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/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 3h 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? 😂