In Stalingrad, one of Vasily Grossman’s two epic novels centred on the second world war’s most destructive battle, a particularly powerful passage depicts exhausted Soviet soldiers arriving at the River Volga and washing themselves in its waters. “This mass baptism before the terrible battle for freedom . . . may have been as fateful a moment in the country’s history as the mass baptism carried out in Kiev a thousand years earlier, on the banks of the Dnieper,” Grossman wrote.
Financial Times: What pagans, Putin and the Volga tell us about Russia
A family rests on the bank of the Volga river in Nizhny Novgorod, on July 4, 2018. Nizhny Novgorod stadium will host on July 6, 2018 the quarter-final football match of the FIFA World Cup 2018 between Uruguay and France. / AFP PHOTO / Dimitar DILKOFF
