The reasons why the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans do not honor the Russian "asvabadi" Traditions of looting, pogroms, violence and robberies of the Soviet (Russian) army.
On August 8, 1945, after declining Japan's request to mediate its surrender to the United States and its allies, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov handed over to Japanese Ambassador Sato a declaration of war that violated the Treaty of Neutrality previously concluded between Japan and the USSR. During the week that followed, the Red Army broke through the defenses of the demoralized Kwantung Army on Sakhalin, as well as in Japanese-occupied Manchuria (Northeast China) and Korea, and occupied vast territories south of the Soviet border.
As a result of hostilities, a huge number of Japanese colonial civilians suffered, who had previously moved to Manchuria occupied by Japan and were not warned in time about the attack by the USSR. According to the recollections of eyewitnesses, “... if you ran into the Manchus, they took everything from you. But the most terrible were the Red Army. They killed the Japanese just for the sake of killing. I saw many corpses pierced with bayonets. Mountains and mountains of bodies..." (Ronald Spector, "In the Ruins of Empire", p. 30).
One of the most famous massacres of Japanese colonists by the Red Army, according to eyewitness accounts (for example, Kawauchi Mitsuo), took place near the Gegenmiao station in Manchuria, where on August 14 there were wagons with approximately 1,200 Japanese refugees.
When the Soviet tank column occupied the station, the head of the council of Japanese colonists, Asano, came out to negotiate with the Red Army. When approaching the tanks, he was mowed down by a machine-gun burst, after which the Red Army began to shoot the rest of the refugees. As a result, about 1000 colonists were killed or committed suicide ("The Japanese Internees and Forced Labor in the USSR after the Second World War", part 1, p. 30).
According to Japanese estimates, over 11,000 Japanese colonists died during the Red Army's offensive in Manchuria. Also, many thousands of Japanese died later from the inhuman conditions in which they found themselves as a result of the Soviet offensive. The Japanese ambassador in Shenyang wrote: “About half a million former colonists have accumulated in the city. Some walked over a thousand miles to reach the refugee camps. Many are completely emaciated, some have no clothes on. Everything that they could not carry with them was taken from them. Sometimes they don't get any food for days." (Ronald Spector, "In the Ruins of Empire", p. 31).
Despite the surrender announced by the Japanese Emperor on August 15, 1945, the Red Army continued to destroy the evacuees, especially in South Sakhalin, which, according to the Shimoda Treaty of 1855, belonged to Japan. On the morning of August 20, Soviet troops landed in the Japanese port of Maoka (now Kholmsk), where 18,000 Japanese were waiting for evacuation to Hokkaido and, according to Japanese archives, shot about 1,000 civilians who tried to flee to the mountains.
A week after the surrender of Japan, on August 22, in Toyohara (now Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk), Soviet bombers dropped bombs on a crowd of refugees gathered at the station, killing several hundred people. This was done despite a huge white flag over the station building and a large white awning with a red cross, in the area of which there were refugees. At the same time, the transport ships Dai-Ni-Sinko-Maru, Ogasawara-maru and Taito-maru with refugees evacuating from Sakhalin were, like the Gustlov in the Baltic, torpedoed by Soviet submarines, and people who were in the water were shot from the air. As a result, 1,708 refugees died.
Having occupied South Sakhalin, Iturup, Kunashir, Habomai and Shikotan, the USSR deported all the Japanese from there, as well as the Sakhalin and Kuril natives - the Ainu and part of the Nivkhs, along with the Wilt. Only 43,000 Korean workers remained on Sakhalin, interned there by the Japanese under a forced labor program in 1920-1945. Now they were forced to work for the USSR in exactly the same difficult conditions as before.
Korean exiles captured by the USSR on Sakhalin and left there for forced labor
Nearly 600,000 Japanese servicemen surrendered to the Red Army in Manchuria, Sakhalin, and the Kuriles. Most of them were transported to the USSR, from where those who survived were repatriated to their homeland in 1956. together with the Japanese captured in the 30s during the Soviet-Japanese border conflicts.
Used captured Japanese and interned Koreans for forced labor in violation of the Potsdam Declaration of 1945. Unlike Japanese war crimes, this Soviet war crime was not condemned by any court or tribunal (Mark Ealey. An August Storm. The Soviet-Japan Endgame in the Pacific War: The Japan Focus.).
Having defeated the Japanese in Manchuria, she took up the robbery of civilians and violence. A detachment of the US Strategic Services Command (OSS), landing on August 16 in the Chinese city of Shenyang (Mukden), to rescue American soldiers from Japanese captivity, reported: “The Russians surpassed the Chinese in robbery, looting and rape. Women are raped at bus stops railway stations and sometimes right on the streets.
Rumor has it that the local authorities are ordered to supply a certain number of women to the Soviet command every night. As a result, women shave their heads, cover their faces with ink, and put on bandages to look as unattractive as possible.” The commander of this detachment, Hal Leith, wrote literally the following about the Red Army: “They are only engaged in robberies and murders. And they are not only robbing the Japanese. Some soldiers wear a dozen wristwatches at once... Among the Soviet military, I happened to meet decent people, but these are only one in ten.”
The American naval attache in Nanjing recalled: “Russian soldiers broke into houses and took away everything except furniture. Then a military truck drove up and took away the furniture. Soviet officers usually did not pay attention to the robberies perpetrated by their subordinates, and often they themselves participated in them.
There is a diary in the CIA archives describing repeated robberies by the Red Army of the house of a German sales agent in Shenyang, in which officers participated, and the Soviet occupation authorities refused to investigate this case and in the end they themselves "bought" this agent's apartment and furniture that they did not have time to steal , at a greatly reduced price. The diary also mentions the frequent robberies of passers-by by the Red Army, the confiscation of industrial equipment with its shipment to the USSR, and the arrests by the Red Army of the Chinese, Japanese and Germans in order to force their labor.
Troops of the Trans-Baikal Front march through Manchuria
Soviet soldiers looted and raped not only in Shenyang, but also in smaller Chinese cities. So, having entered Pingchuan, the Red Army threw representatives of the local police and the puppet army into prison to starve to death, and then robbed all the houses and took away all the cattle.
According to the testimonies of local residents, “Soviet soldiers take away wrist watch and shoot those who refuse to submit to robbery. The Red Army demands women from peasants. The Red Army shot a peasant and two workers who could not find women to satisfy their lust” (Ronald Spector, “In the Ruins of Empire”, pp. 34-35).
