Red Army lost 8,860,400 men killed in Great Patriotic War

[Blackadder1916]

With the recent uproar in Estonia concerning the removal of the Soviet era “Bronze Soldier” memorial and subsequent protests/demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg, I began thinking about the memorials that we erect to our fallen.  I am familiar with many of the monuments and cemeteries for Canada’s war dead (and their allies in Western Europe) plus I have visited some of the German cemeteries in France.  But other than seeing the occasional Soviet monument in places like Berlin, I never paid much attention to how their war dead were remembered. 

These following articles that I came across refer somewhat to the issue.

Red Army lost 8,860,400 men killed in Great Patriotic War
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=11497757&PageNum=0

MOSCOW, May 4 (Itar-Tass) - The Red Army had lost 8,860,400 men killed during the Great Patriotic War, Chief of the Military Memorial Centre (MMC) of the Russian Armed Forces Major-General Alexander Kirilin told reporters here on Friday.

The general stated that, according to the figures of the special team, formed within MMC, the Red Army’s “irretrievable demographic losses in the Great Patriotic War added up to 8,860,400 men, the irretrievable losses – to about eleven million men”. He explained that the second group included the disabled servicemen.

Federal Military Cemetery to be built in Russia - Kirilin
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=11498221&PageNum=2&fy=&fm=&fd=

MOSCOW, May 4 (Itar-Tass) - Work to build a Federal Military Cemetery will begin here this year. Three billion roubles, needed to do it, were allocated for the next three years, Chief of the Military Memorial Centre (MMC) of the Russian Armed Forces Major-General Alexander Kirilin told reporters here on Friday.

“The most favourable conditions have been created for the work of MMC within the Russian Defence Ministry,” he noted. The problem is being considered of opening MMC offices in the foreign countries, where many Russian military burial places are to be found, in order to improve the work with military cemeteries outside the Russian Federation, the general added.

He cited as an example “the excellent work of such an office in Poland, which has a staff of only four employees. They took ten years to travel all over Poland and to record all the places where Russian soldiers are buried.

Touching on MMC work in Russia, Kirilin explained that the Centre was confronted by certain problems, arising from the legislation now in force, which vests local administrative bodies with the duty of taking care of the burial places, but the latter often have no money to cope with this task.

“Four and a half million Soviet officers and men became prisoners of war during the Great Patriotic War, 1.9 millions have returned home, while 2.6 millions did not come back, although not all of them had perished,” Kirilin noted.

 

[FredDaHead]

Maybe I need to find a better English-French dictionary than the one in my head, but what are irretievable losses? Is that just a fancy word (or would that be a euphemism?) for casualties?

 

[AJFitzpatrick]

Unrecoverable perhaps would be a better expression.  I think they are trying to point out the continued effect of the deaths on Russian population (i.e. the decline in population)

 

[3rd Herd]

Blackadder,
In Ivan's War by Merridale there is a very interesting chapter entitled "And We Remember All". A good portion of the chapter covers the Russian/Soviet mind set and war memorials. Just as an aside she also gets into the debate over just exactly how many causalities were actually suffered. To a certain extent the Soviets were forward thinking and some of their memorials are so massive that it is economically unfeasible to remove them. It was alot easier to pull down the bronze statues of Lenin/Stalin in the spirit of democracy.

As to how the war dead are treated, disabled veterans etc after reading Merridale's chapters on those issues I had to take a walk outside and take a long hard look at the flag flying outside the building here. Substitute Canadian for Soviet and there are some astounding parallels.

 

[Kirkhill]

From the army's stand point - an irretrievable loss other than death would be a casualty that could not be patched up and returned to duties.

From a demographic stand point  - an irretrievable loss would be losses beyond the capacity of the population to sustain the loss resulting in a dip in the numbers of productive males.  This effect has been noted widely in Russia where there have been a number of studies suggesting that if the 20th century hadn't happened Russia would have a much larger (and, in my opinion, more optimistic and productive) population.  The difficulty in calculating lost demographic "opportunity costs" in Russia is attributing the losses to any single disaster.

The Germans get much of the blame for WW1 and WW2 but how much blame should the Russians get for sending out multiple soldiers in file with the lead man having the only weapon?  How about the regular use of punishment battalions of undesirables to clear minefields by walking through them?  Commissars in 1917 clearing out enemies of the regime? Stalin's Purge of the Officer Corps?
Not to mention purges of the Kulaks and Ukrainians as well as the steady stream of losses in the Gulag.

