Tag Archives: USSR

“The New Adventures of Schweik”. A fragment of a 1943 Soviet film.

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“Iosif Schweik escaped from prison and enlisted in the army in the Balkans, where a punitive detachment operates. Without doubt or fear, he is trying to help the partisans by coming up with clever ways to kill Hitler.”


Backup at Rumble.
The entire film source on YouTube.
Publication at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

Before you is a fragment of a 1943 Soviet comedy film, created at the joint film studios of Stalinobad* and Soyuzdetfilm**.

It very abruptly stops being a comedy when the monologue of Aunt Adele (played by the legendary Faina Ranevskaya) tears right through at your soul. It is Motherland speaking on behalf of all those mothers, whose children were killed by the Nazis. It is an accusation of Nazism and a declaration of the ultimate judgement to come, a public judgement which, as we know, manifested in the Nuremberg Trials.

Transcript:

Schweik: Oh, you, despicable dog! Who are you calling for, fool?
You’ve killed everyone, but you should’ve started with me.

After all, I am Iosif Schweik. Yes, yes, the very same! The book about whom you burned on the squares of Berlin. The one that hates you, like all the Czechs, like all the Slavs, the whole world!

Close your mouth! Stand at the wall!

Aunt Adele: What are you going to do, Schweik?

Schweik: I want to shoot him, Aunt Adele.

Aunt Adele: Put the revolver away. We are going to judge him.

Listen, you! I don’t even know how to call you. There is no suitable word in the human language. My children were shot at at your behest. Thousands of graves are along your way, and in each lies my child, killed by you. I fed and watered each one of them, taught them to walk, waited for each one of them, but the wait was in vain. No one came back home, did not sit at the table with me, did not lead the old me along the street by my hand, and at night, did not breathe with one breath under the same roof with me.

Why did you kill them?!

Are you silent?!

But you will answer us, you will answer to everyone, for whom you brought suffering and grief.

Schweik: Not so fast! Nothing will help you now.

♦️♦️♦️

Trivia:

This film might have served as an inspiration to the 1978 Italian comedy “Uncle Adolf, Nicknamed Führer”, a fragment from which we posted earlier.

* Stalinobad is the name of the present-day Dushanbe — the capital of Tajik SSR. It was called thus between 1929 and 1961 — literally the Stalingrad of Tajikistan. Dushanbe means “Monday”, and stems from the name of the village, where the capital was founded in 1925. Before that, the village was literally called Dyushambe-Bozor — “a market on Mondays”.

** Soyuzdetfilm is an abbreviation for “The Union’s Children’s Films”.

Who Created Hitler

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In just two minutes, this short clip from 2023, formed as a cinematic film teaser, lays bare who stands behind the fascist War — both past and present.


Backup at Rumble.
The clip is also published at “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

🦇 One important remark regarding Nuremberg Trials: it was Iosif Stalin who insisted on the open trials over the Nazi criminals, documenting their crimes. The Western “allies” wanted to simply quietly finish them off.

From our post “Nuremberg Tribunals 1.0” at Beorn And The Shieldmaiden:

It was primarily the Soviet Union that insisted on its [Nuremberg’s] implementation, while the Western powers, who had suffered significantly fewer casualties in the war, were not averse to dealing with the Nazi leaders without trial. This idea was expressed by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill back in 1942, and US Secretary of State Cordell Hull said that he would prefer to “shoot and physically destroy the entire Nazi leadership”.

The leadership of the USSR turned out to be much more far-sighted and wiser than many Western politicians, advocating a legal procedure for punishing war criminals. When Churchill tried to impose his opinion on Joseph Stalin, he firmly objected:

“Whatever happens, there must be … an appropriate judicial decision. Otherwise people will say that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin simply took revenge on their political enemies!”

👉 Documentary “The Great Unknown War”, which we translated earlier, tells in great detail about the construction of the Third Reich with the Western Capital.

