My Take | Resurgent Russia reclaims its status as a great power

Despite its length or because of it, Tolstoy’s War and Peace provides a relatively simple answer to the question: what/who defeated Napoleon? It wasn’t the tsar or General Kutuzov. It was Russia herself, her geography and terrains and weathers, and the native spirit of the Russian people. What it was for Napoleon, so it was for Hitler. It wasn’t Marshal Zhukov or Stalin who beat back the fuhrer, even though Stalin had claimed full credit for “the Great Patriotic War”.

Let’s call this “spiritual geography”, something that Bertram Wolfe emphasises at the poetic beginning of his classic, Three Who Made a Revolution.

“The Great European Plain opposes few obstacles to frost and wind and drought, to migrant hordes and marching armies,” he wrote.

“In earlier centuries the plain was dominated by vast Asiatic empires, Iranian, Turkish, Mongolian. As the last of these melted away, Muscovy expanded to take their place, expanded steadily though several centuries until it became the largest continuous land empire in the world. Like the tide over limitless flats, it spread with elemental force over an endless stretch of forest and steppe, sparsely settled by backward and nomadic peoples.

“Wherever it met resistance, it would pause as the tide does to gather head, then resume its inexorable advance. Only at the distant margins does the plateau end in the great mountain barriers: the snowy summits of the Caucasus; the Pamirs, roof of the world … thrusting up over four miles each into the sky; the Altai, Sayan and Stanovoi mountains forming China’s natural wall.

“How could a people not be great and not aspire to greatness, whose horizon was as unlimited as this Eurasian Plain?”