Noble fury
The 1812 war of the year is the first war that was called Russia Patriotic, and it will remain forever in the Russian consciousness
Researchers for two centuries have, probably, opened all available documents, from different points of view considered the outline of events. It is difficult to assume that some previously unknown facts can radically change the idea of the annals of the 1812 war of the year. However, modern man and researcher have the opportunity to comprehend this period not only from the height of the knowledge accumulated over two centuries, but also more detachedly, more panoramicly.
Russia had to fight a lot, almost every decade for centuries. However, the wars of modern times, including the heroic campaigns of A.V. Suvorov, who glorified the Russian soldier throughout Europe, did not affect the fate of the country as a whole. They served either to solve their geopolitical tasks, or to others, participating in coalitions and plans of other powers, that is, they were a struggle for interests, but not “for the stomach”.
If the nation is able to feel the threat to the Fatherland as a national disaster, then this is already a symptom of a well-known spiritual system of the people, which is determined by what it considers the most valuable. For misfortune does not happen with the state, but with the Fatherland - a concept that includes not only and not so much the land and the life built on it, but a sense of kind, living involvement in the actions of ancestors and the fate of descendants. Rational foreigners, for example, saw barbarism in the fire of Moscow in 1812. But after all, in such an impulse there is no room for doubts about the price of victory. The landlords burned their estates, the peasants abandoned their farm, not thinking about the fact that later there would be nothing to eat, they took a pitchfork and went to the enemy. Referring to the "self-immolation" of Moscow, Ivan Ilyin wrote that "Russia defeated Napoleon with this utmost inner freedom ... Nowhere do people give up so easily from earthly blessings ... nowhere are so completely forgotten losses and damages like the Russians."
Fatherland is forever in contrast to the state - a transient form, the creation of human hands, which inherits previous sins and accumulates its own.
The state is always imperfect and will always be criticized, even rejected by a part of society. Fatherland is an eternal gift given to us for constant historical work. Genuine national consciousness is not a blind admiration, not an exaggerated self-esteem, it is a burning sense of belonging to the whole. stories Fatherland and its future. Such a feeling is awakened when the question arises: “To be or not to be?”
At the time of the 1812 thunderstorm of the year, this feeling pervaded the entire society, from the aristocracy who worshiped French glamor to peasants who knew only the Psalter. It was not by chance that Lermontov wrote his famous “Borodino” on behalf of a simple soldier, free from any “class” feeling, the absence of which in the 1812 war of the year was so distressed by the “red professorship” of the ultra-Marxist school of Pokrovsky, who considered Napoleon to be a “liberator” who allegedly carried progress in backward "Russia. But no, the king, the officer, the aristocrat, and the simple peasant were one: “Our colonel was born with a grip: servant to the king, father to the soldiers ...”
The same feeling - “noble rage” - “boiled like a wave” during the Hitler invasion, although many were terrified of the revolution and its consequences, did not accept the state. And it was the Great Patriotic War that claimed the national feeling, ruined by class internationalism, cleared the defilement of the Civil War and reunited, in people’s souls, the thread of Russian and Soviet history, which seemed to be broken forever. It was not by chance that the great names of Suvorov, Kutuzov, Davydov were returned from the “historical dump”. The memory of the Patriotic War 1812 of the year inspired 1945, the great Victory of May ...
In this age of skepticism and nihilism, it is useful to remember that a nation capable of appreciating and honoring its history, as a result, always wins and remains an independent subject of world history.
Victory in the Patriotic War consolidates the national will and gives a huge charge of energy, despite the material losses and the death of people - the most courageous and ardent. And Russia emerged from the 1812 war of the year and the subsequent victorious march across Europe capable of a historic breakthrough - as always in Russian history, controversial, intensifying internal tensions, giving rise to new ideas of social reorganization. It was this ability that prompted Russia to further consolidate in the Far East, the Black Sea, and Transcaucasia, protecting it from Persia and Turkey, despite all the machinations of England. At the Vienna Congress 1815 of the year, it already really could behave like a power, “without which not a single gun in Europe couldn’t shoot”. Russia began to turn into such a factor in the global balance of power, which even today causes some nervousness.
1812 year left the deepest mark and in the minds of people, generated a powerful creative impulse, which gave the world the great Russian literature in the person of A.S. Pushkin and L.N. Tolstoy. Pushkin, by the way, has an amazing poem called “Borodino Anniversary”, according to which one can study geopolitics from the 19th century to the present day: “Where shall we move the strongholds? - For Bug, to Vorskla, to Liman? For whom will Volyn? Who is the legacy of Bogdan? ”
The XIX century - the century of empires and "tyrants" was another century of almost "knightly" wars compared to the wars of the twentieth century and the present century of the universal democracy spread by bombs.
There are no memories of the cruelty of the newcomers in people's memory, although “in war, as in war” there were looting, and death of the civilian population, and mutual cruelty, but the war was still conducted with respect for Christian ideas of morality, of man, of death. It is no coincidence that the small masterpiece of the Soviet cinema film Hussar Ballad became a surprisingly bright display of the historical memory of the 1812 war of the year. Both their side and the enemy are represented by equally worthy images: with loyalty to the oath and duty, ethical standards. As a duel.
