This work does not claim to fully cover the voiced problem, and this is not possible within the framework of a short article. We are talking about the most important moments in the history of Russia's participation in two world wars. Of course, the view of these events today, for many, has an extreme ideological connotation. We tried, as far as possible, to avoid ideologemes, at the same time to consider these events within the framework of the logic of the development of Russia as a separate civilization.
"General Frost". French poster of the TMR times. Museum of the Armed Forces of Russia. Moscow. RF. Photo by the author
Causes
For the Russian Empire (Russia), the First World War lasted 3 years and 8 months and ended with the Peace of Brest-Litovsk; for the USSR, the war with Nazi Germany, its allies and satellites lasted 3 years and 11 months and ended with the capture of Berlin and further defeat of the allied Germany of Japan.
“… at the end of 1916, all members of the state body of Russia were stricken with a disease that could no longer pass by itself, nor be removed by ordinary means, but required a complex and dangerous operation …, which mainly accelerated the growth of the disease, namely, to wage an external war; in the opinion of others, it could have abandoned this case,”
- wrote A. Blok at the end of this war.
During World War II, in 1944, in the recently liberated Yalta, the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition visited I. V. Stalin decided the question of the further organization of a safe post-war world.
The reason for the two world wars, however, like the third, lies in the general crisis in the development of capitalism: no matter how hard it hurts, in the struggle for sales markets, cheap raw materials and labor. The key contradictions in this struggle since the end of the nineteenth century were between Germany in alliance with the decrepit Vienna Empire and England and France. The imperialism of the North American United States was already looming behind them. One of the theories defines the First World War as a war between "merchants" and "warriors". From this perspective, it is strange that Russia was on the side of non-“soldiers” …
Russia: real threats and challenges
Russia, despite its "belligerence" and participation in colonial wars, itself at the end of the 19th century became a semi-colony of key world players. The reason here is not in distant historical distances, but in the problems of governing the country in the 19th century. As F. Braudel wrote:
“On the other hand, when the true industrial revolution of the nineteenth century comes, Russia will stay where it is and little by little will lag behind.”
In the absence of a decision on the key social issue, the issue of land, no "super pace" of development could provide the country with the opportunity to catch up with the developed countries, even in the presence of many sectors of the economy, where Russia occupied leading places in the world: peripheral capitalism developed in Russia and "complementary to the West »An industry almost entirely owned by foreign capital. In metallurgy, foreign banks controlled 67% of production. In steam locomotive construction, 100% of the shares were owned by two banking groups - French and German. In shipbuilding, 77% were owned by Parisian banks. In the oil industry, 80% of the capital was owned by the Oil, Shell and Nobil groups. In 1912, foreign companies controlled 70% of coal mining in the Donbass, 90% of all platinum mining, 90% of the shares of electrical and electrical enterprises, all tram companies. The amount of the share capital in Russia in 1912 was: Russian companies - 371, 2 million rubles, foreign - 401, 3 million rubles, that is, more than half was accounted for by foreign capital.
Georg Hallgarten wrote in Imperialism Before 1914:
“French financial imperialism, which before the war mainly controlled southern Russian heavy industry, at that time not only fought against German participation in Russian railway societies, but even made the placement of new Russian loans in Paris dependent on the construction of Russian strategic railways and a significant increase in army.
At the beginning of the reign of Nicholas II, foreigners controlled 20-30% of capital in Russia, in 1913 - 60-70%, by September 1917 - 90-95%.
Simultaneously with the growth of external borrowing of money by the Russian state, foreign capital increased its presence in the country's economy, preparing it for political and social zugzwang.
By WWI it was a semi-colonial country wholly and completely dependent on Western capital with a feudal system of government. The reforms carried out after the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905 were half-hearted and calculated for an extremely long period, as the Minister of Finance V. N. Kokovtsov said: someday there will still be war!
So, Russia was forced to enter the war, in which it was assigned a secondary role, during which it would hardly have received any preferences, and on the basis of which the mass of soldiers did not have a clear motivation, in the name of which it ought to fight and die.
