Among the representatives of the political elite of the People's Republic of China, Zhou Enlai stood out for his high intellectual level. He received a brilliant, versatile European and Chinese education, which greatly strengthened his abilities, allowed him to solve many of the most difficult tasks that required the highest erudition and the ability to apply the acquired knowledge in practice. Zhou Enlai's mind was rationalistic and pragmatic.
It is reasonable to assume that it was he who was to become the head of the CPC. However, Zhou Enlai consciously gave this place to Mao Zedong. According to Zhou, “in such a semi-feudal country as China, with its predominantly peasant population and deep-rooted centuries-old traditions of the absolute power of the Son of Heaven, such a national leader, whom the people would perceive as predetermined by Heaven”, had to be sought in the peasant environment itself.
Mao Zedong became such a leader. With all the shortcomings of this politician, he was "his own" for the Chinese people, as a native of a peasant environment. Zhou Enlai did not have such a biography.
It is indicative that Zhou Enlai did not even aspire to secondary roles in the CPC, rightly assessing that Mao Zedong, who is suspicious of everything, will see in him a desire to encroach on his place and the prerogatives associated with it. And therefore, he “always turned out to be third, skipping forward first one, then the other. Being third was fine with him."
In the fall of 1949, at a meeting of the Central People's Government, the political fate of Zhou Enlai was decided. He was appointed premier of the State Administrative Council of the country and at the same time became the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the PRC. He would hold the post of head of government for 37 years until his death in 1976, to a large extent determining China's domestic and foreign policy.
Zhou Enlai showed himself not only as a practitioner and rationalist, but also as a theoretician of the emerging new statehood in China. He noted that “the new democratic regime of power is an institution of people's congresses of democratic centralism, which does not differ at all from the old democratic parliamentarism, but is not equally similar to the Soviet system. We are the union of every revolutionary class. The peculiarity we have is shown in the form of the People's Political Consultative Council of China. Government organs and existing people's congresses in various places, and also future people's congresses, will all show this feature."
One of the prime minister's first foreign policy steps was the signing on February 14, 1950 of the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union. For China, this alliance was of strategic importance. The USSR undertook to provide him with economic and military assistance, scientific, technical and financial support, which was of vital importance for a country devastated by war and civil unrest.
Observers drew attention to the fact that in the negotiations preceding the signing of the union treaty, Zhou Enlai tried to pursue his own line, which, at times, diverged from the guidelines of Mao Zedong. He did this based on the national interests of his country, which were wider than the interests of the CCP itself or Mao Zedong, and in the end both sides came to a mutually acceptable result.
Zhou Enlai had long-standing, friendly relations with his northern neighbor. Being a hostage of his position, he was obliged to relay the official position of Beijing, which might not coincide with his personal opinion. But even in this case, he sought to demonstrate his sympathy for the people of the USSR.
Speaking at the VIII Congress of the CPC in the autumn of 1956, Zhou Enlai stressed Moscow's merits in China's industrialization and called this assistance fraternal. The Soviet Union not only provided multimillion-dollar loans on favorable terms, but also helped in the design of 205 industrial facilities and supplied most of the equipment for them.
When a split occurred between the leadership of the USSR and the PRC, and at the insistence of N.S. Khrushchev, Soviet specialists were recalled to their homeland, Zhou tried to soften the impression of this event. A warm send-off was organized for the Soviet people, and the people of China were explained that this was due to economic needs, and not political differences between our countries and governments.
At the Bandung Conference in 1955, where 29 countries of Asia and Africa were represented, Zhou Enlai drew attention to the need to develop the concept of peaceful coexistence and the settlement of problems existing between the countries of Asia and Africa.
“1) Mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty. 2) Non-aggression. 3) Non-interference in internal affairs. 4) Equality and mutual benefit. 5) Peaceful coexistence”. Formally, this was an initiative not only of China, but also of Burma and India. But people close to this problem called the actual creator of the idea - Zhou Enlai.
It is noteworthy that such principles were clearly at odds with official Chinese propaganda. Mao Zedong's idea of the inevitability of a new war dominated there. Zhou Enlai, on the contrary, convinced of the fatality of such a step. He repeatedly stressed that in the presence of nuclear weapons, such a clash would end not in victory, but in the death of all mankind. Zhou Enlai considered the existing differences between the CPC and the CPSU to be a tragic mistake and reminded them that they jointly began the struggle for the victory of communist ideals in the world.
Zhou Enlai also tried to solve the problem of Taiwan. He believed that the differences between the CCP and the Kuomintang had to be overcome. To do this, he proposed the creation of a third national united front. He expressed the idea that every Chinese should serve his people, which he publicly stated from the rostrum of the National People's Congress of the 1st convocation.
Zhou Enlai was quite critical of the real possibilities of the PRC. He saw what serious tasks the Chinese economy needed to solve in order to provide the population with a decent standard of living. At the same time, he believed that even in such a situation, China could help third world countries in solving their problems. Thus, in one of his speeches, he stated that “China is only a recently liberated country. Our economy is still very backward, we have not yet achieved full economic independence. Therefore, our economic opportunities are limited, and our economic cooperation with other countries we carry out mainly through trade. However, we know that economic independence is essential to strengthening political independence. Therefore, simultaneously with our economic construction, we are also ready, within the limits of our possibilities, to use our insignificant forces to assist other countries in their economic development.
Now, when China is one of the most dynamically developing countries in the world, and its political ambitions have long gone beyond the East Asian region, it remains only to pay tribute to the foresight of Zhou Enlai, who worked hard to achieve such a status for his country.
Meanwhile, Zhou Enlai's political life cannot be called cloudless. So during the years of the "cultural revolution" in China, he had to literally walk on the edge of a knife. Never publicly condemning the processes taking place in the country, he nevertheless managed to save many comrades from repression.
Revealing the peculiarity of the relationship between Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, the Soviet diplomat A.A. Brezhnev wrote: “Zhou Enlai, as befits an ideal prime minister at the imperial court in China, has always remained loyal to Mao Zedong, with whom he collaborated for many years. Even in his thoughts he did not allow the possibility of betrayal, his participation in any conspiracy against the leader, although he could disagree with him in his views. When Mao did not interfere with him, he found and made reasonable, pragmatic decisions, both on foreign policy, and on economic and other problems. In other cases, Zhou, without contradiction, did what the leader demanded of him. He only tried to minimize, as far as he could, the negative consequences of such actions. Such, apparently, was his political and life credo, which, by the way, gave him the opportunity not only to survive, but also to maintain high activity throughout his long political career.
Examples of the political resourcefulness of this politician are described in the study by S.L. Tikhvinsky, who had the opportunity to talk with people who personally knew both Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. They said that: “He (Zhou Enlai - A.B.) made the most of his access to Mao Zedong, trying to prevent excesses and violence committed by the “rebels” with the knowledge of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing. Coming to Mao Zedong as if "for advice" on certain issues, Zhou Enlai offered Mao Zedong only those options for their solution that were acceptable to him. He then announced to the members of the all-powerful "Headquarters of the Cultural Revolution", which was run by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing, that this decision was "an order from Chairman Mao", to which they could not object.
Despite the difficult relations between the PRC and the USSR, Zhou Enlai came to Moscow and always spoke in favor of maintaining friendly and good neighborly ties between the two socialist countries. When he, being the head of the Chinese delegation, made a report at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, he, in his usual manner, compared the friendship of our peoples with the course of the Yangtze and the Volga. Zhou Enlai also visited the celebration of the 47th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1964. This position of the premier was blamed on him by his enemies in the CCP. They tried to portray him as a traitor to China's interests. But he did not compromise his principles and continued to persistently call for the normalization of relations between our countries.
Not being a hostage of communist ideology, Zhou Enlai was a supporter of strengthening ties with all countries of the world, including the United States. The cooling of relations with the USSR, the growth of political and ideological differences between the CPC and the CPSU, the inability to count on the assistance that the PRC received from the Soviet Union in the future, forced China to look for alternatives.
Rapprochement with the United States was regarded by Mao Zedong as a strategic necessity. The United States saw this rapprochement as a new opportunity to demonstrate to the American public the administration's ability not only to wage a debilitating war in Asia (in Vietnam), but also to implement a plan aimed at establishing long-term peace in the region. In addition, the United States was not averse to taking advantage of the successful international situation and normalizing relations with a country with a huge population.
The visit of the American President in February 1972 led to a breakthrough in Sino-American relations, and this was another diplomatic success for Zhou Enlai. However, this did not prevent him, speaking at the Tenth Congress of the CCP in August 1973, from declaring that “Detente is a temporary and superficial phenomenon, and colossal upheavals will continue further. Such colossal upheavals are a good thing for the people, not a bad thing. They bring confusion and division into the enemy camp, awaken and temper the people, contribute to the further development of the international situation in a direction favorable to the people and unfavorable to imperialism, modern revisionism and the reaction of various countries.
In 1972, the permanent prime minister fell seriously ill. Having undergone many operations (14), he continued to fulfill his duties and even announced at the session of the National People's Congress in 1975 a program for future reforms - the "four modernizations". The essence of the program was to achieve success in four priority areas, which were to become the driving force in the development of the country. It was about agriculture, industry, defense, science and technology. But he did not have to carry out his plan. Zhou Enlai passed away on January 8, 1976, leaving behind a good memory among his compatriots. The incarnation of this program was a man who had known and worked with Zhou for many years - Deng Xiaoping, who considered Zhou his senior comrade and mentor.
Thus, one can note the unique place of Zhou Enlai in the history of the PRC and the CPC: without claiming to occupy the highest party and state posts, he always remained at the center of events, influencing their course, giving them some degree of rationality, protecting them as best he could. , many people from the negative consequences of inflamed revolutionary enthusiasm. Moreover, even when he was next to Mao Zedong, "the question of hierarchy never arose: Zhou was the standard of a person of extremely respectful behavior."
Zhou Enlai from the second half of the 30s. until the end of his life he remained an ally of Mao Zedong, retaining the confidence of the Chairman, which allowed him to become, among other things, the architect of major diplomatic actions, during which he showed great diplomatic skill, laying the foundation for the peaceful coexistence of the PRC with many countries of the world.
Contrary to the official line determined by Mao at a time of sharpening differences in relations with the USSR, Zhou Enlai was not afraid to show his sympathy for the Soviet Union and its people.
Zhou Enlai, as premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, kept his post during the Cultural Revolution. After 1966, in the conditions of anarchy, he continued to lead the state apparatus. During this period, "Zhou did the thankless job of a firefighter who did not deny his allegiance to the arsonists, but tried to tame the flames."
After it finally became clear that instead of realizing the “great dream”, China plunged into anarchy, instead of the successors of the “great cause”, the party and society received unrestrained careerists, and the country was plunging into the possibility of a military dictatorship, organizers and builders were again required, among them Zhou Enlai had the most experience and intelligence.
Huai'an, Jiangsu
Beijing
A prominent diplomat, he promoted peaceful coexistence with the West while trying not to sever relations with the Soviet Union. His delicate policy and adherence to principles in his work ensured that he retained the post of prime minister during the years of the "cultural revolution", and his diplomacy and high work capacity earned him national fame.
Biography
Childhood and youth
Zhou Enlai was born in 1898 in the county town of Shanyang, Huai'an County, Jiangsu Province. His father Zhou Yineng (aka Zhou Shaogang) belonged to an ancient feudal family, but he himself could not make a career, and by the time of Enlai's birth, the Zhou clan had fallen into decline. Enlai lost his parents early and was brought up by his closest relatives in different parts of China. When Zhou Enlai was not even six months old, he was adopted by Zhou Yigan, a childless and seriously ill brother of his father, who lived in the same city estate in Huai'an as Zhou Enlai's parents. The adoptive father soon died, and Zhou Enlai remained in the care of the widow of the deceased, who became his adoptive mother.
From the age of four, Zhou Enlai, under the supervision of his adoptive mother, began to learn to write hieroglyphs and read classical poems of poets of the Tang era (618-907). At the age of five, he began attending a private school, learning by heart didactic essays for children (collections of aphorisms). At the age of 8, Zhou Enlai was sent to a private school by Gong Yingsun (his maternal cousin), an adherent of revolutionary views. The uncle awakened in the boy an interest in political events. In the spring of 1907, Vansha's own mother died, and a year later, her adoptive mother died of tuberculosis.
In Tianjin, Zhou Enlai immediately joined in the patriotic actions of the youth that unfolded after receiving information about the events of May 4th. Since June, he has become the editor of the Tianjin Union Students' Union Newspaper; his very first article on the May 4th Movement was reprinted by the leading newspapers in Tianjin. At first, the newspaper was published once every three days, but soon became a daily newspaper with a circulation of 20,000 copies. On September 16, 1919, Zhou Enlai took part in the creation of the "Society for the Awakening of Consciousness", where he received the pseudonym "Wu Hao" ("Number Five"), which he later used more than once in his revolutionary journalism. The Manifesto of the Society was written by Zhou Enlai. It spoke of the need to put an end to militarism, politicking, bureaucracy, inequality between men and women, conservative thinking and old morality in China. On September 21, 1919, at the suggestion of Zhou Enlai, the famous professor of Peking University, Li Dazhao, was invited to speak to the members of the Society. In October, following mass arrests during celebrations of the anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution, the Society organized mass protests in Tianjin, forcing the police to release the arrested. On November 15, at an emergency meeting of the Society for the Awakening of Consciousness, chaired by Zhou Enlai, it was decided to turn this circle into a militant organization of young people. In December 1919, Zhou Enlai, who by that time had been elected head of the United Union of the Tianjin Students' Association, organized a city-wide boycott of Japanese goods with the participation of other public organizations in the city. In January 1920, a group led by Zhou Enlai who tried to deliver an anti-Japanese petition to the governor of Zhili Province was arrested.
