What's bad about my biography? My father was a worker, my brothers, too, and I have always honestly served my country. - Ivan Bagramyan

There is no point in hiding that before the war we mostly learned to attack, and did not pay enough attention to such an important manoeuvre as retreat. Now we have paid for this. It turned out that the commanders and the staff were not sufficiently prepared to prepare and execute the retreat manoeuvre. Now, in the second week of war, we had in fact to learn from the beginning the most difficult art - the art of the execution of retreat.

We have won on the Arlov, Kursk, Belgorod, and Kharkov grounds. We won because the country was being defended not only by the army but by the entire Soviet people. The Socialist economy, Soviet political structure, and Marxist-Leninist ideology proved their unarguable excellence against the Fascist economy, Fascist political structure, and Fascist ideology of Germany.

Whatever we saw in October 1941, cannot be compared to anything that we had seen prior, when our forces retreated from the Dniepr borders. Now, things like this no longer happen. Now, we can frown by ourselves.