The history of the 20th century was full of events of a very different nature - there were great discoveries and great catastrophes in it. States were created and destroyed, and revolutions and civil wars forced people to leave their native places in order to go to foreign lands, but at the same time save their lives. In art, the twentieth century also left an indelible mark, completely renewing it and creating completely new trends and schools. There were great achievements in science as well.
World history of the 20th century
The 20th century began for Europe with very sad events - the Russo-Japanese war happened, and in Russia in 1905 the first, albeit ended in failure, revolution happened. This was the first war in the history of the 20th century, during which such weapons as destroyers, battleships and heavy long-range artillery were used.
The Russian Empire lost this war and suffered colossal human, financial and territorial losses. However, the Russian government decided to enter into peace negotiations only when more than two billion gold rubles were spent from the treasury for the war - the amount is fantastic today, but in those days it was simply unthinkable.
In the context of world history, this war wasjust another clash of colonial powers in the struggle for the territory of a weakened neighbor, and the role of the victim fell to the weakening Chinese empire.
The Russian Revolution and its consequences
One of the most significant events of the 20th century, of course, was the February and October revolutions. The fall of the monarchy in Russia caused a whole series of unexpected and incredibly powerful events. The liquidation of the empire was followed by the defeat of Russia in the First World War, the separation from it of such countries as Poland, Finland, Ukraine and the countries of the Caucasus.
For Europe, the revolution and the ensuing Civil War also left their mark. The Ottoman Empire, liquidated in 1922, and the German Empire in 1918 also ceased to exist. The Austro-Hungarian Empire lasted until 1918 and broke up into several independent states.
However, even within Russia, calm after the revolution did not come immediately. The civil war continued until 1922 and ended with the creation of the USSR, the collapse of which in 1991 will be another important event.
World War I
This war was the first so-called trench war, in which a huge amount of time was spent not so much on moving troops forward and capturing cities, but on pointless waiting in the trenches.
In addition, artillery was used en masse, chemical weapons were used for the first time, and gas masks were invented. Another important feature was the use of military aviation, the formation of which took placeactually during the fighting, although the schools of aviators were created a few years before it began. Together with aviation, forces were created that were supposed to fight it. This is how the air defense troops appeared.
The development of information and communication technologies is also reflected on the battlefield. Information began to be transmitted from headquarters to the front ten times faster thanks to the construction of telegraph lines.
But not only the development of material culture and technology was affected by this terrible war. She found a place in art. The twentieth century was a turning point for culture, when many old forms were rejected and replaced by new ones.
Arts and Literature
Culture on the eve of the First World War experienced an unprecedented rise, which resulted in the creation of a variety of trends in literature, as well as in painting, sculpture and cinema.
Perhaps the brightest and one of the most well-known artistic trends in art was futurism. Under this name, it is customary to unite a number of movements in literature, painting, sculpture and cinema, which trace their genealogy to the famous manifesto of futurism, written by the Italian poet Marinetti.
The most widespread, along with Italy, futurism was in Russia, where such literary communities of futurists as "Gileya" and OBERIU appeared, the largest representatives of which were Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Kharms, Severyanin and Zabolotsky.
As for fine arts, pictorial futurism had in itsthe foundation of Fauvism, while also borrowing a lot from the then popular Cubism, which was born in France at the beginning of the century. In the 20th century, the history of art and politics are inextricably linked, as many avant-garde writers, painters and filmmakers made their own plans for the reconstruction of the society of the future.
World War II
The history of the 20th century cannot be complete without a story about the most catastrophic event - the Second World War, which began on September 1, 1939 and lasted until September 2, 1945. All the horrors that accompanied the war left an indelible mark on the memory of mankind.
Russia in the 20th century, like other European countries, experienced many terrible events, but none of them can be compared in its consequences with the Great Patriotic War, which was part of World War II. According to various sources, the number of victims of the war in the USSR reached twenty million people. This number includes both military and civilian residents of the country, as well as numerous victims of the blockade of Leningrad.
Cold War with Former Allies
Sixty-two sovereign states out of the seventy-three that existed at that time were drawn into the fighting on the fronts of the World War. The fighting took place in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the Caucasus and the Atlantic Ocean, as well as beyond the Arctic Circle.
World War II and the Cold War followed one after the other. Yesterday's allies became first rivals, and later enemies. Crises andconflicts followed one after another for several decades, until the Soviet Union ceased to exist, thereby putting an end to the competition between the two systems - capitalist and socialist.
Cultural Revolution in China
Told the history of the twentieth century in terms of national history, it can sound like a long list of wars, revolutions and endless violence, often against completely random people.
