The Price of Victory by Lev Lopukhovsky & Boris Kavalerchik

Author:Lev Lopukhovsky & Boris Kavalerchik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2017-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

* Sources: Russia and the USSR in Wars of the 20th Century, 2001, p. 237, Table 120; Frolov, Soviet-Finnish Captivity, pp. 132, 307; Streit, They Are Not Our Comrades, pp. 258, 433; Axworthy, Third Axis, Fourth Ally, p. 217.

** It is very likely, in fact, that the number of the Red Army’s MIAs who actually died significantly exceeds this figure. However, as of today there is not enough reliable information to accurately determine this number.

Most important here, however, is the obtained number of total irrecoverable losses of Soviet servicemen in the Great Patriotic War, which is 14,546,600 men. It is strikingly close to the number 14,540,700, which takes into account the uncompensated deficit of Red Army personnel losses on 1 March 1942 (3,096,000). The value of USSR irrecoverable casualties that we obtained earlier after correcting the numerical size of the USSR armed forces before and after the war, accounting for those who returned to action after injury leave, those who were remobilized from industry, local air defence and local internal security forces, and reservists who went MIA – 14,824,700 – is not at all far from it. It exceeds the total number from Table 11 by only 1.9 per cent. Crucially, all these results were obtained by completely different independent methods. Such a multifaceted coincidence cannot have come about by chance; it convincingly attests that the results of our calculations are sufficiently close to reality.

However it would be premature to take them for the ultimate truth. Judging by some information, which will be discussed later, the data for our calculations include chronic underestimation of irrecoverable losses. This is especially true regarding MIAs. Nevertheless we will base our further analysis on the results computed in Table 12 until new reliable information becomes available. Results obtained in this way should be considered a lower limit of the possible number of irrecoverable losses of the armed forces of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War.

Many historians and researchers who disagree with Krivosheev’s numbers have been concerned that those numbers can be used to create a new history of the Great Patriotic War. Taking into account the ever-growing criticism of the information of his author team and in accordance with Decree no. 37 of the President of the Russian Federation, ‘Issues of Memorializing Those Who Perished in Defence of the Fatherland’, dated 22 January 2006, an interdepartmental commission on assessing personnel casualties and material losses during the Great Patriotic War was created in Russia. The main goal of the commission was to finally determine, by 2010, the casualties for the military and civilian population during the Great Patriotic War and to calculate material losses for the more than four years that combat operations were conducted.

Judging by everything, the authors did not intend to take the criticism into consideration and therefore refine their numbers. Suffice to say, the interdepartmental commission for computing casualties during the Great Patriotic War was formed only on 23 October 2009 by order of Russia’s Minister of Defence. Representatives of the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.