The history of any modern nation is like the skin of a zebra - dark stripes alternate with light ones, almost all of them accumulate more dark ones in total. The dark period for the “bosses” is not always the same for the people and vice versa, although they are often inseparable. A dark period in the history of one nation may chronologically coincide with a bright period in the history of a neighboring one. The surviving nations are the result of a rather ruthless Darwinian selection.

Nicholas Roerich. The city is being built

Almost any history course is a “history of the authorities” - pharaohs, sultans, kings, emperors, generals, nobility, their campaigns, battles and other fascinating events. Novels have been written about them, we admire them (which have nothing in common with the prototypes) on screens. There are much fewer studies of the “history of the people”, of ordinary people, although, of course, there are some.

Much depended on where one or another people found their territory. Some were luckier - they found themselves under the protection of difficult natural boundaries (ideally the sea), while others, instead of such boundaries, got powerful neighbors nearby. Let's look at the map of the settlement of peoples in past centuries and think: where did the Medes, Kushans, Hittites, Umbrians, Thracians, Phrygians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Tocharians, Pelasgians, Etruscans, Picts, Prussians, Khazars, Orchons, Olmecs, Mayans go? This list is huge. But most of them had their own states, sometimes powerful and extensive. But they disappeared, their population dissolved into other ethnic groups, and in some cases was simply exterminated - genocide was a common occurrence in ancient times. Some states were ruined by changes in natural conditions. The surviving nations are the result of a rather ruthless Darwinian selection. No one had a sweet share.

States were born at a time when there were no “generally recognized international norms”, no one had heard of “human rights” or “minority rights”. The birth of almost all known nations was accompanied by atrocities, now forgotten or glorified. It is striking that the more limited the territory for which the struggle was, the more terrible the past of such places. The ancient history of the areas adjacent to the Eastern Mediterranean especially shines with this - read the Old Testament. It happened there that one people ate another - by no means in a figurative sense (Numbers, XIV, 7-9).

Western Europe is also not far behind, whose history is a chain of hecatombs that Europeans try not to remember. The calmness of medieval and later sources telling about the total extermination of the inhabitants of cities and entire regions captured during countless wars is striking, and the composure with which contemporary artists depicted all kinds of fanaticism is amazing. Let's remember Durer and Cranach, let's remember Jacques Callot's engravings with garlands and clusters of people hanging on trees.

The lot of Asia was no sweeter - just remember the “wars of the kingdoms”, which more than once reduced the population of China significantly. Such horrors as a mountain of twenty thousand severed Turkish heads in front of the tent of the Persian Shah Abbas in 1603, or baskets of torn out human eyes as evidence of a victory, are quite typical of countless Asian mutual exterminations. Their hidden reasons were the same as those that plagued Europe: overpopulation and limited territory. Having studied hundreds of wars, the famous Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin showed in his book “Hunger as a Factor” that “ no matter what labels are applied to the motives of the war" Ultimately, they are fought for survival, for food resources. The participants and even the instigators of these wars do not always realize this. Exceptions in the form of purely dynastic wars are rare against this background.

Different worlds

To what extent did Russia share the harsh fate of Europeans and Asians? The answer will be surprising to some: to a relatively small extent. We learned from childhood that our ancestors “waged continuous defensive wars, defending their independence.” They did, of course. However, they can only be called continuous if all border skirmishes are taken into account. A country without clear natural boundaries could not help but be attacked, but the Russian land as a collection of principalities was rarely and rarely in close proximity to the lands of powerful and aggressive neighbors. Simply put, the invaders still had to get to it. That is why Rus'-Russia has known quite long, by world standards, periods of calm and stability. Judging by the chronicles, more people died from civil strife (the same dynastic wars) than from “attacks” (a very old word) of an external enemy - before the appearance of the Horde, of course. Everything is relative. We have passed the cup that most nations have suffered.

A small young people who settled in the wooded and uncompressed expanses of the far end of the then ecumene - although in a fertile land, but far from the seas and from centers of civilizations that had existed for thousands of years - avoided many troubles and dangers. True, he had no chance of rising. The fact that this happened is an advance to history. Perhaps it has not yet been fully worked out by us. There were very difficult periods in the fate of our country, but how could we do without them? But Rus'-Russia not only rose, it knew quite long, by world standards, periods of calm and stability (like the “Great Silence” during the reign of four princes in a row - Ivan Kalita, Simeon the Proud, Ivan the Red and the first years of Dmitry Donskoy).

The region chosen was amazingly successful. In addition, at least the first two centuries of Russian written history and several centuries of pre-literate history were warm. Until the end of the 10th century, there were no severe winters or severe droughts, and crop failures were rare (K. S. Losev. Climate: yesterday, today... and tomorrow? - L., 1985). The combination of a relatively sparse population and the biological wealth of nature greatly diversified the food supply. Throughout almost our entire history, fish, mushrooms and berries have been incredibly cheap, from the point of view of foreigners. The endless forests were teeming with animals and birds. As Nikolai Kostomarov emphasizes in the book “Home Life and Morals of the Great Russian People,” hunting in Russia, unlike Western European countries, was not a privilege of the upper classes; even the simplest people indulged in it.

We were relatively lucky with our neighbors. Attempts to attack Rus' from the west did not have serious consequences in the Middle Ages, since they were repelled. The northern newcomers, the Varangians (even if we accept the “Norman theory”), quickly disappeared into the Slavic environment: Rurik’s grandson already bears the name Svyatoslav. For comparison: the Normans conquered Britain in the 11th century, but until the 15th century the court and nobility spoke French not only among themselves, but even with the people - the French language of “ordinances” (decrees).

There was no mortal enmity with Volga-Kama Bulgaria in the east, although mutual campaigns took place. But alliances were also made. The south was truly dangerous. But the peoples "southern underbelly" The Rus (Obras, Cumans, Pechenegs, Khazars, Torques, Berendeys and others) did not develop an onslaught so powerful as to threaten its very existence. Not only that: they constantly became allies of the Russian princes. Having decided to finally remove the problem of the threat of the steppes, Andrei Bogolyubsky, who had lost interest in Kyiv, in 1157 made the city of Vladimir the de facto capital of Rus'. It would hardly have occurred to the Grand Duke then that in 80 years an evil Horde would come from the depths of Asia, against which Rus' would not be able to resist. The first Great Calamity came to our fatherland, thus, a full four centuries after the beginning of our written history.

These initial centuries, of course, cannot be called blissful. Pestilence and famine occurred, civil strife did not subside, but in terms of ferocity they were far from equal to the European wars. For there, during the same period, several conquests of Italy took place, Frederick Barbarossa destroyed Milan, the Arabs conquered Spain, and the Spaniards began the Reconquista, the Hungarians devastated Central Europe for almost a century, the Crusaders ravaged and plundered Constantinople and a significant part of Byzantium, duchies and principalities passed from hand in hand, the Inquisition arose. In 1209, the burning of the city of Beziers (out of seven thousand inhabitants not a single one survived) began the Albigensian Wars, which lasted half a century, during which half the population of southern France was slaughtered. And to make the general situation clearer, here’s a detail: at the beginning of the 13th century there were 19 thousand (!) leper colonies in Europe. There was no treatment in them, they were locked there. The ferocity of diseases should not be surprising: there were no baths in Europe at that time.

Does this mean that the ancestors of the modern peoples of Europe were, in comparison with ours, too pugnacious, cruel, and unclean? Of course not. It’s just that the number of people in Europe (modest by today’s standards) constantly exceeded the ability to feed them. At any given moment, part of the population was starving, it came to the point of eating the dead dug out of their graves, homeless people roamed everywhere, and the knights lived by robbery. War, uprising, and unrest were always preceded by a crop failure. Hundreds of thousands of believers would not have rushed to the first Crusade if it had not been for seven consecutive years of famine before it. Why did the Catholic Church prohibit baths? It was announced that it was to suppress debauchery, but in fact, because a shortage of water was a widespread phenomenon, especially in cities.

Now let’s imagine the then Rus' and its outskirts (in those days they said “Ukraine”), especially North-Eastern Rus'. She was surrounded by dense forests. It was possible to delve further and further into them, to settle along countless rivers. A wooden dwelling was erected in a new location within a week. With such an abundance of forest, who would waste time and energy on a stone one, so that it would later hold it in place like an anchor? For Europeans, the scope for internal colonization was limited, and by the 18th century it had dried up. However, they not only exterminated each other, but also figured out how to increase yields, showed business resourcefulness, laying the foundations for intensive farming. The forest was not very accessible; they were built from stone, which means they were built to last for centuries. Flaws turned into driving forces.

The invasion of Batu (1237–1241) and the long Horde yoke became the first truly severe blow for Rus'. Many cities, whose names are known from chronicles, have disappeared, and archaeologists argue about their former location. The scale of regression is evidenced by the fact that complex crafts disappear for a long time, and stone construction ceases for many decades. Rus' paid tribute to the conquerors (“exit”). They did not keep garrisons in Rus', but undertook punitive campaigns against the obstinate princes. At the same time, the Horde stopped the princely feuds for a long time, and even when they resumed, they no longer reached their previous scope. As L.N. Gumilyov showed, although Rus' was a tributary, it did not lose its independence, entering into relations with its neighbors at its own discretion, and tribute to the Horde was at the same time a payment for protection. Under this protection, the process of consolidation of Russian lands began. This was facilitated by the church being freed from tribute.

With the strengthening of the Moscow principality, Horde oppression weakens. Prince (1325–40) Ivan Kalita achieved the right to collect “exit” from all Russian principalities, which greatly enriched Moscow. The orders of the khans of the Golden Horde, not backed up by military force, were no longer carried out by the Russian princes. The Moscow prince (1359–89) Dmitry Donskoy did not recognize the khan's labels issued to his rivals and annexed the Grand Duchy of Vladimir by force. In 1378, he defeated the punitive army of the Horde on the Vozha River, and two years later he won a victory on the Kulikovo field over Khan Mamai, who was supported by Genoa, Lithuania and the Ryazan principality.

In 1382, Rus' was again briefly forced to recognize the power of the Horde, but the son of Dmitry Donskoy, Vasily, entered the “great reign” in 1389 without the khan’s label. Under him, dependence on the Horde began to be nominal, although symbolic tribute was paid. However, this tribute, as S.A. Nefedov showed, was small from the very beginning; the famous “tithe” was spread over 7–8 years. The new onslaught of Khan Edigei (1408) cost Rus' dearly, but he did not take Moscow. During a dozen subsequent campaigns, the Horde ravaged the outskirts of Rus', but were unable to restore the previous order. And there the Horde itself split into several khanates.

Which direction were the people running?

Much is unclear about the “Horde period” of our history. Genealogical books are replete with entries like: “The Chelishchevs - from Wilhelm (the great-grandson of the Elector of Luneburg), who arrived in Rus' in 1237”; “The Ogarevs are a noble family, from Murza Kutlu-Mamet, who left the Horde in 1241 to join Alexander Nevsky”; “The Khvostovs - from Margrave Bassavola from Prussia, who left in 1267 to visit the Grand Duke of Moscow Daniil”; “Elagins - from Vicentius, “from the Tsar’s nobility,” who arrived in 1340 from Rome to Moscow, to Prince Simeon the Proud”; “The Myachkovs - from Olbug, “a relative of the Tsar of Tevriz”, who went to Dmitry Donskoy in 1369” and so on. That is, during the time of the “yoke” (L.N. Gumilyov put this word in quotation marks), foreigners went to serve the princes of seemingly conquered Rus'! And every sixth one is from the Horde.

A word from historian Alexander Yanov: “Moscow emerged from under the yoke as a country in many ways more advanced than its Western neighbors. This “heiress of the Golden Horde” was the first in Europe to put on the agenda the main issue of the late Middle Ages - church reformation... The Moscow Grand Duke, like the monarchs of Denmark, Sweden and England, patronized heretical reformers: they all needed to take away lands from monasteries. But unlike the monarchs of the West, Ivan III did not persecute those who opposed this! Tolerance flourished in his kingdom.”

Be in Moscow "ferocious garrison state"(you can also read this), would people from outside strive to join it? Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the end of the 15th century. was in its prime, but they fled from it, risking their lives, to Moscow. Who demanded the extradition of the “departures”, who called them traitors (“zradtsy”)? Lithuanian princes. And who defended the human right to choose their country of residence? Muscovites. “Moscow stood firmly for civil rights!- writes Yanov. - Since the fugitive did not commit mischief, did not escape from a criminal court or from debts, for her he is a political emigrant. She insisted on principle and even with liberal pathos on the right of personal choice.”.

Demographic regulators

The periods of prosperity mentioned above were disrupted by “plagues” and crop failures, but less often than in Western Europe, where, due to constant overpopulation and terrible hygiene, genuine demographic catastrophes occurred - such as the “Black Death” of the 14th century. Because of it, England and France even had to interrupt their Hundred Years' War (which they fought with bulldog tenacity among themselves for not even a hundred, but 116 years). France lost a third of its population from the plague, England and Italy - up to half, and the losses of other countries were approximately equally severe. Historians state that the great plague, having emerged from China and India and traveled throughout Western and Central Europe to the most remote places, stopped “somewhere in Poland.” Not “somewhere”, but on the border of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (whose population consisted of 90% Russians, for which reason it is also called Lithuanian Rus), i.e. on the border of the distribution of the bathhouse.