♦️♦️♦️

👉 Raw video source, kudos to ЭТО Я from a friendly channel’s chat for the lead. We tried to locate the author and the source, but only the following AI-generated response could be traced, with no sight of the mentioned channels themselves:

Original source: The video was published on the account @vladimir_gron (https://t.me/vladimir_gron) (Владимир Грон – Vladimir Gron) on Instagram and TikTok. Date of appearance: Late 2023. Voice: The text was read by a professional narrator (or by the author himself using high-quality equipment) specifically for creating content in the style of “behind-the-scenes secrets”.

The author’s (Vladimir Gron) main links: Instagram: vladimir_gron — here the video gained millions of views and went viral. TikTok: @vladimir_gron (https://t.me/vladimir_gron) — a duplicate platform with similar content. Telegram: GRON — a channel where the author posts his thoughts and full versions of the texts from the videos.

Transcript of the clip

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A history lesson for the United Europe of the Fourth Reich

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There is a saying that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. An even more forceful version was suggested by Dmitriy and Putinger’s Cat:

“Those who alter history will have their geography altered”

Ukraine is now living this axiom. The Baltics are eager to “find out”. Will Germany follow that path to the end, too?

The next materials are history lessons for assorted Merzes, Macrons, von der Leyens and other fuhrers-wannabe of a united Europe in its new “Drang nach Osten”. This series appeared first at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

A meeting with an ancestor

A meeting with an ancestor

Only five minutes left till death.
Melting ice cracking under Fritz.
And one last time, he sends to Bertha-fiancé
His soldier’s farewell.

While in the waters, meeting Fritz,
And banging with his rusty armor,
Teutonic knight is rising from the depth,
Saying: “Soldier, wait!

Tell me, my descendant, have
My German kin
Not gotten wiser over seven centuries,
That Russians they engage in battle?

The Slavs have beaten me on ice;
And now the Slavs are beating you.
Have you forgotten history?
You now acknowledge history no more?”

And Fritz’s voice was hard to hear,
Already going deep under the ice:
“We aren’t allowed to learn from history
By maddened Fuhrer!”

TASS Window poster №460, drawn by N.Radlov with the verse by Sergey Mihalkov.

The French are the hungry rats, commandeered by the head woman Vasilisa

The French are the hungry rats, commandeered by the head woman Vasilisa
– A.G.Venetsianov, 1813


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“Stalin’s Delaying Tactics Against Hitler. Two Years of Astute Manoeuvring”

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In the present, the West is howling, recalling the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Meanwhile earlier, they were admiring Stalin’s cunning in concluding this pact. Not just immediately after the treaty was signed, but even while waging war against Hitler.

I came across a large and competent analysis of Soviet-German relations, published in the “Times” exactly 85 years ago – on May 1, 1941, a month and a half before the start of the Great Patriotic War. As you can see, the article is titled: “Stalin’s Delaying Tactics Against Hitler. Two Years of Astute Manoeuvring”.

The author, thoroughly analysing Stalin’s motives, writes: “On May Day two years ago, Soviet Russia looked like a country under the greatest threat.” The subtitle reads: “The Threats Have Been Eliminated.”

Speaking of Stalin, the “Times” pays him tribute:

“Perhaps. His strong, complex, pragmatic Caucasian mind is less inclined to theorising than to strategic facts. Since 1939, Soviet Russia has indeed avoided major threats. When Stalin saw that Germany had decided to move east, he withdrew from negotiations with Britain and France and met Germany halfway, making it easier for the Germans to go to war, while keeping the Soviet Union out of it.”

At the same time, the author directly writes that Germany continues to prepare for war with the Soviets, about which German officers are quite openly talking everywhere. He mentions, by the way, the Germans’ preparation of Ukrainian militants to fight against the Soviets. And he even hints unambiguously at the time of the possible start of a German attack on the USSR — the coming summer.

He also writes about how the Russians, taking advantage of the respite, are intensively preparing for the upcoming war. Both in military and ideological terms. In particular, he notes that recently the Soviet media have been writing less about the “world revolution”, and more about the “Soviet Motherland”, which needs to be defended…

A very sensible analysis. And no hysteria about the “devilish conspiracy” and the “cunning tyrant”. I emphasise, by that time, the British had been at war with the Germans for almost two years!

