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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
Expensive American Hose: Did Lend-Lease Save the Soviet Union?
2025-05-19
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mikhail Kucherov

[REGNUM] Donald Trump has once again stated that the honor of victory in World War II belongs exclusively to the United States. This includes the implication that without American Lend-Lease supplies, the USSR and its allies would not have defeated Hitler. But was this aid a decisive or significant factor in the defeat of Nazism?

"In Russia they celebrated (the 80th anniversary of the Victory), in France they celebrated, except for us. We didn't celebrate. But we won this war," the US President said. The same thesis in a more moderate version (which was voiced , among others, by the same Trump) sounds like this: before the opening of the second front in Europe, the Americans helped Britain, and then the Soviet Union, with Lend-Lease equipment, shells and food. And that means that this help predetermined the victory.

A quote attributed to Joseph Stalin has been circulating on social networks and even in press publications : “Without these (American) machines, we would not have won the war.” In fact, this is a distorted fragment of the book “Through His Eyes” – a blitz memoir by Franklin Roosevelt’s son, Elliot, who accompanied his father to international conferences.

According to Roosevelt Jr., "on the sidelines" of Tehran in 1943, Stalin said in the presence of Roosevelt and Winston Churchill : "The main thing in this war is machines. The United States has proven that it can produce 8,000 to 10,000 planes a month. Therefore, the United States is a country of machines. These machines, received under Lend-Lease, are helping us win the war."

Roosevelt responded by "praising the mighty Red Army, which is using this technique and, while we are here dining, is stubbornly pushing back the Nazi hordes."

There is nothing similar to this dialogue in Soviet sources from the 1940s and 1950s. But note that the book "Through His Eyes" was translated and published in Moscow in 1947. This means that there was no objection to this interpretation of Lend-Lease in the USSR.

Today, the debate about the criticality of Lend-Lease deliveries continues unabated, and is exacerbated by Trump's boasts. But to appreciate the significance of American aid, we must understand how it was organized.

WHAT IS LEND-LEASE
The term "lend-lease" itselfThis is a tracing of two English words: to lend — to lend and to lease — to rent out, to lease. Hence the modern business term "leasing".

In part, Lend-Lease was similar to this type of long-term lease, when a leasing company buys, say, a truck from a car dealership, and hands the car over to a grocery store owner for a certain period of time. The owner uses the truck, makes payments to the "lessor," and at the end of the contract either buys the car or refuses it.

Only in this case, the role of the car dealer was played by the American military-industrial complex and other big US businesses, the role of the leasing company was played by the Roosevelt administration, and the role of the clients was played by the British Empire, the Republic of China , the Soviet Union, and then Australia, New Zealand, and Charles de Gaulle's "Fighting France".

Another catchy metaphor for Lend-Lease was coined by Roosevelt himself. If your neighbor's house is on fire and you have a garden hose, you lend it to your neighbor before your own house catches on fire. Once the fire is out, your neighbor will either return the hose or, if it breaks, pay for it.

The legal basis for Lend-Lease was the " Defense of the United States Act " passed by Congress on March 11, 1941 (that is, almost 9 months before the United States entered World War II). It allowed the president to transfer military and civilian equipment, ammunition, food, medicine and medical equipment, petroleum products and other raw materials to any country whose defense was "vital" to the national security of the United States.

The law prescribed the Lend-Lease scheme. The US provides a long-term loan to an ally country (usually an interest-free loan). Then the "fire hose" is transferred: equipment, machinery, etc. Purchases are made at the expense of the US Treasury.

After the end of military operations, the property delivered under Lend-Lease, which was not lost and remained suitable for civilian purposes, is paid for in full or in part from the provided credit. Or it is returned in kind. And then the ally returns the loan itself.

HOW THE SCHEME WORKED AND HOW THE USSR WAS CONNECTED TO IT
The United States had been transferring goods to Britain and China to defend against the Germans and Japanese since 1940, even before the Lend-Lease program began. But these were cash-and-carry deliveries. Each of the Roosevelt administration's deals had to be manually carried through Congress, overcoming the resistance of isolationists who called for maximum distancing from a new world war in Europe, East Asia, and the Pacific.

When Roosevelt ran for a third term in 1940, he promised: "Our boys will not be sent to fight any foreign wars." But at the same time, the US president was determined to support Britain. Especially since Churchill pleaded: "Give us the tools, and we will finish the job." But in November 1940, London notified its ambassador : "Britain is broke" financially, and only supplies on credit can save it.

Roosevelt handed over the Lend-Lease Declaration to Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek in December 1940, but it was only in March that the corresponding law was pushed through Congress.

On March 27, 1941, Congress approved $7 billion (152 billion today's dollars) for the Lend-Lease program.

At the end of October 1941, at the most difficult moment of the Battle of Moscow, the program was extended to the USSR. Our country was granted an interest-free loan of 1 billion dollars (21.7 billion in today's equivalent). It is curious that the program was launched on November 7, 1941, the day of the historic parade on Red Square.

Historians ask: why was the Soviet Union not included in the Lend-Lease program immediately after June 22? The most plausible answer is political. One of the obstacles is considered to be the inclusion of the Baltic republics in the USSR in 1940, which the USA did not recognize.

However, the Roosevelt administration had been secretly negotiating with Moscow since the summer of 1941. Roosevelt's special envoy Harry Hopkins, who spoke with Stalin, wrote that the Soviet leader had already been working out the logistics of future shipments in July:

"He told me... that it was difficult to enter Arkhangelsk, but still possible. He was sure that his icebreakers could keep the port free all winter. Vladivostok was dangerous, he said, because it could be cut off by Japan at any time, and the railways and roads in Persia were inadequate. Nevertheless, all these routes had to be used."

After the USSR was included in the Lend-Lease program, Washington was informed that Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek were unhappy that the US had divided the supply flow not between two, but between three, including Stalin.

But for some time all clients were left without what was promised.

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. Due to the urgent rearmament of the army, supplies abroad slowed down (for their resumption, Roosevelt's order was needed not to break the commitments). But soon the American military-industrial complex, the auto industry, and "big chemistry" began to work with renewed vigor. And their owners could be pleased with the fact that the goods were going not only to the US army, but also to the allies.

As a result of World War II, Britain received $31.4 billion (683 billion in 2025 prices) in Lend-Lease aid, the Soviet Union received $11.3 (245) billion, France received $3.2 (about 70) billion, and China received $1.6 (less than 35) billion.

FOUR WAYS
Lend-lease in the USSR went along four routes: the Pacific, the Arctic, through Iran, which had been occupied by Soviet and British troops since August 1941, and through the Black Sea. The first three routes accounted for more than 90% of deliveries.

The shortest, but most dangerous, was the Arctic route – across the North Atlantic and further into the Soviet Arctic.

Here the convoys were under constant threat from the German Air Force and Navy based in Norway. The most famous loss was the American-British-Soviet convoy PQ-17 (June–July 1942), of which 22 of 35 ships were sunk. The blame for the incident is placed on First Lord of the Admiralty Dudley Pound , who ordered "Convoy scatter!" leaving the transport ships unescorted.

The Iranian route was the longest and safest. The journey from the US to Iranian ports alone took 75 days. There were frequent cases when ships waited in Iranian ports for unloading for more than 30 days, and equipment arrived in Soviet Transcaucasia with sand in its engines. Unlike the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Persian Corridor was almost unhindered, with the exception of raids by local bandits, for defense against whom the crews were issued Thompson submachine guns.

The most spectacular delivery method was the “Alsib” – the “Alaska-Siberia” air route, along which American planes were ferried from the city of Nome, Alaska, to Krasnoyarsk.

IT LOOKED SMOOTH ON PAPER
Of the 15.7 million tons of cargo that arrived in the USSR during the entire war, 11 million tons, or 70.7% of deliveries, fell in 1943–1945. Before that, things had been going neither here nor there, not only because of force majeure in the form of the threat of Luftwaffe raids and German submarines, but also because of the fault of the suppliers themselves.

In early 1942, the head of the Soviet military mission to the United States, Alexander Repin, visited the White House and handed Roosevelt a list of complaints. In addition to the long shipping times, Moscow complained about the poor quality of equipment and the carelessness of personnel:

"The crews of the transport ships are assembled indiscriminately and several days before departure... The amount of ammunition sent along with the weapons is so insignificant that soon most of the tanks and aircraft will be inoperative... There is an acute shortage of spare parts for US-made aircraft, and 30% of the machines delivered are inoperative."

For his work in securing supplies, Repin was awarded the American rank of Commander of the Legion of Honor. At the close of the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt presented this award to Stalin.

"COBRA" WITH A TELEPHONE AND "MASS GRAVE - 7"
Opinions about the quality of military equipment arriving in the USSR varied.

For example, the American fighter P-39 "Airacobra", of which 4500 units were delivered to the USSR, had a good radio that worked as a "city telephone" and great firepower: the ability to simultaneously shoot bullets and shells, from which the German "Junkers" literally fell apart. Soviet ace Alexander Pokryshkin flew such a machine, who came up with the idea of ​​using this "mixed" combination in combat.

Despite a serious drawback - the engine was located at the rear, which made it easy for the aircraft to go into a flat spin - in the hands of a professional pilot it turned into a formidable weapon. True, the Airacobras were supplied to the Soviet Union due to the lack of demand in other theaters of military operations, where air battles took place at high altitudes: this model operated at medium and low altitudes.

Reviews of the tanks were less flattering. The M3 "Li" looked like a prototype of a fantasy robot: it was three meters high, had two guns and a crew of seven. Despite a good acceleration of up to 40 kilometers per hour, to fire the main gun, it was necessary to turn the tank itself: our tankers nicknamed it BM-7 "a mass grave for seven."

The Allied tanks, beautifully lined with leather and equipped with radios, were not winter-ready. The Valentine's tracks did not grip the ground well enough: if one roller was damaged, the armored vehicle was immobilized. Some American vehicles, including the Shermans, even lay on their bellies in the snow.

Many Soviet tank crews were afraid to receive Western tanks, preferring their native T-34. Churchill also highly praised the characteristics of this legendary machine:

"There were three great weapons in World War II: the English linear gun, the German Messerschmitt aircraft and the Soviet T-34 tank. However, if in the first two cases I know who did it and how, then I absolutely do not understand how such a miracle tank appeared!"

ROOSEVELT EGGS AND AGED BREAD
Strictly speaking, we should be talking about the allied Lend-Lease, not the American one. In addition to the USA, the USSR's suppliers were Great Britain and its dominion Canada. But the United States accounted for 94% of the total volume of deliveries.

More importantly, how did the allied aid compare with what the Soviet Union itself produced in the factories and plants evacuated deep into the country?

From 1941 to 1945, the USSR received 5,218 tanks from Great Britain and 7,500 from the United States. In total, 110,000 tanks were produced in our country at that time. That is, the share of allied vehicles did not exceed 12%, which does not allow us to talk about their decisive role in defeating the Nazis on the Eastern Front.

The ratio for aircraft was approximately the same: those supplied by the Allies accounted for 15.5% of those manufactured in the Soviet Union.

One of the symbols of the American Lend-Lease was the "commander's Willys" - the Willys MB army vehicle with increased cross-country ability. In total, in 1941-45, our country received 400 thousand passenger cars and trucks. This is significant, but the share of Western vehicles in the Red Army's "automobile fleet" did not exceed 32.8%, the rest was provided by our auto industry.

Under Lend-Lease, the USSR received about 1,900 steam locomotives. The aid was very timely, because due to enemy bombing and shelling, the number of locomotives, so necessary for the front and rear, decreased from 27.9 thousand in 1941 to 23 thousand in 1943. On the other hand, Lend-Lease steam locomotives made up less than 8% of the total number running on our railways.

Much less noticeable was the weapons aid. Guns of various calibers sent to the Soviet Union made up 1.26% of the total, and for machine guns this figure was even lower - only 0.1%.

At the same time, historians call toluene, from which trinitrotoluene (TNT) was prepared: an explosive material for shells and mines, a truly important component for the fight against the invaders. The USSR lacked oil, the main raw material for the production of this component.

Thank you for the help with food, especially considering that in 1941 the Nazis captured territories where up to 40% of the grain in the USSR was grown. In 1941-45, about 5 million tons of food were transported under Lend-Lease. True, more than half of these deliveries - 2.76 million tons - did not occur during the most difficult period of the beginning of the war, but in 1942-44.

The symbols of American aid were "Roosevelt eggs" - American egg powder and canned stew. In addition, the Soviet soldiers were provided with frozen allied beef and pork, canned goods, sausages and bacon, butter and vegetable oil, and cheese. Infantryman Vasily Lobachev also recalled more exotic products:

"Once we received, through Lend-Lease, bread baked in 1936 in special packages. And imagine, it was delicious! It was also given in dry rations."

WE HELP BY MAKING A PROFIT
The Lend-Lease program was essentially curtailed in May 1945 after Germany's capitulation and was completely terminated in September when Japan surrendered.

As has already been said above, Lend-Lease is not charity. In 1947, the Harry Truman administration presented the USSR with a bill for 2.7 (35.5 in today's prices) billion dollars for the undamaged Lend-Lease property that remained at our disposal by 1945. Moscow considered the assessment to be too high, and negotiations that dragged on until 1949 led to nothing.

The fact that the United States has reduced the amount of debt several times (and this is taking into account the inflation of the dollar!) indicates that they do not have a clear methodology for calculating it.
Or that they despaired of collecting the original and even revised amounts, and so presented numbers they hoped they might actually get.
In 1972, the administration of "Tricky Dick" Richard Nixon , against the backdrop of détente, agreed with Moscow that we would pay $722 million in installments (until 2001), but with interest. A year later, the USSR made the first payment of $48 million, and then the Americans themselves ruined everything. In 1974, Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik sanctions amendment, which not only complicated trade between the USSR and the USA, but also the credit relations between the two countries.

The negotiations were put on hold until 1990, and a year later, when the USSR collapsed, Russia, as the legal successor, took on the Lend-Lease debts.

The country, which paid in blood for the freedom of the planet from Nazism, paid off its debts only in 2006, although it received almost three times less cargo from Washington during the war than London.

On the other hand, American business clearly did not lose out during the years of World War II, both from military orders and from Lend-Lease exports.

Wages in the country increased by 44%. General Motors, which produced tanks, aircraft engines and the famous Studebaker trucks, increased its sales from $1.1 billion to $3.1 billion from 1938 to 1945. Douglas Aircraft achieved even more impressive figures, increasing its sales from $28 billion to $987 billion in 1941-1945.

To sum up, we can formulate a remote response to Trump: Russia is grateful to the United States for the timely deal concluded in 1941, which helped our country shoulder the main burden of fighting the common enemy. The importance of Lend-Lease supplies should not be underestimated. But they should be treated objectively: as a project that helped some to establish industry and earn money, and others to bring the long-awaited Victory closer.

Link


Britain
'The Russians Are Coming!' Why Britain Killed Thousands of Soviet POWs
2025-05-12
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mark Leshkevich
Because it was a nasty, ugly war and soldiers are not emotionless automatons?
[REGNUM] Five days before the capitulation of the Third Reich, on May 3, 1945, British Royal Air Force aircraft attacked and sank three German ships carrying prisoners from Nazi concentration camps in the Bay of Lübeck: the ocean liner Cap Arcona, the cargo ship Thielbek, and the ship Deutschland. The scale of the tragedy has only become clear now.

According to recently declassified FSB documents, the British airstrike killed between 7,000 and 12,000 people. Most of them were Soviet prisoners of war.

These ships were used to "evacuate" prisoners ordered by the SS from Germany to Nazi-controlled Norway in the final days of the war. Despite the Allied command being informed of the prisoners on board, the attack was carried out anyway.

"THEY ACTED LIKE FASCISTS"
The FSB archive contains a letter that Vasily Salomatkin, a former prisoner of the Neuengamme concentration camp who miraculously survived the raid on Cap Arcona, sent to the Office of the USSR Council of Ministers Commissioner for the Repatriation of Soviet Citizens. It states, among other things:

"The prisoners who were on the deck took off their undershirts (they were white) and began waving them, making a sign to the English pilots that the ship was surrendering, accepting capitulation, but the English pilots, like the fascist pilots... continued to bomb the ships. The bombing took place at a very low altitude. The English pilots saw all the horrors of their bombing and continued to do it even more, not paying attention to any pleas from the people."