It is very difficult to determine how many people actually died during WW2, how many died on frontline service and how many died a heroic death by German bullet with a Russian bayonet at their back and no weapons in their hand.   And how many of them were actually Russians as opposed to subject peoples from beyond the Urals.

The difficulties the Russians are having now with the Estonians is partly due to the horrendous way that they treated their newly acquired "slaves" after they "liberated" them from the Nazis and partly due to the lies they told themselves about how they were welcomed as "liberators".  They may indeed have been seen that way by some of the population initially but they overstayed their welcome when they took over the operation of their clients.  They never had "allies" in the sense that we think of the term.

 

[Port Hope]

Having lived in Germany and spoken with German veterans, it is my opinion that the Germans did kill Russian soldiers on a scale that would be hard for us to imagine (read poor Soviet leadership as much as German expertise).  I am astounded by how much punishment a nation can absorb (whether Russian or German) and still survive.

 

[FredDaHead]

I am astounded by how much punishment a nation can absorb (whether Russian or German) and still survive.

I was just thinking about that. The RCN lost something to the effect of 2000 sailors (24 ships), while the U-boat service lost something around 30000 sailors. I wonder if Canada would have held strong if we had suffered that kind of loss?

 

[Kirkhill]

Port Hope, having also spoken with German veterans of the Eastern Front I too believe that they killed many Russians.  I am not questioning that.  My point is that many of those Germans felt that the Russians they killed were largely bullet traps, forced forward to eat up bullets until the German guns ran out of ammunition.  Fear of running out of ammunition was a constant concern of those that I have spoken with, leaving them to face men made desparate by their own commisars behind them.  When troops are used in that fashion it becomes hard to decide who is the greater criminal: the invader doing the firing or the defender using the opportunity to "cleanse" the population (or possibly just protect the hierarchy at any cost).

Regardless - I too find it astounding the resilience of nations:

WWI

Country Dead Wounded Missing Total Russia 1,700,000  5,000,000  -  6,700,000  Germany 1,600,000  4,065,000  103,000  5,768,000  France 1,359,000  4,200,000  361,650  5,920,650  Austria-Hungary  922,000  3,600,000  855,283  5,377,283  Italy  689,000  959,100  -  1,424,660  Britain  658,700  2,032,150  359,150  3,050,000  Romania  335,706  120,000  80,000  535,706  Turkey  250,000  400,000  - 650,000  Bulgaria  87,500  152,390  27,029  266,919  USA  58,480  189,955  14,290  262,725  Australia  58,150  152,170  -  210,320  Canada  56,500  149,700  -  206,200  Serbia  45,000  133,148  152,958  331,106  Belgium  44,000  450,000  -  494,000  India  43,200  65,175  5,875  114,250  New Zealand  16,130  40,750  -  56,880  Portugal  7,222  13,751  12,318  33,291  Greece  5,000  21,000  1,000  27,000  Montenegro  3,000  10,000  7,000  20,000  Japan  300  907  3  1,210  Totals  7,996,888  21,755,196  1,979,556  31,508,200

[tr][td]

WW2

Countries  Total Deaths  % of Pre-war Population  Military Deaths  Civilian Deaths  USSR  20,600,000  10.40%  13,600,000  7,000,000  China  10,000,000  2.00%  -  -  Germany  6,850,000  9.50%  3,250,000  3,600,000  Poland  6,123,000  17.20%  123,000  6,000,000  Japan  2,000,000  2.70%  -  -  Yugoslavia  1,706,000  10.90%  -  -  France  810,000  1.90%  340,000  470,000  Greece  520,000  7.20%  -  -  USA  500,000  0.40%  500,000  -  Austria  480,000  7.20%  -  -  Romania  460,000  3.40%  -  -  Hungary  420,000  3.00%  -  -  Italy  410,000  0.90%  330,000  80,000  Czechoslovakia  400,000  2.70%  -  -  Great Britain  388,000  0.80%  326,000  62,000  The Netherlands  210,000  2.40%  198,000  12,000  Belgium  88,000  1.10%  76,000  12,000  Finland  84,000  2.20%  -  -  Australia  39,000  0.30%  -  -  Canada  34,000  0.30%  -  -  Albania  28,000  2.50%  -  -  India  24,000  0.01%  -  -  Norway  10,262  0.30%  -  -  New Zealand 10,000  0.60%  -  -  Luxembourg  5,000  1.70%  -  -  TOTAL  52,199,262  - - -

[tr][td]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2854730

There are many more links at that site with varying numbers..... but the scale remains the same.