Source: @newsEconomics

Translation from our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”. In this context it does good to remind that the Soviet-German non-aggression pact was far from the first signed between Germany and other world powers. Read: The complete list of pacts concluded between Germany and other European countries before and during World War II

The “Burned villages” layer has been updated on the public cadastral map on Belorussia

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On the eve of the Great Victory Day, the Belorussian National Cadastral Agency, together with the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Belarus, updated the information layer “Burnt Villages” on the public cadastral map.

This thematic layer, published in 2021, has become a kind of digital monument to the victims of the war and an important tool for preserving historical memory. Its content is based on data obtained by the Prosecutor General’s Office during the investigation of the criminal case on the genocide of the Belarusian people. According to the results of investigative actions over 5 years, more than 4,000 previously unaccounted-for settlements were additionally mapped.

Results of the current update:

  • 15 villages identified during the investigation have been added.;
  • The descriptive information for more than 300 villages has been clarified;
  • The location of 35 villages has been adjusted.

Today, the map contains data on 12,858 affected villages. A special place in this list is occupied by 290 settlements that shared the sad fate of Khatyn. These villages were burned down along with their inhabitants, disappearing forever from the map of the country.

Data collection, verification, and updating are ongoing.

Each marker on the map is not just a dot, but a tribute to the memory of millions of innocent victims, and our duty is to protect the truth about the events of the Great Patriotic War and pass it on to future generations.

📖 Out of the Fire

Make sure to read the book “Out of the Fire”, available at the Internet Archive!

English translation of Out of the Fire [Я з вогненнай вёскі (Ya z vognennaj vyoski) / Я из огненной деревни (Ya iz ognennoj derevni) / I Am From a Fire Village], published by Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1980. Originally published in Belarus in 1975/6. Writers Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl, and Vladimir Kolesnik conducted interviews with survivors – mainly women and grown children – of fascist Germany’s genocidal violence against the Soviet Union, when hundreds of Belarussian villages were burned to the ground and their inhabitants murdered. Some snippets of these transcriptions would later work their way into Adamovich’s novel Khatyn. His script for Come and See also used this same source material. An anti-fascist masterwork of horror and hope. Translation by Angelia Graf and Nina Belenkaya. Book design by Arlen Kashurevich.

Europe Rehabilitates Fascism While Erasing the Communists Who Defeated It – A Politsturm reblog

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Communists and the Soviet Union played a vital role in liberating France, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany from Nazism. 81 years later, efforts are underway to erase their role from public memory.

Fascism against the Soviet memory

Details. Over the past two years, governments across Europe have moved to criminalise communist ideology, destroy Soviet monuments, and ban communist parties – while far-right and fascist parties freely grow in popularity. Politsturm prepared a review of European countries where the persecution of communists has intensified over the past year, in comparison with the contribution made by communists and the USSR to the liberation of these countries from fascism.

France

The far-right National Rally – founded by former Waffen-SS members as “National Front” – is now on course to win the 2027 presidential election.

► In 2025, the annual fascist march in Paris proceeded with legal permission – with far-right delegations from Hungary, Germany, Italy, and Spain – and openly using WW2 Axis symbolism. The march deliberately coincided with Victory Day commemorations. Meanwhile, counter-protests were banned, and multiple counter-demonstrators were arrested.

► On Victory Day this year, a WW2-era fascist collaborator anthem was played on public loudspeakers in a French town with a National Rally mayor. Last year, an official monument dedicated to the “victims of communism” was revealed in another French city. To justify it, the mayor cited the debunked “100 million deaths” statistic from The Black Book of Communism.

Historically, communists formed the backbone of French anti-fascism. Before the war, the Communist Party of France led the formation of the Popular Front against fascism, winning the 1936 elections and bringing about major social reforms for workers, while significantly weakening fascism in France.