The “Black Death,” which had already subsided, broke out in 1357 in Rus', but the scale of the disaster was incomparable to what its Western neighbors experienced. And later, even the most severe plagues in our history, especially in 1603, 1655 and 1770, did not cause severe demographic damage for the country. The Swedish diplomat Petrei Erlesund noted in his work on the “Muscovite State” that the “pestilence” more often appears on its borders than in the internal regions. According to the English doctor Samuel Collins, who lived in Russia for nine years, when a “pestilence” appeared in Smolensk in 1655, “everyone was amazed, especially since no one remembered anything like this”. Leprosy was rare in Rus'.

Moscow (like other cities in Russia) was a large village, but this means, Klyuchevsky reminds, that, as it should be in a Russian village, “each house had an extensive courtyard (with a bathhouse - A.G.) and a garden” and its inhabitants did not know a lack of water, for there were wells in the courtyards. How much water could ordinary people consume in the cities of Europe, where public wells, before the advent of running water in the 19th century, were only available in some areas (in addition, corpses of cats and rats were always caught from these wells)?

Some hecatombs of European history seem inexplicable. The pinnacle of the Renaissance is the wars of Cesare Borgia. Just one episode: on his orders, 7 thousand residents of the city of Capua were killed right on the streets. During the Thirty Years' War, Germany was practically depopulated, and Cromwell's massacre of Ireland cost the lives of most Irish people. No less terrible were the atrocities of the Spaniards in the Netherlands and the Swedes in Poland. In the Vendée, brave revolutionaries killed between 400 thousand and a million people. And so on.

The answer is that both in the Middle Ages and in modern times, the path to survival for most countries of the world often lay in a simple reduction in the number of eaters. This happened, of course, as part of the fight against enemies - external and internal, real and imagined. When the English “virgin queen” Elizabeth I (next to whom Ivan the Terrible is a meek child) executed 89 thousand of her subjects - this was, among other things, her way of combating overpopulation. Maybe not even fully conscious.

It sounds blasphemous, but having once again gotten rid of some part of its inhabitants - thanks to war or epidemic - Europe made an economic, technological and cultural breakthrough. Labor became more expensive, which encouraged innovation and invention, and per capita consumption increased. Only moneylenders and landlords were in poverty. But even while developing productive forces and trade, Europe gained “weight” extremely slowly - apparently, constantly being at the limit of its capacity. From the time of the Roman Emperor Augustus, when approximately 26 million people lived in what is now Western Europe, until the end of the 15th century, that is, in 1500 years, its population barely doubled, reaching the figure of 50 million (approximately). According to the calculations of the demographer V.I. Pokrovsky, at the end of the 15th century, in all of Russia at that time (at the same time the word “Russia” appeared in the form “Rusia”) there lived a little more than two million people, six times less than in France.

The next time the population of Europe doubled in just two hundred years, by the end of the 17th century. But in Russia, over the same two centuries, the population grew six or seven times, reaching 13–14 million. True, not only due to natural growth. According to historian M. G. Khudyakov’s (perhaps overstated) estimate, the annexation of the vast - much larger than modern Tatarstan - Kazan Khanate increased the number of inhabitants of the nascent empire by more than two million people. The conquest of the sparsely populated Astrakhan and Siberian khanates had almost no effect on the picture, which cannot be said about those approximately 700 thousand people led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky who became subjects of Russia in 1654. This figure is reliable, because the oath was taken to the Russian Tsar "to all the Russian people of Little Rus'", or rather, by all heads of families, Cossacks and non-Cossacks; a total of 127 thousand men swore the oath. According to historians, this gives, together with household members, 700 thousand souls. If we talk about the population of Russia within the borders of the late 15th century (that is, without Kazan and Little Russia), it has grown at least fourfold over these two centuries, to approximately 9 million.

“Many live to a ripe old age without ever experiencing any illness.”

Let me remind you, we are talking about the times when in all countries without exception, the overwhelming majority of the population were peasants, women gave birth to as many children as God would send, and growth was limited (in addition to hunger, epidemics and wars) by infant mortality, overwork, illness, and drunkenness. , poor hygiene, stress, the general heaviness of life. If today rapid population growth characterizes the most disadvantaged countries, then the opposite was true. The Russian indicator, which is remarkably high compared to the rest of Europe, speaks of the comparative well-being of the people.

Croatian Yuri Krizhanich, who lived in Russia during the time of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich for 17 years and saw a significant part of the Moscow state from its western borders to Tobolsk, condemned - what do you think? - extravagance of the Russian commoner: “Even people of the lowest class line entire hats and entire fur coats with sables... and what can be more absurd than the fact that even black people and peasants wear shirts embroidered with gold and pearls?” Krizhanich demanded “to prohibit ordinary people from using silk, gold yarn and expensive scarlet fabrics, so that the boyar class would be different from ordinary people. For it is not fitting for an insignificant scribe to wear the same dress as a noble boyar... Such disgrace cannot be found anywhere in Europe.”.

In Europe, where firewood was sold by weight and furs were available to few, ordinary people suffered much more from the cold in winter than in Russia, where winters were harsher, but furs and firewood were easily available. With all possible (and legal) reservations, the quality of life of the common people of Rus'-Russia, at least before the Industrial Revolution, was higher than in Western countries. For people who were lively and needy, there were more opportunities to escape, albeit at risk to themselves, from the clutches of social control. The presence of such outlets led to the gradual settlement of “Ukrainian” lands around the core of the Russian state. But, for example, for the British - the inhabitants of the island, driven to extremes by “fencing” and “bloody laws” - such an opportunity first opened up only in the 17th century, with the beginning of the settlement of the colonies.

And also about “quality of life”. I will give three quotes from the notes of foreigners relating to the reigns of Fyodor Ioannovich, Boris Godunov and Alexei Mikhailovich about the Russians: “They go two or three times a week to the bathhouse, which serves them instead of any medicine” (Giles Fletcher); “Many of the Russians live to be 80, 100, 120 years old and only in old age are they familiar with diseases”(Jacob Margeret); “Many [Russians] live to a ripe old age without ever experiencing any illness. There you can see seventy-year-olds who have retained all their strength, with such strength in their muscular arms that the work they can endure is beyond the strength of our young people.”(Augustin Meyerberg).

Such an integral way of assessing the past is also possible - I don’t know if it has occurred to anyone before. The fact that Chinese cuisine recognized almost everything as edible, even insect larvae, speaks very clearly: in this country they starved a lot and for a long time. The same applies to French cuisine. Only solid experience of hungry years could force one to find something attractive in frogs, snails, rotten eggs, rotten meat, and cheese mold. There is nothing similar in Russian cuisine. During the famine they ate, as everywhere else, all sorts of things, but not for long enough (the most severe and longest famine in our history was in 1601–1603) to get used to it. Sturgeon caviar - black caviar! - Russian Pomors did not consider them edible. They fed it to pigs for centuries, until some European guests who came in the 16th century. to the White Sea (according to another version, clerks transferred for service from Astrakhan) did not open the eyes of our northerners. And even after that, for another two hundred years they only prepared caviar for sale to foreign merchants, but they themselves disdained eating it.

Women's rights and happy childhood

Much of what was considered indisputable in our country does not stand up to the first test. These are the myths about the “Potemkin villages”, about St. Petersburg built “on bones”. Another wonderful myth goes like this: before Peter the Great, there was a woman in Rus' "trapped in a chamber". Historian N.L. Pushkareva studied the scope of women’s rights in the 10th–15th centuries. for the ownership and disposal of property, for the acquisition and sale of land property, for the opportunity to defend their interests in court. It turned out that the wife could be a guardian - a thing unthinkable in those days in Europe. She was ranked among the first rank of heirs, and the husband who survived his wife found himself in a worse position than she: he could only manage her property, but not own it. The wife herself, unlike her husband, chose who to pass on her inheritance to. Even an illegitimate wife could claim an inheritance. Having studied the laws on land ownership, Pushkareva showed that already in Ancient Rus' a woman could carry out almost any transaction even without the participation of her husband. For damage to a woman, the laws required the perpetrator to be punished more severely than for similar crimes against a man. Quote: “there is no reason to talk about prison hermits... the opinion about the inferiority of women in comparison with the social status of men is nothing more than a myth that appeared in the era of the emergence of capitalism”.

In Russian literature, memories of childhood are almost entirely happy, and we find this natural: how could it be otherwise? But, for example, one of the main themes of English literature is the theme of unhappy childhood. This phenomenon has been noted by many, it is striking, it reflects something. Hazing and other nightmares of dormitory life in English books about pupils of closed schools, Byron's painful childhood, Churchill's painful childhood, Dickens' "Oliver Twist", Maugham's "The Burden of Human Passions". Not to mention Evelyn Waugh. When there are no exceptions, a dozen or two examples are enough. What novels, biographies and memoirs have in common is the lack of warmth in the family. The book “Those Strange Englishmen” says: “For English children, childhood is a period that must be passed as quickly as possible.”. If literature is a mirror of life, we have the right to conclude that the Russian family has historically developed a more successful model of relationships.

Vasily Surikov. Taking the snow town

An important feature of Russian life has long been the abundance of holidays, church and folk. Of course, not all saints and events of the New Testament were celebrated, otherwise there would not have been a single working day left. For peasants and other common people (except for factory workers), folk holidays like Ivan Kupala, Semik, Krasnaya Gorka, Rusalnaya Week, and Vesnyanka added a lot of leisure time. The authorities and the church sought to reduce the number of officially holidays, “non-present” days, but this did not affect the peasants in any way.

The love of leisure and entertainment in Rus' is clearly expressed throughout its entire written history. The description given by N.I. Kostomarov of how the inhabitants of Pskov had fun more than five hundred years ago, in 1505, seems strangely familiar: “The whole city was rising; men, women, young and old, dressed up and gathered for the game... began, as a contemporary put it, with legs jumping, spines wobbling... a lot of seductive things happened about the rapprochement of young people of both sexes.”

Folk games (remember Nekrasov’s: “in the game the horse will not catch her”?) and entertainment was often intricate; preparations for them took time. In the Kostroma province, “in large estates on Cheese Sunday a congress of several hundred gathers (! - A.G.) horses" with riders dressed in straw caftans and caps. The game “capturing a snow town” depicted by Surikov was very difficult (the rider broke through to the snow fortress through obstacles) and required a lot of preparation.

The quality of life is greatly influenced by how people spend their leisure time and how they communicate. Russia’s contribution to the world “leisure technology” is significant: it was here that such a socio-cultural phenomenon as dacha life was born about three hundred years ago. The dacha is a Russian invention that is now being adopted (or reinvented) by the rest of the world.

“The majority of Russian subjects live better than the overwhelming majority of the population in France, Germany, Sweden”

It is impossible not to touch upon one erroneous statement, picked up by hundreds of publicists. Researcher of the agrarian history of Russia L.V. Milov, in his work “The Great Russian Plowman” (1998), made an attempt to determine the labor costs of the Russian peasant of the 18th–19th centuries. Having received, due to some methodological error, absolutely incredible (see: B.N. Mironov. Social history of Russia, 3rd ed. T. 2 - St. Petersburg, 2003. P. 364) figures - two to four times higher in comparison with the data of zemstvo statisticians, he made many conclusions based on them that went far beyond the scope of the topic of his book. Milov claims, among other things, that for several centuries the nutrition of the vast majority of the Russian people was 30–50% below the physiological norm. Be it so, Russian people “would simply have died out rather than colonize or conquer 21 million km² of territory.” Speaking about primitive agriculture, the insignificant volume of the total surplus product, the life of 90 percent of the population on the brink of survival and other consequences of the supposedly worthless nature of Russia, L. V. Milov does not explain how a powerful state could arise on such a basis.

Without a doubt, it arose and existed on a completely different basis. Vasily Ivanovich Semevsky (1848–1916), historian of the populist movement, author of major works “The Peasant Question in Russia in the 18th and First Half of the 19th Century” and “Peasants during the Reign of Empress Catherine II”, is beyond suspicion of varnishing the past, so there is no reason question his conclusion that the welfare of Russian peasants in the second half of the 18th century (Milov also studies mainly the same period) was higher than that of German and Polish peasants and was hardly inferior to French ones.

“The majority of Russian citizens live better than the overwhelming majority of the population in France, Germany, Sweden and some other countries. This can be said about all classes."- this is the conclusion of the Englishman William Tooke (1744–1820), the author of a two-volume study about the Russia of that time, published in 1799 in London.

Honoré de Balzac, based on personal observations, wrote in 1847: “The Russian peasant is a hundred times happier than the twenty million who make up the French people.” But we must not forget that the happy peasants whom Balzac observed worked to satisfy the basic needs of the family - and no further. As B. N. Mironov emphasizes, the peasant saw the purpose of life “in the salvation of the soul, in simply following tradition, in the reproduction of established forms of life. He rarely attempted to expand his economy, as the bourgeoisie usually does, striving for maximum profit.”

