Introduction
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR left many legends. This happened largely because the communists had to constantly prove the advantages of the socialist way of development. Therefore, Russia was proclaimed the homeland of elephants and ingenious designers. And if history gave us a little more time, and they (the designers) were not hindered, then we would have slapped everyone. Although if the war had delayed a little, then our propeller-driven aircraft would have had to meet with German JETS on the FIRST DAY of the war.
I have already written articles T-34 WITHOUT LEGENDS AND ISTERIK, IL-2 IN LEGENDS AND ON THE BATTLE FIELD, ZIS-3 IS POPULAR LEGENDARY AND NOT NEEDED BY ANYONE, but the number of legends is endless.
Legendary KATYUSHA
The BM-13 KATYUSHA jet fire system is truly legendary. In the sense that there are plenty of legends about her. And you probably know them yourself.
Here is nonsense from Wikipedia - and the detonation of a warhead on both sides with ONE fuse, and the length of the projectile was confused, and the year of testing of thermite projectiles was not guessed. What actually happened?
In the beginning there was a primitive rocket with a thermite charge. A thermite charge is like a big sparkler. Yes, if you put it on a barrel of gasoline, then it will undoubtedly burn through the wall and ignite the gasoline. And if it falls on your back, it will hit a bump (unlike napalm, a sparkler does not stick to your back). And if he falls next to you, then you will remember new Year... That is, in general, all the damage that a thermite charge can apply. The Germans bombarded Leningrad with such bombs, but there were no fires in those houses where girls with blacksmith tongs sat on the roofs and dropped these bombs into the yard or a box of sand. The test of warheads with thermite balls took place in the thirty-eighth year at a training ground near Leningrad. Usually all authors mention that there is still no grass growing there. Even if this is true, it is not from the hellish flame of a thermite charge, but from the poisoning of the earth with combustion products.
Quickly realizing the safety of the thermite charge for the enemy, they put a conventional high-explosive warhead with almost five kilograms of TNT on the missile. For comparison, a 130 mm projectile contains three and a half kilograms of TNT, and a 152 mm projectile contains six to seven kilograms.
Why did I call the rocket primitive? Because it was like that, that is, it differed from the Chinese missiles of the MIN or QING dynasty only in the composition of the powder charge. The new composition of gunpowder allowed the rocket to fly further, but she chose the direction of flight herself.
Look at this or any other photo of KATYUSHA's salvo, you can see even with an unarmed eye that the missiles, to put it mildly, are flying in more than one direction.
In meters it was expressed like this. When shooting at three thousand meters, the lateral deviation was 51 meters, and at a range of 257 meters.
Therefore, when I come across such pictures, accompanied by stories about fighting enemy tanks with direct fire, I frankly do not believe. Even if we admit an accidental hit, WHAT CAN A FOOTAGE SHELL having a maximum speed of three hundred and fifty meters per second DO TO A TANK?
It remains to understand why the missiles flew so crookedly? Here is what the artillery expert SHIROKORAD AB writes. The main reason for the low accuracy of the rockets was the eccentricity of the jet engine thrust, that is, the displacement of the thrust vector from the rocket axis due to uneven combustion of gunpowder in the checkers.
Here he is exactly half right. The thrust vector displacement was, is and will always be, but it has nothing to do with uniform combustion. The damned laws of physics claim that in a closed space, gas presses at any point with the same force. And no matter how hard you try to change the thrust vector with its uneven combustion, it cannot do it. The thrust vector ALWAYS bends the CURVED NOZZLE. They struggle with this by replacing one large nozzle with many small ones, in the hope that each nozzle will bend the thrust vector in its direction and the sum of these curvatures will be close to zero.
In the photographs, an aircraft missile of the end of the war with many small nozzles, which flew almost straight and our missile.
The second way is to impart rotation to the rocket - the thrust vector will be directed in a new direction every moment of time and its negative influence will again decrease to zero.
Our launcher did not give the rocket rotation - that is, the same was primitive.
Why am I telling all this in detail and tediously? In order for the reader to understand - THE GERMANS HAVE NO NEEDED TO HUNT FOR THE BM-13 KATYUSHA JET SYSTEM. Well, she didn't have any secrets worthy of attention, at least for the Germans. But when we could capture the launchers, we blew up, and the combat crews that did not have time to blow up their launchers then shot them ourselves.
