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Description:
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In 1943, a young Soviet/Russian platoon commander, correctly obeying his training manual, refuses to follow an order to make his soldiers do a frontal attack on a prepared German position with no previous artillery preparation, or make a flanking maneuver (attack from the side) if there is no artillery support.
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He doesn’t want to send his soldiers against the German enemy’s machine-guns to be mowed down.
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A battalion commander is enraged that the young officer disobeyed his direct order. (In every army, in time of war, this is punishable by death, and if officers disobey orders, then so will the soldiers.) He rips off his officer shoulder straps and sends him to the rear,to Division Headquarters, with a guard, as a prisoner, to face a military tribunal — and execution.
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But the war is everywhere, the Germans are not gone, the front lines keep shifting, and the demoted officer and his escorts have to start an unequal fight with the enemy.
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In this film, the long-time Russian movie star Alexander Mikhailov is superb as a 60-year-old Russian soldier who is trying to calm insecure and traumatized younger people and reason with them to the extent that he can. There is no good solution, but maybe a “least bad” one. (And we find out more about this wise and practical man toward the end.)
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As an old soldier, he asks the young officer, now a prisoner, if he is afraid to be executed, who replies honestly “I am.”
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The old soldier gives his advice, which is true in some cases, but it is also typically Russian to accept it. Russian soldiers accept death better than Westerners.
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IMD on this film: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4335164/
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The promotion “Demoted. THIS WAR FILM IS PROHIBITED! BASED ON REAL EVENTS!” is partly clickbait. A Russian posted that the film is not “prohibited” at all, but promoted everywhere. Why would Putin ban a film which does not impugn Russian patriotism, but only exposes the insanity of Stalin and his harsh rules of blind and instant obedience to even the craziest orders?
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Just as bad, Stalin would have your family arrested and put in the gulag if YOU, as a member of the Red Army, did not blindly obey all orders!
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(Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as a Red Army artillery captain, got 11 years in the gulag, not for disobeying orders, but just for one private letter to a friend criticizing Soviet atrocities against German civilians.)
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The human wave tactic ordered by Stalin was a classic communist CRIME.
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My father as a US Marine captain saw the Communist Chinese use it against his trenches in the Korean War, resulting in a sickening slaughter. Since the young Chinese men were not stupid, many would just pretend to be mowed down, lie motionless on the ground until dark, and then raise their hands and try to defect to the Americans.
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Because of this, the Red Chinese commissars (all political officers and members of the Communist Party, a classic feature of all communist armies), would walk around the mounds of corpses as night set in, and feel the bodies for warmth. If a body was still warm, they would shoot it in the head.
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When my father was in a coma for three days from a concussion after a Chinese mortar round landed on his trench, he was transported to Occupied Japan and then home to the States. But he had persistent nightmares for six months afterward.
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Human-wave attacks are a revolting war crime — the deliberate murder by officers of YOUR OWN troops!
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Léon Degrelle, a Belgian national socialist who fought on the Eastern Front for four years in the German Army and Waffen-SS, wrote about this in his The War in Russia.
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He says that during Soviet human-wave attacks the Russian soldiers reeked of horrible, cheap vodka — if and when they reached the German lines and it then came to hand-to-hand fighting.
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The Red Army for years ordered huge jerry cans full of this rotgut to make the soldiers less panicky before battle. Of course, it also made them mentally and physically slower and bad shots!
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I must say, in yet more defense of the current Russian leader, President Vladimir Putin, this time as the man who ordered the ongoing war in Ukraine, that he has minimized Russian casualties. There NEVER are human-wave attacks in the Russian Army now fighting in Ukraine.
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This is an excellent movie about how war brings out both the best and the worst. You can feel for every character (except for, spoiler alert, the cannibal!)
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The Russians are no angels and no devils, just humans with a heart, facing so many horrors and with no perfect alternative.
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After all, surrendering to the Germans was often foolish or impossible. The Germans might not trust you, or even hate you because the Red Army soldiers did commit atrocities on captured Germans.
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Or maybe the German unit, under orders to quickly achieve some military objective, could not spare even one, two or three soldiers to guard you and take you back to the rear. (In “Saving Private Ryan,” American GIs — not to condone this –shoot surrendered Germans for the same reason. Their orders are to advance quickly, and processing prisoners can be dangerous; they can rebel or run. And disarming and scrutinizing them and deciding what to do with them definitely slows things down at a crucial part of the attack. But, obviously, a consistent policy of treating surrendered soldiers well can be a major part of winning the whole war.)
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Also dissuasive of surrender was that the official German policy was to conquer Russia, annex its agricultural areas to the Reich, and subjugate the Russian people, returning them to serfdom, and not to liberate them.
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This was based on 1) the genuine German need for a reliable breadbasket (food supply) area, 2) a wrong-headed contempt for the Russian people (and other Slavs), but also 3) Hitler’s conviction (partly accurate, and a patriotic Russian said so to me) that the Bolsheviks had exterminated so many millions of the best Russians.
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Yet reincarnation can mean that the SOULS of many good Russians have returned under Putin.
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Adorable: in a diner, a toddler runs up to a complete and total stranger to be picked up and hugged. This kind of thing is an indirect indication of reincarnation. We can feel very drawn to one specific person but not know why. Oh, but we DID know them, and love them — in another life.
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I have read extensively what Americans now living in Russia say, and they say most Russians are fine people….
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…that the economy is great, the culture is clean, Moscow and St. Petersburg are spotless, family values are supported, there is no militant LGBTQ,
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….there is a lot of freedom of speech, that normal religions (not cults) are flourishing…
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….and that 40,000 young Russians a month are volunteering for the Russian Army, which is protecting the ethnic Russians whom the communist Lenin took out of Russia in 1922 and put into Ukraine.
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And Russia, with bravery and intelligent planning, has 90% won the Ukrainian War.
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Here now is the movie, “Degraded Officer.” (“Degraded” as a military term means when an officer or sergeant is disgraced and punished.) There ARE too many ads throughout — but it is, after all, a free movie 😉 — so, after five seconds, just click the button “skip” on the right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxc0GPr7wqA
@deeppurple883
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