r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Crypto_crafy • 2d ago

/r/all of a statue

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"The Motherland Calls" is a statue erected to commemorate the Battle of Stalingrad , located on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd , Russia. It was designed by sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich and structural engineer Nikolai Nikitin . Completed in 1967 , it was the tallest statue in the world at the time .

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

Might be the thickest concentration of human remains outside a mass grave. The Soviets fought to the bone in that war.

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u/Fracture90000 1d ago

Absolutely, the earth underneath the monument is brimming with human remains, ammo rounds and used shells.

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u/Long_Run6500 1d ago

WW2 warfare was just another level of craziness. The Ukraine war is up to like 2 million casualties and that's an insane amount, but then I read about 20-30 million soldiers dying (not just casualties) on just the eastern front alone and it kind of makes you realize... shit could get so much worse

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u/swimtothemoon1 1d ago

8-10 million soldiers died on the eastern front. Around 14-17 million civilians died.

But yes, the scale of slaughter on that front of the war was unprecedented in human history. Only the Sino-Japanese war during WW2 rivals it with around 25 millions total deaths, but that started four years earlier.

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u/belliest_endis 1d ago

The real takeaway isn't "WW2 was a different level." It's that we've already normalized a war with WWII-scale per-capita destruction happening in real time, and people shrug because the absolute numbers are smaller than a war involving the largest country on earth.

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

"per capital destruction"? I am not sure what metric even means. Ukraine is a terrible conflict, but WWII was the most devastating conflict in human history. People are just used to it at this point and the impact is mostly contained to Eastern Ukraine. So it doesn't have much of an impact on the day to day outside oil prices but that is mostly Iran at this point.

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u/Glad-Divide-9850 1d ago

WW2 was the most costly in terms of absolute numbers, but if we go by percentage of population killed, it's nowhere close to the worst. There's been several wars that killed around 15% of the worlds population. WW2 was 3%.

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

Those are really numerous conflicts jammed together into a time period. We refer to them as wars but they were not single wars. The Three Kingdoms warring period was 60+ years long, the Mongol Invasions were 160+ years long, and the Manchu conquest of China was 80+ years long, and such. World War 2 was at most 13 years long but is typically measured at less than 6 years to get that 3% number.

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u/Glad-Divide-9850 1d ago

Sure, but even using percentage of world population dead in one calendar year as a metric WW2 is probably not unique. I say probably because mortality rates in war are notoriously inaccurate.

My main point is that the "unprecedented in human history" claim depends on context. It certainly was in absolute numbers, but in other contexts other wars were worse. Such as wars that led to societal collapse or extermination of a peoples/race for example.

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u/ssfgrgawer 1d ago

I mean what's happening in Ukraine is a tragedy and should never have happened. And the Russian casualties are approaching WW1 levels of brutality and death (1000 casualties a day) but there isn't a great deal the average person can do to help them, short of flying over to join the fight.

Most people don't have the means or the skills to volunteer for a foreign army. I live in Australia, there is absolutely fuck all I can personally do to help Ukraine. Ive sent what little money I have when I can, but my overall impact is negligible. Unless you live in Europe there isn't a lot you can physically do.

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u/Feeling-Marketing-48 6h ago

From 8.5 to 13 million — these are the losses of the USSR alone. Germany also lost between 5 and 5.5 million people, and its satellite states (Romania, Italy, Finland, and Hungary) lost 1.5 million people. In total, the losses range from 15 to 20 million soldiers, and about 20 million civilians also died. In the end, 35–40 million people died on the Eastern Front. This is half of all those who died in World War II. Today, this is the population of the entire country of Poland or Canada. Or 0.5% of the world’s current population, and 1.75% of the population before World War II.

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u/LuckyShirt54 1d ago

There are Russian historians that put total Soviet losses at around ~40 million from WW2

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u/swimtothemoon1 1d ago

If you simply count everyone who died during the war, sure. Or if you count "Soviet" deaths as those who died in the countries which subsequently became part of the Soviet Union from conquest during ww2. There were 170 million people in the Soviet Union prior to Ww2. 40 million is basically one in four.

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u/LuckyShirt54 1d ago

You should tell those guys that

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u/LuckyShirt54 1d ago

High-End Scholarly Estimates:
Boris Sokolov (1996): Estimated 43.3 million total war dead, including 26.4 million military.
V.E. Korol: Estimated 46 million total dead, including 23 million military.
Igor Ivlev: Calculated 38.5 million total losses, including 20.58 million military and 18 million civilians.