The secret was in the technology of making a powder charge for a rocket engine. Our method was more productive, but in order to steal it, it was necessary to capture a powder factory in the Urals and not a launcher.
Another legend about the first use of KATYUSHA.
I honestly do not know whether the Germans were at the Orsha station at the time of the impact or not. But I know for sure that there were no German echelons at the station and could not have been by definition. We have a DIFFERENT railroad width. The Germans were physically unable to come to Orsha by train. The Germans, unlike the compilers of the legends, knew very well about this and understood that EVERYTHING WOULD HAVE TO BE DRAGGED ON THEIR HUMP.
And judging by the photo, they took great care of this.
Combat efficiency of KATYUSHA
As we have already determined, the missile's warhead was a SIMPLE FUGE PROJECT, slightly weaker than a projectile from a 152 mm howitzer, but more expensive and less dense. To deliver six kilograms of TNT to a distance of eight kilometers using a howitzer, two kilograms of gunpowder are needed, and to deliver five kilograms of TNT to the same distance using a KATYUSHA, seven kilograms of gunpowder are needed.
Many publications happily report that KATYUSHA was used in breaking through the front in all major operations. This shows that our command does not fully understand the purpose of KATYUSHA. Its true purpose is to UNEXPECTED strikes against troops located OPEN and having the ability to quickly get out of the attack. To shoot from the KATYUSHA at the trenches is nonsense - the trenches will not run away anywhere.
At the end of the war, however, KATYUSHI began to be included in the advanced mobile groups. When the enemy attempted to dislodge such a group from an occupied line, a KATYUSHA salvo usually dispersed the advancing infantry.
In total, about seven million rockets for the BM-13 KATYUSHA were fired. For comparison, conventional shells in stalingrad operation spent thirty million in Kursk fifty.
And another legend
You definitely haven't heard it. A drunken front-line soldier told me it.
At night on our hands we roll up BM-13 KATYUSHA to our trenches. We lower the front wheels into the trench. We set the rockets fuses to the maximum delay. After the volley, the missiles do not fly, but slide along the ground and fall into the enemy's trenches. And the engine is still running. Here is the rocket and runs along the trench until it hits the dugout. It explodes there.
The legend about machines
The legend goes something like this. Before the war, whether the military or Comrade Stalin did not understand the meaning of automatic weapons. And then the Germans appeared, all equipped with machine guns and constantly firing from them from the belly. And then we urgently started making machines and won everyone.
In fact, it was a little different. Before the war, the Soviet Union was very persistent in the development of automatic weapons. There were a million contests on various topics. All were won by TOKAREV'S SELF-CHARGING RIFLE. In the thirty-eighth year, she was the best. Then it was improved by the whole world to the SVT-40 model. They released it in the amount of one and a half million. The Germans did not make so many machine guns during the entire war.
The fact that they did not know how to fight with them and eighty percent simply gave up is not a problem with a rifle. In 1941, neither a Kalashnikov assault rifle nor a T-90 tank would have helped. It is necessary to look elsewhere for the origins of our defeats.
PPSh of course was easier to manufacture, and the same in circulation. The actual firing range was about fifty meters. That is, it was a distance at which it was possible not only to shoot, but also to hit. And what did you want from an assault rifle with a powerful enough but still PISTOL CHUCK?
Small lyrical digression... The topic of small arms is very interesting, but no matter how offensive it is, the quality of small arms has very little effect on the result of the battle. No, there are of course conditions when everything depends on small arms. For example, in the mountains of Avganistan, a soldier with a PPSh will lose to a soldier armed with SVT-40. But the battle in the ruins of the house will be won by a soldier armed with a PPSh. An automatic pistol cartridge is a self-defense weapon. And oddly enough, this is enough for competent conduct of hostilities. In defense, it can be used to stop the attack in the last fifty meters. And in the initial phase of the offensive, you don't need to shoot at all. You just have to crawl to the enemy trenches at a minimum distance during artillery preparation, and then jerk up to them and finish off the survivors. The offensive that is shown in the movies is just stupidity. You cannot shoot the soldiers leading the return fire from the trenches on the run, especially since you can neither run up nor crawl to the machine gun. Of course, if the machine gunner is a complete idiot and left unprotected areas, then yes. But the Germans had few of them, and for all kinds of beams and ravines there was mining and mortars.
