The Soviet Union

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blindpig
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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 28, 2023 3:44 pm

Never Forget the Soviet Heroes Who Liberated Auschwitz
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 27, 2023
Scott Ritter

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The SS guards abandoned the guard posts surrounding Auschwitz during the night of 20-21 January 1945.

At its height, in the summer of 1944, the Auschwitz complex, which comprised three basic camps — the main camp, Birkenau and Monowitz — and another 40 sub-camps, housed over 105,000 registered prisoners, mostly Jews, and around 30,000 unregistered Jewish inmates of so-called transit camps.

By January 20, 1945, there were approximately 9,000 prisoners remaining. In the days that followed the evacuation, SS guards would patrol the camps, shooting 400 prisoners to death, and burning another 300 alive in their barracks. On January 25, the SS gathered approximately 150 prisoners from Birkenau and marched them out of the camp. The next day the SS blew up some warehouses and abandoned the facility altogether.

Most of the surviving prisoners were starving, sick, and on the verge of death. The camp medical staff, assisted by the healthier prisoners, did their best to care for the bedridden patients. The camp was besieged by a howling winter storm, with temperatures well below zero and snow drifting around the camp. The survivors were afraid to move around too much — regular German troops, falling back in the face of an advancing Soviet Army, made their way through the camp, pillaging as they went, and everyone feared the return of the SS.

Auschwitz had been in existence since 1940, when it was used as a concentration camp for Polish prisoners. By 1942 the camp was converted into a combination labor and extermination facility, and Jewish prisoners began to arrive in larger numbers. Historians estimate that around 1,1 million people perished in Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, nearly a million of the Jews, the rest comprising Poles (some 75,000), Gypsies (20,000), Soviet prisoners of war (15,000), and 10,000-15,000 others from different ethnicities.

The soldiers of the advancing Soviet Army, however, had no knowledge of the existence of Auschwitz — for them, the death camp was simply marked as a “barracks” on the maps they used to plan their advance. General Kurochkin’s 60th Army, fresh off the liberation of the Polish city of Krakow, some 45 kilometers to the west of the camp, began pursuing the defeated German Army out of the city on January 25. Their goal was to take Katowice, an industrial city about 25 miles to the northwest of Auschwitz.

Trudging through knee-deep snow, the Soviet infantrymen of the three divisions comprising the 60th Army — the 107th, the 100th, and the 322nd — repeatedly battled German troops dug in along the way. On the morning of January 27, while the 107th division skirted around the northern edge Polish town of Oswiecim, adjacent to the Auschwitz camp, troops from the 100th divisionentered the Monowitz camp, three miles kilometers to the east of Oswiecim. Primo Levi, one of the surviving prisoners, recalled that the first Soviet soldiers who entered the camp had no idea what they had walked into.

“They did not greet us, nor did they smile,” Levi recalled. “They seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funeral scene.”

To the left of the 100th division were the troops of the 322nd division, with the 472nd infantry regiment in the lead. After crossing the Sola River, the men of the 472nd regiment reached Oswiecim, sweeping aside light resistance from the German defenders, before pushing west, toward the railway station. Here the German resistance stiffened, and the Soviets troops had to work hard to dislodge the dug in Germans. Once the Germans had been either killed or retreated, the Soviets resumed their advance, pushing scouts forward to find a way forward.

One of the Soviet soldiers, Senior Lieutenant Ivan Martynushkin, recalled that his troops had just defeated the Germans in Oswiecim when, after passing through the village, they “came out onto some kind of enormous field almost completely surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences and watchtowers.”

“We saw buildings beyond the barbed wire,” Martynushkin noted. “And as we got closer, we began to see there were people.”

Martynushkin and his men had no idea who these people, who appeared “very thin, tired, with blackened skin,” were.

“At first there was wariness, on both our part and theirs,” he recalled. “But then they apparently figured out who we were and began to welcome us, to signal that they knew who we were and that we shouldn’t be afraid of them — that there were no guards or Germans behind the barbed wire. Only prisoners.”


Martynushkin and his men had just liberated the Birkenau camp.

Anna Polshchikova, a Russian prisoner who worked at the camp medical facility, recalled her joy in seeing the Soviet soldiers — and their confusion.

“They looked at us with surprise and in dismay. ‘Who are you?’ they asked. ‘What is this place?’ ‘We are Russians,’ I replied, ‘and this is Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.’ ‘And what are you doing here?’ they inquired in an unfriendly manner. We were baffled and did not know what to say. We looked wretched and pathetic, so they relented and asked again, in a kinder tone. ‘And what is over there?’ they said, pointing northwards. ‘Also a concentration camp.’ ‘And beyond that?’ ‘Also a camp.’ ‘And beyond the camp?’ ‘Over there in, the forest, are the crematoria, and beyond the crematoria, we don’t know.’”

The horror of the reality of what they had just discovered only then began to register in the minds of the Soviet liberators.

About 7,000 emaciated prisoners were in the Auschwitz main camp, Birkenau, and Monowitz. Another 500 prisoners were discovered in the Auschwitz sub-camps in Stara Kuźnia, Blachownia Śląska, Świętochłowice, Wesoła, Libiąż, Jawiszowice, and Jaworzno. But inside the camps the Soviets found 1.2 million pieces of clothing, 7.7 tons of human hair and other personal items stripped from murdered prisoners, evidence of the horrors that had transpired there. More than 600 decaying corpses were scattered throughout the grounds, the mortal remains of those prisoners gunned down by the murderous SS guards before they abandoned the camps.

But in this nightmare, the humanity of the Soviet soldier shown through. Ten-year-old Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengele’s demented medical experiments, recalled the kindness the Soviets showed to the children of the camp.

“They gave us hugs, cookies, and chocolate,” she said. “Being so alone a hug meant more than anybody could imagine because that replaced the human worth that we were starving for. We were not only starved for food, but we were starved for human kindness. And the Soviet Army did provide some of that.”

Some 231 Soviet soldiers lost their lives in the fighting in and around the town of Oswiecim that occurred during the liberation of Auschwitz, including the commander of the 472nd regiment, Colonel Siemen Lvovich Besprozvanny. Their bodies are buried in the Oswiecim municipal cemetery, a permanent reminder of the sacrifice made in liberating the 7,500 survivors of the Auschwitz death camps.

On January 27, 2023, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum will commemorate the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camps by the Soviet Army. This year, however, Russia won’t be invited. “Because of the attack on free and independent Ukraine,” Pawel Sawicki, a press officer for the museum, told the media, “representatives of the Russian Federation have not been invited to participate in this year’s commemoration event of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.”

This decision was attacked by Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, who posted the following reply on her Telegram channel:

“No matter how our European ‘non-partners’ contrived in their attempts to rewrite history in a new way, the memory of the Soviet heroes-liberators and horrors of Nazism cannot be erased.”

Given that the Russian Army is, today, engaged in a life and death struggle inside Ukraine with the progeny of the murderous SS prison guards of Nazi Germany, the decision of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to prohibit Russia from attending the liberation commemoration is deeply disturbing. One can be rest assured that the descendants of Eva Mozes Kor, Anna Polshchikova, Primo Levi, and the other roughly 7,500 survivors of the death camps whose lives were saved by the sacrifice of Colonel Besprozvanny and the other Soviet soldiers who were killed in the fighting to liberate the camps will never forget who it was who allowed their ancestors to survive that unspeakable horror.

Nor should anyone who reads this article. What the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum has done in denying the representatives of Russia their rightful role as the saviors of Auschwitz in the 78th anniversary commemoration of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz is an abomination. But no matter how hard they might try, Pawel Sawicki and the staff of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum cannot make history disappear.

“Never forget” are words that have meaning. It is a shame that this mantra no longer resonates with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... auschwitz/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 22, 2023 2:59 pm

Polish officers in Katyn were shot by the Nazis, not by the NKVD
April 21, 16:38

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RIA Novosti reports that the Poles in Katyn were shot by the Nazis, not by the NKVD,

Polish officers in Katyn were shot by the Nazis, not by the NKVD

Polish officers in Katyn in 1941 were shot by the Nazis, and not by employees of the NKVD of the USSR - this was testified back in 1945 by a participant in the burial of the killed Poles, later a fighter of the German "special purpose" battalion Arno Dure.
"We slept during the day, and in the evening and at night we worked - digging holes. Parts of the SS brought people in cars and dumped them into a ditch 15-20 meters deep," Dure said.
He also told how in 1943 he came home on vacation and saw in the newspapers a photograph of this huge grave.
“It was written under the picture that the Russians did it all. I told my mother that it was not the Russians who did it, but the Germans, but my mother did not believe me,” Dure said.

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(More photos of documents at link.)

https://t.me/rian_ru/199498 - zinc

I have been writing about this for over 15 years. Of course, the Nazis shot the Poles in Katyn. This should be recognized at the state level, especially since the only court decision regarding Katyn is quite clear that the Poles were shot by the Nazis in the autumn of 1941.
Playing along with the Poles and the Goebbels version at the present time looks simply ridiculous.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8307650.html

Polish flags disappeared in Katyn
June 29, 2022

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The Russian Foreign Ministry has officially confirmed that Polish flags have been removed from the memorials in Katyn and Medny.
The official motivation is the hostile Russophobic policy of Poland.
In this way, circumstances will force the Goebbels version of Katyn to be abandoned.
And in general, there is reason to think about the elimination of these memorials in response to the demolition of monuments to Soviet soldiers in Poland.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7707828.html

Historical boomerang of falsifications
April 5, 2022

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Since the 90s, with a tenacity worthy of better use, we have been pulling Goebbels' sticky stuff about Katyn, which I have been writing about since the second half of the 2000s (even before this blog appeared).
The other day, the historical boomerang returned when the current authorities were accused of about the same thing. So blasphemous and cynical.
It is clear that in both cases, we face a fascist provocation. But at the same time, the story is not without irony.
Interestingly, the state version of the events in Bucha, as well as the conclusions of the Burdenko commission, will also be declared "false justifications for the totalitarian regime"?

By the way, as it is not difficult to see from the current military-political situation, the attempt to please the Poles by accepting the Goebbels version of Katyn for some reason did not help.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7541328.html

"The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre"
March 27, 2020

Here it turns out that the well-known American historian Grover Furr has published a new book, and not a simple one, but on Katyn.
Furr became widely known for publishing a book devoted to Khrushchev's falsifications related to the 20th Congress and the de-Stalinization campaign, which caused enormous damage to the USSR.

This book was very good (who has not read it, you can read it here https://avidreaders.ru/read-book/antist ... dlost.html ), so the author has a certain credibility. Well, here is Katyn.

