ru/weekly/knigi/naselenie/naselenie_1922-1991.pdf

(2) http://nationalproject.rf/news/201702-246/
People's project "Establishing the fate of the missing defenders of the Fatherland"
15 February 2017 (author not specified)
Parliamentary Hearings “Patriotic Education… “Immortal Regiment”

On February 14, the State Duma held parliamentary hearings “Patriotic Education of Russian Citizens: The Immortal Regiment”. Deputies of the State Duma, co-chairs of the All-Russian public movement "Immortal Regiment of Russia" and representatives of other public organizations discussed the importance of patriotic education for the citizens of the country.

(photo: Parliamentary hearings "Patriotic education ... "Immortal Regiment" - see the link)

The event was organized by the State Duma Committee on Education and Science together with the Committee on Defense and the Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans Affairs.

Deputies of the State Duma, members of the Federation Council, representatives of legislative and supreme executive bodies of state power of the subjects of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, public associations, organizations of foreign compatriots took part in the parliamentary hearings .
...
Formula: every fourth

At the hearings, the co-chairman of the Immortal Regiment of Russia movement presented a report “Documentary Basis for the People’s Project “Establishing the Fates of the Missing Defenders of the Fatherland”, within the framework of which studies were carried out on the decline in the population of the USSR in 1941-45. He changed the idea of ​​the scale of the losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War.

According to declassified data of the State Planning Committee of the USSR, the losses of the Soviet Union in World War II amount to 41 million 979 thousand, and not 27 million, as previously thought. This is almost one third of the modern population of the Russian Federation. Behind this terrible figure are our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers. Those who gave their lives for our future. And, perhaps, the biggest betrayal is to forget their names, their feat, their heroism, which have developed into our common great Victory.

Recently, parliamentary hearings “Patriotic Education of Russian Citizens: “The Immortal Regiment”” were held in the Duma. They were attended by deputies, senators, representatives of the legislative and supreme executive bodies of state power of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, the Ministries of Education and Science, Defense, Foreign Affairs, Culture, members of public associations, organizations of foreign compatriots ... True, there were no those who came up with - ​journalists from Tomsk TV-2, no one even remembered them. And, in general, there was really no need to remember. The "Immortal Regiment", which, by definition, did not provide for any staffing, no commanders and political officers, has already completely transformed into a sovereign "box" of parade crew, and its main task today is to learn to step in step and keep alignment in the ranks.

“What is a people, a nation? First of all, it is respect for victories,” Vyacheslav Nikonov, chairman of the parliamentary committee, admonished the participants when opening the hearings. “Today, when a new war is going on, which someone calls “hybrid”, our Victory becomes one of the main targets for attacks on historical memory. Waves of falsification of history are coming, which should make us believe that it was not us, but someone else who won, and still make us apologize ... ”For some reason, the Nikonovs are seriously sure that it was they who, long before their own birth, won the Great A victory for which, moreover, someone is trying to make them apologize. But they weren't attacked! And the aching note of the nationwide misfortune that has not passed, the phantom pain for the third generation of the descendants of the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War is drowned out by a cheerful, thoughtless cry: “We can repeat it!”

Really, can we?

It was at these hearings that a terrible figure was named in between times, which for some reason was not noticed by anyone, which did not make us stop in horror on the run in order to understand WHAT we were told after all. Why this was done now, I do not know.

At the hearings, the co-chairman of the Immortal Regiment of Russia movement, State Duma deputy Nikolai Zemtsov, presented the report “The Documentary Basis of the People’s Project “Establishing the Fates of the Missing Defenders of the Fatherland”, within the framework of which studies of the population decline were carried out, which changed the idea of ​​the scale of the losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War.

“The total decline in the population of the USSR in 1941-1945 was more than 52 million 812 thousand people,” Zemtsov said, citing declassified data from the USSR State Planning Committee. - Of these, irretrievable losses as a result of the action of war factors - more than 19 million military personnel and about 23 million civilians. The total natural mortality of military personnel and the civilian population during this period could have amounted to more than 10 million 833 thousand people (including 5 million 760 thousand - ​deceased children under the age of four). The irretrievable losses of the population of the USSR as a result of the action of war factors amounted to almost 42 million people.

Can we… do it again?!

Back in the 60s of the last century, the then young poet Vadim Kovda wrote a short poem in four lines: “ If only in my front door / there are three elderly disabled people / then how many of them were injured? / And killed?

Now these elderly people with disabilities due to natural causes are less and less visible. But Kovda imagined the scale of losses quite correctly, it was enough just to multiply the number of front doors.

Stalin, proceeding from considerations inaccessible to a normal person, personally determined the losses of the USSR at 7 million people - a little less than the losses of Germany. Khrushchev - 20 million. Under Gorbachev, a book was published, prepared by the Ministry of Defense under the editorship of General Krivosheev, "The Classification Mark Removed", in which the authors named and in every possible way justified this very figure - 27 million. Now it turns out that she was wrong.