The only way out is the use of artillery or an offensive will simply give a mass of corpses without result. Recently there was a fairly honest film about pilots. There they dug trenches all night at the airfield, and in the morning the Germans simply crushed everyone with mortars.
There is really a Chinese way of conducting an offensive, when one hundred and twenty ranks are running and only the first rank has weapons and shoes. After the first hundred ranks are destroyed, the defenders either run out of ammunition or machine guns overheat. At this time, the last ranks take weapons and shoes from the dead and finish off the defenders. What our strategists wanted to oppose to such tactics, read at the end of the article PNEUMATIC WEAPONS.
A small technical digression. At one time, experiments were carried out on shooting at emerging targets from a Kalashnikov assault rifle, both single shots and bursts. When firing bursts, the number of hits increased as expected. But it increased by such a MIND amount that it became clear that if a person cannot hit the target with a single shot, then the turn will not help him much.
Everything said in the technical digression is said in defense of the self-loading rifle. There was a case when one very good shooting man with several self-loading rifles defended the position of a platoon. What did the rest of the fighters do, you ask? They loaded his rifles and eliminated delays in firing. Do you think the Germans took machine guns and went at him firing from the belly? No, they just razed the platoon positions with artillery. And since a mortar of one hundred and twenty millimeters caliber could best compare to the ground the trenches, the Germans quickly copied it and put it into production. You can read about this in the article - THE FORGOTTEN WEAPONS OF VICTORY.
And now just photos of the GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR with comments.
The Germans, Mauser rifles, grenades on long handles, but there are no machine guns. Although the platoon commander should have had a submachine gun, maybe he just didn't get into the frame.
The offended face of a German soldier. Well, the German machine gun was not enough for him, so he has to fight with ours.
Everything seems to be in order - a German, a machine gun at the belly, really forgot to roll up his sleeves. Everything is fine, but the picture is RUNNING - a village destroyed and burnt in places, but no smoke or dust.
Elite German troops, but only one machine gun (new) and two machine guns. And it's true - the Germans had more machine guns than machine guns.
As for the ideal small arms of the GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, one rifle squad had to have two self-loading rifles (for those who know how to shoot) and machine guns for the rest.
For all the years of the GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, a little more than six million machines were produced. And the army in the forty-fourth year was 11 million people. So we have the same, not everyone at the end of the war ran with machine guns.
Anti-tank rifles
Everything is as usual here - at first they did not understand what a formidable weapon it was, and then how they did it and how they defeated everyone.
In fact, the 14.5x114 mm cartridge was designed before the GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR and still feels good today. It is used in the Vladimirov's large-caliber machine gun, which is still on many armored personnel carriers and recently even a column mount for civilian ships has appeared - however, pirates tortured me.
But the fact that anti-tank guns made for this cartridge were a formidable weapon was not understood then. And there were only two, but very good reasons. First, we had a huge amount of anti-tank artillery. The Germans, who had about the same number of anti-tank guns, but of a smaller caliber, managed to destroy all our tanks, including the invulnerable T-34 and KV. Secondly, anti-tank guns did not penetrate tank armor. Usually in the articles of the patriots hurray, data are given that anti-tank guns pierced twenty millimeters of armor at a distance of five hundred meters. Firstly, it is not clear where such information comes from - the tests were carried out on armor with a thickness of 22 millimeters and at a distance of FOUR meters. Secondly - WHERE DID YOU SEE 20 MILLIMETER ARMOR AT GERMAN TANKS?
No, the shooter's manual speaks of two points at the bottom of the hull above some sort of road roller. But no one has ever seen them. I have looked through the scope many times at tanks in real conditions - the bottom of the hull is NEVER visible. Grass or snow and uneven ground ALWAYS cover the bottom of the tank hull. According to statistics, there are practically no hits. And one more sarcastic question - HOW TO FIND ON THE SIDE of a German tank? Moreover, at an angle of strictly ninety degrees, because at a different angle it will not break through.
But the most common side armor of German tanks, thirty millimeters thick, did not penetrate at any distance. Why? Because at the beginning of the GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, the armor of German tanks was of the highest quality, and even optimized against small caliber shells with a high muzzle velocity. And we made an armor-piercing core from (mate was banned on the Internet). The normal core appeared only in December of the forty-first year. It is called BS-41. But the Germans hung screens on the sides of the tanks and forgot about our anti-tank rifles once and for all. In addition, our armor-piercing shells of 7.62 and 85 mm caliber, which had TNT filling, were detonated on these screens.