A book about the large-scale historical falsification of the Katyn case was presented in Tver


The book "Secrets of the Katyn Massacre: Evidence, Solution" was presented on March 25 in Tver. Its uniqueness is due to the breadth of the evidence presented and the circle of people who took part in the creation of this project.

The author of the book, an American professor (University of Montclair, USA) Grover Furr, admitted during an online connection that initially he had no doubts about the official version of the Katyn tragedy, which blamed the Stalinist regime for the execution of several thousand Polish citizens. But later, when he tried to study the evidentiary part of these accusations, there were serious inconsistencies in the widely replicated facts that required additional study. And this study led the author to an unequivocal position: the official version of the Katyn massacre is the result of a large-scale falsification of Goebbels, aimed at causing a split between the allies on the eve of the Tehran conference.

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Grover Furr is a professor of medieval studies who, in addition to his main specialty, studies the era of the USSR in the 20-50s.

The same version is shared by one of the benefactors, on whose money this book was published in Russia, Anatoly Wasserman. In principle, the book, published in a circulation of 1000 copies, is a people's international project, implemented at the expense of people from Russia, America, France, Bulgaria, who want to know the truth, not polished for this or that ideological task.

For almost 80 years, the version about the involvement of the Soviet Union in the execution of Poles in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, which is 18 km from Vitebsk, has been widely circulated. The first president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, during the years of his reign, admitted the guilt of the state in this tragedy. It would seem that the issue is settled, but not everyone agrees with this alignment. Indeed, in the fall of 1939, 6,300 Poles were imprisoned in a camp located on the territory of the Nilo-Stolobenskaya Hermitage on Lake Seliger. There is a strong opinion that later they were shot, the list of the dead is carved on the graves of the memorial in Medny. It is a paradox, but many of those declared dead appeared as living in various documentation after 1940. Personal tokens with their names were also found during excavations in Western Ukraine.

It was the Nazis who in April 1943 informed the world about the "unprecedented crime of the Bolsheviks" - the execution of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest.
The German investigation began in February 1943, based on the testimony of local residents who allegedly witnessed how, in March-April 1940, NKVD officers brought captured Poles to the Katyn Forest, who were never seen alive again.
The news of the destruction of Polish officers by the NKVD was bound to cause a break in relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London.

In February 1946, the "Katyn massacre" became one of the episodes considered by the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Soviet side, blaming Germany for the execution, nevertheless failed to prove its case in court. Adherents of the “NKVD crime” version are inclined to consider such a verdict in their favor, but their opponents categorically disagree with them. As evidence, they cite facts: cartridge cases from German weapons, a method of tying prisoners, which is characteristic of the German side, and many others.

During the years of “perestroika”, documents were allegedly found in the Soviet archives, indicating that the execution of the Poles was carried out by the NKVD with the personal sanction of Stalin. Subsequently, a TASS statement was released in which the Soviet Union pleaded guilty to the shooting, declaring it "one of the grave crimes of Stalinism." The main evidence of the guilt of the USSR is now considered to be the so-called “package number 1”, which was stored in a secret special folder of the Archive of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

Meanwhile, the researchers draw attention to the fact that the documents from "package number 1" have a huge number of inconsistencies, allowing them to be considered fake. A lot of such documents, seemingly testifying to the crimes of Stalinism, appeared at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, but most of them were exposed as fakes. However, supporters of the “guilt of the Nazis” version reasonably note that the investigation of the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office was carried out in years when the thesis about “Soviet guilt for Katyn” was supported by the leaders of the Russian Federation, and therefore, it is not necessary to talk about an objective investigation. Today, the military departments are ready to release new documents from closed archives that will shed light on this story.

So far, only one thing is known: out of more than 6 thousand Poles allegedly shot near Katyn, a little more than 240 bodies were exhumed, of which only 16 were identified. Moreover, the excavations were carried out exclusively by the Polish side.

The participants of the round table, and this is how the presentation of the book can be positioned, in which historical researchers from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tver, Smolensk and the USA took part, agreed to continue an unbiased study of the facts of the Katyn and Mednovskaya tragedies. “We are only interested in the truth,” said Mikhail Kormushkin, publisher of the Russian translation of the American author's book.
A fundraiser has been announced for another project to study the controversial pages of the pre-war and military history of the USSR. In particular, the task is to conduct a historical reconstruction of the events in Katyn and Medny with the involvement of forensic experts from law enforcement agencies and, on the basis of this reconstruction, make a documentary film.
It is also proposed to install in the memorial complex in Medny, in Katyn and in Nilova Hermitage, where Polish prisoners of war were temporarily kept, information stands with facts that are alternative to the official version. So that until the final triumph of truth, the public consciousness is not dominated by the only and, in the opinion of the participants of the round table and the author of the book, a controversial point of view.

Svetlana FINEVICH

https://vedtver.ru/news/society/v-tveri ... kogo-dela/ -

Zinc
Of course, there is no secret in Katyn - the Poles were shot by the Germans.

PS. It is noteworthy that the story about the presentation of this book was on the Zvezda TV channel (with the telling title "The work of Goebbels" https://tvzvezda.ru/news/qhistory/conte ... p9LUD.html ), and in the Legislative Assembly of the Tver Region http://www.zsto.ru/index.php/press-tsen ... -perepisat called Furr's study factual and devoid of political overtones.

The author debunks widelythe fact exaggerated in the West about the alleged execution by the NKVD of the USSR of captured Polish officers in the Katyn forest. 6,300 Poles were massacred in 1940. The executions took place in Katyn (the largest burial, near Smolensk), the village of Pyatikhatki (near Kharkov, Ukraine) and the village of Mednoye (near Kalinin, now Tver). Based on this fact of Stalinist terror, propagandists of all stripes are now demonizing the Soviet Union, and even today's Russia. Modern Polish politicians are trying especially hard.
- It is unacceptable to arrange political dances on the bones of those who died during the period of repressions of the thirties and forties in the USSR. On the issue of the Katyn tragedy, this is a tragedy not only for Poland, but also for Russia. This should not be forgotten, it is necessary to put an end to it. And not to hang labels, but to draw the necessary lessons from our common history. It is gratifying that the study of the American historian is devoid of any political background. Just facts, - said Viktor Konstantinov, deputy chairman of the Legislative Assembly of the Tver region, head of the Tver branch of the Russian Military Historical Society.

To be honest, I don’t really believe that under Putin they will refuse to replicate the Goebbels version of Katyn, but after Putin, options are possible, especially since there is a court decision that the Poles were shot in 1941 and the work of historians on this topic, and relations with Poland, those striving for the freezing point favor this. Well, Furr's book in the long run can contribute to this. But first, of course, you need to read it in order to understand whether it is as good as it is touted.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/5743326.html

The promotion of Katyn was approved by Hitler: who actually killed the Poles?
March 5, 2020

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Suddenly. At RIA Novosti, Goebbels' version of Katyn is being exposed with might and main, providing a platform for Vladislav Shved, who in the 2000s made a significant contribution to the analysis of the falsifications of the Katyn case, along with Ilyukhin, Strygin, Mukhin and others.
State media usually ignored this topic, adhering to "official apologies", but in light of the obvious deterioration in relations with Poland, the topic of Katyn and the guilt of the Nazis in the execution of the Poles again fell into the mainstream of state propaganda.

The promotion of Katyn was approved by Hitler: who actually killed the Poles?

The propaganda promotion of the so-called Katyn case was approved by Adolf Hitler himself, according to a publicist-political scientist, a real state adviser of the third class Vladislav Shved, author of the book "Katyn. Modern History of the Question", who studied those events for many years.
In 1943, near the small village of Katyn, 14 kilometers west of Smolensk, in the tract of Kozy Gory, mass graves of executed Polish prisoners of war were opened. The point in this tragic story has not been set so far. This year, on April 13, Poland intends to hold another anti-Russian campaign dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Katyn crime.
In an interview with RIA Novosti, Vladislav Shved cited a number of facts that, he claims, indicate that Katyn was the work of the Nazis, and not the Stalinist leadership of the NKVD. This version, in fact, is confirmed by the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal.

The "Case" of Goebbels

It is known that Hitler flew to Nazi-occupied Smolensk on March 13, 1943. According to Shved, the Fuhrer met with the head of the propaganda department of the Wehrmacht, Colonel Hasso von Wedel, whose officers were already preparing materials on the Katyn case. His promotion was then taken under personal control by the Minister of Imperial Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
“In the spring of 1943, the Nazis, who were defeated at Stalingrad, realized that the war with the USSR would be tense and long-term. It became dangerous to rely only on military power. They decided to use some kind of provocation that could split the anti-Hitler coalition. This is how Katyn arose as a symbol of the atrocities of the NKVD. The Nazis allegedly accidentally discovered the burial places of the murdered Polish officers," Shved notes.

The Nazi version of Katyn

On the same day, the main Nazi newspaper Völkische Beobachter ("People's Observer") came out with an editorial titled "GPU-Mord an 12,000 polnischen Offizieren" (GPU-Mord an 12,000 polnischen Offizieren).
"Further, the Nazis staged a propaganda show from the exhumation of Polish graves in Katyn - Kozy Gory. Numerous delegations from European countries were invited there to "certify" the atrocities of the Soviet GPU (in 1922-1923 - the State Political Administration under the NKVD of the RSFSR, since 1934 renamed the NKVD of the USSR. - Approx. ed.), "continues the political scientist.
According to him, the exhumation of the Katyn burials in March-June 1943 was carried out by employees of the leading German forensic expert Gerhard Buhtz, head of the forensic laboratory of the German Army Group Center and Standartenführer (colonel) of the SS.
“Recently, it turned out that at that time the Nazis were in close contact with representatives of the Polish government in exile. This was told in the book “RKS” (Intelligence Club of the Allies. - Approx. Ed.) Doctor of Historical Sciences Vladimir Lota, a retired KGB colonel of the USSR. He refers to the archival reports of Shandor Rado (Radó Sándor), one of the most effective residents of the Soviet military intelligence during World War II, "explains Shved.
In the book, Lota reports that “at the German insistence, the Polish embassy in Bern edited the text of its request to the International Red Cross together with the German embassy ...” “The embassy was given only three hours for this, since the Germans wanted the Polish request to arrive simultaneously with the German . Comments, as they say, are superfluous",

Nazi-Polish exhumation and identification

Officially, the exhumation and identification of the Katyn corpses took place from March 29 to June 7, 1943. However, according to witnesses, the Nazis worked in Katyn-Kozy Gory from February to August, they were actively assisted by specialists from the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross (TK PKK).
The results of the exhumation and identification are contained in the "Official Material on the Katyn Massacre" (Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn), published in 1943 in Berlin.
The document, according to Shved, reports that in March-June 1943, 4,143 corpses were exhumed from the Katyn burials, of which 2,815 (67.9 percent) were allegedly identified. According to the official list of identified Katyn victims, published by the Polish side in 1944 in Geneva, 2,636 corpses were identified out of 4,243 exhumed, or 62.1 percent.
“This discrepancy indicates that the Poles had to remove from their lists the names of 179 Polish officers exhumed and identified in Kozy Gory, since in reality they turned out to be alive. This is one of the indirect confirmations of the Nazi falsification of the identification of the remains of the Katyn victims,” Shved points out.
As for the results of Nazi identification, which are incredible for world practice, the political scientist recalled: the exhumation in 1988 in the Belarusian Kurapaty of the remains of victims of Stalinist repressions made it possible to identify only four (0.06 percent) of 6,500 corpses. Of the remains of the "enemies of the people" shot in Butovo near Moscow, no one has been identified, although some names are known.

