Ivan’s war
February 15, 2006
This is a long post, but I think it gives some important insights about ourselves and our nation. What follows was lifted from The Daily Reckoning a free Internet newsletter.
The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: People, who believe that mankind is on an
upward slope, always marching toward greater good for greater numbers,
have some explaining to do. Bill Bonner explores…
IVAN’S WAR
by Bill Bonner
Was ever there a group of people so hapless, so luckless…so witless?
There they were, up to 30 million of them in the heartland of Eurasia,
some 6,000 years after civilization had begun, 20 centuries after the
birth of Christ, 200 years after the Industrial Revolution had begun, and
during the living memory of many people reading this reflection. They
drove automobiles. They talked on telephones. They listened to Debussy and
Chopin on record players. They tuned into the radio, ate food that came in
tins, used condoms, and enjoyed nearly painless dentistry…at least in
Moscow.
How did these poor Soviet grunts get themselves into such a fix?
And here, we add an aggravating detail. These men thought themselves not
backward, but in the very vanguard of human progress. They were men who
had chosen to follow the prophets Vladimir and Josef into the land of
scientific socialism. Gone were the old traditions. Gone were the old
rules. Thrown out the door were the old religions. Now, the Soviets had a
new religion of collectivism, new rules shaped by the communist party, and
new traditions enforced by the Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD)
or the People’s Commisariat for Internal Affairs.
Readers may have relaxed by now, like parishioners at a sermon who see the
preacher’s accusing finger pass them by, but not so fast. While the
victims in today’s essay are the Soviets, the protagonists - the dramatis
personae - of our theme include us all. We may not be communists, or
Russians, or soldiers, but we stand on two legs along with them, and
breathe the same air.
When war with Germany began, the Soviet soldier found himself in a no
man’s land. In front of him was the Wehrmacht, which was, at the time, the
best attack force ever put into the field. The German army would most
likely kill him or take him prisoner. If he were taken prisoner, he would
almost certainly die, partly because the Germans wanted him dead, and
partly because they had no way to keep him alive. They had not prepared
for the millions of Soviet troops who would fall into their grasp. They
had no food to give them and no barracks to lock them up in. Instead,
prisoners were often left out in the open, surrounded with barbed wire and
used for target practice until they finally collapsed of hunger and
exposure.
In back of him, his prospects were not much better. Behind him, Stalin’s
police had put up “blocking battalions.” Described as an additional line
of defense, these troops were meant to shoot their own comrades if they
tried to retreat. “Not a step back,” Stalin had said in his secret order
number 227.
Between the Germans and the blocking battalions, there was almost certain
death.
“The rates of loss were …extravagant,” writes Catherine Merridale in
“Ivan’s War.” “By December 1941, six months into the conflict, the Red
Army had lost 4.5 million men. The carnage was beyond imagination.
Eyewitnesses described the battlefields as landscapes of charred steel and
ash. The round shapes of lifeless heads caught the late summer light like
potatoes turned up from new-broken soil. The prisoners were marched off in
their multitudes. Even the Germans did not have the guards, let alone
enough barbed wire, to contain the 2.5 million Red Army troops they
captured in the first five months. One single campaign, the defense of
Kiev, cost the Soviets nearly 700,000 killed or missing in a matter of
weeks. Almost the entire army of the pre-war years…was dead or captured
by the end of 1941.”
Behind these amazing figures is a long story. The Bolsheviks believed they
had the secret recipe for a better world. A mood of confidence, of
positivism, of rationalism, and of world improvement had settled over
Russia. It required destroying the old institutions, relationships,
customs, attitudes, traditions and religion. Naturally, not everyone was
cooperative. Well, said Lenin, “you can’t make an omelette without
breaking some eggs.” So, the shells were cracked with rifle butts.
“Theirs was no ordinary generation,” Merridale continues, referring to the
Soviet troops. “By 1941, the Soviet Union, a state whose existence began
in 1918, had already suffered violence on an unprecedented scale. The
seven years after 1914 were a time of unrelenting crisis: the civil war
between 1918 and 1921 alone would bring cruel fighting, desperate
shortages of everything from heating fuel to bread and blankets, epidemic
disease, and a new scourge that Lenin chose to call class war.
The famine that came in its wake was terrible by any standards, but a
decade later, in 1932-3, when starvation claimed more than 7 million
lives, the great hunger of 1921 would come to seem, as one witness put it,
‘like child’s play.’ By then, too, Soviet society had torn itself apart in
the upheaval of the first of many five-year plans for economic growth,
driving the peasants into collectives, destroying political opponents,
forcing some citizens to work like salves. The men and women who were
called upon to fight in 1941 were the survivors of an era of turmoil that
had cost well over 15 million lives in little more than two decades.”
This campaign to improve the world included getting rid of experienced
military officers who were from the wrong class - as most were. It also
involved such an ambitious program of careful central planning that
nothing worked properly. You’d think that even a government employee could
figure out that soldiers needed rifles, but many went to war without them.
Nor did they have proper food, shelter, sanitation or clothing.
Fortunately, from a central planner’s point of view, without weapons or
training they were usually killed before they starved to death. Little
things were missing, too. The soldiers were ordered to go places, but
there were no maps to show them how to get there. Only the Germans had
maps. Soviet tanks were equipped with radios, but without an adequate code
system, Germans could listen in on their tactical discussions. And the
high command in Moscow could think of no other tactic other than the
frontal assault, and regarded camouflage as cowardly.
By February 1942, three million soviet soldiers had been captured. The Red
Army had also lost 2,663,000 who were killed in action. The math was bad,
even for a country as large as Russia; for every German who was killed, 20
Soviet soldiers died.
And here, we pause and we wonder. We take our man as we find him, but we
cannot quite believe he is the dumb ox he appears to be. There were more
than five million armed men at any given time in the Red Army. They could
have turned on their incompetent and merciless leaders if they had wanted
to. Instead, the lined up and marched to their own slaughter, many of
them, perhaps the majority, believing that it would help make the world a
better place.
Even now, according to Merridale, they sit around shabby old soldiers
homes and congratulate themselves. They beat the fascists! They saved the
Proletarian Revolution! Thus, they lived almost their entire lives under
the heel of an even more delusional and murderous regime, but didn’t seem
to notice.
Here, too, people don’t seem to notice that much of what they take for
granted, future generations will take for absurd. The dollar is worth
something. You can get rich by spending. Debt doesn’t matter. The American
Empire is at war with “insurgents.”
People will believe anything …even if it kills them.
Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning
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