Losses on the part of the USSR in WWII. They did not return from the battle: the number of deaths in the Great Patriotic War has been declassified. German losses

May 9, 2018 passed unnoticed, a parade was quickly held, the date was noted and... forgotten until next year, not the slightest attempt like 2 years ago the brazen attack of the “anti-Soviet” “Immortal Regiment” did not occur according to the loss figures: “Declassified data from the Ministry of Defense, the organizers of the hearings said, allowed them to update data on the human losses of our country in the Great Patriotic War. If in 1947 it was officially believed that they amounted to 7 million people, and from 1990 to the present - 26.6 million, now the terrible figure has increased to 41 million 979 thousand people.”
The pathological reluctance to count casualties in a war that ended more than 70 years ago is clearly demonstrated in various counts over the decades. Picture taken from "Katorga. What grace!"

Due to the ongoing destruction and classification of archives and, as well as squeezing out drop by drop - here is a completely / extremely secret dozen of documents on the Battle of Stalingrad http://stalingrad75.mil.ru/, we still do not have a complete picture of the Second World War.

Original taken from poteri_sssr Q Don't like the losses of 1941? No problem - we'll fix it!
A few days ago, my magazine was invaded by “patriotically”-minded LiveJournal creatures, who left their mark in the form of illiterate and obscene comments (for some reason written in a personal message). I don’t like to encourage rudeness - for this reason I didn’t answer - I just threw it out and banned him. But it is curious that they were all a reaction to my criticism of that section of General Krivosheev’s reference book, where the losses of the USSR Armed Forces in 1941 were calculated. The creatures claimed that I was lying - I was laying a false accusation against the respected general, since Soviet historiography allegedly never published statistics on the losses of the Red Army for 1941 (especially those that exceeded the general’s estimates by millions of lives), and it was Krivosheev who was the first to declassify these figures in 1993. The main argument was that there is no information on the Internet (except for Krivosheev’s figures) on this matter.
Apparently, it doesn’t even occur to the poor children of the computer era that in the USSR this kind of information was published in paper publications, which in the overwhelming majority now do not exist in electronic form. It is precisely this shortcoming in relation to the Soviet statistics of losses in 1941 that I will now correct - I will post it online....
In order not to complicate the perception of the post with many scans and links, I will start from the material published, so to speak, in the intermediate era - when the Soviet Union no longer existed, and the first edition of General Krivosheev’s reference book had not yet seen the light. That is, I will give evidence that Soviet estimates of losses were used for some time even in the Russian Federation, until pseudo-patriotic propaganda received food in the form of manipulations from Krivosheev’s “research”. And, as usual, I’ll compare it with the calculations of General Krivosheev...

Here is “Military History Magazine” No. 2 for 1992.

On its pages there is an article by Colonel Mazurkevich “Plans and Reality”, which analyzed the situation in which the USSR found itself half a century ago. There is nothing unusual in it - no sensations or declassified information - only those facts and figures that were usually published in similar works in previous Soviet years. But this is precisely why it is valuable, since, among other things, it contains an assessment of the losses of the Armed Forces in 1941.
It is written in black and white:
“5.3 million killed, captured and missing.”

Look here

And the link is not to the archive, since the statistics are not new - they have already been introduced into scientific circulation and have even managed to get into the reference literature. Here she is:
Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945; Events. People. Documents: Brief historical guide. - M.: Politizdat, 1990, - P. 76.

Here it is also necessary to recall that the Politizdat publishing house was famous for its very fierce censorship - every figure there was double-checked many times. And often even “unpleasant” statistics already published earlier in other publishing houses were adjusted in a “pleasant” direction. And “The Military History Journal has always been distinguished by conservatism and the desire to “defend the honor of the uniform.”

A year later, the first edition of Krivosheev’s directory appeared, where the irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces in 1941, without any explanation, suddenly decreased by more than two million souls.
Here they are - not 5,300,000, as before, but 3,137,673 people.

Look here

I posted the Krivosheev reference book from 2001 here - it just fits better in my scanner. But the numbers are exactly the same - the same as in the 1993 edition.

The most curious thing is that Krivosheev (and his subordinates who worked on the “patriotic” reference book) still have not answered the question - how, after all, working in the same archives as Soviet historians, he was able to so radically “improve” statistics. Repeatedly - at various conferences they asked publicly. But he is silent - like a partisan during interrogation...

It turns out that in the USSR, military historians (most of whom took part in the war) tried to “denigrate” one of their most important achievements - the victory over Nazi Germany - pretended that they fought worse than they actually did and for this purpose published false data on army losses , almost twice as high. But the real “beautiful” statistics were kept classified as “secret”.

* * * * *
Original taken from oboguev V
Originally posted by zhu_s at On the structuring of human losses of the USSR in the Second World War

1. In the June issue, Demoscope published a short report on the meeting of the Demographic Section of the Central House of Scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences on May 28, where Alexander Babyonyshev made a report “Demographic losses of the USSR and Russia in the first half of the 20th century.” (Thanks to demographer for the tip to the publication).

The speaker, a former teacher and researcher at Harvard and Boston Universities, is a personality in himself with a very unusual fate, which can be seen at the link in the wiki - in 1989, having already emigrated to the USA, he published under the pseudonym Sergei Maksudov in the publishing house of another human rights activist, Valery Chalidze, the book “Losses of the Population of the USSR”, which immediately became a classic of the genre. (Available for download on the author’s website.) In particular, it is extensively cited in another classic monograph, “The Population of the Soviet Union 1922-1991” by E.M. Andreev and colleagues (hereinafter referred to as ADH, USSR 1922-91), published 4 years later.

2. Among other things, the ADH provides a calculation total number (26.6 million) and age-sex structure of human losses for 4.5 years, including the Second World War (from mid-1941 to early 1946). (On the graph, this is the interval between the hypothetical and actual numbers at the beginning of 1946, while the interval between 1941 and the hypothetical 1946 is referred to as “normal” mortality.) Human losses are understood as the sum of: (a) those killed as a result of military operations; (b) those who died as a result of an increased mortality rate due to deteriorating living conditions and medical care, stress, exhaustion, etc. (compared to peacetime conditions); (b) net emigration.

The indicator of human losses (LC) occupies an intermediate position between direct military losses and total demographic losses, which include the “shortfall” in the war and post-war years, and sometimes the “demographic echo” of wars of various orders. Eg. The graph on the right shows a very primitive, “school” calculation of such losses from the total fertility and mortality rates on the eve of the war.

Demographers, of course, do not think so primitively, but use certain models of the age structure of mortality and fertility. The anniversary collection of Rosstat gives a figure for total losses, taking into account the “shortfall”, at 39.3 million for the USSR as a whole, incl. in the Russian Federation - 19.8, of which 12.9 are PL itself, excluding additional child mortality aged 0-4 years (i.e., approximately half of the corresponding USSR losses of 25.5 million). However, even a sophisticated model always remains only a model with certain prerequisites.

The most weak point in the ADH model is the use of pre-war parameters of age-related mortality to separate “normal” mortality from “excess” mortality. However, it is easy to see that in conditions of a demographic catastrophe, “normal” mortality rates should decrease to one degree or another. As a result, for example, the LP figure of 26.6 million, which has almost become official, gives rather their lower estimate. This is explained, for example, and , and there is a link to works where an attempt is made, if not to correct the ADC estimate, which is unlikely to ever be possible, then at least to give some confidence intervals for it.

