THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 Collage 
 Library 
 
 A WORD FROM THE TRANSLATOR. 
 
 IT is not for the modest translator to preface by any words of 
 personal appreciation a work such as this, which, as a Russian, I 
 feel it an honor and a great privilege to be allowed to present in 
 English garb to the nation of all others whose friendly, enlight- 
 ened, and unbiassed judgment of us and our country we all are 
 most anxious to secure. But inasmuch as my work is not 
 altogether merely a literal translation, I may be permitted to point 
 out in how far a slight amount of editing has been called for. 
 
 It was thought desirable by the publishers to let a moderate 
 thread of annotation accompany the text, so as to bring into yet 
 stronger light the masterly pictures of Russian life historical, 
 social, popular, which Mr. Leroy-Beaulieu unfolds before the 
 reader in a series as varied as that life itself. I gladly take this 
 opportunity of answering the many questions which I have been 
 asked during my twenty years of life in America, among Americans, 
 and try to tell them not only what I know they want to know in 
 the way of characteristic details, but also, as far as the necessarily 
 limited space at my disposal will allow, some of the things which 
 I think they ought to know and do not as yet. I imagined myself 
 reading the book with a circle of interested friends, and from 
 time to time laying it down to discuss some point, to elucidate 
 some historical allusion, to illustrate some description, and some- 
 times very rarely, very respectfully to offer some slight objec- 
 tion. Where I was drawn into a discussion or narrative too long 
 to be placed at the bottom of a page, I gave the note at the end 
 of the chapter, in the form of an appendix. To distinguish my
 
 iv A WORD FROM THE TRANSLATOR. 
 
 annotations from the author's own, I adopted the simple expedient 
 of marking them with figures, while the usual signs stars, dag- 
 gers, etc. were retained for the author's notes, thus doing away 
 with the cumbersome initials or "Translator's note" at the end 
 of each annotation. 
 
 However sparingly I made use of the latitude left me in the 
 matter of annotation, this addition to the original work threatened 
 to swell the English volume to a more than reasonable bulk. It 
 became necessary, therefore, to have recourse to condensation. 
 This delicate and responsible operation being necessarily left to my 
 discretion, caused me more care and anxiety than all the rest of 
 the work put together. Very rarely, very cautiously and lightly, 
 with a fear on me as of committing sacrilege, I proceeded to abbre- 
 viate a paragraph here and there. Not so much by elimination 
 for it is but seldom that several lines or as much as half a page at 
 once have been omitted as by persistent compression, on the 
 same principle as a pound of down, when compressed, is a pound 
 still, though its volume is diminished. " What will the author 
 say to this passage ? or this ? or this ? ' ' was the test question 
 always present before my mind, and it was my standard that he 
 should not be able to detect the abbreviations at the first reading 
 unless he knew where they were made. 
 
 After long and careful deliberation, it was thought advisable to 
 depart from the ordinary custom of having but one -index for a 
 work of so great compass, and of placing this complete index at 
 the end of the last volume. Every student knows how utterly 
 unpractical and disconcerting such a system is, and will thankfully 
 welcome an innovation which places all the references within easy 
 reach and frees him from the necessity of cumbering himself with 
 a big book otherwise unneeded, not to speak of the discomfort of 
 doing without an index at all until the publication of the third 
 volume, which naturally cannot take place for some consider- 
 able time after the first appears. The innovation was the more 
 appropriate in the present case that the three volumes of Mr.
 
 A WORD FROM THE TRANSLATOR. v 
 
 Leroy-Beaulieu's work are in a great measure independent of one 
 another, as they treat three entirely separate divisions of his 
 immense subject, the first volume being devoted to " the Country 
 and People," the second to " The Institutions," and the third to 
 ' ' Religion ' ' and Church matters. 
 
 In the preparation of this first index, I have classed the items 
 more according to subjects than to names and words, with the 
 exception of the ethnographical chapters. This subject being the 
 most unfamiliar and bewildering, from the great number of races, 
 peoples, and tribes, with their strange, hard names, I took particu- 
 lar care to include all these names in the index, in a manner to 
 facilitate immediate reference and cross-reference. 
 
 The transliteration of Russian words and names, I believe, to 
 render the original sound as nearly as the writing of one language 
 can render the pronunciation of another. This result will be helped 
 by the system of accentuation I have adopted, using both the ac- 
 cents x and ' in this way, that the first marks a short vowel, and 
 the second a long one. Take, for instance, o in "hot" and in 
 "hole. " In " hot " it would have a \ so : ' ' h6t, " and in " hole " 
 a ', so : hole ; v on i makes the sound short, as in " fin " ; ' makes 
 it long, as in " eat, " " beet. ' ' The A gives the vowel a very open 
 sound, as that of a in "hand," " man." A few simple rules for 
 the pronunciation of the different vowels, some consonants, etc., 
 are given in notes, as the need of them occurs. 
 
 Z. A. RAGOZIN. 
 NEW YORK, April, 1893.
 
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 WRITTEN EXPRESSLY FOR THE AMERICAN EDITION. 
 
 THE work herewith offered to the English-reading public is 
 forbidden in Russia. The English or American reader will 
 wonder at this : he should not. The Anglo-Saxon who wishes 
 
 to judge of Russian matters must begin by divesting himself 
 
 
 of American or British ideas. For a book to become officially 
 
 naturalized in the domains of the Tsar, it is not enough that it 
 should breathe the spirit of sympathy with the great Slavic peo- 
 ple and respect for its sovereign. Autocracy, like faith, has its 
 noli me tangere. It cannot allow either its acts or its principles 
 to be discussed. And this is just what this book does, with 
 a freedom obviously incompatible with the autocratic system. 
 It would, therefore, be unreasonable to complain of the ostracism 
 decreed against these volumes ; it rather claims the author's 
 thanks, as being tribute to his sincerity from the Russian censure. 
 Indeed, he can boast a rare good fortune that of being able to 
 freely express all his friendliness towards Russia and her people, 
 without a doubt being cast on his independence of spirit. 
 
 One thing I cannot too much impress on my readers, and 
 that is that we are not justified, we Westerners, in applying to 
 Russia the same notions and the same rules as to Europe or 
 America. To do so would be the height of ignorance and unfair- 
 ness. Yet this is the very error into which most foreigners fall. 
 They suffer themselves to be imposed upon by the geographers, 
 who assure them that Europe extends to the flat-topped ridge
 
 viii . AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 of the Ural and to the peak-crowned steeps of the Caucasus. All 
 this college ballast must be thrown overboard, these conventional 
 limits be done away with. Russia is neither Europe nor Asia ; 
 she is a world by itself, situated between Europe and Asia, and, 
 in a way, belonging to both. The Russian Empire I trust 
 I have succeeded in demonstrating thus much is indeed, in a 
 sense, a European state, as it is a Christian one ; but it is not 
 a state of our time. If it does belong to Europe, it is to a 
 Europe of another age, not to our modern Europe. If one 
 would really understand Russia, one should, to look at her, 
 recede some three or four centuries into the past. To imagine, on 
 the faith of the almanacs, that Russia as she is and the Emperor 
 Alexander III. belong to the end of the nineteenth century, is, 
 in spite of all chronological tables, a gross anachronism. The 
 Tsar Alexander Alexandrovitch, crowned in the Kremlin of 
 Moscow, is not so much the contemporary of Queen Victoria as 
 of Queen Isabel of Castile. The uprightness of his intentions, 
 the loftiness of his character are beyond all doubt, but neither 
 he nor his people live in the same intellectual atmosphere with 
 ourselves. He can with a good conscience sign uk&zes that our 
 conscience condemns. If, at the distance of four centuries, the 
 Russian Tsar takes against his Jewish subjects measures which 
 recall the edicts issued in 1492 by los Reyes Catdlicos, it is because 
 Orthodox Russia is not unlike Catholic Spain of the fifteenth 
 century. 
 
 Between this ' ' Holy Russia ' ' and the democratic republics 
 and constitutional monarchies of the West there lies, for any 
 mind trained to observe, an interval of several hundred years. 
 Even tourists, as, with their habitual presumptuous flippancy, 
 they steam by express across the Russian plains, are struck 
 with this anomaly. What makes it so very hard to understand 
 Russia is that, modern as she is if we look to dates, to the exter- 
 nal side of her civilization, to all that she has appropriated of 
 our mechanical sciences, to her army and her bureaucracy, she is
 
 AUTHORS PREFACE. ix 
 
 mediaeval still in the manners and spirit of her people. Urban or 
 rural, the Russian masses have not felt the breath of either 
 Renaissance, or Reformation, or Revolution. All that has been 
 done in Europe or America for the last four centuries, since the 
 time of Columbus and L,uther, Washington and Mirabeau, is, as 
 far as Russia is concerned, non-existent. 
 
 Not that she kept entirely aloof from the West or never tried to 
 enter into closer relations with it : all her history ever since Peter 
 the Great, and even before him, may be described as one contin- 
 uous effort to ' ' catch up ' ' with Europe. I have shown in what 
 sense Peter and his descendants succeeded and in what sense 
 they failed. No, the Russia of the Romanofs certainly never 
 stood still. She has advanced since Peter the Great ; at times 
 even her rulers, in their haste to get ahead, attempted to push on 
 the ponderous and compact empire at an accelerated pace which 
 the heavy popular masses could not keep up. Contrary to all 
 that we have seen in Europe, the initiative, the impulse has 
 always come from above, from those in power, and never had 
 monarchs, or ministers such a weight to lift. 
 
 But, if Russia kept progressing in all directions, Europe, too 
 the West was advancing at an increasing pace, into all sorts of 
 new roads, so that Russia, massive and slow, instead of "catch- 
 ing up," always found herself at a great distance behind. 
 Another thing, at which we should surely not wonder : our nimble 
 West (Europe and America both, which to remote Russia are all 
 one) our unstable West, in its precipitous race for that which it 
 calls Progress, ended by arousing a feeling of uneasiness in the 
 religiously attuned soul of old Russia. As far back as the time of 
 Peter the Great, there were the so-called "old Russians" har- 
 dened Moscovites, who were scandalized at the overt imitation of 
 Europe the Europe of L,ouis XIV. and of Queen Anne. With 
 what feelings, then, must such men, in our days, view our repub- 
 lics and our parliaments, our class strifes, our governments and 
 our parties, which give to our political life the semblance of a
 
 X AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 perpetual civil war, in which the weapons are lies and slander ? 
 Our liberties, too often meaning oppression of the weak, and our 
 license, spreading itself to the destruction of all tradition and 
 reverence ; our democracies with their thirst for novelty and their 
 appetite for wealth, too often inspired by a gross and unblushing 
 materialism ; our incessant agitation, similar, from afar, to the 
 idle plashing of the waves of the sea all our restless instability, in 
 short, have alarmed Russia and the Tsar. After having long 
 believed, with a childlike faith, that to be civilized meant 
 to resemble us, imitate us, numbers of Russians, even of the 
 thin cultivated ' ' upper crust, ' ' have come to ask themselves 
 whether the wide road to " progress" opened out by our politicians 
 and our thinkers does not end in a precipitous cliff. And so, after 
 placing all her pride and vain-glory in copying us and standing 
 by our side, Russia became distrustful, disturbed in spirit at the 
 excesses produced within her domains by our imported ideas, and 
 her government stopped her with a jerk. She is no longer anx- 
 ious to resemble us, nor to keep up with us. She thinks it safer 
 to remain herself, to retain or to recover her own individuality. 
 Such is the prevailing feeling in the surroundings of the 
 Emperor Alexander III. For the last two centuries, his country's 
 history has been that of a pendulum drawn alternately towards 
 two opposite poles. It oscillates between European imitation and 
 Moscovite tradition. Just now, the attraction of Moscow and the 
 Russian pole prevails, as it did at one time under Nicolas. The cur- 
 rent is no longer, as under Catherine, Alexander I. , and Alexander 
 II., set towards Europe. Alexander III. prides himself in being, 
 first and foremost, a national ruler. He is the Orthodox Tsar of 
 popular tradition. Russian, and nothing if not Russian. He 
 seeks for no glory save that of embodying in himself his people. 
 To him, the Russian Tsar is Russia incarnate. With whatever 
 feelings we may regard certain of his acts, it is impossible to 
 deny the dignity of his personal character. Never, perhaps, 
 has Russia had a ruler more profoundly imbued with his
 
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. XI 
 
 duties, more earnestly thoughtful for the welfare of his people. 
 His qualities as a sovereign, his virtues as a man, are his own ; 
 his government methods are not. They are the outcome of the 
 soil, of the autocratic system of which he is the representative 
 and which he deems it his mission to maintain in its integrity. 
 This man, invested with the omnipotence which breeds the Neros 
 and the Caligulas of the world, is an upright, honorable man. 
 He is brave, simple, modest ; he is calm and patient. He has 
 shown a quality most rare with those possessed of absolute power : 
 self-control. The protracted resistance encountered by his policy 
 in Bulgaria has not goaded him into one act of passion. This auto- 
 crat who, with one sign, can put in motion ten millions of men, is 
 a lover of peace. He has made war, and he dislikes it ; he has 
 seen its horrors too closely in the Balkan. It is repugnant to his 
 conscience as a Christian and as a ruler of men. If Europe , all brist- 
 ling with bayonets, is still at peace, the merit thereof lies, in a 
 great measure, with the Emperor Alexander III. Self-constituted 
 warder of the peace of the world : a grand r6le for an autocrat, 
 and we in France wish that he may long continue to enact it. 
 
 Whatever the future may bring, whatever the results the Tsar's 
 policy, domestic and foreign, may be, whether Russia is weak- 
 ened or strengthened thereby, whether the sovereign's authority 
 is shaken or confirmed by it in the end, one thing is certain, and 
 that is that this huge country will remain, in any event, one of the 
 three or four great states of the globe. It will, in our hemisphere, 
 balance the United States in the other. That alone should suffice 
 to arouse on behalf of the Empire of the Tsars, the interest of 
 whoever is a passionate student of the destinies of the human kind. 
 However remote this ponderous Russian people may appear to us, 
 however backward its civilization and institutions may seem to 
 us, this new-comer among nations has already manifested an 
 original genius in all branches of human activity in arts, in 
 science, in letters. Therefore, even while noting its defects or 
 even vices, we have not the right, we Occidentals of Europe or
 
 XII 
 
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 America, we, its elders, to deal contemptuously with it. Its 
 youth may have many surprises in store for us. Let us then, 
 whether we call ourselves Neo-Latins or Anglo-Saxons, beware of 
 the inane race-pride which is too often aired by the Teuton, on 
 the Elbe and the Visla, towards the Slav. The Slav has by no 
 means had his final say indeed he has scarcely yet lisped his first 
 words. Because he is different from us, and because nature and 
 history have retarded his development, we are not to pronounce 
 him doomed to everlasting inferiority. Such presumption may 
 bring its own punishment To show us that he has in him the 
 stuff that goes to make a great people, all the Russian Slav needs 
 is a chance and a couple of centuries' credit. 
 
 January, 1893.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOU,. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PACK 
 
 Difficulty of Knowing Russia Description of the Land In What does 
 
 it Differ from Western Europe ? In What is it European ? . . i 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Two Great Zones The Zone of Forests and the Woodless Zone 
 Subdivisions of the Latter The Black Mould Zone The Steppe 
 Region Accidental Steppes Primeval Steppes .... 15 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Homogeneousness of the Country Its Vast Plains were Destined to 
 Political Unity Uneven Population How, for a Length of Time, 
 it was Distributed after an Utterly Artificial Manner Relative 
 Importance of the Various Regions Vital and Accessory Parts 
 Russia a Country Born of Colonization Her Double Task and 
 Consequent Contradictions ........ 35 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Are the Russian People a European People ? Is there in Russia a 
 Homogeneous Nationality ? Interest Attaching to these Questions 
 The Ethnographical Museum at Moscow Causes of the Multi- 
 plicity of Races on this Uniform Land Reasons why their Fusion 
 is not yet Completed How it is that Ethnographical Maps can 
 Furnish only Insufficient Data 54
 
 XIV CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Three Chief Ethnic Elements of Russia The Finns Are they 
 an Element that has no Parallel in Western Europe? Diversity 
 and Isolation of such Finn Groups as still Survive Their Part in 
 the Formation of the Russian People The Russian Type and the 
 Finn Stamp Is fhis Relationship a Cause of Inferiority for Russia ? 
 Capacity of the Finns for Civilization 63 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Tatar or Turk Element Tatars and Mongols The Kalmyks 
 What is the Proportion of Tatar Blood in the Russians? The 
 Tatars in Russia and the Arabs in Spain Slow Elimination of the 
 Tatar Element Ethnical Influence of the Turk Tribes Previous to 
 the Mongol Invasion Varieties of Type amidst the Modern Tatars 
 Their Customs and Character 77 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Slavic Element and Russian Nationality Slavs and Panslavism 
 Slavs and Letto-Lithuanians Formation of the Russian People : Its 
 Different Tribes Differences between them, of Origin and Char- 
 acter Great-Russians ( Velikorbss) White-Russians (Bielorbss) 
 Little-Russians (Malordss) Ukrainophilism 95 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Russia and the Historical Nationalities of her Western Boundaries 
 Obstacles to Russification Germans and German Influence An- 
 tipathy against the Ni&mets Germans in the Baltic Provinces and 
 in Poland The Polish Question Mutual Interest of Russians and 
 Poles in a Reconciliation Plebeian Nationalities and Democratical 
 Policy . 122 
 
 BOOK III. 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Utility and Difficulty of Studying the National Character Russia One 
 of the Countries where Material Surroundings Act Most on Man 
 Some Effects of the Climate The North, and Sluggishness Brought 
 on by Cold Winter and the Intermittence of Labor Lack of 
 Liking for Physical Exertion Habitual Insufficiency of Food; 
 Drunkenness ; Hygiene and Mortality Cold and Uncleanliness at 
 Home in the North Are Northern Countries More Favorable to 
 Morality? 138
 
 CONTENTS. XV 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 PACK 
 
 The Russian Character and the Struggle against the Climate The 
 North far from Being the Natural Cradle of Liberty Resignation, 
 Passiveness, and Hardening in Evil Practical Spirit and Realistic 
 Instincts Impressions Received from Nature ; her Sadness Her 
 Grandeur and Poverty Effects of these Contrasts On the So- 
 Called Nomadic Tendencies of the Russians The Monotony of 
 Great-Russia and the Lack of Originality 161 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 
 The Variety of Russian Nature Lies in the Alternations of Seasons 
 In what Way the Contraries of Winter, Spring, and Summer have 
 Reacted on the National Temperament Russian Character is all 
 in Extremes, as the Climate Its Contradictions Its Flexibility 
 Its Adaptability An Historical Embodiment of the National 
 Character 79 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Russian Character and Nihilism Origin and Nature of Nihilism 
 Its Three Successive Phases By what Sides it Belongs to the 
 National Temperament Combination of Realism and Mysticism 
 In what Sense Nihilism is a Sect Manner of Nihilistic Propaganda 
 Radical Instincts of the Russian Mind The Slav Woman and the 
 " Woman Question " in Russia . 195 
 
 BOOK IV. 
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Has Russia an Historical Inheritance ? Is it True that she Differs from 
 the West by the Principles of her Civilization ? Various Theories 
 on this Subject Slavophils and Occidentals Origin and Ten- 
 dencies of the Slavophils In what Way the Apologists of Russian 
 Civilization Meet the Detractors of Russia Secret Affinities 
 between Slavophilism and Nihilism The Three Conceptions of 
 the National History and Destinies . . . . . 223 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The First Russia and Europe Traits of Kinship Similarities and 
 Dissimilarities The Varangians Christianity and Byzantine 
 Training The Principalities and Frequent Shiftings of the National 
 Centre The Great Unhingement of Russian History . . . 241
 
 Xvi CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 FAGt 
 
 The Tatar Domination, its Effects on the National Manners and Char- 
 acter On the Reigning Family and Political Status Causes and 
 Character of the Moscovite Autocracy In what the Russia of the 
 Seventeenth Century Differed from the West of the Same Period 
 Gaps in Russian History 256 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Russia's Return to European Civilization Antecedents of the Work 
 of Peter the Great The Reformer's Character and Way of Pro- 
 ceeding Consequences and Defects of the Reform Moral and 
 Social Dualism In what Manner Autocracy Seems to have Ful- 
 filled its Historical Task 282 
 
 BOOK V. 
 
 THE SOCIAL HIERARCHY : THE TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Class Distinctions in Russia : In what Respects they are Superficial 
 and External, in what Deep and Persistent Blow Struck at the 
 Old-Time Social Hierarchy by the Emancipation All Subsequent 
 Reforms Tending to the Lowering of Class Barriers How, in this 
 Respect, the Work Done by Alexander II. Resembles that Done by 
 the French Revolution, and how it Differs therefrom Character 
 and Origin of all these Social Distinctions Privileged and Non- 
 Privileged Classes Lack of Solidarity between the Former ; Lack 
 of Homogeneousness in Each Accessory Classes .... 305 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Disproportion between the Urban and Rural Populations Relatively 
 Small Number of Towns and Cities in Russia and all Slavic 
 Countries Explanation of this Phenomenon Reasons which 
 Hinder the Agglomeration of the Population The Towns and 
 their Inhabitants before Peter the Great Efforts of Peter and 
 Catherine to Create a Middle Class 322
 
 CONTENTS. xvii 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PACK 
 
 Classification of the Urban Population since Catherine II. The 
 Mechanic and the MUsh-tchanln or "Small Burgher" Urban 
 Proletariate How this Class has, as a Rule, Preserved the Same 
 Spirit as the Rural Population The Merchant Guilds and their 
 Privileges How Emancipation has Made it Possible for them to 
 Own Real Estate The "Honorary Citizens" or "Notables" 
 among the Townspeople Russia, till very Lately, had none of 
 the Professions out of which the Western Bourgeoisie Used to be 
 Recruited In how far the Reforms Help Create a Middle Class 
 in the European Sense 334 
 
 BOOK VI. 
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 The Nobles and the Peasants, Personifying the Two Russias, Appear 
 like Two Different Nations By its Origin and Manner of Recruit- 
 ing, the Russian Dvori&nstvo Differs from all Corresponding In- 
 stitutions in Western Europe Personal and Hereditary Nobility 
 Great Number of the Nobles Russian Titles The Descendants 
 of Rurik and Guedimin Why this High-born Nobility does not 
 Form an Aristocracy Constitution of the Russian Family Equal 
 Division among the Males Political Consequences of this System 
 Attempts to Introduce Entails and Primogeniture . . . 346 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 How the Monopoly of Territorial Proprietorship could not Confer on 
 the Nobility any Political Power Historical Reasons of this 
 Anomaly The Drujina of the Kniazes and the Free Service of 
 the Boy&rs Ancient Conception of Property : the Vdt-tchina and 
 the PomiGstiye The Service of the Tsar the only Source of Fortune 
 The Disputes about Precedence at Table Why no Real Aristoc- 
 racy could Come out of all this The Hierarchy of Families Suc- 
 ceeded by the Hierarchy of Individuals The "Table of Ranks," 
 and the Fourteen Classes of the Tchi n Results of this Classification 362 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Effects of the " Table of Ranks " on the Nobility The Functionary 
 and the Landlord, Formerly Combined in the Person of the 
 Dvorianln, Frequently Dissevered in the Nobility of our Day 
 Hence Two Opposite Tendencies : Radicalism and Tchindvnism 
 Revolutionary Dilettanteism High Society and the Aristocratic 
 Circles The French Language as a Social Barrier Cosmopolitism 
 and Lack of Nationality '. 381
 
 XV111 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 HMl 
 
 Personal Privileges of the Nobles, and Prerogatives of their Order 
 What Emancipation has Taken from the Nobles besides Landed 
 Property The Dvoridnstvo Threatened with Gradual Expropria- 
 tion How, though not Despoiled, it Practically Lost all its Privi- 
 leges Importance of the Prerogatives Conferred on the " Nobiliary 
 Assemblies " by Catherine II. Why they did not Manage to Benefit 
 by them Has Russia the Elements of a Political Aristocracy ? . 390 
 
 BOOK VII. 
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Russian Literature and the Apotheosis of the Mujik Various Classes 
 of Peasants Origin and Causes of Serfdom Labor Dues and the 
 Obrdk Situation of the Peasants before Emancipation Napoleon 
 III. , Liberator of the Serfs 403 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Questions Raised by the Emancipation Expectations and Disappoint- 
 ments of the Nobility Agrarian Laws Was it Possible to Free 
 the Serfs without Giving them Lands ? Reasons and Conditions 
 of the Territorial Endowment of the Peasants .... 422 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Manner and Conditions of Redeeming the Lands Advances Made 
 by the Exchequer Actual State of the Operation Slackening 
 in the Last Years of Alexander II. How there still Subsisted, in 
 the Form of Labor Dues, a Sort of Half Servitude, which was 
 Abolished only under Alexander HI. Why Landed Property is 
 often a Burden to the Freedmen Unequal Treatment of the Peas- 
 ants in the Different Regions The Gratuitous "Quarter Lot" 
 The Peasant's Disappointment In what Manner he Understood 
 Liberty 436 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Results of the Emancipation How the Manners and Social Status 
 were less Affected by it than was Expected by either Adversaries 
 or Partisans Disappointments and their Causes Economic Re- 
 sults They Differ according to the Regions How it is that the 
 Conditions of the Master's Existence have been Modified by the 
 Emancipation, on the Whole, more than the Peasant's Moral 
 and Social Consequences 450
 
 CONTENTS. xix 
 
 BOOK VIII. 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PACK 
 
 Land Tenure Unchanged by Emancipation Is the Mir a Slavic Insti- 
 tution ? Antiquity and Origin of Communal Property in Russia 
 Differing Views on the Subject Difference between Moscovite 
 Russia and Western Europe from the Standpoint of the Agrarian 
 System 474 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Village Communities Have their Prototype in the Family 
 The Commune Frequently Looked upon as an Enlarged Fam- 
 ily Filiation of the Village Communities from the Family Com- 
 munities The Peasantry's Patriarchal Manners and the Ancient 
 Village Family Authority of the Head of a Household Com- 
 munity of Possessions Domestic Bonds Relaxed by the Eman- 
 cipation Increase of Family Partitions Material Inconvenience 
 and Moral Advantages Accruing Therefrom Servitude of the 
 Women Progress of Individualism ; its Consequences . . . 486 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Village Communities : Manner of Division and Allotments Large 
 Communities and Free Use of Vacant Lots The Mir of the Present 
 Day and Periodical Re-allotments Division by "Souls" and by 
 Tictglos Epochs of Division ; Disadvantages of Frequent Re- 
 allotments A Portion of the Defects Charged to the Mir Due 
 to the Large Agglomerated Villages Consequences of Excessive 
 Parcelling 505 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Mir in Theory and Practice The Material Equality of the Lots 
 does not Always Imply Equitable Distribution Division Accord- 
 ing to the Working Capacity or Resources of the Laborers Story 
 of One Commune " Soulless " Families ; Strong, "Half-Power," 
 Weak Families The Mir as a Providence Arbitrariness and In- 
 justice Usury The Vampires or " J/ir-Eaters " Rural Oligar- 
 chy Landless Peasants and Rural Proletariate .... 521
 
 XX CONTENTS, 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 MOT 
 
 Partisans and Opponents of the Communal System Frequent Exag- 
 gerations in Both Camps Are the Faults most Justly Imputed to 
 the Mir All Inherent to Collective Tenure ? How Many are Due 
 to Communal Solidarity and to the Fiscal System Situation Cre- 
 ated for the Communes by Emancipation and Redemption The 
 Extent of Peasant Lots The Mir does not yet Really Own the 
 Land The Village Communities will be in a Normal Condition only 
 after they have done Paying the Redemption Annuities . . 534 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The Manner of Dissolving a Community The Peasants of Any Village 
 are Always Free to Suppress the Mir Why they don't Do it 
 more Frequently What they Think of the Mir How the Mir 
 has No Objection whatever to Individual Property, even though 
 it Usually Upholds the Communal System Purchases of Land by 
 Peasants Distribution of the Arable Lands between the Com- 
 munes and Other Proprietors Utility and Functions of Personal 
 Property Can Both Modes of Tenure Co-Exist Some Day ? . 548 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The Communal System and the Struggle between " Great" and 
 " Small " Landed Property The Mir, the Peasant's Entail 
 Transformations which the Agrarian Commune Might Undergo 
 Can this System be Adapted to Modern Manners ? What is Legis- 
 lature to Do with Regard to Collective Tenure ? Can we See in 
 the Mir a Palladium of Society ? Illusions on this Subject The 
 Communal System and the Population Problem Collective Ten- 
 ure and Emigration Village Communities and Agrarian Socialism 563 
 
 INDEX 581
 
 PART 1. 
 
 THE COUNTRY AND ITS INHABITANTS 
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. RACES AND NATIONALITY 
 
 THE NATIONAL CHARACTER AND NIHILISM 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION 
 
 THE SOCIAL CLASSES 
 
 THE PEASANTRY AND THE EMANCIPATION 
 THE MIR
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS 
 
 AND 
 
 THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Difficulty of Knowing Russia Description of the Land In What does it 
 Differ from Western Europe? In What is it European? 
 
 IGNORANCE of all that is foreign has always been one of France's 
 chief blemishes, one of the chief causes of her disasters. This 
 vice of our national education we are at present seeking to remedy : 
 we are making up our minds to let our children learn the lan- 
 guages of our neighbors ; but, if it is effectually to benefit us in 
 our politics, our knowledge of foreign things must not be limited 
 to those nations only who actually touch our boundaries. Like 
 ancient Greece, modern Burope forms one family, the members of 
 which, even in the midst of their quarrels, keep mutually depen- 
 dent on one another. The interests of external politics are com- 
 mon to all ; not much less so are those of internal politics. 
 
 There is, amidst the European states, one which, notwithstand- 
 ing its remoteness, has more than once weighed heavily on West- 
 ern Europe. It is backed up against the East, and, between it 
 and France, there is only Germany. It is the largest of European
 
 2 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 states, the one which has the greatest number of inhabitants, and 
 it is the least known ; in many ways the Mussulman East and the 
 two Americas are known better. Distance no longer can separate 
 Russia from the West ; it is Russia's manners, institutions, lan- 
 guage, which keep up the high barriers that rise between her 
 and the rest of Europe ; political and religious prejudice raise up 
 others. Liberals or Democrats, Catholics or Protestants, all alike 
 find it difficult to keep their Western ideas from imparting a false 
 coloring to the pictures they draw of the Empire of the Tsars. The 
 pity aroused by the victims of her official politics has for a long 
 time warped our judgment of Russia.' She was seen only through 
 Poland and was mostly known only from the pictures drawn by 
 her adversaries. 
 
 Russians are fond of saying that only Russians are competent to 
 write about Russia. We should be perfectly willing to leave to 
 them the task of depicting themselves, could they bring to it the 
 same earnestness, the same sincerity, the same interest that we 
 bring to the study of them. 1 Moreover, if foreigners are preju- 
 diced, so naturally is each nation on its own account. To 
 national prejudice are added party views, school theories. No- 
 where have I heard a greater diversity of judgments on Russia 
 than in that country itself. 
 
 How can we expect to understand a nation that is still endeav- 
 oring to read its own riddle, that moves on with jerky, unsteady 
 gait, with no well-defined goal as yet, that to quote one of its own 
 sayings has left one bank, but has not as yet reached the opposite 
 one ! In these successive transformations we must discriminate 
 between what is superficial, external, official, and what is deep- 
 lying, permanent, national. No people known to history, possibly 
 no country in the world, has undergone so many changes in the 
 
 1 Earnestness and especially sincerity have hardly been until now the 
 distinctive qualities of foreigners' study of us, if the name " study " may be 
 applied to what has always been more like a blind, hostile arraignment. It 
 is only, so to speak, since yesterday that things have begun to mend in this 
 respect.
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 3 
 
 course of one or two centuries ; not one, with the exception of 
 Italy and Japan, has seen similar ones in the course of a score of 
 years. The reforms of all sorts have been so numerous that the 
 most attentive observer finds it difficult to keep track of them. The 
 application of them is still so recent, at times so incomplete and so 
 much disputed, that it is not easy to appreciate all their effects. 
 Old-time Russia, the Russia of which we had some kind of a 
 knowledge, has perished with the abolition of serfdom. New Russia 
 is a child whose features are not yet fixed, or, better still, a youth 
 at the critical age at which face, voice, and character are in the 
 act of being moulded for life. 
 
 Does this imply that in studying contemporary Russia we 
 should forget the past ? By no means : the past everywhere 
 shows through the present. All the institutions, all the charac- 
 teristics peculiar to Russia, all that makes her different from 
 Western Europe, has deep roots which must be exposed to the 
 light, or the troubles under which she labors will remain incom- 
 prehensible. Whatever violence the hand of a despot gifted with 
 genius may seemingly have done to her destiny, her people were 
 not exempted from the laws which regulate the growth of every 
 society. Her civilization is bound up in the land, in the people's 
 life-blood, in its. historical training of centuries. As is the case 
 with all states, and in spite of seeming breaks, the present of Rus- 
 sia is the outcome of her past, and the one is not to be understood 
 without the other. If we wish to gain a profitable knowledge of 
 this people, at once so similar to and different from their European 
 brethren, the first thing needful is to realize the grand physical 
 and moral influences which ruled its growth and helped fashion it, 
 which, even in spite of itself, will for a long time yet hold it under 
 their sway. The real bearing, the probable results in the near 
 future of all the changes which are going on in Russia escape our 
 grasp if we remain in ignorance of the conditions under which 
 labor the development and capabilities for civilization of the 
 country and the people.
 
 4 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 This is a great, an immense question, and, as though not yet 
 sufficiently swathed in darkness, it is further obscured by invet- 
 erate prejudices. It is, in fact, the first and last problem, and if that 
 is unsolved, any study of Russia must remain both baseless and 
 barren of results. In order to appreciate her genius and resources, 
 'her present and, still more, her future, it is imperative to know the 
 soil which nourishes her people, the races that compose it, the 
 history she has lived, the religion to which she owes her moral 
 training. I^et us begin with nature, soil, and climate ; let us see 
 what kind of moral and material development they allow of, what 
 is the population, and what the power the promise of which they 
 hold out to her. 
 
 The first thing that strikes one at the first glance at a map of 
 the Russian Empire, is its extent.* It covers over twelve million 
 square miles ; of these, something over three fall to the share of 
 Europe, i. e. , about eleven times the size of France in her mutila- 
 ted condition, fifteen or sixteen times the size of united Italy, or 
 the three United Kingdoms, f These colossal dimensions are so 
 much out of proportion with the smallness of the so-called " great 
 European States," that, in order to bring it fairly within the grasp 
 of our imagination, one of this century's greatest scientists sought 
 the help of astronomy. According to Alexander von Humboldt, 
 the portion of our globe which owns the sway of Russia, is larger 
 than the face of the moon at its full.t In that empire, the vastness 
 
 * I would remind the reader that all this description of Russia and the 
 people who inhabit her was written before the volume of the Geographic 
 Universelle of Mr. Elise"e Reclus, devoted to Scandinavian and Russian 
 Europe, saw the light. (See Revue des Deux Mondes, isth August, isth 
 September, 1873.) 
 
 f It is no longer correct to say that the Russian Empire is the most ex- 
 tensive in the world. The British Empire, continually enlarged as it is by 
 annexations in Asia, Australia, and especially Africa, surpasses it in acreage ; 
 as to its population, it nearly trebles that of the Northern Empire, but to 
 the latter remains the twofold advantage of compactness of territories and 
 greater homogeneousness in the population. 
 
 J Central Asia, vol. iii., p. 34.
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 5 
 
 of which can be realized only with the help of the stars, the land 
 has no visible boundaries. Its plains, the hugest on our planet, 
 stretch on into the heart of the old continent until they reach the 
 mountain masses of Central Asia ; between the Black and Caspian 
 Seas they are barred by the gigantic bulwark of the Caucasus, the 
 foot of which lies partly below the level of the sea, while its sum- 
 mits rise near on 3,000 feet above the height of those of Mont 
 Blanc. To the northwest Russia owns the lakes Ladoga and 
 Oni6ga, the largest of Europe ; to the northeast, in Siberia, that 
 of Baikal, the largest of Asia ; to the south, the Caspian and Aral 
 Seas, the largest lakes in the world. Her rivers are in proportion 
 with her plains ; in Asia she has the Obi, the Yenissey, the Lena, 
 the Amoor ; in Europe, the Dniepr, the Don, the Volga, that 
 central artery of the country, a river that, with its sinuous course, 
 measuring nearly 2,400 miles, does not altogether belong to 
 Europe. Nine tenths of the Russian territory are as yet almost 
 untenanted, and Russia already numbers over ninety million souls, 
 twice as many as the most populous of European states. 
 
 If we look only at European Russia, from the Glacial Ocean 
 down to the Caucasus, we ask ourselves : Does this country really 
 belong to Europe ? Are only the proportions laid out on a larger 
 scale and is nothing changed but these? or is not rather this 
 prodigious expanding of land sufficient to separate Russia from 
 Western Europe ? Are not the conditions of civilization modified 
 by the ungainly enlargement of the stage which is to be filled by 
 man ? The contrast of size alone would make out between Old 
 Europe and Russia a difference of capital importance, but is this 
 difference the only one ? Do not other and no less important con- 
 trasts flow from this primeval contrast ? Russia's climate, her 
 soil, her geographical structure are all these European ? 
 
 Instead of being, like Africa, attached to the common trunk of 
 the Old World by a narrow joint, Europe is shaped like a triangu- 
 lar peninsula, the whole broad base of which leans against Asia 
 anr 1 is one body with her. There is only a slight ridge between
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 them, a mountain chain remarkable neither for width nor 
 height, and below this chain which is really no partition at all, 
 there is nothing but a gap wide open and unprotected. Thus 
 soldered on to Asia, Russia is similarly shaped. 
 
 Two main features distinguish Europe amidst all the regions 
 of the globe : in the first place, her piecemeal structure "all cut 
 up into small pieces ' ' by the sea, to use the words of Montesquieu ; 
 " peninsular articulate '," to use those of Humboldt; in the second 
 place, a climate temperate as no other under the same latitude 
 a climate which is in a great measure the consequence of this 
 very structure. Russia, on the other hand, adhering to Asia by 
 her longest side, bordered to the north and northwest by ice- 
 bound seas which yield to the shoreland but few of the advantages 
 usually enjoyed by littorals, Russia is one of the most compact, 
 most eminently continental countries on the face of the globe. 
 
 Differing thus from Europe in structure, Russia also lacks 
 Europe's climate temperate, softened by the encompassing waters. 
 Russia's climate is continental, /'. <?., almost equally extreme in 
 winter-cold and summer-heat. Hence the averages drawn from the 
 varying temperatures are deceitful. The isothermal lines rise up 
 towards the pole in summer ; sink low down southward in win- 
 ter, so that the greater part of Russia is comprised, in January, 
 within the frigid zone, and within the torrid zone in July. The 
 very breadth of her lands condemns her to extremes. The seas 
 that bathe some of her boundaries are either too distant or insuffi- 
 cient in extent to be to her what they are to other countries 
 by turns reservoirs of warmth and breeders of coolness. No- 
 where in the west of Europe, do we see winters so long and 
 severe, or summers so hot. Russia remains excluded from the 
 influences which temper the cold to the rest of Europe, from the 
 Ocean currents as well as from the winds of the Sahara. The 
 long Scandinavian peninsula, which stretches out between her 
 and the Atlantic, turns away from her shores the great stream 
 of warm water, the gift of the New World to the Old. Instead of
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 7 
 
 these mild influences, it is the polar ices, Siberia, the Arctic region 
 of Asia, that hold Russia under their sway. Against that proxim- 
 ity, the Ural chain is but an apparent defence, neutralized by its 
 inconsiderable elevation and by its position, nearly perpendicular 
 to the equator. Vainly Russia stretches down to the latitude 
 of Pau and Nizza, she must go down all the way below the 
 Caucasus to find a bulwark against the north wind. The bulk of 
 the land being perfectly flat, is open to all the atmospheric currents, 
 to the arid breath from the deserts of Central Asia no less than 
 to the winds from the polar circle. 
 
 This absence of mountains and consequently of valleys is 
 another of the broad distinctive features of Russian nature, as 
 opposed to European nature. This horizontality of the soil, we 
 may say, is not merely a superficial characteristic, it is an essential 
 feature of the geology as well as the geography of the country. 
 The flattening of the outer crust is only a result of the parallelism 
 of the underground stratification. Instead of frequently rising 
 to the surface, as in the West, and offering a rich variety of land- 
 scape, soil, and culture, the divers geological tiers remain hori- 
 zontally stratified, presenting immense tracts of identical soil, re- 
 quiring identical agricultural treatment. On the greater part of 
 this vast expanse, one would think that the crust of the earth has 
 been spared the commotions which have everywhere left so many 
 traces in the other half of Europe. The most ancient formations 
 are there found without a break, apparently unaltered by either 
 fire or water. Slowly emerged out of the sea, the land pre- 
 serves its marine aspect in its immense, slightly undulating plains, 
 which easily carry fancy back to the relatively recent period when 
 across this depression the Baltic blended its waters with those 
 of the Black Sea and possibly the Caspian with those of the Arctic 
 Ocean, separating Europe from Asia. The mind's eye has no 
 difficulty in figuring to itself the Glacial period, when the floating 
 icebergs carried into the heart of Russia, even to Vor6nej on the 
 Don, the erratic blocks of Finnic granite with which the centre
 
 8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 of the empire is to this day thickly studded, down to, if not be- 
 yond, the line of the Black Mould zone. 
 
 Another great blessing of European nature is almost lacking 
 in Russia the proper degree of moisture, which the Atlantic 
 brings and the Alps store up for the West. Russia, debarred from 
 her share in this blessing by the remoteness of seas and want of 
 mountains, is thereby deprived of a principal source of wealth. 
 The winds from the ocean reach her almost totally robbed of their 
 water- vapors ; those from Asia have lost all theirs long before 
 they touch Russian soil. From west to east moisture goes 
 steadily decreasing until it is reduced to the barest minimum in 
 Central Asia. The wider the continent expands the poorer it 
 becomes in rain. At Kazan already it rains only half as much 
 as in Paris. Hence, over a vast region in the south, the two 
 principal factors of fertility, warmth and moisture, are dis- 
 joined ; hence, in part at least, those woodless, arid steppes, so 
 un-European to the eye, that cover the entire southeast of 
 the empire. 
 
 If in all that concerns the physical conditions structure, cli- 
 mate, moisture Russia stands in complete opposition towards 
 Western Europe, she is in all of them narrowly related to the 
 Asiatic countries she touches on. If we go by natural land- 
 marks, Europe proper begins at the narrowing of the continent be- 
 tween the Baltic and Black Seas ; and Russia fits better the thickset 
 bulk of Asia, of which she is a prolongation and from which the 
 geographers' fictitious boundaries cannot separate her. 
 
 In the southeast there are no natural boundaries at all, and 
 that is why geographers have by turns proposed the Don, the 
 Volga, the Ural or Yaik, or even the depression of the Obi, as 
 frontier landmarks. The desert steppes that make up the centre 
 of the old continent stretch into Russia by the wide gap opening 
 between the Ural chain's southern links and the Caspian. From 
 the lower course of the Don to the lake of Aral, all these low 
 steppes that lie on both sides of the Volga and the Ural River,
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 9 
 
 form a peculiar region, the dried up bed of an ancient sea, of which 
 the shores are quite distinguishable, and of which the vast salt 
 lakes known as the Caspian and Aral Seas are the remnants. By 
 a hydrographic freak which has exercised a considerable influence 
 on the destinies of the Russian people, it is into one of those 
 locked-up seas, decidely Asiatic as they are, that the great artery 
 of Russia, the Volga, debouches, after turning her back on Europe 
 nearly from her very source. 
 
 North of the Caspian steppes, from the 52d degree of latitude to 
 the uninhabitable polar regions, a long chain of mountains, the 
 longest meridian chain of the ancient continent, seems from a 
 distance to place a wall between Russia and Asia. The Russians 
 of old used to call it " the stone belt," indeed the word " Ural " 
 means ' ' belt ' ' ; yet and in spite of its name, the Ural marks the end 
 of Asia on one side, only to mark its fresh start nearly unaltered 
 on the European slope. Slowly descending in terraces into 
 Europe, the Ural is not so much a chain as " a table-land crowned 
 with a line of moderately high summits." Most of the time it 
 presents only low-rounded ridges covered with forests, like those 
 of the Vosges and the Jura. The central portion is depressed to 
 such a degree that in the principal passes from Siberia into Russia, 
 for instance from Perm to Yekaterinburg!!, the eye vainly seeks 
 for summits, and that in order to conduct a railroad through the 
 pass, the engineers had neither tunnels nor any other great works 
 to execute. In this high latitude, where the plains remain seven 
 or eight months under snow, none of the summits of this long 
 chain reaches the line of everlasting snows, none of its valleys 
 encloses a glacier. The Ural really does not separate either the 
 climates or the floras or faunas of its two sides. Owing to its 
 direction which runs nearly perpendicularly due south, it allows 
 the winds from the pole to blow almost equally unhindered along 
 both its opposite slopes. Russia is the same on both, or rather 
 Siberia is only an exaggerated edition of Russia, or Russia a toned 
 down edition of Siberia. The Russian plains start afresh east of
 
 10 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the Ural, as vast, as monotonous in the basin of the Obi as in that 
 of the Volga ; offering the same uniform platitude, the same 
 horizontality of the soil and geological sediments. On both 
 sides the vegetation is identical. One solitary tree, the arole of 
 the Alps, Pinus cembra scarcely marks the difference between 
 the forests on the respective sides. Not until one reaches the heart 
 of Siberia, the Yenisse'y in its higher course, and I^ake Baikal, 
 does one encounter, springing from a different soil, a new flora, a 
 new fauna. The upheaval which raised the Ural was not suffi- 
 cient to disjoin the two regions separated by the ridge in all 
 that concerns appearance and real unity. Instead of being a 
 boundary or bulwark, it is to the two Russias only the reposi- 
 tory of precious mineral wealth. The rocks of eruptive or 
 metamorphic origin bear ores which were lacking in the regu- 
 larly stratified subsoil of the wide plains. The Ural chain no 
 more separates the two than does the river to which it gives 
 its own name, and one day when Eastern Siberia will be more 
 densely peopled, the Ural will be looked upon as the central 
 axis, the spinal column equally belonging to both great halves 
 of the empire. 
 
 Considered thus as a whole, consisting of two similar halves, 
 Russia proves herself decidedly different from Europe. Shall we 
 therefore pronounce her part and parcel of Asia ? Shall we, in the 
 name of nature, cast her back on the Old World, in one lot with the 
 sleeping or stationary peoples of the Far East ? Far from it. Russia 
 is no more Asiatic than she is European. By her soil and her 
 climate, by the bulk of her natural conditions, she differs no less 
 from historical Asia than from Europe proper ; it is not by mere 
 accident that the Asiatic civilizations have all been wrecked on 
 her. Astride on the Ural, Russia, by herself, forms an isolated 
 region, with physical characteristics peculiar to herself, a region 
 enclosing all the northern plains of the old continent, descending 
 too low down to be called boreal, but which the name of ' ' Russian 
 Region " would suit well, and which, from the deserts of Central
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. II 
 
 Asia to the "tundras" * of the polar circle, from the estuary of 
 the Danube to the sources of the Yeniss^y and the Lena, comprises 
 nearly the whole of the colossal depression which covers the north 
 of the ancient world, Humboldt's " Lower Europe " and "Lower 
 Asia." "Russia is a sixth part of the world," the Emperor 
 Alexander III. is reported to have once said and geography has 
 nothing to object to the haughty utterance. 3 Russia's natural 
 affinities point to North America rather than to old Asia or West- 
 ern Europe to that America towards which she reaches out by 
 her eastward stretching dependence, Siberia. With her climate 
 always in extremes and her viewless expanses of territory, she 
 was too rough a land, constructed on too wide a scale, ever to 
 have been the cradle of civilization, but was one of the countries 
 most admirably fitted for its reception. Like North America, like 
 Australia, Russia, short of her extreme parts, offers to Europe an 
 assimilable soil, a field where human activity can unfold itself on 
 the very widest scale. 
 
 With her unkind climes, her meagre forests and woodless 
 steppes, with her lack of stone and building materials, Russia may 
 seem but a poor shelter for the gorgeous plant of European culture. 
 But what man needs is less the spontaneous yield of a given soil, 
 than the facility to master it, bend it to his requirements, to domes- 
 ticate it, if we may so word it. Many countries externally better 
 
 8 The Russian tundra forms a belt of varying, but always considerable, 
 width, skirting the polar sea across the north of European Russia and Sibe- 
 ria, that may be described as the arctic Prairies. Only in lieu of tall, 
 waving grasses clinging lichens on low rocky knolls, and wet mosses that 
 softly yield under the reindeer's dainty hoof, cover the level ground. 
 Here and there a clump of the dwarf shrub-birch, the kind that does not rise, 
 but spreads, crawling on the ground with thin, sapless, serpentine limbs, 
 twisted and gnarled. And this is summer. Nine months out of the twelve 
 this comparative variety disappears under a brittle crust of frozen snow, which 
 the reindeer finds it easy to break with short, dry raps of his nervous and 
 vigorous little foot, to get at the fodder kept fresh and juicy beneath. Lapp 
 and Esquimau villages are sparsely scattered over the face of the Siberian 
 tundra, with their relays of dogs for travelling. 
 3 See Appendix to Chapter I.
 
 12 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 endowed, offer to civilization a less secure field. There is, in the 
 New World, a state to which the forests and savannahs of South- 
 ern America open a career nearly as vast, as boundless as Russia. 
 The sun of the tropics, rivers the largest on our globe, the 
 moisture brought to it by the trade winds, give to its vegetation 
 and animal life, in all their forms, a matchless vigor. Its 
 flora and fauna rejoice in the most marvellous variety and 
 vitality ; but this very bounteousness of nature is hostile to man, 
 who knows not how to conquer it. Grasses and forests, wild 
 beasts and insects alike strive with him for the possession of 
 Brazil. Nature there is too rich, too independent and powerful, to 
 easily accept the post of handmaiden, and even when, as in India, 
 man will have materially mastered the soil, he will still be in dan- 
 ger of morally bending under the yoke, enervated by the climate, 
 enslaved by deteriorating influences. 
 
 Not such is Russia. If the forests cover very nearly the same 
 area, there are none of those creepers, of those beautiful parasites 
 of all shapes and colors, which turn tropical forests into inextri- 
 cable tangles. Like the flora, the fauna, too, is poor for so vast a 
 land ; but then there are few insects, no snakes, no wild beasts, if 
 we except a few wolves in the woods, a few bears in the wastes of 
 the North. Barring the great deserts, there is, perhaps, not 
 another such wide expanse on the face of the earth where the 
 manifestations of life present so little variety and so little power. 
 Inanimate nature alone, only the earth is great in size ; animate 
 nature is puny, not abounding in species, not robust in its births, 
 quite incapable to cope with man. From this point of view, of 
 such capital importance as it is, Russia is as European as any part 
 of Europe. The land is docile, easily made subservient. Unlike 
 the most magnificent countries of both hemispheres, it seems made 
 for free labor. The Russian soil does not require the toil of the 
 slave ; it needs neither the African negro nor the Chinese coolee. 
 It does not wear out him who tends it, does not threaten his race 
 with degeneration, it gives no half-breeds. Man there encounters
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 13 
 
 only two obstacles cold and space. Cold, which is less difficult 
 to conquer than extreme heat. Space, in the present the already 
 half-tamed foe of Russia, and, in the future, her greatest ally. 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK I., CHAPTER I. (See p. n, note 3.) 
 
 The same conclusion practically amounting to this : that Russia is and 
 ought to be herself and not somebody else is arrived at by Mr. N. Danilef- 
 sky in his remarkable book, Russia and Europe, an exhaustive investiga- 
 tion of the questions implied by the title in all their phases and bearings. 
 He contends, however, that the question, " Is Russia Europe ?" does not 
 admit of a categorical answer, inasmuch as the question, " What is Europe ?" 
 would first have to be answered, which it is not by saying it is "a part of 
 the world," since the division of the world especially the Old is purely 
 arbitrary, disjoining regions which have the greatest natural affinity, 
 such as the south of Europe and Asia Minor, Lybia and Arabia, and 
 bracketing others which having nothing in common, such as Central Asia 
 and India (with the Himalaya, too, between), Italy and Norway, Sahara and 
 the Cape. But Africa at least is a separate continent, almost an island ; so 
 are America, Australia. But Asia and Europe are essentially one, or rather 
 "Europe is only the peninsular western portion of Asia, at first differing from 
 her less strikingly than her other peninsulas, then more and more, as it 
 becomes more dismembered and attenuated." Geographically, then, the 
 question, "Is Russia Europe? " answers itself: it is and it is not ; it is in 
 part. How much? that depends, and greatly, on personal views. But 
 Europe is a reality after all ; it represents something definite : " Of course 
 it does ! Something very real and weighty. For Europe is not a geographi- 
 cal, but an historical and cultural term. Europe is the stage of the Teutono- 
 Roman civilization, neither more nor less, indeed ' Europe ' is that civili- 
 zation itself." Not by any means a " universal culture," for no such is pos- 
 sible ; nor yet the old Greco-Roman culture, which had its roots and affinities 
 in Asia, and its own very definite area : the shores and isles of the Mediter- 
 ranean basin, Asiatic, European, and African alike, thus bringing geography 
 and cultural history into beautiful agreement. No. Teutono-Roman 
 culture built up on the ruins of the Greco-Roman, and on another stage ; 
 just that and nothing more. But that is a great deal. Now again in this
 
 14 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSAKS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 sense, " Is Russia Europe ? " " To the questioner's sorrow or pleasure, for 
 Russia's woe or weal, NO," answers our author. "She was not nourished 
 on one of those roots by which Europe absorbed the wholesome as well as 
 the baleful saps of the ancient world first destroyed by her, nor on those 
 roots which brought up nutriment from the depths of the Teutonic spirit." 
 I shall have to refer more than once to Mr. Danilefsky's book, and it is a 
 pity it should have been unknown to Mr. Leroy-Beaulieu, for had he known 
 of it he could not have ignored it, and it might have modified some of the 
 views of so conscientious an inquirer.
 
 BOOK I. CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Two Great Zones The Zone of Forests and the Woodless Zone Sub- 
 divisions of the Latter The Black Mould Zone The Steppe 
 Region Accidental Steppes Primeval Steppes. 
 
 RUSSIA'S chief characteristic is unity in immensity. At the first 
 glance, while comparing the ice-bound tundras of the North to the 
 scorched wastes that skirt the Caspian, the lakes that sleep within 
 their granite banks in Finland, to the warm terraced slopes of the 
 Crimean shore, one is struck with the grandeur of these contrasts. 
 The impression conveyed is that between these boundaries 
 between Lapland, the reindeer's domain, and the Caspian steppes, 
 where the camel is at home lies a space so vast as to need many 
 widely differing regions to fill it up. Nothing of the kind. Rus- 
 sia at all her extremities, even where she touches on Europe, 
 yields specimens of all the climates. Yet the territories that bear 
 the most marked aspects Finland, Caucasus, Crimea are merely 
 annexations, natural appendages, though greatly differing from 
 Russia proper. In the interval, between the projecting spurs of 
 the Karpathian Mountains and the Ural chain, there spreads a 
 region unmatched, on any like area, for similarity of climate and 
 sameness of nature's aspects. From the huge Caucasian bulwark to 
 the Baltic, this empire, surpassing in size the rest of Europe put 
 together, really offers less variety than western countries, owning 
 an area ten or twelve times smaller. This comes from the uni- 
 formity of the plain-structure. The west of the empire is more 
 temperate, more European ; the east more barren, more Asiatic ; 
 the north is colder, the south warmer. Yet, the south, being un- 
 
 15
 
 1(5 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 protected against the polar winds, cannot differ from the north, 
 either in landscape or vegetation, as markedly, abruptly as France 
 from Italy or Spain. 
 
 At the same time, under the fundamental unity through the 
 homogeneousness of structure and climate, Nature has stamped sev- 
 eral regions with singular clearness and precision. These regions, 
 offering each a number of well defined special characteristics, split 
 into two great groups or zones which, between them, cover the 
 whole of European Russia. Both equally flat, with a nearly 
 equally extreme climate, these two zones, mutually analogous as 
 they are, present the most singular contrast. As concerns the 
 soil, vegetation, moisture, indeed most physical and economical 
 conditions, their differences amount almost to complete opposition. 
 Setting apart the uninhabitable northern extremity, the two re- 
 gions divide the empire into nearly equal halves, cutting through 
 it diagonally, from west to east, and both cross the Ural, project- 
 ing their prolongation into Asia. One is the region of forests and 
 peat-swamps, the other is the woodless zone of the steppes. 
 
 From the opposition of these two zones, from the natural anti- 
 thesis of steppe and forest, has proceeded the historical antagonism, 
 the strife of many centuries, which has divided the two halves of 
 Russia, the warfare between the sedentary North and nomadic 
 South, between Russian and Tatar, and, later on, between the 
 Moscovite state, founded in the heart of the forest-region, and the 
 sons of the steppes, the free Cosacks. ' 
 
 The forest zone, although steadily reduced by excessive cutting, 
 still remains the vaster of the two. Taking in all the north and 
 centre, it goes tapering from west to east, from Kief to Kazan. 
 
 At the northern extremity beyond the polar circle, as on the 
 summits of high mountains, no tree can withstand the intensity 
 
 1 In the case of this name as of most others, mispronunciation in the 
 mouth of foreigners led to mis-spelling. The " free sons of the steppes " are 
 named Kaz&k, a form much easier to eye and tongue than the faulty, gen- 
 erally accepted Cossack. But any correction of the kind is apt to bewilder 
 foreigners, and is therefore, as a rule, to be avoided.
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. I/ 
 
 and permanency of the frost. On both sides of the Ural there is 
 nothing but the tundras, vast and dreary wastes, where the earth, 
 permanently hardened by frost, is clothed with moss. In these 
 latitudes no culture is possible ; there is no pasture but lichens, no 
 cattle but the reindeer, who knows no home but these arctic re- 
 gions. Hunting and fishing are the only pursuits of the inhabi- 
 tants, few and far between, of these ice-bound tracts. 
 
 The forests begin about the 65th or 66th degree of northern lat- 
 itude, the atmosphere being slightly warmed by the neighborhood 
 of the Atlantic and the deep gash cut into the shore by the White 
 Sea. From here the forests, interspersed with boggy clearings, 
 descend beyond Moscow, as low down as Kief. From north to 
 south, the kinds of trees succeed one another much in the same 
 order as in the Alps from summit to base. The fir and larch 
 come first, then the forest pine and the birch. The birch, the 
 pine and the fir, the three trees most common in Russia, mingle 
 with the willow and the aspen. Further southward grow the 
 linden, the maple, the elm, and towards the centre the oak at last 
 makes its appearance. There are in these regions, especially in 
 the northeast, immense forests virtually primeval from lack of 
 thoroughfares, but they are sparse, rambling, broken up by large 
 fallow tracts, where nothing grows but meagre brushwood. 
 
 The soil that bears the greatest portion of these forests, at least 
 in the northwest, from the White Sea to the Nie'men and the 
 Dniepr,* is a low plain, spongy and abounding in peat, intersected 
 with arid banks of sand. The highest tableland, the Valday Moun- 
 tains," scarcely reaches 1,000 feet. This region abounds in water 
 
 * Consonants preceding the n in the beginning of a word or syllable in 
 Russian -words and names should be clearly sounded. Thus "Dniepr" 
 must not be read " Niepr," or " Dniestr " " Niestr" but " D-niep-er " and 
 " D-niest-er." 
 
 * The short or truncated y with which so many Russian words and names 
 end, and which will be rendered by j/, always follows a vowel and offers no 
 difficulty in the pronunciation, being exactly similar to the same sound in 
 the English, "toy," "boy " (ex.: Tolstdy). The difference is that in Russian 
 it is combined not with o alone, but with all other vowels. And here it
 
 1 8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 and springs ; here lies the starting-point of all the great rivers, 
 the chief tributaries of Russia's four seas. The little relief of the 
 soil frequently robs the various streams of a clearly defined water- 
 shed. No ridge separates the basins, and at thaw-time the 
 future tributaries of the various seas sometimes get mixed and 
 produce huge swamps. On a very slightly inclined soil the rivers' 
 course is sluggish and hesitating ; the waters, ignoring the un- 
 certain slope, lose themselves in endless marshes, or flow together 
 into numberless lakes, some of which form immense expanses, like 
 the lyadoga, a real little inland sea, while the vast majority resolve 
 themselves into miserable ponds, like the eleven hundred lakes of 
 the government of Arkhangelsk. 
 
 All over this zone winter, whose sway lasts through half the 
 year, leaves little room for vegetation and culture. The earth fre- 
 quently lies over two hundred days under snow ; the rivers do not 
 cast off their icy fetters until May or the end of April. But for 
 the impetuous northern spring, which carries all before it, and at 
 whose touch vegetation springs into life as by a sudden explosion, 
 tilling the ground would be simply useless. Barley and rye 
 are the only cereals that will thrive in that stingy soil. Wheat is 
 seldom raised and does not pay ; flax and buckwheat are the only 
 plants that really prosper under that severe sky. The soil, 
 indeed, in all this region does not provide sufficient food for the 
 population, which, dispersed though it be over vast tracts, and 
 never averaging over fifteen to the square mile, and frequently 
 falling below even this figure, can never force from the soil a 
 sufficiency of bread. Small crafts have to eke out the livelihood 
 refused by agriculture. Sparse as it is, the population of these 
 poverty-stricken countries increases but imperceptibly ; it has, so 
 to speak, reached the point of saturation. From this whole 
 northern half of her European territory, Russia can hope for some 
 
 should be remembered that the Russian vowels have the same value as in 
 all European languages except English : a like a in far, star ; e like e in 
 grey, or the letter "a "/ / like ee in eel, or * in bit, whip ; u like oo in boor, 
 moor (not door andJZoor).
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 19 
 
 increase of population and national wealth only by favoring indus- 
 trial pursuits, which flourish especially in the region of Moscow 
 and that of the Ural. 4 
 
 Very different as regards promise for the future is the woodless 
 zone the most peculiar, un-European of all. Originally less ex- 
 tensive than the forest zone, it is constantly gaining ground in 
 consequence of reckless tree-felling, a proceeding which by de- 
 priving the earth of moisture and shelter makes the climate even 
 worse than it naturally is. Stretching over the whole south, it 
 broadens from west to east, crosses the Ural and extends far into 
 the desert waste of Asia. This zone is flatter still than the forest- 
 bearing one ; on an area several times the size of France it cannot 
 show one hill 350 feet in height. In the west the Karpathians 
 throw out a spur of granite rock which turns off the course of 
 rivers, some of which, like the Dniepr, it encumbers with falls, with- 
 out the aspect of the country around being in the least altered. 
 Now it stretches into undulating plains, now again relapses into 
 the horizontal monotony of the sea in repose. At times it slowly 
 grades down towards the Black Sea and the Caspian ; at others 
 it lapses abruptly in tiers or terraces of uneven height, but all 
 equally flat. There is no boundary to these viewless expanses, save 
 the horizon line, into which they hazily merge. Not the slightest 
 swelling, save in certain parts innumerable small artificial knolls, 
 known under the name of " kurgans" (mounds), or " moghili" 
 (tombs), rounded in shape, from twenty to forty or fifty feet in 
 height, at times apparently disposed in regular lines, as though 
 to mark a road through these wastes they are tombs of extinct 
 peoples, or landmarks along obliterated highways, from the tops 
 of which the herdsman of the steppes can survey his flock at a 
 distance.* 
 
 4 See Appendix to Chapter II., No. I. 
 
 * Such kurgbns or moghili are met with in the north, in Siberia as 
 well as in Russia. Numerous diggings made within the last few years 
 leave no doubt whatever concerning their destination.
 
 20 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 No mountains, no valleys. The rivers skirting the outline of 
 the above mentioned terraces mostly flow along at the foot of a 
 sort of downs, which, however, in obedience to a general law, 
 accompany the course of the rivers, the Don, the Dniepr, the 
 Volga and are, as a rule, nothing more than the supports of a 
 higher tier, and just as even, just as flat on the top as the low plains 
 on the opposite bank, which the overflow of the river in spring 
 converts into a marsh. The small rivers and rivulets born of the 
 thaw dig their beds in the ground, but do not form valleys any 
 more than the great rivers do. They usually roll along in deep 
 ditches, fissures, or ravines, with abrupt banks, under which 
 villages seek shelter from the winds that sweep the plains. 
 
 The absence of trees is the distinctive feature of this entire zone. 
 In the northern portion of it, that is undoubtedly brought about 
 by man's own hand, often quite recently, or even in our own time. 
 Farther southwards, on the contrary, in the steppes properly so 
 called, nature alone seems responsible. Soil and climate, and, 
 above all, lack of water and of shelter, are the causes of these 
 steppes being entirely bare of trees. Such few as do spontane- 
 ously grow there keep to the ravines, which, at the proper season, 
 become beds for the rivulets. The plain is frequently covered 
 with a layer of fertile earth, somewhat too loose, and certainly too 
 exposed to every wind that blows for trees to take root there, 
 while the subsoil, being generally chalky, does not favor the 
 growth of forests. In other parts, again, we find the soil too 
 much impregnated with saline substances, where nothing grows 
 but meagre tufts of grass. It is drought which everywhere im- 
 pedes the growth of woods, while, on the other hand, the want of 
 woods increases the drought ; so we find ourselves moving in 
 a circle from which there is no escape. 
 
 This region, then, through which course the greatest rivers of 
 Europe, suffers from want of water. Heaven grudges it rain, 
 earth grudges it springs. This evil goes on growing from north 
 to south, from west to east. The rainfalls, frequently separated by
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 21 
 
 long intervals and always irregular, at least as to quantity, come 
 only in spring and in autumn. All through summer the denuded 
 earth, parched by such a sun as Asia knows, yields up all her moist- 
 ure to an atmosphere which in no shape returns it, for the clouds 
 keep at an elevation which does not allow of their condensing into 
 water. In certain districts of the farthest south such a thing as 
 a whole year, nay, eighteen months, without a drop of rain, is not 
 unknown. The penury of water in summer is often such that in 
 many villages the peasants, lacking spring or brook, are reduced 
 to drink the liquid mud of the blackish pools wherein they have 
 tried to keep the spring waters. 
 
 This southern zone, too, which would seem entitled to a more 
 temperate climate, is, on the contrary, the very home of abrupt 
 contrasts. It passes, within the year, through arctic cold and all 
 but tropical heat, swayed by turns by the atmospheric influences 
 of Siberia and Central Asia, the icy wastes of the north and the 
 sandy wastes of the southeast. Under the latitude of Paris and 
 Vienna, the countries north of the Black and Caspian Seas have 
 in January the temperature of Stockholm, in July that of Madeira. 
 Two extreme seasons, with next to no transition, scarcely a few 
 weeks of spring and of autumn. In this southern zone the winters 
 are shorter than in the north, but scarcely less severe. The 
 vicinity of Siberia and Central Asia robs the Caspian of the prop- 
 erty usually belonging to vast sheets of water, that of moderating 
 the temperature. Along the shores of this continental sea, almost 
 at the foot of the Caucasus (44 northern latitude, which is that 
 of the south of France), the thermometer descends to 30 below 
 freezing point (Centigrade),* while in summer it rises to 40 above. 
 On the confines of Asia, in the parched Kirghiz steppes, i. e., 
 under the latitude of Central France, the mercury at times con- 
 geals and remains congealed through several days, while in July 
 the thermometer may burst in the sun. It is in the interior of 
 
 *The temperature is given throughout according to the Centigrade 
 measurement.
 
 22 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the continent, in Siberia and Turkestan, that these excessive tem- 
 peratures attain their maximum. Round about the Aral the 
 difference between the greatest cold and the greatest heat amounts 
 to 80 and even to 90, so that the Russian troops in their expedi- 
 tions to Central Asia have had to face by turns the extremes of both 
 winter and summer. Even to the north of the Black and Azof 
 Seas the seasons are markedly exaggerated. There also the dif- 
 ference between the hottest and coldest day of the year sometimes 
 exceeds 70. The Crimean peninsula itself, though bathed by 
 two seas, does not escape these terrible contrasts. 
 
 These extremes of temperature are among the obstacles that 
 civilized life has to battle with in Russia, but they nowhere 
 amount to an insurmountable barrier. It should not be forgotten 
 that of all the privileges enjoyed by Western Europe her temperate 
 climate is the one most rarely found even in the finest of her colo- 
 nies. The other continents frequently, and from analogous causes, 
 labor under the same disadvantages as Russia. The climate of 
 the Northern States of the North American Union greatly resem- 
 bles in this respect the south of Russia ; the most populous States, 
 those of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, pass through 
 very nearly the same extremes of temperature as the steppes of 
 the Black Sea. 
 
 If denuded of trees, Southern Russia is far from lacking vegeta- 
 tion. Over a great portion of this vast territory the richness of 
 the soil makes up for the scantiness of water, and in such places 
 as do not suffer from too hostile atmospherical conditions its fer- 
 tility is really marvellous. As concerns soil, cultivation, and 
 population, the woodless zone naturally falls into three different 
 regions, into three strips or bands, which tend from northeast to 
 southwest. They are : the region of Black Mould, that of fertile 
 steppe land, and that of sandy or saline steppes. 
 
 The Black Mould belt, one of the most fertile as well as most 
 extensive arable plains on the globe, occupies the upper part of 
 the woodless zone, immediately below the zone of forests and
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 2$ 
 
 lakes. Deriving still some moisture and shelter from the latter, 
 the Black Mould region is placed in much less unfavorable climatic 
 conditions than is the steppe region of the farthest south. It owes 
 its name (tchemoziom) to a layer of blackish humus, varying 
 in thickness from, on the average, one foot and a half to five. 
 This mould consists chiefly of loam, and, in lesser proportion, of 
 oily clay mixed with organic matters. It dries up rapidly and 
 becomes pulverized in the process ; but it becomes, with equal 
 rapidity, impregnated with moisture, and, under the action of 
 rain, returns to its original condition of a sort of dough as black 
 as coal. The formation of this layer of wonderful fertility is 
 attributed to the slow decomposition of the steppe grasses, accu- 
 mulated in the course of many ages. 
 
 The tchernozibm stretches in one long band across the whole 
 of European Russia. Starting from the provinces of Podolia 
 and Kief in the southwest, it ascends towards the northeast to 
 Kazan and beyond ; after the break occasioned by the Ural, it 
 reappears in Siberia, in the southern part of the government of 
 Tobolsk. On its upper edge, the tchernozibm still shows some 
 woods. As we advance towards the south, these woods get 
 sparse and stunted in size, until they gradually vanish. In the 
 midst of boundless plains, the last clumps of oaks, aspens, or 
 elms look like small islets lost in space. The trees grow single, 
 even the brushwood disappears. Nothing remains save arable 
 lands, one vast plain to which no end is seen, uniformly stretching 
 away into distance for hundreds of miles. 
 
 Notwithstanding its faulty cultivation, by means of rather 
 primitive implements, this region together with the Mississippi 
 valley, is one of those immense storehouses of grain which bid 
 our modern world defy any famine. The fertility of this soil, 
 which may even yet be called new, till very lately seemed inex- 
 haustible, and the agriculturist has long had reason to believe 
 that it would never need manure or any fertilizer. Just now, 
 however, it is not only conceded that this fertility should be
 
 24 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 entertained artificially, but there already are complaints about 
 exhaustion, and experts foretell that, unless there is a change of 
 method, ignorance will have achieved the feat of ruining the richest 
 soil in all the world.' This part of Russia, as a consequence of its 
 fertility, is the most populous. On an average it already numbers 
 from sixty to sixty-five inhabitants to the square mile, and in 
 certain western portions of it, over seventy-five. And the popu- 
 lation increases as new issues are opened by the railways, and as 
 agriculture progresses in its conquest of the neighboring steppes. 
 
 Between the tchernozibm and the southern seas lie the steppes 
 properly so called, as distinct from the Black Mould fields, which 
 are frequently so designated, so that at last any treeless plain 
 comes under that name. It is in these steppes that the flatness 
 of the soil, the absence of all tree- vegetation, and the summer 
 droughts reach their maximum. Slightly inclined towards the 
 Black, Azof, and Caspian Seas, they take in the lower basins of 
 the Dniepr and the Don, the Volga and the Ural. Left to itself, 
 with little or no cultivation, the steppe is a desert plain, without 
 trees, or shade, or water. For days and days the traveller looks 
 in vain for a shrub, a hut ; still it is not always the barren waste 
 for which the word stands in the Western mind. These immense 
 tracts, covering in European Russia alone over half a million 
 square miles, include lands of very different qualities, which, 
 therefore, notwithstanding a certain outward likeness, are called 
 to widely different uses in the future. Steppes are of two kinds, 
 two types clearly defined : the steppe with productive soil, not 
 unlike the tchemozibm, and the steppe made up of sand, stone, 
 and salt. The former, much the most extensive in European 
 Russia, are ready for cultivation and full of rich promise ; the 
 latter, apparently, will ever be unfit for it. The former are 
 steppes only accidentally, owing to the absence or scarcity of 
 man. The latter are everlasting steppes, by nature's own decree. 
 
 The fertile steppes fill the greater portion of the space that 
 
 *See Appendix to Chapter If., No. 2.
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 2$ 
 
 lies between the tchernozi'bm, of which they are a continuation, 
 and the Black and Azof Seas. They include the lower course of 
 all the rivers that flow into those two seas, from the Dniestr and 
 Bug to the Don and Kuban ; they stop a long way short of the 
 delta of the Volga, but turn up towards the northeast, where 
 they spread between the great river and the southern spurs of the 
 Ural chain. The subsoil generally consists of a layer of vege- 
 table humus, identical with that of the Black Mould belt. Left 
 to themselves, these steppes bear splendid witness to their natural 
 fertility, in the shape, not of forests, but of a gorgeous garment 
 of grass and flowers all their own, so they have nothing to envy 
 the richest forests. Such a steppe is to be likened not to an 
 African desert, but to an American prairie. The exuberance of 
 life shown there by nature is marvellous. The grass shoots up to 
 a height of five or six feet, even higher in rainy years. Well 
 may the legends of Ukrama tell how the Cosacks, in their venture- 
 some expeditions, used to hide in the grass-thickets, horse and 
 all. This excessive vigor of grass-vegetation may be accounted 
 as one among the causes of the lack of woods : the tall grass, in 
 its rapid growth, would smother young saplings. It is, however, 
 not the gramineous tribe, or grass properly so called, that yields 
 the bulk of steppe- vegetation, nor do they lend it that look of 
 vigor ; the steppe owes those to other and taller plants umbel- 
 liferous, leguminous, labiate, composite which abound in spring- 
 time, and whose blossoms clothe it with a thousand colors. The 
 species, too, are few, just as in the north the forests offer no 
 great variety. They are mainly of the so-called " social " species, 
 growing in large patches, and mostly annual plants, as others find 
 it rather hard to weather a climate which combines Baltic winters 
 with Mediterranean summers. Besides, the steppes are not wholly 
 wanting in ligneous plants : a few shrubs are to be met with, 
 trees even occasionally, though small and stunted ; among others, 
 the wild pear, which the Cosack ballads have made the emblem 
 of slighted love.
 
 26 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 During the brief spring of this region, the vegetation of the 
 steppes, like that of Northern Russia, unfolds with prodigious 
 rapidity. The spring rains supply it the wherewithal to resist 
 the intense summer heat ; but if the rains fail to arrive in time, 
 it fails too, a victim to drought. In certain districts, or certain 
 years, all this gorgeousness lasts only a few weeks : in July all is 
 gone, wilted, parched. The blaze of the sun, untempered by 
 shade, scorches everything, and the tall plants, which converted 
 the steppe into an ocean of verdure, now raise their bare stalks, 
 spikelike and ghastly ; the steppe is transformed into a dried up 
 pampa, yet, even in this shape, this once beautiful wealth of 
 vegetation is not wasted. These grasses, scorched by the sun in 
 the fulness of their ripeness, yield to the flocks a sort of naturally 
 cured hay, on which they feed through the rest of the season. 
 Each year the entire vegetation disappears at the approach of 
 winter : whatever has survived the sun, perishes under the snow. 
 
 This primeval steppe with its spontaneous wealth of flowers, 
 the steppe of history and the poets, gets narrowed every year, 
 and will soon vanish before the encroachments of agriculture. 
 The Ukrama of the Cosacks and Mazeppa, with all her legends, 
 has already lost her wild beauty. The plough lords it over her ; 
 the wilderness where Charles XII. and his army could lose 
 themselves, is now under regular cultivation. Gogol's steppe, 
 like Cooper's prairie, will soon be a memory ; it will join the 
 confining tchemozibm. It is difficult to draw an exact boun- 
 dary line between the two zones, one of which is steadily increas- 
 ing at the expense of the other, and must end by absorbing it 
 altogether. For the causes of so unequal a development we must 
 question history as much as nature. For hundreds and thousands 
 of years, these steppes have been the great thoroughfare followed 
 by all the migrations from Asia into Europe ; as lately as the end 
 of the eighteenth century they were exposed to the inroads of 
 nomadic tribes from Crimea, the Caucasus, and the lower Volga. 
 But for the submission of the Crimean Tatars, the Nogays that
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 2? 
 
 dwell on the shores of the Azof Sea, and the Kirghiz of the Caspian 
 region, these steppes never could have been opened to agricul- 
 ture, under whose yoke they will soon have completely passed, 
 thus becoming assimilated to the Black Mould territory of which 
 they have for centuries been the neglected prolongation. 
 
 Two things, besides the scarcity of working-hands, have 
 delayed the breaking of these grassy steppes, two things partly 
 connected with each other : drought and want of wood. Against 
 drought it is difficult to find a remedy ; from lack of water, the 
 most fertile of these plains will always be exposed to an alterna- 
 tion of good and bad years. Hence frequently recurring dearth, 
 sometimes actual famine, in provinces which, at other times, 
 might be regarded as the granaries of the empire. 
 
 The want of trees is perhaps a greater drawback still to the 
 inhabitants, whom it affects in twofold guise lack of fuel and 
 building materials, since stone also is not to be had most of the 
 time. For cooking and heating they have nothing but the dry 
 stalks of the tall steppe -grasses and the dung of the flocks, of which 
 they rob the soil. Such resources cannot suffice a population at 
 all dense ; but the opening of roads and railways, of coal and 
 anthracite mines, will gradually remedy these discomforts, by 
 bringing in wood or substitutes for wood and restoring the manure 
 to its proper agricultural uses. One great advantage these steppes 
 possess in their geographical position : the vicinity of the great 
 rivers' estuaries and of the Black Sea opens out to them the 
 greatest facilities for trade with Europe. It is the only region in 
 the empire that has access to a sea free from ice at all seasons. " 
 
 Between the arable steppe and the tchernozibm proper, the 
 mode of culture and the density of the population are the only 
 
 6 Mr. Beaulieu forgets the Baltic provinces, which possess a first-class 
 harbor, I/ibava (Germanized into Liebau), which never freezes, on a deep 
 gulf of the Baltic, open to navigation all the year round. The immense 
 importance of this fact to commerce secures to Liebau a great future, of a 
 different kind of greatness from that of Cronstadt of course, which owes 
 more than half its glory to its military qualities.
 
 28 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 distinctions to be drawn with any degree of accuracy. In the 
 steppe the population is scant, the culture still nomadic. With 
 only 35 or 36 inhabitants to the square mile, the culture by 
 triennial rotation the fanning system in general use all over the 
 Black Mould region must soon prevail. Thus the annexation of 
 the steppe to the tchernozibm is effected easily, without hurt to 
 anybody, without martyrs to civilization. The fertile steppe, 
 covering 300,000 or 400,000 square miles, is still nearly as extensive 
 as the Black Mould region now under regular cultivation. In 
 the near future both will form one agricultural region, occupying, 
 in Europe alone, from 600,000 to 800,000 square miles, about double 
 the total area of France. The American prairie, which is passing 
 through analogous phases, will probably be the only cereal-bearing 
 country that may outdo it, and if its development is more rapid, 
 it will be owing to the abundance of capital and to European 
 immigration. 7 
 
 South and east of the fertile steppe come the barren steppes, 
 forever unapt for cultivation. No vegetable layer there nothing 
 but sand, or a soil impregnated with salt, still more for- 
 bidding. Such is the vast Uralo-Caspian depression, the bottom 
 
 1 Sheep-breeding is carried on in the south of Russia on nearly as large 
 a scale as in Australia or New Zealand. It is a pity, for that is the resource 
 of tracts that are not good for much else. But while the hands that should 
 put them to their proper use are not forthcoming kept busy, most of them, 
 in the north scratching the earth for a sustenance which, less fortunate 
 than the barnyard fowls, they do not obtain from it, this immense region 
 must be made to yield income of some sort. But unless this makeshift 
 industry soon yields the place to the legitimate one of agriculture, there 
 may be danger of that gorgeous wheatland permanently deteriorating. The 
 huge tracts of plain and hill-land on the east side of the Adriatic used as 
 sheep-walks by the ancient Roman non-resident landlords, and those in the 
 south of Italy which continued to be so used by the various foreign kings 
 and feudal lords down to almost modern times, are made forever unfit for 
 culture, or if they can be reclaimed it would be at a cost which well justifies 
 the hesitations of closely ciphering financiers. Sheep-breeding is the surest 
 and quickest mode of enriching the present to the destruction of the future, 
 and should be confined to unproductive, poor-soiled steppeland, which still 
 grows natural fodder of a quality sufficient for that most easily contented 
 and most close-nibbling of browsers the sheep.
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 29 
 
 of a sea but lately desiccated, where the evaporating waters have 
 left behind a deposit of salt, and which, here and there, is still 
 studded with small salt lakelets, remnants of an inland sea of 
 old, now reduced to the proportion of the Caspian. This is as 
 genuine a desert as the Sahara itself, with but few oases. Starting 
 from Tsaritsin, on the lower course of the Volga, which they 
 include, these salt deserts mingle with or join the immense 
 Kirghiz steppe, a region of stone and sand, and stretch on and on 
 into the very core of Turkestan. Part of these salt steppes lies 
 below the level of the sea, and the Caspian itself, of which they 
 were once the bed, lies about eighty-five feet below the surface 
 of the Black Sea. 
 
 This Uralo-Caspian steppe is, of all European Russia, the 
 driest, most denuded, most exposed to excessive seasons. It is a 
 decidedly Asiatic country, by virtue of its soil and climate, by its 
 flora and fauna, by the race of its population and their mode of 
 life. If there is, in these parts, a natural boundary line between 
 Europe and Asia, it should be sought for, not in the Ural River, 
 (the Yaik), but at the western end of that Caspian hollow, the 
 prolongation of the deserts of Central Asia; around the point 
 where the Don and the I/ower Volga come nearest each other, 
 though art has not yet contrived to unite them, so very marked is 
 the physical boundary of the two regions. 
 
 A glance at the other side of the Azof Sea, shows us the 
 northern half of Crimea and the neighboring shoreland, that lies 
 between the Isthmus of Perekop and the mouth of the Dniepr, 
 forming a little region of itself, scarcely less unfit for agriculture 
 a bit of Asia dropped north of the Black Sea. Here the sandy and 
 rocky steppes predominate. Even where we catch a glimpse of 
 vegetable land, the scarcity of springs and rain would seem to 
 doom to sterility, for a long time to come, this upper half of Tauris, 
 of which such great things were expected in the time of Catherine 
 the Great. From the mountains of Southern Crimea and the coast 
 of the Caspian to the fertile steppeland, the barren steppeland,
 
 30 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 this side of the Ural River, covers nigh on 300,000 square miles 
 
 which cannot show as much as a million and a half of population. 
 