This is as far as the question was struck or not. And if they did? A core with a diameter of EIGHT millimeters penetrates the armor. And what? A tank is not a balloon from which air came out and yeah.
Two questions arise: WHY DID THEY BE DONE? and WHY WERE THE LEGEND?
It is clear about the legend - it was necessary to explain to the people why they were retreating (we did not have machine guns and anti-tank guns).
Why did you do it? Anti-tank guns are not the funniest thing to do during the GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR. Voroshilov in 1941 ordered a lot of PIKs to stab the Germans if they burst into Leningrad.
By the way, anti-tank guns continue their victorious march, though now they are called -
Optimism (let's call it so that it would not offend people who rose up in the twenty-first century to fight the Nazis) is a national Russian quality. Recently, near Slavyansk, militias fired from an anti-tank rifle from the times of the GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR at a T-64 tank. Moreover, the shooting was carried out at a distance of TWO THOUSAND meters.
Soviet aircraft machine gun on Hitler's table
With the light hand of a certain Novikov and the magazine TEKHNIKA YOUTOZHI, about the seventieth year of publication, this legend went for a walk. I myself was not in the imperial chancellery, so I just speculate whether the ShKAS machine gun was so good and whether the Germans needed it so much.
There is such a concept - the BALANCE of aviation weapons. To put it simply, all parts of the weapon should work with the same degree of tension. The most balanced scheme is the multi-barreled revolving cannon, although it has an unavoidable drawback - it slowly reaches its maximum rate of fire.
Constructor Shpitalny had no idea about balance. It was a maniac who thought only about the rate of fire. The ShKAS machine gun had an OVERLOADED barrel. That is, he could shoot quickly but not for long. Then he wedged from overheating.
The bottom photo shows a ShKAS machine gun with a powerful radiator - an attempt to solve an unsolvable problem.
The second point is the CALIBER of aircraft weapons. There is such a concept - OPTIMAL caliber. It is different for each level of technological development of society. For the middle of the GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, the optimal caliber was approximately 23 millimeters. But the Germans were bombed by large American and British planes. Therefore, they began to produce aircraft cannons with a caliber of thirty millimeters, and they were absolutely right in this.
Photos of the German cannon MK-108 with a caliber of thirty millimeters. The barrel is short, the cartridge, judging by the size of the sleeve, is weak, but for any of its shells when firing at an air fortress it will be more effective than a bullet from a ShKAS machine gun
And now the question arises - WHY WOULD THE GERMANS NEED A 7.62 MILLIMETER CALIBER NOT SHOOTING MACHINE GUN?
Ingenious designers who were not allowed to create
Was ingenious aircraft designer Polikarpov and his fighter, which had the highest DESIGN specifications... That is, he flew quickly but only on paper. Moreover, these characteristics were achieved with an engine that was never put into production until the end of the war. When the usual ASh-82 was installed on the plane, the fighter did not have any advantages over the LA-5.
The ingenious designer Kurchevsky. When they say that he designed recoilless guns, everyone at once represents an anti-tank grenade launcher. But he did not have an anti-tank grenade launcher because there was no shaped charge in the country. But there was a recoilless anti-tank gun. True, it did not penetrate thirty millimeters of armor even from ten meters. And then there were hundreds of crazy projects of recoilless guns up to a caliber of five hundred millimeters inclusive. Can you imagine a recoilless tank gun? Barrel, bolt and nozzle sticking out of the bolt. That is, I loaded it, got out of the tank, fired, ventilated the fighting compartment and loaded it into the tank again. That is, they spent a lot of people's money, fired five thousand barrels, and dispersed the normal artillery design bureau. And covered it all great commander Blucher. And although his surname is not literally translated from English, he brought enough harm to the country. In general, both were shot absolutely rightly, although belatedly.
HERE NOW I'll drink coffee and finish the article
A historical look at the Great Patriotic War is impossible without knowledge (recognition) of the following things:
1.
The war with Germany is a direct consequence of 1917, a historical payback for it.
