"Retribution: The Soviet Reconquest of Central Ukraine, 1943" Topic

"Beginning towards the end of the Battle of Kursk, Retribution explores the massive Soviet offensive that followed Operation Zitadelle, which saw depleted and desperate German troops forced out of Central Ukraine. In this fascinating title, Buttar describes in detail the little-known series of near-constant battles in which a weakened German army was confronted by a tactically sophisticated force of over six million Soviet troops. As a result, the Wehrmacht was driven back to the Dnepr and German forces remaining in the Taman Peninsula withdrew into the Crimea.

As the Germans withdrew, the horrors they had inflicted on occupied lands were gradually uncovered, from the "scorched earth" program to the mass deportations and executions of countless men, women and children. With an avenging Soviet army in pursuit, retribution was inevitable…"

Main page
link

Amicalement
Armand

Wondering if the Soviets own executions of countless men, women and children are covered as well?

Not at all countless. All documents have long been open, all victims are counted.
For the period from 1917 to 1991, 800 thousand people were executed for political reasons.
3,134,400 people were convicted under political articles, of which 600 thousand people died in correctional facilities ..
About 1,200,000 displaced people (dispossessed peasants, displaced peoples and other extrajudicial repressed) also died.
Total killed as a result of communist repression for political reasons – 2.6 million people. For 74 years.

Almost 11 million Soviet citizens, including exterminated prisoners of war, became victims of the Nazis – this is without taking into account the losses of the army. For 3 years.

Cuprum---what about the kulaks who were starved during the 1932-33 forced collectivization program? I know it's controversial, but estimates vary, but go from 3 million to 10 million?

Glup!….

Amicalement
Armand

You are confusing the two phenomena.
The kulaks are the rural bourgeoisie (people who used hired labor, giving loans at interest to fellow villagers, or renting farm animals or equipment). According to communist terminology – exploiters. These people were deprived of their property and sent to other regions of the country. Some of them died on the way and at the places of new settlements – they are included in the numbers of the dead displaced persons indicated by me above. But no mass famine was observed among them.
You are now talking, most likely, of hunger during the period of collectivization (the process of forcibly creating large rural producers from many small individual farms). Now, according to available documents, the victims of this famine are estimated at approximately four million people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia. There is undoubted guilt of the country's leadership, but none of the leaders set the goal of artificially creating hunger. This is a combination of many adverse factors. Extensive drought, the state's refusal to timely reduce the tax rate of peasants, the destruction of personal livestock by peasants because of their unwillingness to donate it to the collective farm and some others. This is of course a tragedy, but famine in Russia, before the collectivization, was not uncommon. People under the king regularly died in the millions for this reason.
You see, even Lenin said that socialism is "accounting and control." Any action in the USSR was accompanied by a mandatory bureaucratic procedure. Even if someone wanted to destroy the documents, there would remain a gigantic amount of indirect evidence – how many railway cars were allocated for prisoners, how much food, how much uniform, how much security … How much work they had to do (otherwise the head of the correctional camp to the Gulag for sabotage). All this was calculated based on the number of prisoners. It is impossible to hide any numbers from the researcher in reality.
During the period of total secrecy in the USSR, all these documents were inaccessible to the researcher, which allowed us to make the most terrible assumptions and speculations on this topic. But now the Russian authorities themselves are interested in the descent of communism and there is no reason for them to hide the existing documents. On the contrary, during the period of "perestroika" the state services created a mass of anti-Soviet fakes, which are now being gradually exposed.
There are excellent studies on this subject from the Russian scientist (by the way – a convinced anti-Stalinist) Viktor Zemskov.
link

Well, OK. That seems to paint a rosier picture than I've read about. Just by Googling the topic Soviet force collectivization. Most of those put the deaths caused by the policy at much more than you indicate. Certainly, famine was an issue---one of Stalin's goals was to increase agriculture. Of course his other goal was to increase heavy industry, which worked against his first goal. And he certainly had it in for those richer farmers, since they were of course, class enemies. Don't you just love communism??

In Russia, in agriculture, the problem has been monstrous since tsarist times. The commodity productivity of the vast majority of peasant farms was scanty. The peasant himself consumed everything he produced. Before the revolution, marketable grain was produced almost exclusively by large landowners. After the revolution, landowner land was divided between peasants, but this only reduced the production of marketable products. It was necessary to create large agricultural enterprises with modern farming methods.
The numbers are all called different, but the methodology of these calculations is often not quite clear. If reliable sources of information used are not given, for me these figures simply do not exist. This is just speculation.
I am not a communist, but I hold leftist views. And for me, truth is more important than political preferences :)

By the way, a third of the political repressed were precisely the communists. The "Trotskyists", "Bukharinites", "Zinovievites" and other representatives of the "Leninist Guard", not to mention the socialists – "Socialist Revolutionaries" and "Mensheviks."

Thanks!.

Amicalement
Armand

Interesting how history repeats, and/or certain individuals in power seek to have it repeat, many decades later.

History always evolves in a spiral. This is always the same play, only the actors and the scenery are different :)