Soviet filtering camps for liberated soviet POWs

The following is the full text translated for our English speaking collegues. It comes straight out of the Russian institute of History.

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Office of the Commissioner of the Council of People's Commissars (the Council of Ministers of the USSR) for the repatriation (the agency headed by Colonel-General FI Golikov , former head of the Soviet military intelligence). The documents were the main source in the preparation of this article. In addition, the Administrative Department of the documents used by the CPC (Council of Ministers of the USSR), the Gulag , the Department checkpoint filtration camps of the NKVD of the USSR, Division of special settlements NKVD - MVD USSR 9th management MGB USSR and the Secretariat of the NKVD - MVD USSR.

Viktor Zemskov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Total number of people = 4,199,488 of which 2,660,013 were civilian and 1,539,475 were military.

*Out of the 2,660,013 civililans. 2,146,126 were allowed to return home (80.5%), 141,962 were drafted into the army (5.3%), 263,647 sent to workers batallion (9.9%), 46,740 were assigned SPECIAL CONTIGENT (1.76%)

*Out of the 1,539,475 military personel. 281,780 were allowed to return home (18.3%) 659,190 were drafted into the army (42.8%), 344,448 were sent to workers bastallion (22.7%), 226,127 were assigned SPECIAL CONTINGENT (14.69%).

Number of people entering the "Special Contigent" in 1946 = 272,867

It does not get anymore official.

 

I do understand very well the iconic value of that staged photo and do not object it as it's "original" form (or rather would keep my mouth shut...). However Sloniksp has chosen to EMPHASIZE the commie rag - not the soldiers nor anything else. After that the picture no more represent "a nod of respect to the common Russian soldier" "who did so much to end Hitler's empire" (and to build up Stalin's empire) but indeed "an endorsement of the Communist system".

As everybody knows, pictures are powerful symbols. That avatar - as it is shown now - is a symbol of glorifying the communist imperialism, whether Sloniksp wants it or not.

 

IIRC you have posted same quotes several times too...

Of course no numbers can be seen as absolutely "final and indisputable". However can't say you are wrong with your logic concerning your numbers...

"Favourite part" - don't think I have any.

So? Big deal...

His story sounds something one could have expected - if we have the same soldier in mind.

 

Yes. It's not so much the sources alone but your general attitude - starting with the avatar.

It's not the flag itself - it's your choice to EMPHASIZE only the commie rag.

BTW - that flag was not raised to mark the end of the fighting. It was raised after the figth to make a nice propaganda photo...

 

This is source prof. Merridale uses for her total numbers:

"Velikaya otechestvennaya voina,

book 4, 191-92; Overy,

Russia's War,

pp.302-03. For adiscussion of the repatriations in general, see Nikolai Tolstoy,

Victims of Yalta,

London, 197"

The problem with the "official" soviet sources is, that so much of it is either falsified, incomplete or secret. One never knows, whether
one can trust the sources or not - or how much. That's why it is of utmost importance, that the person using them is extremely
objective and experienced. The soviet/Russian "historians" often do not meet both of those requirements.

The Russian institute of History can not be trusted in the same way as equivilant institutes in the free world, since history - especially
the war history - has always been written in the USSR/Russia according to political needs of the regime, not according to the sources -
which have been altered, falsified, destroyed and invented to support the desired result.

The numbers are always exciting. They can be presented as accurate and precise - if one doesn't know, what have been counted, how
have they been counted, what have been left out, who has counted them and why.

 

Would that be the same Tolstoy who was convicted of slander?

 

I think to be fair here it should be pointed out that Tolstoy's legal troubles stemmed from his book "The Minister and the Massacres", not "Victims of Yalta"

 

It would seem that no matter what sources are presented to you that contradict your version, quickly become Soviet/Russian propaganda.
You have been presented numerous sources on numerous subjects by numerous members. These sources have consisted of several Western Historians, articles, books, a soldiers testimonial and info from Soviet Archives yet you simply wave all of that off.

What would you consider a reliable source on the topic at hand?

I would also like to see some sources regarding the lack of credibility of the Russian Institue of History or the official information contained within the Soviet Archives.

Also, how can you discredit Russian sources and Archives so easily but then give credit to an author who wrote a book based solely upon them? Ivan's War by Merridale

 

In case this hasn't been posted before, this is a great film about [h=1]General Smyslovsky's army in Liechtenstein in May 1945. [/h]
"Weiße Armee" in der Wehrmacht unter General Smyslovsky - YouTube

 

That's how you wish to think. Haven't seen those "numerous" members on "numerous" subjects. Do recall however the last thread (USSR and Germany - two siimilar dictatorships) where you last tried to spread outragious claims and were proven wrong - by me...