In addition, in the ADC calculations, the parameters of 1940, which in fact was also already wartime, were modeled as “normal”. The USSR, fighting in an informal alliance with Germany, which in the minds of the then leadership played approximately the same role as in the minds of today's China - a “ray of light” in the rotten kingdom of the West that had boycotted us, conquered 6 powers with a population of 20 million people. Not counting also the informal war with Manchukuo. The M-R Pact on August 23, 1939 led to a government crisis and the resignation of the Japanese government, which we declared a victory at Khalkhin Gol. Due to increased mortality as a result of hostilities and a drop in the birth rate, natural population growth in 1940 per 1 million people less than in the previous year, 1939. And this also introduces distortions into the calculation of excess mortality.

3. Babyonyshev’s figures structure the LP in a different context - by nature of losses(military, civilians) and by territory (occupied, free). Regarding the latter, there are extremely contradictory estimates, for example, G.F. Krivosheev (ed.) (“Russia and the USSR in the wars of the 20th century”) attributes more than half of the LP - 13.7 million (Table 118) - to the losses of the civilian population in the occupied territory, thereby presenting it as some kind of grandiose “death factory”. On the other hand, calculations about. Nikolai Savchenko, according to which only 1/3 of the population falls in the occupied territories (excluding those born after 1939)

The demographic losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR, promptly taken into account by the headquarters of all levels and military medical institutions, at 8.6684 million people, given in the book, also clearly do not reflect all “front-line” LPs, in particular, militias and “march reinforcements.” Thus, the losses of men of conscription age (15-54 years) - 16.73 million, according to ADH calculations - are almost twice as much. And if we roughly estimate “front-line losses” as an excess of male LPs at these ages over female ones (which, of course, is very crude and arbitrary, since women in the USSR were partially mobilized for military service and died at the front, on the other hand, “rear "mortality among men could differ from women), then this gives the order of “front-line” losses at 12.8 million.

By the way, I note in parentheses that the male LPs of the USSR at conscription age are almost equal to the entire male population of Germany at conscription age according to the 1939 census. (19.354 million, including disabled people and those not liable for military service, with Austria, but without Alsace and other territories that became part of the Reich after 1939). On the territory of the USSR (within the borders of 1946-91), the conscription age group included approx. 56 million men - almost three times more. But due to the rapid retreat of the Red Army, the real mobilization potential by the time the second general wave of mobilization was announced was already significantly less (August 10, before that, the conscription extended only to those with military orders born in 1905-18 in 14 of the 16 military districts).

In Babyonyshev’s calculations, direct military losses fall to 12.2 million, incl. 1 million - civilians who died during the fighting, 0.1 million - partisans of the Baltic and Western states. Ukraine, who fought against Soviet troops, and 0.2 million were shot in the army by their own (according to Krivosheev, 135 thousand according to verdicts of courts-martial). The civilian population in the occupied/blocked territory is estimated at 7.1 million people. (3.5 million increased mortality due to deteriorating living conditions; 0.9 - in Leningrad; 2.7 - Jews; according to another estimate, up to 2.438 million became victims of the Holocaust on the territory of the USSR). In the free territory, civilian populations were smaller - 6.7 million (4.2 million increased mortality due to deteriorating conditions; 1.6 - excess deaths of prisoners and deportees (special settlers); 0.9 - victims of the post-war famine).

4. In conclusion, I will give another calculation by Babenyshev demographic balance of the drafted male population(as is, since I did not understand everything from the table in the Demoscope publication), correcting a similar balance of Krivosheev (Table 132; where, for example, the number of demobilized includes all 994 thousand convicted military personnel, including those sent to penal companies and battalions) and broken down by year (in the graph - cumulative total). It is curious that, taking into account his correction, the number of killed Red Army soldiers did not exceed the number of those who surrendered until the end of the war (according to Krivosheev, this nevertheless happened in the last months of the war).

By quarter, the number of those killed began to exceed the number of prisoners for the first time since September 1942. after order No. 227 introduced penal companies and battalions, as well as barrier detachments (which existed in their infancy before that) into the army staff. The maximum number of deaths on the battlefield occurred in 1944, the intensity of the death of Soviet soldiers was maximum during the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk (1st and 3rd quarters of 1943), as well as at the final stage of the war (1Q45).

* * * * *
Note to the first table from zhu_s :
“The numbers in the first graph are light stripes for 5-year-olds by sex and age, i.e. actual human losses according to ADH (26.6) by sex and age structure.
It is curious, by the way, that the relative losses of men of all conscription ages from 1896 to 1926 are approximately the same. It is usually considered that the most “killed” 5-year-old was 1921-1925. birth, but in general the percentage of losses in it is approximately the same. It’s just that they died mainly in the battles of 1943-45, about which the survivors wrote poems and stories, while, say, the almost equally numerous generation of 1911-15. mostly rotted in captivity 1941-42.
Well, yes - girls 1921-25. R. they were left without suitors almost completely, while their older friends were widowed, which, probably, is not so offensive.

Editor's note. For 70 years, first the top leadership of the USSR (by rewriting history), and later the government of the Russian Federation, supported a monstrous and cynical lie about the greatest tragedy of the 20th century - World War II

Editor's note . For 70 years, first the top leadership of the USSR (by rewriting history), and later the government of the Russian Federation, supported a monstrous and cynical lie about the greatest tragedy of the 20th century - World War II, mainly by privatizing victory in it and keeping silent about its cost and the role of other countries in the outcome war. Now in Russia they have made a ceremonial picture of victory, they support victory at all levels, and the cult of the St. George’s ribbon has reached such an ugly form that it has actually developed into outright mockery of the memory of millions of fallen people. And while the whole world mourns for those who died fighting Nazism or became its victims, eReFiya is organizing a blasphemous Sabbath. And over these 70 years, the exact number of losses of Soviet citizens in that war has not been finally clarified. The Kremlin is not interested in this, just as it is not interested in publishing statistics on the deaths of Russian military personnel in the Donbass, in the Russian-Ukrainian war, which it unleashed. Only a few who did not succumb to the influence of Russian propaganda are trying to find out the exact number of losses in WWII.

In the article that we bring to your attention, the most important thing is that the Soviet and Russian authorities did not care about the fate of how many millions of people, while promoting their feat in every possible way.

Estimates of the losses of Soviet citizens in World War II have a huge range: from 19 to 36 million. The first detailed calculations were made by the Russian emigrant, demographer Timashev in 1948 - he came up with 19 million. The maximum figure was called by B. Sokolov - 46 million. The latest calculations show , that the USSR military alone lost 13.5 million people, but the total losses were over 27 million.

At the end of the war, long before any historical and demographic studies, Stalin named the figure - 5.3 million military losses. He also included missing persons (obviously, in most cases, prisoners). In March 1946, in an interview with a correspondent of the Pravda newspaper, the generalissimo estimated the human losses at 7 million. The increase was due to civilians who died in the occupied territory or were deported to Germany.

In the West, this figure was perceived with skepticism. Already at the end of the 1940s, the first calculations of the demographic balance of the USSR during the war years appeared, contradicting Soviet data. An illustrative example is the calculations of the Russian emigrant, demographer N. S. Timashev, published in the New York “New Journal” in 1948. Here is his technique.