After the second bomb hit the deck of the liner Cap Arcona, Salomatkin "threw himself into the water along with other Russian prisoners." Not far from the site of the Cap Arcona's sinking, English torpedo boats appeared, having left Lübeck, which was occupied by the British.

"When we saw them, we rushed to swim towards them, thinking that they would pick us up and save us. It turned out to be the opposite. The soldiers on the boats stood and shot the floating prisoners with machine guns."

Salomatkin was washed ashore by the tide and woke up in a hospital set up by the British. There he learned that "out of 12,000 prisoners, only three hundred were saved."

And after leaving the hospital, the recent prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp was convinced: German prisoners of war feel at ease under British occupation power. They walk the streets of Lübeck, attack "Untermenschen" and even threaten them with reprisals. According to a survivor of "Cap Arcona", the English commandant of the city ignored the complaints of the Russians.

Red Army Lieutenant Vasily Filippovich Salomatkin was lucky - already in 1945 he returned from the British occupation zone to his homeland, passed the SMERSH counterintelligence check without any problems, and was discharged into the reserve in October 1945. After the war and until his retirement, this holder of the Order of the Red Star and the Order of the Patriotic War worked as a teacher in his native Krasnoslobodsk (now the Republic of Mordovia).

The USSR MGB considered Salomatkin's testimony credible. The report that the special service sent to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September 1949 noted that the words of this former concentration camp prisoner were confirmed by several other eyewitnesses.

“Thus, the witness V.D. Kozulya, a former commander of the Soviet Army aviation detachment, who was interrogated on September 15 of this year, testified: “On May 3, 1945, at approximately one o’clock in the afternoon, I and other prisoners who were in the Cap Arcona cabin saw three Hawker Hurricane aircraft approaching our ship and then dropping bombs on it.”

Interrogated on September 14, 1949, “witness Strandberg E. N. testified: “English planes flew over the ship at low altitude several times and shot at people on the upper deck with machine guns. The Tilbek soon sank.”

Soviet authorities recorded the testimonies of 14 survivors who confirmed the mass extermination. The MGB stated that the attack was carried out on unarmed people, and that the survivors were subjected to violence after the tragedy.

A tragic mistake – this is how British historians interpret the sinking of three non-military ships in May 1945. They say that at the time of the storming of Lübeck, the Royal Air Force could not allow ships on which Nazis might have fled to pass through the Baltic. But, logically, the British should have known who exactly was being transported on the Cap Arcona, Thielbek and Deutschland.

CONCENTRATION CAMP ON A SHIP
With the beginning of spring 1945, when the prisoners of the remaining concentration camps were about to be liberated, the Nazis began to herd prisoners on death marches in a futile attempt to evade the advancing Red Army and Allied forces. This was also the case in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, home to the cities of Flensburg (the seat of the last Nazi government led by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz ) and the port city of Lübeck. Prisoners from the Hamburg concentration camp Neuengamme, where Vasily Salomatkin was a prisoner, were also herded here.

But since the Lübeck Gauleiter and the local SS leadership panicked, many of the SS "personnel" of the remaining camps and prisoners were "evacuated" closer to May 1945.

Neuengamme was the largest concentration camp in northwest Germany.
All these manipulations were known to the British advancing on Lübeck - both aerial reconnaissance and information from the ground helped.

Intelligence on May 2 saw that the ships were not heading for Norway, as was later claimed to justify the attack. The ships were stationary, not moving, and were not under steam.

Information about the prisoners was passed on May 2 to Major General George Roberts, commander of the 11th Armoured Division advancing in the Lübeck area, according to a report compiled in June 1945 by Major Noel Till. It also states that for unknown reasons the information was not passed on to other units of the British Army advancing there and aimed at capturing Lübeck and other centres as quickly as possible. Roberts also failed to inform the Air Force command.

The British had the opportunity to prevent the attack on the Cap Arcona by taking into account at least three reports provided by the Red Cross. But they did not do so.

Meanwhile, the ships had left the shore. The Cap Arcona, which had received the most prisoners, was overcrowded: initially planned to accommodate about 2,200 people, but in the end the number of prisoners exceeded 8,000. This led to unbearable overcrowding and lack of space. The conditions on board were unbearable.

Surviving prisoner Shmuel Pivnik (after the war, the renowned British Holocaust researcher Sam Pivnik) called the ship a "floating hell." Prisoners were locked in cramped quarters, and the bodies of the dead were thrown overboard, where they floated in the water like garbage. Food on the ship was given out extremely irregularly, sometimes without anything.

The prisoners were placed on the ship according to racial theory - people of Western European descent received better conditions, while Russians and Jews found themselves in the lower holds without light, air or water. In fact, the structure of the Neuengamme camp was transferred to the ship, including the organization of life, supervision and abuse. But the prisoners did not know that a real "hell on water" awaited them ahead.

On the morning of May 3, Dr. Hans Arnoldsson of the Swedish Red Cross informed the British command about the prisoners on the ships. Later, the officers promised to "take action" - but the bombardment had already begun.

POLITICAL REASONS
The main question remains: why did the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy attack ships – albeit German, but obviously not military? There was a version that the SS officers who led the “evacuation” planned to sink the “Cap Arcona”, “Tielbek” and “Deutschland” with all the prisoners. This was stated, in particular, during interrogation by Georg von Bassewitz-Behr, the last head of the SS and police in Hamburg. But then the British should have stopped this atrocity, and not committed it “for the Nazis”.

Part of the explanation can be found in the testimony of Vasily Salomatkin: he reported that by the time the German garrison of Lubeck capitulated, the ships were 6 km from the city of Neustadt. At that moment, the British demanded that the ships' crews surrender.

"The SS command of the ships rejected the capitulation. Then the English air force took off in large numbers and began bombing the ships we were on," explained Salomatkin.

But in any case, the question arises: why did the British sink ships on which the vast majority were not SS men, but concentration camp prisoners? Why were the unfortunates shot from boats?

The most logical version seems to be that in the chaos and haste during the capture of Lubeck, the Air Force and Navy, as well as some part of the ground force, were “forgotten to convey” intelligence and Red Cross information. And the haste, confusion and fuss were caused by purely political reasons and a phobia called “the Russians are coming!”

The agreements between Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, reached in Yalta, implied, among other things, the division of Germany into occupation zones. But the Allies, until the last moment, tried to draw the borders of their zones and the Soviet one in their own way, fearing our attack on the West.

At meetings with the member of the House of Commons, future Prime Minister Anthony Eden, regarding the creation of these zones, Churchill emphasized that “our arrival in Lübeck before our Russian friends from Stettin (arrive) will save us from many disputes later.”

The Western Allies emphasized the urgent need to reach Lübeck before Soviet soldiers could occupy Denmark (especially since our troops actually landed on the Danish island of Bornholm on May 9). The primary need to reach the Baltic coast and stop a hypothetical Soviet advance to the West led to panic in the top leadership of England. And this panic was transmitted "through the chain of command," right up to General Roberts.

Then the case began to be hushed up - the British military command's report from 1946 did not make any strict conclusions. The investigation was conducted in a hurry, without involving the testimony of surviving prisoners.

Link


Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
'Czechoslovakia is destined for the Red Army.' How the Red Army took Prague and Vlasov
2025-05-07
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mikhail Kucherov

[REGNUM] On the night of May 5-6, 1945, news arrived in Prague, the former capital of the Czechoslovak Republic and now the center of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, that the Red Army had taken Berlin. On the morning of May 6, the head of the Protectorate government, the Czech Richard Bienert (who until then had been only a puppet of the Reich Minister for Bohemian-Moravian Affairs, Karl Frank ) appeared on Prague radio and announced the liquidation of German power. The Prime Minister called for a general uprising, and he ordered the German group in the city to capitulate.

Belated courage did not help Mr. Binert - in the reborn Czechoslovakia he was convicted of collaborationism. The armed disobedience he had declared retroactively on May 6 had long since become an accomplished fact. Since the beginning of the month, the rebels in Prague had been fighting the Germans throughout the city.

That one of the last bastions of the Reich would soon fall was obvious to everyone since the beginning of spring 1945.

There was only one intrigue left: who would be the first to enter Prague – our troops under the overall command of Marshal Ivan Konev or the Americans from the army of General George Patton, who were less than fifty kilometers from the city. The rebel radio was broadcasting: “Build barricades! We will fight! The allied armies are approaching! We must endure!”

On the night of May 6, the intrigue dissipated: it became clear which of the allies of the anti-Hitler coalition was breaking through to Prague. It was the Red Army.

"INTO THE HANDS OF THE FUHRER"
The war was reluctant to "leave" Prague, a city that had been under Nazi occupation for six months before the start of World War II. Historians argue about which European country should be considered Adolf Hitler's first victim : Austria, where the March Anschluss of 1938 was quick and almost painless, or Czechoslovakia, which was slowly torn apart piece by piece.

In any case, after the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938 (by which Germany, with the approval of Britain and France, took the Sudetenland from the Czechoslovak Republic), after Poland's invasion of the Tesin region and after the arbitration, by which Hungary occupied Transcarpathia and southern Slovakia, the remnants of Czechoslovakia had very little time to live. In March 1939, Slovak nationalists led by Father Jozef Tiso, on "urgent advice" from Berlin, proclaimed the independence of Slovakia, which became a satellite of the Reich. Then, in mid-March 1939, the Wehrmacht and the SS entered Prague.

Edvard Beneš, the president under whom the “only democratic republic in Eastern Europe” was betrayed by its Western allies, fled to London in November 1938. Beneš’ successor Emil Hácha on March 15, 1939 handed over “the fate of the Czechoslovak people and country into the hands of the Führer of the German Reich.” Hácha became the first nominal “president” of the Protectorate.

When, after the war, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was asked at the Nuremberg Trials whether Germany would have attacked Czechoslovakia if Prague had been supported by the Western powers, the military leader answered honestly: "Absolutely not. We were not strong enough from a military point of view. The aim of Munich was to push Russia out of Europe, gain time and complete the armament of Germany."

But in 1938, the West and Poland torpedoed the USSR's proposals for collective aid to Czechoslovakia. Hitler was able to gain time to prepare for war. And the mines, steel mills, and weapons factories of Bohemia and Moravia became a long-term support for the Reich. Suffice it to say that of the 1,366 German tanks sent to the Eastern Front in 1941, 360 were made in the Protectorate.

SAND IN THE POWDER FLASKS
For a long time, there was no talk of mass resistance to the occupiers. During the invasion, essentially the only one who stood up for the honor of the republic was Captain Karel Pavlik, the commander of a machine gun company in the town of Místek, who gave the order to shoot at the approaching Germans.

From 1940, there were separate resistance cells oriented toward the exiled London government of Beneš, and from 1941, there was an organized communist underground with access to Moscow. But the most famous episode of the anti-fascist struggle in 1939–1944 was an action prepared not by the Czechs themselves, but by British intelligence. This was Operation Anthropoid – the liquidation in Prague in June 1942 of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) and acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.

A lesser-known example of Czech underground work itself. In July 1941, defective grenade launcher rounds were delivered to the advancing Wehrmacht units in the Baltics. The mines were filled with sand instead of explosives. In one of these unexploded mines, the Red Army soldiers found a note left by a worker at a Czech arms factory: “We help as much as we can.” Surprising reports of ammunition continued to appear in 1942.

The national uprising in “independent” Slovakia in August–October 1944 was perhaps a negative example for the Czechs, as it was suppressed by the Germans and Tiso’s collaborators. But already in September 1944, during the “ ninth Stalinist strike” – the East Carpathian Operation – the Red Army crossed the pre-war eastern border of the Czechoslovak Republic.

The real catalyst for the “explosion” in occupied Czechia was the Moravian-Ostrava and Bratislava-Brno operations (both in March – early May 1945), as a result of which Soviet troops liberated most of the country.

But in Prague and around it, the 900,000-strong Army Group Center of Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner continued to hold the line.

"TO TAKE PRAGUE BEFORE THE RUSSIANS"
From the west, from Saxony and Bavaria, US troops were advancing. On April 22, 1945, Patton's 3rd Army entered Western Bohemia. According to Winston Churchill, the American allies under Dwight Eisenhower should have moved on to Prague. The commander-in-chief of the Allied ground forces in Europe, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, wrote in his memoirs:

"The main task after the defeat of Germany was to establish a balance of power in Europe acceptable to us and the Western nations... This meant that we had to take Vienna, Prague and Berlin before the Russians." But Vienna was liberated by the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts by April 15. Montgomery lamented that the Allies had then had to divert forces to an offensive in southern France.

On April 16, the 1st Belorussian Front under Georgy Zhukov began the Battle of Berlin. The Allies were again behind. When the Red Army crossed the Oder 50 km from Berlin, the Anglo-Americans were 500 km away, between the Rhine and the Elbe.

That left Prague. If the Allied High Command had given Patton the order, he would have reached the Czech capital in 24 hours, Montgomery confidently believed. But, he lamented, the US Third Army had stopped at the Pilsen-Ceske Budejovice line, “for reasons that are not entirely clear to me.”

Montgomery, citing American General Omar Bradley, spoke of some kind of agreement between the "Soviets" and the United States (led by Franklin Roosevelt until his sudden death in April 1945 ). The idea was that "Czechoslovakia was destined for the Red Army." Both Montgomery and Churchill considered this a "big mistake."

STICKS, IRONS AND CULTIVATOR
With the approach of the Red Army on May 1, 1945, the Czech National Council and the Communist Party began an uprising in the remaining occupied territory of the protectorate. The military leadership was taken over by the leader of one of the resistance cells, divisional general of the pre-war army Karel Kutlvášr, nicknamed the Cultivator. Incidentally, it is curious that his military career began during our Civil War - the Cultivator fought on the side of the Whites as part of the Czechoslovak Corps.

From May 5, the suddenly emerging mass resistance in Prague erected barricades, the rebels tore down swastika flags and hung national blue-white-red ones instead. In battles with German units, they used everything that came to hand - sticks, old sabres, hunting rifles. Women even threw irons on the Germans' heads and poured hot water on them. The rebels managed to seize the central telegraph office, bridges over the Vltava, the post office, armored trains, and even disarmed several German units.

The commander of Army Group North, Schörner, was furious - he ordered the uprising to be suppressed by any means necessary, bringing tanks into Prague. In order to prevent the destruction of the city by the Germans and to help the rebels, the Soviet command, at their request, accelerated the advance on the city.

"WE CELEBRATED THE VICTORY AND WENT TO PRAGUE"
On the night of May 6, units of three fronts, the 1st Ukrainian Ivan Konev, the 2nd Ukrainian Rodion Malinovsky and the 4th Ukrainian Andrey Eremenko, with a total of 400,000 people, hastily advanced to Prague. Together with them, the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps under the command of Ludvik Svoboda advanced against the Germans : it had been formed in the USSR three years earlier.

Our units were transferred to Prague from the Berlin direction - they had to cover more than 100 kilometers a day. Despite the columns of prisoners stretching along the roads, which eyewitnesses testify to, many German units were not ready to lay down their arms even after the signing of the capitulation in Karlshorst.

Sapper Nikolai Fedotov remembers well how joy and the need to remain vigilant when confronted with a treacherous enemy coexisted in those days: “On the night of the 8th, we were driving through the Ore Mountains, and the tanks’ radios reported the capitulation. We celebrated the victory in the mountains, and then we went out onto the highway and headed for Prague. The Germans also knew about the capitulation, they came out of the forest in groups and threw their weapons into the ditch. But some of the stubborn ones supposedly surrendered, but they let our men approach and shot them point-blank.”

On May 8 at 20:00, Soviet commanders asked Schörner to lay down his arms, but there was no response. The strategy of the Nazis, especially the elite SS battalions, was to escape to the West and surrender to the Americans before the Red Army arrived. The loss of Prague cut them off from their escape routes.

THE SMELL OF GUNPOWDER AND LILAC
On the night of May 9, Soviet troops entered the city. And while some of the underground leaders clearly sympathized with London and Washington, ordinary Praguers were sincerely happy about the arrival of our army. According to veterans, they were never met as joyfully as in Czechoslovakia - with fresh cold water, bread, joyful hugs and armfuls of lilacs, which were strewn on tanks.

"There were continuous demonstrations in the streets. When a Soviet officer appeared, he was immediately taken into friendly captivity, they began to hug, kiss, rock him. One after another, all my liaison officers were surrounded - kisses, treats, flowers..." - recalled Konev.

