Chapter 287
The extremely bumpy military plane was flying at a low altitude in the somewhat dazzling sunlight. Looking down through the dusty round windows, one could see the tranquil Shvyatoy River, like a ribbon inlaid on the plain where dark green and light green blended.
The light green is the plain, the dark green is the jungle, and in that dark green, you can see thick smoke rising from time to time. A battle is taking place there, an ongoing battle. The scale is not large, but no one knows when it will stop.
Yuri sat by the window, looking at the ground through the telescope in his hand. With the help of the telescope, he could see a camp built by the Soviet army on the wasteland outside the jungle. Several tanks were moving quickly on the wasteland, and it was unknown where they were going.
This is Lithuania, and the battle going on on the ground is between the Lithuanian nationalist guerrillas who are unwilling to see their country merged into the Soviet Union. On the other side is the Internal Guards under the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs, or more precisely, the "Workers' Annihilation Battalion" also composed of Lithuanians.
Although the German fascism had been defeated, the war in the Soviet Union did not stop. There were a large number of nationalist guerrillas active in Ukraine, Western Belarus, the three Baltic countries, Karelia and even Moldova, and they were supported by many local people who had just been liberated from the clutches of the Germans.
According to the data Yuri has, there are tens of thousands of anti-Soviet guerrillas of various kinds in the three Baltic countries alone, and in Lithuania alone, there are more than 30,000 guerrilla forces.
The strength of these anti-Soviet guerrillas is not strong. They lack weapons and equipment, let alone heavy weapons. They are not even equipped with basic guns and ammunition. However, the garrison here has been clearing them out since before the Battle of Berlin, but the war has not been quelled until now. On the contrary, the size of these guerrillas continues to grow.
Comrade Stalin was very dissatisfied with this. He believed that the garrison troops had sympathy for these nationalists and therefore did not do their best, because among the garrisons responsible for the cleanup there were a large number of so-called "national troops", that is, troops composed of Lithuanians.
Therefore, the first order Comrade Stalin issued to the Executive Bureau of the Disarmament Working Committee was to require that the disarmament work should start with these national troops, disband them all and incorporate them into the corresponding construction corps.
Yuri was not aware of the issue of bandit suppression in the three Baltic countries. This kind of thing was not the responsibility of the military but the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He did not care about the flaws in Comrade Stalin's ethnic policy. He only knew that he was a soldier, and a soldier in a very delicate situation, and it was his duty to obey orders, even if he had doubts about the correctness of the orders.
During the Soviet-German War, the Soviet Red Army formed a large number of national troops composed of soldiers from various ethnic minorities. The reason for forming such troops was, on the one hand, the shortage of troops, and on the other hand, to better command the troops.
Like the three Baltic countries, whether it is Lithuania, Estonia Latvia, before the outbreak of the war, they all had their own countries, and even had a long period of authoritarian governments in power, such as Konstantin Pac in Estonia, Karius Ulmanis in Latvia and Antanas Smetona in Lithuania.
Although it was a dictatorship, it was still a unified government. During the nearly thirty years that these governments existed, the three Baltic countries all experienced a process of national awakening, and because they all promoted their own national languages, Russian was not promoted in these countries. Therefore, the language barrier created difficulties for the Soviet Union to form a mixed national army.
During the entire Soviet-German War, the Soviet Union formed a total of 66 national troops, including 26 infantry divisions and 22 cavalry divisions. Moreover, these divisions were different from ordinary infantry and cavalry divisions in terms of organization. They were basically second-line troops with a full complement of more than 10,000 people.
In addition, there are a large number of troops that are nominally ordinary troops but are actually ethnic troops, such as the 89th Infantry Division, 80% of its soldiers are Armenians.
Now that the Soviet-German War has ended, Comrade Stalin obviously no longer wants these purely national forces to continue to exist. Therefore, he is not concerned about the discharge of wounded soldiers, but instead demands that the issue of the disbanding of these national forces be put at the top of the disarmament work.
This time when he came to Lithuania, Yuri was here to oversee the disbanding of several ethnic forces in Lithuania. The first one he wanted to disband was the 16th Lithuanian Division.
The 16th Lithuanian Infantry Division was formed in 1942. Its troops were affiliated with the 48th Army. It participated in the brutal Battle of Kursk and suffered huge losses in this battle.
