In Russia, several historians have swum against the tide, rejecting the country’s official interpretation of World War II. Viktor Suvorov was the first to explain what Stalin meant and how he transformed Russia into a war machine destined to conquer the world. Mark Solonin explained how the Red Army was destroyed in the first months of the war in 1941 and how Stalin’s planned strength – mainly the size of the Red Army – turned into weakness.
Alexander Gogun is the youngest and least known on this list, but his research topic is no less important. Gogun faced what is completely denied by the so-called of Russia official historians and which has so far hardly been studied: how Joseph Stalin he was preparing for World War III, which was to become a major nuclear war. He also recently participated in the podcast “The Apocalypse of Stalin. The Third World War”.
As a historian, you have worked on topics that are relevant even today: the life of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Banderas, as well as the crimes of the red partisans in Ukraine during the Second World War. Soviet history treated partisans as avengers who came from the people and took revenge on the Germans for their crimes. You think it wasn’t like that at all.
Soviet partisans could be representatives of the people to the same extent that the Soviet establishment was close to the people. In the modern sense, it was a kind of “special forces” (originally Soviet special forces – ed.). The Soviet partisan movement was organized by party organizations, the leadership of the Red Army and the NKVD, and had to do their bidding, in this sense they were not rebels or resistance fighters like in other European countries.
In our imagination, “spetsnaz” is the elite, but the Soviet leadership never fought wisely, but with plurality. Therefore, their low qualifications were the result of the mass. The Soviet regime believed that if there were several hundred thousand partisans, they would cause more damage to the opponent.
The actions of the red partisans can be compared with the horrors that are currently happening in Ukraine. Are the Russian forces deliberately repeating what was done under Stalin, or is it a coincidence and are we rather looking for analogies with history?
I believe that the leaders of Russia know history very well and are deliberately repeating the experience of Stalin’s time. But I, as a historian, say that, in my opinion, what the red partisans did was not repeated in Buch, but what the Red Army did in the German city of Nemmersdorf in 1944. It was one of the first German cities to be captured by the Soviet Army and the Red Army began to kill the local population. After some time, the Germans recaptured Nemmersdorf and German propaganda showed these atrocities all over Germany. It was so terrible that they didn’t even have to lie or make anything up. On the one hand, it strengthened German resistance to the Red Army, on the other hand, the fact that people fled the Red Army in large numbers later helped Poland and the Soviet Union to integrate large areas of Germany.
