There is no such thing as justice in war. Human beings greedily believe that everything belongs to them, but there are countless people who also believe that those things belong to them.
When you plant a wheat field and work hard, you think that all the harvest here is yours, but this is not the case. The tax collector thinks one-third of it is his, the king thinks the land is his, the thief thinks half of it is his, and the alien robbers think everything in the land is his, and your wife is theirs too.
Not only that, but even the birds and voles believe that they have a share in the produce of this land.
In fact, in the minds of these senior noble officers in Tsarist Russia, everything they did was actually the same as what the Manchu Qing Dynasty did more than two hundred years ago and the Yuan Dynasty more than five hundred years ago.
If ethnic minorities in bitterly cold places at high latitudes want to be happy, don't they have to compete with ethnic groups in warm places? This kind of robbery occurs throughout the entire human world, so what's unreasonable about it?
Look at the peoples living happily in civilized cities such as Paris, London, Berlin, Austria, etc. Who are their ancestors? They are Germans, Gauls, Vikings, Goths... and these names once had a unified name, which was the label given to them by the Roman Empire, barbarians.
The huge Roman Empire was destroyed by foreign wars. The ethnic minorities in the bitter cold land of the north, with their fearless banditry spirit that was not afraid of death, pain, or sacrifice, defeated Rome and established their own country, thus erasing the label of being barbaric. , got a happy life.
All this has happened in the East and the West, especially in China. For thousands of years, the northern barbarians have launched wars again and again for the wealth of the Central Plains, and even established regimes that lasted for hundreds of years.
Why can the Manchus enslave the Han people for two hundred years, but the great tsar cannot enslave the Han people for two hundred years? You Manchus can enter the customs, and so can we. Anyway, the Han people are just a group of docile little sheep.
Is there any difference between paying taxes to the Manchus and paying taxes to the Tsar? Anyway, in the history of the Han people, aren't there many cases where people paid taxes in exchange for peace and in exchange for a way out?
This kind of thinking is actually the unified thinking of all the noble officers in the expeditionary force. Tsarist Russia is completely different from Britain and France. Britain and France are now competing for maritime interests. Their desire for territory is not very strong. What they actually value in occupying colonies is ports, Golden routes and colonial resources.
In the minds of Britain and France, as long as your ports and waterways can be used by me at will, resources can be provided to me cheaply, and our industrial products can be dumped freely, this is enough.
Just keep it
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These few points, we have absolutely no interest in subverting your regime. Whoever you like will be the emperor.
But the Russians were different. The interests of the Tsarist Russian Empire lay on land rather than in the sea. Why was Tsarist Russia still a serf society until the 19th century? It is because of this bitter cold land that the land output is far less than that of the warmer places in the south. If people want to get more food output, they must cultivate large areas of land. The small farmer economy of each household like China is simply not realistic. , will starve to death.
Moreover, the 19th century had not yet reached the era of mechanization. Even British farming relied on human and animal power. This can only imagine how much output the vast wilderness of Tsarist Russia, which was frozen for half the year, could produce.
This is a curse and a vicious cycle. The harsh natural environment and poor industrial standards will lead to a sharp decrease in productivity, and the output per unit land area will be pitiful.
Since the output per unit area is too small, people have to desperately expand the land area in order to survive. This is true for both farming and animal husbandry. If efficiency is not enough, quantity must be used to supplement it.
Under the control of this curse, Tsarist Russia had to choose serfdom, a primitive social model that could carry out large-scale economic operations. Another point is their extreme thirst for land. They must have more and more land to adapt to this economic model.
Coupled with the super fighting power of the barbarians in the bitter cold land, coupled with this social system and economic foundation, all these have created the huge Tsarist Russian Empire.
Why invade? Sometimes, for some ethnic groups, they really cannot survive without aggression, and they will be exterminated!
The earliest land contact between Tsarist Russia and China was during the Kangxi period. The Battle of Yaksa maintained peace on the northern border of the Qing Dynasty for more than a hundred years, but that war did not dispel Tsarist Russia's ambitions.
It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution took off and the British took the lead in breaking through the Qing Dynasty that Tsarist Russia finally found an opportunity. In the Second Opium War, Russia did not actually send troops. It only relied on intimidation to obtain more than one million square kilometers of land. This made the entire Tsarist Russia extremely excited.
The powerful neighbor in the past has finally weakened. This is the best time for Tsarist Russia to reach out to the east. In the minds of the entire Moscow hierarchy, gradually encroaching on the Manchu Qing from north to south is a century-old strategy.
At the beginning, you can occupy the Far East first, manage the Far East carefully, and use the resources of the Far East and the profits from trade with the Chinese to start to expand your power in the Far East.
After the Trans-Siberian Railway is opened to traffic, the efficient transportation capacity of the railway will be used to further deploy troops and use the railway to further seize the resources of the East.
Then he took the opportunity to extend his influence deep into the three provinces outside the Guanhai Pass, allowing Russia's influence to directly border the Great Wall of the Han people. In this way, Tsarist Russia could replace the Huns, Turks, Mongols, Jurchens... and other ethnic groups in ancient China and become the northern region directly bordering the Han people. Quite sufficient.
Need to talk about the rest of the strategy? Naturally, they replaced the Manchus, established the tsarist regime in the fertile hinterland of the Central Plains, and let the double-headed eagle flag fly on the banks of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River.
"What the little Jurchen Manchus can do, why can't our great Tsarist Russia not do it? They could enslave the Central Plains for 200 years, but if they were replaced by the powerful Tsarist Russian Empire, they would definitely be able to enslave the Central Plains for 400 or 600 years. …”
This is the common aspiration of all Tsarist Russia, and it is also the Eastern strategy designated by the Tsar in the 19th century. Even if it takes a hundred years to complete, it cannot be given up.
But no one expected that a strange chess piece would appear on the wishful thinking plan! The sudden rise of Xiao Letian caused great trouble to Tsarist Russia's eastern strategy. Expeditions that did not exist in history appeared, and the disastrous defeat that would not have happened in the past was irreversible.
You can imagine how deep the hatred of the noble officers such as Hermansky towards Xiao Letian was. Why is this damn bastard so un-Chinese? Aren’t all Chinese people selfish?
We, Tsarist Russia, have not offended you yet. We are now operating the land ceded by the Manchus! What does it have to do with you Han people? Why are you nosy? You damn bastard, why are you so nosy?
With a bang, Hermansky's fist hit the side of the boat, and the wooden thorns pierced his flesh and dripped with blood. "Since you have chosen to be our enemy, just wait! The great Tsarist Russia will retaliate with all the strength of the country!" We won’t let you go!”
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