 
 
 On all this area it seems hopeless to attempt growing trees, an 
 operation already very difficult in the Black Mould region and 
 the adjacent fertile steppes. Unfit for agriculture, indeed for life 
 in permanent settlements, these vast tracts, like the neighboring 
 portions of Asia, appear to be good for nothing but cattle-raising 
 and nomadic life. Hence these are the only regions of European 
 Russia still held by Asiatic tribes Kalmyk and Kirghiz and, until 
 quite lately, the Crimean Tatar and the Nogay. They feel as 
 much at home on these steppes as in their original Asiatic homes. 
 They lead the same life, driving their flocks to pasture on the 
 scant grass that grows on sand, and the meagre plants impreg- 
 nated with salt which stud in tufts tlie arid soil. 
 
 At this southeastern extremity of European Russia we meet 
 with the same mode of life that we observe in the extreme 
 north, amongst the Lapps and Samoyeds: a nomadic existence 
 under the tent made of hides, only substituting the camel for the 
 reindeer. But then, these two regions are the least populous of 
 the entire empire this side of the Ural. Including the numerous 
 fishermen on the Volga, and the laborers in the salt works, the 
 steppes of the southeast cannot show an average of six people to 
 the square mile. In certain portions of the Kalmyk steppe in 
 particular, there are not quite two inhabitants to the square mile. 
 Not until we reach the mouths of the Dvina in the government 
 of Arkhangelsk do we find another as scanty population. The 
 northern coast of the Caspian is not much better off than the ice- 
 bound coast of the White Sea, nor has it a much more promising 
 future to look forward to. 
 
 This review would be incomplete did we not mention one more 
 region, less extensive and but lately annexed, which, from its 
 mountainous soil and southern climate, holds a peculiar position. 
 This region comprises the Caucasus and the southern coast of 
 Crimea, which, with its abrupt steeps, is merely a prolongation of
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 3! 
 
 the Caucasian chain. Nature, which nowhere marked out a 
 boundary for Russia, neither towards Europe nor towards Asia, 
 appears to have raised at least one very efficient barrier in this 
 one direction, between the Black and Caspian Seas. What 
 boundary could be better carried out than this ridge, measuring 
 from 14,000 to 18,000 feet in height, towering between two seas? 
 It is as thougli another Pyrenees had been heaped up to twice the 
 height of the chain that separates France from Spain. And yet 
 this barrier, which seemed to stand athwart Russia's way, has 
 been crossed. Nature herself, indeed, even while raising, fur- 
 nished the means to defeat it. Thrown across an isthmus, be- 
 tween two inland seas, fated to be subjected to Russian influences, 
 the Caucasus, in the logical order of things, had to be entered 
 from both sides, and could not but easily succumb to a back- 
 handed stroke of strategy. This bulwark of Asia could not hold 
 out against the necessity for Russia to step over it in order to 
 reach the South, that everlasting allurement of all Northern nations. 
 The Caucasus and the southern coast of Crimea cannot be 
 accounted a new region of the Russian soil, Russian nature ends 
 with the plain ; they are an entirely different country, as varied of 
 aspect as the regions of Russia proper are monotonous. There, 
 on the steep sides of the mountains, we find forests, the counter- 
 part of those that have vanished from the centre of the empire 
 downward, not meagre, sparse, and monotonous as in the north, 
 but dense, vigorous, displaying a vegetative power unknown to 
 Moscovia proper. There, too, fruit-trees thrive, along with that 
 variety of plants and culture which Russia would vainly look for 
 on her plains, from the shores of the glacial seas to those of the 
 Euxine, the vine, which on the banks of the Don still enjoys 
 but a precarious shelter, the mulberry, the olive-tree. It appears 
 as though the various zones of culture characterized in other 
 countries by these three trees, unite into one on the slopes of 
 these mountains, as though to compensate Russia for the monot- 
 ony of her plains. Few are the varieties of fruit not acclimated
 
 32 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 in these Crimean hanging gardens suspended above the sea, or 
 in Transcaucasia, where Russian merchants, not content with 
 having succeeded in the cultivation of cotton and sugar-cane, are 
 discussing the introduction of tea plantations. 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK I., CHAPTER II. NO. i. (See p. 19, note 4.) 
 
 The misery is increased and made wellnigh hopeless by the prohibition 
 laid on the peasants to leave the land allotted them at the time of emancipa- 
 tion. The Emperor Nicolas took pride in proclaiming that Russia was "an 
 agricultural country." So agriculture was " encouraged " at the expense 
 of everything else, and the fiction was kept up during the great crisis which 
 was to decide Russia's economical future. The unfortunate peasants of the 
 north, while nominally set free, were given over to a bondage worse than 
 the last. An intelligent landlord could and would allow numbers of his 
 people, for a moderate yearly payment, to go to any place where they could 
 earn a good living. Now they were made bond-slaves, not to men, but to a 
 soulless thing, a soil incapable of rewarding their most assiduous toil with 
 enough of mere rye alone to last the family to the year's end, not to speak 
 of the seed grain for the following season. So they were burdened over and 
 above the taxes, with a considerable purchase sum for the land allotted 
 them, and placed in the impossibility of paying either, even at the cost of 
 half-starvation to themselves, by being " fastened " to a soil absolutely unfit 
 for cultivation under any conditions whatever. The reason given is that 
 "had they their will, they would rush down en masse to the south, south- 
 west, and southeast, (which, nota bene, are as good as uninhabited !) and 
 the north would become a waste." As if that argument did not work pre- 
 cisely the other way: will people and such conservative people as the 
 Russian peasants rush away from their homesteads to unknown lands 
 unless they have nothing left to lose and all change is gain ? Why, that 
 is just what the North ought to be. The forests should be nursed back to 
 their former richness and re-stocked with the wild beasts whose extermina- 
 tion has robbed the country of a real and bountiful source of national 
 wealth. When one thinks that the forests about Ndvgorod and Pskof, all 
 cut up by streams and interspersed with lakes, teemed with beavers only a 
 century and a half ago ! Then the whole great North is undermined with 
 ores copper, lead so rich that huge lumps of pure metal crop up under 
 the plough and are taken to cities by the peasant- wives along with their flax 
 or eggs, carefully hidden under their aprons, and sold for a few coins with
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL, 33 
 
 fear and trembling for it is forbidden to take notice of such things, as they 
 might be to the prejudice of the administration pet agriculture ! Besides, 
 the share demanded by the exchequer on all such finds, and the charges for 
 licenses to extract ore are so exorbitant that no native company can stand 
 them, not to speak of individual effort, which is totally inadequate. So that, 
 with wealth untold under one's feet, it is cheaper for Russian manufacturers to 
 import their raw material, even though we by no means rejoice in free trade. 
 Then a German or American syndicate comes along, goes into things, makes 
 an offer, and lo ! all doors open before them, and though red tape and "to- 
 morrows" are not spared even to them, favors, privileges, exemptions are 
 showered upon them. They go to work, and make colossal fortunes, which 
 they carry out of the country and sneer at the Russians for a set of im- 
 provident, narrow-minded, short-sighted sluggards, too ignorant and lazy 
 to pick up the wealth which is simply wasted on them. There is no doubt 
 that this state of things, especially the mistake of maintaining compulsory 
 settlement and culture, have much to do with the present disaster. The 
 liberal press cried itself hoarse at the time, foretelling the logically impend- 
 ing ruin, which has come to pass, for logic does not deceive as statistics 
 sometimes do. The present emperor, Alexander III., has come to the relief 
 of the peasantry in every way ; remitted arrears, paid up large instalments 
 of the so-called "redemption certificates" (the purchase money for their 
 lands, paid out to the proprietors in a lump), distributed large quantities 
 of grain against seeding time, fed thousands of families, rebuilt burned- 
 tip villages. His great heart is ever open to their needs, his hand never 
 closes all in vain ! A column of figures can add up in only one way. And 
 until the evil is struck at the root, and the grown-up men of Russia are 
 officially acknowledged capable to discriminate what is best for them and to 
 know their own minds, and allowed to act accordingly, there is no salvation. 
 This compulsory coupling of man and earth is unnatural, and has come to 
 be like the binding of a living body to a corpse. And all the time there 
 lies the immense South in the sun, wide open, awaiting only hands to treble 
 the wealth of the empire, and that for all times, inexhaustibly. 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK I., CHAPTER II. NO. ?.. (See p. 24, note 5.) 
 
 Not ignorance entirely. When it is the Russian people that are in 
 question, the word comes glibly to the lips or pen of even our friends, 
 when " poverty " should stand instead, and other things. If the peasants 
 could have afforded more cattle and horses through all these years, and if the
 
 34 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 few poor beasts they did manage to keep had not been so often sold off for 
 arrears of taxes and to satisfy the claims of the local bloodsucker, the ruth- 
 less usurer, known under the graphic nickname of " village fist " (kul&k}, 
 to whom they are fatally driven by the absolute necessity of procuring grain 
 against seeding time, or money for the collector or something as vital, 
 things might be different. The reason why the exhaustion of the soil has 
 been progressing at so frightful a rate of late years is that freedom has come 
 to the peasant weighted with the taxes which did not concern him under 
 the old rtgime, besides the obligation of paying for his land to the State, 
 which had advanced the money to buy off the former landlord. He has 
 succumbed under the load, that 's all. And the land, which was to a 
 certain extent looked after by the landlord, has simply gone to rack and 
 ruin because its present owner is not allowed to keep a sufficient percentage 
 on the produce of his labor upon it to secure a bare sustenance to himself and 
 his, let alone improving the soil. This is one of the reasons which I have 
 not seen mentioned anywhere why the present famine is not only so 
 universal, but so permanent, a phenomenon not to be explained by a couple 
 of bad seasons in such a land. It is the general deterioration of one of the 
 granaries of the earth. It would take millions for fertilizers and years 
 of rest to restore the soil to its natural richness. So where is there hope ? 
 It might be done, if the people were freed from compulsory residence on 
 their lands. They would gladly pay the taxes for them and rush into 
 the glorious South, which is virtually virgin soil and is being wasted for 
 lack of hands. The Government might then take in hand the temporarily 
 half-deserted region, which would fill quickly enough once it became its 
 old self again. It is a simple plan, and, Heaven knows, feasible enough 
 with the untold millions of vacant acres, but it won't be done ! " Igno- 
 rance " is easily said, but so conscientious an inquirer, so good a friend, as our 
 author should not be quite so quick with the word. What, then, shall we say 
 of the New England farmers as a body, who, with nothing to hamper or 
 hinder them, have allowed land throughout their States, ever since they first 
 took possession of it, to go down to nominal value and deteriorate till it is 
 impossible for an ordinary family to make more than a bare living out of a 
 hundred-acre farm with unceasing toil and the plainest of fares just in the 
 same way : by taking and taking from the soil without putting enough in 
 and that originally not from lack of means, but from the thrift that hates to 
 lay out to-day a dollar that is to bring a return, and an ample one, not to- 
 morrow, but in a year or perhaps two. Now of course it is different : the 
 means are wanting, and the farms to be had for the asking.
 
 BOOK I. CHAPTER III. 
 
 Homogeneousness of the Country Its Vast Plains were Destined to Politi- 
 cal Unity Uneven Population How, for a Length of Time, it was 
 Distributed after an Utterly Artificial Manner Relative Importance 
 of the Various Regions Vital and Accessory Parts Russia a Country 
 Born of Colonization Her Double Task and Consequent Contradictions. 
 
 THE physical diversity of the various regions of the country 
 must not blind us to their homogeneousness. Russia is so natu- 
 rally one, that, short of an island or a peninsula, no country in the 
 world is more clearly stamped for the dwelling-place of a nation. 
 Through all their differences, all their physical and economical op- 
 positions, the two great zones of North and South belong together 
 like two halves that complete each other and cannot be separated. 
 In the first place they have in common the soil, the plain, which 
 admit of no barrier, no possible boundary ; in the second place, 
 the climate is common to both ; the winter, which for weeks and 
 weeks gathers them under one mantle of snow. In January you 
 can sleigh it from Arkhangelsk or Petersburgh to Astrakhan. 
 The absence of snow would be for the South as dire a calamity, 
 and nearly as rare as for the North. As in the southern steppes, 
 so in the forests that skirt the polar circle, the rivers are ice-bound 
 for months. The Sea of Azof freezes just like the White Sea, and 
 the northern half of the Caspian just as the Gulf of Finland. 
 The Black Sea is the only one of Russian seas the ports of which 
 are not all closed by ice in exceptionally severe winters ' ; but the 
 Itmans, or broad estuaries of the great rivers, do freeze up almost 
 regularly. As a rule, the navigation on the Black Sea is not in- 
 1 See preceding Chapter, note 6. 
 35
 
 36 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSAJfS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 terrupted ; but under the breath of the north wind, along the 
 coast of Crimea just as along that of Canada, vessels not unfre- 
 quently have their rigging hardened by frost, and their hulls 
 coated with a congealed crust, which make them heavy and 
 stiif, and seriously imperil them. 
 
 With no mountains to part them, the two zones, with their 
 forests and steppes, are linked together by their rivers. Of these the 
 greatest have their sources in the one, their estuary in the other. 
 The different natural regions do not correspond to the various 
 basins : that of the Arctic Sea holds only the extreme north, that 
 of the Baltic only the western provinces ; the entire centre and 
 the east incline southward, as represented by their rivers, the 
 Dniepr, the Don, and, above all, the Volga, the Russian Missis- 
 sippi, which carries to the Caspian the melted snows of the 
 Ural, together with the waters from the lakes of the low table- 
 land of Valday. 
 
 It is not only by what they have in common, but just as 
 much by their discrepancies that the two great zones are united. 
 The more widely their soil, their products differ, the more exclu- 
 sive the call which they seem to have received from nature, com- 
 pelling each to seek assistance from the other. The central region 
 alone, where forests and cultivated fields touch and mingle, the 
 principality of Moscow of old, might be all-sufficient to itself. 
 Neither the North nor the South could. The North needs the 
 grain of the South, the South wants the wood and timber of the 
 North. If ever nature herself traced the outline of an empire, it 
 was when she drew the lines from the Baltic to the Ural, from the 
 Arctic Ocean to the Black and Caspian Seas. The frame was 
 clearly marked, history had only to fill it out. These vast regions 
 were as fatally doomed to political unity as countries ten or twelve 
 times smaller, like France or Italy ; and not only that, but the 
 plain was to make the process both easier and more rapid. 
 
 In this respect Russia has the advantage of another colossus 
 of the modern world. In the general flatness of the soil, in the
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 37 
 
 relative sameness of the climate, she has more solid guaranties for 
 her unity than the United States of North America, the North and 
 South of which are, inde"ed, also strongly linked together by a 
 great river, but where contrasts of every kind are more accentu- 
 ated, and could be still increased by territorial acquisitions to the 
 North and to the South. 
 
 In Asia, as in Europe, it is nature that has marked out the 
 field for Russia's sway. From the high tablelands of the Ural 
 her rule spreads over the Siberian plains ; from the low flats of 
 the Don and the Volga, over the depressed basin of the Caspian 
 and over Central Asia. Asiatic Russia, especially Western Siberia, 
 is not to the Russians an alien colony, impossible to assimilate, 
 difficult to keep ; it is a prolongation, a natural continuation of 
 their European territory. Far from resembling the ephemeral 
 creations of the Asiatic conquerors, the Russian Empire is a solid 
 structure, of which Providence itself has laid the foundations. 
 There may be some uncertainty about its definitive boundaries, 
 more especially towards the West, the line of contact with Western 
 Europe, where history has created live forces independent of 
 physical conditions. But, no matter whether she win or lose a 
 few provinces between the Baltic and the Karpathian Mountains, 
 Russia is sure to remain one whole, with her two grand zones, 
 sure to keep her sway over the low and cold region of the old 
 continent, an immense region created for unity and therefore 
 doomed for a long time to centralization and absolutism. 
 
 Nature drew the plan of the Russian Empire even before Peter 
 the Great ; when and how will that immense frame be filled out ? 
 How many hundreds of millions will be accounted subjects of the 
 Tsar ? What figure will the population of this empire reach, the 
 vastest on earth, and so far, in proportion to its extent, the least 
 populous ? 
 
 One fact strikes you at the first glance: it is the uneven density 
 of the population. Even in Russia proper, situated in Europe, 
 there are districts which have, to the same area, a hundred times
 
 38 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the population of others. The influences which have been at 
 work to regulate this uneven distribution are twofold historical 
 and physical : the latter, essential, permanent ; the former, acci- 
 dental, transitory, and consequently bound to yield to the others 
 in the end. History, owing to their geographical position, has 
 for a long time shaped the two zones' destinies, but little in accord- 
 ance with the nature of the soil and the climate. Confining with 
 the steppes of Central Asia, the woodless zone was the first 
 exposed to the inroads of the Asiatic nomads, and the last wrested 
 from them. Hence an abnormal development of the two regions 
 and a distribution of the population to some extent artificial. 
 Leaving out the West, which, being far away from Asia, worked 
 out a destiny of its own, the most fertile regions were the last to 
 be inhabited, the last to be cultivated. Agriculture, hence 
 wealth and civilization, could not for centuries thrive and blossom 
 on the spot marked out to them by nature. Repelled from the 
 south by the inroads of the nomads, the Russians were relegated 
 to the regions of the north, incapable as these are to support a 
 numerous population, a great civilization.* The effects of this 
 anomaly, which were still keenly felt in the eighteenth century, 
 are now rapidly vanishing. The southern half of the empire 
 already holds a far greater number of inhabitants than the north ; 
 there are certain tracts of the Black Mould region which lay in 
 great part waste a century or two ago, and are now counted 
 among the most populous. Population still crowds chiefly 
 around the two historical centres of old Russia Kief and 
 Moscow. But old habit is no longer the principal cause of 
 this. At Kief the attraction lies in the soil and the climate ; at 
 Moscow it is the central position and industry that detain and 
 draw people, while the fallen queen of the North, Great Nov- 
 
 * Nothing but the utter ignorance of Western Europe concerning 
 Russia could warrant the saying that "the Russians must be sent back 
 into their steppes, whence they never should have issued." Far from com- 
 ing out of the steppes, it is only at a comparatively recent date they set 
 their foot in them.
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 39 
 
 gorod, sees around her forsaken kremlin 2 a sparse sprinkling of 
 inhabitants as poor as the wretched resources of her surrounding 
 fields. 
 
 Physical conditions being identical, the population of a country 
 increases in proportion to its civilization. Every transition from 
 one stage of culture to another : from pastoral and nomadic to 
 settled agricultural life, from purely agricultural to commercial 
 and industrial life every step even from one way of working the 
 ground to another, more productive one ; for instance, from such 
 desultory agriculture as is practised in the steppes to the method 
 of triennial rotation, from #tensive to zwtensive farming every 
 such step enlarges the field for population. In Russia, where, 
 even in the European part of it, can be found all the modes of 
 existence from that of the nomad hunter, the only regions cap- 
 able of considerable increase in the population are those which 
 can pass from one stage of culture to another. But there are 
 several that are debarred by nature from such an advance : the 
 extreme north is set apart by nature for fishing and the chase, as 
 the Uralo-Caspian steppes for pastoral life. 3 
 
 As industrial life is only just budding in Russia, 4 it is to agri- 
 
 2 Kremlin (more correctly kreml), the thing and the word, is the exact 
 equivalent of the Greek akropolis. Every old Russian city had its kremlin 
 It is the central fortified enclosure, always on an elevation, however slight ; 
 the place of shelter in danger, of safe-keeping of the city's treasury and 
 shrines in peace. 
 
 3 The trouble is that nature is systematically thwarted, at least in the 
 case of the north, with results that go widening in their effects as the circle 
 in the water. See preceding chapter, appendix. 
 
 4 Industrial life would be much more than " budding," the decided 
 forte of the Russian genius being applied science, if things and people 
 
 were let alone. But one cannot open a laundry or lunch-room without a 
 special license. Red tape and the exorbitant dues and percentages, not to 
 mention the " sundry " cost item, devour the possible future profits before 
 work has begun, in a country where capital is not yet equal to such drains. 
 They may, in the end, not amount to more than advertising comes to in 
 this country ; but then advertising is a voluntary outlay, under the enter- 
 priser's control, and materially helps his business, while the disproportion- 
 ate tribute levied at every step by the Russian exchequer yields no return 
 whatever to the undertaking which it cripples beforehand.
 
 40 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 culture we must look for nearly all the development of population 
 to be expected in the near future. But then agriculture is, more 
 than industrial enterprise, immediately dependent on physical 
 conditions, therefore the increase of population in Russia is 
 almost entirely controlled by climate, the degree of moisture, the 
 geographical situation, and, above all, the fertility of the soil. 
 Were it not for the delay which history has imposed on the 
 southern regions, the density of the population would be in 
 almost direct ratio to the fertility of the soil. 
 
 This tendency gives the key to a curious phenomenon in 
 statistics. Take European Russia with Poland, and you will see 
 that two thirds of the entire population do not occupy quite one 
 third of the territory, and, more singular still, it is in the most 
 populous region that population increases most rapidly. This 
 seeming anomaly is easily explained : the zone where population 
 is densest and increases most includes the most productive por- 
 tions of the empire. It comprises the two regions which own the 
 best lands, the Black Mould belt and the arable steppes ; it takes 
 in the great industrial tract around Moscow, and, lastly, along 
 the western frontier, a mixed region, at once agricultural and 
 industrial, composed of the quondam kingdom of Poland, and a 
 portion of the adjoining provinces a country whose rise was 
 favored both by its geographical situation and ancient civilization. 
 The industrial region of Moscow owes its numerous population 
 not so much to historical causes as to its central situation between 
 the two great river thoroughfares, the Volga and its affluent the 
 Ok, and to the twofold vicinity of the finest forest lands of the 
 north and the richest Black Mould lands. Put together, these 
 four regions cover, this side of the Ural, not more than about 
 1,000,000 (one million) square miles out of an area of over three 
 millions, while they number 55,000,000 or 60,000,000 people out 
 of a total population of about 90,000,000. It is at their point 
 of junction, near the meridian of Moscow, that Russia's natural 
 centre of gravity may be located. There lie the vital parts of
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 41 
 
 the empire. The other regions, covering two thirds of its Euro- 
 pean territory, are only more or less necessary appendages ; their 
 degree of importance is determined by their relations with the 
 central nucleus, some linking it to one or other sea by means of 
 long rivers, which open to it the issues on Europe and Asia, 
 others presenting it with the precious mineral wealth hidden in 
 their mountains, others again, the largest number too, keeping 
 for it in their forests immense reserves of timber, while some few 
 in the south are its gardens, hot-houses, and orchards. 
 
 The uneven distribution of inhabitants over the various prov- 
 inces affects the statistical averages in a way to greatly mislead 
 on the subject of the real relation between the population and the 
 area it covers. If the empire, as a whole, has only eight inhabi- 
 tants to the square mile ; if European Russia herself numbers only 
 twenty-eight or thirty, the most productive parts, the industrial 
 region of Moscow, the agricultural one of Black Mould, are very 
 nearly as densely peopled as Central Europe, and already have 
 got ahead of Spain. Instead of being sprinkled over immense 
 areas till they are almost lost to sight, two thirds of Russia's 
 entire population are concentrated within an area scarcely more 
 than thrice the size of France. Now, in Russia as everywhere 
 else, the compactness of the population gives greater facilities to 
 civilization, more power and cohesion to the people, more means 
 of action to the government. 
 
 From one half of her European territory and from three quar- 
 ters of her Asiatic possessions, laboring under the curse of either 
 extreme cold or extreme drought, Russia cannot expect any nota- 
 ble increase of population. Asiatic Russia, although three times 
 the size of European Russia, seems incapable of feeding even an 
 equal population. With eighty millions, Siberia, Turkestan, and 
 Transcaucasia put together might be comparatively as well off as 
 the Russia this side of the Ural with a hundred. Taking into 
 consideration the physical and economical conditions of the em- 
 pire, also the demands of life as to food, clothing, warmth, Russia
 
 42 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 seems fated to drop behind the United States in regard to popula- 
 tion, and even, it may be, in two or three centuries from now, 
 behind Brazil. Notwithstanding the vastness of her domain, she 
 is not at all sure ever to exceed India's 250,000,000, or, conse- 
 quently, China's half milliard. Indeed, it is not impossible that 
 innumerable hordes from the latter country may at some future 
 time push up northward and strive to wrest from the Russian 
 colonists the possession of Siberia, if not of Central Asia itself. 
 
 Whatever may be the probabilities for or against these remote 
 prospects, Russia already has 1 15,000,000 of inhabitants, and about 
 the year 1950 she will have 180,000,000 on one continuous territory, 
 a thing not to be thought of for any other European nation, unless 
 the Germans, with their persistent "eastward push" {"Drang 
 nach Osten "), succeed in extending their rule, at the cost of the 
 Slavs, over the greater part of ancient Poland, on Austro-Hungary, 
 and possibly over the Balkan peninsula. 
 
 In Europe as well as in Asia it is principally to the soil and 
 agriculture that the Tsar must look for an increase, in the near 
 future, of the number of his subjects. Field labor, however, is 
 far from being their only resource. In many a district, notably in 
 the central region, industrial enterprise already contributes to the 
 increase, not only of wealth, but of the population too. Russia is 
 already far better equipped in this respect than she was ever 
 thought to be. Industry will sooner or later take a vigorous 
 start, and even now is progressing rapidly. Should they ever be 
 allowed to draw their means of sustenance from abroad, the 
 number of inhabitants might, on the strength of this one item, 
 multiply indefinitely. 
 
 Russia not only finds within her own boundaries the raw 
 material for almost every possible fabrication thus, for instance, 
 Russian cotton factories use scarcely any cotton but that grown in 
 Turkestan but nature has endowed her with the two great agents 
 of modern labor iron and coal. It is not half understood what 
 immense coal mines underlie the Russian plains. They keep
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 43 
 
 showing up on all sides, every kind and quality in the north, in 
 the centre, around Moscow ; the southeast (basin of the Donets) ; 
 in the southwest in the governments of Kief and Khers6n ; in 
 Poland and on both sides the Caucasus ; in Asia itself in the 
 Kirghiz steppes ; in the basin of the Amoor and the isle of Sak- 
 halin. To coal and anthracite the Caspian coasts add naphtha and 
 petroleum. After being trammelled in the north by the lack 
 of openings, in the south by the lack of combustible materials, the 
 industrial development will soon be quickened, once the railway 
 lines are completed and some of the coal mines are worked. And 
 industry will open the way to agriculture by opening out regions 
 now lying waste and enticing the tiller of the earth to follow. 
 Thus the mines of the Ural lead to the fertile plains of Western 
 Siberia ; those of the Altay and Amoor Mountains will draw cul- 
 ture into the very heart of Asia, just as, in California and Aus- 
 tralia, culture came at the heels of the goldseekers. 
 
 If Russia's mineral wealth has long slept inactive under the 
 grass of the steppes or the trees of the forests, the reasons have 
 been many ; the most bountiful stores unfortunately lie at the 
 confines of Asia, in places of difficult access, some of them half- 
 desert still or insufficiently connected with the centre of the empire ; 
 then there are the distances and the high cost of transport ; then, 
 again, the scarcity of the population, and worse still, their poverty 
 and ignorance all serious obstacles to industrial development. 
 The nature of the soil, the rigor of the climate, history, the habits 
 of the people, even to the social conditions these were so many 
 drawbacks which condemned the eastern plain-land of Europe 
 to remain stationary a long time as an essentially rural and 
 agricultural country. 
 
 In order to gain a proper appreciation of the economical con- 
 dition of Russia we must not lose sight of the fact that, under 
 Peter the Great she had not quite fifteen millions of inhabitants ; 
 that as late as the middle of last century her population did not 
 yet equal that of France under Louis XV., and at the beginning
 
 44 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 of the present century that of the German Empire of to-day.* If 
 we take up the successive censuses and examine into their statis- 
 tics it will be seen that Russia is a country in the process of making 
 up its population. She is, in many respects, just a colony ; and 
 this is a fact of capital importance to any one desirous of seriously 
 gauging both her resources and her difficulties. Yes, Russia is a 
 colony, and her history is really that of her colonization. The 
 first turn was the west's, then came the north and centre, and 
 now the turn has come to the south and the east. The lower 
 basins of the Dniepr, the Don, the Volga can be, in this respect, 
 compared to those of the Missouri and the Mississippi, the Russian 
 East to the American West. The colonial character shows in the 
 dates of the foundation of cities, as well as in the rapidity of their 
 progress, and their very looks. Sebastbpol, Khers6n, Nicolayef, 
 Kharkof, Taganr6g, Rostdf, Saratof, Samara, Perm, Orenburg, 
 the greater part of the capitals of governments or districts in the 
 south and east, are younger than the capitals of the Atlantic 
 States in North America. Odessa, a creation of the Due de Riche- 
 lieu, is not quite a century old, and already holds as many 
 inhabitants as Rouen and Hdvre put together. The region named 
 New Russia, of which Odessa is the capital, is as felicitously 
 named as the New England of the United States, and the coloni- 
 zation of it is far more recent. This country, wellaigh a desert at 
 the beginning of the century, has actually increased its population 
 tenfold within less than a hundred years. The growth of the 
 towns and the rural districts on the banks of the Don and the 
 
 * The so-called " revisions," operated at irregular intervals, for the 
 single purpose of ascertaining the numbers of the taxable population, took 
 in only the males of the classes subject to the capitation tax, and can, con- 
 sequently, furnish only approximative data. These revisions suppose the 
 entire population, in its successive increase, to amount to the following 
 figures in the given years : 14 or 15 millions in 1723 ; 16 or 17 in 1742 ; 19 
 or 20 in 1762 ; 28 or 30 in 1782 ; 36 in 1796 ; 41 in 1812 ; 45 in 1815 ; 65 in 
 1835 ; 68 in 1851 ; 75 in 185$. See Schnitzler's Empire of the Tsars, v. ii., 
 pp. 5 ff. In 1889 it was calculated that the population had already reached 
 the figure of over no millions.
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 45 
 
 Volga, in the latitude of Vor6nej and Sardtof, has scarcely been 
 less rapid. 
 
 The aspect of all these- cities in the south and the east is just 
 what would be expected from their recent origin. As in the Far 
 West of the United States, they are all built on a large scale, all one 
 like the other, with no feature of interest, without individuality, 
 with no other difference than that of site. I^ike those of America, 
 they cover far more space than European cities with an equal 
 number of inhabitants. One feels that they were constructed less 
 for the present than for the future, in view of an indefinite growth 
 which has not always progressed as fast as it was hoped. With 
 their huge public buildings, their ambitious boulevards, and their 
 broad streets to be filled by coming generations, the most prosper- 
 ous have an unfinished look, temporary yet pretentious, which is 
 not pleasing to travellers. As in America, the cities, instead of 
 following in the track of agriculture, have preceded it ; but then 
 more than one of these presumptuous cities has been, on the 
 morrow of its foundation, forsaken in favor of a better situated 
 rival, and left with its huge square and mute avenues which no 
 crowd will ever enliven. 
 
 It is curious to measure even at this early hour the conquests 
 of Russian colonization, to calculate how many parallels of lati- 
 tude, or how many degrees of longitude, from north to south, from 
 east to west, it has won from nature or from barbarism : there is 
 all the vast region of the steppes and the Black Mould, the haunt 
 of the horseman of old, Scyth, Tatar, or Cosack, there are the 
 shores of the Black and Azof Seas, where in the beginning of 
 modern times the Genoese still held fortified counting-houses, 
 such as the French keep along the coast of Guinea. This is the 
 greatest, possibly the only conquest of the West from the East, 
 of Europe from Asia ; it were more correct to say that Europe, 
 thanks to the Russians, has nearly doubled her area at the 
 expense of Asia. 
 
 Have we not there a grand result ? And with what resources,
 
 46 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 what elements has this immense and rapid colonization been 
 achieved ; is it going on still ? With the Russian people, who, to 
 effect this great work, have received from abroad none but ineffi- 
 cient, insignificant assistance. The two Americas, Australia, all 
 the colonies of both hemispheres, receive every year a consider- 
 able contingent of emigrants and European capital. Russia has 
 been compelled to colonize herself without anybody's aid, either 
 in men or money. A colonization carried on without immigra- 
 tion, by a country itself deficient in population, by a nation itself 
 only half civilized such has been the task accomplished by 
 Russia. 
 
 If Russia has colonized herself it is not that she did not ask 
 Burope for emigrants. Many did come from two sides first from 
 Germany, then from the Greek-Orthodox provinces of Turkey and 
 Austria. These two classes of colonists, who arrived in the middle 
 of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
 played an unequal part, but both had only a secondary local share 
 in the immense work. The Germans are the most numerous. Rus- 
 sia in modern times has offered the first opening to Teutonic emi- 
 gration, which has not worked as well there as in America. 
 Called in by Catherine II. and other Russian sovereigns, settled 
 on the choicest lands, sprinkled a little all over, from Peterhof at 
 the gates of St. Petersburgh to beyond the Caucasus, but especially 
 in New Russia and along the Lower Volga, these Germans have 
 kept well together in separate groups, alien patches in the midst 
 of the native population, not mixing with it nor exerting any 
 influence over it.* 
 
 At the present day they number many hundred thousands, that 
 preserve their religion, their language, their manners and customs, 
 bearing the name of colonists, and forming under this designation 
 a separate class which, until very lately, enjoyed particular privi- 
 
 * Besides these German colonists, there are the Germans of the Baltic 
 provinces, about 160,000 of them, then the tradesmen and craftsmen of Ger- 
 man or Austrian origin, dispersed over the various cities.
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL, 47 
 
 leges, exemption from military service in the number.* Irving 
 as foreigners in the state whose subjects they are, these colonists 
 are distinguished by many essentially Teutonic qualities, such as 
 the spirit of order, of economy, of family solidarity. In the isola- 
 tion of their small communes, they have made for themselves a 
 small civilization of their own, a domestic civilization so to speak. 
 They have formed agricultural colonies, very curious for the poli- 
 tician and the philosopher to observe. They have achieved a 
 moderate competence without being able ever to rise any higher. 
 Hence it is that their influence on the Russian people, which in 
 material things is almost naught, is still less morally. f Whatever 
 share Germany has had and it is a large one in the develop- 
 ment of Russia, she has owed it much less to these rustic colo- 
 nies, self-centred as they are, than to the German nobility of the 
 Baltic provinces and the German scientists invited to settle in 
 Petersburgh. 
 
 Rather different has been the part played by the Greco-Slav 
 immigrants. If they have not yet quite become merged into the 
 Russian people, they do not, like the Germans, form a separate 
 body within the empire. The kinship of language where Slavs 
 are concerned, the unity of faith which is a bond between all, or 
 nearly all, have been powerful links between these immigrants and 
 their adopted country. Among them are to be met all the Chris- 
 tian tribes of the East : Greeks, Rumanians, Serbs, Dalmatians, 
 Bulgarians, Armenians, Ruthenians, former Turkish or Austrian 
 subjects, attracted of old to Russia by political and religious sym- 
 pathies. This emigration, co-temporary with their first national 
 awakening, gradually ceased parallelly to the political emancipa- 
 
 * The suppression of this exemption in 1874, by the law introducing 
 universal military service, has caused a number of these colonists to emi- 
 grate. Many, however, after unsuccessful attempts at settling in Brazil and 
 elsewhere, went back to Russia. 
 
 f When we come to the study of Russian sects, we shall have, in dealing 
 with the Stundists, to quote a recent exception to this rule. See vol. iii., 
 book iii., ch. ix.
 
 48 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 tion of the small oriental nations on their native soil. Most of 
 these colonies, organized like the German ones, in villages and 
 districts, have settled preferably in the south and in Crimea. The 
 region around Odessa, before it bore the name of New Russia, 
 received from its Serbian colonists that of New Siberia. Many of 
 these Orientals took in Crimea and the adjacent coast-lands, the 
 place vacated by Tatar or Nogay emigrants, so that between the 
 two empires the Russian and the Turkish, a double current was 
 established of emigration and immigration, the one drawing to 
 itself the Christians, the other the Mussulmans. These small ori- 
 ental colonies, some of them scarcely inferior to the German ones 
 in the matter of agriculture, have given their first impulse to the 
 navy and to commerce ; they furnished to them both merchants 
 and sailors. The ports of the Black and the Azof Seas Odessa, 
 Khersbn, Mari6pol, Taganr&g, are so many former Greek cities, 
 and remain partly Greek still. 
 
 Neither Germans nor Orientals, however, no matter how great 
 their services, can claim any large share in the millions of inhabi- 
 tants and the millions of acres of cultivated soil which have been 
 added in less than a century to the wealth of Southern and 
 Eastern Russia. The great colonizer of the Russian land is the 
 Russian people, the mujik. * How many difficulties, what inferiority 
 in every branch are implied in this seemingly so simple fact, if 
 closely looked into ! Instead of the most enterprising men from 
 the most advanced European states, as in America or in Australia, 
 the agent is a people that has long been kept back by nature and 
 history, serfs but yesterday ; instead of all political and civil 
 liberties, of the independence and almost royalty of the individual 
 an autocratic state, a meddlesome and nagging administration, 
 the solidarity of the commune, which binds man to man and the 
 laborer to the soil.* 
 
 6 They to be pronounced as in French : jg, joli ; the u like oo in moor. 
 
 This paragraph can scarcely be accepted unconditionally, at least as 
 
 applied to the Russian people. It is doubtful whether too much culture,
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 49 
 
 The Russians have had a twofold task set them, of apparently 
 irreconcilable elements : to borrow civilization from Europe on 
 one side, and on the other to carry civilization to desert lands. 
 They have had a nation to educate, all but virgin lands to break. 
 This task they had to accomplish under conditions the most 
 repugnant to colonial growth, burdened with standing armies and 
 a long term of military service, under a system of strict centraliza- 
 tion and an omnipotent bureaucracy. It is owing to these incon- 
 sistencies much more than to the inferiority of soil and clime, if 
 their development has been less rapid, and, above all, less 
 productive than that of Northern America ; that is what has kept 
 European emigration away from the steppes and will keep it 
 away for ever. No matter that Russia owns on both sides the Ural 
 admirable land, which but awaits the plough colonists from the 
 West will not look that way. Even her neighbors of the Scandi- 
 navian North prefer the American "Far West" and the wastes 
 of Canada. 7 
 
 developed liberties, ready-made institutions, the "royalty of the individual," 
 is a good thing in the beginnings of colonies. Colonies founded in this way 
 are born old, like the Chinese philosopher Lao-tze, of whom the legend has 
 it he was born eighty years old with a flowing white beard. And they do 
 not aggrandize or strengthen* the mother country. They are separate 
 organisms from the first and very soon assert their independence, if neces- 
 sary, with armed hand. See the ancient Greek colonies and the American 
 colonies. Or else such colonies, if even outwardly thriving, are consumed 
 by a blight at the core, they bear a curse of moral depravity, of lack of 
 vitality, of restlessness and inability to settle down to the wholesome, nor- 
 mal, work-a-day routine which builds up a solid nation as well as a healthy, 
 prosperous individual. See the South American Republics of Latin race. 
 For, planting in rows full-grown trees with ripe fruit on them will never 
 make a forest or an orchard. While the kind of colonization of which Mr. 
 Beaulieu speaks so slightingly is the only kind that gives to the state not an 
 insecure dependence, but a vigorous offshoot, fed on the same sap, living the 
 life, growing the growth of the whole. Secession is an impossibility : can a 
 limb secede from its trunk ? 
 
 7 Be it so and may it remain so. Therein lies the country's future, and 
 it does not matter if we do not live to see it. The American States cannot 
 dispense with immigration ; but for immigration they would not exist, and 
 their vital principle was, from the beginning, under a great show of gentle-
 
 50 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Russia, then, is a recently colonized country. This is a fact 
 which should not for a moment be lost sight of. Many of her 
 peculiarities, many of her faults, private and public, come from 
 this simple fact. This partly explains a certain remnant of crude- 
 ness in so many cultured Russians; for instance, the puzzling 
 mixture of hyper-refined tastes and savage instincts, and a certain 
 superficiality in all but the mere luxury of intellectual culture and 
 civilization. " Such inconsistencies are more or less noticeable among 
 the Americans and in all ' ' new ' ' countries, where civilization, 
 being too young and hasty, still has about it something unbalanced. 
 
 Russia is a colony one or two centuries old, and at the same 
 time an empire of a thousand years." She has some affinities with 
 America and some with Turkey. This opposition alone gives 
 
 ness and moderation, Conquest, the most ruthless conquest that ever 
 Europeans perpetrated : taking possession of a continent by exterminating 
 the only landlord, the native race. The case is different where a homo- 
 geneous, compact race owns an area of land too extensive for its present use ; 
 it naturally considers it a precious safeguard for future times ; for the race 
 has vitality and it will increase and expand and cover its own land, never 
 fear. The times are gone by for offering " inducements " to foreign immi- 
 gration, and our experience with our German colony is not such as to make 
 us call for more. And do not the American States begin to look apprehen- 
 sively on the human tide that keeps rolling in across the Atlantic and 
 already take active measures to stem it ? If Russia continues unattractive 
 to emigrants, she will at least have no Chinese question to face and solved 
 such questions can never be, only cut, more or less cruelly. 
 
 8 A word concerning which it were desirable to come to a generally ac- 
 cepted mutual understanding. As commonly understood just now, it 
 appears to mean principally what house-speculators call " modern improve- 
 ments," mechanical appliances of physical science (telephones, phono- 
 graphs, electric lights) and light opera, and to have nothing whatever to 
 do with culture or the highest capacity for culture. The Khedive of Egypt, 
 Ismail Pasha, returned home an enthusiastic convert to "European civili- 
 zation," announcing his intention to introduce it in his dominions, and, 
 on his arrival at Cairo, straightway established a cafe-concert with the 
 "stars" and all belongings imported from France. 
 
 9 Scarcely an empire or even a state. These names cannot be given to 
 a loose agglomeration of principalities, held together merely by the bond 
 of race and, as regards their respective rulers, the all but fictitious one of 
 family "seniorship" and precedence. The Empire does not trace its 
 existence beyond the close of the fifteenth century, when Ivan III. assumed
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 51 
 
 the key to her national character as well as to her political situa- 
 tion. It is a country at once new and old, an ancient, half 
 Asiatic monarchy, and a young European colony ; a double-faced 
 Janus, turned westward and eastward, one face old and decrepit, 
 the other youthful, nay almost boyish. 10 
 
 This sort of duality is the principle which underlies the con- 
 trasts that strike us in Russian life everywhere contrasts so 
 frequent as to have become the rule and to justify us in saying 
 that, in Russia, contradiction might be erected into a law. Every- 
 thing has worked towards that result : the geographical situation 
 between Europe and Asia astride on the Ural ; the mixture of 
 ill-amalgamated races ; an historical past claimed by two worlds, 
 and made of violently opposed phases. This law of contrasts 
 rules everything. Hence the variety of judgments pronounced 
 on Russia, and generally so false only because showing up one 
 side alone. This law of contrasts turns up everywhere in 
 society, owing to the deep chasm that divides the higher 
 from the lower classes ; in politics and the administration ; 
 because of slight leanings towards liberalism in the laws, 
 and the stationary inertness of habit ; it shows even in the 
 individual, in his ideas, his feelings, his manner. Contrast 
 lies in both substance and form, in the man as in the nation ; 
 you discover it in time in all things ; it strikes you at the first 
 glance in the clothes, in the houses, in those wooden cities with 
 wide parallel streets, so similar to the new cities of America and 
 not unlike the stopping-places along the steamer route in the East. 
 
 This duality, which sways all the conditions of Russian life, 
 also directly influences Russia's material and political growth as 
 
 Khe double-headed eagle of Byzance, the extinct Empire of the East and the 
 title of " Caesar," Tsesar, according to the pronunciation still in use in the 
 Russian schools, whence Tsar. 
 
 10 Old, Russia never can be called on any account. Whatever of " old " 
 and even "decrepit" there may be about her, is what came to her from 
 Byzance, whose effete and doting age made her but an indifferent associate 
 and mentor to a hardy, doughty young nation in her teens.
 
 52 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 well as her moral development. At once a military monarchy 
 and a young colony, she has the weakness peculiar to both without 
 the full strength of either. Belonging to a new world, having 
 deserts to people, Russia, owing to her contact with Europe, is 
 subject to the same burdens, military and financial, that the old 
 crowded and civilized states have borne for ages. When, under 
 President Lincoln, the United States were threatened with seces- 
 sion, what they had reason to dread most was not a curtailing of 
 their territory, it was a radical change in their whole economical 
 and political existence, which would have been caused by the 
 creation of two rival powers on the same continent. 
 
 Geography has placed Russia in the very position into which 
 the secession of the South or the West would have forced the 
 United States. Isolated from Europe by an ocean, as America is, 
 she would have had a far readier and safer development ; she need 
 not then have divided her efforts between two contradictory tasks. 
 The discomforts of such a material situation are singularly in- 
 creased for Russia by moral disadvantages : she has before her 
 the tasks of both Europe and America at once, and in her inhabi- 
 tants she possesses tools inferior in quality to those of both. She 
 is like an actor who was compelled to appear on the stage before 
 he could learn his part, or to a man whose education had been 
 neglected in his childhood and who is forced to complete it in the 
 midst of the labor and strife of manhood." 
 
 The Russians are a people in the act of getting itself into 
 shape, and that from the moral as well as the material stand- 
 
 11 Russia is behindhand not from lack of gifts, but from the simple fact 
 that she is the youngest of the European family a fact of which not even 
 our best friends seem willing to give us the benefit. She can answer most 
 accusations bearing on such shortcomings in the words of Pitt when, to 
 attacks from the ministerial bench on account of his youth, he serenely 
 replied : " I plead guilty to the accusation, but it is a fault that will mend 
 itself." And it is not only unjust but cruel to assert like that, as a matter of 
 course, that the Russian people, as tools of civilization, are " of inferior quali- 
 ty." The way in which they are every day coming to the front in all branches 
 of culture, science and art both, is more eloquent than any words in defence.
 
 NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 
 
 53 
 
 point. In no respect can they, without injustice, be compared 
 with the nations of Western Europe. Towards the latter, Russia 
 stands in the position of an army just forming and still scattered, 
 who should have to face an army with full numbers and con- 
 centrated corps. She may be weak to-day before nations who, in 
 a hundred years from now, will be unable to cope with her. In 
 this respect, the Bulgarian war has not erased the impressions 
 left by the Crimean war. To this day, Russia's power is not in 
 proportion to her bulk, nor to her population. The Russians 
 know this ; but they also know that time will raise their power 
 to the level of the size of their territory.* 
 
 * See France, Russia, and Europe. Calmanu I^vy, 1888.
 
 BOOK II. 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Are the Russian People a European People ? Is there in Russia a Homo- 
 geneous Nationality? Interest Attaching to these Questions The 
 Ethnographical Museum at Moscow Causes of the Multiplicity of 
 Races on this Uniform Land Reasons why their Fusion is not yet Com- 
 pleted How it is that Ethnographical Maps can Furnish only 
 Insufficient Data. 
 
 WERE Russia a lately discovered virgin land, devoid of popu- 
 lation, or roamed over only by a few nomadic tribes, she would 
 soon offer to the world the same spectacle as the United States or 
 Australia. She would rank with those countries where civilization, 
 having left behind her the old institutions which protected her 
 infancy, opens out for herself, on a new soil, a wider and more 
 independent career. I^efl entirely to European civilization, Russia 
 would quickly have rivalled America, for according to a remark 
 made by Adam Smith as early as the eighteenth century nothing, 
 once the foundations are solidly laid, can equal the rapidly increas- 
 ing prosperity of a colony which, in a free land, is at liberty to 
 construct an entirely new building. What makes Russia's 
 inferiority is her elderly population, with its antiquated customs 
 and old traditions; it is this indigenous population which, by 
 shutting out immigration from the West, robs her of the 
 advantages of the usual marvellous growth of colonies. ' 
 
 1 Once for all, we must protest against this off-hand acceptation of 
 "Russia's inferiority" as a thing understood, not even needing proof or 
 
 54
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 55 
 
 Crudely contrasting with Western Europe, the Russian land was 
 unfit to be the cradle of European culture, but is perfectly fit to 
 receive it. Can the same be said of the different peoples that 
 occupy those vast plains? Physical conditions cannot alone 
 determine a country's fate ; in fact they can do nothing with- 
 out man, without the race that dwells there. Nature has marked 
 Russia for the seat of a great empire ; but has history placed there 
 a people capable of making a great nation ? We must ask the 
 same question about the people as about the country. Does it 
 belong to Europe or Asia ? Has it a kinship with us, giving it 
 an inborn aptitude for our civilization ? or is it an alien in the 
 European family, in blood as well as education, and condemned 
 from its birth to remain an Asiatic people under the clothes bor- 
 rowed from Europe ? 
 
 This question which the Russians, as well as their antagonists, 
 have turned in and out and from all sides with equal passion, 
 amounts to nothing more nor less than the question whether or no 
 the Russian people are capable of civilization at all. In our times, 
 ethnography and the study of races has been made in certain 
 countries to play a most untoward and equivocal part, even to 
 being deferred to in the highest instance for judgment in ques- 
 tions of nationality, which, in any case, ethnography never could 
 settle by itself. These exaggerations, prompted by self-interest, 
 must not induce us to lose out of sight the real bearing of 
 such studies. In order to know a people, a young people too, 
 
 discussion. Once for all let it be understood at last, what is so plain as to 
 "put out one's eyes," in the graphic French phrase, cela crtve les yeux, 
 that Russia is inferior in the way that the youngest of a family, who is not 
 yet out of college, is to his elderly brothers who have had the time and 
 opportunity to make their mark in the world. And it is notorious how 
 often the youngest is the most gifted ; then, adding to his own attainments 
 his elders' experience, the future is his when he survives them, as, in the 
 course of nature, he must. There is nowadays but one opinion on the 
 superior intellectual endowments of the individual Russians ; how then can 
 their country be inferior? As to the blessings of immigration, see preced- 
 ing chapter, note 7.
 
 56 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 which has had no chance as yet to manifest its own genius,' a 
 knowledge of the elements of which it is composed, of the races 
 from which it has issued, is imperative. To propound such a 
 problem with regard to Russia amounts to asking whether Peter 
 the Great could succeed in grafting Western civilization on the 
 Moscovite wilding or whether, for lack of European sap, it 
 cannot "take " on the alien trunk.' 
 
 Side by side with this question of the filiation and intrinsic 
 value of the Russian people, another arises, quite as important to 
 the philosopher as to the politician : that of the degree of cohesion 
 possible to so vast an empire. The physical unity of the land is 
 not sufficient to ensure political unity, there goes to that also the 
 material and moral union of the populations, a certain kinship of 
 blood or brain, without which national unity is impossible. Is 
 there in Russia, as in France or Italy, a compact nationality, 
 strongly cemented by history, or is it, like Turkey till very 
 lately and Austria to this day, a patchwork of heterogeneous 
 peoples, each with traditions and interests of its own ? 
 
 * Here the fact of its being " a young people," laboring under the diffi- 
 culties peculiar to youth alone, is admitted unconditionally. Is there not a 
 slight inconsistency in speaking almost in the same breath (see the first 
 paragraph) of Russia's " elderly population " as a drawback and a source of 
 " inferiority " too ? This unconscious fluctuation occurs repeatedly in the 
 present volume. 
 
 ' Why should the Western type of civilization " our civilization " be 
 the only type to be aimed at ? and indeed see a few lines higher the only 
 possible one at all, so that, as the question is plainly put, if the Russian 
 people turn out incapable or unwilling to be exactly like the French, the 
 Germans, the English, they are to be set down "incapable of civilization " 
 generally ? Why to keep up a simile which always fits Why should the 
 growing young giant's proudest ambition be to wear out his elders' old 
 clothes or buy, at a high price, ready-made ones of precisely the same cut 
 and material, though they are a manifest misfit and so much too tight 
 that at each movement of his vigorous limbs they will crack at all the 
 seams? Let him profit by their taste and experience so far as to take 
 from their apparel whatever suits his figure and conditions of life 
 and carefully modify the cut better to adapt it to both and secure free- 
 dom of movements, moreover leaving ample margin for growth and final 
 development.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 57 
 
 The Russian soil is made for unity. Nowhere do we find so 
 vast an area so thoroughly homogeneous ; at the same time, no- 
 where do we find so many different races. The contrast which 
 appears everywhere in Russia is most striking in this respect. 
 The most uniform of geographical areas is occupied by the most 
 motley human families. Races, peoples, tribes, are all tangled 
 together ad infinitum, and their diversities are brought out and 
 made conspicuous by the diversity of their modes of life, their 
 languages, their religions. Among them are found all the Chris- 
 tian confessions : Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Catholics, Protes* 
 tants, sundry sects unknown to the West ; all the beliefs of Asia 
 face to face with those of Europe ; Jews Talmudists, and Kara- 
 ites ; Mahometans Sunnites and Shiites ; Buddhists, Shamanites, 
 and heathens of all descriptions. The bare enumeration of the 
 various races encountered in European Russia is something fright- 
 ful no less than twenty ; and if no group, no smallest tribe is to 
 be overlooked, this figure would have to be doubled, nay, trebled. 
 
 We possess several ethnographical maps of Russia. One of 
 these, by Mr. Rittich, is both recent and excellent. But the 
 Russians have done more : in the DashkofF Museum, founded in 
 Moscow on occasion of the Slavic Congress in 1867, they have 
 attempted to give a presentation at once scientific and picturesque, 
 something like an animated map, of the various peoples of the 
 Empire. By means of mannikins of life-size and of waxen fig- 
 ures moulded after the exactest casts from nature, the peoples and 
 tribes of Russia have been assembled there, in all the variety of 
 their several types and garbs. On the north side of the vast hall, 
 which is laid out after the fashion of a map, next to the Tunguz, 
 the Yakut, the Buriat of Siberia, we see, in his garments of rein- 
 deer hide, the Samoyed, who recalls the Esquimau, and the 
 L,app, who puts one in mind of the Mongol. I/>wer down, to 
 the west, come the Finn peasant of Finland, and the Ehst 
 of the Baltic provinces, both of them betraying, by their flattened 
 faces, a distant kinship with the I^app and the Samoyed. On
 
 58 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the eastern side we behold representatives of other groups of the 
 Finnic race scattered over the basin of the Volga, and showing 
 features less and less European, less and less noble : Permians, 
 Votiaks, Tcheretniss, Mordvins and Tchuvash, in the midst of 
 whom a young Tatar woman from Kazan, disrobed of her veil, 
 is noticeable for her Oriental beauty. Facing this group, on the 
 western side, are the Lett, Samogitian, and Lithuanian peasants, 
 and at last the Bieloruss, i. e., the denizen of Western or White 
 Russia, square-faced, in striking contrast to a Jewish tradesman 
 and a Jewish mechanic, with their long faces and sharp, thin 
 noses. 
 
 In the middle of the hall, on a wide platform, is enthroned the 
 master of the empire, the "Velikoruss" (Great- Russian), in all 
 the variety of his different crafts and provincial costumes ; the men 
 in high top-boots, or low, slipper-like lapti, plaited of tree-bast, 
 in the red shirt or long-skirted kaftan; the women in rich saraf&ns, 
 with their diadem-shaped kokbshniks. Below the ' ' Velikoruss ' ' 
 comes the " Malor6ss " (Little- Russian), with more refined 
 features, garments of more elegant cut and material ; the men 
 wear high sheepskin caps, the girls flowers interlaced with rib- 
 bons. Behind the Little-Russians appear the Poles, then, from 
 west to east, all the numerous tribes of the south of the empire : 
 a Moldavian couple from Bessarabia, a murza or Tatar prince 
 from the Crimea, with his neighbor, a Tsigan (gypsy) beggar, a 
 Karaite bride, a daughter of one of those Jews, enemies of 
 the others, who pretend to be descended from the ten tribes trans- 
 ported by Nebuchadnezzar, lastly two German colonists from 
 New Russia or the Lower Volga, as different from the Russians to 
 this day, in type and garb, as on the day of their immigration. 
 
 In the southwestern portion of the hall we are met by the 
 Mussulman and Buddhist tribes of the oriental steppes, with their 
 Asiatic features and resplendent costumes : the Kirghiz with his 
 tall, pointed cap, Kalmyks from the governments of Stavr6pol 
 and Astrakhan, with narrow-slit eyes, yellow-skinned, wearing
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 59 
 
 the beshmet of silk or velvet in the tenderest colors. Next to 
 these a Bashkir woman from Orenburg or Ufa, in her red cloth 
 robe khal&t and head-dress fringed with coins. In the extreme 
 south we greet the tribes of the Caucasus, the handsomest in the 
 world as to features, the most elegant as to dress. Here an Armen- 
 ian merchant in plain black kaf&n ; further a Tcherkess (Circas- 
 sian) in crimson morocco shoes, his kaft&n bristling with cartridge 
 pockets on the breast, and the camel's-hair bashllk slung round 
 his neck ; next, a Gruzin (Georgian) with lapti woven of leather 
 straps, the arkhalouk* and the tchokka or surcoat with the long em- 
 broidered sleeves, open in front ; a Mingrelian woman in a gown 
 of light-blue silk and the long veil of transparent muslin, and a 
 Kurd woman from the banks of the Araxus, in her silken tunic and 
 wide crimson satin trousers, a ring passed through her nose ; the 
 Armenian woman in a green robe khal&t, wrapt up in one of 
 those immense veils which the women of the Caucasus enshroud 
 themselves in to walk abroad ; the Gruzinka (Georgian woman) 
 in a black satin petticoat with lavender bodice, and a band of 
 brocade round her head, dances as she brandishes a tambourine. 
 At the farthest end of the great hall, in a dark niche, a group of 
 half-naked Ghebers from Baku, the last survivors of the sect, wor- 
 ship the sacred fire. 
 
 The impression produced by this museum, where one single 
 state exhibits so many human types, a plain ethnographical map 
 would not produce in the same degree. The colors hardly have 
 shadings enough to spare one to each tribe ; by their motley color- 
 ing, as by the puzzling intricacy of their lines they recall the 
 geological maps of countries of the most complicated formations. 
 It seems, at the first glance, as though in this country, where land 
 and inanimate nature show such unity, all is confusion in the races 
 of men. 
 
 4 A sort of close-fitting doublet, with short but rather ample, gathered 
 skirts. A becoming and comfortable garment, often worn, of soft quilted 
 silk, by gentlemen as home costume.
 
 60 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 The configuration of the Russian soil accounts for this quan- 
 tity and diversity of races, apparently so little in harmony with it. 
 Having no well-defined boundary line either to the east or west, 
 Russia has always stood wide open to all invasions ; she was the 
 highway of all the migrations from Asia into Europe. Nowhere 
 have the strata of human alluvions been more numerous, nowhere 
 more mixed, more broken and disjointed, than on this smooth, 
 flat bed where each wave, as it was pressed upon and pushed on 
 from the rear by the following one, met no obstacle ahead, save in 
 the wave that had preceded it. Even as recently as in historical 
 times, it were hard to enumerate the people that have settled 
 on Russian land and established there more or less lasting empires 
 Scyth, Sarmatian, Goth, Avar, Bulgar, Ongre or Hungarian, 
 Khazar, Petchen&g, Lithuanian, Mongol, Tatar, to say nothing 
 of the migrations of the Celts and Teutons of old, and others, 
 whose very name has perished, but who, obscure as they were, 
 may have left in the population a trace, undiscoverable at this day. 
 
 If the configuration of the country left Russia open to invasion, 
 the structure of the soil made it impossible to the invaders to 
 settle down on it in organized nations, independent of one another. 
 The multiplicity of races and tribes is not the consequence of a 
 slow working of physical causes, but an historical heirloom. Set- 
 ting aside the icy fields of the north, where none but hunting 
 tribes can exist, also the sandy and salt steppes of the southeast, 
 impracticable to any but pastoral nomads, this complexity of races 
 and tribes, far from being a result of their adaptation to the soil, 
 far from being in harmony with their physical surroundings, is in 
 direct opposition to it. The natural tendency of the land was not 
 to diversify and break up races, but to bring them together to 
 unity. To all these different peoples the country refused the 
 comfort of boundaries within which they might have intrenched 
 themselves, formed groups, led an isolated existence. 
 
 In the immense quadrilateral comprised between the Glacial 
 Ocean and the Black Sea, the Baltic and the Ural, there is not a
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 6 1 
 
 mountain, not one of the things that divide, that apportion. On 
 this even surface the various races have been left to scatter appar- 
 ently at random, not unlike the waters, which find no ridge or shed 
 to separate from, no banks to contain them. Even when diversity 
 of customs, religion, language, precluded their mixing, they were 
 compelled to live side by side, to cross, to interpenetrate one 
 another in every possible way, just as rivers empty themselves into 
 one and the same bed and, at their confluent, roll their waters in 
 the same current without ever confounding them. Thus it is, 
 that, being scattered yet contiguous, frequently wedged into one 
 another, the peoples and tribes of Russia have not been able to 
 attain full national individuality. Exhausted in the act of spread- 
 ing over too great expanses, or thinned down to the merest frag- 
 ments, broken up into bits, one might say, all these races have 
 easily allowed themselves to be gathered under one rule, and once 
 so gathered, were more rapidly unified and merged into one 
 another. From this fusion, begun centuries ago, under the sway 
 of Christianity and Moscovite sovereignty, sprang the Russian 
 people, this mass of sixty-five to seventy millions of men, which, 
 compared to the other populations, assumes the appearance of a 
 sea eating away its own shores, a sea strewed with islets that 
 crumble away in its midst. 
 
 This people that calls itself Russian, what is its filiation?. 
 Occupying, as it does, the centre of the empire, environed by the 
 various races which it has pushed towards the extremities, it still 
 contains numerous Finn and Tatar patches, persistent witnesses 
 to the extent of the area once upon a time covered by similar 
 tribes. In their ethnographic maps, the Russians represent the 
 various populations in conformity to their local distribution at the 
 present day. An external sign language is taken for a stand- 
 ard, and all are accounted Russian or Slav who speak the Russian 
 tongue. No classifying method can be simpler ; only it should 
 not be forgotten that such a classification proves nothing as to the 
 origin of a people, and that, in the matter of race, language is of
 
 62 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 all signs the most deceptive. In order to adopt the Russian 
 speech, Finn or Tatar tribes, in the act of " r ossification," do not 
 infuse into their veins Slavic blood, any more than the Celts or the 
 Gauls or the Iberians of Spain borrowed Latin blood along with 
 Latin speech. From the point of view of ethnographic gene- 
 alogy, these maps, based exclusively on language, bring data, not 
 results. For a research of this sort, it is necessary to collect far 
 more complex elements ; before we turn to philology, we should 
 consult anthropology, /'. <?., the physical constitution, the features, 
 nay, the structure of the skeleton of each given type of the inhabi- 
 tants, all that they have inherited directly from their remotest 
 ancestors ; and, unfortunately, types are not to be numbered and 
 classified with the same precision as languages and religions. 
 
 However, what matters most in an attempt to determine the 
 place belonging to the Russians amidst the human family, is not 
 so much the actual distribution of the various races, as the com- 
 position of the Russian nationality, which tends to swallow up all 
 the others. What part in the formation of this people had the 
 various elements of which, in and around it, we still behold the 
 scattered traces ? And to propound the main question, as it is 
 so often propounded by Russia's foes is the Russian people at 
 bottom European or Asiatic ? Is it Slav, brother and neighbor 
 of the Latin and the Teuton, and, by force of the same blood, 
 called to analogous civilization? or is it Turanian (Tatar or 
 Mongol), fated by its constitution never to take more than the 
 forms of a culture alien to its race ? If this problem has received 
 the most contradictory solutions, the reason lies in the fact that 
 it has been debated by passion, by grudge, by national pride, 
 more than by study and observation.
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Three Chief Ethnic Elements of Russia The Finns Are they an 
 Element that Has no Parallel in Western Europe? Diversity and 
 Isolation of such Finn Groups as Still Survive Their Part in the 
 Formation of the Russian People The Russian Type and the Finn 
 Stamp Is this Relationship a Cause of Inferiority for Russia? 
 Capacity of the Finns for Civilization. 
 
 OUT of the apparent chaos of Russian ethnology three main 
 elements Finn, Tatar, Slav clearly emerge, the last having 
 by this time in a great measure absorbed the other two. Setting 
 aside the three or four millions of Jews in the West, the eight or 
 nine hundred thousand Rumanians in Bessarabia, and one million 
 at least of Germans, scattered from north to south, setting aside 
 also the Kalmyks of the steppe of the Lower Volga ; the Tchet- 
 chens, the Lezghians, the Armenians, and the entire Babel of 
 the Caucasus, all the peoples or tribes that have invaded Russia 
 in the past, all those that inhabit her to-day, can be traced to one 
 of these three races. As far back as we may pursue history, 
 representatives of each of these three groups are found, under one 
 name or another, on Russian soil, and their fusion is not even yet 
 so complete as to conceal from sight the distinctive traits of each, 
 or the area on which they respectively held their sway. 
 
 The Finn or Tchud race * seems to have in olden times occu- 
 pied the greater part of the territory we nowadays call Russia. 
 
 * Tchud, following the Slav etymology, would mean "monsters, won- 
 ders," or "strangers." The name may possibly contain an allusion to the 
 "wonders" done by sorcerers, who enjoyed great renown everywhere 
 among the Finns. 
 
 63
 
 64 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 It is manifestly not of Aryan or Indo-European stock, from which, 
 jointly with the Celts and the Latins, the Germans and the Slavs, 
 most peoples of Europe have sprung. Ethnological classifications 
 generally place the Finns in a more or less extensive group, 
 labelled "Turanian, Allophyl, Mongolian, Mongoloid," all more 
 or less correct designations of a frame with wavering outline, 
 which at times recalls a sort of ' ' what-not ' ' into which philolo- 
 gists and anthropologists cast any people of Europe or Asia they 
 did not succeed in classing with either the Aryans or the Semites. 
 Within the too extensive group which, from the Pacific to Hun- 
 gary, comprises so many human families, the Finns mostly are 
 connected with a branch known under the name of Uralo- Altaic, 
 because the space between the mountain chains of the Ural and 
 the Altai seems to have been the starting-point of the peoples 
 belonging to this family. The Mongols proper, together with 
 the Tatars, are usually placed side by side in this Uralo-Altaic 
 group, which, on the contrary, rejects the Chinese and the nations 
 of Eastern Asia. This classification appears best to fit the facts ; 
 only it is to be noted that, regarding the two sciences on which 
 are based all ethnographic studies, philology and anthropology, 
 this group is far from offering the same homogeneousness as 
 the Aryan and Semitic groups. The relationship between its 
 different branches is far less obvious, less intimate, than that 
 between I,atin and German, and appears far more remote than 
 that between the Brahman or the Gheber of India, and the Celt 
 of Scotland or Bretagne ; at bottom it is hardly closer than be- 
 tween the Indo-European and the Semite. 
 
 From the philological point of view, the Uralo- Altaic or Tura- 
 nian race is distinguished by agglutinative languages, i. e. , such 
 as form their declensions and conjugations by mere juxtaposi- 
 tion instead of combining and merging into one another the root 
 and the desinences until they are unrecognizable, as in our 
 flexional languages. These agglutinative languages which, Max 
 Miiller tells us, characterize nomadic peoples, always compelled
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 65 
 
 by their roaming life to guard against any alteration of the words, 
 do not show such intimate mutual relations as do the Aryan or 
 Semitic idioms, a fact the more remarkable, that, owing to the 
 absence of flexion, they would seem to be less susceptible of cor- 
 ruptions and variations. Their relationship, instead of showing 
 at once in the unity of roots and in the concordance of grammati- 
 cal forms, is limited to similarities in structure and syntactical 
 proceedings, so that the filiation between them is more doubtful, 
 more difiicult to trace. 
 
 From the anthropological point of view, the unity of this vast 
 group is possibly still less firmly established, the affinity still 
 looser. The external, superficial characteristics by which other 
 races are easily known the color of the skin, the eyes, the hair, 
 are unreliable guides on this ground, and separate many Finn 
 tribes. The anatomical characteristics are the only ones that can 
 apply to all the branches of the Uralo- Altaic trunk ; and even 
 those, essential ones too, vary greatly in some Finn tribes. The 
 most important ones are supplied by the shape of the head, and 
 of these the most general and persistent one is the flattening of 
 the face and the high cheek-bones. And yet, within the Finn 
 family alone, these Mongolian survivals are found in very different 
 degrees striking and well-defined in some tribes, the I^apps, for 
 instance, very much weakened and modified in others, especially 
 the Finns of Finland. 
 
 It is to be noted that these craniological characteristics as well 
 as others, even less favorable, as a certain prognatism or promi- 
 nence of the jaws, have been encountered in many of the old 
 populations of Europe, whose traces have lately been discovered 
 by prehistoric archaeology. Most human tribes of the unpolished 
 stone age and especially of the quaternary epoch, the remnants 
 of which have been unearthed in the caves of Western Europe, 
 appear to have belonged to these Mongolian races among which 
 the Finns are classed, or to neighboring races. These primitive 
 
 tribes appear to have occupied all of the north and centre of 
 
 s
 
 66 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Europe, previous to the coming of the first Aryan immigrants. It 
 is not in subterranean caves alone, amidst the remains of the 
 mammals belonging to the geological period immediately preced- 
 ing our own, that these extinct races have left vestiges of their 
 passage ; they can be traced even in the features of those European 
 populations who have taken their place. Covered over by later 
 invasions, and buried under successive strata of Aryan alluvions, 
 these old inhabitants of Europe are no longer visible to the 
 vulgar ; the anthropologist alone at times fancies he can detect 
 survivals of those primeval Europeans on contemporary faces, in 
 the midst of the most civilized countries.* 
 
 Instead of being exclusively Asiatic, the Turanian element 
 and some other, analogous ones, may possibly have played in 
 Western Europe a part at once ethnological and historical ; they 
 may have furnished the bottom layer, the substratum, vanished 
 long ago, of the peoples of Central Europe. A few scientists have 
 gone so far as to consider the Finns of the northwest of Russia as 
 a survival of those quaternary tribes who, driven from the centre 
 of Europe by Indo-European invaders, would naturally have sought 
 shelter on the shore of the Baltic, in the lowlands but recently 
 emerged out of its waters. It is more probable that the Russian 
 Finns, instead of having sprung directly from those prehistoric peo- 
 ples, to whom they appear, on the whole, to be vastly superior, are 
 but very remotely related to them, and have themselves descended 
 from the Ural at a comparatively late period. Whatever the date 
 of their migration, they may be considered as established in 
 Europe at least as far back as the oldest Aryan populations. 
 Settled in Europe at a time as remote as any one of our European 
 families, with as much claim as any to the name of " autochthons" 
 or "aborigines," the Finns, later on, took a considerable part in 
 
 * On this subject we can refer the reader to La Race ffrusstenne, by 
 M. de Quatrefages, although this scientist appears to have greatly exagger- 
 ated the inferiority of the Finn race, and to have, in dealing with Prussia, 
 magnified beyond measure the part belonging to the Finn element, at the 
 expense of the Slav and Teutonic elements.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 6/ 
 
 the invasions that brought on the end of the Roman Empire. 
 The most terrible of the Barbarians, the Huns, appear to have 
 been of Finn extraction, as likewise the Avars, the Bulgars, and 
 the Hungars the latter being the only contemporary nation 
 sprung directly from this stock. 
 
 How much should be credited to the Finn family in the forma- 
 tion of the Russian people, and what physical and moral aptitudes 
 has it bequeathed to them ? Slowly repulsed or swallowed up by 
 rival races, the Finns, in their submersion, have left here and 
 there, scattered over Russia, islets which bear witness to their 
 former widespread presence, such as mounds of ancient make in 
 a plain whence the waters have washed away the primeval soil, 
 and covered everything with their alluvions. The Finn groups 
 dispersed in the empire differ singularly in degree of culture, in 
 religion as well as in languages and dialects. They number but a 
 few millions of souls, yet, as regards all the elements of civilization, 
 they exhibit more diversity than the great I^atin or Teutonic 
 families. Their relationship has been established by anthropolo- 
 gists and philologists ; it has long escaped the ken of those inter- 
 ested in the question, who never achieved a common national 
 consciousness and have remained towards one another in a moral 
 isolation as complete as their geographical isolation. 
 
 The Finn race, outside of Hungary, is almost entirely com- 
 prised within European Russia, where it numbers five or six 
 millions, divided into a dozen different tribes, classed into three 
 or four families.* There is first, in the north, the Ugrian family, 
 the only one that still has representatives in Asia. It comprises 
 only two small tribes, of a few thousand souls each, leading very 
 nearly the same life as the Samoyeds, like them Christians in 
 name and Shamanites in fact ; the Ostiaks, in Western Siberia ; 
 
 * All these tribes have, since the Finn scholar Castren, been the subject 
 of numerous studies : ethnological, statistical, philological, even juridical, on 
 the part of both Russian and Finn students, Ahlquist, Mainof, Rittich, 
 Kuznetsdf, Laptef, Florinsky, Popof, Maximof, Yefime'nko, etc., to whose 
 number should be added Ujfalvy, adopted by France for her own.
 
 68 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the Voguls in the northern part of the Ural. But to this family, 
 which includes the most miserable Finn tribes, is allied the only 
 Finn people that ever played a part in Europe and attained a 
 high degree of civilization the Magyars of Hungary. In the 
 northeast comes the Biarmian branch, numbering from three to four 
 hundred thousand souls, decreasing with every year, however, as 
 the}' are rapidly getting russified, and unevenly distributed among 
 the tribes of the Permians in the basin of the Kama, that of the 
 Votiaks on the Viatka, of the Zyrians on the Dvina and Petchora, 
 all three orthodox, the two former addicted to agriculture, the 
 third to hunting and trade. I/>wer down comes the family of the 
 Volga, with the Finns of the south, more or less crossed with 
 Tatar elements. To this group belong the three most important 
 Finn tribes of Russia proper : the Tcheremiss who, about two 
 hundred and fifty thousand in number, dwell along the left bank 
 of the Volga, around the government of Kazan ; the Mordvins, 
 who, subdivided into several branches, number near on a million 
 souls, in the very heart of Russia, between the Volga and the 
 Oka, in the governments of Nijni-N6vgorod, Penza, Simbirsk, 
 Tamb6f, Sardtof ; the Tchuvash, rather numerous, scattered along 
 the banks of the Volga, the ancient territory of the Tatars of 
 Kazan, whose language they have adopted.* Lastly, in the 
 northwest, we have the Finn family proper, whose principal 
 representatives are the Finns of Finland, subdivided into two or 
 three tribes the Suomi, as they call themselves, about the only 
 ones that have a national feeling, the love of their mother-land, 
 a history, a literature ; also the only ones who are tolerably sure 
 to escape the slow absorption that is making an end of all their 
 kindred races. They make up five sixths of the population in the 
 Grand Duchy of Finland, but a population almost entirely rural, 
 as the Swedish element, much mixed with German and Russian, 
 
 * All these Finn tribes have long been mistaken by foreigners for 
 Tatars. The travellers of olden times thus helped to strengthen the fiction 
 about the Russians being of Tatar origin.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 69 
 
 is invariably predominant in the towns. Over and above the 
 1,800,000 odd they number in Finland, the Suomi come in for about 
 250,000 more in the population of the adjacent Russian govern- 
 ments. 
 
 St. Petersburgh, sooth to say, is built in the midst of a Finn 
 land ; the immediate surroundings only are russified, and quite 
 recently too. Scarcely half a century ago, Russian was not under- 
 stood in the villages at the very gates of the capital, even nowadays 
 the latter is surrounded with fragments of Finn tribes. In the 
 northwest, the Suomi of Finland stretch down nearly to its suburbs ; 
 in the west, where the great lakes are, the Karels and the Veses, 
 who appear to have for a long time occupied a vast territory; 
 in the southwest, nine hundred thousand Ehsts (Esthonians), 
 who, having been, through four or five hundred years, 
 subject to the rule of German lords, have resisted germani- 
 zation in Esthonia and Northern Livonia.* To the same Finn 
 branch belong the Livs, a tribe very nearly extinct, which has be- 
 queathed its name to Livonia, and which, being pressed upon by 
 both Letts and Germans, holds only a narrow strip of land along 
 the sea, at the northern point of Curland. To the same branch 
 belongs lastly the Lapp tribe the very ugliest, morally the least 
 developed, of all its kindred, the only one, perhaps, that has pre- 
 served the original, primeval features and mode of life of the parent 
 stock. It appears that the Lapps at one time owned the whole of 
 Finland, before they were cornered by the Suomi into the hyperbo- 
 rean regions to which they are to this day confined. On the other 
 side of the White Sea, a small tribe which also once covered a 
 far more extensive area, the Samoyeds, get shoved about a good 
 deal, being numbered now among the Finns, now among the 
 Mongols. At another extremity of the vast area covered by the 
 
 *According to Mr. Rittich, the Germans in the population of the three 
 Baltic provinces (Esthonia, Livonia, and Curland) would count only for 
 something less than y^, the Finns for ffij, the Letto-Lithuanians for -j^y, 
 the balance consisting of Russians, Poles, Swedes, and Jews.
 
 7O THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Tchuds, another tribe, much more considerable by its numbers, 
 is also placed on the confine of two ethnic groups : the Bashkirs, 
 one million strong, dwell on the slopes of the Ural ; they have 
 been pronounced alternately to be Finns and Tatars ; in reality 
 they are Mussulmans and speak a Tatar language. 
 
 Thus minutely is this race subdivided, a race whose mem- 
 bers profess every religion, from Shamanism to Islam, from the 
 Greek Orthodox faith to I^utheranism ; who are nomads, like 
 the Lapp and Ostiak ; pastoral, like the Bashkir ; farmers, like 
 the Ehst or Finn ; a race that has assumed the worship and at 
 times the language of one and the other, everywhere ruled by 
 people of different extraction, russified after having been partly 
 tatarized, 1 so that every influence has contributed to break it up 
 
 1 Why not mention the gennanization, systematic and aggressive, to 
 which the Ehsts and I^etts are subjected in the Baltic provinces, where they 
 make out fully three quarters of the population ? Russification is nowhere 
 intentional, much less compulsory, beyond demanding a reasonable com- 
 prehension of the language of the empire, and the passing of a very easy- 
 grade examination from persons filling or desiring to fill official positions. 
 The rest accomplishes itself naturally, by inevitable influences, community 
 of interests, of social and political conditions, intercourse, and, in a very 
 moderate proportion, mixing of blood. The German aristocracy and 
 bourgeoisie, notwithstanding their extremely small numbers (-j^ ; see 
 author's note on p. 69), have undertaken to germanize the provinces, 
 and not only did they admit no language but German in private schools, 
 refusing to send their children to the "gymnasiums" (public schools), 
 colleges, special schools, etc., provided by the government, or to speak 
 to the "natives" their own language, or even learn to understand it ; not 
 only was the same proceeding applied to the Lutheran churches, attend- 
 ance in which was made virtually compulsory by the wealthy and powerful 
 noble German landlords ; but when the government, for reasons of states- 
 manship too obvious to need defence, decreed that business in the public 
 government offices and courts of justice, police, etc., should be transacted 
 in Russian and that the Russian language should be taught in schools, not 
 to the exclusion of, but side by side with, German, also that the railway con- 
 ductors and other public servants should, not necessarily be Russians, but 
 understand and speak Russian, the discontent of the -fa Germans was not only 
 loudly voiced but vented in open, active opposition, while the foreign press 
 was played off to such good purpose that philanthropic Europe soon raised the 
 usual hue and cry of "tyranny," "oppression," "barbarism," with which 
 she greeted the simplest measures of national unity and safety in Russian 
 Poland, though she had never seen anything amiss in Prussia's well-known
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. Jl 
 
 into insignificant fragments. Although equal in numbers to their 
 Hungarian brethren, the Finns of the Russian Empire are far 
 from laying claim to an equal political weight. 
 
 If we but consider the distribution of the Finn tribes from the 
 Ural and the great elbow formed by the Volga to the Neva, we 
 shall find that the principality of Moscow and the surrounding 
 appanages were comprised within the former territory of the 
 Tchuds. Their diffusion will appear greater still if we note the 
 geographical names ; for, in many a region now thoroughly Rus- 
 sian, the names of places, villages, rivers, have remained Finnic. 
 Moscow, as Petersburgh after and N6vgorod before her, was built 
 on land that was Tchud to the core. The same can be said of 
 Suzdal, Vladimir, Tver, Riazdn of all the capitals where resided 
 the kniazes (princes) of the Great-Russians. In the face of such 
 facts, is it not allowable, in all the centre and north, to look on 
 the old Finn blood as one of the elements that enter into the 
 constitution of the young Russian nation ? " 
 
 It is not only on history and ethnographic maps that this 
 induction is based ; it is also justified by the features of the peo- 
 ple. But for this indelible stamp, it might remain an open ques- 
 tion whether the colonists who brought the Slavic language into 
 Russia, mingled with the natives, or, like the Anglo-Saxons in 
 America, simply pushed them aside to take their place. An atten- 
 tive investigation shows that both phenomena took place and that, 
 too, simultaneously. The actual distribution of their tribes leads 
 to the conclusion that the Finns really were pressed upon on two 
 sides by the Slavs pushed in the west towards the Baltic, in the 
 east towards the Ural and the middle course of the Volga. 
 Anthropology nevertheless proves that there has been a mingling 
 
 iron methods of " germanizing " her own " Polish provinces," as also, later 
 on, Alsace-Lorraine. 
 
 2 This is not the case quite to the extent supposed by Mr. Beaulieu, 
 owing to the extreme scarcity of marriages, or even love passages, between 
 members of different races among the lower classes, the only ones that, 
 making the bulk of the population, count in such matters. This note 
 should be borne in mind through the following pages.
 
 72 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 of races, of which many a Russian face still bears the imprint. 
 The way in which the Slavic element at the present day absorbs 
 the Finn groups under our very eyes helps us understand the 
 past. The russification of the contemporary Finns, their geo- 
 graphical distribution, the imprint left by them on the Russian feat- 
 ures, these are the three proofs in favor of this secular crossing ; 
 the two former appeal to the mind, the latter is patent to the eye. 
 
 The Finn tribes of Russia differ considerably among them- 
 selves in physical characteristics as well as in their respective 
 degrees of culture. A few, such as the Lapps and the Tchu- 
 vash, show a strongly marked Mongolian type. Others the 
 more important ones, such as the Suomi of Finland and the Ehsts, 
 owing to the influence of their surroundings or of alliances the 
 trace of which is lost, show nobler features, more nearly akin to 
 the Caucasian type than to the Mongolian. Still, all these groups 
 retain certain characteristics which have not entirely disappeared 
 even among the Magyars, the people which, having mingled most 
 with Europe, has undergone the greatest modification. The 
 structure of the skeleton is less robust than that of the Aryans and 
 Semites, the legs are shorter and leaner. The head is mostly round, 
 short, little developed in the back, in a word brachycephalous, 
 like the heads of one of the chief geological races of Europe, now 
 extinct. The face is generally flat, with high cheek-bones ; the 
 eyes are small ; the nose wide ; the mouth large, thick-lipped. 
 These peculiarities are frequently encountered among Russians of 
 all classes, but most among the peasants and especially among 
 women, who everywhere retain more tenaciously the ethnical 
 stamp. 
 
 When confronted by such marks of kindred between this semi- 
 prehistoric race and the most mighty in numbers of European 
 nations, the observer inquires what genius, capacities, aptitude for 
 civilization, we can credit the Finns with. Is it true that kinship 
 with them must be to the Russians an irremediable cause of infe- 
 riority ? That may be doubted. Hampered by their isolation and 
 their disruption into infinitesimal fractions, also by the thankless
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 73 
 
 quality of the lands to which they are confined, the Finns never 
 had a chance of achieving original development. As though in 
 compensation for this disadvantage, they have everywhere shown 
 a singular facility to assimilate with the more advanced races 
 whenever they have come in contact with them. It is with them 
 as with the country which contains most of their remains, as with 
 the Russian soil : they readily yield to a civilization which could 
 not have originated with them ; if they do not, by blood, belong 
 to Europe, they are quite willing to be annexed by her. The 
 greater part have long been Christians, at least in name, and it is 
 Christianity which, more than anything else, has prepared their 
 fusion with the Slavs, their incorporation into European civiliza- 
 tion. From Hungary to the Baltic and to the Volga, the Finns 
 have embraced with equal facility the three principal historical 
 forms of Christianity ; the latest, Protestantism, thrives better in 
 their tribes in Finland and Esthonia than among the Celtic, 
 Iberian, and Latin peoples. 
 