► During WW2, the communist-led “Francs-Tireurs et Partisans” was one of the largest resistance forces in occupied France, claiming 1,500 operations in three months of 1943 alone. Many thousands of Soviet citizens who found themselves there as prisoners of war or driven into Nazi slavery took an active part in the French Resistance movement.

► The French “Normandie-Neman” Squadron fought as part of the Red Army’s 303rd Fighter Aviation Division from 1942 to 1945. French pilots flew over 5,000 combat sorties on the Eastern Front, shooting down 268 and damaging 80 German aircraft in aerial combat, losing only 46 men.

Germany

The far-right Alternative for Germany leads electoral polling at 27.5% as of 2026. The party has been repeatedly linked to fascist currents within its ranks, with senior figures investigated over the use of Nazi-era slogans.
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The Great Unknown War. A must-see documentary about the WWII prelude. By Andrey Medvedev

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Reading time: 60 minutes

It is assumed in our historiography that the USSR and its allies – the United States, Britain and France – fought with Nazi Germany, which was supported by its allies – Hungary, Romania, Italy, and Japan. And the Soviet Union won this unbearably difficult war.

But it is very important to understand whether our allies were really sincere, on whose side were the so-called neutral countries, and why the war on the Eastern front was so violent with mass destruction of the population.

Without understanding who brought Hitler to power, who financed him, who earned money from the war, we will never realize the greatness of the feat of the Soviet people.

Without a deep understanding of the causes of the war and an analysis of diplomatic agreements, we will not see that the attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 was the result of a serious geopolitical process.

An important question is: who was behind Hitler, who in Europe needed such a Germany and why? Aggressive, militarized, anti-Bolshevik and anti-Russian.

What would Germany be without American loans? Without investment from American companies? Germany could not have fought in the East without receiving for free the top-notch factories of Czechoslovakia, which it gained by the Munich Conspiracy of 1938, when England and France gave up the whole country to Hitler. What for? What were the Western politicians planning?

Why did the allies take so long to open a Second front and what is the Bank for International Settlements? Why did its participants meet every month throughout the Second World War?

How many foreigners fought in the SS, and who defended the Reich Chancellery in May 1945? For whom in Europe were Hitler’s ideas so dear: nationalism, anti-Semitism and living space in the East.

The film “The Great Unknown War” is a story about what the Soviet Union actually faced. And the terrible cost at which we won a war that we were not supposed to win.

Please read the very relevant to this documentary, poignant, and important insights in President Vladimir Putin’s article The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II, published in The National Interest on the 18th of June 2020.

We published the first translation of this documentary 6 years ago, on June 20, 2020.
On March 16, 2022, YouTube freedom-of-speeched the Russian-language channel Rossia24, where the official untranslated video of the documentary was hosted, so we uploaded the film with embedded subtitles to Odysee platform.
Now, on May 8, 2026 we present an updated version with revised and corrected subtitles.


Backup at Rumble.
Original video source at the VGTRK.

During the work on the translation, a lot of background checks were done, and every date and name was verified. Most quotes of the Western politicians are re-translations from Russian, except for a few, where open original sources were available. The links to the sources are added both to the transcript further down the page and the downloadable subtitles (as comments).

While watching the documentary, it was hard to shake off the feeling of the stark parallel of how the Nazi Germany was propped up, and how, in much the same way, the Nazi Ukraine is being propped up now. One example: just replace the name of Henri Deterding of the British-Dutch “Shell” with that of Biden Jr. to see the present-day play of interests. Or replace “Bank for International Settlements” (BIS) with the International Monetary Fund. But there are big differences, too. While Germany was heavily invested into, to make it into a battering ram against Russia, Ukraine is being turned into an ideological battering ram, while at the same time being plundered of its last Soviet industrial legacy.

