Читать книгу The History of the West. Through the Eyes of Bears and Balalaikas - - Страница 12

The 19th century is the first one we are more or less able to understand. The first when people began to some extent to resemble us today. Everything that came before it were dark, strange, unclear years – years of slow communications, simple morals, hard labor, and constant fighting. The transition between these very different time periods is dated quite precisely. It is the American War of Independence and the Great French Revolution. Both of these events dramatically changed people’s consciousness: America showed the world that it is possible to create an “ideal” state modeled after Ancient Rome, a state for citizens, and not the other way around. The French, by overthrowing the old order taught the world to value the Human before everything else: country, power, even religion. One of the bloodiest and most inhumane dramas in history simultaneously became the source of humanism ideas and mutual assistance.

It seems to us that progress is accelerating and nothing could be crazier than our hectic age. Mobile phones, self-driving electric cars, nuclear reactors, reusable spacecraft, Mars rovers… We live in an incredible time. However, in terms of the magnitude of the changes that occurred, the nineteenth century undoubtedly surpasses any other. A calendar century does not always coincide with a historical one, but the 19th century, surprisingly, lasted exactly one hundred years: from 1814 to 1914.

In 1814, Russian troops under the command of Prussian generals entered Paris, mainly concluding the Napoleonic Wars, except for the “Hundred Days”92. Lancers with lances, cuirassiers in armor with broadswords ride into the city in rows, and infantry regiments with flintlocks enter. Bayonets: one shot – and you can charge with bayonets93. Horse-drawn carriages haul muzzle-loading cannons with round shots and fuses. Looking at this army, neither Wallenstein94 nor Turenne95 nor possibly even Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror96 would be surprised. It’s clear that flintlocks are not arquebuses or muskets, let alone bows and crossbows, but the progress over half a millennium is quite recognizable: swords remained swords, armor remained armor. People, horses, sharp sticks, except that the firearms with smoky powder began to have a stronger influence on the outcomes of battles; however, still “the bullet is foolish – the bayonet is brave,” and the scale of battles and campaigns is limited by the size of the field and the voracity of the army.

In 1914, long trains pulled by locomotives transport millions of people to the front, armed with machine guns, repeating rifles, and rapid-fire artillery hurling shells far beyond the horizon. Cordite and trinitrotoluene97 explode. In arsenals, shells with mustard gas await their time. A couple more years – and tanks will break through fortifications of trenches and barbed wire. Telegraph, telephone, and radio transmit orders almost instantly. In the air, giant dirigibles and swift airplanes soar. Cars rattle along the roads. If Murat or Ney98 found themselves on the battlefield, they would hardly be able to understand what was happening around them, let alone command fronts stretching for thousands of kilometers. Perhaps Nelson99 would grasp the tactics of the Battle of Jutland, although fast battleships and cruisers were incredibly different from his multi-gun wooden sailing ships, but torpedo attacks by submarines and forcing through minefields would surely leave him bewildered. In a hundred years, all the military experience of millennia went straight to the dump.

And not only military. In the early 19th century, the world was unimaginably vast. To travel from St. Petersburg to the Caucasus, Pushkin and Lermontov needed months. Along the way, one could visit, for example, Kishinev100 (this is quite far from the Caucasus) – still, no one will find out. And when they do, it will be too late to take action: the fastest means of communication is a courier on horseback, and it takes him more than a week to travel back and forth. Crossing the ocean is even more time-consuming and requires extraordinary courage: ships leak, hit reefs, get caught in storms, and sink. Few, except professional sailors, undertake such a journey more than a couple of times in their lives. Where there are no roads – in Siberia, Africa, Australia – maps are filled with white spots occupying the lion’s share of the continent. With the setting sun, most work ceases: how much can be done by candlelight? Most people are illiterate, book print runs are small, education is the privilege of the elite. Not to mention education, almost all food products are strictly local: how much can you transport in the hold of a sailing ship, barge, or, worse, on a horse-drawn cart? How much can you keep fresh? Wealthy gentlemen can afford to eat exotic foods, but they are the chosen few. The rest make do with what the local land produces. However, this is true for other goods as well; only a few, like tea, wool, and tobacco, are moved around the world on a truly massive scale.

The world of 1914 is certainly not the world of 2014, when any point on the globe can be reached in a day or two. Nevertheless, it is many times more compact than the world a century earlier. The railroad made all civilized and a significant part of non-civilized lands are accessible for travel quickly and comfortably. The Atlantic is crossed by giant liners in three to four days, and you are on the other side of the ocean. Electric trams clatter through cities, cars are available for the particularly wealthy, and the most impatient can use an airplane. Letters, dispatches, documents are transmitted in hours and minutes. A ship going to sea no longer disappears from the world for months and years; constant radio communication makes navigation much safer and more predictable. Ships and trains transport millions of tons of cargo, and there is no longer any sense in adhering to local goods. Ships are built in England, machines in Germany, grain comes from America and Russia, nitrate from Chile, wine from France.

