Russia (bbabo.net), - An uncut history of hot conflicts during the Cold War. On the eve of the Day of Remembrance of Russians who performed their duty outside the Fatherland, a unique historical album "Secret Wars of the USSR from Stalin to Gorbachev" was presented at the Museum of Military Uniform in Moscow.
The joint project of Komsomolskaya Pravda and the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO) includes about 500 original documents that until recently were classified. In the photo - fighters of the invisible front, about whom they did not write in newspapers and whose names did not get into textbooks, although they fully deserved it. For decades, the courage and heroism shown by our compatriots in China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Angola, Ethiopia and other countries was almost unknown. And here is a huge volume of rare photographs, ciphergrams, memoirs, archival documents autographed by the first persons of the Soviet state. For example, briefly in Stalin's hand: "To my archive," on a letter from Chiang Kai-shek. Or a touching photo of the son of the head of Cambodia - a student of the Soviet school.
“In total, our internationalist warriors took part in 47 armed conflicts in 22 countries. One can argue whether it was worth or not worth intervening in them, whether it was worth or not worth going towards our allies or those who wanted to seem like them,” said the author of the concept of the book, chairman RVIO, Assistant to the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Medinsky - But the truth is one thing: wherever our guys with Kalashnikov assault rifles came, order always followed them, we always defended the weak, rebuffed terrorists and bandits, tried to establish peace on this earth " .
Engineers and doctors followed the soldiers, power plants and roads were built, the presidential aide emphasized, and when the Soviet soldiers left, "the locals understood what the horror of a civil war is." "There is nothing to reproach the guys who fought with honor, bravely, valiantly and, in general, for the idea and tried to establish peace and order on these lands," Medinsky put an end to it.
"Our instructors and advisers proved to be the highest professionals. The servicemen went to conflict zones absolutely voluntarily, because the understanding of internationalism was then widespread," Sergey Ivanov, chairman of the RVIO Board of Trustees, added knowingly: graduates of his native philological faculty of Leningrad State University worked as translators in "hot spots", for example, the head of Rosneft Igor Sechin, who served in Angola and whose photo colleagues also found today in the album.
“I didn’t know anything about our war in Laos. And that we had to fight on elephants,” Sergey Ivanov admitted. Leafing through the album, he stopped at one of the photographs. “May Day celebrations in Tel Aviv in 1949: look, trucks, decorated with banners depicting Lenin and Stalin, red banners! A rare and telling photo." Unique and just declassified in this book are also the simplest pictures, which are full of "demobilization" albums: fellow soldiers pose against the backdrop of some mountains before being sent home. Some of the internationalist warriors who came to the presentation today saw themselves there for the first time. The true story of their hard work is revealed to the country.
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