Chapter 5. Paris, California: French Intellectual (excerpts)
Neither at Cambridge nor then in Paris was socialism my political goal; it was my area of scientific interest. In some ways this did not change until adulthood. In 1966, when I became a student at Cambridge, it was the 30th anniversary of the Popular Front, the French center-left coalition that was in power for a short period in the mid-1930s when the socialist Leon Blum became prime minister. In connection with this anniversary, the shelves were filled with an avalanche of books describing and analyzing the failure of the Popular Front. Many of the authors took up this topic with the express purpose of teaching a good lesson, so that next time it would turn out better: an alliance of left-wing parties still seemed quite possible and even desirable.
I myself was not too interested in the directly political aspects of these disputes. Having grown up in certain traditions, I was accustomed to seeing revolutionary communism as a disaster, so I saw little point in re-evaluating its current prospects. On the other hand, I found myself in Cambridge at the height of the reign of Harold Wilson and Labor - a reign that was cynical, exhausted, endlessly justifying and less and less effective. From this side, too, nothing was to be expected. So my social democratic interests led me abroad, to Paris: it turned out that it was politics that connected me with French science, and not vice versa.
Although this may seem strange, given my own political views and the activity of life there, I needed Paris to become a real student of history. I received a one-year Cambridge postgraduate fellowship at the École Normale Supérieure - an excellent observation post for studying the intellectual and political life of France. When I arrived there in 1970, I began to study for real - much more than at Cambridge - and made very serious progress on my dissertation on French socialism in the 1920s.
I started looking for a scientific supervisor. At Cambridge they don't really teach you: you just read books and talk about them. Among my teachers there there were a variety of people: old-fashioned liberal empiricists, historians of England; methodologically sensitive intellectual historians; There were also several economic historians of the old left school of the period between the two wars. My Cambridge supervisors not only did not initiate me into historical methodology, but simply met with me quite rarely. My first official boss, David Thomson, died shortly after we met. My second supervisor was the extremely pleasant, elderly expert on the Third Republic, J. P. T. Bury; he served excellent sherry, but was poorly versed in my topic. I think we met three times during my dissertation preparation. So throughout my first postgraduate year at Cambridge (1969-1970) I was completely on my own.
I had to not only choose the topic for the dissertation on my own, but also come up with all the problems, the questions that made sense to ask, and the criteria that should be used in answering these questions. Why was socialism unable to fulfill its own obligations? Why was socialism in France unable to reach the heights of social democracy in Northern Europe? Why was there no unrest or revolution in France in 1919, although everyone expected radical upheavals? Why did Soviet communism seem in those years to be a much more suitable heir to the French Revolution than socialism, which grew on republican soil? Lurking in the background were questions about the triumph of the far right. Could the rise of fascism and National Socialism be understood simply as a failure of the left wing? This is how I looked at it all at that time, and only much later did these questions again become relevant to me.
Arriving in Paris, I suddenly found myself at the epicenter of the intellectual establishment of Republican France. I was well aware that I was taking classes in the same building where Émile Durkheim and Léon Blum studied at the end of the 19th century, and where Jean Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron studied thirty years later. I was in complete bliss, being among intelligent, like-minded students on a campus in the 5th arrondissement, where it was cozy to live and work great in a very convenient library - they even allowed you to take books home (this is a rarity for Parisian libraries - both then and current ones).
For better or worse, I began to think and speak like a normal (École Normale student). Partly it was a matter of form: to adopt a pose and adopt a style (both academic and everyday), but at the same time it was also a process of osmotic adaptation. The École was filled with overeducated young Frenchmen with inflated egos and sunken chests: many of them today became eminent professors and diplomatic bigwigs around the world. The rich atmosphere of the greenhouse was very different from Cambridge, and it was here that I learned the ways of thinking and arguing that I still use today. My colleagues and contemporaries have an extremely tough style of discussion, although sometimes they are not so open to the facts and materials available from world experience. I acquired the positive features of this style, but without a doubt I inherited all its vices.
Looking back, I realize that much of my self-identification within French intellectual life was determined by my interactions with Annie Kriegel, a leading authority on the history of French communism. I met her in Paris simply because she had written an entire book on my topic, her opus magnum: Aux origines du communisme français (On the Origins of French Communism). She insisted on a historical understanding of communism - as a movement, not an abstract idea; and it had a huge impact on me. In addition, Annie was an extremely charismatic woman. She, in turn, was also intrigued by meeting an Englishman who spoke decent French and was interested in socialism, and not at all the then fashionable communism.
Socialism in those years seemed to be a completely dead branch of history. The French Socialist Party performed very poorly in the 1968 parliamentary elections and ceased to exist in 1971 after poor results in the presidential elections. For the sake of accuracy, it should be said that the party was promptly revived by the opportunist François Mitterrand, but revived formally and mechanically: under a new name and completely devoid of its old spirit. In the early 1970s, the only left-wing party with long-term prospects seemed to be the Communist Party. In the 1969 presidential election, the Communists won a whopping 21% of the vote, leaving all other left-wing parties far behind.