However, the target was always Russia, and WWII was just a fifth act in a war that lasted for several hundred years, dotted by a few armistices. Here is a list of those wars (with some documentaries in Russian):

  1. The Napoleonic Wars of 1812
  2. World War 0 of 1853-1856, mis-nomered as “The Crimean War”, when that was but one of many battles. Just think of one simple fact: if Russia lost the Crimean War, why did Russia retain Crimea?
  3. The war with Japan and the first attempt to conduct a coup d’etat in Russia in 1905
  4. World War I, which was a suicide for Europe, started in 1914, and culminated in the capitalistic coup d’etat in Russia in February of 1917.
  5. World War II and the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945…
  6. …immediately followed by the Cold War, which was planned to not be that cold. Even before it started Winston Churchill ordered development of the “Plan Unthinkable”, the goal of which was to strike the USSR in July of 1945. I am not quoting The Guardian often, if ever, but this article from 2002 is worth the read: The Soviet threat was a myth
  7. This “Cold War” lead to another coup d’etat in Russia and a forced instalment of the bloody Yeltsin regime in November of 1993, the Wild 90’s that took the lives of over 30 million Russian and Soviet people over the course of 7 years of oligarchic rule; and the destruction of the Yugoslavia by NATO in the process.

It is all intertwined. But now, let as zoom in on the developments between WWI and WWII.

One other parallel that sprung to mind is how the German Weimar Republic and its achievements were appropriated and privatised by the Anglo-Saxon (or, rather, “Naglo-Saxon” West), while the Republic itself became demonised once West-sponsored Hitler took power. The same happened to the great legacy of the Soviet Union now, after the West-sponsored Yeltsin took power in Russia. For example, IG Farben Industries, which gave to humanity fertilisers, magnetic tape and magnetophones and many other things during the Weimar Republic, but once it got taken over by the Nazi state and developed the murderous gas “Zyklon B”, that’s all that remained, while origins of the prior works were earased and ascribed to the “victors” after WWII. More about it in the article “IG Farben – the main weapon of the XX-th century“.

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The Day of Remembrance of the Genocide of the Soviet People – We shall never forget!

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‼️ As a reminder to the assorted Fascist and Zionist media, the Day of Remembrance of the Genocide of the Soviet People had been observed in Russia on April 19 for quite some time, since 2020, but unofficially. We first marked it on “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden” in 2024. What changed in 2026, is that the Day is now officially written into the Laws of Russian Federation!

✍️ Let’s recall — the choice of April 19 as a memorial date is due to the fact that it was on this day in 1943 that Decree No. 39 of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR was issued “On punishments for Nazi villains guilty of murdering and torturing Soviet civilians and captured Red Army soldiers, for spies, traitors to the Motherland from among Soviet citizens and for their accomplices”. It was the first act to record evidence of a systematic and purposeful Nazi policy of exterminating civilians in the Soviet Union.

👉 Read also: The European Genocide of the Russian People and The text of Hitler’s statement on the extermination of Slavic peoples has been published in Russia for the first time

Unveiling the forgotten history: German soldiers’ brutal eradication of Slavs – raped, looted, and burned their way through Soviet villages

— By Rina Lu on X


Stop ignoring how the Wehrmacht acted against the Slavs. Increasingly, we hear claims like “maybe Hitler wasn’t a bad guy.” Perhaps this is because all you’ve heard is the story of the six million.

But here’s the real story🧵👇

During WWII, Nazi Germany carried out a full-blown “war of annihilation” in the USSR killing, torturing, raping, and looting millions of civilians. Most people in the West barely know about it. Nazi leaders had branded Slavs “sub-humans” and even issued orders saying soldiers weren’t accountable for violence against civilians. As one German corporal casually wrote in 1942, “The Russians are animals. We can do whatever we want to them.”

Rape as a Weapon

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Following the trail of the missing January 19 order “On behaviour on the territory of Germany”, and presenting authentic documents on the topic

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Presumably, on January 19, 1945, the USSR People’s Commissar of Defence Iosif Stalin signed an order “On behaviour on the territory of Germany”. Many reputable historical sources recite the wording of the supposed order. Last year, we too, presented a translation of the text, only later coming to realise that the order as such does not exist.

