$4.46
Details
The Battle on the Ice: The History and Legacy of the Slavs' Decisive Victory Against the Teutonic Knights
Author: Charles River Editors
Narrator: Stephen Platt
Unabridged: 1 hr 52 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway Voices
Published: 04/15/2020
Synopsis
In 1938, the Soviet Union film company Mosfilm released the motion picture Alexander Nevsky, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. It is a historical drama depicting the defense of the Republic of Novgorod against an invasion of the Teutonic Knights in the mid-13th century. The eponymous hero of the story, the Prince of Novgorod, leads his troops against the German knights on a field of solid ice. During the battle, called the Battle on the Ice or the Battle of Lake Peipus, the ice breaks and many of the knights drown in the freezing waters, but Nevsky is victorious and the pernicious Germans are vanquished forever.
Far from an attempt to portray historical events, Alexander Nevsky is a Stalinist propaganda piece in which the Russian people defy and halt the eastward expansion of the German menace. It is an obvious allegory of the Soviet Union defying Nazi Germany at a time when Soviet-German relations were at their most acrid before World War II. The clothing of the Teutonic warriors inaccurately display swastikas,[1] and the famous scene where they are swallowed up by the ice is also a Stalinist embellishment.[2]
Of course, Soviet Russia was not the first to use the historical conflict between the German West and the Slavic East for propaganda purposes. The German defeat of Russia at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914 was portrayed as revenge for the Battle of Grunwald in 1410.
by Charles River Editors
The three modern Baltic states - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - may occupy small tracts of lands bordering the Baltic Sea, but their respective histories are unique. Latvia, like its neighbours, was settled thousands of years ago, with a number of...
Published: 12/15/2020
by Charles River Editors
The Cold War moved into one of its most dangerous phases after Brezhnev’s death as both sides deployed nuclear weapons within alarming proximity in Europe. A NATO exercise, “Operation Able Archer,” almost led to a Soviet miscalcul...
Published: 07/30/2019
by Charles River Editors
Famine – one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation – continues to be one of the most crippling and destructive scourges of humanity. This inexorable affliction, traumatically fatal in the worst-case scenarios,...
Published: 10/31/2020
by Charles River Editors
“Had I just 10,000 Cossacks, I would have conquered the whole world.” – Napoleon BonaparteThe history of Ukraine is a fascinating story of how cultures, political systems, religions, and power have met, intersected, morphed, and ex...
Published: 03/09/2020
by Charles River Editors
Russia has been depicted by the media as a cyberspace boogeyman, a nation of hackers that can and will exploit any and all vulnerabilities of private organizations, government entities, and social media platforms. Over the last 10 years, as hackers ...
Published: 03/01/2019
by Masha Gessen
"A book that belongs on the shelf alongside The Gulag Archipelago. -- Kirkus Reviews"A short, haunting and beautifully written book." -- The Wall Street JournalThe Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisone...
Published: 03/05/2019
by Charles River Editors
Wedged in the North Caucasus mountain range and bordering the Caspian Sea, Dagestan is a true meeting point of cultures, religions and geopolitical rivalries. A crossroad between east and west, Dagestan has been vitally important at different times...
Published: 11/20/2019
by Andrew Leatherbarrow
At 01:23:40 on April 26th 1986, Alexander Akimov pressed the emergency shutdown button at Chernobyl's fourth nuclear reactor. It was an act that forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands, and crippled the Soviet Union. The event sp...
Published: 10/11/2016
by Charles River Editors
In the wake of taking Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire would spend the next few centuries expanding its size, power, and influence, bumping up against Eastern Europe and becoming one of the world’s most important geopolitical players. It wa...
Published: 01/09/2021