In prison, Zhou Enlai maintained discipline among his comrades, organized political studies and discussions on topical social and political issues. The public hearings on Zhou Enlai's case in July 1920 aroused great interest in the city, and on July 17 the court announced the verdict of the release of Zhou Enlai and his comrades "for the expiration of the term of imprisonment." During his time in detention, Zhou Enlai was expelled from Nankai University and therefore decided to continue his education in France through a program partially subsidized by the government. Already a well-known journalist and editor in Tianjin, Zhou Enlai managed to secure the consent of the influential local newspaper Ishibao to represent it in European countries before going abroad, hoping that the fee received from the newspaper at first would help him financially.
Life in Europe
In honor of Zhou Enlai, a memorial was erected in Tianjin (天津周恩來鄧穎超紀念館), and a monument was erected in Manchuria.
Personal life
In 1925, Zhou Enlai married a revolutionary Deng Yingchao, whom he had known from the May 4th Movement. Zhou and Deng did not have children of their own, but they adopted and raised many children of the dead revolutionaries in their family; one of them was the future premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, Li Peng. However, only three daughters were officially recognized by Enlai and Yingchao, the eldest of whom, Sun Weishi, died during the years of the Cultural Revolution.
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Notes
Literature
- Zhou Bingde. My Uncle Zhou Enlai = 我的伯父周恩来. - Beijing: Publishing House of Literature in Foreign Languages, 2008. - 366 p. - 1300 copies. - ISBN 9787119052830.
- Zhou Enlai. Illustrated biography = 周恩来画传. - Sichuan Renmin Publishing House, 2009. - 483 p. - ISBN 978-7-220-07636-7.
An excerpt characterizing Zhou Enlai
– Voulez vous bien?! [Go to…] – the captain shouted with an evil frown.Drum yes yes ladies, ladies, ladies, the drums crackled. And Pierre realized that a mysterious force had already completely taken possession of these people and that now it was useless to say anything else.
The captured officers were separated from the soldiers and ordered to go ahead. There were about thirty officers, including Pierre, and three hundred soldiers.
The captured officers released from other booths were all strangers, were much better dressed than Pierre, and looked at him, in his shoes, with incredulity and aloofness. Not far from Pierre walked, apparently enjoying the general respect of his fellow prisoners, a fat major in a Kazan dressing gown, belted with a towel, with a plump, yellow, angry face. He held one hand with a pouch in his bosom, the other leaned on a chibouk. The major, puffing and puffing, grumbled and got angry at everyone because it seemed to him that he was being pushed and that everyone was in a hurry when there was nowhere to hurry, everyone was surprised at something when there was nothing surprising in anything. The other, a small, thin officer, was talking to everyone, making assumptions about where they were being led now and how far they would have time to go that day. An official, in welled boots and a commissariat uniform, ran in from different directions and looked out for the burned-out Moscow, loudly reporting his observations about what had burned down and what this or that visible part of Moscow was like. The third officer, of Polish origin by accent, argued with the commissariat official, proving to him that he was mistaken in determining the quarters of Moscow.
What are you arguing about? the major said angrily. - Is it Nikola, Vlas, it's all the same; you see, everything has burned down, well, that’s the end of it ... Why are you pushing, is there really not enough road, ”he turned angrily to the one who was walking behind and was not pushing him at all.
- Hey, hey, hey, what have you done! - heard, however, now from one side, now from the other side the voices of the prisoners, looking around the conflagrations. - And then Zamoskvorechye, and Zubovo, and then in the Kremlin, look, half is missing ... Yes, I told you that all Zamoskvorechye, that’s how it is.
- Well, you know what burned down, well, what to talk about! the major said.
Passing through Khamovniki (one of the few unburnt quarters of Moscow) past the church, the entire crowd of prisoners suddenly huddled to one side, and exclamations of horror and disgust were heard.
- Look, you bastards! That is not Christ! Yes, dead, dead and there ... They smeared it with something.
Pierre also moved towards the church, which had something that caused exclamations, and vaguely saw something leaning against the fence of the church. From the words of his comrades, who saw him better, he learned that it was something like the corpse of a man, standing upright by the fence and smeared with soot in his face ...
– Marchez, sacre nom… Filez… trente mille diables… [Go! go! Damn! Devils!] - the convoys cursed, and the French soldiers, with renewed anger, dispersed the crowd of prisoners who were looking at the dead man with cleavers.
Along the lanes of Khamovniki, the prisoners walked alone with their escort and the wagons and wagons that belonged to the escorts and rode behind; but, having gone out to the grocery stores, they found themselves in the middle of a huge, closely moving artillery convoy, mixed with private wagons.
At the very bridge, everyone stopped, waiting for those who were riding in front to advance. From the bridge, the prisoners opened behind and in front of endless rows of other moving convoys. To the right, where the Kaluga road curved past Neskuchny, disappearing into the distance, stretched endless ranks of troops and convoys. These were the troops of the Beauharnais corps that had come out first; Behind, along the embankment and across the Stone Bridge, Ney's troops and wagon trains stretched.
Davout's troops, to which the prisoners belonged, went through the Crimean ford and already partly entered Kaluga Street. But the carts were so stretched out that the last trains of Beauharnais had not yet left Moscow for Kaluzhskaya Street, and the head of Ney's troops was already leaving Bolshaya Ordynka.
Having passed the Crimean ford, the prisoners moved several steps and stopped, and again moved, and on all sides the carriages and people became more and more embarrassed. After walking for more than an hour those several hundred steps that separate the bridge from Kaluzhskaya Street, and having reached the square where Zamoskvoretsky Streets converge with Kaluzhskaya Street, the prisoners, squeezed into a heap, stopped and stood for several hours at this intersection. From all sides was heard the incessant, like the sound of the sea, the rumble of wheels, and the tramp of feet, and incessant angry cries and curses. Pierre stood pressed against the wall of the charred house, listening to this sound, which in his imagination merged with the sounds of the drum.
Several captured officers, in order to see better, climbed the wall of the burnt house, near which Pierre was standing.
- To the people! Eka to the people! .. And they piled on the guns! Look: furs ... - they said. “Look, you bastards, they robbed him… There, behind him, on a cart… After all, this is from an icon, by God!.. It must be the Germans. And our muzhik, by God!.. Ah, scoundrels! Here they are, the droshky - and they captured! .. Look, he sat down on the chests. Fathers! .. Fight! ..
- So it's in the face then, in the face! So you can't wait until evening. Look, look ... and this, of course, is Napoleon himself. You see, what horses! in monograms with a crown. This is a folding house. Dropped the bag, can't see. They fought again ... A woman with a child, and not bad. Yes, well, they will let you through... Look, there is no end. Russian girls, by God, girls! In the carriages, after all, how calmly they sat down!
Again, a wave of general curiosity, as near the church in Khamovniki, pushed all the prisoners to the road, and Pierre, thanks to his growth over the heads of others, saw what had so attracted the curiosity of the prisoners. In three carriages, intermingled between the charging boxes, they rode, closely sitting on top of each other, discharged, in bright colors, rouged, something screaming with squeaky voices of a woman.
From the moment Pierre realized the appearance of a mysterious force, nothing seemed strange or scary to him: neither a corpse smeared with soot for fun, nor these women hurrying somewhere, nor the conflagration of Moscow. Everything that Pierre now saw made almost no impression on him - as if his soul, preparing for a difficult struggle, refused to accept impressions that could weaken it.
The train of women has passed. Behind him again trailed carts, soldiers, wagons, soldiers, decks, carriages, soldiers, boxes, soldiers, occasionally women.
Pierre did not see people separately, but saw their movement.
All these people, the horses seemed to be driven by some invisible force. All of them, during the hour during which Pierre watched them, floated out of different streets with the same desire to pass quickly; they all the same, colliding with others, began to get angry, fight; white teeth bared, eyebrows frowned, the same curses were thrown over and over, and on all faces there was the same youthfully resolute and cruelly cold expression, which struck Pierre in the morning at the sound of a drum on the corporal's face.
Already before evening, the escort commander gathered his team and, shouting and arguing, squeezed into the carts, and the prisoners, surrounded on all sides, went out onto the Kaluga road.
They walked very quickly, without resting, and stopped only when the sun had already begun to set. The carts moved one on top of the other, and people began to prepare for the night. Everyone seemed angry and unhappy. For a long time, curses, angry cries and fights were heard from different sides. The carriage, which was riding behind the escorts, advanced on the escorts' wagon and pierced it with a drawbar. Several soldiers from different directions ran to the wagon; some beat on the heads of the horses harnessed to the carriage, turning them, others fought among themselves, and Pierre saw that one German was seriously wounded in the head with a cleaver.
It seemed that all these people now experienced, when they stopped in the middle of the field in the cold twilight of an autumn evening, the same feeling of unpleasant awakening from the haste that seized everyone upon leaving and the impetuous movement somewhere. Stopping, everyone seemed to understand that it was still unknown where they were going, and that this movement would be a lot of hard and difficult.
The escorts treated the prisoners at this halt even worse than when they set out. At this halt, for the first time, the meat food of the captives was issued with horse meat.
From the officers to the last soldier, it was noticeable in everyone, as it were, a personal bitterness against each of the prisoners, which so unexpectedly replaced the previously friendly relations.
This exasperation intensified even more when, when counting the prisoners, it turned out that during the bustle, leaving Moscow, one Russian soldier, pretending to be sick from his stomach, fled. Pierre saw how a Frenchman beat a Russian soldier because he moved far from the road, and heard how the captain, his friend, reprimanded the non-commissioned officer for the escape of a Russian soldier and threatened him with a court. To the excuse of the non-commissioned officer that the soldier was sick and could not walk, the officer said that he was ordered to shoot those who would fall behind. Pierre felt that the fatal force that crushed him during the execution and which was invisible during captivity now again took possession of his existence. He was scared; but he felt how, in proportion to the efforts made by the fatal force to crush him, a force of life independent of it grew and grew stronger in his soul.
Pierre dined on rye flour soup with horse meat and talked with his comrades.
Neither Pierre nor any of his comrades spoke about what they saw in Moscow, nor about the rudeness of the treatment of the French, nor about the order to shoot, which was announced to them: everyone was, as if in rebuff to the deteriorating situation, especially lively and cheerful . They talked about personal memories, about funny scenes seen during the campaign, and hushed up conversations about the present situation.
The sun has long since set. Bright stars lit up somewhere in the sky; the red, fire-like glow of the rising full moon spread over the edge of the sky, and the huge red ball oscillated surprisingly in the grayish haze. It became light. The evening was already over, but the night had not yet begun. Pierre got up from his new comrades and went between the fires to the other side of the road, where, he was told, the captured soldiers were standing. He wanted to talk to them. On the road, a French sentry stopped him and ordered him to turn back.
Pierre returned, but not to the fire, to his comrades, but to the unharnessed wagon, which had no one. He crossed his legs and lowered his head, sat down on the cold ground at the wheel of the wagon, and sat motionless for a long time, thinking. More than an hour has passed. Nobody bothered Pierre. Suddenly he burst out laughing with his thick, good-natured laugh so loudly that people from different directions looked around in surprise at this strange, obviously lonely laugh.
– Ha, ha, ha! Pierre laughed. And he said aloud to himself: “The soldier didn’t let me in.” Caught me, locked me up. I am being held captive. Who me? Me! Me, my immortal soul! Ha, ha, ha! .. Ha, ha, ha! .. - he laughed with tears in his eyes.
Some man got up and came up to see what this strange big man alone was laughing about. Pierre stopped laughing, got up, moved away from the curious and looked around him.
Previously, loudly noisy with the crackling of fires and the talk of people, the huge, endless bivouac subsided; the red fires of the fires went out and grew pale. High in the bright sky stood a full moon. Forests and fields, previously invisible outside the camp, now opened up in the distance. And even farther than these forests and fields could be seen a bright, oscillating, inviting endless distance. Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the departing, playing stars. “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me! thought Pierre. “And they caught all this and put it in a booth, fenced off with boards!” He smiled and went to bed with his comrades.
In the first days of October, another truce came to Kutuzov with a letter from Napoleon and an offer of peace, deceptively signified from Moscow, while Napoleon was already not far ahead of Kutuzov, on the old Kaluga road. Kutuzov answered this letter in the same way as the first one sent from Lauriston: he said that there could be no talk of peace.
Soon after this, a report was received from the partisan detachment of Dorokhov, who was walking to the left of Tarutin, that troops had appeared in Fominsky, that these troops consisted of Brusier's division, and that this division, separated from other troops, could easily be exterminated. Soldiers and officers again demanded activity. Staff generals, excited by the memory of the ease of victory at Tarutin, insisted on Kutuzov's execution of Dorokhov's proposal. Kutuzov did not consider any offensive necessary. The average came out, that which was to be accomplished; a small detachment was sent to Fominsky, which was supposed to attack Brussier.