Falsification

In 1945, all the "documentary evidence" of the responsibility of the NKVD for the Katyn massacre, collected by the Butz commission, was burned on orders from Berlin. This was reported in the book "Katyn" by Jozef Mackiewicz, a Polish journalist and the first researcher of the Katyn crime.
“This is a clear confirmation that the “documentation” of the materials was fake and had nothing to do with the Katyn execution by the NKVD,” Shved believes.
In the post-Soviet period, the Poles added dubious "facts" with the obvious connivance of the Soviet, and then the Russian side, and achieved international recognition of the Nazi version.

The collapse of the Nazi-Polish version

On behalf of the prosecutor of Krakow, Roman Martini, who opened a criminal case on the death of Polish officers in the fall of 1945, leading Polish forensic experts, professors Jan Olbrycht and Sergiusz Sengalevich, prepared a review of the Nazi "Official Material on the Massacre at Katyn".
This document was supposed to be presented to the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT). "We believe that we have shown enough gaps, errors and inaccuracies to recognize the statements made by the Germans in the publication Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn that do not withstand scientific criticism, and thereby recognize this document as propaganda," the political scientist cites an excerpt from the Polish review .
Unfortunately, the unexpected happened. “On March 30, 1946, prosecutor Martini was killed. The Soviet side did not show interest in recalling Olbrykht and Sengalevich, as it considered it the main task to present testimonies to Nuremberg about the responsibility of the German Nazis for the Katyn massacre. Therefore, in 1946, the opinion of Polish professors was not heard at the MVT "Swede explains.
However, according to him, there are other indisputable evidence and evidence confirming the responsibility of the Nazis for the execution of Polish officers in Kozy Gory.

The devil is in the details

In the report of the aforementioned Butz, who led the exhumation and identification of the Katyn burials, it was reported that most of the exhumed corpses were dressed in Polish uniforms. “In addition to orders and other awards, personal belongings, documents, souvenirs, letters, notebooks, there were numerous items of military equipment on the bodies ... There were also distinctions for bravery on the uniforms of the dead,” Shvets cites Butz’s report.
This is irrefutable evidence that it was the Nazis who shot the victims, the political scientist emphasizes. Indeed, according to the "Regulations on prisoners of war", approved by the Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of March 19, 1931, in the USSR they "were allowed to wear uniforms, but without distinctive marks assigned to their rank or position." It is known that in the NKVD the Regulations of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR were strictly implemented.

The Swede drew attention to the fact that from grave No. 1, filled with corpses in nine to twelve layers, Nazi exhumers were the first to extract the remains of Polish generals Mieczysław Smoravinsky and Bronisław Bokhaterewicz. “Meanwhile, based on the lists of instructions of the NKVD, which Katynovologists present as evidence of the unconditional guilt of Stalin’s law enforcement agencies, the remains of Smoravinsky and Bokhaterevich should have been in the eighth or ninth layer of those who were shot, if you count from above. Only one could know about the real location of the remains of Polish generals those who shot them. That is, the Nazis, "says the interlocutor of RIA Novosti.
And he quotes from a telegram from the British Ambassador to the Republic of Poland, Owen O'Malley, sent on May 15, 1943, to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden: "At the foot of the hillside is a mass grave in the shape of" L " (grave No. 1. - Ed.), which has been completely excavated. Its dimensions: 16x26x6 meters. The bodies of the dead are neatly laid out in rows from nine to 12 people, one on top of the other, with their heads in opposite directions ... "" To believe that the NKVD
officers descended into the ditch to a depth of three or four meters for neat laying in rows and a jack of the shot, this is from the realm of the impossible. There is a typical German thorough approach: to ensure the maximum filling of the ditch, "adds Shved.
next argument. Butz in his report mentioned "numerous bullets and shell casings" in the burial. “It is known that in 1994-1995, Polish experts during excavations in Katyn found 241 German cartridge cases, 79 of them with traces of such corrosion that it is impossible to read the markings. This is another Nazi trace,” the political scientist notes.
The fact is, he explains, that pistol cartridges Geco 7.65 D. (Gustav Genschow & Co.) with stainless brass sleeves were produced in Germany only until the end of 1940. In 1941, due to a shortage of non-ferrous metals, the Germans switched to copper-plated steel cases, and then pure steel, covered with a gray-green varnish. Copper-plated and varnished sleeves quickly rusted in the soil.
In addition, Polish two-zloty banknotes issued on March 1, 1940 were found in the Katyn Forest, as reported by Jozef Mackiewicz, mentioned above, after visiting the Katyn excavations in May 1943.
"In the Polish General Government, the pre-war two-zlotovkas were replaced with "Krakow" ones from May 8 to 20, 1940. The first stage of Polish officers from the Kozelsk camp of the NKVD left for Smolensk on April 3, 1940, the last - on May 10, 1940. That is, "Krakow" two-zlotovkas Polish prisoners of war in the Kozelsk camp of the NKVD, if they had been shot in April-May 1940, did not have,” Shved emphasizes.
Polish officers could only have these banknotes in the event of a Nazi execution in 1941.

Execution lists

According to Shved, today it has been reliably established that the Nazi exhumers in Katyn-Kozy Gory had lists of Polish officers sent by the Prisoner of War Administration of the NKVD of the USSR to the Kozelsky camp of the NKVD. The camp administration was supposed to transfer the Polish prisoners of war to the NKVD Directorate for the Smolensk region.
This was revealed in the archival correspondence between the Reich Propaganda Ministry and the German Red Cross (GKK), dated May 23, 1943, by Professor of Moscow State University, Doctor of Historical Sciences Vladimir Sakharov. "The Nazis seized the lists of Polish officers in the building of the UNKVD of the Smolensk region in July 1941," Shved clarifies.
Professor Sakharov also discovered another large-scale falsification. The Nazis claimed that they found 3,300 letters and postcards on the Katyn corpses and in the graves, thanks to which they allegedly achieved such an incredibly high percentage of victim identification.
Sakharov, analyzing the addresses of senders of letters and postcards from the Katyn burials, found out that most of the Polish cities and streets indicated in the addresses were already Germanized. “Meanwhile, it is known that the process of Germanization of the territories of Poland, captured by Germany in September 1939, took place with great difficulty. There is a clear discrepancy,” Shved points out.
The miscalculation of the Soviet leadership
The falsification of the "Katyn case" could have been put to an end long ago if the leadership of the USSR, and then Russia, had taken due and exhaustive measures for this, Vladislav Shved believes.
“But the conviction of the Soviet leaders that no one would dare to challenge the Soviet version of Katyn did not allow the truth to triumph properly. Nevertheless, the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal indicted Hermann Göring, Nazi number two, and Alfred Jodl, acting chief of the Katyn crime, for the Katyn crime. Wehrmacht High Command. These are documented facts," the political scientist concludes.

https://ria.ru/20200305/1568164675.html - zinc

Personally, I never doubted that the Nazis shot the Poles.
This was also confirmed by the Russian court at one time, when it issued the only existing decision on the topic of Katyn, which directly states that the Poles were shot not in the spring of 1940, but in the autumn of 1941. Since then, no judicial decision has been made to challenge this conclusion. But the slop of the Polish-Nazi propaganda myths is quite tenacious.

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 26, 2023 2:21 pm

Lenin: Thinker, fighter
April 22, 2023 Vince Copeland



V.I. Lenin was born on this day, April 22, in 1870. Struggle-La Lucha presents this brief biography written by Vince Copeland, originally published in 1989, on the 65th anniversary of Lenin’s death.

George Plekhanov did not have Lenin in mind when he wrote his remarkable essay on “The Role of the Individual in History.” But the following paragraphs describe Lenin more than anybody else you can think of.

“A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time — needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes.

“In his well-known book on heroes and hero worship, Carlyle calls great men beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is a beginner precisely because he sees further than others and desires things more strongly than others.

“He solves the scientific problems brought up by the preceding process of intellectual development of society; he points to the new social needs created by the preceding development of social relationships; he takes the initiative in satisfying those needs.

“He is a hero, but he is a hero not in the sense that he can stop the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course (of history). Herein lies all his significance; herein lies his whole power. But this significance is colossal. And the power is terrible.”

The ‘beginnings’

Aside from the exclusive emphasis on the male sex and the rather literary use of the world “terrible,” this is an almost perfect description of the relation of the individual to the historical process — and not only the “great” individual.

But it may be a little incomplete just to say that great people are “beginners,” because the historical forces they represent and the leaders and thinkers who preceded them also produce those people, too. In that sense, they are “continuers.”

Lenin would have been the first to admit — and even proclaim — that he, too, was a continuer, especially of Karl Marx and even of Plekhanov himself in that thinker’s earlier period.

However, in Lenin we have an example of a person who, although also a “continuer,” actually did clearly begin not one, but several, very important aspects of the struggle for the inevitable socialist future of humanity.

Let us review the main “beginnings” that he was personally responsible for.

But first a few words on his character and personality, which are not always clear from his writing or even from some biographical descriptions.

Love and struggle

The age of complete world socialism that Lenin visualized and fought for will bring about the end of all hunger — hunger of material goods as well as for food for everybody on earth. This can undoubtedly be achieved with the constantly improving machinery and technology already evident in the present age. This technology needs only to be released from the death-grip of an outlived profit-hungry, war-mad social system.

With a new economy and a new system, the socialist age will eventually bring the spirit and practice of universal cooperation, love and consideration for one’s neighbor, and the fullest development of every individual without the necessity of trampling upon any other individual.

To bring about this age, however, requires not so much a program to convince people in the present age to love their neighbors, etc. (which would be utopian if not false and hypocritical), as it requires a relentless struggle against the ruling class enemy which resists the coming into being of the socialist age with all its might.

This struggle, in turn, requires a different kind of person to engage in it. It also requires a plan, a strategy, a theory and a leadership.

Lenin provided all those, but in order to do that effectively he had to conduct himself and even shape himself in a certain way.

