The Battle on the Ice: The History and Legacy of the Slavs’ Decisive Victory Against the Teutonic Knights

In 1938, the Soviet Union film company Mosfilm released the motion picture Alexander Nevsky, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. It is a historical drama depicting the defense of the Republic of Novgorod against an invasion of the Teutonic Knights in the mid-13th century. The eponymous hero of the story, the Prince of Novgorod, leads his troops against the German knights on a field of solid ice. During the battle, called the Battle on the Ice or the Battle of Lake Peipus, the ice breaks and many of the knights drown in the freezing waters, but Nevsky is victorious and the pernicious Germans are vanquished forever.

Far from an attempt to portray historical events, Alexander Nevsky is a Stalinist propaganda piece in which the Russian people defy and halt the eastward expansion of the German menace. It is an obvious allegory of the Soviet Union defying Nazi Germany at a time when Soviet-German relations were at their most acrid before World War II. The clothing of the Teutonic warriors inaccurately display swastikas,[1] and the famous scene where they are swallowed up by the ice is also a Stalinist embellishment.[2]

Of course, Soviet Russia was not the first to use the historical conflict between the German West and the Slavic East for propaganda purposes. The German defeat of Russia at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914 was portrayed as revenge for the Battle of Grunwald in 1410.