An officer of the Kwantung Army, who surrendered to the Red Army in the Chinese city of Jilin, recalled: “Dozens of Soviet soldiers lined up in front of the doors of the house in which they raped Japanese women. When we stopped in a hilly area on the outskirts of the city, a Japanese woman, disguised as a soldier, ran out to us, shouting: “Help! Soldiers!” and hid among us. But a Red Army soldier was already running after her, holding a gun in one hand.
He touched her breasts and said, “Japanese madam. Good!” and took her with him. He fired a machine gun into the air and threatened us not to interfere. The woman being led away by the Red Army soldier looked at us reproachfully. Even now I remember her look.” (“The Japanese Internees and Forced Labor in the USSR after the Second World War. Part 2, p. 68”).
Red Army soldiers drag another victim to rape (Germany)
The Cossacks who fled from Soviet power to China also witnessed the crimes of the Red Army in Manchuria. These are the memoirs of the Cossack Larisa Anatolyevna, a special settler from China, published in the magazine "Fatherland and Faith" of his Chief Editor Mikhail Smyslov. "In 1945, the liberating Red Army, the so-called Rokosovites, came.
“And this began in China, which no one is talking about now ... These veterans put on awards! .. And I was a girl and saw with my own eyes what was happening there! And let these veterans shove themselves in ... these awards. Because none of them is recognized already, you can see what they did. We are already silent about us, it seems like we “deserved”. What did they do to the Chinese? How they dishonored the Chinese girls, who later committed suicide, threw themselves from the steep into the rivers, because they were not able to bear this shame.
They robbed Chinese shops and took out the loot with suitcases to the Union - this is an ordinary composition. And the officers took out the goods of the Chinese, whom they came to liberate, in containers and wagons. And the Chinese were embittered against us. It was necessary to evacuate the village - we all left in one morning.
And let's pour machine-gun fire on us from the hills. Our Cossacks did not get involved in the battle, but went around the machine gunners from the rear along the beam and captured them. It turned out they were Chinese. They began to ask - for what? Well, we lived in peace with you, shared bread, our doctor also helped your patients how much. And they answer: “You Russians have ruined everything for us!” “So this is the Soviet, the Red Army, and not us!” "You all look the same! .."
The Japanese vice-consul in Port Arthur reported that Chinese citizens had stolen weapons from the naval base and formed a militia to counter the looting by the Red Army (Ronald Spector, "In the Ruins of Empire", p. 35). Even the Chinese Communists protested to the USSR.
The secretary of the Northeast branch of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Fujia, wrote to the leadership of the CPSU (b) that "the Red Army is engaged in things that are not befitting the proletarian army, including rape and expropriation of food supplies from the peasants." In his letter, Hu Fujia asked "to create a military disciplinary committee that would prevent violations of military discipline by the Red Army and launch a broad propaganda campaign to regain the confidence of the Chinese, who are now seriously afraid of Soviet soldiers." (Stalin, the Cold War and the pision of China: a Multiarchival Mystery, p. 3).
Propaganda poster printed for China
Following Manchuria, the Red Army occupied North Korea, and it was similarly overwhelmed by a wave of looting and violence. “In the city of Songdo, which was occupied by the Soviets for only a few days because it was south of the 38th parallel, 8 million yen was stolen from a bank and 60,000 pounds of expensive ginseng were stolen from warehouses. As a memento of their stay in the city, Soviet soldiers took away wristwatches from most citizens” (“Do We Run Korea Badly? Well, Look How Reds Do”, p.59, Newsweek, Sep. 24, 1945).
An Australian who traveled to Pyongyang to look for missing Allied POWs reported: “Russians, armed with Thompson submachine guns, fire a few shots into the air, then break into houses, pull out those women, mostly young, that they find there, drag them along with furniture and other things they like in their trucks and go to their barracks.
After a day or two, women are thrown out into the street... I saw how Russians go into vegetable gardens and take off all the vegetables from them, despite the fact that the peasants and their families will die of starvation if they do not receive money for these vegetables. But the Russians don't pay for the food they take from the peasants. At least I have never seen them pay. The Koreans told me they got nothing for the pets and vegetables taken from them by the Red Army” (Ronald Spector, “In the Ruins of Empire”, pp. 144-145).
The looting and looting carried out by individual soldiers of the Red Army pales in comparison to the systematic de-industrialization of Manchuria by the Soviet authorities. Working non-stop, Soviet specialists, with the help of forced Japanese and German engineers, dismantled entire factories and power plants and sent them to the USSR. Six months after the beginning of the Soviet occupation, out of 972 factories and factories in Shenyang, only twenty had the equipment necessary for their work.
Due to expropriations in favor of the USSR, even the water supply, sewerage and heating systems of the city ceased to function. “They took out everything that could be taken out,” recalls Robert Seck, an American aircraft mechanic who flew to Shenyang immediately after the Soviet occupiers left. “The only thing the Red Army left in the city was a monument to itself in the center of the city with a tank on top of a column” (Ronald Spector, “In the Ruins of Empire”, pp. 34-35).
Monument to Soviet soldiers-"liberators" in Shenyang (Mukden). Photo 1946
Here is what a Japanese engineer told the Time correspondent, who happened to be an accidental witness to the removal to the USSR of the largest plant in Manchuria, Anshan Steel Works, located 60 miles from Shenyang. “The Russians took from 70 to 80% of Anshan's equipment, including smelting equipment, a machine shop, steel rolling machines and ore mills, chemical equipment, trucks and locomotives. These trophies were sent by rail to Darien and Russian-occupied Korea for onward shipment to the USSR" ("Foreign News: LOOTED CITY", TIME, March 11, 1946).
Similarly, Soviet-occupied North Korea was looted and deindustrialized. So, everything that could be taken out from the Nippon Steel Company in Chungjin was sent to the USSR, from furnaces and chemicals to telephones and tables with chairs. There is only one empty building left of the Japanese Textile Company. More than half of the coal reserves destined for the Korean railways were exported to the USSR.
American experts calculated that the deindustrialization organized by the Soviets alone caused direct damage to the Chinese economy in the amount of $ 850 million, or 9.5 billion current US dollars, and equipment, raw materials and food stocks worth at least a billion dollars of that time were exported from North Korea to the USSR ( Ronald Spector, "In the Ruins of Empire", pp. 35 and 145).
But incomparably more serious damage to China and North Korea was caused by the fact that the Soviet occupation brought local communists to power, whose efforts established totalitarian regimes that killed millions of people, slowed down economic development and turned these countries into a large concentration camp, and their population into slaves.