 If we would look to language for the clearest test of a race's 
 intelligence, we must admit that certain Finns the Suomi of Fin- 
 land and the Magyars of Hungary have carried their aggluti- 
 native languages to such perfection as enables them, for power, 
 richness, and harmony, to bear comparison with the most complete 
 of our flexional languages. They have an innate taste for music 
 and poetry, a taste the embryonic beginnings of which are per- 
 ceptible among the most barbarous of their nomadic tribes, and 
 which has endowed Finland with a treasury of popular literature, 
 an entire cycle of indigenous poetry, an epos which the most 
 advanced nations of the West would feet honored to own.* To 
 
 * The Kalevala, a collection of popular rhapsodies, connected and put 
 into shape by the Finn scholar I/onnrot, and translated into French by 
 Mr. Leouzon I,educ, with the assistance of Lonnrot himself (editions of 
 1845, 1867, i879). 3 
 
 3 While mentioning the French translator of the Kalevala, the name 
 of Anton Schiefner should not be ignored, a prominent member of the 
 Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg, a scholar of 
 colossal Turanian erudition, who edited most of Castren's works and left a 
 most scholarly German translation of the Finns' national epic.
 
 74 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 these qualities of heart and mind they add others that do credit 
 to their intellect and character. If so be that the Finns are akin 
 to the Mongols and other peoples of the extreme East, they can 
 lay claim to the virtues of those Asiatic races, which, wherever 
 they are engaged in strife with ours, stand the competition so 
 well ; they have the same fortitude, patience, perseverance. That 
 may be the reason why, in all countries where their influence 
 can be traced, they seem to have left behind them a leaven com- 
 pounded of singular power of resistance and singular vitality. 
 
 These qualities have most brilliantly manifested themselves 
 in the Magyars, who, in spite of their scant numbers, have held 
 their own against Germans, Slavs, and Turks ; the same qualities 
 are thought to belong to the Bulgars, the most industrious, the 
 most patient, among the Christian peoples of ancient Turkey. 
 And if (as M. de Quatrefages asserts and Virchow denies) if the 
 Finn element has really played an important part in Old Prussia, 
 Modern Prussia possibly is indebted to them for some of the 
 vigor and tenacity of purpose which have made her fortune.* In 
 Russia itself the Finns, far from being inferior to the Russians, 
 at times show a real superiority over them. If nothing can be 
 meaner than a Tchuvash hut on the Volga, with its roof of bark 
 and its single window, the wooden houses of the peasants in Fin- 
 land are more roomy, more commodious, than the izbas of many 
 Russian mujiks.* Settled on a more thankless land, on a granitic 
 soil which seldom insures their daily food, they work harder and 
 are more saving. They have earned a reputation for honesty and 
 uprightness. Only, it is rather difficult to make out whether this 
 
 * As regards the Bulgars, there is hardly room for doubt, although a 
 Russian scholar, carried away by a retrospective Slavophil patriotism, Mr. 
 Ilovayski undertook to demonstrate that the Bulgars are Slavs, pure of all 
 Uralo-Finn admixture. 
 
 * Constructed, however, on precisely the same plan, with identical inte- 
 rior disposition and furnishings : the immense brick stove, faced with tiles 
 in the better class of houses, containing the deep, wide-mouthed, vaulted 
 oven ; the massive wooden benches running round the sides of the room, 
 and the ponderous family table built into the floor.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 75 
 
 moral superiority of the Western Finns should be attributed to 
 the difference of race, or to the difference of religion, or merely to 
 a more ancient and wider -use of liberty. The fact remains, any- 
 how, that an Kuropean traveller, finding himself in the midst of 
 Finn peasants, with smooth-shaved chins and short coats, gene- 
 rally feels more at home with them than with Russian peasants, 
 nearer to him in blood though the latter may be. 
 
 The Finns of Finland have been favored of history. The 
 long and mild rule of Sweden initiated them to the civilization of 
 the West and civil liberty.* From a political point of view the 
 Finlander, to whom, under Alexander II. of Russia, was restored 
 his archaic constitution and his Diet composed of four orders, f is 
 the most advanced of the peoples subject to the empire. Their 
 neighbors and brethren, in religion as well as race, the Bhsts, hav- 
 ing, until the beginning of this century, held the position of serfs 
 to German lords, were less fortunate. Nevertheless they too have, 
 at Revel and Dorpat, their own press and a national literature ; 
 they too show themselves, in certain respects, superior to the 
 Russian peasants. They are more patient and hardworking, and 
 have been invited to settle on the estates of several Russian land- 
 lords, very profitably for the latter. Such Ehst colonies can be 
 met with in the governments of St. Petersburgh and Pskof and 
 even as far as Crimea. And lastly, should we wish to realize 
 what contact with Aryans, and more especially Slavs, can make 
 of peoples of Finnic extraction, as regards beauty of body and 
 
 * The Grand Duchy of Finland is less a Russian province than an 
 annexed state, and the tsars have wisely respected its autonomy. Finland 
 has preserved her own laws and institutions. In certain respects the trans- 
 fer under Russian rule has been all gain to the Finns of Finland. The 
 Russian monarchs ennobled the Finnish language, which before was spoken 
 only by country people, by raising it to the rank of official language on a 
 par with the Swedish language, which still is that of a portion of the 
 littoral, the principal cities, and the higher classes of society. See further 
 on, p. 134. 
 
 t Nobility, clergy, town-burghers, peasants, after the old Swedish 
 constitution.
 
 j6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 vigor of mind,' we have only to look at the Magyars, one of the 
 handsomest, as well as most energetic races of Europe. If there 
 is any inferiority, it is certainly not from a political, nor from a 
 military standpoint, for the Magyars have, at all times, been one 
 of the most warlike nations of Europe, and through all their 
 revolutions, have been truer to free institutions than most Aryan 
 nations, be they Slav, Latin, or German. 
 
 * Here at last Mr. Beaulieu gives us the real gist of the matter, which 
 he had somehow missed through the preceding pages : the influence is not 
 from Finn to Slav, but the other way. Such is ever the relation between 
 Turanian and Indo-European. To be entirely just, however, the very real 
 superiority of the Finns of Finland, while certainly not an intrinsic racial 
 one, as is more than hinted above, p. 75, is not so much due to Slavic influ- 
 ences as to Swedish ones. As to the Magyars, they owe their aryanization 
 to vicinity and actual cohabitation with Slavs in the same wide lands. 
 The Kalevala is full of descriptions of simple rural life, and it is astonish- 
 ing how many, even to minute details, might just as well apply to Russian 
 or Swedish peasant life. The same may be said of many of the customs 
 therein pictured. This goes far to corroborate the latest theories on the 
 original unity or extremely close affinity of the " primeval Teutonic " 
 (Ur-deutsck) and "primeval Slavic" (Ur-slaviscK) stocks, since it is 
 undoubtedly from these two elements that the Turanian Finn, from the 
 first, absorbed those of his own social and national organization.
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Tatar or Turk Element Tatars and Mongols The Kalmyks What 
 is the Proportion of Tatar Blood in the Russians? The Tatars in 
 Russia and the Arabs in Spain Slow Elimination of the Tatar Ele- 
 ment Ethnical Influence of the Turk Tribes Previous to the Mongol 
 Invasion Varieties of Type amidst the Modern Tatars Their Customs 
 and Character. 
 
 THE second of the great fountain-heads from which the 
 Russian people might be said to have flowed the one most pecul- 
 iar to Russia, more decidedly Asiatic, has received from habit the 
 name of " Tatar." Never did more misleading designation steal 
 into history, philology, ethnography. At its first appearance in 
 Russia this name was borne by one of the Mongol tribes who 
 helped found the empire of Djinghiz-Khan. In her terror of 
 these new barbarians, who seemed to her the outcome of hell, 
 Europe (it was in the thirteenth century) dubbed them "Tartars,'* 
 and this name, suggested by a classical reminiscence, was ex- 
 tended to all the heterogeneous crowd of peoples dragged along 
 after the savage conquerors. As to the old name, "Mongols," 
 the tribes to which it belonged by right were robbed of it, and 
 it came to designate that branch of the Uralo- Altaic stock, of 
 which Turkestan was the starting-point, and of which the Turks 
 are the chief representatives. The Tatars who stayed on the 
 banks of the Volga are nearly related to the Turks, or rather they 
 are Turks, just as the Ottomans, both risen from the same cradle, 
 both speaking dialects of the same language ; all the difference 
 between them being that the Ottomans invaded Europe later and 
 were converted to Islam only after that invasion. To this day the 
 
 77
 
 78 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 scions of the tribes from Turkestan who, coerced and led by the 
 Mongols, settled in Russia, have not lost the memory of their 
 origin : the Tatars of Kaz&n and Astrakhan call themselves Turks, 
 a name endeared to them by the ancient glory of the Osmanlis and 
 a common religion. 
 
 The Turkish branch is, at present, nearer to the Finnic than to 
 the Mongolian branches.* Turks and Finns have often met and 
 mixed to such extent, that there are tribes the Bashkirs and Tchu- 
 vashes for instance in whom it is difficult to make out the share of 
 one and the other. The difficulty is still greater when dealing with 
 extinct peoples, such as the Huns, the Avars, and the old Bulgars 
 of the Volga, in whom the Finn blood seems to have predomi- 
 nated, the Alans and Roxolans.f who appear to have been 
 mostly Turks or Tatars. The union of Turk and Mongol, espe- 
 cially in Asia, has taken place quite as frequently, and it is hard 
 at times to distinguish between them. One instance of such 
 fusion still survives in Europe : it is the tribe of the Tatar-Nogay, 
 who dwelt in the steppes of the Kuban and of the Crimean penin- 
 sula before they were driven out into those of the Kuma. The 
 features of these nomads seem to bear out the notion of an alli- 
 ance with the Mongols. They have the same square, squat figure, 
 the eyes raised obliquely towards the external angle, the broad, 
 flat nose, the beardless chin. This case stands alone amidst the 
 Russian Turks. As a rule, whenever their countenance betrays a 
 cross, it is rather with the Finns or the peoples of the Caucasus. 1 
 
 * In their primitive and unalloyed stage, the Turks may have been nearer 
 to the Mongols. (See Revue d' Anthropologie, vol. iii., 1874, Nos. i and 3.) 
 
 f Some Russian scholars make out these Roxolans to be Russian Slavs. 
 
 1 There certainly is nothing in the features of the Tatars of the Volga, 
 familiar to all dwellers in large cities, where they ply their traditional trades 
 of peddlers, restaurant-waiters, and cab-drivers, to recall the no less familiar 
 type of the Ottoman Turk. The broad face, with slightly salient cheek-bones, 
 not too oblique eyes, and thickish lips, yellowish skin, and scant beard, is an 
 attenuated copy of the rampant Mongolian type. The same characteristics 
 re observable in the Finns of Finland, further modified by the considerable 
 train of Scandinavian blood, to which they owe their lustreless dun or 
 andy locks and almost imperceptible eyebrows over dull, fishlike eyes of
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 79 
 
 There still exists in European Russia a people of Mongol 
 origin the Kalmyks who dwell in the Caspian depression, this 
 side of the Volga. There are about 130,000 of them, and they 
 carry around their kibitkas, or felt tents, and drive their camels 
 and their flocks along in the arid steppes of the governments of 
 Astrakhan and Stavrbpol. It is these twenty-five or thirty thou- 
 sand families, roaming about at one extremity of the empire, 
 whose name has been so frequently applied, as a kind of nick- 
 name, to the Russian people. At first sight their Chinese type 
 distinguishes them nearly as markedly from the Tatars as from 
 the Russians. It is to be noted that these Mongols of the Volga 
 did not enter Europe in the rear of Batu and the successors of 
 Jinghiz-khan, but settled down in that forgotten corner of Russia 
 at a relatively recent period. It was as late as the seventeenth 
 century that, after a long migration from the confines of China to 
 the Ural River, these spiritual subjects of the Dalai Lama of Thibet 
 set foot in the steppes by the Volga. Taking advantage of the 
 hereditary rivalry between the Mongol and Tatar tribes, Russia 
 successfully employed these new-comers in her wars against the 
 Turks and the Khans of Crimea ; but any attempts to get them 
 into more direct subjection caused numbers of them to return to 
 their original fatherland. They went en masse, giving the 
 eighteenth century the spectacle of a wholesale migration, like 
 those of olden times. During the winter of 1770 from two to 
 three hundred thousand Kalmyks, with their flocks, crossed the 
 Volga and Ural upon the ice. Then thaw came on and detained 
 the rest, who decided to stay in Russia, while their brethren, not- 
 withstanding repeated attacks from the Kirghiz, plodded on to 
 their old homesteads on the confines of the Chinese Empire. 
 
 washed-out blue. If the long contact with their whilom masters has un- 
 doubtedly ennobled them morally and intellectually, it has not done the 
 same service to their personal appearance, for they are the most appallingly 
 homely people one can meet It is related of the Emperor Nicholas that, 
 stopping at a Finn village a hundred miles or so from the capital, he was 
 so disagreeably struck by the physique of the villagers, that he ordered 
 one of his handsomest guard-regiments to be forthwith stationed there.
 
 80 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 The Kalmyks who stayed in the cis-Caspian steppes, owning 
 the Russian sovereignty, were, until very lately, all Buddhists. 
 They had a chief to whom they gave the title of Grand-Lama, 
 who, since Alexander I., was nominated by the Tsar, and whose 
 residence lay somewhere near Astrakhan. There is one fact 
 which has exercised vital influence on their respective destinies, 
 it is that the three chief branches of the Uralo- Altaic race have 
 apportioned to themselves the three chief religions of the old 
 continent. The Finn has become Christian ; the Turk or Tatar, 
 Moslem ; the Mongol, Buddhist. To this ethnological distribu- 
 tion of worships there are few exceptions. It is in this diversity 
 of faiths, above all, that we must seek for the causes of the widely 
 diverging destinies of the three groups, especially the Finn and the 
 Tatar. Religion has prepared the one to European ways of life ; 
 religion has removed the other from the same influences. Islam 
 gave the Tatar a more precocious national civilization, and helped 
 him to build such thriving cities as ancient Saray and Kazan, 
 and to found, in Europe and in Asia, powerful states. Islam gave 
 him a more brilliant past, but, on the other hand, prepares for him 
 more difficulties in the future. 
 
 It is to the Tatars that the Russians have long been indebted 
 for the misnomer of " Mongols "; yet the Tatars themselves have 
 but a questionable claim to the name. In any case, it ought 
 to be dropped when dealing with the Russians, not because in 
 itself offensive, but because resulting from a misapprehension. 
 
 The Russians have scarcely a few drops of Mongol blood ; have 
 they much more Tatar blood ? Perhaps even less than the Span- 
 ish people have Moorish or Arab blood. In Spain the Arabs 
 stayed much longer, occupied a far larger portion of the territory, 
 settled down in far greater numbers, and held the peninsula under 
 their own immediate rule. In Russia, the Tatars having entered 
 the country in the thirteenth century, were, already in the six- 
 teenth, driven back to the extremities. They ruled hardly more 
 than one half of European Russia, and the greater part of even
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 8 1 
 
 that they did not hold under their direct sway, but merely 
 under their suzerainty. They did not destroy the Russian princi- 
 palities, but were content to make them pay tribute. The Arabs 
 colonized the fairest regions of Spain, those which, to this day, 
 are the most fertile and most populous. The Tatars spread over 
 the parts of Russia which are even now the most thinly peopled, 
 over the steppes of the south and east. Towards the centre 
 they advanced only up the rivers, along the Volga and its tributa- 
 ries, as shown even still by their actual distribution. It was not 
 even into the midst of the Russians that these colonizers from 
 Asia broke their way. The Russians at that time had barely 
 reached the central basin of the Volga and the junction of this 
 river with the Oka at Nijni N6vgorod. So it was the Finnish 
 peoples, discussed in the preceding chapter, in whose midst they 
 appeared ; the peoples whose remains we see in the Mordvins, the 
 Tcheremiss, the Tchuvash, and of whom several suffered them- 
 selves to be tatarized. The Russian Turks have not, like the 
 Arabs in Spain, created a rich and industrious civilization ; far 
 from devoting themselves to a sedentary agricultural life, they 
 in part remained nomads. Their cities were not numerous, and 
 the largest were small in comparison with the Moorish capitals in 
 Andalusia. With a territory three or four times as extensive, it 
 is doubtful whether the Golden-Horde ever came up in numbers to 
 the Khalifat of Cordova. An analysis of the two languages 
 suggests similar conclusions. The mark left by Arabic on the 
 Spanish language is incomparably deeper than that imprinted 
 by the Turkish or Tatar language on Russian. 
 
 Have the Moslem Tatars contributed more towards the forma- 
 tion of the Russian people because, instead of expelling the Ma- 
 hometans, as did Catholic Castile, Orthodox Moscovia left them 
 thiir religion and their newly adopted country ? The contrary 
 appears more probable. In Russia as in Spain the reasons for 
 separation between victors and vanquished remained the same 
 during the rule of the Cross as during its subjection, and they all 
 
 6
 
 82 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 centred in one thing religion, which raised between the two 
 noes an insuperable barrier. From the one to the other, before 
 as well as after the national deliverance, there was but one road 
 apostasy. If preaching and self-interest made many converts 
 amidst the Mussulmans in Russia, especially amidst the Murzas 
 or Tatar chieftains, a great many more must have taken place 
 amidst the Mussulmans in Spain, subjected as they had been 
 through many long years to the most unscrupulous proselytism, 
 till the day came when they could keep their faith only at the 
 cost of wealth and country. In Russia no such alternative was 
 ever placed before the Mussulmans. The Tsars never had need to 
 resort to such barbarities in order to decrease in their states the 
 power of the Tatar element. What was done violently in Spain, 
 to her eternal damage, did itself, slowly, gradually, in Russia. 
 All that she had to do was to leave things to take pretty well theii 
 own natural course. 
 
 Simultaneously with the process of absorption, assimilation of 
 the Finnic elements, another, inverse process has been going on 
 in Russia, that of secretion, elimination of the Tatar and Moslem 
 elements which she could not assimilate. After their submis- 
 sion numbers of Tatars left Russia, not wishing to remain as 
 subjects of the infidels, whose masters they had been. Before the 
 advance of the Christian arms, they spontaneously recoiled back 
 to the lands where the law of the Prophet still held sway. After 
 the destruction of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, they 
 inclined to concentrate in Crimea and the neighboring steppes 
 which, as late as the eighteenth century, went by the name of 
 Little Tartary. After the conquest of Crimea by Catherine II. 
 they resumed their exodus towards the empire of their Turkish 
 brethren, and even in o*ir days, after the war of Sebastbpol and 
 the submission of the Caucasus, the emigration of Tatars and 
 Nogay has begun again on an immense scale, at the same time 
 as that of the Tcherkess (Circassians), so that they do not at the 
 present day amount to one fifth of their numbers at the time of
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 83 
 
 the annexation to Russia. From 1860 to 1863, nigh on 200,00x3 
 Tatars have gone forth from the government of Tauris (Crimea), 
 leaving behind 784 aouls or villages, of which three quarters 
 remained desert like the despoblados left by the expulsion of the 
 Moors on the map of Spain. Since the introduction of obligatory 
 military service, in 1874, this sort of exodus has begun again. 
 Thus it is that defeat and self-banishment, apart from absorption 
 and commingling, have reduced the Tatars to small groups harm- 
 less islets in the countries where they have been rulers for cen- 
 turies, in such even, like Crimea, of which, some hundred years 
 ago, they were the sole inhabitants. 
 
 Recent examples show us the natural and spontaneous decrease 
 of the Tatar and Mahometan elements in Russia ; that of Euro- 
 pean Turkey, where, up to the emancipation of the Danubian 
 principalities, the Mussulmans made up only one third or one 
 fourth of the population, from which we see that even at the time 
 of their sovereignty the Tatars were numerically a minority in 
 their own empire. The route followed by these invaders and the 
 actual position of the Tatars along the rivers, in lands occupied 
 by Finns, lead us to think that they formed a majority only 
 just around their capitals, on the Volga and in such other coun- 
 tries like Crimea and the steppes of the southeast as seem mean, 
 by nature for pastoral life. The figures to which the armies of the 
 khans mounted up must not mislead us as to the number of their 
 subjects. In these armies, every healthy man hastened to 
 enlist ; lacking fanaticism or patriotism, the bait of booty was 
 sufficient to keep men from deserting in the course of these expe- 
 ditions, of which the main object was plunder. A Crimean khan 
 could call together 100,000 warriors without having a million of 
 subjects. The Tatars scarcely ever got to the centre of Russia 
 except with armed hand, and never settled there. Thus Mos- 
 covia was and remained towards them, from the point of view of 
 population, in a condition similar to that in which Serbia, Hun- 
 gary, Rumania, and Greece stood towards the Turks, who in all
 
 84 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 these countries had but few colonies. Rarely have there been 
 two situations so identical as that of the Russians under the 
 Tatar yoke and that of the South Slavs under the Turkish yoke. 
 In both cases the same races face each other, in both the same 
 religions, so that we have before us the same actors in the same 
 parts though under different names, with nothing changed but 
 the stage. With all these analogies the Russian has had a great 
 advantage over the Bulgar or the Serb. He was vassal and 
 tributary, but never direct subject. Therefore it may well be 
 doubted whether there was any mixture of the two races on the 
 banks of the Volga any more than on those of the Danube. If 
 there was some, through intermarriage, through slavery, rapes, 
 and polygamy, a few perhaps through conversions, sincere or 
 forced, it was perhaps rather at the cost of the Slavs, for through 
 all these channels Christian blood was introduced into the Mos- 
 lem's veins far more easily than Moslem blood into the veins of 
 the Christian. 
 
 It has frequently been remarked how rare, how abnormal con- 
 versions of Mahometans to Christianity have at all times been ; 
 the opposite phenomenon has attracted less attention : how much 
 more frequent has been the passage from the doctrine of Christ to 
 tiiat of Mahomet. All Western Asia, all Northern Africa, Egypt, 
 and Barbary but too loudly bear witness to the fact. Even in 
 Europe, the extremities of which have alone been touched by 
 Islamism, the Begs of Bosnia, the " true believers" of Albania, 
 the Pomaks of Mahometan Bulgars, the Mussulmans of Candia 
 and Crimea, of Greek or Goth origin, are descended from apostate 
 Christians, while it would be difficult to quote a Mahometan peo- 
 ple, nay a single tribe, ever having embraced the Christian faith. 
 The reason does not lie merely in the fact that Islam seems 
 adapted to certain races and certain modes of life, but also in the 
 reciprocal position, in the dogma, and, it may be said, in the 
 respective ages of the two religions. Islam is a more recent 
 doctrine than Christianity, and, in a great measure, aimed directly
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 85 
 
 against the latter. It is, from the standpoint of dogma, a simpler 
 faith, at least apparently, more strictly monotheistic freer from 
 any kind of anthropomorphism. 
 
 The Mussulman emigrates or dies out where the Christian 
 rules, but does not become a convert, so that the mixing of the 
 two races hardly can take place in any way but exchange of one 
 faith for the other. It is certain that, in Russia, the force of 
 example and self-interest, proselytism, private or official, have, in 
 the last three or four hundred years, effected many a conquest 
 amidst the Tatars in favor of Christianity.* Several of the 
 greatest Russian families come from this source, and, when bap- 
 tized, the neophytes exchanged the title of a Tatar Murza for 
 that of a Russian Kniaz V but such apostasies, even when accom- 
 
 * About one-eleventh part (40,000 out of 450,000) of the Tatars residing 
 in the government of Kazan were baptized by the Russian authorities in 
 the eighteenth century. They still are Christian in name ; but, their baptism 
 notwithstanding, they are not yet russified : they retain their language, 
 their own peculiar customs, generally even their faith in the Koran. (See 
 vol. iii., book iii., ch. iii.) 
 
 9 The thoroughly national title kniaz (the k to be well sounded), is that 
 which is uniformly rendered in all other European languages by " prince." 
 Nothing could be more misleading, for the word "prince" represents 
 something that does not exist in Russia, at least not in the form familiar to 
 Other nations, those that have passed through the feudal system, which we 
 have been spared. The title ought to be retained in its Russian form. A 
 slightly parallel case is that of the Anglo-Saxon "jarl," now " earl," which 
 is inadequately rendered in other languages by the lyatin " count " (comes) 
 and the German " Graf." But more of this in its proper place. As to the 
 families of Tatar origin, they are quite numerous in the higher nobility, 
 and the women especially show it in their hair, which is dark, very long 
 and silky, without a wave or ripple, and sometimes in the color of their 
 skin, which is of a warm creamy tinge, not unfrequently leaning markedly 
 to yellow and, unlike the dead olive complexions of so many Spanish 
 women, capable of vivid bloom and quick blush. The names of such 
 families often betray their origin. Thus "Bahmetief" (aspirate the A 
 strongly) is corrupted from " Mehmet." The coats-of-arms improvised for 
 the new Russian nobles also show transparent devices, none prettier than 
 that of a kinsman of the last Khan of Kazan, who, having adopted Chris- 
 tianity, was given a wife from among the noblest maidens, with large landed 
 possessions : the family 'scutcheon bears across the lover field a gold 
 crescent on argent ground symbol of the ancestral faith, while the upper
 
 86 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 plished wholesale, have been relatively rare occurrences. They 
 took place amidst populations in great part already mixed 
 with new Christian masters or old Finn subjects. Outside of 
 Russia, nay, in their very cradles, the Tatars must have under- 
 gone a certain amount of crossing with Caucasian races, first in 
 Turkestan, where from times immemorial Eranians have dwelt 
 in great numbers ; then along the highroads of invasion, especially 
 in the Caucasus, where the community of religion facilitated 
 alliances which the beauty of the Tcherkess women made desira- 
 ble in the eyes of the Turks of the Volga as well as those of the 
 Turks of the Bosporus. 
 
 If then a noticeable strain of Tatar blood has very gradually 
 filtered into the veins of the Russian people, it possibly came less 
 from the hordes of Batu and the invaders of the thirteenth cen- 
 tury than from the kindred tribes who, for thousands of years, 
 have dwelt or roamed in the south of Russia, from the Scythians 
 of old to the Khazars, the Petcheneg, the P61ovtsi of the Middle 
 Ages. Under the vague designations of "Scythians," the 
 ancients used to mix up populations between whom there was no 
 ethnical relationship whatever. It appears that amongst these 
 Scythians there were some Aryan ones ; but the majority of them 
 seem to have been derived from a Finno-Turkish stock. That 
 such was the case is more certain still concerning the Khazars, 
 the Kumans, and other nomads who, up to the great invasion, 
 wrangled for the possession of the south of Russia. These now 
 extinct peoples were for a long time the only denizens of this 
 immense territory, of which the Greeks and Italicans knew only 
 
 field is divided in two compartments, one of which has a crooked scimitar 
 on gules ground a reminder of the founder's bravery in battle, and the 
 other a star on azure ground, in poetical allusion to the lady. It may be 
 mentioned here that, however correct our author's remarks are concerning 
 the frequency of Christian apostasy, they do not apply to the Russian Slavs, 
 who have never been known to forsake orthodox Christianity for any other 
 religion. The only exception is the adoption of the Jewish religion by a 
 very few ignorant fanatics, under very peculiar circumstances, an exceed- 
 ingly curious phenomenon, of which more hereafter.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 8/ 
 
 the coastland. Must we infer from this that they were the 
 ancestors of the thinly scattered population of these even yet half 
 desert plains ? The territory of all these barbarians, was the 
 "woodless zone," the steppe-zone, where the population is still 
 either very much scattered or very recent. In order to open 
 these plains to culture, the nomads had first to be driven off. 
 The Scythians and all their Turko-Finn kindred were pastoral 
 nomads, who, with their wagons and flocks, led in the steppes, 
 this side of the Volga and the Don, the life that their brethren, 
 the Kirghiz, even now lead on the other side of these rivers. All 
 these peoples, so much dreaded by the West, and so soon van- 
 ished from the ken of history, were as insignificant in numbers as 
 the Asiatic tribes of the same race, who maintain, to this day, the 
 same kind of existence. One famine, one epidemic, one battle, 
 sufficed for their annihilation. They destroyed one another, 
 leaving of themselves no other vestiges but their names. It is 
 in the southern half of Russia that we must seek for traces of the 
 Scythian or Tatar element, and it is from the west and north, from 
 the wooded regions, that the present inhabitants of Southern Russia 
 have emerged gradually, we might almost say under our eyes. 
 
 Great has been the influence of the Tatars, but more histori- 
 cally than ethnologically ; it had to do with the conquest more 
 than with the fusion of the races. However, while confuting a 
 popular prejudice, we should not rush into the opposite excess ; 
 the Tatar's share in the formation of the Russian people has been 
 the smallest possible, but cannot be quite explained away. On 
 more than one point there has been some mingling of blood 
 between the Turk and Slav tribes whence Russians have sprung, 
 on the banks of the Dniepr, when the rulers of Kief were 
 collecting the remnants of the P&lovtsi and the Petcheng, on 
 the same river, on the Don, on the Volga, amidst the Cosacks, 
 who, both in peace and war, frequently entertained close relations 
 with their Moslem neighbors and foes. However that may be, 
 the ethnical influence of the Tatars, even in the south, always
 
 88 THR EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 remained far behind that of the Finns in the north, all the more 
 that the Tatars themselves were frequently crossed with Finns. 
 
 Crimea and the region which, as late as the last century, went 
 by the name of Little Tartary, is, after all, perhaps the country 
 where it is easiest to study the manners and character of the 
 Tatars. Scarcely a hundred years ago they were the masters 
 and almost the only occupants of this region. In consequence 
 of repeated emigrations, they are, this day, two or three times 
 inferior in numbers to the Russian or foreign colonists who have 
 taken their place ; in certain portions of the peninsula, however, 
 you still feel that they are at home. On the steppe-land which 
 occupies the centre and north, rebellious against culture, they 
 continue to lead their nomadic life. In the fertile regions, they 
 still own towns, of which they are themselves the chief and almost 
 only population, as for instance Karasu-Bazar, or Bakhtchi-Saray, 
 the old capital of the Crimean khans. There, in a cool and narrow 
 valley, around the verdant gardens and the marble fountain-basins 
 of the palace of the Ghire'y, lives a Moslem community more 
 purely oriental than those of the cities of European Turkey or of 
 the littoral of Asia Minor. There the Mahometan law holds its 
 sway in all its rigor, and were it not for the loneliness of the 
 palace halls, with hangings and furniture all untouched, as they 
 were under the last of the khans, nothing would recall the fall of 
 the Tatar's might. 
 
 The Turks of Bakhtchi-Saray and Karasu-Bazar are traders 
 and farmers. So are those of the Volga. Having come to a land 
 of bountiful soil, they abandoned their nomadic mode of life and 
 became craftsmen or traders in the cities, tillers of the soil in the 
 country. At Kazan, once the capital of the most powerful of 
 the three khanates which sprang from the dismemberment of the 
 Golden Horde, the Tatars inhabit a suburb (slobodctf of their own, 
 
 ' The word slobodb means " a free place," probably because suburban 
 life may have been free from much of the restraint imposed on those that dwelt 
 in the city proper; also the suburb may have enjoyed some local franchises.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 89 
 
 situated at the foot of their former capital, far removed from the 
 Kremlin, taken from them by the Orthodox Tsars. Their suburb 
 looks clean, quiet, and prosperous. They have their mosques and 
 schools,* with their mollahs elected by the community and acting 
 as arbiters and judges, according to Moslem custom. 
 
 At Kazan, as well as in Crimea, the Tatars have preserved the 
 specialty of certain oriental industries, such as the manufacturing 
 of articles in leather and morocco : boots, slippers (babushes)^ 
 saddles, sheaths for swords and daggers, etc. Many of them still 
 boast the muscular strength which is proverbially attributed to 
 the Turks, and the porters at the great Nijni fair are almost all 
 Tatars. The high walks of commerce are not closed against them, 
 and at Kazan more than one of their merchants have achieved a 
 considerable fortune. And although there are many differences 
 among them, as well physical as moral, they are, on the whole, 
 saving and painstaking, and noted for domestic morality and the 
 harmony prevailing in their families. In all these qualities, the 
 Turks of Russia are in no wise inferior to those of the Ottoman 
 Empire, whose virtues in private life are unanimously extolled by 
 travellers. For certain pursuits the Tatars are often preferred by 
 the Russians themselves. Being noted for cleanliness, probity, 
 sobriety, they are sought for in several crafts, and have made a 
 sort of monopoly of certain employments, especially such as require 
 most honesty and trustworthiness. The great Russian families, 
 who own villas on the south coast of Crimea, are not afraid of 
 taking into their homes Tatar servants, and in the restaurants 
 of Petersburgh it is quite "the thing" for the waiters to be 
 Tatars from the government of Riazan, so that the unsuspecting 
 
 * In these, as in all tnoslem schools, the ground work of instruction is 
 Arabic, the language of the Koran, which is frequently recited without 
 being understood. This barbarous method is a great obstacle to the intellect- 
 ual growth of the Tatars. Therefore the government is making praise- 
 worthy efforts to introduce among them instruction in the Tatar language, 
 in expectation of the time when it will be possible to get them to use the 
 Russian language.
 
 90 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS ANf THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 foreigner who orders his dinner from a French menu, is waited 
 on, in perfect ignorance of the fact, by descendants of Djinghiz or 
 Batu's rider-warriors. 
 
 The qualities of the Tatars come in part from their religion, 
 which enjoins temperance as an absolute duty ; their faults, the 
 causes that hamper their progress, come from the same source. 
 The race's only apparent inferiority consists in a lack of origi- 
 nality. Their ancient cities have perished. In order to find 
 monuments of their domination, we must go as far as Turkestan, 
 Samarkand, and there we find buildings entirely in Persian style 
 and taste. In Russia nothing is so rare as constructions from the 
 time of the khans. In Crimea, besides the palace of Bakhtchi-Saray, 
 of late date and poor merit, nothing is left but a few mosques, of 
 which the handsomest do not amount to much. Kazan boasts a 
 grotesque brick pyramid in four tiers, held in great veneration 
 by the Tatars, but probably built after the Russian conquest. 
 It is in a city destroyed by the Tatars themselves at the time of 
 Tamerlan's invasion, in Bolgary, near the left bank of the Volga, 
 that the most interesting Oriental ruins of all Russia are to be 
 seen two constructions with cupolas, which will soon have 
 crumbled to pieces, and whose graceful Arabic architecture, seen 
 from afar, recalls the beautiful tombs around Cairo. The Turks 
 of the Volga, like those of Central Asia, and the Ottomans of the 
 Bosporus, show in everything they do, in architecture as well as 
 in poetry, imitation of the Arabic or Persian genius. Such a 
 lack of originality makes their entire culture dependent on foreign 
 contact, and the civilization which they have received from their 
 Mussulman neighbors, their religion forbids them to improve on, 
 except with the loss of their independence. 
 
 On due reflection, it will appear that the main vice of Islam, 
 the main cause of its political inferiority, lies neither in its dogma, 
 nor even in its morals ; it lies in the confusion of things spiritual 
 and temporal, of the religious and civil law. The Koran being 
 both Bible and Code, the Prophet's word standing for law, the
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY, 91 
 
 laws and customs are once for all consecrated by religion. 4 This 
 one fact is sufficient to keep the entire Moslem civilization at a 
 standstill. Indefinite progress, which constitutes the very essence 
 of Christian civilization, is to them an impossibility ; whatever 
 the seeming rapidity of its development, society, as a whole, is, 
 with them, in reality and of necessity, immovable. This inferi- 
 ority of Islam, however, is more felt in public than in private life ; 
 it affects nations rather than individuals, for, when subjected to 
 foreign influences, Mussulmans can accept ideas and customs 
 which could not have originated in their midst. The Mahometans 
 may experience the same thing that happened to the Jews, no 
 less handicapped by their religious law, in the midst of Christian 
 society : had the Jews ever ceased to form a compact nation, they 
 could not, without great effort, have risen to a civilization more 
 complete than that of the Moslem nations. For these, as for the 
 Jews, Christian domination may prove beneficial in the end, since 
 from political subjection can spring moral emancipation. Thus 
 it is that, wherever the Russian Tatars form a minority, and have 
 been most affected by alien influences, they have done away with 
 the external sign of Islam : the veil and seclusion of women. 
 While yet in strictest use at Bakhtchi-Saray, in the centre of 
 Crimea, the veil has been doffed by the Moslem women of the 
 south coast. The same influences are driving out polygamy, as 
 they put an end to slavery. The Tatars, broken up into small 
 groups scattered over Russia, are inclined to pass through the 
 same phases as the Jews, who, while retaining their worship, 
 gradually fall into our modes of life. Islam would probably 
 not oppose a greater obstacle to their entrance into our 
 civilization, than Judaism to that of the Israelites, hampered by 
 
 * Yet, must not those who do not dissever religion from practical life, but 
 try to think and act up to the teachings of what they have accepted as the 
 "Sacred Word," possess a real moral superiority over those who would 
 laugh to scorn the notion of introducing what they themselves proclaim as 
 the standard of absolute goodness and uprightness into, say, their business 
 dealings ?
 
 92 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 far narrower ritualistic prescriptions. Without amalgamating 
 with the bulk of the population, the Mussulmans who stayed in 
 Russia will for a longer or lesser space of time, preserve their 
 language and customs and form a peaceable, industrious class, 
 who will play a part very much like that now filled by the Jews 
 and Armenians, with this difference that, dwelling in the country 
 as well as in the cities, practising agriculture as well as trade, 
 their agglomeration in the eastern provinces can never give rise 
 to the same economical disasters which are caused, in the west, 
 by the agglomeration of the Jews, who are almost exclusively 
 devoted to city life and trade.* * 
 
 From the political point of view, the Tatars of European 
 Russia even now are scarcely more troublesome to the government 
 than its Russian or Finn subjects. This was seen during the 
 Crimean war : although they made at the time a full half of the 
 population, they rendered hardly any service at all to the invaders, 
 
 * The polemized Tatars, who, residing in Lithuania, lost their language 
 centuries ago, yet preserved their religion, and who are mostly tanners and 
 traders, afford a glimpse of what their brethren of the Volga may become 
 one day, when they are russified. 
 
 It is a fact which cannot be sufficiently emphasized, in view of the 
 senseless accusations of religious animosity continually thrown in our faces, 
 that there is not and never was the slightest ill-feeling on the part of 
 the Russian people towards any of the numerous aliens who live side by 
 side with them as fellow-subjects with the single exception of the Jews, 
 meaning of course not the educated Jews, the "gentlemen," who practise 
 various liberal professions, who have crafts, commercial and industrial 
 positions, or those who, in Russia as everywhere else, rule the financial and 
 high business world, but those wretched, squalid millions which, granting 
 it is their misfortune and not their fault, still certainly are a terrible evil ; 
 and the animosity of the lower classes exasperated because of the close 
 companionship forced on them, from which they have no possible escape 
 has nothing whatever to do with either religion or race. Naturally benig- 
 nant and tolerant, the Russians know not of such feelings. Beyond good- 
 natured banter, expressed in some long-standing nicknames, proverbial saws, 
 their race feeling does not go ; only they do not intermarry, a few may 
 not like to eat at the same board with their alien fellow-subjects. This 
 latter, however, is the case with many religious sects composed of none 
 but thorough-going Russians.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 93 
 
 in whose ranks were their brethren of the Bosporus. The Bul- 
 garian war, the fall of Khiva, and the submission of the other 
 khanates of Turkestan robbed them of their last illusions. Divided, 
 even more than the Finns, into minute scattered groups, locked 
 in on all sides by Russians, the Russian Turks are no longer a 
 people ; religion has, for them, necessarily stepped into the place 
 of nationality, and repeated emigrations rid them of their fanatics. 
 Everywhere in Europe, in the very places where they ruled 
 longest, the Tatars incline to become a minority and this dispro- 
 portion will go on increasing as the colonization of the Russian 
 East progresses. In Europe, including the inhabitants of Northern 
 Caucasus, Russia numbers only 3,200,000 Mahometan subjects. 
 Setting aside the Caucasus, both slopes of which are comprised 
 in the same political circumscription, the number of the Mussul- 
 mans sinks to 2,500,000 and from this figure we must, if we wish 
 to deal with genuine Tatars, descendants of the invaders of the 
 Golden Horde, deduct the Bashkirs and the tatarized tribes in 
 which Finnic blood is predominant. Not quite 1,200,000 is all 
 that remains of that Turk or Tatar race which so long ruled 
 Russia and terrified Europe. In Russian Asia, their kindred by 
 blood and brethren in religion are, in the first place, the Kirghiz, 
 the most extensive of all the Turkish branches ; in Turkestan, 
 the Turkmen or Turcomans, and the Uzbegs ; in the Caucasus, 
 the Tatars (Sunnites or Shiites) from the banks of the Kura and 
 the Araxus, the Kumulis and a few other small tribes ; lastly, in 
 Siberia, some few Mahometans with more or less claim to the 
 name of Tatars, with sundry tribes, now Christian and three 
 quarters russified.* In Europe the Mussulmans exceed a half 
 of the population only in one government, that of Ufa, and that 
 only, thanks to the Bashkirs, in a half Asiatic region which is 
 
 * We do not count here the Tunguz, nor the Mandshu, nor even the 
 Yakut, who are ranked amongst the peoples of Turkish stock, but who 
 are separated from the Tatar group proper by distance and religion.
 
 94 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 just being colonized. In those of the other provinces where they 
 are most numerous in the Governments of Kazan, Orenburg, 
 Astrakhan, the Mahometans do not number even one third of the 
 entire population. Even along the I^ower Volga, the majority 
 has passed over to the Christians.
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Slavic Element and Russian Nationality Slavs and Panslavism Slavs 
 and Letto-Lithuanians Formation of the Russian People : Its Different 
 Tribes Differences between them, of Origin and Character Great- 
 Russians ( Velikoriiss) White-Russians (BielorUss) Little-Russians 
 (Malordss) Ukra'inophilism. 
 
 ABOVE the Finns and Tatars, whose ethnological part in the 
 making of Russia has been very unequal, comes the race which has 
 subjugated or absorbed all the others, the race whose name sounds 
 proudly to every Russian ear the Slav race. On the place 
 belonging to the Slavs and their kith and kin there is no possible 
 doubt. lyike the Celts, the L/atins, the Teutons, they are part 
 of the great Aryan race to which the sovereignty over the world 
 seems to have fallen. To this common origin their physical type 
 bears witness ; so do their language and primeval traditions. L/ike 
 Greek, Latin, and German, the Slavic languages are, sooth to say, 
 but dialects of that Indo-European speech, of which Sanskrit is 
 the oldest known form. The Slavic legends and tales, like the 
 German ones, complete the data from which sprang the myths of 
 India and Greece.* The Slavs are no more Asiatic than we are, 
 or, if they are, it is only in the manner and degree that we are 
 ourselves. Their establishment in Europe dates back beyond all 
 historic times. It is not known whether the Teutons or they 
 were the first to leave Asia ; at all events there can have been but 
 a short interval between the two migrations. Between the great 
 
 * We have at present a great number of collections of Slavic tales from 
 all the Slav countries. For Russia, must be quoted first of all Afandssiefs 
 Collection : Narbdnyia Riisskiya Sk&zki (Popular Russian Tales) ; then, 
 come those of Khudiakdf, Erlenwein, Tchudinsky, etc. For Little -Russia, 
 those of Rudchenko and Kulish. 
 
 95
 
 96 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Aryan tribes who have divided Europe amongst themselves, it is 
 difficult to decide the question as to degree of consanguinity. 
 The philologists insist on a closer tie between the Slavs and the 
 Teutons ; but if the Slavs, as to language, seem to stand somewhat 
 nearer to their Teutonic neighbors, they lean more, in character, 
 towards the Europeans of the West and South. From the remotest 
 times we find them settled in Europe, on the Visla and the Dniepr. 
 Through the obscurities of primeval history it is difficult to 
 make out the original type of these Slav tribes. Classical an- 
 tiquity confounds all alien peoples, whether Celts, Teutons, or 
 Slavs, under the sweeping designation of "barbarians," paint- 
 ing them with the same colors, attributing to them the same 
 customs, from which it would appear that these tribes did not 
 then differ as much as they have done subsequently, and showed 
 more traces of their common origin. From these descriptions 
 (often just as applicable to the barbarians of neighboring races), 
 the ancient Slavs, whom we recognize under the names of the 
 Antes, Vends, Slovens, appear to have been of large, robust 
 build, with blue or gray eyes, hair yellow, chestnut, or auburn, 
 all features frequently met with in the Russians.* Prehistoric 
 
 * It is perhaps at Petersburgh, in the Museum at the Hermitage, that 
 we are to look for the portraits of the first Russian Slavs, on the admirable 
 jewels found in the tumuli of Crimea, at the gates of Panticapaeon (modern 
 Kertch), the ancient capital of the Cimmerian Bosporus. There, on golden 
 belt-buckles or silver cups and dishes, we have before us, after a lapse of 
 over twenty centuries, the live presentation of the Scythian horseman and 
 archer, in high boots, tight-fitting trousers, short tunic, recalling the Russian 
 shirt or blouse. Besides the Greek jewels from Kertch, as superior to those 
 from Pompeii, as Athenian art was to Roman art, similar figures ornament 
 less handsome jewels which were discovered in the tombs of the southern 
 steppes, and appear to be the handiwork of the Scythians themselves, 
 already sufficiently in love with Greek art to try and imitate it. On all these 
 jewels occur types belonging to other races, some of them manifestly Aryan, 
 others showing a mixture of Finno-Turkish blood. 1 
 
 1 This, then would be the first historical instance of one of our race's 
 chief characteristics : its rare aptitude in appropriating every kind of learn- 
 ing, art, or craft, every trick of brain, or tongue, or hand, and its facile 
 itmtativeness. Most precious qualities these for a young race, the latest 
 Come among the makers of human culture, who had to master all that had 
 been done before it could produce original work of its own.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 97 
 
 archaeology seldom yields information more precise. As the 
 Germans, so the Aryans of the East appear to have greatly 
 changed in the course of the ages. Thus, for instance, the oldest 
 tombs of the Slavic countries, in the neighborhood of Cracow, 
 to name one place, have supplied skulls of elongated shape or 
 dolichocephalous of the purest Aryan type. Many Slav peoples 
 of our day have lost this feature, so long regarded as characteristic 
 of the Indo-European race, or have it in a degree inferior to most 
 Latin or Teutonic peoples. Therefore, in the ethnological classi- 
 fications founded solely on the shape of the skull, they have some- 
 times been placed side by side with the Finns amongst the 
 brachycephalians or shortheads, while their Aryan brethren were, 
 together with the Semites, classed with the longheads. However 
 imperfect such a classification may be, it has the advantage of 
 showing that, even if crossed with Finns, the Russians are not 
 removed as far from the other Slavs as is often fancied.* 
 
 It is no easy task to depict the intellectual qualities of this 
 race, which strives for the sovereignty of the world with the 
 Latins and Teutons. It needs a long career of civilization to 
 bring out the genius of races and nations in literature, in art, in 
 political institutions. Most Slavs are too young, too new to 
 independent life and to European culture, for their national 
 individuality to have come out in as strong relief as that of their 
 rivals. They were long despised by the nations of the West, who, 
 out of their name (as they pronounced it), Schiavoni, Esclavons, 
 made the word schiavo, esclave, slave ; scorned to this day by 
 their German neighbors, who persist in seeing in them mere 
 " ethnological material " (ethnologischer Stoff~) ; yet they owed 
 
 * It is notorious that, in our modern races, all produced by mixture, too 
 much importance has been given this trait, and that, on the showing of the 
 latest researches, many Germans, especially of South Germany, are, as well 
 as numbers of French, shortheads. It would be of greater importance, 
 should it turn out, as some scientists assert, that the Slavs had a smaller 
 head and a brain less voluminous than the Western Europeans. But even 
 should the fact be proved, it would be sufficiently accounted for by the 
 relative antiquity of culture in Western Europe. 
 
 7
 
 98 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 their inferiority probably only to their geographical position. 
 Standing, as they did, in the East, so to speak at the entrance of 
 Europe, in the most massive part of the continent and the most 
 exposed to invasions from Asia, they were naturally the last to 
 become civilized and the least deeply affected by civilization. 
 Feeling themselves unqualified to lay claim to the culture of 
 modern Europe, some Slavs have claimed that of the ancient 
 world. Certain Serb and Bulgar writers have taken it into their 
 heads to demand as their rightful patrimony the greater part of 
 Greek civilization, from Thracian Orpheus to Macedonian Alex- 
 ander. Such vindications, based on popular Bulgarian songs of 
 doubtful authenticity, unfortunately rest more on patriotism than 
 
 on science.* 
 
 Having been and remained almost total strangers to the dis- 
 cipline of Rome and Greece, the Slavs, by their situation, by their 
 language and religion, have stood more or less aloof from the 
 chief intellectual centres of modern Europe, nor could they have 
 taken the same share in her work as did the two other great 
 European families. It is no use denying it ; as the ancient civili- 
 zation, so the modern, which they are enjoying themselves and of 
 which, in the East, they have made themselves the apostles, was 
 accomplished nearly without their help. Neither the Russians 
 nor the Southern Slavs have contributed one stone to the build- 
 ing, and it could easily have dispensed with the assistance of the 
 Western Slavs likewise those of Poland and Bohemia. Had 
 there been no Slavs at all, had Europe ended at the foot of the 
 Carinthian Alps and the Boehmerwald, her civilization would 
 not have been less complete, while it could not have been robbed, 
 without mutilation, of the share borne in the work by either of 
 the great Latin or Teuton nations. Relegated to the uttermost 
 
 * This system has been more particularly formulated by Mr. Verkovitch 
 in a collection entitled The Slavic Veda ( Veda Slavena, Belgrad, 1874), a 
 work which the more competent Slavists regard as a mystification. See on 
 this subject L. Le"ger, Nouvelles tudes Slaves (New Slavic Studies}, Paris, 
 1880.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY, 99 
 
 end of Christendom, the Slavs hardly could serve it in any way 
 but with their arms, guarding its boundaries, from the Save and 
 Danube to the Dniepr and Volga, against invasion from Asia." 
 
 Is the race deficient in genius ? Assuredly not. It is a note- 
 worthy fact that it was Slavs who opened the way to the West in 
 the two great movements which inaugurated the modern era in 
 the Renaissance and the Reformation, in the discovery of the laws 
 that rule the universe, and in the vindication of freedom for human 
 thought. The Pole Kopernik was the forerunner of Galileo, the 
 Tchekh John Huss that of I^uther. These are great titles to glory 
 for the Slavs, so great that they are contested by the Germans. 
 For, as ill luck would have it, a rival race, after settling down in the 
 land of their great men, managed to deny them even their names. 
 If we take into consideration the secular encroachments of Ger- 
 many, and the fact that the bulk of the population is Slav in 
 Saxony and Eastern Prussia, the Slavs, very likely, would have 
 more right to claim as theirs many of the great names of which 
 Germany brags. In the wake of Kopernik and Huss, the two 
 Slav peoples most closely connected with the West through 
 religion and vicinity, Poland and Bohemia (Tchekhia) could 
 read off a long roll of men distinguished in letters, sciences, 
 politics, and war. And among the Southern Slavs {Yugoslavs) 
 a small republic like Ragusa could, alone, furnish an entire 
 gallery of men gifted in all lines.* Where remoteness from the 
 West and foreign oppression made study impossible and prevented 
 individual proper names from coming up, the people has mani- 
 
 2 This is not, after all, such a very trifling service to guard the door of 
 the chamber of knowledge and with one's life blood secure to the workers 
 within the necessary leisure and safety, and in this sense at least it is 
 probable that European civilization could not have dispensed with the 
 assistance of the Slavs. 
 
 * On these various Slav tribes, The Slavic World (Le Monde Slave) 
 and the Slavic Studies (Etudes Slaves) by Mr. Louis Lger may be profit- 
 ably consulted. Mr. Le"ger has done most of all Frenchmen since Cyprien 
 Robert, to give us a knowledge of peoples who, by their struggle against 
 Germanism, are of particular interest to France.
 
 100 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Tested its genius in such minstrelsy as has nothing to envy in the 
 finest poetry of the West. In that kind of popular, impersonal 
 poetry which we so greatly admire in the romanceros of Spain, the 
 ballads of Scotland or the songs (chansons} of France, the Slav, 
 far from yielding the prize to the Latins or Teutons, possibly 
 surpasses both. There is nothing more truly poetical than the 
 pitsmc ("lays ") of Serbia, and the dumy (" reveries ") of Little- 
 Russia ; for, by way of natural compensation, it is among the 
 Slavs least initiated into Western culture that popular poetry has 
 blossomed out most freely.' 
 
 What will these new-comers bring to West-European culture ? 
 In poetry, in the novel, they already have struck some new notes ; 
 what will they contribute to scientific research, philosophical 
 conceptions, religious and political ? This, for Western civiliza- 
 tion, is a momentous question. May be the Slavs have come in 
 too late to create for themselves a Pantheon or Walhalla as 
 gloriously filled as those of the Latins and Teutons. May be, in 
 literature and art generally, the heroic age, the age of the sub- 
 lime, has passed away ; may be even in science, the great laws 
 easily accessible to the human mind have all been discovered, 
 and mankind is reduced, for a long period, to their application and 
 to inventions of details. The Slavs, especially the Russians, are 
 endowed with ambition, intellectual no less than material. With 
 the recklessness of the youth who, ere he has learned all his 
 masters can teach him, already dreams of distancing them in the 
 race, they look on the old peoples of the West with a scorn that 
 should be forgiven their youthful presumption. They flatter 
 themselves they will solve the problems which the West boot- 
 lessly agitates ; they think they own the secret of the social 
 and political regeneration of Europe and the Christian world. 4 
 
 3 Is not this a sign that " Western culture " had better be dispensed 
 with, or rather not to be sweeping and misleading that it should not be 
 forced in its entirety on a race which, as a whole, it does not fit and whose 
 individuality it smothers whenever it is given its own way. 
 
 4 Naturally, the future being theirs. It is easy to see that the predomi-
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. IOI 
 
 The future will judge. Meantime, let them widen and renew 
 morally the Western civilization, which they are appropriating and 
 extending territorially. After having been so long merely the 
 warders of its frontier, they carry it forward. From being the 
 rear-guard of Europe, they have become her vanguard in the 
 conquest of Asia and the East. 
 
 By temperament and character the Slavs present an assort- 
 ment of defects and qualities which places them nearer to the 
 I^atins and Celts than to their neighbors, the Germans. In the 
 place of the Teutonic phlegm, they frequently exhibit, even under 
 the northernmost skies, a liveliness, quickness, warmth, at times 
 a mobility, petulance, exuberance, not to be found in the same 
 degree even among southern nations.* In the political life of 
 
 Dating bent of their mind especially that of their main tribe, the Russians 
 lies towards the practical, the positive, that they will make the field of 
 scientific research pre-eminently their own. In chemistry and medicine 
 they are already avowedly in the van. In the arts, especially in music, it is 
 no longer a question of what they will do. But in philosophy and political 
 science they undoubtedly will have, in good time, some weighty words to 
 say, and such as will probably astonish their older sister nations not a little. 
 That they have no part or share in the great Latino-Teutonic civilization, 
 which has never till lately had anything for them but ignorant contempt 
 and utter lack of comprehension is most true, just what Mr. Danilefsky 
 so ably sets forth. (See p. 13.) Their mission will be to correct its faults, 
 to fill its gaps, to rejuvenate it by bringing plain-speaking and genuineness 
 to bear against the shams, catchwords, and cant phrases which are the 
 rotten props of many an empty shell, the stage of decadence to which 
 every great civilization in the world has arrived after a long and glorious 
 course, when the exhaustion of age puts an end to self-renewal and renewal 
 has to come from outside. This renewal, in the sequence of ages and the 
 logic of history, it is the Slavs' turn to bring, and when the Slavic spirit 
 stands revealed and unfettered before the world in its solemn simplicity, its 
 earnestness, sincerity, and broad tolerance, such glaring fallacies as those 
 of the " Contrat Social" in politics, and the elucubrations of Voltaire and 
 the Encyclopedists on religion and history, left to stand on their own mer- 
 its, will fall to pieces of themselves, and their practical applications with all 
 their dire train of consequences of course become impossible. 
 
 5 There is, perhaps, no national character with so many sides to it as 
 the Slavic. By this the emotional and mercurial side it is nearly akin to 
 the Irish, especially the Southern or Little-Russians, with their love of 
 melody, beauty, and idling. There is an intellectual counterpart to this
 
 102 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 those Slavs whose blood is least mixed, this natural disposition 
 has produced a mercurial, mutable, anarchical spirit, a spirit of 
 incoherence, division, separatism, which has thrown great diffi- 
 culties in the way of their national existence, and which, to- 
 gether with their geographical position, has been the main 
 obstacle to the progress of their civilization. The distinctive 
 quality which pervades the entire race independently of the 
 various crosses of its several peoples, is a flexibility, an elasticity 
 of temperament and character, of the organs and the intellect, 
 which enable it to receive and reproduce any and all ideas or 
 forms. The gift of imitativeness characteristic of the Slavs has 
 often been spoken of. This gift extends to everything, to words 
 and thoughts alike ; it belongs to all ages, and both sexes. This 
 peculiar malleability, the property of both Russian and Pole, is at 
 bottom, possibly, only a result of the race's history, and, conse- 
 quently, of their geographical situation. Being the latest comers, 
 and for a long while inferior to the neighboring races, they have 
 always been going to school to somebody or other. Instead of 
 living on their own capital, they have lived on loans, until 
 imitativeness became their leading faculty, because the most use- 
 ful as well as the most constantly called into play. 
 
 too. Quick to seize, tenacious in retaining, and exceedingly prompt, in 
 common parlance, in "putting two and two together," our children guess 
 fully as much as they learn, and do not take kindly to the slow and ponder- 
 ously thorough educational methods so dear and necessary to the Ger- 
 mans. Thus Kindergarten instruction has to be considerably modified to 
 please and therefore benefit them, as a tot of five resents as an insult, for 
 instance, to be gravely shown "at school" an article in papier m&ch& and 
 be told to learn that it represents the familiar rye-bread which he lustily 
 munches in natura three times a day with his milk. Our youth have brains 
 active to restlessness and vastly prefer to exercise them by " making things 
 out " themselves, rather than learn things as they are set down in books, 
 by a mere effort of memory. It is very possible that this trait lies at the 
 root of the almost universal predilection for experimental and inductive 
 science, and the very general disfavor into which historical branches have 
 fallen. This peculiar quickness and intellectual bent, with its advantages 
 and drawbacks, we have in common with the Americans, nor is it, by far, 
 the only point of similarity and, therefore, mutual sympathy and compre- 
 hension, between the two nations.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 103 
 
 This in no wise means that the Slavs differ too little from the 
 others to form distinct nationalities, each having its own separate 
 language, literature, traditions, a character or genius proper to 
 each. Far from it. History, geography, religion, the rule or 
 contact of aliens, have separated them but too well, making a 
 complete fusion impossible ; impossible, also, for consanguinity of 
 race and language to effect forgetfulness of their different nation- 
 alities. Panslavism would prove as impracticable as Panlatin- 
 ism. At bottom it really is nothing but a scarecrow invented by 
 the Germans to arouse the mistrust of the West against the small 
 nationalities engaged in a life-struggle against Germanism. The 
 4 ' Slavic rivulets ' ' have no inclination whatever to lose themselves 
 in " the Russian ocean." Catholic or Orthodox, neither Tchekh 
 nor Croat, neither Serb nor Bulgar ever envied the fate of the Poles 
 on the Visla. What these little ' ' younger brothers ' ' expect 
 from Russia is not absorption into the domain of the Tsar, but 
 the shielding of their independence. That is known in St. 
 Petersburgh. It is also known that the empire incloses within 
 its boundaries peoples and nationalities enough as it is, 
 enough not to want to increase their numbers any more. Even 
 in Moscow, the dreamers of Panslavism, with the exception 
 of a very few utopists, do not let their dreams carry them 
 farther than a sort of ' ' patronate " to be extended to the south- 
 ern Slavs, a sort of Slavic hegemony ; and even this suzerainty 
 may encounter opposition from the most devoted of the kindred 
 peoples. 
 
 As far back as we can trace the past, we find the Slavs 
 divided into two principal groups, which historical influences were 
 to impel to fatal antagonism. In the east, towards the Dniepr, 
 were the eastern Slavs, from whom, along with the Russians, the 
 southern Slavs appear to have sprung : Bulgars, Serbs, Croats, 
 Slovens.' In the west, on the Visla and the Elb, are the west- 
 
 * The Bulgars were originally a Turanian tribe that lived on the Volga, 
 towards its lower course, and it is very likely that the river Ra took its
 
 IO4 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 era Slavs : the Liakhs, Poles, Tchekhs, Slovacks, with others, 
 since destroyed or absorbed by the Germans ; a survival of these 
 still confronts us in the Vends of Saxon and Prussian Lausitz. 
 The geographical situation of each of these tribes determined 
 their history and made enemies out of the two chief ones. In 
 the west the western Slavs were met by the influence of Rome ; 
 in the east the eastern Slavs encountered that of Byzance ; hence 
 the antagonism which, for centuries, has kept the two greatest 
 Slavic nations in strife with each other. The bond of a common 
 origin and affinity of language was severed by that which most 
 binds men religion, writing, calendar, by the very elements of 
 civilization. Hence, between Russian and Pole, a firmly rooted 
 hostility, moral as well as material, a struggle which, after all 
 but annihilating the one, cost the other its life, as though, from 
 the Karpathians to the Ural, on that immense, smooth and even 
 area, there were no room for two distinct states. 
 
 Between these two main branches of Slavs, south of the Baltic 
 Finns, there appears in the northwest, on the Nie'men and the 
 Dvina, a strange group, of incontestably Indo-European origin, 
 yet quite isolated amidst the peoples of Europe, linked on to the 
 Slavs, yet forming rather a parallel branch than a twig of the 
 Slavic branch : this group is the I^etto-Lithuanian. 
 
 Relegated in the north, shut in by marshy forests, pressed 
 upon closely by powerful neighbors, the Lithuanian group was 
 closed to any outer influences, be it from the East or West. Of 
 all the peoples of Europe, this was the last to accept Christianity, 
 
 modern name from them. They became considerably aryanized in the 
 course of time, and migrated southwards, and turned up in the Balkan 
 Peninsula in Ancient Thracia as a Slavic tribe. But after the Turkish 
 conquest, contact with their Turanian masters restored them in a great 
 measure to their original race-affinities, and now the most cursory glance 
 at a group of Bulgarian peasants shows that they have far more Turkish 
 than Slavic blood. Heavy and stolid in looks and mind, they are strikingly 
 unlike the other members of the family, of which, however, they are 
 admitted to be a branch. And the race bond alone would hardly be very 
 strong but for their common Orthodox Christianity.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 10$ 
 
 and to this day its languages are, of all European tongues, the 
 nearest to Sanskrit. No human family had so few migrations ; 
 none ever occupied so compact a territory, and none ever was so 
 cut and slashed into bits by conquests and by religions. Wedged 
 tight between more races stronger in numbers which gradually 
 drove them back, the Letto-Lithuanians, at the present time, are 
 reduced to scarcely three million souls, speaking three languages : 
 Lithuanian, Samogit, and Lett. They are divided between two 
 states, Russia and Germany, not to mention the whilom kingdom 
 of Poland, of which they occupy the northeast. Wrangled over 
 by three nations the Germans, the Poles, the Russians, who 
 by turns obtained a footing in their country, they accepted the 
 religions of all three, some becoming Protestants, some Catholics, 
 and some Orthodox. Their two principal groups, the Letts and 
 Lithuanians, have gone through experiences sufficiently opposed 
 to answer to all these contrasts. 
 
 The Lithuanian element, as the strongest in numbers, has for 'a 
 long time played a considerable part between Russia and Poland ; 
 indeed at one time, under the Yagellons, it was on the point of 
 seizing on the leadership of the entire Slavic world. After four 
 centuries of union with Poland, never, however, culminating in 
 fusion, after being aggrandized at the expense of old . Russian 
 principalities, the country that had its name from the Lithuanians 
 was annexed to Russia at the time of the dismemberment of 
 Poland, and became, between these two countries, the permanent 
 object of an historical contest which was the chief obstacle to a 
 reconciliation. Mixed with the Poles and Russians, who both 
 threaten them with absorption, the Lithuanians and the Samogits, 
 their brethren by race and language, still number in old Lithu- 
 ania nigh on two million souls, mostly Catholics ; they constitute 
 a majority of the population in the Governments of Vilna and 
 Kovno. Hard by, in Prussia, a group of 200,000 Lithuanians 
 still subsists. They are the representatives of the ancient popu- 
 lation of East Prussia, a country that has its name from a peo-
 
 106 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSAA'S AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 pie of the same race (Bo-russians, Po-russians),' and preserved its 
 language up to the seventeenth century- The second now living 
 group of this family, the Letts, possibly crossed with Finns, 
 amounts to quite a million souls. They form the majority in 
 Curland, and the southern half of Livonia. They were subju- 
 gated, made serfs of, and converted by the German Knights- 
 Sword-bearers, and became Protestants along with their German 
 lords. Like the Finn tribes who dwell out of Finland, the Letts 
 and Lithuanians, from their scant numbers and division into small 
 fragments, are incapable, by themselves, of forming a nation, a 
 state. 
 
 It is from the upper course of the Dniepr and the Dvina, near 
 the watershed which divides the waters between the Baltic, the 
 Caspian, and the Black Seas, that those Slavs went forth who were 
 to become the cement of the great race fated to rule within the 
 area bordered by the three seas. Slowly they advanced along the 
 rivers from west to east, radiating northward and southward ; 
 they pushed on into the very hearts of forests, driving before 
 them the Finn tribes, or cutting them asunder into isolated patches 
 to be absorbed at leisure by and by. Out of the mingling of the 
 two races, the ruder one being assimilated by the more cultivated 
 one, under the twofold action of a common religion and common 
 surroundings, tending to lead both to unity, sprang new people, 
 an homogeneous nation. For, contrary to certain prejudices, 
 there are in Russia not merely races more or less amalgamated, 
 there is a nation, or what, in our days, goes by the designation 
 of " a nationality ," as compact, as united, as self-conscious as 
 any in the world. With all her various races, her ' ' allogen s " or 
 aliens, Russia is by no means an incoherent mass, a sort of 
 political conglomerate or patchwork of peoples. It is not Turkey 
 or Austria, it is rather France she resembles as regards national 
 unity. If Russia is to be compared to a mosaic, it should be to 
 
 1 Bo-russi, probably a corruption of Po-russi, which would mean "(the 
 people) alongside of the Russians," *'. e. their nearest neighbors.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. IO/ 
 
 one of those antique pavements the ground of which is made out 
 of a single substance and a single color, the border alone showing 
 different pieces and colours. Most of these populations of alien 
 origin are relegated to the extremities, and form around Russia, 
 especially towards the east and west, a sort of belt, of uneven 
 width and density. The centre is entirely filled with a nationality 
 endowed with the twofold property of absorbing and expanding, 
 in the midst of which vanish a few meagre German colonies 
 or insignificant Finn or Tatar patches, devoid of cohesion or 
 national bond. 
 
 In the interior of this Russia, instead of dissimilarities and 
 contrasts, what strikes the traveller, is the uniformity of the 
 population and the monotony of their lives. This uniformity, 
 which civilization tends to spread everywhere, is found in Russia 
 in a higher degree than in any people of Europe. Language, 
 from end to end of the empire, has fewer dialects and patois, 
 fewer fluctuations and gradings off of shadings, than most West- 
 ern languages have on a far smaller area. The cities are all alike ; 
 so are the peasants, in looks, in habits, in mode of life. In no 
 country do people resemble one another more ; no other country 
 is so free from that provincial complexity, those oppositions in 
 type and character, which even yet we encounter in Italy and 
 Spain, in France and Germany. The nation is made in the like- 
 ness of the country : it shows the same unity, we might say the 
 same monotony, as the plains on which it dwells. 
 
 Yet there are in the nation, as in the soil, two principal types, 
 almost two peoples, speaking two dialects, different and most 
 clearly separate even in their mutual resemblance : they are the 
 4 ' Great-Russians ' ' and the ' ' little-Russians. ' ' By their qualities 
 as by their defects they represent, in Russia, the everlasting con- 
 trast of North and South. History has done no less than nature 
 in this direction. The Great-Russians have their principal centre 
 in Moscow, the Little- Russians in Kief. Stretching away, the 
 one to the northeast, the other to the southwest, these two uneven
 
 108 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 halves of the Russian nation do not exactly correspond to the 
 great physical zones of Russia. The fault lies partly with nature 
 herself, partly with history, which hampered the development of 
 the one and favored that of the other. The steppes of the south, 
 open ever to invasion, have for a long time hindered the expansion 
 of the Little-Russian, or Maloross, who was, through centuries, 
 kept shut up in the basins of the Dniepr, the Bug, and the Dniestr; 
 while the Great-Russian, or Velikoruss, freely spreading to the 
 north and east, went on settling in the immense basin of the 
 Volga, and, after taking possession of nearly the whole of the 
 forest land, from west to east, from the great lakes to the Ural, 
 slowly turned southward, to the Black- Mould belt and the steppes, 
 along the Volga and the Don. 
 
 Between these two principal elements there is a third, less im- 
 portant one, to which history, as well as nature, has left a more 
 thankless part to play. It is the Bieloruss or White-Russian, 
 who dwells in the governments of Mohilef, Vitebsk, Grodno, 
 Minsk, a region owning some of the finest forests in Russia, but 
 the soil of which, all cut up by marshes, is meagre and unwhole- 
 some. More nearly connected with the Great-Russian by his 
 dialect, the Bieloruss has been brought nearer to the Little- 
 Russian by the vicissitudes of politics. The two tribes have often 
 been classed together under the name of Western-Russians. 
 Early subjected to the rule of Lithuania, whose dialect became 
 her official language, White-Russia, like the greater part of Little- 
 Russia, was joined to Poland, and remained, through centuries, 
 the stakes for which the Polish Commonwealth and the Moscovite 
 Tsars played a game from the effects of which she still bleeds. 
 Of the three Russian tribes, this is certainly the one whose blood 
 is purest ; nevertheless it has always been the poorest and least 
 advanced in civilization. 
 
 The White-Russians number about four million souls, the 
 Little-Russians seventeen to eighteen, the Great-Russians forty- 
 seven to forty-eight millions, which means that these alone, by
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. IOO, 
 
 themselves, amount to about half the entire population of the 
 European portion of the empire. 
 
 The Great-Russians constitute the most vigorous and expan- 
 sive element of the Russian nation ; but it is the most mixed. 
 The Finnic blood shows most in their features, the Tatar rule in 
 their character. Before the Romanofs were raised to the throne, 
 this element, all alone, formed the empire of the Moscovite Tsars ; 
 also, they assumed the title of sovereigns "of all the Russias" 
 long before Alexis, the father of Peter the Great, began, by 
 annexing Ukrama, to have some claim to the title. Hence the 
 Great-Russian has, under the name of Moscovite, been held 
 by sundry foreigners to be the true, the only Russian. The 
 name is a misnomer. The Great-Russian, the product of 
 the colonization of Central Russia by the Western - Russians 
 prior to the Tatar invasion, is anterior to the state and 
 even the city of Moscow. If out of it did emerge the Mos- 
 covite autocracy, still it is impossible to sever the bonds which 
 unite to it the great Slavic Commonwealth of the West, the 
 name of which has remained a symbol of activity and liberty, 
 Nbvgorod the Great. 
 
 The least Slavic of all the peoples who claim the name, the 
 Great-Russian * has been the great colonizer of the Slavic race. His 
 enemies call him Turanian, Mongol, Asiatic ; but, in point of fact, 
 he, like the other Russians, had his starting-point in the West, 
 i. e. in Little-Russia, White-Russia, and N6vgorod. He marched 
 from Europe towards Asia. It is from the banks of the Dvina 
 and the Dniepr that he started on that gigantic Odyssey which 
 was, in the course of five or six centuries, to take him beyond the 
 Ural, beyond the Caspian and the Caucasus. We have a good 
 
 8 Yet the peasantry of the central governments, born tradesmen and 
 industrials, are considered to present an Indo-European type of a hand- 
 some and noble order, with eyes blue, gray, or hazel, hair dark blond or 
 light chestnut, and beard always a shade or two lighter, and uncommonly 
 white skins. The children are absolutely rosy wherever their bodies are 
 exposed to the air.
 
 110 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 presentment of the Great-Russian's destiny and route in the river 
 whose downward course he followed, from source to mouth. The 
 Volga has traced out his itinerary for him ; like the Volga, he 
 flowed from Europe to Asia. When with Ivan III. and Ivan IV., 
 and, later, with Peter the Great, he turned his face aggressively 
 towards the Baltic and the West, he merely went back to his 
 source, seeking for his European basis of yore." His entire history 
 has been one long struggle against Asia ; his conquests en- 
 larged Europe, every one. Though so long the vassal of the 
 Tatar khans, the Asiatic sway never made him forgetful of 
 his European origin, and in the farthest corner of Moscovia the 
 very name "Asiatic," "Asiat," is even still an insult in the 
 ear of the peasant. 
 
 Having won the victory over Asia, the Great-Russian 
 could not traverse the space of six centuries, nor the distance 
 from the Dniepr to the Ural without adopting by the way 
 more than one trait, both moral and physical, of the popu- 
 lations assimilated or subjugated by him. These influences 
 have left him a something harsher, but also more robust, than 
 the gifts the other Slavs are endowed with. He has less 
 spirit of independence, less pride, less individuality ; but these 
 qualities are made up to him by greater patience, unity of views, 
 consistency. According to a remark made by Herzen, the Great- 
 Russian, if, in getting crossed with more ponderous races, he 
 has lost some of the lightness peculiar to pure Slavic blood, 
 has also lost some of the mercurial mobility which has become 
 fatal to other Slavic tribes. The extreme Slavic ductility has 
 been corrected by foreign alloy. In its fusion with the Tatar 
 copper or the Finnic lead, the Russian metal has gained more in 
 
 It should be remembered that Novgorod was a member of the Hansa, 
 *nd that Anne, a daughter of Yaroslav the Great and granddaughter of 
 Vladimir of Kief, of Christian and epic memory, was wife of Henri I. King 
 of France, one of the first Capetians. These two facts imply a good deal 
 of mutual knowledge and congeniality, as well as pretty regular and 
 frequent intercourse.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. Ill 
 
 solidity than it has lost in purity. It is perhaps owing to this 
 cross that the Great-Russian has distanced all his rivals and 
 become the nucleus of the greatest empire in the world. The 
 triumph of such mixed blood in certain tribes over competitors 
 more free from mis-alliances, far from being an anomaly, is on the 
 contrary a phenomenon frequently recurring in history. These 
 peoples, sprung from various races, make up in vigor for what 
 they lack in delicacy. Thus Prussia in Germany, Piedmont in 
 Italy, have given to the two countries the unity they could not 
 derive from less mixed national elements and, in ancient times, 
 Macedon and Rome herself have yielded analogous examples. 
 
 For being crossed with Finn or Tatar blood, the Great- 
 Russians have not themselves become either Finns or Tatars ; for 
 not being of pure Indo-European race, they are not Turanians. 
 Language and bringing up do not constitute their only claim to 
 the name of Slavs. The Russian of Great-Russia is not a Slav 
 merely in the way that the French and Spaniards are Latins by 
 traditions and civilization, by adoption so to speak ; he is Slav by 
 direct filiation. A notable portion of the blood in his veins is 
 Slavic. The proportion is difficult, or rather impossible, to specify ; 
 it varies according to the regions, to the classes, which have long 
 ago formed themselves into more or less closed castes. It is 
 larger in the regions more anciently colonized, such as the banks 
 of rivers along which the Slavs formerly advanced. At times, 
 when journeying from the banks of rivers into the interior, we 
 pass from a type almost entirely Slavic to one almost entirely 
 Finnic until we come to barely russified Finns who, while losing 
 their language, have preserved their garb and customs. The por- 
 tion of Slavic blood in the mass of the nation is nevertheless very 
 considerable, if not predominant. The same arguments which 
 demonstrate a Finnic alloy in the Great-Russian also show us 
 that he is Slav at bottom. 
 
 Great- Russia was not subdued by the Slavs of Novgorod and 
 Kief in a few brief military expeditions. It was not a conquest,
 
 112 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 a mere armed occupation, with no more important revulsion than 
 a change of dynasty or landlords ; it was a long, slow immigra- 
 tion, a sort of scarcely perceptible infiltration of the Slavic ele- 
 ment, that went on for centuries, almost escaping the notice of 
 contemporary annalists, and only guessed at by history, and that 
 not with sufficient precision to mark off the stages. There is 
 nothing to compare with this in the West. The colonization of 
 Great-Russia by the western Russians must have been some- 
 thing very like what is going on even now in the half-desert 
 provinces of the east and south. We cannot picture to ourselves 
 the forests of the north, in the Finnic period, being as densely 
 peopled as those of Gaul or even Germany, before the Roman 
 wars. The climate, soil, mode of life of these frequently still 
 half-nomadic populations are opposed to such an idea. The little 
 resistance met by the Russian invasion also bears witness to the 
 small numbers of the natives. It is the same with the physical 
 and moral differences which we can note among the few Finns 
 still scattered on Russian soil. So great a diversity among mani- 
 festly kindred tribes must have been anterior to the Slavic coloni- 
 zation and proves the dispersion and extreme parcelling of the 
 native tribes. It was easy for the Slavs to settle in the midst of 
 these scattered tribes, more than one of which probably owed 
 them its concentration into a comparatively compact group. Pos- 
 sibly even, the russification of the Finns did not proceed on a large 
 scale until these tribes, packed close by pressure from the new 
 arrivals, were closely encompassed on all sides by them. 
 
 It should not be forgotten, moreover, that mingling of blood 
 is not the only way in which two hostile races react upon one 
 another. Their mere coming into contact on the same soil, even 
 without armed strife, is frequently sufficient to cause the decrease 
 of one to the advantage of the other. This phenomenon so strik- 
 ingly illustrated in our time in America and Australia by what fol- 
 lowed on the coming of the Europeans, appears to have taken place 
 in Europe itself, in prehistoric times, when the primeval popula-
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 113 
 
 tions began to vanish before the Indo-European race. Is it not 
 probable that in Russia the Slavic, i. e. the Indo-European blood, 
 may have had the same advantage over Turanian blood that it had 
 in the other parts of Europe ? Although we have, unfortunately, no 
 statistical data on the subject, some observers assert that, at this 
 very day, the Finn population tends to diminish in numbers 
 wherever it is placed in direct contact with a Russian population, 
 and that too, independently of intermarriages, very rare between 
 Finns and Russians, independently of all mixture, from the mere 
 fact of vicinity. Could not the mysterious laws of the ' ' struggle 
 for life ' ' have acted in a more perceptible manner when, instead 
 of Russians already crossed with them, the Finns found them- 
 selves face to face with Slavs of purer blood ? 
 
 Tradition equally bears out the Great-Russian's claim to the 
 name of Slav. Indeed, language is not the only link that con- 
 nects him with the Slav family, and, through that, with the other 
 nations of Europe ; the chief link consists in his folk-lore ; popu- 
 lar stories and songs, chips of mythology and still living beliefs 
 and superstitions, all documents that cannot be ignored when the 
 genealogy of a people is inquired into. A noticeable fact is that 
 it is in the north, in regions incontestably Finnic, on the shores of 
 L,ake Onega for instance, that modern scholars have collected the 
 largest numbers of tales and ballads in prose or verse skazkas and 
 byltnas although the farther the Russian Slav penetrated into 
 the northern forests, the more careful he was to take along with 
 him his family titles.* 
 
 10 They in this word, as in Aa/wj>/fc(Kalmuk) is an attempt to approximate 
 an untranscribable Slavic sound which comes nearest to we ; so that bylina, 
 Kalmyk, would read something like bwelina, Kalmweek, with the w much 
 weakened. Bylina literally means "something that has been," while 
 skazka, from skasati, "to tell," answers exactly to "tale" or the Latin 
 equivalent, "legend." 
 
 * On this subject, which has given rise to so many controversies, see, 
 apart from Russian writers : Mr. Ralston, Russian Folk Tales, and Songs 
 of ihe Russian People ; M. A. Rambaud, La Russie pique ; and M. A. 
 De Gubernatis, in his Zoological Mythology. 
 
 8
 
 I 14 THE EMPIKK OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 The upshot of all this is that, on the plains of the Upper 
 Volga and the Oka, heterogeneous, scattered, and loosely consti- 
 tuted tribes somehow congregated, and, out of all these bits and 
 patches, a compact whole was formed, the various elements of 
 which, associated before fusion, are still recognizable ; just as in 
 granite, quartz, feldspath, and mica, mixed without being assimi- 
 lated, together form one of the hardest substances in existence. 
 Thus it is that in the Russian people, especially the Great-Rus- 
 sian, various national elements often are discernible to the eye : 
 they are as yet in the aggregate stage ; the physiological fusion, 
 begun centuries ago, is not completed yet ; the moral and political 
 fusion, the only one that matters to a nation's constitution, has 
 been beforehand with it. In certain senses the national type is 
 still being elaborated and in what may be called the ' ' sketchy 
 stage" ; but the same cannot be said of the Russian nationality, 
 even if at times it seems less finished than that of one or other 
 Western people : there would be no gain for it in the obliteration 
 of traces of an origin which the people do not perceive and the 
 causes of which are to them unknown or matter of indifference. 
 In their greatest divergence, the populations of Russia do not 
 show oppositions in types and colors so violent as not to yield 
 even to centuries of race mixing, such oppositions as entail on 
 the American States strife and race rivalries capable of endanger- 
 ing their liberty and safety. In all that concerns ethnological 
 unity as well as the physical unity of soil and clime, Russia has 
 the advantage of the United States and still more of Brazil. 
 
 In spite of the traces of crosses which he often bears on his 
 face, the Great- Russian maintains unbroken his community with 
 the Caucasian race, by the external signs which most clearly 
 characterize it : stature, color of skin, hair and eyes. His stature 
 is more often high than low, his skin is white, his eyes are fre- 
 quently blue ; his hair is mostly blond, light chestnut or auburn, 
 all shades which almost exclusively belong to the Caucasian or 
 Mediterranean stock. The long, thick beard which is the pride of
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. HJ 
 
 the peasant's heart, and which all the persecutions of Peter the 
 Great could not induce him to cut off, 11 is in itself a sign of race, 
 as nothing can be barer than the chin of a Mongol or a Chinese.* 
 
 Thus then, with regard to race as well as soil, Russia, if she 
 does differ from the West, differs still more from old Asia ; from 
 both points of view, she embodies the conquest of the latter by 
 the former. The Russian people, both by blood and tradition, is 
 directly linked to the noblest, most progressive, most intellectual 
 family in the world, but to the branch thereof the least illustrious 
 so far. Of the two chief ethnical elements that enter into the 
 making of Russia, the most European the Slavic element is, as 
 regards its genius, nearly as unknown to the West as the other ; 
 what surprises the singular people issued from their fusion re- 
 serves to the future, cannot even be conjectured. 
 
 The lyittle-Russians (Maloross) are Russia's Southerners. 
 It is calculated that two thirds of them have brown or dark- 
 chestnut hair. Of purer race than their brethren of Great-Russia, 
 located nearer to the West, they glory in their comparatively 
 unmixed blood, their milder climate, their cheerier land. They 
 are handsomer of countenance and taller in stature, have finer 
 limbs and are of slighter make ; they are livelier and more alert 
 in mind, but at the same time more changeable ahd more indo- 
 lent, more meditative and less determined, consequently more 
 apathetic and less enterprising. Their climate having been less 
 of a trial to them, and Oriental despotism having sat lighter on 
 them, the I/ittle-Russian and White-Russian have more personal 
 
 11 Peter never meddled with the peasants in any way. His high-handed 
 reforms in dress and mode of life did not go beyond the nobility and the 
 urban classes. If he could have taken in hand all classes equally, there 
 might not be now such a chasm between "the million" and the social 
 "upper ten thousand." 
 
