Instead of a preface, Rus 2 Russia
Often, we hear that people, confused by the problems of our time, turn to history in search of a way out of difficult situations, "for instructive examples”.
Today in our country there is an unprecedented growth of interest in history. What causes it? What is it based on?
The interest in history testifies and are perceived by the majority of our compatriots as fundamentally different, just incompatible temporal elements. Often history and modernity simply collide head-on: "We are only interested in modernity and need knowledge only about that!" Similar opinions can be heard in scholarly debates, at tea parties, and even in bazaar squabbles.
Indeed, there are some grounds for contrasting modernity and history. The word "history" itself implies "the former," "the not-today," and so, historical scholarship is inconceivable without taking into account the changes separating "yesterday" from "today". The number and scale of these changes may be negligible, but outside of them, history does not exist.
By saying "modernity," on the contrary, we are referring to a certain familiar and seemingly a system of relationships inside and outside the country that seems stable to us. It is this habitual, familiar, almost unchanging and understandable, that is usually contrasted with history - being something that is invisible, intangible and therefore incomprehensible. And then it is simple: if we cannot explain the actions of historical characters from a modern point of view, it means that they were not educated, had many class prejudices, and generally lived without the benefits of scientific and technological progress. So much the worse for them!
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And after all, few people think of the fact that, at one time, the past was also modernity. So, the apparent permanence of modernity is a deception, and it does not differ at all from history. All the lauded present is but a moment, immediately becoming the past, and it is no easier to bring back this present morning, as it is to bring back the age of the Punic or Napoleonic wars. And paradoxically, it is modernity that is imaginary, and history that is real. It is characterized by ... the change of epochs, when suddenly the equilibrium of peoples and powers crumbles: small tribes undertake great campaigns and conquests, and mighty empires are powerless; one culture replaces another, and yesterday one culture succeeds another. The gods of yesterday turn out to be worthless idols. To understand historical patterns, generations of true scholars have worked, whose books ... are still being read.
Thus, history is a constant change, an eternal rearrangement of seeming stability. When we look at a particular territory at any given moment, we see, as it were, a photographic snapshot - a relatively stable system of interconnected objects: geographical (landscapes), sociopolitical (states), economic, ethnic. But as soon as we begin to study not one state, but many of them, i.e. as a process, the picture changes dramatically and begins to resemble a child's kaleidoscope rather than a strict cartographic image with dry inscriptions.
Sarcophagus of muses (from antique bas-relief).
Let us look, for example, at Eurasia at the beginning of the first century A.D. The western extremity of the great Eurasian continent was occupied by the Roman Empire. This power, which grew out of a tiny city founded by a tribe of Latins eight centuries B.C., it absorbed many peoples. The empire organically incorporated cultured Hellenes, who remained generally loyal subjects for a very long time. With the Germans, on the other hand, who lived across the Rhine, the Romans went to war. Although their victorious commanders Germanicus and the future Tiberius led legions as far as the Elbe, by the middle of the first century AD the Romans had abandoned the conquest of the Germans.
To the east of the Germans lived Slavic tribes. The Romans called them, like the Germans, barbarians, but in reality, they were a completely and very different people, not at all friendly with the Germans. Farther east, in the boundless steppes of the Black Sea and Kazakhstan, we find at this time, a people with little resemblance to Europe - the Sarmatians, on the border with China, in what is now Mongolia.
Mongolia today, a people called the Huns roamed the frontier with China. The eastern edge of Eurasia, as well as the western edge, was occupied by a huge power, the Han Empire. The Chinese, like the Romans, considered themselves a cultured, civilized people, living among the surrounding barbarian tribes. The Romans and Chinese hardly ever encountered each other, but there was still a connection between them. The thread between the two empires, invisible but strong, was the Great Silk Road. It was the way Chinese silk was sent to the Mediterranean, turning out gold and luxury goods for China.
But even on the Great Silk Road, the Chinese and the Romans did not meet, for neither of them went with caravans. It was the Sogdians - the inhabitants of Central Asia - and the Jews, who had developed an international trade. Under their leadership the caravans crossed the vast of the continent.
And on its fringes, in Roman fortresses, and on the Great Wall of China, and the wall of Rome, sentinels guarded the peace of "civilized" empires day and night.
