About how the Thaw works, why it works and delights
December 18, 2013 Igor MantsovThe outgoing year was a triumph for Valery Todorovsky. He is the producer of the film that won at Kinotavr, The Geographer Drank His Globe Away, and he also conceived, produced and directed The Thaw, a 12-episode TV movie that I absolutely loved.
How is the Thaw arranged, why does it work and delight?
The story takes place in 1961. The protagonist's name is Viktor Khrustalev. He is 36 years old, and he is a cameraman by profession. Divorced, teenage daughter. What is called, "unscrupulous", sleeping with all the pretty girls and women, free and married, at the first opportunity.
Refuses to marry. Doesn't let you into your soul, hides. It breaks up easily, inexorably and forever.
Got pregnant? - It's not my problem.
“There are, you know, such protective products of the Bakov factory ...”
He gets into a fight as soon as someone runs into him or he doesn’t like him.
Worse, due to age and health, he was supposed to fight during the Great Patriotic War, however, an influential father provided the boy with a reservation.
Even worse: Victor drank for several days with a close friend, “the best screenwriter in the country,” and then, in response to the latter’s pitiful confession, he directly advised him to put a chair to the window, and even step into the window opening. What a friend, by the way, did.
After Khrustalev lies to the investigator of the prosecutor's office and, to top it off, beats that face.
Absolute individualist in the center of the plot. Actor Yevgeny Tsyganov endows him with remarkable charm. What, we haven't seen inveterate egoists, charming individualists in our cinema?
We saw. They especially bred in the era of late stagnation. And, on the contrary, in the cinema of the 60s, to which the picture of Valery Petrovich refers, friendly young people who loved to cluster and huddle in flocks prevailed: a pronounced communal consciousness. These are the three inseparable positive friends from Ilyich's Outpost, but so are the petty hooligans from Three Days of Viktor Chernyshev, a picture invented by screenwriter Evgeny Grigoriev in a clear polemical fervor in relation to the life-affirming Outpost ...
So, Todorovsky deliberately reproduces the arrangement of characters from the popular cinema of the "thaw" era: three men doomed to each other. In this case, these are the Operator, Director and Screenwriter. They are destined to shoot a cinematic masterpiece called "Shards".
How they are friends, why they are friends - the authors of the "Thaw" script do not bother about this. But because here it is not quite "friendship" and not at all "community"! For the time being, the Director and the Operator did not know each other at all, however, without knowing it themselves, they were already tied with receipts that the Screenwriter handed them. He promised in writing to both one and the second that his script would be implemented by them and no one else.
Blatant convention? Undoubtedly. Thus, we are given to understand - and all the subsequent development of the "Thaw" confirms this - that the three men are not completely independent. Screenwriter/Director/Director - collective image. One in three persons. Main character- Viktor Khrustalev, however, this Operator will be both incomplete and incomprehensible without a Screenwriter and without a Director.
We traditionally give psychology through conversations or, conversely, through pauses. The hero is silent - in the meantime, the mental process is carried out in his subcortex, but we cannot see it. The hero is usually solid. One soul - one body - one actor.
It is possible, however, in another way. In American cinema, they have long learned to first crush, and then spread a certain typical personality - by face. Therefore, we can do without thoughtful pauses, without meaningful languor. All the time - the dynamic development of the plot.
So, psychological features settled in different bodies, and these bodies act completely autonomously. The characters are extremely different from each other, but at the same time they are not “free radicals”, but parts of some flawless geometric construction.
For example. Operator Khrustalev is that part of the personality that exists "here and now." Khrustalev, as they say, in the stream. He never gains anything, does not "estimate". When he was afraid, he, without hesitation and without execution, accepted his father's gift, his father's armor, avoiding the front.
He was bored with another female, and he easily puts her out the door.
The whiner-screenwriter is sick of it, and now he is offering the whiner to take his own life. Khrustalev does not accept affectation, does not understand why other people allow themselves a gap between words and deeds: “Tired of living? - Die!
Apparently, this is an absolutely innovative narrative style for our cinematography. Todorovsky, as far as I know, confessed his interest in the popular American television series Mad Men. This series really shines through the dense artistic fabric of the Thaw. Meanwhile, in all the serious analyzes of Mad Men known to me, the first thing they say is the influence on its authors of the work of the not-so-popular American prose writer John Cheever, unfortunately.
Cheever is not fully translated and has not been properly republished in Russian for a long time, but meanwhile, he spoke exceptionally subtly about the mode of existence of a “successful” mass person, first in big city, and then also in a respectable suburb.
Starting around the 40s of the last century, he presents the outside world as a metaphor mental life Main character. Massive, like you and me, Cheever's man encounters in the framework of the plot not with other sovereign personalities, but with phantoms and ghosts, which are in fact projections of his own mental problems.
In one of the early novels, Cheever talks about a young woman who professes loneliness and independence. It comes to the fact that she harshly refuses financial assistance to her younger brother. And then one fine day, two teenagers appear at her door, who at first complain about hard life, and in the next parish they steal money.
“They could have asked, I would have given them myself!” - the virtuous girl is indignant. Well, in the magical world of Cheever, all wishes come true: the next time the returned, shameless boys demand money from her openly.