The All-Union Population Census of the USSR in 1939 determined its number at 170.5 million. Growth in 1937-1940. reached, according to his assumption, almost 2% for each year. Consequently, the population of the USSR by mid-1941 should have reached 178.7 million. But in 1939-1940. Western Ukraine and Belarus, three Baltic states, the Karelian lands of Finland were annexed to the USSR, and Romania returned Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Therefore, minus the Karelian population who went to Finland, the Poles who fled to the West, and the Germans repatriated to Germany, these territorial acquisitions gave a population increase of 20.5 million. Considering that the birth rate in the annexed territories was no more than 1% in year, that is, lower than in the USSR, and also taking into account the short time period between their entry into the USSR and the beginning of World War II, the author determined the population growth for these territories by mid-1941 at 300 thousand. Consistently adding up the above figures, he received 200.7 million who lived in the USSR on the eve of June 22, 1941.

Timashev further divided 200 million into three age groups, again relying on data from the 1939 All-Union Census: adults (over 18 years old) - 117.2 million, teenagers (from 8 to 18 years old) - 44.5 million, children (under 8 years) - 38.8 million. At the same time, he took into account two important circumstances. First: in 1939-1940. From childhood, two very weak annual streams moved from childhood to the group of teenagers, born in 1931-1932, during the famine, which covered large areas of the USSR and negatively affected the size of the teenage group. Second: in the former Polish lands and Baltic states there were more people over 20 years of age than in the USSR.

Timashev supplemented these three age groups with the number of Soviet prisoners. He did it in the following way. By the time of the elections of deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in December 1937, the population of the USSR reached 167 million, of which voters made up 56.36% of the total figure, and the population over 18 years of age, according to the All-Union Census of 1939, reached 58.3%. The resulting difference of 2%, or 3.3 million, in his opinion, was the population of the Gulag (including the number of those executed). This turned out to be close to the truth.

Next, Timashev moved on to post-war figures. The number of voters included in the voting lists for the elections of deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the spring of 1946 amounted to 101.7 million. Adding to this figure the 4 million Gulag prisoners he calculated, he received 106 million adult population in the USSR at the beginning of 1946. Calculating the teenage group, he took as a basis 31.3 million primary and secondary school students in the 1947/48 school year, compared them with data from 1939 (31.4 million schoolchildren within the borders of the USSR before September 17, 1939) and obtained a figure of 39 million When calculating the children's group, he proceeded from the fact that at the beginning of the war the birth rate in the USSR was approximately 38 per 1000, in the second quarter of 1942 it decreased by 37.5%, and in 1943-1945. - half.

Subtracting from each year group the percentage calculated according to the normal mortality table for the USSR, he received 36 million children at the beginning of 1946. Thus, according to his statistical calculations, in the USSR at the beginning of 1946 there were 106 million adults, 39 million adolescents and 36 million children, and a total of 181 million. Timashev’s conclusion is as follows: the population of the USSR in 1946 was 19 million less than in 1941.

Other Western researchers came to approximately the same results. In 1946, under the auspices of the League of Nations, F. Lorimer’s book “The Population of the USSR” was published. According to one of his hypotheses, during the war the population of the USSR decreased by 20 million.

In the article “Human Losses in the Second World War,” published in 1953, the German researcher G. Arntz came to the conclusion that “20 million people is the closest figure to the truth of the total losses of the Soviet Union in the Second World War.” The collection including this article was translated and published in the USSR in 1957 under the title “Results of the Second World War.” Thus, four years after Stalin’s death, Soviet censorship released the figure of 20 million into the open press, thereby indirectly recognizing it as correct and making it available, at least, to specialists: historians, international affairs experts, etc.

Only in 1961, Khrushchev, in a letter to Swedish Prime Minister Erlander, admitted that the war against fascism “claimed two tens of millions of lives of Soviet people.” Thus, compared to Stalin, Khrushchev increased Soviet casualties by almost 3 times.

In 1965, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Victory, Brezhnev spoke of “more than 20 million” human lives lost by the Soviet people in the war. In the 6th and final volume of the fundamental “History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union,” published at the same time, it was stated that of the 20 million dead, almost half “were military and civilians killed and tortured by the Nazis in occupied Soviet territory.” In fact, 20 years after the end of the war, the USSR Ministry of Defense recognized the death of 10 million Soviet troops.

Four decades later, the head of the Center for Military History of Russia at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor G. Kumanev, in a line-by-line commentary, told the truth about the calculations that military historians carried out in the early 1960s when preparing the “History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union”: “Our losses in the war were then it was determined at 26 million. But the figure “over 20 million” was accepted by high authorities.”

As a result, “20 Million” not only took root in historical literature for decades, but also became part of the national consciousness.

In 1990, M. Gorbachev announced a new figure for losses obtained as a result of research by demographers - “almost 27 million people.”

In 1991, B. Sokolov’s book “The Price of Victory” was published. The Great Patriotic War: the unknown about the known.” It estimated direct military losses of the USSR at approximately 30 million, including 14.7 million military personnel, and “actual and potential losses” at 46 million, including 16 million unborn children.”

A little later, Sokolov clarified these figures (he added new losses). He obtained the loss figure as follows. From the size of the Soviet population at the end of June 1941, which he determined to be 209.3 million, he subtracted 166 million who, in his opinion, lived in the USSR on January 1, 1946, and received 43.3 million dead. Then, from the resulting number, I subtracted the irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces (26.4 million) and received the irretrievable losses of the civilian population - 16.9 million.

“We can name the number of Red Army soldiers killed during the entire war, which is close to reality, if we determine the month of 1942, when the losses of the Red Army in the dead were taken into account most fully and when it had almost no losses in prisoners. For a number of reasons, we chose November 1942 as such a month and extended the ratio of the number of dead and wounded obtained for it to the entire period of the war. As a result, we came to a figure of 22.4 million Soviet military personnel killed in battle and died from wounds, illnesses, accidents and executed by tribunals.”

To the 22.4 million received in this way, he added 4 million soldiers and commanders of the Red Army who died in enemy captivity. This is how it turned out to be 26.4 million irretrievable losses suffered by the Armed Forces.

In addition to B. Sokolov, similar calculations were carried out by L. Polyakov, A. Kvasha, V. Kozlov and others. The methodological weakness of this kind of calculations is obvious: the researchers proceeded from the difference between the size of the Soviet population in 1941, which is known very approximately, and the size of the post-war population USSR, which is almost impossible to accurately determine. It was this difference that they considered the total human losses.

In 1993, a statistical study “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed: Losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR in Wars, Combat Actions and Military Conflicts” was published, prepared by a team of authors headed by General G. Krivosheev. The main source of statistical data was previously secret archival documents, primarily reports of the General Staff. However, the losses of entire fronts and armies in the first months, and the authors specifically stipulated this, were obtained by calculation. In addition, the reporting of the General Staff did not include the losses of units that were not organizationally part of the Soviet Armed Forces (army, navy, border and internal troops of the NKVD of the USSR), but were directly involved in the battles: people's militia, partisan detachments, groups of underground fighters.

Finally, the number of prisoners of war and missing in action is clearly underestimated: this category of losses, according to the reports of the General Staff, totals 4.5 million, of which 2.8 million remained alive (were repatriated after the end of the war or again drafted into the ranks of the Red Army in the liberated from the occupiers of the territory), and, accordingly, the total number of those who did not return from captivity, including those who did not want to return to the USSR, amounted to 1.7 million.

As a result, the statistical data in the “Classified as Classified” directory was immediately perceived as requiring clarification and additions. And in 1998, thanks to the publication of V. Litovkin “During the war years, our army lost 11 million 944 thousand 100 people,” these data were replenished by 500 thousand reservists drafted into the army, but not yet included in the lists of military units and who died along the way to the front.

