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Review: Russian WWII film The Last Stand
Correction: the third front involved in the Vyazma operation was the Kalinin Front, not the Volkov Front. Corrected.[YouTube] The film The Last Stand is about how Soviet trained military cadets took part of the defense of Moscow 80 years ago last October. US and UK film reviewers decry it as “jingoistic,” their pejorative for patriotic. Aside from the snidely ignorant descriptions of the film in paid English language media reviews, some significant information was overlooked. This is not surprising considering how ignorant even paid media is on Russian affairs, past or current. The film is set in October, 1941 in the Podolsk Artillery School, at the same time of the Soviet disaster near Vyazma. In that operation, defending on the way to Moscow was about 850,00 Soviet troops, parts of the Bryansk, Western and Kalinin fronts. The German Army began its offensive, the putative final drive to capture Moscow on September 30, 1941. By the time the initial stage was complete just four days later, 850,00 Soviet troops were trapped, captured with no hope of escape. This is where the film begins. The disaster for the Soviets was so great at the time that the Reserve Front, under the direct command of the Soviet General Staff (STAVKA) was folded into the Western front. At the time only about 90,000 troops were available to hold the line previously held by almost 10 times that number. When Soviet general Georgi Zhukov took over, he did as Stalin’s plenipotentiary. He spent the next three weeks moving troops into positions to block the German advance on Stalin’s capital. The Podolsk Artillery School was commanded by a colonel, and comprised 3,500 cadets including support staffs. Following the film, the cadets at the school trained mainly on 45mm antitank guns, but they also were deployed as recon troops as well. As the film’s narration goes on, about 90 percent of those cadets and students died delaying the German advance. They were delaying to be relieved by fresh troops, they were told would arrive in five days, a time which stretched into 12. Now, the Russians have been going over their own participation in WWII. Some of their information on the war are very murky. There are a lot of missing and presumed dead, men and women buried in mass graves with their fates unreported. I follow two such projects online: Legenda, in the Baltic countries, and one near the Mius defensive line. And graves of both Soviet soldiers and citizens murdered in pogroms conducted by the Germans and their allies are being found and recorded all the time. To understand that, even an amateur historian such as this writer knows, or should know, that the lions share of information about Soviet troops deployment in WWII are just flat wrong. The currently accepted English language historical record by such historians and authors such as John Erickson, Paul Carrell (AKA nom de plume of German SS officer Paul Schmidt), and others get some things right, but also they get a lot wrong. And a lot of that wrong information came from the Soviets. One historical matter is the Podolsk Artillery School’s cadets, which this films attempts to uncover Now, in my last full year of full time college, I read about historic stands by Soviet antitank units against the Wehrmacht in 1941. What I read then has faded over time, and subsequent reads said that those defending Moscow against such great odds were NKVD units, the political henchmen of the Soviet regime. The first book I bought on the subject by Albert Seaton -- a British Lt. Colonel -- The Battle For Moscow, did not mention those stands nor how the cadets fought, nor did any other texts I still own. When I viewed the film The Last Stand, I looked up their information on the texts still in my possession. There was nothing about them, not even a mention. The participation of those cadets is a big black hole, shrouded in part by ignorance, but also by sheer mendacity on the Soviet’s part. The Final Stand, for all its presumed faults does attempt to provide a fresh and welcomed bit of information and drama to a still mysterious war. The film can be seen free on Tubi (with commercials). The film is dubbed in English with English subtitles. Posted by: badanov 2021-12-18 |
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