Communism then seemed to occupy a central place in the past, present and future of the French left. In France, as in Italy, not to mention the more eastern territories, communism could consider itself a historical winner (and indeed did): socialism seems to have been defeated everywhere, not counting the far north of Europe. But I wasn't interested in the winners. Annie understood this and considered this a commendable quality for a serious historian. So, thanks to her and her friends - not least the great Raymond Aron - I found my path through French history.
Snyder asks Judt to discuss the European political movements in the context of which French interwar socialism existed.
We have already talked about the emotional and intellectual appeal of Marxism and Leninism. Ultimately, the Popular Front is an anti-fascist phenomenon. But for anti-fascism to arise, fascism must first happen: the rise to power of Mussolini in 1922, the similar rise of Hitler in 1933, the growing influence of the Romanian fascists in the 1930s, and in France and Britain, of course, in a much weaker form, but there were features of fascist ideology.
So to begin with, I would ask you about something that you did not cover in any way in your dissertation. Why do we so easily dispense with the fascist intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s?
When it comes to Marxists, concepts can be discussed. And the fascists, in fact, have no concepts. They have special characteristic reactions - to war, depression, economic backwardness. But they don't start with a set of ideas that they then apply to the world around them.
Perhaps the fact is that their argumentation, as a rule, was the opposite: against liberalism, against democracy, against Marxism.
Until the late 1930s (or even early 1940s), when they began to become involved in real politics (I'm talking about, for example, passing laws against the Jews), fascist intellectuals did not stand out much from the general background of political discussions. It is difficult, say, to separate the Frenchmen Pierre Drieu la Rochelle or Robert Brasillac, obvious fascists, from the editors of the center-right mainstream French press, judging by their views on key issues like the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front, the League of Nations, Mussolini or America.
Criticism of social democracy, liberalism or Marxist-Bolshevik ideology - all this is quite difficult to distinguish between. This is largely true even in pre-Hitler Germany, where a wide range of politicians had very similar views on foreign policy, ranging from, say, the liberal Gustav Stresemann all the way to the Nazis. And in Romania, the people we now call fascist intellectuals - Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran - were not just mainstream, they set the tone, being representatives of the influential intelligentsia.
What could be called the intellectual traits of a fascist thinker?
Take the case of Robert Brasiliac. Contemporaries considered him a deep-thinking representative of the far right flank. What is characteristic is that he was young, reaching adulthood in the 1930s. He wrote very well, which is generally typical of fascists. They were often wittier and more caustic than the ponderous and serious intellectuals of the left. They are distinguished by an aesthetic sensibility that promotes a sympathetic and cultural response to contemporary art. Brasiliac, for example, was a film critic, and a very good one. If you read his work today with an open mind, you will notice that his criticism of left-wing films of the 1930s, especially those that are now in vogue, was quite caustic. And finally, in the case of Brasiliac and many others, we are dealing with a conscious individualism that is quite natural for people of right-wing convictions, but looks alien on the left flank. Right-wing intellectuals look more like the newspaper culture critics of the 1830s and 1940s; this is a more recognizable and positive social type than the ideologized leftist intellectual of subsequent generations. People like Brasiliac do not identify themselves primarily with politics. Many right-wing intellectuals - Junger, Cioran, Brasiliac - were not party members. And at the same time they were significant figures in the intellectual world.
After 1913 comes the First World War, the principles of national self-determination in action, then the Bolshevik revolution. How inseparable are these events and factors?
When viewed from our time, it seems that the level of violence during the First World War should have had a much greater effect, but surprisingly it did not. It was the bloody, deadly side of war that was most extolled by those for whom it was the key moment of their youth. Reading Ernst Jünger, Drieu la Rochelle or angry responses to Remarque, you understand that the spirit of unity in a dangerous situation, then glorified in retrospect, gives war a special heroic glow in the eyes of many. The veterans were divided into those who, until the end of their lives, carefully preserved the memories of the harsh everyday life of the trenches, and those who, on the contrary, forever distanced themselves from national militaristic politics in any form. The latter were probably in the absolute majority, especially in France and Britain, but certainly not in intellectual circles.
The Bolshevik revolution happened at the end of 1917, that is, even before the end of the war. This means that even then there was a vague threat of subsequent unrest, revolution in Europe, facilitated and prepared by military destabilization and unjust peace agreements (real or perceived as such). The example of many countries - starting with Italy - shows us that if not for the threat of the communist revolution, the fascists would have had much less chance of becoming guarantors of the preservation of the traditional way of life. In fact, the fascists, at least in Italy, themselves did not quite understand whether they were radicals or conservatives. And the shift to the right occurred in large part because right-wing fascists succeeded in presenting fascism as an adequate response to the communist threat. In the absence of the specter of a leftist revolution, left-wing fascists might also prevail. However, instead they were purged by Mussolini, and ten years later by Hitler. Conversely, the relative weakness of the radical left in post-war Britain, France and Belgium prevented the right wing from successfully exploiting the specter of communism over the next decade. Even Winston Churchill himself was ridiculed for his obsession with the Red Scare and the Bolsheviks.
Many fascists admired Lenin, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Soviet state, and viewed one-party rule as the standard.