But even if Russia had remained in the camp of the victors, some events, extremely unpleasant for Russia, would have happened by themselves. Which, by the way, does not want to see the modern supporters of "war to the bitter end." There would be a separation of Poland, especially since its territory was already occupied by Germany and the Polish armed forces were formed there. And one could only continue to dream about the straits and the cross on Hagia Sophia: control over the straits directed against Russia was the most important aspect of French and English politics (which happened in 1878, when Russian troops reached the Bosphorus!). As the French ambassador M. Palaeologus wrote:
“In its imagination, it [Russian society. - VE] already sees the allied squadrons pass the Hellespont and anchor in front of the Golden Horn, and this makes him forget the Galician defeats. As always, Russians are looking for oblivion of reality in their dreams."
And this is in the presence of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement on the division of Turkey.
And such actions against Russia, given its military weakness and economic problems, were not few. Here are the "particulars" already from the period of the Civil War, but very well characterizing the relationship of the British to the Russians (this despite the fact that some of the allies sincerely participated in the "white" movement or helped him):
“By the same time, the British opened an artillery school for Russian officers in Arkhangelsk, where the latter were also in the position of soldiers, and the attitude of the British officers towards them remained much to be desired. The British sergeants also treated rudely and there were cases when one of them allowed himself to hit our officer without incurring any punishment for it."
Let's make a guess: “political discrimination” by the West of Russia, simultaneously with the obvious strengthening of Western capital in Russia, could have contributed to its fascistization, which happened to another ally by “cordial” agreement and for the same reasons - Italy. But, by the way, the creation of fascist organizations by the "white" and the support of the leaders of the white movement and anti-Soviet emigrants of the Nazis, and direct participation in the German invasion of the USSR - all these are links in one chain. Lieutenant General K. V. Sakharov, who served with Kolchak, wrote:
"The White movement was not even the forerunner of fascism, but a pure manifestation of it."
However, here we deviated from the topic.
Now let us answer the same question about the USSR: what did the new threat of world war bring to it? This time the situation changed radically, for two reasons. First, it is a “challenge”, a challenge that has been thrown down to the “civilized world” or the West by another civilization over many centuries. It was a challenge, in modern terms, to "Russian civilization" in the image of the USSR, which offered an alternative and extremely attractive path of development for many countries and peoples, especially those who were under the thumb of Western civilization. S. Huntington pointed out:
“The coming to power of Marxism, first in Russia, then in China and Vietnam, was the first phase of a departure from the European international system to a post-European multi-civilization system … Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh adjusted it to suit themselves [I mean Marxist theory. - VE] in order to challenge Western power, as well as to mobilize their peoples and assert their national identity and autonomy as opposed to the West."
Secondly, Hitler's coming to power clearly defined the benchmark for a new "place in the sun" of the German nation. "Mein Kampf", the program document of the Nazis, defined this "place" in Russia, and its territory was chosen as the key direction of the war; the Slavs, followed by the Baltic and Finno-Ugric ethnic groups, later the Slavs of central and southern Europe.
Thus, the "collective" West has a clear understanding that the key contradictions of capitalist development can be resolved only by crushing the Soviet state, thereby simultaneously solving ideological and material problems. The war could only be total. In such conditions, the leadership of the USSR at the cost of certain sacrifices passed the necessary historical and economic minimum in twenty years, ensuring victory in the war of civilizations of the Russian civilization. By the way, and finding a way out of the unsolvable problems inherited by the Romanov managers.
In this there is a huge difference between the root causes of our country's participation in two wars, in the first case, a war for alien and at the same time alien interests, in the second case - the salvation of our own civilization. And there is a huge difference in victims …
Preparing for war
We would like to dwell on some aspects of preparation for war.
Personnel. In 1914, among the conscripts, only 50% were literate, but "literate" here meant an extremely low threshold: the ability to read something by syllables and put a signature, and this could not be compared with the level of a recruit in 1941, where 81% of the literate meant a four-year secular school. Since its inception, the Red Army has been training to eradicate illiteracy. German generals who participated in both wars noted in their memoirs the dramatically increased quality of the Russian soldier and officer. Here is what the English historian L. Garth writes, based on communication with captured German generals:
“During the course of the war, the Russians set an extremely high standard of commander from the highest to the lowest echelon. A distinctive feature of their officers was a willingness to learn."