The action seems to take place in the outside world, but it only seems. In fact, the action develops in the space of the soul. Boys within the plot exist, but at the same time, of course, there are no boys! Insidious hooligans embody a repressed sense of guilt towards a brother. Cheever is in many ways a pioneering figure, a pivotal figure in American narrative art, including film and TV series.
The protagonist of "The Thaw" tears the fabric of life in order to be repaired later by others. He does it creatively, and creativity is collaborative. When the Operator encourages the Scriptwriter to commit suicide, it only becomes possible because the Scriptwriter himself is accustomed to over-interfering with reality and imposing his dangerous plots on it.
All are tied.
The world of cinema in Todorovsky is a grandiose metaphor. This series is not about filmmakers and not about "bohemianism", as the author for some reason announced in Andrei Malakhov's program, which crowned the TV show of "The Thaw", but about all of us, participants in a mass consumer society. This is good, so I hooked.
Mass man everywhere is arranged in approximately the same way. In any hero of Cheever, in any hero of American cinema, I can easily recognize myself. Here are the characters of the "Thaw" - not filmmakers of the 60s, but projections of my immortal soul.
So, the Operator is an imperturbable observer of life. Accepts what comes into his hands. Letting go of what slips out. No death grip. I saw a beauty wet in the rain from the car window - I picked it up. And this is not "debauchery", but a specific psychological strategy.
Completely different behaves with the same girl another hypostasis of the basic personality - the Director.
The director, performed by Alexander Yatsenko, is the embodiment of will. That part of the personality that depends entirely on the requirements of society, which wants to please everyone and everyone, desires public victories, dreams of fame and brilliance.
The director tries to subordinate life to his desires. At the same time, his desires are tracing paper from public prescriptions. For example, he makes a marriage proposal to the first girl he meets, having barely met her! Why? Yes, because, I repeat, it depends entirely on social norms, and "legal marriage with your beloved" is the norm number one.
Grotesque in the spirit of Cheever, absolutely not "realistic" cinema!
The director rapes life, trying to control it. He, like the Operator, consistently embodies certain mental qualities. Each of them is an abstraction, an abstract idea in the flesh. Director and Operator - react to society, but in the opposite way.
The third component of the personality of a mass person is the Screenwriter. Its main property is a violent fantasy that replaces reality. The screenwriter lives in a world of dreams, forever trying on other people's invented destinies. At a drunken party that preceded his death, he tells his plan: a Komsomol member comes to the construction site of the five-year plan, but instead of working, he drinks in disappointment, and as a result is thrown out the window.
The screenwriter is that part of the personality that the society completely ignores. Poems, fantasies, a script about partisans, which he most likely knows nothing about; a quick switch to a script about a suicide Komsomol member…
All other characters of the Thaw are variations on the themes of basic psychological attitudes, embodied by the glorious cinematic trinity. The operator goes with the flow and sleeps with everyone, the director seeks formalization of relations, the screenwriter completely ignored the available girls after the memorable party - these three behaviors are scrolled in the "Thaw" many times, in different ways.
The sympathy of the authors and, of course, mine is on the side of the Operator. Why? This man, this unbearable Khrustalev, despite his seeming immorality, believes in the so-called "life". In a post-religious society, in a society of mass consumption, which both in the West and in our country finally takes shape precisely in the 60s, religious instinct doesn't go anywhere. The famous Protestant theologian Paul Tillich spoke well about this:
“It seems almost ridiculous to talk about the loss of faith in the Western secular world. This world has a secular faith that has put other forms of religion on the defensive. But, nevertheless, this is faith, not “unbelief”. It is a state of ultimate interest and selfless devotion to this interest.
That which was the source of Meaning and the cause of enthusiasm for the man of previous epochs has not disappeared. In a mass society, the ultimate questions are still relevant, just the wording has changed: the frivolous word "interest" should not be misleading. The fanaticism of the filmmakers from The Thaw is very indicative in this sense.
Todorovsky makes, I think, a brilliant move. He places the action in 1961, the year of our greatest technological triumph, the year of Gagarin's flight. Collective memory presents us with this time: wandering crowds, mass delight, sticking together in a community. In the multi-part film, virtually nothing remains of the sensational flight to heaven. This is a change of priorities: God is not in the sky, not in outer space, but inside. Khrustalev - carrier "marginal interest" and embodiment "selfless devotion to this interest". The Scriptwriter who committed suicide and the Director who married an indifferent woman is doubtful.
The impeccably crafted visual fabric of The Thaw, all those graceful camera rides, all those infinitely comfortable slides, signify inner space, but not Soviet Union 60s.
Beautiful, infinitely beautiful people - all without exception.
Time after time situations of solidarity, forgiveness and love arise.
Soothing music.
From series to series, the action takes place in the inner world of a certain typical little man. Looks like a cynic. But it generates psychological phenomena embodied in the beautiful, beneficially interacting characters of The Thaw.
The "investigation" technique is borrowed from Mad Men. What can be mysterious in the cynic Khrustalev? The investigator of the prosecutor's office boasts: "We know everything about you!" But even the investigator will not know that Khrustalev was really in the room of the deceased Screenwriter 10 minutes before the death of the latter and is really guilty (“You killed it!”). Although, I repeat, at the same time I am not to blame, because there was no Screenwriter separate from Khrustalev himself in the space of this thoroughly conditional construction.