Necessary explosions

He was passionate in his will to bring about the revolution to usher in the socialist age, but so absolutely devoted to the task that he was ruthless toward its enemies and, whenever necessary, critical toward its friends. This alone required a certain austerity and at times aloofness.

His devotion to the goal, together with the constant deep study to prepare himself for battle, did not always prepare people for the occasional explosions of his great store of political ammunition. He was irresistible on the platform, but infinitely more from the logic and the political power of his position than from any so-called “charisma.”

This, of course, required a “terrible” intensity on his part.

Humor, personal love, relaxation and other human attributes he had, of course. But these were not part of the highly political personality that his contemporaries were usually acquainted with.

A well-known Menshevik named F.I. Dan said of him (probably after Lenin gave him some well-deserved political blow):

“What are you going to do with a guy who talks, writes, thinks and breathes nothing but revolution 24 hours a day?”

This was probably not meant entirely as a compliment.

But it gives us an inkling of why Lenin became the leader of the revolution, if not why Dan became one of its leading opponents.

1895: First Marxist workers’ organization in Russia

At the age of 25, Lenin founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, which was the first Marxist workers’ organization in Russia.

(Some time before that, Plekhanov had formed the Emancipation of Labor Group, but it was composed of professionals and exiles.)

As a result, Lenin was arrested on Dec. 8, 1895, and sent first to prison for 14 months and then to Siberia for three years. In both places he constantly kept in touch with his revolutionary followers and also wrote a powerful book, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia.”

1900: ‘The Spark’ is lit

In 1900, Lenin founded the first nationally circulated illegal Russian Marxist newspaper. It was called Iskra (The Spark) and was edited and printed abroad.

Its editorial board included Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich and other prominent Marxists.

It reached thousands of workers in Russia who, in turn, read it aloud to thousands of others.

1903: A new kind of party

Lenin founded the Bolshevik Party. He didn’t do this merely by setting up a banner and coining a few good slogans and calling upon people to rally ‘round. He did it after long struggles with the old anarchist-populist elements in the 1890s and then against a new opportunist trend among the Marxists called “economism.”

While he already had great prestige in the movement, he did not necessarily have the full confidence of all the other leading Marxists at the time — nor did he have confidence in all of them. He was dissatisfied with some of the attitudes among them — attitudes about party membership and responsibilities.

So he proposed at a convention of about 60 leaders held in exile that every party member become, in effect, a professional revolutionary. That is, the party must be a party of cadres whose main interest in life was the socialist revolution and who would subordinate their other activities to the needs of the party.

A political bombshell

When he made this proposal it was like dropping the proverbial bombshell. It led to an irreconcilable split. The Mensheviks (meaning minority) walked out. It later became clear that underneath the simple words describing what a party member should be was a determination to make the socialist revolution. And underneath the opposition to those words was not only a softness in general, but a different view of the coming revolution.

The concept of a party is generally known at the present time (although not generally practiced), but the difficulties in forming the party and keeping it together under Czarist rule are somewhat less known and even less understood.

From the very beginning, the road was hard.

But Lenin knew he was right. And he was more right than he knew. Even Lenin could not have foreseen in 1903 the sequence of events in 1917. He could not have known that the Mensheviks would actually oppose the October Revolution tooth and nail.

As a matter of fact, even the Mensheviks themselves could not have dreamed in 1903 that their own leader in 1917, I.G. Tsereteli, the president of the Soviets (until September, when the Bolsheviks won the Soviet elections), would shortly after the revolution go down to Georgia and actually organize an armed counterrevolution against the new Soviet state.

1905: Revolution and insurrection

There were many tests and crises for the new party, which were reflections of and responses to the crisis-torn Czarist regime and the workers’ struggle against it.

In the 1905 revolution, for instance, when the Petersburg Soviet members were all arrested, the Bolsheviks under Lenin (who had secretly returned to Russia from exile) led the Moscow uprising.

The insurrection was beaten down, though it lasted several days before it ended. This put an even deeper chasm between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks — the latter saying: “They shouldn’t have taken up arms.”

1907: Reaction and bourgeois parliament

During the events of 1905, the Czar had been forced to “grant” a representative parliament called the Duma. All the real revolutionaries, mostly Bolsheviks, boycotted this Duma, which they regarded as an attempt to co-opt the revolution.

But during the reaction after the revolution was over, Lenin was the first of the revolutionaries to recognize that the times had changed. Even though he had been the first to advocate insurrection, he now proposed taking part in this more or less fraudulent Duma. He was at first opposed by the majority of his own central committee, although he later convinced them to do it.

(Lenin was called inflexible and stiff-necked by his enemies, but he was really a superb tactician who tried to take advantage of every possible means of struggle, including the parliamentary.)

1908: The socialist heaven must stay on earth

During the reaction, there was a struggle over Marxist philosophy led by supporters of a form of mysticism which tried to establish itself in the party and actually form a new “religion.”

Lenin led this fight and wrote a powerful and thoroughgoing rebuttal to the philosophical revisionists known as “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.”

This did not come easy, either. Besides the tremendous theoretical work required, he had to rebuke his personal friend, the great novelist Maxim Gorky, who helped the party with funds and in other ways, too. And he had to attack leading comrades while being temporarily in a bloc with George Plekhanov, who had now become a Menshevik but still fought for the materialist view of history.

That was how Lenin saw the issue of Marxist theory and the materialist method.

How easy it would have been to gloss over the mystical maunderings of a few leaders and just make a few remarks about them! But that wouldn’t have been Lenin, and it wouldn’t have maintained the party’s sharpness in doctrine and method that was necessary to make a revolution.

1913: Right of self-determination

There was also an important, and in the light of later events, historical dispute with Rosa Luxemburg, an otherwise very revolutionary comrade, over the question of self-determination.

Luxemburg thought the socialist revolution would solve national oppression, and anyway, the leaders of some of these oppressed nations were oppressors too, so how could a workers’ party support them?

Lenin not only led a debate against this view, but was the first to set down in theoretical form the whole question of the defense of the rights of colonies and semi-colonies (called neo-colonies today) to secede from imperialist oppressors.

Later, during the First World War, when he refused to support the imperialist countries, he took care to make exception for small countries fighting for their liberation.

This was extremely difficult to do at that time, because the small European countries fighting in the First World War (e.g., the Balkans) had completely sold themselves to the big imperialist countries and it appeared to revolutionaries like Luxemburg that there never would be any progressive war by any small country.

1914: ‘Turn the imperialist war into civil war’

The greatest test for Lenin personally, parallel to that of the 1917 revolution itself, was in taking his uniquely revolutionary position on the First World War.

Earlier, the European socialist parties had all pledged themselves to oppose the coming war. But, when the war actually came, the parties capitulated and each — except for individual holdouts — supported its respective imperialist government.

In Germany, for instance, 110 socialist members of the national congress voted for the war. Only one, Karl Liebknecht, voted against. (There were other great German leaders who agreed with Liebknecht, like Rosa Luxemburg.)

It was about the same in the smaller socialist parties.

In Russia, however, all five Bolshevik representatives in the Duma, along with some “internationalist” Mensheviks, voted against the war. And they were all sent to hard labor in Siberia. (So much for parliamentary immunity!)

But Lenin not only opposed the war: he went further and proposed that socialists use the war situation to work for the overthrow of their respective governments.

“Turn the imperialist war into civil war,” he said.

And he developed the doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism” — that is, the proposition that the defeat of your own imperialist country, your own ruling class, is preferable to their chauvinist victory, especially if the defeat is brought on by the people’s struggles for their rights and for progress and socialism.

Needless to say, the imperialist rulers of all countries persecuted the opponents of their war. And they accused the strikers and fighters for justice of being enemy agents. Even a literary opposition to the war was tantamount to treason.

‘Second International is dead: Long live the Third!’

Furthermore, Lenin condemned all the socialists who supported the war or half-supported it. He condemned the whole Second International and called for the establishment of a Third (Communist) International.

He was the first person to do this. And he found no answering echo for some time, not even among the most resolute anti-war fighters in all countries.

All this was in the first few months of the war. And it must be remembered that the chauvinism and hysteria on both sides had reached heights not previously known in the modern world — and never known on such a worldwide basis.

The pressure to conform was very intense. Even within the anti-war part of the Social Democratic parties, there was a strong tendency to go along with Karl Kautsky, leader of the Second International, who had a centrist position. But Lenin vigorously condemned this grouping and Kautsky in particular for not declaring war on their own ruling class.

He took an equally hard line in his own country, of course. Plekhanov, the “Father of Russian Marxism,” supported the war, objectively supporting the same Czar against whom he had fought for most of his life.

Lenin, who had blocked with Plekhanov on the question of Marxist philosophy, now mercilessly condemned him for his terrible capitulation.

But Lenin’s hard line helped to further harden the Bolshevik Party and prepare it for the revolution that came in 1917.

1917: It began on Women’s Day

The revolution itself began on International Women’s Day, March 8, 1917, with a demonstration of women textile workers. It came like a thunderclap in the middle of the war under the very nose of the Czarist court.

After five days of constantly increasing strikes and street demonstrations, first unarmed and finally armed, the Czar abdicated and the capitalist democrats took over with a so-called “provisional government.”

From the start, the workers and soldiers (the latter mostly peasants in uniform) established huge councils (“soviets”) that really rivaled the provisional government, but appeared to be only auxiliaries.

‘All power to the Soviets!’

Within a month after the spring revolution, Lenin came back from exile and immediately raised the slogan, “All power to the Soviets.”

This slogan may seem simple enough and clear enough to revolutionaries looking at it from the vantage point of history.

But it caused a great furor in the whole movement when he raised the idea.

In fact, of all the difficult, creative revolutionary positions that Lenin ever took, this one was the boldest, the most courageous, the most heroic, one might say. For he mobilized his whole party, the party he had worked with and sacrificed so many years to build, in an effort to do something that had never been done before and appeared to many wise heads to be absolutely suicidal.

What? Make another revolution just weeks or months after the first? Not only that, but to make a socialist revolution, a proletarian revolution, without allowing a period for capitalist rule (after the fall of feudalism) of the type that had developed in all the advanced countries?

Obviously, an attempt to take power followed by a failure would destroy the Bolshevik Party completely and every chance to be an opposition party in the new democratic capitalist regime would be lost.

On the other hand, think of all the wise people today who will tell you how Marx was wrong about the socialist revolution coming first in Western Europe and that its success in the underdeveloped East proves that Marx’s whole thesis was wrong.

In the Russia of 1917, every socialist of whatever faction was more keenly aware of this proposition of Marx than the smartest kibitzers of today. And it was precisely this thought (in addition to sheer worry and fear) that paralyzed the movement. It was this mental paralysis that Lenin had to overcome and the Bolsheviks had to cure in action.