Monument to Soviet soldiers-"liberators" in Pyongyang
The year 2015 is going down in history - the seventieth year since the end of the Second World War. Hundreds of articles, documents, photographs dedicated to the holy anniversary, Rodina published this year. And we decided to dedicate the December issue of our "Scientific Library" to some of the results and long-term consequences of the Second World War.
Of course, this does not mean that, along with the anniversary year, the pages of Rodina will become a thing of the past. military theme. The June issue is already planned, which will be dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the start of the Great Patriotic War, in the editorial portfolio, analytical materials of prominent Russian and foreign scientists are waiting in the wings, letters about native front-line soldiers for the heading "" continue to arrive ...
Write to us, dear readers. In our "Scientific Library" there are still many empty shelves.
Editing "Motherland"
Open Trials of Nazis
History of World War II - a never-ending list of war crimes Nazi Germany and her allies. For this, the main war criminals were openly judged by humanity in their lair - Nuremberg (1945-1946) and Tokyo (1946-1948). Because of its politico-legal significance and cultural footprint, the Nuremberg Tribunal has become a symbol of justice. Other show trials of the countries of Europe over the Nazis and their accomplices, and, first of all, open trials held on the territory of the Soviet Union, remained in its shadow.
The most brutal war crimes in 1943-1949 took place in 21 affected cities of five Soviet republics: Krasnodar, Krasnodon, Kharkov, Smolensk, Bryansk, Leningrad, Nikolaev, Minsk, Kyiv, Velikiye Luki, Riga, Stalino (Donetsk), Bobruisk, Sevastopol, Chernigov, Poltava, Vitebsk, Chisinau, Novgorod, Gomel, Khabarovsk. They were publicly condemned 252 war criminals from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Japan and several of their accomplices from the USSR. Open courts in the USSR over war criminals carried not only the legal meaning of punishing the guilty, but also political and anti-fascist. So films were made about the meetings, books were published, reports were written - for millions of people around the world. Judging by the reports of the MGB, almost the entire population supported the accusation and wished the defendants the most severe punishment.
At the show trials of 1943-1949. the best investigators, qualified translators, authoritative experts, professional lawyers, talented journalists worked. About 300-500 spectators came to the meetings (the halls no longer fit), thousands more stood on the street and listened to radio broadcasts, millions read reports and brochures, tens of millions watched newsreels. Under the burden of evidence, almost all suspects confessed to their deeds. In addition, only those whose guilt was repeatedly confirmed by evidence and witnesses were in the dock. The verdicts of these courts can be considered justified even by modern standards, so none of the convicts were rehabilitated. But, despite the importance of open processes, modern researchers know too little about them. The main problem is the unavailability of sources. The materials of each trial amounted to fifty extensive volumes, but they were hardly published 1 because they are stored in the archives of the former KGB departments and have not yet been fully declassified. There is also a culture of remembrance. Opened in Nuremberg in 2010 big museum, which arranges exhibitions and methodically examines the Nuremberg Tribunal (and the 12 subsequent Nuremberg Trials). But on post-Soviet space there are no similar museums about local processes. Therefore, in the summer of 2015, the author of these lines created a kind of virtual museum "Soviet Nuremberg" for the Russian Military Historical Society 2 . This site, which caused a great resonance in the media, contains references and rare materials about 21 open courts in the USSR in 1943-1949.
Justice in times of war
Until 1943, no one in the world had the experience of trying the Nazis and their accomplices. There were no analogues of such cruelty in world history, there were no atrocities of such temporal and geographical scales, therefore there were no legal norms for retribution - neither in international conventions, nor in national criminal codes. In addition, for justice, it was still necessary to free the scenes of crimes and witnesses, to capture the criminals themselves. The first to do all this was the Soviet Union, but also not immediately.
From 1941 until the end of the occupation, open trials were held in partisan detachments and brigades - over traitors, spies, marauders. Their spectators were the partisans themselves and later the inhabitants of neighboring villages. At the front, traitors and Nazi executioners were punished by military tribunals until the issuance of Decree N39 of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of April 19, 1943 "On punishment for Nazi villains guilty of killing and torturing the Soviet civilian population and captured Red Army soldiers, for spies, traitors to the motherland from among Soviet citizens and for their accomplices". According to the Decree, cases of murders of prisoners of war and civilians were submitted to military field courts attached to divisions and corps. Many of their meetings, on the recommendation of the command, were open, with the participation of the local population. In military tribunals, partisan, people's and field courts, the accused defended themselves, without lawyers. Public hanging was a frequent verdict.
Decree N39 became the legal basis for systemic liability for thousands of crimes. The evidence base was detailed reports on the scale of atrocities and destruction in the liberated territories; for this, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of November 2, 1942, an State Commission to establish and investigate the atrocities of the Nazi invaders and their accomplices and the damage caused by them to citizens, collective farms, public organizations, state enterprises and institutions of the USSR "(ChGK). In parallel, investigators interrogated millions of prisoners of war in the camps.
The open trials of 1943 in Krasnodar and Kharkov were widely known. These were the world's first full-fledged trials of the Nazis and their accomplices. The Soviet Union tried to ensure a global resonance: the meetings were covered by foreign journalists and the best writers of the USSR (A. Tolstoy, K. Simonov, I. Ehrenburg, L. Leonov), cameramen and photographers filmed. The entire Soviet Union followed the processes - the reports of the meetings were published in the central and local press, and the reaction of readers was also posted there. Brochures about the processes have been published on different languages, they were read aloud in the army and rear. Released almost immediately documentaries"The Sentence of the People" and "The Judgment Is Coming", they were shown by Soviet and foreign cinemas. And in 1945-1946, the documents of the Krasnodar process on "gas chambers" ("gazenvagens") were used by the international tribunal in Nuremberg.
According to the principle of "collective guilt"
The most thorough investigation was carried out in the framework of ensuring open trials of war criminals in late 1945 - early 1946. in the eight most affected cities of the USSR. According to government directives, special operational-investigative groups of the Ministry of Internal Affairs-NKGB were created on the ground, they studied archives, acts of the ChGK, photographic documents, interrogated thousands of witnesses from different regions and hundreds of prisoners of war. The first seven such trials (Bryansk, Smolensk, Leningrad, Velikie Luki, Minsk, Riga, Kyiv, Nikolaev) sentenced 84 war criminals (most of them were hanged). So, in Kyiv, the hanging of twelve Nazis on Kalinin Square (now Maidan Nezalezhnosti) was seen and approved by more than 200,000 citizens.