The study by V. Litovkin states that from 1946 to 1968, a special commission of the General Staff, headed by General S. Shtemenko, prepared a statistical reference book on losses in 1941-1945. At the end of the commission’s work, Shtemenko reported to the Minister of Defense of the USSR, Marshal A. Grechko: “Taking into account that the statistical collection contains information of national importance, the publication of which in the press (including closed ones) or in any other way is currently not necessary and undesirable, the collection is intended to be kept at the General Staff as a special document, to which a strictly limited circle of persons will be allowed to become familiar.” And the prepared collection was kept under seven seals until the team under the leadership of General G. Krivosheev made its information public.

V. Litovkin’s research sowed even greater doubts about the completeness of the information published in the collection “Classified as Classified”, because a logical question arose: were all the data contained in the “statistics collection of the Shtemenko Commission” declassified?

For example, according to the data given in the article, during the war years, military justice authorities convicted 994 thousand people, of whom 422 thousand were sent to penal units, 436 thousand to places of detention. The remaining 136 thousand were apparently shot.

And yet, the reference book “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed” has significantly expanded and supplemented the ideas not only of historians, but also of the entire Russian society about the cost of the 1945 Victory. It is enough to refer to the statistical calculation: from June to November 1941, the Armed Forces of the USSR lost 24 thousand people every day, of which 17 thousand were killed and up to 7 thousand wounded, and from January 1944 to May 1945 - 20 thousand people , of which 5.2 thousand were killed and 14.8 thousand were wounded.

In 2001, a significantly expanded statistical publication appeared - “Russia and the USSR in the wars of the twentieth century. Losses of the armed forces." The authors supplemented the General Staff materials with reports from military headquarters about losses and notifications from military registration and enlistment offices about the dead and missing, which were sent to relatives at their place of residence. And the figure of losses he received increased to 9 million 168 thousand 400 people. These data were reproduced in volume 2 of the collective work of employees of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Population of Russia in the 20th century. Historical essays”, published under the editorship of academician Yu. Polyakov.

In 2004, the second, corrected and expanded, edition of the book by the head of the Center for Military History of Russia at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor G. Kumanev, “Feat and Forgery: Pages of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945,” was published. It provides data on losses: about 27 million Soviet citizens. And in the footnote comments to them, the same addition mentioned above appeared, explaining that the calculations of military historians back in the early 1960s gave a figure of 26 million, but the “high authorities” preferred to accept something else as the “historical truth”: “over 20 million."

Meanwhile, historians and demographers continued to look for new approaches to determining the magnitude of the USSR's losses in the war.

The historian Ilyenkov, who served in the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, followed an interesting path. He tried to calculate the irretrievable losses of the Red Army personnel based on the files of irretrievable losses of privates, sergeants and officers. These files began to be created when, on July 9, 1941, a department for recording personal losses was organized as part of the Main Directorate for the Formation and Recruitment of the Red Army (GUFKKA). The responsibilities of the department included personal accounting of losses and compiling an alphabetical card index of losses.

The records were kept in the following categories: 1) dead - according to reports from military units, 2) dead - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 3) missing in action - according to reports from military units, 4) missing - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices, 5) dead in German captivity , 6) those who died from illnesses, 7) those who died from wounds - according to reports from military units, those who died from wounds - according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices. At the same time, the following were taken into account: deserters; military personnel sentenced to forced labor camps; sentenced to capital punishment - execution; removed from the register of irretrievable losses as survivors; those on suspicion of having served with the Germans (the so-called “signals”), and those who were captured but survived. These military personnel were not included in the list of irretrievable losses.

After the war, the card files were deposited in the Archive of the USSR Ministry of Defense (now the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation). Since the early 1990s, the archive began counting registration cards by letters of the alphabet and categories of losses. As of November 1, 2000, 20 letters of the alphabet were processed; a preliminary calculation was carried out using the remaining 6 uncounted letters, which had fluctuations up or down by 30-40 thousand persons.

The calculated 20 letters for 8 categories of losses of privates and sergeants of the Red Army gave the following figures: 9 million 524 thousand 398 people. At the same time, 116 thousand 513 people were removed from the register of irretrievable losses as those who turned out to be alive according to reports from military registration and enlistment offices.

A preliminary calculation based on 6 uncounted letters gave 2 million 910 thousand people as irretrievable losses. The result of the calculations was as follows: 12 million 434 thousand 398 Red Army soldiers and sergeants were lost by the Red Army in 1941-1945. (Recall that this is without losses of the Navy, internal and border troops of the NKVD of the USSR.)

Using the same methodology, the alphabetical card index of irretrievable losses of officers of the Red Army was calculated, which is also stored in the TsAMO of the Russian Federation. They amounted to about 1 million 100 thousand people.

Thus, during the Second World War, the Red Army lost 13 million 534 thousand 398 soldiers and commanders killed, missing, died from wounds, diseases and in captivity.

These data are 4 million 865 thousand 998 people higher than the irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR (payroll) according to the General Staff, which included the Red Army, sailors, border guards, and internal troops of the NKVD of the USSR.

Finally, we note another new trend in the study of the demographic results of the Second World War. Before the collapse of the USSR, there was no need to estimate human losses for individual republics or nationalities. And only at the end of the twentieth century L. Rybakovsky tried to calculate the approximate amount of human losses of the RSFSR within its then borders. According to his estimates, it amounted to approximately 13 million people - slightly less than half of the total losses of the USSR.

(Quotes: S. Golotik and V. Minaev - “Demographic losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War: history of calculations”, “New Historical Bulletin”, No. 16, 2007.)

“According to the results of calculations, during the years of the Great Patriotic War (including the campaign in the Far East against Japan in 1945), total irreversible demographic losses (killed, missing, captured and did not return from it, died from wounds, diseases and as a result of accidents) of the Soviet Armed Forces, together with the Border and Internal Troops, amounted to 8 million 668 thousand 400 people.” Ratio with Germany and its allies 1:1.3

Every time the next anniversary of the Great Victory approaches, the myth about our unimaginable losses becomes active.

Every time, knowledgeable and authoritative people with numbers in their hands convincingly prove that this myth is an ideological weapon in the information and psychological war against Russia, that it is a means of demoralizing our people. And with each new anniversary, a new generation grows up, which must hear a sober voice that, to some extent, neutralizes the efforts of manipulators.

WAR OF NUMBERS

Back in 2005, literally on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Victory, the President of the Academy of Military Sciences, Army General Makhmut Gareev, who in 1988 headed the Ministry of Defense commission to assess losses during the war, was invited to Vladimir Pozner’s TV show “Times”. Vladimir Pozner said: “This is an amazing thing - we still don’t know exactly how many of our fighters, soldiers, and officers died in this war.”

And this despite the fact that in 1966 - 1968, the calculation of human losses in the Great Patriotic War was carried out by a commission of the General Staff, headed by Army General Sergei Shtemenko. Then, in 1988 - 1993, a team of military historians was engaged in collating and verifying the materials of all previous commissions.

The results of this fundamental study of the losses of personnel and military equipment of the Soviet Armed Forces in combat for the period from 1918 to 1989 were published in the book “The Classification of Secrecy has been Removed. Losses of the Armed Forces in wars, hostilities and military conflicts.”

This book says: “According to the results of calculations, during the years of the Great Patriotic War (including the campaign in the Far East against Japan in 1945), the total irreversible demographic losses (killed, missing, captured and did not return from it) , died from wounds, illnesses and as a result of accidents) of the Soviet Armed Forces, together with the Border and Internal Troops, amounted to 8 million 668 thousand 400 people.” The ratio of human losses between Germany and its allies on the Eastern Front was 1:1.3 in favor of our enemy.

