As requested, here is my new video investigation about Vladimir Putinâs path to the KGB. It is full of interesting historical tidbits. And how could I leave out World War II?
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There has been much discussion about the trophies used by each side in the current conflict in Ukraine. For this reason, it is worthwhile to return to World War II and examine the captured weapons used by the Red Army to its advantage. The following article, originally entitled “Red Army’s Trophies: What Did Our Fighters Take from the Germans?” was translated as is. Exceptions include 1) using “Soviet” or “Red Army” instead of “our,” and “World War II” instead of the “Great Patriotic War” for an English-speaking audience; 2) minor clarifications on weapons’ names; 4) a clarification about the incident with Vasily Vatanam; 4) two inset stories about Vasily Vataman and Mikhail Devyatayev, respectively, written specifically for this translation by me or translated from another source.
Nazi German Weapons as Trophies at the Service of the Red Army in World War II
By Boris Semionov
We have already written about trophies in the global history of wars and conflicts and that the trophy business is an important part of any war.
Now let us consider World War II, in which both warring parties gladly used captured enemy weapons or equipment. Today we will discuss the preferred types of trophy small-caliber firearms and other weapons manufactured by the enemy that also served the Red Army in the liberation of the Soviet Union and Europe from the Nazi invaders.
Small-Caliber Firearms
Undoubtedly, the most important aspect of World War II for the Soviet Union was the large-scale land battles along the entire front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. And, of course, they would not have been possible without the small-caliber firearms. During the war, such firearms were actively developed and improved as dozens of new models emerged. Yet the warring parties approached the question of arming and supplying their infantrymen in completely different ways. By the way, we should note that the Red Army was better armed in almost all categories.
Red Army soldiers with captured firearms.
Nevertheless, in the massive battles of the Second World War, the Red Army collected a multitude of trophy firearms.
The original article was entitled “Stories from Oles Buzina: Banderaâthe Cat Strangler” written by a prominent Ukrainian journalist Oles Buzina and published on January 29, 2010. Buzina was a Ukrainian patriot who believed Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians were triune. He was critical of the gradual imposition of the minority Galician (western Ukrainian) identity onto the majority of Ukraine even before the 2014 Maidan. For example, in this article, the author criticizes Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yushchenko brought to power through the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004. Some consider the 2004 event to be a proto-regime change in that country that succeeded in 2014. In 2010, Yushchenko posthumously granted Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera the Hero of Ukraine title. Bandera lived in Polish-controlled Galicia outside the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1920s-1930s and then in Munich, Germany.The latter is an early negative-identity example along the same trajectory as the post-2014 attempts to “cancel” the Russian language and heritage and even remove monuments to the Soviet WWII military leaders.
«Any politician who tries to impose Bandera as Ukraineâs hero will not only destroy his personal careerâŠbut will also destroy the country.»
Oles Buzina, in “Unheroic ‘bandera’,” January 2011
In April 2015, Buzina was assassinated outside his Kiev homeâallegedly for his vocal criticism of the Maidan. The murder was one of the first key signs of political radicalization in Ukraine. I have previously translated him here.
The article is presented in its entirety. The only deviation from the original is using the first name the first time each new individual is mentioned. Square brackets are editorial clarifications.
Stepan Banderaâthe Cat Strangler
by Oles Buzina
Itâs too bad that [Ukraineâs President (2005-2010)] Viktor Yushchenko doesn’t know history very well. With his decree making Stepan Bandera a national hero [of Ukraine], he spat in the soul of animal rights advocates all around the world by awarding an animal abuser.
As a writer, what impresses me the most in the story of the newly minted âhero of Ukraine,â is the completeness of the gastronomical theme. On Banderaâs order in 1934, the Interior Minister of Poland, BronisĆaw Pieracki, was assassinated as he entered a cafe in Warsaw to grab a bite to eat. The mastermind and organizer of this âattentatâ (what they call assassination attempts in Galicia [Ukraine]), the half-educated student Bandera was only 25 years old. He was halfway through his life path which he did not suspect.
This interview initially appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda on December 7, 2022. It was entitled, “A Pilot of the Russian Aerospace Forces: ‘We decided not to give up. The navigator took the grenade, and I pulled the ring out of it.'”
Editor’s Note:
The Story of a Real Man by Boris Polevoy (1946) referenced below is about Soviet fighter ace Alexey Maresyev (1916-2001). During World War II, Maresyevâs plane was shot down but he managed to return to the Soviet side. He was injured so severely that both of his legs had to be amputated above the knee due to gangrene. Not only was Maresyev able to recover but he returned to flying a year later, in 1943, despite his disability. In total, he is credited with 80 combat sorties. Maresyev earned Hero of the Soviet Union. In 1947-48, renowned composer Sergei Prokofiev turned Marasyev’s experience into an opera.