By a strange chance, this appointment - the most difficult and most important, as it turned out later - was received by Dokhturov; that same modest, little Dokhturov, whom no one described to us as making battle plans, flying in front of regiments, throwing crosses at batteries, etc., who was considered and called indecisive and impenetrable, but the same Dokhturov, whom during all the Russian wars with the French, from Austerlitz and up to the thirteenth year, we find commanders wherever only the situation is difficult. In Austerlitz, he remains the last at the Augusta dam, gathering regiments, saving what is possible when everything is running and dying and not a single general is in the rear guard. He, sick with a fever, goes to Smolensk with twenty thousand to defend the city against the entire Napoleonic army. In Smolensk, he had barely dozed off at the Molokhov Gates, in a paroxysm of fever, he was awakened by the cannonade across Smolensk, and Smolensk held out all day. On Borodino day, when Bagration was killed and the troops of our left flank were killed in the ratio of 9 to 1 and the entire force of the French artillery was sent there, no one else was sent, namely the indecisive and impenetrable Dokhturov, and Kutuzov was in a hurry to correct his mistake when he sent there another. And the small, quiet Dokhturov goes there, and Borodino is the best glory of the Russian army. And many heroes are described to us in verse and prose, but almost not a word about Dokhturov.
Again Dokhturov is sent there to Fominsky and from there to Maly Yaroslavets, to the place where the last battle with the French took place, and to the place from which, obviously, the death of the French already begins, and again many geniuses and heroes describe to us during this period of the campaign , but not a word about Dokhturov, or very little, or doubtful. This silence about Dokhturov most obviously proves his merits.
Naturally, for a person who does not understand the movement of the machine, when he sees its operation, it seems that the most important part of this machine is that chip that accidentally got into it and, interfering with its movement, is rattling in it. A person who does not know the structure of the machine cannot understand that not this spoiling and interfering chip, but that small transmission gear that turns inaudibly, is one of the most essential parts of the machine.
On October 10, on the very day Dokhturov walked halfway to Fominsky and stopped in the village of Aristovo, preparing to execute the given order exactly, the entire French army, in its convulsive movement, reached the position of Murat, as it seemed, in order to give the battle, suddenly, for no reason, turned to the left onto the new Kaluga road and began to enter Fominsky, in which only Brussier had previously stood. Dokhturov under command at that time had, in addition to Dorokhov, two small detachments of Figner and Seslavin.
On the evening of October 11, Seslavin arrived in Aristovo to the authorities with a captured French guard. The prisoner said that the troops that had now entered Fominsky were the vanguard of the entire large army, that Napoleon was right there, that the entire army had already left Moscow for the fifth day. That same evening, a courtyard man who came from Borovsk told how he saw the entry of a huge army into the city. Cossacks from the Dorokhov detachment reported that they saw the French guards walking along the road to Borovsk. From all this news, it became obvious that where they thought to find one division, there was now the entire French army, marching from Moscow in an unexpected direction - along the old Kaluga road. Dokhturov did not want to do anything, because it was not clear to him now what his duty was. He was ordered to attack Fominsky. But in Fominsky there used to be only Brussier, now there was the whole French army. Yermolov wanted to do as he pleased, but Dokhturov insisted that he needed to have an order from his Serene Highness. It was decided to send a report to headquarters.
For this, an intelligent officer, Bolkhovitinov, was chosen, who, in addition to a written report, was supposed to tell the whole story in words. At twelve o'clock in the morning, Bolkhovitinov, having received an envelope and a verbal order, galloped, accompanied by a Cossack, with spare horses to the main headquarters.
The night was dark, warm, autumnal. It has been raining for the fourth day. Having changed horses twice and galloping thirty miles along a muddy, viscous road in an hour and a half, Bolkhovitinov was at Letashevka at two o'clock in the morning. Climbing down at the hut, on the wattle fence of which there was a sign: "General Staff", and leaving the horse, he entered the dark passage.
- The general on duty soon! Very important! he said to someone who was getting up and snuffling in the darkness of the passage.
“From the evening they were very unwell, they didn’t sleep for the third night,” whispered the orderly voice intercessively. “Wake up the captain first.
“Very important, from General Dokhturov,” said Bolkhovitinov, entering the open door he felt for. The orderly went ahead of him and began to wake someone:
“Your honor, your honor is a courier.
- I'm sorry, what? from whom? said a sleepy voice.
- From Dokhturov and from Alexei Petrovich. Napoleon is in Fominsky,” said Bolkhovitinov, not seeing in the darkness the one who asked him, but from the sound of his voice, assuming that it was not Konovnitsyn.
The awakened man yawned and stretched.
“I don’t want to wake him up,” he said, feeling something. - Sick! Maybe so, rumors.
“Here is the report,” said Bolkhovitinov, “it was ordered to immediately hand it over to the general on duty.
- Wait, I'll light the fire. Where the hell are you always going to put it? - Turning to the batman, said the stretching man. It was Shcherbinin, Konovnitsyn's adjutant. “I found it, I found it,” he added.
The orderly cut down the fire, Shcherbinin felt the candlestick.
“Oh, the nasty ones,” he said in disgust.
By the light of the sparks, Bolkhovitinov saw the young face of Shcherbinin with a candle and in the front corner of a still sleeping man. It was Konovnitsyn.
When at first the sulphurous tinder lit up with a blue and then a red flame, Shcherbinin lit a tallow candle, from the candlestick of which the Prussians gnawed at it ran, and examined the messenger. Bolkhovitinov was covered in mud and, wiping himself with his sleeve, smeared his face.
Zhou Enlai Chjou Anlay Career: Politician
Birth: China, 5/3/1898
Premier of the State Administrative Council of the People's Republic of China (1949-1954). Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China (since 1954). Minister of Foreign Affairs (since 1949). Together with J. Nehru, he developed five principles of peaceful coexistence (pancha shila).
Zhou Enlai was born on March 5, 1898 in the county town of Huai'an in the outback of Jiangsu into an impoverished family of hereditary civil servants. His father, a small financial officer, having been widowed before his term, gave his nine-year-old son to the family of his childless brother. A year later, the boy was taken in by another paternal uncle who served as a police officer in Mukden (today Shenyang). Here Zhou Enlai began attending school. Along with Chinese classical literature, he read the works of C. Darwin, J.-J. Rousseau and other European authors, taught the British language.
In 1913, Zhou Enlai entered the Nankai High School in Tianjin, where he studied for four years. He lived in a boarding school and earned a living by performing various technical jobs that the administration gave.
In the fall of 1919, Zhou Enlai was enrolled as a student at Nankai University. He became editor and active contributor to the daily student newspaper. A year later, Zhou Enlai left for France with a group of students, where he continued to master and promote the ideas of Marxism.
In September 1924, at the direction of the CPC leadership, he returned to China, where he served as secretary of the Guangdong-Guangxi Committee of the CPC and head of its military department.
At the age of 27, Zhou Enlai married Deng Yingchao, an activist of the Tianjin Student Awakening Association, whom he met back in 1919 and corresponded throughout the years he spent in Europe. Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao lived together for more than 50 years.
After the betrayal of the right wing of the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-shek to the cause of the revolution, Zhou Enlai left the Kuomintang. At the Fifth Congress of the CPC in the spring of 1927, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPC and remained a member of it all subsequent years.
On December 12, 1936, Chiang Kai-shek was arrested in Xi'an by his own military leaders. Since Chiang Kai-shek was not a supporter of surrender to Japan and was a major political figure capable of leading a united Chinese front, the CCP sent Zhou Enlai to Xi'an to peacefully resolve the incident. He successfully coped with this only difficult diplomatic task. Chiang Kai-shek, in a conversation with him, expressed readiness to unite all the forces of the country to defend against an external enemy and end the civil war. The peaceful resolution of the Xi'an conflict marked the beginning of the formation in China of a united anti-Japanese national front with the participation of the Kuomintang and the CCP. But a few years passed, once the national liberation battle ended in victory.
In November 1944, Zhou Enlai was sent to Chongqing to negotiate with Kuomintang troops and US representatives who mediated between the Kuomintang and the CPC in order to create a coalition government in China. On August 28, 1945, on the eve of Japan's surrender, Zhou Enlai, together with Mao Zedong, arrived in Chongqing. Peace negotiations with the Kuomintang ended with the signing of an agreement. On January 1, 1946, Zhou Enlai was appointed as the representative of the CPC in negotiations with the Kuomintang and the representative of the United States on ending military conflicts and restoring communications, and then participated as the head of the CPC delegation in the first session of the Political Consultative Conference of representatives of various parties and public organizations convened in Chongqing.
At the conference of the People's Political Consultative Council, which opened on September 22, 1949, in Peiping, Zhou Enlai presented a draft General Program and, in practice, headed the work of the conference. At the first session of the People's Government of the People's Republic of China, proclaimed on October 1, 1949, he was elected Premier of the State Administrative Council and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the PRC. In these posts, his organizational and diplomatic abilities were dazzlingly manifested.
On January 20, 1950, Zhou Enlai arrived in Moscow, where Mao Zedong was at that time, and participated in the Sino-Soviet negotiations. On February 14, on behalf of the PRC, Zhou Enlai signed in Moscow the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, according to which China received from the USSR the necessary financial, economic, scientific, technical and military support and reliable protection from the Soviet Armed Forces in the event of foreign aggression.
Since 1949, Zhou Enlai's activities have been associated with all the main stages of the national economic construction of the PRC, the development of culture, science, and enlightenment. Thanks to Zhou Enlai, Chinese diplomacy achieved significant success, helping to ease tensions in international relations. His diplomatic genius was especially dazzling at the meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the five great powers, which opened on April 26, 1954 in Geneva, at which the Korean interrogative motif and the situation in Indochina were discussed. At the conference, China and the Soviet Union energetically supported the proposals of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), which provided for the recognition of its independence, as well as Cambodia and Laos. The agreements reached in Geneva strengthened the position of the DRV as a young socialist state and marked the end of French intervention in Indochina.
The Americans then did not recognize the People's Republic of China. J. F. Dulles, moreover, jokingly stated that he did not intend to contact the head of the Chinese delegation, moreover, if their cars collided on one of the streets of Geneva. Under such conditions, the Chinese Foreign Minister had to start his difficult diplomatic business.
More than enough years will pass, and the term politician Zhou Enlai will appear in diplomatic circles. It is used when they want to utter prudence, consistency, realism and pragmatism in an effort to provide China's national interests. Zhou Enlai himself is often called the chief Chinese diplomat, and rightly so, because until the last days of his life he remained the organizer and active participant in all the most important foreign policy actions of the PRC.
In 1954, Zhou Enlai and Indian Prime Minister J. Nehru developed five principles of peaceful coexistence (pancha shila), which were further recognized and supported by the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries at the Bandung Conference held in April 1955. Its decisions, achieved thanks to the diplomatic skill of Zhou Enlai and Nehru, were imbued with the spirit of the struggle against colonialism, for all-round economic and cultural cooperation between the countries of Asia and Africa on the basis of the ten principles of peaceful coexistence formulated by the conference, which represented the formation of pancha shila.
Zhou Enlai attached great importance to personal contacts with leaders and public figures of foreign countries, traveled abroad on his own and often received foreign guests in Beijing. He meticulously prepared for foreign trips, sensitively studied the dossiers collected on his instructions by the apparatus of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC on all issues related to the country where he was to move.
In November 1956 - February 1957, Zhou Enlai made a series of trips to Asian countries - Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ceylon, establishing contacts with these countries.
In October 1961, Zhou Enlai visited Moscow as head of the Chinese Party delegation to the CPSU congress. In his speech on October 19, he rudely condemned the US military provocations in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, South Vietnam, South Korea and in China - on the island of Taiwan, called for the unity of the entire socialist camp: Cohesion is power. In the presence of cohesion, it is allowed to overcome everything. There has long been a deep friendship between the peoples of China and the Soviet Union... This great solidarity and friendship between the peoples of our two countries will exist for centuries, just as the Yangtze and the Volga will carry their waters all the way.
In the spring of 1966, he again visited Burma, India, Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam, and also the Mongolian People's Republic. In late 1963 and early 1964, Zhou Enlai traveled to ten African countries. The statements he made during this trip, in the spirit of Mao Tse-tung's tenets that there is an excellent revolutionary situation in Africa, did not, however, receive the expected support of the governments of these countries. In this regard, his new trip to African countries in the summer of 1965 was not crowned with success either. It is quite noteworthy that Zhou Enlai's public speeches in African countries during these years differed significantly in content and tone from the stormy anti-Soviet campaign then launched in the Chinese press.
China especially appreciates Zhou Enlai's contribution to the normalization of relations with the United States. To lead the country out of the chaos of the cultural revolution and implement the program of four modernizations, colossal material costs were necessary, the existence of a large number of highly qualified personnel. The 10-year stretch of the Cultural Revolution brought China into economic decline. Under these conditions, Mao Zedong came to the conclusion that it was possible to reach a rapprochement with the United States and entrusted Zhou Enlai with the practical implementation of this turn, which he began to act.
It all started with a dramatic performance of ping-pong diplomacy played out by the Chinese premier. After the World Table Tennis Championship held in Japan, the head of the Chinese government invited an American team to China. This competition helped, according to experts, to dampen anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States and create a favorable atmosphere for a confidential visit to Beijing by US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.
During his first visit to Beijing (July 1971), Kissinger lived in the Diaoyutai government mansion. Before his arrival, Chou En-lai himself instructed everyone who had something to do with this visit, pointing out the need to strictly observe secrecy and not allow any surprises. As Kissinger recalls, at the first meeting, Zhou Enlai asked him if he was among the delegates to the Geneva Conference who refused to meet Chinese diplomats. Kissinger said no, which earned the premier's goodwill.