In the same TV program, a famous front-line writer entered into the conversation: “Stalin did everything to lose the war... The Germans lost a total of 12.5 million people, and we lost 32 million in one place, in one war.”

There are people who, in their “truth,” bring the scale of Soviet losses to absurd, absurd levels. The most fantastic figures are given by the writer and historian Boris Sokolov, who estimated the total number of deaths in the ranks of the Soviet Armed Forces in 1941 - 1945 at 26.4 million people, with German losses on the Soviet-German front at 2.6 million (that is, with loss ratio 10:1). And he counted 46 million Soviet people who died in the Great Patriotic War.

His calculations are absurd: during all the years of the war, 34.5 million people were mobilized (taking into account the pre-war number of military personnel), of which about 27 million people were direct participants in the war. After the end of the war, there were about 13 million people in the Soviet Army. Of the 27 million participants in the war, 26.4 million could not have died.

They are trying to convince us that “we overwhelmed the Germans with the corpses of our own soldiers.”

BATTLE, IRREVOCABLE AND OFFICIAL LOSSES

Irreversible combat losses include those killed on the battlefield, those who died from wounds during medical evacuation and in hospitals. These losses amounted to 6329.6 thousand people. Of these, 5,226.8 thousand were killed or died from wounds during the sanitary evacuation stages, and 1,102.8 thousand people died from wounds in hospitals.

Irretrievable losses also include those missing and captured. There were 3396.4 thousand of them. In addition, in the first months of the war there were significant losses, the nature of which was not documented (information about them was collected subsequently, including from German archives). They amounted to 1162.6 thousand people.

The number of irretrievable losses also includes non-combat losses - those who died from illnesses in hospitals, those who died as a result of emergency incidents, those who were executed by verdicts of military tribunals. These losses amounted to 555.5 thousand people.

The sum of all these losses during the war amounted to 11,444.1 thousand people. Excluded from this number are 939.7 thousand military personnel who were registered as missing in action at the beginning of the war, but were called up for the second time into the army in the territory liberated from occupation, as well as 1,836 thousand former military personnel who returned from captivity after the end of the war - a total of 2,775, 7 thousand people.

Thus, the actual number of irretrievable (demographic) losses of the USSR Armed Forces amounted to 8668.4 thousand people.

Of course, these are not final numbers. The Russian Ministry of Defense is creating an electronic database, which is constantly being updated. In January 2010, the head of the Russian Ministry of Defense Department for perpetuating the memory of those killed in defense of the Fatherland, Major General Alexander Kirilin, told the press that on the 65th anniversary of the Great Victory, official data on our country’s losses in the Great Patriotic War would be made public. The general confirmed that the Ministry of Defense currently estimates the losses of military personnel of the Armed Forces in 1941 - 1945 at 8.86 million people. He said: “By the 65th anniversary of the Great Victory, we will finally come to that official figure, which will be recorded in a government regulatory document and communicated to the entire population of the country in order to stop speculation on loss figures.”

Close to real information about losses is contained in the works of the outstanding Russian demographer Leonid Rybakovsky, in particular one of his latest publications, “Human Losses of the USSR and Russia in the Great Patriotic War.”

Objective research is also appearing abroad in Russia. Thus, the famous demographer Sadretdin Maksudov, who works at Harvard University and studied the losses of the Red Army, estimated the irretrievable losses at 7.8 million people, which is 870 thousand less than in the book “The Classification of Secrecy Has Been Removed.” He explains this discrepancy by the fact that the Russian authors did not exclude from the number of losses those military personnel who died a “natural” death (this is 250 - 300 thousand people). In addition, they overestimated the number of dead Soviet prisoners of war. From these, according to Maksudov, it is necessary to subtract those who died “naturally” (about 100 thousand), as well as those who remained in the West after the war (200 thousand) or returned to their homeland, bypassing official repatriation channels (about 280 thousand people). ). Maksudov published his results in Russian in the article “On the front-line losses of the Soviet Army during the Second World War.”

THE PRICE OF EUROPE'S SECOND COMING TO RUSSIA

In 1998, a joint work of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation “The Great Patriotic War. 1941 - 1945" in 4 volumes. It says: “The irretrievable human losses of the German armed forces on the Eastern Front are equal to 7181.1 thousand military personnel, and together with the allies... - 8649.3 thousand.” If we count using the same method - taking into account prisoners - then “irretrievable losses of the Armed Forces of the USSR... exceed enemy losses by 1.3 times.”

This is the most reliable loss ratio at the moment. Not 10:1, like other “seekers of truth”, but 1.3:1. Not ten times more, but 30%.

The Red Army suffered its main losses at the first stage of the war: in 1941, that is, just over 6 months of the war, 27.8% of the total number of deaths during the entire war occurred. And for 5 months of 1945, which included several major operations, - 7.5% of the total number of deaths.

Also, the main losses in the form of prisoners occurred at the beginning of the war. According to German data, from June 22, 1941 to January 10, 1942, the number of Soviet prisoners of war amounted to 3.9 million. At the Nuremberg trials, a document was read out from the office of Alfred Rosenberg, which reported that of the 3.9 million Soviet prisoners of war by the beginning of 1942 1.1 million remained in the camps for a year.

The German army was objectively much stronger at the first stage.

And the numerical advantage at first was on the side of Germany. On June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht and SS troops deployed a fully mobilized and combat-experienced army of 5.5 million people against the USSR. The Red Army had 2.9 million people in the western districts, a significant part of whom had not yet completed mobilization and had not undergone training.

We must also not forget that, in addition to the Wehrmacht and SS troops, 29 divisions and 16 brigades of Germany’s allies - Finland, Hungary and Romania - immediately joined the war against the USSR. On June 22, their soldiers made up 20% of the invading army. Then Italian and Slovak troops joined them, and by the end of July 1941, German satellite troops accounted for about 30% of the invasion force.

In fact, there was an invasion of Europe into Russia (in the form of the USSR), in many ways similar to the invasion of Napoleon. A direct analogy was drawn between these two invasions (Hitler even granted the “Legion of French Volunteers” the honorable right to begin the battle on the Borodino field; however, during one major shelling, this legion immediately lost 75% of its personnel). The Red Army was fought by the Spanish and Italian divisions, the Netherlands, Landstorm Netherlands and Nordland divisions, the Langermac, Wallonia and Charlemagne divisions, the Bohemia and Moravia division of Czech volunteers, and the Skanderberg Albanian division. , as well as separate battalions of Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, and Danes.

Suffice it to say that in battles with the Red Army on the territory of the USSR, the Romanian army lost more than 600 thousand soldiers and officers killed, wounded and captured. Hungary fought with the USSR from June 27, 1941 to April 12, 1945, when the entire territory was already occupied by Soviet troops. On the Eastern Front, Hungarian troops numbered up to 205 thousand bayonets. The intensity of their participation in the battles is evidenced by the fact that in January 1942, in the battles near Voronezh, the Hungarians lost 148 thousand people killed, wounded and captured.

Finland mobilized 560 thousand people, 80% of the conscript contingent, for the war with the USSR. This army was the most trained, well-armed and resilient among Germany's allies. From June 25, 1941 to July 25, 1944, the Finns pinned down large forces of the Red Army in Karelia. The Croatian Legion was small in number, but had a combat-ready fighter squadron, whose pilots shot down (according to their reports) 259 Soviet aircraft, losing 23 of their own aircraft.