“The earnings of Russian workers were among the highest in the world”

This “subsistential” ethics (“everything beyond what is necessary is superfluous”) has been overcome since ancient times by the very course of things, but extremely slowly. It was probably ideal for the people of the Golden Age, of which the historical consciousness of all peoples retains vague memories. The countries of Western Europe, squeezed by their geography, moved away from this ethics long ago, thereby accelerating the processes of their development. The inevitable departure from it in Russia was accelerated by the “great reforms” of Alexander II and the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. The norm, when the majority of the country's residents are content with the minimum acceptable level and do not strive for more, when needs follow income and do not precede them, when hard work, although included in the list of virtues, but rather closes it, gradually ceased to be the only possible one. Overcoming this norm, generating inflated expectations, unfortunately, reduces the number of happy people.

The mechanisms of equalization, historically inherent in the peasant environment, retained their inertia in the urban environment. Far from being an apologist for pre-revolutionary Russia, Soviet academician S. G. Strumilin (Essays on the economic history of Russia. - M., 1960, pp. 122-123) could not escape the conclusion that, taking into account lower prices (almost three times compared to American ) for food, essential goods and rental housing, “Russian workers' earnings were among the highest in the world, second only to American workers' earnings.”. Russian workers lagged behind in this indicator by only 15 percent. “The real [in terms of purchasing power] level of wages in Russian industry was ahead of the level of wages in England, Germany, and France.” Although, if we calculate at the bank rate, a Russian worker received 2–4 times less per hour of labor than his counterpart in England or the USA.

The Russian worker had " a larger number of weekends and holidays than in other countries... Before the revolution itself, the length of the working year in Russia averaged about 250 days in industry. In Europe, these figures were completely different - about 300 working days a year, and in England - even 310 days.". Let us add: in Austria-Hungary it was 312. The length of the working week in Russia in 1913 was lower than in France: 57.6 and 60 hours, respectively.

The almost threefold lower level of Russian prices compared to American prices was associated not only with a lower level of purchasing power, as is often interpreted, but also with almost universal Russian moderation, generated by a subsistence ethic. First of all, with lower profit margins. Under the conditions of capitalist development, this could not last too long. But for how long, we will never know.

By 1917, the departure from the subsistence model in the minds of the Russian population was apparently not even half complete. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain how the Bolsheviks managed to impose a system of forced property quasi-equality on the population of the USSR for several decades. At the same time, any development was directively directed from above (sometimes irreversibly distorted in the process), and self-development was put in the way. Nowadays, all this has been irrevocably eliminated, and naive nostalgia about this on the Internet, although not harmless, is completely fruitless.

Despite all the contradictory nature of the picture, one cannot help but admit: for most of its history, Russia was a much more suitable place for the happiness of the common man than Western Europe, but someone appointed us Russians to be unhappy, and for all centuries of our history, and many of us They almost believed it. Our ancestors were unhappy for not that long; there is immeasurably more white in our “zebra” of history. Maybe because of this, according to some law of compensation, we suffered so badly - like perhaps no one else - in the 20th century? But we will not discuss the twentieth century here. How to evaluate it, everyone decided for themselves long ago.

The main thing is different. We have lived through this century and survived. We were helped by the happiness gene embedded in us over the centuries. We are in our beautiful country, there is a lot of exciting work ahead.

Olga Naumova

Sometimes, when you see what is happening around you, you feel despair. For what? - we sadly ask ourselves. - Was it really impossible to be born at some more decent time? Have there ever been such “decent”, calm, prosperous times in Russian history? And what do you order us, living today, to do?

First of all, let’s define what “today” is. Where, on what part of Russia’s historical path are we located? (That is, we immediately postulate that we have this historical path.)

From the school course on our native history, most of us learned a terrible mixture of great personalities, uprisings and stages of enslavement of the peasantry (no one really understood who was enslaving them and why, but everyone was very sympathetic).

I remember how, while preparing for the entrance exams to the university, I crammed a chronological table: I walked around the room and, occasionally looking at the textbook, loudly and monotonously listed the dates. At the same time, I appealed to my dog, who looked sympathetically, but occasionally fell asleep, which completely drove me crazy. The use of various mnemonic techniques did not help: the dates did not want to stay in my head and kept trying to pop out.

From all this I learned one lesson, not very original, but vital: what you don’t understand, what you don’t see the meaning and at least some logic in, you can’t wrap your head around.

So is there logic in our history, is there any meaning in what happened once and in what is happening now?

Cycles

Traditionally, three large periods are distinguished in the history of Russia: Kievan Rus, the Muscovite Kingdom and the Russian Empire. They really differ from each other in all respects. The times closer to us go under the code name “new history” and “modern history” (I have always wondered what will happen next - “the newest”? Or will it remain “the newest” forever? Or will there be no more history?). Thus, we separate ourselves almost like a stone fence from the entire previous Russia and look at the life of our ancestors as a historical monument - instructive, but fossilized.

And everything would be fine, but suspicious coincidences of some historical collisions are alarming: periodically Rus' is fragmented, then united again, periodically the capital moves, periodically there is a flourishing, and then a decline... Stalin is compared with Ivan the Terrible, the collapse of the USSR - with feudal fragmentation. .. But this just sounds like a metaphor, nothing more.

There are essentially two approaches to history: linear and cyclical. We have already rejected the linear one as being out of our minds. And cycles, in fact, are the subject of our conversation.

Any cycle consists of three phases: birth - flourishing - extinction. In relation to history cycles, this scheme should be slightly expanded.

Stage 0. Even before birth there is a necessity for this birth. Something is already knocking from above, wants to come true, but this “something” still needs to be caught.

Stage 1. Preparation. In order for “something” to descend, you need to prepare a place for it - “build a nest.”

Stage 2. "Spiritualization". Despite the “primacy of matter” that is ingrained in our heads, the spirit is still primary. This is the most beautiful stage: the “conscience of the people” is born, sometimes reflected in some person, image, symbol.

Stage 3. Bloom. Territorial expansion. A splash of culture. International authority.

Stage 4. Spiritual breakdown, extinction. Accompanied by historical cataclysms.

Stage 5, also known as 0. The need for the next round. Not just the very bottom, but even the “bottom of the bottom.” Cataclysms are growing. This cannot continue forever, and in the depths of decline a new birth is already beginning to mature.

Kievan Rus

The principle is clear, now let's return to Russian history. Let's start with the 9th century. There was a story before this, of course, but there is no completely reliable evidence about this time.

Stage 0. Until the end of the 9th century, more precisely until 882, the future Rus' was a huge territory equal to Western Europe and inhabited by tribes of the Eastern Slavs. Remember? - glades, Drevlyans, northerners, Dregovichi, Ilmen Slovenians, etc. For the sake of fairness, it must be said right away that these same “tribes” (the word itself evokes an association with something wild, primitive) were, in fact, not tribes, but large alliances of tribes, even “unions of unions,” and in terms of population and territory were comparable to solid European states. But no matter how numerous and powerful these tribes were, they were scattered, and their lands were looked at with appetite by much stronger neighbors: the Byzantine Empire,

Khazar Khaganate, northerners-Vikings. Consolidation of forces was required...

Stage 1. ...Which is what the legendary Prophetic Oleg accomplished. In the already mentioned 882, he, an ally or relative of the no less legendary Rurik, descended from Upper Rus' (Novgorod, Ladoga) along the Dnieper, captured Kyiv by cunning and made it the capital of the newborn state that united the North and South. Future historians will call it Kievan Rus. And “having nailed a shield to the gates of Constantinople,” Oleg neutralized his dangerous neighbor - Byzantium. (In another 90 years, Svyatoslav would defeat the invincible Khazaria.)

Stage 2. But the created “nest” was not enough. The newly united tribes remained disparate units. The power of the state cannot glue things together. What was required was a single core, a spiritual basis, an ideology in the highest sense of the word. Usually the acquisition of this spiritual foundation by the young Russian state is associated with the adoption of Christianity in 988, under Prince Vladimir. However, we should not forget about our other source - pre-Christian culture (for some reason, some abusive name for it “pagan” is more common). Cosmic consciousness, merging with Nature and worship of the elements, expressed in the images of Slavic deities, was “balanced” by the Christian ideal, the ideal of love and sacrifice. This determined the spiritual essence of the still young people for many centuries.

And one more name: Princess Olga. She was our first Christian ruler, she spread the civilizing impulse in the northern lands, she established relations with the Western powers... But this is not why she remained in history. Her name is surrounded by a halo of legends, many of which are very similar to myths. And it seems that it was she who gave the young state that elusive thing called soul.

Stage 3. The heyday of Kievan Rus is traditionally associated with Yaroslav the Wise (11th century). The state grows and strengthens, the capital - Kyiv - increases many times and receives a new sacred center - the Church of Hagia Sophia. The first monasteries and libraries were founded, the first books and icons were written, the first doctors appeared, and newly founded schools developed. The first written law is drawn up - “Russian Truth”. With the help of dynastic marriages, Rus' became related to all of Europe and became an important element of international politics.

Stage 4. The breakdown occurred in the 12th century, when, under the pressure of nomads and internal strife, the center weakened, and each principality began to live its own life, sometimes fighting for a place in the sun with its own Russian brothers. Even the capital of the state moved - to the Zalessk lands (north-eastern Rus'), to Vladimir-on-Klyazma.

However, the notorious “feudal fragmentation,” usually painted in black terms, had one major positive side: the principalities had the opportunity to find themselves, grow and strengthen. Beautiful temples of the 12th century have survived to our time, scattered like pearls across Rus'. They are no longer as huge and majestic as before (to match a single, powerful state), but more comfortable and subtle. Their unsurpassed peak is the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl in Vladimir.

The swan song of Kievan Rus is the reign of Vladimir Monomakh. He was the only prince who, with his indisputable authority, could reconcile and unite the warring parties.

Stage 5 The invasion of the Horde brought the line under strife and rivalry. It was still possible to do something, to fight back, but, alas, the motto of that time was “every man for himself.” And Kievan Rus, the strongest state of its time, went... no, not into oblivion, but into legends and epics, in the memory of the Russian people.

But amid the chaos, discord and destruction, a figure rises who, many centuries later, will inspire hope and show how a person can act even in the most inhuman conditions. Alexander Nevsky was a great commander who never knew defeat. Having become related to the khan, he could lead a calm and comfortable existence. But he chose at the cost of his own independence, his own life and even, as many believe, his own honor to protect and shield his native land from a terrible enemy.

Moscow kingdom

This, as you probably guess, is not the end of Russian history. The historical mission of the people, whatever it may be, can hardly be fulfilled in such a short period - just over four hundred years. This means we need a new round, a new chance.

Stage 0 - see previous. The country is in ruins - physically, morally, and spiritually.

Stage 1. Revival requires a new center. We owe much of the subsequent Moscow history to Daniil (the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky) and his son Ivan Kalita. Having inherited an ordinary and, strictly speaking, microscopic principality, they put it on a par with the largest and strongest. Already in the middle of the 14th century, Moscow disputed the right to a great reign. At the same time, the head of the Russian church, the Metropolitan, moved to Moscow.

Stage 2. And again we are convinced that force and money cannot be united. The stage of “spiritualization” of the young Moscow state is often called the era of the Battle of Kulikovo. This was the time of Dmitry Donskoy and Metropolitan Alexy, Theophan the Greek and Andrei Rublev. But the real teacher of the Russian people for many centuries - and until today - was Sergius of Radonezh. And the symbol of the Trinity showed the path to Light, Love and Harmony.

Stage 3. Having found a center, Rus' is experiencing a new flourishing. Under Ivan III and his son Vasily III, the capital was built again (the current Moscow Kremlin is a memory of those times, the end of the 15th - beginning of the 16th centuries), and culture flourished. Europe discovers a powerful state in the far East, in “Tatary”, and is in a hurry to establish relations with it. After the fall of Byzantium, Russia becomes the head of the Orthodox world, proclaiming: “Moscow is the third Rome.” Ivan III for the first time in Russian history calls himself a tsar, that is, “Caesar.”

03/07/2017 | Valery Vyzhutovich

When was life good in Rus'?

Now, under Vladimir Putin, life in Russia is better than at any time in the last 100 years. This answer was given by almost a third of Russians, 32%, when answering the Levada Center question: “When was life better in Russia?” The study was conducted for the 100th anniversary of the February Revolution, and the countdown of “best eras” offered to respondents to choose from began in 1917. In this historical range, “silver” went to the Brezhnev era (29%), “bronze” was shared by the pre-revolutionary era and the Stalin era (6% each).