Let us ask ourselves a simple question: what has prevented this well-functioning static system of relations from surviving to our time? Why do we not see the Romans or the Great Silk Road today? Because at the end of the first century, and the beginning of the second century A.D. the situation changed fundamentally: many nations, which had been calmly living in their usual conditions, were set into motion.
By a landing of Goths - inhabitants of Scandinavia - in the mouth of the Vistula River the Great Migration of Peoples began, which in the IV century became the cause of the death of the united Roman Empire. It was also at this time that the Slavs, who left the territory between the Vistula and the Tisza and subsequently spread from the Baltic in the North to the Adriatic and the Balkans in the South, from the Elbe in the West to the Dnieper in the east.
Chinese emperor with his entourage. From the scroll "Thirteen Emperors". VII century.
Scene from Jewish life. Drawing from Egyptian mural painting.
The Dacian tribe, which occupied the territory of modern Romania, went to war with Rome, and the empire. It took 20 years of struggle for the forces of the entire Mediterranean, united by the military and statesmanship of Emperor Trajan, to defeat these people.
From the Christian communities that had sprung up in Syria and Palestine, a new ethnos, an "ethnos according to Christ." The bearers of the once persecuted doctrine managed not only preserve it, but also make it the official ideology in one part of the disintegrating empire. Thus, a new, Christian power, Byzantium, emerged to counterbalance the dying Western Rome of Hesperia power - Byzantium.
In the same Palestine, a hotbed of resistance to Roman domination emerged. A small people ... Jews - after two revolts, brutally crushed by the Romans, left their historic homeland. But the emergence of the Jewish diaspora and the preaching of Christianity led to the strengthening of Eastern religions at the heart of the Empire and in its provinces. Not only the Near East, but also the Far East became a source of trouble for Rome at this time.
A branch of the Xiongnu, having left the steppes of Mongolia, as a result of an unparalleled migration was in Europe. Already in the IV century their descendants had crushed the kingdom of the Goths and almost destroyed the Roman Empire itself.
Relief depicting the Emperor Domitian. End of the 1st century.
Archers of the Persian Guards. Frieze from the palace of Artaxerxes II.
Thus, if we try to imagine Eurasia in V-VI centuries, we shall see a picture which was totally different than the Ist century. On the continent, very different peoples roamed the vastness of the Great Steppe. The entire history of mankind consists of a series of such changes. Maybe the change of empires and kingdoms, faiths and traditions does not have any internal consistency, but is an unexplainable chaos?
From time immemorial, inquisitive people (and there have always been such people) sought to find an answer to this question, to understand and explain the origins of its history. The answers for history are multifaceted: it may be a history of social and economic formations or a military history, i.e. a description of campaigns and battles; a history of technology or culture; a history of literature or religion. These are all different disciplines of history. And so, some of the historians of the law school, have studied human laws and principles of government; others, the Marxist historians - considered history through the prism of the development of productive forces; others relied on individual psychology, etc.
But is it possible to imagine human history as the history of peoples? Let us try to proceed from the fact that within the Earth, space is by no means homogeneous. And it is space that is the first parameter that characterizes historical events. Even primitive man knew the boundaries of his territory, the so-called nourishing, and containing landscape in which he himself, his family and his tribe lived.
The second parameter is time. Every historical event takes place not only somewhere, but at some time. The same primitive people were quite conscious not only of "their place," but also of the fact that they had fathers and grandfathers and there would be children and grandchildren. So, temporal coordinates exist in history along with spatial coordinates.
Map of the Earth's light belts. Western Hemisphere.
But in history there is another, no less important, parameter. From the geographical point of view, all mankind should be regarded as the anthroposphere, one of the Earth's shells, connected with the existence of Homo sapiens. Humanity, while remaining within this species, has a mosaic, i.e. it consists of representatives of various nations or, in modern terms, ethnic groups. It is within the framework of ethnoses in contact with each other, that history is made, because each historical fact is the heritage of the life of a particular people.
The presence in the Earth's biosphere of these particular entities, ethnic groups, constitutes the third parameter that characterizes the historical process. Ethnoses, existing in space and time, and are the actors in the theater of history. Hereafter, speaking of ethnos, we will be referring to a collective of people who oppose themselves, consider themselves different, to all other such Ethnoses. The ethnic group is not a conscious calculation, but a feeling of complementarity - a subconscious feeling of mutual sympathy and commonality of people, which defines the opposition "us - them" and division into "our own" and "alien".
