Churchill as a statesman: myths and reality (on the 150th anniversary of his birth)
EDN OFBZRY
Keywords:
Churchill, British Empire, colonialism, World War I, intervention in Russia, World War II, Cold WarAbstract
The aim of the study is to comprehensively analyze the state activities of Winston Churchill through the prism of critical rethinking of established historiographic myths and stereotypes
The methodology is based on the principles of historicism and systemic analysis, which allow us to consider Churchill's state activities in dialectical unity with the political and socio-cultural context of the era. A comparative approach is used to compare the official biography with alternative historical narratives.
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on November 30, 1874. Most of his ninety-year life is associated with British and world politics. The trajectory of his state activities repeatedly intersected with Russian history at its most pivotal moments: the First and Second World Wars, the Civil War and the Cold War. Because of his involvement in major world events, as well as his unique versatility, Churchill's personality has become surrounded by all sorts of myths, many of which are mutually exclusive.
Who was Churchill: a great statesman or an incompetent upstart, a reactionary or a reformer, an outstanding strategist or a military adventurer, a savior or a destroyer of the British Empire? The perception of this personality, due to his uneven and contradictory relations with Great Britain, is especially distorted in Russia, where he is increasingly called a Russophobe and the instigator of the Cold War. The objective of this work is to cleanse the historical role and personality of Churchill of mythological layers. A study of various aspects of his activities leads us to the conclusion that the Churchill phenomenon is the result of a unique combination of his personality traits with the peculiarities of the British social and state structure and the character of the era in which he operated. The prism of his political biography more clearly reveals the essence of the main events and results of the 20th century, including the fate of Russia.
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