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I don't think the people in Latvia, Lithuania Estonia, Finnland, Germany, Hungary, Georgia, Ukraine etc pp et al were particularly sad about not being ruled from Moscow anymore. You could even say they grew happier, healthier, taller and had less dental cavities.

I am a Czech myself, and old enough to remember that period.

We were all happy to escape the Russian yoke, but the transformation was really challenging, not to mention the potential threat of wars as various ancient ethnic hatreds, suppressed by the defunct empire, reappeared.

A lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of currencies collapsed and took people's life savings with them... There was a wave of crime and various oligarchs tried to lift themselves above the law.

And your healthcare quip is way off. In many places further East, basic healthcare structure collapsed, and diseases like tuberculosis or HIV either returned or spread anew massively.

The situation began improving by re-attachment of the newly free countries to another, more benign empire, which was the EU.

In 2011 I spent a month in Latvia and while no one ever outright said that they wished the USSR had not fallen, I heard a lot of stories about how things got a lot worse in the short term and had only recently recovered. They were mostly centered around how Latvia’s economy was very intertwined with things on the east side of the border and trade became much more complicated (and supplying make-work Soviet factories was suddenly not viable).

I suspect the fact that I spent the entire time with ethnic Russians played a role in this, as it sounded like the Latvians had been second-class citizens in their own country.

I noted the data point of the civil war in Syria: 20 times as many people moved as were killed. That's good news as far as it goes - to run is better than to die - but that doesn't make the Syrian civil war a good time for the people involved. They were running for a reason - the threat of death was too high if they stayed put. So they left. They left their homes, their belongings, their jobs, and ran to a very uncertain future somewhere else.

So I'm not sure that "the death toll wasn't that high" should be casually interpreted as "it wasn't that bad for regular people". Yes, most of them lived. That doesn't make it benign.

(Hmm, I seem to have used a lot of dashes in the first paragraph. No, I'm not an AI.)

A good remark, but also a word of caution.

The Syrian situation is not directly comparable. With modern logistics, it is way, way easier to feed even big masses of displaced people. We can produce food efficiently and we can move it over long distances before it spoils. If you run away from active fighting, chances are that you actually survive, even though the refugee camps are miserable.

Neither was true in the Early Middle Ages and if an invader displaced tens of thousands of people from somewhere, they would just die of hunger. The capacity to take care of sudden crowds of refugees just wasn't there.

It was far worse in the past, for the reasons you mentioned about security in particular. This is when we see the rise of castles and fortresses and the feudal system.

The Nazi Reich was very short lived (12ish years) and after its collapse, Western Germany was in a better place. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a bigger deal, as people had lived a few generations under the communist system and had to adapt rather suddenly to market economics and new governance. No doubt there was a shock period, but by and large people's lives got better. This is largely because of how globalized we are in modern day.

The Dark Ages lasted for hundreds of years and were a regression in quality of life for vast majority of western europe.

"Western Germany was in a better place."

Due to a somewhat historically anomalous generosity of the winners, who (from a mixture of humanity and economic motives) decided to invest into its rebuilding.

In earlier times, debellatio of an enemy state after a long, vicious existential war would end in a way similar to what the Romans did to Carthage.

WWI was a thing.

Can you expand your comment? I am not sure what you mean by such a short reaction. Of course there was WWI, but ... ?

The victorious allies imposed a punitive peace on German at the end of WWI. This caused huge resentment, that was at least partly responsible for the rise of Nazism and WWII. The Marshall plan was, I believe, an attempt to the stop the same cycle from happening again. Similarly for Japan. It was an act of incredible generosity by the USA, but I think history shows that it was also a very smart investment. I can't imagine such generosity and foresight being employed again any time soon.

I think the Cold War played a role too. Germany was defeated, but its industry was still fairly operational. In contrast to housing, which was bombed into pieces, German heavy industry was remarkably operational until the very end and the British were surprised to find that German factories were, on average, equipped with more modern machines than British ones.

And some 75 per cent of that industry was in Allied hands. It made strategic sense to rebuild the country in face of a Soviet threat and make it a factory for the Allies (notably, the German army was only reconstituted much later, in 1955) instead of destroying it.

>I think the Cold War played a role too.

Yes, definitely. The USA wanted as many allies as it could get against the USSR, even former enemies.

>German factories were, on average, equipped with more modern machines than British ones.

