Стр. 6 - V

Упрощенная HTML-версия

Author : A. Kirilin
Head, Administration Department, Central Election Commission of Russia, Major-General, Member
of the Central Council of the Russian Military-Historical Society
DISINTEGRATION of the Soviet Union in 1991
started an unbridled campaign of mudslinging of
the Soviet period in the history of the state and the
nation. The media of Russia and the CIS competed
in slandering the Soviet Armed Forces and the offi-
cer corps.
Russian imitators of Western falsifiers distorted the
facts and figures related to the Great Patriotic War.
They slandered the recent past and misrepresented,
from the positions of NATO, Soviet achievements
and Soviet victories in history textbooks for secondary and higher schools.
The preachers of "new approaches" to the history of World War II are trying hard to plant their
own version of why the war was unleashed and how it unfolded; they cite distorted statistics of
the composition, numerical strength and armaments of the warring sides.
They are deaf to admonitions; they have no conscience and ignorefacts: their careers are built
on these unseemly achievements. They are pets of certain radio and TV companies and pub-
lishing houses. There is a great demand for slanderers in a certain segment of mass media which
organize telephone interviews with Vladimir Rezun (aka Viktor Suvorov), author of Ledokol
(Icebreaker) and other anti-Soviet libelous works.
Strange as it may seem the Germans are not as critical of their army which suffered a crushing
defeat as some of our literati who never hesitate to slander the victorious army.
The leadership of the Defense Ministry of the USSR decided to declassify information about
the human losses to respond to alternative information and arbitrary assessments of the results
of World War II and the scope of losses which had appeared in the media and caused quite a
stir.
An interview with Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces, Army General
Mikhail Moiseev published in Voenno-istoricheskiyzhurnal (Military History Journal) (No. 3,
1990) disclosed the figures of human losses. In the same year, acting on his orders a group of
experts started working on a volume of statistical data of the Soviet military war losses.
Many historians, both in this country and abroad, understood and accepted this procedure of
estimation. In his Foreword to the English edition of Colonel-General G. Krivosheev's Soviet
Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (Greenhill Books, London, 1997), Prof.
John Erickson of Edinburgh University, an expert in demography, drew the attention of readers
to these figures and explained them.
Электронное приложение к журналу «
Международная жизнь
»
"Historians Should Celebrate and Grieve Together With Their
People"