Okay, one secret has been revealed. Then the authors start a new investigation: what black cat ran between Khrustalev and his influential Father?! Gradually it turns out that in exchange for safety, Khrustalev got a feeling of heavy guilt. Everyone must be responsible for himself. In 1944, Khrustalev Jr. chose a family, accompanying comfort, and only in the year of a great mental break, after a long 17 years, he was cured, confessing to his daughter his long-standing cowardice.
By the way, he does this in a shelter that his daughter has equipped in the forest in case he soon has to leave the family, which, by definition, claims control, suppresses independence. The most witty dramatic move - the daughter, thus, has long been older than her father.
So, the "ordinary" layman is the focus of psychological secrets, only a small part of which is known to the all-powerful Committee of State Security.
I recalled the outstanding, in my opinion, Soviet television series “And it's all about him” based on the novel by Vilya Lipatov, where the production theme served as a screen for a fascinating journey into the rich inner world of the same at first glance simpletons.
There is continuity. Even if Valery Todorovsky did not strive for this.
“Karl passes through a terrible shantytown on his way to the station,” she said. “He always has thousands of dollars with him, I’m so afraid that he will be attacked…”
Then Karl appeared, told the whole company an indecent anecdote, and we went to the dining room.
The painting by Valery Todorovsky is made according to this recipe, according to the method of John Cheever. As usual, active strong-willed people always planning some kind of violence, and indefatigable dreamers are afraid of everything. Only those who did not submit to either mass psychosis or typical desires return light, alive, healthy and rich, unobtrusively relieves general stress, gives strength to live in the most unbearable circumstances.
We can say that this person loves and protects God. With such an attitude, you get a great classic movie like Andrey Rublev.
But it can be said in some other way, without pompousness: a mass person in typical interiors, "Khrustalev, you bastard!".
Valery Todorovsky is not eager to compete with great artists in their almost sacred territory, choosing simpler people as heroes. The essence of the matter does not change from this, but the soul does not become smaller.
Vasily Belov
YEAR OF THE GREAT REVERSE
Chronicle of the early 30s
“The general war that will break out will break up the Slavic alliance and destroy these petty, dumb-headed nationalities, down to and including their name.
Yes, the next world war will wipe out not only reactionary classes and dynasties from the face of the earth, but entire reactionary peoples, and this will also be progress.”
“... We now know where the enemies of the revolution are concentrated: in Russia and in the Slavic lands of Austria ... We know what we should do: a war of extermination and unbridled terror.”
Fr. Engels
Part one
After the greatest turmoil, which claimed millions of lives in its chilling whirlwind, less than ten years had passed, and Russia and Ukraine were already close to another, no less terrible tragedy. It seemed that all the forces of evil again took up arms against this earth. Stepping on the empty imperial throne, did the gloomy General Secretary know that in a few years, on the day of his fiftieth birthday, he would throw a hundred million peasant destinies at their feet? You have to pay for everything, even for the People's Commissar's cap. And then, unexpectedly, even Monomakh's hat turned up ...
And if there were at least one not humiliated monk-chronicler in the country, perhaps the following entry would appear in the chronicle scroll: “In the summer of one thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine years in Filippov fast, with the permission of the Lord, the son of the Grodno pharmacist Yakov Arkadyevich Epshtein (Yakovlev) appointed byst in the Moscow Kremlin commissar over all Christians and farmers.
There were no such chroniclers.
Hosts of other writers howled about the kulaks and about the Rightist danger. Who was dangerous and most importantly for whom? Trotsky left the country with two carloads of loot, but before that he scattered the seeds of his anti-muzhik ideas over the thousands of miles of Russia. Dispersed by the winds of the last two decades, these seeds boldly sprouted here and there, strengthened and bloomed double, giving new plentiful seeds, no longer afraid of either Siberian frosts or dry steppe dry winds.
More recently, Russia provided a third of the world's grain exports. Will something happen now? Epstein, leading Agriculture great power, did not know the difference between winter and spring sowing. Of course, like his younger comrades-in-arms Wolf and Belenky, Klimenko and Kaminsky, Bauman and Katzenelbogen, he irritated and branded the Trotskyists in every way.
He wasn't afraid of anything.
On December 5, 1929, his boss Kaganovich - that executioner of the peoples - in a few minutes threw up a list of twenty-one candidates for the savage commission. The Politburo approved. And three days later, Yakovlev organized eight subcommittees, which immediately began to develop a grandiose plan for a crime unprecedented in history. On the same day, that is, December 8, Yakovlev became the commissar of Russian agriculture.
On Saturday and Sunday, December 14–15, all eight subcommittees met continuously, after which the proposals of the chairman of the collective farm center G. N. Kaminsky, one of the main henchmen of the newly minted commissar of agriculture, were hastily accepted. These proposals were mainly about the timing of dispossession. They were in a hurry, seizing power! On Monday and Tuesday, December 16–17, the Sabbath continued with renewed vigor, and on Wednesday, December 18, the commission had already approved the draft resolution. In the briefcase of Yakov Arkadievich lay a cozy folder with sheets covered with those satanic signs that programmed the life, or rather the death, of millions of people. They, these signs, predicted a disastrous path for a great country, which to a large extent determined the future of the whole world!