Thankfully the Germans wasted amounts of resources on not very useful weapons, such as the V2 rocket (technologically brilliant, strategically pretty useless) and the King Tiger (unreliable and IIRC cost somewhere around 20 times as much to make as a typical allied tank).

I believe a lot of historians get rather upset about the use of the term 'dark ages'.

The Romans used their professional army to destroy many of the cultures unfortunate enough to be within their reach (Dacia, Carthage etc). They then wrote the history to make themselves look good and the 'barbarians' look bad. Consequently the fall of the Roman empire is seen as a disaster. But the Romans were a brutal bunch. They used to watch people being mauled by wild animals and gladiators hacking each other to death as entertainment, after all. Many of the people that the Romans conquered must have been glad to see the back of them.

This is a very modern reading of a very ancient situation.

By the time of Western Roman Empire collapsing, the realm was Christian for two centuries and gladiator games et al. were banned for so long that no one alive would remember them happening. Most of the local languages were also gone and the previously conquered people considered themselves Romans and spoke Latin. They didn't have any Wikipedia or nationalist schooling system to teach them that they were once Celts or Illyrs, 400 years ago.

(Even in our modern world where history is taught and movies and books are abundant, few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors. This is a domain of history geeks. No modern German loses their sleep over whether his city was once plundered by the Palatinate forces or burnt to the ground by a Saxon army, and would not dismantle modern Germany just because such atrocities once took place.)

Also, the Roman empire did not dissolve into a vacuum, with the previous provinces simply declaring their long desired independence. It was conquered from the outside, and the attackers would not necessarily treat the subdued population any better. They might, or they might not.

>few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors

I bet most people in the US could tell you in broad strokes who used to live in North America and who conquered them.

Very broad strokes. "Indians vs. Whites".

But the Roman situation was more akin to "what precisely happened during the Thirty Years War". I really like history, but I wouldn't be able to tell you if Münster or Würzburg sided with those or these.

Unlike the conquest of North America, which usually resulted in physical destruction of the Indian tribes and their displacement by the colonists, Roman conquests tended to absorb the conquered polity, often with the basic social structure still intact, so the nobility would remain in local control, the priests would remain priests of that particular local god etc. This tends to take the edge off and make assimilation easier.

The conquest of north America was largely done by smallpox. As soon as the Europeans arrived, it doomed 95% of the population, who had been spared countless plagues and viruses that swept through Asia, Africa and Europe over the millenia. This fractured many tribes and collapsed their numbers to a point where they had no meaningful polity, maybe a few hundred to a few thousand at most.

Among the remaining tribes and the decimated numbers, many did in fact eventually integrate with Spanish, French, or English settlers, particularly the tribes that allied with them against another rival tribe, such as the Tlaxcalans who aided the Spanish in conquering the Aztecs, and subsequently integrated.

We hear the most and remember the most the tribes which warred the most fiercely (ie Commanche, Apache, Sioux, etc), however, we scarcely remember the tribes they themselves slaughtered, enslaved, and scalped, such as the Crow and Pawnee (who would ally with the US Army) . And some like the Iroquois were generally peaceful and continue to this day.

1620 was after the advent of the printing press and mass production of paper and the spread of reading and writing generally. By then we recorded everything.

We don't know as much about who conquered whom in pre-Colombian America, other than standout examples like the Incans, Mayans, and Aztecs. Oral histories fade rather quickly especially when decimated by war, famine, or disease. But even when conquered and absorbed into a society, how quickly would the descendents forget if properly integrated? A few generations is all it would take. We speak English because there was a society known as the Angles that I know almost nothing about. Are there any pure blood Angles still around? Who knows? They were conquered by the Saxons and no one can today tell you the difference. I'd reckon that the Anglo or Saxon distinction went away rather quickly.

>By the time of Western Roman Empire collapsing, the realm was Christian for two centuries and gladiator games et al. were banned for so long that no one alive would remember them happening.

That is a fair point. But I believe the Romans were still a pretty brutal and repressive regime right up the the end. And also levied high taxes. Whether the regional powers that replaced them were any better, was a matter of luck I suppose.

During the Gothic Wars of the 6th century, there was an interesting episode when the remaining Roman inhabitants of (much diminished) city of Rome actually defended the city on the Goths' side against their own Eastern Roman brethren, because they considered Gothic rule lighter and more tolerable.

