Post by pieter on Oct 18, 2022 8:04:27 GMT -7
Folks,
In the topic ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ the First and Second World Wars became a topic because that movie is about the First World War. This First and Second World War of course also took place in the area where today the Russians and Ukrainians fight in Ukraine, the Eastern Front of the First and Second World Wars.
Ukraine during the First World War
WW1: German infantry charging against the Russian Fortress of Novogeorgievk in August 1915. Public Domain
Ukraine plunged into turmoil with the beginning of World War I, and fighting on Ukrainian soil persisted until late 1921. Initially, the Ukrainians were split between Austria-Hungary, fighting for the Central Powers, though the vast majority served in the Imperial Russian Army, which was part of the Triple Entente, under Russia. As the Russian Empire collapsed, the conflict evolved into the Ukrainian War of Independence, with Ukrainians fighting alongside, or against, the Red, White, Black and Green armies, with the Poles, Hungarians (in Transcarpathia), and Germans also intervening at various times.
Austro-Hungarian field battery conducting exercises, 1914. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
The Russian advance into Galicia began in August 1914. During the offensive, the Russian army successfully pushed the Austrians right up to the Carpathian ridge effectively capturing all of the lowland territory, and fulfilling their long aspirations of annexing the territory.
Ukrainians were split into two separate and opposing armies. 3.5 million fought with the Imperial Russian Army, while 250,000 fought for the Austro-Hungarian Army. Many Ukrainians thus ended up fighting each other. Also, many Ukrainian civilians suffered as armies shot and killed them after accusing them of collaborating with opposing armies (see Ukrainian Austrian internment: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenian_Austrian_internment )
Russian troops fighting in a village in Volhynia, northwestern Ukraine, during World War I.
An Austrian artillery battery on the Eastern Front, c. 1916.
German transport columns passing through Skole, Galicia (now in Ukraine), 1914.
The Austrian Archduke Friedrich, commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian army, reviewing German troops in East Galicia, 1916. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Map of the Eastern Front in World War 1, 1914. Public Domain
Historical map of the Eastern Front during World War I.
Map of the Eastern Front campaigns from the 13th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
The Polish–Soviet War
In the the Polish–Soviet War (1918-1921) you had on one side the Soviet Red army under command of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Sergey Kamenev, Joseph Stalin and the Polish Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinsky with the Logistical support of Lithuania 🇱🇹 (Lithuania was at war with Poland from May 1919 to 29 November 1920) while on the other side the Poles were supported by the Ukrainians (Symon Petliura), Latvians (Jānis Puriņš, a Latvian Rifleman and later colonel (since 1925), commander of the 1st Kurzeme Division of the Latvian Army and commander of the Eastern Front) and with the logistical support of France 🇫🇷 and Hungary 🇭🇺. The commanders on the Polish-Ukrainian side were Józef Piłsudski, Symon Petliura, Jānis Puriņš, Józef Haller, Władysław Sikorski, Edward Rydz-Śmigły and other commanders.
Polish General Antoni Listowski (left) and exiled Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura (second from left) following Petliura's alliance with the Poles.
Józef Piłsudski (centre) with Polish soldiers. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 31084)
Short but important allies the Ukrainian and Polish commanders during the the Polish–Soviet War, Symon Petliura and Józef Piłsudski inspecting troops from a Polish train.
Józef Piłsudski and Symon Petliura
This all had it’s influence in Ukraine 🇺🇦 despite the later Polish-Ukrainian tensions, assassinations and blood baths🩸( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia ). Today Ukrainians will remember that Polish-Ukrainian alliance against Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Kamenev and the terrible head of the Cheka, the Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat-turned-Bolshevik of 1920. The Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet secret-police organizations. It's successors were the NKVD and the KGB.
Once Poles and Ukrainians were brothers in arms and today again with the logistical support of Poland 🇵🇱 to Ukraine 🇺🇦 and the fact that Poland 🇵🇱 had taken in 2 million Ukrainian refugees 🇺🇦.
Ukraine during the Second World War
Ruined Kyiv during bombings of World War II.