Yes, the papers were ready, they were waiting, and now everything depended on the “barbecue man” or “seminarian,” as the Trotskyists called the General behind his back. The next Politburo was planned to be held on Monday, but on Saturday Stalin turns fifty. And in his small semicircular living room in a narrow circle, over glasses of fine red and white Caucasian wine, Yakovlev's theses will surely be discussed.
The big Saturday is coming up...
* * *Stalin was irritated by his own anniversary and the many congratulations printed in Pravda. Willy-nilly, one had to tally up life results, but, in his opinion, they were not so impressive as to listen and read magnificent doxologies with a light heart. And today, on this Sabbath day, he was more irritated than usual. But the stronger this inner irritation became, the more unhurried were his movements.
Dinner, completed in silence, offended his wife, but Stalin rarely noticed not his own grievances. And when he noticed, he immediately forgot them, believing that in his position it was impossible otherwise. He never answered her who was invited to the evening and at what time to set the table. He got up, looked at the children with a kindly smiling squint, and, slightly clubfoot, waddled, but quite quickly, left the drawing room for his little office. He knew that the bewilderment left by him would immediately turn into even greater resentment, the resentment would escalate into conflict, but, as always, he did not want to prevent all this. Lying on the couch and looking through the newspapers, he tried to quell his irritation and doze off, but the newspaper reports left no time for that. And then there was still a bunch of telegrams collected in one place by Sasha Poskrebyshev ...
Stalin threw a stack of newspapers right on the carpet, leaned back and closed his eyes, discolored by years.
So, fifty years... Is it a lot or a little? Many... He thought and spoke from the stands using the short Christian catechism method. Question answer.
V and O. They said that his father, the shoemaker Dzhugashvili, was not his father at all ... Question: who said? The steward's wife spoke, a fat witch who never knew her own mother. They also said that the traveler from St. Petersburg Przhevalsky, being in the Caucasus, lost his head because of the black-eyed wife of a shoemaker. Who spoke? Who needed it? Talked about it...
But all this is nonsense, miserable rubbish! To hell! Not worth thinking...
He knew how to stop, interrupt not only other people's, but also his own thoughts, words, thoughts. However, the thoughts did not disappear today.
He recalled many episodes of his half-century journey, although he wanted to forget some of these episodes. But he was unable to do so. He remembered everything, including that shameful day for him on October 18, 1888!
The day before, that is, the seventeenth, at twelve o'clock in the afternoon between the stations of Borki and Taranovka of the Azov-Kursk railway a passenger train collapsed from an embankment six fathoms high. The wagons crashed one after the other. The dining car also rushed downhill, where, returning from the Caucasus, Emperor Alexander had breakfast with his family and retinue. Newspapers of that time reported that the icon of the Savior Not Made by Hands was removed from the destroyed carriage, and that the glass of the icon turned out to be intact. The tsar allegedly got out from under the wreckage of the wagon and immediately ordered to save the surviving passengers, the empress allegedly herself assisted the wounded. At the Lozova station, in honor of the salvation of the royal family, there was a thanksgiving service, then a funeral service for the dead. The next day, all of Russia offered up prayers, millions of people lit candles in churches, recalled the death of Alexander II, the reformer and liberator of the serfs. Even then, having lowered his heavy eyelids, like those of Gogol's Viy, a nine-year-old Georgian boy, a student of one of the religious schools in the south of the empire, prayed diligently, with feeling. Thin and small, this boy, like most undersized people, had a habit of lifting his head when walking, but at prayer he kept it slightly tilted forward. Every minute he swallowed the accumulated lump of prayerful delight...
Stalin tightly squeezed the wax fist, the matchbox and pencil cracked in his palm. Fending off obsessive visions, he jumped up, walking along the carpet in only woolen socks. He filled his pipe and found in the table a new matchbox with the image of a blacksmith hitting an anvil. What's the matter? He could run away from the army halfway, leave a distant exile or prison, inspiring respect for himself from the most experienced gendarme. He could immediately throw any story out of his memory forever. Why is it that this abomination that happened to him more than forty years ago is not forgotten and does not disappear? He was David and Nizheradze, Ivanovich and Koba, he was Chizhikov and Stalin. And none of them aroused such disgust in him as that praying boy with a Georgian surname. Old Hashim, in whose jugs they hid typographic fonts, once said: “You were born by thunder and lightning! You have a great heart! You are an afyr-hatsa!”
But old Hashim lied like a drunken mingrel in a Georgian feast. These are lying too... Klim is lying, Lazar is also lying. Bergavinov is lying, who, on behalf of the joint plenum, sent a sycophant telegram from Arkhangelsk: “... we undertake to give a million foreign currency rubles to the gold fund of industrialization in your name in addition to the regional export plan. We have decided to rename the city of Arkhangelsk, the Union's northern maritime outpost, to Stalinoport."
GREAT TURN (Radical change) - a period of radical change in the forces of the opposing sides during the years of the Great Patriotic War, characterized by the transfer of the initiative on the Soviet-German front into the hands of the command of the Red Army, as well as a sharp increase in the military and economic power of the USSR. In Russian historiography, it is traditionally believed that Great fracture started during Battle of Stalingrad and ended with the end of the Battle of Kursk.
