The 1941 DniproHES Demolition: Who and Why

The myth: “the Germans blew up DniproHES”

In Soviet times the official version was unambiguous: Europe’s then-most-powerful hydroelectric station had been destroyed by the Nazis. Moscow maintained this lie for decades and even tried to enshrine it at the Nuremberg trials, shifting the blame onto Germany^[1]. In reality, the demolition of 18 August 1941 was carried out by Soviet forces — on an order signed personally by Stalin. The Germans did blow up the station, but separately and later — in the autumn of 1943, during their retreat (they laid over 200 tons of explosives and five aerial bombs in each turbine). Soviet propaganda merged two distinct demolitions into one and pinned it on the enemy.

What actually happened

On 13 August 1941, Stalin and Chief of the General Staff Boris Shaposhnikov sent an encrypted telegram: destruction was permitted “in case of extreme necessity.” And on 17 August the State Defence Committee adopted a resolution on the evacuation and demolition of DniproHES — Gogun found this document, signed by Stalin, in a Moscow archive^[1]. The order called for dismantling the equipment and, finally, destroying the bridge over the fore-chamber, the bridge over the sluice, and “blowing up, in two places, the body of the main dam, no fewer than three spans in each place.”

The demolition was carried out by Red Army sappers, not the NKVD — this is the second common myth. The work was led by first-rank military engineer Boris Epov, who flew in from Moscow on 15 August with two assistants; the dam was directly mined and detonated by officers of the 545th separate sapper battalion (Junior Lieutenants Bednyakov, Osipov, Afanasyev)^[1]. Stalin’s order and the investigation file list only military men and economic officials — not a single Chekist. The regiment guarding the site had been removed from the NKVD structure and subordinated to the Red Army at the war’s start.

The mining was done in haste — effectively in under a day, as German troops approached; there was no pre-planned preparation (the third myth). Epov laid 20 tons of explosives and, by his own account, worked “by eye.” The blast tore out a 175-metre section of the dam — which is why a powerful torrent surged through.

How many actually died

Here begins the most delicate part. Journalism cites figures from 20,000 to 100,000 dead — mostly civilians supposedly swept away by a 25–30-metre “tsunami”. Yet none of these figures is confirmed by testimony or investigation, as Wikipedia itself notes^[2].

The Zaporizhzhia researcher Volodymyr Linnikov analysed the dam’s blueprints and photographs and showed that the water rose by about 5.5 metres (considerable, but no “tsunami”), and that the breach measured 175.5 × 21.2 m^[2]. The wave dispersed across the river’s broad valley; the local population was used to seasonal floods and did not settle in the lowlands. There are no photographs of bodies or burials — even though German war correspondents meticulously documented anything usable for propaganda.

By Gogun’s estimate, those killed numbered in the dozens, at most about 200 people — and they were Red Army soldiers and partisans, not civilians. Some troops of the 274th Division were still on the right bank when Epov detonated the first bridge too early; it was for this that he was arrested (and later released — there was no punishment and no award for the operation). Documented civilian deaths: zero.

Where the tens-of-thousands myth came from

The figure was launched not by Soviet but by Nazi propagandists: in March 1942 a Berlin illustrated newspaper ran a painting of the demolition with crowds of refugees dying on the dam — a scene that physically could not have occurred^[2]. From there came the “round” figure of 3,000, which later swelled in memoirs to tens of thousands. It was cemented by the émigré Fyodor Pigido’s book (The Great Patriotic War, under the pen name Pravoberezhny), on whose fantasies the Canadian historian Karel Berkhoff partly built his well-known work Harvest of Despair. In Putin’s Russia outright fabrications appeared as well — invented “recollections” of eyewitnesses in articles such as “A Sabotage in Stalin’s Name” (2008).

The paradox is that the inflated figure suits two opposite propagandas equally: the Soviet one — to pin an “atrocity” on the Germans — and a shallow patriotic one — to make Stalin the killer of a hundred thousand of his own citizens right here. Honest fact-checking rejects both myths: the crime was real (the dam was destroyed without adequate warning, drowning the army’s own retreating men), but the inflated civilian death toll is as much an invention as the “German authorship.”

Why this matters

The DniproHES demolition is a model case of Soviet historical policy: commit an act of destruction, spend decades shifting the blame onto the enemy, and cement the lie all the way up to an international tribunal. It is the same pattern as in the cult of the “Great Victory” and in the reading of what the Red Army brought to Europe. The subject took on new urgency in 2023, when Russia demolished the Kakhovka dam — “the Kremlin’s familiar handwriting”. But that is precisely why the 1941 story matters doubly: it shows not only how the Soviet state lied about its own crime, but also how both sides of the propaganda inflated the death toll for a century. To refute the Kremlin’s myth is not to accept its mirror image.