War Over The Steppes

[HGabor]

I think the beginning of the war should be sharply separated from the later stages of the war when soviet units basically couldn't deny their losses due to the multiple levels of cross-references. What they could do, however, is to go wild with the overclaims, making the overall statistics and war balance more acceptable for the HQ.
Air divisions, for instance, had to send quarterly AC inventory reports with listed serial numbers to the VVS HQ on their plane and aircraft engine lists and assignments and of course if a plane was listed eg. on January 1, 1945 but not on April 1, 1945, somehow you had to explain what happened to it. So I would say the statistics were fixed by the overclaims/kills, not by the denial of the losses - at least in 1944-45. Soviet loss reports in 1944-45 are pretty much reliable, while the claims are not. Claims sometimes cannot be verified from German, etc. sources and perhaps they were just damaged planes, not destroyed. Same thing with the tanks. Somewhere I read that tank crews got 500 rubles after every KOd enemy tank without strict control system, so the statistics were overall OK ;-))) (That is another story that most of them had no chance to spend their money due to the huge loss and replacement rate of the crews...)

Gabor