For the reference, here is the text of the “order” and additional information that was provided by Historian Magazine back then:

On January 19, 1945, the USSR People’s Commissar of Defence Iosif Stalin signed an order “On behaviour on the territory of Germany”, which stated:

“Officers and Red Army soldiers!

We are going into the enemy’s country. Everyone must maintain self-control, everyone must be brave…

The remaining population in the conquered areas, regardless of whether they are German, Czech, or Polish, must not be subjected to violence. The guilty will be punished according to the laws of wartime.

Sexual relations with the female sex are not allowed in the conquered territory. Those guilty of violence and rape will be shot.”

Stalin’s order was followed by orders from the commanders of the 1st and 2nd Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts, Marshals of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov (January 29), Konstantin Rokossovsky (January 21, order No. 006) and Ivan Konev (January 27), who prohibited “oppressing the German population, robbing apartments and burning houses.”

The commanders called on the Red Army soldiers to direct their feelings of hatred “to the extermination of the enemy on the battlefield.”

Where do the legs grow from..?

Let us perform source research of the above text.
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The USSR – a Realm of Goodness and Reason!

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We present translation of an article from the German Telegram channel FKT – History of the Soviet Union, first published at our Telegram channel Beorn And The Shieldmaiden. The article debunks more of the black myths about Stalin and the USSR of the 1930s. Make sure to also read their other article that we have translated: The Myth of the “Stalinist Purges”.

Under Gorbachev, we were indoctrinated with the brazen slander about the “Stalin repressions”, which the orthodox anti-Sovietist Solzhenitsyn invented – supposedly, the “bloody tyrant” Stalin killed 100 million of the “best sons of the Fatherland”. And millions of people actually believed it, because the more brazen and unbelievable the lie, the easier it is for fools to believe it – as the fascist Goebbels noted, and the liar Solzhenitsyn took advantage of it.

Here’s the clarification of a few fundamental questions:

Why are the fights against the enemies called “repressions”?!

Because for many, the word “repressions” associates with the punishment of innocent people.

Where are the bodies of 100 million victims?

Without their demonstration, the criticism of Stalin by the liar Solzhenitsyn is obviously unscientific. With the same success, any terrorist from Guantánamo and indeed anyone could write a book titled “The Camps of Guantánamo” and, apart from the revelations of a dozen terrorists imprisoned there, claim the following without evidence:

“Every US President tortured 100,500 million Americans on a hydraulic press and drank their blood for breakfast, lunch and dinner”

And then you could award the Nobel Prize for Literature to the author of the book, and it would be the truth?
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The Third Reich’s genocidal strategy of famine, aimed at the Soviet population

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April 19 is Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People, committed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.

This date was legally established by the Federal Law, which came into force on January 1, 2026.

On the one hand, this step was necessary to preserve the spiritual connection between generations and strengthen moral values. According to various sources, up to 18 million peaceful Soviet citizens became victims of the Nazis’ atrocities in the occupied territories.

Their memory is sacred to us.

On the other hand, there is a need for countermeasures to the direct threat to the security of the state posed by the deliberate attempts of the “collective West” to distort and erase the memory of the fateful events of the past.

To counter this concept, a law was signed on April 9 by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the introduction of criminal liability for denying or approving the genocide of the Soviet people, for insulting the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people and for desecrating their graves on the territory of the Russian Federation or beyond its borders.

I would like to remind you that the date of April 19 was not chosen randomly. On this day in 1943, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued Decree No. 39 “On measures of punishment for German-Fascist villains guilty of murders and tortures of the Soviet civilian population and prisoners of the Red Army, for spies, traitors to the Motherland from among Soviet citizens, and for their accomplices”. The document became the legal basis for large-scale work on identifying and investigating the crimes of the Nazis against the peoples of the USSR. This work continues to this day by the Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation.