At present, the division is responsible for the task of clearing out the guerrillas in the Panevėžys region of Lithuania, but the results are extremely insignificant. Not only that, two political commissars of the division were killed this month, so it is inevitable that it will arouse the dissatisfaction of Comrade Stalin.
In fact, the Soviet Union's control over Lithuania is now very unstable, mainly because the nationalist guerrilla forces active here are too large. They lurk in the vast jungles, and it is not very effective to rely solely on the internal security forces to clear them out.
It is for this reason that Comrade Stalin made three preparations in Lithuania. Yuri will be responsible for "disbanding irresponsible troops", while Comrade Shelov will be responsible for mobilizing more internal security troops to clear out the guerrillas active in the jungle. The last preparation is for Comrade Antanas Snezhikus to take "economic measures" to squeeze the guerrillas' living space.
The so-called "economic means" does not mean to launch an economic war, which is too advanced and cannot be used against guerrillas. Here, the economic means are to promote the collective farm system and at the same time, cooperate with large-scale population relocation.
Antanas Snechikus has just been appointed as the First Secretary of Lithuania. He is a native Lithuanian. However, perhaps because he was arrested and imprisoned three times in Lithuania, this guy has an inexplicable hatred for his motherland. He is not only an admirer of Stalin, but also an admirer of Khrushchev. He highly praises the policies implemented by Khrushchev in Lithuania at that time. He not only advocates changing the ethnic structure of Lithuania through ethnic migration, but also advocates abolishing the language, history and culture of Lithuania.
This guy thinks that there are too few Russians in Lithuania, so he suggests that no less than 500,000 Lithuanians should be relocated out of the country in the next two years, and at the same time, the Russian language should be popularized in Lithuania.
To be honest, Yuri looked down on Comrade Snechikus. He thought that such a person had no bottom line at all, and that the almost radical ethnic policy he advocated was of no benefit to the stability of the Soviet Union.
But then again, given the current situation, the collective farm policy proposed by this person, supplemented by national migration, is indeed the best measure to strangle the Lithuanian guerrillas . After all, the implementation of these two policies will compress the guerrillas' living space to the maximum extent - these militants do not engage in production, and separated from the ordinary Lithuanians who nourish them, they will have a hard time.
The plane landed at the military airport on the outskirts of Panevezys at exactly eleven o'clock in the morning. When Yuri got off the plane, there was already a large group of people waiting there.
The people who came to greet him were clearly divided into three groups. The group standing in the middle was headed by Snechikus, all of whom were officials from the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic; the group on the right were all wearing military uniforms, from the 48th Army, headed by the army commander Romanenko; and the group on the left were the Ministry of Internal Affairs personnel, headed by Shelov.
As the first secretary of Lithuania, Snezhikus' current position is somewhat delicate. Not only him, but also the first secretaries of the three Baltic countries, including Latvian First Secretary Junis Karomberzins and Estonian First Secretary Johannes Kempin, are not members of the Presidium, let alone members of the Presidium Standing Committee. They are only members of the Central Committee. In this respect, they are the same as Yuri.
Of course, this was also because the war had just ended and the Central Committee Presidium had not been adjusted yet, because in theory, the first secretaries of the union republics were eligible to become members of the Presidium. However, Yuri was very clear that Comrade Stalin obviously had no intention of adjusting the members of the Central Committee Presidium in the short term, so these three, including the first secretary of the Karelian-Finnish Republic whose candidate had not yet been determined, would not be able to enter the second echelon of the Moscow leadership in the short term.
So, what do the current Moscow leadership echelons think? First of all, the first echelon is definitely the members of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee Presidium, including Stalin, Kalinin, Molotov, Khrushchev, Andreyev, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, etc. Of course, this is only nominal, but in fact, Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin, and Voznesensky should all be considered the first echelon, but they are not members of the Standing Committee.
As for the second echelon, they are the members of the Presidium, including the first secretaries of the republics, military leaders and so on. In fact, Yuri is now considered a member of the second echelon. At least in the entire leadership circle in Moscow, no one would regard him, a young man with outstanding military achievements and who is highly valued by Stalin, as a member of the third echelon.
Otherwise, Snechikus would not have come to the airport to pick him up in person this year, and Shelov, Beria's deputy, would not have come.
