Was there an ice battle?

Video: Was there an ice battle?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-31 08:38

The medieval battle is not a subject for fortune telling on a chamomile, especially when it comes to an event that still causes controversy among historians to this day.

In April 1242, a large army of the Livonian Order and its allies on the ice of Lake Peipsi met in a bloody battle with the Novgorod squads under the command of Prince Alexander Yaroslavich, called Nevsky. As a result of a hard battle, the Novgorodians won a convincing victory and chased the fleeing enemy for 7 miles on the spring ice, which began to break under heavily armed invaders.

School textbooks have invariably been told about this since the deep Soviet times, talentedly supported by an undoubted masterpiece - a film by Sergei Eisenstein. The great music of Sergei Prokofiev, the amazing acting skills of Nikolai Cherkasov, the genius of the director - all this much more successfully than excerpts from the chronicles convinces us that this is exactly what happened. Again, it fits well into the traditional patriotic discourse: "Whoever comes to us with a sword will die by the sword."

The most detailed description we find in the Novgorod first chronicle of the older edition: here is the place of the battle "/>

The scale of the battle, traditionally exaggerated by chroniclers "/>

Even what we more or less reliably know about the events of that time in the Novgorod lands and the Baltic states makes us assume that there was no "decisive" victory that "stopped the aggression of German feudal lords" - there was an important, memorable, but private success that surpassed in the memory of the people others for reasons far from their real meaning.

The fact is that the battle at Lake Peipsi became "the greatest victory of Russian weapons" in hindsight, and acquired different colors at different historical stages. It was mythologized, turning into "the triumph of Orthodoxy over Catholicism", then into "a just national liberation struggle of the peoples of our country", then into Blok's "they held a shield between two hostile races", then - after the release of Eisenstein's film - into a "formidable warning to the German aggressors ". Now the Day of Military Glory has been established in his honor. And this is the most harmless thing that can be done with it.

Was it - the Battle of the Ice?

Independent researchers and historians with a clear eye argue that this was not the case at all. This is yet another propaganda myth with a single purpose: to create in Russian history the personality of a great commander, in scale not inferior to David, Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. This completely unpatriotic version is warmly defended by sober Russian scientists, including the historian and archaeologist Alexei Bychkov

Film: The Earth of the Future. But what if we get there, and everything will be there?

Good reason for a Saturday movie show. Post-apocalyptic films come out very often, it seems that Hollywood has already put an end to the future of humanity and now only wonders what will cause the death of billions of people. Does it depend on us what the Earth of the Future will be like?

There were Russians - now there are Ukrainians. The violent history of Ukrainization

The Bolsheviks, who came to power in 1917 on the ruins of the Russian Empire, immediately took the national question under their special control. Following the new ideological formula, according to which tsarist Russia is a prison of peoples, and the Russian people is an oppressor people, the communist leaders began to build a state of workers and peasants on the foundation of a new national policy

Myths about the Battle of the Ice

For many, the battle, according to the chronicles that took place on April 5, 1242, is not much different from the shots from Sergei Eisenstein's film "Alexander Nevsky". But was it really so?