Map of the Earth's light zones. Eastern Hemisphere
Each such collective, in order to live on Earth, must adapt to the conditions of the landscape within which it has to live. The ties of the ethnos with the surrounding nature gives birth to the spatial relationship of the ethnos with each other. But naturally, living in their landscape, the members of an ethnos can adapt to it only by changing their behavior, assimilating some specific rules of behavior - stereotypes. The assimilated stereotypes (historical tradition) constitute the main difference between the members of one ethnos from another.
In order to describe their historical tradition, the members of an ethnos must necessarily have a system of counting time. The easiest thing to do is to consider time cycles. Simple observations show that day and night make up a repeating cycle - a day. Likewise, the seasons of the year, as they alternate, make up a larger cycle, the year. Because of this simplicity and obviousness, the first time counting known to men and still in use today is the cyclic counting.
The very origin of the Russian word "time" is connected with the idea of the cyclic nature of time, (the same root with the words "twirl" and "spindle").
Persian Warrior Midian
In the Orient, for example, a system of counting time was invented in which each of the 12 years was named after one or another beast represented by a certain color (white - metal, black - earth, red - fire, blue-green - vegetation). But since the ethnos lives for a very long time, neither the annual cycle nor even the twelve-year cycle of the Oriental peoples were sufficient to describe the events stored in the memory of the people.
In search of a way out of this impasse, the linear measurement of time, which counts from a certain moment in the historical past, began to be applied. For the ancient Romans, this date was the foundation of Rome; for the Hellenes, it was the year of the first Olympics. Muslims count years from the Hijra, the flight of the prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Medina. Christian chronology, which we use, counts from the Nativity of Christ. With regard to linear time, we can say that, unlike cyclical time, it stresses the imperative of time.
In the East there was another way of knowing and calculating time. Here is an example of such a calculation. A princess of the Southern Chinese Cheng dynasty, destroyed by the Northern Sui dynasty, was captured. She was given as a wife to a Turkic khan who wanted to become related to the Chinese imperial family. The princess was bored on the steppes and composed poetry. One of her poems goes like this:
For the world's laws are circles on the water.
The tower and the pond are flattened,
Though now we have riches and luxuries,
The hour of serenity is always short-lived.
The cup of wine has not drunken us for ages.
The lute's strings ring and fade.
I was once a tsar's daughter.
And now in a nomadic horde I wandered
Without shelter and alone at night,
I was in joy and despair.
And the song that was sung in the years of yore,
The exile's heart is always troubled.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Ruins of the Temple of Neptune in Pestum
Here, the passage of time is seen as an oscillatory movement, and certain time segments are distinguished according to the saturation of events. This creates large discrete "sections" of time. The Chinese called it all with one easy word. In the word "v-turn". Each "vicissitude" occurs at a particular moment of historical time and, that having begun, inevitably ends, being replaced by another "vicissitude". This sense of discreteness (discontinuity) of time helps to record and understand the course of historical events, their interconnection and sequence.
But when speaking of discontinuous time, linear or cyclical time, we must remember that we are talking only about man-made reference systems. The single absolute time we calculate remains a reality, without becoming a mathematical abstraction, and reflects the historical (natural) reality.
Thus, discontinuous time applies equally to human and natural history. Well-described historical geology operates on eras and periods, each of which had a particular character of the Earth's biosphere. These are either the "wet" Carboniferous, with its abundance of large amphibians, or the "dry" Permian, with large reptiles living near bodies of water.
In the three periods of the Mesozoic era: the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, new flora and fauna emerged each time. The Ice Age altered the Earth's flora and fauna once again. Prior to that time, Africa was inhabited by Australoptic species that vaguely resembled modern humans. After the Ice Age, Neanderthal Man appeared, with his oversized head and strong, stocky torso. Under circumstances unknown to us, the Neanderthals disappeared, to be replaced by modern Homo sapiens. In Palestine there are material traces of a clash between two types of humans: Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. In the caves of Schul and Tabun on Mount Carmel the remains of mixtures of the two species have been discovered. It is difficult to imagine the conditions for the emergence of this hybrid, especially considering that Neanderthals were cannibals. In any case, the new, mixed species proved to be non-viable.