But the Germans did not leave the city alone. Without regard for the historical heritage, they mined the famous architectural complex of the 17th century – the Prague Loreto. The same fate befell the military equipment factories, which until the last moment supplied the Wehrmacht with tanks and cars. Among them, according to the remark of a participant in those events, Yakov Fadeyev, was the underground enterprise “Skoda”:

"42,000 prisoners of war worked there. The Germans, not wanting to give up either the equipment or the workers, mined the plant. When entering the territory, it was supposed to blow up. But our unit of miners found the cable intended for detonation in time. One senior lieutenant cut it and de-energized it. True, he died in the process - the resulting "voltaic arc" literally burned him."

Since the Red Army had orders to preserve the city as much as possible, tanks and artillery were used cautiously to suppress the remaining German units. Residents of Prague ran up to the Soviet crews and asked them not to shoot at buildings of special value.

"Look, there are tanks and guns buried behind the bushes on the other side. The Germans have a lot of people and equipment there," local residents told the Red Army soldiers before crossing the Vltava. The first Soviet tank was knocked out, but the rest managed to break through the German defenses with shells. By about 10:00 on May 9, the city was cleared of Nazis.

The desperate Schörner changed into civilian clothes and flew to Austria, where he hid from the Americans until he was handed over to the Soviet side. Several divisions managed to break through to the American zone. The Red Army captured more than 860 thousand German soldiers and officers.

TRAITOR UNDER THE BLANKET
In historiography since the 1990s, a myth has spread that the so-called Russian Liberation Army (ROA) of traitor General Andrei Vlasov allegedly played a significant role in the liberation of Prague. In fact, the "head of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia" Vlasov by April-May 1945 had removed himself from the military-political leadership of the collaborators, was in a state of prostration and, at most, made plans to escape to the Anglo-Americans.

The rebels of May 5–7 were conditionally supported only by the 1st ROA division under the command of another traitor, former Red Army Colonel Sergei Bunyachenko. The Vlasovites hoped to “show themselves” to the Americans by turning their bayonets against their former masters, to ensure an organized retreat to the West, and who knows, even to continue serving “against the Bolsheviks” under new sponsors.

For their part, the pro-Western factions of the Czech rebels promised the Vlasovites political asylum in exchange for support, which, of course, turned out to be a fiction.

Bunyachenko's troops were indeed able to drive the Germans out of some areas of Prague, but when they learned of the Red Army's advance toward the city, fear of legal retribution led them to the same place as many of the Nazis - to the US occupation zone, located 70 kilometers from the city. The Soviet command asked the Americans not to let the Vlasovites through, to which they agreed. The supposed agreements between the Roosevelt administration and Moscow, which had so upset Field Marshal Montgomery, apparently continued to operate.

On May 12, Vlasov himself was captured. "The traitor was discovered by his own driver. The tank crews and the driver pulled Vlasov out from under the blankets, loaded him onto a tank and immediately sent him straight to the headquarters of the 13th Army. A miserable end, which quite naturally crowned the entire career of this renegade!", recalled Marshal Konev. Vlasov asked to meet with him. But the marshal, who considered this humiliating, resolutely refused and after delivering the traitor to his command post, immediately sent him to Moscow.

Three days later, the Americans extradited Bunyachenko to Moscow and a year later the ROA leaders were executed by court order.

The Germans were completely finished off on May 12, when after the battle near the village of Slivice the last three divisions of 5-6 thousand SS men, who had found themselves in a circle, laid down their arms. By that time, the Victory salute had long since died down in Moscow. The Soviet troops irretrievably lost 50 thousand people during the Prague operation, including in the "battles after the war", and a total of 140 thousand during the liberation of Czechoslovakia.

A total of 429 Red Army soldiers who died in those battles are buried at the Olšany Cemetery in Prague. Here, as a symbol of historical continuity, is a memorial to Russian officers, participants in the Foreign Campaign of 1813, who died from wounds received in battles with Napoleon at Dresden and Kulm. The memorial is still surrounded with care and honor. Ordinary Czechs remember their defenders and liberators.

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Home Front: Politix
Why I was wrong about Donald Trump — he''s a ''strange attractor'' with a mission
2025-05-02
[NYPOST] In retrospect, I can see that the sources of error lay within me. Trump is one of a kind and escaped my ready-made categories. He's also a mixture of popular culture and personal weirdness — the hair, the hand gestures, the dancing — which everything in my background told me was not to be taken seriously.

Let me offer a significant example: political oratory. My models of eloquence in political speech are Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan. When, on YouTube or television, their voices speak to me from beyond the grave, my heart beats faster and I'm overcome with sadness that nobody today delivers such an effect.

Trump's rhetoric leaves me cold. When he spoke of ''American carnage'' in his first inaugural address, I had no idea what he was talking about. When he proclaimed a ''golden age'' to coincide with his second presidency, it sounded like empty bragging.

How he deals with important issues is perplexing to me. He berates adversaries, high and low, in a manner that seems petty and often childish. His style of talking, which he calls ''the weave,'' spins around and around and seldom arrives at its destination.

All this could be interpreted as a criticism of Trump, but I intend it rather as a partial explanation of why I failed to obtain an accurate picture of the man. Trump, after all, is a performer who carried a trivial reality TV show to popularity for more than a decade — he well knows how to communicate with the American public. And I get the humor.

Watching Trump be Trump can be vastly entertaining; there's no predicting what he will say next.

The key to the Trump rhetoric may be found in that unique ritual — part county fair, part revival meeting — known as the ''Trump rally.''

What becomes evident from viewing these events on TV is that Trump loves the adoration of the crowd. But more than this, he loves the crowd itself, the proximity to ordinary people.

He may be the only American politician who currently displays, and knows how to convey, a visceral affection for voters. He's clearly energized in their presence, to the extent that he never wants the show to end. Just like some operatic arias offer an excuse for the diva to flaunt her vocal skills, the meanderings of the weave are Trump's pretext for keeping himself in front of his audience.

That's his moment of transcendence.

The style, with its comical insults, first-person informality, and wandering attention span, fits perfectly into the modalities of digital communication. This isn't by design. It's just the way he talks, the first of many coincidences favoring him with which we must come to terms. Trump is a boomer, who, online, sounds like a zoomer.

He's a face-to-face personality transmuted, almost physically, into the virtual realm. He was the Beethoven of Twitter during his first presidency, the loudest voice amid the uproar of what Jonathan Haidt has called the digital Tower of Babel.

Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst and the author of “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” From City Journal.
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China-Japan-Koreas
Chinese White: How Chiang Kai-shek Lost Everything and Remained the Winner
2025-04-24
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Kirill Novikov

[REGNUM] Half a century ago, in April 1975, the Republic of China bid farewell to its president, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. After a month of mourning declared across the island of Taiwan, the body of the “dear leader” was placed in a copper coffin and buried in the Generalissimo’s favorite residence near Lake Qihu (which so reminded the president of his forever lost homeland).

The "Song of Memory of Chiang Kai-shek" was heard everywhere, written by the living classic, the author of "folk" songs Huang Yaotai. The ruling, and also the only National Party - the Kuomintang, organized a campaign of worship of the leader, whom they tried to call by one of his many names - Zhongzheng, which means "a just and correct person."

The president's funeral was attended by his closest partners in the fight for democracy and against communism - President Gerald Ford sent US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. The former sworn enemy, Japan, was represented by former prime ministers Nobusuke Kishi and Eisaku Sato. Even the current enemy - Mao Zedong's "Red China" did not speak in the spirit of "a dog's death for a dog." Beijing newspapers limited themselves to a restrained and respectful "Chiang Kai-shek has died."

And yet, with this major political figure, military leader and patron of the economic miracle, “not everything was so clear-cut.”

The "Republic of China" he ruled at the time of his death occupied one small island - Taiwan, which had become Chinese only recently by the standards of the history of the Celestial Empire. One of the officially recognized victors in World War II, Generalissimo Chiang surrendered the gigantic mainland of China to the communists.

The Generalissimo and his National Revolutionary Army were compared to the Russian White Guards (which is hardly true), but the Kuomintang did not lose their civil war, but rather paused it. Vasily Aksyonov's fantasy about the white island of Crimea was inspired by Taiwan.

Revolutionary, general and dictator Chiang Kai-shek was called the Chinese Bonaparte, but instead of a dramatic and heroic ending, his biography ended almost with a happy ending. The island of Taiwan is not the island of Saint Helena after all.

In order to understand the paradoxical figure of the Generalissimo, one must turn to his biography.

"THE INDOMITABLE SPIRIT OF FIGHTING"
The future leader of the Chinese national revolution was born in 1887, the same year as Vasily Chapayev, Sidor Kovpak and Erich von Manstein. He was born, like his future enemy Mao Zedong, into a wealthy peasant family. But the Chang family - or Jiang, if you read it in modern transcription - traced its origins back to Prince Zhou Gong, no less. Confucius treated this ruler of the 11th century BC with respect.

Jiang Zhongzheng (or, by his second name, Jiang Jieshi, or Chiang Kai-shek in the obsolete transcription) was a representative of the 28th generation of the dynasty.

But the early death of his father and political turmoil left the family on the brink of survival. Many 20th-century dictators liked to complain about their difficult childhoods. Jiang Zhongzheng had good reason to say such things.

“Deprived of any protection after the death of her husband, my mother was subjected to the most ruthless exploitation by the neighboring scoundrels and the local gentry,” the generalissimo told his comrades in 1945. “ The efforts she made in the fight against the intrigues of these family invaders undoubtedly endowed her child, raised in such an environment, with an indomitable spirit of struggle for justice.”

Perhaps the idea of ​​the antiquity of the lineage (in light of which the Manchu Qing dynasty looked like barbarians and upstarts) coupled with the hatred of "scoundrels and nobility" made Jiang Zhongzheng a nationalist and revolutionary.

THE RISE OF THE YEAR OF THE METAL PIG
The young man chose a military career for himself – but not in the Qing army. In 1906, he went to study in Japan, where he entered the preparatory school of the Imperial Japanese Military Academy. There he joined the democratic Chinese émigrés.

Their leader, Dr. Sun Yat-sen —still revered in both China and Taiwan—put forward the “Three Principles of the People”: Chinese sovereignty (primarily from the West), popular sovereignty and welfare, which meant nationalization of large-scale industry, and a progressive tax on the rich.

In October 1911 (or the year of the Metal Pig - "xin hai" according to the 60-year cyclical calendar), the "United Alliance" - "Tongmenghui" created by Sun Yat-sen became the driving force behind the military uprising, which grew into a revolution called, after the year, the Xinhai Revolution.

A graduate of the Japanese military academy, Jiang Zhongcheng acted under the command of the head of the revolutionary combat organization, Chang Qimei. At the age of 24 ("the age of Bonaparte's first victory at Toulon"), Jiang could already list the armed seizure of Shanghai and his native province of Zhejiang as an asset. Fortunately, the Qing troops were demoralized.

The Chinese October Revolution, which overthrew the Qing monarchy, occurred six years before ours. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin spoke with delight of both the revolution in the East and the provisional president of the Chinese Republic, the founder of the National Party, the Kuomintang: "Sun Yat-sen... a European-educated representative of the militant and victorious Chinese democracy, which won a republic for itself."

Sun Yatsen would later personally communicate with Ilyich, advocate friendship with Soviet Russia, the Comintern and local communists, and invite advisers from Moscow. But in China itself, the revolutionary process did not work out.

The victorious democracy was overthrown by the local "Kornilov" - General Yuan Shikai - already in 1912. And soon a civil war began in the gigantic country, which continued in one form or another until 1949.

It was as if the Celestial Empire had returned 1,700 years ago, to the times of the epic "Three Kingdoms," when everyone was at war with everyone else.

"THE UNSHAKABLE CLIFF" AGAINST TROTSKY'S METHODS
The period from 1916 to 1928 is called the "era of militarists." Almost every province of the disintegrated country was ruled by its own general, and military leaders united into cliques - Anhui, Zhili, etc. - that fought with each other. As for the island of Taiwan, Japan had already captured it at the end of the 19th century.

In the Chinese south, in the port city of Canton – now Guangzhou – Sun Yat-sen’s nationalists were trying to gain a foothold, including Jiang Zhongzheng, who increasingly began to use the name Jieshi (or Kaishi, literally “unshakable as a cliff”). Another clique of generals could throw the Kuomintang into the sea – the National Party did not have a full-fledged army.

Sun Yat-sen decided to seek help from Soviet Russia. In 1923, a delegation from the Kuomintang headed by the leading associate of the democratic leader, Chiang Kai-shek, went to Moscow.

The newly formed USSR made a complex impression on Chang. On the one hand, he admired the structure of the Red Army and wanted to use its experience to create the armed forces of revolutionary China. He especially admired the conqueror of the Far East, the future Marshal Vasily Blucher. On the other hand, he was irritated by the open desire of the People's Commissar of War and Navy Leon Trotsky and the head of the Comintern Grigory Zinoviev to use his country as a stronghold of the world revolution.

The Comintern transformed the Kuomintang in its own image and likeness: the functionary of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Mikhail Borodin (Gruzenberg), a long-time friend of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, was sent to China. At Borodin's instigation, the Kuomintang acquired a clear party structure, and political commissars appeared in the army. A military academy was created on Huangpu Island (or Whampoa in Cantonese) near Guangzhou, headed by Chiang Kai-shek. The Whampoa Academy began training personnel for the new revolutionary army of the Kuomintang.

In 1925, having outlived his friend Lenin by a year, Sun Yat-sen died. The father of Chinese democracy left behind a zone of control of the Kuomintang with a rigid one-party structure. According to Dr. Sun, the Chinese were not ready for the third popular principle, democracy.

The Nationalists were ready to finish off the generals' cliques by taking control of the country. The Northern Campaign of the National Revolutionary Army in 1926–28 (which Marshal Blucher helped plan, and the Red Army supplied weapons and aircraft) demonstrated the effectiveness of Chiang Kai-shek's divisions.

"IT'S BETTER TO KILL A THOUSAND INNOCENTS"
But from the end of the 1920s, Moscow partners began to bet on an even closer force – the Communist Party. In turn, the leader of the right wing of the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek, relying on the army, took the liberty of interpreting the teachings of Sun Yat-sen. He interpreted it as follows: it was time to break relations with the Comintern and look for new allies.

In April 1927, while the main forces of the National Revolutionary Army were heading north, Chiang Kai-shek organized a mass terror against all leftist forces in Shanghai, which resulted in the deaths of 12,000 people. Chiang Kai-shek himself said at the time that it was better to kill 1,000 innocent people by mistake than to let even one communist escape. Among other things, Chiang gave the order to "cleanse" the Kuomintang party of Communist Party functionaries who had collaborated with it. The execution list of 197 people included the name of a certain Mao Zedong, a member of the CPC Central Committee without the right to an advisory vote. The future great helmsman escaped death, and he was already vindictive at that time.

In response to the Shanghai massacre, the Comintern, with the approval of Joseph Stalin, gave the go-ahead for a Communist uprising in the rear Canton – which was brutally suppressed by the Nationalists. But in Hunan Province, the Communists staged the Autumn Harvest Uprising, led by Mao, who had earned authority in the Party leadership.

By 1931, in the territories in central China not controlled by the Kuomintang, the Chinese Soviet Republic already existed, with the Council of People's Commissars headed by the same Mao (not yet the sole leader, but already an authoritative comrade with whom Moscow was forced to reckon). The two-million-strong National Revolutionary Army of the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek, fought the communists with varying success.

But that was only half the trouble. In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria. A year later, the puppet state of Manchukuo was formed here, headed by the last Qing emperor Pu Yi, who was “restored to the throne.”

Chiang Kai-shek tried his best to avoid war with the Japanese Empire; from his point of view, peace should first be established within the country by destroying the communists and other leftists.

AN UNWANTED ALLIANCE AND AMERICAN RECOGNITION
The third disaster came from within the Kuomintang.

An incident occurred in the city of Xi'an - Chang was arrested by his closest associates, Yang Hucheng and the former hereditary master of Manchuria, the "young marshal" Zhang Xueliang. The marshals demanded that their colleague stop the civil war with the communists and unite with them against the Japanese. The conflict between the military leaders was "resolved" by Mao's closest associate, the future head of the PRC MFA Zhou Enlai.

The Kuomintang Chinese Republic restored relations with the USSR. But Chiang Kai-shek dragged out the creation of a united front with local communists in every possible way. This continued until the "Marco Polo Bridge incident" in 1937, when the Japanese invaded the Chinese Republic from Manchukuo. In fact, World War II in the Far East began two years before Hitler's invasion of Poland and lasted until the fall of 1945. It was in 1937 that the Japanese carried out a massacre in occupied Nanjing, which is considered an act of genocide in both the PRC and Taiwan.