People still have different assessments of the February Revolution, which put an end to the Russian monarchy. The dynamics of sentiment can be seen here. Thus, 13 percent (4 more than in 1997) of respondents believe that “the collapse of the monarchy was a progressive step in the development of the country”, 21 percent (4 less than in 1997) - that it “led Russia to the path loss of their national and state greatness,” 23 percent (versus 18 in 1997) - that “the positive and negative consequences of the collapse of the monarchy compensate for each other.” The share of those who are sure that “the February Revolution was a stage on the way to the Great October Socialist Revolution, which created the world’s first state of workers and peasants” increased by 5 percent (from 27 to 32). The number of those who believe: “The February revolution weakened Russia, which led to the October coup and the collapse of the country,” decreased by 5 percent (from 24 to 19). And the number of people who believe that “the February revolution, if not for the subsequent October coup, would have led Russia onto the path of progress and democracy, and our country would now be among the most developed countries in the world” fell by 2 percent (from 13 to 11) .

Such surveys are conducted regularly and almost never bring sensations. Society’s attitude towards certain events of the past, citizens’ assessment of Russian rulers of various eras are always determined by modern realities. Two years ago, the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) similarly asked representatives of the population when, from their point of view, there was more democracy in the country. 27 percent of citizens said that Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term is the most democratic period in Russian history. Another 12 percent expressed the belief that the most democracy in the country was during Vladimir Putin's two previous terms (from 2000 to 2008). The next most popular answer is “there was most democracy under Leonid Brezhnev” (8 percent).

Brezhnev's second place in the ranking of the most respected rulers of Russia by the masses may surprise some. The commitment to the ideals of freedom and democracy attributed to this leader also raises questions. But it’s probably not worth seriously finding out why Brezhnev, in the opinion of a significant part of society, meets the standards of a democratic ruler. Because our citizens do not have a clear idea of ​​these standards. According to the same FOM survey, democracy is important for 62 percent of Russians, 16 percent do not attach importance to it, and 20 percent found it difficult to determine the most important value for the country. For 43 percent of respondents, democracy is “openness, freedom of speech and opinion,” “freedom of choice,” and “respect for human rights,” and 12 percent believe that democracy is “the participation of the people in governing the country.” The rest of the respondents were unable to define the meaning of the word “democracy”. When asked whether there is enough democracy in Russia today, a third of respondents answered that there is “as much as needed”, 22 percent - that there is “not enough”, there is “no openness and freedom of speech” in the country, more than 10 percent - that there is “too much democracy” a lot,” “everything is permitted, and everyone does what they want.” Another 33 percent found it difficult to say whether there is enough democracy in Russia. In short, it is not possible to fully understand what exactly the Russian population understands by democracy and how much it is necessary for them. Leading FOM analyst Grigory Kertman believes that the majority gives a “socially approved answer” that is not backed by “Russians’ deep commitment to democratic values”: “People value the right to vote. But for most of them, elections are only a form of dialogue with the authorities, and not a change in them.”

In reality, democracy has nothing to do with it. Estimating at what times there was more of it, citizens subconsciously gave an answer to another question: which of the named Russian leaders do you like most? And Putin’s primacy with this high credit of trust in this case is completely understandable. With Brezhnev it’s different. There's nostalgia here. Longing for the times when most of our compatriots lived, as it seems to them, better than now. In general, democracy for the Russian average person is something good, although not very clear. Most likely - a synonym for a more or less tolerable life. Memories of such a life, interrupted first by perestroika, then even more harshly by the “dashing nineties,” warm the minds of many people and bring into the top three those political leaders who ensured the former general prosperity. But the fact is that these are false memories. Memories of what didn't happen. For example, sausages for 2 rubles. 20 kopecks, in someone’s nostalgic opinion, was a lot, which means there was democracy at that time; eat it or not. That in those days there was no more sausage than democracy was somehow forgotten.

The peculiarity of false memories is that idealized ideas about yesterday’s life, when “the lines were shorter,” “ice cream tastes better,” “girls are more chaste,” are transferred to the entire political system. In this case - in Soviet. Its idealization comes from both above and below. The state (with the help of the media) and citizens (through nostalgic sighs and exclamations), each for their part, are creating a “happy past” - in return for a “happy future” that was promised but never came.

People evaluate past figures not by historical standards, but through the prism of today's hopes, disappointments and fears. The era of the nineties rolled through the destinies of millions. Those who survive do not look back with a feeling of irreparable loss. Those who are unable to adapt to new realities seek support in false memories. Unfortunately, the latter are still the majority.

  – political commentator

An ordinary yard in the city of Tomsk. Around the Khrushchev building, somewhere in the distance, shabby wooden architecture is hidden in the poplars. Two young women share a clothesline. They act silently and harmoniously, without entering into territorial conflicts. Pensioners are sitting on a bench near a flowerbed. A Caucasian boy passes by with a stack of leaflets “I’ll rent an apartment” and pastes an advertisement on the iron door of the entrance.

- Don't sculpt! Don't put it on the door! - shouts the granny with the stick. - I'm cleaning this door!

-Where should I glue it? - The boy is not going to give up right away.

- Don’t sculpt here! Go there - sculpt!

It is in such courtyards that a hymn to a simple and measured life is created. There are no events happening here - it's just a housing issue.

We are going to visit the ordinary Frolov family. There are billboards all over the city shouting about the May innovation forum Innovus - Tomsk's answer to the Skolkovo project. It’s June, and the billboards are still standing, broadcasting that the issues of the future are in the past.

Vova

The head of a young family, Vladimir, meets us near the new high-rise building. He is 28 years old, his wife Nastya is 22. Vladimir makes a sarcastic remark about the Lada Priora in which we arrived. The same sheets and duvet covers hang around, as if they were quickly dragged here from the previous yard.

The Frolovs' story began with love and continued with a mortgage. Vladimir and Nastya came to Tomsk from regional villages to enter universities: Vladimir - to the polytechnic, Nastya - to the pedagogical one. Vladimir graduated and ended up at the Tomsk Electromechanical Plant (TEMZ). One day I met Nastya, who needed help with drawings. Helped. We got married. Son Seryozha was born.

Actually, after college, Vladimir chose between three factories. Not to say that the conditions were very different - he would have to start with a salary of about 10 thousand rubles everywhere. Therefore, he focused on objective (where salaries are not delayed) and subjective (whose business is more promising, where managers are better) indicators. I chose electromechanical. And now he himself constantly communicates with students, looking for personnel for the plant. The problem is described simply:

— Enterprises select good guys in advance throughout the country; specifically, Tomsk gets only those heads and hands that want to stay here.

The main problem is the low start. Ten thousand rubles is not a lot of money for Tomsk. Naturally, Vladimir stayed here not only out of a great love for wooden architecture. As a promising employee, the plant offered him a mortgage. The term is 25 years. Vladimir pays off the loan himself, and the company pays interest. In principle, it’s convenient. True, there is a nuance - an additional agreement, which states that in the event of dismissal before the completion of mortgage payments, the employee must return the amount of this paid interest to the company. So the future of the Frolov family is predetermined.

— Do you feel like you were deceived? - I ask Vladimir.

- No. From the employer's point of view, everything is quite logical. If there were no such condition, there would be many people willing to purchase an apartment with the help of the plant. But the plant is not a charitable organization. He minimizes his own risks.

— Is that how everyone buys an apartment there?

— This agreement is signed only with promising ones.

- What are the others doing?

- They're filming. Or they are looking for other options.

— Did you have others?

The one-room apartment of the Frolov family is located in a new building on the banks of the Tom River. This is the third year Vladimir has been renovating it. The wallpaper in the room has just been hung. Now the hallway, bathroom and room are ready. Next up is the kitchen. There is practically no furniture, only the bare necessities: a crib, a computer desk and a sofa. The tea table has to be pulled out of the kitchen.

- Why don’t you hire a team of repairmen? Expensive?

“It’s not about money, you can accumulate it.” — Vladimir speaks as if he had been rehearsing the answer to this question for a long time. — The problem is that we have nowhere to escape from the apartment during the renovation. Parents in the village, relatives in Tomsk live in the same conditions as us.

Labor productivity and wages
A specialist of Vladimir Frolov’s level in Europe would receive at least twice as much. And with a salary of 50 thousand rubles instead of 25 and the same level of consumption, he could have paid off the rent in just over three years - and at the moment when we talked to him, he would already be a free man.
Low wages are a consequence of low labor productivity: in Russia they are approximately four times lower than in the United States. This does not mean at all that Volodya and his colleagues work four times worse than the conditional John at an electromechanical plant near Detroit. The problem is with old equipment: on machines from the 30s-60s of the last century it is difficult to work at the same speed and produce the same quality product.
To be convinced of this, you don’t need to travel to the USA - just walk around the workshop of the Volodin plant, where in one corner a worker sharpens parts for subway fans on an antediluvian Samara-made machine, and in the other he loads blanks into a Korean milling machine, which turns them in 3D -models.
However, not everything is so bad: both at TEMZ, where Volodya Frolov works, and in Russia as a whole, fixed assets are gradually being updated. As a result, our labor productivity has increased by almost a third over the past 10 years. But still, three quarters of the machines are over 15 years old. They can only be updated with the help of large investments: on average, each machine for which Volodya goes on business trips to Germany costs 300-500 thousand euros.
The state understands that there is no other way, other than a complete update of the technical base of production, to increase labor productivity, and subsequently the salaries of specialists. Therefore, it takes various measures - sometimes quite chaotic, but persistent - both at the federal and regional levels. Thus, Tomsk enterprises receive subsidies from the regional budget to pay interest rates on loans taken out for the purchase of new equipment, that is, they themselves actually become participants in a scheme similar to the Frolovs’ factory-subsidized mortgage. Specifically, TEMZ, where Vladimir works, received such subsidies and tax breaks for 400 million rubles.
In addition, as Vladimir told us, the plant participated in a competition in which the most technologically advanced enterprises can receive 200 million rubles from the federal center for new machines. “We didn’t win, but next year we’ll apply again. We really need this money,” he told us with gloomy determination: with this amount the plant will be able to purchase 20 more new machines.
Another way to modernize factories could be the participation of foreign companies. A year ago, specifically for this purpose, the government reduced the list of strategic enterprises to which access to foreign capital was denied by five times. Of course, many foreigners are afraid to invest in Russia because of the insecurity of the rights of owners, but the president, in pursuit of foreign capital, recently put forward a new initiative. At the upcoming St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Dmitry Medvedev will officially open the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The essence of the idea is that the state will select the most promising projects and invest in them in half with foreign companies, thereby protecting them from corruption and obstacles put up by local officials.

— Do you feel confident in the future?

- No. Theoretically, orders at the plant could be reduced at any time,” says Vladimir. “If the guys who run our state do something weird somewhere, our plant will immediately have problems.” This means that I will have problems too.

- What does it take for you to be sure?

- A salary of thirty-eight thousand is enough for confidence. If in our state,” Vladimir continues to argue, “there was a reorientation of industry under , then everything would be fine. For example, I travel to Germany for work. They basically try to work in all German. I am sure that the key to a good future in Russia is patriotism. - But you yourself recently laughed at a domestic car and go to Germany to buy machine tools...

— So, first of all, manufacturers should have patriotism: they are obliged to do everything with high quality. The state must be a patriot of its country. “He doesn’t feel caught at his word at all.” — Necessary , loans for enterprises should be more accessible, and Russian goods should have priority in the market.

Russian machine tool industry
Our factories today are indeed very dependent on imports: 87% of new machines installed are not made in Russia. And in value terms, according to estimates from the Stankoimport association, the share of Russian machine tools on the market is only 1%. That is, modern and expensive equipment is bought abroad, cheap equipment is bought at home.
The government has been trying to update Russian factories, and at the same time rid them of excessive dependence on foreign suppliers, since 2002 - then the first federal target program “National Technological Base” for 2002-2006 was adopted. 10 billion rubles were allocated for it. Four years later, the project of exactly the same program, but already for 2007-2011, had to admit that not all goals were achieved “due to insufficient funding.” And 50 billion rubles have already been allocated for the purchase of new high-tech equipment.
The concept of the third, not yet adopted program for the renewal of Russian industry - already until 2016 - allocates from 100 to 300 billion rubles for these purposes.
At the same time, the effect of already adopted programs is not obvious. The current one, for example, states that government spending - those same 50 billion - will return to the budget in excess in the form of an additional 70.8 billion rubles in taxes paid. But it is impossible to find reports on the real impact of these injections on the state of Russian industry.
Prime Minister Putin, not limiting himself to existing programs, recently said at a meeting with machine tool manufacturers that another federal target program will be adopted - “Development of domestic mechanical engineering and tool industry” for 2011-2016 - and that already this year a billion rubles will be spent on it . And the Ministry of Economic Development came up with the idea of ​​introducing innovations into industry through “technological platforms” - conglomerates of organizations that form a single cycle: from invention (scientific and educational institutions) to production (factories). So far, 27 such platforms have been selected, but how much money will be allocated for them is still unclear.
In the meantime, thanks to state support, our factories will learn to produce competitive products and leave at least part of the money for upgrading production in Russia and not abroad, the state is not going to give up direct protectionist measures.
This can be seen in the example of the same TEMZ. During the crisis, in 2008, the plant survived largely thanks to protectionism. In addition to oil valves and fans, it continues to produce what it specialized in during the Soviet era - jackhammers: due to the fact that these hammers are on the “protected” list, mines are “strongly recommended” to buy them from domestic manufacturers.
We ask Vladimir Frolov if they would have been able to compete if they had not been on this closed list. “No, of course, what can I talk about! The Chinese would immediately sweep us away. They have better quality and are cheaper. This is not surprising: they can organize the assembly in the open air, but in our winter in the workshop, no matter how hot it is, it’s 14 degrees - you have to work quickly, otherwise you’ll freeze.”