◼️ According to the commission, there were fully or partially destroyed and burned:

🔻 1710 cities and urban-type settlements,
🔻 more than 70 thousand villages and hamlets,
🔻 over 6 million buildings,
🔻 deprived of shelter by about 25 million people.
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The Road to Space. A fragment of Yuri Gagarin’s book

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On the 65th anniversary of humanity’s first Space flight, we publish our translation of the first chapter of Yuri Gagarin’s book “The Road to Space”, where he tells about his younger years and the War time.

The original text of the book can be found here as an HTML or downloaded as a PDF from our blog. We also embedded the PDF at the bottom of this article.

Today, on April 19 – the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People – this fragment of Yuri Gagarin’s book serves as a sombre reminder of tragedy that befell the Soviet Union before it could lay the road to the Space.

SMOLENSK REGION IS MY NATIVE LAND

…The family in which I was born is the most ordinary one, it is no different from the millions of working families of our socialist Motherland. My parents are simple Russian people, for whom the Great October Socialist Revolution, like for all our people, opened a wide and direct path in life.

My father, Alexei Ivanovich Gagarin, is the son of a poor peasant from Smolensk. He had only two classes of parish school education. But he is an inquisitive man and has achieved a lot through self-education; in our village of Klushino, near Gzhatsk, he was known as a jack of all trades. He knew how to do everything in a peasant household, but most of all he did carpentry. I still remember the yellowish foam of the shavings, as if washing over his large working hands, and by the smells I can distinguish the types of wood — sweet maple, bitter oak, astringent taste of pine, from which my father made useful things for people.

In short, I have the same respect for wood as I do for metal. My mother, Anna Timofeevna, told me a lot about metal. Her father, and my grandfather, Timofey Matveyevich Matveyev, worked as a drill biter at the Putilov plant in Petrograd. According to my mother, he was a tough man, a master of his craft — a highly skilled worker, one of those who could, as they say, shoe a flea and forge a flower out of a piece of iron. I did not get to see Grandfather Timofey, but our family keeps the memory of him, of the revolutionary traditions of the Putilovites workers.

Our mother, like our father, was unable to get an education in her youth. But she’s read a lot and knows a lot. She could correctly answer any question the children asked. And there were four of us in the family: the elder brother Valentin, who was born in the year of Lenin’s death; sister Zoya, three years younger; and finally, me and our younger brother Boris.

Childhood years. Yuri Gagarin (sitting in the center), his older brother Valentin, younger brother Boris and sister Zoya.

I was born on March 9, 1934. My parents worked on a collective farm, my father was a carpenter, and my mother was a milkmaid. For her good work, she was appointed head of the dairy farm of the collective farm. She worked there from morning until late at night. She had a lot to do: either the cows were calving, then to worry about the young ones, then she was worried about the feed.

Our village was beautiful. Everything is green in summer, deep snowdrifts in winter. And the collective farm was good. People lived in prosperity. Our house was the second on the outskirts, by the road to Gzhatsk. There were apple and cherry trees, gooseberries, and currants in the small garden. There was a flowery meadow behind the house, where barefoot children were playing “Lapta” (traditional Russian folk team sport, similar to “baseball” and “cricket”) and “Gorelki” (an old Russian folk gane of Spring, similar to “Tag”). I still remember being a three-year-old boy. My sister Zoya took me to school on May Day. I was reading poetry from a chair there:

The cat sat on the window sill,
She purred in her sleep…

The schoolchildren applauded. And I was very proud: after all, the first applause in my life.
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Mama-Motherland – A song by Oleg Gazmanov and Alexander Marshal, with lament by Mihail Zhvanetsky

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Reading time: 8 minutes

Newly, we translated Soviet Union – a music video by Kersari, which resonated with a lot of people both of younger generation and those who were born in the USSR. That song was from a younger generation, feeling that something great was lost, yet not fully comprehending the magnitude of the loss.

The song are about to listen to and watch, premiered by Oleg Gazmanov and Alexander Marshal on June 10, 2022, is a song from the generation of us, who were born and lived in the USSR…


Backup at Rumble.

This is a brief emotional story of every Soviet child and the Soviet Union itself.