Ironically, the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union created more problems for the left in the West than for the right. In the first post-war years in Western Europe, very little was known about Lenin and his revolution. Accordingly, there were a lot of abstract interpretations of events in Russia, depending on the local context: they were perceived as a syndicalist revolution, as an anarchist revolution, as Marxist socialism adapted to Russian circumstances, as a temporary dictatorship, etc. The left was concerned that the revolution in a backward agricultural country did not meet Marx's predictions and, therefore, could cause unintended consequences and even lead to tyranny. As for the fascists, Lenin’s voluntarism and arrogant desire to force the course of history (what worried the classical Marxists most of all) were exactly to their liking. The Soviet state was ruled from above, relying on violence and determination: in those years, this is what future fascists strived for, this is what they lacked in the political culture of their own societies. The Soviet example confirmed that a party can make a revolution, seize a state and, if necessary, rule by force.
In those early years, the Russian Revolution had effective, even excellent, propaganda. Over time, the Bolsheviks developed a certain talent for using public spaces.
I would go even further. The facades of fascism and communism were often strikingly similar. Some of Mussolini's projects to rebuild Rome, for example, are eerily reminiscent of Moscow University. If you know nothing about the history of the People's House Nicolae Ceausescu, how can you determine whether it is an example of what kind of architecture it is - fascist or communist? Both regimes were characterized (at first glance in a paradoxical way) by conservatism in high art, which replaced the initial enthusiasm of the revolutionary years. Both communists and fascists were extremely suspicious of innovation in music, painting, literature, theater and dance. By the 1930s, aesthetic radicalism was as out of place in Moscow as it was in Rome or Berlin.
In 1933, Hitler came to power, and soon after that, already in 1936, it became clear that Nazi Germany would be one of the strong players on the right flank among European states. How do fascists in other countries react to this?
As a rule, they re-emphasize their connection with Italian fascism. Italian fascism, without overt racist connotations and not posing (for most European countries) a particular threat, becomes respectable, at the global level, the embodiment of the policy that they would like to implement at home. This was the case in England, where Oswald Mosley worshiped Mussolini. Many of the French rightists had traveled to Italy, read Italian and had first-hand knowledge of Italian life. Italy even played a role in defending Austria from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1936.
At the same time, during these years many people quite freely expressed their admiration for Hitler. Mosley's wife and daughter-in-law traveled to Germany, where they met Hitler and spoke with delight of his strength, determination and originality. The French also traveled to Germany, although less often: French fascism was formed according to the nationalist model, and French nationalism in those years, by definition, was anti-German (as well as anti-British).
The Romanian fascists did not show much interest in Germany, at least until the war. They perceived their culture as a continuation of the Latin one, and much closer to them was the Spanish Civil War, in which they saw the cultural confrontation of the 1930s. In general, Romanian fascists did not seek to affiliate with Hitler, and not so much because of political differences, but because of the anti-German sentiment typical of most Romanians after the First World War (although at the end of the war Romania received its territorial indemnity, being an ally of the Entente). Romania acquired a huge territory, primarily at the expense of Hungary, but only through an alliance with France and Britain. Since Hitler was determined to overturn the post-war order based on these peace agreements, Romania had every reason to maintain a low profile. As soon as Hitler demonstrated, starting in 1938, that he could move the borders within Europe, the Romanians had no choice but to negotiate. Indeed, they had no choice after Hitler arranged for part of the Romanian territories to be transferred back to Hungary.
Sometimes (rather as an exception) the Germanic character of German National Socialism revealed its attractiveness. One may recall Leon Degrelle, the Belgian fascist leader. Degrelle, although he spoke French, was a representative of Belgian revisionism, more widespread in the Flemish regions of the country. The revisionists rightly considered Germany a greater ally than the French, Dutch or British, who adhered to the status quo. The Belgian revisionists were primarily concerned with minor territorial redistribution, as well as the recognition of the rights of the Flemish language. The Germans prudently gave the go-ahead for all this in 1940, as soon as they occupied Belgium. However, the outstanding example of pro-German fascism was Quisling's party in Norway. These Norwegians considered their nation an extension of the German essence, Germanness itself, and their country as part of the great Nordic space, within which they too could have some role within the framework of Nazi ambitions. However, right up to the war they had no political weight.
But the appeal of German National Socialism extended wider, to the whole of Europe. The Germans had a scenario that the Italians did not have: a post-democratic strong Europe, within which Western countries live well, but at the head of this unification is Germany. Many Western intellectuals were attracted to this idea, some even deeply believed in it. The European idea, no matter how much we would like to forget it, was then a right-wing idea. Of course, it was a counterweight to Bolshevism, but also to Americanization, it was a counterweight to industrial America with its “material values” and ruthless financial capitalism (which is supposedly run by Jews). A new Europe with a planned economy would become a force, although in reality it could only become strong by crossing meaningless national borders.
All this was very attractive to young, more economically oriented fascist intellectuals, many of whom would soon find themselves governing the occupied territories. After 1940, after the fall of Poland, Norway and especially France, the German model seemed incredibly attractive. But this must be contrasted with the “Jewish question.” It was during the war that the racial problem arose in full force, and many fascist intellectuals, especially in France and England, were unable to cross this line. It is one thing to endlessly speak out about the delights of cultural anti-Semitism, and quite another to support the mass destruction of entire nations.