The Slovaks were different from all of these allies of Hitler. Of the 36 thousand Slovak military personnel who fought on the Eastern Front, less than 3 thousand died, and more than 27 thousand soldiers and officers surrendered, many of whom joined the Czechoslovak Army Corps, formed in the USSR. At the start of the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944, all Slovak military aircraft flew to the Lviv airfield.

In general, according to German data, on the Eastern Front, 230 thousand people were killed and died as part of foreign formations of the Wehrmacht and SS, and 959 thousand people as part of the armies of satellite countries - a total of about 1.2 million soldiers and officers. According to a certificate from the USSR Ministry of Defense (1988), the irretrievable losses of the armed forces of the countries officially at war with the USSR amounted to 1 million people. In addition to the Germans, among the prisoners of war taken by the Red Army were 1.1 million citizens of European countries. For example, there were 23 thousand French, 70 Czechoslovaks, 60.3 Poles, 22 Yugoslavs.

Perhaps even more important is the fact that by the start of the war against the USSR, Germany had occupied or effectively brought under control all of continental Europe. A territory of 3 million square meters was united by common power and purpose. km and a population of about 290 million people. As the English historian writes, “Europe has become an economic whole.” All this potential was thrown into the war against the USSR, whose potential, by formal economic standards, was approximately 4 times less (and decreased by approximately half in the first six months of the war).

At the same time, Germany also received significant assistance from the United States and Latin America through intermediaries. Europe supplied German industry with labor on a huge scale, which made it possible to carry out an unprecedented military mobilization of the Germans - 21.1 million people. During the war, approximately 14 million foreign workers were employed in the German economy. On May 31, 1944, there were 7.7 million foreign workers (30%) in the German war industry. Germany's military orders were carried out by all large, technically advanced enterprises in Europe. Suffice it to say that the Skoda factories alone produced as much military products in the year before the attack on Poland as the entire British military industry. On June 22, 1941, a military vehicle burst into the USSR with an amount of equipment and ammunition unprecedented in history.

The Red Army, which had only recently been reformed on a modern basis and had just begun to receive and master modern weapons, faced a powerful enemy of a completely new type, which had not been seen in the First World War, or in the Civil War, or even in the Finnish War. However, as events showed, the Red Army had an exceptionally high ability to learn. She showed rare resilience in the most difficult conditions and quickly strengthened. The military strategy and tactics of the high command and officers were creative and of high systemic quality. Therefore, at the final stage of the war, the losses of the German army were 1.4 times greater than those of the Soviet Armed Forces.

Vladimir TIMAKOV: In the proposed article, my modest experience in teaching demography is mobilized to investigate one of the most painful historical mysteries: how many Soviet soldiers died in the Great Patriotic War?

Vladimir TIMAKOV

In this article, my modest experience in teaching demography is mobilized to investigate one of the most painful historical mysteries: how many Soviet soldiers died in the Great Patriotic War?

Let us first consider the balance sheet of military personnel who passed through the army, compiled by the author’s group of the General Staff under the leadership of G.F. Krivosheeva. When the authors reduce the call to decline, the article “irretrievable losses” (dead) leaves 8 million 668 thousand people. However, there are obvious holes in the balance. Thus, the column “loss” includes 427 thousand soldiers sent to penal battalions. But in the end, these penal prisoners had to be included either in the “killed” article or in the army’s combat ranks on July 1, 1945. Where did they go?

Also missing from the balance are 500 thousand recruits who did not manage to get into units, and 939 thousand released from captivity and called up for the second time.

On the other hand, Krivosheev’s group did not reflect in the balance sheet such a loss item as captured Red Army soldiers who went over to the enemy’s side and/or chose to remain in exile. Their numbers reach six figures and, when balanced, reduce the death toll. The omission of emigrants and defectors from the balance of the author's group of the General Staff indicates a varnishing of reality, but sweeps away suspicions that the main goal of Krivosheev's comrades was to underestimate Soviet combat losses.

Upon first examination, the proportion of male contingents who passed through the Wehrmacht (21.1 million, according to the German historian Müller-Hillebrand) and through the Soviet Army (34.5 million, according to Krivosheev) raises a protest. This ratio seems implausible, since the population of the USSR exceeded the population of Germany (even with Austria and the Sudetenland) by about two and a half times.

However, it is necessary to take into account that by the beginning of the war, the borders of the Reich included a significant part of Poland (East Silesia, West Prussia, Gau Posen), Bohemia and Moravia, Alsace and Lorraine, most of Slovenia, Luxembourg, with a total population of at least 20 million people. The fact that the inhabitants of these territories were subject to conscription into the armed forces is eloquently evidenced by the ethnic composition of Nazi soldiers captured. By the way, the share of the inhabitants of these lands who were captured by us significantly exceeds the share of the Red Army soldiers who were captured by the Germans, representing the ten republics that joined (or formed) the USSR after 1922. Thus, taking into account the new lands, the population of the Reich on June 22, 1941 can be estimated at 102 million people.

The population of the Soviet Union on the fateful June Sunday was 196.7 million people (according to the calculations of Andreev, Darsky, Kharkov).

It is also necessary to take into account that the sex and age pyramid in the pre-war USSR resembled the sex and age pyramid of modern Pakistan or India, with a huge preponderance of children's ages. Therefore, the share of Soviet men aged 18 to 50 was only 21.7% (1939 census), while their peers in Germany were 23.4% (Urlanis estimate). Consequently, the potential conscription contingents of our country and the Reich were 42.7 million people. to 23.9 million people, that is, they differed by less than 1.8 times.

Note that the enemy could use its human resources more effectively by attracting huge masses of foreign labor, as well as by recruiting a significant (1.17 million, according to Romanko’s estimate) number of Soviet collaborators and Volksdeutsche into the Wehrmacht. In view of this, the proportion of conscripts resulting from a comparison of the figures of Krivosheev and Müller-Hillebrand looks quite realistic.

The verification calculations below can be done by any educated person, since the initial information I used is publicly available (for example, on the website demoscope.ru). First of all, we are interested in comparing the census tables of 1939 and 1959 (due to the expansion of the borders of the USSR, the data of 1939, in order to correlate with the data of 1959, must be multiplied by a factor of 1.116).

Having traced the fate of men born in 1889-1898. (when comparing the cohort of 40-49 years old in the pre-war and 60-69 years old in the post-war census), we see that their number decreased from 7.8 million to 4.1 million, or by 47.5%. In the same age cohort, between the 1970 and 1989 censuses the decline was 36.5%. Considering that the natural mortality rates in the near-war years were higher than in the prosperous seventies, it must be admitted that the army losses of men born in 1889-1898. turned out to be not too big. They fully correlate with the figure given in Krivosheev’s work of 520 thousand dead soldiers and officers over 46 years of age.

The fate of the generation born 1899-1928 turned out to be more tragic and can be presented in the table.

The key to determining army casualties is the difference between male and female losses in this cohort—12.9 million. Excess mortality among men is primarily due to war. However, we know that even in peacetime, the natural mortality rate of men reaching the age of 30-60 years significantly exceeds female mortality. From this we can conclude that army losses in the cohort under study are unlikely to exceed 10 million people.

Female decline in 1939-1959. should be divided into civilian casualties (about 4-4.5 million people) and natural loss (5-5.5 million people). Then the civilian casualties among men of this generation can be estimated at 2-2.5 million, and their natural decline at 9-10 million people. (taking into account that male mortality rates for these ages are more than twice that of females, but 1/5 of the male cohort will not live to die naturally as a result of military losses).