 * If these traits, unfamiliar to the races of Upper Asia, are more or less 
 frequently encountered in certain Finn or Tatar tribes, that presupposes 
 alliances, in remote antiquity, between these and peoples of Caucasian 
 stock, and this very fact brings the Russians into closer relationship with 
 the Western Europeans.
 
 1 16 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 dignity, more independence, more individuality than the Great- 
 Russian ; their mind is less positive, more open to sentiment and 
 fancy, more dreamy and more poetical.* All these shades of 
 character are reproduced in the melodies and songs of both groups, 
 in their holidays and customs, although provincial diversities are 
 gradually dying out under the influence of the Great-Russian 
 branch, which bids fair to assimilate the western Russians as the 
 other populations of the empire. The contrast is still visible in 
 family and commune, in the house and the villages of both tribes. 
 Amidst the L,ittle- Russians the individual is more independent, 
 woman is freer, 1 * the family is less compactly agglomerated ; the 
 cottages have more room between them and are frequently sur- 
 rounded with gardens and flowers. 
 
 These people, who were subjected to western influences under 
 the rule of Poland, were, towards the seventeenth century, the 
 first intermediate agents between Europe and Moscovia, to which, 
 besides vicinity, they were attached b) r mutual affinities of lan- 
 guage and religion. Prior to Peter the Great, and partly even in 
 
 * For a knowledge of the Little-Russian songs (pUsni), which vie with 
 those of Serbia for the palm of Slavic popular poetry, consult Bodenstedt, 
 Die Poetische Ukrain (1845), andRambaud, La Russie fcpique (1876). 
 
 15 In what way ? No peasant housewife could have a position more 
 honored, independent, masterful than the mate of the Great-Russian and 
 northern husbandman. As among the Spartans and early Romans, she is 
 subject and responsible only to her " man," but even he does not interfere 
 with her house-rule and her own specially feminine branches of farming. 
 The produce of dairy and poultry left over from home use, the surplus of 
 her spinning and weaving, are hers to sell, and the money, by immemorial 
 unwritten, but all the more compelling law, is awarded her as her property 
 to hold or spend, and many a husband has received a flogging by decree of 
 the mir (village assembly), for having robbed the housewife of her private 
 hoard. Aud many a heifer or colt finds its way to a peasant's stable 
 that would never have come there but for her savings and many a log 
 house has been roofed, and repaired, and made snug against the winter 
 with money from the same source. The southern woman may dance and 
 sing more in the young folk's chorus on moonlight nights on the broad 
 village street, and sport more many-colored ribbons and gay silk ker- 
 chiefs, and be freer of talk and manner with the village swells, but hardly 
 to the increase of her dignity and moral worth.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. \\J 
 
 his reign, it was chiefly through their instrumentality that Europe 
 exerted her influence over Moscow and Russia. 
 
 To Little-Russia belonged the Zapor6gs, the most famous of 
 those Cosack tribes which played so prominent a part between 
 Poland, the Tatars, and the Turks, in the Ukrama or southern 
 steppes, and whose name will ever be to Russians the symbol of 
 free and independent life. Kaz&tchestvo Cosackdom with its 
 liberal or democratical traditions, is to this day the more or less 
 conscious, more or less avowed ideal of a great many Little- 
 Russians. Another thing, also connected with the history of 
 Ukrama, the foreign descent or denationalization of a great 
 portion of the upper classes, half Polish and half Great-Russian, 
 equally favors democratic instincts in the Little-Russian people. 
 For this twofold reason, the Little-Russian is perhaps less imper- 
 vious to political aspirations, and consequently more open to 
 revolutionary blandishments than his brother of Great-Russia.* 
 
 Of the Cosacks of our day, those of the Black Sea, transferred 
 to the Kuban between the Azof Sea and the Caucasus, are alone 
 Little-Russians ; those of the Don and Ural are Great-Russians. 
 To the seventeen or eighteen millions of Little- Russians residing 
 in Russia, should be added, on ethnological grounds, about three 
 millions more, dwelling in Austria, on both sides of the Kar- 
 pathian Mountains, in Eastern Galicia, formerly " Red- Russia," 
 in Bukovine, and in the " comitats " of Northern Hungary. 
 
 The claim of the Little- Russians to the name and quality of 
 Russians has been contested, as well as that of the White- Rus- 
 sians, virtually one third of the Russian people. In order to 
 separate them from the Great- Russians, different national designa- 
 tions have been sought out for them. At one time the name of 
 "Russian" would be reserved for the Great-Russian, and the 
 others would be given the Latin name of ' ' Ruthenes, ' ' or the 
 
 * This seems to be borne out by several political trials that took place 
 between 1879 an< l I 888, and in which several Ukraina peasants were im- 
 plicated.
 
 Il8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Hungarian one of " Russniak," both of which are merely a tran- 
 scription and synonym of the name they were to supplant. At 
 another time the title of ' ' Russian ' ' would be reserved for the 
 Slavs of little-Russia and White-Russia, the first centres of the 
 empire ruled by the descendants of Rurik, while it would be 
 denied to Great-Russia, on which was inflicted the name of 
 1 ' Moscovia. ' ' These bickerings on words, gotten up not by 
 Little- Russians, but by Poles, in no wise alter the facts. Their 
 only effect was to keep up between luckless Poland and Russia 
 irreconcilable pretensions, which have brought the stronger 
 nation to ignore the nationality of the weaker, as Poland once 
 had ignored that of her Russian subjects. Suffice it here to 
 establish the fact that these designations: "Ruthene," "Russ- 
 niak," "Russin," like those of "Russ" and "Russian," used 
 indifferently and interchangeably by old writers and old travellers, 
 are at bottom merely forms of the same name, designating the 
 same nationality at least within the limits of the empire.* 
 
 Separated from Great- Russia at the time of the Tatar invasion 
 Little-Russia was through five centuries subject to Poland and 
 Lithuania, not to much purpose. Only the polished surface, 
 the nobility of Kief, Volhynia, Podolia, became polonized.f It is 
 
 * Nowadays these different terms, particularly that of " Ruthene," 
 ordinarily applied to Uniats, have assumed a more definite sense. Besides, 
 the Little-Russians are divided into three distinct types with as many prin- 
 cipal dialects: that of the plain of Ukraine, that of the " Polie'ssiye" or 
 " forest region " of Kief, and that of Galicia and Pod61ia. 
 
 t Russian statisticians have long ago called attention to the fact that in 
 the provinces of the southwest Podolia, Volhynia, Kief usually consid- 
 ered as Polish by the Poles, these latter are in reality numerically inferior 
 to the Jews. The same observation applies to Lithuania and White-Russia, 
 f. e. to all the provinces annexed in one of the three divisions of Poland. 
 According to Mr. Tchubinsky, who has published some very detailed statis- 
 tical tables on this very subject, the Poles could not muster 100,000 strong 
 in the above three governments put together. Even allowing for some 
 exaggeration in the Russian documents, still so much remains that the 
 figure of the genuinely Polish population is extremely low. In those three 
 governments, the number of the Catholics, among whom there certainly 
 are non-polonized Little-Russians, amounted to scarcely 400,000, or less
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 119 
 
 owing pre-eminently to the Greek Orthodox rite that the bulk 
 of the people, the immense majority of the inhabitants of Kief 
 and Ukraina have turned out quite as Russian as the people 
 of Moscow. It matters little that the Little- Russian idiom 
 deserves the title of language rather than that of dialect ; such 
 was the case with the Provencal in France ; it matters little 
 even that the people of little-Russia and Ukrama are entitled to 
 be considered as a nation or a distinct nationality. This question, 
 ardently discussed by scholars as well as by Ukrai'nophil patriots, 
 is one of those which should not be settled with the assistance of 
 ethnological or linguistical arguments, for nationality does not 
 really reside in race any more than in language, but in a people's 
 consciousness. What admits of no doubt whatever is that, in 
 the eyes of Western Europe, the Little-Russian is as much a 
 Russian as the Great-Russian. 
 
 If a few thinkers, such as the poet Shevtchenko * and the 
 Ukramophils, have been suspected of a wish to erect Little- Russia 
 into a nation, independent of both Russia and Poland, to resume 
 the projects of Khmelnitsky and Mazeppa, such dreams found 
 not much more echo among the Little- Russians than, in 1870-71, 
 the projects of a southern league met with in the south of France. 
 The contemporary writers, natives of Little- Russia, are almost 
 unanimous in discountenancing any leaning towards secession, 
 and the most renowned of them, Kostomarof, severely condemns 
 Mazeppa, the last statesman who seriously undertook to separate 
 Ukrama from Russia. Ukramophilism and the Little-Russian 
 poets are scarcely more dangerous to Russia than are to France's 
 
 than a seventh of the entire population (16.94 per cent.). In these same three 
 governments, on the contrary, the number of the Israelites rose to over 750,000, 
 nearly double that of the Catholics. See Labors of the Ethnographico- 
 Statistical Expedition ; Materials and Investigations, by P. Tchubinsky, 
 vol. vii., pp. 272-290. 
 
 * On Shevtchenko, orginally a serf, then by turns footman and soldier, 
 painter and poet, the reader might look up an interesting study by M. 
 Durand, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, of June 15, 1876.
 
 I2O THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 unity the revival of a Proven?al literature, and those " ftlibres" 
 of the south in whose language an over-fastidious police might 
 easily detect more than one imprudent expression. Even among 
 their partisans the tendencies accused of separatism are mostly 
 limited to wishes for decentralization aud provincial autonomy, to 
 regrets about the suppression, by Peter the Great and Catherine 
 II., of ancient franchises, to a feeling of repulsion towards the 
 bureaucracy imported from Moscow and Petersburgh. The most 
 determined of Ukramophils do not go beyond federalistic dreams, 
 and the assertion that federalism can alone give satisfaction to the 
 numerous peoples of alien origin scattered over the vast empire.* 
 At all events, the obstacles blunderingly thrown by the authori- 
 ties in the way of the diffusion of little- Russian literature and 
 press, even of the use of a dialect which alone is understood by 
 the people, are not exactly calculated to stifle in the Little- 
 Russian's heart the hankering after autonomy which it is expected 
 to destroy in the germ by such means. 
 
 It is a notable portion of the national genius that Russian 
 censure dooms to silence and obscurity by the proscription of an 
 idiom spoken by more mouths than Serb and Bulgar put together ; 
 a notable portion of the Russian people, perhaps the best gifted 
 for art and poetry, that Petersburgh bureaucracy deprives of all 
 means of expression, all means of instruction. In Russia less 
 than anywhere else, spirits scornful of languages restricted within 
 narrow bounds and provincial dialects should indulge in any 
 illusions ; popular speech, doomed to perish in the course of time, 
 does not suffer itself to be evicted in a few years ; it is easier to 
 forbid the use of it by ordinances and decrees than to substitute 
 for it in daily practice the official literary language. In the inter- 
 val, the hand which, under pretence of opening to them a wider 
 window on the world, closes the humble transom through which 
 
 *See especially Hrontdda of Mr. Dragomanof and, by the same 
 author, Historical Poland and Great-Russian Democracy ', Geneva, 1882.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 121 
 
 light could reach them, consigns to ignorance millions of human 
 creatures. 
 
 The differences in race, dialect, character, which distinguish 
 the two chief Russian tribes, are not greater than those which exist 
 between the north and south of the Western states whose unity, 
 whether ancient or recent, is best assured. As to the race itself 
 in the name of which certain ethnologists pretend to separate 
 them, there is far less distance between the Russian tribes than is 
 commonly imagined. If the Great-Russian has been mixed more 
 with Finns, the I<ittle-Russian perhaps mixed more with Tatars, 
 of whom his princes at Kief received and sheltered whole tribes, 
 while his Cosacks of the steppes recruited from among them 
 numbers of fugitives and comrades for their life of adventure. 
 Far from being naturally antagonistic to each other, the Little- 
 Russian and the Great- Russian have much in common : geogra- 
 phy, which would hardly allow of the weaker party having a 
 separate existence ; historical traditions and antipathies, common 
 to both ; religion, still regarded by both as the foremost power of 
 all; and lastly, the twofold kinship of language and origin. 
 They mutually complete each other, and lend their common 
 country that complex character and genius, which, when enfolded 
 in unity, has made the greatness of all the great nations in history.
 
 BOOK II. CHAPTER V. 
 
 Russia and the Historical Nationalities of Her Western Boundaries Ob- 
 stacles to Russification Germans and German Influence Antipathy 
 against the Nitmets Germans in the Baltic Provinces and in Poland 
 The Polish Question Mutual Interest of Russians and Poles in a 
 Reconciliation Plebeian Nationalities and Democratical Policy. 
 
 THE Russian nation, including even the Little- Russians and 
 White-Russians, occupies the interior of the empire, but does not 
 begin to fill out the frame. On no side, unless it be the Black and 
 White Seas, and unless we take the Ukrainians skirting Eastern 
 Galicia, does the Russian people reach the limits of Russia. On 
 nearly all its frontiers, it is encompassed by populations of alien 
 origin, divided into two principal bands : one in the east, towards 
 Asia, composed of Finns, Bashkirs, Tatars, Kirghiz, Kalmyks ; 
 the other, more considerable but not more homogeneous, in the 
 west, facing Europe, along the most vulnerable flank line of 
 Russia, the only one on which she confines with powerful neigh- 
 bors. At certain times the government at St. Petersburgh may 
 well find there material for weighty and apprehensive thought. 
 
 It is to be noted that the main element of the nation the 
 nucleus of it the Great- Russian comes into actual contact with 
 these western populations on one point only, and that the least 
 exposed, the shore of the Gulf of Finland, by a region, moreover, 
 that counts among the poorest and least peopled. In the centre 
 and south, between ancient Moscovia and the conquests of Peter 
 the Great and Catherine II., between Great- Russia on one side 
 and Livonia, Lithuania, Poland, on the other, lie White-Russia
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 123 
 
 and Little- Russia, which being, as one might say, Russian only 
 in the second degree are far less proper to russify others. This 
 inconvenience is increased by the scantiness of the population in 
 White-Russia and the swamps of Pinsk in the region bordering 
 on Little-Russia. These two districts have dug, between the 
 best-peopled regions of old Moscovia and her conquests of the last 
 two centuries, a sort of half-desert gulf, which, in spite of the fine 
 draining works going on in the marshes of the Pripet,* cannot 
 possibly fill rapidly. The Poles, Lithuanians, Letts, and Germans 
 of the west thus find themselves protected against russification 
 by a double barrier ; and this accounts for the trifling progress it 
 makes. The same phenomenon can be explained by still another 
 consideration. Population, like water, naturally inclines towards 
 a vacuum and finds its own level. So it is towards the east and 
 Asia, not towards the west and Europe towards the oriental 
 regions, insufficiently peopled as yet, and not towards provinces 
 peopled frequently more densely than the interior of the empire, 
 that the surplus of Russian population naturally flows. 
 
 With sixty -eight or seventy millions of Russians, it is no very 
 great thing to have some fourteen or fifteen millions non-russified, 
 which is all that European Russia has to show, outside of Fin- 
 land, Poland, and the Caucasus, those being, moreover, divided 
 into over ten peoples and nearly as many languages and religions. 
 If we take in the kingdom of Poland and Finland, the figure will 
 mount up to twenty-four or twenty-five millions, and to three or 
 four more if we add thereto that Babel the Caucasus, which 
 should rather be considered as a colony, and which, alone, num- 
 bers about as many peoples and tribes as all the rest of the 
 empire, f All these populations are for the most part too weak, 
 
 * The works carried out in this region constitute one of the finest under- 
 takings of the kind in Europe. In 1889 a good deal over two million acres 
 had been already drained. 
 
 t According to Mr. Rittich, the population of the Caucasus, even prior 
 to the annexations sanctioned by the treaty of Berlin, was divided into 
 twelve principal groups, speaking sixty-eight different dialects.
 
 124 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 too fragmentary, to have any claim to independence ; they will let 
 themselves be assimilated by the mere force of progressing civili- 
 zation, everywhere unfavorable to small tribes and shut-in 
 languages. Many of these aUogens (aliens), as the Finns of the 
 interior or the Gruzins (commonly called Georgians) of Trans- 
 caucasia, are nearly as devoted to the Tsar as his natural-born 
 Russian subjects. Others, such as the two million Ehsts and 
 Letts of the Baltic provinces, find in the Russian government 
 a protection against the aristocratical oligarchy and the burgher 
 arrogance of 160,000 Germans. These latter and their kindred of 
 the interior are urged by self-interest, in spite of enticements from 
 abroad, to remain subjects of a state in which, notwithstanding 
 their scant numbers, they occupy so ample a place ; where, 
 thanks to the antiquity of their civilization, thanks to certain 
 Teutonic qualities a taste for work, the spirit of order and ex- 
 actness, thanks also to comradeship, worldly connections, and 
 influences at court, they have for a long time filled the high 
 posts of the military and civil careers, so that, in the vast Slavic 
 Empire, the Germans, until very lately, appeared to be the 
 privileged race.* 
 
 * The proportion of Germans goes on increasing progressively from the 
 lower to the highest charges, both civil and military. It is notorious how 
 Alexander III., then heir to the crown, at a reception of the highest staff 
 officers, after several generals with German names had been presented to 
 him, exclaimed, " At last ! " at the first Russian name he heard. Yet there 
 have been stories current about the antipathy of the future Alexander III. 
 and his wife against the Germans, which got some Frenchmen, who took 
 them literally, into sad trouble. Thus once, at an official dinner, the then 
 French ambassador having thanked the Cesare"vitch for the sympathy he had 
 shown France in the war of 1870-71, the latter turned his back on him with- 
 out vouchsafing a word in reply. 1 
 
 ' There is a very popular story, illustrative of this galling state of 
 things, about General Yermolof, one of the heroes of the now epic war 
 against Shamil and his fanatical robber tribes of the Caucasus, a blunt 
 old warrior, as notorious for plain speaking as for bravery and military 
 genius. It is said that the Emperor Alexander II. received him at a private 
 audience, to congratulate him on a victory which prepared the final one by 
 which Prince Bariatinsky, another Theseus, freed Russia from the annual 
 blood tribute which she had been paying for half a century to the murderous
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 12$ 
 
 This sort of supremacy, which the Germans exert both in pri- 
 vate and public life, cannot but excite in the Russians feelings of 
 distrust and jealousy which, at times, break out into loud protest. 
 The national feeling rebels against the sway of the Germans, 
 accused as they are of forming in the administration as well as in 
 business a sort of corporation, the members of which support one 
 another at the cost of the state and of private persons.* In Peters- 
 burgh, and especially in Moscow, the periodical press continuously 
 
 1 There are sundry trades and professions of which the Germans have 
 appropriated the monopoly, which they guard as fiercely as though it had 
 been legally bestowed on them. Twenty years ago the bakers and the 
 apothecaries (druggists and pharmacists) were all German, and that all over 
 the country. It was impossible for a Russian to get into a bakery as appren- 
 tice or even errand boy. At last an enterprising Moscow man started in 
 Petersburgh, in a fashionable quarter, a "Moscow bakery." The venture 
 was a success, the number of " Russian bakeries " and " Moscow bakeries " 
 increased rapidly at first in the two capitals till it rivalled that of the 
 German ones. This was partly, of course, a " demonstration," but what 
 made the success a permanent one, is the fact that there are some special 
 kinds of plain and fancy breads, thoroughly national in quality and shape, 
 which the Germans never could produce, and which, until this popular 
 movement was started, could be got only from itinerant sellers or at open- 
 air stands in the more populous commercial quarters. The pharmacists' 
 "ring" was more difficult to break. On no consideration whatever could 
 a Russian obtain access to a prescription counter or laboratory. I have 
 personally known young men of good family, university graduates, having 
 brilliantly passed all the examinations required by the law of pharmacists' 
 assistants ("pro visors") whose continuous efforts were met with as con- 
 tinuous defeats, till they were forced into some other work than that for 
 which they had spent their youth preparing themselves. When I left, 
 eighteen years ago, one Russian drug store had just been started, and the 
 success was still uncertain. 
 
 Minotaurs of the mountain labyrinth. Alexander was a kind man and a 
 generous master, and the thanks and praise he bestowed on his faithful old 
 servant were meted out unstintingly, winding up with the command to 
 select any favour within the power of the imperial hand to bestow. Where- 
 upon the General is reported to have replied that his gracious sovereign's 
 bounty had left him nothing to wish for " Unless," bethinking himself of 
 a crowning boon " Unless it might be your Majesty's pleasure to promote 
 me into a German ! " The point of the story is greatly sharpened by the 
 fact that the first half of the General's career had been one long struggle 
 against German esprit de corps and nepotism. Whether the thing occurred 
 just so or not who shall tell? At all events it is eminently a case of " se 
 non vero, ben irovato."
 
 126 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 stimulates Russia to throw off the political and economical yoke 
 of the nitmets* a yoke the weight of which certain patriots 
 very greatly exaggerate, and which they seem as unable to shake 
 off entirely as to bear it patiently. To the twofold jarring pro- 
 duced by individual self-love and by national pride, is added the 
 antipathy in both mind and character which of yore exists between 
 the Slav and the Teuton. This secular antipathy has repeatedly 
 manifested itself in Russian society, especially since the treaty of 
 Berlin, in rather curious ways : by more or less malicious jeers 
 at the Teutonic accent and manners, in petty, often puerile, 
 taunts, by affecting a more or less sincere contempt for the arts, 
 literature, and products of Germany affecting indeed to be ignor- 
 ant of the German language or purposely disfiguring it, so that it 
 came to pass that I, a Frenchman, more than once took up the 
 cudgels in defence of the conquerors of Alsace-Lorraine against 
 their neighbors, the Russians. 
 
 This repulsion against the Germans, which breaks out in 
 periodical spells, might appear excessive and ridiculous, were it 
 not justified by the political apprehensions aroused by the resur- 
 rection of the German Empire and the invasive propensities of the 
 Germanic race. Had Alexander II. followed the national instinct 
 and shared the preferences of his subjects, he should not have 
 congratulated his uncle, Wilhelm, on the battle of Sedan, nor 
 should he have connived at the mutilation of France. In un- 
 prejudiced eyes, Germany is assuredly more dangerous to Russia 
 than to France. In France's case, indeed, the empire of the 
 Hohenzollerns encounters a compact nationality, difficult to break 
 into, offering no handle to Teutonic assimilation. The same 
 cannot be said of the east of Europe, where Germany, jointly with 
 Prussia, has been steadily aggrandizing itself, century after cen- 
 tury. Now, the Russians don't care to see their Western neigh- 
 bor carry on at their expense on the Visla, the Nie'men, or the 
 
 * Nitmets originally means " dumb," one who cannot speak ; therefore 
 " a foreigner," a German.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. I2/ 
 
 Dvina, his secular encroachments on territory belonging to the 
 Slavs or to the Letto-Lithuanians. 
 
 There are no German provinces in the Russian Empire. This 
 designation, often used by the Germans and even by the French, 
 as applied to the three Baltic provinces, is absolutely incorrect, 
 and it is easy to understand why the Russians will decidedly not 
 tolerate the misnomer. Statistics have long ago established the 
 fact that, in these pretended ' ' German ' ' provinces Livonia or 
 Liefland, Esthonia or Esthland, and Curland, the Germans do 
 not, in reality, make out one tenth of the population, the immense 
 majority of which consists of Letts in the south and Finns in the 
 north. The modern principle of nationality, which, by the way, 
 when not grounded in national consciousness, merely furnishes a 
 novel instrument of oppression, supplies, from this side, no pre- 
 tence for the clamoring for restitution kept up by the Germans. 
 But neither numbers, nor race, nor language are everything in a 
 country. It matters little that the Germans, on the lower course 
 of the Dvina, constitute a minority amounting to a minimum ; 
 they have ruled the land too long by force of arms, by trade, by 
 religion, by all that goes to make up civilization, not to have 
 impressed their stamp on it. 
 
 The mark of the Hansa is discernible everywhere in the cities, 
 and that of feudal Germany everywhere in the country, owned 
 by the heirs of the "Sword-bearers. ' ' Take it all in all manners, 
 history, traditions the Baltic country is far more German than 
 was Alsace-Lorraine in 1870. It might even be said without para- 
 dox, that these Russian provinces, peopled by Letts and Finns, 
 were the most German country on the continent, so largely had 
 mediaeval Germany survived there. 
 
 It is but natural that the Russian government, who has ruled 
 them for the last two centuries, should seek to de-germanize and 
 to modernize its Baltic provinces, in spite of charters or privileges 
 granted to the Lieflanders by Peter the Great on the occasion of 
 their annexation. It is but natural that, in order to diminish the
 
 128 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 German preponderance, Petersburgh and Moscow should call in 
 the aid of the former Finn or Lett serf ; but such an undertaking 
 everywhere requires more than average prudence, patience, mod- 
 eration. 
 
 The German spirit and moral influence are too deeply rooted 
 in the soil to allow of easy eradication, nor can a country's attach- 
 ment be obtained without taking into account its customs and 
 traditions. Were it to follow all the inspirations of ultra-zealous 
 russifiers, the Russian government, on the plea of assimilating the 
 Baltic country, would run the risk of alienating it, nay, of creating 
 in it a separatist party, by irritating the ruling classes, and those 
 German-Russians whose allegiance to the Tsars has always been 
 untainted and who, from Barclay-de-Tolly down to Totleben, and 
 from Ostermann to Nesselrode, have furnished more than one 
 illustrious general or distinguished statesman. 3 On the Dvina, 
 just as on the Visla and on the Dniepr, the best way of securing 
 the Russian rule is, after all, to make it mild, not to do violence 
 to the local manners and traditions, at least in so far as they are 
 compatible with the spirit of the age and the preservation of the 
 empire's integrity.* 
 
 The Baltic provinces are not the only ones where the Russians 
 have to keep an eye on germanism. In reality, it is not even 
 
 ' It were a great mistake to imagine that a German name is a sure index 
 of anti-Russian feeling, or a Russian one is a sure pledge of patriotism. 
 Men with uncompromising German names, like Hilferding, historian-archae- 
 ologist ; Orestes Miller, philologist and folk-lorist; Dahl, the compiler of 
 the great national dictionary, collector of the popular proverbs and saws, 
 are found foremost in the front ranks of Russian nationalist workers, with 
 a moderate leaning towards slavophilism, while a Count Sbuvalof was a 
 notorious contemner of all things national, and did his best to scare Alex- 
 ander II. out of his fixed purpose of freeing the serfs, by conjuring up 
 insurrections, wholesale massacres of landlords, and other like bugbears. 
 
 * Perhaps no question in Europe has given rise to so large a quantity of 
 writings of all sorts as this question about the Baltic provinces, which it is 
 impossible to enter into here with any details. A whole library might be 
 made up of nothing but the Russian and especially German books and 
 pamphlets called forth by George Samarin's Borderland of Russia.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 12Q 
 
 the ntimets who is most to be dreaded. Curland, Liefland, and 
 Ksthland are, by their geographical position, bound to the great 
 empire of which they occupy the coastland, and whose traffic is 
 carried on by their seaports. Severed from Russia, the three 
 provinces would be as good as cut off from the continent and 
 would fall into a situation analogous to that of Austrian Dalmatia 
 before the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina gave her a " back- 
 ground." And it is not even in the Baltic provinces that there 
 are most Germans. 
 
 Apart from their trading colonies in the cities and from their 
 rural agricultural colonies, also scattered from end to end of the 
 empire, the Germans gradually filtered into the provinces confin- 
 ing with Prussia and Austria into Poland, Lithuania and Little- 
 Russia.* On many points they slowly gained possession of the 
 soil and capital, notwithstanding the competition of the indigenous 
 Jews, who, moreover, might, under certain circumstances, as it 
 happened in Poznania (Posen), become their auxiliaries and 
 smooth the way for germanization.t In the Kingdom of Poland 
 more particularly, the Germans are already more numerous in 
 proportion than they are in the Baltic provinces, which are 
 regarded as their main centre. 
 
 The Polish question, so many times settled in so many contra- 
 dictory ways in the course of the last century, is, in reality, lined 
 with a German question also. The fault is, partly, the Russian 
 policy's, which, in its dread of polonism, favored germanism, 
 permitting Germans, until 1884, to purchase land, while denying 
 the same privilege to Poles and Jews. "I dread the Germans 
 less than the Poles," wrote Nicolas Miliutin immediately after 
 
 * The statistics of travellers crossing the frontiers show that 30, 40, and 
 sometimes 50,000 more Germans enter Russia every year than leave it, not 
 counting 30 or 40,000 Austrians, part of whom are Germans. 
 
 f To prevent rural real estate passing into the hands of Germans, Alex- 
 ander III. has proceeded to radical measures. By an imperial ukaz or decree 
 dated 1884, foreigners are forbidden from acquiring land in the western 
 provinces, either by purchase or even by inheritance.
 
 I3O THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the insurrection of 1863.* Miliutin would hardly speak so to-day. 
 The most clear-sighted patriots admit that Russia could not solve 
 this much-vexed Polish question against both Poles and Germans, 
 any more than the Poles can flatter themselves that it could be 
 settled against both Russians and Germans. The Russian who 
 insists on denationalizing the provinces on the Visla, and the 
 Pole who declines any terms whatever with Russia, are equally 
 in danger of working for the Prussians, who have not forgotten 
 that they ruled in Warsaw before Russia did. 
 
 There are indeed Russians who, to see the end of this ever- 
 lasting Polish question, would like to make over to Germany the 
 whole of Poland proper, f or at least the half of the kingdom situ- 
 ated west of the Visla, reserving the right to look for a compensa- 
 tion from Austria or from Turkey. This would be Finis Polonia 
 indeed ; yet, though the combination was at one time much ex- 
 tolled, it would not find many advocates nowadays. 
 
 Not to mention a natural repugnance to sacrificing an old 
 Slavic land to germanism, or the difficulty of drawing a boundary 
 line at the gates of Warsaw, or else give up this capital itself to 
 Prussia, the Russians understand that, once the Germans are suf- 
 fered to take firm footing in the heart of Poland, they must fatally 
 yield to the temptation of gradually absorbing the whole. Warsaw 
 would be to the Prussians merely a stopping-place. Once installed 
 on the Visla, they could extend their greed to the rest of the 
 kingdom, and as far as Lithuania, Esthonia, and Livonia. They 
 could, alone or jointly with Austria, devour the whole of ancient 
 Poland, province by province. 
 
 * Unpublished letter from N. Miliutin to Tcherkassky, 8/20 February, 
 1865. 
 
 t The kingdom of Poland or " Congress Poland " {Kongresbwka) was, 
 as is well known, constructed out of such portions of the ancient " Grand 
 Duchy of Warsaw " as were awarded to Alexander I. in 1815, and by him 
 endowed with a constitution. In the eyes of the Russians this "Congress- 
 kingdom " alone constitutes the whole of Russian Poland. They take their 
 stand on history and ethnography when they refuse to recognize as Polish 
 the provinces annexed by Catherine II. at the time of the three divisions of 
 the eighteenth century.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 13! 
 
 The Poles should dread no less than the Russians any cession 
 to the heirs of Frederic the Great. Poland's curse is that the 
 Poles, with all their brilliant qualities, with their noble chival- 
 rous spirit, their generous patriotism, have always, both before 
 and after the divisions of the eighteenth century, shown poor 
 political spirit. Still, in this respect, their long misfortunes do not 
 appear to have been entirely lost upon them. They have become 
 more practical, more positive, less inclined to indulge in the vast 
 dreams and chimerical fancies of old. Many of them have found 
 out that, for their nationality, the Russian rule is infinitely less to 
 be dreaded than the German, and that Warsaw cannot nurse the 
 hope of wholly escaping both. The reunion of Russian Poland 
 with Austrian Galicia, the day-dream of certain patriots, is a 
 mere Utopia, which geography alone would effectually dispose of. 
 There exists a project, put forward at times in Germany, propos- 
 ing the erection of the ' ' Congress-kingdom ' ' into a vassal state 
 or confederate of Germany, but it is only a piece of delusive mirage 
 behind which lurks German absorption. A fifth or sixth division 
 would be the saddest thing that could befall Poland, and her 
 patriots surely must regret that, in 1815, France caused the 
 propositions of Alexander I. to be rejected, and suffered Poznania 
 (Posen) to be made over to Prussia and germanization. 
 
 When we consider what history has done with Schlesien (Sile- 
 sia), Poznania, and Old Prussia, we can assert that the Russian 
 rule is, for the Poland of the Visla, for Warsaw and Mazovia, the 
 best, perhaps the only, possible guarantee against germanization. 
 The Poles, in declaring themselves irreconcilable toward Russia, 
 appear to an impartial outsider to be committing a sort of national 
 suicide. 
 
 This is felt more and more on the banks of the Visla, and anx- 
 iety for the future prevails over old grudges. Fear of Germany 
 balances hatred of Russia. Economic considerations too work in 
 the same direction. From a material point of view, Poland has 
 everything to gain from union with the great Slavic Kmpire, which 
 offers immense openings to her industry. Russian Poland has
 
 132 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS 
 
 greatly changed since the insurrection of 1863. She is beyond 
 comparison wealthier than Galicia and Poznania. Agriculture 
 has prospered. The peasant, now a landholder, has enjoyed com- 
 forts hitherto unknown to him. The cities have become crowded 
 with factories ; Warsaw's population has been doubled, that of 
 Lodzi and other cities quadrupled, and more, all within twenty 
 years. The rise of tariffs, the exaggeration of which is, in our 
 belief, one of the obstacles to the development of Russia, has been 
 of considerable advantage to Poland, placed as that country is in 
 better conditions for production. A great portion of the empire 
 pays tribute to Poland's industry itself, it is true, frequently placed 
 in German hands. Any custom-house barrier raised between the 
 two countries would kill the industry of the kingdom, which then 
 would find it hard to hold out against the competition of Schlesien 
 and Westphalia. In our day material interests are a strong chain ; 
 and Russia, by suppressing the custom-house system between the 
 kingdom and the empire, has, perhaps unconsciously, bound the 
 Poles by the only tie which Polish hands would be loth to sever. 
 
 Thus the two main and often hostile springs which govern 
 men and nations material interests and abstract considerations 
 are at one in this case, to bring about the reunion to Russia of the 
 most unmanageable among the peoples subject to her imperial 
 sceptre. In spite of irritating memories, of the blundering at- 
 tempts at russification pursued since 1864, stubbornness is no 
 longer so deeply rooted in Polish hearts. The conciliating policy 
 of Vie"lop61sky a policy which, unfortunately for both nations, 
 numbered so few partisans about 1860 would now command an 
 immense majority.* 
 
 * According to Russian statistics, the number of the Poles subject to the 
 empire scarcely reaches six million souls. They form a large majority in 
 the kingdom created by the Vienna Congress, where they amount to 
 about seventy per cent of the total population, but in the other parts of an- 
 cient Poland they constitute a feeble minority. To these genuine Poles of 
 Polish descent must be added, in order to calculate the efficient force of 
 " Polonism," a certain number of Lithuanians, Little-Russians, White-Rus- 
 sians, and even of Germans, and more or less polemized Jews.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 133 
 
 The trouble is that in the Russian "borderlands " (pkrcilny), 
 as in Austria, as in Turkey, these questions of nationalities are 
 far from being as plain as they appear in theory. With the best 
 will in the world it is frequently impossible to solve them to every- 
 body 's satisfaction. Side by side with regions held by a clearly 
 denned nationality, possessed of continuous historical traditions, 
 there are countries inhabited by mixed races, often openly hostile 
 to one another. The Baltic provinces are a case in point but by 
 no means the only one. The greatest portion of ancient Poland, 
 the provinces annexed to Russia at the time of the three first par- 
 titions, are more or less in a like predicament. That indeed was 
 one of the things which made the dismemberment of the Common- 
 wealth easy, and reconciliation between the former and the new 
 masters of the soil very difficult to achieve. 
 
 The chief obstacle to an agreement between Russians and Poles 
 has always been the part of Ukrama situated on the right bank of 
 the Dniepr, and especially Lithuania, these provinces being looked 
 upon by the former as Russian and by the latter as Polish, the 
 Poles taking preferably the standpoint of the wealthy and culti- 
 vated classes, the landlords or the city burghers ; the Russians, 
 instead, taking thought of the rural classes, the peasant, the 
 manumitted serf freed by Alexander II. 
 
 In the greater portion of ancient Poland not the ' ' Congress- 
 kingdom" as well as in the three Baltic provinces, national 
 rivalries often are made more complicated by strife between the 
 classes. Nationalities, and at times religions, are, in a way, dis- 
 posed in layers. While the upper classes the nobility and 
 landlords are Germans or Poles, by race or by tradition, the 
 bulk of the people is Lithuanian, White-Russian (Bielorbss), 
 Little-Russian (Malorbss), not to mention the Jews who, gen- 
 erally addicted to trade, form an additional class and nation- 
 ality too. It is easy to perceive the difficulties of such a state 
 of things and the temptations into which it can lead those 
 in power.
 
 134 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS, 
 
 In order to check the historical nationalities, with their old- 
 established nobility and burgherdom, which still hold the power 
 by virtue of wealth and education, the Russian government has 
 been induced to seek the support of the petty rural and, so to 
 speak, "plebeian" nationalities,* until quite lately unknown to 
 foreigners and scarcely self-conscious. To the Swede of Finland, 
 to the German of Liefland or Curland, to the Pole of Lithuania 
 or Ukraina, it opposed the Finn, the Ehst,.the Lett, the Samog&t, 
 the White- and Little- Russian, thus making use for its own ends 
 of ethnology and the principle of nationality and turning them 
 against its adversaries, re-kindling national feeling in populations 
 in whose breasts it had lain extinct for ages, with the mental re- 
 servation that it might be smothered again the moment it showed 
 inclination to encroach. This is one of the reasons for " peasant 
 policy," called by some democratic, by others socialistic, being 
 adopted more than once by the tsars towards subject provinces, 
 more especially those that constituted ancient Poland. Along her 
 western frontiers Russia had two or three Irelands, which she felt 
 all the more tempted to deal with on the principle of agrarian law, 
 as the landlords, through their origin or tradition, were more 
 obnoxious to her. What Alexander II. did in Lithuania, Podolia, 
 even in Poland, sundry patriots should like to see done again in 
 the Baltic provinces, at the cost of the German barons, for the 
 benefit of the Lett and Ehst peasantry. f 
 
 At a time when conflicts of nationalities and class jealousies 
 breed so much animosity, it is easy to see how greatly the social 
 status would be endangered by a policy that would take pleasure 
 
 * The expression belongs, unless I am mistaken, to Mr. Dragoma'nof, in 
 his Historical Poland. 
 
 t In order to appreciate the conduct of the Russian government, it must 
 not be forgotten that, at the time of the emancipation, the whole empire 
 was placed under agrarian laws more or less favorable to the quondam serfs. 
 The Baltic provinces alone were exempted, because emancipation had taken 
 place there under Alexander I., on different principles. See farther on, 
 Book VI., Chapter. II.
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 135 
 
 in envenoming and doubling, the one by the other, two of the 
 weightiest incentives to antagonism that can divide those that 
 dwell on one soil. The internal difficulties under which Russia 
 labors, and the geographical situation of the provinces exposed 
 to such divisions, would render such a game very dangerous for 
 the empire. Far from having any interest in nursing the passions 
 of the various races subject to its rule, the Russian government 
 would find it to its advantage to get them to live peaceably 
 together. Having once taken on himself the character of pro- 
 tector to the lowly and weak, of patron to long-enslaved majori- 
 ties, the tsar might find himself called upon to take a turn at 
 defending, against them, powerful minorities. Nothing could be 
 less profitable to Russia than a renewal, directed against the 
 Germans, of the popular riots against the Jews, or the perpetra- 
 tion of rural wholesale risings against the Baltic barons of lyief- 
 land or the Polish pans (squires, lords) of Lithuania and Podo- 
 lia. It matters greatly to the empire not to allow racial rivalries 
 to degenerate into class strife, so as to offer a handle to revolu- 
 tionary agitation or foreign interference. The safest course for a 
 government as well as for a dynasty, is to arbitrate between the 
 different nationalities and the different, classes without sacrificing 
 the ones to the others. If the task is often difficult for Russia 
 in those of her provinces that adjoin Europe as well as on the 
 confines of Asia, this difficulty is but the price she has to pay for 
 her greatness. 
 
 To escape paying it, Russia would have to give up the annexa- 
 tions of the last two centuries, the conquests of Alexander I., 
 Catherine II., nay, of Peter the Great himself. If, on the con- 
 trary, she wishes to strengthen her authority over the various 
 peoples of her immense domain, her best course is, after all, to 
 show respect of their nationality, their language, their religion, 
 so as to take from them all incentives to discontent, leaving it to 
 time, to reason, to their self-interest, to the natural attraction of 
 a great country, to bind them more and more firmly to the
 
 136 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 empire. 4 Unfortunately for herself, Russia lacks the most potent 
 charm of all in the eyes of modern nations lacks the magnet most 
 powerful to attract them lacks liberty. And one may, without 
 claiming a prophet's gift, venture the prediction, that only on that 
 day she can be certain of keeping all her European borderlands 
 Ukraines when she will have contrived to raise them to the same 
 political level as the rest of Europe. 
 
 The Emperor Alexander III. appears to have set himself the 
 task of russifying Poland, Lithuania, and, above all, the Baltic 
 provinces. He has successively introduced in the Baltic country 
 Russian administration and courts of justice,* substituting every- 
 where in the university, the schools, the municipalities, the 
 courts, Russian to German, f Hofgericht, Manngericht, Land- 
 
 4 That is what Russia has always done and is doing all the time, following 
 in the footsteps of Rome's wise statesmanship. Not many chapters back, our 
 author praised the Russian government for having respected the autonomy 
 and self-government, customs and laws, of the annexed Grand Duchy of 
 Finland. In the same way it leaves to all its own Russian rural populations 
 their communal self-government, based on custom-laws of immemorial eld, 
 easily traceable, many of them, to a primeval Aryan social status, such as 
 is revealed to us by the Veda and later, but still very ancient, Sanskrit litera- 
 ture. As to the alien subjects, their manners, their religions are not less 
 scrupulously respected. Thus religious teaching is an integral and obliga- 
 tory part of the course of instruction in all public schools of every grade. 
 But this instruction is imparted to the children and youths in their respec- 
 tive religions, by teachers engaged and paid by the State. Should there be 
 in a school one Hebrew boy, or one Mussulman, there will be a Rabbi or a 
 Mollah to teach him the Thora or the Koran, and he will not be required to 
 assist at the Greek-Orthodox catechism. In the army all allowances are 
 made for Jewish and Moslem soldiers, that are compatible with service and 
 discipline, in the matter of food, religious observances, and the like. In 
 return for this more than tolerance the state surely has a right to decree 
 that the state language shall be used in public schools, courts of justice, 
 and government offices, understood and partly spoken by the officials of 
 railway companies and other public servants, and that the state institutions 
 shall be accepted by all its subjects. Otherwise where would be the 
 state? 
 
 * The judicial organization of the empire was not enforced until 1890. 
 
 f There are exceptions, especially in favor of the rural courts where it 
 would have been impossible to enforce the use of the Russian language ; 
 but the exception is made in favor of the local languages, Ehst and Lett
 
 RACES AND NATIONALITY. 137 
 
 gericht) all these are now memories no more.* It is to be feared 
 that, along with these Gothic institutions, may perish the self- 
 government which was the pride and prosperity of the three 
 provinces. Russification is everywhere carried on to the benefit of 
 centralization. There lies the evil. Possibly, it might have been 
 to the imperial government's advantage to proceed with greater 
 gentleness. In its religious policy at least, it would have shown 
 greater wisdom by acting in a more liberal spirit. It is not by 
 wounding the consciences of her Catholic or Protestant subjects, 
 that Russia will win their hearts.* 
 
 ' Perfectly right and proper. Why should mediaeval survivals, denounced 
 and swept away through all Europe, be treasured only just here where they 
 do infinite harm by fostering a rebellious and aggressive spirit, and per- 
 petuating oligarchical oppression under the guise of a self-government 
 which may have been the pride and prosperity, not of the three provinces 
 but of the small minority of aliens that rules them, much against the feel- 
 ing prevailing among the native population, which gravitates steadily 
 towards the Russian element, especially as represented by the mild, unob- 
 trusive, uninterfering Orthodox Church. Centralization ? Well, no social 
 or political life is possible without some without much of it, especially 
 where heterogeneous elements have to be welded together, and where 
 decided centrifugal tendencies have to be counteracted. Even in a repub- 
 lican confederacy, what is a federal government with its one executive 
 head but centralization? And as to gentle and gradual means, Germany 
 in like cases shows herself neither so lenient nor so long-suffering ; she 
 makes repression unnecessary by at once, and on principle, laying on her 
 iron hand, without the velvet glove, and leaving no room for unruliness. 
 And Germany succeeds and is approved by the world. 
 
 * See Vol. III., Book IV., Chap. III.
 
 BOOK III. 
 THB NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Utility and Difficulty of Studying the National Character Russia One of 
 the Countries Where Material Surroundings Act Most on Man Some 
 Effects of the Climate The North, and Sluggishness Brought on by 
 Cold Winter and the Intennittence of Labor Lack of Liking for 
 Physical Exertion Habitual Insufficiency of Food ; Drunkenness ; 
 Hygiene and Mortality Cold and Uncleanliness at Home in the North 
 Are Northern Countries More Favorable to Morality? 
 
 IT is something to know the origin of a people and the land 
 they inhabit. It is not much if one cannot account for the influ- 
 ence of nature on man. From this action of the outer world 
 and from the people's historical or religious training results the 
 national character. Now nations do their politics as private 
 people transact their business, temperament being a factor as 
 well as self-interest. 
 
 For the character of a nation, like that of a man, depends on 
 the temperament or blood, on the physical surroundings and on 
 the moral training, not to mention what, in an individual is con- 
 tributed by age, and, in a nation, by a long course of civilization. 
 Between these three orders of influences race, nature, history 
 now one, now another, has been awarded pre-eminence in the 
 study of nations. All three have their importance ; but, nations 
 being, even more than individuals, of mixed blood, what is most 
 difficult to determine is the share to be allotted to race and hered- 
 
 138
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 139 
 
 :ty . In Russia itself discussion is rife about the character of the 
 Great- Russian : what distinguishes him. from the western Russian 
 tribes, what must be credited to his mixing with Finns and 
 Tatars, what to his own settling on a new land. Both causes 
 must have acted concurrently ; but the latter, being the more per- 
 sistent, must have been the more powerful. Two circumstances 
 combined to lend it a peculiar stress. It is one of the effects of 
 civilization to neutralize the influences of clime and soil by lifting 
 man beyond their action. In Russia, culture being of more 
 recent date and therefore going less deep, the bulk of the people 
 have remained nearer to nature, more submissive to her sway. 
 Moreover, under northern skies, the domination of climate is 
 more absolute, its yoke more difficult to shake off. The Russian 
 soil is no pleasant habitation, fashioned and furnished for man 
 by nature's kindly hand ; it must be conquered with armed hand 
 and so maintained. How, then, in such a country, with a civili- 
 zation not as yet very advanced, should not nature have imprinted 
 on both the temperament and character an indelible stamp ? Thus 
 it is that, in dealing with Russian character, a goodly proportion 
 of defects and qualities for which race, history, religion, are 
 usually held responsible, should be credited to physical nature. 
 
 In order to appreciate how much, we must transfer ourselves 
 into the northern half of modern Russia, the region which has 
 been the cradle of the Great-Russian, and formed the nucleus of 
 ancient Moscovia. Owing to the Tatar raids, this region lies 
 entirely north of the soth degree of northern latitude. There, 
 besides N6vgorod and Pskof, the two semi-republican cities, 
 which on all accounts deserve to be set apart, we find Tver, Yaro- 
 slavl, Kostroma, Vladimir, Suzdal, Riazan all the ancient 
 capitals of the Russian kniazes? describing a sort of circle 
 around Moscow. That part of the country is essentially con- 
 tinental, colder than Petersburgh, with greater extremes of 
 climate, where the average winter temperature is from thirteen 
 1 See Appendix to this Chapter, No. I.
 
 140 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 to fourteen degrees below that of Paris. Setting aside Scandi- 
 navia and Scotland, both warmed by the nearness of two seas, this 
 is the only region of both hemispheres that has a sedentary, agri- 
 cultural population in such close proximity to the Polar Circle. 
 At so great a distance from any sea and from the equator, it is 
 only thanks to its want of elevation that it is inhabitable at all. 
 
 The action of such a climate on the life and body of man must 
 be enormous. One feels that, but it is hard to demonstrate. Within 
 a century or two, there has been in Europe much discoursing on 
 the political effects of climate ; there are few subjects that recur 
 more often and on which we know less. In the actual state of 
 our knowledge we cannot even determine scientifically the direct 
 effects of external nature on organism and temperament. Montes- 
 quieu was the first to attempt a political theory of climates ; but 
 this experiment, being based on unreliable narratives of travellers 
 and on incomplete observations, was premature. Since the last 
 century, science, which has shed light on so many questions, has 
 had scarcely a ray to spare for this one. 
 
 The most general effect of cold on vegetal or animal life is 
 to produce numbness, sometimes even suspension of the vital 
 energies. The sap stops coursing in plants ; the blood coagulates 
 in the veins of animals. Many of the latter hibernate in a state 
 of somnolence, and, during the very coldest months, lie down in 
 temporary graves. Man escapes this deathlike lethargy by force 
 of his industry and civilization as much as by his constitution, 
 but cannot entirely withstand the sluggishness which is so general 
 a phenomenon throughout nature. 
 
 Montesquieu made out the North to be the home of activity, 
 courage, liberty. This theory may be correct as far as moderately 
 cold countries are meant ; but extreme cold in the North produces 
 effects analogous to those of extreme heat in the South, so that 
 in tropical countries the sleep of summer siestas during the hottest 
 hours or seasons corresponds to that of hibernation in polar ones. 
 Bracing and stimulating for lungs and general activity, as long as it
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 141 
 
 keeps within certain limits, cold becomes depressing as soon as it 
 reaches too low a degree, or lasts too long. It then disposes to a 
 certain indolence, physical and moral, to a sort of passiveness of 
 mind and soul. To the excitement of the first frosts succeeds 
 the torpor brought on by intense cold. Winter like summer, the 
 North like the South, have each its own kind of sloth ; fire in cold 
 weather exerts the same influence as shade in hot weather, both 
 equally invite to dawdling and idleness. The mere weight of the 
 garments is oppressive, their length is in the way. 
 
 With all this the North has a great, an immense advantage 
 over the South. If cold counsels rest, it by no means makes it 
 imperative ; action is one of the remedies against it. Instead of 
 reducing man's needs, it increases them and thereby incites to 
 work. Moreover, the cold is rarely unendurable out-doors in the 
 centre of Russia, in the latitude of Moscow, and even Petersburgh, 
 or severe enough to compel Russians to burrow, like the Lapps 
 and Esquimaux, in their huts. When the air is calm and in 
 very severe cold it generally is a temperature of from 20 to 
 25 below freezing point is quite endurable, 10 or 12, the 
 average temperature of the coldest months, gives very fine, 
 even pleasant weather, very favorable to out-door exercise. In 
 those latitudes it is the motion of the air, the wind, and not 
 the degrees of temperature, which produces the sensation of cold 
 and makes it painful. 
 
 Winter has its own peculiar tasks as it has its pleasures. In 
 Russia as everywhere else, it is the season of city life, society, 
 festivities. In the country it is the time of freight carrying a 
 most important item in a country where distances are such a draw- 
 back. In summer the peasant has roads which are insufficient 
 both in quality and quantity. In winter frost and snow construct 
 splendid roads for him, and traffic is at once enlivened. The 
 opening of sleighing is sometimes delayed by scarcity of snow, 
 and that is a calamity. It is during the transition weeks between 
 frost and thaw in spring and autumn, that the peasant is con-
 
 142 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 demned to in-door life. The long winter leisure created in the 
 North all the handicrafts on which so many villages subsist, and 
 which in their turn gave rise to peddling and to the numerous 
 fairs where the products of rustic industries are bartered. It is 
 in winter that the girls and women work those drawn-work laces 
 which are being imitated in France, and those red and blue em- 
 broidered towels polottntsa the designs of which seem in great 
 part borrowed from the symmetrical flower patterns traced by 
 frost on the window panes. 1 
 
 There is in the North, over and above the direct action of cold 
 on the organs, one thing which places labor under conditions 
 less favorable than in tempered countries, and that is the violent 
 alternation and opposition between the seasons. If we find it 
 difficult to determine the physiological effects of climate, we per- 
 ceive rather more clearly some of its economic influences. An 
 English historian, Buckle, has noticed that nations living under 
 high latitudes did not show the same taste for labor, the same 
 energy, as those living under gentler skies. He attributes this 
 defect to the interruption enforced by winter, which, by the 
 rigor of its weather and the shortness of its days, breaks every 
 year, for months, the sequence of agricultural pursuits. " Why 
 
 9 The patterns are rather architectural /. e., they reproduce the 
 national architectural ornament-motives in sawed woodwork. Besides that, 
 they conventionalize every possible natural object trees, flowers, animals, 
 birds in a very original and consistent manner, which gives a perfectly 
 well defined and individual art type. The standing combination of such 
 designs is : two birds, sometimes, but very rarely, quadrupeds, facing 
 each other, with a tree or plant of some sort between them precisely after 
 the manner of the Assyro-Babylonian ornamental art and its derived 
 branches. The women have of course no patterns to work from. The 
 designs are "stitched" and handed down through generations, from 
 mother to daughter, and may be, nay probably are, many hundred years old. 
 These towel-embroideries which are used as well, only much wider, for 
 borders of table-cloths and bed-sheets, for aprons, petticoats, men's shirts, 
 etc. are the most venerable and authentic documents we have for a history 
 of national art All Slavic nations and tribes have this cunning, but the 
 characters of the designs, the stitches and the combinations of color vary 
 according to country or even province.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 143 
 
 sleepest thou, mujik ? ' ' says a popular song, in which the peas- 
 ant is reproved for sleeping all day on top of the stove while 
 Want comes and sits down at his door. If he sleeps, it is 
 because his crops have been taken in, the autumn sowing has 
 been attended to, and the snow has come, so there is no more 
 work for him in the fields. 3 This intermittence of labor causes 
 a certain desultoriness and instability which interfere with con- 
 sistency and regular habits. The North throws peculiar obstacles 
 in the way of agriculture and industry, by making them depend- 
 ent on a climate at once rugged and whimsical, and it is not 
 impossible that these failings may extend to the character. Here 
 again, should not nature by rights be held responsible for some 
 of the propensities or defects usually imputed to the Slavic 
 temperament ? 
 
 Foreigners who have had work done in Russia have generally 
 noticed that Russians, like southerners, are better capable of a 
 vigorous spurt of energy than of continuous steady effort. With 
 more vivacity, probably an inheritance of his Slavic blood, the 
 Russian frequently displays less activity than the northerners of 
 Teutonic race ; he even often shows, in the lower as well as in the 
 
 8 Accordingly the poet does not rebuke the peasant for sleeping, but for 
 sleeping too long, for being caught napping by Spring who is at the door, 
 as the second line explains. The author of this pretty poem and many 
 more short pieces, all in lyrical-idyllic strain, remarkable for the sadly 
 pensive, pathetic vein, sometimes deepening to passion, which runs 
 through them like a rich minor harmony, is Koltsof, often called the 
 "Russian Burns." He was born in 1809, and died at thirty-three at an 
 age when achievement, even the best, is still promise. He belonged by 
 birth to a lowly class, though not to the peasantry, as has often been 
 averred ; his father traded in cattle, and he worked under him. In the midst 
 of uncongenial surroundings and disapproving relatives, who did not spare 
 him their jeers, and taunts, and wise saws, he faithfully plied the humble " 
 duties to which he was called, and only two or three times, business trips 
 in his father's interests gave him the golden opportunity of snatching 
 glimpses of the world of intellect, of literature and art, the world to which 
 he was born, yet where he never could be but a passing guest, to join 
 hands with men whose peer he was, yet whose society was not for him. He 
 was patient, dutiful, profoundly unhappy and died.
 
 144 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 higher classes, less taste for bodily exercise. He appears to like it 
 only in the shape of fast sleighing and driving, and that to an 
 extent at which foreigners are amazed, and which may probably 
 be accounted for by the long distances and the cold, which make 
 it desirable to get to one's destination as quickly as possible, and 
 thus a certain hastiness becomes a habit. Bodily exercise, violent 
 games, sport and athletics in all their forms, do not seem more 
 attractive to these sons of the North than to the modern nations of 
 the South. Even skating is less in favor than in countries where 
 it is not so easily to be had. In this respect as in so many others, 
 the Russian may be said to be the very antipodes of the English- 
 man. Travellers have often been struck by the disinclination of 
 Russian peasants to physical exertion ; at their numerous festivals 
 their chief delight appears to be rest and immobility. Their fav- 
 orite pastime is swinging ; nor do they boldly launch into space 
 as Western children do, but are content with a soft, swaying 
 motion. 4 Their habitual dances, such as the khorovdd, a sort of 
 chaunted dance in a circle, apparently originating in old heathen 
 rites, are slow and monotonously indolent. Climate and race may 
 have something to do with this impassive laziness of mind and 
 body ; the people's diet is also in great part responsible for it. 
 
 The principal physiological effect of cold is to activate respira- 
 tion, to determine in lungs and blood a more rapid combustion 
 and, as a consequence, to demand more substantial nourishment. 
 
 4 I cannot imagine what could give Mr. Beaulieu this entirely mistaken 
 impression. The passion for swinging with dizzy recklessness is character- 
 istic of Russians of all classes, and not of children and very young people 
 alone, for swinging is the national amusement par excellence. The slow 
 " chorus-dance" mentioned in the next line (a gentle swaying of a circle of 
 maidens and women, holding hands, performed to their own singing) and the 
 beautiful national attitude-dance too have their counterpart in the wildly 
 delirious solo steps executed by men alone. One invariably follows and 
 completes the other. This character of our national dancing was appropri- 
 ated and intensified in their world-renowned csardaS by the Hungarians, 
 whose culture-life, with much of their vocabulary, came to them from the 
 Slavs, with whom they mixed for centuries before German influences began 
 to make themselves felt
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 145 
 
 The nearer we are to the pole, the more man needs food rich in 
 carbon and azote, animal food. Now in the extreme north, as an 
 effect of the cold itself, the fertility of the soil is rarely in propor- 
 tion with the demands of the climate. This is nowhere more 
 obvious than in the northern half of Russia, unfavorable to the 
 growth of wheat, and beset by such obstacles to cattle raising as 
 are unknown to temperate climes. Throughout this region the 
 earth is niggardly in granting to man the food indicated by heaven 
 itself : such a lack of balance between needs and supplies has very 
 disastrously reacted on the temperament of the people ; they have 
 through many centuries been condemned to meagre, almost 
 entirely vegetable fare. Under a Northern sky they have lived 
 as people do in the South. The' use of meat, bacon, of salt pork 
 even, is only now beginning to gain ground amongst them. 
 Although great progress has been made in this direction since 
 the emancipation, the majority of peasants even yet taste meat 
 only on holidays. Their staple food consists of rye bread, broken 
 into the shtshi, a sort of soup made of fermented sour cabbage 
 this latter dish being the national one par excellence* To these 
 edibles are added dried mushrooms and frozen or salted fish two 
 articles of food that are nowhere consumed in such quantities as 
 in Russia. A religion imported from the South, with four lents 
 and several oriental fasts, the strictness of which has been proof 
 against centuries, increased the evil inflicted by nature. " However, 
 the demands of the climate could not be entirely eluded, and 
 drink had to supply the lack of food. 
 
 The Russians have two national beverages : kvass, a sort of 
 rye water, slightly fermented ; and tea, the use of which is well- 
 nigh as universal as in China.* The tea-kettle the brass samovar, 
 
 s See Appendix to this Chapter, No. 2. 
 
 ' See Appendix to this Chapter, No. 3. 
 
 * To judge by the Russian name, tchay (which is a Chinese word, 
 teha, as is, at the other end of Europe the Portuguese cha), the Russians 
 had tea directly from China. There are in Russia two more beverages in 
 use among the people ; one, called miod (honey), is mead or the hydromel
 
 146 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 is always the first and chief utensil of a household ; no hut, be it 
 ever so poor, is without it. Tea, especially in a country where 
 the water is frequently of poor quality, is a great help, but, 
 under such a sky, it is insufficient as a tonic. It is supplemented 
 by grain whiskey, the pale, white vodka? It has long been 
 noticed that drunkenness increases along with the degrees of lati- 
 tude. The taste for alcohol is as natural to the Russian peasant 
 as temperance is to the Sicilian or Andalusian : it is not so much 
 the man's vice as the climate's fault. As long as the fare is not 
 better, whiskey will be to the peasant a tonic and stimulant, un- 
 wholesome, but difficult to find a substitute for. What is most 
 to be deplored is, not that it cannot be proscribed entirely, but 
 that it is impossible to regulate the use of it, so that on a " spree 
 day ' ' one inevitably beholds the absorption (for they do not 
 drink liquor, they gulp it down) of such quantities of -vodka as, 
 wisely dealt out, would further the peasant's health instead of 
 helping to degrade him into a brute. 
 
 In point of fact, the intemperance of the Tsar's subjects has 
 been greatly exaggerated. The Russian drinks less than the 
 Dane, perhaps less than the Englishman, the German, the 
 Frenchman. 8 Many peasants who get drunk on every holiday, 
 
 so much in favor with barbarians ; the other is beer which, judging from 
 the etymology of the name it bears both in Russian and Polish (pivo, from 
 piti, "to drink,") must have been known to the Slavs in remote antiquity. 
 Beer is also called, only by the people, when they prepare it themselves, 
 Br&ga, the identical name of the Scandinavian, or rather Northern and 
 Teutonic, god of feast-drinking with its exalted exhilaration and the obli- 
 gatory post-prandial bragging which is a distinctive feature of all archaic 
 Aryan mythical and epical hero life. 
 
 ' Vodka is the diminutive of vodd,, "water" a contemptuous diminutive. 
 
 8 What a relief to find one man of those who know and whose words 
 have weight find out and proclaim this fact, and lift from the Russian peas- 
 ant this unthinking, cruel charge, doubly' cruel because there seems to lurk 
 in it a mockery ! Of course he drinks less than his neighbors, because, poor 
 thing, he is so much poorer. Only when he drinks, which he cannot afford 
 very often, he is very drunk, and the worst is they usually get drunk all to- 
 gether, which makes it conspicuous. The evil is much greater in the towns, 
 among the artisans and especially among the factory people, where there is
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 
 
 go for weeks without a drop of spirits. Moreover, the consump- 
 tion had noticeably diminished during the second half of Alex- 
 ander II. 's reign, doubtless owing to the rise in the taxes, and 
 also perhaps to the moral upraising of the former serfs.* Not- 
 withstanding this progress, drunkenness, with all its attendant 
 vices and evils, remains one of the plague-spots of rural life. 
 
 As a rule, the villages thrive in opposite ratio to the number 
 of kabhks, i. e. , taverns or tap-rooms ; therefore both public func- 
 tionaries and private persons strive to reduce that number. The 
 peasants are not always deaf to the preachings of the apostles of 
 temperance. Certain communes forbid the opening of any tavern 
 whatever on their territory, and when Alexander II. was mur- 
 dered, several villages are known to have closed their kab&ks, in 
 token of mourning for the " liberator." In former times such 
 doings would not have been viewed favorably by the administra- 
 tion, from the fear of letting the most bountiful source of revenue 
 run dry. Indeed the tax on the national vice brings in every 
 year over two hundred and fifty million roubles, in other words, 
 nigh on one quarter of the entire income of the exchequer, so that 
 the wag who said that Russia paid her debts by getting drunk was 
 
 always a little money on hand. But where the effects are most deadly is 
 in the upper classes, where the spirit fiend so frequently gets holds of the 
 choicest, most gifted individuals, especially among writers and artists, who 
 can afford to satisfy its insatiable demands in the present, even though at the 
 cost of financial ruin in the end. To explain why this should be so, why 
 the most fatally doomed should be preferably among the noblest and best, 
 the salt of the land, would take us into such hidden and dark depths of 
 national life and misery, both material and psychical, as would require a book 
 by itself to explore. The deadly flatness and ennui of provincial life, and, 
 for the army, of garrison life in the interior and on the far outskirts of the 
 empire, suck into perdition thousands more of a race among whose qualities 
 self-discipline and firmness of character are not the most prominent. 
 
 * From 1863 to 1879 the consumption had decreased 7 per cent, notwith- 
 standing the increase of the population. The number of tap-rooms had 
 gone down still more rapidly; from 257,000 (1863) to 139,000 (1875); true, it 
 rose again to 146,000 (1881). For so vast an empire, even this is a very low 
 figure. (See Mme. O. Novikof 's paper, The Temperance Movement in 
 Russia, in the Nineteenth Century for September, 1882.)
 
 148 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 not so very far wrong. It was calculated, in 1882, that the nation 
 spent half a milliard roubles yearly on whiskey, the real value 
 of which amounted to not over fifty millions, the margin being 
 divided between the liquor sellers and the government. Yet in 
 these latter days the government, even while it is the party most 
 interested in the sale of vodka, has spared no efforts to free the 
 peasant from the bondage of drunkenness. One of the first acts 
 of Alexander III. was the convocation of a sort of temperance 
 parliament, the sessions of which kept Russia and the peasantry 
 much interested up to the autumn of 1881. 
 
 The sorry hygienic conditions react on the economical condi- 
 tions. The poorness of the fare lowers the peasant's capacity for 
 
 work, and destroys, together with the necessary vitality, the taste 
 
 i 
 
 and need for labor. Accustomed to his meagre pittance, he ends 
 by being content with it. Like the Southerners, he often allows 
 his indolence to benefit by his frugal habit of life. 
 
 Such a diet, in such a climate, cannot fail to exert a deplorable 
 influence on health and even on the duration of life. The effects are 
 apparent in the statistics of the country. We here meet with two 
 extremes, another of those anomalies which have led us to set up 
 contrast as the law of Russia. This is one of the countries where 
 mortality is highest, the average of life shortest ; it is also one of 
 those where we find the most numerous cases of longevity, where 
 human life attains its uttermost limits. This opposition is espe- 
 cially striking in the northern regions. Thus, in the government 
 of Novgorod, out of a population of one million souls, there died in 
 one year (1871), thirty-nine persons a hundred years old or more, 
 a fact which presupposes the existence of others of the same age.* 
 Side by side with this phenomenon, the number of persons who 
 have passed their thirty-fifth year is, in all Russia, proportionately 
 lower than in France, while those having passed their sixtieth 
 
 * In 1878 the Procurator of the Holy Synod, in his report for 1875, gave 
 262 as the number of all the centenarians deceased in that year in the Ortho- 
 dox population.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 149 
 
 year are only half as numerous not fifty in a thousand, to a 
 hundred and over, in France.* 
 
 It is especially the children on whom mortality descends. 
 Under such a sky, the apprenticeship to life is harder, the child 
 needs more care, and the care is not so easy to give. It suffers 
 from the difficulty of breathing the air, from that of artificial 
 nursing ; it suffers even from the distances which, during the 
 working season, compel the mother to leave it untended for many 
 long hours. Delicate infants are doomed ; only the stronger ones 
 survive, to be subjected to an ordeal which, every year, is fatal 
 to many. They undergo, at the hand of death, a series of sift- 
 ings which successively eliminates the weaklings, until only the 
 robust are left, for life and reproduction. 
 
 It would seem as though, in a population subjected to this kind 
 of continuous selection, a vigorous temperament should be a com- 
 mon thing. Unfortunately it is far from always being the case. In 
 this country of high statures and frequent longevity, where men 
 six feet high live to a hundred, strength is more frequently appar- 
 ent than real. The climate, which in a few years corrodes granite, 
 is, in the long run, exceedingly depressing, debilitating. The 
 lymphatic temperament prevails in Russia. Scrofula is habitual, 
 contagious diseases are common, easy to take and difficult to cure. 
 What is most to be dreaded is not severe frost, nor even the great 
 contrast between the rigor of winter and the blazing heat of 
 summer ; it is the intermediary seasons, with their long alterna- 
 tives of frost and thaw, lasting sometimes for months, with 
 abrupt variations of temperature, the difference amounting to as 
 many as 20. In these oppositions, in this instability of the 
 climate, all diseases, all epidemics find favorable conditions, 
 intensified, too, by insufficient nourishment. Owing to greater 
 dryness of the atmosphere, at least in the centre and east, lung 
 
 * In the northern governments, the proportion is greater, reaching sixty- 
 three to the thousand, while in some of the southern ones, as in that of Kief, 
 it descends under thirty.
 
 150 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 diseases are less prevalent than they are in England. In com- 
 pensation, however, smallpox, typhoid fevers, puerperal fevers, 
 diphtheria, and many more, break out periodically amidst the 
 ill-fed, ill-sheltered populations, and their ravages are terrible.* 
 
 If the higher classes have a diet more in accordance with the 
 latitude, their mode of life frequently robs them of the benefit 
 they should derive from it. Nowhere else is the natural order 
 of waking and sleep inverted to such an extent ; nowhere else 
 is night so universally turned into day. That also may be an 
 indirect effect of the climate, which, in the North, suppresses by 
 turns both day and night, or exaggerates beyond measure the one 
 at the expense of the other. 
 
 To the debilitating influence of the climate are added habits 
 tending to intensify the nervous sensibilities. The very precau- 
 tions to which the cold compels are unhealthy. To resist the 
 winter, people must live in a heavy, thick atmosphere of vitiated 
 air, rarely renewed : to protect themselves against excessive cold, 
 they must accumulate beforehand a reserve fund of warmth, and 
 fabricate in the house, with the help of fires and stoves, an arti- 
 ficial climate almost as hot as summer in the south of Europe. 
 
 * For the greater part of the population who include meat into their 
 habitual diet, this article of food may have lost some of it properties in 
 consequence of the proceeding used in preserving it The meat and fish 
 needed through the season are allowed to freeze hard in the beginning of 
 the winter. This singularly facilitates transport and provisioning ; but it 
 is just possible that such meat, thawed before cooking, may be less whole- 
 some than fresh meat.' 
 
 This evil is really not as great as it would seem. When properly treated 
 just before cooking, the meats and certain large fish, fresh and salt, do not 
 perceptibly lose in flavor and nutritiveness, and as to game and venison, we 
 almost never get it any other way in large cities in winter. For long winter 
 journeys in the north, where travellers would go hungry but for the provi- 
 sions they carry, certain articles of food containing minced meat are 
 cooked, then frozen, and packed into boxes. As much as is required for 
 a meal is thawed, seasoned, and warmed at the stopping-places. The plan 
 works admirably. The greatest inconvenience of the frozen-meat system 
 is that it gives facilities to unprincipled dealers for disposing of wholesale 
 quantities of tainted meat, and the fraud is discovered only in the pur- 
 chaser's kitchen. The police have much to do to watch the winter markets 
 on account of this abuse.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. !! 
 
 The lower the temperature out-doors, the higher it must rise 
 in-doors. Behind their double windows, calked with oakum and 
 putty for the entire season, city folks convert their apartments 
 into hothouses, where they breathe the same air as the tropical 
 plants with which they love to decorate their dwellings. In his 
 log cabin izbfr, frequently surrounded with a rampart of manure, 
 the peasant and his whole family crowd around the huge oven, 
 on top of which they all sleep at night. Out of this enervating 
 atmosphere people must, every day, emerge into the icy out-door 
 air ; after laying up a supply of warmth for the blood and limbs, 
 a supply of air must be taken into the lungs. And so they go 
 continually, during several months, back and forth, from house 
 to street, the difference between the two temperatures oscillating 
 between 40 and 50, which is the same as though one were to 
 pass several times in the same day from a southern summer to a 
 northern winter, from the shores of the Red to those of the 
 White Sea. 
 
 The climate is hardly more favorable to cleanliness than to 
 health. The houses, every chink of which is hermetically stuffed 
 up against the winter, are difficult to keep clean. The stoves, the 
 only agents of heating, cannot purify the air of the rooms into 
 which they do not open. Wealthy or well-to-do families remedy 
 this inconvenience by the size of the apartments, which open into 
 one another and are kept in constant free communication, with 
 frequent burning of perfumes. The peasant is condemned to live 
 in a stifling atmosphere redolent with miasms. The warm and 
 infected air of his cabin hatches out myriads of insects ; it teems 
 with all kinds of vermin. Out-doors, the filth thrown out all 
 around the house vanishes in the snow to reappear with unim- 
 paired fetidity in spring. Even in the cities the refuse is not 
 always carried away by the sewers, as these are often shut off by 
 ice ; rendered harmless by frost, it keeps, and on the first warm 
 days, fills the streets with pernicious exhalations. Nothing can 
 equal the stench of a Russian thaw in the cities. The snow which,
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 under the sleighs' runners, was like sand or pounded glass, is 
 transformed into a thick, nauseous slush, which pedestrians bring 
 into the houses on their feet." Under such sanitary conditions, 
 is it to be wondered at that the people fall an easy prey to every 
 epidemic, and that even the plague itself still occasionally puts 
 in an appearance in European Russia ? * 
 
 The necessity of keeping the body well covered is in itself, 
 for the people, an obstacle to cleanliness as well as to hygiene. 
 The peasant sleeps in his clothes, and lives night and day in the 
 same sheepskin tulbp. True, he takes a vapor bath once a 
 week, on Saturdays, the Sabbath eve, as an act of ritualistic puri- 
 fication. Unfortunately, he is compelled to get into the same 
 clothes, teeming as they are with vermin. In winter he rarely 
 takes them off on any other day, the only one, too, on which he 
 changes his underwear, when he has some ; ofttimes, when he 
 owns no change, he washes his shirt after his bath, before putting 
 it on again. Every village has its vapor bathhouse, wretched 
 wooden hovels, where vapor is generated by pouring water on a 
 hot stone hearth ; a few inclined boards are used as couches by the 
 bathers ; handfuls of shredded bark or linden rods take the place 
 of sponges and washing-gloves. Whether it came down from the 
 Greeks, the ancient Slavs, or the Finns, f this custom is perhaps 
 more conducive to health than even to cleanliness. The vapor 
 bath, often followed by an immersion into snow or ice-water, is a 
 violent stimulant under a debilitating climate ; the only one, 
 besides alcohol, within the mujik's means ; they are to him an 
 
 10 See Appendix to this Chapter, No. 4. 
 
 * The contact with Asia is, in this respect, a great danger ; that is why 
 the plague is so often reported in the Russian annals. That which raged 
 in the government of Astrakhan, in 1879, was probably imported from 
 Turkish Asia in consequence of the Armenian campaign. It performed 
 one good office anyhow, by drawing the attention of the government and 
 the local authorities to the badness of popular hygiene. 
 
 t Vapor baths are still in general use among the Finns of Finland, 
 where they appear to have been handed down from remote antiquity. They 
 are frequently mentioned in the Kalevala. See, f. ex., Rnno iv. and L
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 53 
 
 equivalent of the mineral waters to which, and for the same 
 reasons, the Russians of the higher classes are so partial. 1 
 
 Public opinion, which credits northern countries with a higher 
 degree of morality, is not always more correct in this than when 
 it ascribes to them greater cleanliness. In Russia the climate does 
 not favor, if not morality, at least refinement. True, the great 
 number and precocity of marriages diminish the number of natural 
 children ; this however, is an unreliable gauge to measure popular 
 virtue by. It is to be noted that in Russia, from various causes, 
 the illegitimate births are much more numerous in the north than 
 in the south, although the former counts fewer cities.* The winter 
 reclusion, the long nights, the crowding of the family within one 
 room, around one hearth, the sleep in common on top of the broad 
 stove that serves as bed to the entire household all these condi- 
 tions are not exactly conducive to the sanctity of domestic life. 
 Dreadful abuses frequently resulted therefrom in the times, quite 
 recent still, when several families dwelt together under the roof of 
 the family-chief. The custom of bathing in common, even though 
 the sexes are kept strictly separate, so that none of those scenes 
 come to pass for which travellers formerly used to reprove them,f 
 this most wholesome custom may have tended to entertain in the 
 peasant a certain coarseness. With both sexes decency seems less 
 strict than in the West, modesty is less easily alarmed, both men 
 and women appear to take less thought of their nudity. In summer, 
 
 11 See Appendix to this Chapter, No. 5. 
 
 * One cause of the greater proportion of natural children in the north 
 is the absence of so many of the men, who go towards the centre in search 
 of work, leaving the female population greatly in excess of the male. The 
 average rate of illegitimate births in Russia is about three per cent., one 
 of the lowest figures in Europe, outside of Greece. 1 * 
 
 f For instance the Abbe" Chappe d'Auteroche, to whom Catherine II. 
 took the trouble of replying herself in her Antidote. 
 
 12 Matters of course were a great deal worse in the times of Emperor 
 Nicolas, when a man could be taken from his family to be sent away as 
 soldier, for a term of service never under twenty years. The young wife's 
 utter helplessness under these unnatural conditions could not but produce 
 great leniency in the local public opinion.
 
 154 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the traveller is often shocked in this respect. Along the rivers, in 
 the towns and villages on the Don and the Volga more particularly, 
 it is not unusual, especially on Saturdays, the day set apart for 
 ablutions by custom and religion, to see girls and women, with no 
 garment of any kind, disport themselves in troops in scarcely 
 sheltered spots, sometimes even under the most frequented bridges. 
 If, as people say, temperaments are colder and the senses blunter 
 in the North, there is, as a set-off, less delicacy in feelings and 
 sensations. 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK III., CHAPTER I. NO. i. (See p. 139, note I.) 
 
 The title kniaz (sound the k strongly) is usually rendered "Prince," 
 which is terribly misleading, but probably not to be helped. The only 
 proper way would be to use original national titles without translating them. 
 But all nations object to that, and so the Anglo-Saxon " Earl " has become 
 " Graf" in the Teutonic languages, and " Count " in the Latin ones. Histori- 
 cally the kniaz was the sovereign of a given domain, or principality. The 
 first known kniazes were Rurik and his immediate descendants. At first 
 they were few, and the domains, continually enlarged by conquest, exten- 
 sive, so there was great power and real royalty attached to the title. But 
 the families multiplied, and as no privilege belonged to primogeniture in 
 the matter of landholding, the domains, which were treated as private pos- 
 sessions, the state-idea being embodied only in the various kniazes' alle- 
 giance to the head of the family, the " Grand-Kniaz" (commonly translated 
 " Grand-Duke), who resided in Kief, were parcelled and re-parcelled out 
 to provide for all the young kniazes born into Rurik's house, just as com- 
 munal lands in our day are re-distributed to meet the needs of a village 
 community. So there came to be a very multitude of kniazes, with ever 
 decreasing power and territories ; moreover, habitually and hereditarily at 
 daggers drawn with one another. These two hundred years eleventh to 
 thirteenth centuries are the "dark ages" of our history, and it is im- 
 possible to say to what depth of degradation and even penury the House of 
 Rurik might have sunk, had not the Tatars come, and, in a certain sense, 
 wiped out the past and made of the future a tabula rasa, on which the 
 kniazes of Moscow, risen from obscurity, in obscurity and even meanness 
 grown and strengthened, with a grand polar purpose ever before them, to
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 155 
 
 redeem and ennoble their apparently abject policy, were to write a new and 
 very different tale. The kniazes of the old and degenerated line still 
 remained, a title being an unalienable birthright common to all the members 
 of a family down to all times and posterity, but gradually settled into the 
 condition of mere landlords, owners of estates in a word, country gentle- 
 men, with a claim, by courtesy, on court favours, state charges, honorable 
 missions, and the like. Then came a time when the title the only national 
 one began to be conferred at pleasure as a reward for state services, usually 
 with lands attached. After this all vestiges of lingering royalty departed 
 from the kniazes, who merely form a higher layer of nobility, whose posi- 
 tion in life eminent or obscure, wealthy or penniless has nothing to do 
 with their title, but is subject to the usual conditions and vicissitudes. 
 There still are a number of families who can trace themselves back to 
 Rurik, but several have lost or dropped the title by the way. 
 
 As for the word itself, it has come down a long way and tells the story 
 of its mighty past : it is the Slavic equivalent of the Teutonic chuning, 
 konung, konig, king, and equally derived with the Sanskrit jdnaka, which 
 originally meant both "king " and " father." 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK III., CHAPTER I. NO. 2. (See p. 145, note 5.) 
 
 The cabbage soup referred to is made out of sour cabbage (almost identi- 
 cal with the German Sauerkraut) and water, without meat, and has received 
 from the people the grimly humorous designation of "empty shtshi." 
 Cooked with fresh fat beef, which is served in it cut up into good-sized 
 pieces, and enriched with a teacupful of thick sour (or clotted) cream 
 smietana it is the national soup and a dish for kings. Mr. Beaulieu for- 
 gets the obligate accompaniment buckwheat baked porridge. It is much 
 like oatmeal, only that, after having been steamed for a while, it is finished 
 in the oven, invariably in an earthenware pot of a peculiar shape, probably 
 as old as the race. This is the renowned kasha, the fragrance of which, 
 when the thick, hard crust has been removed and the rich golden butter 
 mixed in, haunts an exile's hours of gloom and gives homesickness a tan- 
 gible form. For this porridge and the cabbage pottage shtshi da kasha 
 are the staple standby of every Russian table without exception, beginning 
 with the Emperor's own, and the very name is replete with associations, 
 national and personal, since there is not one of us but has grown up on it 
 and the wholesome, toothsome, literally " black bread," made of honest,
 
 1 56 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 unmixed, unbolted rye meal ; and the same triad, so national as to have be 
 come almost symbolical, has greeted us on every board we have been invited 
 to, both where it was merely an accessory, ushering in an elaborate French 
 banquet in graceful acknowledgment of the common bond of nationality 
 and where hospitality had nothing else, besides a hearty welcome and " with 
 God's blessing " (s Bbgomf) to bestow. Yes! Shtshi da kasha, and black 
 ryebread (tchbrnoy hlilb, the latter word, by the way, identical with the 
 Anglo-Saxon hlaib, "bread," and German laid, "a loaf"), and the ubiqui- 
 tously steaming, friendly samovar, whether of silver or brass, with its glit- 
 tering tea-equipage, whether of egg-shell china or homely stoneware these 
 embody Russian family life, from tsar to peasant, from cradle to grave. 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK III., CHAPTER I. NO. 3. (See p. 145, note 6.) 
 