Hitler's rise to power entailed, after only a year, a complete reorientation of Soviet foreign policy (as expressed by the Communist International). The Soviets put forward the slogan of anti-fascism. The communists stopped seeing enemies in those to the right. In 1934 in France, they entered an electoral bloc with the socialists and won the elections as the Popular Front. The importance of the French Communist Party grew, becoming greater than its real weight. The German KPD ceased to exist...
...And most of the other European communist parties meant nothing. The only major figure was the French Communist Party (PCF). By 1934, Stalin realized that this was the only lever in the camp of Western democracies that he had left for himself. The PCF has suddenly transformed from a small, if noisy, player on the French left into an important global instrument of political influence.
PCF was just another office. Its roots are in the old and traditionally strong leftist tradition. It is important to understand that France is the only country where an open democratic political system is combined with a strong left-wing revolutionary movement. So the PCF party was large from the very beginning, from 1920. Then, throughout Europe, socialists had to choose between communists and social democrats under the influence of the Bolshevik revolution, and in many places the social democrats gained the upper hand. But not in France. There the communists remained in power until the mid-1920s. Later, the party began to steadily decline: this was facilitated by tactics imposed by Moscow, internal disagreements, and the inability to formulate rational arguments for the electorate. By the elections of 1928, the parliamentary faction of the PCF was very small, and after the elections of 1932 it became completely dwarfed. Stalin himself was shocked by the disappearance of communism from the French political scene. By that time, all that remained in France was the supremacy of the Communists in the trade unions and in the municipalities of the Parisian “red belt”. However, to some extent, this was enough: in a country where the capital means a lot, where there is no television, but there is radio and newspapers, the constant presence of communists at strikes, debates and the streets of the radical suburbs of Paris did its job - it gave the party much greater recognition , than what could be claimed with such a number.
Stalin was lucky - the PCF was extremely pliable. Maurice Thorez, an obedient puppet, took over the leadership of the party in 1930, and the Communist Party, which only yesterday had been marginal, suddenly gained global significance in just a few years. When Stalin switched to a Popular Front strategy, the Communists no longer had to proclaim the socialists, the “social fascists,” as the main threat to the working class.
On the contrary, now an alliance with Blum’s socialists became possible to protect the republic from fascism. This could largely have been a political ploy by the USSR to defend against Nazism, but in that case it was a rather convenient ploy. The long-standing readiness of the French left to unite against the right coincided perfectly with the new course of communist foreign policy towards a blockade with the USSR against the world right wing. The communists, of course, did not enter the government formed on the basis of the united electoral front in the spring of 1936, but they were perceived by the right as the most powerful and dangerous component in the Popular Front coalition (and in this they were not so far from the truth).
Stalin's vision of the interests of the USSR changed and became consonant with the interests of the French state. And suddenly, Thorez’s constant remarks about the need to give Alsace and Lorraine to Germany (in accordance with the previous Soviet line) are replaced by another concept - now Germany could become the main enemy.
Even more. Countries that had in some way failed France by abandoning the idea of a united "anti-German" front became countries that failed the Soviet Union by not guaranteeing free passage for the Red Army in the event of war. Poland signed a non-aggression pact in January 1934, and everyone understood that Poland would never voluntarily allow Soviet troops into its territory. So the interests of the USSR and France were somehow intertwined, and quite a large number of French people were ready to believe this. This was also reminiscent of the Franco-Russian alliance, which lasted from the 1890s until the end of the First World War and coincided with the last period in the history of France when it was strong in the international arena.
One should also take into account the special attitude of the French towards the Soviet Union, because when thinking about Moscow, they always, in some sense, have Paris in mind. The question of Stalinism in France is primarily a historical paradox: is the Russian revolution the legitimate heir of the French one? And if so, shouldn't it be protected from any external threat? The ghost of the Great French Revolution was present all the time, making it difficult to really see what was happening there in Moscow. Therefore, many French intellectuals, by no means all communists, saw in the show trials that began in 1936 the revolutionary terror of Robespierre, and not totalitarian mass purges.
Soviet terror was individualistic. And in the same way, individuals at show trials individually repented of incredible crimes, but they did it as individuals. We now know that about 700,000 people were shot in the period 1937-1938, but most of them were arrested under the cover of darkness, one by one. And this did not allow either them or their families to understand what was happening. And this terrifying grayness, this uncertainty and unknown remains part of the landscape of Soviet memory right up to this day.
So I think that when we think of Orwell simply as a man with his eyes open, we are not seeing the whole picture. Like Koestler, Orwell had a good imagination, which allowed him to see conspiracies and other conspiracies - no matter how absurd - behind the scenes of what was happening, and then declare them to be reality, thereby making them real to us.
I think this is the key point. Those who correctly perceived the 20th century, either anticipating it, like Kafka, or, like contemporary observers, must have had a rich imagination: for a world for which there was no precedent in history. They were forced to assume that this unprecedented and seemingly absurd situation was real, rather than, like everyone else, dismissing it as an unimaginable grotesque. It was incredibly difficult for contemporaries to learn to think about the 20th century in this way. For the same reasons, many people convince themselves that the Holocaust never happened, simply because it didn't make sense. Not for Jews - this is just obvious. But for the Germans it also made no sense. The Nazis, since they wanted to win their wars, of course, should have used the Jews, and not destroyed them, spending enormous resources on this.