Since these trials coincided with the start of the Nuremberg Trials, they were compared not only by the newspapers, but also by the prosecution and the defense. So, in Smolensk, the public prosecutor L.N. Smirnov built a chain of crimes from the Nazi leaders accused in Nuremberg, to specific 10 executioners in the dock: "Both those and others are participants in the same complicity." Lawyer Kaznacheev (by the way, he also worked at the Kharkov trial) also spoke about the connection between the criminals of Nuremberg and Smolensk, but with a different conclusion: "The sign of equality cannot be put between all these persons" 3 .
Eight Soviet trials of 1945-1946 were completed, and the Nuremberg Tribunal was also completed. But among the millions of prisoners of war, there were still thousands of war criminals. Therefore, in the spring of 1947, by agreement between the Minister of the Interior S. Kruglov and the Minister of Foreign Affairs V. Molotov, preparations began for the second wave of show trials against German military personnel. The next nine trials in Stalino (Donetsk), Sevastopol, Bobruisk, Chernigov, Poltava, Vitebsk, Novgorod, Chisinau and Gomel, held by a decree of the Council of Ministers of September 10, 1947, sentenced 137 people to terms in Vorkutlag.
The last open trial of foreign war criminals was the 1949 Khabarovsk trial of Japanese developers. biological weapons who tested it on Soviet and Chinese citizens (more on this on page 116 - Ed.). At the International Tribunal in Tokyo, these crimes were not investigated, since some potential defendants received immunity from the United States in exchange for experimental data.
Since 1947, instead of separate open trials, the Soviet Union began to massively conduct closed trials. Already on November 24, 1947, the order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, the Ministry of Justice of the USSR, the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR N 739/18/15/311 was issued, according to which it was prescribed to consider the cases of those accused of committing war crimes at closed meetings of the military tribunals of the troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the place of detention of the defendants (that is, practically without calling witnesses) without the participation of the parties and sentence the perpetrators to imprisonment for a period of 25 years in labor camps.
The reasons for the curtailment of open processes are not completely clear, so far it has not been possible to find any arguments in declassified documents. However, several versions can be put forward. Presumably, the conducted open trials were quite enough to satisfy society, propaganda switched to new tasks. In addition, open trials required highly qualified investigators, there were not enough of them in the field in the conditions of the post-war personnel shortage. It is worth considering the material support of open processes (the estimate for one process was about 55 thousand rubles), for the post-war economy these were significant amounts. Closed courts, on the other hand, made it possible to quickly and massively consider cases, sentence defendants to a predetermined term of imprisonment, and, finally, corresponded to the traditions of Stalinist jurisprudence. In closed trials, prisoners of war were often tried on the principle of "collective guilt", without concrete evidence of personal involvement. Therefore, in the 1990s, the Russian authorities rehabilitated 13,035 foreigners convicted under Decree No. 39 for war crimes (in total, in 1943-1952, at least 81,780 people were convicted under Decree, including 24,069 foreign prisoners of war) 4 .
Statute of limitations: protests and controversy
After Stalin's death, all foreigners convicted in closed and open trials were handed over in 1955-1956 to the authorities of their countries. This was not advertised in the USSR - the inhabitants of the affected cities, who well remembered the speeches of the prosecutors, clearly would not have understood such political agreements.
Only a few who came from Vorkuta were imprisoned in foreign prisons (this was the case in the GDR and Hungary, for example), because the USSR did not send investigation files with them. Walked" cold war", the Soviet and West German judicial authorities cooperated little in the 1950s. And those who returned to the FRG often said that they were slandered, and confessions of guilt in open trials were beaten out by torture. Most of those convicted of war crimes by the Soviet court were allowed to return to civilian professions, and some then - even enter the political and military elite.
At the same time, part of West German society (above all, young people who did not see the war themselves) strove for a serious overcoming of the Nazi past. Under the pressure of society in the late 1950s, open trials of war criminals took place in the FRG. They determined the creation in 1958 of the Central Office of the Department of Justice of the Lands of the Federal Republic of Germany for the prosecution of Nazi crimes. The main goals of his activities were the investigation of crimes and the identification of persons involved in crimes who can still be prosecuted by law. When the perpetrators are identified and it is established which prosecutor's office they fall under the competence of, the Central Office completes its preliminary investigation and transfers the case to the prosecutor's office.
Nevertheless, even identified criminals could be acquitted by a West German court. In accordance with the post-war Criminal Code of the Federal Republic of Germany, most of the crimes of the Second World War in the mid-1960s should have expired. Moreover, the twenty-year statute of limitations applied only to murders committed with particular cruelty. In the first post-war decade, a number of amendments were made to the Code, according to which those guilty of war crimes who did not directly participate in their execution could be acquitted.
In June 1964, the "conference of democratic jurists" that met in Warsaw protested fervently against the application of the statute of limitations to Nazi crimes. On December 24, 1964, the Soviet government made a similar declaration. A note dated January 16, 1965 accused the FRG of seeking to completely abandon the persecution of Nazi executioners. Articles that appeared in Soviet publications on the occasion of the twenty-year anniversary of the Nuremberg Tribunal 5 spoke about the same thing.
The situation seems to have been changed by the resolution of the 28th session of the UN General Assembly of December 3, 1973 "Principles international cooperation regarding the detection, arrest, extradition and punishment of persons guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. "According to its text, all war criminals were subject to search, arrest, extradition to those countries where they committed their atrocities, regardless of time. But also after the resolution, foreign countries were extremely reluctant to hand over their citizens to Soviet justice, arguing that the evidence from the USSR was sometimes shaky, because many years had passed.
In general, due to political obstacles, in the 1960s-1980s, the USSR tried in open trials not foreign war criminals, but their accomplices. For political reasons, the names of the punishers almost did not sound at the open trials of 1945-1947 over their foreign masters. Even the trial of Vlasov was held behind closed doors. Because of this secrecy, many traitors with blood on their hands were missed. After all, the orders of the Nazi organizers of the executions were willingly carried out by ordinary traitors from the Ostbattalions, Jagdkommandos, and nationalist formations. So, at the Novgorod trial in 1947, Colonel V. Findeisen, 6 the coordinator of punishers from the Shelon Ostbattalion, was tried. In December 1942, the battalion drove all the inhabitants of the villages of Bychkovo and Pochinok onto the ice of the Polist River and shot them. The punishers concealed their guilt, and the investigation was unable to link the cases of hundreds of executioners from "Shelon" with the case of V. Findizen. Without understanding, they were given general terms for traitors and, together with everyone, they were amnestied in 1955. The punishers fled in all directions, and only then was the personal guilt of each gradually investigated from 1960 to 1982 in a series of open trials 7 . It was not possible to catch everyone, but the punishment could have overtaken them as early as 1947.