A few months later, Zhou Enlai personally participated in the drafting of a joint Chinese-American communiqué, which outlined the positions of both sides and which was supposed to be issued during Nixon's visit to China. Today, China believes that the mere fact of the publication of the Shanghai Communiqué is the fruit of Zhou Enlai's diplomatic skill. They especially note the prime minister's principled position on the issue of normalizing relations with the United States. When, shortly before Nixon's arrival, Presidential Aide General A. Haig visited Beijing to clarify all the details of the upcoming visit, Zhou Enlai had many hours of conversation with him, during which he explained that the Americans needed to build negotiations with the PRC on an equal basis and keep in mind that China will not make concessions. In the same spirit, the head of government instructed his assistants: Behave with dignity, show hospitality, but do not kowtow to foreigners.
Chinese oncologists diagnosed Zhou Enlai's infirmity in May 1972. It would seem that what prevented the 72-year-old prime minister from leaving for a well-deserved rest? But because there was still Jiang Qing with her entourage, who still enjoyed the patronage of the elderly, but, as before, powerful husband - Mao Zedong.
Having thought over a new arrangement of personnel in the highest echelons of state power, he went by plane to Changsha, where Mao Zedong was at that time, and managed, ahead of Jiang Qing, to enlist the support of the leader. Zhou Enlai did everything so that after the death of Mao Jiang Qing and her entourage did not come to power.
He underwent a total of 14 operations. In the spring of 1974, his health deteriorated, he was always in the hospital, but he did not stop doing the affairs of the State Council and receiving visitors. On January 13, 1975, Zhou Enlai made a report at the session of the National People's Congress, in which he outlined the program of four modernizations. This, according to the Chinese, is his most important testament.
In February 1975, he underwent another operation, but the formation of the disease was no longer allowed to stop. On January 8, 1976, Zhou Enlai died. Dying, he bequeathed that his funeral ceremony be held in the Taiwan Hall of the National People's Congress building, and his ashes after cremation were scattered over the fields, mountains and rivers of China and over the waters of the Taiwan Strait.
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I propose to discuss the problem of border conflicts in the 50-80s. 17th century I am especially interested in Chinese and Korean data on wars. Please provide online links to materials. I am also interested in A. Pastukhov's article on the settlements of the Amur peoples. I think Zhang Geda will help.
Stankov K. N. Patrick Gordon and the Jacobite Party in Russia at the end of the 17th century. // Questions of history. - 2011. - No. 10. - S. 108-121.
In 1688 - 1689. In England, during the Glorious Revolution, the last Catholic monarch, James II Stuart (1685 - 1688), was overthrown. However, despite the easy and relatively bloodless victory of the revolution, the dethroned king had many supporters in Britain who began to fight for his return to the throne. By the name of their formal leader, the representatives of this political movement were called "Jacobites". After the death of James II in exile in 1701, his followers did not lay down their arms. Having proclaimed first the son and then the grandson of the deposed monarch as their king, the Jacobites were active throughout almost the entire 18th century.
The Jacobite movement is one of the brightest pages of modern British history. Many studies have been written on this topic both by British scientists and their colleagues in the USA, France, Ireland, Italy and other countries. However, certain aspects of this problem still remain unexplored, in particular, the emergence and activities of the Jacobite party in Russia. This problem is partly touched upon in the collective monograph by Scottish historians P. Dukes, G. P. Heard and J. Kotilan "The Stuarts and the Romanovs: the formation and collapse of special relations." The problem of Jacobite emigration to Russia is also discussed in the works of their compatriots R. Wills and M. Bruce, but both authors refer to a later period in the development of the movement that followed the defeat of the Jacobite uprising of 17151.
In Russian historiography, the activities of the "Russian Jacobites" in the first decade after the Glorious Revolution are practically unexplored. In the second half of the XIX century. historian A. Brickner, based on the abbreviated version of the "Diary"2 published by M.F. Posselt, who was in the Russian service, General Patrick Gordon, suggested that most of the British subjects living in the Muscovite state continued to support the deposed Yakov after the Glorious Revolution II3. A decisive breakthrough in this direction was made in recent decades by D. G. Fedosov, a senior researcher at the IVI RAS. The main merit of the Russian scientist was the publication of the extensive "Diary" of P. Gordon, stored in the Russian State Military Historical Archive, which continues to this day. At the moment, the surviving parts of the general's diaries have been published, covering the period from 1635 to 16894. Based on these materials, Fedosov came to the conclusion that Patrick Gordon became the main representative of the Jacobite movement at the Russian court at the end of the 17th century. The historian pays special attention to the fact that in 1686 James II appointed P. Gordon as the extraordinary envoy of Britain in Russia, and until his death in 1699 the Scottish general defended the interests of his overlord before the Russian government5. The author is deeply grateful to D. G. Fedosov for providing unique documents, assistance in translating archival materials, and numerous consultations when writing this article.
This study is based on the materials of Russian archives: the unpublished fifth and sixth volumes of the "Diary" and the correspondence of P. Gordon, dedicated to the events of 1690 - 1699 and stored in the RGVIA, as well as diplomatic documents relating to Russian-British and Russian-Dutch relations, presented in funds N 35 ("Relations between Russia and England") and N 50 ("Relations between Russia and Holland") of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts.
The first question that a historian asks when studying the problem posed is why in our country the appearance of such a party became possible at all? At a superficial glance, there is bewilderment why the British, cut off from their homeland and living practically on the other side of Europe, so sharply perceived the events of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. and continued to consider James II as their legitimate monarch, while in Britain itself the bulk of the population chose to stay away from the political struggle. It is noteworthy that if in other European countries the Jacobite emigration was based on people who fled from the British Isles immediately after the overthrow of James II and the defeat of the Jacobite uprising of 1689-1691, and their political motives remain quite clear, then in our country the Jacobite party was made up of the British, who left their homeland long before the events of 1688-1689. In addition, some, such as James Gordon, were born already in Muscovy and were only half British in origin.
The emergence of the Jacobite party in Russia, in my opinion, can be explained by several factors. From a number of sources it is known that it was based on the military. Among the British officers who entered the Russian service in the second half of the 17th century. in connection with the formation of regiments of the "foreign system", there were many people who left "Foggy Albion" during or after the English bourgeois revolution of 1640-1658. For many of them, the main motive for emigration was loyalty to the Stuart dynasty and the Catholic Church. The royalists did not accept the Glorious Revolution, since they considered it as a kind of continuation of the revolutionary events of 1640-1658. and perceived William of Orange as the "new Cromwell". The Catholics supported James II because he was their co-religionist, and rightly feared that with his overthrow and the coming to power of the Calvinist William III of Orange, the position of their brothers in faith, who remained in Britain, could seriously worsen.
Anisimov E. V. Peter I: the birth of an empire // Questions of History. - 1989. - No. 7. - S. 3-20. Peter I in a foreign outfit in front of his mother Tsarina Natalia, Patriarch Andrian and teacher Zotov. Nevrev N. V., 1903
We, the people of the end of the 20th century, cannot fully appreciate the explosive effect of the Petrine reforms in Russia. People of the past, the 19th century, felt it differently: sharper, deeper, more visually. Here is what historian M.N. Pogodin, a contemporary of Pushkin, wrote about the significance of Peter in 1841, that is, almost a century and a half after the great reforms of the first quarter of the 18th century: “In the hands of [Peter], the ends of all our threads are connected in one knot. we don’t look back, everywhere we meet with this colossal figure, which casts a long shadow on all of our past and even obscures ancient history for us, which at the present moment still seems to hold its hand over us and which, it seems, we will never lose out of sight, no matter how far into the future we may go."
What Peter created in Russia survived the generation of Pogodin, as well as the next generations. Let me remind you that the last recruitment took place in 1874 - 170 years after the first (1705), the Senate lasted from 1711 to December 1917, that is, 206 years; the synodal structure of the Orthodox Church remained unchanged for 197 years (from 1721 to 1918); The poll tax system was abolished only in 1887, when 163 years had passed since its introduction in 1724.
In other words, in the history of Russia we will find few institutions consciously created by man that would have existed for so long, having had such a strong impact on all aspects of the life of the people. Moreover, some principles and stereotypes of political consciousness, developed or finally fixed under Peter, are still alive. Sometimes they exist in new verbal clothes as traditional elements of our thinking and social behavior. The Bronze Horseman has more than once galloped heavily through our streets. Let us try, following generations of historians, to reconsider the phenomenon of Peter the Great's reforms, we will make an attempt to get closer to understanding their significance for the fate of Russia.
Of the many familiar symbols of the Petrine era, which have become the property of literature and art, it is necessary to highlight a ship under sail with a skipper on the bridge. Remember, in Pushkin: "This skipper was that glorious skipper who moved our earth, who gave a mighty run to the sovereign rudder of his native ship." The ship - and for Peter himself - a symbol of an organized, calculated to the inch structure, the material embodiment of human thought, complex movement at the will of a rational person. Moreover, the ship is a model of an ideal society, the best of the organizations invented by man in the eternal struggle with the blind elements. Behind this symbol is a whole layer of culture of the 16th-17th centuries. Many ideas of the so-called age of Rationalism - the 17th century - immediately merged here. These ideas became a system in the works of the famous philosophers of that time - Bacon, Gassendi, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz. These ideas seemed to permeate the air that scientists, writers, statesmen - Peter's contemporaries breathed. The new concepts asserted that science, experimental knowledge, is the surest means of man's dominance over the forces of nature, that the state is a purely human institution that a reasonable person can change at his own discretion, improve depending on the goals that he sets for himself.
The state is built like a house, Hobbes argued. Like a ship, we add. The idea of the human, and not the God-given nature of the state gave rise to the idea that the state is that ideal instrument for transforming society, educating a virtuous subject, an ideal institution with which you can achieve the "general good" - desired, but constantly leaving, as horizon line, goals of mankind. The improvement of society is possible, according to the then philosophers and statesmen, only with the help of organization and laws - the levers of the state. By perfecting the law, by securing the implementation of laws through institutions, it is possible to achieve universal prosperity.
It seemed to humanity, which had recently emerged from the Middle Ages, that the key to happiness had been found, it was only necessary to formulate laws and put them into practice. It is no coincidence that the appearance and distribution in the XVIII century. dualism - a doctrine that assigns to God the role of the first impulse, the initiator of the world, which, however, further develops according to its inherent natural laws; you just need to discover them, write them down and achieve an accurate and universal performance. Hence the amazing optimism of the people of the 17th-18th centuries, the naive faith in the unlimited forces of a person who builds his ship, house, city, society, state according to drawings, on "reasonable" principles. The 17th century is the time of Robinson Crusoe, not so much a literary hero as a symbol of the "epoch of rationalism", a hero who believes in himself and overcomes hardships and misfortunes with the power of his knowledge.
Worthy of attention is the well-known mechanism of thinking of the people of Peter the Great. The outstanding successes of the exact, natural sciences prompted the interpretation of social life as a process close to mechanical. Descartes' doctrine of universal mathematics - the only reliable and devoid of mystic branch of knowledge - did its job: the image of a certain "colossus", acting like a precise clockwork, became a favorite image of statesmen and politicians, doctors and biologists of the 17th - early 18th centuries.
All these ideas and images with varying degrees of abstraction and simplification were in circulation in European society, and together with the ideas of reforms (and some even earlier) they reached Russia, where, refracted in accordance with local conditions, they became elements of political consciousness. Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say that Peter began to build his empire on the basis of the concepts of Descartes and Spinoza. We are talking about the strong influence of these ideas on the practical state activities of the great reformer. It is impossible to discount the personal acquaintance of the tsar with Leibniz, Peter's good knowledge of the works of G. Grotius and S. Pufendorf. The tsar ordered to translate the book of the latter "On the position of a person and a citizen" into Russian. Without taking into account all these circumstances, it is difficult to give an adequate assessment of Peter's reforms, the very personality of the tsar-reformer.
During his reign in Russia there was a sharp economic leap. Industrial construction was carried out at an unprecedented pace: in the first quarter of the 18th century. at least 200 original manufactories arose instead of the 15-20 that existed at the end of the 17th century. The most characteristic feature of this process was the prominent role of the autocratic state in the economy, its active penetration into all spheres of economic life. This role was due to many factors.
The economic concepts of mercantilism, widespread in Europe and Russia, assumed, as a condition for the existence of the state, the accumulation of money due to the active balance of foreign trade, the export of goods to foreign markets and the prevention of the import of foreign goods into one's own. This in itself required government intervention in the economy. The promotion of some - "useful", "necessary" types of production, crafts and goods, was combined with the prohibition, restriction of others - "unuseful" and "unnecessary" from the point of view of the state. Peter, who dreamed of the power of his country, was not indifferent to the ideas of mercantilism. The ideas of coercion in economic policy coincided with the general principles of "forcible progress" that he practiced during his reforms.
But something else is more important - in Russian conditions, the concept of mercantilism served to substantiate the characteristic direction of domestic policy. The unsuccessful start of the Northern War in the strongest way stimulated state industrial construction and, in general, state intervention in the economic sphere. The construction of numerous manufactories, mainly of defensive significance, was undertaken not from abstract ideas about the need for development and the benefits of the economy or the calculation of generating income, but was directly and strictly determined by the task of providing for the army and navy. The extreme situation after the defeat near Narva in 1700 with the loss of artillery caused the need to re-equip and increase the army, determined the nature, pace and specifics of industrial growth and, more broadly, Peter's entire economic policy.
