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 collapsed, and revolutions and civil wars forced people to leave their homes to go to foreign lands, but save their lives. In art, the twentieth century also left an indelible mark, completely updating it and creating completely new directions and schools. There were great achievements in science.
World History of the 20th Century
The 20th century began for Europe with very sad events - the Russo-Japanese War took place, and in Russia in 1905 the first, albeit failed, revolution took place. This was the first war in the history of the 20th century, during which such weapons as destroyers, armadillos and heavy long-range artillery were used.
The Russian Empire lost this war and suffered enormous human, financial and territorial losses. However, the Russian government decided to enter into peace negotiations only when more than two billion rubles in gold were spent from the treasury for the war - the amount is still fantastic today, and at that time simply unthinkable.
In the context of world history, this war was just another clash of the colonial powers in the struggle for the territory of a weakened neighbor, and the role of the victim fell to the weakening Chinese empire.
Russian revolution and its consequences
One of the most significant events of the 20th century, of course, was the February and October Revolution. 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 of countries such as Poland, Finland, Ukraine and the countries of the Caucasus.
For Europe, the revolution and the ensuing Civil War also did not pass without a trace. The Ottoman Empire, which was liquidated in 1922, the German Empire in 1918 also ceased to exist. The Austro-Hungarian Empire lasted until 1918 and split into several independent states.
However, even after Russia, calm after the revolution did not come immediately. The civil war lasted 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 warfare, in which a huge amount of time was spent not so much on moving troops forward and seizing cities, but on meaningless waiting in trenches.
In addition, artillery was used in droves, chemical weapons were first used and gas masks were invented. Another important feature was the use of combat aircraft, the formation of which actually took place during the hostilities, although aviation schools were established several years before it began. Together with aviation, forces were created that were supposed to fight it. So the air defense forces appeared.
The development of information and communication technologies has also been 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 for culture was the turning point when many old forms were rejected, and new ones replaced them.
Art and literature
Culture on the eve of World War I experienced an unprecedented upsurge, which resulted in the creation of a variety of trends in literature, as well as in painting, sculpture and cinema.
Perhaps the most striking and one of the most well-known artistic trends in art was futurism. Under this name, it is customary to combine a number of movements in literature, painting, sculpture and cinema, which raise their genealogy to the famous manifesto of futurism, written by the Italian poet Marinetti.
Futurism received the greatest distribution, along with Italy, in Russia, where such literary communities of futurists as Gilea and OBERIU appeared, the largest representatives of which were Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Harms, Severyanin and Zabolotsky.
As for the visual arts, pictorial futurism had Fauvism in its foundation, borrowing much 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 is inextricably linked, because many avant-garde writers, painters and filmmakers made their own plans for rebuilding the society of the future.
The Second World War
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 not one of them can be compared in its consequences to 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 civilians, as well as numerous victims of the siege of Leningrad.
Cold War with Former Allies
Sixty-two sovereign states out of seventy-three that existed at that time were drawn into hostilities on the fronts of World War II. 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 another. Yesterday's allies became first rivals, and later enemies. Crises and conflicts followed one after another for several decades, until the Soviet Union ceased to exist, thereby putting an end to the competition of two systems - the capitalist and the socialist.
Cultural Revolution in China
If you tell the story of the twentieth century in terms of state history, then it can sound like a long list of wars, revolutions and endless violence, often used in relation to completely random people.
By the mid-sixties, when the world had not yet managed to fully comprehend 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 reason for the Cultural Revolution in the PRC is considered to be the inner-party split and Mao’s fears of losing a dominant position within the party hierarchy. As a result, it was decided to start an active struggle with those party representatives 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 destinations in the twentieth century. Although today international cooperation in the field of high technology and space exploration has become customary for people, while space was an arena of intense confrontation and fierce competition.
The first boundary, for which two superpowers fought, was near-Earth orbit. Both the USA and the USSR had rocket technology samples by the early fifties, which served as prototypes for later launch vehicles.
Despite the speed with which American scientists worked , the Soviet rockets were the first to put the load into orbit, and on October 4, 1957, the first human-made satellite appeared on Earth orbit, which made 1,440 orbits around the planet and then burned in dense layers of the atmosphere.
Also, Soviet engineers were the first to launch into orbit the first living creature - a dog, and later a human being. In April 1961, a rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the cargo compartment of which was the Vostok-1 spacecraft, in which Yuri Gagarin was. The event to launch the first man into space was risky.
In a race, space exploration could cost an astronaut life, since in a hurry to get ahead of the Americans, Russian engineers made a number of decisions that were rather risky from a technical point of view. However, both take-off and landing were successful. So the USSR won the next stage of the competition, called the Space Race.
Flights to the moon
Having lost the first few stages in space exploration, American politicians and scientists decided to set themselves a more ambitious and difficult task, which the Soviet Union might simply not have enough resources and technical achievements.
The next frontier to be taken was the flight to the moon - the natural satellite of the earth. The project, called "Apollo", was initiated in 1961 and aimed at carrying out a manned expedition to the moon and landing a person on its surface.
No matter how ambitious this task may have seemed at the time the project began, it was solved in 1969 with the landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. In total, six manned flights to the Earth's satellite were completed within the program.
The defeat of the socialist camp
The Cold War, as you know, ended in the defeat of the socialist countries not only in the arms race, but also in economic competition. Among the majority of leading economists there is consensus that the main reasons for the collapse of the USSR and the entire social camp were economic.
Despite the fact that some countries of the former Soviet Union have a resentment regarding the events of the late eighties and early nineties, for most countries of Eastern and Central Europe the liberation from Soviet domination was 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 the physical symbol of the division of the world into two hostile camps. The date of the collapse of this symbol of totalitarianism is considered November 9, 1989.
Technical Progress in the 20th Century
The twentieth century was rich in inventions; never before had technological progress been so rapid. Hundreds of very significant inventions and discoveries have been made over a hundred years, but some of them are worthy of special mention due to their extreme importance for the development of human civilization.
To inventions, without which modern life is unthinkable, of course, refers to the plane. Despite the fact that people dream of flying for many millennia, the first flight in the history of mankind was possible only in 1903. This achievement, fantastic in its consequences, belongs to the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright.
Another important invention related to aviation was a knapsack 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 constructed.
But perhaps the most terrible invention of the twentieth century was a nuclear bomb, a single use of which plunged mankind into horror, which 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 has the opportunity 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. Indeed, without the achievements of fundamental physics, chemistry or biology, it would be impossible to invent an X-ray apparatus, 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 difficult diseases. It is worth noting that the opening of the DNA helix and its subsequent decoding also allow us to hope for the possibility of curing inherited diseases.
After the USSR
Russia in the 20th century experienced many disasters, among which there were wars, including civil wars, the collapse of the country and revolution. At the end of the century, another extremely important event happened - the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and sovereign states formed in its place, some of which plunged into civil war or in a war with neighbors, and some, like the Baltic countries, quickly entered the European Union and began the construction of an effective democratic state.