Furthermore, Lenin called for the Soviets to take power at a time when the Bolsheviks were in a small minority in the Soviets.

This alone required a deep historical understanding and a clear historical perspective.

If Lenin and the Bolsheviks had failed to see the special situation in Russia — both theoretically and practically — if they had failed to apply living Marxism to the given, historical Russian conditions, there might have been no successful socialist revolution in Russia. And if so there would not have been any in Eastern Europe after the Second World War and probably not so soon in China, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America in the subsequent period.

The “beginner,” who was part of the inevitable and unconscious force of history, had begun a whole chain of revolutions and a new phase in the world socialist revolution first conceived by Karl Marx.

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Sat May 06, 2023 2:54 pm

Lu Shaye States Some Facts: The West Trembles
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 5, 2023
Christopher Black

Image

Lu Shaye States Some Facts: The West TremblesThe Chinese ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, in a long and wide-ranging interview with a journalist on the French television news channel LCI, about world and Chinese affairs, stated, in response to a question as to whether or not Crimea was a part of Ukraine, that ‘it depended on how one looks at the history of the situation,” and that Crimea was Russian for a long time and only given to Ukraine during the Soviet era.”

He then added,

“Even these ex-Soviet countries don’t have an effective status in international law because there was no international agreement to materialize their status as sovereign countries.”

Both these statements caused an angry reaction in the West, especially the Baltic countries and Ukraine, and drew statements condemning what he said and calls for his removal from his post.

But among all this furore no one in the western media or halls of power bothered to ask the question, are his statements correct? The answer is yes and the anger in the West is due to their recognition that he is correct, that the entire post-Soviet order in Europe is built on a foundation of sand.

To understand this and its consequences we have to examine the events during the counter-revolution in, and during the dissolution of, the USSR in 1991.

The history of the counter-revolution in the USSR and the break up of the Soviet state is a long and complex one which is difficult to summarise n a short essay such as this. However, we can penetrate through the web of complexity to get to the heart of the issue raised by Ambassador Lu by examining the 1977 Constitution of the USSR for it was, or is, the controlling law governing the situation.

Article 1 of the Constitution states that,

“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a socialist state of the whole people, expressing the will and interests of the workers, peasants, and intelligentsia, the working people of all the nations and nationalities of the country.”

Article 72 states,

“Each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the USSR.”

But, in this regard it is important be aware of Articles 74 and 75, which confirm the supremacy of the Supreme Soviet and that, where there existed discrepancies between the laws of a constituent republic and the Supreme Soviet the laws of the Supreme Soviet prevailed.

Article 74 states,

“Article 74. The laws of the USSR shall have the same force in all Union Republics. In the event of a discrepancy between a Union Republic law and an All-Union law, the law of the USSR shall prevail.”[

Article 75 states,

“Article 75. The territory of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a single entity and comprises the territories of the Union Republics. The sovereignty of the USSR extends throughout its territory”

Article 72 did not set out a process by which a republic could secede but on April 3 1990, the Supreme Soviet filled that gap by adopting a law regulating the process by which a republic could secede.

In essence, the secession law adopted by the Supreme Soviet in 1990 required a referendum be held in the republic desiring to secede and required a positive vote of two-thirds of republic’s voting residents to be valid. The result of the referendum was then required to be submitted to the Supreme Soviet for approval after which various mechanisms would be implemented to resolve all the issues that would flow from secession and how to handle them.

Once the result was approved by the Supreme Soviet then it also had to be approved by the Congress of People’s Deputies, the nation’s top parliamentary body.

The secession law also required a five-year transition period for settling property and other questions to be approval by the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow and payment by the seceding republic of resettlement expenses for those who oppose independence and wanted to leave.

One of the major issues that was to be determined in the event of secession were the rights of those who voted to remain in the USSR and belonged to an ethnic minority, and their right to in turn secede from the seceding republic in order themselves to remain within the USSR, or to leave with compensation.

This is a major point because in the Baltic States there lived significant, and in the case of Ukraine, large Russian populations. In the east of Ukraine, a majority of the citizens were and are Russians.

The 1990 Amendment is long and I will not include it in the text here, but it is well worth-examining in detail especially in view of the events in Ukraine sine 1990 and the reader can find it here.

In this regard attention must be paid to Article 3, which states,

Article 3.

“In a Union republic which includes within its structure autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts, or autonomous okrugs, the referendum is held separately for each autonomous formation. The people of autonomous republics and autonomous formations retain the right to decide independently the question of remaining within the USSR or within the seceding Union republic, and also to raise the question of their own state-legal status.”

This is an important factor in determining whether Crimea is a part of Ukraine or not since Crimea was an autonomous oblast and therefore the people of Crimea had the right to vote, independently, in a separate referendum to decide whether they wanted to join a seceding Ukraine or to remain with the USSR. But no such referendum was ever permitted the citizens of the oblast of Crimea. We can understand why Kiev would not permit it, since the majority of Crimeans would have voted to stay within the USSR, not Ukraine, as the 2014 referendum proved.

But Western agents were very active in the Baltic states and Ukraine during this period as they are now and the counter-revolutionary elements among the Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians maintained that the new Soviet law on secession did not apply to them since, they claimed, their republics did not voluntarily join the Soviet Union but were forcibly annexed by the USSR in June 1940.

However, it must be noted that Estonia was a part of Russia for three hundred years, from 1721 until 1920, when the Bolsheviks granted it independence after a two-year conflict during which Estonia tried to use the events of WWI and the Russian Revolution to leave the Russian empire. This proved to be a short-lived independence since the USSR, in order to defend itself against the new German threat, reoccupied the country in 1940, and a pro-communist government took power in Estonia and asked to join the USSR. From 1940 Estonia was a part of the USSR and as a constituent republic was subject to the laws of the USSR.

Lithuania took the same position as Estonia but, at the time, Gorbachev’s press secretary, Arkady A. Maslennikov, indicated that no exceptions would be made for the Baltic republics when asked about the current legal status of Lithuania.

“Lithuania is part of the U.S.S.R., and all questions pertaining to the state structure of the republic and the problem of being in or out of the Soviet federation can be solved exclusively on a constitutional basis, even if that basis is not to somebody’s liking,”

The history of Latvia is similar, with it falling under Polish, German, Swedish and Russian rule at various points of history. But from 1795 it was a part of the Russian Empire. During the events of WWI and the Russian Revolution, Latvia also gained a tenuous independence, which ended when Germany invaded Poland, and Latvia, at the request of the new people’s assembly that took power on August 5, 1940 asked for admission to the USSR, which was also granted.

In the period 1988-90, pushed and supported by the West and its intelligence services, all three Baltic states began to refuse to adhere to the Constitution of the USSR by which they were bound and, after a series of illegal steps declared independence from the USSR in 1991, after the coup by communist forces and elements against the counter-revolutionary forces in Moscow failed.

But their actions were not just illegal under the Constitution by which they were governed and subject to. They were against the will of the majority of the citizens of the USSR for it must also be noted that another important development took place in 1991. In that year a national referendum took place across the USSR, except for a few republics that boycotted it, in which the question posed was whether to approve a new Union Treaty between the republics, to replace the 1922 treaty that created the USSR. The question put to most voters was:

“Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any ethnicity will be fully guaranteed?”

Voter turnout was 80 per cent and 80 per cent of those voted for keeping the union together.

Among the governments who boycotted the referendum on national unity were the Baltic States, among a few others, such as Georgia, who would not allow their citizens to vote on the matter. In fact, to counter the USSR referendum they conducted their own a few days before with the result supporting independence. But these referenda were illegal under the 1977 Constitution since any referendum on secession had to be approved by the Supreme Soviet and, due to overt pressure from western independence forces and those in power, the validity of the vote can be questioned. The Baltic states knew that if they acted legally, they would be bound by the referendum held across the USSR which voted to maintain the USSR and to gain independence would then have to have another referendum on secession as required. This they did not want to risk.

With respect to Ukraine, the vote was over 71 per cent in favour of remaining within the USSR. We must assume with confidence that in Crimean and the Donbass it was much higher but figures are unavailable.

In Ukraine citizens were asked a second question which was,

“Do you agree that Ukraine should be part of a Union of Soviet Sovereign States?

The vote was 88.7 per cent in favour.

The situation is further complicated because, in tandem with the referendum on national unity, a new treaty was drawn up replacing the USSR with a new Commonwealth of Independent States to which all the republics would belong. But the signing ceremony for the Russian republic set for August 20, 1990 never took place because of the coup of in Moscow a day earlier by those trying to preserve the USSR as it was. That left the USSR intact.

The final illegality was the signing, on December 8, 1991, of what are known as the Belosvzha Accords, the name taken from the place where this event took place. The leaders of the republics of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, that is Boris Yelstin, for Russia, Leonid Kravchuk for Ukraine and Stanislas Shushkevic for Belarus, decided, on their own, and in violation of the USSR Constitution, to issue a decree dissolving the USSR and establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States. Their pretext for this act against the will of the majority of soviet citizens was the failed coup attempt by those trying to save the USSR.

In other words, they acted on their own, against the expressed will of the people, against the will of the majority of the Soviet republics, against the Constitution, and, it appears for no one’s benefit except that of the West and western assets inside the USSR.

Mikhail Gorbachev in his memoirs of 2000, stated,

“The fate of the multinational state cannot be determined by the will of the leaders of three republics. The question should be decided only by constitutional means with the participation of all sovereign states and taking into account the will of all their citizens. The statement that Union wide legal norms would cease to be in effect is also illegal and dangerous; it can only worsen the chaos and anarchy in society. The hastiness with which the document appeared is also of serious concern. It was not discussed by the populations, nor by the Supreme Soviets of the republics in whose name it was signed. Even worse, it appeared at the moment when the draft treaty for a Union of Sovereign States, drafted by the USSR State Council, was being discussed by the parliaments of the republics.”

But the fait accompli soon led the other republics to follow suit since their seemed no alternative to overcoming the illegal actions of Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevic which had taken place.

With regard to Crimea the argument can be made that Ukraine’s secession from the USSR was illegal, invalid and of no legal effect, and therefore its status as a nation state is questionable and therefore its claim to Crimea is also questionable. But this is not the end of the matter for Crimea has been part of Russia since the days of Catherine the Great, and the decision, by Premier Kruschev in 1954, to assign Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was solely for administrative reasons and only on the condition that Ukraine would remain a Soviet republic within the USSR.

The decree of 1954 stated,

“Taking into account the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic and cultural ties between the Crimea Province and the Ukrainian SSR, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet decrees:

“To approve the joint presentation of the Presidium of the Russian SFSR Supreme Soviet and the Presidium of the Ukrainian SSR Supreme Soviet on the transfer of the Crimea Province from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR.”