But at nearly the same time, the Goths absolutely destroyed Milan.

History is rarely straightforward.

> Even in our modern world where history is taught and movies and books are abundant, few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors.

This is just wrong, people are typically very well aware of the history of the area they grew up in. If you ask people in Sweden if Denmark once ruled Sweden, I'd bet around 99% of Swedish people would say yes. That ended 1523, they probably wouldn't know that exact date but they would know it happened for sure, people joke about that all the time. If you ask people in Finland if they were once ruled by Sweden, I'd bet 100% would say yes. If you asked exactly what periods people will be shaky, but they will know Sweden once ruled them and then Russia did rule them.

I think everyone goes into detail about their home area in the 9 years you study history in school, at least what happened the past 1000 years since that is recent and well documented, studying every single recorded war and rebellion for the area you live in is normal.

And the consequences? You can see them all over the places, you see the language changing, you see cultural connections everywhere with the conquerors etc, even hundreds of years later. Even today you have remnants from Mexico owning Texas like Cathedral of San Fernando, people wouldn't think USA built that with such a name.

Even USA does this, although its history doesn't stretch 1000 years back but the wars USA was in I think are well known by most Americans. And this goes for states as well, I'd doubt you would find many who grew up in Texas that doesn't know it was once a Mexican province and was conquered by USA. People in New York might be more shaky about that, but that's because the war didn't really affect their area.

People know relatively recent history of large nation states because we live in the post-Gutenberg era and we live in an era where vast majority of people do 12 years schooling at a minimum (a quite recent phenomenon). You can read, the vast majority of people in human history could neither read nor write. So people largely relied on oral history. How many Swedes can tell you about the various tribes that made up the oroginal identity of Sweden itself? Would a modern Swede think about the Götar, Upplänningar, or the Värmlänningar? These tribes occupied Sweden before the Swedish national identity emerged somewhere between the 1200s and 1500s. Unless they're history buffs probably not, and there are countless others for which we have no record of.

Many areas of the world existed outside the bounds of extensive record keeping. Thousands of tribal identities and city-states were absorbed into the modern day nation state. Even Germany did not exist as a country until 1871. At one point there was 300 principalities in the region now known as Germany.

The Cathedral of San Fernando was built by the Spanish in 1738, not Mexico. Mexico didn't exist as a nation state until the establishment of the First Mexican Empire in 1821. Meanwhile the Republic of Texas was founded in 1835, just 14 years later, as it broke off from a Mexican dictatorship. The Texans were wise to keep around beautiful and historic works from the Spanish and even retain the names of many Spanish established cities (although they might pronounce them differently as in Amarillo).

Texas wasn't conquered by the U.S., it was a sovereign republic for 10 years before the Texans voted to join the U.S.

Either way history is extremely complex and even as we know so much there is a lot that went undocumented and is lost to the ether. There are many cases where entire cultures were assimilated away, by the Romans and otherwise.

Yes, "people largely relied on oral history", but don't underestimate the power of that. We are now (kept) so busy that we don't listen to stories being passed down, but this used to be very different! Also, if your knowledge comes from books in the school system, they can be (and regularly are!) replaced and their content adapted to 'current needs'.

As to "the previously conquered people considered themselves Romans and spoke Latin", I don't believe everybody spoke Latin, as even in what we now call Italy, people kept speaking their various regional languages, let alone in territories with people groups with a more distantly related "mother tongue". They would keep identifying with their ethnic and linguistic origins.

If you look at the history of Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire you'll find that Society largely collapsed into small towns each governed by their own local Lord or perhaps a king but constantly subject to attack from all sides by neighboring powers in distant foreign powers who would occasionally sweep through and murder every one except for the desirable women and children. Occasionally a man's life might be spared if agreed to be a slave or serf for another Lord or King. The situation was exacerbated by the effects of the Justinian plague and the onset of volcanic winter in the year 536.

they are on point regarding people moving rather than dying, but that kinda proves the point that situations can and do get worse sometimes for a whole generation.

Historic sources indicate massive workforce (and military force) shortages where once were none, which means that the total population must have dropped significantly.

Rome was able to field huge armies by the 3rd century BC already, originally sourced from the Italian peninsula alone. In contrast, when the Eastern Roman forces finally defeated the Goths in the 540s, they were unable to hold Italy against a relatively minor Langobard invasion in 568, which is estimated to some 20 000 warriors. Why? For the lack of soldiers. They just couldn't put together the necessary garrisons and feed them from local sources.

