Per Wikipedia, the Battle of Shelon was a battle between the forces of the Duchy of Moscow under Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) and the army of the Novgorod Republic, which took place on the Shelon River on 14 July 1471 in which Novgorod suffered a major defeat. Allegedly, the reason for the attack was that Novgorod violated a Treaty that had been signed 15 years ago that limited Novgorod’s ability to conduct its own foreign affairs. By all means, the 1471 attack was a punitive operation with an aim to subdue a prosperous trading city, so why did Moscow decide to use such a wording about “Unity” at that Memorial we see in the title picture?
For the Novgorodians, that was not the battle for “unity” for sure, but rather the battle for survival. The question may be much more important than it appears at first glance. First, it is vital to realize that it was Muscovy that attacked the Novgorodian Republic, and Muscovy of that time was already a replica of the Golden Horde. You can read a Harvard Professor’s insights in how Moscow became a capital city in a previos article. But Ivan III did not quite finish the job and Novgorod managed to revive its independent spirit. That was the reason why almost exactly a century after the Shelon Battle, in 1570, another Muscovite ruler, Ivan IV, would literally obliterate Novgorod.
Marquis de Custine (1790–1857) described what happened in Novgorod during that attack:
“…the Volkoff (river) represented to me the frightful scenes connected with the siege of this republican city, taken, retaken, and decimated by Ivan the Terrible. I could fancy I saw the imperial hyena, presiding over carnage and pestilence, couched among the ruins of the city; and the bloody corpses of his subjects seemed to issue out of the river that was choked with their bodies, to prove to me the horrors of intestine wars. It is worthy of remark, that the correspondence of Archbishop Pinen, and of other principal citizens of Novgorod with the Poles, was the cause which brought the evil on the city, where thirty thousand innocent persons perished in the combat, and in the executions and massacres invented and presided over by the Czar. There were days on which six hundred were at once executed before his eyes; and all these horrors were enacted to punish a crime unpardonable from that epoch — the crime of clandestine communication with the Poles. This took place nearly three hundred years ago, in 1570. Great Novgorod has never recovered the stroke: she could have replaced her dead, but she could not survive the abolition of her democratic institutions: her whitewashed houses are no longer stained with blood; they appear as if they had been built only yesterday; but her streets are deserted, and three parts of her ruins are spread over the plain, beyond the narrow bounds of the actual city, which is but a shadow and a name. This is all that remains of the famous republic of the middle ages.”
This is how “unity” and “succession” look according to Moscow’s perverted logic. That kind of logic is reminiscent of the famous Orwellian ‘War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength’.
Slaverish, autocratic Muscovy already in the 15th century claiming to be the same as the democratic Novgorodian Republic is the first example of the first Orwellian oxymoron.
Waging wars of extinction for ‘peace’ is another. But ignorant people still believing Moscow’s lies even in our days are truly Moscow’s strength.
It may come to revelation, but speaking in modern-day terms, Novgorod was a Ukrainian city whose foundation history Moscow forged. As the new facts reveal, Novgorod was founded by Kyiv rulers. Those were the Kyiv rulers who gave Novgorod its freedoms that brought prosperity.
Can we see some parallels in the current war Russia wages against Ukraine with the wording on the Shelon Memorial? It is again about a democratic state wishing to be prosperous and independent. And it is again genocide for the ‘Unity”, is it not?
Read Novgorod the Great was founded a century later than the ‘official’ date >
What language did the Novgorodians speak? >
Ivan the Terrible or Ivan the Terrified? >
