The History of the West. Through the Eyes of Bears and Balalaikas. Konstantin Khait

      ISBN 978-5-0065-7588-2

      Created with Ridero smart publishing system

      Preface (boring, but short)

      This book was written under the significant influence of another work – George Macaulay Trevelyan’s1 “A Social History of England,” where the author attempted to move away from detailed descriptions of political events and historical figures in favor of a deep analysis of the transformation of social relations. After all, what does a traditional history textbook represent? Kings, wars, revolutions, and again kings. Dates, dates, dates. Names and again dates. Which are impossible to remember and behind which the understanding of what really happened in the world at that time is erased.

      You can’t completely get rid of kings and wars, after all, they were the ones who determined the course of the historical process, creating this or that reality over many centuries. And yet, in my deep conviction, the main thing is not the names and events; they are merely hooks, markers that allow us to tie together the chronological sequence of facts, but rather the changes that occurred in a particular historical era.

      At first, I wanted to take a specific time period, for example, the mid-19th century or the early 16th century, and examine it in detail. But such an approach turned out to be practically impossible: every fact or trend has causes and consequences, without the analysis of which the fact itself is merely a meaningless line. Therefore, it was necessary to dig deeper and wider so that the events would at least hint at the interconnections that in reality permeate the entire socio-political process, regardless of the era.

      There is very little specificity in this book, and the facts are mostly placed in the footnotes, of which there are, on the contrary, an enormous amount. This is done intentionally. Surely much of what is told is already familiar to the reader, and much else cannot be briefly stated. For any event and historical figure in our time, there is a huge layer, or as they say, corpus of materials that are not difficult to find. The task of this text is different: to provide a general overview of what has happened with Western civilization over the last five centuries, to sketch the general outline of events, and to provide enough information so that the reader can delve into the study of those details that seem interesting to them.

      Introduction. How to and How Not to Study History

      The study of history is not the study of facts; facts in themselves have no value: all these events – wars, uprisings, discoveries, and catastrophes – have already occurred, and knowing their details, exact dates, and sequences does not enrich human experience or allow for the systematization of data and drawing conclusions, which is the essence of any science. The study of history is the understanding of the logic of the historical process, the interconnection of events, causes, consequences, and relationships between people, nations, and states. It is generalization, the search for patterns, and ultimately an attempt to use accumulated knowledge for forecasting. We study the past not out of idle curiosity but solely for the ability to predict the future.

      The study of history has several adversaries: the incompleteness of sources, often irreplaceable, since not all decisions, actions, and events are documented, and not all documents survive to the present day. Often, when researching a particular historical period, personality, or phenomenon, a historian is forced to rely not on primary sources, but on material already processed by someone else – memoirs, retellings, quotes that often appear many years or even centuries later. Often, one has to turn to the works of predecessors: articles, monographs, translations – hopefully, they are created competently and impartially. However, the incompleteness of sources provokes or, if you will, forces one to fill in the missing parts: cause-and-effect relationships, the logic of the actors, customs, and even events. A theory built on such conjectures serves as a basis for further research, and after some time, it becomes impossible to understand which events and processes actually took place and which are only assumed with varying degrees of justification. Such “the conjecturing of facts” is inevitable for obtaining a complete theory from incomplete data, but a conscientious historian must always be aware of which of their statements have a reliable evidential nature and which are derived through reasoning. And they must disclose the sources of their conclusions as fully as possible.

      An even more complex adversary is the politicization of history, the attempt to replace the study of actual phenomena with the proof of one’s own point of view. Like any “fit to answer,” this approach has nothing to do with either science or knowledge, being a form of propaganda, and from a researcher’s perspective, falsification. And no matter how good the intentions, they cannot justify this falsification – it’s impossible to draw correct conclusions from deliberately false arguments invented. Interpretations can form logical chains, but these chains do not correspond to what actually existed. Whether we like it or not, in history, as in any science, there is no concept of good and evil, good and bad; there is truth, that is, everything that actually took place, and falsehood, that is, everything that did not actually occur.

      But the most significant enemy of studying history is the anachronism of thinking. We, people of our time, interpret past events through the prism of our own ethics, experiences, knowledge, and culture. We think as the people of the 21st century, who have launched spaceships into the sky, built nuclear power plants, and established, in a significant part of the world, the principles of humanism and some form of democracy. But people of the past, even the recent past, let alone the distant past, thought differently. They had different experiences, different knowledge, different values for their own and others’ lives, and different motivators. It is very difficult, almost impossible, to understand not only a 10th-century Viking, whose short life consisted of drinking, fighting, and rowing, but even a soldier of the First World War, ready to give his life for the personal interests of the Austrian, Prussian, or Russian emperor, who had almost no connection to this soldier. For us, inhabitants of countries where people are more or less equal, at least in words, it is hard to reconcile with the fact that for most of human history, such equality was by no means considered the norm. Gender equality, racial equality, social class equality, the honor of labor, the value of art – all these things seem obvious to us, but in past eras, they could be perceived, be regarded as absurd, blasphemous, and even criminal. And if we want to understand the logic of the historical process and draw justified, practically applicable conclusions from it, we first need to think, or at least try to think, as the people of the studied era did, living by their ethics, morals, stereotypes, and ideas, even if from our current perspective they seem ridiculous and immoral.

      Who won and who lost the Second World War

      Absurd question. Everyone knows that the anti-Hitler coalition won the war, and Germany and Japan lost. This is well-known, and there are surrender acts from 1945 about it.

      Alright. Let’s put the question differently. Who won and who lost as a result of the Second World War? And although these questions are equivalent, in the new formulation, the answer is not at all obvious. Especially if we look at it not from the standpoint of 1945, but from the height of what we know now.

      And we know a lot. Firstly, calling the “anti-Hitler coalition” the winner of the war would be at least bold: at the time of the war’s end, the relations among the allies were in some cases worse than with the enemy. So much so that American General Patton seriously contemplated a march on Moscow, and the Soviet General Staff was developing a plan to capture Europe up to the Atlantic. And as soon as the smoke cleared, the former brothers in arms immediately clashed with each other – initially little by little in West Berlin2, then all.

      The conflict in Korea3 and then practically everywhere else. The inevitability of this was understood even before