— the Russian Empire (or democratic Russia), which survived to the end of the First World War and became one of the victorious countries, would never have allowed the revival of a militarily strong Germany. While the military-political flirtation of post-war Germany with the USSR was based precisely on the fact that both countries were among the losers; the same interest in the revival of their own power and the consciousness of political isolation pushed them towards rapprochement with each other.
- In the "peaceful" coming of the Nazis to power in 1933, the erroneous policy of the International, the German Communists and Social Democrats, and also Comrade Stalin personally played a huge role.
- Nazism itself is primarily anti-communism. Without this core, it turns into ordinary German chauvinism, which made itself felt back in 1914-1918. So existence historical Russia in itself knocked out of the hands of the Nazis the main ideological trump card of the "struggle against Jewish-Bolshevism" with all the ensuing practical consequences.
- Bolshevik policy of 1918-1939 became the reason that the Great Patriotic War acquired the features of the "Second Civil" War, which significantly weakened the resistance to the Wehrmacht and led to additional demographic losses.
2. Great Patriotic War - the final and decisive part of the Second World War.
- But the USSR has been one of the main participants in World War II from its first day. The specificity is that for more than a year and a half he avoided direct military confrontation with both sides of the conflict (England, France and Germany).
- Pre-war Germany and the USSR had plans to expand their borders at the expense of their neighbors, albeit for different reasons and for different purposes. These plans were implemented to one degree or another, which led to the emergence of the Soviet-German border. Without this key factor, a surprise attack on the USSR would have been impossible and, therefore, it is the pre-war policy of the Soviet government that is responsible for the disastrous results of the 1941 summer campaign.
3. The particular cruelty of the war was due to the "fascist" political thinking of all the main participants in WW2.
This was expressed in the fact that the governments of both belligerents (including "democratic" countries) recognized violence (including mass terror) as a decisive way to achieve military-political tasks. But the Hitlerite and Bolshevik regimes, in addition, practiced massive repressions against whole national and social groupsas well as to their political opponents within the country. Thus, the "destructive" nature of the war was predetermined from the outset.
4. The role of Stalin in the Victory is undeniable and at the same time contradictory.
They say the war will write off everything - and it really is. If Stalin had died in 1940, he would hardly have managed to remain in folk mythology and on the windshields of trucks. But in his life there was not only a struggle for power, there was also a victory over fascism in it. During the war years, Stalin's outstanding political and organizational abilities were finally directed not at strengthening personal power, but against a terrible enemy who carried something worse to our country than the collective farms and the GULAG.
Of course, Stalin made major mistakes in assessing the military-political situation, the military disasters of 1941-42 - in many respects on his conscience. But in that war, none of the sides had invincible generals and infallible strategists. To say that on June 22 Hitler outplayed Stalin is at least strange, knowing how the Third Reich and its Fuhrer ended. If you managed to pull the tiger by the mustache, this does not mean that you have outplayed him.
Having recovered from the shock of the first days of the war, Stalin managed to mobilize the country to repel the enemy. As a result, under his leadership Soviet army inflicted unprecedented defeat in history on Germany, Japan and their allies. “Undoubtedly, he was a worthy Supreme Commander-in-Chief,” concluded Zhukov. "During the Great Patriotic War, Stalin's military authority in the eyes of the commanders of the fronts and armies was high," Konev stated. “One thing is indisputable,” emphasized the famous naval commander Kuznetsov, “one cannot belittle the outstanding role of Stalin during the Great Patriotic War.”
Another thing is that Stalin quickly got used to the idea that Stalingrad battle and all subsequent strategic offensive operations - first of all, his personal merit. Although he was able to fulfill his role of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief only thanks to the presence of outstanding military leaders in the Armed Forces. It was from them that Stalin learned the art of war.
The defeat of fascism and the victory over Japan turned the Soviet Union into a superpower, and Stalin into one of the most authoritative leaders of that time. In defending the country's interests, Stalin showed himself to be an uncompromising politician, which earned the respect of Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle and other Western leaders.
It is a pity that the Victory strengthened Stalin in the consciousness of the infallibility of the pre-war course. No indulgence was made to the victorious people. The leader prepared for him new hardships and expected new victims from him.
However, so far our people are in demandmythology and romanticization of war in the spirit of "absolute good against absolute evil", "angels against demons", and this is also not without reason. This means that now it is necessary for the "well-being" of our society. Who, if not historians, understand such things.
