16.05.2023, Aleksandrovskoye.
The military skills of the soldiers of the Red Army, which they continuously improved, astonished experienced German generals, said political scientist and philosopher, the leader of the Essence of Time movement Sergey Kurginyan on May 9 in his congratulatory address.
Speaking about his father’s wartime experience, Kurginyan noted that in the beginning of the Soviet-Finnish War the soldiers of the Red Army faced a number of unexpected difficulties. They immediately began to learn new combat practices.
“Very soon everyone understood that it was a serious war, and they quickly adapted in the field to what was necessary in order to fulfill the tasks of the Party and the government in Finland. And they successfully fulfilled them in general,” the political scientist said.
According to Kurginyan, the costs of the Soviet-Finnish War turned out to be much greater than expected. And that was an important lesson for everyone.
“And then the Great Patriotic War began, and my father said many times that ‘without Finland and my combat experience that I already had, my combat existence would have ended within one month of the German offensive,’” Kurginyan told.
According to his father, those who came to the front right after the mobilization of 1941 were trained much worse than those who had fought in the Soviet-Finnish War. “And still we have to train again and again,” his father stressed that continuous study is important.
Kurginyan told how at the Solovyovskaya crossing his father saw a Soviet military leader notorious for his, quite justified, in his opinion, cruelty. The philosopher omitted the details regarding how, according to his father, this high-ranking commander beat a general who made a jam of traffic at the crossing.
“My father, as he looked at that, understood everything… In his Armenian mountain village there were no rivers to swim, so he could not swim, but he jumped into the Dnieper river, and he crossed it, and later he said, ‘That is where I learned to swim,’” Kurginyan remembered.
He also told that his father had a lot of friends, including ones who met German officers. Some of those officers were quite convinced supporters of the Reich whom the Soviet Army took as POWs in 1945.
“All these officers and generals, who maintained the values they had and who were convinced in the greatness of the German army, told in total astonishment that when the Russians began to attack them in 1944-1945 having one platoon per certain number of kilometers, ‘and we were absolutely sure that we would repel their attack, we could not do anything,’” the philosopher told.
According to him, the German generals never understood what the Russians were doing and how they could fight like that. Besides, the political scientist pointed out that all these officers and generals said “Russians” but never otherwise.
“They said it was something absolutely unprecedented,” Kurginyan added.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