In the same year of 1937, Chiang Kai-shek received the title of Generalissimo. However, the war with Japan was not going very well for China: its army was seriously lagging behind in technological terms, despite assistance from the USSR and the USA. By 1940, the Japanese controlled vast territories from Beijing to Shanghai and, attacking from their colony, Taiwan, captured Canton and other strongholds in the south.

At the same time, the alliance between the Kuomintang and the communists turned out to be fragile, because already in 1941, despite the advance of Japanese troops, Chiang Kai-shek resumed the fight against leftist forces and effectively unleashed a civil war again.

However, after Japan entered the war on the Axis side, the importance of the China front increased dramatically.

The head of the National Government of the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek, was invited to the Cairo Conference in 1943, where he negotiated alongside Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The leader of part of China managed to simultaneously confirm the legitimacy and defend the interests of the country. The Republic of China was promised the return of all territories occupied by Japan (Manchuria, the Pescadores Islands, and the island of Taiwan) after the war.

However, after the end of World War II, the civil war continued with renewed intensity. All attempts to form a coalition government of communists and nationalists failed.

The CPC, using Manchuria liberated by the Red Army and the "Special Region" that existed during World War II as bases, launched large-scale offensives. In essence, this was a proxy clash between the USSR and the USA. Especially if we take into account the agreements between Chiang Kai-shek and Harry Truman on aid in exchange for granting the United States and its army "special rights" in the Republic of China.

But the "red" People's Liberation Army of China (PLA) was clearly better prepared. Mao Zedong's million-strong army took Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, crossed the Yangtze and pushed the Kuomintang to the south. By the end of 1949, Chiang Kai-shek found himself in the situation of Wrangel, locked in the Crimea.

But the Generalissimo and his republic had somewhere to retreat.

FROM THE '228 INCIDENT' TO THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE
The remnants of the army (approximately 450,000 people), the party and state apparatus, officials and ordinary people, a total of up to 1 million people, were evacuated to Taiwan, which the Republic of China had recently acquired. The history of an alternative China began - under the cover of the American fleet, and then the nuclear "umbrella". With portraits of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, who became president, but without any hint of the three people's principles.

The first years of the "island of China" were marked by white terror. This is what the events of February 1947 are officially called in modern Taiwan, when, under the pretext of opposing communism and separatism, the Kuomintang suppressed the uprising of the indigenous Taiwanese who demanded democratic reforms.

The "228 Incident" (date 28.02.1947), according to various estimates, took the lives of 10,000 to 30,000 residents of the island. But, as modern Taiwanese politicians believe, the white terror of the Kuomintang continued either until the death of President Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, or even until the political reforms of 1987.

In any case, martial law was in effect until 1975. The president suppressed all opposition, all power was concentrated in the hands of the Kuomintang. "Great China" nationalism was actively promoted, the culture of local Chinese was suppressed, and the languages ​​of the island's natives were banned in the media and education. But the Washington curators turned a blind eye to all this.

In the post-war years, Chiang Kai-shek relied on both military and economic aid from the United States, which had a vested interest in the regime's survival, especially since the Korean War.

And later, Taiwan became a useful economic partner. Chiang Kai-shek, like the South Korean dictators and Singapore's enlightened autocrat Lee Kuan Yew, laid the foundations for authoritarian modernization. The island carried out land reform, introduced compulsory education, and curbed inflation. And by the 1970s, the Kuomintang began actively attracting investment and patronizing national capital, from the textile industry to high-tech. It is no coincidence that Taiwan is still churning out microchips for American IT giants, and island firms maintain offices in Silicon Valley. Even though the "Republic of China" has been in a gray zone politically since 1971 to this day.

WHO WILL RETURN THE ISLAND TO ITS HOMELAND?
Richard Nixon conducted détente with Maoist China, and it was not without his help that the PRC took the place in the UN and its Security Council that had previously been occupied by Kuomintang Taiwan. Since then, the number of UN countries that de jure recognize Taiwan as the "Republic of China" has been rapidly melting away. Now there are only 11 such countries: for example, Tuvalu, Belize, Paraguay, but, by the way, the Vatican too. But it is still covered by the Americans - and this will continue as long as the antagonism between Washington and Beijing persists.

The memory of the dictator and father of Chinese democracy is not so simple. Separatists from the Democratic Progressive Party, who came to power in the mid-2010s and are seeking to turn the “island of China” into the “Republic of Taiwan,” are uprooting this memory. At least three hundred monuments have already been torn down, all museums have been closed, and streets are being renamed. At the same time, the great-grandson of the generalissimo, Andrew Jiang Yuqing, moved to China in March of this year in order to develop his career on the mainland and facilitate the “convergence” of the two shores of the Taiwan Strait.

It is the leaders of the Kuomintang who are now finding a common language with Chairman Xi Jinping, and if Taiwan ever returns to its native harbor without a fight, it will be the heirs of Chiang Kai-shek who will do it.

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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
'Honest People': How Stalin's Informants Broke the West's Peace with the Nazis
2025-04-21
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mikhail Kucherov

[REGNUM] "Yustas. According to our information, senior officers of the SD and SS security services appeared in Sweden and Switzerland, looking for access to the Allied residency. In particular, in Bern, SD people tried to establish contact with Allen Dulles' employees... A l e x s."

This cipher, which the Moscow Center sent to Berlin to SS Standartenführer von Stirlitz (aka Colonel Isayev), became the beginning of the main mission of the Soviet super-intelligence officer in "Seventeen Moments of Spring." The cipher was, of course, fiction, but the fears of the Soviet leadership were real.

The author of this book and the script of the same name for one of the most popular Soviet TV series, Yulian Semyonov, had access to archival documents, many of which will only be declassified in our time.

And - despite the fantasy of the figure of the Soviet "supermole" with access to the highest leaders of the Reich (from Heinrich Himmler to Martin Bormann ) - the eighth novel about Stirlitz was a "true detective" based on real events.

Just as, most likely, the conversation between Joseph Stalin at the nearby dacha in Kuntsevo with the curator of the “Soviet secret service abroad” that took place in the spring of 1945, reconstructed by Semyonov, had a basis.

That same Alex. Neither the book nor the film mentions this person's name, but most likely it was the head of the foreign department at the main department of the NKVD, Pavel Fitin. He signed his ciphers, if not with Alex, then with another short, common European name - Victor.

Stalin told Fitin: "Any attempt at an agreement between the fascists and the anti-Soviets of the West must be considered by you as a real possibility. Naturally... you must realize that the main figures in these possible separate negotiations will most likely be Hitler's closest associates, who have authority both among the party apparatus and among the people."

Meanwhile, in Berlin, which is being bombed by Allied aircraft and towards which the Red Army is inexorably approaching, the head of foreign intelligence of the security service (Department VI of the RSHA) Walter Schellenberg reminds his boss Himmler: "Reichsfuehrer, it is now the spring of '45, not the fall of '41." It is necessary to negotiate with the Anglo-Americans before the Russians take the citadel of the Reich, the head of intelligence hints.

This phrase was also invented by Semenov (by the way, it is in the script, based on which Tatyana Lioznova shot the film - but not in the book). But these words of Oleg Tabakov - Schellenberg are also based on real events.

Here is a real phrase from one of the last letters of Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, sent to Adolf Hitler in the last days of March 1945: "You addressed me with words from which, if I understood you correctly, it clearly and unequivocally followed: if the war is lost, let the people perish too! This fate, you said, is inevitable."

Total war, the beginning of which was announced by Joseph Goebbels back in 1943, implied that the shame of November 1918 would not be repeated, Germany would perish, but would not capitulate.

But this obsession, significant for the corporal of the First World War Hitler and Goebbels, who did not have time to fight, but was poisoned by his own propaganda (including the myth of the “stab in the back”) - this suicidal idea in the spring lost all meaning for many of the top leaders of the Nazi state.

Especially when the Red Army took Königsberg and Danzig-Gdansk, advanced towards the Oder and developed an offensive on Vienna, and the Allies crossed the Rhine and pressed the Wehrmacht towards the Elbe.

THREE WERNERS AND THE SLY FOX
The first to become disillusioned with the idea of ​​a suicidal war, along with “Russian Bolshevism” and “Anglo-American plutocrats,” were those who were not enchanted by it – the Prussian generals. They also remembered how the war on two fronts ended in 1918.

The first attempt to stop World War II took place before the war began.

In 1938, the Imperial Minister of War Werner von Blomberg (nicknamed "Siegfried with the monocle") and another Werner, the commander-in-chief of the ground forces von Fritsch, planned to remove "Corporal Hitler" and not get involved in a confrontation with the West.

"The Corporal" removed both military leaders from service - Blomberg went into retirement, and Fritsch very conveniently died at the very beginning of the Second World War.

But military conspiracies continued.

The most famous attempts to stop the war by eliminating Hitler were Major General Henning von Tresckow 's 1942 plan to blow up the Fuhrer's plane during his trip to the Eastern Front, and the famous Operation Valkyrie of 1944, inspired by the same von Tresckow.

The disagreements within the circle of conspirators are indicative.

The most famous hero of "Valkyrie", the perpetrator of the failed assassination attempt on Hitler, Claus von Stauffenberg, was sure: "We must use every opportunity to conduct political negotiations with Russia, which is our neighbor."

According to Count Stauffenberg, the last pre-war ambassador to the USSR, Werner von Schulenburg, was to become the liaison with Moscow.

But the political leader of the conspiracy, who aimed to become the chancellor of the new Germany, Carl Goerdeler, held a different opinion. As did the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, nicknamed the "Sly Fox", who was connected with the rebellious generals.

They were looking for a way out to the same Allen Dulles, a key employee of the US Office of Strategic Services, the future CIA, who worked on the German direction.

"The main principle of Goerdeler-Dulles-Canaris was the unilateral end to the war only in the West in the name of continuing the war against the Soviet Union. This caused a protest among young officers," noted the Soviet historian, Germanist and military translator Lev Bezymensky.

SWISS CANAL
But these were disgraced politicians, opposition-minded officers, high-ranking leaders of the Wehrmacht and military intelligence (people who were important in the structure of the Reich, but had no connection with its party-political elite). But long before the spring of 1945, treason began to mature in the Fuhrer's inner circle.

The most mysterious episode to this day remains the arrival in Britain in May 1941 of the Fuhrer's deputy for the party, Rudolf Hess. He, we recall, announced to the Lord Steward Douglas Hamilton : he had come to end the war and begin a common struggle between Germany and Great Britain against Bolshevik Russia.

Even if Hess was not “mad,” the Führer — judging by his reaction — did not sanction this adventure. As Speer recalled, Hitler, upon learning this, fell into a chair in confusion, saying: “Oh, my God! He flew over there!” and even uttered “an inarticulate, almost animal-like cry.”

Whether any of the Nazi bigwigs, other than Hess himself, were involved in his plan is something history is silent about.

The next episode looks more substantial.

In the summer of 1942, SS Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg began to push his boss Himmler, the head of the SS, towards a scenario of reconciliation with the West.

The head of foreign intelligence believed that a figure of Himmler's stature should initiate negotiations with the Anglo-Americans while the Reich still had the strength to fight, in order to obtain the most favorable conditions.

Himmler was furious when his subordinate first floated the idea, but they soon began to seriously discuss "trading" the occupied territories.

According to this plan, the Germans were to withdraw their troops from Belgium, Holland and Northern France, building close trade ties with the French people. Austria would remain part of the Reich, and the countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe would be governed by sovereign governments, but with close economic integration with Germany.

Himmler supported the initiative, although he said that he would immediately get rid of Schellenberg if he made the slightest mistake in its implementation.

It should be noted that Moscow had already learned of Berlin's "interesting" initiatives back in 1942. Thus, the famous intelligence officer Kim Philby reported that the German ambassador to Ankara, former chancellor (and former vice chancellor in Hitler's first cabinet) Franz von Papen was trying to contact US intelligence resident George Earle in Turkey.

But Himmler was indecisive and did not try very hard to convey Schellenberg's concept to Hitler.

He came to his senses towards the end of the war, when he realized that in order to take up an acceptable position in the post-war country, he had to “wash himself clean” of the crimes of the SS. And for this he used the same channel as Professor Pleischner and Pastor Schlag – Switzerland.

In early 1945, at a secret meeting with former Swiss President Jean-Marie Musy, Himmler reluctantly agreed to transport 1,200 Jews every two weeks to a neutral country.

The plan failed due to political intrigue: the head of the Imperial Main Security Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, reported to the Führer that Himmler and Schellenberg were acting behind his back, and in the eyes of Hitler, the SS chief was discredited.

Schellenberg persisted and chose as a mediator another "neutral", Sweden, which at that time had become the center of secret peace negotiations and spy games.

He arranged for Himmler to meet with the Swedish king's nephew, Count Folke Bernadotte, who convinced the SS chief to begin transporting Danish, Norwegian, Polish and Jewish prisoners from concentration camps to Sweden.

At the end of April 1945, Himmler met with the representative of the World Jewish Congress, Norbert Masur, and agreed to stop the extermination of Jews.

But the head of the SS was in no hurry to fulfill his promises, and his image in the West was so monstrous that Winston Churchill and the recently appointed President Harry Truman refused to negotiate with him.

WILLY BRANDT'S DELUSIONS
A number of modern publications suggest that Joachim Ribbentrop and even someone from Himmler's circle allegedly sought access to Soviet representatives. The most compelling evidence is a quote from the memoirs of Willy Brandt (Chancellor of Germany in 1969-1974, and an anti-fascist emigrant during the war):

"It became known that an official from Ribbentrop's department had already met in Stockholm in 1943, testing the waters, with embassy adviser Vladimir Semenov. In the end, Himmler's apparatus also tried, as one colonel put it, to establish "non-binding contact with Russia" through Stockholm.

Willy Brandt seems to have been less informed than he would have liked.
But the emigrant Brandt, although he was in Stockholm (and communicated there with people who had connections to the "Valkyrie"), hardly had information circulating through secret diplomatic channels. His "became known" is more like a retelling of rumors thrown in by someone.

If the "contacts with Russia" were not a pure conspiracy theory, they resemble "disinformation" for potential Western counterparties: if we don't reach an agreement with you, we'll reach an agreement with Stalin. A sort of Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact 2.0.

Even though this sounded fantastic at the time of the Battle of Stalingrad, the winter of 1943 was not the summer of 1939, when Soviet-German agreements were still possible.

In addition, we note that Brandt in his memoirs clearly tried to whitewash the reputation of all the participants in the "Valkyrie": "The officers who decided to rebel and the political figures associated with them sought to conclude a separate peace with the Western powers in order to then continue the war with the Soviet Union - this is one of the many legends that have been created around the plot of July 20."

They say that not only the anti-Hitler conspirator Goerdeler, but also Hitler’s inner circle, allegedly advocated for peace with the USSR.

What was actually documented, unlike Willy Brandt's stories, was Operation Sunrise (called Operation Crossword by the British), which became the basis for the key episode of Seventeen Moments of Spring.

THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE IS SOLVED
In March 1945, General Karl Wolff (who was brilliantly played in the film by Vasily Lanovoy) met with the future head of the CIA, Dulles, in Switzerland, the SS commissioner for Army Group C in Italy. Dulles had been in Switzerland since 1943, heading the residency of the Office of Strategic Services.

Dulles was helped to establish contacts with the Germans by the OSS employee and German émigré Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz, the son-in-law of the Ruhr coal magnate Hugo Stinnes.

On the other hand, an agent of the German secret service SD, who had been planted in the OSS residency under the operational pseudonym Gabriel, reported to Berlin: Dulles does not trust his Russian allies and, moreover, hates them and considers them the main opponents of the United States.

From the German side, people from the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) began to appear in February 1945 – envoys from Schellenberg and even his immediate superior, Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

On March 8, the first high-level contact took place in Bern: on one side, Dulles, the American General Lehman Lemnitzer and the Chief of Intelligence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the British General Terence Airey. On the other, Wolff.

The secret negotiations (of which Moscow was not informed, as expected) discussed a separate capitulation of the northern Italian group - a plan that had been discussed earlier through the Vatican representative, the papal chamberlain Luigi Parelli. This plan was also supported by the British.

