Paul Goble
Staunton, May 8 – Only 6800 men and women who fought in the Soviet army or in partisan detachments against the Germans or worked as war correspondents are still alive, down from 230,000 two decades ago, according to official Russian statistics surveyed by the To Be Precise portal.
But as the number of people whom most would count as veterans in the normal sense as fallen with the passage of time, Moscow has included two other groups to keep the number of veterans up, including those who lived through the blockade of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad, and those who worked in construction or transport near the front lines.
There are approximately 40,000 of these people, bring the total number of veterans of fighting between 1941 and 1945 to about 47,000, the portal says, all of whom continue to be celebrated as their numbers decline with the passage of time (tochno.st/materials/ostalos-v-rossii).
But there is an additional category of people Russian law defines as veterans of the Great Fatherland War: those who took part in operations “for the liquidation of the nationalist undergroundon the territories of Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia between January 1, 1944 and December 31, 1951” (kremlin.ru/acts/bank/7432).
To Be Precise does not give figures for this category nor do Russian officials, likely because the numbers of Soviet troops involved in the tens if not hundreds of thousands to suppress these national movements only serves to highlight just how much resistance there was in these places and for how long.
But despite this silence, the 1995 Russian law that adds them to the number of veterans of the Great Fatherland War remains very much in force and is no doubt actually applied so as to ensure that for another decade or so there will be at least a few remaining veterans the Kremlin can celebrate, although some in these countries may feel differently.
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