That would have been unthinkable in 168. Anyone who would seriously want to conquer Italy at that time would have to field at least ten times as many soldiers.

In contrast, the Eastern Roman Empire at home was still able to field massive armies and even send some expeditions overseas, because the more developed civilizational structure was still present there, and with it, much higher population density.

> Rome was able to field huge armies by the 3rd century BC already, originally sourced from the Italian peninsula alone.

That's true, but the contrast to other contemporary states is not felt to be one of population size. Rather, the Romans were able to mobilize a much larger share of their subject population into the army.

This would be an interesting debate, but it is after midnight here, so I will be going to sleep shortly.

Basically, yes, but also no. There is a huge difference between being able to mobilize a large portion of your population for a short time vs. keeping the standing army indefinitely. With the latter, various intrinsic economic limitations will bite. Rome started with the "big temporary armies" model, but slowly transitioned into "big permanent armies" model, which required a lot of support from civilians.

Professional soldiers are economically unproductive; they have to be fed, clothed and provided with weapons. Just the necessary smelting of iron in order to equip a single legion would be a lot of work for blacksmiths, miners and lumberjacks who produced the necessary wood for charcoal. If a premodern empire can field tens of thousands of iron-clad professional soldiers indefinitely, it must have a lot of civilian workers supporting that army. Literally millions.

The precipitous drop in the size of field armies in the Early Middle Ages is a good indication of the precipitous drop of the entire economy which would prop them up.

>If a premodern empire can field tens of thousands of iron-clad professional soldiers indefinitely, it must have a lot of civilian workers supporting that army.

Or it must continually conquer new territories to plunder and tax. And that was the Roman model. But finally the empire got too big to manage with the technology of the day. They weren't able to conquer new territories and that meant they could not afford the huge professiomal army. Which led to the collapse of the empire in the west. Or you could argue that it just morphed into the Roman catholic church.

(Not a historian, just been reading a bit about this recently)

With two exceptions (Britain and Dacia), the Roman empire mostly ran out of interesting neighbours to conquer by 1 AD.

Britain was considered Claudius' vanity project and probably was, on the net, an economic loss. Dacia was abandoned quite early precisely because it wasn't interesting enough to defend.

The legions remained pretty big long (centuries) after the expansion phase ceased.

>With two exceptions (Britain and Dacia), the Roman empire mostly ran out of interesting neighbours to conquer by 1 AD.

The Romans spent centuries after that trying to conquer the Persians (Parthians/Sassanids).

> Britain was considered Claudius' vanity project and probably was, on the net, an economic loss.

Apparently there were 3 legions in Britain, which was (per conquered person) more than any other Roman territory. Certainly a lot for a damp island with some tin. ;0)

"trying"

That is the point, though. An interesting neighbour to conquer is one which looks wealthy enough (no sense in conquering cold northern marshes full of mosquitos), and is weak enough so that you may actually conquer him and hold the territory without overextending yourself.

Most Roman neighbours by 1 AD would not pass the first test. The Persians would absolutely ace the first test, but they were equals to the Romans when it came to military prowess, and a danger to be reckoned with. As a result, the Eastern border was, overall, a source of weakness rather than profit.

Modern MBAs would probably call the Roman-Persian border a "cost center".

Or maybe a drop in military spending?

Germany under Hitler had a big army, it now has a small one. It's not because they population or economy collapsed. See also modern Russia where they are cranking up the army in spite of declining population and an iffy economy. It seems more about having a dictator who wants to do wars.

You can't really compare premodern and modern societies in this regard. Totally different contexts.

In ancient Europe, if you had some lucrative territory and not enough military force to defend it, you would be raided and invaded by your neighbours with absolute certainty. Maybe not the same summer, but quite soon. People had different understanding of morality and wars of conquest were glorified. Plus, quite a lot of the pre-state societies didn't have any centralization of power and a hot-headed noble could absolutely start a war just with his retinue, dragging his entire tribe into it.

This is just not the model on which the current EU works, although the Russo-Ukrainian war was a rude awakening in this regard.

> Rome started with the "big temporary armies" model, but slowly transitioned into "big permanent armies" model, which required a lot of support from civilians.

What does that have to do with what they were doing in the 3rd century BC?

I'm only talking about the actual empire collapse I saw myself, no the Rome