The great turning point was also characterized: at the front - by large losses of the fascist German troops in manpower and equipment, which made their strategic offensive operations impossible; in the strategic rear - the completion of the transfer of the Soviet economy to a war footing, the completion of the evacuation and deployment of evacuated enterprises in the rear, which, together with the labor heroism of workers in industry and agriculture, led to a significant increase in the production indicators of the USSR national economy over the economy of Nazi Germany; in international relations - the growth of the authority of the Soviet Union among the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition and beyond (as evidenced by the turn in public opinion in Great Britain and the United States and the change in the status of the USSR in negotiations with its allies), as well as the crisis and collapse of the aggressor bloc.
In the winter of 1942, the Soviet command made several attempts to seize the initiative and launch a counteroffensive, however, both the winter and spring offensives were unsuccessful (Demyanskaya, Rzhev-Vyazemskaya, Kharkov and other offensive operations in the winter-spring of 1942). The main tasks of the German command in the 1942 campaign were: in the north - the capture of Leningrad and the establishment of communications between Army Group North and the Finnish troops, in the south - a breakthrough to the Volga and the Caucasus, crossing Caucasian Range and access to the richest oil-bearing regions of Grozny and Baku. Stalin believed that the Germans in 1942 would be able, in addition to major strategic operations, to simultaneously fight in the Moscow direction, trying to capture the city. He proposed launching offensive operations on the main fronts in the early summer, exhausting the enemy, stretching his strike groups in all directions and making them incapable of delivering powerful strikes in the Moscow region. In this regard, on May 12, 1942, the troops Southwestern Front went on the offensive on Kharkov, but a week later, hitting plight, the command began to take measures to withdraw troops from the encirclement and save them. But it was already too late, the difficult retreat of the Red Army began with heavy losses, and the German troops rushed to the south.
In August, superior enemy forces captured the cities of Maykop, Krasnodar, and Mineralnye Vody. Having occupied the Mozdok station, the Germans reached the river. Terek, mastered almost all mountain passes.
Simultaneously with the offensive in the south, German troops rushed to the Volga in order to capture Stalingrad and thereby deprive the Soviet Union of the southern routes of communication with the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition and the oil regions of the Caucasus. Forcing the Volga was considered as a condition for the entry of Japan and Turkey into the war against the USSR.
By mid-July, having driven the Red Army back from Voronezh beyond the Don, the enemy troops got stuck in the big bend of the Don. Under these critical conditions, on July 28, 1942, Stalin issued Order No. 227 (“Not a Step Back!”), aimed at improving military discipline.
July 17 - November 18, 1942, the defensive phase of the Battle of Stalingrad unfolded. On the morning of August 24, the enemy was able to break into the city with fighting and went on the offensive against the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. A months-long defense of the city and battles for its liberation began. After heavy battles in the south and in the region of Stalingrad, which cost the defenders of the city on the Volga and the enemy heavy casualties, the Nazi leadership believed that the Soviet troops were not in a position to carry out major offensives in these areas. However, the Soviet Supreme High Command conducted an offensive codenamed "Uranus" (November 19, 1942 - February 2, 1943), surrounding and forcing the capitulation of the Stalingrad group of Nazi troops. This made it possible to begin the liberation of the southern regions. Soviet troops, developing the offensive, liberated Rostov-on-Don, Novocherkassk, Kursk and a number of other important areas. The general operational-strategic situation deteriorated sharply for the invaders on the entire Soviet-German front. According to the chief of the Soviet General Staff A. M. Vasilevsky, during the offensive in the winter of 1942-1943, 100 enemy divisions were defeated (about 40% of all their formations). Only by ground forces from July 1942 to June 1944, according to the General Staff of the German Ground Forces, the losses amounted to 1 million 135 thousand people. In addition, events on the Soviet-German front contributed to the fact that the Anglo-American troops led active operations in Tunisia.
Great value for success Soviet troops near Stalingrad had the First Rzhev-Sychevsk strategic offensive operation July 30 - August 23, 1942 and the Second Rzhev-Sychevsk operation (Operation Mars, November 25 - December 20, 1942). The Soviet command failed to achieve the goals stated in the plans for these operations. The fighting here was of the most difficult nature, accompanied by heavy casualties on the part of the Soviet troops. The Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army (RKKA) moved forward several tens of kilometers. However, despite this, the Soviet command thwarted the plan of the Wehrmacht to launch an unexpected strike in the direction of Moscow in order to divert forces from Stalingrad (Operation Smerch).
As a result of the First Rzhev-Sychevsk operation, Soviet fighters near Moscow pinned down the large forces of Army Group Center and forced the enemy to transfer 12 of their divisions, including from the southern flank, at the height of the German offensive on Stalingrad. As a result of the Second Rzhev-Sychevsk operation, the Soviet troops also made little progress, but at the same time they knocked out all the reserves of the Army Group Center, which was unable to reinforce the German troops during Operation Winter Thunderstorm.