As a result, the specific male decline of this generation during the war years will be approximately 10.4-11 million people. This includes not only the losses of military personnel, but also partisans, collaborators, Gulag prisoners, etc.

In general, if we sum up the front-line losses of all age cohorts and add to them the dead female military personnel (1-2% of men), the final figure for the losses of the Soviet army is unlikely to exceed the designated level of 10-11 million people. A similar assessment is given by the British historian Norman Davis, who gained popularity with the recent publication “Europe at War.
1939-1945. Without an easy victory."

Please note: if you “patch” the above “gaps” in Krivosheev’s balance sheet, you will also get very similar figures.

Demography is a science in which it is quite difficult to lie. Various indicators are so linked to each other that any lie shakes the entire system of statistical connections - like a tangled fly shakes the entire fabric of the web.

We can, for example, estimate how many boys born in 1923 returned home from the war. These are conscripts of the forty-first, “knocked out conscription”, who suffered maximum losses compared to other ages.
At the beginning of 1959, for every 100 women of this age, there were 64 women of the same age.

For comparison, in the peaceful year of 1939, there were 93 peers per 100 thirty-five-year-old Soviet women.
And in Germany, according to Urlanis, in 1950, for every 100 women of the “knocked out” generation (born 1920-1924), there were 71 men. That is, taking into account the traditional difference in natural male mortality among Germans and Russians, it should be recognized that the proportion of those killed at the front in the USSR and in Germany is approximately the same.

The proportionality of front-line losses is confirmed by the similarity in the post-war proportions of widows: USSR - 19.0%, East Germany - 18.6%, Austria - 18.5%, Germany - 17.7% (“World population”; of the total number of adult women) . These figures, as well as a careful analysis of the Müller-Hillebrand balance sheet, suggest that German military statistics are “varnished” on approximately the same scale as the official conclusions of the Russian General Staff. But the research of the German historian Overmans, who counted 5.3 million fallen Wehrmacht soldiers, looks quite reliable.

It should be concluded that the army losses of the USSR and the Reich are approximately proportional to the conscription contingents of these countries, i.e. are unlikely to differ by more than a factor of two.

How many inhabitants of the USSR died in the Great Patriotic War?

Stalin announced the figure of 7 million people in 1946. Where did Stalin get this figure from? From the ceiling. In the second half of 1945 and early 1946, a commission under the leadership of the Chairman of the State Planning Committee, Voznesensky, worked in the USSR on the instructions of the Politburo, which in its report named the figure - 15.4 million dead. Stalin did not dare voice it to the people. And he named the number 7 million.

How many actually died? The Voznesensky commission was no fool and they named an almost exact figure. Stalin did not play fools. But a more accurate figure was given by the legendary Zemskov in the early 90s. The same one who named the exact number of those repressed during the reign of Stalin. And no one can refute this number of repressed people.

The irretrievable losses of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War amounted to 16 million people. Zemskov named this figure in the early 90s; his data came as a shock to Yeltsin and the company, who expected a much higher number of deaths, so Zemskov’s data is carefully hidden to this day. Where are 11.5 million military personnel, both killed at the front, missing in action, and those who died in captivity, in hospitals from wounds, and 4.5 million civilians. At the same time, 15.8 million died, and 200 thousand military personnel, mostly traitors, remained to live after the war in the West.

But what about the figure of 20 million, announced in the 60s first by Khrushchev and then by Brezhnev? There is no exact information, as they thought. It is only known that the 20 million includes not only those killed, but also those who died as a result of excess mortality during the Second World War of 1941-45. It is possible that they took into account 15.4 million of the Voznesensky commission and the rounded figure of excess mortality during the Second World War - 4.6 million. It is possible that they considered it a balance path.

And the figure of 26.6 million, named in 1990? I will dwell on it in detail and give a full analysis of where it came from and whether it is honest. I advise you to read to the end. Interesting information.

On May 8, 1990, at a ceremonial meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, new figures for human losses of the Soviet Union during the Second World War of 1941-45 were announced. From now on, human losses during the most difficult war in the history of our country began to equal 26.6 million people. Before this, the official figure for human losses of the USSR during the Second World War of 1941-45 was considered to be more than 20 million, announced by Brezhnev in 1965.

Moreover, 26.6 million is not the number of deaths, as most believe, but the number of deaths, plus the number of deaths during the war as a result of excess mortality, since during the war the living conditions were inhumane, especially in the territory occupied by the Nazis.

And now where did the figure 26.6 million come from?

The population of the USSR as of June 22, 1941, including all territories annexed in 1939 and 1940, was 196.7 million people.

The population of the USSR within the borders of 1941 as of December 31, 1945 was 170.5 million people. Of these, those born before June 22, 1941 - 159.5 million. That is, the total loss was 196.7-159.5 = 37.2 million people.

Moreover, if there had been no war, then 11.9 million people would still have died in the USSR from June 22, 1941 to December 31, 1945, based on the pre-war mortality rate of 1940. At the same time, 1.3 million babies born during the war died from increased infant mortality during the war. They must be subtracted from the figure 11.9 or added to the figure 37.2 million. Doesn't matter. Subtract 11.9-1.3=10.6

And one last thing. From the figure 37.2 we subtract 10.6 million, we get 26.6 million. These are the demographic losses of the USSR during the Second World War of 1941-45 according to Gorbachev’s commission.

See the table above.

Are these calculations correct, are they honest, or did Gorbachev and his entourage lie, deliberately increasing the losses of the USSR in order to denigrate Soviet power?

Alas, everything is calculated correctly. What evidence? They took the 1939 census data, added the number of territories that were annexed to the USSR from 1939 to 1941, added the registry office data, plus, in order to check the registry office data, derived the arithmetic average of population growth by 06/22/1941 and received a figure of 196.7 million. Then they took the 1959 census data, subtracted the registry office data from them, plus calculated the average population growth from January 1, 1946 to 1959, and got 170.5 million. 159.5 million were received by subtracting the number of children born and surviving during the war, 11 million from the number of 170.5 million.

Where did they get 11.9 million of those who would have died during the Second World War? From a secret note from the head of the Central Statistical Office Starovsky dated September 13, 1952 addressed to Beria, as well as a similar note from the same Starovsky dated March 1953 to the Politburo, in which he compares the pre-war data of 1940, births and deaths with the figures of 1951 and 1952 respectively. From these notes it is clear that in 1940, 3.535 million people died in the USSR. Of these, 1.147 million are children under one year of age. Yes, infant mortality has gone through the roof. Although it decreased by 1.5 times compared to 1913.

That is, 2.388 million people died without children under one year old in 1940. Let's multiply this figure by 4.5 years of war. We get 10.746 million. Now let’s add to this number 1.147 million children under one year of age, who would have died anyway during the war, based on the pre-war birth rate. Since during the Second World War the birth rate dropped significantly. 10.746+1.147=11.893 million. That is, the same 11.9 million that are in the commission’s report.

That is, everything is correct. Why did Khrushchev and then Brezhnev talk about demographic losses of 20 million? Data that were made public in Stravinsky's notes during perestroika. Before that, they were kept classified as "Secret". And as the famous historian Zemskov, who himself was mistaken, writes, it was previously believed that 4.2 million died in 1940. In addition, children who died before 1 year of age were not subtracted from this number. 4.2*4.5=18.9 million. 7 million more than in the commission's report. 26.6-7=19.6 million. Q.E.D.