In the original Russian title, âmanâ refers to a âpersonâ (chelovek), but the standard English translation is âman.â
Pilot Pyotr Kashtanov, awarded Hero of Russia, defeated the enemy and escaped being captured. Kashtanov successfully carried out his combat mission and destroyed enemy equipment. However, the crew was hit and catapulted into enemy territory. The ânationalistsâ were close by, while his comrade was unconsciousâŠ
Source: Pyotr Kashtanov’s personal photo archive.
On the eve of Heroes of the Fatherland Day [December 9], Komsomolskaya Pravda journalists met with an officer whose airplane was shot down over enemy territory. Yet he completed his combat mission and, despite being wounded, led the crew to rejoin the Russian troops.
Not very tall, humble, and seemingly very young, the senior lieutenant tries to be sociable and relaxed.
– Pyotr, he extends his right hand.
Based on his weak handshake, as if it were unnaturally constrained, we understand that the pilot has not yet fully recovered. In September, his Su-34 fighter bomber was shot down over enemy territory, while on a combat mission in the Special Operation zone [during the international conflict taking place in Ukraine]. The situation was hopeless. He had a broken arm, while the navigator had a compression fracture of the spine. There were enemies all around. Yet by some miracle, both managed to get out and reached their own comrades.
And now, sitting in front of us, as if descended from the pages of Boris Polevoy’s The Story of a Real Man, is Pyotr Kashtanov, a Russian officer. The star of the Hero of Russia sparkles on the chest of this 31-year-oldâŠ
âYou are but millions. We are hordes and hordes and hordes.â (âScythians,â Alexander Blok, 1918)
On May 9, 2015, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, was on an official visit to Moscow in order to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. Upon seeing countless people marching in the streets, he assumed that what he was witnessing was an anti-Putin protest. This kind of âmisunderstandingâ was not a surprise. After all, European and North American mainstream media is fond of exaggerating anti-government protestsâby a handful of affluent pro-Western ideological Liberalsâthat are limited to large urban centers. Yet that day, foreign journalists were forced to cover something unprecedented, though underestimating the numbers: half a million Muscovites marched through the city carrying mounted photographs of their family members, who participated in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945).
But then I saw that, on the contrary, the marchers hailed your government. I saw that they did it with pride, I saw it in their faces. They waved to us as the UN delegation passed by, which was very pleasant. And so I really think you deserve all this love of the people.
With the onset of the Ukrainian crisis, I realized that I often looked forward to the work of certain journalists, who were both eloquent and informative. Oles Buzina was one of them. In addition to reading his columns, I, like millions of other Russians, watched his frequent appearances on political talk shows. I often found myself in disagreement, but had to admit that his points were well-argued and factually justifiedâa true sign of a charismatic erudite.
Thus, the news of his brazen murder on April 16 of this year, in broad daylight and outside his home, was particularly distressing. Later, I found out that Olesâa well-known author and historian, in addition to his journalistic careerâhad been receiving threats for quite some time. Yet he consistently turned down offers to relocate to Russia. Like a true patriot of a country in peril, he continued to love Ukraine. But Ukraineâtoday’s Ukraineâdid not return that sentiment.
“There are no separate Russia or Ukraine, but one Holy Rus” â Elder Iona of Odessa
The year 2014 saw an unprecedented surge of patriotism in contemporary Russia, which resulted in popularizing the notion of the Russian World. One reason for the increased patriotic sentiment was Crimeaâs return to the home port after the overwhelmingly positive vote by its majority-Russian residents in a referendum one year ago. The onset of the liberation war in Donbass from the West-backed Kiev regime was the other. This war truly delineated the stakes for the existence of the Russian World. The latter is not an ethnic, but a civilizational concept that encompasses shared culture, history, and language in the Eurasian space within a traditionalist framework. To a certain extent and despite the obvious ideological differences, the Russian Empire and the USSR embodied the same geopolitical entity. A particularly noteworthy aspect of the ongoing crisis in Donbass is the symbolismâreligious and historicâthat surpasses the commonly used, but outdated Left-Right political spectrum. In the Russian context, this also means overcoming the Red-White divide of the Communist Revolution. That this war pushed Russians to examine their countryâs raison d’ĂȘtre is somewhat remarkable: for two decades its citizens did not have an official ideology, prohibited by the Constitution that is based on Western models. The emergence of a new way of thinking in Russia will become clearer once we refer to the meaning of religious insignia, warsâRussian Civil and Great Patriotic, as well as the question of ideology in the Postmodern world.
Nina Byzantina 