Fewer and fewer witnesses remain, and the already unlikely chance of a full investigation of the atrocities of the occupiers and holding open trials is decreasing every year. However, such crimes do not have a statute of limitations, so historians and lawyers need to look for data and bring to justice all suspects who are still alive.
Notes
1. One of the exceptions is the publication of the materials of the Riga trial from the Central Archive of the FSB of Russia (ASD NH-18313, vol. 2. LL. 6-333) in the book by Kantor Yu.Z. Baltics: war without rules (1939-1945). SPb., 2011.
2. For more details, see the "Soviet Nuremberg" project on the website of the Russian Military Historical Society http://histrf.ru/ru/biblioteka/Soviet-Nuremberg.
3. Trial in the case of Nazi atrocities in the city of Smolensk and the Smolensk region, meeting on December 19 // News of the Soviets of Workers' Deputies of the USSR, N 297 (8907) of December 20, 1945, p. 2.
4. Epifanov A. E. Responsibility for war crimes committed on the territory of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. 1941 - 1956 Volgograd, 2005. P. 3.
5. Voisin V. ""Au nom des vivants", de Leon Mazroukho: une rencontre entre discours officiel et hommage personnel" // Kinojudaica. Les representations des Juifs dans le cinema russe et sovietique / dans V. Pozner, N. Laurent (dir.). Paris, Nouveau Monde editions, 2012, R. 375.
6. For more details, see Astashkin D. Open Trial of Nazi Criminals in Novgorod (1947) // Novgorod Historical Collection. V. Novgorod, 2014. Issue. 14(24). pp. 320-350.
7. Archive of the FSB department for the Novgorod region. D. 1/12236, D. 7/56, D. 1/13364, D. 1/13378.
Killings of hostages, torture of prisoners and mass executions of civilians - war crimes in world legal practice are assigned special place. Finding the perpetrators is sometimes possible only after decades. About how the NKVD and KGB hunted down Nazi criminals after the Great Patriotic War - in the material of RIA Novosti.
she-devil
Antonina Makarova, better known as Tonka the Machine Gunner, defected to the Nazis in 1942. In the Lokot Republic created by the Nazis, she served as an executioner, shooting partisans and their relatives. After the war, her trail was lost. The search was carried out by a special group of KGB officers. In 1976, one of the residents of Bryansk identified Nikolai Ivanin, the former head of the Lokot prison, as a bystander on the street. The traitor was arrested. During interrogations, he remembered that Antonina Makarova had lived in Moscow before the war. Operatives checked all Muscovites with this surname, but no one matched the description.
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg (Tonka the machine gunner)
KGB investigator Pyotr Golovachev drew attention to the questionnaire of one resident of the capital, filled out for traveling abroad. In the document, a Muscovite by the name of Makarov indicated that he lives in Belarus Native sister. Investigators set up covert surveillance of the suspect. They showed her to several former prisoners of the Lokot prison, and they identified Tonka the machine gunner in her. When all doubts disappeared, Makarova was detained. According to unofficial data, she has 1,500 murders on her account. In 1978, the war criminal was shot.
On the trail of the "count"
In 1942, a detachment of Red Army soldiers under the command of junior sergeant Stroganov fell into German captivity. The commander immediately went over to the side of the Nazis and, using a well-known surname, began to impersonate a count. Having led the punitive battalion GFP-520, a couple of years later he rose to the rank of non-commissioned officer. After the war, he moved to Austria, but in 1950 he returned to the USSR - he left his wife in Armavir.
By that time, a whole investigative group, created under the KGB Directorate of the Leningrad Region, was working on the case of the Stroganov punishers in the Soviet Union. The brigade was headed by investigator for especially important cases Yuri Menshakov, he was assisted by operatives Savelyev, Ryabchuk and Lesnikov. They found out that the "count's" battalion was involved in the destruction partisan detachment Pavel Nosov. Over the course of several years, intelligence officers arrested many participants in the GFP-520, including Stroganov himself. Some were sentenced to different terms imprisonment, others, like Stroganov, to the death penalty.
Archival and Investigative Files of the Fund of Criminal Cases of the Central Archive of the FSB of Russia
Khatyn executioner
In March 1943, punitive detachments burned alive and shot 149 residents of the Belarusian village of Khatyn. The key role in this execution was played by the 118th police battalion, staffed by Ukrainian nationalists. The first trials of them took place only in the mid-1970s. During the hearings, Judge of the Military Tribunal of the Belarusian Military District Viktor Glazkov learned from the defendants the name of the main organizer of the massacre - it turned out to be Grigory Vasyura. He lived near Kyiv and served as deputy director of a state farm. Moreover, in 1985 Vasyura even demanded for himself the Order of the Patriotic War.
Glazkov, together with the KGB officers, carefully prepared for the investigation, finding the main witnesses to Vasyura's crimes. After the arrest, he strongly denied his guilt. He declared that during the whole war he had not offended a fly. However, the military tribunal came to a different conclusion and at the end of 1986 sentenced the traitor to death. The offender appealed against the decision of the court, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR upheld the verdict.
Dangerous tourist
In 1942, the Nazis set up the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland. It was guarded by SS officers, former Red Army soldiers and residents of the occupied territory. After the war, many of them fled abroad, but this did not help everyone. The NKVD and KGB carefully studied the personal files of the guards, checked the testimony of surviving prisoners and sifted hundreds of thousands of names through file cabinets.
Residents of the Warsaw Ghetto are sent to the Treblinka death camp. 1942
So, in 1974, a US citizen Fedor Fedorenko came to the Crimea with a tourist group. KGB officers became interested in his personality and found out that the overseas guest during the war years was a guard at the Treblinka camp. The operatives managed to find witnesses who said that Fedorenko personally took part in torture and executions. He was detained and extradited to the USSR. The court found that while the accused was working in Treblinka, about a million people were killed there. In 1987, Fedorenko was shot. By that time he was already 80 years old.