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My book came out
During World War II, the Soviet Union and China suffered the most, not the Jews, Poles, or other peoples who were occupied twice over the course of several years. The Soviet Union and once by Hitlerite Germany. But no - only Russians and Chinese. Russian mythology of the Great Patriotic War is based on a “competitive” approach to history.
Today Russia is the first fighter for "historical truth." In 2009, then-President Dmitry Medvedev created a special commission to "prevent attempts to falsify history." It was intended to suppress attempts to de-heroize Soviet soldiers, call liberation an occupation, and generally change the image of the USSR in World War II.
The current President Vladimir Putin, in turn, ordered the creation of a unified history textbook that would correspond to the official position of the Kremlin. And she, in relation to the Great Patriotic War, is unambiguous. By the way, the rest of the world calls this war "World War II". And this is symbolic. For the Russians, this was their war. And their victory in their interpretation.
In February of this year, the deputy the Russian Duma from liberal democrats Roman Khudyakov proposed to introduce even harsher penalties for distortion russian history... Already since 2014, a term of up to five years threatens those who spread lies about the actions of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. However, the decision is made in the Kremlin about what is true.
The myth of the enmity between the USSR and Germany
Russian children in schools are still not told anything about the Soviet-German alliance until June 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, as well as about what was happening in the territories that were before the USSR, in collusion with the Germans (Molotov Pact- Ribbentrop), occupied. It is strictly forbidden in Russia to say that in reality two countries, Germany and the USSR, began military action, having attacked Poland together in September 1939.
According to independent Russian historians, their science has turned into mythology. This week, the deputy of the Pskov Duma, Lev Shlosberg, even said that the Russian state is cynically transforming the memory of the Great Patriotic War into an oath of allegiance to the policies of the current rulers.
The mythology spread by President Putin concerns, in particular, the immense suffering of the Soviet, or rather the Russian people. Yes, the suffering was immeasurable, but exaggerating it while keeping silent about the suffering of others is simply the manipulation of historical facts.
If at all it is possible to measure human suffering, then the Russians, given a very small part of the occupied territory, had, in comparison with the Jews (in post-war USSR it was forbidden to mention the Holocaust), Ukrainians, Belarusians and Poles have a huge advantage. What happened in the western part of Russia, occupied by the Germans, was by no means as terrifying as what happened in the territories that the American historian Timothy Snyder calls "bloody lands."
The myth of the need for millions of losses
And the role of the United States and Western allies russian schoolchildren tell practically nothing. Associated with this is the myth of the need for huge losses (they are estimated at 20-30 million).
In the 90s, many Russian historians dared, including the historian Georgy Mirsky, to openly declare that the Soviet command was at first criminally amateurish, and the losses were the result of an illiterate warfare. For example, during the German attacks on Stalingrad, the "life time" of a Russian soldier on the front line averaged only seven hours. The successes of the Red Army were achieved only thanks to a completely unprecedented waste of soldiers' lives.
In addition, Russian propaganda often speaks of "Russian" losses. At the same time, the overwhelming part of the fallen soldiers and killed civilians were Ukrainians, Belarusians and residents of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union after 1939, including the population of the Baltic States and Poles. Some of them did not die at the hands of the Germans - they were captured or killed by units of the Soviet NKVD. These people were included in the Soviet losses for propaganda reasons: this increased the suffering of the Soviet (Russian) people.
The myth about the unity of the Soviet people in the struggle against Nazism also does not correspond to reality. First of all, Western Ukraine and the Baltic states were not at all loyal to the communist government. But many soldiers did not want to die for Stalin: in the first six months of the war, about 3 million of them surrendered to the enemy. The victory came at the cost of huge losses, for example: out of every hundred young men born in 1921-1923, who went to the front, only three returned.
Robbery and sexual assault are taboo
The topic of robbery and rape of women by Soviet soldiers in the liberated territories and in Germany is an absolute taboo. Rarely does a courageous eyewitness to those events appear, such as Lieutenant Leonid Rabichev, a poet and artist, who describes how in Eastern Poland the Red Army men raped all women who did not run away.
One of the episodes concerns a gang rape using glass bottles. But his book cannot be found in Moscow stores. When the commentators of the Ekho Moskvy radio talked about it, they remarked to the readers: "You will read it in one breath, but then you will fall into depression."