Do you know which war in which Russia participated can rightfully be called the most unfamous?
The choice is, of course, huge. Over the long history of Russia, many military conflicts, for a variety of reasons, fell into the categories of unfamous, unknown and simply forgotten. But the First World War, which ended 105 years ago, became one of them with fatal inevitability, because it differed from all previous wars in the enormous scale of combat operations and losses. And in terms of the cession of territories and the size of the indemnity paid to the enemy, the result of this war in many ways eclipsed all previous defeats.
Naturally, I wanted to forget all this — and as quickly as possible. But in the first peaceful years in Soviet Russia, they decided to study and generalize her experience. And in the course of this work, episodes were revealed that those responsible for them probably dreamed of erasing from the memory of everyone and everything once and for all. For example, about the nutrition of the army in 1915:
“The canned meat preserved from 1905, according to the laboratories of the Nikolaev Military Hospital, turned out to be infected, but their supply was so large that samples of them were recognized by the Central Military Laboratory as suitable and approved for use in the army.”
In general, the analysis helped to understand who inevitably loses in a protracted positional war. All details are in the text “Immediately and widely transferred to the army.”
The fact that “lone artisan” is not an insult, but the name of millions of honest workers was firmly forgotten at the end of the Soviet era. But industrial self-employment has come a long and difficult path in Russia, and experience in supporting it has been accumulated, not without difficulty and difficulties. Details are in the article in our regular column “Forgotten Life” — “The war forced the population to believe in handicraft industry.”
Attempts to make citizens' pockets a source of replenishment for the state treasury never stopped. But the time when financial authorities became truly dependent on this process was remembered only in recent years. About how this happened — the material “Trying to revive the type of stock exchange businessman in our society.”
Memories of how the symbiosis of officials and entrepreneurs was formed and operated is not that part of the domestic a life to be proud of. But, as people say, you can’t erase the words from the song. And about the extraordinary events in the fishing capital of Russia — the text “The only answer to all their crimes is death.”
This issue of the monthly “Kommersant-History” is about these and other events of our long and recent past, which must not be forgotten.
Contents
“The war made the population believe in handicraft industry”/Why it was difficult to be self-employed in Russia
“Immediately and widely transferred to the army”/Who inevitably loses in a protracted positional war
“Trying to revive the type of stock market in our society businessman»/How the Soviet securities market functioned
“The only answer to all their crimes is death”/How they restored order in the fishing capital of Russia
“A number of persons involved in illegal production have been identified”/How bans on Western music were circumvented
*All dates before February 1, 1918 are given in the old style.
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