It was based on the idea of the leading role of the state in the life of society in general, and in the economy in particular. Possessing huge financial and material resources, the monopoly right to use the land and its subsoil, ignoring the property rights of various classes, the state took the initiative of the industrialization necessary in those conditions. Based on clearly perceived interests and goals, the state dictated everything that was connected with the production and marketing of products. In the system of state industry created in a short time, the principles and methods of managing the economy, characteristic of subsequent years and unfamiliar to Russia of the previous period, were worked out.
A similar situation arose in trade. By planting its own industry, the state created (more precisely, sharply increased) its own trade, trying to get the maximum profit from popular goods within the country and export goods when they were sold abroad. The state seized trade in a primitive but very effective way - by introducing monopolies for the procurement and sale of certain goods, and the range of such goods (salt, flax, yuft, hemp, bread, lard, wax and others) was constantly expanding.
The establishment of state monopolies led to a voluntaristic rise in prices for these goods within the country, and most importantly, to the restriction and regulation of merchants' trading activities. The result was a breakdown, a disorganization of free trade enterprise based on market conditions. In the vast majority of cases, the introduction of state monopolies meant the transfer of the right to sell a monopolized product to a specific tax farmer, who immediately paid a large amount of money to the treasury, and then sought to return it with a vengeance at the expense of the consumer or supplier of raw materials, inflating prices and destroying his potential competitors in the bud.
The Petrine era turned out to be a real hard time in the history of the Russian merchant class. A sharp increase in direct taxes and various government services from merchants as the wealthiest part of the townspeople, the forcible cohesion of trading companies (a form of trade organization that seemed to Peter the most suitable in Russian conditions) are only part of the means and methods of coercion that he applied to the merchants on a significant scale, setting the main goal to get as much money for the treasury as possible. In line with such measures, one should also consider the forced relocation of merchants (moreover, from among the wealthiest) to St. where is strictly prohibited.
Studies by N. I. Pavlenko and A. I. Aksenov indicate that in the first quarter of the 18th century. it was precisely the wealthiest group of merchants - the "living room hundred" - that was ruined, after which the names of many owners of traditional trading firms disappeared from the list of wealthy people. The gross intervention of the state in the sphere of trade led to the destruction of the shaky foundation on which the well-being of many wealthy merchants, namely, loan and usurious capital, to a large extent rested. It is not an exaggeration to state the regulations of the Chief Magistrate of 1721: “Merchant and artisan tax-paying people in all cities are found not only in some kind of charity, but more from all sorts of insults, attacks and unbearable burdens, almost everyone is ruined, from which they have greatly diminished and already is not without important state harm"3. The realization of this fact came rather late, when the viability of the merchant's capital was significantly undermined.
This was the price paid by Russian entrepreneurs for a military victory, but the cost was shared by the townspeople with the rest of the population. The greatest burden of the war fell on the shoulders of the Russian peasantry. The burden of dozens of monetary and in-kind payments, recruitment, collection of workers, horses, heavy underwater and residential duties destabilized the national economy, led to impoverishment, the flight of hundreds of thousands of peasants. The intensification of robberies, armed uprisings, and finally, the uprising of K. Bulavin on the Don became the result of immense taxation pressure on the peasants.
By the 20s of the 18th century, when the military storm finally moved to the west and there could be no doubt about the successful completion of the war for Russia, Peter significantly changed the commercial and industrial policy. In the autumn of 1719, virtually all monopolies for the export of goods abroad were liquidated. The industrial policy has also undergone changes: the encouragement of private entrepreneurship has increased. Introduced in 1719, the Berg privilege allowed all residents of the country and foreigners, without exception, to search for minerals and build factories, even if this was associated with a violation of the feudal right to land where ores were found.
The practice of transferring state enterprises (especially those recognized as unprofitable for the treasury) to private owners or companies specially created for this has become widespread. The new owners received numerous benefits from the state: interest-free loans, the right to duty-free sale of goods, and so on. Significant assistance to entrepreneurs was also provided by the customs tariff approved in 1724, which facilitated the export of products of domestic manufactories and at the same time made it difficult to import from abroad goods produced in Russian manufactories.
It may seem that the changes in the economic policy of the autocracy that came at the end of the Northern War are a kind of "NEP" with the principles of greater economic freedom characteristic of it. But this illusion quickly dissipates as soon as we turn to the facts. There is no reason to think that, by changing the economic policy, Peter intended to weaken the influence of the state on the national economy or, for example, unconsciously contributed to the development of capitalist forms and methods of production, which were widespread in Western Europe at that time. The essence of what happened was a change not in the principles, but in the accents of industrial and trade policy. Manufactories were transferred to companies or private entrepreneurs in fact on lease terms, which were clearly defined and, if necessary, changed by the state, which had the right to confiscate enterprises in case of non-performance. The main duty of the owners was the timely execution of government orders; only surpluses beyond what would correspond to the current concept of "government order" could be sold by the entrepreneur on the market.
The created trade and industry management bodies, Berg-, Manufaktura-, Commerce College and the Chief Magistrate corresponded to the essence of the changes that had taken place. These bureaucratic institutions were institutions of state regulation of the economy, bodies of the commercial and industrial policy of the autocracy based on mercantilism. In Sweden, whose public institutions served as a model for the reforms of Peter the Great, similar boards carried out the policy of the royal power on the whole on the same theoretical foundations. The conditions of Russia differed from the Swedish ones not only in the scale of the country, but also in the fundamental features of the political order and culture, the intensity of industrial construction by the forces and at the expense of the state, but above all, in the unusual rigidity of regulation, an extensive system of restrictions, purely guardianship and supervision of commercial and industrial activities. subjects.
Giving "relaxation" to manufacturers and merchants, the state was not going to withdraw from the economy or at least weaken its influence on it. After 1718 - 1719 a new version of the old policy came into effect. Previously, the state influenced the economy through a system of prohibitions, monopolies, duties and taxes, that is, through open forms of coercion. Now that the emergency military situation had passed, all efforts were shifted to the creation and operation of an administrative-control bureaucratic machine, which, with the help of charters, regulations, privileges, reports, inspections, sought to direct the economic (and not only) life of the country through a system of peculiar gateways and channels. in the right direction for the state.
Administrative impact was combined with economic measures. Private enterprise was severely tied to the state chariot by a system of government orders, primarily of a defensive nature. On the one hand, this ensured the stability of the income of manufacturers, who could be sure that the sale of products to the treasury was guaranteed, but on the other hand, it closed the prospects for technical improvement, sharply downplayed the importance of competition as the perpetual mover of entrepreneurship. That is why later attempts to bring primitive production to the modern level turned out to be futile: there was no interest in increasing and improving it - with the provision of orders and sales through the treasury - there was no. The privileged position of a part of the entrepreneurs influenced in the same direction, for it eliminated competition.
The active influence of the state on the economic life of the country is only one aspect of the problem. Social relations, which the state served as a conductor, were actually transferred to manufactories, largely deforming their features as potentially capitalist enterprises. First of all, we are talking about the peculiarities of the use of labor force. Almost all the years of the Northern War (a time of rapid economic construction), the methods of providing enterprises with workers were diverse: the state and the owners of manufactories used both ascribed peasants who worked out their state taxes at the factories, and criminals, and civilians. There was no hiring problem. The presence in society of many non-taxable small strata, the large number of fugitive (including landowners) peasants, the existence of completely legal ways out of the service or taxable class - all this created a contingent of "free and walking" in the country, from where the labor force was drawn. The authorities turned a blind eye to this use of fugitive labor.
However, by the beginning of the 1920s, important social measures were taken: the fight against the escape of peasants, who were returned to their former owners, was intensified; in the course of a detailed audit of the actual population (as part of the tax reform that had begun), all peasants were subject to permanent attachment to the place of registration in the tax cadastre, and "free and walking" were equated with fugitive criminals and were considered outlawed.
The turn in government policy was immediately reflected in industry. The owners of manufactories and managers of state-owned factories complained about the catastrophic situation created by the export of the fugitives and the prohibition from now on, under pain of fines, to employ them. The execution of deliveries to the treasury was called into question. It was then that a law appeared that had the most serious consequences. By decree of January 18, 1721, Peter, in the form of state benefits, allowed private manufacturers to buy peasants for use in factory work4. Thus, a decisive step was taken towards the transformation of industrial enterprises, where, it would seem, the capitalist way of life was born, into a feudal patrimonial manufactory.
The existing norms of feudal law with its class criteria, as well as the social consciousness reflected in them, did not take into account the new social reality - the emergence of manufacturers and workers. There was no place for new population groups in established social orders. The new in the economy was perceived only as a variation of the old. The decree of May 28, 1723 regulated the procedure for hiring people who did not belong to the owner or were not "assigned" to the plant5. All of them had to either get permission from their landowner to work temporarily (“otkhodnik” with a passport), or fall into the number of fugitives, “passportless”, subject to arrest and immediate return to where they were recorded in the capitation cadastre.
Since then, industry could not develop in any other way than feudalism; the share of free labor in industry was reduced, state-owned enterprises switched to the work of "assigned", the institute "recruit" was formed - lifelong "industrial soldiers". Even those workers of private factories who were not anyone's property were later declared serfs ("eternally given"). Entire branches of industry were converted almost exclusively to the labor of serfs. The victory of forced labor in industry predetermined the growing from the beginning of the 19th century. Russia's economic backwardness.
Serfdom also deformed the process of formation of the bourgeoisie. The benefits received from the state were of a feudal nature. It was easier and more profitable for the manufacturer to beg for "peasants" than to look for workers on the free market. In addition, the purchased labor force led to the "death" of capital, an increase in unproductive costs, because in reality the money was spent on the purchase of land and serfs, of which no more than half could be used in factory work6. Under these conditions, there could be no question of expanding and improving production. The monopolies of breeders on production, the preferential sale of certain goods or the right to buy raw materials - these and other benefits were also not essentially capitalist, but were only a variant of the medieval "letters of honor".
The feudal deformation also affected the sphere of public consciousness. Manufacturers - the owners of serfs - did not feel their social identity, they did not have a corporate, class consciousness. While in the developed countries of Western Europe the bourgeoisie had already loudly declared its claims to the monarchs and the nobility, in Russia it was different: having become soul owners, artsy manufacturers sought to improve their social status by obtaining the nobility, longed to merge with the powerful privileged class, share its fate . The transformation of the most wealthy entrepreneurs, the Stroganovs and Demidovs, into aristocrats is the most striking example.
Thus, active state industrial construction created the economic base, so necessary for the developing nation, and at the same time restrained the tendencies leading it to the path of capitalist development, on which other European peoples had already embarked. The natural question is whether there was an alternative to what happened to the economy under Peter, whether there were other ways and means of its rise, except those chosen at that time.
If we accept the conquest of the shores of the Baltic Sea by Russia as a prerequisite for the full development of the state and recognize that the peaceful concession by Sweden of access to the Baltic was excluded, then much that Peter did was caused by necessity, including the creation of industry in the shortest possible time. But still, the historical path passed does not seem to be the only one even for that time.
The decree of 1721, as well as the subsequent acts, which allowed to buy peasants for factories or to exploit other people's serfs in various forms, had, as they say now, a fateful significance. The only alternative to it could be the abolition of serfdom. Did such a possibility exist in principle under Peter? His older contemporary, the Swedish king Charles XI, spent in the 80s of the XVII century. the so-called reduction of land: state estates appeared, leased out, while the peasants were freed from serfdom. For Peter, there was no such alternative. Serfdom, established in Russia long before the birth of Peter, permeated the entire life of the country, the consciousness of people; in Russia, in contrast to Western Europe, it played a special, comprehensive role. The destruction of the legal structures of the lower level would undermine the basis of autocratic power, which crowned the pyramid of serfs and their varieties. Thus, the sign of 1721 stood at a fork, but called to the main high road of Russian history, at the end of which the sign "1861" was visible.
Continuing the comparison of Peter's Russia with a ship, let us now consider what its upper structure was, above the waterline, under which the economic basis of society is hidden.
Transformations of public administration were carried out from the end of the 17th - beginning of the 18th century. Preparations for the Northern War, the creation of a new army, the construction of the fleet - all this led to a sharp increase in the workload of government departments. The clerk's apparatus, inherited by Peter from his predecessors, could not cope with the more complicated tasks of management. New orders were required, offices appeared. But there was very little new in their organization and functioning, and already at the beginning of the war it became clear that the momentum of the mechanism of state administration, the main elements of which were orders and local districts, did not keep pace with the increasing speed of the flywheel of autocratic initiative. This was manifested in the lack of money, people, provisions and other supplies for the army and navy.
The regional reform of 1707-1710 followed: provinces appeared, uniting several former counties, with the institution of kriegs commissars, and the main goal was to restore order in the provision of the army with the hands of the latter, establishing a direct connection between the provinces and the regiments assigned to the provinces. The regional reform not only met the acute needs of autocratic power, but also developed the bureaucratic trend that was already so characteristic of the previous period. It was with the help of strengthening the bureaucratic element in management that Peter intended to solve all state issues. The reform led not only to the concentration of financial and administrative powers in the hands of several governors - representatives of the central government, but also to the creation of an extensive, uniform, hierarchical network of bureaucratic institutions with a large staff of officials on the ground. The bureaucratic system was further developed during the new reform of local government in 1719.