But the 1812 war of the year, if we talk about the victims and geopolitics, had an all-European character. On the scale of geopolitical ambitions of the idol over the kingdoms and on the involved participants of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, it was almost a world war. During the invasion of the “two languages,” the French made up only half of the Great Army. It was all conquered Europe - the Dutch and the Belgians, the Bavarians, the Saxons and the Croats, the Italians and the forcibly mobilized Spaniards and the Portuguese, the Austrians in the face of Eastern Europeans, Romanians and Magyars and, of course, unruly when it comes to harm Russia, Poles who gave XNUM thousand soldiers.
The idol of the latter - Napoleon Bonaparte, "who did not love Poland, but who loved the Poles who shed blood for him" (A. Herzen), considered Poland a bargaining chip against Russia, as evidenced by his proposals during the negotiations on the Peace of Tilsit.
Napoleon, the brightest figure of not only French, but also European history, returned the motive of national unity and grandeur to the drenched revolutionary blood of France, for which the French rightfully honor him.
But in accordance with the Western "Promethean" type (V. Schubart), Bonaparte turned the revolutionary pathos into aggressive. Desiring to lead Europe, he unsuccessfully tried to undermine the power of his main rival - Britain, drawing Russia into the "continental blockade", unsuccessfully suggested Alexander I to remove Prussia from the map of Europe. Napoleon, perhaps the first in history, realized that it was impossible to become the ruler of the world without removing Russia from the world field, without depriving it of the role of a great power. Russia has already interfered, as it will interfere in the twentieth and in the twenty-first centuries to anyone who thinks to rule the world. Having not regretted lives for the Fatherland, even then it turned out to be a force equal to the total power of Europe, which Pushkin expressed with his extraordinary historical flair:
Great day of Borodin
We are fraternal trinity remembering
They said: “As the tribes went,
Russia's trouble threatening;
Not all Europe was here?
And whose star led her! ..
But we have become the fifth solid
And the breast took pressure
Tribes obedient to the will of the proud
And unequal dispute was equal ... "
The outstanding Russian political geographer P.P. Semyonov-Tian-Shansky, chairman of the Russian Geographical Society, considered large geopolitical projects that had ever existed, among which, from the time of the Punic Wars, there was a tendency to circle both shores of the Mediterranean Sea, which both the Arabs and the Turks did and Napoleon began to realize. If he, at the instigation of his rival England, as Semenov-Tian-Shansky writes, did not move to Russia, Bonaparte could well have become the “master of the world.” It would be interesting to find documentary evidence of such an opinion and find out if the Anglo-Saxons were already already interested in pushing major continental rivals in Europe in order to prevent the formation of one predominantly influential power on the European continent, which is the essence of British strategy. It was Napoleon’s fatal mistake.
Having suffered a crushing defeat, he fled from Russia, leaving his crushed, hungry, ragged and freezing Great Army. Russia, over the centuries, did not know such a loss of people and such ruin and devastation.
The Russian army triumphantly entered Paris, surprising Parisians with Cossack uniforms and the desire to get a bistro bistro. But Russia nevertheless saved France, becoming the only one at the Congress of Vienna who did not allow Austria and Prussia to deprive it of its geopolitical significance. Emperor Alexander contributed to the reduction of reparations imposed on France, reducing the period of occupation of the French territory by the Allied forces. Mercantile spirit was absolutely not peculiar to the then Russian policy, which was guided primarily by the principle of legitimism and the state morality that was still preserved.
Although France was the enemy and conqueror, French political ideas were very infectious, and Russian minds dreamed of republics, socialism, the overthrow of the autocracy, without fear of terror. This is the spirit of Decembrism, with its armchair, though very bloodthirsty utopias, it is the revolutionary project that developed throughout the 19th century, which realized itself through the century in the October revolution that copied Jacobin “revolutionary terror” and the inevitable result when “a revolution like Saturn , devours its own children ”(A.Frans), and the guillotine of repression cuts down already its own“ October ”dantons and robespierres.
One can only regret that mutual recognition of Russia and Europe, the clash and interaction of cultures, habits, lifestyle directly and tangibly occurred in past centuries when the Russian people, driving out invaders and pushing them to their own borders, liberated other countries and peoples . But this is a very interesting process at the most lively human level.
If in French, the Russians left the word “bistro” - quickly, then in Russian, the word “sharomyzhnik” has remained to this day - a pathetic petitioner, from the French word “Sher am” (Cherami! - Dear friend!), With whom the freezing French in the late autumn, 1812, having eaten their dead horses, asked for food and warmth.
This word, purely mildly in Russian, reflects the fate of the conqueror, who comes to Russia in a brilliant uniform on a white horse, playing the ruler of the world, and back, dotting the Russian plain with his and our dead bodies, returns with an outstretched hand, hungry, cold, pathetic and wondering why he came here with weapons... The lessons of history, although no one is taught, still instructive.
In the photo: N.S. Samokish “The feat of the soldiers of General N.N. Raevsky under Saltanovka 11 July 1812 of the Year.
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