What is it about Russia that Westerners and even Russians don't understand?
Napoleon couldn't believe that anyone could be so insane as to burn their own capital. He was wrong.
Hitler thought the Soviet Union would collapse and that their people would be unwilling to defend it. He was wrong.
The rest of the world thought the Soviet Union would never collapse. They were wrong. It collapsed without any foreign boots on their ground.
What is the Russian mystery? Is it just nihilism?
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Moscow wasn't Russia's capital in napoleonic times.
Russia is like the guy that was born in a dumpster behind arctic circle and had to do whatever he had to do to survive. No wonder silverspoon fed fuckers don't get him.
In the modern era?
It's literally just propaganda. Russia lies to itself and the world, and has been doing so non-stop since the 40's.
It's not an open society with free press, so good information doesn't come out, and what we do get tends to be fucking useless.
It's hard to understand a people who've been fed bullshit for so long that they believing it, while simultaneously assuming everything is a plot (because it probably is) while also being drunk and suffering a multi-decade national identity crisis.
>mysterious Russian soul
>Napoleon couldn't believe that anyone could be so insane as to burn their own capital. He was wrong.
They probably didn't. Thats just a recent meme.
For one, the fire killed 10-15 thousand russians. If they set it on fire to spite the french, they wouldn't be dying trying to put it out.
Leo Tolstoy, in his novel War and Peace, says that the french started the fire on incident, while making campfires in the mostly wooden city. I think this is more likely.
An alternative is that the army set it on fire while retreating, but the citizens tried to put it out, because fuck the army, we'd rather have homes and businesses under the french than be homeless and poor under the tzar.
At any rate, the stubborn nationalistic russian wasn't a thing back then, and the modern meme doesn't fit the reality of the period.
This.
And Hitler fucked up not realizing that, ordering his troops towards Kursk instead. Should have listened to his commanders instead of fancying himself to be one.
Attacking Moscow was absolutely retarded. There is no guarantee that Moscow would be reached before winter and even if they did reach it, they would lose the battle hard. Even if they did take Moscow, that would not change anything. Just more ground to cover.
Forces were closer to Moscow than Kursk when they were ordered to retreat to the later, and a victory there, however unlikely, would have yielded a more favorable result by magnitudes. Hell, even a hit and run tactic would have done more damage to the Soviets than Kursk would ever have done.
Winning Kursk would give a strategic advantage to the Germans and would disorganize the soviet offensives. Either way it was a gamble, but a gamble with bigger odds than attacking Moscow.
The Soviet intelligence was pretty much only centered in Moscow. The UdSSR would have collapsed
Perhaps, had they been stationed there first.
But changing their rout with the approaching winter not only delayed the attack, it also gave the Soviets ample enough time to prepare.
I'm not even saying the could have taken Moscow, but with it under attack, they might not even have had to, because any disruption of the day to day operations at the Kremlin at that point could have at least earned them a bargaining position or a stalemate that could have saved countless lives on either side. Trowing that away for Kursk because "muh ghost of Napoleon" was more of a guaranteed suicide instead of just a potential one.
did someone cut off their legs
Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries were ruled by a pack of German-descended western Europeans.
“If anything at all must be adduced against being sick and being weak, it is that man’s really remedial instinct, his fighting instinct wears out. One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot get over anything, one cannot repel anything—everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike one too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound. Against all this the sick person has only one great remedy: I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without revolt which is exemplified by a Russian soldier who, finding a campaign too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow. No longer to accept anything at all, no longer to take anything, no longer to absorb anything—to cease reacting altogether. This fatalism is not always merely the courage to die; it can also preserve life under the most perilous conditions by reducing the metabolism, slowing it down, as a kind of will to hibernate. Carrying this logic a few steps further, we arrive at the fakir who sleeps for weeks in a grave. Because one would use oneself up too quickly if one reacted in any way, one does not react at all any more: this is the logic. Nothing burns one up faster than the affects of ressentiment. Anger, pathological vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge, thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense—no reaction could be more disadvantageous for the exhausted: such affects involve a rapid consumption of nervous energy, a pathological increase of harmful excretions…”
Tolstoy hated Napoleon and was born after the events. Do not take his books as a historical source but a personal opinion, a very biased one at that.