 The name "Lent " properly belongs only to the forty days of fasting, 
 meagre fare, and mortification of the flesh generally, preceding the Easter 
 festival in the Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches and their branches. 
 But what other name can be found for the three analogous periods in the 
 Greek Church year ? Six weeks before Christmas, a fortnight before the 
 feast of Peter and Paul (29th of June), and another fortnight before the 
 Assumption of the Virgin (isth of August). The fare prescribed is the same 
 for all and makes us smile at what the Catholics call Lent : it means simply 
 abstention from all animal food, under which head come not only the various 
 meats of fowl and quadruped, but milk, butter, and eggs. The almost uni- 
 versal use of fish is in reality a concession to the degeneracy of modern con- 
 stitutions and religious zeal, not extended to the clergy, especially the Black 
 Clergy (monks and nuns). The moderately pious among laymen abstain from 
 fish during the first week of Lent, the fourth and the last (Holy Week). It is 
 astonishing how far mushrooms will go as substitute for meat. We have a 
 dozen edible varieties, all of them wholesome, nourishing food, and some 
 ranking with the choicest delicacies. The woods are as full of them as of 
 berries, and the children of each family spend half the long summer days 
 gathering them. Indeed, that and "berrying" are the chief national sum- 
 mer amusements in which young and old share with almost equal zest in 
 the better classes, affording endless fun in the way of family and social pic- 
 nicking, hay rides in springless farm wagons, etc. For the poor it is not a 
 question of amusement and housewives' rival display of skill in preserving, 
 pickling, drying, but actually a vital matter ; and dire indeed would be the
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 57 
 
 winter prospects but for the chaplets of little shrivelled, leather-like black- 
 ish morsels strung up along the rafters of the living-room in the izb&, eked 
 out by a few strings of onions and, down in the cellar, a heap of those huge 
 black-skinned, terribly strong radishes, half-way between the pink-and- 
 white table radish and the violent tear-compelling horseradish, which, 
 seasoned with various kinds of oil, yield a wholesome though coarse relish 
 to relieve the monotony of the everlasting dry black bread. Green hemp- 
 seed oil is the staple article of the poor, though, as an acquired taste, with 
 that same black radish, it is cultivated by many a bla.sk aristocratic palate. 
 Not, however, with k&sha, in lieu of butter, as the common people use it in 
 Lent time. Other oils, as rape seed and especially sunflower-seed oil, are very 
 acceptable substitutes in cooking, and even pastry. The Lenten fare of the 
 average well-to-do-family table, by long practice and ingenuity, reaches a 
 highly respectable standard of excellence. It is a special branch of the art, 
 and the skill and inventiveness displayed by high-toned club and restaurant 
 cooks are crucial tests, so that many a church magnate bishop or archbishop 
 takes pride in his Lenten fare as the crowning perfection of his establish- 
 ment. Indeed the variety that can be attained in this seemingly poor and 
 limited field of course with fish included is a constant source of amaze- 
 ment to foreigners. The fish soups are renowned, and the king of them all, 
 the sterlet soup, can compare, for richness of flavor and costliness of material, 
 only with the turtle soup of aldermanic fame. The daintiness of the des- 
 serts is unsurpassed and no wonder, when there is the whole range of dried 
 and candied fruits, jellies and syrups, and the place of milk and cream is 
 taken by a substitute which every Russian woman knows how to prepare 
 out of almonds pounded in a mortar with water measured according to the 
 thickness and strength desired. That tea and coffee whitened and flavored 
 with "almond milk" or " almond cream " are uniquely delicious beverages, 
 is known to few outside of Russia. To sum up : the wealthy and fairly 
 prosperous are not as much to be pitied as would seem at first sight if they 
 are rigid observers of the Church canons in matters of food, although the 
 prolonged deprivation of meat, milk, and eggs tells on most modern consti- 
 tutions, for the palate is as frequently the gainer as the loser. How far such 
 Lenten fare, requiring far more thought, care, and elaborateness in the prep- 
 aration than ordinary meat fare, answers the original religious object of the 
 institution, is a question which does not belong here. For the poor, the Lent 
 periods are times of increased hardship and most debilitating want of nour- 
 ishment. The specially appointed fast-days are equally severe for all. The
 
 1 58 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 two principal are the eve of Christmas and that of Twelfth Night. On these 
 days neither food nor water must pass the lips from midnight until the 
 rising of the evening star. This is the reason why a Christmas tree on 
 Christmas Eve is an impossibility. The tree may be lit on Christmas night 
 or any night of the ensuing week (the school holidays lasting from Christ- 
 mas Eve to Twelfth Night 6th of January), but the usual time is New Year's 
 Eve. It is a comfort to know that children, up to seven years, are exempted 
 both from fasting and Lent fare ; from seven to fourteen the severity of the 
 observances is considerably alleviated for them. A far larger proportion of 
 the higher classes than is usually supposed are church goers and strict 
 observers of Lents, fasts, etc. Then there are those who do in this line as 
 much as they think fit or absolutely necessary for their souls' welfare, or 
 for respectability. The entirely emancipated, to which number the bodies 
 of literature, science, and art belong almost without exception, form the 
 class best known to foreigners. In this respect again Petersburgh is far 
 ahead of Moscow, where it is not impossible to find old-time piety combined 
 with distinction in these careers. 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK HI., CHAPTER I. NO. 4. (See p. 152, note 10.) 
 
 All that our author says about the out-door effects of the spring thaw and 
 about the atmosphere in the rural izbd, is unfortunately true in every detail. 
 But his strictures on the city dwellings in this respect are unfounded. Our 
 heating system, which we have in common with all the extreme north of 
 Europe Sweden, Norway, Denmark and some of the northernmost parts of 
 Germany is the only perfect one, combining the power of regulating the 
 heat within half a degree, evenness of temperature throughout the dwelling, 
 active ventilation, and great economy of fuel. The valves in the flues, by 
 which we can let in the outer air, are six or eight inches in diameter ; 
 there are two by the side of each stove, accessible by a little door opening 
 into the room, and can be opened just as much or as little as desired. They 
 are of course wide open during the hour or so which it takes the stove to 
 consume its daily armful of wood, or in the south pail of coal. Such is 
 the allowance for twenty-four hours, and only on extremest cold days, not 
 thirty in the winter, is it doubled and the firing operation repeated after 
 twelve hours. The perfect protection afforded by the putting up for winter 
 of duplicate window frames calked all round the edges, with sometimes a 
 strip of felt nailed over the putty for greater security, is scarcely to be counted
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 159 
 
 a defect, and is surely preferable to the expensive and only half-efficient 
 weatherstrips of this and other countries. In one at least of the windows 
 of each room there is a pane made with hinges, to open and close. It is 
 kept open in the morning while the chamberwork is being done, and is 
 opened for as long as the cold allows several times in the day, though to do so 
 is not always easy, as the edge often freezes hard and the ice must be broken 
 to get the pane to work. On the sill the interval between the two window 
 frames is filled, to the height of some three inches, with sand, in which are 
 stuck a few small paper cornucopias filled with coarse salt, a great absorber 
 of moisture. Owing to all these precautions the atmosphere of the dwel- 
 lings is singularly free from dampness, consequently cannot be called " a 
 hothouse atmosphere" ; and it is further corrected by the universally popu- 
 lar window-gardens, and the tall, large-leaved foliage plants which are such 
 favorites for both decorative and sanitary reasons. 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK III., CHAPTER I. NO. 5. (See p. 153, note n.) 
 
 A man who takes an obligatory thorough washing once a week, cannot 
 be personally very dirty. For a Russian of the lower classes it is, besides, 
 a matter of religious duty to wash his hands before " touching bread." For 
 the same reason the table is kept scrupulously scoured, and is washed down 
 every time a meal is to be spread on it, and the dishes, bowls, and platters are 
 treated likewise. If the family can afford it, the table is covered with a 
 snow-white linen cloth, homespun and homewoven. "Bread," the symbol 
 of food, of life, has still much of the veneration of primeval ages clinging to 
 it ; it is not to be played with or frittered away by the children or wasted in 
 any way, and no crumbs must be suffered to fall to the ground ; they may be 
 collected and served as food for the chickens, or scattered about for "God's 
 little birds," a pretty custom which we can trace to one of the daily offer- 
 ings prescribed to the Brahmans by ancient Hindu law. What Mr. Beaulieu 
 says about the condition of the peasants' clothing neutralizing the effects of 
 the daily bath, cannot be disputed, but it applies only to the very poor. A 
 well-to-do peasant family often has a bathroom of its own and always suffi- 
 cient change of raiment. In this as in so many respects, things stand worst 
 in towns, in factory quarters, and others crowded with the poorer laboring 
 class. But in the capitals, and in due time in the larger cities, great and 
 thoughtful improvements have been made in the public baths. The most 
 to the point is the arrangement providing for the bather's shirt and trousers
 
 160 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 being laundried and dried ready for him when he returns to the dressing-room 
 if he has no change, and a certain iron press closet in which his tulup (sheep- 
 skin) is subjected to a degree of dry heat which entirely frees it from vermin. 
 They say that the floor of that closet seems strewn with a black powder 
 and must be swept out every couple of hours. These two items, incalculably 
 beneficial as they are, are included in the charge for the use of the bath- 
 rooms from two to five cents, according to accommodation, of which there 
 are three grades for the common people, apart from the really luxurious pub- 
 lic bathrooms, with carpets, marble swimming basins, attendants, etc. (from 
 fifteen to twenty-five cents a person), and the private suites of three rooms 
 dressing-room, washing-room with wooden benches all around, bath tub, and 
 a sufficiency of wooden buckets and brass basins, and the small vapor room 
 with its shelves along one wall. These suites, which occupy a separate part 
 of the building, opening on both sides of a long corridor, cost from fifty cents 
 to two dollars, according as they are fitted up, and you are not limited as 
 to time within reasonable bounds, say an hour and a half, or two hours.
 
 BOOK III. CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Russian Character and the Struggle against the Climate The North 
 far from Being the Natural Cradle of Liberty Resignation, Passiveness, 
 and Hardening in Evil Practical Spirit and Realistic Instincts Impres- 
 sions Received from Nature ; her Sadness Her Grandeur and Poverty-^ 
 Effects of these Contrasts On the So-Called Nomadic Tendencies 
 of the Russians The Monotony of Great-Russia and the Lack of 
 Originality. 
 
 THE direct influence of climate on the human organ- 
 ism and habits, on the physical and economical conditions of 
 existence, is neither the only nor perhaps the deepest one. Nature 
 indirectly exerts a considerable influence over the thoughts, the 
 feelings, the entire character, by the passions she provokes and 
 the faculties she calls into play. The first remark suggested by 
 the physical formation of Great-Russia is that life there, more than 
 anywhere else, is a strife against nature, a hand to hand combat 
 against an ever-present and unvanquished foe. Under that sky 
 man cannot, as in more temperate climes, forget his adversary ; 
 nor can he ever completely triumph over that foe, and even while 
 struggling for the land foot for foot, he is often made to yield 
 before a superior force. Hence several apparently incompatible 
 traits of the Russian national character. This warfare is first of 
 all a school of patience, resignation, submissiveness. Unable to 
 slip his neck from under the yoke of nature, he has borne that of 
 man more patiently ; the one has bent and fashioned him for the 
 other. The tyranny of climate prepared him for man's absolute 
 power. The object of all his striving being bare existence, des- 
 potism weighed on him less. We should not indiscriminately 
 it 
 
 161
 
 162 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 acquiesce in the ancient theory which set down the peoples of the 
 North as apt for freedom and those of the South as doomed to 
 bondage. At a certain latitude, in a given environment of phys- 
 ical conditions, the North can bow the souls as well as the bodies, 
 and culture alone can raise and straighten them. The grand 
 advantage the North possesses, is that there the liberating 
 efficiency of culture is always possible, while in tropical countries 
 the final success remains still doubtful. 
 
 One of the qualities that have been most developed by the 
 climate and the strife against nature, is passive courage, endur- 
 ance, negative energy, the power of inertia. Hardening endurance 
 has long been the Great-Russian's popular ideal. This feeling is 
 very apparent in an old national game, a sort of rustic boxing 
 match, in which the combatants vied not in strength and skill, 
 but in endurance, the victor being not he who floored his antago- 
 nist, but he who could take most hard knocks without crying out 
 for mercy. Life, at one with history, has fashioned the Great- 
 Russian to a stoicism, the heroism of which he himself is not 
 conscious of. Nobody can suffer like a Russian ; no one can die 
 like him. In the quiet courage with which he faces suffering and 
 death, there is something of the stolid resignation of the captive 
 Indian, ennobled, however, by serene religious conviction. 1 
 
 The first time I met a Russian peasant was is 1868, in Palestine, 
 in March, at the beginning of Lent. I was camping out, under a 
 
 1 Nowhere does the Russian's genuineness, earnestness, simplicity shine 
 forth with a steadier and clearer light than on the deathbed, the battlefield, 
 the scaffold. His inveterate hatred of cant, his contempt of "phrase," 
 " attitude," catchwords (which, by the way, makes him out of sympathy with 
 hero-worship or what is commonly called so) never leaves him, least of all at 
 critical points and tragic climaxes. This is why the effective " last words," 
 the deliberate " posings " and self-drapings with which men of other nations, 
 even the great ones, generally think it necessary to emphasize their public 
 acts and especially the last one of all death under the public eye with a 
 view to producing a certain impression, not only does not warm the Russian's 
 heart or appeal to his admiration, but either jars on him and puts him out 
 of patience, or leaves him coldly critical, with a curl of the lip not unlike 
 a sneer.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 163 
 
 tent, on the margin of Solomon's Ponds, not far from Bethlehem. 
 The night had been disturbed by one of those tempests, bearers of 
 wind and rain, which are of frequent occurrence in Syria at that 
 time of the year. We had been joined by one of those groups of 
 Russian pilgrims that walk over the Holy Land in small gangs, 
 staff in hand, with no other luggage than a canvas bag and a 
 wooden bowl. They were all peasants ; there were among them 
 both men and women ; most of them were aged.* Tired out with 
 the hardships of a distant journey and a long march, they were 
 seeking around our tents, or at the foot of ruinous walls, for shelter 
 against the driving rain. At dawn they wanted to return to the 
 Greek Convent at Bethlehem ; but, although the distance was not 
 over a few miles, cold and fatigue prevented several from reaching 
 it. When their strength gave out, they would drop down on the 
 ground, and the others would silently pass on, giving them up as 
 they gave up themselves. We followed them very closely, on 
 horseback, numb with cold too, and worn out, making for the 
 I/atin Convent at Bethlehem. I thus came on two of these 
 peasants, lying on the rocky ground in the pathway, which the 
 rain had transformed into a rivulet. It was in vain I tried to 
 raise them, to revive them with rum, to haul them up on a horse ; 
 they seemed bent on letting themselves die. 1 When we reached 
 Bethlehem, we could send out assistance to them. That very 
 morning one man and two women, Russians, had been found dead 
 on roads and buried. 
 
 It was with the same feeling, the same calm and gentle fatal- 
 ism that, during the Crimean war, Russian soldiers followed their 
 leaders across the steppes of the south, marching until totally 
 
 * Household cares and the communal authorities rarely allow young 
 people to embark on these long pilgrimages, whether within the empire or 
 abroad, of which the lower classes are so fond. 
 
 s They probably were. Death such as this, at the goal of the long, weary 
 pilgrimage on the sacred earth of the Holy I/and, is a beatific vision to these 
 simple, loving souls, as sure and short a cut to Paradise as death in battle to 
 the Moslem.
 
 164 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 exhausted, when they would die along the roads, by the hundred 
 thousand, with not a cry of revolt, almost without a moan or 
 murmur. It was with the same patience, the same resigned 
 energy that, in the Balkan wars, they stood the extremes of cold, 
 of heat, of fatigue, of hunger. The Russian soldier is the most 
 enduring in Europe ; in this respect no other can be compared to 
 him but his secular adversary, the Turkish soldier. Both have a 
 capacity for suffering unknown to the nations of the West. And 
 yet the Russian people are naturally the least pugnacious, the 
 least warlike in the world. They never were, at any time. 
 Whatever conquests they have achieved, they are devoid of con- 
 quering instincts. Essentially peace-loving, the Russian sees in 
 war only a scourge to which he submits out of obedience to God 
 and the Tsar. 
 
 From this strife against the climate, which has fashioned him 
 so well for resignation, the Great-Russian derives two opposite 
 qualities. Together with a singular mixture of strength and 
 weakness, of tenacity and elasticity, it has given him a curious 
 mixture of roughness and good nature, of insensibility and kind- 
 ness. The ruggedness of the world around him, while hardening 
 him for himself, teaches him compassion for others. He knows 
 what it is to suffer, so can sympathize with his neighbor, and 
 succors him as much as lies within his power. Family feelings, 
 beneficence towards the poor, pity for the unfortunate of all sorts, 
 these are some among the most marked features of the national 
 character. Contrary to a vulgar prejudice, the Russian, under 
 his rugged shell, is generally affectionate, gentle, even tender ; 
 but let him encounter an obstacle, let him engage in a struggle 
 with an adversary, the latent ruggedness and harshness at once 
 take the upper hand. In the unceasing struggle against a ruthless 
 nature, he has learned to respect the laws of war, which he applies 
 as he endures them with inflexibility. 1 
 
 8 The Russian's mind is intensely theoretical, his conscience rigid in the 
 extreme, holding all compromises with existing things as dishonest or, at
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 165 
 
 It is in those struggles in which Russia's very existence seems 
 at stake that all these contrasts appear. Otherwise as was 
 shown in the French campaign of 1814, as well as in the Crimean 
 war the Russian is the most generous of enemies. Gentle and 
 compassionate in his private capacity, he can, in his national and 
 civil struggles, become pitiless as soldier or public servant ; but, 
 the victory won, he often shows himself again as simply kind as 
 he just was ingenuously stern. In the country whose sad privi- 
 lege it was to draw on itself his worst severities, in Poland, I have 
 sometimes heard pathetic stories told of this contrast in the 
 Russian character. Here is one, told us by Poles : In one of those 
 terrible insurrections, the consequences of which still weigh so 
 heavily on this hapless land, a Russian non-commissioned officer, 
 quartered on a Polish family, took the liberty of kissing the child 
 of the house. In the eyes of the mother, who, like all the Polish 
 women, was an exalted patriot, this Russian kiss was pollution. 
 She was pregnant at the time, and committed the imprudence of 
 giving the offender a box on the ears. Instead of getting angry 
 or complaining to his chiefs, the Russian sergeant offered his 
 other cheek and allowed himself to be turned out of the room. 
 Soon after, he left the town, and, having requested a comrade to 
 inform him of the birth of the expected child, sent it little chris- 
 tening gifts. 
 
 The Russian has not much comprehension for resistance 
 unencouraged by the hope of success. Himself accustomed to bow 
 before fatality, he thinks it but just that other people should do 
 
 the best, cowardly. Therefore, once possessed of an idea, they go all 
 lengths, and therefore, too, should there ever be a Russian revolution, 
 which Heaven in its mercy forefend, the horrors of French '93 will pale 
 before it. How otherwise could we find among the most ruthless of "ter- 
 rorists," ready at any moment for wholesale massacre, gentle, soft-eyed 
 creatures that would take to their bosoms a hurt cur of the streets and go 
 out of their way not to tread upon an insect? Remember the youth placed 
 in charge of the mine under " Mikhaylofsky Street " in Petersburgh, who, 
 when he left his basement chamber, flying from the police, did not forget 
 to leave on the table the money due to his cat's butcher.
 
 1 66 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 so too. If he does not worship force, he certainly respects it. 
 Something like this medley of contrasting feelings is found amongst 
 the Germans, especially the Prussians 4 ; but with the latter the 
 affectionate side is more exclusive, more turned inward, more 
 selfishly domestic, while the rugged, brutal side is turned more 
 outward to the world, with a superadded supercilious arrogance 
 to which the Russian, as a rule, is a stranger. 
 
 The faculty which has been aroused most thoroughly in the 
 Great-Russian by this struggle against a cold and implacable 
 nature is a practical, positive spirit ; this is the feature by which 
 chiefly he differs from the L,ittle- Russian and from the western and 
 southern Slavs.' This predominant quality of his shows in every- 
 thing, and everything tends to account for it. As one of his 
 writers remarks,* it was in the secular labors of colonization that 
 he contracted this disposition to see in everything the immediate 
 aim and the realities of life. Hence that presence of mind, that 
 facility in devising ways and means, that wealth of resources, that 
 tact in dealing with men and things, which characterize the Great- 
 Russian. Very perceptible in the people's manners, politics, 
 literature, this tendency is not less apparent in things where it 
 
 4 The Prussian people are much mixed with Slavs, and a great part of 
 them are Prussian only politically and from long habit, not in blood. This 
 is especially noticeable in the Pomeranians, who, along with their purely 
 Slavic name Pomoridnit, " the people by the sea" have retained -a very 
 pure and handsome Slavic type of features. Morally they are almost en- 
 tirely germanized, with a superadded stolid obstinacy of their own, much 
 like that of the Bretons of old Armorica. Does association with the rugged 
 northern sea produce it in the course of time ? 
 
 This is a feature of our national character very patent to us Russians, 
 but until now scarcely even suspected by foreigners, who thus lost an im- 
 portant clue to the Russian nature and its practical workings. The first to 
 point it out with a precision and surety due to intelligent observation, and to 
 bring it out in the living form of an artistic creation, was Henri Gre'ville, in 
 her admirable novel, Un Violon Russe. In this book, by far the best of her 
 Russian series, everything is caught warm from life even to the servant 
 girl who appears just once, to open the door to visitors and go on with her 
 scrubbing. 
 
 * Mr. Kavllin : Thoughts and Notes on Russian History.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 167 
 
 would seem most out of place, such as poetry and religion. The 
 Great-Russian popular songs show little taste for abstractions or 
 personifications of any sort. No nation has a less metaphysical 
 turn of mind, or takes less thought of the essence of things. His 
 favorite sciences, those that most attract him, are the physical sci- 
 ences, the natural sciences, the social sciences. The whole nation, 
 the educated classes as well as the ignorant masses, is pervaded 
 by a more or less conscious positivism. The quality most 
 esteemed by the peasant is common-sense ; he says his worst 
 about the Pole when he calls him " brainless." Few nations are 
 more devoid of sentiment, even while pluming themselves on it. 
 
 Indeed, the pretension to practical sense, with the Great-Rus- 
 sian, at times verges on brutality. Was it not a Russian who 
 said that a piece of cheese was worth more than a Pushkin ? ' 
 These realistic instincts make themselves felt in literature and in 
 all the lines of art, notably in painting, in criticism, in history, in 
 philosophy, or, more correctly, in the absence of philosophy and 
 metaphysics. The romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth 
 century, like the classicism of the preceding century, and notwith- 
 standing the genius of Pushkin and Lermontof, was little else than 
 an importation from abroad. Nowadays the national literature 
 belongs, and has belonged for quite a while already, almost 
 entirely to realism or naturalism. Of all foreign writers, the one 
 
 6 This piece of criticism was beaten by one of the would-be prophets of 
 "the last word of science," (how sick Russian ears have grown of the sound 
 of that phrase and a few others !) magazine reviewers, who retailed at third 
 hand the materialistic theories of Feuerbach, Moleschott, etc. On one 
 occasion he went into a rage against poetry in general, and became especially 
 rampant against Shakespeare. Shakespeare ? Faugh ! What was the good 
 of him ? What was the sense of him ? Why, there was more sense in " soft- 
 boiled boots." The expression has become a by-word and a classic. It was 
 the same wiseacre or another of that ilk who, in reviewing Victor Hugo's 
 Toilers of the Sea, fell foul of one of the poet's sweetest creations, his 
 " Bird-Girl," and triumphantly demonstrated in a lengthy anatomical 
 dissertation that only an ignorant fool could liken a human being to a 
 bird. Pretty work he would make of Austin Dobson's gem, charming 
 A vice !
 
 1 68 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 most read and relished is Zola, whom one of their novelists * calls 
 " The Hercules of Naturalism," Zola, who has long numbered 
 more admirers among the Russians than among his own 
 countrymen. 
 
 Nothing is as complex as the character of a man, how much 
 more that of a nation. After having portrayed one side of it, one 
 is bound to present the opposite side, under penalty of producing 
 a deceptive likeness. In Russia, as elsewhere, nature, which 
 influences man in so many divers and roundabout ways, does not 
 always impel him in the same direction. She not only acts on 
 the temperament through the climate, the diet, and the habits, on 
 the character through the needs which she imposes, or the faculties 
 which she stimulates ; she acts, with no less force, on the imagina- 
 tion and the entire soul through her aspects, through the pictures 
 she presents, the impressions she arouses. Now, as nature is 
 nowhere simpler, these impressions are nowhere clearer. One of 
 the first to be perceived by the traveller is a feeling of sadness. 
 This sadness emanates from the sky and the climate ; Northern 
 nations are all more or less touched with it ; in Russia the very 
 earth, flat and monotonous, exhales it. The Russian of the south 
 the Little-Russian is not less subject to it than is he of the north. 
 
 The Russian soul is melancholy. If incurable boredom, if 
 hypochondria or British " spleen " are nevertheless of rarer occur- 
 rence than in England, it is because the climate, being more 
 nigged, is far less moist and misty ; possibly also because the 
 Russian's sadness is tempered or dispelled by his sociability, one 
 of the qualities most generally common to all the Slavs, one 
 which, in Russia, the enforced seclusion of winter with its long 
 nights has done most to foster and develop. The Russian's relish 
 for pleasure and emotions, his love of travelling, his passion for 
 gambling, even his propensity to drink, frequently are with him, 
 as with many other nations of the North, only an effort to forget, 
 or to fill an inner void. 
 
 * Boborykin.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER, 169 
 
 It is in the poetry and music of the people, in the songs or 
 i" of Great-Russia, those songs which Herzen used to 
 call "sounding tears," in those "airs" of slow rhythm and in 
 minor keys, that the native melancholy, bred of soil and clime, 
 finds its fullest expression. Between the Russian songs and the 
 canzoni of Naples and Sicily, all sun-imbued, there is a distance 
 as between the antipodes. In these popular songs, a cloud of soft 
 sadness casts elegiac shades over the realistic background of the 
 national character. In literature and cultured poetry, this sadness 
 assumes a bitterer, intenser flavor. From I^ermontof and Pushkin 
 to Nekrassof and Tiutchef, the poetry of all the schools is impreg- 
 nated with it ; it makes itself felt in the life as well as in the works 
 of all these poets, most of whom died young, and some tragically. 
 " Sadness, scepticism, irony these are the three chords of Russian 
 poetry " wrote Herzen, who might have quoted himself as an ex- 
 ample. "Our laugh," he further remarked, " is but an unwhole- 
 some grin." * The fact is that Gbgol's sarcastic mirth is at times 
 more heartrending than that of the sombrest Bnglish humorists. 
 
 This sort of melancholy, inspired by the climate and entertained 
 by the political regime, at times inclines the Russian soul to a 
 mysticism which prevails over its realistic instincts, or combines 
 with them in strange ways witness more than one popular reli- 
 gious sect, and many a national writer, such as Juk6vsky, G6gol, 
 Dostoyefsky, Tolstoy. Between this spontaneous sadness, at 
 times streaked with spells of joviality, and the kind of pessimism 
 so prominent in several ignorant sects as well as in the nihilism 
 of literary youths, it is equally easy to find a link. 
 
 In the lower classes, this unconscious melancholy frequently 
 appears wedded to a resigned fatalism, and the outcome is a 
 tranquillity, a sort of placidity which fills one with wonder. In 
 crowds, in games, in his cups even, the Great-Russian is, as a 
 rule, peaceable and not noisy. Very little quarrelling or riot- 
 ousness, among men as well as among children. A crowd, silent 
 * The Russian People and Socialism.
 
 170 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 as nature herself, as the snow, which, in the streets of cities, 
 muffles the sound of footsteps. 
 
 In order better to enter into the feelings of such a crowd, let 
 us figure to ourselves the impressions gathered through centuries 
 by the colonists from the West, during their slow settling on the 
 soil of Great-Russia. Face to face with these expanses as bound- 
 less as the sea, man felt small. The consciousness of his power 
 dwindled before the vastness of the land which encompassed him, 
 and which, down even to our own times, he felt incapable of 
 filling. These lakes and swamps, unnumbered and unbounded, 
 these rivers which no bridge could span, these forests without 
 end, these steppes with no horizon but the sky-line, all these 
 things brought home to him his inferiority. 
 
 If we would analyze the chief outer features, we shall see that 
 all the impressions produced by Russian nature can be summed 
 up in the word ' ' contrast ' ' : the pictures presented to man by 
 Great-Russia show him his own smallness without making him 
 realize the energies of nature. It is not only by its extent that this 
 land dwarfs man : it attunes the imagination to dreams and vague 
 musings, without supplying, as in the South, materials for food 
 and warmth, i. e. , that which trains it to the gorgeous poetry which 
 we admire in the poems of India or Greece. Flat and bare, dull 
 and inert, this nature has not much to stimulate the mind with, 
 little nourishment for poetry and art. It is not very apt to suggest 
 powerful conceptions or brilliant imagery. Even by its meagre 
 fertility, the Russian soil is often inferior to the desert in its nudity, 
 where, at least, nothing dwarfs the impression of immensity.' 
 
 7 It is natural for a foreigner to think so, whose necessarily transient 
 stay could not attune his soul to the tranquillity and inner silence, re- 
 cueillement which would open it to the subtle charm, the mystery of local 
 influences, repugnant, moreover, with their northern and oriental melan- 
 cholia to his Latin temperament. But we are passionately fond of our 
 steppe, our plains, our woods, and even a cursory acquaintance with our 
 poets, novelists, and painters would suffice to show that art and poetry find 
 therein ample and substantial food.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1^1 
 
 The land formerly called Moscovia is devoid of all those grand, 
 spectacular attractions by which nature amazes and uplifts the 
 spirit. It has neither mountains nor sea, and lacks the impulse 
 which life by the sea or in the mountains gives to individuality. 
 Its forests, sparse and stunted in size, lack majesty ; most of its 
 numerous lakes have flat margins, like big pools. Russia has 
 been denied the grand scenery of the North. She has no surf- 
 beaten coasts ; no steep, beetling islands ; no gulfs or sinuous 
 fjords ; no granite rocks or glaciers ; no torrents or waterfalls. 
 She has no share in the mighty nature which has begotten the 
 rugged myths of the North ; she has little of anything that stirs 
 and stimulates the personality. 
 
 Russian nature has two opposite characteristics : amplitude and 
 vacuity wealth of space and scarcity of contents to fill it. Huge 
 areas show no variety, either of forms or colors. In live and 
 inanimate nature alike, there is an absolute want of grandeur and 
 power. Picturesqueness is either totally absent or appears on 
 such a minimum scale as leaves it imperceptible to a foreigner's 
 eye. Travelling over these undulating plains, where towns and 
 villages are sparsely scattered, produces almost the same feeling 
 of satiety as a sea-voyage. When embarked on a long railway 
 trip, one can, just as on board a steamer, close one's eyes at night 
 and reopen them the next morning without being made aware of 
 a change of locality. Only some few cities, rising in tiers on the 
 margin of rivers or lakes, with their old walls and colored 
 cupolas, such as Kief, the two Nbvgorods, Pskof, Kazan, present 
 from a distance an imposing front. The very size of the rivers 
 impairs their beauty ; it is in vain that one bank rises into high 
 acclivity, sometimes overgrown with handsome trees ; no matter 
 how fine in themselves, they are always too low for the width of 
 the stream and look crushed. This disproportion mars the most 
 beautiful portions of the Dniepr, the Don, the Volga. For instance, 
 in the great bend the latter describes between Stavrbpol and 
 Syzran, where " Mother Volga " opens a road for herself through
 
 1/2 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 a range of steep hills, perhaps equal in height to those on the 
 Rhine, the Danube, or the Nile, the width of the river exceeds the 
 height of the hills, so they look dwarfed and the effect is lost. 
 Everything in Russia suffers from this want of proportion between 
 the vertical section and the horizontal plan of the landscapes. 
 Perhaps the most truly picturesque scenery is presented by the 
 calm ponds that lie in the desert forests, the ravines dug in the 
 steppe by the melting snows, the wooded glens through which a 
 slow river winds its silent course. 
 
 This reliefless soil is overspread by a vegetation lacking both 
 vigor and variety. Nature repeats herself everywhere, same 
 species, same plants, same trees. The similarity that pervades 
 the conditions of life brings about the sameness of live creatures, 
 while the rigor of the climate weakens them. Free nature in 
 Great-Russia shows the monotony that, in other parts of the 
 world, man inflicts on nature enslaved. In this respect, the 
 wooded zone, which comprises the vastest and oldest portion of 
 Great-Russia, has not much the advantage of the zone denuded 
 of trees. The forests are, if anything, of poorer aspect than the 
 steppe, since the latter, in spring, dons its luxuriant grass robe. 
 Fine trees are rare and scarcely to be met with outside of certain 
 favored regions of the centre or west. The species are the same 
 as in Sweden and Norway, but without their vigor. Instead of 
 giving vent to the exuberance, the energy of an ever-youthful 
 nature, these forests give you an impression of powerlessness, of 
 indigence, lassitude. The trees now are poorly, stunted, small, 
 and old-looking, now again they are slim and lanky, without 
 being tall, and cast but scant shade on the bare ground beneath 
 them. What most strikes the eye is the everlasting contrast of 
 pine and birch, with their respectively reddish and white-bark 
 trunks ; the pine straight and bare with its meagre head, the 
 birch with its slender limbs, with its minute foliage. 
 
 The fields offer still less variety than the woods. The soil does 
 not receive at man's hands the animation and variety which they
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 173 
 
 impart to it in other countries. The cultivated crops are stricken 
 with the same monotony as the spontaneous vegetation. You 
 seldom see those different and adjoining crops which lend such 
 life to the fields in the West. You might take it all for one and 
 the same field, stretching away into the infinite, were it not 
 broken now and then by a strip of fallow land. No hamlet, no 
 homestead, not even isolated farmhouses. In the steppe as well 
 as in the forest, the Russian husbandman seems afraid of finding 
 himself alone in the midst of the immensity which encloses him 
 on every side. Community of landed property, in general use 
 among the peasants, increases the defect of nature ; it deprives 
 Russian rural scenery of those enclosures, those fancifully shaped 
 fences which go for much in the charm of the villages in England 
 and Normandy. Thence partly come the sad flatness, the dull 
 wearisomeness of this impersonal, collective country, where the 
 fields are undivided or cut up into long, even, and symmetrical 
 strips. 
 
 This liking for common property, for association and the kind 
 of organization known in Russia under the name of arfel, has 
 frequently been ascribed to Slavic blood. It is more likely that 
 it has its chief sources not so much in race as in nature on one 
 hand, and in a given stage of civilization on the other. The 
 persistency of agricultural communities in Great-Russia, this 
 desire to crowd together, to live in close vicinity, is certainly not 
 unconnected with the cold immensity of space wherein man, if 
 isolated, feels lost and powerless. 8 
 
 8 Isolation in the midst of hostile populations has the same effect, and 
 produced among the Balkan Slavs Serbs, Bosnians, Bulgars those famous 
 family communes or "brotherhoods" the Zadrugas to which those 
 persecuted branches of our race owe the preservation of their national 
 consciousness, their inspiriting traditions, and more prosaically their 
 safety. Kach is an embryo state, a survival of primeval patriarchism ; a 
 fossil, but instinct with life and with beating heart. When the necessity for 
 them ceases, they cease to exist, naturally, of themselves as the bodies in 
 the old Etruscan tombs, seemingly unaffected by ages of sepulchral gloom, 
 crumble to dust when touched by a ray of the sun of the living.
 
 1/4 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 From the same roots springs another inclination tending in 
 an opposite direction : the love of adventure, of travelling, of 
 vagrancy what foreigners designate by the high-sounding word 
 " nomadic tastes." The little love the peasant bears to the sorry, 
 thankless soil of old Moscovia is easily accounted for ; besides, if 
 the peasant at times really deserves this stricture, it should be set 
 down for a good part to the institutions, serfdom, and the current 
 form of property-holding. 
 
 There is, to this phenomenon, another reason still, which also, 
 though indirectly, is bred of local conditions, and weakens the 
 attachment to house and home : it is the materials of which the 
 dwellings are built, more particularly the peasant's cabin the 
 izbci, and the consequent frequency of conflagrations. 
 
 In Russia, especially Northern Russia, poor in stone and 
 abounding in forests, in that region which the historian Soloviof 
 'calls "Wooden Europe" in opposition to Western or "Stone 
 Europe," all villages, from the peasants cabin to the church and 
 the old manor house, are built of fir-wood. So were most towns 
 until quite lately, even the capitals. In such a country, fire 
 " the Red Rooster," such being the homely name for it among the 
 people is a terrible foe, both for the individual and for society. 
 It is in vain that, to lessen the danger, a certain distance is left 
 between the houses in the villages ; they are about certain to 
 burn down some time or other, every one of them. The chances 
 of duration of a dwelling can, according to the region, be cal- 
 culated with as much accuracy as those of human lives, only 
 that the dwelling's term is frequently considerably the shorter. 
 One feels how discouraging must be the prospect of destruction 
 by fire, which overshadows a family's whole life, how hampering 
 to any thought of embellishment, consequently to any added 
 comfort or improvement. What is the use of getting attached ^to 
 the frail construction of wood which is liable to be consumed by a 
 spark and a breath ? So the peasants often listlessly allow their 
 izbd, to lean off its basis, as though ready to tumble down, and
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1/5 
 
 appear to wait for the flames to consume it, before they set it 
 straight. 
 
 Independently of the chances of fire, the facility with which 
 the peasant of the north-country constructs his house is not apt 
 to inspire him with sedentary tastes. A peasant, up to very lately, 
 was able to build a house in a few weeks, and all he wanted in 
 the way of tools was an axe. In the times when the land had not 
 been so denuded of woods, the izba, though otherwise roomy and 
 comfortable, could be replaced almost as easily as the Arab's 
 hut, or gurbi. That may have been another of the causes of 
 those ' ' nomadic tastes, ' ' much too freely ascribed to the 
 nation. At all events, the frequency of fires, which have 
 not been stopped by the recently created insurance offices, 
 still remains an obstacle to steadiness of habits, to the feeling 
 of stability and permanency, to care for the morrow. This 
 calamity, ever hanging over the villages, diminishes the love 
 of home, a feeling which has everywhere been one of the 
 greatest factors of morality, order, and economy, and which 
 conies more naturally to the Russian than to any other people, 
 as, since the emancipation, every peasant owns the house in 
 which he lives. 
 
 As a rule, the people of the North are less attached to the land 
 than those of the South. Emigration is less hard to them ; we 
 see that in Germany and England, and in the Scandinavian 
 countries, which, from a not very dense population, send off each 
 year to Canada a considerable contingent of emigrants. The 
 Russian at least the peasant does not easily leave his country ; 
 he is held there by the institutions, by his prejudices, by his 
 religion ; but Russia is vast enough to open a field to him when 
 the wandering humor comes over him. The plain lures on the 
 pedestrian ; nothing on his monotonous way invites him to loiter, 
 to settle down. Hence, in the Cosack of old and the modern 
 peasant, the ease with which they go from place to place, an 
 instinct which manifests itself in so many ways fairs, pilgrim-
 
 176 THE EAfPIJtE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 ages, seeking new land, and which, historians tell us, was one 
 of the reasons for establishing serfdom.' 
 
 This readiness to go ahead, at random, corresponds to a moral 
 tendency perhaps more worthy of note, though less generally 
 taken notice of. This is the adventurous inclination of the Rus- 
 sian nature, often longing to rush blindly into the most reckless 
 speculations, impatient of obstacles, not shrinking before any 
 extreme of boldness, be it in philosophy, religion, or social 
 science, with a general tolerance or indulgence for all such 
 flights at which other nations stand aghast. Russian thought 
 is frequently not more conscious of limitations than are Russian 
 plains and horizons ; it revels in the boundless, goes straight the 
 
 * From earliest times land used to be given as a reward for public ser- 
 vices. This was only just, since public servants would have considered the 
 offer of pay or salary as an insult. They defrayed all the expenses entailed 
 by their respective posts out of their personal means, and some charges were 
 so onerous as to leave them well-nigh penniless for instance, embassies 
 to foreign lands, or even only to other Russian princes' courts, with the 
 numerous suite and the representation such a post necessitated. The people 
 on the estates were not slaves to the landlord, though owing them certain 
 service and dues, and in a great measure dependent on their pleasure and pro- 
 tection, much as Roman clients of the early times on their patrons. When 
 they were or thought themselves ill-used, they would migrate en masse to the 
 estates of some other landlord, of more popular fame, till some lands would 
 become overcrowded and some remain almost deserted, to the destruction 
 not only of the owners' interests, but of the country's economic balance. 
 It was attempted to stem the current by an ordinance, forbidding change of 
 land throughout the year, and permitting the peasants to leave their home- 
 steads on one single day, the feast of St. George, 26th of November, when 
 their work for the year was done and they had several months before them 
 in which to effect their emigration and get settled on the new land. When 
 even this restriction did not sufficiently reduce the peasant migrations, the 
 decree "attaching them to the glebe" was issued by Boriss Godundf 
 (contemporary of the last years of Elizabeth and the first of James I.), an 
 usurper and a murderer, yet a wise and careful sovereign, somewhat after 
 the manner of Richard III. Thus serfdom came into being, and thence 
 the dread of leaving free play to the supposed " migratory instincts " of the 
 peasant, a dread which has become a sort of obsession, so that, even now 
 that he is nominally freed, in another age and under entirely altered con- 
 ditions, the main feature of his bondage bondage to the soil is still 
 maintained. 

 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 177 
 
 whole length of ideas at the risk of encountering the absurd. By 
 this logical consistency, this longing for the absolute, the Russian 
 mind betrays a certain affinity to the French mind, only the latter 
 submits to correction by positive practical sense, which will not 
 suffer it to stray beyond the domain of speculation. Hence the 
 striking contrast, in so many Russians, of great audacity in 
 intellectual spheres joined to as great timidity in real life, of 
 excessive temerity in the one and the most cautious reserve in 
 the other. 
 
 The levelness of the soil and the debility of the Russian 
 nature ought to be held responsible for one of the accusations 
 most frequently, and possibly with least justice, brought up 
 against the Russian people : lack of individuality, of originality, 
 want of creative faculties. The history of the nation and the 
 tardiness of its civilization are certainly not blameless in this ; but 
 if a thing we may be permitted to doubt if this defect should 
 prove universal and incurable, the blame should first of all be laid 
 on the country's physical nature. If he is lacking in personality, 
 the Russian, in this particular again, reflects the characteristics 
 of the land of his birth. To its poverty, to its sameness, he is 
 indebted for the comparative barrenness of his mind. This land, 
 indeed, offers but few images to the poet, or colors to the painter ; 
 it does not lend itself to a renewal of impressions and ideas.* If 
 this unproductiveness is to be corrected in the future by the 
 enlarged horizons which are opening out on all sides into the 
 
 * On this occasion I shall make bold to remark on the great and pro- 
 lific influence brought to bear on Russian literature by the mountainous 
 regions remote from the empire's centre and more or less lately annexed to 
 it, Crimea and Caucasus more particularly. Owing in a great measure to 
 the mistrust of a suspicious police, always ready to banish writers to the 
 extremities of the empire, national poetry, as represented by Pushkin and 
 Lermontof, has found there a source of inspiration by which romanticism 
 has largely profited. In this respect the influence of the Caucasus on Rus- 
 sian poetry, in the first half of the nineteenth century, might be likened to 
 that which the Alps exercised on French and German literature in the 
 eighteenth century, after Rousseau.
 
 178 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 world of science and culture, is it not the land itself which should, 
 in a great measure, be charged with the long inferiority of the 
 Russian nay, the Slav genius, such as, for instance, the lack 
 of vitality and vigor in the ancient mythology of the Russian 
 Slavs, when compared to the fables of the Greeks or the Scan- 
 dinavians ? * 
 
 * On the religious and mystical proclivities of the Russian soul, see Vol. 
 III., Book 1.
 
 BOOK III. CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Variety of Russian Nature Lies in the Alternations of Seasons In what 
 Way the Contraries of Winter, Spring, and Summer have Reacted on the 
 National Temperament Russian Character is all in Extremes, as the 
 Climate Its Contradictions Its Flexibility Its Adaptability An His- 
 torical Embodiment of the National Character. 
 
 WE have perhaps dwelt too persistently on the uniformity of 
 Russian rural scenery ; it has, after all, a variety of its own, which 
 powerfully reacts on man, and helps to account for the seeming 
 contradictions of the national character. This principle lies not 
 so much in the soil as in the climate. 
 
 Variety in Russia, and the beauty and picturesqueness it brings 
 with it, come more from weather than space, from the succession 
 of seasons more than from that of scenery. It is the opposite of 
 what we see in southern countries, especially tropical ones, where 
 vegetation and the outward appearance of earth and sky change 
 little, where the seasons are known only by shadings, and life flows 
 on amidst these conditions, even and monotonous in tenor. In 
 the North, especially in a continental region like Great- Russia, 
 the seasons forcibly contrast with one another ; they clothe the 
 earth alternately in garments violently differing in coloring. 
 They lend nature the variety of aspect which enables the Russian 
 to imbibe from them the variety of impressions and feelings he 
 never could draw from the soil. Without leaving his village, he 
 passes, at intervals of six months, through climates and pictures 
 as different as though he were oscillating between pole and 
 equator, scaling back and forwards a ladder of from twenty-five 
 
 179
 
 180 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 to thirty degrees of latitude. Such changes tell no less on the 
 character than on the temperament, on the imagination than on 
 the mind. In Russia each season has its own labors, festivities, 
 and pleasures ; each has its own songs, and even sometimes its own 
 dances. In fact, the seasons hold so great a place in the popular 
 life and poetry, that they might very well serve as frames to 
 classify many of the piesni sung by the peasant. When we wish 
 to describe Russia, it is not enough to depict the soil ; it is, above 
 all, the seasons which must be portrayed. Nothing in the climate 
 of Western Europe, marked as the contrast is there between winter 
 and summer, can give an accurate idea of what that contrast is by 
 the Volga or the Neva : who has seen Russia under one only of 
 these two aspects does not know the country. 
 
 Of Russian seasons, winter is the longest and most original ; 
 in its very monotony partly lies its picturesqueness and beauty. 
 It casts over that lustreless nature the most gorgeous of bridal 
 robes. Snow is the most brilliant of ornaments, and its cold 
 whiteness, by turns sparkling and dull, is enhanced by the pearly 
 iridescence supplied by ice and frost. Everything vanishes under 
 the snow, land, sea and rivers, roads and fields ; but in this 
 viewless uniformity nature assumes a majesty with which the 
 meagre variety of spring or summer never could invest her. 
 Under this thick mantle the eye detects nothing but hollows and 
 swellings, depressions and unevenness ; but this monochrome 
 ground-tone receives from the sun the most dazzling splendor, 
 from night and the moon the tenderest, the daintiest tints. In the 
 glare of fine sunny winter days the eye can scarcely bear the even 
 and continuous blaze ; so that in the north, where the snow lies 
 on the ground five or six months at a stretch, there are nearly as 
 many eye-diseases, as many blind people, as in the lands of 
 the south. 
 
 It is in the forests that the beauties of winter should be pref- 
 erably sought. There rime decks the birch and the aspen with 
 crystal flowers more brilliant and delicate than their leaves would
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. l8l 
 
 be, while, on the background of white snow, shot with bluish 
 streaks, the sombre masses of the pines and firs take on warm, 
 velvety tones, which make them appear almost black. At night 
 these landscapes loom in solemn grandeur. By moonlight the 
 cold plains, in their spectral pallor, recall to the mind the limbos 
 of Catholic poets. On trees or monuments the snow assumes 
 fantastical light effects, and crowns the cupolas of the churches 
 with a mystic halo. On moonless nights the stars scintillate with 
 the vibrating intensity which is theirs in severe frost. The gloom 
 of the darkest nights is lightened by the reverberation of the snow ; 
 it is then as though the light, instead of coming down from the 
 sky, were rising from the earth. In winter, night is the favorite 
 time for sleigh-rides and country picnicking. Coming out of 
 theatre or ball, young women, wrapped in furs, get into open 
 sleighs, and, carried along by swift troykas (the Russian teams of 
 three abreast), are driven " to the Islands," ortosome "resort" just 
 outside St.Petersburgh, to enjoy the threefold sensation of fleetness, 
 cold air, and night. In the streets of cities, or on the high-roads, 
 the sleighs give you a peculiar impression, due to the combination 
 of motion and silence. On the most frequented ' ' perspectives ' ' the 
 horses, stimulated by cold, are started at a gallop, or at the high- 
 stepping trot known only in Russia. Sleighs and vehicles of all 
 kinds crowd, press, pass one another on the white carpet which 
 kills sound, giving to the eye the spectacle of life at its wildest, 
 while the ear receives the impression of absolute repose. 
 
 The long winter nights, so highly prized in the capitals, are 
 not devoid of pleasure for the peasants. They too are impelled 
 to assemble together, for work or recreation. Quite lately, in the 
 northernmost provinces, the women and girls used to flock into 
 the most spacious izbh of the village, sometimes clubbing together 
 to rent it for the purpose. In the wavering light of the lutchinas 
 (a kind of torches made out of resinous chips) l they held their 
 
 1 These lutchinas are long chips of pine or fir, carefully cut from the 
 portions of the logs most saturated with resin. They are stuck into some
 
 1 82 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 possiditlki, the rustic "sociables" of a people whom winter dis- 
 poses to good fellowship. After spinning flax or wool, talking 
 all the while, the young maidens, now joined by their lovers or 
 betrothed, begin to sing some of those piesni with choral burdens 
 so dear to the Russian people, or to dance one of their slow dances 
 with balalayka accompaniment, but too often superseded nowa- 
 days by the vulgar accordeon. 1 
 
 Spring puts an end to these village parties, by restoring to the 
 peasant the grass and sward and fetching the khorovbd out into the 
 open air. The end of winter or the first dawn of spring is, of all 
 times of the year, the dullest and most disagreeable. Instead of 
 the green grass, a sea of mud ; in place of rural scents, the stench 
 of the thaw. It is something like a decomposition, a general cor- 
 ruption, of nature, coming just before her yearly resurrection ; but 
 how thrilling this resurrection, how longed for and joyfully hailed 
 after the long winter mourning ! Nothing in moderate climes can 
 give an idea of such a rejuvenation. The spring recalls to life 
 both earth and water. After a hundred and fifty or two hundred 
 
 fissure in the wall, those interstices between the natural logs which are 
 stopped up most effectively too, so closely do the logs fit with oakum 
 and moss. The other end of the lutchina is lit and a tin or sheet-iron drip- 
 ping pan placed under it on the floor, for droppings of hot resin, sparks, 
 and bits of burnt off tinder. The name of this primitive torch, which begins 
 to grow rare, is an ambitious one, being derived from lutch, " a beam, a ray " 
 which reproduces exactly the Greek lykt, the Latin lux, Italian luce, and 
 the Teutonic licht, English light. Possiditlki literally means "sittings," 
 from sidilti = sedere, " to sit" 
 
 ' The balal&yka is the national strumming-instrument, a genuine antique, 
 the body nearly triangular in shape. The strings are not pinched, only 
 strummed by a very rapid wrist motion, up and down, with the ends of the 
 fingers (the nail side) ; the range of harmony and melody is limited to the 
 tonic and fifth or dominant chords, and the effect produced is as rakishly 
 merry and " devil-may-carish " as ever drove "blues" away. When it is 
 used as an accompaniment to chorus singing and round-chain dancing 
 (khorbvdd)'\a. the silent moonlight in the middle of the broad village street, 
 the girls swaying gracefully from side to side, scarcely stirring their long be- 
 ribboned braids, and one solo voice launching into space on a high end-note 
 held out ad injinitum, then broken clean off without grading, the whole scene 
 has a weird, penetrating, poetic beauty that leaves an indelible impression.
 
 THE "NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 183 
 
 days of snow, it brings back to light the green earth which had 
 totally vanished ; it reopens the rivers, lakes, and gulfs, converted 
 by winter into sullen, dead surfaces ; breaks up the ice that fettered 
 them ; restores their color, murmuring, the mobility of dancing 
 waves; makes them over new, so to speak. It is a whole element the 
 entire liquid world, which April or March thus reawakens to life. 
 When nothing has fallen from the sky but snow, even the first 
 rains bring something of surprise and almost joy, not unlike the 
 pleasure experienced in Southern countries at the first drops of 
 rain after long weeks of heat and drought. And indeed the 
 children greet the rain and welcome it by traditional songs. 
 Together with the rivers and all the watery realm, leaves and 
 flowers come to life once more in forests and meadows, preceded 
 by the birds who had fled to softer climes and whose return is 
 kept daily track of in a naive popular calendar : to-day the lark, 
 to-morrow the swallow, of which a Russian legend will have that 
 it comes down from Paradise and brings warmth from thence. 
 Nature, in all her forms, appears alive and young in proportion to 
 her previous deep and death-like trance. 
 
 Man accepts this renewal of all things with a gladness that 
 would be inconceivable elsewhere. The peasants of the north, 
 in their popular songs, celebrate the departure of winter and 
 return of spring in simple poetic strain. From hill-top or house- 
 roof they greet his coming in the far distance, and sing to him as 
 early as March : " Come, O Spring, beautiful Spring, come with 
 joy, bring flax tall-grown and plenty of grain ! " In many parts 
 of the country they call on spring some time ahead, bidding it 
 hasten, with rites and incantations of heathen origin. In others 
 the festivities that celebrate the resurrection of nature mingle 
 with those held for the resurrection of Christ, as though the one 
 were the type or symbol of the other. The first day of May is a 
 people's holiday almost everywhere : thej- wander about the woods, 
 whence, like the dove of the Ark, they take home young tree- 
 sprouts as testifying to the return of verdure and the disappear-
 
 184 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 ance of winter. The sun and the tepid vernal breezes give a 
 delicious sensation, perfect in itself. The body, freed from its 
 heavy wrappings, feels lighter as well as younger.' 
 
 The Russian spring is brief. From the nastiness of the thaw 
 it quickly passes into midsummer heat ; but this very shortness 
 enhances its effectiveness. There is something wonderful in the 
 sudden outbreak of vegetation which bursts into life all on a 
 sudden. The eye all but follows its unfolding day by day, and 
 the laborer's gladness is more intense as he watches the grain, 
 which he has just laid in the ground, sprout, rise, color, and 
 ripen all in six weeks. In the north the rapid growth of the days 
 rivals that of the plants. In proportion as the interval is greater 
 from the long winter nights to the long summer days, the days 
 lengthen by a more notable piece in each twenty-four hours. 
 Thus everything combines earth and water, plants and light 
 to make more intense the impression of universal renovation. 
 
 * The glad feeling of deliverance, of revival, forcibly strikes the poetic 
 vein which is never far away from the people's heart, and sometimes finds a 
 vent in the quaintest bits of word-painting. One morning in early spring I 
 asked my maid who had just been out on an errand what kind of weather 
 it was. " Beautiful," she answered, her eyes still dancing with the exhilara- 
 tion of exercise in mild unaggressive air ; "there is a wind, but it is so 
 warm when it blows against you, it wraps you round as with a fur robe." 
 I knew a grand, venerable old man, of mighty build and majestic simplicity 
 of mind and manner. There was something heroic, epic about him. He 
 had been born a serf, but manumitted by a wise master in time to make some- 
 thing of his life, and was now consciously enjoying the last years of it in 
 wealth and comfort, the father of many sons who all had made their mark 
 in science, art, or the service of the State. He was so near the end that even 
 Solon might, after some demurring, have pronounced him a happy man. 
 There never was a spring, since he began to consider each added year as one 
 of grace, that he missed walking to the mighty granite embankment of the 
 Neva, and as he gazed on the great floes of Ladoga ice drifting and dancing 
 down the current, jostling and crunching one another with the cool slushy 
 sound of melting cracked ice in motion, under the turquoise blue of the 
 cloud-flecked sky and on the deeper blue of the boisterous river, he bared his 
 head and, crossing himself with the broad gesture of the Russian peasant 
 at prayer, spoke aloud : "I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast vouchsafed 
 to let Thy servant behold Thy spring once more ! "
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 8$ 
 
 The old-time Russians did not count this fleeting spring as a 
 season ; they acknowledged only three : autumn, winter, and 
 summer. Summer, with some of the inconveniences it entails on 
 .southern countries, such as heat at times oppressive dust, and 
 often drought, brings also some of the southern loveliness: the 
 beauty of sky and atmosphere, the mildness of the air, the trans- 
 lucent haziness of the horizon, the coolness of shade and waters, 
 the delicious freshness of earliest morning and of the last hours 
 of eve. In the northern half of the empire, summer has pictures 
 exclusively its own, which fancy could not conjure without having 
 enjoyed them in reality. The nights of the southern summer, 
 with their soft temperature and their diaphanous sky, are beauti- 
 ful ; but those of the north are no less so, and surprise you more. 
 No brush could render the delicacy of their tints, the fineness of 
 their gradations. On those nights on which the sun scarce dips 
 below the horizon, the lively colors of a spring sunset are suc- 
 ceeded by opalescent and pearly tints which might belong to 
 another planet. The light, in paling, assumes a semblance 
 almost ethereal. It is neither night nor day, neither dawn nor 
 twilight or rather it is both. As we near the Polar Circle, sun- 
 set and dawn follow each other more nearly, in both space and 
 time. Towards midnight, the pallor of the one and the blush of 
 the other are very close together at both ends of the north, light- 
 ing up the heavens simultaneously, as though mutually reflecting 
 each other. 
 
 Under the 6oth degree the latitude of St. Petersburgh there 
 is already no night at the end of June, although not until we 
 reach the 66th degree, just above Arkhangelsk, do we actually see 
 the sun on the horizon at midnight. These weird nights, so 
 soothing to the eye and imagination, have in them something 
 exciting to the nerves ; they seem to repudiate sleep. Therefore, 
 in order to better enjoy the long evenings, many Russians take 
 a siesta in the daytime, as do all southern peoples. There is 
 in this continuous daylight a subtle stimulant which renders it
 
 1 86 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 quickly wearisome to foreigners and makes them wish for the 
 return of normal nights. They do return soon, and begin to in- 
 crease just as fast as they had decreased. Already in the numer- 
 ous and wholly pagan rites that celebrate the summer solstice on 
 St. John's Eve, through the joyful songs in praise of the sun, 
 arrived at the zenith of his ascent, some sad strains are heard, 
 mourning beforehand his rapid descent towards winter. 
 
 With the lengthening nights autumn returns, the least con- 
 spicuous and least original of Russian seasons, but not the least 
 beautiful. The forests don those hues, warm and varied, whose 
 richness summer cannot match. The frequent atmospheric 
 changes lend to the sky tones of a sombre and fitful beauty, and, 
 on the boughs in the woods, or on the grass of the steppes, the first 
 morning frosts descend, shedding over the scenery charms scarcely 
 familiar to any eye but that of the early huntsman. Moreover, 
 there is in this decadence of light and vegetation a feeling of sad- 
 ness, a poetic vein of mild melancholy, which suits well with this 
 northern nature. Autumn always lasts a long time ; the days 
 shorten ; the leaves fall ; the birds depart on their migration, 
 species by- species, the cuckoo, the most sensitive to cold, some- 
 times starts as early as the end of July ; the rains come, then 
 snow ; but winter, the genuine Russian winter, does not arrive 
 until the earth lies enfolded in the heavy shroud which spring 
 alone will lift. 
 
 All these vicissitudes of the seasons are strongly felt by the 
 Russians, and nobody has rendered them more beautifully by 
 word and brush. Not a shading of that pallid nature, not a gleam 
 of light or color in the sky, not a deepening shadow on the face 
 of the earth, has escaped their eye, not a murmur their ear. " By 
 nothing but the motion of the leaves, I could, with closed eyes, 
 tell the season or the month of the year," says one of their writers, 
 somewhere.* They have lovingly depicted this land of theirs, 
 
 * Ivan Turgue'nief, the greatest word-painter amidst the great Russian 
 novelists.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 187 
 
 which, in the long run, does assume a penetrating charm for any- 
 body that has once felt it, like a face the beauty of which lies in 
 the expression. Their painters have portrayed it in those alterna- 
 tions of the seasons which, at few months' interval, offer to their 
 brush different worlds. Hence the twofold talent which often 
 strikes one in their pictures, the feeling of color and that of 
 shading, the comprehension of great lines and large masses, and 
 that of detail and accessories. It is because in these vast plains, 
 usually devoid of successive plans, there is not much of a medium 
 between the general effects and the isolated ones, between the 
 long-stretched forest and a clump of trees, between the boundless 
 steppe and a bunch of shrub. As immensity draws the eye till it 
 loses itself in the horizon, so every slightly conspicuous detail irre- 
 sistibly attracts attention in the end. Nothing could render the 
 grandeur of a sunset in the southern steppes, say between the 
 Azof and Caspian Seas. At the same time, on these level plains, 
 as on an empty stage, every human figure, every object, stands out 
 with singular vigor on the uniform immensity ; a tree, a hut, a 
 man, a horse, assume an unusual importance, and almost appear 
 larger than nature in size. It is thus, to make use of a homely 
 simile, that the Russians have a rare facility to contemplate nature 
 through both ends of their spy-glass, to see it by turns as a near- 
 sighted person sees it or a far-sighted one. With this faculty 
 they possess the gift of accuracy, of hitting the right expression. 
 Things appear to them precise and lifelike a gift which they 
 derive from that same nature whose forms and colors impress 
 themselves by perpetual iteration or are brought into relief by 
 their isolation. 
 
 The influence of these vicissitudes of seasons makes itself felt 
 especially in the temperament and the character of the nation. 
 To them the Russian owes the flexibility, the elasticity of organs 
 which have been fashioned by the alternations of winter and 
 summer, so as to adapt themselves to any climate ; to them 
 he is indebted for his intellectual plasticity, the ease with which
 
 188 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 he passes from one idea to another, a faculty which matches the 
 former, and makes moral as easy as physical acclimatization 
 wherever he may be. 
 
 To these oppositions of climate I am tempted to ascribe also 
 whatever at times appears in the Russians ill-regulated, exagger- 
 ated, disorderly, unbalanced. They are frequently accused of 
 want of originality. Now we should arrive at an understanding 
 as to what is meant by that word, that rebuke. If they lack 
 originality in intellect, in ideas, on the other hand they have a 
 great deal of it in character, mind, and expression. Russian 
 poetry, novels, music, often show remarkable originality. What, 
 perhaps, the Russians are wanting in or, more correctly, what 
 time and education have prevented their showing, as yet, as much 
 as some other nations is the genius of invention. Far from 
 being generally deficient in individuality, the Russian often 
 abounds in it in feelings, taste, and habits. He is frequently 
 original, in the new and commonly accepted sense of the word, 
 in tastes and manners. This originality, indeed, often degenerates 
 into peculiarities, eccentricities, nay, into insanity. Ivan the Ter- 
 rible, Peter the Great, Paul I. , are appalling instances in point. 
 If, among sovereigns, this defect should be laid to the account of 
 personal temperament or of that unwholesome effect of absolute 
 power which, among the Roman Caesars has produced so many 
 monstrosities, signs of the same disposition can be traced far 
 below the level of the throne. It would be an easy task to report 
 many a trait of Russian originality, and in the course of over two 
 centuries more than one nobleman in Petersburgh or Moscow, 
 besides Suv6rof or Rostoptchin, has made for himself a European 
 reputation in this line. Eccentricity and singularity, in fact, are, 
 on the whole, less rare in northern countries than in southern 
 ones, in England and the United States than in Italy or Spain. 
 In the Russia of the times of serfdom, moreover, eccentricity could 
 also be bred of the accumulation of riches in few hands, of the 
 inordinate license affected by the owners of vast wealth, to whom
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 189 
 
 the habit of indulging every whim and wish was like another 
 kind of absolute royalty, who became as quickly satiated and 
 blast, and, to force some new sensation, exhausted the round of 
 fancies. 
 
 In Russia the absence of political life, the frequently enforced 
 idleness of talent, have fora long time done their work of warping 
 the most active faculties. Even in the low classes the weight of 
 want and bondage has not always suppressed eccentricity ; only it 
 assumes a religious disguise. It were a vain attempt to try and 
 catalogue all the singular sects with which the dregs of Russian 
 society teem, for there is no extravagance too great to attract 
 adepts. In spite of appearances, such abnormal or inordinate 
 propensities, in religion or daily life, are not irreconcilable with 
 a practical turn of mind or realistic common-sense in a nation any 
 more than in an individual. The most positive, most matter-of- 
 fact people the American nation are a proof in point. 
 
 If the affinities between man and climate easily turn to fanciful- 
 ness, there is, between the Russian temperament and Russian 
 nature, as manifested in the opposition of the seasons, a likeness 
 not easily to be denied. Both are immoderate, both easily rush 
 from one extreme to another. Alternations of all kinds, changes 
 of moods, ideas, feelings, are always strongly marked ; a wide 
 margin is open to the oscillations of mind and heart ; the various 
 stages of life differ perhaps more than anywhere else. The 
 Russian soul easily passes from torpor to buoyancy, from meek- 
 ness to wrath, from submission to revolt ; in all things it appears 
 to naturally incline to extremes. By turns submissive and irrita- 
 ble, apathetic and impetuous, jovial and morose, indifferent and 
 passionate, the Russian, perhaps more than any other people, runs 
 all the gamut of cold and heat, of calm and tempest. The Russian 
 is prone to sudden infatuation, to unbridled whims, to impulses 
 and transports of passion for things either serious or futile an 
 opinion, a writer, a singer, a dancer, a fad of fashion. This dis- 
 position makes itself felt as well in public as in private, in national
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 as in individual life, all the more that it is indirectly favored 
 by the political rfgime, which, forbidding one day a thing 
 it tolerates the next, seems to encourage to-day what it will 
 proscribe to-morrow. 
 
 The individual, society, the government, seem equally inclined 
 to think, to will, to act by fits and starts, so that periods of fever, 
 energy, and confidence are closely followed by spells of flat calm, 
 of inertia, of languor, during which a feeling of despair, a lack of 
 interest in things in general, overcasts the soul. This accounts for 
 many of the contradictions and alternations of Russian life. In the 
 same persons or in the same sphere there is the strangest inter- 
 weaving and intertangling of doubt and conviction, of indifference 
 and enthusiasm, and initiative in ideas is often seen attended by 
 routine in action. 
 
 Being made like that, the Russian at times yields to infatua- 
 tion, to impulses at which he is the first to wonder. The Eastern 
 war of 1877-78 is a striking instance of this. Owing to the lack 
 of liberty and the want of interest in the political life at home ; 
 owing also to the urging of a press which enjoys getting excited 
 about something with impunity, and, lastly, to the need of emotion 
 vaguely felt by a public disgusted with the emptiness of daily life 
 and made hungry by a system of dieting and fasting, a sceptical 
 and chaffing society, lately almost indifferent to the sufferings of 
 the Balkan Slavs, becomes in the course of a few months fired with 
 an ardent and irresistible enthusiasm for the Serbs and Bulgars. 
 In the face of the reluctance manifested by the sovereign and 
 ministers, in spite of the bantering incredulity expressed in the 
 drawing-rooms of Petersburgh, Russia, stirred up from high to 
 low, starts on a sort of crusade, and wages a great national war in 
 which no one would have believed two or three years before, a 
 war which, the suspicious attitude of the West notwithstanding, 
 was decided on not so much out of political calculations as from 
 a sudden explosion of feelings long suppressed and eager to 
 find a vent.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. IQI 
 
 This mobility, this impressionability, so often pointed out in 
 Slavs, especially Russians and Poles, this lack of balance, of 
 measure, so repeatedly deplored by the Russian writers them- 
 selves, show too great an affinity with a climate persistently given 
 to excesses not to be derived therefrom, at least in part. The 
 successive oppositions of nature in her various phases seem to 
 have stamped their impress on man. We should not wonder 
 therefore at the Russians exposing to view so many contrasts, or 
 our being continually forced into contradiction when we speak 
 of them. 
 
 In the Great- Russian, moreover, this changefulness is usually 
 moderated by practical sense, and, like a child, being but young 
 as a nation, he can correct it by training, age, and experience. 
 To look at it more closely, this defect may, after all, turn out to 
 be the obverse side of a quality, itself ascribable to climate 
 no less than to the Slavic trait of malleability. I mean that 
 facility of adaptation, that faculty of comprehension, which so 
 eminently distinguish the Russian, and for which Herzen coined 
 the word "receptivity." This imitative instinct, this innate 
 talent of assimilation, so striking in the cultivated Russian, has 
 sometimes been doubted when discussing the common people. 
 Yet we surely can trace it even in the latter in the technical 
 sphere, the only one ordinarily open to the peasant, in that versa- 
 tility which renders all work easy to him, and frequently enables 
 him to ply ten crafts at once ; lastly, in that suppleness of the 
 Russian soldier and the Cosack, so promptly ready to meet all 
 demands of either war or peace. Half hidden and as though 
 paralyzed in the lower classes by the monotony of their existence, 
 by habitual routine, attachment to ancient customs or half-oriental 
 prejudices, this quality takes its free development in the higher 
 classes, among the Russians who have shaken themselves free of 
 popular prejudice ; there it unfolds itself in all spheres at once 
 in ideas, manners, customs, literature, even language. In this 
 respect, as in a great many others, the Russian is the exact
 
 192 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 opposite of the Englishman. The suppleness of his intellect 
 appears to be unlimited, and the ease with which he appropriates 
 may have been an obstacle to the spontaneous development of 
 national originality. 
 
 With its inconveniences and its advantages, this flexibility 
 remains one of the most marked features of the Russian nature. 
 Were it not that it always is a somewhat arbitrary proceeding to 
 establish a hierarchy among simultaneous faculties and intercon- 
 nected moral leanings, one might say that this is the Russian's 
 pre-eminent faculty. It shows in every part of him, in his intel- 
 lect as much as in his body and organs, all of which are tempered 
 and tested by those trying alternations of the seasons as by a sort 
 of gymnastics, to which nature, stern mother, subjects him every 
 year. Hence the success of the Great-Russian in colonizing the 
 vast plains of his continent, spreading northward and southward 
 with an almost equal facility of acclimatization under every or any 
 sky ; hence, in the course of the last two centuries, the surprises 
 given to aged and scornful Dame Europe by a people so long 
 considered as an alien in the European world, and rebellious 
 to its civilization ; hence, lastly, the difficulty for the observer 
 of discerning what is possible in Russia from what is not. 
 For this faculty of adaptation, confined until now to private 
 life, to external politeness, to arts and sciences, can any day 
 extend into novel spheres, such as government, institutions, 
 public liberties. 
 
 Should an historical type be asked for, a living type of this 
 Russian nature, which the weight of events has so long hindered 
 from blossoming out into great men, there is the Tsar Peter the 
 Great. All through his semi-barbarism, in his very excesses and 
 contradictions, with his foibles and infatuations, with his innovat- 
 ing recklessness and his practical good-sense, his scorn of obstacles 
 and his positive instinct, his wide open mind and his marvellously 
 cunning hand, his universal aptitude for all crafts and callings, 
 Piotr Alex6yevitch remains the national type/ar excellence. Few
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 93 
 
 of the national defects are lacking in the great reformer, and 
 many have reached in him the limits of the possible ; few of the 
 national qualities but come to light in him, and several have, in 
 him, risen to genius. The imperial carpenter of Zaandam may 
 seem to us of a harder and stronger temper than most of his 
 countrymen, but he is unmistakably wrought out of the same 
 metal. 4 In the great reformer, the two extremes of the nation, 
 the two Russians, so different even yet, that the one does not 
 always appear to be evolved from the other, the mujik and the 
 cultured nobleman, the former with his stolid, massive stubborn- 
 ness, the latter with his alert and mobile suppleness, seem com- 
 bined and merged together, as though to correct and complete one 
 another. Peter has shown that Russian flexibility need take 
 nothing from energy, that Slavic ductility can abide together with 
 solidity. 
 
 If one is astonished at finding, in one people, so many traits of 
 character different or even opposite, one can, in the person of 
 Peter the Great, behold them all united and centred in one man. 
 This converging, in one individual, of so many qualities and defects, 
 so many features scattered through a nation, has shaped a queer 
 and well-nigh monstrous man, but, at the same time, one of the 
 most mighty, most enterprising, the best endowed for life and 
 action, whom the world has seen. No other nation can boast of 
 owning a great man in whom it can embody all itself, who, in his 
 very vices, stands out, a colossal incarnation of its genius. Peter, 
 the pupil and imitator of foreigners, Peter, who seemed to have 
 set himself the task of violently breaking his people's nature, and 
 who has been regarded by the old-time Moscovites as a sort of 
 Ante-Christ, Peter is the Russian, the Great-Russian par excel- 
 lence. Standing before his face, one may say that sovereign and 
 nation explain each other. A nation that resembles such a man 
 is sure of a great future. If it is apparently wanting in some of 
 
 4 Or he could not have succeeded, even with his force of will and sum- 
 mary methods. 
 
 13
 
 194 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 those highest or most refined qualities on which mankind prides 
 itself, it owns those which give power and political greatness.* * 
 
 * For personality, energy, consistency, qualities too often denied the 
 Russians, three men, vastly different, might be mentioned from among our 
 own contemporaries : N. Miliutin, G. SamaVin, and Prince V. Tcherkassky. 
 See Un Homme d'tat Russe, d'aprts sa Correspondance In&dite ("A 
 Russian Statesman, from his Unpublished Correspondence "). 
 
 6 This chapter is one of great beauty of an order of beauty one would 
 least have looked for from an historian and political writer. And the com- 
 prehension of the Russian nature, both human and physical, the insight 
 into the connection, the interdependence of both, must be a revelation to 
 foreign readers. Mr. Beaulieu has here said things that no one said before 
 him, because he has seen things that must remain a sealed book to any but 
 a poet's eye, sharpened by science and scholarship.
 
 BOOK III. CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Russian Character and Nihilism Origin and Nature of Nihilism Its 
 Three Successive Phases By What Sides it Belongs to the National Tem- 
 perament Combination of Realism and Mysticism In What Sense 
 Nihilism is a Sect Manner of Nihilistic Propaganda Radical Instincts 
 of the Russian Mind The Slav Woman and the " Woman Question " in 
 Russia. 
 
 BY its rigor and demands the Russian climate inclines man to 
 realism ; by the vastness and sameness of her plains, by her im- 
 mensity and poverty, nature predisposes him to mysticism and 
 melancholy. Therein lies the key to many of the contrasts with 
 which the Russian nature abounds. Of this conflict or this union 
 of tendencies often opposed to one another or apparently irrecon- 
 cilable, several illustrations might be found in the bulk of the 
 people themselves, in the ignorant sects of Great-Russia. We 
 will take instead as a specimen a phenomenon not less curious, 
 although less spontaneous, less thoroughly native. This is the 
 development called "nihilism," or, as the Russians pronounce it : 
 nighillsm. 1 
 
 Like nearly all the theoretical conceptions of the Russians, 
 "nihilism," in its principle, is simply an importation from the 
 West. It was from Europe and especially from German philosophy 
 that, under Nicolas, the first intellectual seeds came into Russia 
 of that spirit of negation and revolt which, in the land of autocracy, 
 
 1 The letter h is lacking in the Russian alphabet, and the letter does 
 duty for it in words of foreign extraction. The I/ittle-Russians sound it with 
 a strong guttural aspiration, which makes a sort of compromise between the 
 two. Concerning the pronunciation of the i, see note 3, on p. 18. 
 
 195
 
 196 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 under the shades of a secular absolutism, found a soil more apt 
 than their own original native sod. It was from the latest sons of 
 Kant and the revolutionary children of the peaceable and conserva- 
 tive Hegel, from the most extreme representatives of the Hegelian 
 Left, that the first ancestors or first apostles of Russian nihilism 
 drew their inspirations, if not their theories. In all that regards 
 ideas and views, negations and dreams, nihilism is nothing but a 
 corrupted extract from French philosophy, criticism, and socialistic 
 schools. The interest and originality of Russian radicalism are 
 not there to be found, not in speculations and abstractions un- 
 familiar to most young adepts of contemporary nihilism. What 
 the latter holds of truly original, it owes to Russia's political and 
 to her economic situation, to social and religious status, and above 
 all to the national temperament. 
 
 At bottom, nihilism is simply the Russian form of the negative 
 and revolutionary spirit of the age. Far from being an affection 
 peculiar to Russia, it is a moral epidemic of which the germ has 
 been imported, and with which all Europe, nay, the whole civil- 
 ized world is more or less affected ; only the symptoms and the 
 consequences of the disease vary with each people, according to 
 the patient's age, constitution, and habits. If, in the low plains 
 of the Neva or the Volga, the attacks of this revolutionary fever, 
 nowadays, become endemic, offer peculiar symptoms, that is due 
 to the people's idiosyncrasies and also to their diet. 
 
 Nihilism, which has made so much noise from 1878 to 1883, is 
 not exactly a novelty. It can register, even under this uncouth 
 name, a long existence, for it is not necessarily associated with 
 revolutionary conspiracies or with political crimes. It is anterior 
 to all such attempts, and may survive them or again become, as 
 formerly, a stranger to them.* 
 
 * Among the conspirators, many and not unfrequently the most enter- 
 prising are of Jewish extraction. This gave occasion to certain Russian 
 papers, happy to find an alien scapegoat, to assert that all the trouble came 
 from abroad and from the Jews. This should not be taken seriously.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 97 
 
 Few designations have lent themselves to more misunderstand- 
 ings than this term "nihilism," which, in reality, is only a witty 
 nickname, disowned by the greater part of those to whom it is 
 applied.* As often happens with such misnomers, the word has 
 changed meaning three or four times, or rather, this contempt- 
 uous surname has been successively applied to different doctrines 
 or tendencies, naturally, however, connected with one another by a 
 more or less direct filiation. Three phases are distinguishable, or, 
 so to speak, three stages and metamorphoses. In its first acception, 
 " nihilism " was untinged with politics ; it was little more than a 
 certain way of bearing oneself, thinking, talking, a mannerism, 
 a fashion, one might say a pretence and attitude, that came into 
 favor among the young people of 1860 to 1870, among the students 
 at the universities, and the girl-students with cropped hair re- 
 siding abroad or in the provinces. This designation was pointed 
 at a spirit of revolt against received ideas and social convention- 
 alities, against all traditional authorities and antiquated religious 
 or political dogmas, a spirit of negation, stamped with an intolerant 
 materialism and naive radicalism ; nothing more, at bottom, than 
 a violent reaction of the Russian soul against the system of govern- 
 ment and the intellectual yoke under which it had long been 
 bent. This was the first and, properly speaking, the true nihilism, 
 the nihilism which has been depicted in immortal strokes by 
 the most famous Russian novelists, the nihilism of which Tur- 
 
 Nihilism is a genuinely Russian thing, although there are numbers of 
 nihilists outside of Russia. As to the Israelites, it might be said that there 
 exists a kind of Jewish nihilism -which naturally amalgamates with the 
 Slavic nihilism. The inferior situation, created for the numerous Jews of 
 Russia by laws or custom, has, moreover, much to do with their readiness 
 to take part in plots. See Vol. III., Book IV., Ch. III. 
 
 * The name is taken from a novel by Ivan Turgue"nief, Fathers and Sons, 
 where, about 1860, the first generation of " nihilists " was taken off. The 
 Russian revolutionists usually style themselves "socialist-democrats," or 
 simply "propagandists." Their various factions are mostly named after 
 the clandestine periodicals which they issue as their organs. (See Vol. IL, 
 Book V., Ch. III.)
 
 198 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 gue'nief 's Bazarof and Pissemsky's Helen will remain undying 
 presentations.* 
 
 After this theoretical and abstract nihilism, frequently dabbled 
 in by amateurs, at times all made up of posing and outward show, 
 and which did not attempt to carry out its maxims except in 
 individual life and private relations, came, about 1871, under the 
 twofold influence of the Paris Commune and the International, 
 a nihilism all action and agitation, transformed into a militant 
 socialism, which strove to spread its ideas among the people, a 
 nihilism already given to politics and revolution, having recourse 
 to association and secret propaganda, though not to plots and 
 murder. It is only after several years of disappointment and 
 bitterness, towards 1877-78, that this peaceably preaching nihilism, 
 transformed into a violent party seeking redress from conspiracies 
 and assassinations, takes for its weapon dynamite and for its 
 watchword terror, f Under the threefold aspect of speculative 
 radicalism, socialistic apostolate, revolutionary terrorism, "nihil- 
 ism ' ' has shed on the Russian temperament a totally novel light. 
 It has laid bare before the world a power of logic as to intellect, 
 a force of will as to character, a capacity for passion, for fanaticism, 
 stubbornness, and self-devotion, which might be matched among 
 popular sects, but which, as found in civilized Russians, have been 
 to Europe a veritable revelation. 
 
 However nihilism may reach out from afar towards Western 
 metaphysics, it never was a system after the manner of Schopen- 
 hauer's pessimism or Auguste Comte's positivism ; it is not a new 
 form of old scepticism or old naturalism. In its philosophy it is 
 little more than a coarse and boisterous materialism, almost devoid 
 
 * Bazarof, the medical student, the hero of Fathers and Sons ; Helen 
 Jigllnsky, the heroine of Pissemsky's novel, which has been translated 
 into French, under the title of Dans le Tourbillon (In the Whirlpool), 
 Charpentier, 1882. 
 
 t What caused this abrupt evolution of socialism into terrorism will 
 be made clear in Vol. II., Book VI., Ch. II. , where we shall study the form- 
 ation and organization of the revolutionary party.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 199 
 
 of any scientific apparatus. In its politics it is a socialistic radi- 
 calism, fomented by bureaucratic despotism and exasperated by 
 the capricious severities of an irresponsible power. It is not a 
 party, for under its banner march revolutionists of all kinds 
 authoritarians, terrorists, federalists, anarchists, mutualists, com- 
 munists who keep on terms of mutual understanding only by 
 putting off till the day of their triumph all discussion on future 
 organization.* 
 
 In the midst of all its exaggerations, through its successive 
 phases, nihilism has been little else than the pupil of the revolution- 
 ists of the west, a pupil, indeed, who flatters himself that he will 
 outdo his masters, and who magnifies at will their boldest teach- 
 ings. Russian radicalism can, it is true, claim one national theo- 
 retician, who, for talent, character, or influence, does not remain 
 behind any one of his rivals and co-religionists of the west. This 
 legislator of Utopia-land is neither Herzen nor Bakunin, neither 
 of those exiles, agitators, so long friends and associates, yet so 
 profoundly different in genius and sentiment that, in spite of their 
 common aspirations, they could fitly represent each one of the 
 fares of the national radicalism, or, more correctly, of the Russian 
 spirit itself. f It is not Herzen, the paradoxical and fascinating 
 writer, the great railer and great dreamer, whose eloquence is so 
 warm and highly colored that his true home might be the land 
 of the sun ; Herzen the poet and minstrel of negation, ever 
 
 * Under the influence of Bakunin and the Internationale the greater part 
 of Russian revolutionists appear to have adopted for their formula the fede- 
 ration of productive independent communes, suggested to them by their own 
 communal organization. (See further in Book VIII.) In 1874, after the 
 foundation of the paper Vperidd (Go Ahead), by L,avr6f, discussions having 
 arisen within the " emigration " on the manner of preparing the revolution, 
 the most ardent ones declared with Tkatchof that, instead of taking thought 
 for future organization, "the action party " should keep in view only the 
 work of destruction. This advice became a rule with the immense majority 
 of nihilists. 
 
 fl had better recall to the reader's mind that Herzen died at Nice in 
 1869, and Bakunin at Bern in 1878.
 
 2OO THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 romantic and idealist in spite of himself, sceptical and sad at 
 bottom, driven into revolutionism by his sympathies, by the crav- 
 ing for hope and faith ; a heart open to all the passions as to every 
 noble feeling ; a mind accessible until the end to all ideas and even 
 to the rough teachings of experience. Nor is it Bakunin, the 
 narrow, incorrigible sectarian, the logician, colder and harder than 
 the ice of his native land, systematic as a geometrician, declam- 
 atory as a rhetorician, the fanatic of negation, the maniac with 
 mind shut tight against all that is foreign to his craze, impervious 
 to doubt, to discouragement, to all the teachings and deceptions 
 of life. 
 
 Herzen, by the amplitude of his intellect, which, undisciplined, 
 was ever in search of new things, by the breadth and winged flight 
 of his imagination, which would carry him beyond his own system, 
 strangely overlapped the scant frame of doctrinal nihilism ; he was 
 less its lawgiver than its involuntary, free harbinger. With all his 
 weaknesses and generous rushes, with his spells of unrealizable 
 hopes and his numerous lapses into hopelessness, with his 
 disappointment in revolution as well as in civilization, with 
 all the inconsistencies and contradictions of his mind and 
 of his life, Herzen, a sort of revolutionary Faust, remains one 
 of the most living types of the modern Russian, thrown off his 
 bearings by a civilization from which he demands more than it 
 has to give. 
 
 Bakunin, on the other hand, ' ' the apostle of destruction, ' ' the 
 prophet of anarchy and amorphism, or social formlessness, the 
 involuntary disintegrator of the Internationale, and the founder of 
 the bootless Alliance Universelle, Bakunin, the cosmopolitan con- 
 spirator, the man of deeds, more mighty by his word and personal 
 magnetism than by the pen and written exhortation, has, not- 
 withstanding his relations with Nietchdyef and the conspirators of 
 the north, had more influence, perhaps, abroad, over the working- 
 men of Switzerland, Spain, Italy, than in his own country, more 
 power over professional conspirators than over the young people
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 2OI 
 
 at school.* All through his long career, animated by a single idea, 
 and that a barren one, he was not so much the theoretician or 
 codifier of the national nihilism, of which he had appointed himself 
 the peddler in the west, as its living impersonation, and, we might 
 say, its blind and sterile incarnation. 
 