Prof. Merridale seems to be a reliable interpreter of the sources here. As I wrote - but obviously you didn't want to understand - it's not all about the sources but how to read them critically. One must valuate the sources; are they credible, are they complete, who has done them, why and so on.

E.g. Yale Alumni Magazine 1995:

Still, the absence of false material does not, however, ensure that only the truth remains, notes Yale’s Mark Steinberg, an associate professor of history who is working on two books in the Annals of Communism series. “Say you find an order to shoot someone,” says Steinberg, who has worked in various Soviet archives since 1983. “Do you take it at face value? Was the order ever carried out? Who was it written for? Is the source reliable? What were the motives of the author? To believe anything, you need corroboration, ‘truths’ repeated by unrelated sources, not just a statement that makes its way up the chain of command.”

Then, there’s the matter of completeness. “There are lots of missing documents,” the historian explains, “and one has to ask not only what was removed from the files, but what was never written down in the first place. Stalin, for example, gave many orders orally.” So did Lenin, who may—or may not—have given what is perhaps the most famous order in Soviet history—to shoot the Czar and his family. Steinberg and his Russian collaborator V. M. Khrustalyov are using previously unavailable material from the archives to write The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty for the press.

See my earlier answers. It's not so much the sources themselves but who can read them critically and form an educated, un-biased and credible opinion of the events. Somehow communist flag waving doesn't increase credibility...

 

I do not remember my outrageous claims and you proving me wrong. I actually forgot all about that thread. I will take a look into it...

Prof. Merridale has certainly done her share of research and interviews, however; she has been criticised by some regarding her numbers (a bit high). For example, In the book she claims that roughly 360,000 Red army soldiers died in the battle of Berlin and Bagration cost an additional 300,000 lives in just two weaks of fighting. In reality the number of Red army troops killed in Berlin was less than 82,000 and aproximately 180,000 were either killed or missing during all of Bagration. Even Wiki has updated figures, feel free to check. Her numbers for Citadelle are also suspect, 300,000+ tank crews killed certainly seems high...

Have you actually read your own source???

You posted below...

The opening sentence of your source is "Still, the absence of false material does not, however, ensure that only the truth remains...". The absence of false material,... does not mean something has been falsified, altered, or invented quite the opposite actually.

Where in your source does it claim everything thats in bold?

No one has ever claimed that archives were easy to read, understand and/or interpret. We are afterall; speaking of a delicate matter concerning an extremely secretive Govt. more than 65yrs ago.
Soviet numbers which have been presented to you by Russian intitute of History have not been falsified. Your own source claim this.

Please do not confuse what the Soviet Newspaper or radio of the time told the public vs what the Soviet Government actually had and knew and locked away in a safe...

 

Karjala if I may offer a few observations.

Sloniksp has stated more than once that Soviet era records are not the most easy to read or data mine and that I gather that you dismiss this as a viable reason for discrepencies in numbers recorded.

I am an American, living in a modern democratic nation, at peace, with a vigerous free press. Yet I can cite three examples, which in part, mirror what Sloniksp is refering to.

I have reached that estimable age where I must interact with my government on a regular basis reguarding both my health and welfare. To put it bluntly the interface with these organs of goverment are not very user freindly. They require multiple attempts and much to and froing to resolve the simplest of issues. We speak the same language and these departments are supposedly set up to help me.

Next consider the unemplyment rate in the US. Officialy it is now 7.8% (12.1 million people), yet everybody knows that this is not completely accurate. It largely excludes both the under-employed (myself incuded) and those who have quit looking for work. If the latter groups are included, and no one knows exactly how many they are, it could add another 1 to 2 percent to this total. Even this excludes the number forced into early retirement when they would have prefered to keep working. The actual number of people might be as high as 14 million. Quite a descrepency, yes? A future historian will genneraly accept the official rate. They might read a footnote about the latter groups, but how can they reconcile the differences? Will they call it a cover up by the current administration?

Next consider Illeagal Immigration in the US. Estimates vary from a 'low' of 6 million to a 'high' of 11 million people. This is both an economic issue and a national security matter, yet millions of people reside in the US that its government has no firm idea how many or where exactly. If a peacefull, democratic nation enjoying the benefit of the use of super computer's and a powerfull free press can 'lose' millions of people in the cracks of its society, (for decades on end) surely a nation either fighting for or just after the greatest struggle for its existance could do so as well?

Let us remember that whether considering PoW's taken by the Soviet Union in combat or it own people returned to filtering camps after the war, these persons in question do not represent people in optimal condition or in an optimal situation. PoW's would include many wounded, ill fed and mentally despondent person's. Post war returnee's would have spent, in some cases year's, in captivity under appaling conditions. Either way their health would have been severely compromised.