It turned out that applying rational moral and political calculation to human behavior, self-evident for people of the 19th century, is simply impossible in the 20th century - this principle no longer works.
Translation by Nikolay Okhotin
Since the late sixties, a new tight knot in Russian history has been tightening. The second Alexander era ended on March 1, 1881 with the explosion of two bombs on the Catherine Canal. As a result of the seventh attempt, the emperor was mortally wounded, the terrorists were executed (although L.N. Tolstoy, in a letter to the new tsar, asked for mercy, hoping that as a result of this act of Christian mercy, future terrorists would abandon their goals and the history of Russia would follow a peaceful, evolutionary path) , and the new Emperor Alexander III, returned to the policy of “freezing” Russia, containing and curtailing all reforms.
The view of the reign of Alexander III is very unstable. Under him, Russia did not fight, industry developed, and the outskirts of the empire were developed. But the emperor completely abandoned political and liberal changes, quickly removed officials who worked under his father from power, and persecuted all manifestations of free-thinking. This time is called era of counter-reforms.
If the era of Alexander II was in some way reminiscent of “the days of the Alexanders, a wonderful beginning,” then the time of Alexander III was their sad end. This is the second dead-end era, Chekhov’s time of “gloomy people”, life “in the twilight”, a time of confusion, the search for new ideals
Looking from another time, but relying on the judgments of his contemporaries, the poetic image of time was created by A. Blok in the unfinished poem “Retribution” (1911). Here Russia appeared as a fairy-tale beauty, bewitched by evil forces, and the main villain-sorcerer turned out to be the Chief Prosecutor of the Synod K P. Pobedonostsev, an implacable conservative, the emperor's closest adviser.
In those distant, deaf years, sleep and darkness reigned in the hearts: Pobedonostsev spread out his owl's wings over Russia, Alexander III suddenly died on October 20, 1894. The transfer of power, unlike 1825 or 1881, this time seems to have occurred naturally, without conflict or disaster. But in fact, the last reign almost immediately began to turn into an endless chain of conflicts and disasters, ending with the death of both the imperial family and the empire itself. “I fail in my endeavors... I have no luck. And, besides, human will is powerless,” Nicholas II admitted in a difficult moment to one of his faithful comrades, P. A. Stolypin. The last tsar was a wonderful family man, but a weak, short-sighted, and much mistaken ruler of Russia. He insisted on the inviolability of the principle of autocratic power. At the very beginning of his reign, he spoke out against “meaningless dreams about the participation of zemstvo representatives in internal government affairs” (the tsar made a symptomatic reservation: in fact, the speech talked about baseless dreams). Nicholas blindly believed the myths about the unity of the tsar and the people, did not take into account the realities of the “industrial age”, refused liberal reforms, yielding to society only under the pressure of the revolutionary movement that was gaining strength. Already the Moscow coronation of the new emperor led to tragedy: during the distribution of royal gifts on the Khodynka field on May 18, 1896, a terrible stampede arose in which more than 1,300 people died. The tenth anniversary of Nicholas's reign was marked by the January "Bloody Sunday", when a peaceful deputation of workers was shot at the Winter Palace, and by the first Russian revolution of 1905, the culmination of which was the December armed uprising in Moscow. In this struggle, society won back some democratic institutions (primarily the State Duma). But the result of another irreconcilable battle between society and the state was a new round of terror after the Narodnaya Volya movement, in which hundreds of dignitaries, including some members of the royal family, and thousands of terrorists, and often innocent people, were killed by the verdict of military courts. From this era to the twentieth century, the concepts of “Stolypin tie” (gallows) and Stolypin carriage (a carriage transporting prisoners) have passed. Chairman of the Council of Ministers P. A. Stolypin, who gave his name to these terrible “inventions,” was one of the most devoted people to the emperor, and also died at the hands of a terrorist. Another decade passed in disasters and dire premonitions of the future. The last shock of Nicholas's reign was August 1914, the beginning of the war with Germany, which Russia entered unprepared and from which it emerged only four years later, through two more revolutions, the death of the royal family, a change in the social system, and civil war. But these were already catastrophes of the new century, which revealed the illusory nature of many things and phenomena, theories and principles. The nineteenth century was thus given another calendar decade and a half. The First World War turned out to be a milestone, the end of a previous era. This is the sinusoid of Russian history of the 19th century, its rapid rise and no less catastrophic fall.
Questions and tasks
1. How did contemporaries evaluate the outgoing 18th century? What explained these estimates?
2. What are the not calendar, but historical boundaries of the “present, not calendar” “Nineteenth Century”? What historical events mark its beginning and end?
3. Which emperors ruled Russia in the 19th century?
4. Slavophile A. S. Khomyakov, at the beginning of the reign of Alexander II, deduced a humorous law of historical alternation: “In Russia, good and bad rulers alternate through one: Peter III was bad, Catherine I was good, Paul I was bad, Alexander I was good, Nicholas I bad, this one will be good! Was this pattern justified in the subsequent Russian history of the 19th century? And in the twentieth century?