 

[retiredgrunt45]

I wonder if the number includes the people Stalin ordered executed. Millions died under his brutal reign.

I seen a documentry called Stalingrad on the military channel and it was horrendous how many Russians were slaughtered by the Germans.

 

[Blackadder1916]

I wonder if the number includes the people Stalin ordered executed.

Don't know, but here are some numbers put out by the Russian Armed Forces.

http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=11498220&PageNum=0

103,000 servicemen were executed during Patriotic War - Kirilin

MOSCOW, May 4 (Itar-Tass) - As many as 147 thousand servicemen were sentenced to death by firing squad during the Great Patriotic War for stealing a can of meat or for high treason. One hundred and three thousand of them were executed, Chief of the Military Memorial Centre (MMC) of the Russian Armed Forces Major-General Alexander Kirilin told reporters here on Friday.

 

[CougarKing]

I wonder if the Official Russian version of their history of World War II includes the casualties from the  "Winter War" or Stalin's costly invasion of pro-Axis Finland, as well as the Soviet "Advisors" that helped aid Spanish Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War as well as the Soviet casualties in the 1938 Nomonhan incident against Japan? Or does the "Great Patriotic War" only include everything after Operation Barbarossa?

 

[3rd Herd]

From "The following testimony was delivered at the October 8 hearing of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. Dr. Robert Conquest is a historian and author of "The Harvest of Sorrow," the recently released study of the Great Famine."(http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1986/448621.shtml)


"A census taken in January 1937 was suppressed and the census board were shot as (in the words of official communique) "a serpent's nest of traitors in the apparatus of Soviet statistics"; they had, Pravda stated "exerted themselves to diminish the population of the Soviet Union."

"In Khrushchev's time a later head of the Census Board wrote sardonically that the State Planning Commission had been very incompetent in it population predictions, having forecast 180.7 million for 1937 when the real total was 164 million. This enormous discrepancy can be reduced to about 11.5 million for various reasons (for example, children unborn owing to prematurely dead parents). Of this the famine deaths seem to have been about 7 million - 5 million in Ukraine, 1 million in the Kuban and North Caucasus, 1 million in the Don and lower Volga. 3 million plus had already died in the dekulakization and about 1 million (out of about 4 million) Kazakhs had perished as a result of the banning of their nomad life and resettlement on desert "farms." To this 11-plus million we must add about 3 million plus for the peasants in labor camps at the time of the 1931 census and dying there later for a reasonable estimate of the victims of the whole anti-peasant and anti-Ukrainian operation to be about 14.5 million."


Edit to add:

"The war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany lasted from June 1941 to May 1945 and remains one of the bloodiest wars in human history. Irrecoverable losses in the Soviet armed forces alone were in the region of 8,668,400, of which 12,031 were lost in the war with Japan. (G.F. Krivosheev (ed.), Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London: Greenhill Books, 1997), pp.84-6.)

RUSSIAN COMBAT DEATHS 1918-2001 PUBLISHED -- The Russian General Staff released the following information on Russian combat deaths from their Civil War up through today's Chechen War.

As published in "Argumenty i fakty," No. 22, the Soviet military lost 939,755 soldiers during their Civil War (1918-22), 626 in the struggle against the basmachi movement in Central Asia (1923-31), 187 in the 1929 Soviet-Chinese conflict, 353 in the Spanish Civil War, 9,920 in battles with the Japanese at the end of the 1930s, and 1,139 during the occupation of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. During the Soviet- Finnish War the Soviet side lost 126,875. During World War II they suffered a staggering number of 8,668,400 dead. During the Korean War (1950-53), the Soviet forces lost 299 in combat against the Americans. During military assistance operations in Asia and Africa 145 Soviet soldiers died; in Hungary in 1956, 750; and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, 96 were killed. During the 1969 border dispute with China, 60 Soviet soldiers were killed. The Afghan war claimed 14,751 Soviet soldiers' lives. In the first Chechen war, 5,835 Russian soldiers died, and in the second 3,108 have died so far.(http://www.afio.org/sections/wins/2001/2001-23.html)

 

[CougarKing]

Everyone's perspective on World War II differs- I guess the Soviets would only consider "the Great Patriotic War" to be everything after the initial Gemran invasion/Operation Barabossa in 1941.


For the Nationalist/Guo Min Dang Chinese, their version of World War II, began with the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937 and the subsequent Japanese invasion that laso led to the infamous "Rape of Nanking"  (Nanjing).

 

[vonGarvin]

So many people killed in war in the 20th Century: we throw around numbers like so much chaff.  I guess Stalin WAS right: one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic...

