Gefira 81: The indomitable spirit

It were the Mongols in the Middle Ages, it was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century, it was the Swedish King Charles XII at the beginning of the 18th century, it was Napoleon along with half of Europe at the beginning of the 19th century, it was Hitler along with half a Europe in mid 20th century, it is NATO now. They all wanted to conquer, subjugate, make dependent, carve up, destroy Russia and they all have failed, though at first they usually reported initial victories. Historians put the successful Russian resistance now to the vastness of Russia’s territory, now to climatic conditions, now to the stamina of the Russian soldier (Frederick the Great is reported to have said that it is not enough to shoot dead a Russian soldier to make him fall: you also need to knock him down.), now to the incompetence or arrogance or excessive self-assuredness of the aggressors. Be that as it may – certainly not one factor can explain a complex phenomenon like a big war with a big country – there is also something referred to as the Russian spirit. It is not without reason that historians, journalists or politicians around the globe like to warn potential conquerors against waking the Russian bear: the bear may seem calm, tamed or at times lethargic and downright weak, but woe to anyone who decides to poke the bear in the eye!

Gefira 81 takes a closer look at the Russian spirit. To be precise, we survey a number of popular songs and scan their lyrics with the aim of finding out about the morale in Russian society in the face of the ongoing war. There are a large number of new, popular, patriotic songs that are sung by young performers and usually accompanied by patriotic video content. All this can of course be denounced as sheer Kremlin propaganda, as anything that comes from Russia. Still, we believe the reader deserves to know. By way of comparison, Sergei Eisenstein’s movies Battleship Potemkin (Броненосец Потёмкин), Alexander Nevsky (Александр Невский) and Ivan the Terrible (Иван Грозный ) or Vladimir Mayakovsky’s revolutionary poems might be dismissed as Bolshevik propaganda (which they doubtless were), and yet at the same time the ardour, the passion along with the artistry and the imaginative skills show beyond a shadow of a doubt that at least the creators were fervent and ardent believers in the cause that they advocated in their art. If the creators were such ardent believers in the cause, so must have been millions of others, if only their followers in art. The same is certainly true in the case of the patriotic songs composed and sung in today’s Russia.

In the financial section of our bulletin, we briefly describe the situation in China ahead of the next plenum of the CCP and the associated opportunities for investors. We also provide a concise analysis of the situation on the metals market and the US stock market. Finally, we draw the attention of our readers and investors to new drugs and their producers in order to round off our recommendations.