And they helped two dictators stay in power, one of whom dreamed of going down in history as a restorer of the empire at the cost of other people's lives, and the other was simply pathologically afraid of losing the presidential post, which he considered his property for a long time.

And all this will be revealed very soon: it is enough to wait until the bloody wheel of war makes its last turn.

Some - those who avoided today's mobilization - will soon see it with their own eyes.

The others - who voluntarily or under compulsion will take up arms and go to war - will themselves fall under this senseless and merciless bloody circle.

This has happened many times in recent and distant history.

They waited in lines at the military offices

Those who believe that the Kremlin did not think about mobilization until February 24, 2022, are mistaken.

They thought.

Just as they believed in the invincibility of their "second army in the world".

In Moscow, they were convinced that the subordinated population, if called by the authorities, would immediately line up obediently at the military offices.

As proof, I will recall a not so long ago episode.

On December 1, 2021, the chairman of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation,

Valentina Matviyenko

, allegedly casually mentioned a joke during the "government hour": they say, why, unlike other countries, when a difficult war comes, there are no refugees in Russia?

Valentina Matviyenko, on the left Dmitri Medvedev

The correct "patriotic" answer: because Russians in such cases allegedly do not immediately run abroad, but all of them in general - to the military commissariat.

Matviyenko advised the West then, two months before the start of the war, to "keep this in mind."

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Where did the Russians run when this "difficult time" came and the authorities started mass summonses to conscripts?

We saw huge, multi-kilometer long queues not at the gates of military checkpoints, but at border crossings - on the Russian-Georgian, Russian-Kazakhstan and even on the Russian-Mongolian border.

Hundreds of thousands of Russian men ran away from forced mobilization.

Protest against mobilization in Makhachkala.

September 21, 2022

In general, the entire Russian mobilization machine turned out to be archaic, helpless, and in some cases even ridiculous.

Everyone saw how groups of commissariat and police officers lay in wait for potential recruits to forcefully serve subpoenas in apartment building entrances, subway entrances, and train stations;

how sick, elderly and even disabled people are taken to the war;

how many of the mobilized do not even have time to reach Ukraine due to either incessant drunkenness or mutilation as a result of shootings and fights between their "brothers in arms".

SEE ALSO: In Russia, they are conducting roundups for mobilization at metro stations, on streets and roads.

VIDEO

In response to their idealistic expectations, reality prepared an evil joke for Valentina Matviyentsa and other Kremlin high-flyers.

They, brought up on idyllic sentimental pictures from patriotic Soviet films like "Cranes Fly", were certain that everything would be like in the Stalinist march of Lebedev-Kumach:

If there is a war tomorrow, if the enemy attacks

If the dark force heats up, -

As one person, the entire Soviet people

He will stand up for his beloved Motherland.

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What is being done in Belarus against the background of possible mobilization

150,000 shot Soviet deserters

What is remarkable: the Stalinist mobilizations during the Second World War also took place in a completely different way than in the old Soviet films, where a reservist, having heard Molotov's address from the black "plate"-reproducer, and seeing the formidable poster "Did you sign up as a volunteer?", immediately folds his duffel bag , hugs his weeping wife and stomps to the military office with a firm step.

In which he is immediately handed a new rifle, and he marches to the front in formation to the march "Farewell to the Slavic Woman".

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What mothers of Russian conscript soldiers say

Not everyone was ready to voluntarily fight and die for the Stalinist regime.

This especially concerned those who, before the war, suffered in one way or another from political repression and who had their own accounts with the Red commissars.

According to official information that became known during Gorbachev's perestroika, only during the period from June 22 to the end of 1941, the penal authorities of the NKVD detained more than 700,000 deserters and about 70,000 "evaders" from the draft.

In total, as noted by some Russian researchers, over one and a half million people deserted from the Red Army during the war, and another 2.5 million were listed as military service evaders.

Execution of a deserter in the USSR

At the same time, over a million people were convicted of desertion during the four years of the war.

What kind of punishment was it?

Formally, deserters were allowed to be shot.

But if everyone who ran away from the service is shot, who will remain on the front line?

That is why the special Stalinist commissars, who investigated such cases, most often acted "rationally": they shot on the spot approximately every tenth person caught fleeing or evading (during the war, a huge army of such people were shot according to the decisions of military courts: 150,000 people).

A battalion of deserters in the USSR

The rest were sent to "penalty camps" and thrown to the front line.

In reality, it also meant death in most cases, but some lucky ones still survived.

Hunting for recruits

In Western Belarusian villages, the attitude towards all mobilizations, which were held more than once (and under different flags) in 1939-1945, was wary and critical.

Both his own life experience and the centuries-old tradition of his ancestors, based on repeated historical dramas, predisposed him to this.

If people change citizenship three times within five years;

if you, without leaving your native village, in the same time find yourself in three different states, each of which announces your "sacred duty" to defend it with weapons in your hands, apparently, it could not be otherwise.

The Soviet army enters Vilnius, which was part of Poland, on September 19, 1939

When the Polish state announced "general mobilization" on September 1, 1939, not everyone in my forest village in the Vilnius Voivodeship rushed to the conscription point in the commune.

Half of those who hurried home did not return.

