This video in particular stood out to me. The woman peers out from behind a pillar, not sure if it’s safe, but staying isn’t an option and someone has to go first. Then a man darts in front of her and she follows along with everyone else. There were no words spoken and no words were necessary. The man was certainly just as scared as everyone else but he wasn’t going to let a girl go first! That was no trivial matter either, if the group had encountered a terrorist, the person on point would have stood no chance. If no one else had stepped up she would have done it, that’s Russian women for you.
During COVID, the mask mandate was more like a suggestion than a law. I don’t think I ever saw more than 10% of people around here wearing their masks, and those who did wore it around their chin. Managing Russians is like herding cats. Russians are highly individualistic and think rules are dumb. When a cop makes people wait their turn to go in or out of a concert, they loudly complain about it.
But in the moment when it really mattered, the people were Christlike. In all the videos I saw, I did not see anyone knocked down or stampeded. They kept their spacing and patiently waited as everyone in front filed out the narrow exits. Lingering in the open rather than shoving your way out takes a lot of courage and composure.
Even in those moments when the terrorists mowed down a crowd, people shielded their loved ones with their bodies. But can we be surprised? The most celebrated Russian heroes of World War II are not the great warriors who killed a hundred nazis, though that was certainly helpful. No, the greatest heroes were the human shields. The men who blocked the loopholes of enemy pillboxes with their bodies. And the women who shielded wounded men from artillery shrapnel with their bodies. There are of course other notable heroes, but they follow the same pattern. Like the pilots who rammed enemy bombers before they could reach their targets, Russian cities. Or the stubborn peasant girls like Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya who refused to give up the names of their fellow partisans, even under torture, and were hanged for it.
As someone once explained to me, heroism is not about killing the enemy, but about protecting life at all costs, up to and including your own life.
So these heroes on the home front are no different than war heroes on the front line.
Ian Kummer
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Jan, I’ll show you how Russians reacted to this post:
“Thank you for the kind words and words of support!”
“I’m surprised. I take off my hat.”
“I wrote strongly. Russian russians don’t hit the bull’s-eye, but the heart.”
“Jan Kummer is one of those foreigners who, having fallen in love with Russia, become more Russian than the Russians themselves.”
“I’m crying. Sobbing”
“Not everyone can hack our deep code like that. Thanks to a friend. And he is exactly our comrade.”
https://dzen.ru/a/Zf6OXyKqByS119Ty?comments_data=n_new