Financial system. Taxes, loans, inflation
It is quite possible that the majority of Russian enterprises would have managed without direct financial assistance from the state and protectionism if tax policy and loan rates had been more merciful to them. After all, why do TEMZ owners slowly update their machines? They cannot jump to a new level by taking out a large loan and replacing all outdated equipment: the loan is too expensive. But if there is no modern equipment, the products are less competitive, there are no “long contracts”, and the plant has fewer opportunities to obtain “long-term loans” at a more favorable interest rate. The circle closes.
Inflation is driven mainly by two factors: the increase in tariffs of natural monopolies (and one of its reasons is the same technological backwardness and, as a consequence, low efficiency) and an increase in government spending - it was not for nothing that Volodya Frolov complained that every increase in salaries for public sector employees is not for the better side affects their family budget. There is a third factor: competition in the domestic market is suppressed by weak business activity, and it is stifled by interest rates raised to fight inflation. Another vicious circle that the state is actually quite capable of breaking is by developing low-interest lending programs. Not for the population, but for producers of goods and services.
In addition, the fiscal measures taken by the state to increase pensions and salaries for public sector employees reduce the amount of free funds available to large enterprises. Unlike small businesses, which quickly hid “in the shadows” with an increase in social contributions to 34%, enterprises like TEMZ continue to pay exorbitant salaries, because they do not receive cash from their suppliers - oil companies and government agencies. Therefore, they can only reduce investments: this year 36% of machine-building enterprises have already done this. The government is discussing options for reducing social contributions for medium and small businesses, but TEMZ will not be affected by these benefits.

Vladimir’s patriotism, unlike the state’s, is described in absolutely real categories. He wants to stay in Tomsk and work for the benefit of his family and enterprise. A good life in his understanding is the opportunity to travel, have a house outside the city and have three children. He is still fulfilling his civic obligations: he has become a good specialist for the country, he is valued at the plant, he went to work in the production of Russian goods, and technologically innovative ones at that.

The only problem of this ordinary Russian citizen is the lack of a dream. More precisely, his dream came true in real estate. Within the framework in which he lives, it is impossible to fantasize and dream - otherwise everyday life will become unbearable, and he still needs to hold out for twenty-two years. Until the mortgage is paid off.

Nastya

The wife of an ordinary person, Nastya, does not interrupt her husband while he is talking, sits calmly next to her and waits for her turn to talk about a good life. Her ideas are not very different from Vladimir's. Only she would limit herself to two children.

- If you forget about the mortgage, then when will you live well?

- When Seryozha goes to kindergarten and I have the opportunity to get a job. “She, like her husband, answers general questions very quickly: an ordinary family has plenty of time to tell themselves what they want.

To begin with, Nastya would like to receive fifteen thousand rubles, but twenty is better. The future teacher is not going to go to school, due to the negative experience of working as a teacher in a kindergarten: Nastya experimented when she placed her son in a nursery, but two weeks later the boy fell ill and the experiment stopped.

The guys say: there was - they stood in line for some twelve thousand.

The quality of life. Social sphere
In our conversation with Vladimir and Nastya, it was felt that they were a new generation who were accustomed to solving their problems on their own, without relying on social security. Therefore, it was not possible to extract complaints from them about the state. Of course, they are annoyed by the healthcare system - in this they are in solidarity with the absolute majority of Russians: according to recent polls, 58% of the country's population are extremely dissatisfied with medical care.
“Seryozha had some kind of heart murmur,” Nastya told us, “and we rushed to the doctor. “Well, you can stand in line for a month and a half and get examined for free...” the doctor told us. We paid and had results the next day.
Moreover, even for the Frolovs’ modest budget, the doctor’s fee was relatively small - 500 rubles. What irritates me is not so much the corruption of the medical system as its complete unpredictability and lack of rules.
Another serious social problem affecting young Russian families is the lack of places in kindergartens: queues of tens of thousands of children are standing in many regions; in total, in Russia, according to the Ministry of Health and Social Development, about one and a half million children are waiting for a place in a kindergarten. The authorities seem to be stimulating the birth rate, but they do not have the appropriate infrastructure for arriving children: many kindergarten buildings have long been rented out for offices, and overly strict rules for registering child care institutions slow down the opening of private kindergartens or make them very expensive due to bribes to registration authorities .
In October 2010, however, new sanitary standards for preschool organizations were adopted, which somewhat simplified the life of private child care institutions and legalized the existence of home nurseries - this form, which requires the least investment, can partly save the situation.

A nanny is not their option, it’s an extra four thousand a month. A private kindergarten is even worse - fifteen. They even offered a bribe to move in line closer to the beginning, but no one took it. Vladimir asked the bosses to influence the situation - nothing came of it. As a result, somehow miraculously one day they were informed that there was a ticket to the garden. Most likely because two new ones were built in their area. The situation with kindergartens is generally interesting. The fact is that the Constitution guarantees us the right to school education, but kindergartens do not fit this definition. In essence, this is a personal problem for citizens.

Now Nastya can’t wait for autumn.

— Teachers are going to increase their salaries by thirty percent, are you sure you don’t want them?

“No, it’s not mine,” she insists. — I would like to go somewhere to the guardianship authorities.

Chicken cutlets are sizzling in the kitchen. Nastya jumps up and runs to save them.

“And in general, about thirty percent is terrible news,” Vladimir continues the conversation. - As soon as this happens, prices in stores will rise. And our twenty thousand family budget will decrease.

Nastya imagines another good life in the form of a trip to Sevastopol - her relatives are there. And then to Egypt - there are pyramids. Next is Thailand, because it’s warm and sea, Germany - Vladimir told a lot of good things about it. That's all, actually. In short, all this family needs for a good life is to stop being reclusive in their apartment: due to the fact that there is no one and nothing to leave the child at home with, they almost never go out.

“The cutlets were burnt,” Nastya returns with a guilty look.

“Nothing,” her husband reassures. - So, let's eat the burnt ones.

—Have you been to the restaurant recently?

“In September,” they answer in unison.

Nastya complains about her neighbors. They also have a housing problem: they are Uzbeks, several families moved into one apartment and live there. In principle, they are normal people, but in their huge ordinary Uzbek family there are too many children. And, of course, everyone speaks their native language. Seryozha sometimes gets scared when he finds himself among them on the street. He doesn't understand anything they say. Nastya is not against Uzbeks, but she would like there to be some centers for their adaptation to life in Russian cities. It would then be easier for newcomers with work, with education, and with neighbors as well. By the way, Nastya is not sure that her neighbors are Uzbeks. It may very well be Tajiks. She doesn’t care, as long as they don’t scare Seryozha.

Factory

To be honest, we didn’t really believe that Vladimir was happy with his work at the plant. It seemed that he plowed there from morning to evening at the machine, like a robot, and then returned home to repeat his life cycle. To some extent this is true, but everything turned out to be not so scary. Firstly, Vladimir works in the middle management level - between the office area and the workshop. Part of the working time he processes orders, sometimes he goes on business trips, but he can also stand at the machine. Secondly, “old equipment” is not all old. Part of the capacity has been replaced with German machines. The tool shop where they produce precision parts for oil pipelines is at least modern.

Next to the smoking room is a Soviet soda fountain.

- Everything for the people? — I nod at him.

- Yeah. By the way, water is free,” Vladimir declares with a touch of pride.

- With gas?

- Sometimes with gas.

It is not yet possible to replace all the old machines with new ones: the company does not earn that much. The main problem of the survival of such a business is the lack of long contracts. The plant is receiving short orders - they will fill it up for the near future. They make money mainly from air purifiers and automated control devices for oil pipelines. They also produce jackhammers. But you can't get much for them. The ideal development of the plant, from Vladimir’s point of view, is two or three long-term contracts with oil workers or builders of the Moscow metro. Then they would have healed no worse than the Germans.

— You are meeting ordinary German workers. How is their life different from yours?

“They have a distinctive feature - smiling,” Vladimir recalls the Germans.

- Why are they so smiling?

- They have confidence in the future. I don’t know for sure, but a German worker is socially packaged in full: swimming pool, gym, health insurance, house, car, and so on. This is an uncertain future for us. For example, they specifically make sure that a person does not overwork, so that he can rest on weekends. This is not a question of humanity. People are a resource in which money is invested.

- But you can threaten your employer with dismissal.

- First of all, we can’t. I have a mortgage. Those can go to another plant, but this does not guarantee them a better life.

Population mobility
Perhaps a better life for people like Vladimir Frolov would be guaranteed by moving to another city, to another production facility. Perhaps specialists of his level - fluent in English and versed in complex modern technology - are very much needed now, for example, in the Leningrad region, which is developing quite quickly. But he has no chance to move there and start earning more: he is tightly tied to Tomsk with his mortgage.
The lack of interregional mobility limits the distribution of labor in the most efficient way. In Russia, only six out of a thousand people move from region to region every year. In the US this figure is four times higher. As the rector of the Russian Economic School, Sergei Guriev, showed in his study, it is problems with real estate and administrative barriers (a young family, for example, in a new place has much less chance of sending their child to kindergarten without permanent registration) that drive Russian families into the “poverty trap” - when you need to leave, but there is nothing to go for.
After the crisis, the government adopted a program to promote labor migration: 800 million rubles were allocated to pay for the move and compensate for the cost of renting housing in a new location during the first three months. But so far only 9 thousand people have taken advantage of this program - in truly attractive regions you cannot rent housing for the money provided by the state.
Secondly, the employer is not against improving our lives, but for now it is not profitable. The problem is that the plant owners also have no confidence in the future, and social guarantees are long-term investments.

— What will happen to your mortgage if an accident happens to you at the factory?

“There is insurance for this,” here Vladimir for some reason becomes smiling, like the Germans, “so don’t worry about it.” If something happens, my mortgage will be paid by the insurance company.

Vladimir’s love for his plant is not an attempt at PR. Imagine a gambler who bet his entire life on zero. What can he do? Just believe.

Already on the way out he stops and says:

— To be honest, I was very lucky. Millions of people could envy me.

With the participation of Viktor Dyatlikovich, Maria Ishutina.

See also:

Much depended on where one or another people found their territory. Some were luckier - they found themselves protected by difficult natural boundaries (ideally the sea). Others, instead of such boundaries, got powerful neighbors nearby.

Take a look at the map of the settlement of peoples in past centuries and ask yourself: where did the Medes, Kushans, Hittites, Umbrians, Thracians, Phrygians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Tocharians, Pelasgians, Etruscans, Picts, Prussians, Khazars, Orchons, Olmecs, Mayans go? This list is huge. But most of them had their own states, sometimes powerful and extensive. But they disappeared, their population dissolved into other ethnic groups, and in some cases was simply exterminated - genocide was a common occurrence in ancient times. Some states were ruined by changes in natural conditions. The surviving nations are the result of a rather ruthless Darwinian selection. No one had a sweet fate.

The classical states that have survived to this day were born in a time when there were no “generally recognized international norms”, no one had heard of “human rights” or “minority rights”. The birth of almost every known nation was accompanied by countless atrocities, now forgotten or glorified. It is striking that the more limited the territory for which the struggle was, the more terrible the past of such places. The ancient history of the areas adjacent to the Eastern Mediterranean is especially rich in this - read the Old Testament. It happened there that one people ate another - not in a figurative sense (Book of Numbers, chapter 14, vv. 7-9).

Europe has also gone far, whose history is a chain of hecatombs that Europeans try not to remember. The calmness of medieval and later sources is striking, telling about the total extermination of the inhabitants of cities and entire regions captured during constant wars. The composure with which contemporary artists depicted all kinds of fanaticism is striking. Let's remember Durer and Cranach, let's remember Jacques Callot's engravings with garlands and clusters of people hanging on trees. We will return to Europe again.

The lot of Asia was no sweeter - take, for example, the “wars of the kingdoms”, which reduced the population of China significantly. Such horrors as a mountain of twenty thousand severed Turkish heads in front of the tent of the Persian Shah Abbas in 1603 or baskets of torn out human eyes as evidence of military victories are quite typical of Asian mutual exterminations. Their reasons were the same as those that tormented Europe: excess population, competition for resources and land.

Different worlds

To what extent did Russia share the harsh fate of Europeans and Asians? The answer will be surprising to many: to a relatively small extent. We learned from childhood that our ancestors “waged continuous defensive wars, defending their independence.” They did, of course. But they cannot be called continuous. A country without clear natural boundaries could not help but be attacked, but everything is learned by comparison. We have passed the cup that most nations have drunk.

