Dive into the tangled history of Soviet war casualties, political legends like Gorbachev, and the twists behind the numbers! We break down myths, mysteries, and debates that shaped a nation—and the world. Curious about Cold War facts, Glasnost, and shifting Soviet stories? This video is for you! Subscribe for more gripping history and tell us in the comments what surprised you most! #history #SovietUnion #WWII #Gorbachev #ColdWar
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0:21 - Gorbachev's Role in German Reunification
0:50 - Perestroika, Glasnost, and the Collapse of USSR
1:14 - Key Figures and Soviet Challenges During the Cold War
3:02 - Cultural Misconceptions and the End of the USSR
4:18 - Gorbachev, Stalin, and Soviet War Loss Numbers
7:51 - Shifting Official Figures and Cold War History
11:00 - Research and Debate on Soviet WWII Casualties
13:42 - Modern Estimates and Reflections on Historical Truth
👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@zeitgeschichteinbildundton
0:21 - Gorbachev's Role in German Reunification
0:50 - Perestroika, Glasnost, and the Collapse of USSR
1:14 - Key Figures and Soviet Challenges During the Cold War
3:02 - Cultural Misconceptions and the End of the USSR
4:18 - Gorbachev, Stalin, and Soviet War Loss Numbers
7:51 - Shifting Official Figures and Cold War History
11:00 - Research and Debate on Soviet WWII Casualties
13:42 - Modern Estimates and Reflections on Historical Truth
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LearningTranscript
00:21It is undisputed that Mikhail Gorbachev played a significant role in ensuring that on the
00:273rd, on October 3rd, 1990, the GDR and the Federal Republic were able to unite to form the larger
00:34Federal Republic of Germany. On August 30th, 2022, this initially Soviet, then Russian politician
00:43died at the age of 91, with the obituaries about him being mixed. But if you look at the policy
00:52of
00:52perestroika, meaning restructuring, that he pursued from 1986, and of freedom of expression,
01:00Glasnost, which, however, five years later, also contributed to the decline and the collapse of
01:05the USSR, and, last but not least, led to the German reunification, there was hardly any alternative
01:13for him. Because history, during the time of upheaval, had some highly interesting people
01:19thrown into political offices by chance. For the West, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
01:26and, as the most powerful and steadfast representative, U.S. President Ronald Reagan
01:33must be mentioned. In 1983, during the Cold War, he responded to the Soviet arms buildup by announcing
01:42the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative, South Dakota I, which also became popularly known
01:49as Star Wars. Due to the lack of financial resources and the obvious technological lag,
01:57Gorbachev didn't have much of a choice. But to come to an agreement with the Americans,
02:03who had consistently stood by what they had announced. I'm not sure if Gorbachev might not
02:11have taken a harder line, if the cash-strapped Soviet Union hadn't been up to its neck in trouble
02:17because, when it came to his Communist principles and beliefs, he never abandoned them until the
02:23very end, despite meeting with the Polish Pope, whose influence on further developments in the
02:29so-called Eastern Bloc should not be underestimated. But in this way, it was not only the INF
02:37disarmament treaty that resulted from several summit meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan,
02:43but also to a foreign policy rapprochement-based, more on trust than on mistrust, to the end of the Cold
02:52War and the cautious attempt at more democracy in the Soviet Union, which, however, ultimately also
03:00led to its dissolution. Because it was and still is a misconception that by enjoying McDonald's and
03:07Coca-Cola, everyone automatically becomes a Democrat. And that's with a population that, for centuries,
03:14has lived in an absolute authoritarian state, without major upheavals, and sometimes under atheist
03:21dictatorships marked by terror. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, the three former Union republics,
03:30Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, marked two, three, and four on the map, as well as the former socialist
03:38brother states in the Warsaw Pact, like the rebellious Poles, Czechoslovaks, and Hungarians, the Bulgarians,
03:46Romanians, and Slovenians couldn't join NATO fast enough. And that, even though, according to the 2,850 German
03:55hardcore leftists gathered in the DKP, the communist socialist system is supposed to be so great. No, whether with or
04:04without
04:05Gorby, as the Germans, in their tendency to make names sound cuter, call Mikhail Gorbachev, the time was simply
04:13ripe for a dramatic change in history, a turning point in history. But when I revisited his life on the
04:21occasion of Gorbachev's passing, I remembered a remark he once made, which he made during a summit
04:31meeting with the American President Reagan. At that time, President Gorbachev, rather casually and largely
04:38unnoticed, revised the Soviet figure upward for the number of Soviet war casualties that had been in place
04:45since 1965 war casualties of the Second World War, raising the number of deaths from the previous 20 million
04:52million by another 7 million, to a total of 27 million dead. With this increase, however, the difference
05:00compared to earlier official Soviet figures became even more striking and inexplicable.
05:05Here are the facts. The very first figure regarding Soviet war casualties probably came from Joseph
05:13Stalin himself, who said to Churchill during the Potsdam Conference in July 1945,
05:20we lost 5 million people during the war. Stalin was much more detailed, although 2 million higher, on the 14th,
05:30March 1946, in an interview with the newspaper Pravda, where he based his statement on the figure submitted
05:38to him on the 13th, September 1945, from the State Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes.