Some Russian jurists now take the position that this action was illegal under Soviet law at the time. But in any case, the fact is that Crimea’s transfer to Ukraine was clearly conditional on it remaining with the USSR as a part of the Ukraine SSR and it was done mainly for ease of administration at the time. It was never meant to be a permanent gift to Ukraine if it chose to secede from the USSR. Together with the refusal of Ukraine to conduct a referendum in Crimea on the question whether Crimeans wanted to remain with Ukraine or the USSR, the illegal secession of Ukraine from the USSR, and the fact that Crimea was not intended to remain under Ukrainian control if it left the USSR, it can be argued that Ukraine has no valid claim to Crimea whatsoever.

So, Ambassador Lu was perfectly correct to say what he did, to point out that the entire legal status of the ex-Soviet republics is in question and in fact, that the dissolution of the USSR itself was illegal under Soviet law and, in legal terms never took place, and therefore, according to the 1977 Constitution the USSR still exists. It is often said in Russia that those who do not miss the USSR have no heart, but those who want to reconstitute it have no head. But one could reply that the USSR was never properly dissolved.

But history has moved on and, de facto, these states now exist, are recognised, internally and externally and have consolidated their existence by building an edifice of laws, agreements, and treaties and established relations which solidify the status quo. But it is a status quo that can be regarded as built on a foundation of sand, for illegality always has consequences as we have witnessed in several of the ex –soviet republics since 1991.

The Western anger at Ambassador Lu’s remarks in Paris reflects the West’s own insecurity and weakness. They know he is right. Their anger and reactions are meant to try to push his remarks into the dark, so they cannot be examined and considered. Ambassador Lu stated facts, and the facts made them tremble, for they are afraid the whole edifice they helped to build can come crashing down.



https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... -trembles/
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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Tue May 09, 2023 2:52 pm

THE END OF THE WORLD SYSTEM
Andrey Fursov

May 6, 2023 , 9:43 a.m.

Image
Only rational, subjective and free knowledge about society will teach people not to be afraid of the tolling of the bells of history (Photo: File)

In October 1990, I gave a lecture at Columbia University. One of those present sarcastically asked "Don't you think the bell of communism is tolling?" I told him that John Donne had a poem with this line that Hemingway used as an epigraph: "Never ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for you!" I meant that the destruction of the Soviet system is the beginning of the end of your own system, in 10 or 15 years. The audience laughed… But in 2008 the crisis really came. Crisis that was predicted in the West in the early 1980s.

And now the question arises: for whom, in fact, do the bell toll? They bend for the existing world system. And if Russia remains mentally, economically and socially as lax as a part of this world, then the bell will ring for her too. Another thing is that if Russia was not part of this world, but was, let's say, a socialist system in itself, everything would be different. As expected in American forecasts in the early 1980s.

In the early 1980s, Reagan ordered forecasts from three groups of economists for the next 15 years. And they came to absolutely identical conclusions, and then together they summed up the general result. The prognosis was the following: before the "two-humped" crisis of 1987 and 1992/1993 production fell by 20 to 25% in the capitalist sector and by 10 to 12% in the socialist sector.

The political outcome of this whole affair for the West is the coming to power of the communists in Italy and France, alone or in an alliance of leftist forces. In the UK, the Labor Left is making a comeback. And in the United States, nobody returns anywhere, except for the protests of the black community in all the major cities. There was a separate forecast for the Soviet system: it slipped through this crisis much more easily. But it was as it was. Capitalism was not built, but we suffer from its ulcers. The people who built criminal capitalism at best are suffering the plagues of global capitalism.

Apparently, this period in human history (which was characterized by rapid growth) is ending forever. I mean technical advancement, which, conditionally, was from the middle of the 18th century to the 1980s of the 20th century. It must be said that after the Neolithic revolution, economic growth in antiquity, in the Middle Ages and in Asian societies was 0.2% per year. It was an asymptote. And suddenly there was a strong jolt! But this breakthrough is really coming to an end.

This does not mean that tomorrow the whole world will move to a pre-industrial economy. But in the sense that there really is a certain limit. In principle, this is nothing new for those who once, in 1960, followed the lectures in Byurakan, here in Armenia, dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. There was a lot of discussion about whether we are alone in the universe and basically the points of view of Stanisław Lem and our astronomer Víktor Shklovski clashed. "We are not alone," Lem said. And Shklovski said: "To hell with us in the universe."

But Kardashov, who created his own typology of extraterrestrial civilizations, found a third solution. He said that "we are not alone in the sense that the technical phase of any civilization cannot last more than a certain time." The hypothetical scheme of it is very important for us now, for the prospects for the development of earthly civilization and the post-capitalist system. As Kardashov himself said, our modern system (capitalism/socialism together) uses only 0.16 of the energy potential of the planet. And there are practically no prospects of using anything else. This does not mean that development stops there. Or does it not mean that we need to implement the version of the Club of Rome and Klaus Schwab? Because Schwab, in fact, with the exception of stakeholder capitalism,did not present anything new compared to the robbers of the Club of Rome.

Let me remind you that the Club of Rome was founded in 1968. Formally, it was created by three people: Alexander King (Great Britain), Aurelio Peccei (representing the Vatican as well as the elites of southern Germany and northern Italy) and Germain Gvishiani. He was Kosygin's son-in-law and the only son of Beria's only deputy, who was not shot, but only took off his epaulettes and command. The Club of Rome was one of the means of penetration of the Soviet nomenklatura when, in the second half of the 1960s, it abandoned the de facto advance of the real construction of communism, on the way of fact (in ideology, of course). , nobody said this) to the capitalist system. There were two organizational forms of integration. This is the "network" structure, it is also Pitovranov's "signature".

The Club of Rome already in 1968 and 1969 began to prepare the first report The limits to growth on the "one world" model based on the Forrester model. And even then, it was clear what kind of model it was: reduce consumption, reduce the population of the planet.

The most interesting thing is that at the same time an alternative system was developed in the Soviet Union. In 1965, at the Moscow Social Pedagogical Institute, a laboratory for the analysis of systems development ("Laboratory of Systems Development Management Systems", abbreviated as "LASURs") was created. It was run by an absolutely fantastic if little known person, but I think one day Russia will be informed about the second half of the 20th century based on this name: Pobisk Kuznetsov.

They developed their own model of the development of the world system. If there were five variables and capital in Limits to Growth , here there were 30. And the person who saw both versions said that "LaSUR" was written by a very powerful doctor of science, and Limits to Growth it was written by an excellent student. According to the LaSUR model, the system is moving towards an asymptotic regime, but it can feed up to 30 billion people. Then some very interesting things happened. LaSUR leaders are accused of waste. Pobisk Kuznetsov is expelled from the party and imprisoned in the Serbski Institute. His friends take him out of there and then reincorporate him into the party. He even advises Andropov and predicts the crisis of the capitalist system at the end of the 20th century, but the socialist system was broken. This happened for one simple reason: since the Soviet nomenklatura was betting on entering the Western world through the Club of Rome, all alternatives had to be eliminated. On top of that, there was a struggle within the various groups of the nomenklatura.

What is very important to us here? This means that the problems Schwab is talking about are the problems of the capitalist system. Furthermore, the transition from the exponent to the asymptote is planned in such a way that the owners of the capitalist system flow smoothly to the owners of another system. But for this they need to significantly reduce the population of the planet. What's more, if before it was said 2 billion now we are talking about 500 billion. There is a certain primatologist, Jane Goodall, involved in globalist structures. Goodall recently said: "The population of the planet should be the same as it was 500 years ago." Then there were 491 million.

I often hear: "Well, what can an ordinary person do in such a situation?" The fact is that in transitional situations, when the old system breaks down and the new one has not yet taken shape, necessity and chance almost equalize. And when, in a balanced situation, a butterfly lands on the scale, it weighs much more and then there is a process of inertia. And it is precisely in these periods that we are experiencing that usually the development of events depends on the individual choice of each person. And to decide you have to have knowledge. For this reason, I allow myself to add the final part of my book The bells of history: "Only rational, subjective and free knowledge about society will teach people not to be afraid of the tolling of the bells of history. It will teach them to live without hope of a reward, because being a man is the greatest reward. To live without illusions, because life is the best of them. To live life without idealizing the past, without complaining about the present and without fearing the future. It will teach you the courage to be and the courage to know. Knowing and being a man, a man free from defeatism". It all depends on the person, especially when social worlds collapse and the bells of history ring.

https://misionverdad.com/traducciones/e ... ma-mundial

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Wed May 10, 2023 2:04 pm

HOW MUCH THE SOVIET UNION LOST IN THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR
May 9, 2023 , 4:00 p.m.

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About 1,700 towns and cities in the USSR were completely destroyed, in addition to 70,000 villages (Photo: Getty Images)[/img]

To understand the dimension of the issue, we bring up this excellent thread by the blogger, researcher and military analyst Big Serge, translated below.

One cannot understand why Victory Day is the most important secular holiday in Russia without having an idea of ​​how much the Soviet Union (USSR) lost in the Nazi-Soviet War.

The Nazi-Soviet War was the largest land war ever fought. My great-grandfather served in the US Army and was a lieutenant at Omaha Beach, so I would never downplay the bravery of the American people in this war. However, the focal point of the war was the east.

Approximately 80% of the casualties of Nazi Germany were suffered during the confrontation with the Red Army. The Soviet Union was where the Wehrmacht was worn down and ultimately destroyed. This was a huge world historic feat by the Soviet people, but it came at a horrible cost.

The Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht in two phases of the war. In the first phase, Germany had the operational initiative and the USSR fought a desperate defense. In the second phase, the Red Army went on the offensive and destroyed the stunted Wehrmacht.

During the defensive phase, the pivotal factor was the USSR's ability to mobilize large numbers of trained reservists and deploy new units. Between June and December 1941, the Soviets mobilized 14 million reservists, 5 million at the end of June alone.

German intelligence estimated that the Red Army could raise and deploy 40 new divisions in response to Operation Barbarossa. The actual number? About 800. One of the great intelligence failures of all time. That's why Germany lost.

It is difficult to understand the magnitude of this war. By the end of the war, approximately 35 million men had served in the Red Army in some capacity. The casualties on the battlefield were equally horrible.

Getting a precise number of Red Army casualties is impossible, but the best estimates are that the Soviets lost something like 10 million men killed or missing, including 3 million who deliberately starved to death in POW camps. In addition, some 18 million people were injured.

Civilian casualties were even more significant. The Germans waged a brutal and animal war. Soviet Jews were shot in open-air pits. One million people starved to death in Leningrad. In total, about 15 million Soviet civilians died.

When Red Army combat deaths are added to the civilian death toll, we get total Soviet losses of approximately 25 million people. The population of the USSR before the war was 200 million.