And how strikingly different from the assessment of the army personnel at the beginning of the twentieth century. clairvoyant V. O. Klyuchevsky, by the way, his view coincides with the opinion of A. I. Denikin:
“Meanwhile, the technical complication of military affairs required a completely different preparation. The regime of closed military educational institutions, the very study in which acquired the character of the estate privilege of the nobility, contributed to the replacement of the spirit of vocation with the spirit of privilege, the study of military affairs was inhibited by external training, by the tradition of the Nikolaev era. In most cases, the military school does not provide the officers with the threads to tie to themselves and militarily educate the multi-tribal and multilingual mass of the army, and the only means of turning a recruit into a soldier is a semi-convict barracks regime, which kills in the rank and file the sense of initiative and conscious free enthusiasm necessary in modern warfare. … Wholly for the most part, depending on service earnings, officers cannot prevent the superstructure of the higher military bureaucracy over them, strong ties, patronage, means, which dispose of the army's affairs in an autocratic and irresponsible manner, much to the detriment of its combat ability."
Proceeding from this, very little was involved in the development of the cultural level of the private, except, of course, the guards regiments. The officer corps, contrary to the tradition in the Russian army, preferred to regard the soldiers as "soldiers" and "masses". This situation was associated with the policy pursued by the state in relation to the peasantry (for example, the "law on cook's children"), and she completely ignored the fact that in the era of the 2nd industrial revolution the teacher wins the war. This includes the most disciplined part of the army - the Cossacks. Such a level of education and culture, or, rather, its absence, including elementary self-discipline, led to a lack of conscious army discipline, the ability to obey when necessary, forced the command during the First World War to use physical measures contrary to the rules established by law, which he later recalled. G. K. Zhukov. General AA Brusilov ordered to issue 50 rods to recruits who have lost part of their military property. All this gave the generals the right to call their soldiers a “low-cultured mass” (A. I. Denikin). Semyonovets Guardsman Yu. V. Makarov wrote:
“There was little order in the old tsarist army in the war. The discipline was weak. And the soldiers, and especially the officers, sometimes did things with impunity for which a military court and an almost inevitable execution were relied on in other European armies."
The ideological preparation for war in the USSR and its complete absence or imitation cannot be compared in any way, as the same A. I. Denikin regrettably reports in Russia on the eve of the First World War. And we are not talking about the "fooling of the masses by the communists" (an expression worthy of Goebbels and his followers), but about the deliberate ideological work of the Communist Party, confirmed by the real achievements of the USSR, when even children fought against foreign invaders.
In this regard, an extremely important factor, and for victory, the key factor, in any war in world history, was and remains the factor "what we are fighting for": no one fought for an abstract homeland, fought for a homeland in which one can live freely, have some goods, etc., etc., that is, the material factor. This was a big difference between the "material justification" in 1914 and in 1941. In the first case, there was a need to bear huge sacrifices because of the "mythical" straits or for Serbia to annex Dalmatia, and Paris again became a place of burning money by Russian revelers. As the soldiers at the front said: a German will not reach my Tambov anyway.
In the second case, for the bulk of the population (this was especially true of young people, that is, conscripts), progress in the USSR compared with pre-revolutionary Russia was obvious. It was not some point and extremely rare "social elevators" that operated, but "social escalators", when the children of an illiterate peasant received free primary education, entered all universities of the country for free, a popular, mass medicine was created, culture and mass applied physical education developed with giant steps and sports, and much, much, much that the peasant could not even imagine in 1914. What to talk about when the overwhelming majority of the marshals and generals of victory came from the very bottom! We do not want to idealize the situation on this issue before the Great Patriotic War, we have many facts of a different nature, but the progress was serious and absolute. Such, first of all, social, and then economic progress was positively impossible within the framework of the state system of the last period of the Russian Empire.
