On June 18, 1862, exactly 150 years ago, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Abolition Bill voted in by the Congress both on the territories that were already part of the United States and on the lands yet to join the North-American Nation.
True, it took three years of Civil War and more than half a million victims for that bill to become a reality.
You may wonder why we need to care about what happened in the USA 150 years ago.
We don’t have to, but this is a good occasion to talk about the traditional attitude to Russia on the part of so-called developed nations and their interpretation of our so-called natural barbarianism. What’s more, this is also a question of the moral right of the West to teach us how to live on the basis of the priceless Western democratic and public administration experience.
It should be added that this practice resulted in a stalwart “second-rate nation” complex developed by a considerable part of our publics who are not well versed in history and not very good at analysis. They have come to believe that by virtue of historical idiosyncrasies our nation is incapable of being fully emancipated.
You’d agree: the proposition that backward Russia overthrew the yoke of serfdom ONLY in 1861 at the will of Emperor Alexander II has been a rather popular argument with proponents of the Western values. They infer from this logic that Russians have no other alternative but to learn on the example of the USA and other western nations.
It turns out that we got rid of serfdom more than a year earlier than did the advanced American nation, not to mention the fact that our serfdom was a way milder form of human dependency than the American slavery.
The former colonial nations that are now part of the Euro Zone put an end to slavery even later. Thus in the Dutch colonies slave ownership was banned only in 1863, in Portuguese colonies – in 1869, and in the French Madagascar – in 1896. Italians and the British procrastinated with the emancipation declaration till the middle of the XX century. In Italian Abyssinia and British Northern Nigeria abolition was ruled only in 1936 or 76 years ago! It means that some of the people who received freedom from the hands of the most liberal British state are still alive…
Chronic lameness of the Russian nation has some other aspects, according to critics. They say Russia could be found on the political map only in the XVIII century or in the middle of the XVII century at best. Prior to that there had been only isolated principalities, the yoke, land-locked Muscovy without historic territory, feuds, unrest, imposters, riots… in short, continuous outrage. Only Peter the Great took at least some nation-building efforts.
On the other hand, European nations may serve as role models, according to Western historians and political scientists.
Let’s take a closer look.
As regards the British and French statehood, this is a long story, though both had a rather long record of rebellions and revolutions, mutinies and executions. Spaniards may boast the old age of their statehood that goes back to the late XV century (the time of our Czar Ivan III). But just in the XIX century the nation was shattered by five revolutions and a good half of the XX century Spain was a dictatorship.
The modern-day Italian state emerged in the middle of the XIX century, i.e. when Russia had had the status of empire for about 150 years already. Germany had a similar history. The amalgamation of German lands belonging to the North-German Union into the German Empire took place only in December 1870. The XIX century saw the emergence of such nations as Belgium, Norway, Greece and Bulgaria and the XX century saw the restoration of Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary.
I intentionally amplify the complex nation building processes, reducing them to a number of formal hallmarks. Yet these hallmarks are very significant. German philosopher Spengler also carried it too far in The Decline of the West where he looked at the European civilization through the eyes of the Chinese peasant who imbibed the continuous 4,000-year national-cultural experience, even if at the subconscious level.
The above-mentioned facts by no means downplay the achievements of European-American civilization. During the recent three-four hundred years it apparently shot ahead of others, but lying ahead is a long straight line until the next zigzag. The winners will be those who are more than others longing for success, rather than those who make a parade of their past achievements.
A simple joke proves this point: slightly more than 150 years ago both North American blacks and ethnic Chinese in their home empire of Qing were slaves.
Mikhail Bykov