The vast majority of the fighting in World War II took place on the Eastern Front. By some estimates, 93% of all German casualties took place there. The total losses inflicted upon the Ukrainian population during the war are estimated at 6 million, including an estimated one and a half million Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen, sometimes with the help of local collaborators. Of the estimated 8.6 million Soviet troop losses, 1.4 million were ethnic Ukrainians, and general losses of the Ukrainian people in the war amounted to 40–44% of the total losses of the USSR. better source needed] The Victory Day is celebrated as one of eleven Ukrainian national holidays.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was perhaps the only underground movement in World War Two to fight against both the Axis and the Allies. It commited war crimes against Polish civilians in Volhynia, South-Eastern Poland, killing about 100 thousand Polish women, children and men and erasing villages from the earth, in Nazi Einsatzkommando/Einsatzkommando/SS Sonderkommando style. Poland and the Poles have never forgotten this history despite their justified present day Help of Ukrainian civilians, the Ukrainian administration and the Ukrainian Army -with logistical support-. The enemy of your enemy is your friend.
If you look at the Eastern Front of the First and Second World War, the Polish–Soviet War (1918-1921), the Holodomor Terror-Famine (1932–1933), the Stalinist terror in Ukraine 🇺🇦, Ukrainian insurgency against the Soviets, Nazi's and Polish resitance opponents (Armia Krajowa), the fact that Ukraine 🇺🇦 for a long time was dominated by Czarist Russia and the Russian dominated SovietUnion you understand the present better.
The Russian Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back myth)
Back to the subject. In Soviet Russia 🇷🇺 in the Russian mindset Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Jeltsin destroyed the mighty SovietUnion, with Perestroika and Glasnost and the dismantlement of the SovietUnion by Jeltsin and other leaders of the various (former) Soviet states on 26 December 1991. The SovietUnion was build on Czarist Russian imperial foundations. Gorbachev, Jeltsin, their men and the (Russian Jewish) Oligarchs Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Prokhorov, Petr Aven, Arkady Rotenberg, Boris Romanovich Rotenberg, Mikhail Fridman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Alexander Smolensky, and Valery Malkin sold Russia 🇷🇺 to the West in this Russian version of the old German stab-in-the-back myth (German: Dolchstoßlegende). Some of these Jeltsin era Oligarchs were confronted and taken away their power by Putin's admininstration, others became his allies. Not all Oligarchs are Jewish by the way, some are Orthodox Russian Christians and others have other ethnic (Armenian, Turkic) Russian/Soviet backgrounds.
This Russian Dolchstoßlegende ( Легенда об ударе ножом в спину ) lives in Russia amongst old Russian Leninists, Stalinists, Russian Ultra-Nationalists and Eurasian Pan Slavic Russians. In Czarist Russia and the SovietUnion the Eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians) were United in one empire. Russians felt at home in Ukraine, and Kiyv (Kiev) and Odessa were largely Russian speaking cities, and you could speak Russian in Lviv as well. Then suddenly the SovietUnion was dismantled due to Gorbachev, Boris Jeltsin and their henchmen. The Soviet economy collapsed because industries were often spread over various Soviet republics, and the broken of industries in the new Independent nations went their own way and often wanted to make deals and trade with the West. The shock, feeling of disgust and feeling of loss went deep inside old Patriotic Soviet Communist hard liners, Marxist Leninist Russians, Great Russian Ultranationalists, and Eurasian Orthodox Russian people. Suddenly they had lost Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania 🇱🇹, Latvia 🇱🇻, Estonia 🇪🇪, Georgia 🇬🇪, Moldova 🇲🇩, Kazakhstan 🇰🇿, Uzbekistan 🇺🇿, Kirghizistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan 🇦🇿 and Armenia 🇦🇲.
An illustration from a 1919 Austrian postcard showing a caricatured Jew stabbing a personified German Army soldier in the back with a dagger. The capitulation of the Central Powers was blamed upon the unpatriotic populace, Socialists, Bolsheviks, the Weimar Republic, and especially the Jews.
I talk in a rough manner now like an old hard line Soviet Nationalist Russian; “These God darn Reformist traitors, these liberal Reformists, these bastards betrayed the SovietUnion, Russia, the Russian Empire.” Folks, if you understand this, really understand this, than you understand Vladimir Putin, Colonel General Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s new commander for the war in Ukraine, Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu, the minister of defense of Russia, and the Russian generals, Colonel generals, Lieutenant generals, Major generals, Colonels, Lieutenant colonels, and Majors of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Putin's power base next to his FSB secret service, the GRU military intelligence and his strong Rosgvardiya, the National Guard of the Russian Federation, the internal military force of Russia, comprising an independent agency that reports directly to the President of Russia Vladimir Putin under his powers as Supreme Commander-in-Chief and Chairman of the Security Council.