A similar scheme was incorporated into the idea of organizing the Senate. The tendencies of bureaucratization of management, which arose long before Peter, received their final form under him. At the beginning of the XVIII century. in fact, the meetings of the Boyar Duma - the traditional council of the highest representatives of the nobility - are stopped, the functions of the Boyar Duma for managing the central and local apparatus are transferred to the so-called Council of Ministers - the temporary council of the heads of the most important departments. Already in the activities of this temporary body, the desire for bureaucratic regulation is clearly manifested. It was precisely with Peter’s desire to succeed in business by strengthening the bureaucratic principle that the decree of October 7, 1707, was connected, by which the tsar ordered all members of the council to leave signatures under the considered case, “because all foolishness will be shown by it”7.
There is one aspect, without taking into account which it is sometimes difficult to understand the essence of many phenomena in the history of Russia. This is the huge role of the state, when it is not public opinion that determines legislation, but, on the contrary, legislation in the strongest way forms (and deforms) public opinion and public consciousness. Peter, based on the concepts of rationalist philosophy and from traditional ideas about the role of an autocrat in Russia, attached great importance to written legislation, believing that the "correct" law, issued on time and consistently implemented in life, can do almost everything, starting with supplying the people with bread and ending with the correction of morals. Peter considered the exact fulfillment of the law to be a panacea for all the difficulties of life. He almost never had any doubts about the adequacy of the law of reality.
The law was implemented only through a system of bureaucratic institutions. We can talk about the creation under Peter of a genuine cult of an institution, an administrative authority. The thought of the great reformer of Russia was directed, firstly, to the creation of such legislation, which would cover and regulate, as far as possible, the whole life of subjects - from trade to the church, from a soldier's barracks to a private house. Secondly, Peter dreamed of creating a perfect and clock-like state structure through which legislation could be implemented. Peter had been hatching the idea of creating such an apparatus for a long time, but only when there was a turning point in the war with Sweden, he decided to do it. At the turn of the first two decades of the XVIII century. Peter in many areas of domestic politics began to move away from overt violence to regulation with the help of a bureaucratic machine.
As a model for the reform, Peter chose the Swedish state system, based on a functional principle, with the separation of powers, the uniformity of the hierarchical structure of the apparatus. In generalizing and systematizing administrative law, he went much further than the European apologists for cameralism. Generalizing the Swedish experience, taking into account some specific aspects of Russian reality, Peter created, in addition to a whole hierarchy of regulations, a regulation of regulations that had no analogues in Europe at that time - the General Regulation of 1719-1724. The regulations of the Admiralty Board, in particular, established 56 positions of officials from the president of the board to the almost anecdotal "position of profos" ("I must make sure that no one in the Admiralty defecates except for certain places. And if someone defecates past the indicated places, he will be beaten with cats and ordered clean up") 8.
Particularly important and key was the reform of the Senate. He concentrated judicial, administrative and legislative functions, was in charge of colleges and provinces. The appointment and approval of officials was also an important prerogative of the Senate. Its unofficial head was the Prosecutor General, endowed with special powers and subordinate only to the monarch. The creation of the post of prosecutor general laid the foundation for the whole institution of the prosecutor's office (according to the French model). Prosecutors of various ranks supervised the observance of the law and the correctness of doing business in almost all central and many local institutions. The pyramid of explicit state supervision, taken out of the control of administrative bodies, was duplicated by the pyramid of secret-fiscal supervision, which also had a branched and hierarchical structure. It is important that, in an effort to achieve his goals, Peter freed the fiscals, whose profession is denunciation, from responsibility for false accusations, which expanded their opportunities for abuse. Since the times of Peter the Great, fiscalism has become synonymous with vile denunciation among the Russian people.
The creation of a bureaucratic machine that replaced the system of medieval government, which was based on custom, is a natural process. Bureaucracy is a necessary element in the structure of modern states. However, in Russian conditions, when the unrestricted will of the monarch served as the only source of law, and the official did not answer to anyone except his boss, the creation of a bureaucratic machine also became a kind of "bureaucratic revolution", during which the perpetual motion machine of bureaucracy was launched, setting the ultimate goal of strengthening its position, successfully achieved regardless of which ruler was sitting on the throne - smart or stupid, businesslike or inactive. Many of these traits and principles have made the tight-knit caste of bureaucrats invulnerable to this day.
Closely examining the state ship of Peter, we, of course, cannot help but notice that this is primarily a warship. Peter's worldview was characterized by an attitude to a state institution as to a military unit. And it's not about the special militancy of Peter or the wars that have become familiar to the king, who out of 36 years of his reign (1689 - 1725) fought 28 years. The point is the belief that the army is the most perfect social structure, a model worthy of expansion to the scale of the whole society, tested by the dangerous experience of battles. Military discipline is something that can be used to instill in people a love of order, diligence, conscience, and Christian morality. The transfer of military principles to the civilian sphere was manifested in the extension of military legislation to the system of state institutions, as well as in giving the laws governing their work the significance and force of military regulations.
In 1716, the basic military law - the Military Regulations, by direct decree of Peter the Great, was adopted as a fundamental legislative act, binding on institutions at all levels. Since not all the norms of military legislation were acceptable for the civilian sphere, specially compiled samples from military laws were used. As a result, military penalties were extended to civil servants for crimes against the oath; neither before nor after Peter in the history of Russia was there such a huge number of decrees that promised the death penalty for crimes in office. In 1723, Peter divided all crimes into two groups: "private" and "public", as the crimes committed "by office" were called. Peter believed that the crime of an official causes even more damage to the state than the betrayal of a warrior on the battlefield.
Nurtured by the great reformer, the regular army took a prominent place in the life of Russian society, becoming its most important element. The assertion made in the literature that in Russia in the 18th-19th centuries is not an exaggeration. the army was not under the state, but vice versa - the state was under the army, and St. Petersburg would turn into a wasteland if all the monuments, buildings, structures in one way or another connected with the army, military art, military victories suddenly disappeared in the capital. The 18th century became the century of "palace coups" largely due to the exaggerated importance of the military element, primarily the guards, in the public life of the empire.
Peter's reforms were marked by the spread of the practice of the participation of professional military personnel in state administration. Often the military, especially the guards, were used as emissaries of the king with emergency powers. Even such an undertaking as a "revision" (population census) was also carried out over a number of years by military forces, for which it was necessary to occupy almost half of the officer corps; the government resorted to such practice more than once and subsequently. After this census, a new order of maintenance and deployment of troops was established. As a result, units of the army were stationed in almost every county (with the exception of the outskirts), and the tenant duty, previously temporary, became permanent for most peasants.
This order, borrowed by Peter from the practice of the "settlement" system in Sweden and adapted to the conditions of Russia, was very difficult for the people. Subsequently, the most effective means of punishing recalcitrant peasants was precisely the placement of soldiers in their homes, and, on the contrary, exemption from lodging was seen as a privilege that rare villagers and townspeople were awarded for special merits.
Laws on the settlement of regiments - "Plakat" of 1724 - regulated the relationship of the population with the troops. However, the power of the regimental commander surpassed that of the local civil administration. The military command not only monitored the collection of the poll tax in the area where the regiment was deployed, in the success of which it was directly interested, but also performed various police functions (stopping the escape of peasants, suppressing the resistance of the people, supervising the movement of the population, according to the system of passports introduced at the same time).
The Petrine era is notable for its attempt to theoretically substantiate autocracy. Feofan Prokopovich, developing the concept of the sovereign's unlimited power, relied both on the tradition of the Muscovite kingdom and on the teachings of Western European theorists of "natural law". Theophan's works are an eclectic compilation (excerpts from Holy Scripture, extracts from the latest works in the spirit of the "contractual" concept of state formation), which aimed to convince the Russian reader of the autocrat's right to command both on the basis of divine and "natural" law. The appeal to reason, characteristic of the latter trend of thought, is undoubtedly a new feature in the ideology of autocracy, supplemented by the concept of the "exemplary" service of the tsar on the throne.
For the first time in Russian political thought, the concepts of "duty", "duties" of the monarch were formulated, the limits (more precisely, the infinity) of his power were outlined - the most necessary condition for the effective execution of the "royal work". The ideas of rationalism, the beginning of "reason", "order" largely dominated the mind of Peter. Speaking about the peculiar democracy, hard work, dedication of the great reformer, one must not forget one fundamental difference between the "service" of the tsar and the service of his subjects: for the latter it was the service of the sovereign, with which the service of the state merged. In other words, with his daily work, Peter set an example of serving himself, the Russian autocrat.
Of course, serving the Fatherland, Russia is the most important element of the political culture of the time of Peter the Great with its traditions of patriotism. But the main, defining was another, also coming from the Middle Ages, the tradition of identifying the power and personality of the autocrat with the state. The fusion of ideas about statehood, the Fatherland - a concept that is sacred for every citizen and symbolizes an independent national existence, with the idea of \u200b\u200bthe bearer of statehood - a completely real and far from sinless, mortal person, extended to him, by virtue of his position, sacred concepts and norms of statehood . (In recent history, the most striking identification of the personality of the ruler with the state, Motherland and even the people manifested itself in the personality cult of Stalin: "Stalin is the will and mind of millions".)
For the political history of Russia in the future, this, as you know, had the most serious consequences, because any speech against the holder of power, whoever he was - the supreme ruler or a petty official - was interpreted as a speech against the statehood, Russia, the people, personified in his personality, and this means that it could lead to accusations of treason, recognition as an enemy of the Fatherland, the people. The idea of the identity of punishment for insulting the personality of the monarch and insulting the state can be traced in the Council Code of 1649, the apotheosis of this idea came under Peter, when the concept of "fatherland", not to mention "land", disappears from the military and civil oath, leaving only autocrat personifying statehood.
The most important element of Peter's political doctrine was the idea of paternalism, figuratively embodied in the form of a reasonable, far-sighted monarch - the father of the fatherland and people. The Truth of the Will of the Monarchs formulates a conclusion, paradoxical at first glance, but logical in the system of paternalism, that if the sovereign, "according to his highest authority", and his father is the father, then the son-sovereign is already the father of all his subjects. It is important to note that the idea of paternalism merges with the idea of a "charismatic leader" according to M. Weber, a leader of an intermediate type - between traditional and democratic. It can behave democratically, neglect material interests, reject the past, and in this sense be a "specific revolutionary force." At the same time, there can be only one "father of the fatherland", "father of the nation", because charismatic authority is purely personal in nature and is not inherited like a throne.
Undoubtedly, Peter, who appropriated the official title of "father of the fatherland", was not alien to many features of a charismatic personality, based not so much on the divinity of the origin of his power, but on the recognition of the exclusivity of personal qualities, demonstrative pedagogical "exemplary" in the performance of "position". Simplicity in his personal life, democracy in dealing with people of different classes, he combined with a frank disregard for many traditional forms of reverence for the autocrat and with a constant desire to radically break social institutions and stereotypes. True, the question of the direction of the "revolutionary break" remains open (recall the recent victory of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran). In the Russia of Peter's time, such a breakdown ultimately led to the consolidation of feudal and political structures derived from the system of serfdom.
Reforms, work were perceived by Peter as a permanent school, teaching, which naturally corresponded to the rationalistic perception of the world, characteristic of him. In an environment of turbulent change, instability, general uncertainty (a phenomenon so characteristic of turning points in history), when the goals of transformation, except for the most general ones, were not visible and understandable to many and even met with open, and more often hidden resistance, the idea of a reasonable Teachers and unreasonable, often stubborn pupils-subjects, who can be accustomed to business only with the help of violence, under duress.
The idea of violence as the universal and most effective form of government was not new. But Peter, perhaps, was the first to use coercion, "pedagogy of a club" with such consistency. A contemporary recalls how Peter once said to his close associates: “Strangers say that I command slaves as slaves. I command subjects who obey my decrees. These decrees contain good, and not harm to the state. peas against the wall. It is necessary to know the people how to govern them... The unkind and villains of mine and the fatherland cannot be satisfied, the bridle to them is the law. He is free who does not do evil and is obedient to good "9.
This hymn to the regime of autocracy (and, in essence, a veiled tyranny) is supported both by Peter's sympathy for Ivan the Terrible, and by the tsar's numerous statements saying that the path of violence is the only one that will bring success under Russian conditions. In the decree of the Manufactory College in 1723, regarding the difficulties in spreading manufactory production in the country, Peter wrote: “That there are few hunters and it’s true, for our people, like children of ignorance for the sake of who will never take up the alphabet when they are not forced from the master there are those who at first seem annoyed, but when they learn, then they give thanks, that obviously out of all deeds, not everything has been done involuntarily, and for many thanksgiving is already heard, from which the fruit has already come.
Peter's reign showed that numerous appeals and threats could not force people to do as Peter demanded: precisely, quickly, with initiative. Few of the associates of the reformer tsar felt confident when he had to act without Peter's orders, at his own peril and risk. This was inevitable, for Peter had set himself an impossible task. He, as V. O. Klyuchevsky wrote, “hoped by a thunderstorm of power to provoke amateur activity in an enslaved society and, through the slave-owning nobility, to establish European science and public education in Russia, as a necessary condition for social amateur activity, he wanted the slave, remaining a slave, to act consciously and freely The joint action of despotism and freedom, enlightenment and slavery, is the political square of the circle, a riddle that has been resolved in our country since the time of Peter for two centuries and hitherto unresolved"11.