 The chief master and inspirer of nihilism was not, like Herzen 
 and Bakunin, an aristocrat brought up in the drawing-rooms of 
 Petersburgh and Moscow, and whose existence was passed in 
 great part abroad. He was a child of the people, the son of a country 
 priest, who never stepped off the Russian soil and never spoke in 
 favor of the West ; who, instead of preaching ' ' from the other 
 side," i. e. from I^ondon or from Paris, wrote in Petersburgh, 
 under the censors' eyes. This man, who during his brief apostolic 
 career, from 1855 to 1864, had over young people an influence 
 which his sufferings served to increase, this man was Tcherny- 
 shefsky. This Russian Proudhon or Ivassalle, sentenced to hard 
 labor for revolutionary propaganda, lived twenty years in Siberia, 
 of which seven in the mines. Then he aged in solitude and in- 
 action, having been sent to reside at one of the uttermost stations 
 nearest the polar circle, far removed from all intercourse with 
 Europe and the outer world, f Well informed as a writer and 
 unwearying as a worker, his weapon at one time a redoubtable 
 logic, at another a biting irony, gifted with an intellect both vig- 
 orous and supple, an energetic and all-of-one-piece character, in 
 so far like the rest that he too mixed the intoxicating fumes of 
 sentimental idealism with the crudities of realism, Tchernysh^f- 
 sky, by his faults not less than by his qualities, is and remains a 
 
 * Nietchayef was a man of intrigue, who, under Bakuniu's inspiration, but 
 in view of personal advantages, had organized in Russia a revolutionary 
 society. He was arrested in Switzerland and tried in Petersburgh in 1871, 
 for the assassination of one of his accomplices, from whom he dreaded 
 betrayal, and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labor. 
 
 f In 1889 the papers announced his death at Sara"tof, in the southeast of 
 Russia, whither he had been transferred at his urgent request. He had 
 resided in Siberia until 1883, teen had been confined within the city of 
 Astrakhan.
 
 202 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 representative Russian. Philosopher, economist, critic, novelist, 
 and everywhere the propagator of the cheerless doctrines of which 
 he was the first victim, Tchernyshefsky, in his scientific treatises, 
 has given the theory or summing up of Russian radicalism. In a 
 queer and indigestible novel, written in the gloom of a prison, he 
 has given its poetry and its gospel.* 
 
 We shall hardly be wronging Tchernyshefsky if we ascribe to 
 his long and tedious novel more ascendancy over youthful Russian 
 heads than his didactical treatises ever achieved. This man, whose 
 influence had dethroned that of Herzen, and whom Siberia and 
 long sufferings had circled with the martyr's halo, was regarded by 
 many of his countrymen as one of the giants of modern thought, 
 one of the great pioneers of the future, as a Russian Fourrier, or, 
 better still, Karl Marx.f In spite of all the admiring homage of 
 which he was the object, notwithstanding the sterling originality of 
 his mind, his ideas have nothing very original about them, either 
 in political economy or philosophy. The form and the details may 
 be novel and marked with individuality, but the substance of 
 his theories takes us to Germany, England, France." What gives to 
 
 * Tchernyshefsky opened fire, about 1855, by a treatise on naturalistic 
 esthetics, his subject being The Relations between Art and Reality. A 
 little later, in an essay entitled The Anthropological Principle in Phi- 
 losophy, he expounded a system of transformistic materialism, defended 
 the unity of principle in nature and in man, and reduced ethics to pleasure 
 or utility. In 1860 he published in the Sovremiennik (Contemporary}, 
 conducted by the poet Niekrdssof, a review of the Political Economy of 
 Stuart Mill, on wholly socialistic lines. This review was translated into 
 French under the title, Economic Politiquejugee par la Science ; Critique des 
 Principes de Stuart Mill (Bruxelles, 1874). (Political Economy Judged 
 by Science ; a Criticism on the Principles of Stuart Mill.) Lastly, in 1863, 
 the Sovremiennik, which was soon after suppressed, published anonymously 
 his novel, What is to be Done? It was written in prison, in Petersburgh. 
 
 f See, for instance, the introduction to a pamphlet entitled Unaddressed 
 Letters, a little book that was never finished, but was published in French, 
 1874, and also in Russian, in the same year, in the revolutionary review 
 Vperidd. 
 
 * Farther away and back too, as far as ancient India. Our theoreticians 
 fall into plagiarism continually, but most innocently, from simple ignorance, 
 since they deliberately throw the past overboard, under the name of " use-
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 203 
 
 Tchernyshefsky's works, leastwise to this novel, the most native 
 soil-flavor, is possibly that kind of mystic and visionary realism 
 which we find in so many nihilists. Moreover, however great 
 may have been the ascendant of Tchernyshefsky and a few other 
 writers of that ilk, nihilism is far from having followed in servile 
 fashion the masters it glorifies, it is more indebted to their 
 romantic fictions than to their scientific deductions. 
 
 From the psychological point of view, one might say that the 
 nihilism of Turguenief's and'Pissemsky's heroes is the outcome 
 of the union between the two opposite inclinations of the Russian 
 character that to the absolute and that to realism. From this 
 unnatural connubium was born that repulsive monster, one of the 
 sorriest births of modern thought. There again we encounter an 
 instance of that impatience under restraint of any sort, that reckless 
 boldness in speculation, which are frequently found among the 
 Russians, but which, with them, lay less claim to science and method 
 than among the Germans. From the moral and political stand- 
 points, nihilism was first of all a sort of pessimism, half instinctive 
 and half thought out, a form of pessimism not uninfluenced by 
 nature and climate, fostered and intensified by history and the 
 political order of things.* Seeing nothing around but evil, it longed 
 to demolish everything government, religion, society, family 
 in order to reconstruct, all in one block, a better world. Doc- 
 trinary nihilism, the oldest and most ordinary form, has never had 
 anything in common with the critical scepticism which compares 
 and analyzes, reserving its judgment and liberty. Being in sub- 
 less ballast " (not a felicitous simile, as no ship can go straight and steady 
 without ballast). So they keep every now and then stating what they fancy 
 to be novelties, in beautiful unconsciousness that they propound theories 
 that have been tried and exploded hundreds of years ago ; they are all the 
 time, in the pregnant Russian phrase, "discovering Americas." 
 
 * Herzen ( The Russian People and Socialism) wrote already about 1848, 
 long before nihilism had a name : " The real character of Russian thought 
 was developed in all its force under Nicolas. The distinctive feature of 
 that movement is a tragical emancipation of conscience, an implacable 
 negation, a bitter irony."
 
 2O4 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 stance a negation which affirms itself and admits of no inquiry, it 
 was from the very first a sort of dogmatism the wrong way, as 
 narrow, as blind as, and no less imperious, no less intolerant, than 
 the traditional creeds the yoke of which it throws off. 
 
 In the intemperateness and coarseness of their negation, flung 
 in the face of all that humanity holds it an honor to respect, 
 something could be felt in BazaroP s imitators of the boyish- 
 ness of incredulity when it is as yet a novelty, something of the 
 ill-regulated excesses of minds but recently set free. In these 
 pretensions to maturity, advanced by a youthful generation disil- 
 lusioned before having lived, something like depraved childish- 
 ness peeps through. For many adepts the nihilistic theories 
 were only a sort of protest against the old-time superstitions which 
 still sway the masses, against the political servility, the intellectual 
 hypocrisy, or conventional belief in dogmas which still prevail too 
 generally among the higher classes. 
 
 A nihilist of the first manner was asked in what his doctrine 
 consisted. "Take earth and heaven," he replied; "take State 
 and Church, kings and God, and spit on it all that is our 
 symbol." Were it the raillery of an adversary, this definition 
 still would be exact. The word, however, is less shocking to the 
 ears of Russians, for spitting plays a great part in their life and 
 superstitions. You spit to turn aside an evil omen ; you spit to 
 express wonder or contempt ; you spit everywhere and all the 
 time.f The nihilist took pleasure in spitting on everything ; he 
 delighted in challenging and defying the spirit of veneration and 
 humility so tenaciously rooted in the Russian ' ' of the people, ' ' who 
 
 t Turgue'nief somewhere tells that at Heidelberg, frequented at the time 
 by many Russian students who had been expelled from their own national 
 universities, there appeared, about 1865, a nihilist paper entitled On All 
 Comers I Spit. When a Russian means "I don't care a snap," he says 
 "I spit on it." 8 
 
 3 Spitting, in the Greek Church, is a form of exorcism. Thus at baptisms, 
 at the point of the service where the godfather and godmother, in the 
 infant's name, renounce Satan and his pomps, they emphasize the renuncia- 
 tion by thrice spitting at the Enemy over their shoulder.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 2O$ 
 
 even yet bends in twain before his superiors, as before the holy 
 eikons or images. Herein lies an indication of the profound dis- 
 cordance in thoughts and feelings under which the nation labours. 
 Morally and physically, in man and nature alike, the two extremes 
 meet : to the most naive veneration, political as well as religious, 
 corresponds the most barefaced cynicism, intellectual and moral. 
 
 The coarse and repulsive realism, so obtrusively apparent in 
 nihilism, so perceptible in the Russian schools, among the major- 
 ity of students, could not fail to attract the attention of enlightened 
 minds and the government. Against this unwholesome bent of 
 the young and of the national mind a remedy had to be sought for, 
 a counterpoise, primarily in the education of the young. Religion 
 could not be relied on overmuch, for in Russia it has but little 
 hold on the cultured classes, and orthodoxy is weakened rather 
 than strengthened by the compromising support of the govern- 
 ment and the imperfection of religious liberty, packing better 
 means, recourse was had to classical studies, but in vain. litera- 
 ture and the dead languages being the studies most disinterested, 
 most removed from actual preoccupations, were thought to be the 
 best corrective to the exaggerated naturalism of embryo Bazdrofs. 
 Under the influence of Katkof and his Moscow Gazette, the ministry 
 of public instruction, directed by Count Tolstoy, has been long at 
 work, striving to subject the entire young generation to this classi- 
 cal discipline, and, through that, to a sort of idealistic gymnastics 
 or drilling. The most singular thing about the business is that 
 the languages and literatures, now suddenly called in to the rescue 
 of society, had long been held " suspicious." Under the Emperor 
 Nicolas the Greek and I,atin classics had been denounced as 
 fostering the spirit of revolt. Demosthenes and Cicero, all the 
 republicans of Athens and Rome, were supposed to kindle revolu- 
 tionary sentiments. In point of fact, they have been undesirable 
 teachers of children destined to live and die under an autocratic 
 rule. If not exactly proscribed, instruction in ancient history 
 and literature had certainly been curtailed and lowered. In the
 
 2O6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 schools tolerated by Nicolas, precedence had been given to the 
 sciences, especially the natural sciences ; that meant pushing the 
 Russian mind down the very incline to which it was naturally 
 drawn. 
 
 By one of those abrupt changes so frequent in Russia, and 
 quite compatible with the nature of the government, there was, 
 under Alexander II. , a sudden return to the classics and antiquity. 
 It was announced as a discovery that the exclusive study of 
 physical and natural sciences must lead to positivism. To coun- 
 terbalance their realistic influence, the ancient literatures, treated 
 but lately with distrust, were summoned in. After having been 
 accounted the accomplices of revolution, Greek and I,atln became 
 the supporters of moral order. This restoration of classical studies 
 in a country which pretended to have no use for Greeks and 
 Romans, butted straight against the national inclinations which 
 it was expected to correct. Accordingly it was violently kicked 
 against by all the instincts, practical and positive, of the Great- 
 Russian, the more outraged at such a treatment, as the awkward- 
 ness and harshness of the hand that inflicted it made it more pain- 
 ful and irritating. Notwithstanding the efforts made by Count 
 Tolstoy, through fifteen years,* the study of antiquity could not 
 restrain the realistic and radical tendencies of the contemporary 
 young generation. As a protest against classicism, materialism 
 and, along with it, revolutionary nihilism have never stopped 
 increasing in the schools, irritated by petty restrictions and puerile 
 vexations, which hit the teachers almost as hard as the learners. 
 For, to prevail against such inclinations, indirectly encouraged by 
 the social and political order of things, it is not enough to change 
 
 * Count Tolstoy became the most unpopular of ministers, and had to 
 give up the portfolio of Public Instruction in 1880. In 1883 he was ap- 
 pointed Minister of the Interior, and died in 1889. Under Alexander III. 
 another abrupt change. After having done everything to attract students 
 to the classical universities and gymnasiums, regulations were issued in 
 1887, calculated to keep away from them young people not possessed of 
 large means or influential family connections.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 2O/ 
 
 the school curriculum and make over the programmes of lessons 
 and lectures. 
 
 Coarse negative materialism is not the whole of nihilism. 
 This Janus has another face still, very different, yet equally 
 Russian mysticism. These men, so scornful of all creeds, all 
 dreams, metaphysical or religious, themselves have speculations 
 and dreams of their own ; and not the most timid or best regulated 
 either. At the bottom of this naturalistic realism lurks a kind of 
 idealism, anxious to take its flight through all the unexplored 
 fields of possibilities. From out this pessimism, which curses the 
 actual social order, issues an unbridled optimism, which ingenu- 
 ously draws on the marvels of a Utopian future. In Russia, a 
 number of young people of both sexes, who would consider it the 
 most cutting of insults to be called idealists, and the depth of 
 humiliation to be held for such, do not hesitate, in matters the 
 least apt, it would seem, for such treatment, to give themselves 
 up to the most foolhardy dreams. It is in the domain of social 
 and economical theories, in the field of positive realities, that the 
 Russian, whether nihilist or not, loves best to indulge in the 
 fumes of Utopia and the search for the absolute. By entangling 
 himself too deeply in realism and utilitarianism, he falls back 
 into theories and chimeric vagaries, as though wandering in a 
 circle; it is when he has apparently strayed farthest that he 
 returns to abstract speculation, as a traveller, after getting to the 
 antipodes, might land on another part of the shore of the country 
 he had quitted. The sphere which demands most moderation 
 and intellectual sobriety is precisely that in which the Russian 
 and in that he does not stand alone leaves the widest scope 
 to his imagination. With a great difference in knowledge and 
 method, have we not seen something of the same wrong-headed 
 speculativeness among the most declared opponents of metaphysics 
 for instance, among certain positivists who, in economical and 
 political questions, have at times arrived at conclusions so little 
 in unison with their method and in reality so anything but posi-
 
 208 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS -AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 tive? This contradiction, which is quite habitual with the 
 majority of socialists or radicals, this sort of wheeling-round, 
 which, in the most negative schools is so easily accounted for by 
 an unconquerable craving for an ideal and for faith in a better 
 world, is nowhere less rare or more striking than among the 
 Russians. On this ground their natural turn of mind shows off, 
 with all its contrasts, its distrust and contempt for generally 
 received creeds, with its naive trust in doubtful positions and its 
 love of paradox. 
 
 Tocqueville has remarked that in our days the revolutionary 
 spirit acts after the manner of the religious spirit. This is more 
 true in contemporary Russia than anywhere else. For many 
 young people revolution has become a religion, of which the dog- 
 mas are as little to be discussed as a revealed ' ' creed," which has 
 its confessors and martyrs as well as its gods and idols. With 
 them negation has taken the aspect and character of a faith the 
 same enthusiastic fervor, the same sombre and contagious ex- 
 altation. From this point of view, the opinion of the ignorant 
 abroad, who used to take nihilism for a sect, is not as false as it 
 seemed at first sight. With its absolute spirit, intolerant of any 
 criticism, with its blind faith and passionate self-devotions, it is 
 indeed a sort of cult of which the god, deaf and unfeeling, is "the 
 people," worshipped in its abasement, a sort of church, kept 
 together by the bond of love to that misjudged deity, and whose 
 law is hatred to its persecutors. 
 
 These nihilists, detractors of all hope in the supernatural and 
 contemners of every kind of spiritualism, are themselves, after a 
 fashion of their own, believers and mystics. This can often be 
 perceived in their manner of speech, in their writings, although 
 most of them profess to despise poetry as babyish stuff. These 
 foes to all superstition and veneration, who, in the noblest self- 
 sacrifice pretend to see nothing but a reflex action or a refined 
 form of egotism, honor the heroes and heroines of their struggle 
 against might with a sort of poetical canonization. They celebrate
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 2<X) 
 
 the martyrs of their cause with a lyrism and a sort of piety which 
 seems addressed rather to saints enthroned in their shrines than 
 to modern conspirators.* 
 
 Read Tchernyshefsky's famous novel, What is to be Done f f 
 (S&tb DiGlatf), and you will be surprised at the singular medley 
 of mysticism and realism, of practical, wholly prosaic obser- 
 vations, and vague, visionary aspirations, all huddled together 
 hi this strange work of the radical doctrinarian. In this long, 
 slow story, which claims to depict for us the reformers of society 
 and the sages of the future, it is through symbols, in dreams, that 
 to the heroine are revealed her own destinies, together with those 
 of woman generally, and the human race. True, these sufficiently 
 transparent allegories may have been suggested to the author, 
 then already imprisoned, by the necessity of not arousing too much 
 the distrust of the censors' office. In the prisoner's novel, side 
 by side with this humanitarian mysticism, a sort of naturalistic 
 asceticism shows itself, which to foreigners appears more peculiar 
 still. His ideal revolutionist, the finished type of the "new 
 men, ' ' Rakhmietof, not only owns all the moral perfections of the 
 brotherhood and universal solidarity, but, like a Christian ancho- 
 rite, or a Hindoo yogee, takes delight in renouncing the joys of 
 life and the pleasures of the senses ; inflicts privations on himself, 
 hardships ; loves to mortify his flesh, so as to make himself like 
 his suffering deity the oppressed "people." When fruit was 
 
 * Take, for instance, the following translation of verses addressed to one 
 of the heroines of one of the great political trials, Lydia Figner, who had 
 studied medicine at Zurich and Paris: "Mighty, O maiden, is the impres- 
 sion produced by thy witching beauty ; but mightier than the. witchery of 
 thy countenance is the charm of thy soul's purity. . . . Full of pity is the 
 image of the Saviour, full of sadness are his divine features ; but in thy eye 
 of fathomless depth there is even more love, more pain still." Infanticide 
 Perpetrated by the Russian Government, Geneva, 1877. Compare the por- 
 traits of revolutionists given under the nont de plume Stepniak in Russia 
 Sotterranea (Underground Russia), a small volume published in Italian, in 
 Milan, 1882, with a preface by Lavrof. 
 
 f This novel has been translated, or rather epitomized, in bad French, 
 in an edition published in Milan in 1878.
 
 210 THE EM PIKE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIAN'S. 
 
 placed before him, he ate none but apples, because in Russia 
 apples are the only fruit "the people " can partake of. If he did 
 not wear a horse-hair shirt, this vindicator of the rights of the 
 flesh used, instead of sleeping in a bed, to lie on a felt rug all 
 studded with short nails, points upwards. 4 
 
 Men like Rakhmietof, doubtless, are rare outside of fictions. 
 Of Tchernyshefsky's admirers, only too many give themselves up 
 to the unbridled license authorized by their wretched doctrines. 
 This stoicism, this contempt of material delights, imperatively 
 demanded for others, does, however, show up sometimes in real 
 life. Among the innovators of either sex who profess and fre- 
 quently practise free love, I have known such as considered it 
 incumbent on their honor not to use for their own benefit the 
 rights which they. claimed.* This naturally is the case more often 
 with women, as they are always more given to inconsistencies, more 
 anxious to ennoble all sorts of aberrations. It is there, among 
 some of these votaresses of nihilism, these young girls who are 
 its most ardent proselytes and most courageous missionaries, that 
 one can best see how much generous feeling and unconscious 
 idealism can thrive under the mantle of this repulsive materialism. 
 
 4 This feat of asceticism, from its impossibility, has become proverbial, 
 an equivalent of the reductio ad absurdum of classical rhetoric. So that a 
 translator familiar only with the dictionary, in tackling very modern stories, 
 sketches, comedies, etc., might at any time be nonplussed by phrases like the 
 following, and not to be rendered in any other way : "Oh, come now, you 
 are talking yourself to nails " ; or : " We talked and talked for hours ; but 
 when they got to nails, I got up and left " ; or yet : "At this rate we shall 
 soon get to nails." 
 
 *Here is one of Rakhmitof's maxims: " Seeing we demand that all 
 men should be free to enjoy life in its entirety, we must prove, by our exam- 
 ple, that our object in making the demand is not the satisfaction of our own 
 personal passions, but the happiness of all." * 
 
 5 This identical plea was put forward against the Neo-Christian reformer, 
 Pre Hyacinthe, when he took to himself a wife, by his opponents and 
 even by not a few of his followers. While he claimed that it was his duty 
 to marry in order to enforce by his example his denunciations of clerical 
 celibacy with its inevitable consequence gross immorality, he was 
 accused of having made the point solely in order to justify in the world's 
 right his own self-indulgence.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 211 
 
 Among these women who preach the suppression of family life 
 and the free union of the sexes, among these maidens with the 
 close-cropped hair, who delight in mimicking the ways and tricks 
 of speech of the young men, it is by no means rare to discover 
 such, whose conduct, far from harmonizing with their cynical 
 principles, remains pure and blameless, in spite of all the ap- 
 pearances of a life of adventure and lawlessness, in spite of a 
 sort of moral promiscuity in which the best behaved appear to 
 find pleasure.* 
 
 Nihilism has its virgins. Many girl-conspirators of twenty, 
 exiled within the last few years, have carried into Siberia an im- 
 maculate virtue, the more meritorious that their doctrines do not 
 inculcate it. Stranger still, nihilism has had its mystical or pla- 
 tonical unions, its married couples that were not such in reality, 
 i. e. ostensibly married in the eyes of the world, but preferring to 
 live as though they were not. These unions went in the sect by 
 the name of ' ' fictitious marriages. ' ' Since the trial of Nietchdyef, 
 in 1871, few political trials failed to reveal some of these singular 
 unions. For many especially young girls it was a welcome 
 means of emancipation, which made it easy to carry on 
 political propaganda. The young girl, won over to the sacred 
 cause, was offered a husband, so she might enjoy the freedom of 
 a married woman. Sometimes it was the man who had catechised 
 and converted her, oftener an old friend, sometimes a stranger, 
 enlisted for the purpose. Solovibf, one of those who attempted 
 
 * In the university cities, students of both sexes were often known to 
 dwell side by side. Their several rooms were divided only by a thin parti- 
 tion, or a door, barricaded merely by a bed or wardrobe. "Young men," 
 says a man who has been established in Russia a long time, "look out for 
 furnished rooms where some are occupied by women-students, who do them 
 a hundred little services. It is not superfluous to mention that the greatest 
 morality reigns in these mixed colonies." Edm. de Molinari, Journal of the 
 Economists, ist of May, 1880. This frequent cohabitation, however, even 
 though unprejudicial to the morals, helped to increase the exaltation 
 of young people of both sexes, who mutually excited and, so to speak, 
 wound one another up.
 
 212 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the Emperor Alexander II. 's life, had contracted a marriage of 
 this sort. In reality the bride had espoused only the sect, her 
 slender dowry went into the common till, and the couple separated 
 frequently on the very day of their wedding, to go their different 
 ways, "to make propaganda" at some distant spot. That is 
 what Solovi6f had done, and when he and his wife left the 
 province for Petersburgh, they took separate lodgings. To 
 some this "fictitious marriage" was an association, a sort of co- 
 operation between two comrades. Others regarded it as a fine 
 chance to show their contempt for an institution blessed by the 
 Church and sanctioned by the State, a way of placing themselves 
 above society while pretending to obey its laws. The husband 
 took no advantage of the rights awarded him by religion and 
 law ; the wife preserved her liberty while legally bound. After 
 thus practically sneering at regular unions and denying herself 
 to her husband, she could, with his consent, go and practise free 
 love. For some few, again, "fictitious marriage " became a sort 
 of novitiate or test stage, which, after a few months' or years' 
 trial, made room for a more natural union. Thus it is that, in 
 TchernysheTsky's novel, Ve"ra and Lapukh6f live together at first 
 as brother and sister ; they occupy under the same roof two sepa- 
 rate apartments, divided by a neutral ground, until one day they 
 move into a common chamber, when the husband finds out that 
 a mutual attachment has sprung up between his wife and one of 
 his friends, and discreetly disappears, in order not to place them 
 in an awkward position, or cause them to feel any scruple, mean- 
 ing to return under another name, at the end of a few years, and 
 witness in good comradeship the happiness of the new couple. 
 
 It was in the manner of carrying on the nihilistic propaganda, 
 during its period of secret socialistic preaching, that the faith, 
 enthusiasm, and religious devotion of the adepts shone forth most 
 brightly, and that not only in the recklessness of their attempts, 
 or in the doggedness with which they braved deportation and 
 death. Such pathetic courage before judge and hangman other
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 213 
 
 sectarians, revolutionists of other countries, have often shown as 
 well ; there is no folly however perverse but has had its believers 
 and martyrs. The power of exaltation characteristic of the Slavic 
 soul only manifests itself here in a more singular manner. What is 
 peculiar to contemporary Russian nihilism is its way of appealing 
 to the masses ; " going forth among the people " (itti v-narbd) 
 is the consecrated phrase. In order better to understand the 
 people whom they wish to indoctrinate, to make themselves better 
 understood by them, they go forth and mix with them, strive to 
 assimilate with them, to live their own life of privation and man- 
 ual labor, discarding the prej udices and habits of their bringing up. 
 In this the missionaries of nihilism apparently propose to imitate 
 the first apostles of Christianity. What other country has seen 
 young men of good family, university students, cast off the garb 
 and habits of their class, put away books and pen, to labor like 
 workmen in factories, so as to be in a position enabling them 
 better to understand ' ' the people ' ' and initiate them to their own 
 doctrines ? * In what other country do we see young ladies, well- 
 bred and well-informed, on their return from foreign countries, 
 rejoice at having obtained the position of cook in the family of a 
 superintendent, so as to get nearer to " the people " and personally 
 study the labor question ? f 
 
 In Russia, where manners, ideas, even clothes, place a greater 
 distance between the different classes, this sort of disfranchise- 
 ment must assuredly be more painfully felt than anywhere else. 
 In this manner of ' ' making propaganda, ' ' getting into direct 
 contact with the people, do we not recognize, through all its 
 attractions, the practical sense, the realistic turn of mind of the 
 
 * That is what, to quote one instance, Prince Titsianof and his accom- 
 plices did (trial of 1875) ; also Solovidf till 1878. Others learned trades and 
 opened workshops in various cities : a locksmith's shop at Tula, a carpen- 
 ter's at Moscow, a shoemaker's at Saratof, etc. 
 
 t Testimony of a young lady in the trial of Prince Titsianof (1877). The 
 trials of 1878-1882 have brought to light other facts of the same kind. 
 From such models Turgudnief drew the heroine in his novel, Virgin Soil.
 
 214 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Russian ? Instead of holding aloof and hovering in the misty 
 regions of theory, he descends to the laborer's level and the 
 peasant's, associates with him in the factory or the workshop, in 
 the school or the common dwelling.* With him practical sense 
 combines in quaintest guise with his speculative eccentricities ; 
 thus a sort of idealism is grafted on the most uncompromising 
 naturalism.* 
 
 Scarcely anything can be more heartrending to the observer 
 than this combination, among the young of both sexes, of qualities 
 and defects opposed to one another and almost equally extreme, 
 than this pledging to nefarious doctrines of the loftiest, most gen- 
 erous capabilities of the human heart. However that may be, 
 however repulsive in its principles and odious in its practical 
 attacks on life and property nihilism may show itself, it cannot be 
 denied that it reveals several of the finest qualities of the Russian 
 mind and character, and precisely those which foreigners are most 
 apt to deny. If it brings out into the glare of daylight some of 
 the most unlucky traits of the Russian temperament, its sinister 
 blaze illumines one of that temperament's noblest and least showy 
 phases. This people, so often accused of passiveness and intel- 
 lectual torpor, is shown to us capable of energy and initiative, of 
 sincere and active enthusiasm, capable of devotion to ideas. From 
 this point of view I will venture to say that this terrible phenome- 
 non does credit to the nation which suffers under it. In Russia 
 it is not, as elsewhere, want and ignorance, cupidity and ambition, 
 that are the most active leavens of the revolutionary spirit ; fre- 
 quently they are noble and lofty passions, feelings generous in 
 their very errors. The men who claim to be the apostles of human 
 
 * One of the means of propaganda revealed by the political trials is for 
 the adept to procure an appointment as village schoolmaster or communal 
 scribe. Solovidf had served in both capacities. Many agitators of both 
 sexes embraced, for the same reasons, the medical profession. 
 
 ' All this forcibly recalls the ground taken by Walter Besant in that 
 wonderful book of his, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, which is as much a 
 clarion-note and call to arms, though only spiritual, as Uncle Tom's Cabin.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 21$ 
 
 solidarity can, when called upon, share in the labors of the lowly 
 and in the sufferings of the poor. They are not unaware that, in 
 their country, a revolution is not as yet a career nor a game at 
 which ambition has all to win and nothing to risk. 
 
 The greater part of the nihilists, of those at least who figure 
 in the trials, are very young mere boys and girls. It is among 
 such that the revolutionary faith enrolls almost all its neophytes. 
 Among sentenced or arrested conspirators, men of thirty are 
 rare, few are over twenty-five, many are not of age. On the 
 other hand, nothing can be more common than to see young 
 people, inclined to every kind of visionary chimeras, become, at 
 the end of ten or fifteen years, practical men of the earth earthy, 
 of the world worldly, who deem it a good bargain to get rid of 
 principles in order to further their interests. Russia is not the 
 only country where such transformations are habitual, but in 
 Russia this contrast between the seasons of life youth and 
 maturity appear prompter and more marked than elsewhere. 
 Maybe, in matters concerning politics, the Russian, with his 
 practical sense, sooner becomes undeceived regarding revolutionary 
 vagaries, is more quickly struck with the disproportion between 
 the aim and the means of the agitators. Maybe, again, we have 
 here another trait of the national character, a new indication of its 
 propensity to fall from one extreme into the other. Anyhow, there 
 are few countries where parents and children have so much diffi- 
 culty in understanding one another. In this respect the pictures 
 drawn by Turguenief in his Fathers and Sons are in great part 
 true even now. At the contact of real life, the practical and 
 positive instincts, as well as the egotistical, usually resume the 
 upper hand over revolutionary romance and utilitarian idealism, 
 until the latter are completely choked up or waved away into 
 the quietude of dreamland, where the most reckless theories do 
 not interfere with the most matter-of-fact prudence. Hence so 
 many young utopists swearing to demolish everything, and so 
 many mature men resignedly bearing everything ; hence, in
 
 216 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 I 
 
 one word, so many Russians with whom ideas do not interfere 
 with material interests, with whom the most daring radicalism 
 jogs along comfortably with the care of a fortune and the vulgar 
 anxieties about a career. True, such a moral collapse after the 
 sure excitation of several years is only too natural, no matter 
 where : has not France herself, after each of her revolutions, had 
 her hours of exhaustion and prostration. The phenomenon is, 
 nevertheless, to be noted in Russia. In the Russian soul dis- 
 couragement seems to follow ever close at the heels of enthusiasm, 
 dejection on exaltation. With whom lies the fault? with the 
 political rlgime or with the people's temperament ? Perchance 
 with both ! 
 
 With the Russians nihilism and radicalism are mostly a matter 
 of age ; it might be called a disease of childhood, and that would 
 be true, not only of individuals, but of the nation at large.* It is 
 owing to his intellectual and political youth, to his country's 
 political inexperience, that the Russian is so eager on so many 
 questions, in the pursuit of daring speculations, so scornful of 
 other people's experience, so confiding in the easy achievement 
 of a social regeneration. To this propensity is added a secret 
 feeling of conceit. Even while accepting the ideas of the West, 
 the Russian likes to magnify them, he takes pleasure in overdoing 
 things, and pride in overleaping the West, in revolutionary as 
 well as other matters. Being engaged in growing when the other 
 nations had long been grown up, compelled to be their pupil, and 
 
 * A humoristic writer with tendencies at once national and aristocratic, 
 Prince Mesh-tche'rsky, has given in a pamphlet, Exposing the Times, 1879, 
 a pathological explanation of nihilism, which, paradoxical though it be, is 
 not wholly devoid of truth. According to him it is a sort of neurosis, pro- 
 duced by anaemia caused by the lack of muscular exercise in the schools. 
 It were easy to generalize the observation, and to say that, aside from the 
 lack of equilibrium between the bodily exercises and those of the intellect, 
 bad hygienic conditions, the students' poor fare, and their being for the 
 most part badly lodged, and even poorly clad, all these things have much 
 to do with the morbid cerebral exaltation of so many young people of both 
 sexes. (See Vol. H., Book VI., Ch. II.)
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 2 \J 
 
 mortified at the necessity, he longs to get ahead of his masters in 
 all things. The new-comer is apt to think his elders timid and 
 backward. The Russian of whatever persuasion frequently feels 
 towards the West as young people do towards mature or elderly 
 men ; even while enjoying the West's ideas or lessons, he is 
 inclined to think of it as lagging behind, vows to go the whole 
 length of the roads and ideas that same West has opened before 
 him. " Between ourselves, to what amount your European 
 nations ? ' ' said to me, fully twenty years ago, one of the first 
 Russians I have known. ' ' Old fogies who have given all they had 
 to give. It would be unreasonable to expect anything more from 
 them. When our turn comes, we shall not have much difficulty 
 in beating them hollow." But when will their turn come ? Many 
 get tired waiting. Unfortunately this piece of national bragging 
 is far from always implying effort. Too many Russians await 
 their country's grand future as a thing that must come on its 
 appointed day, as a fruit ripening on the tree. Too many others, 
 scorning the possible, rail at the liberties of which the West offers 
 them the models, as insufficient, adopting the attitude of sceptics 
 and blasts ; while the most impatient, fancying that they can 
 revolutionize the country with one wave of their magic wand, 
 do not scruple to have recourse to the maddest, most odious 
 machinations. 
 
 The radical instincts of the Russian mind, or, if preferred, its 
 propensity to novelties and bold strokes of theory, frequently 
 manifest themselves in other things besides nihilism as practised 
 in schools, or the ignorant sects of the lowest classes. I will 
 mention one instance only, taken from the last fifteen or twenty 
 years. I mean the movement in favor of the emancipation, or, 
 more correctly, the independence of women. * Very different 
 
 *The Russians do not like to use the word "emancipation" in this 
 case. They will tell you that, with them, woman is emancipated, since the 
 law allows her to manage her own property in wedlock. Therefore this 
 subject is referred to, in Russia, as " The Woman Question."
 
 2l8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 from nihilism, although in its vagaries it associated with it too 
 closely not to get compromised by it, this remarkable movement 
 of public opinion has its principle partly in that same side of the 
 Russian character the contempt for prejudices, the taste for 
 daring propositions and social reforms. In the beginning of the 
 last century the Russian woman was, like the Turkish woman of 
 to-day, kept under lock and veil. Nowadays she, like man, more 
 than man, perhaps, aspires to enfranchisement and liberty. 
 Through all the exaggerations which expose them to ridicule, 
 these feminine pretensions are less out of place and less surpris- 
 ing than they would be elsewhere. The sex, emancipated by 
 the rough hand of Peter the Great, profited most, it may be, by a 
 civilization which, in giving it freedom, singularly flattered its 
 natural tastes. If in the empire, so many times and so gloriously 
 governed by women, the woman of the people is still kept in a 
 sort of servitude, 7 it is very different in the cultivated classes. 
 In intelligence and power of will, as well as in knowledge and 
 in the rank she holds in the family, the Russian woman is already 
 the equal of the man ; in some ways she even seems superior to 
 him, perhaps through the fact of this very equality which, by 
 exalting one sex, seems to lower the other. 
 
 This remark on the Russian woman might be extended to the 
 Slav woman in general. Polish society, for instance, would lend 
 itself to similar observations. It would appear as though, in this 
 race, the psychological differences between the sexes are at times 
 less marked, the moral or intellectual chasm less wide. Between 
 the Slav man and woman there is not unfrequently a sort of ex- 
 change and indeed of inversion of faculties and qualities. If the 
 men may sometimes be accused of a certain femininity, i. e. , of 
 something mobile, flexible, ductile, or impressionable to excess, 
 the women, as though in compensation, have, in their minds and 
 characters, something strong, energical, in one word, virile, which, 
 
 1 Not as much as it seems. See note on p. 116.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 2ig 
 
 far from robbing them of any portion of their grace and charm, 
 often adds to them a strange and irresistible attractiveness. 
 
 Feeling herself the equal of man in character and intellect, 
 the Russian woman is inclined to claim the recognition of this 
 equality, with its advantages and drawbacks : equality in labor 
 and instruction, equality in rights, equality in duties. Girls and 
 married women and that in well-to-do families too have been 
 known to take pride in providing for themselves, making it a point 
 to earn their livelihood without the assistance of their husbands 
 or fathers. Women, and especially young girls, have rushed 
 into all the careers open to their sex, loudly clamoring for new 
 openings.* The passion for knowledge, even for science, has been 
 one of the consequences of this desire for moral and material 
 independence. Young girls crowded the courses of lectures, 
 gymnasiums, universities. A few took hold of the classic lan- 
 guages a much greater number went in for natural science and 
 medicine, f 
 
 The revolutionary spirit could not fail to turn to its own profit 
 these pretensions and aspirations of a sex always more prone than 
 the other to give way to impulse and infatuation. Among these 
 
 * It should be mentioned that this feminine movement is partly due to 
 economic causes which should be taken into account : perturbations in many 
 a family budget in consequence of the emancipation of the serfs, growing 
 difficulties in family life in consequence of the increase in prices ; difficulty 
 for the young girls of a certain class to settle in their own circles, especially 
 in cities, where the number of marriages has greatly diminished ; lastly, 
 certain legal restrictions, which allow to the women of a family only a very 
 small share of the paternal inheritance. 
 
 f Under the pressure of similar moral or economical causes, the same 
 longing for independence, the same striving to provide for themselves, have 
 grown up among the young girls of Hebrew parentage. In the number of 
 the female medical students registered in 1878, the Jewesses represented T 8 ^. 
 This steadily increasing percentage reached T 8 5 4 ff in 1879, i. e., a full third of 
 the total. This figure is accounted for by the fact that, owing to legal ob- 
 structions or to custom, the medical career is about the only one open to 
 Jewish women. [See Razsvi&t (The Dawn), an Israelitic organ, Sept. n, 
 1880.] Since 1887 the Jews have been systematically excluded from the 
 higher lines of instruction. See Vol. III., Book IV., Ch. III.
 
 220 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 women, hungering for knowledge and liberty, among these strong- 
 minded young girls, sometimes too careless of the proprieties, 
 who combined a sort of instinctive idealism with an affected 
 realism, and substituted humanitarian dreams for the religion of 
 their childhood, the coarse seductions of nihilistic radicalism have 
 made all the more victims that many of these coursistes or 
 students could find no way of putting their studies to practical 
 uses and making a livelihood out of the acquired knowledge. 
 The evil was often made worse by the remedies which distrust 
 inopportunely suggested to the authorities, who, instead of 
 widening the field of feminine activity, in some cases half shut 
 in its face even those careers which they had but lately opened 
 before it.* 
 
 Thus it was that, in the large cities, sprang up a sort of femi- 
 nine proletariate if the word may be applied to young girls, 
 well informed, enthusiastic, more diligent and usually not less 
 revolutionary than their school brethren. The West, especially 
 Zurich in Switzerland, has lately seen numerous specimens of 
 these girl-students, who strove to eradicate in themselves all 
 the qualities natural to their sex, in order better to establish 
 their right to the pursuits of the other sex, of these, as Shake- 
 speare says, unsexed girls, who, the better to rise to the level of 
 men, worked hard to cease being women. Many noble and gen- 
 erous natures were hopelessly warped and worn out in the effort. 
 The most ardent and energetic, arrested in the front ranks of the 
 conspirators, in the flower of their youth, got themselves sent off 
 to Siberia. Others, less lofty or upright of soul, fell into excesses, 
 which must have been to them a severer punishment still. 
 
 *That is what happened about medicine, under Alexander III., as well 
 as under his father. The government, dreading the propaganda which 
 women doctors would carry on in the rural districts, more than once opposed 
 the appointment of a great number of them by the provincial assemblies 
 (Zemstvo); at other times, and notably in 1882, it suppressed the special 
 courses of medicine for women, allowing, however, others to be opened by 
 private subscription.
 
 THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 221 
 
 All this cannot hinder the movement in favor of feminine 
 emancipation from being one of the most interesting and most 
 characteristic phenomena of contemporary Russia. Of all con- 
 tinental states, Russia, by this side, comes up nearest to the 
 Anglo-Saxon countries, though in the two cases claims in reality 
 analogous present themselves under very different aspects. If a 
 revolution of this kind is ever to take place, Russia will doubtless 
 be one of the first countries on the old continent to give the new 
 order of things a trial. 8 In the meantime she has already made, 
 in the matter of higher female education, experiments of which 
 some might serve as models to states that think themselves much 
 more advanced.* The Russian mind does not shrink from daring 
 initiatives, even risky ones. From that side, to which we do not 
 much look for examples, we shall some day receive more than one 
 lesson. 
 
 In no other nation have the traditions of the past at one and 
 the same time wielded more power and less authority, or been 
 venerated more superstitiously below, cast off more scornfully 
 above. At the two extremities of the same people the opposite 
 
 8 There will be no need of a revolution. There would be no " woman 
 question " but for the mania of aping the West. The law lays no restriction 
 on our women ; whatever opposition they encounter comes from public 
 habit and prejudice, and these are by no means stubborn in Russia; the 
 educated Slav is not conservative. It is not only that our women have full 
 control of their property, married or single, from the age of eighteen ; they 
 also vote in local elections for instance, when the so-called " marshal of 
 the nobility " is appointed, a functionary whose duty it is to represent the 
 nobility of each government (province) on gala occasions, to look after their 
 interests as a class, to be their spokesman and entertainer. The right to 
 vote on these and other public local occasions is conferred by a property 
 census, from which women are not excluded, only it is customary for them 
 to send in their vote in writing or by power of attorney, as their presence 
 would be undesirable at these usually pretty festive celebrations. 
 
 * The "Bestujef Courses" (pronounce they as in the French jolt) in 
 Petersburgh, the courses of Mr. Guerrier in Moscow, both founded by private 
 endowment, gave young girls a genuine " higher education." To these free 
 institutions the state substituted, in 1888-9, higher courses for boarders and 
 day scholars, the access to which is much less easy.
 
 222 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 exaggerations meet. Of all men the Russian, once rid of his tra- 
 ditional ideas, of his national prejudices, is the most completely 
 freed. In this respect no other can be compared to him but the 
 Jew, the modern Israelite. He, too, at the contact with aliens, 
 passes from the extreme of the spirit of veneration to the extreme 
 of free-thinking, from the oriental traditionalism, to which the 
 bulk of his brethren stubbornly cling, to the most daring feats of 
 the spirit of innovation. By one of those contrasts perpetually 
 recurring in Russia, while the peasant, like the humble oriental 
 Jew, remains obstinately conservative, guardian of rites and 
 forms, the man of the cultured classes glories in having cast 
 behind him all the old traditions together with the old creeds. 
 Some people liken the Russian intellect to those virgin steppes, 
 where the ages have left no imprint and which have treasured up 
 for the future all their fertility. We shall see in the following 
 chapters in what sense such beliefs are justifiable. At all events, 
 we can say even now that the feeble hold of national tradition, the 
 poorness of the inheritance bequeathed to Russia by ten centuries, 
 have something to do with the radical propensities of the Russian 
 mind and "nihilism," or rather, to borrow a barbaric but 
 graphic word from Joseph de Maistre, the nothingism (rienisme), 
 more or less thought out, of the contemporary generations.
 
 BOOK IV. 
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Has Russia an Historical Inheritance ? Is it True that she Differs from the 
 West by the Principles of her Civilization ? Various Theories on this 
 Subject Slavophils and Occidentals Origin and Tendencies of the 
 Slavophils In -what Way the Apologists of Russian Civilization Meet 
 the Detractors of Russia Secret Affinities between Slavophilism and 
 Nihilism The Three Conceptions of the National History and 
 Destinies. 
 
 AFTER wandering over the Russian soil and successively 
 examining into the genealogical titles and the national temper- 
 ament of the Russian Slav, we should like to find out what 
 elements have been brought to him by history, how the ages in 
 their course have confirmed or corrected the influences of clime 
 and race, what features they have added to the character of the 
 people, what bases given to its culture and institutions. ' ' We 
 know enough of the history of barbarous times when we know 
 that they were barbarous, ' ' says one of the eighteenth-century 
 philosophers, referring to Russia before Peter the Great.* This 
 saying bears the stamp of the ignorant and naive presumption 
 which, in the matter of historical and political sciences, has led 
 that century into so many mistakes and deceptions. 
 
 The Russians themselves will say at times they have no 
 history. Some, like Tchaadayef of old, deplore the fact in 
 
 * Condillac, Modern History, vol. vi. 
 223
 
 224 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 melancholy strain, passionate and eloquent,* nor can anything 
 console them for having missed the most brilliant epochs of 
 European life, or allay their fears that, for lack of the same trials 
 and upbringing, their country never can achieve the same civili- 
 zation, for that a nation without a past is also without a future. 
 Others, more numerous, boldly congratulate themselves on the 
 same fact, boasting of their freedom from the trammels of all 
 tradition and all prejudice, from the fetters of a past in which, in 
 spite of her revolutions, old Europe remains en tangled, f Ixx>k- 
 ing on all the bequests of past ages as on so many burdens and 
 hindrances for the present generations, they make light of the 
 inheritance left them by their forbears, and rejoice that they have 
 received from them nothing worth handing down to their chil- 
 dren. They delight in considering their country as free land, as 
 a tabula rasa, on which science and reason are free to construct, 
 with materials all new, the building of the future. This point of 
 view, dear to radicalism, is the one which most revolutionists 
 hold. In that, it must be confessed, they really do little else than 
 appropriate the views or imitate the examples of the authorities, 
 who, ever since Peter the Great, have been the first to teach the 
 subjects to make stable litter of the national past and history. 
 
 In a state which, in 1869, celebrated its tenth centennial, such 
 views cannot be accepted literally. Many of those Russians who 
 express them would be justly indignant if they were taken at 
 their word. If a past of a thousand years has merely littered the 
 national soil with useless rubbish or brittle structures lacking base 
 and cement, it is that past itself which should tell us the reason. 
 
 * " We belong to none of the great families of nations, either Oriental 
 or Occidental ; we have the traditions of neither. We live, so to speak, 
 outside of time, untouched by the culture of mankind," etc. Letters of 
 Tchaad&yef, 1836. For these letters, written in French, the author was 
 officially declared insane. (See Herzen, Revolutionary Ideas, and Pypin, 
 Characteristics of Literary Views, Petersburgh, 1869). 
 
 t In his Apology of a Madman, subsequently written, Tchaadayef him- 
 self, changing his mind about the gloomy pessimism of his letters, partly 
 adheres to this opinion.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 22$ 
 
 The taste for historical studies, the crown of honor of the nine- 
 teenth century, made itself felt in Russia as well as in the West. 
 For the last fifty years, especially the last twenty-five years, a 
 band of historians who in nothing number, intelligence, or con- 
 scientiousness are behind those of England, France, or Germany, 
 study with passionate zeal the annals of their country, and seek in 
 its past the key to its destinies.* 
 
 Russia has a long history, but the chain of her national exist- 
 ence has once or twice been so rudely snapped that it is an arduous 
 task even yet to reunite the severed links, and there remains in 
 the popular consciousness a sort of blank. This history the 
 Russian people have suffered rather than made ; it was not, as in 
 the countries of the West, the people's own personal work, sprung 
 from the free development of their national genius ; it was passive 
 rather than active. In this respect the history of Russia resem- 
 bles not so much the histories of European nations as the annals 
 of Asiatic ones. Whether it came from abroad or from above, 
 from aliens or from its own rulers, it often remained all external 
 or superficial ; it has, so to speak, passed over the people's head, 
 and, having at times bowed it low, still weighs heavily on its 
 shoulders. 
 
 It is neither in the climate nor in the race, it is in history and 
 geography that we should seek the causes of the inferiority of 
 Russian civilization. Many foreigners, the Catholics especially, 
 account for it by the adoption of a barren form of Christianity ; 
 others, chiefly Germans, by the absence of Teutonic influence, a 
 double defect sometimes lumped under the designation of byzantin- 
 tsm. Some see the cause of it in the lack of the classical heritage, 
 
 * In the foremost rank of contemporary historians are especially dis- 
 tinguished : Solovidf (died in 1879), Kostomdrof (died in 1885), Bestujef- 
 Riurnin, Zabielin, Ilovaisky, etc. Contrary to what is usual in other coun- 
 tries, most Russian historians bravely undertake a general history of their 
 country since Rurik's times, and each usually has an historical, more or less 
 original, theory of his own. As very few reach the end of their task, it 
 follows that the initial periods of Russian history have perhaps be-n more 
 studied than the epochs nearer our own.
 
 226 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the greater number in the Mongolian domination. The Russian 
 historians everlastingly face the same problem ; placed between 
 Europe and Asia, Russia is, so to speak, the offspring of both. 
 But of which is she morally or politically the daughter ? We have 
 to ask the same question in its bearing on social development, only 
 as regards soil and race : In what is Russia European, in what 
 Asiatic, in what merely Slav and Russian ? Have the centuries 
 of her long infancy disposed her, by an appropriate education, to 
 European life, or have they fashioned her for a culture of her own 
 original, substantially distinct from that of the West ? To bor- 
 row the expression used by a native writer, does the difference 
 between Russia and Europe lie in the degree or in the principle 
 itself of civilization ? * 
 
 That is the point round which revolve most of the serious ques- 
 tions that have come up in Russia. The question under discussion 
 is no less a thing than the vocation of a country, of a people. To 
 acclimate a civilization, it is not sufficient that the soil should be 
 apt, it is imperative that the nation into which it is transplanted 
 should be prepared by the elements of culture. When it is 
 the Russian people we have to deal with, so long buffeted 
 between opposing influences, the question is far from being a 
 merely theoretical one ; it is a live one, the solution of which 
 awaits a practical application, and must decide the way the coun- 
 try shall go. 
 
 What we must find out is this : what attitude is Russia to 
 assume towards Europe ? Is she to consider herself Europe's 
 pupil? as such to submit to Western schooling and persist in 
 imitating and adapting Western things ? Or, on the contrary, is 
 she to proclaim herself a stranger to the West ? give up borrowing 
 things which suit neither her genius nor her temperament, and 
 stand up unfettered, once more her own self? ' On the way that this 
 fundamental conception of her national destiny is decided depend 
 
 * Youri Samarin : The Jesuits and their Relations to Russia, p. 364. 
 1 See appendix to this chapter.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 22/ 
 
 all the views the Russians shall hold on their civil and political 
 life. Accordingly it is on the view they take of their history that 
 their diversity of opinions is mostly based. Historical parties take 
 the place of political parties, or, rather, the tendencies which are 
 in the stead of parties have for their point of departure a different 
 conception of their national history. Such is the substance of the 
 battle which, under various names, has been raging, ever since 
 Peter the Great, between the Old- Russians and their adversaries, 
 between Moscow and St. Petersburgh, between the Slavophils and 
 the Occidentals* 
 
 In the eyes of the Z&padniki, or partisans of the West, there 
 is, in Russia's past and her traditions, nothing that need radically 
 separate her from Europe. She has no culture of her own, really 
 original, national, indigenous ; she is only behindhand with her 
 Western neighbors. She still is a mediaeval state, an ancien 
 regime state ; but there is no reason why she should not appro- 
 priate all the culture of more advanced nations, why she should not 
 do for Teutono-L,atin civilization what the Teutonic peoples once 
 did for Roman civilization. 
 
 In the eyes of the Slavophils, on the contrary, and of many 
 patriots instinct with the same spirit, Russia is substantially dif- 
 ferent from Europe. Having received from the past peculiar 
 institutions, she is, by her origin, her beginnings, and bringing 
 up, by the elements of her culture, called to entirely different for- 
 tunes. In the manner in which her land has been peopled, in 
 which her state has been founded, her territories have been occu- 
 pied, in her conception of family, property, authority, Russia 
 possesses the principle of a novel civilization, and, naturally, if 
 local patriotism is to be believed, of a better balanced civilization, 
 more stable and harmonious, more really capable of progress ad 
 infinitum than the senile and effete Occidental civilization, threat- 
 
 * " Occidentals " (Z&padniki) : partisans of European imitation. As to 
 the name of " Slavophils " (SlavianopMly), it is frequently mistaken in the 
 West for a synonym of " Panslavists."
 
 228 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS, 
 
 ened, as the latter already is, with decomposition, as a result 
 of its internal conflicts. 
 
 One of the most curious phenomena of Russian life in the nine- 
 teenth century is undoubtedly " Slavophilism." The ascendancy 
 it has gained over the contemporary thinking heads is entirely 
 out of proportion with the number of its adepts. The little Slavo- 
 phil Church, with its exclusive beliefs, its stiff dogmas, numbers 
 as yet few declared followers, few faithful orthodox believers ; 
 but the sort of national apotheosis which lies at the bottom of it 
 draws to it many more or less unconscious proselytes, among men 
 apparently strangers to Slavic fetishism of any kind. Then, too, 
 one not unfrequently stumbles on some Slavophil dogma or super- 
 stition, among people of the world, or writers who make it a point 
 to have nothing to do with such idolatry. As sometimes happens 
 in the domain of thought, the Slavophil formulas and positions 
 were shattered in the shock of discussion, but the contents, the 
 spiritual essence, escaped out of the broken vessels and spread far 
 away into the air. 
 
 A remarkable and characteristic thing is that this Russian 
 school, which claims that it is to shake off the intellectual domina- 
 tion of Europe, was itself formed under Occidental impulses, under 
 the influence of European thought. Not in the direct study of 
 national history or popular life, but in the study and pondering 
 of foreign writers, have the founders of Slavophilism taken their 
 method, their dialects, and, indirectly, their ideas. 
 
 This vindication of the Russian spirit, this rebelling against 
 foreigA sway, was itself, at its origin, a loan or imitation, an adap- 
 tation of foreign things. The period between 1830 and 1840 was 
 one of debating, of theoretical speculations and hypotheses of all 
 kinds, a time when everywhere, but more especially in Germany, 
 systems sprang up full-fledged, philosophical, historical, political. 
 And it was from German metaphysics, from Hegel's logic and 
 philosophy of history, that the Slavophils of Moscow took the first 
 elements of their ideas, the shape and mould of their doctrines.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 22<) 
 
 To Russia and the Slavs they applied Hegel's proceedings, claim- 
 ing for their race and country the overlordship which the Prussian 
 philosopher, in the history of mankind, ascribed to the Teutonic races. 
 Slavophilism was entirely a birth of the speculative spirit, originally 
 merely a combination of the abstractions of German metaphysics 
 with literary romanticism, and with the religious mysticism, this 
 latter representing the contribution of the national element. The 
 originality and virtual superiority of the Russian or Graeco-Slavic 
 over the Occidental civilization were proclaimed a priori, by de- 
 duction. Later on, in order to adapt the facts to their theory, 
 these philosophers of the national idea began to turn their atten- 
 tion towards history and the people. 
 
 Putting away metaphysics, the Slavophils began to search in 
 the religion and the character of the people, in the regulation of 
 property, and in the constitution of authority, for the principles 
 on which rests Russian life. In their quest after all the original 
 features of the national civilization, they solemnly condemned the 
 moral subjection of the Petersburgian period ; they declared the 
 foreign intellectual yoke all the more intolerable that Europe, 
 whose pupil Russia avowed herself, was going full tilt the way of 
 decadence. 
 
 Russian history, at that time but little studied, lent itself better 
 than any other to the vagaries of systematizing. To this day, many 
 fine works notwithstanding, it is for many writers a field open to 
 any and all hypotheses. In this career, the Slavophils were, by 
 their point of departure, exposed to commit remarkable blunders. 
 They were more than once to mistake for essential traits of the 
 social and political life of the Slavs things which, in the eyes of 
 their adversaries, were only survivals of an obsolete past crumbled 
 to ruins long ago. They were to proclaim as signs of race or 
 nationality what ofttimes was but a token of infancy or childhood. 
 They brought out into relief all the real or imaginary differences 
 which, in the past, had distinguished Russia from the West, and 
 of all these distinctive traits, more or less well-sorted, they made
 
 230 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 up the elements of a Russian civilization. With the help of a 
 little generalizing they discovered and endowed their native land 
 with a civilization of its own ; indigenous, complete in its prin- 
 ciple, though abruptly arrested in its growth by the hapless 
 ' ' Petersburgh period. ' ' This culture is, after a fashion, European, 
 but not after the manner of Western Europe of Italy, France, 
 England, Germany. To Teutono-Latin culture, a Graeco-Slavic 
 culture was opposed, of which the broad and solid basis had been 
 preserved intact in the lower layers of the people below the surface, 
 where nationality had been undone by imitation of foreign things. 
 Once they had entered on this way, the Slavophils were not con- 
 tent with bringing into relief the features by which Russia differs 
 from the West ; not content with pointing out differences too great 
 to stand in need of exaggeration. They delight in transforming 
 this diversity into opposition ; they undertake to prove that the 
 national traditions are incompatible with the principles that rule 
 Occidental life.* 
 
 The long and arduous campaign of Bulgaria, the " attempts " 
 of the nihilists, ascribed to European contagion, the advent of 
 Alexander III., loudly greeted in Moscow as that of the old- 
 Russian spirit incarnate, had restored to the but lately obsolete 
 inheritors of Slavophilism a fleeting ascendancy. In the life of 
 nations there come hours of patriotic fever and public anguish, 
 when all that bears a national semblance easily commands 
 applause. The battles fought on behalf of the Bulgars tem- 
 porarily raised to high honor on the other bank of the Pruth all 
 that, in name or appearance, is Slavic, just as in Germany the 
 struggle against Napoleon brought into vogue once more all that 
 was or seemed Teutonic. In Russia this tendency is, at certain 
 epochs, all the more urgent for the many reasons which patriotism 
 
 * That is what Aksakof did in his paper, Rus, up to his death (1886), 
 what more than one writer did even outside the circle of " neo-Slavophils " 
 Prince Vassiltchikof for instance. (Landholding and Farming, St. Peters- 
 burgh, 1878, pp. 24, 30, and ff.)
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 231 
 
 has at others to feel discouraged and apprehensive. National 
 feeling gets wound up the more willingly for the self-delusion 
 it has to practise in order to work itself up to sticking point. 
 That is what excuses the ranting of certain Russians anent the 
 superiority of their Slavic culture, the intellectual decadence of 
 Western Europe, its political decomposition and rottenness. 
 
 Slavophilism was born, under Nicolas, of a violent and legiti- 
 mate recoil against the long intellectual enslavement of the 
 eighteenth century. By re-awakening in the country's breast 
 reverence for its history and traditions and a liking for its national 
 antiquities, by winning the attention and affection of the higher 
 classes back to the mujik and the rural population, by serving 
 as counterweight to the systematic copyists of the West and the 
 innovators of the bureaucracy at St. Petersburgh, the Slavophils 
 have rendered their country a most undoubted service. Thanks 
 to them, Russia has recovered her national consciousness, which 
 threatened to become obliterated under a vain and sterile cosmo- 
 politism. At one time it was a wholesome reaction of "home " 
 against "abroad." With nations even more than with indi- 
 viduals, the feeling of personality is a great power, but on the 
 understanding that the over-excited national feeling do not 
 degenerate into a sort of intellectual " Chauvinism," or moral 
 protectionism. When it goes the length of depreciating and con- 
 temning all that is foreign, it becomes the worst adviser a nation, 
 no matter how great, can have; but in no country could this 
 exclusive self-admiration, self-deification, be so baneful as in 
 Russia. 2 In his most exaggerated aberrations,' the least moderate 
 of Slavophils is not more laughable than the Teutonic patriot, 
 
 2 Is it not rather the only safeguard when a nation's righteous self- 
 consciousness is in danger of being sneered away from abroad, stamped 
 out by self-abasement within ? It is only a wholesome reaction. The quali- 
 ties demanded of nations are different from those that become individuals. 
 Amiable qualities are not necessary only such as secure the existence, 
 and self-assertion is the most directly to the point. We all admire England 
 for " not knowing when she is beaten."
 
 232 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 who, in the wide modern world, perceives nothing but German 
 culture, German science, Teutonic influence. But of the two the 
 Slavophil is certainly the worst inspired as regards the good of his 
 country, for in preaching the contempt of the West and of the 
 nations out of which have come art, science, and the whole of 
 modern civilization, he runs the risk of teaching Russia the con- 
 tempt of all these things themselves, and of liberty and progress 
 to boot. Thus it is that Slavophilism and all analogous doctrines 
 involuntarily join hands on one side with revolutionary nihilism, 
 and on the other with the Western detractors of Russia. 
 
 When, under pretence of bringing out the originality of their 
 country, Russians are not content with accentuating the really 
 existing features of their national individuality, but insist on 
 placing Russian history and culture, Slavic genius and society, in 
 complete opposition, in radical incompatibility, with European 
 civilization, they unawares arrive at the same position, the same 
 conclusions, as their foreign opponents and contemners. The 
 Slavophil of Moscow echoes the Russophobes of London or Pesth, 
 who represent the "Muscovite" as substantially foreign to 
 European civilization, as incapable of appropriating it as the 
 Ottoman of Stamboul. The extremes of eulogizing and depreciat- 
 ing meet, as other extremes do. There is nothing in that to flatter 
 the reasonable patriotism of the Russians, for Western civilization 
 has traversed crises enough, has taken strength enough from its 
 various revolutions, to have little cause to dread the scorn of those 
 who take pride in remaining strangers to it, let such pretensions 
 come from Stamboul, Pekin, or elsewhere. 
 
 Another no less remarkable thing : Moscovite Slavophilism, 
 by its point of departure as well as by its attitude towards Occi- 
 dental civilization, is not without some analogy with the revolu- 
 tionary nihilism which would appear to be the opposite pole of 
 Russian thought. This name, "nihilism," which it repudiates, 
 Russian radicalism has earned chiefly perhaps by its disrespect 
 to that civilization on which it has more than once passed
 
 HISTOR Y AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZA TION. 233 
 
 condemnation, and to which it also loves to oppose an ideal 
 Russia, if not of the past, then of the future. It was the classico- 
 Christian culture, as it came out of the Teutono-Latin peoples, 
 that the fathers of nihilism chiefly denounced. What they 
 aimed at, what they denied, was not so much Russia as the 
 West. Russia, her customs and traditions, most modern Rus- 
 sians had long ceased to believe in ; in this respect all but 
 the Slavophils had long been nihilists. They had pinned their 
 faith on Western culture, with which they strove to become 
 impregnated. In the beginning of Nicolas' reign, as in the 
 eighteenth century, the civilization of which Peter the Great and 
 Catherine had been able to import only the outer shell and 
 formulas, still was to the literary world a religion which, outside 
 of a few belated conservatives, counted in Russia neither incred- 
 ulous nor indifferent spirits. The young generation were more 
 fervent believers than the Occidentals themselves in the lights and 
 the liberties that came from the West ; they believed, with the 
 ardor of a neophyte's faith, in the efficiency and sacredness of 
 " the principles of '89," in the infallibility of the human revela- 
 tion brought by the great Revolution. 
 
 Towards the middle of the century, a sudden and violent re- 
 vulsion occurred, as we have already seen, in the Russian intellect ; 
 but this evolution was not always to turn out favorably to the 
 Slavophils and the admirers of the national past. On a closer 
 view of this civilization, to which he looked for salvation, when he 
 touched its failings and heard it cursed and denied by many of 
 those who had been nurtured by it, the Russian began to doubt 
 it. He saw that, against ills and suffering, it had only uncertain 
 remedies or idle palliatives, and its liberty, its science, its wealth, 
 appeared to him but as a lie, a cheat. All the institutions and 
 formulas he had learned to reverence, became to him a hypocriti- 
 cal and sacrilegious profanation of the truths half perceived in the 
 days of simple, youthful fervor. The modern Scythian fancied he 
 had found out the emptiness of that Grseco-I/atin culture whose
 
 234 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 splendor had dazzled him, and, with his race's versatility and 
 proneness to rush from one to the other extreme, with the bittei 
 wrath of a believer undeceived and ashamed of his long credulity, 
 he blasphemed what he had worshipped but yesterday. The 
 Russian of the nineteenth century renounced his childhood's faith 
 as a puerile superstition ; he made it his study and pleasure to 
 insult, the while he could not yet shatter them, the false gods to 
 whom he had lovingly burned his incense ; he hurled from the 
 pedestal his own hands had raised, all those brilliant but worth- 
 less idols whose seductive beauty had fascinated his youth ; he 
 swore to tear down the proud temples erected for these deceitful 
 modern deities who,, under the ill-gotten names of liberty, equality, 
 fraternity, keep up amidst men error, discord, and the sordid 
 bondage of poverty. Such was, for its most illustrious founders, 
 the starting-point of nihilism. 
 
 Looked at in this light, nihilism, instead of being a produce 
 of the West and European contagion, becomes a sort of protest of 
 Russia against Europe, a ' ' tragic emancipation of the Russian con- 
 sciousness." If we consider, not the logical sequence and the 
 historical filiation of ideas, but the feelings it nourishes, often 
 unknowingly, nihilism turns out to be, like Slavophilism, a sort 
 of violent reaction against the long intellectual domination of 
 Europe, against her society, her science, against the whole modern 
 world. It is the rebellion of a child indignant at having been 
 deceived by his master ; and the more confiding, the more respect- 
 ful his docility has been, the more bitter, the more passionate 
 will the rebellion be. 
 
 The spectacle of Western Europe's incessant and barren revo- 
 lutions was not calculated to lead Russian radicalism back to 
 admiration and imitation of the Occident. After having, like 
 Herzen, eulogized with ingenious enthusiasm its various revolu- 
 tionary experiences, they proclaimed, like Herzen still, that it was 
 as narrow as inconsistent, as incapable of progress in revolution 
 as in conservatism. This Europe towards which he kept turning
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 235 
 
 his eyes and his heart's desires, as the Mussulman towards Mecca, 
 he despaired of it ; he proclaimed it decrepit and ' ' played out ' ' ; 
 he turned his back on it, and sought elsewhere, on a younger soil, 
 the site for his New Jerusalem, for the humanitarian earthly para- 
 dise, to be opened by revolutions. By an abrupt revulsion quite 
 in accord with the national character, always prone to sudden 
 changes of front, Russian radicalism overthrew its own position 
 and turned its own theory inside out. The part of initiator and 
 rescuer, lately held to be the undoubted privilege of the West, it 
 suddenly transferred to its own ignorant and belated native land. 
 The light it had looked for from abroad and from Europe's enlight- 
 enment, it took to expecting from out of the darkness at home. 
 In losing faith in the West, the radical, like the Slavophil, went 
 back to his faith in Russia, but for reasons the opposite of the 
 Slavophil's. In this native land of his, so severely scorned by 
 him, he all at once discovered a secret superiority, born of its 
 very inferiority. 
 
 And this recoil was logical. Modern civilization, modern 
 society once condemned, the country most apt for future creations 
 is that where the past leaves the most widely open field to the 
 present, where the land is easiest to clear. Now in this respect 
 Russia manifestly heads the list. Of all civilized states, it is that 
 where the institutions and the arts which are the pride and joy 
 of the modern world have struck their roots least deeply and bear 
 the least luscious fruits ; where it is easiest to destroy, and where 
 destruction would be effected at a minimum cost to imagination, 
 heart, reason, prejudices. The Russians are the veritable chosen 
 people of revolution, because they are the people that has least to 
 lose by it. By this sort of rehabilitation and glorification of the 
 land, lauded up by its children not for its wealth, real or fancied, 
 but for its barrenness and poverty, the revolutionary spirit has 
 assumed in Russia a singular vigor and confidence ; it has, so to 
 speak, taken a national and patriotic character, through its very 
 negation of nationality and love of country.
 
 236 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Thus, even apart from their common origin from German phi- 
 losophy and Hegel, Slavophilism and nihilism, as doctrines, have 
 had the same points to depart from and to arrive at. Both these 
 ' ' hostile brothers ' ' departed from the insufficiency of the bour- 
 geois civilization and the disappointment it entailed ; then, after 
 keeping their backs turned on each other a while, they unexpect- 
 edly met on the ground of the glorification and apotheosis of 
 Russia, to whom they both promise a sort of primacy, leadership 
 in the future, though they all find to praise at present but one thing 
 the mir, or the collective property scheme of the peasant class. 
 
 One of the causes of the waverings, the inconsistencies, the 
 worries which the tsars undergo in their home politics in this 
 nineteenth century is the violence with which they, no less than 
 their subjects, are tugged at and pulled different ways by the two 
 chief tendencies that strive together for the direction of the public 
 spirit. Under Alexander I. the influence of Western Europe and 
 her admirers was almost constantly predominant. Under Nicolas 
 public sympathy veered round to the so-called national spirit. 
 Under Alexander II. the government yielded to each current by 
 turns, to successive but opposite impulses. 
 
 Since Alexander III. came to the throne, greeted by a portion 
 of the nation as a sort of Messiah, destined to restore Russia to her 
 own real self, the neo-Slavophil or national tendencies once more 
 came to the fore, both at court and in the government. It can be 
 predicted without much risk of going wrong, that Russia will pass 
 through many more such oscillations, driven this way to-day and 
 that to-morrow by the contrary winds which fight for the control 
 of her. That alone accounts for many of the difficulties among 
 which she flounders, for her uncertainties, her reluctance to enter 
 on the road of political transformations. As long as she cannot 
 make up her mind and choose between the neo-Slavophils and 
 their opponents, Russia will drift along rudderless. 
 
 Against the Slavophils who claim for their country a culture all 
 its own, original, capable of indefinite development as soon as it
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 
 
 will be rid of the false gods of the foreigner, the " Occidentals " 
 (Z&padniki) will long struggle, they who will not allow the 
 Slavs to possess the elements of a new civilization, and are bent 
 on carrying on the tradition inaugurated by Peter the Great. 
 Between the two hostile camps nihilism stands up, grown tall in 
 their shade, under cover of their wrangles, nihilism which sports 
 the armor of both, and, taking its cue from the negative portions 
 of both their doctrines, denies Russia with one breath and the West 
 with the next. 
 
 Such are the three extreme directions between which, under 
 various names, with more or less determined opinions, the Russian 
 mind oscillates. Some assert that Russia has enough stuff in her 
 traditions to provide for herself ; others derive from imitation of the 
 foreigner all the ills of society and the government. Others again, 
 not allowing their country any social or political principle of its 
 own, look on it as on a belated member of the great European 
 family and see no chance of progress for it except along the lines 
 opened to it by the West. Still others will have it that, in the 
 shapeless survivals of the past, there is nothing worth preserving, 
 and call for the destruction of all that now exists, so as to clear 
 the ground for putting up a building constructed after no known 
 model whatever, either native or foreign. A glance down Russian 
 history will show us how these three seemingly incompatible con- 
 ceptions can all emerge out of the same past, and in what measure 
 each may consider itself justified by facts. 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK IV., CHAPTER I. (See p. 226, note i.) 
 
 ONCE FOR AM, WHAT IS RUSSIA'S RELATION TO EUROPE ? 
 
 This question, which continually turns up in any earnest discussion of 
 Russia's historical position and the future that must spring therefrom, 
 being as difficult to settle as impossible to dismiss, was already touched 
 upon by Mr. Iveroy-Beaulieu in the initial chapter of this, his great work. 
 We there supplemented his remarks with some pithy lines from Mr. Dani-
 
 238 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 lefsky's thoughtful book, Russia and Europe. In the present chapter ou 
 author is brought back to this master-question, on which he rests with 
 greater insistence. It may not be out of place to follow his lead and here 
 present our readers, as briefly as possible, with the sequel of Mr. Danilef- 
 sky's argument or, more correctly, review of facts, and the conclusions, 
 they force on him. 
 
 Russia is not Europe, either geographically or historically, is his verdict 
 (see pp. 13, 14), supported by a breadth and wealth of illustration at which 
 limited space does not allow of our even hinting here, and concludes : 
 "Having no part either in the European good or the European evil, how 
 can she belong to Europe ? Neither true modesty nor true pride allow her 
 to assume that she does. Only low-bred upstarts push their way among 
 their betters. . . . But, it will be said, if Russia does not belong to 
 Europe by right of birth, she does by right of adoption. She has appro- 
 priated to herself (or should strive to do so) all that Europe has worked out ; 
 she takes (or at least should take) her share of Europe's labors, Europe's 
 triumphs. But who has done the adopting ? We don't, somehow, perceive 
 much of Europe's parental feeling in her relations with Russia. But there 
 lies not the point. It lies in this : is such adoption a possible thing any- 
 how ? Can an organism, so long nourished on its own saps, drawn by its 
 own roots out of its own soil, fasten itself by suction on to another organ- 
 ism, let its own roots dry off, and, out of a self-dependent plant, become a 
 parasitical one ? . . . But, for the sake of argument, let us have it so : 
 Russia, though not by birth European, has become so by adoption. Why 
 then, of course, our motto should be : Europczus sum et nihil europcei a 
 me alienum esse puto. All Europe's interests must also be Russia's interests, 
 her wishes must be our wishes, her aspirations ours ; ilfaut les epouser we 
 must become wedded to them in the expressive French phrase. We may 
 differ in details with France or Italy, England or Germany, but with Europe 
 as a whole, i. e. t with ourselves, we cannot possibly differ or disagree : we 
 must be conscientious, consistent. 
 
 "What rdle on the universal stage does Europe assign us, her adopted 
 children ? To be the bearers and propagators of her civilization in the East 
 that is the lofty mission allotted to us, the task in which Europe will sym- 
 pathize, which she will advance with her blessings, her best wishes, her ap- 
 plause, to the edification and delight of our humanitarian progressists. Very 
 well. Eastward-ho ! then. But stop what East ? We had thought to begin 
 with Turkey. What could be better ? There live our brethren, in blood and 
 spirit, live in agonies and yearn for deliverance. ' Whither away ? You
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION, 239 
 
 have no business there,' thunders Europe; 'that is not the East for you ; 
 there 's more Slavic trash there than I like, and /'m going to manage them. 
 My Germans have done such work before. Clear out of there.' We 
 tackled the Caucasus that 's a sort of East too. Mamma got very mad : 
 ' Don't dare to touch the noble paladins of freedom ! much it becomes you 
 to meddle with them. Hands off ! ' For once, thank goodness, we did not 
 obey, and forgot our Europeanism. There is Persia now ; something might 
 be done there in the way of sowing the seeds of European civilization. The 
 Germans would not have minded ; their Drang nachOsten ('Eastward Push'), 
 scarcely would reach so far ; but out of respect to England we had to be 
 checked: 'Too near India. Move on!' To China, perhaps? 'Well, 
 no. Is it tea you need ? We '11 bring you all you want from Canton. China 
 is a wealthy country we can teach her without your help. She is smoking 
 our Indian opium like a charm let her alone.' But, for mercy's sake, 
 where is our East, the East which it is our sacred mission to civilize ? 
 'Central Asia, that's the place for you, do not forget it. We could not 
 get there anyhow, besides it would not pay. There lies your sacred histori- 
 cal mission. . . .' So then we shall have gone through a thousand years 
 of labor, streaming with sweat and blood ; we shall have built up an empire 
 of a hundred million souls (of which sixty millions of one race and blood, 
 a thing unequalled in the world, except in China), all to tender the bless- 
 ings of European civilization to five or six millions of tatterdemalions, the 
 denizens of Kokan, Khiva, and Bokhara, with two or three millions of Mon- 
 golian nomads thrown in for that is what the high-sounding phrase about 
 bearing European civilization into the heart of the Asiatic continent really 
 amounts to, an enviable lot indeed, and a mission to be proud of. In sooth, 
 Parturiunt monies, nasdtur ridiculus mus. . . ." Then the author 
 depicts in glowing colors what a glorious thing it would have been foi Eu- 
 rope had Russia existed only as an empty space, with no tiresome Russian 
 and other Slavs to exercise there a sort of right of pre-emption, and only 
 savages of the Red-Indian type to be summarily dealt with what a fine set 
 of United States, with all European improvements, would have grown up 
 there, opening out to Europe a gorgeous " Far-East," in an unending golden 
 perspective ! Curious enough, the identical thought came, in a somewhat 
 different spirit, to Mr. Leroy-Beaulieu, and, our sincere friend and earnest 
 well-wisher as he is, much of the regret which the Russian writer banter- 
 ingly supposes and expatiates upon, shows, seriously, between his lines. 
 Even he cannot help grudging us Slavs, the Europeans not of Europe, a 
 little, and, perhaps unconsciously, our broad place in the sun (see p. 54).
 
 240 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 What wonder then if Mr. Danilefsky, dropping banter for the graver tone 
 becoming the subject, announces this result : 
 
 " Thus, then, after conceding that Russia is European by adoption if not 
 by birth, we are led to the conclusion that she is not merely a colossal 
 superfluity, a huge historical pleonasm, but a very positive, hard-to-be-over- 
 come hindrance to the evolution and propagation of the alleged only uni- 
 versal in reality European, j. e., local Teutono-Latin civilization. In this 
 light and in this light only Europe regards Russia."
 
 BOOK IV. CHAPTER II. 
 
 The First Russia and Europe Traits of Kinship Similarities and Dissimi- 
 larities The Varangians Christianity and Byzantine Training The 
 Principalities and Frequent Shiftings of the National Centre The Great 
 Unhingement of Russian History. 
 
 EUROPEAN civilization grew upon a triple foundation : the 
 Christian element, the Graeco-Roman or classical element, the 
 Teutonic or barbaric element.* All the Western states were 
 erected, so to speak, with identical materials, in the same style, on 
 a more or less similar plan. The three great bases on which re- 
 poses the culture of the West, are they found in the foundations 
 of Russia ? If we dig deep enough, we do come upon them, but 
 they have neither the same proportions nor the same importance 
 as in the other countries. 
 
 The ancients knew of Russia only the shores of the Euxine. 
 The Greeks dropped colonies only on those shores ; the Romans 
 scarcely held a nominal sway over them. With the former those 
 wide plains passed for the home of the Cimmerians' eternal night ; 
 to the latter the regions north of the Danube and the Black Sea 
 were a sort of Siberia, whither they sent state criminals. Russia 
 was too compact, too continental for antique civilization, which, 
 wending its way along shorelands, could gain a hold only on essen- 
 tially maritime countries. Germany already had proved too solid 
 a mass and too severe a clime for it ; Russia was just touched by 
 it along her southern beaches. The Greeks had had some preco- 
 
 *It should he mentioned that the following pages were mostly written 
 before Mr. Alfr. Rambaud's admirable History of Russia came out. See 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, January 15, 1874. 
 16 241
 
 242 THE EM PIKE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 cious intercourse with the natives. They have themselves pre- 
 served for us the memory of the Scythian alias the Russian 
 Anacharsis, 1 and the jewelry discovered in the graves of the steppes 
 shows that these remote wildernesses were not closed to Hellenic 
 art. As has been the case with all great states of Europe, some 
 portions of Russia's territory have been under Greek or Roman 
 rule. It was not, however, till the Middle Ages that the Rus- 
 sians, through Constantinople, came, though remotely, under the 
 influence of Greece and Rome ; and the channel was a round- 
 about and corrupt one. Byzance, at the time of her decadence, 
 was the only Rome they knew, the Lower-Empire was the only 
 model supplied them by Greek and Latin civilization. 
 
 Very different were the part and importance of the barbaric 
 element. Like the states of Western Europe, the Russian state 
 appears to have been founded by Teutons amidst a people that 
 was soon after to be won to Christianity. This, to begin with, is 
 a patent similarity to all those European histories which all seem 
 to be the repetition of one and the same occurrence. Yet, under 
 the similarity, the difference already shows. Russia was a different 
 material, though of kindred substance Slavic material, instead 
 of Celtic or Teutonic. What is the Slavs' original contribution 
 to civilization ? The Russians would fain base on them their cul- 
 ture as well as their nationality. History unfortunately knows 
 little about them at the time of their separate existence. There 
 
 1 This young prince is the first-known prototype of the much-travelled, 
 brilliant, cosmospolite Russian of our day. He, too, fell down and wor- 
 shipped "civilization," "progress," "liberalism," which the Athens of the 
 Pisistratidte and of Solon, no doubt, embodied in a form no less entrancing 
 than the Paris of to-day. And when recalled by duty to his "barbaric" 
 realms, the poor fellow sweetened his exile by initiating his companions 
 into the delights of Hellenic culture and easy social manners. But there 
 was a stern elder brother the Slavophil of the time who made it his mis- 
 sion to guard his people from the pollution and dangers of foreign innova- 
 tions, and, in the name of nationality, put an end to all attempts at reforms 
 by taking the would-be reformer's life. Things were simple in those days, 
 and if the end was admitted to be desirable, the surest and shortest means 
 to it were naturally the best See Herodotus, iv., 76, and Lucian, Scytha.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 243 
 
 was no Tacitus to leave us a Slavia to match the Germania of 
 Agricola's son-in-law. In old-time Sarmatia we find the Slavs at 
 their earliest known stage in contact with Teutonic or Finnic 
 ' ' allogens. ' ' Since some time before Rurik, the Slavs of the Dniepr 
 and the Volkof were settlers and farmers ; already they lived in 
 solid wooden houses; already they had cities or "enclosures" 
 that served for shelter, the so-called gorodish-tsh$* thence 
 grhd or gdrod* like Kief and N6vgorod ("new enclosure," 
 or " new city "), the very names of which presuppose other older 
 ones. The different tribes lived in isolated clans, which do not 
 seem to have had much cohesion, since, to shape them into a state 
 or nation, foreign alloy was needed. Compared to the Teutons, 
 the Russian Slavs appear to have had a preference for association 
 and community as forms of social life, to have possessed a more 
 peaceable and less hierarchical spirit, a more outspoken or more 
 persistent leaning towards patriarchal life, or, more correctly, tow- 
 ards family life on a large scale. The rod, or " family," in the 
 sense of the L,atin gens, seems to have been the only basis of their 
 entire social organization. These tendencies, so blurred and in- 
 distinct at this distance of time, perhaps contained the first germ 
 of Russian institutions. 
 
 The Teutonic element, which in all Europe has played a part, 
 rather too promptly contested just at present, was not entirely 
 
 ' The peculiar and rather vigorous Slavic double sibilant compounded 
 of the sounds sh and tch is so puzzling to foreigners that the only way to 
 make the pronunciation clear to them is to separate the two component 
 sounds by a hyphen, which at once shows how really simple and easy it is. 
 This is the sound which the Latin alphabet of the Poles and the Tchekhs, 
 inadequate for Slavic phonetics, renders by the bewilderingly bristling com- 
 bination, szcz, the conventional sign for sh (as in shy) being sz and that 
 for tch or ch (as in church} cz. The old Slavic alphabet (adopted by the 
 Orthodox Slavs), compiled half of Latin, half of Greek characters, has signs 
 specially invented for this and a few other peculiarly Slavic sounds. But 
 when the Western Slavs accepted Latin Christianity, they had to accept 
 also the Latin alphabet of the Latin prayer-books, and to twist and force it 
 into phonetic uses for which it was insufficient. 
 
 * Identical with Lithuanian grod, English garden and yard, German 
 gar ten, Latin hortus, Greek khortos.
 