Colonel General Sergei Surovikin participated in the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as well as in both Chechen wars. [File: Sputnik/Alexei Druzhinin via Reuters] Al Jazeera 9 Oct 2022
Putin's new Ukraine war commander general Sergei Vladimirovich Surovikin has a history of brutality in and outside Russia. Surovikin is accused of having ordered troops to open fire on pro-democracy protestors in Moscow, during the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, when three people were killed. In March 2004, Surovikin was accused by Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Chibizov of beating him up for voting for the wrong candidate. In April, division deputy commander for armaments Colonel Andrei Shtakal shot himself in the presence of Surovikin and the district deputy commander after being criticized by Surovikin. In both cases, a military prosecutor found no evidence of guilt.
The experience of general Sergey Surovikin, the commander of all Russian forces invading Ukraine since 8 October 2022 goes back to the Soviet–Afghan War (1979 – 1989), the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War (30 September 2015 – present), the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014-2022), and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Colonel General Sergey Surovikin, then-commander of the Russian forces in Syria, speaks at a briefing in the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow, on June 9, 2017. Source: CNN
Great Russian pride, Grandeur, Imperial Power, the Russian soul, the Russian nation was lost. And it went further, states that were former Soviet states, former parts of the Great Czarist Russian Empire became EU and NATO members. This enraged Russian Leninists, Stalinists, Russian Nationalists and Orthodox Russian people whom are very Russia 🇷🇺 oriented and whom Russian identity goes back centuries. Putin and other leaders play this Russian sentiment and Old Aversion towards the West, West-European power, the United Kingdom 🇬🇧, the USA 🇺🇸 and Germany 🇩🇪, France 🇫🇷 and the old arch rival in the Slavic world, Poland 🇵🇱.
The Russian Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back myth) exists and it is a large part of this Ukrainian war. Putin’s propaganda against the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi’s and his so called denazification campaign in Ukraine is exactly that Dolchstoßlegende.
Cheers,
Pieter
Source: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine
In the topic ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ the First and Second World Wars became a topic because that movie is about the First World War. This First and Second World War of course also took place in the area where today the Russians and Ukrainians fight in Ukraine, the Eastern Front of the First and Second World Wars.
Ukraine during the First World War
WW1: German infantry charging against the Russian Fortress of Novogeorgievk in August 1915. Public Domain
Ukraine plunged into turmoil with the beginning of World War I, and fighting on Ukrainian soil persisted until late 1921. Initially, the Ukrainians were split between Austria-Hungary, fighting for the Central Powers, though the vast majority served in the Imperial Russian Army, which was part of the Triple Entente, under Russia. As the Russian Empire collapsed, the conflict evolved into the Ukrainian War of Independence, with Ukrainians fighting alongside, or against, the Red, White, Black and Green armies, with the Poles, Hungarians (in Transcarpathia), and Germans also intervening at various times.
Austro-Hungarian field battery conducting exercises, 1914. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
The Russian advance into Galicia began in August 1914. During the offensive, the Russian army successfully pushed the Austrians right up to the Carpathian ridge effectively capturing all of the lowland territory, and fulfilling their long aspirations of annexing the territory.
Ukrainians were split into two separate and opposing armies. 3.5 million fought with the Imperial Russian Army, while 250,000 fought for the Austro-Hungarian Army. Many Ukrainians thus ended up fighting each other. Also, many Ukrainian civilians suffered as armies shot and killed them after accusing them of collaborating with opposing armies (see Ukrainian Austrian internment: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenian_Austrian_internment )
Russian troops fighting in a village in Volhynia, northwestern Ukraine, during World War I.
An Austrian artillery battery on the Eastern Front, c. 1916.
German transport columns passing through Skole, Galicia (now in Ukraine), 1914.
The Austrian Archduke Friedrich, commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian army, reviewing German troops in East Galicia, 1916. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Map of the Eastern Front in World War 1, 1914. Public Domain
Historical map of the Eastern Front during World War I.