Reading the letters of his companions, who experienced a feeling of helplessness and even despair, when they did not have the exact orders of the king, Peter had every reason to believe that without him all things would stop. Along with this feeling of exclusivity, Peter, far from narcissism and empty vanity, should have possessed, especially in the last years of his life, a feeling of loneliness, the consciousness that he was feared, but not understood.
So, before us is not just a ship, but a galley, along the gallery of which the nobility dressed in military uniform walks, and other classes are chained to the banks. Peter, no doubt, reformed not only the state, military, economic, but also the social structure. We are talking not only about the indirect social consequences of various transformations, but also about the direct social changes that have become a direct result of the estate reform.
In the Petrine era, the once united class of "service people" disintegrated. The top of it - those who served "by the fatherland", that is, by origin - turned into nobles known to us from a later era, however, the lower classes of the service class "by the fatherland" (mainly settled on the southern outskirts of the "odnodvortsy"), as well as all the servicemen " according to the instrument, that is, according to recruitment, became state peasants.
The formation of an estate of nobles, who later enjoyed exclusive rights of soul and land ownership, was the result of not only a gradual stratification into upper and lower classes, but also the conscious activity of the authorities. The essence of the changes in the position of the top of the service class was the introduction of a new criterion for their service. Instead of the principle of origin, which allowed noble servicemen to immediately occupy a high place in society, the army and in the service, the principle of personal service was introduced. This seemingly democratic undertaking opened the way to the top for the most capable people; the new principle, reflected in the well-known Table of Ranks of 1722, strengthened the nobility due to the influx of people from other classes. But this was not the ultimate goal of the transformation. With the help of the principle of personal service, strictly stipulated in the Table of ranks of conditions for promotion up the ladder of ranks (the most important of these conditions was the obligation to start service from an ordinary soldier or clerk), Peter turned a rather amorphous mass of service people "in the fatherland" into a military-bureaucratic corps, completely subordinate to him and dependent only on him.
Of course, the formation of the nobility should also be considered as the formation of a corporation endowed with special rights and privileges, with a corporate consciousness, principles and customs. But at the same time, Peter sought to connect the concept of noble dignity as closely as possible with compulsory, permanent service, requiring knowledge and practical skills; all the nobles were assigned to various institutions and regiments, their children were sent to schools, sent to study abroad, the tsar forbade those who did not want to study to marry, and deprived those who were hiding from service from their estates.
In general, the policy of the autocracy in relation to the nobility was very strict, and the bureaucratized, regulated nobility, obliged to study in order to serve, serve and serve, can only be called the ruling class with a stretch. In addition, his property, as well as service, was regulated by law: in 1714, in order to force the nobles to think about service as the main source of wealth, primacy was introduced, it was forbidden to sell and mortgage land holdings; the estates of nobles, including family estates, could be confiscated, which happened in practice. It is difficult to imagine what the Russian nobility would have been like if Peter's principles had been consistently followed after his death. Genuine emancipation and the development of the corporate consciousness of the nobility took place under the sign of its "emancipation" in the 30s - 60s of the XVIII century, when the primacy was first abolished, the term of service was limited, and then the manifesto of 1762 followed, the title of which speaks for itself: "On the granting of liberties and freedom to the Russian nobility". In Peter's time, the nobles were seen primarily as a bureaucratic and military estate, closely tied to the state chariot.
The estate of state peasants arose, as it were, according to the plan conceived by the tsar: various categories of the non-serf population of Russia were united into one taxable estate. It included the single-dvortsy of the South, the black-tailed peasants of the North, the yasak peasants - foreigners of the Volga region, in total at least 18% of the taxable population. The most important distinguishing feature of the odnodvortsev, yesterday serving "in the fatherland" and "according to the instrument", was their recognition as taxable, forever blocking their way to the nobility, although some of them owned serfs, and the land - on local law. In general, since then, belonging to the taxable estates meant lack of privilege, and Peter's policy in relation to the categories included in the estate of state peasants was aimed at limiting their ability to enjoy the advantages that they had as people personally free from serfdom.
Peter decided to transform the social structure of the city, planting institutions such as magistrates, workshops and guilds, which had deep roots in the Western European medieval city. Russian artisans, merchants, in general, most of the townspeople woke up one fine morning as members of guilds and workshops. The rest of the townspeople were subject to a general check in order to identify runaway peasants among them and return them to their former places of residence.
The division into guilds turned out to be the purest fiction, because the military auditors who carried it out thought primarily about increasing the number of poll tax payers. Fiscal goals, rather than the activation of commercial and industrial activity, came to the fore. It is extremely important that Peter left unchanged the former system of distributing taxes according to the "belly", when the most wealthy citizens were forced to pay for tens and hundreds of their poor fellow citizens. By this, medieval social orders were fixed in the cities, which in turn hindered the development of capitalist relations.
The system of government in cities has become just as formal. Peter subordinated the local magistrates to the Chief Magistrate, and all of them, neither in essence nor in a number of formal features, had any resemblance to the magistrates of Western European cities - actual self-government bodies. Representatives of the township, who were part of the magistrates, were considered, in essence, as officials of the centralized system of city government, and their positions were even included in the Table of Ranks.
Judiciary, collection of taxes and supervision of order in the city - these are all the main functions provided to the magistrates.
The transformations also affected that part of the population of Russia, with whom, it would seem, everything was clear anyway - the serfs: they and the serfs merged into a single estate. Serfdom had a thousand-year history and developed law. The extension of servile law to serfs served as a common platform for their merger, which intensified after the Code of 1649, which legally formalized serfdom. But nevertheless, by the time of Peter the Great, certain differences remained: serfs, working for the master on the lordly plow and in his household as domestic slaves, were not subject to state taxes, and, in addition, a significant part of them - bonded serfs - had, according to tradition, the right to go out released after the death of his master.
Under Peter, at first, the opportunities for serfs to go free were sharply narrowed - they were subject, according to decrees, to military service. In addition, a struggle with shoots unfolded; by severe decrees, the group of "free and walking" was actually liquidated - the main source from where the serfs came out and where they returned in case of release. Finally, in 1719 - 1724. serfs were rewritten by name and forever put in a capitation salary. Having lost the sign of taxlessness, serfs became a kind of serfs, having lost any right to freedom. The thousand-year-old institution of servility was destroyed with a single stroke of the pen, which had far-reaching consequences: a noticeable increase in corvee in the middle of the 18th century, noted in literature, is to a large extent connected with the disappearance of servitude: the burden of work on the manor's field now completely fell on the shoulders of serfs .
What happened in the social system of Russia in the time of Peter the Great (to the described plots one should add the introduction of states of clergy, as a result of which churchmen who did not get into the states were recognized as taxable; severe "analysis" of raznochintsy with their subsequent distribution to services, salaries or almshouses; merger of monastic, church and patriarchal peasants), testifies to the unification of the class structure of society, deliberately directed by the hand of a reformer who set as the goal the creation of a so-called regular state, which can be characterized as totalitarian, military-bureaucratic and police.
The created internal regime was characterized by a number of restrictions: movement around the country, the choice of occupations, the transition from one "rank" to another. All these restrictions, especially of a social orientation, were traditional in the class policy of the state even before Peter. The preservation and strengthening of the monopoly of class occupations, the suppression of attempts by representatives of the lower classes to join the privileges of the higher classes was seen as the basis of law and order, justice, and the prosperity of the people. But in pre-Petrine times, the influence of customs strongly affected, class boundaries were blurred, the diversity of medieval society gave its members, especially those who were not bound by service, tax or fortress, immeasurably greater opportunities for the realization of personality than the regularity of Peter's society. Its legislation was distinguished by a clearer regulation of the rights and obligations of each estate and, accordingly, a more severe system of prohibitions regarding vertical movement.
Tax reform was of great importance in this process. With the introduction of the poll tax, which was preceded by a census of male souls, a procedure was established for the rigid attachment of each payer to the tax in the place where he was recorded as a salary, in the payment community. This in itself made it difficult to change the status. In order not to paralyze the economic life of the cities, the government, by decree of April 13, 1722, allowed the landlord peasant, having paid a huge tax, to enroll in the township, while maintaining his dependence on the landowner. The law, allowing the peasant to trade, guaranteed the landowner power over the serf. Thus, he seemed to lengthen the chain on which the so-called trading peasant was planted. The same thing happened to the otkhodnik peasants who worked in the manufactories. The socio-economic significance of such a "Solomon" decision is obvious: such a otkhodnik, exploited at an industrial enterprise, having received a salary, turned it into quitrent, which he gave to his landowner. It was a dead end development.
Peter's time is characterized by large-scale police measures of a long-term nature. The most serious of them should be recognized as the placement in 1724 - 1725. to the permanent apartments of the army regiments in places where the poll tax was collected for them, and the empowerment of army commanders with the appropriate police functions. Another police action was the introduction of the passport system. Without a passport, not a single peasant or city dweller had the right to leave his place of residence. Violation of the passport regime (loss, delay, leaving the territory allowed for visiting) automatically meant turning a person into a criminal subject to arrest and sending to his former place of residence.
All sorts of restrictions were directly dictated not so much by the special suspicion of the king, but by a peculiar refraction of rationalistic ideas in his mind. According to the reformer, their specific application to Russia required strengthening all kinds of guardianship over society, expanding the functions of the state in the life of the country, estates, and each individual. All this gave the state of Peter the police character, if the term "police" is understood not only as a kind of repressive organization, but mainly as the establishment of a "regular" life of subjects in all respects, starting with the arrangement of their houses according to an approved blueprint and ending with careful control over their morality and even spiritual movements.
There is no exaggeration or irony here. Peter carried out, as you know, a church reform, expressed in the creation of a collegiate (synodal) government of the church. The destruction of the patriarchate reflected Peter's desire to eliminate the "princely" (specific) system of church power, unthinkable under the system of autocracy. By declaring himself the de facto head of the church, Peter destroyed its autonomy. Moreover, he made extensive use of the institutions of the church to carry out police policy. Citizens, under pain of large fines, were obliged to attend church and repent of their sins at confession to the priest. The priest, also according to the law, was obliged to inform the authorities about everything illegal that he heard in confession.
Such a rude intervention of the state into the affairs of the church and faith was most perniciously reflected in the spiritual development of society and in the history of the church itself. The transformation of the church into a bureaucratic office, protecting the interests of the autocracy, serving its needs, meant the domination of statism, the destruction for the people of a spiritual alternative to the regime and ideas coming from the state. The Church, with its thousand-year-old traditions of defending the humiliated and defeated by the state, the Church, whose hierarchs "mourned" for the executed, publicly condemned tyrants, became an obedient instrument of power and thereby largely lost the respect of the people, who subsequently looked so indifferently at her death under the rubble of autocracy, and later - on the destruction of its temples.
Such was the crew of Peter's ship. Now the last question: where is this ship sailing? What are the goals of the royal skipper?
The foreign policy concept of Russia during the Northern War has undergone significant changes. The battle of Poltava clearly divided the war into two stages: from 1700 to 1709 and from 1709 to 1721. At the first stage, which became defensive in view of the defeat at Narva, Sweden owned the military initiative, whose regiments occupied Poland, Saxony, and invaded Russia. Therefore, Peter solved the problem of preserving and transforming the army, accumulating the military potential of the country. Unsuccessful attempts were also made to revive the Northern Union (Denmark, Saxony, Russia), paralyzed by the victories of Charles XII. At the first stage of the war, Peter, taking advantage of the absence of large Swedish forces in the Eastern Baltic, managed to occupy Ingria and found St. Petersburg and Kronstadt.
The Poltava victory allowed Peter to seize the initiative, which he developed, strengthening his position in Ingria, Karelia, occupying Livonia and Estonia, and then entering Germany, where, with the assistance of Denmark, Saxony, partly Prussia and Hanover, an attack was launched on Swedish possessions in Pomerania. In less than six years, the Allies ousted the Swedes from all their overseas possessions. In 1716 their empire was ended forever. But in the course of the division of the Swedish possessions, the claims of Russia, which had changed under the influence of brilliant victories on land and at sea, were clearly manifested.
Firstly, Peter renounced his previous obligations given to the allies, to confine himself to the old Russian territories, torn away by the Swedes after the Troubles of the early 17th century - Ingria and Karelia. Estland and Livonia, occupied by the power of Russian weapons, were already included in Russia in 1710. The sharply strengthened army and navy became the guarantee of these conquests. Secondly, beginning in 1712, Peter began to interfere in German affairs. At first, this was due to the struggle against the Swedes in Pomerania, Holstein and Mecklenburg, and then, after their expulsion from Germany, Peter began to support (including with an armed hand) the Mecklenburg Duke Karl-Leopold, who claimed absolutist power, entered into negotiations with Holstein - a neighboring and hostile state to Denmark.
"Mecklenburg", "Holstein, and also "Courland" issues became a source of increased tension at the final stage of the Northern War and even after its end, because Peter, imperiously interfering in German affairs, fighting against the influences of England, France and Denmark, alien to him, from 1709 In 1709, Peter's niece Anna Ivanovna became the Duchess of Courland, and her sister Ekaterina became the Duchess of Mecklenburg, his son Alexei was married to Princess Charlotte-Sophia of Wolfenbüttel, in 1709 Peter's eldest daughter became a bride, and after death of Peter - the wife of the Holstein Duke Karl-Friedrich.