A small young people who settled in the dense forests of the far end of the then ecumene - although in a fertile land, but terribly far from the centers of civilizations that had existed for thousands of years - avoided many troubles and dangers. True, he had no chance of rising. The fact that this happened is an advance of history that has not yet been fully worked out by us. There were, of course, difficult periods in the fate of our country, but what could we do without them? But Rus'-Russia knew periods of calm and stability that were amazingly long by world standards.

The region was chosen exceptionally well - the Russian Plain is unknown to earthquakes, typhoons, dust storms, there is an abundance of water, there is no sweltering heat or excessive frost. The word “dry wind” appeared in our language only when Russia advanced to the lower reaches of the Volga.

The combination of a relatively sparse population and the biological wealth of nature greatly diversified the food supply. Fish, mushrooms and berries throughout almost our entire history have been incredibly cheap, from the point of view of foreigners (the saying “cheaper than mushrooms” arose in the Russian environment itself). The endless forests were literally teeming with animals and birds, and therefore, to foreigners, Rus' seemed like a “huge menagerie.” As Nikolai Kostomarov emphasizes, hunting in Russia, unlike Western European countries, has never been a privilege of the upper classes; even the simplest people did it.

We were lucky with our neighbors too. Attempts to attack Rus' from the west in the Middle Ages did not have serious consequences. The northern newcomers, the Varangians (even if we accept the “Norman theory”), quickly disappeared into the Slavic environment: Rurik’s grandson already bears the name Svyatoslav. For comparison: the Normans conquered Britain in the 11th century, but until the 15th century the court and nobility spoke French not only among themselves, but even with the people - the French language of decrees.

There was also no mortal enmity with the Volga-Kama Bulgaria in the east, although mutual campaigns did take place. Only the south was truly dangerous. But the peoples of the “southern underbelly” of Rus' (Obras, Cumans, Pechenegs, Khazars, Torques, Berendeys and others) did not develop an onslaught so powerful as to threaten its very existence. Moreover, they constantly became allies of the Russian princes. Deciding to finally remove the problem of the threat of the steppes, Andrei Bogolyubsky moved the capital from Kyiv to Vladimir in 1157. It could not have occurred to the Grand Duke that in 80 years an evil Horde would come from the depths of Asia, against which Rus' would not be able to resist. The First Great Disaster, therefore, came to our fatherland four whole centuries after the beginning of our written history.

These initial centuries, of course, cannot be called blissful. Pestilence and famine occurred (but never widespread), bloody civil strife did not subside, but in terms of ferocity they were far from Europe. For there, during the same period, several conquests of Italy took place, Frederick Barbarossa destroyed Milan, the Arabs captured Spain, and the Spaniards began the Reconquista, the Hungarians devastated Central Europe for almost a century, the Crusaders ravaged and plundered Constantinople and a significant part of Byzantium, duchies and principalities passed from hand in hand, the Inquisition arose. In 1209, the burning of the city of Beziers (out of seven thousand inhabitants not a single one survived) began the Albigensian Wars, which lasted half a century, during which half the population of southern France was slaughtered. And, to make the general situation clearer, one more detail: at the beginning of the 13th century there were 19 thousand (!) leper colonies in Europe. There was no treatment in them, they were locked there. The rampant disease should not be surprising: there were no baths in Europe at that time.

Does this mean that the ancestors of the modern peoples of Europe were too pugnacious, cruel, and unclean in comparison with ours? Of course not. It’s just that the number of people in Europe (modest by today’s standards) constantly exceeded the ability to feed them. A significant part of the population was always starving, it even went so far as to eat the dead, homeless people roamed everywhere, and the knights lived by robbery. War, uprising, and unrest were always preceded by a crop failure. Hundreds of thousands of believers would not have rushed to the first crusade if it had not been for seven consecutive years of famine before it. Why did the church ban baths? Because water shortages were widespread.

Now let’s imagine the then Rus' and its outskirts (in those days they said “Ukraine”), especially the outskirts of North-Eastern Rus'. It was surrounded by dense forests. It was possible to delve further and further into them, to settle along countless rivers, where (to quote Georgy Fedotov) “it was easier to burn out and plow up a piece of no one’s neighboring forest than to fertilize an exhausted field.” There were, of course, clashes with Chud, Vod, Yam, Ugra, Meshchera, but, by and large, there was enough space for everyone.

A wooden dwelling was erected in a new location within a week. With such an abundance of forest, who would waste time and energy on a stone one, so that it would later hold it in place like an anchor? This is how our extensive psychology and ease of growth were born, which allowed the Russian ethnos to populate vast spaces. Any people, regardless of language and race, would behave in exactly the same way if they found themselves in this corner of the world, at the edge of an endless forest - fabulously rich, but not hostile, as in the tropics.

The Europeans, squeezed by their geography, had nowhere to go. However, they not only exterminated each other, but also figured out how to increase yields and showed ingenuity, laying the foundations for intensive farming. The forest was not very accessible; they were built from stone, which meant they would last for centuries.

Horde yoke

The invasion of Batu (1237-1241) and the long Horde yoke became the first truly severe blow for Rus'. Many cities, whose names are known from chronicles, have disappeared, and archaeologists argue about their former location. The scale of regression is evidenced by the fact that complex crafts disappear for a long time, and stone construction ceases for many decades. Rus' paid tribute to the conquerors (“exit”).

They did not keep garrisons here, but undertook punitive campaigns against the obstinate princes. At the same time, the Horde stopped the princely feuds for half a century, and even when they resumed, they no longer reached their previous scope. According to Lev Gumilev, although Rus' was a tributary, it did not lose its independence, entering into relations with its neighbors at its own discretion, and tribute to the Horde was payment for protection. Under this protection, the process of consolidation of Russian lands began. This was facilitated by the church, which was freed from tribute.

With the strengthening of the Moscow principality, Horde oppression weakens. Prince (1325-1340) Ivan Kalita achieved the right to collect “exit” from all Russian principalities, which greatly enriched Moscow. The orders of the khans of the Golden Horde, not backed up by military force, were no longer carried out by the Russian princes. The Moscow prince (1359-1389) Dmitry Donskoy did not recognize the khan's labels issued to his rivals and annexed the Grand Duchy of Vladimir by force. In 1378, he defeated the punitive Horde army on the Vozha River, and two years later he won a victory on the Kulikovo field over Khan Mamai, who was supported by Genoa, Lithuania and the Ryazan principality.

In 1382, Rus' was again briefly forced to recognize the power of the Horde, but the son of Dmitry Donskoy, Vasily, entered the great reign in 1389 without the khan's label. Under him, dependence on the Horde began to be nominal, although symbolic tribute was paid.

However, this tribute, as Russian historian Sergei Nefedov showed, was very small from the very beginning; the famous “tithe” was spread over seven to eight years. Khan Edigei's attempt to restore the previous order (1408) cost Rus' dearly, but he did not take Moscow. During a dozen subsequent campaigns, the Horde ravaged the outskirts of Rus', but did not achieve their main goal. And there the Horde itself split into several khanates.

Much is unclear about the “Horde period” of our history. Genealogical books are replete with entries like: “The Chelishchevs - from Wilhelm (the great-grandson of the Elector of Luneburg), who arrived in Rus' in 1237”; “The Ogarevs are a Russian noble family, from Murza Kutlu-Mamet, who left the Horde in 1241 to join Alexander Nevsky”; “The Khvostovs - from Margrave Bassavola from Prussia, who left in 1267 to visit the Grand Duke of Moscow Daniil”; “Elagins - from Vicentius, “from the Tsar’s nobility,” who arrived in 1340 from Rome to Moscow, to Prince Simeon the Proud”; “The Myachkovs are from Olbug, “a relative of the Tsar of Tevriz,” who went to Dmitry Donskoy in 1369.”

Researchers have different attitudes to the period of the XIV-XV centuries in Russian history. For some, this is the time of “gathering Russian lands”; for others, it is the era of the decline of veche democracy and “ancient liberties”, the time of the rise of authoritarian Moscow and the strangulation of the city-republics of Novgorod, Vyatka and Pskov. It was even customary to believe that post-Horde Rus' was a ferocious garrison state. But here is what historian Alexander Yanov, an expert on this era, writes: “Moscow emerged from under the yoke as a country in many ways more advanced than its Western neighbors. This “heiress of the Golden Horde” was the first in Europe to put on the agenda the main issue of the late Middle Ages, church reformation... The Moscow Grand Duke, like the monarchs of Denmark, Sweden and England, patronized heretical reformers: they all needed to take away lands from monasteries. But unlike the monarchs of the West, Ivan III did not persecute those who opposed this! Tolerance flourished in his kingdom.”

If Moscow were a “garrison state,” would people from outside flock to it? It would be like a mass exodus from Western countries to the USSR. Lithuania at the end of the 15th century was in its prime, but people fled from it, risking their lives, to Moscow. Who demanded the extradition of the “expatriates”, who – just like the Brezhnev authorities – called them traitors (“zradtsy”)? Lithuanians. And who defended the human right to choose their country of residence? Muscovites. “Moscow stood firmly for civil rights! – writes Yanov. – Since the fugitive did not commit any mischief, did not escape from a criminal court or from debts, he is a political emigrant for her. She insisted on principle and even with liberal pathos on the right of personal choice.”

"Holy Rus'"

The famous emigrant theologian Anton Kartashev argued that it was no coincidence that the Russian people called their country Holy Russia. “By all indications, this is a significant self-determination ... of grassroots, mass, spontaneous origin,” he wrote. “Not a single Christian nation has heeded the most essential call of the church, namely to holiness, the Divine attribute.” Only Russia “dared to use the super-proud epithet and gave its heart to this unearthly ideal.”

It's amazing if you think about it. Not “good old” (like England), not “beautiful” (like France), not “sweet” (like Italy), not “above all” (like Germany), but “holy”.

Many authors, including the famous philosopher, mathematician and Orthodox thinker Viktor Trostnikov, convincingly argue that between the 14th and 17th centuries this ideal was achieved, that “Holy Rus'”, which recognized faith and service to the Truth of God as its main cause and main difference from others peoples, was a spiritual and social reality.

This was the historical peak of Russian religiosity. Its bearers did not consider successes in the economic sphere or in competition with other states too important (unless it was a matter of saving fellow believers). “Service to the Truth of God,” although not entirely realized in reality, lived in the popular consciousness as an ideal, helping to convert the peoples of the Russian periphery to Orthodoxy.

If Europe took the baton of Christianity from the hands of the falling Western Roman Empire and, over ten or eleven centuries of self-development, came to the idea of ​​humanism, then Rus' remained under the spiritual patronage of the living and still powerful Eastern Roman Empire for almost five centuries. Humanism gave birth to the European Renaissance, hesychasm on Russian soil - the ethical and social ideal of holiness. Not seeing the real Byzantium with its shortcomings and vices, the Russians imagined Constantinople almost as the Kingdom of Heaven. Greek shepherds in Rus' supported this belief.

Rus' took to itself the First Epistle of the Apostle Paul, addressed to Christians living among the pagans: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people taken as an inheritance, in order to proclaim the perfections of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light; once not a people, but now the people of God; once they were not pardoned, but now they have been pardoned.”

Our ancestors perceived themselves as God's chosen people: Russian rulers on the pillars of the Archangel Cathedral are correlated with biblical kings; in the paintings of 1564-1565, the images of Russian princes continue the genealogy of Christ and the forefathers.

The above is directly related to our topic. If the reconstruction is correct, “Holy Rus'” was a country dominated by happy people, no matter rich or poor, most importantly, deeply religious and happy with their faith.

Its chronological framework and even geographical outlines are, of course, vague. Recalling that history never goes well for long, Trostnikov nevertheless assigns it three and a half centuries: from the time of Ivan Kalita to the beginning of Peter’s reforms. “Holy Rus'” could not be shaken by the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Time of Troubles, or even the Schism, because the cultural superstructure remained ideally consistent with its Orthodox basis. Correspondence was apparently achieved just in time for the 14th century.

“Elements of pagan culture were rethought,” explains Trostnikov. “Perun turned into Elijah the Prophet, Radonitsa on All Souls’ Day, and so on.” The new elements, borrowed from Byzantium, were assimilated so organically that this gives the right to talk about the “exceptional plastic talent of the Russian people.”

Although this idea will not appeal to those for whom the concept of “Holy Rus'” is a purely spiritual phenomenon, it is obvious that between Kalita and Peter in most of the territory of historical Russia the maximum population density (for the then level of development and use of natural resources) had not yet been reached. According to the calculations of demographer and statistician Vasily Pokrovsky, at the end of the 15th century, in all of what was then Russia (at the same time the word “Russia” appeared) there lived a little more than two million people, six times less than in France. For centuries, chronicles hardly record land conflicts in Vladimir-Suzdal and Moscow Rus'. Anatoly Gorsky, who studied this issue in depth, writes about the “expanse of land” that remained there.

Bathhouse against the plague

Harmony with the "encompassing landscape" promoted other types of harmony. Sometimes it was disrupted by “plagues” and crop failures.

