Old Prussians

Maria Theresa never forgave Friedrich for stealing her province.

She became his arch-nemesis and would lead Austria into three wars to recapture Silesia from the Prussians.

This was the beginning of the great feud between Austria and Prussia.

The two strongest powers in the HRE were now mortal rivals.

Normally, the Prussian army always attacked, but Napoleon didn't give them a chance.

His army was faster, better organized, better trained.

His staff brought new methods of command and control to the battlefield that outmatched anything the Prussians had.

Like, Napoleon has been cooking stuff for the last 10 years.

You know, which makes sense.

I mean, forgive the digression, but you know, the, like we've talked about and like I'm not sure a lot of people know this, you know, the reasons why the armed force of the Russian Federation, the reason why they perform a modified goose step, you know, they, they were drilled by Prussians.

I mean, Clausewitz was observing- The Battle of Moscow from Moscow, you know, um, Russian deep battle, uh, there's the DNA of, uh, you know, um, some of these imperial infantry doctrines, you know, which admittedly, uh, the, were, was, was somewhat at odds with Prussian sensibilities, but you had plenty of Prussian officers who were drilling the Ivans and, and what amount of do Habsburg techniques.

I find this fascinating.

Like, what was to become Germany was essentially destroyed by the Thirty Years' War.

Prussia survived because it wasn't truly a party combatant in a way that most of the central German territories were.

But what the Prussians realized is that they had to sus- they had to, they had to maintain a credible military capability on a permanent and perennial basis because it was inevitable, in their opinion, that an event like a Thirty Years' War would return, and they wouldn't survive the next conflict cycle due to a burgeoning interdependence at scale with the rest of the continent and other things, as well as, you know, the ongo- what they perceived as the ongoing existential racial conflict with the Eastern peoples.

So the Prussian kingdom, not only did they create the first modern standing army, as we think of it, they also implemented taxation at scale of everybody.

Yeah.

And the Prussians were like, we need to change everything we know about war.

And this is kind of where we're at, historically speaking, with traditional publishing.

They're still too small.

Even Orthodox priests themselves to discover his secret cache where he keeps the much-fingered books in the Ukrainian tongue.

He may be articulate, he may hate the Prussians as much as he hates the Poles, but he does not wish to be absorbed by the Muscovite.

The get-all and get-on-at-all-cost Muscovite.

The truth is that you, people of England, do not believe in your hearts in the rights of the small nationalities.

It will ever be so.

Will there be anyone in England who will be perverse enough to advise disarmament after this war on the plea that all is well with the small nationalities? Prussian rule is in our way, and we must smash it.

But there are other Prussians in the making.

Whenever they oppress other small nationalities, it will be like the case of the Ukraine.

Within the USSR, the outpouring of propaganda intended to bolster the morale of both the population and the fighting soldiers continued unabated.

On the 6th, Stalin issued an appeal to the troops that closed with the line, The Russians have always defeated the Prussians.

The military tradition of the Russian people lives on the heroic deeds of Soviet fighting men.

This continued a relatively new and telling shift in wartime messaging and appealed to Russian nationalism rather than communist ideology.