5. Which eras of Russian history are designated as twenties, thirties, forties, sixties, seventies, eighties? What is the main meaning of these eras?
6. What is the meaning of the definitions “people of the twenties”, “people of the thirties”, “people of the forties”, “sixties”, “seventies”, “eighties”?
7. A rebellion cannot end in success.
Otherwise his name is different.
8. What is the meaning of the polemic between Chaadaev and Pushkin about the fate of Russia? Who, from your point of view, was right in this dispute?
9. In which era of the 19th century did the dispute between Westerners and Slavophiles unfold? How were these community camps different?
10. In 1856, L. N. Tolstoy wrote the story “Father and Son,” which received the final title “Two Hussars.” The story begins with a huge period sentence (193 words), representing the characteristics of an entire era.
« In the 1800s, at a time when there were no railroads, no highways, no gas, no stearin light, no springy low sofas, no furniture without varnish, no disillusioned young men with glass, no liberal female philosophers, nor the lovely lady camellias, of which there are so many in our time - in those naive times when, leaving Moscow for St. Petersburg in a cart or carriage, they took with them a whole home-cooked kitchen, drove for eight days along a soft dusty or muddy road and they believed in Pozharsky cutlets, in Valdai bells and bagels - when tallow candles burned on long autumn evenings, illuminating family circles of twenty and thirty people, at balls wax and spermaceti candles were inserted into candelabra, when furniture was placed symmetrically, when our fathers were still young not only because of the absence of wrinkles and gray hair, but they shot at women and from the other corner of the room rushed to pick up accidentally and not accidentally dropped handkerchiefs, our mothers wore short waists and huge sleeves and solved family matters by taking out tickets; when the lovely camellia ladies were hiding from the daylight - in the naive times of the Masonic lodges, Martinists, Tugendbund, in the times of the Miloradovichs, Davydovs, Pushkins - in the provincial city of K. there was a congress of landowners and the noble elections ended.”
Comment on the subject realities and names of this fragment, based on dictionaries and encyclopedias ( Camellia ladies, Pozharsky cutlets, Martinists, Miloradovich etc.).
Try, based on the details of this passage, to determine in what times Tolstoy’s father and son live (the second half of the story is dedicated to him).
What Tolstoy's intention does this characteristic of the era predict?
What work of Russian literature of the sixties does Tolstoy's original title predict?
Try, imitating Tolstoy, to characterize our time in one sentence-period.
11. In a historical poem and two historical novels by remarkable Russians
writers of the twentieth century, created approximately a century after the events described, in
Tolstoy style encyclopedic period characteristics are given
post-reform Russia.
B. L. Pasternak Nine hundred and fifth year (1936)
Drum roll
Cast iron signals are drowned out.
The thunder of shameful carts -
The rumble of the first platforms.
Serf Russia
It turns out
With a short shackle
To a vacant lot
And it's called
Russia after reforms.
These are the Narodnaya Volyas,
Perovskaya,
First of March
Nihilists in undershirts,
dungeons,
Students in pince-nez.
The story of our fathers
Exactly a story
From the age of the Stuarts,
More distant than Pushkin,
And it seems
Just like in a dream.
And you can’t get any closer:
Twenty-five years - underground.
The treasure is in the ground.
On the ground -
A soulless kaleidoscope.
To dig up a treasure,
We are the eyes
We strain until it hurts.
Submitting to his will,
We go down into the tunnel ourselves.
Dostoevsky was here.
These recluses
Without waiting,
What do they have
No matter the search,
That is the removal of relics to the museum,
They were going to execution
And for that,
So that the beauty of their underground leader Nechaev
Hid it in the ground
Concealed
From times and enemies and friends.
It was yesterday,
And if we were born thirty years earlier,
Come from the yard
In the kerosene haze of lanterns,
Among the flickering retorts
We would find
What are those laboratory assistants -
Our mothers
Or
Friends of mothers.
The history of the 20th century was full of events of a very different nature - there were both great discoveries and great disasters. States were created and destroyed, and revolutions and civil wars forced people to leave their homes in order to go to foreign lands, but save their lives at the same time. In art, the twentieth century also left an indelible mark, completely updating it and creating completely new directions and schools. There were great achievements in science as well.
World history of the 20th century
The 20th century began for Europe with very sad events - the Russo-Japanese War happened, and in Russia in 1905 the first revolution, albeit one that ended in failure, took place. This was the first war in the history of the 20th century in which weapons such as destroyers, battleships and heavy long-range artillery were used.
The Russian Empire lost this war and suffered colossal human, financial and territorial losses. However, the Russian government decided to enter into peace negotiations only when more than two billion rubles in gold were spent from the treasury on the war - a fantastic amount even today, but in those days simply unthinkable.
In the context of global history, this war was just another clash of colonial powers in the struggle for the territory of a weakened neighbor, and the role of the victim fell to the weakening Chinese Empire.
Russian Revolution and its consequences
One of the most significant events of the 20th century, of course, was the February and October revolutions. The fall of the monarchy in Russia caused a whole series of unexpected and incredibly powerful events. The liquidation of the empire was followed by the defeat of Russia in the First World War, the separation from it of such countries as Poland, Finland, Ukraine and the countries of the Caucasus.