 

[JackD]

Since i live in Poland, and see items that you are perhaps unaware, a rather interesting perspective on monuments and war cemeteries is that while Soviet era 'grandiose' monuments were removed, the cemetery memorials have not been touched and are well looked after. Indeed it is more surprising to find well-cared for First World War cemeteries, I discovered a large First World War Austrian war cemetery the other day - well-fenced, well maintained. Many of the Soviet-Polish war cemeteries  were heavily vandalized when the Soviet Union occupied this part of Poland but since have been somewhat restored. in regard to Russian dead in the First World War period - how many were actually motherland Russians as opposed to Poles, Fins, Lithuanians etc. is rather difficult to ascertain. Another interesting perspective on Russian war cemeteries is that  while officers have marked graves, the other ranks have mass graves - so much for socialist equality.

 

[CougarKing]

Another interesting perspective on Russian war cemeteries is that  while officers have marked graves, the other ranks have mass graves - so much for socialist equality.

Could it be that the remains of those enlisted ranks were just harder to identify, so they were just put into mass graves? Did the Soviets in that time even have Grave Registration Units like the US military or any unit that identified human remains without identification? Speaking of identification- it brings to mind what kind of identification the Soviets have- they must have had some of form of dogtags then, even for the lowliest conscript, like those forced to cross the Volga river en masse at the point of Thompson machine guns by Stalin's NKVD- the poorly trained conscripts either had to face the Germans at Stalingrad or retreat into a hail of fire put up by NKVD machine guns.

As for the Chinese number of 10 million in the BBC list above- does that include all those killed from the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria and after, or the 1937 invasion of China proper and after? Or does it include only everything after the beginning of the Pacific War in Dec.1941?

 

[JackD]

Hi! I cannot find the reference, but there was an article i read last year about  individuals recovering bodies of the eastern front wars - a laudable activity i might add - and on going - I believe the soviet way wasn't dogtags but a vial in which there was a paper note of name and particulars - not something that lasts long. Mind you - i think the Canadian approach during the time were hard paper discs - I'm sure someone can clear that up. In Lublin where I live, in the old cemetery, First World War graves are marked out in squares - "Austria 1916 - 50 bodies"  and there are  7 or 8 squares like that. Beside that site  is the Polish- Soviet war graves - individually marked, Around that, graves of the Home Army and the Katyn monument, east of that the Soviet war grave - with a monument in the shape of a helmet, surrounded by mass graves - five or six bodies per, and individually marked officers' graves, and ironically, beside that with identification removed - German army single graves of the 2nd World War. of course the biggest grave site in this area is the majdanek death camp - and that is an massive dome overtop of a pile of ash. By the way,  no birds sing there.

 

[Blackadder1916]

... east of that the Soviet war grave - with a monument in the shape of a helmet, surrounded by mass graves - five or six bodies per, and individually marked officers' graves...

Interesting description, thanks.  The 'mass graves' of the (five to six) Soviet enlisted soldiers - are those interred identified by name anywhere or simply the number of occupants.

 

[Blackadder1916]

Russians plan new war memorial
http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=24&art_id=nw20070507140230664C872161

May 07 2007 at 02:27PM 

Moscow - Local authorities in a Russian region bordering Estonia are to erect a World War II memorial at the frontier in answer to the controversial relocation of a Soviet-era statue in the Estonian capital Tallinn, a parliament deputy said on Monday.

Vitaly Yuzhilin, who represents the Russian constituency adjoining Estonia, said foundations for the memorial would be laid on Wednesday in the Russian border town of Ivangorod during annual World War II commemorations.

Yuzhilin accused Estonia of "defiling" soldiers' graves beneath the Bronze Soldier memorial during the transfer last month from the centre of the Estonian capital to a military cemetery.

 

[JackD]

hi - I'll have to get back to you on whether names or just number in this section of the Lublin cemetery - my recollection in this case is a combination - I assume if known, the name was added, if not , just numbers - the markers hold  brass 'name' plates  and  there are 15 individual markers  surrounding the helmet monument - which holds still more. Grave sites along the road to Zamosc - which was the frontline for much or 1914-16 contain maybe 3 or 4, sometimes up to 10 marked graves, and 4 or 5 mass graves mounds unnumbered, marked by a collective headstone. Some graves sites I have encountered are from where they fell - I assume the bodies were merely dragged to a convenient hole, and the dirt piled up, marked by a common headstone, these areas often still bear the marks of the original battle. All of Poland really is one large cemetery.