It is also a sincere declaration of love.

The footage of the clip shows a chronicle of those years and the ill-fated period when devastating events began to occur in the country, which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the last frames, the map of the USSR explodes into small pieces…💔

So, in this way, the lost children ask their Mother for forgiveness for the fact that many fell for the propaganda of perestroika, blasphemed the Motherland for nothing…

The song is inspired by the lament About Our Soviet Motherland, written in 2008 by Mihail Zhvanetsky, which we translated further down in this article.

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Lyrics

She wasn’t a glamorous diva,
And she couldn’t boast of her pedigree,
And she didn’t think about how to be happy herself —
She worked day and night.

She dealt with everything at once, and with us.
She raised us, young brats,
Fed and clothed us as best she could,
Giving her last to us.
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35 Years Without the Union – memories of the bygone time in Bulgaria

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Reading time: 7 minutes

As part of the project “35 Years without the USSR”, corresponded Georgy Zotov visited Germany, looking for the memories of the not so distant past. The article below appeared in “Argumenty i Fakty” on February 27, 2026.

“It was terrible.” What happened to Bulgarian products, beloved in the USSR?

Bulgarplodexport, Slynchev Bryag and ketchup were extremely popular in the Soviet Union.


I am looking for the famous Bulgarian ketchup in the Plovdiv supermarket, which was loved by all families of the USSR. Glass bottle, ribbed surface, red lid. No, it’s not to be found. They say it’s still there, in very small shops, produced in negligible quantities. But Heinz is offered everywhere — from America, also Austrian, German ketchups, and even French one.

A ketchup counter in a Bulgarian supermarket.

I manage to find Bulgarian as well, in a standard plastic package. “It’s not profitable to produce in glass,” the saleswoman tells me. — “Plastic is popular everywhere. And that ketchup had a different recipe — it had a more tomato flavour, much less sugar. Now the American standard is everywhere, chemicals instead of tomatoes, and it’s very sweet.”
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Decoys and camouflage in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War

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Reading time: 10 minutes

On May 24, 2021, TV Zvezda aired episode №64 of program “Hidden Threats”, which contained a fragment on the use of decoy mock-ups and camouflage during the the Great Patriotic War. Here we present our translation of this fragment. These days, Iran used decoys to fool the American-Zionist aggressors, just like the Soviet Union had been fooling the German-Nazi ones before.


Backup at Rumble.
Presentation of the material at “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

The program was introduced in a dedicated article at TV Zvezda site:

During the Great Patriotic War, the victory of the USSR was forged not only in weapons factories, but also in special factories that massively “stamped” inflatable and plywood tanks and airplanes. They immediately went to the front on a par with real equipment — about a thousand real-sized models “fought” on the Kursk Bulge alone. So the ingenuity of the Soviet people helped in the fight against the Nazi invaders.

In 1942, the 23rd special squad was created, which consisted of more than a thousand artists. Their task was to recreate Soviet military installations, imitated as accurately as possible. Then the dummy armored vehicles were mounted on tractors. For reliability, they were equipped with a soundtrack that mimicked the hum of engines. And branches were attached to the bottom so that the same dust rose after the “tank” as behind real military equipment.

However, it wasn’t limited to technology alone: sometimes mock-ups of soldiers were used to mislead the enemy. For example, when enemy aircraft approached the actual location of the Soviet troops, “equipment” with “military personnel” sitting inside was pushed forward. So, the German pilot fired bullets at it and threw bombs without harming real people.

👉 Original video source at TV Zvezda, and a properly-deinterlaced copy at Odnoklassniki.

Following is a fragment from the memoirs of the head of the engineering troops of the Leningrad Front, Boris Vladimirovich Bychevsky, chapter 4, “The Assault Has Been Repelled”:

I put down the maps and began to show what had been done before the start of the breakthrough at Krasnoe Selo, Krasnogvardeisk and Kolpin, what we have now at the Pulkovo position, what is being done in the city, on the Neva, on the Karelian Isthmus, where miners and pontoons are working.
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