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On the Rasputitsa [1]
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Date: 2022-10-12
Soft shoulder. Beware.
Ukraine is entering what is usually called “the muddy season” in the West. This is not unique to Ukraine; it extends into western Russia and Belarus as well.
The Russian word for this twice-yearly “season” is “Rasputitsa”. “Put” is the Russian word for “road” or “way”. “Ras” is a negative pronoun that is roughly equivalent the English “non”. Putting both together we get “non-roads”. It's more commonly translated as “the coming apart of the roads”, or something similar.
Most of the roads in the world, including in North America, are not hard-surfaced; they’re what we call dirt roads. And dirt roads are at the mercy of the weather more so than hard-surfaced roads.
The area in question (Ukraine, western Russia, Belarus, etc.) has a humid continental climate. This isn't unusual in the northern hemisphere. Most of North America has the same sort of climate. However, since the area in question is far from the moderating effects of the oceans, thunderstorms tend to be frequent during the summer months and into the autumn, due to convection.
Now I go back to my study of the Soviet-German War in 1941-45, particularly that first year. Climate change is a factor over the past 80 years, and the former USSR today has many more hard-surfaced roads than at that time, but from my reading I have learned this:
The pop-up thunderstorms took the Nazis by surprise. They had little experience of such weather at home. Those storms regularly mired the Nazi trucks and other vehicles, especially the horse-drawn transport that most of the Nazi forces relied on.
But, in summer, the sun usually came out and dried the roads, so the invasion went on, at a somewhat slower pace than planned.
This changed with the arrival of autumn. The rains weren't more frequent (there was no rainy season) but the sun no longer had the strength to dry the roads. So the water from the thunderstorms built up. Eventually it overwhelmed the ditches and the roads became swamped.
As the autumn became winter that standing water (and the area in question is very flat, with little run-off) froze in place, and the snowpack grew upon it. When the spring came both the snowpack and the underlying ice melted, and that's why the spring Rasputitsa is deeper and longer-lasting than the autumn one.
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