Despite the loss of more than 330 thousand people in the Stalingrad cauldron, the Nazi command decided in the summer of 1943 to launch a strategic offensive. The immediate goal of Operation Citadel was to cut off the so-called Kursk (or Belgorod-Orlovsky) ledge, formed after the fighting in the winter of 1942-1943, with converging blows from the north and south in the direction of Kursk. On the other hand, an attempt at revenge on the Soviet-German front was necessary to strengthen the morale of the Germans and the position of Germany's allies. Total mobilization was introduced in it, the troops were replenished with new equipment (in particular, T-V tanks"Panther" and T-VI "Tiger"), significantly superior to Soviet models. Operation Citadel involved 50 of the most combat-ready divisions, including 14 tank divisions (70% tank divisions Wehrmacht) and two motorized.
Knowing about the upcoming offensive (in particular, from the reports of intelligence officer N. I. Kuznetsov and British Prime Minister W. Churchill), the Soviet command prepared a defense in depth. As a result of heavy defensive battles on the Belgorod-Oryol ledge, the Soviet command managed to bleed the enemy. Almost immediately after the completion of the defensive battles, the Soviet command went on the offensive. From July 12 - August 18, 1943, the Western (commander - Colonel General V. D. Sokolovsky) and Bryansk (commander - Colonel General M. M. Popov) conducted the Oryol strategic offensive operation (under the code name "Kutuzov"). On August 3-23, 1943, the Voronezh (under the command of General of the Army N.F. Vatutin) and Stepnoy (under the command of Colonel-General I.S. Konev) fronts conducted the Belgorod-Kharkov strategic offensive operation (under the code name "Commander Rumyantsev"). Their result was the exit of Soviet troops to the Dnieper and the beginning of the liberation of the Ukrainian SSR.
The Soviet command received the initiative not only in the central sector of the Soviet-German front, but also in its northwestern direction. There, as a result of Operation Iskra (January 12-30, 1943), the blockade of Leningrad was broken.
The allies of the USSR in the anti-Hitler coalition also had great successes in the course of hostilities in the summer-autumn of 1942, which predetermined the completion of a radical change also during the Second World War. In the summer of 1942 on Pacific front the Battle of Midway took place (June 4-6, 1942), as a result of which the Japanese aircraft carrier fleet suffered irreparable losses. During the defensive phase of the Battle of Stalingrad, the allies of the USSR in the anti-Hitler coalition held the Second Battle of El Alamein in North Africa (October 23 - November 5, 1942), which ended in the defeat of the German-Italian troops and their retreat to Tunisia. As a result of the defeats of the Italian troops in the Soviet Union and North. Africa in Italy July 25, 1943 there was a coup d'état, Rome withdrew from the military-political alliance with Nazi Germany, and six months later fighting were transferred to the territory of the Apennine Peninsula. The leadership of Horthy Hungary began behind-the-scenes negotiations with Anglo-American representatives. The situation on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War and World War II finally changed in favor of the anti-Hitler coalition, which seized the strategic initiative. However, the USSR and its allies still had to face a difficult struggle against the German and Japanese troops that had gone over to the strategic defense.
D. V. Surzhik.
Russian historical encyclopedia. T. 3. M., 2015.
Literature:
The Great Patriotic War: In 12 vols. T. 3. Battles and battles that changed the course of the war. M., 2012; Zamulin V.N. Kursk fracture. The decisive battle of the Patriotic War. M., 2007; Isaev A. V. Stalingrad. There is no land for us beyond the Volga. M., 2008; Krivosheev G. F. et al. The Great Patriotic War without the stamp of secrecy: The Book of Losses. The latest reference edition. M., 2010.
Chronicle of the early 30s
“The general war that will break out will break up the Slavic alliance and destroy these petty, dumb-headed nationalities, down to and including their name.
Yes, the next world war will wipe out not only reactionary classes and dynasties from the face of the earth, but entire reactionary peoples, and this will also be progress.”
“... We now know where the enemies of the revolution are concentrated: in Russia and in the Slavic lands of Austria ... We know what we should do: a war of extermination and unbridled terror.”
Fr. Engels
Part one
After the greatest turmoil, which claimed millions of lives in its chilling whirlwind, less than ten years had passed, and Russia and Ukraine were already close to another, no less terrible tragedy. It seemed that all the forces of evil again took up arms against this earth. Stepping on the empty imperial throne, did the gloomy General Secretary know that in a few years, on the day of his fiftieth birthday, he would throw a hundred million peasant destinies at their feet? You have to pay for everything, even for the People's Commissar's cap. And then, unexpectedly, even Monomakh's hat turned up ...
And if there were at least one not humiliated monk-chronicler in the country, perhaps the following entry would appear in the chronicle scroll: “In the summer of one thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine years in Filippov fast, with the permission of the Lord, the son of the Grodno pharmacist Yakov Arkadyevich Epshtein (Yakovlev) appointed byst in the Moscow Kremlin commissar over all Christians and farmers.
There were no such chroniclers.
Hosts of other writers howled about the kulaks and about the Rightist danger. Who was dangerous and most importantly for whom? Trotsky left the country with two carloads of loot, but before that he scattered the seeds of his anti-muzhik ideas over the thousands of miles of Russia. Dispersed by the winds of the last two decades, these seeds boldly sprouted here and there, strengthened and bloomed double, giving new plentiful seeds, no longer afraid of either Siberian frosts or dry steppe dry winds.