True, not to the same extent as in Europe, where, due to constant overpopulation and problems with hygiene, genuine demographic catastrophes occurred - such as the “Black Death” of 1347-1353. Because of it, England and France even had to interrupt their Hundred Years' War (which they fought with each other with bulldog tenacity for not even a hundred, but 116 years). France lost a third of its population from the plague, England and Italy - up to half, and the losses of other countries were approximately equally severe. Historians state that the great plague, having emerged from China and India and traveled throughout Western and Central Europe, reaching the most remote places, stopped “somewhere in Poland.” Not “somewhere,” but on the border of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (whose population consisted of 90% Russians, for which reason it is also called Lithuanian Rus), that is, on the border of the distribution of the bathhouse. And even more precisely - at the intersection of the absence and presence of hygiene.

Echoes of the “Black Death” then affected some Russian cities visited by foreigners (primarily Novgorod), but the scale of the disaster for the Russians was incomparable with what their Western neighbors experienced. Even the most severe plagues in our history - especially in 1603, 1655 and 1770 - did not cause a demographic crisis for the country.

The Swedish diplomat Petrei Erlesund noted in his work on the Muscovite state that the “pestilence” more often appears on its borders than in the internal regions. According to the testimony of the English doctor Samuel Collins, who lived in Russia for nine years, when this same ulcer appeared in Smolensk in 1655, “everyone was amazed, especially since no one remembered anything like this.” Leprosy was rare in Rus'.

Moscow (like other cities in Russia) was a large village, but this means, reminds the famous historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, that, as it should be in a Russian village, “every house had an extensive courtyard (with a bathhouse) and a garden,” and its inhabitants did not They knew there was a shortage of water, for there were wells in the courtyards. How much water could ordinary people consume in the cities of Europe, where public wells, before the advent of running water in the 19th century, were only available in some areas (in addition, corpses of cats and rats were always caught from these wells)? May the defenders of ancient piety forgive me, but holiness is more natural to those who have a well and a bathhouse in their yard, even the poorest one.

Where was it more comfortable?

Why did wars not subside in Europe both in the Middle Ages and in modern times? Having studied hundreds of wars, the famous Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin published the conclusion back in 1922 that “no matter what labels are applied to the motives of war,” they are ultimately fought for survival, for food resources. Exceptions (for example, dynastic wars) against this background are rare. And very often the path to survival is simply reducing the number of eaters.

The pinnacle of the Renaissance is the wars of Cesare Borgia. Just one episode: on his orders, seven thousand residents of the city of Capua were killed right on the streets. The English virgin queen Elizabeth I (next to whom Ivan the Terrible is a meek child) executed 89 thousand of her subjects - and this was also a way to combat overpopulation.

During the Thirty Years' War, Germany was practically depopulated, and Cromwell's massacre of Ireland cost the lives of most Irish people. No less horrific were the atrocities of the Spaniards in the Netherlands and the Swedes in Poland. In the Vendée, brave revolutionaries killed between 400 thousand and a million people. And so on. True, in the movies all these events look very romantic.

No matter how blasphemous it sounds, but having once again gotten rid of a significant part of its population - thanks to war or epidemic - Europe made an economic, technological and cultural breakthrough. A labor market emerged, labor became more expensive, and this encouraged innovation and invention, and per capita consumption grew. Only moneylenders and landlords were in poverty.

But even while developing productive forces and trade, Europe gained weight extremely slowly. From the time of the Roman Emperor Augustus, when approximately 26 million people lived in what is now Western Europe, until the end of the 15th century (that is, in 1500 years), its population barely doubled. The next time it doubled in just 200 years, by the end of the 17th century.

In Russia, over the same two centuries, by the beginning of Peter’s reforms, the population reached 13-14 million, that is, it became six to seven times more numerous. True, this happened not only due to natural growth. According to historian Mikhail Khudyakov's (perhaps overstated) estimate, the annexation of the vast - much larger than modern Tatarstan - Kazan Khanate increased the number of inhabitants of the nascent empire by more than two million people. The conquest of the sparsely populated Astrakhan and Siberian khanates had almost no effect on the picture, which cannot be said about those approximately 700 thousand people led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky who became Russian subjects in 1654. This figure is reliable, since the oath to the Russian Tsar was taken by “the entire Russian people of Little Rus',” or rather, by all heads of families, Cossacks and non-Cossacks. In total, 127 thousand men swore the oath. Which gives, together with household members, 700 thousand souls. If we talk about the population of Russia within the borders of the late 15th century, then it has grown no less than fourfold over the mentioned two hundred years.

Since we are talking about times when in all countries, without exception, the overwhelming majority of the population were peasants, women gave birth to as many children as God would send, and growth limiters were (in addition to hunger, epidemics and wars) infant mortality, overwork, drunkenness, poor hygiene, stress, the general heaviness of life - this figure speaks volumes.

If today rapid population growth characterizes the most disadvantaged countries, then the opposite was true. This indicator, which is remarkably high compared to the rest of Europe, demonstrates the comparative well-being of the people.

I have already quoted in Expert (No. 44, 2005) Yuri Krizhanich, a Croat and Catholic, who lived with us during the time of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich for 17 years and saw a significant part of the then Russia, from its western borders to Tobolsk. He condemned the wastefulness of the Russian commoner: “Even people of the lower class line entire hats and entire fur coats with sables... and what could be more absurd than that even black people and peasants wear shirts embroidered with gold and pearls?” Krizhanich demanded “to prohibit ordinary people from using silk, gold yarn and expensive scarlet fabrics, so that the boyar class would be different from ordinary people. For it is not fitting for an insignificant scribe to wear the same dress as a noble boyar... Such disgrace cannot be found anywhere in Europe.” Poor people do not have the opportunity to be wasteful.

It's good to live in Russia

In Europe, where firewood was sold by weight and furs were available to few, ordinary people suffered much more from the cold in winter than in Russia, where winters were harsher, but fur and firewood were easily available. With all the reservations, the quality of life of ordinary people of Rus'-Russia, at least before the Industrial Revolution, was higher than in Western countries. For people who were lively and needy, there were more opportunities to escape, albeit at risk to themselves, from the clutches of social control.

The presence of such outlets led to the gradual settlement of “Ukrainian” lands around the core of the Russian state. But, for example, for the English people, driven to extremes by enclosures and “bloody laws,” such an opportunity first opened up only in the 17th century, with the beginning of the settlement of the colonies.

And also about the quality of life. I will give three quotes from the notes of foreigners relating to the reigns of Fyodor Ioannovich, Boris Godunov and Alexei Mikhailovich about the Russians: “They go two or three times a week to the bathhouse, which serves them instead of any medicine” (Giles Fletcher); “Many Russians live to be eighty, one hundred, one hundred and twenty years old and only in old age are they familiar with diseases” (Jacob Margeret); “Many [Russians] live to a ripe old age without ever experiencing any illness. There you can see seventy-year-olds who have retained all their strength, with such strength in their muscular arms that the work they can endure is beyond the strength of our young people” (Augustin Meyerberg).

There is no doubt about another integral way of assessing the past - I don’t know if anyone has written about this before. The fact that Chinese cuisine recognized almost everything as edible, even insect larvae, speaks very clearly: in this country they starved a lot and for a long time. The same applies to French cuisine. Only solid experience of hungry years could force one to find something attractive in frogs, snails, rotten eggs, rotten meat, and cheese mold. There is nothing similar in Russian cuisine. When we were hungry we ate all sorts of things, like everywhere else, but not for long enough to get used to it. Black caviar in Russia was fed to pigs for centuries until the French opened our eyes.

Another wonderful myth goes like this: before Peter the Great, a woman in Rus' was imprisoned in a mansion. Historian Natalya Pushkareva studied the scope of women's rights in the 10th-15th centuries to own and dispose of property, to acquire and sell land property, and to defend their interests in court. It turned out that the wife could be the guardian, which was absolutely unthinkable in those days in Europe. She was ranked among the first rank of heirs, and the husband who survived his wife found himself in a worse position than her - he could only manage her property, but not own it.

The wife herself, unlike her husband, chose who to pass on her inheritance to. Even an illegitimate wife could claim an inheritance. Having studied the laws on land ownership, Pushkareva showed that already in Ancient Rus' a woman could carry out almost any transaction even without the participation of her husband. For damage to a woman, the laws required the perpetrator to be punished more severely than for similar crimes against a man.

What Peter I abolished

During the reign of Peter, comparative prosperity was ended. Official history called him great, but the people’s memory had a different opinion: “Antichrist”, “replaced”, “world-eater, the whole world was eaten up”, “he ruined the peasants with their houses”, “he took everyone as soldiers”. Beginning with this monarch, the extreme tension of all the forces of the state for a hundred and fifty years literally squeezed the juices out of the tax-paying classes. Under Peter, everything that was politically promising in Russia in the 17th century was stopped. Before him, the country had a class-based and at the same time an elected representative body, and there were grassroots elected democratic institutions. We are talking about Zemsky Sobors and Zemstvo administration.

The councils of 57 convocations are reliably known (historians argue about the council of 1698, which condemned Queen Sophia). The direct analogue of councils, the French States General, was convened fewer times, but the French parliamentary tradition comes precisely from them, and it turns out that we have no parliamentary tradition. Meanwhile, the powers and functions of the councils were completely parliamentary. They resolved taxation issues; the most important legislative documents in the history of Russia of the 16th-17th centuries were adopted: the Code of Law of 1550, the “Sentence” of the Council of the First Militia of 1611, the Council Code of 1649, the “Conciliar Act” on the abolition of localism of 1682. The councils had the right of legislative initiative and resolved issues of church structure, internal administration, trade and industry.

In 1653, the cathedral decided to accept Hetman Khmelnitsky “with the entire Cossack army” under the royal hand. A positive answer meant an inevitable war with Poland and Crimea, and many participants in the council knew that they would have to take personal part in it. Moreover, this decision became possible thanks to the voices of the merchants; without their money, the enterprise would have been doomed - but the merchants, as one, volunteered to pay the costs. Not with “budget” money, with your own! But to the request for consent to start a war with the Turks for Azov (it required, according to estimates, 221 thousand rubles), the participants in the 1642 council answered so evasively that it was, in fact, a refusal.

Zemsky councils resolved the issues of electing a new king to the kingdom. In 1584, the cathedral elected Fyodor Ioannovich. The elected tsars were Boris Godunov, Vasily Shuisky, Mikhail Romanov. In 1682, young Ivan and Peter were chosen as co-tsars. Zemsky councils could remove the tsar from power; in 1610, Vasily Shuisky experienced this himself. During the “kinglessness”, it was the cathedral that assumed full supreme power in the country. After the Time of Troubles, councils were engaged in the “organization” of the state. If a foreigner came to Moscow from a country that had a representative body, he did not ask for an explanation of what the Zemsky Sobor was. For the Polish subject Philo Kmita, the Cathedral of 1580 is a Diet, the Englishman Jerome Horsey identifies the Cathedral of 1584 as a parliament, the Livonian nobleman Georg Brunno calls the Cathedral of 1613 the Riksdag, and the German Johann Gotgilf Fokkerodt comes to the conclusion that it was “a kind of Senate.”

Gerasim Dokhturov, the Russian envoy to England in 1646, sees the English parliament quite symmetrically: “They sit in two chambers; in one chamber sit the boyars, in the other – elected from the worldly people.” The English “boyars” that Dokhturov speaks of sat in the House of Lords.

The Russian equivalent of the House of Lords, the Duma, which had existed since the 10th century, was abolished by Peter. The idea that the boyars did nothing but bow to the kings came from bad literature. The Duma decisions ended not only with the formula “The Great Sovereign spoke, but the boyars sentenced.” They sometimes ended differently: “The great sovereign spoke, but the boyars did not sentence.” Controversial issues aroused “the outcry and noise were great and there were many speeches among the boyars.” Most decisions were made without the sovereign at all. Surprisingly, the Duma’s “verdicts” did not require his approval. Klyuchevsky explains: “There were only two types of boyar sentences, which were always or often submitted to the sovereign for approval. These are the verdicts of the Duma on local disputes (about who is more noble - A.G.) and on punishment for serious guilt.”

In pre-Petrine times, local, zemstvo, power in Russia was elected. The vertical of power, from the voivode down, was represented by district, volost and township self-governing bodies. Cities had their own structures of medieval civil society - “hundreds” and settlements with elected elders. The Code of Law of 1497 prohibited trials without the participation of a jury (“at the trial... to be the elder and the best kissers of the people”).

The elders were elected from local nobles, and their assistants - kissers - from local peasants and townspeople. In terms of the participation of the grassroots democratic element in local self-government, pre-Petrine Russia was fundamentally ahead of England, where only the reforms of 1888 and 1894 ended the monopoly of the aristocracy in local self-government.