When on March 12 the commander of the Allied forces in Italy, Field Marshal Harold Alexander, true to his allied duty, informed the Soviet ambassador about some contacts regarding the capitulation of the Italian Wehrmacht group, there was what is called an awkward pause.

Especially after the State Department and the Foreign Office refused Vyacheslav Molotov’s legitimate request to include our representatives in the negotiations.

But the main thing is that Moscow, through its own channels, knew in full about the preparation, progress and nature of Operation Crossword, in particular that these were essentially preparations for a separate peace on the Western Front – in conditions when the Red Army was preparing for the battle for Berlin.

On April 5, 1945, Stalin sent Roosevelt a message that was formally polite towards the Allies (“I have never doubted your honesty and reliability, just as I have never doubted the honesty and reliability of Mr. Churchill”), but full of reproaches for trying to organize a unilateral capitulation without the participation of the USSR.

The second point of the message is especially interesting: "As for my informants, I assure you that they are very honest and modest people who perform their duties carefully and have no intention of offending anyone. These people have been tested by us in practice many times."

Thanks to Stalin's informants, Operation Sunrise, also known as Crossword, was thwarted.

DULLES SAYS GOODBYE TO PLANS
On April 20, 1945, Dulles received, not without surprise, an order from the headquarters of the Allied forces: given the conflict with Moscow, contacts with the Germans were to cease and the operation was to be curtailed.

Hitler, who apparently did not know about Wolff and Kaltenbrunner's mission, summoned both of them to the carpet, but showed no anger, merely scolding Wolff for "disregarding the opinion of the leadership."

Moreover, the Fuhrer shared his own plan: the total war would continue in three “impregnable fortresses” – in the north – in Schleswig-Holstein, in Berlin and in the south, in the Alps. At the same time, as Hitler believed, the Red Army and the Anglo-Americans, meeting in the center of Germany, would enter into a conflict, which the Reich would take advantage of.

But this, fortunately, remained an “alternative history”.

On April 16, our troops began the Berlin offensive operation, on April 25, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front met peacefully in the city of Torgau on the Elbe with the Americans from General Hodges' 1st Army. Roosevelt acknowledged the story of the attempted negotiations as "an incident that has faded and receded into the past without having brought any benefit."

Despite all their differences, the leaders of the USSR, USA and Great Britain together brought to the end the fight against those who decided to openly renounce their monstrous views for personal gain. Most of the Berlin "peace seekers" had to answer for many years of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Himmler, however, managed to escape retribution - at the moment of his arrest by the British, he bit into an ampoule of poison. Kaltenbrunner and Schellenberg found themselves in the dock at Nuremberg, as did the first "peacemaker" Hess.

SS General Karl Wolff's retribution came after Dulles resigned as CIA director (the head of the American intelligence agency clearly favored his former negotiating partner). In 1964, a West German court sentenced Wolff to 15 years in prison for complicity in the Holocaust.

Link


Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
Common enemy
2025-04-19
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.

Text taken from a press release by the Russian spy agency, SVR
[ColonelCassad] A retrospective analysis of the policies of Western states shows Europe's "historical predisposition" to various forms of totalitarianism, which periodically produces destructive conflicts on a global scale. According to experts, the current discord in relations between the United States and the EU countries, which accuse D. Trump of authoritarianism, is becoming, against the backdrop of the upcoming 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, a factor contributing to the situational rapprochement between Washington and Moscow, as has happened more than once in the past.

This is evidenced, in particular, by the scandal associated with the demands of the French member of the European Parliament Raphael Glucksmann to the Americans, who "decided to side with the tyrants", to return to Paris the Statue of Liberty, which was previously donated to the United States. R. Glucksmann, being a representative of globalist forces and a staunch supporter of the Kiev regime, criticizes the owner of the Oval Office for weakening support for Ukraine and dismissing civil servants who hold liberal views. White House Press Secretary K. Leavitt gave a sharp rebuke to the "impudent Gaul", recalling that only by the grace of the United States, whose troops landed in Normandy in 1944, is he able to express his thoughts in French, not German.

Attention was drawn to the fact that it was in France that dictatorial regimes came to power many times, distinguished by particular atrocities and cruelty. Among them were the Jacobin dictatorship, which in 1793-1794 destroyed thousands of its own citizens and imprisoned 300 thousand people on suspicion of "counterrevolution", as well as the bloody actions of Napoleon. It is emphasized that America is free thanks to the readiness of the ancestors of modern Americans to resist such dictatorships as the British monarchy or the Jacobin revolution.

According to experts, it was in the works of the French writer and publicist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, who collaborated with the German occupation authorities during World War II, that the concept of Eurofascism was introduced and its ideology was justified as inherent not only to the Germans, but also to other “societies” of Europe. In the same context, one can recall the French volunteer SS division “Charlemagne”, named in honor of the “unifier of Europe” Charlemagne. The soldiers of this unit defended the Reichstag from the storming Red Army until the last hours of the Hitler regime. 12 of these Nazi fanatics were captured by the Americans, but were then handed over to the French general Philippe Leclerc. On May 8, 1945, by his order, all these war criminals were shot without unnecessary judicial red tape.

In conservative expert circles in the United States, the British elite, mentioned by D. Trump's representative, is considered to be very prone to committing the most serious crimes against humanity. Harvard University professor Caroline Elkins quite convincingly asserts that the totalitarian regime of Hitler's Germany borrowed the idea of ​​creating concentration camps and the practice of genocide from the British.
He is here referencing the treatment of the Boers in South Africa, I assume.
It is emphasized that British "liberal imperialism" is a more stable and therefore even more destructive force than fascism, since it has "ideological elasticity", the ability to distort facts to its advantage, hide realities and adapt to new conditions.
I have no idea what that means.
Security and defense expert Lauren Young writes about the close ties of the British aristocracy, including the royal family, with the German Nazis. Attention is drawn to the visit to Italy by future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill before the start of the Great Patriotic War, who was left with a positive impression of the local fascist regime. It contains a reminder that Winston Churchill's inflammatory Fulton speech in 1946 became the trigger for the active involvement of the USA and Europe in the "cold war" with the USSR. During it, the British (similar to the "Goebbels lie machine") were engaged in "black propaganda", carried out disinformation and special operations that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of residents of Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia, Western experts emphasize.

In this regard, analysts are not surprised by London's leading destructive role in the Ukrainian conflict. The British in every way encourage the Kiev regime, which praises the punishers who fought on Hitler's side, Bandera's executioners, and today itself commits numerous crimes against humanity. Incidentally, America felt such inclinations of the British back in August 1814, when British troops occupied Washington, burned the Capitol and the White House. As experts believe, apparently in the context of the above, a proposal has even arisen among American historians about the legitimacy of calling Great Britain the first “evil empire.”
It has? I must have missed it while paying attention to current events.
Experts recall that in the past there have been many moments when Washington and Moscow became partners in opposing London and Paris in the international arena. A typical example of this is the Suez Crisis of 1956. The tough position of the USSR and the USA stopped the triple aggression of Great Britain, France and Israel against Egypt.
Possibly a mistake…
Another little-known page of history in the West is the events of the Crimean War of 1853-1856, when Great Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia united against Russia (similar to today's "coalition of the willing"). Despite formal neutrality, the sympathies of the White House in this confrontation were on the side of St. Petersburg. This is evidenced by the participation of American doctors in the treatment of the defenders of Sevastopol, the "request of 300 riflemen from Kentucky" to send them to defend this city, the activities of the Russian-American Company to supply gunpowder and food to our fortresses and possessions on the Pacific coast.
I had no idea we were that generous.
It is noteworthy that it was during that Crimean "expedition" that the Anglo-French troops bombed Odessa, ravaged Yevpatoria, Kerch, Mariupol, Berdyansk and other cities of Novorossiya, which the West today calls Ukrainian. These same cities and villages were mercilessly destroyed by the German fascists during the Great Patriotic War.

80 years ago, all the peoples of the Soviet Union participated in the sacred battles against the German and other European fascists. In Crimea, there are monuments to the soldiers of the units formed in the former republics of the USSR - Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia - who died during the storming of Sevastopol in 1944. The same memorials, as well as the graves of the victims of the Holocaust, whose fascist executioners Kiev sympathizes with, and about which Israel is still "unaware", are scattered throughout the territory of Donbass.

As for Russian-American relations in the context of past and current events, foreign expert circles express hope for a new unification of efforts by Moscow and Washington, capable of preventing the world from sliding into a new global conflict and resisting possible provocations from both Ukraine and the “crazy Europeans,” traditionally egged on by Great Britain.

Link


Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
The Race for Berlin: How Stalin and Zhukov Outpaced Churchill and Eisenhower
2025-04-16
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mikhail Kucherov

[REGNUM] On the night of April 15-16, 1945, the sky to the east of the German capital was illuminated by the light of 140 anti-aircraft searchlights. Then the roar of 20,000 artillery guns and Katyusha rockets fell on the Germans' first line of defense. This was the beginning of the Berlin Offensive Operation - victorious for the Red Army and fatal for the Third Reich.

Earlier, in February–March, the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front under the command of Georgy Zhukov and the 1st Ukrainian Front, commanded by Ivan Konev, carried out several successful operations in the area from mountainous Silesia to the Baltic Sea. Thus, during the Vistula–Oder Operation, our armies in less than a month, with heavy fighting, advanced from the outskirts of Warsaw to the Prussian city of Küstrin, from where no more than 60 kilometers remained to Berlin.

By that time, Anglo-American troops had crossed the Rhine and surrounded a large German group in the Ruhr, which opened the way to the Elbe. There was no doubt that the attack on Berlin would soon begin from the west or the east. But it was not clear which of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, the Soviet Union or the Western Allies, would send troops there first.

"THE REAL AIM OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ARMIES"
On 1 April 1945, Winston Churchill wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, saying:" I believe that politically we should push as far east as possible in Germany and that if Berlin were within our reach we should certainly take it." The British and American General Staffs must coordinate their armies "before any commitment to the Russians is made," the Prime Minister insisted.

After the war, in his memoirs, Churchill bluntly recalled his plans from the spring of 1945: together with the Americans, “to immediately create a new front against its (Soviet Russia’s) rapid advance.”

“The main and real goal of the Anglo-American armies is Berlin; the liberation of Czechoslovakia and the entry of American troops into Prague are of the utmost importance,” Churchill reconstructed his plans.

In his memoirs, Zhukov cites the phrase of the commander of American forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, at a meeting of the Allied headquarters on April 7: “If, after the capture of Leipzig, it turns out that it is possible to advance to Berlin without major losses, I want to do it.”

For his part, Joseph Stalin was clearly afraid of a separate conspiracy between the Nazi elite and the Anglo-Americans. He believed that the Nazis were amassing forces against us, exposing the Western Front. Thus, Zhukov cites details of one of the meetings with the Supreme Commander before the start of the Berlin operation:

"Silently extending his hand, he (Stalin), as always, as if continuing a recently interrupted conversation, said: - The German front in the West has finally collapsed, and, apparently, the Nazis do not want to take measures to stop the advance of the allied forces. Meanwhile, in all the most important directions against us, they are strengthening their groups."
Given Soviet internal history, it was quite reasonable for the Nazis to be more afraid of them than of the Allies.
Further, “having lit his pipe, the Supreme continued: “I think that a serious fight is coming… ”
All expected the next war of the free world vs. totalitarianism to be the Allies against the Soviet Union, et al, and so it was. It just turned out to be a cold war instead of a hot one, because America got nuclear bombs first.
ZHUKOV OR KONEV?
During another meeting with the commanders of the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts, Stalin read out intelligence data (the Anglo-Americans were preparing to attack Berlin) and asked the military leaders a leading question about who would actually take it. "Of course we will, Comrade Stalin," Konev replied. Zhukov then repeated the same thing.

The Supreme Commander took a large operational map and drew a dividing line between the fronts, stopping at the town of Luben, several dozen kilometers from Berlin.

The marshals, competing with each other, got the hint: they needed to begin the operation quickly, with the honor of the winner going to the one who managed to break through to the city first. However, the troops of Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front were in a more advantageous position, so Konev and his 1st Ukrainian Front had no choice but to assist their bureaucratic rival and focus on other tasks, including reaching the Elbe.

The honorable but extremely difficult task of taking Berlin fell to Zhukov.

"I'VE NEVER HAD TO TAKE CITIES LIKE THIS BEFORE"
The enemy was indeed able to concentrate very serious forces on the eastern approaches to the capital of the "thousand-year Reich". Zhukov noted: as a result of the operation, it turned out that the fascists had deployed against us no less than a million "bayonets" (this is without counting the 200-thousand garrison that was being formed in Berlin itself), about 1.5 thousand tanks and assault guns, 10.4 thousand artillery pieces and mortars, more than three thousand combat aircraft.

Yes, for the first time in the war years we had an overwhelming, not just significant, superiority over the enemy. In aviation - 2.5 times, in tanks and artillery - four times. The offensive involved 2.5 million soldiers and officers, 6,300 tanks, 7,500 aircraft. In addition, our military already knew the upcoming battlefield well: our reconnaissance aircraft took 15 thousand photographs, on the basis of which they created a detailed map

But the 1st Belorussian was facing the toughest urban battles of the entire war. It had to break through three lines of defense and minefields (in some areas the density reached 2 thousand mines per square kilometer).

"During the war, we had never had to take such large, heavily fortified cities as Berlin. Its total area was almost 900 square kilometers. The metro and widely developed underground structures gave the enemy troops the opportunity to carry out a wide covert maneuver," Zhukov explained. The Nazis equipped the city with at least 400 pillboxes and bunkers and erected barricades on the streets. Residential and industrial areas, highways and bridges were transformed into a huge fortified area.

It was also necessary to take into account that 2.5 million residents remained in the city. There was no talk of evacuation - the authorities forbade them to leave the city, believing that the people should perish together with the leaders of the Reich. Gauleiter and imperial leader of the defense of Berlin Joseph Goebbels explained the refusal to evacuate civilians from the city by saying that he "did not intend to plunge the capital into panic."

One should also not forget about Goebbels' main specialty - propaganda. Thanks to it, the garrison and the city's population, in fact, did not have a defeatist mood.

On the one hand, Goebbels’ department kept repeating about the “war crimes” that the “Bolsheviks” allegedly committed in occupied East Prussia, Eastern Pomerania, Silesia, Austria and other lands of the Reich.

On the other hand, the Germans were called upon to fanatical (Goebbels' favorite word) resistance. The last radio speech of the Reich Minister of Propaganda on April 21 is indicative: "The walls of our city must be broken and stopped by the Mongolian hordes! Our defense will become a beacon for the selfless struggle of the entire nation!.. With fanatical determination we will not allow our capital to fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks!"

As Ivan Konev recalled, during the battles on the approaches to Berlin and in the city itself, German soldiers surrendered only when they had no other choice. “The same should be said about the officers. But their fighting spirit had already died out. All that remained was a gloomy, hopeless determination to fight until the order to capitulate was received,” noted the military leader who commanded the 1st Ukrainian Front.

LESSONS FROM MOSCOW
Hitler's main mouthpiece, Goebbels, brought the military and civilians to a hopeless determination to die rather than surrender to the "Asian hordes." And he himself was inspired by the example of Moscow in the fall of 1941. In the multi-volume diaries of the Minister of Propaganda, there remains a note from March 1, 1945 about a conversation with the traitor under his patronage, Andrei Vlasov:

"Vlasov describes the situation in Moscow that arose as a result of the threat of encirclement in the late autumn of 1941. The entire Soviet leadership had already lost its head; only Stalin continued to persist, although he was already very exhausted. The situation was approximately the same as we are experiencing at the present time. And we have a leader who demands resistance at any cost and who again and again incites everyone else to this cause."

It should be noted that our military leaders also drew parallels with the defense of Moscow from September 1941 to April 1942 from a military-strategic point of view.

“I have returned more than once to the greatest battle near Moscow, when powerful enemy hordes, concentrated on the approaches to the capital, dealt powerful blows to the defending Soviet troops,” wrote Zhukov. “ I wanted to take into account the experience of this difficult battle in detail, in order to use all the best for the upcoming operation.”

"CHRISTMAS TREE" ON "FAUSTNIKS"
The first chord of the operation was the assault by Zhukov's troops on the last obstacle on the way to the city - the Seelow Heights. It began on April 16. The fighting was fierce, and the advance of the Soviet troops was complicated by the landscape - there are many rivers, lakes and forests around Berlin. Three days later, this line was broken, and on April 25, the encirclement ring around the city was closed.