Map of the Eastern Front campaigns from the 13th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
The Polish–Soviet War
In the the Polish–Soviet War (1918-1921) you had on one side the Soviet Red army under command of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Sergey Kamenev, Joseph Stalin and the Polish Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinsky with the Logistical support of Lithuania 🇱🇹 (Lithuania was at war with Poland from May 1919 to 29 November 1920) while on the other side the Poles were supported by the Ukrainians (Symon Petliura), Latvians (Jānis Puriņš, a Latvian Rifleman and later colonel (since 1925), commander of the 1st Kurzeme Division of the Latvian Army and commander of the Eastern Front) and with the logistical support of France 🇫🇷 and Hungary 🇭🇺. The commanders on the Polish-Ukrainian side were Józef Piłsudski, Symon Petliura, Jānis Puriņš, Józef Haller, Władysław Sikorski, Edward Rydz-Śmigły and other commanders.
Polish General Antoni Listowski (left) and exiled Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura (second from left) following Petliura's alliance with the Poles.
Józef Piłsudski (centre) with Polish soldiers. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 31084)
Short but important allies the Ukrainian and Polish commanders during the the Polish–Soviet War, Symon Petliura and Józef Piłsudski inspecting troops from a Polish train.
Józef Piłsudski and Symon Petliura
This all had it’s influence in Ukraine 🇺🇦 despite the later Polish-Ukrainian tensions, assassinations and blood baths🩸( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia ). Today Ukrainians will remember that Polish-Ukrainian alliance against Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Kamenev and the terrible head of the Cheka, the Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat-turned-Bolshevik of 1920. The Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet secret-police organizations. It's successors were the NKVD and the KGB.
Once Poles and Ukrainians were brothers in arms and today again with the logistical support of Poland 🇵🇱 to Ukraine 🇺🇦 and the fact that Poland 🇵🇱 had taken in 2 million Ukrainian refugees 🇺🇦.
Ukraine during the Second World War
Ruined Kyiv during bombings of World War II.
The vast majority of the fighting in World War II took place on the Eastern Front. By some estimates, 93% of all German casualties took place there. The total losses inflicted upon the Ukrainian population during the war are estimated at 6 million, including an estimated one and a half million Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen, sometimes with the help of local collaborators. Of the estimated 8.6 million Soviet troop losses, 1.4 million were ethnic Ukrainians, and general losses of the Ukrainian people in the war amounted to 40–44% of the total losses of the USSR. better source needed] The Victory Day is celebrated as one of eleven Ukrainian national holidays.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was perhaps the only underground movement in World War Two to fight against both the Axis and the Allies. It commited war crimes against Polish civilians in Volhynia, South-Eastern Poland, killing about 100 thousand Polish women, children and men and erasing villages from the earth, in Nazi Einsatzkommando/Einsatzkommando/SS Sonderkommando style. Poland and the Poles have never forgotten this history despite their justified present day Help of Ukrainian civilians, the Ukrainian administration and the Ukrainian Army -with logistical support-. The enemy of your enemy is your friend.
If you look at the Eastern Front of the First and Second World War, the Polish–Soviet War (1918-1921), the Holodomor Terror-Famine (1932–1933), the Stalinist terror in Ukraine 🇺🇦, Ukrainian insurgency against the Soviets, Nazi's and Polish resitance opponents (Armia Krajowa), the fact that Ukraine 🇺🇦 for a long time was dominated by Czarist Russia and the Russian dominated SovietUnion you understand the present better.
The Russian Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back myth)
Back to the subject. In Soviet Russia 🇷🇺 in the Russian mindset Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Jeltsin destroyed the mighty SovietUnion, with Perestroika and Glasnost and the dismantlement of the SovietUnion by Jeltsin and other leaders of the various (former) Soviet states on 26 December 1991. The SovietUnion was build on Czarist Russian imperial foundations. Gorbachev, Jeltsin, their men and the (Russian Jewish) Oligarchs Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Prokhorov, Petr Aven, Arkady Rotenberg, Boris Romanovich Rotenberg, Mikhail Fridman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Alexander Smolensky, and Valery Malkin sold Russia 🇷🇺 to the West in this Russian version of the old German stab-in-the-back myth (German: Dolchstoßlegende). Some of these Jeltsin era Oligarchs were confronted and taken away their power by Putin's admininstration, others became his allies. Not all Oligarchs are Jewish by the way, some are Orthodox Russian Christians and others have other ethnic (Armenian, Turkic) Russian/Soviet backgrounds.
