MOSCOW, RUSSIA (KELO-AM) – To understand Russia’s schizophrenia about it being, on the one hand, a superpower, and on the other, skittish about its borders, you need to understand its history, particularly World War II.
“The Great Patriotic War,” as the Russians call WWII, is not some foggy memory. From my recent travels in western Russia, nearly every city of any consequence has some sort of memorial or marker to defeating the Nazis and the terrible sacrifice ordinary Russians made from 1941 to 1945.
It might be as simple as a T-35 tank on a pedestal on the outskirts of town. Or it could be the elaborate museum and memorial in St. Petersburg like the Museum of the Siege and Defense of Leningrad (St. Petersburg’s former name).
Take St. Petersburg (Leningrad). About a million people of the city of five million died of starvation during the nearly 900 day German siege of the city from 1941 to 1944. That’s more people who died than died from the whole United States during the war. Another million or so troops died. The United States lost 419,000 people or so in comparison.
In all, the former Soviet Union lost 26 to 27 million people.
For example, you know how patriotic South Dakotans are, particularly at an event like a Memorial Day observance? Multiply that by ten or so. That’s how raw World War II is to many Russians. It is still part of their everyday consciousness.
There are still people alive who lived through the war. My father Rodney and I met one of them at the Leningrad museum. The old man was a boy during the Nazi siege of the U.S.S.R.’s second largest city.
We got to see the one small piece of bread (about the size of an appetizer piece at a nice restaurant), 125 grams, that would have been all he got to eat for the day during the darkest period of the siege. And that piece of bread was only 60 percent wheat, the rest being sawdust and stuff you probably don’t want to know.
Stalin literally used scorched earth in the Red Army’s retreat to the outskirts of Moscow in 1941-2 during Hitler’s early success of Operation Barbarossa. Stalin didn’t want the Germans to have access to anything—food, water, roads, bridges, villages, animals—it was all destroyed.
Couple this with the Czarist’s defense of The Motherland against Napoleon in the 19th Century and a string of other invasions through the centuries, none of which we’ve ever heard of, and you begin to understand Russians’ paranoia when they see the Baltic states and Poland join NATO and Ukraine wanting to. They see encroachment then invasion.
It raises the hairs on the back of the necks of not just President Vladimir Putin, but your average Russian, particularly the older ones.
As one Russian guide told us why there are no pews in a Russian Orthodox cathedral, he said, “Since Jesus suffered, we have to suffer when we worship.” That life is suffering is baked into Russians. The Russian people have withstood unbelievable suffering in their long history—and in their recent history. Think Leningrad. That suffering does not dissipate easily or quickly.
The Russians have faced—and faced down—brutal invasions in the past. That muscle memory is not soon forgotten—rightly or wrongly. We as Americans and America--Presidential candidates inlcuded--ignore that lesson at our own peril.