I didn't state its a fact, I stated its more likely to be true, as it makes more sense in the historical context.
There is no proof of how or why the city was set on fire, and I am annoyed by people acting as if its certain the people did it themselves, out of patriotism or some such.
Napoleon?
Even the British on their filthy Island was still European in moral. What Napoleon encountered when he tried to go towards the great Tsardom, was alien morals and behavior.
Remember: The slav traders where traders, they where used to cultural differences wherever they would go.
Napoleon was a stateman. He didn't understand.
He thought he would fight an empire with 50-200 years of tech lag.
Instead he fought an empire with 50-200 years of tech lag, but the Slavs understood that the Russian land was very different, especially when nothing had been done to improve the horrid levels of infrastructure.
Its not that simple.
If public news is public space, its not obvious that its suppose to be Propaganda.
In the Slav spirit, public property is worthless, so its anyones. And if its anyones, it can be taken, damned be the public benefit.
So news, the internet, media, and schools for a Slav isn't the same thing as it is in the west. Its a place where the upper echelons of the state, or anybody with money: Its a place where these people can try to take complete control over it, for their own benefit.
You see the same in Russian and Polish housing projects: Hallways are littered with trash and smells garbage, but the apartments are well maintained.
Outside of houses are often under maintained, but the inside is often high quality.
Carpets is used as decoration, even middle quality ones.
Even if the Tsar was a bunch of exported Danes towards the end, the same Tsar was raised in a Slavic court, and the same is true of the other Tsars.
You can sorta see this on what the various Danish Tsars tried to do: The first one was more ambitious then anybody after him, in every way.
In the memoirs of sergeant bourgogne, he notes that freed prisoners, army irregulars, and the local police set the fires.
>ITT:mysterious russian souls
There is no mystery in slavery.
Russians are the most masochistic and slavish people on earth. That's pretty much it.
Its not mystery.
People just are not used to foreigners having different moral, even if they are thought of as westerns in some ways.
As a russian speaker with soviet born parents all I can say is that russians in general are a very wild people.
They will fight like lions when needed to but also require a tough despot over them to function.
I blame russian tsars, because of their policies the majority of russian population in the begining of the previous century were living like medieval french.
>have a sacrilegious amounts of resources poured into your gaping asshole for free
>have america undertake its biggest military mobilization for the sole purpose of attacking your main aggressor
>somehow still almost lose the war
wow such mystery much noble slavage
last free place on earth
And those resources fell from the sky, right? Russia was never attacked at all, and had plenty of time to develop in peace in greenhouse-like conditions, right?
>Swedes in the north
>Poles, Germans and French in the West
>Mongols in the East
>Ottomans in the South
Whats hilarious is that Russia was irrelevant, but not because of its power or neighbors.
But mostly because the only "good" invasion route is the Baltic or Black Sea.
Arabs don't want to invade the cold north of Ex Khans, so nobody bothered.
Baltic Sea is literally a landmine, because of all the nations needed to be bypassed before you can land on the small wannabe Russian strip of land in the end of it.
There is also the Norse sea, but that closes during winter, and it takes too long to actually sail past Norway, so nobody bothered.
Ironically enough, The North Sea route is literally what Carl the 12th tried, before he got shot, like the magnificant warlord he was, trying to take over Norway.
Seriously, the "We invaded Russia" page goes like:
1. Mongols
2. Carl the 12th, ended in failure, dying on recampaign to take over Norway for the sake of launching campaign 2
3. Napoleon
4. Hitler tries to take over the WORLD
5. See: Civil Wars Poland thought it was a good idea to stick its dick in
>Napoleon couldn't believe that anyone could be so insane as to burn their own capital. He was wrong.
Tsar Alexander doomed hundreds thousands of his peasants to death by starvation just to avoid having to abid to a fucking trade treaty
Most european monarchs of the time wouldnt have allowed such a sacrifice even in a war of annexation.
Alexander was mentally challenged, and his decision was motivated by the fact he unironically believed Napoleon was the antichrist