One in eight Soviet citizens was killed within four years.
The physical destruction of the country was equally catastrophic. About 1,700 towns and cities were completely destroyed, in addition to 70,000 villages (this figure is not a misprint). The main cities that fell under the German occupation were devastated.

In Minsk, for example, 80% of the city's buildings were completely destroyed by the end of the war. Only 19 of the city's 332 main factories survived. By one famous estimate, the war destroyed a third of the wealth of the Soviet Union.

It is obvious why the Great Patriotic War is now a focal point of Russian national consciousness. It was literally the greatest tragedy that has ever befallen the nation, at the same time it was the greatest triumph. A duality of victory and devastation.

With so much death, dislocation, and physical devastation, this war affected all Soviet citizens in some way. It was a universal phenomenon; no one was away from the conflict. They all lost a son, a brother, a father, an uncle, a cousin, a friend, a home.

The Russian people cannot and will not forget this. The Soviet people achieved the iconic victory of all time: the diversion and then the destruction of the Nazi war machine. But it cost them oceans of blood.

Coda: "The German invaders want a war of extermination against the peoples of the Soviet Union. Very well then! If they want a war of extermination, they will have it": Stalin, November 7, 1941.

https://misionverdad.com/cuanto-perdio- ... rra-patria

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Wed May 17, 2023 5:09 pm

On April 25, 1945, U.S. and Russian Soldiers Shook Hands and Made a Pledge For Peace
By Joseph Wolff - May 16, 2023 1

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[Source: reddit.com]

There is No Reason it Cannot Happen Again

[Below is a speech given by Joseph Wolff, the son of Joseph Polowsky, an American GI from Chicago during World War II who was involved in the famous Elbe River link-up at the end of the war and became a lifelong peace activist, to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Elbe River link-up.—Editors]

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, depending on where you are in the world. My name is Joseph Wolff and my father was peace activist Joseph Polowsky and I’m here to mark the 78th anniversary of Elbe Day, which was the date at the close of World War II, or the Great Patriotic War as it’s known in Russia, when the Russian Red Army and the American Army linked forces and brought the final curtain down on the scourge of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

This is without a doubt one of the most important events in the previous 80 years. It was a joyous moment in time when, for an all too brief instant, the United States of America and the Soviet Union were actually allies in the world.

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Joseph Polowsky shakes hands with Russian counterpart during Elbe River link-up. [Source: youtube.com]

Now at this moment we’re in a very different situation. Undoubtedly, tensions are at there highest level since at least the early 1980s when, on September 26, 1983, roughly three weeks prior to my father’s passing, a malfunctioning early warning system nearly caused the Soviet Union to mistakenly launch a full-scale nuclear attack on the United States.

Only the wise actions of the overnight duty officer in the nuclear bunker outside Moscow, Stanislav Petrov, averted a calamity of truly epic catastrophic proportions. And bear in mind that, just several weeks prior, a Soviet fighter jet accidentally shot down south Korean Airlines [flight] 007, killing all 269 people aboard. This was certainly a time on par with the Cuban Missile Crisis of mid to late October of 1962.

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Stanislav Petrov [Source: meziesblog.com]

Tensions were boiling over then as they are now. So what exactly is the way forward from the current situation the Russian Federation and the USA finds ourselves in? I think our ancestors hold the answer.

My father, to his very last breath, always, ALWAYS felt that there was simply no reason that our two great and proud nations couldn’t live on the same planet in peace and harmony. He saw first-hand that we both shared the common human spirit of love for one another and love for peace.

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Meeting at the Elbe [Source: newkontinent.org]

After all, nobody wants to live in a world that’s constantly on the brink of a mutually assured nuclear holocaust. He and his Russian and American comrades saw the evil of humanity in their fight against the Nazis, but they also saw the kindness and altruism of humanity as well in liberating and freeing those brutalized and subjugated by the Nazi regime.

In this moment in time, when we’re again on the precipice and on the brink of civilization-ending catastrophe, we must again look to the momentous events of April 25, 1945, and not just in Strehla, Germany, on the banks of the Elbe, but in San Francisco, California, where, on the very same April 25, 1945, delegates of 50 nations met for the United Nations Conference on International Organization.

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Representatives of 50 countries at the United Nations Conference on International Organization drew up the United Nations Charter, on April 25, 1945, in San Francisco. [Source: medium.com]

To me, the mere fact of the United Nations’ existence, where all 193 member-states have a forum for diplomacy and collaboration and dialogue is proof that humanity, whatever our vast differences across the world, shares the same basic needs; and paramount to those needs, as much as food and water, is the need for safety and security; the need for the peoples of the world to live together and coexist on the same planet in peace.

As I stated last year, we’re all of one race, the human race; we’re all brothers and sisters. We desperately, desperately need to come together in this moment. One needn’t be an expert in international relations or geopolitics to see that humanity is heading right back down the disastrous road it took in the 1930s. We MUST resist the temptation to take that road to calamity yet again.

I can almost hear our forebearers and ancestors shouting loudly to turn around before it’s too late. In the context of how to proceed, I think the American President Abraham Lincoln got it exactly right. To quote him, he said, “the best way to destroy an enemy is to make him your friend.”

In my opinion, Presidents Zelensky, Biden, Putin, Xi and all the rest of the leaders in the world can and should and, dare I say it, MUST look to the events of Elbe Day as their guidepost. We’ve all heard the phrase “those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” Unfortunately, at this moment in time, humanity is on a pathway to ruin. But it’s not too late to turn back. Conflict and war between the great powers is not inevitable. There’s still time for humanity to save itself from itself.

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[Source: info.mysticstamp.com]

We have a large amount of challenges that need to be overcome, challenges such as climate change and global pandemics. Challenges that scream out for cooperation and collaboration, and particularly by the largest and most powerful nations, in particular the Russian Federation and the United States of America. It is within our grasp and control to work together for the benefit of the entire planet, and indeed, we must do so. With great power comes great responsibility.

So with that sentiment in mind, I hereby personally pledge to do everything in my power to encourage mutual respect and understanding—to do my utmost to understand and respect fully the perspective of the other side—and I’m imploring you to do so as well. Especially to the children in the audience, you’re the future! Take this extremely seriously and take the time to learn about your ancestors’ struggles, their sacrifices and their enormous triumphs!

And I’m urging you not to take the world for granted, because if wrong decisions are made by our leaders, this world can literally turn to ash and vanish in an instant!

Make peace for our societies your personal mission in life too!!

I humbly thank you for taking the time to listen to my remarks today, and I know we shall overcome our troubles, we will persevere, peace has no choice but to persevere because the alternative is simply unfathomable. Thank you, and God bless you!

[Below is a report on May 9 Victory Day, which is celebrated in Russia to commemorate Russia’s victory over the Nazis—Editors]


97-year old Elbe River Veteran Says “We Can Do This Again”
Russia’s Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov charged that the Biden Administration used threats to prevent U.S. World War II veterans from attending Moscow’s Victory parade on May 9 commemorating the Russian victory over the Nazis. Antonov said in a statement that the veterans were threatened with the revocation of their passports, so they couldn’t fly to Russia and take part in the celebration of the 78th anniversary of the Great Victory.

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Victory Day celebrations in Moscow. [Source: cnbc.com]

One of the veterans, 97-year-old Col. Frank Cohn (ret.) had eleven relatives die in the Holocaust and was one of the U.S. soldiers who was part of the historic meeting with their Soviet allies at the Elbe River at Torgau, Germany on April 25, 1945.

An army intelligence officer whose family escaped Breslau, Germany in 1938 after the passage of the Nuremberg laws persecuting Jews, Cohn told Sputnik in an interview from the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. and Russia have to remember that they were allies during World War II and can restore their historic partnership again.

“While it is probably a false hope, I am an optimist, and I hang onto the time when things looked bright for all of us—back in May 1945. Yes, there was terrible devastation all around us, but the spirit was correct. We were going to go forward and repair the world, we were allies, we were friends,” Cohn said.

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Frank Cohn [Source: stripes.com]

Cohn noted further that it is his obligation to remind people about those times when the U.S. and Russia, along with the UK and France, were on the same side and fought Nazism.

“Now, I go and participate to bring back that moment. It is not an easy thing to do at my age, but I must do it as long as I can, because someone young might catch that simmering glow of a short-lived peaceful world surrounded with friendship, and in remembrance, perhaps years far in the future, say with the political power that he or she might have attained: ‘We can do this again!’”

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... for-peace/

I wish Mr Cohen were correct, but I cannot see it without socialism. Even as that famous meeting occurred the US was unleashing the Banderites and other fascists upon their ally who had suffered so much to achieve the victory that the US now disgracefully claims for it's own.
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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 23, 2023 3:12 pm

Hitler's provocation in Katyn
June 23, 13:38

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Hitler's provocation in Katyn

Nazi Germany was preparing provocations, and not only in Katyn, to accuse the USSR of mass atrocities , new archival documents about this are published by RIA Novosti. These materials are placed in the State Archive of the Recent Socio-Political History of the Smolensk Region, and the agency got acquainted with them.

We are talking about photocopies of interrogations of captured Germans - Kurt Groner and Fritz Yurashek, who were among the direct perpetrators of provocations in the Katyn Forest and near Vinnitsa in Krajina. The interrogations were carried out after the Great Patriotic War by Soviet state security agencies.

Groner was an employee of the criminal police of the Third Reich, the criminal secretary of the homicide department. Yurashek was a photographer who worked in the structure of the criminal police.
According to their testimonies, thousands of burial places of Soviet citizens shot by the Nazis during the occupation of the city in Vinnitsa were presented by the Nazis as supposedly victims of Soviet executions in 1938.
Photographs of the remains taken from the graves in Vinnitsa were selected so that they would become "a visual aid for anti-Soviet propaganda." Moreover, the Nazis published a book "On the mass executions in Vinnitsa."

As follows from the interrogation texts, the Nazis used the same methods in the Katyn forest in the spring of 1943 to accuse the USSR of allegedly mass executions of Polish officers.

On April 13, 1943, the German Propaganda Ministry, led by Goebbels, reported that a mass grave of Polish officers allegedly shot by the NKVD had been found in the Katyn forest in the Smolensk region. After the liberation of Smolensk by the Red Army, a Soviet commission was created, which, after conducting its own investigation, concluded that the Poles in Katyn in the autumn of 1941 were killed by the German occupying forces.

Warsaw believes that the murder of Polish officers was the work of the NKVD of the USSR, Polish officials called that execution a genocide. In the USSR, a criminal case on the discovery of mass graves of the remains of Polish servicemen was opened in 1990, and in 2004 the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation closed the case due to the death of the perpetrators.

