2023-08-12 04:02:39
When he was 67 years old, the President of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, gave his Western colleagues a story, an anecdote that navigated between the honor of the samurai and the fear of the little magnanimous Mother Russia. The politician, as if he were in the heat of the fire, evoked the darkest days of the Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion in 1941, and a young, good-looking political commissar with a mustache like Joseph Stalin; a certain Nikolai Vashugin. The guy in question had been determined to lead an absurd offensive from Ukraine to Poland that had ended in disaster. When he returned, a mixture of shame and fear gripped him.
Khrushchev, then one more of Comrade Supreme’s envoy to the extreme vanguard to bring order, was the one who spoke to him. Although it is difficult to know if in person or over the phone. There are versions of the fact to take and give away. It seems that he was desperate, his voice trembled and he was convinced that the ‘Blitzkrieg’ of the Third Reich would soon pass over the defenses established in the Soviet Union. Beyond whether one was at the front and the other in the trenches, or whatever the hell it was, for the president the joke lay in the brief words he had shared with the political commissioner.
–All is lost, the same will happen as in France and Poland. This is the end. I am not to blame for the defeat of the mechanized body. I’m going to shoot myself.
“Excuse me, what are you saying?”
-Can’t…
Why don’t you stop talking nonsense? If you have decided to shoot yourself, what are you waiting for?
against the topic
The president finished off the anecdote effusively. “Before he could tell her anything else, he committed suicide before my very eyes.” The historian and researcher Laurence Rees, a veteran of World War II disclosure, affirms in his essays that the two were face to face and that Vashugin fell, after his life vanished, in front of Stalin’s emissary . The scene could be straight out of any modern conflict movie; the umpteenth topic extended by feature films such as ‘Enemy at the gates’, by Jude Law. But the historical truth is far from that myth.
The work ‘Fallen Soviet Generals: Soviet General Officers Killed in Battle, 1941-1945’ collects only four cases of suicide of Russian commanders throughout the Second World War out of a total of almost half a thousand senior officers killed in combat (421 generals and 7 political commissars). The first is “II Larin, Member of the Military Council of the Second Guards Army.” This is followed by Anisov, at the head of the 57th Army, who “taken his own life before being captured.” Thirdly, the investigation also points to the case of AA Zhukov, in charge of Leningrad’s naval defenses.
The essay ‘Sacrifice of the Generals: Soviet Senior Officer Losses, 1939-1953’ is more thorough. In it, the researcher Michael Parrish collects the names and deaths of the Soviet officers who fell since the war began. Great Patriotic War, as the USSR called it, until Stalin’s death. And his data is larger than his colleague’s. In his words, some twenty senior officers “committed suicide” after losing a battle or leading their troops to their deaths. And he leaves a dozen more in doubt. However, it is unknown if it was of his own free will or because he was “advised” from high domes.
The figures are halfway between myth and reality. What we can be sure of is that the number was much larger than that of the high-ranking German officers who decided to end their lives during the war in the East. Between June 22, 1939 (when Operation Barbarossa began) and June 21, 1944 (with the beginning of the Operation Bagration), it is estimated that at least six Teutonic officers committed suicide: Konrad von Cohenhausen, Friedrich Kammel, Josef Ebbert, Arno Jaar, Richard Stempel and Gunther Angern. Some like von Paulus tried when surrounded, but Hitler stopped them.
The most notorious case
The two works analyze the case of Vashugin. Normal, because he was the most mediatic. This curious character was born on April 18, 1900 and soon joined the ranks of the Red Army. There he rose at lightning speed and earned a place among the most ideologized military in the country. To such an extent that Constantine Pleshakov, author of ‘Stalin’s Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front’, assigns him a role in the purges that Comrade Supreme undertook from the 1930s. In addition, he had participated in the Russian Civil War and the invasion of Finland.
In World War II, this officer was still just as fanatical, vain and haughty when German troops entered Russia on June 22, 1941. In Rees’s words, that same day the Red Army received the famous ‘directive number 3‘; a wild order in which he forced his men to start an attack in the direction of Lublin. “At the front, General Kirponos’s units were ordered to surround and destroy the Germans who had taken their positions and advance towards a Polish city located far behind Nazi lines,” Rees reveals in his essay.
Kirponos considered this to be completely stupid. However, Vashugin was not willing to disobey. With the lines of communication cut, the phones down and with no possibility of receiving any further orders, the political commissar forced his colleague to carry out the mission assigned to him. Our protagonist took command of the 8th Mechanized Corps and rushed headlong into Adolf Hitler’s lines. The result was as expected: after seizing some positions in the vanguard, the tanks were surrounded and crushed by the troops of the Third Reich. Then came the episode with Khrushchev, sent along with Georgy Zhukov to organize the defense.
witness to madness
It is difficult to trace the imprint of the alleged suicides of senior Russian officials in the press. ABC, witness to the conflict through its correspondents, barely hosts a page in which reference is made to them. And, furthermore, it was published in February 1941, four months before the panzers crossed the borders of the Soviet Union:
“Russian General Walter Krivitsky, former head of the secret police in Western Europe, has been found dead in a hotel in Washington. The drama has the dark outlines of communism. Has he committed suicide, as a rare paper found in his room claims, or has he been murdered? ».
Krivitsky’s case was similar to that of many other dissidents who had turned their backs on Comrade Supreme, but it had little to do with that ceremonial suicide so recurrent in the movies.
«The bankruptcy of his life, apparently, has been his enmity with Stalin, which arose in the first days of the year 1939, because before he enjoyed the confidence of the dictator in such a way that he was entrusted by him with very special missions, among them, that of organizing the Soviet revolution in the Iberian Peninsula».
The newspaper also pointed out its possible embezzlement during the “exit of gold from Spain” in the middle of the Civil War; a suspicion that made him fall into disgrace:
«Stalin’s purges in the year 38, especially against those who knew of the gold exit, made him fear for his life and he took refuge in Canada. There he began to write his memoirs, of enormous interest, because they revealed the plot of many events whose causes seemed a mystery ».
Among them, the creation of the ‘checas’ in Spain, the simulation of the purchase of several ships to transport weapons to the peninsula –something more false than a wooden ruble–, the intrigues to demolish Largo Caballero from his easy chair for the lover of Russia Juan Negrín or the repression against groups opposed to the Soviet revolution.
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