Soviet Union Nearly 1.1 million repatriated Red Army prisoners were vengefully executed or sent to forced labor camps: the old GULAG system swung its camp doors wide to receive them, as they went down mines, forests, and into other harsh occupations across the Soviet wilderness Many veterans were held in suspicion by the regime for decades, some merely for involuntary exposure to distant lands while conquering the foreign enemies of the Soviet state; others for daring to hope out loud that postwar social realities might aspire to match wartime Red Army idealism, and that reforms might honor to the great victory over fascism won by ordinary krasnoarmeets and farm and factory workers Millions just went home, returning to burned-out cities and villages, to forgotten or emotionally distant wives, to children grown into strangers, to dreary factories, crowded flats, and peasant huts, or into the cold oblivion of vodka Many of the most severely wounded veterans passed on within a year, neglected to death by a society still numb with its own wartime suffering Others turned to begging, until turned out of the cities in 1947 by another heartless order from the Kremlin After Stalin’s death, sacrifices and achievements of Soviet veterans were better recognized with public honors, pensions, memorials, in official histories and school lessons Also with time, however, children and grandchildren turned away, tired of old stories told by the greatest generation of Soviets That was a natural turn for any new generation, in any country In the Soviet Union it was also forced by the pressing need to concentrate on daily navigation through a hard, grey life inside a broken and dispirited system that ground down real and vital memories to replace them with cynical myths Tens of millions of ordinary Russians, Armenians, Georgians, Jews, Kazakhs, Poles, Siberians, Uzbeks, Yakuts, and a dozen more minorities had been sucked into the great vortex of the Eastern Front Millions were killed in place in their homes and villages as industrial war rose over them, a tsunami of suffering rising across the grass ocean of the steppe lands, drowning forests, rushing into major cities, cascading even into the southern mountains before its recession was willed back by men and women determined to survive While precise numbers will never be known, consensus figures on casualties are that the Great Fatherland War cost the Soviet Union 14.7 million military dead and an additional 20 million military casualties (wounded, missing, captured) Another 20–25 million Soviet civilians likely were killed There is simply no accounting possible of the massive mental and physical wounding of soldiers and civilians, or its multigenerational effects Some Soviet and Russian historians made the point, which seems entirely valid to this writer, that Soviet losses were the equivalent of been subjected to a major atomic war In exchange, the Soviet Union achieved its only truly notable success: victory over German fascism As tainted by internal moral flaws and Stalin’s brutal personality and policies as that grand victory was, it should and will forever exert a claim on the gratitude of all later generations, everywhere See also desertion; kulaks; NKGB; OGPU; opolchentsy; Tripartite Pact Suggested Reading: Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (2007); Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (1994); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War (2006) 1012