Wandering the web over coffee this morning, I happened upon this note about a point GWB's apparently going to make in his state of the union address tonight. Basically, that America needs to worry because we may start lagging (or are lagging) in science and technology.
Now, aside from the oddities of this president making that claim, which Chris Mooney, the blogger (who's admittedly and totally partisan, I should perhaps note), makes, this struck me because of a historical parallel I've been pondering for the past day.
Basically, I've been thinking about how to go about dividing all of Russian history into two sections (semesters/terms). Bear with me, here.
Different people do that dividing in different ways. When I first got my job, the course catalog had two regular classes on Russian history: Imperial Russia, which ran from the beginning of time until 1917, and the Soviet Union. That was fairly normal. I divided the first class into two, divided by Peter the Great. Also fairly normal.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union (which is frickin' almost 15 years ago), there've been movements to integrate its history more fully into the broader history of Russia. That has often meant using earlier dividing points for a two semester sequence (that is, not privileging the Soviet Union by giving it a whole semester to itself).
Most often, the new dividing point between semesters is 1855 (or 1861). The former brought a new tsar to Russia, Alexander II (that's him in Helsinki on the left). The latter brought the first of his "Great Reforms," the emancipation of the serfs.
The Great Reforms brought a whole series of other, uh, reforms to Russia; to the army, to the judicial system, to provincial organization and self government, to censorship, to towns... and the new tendency to use them as a dividing point emphasizes their significance.
I've been wondering whether I'd want to use them as a dividing point, however. There's been a lot of work showing the ways that efforts in the decades before the Great Reforms really paved the way for them. In other words, they're much more integrated with the time that precedes them than this division suggests.
But what other date to use? Another possibility would be 1812 (or probably 1815). Using the Great Reforms really emphasizes Russia's internal politics. Using this time, the end of the Napoleonic wars, would emphasize Russia's place in the world. The Napoleonic period sees the peak of Russia's international power, in many ways. For all the claims that Napoleon was beaten by the cold, not by the Russians (and certainly there's truth to the idea that poor provisioning beat Napoleon), Russia's military did extraordinarily well during the eighteenth century (hence a lot of the anti-Catherine propaganda [it's not how she died]) and into the beginning of the nineteenth. Although Russia rides on the success of 1812 (and on) for another few decades, proclaiming itself the gendarme of Europe and all that, in many ways from this point on there's perpetual decline of Russia's international position as defined militarily (a few successes notwithstanding).
The first major sign of that is the Crimean War... and that brings us to the Great Reforms. One theory for why Alexander pushed through the Great Reforms is that the debacle of the Crimean War forced it upon him. And why the debacle? Too many enemies, not enough allies. Serfdom. But also, and very significantly, technological backwardness. More difficulty supplying troops over much shorter distances than enemies. Guns that don't shoot as far. Less advanced navy.
Now. It's all these links that have me thinking like the president. (Well, as the president supposedly thinks.)
I've often thought that there are interesting parallels between Russia's two wars with Napoleon and the US wars with Saddam. Two wars separated by periods of more or less liberal reform. The first a kind of half victory. The latter a rout. Images of the enemy as the antichrist (or otherwise eeeeevvviiillll). There are big problems with the analogy, of course; it's only really quite loose. But, still, there are certainly ways in which links can be made.
But just recently, I started thinking about future parallels, based on the idea that just struck me about this period being in many ways the peak of Russia's international power (until 1945, really). After this Russian leaders squander many opportunities for internal reform, make bad judgments as far as foreign policy goes, and allow millions of their citizens to die from natural disasters or wars. And that's not even getting into the whole revolution and Soviet disasters and Stalin stuff.
And one of the things that was an immediate problem was Russia's inability to keep up with the West technologically, which most manifested itself during the Crimean War. Although between the Napoleonic Wars Alexander I, then tsar, established new educational institutions throughout Russia, after the second war he allowed his minister of education to force them onto a much more religious path. Now, internal freedoms, or the lack thereof, certainly played just as much a role in Russia's difficulty with modernization, but educational priorities matter, too.
And that brings me to the US today. And science. And its difficult position within American society, largely because it's not in American society.
And that makes me sad and anxious.