 244 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 missing in Russia. It was most probably Norman adventurers, 
 like the Vikings that were at the same period ravaging the West- 
 ern countries and founding there their various dynasties, who, in 
 the ninth century, laid the -grounding of the state out of which 
 was evolved the Russian Empire. The Kief chronicler, Nestor, 
 shows us Rurik and his brothers called by the Slavs of N6vgorod, 
 tired of their intestine squabbles.* The chronicler of the eleventh 
 century may already have, out of national conceit, disguised a Nor- 
 man conquest or invasion under the veil of a voluntary call from the 
 Ndvgorod Slavs. In our days a new-fangled historical criticism 
 and retrospective patriotism have attempted to wrest from the 
 Scandinavians Rurik and his companions, the Varangians. The 
 Russians have looked about for a more national genealogy to 
 endow the founders of their empire with. No historical question 
 has called forth more passionate discussions among the scholars 
 of Moscow and Petersburgh. They have applied Niebuhr's 
 proceedings with Roman history to their own country rather late 
 in the day. One scholar holds Rurik and the Varangians to be 
 exiled N6vgorodians, another Slavs from the southern coast of 
 the Baltic, or from the Isle of Riigen ; another takes them for 
 Lithuanians ; others still for bands of adventurers of mixed races, 
 Slavs and Scandinavians. In these latter days some have gone 
 so far as to make of this most essential incident a myth invented 
 by the self-conceit of the monks of the twelfth or thirteenth cen- 
 tury, anxious to discover an illustrious origin for their nation or 
 their princes, after the fashion of the French chroniclers who 
 brought down the Merovingians from Priam of Troy.f In spite 
 of the latest researches, the Varangians will have to be left to 
 
 * On this legendary call the Slavophils lately constructed a whole his- 
 torical system, which placed the Russian state, based on the people's vol- 
 untary submission, on a different footing from the Western states, all based 
 upon conquest This position, now abandoned in history, can still be found 
 in the economical or political theories of many a Russian writer. 
 
 t This position, very ably upheld by Hovaisky, has been refuted by 
 Soloviof, one of Russia's most eminent historians.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 245 
 
 Scandinavia. This filiation accords better with the Byzantine 
 annalists and with Nestor as well. 4 The names of Rurik and his 
 comrades betray their Teutonic stock ; the character of the leaders' 
 authority, their method of parcelling out occupied lands, and even 
 to their manner of warfare confirm this origin. They were Nor- 
 mans, seeking for a road to Constantinople, and who, having 
 gained possession of N6vgorod and Kief, founded a military and 
 trading state between the Baltic and the Black Sea, along the 
 Dniepr, then one of the great commercial thoroughfares of the 
 East. Like their brethren in the West, these Russian Northmen 
 were, as Gibbon observes, more formidable by water than by land ; 
 on their small barges they went down and attacked Constantinople, 
 and imposed on it tributes or commercial treaties, of which the 
 chronicles have preserved the very practical clauses.* 
 
 The first Russian law-book, Rbsskaya Prdvda the Russian 
 Right still bears the Teutonic impress. In this code, put 
 into shape by Yaroslav, over a century and a half after Rurik, 
 some have fancied they could trace more than one custom of Nor- 
 mandy. Like the Western nations, the Russians then had the 
 ordeal and the judicial duel ; like them, they admitted, for murder 
 and other crimes, compounding in a sum of money ; the very name 
 of this fine, vzra, answers to the German Wehrgeld. Between 
 this first Russian and the European states founded by Teutonic 
 tribes, numerous similarities can be adduced. The difficulty lies 
 in discriminating what belongs to the Varangians and to the Scan- 
 dinavian influence and what should be credited to the Slavs. In 
 
 4 See appendix to this chapter. 
 
 * The Western scholars, especially those of Scandinavia, stand up for the 
 old tradition which, to use a Russian writer's expression,stands firmly based 
 on two hitherto unshaken pillars : the names of the first Russian princes, 
 and the names of the falls of the Dniepr. (See, for example the learned 
 researches of the Rev. Path. Martynof, in the Revue des Questions Histo- 
 riques, July, 1875, and the Polybiblion, May, 1875.) W. Thomson, Profes- 
 sor at Copenhagen, has given three lectures on this subject. They were 
 translated into German under the title, Ursprung des Russischen States 
 (Origin of the Russian State}, 1879.
 
 246 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Russia even more than in the West, we run the risk of ascribing 
 to the Teutons what the Barbarians can lay claim to, of attributing 
 to race the effects of culture. Slavs or Teutons, no matter which, 
 all these tribes had similarities of customs and character which 
 render it no easy task to make out in the institutions the part of 
 each. 
 
 The Teutonic impress, having gone less deep, was also less 
 enduring in Russia than in the West. The absorption of the 
 Scandinavian top-layer by the Slavic subsoil was rapid and com- 
 plete. No matter how many recruits from Scandinavia the Va- 
 rangian princes kept calling in during more than a century, their 
 settling in Russia is rather to be compared to that of the Normans 
 in Neustria than that of the Merovingians and the Carlovingians 
 in Gaul. Rurik's grandson, Sviatoslav, already bears a Slavic 
 name and worships Slavic gods.* 
 
 In Russia, as everywhere else, it was a woman who opened 
 the way to Christianity. Olga, the Russian Clotilda, was bap- 
 tized in Constantinople. Her example, scorned by her son 
 Sviatoslav, was followed by her grandson Vladimir, who was 
 Russia's Clovis and Charlemagne in one. No nation ever ac- 
 cepted Christianity more easily ; it had been prepared for it all 
 through the last century by its relations with Byzance, and Chris- 
 tianity itself had been prepared for the Russian people by the 
 translation of the Gospels and of the liturgy into Slavic. By 
 ushering his subjects into Christianity, Vladimir at the same 
 time introduced them amongst the European nations. Although 
 Christ's creed has been to our civilization much more a nurse 
 than a mother, still this civilization never could become natural- 
 ized in any nation but such of which the majority were Christian. 
 Even at this present day, when it seems most free of its infancy's 
 swaddling-clothes, it is doubtful whether it could become entirely 
 acclimated among people professing alien religions. No country 
 
 * On the drujina of the kniazes, as on the boybrs of the next following 
 epoch, see, further on, Book VI., Chap. II, The Nobility.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 247 
 
 yet has entered into civilization by another gate than that of 
 Christianity.* In Vladimir's time more particularly the Christian 
 faith drew the moral boundary line of Europe. This boundary 
 was crossed by Russia as early as the tenth century ; but the 
 Gospel was not to clear a place for her in the family into which it 
 had just introduced her. Here, again, through the resemblance 
 of Russia to the West, shows an essential dissimilarity. The Cross 
 comes to her by another road from Byzance, not from Rome, and 
 thus the very bond which appeared to link her to Europe, in 
 reality, was to hold them apart. 
 
 To gain a knowledge of the elements of Russian civilization, it 
 were needful to appraise this oriental form of Christianity, to de- 
 termine its value as a civilizing agent. Unfortunately this is too 
 lofty a question to be lightly touched upon in passing ; it will 
 have to be reserved for our study of the Russian Church, t Let it 
 suffice here to remark that, if less favorable to the progress of its 
 proselytes, the Greek creed need not, therefore, be inferior to the 
 Latin. By sequestering Russia from the West, the Eastern 
 Church took from her one of the principal advantages of her con- 
 version ; she robbed her of the benefit conferred by membership 
 in that vast intellectual community of which Rome was the cen- 
 tre, and which, for the West, was one of the most favorable condi- 
 tions of civilization. Russia remained, as though excommuni- 
 cated, outside the pale of the Christian republic ; morally as well 
 as physically, she was banished to the frontiers of Europe. 
 
 Christianity, through Constantinople, brought Russia into some 
 sort of connection with antiquity. Under the " Grand-Kniazes " 
 of Kief, she became a sort of colony of Byzance. That is what 
 one of her writers calls by the name of ' ' the first of her intellec- 
 tual bondages." The Russian Metropolitans were Greeks, the 
 
 * This precisely is one of the things that lend so fascinating an interest 
 to the grand experiment that is being tried in Japan. 
 
 f The third volume of the present work will be devoted to the Russian 
 Church and sects. It will there appear in what measure heathen ideas and 
 practices have at times persisted under Christian rites.
 
 248 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 "grand princes" took pleasure in marrying Greek princesses 
 and visiting the Bosporus. The numerous schools endowed by 
 Vladimir and Yaroslav were founded by Greeks, after Byzantine 
 models. For over two centuries, Constantinople and her daughter 
 entertained a close intercourse, by means of commerce, religion, 
 arts, etc. Byzance impressed on the Russians' manners, character, 
 taste, a stamp which was not quite obliterated by the Tatar 
 impression which came on top of it. 
 
 The first social type which civilization held out to the young 
 Russian Empire was the autocracy of the L,ower Empire, a state 
 without political rights, ruled by Imperial Omnipotence, aided by 
 a close hierarchy of functionaries and employes. 
 
 This Byzantine training was corrected by Kiefs relations with 
 the other European states. The isolation to which geography, 
 religion, and, later on, the Mongol yoke condemned Russia, was 
 not as severe then as it soon became. The schism between 
 the two churches, undecided as yet, had not brought about the 
 hostility in which the crusades resulted. It had not yet vetoed 
 unions between worshippers of the two rites. The Russia of the 
 eleventh century was part of the political system of Europe. 
 Yaroslav, Vladimir's son and continuator, was connected, through 
 his children, with the King of France, Henry L, as well as with 
 the Eastern emperors, the rulers of Poland, Norway, Hungary, 
 with German princes and with the Saxon Harold, the hapless 
 rival of William the Conqueror. At the time of Kief's suprem- 
 acy Russia was more European than at any other time before the 
 eighteenth century. Her relations with Constantinople, the last 
 refuge of the arts and sciences of antiquity, gave her an easily 
 gotten advantage over the West. Kief, beautified by Greek 
 builders and limners, came to be, as one would say, a reduced 
 copy of Byzance, a Ravenna of the north. The superb mosaics 
 of her grand Cathedral of St. Sophia, the magnificent insignia 
 now to be seen in the treasury at Moscow, bear witness even yet 
 to the wealth of this capital, the wonder of chroniclers German,
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 249 
 
 Greek, and Arab. The Russian state was already then the vastest 
 of Europe, one of the most active in trade and by no means the 
 least cultivated. In the eleventh or twelfth century it could seem 
 more favored than Northern Germany, which at that time still 
 was in great part under Slavic or Lithuanian rule, sunk in heathen- 
 ism and barbarism. It was an empire firmly seated on European 
 foundations, yet possessed of elements of originality already clearly 
 marked ; a country which in the midst of Christendom appeared 
 called to some special mission, that of serving as a link between 
 the Greek Orient and the Latin Occident. But history denied to 
 it the simple boon of a normal development. On the threshold 
 of youth its growth was stopped by one of the greatest perturba- 
 tions recorded in human annals. The Mongol invasion was not 
 merely to put back the hand of Russia's timepiece three hundred 
 years, it was to turn her from the European road on which she 
 was travelling, bend her to alien manners, and, in a measure, 
 twist her out of shape. It was in the early years of the thirteenth 
 century, at the very dawn of Western civilization, when mediaeval 
 Europe was on the point of blossoming out on all sides in poetry, 
 in architecture, in scholasticism, that the hordes of Djinghiz- 
 Khan cut away from Europe Russia's co-operation. 4 
 
 Long before the Mongol invasion the development of the first 
 Russian Empire had been hampered by an internal evil, the division 
 of sovereignty. All the descendants of Rurik were entitled to 
 
 4 But what a compensating boon to have escaped such influences as 
 those of Innocent III. and the Albigensian wars ! Terrorizing Christianity 
 is uncongenial to Russian nature, and would have warped it, ruined it irre- 
 trievably. Not even the divine trio, Dante, Giotto, and sweet Francis of 
 Assisi, could have made up for the moral havoc that would have been 
 wrought by these two things alone the blasphemous Albigensian " crusade " 
 and the Inquisition. Catholicism, being hostile to the Slavic nature, must 
 have destroyed, defaced, perverted (dnatur&) what is best in it. See 
 what became of Poland in the hands of Rome ! Thus the Mongolian 
 visitation was really an escape. How, in other ways it brought out and 
 strengthened the best in the nation, we shall see farther on. Another 
 escape no scholasticism. Better a thousand times the naive poetry of pop- 
 ular beliefs.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 some share in the common inheritance, or rather the common 
 property. The eldest, the head of the house, the ' ' Grand-Kniaz, ' ' 
 residing in Kief, had over the others a merely nominal supremacy. 
 In the course of two or three generations this system of absolute 
 equality of rights had brought about a parcelling out of the country 
 nearly amounting to trituration. This Russian system of appa- 
 nages was not the feudal system of the West ; it differed from 
 that in many particulars, and instead of favoring the introduction 
 thereof, rather hindered it. Notwithstanding all these successive 
 divisions and subdivisions, the sovereignty, like the nation, re- 
 mained one and indivisible, or, at least, was regarded as such. 
 The kniazes, who divided it among themselves, held only a life 
 interest in it, very much as to this day in the rural communes 
 each member of the mir has only the temporary use of his lot, the 
 land itself remaining the property of the community.* 
 
 As though to make this resemblance more complete, the appa- 
 naged princes frequently passed from one appanage to another. 
 The national unity was maintained by, or, more correctly, was 
 vested in, the unity of the reigning family, the claims of the kniazes 
 to one another's inheritance and to the title of " Grand-Kniaz." 
 Russia formed a sort of patriarchal federation composed of princes 
 of one and the same blood, having at their head their "senior," 
 or, rather, the oldest of the line. From such a constitution or 
 custom naturally sprang civil wars, which mutually enfeebled 
 the princes. This and their frequent transfer from one appanage 
 to another enabled a few cities, as, for instance, N6vgorod, to 
 preserve their liberty and to rise to a high pinnacle of power, f 
 
 * See, further on, the chapters on collective property and the village com- 
 munities. The Russian word for the princely appanages, uditl, signifies 
 " portion," "share," " lot " ; it has the same radical and nearly the same 
 meaning as the word naditl, designating the lot of each peasant in the com- 
 munal land. 
 
 t The appanage system has given rise to many discussions and various 
 hypotheses, an epitome of which will be found in Mr. Ralston's excellent 
 volume, Early Russian History, pp. 192, 193.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 25 1 
 
 The period which these competitions made one of misery 
 was still not barren of good. In the midst of these dissensions, 
 possibly thanks to them, Russia was accomplishing the great 
 work set her by destiny : the colonization of the vast regions 
 now known under the name of " Great- Russia, " a colonization 
 entirely continental and, as a rule, peaceable, which lasted 
 through centuries, and is going on still, and which, with regard 
 to results, is no whit behind the maritime colonization of the 
 Western nations. The Slavs of the Dniepr or V6lkof, turning their 
 backs on Europe, marched eastward into the wilderness, looking 
 out for new lands. Ambition or religious zeal urged each kniaz 
 to extend his dominions and to found new cities to endow his 
 children with. The peoples of Turkish race, who called the 
 steppes of the south their own, headed the new-comers off towards 
 the centre and the north, the wooded region, which, owing to the 
 nomads, was for a long time the only one fit for settled life. 
 Between the Slav immigrants and the Finn aborigines Christian- 
 ity served as link ; it became the cement of a new people. 
 
 To judge by the very vague memory which the Great-Russian 
 retains of the old Slavic gods, compared to his brethren of Little- 
 Russia and White-Russia, this colonization proceeded on a large 
 scale only after the conversion of the Russians to Christianity, a 
 conversion so rapid, so easy, that in a short hundred years these 
 central colonies rivalled the cities of the West, and tended to 
 become the centre of the empire. In the middle of the twelfth 
 century, a kniaz of Vladimir on the Kliazma took, without 
 changing his capital, the title of "Grand-Kniaz," exclusively 
 reserved, so far, to the prince ruling at Kief. A little later the 
 holy city on the Dniepr was captured and sacked by Russian 
 hands. In these strifes between prince and prince there was, 
 however, no strife of race, no national scission between the new 
 Russians of Suzdal and the original Russ, as those have since pre- 
 tended who would fain make two different nations of the Great- 
 and the Little-Russians. If this war between Suzdal and Kief
 
 2$2 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 had any historical sense, it was as the first collision between the 
 patrimonial rtgime of the north and the patriarchal anarchy of the 
 south, as the first triumph of the autocracy just sprouting amidst 
 the forests of the east over the family traditions of the kntazesand 
 the traditions of independence boasted by the cities or tribes 
 of the west. 
 
 On the banks of the Volga, the Kliazma, the Moskva, the 
 mutual relations between Rurik's heirs had been but little modi- 
 fied. In the feeble cities founded by the kniazes in the midst of 
 countries either desert or inhabited by heathen natives, there 
 were few or no popular assemblies or -vittchts* to limit the author- 
 ity of the kniaz. In these remote regions the prince clings to the 
 soil conquered or colonized by him ; he settles down in a fixed 
 residence, instead of passing from one appanage to another. To 
 the undivided sovereignty vested in Rurik's house is substituted 
 the patrimonial hereditary regime, which, by inheritance or con- 
 quest, is one day to unite the entire nation under one single rule. 
 
 From the fertile banks of the semi-classical Borysthenes, the 
 centre of Russia had been shifted to a land farther removed from 
 Europe, and differing more widely from it, to a poorer soil and a 
 severer clime, to a people more mixed, more foreign to all Teu- 
 tonic or Byzantine influence. The Western customs, which in the 
 Russia on the Dniepr had but feeble roots, were not given time to 
 strike any at all in this ungracious soil. There we find still fewer / 
 European elements, fewer political rights for the individual, for / 
 corporations or cities. A country almost entirely rural, where the 
 base and type of social order is the " house and yard," the dvor, 
 with the head of the family at the top. Already so distant from 
 Europe, this nation was to be removed still farther away by two 
 centuries of the domination of tribes the most impermeable to the 
 manners, religion, civilization of Europe. 
 
 * Vittchl (from vitsh-tch&ti, " to speak, to discourse " cfr " parliament " 
 from purler) the public popular assembly, long retained in Ndvgorod and 
 Pskof, while in Rostdf and the cities of the province of Suzdal, Moscovia 
 that was to be, the vittcht was early suppressed or shorn of all power.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 253 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK IV., CHAPTER II. (See p. 245, note 4.) 
 
 Mr. Beaulieu dismisses this question far too summarily and with less 
 of his habitual conscientious deliberation than might be expected when 
 treating a subject of such vast import and capital bearing on a host of Rus- 
 sian issues, one moreover that so nearly touches the very core of the 
 nation's patriotic sensitiveness. He passes sentence on it from evidence 
 taken for granted at second hand ; there is no trace of personal investiga- 
 tion in these pages, and they are, accordingly, not up to date. Mr. Zabilin, 
 in the second chapter of his sterling work, A History of Russian Life 
 (1876), gives an exhaustive history of the momentous question of the racial 
 identity of the Varangians, as presented by both sides. It is most instruc- 
 tive and, if not absolutely conclusive, leaves the onus probandi very much 
 to the German party abroad and at home, who had settled the matter 
 for us after the most ponderous scientific methods, never dreaming of an 
 appeal to a later tribunal, with added materials and new lights for the 
 revision of the old. The merest epitome of these most interesting two 
 hundred pages is far beyond the limits of even the most liberal appendix, 
 though it would yield the substance of a fascinating magazine article, and 
 we must be content with emphasizing the following facts : that the entire 
 southern littoral of the Baltic, as well as several islands of the same, are 
 irrefragably proved to have been thickly peopled with Slavs and, in some 
 parts, wholly occupied by them ; that the Isle of Riigen was one of their 
 chief centres, emporiums, gathering-points, for, like their Scandinavian 
 brethren and neighbors, the Northmen of various tribes, they were profes- 
 sional pirates, as indicated by the designation of Variagy, Vagre, Vargy 
 all more or less incorrect phonetic approximations of, not a proper, but a 
 common Scandinavian noun, vargr, meaning "wolf, fugitive, robber," 
 etc., and still surviving in the modern vagrant which they by no means 
 exclusively owned, but shared with the other Northmen ; that the partic- 
 ularly warlike and powerful tribe of Slavic Varangians or Vagrians with 
 which we are concerned, sailors as fearless, robbers as fierce as their 
 southern brethren of the Adriatic, were next-door neighbors to the Anglo- 
 Saxons from before their wholesale invasion of Britain, occupied the 
 sheltered and convenient cornerland by the sea and the mouth of the Elbe, 
 which to this day teems with Slavic names of places, some only slightly 
 germanizecl, like L,iibeck = Liubitch, Wismar = Vsemir, or translated, like 
 Oldenburg or Aldenburg from the Slavic Stargrad. That these things 
 and many others to the point were really so is amply established by the
 
 254 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 testimony of mediaeval North German chroniclers, naturally hostile to the 
 Slavs, but simple and honest in their work. Helmold (twelfth century) 
 writes expressly : " The city of Aldenburg, the same which in Slavic bears 
 the name of Starygrad, i. e., ' the Old City,' lies in the land of the Vag- 
 rians, on the western shore of the Baltic Sea, and on the furthest confines 
 of Slavia. This city and all the Vagrian land were, from of old, inhabited 
 by very brave men, because, standing in the front of all the Slavic peoples 
 and bordering on the Danes and Saxons, they always were first and leaders 
 in the warlike expeditions against their neighbors and bore the brunt of 
 their blows." Helmold mentions having been told that the Varangians 
 "at one time ruled many very distant Slavic peoples." These Slavic 
 Northmen differed from their Scandinavian rivals chiefly in this : that, 
 famous as they were for their "excessive prowess by land and sea, "they 
 were not content with the precarious gains of a piratical existence, but early 
 turned their attention to the arts of peace, especially agriculture and com- 
 merce, until, in the words of eye-witnesses, this northern part of modern 
 Germany became "like unto a promised land, full to overflowing with all 
 good things, unless it were grapes, figs, and dates." Adam, the venerable 
 canon of Bremen, who wrote a most valuable geographical work in the 
 eleventh century, waxes enthusiastic as he describes the glories of the Slavic 
 cities of Pomerania (Pom6riye}> while Jornandes, the Gothic monk-chron- 
 icler and secretary of the Gothic kings in Italy, as early as the sixth 
 century mentions the brisk trade in furs between the Baltic Slavs and the 
 "Roman South," and remarks that their name was made famous by the 
 extraordinary beauty and natural black color of the sables which they 
 brought to the Italian markets. 
 
 As for Nestor, the Russian monk-chronicler of the twelfth century, the 
 first and only native authority concerning the beginnings of Russian tate 
 life, and who might be less misleading were he not unfortunately rather 
 deeply versed in the confused and misty erudition of the age, his hand, in 
 an evil hour, while telling the famous story of the delegation sent from 
 N6vgorod to invite the Varangian princes over to rule a " vast and rich, 
 but ill-ordered land," penned the following luckless sentence : " They went 
 beyond the sea, to the land of the Varangian Russ. These Varangians 
 called themselves Russ; just as some were named Swedes, others North- 
 men, Angles, others again Goths, so these ones are named Russ." This 
 sentence of Nestor's is brought forth as the strongest possible proof that 
 they were undoubtedly Scandinavian. Why? "On the strength," says 
 Mr. Zabielin, " of the following logical argument : If in a room there are
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 25$ 
 
 five inmates, of whom four are Germans, the fifth must of necessity be a 
 German also ; indeed the word ' inmate ' itself must mean ' a German.' 
 Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Englishmen, are called Europeans. It is well 
 known that these peoples are German. Consequently, the Russians, who 
 also call themselves Europeans, must be Germans too." 
 
 Strange that such a fallacy should have been accepted by numbers of 
 respectable scientists for sound, conclusive reasoning ! Sad effects of parti- 
 sanship in science ! 
 
 It is hard to have to abstain from developing in its principal phases and 
 following out to its conclusions this most interesting theme. But it would 
 seem as though a little reflection must show which way lie the probabilities, 
 the natural and easy solution of many problems of national history and life 
 which, under the other hypothesis, have always remained puzzles that 
 vainly exercised the ingenuity of its own propounders. 
 
 (Besides Mr. Zabielin's History of Russian Life, consult Alexander 
 Hilferding's classical History of the Baltic Slavs, a very valuable work 
 bearing the same title by Kotliarefsky, and the works of the Tchekh 
 historian Schafarik.)
 
 BOOK IV. CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Tatar Domination, its Effects on the National Manners and Character 
 On the Reigning Family and Political Status Causes and Character 
 of the Moscovite Autocracy In what the Russia of the Seventeenth 
 Century Differed from the West of the same Period Gaps in Russian 
 History. 
 
 THE invasion of the Mongols, in the beginning of the thirteenth 
 century, snapped the thread of Russia's destinies. The conse- 
 quences of this terrible event were peculiar to Russia ; the causes 
 were not. This catastrophe, seemingly isolated, was only an 
 incident in the great struggle between Europe and Asia, of which 
 the crusades were the chief incident. In this collision of two 
 worlds the same causes were at work from the Russian steppes to 
 the Spanish sierras. Russia defended the left wing of Christen- 
 dom against the immense converging host which advanced from 
 Asia and Africa, in the shape of a gigantic crescent, ready to 
 extend its extremities so as to coil itself round Europe, while 
 Spain defended the right wing, and France and England, Italy 
 and Germany, boldly taking the offensive, attacked the enemy's 
 centre by means of the crusades. Russia had done that sort of 
 fighting, in her own southern deserts, against the Petchengs, the 
 P61ovtsy, and other nomads of Turkish race, bearing the brunt of 
 the strife against Asia, long before the great invasion of the thir- 
 teenth century. Being placed at the most perilous outpost, in the 
 neighborhood of the most extensive gathering-place of the Bar- 
 barians, her fall was a foregone conclusion. The Russian princes, 
 united against the hosts of Djinghiz-Khan, had valiantly held out 
 against the first shock on the Kalka (1224). A second invasion 
 
 256
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 
 
 encountered resistance only behind the walls of cities. The two 
 capitals, Vladimir and Kief, were taken at the first onslaught. It 
 seemed as though the Russian nation was to vanish, and those 
 immense plains, a prolongation of Asia, were to become, definitely, 
 Asiatic. 
 
 Nature, after preparing the invasion, herself marked its bounds. 
 The Tatars, now masters of the steppes in the southeast, which 
 felt to them very much like home, grew ill at ease as soon as they 
 began to lose themselves in the forests of the north. They did 
 not settle there. These regions were too European to suit their 
 lialf-nomadic habits, and they cared more for tribute-payers than 
 for subjects. So the kniazes received their principalities back 
 from the hands of the Mongols as fiefs. They had to submit to 
 the presence near their person of a sort of Tatar "residents," 
 the bask&ks, whose duty it was to take the census and to collect 
 the taxes. They were compelled to take the long, long journey 
 to the " Horde," often encamped in the heart of Asia, in order to 
 receive their investiture from the successors of Djinghiz, and ended 
 by becoming the vassals of a vassal of the " Great-Khan." At 
 this price Russia retained her religion, her dynasties, and thanks 
 to her clergy and her princes her nationality. 
 
 Never yet was nation put through such a school of patience 
 and abject submission. St. Alexander Nevsky the Russian St. 
 Louis is the type of the princes of that epoch, when heroism was 
 taught to cringe. Alexander, the victor over the Swedes and the 
 German knights of the Baltic, who, instead of assisting Russia, 
 strove to wrest from her a few wretched roods of land, was forced, 
 if he would protect his people, to make himself very small indeed 
 before the Tatars. The Russian princes, in their dealings with 
 them, had no weapons but supplication, presents, and intriguing. 
 Of these they made use largely for the preservation, or even 
 aggrandizement, of their power, freely denouncing and slandering 
 one another to the foreign masters. Under this humiliating and 
 impoverishing domination the germs of culture laid in the old 
 
 IT
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 principalities withered up. The meagre and marshy region of the 
 northwest alone, the land of Nbvgorod and Pskof, secure against 
 invasion, could, undercover of a merely nominal subjection, lead 
 a free and European life. 
 
 Of the manifold effects resulting from the yoke imposed on the 
 country, the moral ones are perhaps the least obscure. For nations, 
 as for individuals, slavery is unwholesome ; it bows their souls so 
 low that, even after deliverance has come, centuries are needed to 
 straighten them again. The oppressed are all alike ; bondage 
 breeds servility ; abasement breeds baseness. Craft takes the 
 place of strength, which has become useless ; finessing, being most 
 called for, becomes the universal quality. The Tatar domination 
 developed in the Russians faults and faculties of which their 
 intercourse with Byzance had already brought them the germs, 
 and which, tempered by time, have since contributed to develop 
 their diplomatic gifts. 
 
 Spain and Russia, standing isolated, one at each end of Europe, 
 both fell under the Mussulman rule, and, as a consequence of this 
 similarity in their position, the destinies of both also are com- 
 parable. Between the political and religious development of these 
 two countries, different as they are, this double analogy created 
 peculiar resemblances ; but on the character of the two nations, a 
 yoke, apparently identical, has had the most opposite effects. 
 Spaniard, conquered, but never cowed into submission, the Cas- 
 tilian, who, to drive out the infidel, had recourse to the sword 
 alone, retains, to this day, as an effect of the invasion, an over- 
 weening haughtiness, an excessive national pride, a scornful stiff- 
 ness in his demeanor to strangers. The Russian, forced to give 
 up his arms, compelled to look for help exclusively to his own 
 patience and suppleness, has brought down from the time of his 
 bondage a character perhaps less dignified, but of which the very 
 faults are less of a danger to the progress of his country than are 
 the Spaniard's qualities. The oppression by man, added to the 
 oppression by the climate, deepened certain traits already sketched
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 
 
 in by nature in the Great- Russian's soul. Nature inclined him to 
 submission, to endurance, to resignation ; history confirmed these 
 inclinations. Hardened by nature, he was steeled by history. 1 
 
 One of the chief effects of the Tatar domination and all that 
 makes up Russian history, is the importance given to the national 
 worship. That again reminds one of Spain. Suffering opens to 
 faith the hearts of a people as well as those of individuals ; reli- 
 gion draws new vigor from public calamities as well as from 
 private misfortunes. Such an impulse must have been deep and 
 enduring in the thirteenth century and in such a country as 
 Russia. On all sides sprang up prophecies and apparitions, every 
 city had its wonder-working elkon that could stay the hand of the 
 foe. In the midst of universal penury, wealth flowed freely into the 
 churches. The black Byzantine paintings were cased in massive 
 gold and silver, and set with those gorgeous jewels which even 
 yet astound the traveller. The men crowded into the monasteries 
 whose battlemented walls afforded the only retreat within which 
 peace of mind and security of life and limb could be found. The 
 policy of the Tatars was wholly favorable to religion and the 
 clergy. The khans, desirous to conciliate the conquered through 
 their religion, almost became its protectors. Church property 
 was by them exempted from taxes, and the Metropolitans re- 
 ceived from the Horde the confirmation of their dignity, like the 
 "Grand-Kniazes." 
 
 The domination of an enemy who was a stranger to Christian- 
 ity fortified the sufferers' attachment to their worship. Religion 
 and native land were merged into one faith, took the place of 
 
 1 The Spaniards had mountains, where a few can hold their own, where 
 independence can always be bought at the price of hardships and watchful- 
 ness, mountains, which demand and fashion a character and qualities the 
 exact opposite of those which alone can ensure the preservation of the races 
 that dwell on plains, open to all attacks, for whom danger and disaster are 
 one, from the lack of fastnesses to fall back upon. Where successful resist- 
 ance is physically impossible, unbending stubbornness would be suicidal, 
 and nature forbids wholesale self-destructiou.
 
 260 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 nationality and kept it alive. It was then that the conception 
 sprang up which still links the quality of Russian to the pro- 
 fession of Greek orthodoxy, and makes of the latter the chief 
 pledge of patriotism. Such facts occur in other nations, but it is 
 Russia's peculiarity that all her wars have had the same effect. 
 Owing to the differences in worship, her wars with Pole, Swede, 
 or German have assumed a religious character, just as her long 
 crusade against Tatar or Turk. Every war has been to this peo- 
 ple a religious war, and patriotism was reinforced by piety and 
 fanaticism. In his battles against infidel, heretic, or L,atin, the 
 Russian learned to consider his native land, the only one exempt 
 from both the Mussulman and the Popish spiritual yoke, as a 
 blessed land, as sacred soil, and came at last to regard himself, 
 after the fashion of the Jew, as the chosen of God, until, filled 
 with religious reverence for his own country, he named it ' ' Holy 
 Russia." 
 
 Upon Russia's political sovereignty the Tatar domination had 
 two parallel effects : it hastened national unity and it strengthened 
 autocracy. The country which, under the appanage system, was 
 felling to pieces, was bound together by foreign oppression as by 
 a chain of iron. Having constituted himself suzerain of the 
 " Grand-Kniazes, " whom he appointed and dethroned at will, 
 the Khan conferred on them his authority. The Asiatic tyranny 
 of which they were the delegates empowered them to govern 
 tyrannically. Their despotism over the Russians was derived 
 from their servitude under the Tatars. Thus, thanks to the Horde, 
 there ensued a territorial concentration of the different principali- 
 ties in the hands of the Veliki- Kniaz of Moscow, transformed 
 into the general agent of the conquerors, as well as a political con- 
 centration of authority. All liberties, all rights and privileges 
 disappeared. The bell of the vUtche ceased to call the citizens to 
 the popular assemblies. The boybrs and the princes who used to 
 hold appanages in their own right no longer had any dignities 
 but those which the Tatar suzerain conferred on them. Every
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 26 1 
 
 germ of free government, whether aristocratic or democratic, was 
 stifled. Nothing remained but one power, the Veliki- Kniaz, the 
 autocrat, and such now, after more than five hundred years, 
 still is the basis of the state. 
 
 To the Mongols, said Karamzln in the beginning of the pres- 
 ent century, Moscow owes her greatness, and Russia owes autoc- 
 racy. This opinion nowadays is contested by Russian patriots : 
 they prefer to seek for the foundations of Moscovite autocracy in 
 the physical and economical conditions of Great- Russia, in the 
 character of the people themselves, in the primitive or patriarchal 
 form of their institutions, in their conception of the family and of 
 domestic sovereignty. 
 
 Formerly it was the fashion to account for everything in Russia 
 and for Russia herself, for the character of the nation as for the 
 nature of its government, by the Mongol domination. Nowadays 
 this view is almost entirely exploded. Of the contemporary his- 
 torians, the greater number regard the long rule of the Tatars 
 merely as the superposition of an alien element, which by its 
 weight, it is true, lay heavily on the conquered people, but with- 
 out the manners or mind of the Asiatic invaders having at all 
 penetrated as far as the hearth or the soul of their Russian vassals. 
 This contact of three centuries is admitted to have had scarcely 
 more than indirect effects, through the isolation into which it 
 threw Russia, and the abrupt stoppage to which it brought her 
 moral growth. 2 Indeed Solovidf, the great Moscovite historian, 
 has gone so far as to say that the three centuries of subjection left 
 hardly more traces in Russia than the raids of the Petchenegs and 
 P61ovtsy of yore. 
 
 There is nothing astonishing in this reaction against the old 
 historians and their antiquated views. All nations just now are 
 rehandling their histories in the same sense, trying hard to reduce 
 to a minimum or to eliminate altogether out of their national life 
 
 * Not a very close contact either, since the conquerors did not live 
 among the conquered, but only sent their agents and collectors.
 
 262 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 all that comes from abroad, and especially from conquest. So the 
 English often do with regard to the Norman conquest ; so do the 
 French with regard to German invasions. The reason is twofold. 
 On one side, the modern historian treats the evolution of nations 
 much as the geologist does that of our globe, and both reduce 
 more and more the importance of revolutions and sudden catas- 
 trophes in favor of slow, continuous action and permanent 
 causes. On the other side, under the influence of frequently un- 
 conscious patriotism, historians set aside impulses received from 
 abroad, smooth over the violent shocks of invasions, that their 
 peoples may appear to owe nothing but to themselves, and give 
 all their attention to the spontaneous and internal development of 
 the national genius. The new scientific methods, the tendencies, 
 one might call them naturalistic and biological, of modern criti- 
 cism and history, strengthen this bias. One takes pleasure in 
 considering nations as living organisms, each of which has in itself 
 the principle and the law of its own growth. In accordance with 
 this conception, each nation loves to vindicate the spontaneity of 
 its genius and of its historical development. 
 
 What the Russians do with regard to the Tatars, the Spaniards 
 do with regard to the Arabs. The peninsula which, more unfor- 
 tunate than Russia, has for centuries, almost the whole of it, 
 been under the direct rule of Semites or Berbers, denies having 
 undergone any moral fashioning at the hands of its Mussulman 
 masters. 
 
 In such vindications there is much truth : it is neither the 
 Tatar who has made Russia, nor the Moor who has made Spain. 
 If, by a natural reaction against antiquated and exaggerated views, 
 we now fall at times into the opposite extreme, forgetting that, 
 after all, a people could not, without retaining some mark of it, 
 be for several centuries in a state of subjection, it appears beyond 
 doubt that the Mussulman influence on Russia formerly used to be 
 greatly overestimated, even to forgetting that, besides their religion, 
 the Russians have always preserved their own form of government
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 263 
 
 and their own laws, and that all these things protected them 
 against too servile an imitation of their foreign masters. 
 
 The nomads from the steppes of Asia are far from having been 
 the only historical teacher of Moscovia. Side by side with the 
 Asiatic influence of the Mongol or Turk conquerors, Russia, as has 
 already been said, was early subjected to a more discreet but not 
 less powerful influence which both preceded and survived that of 
 the Tatars, an influence which, instead of being combated by the 
 beliefs and prejudices of the people, was strengthened by their 
 sympathies and superstitions. From Vladimir down to Peter the 
 Great, Russia never quite got clear of the Byzantine ascendancy 
 which was exercised through the clergy, the schools, the laws, 
 and literature. Is not Moscovite aristocracy, for instance, as much 
 indebted to the Orthodox court of the emperors on the Bosporus 
 as to the half nomadic seraglio of the Mongol khans ? If the 
 regime of the Horde, which might also be decorated with the 
 epithet of "patriarchal," could give so Asiatic a coloring to 
 Tsarism, grown up beneath its shade, was it not of Byzance and 
 the Greeks of the lyower Empire that the Russian princes bor- 
 rowed the type and the model, together with the forms, the eti- 
 quette, and the very name of their autocracy, when, after the fall 
 of Constantinople, Ivan III. assumed the imperial eagle, as an 
 inheritance from the Paleologues.* 
 
 What applies to autocracy and government, applies to a good 
 many other things. A great part of what, in the manners, the 
 fashions, arts, laws of the Moscovite state, we are tempted to as- 
 cribe to the Tatars, might with equal justice be traced to the By- 
 zantines. The veiling and sequestration of women, shut up in 
 the trem,\ were customs quite as much at home at Byzance as 
 
 * The Russian title, SamodiZrjets, is nothing but the literal translation 
 of the Greek autocrator (" self-ruler "). 
 
 f T6rem, the Russian for "gynaeceum," comes from the Greek ttrem- 
 non, signifying "chamber, house." 3 
 
 3 Compare the German thurm and the curtailed English tower, from 
 the French tour with this again Italian torre, from the Latin turris, which 
 brings us back to the Greek word.
 
 264 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 with the Tatars ; to Byzance also very likely belong the prostra- 
 tions, ' ' with brow beating the ground ' ' (tchelobitiyt}, and other 
 humiliating formalities observed at the court of the ' ' Grand- 
 Kniaz " ; to Byzance, lastly, the long garments, the kaft&n and 
 armi&k* to this day worn by the Old-Russians. And Byzance 
 too may be credited, through the codes of her emperors, with the 
 scourging with rods, if not with the knbt itself, with corporal 
 punishments and elaborate tortures. The same question may be 
 asked concerning art and poetry, in which Asiatic inspiration used 
 to be too hastily taken for granted. We may venture to doubt 
 the opinion of those scholars who, in the historical popular songs, 
 the Bylinas, insist on recognizing imitation of Tatar lays,f or of 
 those archaeologists who, in the Russian bulb-shaped cupolas, flat- 
 ter themselves they have found a Mongolian type, in vogue from 
 the Ganges to the Dniepr, wherever the successors of Djinghiz 
 and Timur ruled. \ 
 
 Generally speaking it is no easy task to apportion their several 
 parts to the Mussulman oppressor and the Orthodox instructor, 
 either in private or in public life, as the peaceableteachings of the 
 one generally confirmed the rough examples set by me\ other. 
 Between the lessons taken at the schools of two such different 
 
 * Still kaftan comes from a Turkish or Tatar word, and armiak is an 
 Armenian one. 4 
 
 f On the Aryan vs. Turanian origin of these songs, see Mr. A. Rambaud's 
 Russie fcpique. 
 
 \ Viollet-le-Duc, in his book on Russian Art, claims that he can trace 
 everywhere in architecture, in ornamentation, in calligraphy even an 
 influence decidedly Tatar or Indian. Russian scholars, such as Count S. 
 Strdgonof and Buslayef, have shown how fanciful and erroneous this theory 
 is, when thus generalized. They have proved, with the help of the monu- 
 ments, that most of the strokes and ornaments, which the French architect 
 wanted to force on the Mongols and on India, came in reality from the 
 Southern Slavs and from the Byzantines. (See especially Buslayef, in the 
 Critical Review, published in Moscow January and March, 1879 ; also the 
 pamphlet of the learned Father Martynof, in DArt Russe, Arras, 1878.) 
 
 4 Probably indicating an originally Armenian garment, a lighter, sleeve- 
 less kaft&n, which leaves the arms, in their wide, long colored shirt-sleeves, 
 pleasantly cool and free for work or exercise.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 26$ 
 
 masters, it is the more difficult to discriminate that, through all 
 the oppositions of the two races and the two civilizations, both, on 
 the whole, taught young Russia very much the same things. 
 From Byzance and from Sarai, from the effete court of the super- 
 annuated empire in its second infancy and from the half nomadic 
 camp of uncouth shepherds, from the pale heirs of classical tra- 
 ditions and from the sturdy hordes who had become, through their 
 conversion to Islam, the disciples of the Arabs and Persians, 
 what most regularly came to Russia were models of despotism 
 and examples of servitude. Therefore, in the coarse web of pop- 
 ular Russian life, it is often difficult to separate these two threads, 
 both equally Oriental, so similar do their colors appear to us. Un- 
 fortunately for the Russians, the threadbare civilization of their 
 Christian instructors, the stationary barbarism of their Moslem 
 conquerors, instead of mutually acting as correctives, or neutral- 
 izing each other, only confirmed them in the same faults. Far 
 from each counteracting the other, the double impulse drove them 
 along in the same direction, and almost equally isolated them 
 from Europe. Either as the Tatar's vassal, or as the Byzantine's 
 pupil, the Moscovite breathed an air, Oriental if not Asiatic, for 
 the Byzance of the Lower Empire was as much related to Asia as 
 to Greece or Rome. 
 
 A terrible and wonderful story is that of Moscow's autocracy, 
 growing up under the protecting shade of the Horde. Never did 
 such lowly beginnings leap up so rapidly to greatness ; never was 
 there more striking instance of the power of tradition in a sover- 
 eign house, whose members, along with blood and inheritance, 
 transmit, from child to grandchild, a sacred goal and task, whose 
 views, at first narrow, go widening from generation to generation, 
 the faculties themselves seeming to grow by a kind of natural 
 selection. * 
 
 * The beginnings and destinies of the House of Savoy its struggles, self- 
 imposed patriotic mission, and ultimate glorious success are no unapt 
 counterpart of those of the House of Moscow. And the personally not very
 
 266 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 As men they were crafty, grasping, anything but chivalrous, 
 of few scruples, patiently building up greatness on self-abasement ; 
 as princes they were mostly of mediocre parts, far from shining 
 with the brilliant qualities that distinguished the kniazes of the 
 preceding epoch ; dull-faced, with countenances devoid of relief, 
 of individuality, with features that from afar seem to run into one 
 another.* All these Ivans and Vassilis of the fourteenth century 
 kept on hoarding wealth in their treasury and aggrandizing 
 their patrimony after the fashion of a private inheritance, and, as 
 it appears from treaties and wills, without any very well-defined 
 political idea, more after the manner of landholders anxious to 
 ' ' round up ' ' their estates, than of sovereigns ambitious of extend- 
 ing their territories, f This character private, domanial the vast 
 Moscovite Empire was to preserve in its government and adminis- 
 tration, through all its achievements and conquests, down to the 
 reforms of Peter the Great. 
 
 The establishment of heredity in the direct line gave Moscow 
 the advantage which enabled her to triumph over all her rivals, 
 Asiatic or European." A kniaz of Moscow, Ivan Kalita, obtained 
 
 amiable but politically invaluable qualities of the early princes of the Italian 
 house their craft, stinginess, stubbornness, queerly combined with a sup- 
 pleness often verging on unscrupulousness, all these forcibly recall the 
 unsympathetic yet venerable figures of the kniazes and tsars of the Russian 
 house. Before the magnitude and righteousness of the results achieved in 
 both cases, history forgets to moralize, and is compelled to own that here, 
 if ever, the end justified the means. 
 
 * "All these Moscow kniazes" says Soloviof, " look like one another. 
 In this passionless mask it is difficult for the historian to make out the 
 characteristic features of each. They are all imbued with the same idea ; 
 they all tread the same path, slowly, cautiously, by fits and starts, yet 
 inflexibly." 
 
 t The word gossudar, which now signifies "sovereign," and is used 
 only in speaking of the Emperor, had then the meaning of khozidin, 
 "thrifty landlord and farmer" (a sort of domestic economist much in the 
 spirit and after the pattern of Cato the Elder). 
 
 ' Among the sources of discontent and dissensions with which the old 
 appanage system abounded, one of the most unfailing was the law regulating 
 succession or rather inheritances, since it has already been observed that 
 the House of Rurik treated the land it was their lot to rule after the manner
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION, 267 
 
 from the Horde, about 1330, the title of " Grand- Kniaz " ; he also 
 constituted himself general collector of taxes for the Tatars, and 
 thus rapidly increased his wealth as well as his power. His grand- 
 son, Dimi'tri Donsk6y, the only hero of the family, already felt 
 strong enough to put his differences with the Horde to the test of 
 arms. Crowned with victory on the field of Kulikovo, on the Don 
 (1380), he paid the price of heavy reverses for his premature suc- 
 cess. Sometimes in open rebellion, more often the Tatar khans' 
 humble tributaries, Dimftri's successors restored, by finessing, the 
 Moscovite power momentarily endangered by his bravery. 7 While 
 Russia, under their rule, was working out her unity, the Golden 
 Horde was dismembered into three Khanates. At the end of the 
 fifteenth century appears Ivan III., a really great monarch, after 
 the manner of the greatest among his contemporaries, I^ouis XI. 
 
 of a private patrimony. By this law an immemorially old Slavic one, which, 
 if duly pursued, might very probably be traced back to nearly primeval 
 Aryan antiquity it was not the eldest son who succeeded or inherited, but 
 the next brother, or cousin in short, the oldest of the race, the " Senior." 
 This institution, which may be designated as " lateral heredity," was never 
 cordially accepted by those who, from a very natural feeling, law or no law, 
 felt disinherited and aggrieved. Thus there was a standing feud between 
 uncles and nephews, brimming with incidents of violence, treachery, and 
 cold-blooded cruelty, such as would have enlivened the chronicles of rival 
 tyrant houses in mediaeval Italy. It was Dinritri, the victor of the Don, 
 who, with far-sighted political wisdom, realized the absolute necessity of a 
 change in the order of succession. But it was like cutting off an entail : he 
 could do nothing without the consent of the person immediately concerned. 
 This, fortunately for Russia, was Vladimir the Brave, his heroic cousin and 
 life-loug friend. For the good of the country for whose deliverance they 
 had fought side by side at Kulikovo, Vladimir renounced his right and claim 
 forever, and pledged himself to hold his young nephew, Dimitri's eldest son 
 Vassili, " in the place of elder brother." Thus the ancient unnatural custom 
 was broken at last and a rational order of succession established, cutting 
 off for all future times one mainspring of civil strife. 
 
 1 Yet the " Mamay' Massacre " as the battle on the Don is often called, 
 from the name of the defeated Tatar general is universally acknowledged 
 to have " broken the back " of the Tatar domination, to borrow the pictu- 
 resque expression with which Southerners describe the effect of the first cool 
 showers, which are said to have " broken the summer's back," though they 
 may be followed by many more warm days, or even weeks.
 
 268 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 of France and Ferdinand the Catholic. Ivan III. reduces the 
 Khanate of Kazan to vassalage. His grandson, Ivan the IV., 
 brings Kazan and Astrakhan into subjection. Ivan III. despoils 
 the appanage-holding princes ; Ivan IV. abases the boybrs and 
 ancient families. The former compels N6vgorod's submission, the 
 latter completes the proud republic's ruin by executions and trans- 
 portation. The last principalities, the last free cities disappear, 
 and with them all traces of individual rights, alike for princes, 
 nobles, and people. Russia is one, from the White to the Caspian 
 Sea, and in this empire, already the most extensive of Europe, there 
 is only one master the Tsar. Under Ivan IV. the Terrible 
 autocracy, arrived at its zenith, became a sort of methodical Reign 
 of Terror. A strange compound of craft, mysticism, inhuman in 
 his piety, sarcastic in his atrocities, bloodthirsty in his reforms, 
 bred in the midst of plots and suspicion, possessed of a mind sin- 
 gularly free and inquiring for his time and country,* combining 
 the Russian's practical sense with the ravings of a maniac, the 
 assassin of his own son and husband of as many wives as 
 Henry VIII., Ivan IV., the enemy of the boyars, has, like Nero, 
 remained popular. Too much reviled at one time, possibly over- 
 rated at the present day, this royal leveller is the fierce fore- 
 runner of Peter the Great, with whom the ballads sometimes 
 confound him, and who also might aptly have been surnamed 
 "The Terrible.'" 
 
 Scarcely delivered from the Tatar domination, the Russians 
 spread themselves in all directions across their vast plains. Then 
 
 * See the curious correspondence between Ivan IV. and the rebel, Prince 
 Kurbsky, also with Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 8 It might help the imagination to form some adequate presentment of 
 this unique and wellnigh monstrous historical figure, were we to try to mix 
 together, then cast into one mould, Tiberius, Louis XL, and Richelieu, not 
 only with their horrible individual instincts and qualities, but also with their 
 very real greatness of political genius, statesmanship, and patriotism. The 
 objects of the French king's and minister's life-long endeavors their coun- 
 try's aggrandizement and unity and the abasement of an ambitious nobility 
 were also those of the Moscovite tsar. Even the means used were of much 
 the same nature.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 269 
 
 they descended the Volga and came out into the Caspian Sea, 
 entered the Caucasus and Central Asia, ascended the Kama, 
 crossed the Ural, and a Cosack outlaw conquered Siberia.' 
 
 Under the Tatars, "the Plain" {pblie\ t. e., the southern 
 steppe region, had temporarily domineered over the northern forest 
 lands, although unable to assimilate them. Under the Moscovite 
 tsars, the forest region, now the seat of an agricultural state, stable 
 and centralized, such as never could have developed on the ' ' dry 
 sea ' ' of the steppes,* in its turn subjects the woodless region, and, 
 by the defeat of the nomads, by colonization and farming, incor- 
 porates it into Europe. 
 
 At the same time, the Russians quickly turn towards the West, 
 towards the Baltic and the Dniepr, their European starting-points. 
 The Mongol invasion had separated Moscovite Great-Russia from 
 the cradle of Rurik's empire, from White-Russia and little- Russia, 
 which, in the meanwhile, had fallen into the hands of the Lithu- 
 anians and the Poles. In the north, the Swedes and the Teutonic 
 Knights, after the Sword-Bearers, were holding the shores of the 
 Baltic. So that Moscovia was compressed between two rows of 
 hostile states which seemed ready to choke out her breath : in the 
 east the Tatars, in the west the Lithuanians and the Teutonic 
 Order. And after Russia was free from the Tatars, there still 
 remained, between her and the West, a broad Christian barrier, a 
 hostile wall, built up out of her own ruins. She had to cut her 
 way through, to Europe and to the sea ; hence her strife with 
 Sweden, the inheritor of the German Knights on the Baltic, 
 against Poland, the inheritor of Lithuania, a strife which, after all 
 but making an end of Moscovia, did end by costing Poland her life. 
 
 The death of Ivan the Terrible' s sons ushered in a crisis in 
 which Russia nearly fell to pieces ; the great work of the Mosco- 
 vite princes, barely achieved, seemed on the point of perishing 
 along with their family. In this country, where sovereignty was 
 
 See appendix at the end of this chapter. 
 
 * A word of Solovidf, the historian.
 
 270 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 everything, it suddenly failed. The condition of Russia at that 
 period recalls that of France at the death of Charles VI., when an 
 English king lorded it in Paris. The Tsarian house was extinct ; 
 the Kremlin was wrangled for by a series of usurpers and pretend- 
 ers, supported by foreign arms. At one moment, the Poles were 
 encamped in Moscow, and Ladislas, a son of the King of Poland, 
 was proclaimed Tsar. Russian nationality and Greek Orthodoxy, 
 equally endangered, found salvation in their union. It was from 
 the lower ranks of this people, to all appearance inert, that the 
 movement was started which put an end to internal anarchy and 
 foreign rule. A butcher of Nijni-N6vgorod, Mmin by name, pro- 
 voked the popular rising, the direction of which was entrusted to 
 Prince (kniaz) Pojarsky. The Poles having been repulsed, a 
 new family, that of the Romdnofs, was called to the throne by the 
 zemsky sobbr, i. <?., " popular assembly," a sort of States-General. 
 In this people who had just rescued themselves by their own act, 
 the fact of the throne being vacant awakened neither the sense of, 
 nor the wish for, liberty. In the words of the Slavophil Khomiak6f, 
 1 ' the people, having restored order and made another tsar, retired 
 from political life." The new Tsarian House was to have the 
 same power as the old, only it invested that power with a more 
 religious, more paternal character. In vain the example of the 
 Polish nobility and the Swedish aristocracy aroused the emulation 
 of the boyhrs ; in spite of a few empty formulas,* in spite of the 
 " 'zemsky sotibr" autocracy remains the law of Russia. The serf- 
 dom of the peasant, tied to the glebe by Boriss Godunbf, the 
 usurper, was the only advantage won by the nobles. Neither 
 minorities, nor interregnums, nor invasions could give to any class 
 of the nation any rights or liberties before the face of the sovereign. 
 A Russian was saying to a foreigner that autocracy raised 
 Russia from the ground, where she lay prostrate at the Tatars' 
 feet ; to which the foreigner remarked that it had raised her to 
 
 * The formula, " The boy&rs have deliberated, the tsar has ordained," 
 is well known.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 2/1 
 
 her knees. The habitual formulas used by the Moscovites in 
 addressing their sovereigns leave far behind all that was ever 
 invented in the way of servility by the courts of the West. In 
 the public petitions or declarations high and low entitled themselves 
 the tsar's serfs, his varlets or khol'bpy. Catherine II. was the first 
 to show a repugnance against these abject designations ; they 
 were so deeply seated in the nation's habits that they were fre- 
 quently employed as synonyms for "subjects." In his famous 
 letters to Prince Kurbsky, Ivan IV. calls the King of Poland a 
 "slave of slaves," meaning that he was the subject of his own 
 subjects. Peter the Great himself, in reporting about the siege of 
 Azof, which he was conducting, to Rodomanovsky whom he had 
 appointed, in play, to act the part of tsar, took to himself, in 
 addressing this sham sovereign, the qualification of kkolbp* 
 
 *Ustridlof, History of Peter the Great. Russian scholars, indeed, main- 
 tain that these designations were in no way abject originally ; kholbp 
 meaning simply "servant." 10 
 
 10 These and other similar conventional forms, waifs and strays of the 
 Tatar domination and of Byzantine influence since Ivan III., certainly 
 have come to be as meaningless as the letter endings of European episto- 
 lary etiquette, especially in countries of the so-called Latin race. One might 
 as well exclaim at the " servility " of the Spanish national character because 
 the Castilian winds up the long rigmarole of "service " and "devotion" 
 and " humbleness " which precedes his signature with the initials Q. S. P. ., 
 which stand for " Que Sus Pies Besa " " who kisses your feet." The Rus- 
 sian of the lower classes never loses personal dignity in his demeanor to 
 superiors, even while using the traditional forms of speech, and one of his 
 chief objections to the Pole of the same and indeed a far higher class even 
 to the lower nobility is the cringing manner of the latter, not merely in 
 words, but in acts, such as kissing the hand, the hem of the garment, or if 
 the difference of rank be not quite so great the shoulder. Such things should 
 not be taken too literally. And as an offset to a few offensively humble forms, 
 we have the fact that the peasant to this day addresses his landlord and lady 
 and his superiors generally as "father" and "mother" (b&tiushka, m&tushka), 
 while they respond with the affectionate " brother," " little brother " (br&t, 
 br&tiets), both using the familiar "thou," the only form of address known 
 in Russian, as in Latin, Greek, and all ancient or root-languages, until 
 Peter's wholesale innovations, extending to language itself, introduced the 
 absurd use of the second person plural. The "Occidentals" strenuously 
 advocate, in word and practice, the use of the European forms of politeness 
 in the intercourse with the lower class and it is notorious that since they 
 have in great part succeeded, the two classes are further from mutual under- 
 standing than they were before. The old cordial familiarity is being frozen 
 out, and it will be long before there is between them the common level of 
 average culture which might take its place.
 
 272 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS, 
 
 Nor was this an empty form under Peter any more than undei 
 Ivan : the sovereign did dispose at will of the property as well as 
 the lives of his subjects. Being in the habit of prostrating them- 
 selves before their masters until their brows struck the ground, 
 the Russians gave the name of "brow-beating" (tchelobttiyfi), to 
 the written petitions placed in the tsar's hands. In token of 
 self-abasement before the sovereign, even when not personally 
 admitted to his presence, the Moscovite boy&rs, instead of signing 
 their full names in their petitions, used servile diminutives. 
 These degrading formulas descending from class to class, every one 
 making himself small before his superiors, baseness, hand in hand 
 with arrogance, permeated the entire nation down to its lowest 
 depths. 
 
 It is but just to note that these formulas, so repugnant to West- 
 erners, were ennobled by religious sentiment and simple earnest- 
 ness ; there also lingered in the custom some of that patriarchal 
 feeling which we encounter everywhere in Russia even to 
 this day. The tsar, as the landlord, was called "father," and 
 these names, taken from the dearest family ties, which even yet 
 lend the forms of popular politeness a character so primitive and 
 affectionate, were not, to the people, empty titles. The last of the 
 peasants in speaking to the tsar, could say ' ' thou ' ' to him ; he 
 saw in him a natural protector against the oppression of the 
 boy&rs, and all tsars have regarded themselves as such. The 
 sovereign was at the same time the father, wielding absolute 
 authority over his children, and the master, the supreme landlord, 
 disposing of the land and of all things therein as of his property. 
 
 An incident from the history of the sixteenth century places in 
 bold relief, together with the rigorous severities of tsarism, the 
 submissiveness of the subjects, dignified and touching even in its 
 self-abasement. The occasion was the reduction of Pskof, N6v- 
 gorod's sister city, by Vassfli, son of Ivan III., and father of Ivan 
 IV., both decorated by their contemporaries with that surname of 
 " dread " or " terrible" (grbzny), which appears to suit the entire
 
 HISTOR Y AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZA TION. 273 
 
 dynasty or regime. ' ' Thy patrimony, the city of Pskof, throws 
 itself at thy feet, ' ' said the delegates of one of the two or three 
 Russian cities which have known liberty, to Vassili, come to take 
 from them their last franchises. " Deal mercifully by thy old 
 patrimony. We, thy orphaned children, are attached to thee and 
 thine unto the end of time. To God and thee all is lawful in your 
 patrimony."* Vassili sent them word that it was his will to 
 suppress the vittcht and all the privileges which his ancestors had, 
 under oath, awarded to Pskof." "It is written in our annals," 
 said a citizen at the last popular assembly called together in the 
 city, ' ' that the men of Pskof swore allegiance to the ' Grand- 
 Kniaz, ' who thereupon permitted them to live freely according to 
 their customs. It is said that the Divine Wrath shall smite him who 
 shall not keep his oath. By the grace of God, our lord this day 
 disposes after his pleasure of Pskof, his patrimony, of us all and 
 the bell that was wont to call us together. We have not perjured 
 ourselves, we will not raise our hand against our sovereign ; we 
 are rejoiced at his presence, and only beseech him not to annihi- 
 late us quite." The Pskovites, with tears, took down the bell 
 which, for centuries, had been wont to call them to the vidtcht, 
 Vassili, having entered the city, assured them of his good graces, 
 and having bidden together the chief inhabitants, ordered the 
 announcement to be made to them, that they should, with their 
 wives and children, depart from their native city, to settle down 
 in the centre of Russia, and ' ' live there happily by the grace of 
 the tsar. ' ' That same night, three hundred families were started 
 on their way to Moscow, and soon after, Moscovites from the basin 
 of the Volga came, by Vassili's order, to occupy on the shores of 
 Lake Peipus the place of the transported Pskovites. Similar pro- 
 ceedings, renewed from the usages of ancient Nineveh and Baby- 
 
 * Chronicle of Pskof > quoted by Karamzin. This parallel between God 
 and the Tsar often recurs in the Russian Chronicles, and still survives in 
 popular adages. " It has pleased God and the Tsar " " God and the Tsar 
 will see to it " are proverbial expressions.
 
 274 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Ion, had been employed towards N6vgorod. By such means did 
 the tsars work out the unification and levelling of their empire. 
 Such examples help us to comprehend the autocracy of Peter 
 and Nicolas. 
 
 This concentration of all branches of authority and of the 
 whole of national life in one hand was it entirely a produce of 
 history, of Tatar oppression, and Byzantine teachings ? By no 
 means, and the Russian historians are justified in denying it. 
 The cause lies in the country's nature and the soil itself, in the 
 physical and economic conditions of Russia, in the extent and 
 poverty of the meagre forest regions in which the Moscovite state 
 grew up ; it lies in the disproportion between the immensity of 
 the territory and the sparseness of the population ; and these 
 things, from Rurik to Peter the Great, account for the mould into 
 which the Russian government has been cast, for the slowness of 
 the country's political and civil development. By these, too, the 
 long period of formation, and, so to speak, of the country's 
 embryonic historical life, is accounted for ; these explain what 
 Solovibf calls "the long duration of the fluid state period." 
 What, indeed, can be more difficult than to base something solid 
 and lasting on those boundless plains, over which freely rolled the 
 swell of invasion, where the population forever seemed about to 
 sink and be lost, like streamlets in the sands of the desert, so that, 
 to keep it in place and fix it to the soil, recourse had to be had to 
 serfdom ! 
 
 In such a country, the frailer the bonds between the various 
 regions and the various tribes, the stronger the authority had to 
 be, that was to be capable of creating and keeping alive a state. 
 Thus Solovibf could say that the excessive energy, the boundless 
 strain of the government organism, was a natural consequence of 
 the feebleness and incomplete development of the body politic. 
 The weakness of internal and spontaneous ties was compensated 
 by external centralization, by the mechanical concentration of all 
 the national forces in the hands of autocracy.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 2/5 
 
 In what way did the Russia of the first Romanofs, the Mosco- 
 via of the seventeenth century, belong to Europe ? Constructed 
 on Slavic foundations by Teutonic leaders, cemented by Chris- 
 tianity under the influence of the "New Rome," the Russia 
 which the Tatars laid low did have European bases. The 
 Russia which Moscow raised on her own ruins was patched out 
 of heterogeneous materials, partly borrowed from Asia : it was a 
 building of mongrel architecture, made up of Byzantine and 
 Mongol, of Gothic and Renaissance, a building resembling the 
 church of Vassili Blajennoy, quaint wellnigh to monstrosity, 
 which was built in Moscow under 'Ivan the Terrible. 
 
 One thing strikes the student of Russian history : its barren- 
 ness, its comparative lack of interest. Through all its vicissitudes, 
 it is wanting in those large movements, religious or intellectual, 
 those broad epochs, social or political, which are the landmarks 
 of the stormy and active lives of the Western nations. In fact, the 
 history of Russia differs from that of other nations more by what 
 it lacks than by what it possesses of its own, and to each gap in 
 her past answers a gap in the present, which time could not fill, 
 a gap in her culture, her society, at times in the Russian mind 
 itself. This blank in the country's history, this absence of certain 
 traditions and institutions in a people who has not yet learned 
 how to appropriate those of others, seems to me one of the secret 
 causes of the negative bent characteristic of the Russian intellect, 
 one of the remote sources of nihilism, or ' ' nothingism, ' ' in morals 
 and in politics. 
 
 In this state, over which ten centuries have already passed, 
 nothing is consecrated by time. The country is old, yet all therein 
 is new. " In your country," one of the men who have known 
 Russia best wrote to a Russian, " nothing is reverenced, because 
 nothing is old." * 
 
 * Joseph de Maistre, letter to Prince Kozl6fsky, dated October 24, 
 1815. Twenty years later Tchaadayef expressed an idea the same in sub- 
 stance, when he said: "The civilization of mankind has not touched us.
 
 276 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Russian history, compared to that of the Western nations, 
 appears entirely negative. Moscovia never had a feudal system 
 which, along with the conception of reciprocity in service and 
 duty, fostered the feeling of right ; nor chivalry, from which the 
 West received the feeling of honor, according to Montesquieu, 
 the foundation of the monarchy, and which, where liberty 
 became extinct, still maintained alive human dignity. Russia 
 never had any class of men answering to the French gentilhomme, 
 and her only apology for a chivalry was the Cosacks bands of 
 deserters and runaway serfs, republics of adventurers, half 
 crusaders, half pirates, whose savage freedom was guaranteed 
 them by the steppe. 
 
 Russia never had communes, nor charters, nor a real burgher- 
 dom, nor a third estate. Ndvgorod, Pskof, Viatka, stationed at 
 the uttermost ends of the country, were exceptions, creditable to 
 the genius of the nation, but which did not perceptibly influence 
 its development. Besides, the cities were too few. Moscovia, 
 but just freed from the Tatar yoke and forthwith levelled by 
 autocracy, could scarcely be said to have in reality more than one 
 city, the monarch's residence, and this capital itself was nothing 
 but a huge village. Moscovia was a commonwealth of peasants, 
 a rural empire. Now, without cities there can be no wealth," nor 
 art, nor science, nor political life ; in short, etymology tells the 
 story : without cities civitates no civilization. 
 
 As in the countries of the West, so in Russia, centralization 
 meant monarchy ; but Russia had had none of the instruments or 
 institutions of European monarchies ; neither parliaments nor 
 universities, men of the robe, nor the pen. She had sovereigns ; 
 she never had a court. Shut up in the tirem, the gynaeceum 
 bequeathed by the Tatars or Byzance, the tsarttsas and tsarevnas 
 
 What with other nations has long since passed into their life, with us is to 
 this day speculation and theory." Herzen himself said much the same 
 thing, when he wrote {On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in 
 Russia) : " We are untrammelled by the past, because our past is empty, 
 poor, narrow."
 
 HISTOR Y AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZA TION. 
 
 left the tsars to the coarseness of their sex. Moscow had neither 
 castles nor palaces. The Kremlin was nothing but a combination 
 of fortress and convent, where low pleasures fit for common 
 soldiers alternated with a tiresome ecclesiastical pomp.* 
 
 The Russian Church had a national clergy, patriotic and 
 respected. She also had her monasteries, and, later on, her 
 synods or national councils. But she had no religious orders, no 
 scholastic training, no great heresies, nor the grand councils of 
 the I/atin Church. Russia had ignorant sects has them still 
 rustic, with no knowledge of the ancient tongues. She remained 
 outside of the Reformation, of the learned and literary polemics, 
 which, through the liberty of thought, led to political liberty. A 
 stranger to the Reformation, she was one also to the Renaissance. 
 Classical antiquity, which once upon a time had just brushed her, 
 did not become naturalized in Russia, as it did in Germany, as by 
 a second education. 
 
 Bound to Byzance by the ties of religion and neighborliness, 
 Russia probably sheltered a greater number of Greek emigrants 
 than Italy and the West. After the fall of Constantinople and 
 the marriage of Ivan III. to the heiress of the last emperors, the 
 Greeks began to flock to Moscow. Thither they brought Byzan- 
 tine etiquette and devotional tracts. They did not find there, as 
 in the West, the classical letters and genius smouldering under 
 the ashes of antiquity, waiting to be revived. Though Russia 
 did, besides the Greeks, import a few Italian artists and a few 
 German artificers, she harbored neither the arts nor the literature 
 of Europe, nor printing, the propagator of thought, nor the 
 geographical discoveries which, together with the conception of 
 the world, widened the modern mind.* 
 
 In emerging from under the Tatar domination, Moscovia 
 
 * See the two works of Zabidlin, on the Domestic Life of the Russian 
 Tsars and TsarUsas. 
 
 * Ivan the Terrible patronized the introduction of printing in Moscow, 
 but the first presses, looked on suspiciously by the people, produced only 
 books of devotion.
 
 278 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 awoke in the midst of the Middle Ages minus crusades and 
 knighthood ; minus troubadours and trouvtres, scholastics and 
 legists the Middle Ages shorn of romance. No Reform, no 
 Renaissance, no Revolution Russia's later history must needs be 
 more incomplete still. Of the great facts and great epochs of 
 European life, from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, she 
 felt only a feeble shock. What would a Western nation be that 
 had missed all that ? And with what could such gaps be filled ? 
 In the seventeenth century, Russia was as yet but a rudimen- 
 tary embryonic organism ; outside of the Church, she possessed 
 only two institutions, one at the basis, the other at the summit, of 
 the state, and both not particularly favorable to the development 
 of individuality : the commune with mutual solidarity of the 
 members, and autocracy ; the bond between them serfdom. 
 The Tatar oppression and the struggle for life against Poland 
 had absorbed all the country's vitality. Sieyes, to those who 
 asked him what he had been doing during the Terror, used to 
 reply : "I lived. ' ' To a similar question concerning her long 
 inertness Russia might have given a similar answer. In order 
 not to get crushed quite out of existence by the Mongols, she was 
 compelled to sham death for centuries. The whole task of 
 Moscovia consisted in making, materially, a nation of herself. 
 Similar to a child of a robust temperament, she came strengthened 
 and steeled out of trials that should have killed her ; but the 
 assaults which gave her bodily vigor hindered her intellectual 
 development. Compared to the other nations of Europe, she had 
 but a coarse, rustic bringing up ; the masters, and even the time 
 for cultivating the mind, were wanting. 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK IV. CHAPTER HI. (See note 9, p. 269.) 
 
 THE FIRST CONQUEST OF SIBERIA. 
 
 Unlike so many important names of peoples and places that of Siberia 
 gives no occasion for learned disputes as to its origin. There is no obscurity 
 about it of course up to a certain point, beyond which our interest does 
 not extend. We know that, as early as the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 279 
 
 tury, Sibir was the name of a Tatar kingdom on the Asiatic side of the Ural, 
 along the rivers Tobdl, Irtish, and Tura. After the conquest, by Ivan the 
 Terrible, of Kazan and Astrakhan the Siberian Khan Yediger tendered his vol- 
 untary submission, in the hope of finding protection against the rebels and 
 pretenders who beset his life and throne. In vain ; he soon after lost both at 
 the hands of the neighboring Kirghiz Khan Kutchum, who immediately pro- 
 ceeded to make trouble for the Russian pioneer-borderers on this side the 
 mountain chain, which, from its peculiar tameness and want of altitude, 
 never was a serious obstacle to raids and invasions. The greatest sufferers 
 from this state of things were the Str6gonofs, a wealthy, enterprising family 
 who owned untold thousands of acres to be had for the taking in the wild 
 borderland which now is the government of Perm. The founder of this famous 
 family's greatness had gone out into the wilderness early in the fifteenth cen- 
 tury, and towards the end of the sixteenth they were the centre and soul of a 
 large Russian colony, and had opened the industries especially salt-boiling, 
 and fur trade which have always been this region's main source of wealth. 
 In 1581, finding themselves unable to cope with the many nomadic tribes 
 Ostiak, Vogul, Tcheremiss, etc., who harassed the Russian settlements on 
 all sides, with more united and unremitting efforts since they were sure of 
 support from the Siberian khan beyond the mountains, the Strdgonofs 
 obtained from the Tsar an order to the Voyevdd or military commander of 
 the Permian region enjoining him to lend them armed assistance and author- 
 ize them to enlist men from the colony and supply them with arms. They 
 stretched this rather elastic decree to its widest reach and, in 1582, sent across 
 the Ural a regular expedition, under command of ataman Yermak Timofeye- 
 vitch, a Cosack officer in the government's service stationed at Perm, thus 
 taking a decidedly aggressive attitude instead of limiting their measures to 
 self-defence. When Ivan IV. heard of this undoubtedly arbitrary proceeding, 
 he was very angry and sent off post-haste special messengers to inform the 
 Strdgonofs of the fact and order them to recall their forces and send Yermak 
 back to Perm, to his post of service, and, furthermore, to beware how they 
 attacked or provoked any quarrel with the Siberian "Sultan." Themes- 
 sage came too late ; the Cosacks had already half achieved their won- 
 derful venture. 
 
 It will be seen from this that Yermak can in no wise be described as a 
 brigand or "outlaw," an error, however, which has crept into popular 
 history and has only recently been rectified. What gave rise to it may have 
 been the fact that the men under his command were picked for bravery but 
 certainly not for law-abiding morality. It was a handful of daredevil adven-
 
 280 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 turers, of the same mettle as those of Cortez and Pizzaro, of the kind that do 
 great things and shrink from few. His own chosen lieutenant, Ivan Koltsd, 
 was an outlaw, under sentence of death, for capturing and sacking a small 
 town of the Nogay. They had a few cannon and muskets, and were well 
 supplied with all things needful, including guides and interpreters. Beyond 
 that, no resources nor real knowledge of the country. They started in boats 
 up a not very considerable river, from which they soon had to strike inland. 
 The boats had to be left But whenever possible, they still kept to the 
 rivers, a mode of transit familiar to them from their experience in navi- 
 gation on the Volga, and each time had to build new boats, an operation 
 fraught with delay and danger in the midst of a hostile country, notwith- 
 standing the abundance of material. At times, where the distance was 
 short and the soil even from one river to another, they carried or dragged 
 them across. Thus they came to a town ruled by a third-class khan tribu- 
 tary to Kutchum. The natives were taken utterly by surprise ; besides, they 
 had never seen firearms, so fled at the first discharge. Some never stopped 
 till they had reached the presence of Kutchum, who heard from them the 
 first tidings of the Russian invasion : " Warriors have come into our land," 
 the fugitives reported, "with bows which give forth flashing fire, and strike 
 like to the lightning from heaven. No arrows are to be seen, yet they wound 
 and kill, and no armor avails for protection. They pierce clean through 
 our plate and mail armor." 
 
 Now that Kutchum was aroused, the crisis came quickly. The Cosacks 
 were pursuing quite a triumphant course down the river Tobdl, when they 
 were arrested by a large and comparatively regular army, gathered from all 
 the tribes subject to Kutchum, and led by a son or nephew of his own. 
 There were thirty Siberians to one Russian. The Cosacks held a council of 
 war. Several advised retreat. The greater part applauded Yermak when 
 he said : " Retreat ? Whither? It is autumn. The rivers are beginning 
 to freeze. Do not let us lay up an evil name for ourselves. Let us be 
 mindful of the promise we made to honorable men (the Strdgonofs), before 
 God. If we turn back, shame will be ours and the name of word-breakers. 
 Whereas, if God Almighty help us, our memories shall not die out among 
 men, and glory will be ours forever." One would almost think that Shake- 
 speare had inspired himself from the old Russian chronicler, when he 
 penned the famous harangue of Henry V. 
 
 The Tatars fought desperately, but the Cosacks routed them completely, 
 though with the loss of 107 men a large one for their small force. 
 Kutchum himself snatched together all he could of his treasure and disap-
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 28 1 
 
 peared into the woods. When Yermak entered the capital, Sibir, or Isker, 
 it was empty, and yielded a mighty booty in furs, precious tissues, and all 
 sorts of valuables. Soon the surrounding princelings began to drop in 
 and make their submission ; Yermak, suddenly developing remarkable 
 statesmanship, treated them with great kindness and courtesy, and, after 
 receiving their oath of allegiance in the name of the Tsar, forbade his men, 
 under the severest penalties, to offer the slightest violence to the natives. 
 At the same time he made good use of the enforced idleness of the long 
 winter, by sending his lieutenant, Ivan Koltsd, with a small retinue, to the 
 Tsar, to inform him that God had given into his hand the land of Sibir, and 
 beg for reinforcements, also request that a Voyevbd might be sent, to 
 take official possession of the country. Ivan the Terrible received Koltsd 
 most graciously, granted him a free pardon, and sent him back with presents 
 to Yermak, the fur robe he was wearing in the number, than which no 
 greater mark of sovereign favor could be given. The Voyevdd Yermak had 
 asked for accompanied Koltsd, also a considerable detachment of soldiers. 
 
 After this things went wrong for a time. Most of the first conquerors 
 perished in one way or another, when spring of 1584 had reopened hostil- 
 ities, and Yermak himself fell into an ambush on the banks of the river 
 Irtysh, and was drowned while trying to swim in his heavy armor, out to 
 his barge, which was stationed in the middle of the river. But he had done 
 his work, and it was never abandoned. Slowly but steadily, one Siberian 
 country after another was subdued and thrown open to colonization from 
 home ; forests were cleared, towns grew up and, later on, large cities ; trade, 
 mostly in the form of barter, was established with the natives, who learned 
 to prize Russian cloths, linens, hides, etc. and, to their destruction, Russian 
 whiskey. For a long time furs were the staple and almost only article of Sibe- 
 rian export ; then came walrus tusks, (that go by the name of " fish-ivory ") ; 
 it was in the time of Peter the Great that Siberia's inexhaustible wealth in 
 metals, precious stones, and other minerals was discovered wherein lies 
 the chief value of the immense dependency for the possession of which 
 Russia is indebted to the simple heroism of the Cosack atam&n Yermak 
 Timofe'ye vitch .
 
 BOOK IV. CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Russia's Return to European Civilization Antecedents of the Work of 
 Peter the Great The Reformer's Character and Way of Proceeding 
 Consequences and Defects of the Reform Moral and Social Dualism 
 In what Manner Autocracy Seems to have Fulfilled its Historical Task. 
 
 IN this belated and isolated country there arises one day a man 
 who undertakes to bring it to Europe and make it jump at one 
 leap all the interval that divides the two. Was it possible for 
 Russia to snatch at one stroke all that ages had given to her 
 rivals ? to get at one pull to the term of a long road, the historical 
 stations of which she had not travelled ? Was this the conception 
 of a genius or a chimerical dream, an individual fancy doomed to 
 failure ? or was it, in spite of its daring, a plan suggested by 
 nature, facts, and men ? For a long time Peter the Great was 
 regarded as one of those lawgivers after the antique pattern, who 
 fashioned states at their will, as a sort of Deucalion, the maker 
 of peoples. History in Russia has not, any more than elsewhere, 
 proceeded by leaps and bounds. The Russians have been the 
 first to feel this ; one of their historians' favorite tasks is to fill 
 the apparent chasm between ancient and new Russia. 
 
 The work of Peter the Great did not lack historical ante- 
 cedents. In principle, if not in form, it lay in the logical 
 destinies of the Russian people. Russia was too near Europe, 
 had too much affinity with her, by blood and by religion, 
 not to feel one day the contagion of her civilization. The two 
 parts of Peter's work bringing his people nearer Europe materi- 
 ally, territorially ; and morally, socially, by imitation of foreign 
 
 282
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 283 
 
 customs had been almost equally indicated, attempted, or 
 prepared by the two preceding centuries. 
 
 Ever since Ivan III. , the Russian sovereigns strove to force 
 their way to the north through the rampart formed by the Swedes, 
 the Teutonic Order, and Lithuania ; to the south, through the 
 Tatars, the Turks, and Poland, in order to reach Europe and 
 the sea. 
 
 In his attempts on Azof and the Black Sea, as in his conquests 
 over the Baltic, Peter did no more than continue what his prede- 
 cessors had begun : his father Alexis, who had accepted the 
 submission of the Ukrama Cosacks ; his sister Sophia, who had 
 directed two expeditions against Crimea. 
 
 Since Ivan III., also, most tsars had called in foreigners, 
 with a view to introduce in their states the arts and inventions of 
 the West. The influence of European manners naturally made 
 itself felt first from the nearest countries Poland, Little Russia, 
 Lithuania ; then it came from Germany, Holland, England, 
 Italy, from France at last, and so from the whole West. As early 
 as the fifteenth century, Ivan III., who was in this respect, as in 
 so many others, the precursor of Peter I. , entered into relations 
 with the sovereigns of Europe and asked them to send him 
 physicians, artists, and mechanics. From Italy, at that time the 
 teacher of Christendom, Moscow received through Byzance and 
 Germany architects and engineers. It was artists from Bologna 
 and Venice who, under Ivan III. and his successors, built the 
 handsomest towers of the Kremlin. A noteworthy thing is that, 
 instead of bringing along their Renaissance style, which, in 
 Western Europe, they masterfully imposed everywhere, these 
 Italians took Russian models and constructed the most dis- 
 tinctively Moscovite edifices of Moscow. This anomaly has an 
 instructive side. The queer, bulb-shaped cupolas of the 
 Vassili church bear witness to the condition of foreigners in 
 Russia at that time : instead of imposing on the Russians their 
 own tastes and customs, they were compelled to adopt theirs.
 
 284 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Along with artists, Ivan III. called in craftsmen of all sorts 
 founders, goldsmiths, miners, masons, pyrotechnists. Thus, from 
 the first, the road was traced for Peter the Great ; it was from the 
 material, technical, industrial side that Russia first came in touch 
 with Europe. As Peter the Great, so Ivan III. and Ivan IV. 
 before him are more anxious to train their people to mechanical 
 arts than to sciences or fine arts. After Ivan III., Vassili IV., 
 married to a Lithuanian, not content with calling in foreigners, 
 goes the length, to please his wife, of adopting their customs and 
 cutting off his beard. Under Ivan IV. , the Terrible, Moscovia, 
 through Arkhangelsk, enters into relations with England ; he it 
 is who, despite the monks, introduces printing in Russia. He 
 sends out emissaries to Europe, to collect skilled workmen for 
 him ; but the greater part are detained on the way by the military 
 jealousy of the Teutonic Order, and the commercial jealousy of 
 the Hansa Cities, which, in the interest of German arms and trade, 
 attempt to place Russia under an interdict. 
 
 The period of usurpers endangered European influence by 
 giving it too wide a scope. On the point of lording it over Russia 
 with the false Dimitri or the Polish voyevbds, the foreigners nar- 
 rowly escaped being driven out with them. The Romanofs seemed 
 little likely to favor Western civilization. They were carried to 
 the throne by a national reaction. The first sovereign of their 
 house had been brought up in a convent by a mother who had 
 taken the veil, and it was his father Philaret, raised to the rank 
 of Patriarch, who governed in his name. This dynasty, of Rus- 
 sian blood and all but sacerdotal origin, made it their task to 
 restore the old-fashioned manners. It nevertheless contributed to 
 throw the seeds of European culture, and with the assistance of 
 certain little- Russians, trained in the sciences of the West under 
 the Polish sovereignty, founded in Moscow, long before the 
 majority of Peter the Great, a ' ' Slavo-Graeco-Latin Academy," 
 the name of which sufficiently indicated new aspirations. Michael 
 Romanof already sends abroad for merchants, craftsmen, even
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 285 
 
 soldiers, and concludes commercial treaties with the West. 
 Alexis, a genuine Moscovite tsar, clad in long Byzantine garments, 
 which lend him a likeness to the saints on the eikons, acts as his 
 son Peter's forerunner. Under his reign the foreigners increase in 
 numbers, as though the father had collected for the son teachers 
 and materials of instruction. These Occidentals occupy in Moscow 
 a separate quarter, the "Slobodb of the Nitmtsy" (Germans). 
 They are men of all crafts skippers, carpenters, mostly Dutch- 
 men ; a bark of theirs, left for useless on a pond, was to arouse in 
 Peter the liking for marine things. Some are officers and in- 
 structors, as was the future tsar's counsellor Lefort, from Geneva. 
 Along with mechanical arts, Alexis introduced a few accomplish- 
 ments ; he had an opera in Moscow, in a real theatre ; his daughter 
 Sophia wrote a tragedy, and had a play of Moliere, translated by 
 herself, represented in the Kremlin. 
 
