Quote:
Originally Posted by Andreas Brekken
Hi.
Since virtually no controllable information on the VVS ever appear for serious evaluation these attempts to compare claims vs losses are at best futile.
Until the (now) Russian, ex-Soviet, archives are open for study these comparisons are and sadly will be a waste of time, and one will only have small parts of information of dubious quality and most probably, as we have seen earlier, with a rather heavy political twist to it, even 70 years on in time.
It is regrettable, and I hope that we will be able to use the archives as a real source in the future.
It is of course a very relevant question to what extent the records are influenced by politics or shear fear - the same question the students of the air war in the west constantly ask with regards to german records.
Regards,
Andreas B
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Andreas,
AFAIK, Soviet loss records are open and, except for part of the records of the fronts involved in large-scale disasters in 1941-1942 (when part of the documents were lost), they seem to be more complete than German ones for the Eastern Front, a large part of which seem to have been lost (including many which were destroyed at the end of the war) or neglected in the second half of the war.
The main problems are that in order to access them, you have to go to Russia, that the procedures to access them are time-consuming (AFAIK, most of the records are not digitized), and, first of all, that, while many non-Russian historians can either speak English and/or German or get some help with those languages, quite few of them can access documents in Russian.
I am no specialist on Russian archive conservation and access, but I think this subject has been discussed on 12OCH by Russian researchers with experience about working on military archives in the past.
Kolya.