05:49As a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union lost about 7 million people in the fighting with the
05:56Germans
05:57through German occupation and through the deportation of Soviet citizens into slavery in Germany.
06:04In other words, the Soviet Union lost many times more people than England and the United States combined.
06:13What was remarkable about this interview was that Stalin listed all three categories relevant for such calculations.
06:21That is, death in combat, through occupation and deportation for forced labor.
06:29Wasn't the impression already being given back then that by mentioning 7 million war victims a final count had now
06:37been made?
06:39Which, moreover, as is usual in such cases, certainly was not underestimated, but rather had been rounded up.
06:47Stalin didn't mention this new number by chance, because amid the sharp deterioration in relations with the Western allies,
06:55he wanted to impress them with it.
07:00The cooling was also the result of the Iron Curtain established by the Soviet side of lies and denial, for
07:07example.
07:09The one ordered by Stalin in April 1940, and unfortunately at first also by his Western allied partners,
07:17the hushed-up murder of 22,000 to 25,000 Polish officers and intellectuals during the massacre in the village
07:28of Katyn near Smolensk,
07:31which for years was blamed on the Germans.
07:34It was only on April 13, 1990, that President Gorbachev accepted the Soviet Union's responsibility for these mass murders,
07:44which were never prosecuted in the Soviet Union and later apologized to the Polish people for it.
07:50However, on March 14, 1946, Stalin had still spoken of a total number of 7 million.
07:59A few years later, a new number appeared in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
08:0610 million?
08:07In the same year, a Soviet General Staff Colonel under the alias Kalinov also defected to the West.
08:16Or he had been sent by the Soviet Intelligence Service, and in a publication he wrote that Soviet sources indicated
08:23a loss of 20 million people.
08:27At that time Kalinov might have been referring to the documents prepared in March 1946 by the extraordinary Soviet State
08:36Commission and the Soviet General Staff,
08:40which, however, for some inexplicable reason, were only published after more than 45 years in the 1990s.
08:51Thus, the Soviet General Staff estimated 8,668 dead and missing in the military sector.
09:01For the civilian population, the extraordinary State Commission had estimated 6,074.
09:11For the forced laborers, 3,399,000 dead and 641,803 civilian starvation deaths during the Siege of Leningrad,
09:26Also, 688,772 Soviet citizens who remained in Western countries after the war were included in the war losses.
09:35However, it is not reported how such precise numbers were reached in estimates so soon after the end of the
09:43war.
09:44Another 15 years passed before, in November 1961, the first Secretary of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev, brought it up for
09:57discussion.
09:57The Soviet war losses amounted to 20 million.
10:01And again, four years later, in 1965, 1965, his successor Leonid Brezhnev estimated the number of Soviet war deaths at
10:13more than 20 million.
10:14This shocking and memorable figure of 20 million was accepted by the Western public at the time without verification and
10:25was repeatedly held against the Germans.
10:30Brezhnev received support for his 20 million claim from Marshal of the Soviet Union Ivan Konev,
10:38who stated at a press conference of the Soviet Ministry of Defense on April 28, 1965,
10:47that the number of Soviet military deaths in World War II amounted to 10 million.
10:55From then on, the figure of 20 million was officially fixed.
11:00Then, in 1983, the Soviet mathematician, geophysicist, and physicist Yosef Jezelevich Dayatkin,
11:10here with his family in the United States,
11:14he published a study based on mathematical techniques applied to the demographic statistics of the Soviet Union,
11:22which recorded the entire Soviet population loss between 1939 and 1945,
11:30and estimated it at 30 million due to the acts of war and internal political repression.
11:38For this study, Dayatkin, together with the Russian Germanist, writer, and humanist Lev Kopelev,
11:46was sentenced to three years in prison in the Soviet Union.
11:52Because between 1976 and 1980,
11:56he repeatedly spread knowingly fabricated false claims,
12:01both orally and in writing,
12:04which would defame the Soviet state system.
12:08According to the indictment, he claimed,
12:11the October Revolution and the Civil War led to unnecessary casualties and an economic collapse.
12:19During collectivization,
12:21the majority of the peasantry was destroyed
12:24and agriculture was practically ruined,
12:28which is the reason for the difficulties in agriculture today.
12:33Socialism is a regime of coercion
12:36and mass destruction of nations and ethnic groups.
12:41The foreign policy of the USSR before the Great Patriotic War led to the outbreak of the war.
12:48The assistance for the peoples of Czechoslovakia,
12:51the assistance for the peoples of Czechoslovakia,
12:54Afghanistan, and Angola
12:56is described by Dayatkin as aggression and occupation by the USSR
13:00and is the cause of the Cold War.
13:03Dayatkin repeatedly stated that the rights and freedoms of the individual were restricted in the USSR.
13:11The official press lies and restricts and distorts information,
13:16and so on.