The Treaty of Nystadt in 1721 legally formalized not only Russia's victory in the Northern War, Russia's acquisitions in the Baltic states, but also the birth of a new empire: the connection between the celebration of the Nystadt Peace and Peter's acceptance of the imperial title is obvious. The tsarist government used the increased military power to strengthen its influence in the Baltic. An undoubted diplomatic success was the conclusion of an alliance treaty with Sweden, and the use of the "Holstein question" made it possible to influence both the position of Sweden, whose royal dynasty was associated with the Holstein rulers, and Denmark, from which Russia sought the abolition of the Sound tax when ships passed through the straits. After Peter's death, the continued strengthening of Russia's claims in Holstein brought her to the brink of war with Denmark.
Peter was driven not only by political motives, the desire to achieve influence in the Baltic region, but also by economic interests. The mercantilist concepts that he shared demanded a revitalization of the trade balance; one can speak of the dominance of trade tasks in the general system of Russia's foreign policy after the Treaty of Nystadt. A peculiar combination of military-political and commercial interests of the Russian Empire caused the Russo-Persian war of 1722-1723, supplemented by attempts to penetrate into Central Asia. Knowledge of the international trade situation prompted Peter to seize the transit routes of the trade in rarities of India and China. The conquest of the southern coast of the Caspian was by no means conceived as a temporary measure. Having annexed significant territories of Persia to Russia (1723), having built fortresses there, Peter hatched projects for the deportation of Muslims and the settlement of the Caspian provinces by Orthodox Christians. The creation of a foothold in the Caspian Sea testified to the preparation of a campaign against India; a kind of "Indian syndrome", which owned many conquerors (for there is no true empire without the wealth of India), did not pass Peter. For the same purpose, an adventurous attempt was made to annex Madagascar to the empire, for which in 1723 the expedition of Admiral D. Wilster was secretly preparing.
In general, during the reign of Peter the Great, a serious metamorphosis of Russia's foreign policy took place: from solving the urgent tasks of national policy, it moved on to posing and solving typically imperial problems. Peter's reforms led to the formation of a military-bureaucratic state with a strong centralized autocratic power based on a feudal economy and a strong army (whose numbers continued to grow after the war). The fact that the sovereign ship of Peter sailed to India naturally followed from the internal development of the empire. Under Peter, the foundations of the imperial policy of Russia in the 18th-19th centuries were laid, imperial stereotypes began to form.
NOTE
1. Pogodin M. N. Peter the Great. M. 1841, p. 2.
2. Pavlenko N.I. Commercial and industrial policy of the Russian government in the first quarter of the 18th century. - History of the USSR, 1978, N 3; Aksenov A.I. Genealogy of the Moscow merchants of the 18th century. M. 1988, p. 44 - 45.
3. Complete collection of laws of the Russian Empire. Assembly One (PSZ). T. 6. St. Petersburg. 1830, p. 296.
4. PSZ. T. 5. St. Petersburg. 1830, p. 311 - 312.
5. PSZ. T. 7, p. 73.
6. Pavlenko N. I. Uk. cit., from 67.
7. Legislative acts of Peter the Great. T. 1, M. - L, 1945, p. 196.
8. PSZ. T. 6, p. 591.
9. Maykov L. N. Nartov's stories about Peter the Great. SPb. 1891, p. 82.
10. PSZ. T. 7, p. 150.
11. Klyuchevsky V. O. Sobr. op. T. 4. M. 1958, p. 221.
ZHOU ENLAI
State and political figure of China, diplomat. Premier of the State Administrative Council of the PRC (1949–1954) Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China (since 1954). Minister of Foreign Affairs (since 1949). Together with J. Nehru, he developed five principles of peaceful coexistence (“pancha shila”).
Zhou Enlai was born on March 5, 1898 in the county town of Huai'an in Jiangsu Province into an impoverished family of hereditary civil servants. His father, a petty financial officer, having been widowed early, gave his nine-year-old son to the family of his childless brother. A year later, the boy was taken in by another paternal uncle who served as a police officer in Mukden (now Shenyang). Here Zhou Enlai began attending school. Along with Chinese classical literature, he read the works of C. Darwin, Zh-Zh. Rousseau and other European authors, taught English.
In 1913, Zhou Enlai entered the Nankai High School in Tianjin, where he studied for four years. He lived in a boarding school and made a living doing various technical jobs that the administration gave.
In the fall of 1919, Zhou Enlai was enrolled as a student at Nankai University. He became editor and active contributor to the daily student newspaper. A year later, Zhou Enlai left for France with a group of students, where he continued to study and promote the ideas of Marxism.
In September 1924, at the direction of the CPC leadership, he returned to China, where he served as secretary of the Guangdong-Guangxi Committee of the CPC and head of its military department.
At the age of 27, Zhou Enlai married Deng Yingchao, an activist of the Tianjin Student Awakening Association, whom he met back in 1919 and corresponded throughout the years he spent in Europe. Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao lived together for over 50 years.
After the betrayal of the right wing of the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-shek to the cause of the revolution, Zhou Enlai left the Kuomintang. At the Fifth Congress of the CPC in the spring of 1927, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPC and remained a member of it all subsequent years.
On December 12, 1936, Chiang Kai-shek was arrested in Xi'an by his own military leaders. Since Chiang Kai-shek was not a supporter of surrender to Japan and was a major political figure capable of leading a united Chinese front, the CCP sent Zhou Enlai to Xi'an to peacefully resolve the incident. He successfully coped with this extremely difficult diplomatic task. Chiang Kai-shek, in a conversation with him, expressed his readiness to unite all the forces of the country to defend against an external enemy and stop the civil war. The peaceful resolution of the Xi'an conflict marked the beginning of the formation in China of a united anti-Japanese national front with the participation of the Kuomintang and the CPC. But several years passed before the national liberation struggle ended in victory.
In November 1944, Zhou Enlai was sent to Chongqing to negotiate with Kuomintang troops and US representatives who mediated between the Kuomintang and the CPC in order to create a coalition government in China. On August 28, 1945, on the eve of Japan's surrender, Zhou Enlai arrived in Chongqing with Mao Zedong. Peace negotiations with the Kuomintang ended with the signing of an agreement. On January 1, 1946, Zhou Enlai was appointed the CCP's representative in negotiations with the Kuomintang and the US representative on ending military conflicts and restoring communications, and then participated as the head of the CPC delegation in the first session of the Political Consultative Conference of representatives of various parties and public organizations convened in Chongqing. .
At the conference of the People's Political Consultative Council, which opened on September 22, 1949, in Peiping, Zhou Enlai presented a draft General Program and practically supervised the work of the conference. At the first session of the People's Government of the People's Republic of China, proclaimed on October 1, 1949, he was elected Premier of the State Administrative Council and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the PRC. In these posts, his organizational and diplomatic abilities were clearly manifested.
On January 20, 1950, Zhou Enlai arrived in Moscow, where Mao Zedong was at that time, and participated in the Sino-Soviet negotiations. On February 14, on behalf of the PRC, Zhou Enlai signed in Moscow the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, according to which China received from the USSR the necessary financial, economic, scientific, technical and military assistance and reliable protection from the Soviet Armed Forces in the event of foreign aggression.
The activities of Zhou Enlai after 1949 are associated with all the main stages of the national economic construction of the PRC, the development of culture, science, and enlightenment. Thanks to Zhou Enlai, Chinese diplomacy achieved significant success, helping to ease tensions in international relations. His diplomatic talent was especially clearly manifested at the meeting of the foreign ministers of the five great powers, which opened on April 26, 1954 in Geneva, at which the Korean question and the situation in Indochina were discussed. China and the Soviet Union vigorously supported at the conference the proposals of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), which provided for the recognition of its independence, as well as those of Cambodia and Laos. The agreements reached in Geneva strengthened the position of the DRV as a young socialist state and put an end to French intervention in Indochina.
The Americans then did not recognize the People's Republic of China. J. F. Dulles even jokingly stated that he did not intend to communicate with the head of the Chinese delegation, even if their cars collided on one of the Geneva streets. Under such conditions, the Chinese Foreign Minister had to begin his difficult diplomatic activity.
Many years will pass, and the term "Zhou Enlai's policy" will appear in diplomatic circles. It is used when they want to talk about prudence, consistency, realism and pragmatism in an effort to ensure China's national interests. Zhou Enlai himself is often called the "chief Chinese diplomat" and rightly so, because until the last days of his life he remained! organizer and active participant in all the most important foreign policy actions of the PRC.
In 1954, Zhou Enlai and Indian Prime Minister J. Nehru developed five principles of peaceful coexistence (“pancha shila”), which were then recognized and supported by the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries at the Bandung Conference held in April 1955. Its decisions, achieved thanks to the diplomatic skill of Zhou Enlai and Nehru, were imbued with the spirit of the struggle against colonialism, for all-round economic and cultural cooperation between the countries of Asia and Africa on the basis of the ten principles of peaceful coexistence formulated by the conference, which represented the development of "pancha shila".
Zhou Enlai attached great importance to personal contacts with leaders and public figures of foreign countries, he himself traveled abroad a lot and often received foreign guests in Beijing. He carefully prepared for foreign trips, carefully studied the dossiers collected on his instructions by the apparatus of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC on all issues related to that trip; the country to which he was to go.
In November 1956 - February 1957, Zhou Enlai made a number of trips to Asian countries - Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ceylon, establishing contacts with these countries.
In October 1961, Zhou Enlai visited Moscow as head of the Chinese Party delegation to the CPSU congress. In his speech on October 19, he sharply condemned the US military provocations in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, South Vietnam, South Korea and in China - on the island of Taiwan, called for the unity of the entire socialist camp: “Cohesion is strength. With unity, anything can be overcome.<…>There has long been a deep friendship between the peoples of China and the Soviet Union… This great unity and friendship between the peoples of our two countries will live for centuries, just as the Yangtze and the Volga will carry their waters forever.”
In the spring of 1966, he again visited Burma, India, Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam, and also the Mongolian People's Republic. In late 1963 and early 1964, Zhou Enlai traveled to ten African countries. The statements he made during this trip, in the spirit of Mao Tse-tung's tenets that there is an "excellent revolutionary situation" in Africa, did not, however, receive the expected support of the governments of these countries. In this regard, his new trip to African countries in the summer of 1965 was not crowned with success either. It is noteworthy that Zhou Enlai's public speeches in African countries during these years differed significantly in content and tone from the stormy anti-Soviet campaign then launched in the Chinese press.
China especially appreciates Zhou Enlai's personal contribution to the normalization of relations with the United States. To bring the country out of the chaos of the "cultural revolution" and to implement the program of "four modernizations", colossal material costs and the presence of a large number of highly qualified personnel were necessary. The 10-year period of the "cultural revolution" led China to economic decline. Under these conditions, Mao Zedong came to the conclusion that it was possible to make rapprochement with the United States and entrusted Zhou Enlai with the practical implementation of this turn, which he began to do.
It all started with a dramatic performance of "ping-pong diplomacy" staged by the Chinese premier. After the World Table Tennis Championship held in Japan, the head of the Chinese government invited an American team to China. This competition helped, according to experts, to significantly dampen anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States and create a favorable atmosphere for a secret visit to Beijing by US National Security Assistant H. Kissinger.
During his first visit to Beijing (July 1971), Kissinger lived in the Diaoyutai government mansion. Before his arrival, Zhou Enlai himself instructed all those involved in this visit, pointing out the need to strictly observe secrecy and not allow any "surprises". As Kissinger recalls, at the first meeting, Zhou Enlai asked him if he was among the delegates to the Geneva Conference who refused to communicate with Chinese diplomats. Kissinger said no, which earned the premier's goodwill.
A few months later, Zhou Enlai personally participated in the drafting of a joint Chinese-American communiqué, which outlined the positions of both sides and which was supposed to be published during Nixon's visit to China. Today, China believes that the very fact of the publication of the "Shanghai Communiqué" is the fruit of the diplomatic art of Zhou Enlai. They especially note the prime minister's principled position on the issue of normalizing relations with the United States. When, shortly before Nixon's arrival, Presidential Aide General A. Haig visited Beijing to clarify all the details of the upcoming visit, Zhou Enlai had many hours of conversation with him, during which he explained that the Americans needed to build negotiations with the PRC on an equal footing and keep in mind that China will not make concessions. In the same vein, the head of government instructed his assistants: "Behave with dignity, show hospitality, but do not kowtow to foreigners."
... Chinese oncologists identified Zhou Enlai's disease in May 1972. It would seem that what prevented the 72-year-old prime minister from leaving for a “deserved rest”? But after all, there was still Jiang Qing with her entourage, who still enjoyed the patronage of her elderly, but, as before, powerful husband, Mao Zedong.
Having thought over a new arrangement of personnel in the highest echelons of state power, he went by plane to Changsha, where Mao Zedong was at that time, and managed, ahead of Jiang Qing, to enlist the support of the "leader". Zhou Enlai did everything to prevent Jiang Qing and her entourage from coming to power after the death of Mao.
He underwent a total of 14 operations. In the spring of 1974, his health deteriorated, he was constantly in the hospital, but did not stop doing the affairs of the State Council and receiving visitors. On January 13, 1975, Zhou Enlai delivered a report at the session of the National People's Congress, in which he outlined the program of "four modernizations". This, according to the Chinese, is his most important testament.
In February 1975, he underwent another operation, but the progress of the disease could no longer be stopped. On January 8, 1976, Zhou Enlai passed away. When he was dying, he bequeathed that his funeral ceremony be held in the Taiwan Hall of the National People's Congress building, and his ashes after cremation be scattered over the fields, mountains and rivers of China and over the waters of the Taiwan Strait.
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