I’ll be honest, when I got to the bottom of everything, because Gorbachev’s commission did not give any explanations, I double-checked everything myself, I was shocked. I used to think that the figure of 26.6 million was greatly overestimated. But that is not all.

Are the numbers 20 million and 26.6 million fair? No. For they take into account both irreparable losses and indirect ones - excess mortality, as well as those who did not return to the USSR after the Second World War and remained to live in the West, and this is 450,000 people, mainly from among the collaborators and members of their families. All other countries give only irretrievable losses. And these figures are presented to the population of Russia as irreparable losses; they rarely write that they take into account indirect losses, that these are the total human losses of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. It’s good that they don’t take into account the drop in the birth rate, otherwise the figure would have increased by another 7-8 million.

The figure of 42.7 million casualties, which was recently announced, is not even serious to discuss. There's one lie there. Moreover, it begins with the fact that to the population of the USSR - 196.7 million, the number of the Red Army is added to more than 5 million people, allegedly, the number of the Red Army was not included in the number of the USSR, which means that the total number of the USSR was more than 202 million people. Such a statement is the height of insanity. It is absurd to analyze insanity.

PS. Are Zemskov's data accurate? In principle, there are no questions regarding the figure of 11.5 million dead, those who died from wounds and those in captivity.

In total, during the Second World War, 34.5 million military personnel served in the Red Army. Of these, 3.8 million were discharged from the army due to injury or illness; transferred for work in industry, local air defense and paramilitary security units - 3.6 million; aimed at staffing the troops and bodies of the NKVD, special forces of other departments - 1.2 million; convicts, deserters, unreliables, transferred to the Allied army - 1 million; returned from German captivity - 1.8 million; on July 1, 1945, 11.4 million remained on the list in the Armed Forces; in military formations of other departments that were on the payroll of the People's Commissariat of Defense - 0.4 million; were treated in hospitals - a little more than 1 million. We calculate all these figures from 34.5 million and get the number of military personnel killed. The balance is 10.3 million. Plus 0.5 million who were drafted into the Red Army, but did not make it to the unit or were not registered, but died. There were especially many of these in 1941. Plus, those who were called up again from among those released from captivity, as well as from among those previously discharged due to injury, which the leadership of the Red Army was forced to do in 1944, there were not enough soldiers, human resources were coming to an end. to Plus, Zemskov has a number of amendments to the figures above. That is, its 11.5 million is quite logical.

Krivosheev’s data is greatly underestimated: 8,668,400 people (6,818,300 soldiers died in battles, hospitals and other incidents, and 1,850,100 people did not return from captivity). But only according to the data of the fascists, we take into account German punctuality, as of May 1944, more than 3 million Soviet prisoners of war died in captivity, then the fascists did not keep records, just as they did not keep records of their dead soldiers and officers, they had no time for that, which means that prisoners substantially more than three million died. There was no point in lying to the fascists. The decrease in the total number of dead military personnel occurred due to the fact that Krivosheev significantly underestimated the data on the number of our prisoners of war, by 1.2 million, at least 3.4 million were indicated instead of 4.6 million according to the Ministry of Defense, and according to Hitler’s statistics there were at least 5.2 million prisoners . Krivosheev’s data on the number of military personnel killed has been reduced. Criticism of his calculation methods and indications of his mistakes are easy to find on the Internet. In addition, Krivosheev significantly overestimates the number of people killed in forced labor in Germany; according to his data, there are 2,164,300 people. The number of dead prisoners was 1,850,100, and those who were fed much better and who lived in better conditions were 2.1 million. Absurd. According to Zemskov’s calculations, 0.2 million died in forced labor in Germany, while he played it safe by doubling the data kept by the Nazis. The Germans kept accurate statistics here too. Zemskov provides the following data on the number of dead “ostarbeiters” for individual months: 1943: October - 1268, November - 945, December - 899; for 1944: January - 979, February - 1631 people. From these figures it is obvious that Krivosheev’s data regarding those killed during forced labor in Germany are overestimated by 2 million. That is, Krivosheev significantly underestimated the number of irretrievable losses of military personnel, and significantly increased the number of civilian deaths.

But more civilian Soviet population died than indicated by Zemskov. And the most accurate data was provided by the Extraordinary State Commission to establish and investigate the atrocities of the Nazi invaders and their accomplices and the damage they caused to citizens, collective farms, public organizations, state enterprises and institutions of the USSR (ChGK). Which was created by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR dated November 2, 1942. The resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated March 16, 1943 ordered the creation of local republican, regional and regional commissions to assist in the work of the ChGK. In total, 25 republican, 4 regional, and 76 regional commissions were created. Commissions were created at the union and republican people's commissariats, city, district, rural, collective farm commissions, at public organizations, at each enterprise and institution that suffered from the invaders, as well as in city house administrations to determine the damage suffered by individual citizens. The ChGK reviewed and studied 54 thousand acts and over 250 thousand protocols of interviews with witnesses and statements about the crimes of the occupiers. According to these documents, on the territory of the Soviet Union alone, the Nazis killed and tortured millions of civilian Soviet citizens and prisoners of war during the occupation. The commission reviewed about 4 million reports of damage caused by the German invaders, which amounted to 679 billion rubles (direct damage only). Based on investigation materials, the ChGK compiled a list of leaders and direct perpetrators of the crimes of the German invaders, as well as persons who exploited Soviet citizens. The acts and messages of the ChGK became one of the most important evidence for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials.

In total, the ChGK counted 6.8 million victims of fascism. Until the end of the 1960s, this figure was strictly classified and was first published in 1969 in an article by the former chief prosecutor from the USSR at the Nuremberg trials, R.A. Rudenko. It is also given in the 10th volume of “History of the USSR from Ancient Times to the Present Day,” published in 1973.

At the same time, the ChGK, which continued to work after the Second World War, took into account virtually all the dead civilians; there cannot be more than 6.8 million. Moreover, many historians believe that this figure is somewhat overestimated. Since the same people in different regions were counted several times. The same Zemskov doubted it, so he reduced it, after making his own calculations, to 4.5 million. But most historians agree that the figure of 6 million most accurately reflects the number of civilian deaths.

So what's the result? 11.5+6=17.5 million - irretrievable losses of the USSR. From 26.6 we calculate 17.5 million, we get 9.1 million. From this number we calculate those who remained to live in the west, both military and civilian. Zemskov believed that 200,000 people remained, but this is clearly an underestimated figure. According to Western and Soviet historians, 450 thousand remained in the West. Mainly collaborators (mostly from Western Ukraine and the Baltic states), members of their families, as well as prisoners of war and civilians kidnapped from the USSR. Subtract 400,000 from 9.1 million (rounded) and get 8.7 million. This number, 8.7 million, is excess mortality during the Second World War of 1941-45, including in the occupied territory. A lot of? Let's compare with the mid-90s. The excess mortality rate in this period, compared to the 80s, amounted to 2.4 million over 4 years. At the same time, the population was 50 million less. With a population of more than 190 million, it would be 3.2 million. At the beginning of the 0s, the excess mortality rate over 4 years was even higher - 3.1 million. With a population of more than 190 million - 4 million. And this is in peacetime. When there was no war. When the people did not experience even a small fraction of what they experienced and went through in the period 1941-45. That is, the figure for excess mortality during the Second World War - 8.7 million - is quite true.

Eternal memory to those who fell in battle and died from unbearable living conditions during the years
Great Patriotic War...