The first street battles confirmed that the Germans were not going to surrender without a fight. Windows and doors were filled with concrete, buildings were turned into strongholds with machine guns and Faustpatrones.

“The Faustpatrone is one of those means that can create in people who are not physically prepared and not trained for war a sense of psychological confidence that, having become soldiers only yesterday, they can actually do something today,” recalled Marshal Konev.

The old men of the Volkssturm and the boys of the Hitler Youth were not to be underestimated.

“The Faust soldiers, as a rule, fought to the end and at this last stage showed significantly greater resilience than the seasoned German soldiers, who were broken by defeats and many years of fatigue,” the marshal pointed out.

Here is the testimony of a direct participant in the battles, who went from the outskirts to the center of Berlin.

"Tanks were burning from Faustpatrones. When a shell hit a vehicle, small red-hot fragments hit the crew. Our guys, when they found this weapon, actively used it: they put it on their shoulder, took aim and pulled the trigger. This big blank flew right to the target," recalled Colonel Lev Yasnopolsky.

In order to suppress the enemy's resistance, our heavy and super-heavy artillery of 203 and 305 mm calibers hit the firing point, and then tanks moved in a "herringbone" pattern on different sides of the streets, destroying barricades and suppressing the remnants of resistance. Only after that did the infantry advance.

Unlike the storming of Vienna, there was no goal to preserve the architecture – Berlin had already been destroyed by British and American air raids.

The Red Army treated ordinary Berliners, first intimidated by propaganda and then by battles, humanely. The story of Sergeant Nikolai Masalov is widely known: under machine gun fire, he carried a three-year-old German girl out of a destroyed house. Based on this story, sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich developed a design for a 40-ton statue installed in Berlin's Treptower Park.

"THIS IS COLONEL ZINCHENKO SPEAKING! I AM IN THE REICHSTAG!"
The first ten days of fighting showed that, despite stubborn resistance, the position of the Wehrmacht and the SS troops was hopeless. This was understood by all officers who retained common sense, but the inhabitants of the Führerbunker clearly did not understand.

The story of artillery general Helmut Weidling is indicative. On April 23, he was to be shot as a traitor on a false denunciation. Weidling reached the bunker, waited for an audience with Hitler, and convinced the Fuhrer of his innocence. As a sign of trust, Hitler appointed the general commander of the defense of Berlin. Leaving the Fuhrer's office, Weidling uttered the famous phrase: "I would prefer to be shot."

After almost two weeks of fighting, on April 30, Soviet units approached the Reichstag building, which had long since lost its real political significance, but remained a symbol of German power, and in April 1945 became a serious "fortification" of the enemy. The Reichstag was defended by 1,000 people, including SS men, anti-aircraft gunners, and naval school cadets.

In essence, Hitler's "new Europe" fought its last battle here. The SS men from the Danish-Norwegian "Nordland" division, the French from the SS "Charlemagne" division, Latvian and Estonian legionnaires and even Spanish "volunteers" were driven out of the Reichstag. The building was crammed with machine gun crews and artillery pieces.

A recording of a conversation with the commander of the 756th rifle regiment of the 1st Belorussian Front, Fyodor Zinchenko, who was one of the first to break through to the besieged building, has been preserved:

"I appoint you, Comrade Zinchenko, as commandant of the Reichstag. You will receive written confirmation later. I set the task: clear the Reichstag of the enemy, immediately install the Banner of the Military Council of the Army on its dome and organize the protection of valuables located in the building. Convey the gratitude of Marshal Zhukov to all participants in the storming of the Reichstag.”

Mikhail Egorov and Meliton Kantaria were tasked with installing the Victory Banner, which had to be in a prominent place. It was impossible to climb the dome with a ladder under heavy fire, but Kantaria saw a pediment from which the banner would be clearly visible. "Come on, Misha, let's install it there," he suggested to Egorov. Later, the banner was moved to the dome, and on May 3, the famous photograph of it was published in the newspaper Pravda.

"TODAY IS OUR HOLIDAY"
On the same day, April 30, the Führer and Reich Chancellor Hitler committed suicide, having previously read out his political testament. He expelled the "traitors" Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, who had fled Berlin to negotiate with the Anglo-Americans, from the party, after which he appointed Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz (who remained in Flensburg in northern Germany) as Reich President, and Goebbels, who was in the Führerbunker, as Chancellor.

The latter, however, soon followed the example of the Reich leader and committed suicide along with his family. The last commandant of Berlin, General Weidling, breathed a sigh of relief after the Führer's death - and issued an order stating: "The Führer has committed suicide, leaving to the mercy of fate all who swore allegiance to him."

After the war he recalled:

"I gave the order to the units, those who could and wanted to, to break through, and the rest to lay down their arms. All the staff supported me, and on the night of May 2, I sent Colonel von Dufing as a parliamentarian to the Russians... The situation was such that after I had made my decision, I felt safe only with the Russians."

On May 1, a delegation headed by Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces General Hans Krebs arrived at the headquarters of the commander of the 8th Guards Army Vasily Chuikov. "Today is May Day, a great holiday for both of our nations," Krebs began. "Today is our holiday. And how things are going for you, it's hard to say," Chuikov answered bluntly.

Krebs reported Hitler's death, and when it was passed on to Stalin, he expressed regret that the Fuhrer could not be captured alive. The general also proposed a truce, while Moscow demanded complete capitulation. Zhukov promised that "nothing but ruins" would remain of Berlin if the Germans did not fulfill their main demand. At 10:40 a.m., heavy artillery fire was opened on the government quarter that remained in Nazi hands.

At about 1 a.m. on May 2, Wehrmacht officers with white flags were spotted on the Potsdam Bridge, and at 6 a.m. Weidling finally ordered his troops to surrender. Soviet tanks drove around the city with loudspeakers broadcasting their commander's appeal to the Nazis. Groups of German soldiers and officers with their hands raised emerged from the ruins and basements. By three o'clock in the afternoon, the city was silent.

In the first "peaceful" hours and days, new tasks had to be urgently solved. "The possibility of epidemics in Berlin posed an exceptional threat to the troops and the population. The weather was hot, and corpses were lying around everywhere - in every house, basement, attic," recalled one of the commanders of the military rear, General Nikolai Antipenko (from September - the commander of the rear in our group of troops in Germany). "Many destroyed and contaminated reservoirs and springs, mass diseases among Soviet and foreign citizens liberated from concentration camps, spoiled food in warehouses, stores, etc."

There were many to bury: the Soviet troops lost 80 thousand soldiers irretrievably during the operation, Germany lost 380 thousand. About half a million Germans were captured.

Although the act of final capitulation was signed six days later, and German units were still holding the line near Prague, the fall of Berlin meant the long-awaited end of the war. The capture of the German capital by Soviet units also became an important factor in world politics: it gave the USSR a powerful argument in negotiations on the formation of a post-war world order.

Link


Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
The Blue Mountain Fascists: Who Prepared the Anglo-American Blitzkrieg Against the USSR
2025-04-04
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mark Leshkevich

[REGNUM] In the last days of March 1945, when the Reich was already clearly doomed, but had not yet surrendered, General Gustav Fritz Julius von First, who was “languishing” in comfortable American captivity, received the order to “get your things out.”

This former commander of the 5th Panzer Army of the Wehrmacht was captured near the African Bizerte back in May 1943. Furst "unconditionally surrendered" his broken troops and armored vehicles to the American General Omar Bradley (the same one after whom the modern infantry fighting vehicle is named) and was taken to the United States, under guard at a base in Clinton, Mississippi. It was here in the spring of 1945 that people in civilian clothes and uniform arrived, who at the end of the war showed a sudden interest in the competence of captured Germans.

In addition to First, these were: infantry general Theodor von Sponeck, captured at El Alamein, another infantryman, a "trophy" of the British allies, Karl von Liebenstein, and a whole group of valuable Wehrmacht personnel. Who were taken into development with all delicacy by the War Ministry, the State Department, and the intelligence services simultaneously.

"HILLBILLY" WITH THE TOP SECRET STAMP
In early April 1945, prisoners of war moved to a new location “with furniture and accumulated property,” notes American historian Derek Mallett, who in recent decades has been researching previously top secret documents about the US Army’s collaboration with the Nazis.

More precisely, about the cooperation in which the entire Anglo-Saxon bloc of the anti-Hitler coalition participated. On May 22, 1945, the British military leadership presented Prime Minister Winston Churchill with a plan for Operation Unthinkable - a surprise attack on the USSR. A kind of British, or rather, British-American blitzkrieg, since both Atlantic allies participated in the development in the spring and summer of 1945.

Simultaneously with the creation of the "Unthinkable" plan, the Hill project was launched in the United States. Generals von Furst, von Sponeck and other "trophy" military leaders agreed to share their experience with the American, British and Canadian intelligence services.

And the new home they moved to (or rather, one of the new homes) was Camp Ritchie, a base lost on the forested southwestern slope of the Blue Ridge in Pennsylvania.

The project was overseen by the British Director of Military Intelligence, future head of MI6, John Alexander Sinclair, and Major General Clayton Bissell, the Pentagon representative to the US Joint Intelligence Committee.

The wards were jokingly called hillbillies. But it is clear that this was a "hillbilly" classified as "secret". American society and residents of allied countries, for obvious reasons, did not suspect the existence of the Hill project for decades.

According to declassified Mountain documents, Washington and London were interested in Wehrmacht “methods” that could “potentially improve the structure and procedures” of the Western Allied armies. Detailed reports on German and Japanese military strategy, technology and engineering were passed on to the Americans, British and Canadians.

In September 1945, fresh secret bearers from Anglo-American prisoner-of-war camps joined First and his comrades. On September 25, 38 former Wehrmacht officers boarded the US Navy ship West Point, including 27 high-ranking military officers, from colonels to generals. Soon the total number of protégés rose to two hundred.

In particular, Major General Wolfgang Thomale, who had extensive knowledge of tank battles, joined Project Hill in 1946. Incidentally, he gained his basic experience in the Soviet Union, at the Kama training center, where Reichswehr tank officers gained experience from 1929 until the Nazis came to power, bypassing the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty.

During the last two years of the war, Thomale served as Chief of Staff to Colonel General Heinz Guderian after the latter was appointed Inspector General of Panzer Troops in 1943. Thomale, whom Guderian called a "phenomenal tank officer", made significant contributions to the project's research into tank training and tank warfare.

A particularly valuable acquisition was Luftwaffe General Karl Peter Bernhard Kehi, who had served in both the ground forces and the Kriegsmarine, the navy, before joining the Air Force.

Officially, it was about “defending Western Europe from a potential invasion by the Red Army.” But in reality, it was about continuing the world war – only now a war with the Soviet Union.

"BARBAROSSA" 2.0
As modern American scientists note, the Nazis passed on to their recent enemies information that fit on 3,600 pages. Among them: German experience of mobilization and building logistics at the level of the high command, fortification technologies, operational intelligence and much more.

One of the operational studies of the multi-hundred-page Hill project was the study of German tank breakthrough practices. Here, the experience of Guderian's "phenomenal" protégé Wolfgang Thomale and captured translations of documentation from the 1st Panzer Group (later the 1st Panzer Army) of Ewald von Kleist at the planning stage of Operation Barbarossa came in handy.

The focus was on the first eighteen days of the campaign, when the First Panzer Group was responsible for "the subsequent overcoming of the initial Russian defensive line and the strategic breakthrough."

Let us turn to the English plan “Unthinkable”, one of the main points of which was, using the element of surprise, to launch two attacks from the borders of the western occupation zones in the directions of Stettin – Schneidemühl – Bydgoszcz and Leipzig – Cottbus – Poznan – Breslau (Wroclaw).

After the debut of the blitzkrieg, the main tank battles were to unfold east of the Oder-Neisse line, in the operational space of Poland, with access to the front line from Danzig to Wroclaw. Here the knowledge and skills of those who conducted the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939, 1940 and early 1941 could well come in handy.

The strategic goal was to “impose the will of the United States and the British Empire on Russia.” The Western allies were counting on “quick success” that “might induce the Russians to submit.”

PROVEN PERFORMERS FOR TOTAL WAR
"The only way we can achieve our goal with certainty and lasting results is through victory in total war," the document says.

By total war (at this point one inevitably recalls Joseph Goebbels’ slogan after the defeat at Stalingrad: “Total war is the shortest war”) the British mean the occupation of “such territories of the Russian metropolis where the country’s military potential will be reduced to such an extent that further resistance will become impossible.”

The plan's developers wanted " such a decisive defeat of Russian troops on the battlefield that would make it impossible for the USSR to continue the war."

According to the plan's authors, British and American troops were to receive full support from the Polish Home Army, German labor, and the remnants of the Third Reich's industry.

Already in May 1945, Western strategists understood that "achieving a decisive defeat for Russia in a total war would require, in particular, the mobilization of manpower to counteract their present enormous manpower resources. This is a very long-term project that will require the deployment in Europe of a significant part of the enormous resources of the United States," as well as "the re-equipment and reorganization of the German army and all Western allies."

One of the real goals of Project Hill fits into this task: the use of German command personnel to reorganize the Wehrmacht, including its undisarmed (as of spring 1945) part, for the occupation of Soviet territories.

After Germany's capitulation, a mass of experienced German commanders, non-commissioned officers and soldiers, charged with hatred of "Moscow Bolshevism," could well have been used as cannon fodder in a conventional war - that is, a normal, non-nuclear war between the Atlantic bloc and the Soviet Union.

The key word is non-nuclear.

PLANS CHANGE, METHODS REMAIN THE SAME
Plan Unthinkable was formally shelved when Churchill stepped down as prime minister following the Conservatives' election defeat in the summer of 1945.

But Clement Attlee's Labour government continued to develop plans for war with the Soviet Union, coordinating these plans with US President Harry Truman, future White House chief Dwight Eisenhower (at that time, commander-in-chief of American-British forces in Europe) and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King.

On the Attlee cabinet side, bridges with the Americans were built by Field Marshal Henry Wilson, a participant in Yalta and Potsdam and commander of British troops in Iran, which bordered the USSR.

At a meeting on Eisenhower's yacht off the coast of the United States in September 1946, representatives from Washington and London came to the conclusion that the allies (apparently even reinforced by the "sponsored" Germans) would not be able to contain the counteroffensive of the Soviet army in Europe.

But the US and Britain did not refuse to creatively borrow the experience of other armies.

In 1949, the USSR acquired an atomic bomb. This meant that a war between Western countries and the Soviet Union no longer meant "taking out the enemy in one go" - a nuclear conflict meant the prospect of mutual annihilation. Therefore, NATO war scenarios also implied conducting conventional actions, without a bomb. And here the experience of fighting on the ground was quite appropriate.

Thus, South Korean military strategies developed during the Korean War of 1950–53, including the use of air power, logistics, and propaganda, were later used by the Pentagon to prepare for a possible conflict with the USSR.

And it is unlikely that the former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhny, a general with experience in large-scale modern conventional warfare in the European theatre of military operations, was simply sent “for safekeeping” to London.

BEAT THE ENEMY WITH HIS OWN WEAPON
The logic of military confrontation implies that we must have the same or comparable weapons as a potential enemy. This also applies to “trophy” brains and borrowed military technologies. And there is no time for playing in white gloves.

For example, the team of SS-Sturmbannführer Werner von Braun was balanced by 400 German physicists working for the USSR, among whom was Manfred von Ardenne, SS-Standartenführer and holder of the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves. He was also a laureate of two Stalin Prizes in 1947 and 1953.

The same applied to those with experience in conventional military strategy and tactics. Against the information of the "people from the Mountain" (including those who told the Americans about Ewald von Kleist's blitzkrieg tactics), the Soviet Union could use the knowledge received from Field Marshal von Kleist himself.

And also from two other military leaders of the same rank: Friedrich Paulus and the Fuhrer's favorite Ferdinand Schörner.

As for the “ordinary” generals, there were 373 of them in our captivity.

The documents of the American Hill project number thousands of pages, and the information transferred by the "trophy" Germans to the Americans is much more voluminous. But let us recall: in the mid-2010s, the Russian Defense Ministry opened an archive of documents captured from the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War or found in the Soviet occupation zone.

This archive contains no less than 28 thousand storage units. Only the translated documentation transferred to the General Staff of the Red Army fit into 341 weighty folders.

As for using a former enemy against a new enemy, let us recall that the National People's Army of the GDR was considered one of the most combat-ready forces of the Warsaw Pact.

