This book is about the Civil War in the United States of 1861–1865.
The first question a listener might have is: why this war in particular? The author, with his characteristic polemical flair, answers: to draw lessons for himself. Our country’s civil wars also didn’t pass us by. Even Switzerland, which we’re used to thinking of as quiet and peaceful, experienced its own civil war.
To reconstruct a detailed picture of such a “well-known” event as the Civil War in the United States, A. Bushkov had to go through two and a half hundred books—after which the author concluded that such a story belongs among the hidden ones. “Everyone knows” that on the American South there lived reactionary slave owners—cruel people, whose hearts burned with hatred for opponents of slavery. And when the vile southerners treacherously rose up against the government and created their own southern state, noble northerners began a war to destroy slavery.
Slavery in the South existed, and of course it was evil. But the true motives and impulses of the North had nothing to do with progress. They were dirty and selfish, and had nothing to do with the struggle for the liberation of Black people…