Related: Russian assault on world order falters and fails
In reporting this development, Moscow historian Boris Sokolov notes that what Putin is doing now represents a revival of a policy Stalin used during World War II. More than 975,000 prisoners and approximately a million special settlers were sent to the front, forming approximately five percent of the Soviet Red Army (graniru.org).Related: Ukrainian sniper-theologian tells why Russians are ready to die for Putin’s regime
No data are publicly available as to how many of these former prisoners and special settlers died, but the percentage almost certainly was higher than the 60 percent of all Soviet citizens in uniform who did given that such people were often used as cannon fodder during that conflict too and put in harms way more often to spare other units.One group that was not recruited by Stalin were political prisoners. They were not allowed to escape their time in the camps by fighting in the front lines. That too is likely to be a tradition that even an increasingly hard-pressed Vladimir Putin is unlikely to violate in the future.
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