Imperial Russian Army

Yes, exactly.

Because the diaries he kept during this time document how the Imperial Russian Army, commanded by Grand Duke Nicholas, pushed into Austrian rule Galicia, operating under this deep, paranoid delusion.

A completely unfounded delusion that the local Jewish civilian population were natural spies for the enemy.

But where did that even come from?

Exactly.

The physical destruction of those towns basically forces Ansky into a corner.

He can't fight the imperial Russian army.

No, he's powerless in that regard.

He does, they kind of are like, all right, we'll send him off.

Russian Imperial Army.

He's going to be a cavalryman.

He's going to go off and fight in the Russo-Japanese War.

The first Russian troops enter Austria-Hungary in the middle of August, just a few weeks in, and then the big invasion starts at the end of August.

And the Imperial Russian Army has a massive numerical superiority.

I mean, this is what people forget.

You know, it's always the German army.

And also, it's...

These are multi-ethnic armies.

We talk about the Russian army, but actually it's the imperial Russian army.

So you've got Ukrainians, Kazakhstanis, Belarusians, Lithuanians, all in this.

You mentioned some of those regiments.

I'm reminded from stories of later Russian military history, those regiments would remain the elite of the Russian Imperial Army, wouldn't they, until the First World War? And then as I understand it, some of them have been refounded now under Putin.

Yes, that's right.

Absolutely, yeah, which is part of the sort of a broader shift in contemporary Russia to kind of exhume and revalidate Tsarist past, yeah.

These kind of defections have had enormous consequences in wars throughout history, just like what he's about to do.

During World War I, roughly 2 million Russian soldiers deserted their posts in 1917, contributing to the collapse of the Imperial Russian Army.

Decades later, during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, some Soviet soldiers actually defected and joined the Afghan resistance.

that's why there is a military term for people secretly working with the enemy from inside their own country it's called the fifth column the phrase originally comes from the spanish civil war in 1936 and according to the famous story four column of rebels they were advancing toward madrid but a nationalist general claimed that there was a secret fifth column already inside the city made up of sympathizers who were prepared to undermine its defenses from within What Russian Lieutenant Stupnikov is about to go through shows just how much damage one insider in this fifth column can really do.