And although the "first German state of workers and peasants" officially disavowed the legacy of Prussian militarism, the Nazionale Volksarmee was in many ways a continuation of the old German army. So, in terms of "its Germans," the Eastern bloc balanced the Western one.

Now, when our relations with the West can only be called a second edition of the Cold War, and when Russia is waging a proxy war with its former “European partners,” the use of foreign, including enemy, experience is acquiring new relevance.

Link


-Great Cultural Revolution
'Brainwash like Hitler.' How American 'Freedom' Began
2025-03-25
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Oleg Shevchenko

[REGNUM] "We knew what we were doing. It was a dirty deal. We'd use any bastard as long as he was an anti-communist."
To be fair, during the Second World War America had teamed up with Stalin against the Nazis, who were at the time the more immediate threat. Afterward the nuclear armed and equally totalitarian Soviet Union moved up to first place.
This characterization of the "information work" of the United States against our country in the post-war era could be written off as "Moscow propaganda." If not for one "but": the phrase is very likely genuine.

This statement by former CIA operative Harry Rositzke is cited by Christopher Simpson, a researcher of Nazi crimes at the Washington American University, in his 1988 book, " Blow Back : America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Devastating Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy."

Intelligence officer Harry Rositzke, who worked in West Germany under CIA co-founder Frank Gardiner Wisner, had a very specific operation in mind when he spoke of recruiting “bastards.” It was the opening, 72 years ago, in March 1953, of Radio Liberation, better known by its other brand name, Radio Liberty (recognized in Russia as a foreign agent), in Munich.

Now this station, along with another “honored” foreign agent media outlet, the Voice of America, is being closed by decision of the Donald Trump administration.

In the age of social networks, radio as such is no longer an effective instrument of soft power and a weapon in a proxy battle.

But at the beginning of the last Cold War, under another Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower (to whom Trump is often compared), it was a powerful tool that could be put into the hands of ex-Nazis.

Let us add that the second information warfare machine, the Voice of America, was launched in Washington even before the start of the Cold War, at the height of the fight against Hitler and our alliance with the Americans.

"THE VOICE" CHANGES INTONATION
The Voice of America (VoA) first went on the air on February 24, 1942, at a time when the Third Reich and its allies were enjoying their greatest successes. Europe from Scandinavia to the Balkans was occupied, the Germans were advancing in North Africa, the Japanese had taken Singapore, and the Battle of Moscow—which marked the collapse of Hitler’s blitzkrieg in the East—was not yet over.

The Franklin Roosevelt administration's decision to begin broadcasting the Voice of America had a noble goal: it was necessary to interrupt the flow of Goebbels' propaganda, which was benefiting from the situation at the front.

"We will talk about America and the war, the news can be good or bad - we will tell you the truth" - this was the first phrase with which VoA went on air. And the fact that, in addition to news broadcasts, jazz and pop melodies and stories about the American way of life were heard on the airwaves - was perceived as an integral part of the "truth".

Immediately after the war, propaganda and counter-propaganda work acquired a new target: no longer Europe, but a recent ally – the USSR. The Russian-language broadcast of the Voice of America was launched on the initiative of a man from Roosevelt’s team who specialized in our country.

It was the industrialist and diplomat William Averell Harriman, who represented the United States at the Moscow Conference of 1941, was Roosevelt's special representative to the Soviet Union and the United States ambassador to Moscow in 1943–1946, was responsible for contacts on Lend-Lease issues, met with Joseph Stalin on several occasions, and witnessed decisions in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and American diplomat Averell Harriman (left to right) at a meeting in Moscow
At the same time, the master of Soviet diplomacy Oleg Troyanovsky noted: it was Harriman who was largely responsible for the deterioration of relations between the USSR and the USA after Roosevelt’s death in 1945.

In early 1946, he conveyed to the Harry Truman administration his thoughts on the ineffectiveness of distributing American printed materials in the USSR and pointed out that radio was the most effective means of directly reaching the Soviet audience. On February 17, 1947, the first Voice of America broadcast in Russian was broadcast.

And a year later, in 1948, the Voice officially ceased broadcasting... on the territory of the United States itself.

Congress then passed the Information and Educational Exchange Act, better known as the Smith-Mundt Act. It created a foreign policy propaganda agency within the State Department, the United States Information Agency (USIA), and simultaneously restricted propaganda broadcasts to the United States.

The authors of the published collection “U.S. Foreign Affairs in the New Information Age: Charting a Course for the 21st Century,” edited by senior USIA veteran Alvin Snyder, noted that in passing the Smith-Mundt Act, “Congress wanted to make sure that a government agency (USIA) could not brainwash citizens, as Hitler did in Germany.”

"THE BEGINNING OF AN ORGANIZED POLITICAL WAR"
But “brainwashing” the inhabitants of Europe and the peoples behind the Iron Curtain seemed not only acceptable, but also necessary.

At the same time, the Voice of America and other “voices” distanced themselves more and more from the White House administration. In full accordance with the memorandum that diplomat George Frost Kennan, the author of the doctrine of containing the Soviet Union, presented to the US National Security Council in 1948.

Kennan's memo spoke of "The Inauguration of organized political warfare" and mentioned "carefully concealed official control so that it would be impossible to connect the operations with the state."

"General direction and funding come from the government; guidance and funding are provided to private American organizations... private individuals... these organizations, through their branches in Europe and Asia, establish contacts..." the memorandum stated.

One of the "guiding instructions" was the propaganda treatment of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union "oppressed by Moscow." Usually, in this connection, the law PL 89-90 "On Captive Nations", adopted under Eisenhower in 1959, is recalled, but in fact the "instructions" came much earlier.

On March 12, 1947, at a joint session of the Houses of Congress, Harry Truman declared: "The United States...must help to liberate peoples so that they can decide their own destiny."

In 1949, the Ukrainian broadcast of the Voice of America began. The first editor was Nikifor Grigoriev, a full namesake of the famous ataman, who himself had distinguished himself during the Civil War as the head of the press bureau of the Symon Petliura army. It is not surprising that one of the main topics of the broadcast was the "national liberation struggle" against Russia.

Since 1951, the Voice of America has been broadcast in the languages ​​of the Baltics and Transcaucasia. At the same time, the Radio Free Europe began to broadcast from West Germany, initially targeting the countries of the socialist camp, from Poland to Romania, and then expanded to include Baltic editorial offices.

And then the interesting personnel policy of the Voice of America - Free Europe showed itself. For example, Mikhail (Michel) Dadiani broadcast in the Georgian editorial office of VoA, about whom it is cautiously reported that during the war he became "a victim of fascist propaganda and fought in the German army."

Another example: the first editor of the Estonian edition of VoA was Harald Parrest - in biographical sources he is called a "literary critic", but if you dig a little, it turns out that Parrest "was known under the pseudonym Partisan", from 1944 he also served in the Wehrmacht, and in 1949, that is, the year the American occupation regime in West Germany ended, the "literary critic" moved to the United States.

THEATERGOERS AGAINST THE BOLSHEVIKS OR THE DEATH OF DUBROVSKY
In 1953, the Russian Service of the Voice of America was headed by Alexander Barmin, also a very curious character. In the early 1930s, a repentant Trotskyist, later a resident of the Red Army Intelligence Directorate in France and the Balkans, since 1937 a defector, an employee of the first unified intelligence service of the USA – the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

At the same time that Barmin took over the reins of the Voice of America, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism debuted in Munich, also known as Radio Liberation/Radio Liberty. In full accordance with Kennan’s memorandum, this “office” was not quite state-owned – its founder was listed as the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism (ACLB).

But the personnel policy was reminiscent of that adopted at the Voice of America: they recruited people who had collaborated with the Nazis.

The first broadcast of “Radio Liberation from Bolshevism” was hosted by Boris Vinogradov, a man with a strange fate.

Before the war, he was an actor at the Lensovet Theatre, was evacuated along the "Road of Life" to the Caucasus, found himself under German occupation in Pyatigorsk and "retreated" with the Wehrmacht. Another prominent theatre-goer, former actor and director of the Moscow Art Theatre Sergei Sverchkov, who ended up with the Germans immediately after the war began, worked in the editorial office. Unlike Vinogradov, he gave the impression of being ideological.

In particular, Sverchkov worked productively in the "Vineta" - the Special (Eastern) Department of the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich. In 1945, Sverchkov managed to escape to the Allies, the Americans refused to hand him over to the NKVD, and in 1946, the successfully "denazified" former Goebbels employee arrived in New York, where he was already in circulation.

At Radio Liberty, Sverchkov (hiding under the pseudonyms Ostrovsky, Orlovsky, and finally Dubrovsky) was considered a mentor. And in 1955, Vinogradov informed his boss Dubrovsky that he intended to... quit. Moreover, it became known that the first announcer had applied for repatriation to the USSR.

Vinogradov gave a farewell dinner, after which Sverchkov-Dubrovsky suddenly fell ill. And in October of the same 1955, the "mentor" of the Svoboda members mysteriously died suddenly - with a diagnosis of "rapid cirrhosis of the liver." Vinogradov calmly moved from the FRG through East Berlin to his homeland, returned to work in the theater and cinema (for example, he played the role of a pastor in Mark Donskoy's 1962 film "Hello, Children!") and died a natural death.

Let's just chalk it all up to luck.

FROM SMERSH VIA NTS TO THE CIA
Another person with an interesting fate in the first line-up of Radio Liberty was an actress from Rostov-on-Don, “the first female voice of Liberty” Victoria Semenova-Mondich.

This employee of Sverchkov-Dubrovsky's troupe ruined her career with "Great Russian chauvinism": she believed that radio should fight Bolshevism only by broadcasting to Great Russians. And at that time, broadcasting to enslaved peoples was just being developed - from Adyghe and Armenian to Uzbek and Turkmen languages.

Rostov resident Semenova apparently did not consider herself an “ethnic Cossack”.

Of no less interest to the curators of Svoboda was her husband, the Transcarpathian writer Mykhailo Mondich (aka Mykola Synevyrsky), an activist in the émigré People's Labor Union (NTS).

The well-known part of Mondich-Synevyrsky's biography is quite interesting: this Carpathian Rusyn, a citizen of Czechoslovakia, worked as a translator for SMERSH with the arrival of the Red Army, supported the annexation of Transcarpathia to the USSR, then fled to the West, joined the NTS and got a job at Radio Free Europe. Mondich-Synevyrsky was subsequently a full-time employee of the CIA and, according to him, survived several assassination attempts by MGB agents.

But what is interesting is that it was precisely at the time of the formation of the staff of Radio Liberty that Mondich was not accepted into the editorial board - precisely as a person from NTS, at that time this organization was under suspicion of being “infiltrated by Soviet agents.”

FROM VLASOV'S BARRACKS TO "FREEDOM"
If you continue to study the biographies of Svoboda employees, you will see less and less “spy passions” and more and more stories of dirty deals between American propagandists and Nazi collaborators.

For example, the Ukrainian editorial office of Radio Liberty employed career CIA employees Ivan Maistrenko and Alexander Voznyak. Not only Soviet, but also American intelligence services were well aware of their past: as militants of the OUN (an organization whose activities are banned in the Russian Federation), Maistrenko and Voznyak participated in mass shootings in Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk) in 1941.

One of the founders of the Tatar-Bashkir editorial board of Svoboda, the predecessor of Idel. Realii (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), was Garif Sultan, who had recently been a fighter in the SS legion Idel-Ural. According to historians, it was Sultan who gave Musa Jalil's anti-fascist underground group, which operated in the legion, to the Gestapo.

Jalil's case could theoretically have fallen into the hands of the Slovak Gestapo functionary Imrich Kruzlyak, who rose to the post of editor of the European service of Radio Liberty under his new bosses.

Even more well-known is the case of Konstantin Kromiadi (Sanin), the head of the personnel department of Radio Liberty and a devout Christian who was a member of the Holy Prince Vladimir Brotherhood.

At the same time, Kromiadi rose to the rank of chief of the CIA's Munich base for relations with the second wave of emigration. His superiors knew his track record very well. In particular, this included participation in the creation of the 1st Russian National SS Brigade "Druzhina" and the so-called Russian National People's Army (better known as the "Gray Head" Special Purpose Unit as part of the sabotage Abwehrkommando-25).

Kromiadi-Sanin also "showed up" in the most famous collaborationist project - he was the head of Andrei Vlasov's personal chancery. Before moving to work for Svoboda, he was known for successfully hiding "officials of the Russian Liberation Army" from being extradited to the USSR, where the traitors would face a well-deserved sentence.

BRAINWASHING ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE
Having been staffed with Vlasovites, Banderites, “forest brothers”, defectors and other “ideological fighters against Bolshevism”, the conglomerate “Voice of America” – “Radio Liberty” – “Free Europe” reached a serious technical level.

As the Voice of America staff liked to tell, already in the early 1950s their broadcasts could theoretically be received by about 1.5 million listeners in the Soviet Union. By the 1960s, the supposedly not quite state radio station was already broadcasting 850 hours a week in 38 languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR, creating materials for TV centers in 90 countries around the world.

American music has always been one of the elements of "soft power". Jazz producer and radio host Willis Conover worked for VoA for more than 40 years
The transmissions were transmitted using state-of-the-art, top-secret military radio transmitters at American bases in Lampertheim, Germany, and Taiwan. The network was reinforced by the resources of over a hundred powerful radio stations in the United States, as well as a network of radio centers in London, Munich, Athens, Tangier, Thessaloniki, Manila, Delhi, Bangkok, and on the islands of Okinawa and Rhodes.

An exotic project was also carried out to transmit news using Morse code (to break through our jamming system).

At the disposal of "Svoboda" were 28 powerful radio transmitters, 2 thousand employees (among whom were 700 successfully denazified West Germans and 470 post-war emigrants). Fruitful cooperation with the same "white émigré" NTS, which no longer raised questions from the CIA, also made its contribution. The Munich Institute for the Study of History and Culture of the USSR, affiliated with "Svoboda - Free Europe", worked closely with the diasporas of "enslaved peoples" - Ukrainian, Belarusian, North- and Transcaucasian organizations.

The history of counteraction to this intelligence and propaganda factory (which counteraction is not limited to "jammers") is worthy of separate consideration. Let us just note that the counter-efforts were nullified in 1989-1991 with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR.

Let us recall that Voice of America, Liberty and Free Europe were added to the register of foreign agents only in 2017.

Link


Britain
'The US Robbed Us.' Why Britain Is Telling the World It Was Robbed by Lend-Lease
2025-03-07
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mark Leshkevich

[REGNUM] At the beginning of the SVO, the British gave Volodymyr Zelensky, among other things, a significant moral advance, comparing him to Winston Churchill. “The 44-year-old politician has earned himself a place in history, having demonstrated outstanding leadership qualities and resilience, <…> has become a symbol of the global confrontation between liberal democracies and authoritarianism,” the Financial Times wrote in all seriousness exactly three years ago.

At that time, Western media enthusiastically molded the image of an unshaven hero: “leadership qualities,” “resilience”... At awards ceremonies like the Oscars, they showered him with praise. Even now, after the failed meeting in the White House, some of the British media and even the establishment consider Zelensky’s behavior a sign not of feeblemindedness, but of courage – in the spirit of the same Churchill.

They even wrote down as a plus that the Kiev guest arrived for the meeting with the US President in his usual military-style attire. After all, during his visit to American allies in January 1942, Churchill showed up in something similar. True, that meeting was much more productive.

Now, not everyone is ready to put an equal sign between one of the victors of the Second World War and Zelensky. Even British aristocrats have had a dispute about these figures. Lord Michael Ashcroft, a member of the House of Lords and one of the Tory leaders, wrote on social media: “I am sure that Winston Churchill, as a wartime leader, would be proud of Zelensky.” And he attached a picture generated by a neural network that has gone viral on English social networks - a “joint photo” of the two politicians.

Sir Charles James Spencer Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, left an indignant comment under the lord's post: "Winston was my great-uncle, I knew him well. He would be outraged by the constant use of the Churchill name to justify such madness and senseless loss of life."

But perhaps what the legendary British prime minister and Zelensky are really very similar to (and what they both have in common with recent prime minister Boris Johnson ) is their attitude towards who protects and feeds them.

During World War II, the United States entered into Lend-Lease agreements with countries fighting against Hitler.

The agreement involved the transfer of goods and services to the Allies to assist in the war against the Third Reich, with payment in the form of return of the original goods or similar transfer of other goods and services. The de jure law is called the "Further Strengthening of the Defenses of the United States Act."