They say that Peter “led Russia to Europe.” But reunification with Europe would have taken place in any case. The intensive method of development of not so geographically distant Christian countries was increasingly demonstrating its advantages, and there was no reason why Russia would not take advantage of its fruits. From the notes of the Frenchman de La Neuville, who had a conversation with Vasily Golitsyn, the unofficial ruler of the country under Queen Sophia, it can be concluded that the unofficial ruler of the country under Queen Sophia subsequently claimed that he was planning much more thorough transformations than Peter: he intended, in particular, to develop Siberia, build postal roads there, free the peasants from serfdom, and even give them land...

Isn't it wonderful? Serfdom has only recently acquired some completeness in Russia, and Golitsyn is already planning to abolish it. But power went to Peter, who, on the contrary, became the main enslaver in our history. True, he built St. Petersburg and Taganrog. And also Lipetsk and Petrozavodsk.

Serfdom

Peter left the serfs at the mercy of his landowners by the very fact that he entrusted the latter with responsibility for the supply of recruits and for collecting the poll tax. Even more important was the fact that under Peter almost everyone lost their freedom of action. Nobles, under pain of punishment, had no right to evade public service and could not move around the country at their own discretion. Only on February 18, 1762, 37 years after the death of Peter, was the Manifesto on the freedom of the nobility followed, allowing not to serve, to bask in one’s village, to travel abroad, and so on. Many peasants believed that from that moment on, serfdom became illegal, and began to wait for the next decree - on the freedom of the peasantry. They had to wait 99 years and one day.

At first, these expectations were so strong that they alarmed the throne. One of the reasons that Catherine II did not dare (although she repeated that she intended) to take a step towards the liberation of the peasants was the example of her contemporary Frederick the Great, who did nothing but worsen the situation of the German serfs. And her successors in the 19th century delayed reform, waiting to see how events would turn in Prussia, Westphalia and other German states, where the liberation of peasants began in 1807, but, according to Franz Mehring, “stretched out for two generations.”

This unrealized expectation broke through with all its force during the Pugachev rebellion. And in later years, although patriarchal serfdom, being soft in its forms, cushioned social protest, it broke through, went into a self-sustaining mode, and it was difficult to cope with it.

We know very little about real serfdom. It is known that by the time of its abolition, the share of serfs and courtyards in the population of Russia was less than 28%, whereas at the end of the 18th century (six decades earlier) it was 54%. Since the birth rate of the serfs was no lower than that of the free, such a sharp decrease in their share in the population suggests that millions of peasants were freed during this time. How did they come out, what were the mechanisms? Both pre-revolutionary liberal historians and engaged Soviet historians are unanimously silent about this great process of the natural elimination of serfdom. The heirs of Herzen (who was himself a landowner and lived abroad on income from his Russian estate), they always looked for the slightest mention of the tyranny of the serf owners, skipping everything else.

Perhaps, over time, an understanding will come that serfdom was a peasant-landowner condominium, that peasants and landowners, meeting in the same church, could not seriously be antagonists. Patriarchal serfdom, being soft in its forms, absorbed social protest. The estate is not a town where you can call the police, but a relatively remote place.

Landowner life would hardly have been possible if the masters had not adhered to unwritten, but obvious moral laws to all. In 1846, the landowner of the Maloyaroslavets district of the Kaluga province of Khitrovo was killed by his peasant women, and the investigation established that the women did this in response to his harassment. But here’s what’s important, I quote: “The district marshal of the nobility was put on trial for failure to report the bad behavior of the said landowner.” That is, their fellow classmates were responsible for the good character of the landowners. Russian estates did not even have fences - not to mention ditches, drawbridges, stone walls with loopholes, these are all the realities of European feudalism.

The most prominent expert on the social history of Russia, Boris Mironov, found a remarkable explanation for the low efficiency of serf labor. He believes that the serf worked until his small primordial needs were satisfied - and no further. “He saw the purpose of life not in wealth or fame, but in the salvation of the soul, in simply following tradition, in the reproduction of established forms of life. He made no attempts to expand the economy, as the bourgeoisie usually does, striving for maximum profit.” For the heirs of Holy Rus', this is very natural behavior.

Components of happiness

An important feature of Russian life has long been the abundance of holidays, church and folk. Russia’s contribution to the world “leisure technology” is not bad at all: it was here that such a socio-cultural phenomenon as dacha life was born about three hundred years ago. The dacha is a Russian invention that is now being adopted (or reinvented) by the rest of the world.

By contrast, Protestant Europe and America saw little rest between the 17th century and the First World War. Sunday was dedicated to church and household chores; vacation was still a rarity. A thin layer of rich loafers were resting.

In the West, almost everyone agreed with Freud's statement that childhood is the most difficult and unhappy time of life. One of the main themes of English literature is the theme of unhappy childhood. Many people have noted this. The painful childhood of Byron, the painful childhood of Churchill, “Oliver Twist” by Dickens, “The Burden of Human Passions” by Maugham. Not to mention Evelyn Waugh. When there are no exceptions, a dozen or two examples are enough. What novels, biographies and memoirs have in common is the lack of warmth in the family. Apparently, it has to do with the structure of the English family and the structure of English educational institutions. The rods in them were abolished only thirty to forty years ago. Aristocratic schools are just bursas. The book “Those Strange Englishmen” says: “For English children, childhood is a period that must be passed as quickly as possible.” But why are Russian memories of childhood all happy memories? I would venture to suggest that Freud’s teachings are simply more true for Western Europeans than for Russians.

From foreigners who have lived in Russia and speak Russian, I have heard more than once that nowhere in the Western world is it possible for people to sit up until the morning and discuss eternal issues. And they all complained how sad they felt without this in their homeland. The American journalist Robert Kaiser, hardly the greatest Russophile in the world, could not resist the following confession in his book “Russia”: “It is worth spending one boring evening in London or Washington, just one long lunch with endless conversations about shopping, restaurants, tennis or skiing to appreciate the charm of Moscow feasts. A mundane, insignificant topic will not linger here. Conversations are the source of the greatest pleasure here, and after spending many hours in Russian conversations, I began to understand that it was this aspect of Russian life that I would miss most of all ... "

The strength of historical Russia

What was she like? At least not like we were told at school. “Eugene Onegin” is, of course, not an encyclopedia of Russian life; this title is more suitable for “Ivan Vyzhigin” by Thaddeus Bulgarin - despite all the incomparability of the authors.

But no matter how you approach Russian literature, it least of all prepared its readers for totalitarianism. There is not a single image of a superman in it, destined by fate itself to control the masses. But she was always on the side of the “little man” - like, perhaps, no other literature in the world. The very presence of the “little man” theme speaks quite clearly of the built-in humanity of the society that gave birth to this literature. There was negativism in it, sometimes there was a frivolous “thirst for a storm,” but there was never pathos of submission (“give me a boss, and I will bow at his huge feet”), or admiration for power.

The Bolshevik utopian project (“a Western European and absolutely non-Russian phenomenon,” according to Oswald Spengler’s definition) was doomed for many reasons, although the one that became the main one would have been enough: it was incompatible with historical Russia.

The Bolsheviks took this force extremely seriously, throwing their entire arsenal of available resources into the fight against it - from the demolition of churches and monuments and the physical destruction of entire classes and estates to the complete denigration of national history. The expressions “damned past” and “birthmarks of capitalism” are still alive in popular memory.

The following fact shows how far the utopian ideologists were ready to go in this direction: in 1930, it was announced that the Cyrillic alphabet would be replaced by the Latin alphabet (in order to “free the working masses from any influence of pre-revolutionary printed materials”). Only the enormous high cost of the event, and even against the background of the breakdown of industrialization, saved our culture from this disaster. As for the slander against the Russian past, it has so permeated the worldview of our compatriots that dealing with it (and the entire subculture based on it) is the work of generations.

The implementers of utopia were especially keenly aware of the alienness of Russian culture to their ideas, hence the slogan of “organized simplification” and “degradation of culture”, which was advocated by Nikolai Bukharin (holder of the title “favorite of the party”), Alexei Gastev, Mikhail Levidov and others.

Their main leader, Vladimir Lenin, at the XI Congress of the RCP (b) in 1922 showed rare vigilance, saying: “It happens that the vanquished imposes his culture on the conqueror. Didn’t something similar happen in the capital of the RSFSR, and didn’t it happen here that 4,700 communists (almost an entire division, and all the best) found themselves subjugated to a foreign culture?”

It is said very precisely and frankly about the “conqueror” and “foreign culture”. And prophetically: the (supposedly) defeated culture really won – only, unfortunately, much later. History moves slowly.

We owe our victory over utopia to the very structure of our culture. The components on which only totalitarian power can rely are initially alien to her: cruelty and the habit of unreasoning discipline.

Our post-perestroika development is not imitation of someone else's model. Russia has returned to its civilizational choice, which is clear throughout its entire path - from baptism to 1917, and has returned to its essence. But this, alas, does not mean that the restoration of former values ​​and the former natural sense of self is guaranteed.

But, most importantly, the utopia did not take root with us, we rejected it at the tissue level and left the experiment ourselves. But whether, for example, Germany could overcome its totalitarianism on its own is a big question. Hitler did not need a five-year civil war and monstrous, unprecedented terror to become the complete master of the country. In a matter of months, he radically changed Germany to the complete delight of its population. Germany, if anyone has forgotten, is a country of “Western civilization”.

The bygone Russia had a high attractiveness. In the 87 years between 1828 and 1915, according to statistics summarized by Vladimir Kabuzan, 4.2 million foreigners moved into Russia, most of them from Germany (1.5 million people) and Austria-Hungary (0.8 million). By the beginning of the First World War, our country was the second center of immigration in the world after the United States - ahead of Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia. Left out of the statistics were the inhabitants of its outskirts who moved to Russia proper - the Baltic and Caucasian provinces, Turkestan, the Grand Duchy of Finland, the Poles and Lithuanians of the Kingdom of Poland. Like any desirable country, large unaccounted immigration was sent to Russia. For example, many people think that our “Pontic” Greeks are the descendants of almost the participants in Jason’s voyage for the Golden Fleece. In fact, most of the “Pontians” moved to Russian possessions in the 19th century from Turkish Anatolia and from Greece proper. Many of them did this, bypassing border registration and control - the Black Sea shores knew different interesting routes, read Lermontov’s “Taman”.

Large migrations of Persians, Chinese and Koreans were hidden. That is, instead of 4.2 million people, we may well be talking about, say, five, or rather even six million immigrants.

People do not move to countries of unfreedom - where a strict police regime and (or) heavy social control prevail, intolerance reigns, and there is no respect for property. You cannot lure people of other faiths and languages ​​into the “prison of nations.” The numbers of migration to Russia refutes all later tales of this kind.

We ourselves chose New Russia

There is not the slightest doubt: the rejection of communism and democratic reforms were the historical creativity of the “Soviet people,” especially the Russian people. Yegor Gaidar knows what he’s talking about: “If you think that it was the Americans who imposed democracy on us in the form in which it arose in 1990-1991, then this is not true. We ourselves chose this path, the Americans played the last role in this and will play the last.”

It is impossible to forget how in 1988 the very air of cities changed from the first Russian tricolors, to forget that powerful atmosphere of freedom, enlightenment and solidarity, which reached its peak in the days of hundreds of thousands of rallies on Manezhnaya and Palace Squares and lasted until the “shock therapy” of 1992 and despite it lasted until the referendum on confidence in Yeltsin’s course on April 25, 1993 (the president then received 58.7% of the votes) and much longer, changing, weakening and becoming increasingly fragmented into shades. If the atmosphere had been different, everything would have turned out differently.

And this massive fortitude! There are detailed chronicles of those years, and the final years of perestroika look eerie in them: completely empty stores, attacks on trains, seizures of weapons depots, Western missionaries with sermons prepared for pagans, suspicious sects, financial pyramids, “humanitarian aid,” newspaper reports about abandoned border posts and that food supplies in the country are running out, predictions of an imminent military coup and imminent epidemics, the most fantastic rumors. And against this background - elation, fearlessness, faith: a little more, a little more...;

And on every pillar there are advertisements: “I teach how to use a computer.” Many people suddenly felt that they had gotten rid of something oppressive and painful that they had been living with without noticing it. The discomfort to which one has become accustomed throughout life has gone, just as one becomes accustomed to the stench. The new Russia was formed almost entirely, down to the smallest detail, in the last months of the existence of the USSR. The quantitative changes of the next sixteen years were, of course, enormous, but almost everything that we observe from modern life - both good and bad - appeared already then for a reason.

I don’t know how this was possible, but someone designated us Russians as unfortunate, for all centuries of our history, and many of us almost believed it. We have not been unhappy for long in our history; there is immeasurably more light on our zebra. Maybe because of this, according to some law of compensation, we suffered so badly in the 20th century? But we survived. We are in our beautiful country, there is a lot of exciting work ahead.

Alexander Goryanin

Reference:Alexander Goryanin is a historian, journalist. Author of a number of books on the history of Russia, including “Myths about Russia and the spirit of the nation” (Moscow, 2002). Co-author of the textbook "National Studies" (Moscow, 2004). Nominated for the Ivan Petrovich Belkin Prize and the National Bestseller Award.