General Winter
General Winter is a symbolic term from Russian history that describes the cold Russian winters, which have already played a key role in driving foreign invaders out of Russia . The winter time in the east is the Rasputiza as a mud time before and after.
Historical background
The term is used in particular to refer to two wars:
- Napoleon's Russian campaign : For fear of the Russian Empire as a possible opponent, Napoleon decided in 1811 to eliminate this last power on the mainland, which was not allied with France. Instead of facing the French troops , the Russian army retreated deep into the interior, destroying everything that could benefit the French. Even Moscow was burned down on the orders of Tsar Alexander . When winter had fallen, the Grande Armée had used up all its supplies and the land that had already been conquered offered no food and no protection, since the Russians had destroyed everything, the French were at the mercy of the Russian winter in all its hardness. The temperatures sometimes fell below -30 degrees. Napoleon's troops, decimated and weakened in this way, were now an easy victim of the rested Russian armed forces. The resulting victims on the French side have not been properly clarified, but in any case they could no longer be compensated for by the Grande Armée and the beginning of the end of Napoleon's reign. For example, the Prussian military theorist and historian Clausewitz wrote that of the original 610,000 soldiers, only 81,000 survived the war, of which only 1,500 were still fit for action.
- Operation Barbarossa in 1941: The conquest of Russia was the aim of the belligerent German Reich under Adolf Hitler from the beginning of the Second World War . In the second year of the war, 1942, however, it became clear that Germany could not win the war, because, on the one hand, the Soviet Union had several times greater capacities in terms of people and material, and, on the other hand, the cold Russian winter hit the soldiers of the Wehrmacht both mentally and physically , which made German weapons unusable and obstructed supply routes for the troops fighting in Russia.