More recently, Russia provided a third of the world's grain exports. Will something happen now? Epstein, heading the agriculture of a great power, did not know the difference between winter and spring sowing. Of course, like his younger comrades-in-arms Wolf and Belenky, Klimenko and Kaminsky, Bauman and Katzenelbogen, he irritated and branded the Trotskyists in every way.
He wasn't afraid of anything.
On December 5, 1929, his boss Kaganovich - that executioner of the peoples - in a few minutes threw up a list of twenty-one candidates for the savage commission. The Politburo approved. And three days later, Yakovlev organized eight subcommittees, which immediately began to develop a grandiose plan for a crime unprecedented in history. On the same day, that is, December 8, Yakovlev became the commissar of Russian agriculture.
On Saturday and Sunday, December 14–15, all eight subcommittees met continuously, after which the proposals of the chairman of the collective farm center G. N. Kaminsky, one of the main henchmen of the newly minted commissar of agriculture, were hastily accepted. These proposals were mainly about the timing of dispossession. They were in a hurry, seizing power! On Monday and Tuesday, December 16–17, the Sabbath continued with renewed vigor, and on Wednesday, December 18, the commission had already approved the draft resolution. In the briefcase of Yakov Arkadievich lay a cozy folder with sheets covered with those satanic signs that programmed the life, or rather the death, of millions of people. They, these signs, predicted a disastrous path for a great country, which to a large extent determined the future of the whole world!
Yes, the papers were ready, they were waiting, and now everything depended on the “barbecue man” or “seminarian,” as the Trotskyists called the General behind his back. The next Politburo was planned to be held on Monday, but on Saturday Stalin turns fifty. And in his small semicircular living room in a narrow circle, over glasses of fine red and white Caucasian wine, Yakovlev's theses will surely be discussed.
The big Saturday is coming up...
Stalin was irritated by his own anniversary and the many congratulations printed in Pravda. Willy-nilly, one had to tally up life results, but, in his opinion, they were not so impressive as to listen and read magnificent doxologies with a light heart. And today, on this Sabbath day, he was more irritated than usual. But the stronger this inner irritation became, the more unhurried were his movements.
Dinner, completed in silence, offended his wife, but Stalin rarely noticed not his own grievances. And when he noticed, he immediately forgot them, believing that in his position it was impossible otherwise. He never answered her who was invited to the evening and at what time to set the table. He got up, looked at the children with a kindly smiling squint, and, slightly clubfoot, waddled, but quite quickly, left the drawing room for his little office. He knew that the bewilderment left by him would immediately turn into even greater resentment, the resentment would escalate into conflict, but, as always, he did not want to prevent all this. Lying on the couch and looking through the newspapers, he tried to quell his irritation and doze off, but the newspaper reports left no time for that. And then there was still a bunch of telegrams collected in one place by Sasha Poskrebyshev ...
Stalin threw a stack of newspapers right on the carpet, leaned back and closed his eyes, discolored by years.
So, fifty years... Is it a lot or a little? Many... He thought and spoke from the stands using the short Christian catechism method. Question answer.
V and O. They said that his father, the shoemaker Dzhugashvili, was not his father at all ... Question: who said? The steward's wife spoke, a fat witch who never knew her own mother. They also said that the traveler from St. Petersburg Przhevalsky, being in the Caucasus, lost his head because of the black-eyed wife of a shoemaker. Who spoke? Who needed it? Talked about it...
But all this is nonsense, miserable rubbish! To hell! Not worth thinking...
He knew how to stop, interrupt not only other people's, but also his own thoughts, words, thoughts. However, the thoughts did not disappear today.
He recalled many episodes of his half-century journey, although he wanted to forget some of these episodes. But he was unable to do so. He remembered everything, including that shameful day for him on October 18, 1888!
On the eve, that is, on the seventeenth, at twelve o'clock in the afternoon between the stations of Borki and Taranovka of the Azov-Kursk railway, a passenger train collapsed from an embankment six fathoms high. The wagons crashed one after the other. The dining car also rushed downhill, where, returning from the Caucasus, Emperor Alexander had breakfast with his family and retinue. Newspapers of that time reported that the icon of the Savior Not Made by Hands was removed from the destroyed carriage, and that the glass of the icon turned out to be intact. The tsar allegedly got out from under the wreckage of the wagon and immediately ordered to save the surviving passengers, the empress allegedly herself assisted the wounded. At the Lozova station, in honor of the salvation of the royal family, there was a thanksgiving service, then a funeral service for the dead. The next day, all of Russia offered up prayers, millions of people lit candles in churches, recalled the death of Alexander II, the reformer and liberator of the serfs. Even then, having lowered his heavy eyelids, like those of Gogol's Viy, a nine-year-old Georgian boy, a student of one of the religious schools in the south of the empire, prayed diligently, with feeling. Thin and small, this boy, like most undersized people, had a habit of lifting his head when walking, but at prayer he kept it slightly tilted forward. Every minute he swallowed the accumulated lump of prayerful delight...
Under the leadership of Stalin, she chose a different path - the creation of a mobilization economy with the maximum concentration of resources in the hands of the state and political repressions against entire classes and social groups - and above all against the peasantry.
In his article "The Year of the Great Turning Point: On the Twelfth Anniversary of October," I. V. Stalin called 1929 "the year of the great turning point on all fronts of socialist construction." It was in this year that the final rejection of the NEP policy took place and a mobilization course of development was outlined, thanks to which the task of industrial modernization facing the country was solved.