В. M. Vasnetsov. Stone Age. Detail of a Frieze. 1885. State Historical Museum, Moscow.
1). Lysippus. Athlete wearing a wreath on his head. Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum
2). Statue of Apollo on the facade of a house in St. Petersburg
So, Neanderthals disappeared, and in our time, the Earth is populated by humans, though of five different races, but belonging to the same biological species. Consequently, we have the right to consider that there is no direct continuity between Neanderthals and modern humans. But in the same way there is no continuity between Cro-Magnon mammoth hunters and ancient Celts, between Romans and Romanians, between Huns and Magyars.
In the history of ethnoses (peoples), as in the history of species, we are confronted with the fact that from time to time there is an absolute breakdown in certain parts of the Earth, when old ethnoses disappear and new ones appear. The Philistines and Chaldeans, the Macedonians and the Etruscans belong to antiquity. They are gone now, but once there were no Englishmen and Frenchmen, Swedes and Spaniards. So, ethnic history consists of "beginnings" and "endings”.
But where and why do these new communities arise, suddenly beginning to separate themselves from their neighbors: "Eh, no, we know you: you are Germans, and we are French!"? It is clear that any ethnic group has an ancestor, not even one, but several. For example, for Russians the ancestors were ancient Russians, people from Lithuania and the Horde, and local Finno-Ugric tribes. However, the establishment of an ancestor does not exhaust the problem of the formation of a new ethnos. There are always ancestors, but ethnoses are formed quite rarely, both in time and in space. It would seem that there is no answer to this question, but let us remember that a hundred years ago there was no answer to the question about the origin of species.
In the last century, during the heyday of evolutionary theory, both before and after Darwin, it was believed that particular races and ethnic groups evolved out of a struggle for existence. Today, this theory is of little use to anyone, since a great deal of evidence points in favor of a different concept, the theory of mutagenesis. According to this theory, every new species emerges as a consequence of a mutation - a sudden change in the gene pool of living beings that occurs under the influence of external conditions in a certain place and at a certain time. Of course, the presence of mutations does not cancel the intraspecific process of evolution: if the traits produced increase the viability of the species, they are reproduced and fixed in the offspring for a long enough time. If this is not the case, their new carriers die out after a few generations.
The theory of mutagenesis agrees well with the known facts of ethnic history. Let us recall the already mentioned example of migrations in the first and second centuries A.D. The powerful movement of new ethnic groups was relatively short-lived and took place only in a narrow band from southern Sweden to Abyssinia. But it was this movement that destroyed Rome and changed the ethnic map of the entire European Mediterranean.
Consequently, we can also hypothetically link the beginning of ethnogenesis to the mechanism of mutation, which results in an ethnic "push" that then leads to the formation of new ethnic groups. The process of ethnogenesis is associated with a very definite genetic trait. Here we introduce a new parameter of ethnic history - passionarity. Passionarity is a trait that arises as a result of a mutation (a passionate impulse) and forms within a population a certain number of people with an increased propensity for action. We will call such people passionarians.
Passionaries strive and are capable of changing things around them. They are the ones who organize distant campaigns from which few return. They fight for the conquest of the peoples surrounding their own ethnos, or, conversely, fight against the invaders. Such activities require an increased capacity for exertion, and any effort by a living organism involves the expenditure of some kind of energy. This type of energy was discovered and described by our great compatriot, Academician V.I. Vernadsky, and named by him the biochemical energy of living matter in the biosphere.
[See if you can get something out of this, one of Gumilev’s favorite diagrams. The point is that the level of passion, which is the will to do extra, in a certain fraction of a population grows through time, and then it self-destructs and recedes. It doesn’t take everyone, as the active ones drive the passive ones. This is the cycle of an ethnos. Even we (now), can identify where we are on this chart, and know our future, by what our group is willing to accomplish.]