For Europe, the revolution and the subsequent Civil War also did not pass without a trace. The Ottoman Empire, liquidated in 1922, and the German Empire in 1918 also ceased to exist. The Austro-Hungarian Empire lasted until 1918 and broke up into several independent states.
However, within Russia, calm did not come immediately after the revolution. The civil war lasted until 1922 and ended with the creation of the USSR, the collapse of which in 1991 would be another important event.
World War I
This war was the first so-called trench warfare, in which a huge amount of time was spent not so much on moving troops forward and capturing cities, but on meaningless waiting in the trenches.
In addition, artillery was used en masse, chemical weapons were used for the first time, and gas masks were invented. Another important feature was the use of combat aviation, the formation of which actually took place during the fighting, although aviator schools were created several years before it began. Along with aviation, forces were created that were supposed to fight it. This is how the air defense troops appeared.
Developments in information and communications technology have also found their way onto the battlefield. Information began to be transmitted from headquarters to the front tens of times faster thanks to the construction of telegraph lines.
But not only the development of material culture and technology was affected by this terrible war. There was also a place for it in art. The twentieth century was a turning point for culture when many old forms were rejected and new ones replaced them.
Arts and literature
Culture on the eve of the First World War was experiencing an unprecedented rise, which resulted in the creation of a variety of movements both in literature and in painting, sculpture and cinema.
Perhaps the brightest and one of the most well-known artistic movements in art was futurism. Under this name it is customary to unite a number of movements in literature, painting, sculpture and cinema, which trace their genealogy to the famous manifesto of Futurism, written by the Italian poet Marinetti.
Futurism became most widespread, along with Italy, in Russia, where such literary communities of futurists as “Gilea” and OBERIU appeared, the largest representatives of which were Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Kharms, Severyanin and Zabolotsky.
As for the fine arts, pictorial futurism had Fauvism as its foundation, while also borrowing a lot from the then popular cubism, which was born in France at the beginning of the century. In the 20th century, the history of art and politics are inextricably linked, as many avant-garde writers, painters and filmmakers drew up their own plans for the reconstruction of the society of the future.
The Second World War
The history of the 20th century cannot be complete without a story about the most catastrophic event - the Second World War, which began a year ago and lasted until September 2, 1945. All the horrors that accompanied the war left an indelible mark in the memory of mankind.
Russia in the 20th century, like other European countries, experienced many terrible events, but none of them can compare in their consequences with the Great Patriotic War, which was part of the Second World War. According to various sources, the number of war victims in the USSR reached twenty million people. This number includes both military and civilian residents of the country, as well as numerous victims of the siege of Leningrad.
Cold War with Former Allies
Sixty-two sovereign states out of seventy-three that existed at that time were drawn into hostilities on the fronts of the World War. The fighting took place in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the Caucasus and the Atlantic Ocean, as well as the Arctic Circle.
World War II and the Cold War followed one another. Yesterday's allies became first rivals, and later enemies. Crises and conflicts followed one after another for several decades, until the Soviet Union ceased to exist, thereby putting an end to the competition between the two systems - capitalist and socialist.
Cultural Revolution in China
If we tell the history of the twentieth century in terms of national history, it can sound like a long list of wars, revolutions and endless violence, often inflicted on completely random people.
By the mid-sixties, when the world had not yet fully comprehended the consequences of the October Revolution and the Civil War in Russia, another revolution unfolded at the other end of the continent, which went down in history under the name of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The cause of the Cultural Revolution in the PRC is considered to be an internal party split and Mao’s fear of losing his dominant position within the party hierarchy. As a result, it was decided to begin an active struggle against those party representatives who were supporters of small property and private initiative. All of them were accused of counter-revolutionary propaganda and were either shot or sent to prison. Thus began mass terror that lasted more than ten years and the cult of personality of Mao Zedong.
Space Race
Space exploration was one of the most popular trends in the twentieth century. Although today people have become accustomed to international cooperation in the field of high technology and space exploration, at that time space was an arena of intense confrontation and fierce competition.
The first frontier for which the two superpowers fought was near-Earth orbit. By the early fifties, both the USA and the USSR had samples of rocket technology that served as prototypes for launch vehicles of a later time.
Despite all the speed with which they worked, Soviet rocket scientists were the first to put the cargo into orbit, and on October 4, 1957, the first man-made satellite appeared in Earth orbit, which made 1440 orbits around the planet, and then burned up in the dense layers of the atmosphere.
Also, Soviet engineers were the first to launch the first living creature into orbit - a dog, and later a person. In April 1961, a rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the cargo compartment of which there was the Vostok-1 spacecraft, in which Yuri Gagarin was. The event of launching the first man into space was risky.
In the conditions of the race, space exploration could cost an astronaut his life, since in a hurry to get ahead of the Americans, Russian engineers made a number of decisions that were quite risky from a technical point of view. However, both takeoff and landing were successful. So the USSR won the next stage of the competition, called the Space Race.
Flights to the Moon
Having lost the first few stages in space exploration, American politicians and scientists decided to set themselves a more ambitious and difficult task, for which the Soviet Union might simply not have had enough resources and technical developments.