According to Stalin, in 1929 the party and the country managed to achieve a decisive turning point:
- in the field of labor productivity, which was expressed in "the development of a creative initiative and a mighty labor upsurge of the millions of the masses of the working class on the front of socialist construction."
- in the field of solving mainly the problem of accumulation for the capital construction of heavy industry, the accelerated development of the production of means of production and the creation of prerequisites for "the transformation of our country into a metal country."
- in the transition of agriculture "from small and backward individual farming to large-scale and advanced collective farming, to joint cultivation of the land, to machine and tractor stations, to artels, collective farms, based on new equipment, and finally, to giant state farms, armed with hundreds of tractors and combines ".
The real situation in the country, however, was far from being so optimistic. As the Russian researcher O. V. Khlevnyuk points out, the course towards forced industrialization and forced collectivization "actually plunged the country into a state of civil war."
The rural population reacted especially sharply - violent grain procurements, accompanied by mass arrests and the ruin of farms, led to mutinies, the number of which by the end of 1929 numbered in many hundreds. Not wanting to give property and livestock to the collective farms and fearing the repression that wealthy peasants were subjected to, people slaughtered livestock and reduced crops.
The state responded to the resistance of the countryside with force. Having proclaimed a course towards complete collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks, relying on special work detachments sent to the countryside from the city with the support of the OGPU and the army, local authorities peasants were forcibly driven to collective farms, taking away their property. Collectivization was accompanied by the mass closure of churches, the use of these buildings for household needs, the destruction and plunder of objects of religious worship, and the arrests of church ministers who were considered to be the conductors of reactionary ideology.
This only aggravated the situation even more. According to data from various sources cited by O. V. Khlevnyuk, in January 1930, 346 mass demonstrations were registered, in which 125 thousand people took part, in February - 736 (220 thousand), in the first two weeks of March - 595 (about 230 thousand), not counting Ukraine, where 500 settlements. In March 1930, in general, in Belarus, the Central Black Earth region, in the Lower and Middle Volga regions, in the North Caucasus, in Siberia, in the Urals, in the Leningrad, Moscow, Western, Ivanovo-Voznesensk regions, in the Crimea and Central Asia, 1642 mass peasant uprisings, in which at least 750-800 thousand people took part. In Ukraine, at that time, more than a thousand settlements were already covered by unrest. The party and state leadership had to retreat somewhat, and on March 2, the Soviet press published Stalin's letter "Dizzy with Success", in which the blame for the "excesses" during collectivization was laid on local leaders. A month later, a government directive was sent to the places to soften the course in connection with the threat of a "wide wave of insurgent peasant uprisings" and the destruction of "half of the grassroots workers." The resistance of the peasantry, however, only led to some restraint in the pace of collectivization, which was completed in the next few years, after the OGPU managed to suppress anti-Soviet speeches, neutralize and eliminate their organizers and most active participants. The mass expulsion of kulaks and members of their families to camps and labor settlements in Siberia and the North also contributed to the pacification of the peasantry.
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See what the "Great Break" is in other dictionaries:
From the article “The Year of the Great Break” by I. V. Stalin (1878 1953), published in the newspaper Pravda on November 7, 1929. Its first paragraph: “The past year was the year of a great turning point on all fronts of socialist construction. This fracture was going on and ... ... Dictionary winged words and expressions
THE GREAT TURN, USSR, Lenfilm, 1945, b/w, 108 min. Heroic drama. The film is dedicated to the heroic defenders of Stalingrad. Cast: Mikhail Derzhavin (see Mikhail Stepanovich DERZHAVIN), Pyotr Andreevsky, Yuri Tolubeev (see Yuri Vladimirovich TOLUBEEV) ... Cinema Encyclopedia
GREAT CRASH- 1945, 108 min., b/w. genre: drama. dir. Friedrich Ermler, sc. Boris Chirskov, opera. Arkady Koltsatiy, art. Nikolai Suvorov, comp. Gavriil Popov, sound. Alexander Ostrovsky, Nikolay Kosarev. The film was restored at the Mosfilm studio in 1967 ... Lenfilm. Annotated Film Catalog (1918-2003)
The Great Fracture Genre war film ... Wikipedia
The Great Fracture Genre Military Director Friedrich Ermler Scriptwriter Boris Chirskov Starring ... Wikipedia
Great exalting or distinguishing epithet, in the case of a person, an additional naming that was often received by the most prominent people: rulers, commanders and philosophers. People often received exalting epithets during their lifetime, and ... Wikipedia
great- great actor great artist great architect great wrestler great contribution great warrior great magician great delight great mischief great genius great hero great wrath great racer great citizen ... ... Dictionary of Russian Idioms
fracture- great fracture fundamental fracture sharp fracture ... Dictionary of Russian Idioms
fracture- , a, m. A sharp change, a sharp turn in the development of the national economy. == A sharp break. pathet. == Great fracture. pathet. ◘ The successes of the socialist industry provided a radical change in the direction of the socialist development of agriculture ... ... Dictionary the language of the Soviets
"Konstantin I" redirects here; see also other meanings. Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus ... Wikipedia