This Russian Dolchstoßlegende ( Легенда об ударе ножом в спину ) lives in Russia amongst old Russian Leninists, Stalinists, Russian Ultra-Nationalists and Eurasian Pan Slavic Russians. In Czarist Russia and the SovietUnion the Eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians) were United in one empire. Russians felt at home in Ukraine, and Kiyv (Kiev) and Odessa were largely Russian speaking cities, and you could speak Russian in Lviv as well. Then suddenly the SovietUnion was dismantled due to Gorbachev, Boris Jeltsin and their henchmen. The Soviet economy collapsed because industries were often spread over various Soviet republics, and the broken of industries in the new Independent nations went their own way and often wanted to make deals and trade with the West. The shock, feeling of disgust and feeling of loss went deep inside old Patriotic Soviet Communist hard liners, Marxist Leninist Russians, Great Russian Ultranationalists, and Eurasian Orthodox Russian people. Suddenly they had lost Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania 🇱🇹, Latvia 🇱🇻, Estonia 🇪🇪, Georgia 🇬🇪, Moldova 🇲🇩, Kazakhstan 🇰🇿, Uzbekistan 🇺🇿, Kirghizistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan 🇦🇿 and Armenia 🇦🇲.
An illustration from a 1919 Austrian postcard showing a caricatured Jew stabbing a personified German Army soldier in the back with a dagger. The capitulation of the Central Powers was blamed upon the unpatriotic populace, Socialists, Bolsheviks, the Weimar Republic, and especially the Jews.
I talk in a rough manner now like an old hard line Soviet Nationalist Russian; “These God darn Reformist traitors, these liberal Reformists, these bastards betrayed the SovietUnion, Russia, the Russian Empire.” Folks, if you understand this, really understand this, than you understand Vladimir Putin, Colonel General Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s new commander for the war in Ukraine, Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu, the minister of defense of Russia, and the Russian generals, Colonel generals, Lieutenant generals, Major generals, Colonels, Lieutenant colonels, and Majors of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Putin's power base next to his FSB secret service, the GRU military intelligence and his strong Rosgvardiya, the National Guard of the Russian Federation, the internal military force of Russia, comprising an independent agency that reports directly to the President of Russia Vladimir Putin under his powers as Supreme Commander-in-Chief and Chairman of the Security Council.
Colonel General Sergei Surovikin participated in the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as well as in both Chechen wars. [File: Sputnik/Alexei Druzhinin via Reuters] Al Jazeera 9 Oct 2022
Putin's new Ukraine war commander general Sergei Vladimirovich Surovikin has a history of brutality in and outside Russia. Surovikin is accused of having ordered troops to open fire on pro-democracy protestors in Moscow, during the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, when three people were killed. In March 2004, Surovikin was accused by Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Chibizov of beating him up for voting for the wrong candidate. In April, division deputy commander for armaments Colonel Andrei Shtakal shot himself in the presence of Surovikin and the district deputy commander after being criticized by Surovikin. In both cases, a military prosecutor found no evidence of guilt.
The experience of general Sergey Surovikin, the commander of all Russian forces invading Ukraine since 8 October 2022 goes back to the Soviet–Afghan War (1979 – 1989), the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War (30 September 2015 – present), the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014-2022), and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Colonel General Sergey Surovikin, then-commander of the Russian forces in Syria, speaks at a briefing in the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow, on June 9, 2017. Source: CNN
Great Russian pride, Grandeur, Imperial Power, the Russian soul, the Russian nation was lost. And it went further, states that were former Soviet states, former parts of the Great Czarist Russian Empire became EU and NATO members. This enraged Russian Leninists, Stalinists, Russian Nationalists and Orthodox Russian people whom are very Russia 🇷🇺 oriented and whom Russian identity goes back centuries. Putin and other leaders play this Russian sentiment and Old Aversion towards the West, West-European power, the United Kingdom 🇬🇧, the USA 🇺🇸 and Germany 🇩🇪, France 🇫🇷 and the old arch rival in the Slavic world, Poland 🇵🇱.
The Russian Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back myth) exists and it is a large part of this Ukrainian war. Putin’s propaganda against the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi’s and his so called denazification campaign in Ukraine is exactly that Dolchstoßlegende.
Cheers,
Pieter
Source: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine
