Page 213 - The Chief Culprit

174 y e Chief Culprit

the General Staff of the Red Army, these regions were unofficially (and with a dose of irony)
referred to as the Molotov Line. It had the same “father”: Professor Karbyshev. e decision to
construct it came on June 26, 1940. But the defense buildup on the new borders proceeded
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very slowly, while the destruction on the old borders was surprisingly fast. In the summer of
1941, the tragedy of the Stalin Line reached its climax. Wrote General Grigorenko:

I do not know how future historians will explain this crime against our people. . . . e
present ones bypass this occurrence with complete silence, and I myself do not know
how to explain it. Many billions of rubles (according to my calculations, more than 120)
were taken by the Soviet government from the people to build impassable barriers on the
border, from sea to sea, from the grey Baltic to the blue Black Sea. And on the eve of the
war, the spring of 1941, loud explosions boomed across the 1,200 km of fortifications.
e formidable concrete structures, triple, double, and single embrasure firing points,
command and observation points—tens of thousands of long-term defense structures
were blown up according to a personal order from Stalin. 12

e Stalin Line on the old border was already destroyed, while the Molotov Line on the
new border was not yet built. Soviet generals and marshals, after Stalin’s death, unanimously
expressed their anger. Here are the words of Chief Marshal of Artillery N. N. Voronov: “How
could our leadership, without building the necessary defenses on the new western borders of
1939, decide to liquidate and disarm the fortified regions on the old borders?” In addition,
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as Marshal M. V. Zakharov declared, it was decided to severely limit or even stop the produc-
tion of all FR-type weaponry.
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is is a “red herring” argument used by pro-Communist historians to distract us.
ey want us to bemoan the folly of breaking the old fortifications line before the new one
was ready. But the relevant question is: why break the old one at all? Two lines surely provide
better defense than one.
Another pretext is that old fortifications were destroyed in order to move their weapons
to the new ones. is is just another set of fallacies. Firstly, the weapons could have been left
in the old line, and there had been enough time to order the Soviet industry to supply FR-
type weaponry for the new line. But we know that the production of this type of weaponry
was reduced immensely in favor of offensive-type arms.
Secondly, one does not demolish his old house just to move the furniture to the new one,
unless the old house is not needed. With weapons in the fortifications it is exactly the same.
irdly, pro-Communist historians hope that we do not remember the chronology of
the events: Stalin started to demolish the old line in September 1939, and decided to build
the new one only on June 26, 1940. ey want us to believe that the cause came after its
consequence.
e dates demonstrate that there was no connection between those two events, except
for the fact that the Stalin Line was built for a defensive war and the Molotov Line was built
for an aggressive war against Germany, as we shall show further on.
In comparison with the Stalin Line, the Molotov Line was a thin chain of rather light
field strongholds that did not require much armament. For example, in the western special
military district in Belorussia, there were 193 field strongholds built near the new border. e
old one had 876 much more powerful ones. In other military districts, the ratios between the