By Vestnik Kavkaza
Due to the events in Ukraine - which directly and indirectly involve Russia, Europe and the EU - not only historians, but also politicians, political scientists and experts often refer to the events of the First World War, the 100th anniversary of the start of which is marked this year.
Yevgeny Sergeyev, the president of the Russian Association of Historians of the First World War, thinks the war was a preface to modern history: “It still holds us. The last reparations and compensation for the damage caused during the military events were paid to the UK by Germany in October 2010.”
According to Sergeyev, the First World War opened a Pandora's box: “Except for the nuclear and missile weapons which appear at the end of the Second World War, all other kinds of weapons and methods of fighting were invented and adapted during the First World War, including tanks, submarines, poison gases. Guerilla movements which had been developing on occupied territories also took place during WWI.”
The historian says that “the First World War was the first total war in the history of humanity, when military activities took place in three spheres, a 3D war – in the air, underwater, on water and land. The war covered almost every continent… The war was shocking not only in its scale, but also its cruelty. After the First World War (10 million dead and 20 million injured, a great number of victims of an epidemic), people were horrified and stated that war should be eliminated as an instrument of politics.
This antihuman total character, when a front and a home front were united into a joint military camp in all fighting countries; when the so-called non-aligned countries which were few in Europe were also involved in the war, as refugees were settled on their territory; they indirectly participated in supplying fighting coalitions and felt all the military stress; when traditional trade and economic ties were broken, everybody felt the horror of the war. But, unfortunately, the First World War only opened the box, and later it was even worse, the even greater disasters of the Second World War, including nuclear bombings…”