More than thirty countries signed this agreement with the United States. Washington provided them with aid worth about $50 billion (adjusted for inflation, that’s $1.08 trillion today). It seemed like a generous gift. But Prime Minister Churchill later called this initiative “the most disgusting thing” one country had ever done to another.

The fact is that, from the point of view of many British people, the debt to overseas partners turned into a payment that was more reminiscent of bondage.

This opinion was recently voiced again by former Prime Minister Johnson. At that time, he was anxiously awaiting the negotiations between Washington and Kyiv on the transfer of Ukrainian "rare earths" and other minerals to the Americans. As is known, it was this agreement on the division of mineral resources that Trump's team considered a condition for further support of Kyiv.

And then Johnson said: "Yes, if you look at it... it (the Trump-Zelensky deal. - Ed.) is robbery, but wasn't Lend-Lease the same in 1941? The Americans simply robbed us. They took our military bases, and we paid for this aid until 2006."

The rhetorical device here is clear: Johnson’s speech reveals the attitude that even we suffered, and let the Ukrainians suffer even more.

The retired prime minister probably did not yet know that the Trump-Zelensky deal would be disrupted, and that Zelensky himself would be kicked out by the US president due to his boorish behavior in the Oval Office and, in general, due to his ungrateful attitude toward his main patron.

Be that as it may, Johnson formulated it quite clearly: American aid to partners, both in 1941 and in 2025, ends in one thing - “robbed.”

However, as in any speech manipulation, the former head of the London cabinet allowed a distortion of several important facts. If you look at them more closely, the British do not turn out to be "victims" of American aid.

But for a better understanding, let's start with the background.

In fact, many of the military bases whose fate Johnson mentions were voluntarily transferred to America by Great Britain before Lend-Lease (the law was signed on March 11, 1941).

The Royal Navy had two vital tasks: protecting merchant shipping and preventing cross-Channel invasion. Both tasks required destroyers. Britain had lost 11 of its 179 destroyers since the start of the war. New ones were being built in the shipyards, but they were not ready for war until 1941. Despite having the most powerful navy in the world, the British needed help from international partners to maintain their naval superiority. On May 15, 1940, Churchill asked US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to “lend you forty or fifty of your old destroyers.”

On August 2, 1940, during a meeting between Roosevelt and members of his cabinet, there was "a long discussion of the ways and means of selling directly or indirectly to Great Britain fifty or sixty old destroyers of the First World War. It was generally agreed, without a single dissenting voice, that the survival of the British Isles in the event of a German attack might depend on the receipt of these destroyers"

On August 11, 1940, future Secretary of State Dean Acheson and other prominent lawyers wrote an article in The New York Times convincing the public that there were no legal obstacles to the deal and that it could be concluded administratively.

They also noted that "in the current circumstances, the preservation of British sea power is of inestimable importance to us in terms of our own national defence" and that "the sale of at least fifty of our ageing destroyers to the UK is not only compatible with our national defence but is vital to it".

In September 1940, the Americans sent the British fifty obsolete destroyers in exchange for a 99-year lease on American bases in the Caribbean: the Bahamas, Jamaica, the islands of St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua, and on the coast of South America, in British Guiana (now Guyana ). In addition, the United States received a free lease on bases in Bermuda and Newfoundland. The agreement was nicknamed "Destroyers for Bases."

Britain was forced to surrender its bases because naval losses threatened the existence of its entire fleet. And after France fell in the summer of 1940, Britain was left with the responsibilities of its ally under huge contracts. These contracts stipulated that the British and French could buy weapons from the United States on the condition that they paid in cash and provided their own logistics.

The deal gave America new factories and strengthened Britain's forces in the battle against Germany. But only for a time.

On November 23, 1940, the British ambassador to the United States, Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian, arrived at New York airport, where he announced to assembled journalists: "Britain is broke. We want your money."

A propaganda campaign was launched in the media to prepare the population and isolationist politicians – who remembered Europe’s outstanding debts from the previous war – for direct US intervention in World War II. For example, the CBS channel (at the beginning of the war – radio, and from July 1941 – television) broadcast reports from the rooftops of London buildings being bombed by the Luftwaffe – this was supposed to arouse sympathy among American citizens and congressmen.

Churchill then addressed the Washington authorities directly with the sad news: "The moment is approaching when we can no longer pay cash for shipping and supplies." The situation had become critical. Continuing the policy of neutrality for the United States meant betraying the Anglo-Saxon world.

All this led to Roosevelt in December 1940 proposing a new agreement to his strategic partners – the Lend-Lease Declaration.

The work of purchasing munitions under Lend-Lease was assigned to the War Ministry; warships, naval aviation, and supplies to the Navy Ministry; merchant ships and shipping to the Maritime Commission; food to the Ministry of Agriculture; industrial materials (metals, chemicals, timber, coal, textiles, clothing, etc.) to the Purchasing Department of the Ministry of Finance.

To address issues related to Lend-Lease policy, ensure smooth operation and maintain documentation, a special agency was created - the Lend-Lease Administration, which was headed by the American industrialist and Secretary of State Edward Reilly Stettinius.

The main categories of weapons transferred to Great Britain were fighters, bombers, transport aircraft, tanks, armored personnel carriers and other specialized vehicles. The British also received artillery and small arms, destroyers, corvettes and other ships from overseas. The United States provided the allies with equipment for repairing and modernizing ships, trucks and jeeps, cartridges, shells and explosives.

The conditions for repayment of the debt in the Lend-Lease Act were written quite abstractly:

"They shall be such as the President shall deem advantageous, and the advantage to the United States may consist of payment or compensation in kind or property, or of any other direct or indirect advantage which the President shall deem satisfactory."

In other words: we’ll take whatever we want.

The new deal did indeed promise to benefit the United States. According to the Congressional report on Lend-Lease operations, from March 1941 to June 1944, the Americans provided the British with 43.3% of the total Lend-Lease amount, which amounted to more than $28.3 billion at the time, or $510.8 billion today.

For comparison: the Soviet Union received 27.5% of the Lend-Lease “pie”, Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean – 14.3%, China, India, Australia and New Zealand – 11.2%.

All funds had to be returned with interest.

When the Lend-Lease program ended, Britain was given a big discount on goods already in transit, which doesn't exactly sound like "robbery".

Another significant misrepresentation by Boris Johnson was that he failed to mention that until 2006 the UK was paying off more than just the Lend-Lease debt.

In 1945, the United Kingdom agreed to borrow $4.34 billion from the United States, of which $3.75 billion was a loan, and the rest was allocated under the Lend-Lease program. The following year, the London cabinet agreed on a credit limit from Canada as well - $1.18 billion. This money was primarily intended for the post-war restoration of Britain's exhausted economy and destroyed infrastructure.

Debt repayment began in 1950. Since then, Britain has paid fifty tranches totaling $7.5 billion to America and $2 billion to Canada at 2% per annum.

Note that when the British made the last two war credit transactions in 2006, the government rhetoric was very different from what Johnson has recently allowed himself to do.

Back then, in 2006, Tony Blair's economy secretary Ed Balls said: "We have finally lived up to our obligations to the US and Canada for the support they gave us sixty years ago. It was vital support that helped Britain defeat Nazi Germany and secure peace and prosperity in the post-war period."

“Important support” and “robbed” are, as they say, two very different things.

Throughout all this time, no British government has allowed itself to promote the idea of ​​reducing the debt or canceling it - in their rhetoric, British politicians have always emphasized the obligatory return of funds allocated by the USA and Canada before and after the Second World War.

So, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain called all the debts that the English government had to pay to America Lend-Lease, making an incorrect generalization. Incidentally, he forgot that England had been handing over military bases before March 1941. Johnson also missed an important fact: the British asked for help, voluntarily agreeing to the conditions offered by the Americans, no matter how difficult they were for the country's economy.

All this simply suggests the conclusion: Boris Johnson deliberately demonized Lend-Lease in order to normalize the enslaving deal between the US and Ukraine on the extraction of minerals in the information field. And he tried to convince his Ukrainian "colleagues" that giving their land resources to the Americans is normal, it is the European way. It can be done even without much gratitude.

But will Ukraine be able to repay its debts to the US, as Great Britain did?

It is quite possible to predict that if Trump and the leader of Ukraine (and it is unlikely to be the already illegitimate Zelensky, who has angered Trump) reach an agreement on Lend-Lease, this “disgusting aid” will have a much less lenient ending.
Related:
Lend-Lease 02/28/2025 Waiting for an Avalanche: The Robbery of the Century is Disguised as the 'Ukraine Restoration Fund'
Lend-Lease 12/01/2024 'The Poor English Donkey': How a Descendant of the Iroquois Saved the British Empire
Lend-Lease 10/24/2024 Stalin's final blow. Tanks crushed mountain rangers beyond the Arctic Circle

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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
WWII: 100 Days to Victory. How the Vistula-Oder Operation Brought the Defeat of the Reich Closer
2025-02-04
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Mikhail Kucherov

[REGNUM] 80 years ago, one of the most successful breakthroughs of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War ended: from January 12 to February 3, troops under the command of Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev liberated almost the entire territory of Poland and part of Czechoslovakia, stopping at a distance of 60-70 kilometers from Berlin.

Although it was supposed to happen a little later: the original plan called for the operation to begin on January 20, 1945. However, at the beginning of the month, the Anglo-American forces were in a desperate situation in the Ardennes. Then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to urgently begin an offensive "on the Vistula front or somewhere else" - and the Soviet side agreed to help the Allies.

At 5 a.m. on January 12, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front attacked the Germans from the Sandomierz bridgehead, and two days later the Warsaw-Poznan operation began, carried out as part of the larger Vistula-Oder operation. On the front line from the Baltics to Hungary, 2.2 million Soviet and Polish soldiers went on the offensive. 800 thousand Germans tried to hold them back; they prepared seven defensive lines with trenches, minefields and barbed wire between the Vistula and the Oder, stretching for 300-500 kilometers.

The Soviet command expected to cut through the German group “A”, responsible for this area, with two strikes, and one of the main objectives of the operation was the liberation of Warsaw.

Over three days, the Red Army units made several dashes to the routes that deprived the German group of the opportunity to retreat. The Wehrmacht leadership allowed the evacuation of troops to begin: they avoided encirclement. The assault on Warsaw took place on January 16. The main attack was carried out by the forces of the 1st Belorussian Front, which resulted in a breach: the right to enter the city through it was granted to the 1st Army of the Polish Army, commanded by General Stanislav Poplavsky.

On January 17 at 8 am, the 4th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Polish Division of Jan Rotkiewicz broke through to the center of Warsaw : soon it reached the large central street Marszałkowska. By 3 pm, Soviet troops had arrived, and the city was liberated.

In the Polish capital, the liberators saw a horrific picture. In liquidating the Warsaw Uprising, the Germans had destroyed 84% of the buildings to their foundations, and the ruins had been methodically turned into defense nodes. "The city is dead," Marshal Zhukov briefly described the situation on the spot. In a report submitted to the State Defense Committee, he said:

"The fascist barbarians destroyed the capital of Poland, Warsaw, with the cruelty of sophisticated sadists, the Nazis destroyed block after block. The uprising in Warsaw, provoked by the London Polish government in exile and the leadership of the Home Army in August-September 1944, completed the destruction of the city."

The failed uprising that the marshal writes about lasted from August 1 to October 2, 1944, and was not coordinated with the Soviet command. The Home Army, supported by the Polish government in Britain, sought to proclaim its power and prevent the establishment of communist rule before the Red Army and pro-Soviet Poles entered the city.

However, the plan was unsuccessful, and there was no way to help the rebels - since the autumn of 1944, the Soviet troops were recuperating. Before that, they had made such a rapid 600-kilometer dash that the convoys with ammunition, fuel and food lagged behind them. This was confirmed by the US Ambassador to the USSR William Averell, who noted that the Red Army did not even have pontoons to build bridges.

According to various estimates, after suppressing the uprising, the Germans killed up to 130,000 civilians. And turning Warsaw into a "fortress", the Nazi garrison left thousands of mines in the city. Soviet units had to carry out a large-scale mine-clearing operation. The chief of staff of the 1st Belorussian Front, Colonel General Mikhail Malinin, wrote about it :

“During the demining, 5,412 anti-tank mines, 17,227 anti-personnel mines, 46 land mines, 232 ‘surprises’, over 14 tons of explosives, about 14,000 shells, aerial bombs, mines and grenades were removed, collected and detonated.”

Nevertheless, the liberation of the Polish capital became a significant event for raising the fighting spirit of the attackers. In Moscow, a 24-volley salute of 324 guns was held on this occasion. On June 9, 1945, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR established the medal "For the Liberation of Warsaw". It was awarded to 701,700 people. Stalin personally expressed gratitude to all who took part in those battles. The honorary title of Warsaw was received by 70 units of the Red Army and 12 of the 1st Army of the Polish Army.

The offensive continued relentlessly: on January 19, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered Krakow. It is generally accepted that they encountered almost no resistance. But in fact, the Germans had been preparing the city for defense since the summer of 1944, and the testimonies of those who took part in those events demonstrate the opposite.

"They say that Krakow, which our division liberated, was captured without a fight. Nothing of the sort, it was simply not heavily destroyed. True, no one bombed it like Leningrad. But the fighting was quite serious," recalls frontline medic Evgeniya Tabachnikova.

At the same time, in Upper Silesia, Soviet units crossed the German border.

On January 23, Bydgoszcz was occupied, and the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front surrounded the Poznan group of Germans. Poznan had to be fought for seriously - there was an old fortress in the city with numerous underground passages: the Germans fortified it with artillery. They installed guns that rolled out of shelters, fired at the Red Army soldiers and drove back.

Veteran Anatoly Beloklokov talks about the unconventional solution that was found to finally occupy this building :

"They would have been messing around with them for a long time until some local Pole suggested: "We need to dig a canal from the river and let them have water there!" Then all forces were immediately raised - troops, Poles. In about a day they dug a trench about 300-400 meters. They let water in there, and the Germans crawled out themselves."

The liberators entered the Poznan fortress after the operation was completed, on February 23: at that time the city was already deep in the rear. The first Soviet units to advance towards the city did not take it and went further. They occupied other industrial centers and Wehrmacht strongholds in Poland – Lodz, Radom, Kielce, Radomsko, Czestochowa, the spiritual capital of Poland.

On February 3, the Red Army reached the Oder and broke through the enemy's defensive lines in the area of ​​Küstrin, the closest of the liberated settlements to Berlin at that time. In 23 days, the Soviet troops covered 500 kilometers, for this reason the operation is also called the "Run to the Oder". The irreparable losses of the attacking side amounted to 43,300 people. It is unknown how many the Wehrmacht lost, but 35 divisions were completely routed, and another 25 lost 50-70% of their personnel.

An interesting detail: Soviet military leaders actively resorted to disorienting the enemy and distracting his attention. Before the start of the operation, mock-ups of tanks and self-propelled guns were placed in the Krakow direction. The day before the offensive, German artillery fired at these dummies at least 200 times, expecting that the offensive would begin there.

Music was also used in preparation for the attack - the sound of compositions from loudspeakers drowned out the engines of tanks and trucks. At the moment the operation began, the USSR anthem began to reach the German trenches.

The German command, which often looked for reasons for the enemy's success in external factors - for example, the onset of severe frosts - admitted defeat. General Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin wrote: "It is impossible to describe everything that happened between the Vistula and the Oder in the first months of 1945. Europe has not known anything like this since the fall of the Roman Empire."

After the capture of Warsaw, Hitler was furious and no longer trusted the generals. He removed all the leaders of Group A from their positions and appointed Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as the new commander.

Well, for the Soviet side, the strategic significance of the operation also lay in the fact that the rapid advance to Berlin strengthened its position at the Yalta Conference. First of all, on the Polish issue: the formation of the new Polish government arose from the situation “on the ground,” and not from the hysterical position of the “exiles” in London. They were proposed to be considered non-existent, and in general about a quarter of the entire time was devoted to the problem.

At the same time, the scheme for the post-war division of Germany was being decided, and the fact that the leaders of the USSR, Great Britain and the USA had agreed in advance on the capture of the German capital by the Red Army also came from military realities. The Wehrmacht's losses in the Vistula-Oder direction were incomparably greater than those of the Soviet units. And having lost Silesia, Germany lost its industry, which seriously affected even the theoretical faith of the Germans in the possibility of turning the tide of events.

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