Monday, March 18, AD 2024 10:09pm

Ten Years of TAC: Arise Ye Russian People!

 

(The American Catholic will observe its tenth anniversary in October.  We will be reposting some classic TAC posts of the past.  This post is from May 10, 2015.)

 

 

The Russians are celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany this weekend.  It is fair to say that in that defeat the Soviet Union did the lion’s share of the fighting, the Soviets suffering more than twenty million war dead.  For all their heroism and suffering , the Soviets were still enslaved to a tyranny just as bad as the Third Reich, with that system now extended throughout Eastern Europe.  This cold fact is why Churchill entitled the final volume in his World War II history:  Triumph and Tragedy.

The clip from the  film Alexander Nevsky at the beginning of this post underlines the tragedy for the Russian people of World War II.   A true work of genius by Sergei Eisenstein, who somehow pulled off the feat of making a film about an Orthodox Saint, an aristocratic Prince and pillar of the Church, and ladling it with Communist and anti-religious propaganda, and yet having the final result not be laughably absurd.  The film was among the first efforts of Stalin to rally traditional Russian patriotism against the looming threat of Nazi Germany.  Poor Eisenstein found himself in the doghouse soon after the release of the film due to the Nazi-Soviet pact.  After the onset of Operation Barbarossa, the film was once again released and played to packed houses throughout the war.  The Russian rallying song in the film was composed by Sergei Prokofiev.  The lyrics roughly translated are :

Arise, ye Russian people,
to glorious battle, to a battle to the death:
arise, ye free people,
to defend our beloved country!
All honour to the warriors who live,
and eternal glory to those slain!
For our native home, our Russian land,
arise, ye Russian people!

Needless to say talking about a free people in Stalinist Russia must have struck many of the listeners as an example of black humor.

However, Stalin was onto something.  Most Russians, not to mention Ukrainians and the other subject nationalities, were ready to greet as liberators virtually any invading army to free them from their Communist oppressors.  In one of the great tragedies of history they were invaded by an army all too eager to slaughter them as untermensch, fit only to be killed or to be slaves.  Appealing to traditional Russian patriotism, Stalin rallied the nation to fight.  Stalin understood this.  He remarked to a British diplomat while reviewing Russian troops marching off to the front.  “We are not so fond as to think they perform these miracles for us, but for Holy Mother Russia.”

That of course is why Stalin also enlisted the aid of the Russian Orthodox Church which he had done his best to obliterate.  He made a joint radio address with the Metropolitan of Moscow appealing for resistance to the invaders and reopened some of the churches the Communists had closed.   The Orthodox responded with enthusiasm, preaching a crusade against Nazi Germany and  raising funds to equip an armored division which fought under the Orthodox banner.  Russian grandmothers and mothers, from the start of the war, sent off their men to serve in an atheist army with crosses around their necks, even if the crosses consisted of two nails twisted together.  The irony of Stalin, a Communist Georgian atheist, being saved by traditional Russian patriotism and religious fervor is richly self-evident.  Here is a rendition of  the Arise Ye Russian People sans movie:

0 0 votes
Article Rating
1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Tuesday, July 24, AD 2018 3:30pm

The Ukrainians are an ancient people, dating back to the adoption of Christianity in Kiev by the ‘Rus in the year 988. They have almost always found themselves governed or ruled by foreigners. Ukraine was part of the ancient Lithuania that consolidated with post-Piast Poland to form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, at the time a very large nation usually ignored in Western history texts. As one of Ukraine’s curses has been its geography, just to the south of it was the Ottoman Empire. The Commonwealth spent a lot of time, treasure and blood to keep the Ottomans from encroaching farther north into Ukraine.
The Commonwealth was invaded by Sweden in the 1650s and significantly weakened afterwards. In 1795 the Commonwealth ceased to exist and the Ukrainians were no longer governed by Poles, but ruled by Czars and the Hapsburgs for the next 123 years.

As a result of the Polish Soviet War, Ukraine, which had hopes of having its own nation, found itself cut in half between Soviet Russia and the Second Polish Republic. Ukrainians were extremely bitter as the felt Pilsudski sold them down the river.

When the USSR invaded Poland in 1939, many Ukrainians helped the Red Army hunt down and arrest or kill Poles in the Wolyn region. When Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, many Ukrainians welcomed the Germans as liberators. These Ukrainians helped to round up Jews and Poles for deportation or death. Stepan Bandera was a Nazi sympathizer whose OUN committed atrocities against Polish women and children throughout Wolyn.
Ukrainain Orthodox and Greek Catholic priests blessed axes, hoes, scythes and other such things that were used to kill Poles, Ukrainians married to Poles and Polish-Ukrainian families. According to a YouTube documentary made by a Polish historian – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK-JRMUEn_4 Metropolitan Sheptysky supported the formation of a Waffen SS volunteer unit made up of Ukrainians.
It did not end until after WWII when the Red Army hunted down the UPA and in collaboration with the Communists installed in power by Stalin, Operation Vistula took place scattering the rest of the Ukrainians in postwar Poland to the former German territories to the west.

I have drifted off topic from the Russian celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Russian blood was spilled in excess in the defeat of the Wehrmacht, but then again Stalin didn’t care how many people were killed.

Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands is one of the few books I am aware of that covers the horrors of life for civilians caught between Hitler and Stalin. As the World War II generation is nearly gone, I suspect that in the West, given the lousy condition of teaching history (Howard Zinn? Really!) much of what happened there will be forgotten or ignored.

Discover more from The American Catholic

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Scroll to Top