According to the point of view of a number of Russian historians, the executions in Katyn were carried out by the Nazis, and the "Katyn case" was a provocation by the secret services of the Third Reich, who wanted to split the ranks of the anti-Hitler coalition, and to Poland, through which the Red Army was supposed to reach the border of Germany, present this as Moscow atrocities. Experts draw attention to the fact that the "Katyn case" was launched almost immediately after the USSR refused to return the lands of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus to Poland, which legally returned to the Soviet Union in November 1939.

As experts emphasize, the Soviet leadership had no motive to shoot Polish officers, because they did not pose any danger to Moscow. Moreover, in the tense situation of the late 1930s, the extrajudicial execution of Polish prisoners of war would have been a factor that contributed to further tension in the USSR’s relations with England and France, and in the future, the use of this factor as a pretext for their attack on the Soviet Union, experts say .

Historians also point to inconsistencies in the evidence base on which Warsaw relies.As Russian experts explain, the versions of the "Katyn tragedy" are contradictory, since the bulk of the sources on those events are still classified and not put into free scientific circulation. The Russian Federation also notes that the current approach to covering the "Katyn case" does not meet the principles of objectivity and historicism, and it should be considered as one of the directions of the information and propaganda campaign to lay responsibility on the USSR for unleashing World War II.

Polish officers in Katyn in 1941 were massively shot by the Nazis, and not by employees of the NKVD of the USSR- this was testified back in 1945 at the Leningrad trial of Nazi criminals by a direct participant in the burial of the murdered Poles, later a fighter of the "special purpose" battalion, which rampaged in the Leningrad region during the Great Patriotic War, Arnaud Duret.

Experts point to the similarity of the approaches used by the Nazis in Katyn with the actions of the Kyiv regime, which organized a provocation in Bucha in the spring of 2022.

In April last year, the Russian Defense Ministry stated that all photographs and video materials published by the Kyiv regime, allegedly testifying to the "crimes" of the Russian military in the city of Bucha, Kiev region, are "another provocation." As noted in the military department, during the time this settlement was under the control of the Russian armed forces, not a single local resident suffered from any violent actions.

https://vk.com/wall-89453312_123929 - zinc

In 2023. Can't be. After all, no one guessed that this was a provocation of the Nazis, which we supported at the highest level from Gorbachev to Putin. It took the SVO in Ukraine to start revising this crap.
I wonder how many more years it will take to officially recognize the guilt of Nazi Germany for the destruction of the Poles in Katyn.

Since the zero years I have been writing and will continue to write - the Poles in Katyn were shot by the Nazis. The shooting took place in the autumn of 1941. This fact is confirmed by the only court decision on Katyn. Numerous falsifications of the Katyn case carried out in the 80-90s were also established.
Laying responsibility for Nazi crimes on the USSR and Stalin in our country was part of a long campaign of demonization of the USSR, Stalin and the Soviet past. What this led to is perfectly visible and understandable now.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8442243.html

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 26, 2023 2:20 pm

The death of the 11th army
June 26, 6:22 am

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The death of the 11th army

An episode of Citizens in the North Caucasus in 1918, showing how dangerous a mutiny in the army is and what a catastrophic chain it can start.

On July 21, 1918, Ivan Lukich Sorokin, a former paramedic who ended up in the school of ensigns of the WWI, was appointed commander-in-chief of the red troops of the North Caucasus. On September 7, 1918, armies and fronts were formed and the army of the North Caucasian Republic became the 11th army.

In the interval between these dates, the Taman army came out to join Sorokin's troops, whose unprecedented 500-kilometer campaign was subsequently sung by A. Serafimovich in the Iron Stream. Those who are interested, it is better not to read worse, but rather the very informative work "Iron Stream" in a military presentation ( http://militera.lib.ru/h/kovtyuh_ei01/index.html ) by Kovtyukh. Achievement, no question.

After such a breakthrough, the Tamanians considered themselves the salt of the earth (partially not unreasonably) and claimed a special status. However, the commander of the Taman army, Ivan Matveev, who lost his shores, was arrested and, by decision of the Revolutionary Military Council, on October 8, 1918, was shot. Kuban party leader Yan Poluyan wrote bluntly: “The Revolutionary Military Council had to face separatism and the former “liberty” of the commanders and the armed masses who supported them. It was necessary first to subdue this mass, to take it, as they say, into hands ... ". I.I. Matveev was chosen as an exemplary victim and away we go.

Upon learning of the execution of Matveev, the Tamanians became furious, shouts were heard among them: “To Pyatigorsk! Let's avenge Matveev with bayonets! Sorokin is a traitor! Those. begins what is commonly called the word mutiny.

Meanwhile, Sorokin himself comes into conflict with the CEC, it comes to executions (which is usually called the "mutiny" of Sorokin himself, but here it is still in quotation marks, and this became the reason for glossing over the real picture of events written in hot pursuit of Citizens historical research), but comrade Trotsky sends a telegram demanding that he be brought to Moscow for trial.

Trotsky's telegram is hidden (and this is also a rebellion without quotes) and "through an oversight of the guards" Sorokin is killed on November 3, 1918 without trial or investigation. Using the Tamanians to fight Sorokin by the CEC was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. Subsequently, L.D. Trotsky blamed Poluyan that as a result of the latter’s stupid actions, “a talent-nugget (Sorokin)” was killed. For such statements, Lev Davidovich clearly had grounds. Denikin in his memoirs also praised Sorokin, who opposed him, as a talented commander.

The decapitated 11th Army was defeated over the next three months, and already in November 1918 suffered defeat after defeat. Denikin wrote about her "For 7.5 months she diverted almost all the Volunteer Forces of the South to herself," but the trick of the Tamanians follows and everything falls into decay.

Would all this have happened without the rebellion and revenge of the Tamanians and connivance with him? Most likely no.

(c) Alexey Isaev

https://t.me/boris_rozhin/90351 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8448686.html

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Re: The Soviet Union

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 27, 2023 2:32 pm

Who stabbed Russia in the back in 1917?
No. 6/82.VI.2023

I wonder who Putin had in mind when he spoke about a stab in the back in 1917, when the victory was stolen from Russia? And who, I wonder, stole it? And when? And what victory?

Well, let's say we are talking about the February Revolution. So, firstly, there was no smell of any victory there. The Brusilovsky breakthrough of 1916 did not achieve the planned goals, the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary on the Eastern Front did not happen. On the contrary, Romania, which entered the war on the side of the Entente, was defeated and occupied by the German-Austrian troops.

To its foundation, rotten tsarism waged a mediocre war, and by the end of 1916 had already lost quite vast territories. The imperialist goals of the war, the stupidity of the tsarist generals and staff officers, the shortage of shells, food problems in the rear and at the front - all this led to the demoralization of the army. So, before the victory over the Central Powers, Russian tsarism at the beginning of 1917 was like walking to the moon.

The February Revolution was the work of the bourgeoisie, which was just dissatisfied with the way tsarism was realizing its imperialist aspirations. Who stabbed whom in the back? Tsarism got involved in the war, pursuing the goals of the Russian imperialist bourgeoisie, coped with the task poorly, so the bourgeoisie removed the tsar from power, while naturally continuing the war.

The "successes" of the bourgeois Provisional Government in the war were even more modest. There was no question of any military victory over the German-Austrian troops in 1917. In military affairs, the bourgeois government turned out to be just as mediocre as the tsarist government. Yes, and it was impossible to achieve success at the front with the scale of unresolved internal problems. For the Russian bourgeoisie, the best option would be to conclude a separate peace with Germany. But dependence on Anglo-French capital did not allow her to go for it.

So, maybe, after all, Putin had in mind the October Revolution? Say, the Bolsheviks stabbed in the back?

As of October 1917, the military defeat of Germany also did not smell either on the eastern or on the western fronts. What is the basis of the opinion that if the Bolsheviks had not concluded a separate peace with Germany, the German troops would have been soon defeated is not clear. Putin, apparently, did not study history at school, since he does not know that a year has passed from the October Revolution to the defeat of Germany in the war. All this year, the German troops, despite the entry into the war of the United States, fought well on the Western Front, and even fought on the territory of Ukraine with various partisan formations. It took a year for the German imperialists to admit their military defeat.

So who was stabbed in the back by the Bolsheviks? Russia? The Russian bourgeoisie has driven millions of workers and peasants to the slaughter for their imperialist interests. The war was waged mediocre, the soldiers paid for the mediocrity of the bourgeoisie with their blood. It was the workers and peasants who made up the absolute majority of the population of Russia, so, in fact, they were it. The Bolsheviks gave the bourgeoisie a kick in the ass by pulling out of a war that the bourgeoisie was incapable of winning. Was it a backstab? No. Not the bourgeois were sitting in the trenches. They just hid behind the backs of the workers and peasants, dressed in overcoats, fattened in the rear on their blood. So they got it not in the back, but in the face. And even more so, no one stole the victory from the bourgeoisie. You can't steal something that doesn't smell.

More than a hundred years have passed, and the bourgeoisie is still stupid, illiterate and ready, in pursuit of profit and momentary interests, to cut down the branch on which it sits.

N. Fedotov
27/06/2023

https://prorivists.org/82_history_putin/

Google Translator

*******

THE DETAILS OF THE NAZI EXTERMINATION PLAN AGAINST THE SOVIET PEOPLE
June 26, 2023 , 11:22 a.m.

Image
The Nazi army invaded territories of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa (Photo: File)

For the first time, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Soviet people is published, a text that was published last week as part of the Day of Remembrance and Mourning that is celebrated every June 22 in Russia.

The Nazi Germany document of May 23, 1941, called the Economic Policy Directive, and which in the West is known as the Hunger Plan, reflects how the directive provided for the extermination of millions of civilians in the Soviet Union to "provide food for the Army and the German people", reports Sputnik .

The director and founder of the Russian Digital History Foundation, Egor Yakovlev, points out that along with Operation Barbarossa, known as the Nazi lightning invasion of Soviet territory on June 22, 1941, an economic plan was also being prepared to plunder the invaded areas. .

The historian details that the plan arose at a time of uncertainty in the face of a possible British naval blockade that would compromise the supply of food to Nazi Germany. The plan was to plunder the Soviet Union and cause 20 to 30 million people to die from starvation.

For the Nazis, the genocidal plan was justified not only for economic reasons, but also for political plans such as seizing territories in the Soviet East and exterminating the indigenous population. "In this war we are fighting for the right to exist, we are not interested in preserving the population," Hitler said at that time.

In this sense, the Russians remember that the Nazis caused the death of more than 26 million Soviet citizens, a memory that is fair to rescue at a time when the country is once again fighting against this historical enemy that is reborn with the support of West.

https://misionverdad.com/los-detalles-d ... -sovietico

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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