Interrogation of the General
From August 1941 to January 1944, dozens of civilians died at the hands of the Nazis in the Novgorod region. In addition, during the retreat, the Nazis burned and looted many objects. cultural heritage. Immediately after the liberation of Veliky Novgorod, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of State Security of the USSR formed a special investigative team to investigate the crimes of the Nazis. The group, which included about 30 of the most experienced employees, was headed by Lieutenant Colonel Mayorov.
One of the first operatives interrogated the German Major General Josef Ruprecht, who was in Soviet captivity. He confessed to the crimes and handed over almost all of his accomplices. As a result, about 20 former high-ranking Wehrmacht soldiers were arrested. In 1947 they were tried in an open trial. The defendants pleaded guilty, but referred to the fact that they were only following the orders of their superiors. They were sentenced to 25 years in prison.
One of the meetings of the International Military Tribunal during the Nuremberg Trials
Thousands of war criminals, collaborators who collaborated with the Germans during the war, after it ended, could not escape punishment. The Soviet special services did everything possible so that none of them escaped the deserved punishment.
A very humane court
The thesis that there is a punishment for every crime was refuted in the most cynical way during the trials of Nazi criminals. According to the records of the Nuremberg Court, 16 out of 30 top SS and police leaders of the Third Reich not only saved their lives, but also remained at large.
Of the 53 thousand SS men who were executors of the order to exterminate "inferior peoples" and were part of the "Einsatzgruppen", only about 600 people were prosecuted.
The list of defendants at the main Nuremberg trials consisted of only 24 people, this was the top of the Nazi organs. There were 185 defendants at the Small Nuremberg Trials. Where do the rest go?
For the most part, they ran along the so-called. South America served as the main refuge for the Nazis.
By 1951, only 142 prisoners remained in the prison for Nazi criminals in the city of Landsberg, in February of that year, US High Commissioner John McCloy pardoned 92 prisoners at the same time.
Double standards
Tried for war crimes and Soviet courts. The cases of the executioners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were dealt with, among other things. In the USSR, the chief physician of the camp, Heinz Baumketter, who was responsible for the deaths of a huge number of prisoners, was sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; Gustav Sorge, known as "Iron Gustav" participated in the execution of thousands of prisoners; camp guard Wilhelm Schuber personally shot 636 Soviet citizens, 33 Polish and 30 German, also participated in the execution of 13,000 prisoners of war.
Among other war criminals, the above-mentioned "people" were handed over to the German authorities to serve their sentences. However, in the federal republic, all three did not remain behind bars for long. They were released, and each was given an allowance of 6 thousand marks, and the "doctor-death" Heinz Baumketter even got a place in one of the German hospitals.
During the war
War criminals, those who collaborated with the Germans and were guilty of the destruction of civilians and Soviet prisoners of war, the Soviet state security agencies and SMERSH began to search for even during the war. Starting from the December counter-offensive near Moscow, operational groups of the NKVD arrived in the territories liberated from occupation.
They collected information about persons who collaborated with the occupation authorities, interrogated hundreds of witnesses to crimes. Most of the survivors of the occupation willingly made contact with the NKVD and the ChGK, showing loyalty to the Soviet government.
In wartime, trials of war criminals were conducted by military tribunals of active armies.
"Travnikovtsy"
At the end of July 1944, documents from the liberated Majdanek and the SS training camp, which was located in the town of Travniki, 40 km from Lublin, fell into the hands of SMERSH. Wachmans were trained here - guards of concentration camps and death camps.
In the hands of SMERSHovtsy was a card file with five thousand names of those who were trained in this camp. They were mostly former Soviet prisoners of war who had signed an obligation to serve in the SS. SMERSH began the search for "Travnikovites", after the war the search was continued by the MGB and the KGB.
The investigating authorities have been looking for the Travnikovites for more than 40 years, the first trials in their cases date back to August 1944, the last trials took place in 1987. Officially, at least 140 trials of the Travnikovites are recorded in the historical literature, although Aharon Schneer, an Israeli historian who has closely dealt with this problem, believes that there were many more.
How did you search?
All repatriates who returned to the USSR went through a complex filtration system. It was a necessary measure: among those who ended up in the filtration camps were former punishers, and accomplices of the Nazis, and Vlasov, and the same "travnikovites".
Immediately after the war, on the basis of captured documents, acts of the ChGK and eyewitness accounts, the USSR state security agencies compiled lists of Nazi accomplices to be wanted. They included tens of thousands of surnames, nicknames, names.
For the initial screening and subsequent search for war criminals in the Soviet Union, a complex, but efficient system. The work was carried out seriously and systematically, search books were created, a strategy, tactics and methods of search were developed. Operational workers sifted through a lot of information, checking even rumors and those information that were not directly related to the case.
The investigating authorities searched and found war criminals throughout Soviet Union. The special services were working among the former Ostarbeiters, among the inhabitants of the occupied territories. So thousands of war criminals, fascist comrades-in-arms were identified.
Tonka machine gunner
Indicative, but at the same time unique is the fate of Antonina Makarova, who for her "merits" received the nickname "Tonka machine gunner". During the war years, she collaborated with the Nazis in the Lokot Republic and shot more than one and a half thousand captured Soviet soldiers and partisans.
A native of the Moscow region, Tonya Makarova, in 1941, she went to the front as a nurse, ended up in the Vyazemsky boiler, then was arrested by the Nazis in the village of Lokot, Bryansk region.
The village of Lokot was the "capital" of the so-called. There were many partisans in the Bryansk forests, whom the Nazis and their associates managed to catch on a regular basis. To make the executions as demonstrative as possible, Makarova was given a Maxim machine gun and was even given a salary of 30 marks for each execution.
Shortly before Elbow was liberated by the Red Army, Tonka the machine-gunner was sent to a concentration camp, which helped her - she forged documents and pretended to be a nurse. After her release, she got a job in a hospital and married a wounded soldier Viktor Ginzburg. After the Victory, the family of the newlyweds left for Belarus. Antonina in Lepel got a job at a garment factory, led an exemplary lifestyle.
On her traces, the KGB came out only after 30 years. The coincidence helped. On Bryansk Square, a man attacked a certain Nikolai Ivanin with his fists, recognizing him as the head of the Lokot prison. From Ivanin, a thread began to unravel to Tonka the machine gunner. Ivanin remembered the name and the fact that Makarova was a Muscovite.
The search for Makrova was intensive, at first another woman was suspected, but the witnesses did not identify her. Helped again by chance. The brother of the “machine gunner”, filling out a questionnaire for traveling abroad, indicated the name of his sister by her husband. Already after the investigating authorities discovered Makarova, she was “led” for several weeks, several confrontations were held to accurately establish her identity.
