Dying for "Greatness": How History Was Built. ​

[00:00:00]You know, I have always been fascinated by this subtle, barely perceptible difference in mentality. Take St. Petersburg, for example, a gloomy, despotic city, literally built on bones.

[00:00:12]The horrifying savagery of Tsar Peter, who, just think of it, dared to round up miserable souls to build a capital on marshes. A nightmare, barbarism, almost a crime against humanity. But the enlightened, fragrant Europe is a whole different story. Let us take Versailles, a symbol of elegance, taste, and malaria. The great Sun King, Louis the 14th, acting as a true humanist, also decided to build a palace on a swamp.

[00:00:42]But he did it in an exclusively European fashion. Tens of thousands of Frenchmen dying of typhus in the freezing mud surely rejoiced at being introduced to high culture. And to ensure that the corpses would not ruin the monarch's appetite, they were simply hauled away from the construction site at night, secretly. Now, that is true care for the psychological comfort of one's subjects.

[00:01:07]Up to 22,000 dead, but you must admit how elegant they were. Or, let us fly over to Madrid, the majestic El Escorial Palace.

[00:01:17]The Spanish crown erected it in harsh mountains using the labor of convicts and the destitute. People died by the thousands under the collapse of massive stone boulders. But who cared, since the construction was paid for with gold and silver from the colonies? And out there, in the mines of Potosi, indigenous people perished by entire tribes. But after all, it was so far away from Madrid that the bones were barely visible from the palace. Who cares about the underbelly of an empire? And how beautiful London is. Following the Great Fire, the city was rebuilt with truly British grandeur. A bit later, when England needed great docks and canals, thousands of Irish laborers dug them under inhuman conditions, dying in poverty and scurvy from unbearable toil.

[00:02:07]Yet in London, this was proudly called the development of capitalism and the free market. To die in a ditch for pennies for the sake of Britain's greatness. Now that is completely different, isn't it? Even the Swedes, the harshest critics of Peter while he was building in Kronstadt, founded their own naval base, Karlskrona, on islands in the freezing Baltic Sea. Starving Swedish peasants perished there with pure Scandinavian dignity. Today, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and not a single wine. Can you feel the class? So, the next time someone tells you that St. Petersburg is a uniquely Russian tragedy, just smile and gently remind them that back then, all European beauty was built according to the exact same standard.