Page 311 - The Chief Culprit

256 y e Chief Culprit

A. Sviridov commanded the 144th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion of the 164th Rifle
Division of the 17th Rifle Corps of the 12th Army posted in the Lvov-Chernovits bulge, on
the Romanian border. e 17th Corps was in essence a mountain rifle corps. And the entire
12th Army was, in fact, a mountain army. Sviridov wrote of June 19, 1941: “Our division
replaced border guards at the river Prut. Leaving the state border, they handed a fortified
shoreline to us.” From the Romanian side “we heard the cries from Romanian villages: the
peasants were being relocated further away from the borders.” “All of us, Soviet warriors
were preparing to fight the enemy only on his lands.”
Meanwhile, from June 13 to 20, the NKVD troops were relocating by force the popu-
lation of the border regions from the White Sea to the Black Sea. e Germans relocated
people from a strip of land twenty kilometers in width, while the Soviets removed people
from land one hundred kilometers wide. e Germans relocated the population. e Soviets
relocated some people and sent others to the GULAG. On June 19, the day described by
Sviridov, the NKVD operation to clear the front strip entered its bloodiest stage.
After the forced deportation of the population, the border guards dismantled all mines
and barbwire obstacles on the Soviet border, and left the borders themselves. On strips tens
of kilometers long, in the places where the Soviet assaults were being prepared, the border was
opened, and the border guards had left, having handed the borders over to the Red Army. e
reconnaissance battalions of the Soviet divisions came out right up to the borders.
Many years before the war in 1941, Shaposhnikov said that the “transfer of armies to
wartime positions creates an obvious elevation in their military valiance and their morale.”
Shaposhnikov warned, however, that an army put on wartime regime and moved to the bor-
ders experienced nervous tension that couldn’t be contained. Shaposhnikov also cautioned
that the army couldn’t be kept at the borders for long: it had to be brought into action. Stalin
read Shaposhnikov’s book with great care, knew it well, and often quoted it. In May 1940,
Shaposhnikov was promoted to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. Officially, he was
a deputy of the People’s Commissar for Defense, but in practice he was Stalin’s number one
military advisor. By the middle of June 1941, Soviet armies were moved to the borders. e
Soviet High Command knew that the commanders and soldiers were eager to enter combat,
and that their assault drive couldn’t be contained.
e Red Army was not separated from the enemy even by a thin line of NKVD border
guards. Neither Zhukov, nor Timoshenko, nor Shaposhnikov had the power to order the
guards to leave the borders. e guards were not under their jurisdiction. e guards were
subordinate to Beria, the NKVD commissar. But Beria did not have the power to order the
army units to replace his people on the borders. Only one man, Stalin, could have ordered
the NKVD commissar to remove the border guards and the Defense commissar to move the
army divisions to the borders.
en, the unexpected happened. e German army attacked. Let’s examine the con-
sequences of the attack using the example of the 164th Division in which Sviridov served as
battalion commander. ere are two rivers in this region: the border river Prut, and the river
Dniester that runs parallel to it on Soviet territory. If the division had been preparing for
defense, there was no reason to move to the land between the two rivers; it would have been
logical to dig trenches on the Dniester’s eastern shores, using both rivers as water obstacles.
Bridges should have been prepared for detonation. ere should have been no supplies, hos-
pitals, large army units, and headquarters stationed in the land between the two rivers, only