13:17End of quote.
13:19If you now go to the website of the Federal Republic's Minister of State for Culture and Media,
13:26a certain Miss Roth, who is well known for her embarrassing appearances at protests,
13:32you read in the first sentence,
13:34around 13 million soldiers of the Red Army fell during the Second World War.
13:39This number is incorrect!
13:42Here is the first part of the list of the most important historians and their figures since 1989.
13:52Richard Overy, listed at the very bottom, assumes that the figure of 8.6 million must currently be regarded as
14:03the most reliable.
14:05However, the official figures themselves, including Overy's, should be viewed critically,
14:10because due to the chaos of 1941 and 1942, it is still not clear who was killed, wounded, or even
14:19conscripted at all.
14:21Here is the second part of the list.
14:26Except for Gilbert, who died in 2015 at the age of 78, who wrote 88 books,
14:34but can't necessarily be considered an expert on the subject.
14:38The number is mostly estimated to be somewhat lower, at over 4 million deaths.
14:46Starting in 1988, during the time of Glasnost,
14:50the official number of 20 million war deaths was suddenly called into question.
14:56Why this happened, whether by chance or by order from above, is not known.
15:01In any case, the question arises,
15:05what new findings are supposed to have emerged after 43 years,
15:10and why Soviet historians are supposed to have been so greatly mistaken for more than four decades.
15:17But be that as it may,
15:19in 1988 slash 1989,
15:21certainly not by coincidence,
15:24estimates of a total of 26 to 28 million war dead,
15:29suddenly appeared in the Soviet press.
15:33However, these figures matched the published numbers of the former Soviet,
15:38later Russian Colonel General Dmitryk Antonovich Volkovich,
15:45who had estimated the total number of war dead at 26 to 27 million,
15:51including 10 million in the military.
15:54Volkoganov, author of numerous books,
15:57who, starting in 1985, was the head of the Institute for Military History,
16:02and, during his five years in that position,
16:06was able to study the secret archives of the party.
16:09Had, in his 1990 biography of Stalin,
16:13identified three factors as responsible for the totalitarian development of the Soviet Union.
16:20Lenin, through his authoritarian communism.
16:25Stalin, through his ruthless pursuit of personal absolute power and manipulation of internal party rivalries.
16:34And the Russian people, through inertia, passive character,
16:39a tendency toward a strong leader, lack of knowledge about democracy and personal autonomy.
16:46This criticism of the Soviet system was made by Volkoganov,
16:50who had transformed himself from someone intimately familiar with communist reality,
16:57from an orthodox Marxist and convinced Stalinist to a Democrat,
17:02found himself isolated on all sides and made enemies everywhere in the Nomenklatura.
17:07And also, the communist coup attempt that lasted from August 19 to 21, 1991,
17:17Gorbachev, weakened by it,
17:19whom Volkoganov saw as one of those party leaders
17:23who was the only one to have called for reflection
17:26on the fundamental questions of the Soviet system,
17:30but rejected any rethinking
17:33and wanted to preserve the communist system under all circumstances.
17:37It turned away from him.
17:40After a draft of a new history of the Second World War
17:44was published under his editorship in June 1991,
17:50the content of which the old communists did not like,
17:53the empire struck back.
17:56Volkoganov was forced to resign by Defense Minister Dmitry Yassov.
18:03As for Gorbachev, he had established a committee in March 1989
18:08to investigate Soviet war losses,
18:13which, as we've heard, was not the first committee to investigate such questions.
18:19Then, in a speech in May 1990,
18:23he suddenly increased the number of total Soviet losses,
18:27which had been set at 20 million for 20 years by 7 million to almost 27 million.
18:35Gorbachev did not give a reason for this.
18:40But now let's take the book published in 1981 by Count Nikolai Tolstoy-Miloslavsky,
18:48Stalin's Secret War.
18:52This Russian-British historian had already critically examined
18:57the increase from 5 million to 20 million on several pages of his book.
19:04And he was not the only Soviet expert who suspected that even the figure of 20 million,
19:12because of the requirement for a consistent...
19:16A large number of Stalin's victims had also been included in the democratic accounting
19:22simply by charging them to the German account.
19:27That the Soviet Union suffered horrendous losses in the war with Germany,
19:32both at the front and in the hinterland,
19:35is completely beyond doubt and is not questioned by anyone.
19:39On the other hand, it also doesn't make sense that, as can be observed,
19:45more or less regularly the Soviet casualty numbers are increased,
19:49sometimes with grotesque percentage jumps.
19:54Even though the communist-socialist system was supposedly superior to everything else in all areas,
20:00including counting and determining war casualties.
20:03While the German losses have not only remained the same for decades,
20:08but, for example, regarding the bombing campaign and expulsions,
20:12have even been reduced by German historians.
20:17What did the great Greek historian Thucydides, the father of history, know 2,500 years ago?
20:27Most people are too lazy to get to the bottom of the truth.
20:31They are satisfied with the first authoritative opinion they come across.
20:48You
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