By the mid-sixties, when the world had not yet fully comprehended the consequences of the October Revolution and the civil war in Russia, another revolution unfolded on the other side of the continent, which went down in history as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The cause of the Cultural Revolution in the PRC is considered to be an intra-party split and Mao's fears of losing his dominant position within the party hierarchy. As a result, it was decided to start an active struggle against those representatives of the party who were supporters of small property and private initiative. All of them were accused of counter-revolutionary propaganda and either shot or sent to prison. Thus began the mass terror, which lasted more than ten years, and the cult of personality of Mao Zedong.
Space Race
Space exploration was one of the most popular avenues in the twentieth century. Although today people have already become accustomed to international cooperation in the field of high technologies and space exploration, at that timespace was the scene of intense confrontation and fierce competition.
The first frontier for which the two superpowers fought was near-Earth orbit. By the beginning of the fifties, both the USA and the USSR had samples of rocket technology, which served as prototypes for launch vehicles of a later time.
Despite all the speed with which American scientists worked, Soviet rocket scientists were the first to put the cargo into orbit, and on October 4, 1957, the first man-made satellite appeared in Earth orbit, which made 1440 orbits around the planet, and then burned out in dense layers of the atmosphere.
Also, Soviet engineers were the first to launch the first living creature into orbit - a dog, and later a man. In April 1961, a rocket was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome, in the cargo compartment of which was the Vostok-1 spacecraft, in which Yuri Gagarin was. Taking the first man into space was risky.
In the conditions of the race, space exploration could cost the cosmonaut his life, as in a hurry to get ahead of the Americans, Russian engineers made a number of rather risky decisions from a technical point of view. However, both takeoff and landing were successful. So the USSR won the next stage of the competition, called the Space Race.
Flights to the Moon
After losing the first few stages in space exploration, American politicians and scientists decided to set themselves a more ambitious and difficult task, for which the Soviet Union could simply not have enough resources and technical developments.
The next frontier, which had to be taken, was the flight to the Moon - the Earth's natural satellite. The project, called "Apollo", was initiated in 1961 and aimed at carrying out a manned expedition to the moon and landing a man on its surface.
As ambitious as this may have seemed by the time the project began, it was accomplished in 1969 with the landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. In total, within the framework of the program, six manned flights to the earth satellite were made.
The defeat of the socialist camp
The Cold War, as you know, ended with the defeat of the socialist countries not only in the arms race, but also in the economic competition. There is a consensus among most leading economists that the main reasons for the collapse of the USSR and the entire socialist camp were economic.
Despite the fact that in some countries of the post-Soviet space there is widespread resentment regarding the events of the late eighties and early nineties, for most countries in Eastern and Central Europe, liberation from Soviet domination turned out to be extremely favorable.
The list of the most important events of the 20th century invariably contains a line mentioning the fall of the Berlin Wall, which served as a physical symbol of the division of the world into two hostile camps. The date of the collapse of this symbol of totalitarianism is November 9, 1989.
Technological progress in the 20th century
The 20th century was rich in inventions, never before has technological progress been so fast. hundredsvery significant inventions and discoveries have been made over a hundred years, but some of them deserve special mention because of their extreme importance for the development of human civilization.
The aircraft is certainly one of the inventions without which modern life is unthinkable. Despite the fact that people have dreamed of flying for many millennia, the first flight in the history of mankind was only possible in 1903. This achievement, fantastic in its consequences, belongs to the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright.
Another important invention related to aviation was the backpack parachute, designed by St. Petersburg engineer Gleb Kotelnikov. It was Kotelnikov who received a patent for his invention in 1912. Also in 1910, the first seaplane was designed.
But perhaps the most terrible invention of the twentieth century was the nuclear bomb, the single use of which plunged humanity into a horror that has not passed to this day.
Medicine in the 20th century
One of the main inventions of the 20th century is also considered the technology of artificial production of penicillin, thanks to which mankind was able to get rid of many infectious diseases. The scientist who discovered the bactericidal properties of the fungus was Alexander Fleming.
All the achievements of medicine in the twentieth century were inextricably linked with the development of such fields of knowledge as physics and chemistry. After all, without the achievements of fundamental physics, chemistry or biology, the invention of the X-ray machine would not have been possible,chemotherapy, radiation and vitamin therapy.
In the 21st century, medicine is even more tightly connected with high-tech branches of science and industry, which opens up truly fascinating prospects in the fight against diseases such as cancer, HIV and many other intractable diseases. It is worth noting that the discovery of the DNA helix and its subsequent decoding also give hope for the possibility of curing inherited diseases.
After the USSR
Russia in the 20th century experienced many catastrophes, including wars, including civil ones, the collapse of the country and revolutions. At the end of the century, another extremely important event happened - the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and sovereign states were formed in its place, some of which plunged into civil war or into a war with their neighbors, and some, like the B altic countries, rather quickly joined the European Union and started building an effective democratic state.