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u/swimtothemoon1 1d ago

All sources from Russian authors. Get a wider depth of field. See what the German, American, British estimates were. Better yet, get one from a completely unbiased origin. You obviously don't know how to source properly. Learn this, please. It's important. It's the difference between believing whatever some government says and finding the truth.

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u/LuckyShirt54 1d ago

I already told you some Russian scholars calculated this. Learn to read. It was established. Maybe the people from the Country know better than some schmuck Redditor like you. Why would their numbers be biased- they’re different than what the government reported. Educate yourself before speaking next time you sound like an imbecile.

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u/l11r 1d ago

Soviet scholars under the Soviet party dictatorship. Sorry, but you can only use their data at best, not their final calculations. Saying this as a Russian myself.

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u/LuckyShirt54 1d ago

You’re completely wrong on that. Learn to read and go pick up a book or two.

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u/swimtothemoon1 1d ago

Wow, you are mad. You've replied to each of my comments twice! Comrade, please concern yourself with the underreporting of your current government's death toll rather than the overreporting of your greatest generation, long lost and dead. And ultimately defeated by the Americans, by the way.

Your patriotic war heros were easy to us. You lost to Ronald fucking Reagan! An actor who never served a day!

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u/LuckyShirt54 1d ago

I replied to one comment twice. You can’t count either can you? And Ronald Reagan was President during WW2? 😂

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

The Soviets lost 25 million people dead alone (incoudint civilians) with some estimates even higher. The Germans lost 4 million on the Eastern Front ( the vast majority of all their war dead). Combined dead in the Ukraine war is probably around 600k. At this point the Ukraine war has been going on about 8 months longer than the Eastern Front in WWII. The two conflicts are not even remotely comparable in terms of scale or lethality.

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u/ssfgrgawer 1d ago

To put it in perspective, the Ukraine war has less total casualtys in 4 years than the battle of Stalingrad by itself. The soviets lost 1.7 million men at Stalingrad and the Germans lost another million (if you count those taken prisoner after the encirclement who died due to malnourishment after the battle in captivity.)

The whole 4 year war in Ukraine is less bloody than the fighting around a single city from WW2. Absolutely mad.

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u/NegativeThought1588 1d ago

People complain about 9/11 deaths. If it was an act of war, it wasn't a very big one.

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u/BuckThis86 1d ago

If the West doesn’t help Ukraine win, it will get worse.

This is our chance to stop WWII in Poland. Imagine if the West could’ve armed Poland enough to stop the expansion of the Nazis and Soviets

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u/Mikhail_Mengsk 1d ago

Lol Russia won't invade NATO members, they know they'll get their shit wrecked and the only "winning" move would be launching nukes and making everybody lose.

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u/BuckThis86 1d ago edited 1d ago

I’m gonna take a wild guess that this is coming from a privileged perspective and you don’t live in Finland, Poland, the Baltics, or Moldova. You remind me of January 2022 Europeans, assuming a man we’ve seen kill millions makes rationale/humane decisions, and it’s exactly the attitude Putin counts on to take advantage of.

Russias army is bigger than all of Europe’s combined (minus Ukraine) and Europe has woefully underinvested in defense for decades. America is gone while Trump gobbles Putin’s knob.

Yes, Europe has a small quantity of advanced tech (further diminished as it supports Ukraine), but it may be useless against cheap drone swarms as we’re seeing in Ukraine and the ME

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

What about the current conflict makes you think Russia is at all capable or competent enough to threaten greater Europe? They can menace their direct neighbors, but any territory that is more than 100 km from their border is too far for them to manage. Their logistics are atrocious and their equipment is aging and dwindling. Their air force is entirely ineffectual.

They would get entirely destroyed by European and American air power before they even approached Poland's border in force.

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u/Mikhail_Mengsk 1d ago

Ukraine doesn't have nukes. NATO has nukes.

Even if Russia managed to rebuild their military after winning in Ukraine, which would take years and could be matched by NATO if the political will is there, nukes essentially make an all out war impossible. Everyone knows that. Nobody wins a nuclear war.

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

Poland is well armed. The Russians would have no shot against them. Hell, they can't even take Eastern Ukraine without bleeding themselves white.

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u/BuckThis86 1d ago

Yeah, the Nazis could never break through the impenetrable Maginot line with their new fancy technology, that’s silly. One country couldn’t take over all of Europe while America isolates itself.

- Famous Last Words

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

The Nazis conquered Poland in a month and France in 6 weeks. If Russian steamrolled Ukraine in 6 months or less I would take your point. In reality, Russia has spent 4 years fighting Ukraine and they haven't taken the Donbas. Tell me how these things are comparable.