As Germany found to its dismay Russian lines of communication were abysmal to say the least. Requiring journey's of hundreds of miles,or more. Moving any great number of people, whether against their will or not, has led to a terribly high percentage of 'wastage'. African slaves to the new world, the Trail of Tears for AmerIndians, or large numbers of PoW's have all resulted in the same effect. No one is entirely sure how many German PoW's died after the war in Allied Internment camps.

There were simply too many moving parts, moving in too many different directions for there to be a completely accurate figure of lost lives. It is commendable that Finland went to such great efforts to account for each of her soldiers, but let us be fair here. The Finnish Millitary of WWII was miniscule compared to the major player's. They fought on one front only, largely a land war only, and had intense periods of combat operations only 3 times. The Winter war, the beginning of the Continuation War and during the last Soviet offensive.

According to Wiki, The bulk of Finnish PoW's lost to malnutrition occured in the spring and summer of 1942. This is not surprising considering that the Soviet Union was struck by its greatest military disater since the Napoleonic Wars during the previous 3 quarters. Much of the 1941 harvest was lost either to German forces or to the deliberate destruction by soviet forces to prevent their capture. Even so, most able-bodied men had been called up, so who is left to collect the remainder? The Communist system in peacetime could never keep its larder fully stocked and shortages were always rampent, how does it cope feeding unwanted guests, who from their perspective was out to destroy them?

 

Found this topic again. Here's some more views of the credibility of the soviet sources:

"The accompanying falsifications took place, and on a barely credible scale, in every sphere. Real facts, real statistics, disappeared into the realm of fantasy. History, including the history of the Communist Party, or rather especially the history of the Communist Party, was rewritten. Unpersons disappeared from the official record. A new past, as well as new present, was imposed on the captive minds of the Soviet population, as was, of course, admitted when truth emerged in the late 1980s."

Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000) ISBN 0-393-04818-7, page 101

"The official version of Soviet history has been dramatically changed after every major governmental shake-up. Previous leaders were always denounced as "enemies", whereas current leaders were usually a subject of a personality cult. Textbooks were rewritten periodically, with figures - such as Leon Trotsky or Joseph Stalin - disappearing from their pages or being turned from great figures to great villains."

Ferro, Marc (2003). The Use and Abuse of History: Or How the Past Is Taught to Children. London; New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-28592-6. See Chapters 8 Aspects and variations of Soviet history and 10 History in profile: Poland.
The Liberators (Освободитель), 1981, Hamish Hamilton Ltd, ISBN 0-241-10675-3; cited from Russian edition of 1999, ISBN 5-237-03557-4, pages 13-16

"Yet another example is related to the case of Soviet reprisals against former Soviet POWs returning from Germany; some of them were treated as traitors and imprisoned in Gulags for many years, yet that policy was denied or minimized by Soviet historians for decades and modern Western scholars have noted that "In the past, Soviet historians engaged for the most part in a disinformation campaign about the extent of the prisoner-of-war problem."

Rolf-Dieter Müller, Gerd R. Ueberschär, Hitler's War in the East, 1941-1945: A Critical Assessment, Berghahn Books, 2002, ISBN 1-57181-293-8, Google Print, p.239

"As with all Soviet historiography, reliability of Soviet statistical data varied from period to period.
The first revolutionary decade and the period of Stalin's dictatorship both appear highly problematic with regards to statistical reliability; very little statistical data were published from 1936 to 1956."

Nikolai M. Dronin, Edward G. Bellinger, Climate Dependence And Food Problems In Russia, 1900-1990, Central European University Press, 2005, ISBN 963-7326-10-3, Google Print, p.15-16

"While some researchers say that on occasion statistical data useful in historical research (such as economical data invented to prove the successes of the Soviet industrialization, or some published numbers of Gulag prisoners and terror victims as Conquest claims) might have been completely invented by the Soviet authorities,"

Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000) ISBN 0-393-04818-7, page 101

"Data was falsified both during collection - by local authorities who would be judged by the central authorities based on whether their figures reflected the central economy prescriptions - and by internal propaganda, with its goal to portray the Soviet state in most positive light to its very citizens."

Nicholas Eberstadt and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule, American EnterpriseInstitute, 1995, ISBN 0-8447-3764-X, Google Print, p.138-140
Nikolai M. Dronin, Edward G. Bellinger, Climate Dependence And Food Problems In Russia, 1900-1990, Central European University Press, 2005, ISBN 963-7326-10-3, Google Print, p.15-16

"The impact of ideological demands also varied based on the field of history. The areas most affected by ideological demands were 19th and 20th century history, especially Russian and Soviet history"

Service, Robert (2009). A History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century, Third Edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 419. ISBN 0-674-01801-X.

 

When the wall fell...a few of us were given the raided docs and info on specific items relating to our own annalysis work over the years..to see if we had made the correct annalysis and given the correct items of raw data to those above...As Belasar says...