On November 20, 1978, the 59-year-old machine-gunner Tonka was sentenced to capital punishment. At the trial, she remained calm and was sure that she would be acquitted or have her sentence reduced. She treated her work at Lokta as a job and claimed that her conscience did not torment her.
In the USSR, the case of Antonina Makarova was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Second World War and the only one in which a female punisher appeared.
Everyone who served in the Soviet army can easily recall many stories about military crimes committed in his time. In almost all parts, theft, as stated in official documents, of military property - food, gasoline and, in general, everything that had at least some value. There were also various kinds of incidents with shooting - most often due to careless handling of weapons. However, sometimes the soldiers, tired of the service or for some other reason, decided to go home. Well, since everyone knew that desertion was punishable and they would try to find every fugitive, soldiers often took weapons with them to fight off their pursuers.
A similar case is described in the report of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, sent to the Council of Ministers of the USSR on March 19, 1958:
"The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR reports that on March 17 of this year, Sergeant Stepansky G.E., born in 1937, and corporal Vaskov A.K. , born in 1936, both members of the Komsomol, drafted into the army in 1956, who stole 4 Makarov pistols, 2 TT pistols and more than 400 pieces of cartridges for them from the military unit.
Territorial and transport police agencies were instructed to search for and detain deserters.
An operational group of employees of the Chusovsky linear police department, consisting of the operational commissioners of the criminal investigation department Aleksakhin and Krasilnikov, policemen Lazarev and Borodin on March 17 with. At 9:30 p.m., at the Chusovskaya station, on the train N76 Moscow - Nizhny Tagil, a deserter Stepansky dressed in civilian clothes was detained, from whom 2 Makarov pistols, 2 TT pistols and 315 live cartridges were confiscated.
same task force in the premises of the railway station of Chusovskaya station, the second deserter Vaskov, also dressed in civilian clothes, was found. During the arrest, Vaskov killed policeman Lazarev, passenger Shvetsov, and seriously wounded policeman Borodin with the weapons he had.
2 pistols of the Makarov system and 146 live cartridges were confiscated from the detainee Vaskov.
The investigation is being conducted by the district prosecutor of Sverdlovsk railway. The Sverdlovsk Regional Committee of the CPSU was informed about the incident by the police."
There were shootings under other circumstances as well. Often, fire on colleagues was opened by soldiers who were driven to the extreme by old-timers or commanders. Over the years, I don’t remember the details of the order of the district commander read to us before the ranks about the incident at the anti-aircraft missile school, in which a cadet at the shooting range stood up and, turning his back to the targets, began firing from a machine gun at the company commander, seriously injuring him. Someone was punished, the cadet was handed over to the tribunal. And then they said that the company commander pestered the guy for a long time with nit-picking, so he broke loose. He hit two dozen times, but, surprisingly, none of the wounds became fatal for the officer.
From time to time they opened fire for no apparent reason. There are many stories in army folklore about how a soldier who received a typical letter from a girl - "I'm sorry, I met another, I'm getting married" - shot his comrades. It is difficult to judge the prevalence of such situations, but it is known that it was strictly forbidden for those who stood guard with weapons to hand over letters.
Perhaps such stories will seem nothing more than tales, because in the 1950s and 1970s, unlike the 1980s and 1990s, in the Soviet army, as is commonly believed, there was neither hazing nor crime. However, declassified documents show otherwise.
War crime
For example, in the report of the chief military prosecutor A. G. Gorny to the leadership of the country "On the state of legality in the Armed Forces of the USSR and the work of the military prosecutor's office in 1971" it was said:
"In the past year, 17,047 crimes were registered in the Armed Forces of the USSR - 1.6% less than in 1970. The number of persons who committed crimes decreased by 2% - from 17,421 to 17,078 ...
At the same time, a number of unfavorable trends are observed in the dynamics and structure of crime.
The reduction in crime has not been universal. The number of crimes remained at the level of 1970 in the BVO, TurkVO, ZakVO, Air Defense and Baltic Fleet troops, and in the Transbaikal, Leningrad, North Caucasus, Baltic, Central Asian military districts, in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, in the Northern Fleet and in railroad troops increased. In the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, 838 crimes were recorded.
Crime remains widespread in military construction units and detachments, in which 36.9% of crimes of the total number in the Armed Forces were committed.
A significant part of the crimes is committed in support units, small units, teams, in which the proper statutory order is often not maintained ...
The number of ordinary crimes remained at the level of 1970 (8285 against 8300), among them the theft of state and public property, weapons and ammunition, deliberate and careless murders increased.
Every fourth crime committed was serious ...
Causes anxiety a large number of crimes against the civilian population (3473, including against citizens of the host countries of our troops - 285). Many more hooligan actions of military personnel in in public places; during the year there were 42 mass fights between military personnel and civilian youth.
It was said in the report on hazing and abuse of commanding power:
“Cases of abnormal relationships in military collectives continue to appear. Facts of distortion of disciplinary practices, assault by commanders and superiors against subordinates, as well as resistance to superiors and violent actions against them have not been eliminated. 32 encroachments on the lives of commanders and superiors on the basis of official demands There were 58 mass fights between servicemen different parts and divisions. Fulfilling the decision of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU of August 24, 1971, additional measures were taken in the troops to eliminate bullying and mockery of young soldiers. The number of such facts as a whole decreased somewhat (from 666 in 1970 to 628 in 1971). However, despite the measures taken, these negative phenomena continued to occur, and in some districts even increased.
As a result, the Chief Military Prosecutor noted:
"In the Armed Forces of the USSR, 1,573 suicides and attempted suicides (+ 13.1%) were registered, a significant increase in them occurred among young soldiers and sailors (+ 43%). Among the suicides were 279 officers and 200 conscripts. Every fourth case of suicide occurred due to a painful condition (mostly mental), one in three - due to family troubles. There are facts of an insensitive, sometimes rude attitude of superiors towards subordinates.
Gorny also mentioned an increase in embezzlement:
"In the Armed Forces, 1928 thefts of state and public property (+ 11.9%) and 236 thefts of firearms and ammunition (+10.8%). Material assets and cash were stolen in the amount of 1,788.5 thousand rubles. Every fourth theft was committed by officials through misappropriation, embezzlement or abuse of official position. In many parts of the requirements of the Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU of March 18, 1968 on strengthening the protection of socialist property, eradicating embezzlement and theft, mismanagement and wastefulness, they are not fully implemented.