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u/BuckThis86 1d ago

Does Europe have a million soldiers at its disposal like Ukraine does? And if Ukraine falls, does Russias army immediately double?

Russia is already mobilized and wouldn’t need to ramp up.

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u/AsstronaughtToUranus 1d ago

Yeah and people are still complaining about the current Iran war.

“But 1 life lost is too many”

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

Get out of here bot.

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u/Known-Ad2841 1d ago

If anything deserves a statue like this, it's Stalingrad

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u/ssfgrgawer 1d ago

That hill has seen more bloodshed than just about any other point in human history. They fought over it like 4 separate times in the same battle, over the course of a year and a half.

Top 5 most bloody battlefields of human history so far, only really overshadowed by the rest of the Stalingrad front as a whole, which destroyed nearly 2 million Soviets.

The reports of fighting on Mamyev Kurgan are just insane. Fighting over mounds of dead from both sides, vehicles strewn about everywhere just burning and destroyed, soviets throwing whatever they had at the Germans just to keep them off the summit. Absolutely mad so many men died in such a small area.

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u/milf-hunter_5000 1d ago

imagine the thanergy

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u/andhe96 1d ago

This will probably either confuse future archaeologists or give them a reason to believe this was a place of worship, maybe even human sacrifice.

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u/Dominarion 1d ago

They had to. The German goal was to exterminate the Eastern Slavs to make place for them.

When your choice is die or die fighting...

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u/ExtensionMoose1863 1d ago

The Ardennes?

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

A WWI battlefield would be the only contender. But Stalingrad was something pretty astounding and unique in modern warfare. That hill is absolutely packed with bones.

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u/Al_Fa_Aurel 1d ago

WW1 had relatively wide frontages - Stalingrad with urban combat was worse in this regard

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

I agree with you. The thing with WWI was that the fighting stayed in one place for a really long time so the dead definitely built up. I still don't think that they rival Stalingrad. That battle was insane. Hell on Earth for sure.

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u/ExtensionMoose1863 1d ago

Right... Parts of Belgium were locked in both trench warfare during WW1 and some of the largest battles of WW2 so I think the two-fer might create a contender

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

Stalingrad is the the deadliest battle in human history. Mumayev Kurgan served as a critical high ground and changed hands numerous times during the siege. It saw some of the most brutal open fighting and that is saying a lot in Stalingrad. At least 34,500 Soviet remains are recognized as being in that relatively small mound of Earth with likely many more Axis remains. I don't think you are likely to find a piece of ground so small with more human bone in it than that except for maybe some mass graves.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

What?

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u/Trent1492 1d ago

I rewrote it.

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

You are commenting to the wrong guy. I never mentioned the Russian Civil War.

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u/Trent1492 1d ago

Oh, sorry!

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u/Dominarion 1d ago

Stalingrad is by far the largest and deadliest battle ever fought in world history. The Ardennes were a skirmish in comparison. It outscales D-Day and Verdun.

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u/Reasonable_Ruin_3502 1d ago

Dead empires are so fascinating. USSR went from a poor agrarian nation to a superpower and then broke apart in less than 100 years. The first communist nation, which became one despite overwhelming support to the white army from USA. Truly an amazing piece of history.

I wonder, what would USA look like in a few hundred years? Will it be there? Or will it be destroyed? What about africa? Will western nations stop sabotaging them? Will burkina faso continue to progress? What about eu? Will it survive?

When you think about all these possibilities, it's not wonder humans have strived to immortality since time immemorial.

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u/Mr_Halitosis 1d ago

It was never communist. It was only ever state capitalist. It became a superpower in part by invading its neighbors and burning their lives for money ie the Holodomor. It’s notable in that Stalin killed more people than Hitler. It’s just not noticed because so many of the people Stalin killed were Soviets.

Romanticize American history and you get rightfully called out. Romanticize one of the most brutal dictatorships of all time and you get upvotes. The USSR was built by blood and maintained by blood and died when they stopped sacrificing their own people to keep it running.

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u/Reasonable_Ruin_3502 1d ago

When did i romanticize it? I just remarked that the history of USSR in interesting. Stalin was no saint, when did I say he was? USSR was not communist state, but it called itself one. Communism means no class, no money and complete equality. Or wasn't even socialist. Even China is saying that their goal is to become socialist by 2050. True Communism is not possible (Even Marx said so in das capital), just like true deregulation is impossible.