By that time, there were no problems with moral in Soviet army, so all that nonsense about politruks shooting regular russian soldiers while they retreat and while germans are no more than few hundred meters away (or at least it looked that way) is just nonsense. There were orders like that but they were applied mostly to penal battalions and definitely were not carried during the attack itself.Equinox wrote:I want you to go on.Shurik wrote:I've seen Enemy At The Gates yesterday - that movie is wrong on so many levels and so insultingly dumb that I can safely say it's probably the worst war movie I've ever seen (I haven't seen Pearl Harbor yet, but I feel I'm not missing much) ... I mean, do those who made the movie really believe that the only reason Soviets won the war was the by sheer quantity and not quality? Do they really think that this crap about one old gun for 2-3 soldiers was still happening during the battle of Stalingrad? I can go on and on about what's wrong with this movie, but it will be long and probably very boring ...
Soldiers being sent to front like cattle, standing and with locked doors is also pretty far from reality too. The real conditions weren't of course first class (far from it), but the commanders were interested that the soldiers would arrive at least somewhat fit to the battle ...
The scene in the end, where Vasily's girlfriend tells the mother of the boy that he defected to the germans instead telling her that the boy died a heroic death while helping the known hero (this is what actual politruk would tell the mother) is very far from reality. Things like what the boy did (helping soviet hero and collecting information from germans) was considered very heroic and the boy's death by the hands of a nazi would have been made into one huge propaganda story and something to boost an already enormous hatred towards the germans. There were hundreds if not thousands such a stories during the war, most of them were turned into propaganda and were told even when I was at school in USSR (late 80's) ...
There were also the religious images in the place were the boy lived with his mother and Vasily's girlfriend. While the religion was never fully forgotten and abandoned during a soviet rule, I find it highly unlikely that something like that could happen during Stalin's rule and in the middle of the war. Being religious then was something people preferred to keep quiet about.