And the report of the Minister of Justice of the USSR V.I. Terebilov on the activities of military tribunals in 1971 painted an even sadder picture of crimes in the armed forces:
"In 1971, 7,623 servicemen were convicted by military tribunals Soviet army and the Navy, 5348 military builders, 696 servicemen of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 215 servicemen of the KGB, 808 people. from among civilians, and only 14,690 people ...
It should be emphasized that over the past 6 years, the criminal record of both servicemen and military builders showed an upward trend and in 1970-1971. surpassed the level of 1965 in terms of military personnel by one third, and in terms of military builders by two and a half times.
Among those convicted are 413 officers, 567 re-enlisted servicemen, 1149 sergeants and foremen of military service, 5494 soldiers and sailors...
The conviction of officers in 1971 was the highest in the last 19 years, for 6 recent years She kept growing."
The Minister of Justice drew the attention of the country's leadership to the main causes of crimes in the Armed Forces:
"The materials of the criminal cases considered by military tribunals allow us to conclude that in some units the requirements of the Minister of Defense of the USSR on improving organizational and political work to radically strengthen military discipline and law and order in the troops are still poorly met. This is confirmed, in particular, by the fact that For a number of years, repeating from year to year, the same causes and conditions have been noted that contribute to the commission of offenses in the Armed Forces.The most important of them are the lack of a proper statutory procedure and serious shortcomings in educational work.
As in previous years, in some parts, drunkenness is widespread. Cases of collective drunkenness in the barracks, soldiers' canteens, guards and at posts, while on combat duty, have been established.
It should be emphasized that the most serious crimes are most often committed while intoxicated. So, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, 71% committed premeditated murders, 76.3% - rapes, 76.4% - malicious hooliganism, 87.7% - robbed and robbery."
Terebilov also cited the statistics of sentences:
"The convicted servicemen were sentenced: to death - 19 people (all for premeditated murder under aggravating circumstances), to imprisonment - 3983 people, or 52.2% (of which 189 people are officers), to being sent to a disciplinary battalion - 2785 people, or 36.5%, 782 people, or 10.3%, were sentenced to probation, 54 people, or 0.7%, to other penalties.
Bouquet of offenses
If these reports had given the most characteristic and vivid examples of crimes considered by the tribunals in 1971, the first place among them would most likely have been taken by the case of Corporal Yuri Gaev, who arranged the execution of his colleagues in his military unit. True, crimes of this kind have happened in the country before, and not only in the army, but also in civilian life. For example, in 1958, the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs reported to the Central Committee of the CPSU:
"The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR reports an emergency that took place in the Perm region. On February 11 this year, at about 7 pm, a student of construction school N6 of the Main Directorate of Labor Reserves under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, located in the village of Lyamino, Chusovsky District, Perm Region , Tselousov M. G., born in 1934, the secretary of the Komsomol organization of the school, being in a state of intoxication, entered the premises of this school, broke the doors of the offices of the director and secretary of the school, as well as the premises of the library, took a small-caliber rifle belonging to a local organization that was in the library DOSAAF, and went out into the street.
Being on the street, Tselousov fired several shots from a rifle, with which he killed the workers of the Gubakhtyazhstroy construction and installation department Laletin, born in 1935, and Bakhonkin, born in 1940.
After that, Tselousov went to the girls' dormitory, where he killed the students of the construction school Maltseva, Sukhoroslova, Smelova with several shots from a rifle, wounded Druzhkova, Chupina, Erokhin, Barmatova, Dudina, Mokrushina, Kopytova and a student of the same school Lelekin, all born in 1940-1941 . Druzhkova and Chupina died in the hospital.
Citizens of the village about the incident at the school were reported to the district commissioner Ponosov, who, together with a member of the police assistance brigade, detained and disarmed Tselousov.
The crime of Corporal Gaev in many ways resembled what the Komsomol organizer Tselousov did. At least the fact that, according to the initial information, everything has not yet been sorted out in detail, the victims of the execution in the military unit, in addition to the commander, were at least one and a half dozen soldiers who were considered killed, wounded and disappeared. Almost the same as in Lyamino.
Yuri Gaev was born in 1950 in Karelia, graduated from eight classes and entered a vocational school that trained tractor drivers. In 1968, he left for service in the 359th separate local rifle guard platoon at the Titovka station in the Murmansk region. In the characterization written for the investigation, it was said that he served well and shot well, for which he received the rank of corporal. Although, it was also noted there that Gaev was rude to others and drank alcohol.
Gaev's term of service ended in November 1970, but Major Zaiko, the commander of military unit 42290, which included Gaev's platoon, delayed his demobilization so that he could take part in a party meeting. The deprivation of the sacred right to a timely demobilization made the corporal very angry.
On top of that, together with other soldiers and the platoon commander, re-enlisted Moskalev, he was sent on a business trip to guard another cargo. On the way, the brave soldiers stole the socialist property entrusted to them - meat, immediately sold it, and bought vodka with the proceeds.
November 23, 1970 Gaev, as stated in the case, drank almost half a liter and fell asleep soundly. And in the evening, when the train approached the Titovka station, the platoon commander began to wake him up. Some witnesses at the investigation claimed that when Moskalev began to wake Gaev, he attacked him, grabbed him by the throat and hit him against the window with such force that he broke the glass. The commander turned out to be stronger and beat the corporal in the face with his fists and head with such force that he broke his nose and lips. Gaev shouted that he would kill Moskalev, opened the car door, jumped out of the train that was slowing down at the Titovka station and ran to the unit.
“Taking advantage of the indecision and confusion of the young soldier Dolganyuk Yu. M., who at that time was alone in the guardroom, Gaev entered the guardroom and immediately captured both SKS carbines standing there in the pyramid.
Then Gaev found the key to the ammunition box, took over 130 rounds of ammunition.
With two carbines, he entered the barracks and began to shoot his colleagues. The corporal hit his commander, Major Zaiko, six times. As the investigation later established, among other victims, Gaev took the life of one and seriously wounded another soldier with one shot. He did not kill only the one whom he most wanted to kill.
It was useless to deny the obvious in the tribunal. However, Gaev and his lawyer chose a strange line of defense. Instead of arguing that the crime was, if not a natural, then a logical continuation of the riots in the unit, the accused focused on the question of whether he consciously or unconsciously shot Major Zaiko. Perhaps the defense could fight for the recognition of Gaev insane. However, the lawyer did not challenge the conclusion of psychiatrists on the sanity of the accused. The story of the Russian Breivik ended with a note in the case:
