1- INVASIONS
A passage of the novel War and Peace challengesthe wisdom of the “parallel march” retreat carried out by General Kutuzov, commander in chief of the Russian troops, after the battle of Borodino, the first clash with the Grande Armèe during the Napoleonic invasion. According to Tsarist rhetoric, the move was to be ascribed to the strategist’s foresight, but Tolstoy instead recounts it as the unimagined outcome of a jumble of circumstances, unforeseen events, and chances.
Perhaps thinking of the novel and the novelist, Alessandro Barbero has recalled the scientific illusion of historiography. Scholars have long dreamed of it as an exact science, capable of legislating in its disciplinary field on a par with logic, physics, biology. However, Barbero warns that historical events are generally governed by the unexpected and the unavoidable: by chaos. But there are exceptions. He himself is ready to swear at least to one law:
one must not invade Russia
This would seem obvious, if only for general reasons of geography and society. Yet in the modern age the event has repeated itself several times, as if ruled by a cycle, if we exclude minor wars. Over the centuries, different countries of Western Europe have moved armies to conquer Moscow and its boundless horizon. Poland, which still harbors that thought today, tried in the early seventeenth century. Almost a hundred years later, the honor and the burden fell to the Swedes. France and Bonaparte made their play at the dawn of the nineteenth century. And towards the middle of the twentieth century, Nazi Germany repeated the gamble.
The inertia of the cycle is so strong as to cause it to cross the threshold of the millennium. Since last August, a calculation by Vlodymyr Zelensky has staged the fifth invasion of the series, albeit in one sixteenth of the country, the first of the 21st century. So far Biden and NATO have nodded alongside the leader president with paternal pride.
2- RESISTANCE
With the exception of the modest flood of the Ukrainian army into Kursk and the still unknown future of the initiative (Trump will deal with it), the outcomes of previous invasions were disasters for the perpetrators (Wladislaus IV of Poland, Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler). On the other hand, the official champions of the Russian resistance have emerged victorious, albeit at a high price: Michael of Russia (1613), Peter the Great (1709), Alexander 1st Romanov (1812) and Joseph Stalin (1945).
S
The expression “patriotic war” appears in a book from 1839. It was invented by the author, Alexander Micajlovskij Danilevsky, but the client was Tsar Alexander. The two words celebrate the Russian resistance to Napoleon’s army in the style of imperial populism. However, the phrase did not go unappreciated by the communist state, and Stalin took them up again in the 20th century to launch against Hitler. He added the adjective “great” to adapt them to the extent of the losses: 4,300,000 soldiers in Operation Barbarossa alone (210,000 had died against Napoleon).
Eighty years – the time that has passed since the end (1944) of the last invasion – are not enough to forget the horror and the fear. Even more so since the Russians are certain that the Western world has them in their grip, because in the meantime NATO has not stopped besieging them. They live with a basic anxiety (their leader knows it well and takes advantage of it), but no one is interested in reassuring them. On the contrary, the Western countries mock them, and talk about invasion syndrome. Crocioni Anteo, the anarchist peasant created by Paolo Volponi, would comment:
It is easy for persecutors to accuse their victims of suffering from persecution mania.
A special mention must be made of Italy. In its entirety or in part, over the centuries it has participated in all the epochal campaigns against Russia, always on the side of the invaders. Instead, the Russians never imagined the invasion of Italy, much less the conquest. Indeed, after the Second World War they were generous in avoiding blaming the Italians for the misdeeds of the ARMIR.
3- THE GREAT BATTLE
“A German soldier dies in Russia every seven seconds.” the announcer informs Hitler’s armies, speaking from Radio Moscow. He repeats the announcement with obsessive frequency, against the backdrop of the ticking of a stopwatch.
Thus begins the media erosion of the invaders’ hopes. It is Christmas Day 1942. In the city named after Stalin, the epochal confrontation rages among the rubble and the dead, the mother of all battles, the “…epic struggle that will never be surpassed” (Geoffrey Roberts). The outcome of the clash is destined to prefigure that of the entire war. “Stalingrad is the mass grave”, continues the message, meant to irremediably humiliate the German soldiers already disconcerted by war fought house by house, street by street. One of them writes in his diary: “…the street is no longer measured in meters but in corpses”.