Pki is the level of the system's passionary tension. The qualitative characteristics of this level ("sacrifice," etc.) should be regarded as a kind of averaged "evaluation" of ethnos representatives. At the same time there are people within the ethnos who have other characteristics noted in the figure, but one type of people dominates;
i is the index of the level of passionary tension of the system, corresponding to a certain imperative of behavior; i = -2, -1... 6; when i = 0, the system's level of passionary tension corresponds to homeostasis;
k is the number of sub-ethnoses that make up the system at a certain level of passionary tension; k = n+1, n+2... n+21, where n is the initial number of sub-ethnoses in the system.
Note: This curve is a generalization of forty individual ethnogenesis curves that we constructed for various ethnic groups.
The dotted line indicates a drop in passionarity below the homeostasis level, coming as a result of ethnic displacement (or external aggression).
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The mechanism of the connection between passionarity and behavior is very simple. Usually people, as living organisms, have as much energy as necessary to sustain life. If the human body is able to "absorb" more energy from the environment than it needs, it forms relationships with other people and connections that allow it to use this energy in any of their chosen directions. It is possible to create a new religious system or scientific theory, build a pyramid or the Eiffel Tower, etc. Passionaries act not only as direct doers, but also as organizers. Putting their surplus energy into the organization and management of tribesmen at all levels of the social hierarchy, they develop, albeit with difficulty, new stereo-types of behavior, impose them on everyone else, and thus create a new ethnic system, a new ethnos visible to history.
В. P. Vereshchagin. The Flood
Fight of the Gods against the Titans (from the Pergamon rubble). Berlin Museums
But the level of passionarity in an ethnos does not remain unchanged (see diagram on p. 19). Ethnos, having emerged, passes through a series of regular phases of development, which can be likened to the different ages of man. The first phase is the phase of the ethnos' passionate rise, caused by a passionate impulse. It is important to note that old ethnoses, on the basis of which a new ethnos emerges, join together as a complex system. Subethnic groups that are sometimes dissimilar create a whole, fused by passionary energy, which expands and subjugates territorially close peoples. This is how an ethnos emerges. A group of ethnic groups in one region creates a super-ethnos (thus, Byzantium, a super-ethnos that emerged as a result of a shock in the first century AD, consisted of Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians, Georgians, Armenians and Slavs and existed until the 15th century). The life expectancy of ethnic groups, as a rule, have a similar duration of lifespan: from the moment of shock to the moment of complete destruction about 1500 years, except when alien aggression disrupts the normal course of ethnogenesis.
The greatest rise of passionarity - the acmatic phase of ethnogenesis - causes people to strive not to create integrity, but, on the contrary, to "be themselves": not to obey any common regulations, to reckon only with their own nature. Usually, this phase in history is accompanied by such internal rivalries and massacres that the course of ethnogenesis is temporarily halted.
Gradually, the massacre causes the passionary charge of the ethnos to diminish, as people physically exterminate one another. Civil wars break out, a phase that we will call the Fracture Phase. As a rule, it is accompanied by an enormous dissipation of energy, crystallized in monuments of culture and art. But the outward blossom of culture corresponds to the decline of passionarity, not its rise. This phase usually ends in bloodshed; the system expels excessive passionarity, and apparent equilibrium is restored in society.
Ethnicity begins to live "by inertia," thanks to acquired values. Let's call this phase inertia. Once again, people are mutually subordinated to one another, large states are formed, and material wealth is created and accumulated.
The passionarity gradually dries up. When the energy in the system becomes scarce, sub-passionarians - people with reduced passionarity - take the leading position in society. They seek to destroy not only restless passionaries, but also hard-working harmonious people. Then comes a phase of obscuration, in which the processes of disintegration in the ethno-social system become irreversible. The people everywhere are dominated by sluggish and selfish people, guided by a consumerist psychology. And after the sub-passionarians have eaten up and drunk everything of value that has survived from heroic times, the last phase of ethnogenesis - the memorial phase - begins, when the ethnos retains only the memory of its historical tradition. Then memory also disappears: a time of equilibrium with nature (homeostasis), when people live in harmony with their native landscape and prefer to the mundane intentions of everyday life. In this phase, people's passionariness only suffices to maintain their ancestral economy.
A new cycle of development can only be triggered by another passionate push, in which a new passionate population emerges. It does not reconstruct the old ethnos, but creates a new one, giving rise to another round of ethnogenesis, a process thanks to which Mankind does not disappear from the face of the Earth.
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