Is it true that the expression “little victorious war” was invented by Minister Pleve?

Many attribute the words about an inconspicuous, but spectacular and successful armed conflict that allows the state to solve the accumulated problems, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Nicholas II. We checked how true this attribution is.

Vyacheslav Pleve is attributed to the authorship of the phrase about the “small victorious war” a variety of sources: from the site Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation in the Kaluga Region to former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov in the book "Without Putin", from BBC to Republic. Such an attribution is also popular on social networks: relevant publications can be found in "VKontakte", Livejournal And Twitter.

For the first time, words about the need for a "little victorious war" attributed Pleve A. Naval in the book “The Exodus of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Government of the Nosar”, published in 1911. The author says that the minister announced a similar need in an interview with General Kuropatkin. Allegedly, during the “intimate conversation”, statesmen argued about the appropriateness of war, and after that Klove said: “Believe me, Alexei Nikolaevich, we need a small victorious war, otherwise it is impossible to keep the revolution.” According to the assurances of the sea, this fact is reflected in the memoirs of Kuropatkin, however, the description of the conversation of the two officials stated in them differs From retelling.

Another source in which you can find these words is Sergey Witte's memoirs. In his memoirs published in Berlin in 1922, the former chairman of the Committee of Ministers He wrote: “Right newspapers, which all the time set Russia for Japan, following the policy of Polev, who said:“ We need a small victorious war in order to keep Russia from the revolution, ”of course, they began to say in their own way that we should not have concluded peace, that if we continued the war, we would have won.” Witte Completed his memoirs in 1912, and Pleve was Killed Socialist-Revolutionary Sosonov back in 1904, so Witte and Sea had no way to comment on the publications of Witte. By the way, there are reports that under the pseudonym A. Marine He wrote Vladimir von Stein - clergyman of the office of the Academy of Sciences and the Literary Agent Witte.

How Notes Culturologist Konstantin Dushenko, contemporaries and colleagues of the two ministers cast doubt on Witte's words. For example, a subordinate pleury in the Ministry of the Interior Vladimir Gurko He wrotethat his chief of “this war (Russian-Japanese.-approx. Ed.), Like all other ministers and, of course, the sovereign himself, definitely did not want.” According to Dushenko, this testimony can be believed - "the gendarme department, as a rule, was least prone to chapcake."

Expressions similar to the Russian “little victorious war”, shortly before the conflict between Russia and Japan, appeared in other languages. First of all, we are talking about the Spanish-American War of 1898, which continued Less than four months ended with the capture of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. American ambassador to Great Britain John Hay in a letter to future President Theodor Roosevelt He called it This conflict with the words “brilliant little war” (a splendid Little War). Dushenko suggestsWhat Witte could learn about this phrase from Roosevelt’s book “Description of the Spanish-American War” (1900) and adapt it to Russian realities, but we could not find such a text from the American politician. In 1899, Roosevelt published a book dedicated to those events The Roun Riders, where there are no words Splendid Little War.

Thus, although even some of his contemporaries attributed the authorship of the phrase to be attributed to Polev, this happened several years after the murder of the minister. No reliable evidence of what he spoke of a “small victorious war” has not been found at the moment. At the same time, a few years earlier a very similar phrase appeared in English to describe the conflict between the United States and Spain.

This is not for sure

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. K. Dushenko. A small victorious war
2. M. Saevskaya. To the question of the origin of the phrase about the "small victorious war"
3. S. Witte. Memories