Technical progress leads to economic progress. Engaging in agriculture in northern non-black soil countries is now completely unprofitable. Peasants move and entire villages migrate to cities. The few manufacturing workers turn into the proletariat – factory workers, becoming the most numerous category of the population. The urban population grows, and infrastructure inevitably follows: sewage, gas, electricity, transport. Books, newspapers, theaters, boulevard novels, yellow press. A different world, different opportunities, a different society – the 19th century changed everything.

Or almost everything. In 1814, the Congress of Vienna101 begins – an amazingly archaic event. Shocked by the revolutionary nihilism of the French, and aggrieved by the fact that the upstart Bonaparte unexpectedly managed to join their ranks, European rulers from ancient lineages gather to hold a council. They, or rather their diplomats, spend a long time chewing over various topics, refining formulations, and preparing extensive documents, but the entire purpose of the event is to create a mechanism that secures the “divine right of kings” and the old world order based on absolute or at least minimally restricted monarchy, the class-based organization of society, and maintaining a balance of power among established world powers. In other words, the most influential people in Europe spend almost a year agreeing on how exactly they will hinder and suppress social progress, not only in their own countries but also in the surrounding ones.

This strange event – the Holy Alliance of terrified rulers still believing in their blue blood and divine rights – didn’t go well from the start. The British, without whom the world politics of that time were unimaginable, did not support the idea. Their kings had already had reasons to doubt their exclusivity for a century and a half102, and now they were preparing to hand over real power to the Parliament, though not recruited from peasants, does not claim divinity. The French, against whom the alliance was actually conceived, quickly grew disenchanted with the Bourbons and returned to their old ways – revolutions. Moreover, there was no one to calm them down since the agreeing rulers immediately quarreled among themselves. But the trouble was not in this. At the Congress of Vienna, European powers laid the foundations of diplomacy for the next two hundred years, introducing into usage dubious phrases that still exist: “spheres of influence,” “national interests,” “policy of containment,” and postulating that all these vague abstractions are worth shedding blood for.

They shouldn’t have done it. Honestly, they shouldn’t have. The Russians were the first to get caught up. The victory over the undefeated Napoleon and the liberation of Europe instilled almost messianic emotions in the Russian emperors. And while Alexander103, who had been defeated at Austerlitz104, surrendered at Tilsit105, and lost Moscow, combined gloating with caution, his brother Nicholas106, who managed to rise to autocracy through the back door sincerely considered himself “the gendarme of Europe,” the defender of world order and the guardian of traditions. Russia, a major regional power as it would be called today, began to claim the role of a global power.

At first, this didn’t particularly worry anyone. Inviting Russian troops to deal with yet another rebellion even became a kind of fashion: people have always loved to rake in the heat with someone else’s hands in all times and under all regimes. But since the time of Peter I, Russia had a fixation, which especially intensified under Catherine and became an obsession for her grandson Nicholas – to “beat” Turkey, seize Constantinople, and annex the territories of the second Rome to the “third Rome”107. While the Ottoman Empire was strong, such scenarios were out of the question, but by the mid-19th century, the once mighty conquering country had turned into the “sick man of Europe.” And the option to “beat and seize” took on quite real outlines.

These ambitions, however, did not amuse England, which was engaged in the Great Game with Russia for dominance.

Domination in Asia. Therefore, as soon as Nicholas moved from words to action, a representative coalition of former allies immediately gathered against him and vividly demonstrated what happens to an economically backward and politically archaic country that aspires to the role of a world hegemon. The “division of spheres of influence” turned out to be quite effective, but it gave all participants even greater confidence that for the sake of “containment” and “putting in place,” it is possible and even necessary to uncase the cannons. What followed was a series of wars between European neighbors, strategically of little use, but precisely because of this, they further convinced elites and society that a small war is no different from other political tools.

However, these wars did lead to some strategic shifts. As a result, a never-before-existing country, Italy108, appeared on the map of Europe, and instead of the old Prussia109 and its small and generally quite unhappy neighbors, the very Germany was formed that would cause so much commotion in the next century. The equally absurd and asymmetrical American-Mexican War110 rounded out the territory of the US, quietly transforming a large fragment of British colonies into a powerful force on a global scale. And a series of Opium Wars111 brought China to the state of a half-occupied, semi-wild land somewhere on the edge of the Earth, devoid of any meaning and significance for everyone except its closest neighbors. The fact that all these wars were fought with relatively small forces on limited territory in a medieval “army against army” format ultimately led the world to a stable understanding that “this is possible.” And when, a hundred years after the congress, the private disputes of sovereigns suddenly turned into a worldwide carnage, it was surprising to all parties. If everyone wanted the Second World War, then, by and large, no one desired the First. To rattle for a couple of months and disperse, as had happened many times before… the naive belief in the possibility of holding red-hot coal in one’s palms cost nations millions of lives, and rulers and elites – thrones, positions, and titles, and humanity as a whole – an unexpected and unpredictable change in the entire way of life.