The next milestone that needed to be taken was the flight to the Moon - the natural satellite of the Earth. The project, called Apollo, was initiated in 1961 and aimed to carry out a manned expedition to the Moon and land a man on its surface.
No matter how ambitious this task seemed at the time the project began, it was solved in 1969 with the landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. In total, six manned flights to the earth's satellite were made as part of the program.
Defeat of the socialist camp
The Cold War, as we know, ended with the defeat of the socialist countries not only in the arms race, but also in economic competition. There is a consensus among most leading economists that the main reasons for the collapse of the USSR and the entire socialist camp were economic.
Despite the fact that in some countries there is widespread resentment regarding the events of the late eighties and early nineties, for most countries in Eastern and Central Europe the liberation from Soviet domination turned out to be extremely favorable.
The list of the most important events of the 20th century invariably contains a line mentioning the fall of the Berlin Wall, which served as a physical symbol of the division of the world into two hostile camps. The date of the collapse of this symbol of totalitarianism is considered to be November 9, 1989.
Technological progress in the 20th century
The twentieth century was rich in inventions; never before had technological progress progressed at such a speed. Hundreds of very significant inventions and discoveries have been made in a hundred years, but a few of them are worthy of special mention because of their extreme importance for the development of human civilization.
One of the inventions without which modern life is unthinkable is, of course, the airplane. Despite the fact that people have dreamed of flight for many millennia, the first flight in human history was accomplished only in 1903. This achievement, fantastic in its consequences, belongs to the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright.
Another important invention related to aviation was the backpack parachute, designed by St. Petersburg engineer Gleb Kotelnikov. It was Kotelnikov who received a patent for his invention in 1912. Also in 1910, the first seaplane was designed.
But perhaps the most terrible invention of the twentieth century was the nuclear bomb, the single use of which plunged humanity into horror that has not passed to this day.
Medicine in the 20th century
The technology of artificial production of penicillin is also considered one of the main inventions of the 20th century, thanks to which humanity was able to get rid of many infectious diseases. The scientist who discovered the bactericidal properties of the fungus was Alexander Fleming.
All advances in medicine in the twentieth century were inextricably linked with the development of such fields of knowledge as physics and chemistry. After all, without the achievements of fundamental physics, chemistry or biology, the invention of the X-ray machine, chemotherapy, radiation and vitamin therapy would have been impossible.
In the 21st century, medicine is even more closely connected with high-tech branches of science and industry, which opens up truly fascinating prospects in the fight against diseases such as cancer, HIV and many other intractable diseases. It is worth noting that the discovery of the DNA helix and its subsequent decoding also allows us to hope for the possibility of curing inherited diseases.
After the USSR
Russia in the 20th century experienced many disasters, including wars, including civil ones, the collapse of the country and revolutions. At the end of the century, another extremely important event happened - the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and in its place sovereign states were formed, some of which plunged into civil war or war with their neighbors, and some, like the Baltic countries, quickly joined the European Union and began building an effective democratic state.
“Russian culture in the 19th century” - Science. The generally recognized founder of Russian classical music. Major events. Romanticism. Famous architects: Outstanding writers. Enlightenment Science Literature Art a) architecture b) painting c) music. Educational establishments. Jacobi Boris Semyonovich. Russian culture of the first half of the 19th century.
“Russian culture of the 19th century” - Russian culture of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Public public universities are opening in large cities. The end of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th century. - the most “theatrical” era in the history of Russian culture. The power of the literature of critical realism in the person of L.N. did not dry out. Tolstoy, A.P. Chekhova, I.A. Bunina. Azov-Don Bank in St. Petersburg.
“Russian culture of the 19th century” - Rules of the game: General question in the field of knowledge of Russian culture for the most erudite: Qualifying task. Russian traveler who was the first to explore the mountains of Central Asia. Choose from the following names of the Russian writer the author of the novel “Demons” V.G. Korolenko; I.S. Turgenev; F.M. Dostoevsky; L.N. Tolstoy.
“Russian Culture of the 19th Century” - Interaction of different arts. A. S. Popov is the inventor of radio. Discovery of the theory of relativity. S.I. Mamontov 1885 – private opera house of S.I. Mamontov. Marie Curie. Scientific discoveries: Tretyakov Gallery S. T. Morozov. Invention of wireless communication. Socio-political features of the era.
“Russia in the 2nd quarter of the 19th century” - Lesson assignment. Bashkir costume. Receipt for payment for wearing Jewish clothing. 5.Eastern territories. XIX century. 1. Kingdom of Poland. 3.Ukraine and Bessarabia. Commemorative medal "For the capture of Warsaw." Lesson plan. Monument to Alexander I in Helsinki. Mari costume. In 1833, a university was opened in Kyiv.
“Culture of the 19th century” - Sculpture. Literature, theater, music. "Girl with Peaches" "Rainbow". AREAS OF ACTIVITY A) chemistry B) soil science C) physiology D) history E) mathematics. "Religious procession in the Kursk province." The building of the Moscow State Duma. Mansion of engineer Klodt. Creative Commonwealth of Russian Composers (1862).