Sloniksp has stated more than once that Soviet era records are not the most easy to read or data mine and that I gather that you dismiss this as a viable reason for discrepencies in numbers recorded.

It was no different in early ninetees to anything gone before.

Impossible to data mine even in our day.

 

See my post above.

True. Still the soviet estimates appear to be WAY too low on both counts. Also we know for a FACT, that the soviet (captured) POW statistics include only those, who managed to reach the prison camps - in other words, only about 70 % of the total...! We also know for a FACT, that many of those who perished before the soviet camps could/would have survived, if they only had received adequate(any) medical treatment and little food - and not been e.g. executed on the spot.

True. Still that "one" Finnish(/German) front "only" was more than 1.300 km long, twice the Western front and five times the Italian front - or about the same as the Eastern Front from Königsberg to Odessa.

in 1944 Finnish army in total was abt 530.000 soldiers (in a country of 3,7 milj. people). In Lapland there were at the same time abt 220.000 Germans. On the other side there were 1,5 milj. soviets. So sizewise at least the same as the Italian front and larger than the pre-october 1942 North African front.

In the air the Finnish pilots were fighting against thousands of soviet planes.

Those intense periods of combat lasted 3,5 months (the Winter War), 5,5 months (the Finnish offensive 1941), 1,5 months (the battle of Kriv, early 1942, 10 days (a soviet offensive at Syväri/Svir river April 1942), 3 months (soviet offensives in summer 1944) - abt 14 months in total. In comparison the land war in the West from Normandy to Berlin lasted 11 months.

Not true. Maybe you are referring to the Soviet PoWs in Finland, among of which the worst malnutrition period - basically caused by the soviets - indeed was the spring and summer 1942 .

Most of the Finnish PoW's were captured in summer 1944. Although percentage-wise the early PoW's died more even those late ones died a lot too - at the time when the soviet army was enjoying masses of American aid, as the Finnish soldiers were able to testify.

 

I'd like to know where Karjala gets the figures of 1,5 million Soviet soldiers, and "thousands of aircraft". For 1944? Is that simultaneously with Operation Bagration in June (because of the timing with the PoWs)? I would also be interested in seeing the breakdown of numbers and types of aircraft.

 

The number of the soviet soldiers vary considerably depending on source, and also depending on what is included and what is not. The numbers I gave were/are to give a picture of the size of the Finnish front - not to be seen as an absolute truth.

That 1,5 million estimate was straight from the Finnish Wiki. I am not sure where that number is from nor what it includes. The same source also gives number of soviet tanks as 4.900 and planes as 5.000. I suppose those numbers include pretty much all the soviets in uniforms around there and everything possible which fly or have tracks.

It could also be, that those numbers are for all the soviets who fought at the Finnish front in 1941-44. On the other hand the Finnish and German numbers in that source are from summer 1944 only.

http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatkosota

This site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyborg%E2%80%93Petrozavodsk_Offensive#Svir.E2.80.93Petrozavodsk_Offensive puts it like this:

451,500 soldiers[2]
10,500 artillery pieces
800 tanks
1,600 aircraft[1]

These figures are for this offensive only and e.g. do not include the soviet troops further north. Also I think the number of the soldiers is for the actual ground fighting force only.

"To overcome these obstacles, the Stavka assigned 11 divisions and 9 tank and assault gun regiments to the Leningrad Front. That meant that there were 19 divisions, 2 division strength fortified regions, 2 tank brigades, 14 tank and assault gun regiments at the Isthmus, all of which included over 220 artillery and rocket launcher batteries (almost 3,000 guns/launchers). Around 1,500 planes from the 13th Air Army and the Baltic Fleet naval aviation also contributed to the operation which included surface and naval infantry units of the Baltic Fleet.
To the east of Karelia, the Stavka planned to use 9 divisions, 2 sapper brigades, 2 tank brigades and 3 assault gun regiments, raising the whole strength to 16 divisions, 2 fortified regions, 5 separate rifle brigades, 2 tank brigades, 3 assault gun regiments and 3 tank battalions. They were supported by Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega naval flotillas and the 7th Air Army."

 

More:

http://www.sci.fi/~fta/fintac-5.htm

"When the Soviet attack started on 9th June 1944 the enemy concentrated on the Karelian Isthmus about 1500 aircraft."

This does not include the planes north of Lake Laatokka (Ladoga) up to the Arctic Sea.

The operation Bagration started on 22nd June, i.e. 12 (13) days after the soviet offensive against the Finns ("4th strategic strike") on Karelian Isthmus and one day after their offensive at the river Syväri (Svir) east of lake Laatokka (Ladoga).

 

Thanks Karjala! Do you have any books, essays, or studies on the Continuation War, that you could recommend?

 

You are wellcome. Here's some more information:

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=130079&sid=82ec14d949d3067a21e6f43721408016