If we leave this land now we might as well stay wherever we go. The rats will pour in. And they will eat the rest of the crumbs. Shit. Wouldn't surprise me if returning soldiers werent executed upon arrival for not dying.
And the convicted prisoners, the entire nation, and the newspapers repeated and reinforced this mistake, involuntarily letting the truth out of the bag. They intended to declare them “traitors to the Motherland.” But they were universally referred to, in speech and in writing, even in the court documents, as “traitors of the Motherland.”
You said it! They were not traitors to her. They were her traitors. It was not they, the unfortunates, who had betrayed the Motherland, but their calculating Motherland who had betrayed them, and not just once but thrice.
The first time she betrayed them was on the battlefield, through ineptitude—when the government, so beloved by the Motherland, did everything it could to lose the war: destroyed the lines of fortifications; set up the whole air force for annihilation; dismantled the tanks and artillery; removed the effective generals; and forbade the armies to resist.2 And the war prisoners were the men whose bodies took the blow and stopped the Wehrmacht.
The second time they were heartlessly betrayed by the Motherland was when she abandoned them to die in captivity.
And the third time they were unscrupulously betrayed was when, with motherly love, she coaxed them to return home, with such phrases as “The Motherland has forgiven you! The Motherland calls you!” and snared them the moment they reached the frontiers
If we leave this land now we might as well stay wherever we go. The rats will pour in. And they will eat the rest of the crumbs. Shit. Wouldn't surprise me if returning soldiers werent executed upon arrival for not dying.
Expecting full soviet union military are we?