Those who ignored the summons and hid from the military police in a specially made dugout in the forest returned home two weeks later, and a month later became citizens of another state without any consent of their own.

And no one remembered their "evasions" anymore.

A joint parade of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in Brest on September 22, 1939, after the invasion of Poland by German and Soviet troops.

On the podium (left to right): Lieutenant General Moritz von Viktorin, Panzer General Heinz Guderian and Soviet Brigadier Semyon Krivashein

In June 1941, our Lida Military Commissariat barely managed to escape to the east, where mobilization was already underway.

But the dugout made in the forest was not empty.

The fact is that young village men were hunted by all kinds of new recruiters.

Some were recruited to serve in the local occupying Kalibaran police.

Others tried in various ways to lure Polish partisans into the Kraiova Army.

Others hunted down young men to make them Soviet partisans.

What is remarkable, all the recruiters appealed to patriotic feelings and the need to defend the Motherland from enemies (which is true, everyone's enemies were different).

Someone became a red partisan, someone joined the AK, someone was lured or forced to serve in the police.

The fates of all of them were mostly dramatic: one died, the second ran away, the third disappeared without a trace... Mostly those who survived

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Three uncles.

Three fates

Then the summer of 1944 came.

"Khapuns" from the Soviet military commissars appeared a few days after the departure of the Germans and the arrival of the "second Soviets".

At that time, three young men of military age remained in the village.

Before being recruited into the army, their nationality had to be determined: several questions during recruitment related to native language, nationality and religion.

The first of the guys,

Viktar

, called himself Belarusian, said that he spoke "in a simple way" - and he was immediately taken to the Soviet infantry.

The second,

Yuzik

, was interested in politics, listened to the radio, graduated from primary Polish school before the war.

He knew that if he got into the Polish army and not the Red Army, he would have a much better chance of survival.

That's why he spoke exclusively in Polish with the "captors" and signed up as a Pole.

And he managed to be handed over to recruiters from the Polish army.

And the third, also

Yuzik

, did not wait for any "grabbers" and immediately went to the forest dugout.

They were watching him, once they even came at night.

- Where is Yuzik?

- And who knows, he is somewhere in the forest: he collects firewood, mows hay... He is unlikely to return before winter.

Then the front rolled back to the west - and the representatives from the Military Commissariat stopped coming.

And Yuzik - alive and well - returned to the family before the cold.

Victor returned home in the spring of 1945.

With two Soviet orders.

He was lame, without one eye and with a broken jaw, which made it difficult to understand his slurred speech until the end of his life.

He did not like to remember the war.

And when he remembered, he told how they, the unfired recruits from the liberated areas, were immediately deliberately thrown into hell when they were pushing the Vistula.

Soviet commanders of the "Zhuka" school were always distinguished by their disdain for the value of a soldier's life.

The lack of modern weapons and their own military leaders' miscalculations were compensated by the silent mass of soldiers.

And Uncle Viktor did not remember much from his first fight, because he was immediately seriously wounded and hospitalized.

The second Yuzik, who joined the Polish army, never made it to the front.

Being very young and inexperienced, he was sent to the rear for training.

And soon the war ended there.

After the war, Yuzik never returned to his native village, which remained on the Soviet side of the border.

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Just survive

All these stories were well known in the village.

And I have never heard that any of these three men were condemned for his choice.

And that forest dugout, where the peasants hid from mobilization, was never handed over to the authorities.

Why?

After all, people thought first of all not about how great and powerful Stalin's Soviet Union would emerge from the war, but about the fate of their loved ones and their own families.

Centuries-old folk wisdom forced us to ask ourselves questions not about patriotism, but of a completely different kind: who will raise your children if their father dies at the front?

With whom will the elderly parents live out their old age, if the son does not return?

The dramatic fates of lonely widows and mothers, half-starved orphans, disabled people abandoned by the state during the long post-war decades were before everyone's eyes,

After the war, they envied the wrong families, where the owner "died a brave death" or returned from the war crippled.

And those where there was simply a living father who earned bread for the family, raised children, built a house, took care of the farm.

No matter how he escaped the war.

Even if it was done with the help of a forest dugout, collective morality did not condemn it at all, rather the opposite.

Especially since the communist Soviet regime, which replaced the fascist one, was not perceived as ours for a long time.

Everyone remembered the experience of 1939–1941 and knew what and how he "liberates" the village owner and what "freedom" he brings with him.

SEE ALSO: "All conscription activities are scheduled."

What did the Belarusian authorities say about mobilization

...These days, the famous military journalist

Arkady Babchenko's phrase,

which became almost the main Russian meme against the background of Putin's bloody wars, is mentioned again and again: "The motherland will abandon you, son.

Always."

The words are spoken about Putin's Russia, about the future of the conscript soldier who was thrown into the flames of the senseless Chechen war.

But these words are completely appropriate for today's Lukashenka's Belarus, in which real mobilization has allegedly not yet begun, but preparations for it are in plain sight: war is on the horizon.

How do these words fit into any totalitarian regime, where human life is nothing compared to the interests of a greedy dictator whose only goal is to preserve his sole power.

At any cost.

The opinions expressed in the blogs represent the views of the authors themselves and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editors.

SEE ALSO: "In the hospital, everyone was called to the commissariat - both women and men."

What is being done in Belarus against the background of possible mobilization