In Stalingrad, the world is at stake. The Allies do not want to open a Western front, as Churchill had confirmed in August. The weight of the war will fall on the Soviet Union, invaded from within and pressed by enemies at its borders: Finland, the Baltic republics, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine are aligned with Hitler. In early September, Stalin decides to entrust the city to a young general, the son of peasants: Vasilij Ivanovič Čujkov, who solemnly pledges:
We cannot leave Stalingrad to the enemy… as for me, I swear not to abandon it; we will hold Stalingrad or we will die there.
And in the desperate and victorious defense he keeps the 62nd Red Army close to their enemies, fighting almost hand to hand. He has carefully studied the enemy’s methods and knows that the Wehrmacht precedes their assaults with vast aerial bombardments. Fighting in close contact with the Germans, Chuikov effectively makes the Luftwaffe raids, which up to that point had made the difference, impossible to carry out.
The great battle will lead many historians to judge him as the most capable among the fighters of the Second World War. However, Stalingrad was not his only campaign. One victory after another, Chuikov would finally take part in the conquest of Berlin, after having also liberated Odessa and the Donbass along the way.
4- TO GIVE AND NOT TO HAVE
Levada is an independent Russian agency that specializes in demographic analysis. A recent survey (2019) found that two-thirds of Russians miss the Soviet Union. And us?
We owe the salvation of Europe and its civility to the Red Army. Between 1941 and 1945, the USSR fought, won and paid for everyone, with 25 million deaths (almost half of the total). However, the West holds no gratitude. Indeed, like dishonest debtors, since then it has been looking for pretexts for argument in order to avoid paying. We know that the second front, invoked by Stalin in 1942, was opened in June 1944 (the Normandy landings), when the Germans were already defeated, and the Red Army was preparing to chase them home. The meaning of that action does not escape us, being aimed at limiting the success of the victorious ally rather than increasing the failure of the now defeated enemy. Yet we have become accustomed to pretending that the credit for the victory in Europe should be given to the USA, conversely the winners of the war in the Pacific. With perseverance, the celebratory machine has reversed the roles and the meaning of events.
The origin is the reversal of Harry Truman, who became president of the USA on April 12, 1945. He turned the game upside down in three moves :
He had been in the White House for a hundred days when he dropped the atomic bombs on the Japanese, and under the pretext of ending the war, incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. However, at that point Japan was already defeated, and he knew it (he admits as much in his autobiography). The month before, Emperor Hirohito had sent Moscow an unconditional surrender so that Stalin could start mediation with the USA. Blocking that path was the real objective of the bombs. It was necessary to terrorize the Soviet Union and prevent it from gaining political space in Asia.
For four years he ruled the from the heights of the world’s only nuclear power. Then, shortly before the USSR acquired atomic weapons, he launched NATO, the transatlantic pact with the Europeans. It was April 4, 1949. Suddenly the victorious ally of the war, the Soviet Union, became the enemy of the West, while for Germany, which had destroyed the world, the fattest calf was killed, as for the prodigal son.
The invention of the Atlantic Pact created the Cold War between the USA and the USSR, fought in corpore vili, each time by proxy. The first theater was Korea, immediately divided into zones of influence (1948), which then waged war for three years (1950-1953, leading to millions of deaths), and was finally divided into two hostile states.
5- НОСТАЛЬГИЯ (Nostalgia)
Levada says that the Russian people proudly remember the victory in the Great Patriotic War. We imagine that they would like to share that feeling with the allies of the time. A vaguely symmetrical cultural impulse is also possible: perhaps nostalgia for Gogol, Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, Tatlin, Eisenstein survives in the West. However, there is no dialogue. The two worlds are alien to each other, they speak untranslatable languages and cannot even look each other in the eye. The Cold War has left its mark.
In 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the last Soviet Union, published a message book with an eloquent and memorable title: The Common European Home. But there was no response. Or rather, NATO responded.
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