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[That bears repeating. Russians will eventually fight like tigers if they are fighting in Mother Russia to repel an invader]

I don’t think it’s anywhere near as ideological as that. If they are fighting an invader who wants to kill them even if they surrender, they will, rightly, try to kill him before he kills them. But if Napoleon had offered Russian serfs their freedom, there’s a good chance the Russian armies would have fallen apart. Instead of undermining the Tsar’s authority with a revolutionary offer to the common Russian peasant, Napoleon tried to make a man-to-man deal with the Tsar. That was Napoleon’s undoing.

In fact, that was also Hitler’s undoing. Instead of offering the Russian masses freedom from Soviet oppression, he offered them death, whether they fought or not. Hitler was brilliant in some respects and deeply, fatally stupid in others.

“I don’t think it’s anywhere near as ideological as that. If they are fighting an invader who wants to kill them even if they surrender, they will, rightly, try to kill him before he kills them.”

The Russian leadership sure as hell knew the German mindset in 1941 was to destroy Russia and enslave the able-bodied Russians and kill all the rest. They knew because they had read Mein Kampf, where Hitler spelled out his plan for all to see. The lowest conscript in the Soviet army, illiterate and disinterested, might not have known; but it was no secret to Soviet Russia in general. Yet, they surrendered in the millions (5.7 million Soviet troops surrendered to the Germans in WWII, of which 3.5 million died in captivity, mostly due to maltreatment).