He looked a lot jollier than Hitler.
And led the military that defeated the Third Reich.
Stalin was a mass-murdering bastard, and I’d cheerfully shit on his grave. But it was the Red Army that stopped Hitler. D-day was a diversion.
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Too late. My mom linked to the YouTube video above. Didn’t realize it was already on Facebook.
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Well if that is what we are going on, John Wayne Gacy must have been a saint 
Yeah, I didn’t say the Russian meat grinder didn’t defeat the Germans through attrition. Their casualty numbers showed they gave the lions share of blood. We were even technically allies before becoming enemies. The original Freinemies?
Thanks Russia!
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I hope Obama paid his respects in Bowling Green when he went on that fifty-seven state tour…
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It’s worth keeping in mind that for Russia, there was no real separate WWI/WWII. There was pretty much just constant war for the first fifty years of the 20th C; straight from WWI into this:
It wasn’t just the lives lost to Hitler; by that point, they’d been bleeding for decades. The eastern front stuff in WWI is insane; mass-casualty human wave attacks were a Russian tradition from long before Stalin arrived.
The image of Russian military history as being only badly-led ravening hordes is false, though.
(although the Russian generals in the north during WWI could’ve given the Austrians and Italians some competition in the incompetence awards)
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There are some historian who feel that Russia is who pushed WWI to happen in the scale that it did.
IIRC they get to that point in part 2.
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Plenty of blame to go around on that one.
The Germans wanted a war because they were terrified that they couldn’t beat Russia if they had time to industrialise (turns out they were right about that…), the Austrians wanted a war because they were idiots, the Serbians wanted a war because nationalism, and some of the Russians wanted a war because they thought it would be a good excuse to clean out their revolutionaries (oops).
I’m not trying to absolve the Russian/Soviet governments of blame, though. Plenty of those wars were started by the Russians, although that hardly makes them unique.
My point was more that the Russian people began the 20th century with fifty years of constant slaughter. That sorta thing makes a mess of your national psyche.
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OH I agree with that point. I’d say on average they don’t value life as much. “Eh, people die. No big whoop.” This partly can be seen with their higher participation in risky behaviors. An example would be the Space Program, which I admire for what they did with what they had, but their people were way more expendable. They even were going to risk the life of the national hero Yuri Gargarin when a friend took his place in a capsule that failed on its return.
Just as an exercise in creative thinking: how do you think you would have phrased that paragraph if you were Russian? Would it be “don’t value life” or “steely determination to sacrifice all defending our homes when the invaders come again”?
How do you think Russians see themselves?
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I don’t really know. Nihilist? Nothing matters so just do what ever?
We had a Russian exchange student and his attitude was “fuck it, it doesn’t matter” and would do what ever he wanted. He recounted stealing rocket motors from the private schools in Russia and using them to make bombs to blow shit up in the woods, which he admitted was dangerous, but his words were, “The worst that could happen is I could die.” And then he would giggle. Of course that is just one guy, but the handful of Russian Russians I have met had a similar attitude. But that was post Soviet and life in general, not like in a war.
If you’re asking about that attitude during WWII I imagine it was a combination of nationalism and being forced to move forward lest you got shot in the back running away by your own troops. If you have just enough people cracking the whip, you can get the job done. And people are willing to crack the whip because if they aren’t the whip holders, they are the person being whipped. I am sure the best source would be actual soldier letters and memoirs. In general, soldiers fight for each other.
And others who believe it was the French, who bankrolled Russian and Serbian armament and then suggested they pay for it by dealing with the enemy of 1870.
You cannot understand WW1 without understanding the Franco-Prussian war. The French seem to have intended a war that would defeat Austro-Hungary while they dealt with Germany. That’s a pretty big scale right there.
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Unlike the US, with the cobbled-together Apollo program that killed 3 people on a ground test*, or the Shuttle?
From here I don’t see much difference in Russian versus US attitudes to life until around 1990, when there was an extremely rapid divergence. In WW1, Britain, France, Germany and Russia were equally reckless. By WW2, Britain and France were much more cautious.
*There have been several articles about it recently. Wiring with damaged insulation because not enough care was taken over installing it, Velcro everywhere to hold things that hadn’t been thought about, and then they filled it with an overpressure pure oxygen atmosphere rather than use air. One spark in the wrong place and burning PTFE insulation that killed the crew with hydrogen fluoride - the people who opened the capsule were lucky it did not kill them. Then there’s the whole X-plane series as documented in The Right Stuff, where test pilots were killed but, despite the speeds and altitudes, they weren’t classed as astronauts to make the space program look better.
Post-WW2, with atmosphere bomb tests including Castle Bravo and the Tsar Bomba, was an amazingly reckless era.
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I’ve got a feeling it takes months to get formal 501c3 status, but that you can set up shop with a snap of the fingers.
I received my pet bunny from a rabbit rescue in bowling green Ky… that night he ate three bunches of cilantro five stalks of celery and six carrots. This my friends was the real bowling green massacre…
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Hardly technically. Look on YouTube for videos of American and Soviet armies meeting up in Germany in 1945. The sense of camaraderie is palpable.
Anecdotally, there seems to have been genuine affection among Russians (at least those of a certain generation) for the American people, and sadness that their governments were at odds.
The right-wing commentator P. J. O’Rourke went on an organised tour of the USSR in 1982. He managed to slip his leash and ended up on a booze-soaked river cruise with a Russian called Ivor:
His father had been on the front lines when the armies of the East and West had met in Germany in 1945. Apparently the Americans had liberated every bottle of alcoholic beverage between Omaha Beach and the Oder-Neisse Line and really made the welkin ring for their Russian comrades in arms…
Standing behind Ivor was a giant man well into his sixties, a sort of combination Khruschev and old Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was staring hard at me, cocking an ear to my foreign language. He wore an undershirt and a suit coat with a line of medals out across the breast pocket. “Deutsch?” he asked me sternly.
“Nyet deutsch,” I said. “American.”
He beamed, I mean just beamed. “Ally!” he said. It was his only English word. He pulled out a wallet with what I guess were commendations and an honorable discharge. “Amerikanskii ally,” he said and slapped my shoulder. Eight-ounce glasses of brandy must be bought for Ivor and me…
… I toasted the big guy again. He pledged a long toast in return and, as I understood Ivor’s translation, we’d drunk to the hope that America and Russia would be allies again in a war against China.
— P. J. O’Rourke, Republican Party Reptile.
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I have a deep and abiding respect for the Russian people. It’s their leaders I want to go take a long walk into the cold unforgiving Siberian wastes naked in the middle of winter.
Well in white supremacist lore, the Jews are at the root of all the bad things in the world. Both capitalism and communism were part of the world wide Jewish conspiracy. Just the tiniest bit of rationality tears whatever they believe down quite quickly.
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