 Peter grew up among these foreigners. From them he took 
 lessons in civilization, and also in vice, for the German Slobodb 
 teemed with drinking dens and places of debauchery. A Hollander 
 was his tutor, a German girl his mistress ; Europeans of all nations 
 formed his social circle. Most of them, even Lefort himself, ap- 
 pear to have been men of middling information, more capable of 
 exciting the young tsar's curiosity than of imparting to him vast 
 or profound knowledge. Under his brother Theodor and the 
 regency of their sister Sophia, the foreigners already were numer- 
 ous and played an important part, but they did not rise above 
 suoaltern positions. Under Peter, their pupil, they were to be- 
 come the instructors of the nation ' ; under his niece Anne they 
 were to be, for a short while, its tyrants. The old tsars had 
 prepared their rule a long while ahead. Peter did not violently 
 alter the course already steered by Russia, did not turn her head 
 forcibly away from Asia and towards Europe ; he only hastened 
 
 1 Had there been any geniuses among them, Peter would have been 
 more wary how he trusted them : he was not the man to endanger or 
 share his authority, or to let the helm slip out of his own hand.
 
 286 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 her progress on a road on which she had entered of her own 
 accord. He did not throw her off the track ; he only made her 
 take a short cut, to catch up with Europe. 
 
 Tsar at the age of ten, 1 sole master of the empire at seven- 
 teen, Peter undertakes to transform the manners of a nation, of all 
 the most devoted to its ancient customs. Surrounded with for- 
 eigners the Dutchman Timmermann, the Genevese lyefort, the 
 Scotchman Gordon, the Frenchman Villebois he falls deeper and 
 deeper in love with foreign civilization, and, in Leibnitz's graphic 
 phrase, "sets to debarbarizing his native land." Before he at- 
 tempts to remodel his subjects after the pattern of European ideas, 
 he makes himself fully familiar with them. He travels in the 
 West, and, the better to become naturalized there, he lives the life 
 of the people. He gives his mind less to institutions than to 
 manners : it is these he is chiefly bent on importing into his own 
 country. His genius is marred by the faults of his race and his 
 own education, by his temperament and by the possession of 
 autocratic power. He may play the European ever so much, he 
 is unable to ' ' debarbarize ' ' himself ; he continually offends that 
 same Western culture of which he makes himself the missionary. 
 I/ike a child or a savage, he at times appears infatuated with only 
 the exterior of civilization. In order to polish the Moscovite, he 
 shaves his beard and makes him change his clothes. He does not 
 always distinguish between essentials and accessories. He at the 
 same time creates a navy and introduces smoking ; he pursues 
 with bitterest hatred beards and long-skirted kaftans. To certain 
 things, as for instance to the navy, he gives undue importance. 
 His reformer's zeal at times trenches on mania, his regulations 
 descend to pettiness. He frequently is content with appearances, 
 
 * Jointly with his half-brother, Ivan, a frail and sickly youth. The 
 brothers were on affectionate terms, and for his elder's sake, Peter bore 
 with the arrogance of the self-appointed regent, his half-sister Sophia, who 
 had incited a mutiny of the archers of the guard, and attempted his life 
 before he was ten years old.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 287 
 
 altering the garb rather than the man, the names rather than the 
 things ; he more than once appears satisfied with a mere Western dis- 
 guise. No matter. In his exaggerations, the indefatigable reformer 
 is more perspicacious than he seems ; measures, puerile at first 
 sight, concealed a deep-laid scheme. It is by the outside of things, 
 fashions, and exterior usages, that the Russians could most easily 
 be turned back into Europeans. The remainder the substance, 
 the essentials would follow : after adopting the garb of Europe, 
 his subjects would want to adopt also her manners and learning. 
 
 What in his travels particularly fascinates Peter, what he 
 strives most earnestly to introduce at home, is every kind of 
 mechanical inventions, crafts, technical proceedings. In that 
 again there may have been much of the child or the barbarian, 
 who is less impressed by theoretical knowledge than by its prac- 
 tical applications ; still, this certainly is the most accessible side of 
 a civilization, and in a country like Russia, it was not only the 
 easiest but the most useful to appropriate. To master the tech- 
 nical part, Peter at Zaandam becomes a journeyman : he wishes 
 to be not only the foreigner's pupil but his apprentice. He gives 
 himself what we would call to-day a professional education. In 
 his first trip to the West, his initiation trip, it is not to the uni- 
 versities, the academies, that he goes for lessons, but to the ship- 
 yard. In his second trip, even if he does give more attention to 
 arts and sciences, still he is always guided by the Great- Russian's 
 bent towards the positive, and by the reformer's practical sense. 
 The natural sciences are those that most exite his interest : 
 anatomy, surgery, mechanics, nautical sciences, civil and military 
 engineering. He brings home with him few scientists and fewer 
 artists, but is followed by an army of mechanics and overseers. 
 
 On his return he follows out the same method ; no detail is 
 too mean for him, and he is bent on teaching everything himself. 
 In the army, in the navy, he takes pleasure in passing through 
 all the grades, acting drummer one day, pilot the next. First 
 of all he teaches his people discipline, shows them how to sub-
 
 288 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 mit to the foreigners whom he has placed as instructors over them 
 as well as over himself. In true reformer-guise the first lesson 
 Peter gives is by example ; of that lesson he is lavish. He puts 
 his shoulder to everything ; handles the laborer's pick-axe, nay, 
 the headsman's axe. Never was man seen to practise so many 
 different crafts at once. He is the true jack-of-all-trades ; there is 
 nothing he cannot manufacture with his own hand : boats, ship- 
 models, pulleys, all that has anything to do with marine things, 
 these latter being his hobby. He produces masterpieces of work- 
 manship ; he also is an artist, he can engrave, carve. The supple 
 and versatile genius of the Great- Russians no less than their 
 realistic tendencies assert themselves in their emperor on a magni- 
 fied scale. Contrary to the ways of closet-reformers, execution is 
 what he has most at heart. He takes hold of all things with equal 
 ardor, reforming the primer and the calendar at the same time as 
 the administration of church and state and the manners of society, 
 asking Leibnitz for projects just as he demands models from his 
 craftsmen, gathering objects of art and scientific collections, even 
 while he is creating a navy and remodelling the army, endowing 
 industry with new fabrications, agriculture with foreign breeds of 
 cattle, and, as though he had had time to accomplish nothing, 
 leaving to the future numberless plans on each and every subject 
 and for all the portions of his vast empire.* 
 
 This manifold task was in reality one. Peter's conquests and 
 public labors were the outcome of his social reforms, of which the 
 
 * It is said that Catherine II., whose reverence for her great predecessor 
 amounted almost to superstition, never took up any project of reform or of 
 a new creation, before she had ordered a search in the state archives or 
 those of the respective departments, to ascertain whether Peter had not left 
 some memorandum, note, or directions, jotted down in his usual hasty but 
 clear and comprehensive manner on the particular matter in hand. The 
 search was scarcely ever in vain, and Catherine found support, encourage- 
 ment, and luminous guidance every time she sought for them, leaving to 
 the world a most touching and majestic instance of the communion, for the 
 good of the living and of those to be born, of two great spirits across the 
 dividing gulf of death.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 289 
 
 transfer of his capital was both symbol and means. When he 
 built St. Petersburgh and connected the Neva and the Volga by 
 canals, he gave the longest of Russian rivers one European mouth, 
 and by reversing the current of this great central artery he made 
 Russia recoil on the West. Morally and physically, it was the 
 same task still : the emperor suddenly brought back to Europe a 
 country whose head had for centuries been turned towards Asia. 
 
 Unfortunately, man is less easily bullied than nature, and Peter 
 treated both alike. In his passion for civilization, he inflicts it ; 
 he goes about it as much after the fashion of a barbarian as of a 
 great man, of a tyrant as of a reformer. His method at times de- 
 feats his end. In the words of a modern historian (KostomaVof ), 
 he employs Asiatic proceedings to europeanize his country. His 
 most familiar tools are the knut and the axe, to say nothing of the 
 cudgel which he did not spare to his favorites. He civilizes by 
 means of the rod. 
 
 Peter's great motor, great lever, is despotism, autocracy. He 
 neither corrects nor limits, but regulates and renovates it. He 
 does for autocracy what he has done for himself and for his people: 
 puts it into European clothes, shorter and lighter, so as to give it 
 greater liberty of movements. To the scandal of the Old- Russians, 
 the semi-sacerdotal robes of the ancient sovereigns are exchanged 
 for a military uniform ; the biblical and patriarchal designation of 
 Tsar makes room for the foreign and heathen title of Emperor * 
 " Public Weal" is Peter's deity ; to this idol he offers up every- 
 thing in sacrifice his health, his family, his people ; for its sake 
 he does not shrink from any measure, not from a renewal of the 
 sacrifice of Abraham. As a true revolutionist, he takes no more 
 account of historical obstacles than of moral or material ones. 
 Sentiment, tradition, facts all are equally powerless to arrest 
 him ; he thinks himself strong enough to break through every- 
 thing. 
 
 * Whatever its etymology, Oriental or Roman, the title of Tsar is the one 
 usually employed in the Slavic Bible: " Tsar Solomon," " Tsar Herod," etc. 
 
 19
 
 2QO THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 And he was. But how ? Could the energy of one human will, 
 with impunity, do violence to nature, history, time? By no 
 means. The fact is, all those barriers which Peter broke down 
 with so daring a hand were in reality frail and stood not high 
 from the ground ; those traditions which he shook so rudely were 
 not solidly rooted, either in the soil or in history; the people which 
 he undertook to turn up as with a plough, having no institutions 
 of its own, grown out of its own soil, could, without too much 
 presumption, be treated as a fallow field, or a tabula rasa. With any 
 other European nation, a reform so radical and so sudden would 
 have been insensate ; in Russia, it struck less against history and 
 nature than against preventions and prejudices partly come from 
 without ; opinions and habits which, although inveterate, had not 
 been of necessity imposed by either climate or race, or by religion. 
 The outer side, the manners, the domestic fashions and usages 
 these were the things in which Peter encountered the most for- 
 bidding obstacles, and that alone accounts for the fact that he 
 waged war most passionately against external things : the long 
 garments and beards of the men, the veils of the women. 
 
 Peter the Great's undertaking was carried out by the most de- 
 termined genius, assisted by the most formidable array of power ; 
 that, however, was not what made its success. If his work did 
 not die with him, it was because it lay in the natural order of his 
 people's destinies ; it was because, in the words of Montesquieu, 
 "Peter I. was giving European manners and customs to a nation 
 which was of Europe." * 
 
 "Scratch the Russian and you will find the Tatar " is a sort 
 of proverb. It were rather more historically correct to reverse the 
 saying. In shaking off the Mongol domination, in washing off 
 the stain of bondage, in doffing the garb and habits taken under 
 alien masters or instructors, the Russian, the Christian Slav, 
 could not but gradually feel himself European once more. In its 
 vital portions, Peter's reform was merely a moral throwing off of 
 * Esprit des Lois, livre xix., ch. xiv.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 29! 
 
 the Tatar or Byzantine yoke, a reclaiming of soil and climate from 
 the habits of another race and sky, brought by Asiatic conquerors 
 and Oriental influences. There happened to live in the nineteenth 
 century a sultan nearly as determined as Peter the Great, armed 
 with power as absolute, who used nearly the same means in pursu- 
 ance of a similar design. The people he ruled also belonged, geo- 
 graphically, to Europe ; but what a difference between a Turk and 
 a Russian, after both have passed through the reforming process ! 
 The reason is that Mahmud was handicapped in his task by all 
 those very factors which had prepared the solution of his task for 
 Peter : the national spirit, religion, the very elements of civilization. 
 Peter left no heirs. Nevertheless what he had begun was con- 
 tinued. Never was undertaking seemingly so bound to one man's 
 life yet, contrary to all calculations, it survived him. Never 
 was order of succession more disturbed ; never consistency more 
 impossible : four women, partly or wholly foreigners, two boys, 
 two maniacs such were, in the course of a century, Peter's suc- 
 cessors. At each accession a barrack or bed-chamber revolution, 
 an overthrowing of ministers and policy. Each new reign takes 
 its stand in opposition to the preceding one, and the mighty of 
 yesterday are sent off to Siberia or the scaffold. The history of 
 Russia through the eighteenth century is one series of alternations 
 and reactions. It is through a haphazard succession of conspira- 
 cies and regencies sprinkled with attempts at aristocratic oligarchy, 
 in the hands of governments at once weak and violent, that Russia 
 is called upon to pursue the road opened out to her by Peter the 
 Great. The reform accomplishes itself in the midst of intrigues, 
 crimes, and debauchery, by the hands of adversaries almost as 
 much as of partisans. The capital, transferred to Moscow, is 
 brought back to Petersburgh ; the foreigners, by turns expelled 
 and recalled, ascend the throne with Peter III. and Catherine II. 
 In the midst of their bickerings, Peter's successors complete his 
 task, now correcting it, now overdoing it, but always, willingly 
 or not, carrying it onward.
 
 2Q2 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 To get itself done by such hands, the reform must needs have 
 been part and parcel of Russia's vocation. What singular guides 
 to civilization, what mortifying instructors for a great people ! 
 First a I,ivonian peasant, who can neither read nor write, assisted 
 by a former pastry vender, now prince and regent. 4 Then comes 
 a boy of twelve, who dies at fourteen, succeeded by a coarse 
 woman, who is ruled by the son of a Courland groom, 5 and for the 
 space of ten years, yields up the empire to the tyranny of Ger- 
 mans, who despise the Russians as an inferior race, yet do credit 
 to Russia by their arms, even while they oppress her and suck the 
 life-blood out of her, as the Spaniards or the Dutchmen did with 
 both the Indies. Emerging from this foreign domination, the 
 memory of which has remained as vivid and hateful among the 
 people as that of the Tatars, comes another child, an infant in 
 arms this time, then again an ignorant and sensuous woman, who 
 has no policy but the whims of her passions, or the spiteful 
 promptings of her vanity.* When at length the crown comes to 
 a man once more, Peter III. , he proves an idiotic brute and has 
 to be deposed. The land of autocracy must wait half a century 
 for a sovereign capable of ruling it, and when that sovereign 
 appears, it is a woman, a German, a disciple of the French 
 philosophers. 
 
 4 Catherine I. and Alexander Me"nshikof. The origin and earliest life 
 of Catherine are and always will be wrapped in uncertainty. There is no 
 doubt, however, that Peter raised her from a low estate when he made her 
 his companion. She gave him what he most needed : rest and cheerful un- 
 ceremonious comradeship, comprehension and sympathy. In marrying 
 her, he not only discharged a debt of gratitude, but did the best possible 
 thing for himself. She was to the end a good wife to him, and what he 
 most prized with his peculiar tastes a good, thrifty house-wife. As to 
 Mdnshikof, he was one of Peter's most trusty, zealous, and intelligent help- 
 ers. The reformer had need of such and took them where he found them ; 
 his marvellous, instantaneous insight into character never stood him in 
 better stead. 
 
 * Anne, a niece of Peter the Great, and Biron a disgrace to humanity, 
 a foul blot on even the pernicious race of court favorites. 
 
 ' Elizabeth, youngest daughter of Peter the Great
 
 HISTOR Y AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZA TION. 293 
 
 At home and abroad, Catherine II. was Peter I.'s true succes- 
 sor. I^ke him unburdened with scruples and moral sense, wholly 
 devoid of virtue, and gifted with the highest faculties of states- 
 manship, Catherine had over Peter the advantage of belonging 
 by birth to the civilization which she strove to propagate among 
 her subjects. With her woman's hand the Tsaritsa, who remains 
 European even in her faults, corrects and softens the reform 
 initiated by the Moscovite Tsar, invests authority with more 
 humaneness, lends more decency to the court, to the govern- 
 ment more polish and dignity, as well as greater regularity to 
 the working of the institutions. Catherine herself, however, 
 in her mode of governing, is lacking in one of the chief qual- 
 ities of her great model : unity of views, logical sequence in 
 action. With her it is the reverse, especially during the second 
 half of her reign, when she is too much inclined to neglect 
 the internal development of the nation in favor of its material 
 aggrandizement. 
 
 The work done by Peter the Great triumphed over the in- 
 capacity or the vices of his successors as well as over the reluctance 
 of his people. History has witnessed few such successes. Has 
 this success been as complete as has long seemed to the West ? 
 In the material order of things, it has, marvellously so : army or 
 navy, administration or industry the whole of modern Russia 
 was started by the son of Alexis. Some few of his innovations, 
 such as his " administrative colleges," may have been mistakes ; 
 others, such as his "Table of Ranks" and his bureaucratic 
 nobility, good perhaps for a period of transition, have in time 
 become nuisances. Such an undertaking was doomed to im- 
 perfection, to error even. What it were desirable to know is, 
 whether, while materially successful in his reform, Pi6tr Alexe"ye- 
 vitch morally accomplished his design. Has the steep path up 
 which he forced his country taken it to Europe and civilization 
 more rapidly than it would have arrived there by a more circui- 
 tous and easier road ?
 
 2Q4 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 However hard on the man's genius and the power of his will 
 such a verdict may be, the fact may be doubted. It may be that 
 Russia, left to the sole allurements of contact with Europe, might 
 have, by degrees, become more deeply imbued with her influence, 
 opening out wider, because spontaneously, to the breath from 
 the West, taking from it more discerningly what best suited her 
 temperament. If he did spare his country a long period of transi- 
 tion and took it at a leap over one or two centuries of uncertain 
 gropings, Peter could not achieve this miracle without making his 
 people pay for it dearly. The abruptness of the proceeding en- 
 tailed on Russia a fourfold failing : a moral evil, an intellec- 
 tual evil, a social evil, a political evil, came of it. Considered 
 from any one of these four points, the reform imposed by Peter the 
 Great produced sad results which still have much to do with the 
 woes and uncertainties of contemporary Russia. 
 
 In his passion for progress Peter neglected one thing without 
 which all others are fragile. He left out morals, which may not 
 be one of the principles of civilization, but which no civilization 
 can with impunity dispense with. Material culture was what he 
 envied Europe, what he was chiefly bent on borrowing from her. 
 There was in that something of the Great-Russian's realistic spirit, 
 the age was also partly to blame. The moral corruptedness and 
 intellectual anarchy of the eighteenth century gave pernicious 
 examples to a semi-barbarous people, more disposed, after such 
 peoples' wont, to appropriate the vices than the qualities of their 
 foreign instructors. Peter himself, being no longer a Moscovite and 
 not yet a European, having the bringing up of neither, owned abso- 
 lutely no moral restraint. The brutality of his pleasures, the feroc- 
 ity of his vengeances, made of him a singular apostle of progress. 
 The Moscovite coarseness combined with the sceptical license of 
 the West found their climax, around him and his first successors, 
 in a cynicism as repulsive to the Old-Russians as to Europe. 
 
 The means and the men employed by Peter in his work fre- 
 quently drew on it, instead of sympathy and admiration, the peo
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 2$$ 
 
 pie's horror and contempt. How could the latter love and honor 
 a learning and civilization which, in Herzen's words, were ten- 
 dered to them at the knufs end, and that by hands frequently 
 impure ? By the rigor of his laws, the indiscretion of his regu- 
 lations, the cruelty of his punishments, the reformer, busy princi- 
 pally over external discipline, himself taught hypocrisy and base- 
 ness. By unscrupulously doing violence to the public conscience, 
 he weakened it ; while trying to polish, he demoralized. The 
 men he used as instruments of reform made the evil worse. Peter 
 often took the boon companions of his drinking bouts for associates 
 in his work of reformation. Germans and Europeans from every 
 land, the foreigners who, during a century, kept swarming into 
 Russia, generally brought sad moral teachings to the people they 
 pretended to renovate. Among these missionaries of Western 
 culture an honest man was perhaps as rare a bird as a great man. 
 The majority were adventurers, anxious to make a fortune, with no 
 other civilizing qualification than an immoderate appetite for 
 power and wealth. The best and most skilled still offended the 
 popular conscience. Being strangers to the people's customs and 
 beliefs, they ran their heads straight against prejudices and scru- 
 ples deserving of respect even in their ignorance.* 
 
 The eighteenth century was for Russia a school of demoraliza- 
 tion. The court of St. Petersburgh is a repulsive spectacle even 
 in the time of L,ouis XV. One feels that, in that young colony of 
 old Europe, two ages of corruption mix together. Debauchery, 
 venality, and bloody repression such are the three stages or the 
 three acts, of public life. A French philosopher who had been the 
 guest of Catherine II. said of Russia as it was then, that it was a 
 
 * Haxthausen (Studien, vol. i., p. 48) expresses the singular opinion 
 that the whole evil came from having forsaken German culture, introduced 
 by Peter the Great, for French culture, -which prevailed from Elizabeth on. 
 This is one of those claims familiar to German arrogance, too naive to merit 
 discussion. There is only one remark to be made in reply : that in the mid- 
 dle of the eighteenth century French culture prevailed everywhere, not to 
 mention that it was, of the two, the more congenial to the Russian nature.
 
 296 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 fruit rotten before it was ripe. 7 If the censure was merited, Europe 
 was in great part responsible. The Russians claim a high 
 standard for the manners of Old- Russia. Without disputing the 
 West's primacy in matters intellectual and scientific, they are fain 
 to vindicate for their country and its patriarchal usages a moral 
 superiority.* They flatter themselves that, by remaining outside 
 of the West's great historical epochs, it has escaped the threefold 
 corruption of Middle Ages, Renaissance, and modern times. Pay- 
 ing tit for tat, they take pleasure in alluding to the rottenness of 
 the West ; they say that in the ancient empire of the tsars civili- 
 zation had a basis more moral and religious than in the brilliant 
 Western societies reared on heathenism ; they are prone to ascribe 
 the vices of new Russia to European contagion. The pictures 
 drawn by old travellers do not always endorse these claims, f In 
 the North, as everywhere, despotism and serfdom were a sorry 
 school for virtue. Still the traditional foundations of Moscovite 
 morality certainly were shaken by the imperial reform and the 
 teachings from the West. In a large proportion of the nation the 
 old-time manners and beliefs were destroyed before anything was 
 ready to take their place. Here, perhaps, lies another of those re- 
 mote springs of nihilism even in the classes converted to civiliza- 
 tion. By his way of casting to the winds national traditions, 
 institutions, prejudices, by his unceremoniousness in dealing with 
 the past of his people and his scant respect for his subject's cus- 
 toms, Peter, the most masterful of crowned revolutionists, might 
 I be looked upon as the true progenitor of modern nihilism or 
 "nothingism." 
 
 1 With the usual amiable candor of honored and petted guests, of which 
 this noble country, like our own, has had some edifying experience. 
 
 * This opinion of the Slavophils will be found developed at length in the 
 Histoire de la Civilisation en Russia, from the Russian of Jerebtsdff. It 
 crops up at every step in the writings of many of Russia's most popular 
 writers. See, for example, A Writers Diary, by Dostoye"fsky, 1880. 
 
 t Olearius, Mergeret, Fletcher, draw a black picture of the morality 
 of both laymen and clergy. Others, it is true, such as Herberstein, give 
 accounts more favorable to Russian manners.
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 297 
 
 To the moral evil in Peter the Great's work was added an 
 intellectual evil, and, by a fatal concatenation, this latter brought 
 in its train social and political evil. The mind, like the heart, 
 
 was forced off the track. The reformer pressed too hard on certain 
 
 
 
 Russian qualities almost unknown before his time and soon to be, 
 thanks to him, carried to excess: the ease with which the Russians 
 comprehend and assimilate any and every thing. Or, what comes 
 to the same, the reform emphasized certain faults which they held 
 from nature or history, such as the want of originality, insufficient 
 personality. Peter unconsciously made echoes and reflections of 
 his subjects. Urging them violently along the road of imitation, 
 he smothered in them the spirit of initiative and thus deprived 
 them of the most active leaven of progress. By getting them into 
 the habit of thinking with other people's brains, he prolonged 
 their intellectual nonage under the foreigner's tutelage. This 
 tendency to imitation delayed by a century the birth of an original 
 national literature. The Russian of St. Petersburgh was subjected 
 to every influence from the West, obediently reproducing the most 
 contradictory ones, going to school by turns to the Encyclopedists 
 and the French emigrants, to Voltaire and Joseph de Maistre, and, 
 be it from weariness or supineness, too often inclining to a hollow 
 scepticism, too often carried away by externals and appearances.* 
 To these intellectual vices corresponds the social vice, the 
 denationalization of one half of the nation, the severing of the 
 classes. By dint of copying the foreigners, the reformed Russian 
 ceased to be a Russian. All that was national went the way of 
 the kafthn and the beard, the way of the language too, reduced 
 to the condition of a dialect left to the ' ' common people. ' ' Peter, 
 so thoroughly Russian in character, seemed to have set himself the 
 task of germanizing his subjects. To the cities which he founded, 
 
 * " Everything is always changing in your country, Prince, the laws like 
 the ribbons, the opinions like the waistcoats, the systems of all kinds like 
 the fashions ; a man sells his house as he sells his horse. Nothing is con- 
 stant but inconstancy." (Letter from Jos. de Maistre to Prince Kozldfsky, 
 1815.)
 
 298 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 to the institutions which he created or renovated, he gave German 
 names, often fabricating useless barbarisms, incomprehensible to 
 the people. At one time, he is said to have been on the point of 
 making German the official language. Under his daughter Eliza- 
 beth it was the French language's turn, and that stayed over a 
 century as undisputed sovereign. 
 
 The surface layer, the upper classes alone, became impregnated 
 with the manners and ideas of the West. The substratum, the 
 bulk of the people, remained impermeable. As the latter re- 
 mained Russians while the former were transmuted into make- 
 believe Germans and Frenchmen, Russia split herself into two 
 peoples, severed by language and habits, unable to understand 
 each other. The great cities and lordly mansions arose in the 
 midst of the rural population like foreign colonies. As for the 
 masses, the precipitancy with which the leading classes rushed 
 westward rather delayed their progress. Having been left too far 
 behind ever to join their masters, the common people were aban- 
 doned to barbarism. 
 
 This social evil crops up in politics. Unconnected, unharmo- 
 nized, the institutions were out of tune with the country. 
 Imported wholesale and with no roots in the soil, they often were 
 transplanted before it was made ready for them. While in the 
 West the modern era rests on the Middle Ages and each century 
 on the preceding one, in Russia the entire political building, as 
 the entire civilization, had neither a national basis nor historical 
 foundations. The whole government organization was an append- 
 age, to which the people remained strangers. Most of the laws 
 were growths of other climes : they resembled borrowed clothes, 
 suiting neither the figure nor the habits of the wearer. 
 
 A contemporary thinker * makes the remark that one of the 
 characteristics of the modern era, and one of the evils the peo- 
 ples of the continent have most suffered from since the eighteenth 
 century, is too much law-making, too great a confidence in the 
 * Mr. Le Play, Social Reform,
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 299 
 
 written letter, regarded as the supreme and irresistible vehicle of 
 progress. Well, nowhere has this fault been carried to the extent 
 it has reached in the Russia of Peter the Great and his successors. 
 No other state perhaps has seen such abundant and intrepid legis- 
 lating, because the legislator nowhere else disposed of such means 
 of action. The whole history of Russia, the whole long Mosco- 
 vite period in particular, apparently served only to fashion in the 
 person of the imperial autocrat an omnipotent lawgiver, free to 
 do and dare all things. The heirs of Peter and Catherine outdo 
 one another in raining ukazes, believing all things lawful to them, 
 never appearing to doubt the success or efficiency of these decrees 
 so hastily issued and annulled, innovating and modifying without 
 rest or pause, commanding and forbidding, and frequently by 
 dint of variations, inconsistencies, contradictions warping and 
 discrediting in the public mind the very notion of law itself, which, 
 in Russia, appears as the expression of an individual will, power- 
 ful and dread, but fleeting and changeful. The people at last are 
 reduced to a state like that of an inert patient, if not of an unfeel- 
 ing corpse, over which the masters of the empire bend in the 
 guise of physicians performing dire experiments in anima vili. 
 More than that, the sovereigns themselves, not of their own will 
 but by the force of their everlasting altering, remodelling, upsetting 
 all that seemed settled and done with, have taught their people to 
 look on the country as on a tabula rasa, or on the stage of a theatre 
 the scenes of which are shifted at the whistle of the machinist. 
 
 The Russia of Peter the Great, that of Catherine II. and of 
 Alexander II., afford the best illustration of what written law can 
 and what it cannot accomplish. In no other state has law-making 
 so often shown at once the extent and limit of its power. In the 
 hands of autocracy, modern Russia seems, once or twice in a cen- 
 tury, on the point of being entirely transformed in the course of 
 a few years, but the most long-suffering of peoples are not to be 
 thus kneaded by their masters' knuckles. To look at the laws, 
 Russia has been more than once upturned from the very bottom ;
 
 300 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 but laws do not reach a people's soul. To be efficient, the 
 changes accomplished in the legislation should have a parallel in 
 the minds and customs. Otherwise, no harmony existing between 
 law and custom, nothing comes of it but disturbance and a gen- 
 eral ill-at-ease feeling, and this is what, in the course of the last 
 two centuries, the Russians have too frequently experienced. 
 
 Moral or intellectual, social or political, all the ills under 
 which Russia suffers ever since Peter the Great may be summed 
 up in one : dualism, contradiction. The nation's life and con- 
 sciousness have been cleft in twain ; the country, stirred to its core, 
 has not yet been able to recover its balance. That is, possibly pn 
 a larger scale, the uncomfortable feeling familiar to France since 
 the Revolution. Whether they are started from above or from 
 below, these violent transformations, which become for a people 
 the starting-point of a new life, always leave behind them a pain- 
 ful trail. There remain in society and in the public mind discords 
 which sway aside the soundest judgments. France had this 
 advantage, that her Revolution was made by herself, in accord- 
 ance with her own genius, and that, in its errors as in its successes, 
 it was wholly French. In Russia the revolution was made by the 
 authorities, under foreign influence, the schism between the past 
 and present was deeper, the jar and wrench in the nation's life 
 more painful. To Peter's reforms are traceable many of the oppo- 
 sitions, or rather anomalies, which, in Russia, caused contrast to 
 become law. Institutions and customs, ideas and facts find it 
 hard work to get attuned together. In the nation as in the indi- 
 vidual, dissonances of all kinds abound. The Russian is divided 
 against himself, he feels double ; at times he does not know what 
 he believes, what he thinks, what he is.* 
 
 Being no longer herself, and not feeling herself European yet, 
 Russia is as though suspended between two shores. In order to 
 
 * "Peter," wrote Joseph de Maistre in another letter to his Russian 
 friend, " Peter has placed you in a false position towards the other coun- 
 tries : nee tecum possum vivere, nee sine te [ "I can live neither with nor 
 without you,"] that is your motto." (Letter to Prince Kozldfsky, Oc- 
 tober, 1815.)
 
 HISTOR V AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZA TION, 301 
 
 get out of this duality from which her sufferings come, is she to 
 lean wholly to one side and rush forward on the West, or to 
 recoil and resolutely return to old-time Moscovia? What is 
 best to wade knee-deep into imitation, or, casting aside all foreign 
 importations, practise rigorous self-sequestration, and return to 
 all that is national ? But in the scantiness of the inheritance left 
 by the past, in the midst of the ruins and rubbish accumulated by 
 Peter and his successors, where is ' ' all that is national " to be 
 found most of the time ? Russia is physically and morally too 
 near to Europe, to which in these last two centuries she has drawn 
 nearer still, to be able to snap the bond. She is European, but 
 her historical bringing up has given her with regard to the peo- 
 ples of the West certain dissimilarities which one or two centuries 
 did not suffice to obliterate. The solution of the problem of her 
 future lay in the conciliation of these two terms : Russia and 
 Europe, civilization and nationality. 
 
 It is with Peter's reform as with the French Revolution: we may 
 deplore their violences, we may point out their fallacies ; not the 
 less for that will both remain, each for the nation it has renovated, 
 the steadfast basis of all future moral development. Russia's 
 task with regard to her European reform is the same as France's 
 with regard to her Revolution : it is no use lamenting and regret- 
 ting. All there is to do is to carry on the work, correcting it as 
 we go, but also strengthening and completing it, giving way to 
 neither discouragement nor precipitancy. 
 
 What reason counsels Russia, her own impulse leads her to 
 carry out through inevitable delays. The three last reigns bear 
 witness to this, even though two of them were as barren, seem- 
 ingly, as the third was fertile. Open to all generous illusions, in 
 love by turns with a vague liberalism and a sort of authoritative 
 mysticism, Alexander I. was conscious of his people's discomfort, 
 and during many years his dream was to heal it. In him the 
 final reformer appeared to have arisen, the Messiah expected 
 through centuries ; but he proved only a precursor. He had it not 
 in him to go beyond feeble flutterings of will, timid attempts.
 
 302 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 All the aspirations and contradictions of his time appeared to be 
 centred in him, and his time was one of the most troubled in his- 
 tory, and the most fitted to trouble well-meaning souls. 
 
 In him also came out most clearly all the faculties and all the 
 contrasts characteristic of the modern Russian, the civilized Rus- 
 sian, frequently at strife and at odds with himself, such as he 
 came out of the reforms of the eighteenth century. I,ike Peter 
 the Great, although in a very different way, Alexander I., with 
 his nature so weirdly made up of strength and softness, ' ' of 
 manly qualities and feminine weaknesses ' ' ; with his noble infat- 
 uations and his facility to become enamoured by turns of the most 
 divers ideas; with his alternations of illusion and discourage- 
 ment, of action and apathy, this monarch of enigmatic char- 
 acter, so variously and sometimes so unjustly appraised, might be 
 given as one of the historical types of the national temperament.* 
 The brilliant, versatile son of Paul I. the liberal pupil of the 
 republican I^aharpe the mystic confidant of Madame de Krii- 
 dener appears to embody not merely an epoch and a generation, 
 but an entire race, with its collective intellect, a race that to this 
 day is alive on the banks of the Neva. 
 
 As man and as sovereign, Nicolas was the direct opposite of 
 his brother and predecessor. In him the old Moscovite tsars 
 appeared to revive, rejuvenated and polished up after the modern 
 fashion. Tall, well-built, stern, indefatigable, never doubting 
 himself or his system, Nicolas was the true, typical autocrat. 
 Distrustful of all change, stability was his ideal. The revolutions 
 in the West scared him, and he cut himself adrift from Europe. 
 For nigh on a third of a century Russia seemed to be going back- 
 wards ; but this very reaction served as corrective to the main 
 blemish of Peter's reform denationalization. The tyranny of 
 imitation relaxed, nationality began to crop up everywhere, and 
 first of all it revived in its proper place in art and literature. 
 
 * See the portrait of Alexander I. by Metternich (Mtmoirgs, etc., vol. 
 L, pp. 316, 317).
 
 HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 303 
 
 Slavophil theories notwithstanding, the European influence did 
 not suffer . Between the West and his subjects Nicolas had raised 
 a Chinese Wall, or rather, after the manner of Russian house- 
 keepers at the approach of winter, he had hermetically closed and 
 caulked up the windows carefully going over every chink 
 through which the outer air might thread its way into the house. 
 But even if the breath from Europe and the pression of external 
 air could not have defied the custom-house and the imperial cen- 
 sure, the Russian atmosphere was already too impregnated with 
 European ideas to be capable of disinfection. The reign of Nico- 
 las has shown that, with all its omnipotence, autocracy was not 
 strong enough to keep Russia long from rolling down the incline on 
 which Peter the Great had started her. The Crimean War made 
 patent to all eyes, together with the feebleness of the stationary 
 system, the necessity for Russia of placing herself, socially, if 
 not as yet politically, on one level with the West, if only to be 
 in a condition to stand her own against it. 
 
 Under Alexander II. the gates were thrown open and the re- 
 form came at last that was to reconcile Russia with herself as well 
 as with Europe. This time it was not a whitewashing or a patch- 
 ing up of the facade-stucco, or a mere outer casing ; it was an 
 upheaving and a remodelling of the very foundations of society ; 
 it was the whole people, not one class, that was called to liberty 
 and civilization. Until the emancipation of the serfs, the work of 
 Peter I., having left out the bulk of the nation, lacked a basis ; 
 the emancipation gave it one. 
 
 I,ike Peter's, Alexander's reforms were worked from above, by 
 the hand of autocracy, but not again were they enacted before a 
 passive, inert people, through the agency of foreigners called in 
 from abroad, with the help of rods and knut ; they were accom- 
 plished with the co-operation and at the demand of a power 
 entirely new in Russia public opinion. Already the chief motor 
 of Russian history, its main or indeed only spring, autocracy, does 
 not appear to be the only factor of progress. It is that, indeed,
 
 304 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 which, as in past times, sets in motion the vast machinery, but the 
 impulse which formerly had no other spring often now comes 
 from below. This change is but the prelude to another which 
 must gradually modify the habits and traditions of the state. 
 Russian civilization has, so far, been fashioned by ukazes ; it 
 cannot be completed without the participation of the nation. The 
 proceedings of Peter the Great and Catherine II. have served their 
 time ; Russia is sufficiently European now to be associated to the 
 work. After having compelled her to taste of the arts and sciences 
 of the West, it becomes awkward to hinder her taking a bite at its 
 liberties too. The reign of Alexander II., therefore, may be con- 
 sidered as the closing of a long historical cycle the cycle of 
 autocratic reforms. 
 
 By persisting in maintaining the absolute regime in its integ- 
 rity, autocracy attempts to survive itself. By refusing to lend 
 itself to transformations that have become unavoidable, it only 
 risks to make them more difficult and perilous without rendering 
 them less necessary. From Ivan III. and Ivan IV. to Peter, 
 from Catherine to the three Alexanders, autocratic power appears 
 to have fulfilled its historical mission. It has been said that states 
 are preserved by the same means that made them. This seems 
 to apply particularly to Russia. By her traditions, by her size, 
 by her social and ethnical composition, colossal Russia manifestly 
 needs a strong governing power ; but it can be strong without be- 
 ing absolute Prussia and the German Empire are a proof of that. 
 After the great economical, social, administrative reforms of the 
 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the political reforms must 
 come sooner or later. However complicated, however arduous they 
 may be, Russia scarcely can put them off much longer. That 
 task will be the inheritance of the twentieth century. May it be 
 achieved peaceably, gradually, by the hand of the tsars them- 
 selves, for the happiness of the people of the great empire ! * 
 
 * See, on this weighty matter, Vol. II., Book IV., Chaps. III. and IV.
 
 BOOK V. 
 THE SOCIAL HIERARCHY : THE TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Class Distinctions in Russia : In what Respects they are Superficial and 
 External, in what Deep and Persistent Blow Struck at the Old-Time 
 Social Hierarchy by the Emancipation All Subsequent Reforms Tend- 
 ing to the Lowering of Class Barriers How, in this Respect, the Work 
 Done by Alexander II. Resembles that Done by the French Revolution, 
 and how it Differs Therefrom Character and Origin of all these 
 Social Distinctions Privileged and Non-Privileged Classes Lack of 
 Solidarity between the Former ; Lack of Homogeneousness in Each 
 Accessory Classes. 
 
 THE most salient fact presented to the French observer by 
 Russia's social constitution is the division of the population into dis- 
 tinct groups, into classes neatly defined, for a long time one might 
 almost have said into castes. History and law have divided 
 the Russian people into compartments, superposed like tiers which, 
 from base to summit, would go tapering off abruptly. Russian 
 society thus looks from a distance much like a pyramid in stages 
 that of Saqqarah on the Nile, or the pseudo-Tatar four-tiers tower 
 in Kazan, each tier further subdivided into secondary steps. To 
 look on the outside of it only, this society, elaborately partitioned, 
 appears made for people who, in the classification of the various 
 social layers, see the first condition of a nation's greatness. From 
 afar, with all her denominations and official rubrics, Russia would 
 seem to realize the dreams of the utopists of hierarchy ; one seems
 
 306 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 to see a vast Salentum, where every man, at his birth, finds his 
 place and pursuits marked out for him by the law. 
 
 On a nearer view it turns out something quite different. At 
 the very time when all the demarcations were most precise, those 
 official frameworks, in which the different classes are arranged 
 according to a pre-determined order, might possibly have misled 
 the theoreticians enamoured of social distinctions. How much 
 more is it so now, when such manifold reforms have rehandled, 
 overhauled, altered in a thousand ways the old hierarchical order ! 
 Were Russia's strength there, as foreigners so generally fancy, 
 Russia would have already lost the inner power long attributed to 
 her by the prejudiced West. 
 
 Russia's social constitution, such as it was, fashioned by the 
 two or three last centuries, was based on the servitude of the peas- 
 antry ; the emancipation could not fail to shake it. In this regu- 
 larly stratified society, it was difficult for the lower tier suddenly 
 to straighten itself up without disturbing the balance of the 
 tiers it was supporting. The old-time classification into orders 
 still subsists before the law nominally, externally, of course ; in 
 reality it is considerably honeycombed. This progressive decrease 
 of class distinctions and social privileges, indeed, proves on a closer 
 inspection to be one of the main characteristics of contemporary 
 Russia. 
 
 If we attempt to sum up into one all the alterations that have 
 taken place in our own days in the immense Empire of the North, 
 it will be found that they all culminate in this one essential fact : the 
 progressive abrogation of the differences existing between the 
 classes or castes, or, what amounts to the same thing in the suc- 
 cessive reduction of both prerogatives and burdens peculiar to each 
 of the various classes. This is the central point towards which 
 converge the numerous reforms of the last reign, the climax from 
 which the observer can best appreciate their order and bearing. 
 
 Administrative or judicial, ecclesiastical, financial, or military 
 all these alterations, which strike at all the branches of public
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY: TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 307 
 
 life, tend at bottom, more or less directly, more or less consciously, 
 towards one and the same end the lowering of caste barriers, the 
 obliteration of old boundary lines, the widening of social compart- 
 ments, in one word, the equal distribution of state favors and 
 state burdens among all the parts of the nation. Whether or no 
 the goal were distinctly perceived by the promoters of the reforms, 
 whether they pursued it of their own free and clearly defined will, 
 or unknowingly yielded to a secret and involuntary impulse the 
 final terminus stands out afterwards with extraordinary distinct- 
 ness. Whatever branch of administration one may take up to study, 
 courts of justice, army, taxation, municipal or provincial institu- 
 tions the same tendency will invariably assert itself. Therein, 
 we repeat, lies the bond which links all the late reforms together, 
 and which, notwithstanding serious breaks and gaps, and singular 
 inconsistencies, lends them that which is the stamp of great 
 things unity. 
 
 There certainly are incoherences, restrictions, contradictions, 
 shortcomings of all sorts ; within the last few years especially 
 there have been many waverings, side-starts in the direction of 
 reaction, attempts at backing out ; the fact is not the less there. 
 In the Russia of Peter the Great and his successors, all the rights, 
 all the immunities administrative, judicial, military were be- 
 stowed on each class separately ; it is the other way now ; the 
 democratic proceeding prevails, which deals with a people and 
 wots not of classes. In the midst of the nineteenth century 
 Russia still clung, in this respect, to mediaeval views and ways ; 
 under Alexander II. she became a modern country. In this 
 respect the work, as yet incomplete, of the Liberator, bears a 
 striking resemblance to that of the French Revolution ; its final 
 terminus is civil equality, without distinction of classes, races, 
 religions. 
 
 There are, however, important differences between the two, in 
 the manner in which each was prepared, and in the manner in 
 which each was carried out. In the France of the ancien rtgime
 
 308 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the moral barriers between the different classes, especially between 
 the nobility and the middle class (noblesse and tiers-ltaf}, had 
 been overthrown and obliterated by custom before they were abol- 
 ished by law. The distance between noble and burgher, still so 
 impassable in the seventeenth century, had been bridged over in the 
 eighteenth. Salons and belles-lettres the drawing-room and the 
 study had brought the two together, frequently even merged 
 them into one. The only distinction now lay in the outer man, 
 the costume, and on the day on which the noble laid aside sword 
 and embroideries the last difference vanished. Uniformity of 
 garb and manner betokened spiritual similarity. As a living 
 historian remarks, equality de facto had preceded equality de 
 jure; noblesse and tiers-etat were placed on a par by education and 
 mental capacity, even while still separated by privileges.* Not 
 so in Russia, even on the eve of the latest reforms. The noble, 
 the priest, the townsman, the peasant, were severed not merely 
 by legal privileges, but by habits, bringing up, even natural 
 inclination ; they were so many different men, and in order to 
 make them alike it was not enough that the law should place them 
 on an equal footing. The classes not having been brought together 
 by manners before they were so by law, the taking down of the 
 legal fences which kept them apart did not suffice to bring about 
 a fusion ; it is only with time and indirectly that the great results 
 of the social reforms will unfold themselves. 
 
 Between the French Revolution and the imperial reforms 
 there is another difference, an opposition in the midst of re- 
 semblances. For reforms made by monarchs and those made 
 by popular revolutions cannot, even when tending the same way, 
 be accomplished in the same manner ; the former do not proceed 
 after the violent, abrupt, uncompromising fashion natural to the 
 latter. While the revolutions started from below aim first of all 
 at the outer shell of things and bear a grudge against names as 
 much as against substance, reforms from above are often inclined 
 
 * Taine : Les Origines de la France Contemporaine : PAncien Rtgimc.
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 309 
 
 to respect the shell, content in proportion as the innovations are 
 less apparent. The class distinctions have not been abolished in 
 Russia, the forms and moulds are still untouched. Instead of 
 dropping them as empty shells and taking them down as useless 
 scaffoldings, the lawgiver has kept them all. The lovers of the 
 past are thus left free to dream of some day forcing back into them 
 the various classes of the nation, of reconstructing the social 
 order on the old lines with some slight modifications. 
 
 These distinctions, it should be remembered, have, in history 
 and manners, roots too deep to be eradicated in a few years. There 
 are still reasons for their existing in Russia which in Western 
 Europe have vanished long ago, or never existed at all. One is 
 the exotic manner of the introduction of modern civilization and, 
 as a consequence, the enormous, the incalculable difference in 
 manners and culture ; another is the double system of land tenure, 
 inalienable and held in common by the recently emancipated 
 peasants, individual and hereditary for the former serf-owner. 
 
 legislation and society itself are, with regard to this matter, in 
 a state of transition ; a study of the different classes is all the 
 more arduous and complicated. It is often difficult for a foreigner 
 to find out what has been abrogated by the recent reforms, and 
 what has not, to distinguish nominal rights and privileges from 
 real ones. Yet nothing is of greater importance for the discrimina- 
 tion of facts from appearances. Outwardly, this society, the best 
 framed, most neatly partitioned and pigeonholed, seems to be one 
 of the most aristocratic in Europe. Virtually there is none more 
 democratic. Here again, there is, between show and reality, one 
 of those contrasts so familiar to Russia and so bewildering 
 to strangers. 
 
 " In our country," one of the principal compilers of the Eman- 
 cipation Act, Prince (kniaz) V. Tcherkassky, once said to me 
 " the distinctions of classes have never existed but on the sur- 
 face. From the Varangians of Rurik to Peter the Great and 
 Catherine II., the nobility has been only a thin and superficial
 
 310 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 alluvion. On scratching the soil you find the old Slavic hard-pan 
 smooth and even." 
 
 A foreigner, therefore, must not be beyond measure astonished 
 if, contrary to the evidence of his own eyes, he hears Russians as- 
 sert that there are no class-distinctions in Russia, that every kind 
 of hierarchy has always been repugnant to the Russian nature. 
 This assertion, first made by the Slavophil school, is joined in by 
 all the Slavic nations, with the exception of the Poles, who, in this 
 respect, as in many others, are different from their race-brethren. 
 Fundamental unity of the people, social homogeneousness, is given 
 out as the distinctive feature of the Slavic genius, as the charac- 
 teristic of their civilization and the main condition of their future 
 development. 
 
 In Russia the individual does not, as in France, stand isolated 
 before the state. Each man is classed in the administrative 
 nomenclature under some rubric ; each belongs, by birth or pro- 
 fession, to a given group, of which he shares the rights and obli- 
 gations. The law distinguishes between the noble, the priest, the 
 peasant, the townsman. Until the last few years, every one held a 
 different position as regards taxation, the administration of justice, 
 and military service. Bach order had its own organization, its 
 co-operation forms, its assemblies and elective officers, sometimes 
 its own judges and courts ; each assumed guardianship over those 
 of its members who were under age, and at times was held respon- 
 sible for its grown-up members. These charges or immunities, as 
 well as this internal self-government, in many cases still subsist ; 
 but the various classes are no longer kept apart. 
 
 The government of the Emperor Alexander II., in endowing 
 Russia with provincial assemblies, has for the first time called on 
 the different orders of the nation to deliberate in common ; but 
 such is still the distance between them that, in the common sit- 
 tings of these assemblies, pointedly entitled ' ' of all classes, ' ' each 
 class usually has its separate representatives, elected in private 
 partial gatherings. While introducing self-government into local
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY . TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 311 
 
 administration, Russia appears to be wavering between the system 
 which gives to each group of the population special representatives, 
 and that of mixing all the inhabitants up together in one common 
 representation. The former method, but lately in general use, 
 prevails in the provincial councils, in the ztmstvo, the most impor- 
 tant of deliberative assemblies in contemporary Russia ; the latter 
 has recently been applied to the municipal town-councils as well as 
 the jury. Which of the two systems will finally triumph ? Which 
 will be preferred on the day on which the empire will receive a 
 political constitution ? Will the nobility, the towns, and the 
 peasants have separate representatives, separately elected, and 
 deliberating in common ? Or will one of the orders the nobility, 
 for instance, with or without the clergy have a separate house, 
 as in England ? There lies, concerning the future of Russia, a ques- 
 tion not unlike that which had to be met at the outset of the French 
 Revolution, at the time of the convocation of the States-General 
 a ticklish question, which no one could solve without first becom- 
 ing familiar with the social organization of former times, and with- 
 out having gauged the value and real force of each of the great 
 groups which, together, constitute the nation. 
 
 A whole volume of the bulky Russian Code is devoted to 
 "classes, orders, or conditions." The Code contains no less than 
 sixteen hundred articles on this difficult matter, and numerous 
 amendments and appendices continually increase its complexity. 
 The law recognizes in Russia four principal classes : the nobility, 
 the clergy, the inhabitants of the towns and cities, the rural popu- 
 lation. This division is the natural outcome of the country's 
 history indeed of the social state of all primitive peoples. From 
 India to Scandinavia, everywhere almost, at a certain stage of 
 civilization, these four fundamental orders are found, the two 
 latter either separated, as in Sweden, or united under one name 
 as in France, without being really one in fact ; the warriors or 
 nobles at the top, together with the priests or clergy ; lower down 
 the men of trade and crafts, the burghers (bourgeoisie) ; quite
 
 312 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 below, the peasant or rustic, the husbandman, tiller of the earth. 
 This similarity in classification and hierarchy does not imply per- 
 fect identity everywhere. Though the social groups in Russia 
 may bear in French and German the same names as the classes 
 of feudal Europe in Sweden's old constitution, for instance, they 
 do not differ the less deeply from their foreign homonyms, and it 
 would be rushing into serious blunders to judge them one by the 
 others. 
 
 In Western Europe, whatever may be the actual social condi- 
 tion of the different nations in Spain or in Germany, in Italy or 
 Belgium, the words ' ' nobility, " " burgherdom, " ' ' peasantry, ' ' 
 have at bottom the same meanings ; they convey to the mind 
 analogous notions, because the classes designated by these terms 
 were born in the same age, under the same influences, at an epoch 
 when all Europe, I^atin or Teutonic, had institutions nearly 
 identical. Russia, in common with most Slavic peoples, was not 
 then a part of the European community, and therefore the same 
 names cannot possibly have there the same meanings. These 
 terms, "nobles," "burghers," we use in speaking of Russia only 
 from the lack of more fitting ones, and in order not always to utter 
 sounds unfamiliar to the European ear. This Russian hierarchy, 
 with all its class denominations, was indeed also born in the 
 Middle Ages but in Middle Ages of her own, different from the 
 same period in Western Europe. By their origin, by the spirit 
 of their kind and their historical rdle, the Russian noble (dvorianm) 
 and burgher (mi$sh-tchaniri) are probably still further removed 
 from their European equivalents than the Greek clergy from the 
 I^atin, the Orthodox married priest {pop} from the Catholic priest 
 vowed to celibacy. Between the two, there is scarcely as much 
 as a family likeness. 
 
 As all things in Russia, the constitution of the four principal 
 classes of society in their modern form dates from Peter the 
 Great, and, after him, from the great Catherine. It was Peter who, 
 in establishing the official hierarchy of ranks according to the
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 313 
 
 degree or pursuit of each person, definitely gave its national char- 
 acter to the Russian dvori&nstvo, the class entitled "nobility " in 
 the other languages. It was Catherine who, under the influence 
 of Western models, erected this nobility, as well as the class of 
 townspeople (so-called bourgeoisie), into corporations, endowed 
 with certain privileges. In the society regulated by Peter each 
 citizen seemed to have his place marked by the law, each class its 
 well-defined sphere of action, its specialty, so to speak. For all 
 classes or social categories, the nobility, as well as the rest, corre- 
 sponded at bottom to a determined occupation, and answered to 
 common charges and obligations, not to exemptions and privileges. 
 To the peasant fell the working of the land ; to the townsman, 
 trade and crafts ; to the noble, public service ; to the priest, the 
 altar. Each wheel, each attachment had its work marked out in 
 the service of the state, and none might shirk it. These classes, 
 so precisely outlined, between whom custom and training even 
 yet draw a harsher line than does the law, were, nevertheless, no 
 closed castes. The very nature of the governing power, whose 
 handiwork they were, could not allow them to shut themselves up 
 within themselves. Superior as well as inferior classes existed 
 only for the convenience of Throne and State, not in or for them- 
 selves, and the sovereign was always free to raise or lower his 
 subjects, in accordance with his needs or views, from one category 
 to another. 
 
 In such a society, where no class held any rights or preroga- 
 tives on their own merits or their ancestors', or in virtue of a 
 national tradition, none could have an}' rights that the governing 
 power need consider. All remained alike dependent on the 
 pleasure of him from whom they had received their prerogatives. 
 There was in these classes, especially in the nobility and burgher- 
 dom, no living organism instinct with a principle of spontaneous 
 action ; nothing but an inert mechanism, obedient to the directing 
 hand. Russia's example shows that hierarchy and class limita- 
 tions are not always safe pledges for a people's freedom. It is easy
 
 314 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 to lament the crumbling of social forces in countries where the 
 individuals, in their theoretical equality before the state, are 
 at once merged together and isolated, like the grains of sand in a 
 beach. This evil, however great, is difficult to remedy artificially. 
 To give social groups cohesion and unity it needs something more 
 than taking individuals and agglomerating them into corporations, 
 orders, classes. From a political point of view, nothing has real 
 consistency except the spontaneous products of nature and history, 
 the bodies which have formed and become cemented organically, 
 that have within and not outside of themselves the principle of 
 their life and power. 
 
 In Russia no class possesses political rights of any sort ; each 
 insures to its members personal rights and privileges which it 
 holds from the law and the sovereign's pleasure. In this respect 
 Russian society is divided or rather was, for the late reforms 
 have gradually wellnigh obliterated the distinction into two 
 main groups, the privileged classes and the non-privileged. The 
 former were exempt from military service, from the heaviest of 
 direct taxes the poll tax and from corporal punishment the 
 knut and the rods. As everywhere, these privileged ones were 
 the nobility and clergy, to whom were added the selectest of the 
 townsmen and tradespeople, what would be called in French, "la 
 grosse bourgeoisie, ' ' the big- wigs of the middle class. The rest of 
 the townsmen the small fry among tradespeople and mechanics 
 were, like the serfs, subject to conscription, capitation, and the 
 rods. Thus the rural and urban plebs formed one great rightless 
 mass, which from times immemorial went under the graphic 
 appellations of smerd ("the stinking") and tchern (" the dirty "). 
 
 But even amidst the privileged classes there was not by any 
 means the unity of spirit, the uniformity of culture in a word, 
 the moral homogeneousness, which was found in other countries 
 under similar conditions. Between the nobility and clergy there 
 was nothing like the union or solidarity, there were none of the 
 manifold ties, of family and interests, which, in old-time France,
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 315 
 
 made one of the two first orders of the state. Even before Peter 
 the Great the high church dignitaries had fallen into disfavor 
 with the nobility. Already the clergy, condemned to recruit 
 itself out of its own ranks, had become a sort of hereditary caste; 
 not that it was closed by law against outsiders, but because the 
 sons of priests were almost the only candidates. Since Peter the 
 Great, the clergy, confined to its church duties, and long 
 suspected of ill-will towards the innovations, 1 had remained, 
 like the bulk of the people, true to the old customs, 
 usages, ways to Old- Russia. The nobility, on the contrary, 
 recruited from among foreigners of many lands, favorites of the 
 sovereign and adventurers of all sorts, had, after a short resist- 
 ance, opened its door to the breath from Europe ; it was the only 
 class that adopted the garb, the mode of life, the ideas of the 
 West. This nobility, composed of serf-owners, mostly state 
 functionaries, and the privileged portion of the urban population, 
 had not much more in common in the way of interests or senti- 
 ment, for the tradespeople and " townsmen " generally are less far 
 removed from the people in tastes or bringing up in Russia than 
 in any other country. 
 
 One of the peculiarities of this social constitution is that each 
 of the four classes is divided into sub-classes, generally strangers, 
 frequently quite hostile towards one another. The dualism which 
 pervades the clergy, divided into priesthood and monkhood white 
 and black clergy, shows up to a certain degree in all the classes 
 of society. In the nobility there are the personal and the heredi- 
 tary nobles ; among the townsmen there are the " notables" on 
 one side, the mechanics and ' ' small people ' ' on the other ; even 
 the peasantry is divided into peasants attached to private land- 
 lords and peasants of the Crown demesnes. 
 
 'Not "suspected" convicted. At the head and at the root of all 
 opposition, the inspirers and instigators of rebellious discontent, the hidden 
 soul of ever reviving conspiracy, in the van of open resistance, lurking in 
 the gloom of church and convent cell, ear to lip with fair penitents and 
 callow youths, inciting to riot, treason and murder.
 
 316 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 The complexity of this social order does not stop there. Out- 
 side of these four great frames, further cut up by inner partitions, 
 there are smaller compartments, accessory or secondary, some 
 being remnants of an earlier organization, others destined for the 
 use of the inhabitants of countries more or less recently annexed, 
 and fitting but awkwardly into the older frames. Up to the time 
 of the reforms of Alexander II., the army, no less than the clergy, 
 could be regarded as a class by itself. In Russian statistics the 
 soldiers, their wives and children, figured in the midst of the 
 social nomenclature under a special rubric.* This was a conse- 
 quence of the long term of military service ; when a man knew 
 that he was to remain in his regiment twenty or twenty-five years 
 he entered the army very much as one enters the church for 
 life.f Once enrolled, the peasant ceased to belong to his native 
 commune ; once shaved, he never again donned the garb of his 
 younger days. As a rule, when age shelved him as to active ser- 
 vice, he would continue, in the humble functions that were gener- 
 ally awarded him, or in the places where he appealed to public 
 charity, to wear the military tunic. It is only since 1872 and 
 1874, i. e,, since the reduction of the term of service, that the 
 recruit is no longer severed from his class and commune by the 
 call under the flag. 
 
 In the first half of the present century, under Alexander I., 
 there was a moment when, owing to the military colonies invented 
 by Count Araktchyef, the profession of arms seemed on the point 
 of becoming a livelong and hereditary one. In certain districts, 
 the inhabitants of which were dubbed "soldier-husbandmen," the 
 girls were, equally with the boys, devoted to the army, destined 
 
 * These statistics, blundered over by the West, have sometimes led to 
 singular mistakes. Thus the figure of the class would be given as that of 
 the army, regardless of the fact that this figure, in the case of the Cosacks, 
 represented for over half its value women and children. 
 
 fThe long-term service was partly a consequence of the social organiza- 
 tion ; frequent levies and large contingents would have ruined the land- 
 lords by robbing them of their serfs, who, once entered on the army rolls, 
 were ipso facto manumitted.
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 317 
 
 at their birth to marry and bear soldiers. It was a novel sort of 
 serfdom, the promoters of which flattered themselves that they 
 would draw great profit therefrom, both for the forces and finances 
 of the empire. The resistance of the peasants, which sometimes 
 reached actual revolt, compelled Nicolas to give up this attempt. 
 Alexander II. , in this respect, followed tendencies directly opposed 
 to those which prevailed under Alexander I. The law which 
 abridged the term of military service at the same time that it 
 rendered it obligatory to all, struck another hard blow at class 
 distinctions. Instead of being an isolated body, a recipient of 
 privileges, or a bond slave, the army will become a levelling agent, 
 one of the principal factors in the fusion of classes and ranks.* 
 There is in the Russian army, or rather military forces, an im- 
 portant element which continues to form, to a certain extent, a dis- 
 tinct class, a warrior caste ; it is the Cosacks. Along the southern 
 frontier of the empire, along the lower course of the Don, the 
 Volga, the Ural, the Kuban, the Terek, there are still found 
 populations of mixed origin, all equally subject to a military 
 organization. This is the only resemblance the Cosacks bear 
 to Alexander I.'s soldier colonies or the old-time Granitchars 
 ("Military Confines") of Austria. In compensation for the 
 special burdens imposed on them, they have from the oldest 
 times enjoyed immunities which they always valued very highly ; 
 hence they were regarded as privileged bodies, although their 
 individual and corporative privileges were greatly curtailed in the 
 course of the centuries. Abroad the name of " Cosack," associated 
 with memories of invasion, awakens the ideas of barbarity and 
 plunder ; at home, the same name, associated with memories of 
 the unfettered life of the steppe, recalls the ideas of liberty and 
 equality. "Free as a Cosack" is to the Russian a deeply sig- 
 nificant saying, for it designates the man who has never borne 
 
 * Obligatory military service, mitigated by certain provisions, was 
 instituted in 1874. The term of service is, since 1888, five years in the 
 active army and thirteen in the reserve. A man belongs to the " territorial 
 army " (landwehr) till he is forty-three.
 
 318 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 either a foreign yoke or the bondage of the " glebe." Among the 
 chief Cosack groups, those of the Dniepr and the Don, equality 
 reigned as well as liberty. Both of them the former under 
 Polish sovereignty, the latter under the Moscovite sceptre formed 
 a sort of democratic republic. They elected their own atam&nsS 
 and, among themselves, knew of neither nobles nor serfs.* 
 
 In this respect the extreme south of Russia used to resemble 
 certain regions of the extreme north, where serfdom and nobility 
 never quite struck root. Like the peasants of Arkhangelsk and 
 Viatka, the Cosacks long preserved the forms of an ancient 
 Russian commonwealth foreign to class distinctions. These free 
 colonists of the steppe, for long years partly recruited from among 
 runaway serfs, had cast behind them, in flying from their old 
 homes, all traces of social hierarchy. The class distinctions 
 gradually regained ground among them, together with the 
 administration of modern Russia. Their officers were ennobled, 
 and of the old-time equality, as of old-time liberty, little more is 
 left than a memory, f 
 
 * Hetman is the genuine Little-Russian title. Atambn is a Great- 
 Russian corruption, and has somewhat deviated from the original meaning, 
 inasmuch as it has come to be used especially for " robber-chief. " Thus the 
 renowned Stie"nka Razin, and, under Catherine II., Pugatchdf, were the 
 atam&ns of their dreaded bands, but could never, by any possibility, be 
 entitled hetmans, while even Great-Russian historians never would designate 
 Hetmans Mazeppa or Khmelnitsky as atamUns. 
 
 * The Cosacks of later times, forming the vanguards of Russian power, 
 have contributed wonderfully to the conquest and colonization of the steppes 
 of the southeast and certain regions of Asia. Of all modern states, Russia 
 perhaps has best known how to utilize military colonization. On the old- 
 time Cosacks of Little- and Great-Russia, the reader might do well to peruse 
 the book of Prosper Me'rime'e, Les Cosaques <P A utrefois, in reality an epitome 
 of the researches of Mr. Kostomarof, one of the most eminent of Russian 
 historians. 
 
 f Even serfdom itself stole in amidst the Cosacks at the last, and, at 
 the moment of emancipation, there were nowhere so few free peasants as on 
 the territory of the "Army of the Don." As to the administrative and 
 financial immunities and privileges, they got gradually curtailed and almost 
 annihilated by the constant encroachments of centralization, as well as by 
 the progress of commerce and means of communication. Thus it is that the
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 319 
 
 Among the accessory classes placed outside or, it might be 
 said, in the gaps between the normal classes, one only deserves 
 special mention ; it is the class the members of which bear the 
 quaint name of odnodvdrtsy (meaning literally "one-yarders")- 
 They are men who own only one house and yard, and one lot of 
 land. They are freemen who, unlike the peasants, owned the 
 land they worked, in full property, individual and hereditary. 
 In this respect they stand nearer to the nobles, while, by their 
 bringing up and pecuniary circumstances, and by the fact that 
 they were subject to poll-tax and conscription equally with the low- 
 est classes of the nation, they might rather be counted with the 
 peasantry. This class, intermediate between the two main orders 
 of the state, numbered somewhere between two or three million 
 souls of both sexes. Some of them have achieved a degree of 
 prosperity unusual with the peasant, while others have sunk to 
 the level of the poorest mujik. Like the Cosacks, these people 
 might be regarded as representatives of another age of Russian 
 society. Their origin is somewhat obscure ; their ranks appear 
 to have been filled from several different classes. They them- 
 selves consider themselves, sometimes rightly no doubt, as nobles 
 fallen into penury and stripped of their privileges. The greater 
 part appear to be descended from soldiers, formerly settled along 
 Moscovia's southern border, and, in acknowledgment of their 
 services, provided for by gifts of land exempt from taxes for a 
 long time ahead. These warlike husbandmen formed, in front of 
 the Tatars, a line of observation and defence which, shifting 
 slowly southward, gradually strayed down into the steppes. To 
 this day it is in the Governments of Vor6nej, Kursk, Ori61, in the 
 provinces confining on Moscovia of old, that these " one-yarders " 
 are met with in greatest numbers. Whatever their origin, they 
 are, outside the nobility, almost the only representatives of free land 
 interest, as known in Europe ; by right of this, they form an in- 
 
 individuality, as well as the self-government, of the Cosacks is steadily 
 disappearing.
 
 32O THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 termediate link between the former serf and landlord, and may, 
 some day, contribute to endow Russia with one of the things she 
 is most lacking in a rural middle class. 
 
 Most of the classes into which the Russian population was di- 
 vided were of their nature so peculiar to Russia, to her social state, 
 that one hardly sees where alien populations were to come in, with- 
 out increasing the number of special subdivisions. Accordingly, 
 in order to do no violence to local customs, not to infringe the 
 recognized rights of the conquered countries, the Russian govern- 
 ment, at each new annexion, be it in Europe or Asia, found itself 
 compelled to create for its new subjects new rolls, new rubrics. 
 Each region, each race, each form of worship even, in the act 
 of being embodied in the empire, gave rise to special divisions, 
 social categories, each with its own rights and obligations. The 
 diversity of the nationalities that inhabit Russia is one of those 
 things which, even in Europe, delay the fusion and legal unifica- 
 tion of all the peoples scattered over Russian land. The nomadic 
 tribes, like the Samoyeds and Kalmyks, are naturally not included 
 in the four main classes. The Tatars, the Bashkir and all the 
 Mahometan population, still occupy in the cities or rural districts 
 a special position. The same applies in some ways to the free 
 agriculturists of Bessarabia, the burghers of what was once Poland 
 and of the Baltic provinces, to the German and Greek colonists in 
 the interior, lastly to the Jews of the western provinces. If they 
 do not form, as they did in the Polish Commonwealth, a fifth 
 order in the state, and a veritable caste, the Israelites, even after 
 the last reforms, are still subject, as to place of residence, property, 
 and elective functions, to certain restrictions which keep them in 
 the condition of a special -category in the midst of the very classes 
 of which they are members. This inferior position in which they 
 are held has probably much to do with the part taken by many 
 Jews in the political crimes of the last years. The supineness 
 with which the government acts in the matter of protecting them 
 against popular outbreaks, and the severe measures against them
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. $21 
 
 urged from time to time by the patriots of Moscow and Kief, are 
 not the things to inspire them with love or respect for the laws of 
 the empire. 
 
 Such is, in its archaic complexity, the social structure of 
 Russia. Under the law, or from custom, it is still, in a great 
 measure, a country of classes, though not of castes. This char- 
 acter some contend she must preserve, under penalty of becoming 
 another China, sacred to the ' ' mandarinate. " The reforms of 
 Alexander II. tended to a change in this respect, but some laws 
 of Alexander III. seem rather to favor a retrograde tendency. 
 The barriers which the father had lowered the son seems inclined 
 to build up again.
 
 BOOK V. CHAPTER II. 
 
 Disproportion between the Urban and Rural Populations Relatively Small 
 Number of Towns and Cities in Russia and all Slavic Countries 
 Explanation of this Phenomenon Reasons which Hinder the Agglom- 
 eration of the Population The Towns and their Inhabitants before 
 Peter the Great Efforts of Peter and Catherine to Create a Middle Class. 
 
 THE first thing that strikes one about the distribution of the 
 classes of the Russian population is the proportion or rather 
 the disproportion in their numerical force, and especially between 
 the population of cities and that of the country. This latter 
 rubric alone comprises the vast majority of Russian subjects. In 
 European Russia, not including the Kingdom of Poland, the 
 Grand Duchy of Finland, and the Caucasus, the latest census 
 (1867) gave for the "rural class," comprising the Cosacks, the 
 figure of about 55,000,000; for the "urban classes" proper 
 tradesmen, merchants, mechanics, townspeople, less than 
 6,000,000. The nobility and clergy are omitted in this valuation, 
 the former numbering from 800,000 to 900,000 souls, the latter 
 about 600,000. The clergy mostly live in the country, while the 
 nobility are divided about evenly between town and country. 
 Notwithstanding the fact that the urban population has been 
 increasing rapidly for the last twenty years, the peasantry "the 
 rurals " still represent an immense majority. This is a notable 
 fact, of vital importance to the social, economic, and political 
 status of Russia. 
 
 The disproportion between the two chief elements of the popu- 
 lation becomes more conspicuous if we realize what goes by the 
 name of town in Russian statistics. It is not only by their 
 scarcity, their dispersion over a vast territory, that Russian towns 
 
 322
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 323 
 
 differ from those of Western Europe. With their wooden houses, 
 low and far between, with their preposterously wide streets, 
 for which only the fear of fire accounts, streets usually unpaved, 
 where, as on country roads, snow, mud, and dirt alternate, these 
 towns are lacking in what constitutes the first characteristics of 
 cities in Western eyes. Instead of standing their houses closely 
 side by side, instead of heaping tier on tier up to the sky, like the 
 old cities of France, Italy, and Germany, and thus forming a 
 little world entirely distinct from the country, brimming with 
 only men and men's works, the Russian towns stretch and sprawl 
 out into the fields into which they merge, leaving between the 
 houses and the public buildings acres of waste land that can 
 never be filled or enlivened. To the traveller arriving from 
 Europe they appear as something huge, desert, unfinished ; they 
 often seem to be their own suburbs, and the foreigner expects to 
 enter the city when he is just leaving it behind him. . To him 
 they are so many overgrown villages, and, in fact, there is less 
 difference here than anywhere else, between village and town, as 
 regards the manner of building and of living. All Russia was, 
 for centuries, nothing but one village of a great many square 
 miles. During the whole Moscovite period of her existence, there 
 was in reality only one city the capital, the "throne city" or 
 residence of the sovereign, and even that was nothing but a huge 
 borough built in wood, scattered around a stone stronghold. It 
 is only since the fire of 1812 and the subsequent reconstruction, 
 since stone, or more correctly brick caused wooden buildings 
 to be reserved for the suburbs and allowed the houses to rise 
 higher and draw closer together, that Moscow has really assumed 
 the appearance of a great city. The capitals of governments, 
 gradually reconstructed on the model of the rejuvenated old 
 empire capital, are, as a rule, the only cities deserving of the name 
 in a foreigner's eyes.* 
 
 * Ten years ago Russia, apart from Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland, 
 owned only four cities having 100,000 inhabitants : St. Petersburgh, Moscow,
 
 324 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 In comparing the areas, we find that in European Russia the 
 cities even if we award the title to a crowd of boroughs three 
 quarters rural are ten, fifteen, twenty times farther apart than in 
 Western Europe. This is a most striking contrast, and not with- 
 out influence on all the relations of life. In Russia, the cities are 
 like islets scattered at great intervals over a rural ocean, while in 
 the West they press against one another like the islands of a 
 group : the difference between the Pacific and the ^Egean Seas. 
 
 The contrast is not less great as regards population. In 
 France, in Germany, in Belgium, in England, the towns and cities 
 contain one third, even one half or more, of the entire population ; 
 in Russia, scarcely more than a ninth, and even of that number 
 a good many hardly come under the head of townspeople. It is 
 kept fluctuating by the peasants, who are only temporary residents, 
 on business, or in pursuit of winter earnings, their great and only 
 resource during the months of forced inaction in the country. 
 The little importance, the insignificancy of the towns in Russia, 
 for which even building materials seem to be wanting, is one of 
 the historical characteristics of old Moscovia, of what Solovi6f 
 calls "Wooden Europe"; and so it is, in due proportion, of 
 modern Russia, especially Great-Russia. The two main elements 
 of the population stand towards each other in a very different pro- 
 portion from what we see in most countries of Europe and America. 
 What contrasts in manners and customs, ideas, aspirations, what 
 differences in the whole drift of the two civilizations are implied by 
 this one fact ! By the light of its statistics, the vast Empire of the 
 North, in spite of its rapid and unceasing progress, looms before 
 us as a rural state, an empire of peasants ! ' Russia and the United 
 
 Odessa, and Riga, the latter, however, far more German than Russian. 
 Even at the present time there are scarcely ten cities that reach this figure : 
 the four just mentioned, Kief, Kharkof, Saratof, Kazan, Vilna, perhaps 
 Lodzy, the Polish Manchester, perhaps Berditchdf, the great Jewish mart in 
 the West, and possibly Kishiniof, the huge, half Rumanian village-capital 
 of Bessarabia. 
 
 1 What a magnificent vista this opens in the future, when freedom will 
 have become habit, and the normal increase of population will have raised the
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES, 325 
 
 States of America, which, as regards extent of territory and distri- 
 bution of the population, offer so many points of comparison, 
 stand in this respect in the most perfect opposition, represent the 
 two poles of modern civilization. It is to be observed, however, 
 that even in Russia, amidst the regions which can show the rela- 
 tively largest urban population, figure Ukraina, New Russia, and 
 most of the lately peopled tracts. Which goes to show that modern 
 colonization, there as everywhere, proceeds first of all to create cities. 
 The same phenomenon, the same disproportion between town 
 and country, is observable, in various degrees, in most Slavic 
 peoples the Slavs of the West as well as of the East and South. 
 This is, one may say, one of the principal signs, at the same time 
 as one of the principal causes, of the historical inferiority of the 
 Slavic nations. 2 At the first glance the Slavs of the West the 
 Tchekhs and Poles appear to differ in this respect as in so many 
 others, from their Slav brethren, and to lean more towards the 
 Western Europeans. The Kingdom of Poland especially is, in this 
 respect, singularly unlike the empire to which it is annexed. The 
 urban and the rural population there stand to each other in much 
 the same relation as they do in the wealthiest countries of Teutono- 
 Latin Europe, i. e. , as one to three ; about two millions in the cities, 
 nigh on six in the country. Unfortunately this resemblance is 
 delusive. The population of these Polish towns is made up in 
 great part of Jews and Germans, and but too frequently remains a 
 stranger to the Slav people in the midst of which it lives, in spirit 
 and interests as well as in origin. Founded mostly by German 
 colonists, and all more or less peopled with Jews talking a German 
 jargon, these towns, as a rule, were governed according to the 
 
 average of education to that of American farmerdom : acultured.land-owning, 
 self-governing peasantry ! Why, it 's the ideal, and another affinity between 
 Russia and America, far rather than polar opposition. (See a few lines lower.) 
 2 The Western mind never can quite divest itself of the feudal point of 
 view. Centralization is the universal bane bred and bequeathed by 
 feudalism. There was no need of hiding behind city walls from a brigand 
 nobility, where no such nobility, born of alien conquest, existed, where all 
 the classes, high and low, were of one race and blood.
 
 326 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 old Magdeburg code, and remained isolated in the midst of a 
 commonwealth composed of nobles, confined within their narrow 
 enclosures, hedged in by their privileges, with no place in the 
 constitution, no part to play in the state, without influence on the 
 civilization and politics of the country, for which this lack of a 
 national middle class was not one of the least causes of ruin. In 
 ancient Poland the towns were like so many half foreign colonies 
 in the midst of the people, or, in the picturesque words of a 
 German journalist, " like drops of oil on a pond." In the whole 
 of Western Russia, in Lithuania, White Russia, and those parts of 
 Little Russia which once were annexed to Poland, the situation is 
 still about the same as in Poland proper. The Jews, crowded in 
 the towns and boroughs, are there also one of the main elements of 
 the urban population, and no fusion between them and the other 
 inhabitants has ever taken place. 
 
 In Russia proper, on the contrary, the towns were genuine 
 growths of the national soil ; but they were few, scattered, shabby ; 
 with no institutions or life of their own, they hardly emerged out 
 of the immense rural ocean. Under another form the evil was the 
 same ; the spirit of progress, of investigation, and liberty was 
 wanting. There were no towns or boroughs in old-time Russia, 
 hence no burghers, no town-class. Nbvgorod and Pskof, both not 
 distant from the Baltic, both in contact with the merchant asso- 
 ciation of the Hansa, were a glorious but barren exception. Mos- 
 covia, which swallowed them up, was an essentially rural country ; 
 hence in great part, among the Russians as among other Slavs, 
 the persistence, so often remarked on, of the patriarchal or family 
 spirit. In this state of peasants and landlords, the manners, insti- 
 tutions, all the social relations, have long preserved something 
 simple, primitive, and as though rudimentary.* 
 
 *As the historian, Mr. Zabielin, observes (History of Russian Life 
 front the Oldest Times), these patriarchal forms, the persistence of which 
 amidst the Slavs has so often been pointed out, really spring from the 
 predominance of home life in the absence of public life. As this fact can 
 be traced mainly to the scarcity and insignificance of urban centres, it is not
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 327 
 
 The want of towns had another serious consequence ; it 
 implied the want of the first economic element of modern civiliza- 
 tion, liquid wealth personal effects, circulating capital, an essen- 
 tial principle of all great material development, of all fruitful 
 social activity. 
 
 Is the character of the Russian people, are the supposed 
 nomadic tastes of the Slavic race, responsible for this long absence 
 and persistent scarcity of towns ? By no means. We must look 
 for the reason elsewhere. It lies in the economic habits, in serf- 
 dom, partly also in the soil, the climate, the very formation of the 
 land. The Russian market has, so far, no demands capable of 
 keeping at par the productions of a numerous urban population. 
 The trades or professions, the crafts of all sorts, which generally 
 have their seat in towns and cities, are as yet but little developed, 
 or still remain scattered in the villages. The serf-owners of old 
 found it convenient to have everything they needed manufactured 
 on their own estates, articles of luxury alone excepted, and those 
 they imported from abroad. The severe climate, the huge dis- 
 tances, have a similar action. In the north especially, the poverty 
 of the soil, the long, enforced idleness of the winter time, with its 
 endless nights, compel the peasant to seek means of existence in 
 other things than the tilling of the ground. Hence it is that this 
 immense rural population is far from being occupied exclusively 
 with agriculture. Rural and industrial life are less separated, less 
 specialized than in the West. Articles which, in other countries, 
 were manufactured in workshops or city factories, by essentially 
 urban operatives, were most of the time turned out in villages in 
 the mujik's cabin." 
 
 to be wondered at that the same historian should admit cities to be the first 
 nucleus of civil society and the first agent for organizing the Russian state. 
 Owing to the lack of vigor and the small number of these hearths of civil 
 life, the private relations between men must necessarily, for a long time to 
 come, retain a greater importance in Russia than in the Western states. 
 
 3 This in part accounts for the greater intelligence of the Russian " com- 
 mon people. ' ' Nothing is so deadening to mind as excessive division of labor.
 
 328 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Thus the towns had against them the social status, which 
 formerly bound the peasant to the glebe, and to this day binds 
 him to his commune ; they had against them the few wants and 
 scant wealth of the masses, and even the rigor of the climate, even 
 the people's own best qualities. The easy imitativeness, the skill 
 and deftness of hand, natural to the Russian, discouraged urban 
 agglomerations by doing away with the need of permanent pro- 
 fessions, of sedentary trades, of specialties. The peasant, being 
 amply capable of manufacturing for himself all that his humble 
 needs require, has rarely occasion for the services of townspeople or 
 the products of town life. The town is thus reduced to being little 
 more than an administrative centre and a place of barter a mart, 
 lively enough and even crowded at fair times, empty and dreary 
 during the greater part of the year. Many of these towns are 
 only artificial creations, born at the beck of the sovereign hand, 
 and, were it withdrawn from them, would fall back into rural 
 nothingness.* 
 
 This mode of formation of urban centres accounts for the fact 
 that, in Russia, town and country differ generally so little, while 
 sometimes they differ very greatly. While most district towns 
 look to us like pretentious villages, the large cities, especially the 
 two capitals, seem colonies of another nation or another civiliza- 
 tion. There you find all the luxury, all the pleasures, all the 
 arts of the West ; life seems altogether European, while in the 
 provinces it seems Moscovite, half Oriental still. The contrast is 
 thrilling ; yet it is all external, on the surface : appearances differ, 
 man is the same. Setting aside a highest class, trained to foreign 
 discipline, the bulk of the city people, by tastes and bringing up, 
 by intellect and custom, is very near still to the rural population. 
 In these cities, frequently built all in a lump and already populous, 
 
 * The introduction of machinery, of steam, and the improvement of 
 means of communication, tend to change this state of things by encouraging 
 factory industry on a large scale to the detriment of the lowly village 
 industries. This revolution, which is going on in Russia as everywhere 
 else, must naturally benefit the urban centres.
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 329 
 
 the peasants reside in great numbers, and manners are half rural 
 still. There is no bourgeoisie, in the French acception of the 
 word, nor an urban plebs comparable to the working population 
 of large French cities and their suburbs. 
 
 Old-time Moscovia made little difference between town and 
 countrj', townsman and husbandman, of which modern Russia 
 has made two separate classes. To foreign travellers the condition 
 of the one appeared to differ very little from that of the other. The 
 Englishman Fletcher, Queen Elizabeth's envoy at the court of the 
 son of Ivan the Terrible, looked on the tradesman and craftsman 
 as part of the lowest class, to which he gives the humiliating 
 designation of mujiks* Not until the seventeenth century are 
 the towns habitually treated by the administration as something 
 separate from the country. Only at this epoch, when serfdom 
 was established, did the urban populations begin to be regarded 
 as a separate class and the towns as separate communities, based 
 on a special scheme. f Until then the towns and boroughs and the 
 peasantry were, on the whole, subject to one and the same law 
 {jus} and authority. The condition of the lower classes in the 
 towns was little more to be envied than that of the rural classes. 
 The townsman was " attached " to his native town as the husband- 
 man to his native glebe, for similar reasons too that the exchequer 
 
 * Ivan the Terrible himself, in his letters to Queen Elizabeth, contemptu- 
 ously refers to the English merchants, come to Russia for trading purposes, 
 as trading mujiks.* 
 
 f All this and what follows naturally does not apply to either N6vgorod 
 or Pskof, who had maintained their right of self-government, and where, as 
 in the Republics of Mediaeval Italy, we find the strife between rich and poor, 
 between " popolo grasso " and "popolo minuto." 
 
 * This fact alone proves that the designation which so shocks Western 
 delicacy is, to the Russian ear, neither " humiliating " nor " contemptuous." 
 It was continually used simply in the sense of "man," and is so still by the 
 people. When a man is admiringly spoken of as "a handsome, portly, 
 robust mujik" or as "an honest, quiet mujik" those who so describe him 
 certainly do not mean to disparage him, but use the word mujik exactly in 
 the way that Englishmen, in like case, would use " fellow" and Germans 
 Kerl. The peasant woman who speaks of her mujik does not mean any more 
 disrespect to him than the English laborer's wife in speaking of her " man."
 
 33O THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 might not be defrauded by the departure of the tax-payer, and 
 that the community, being taxed in a lump and mutually respon- 
 sible, might not have to pay for the absentees. The prohibition 
 of going from one town or borough to another was enforced by 
 measures that recall the laws invented for the curiales in the latter 
 times of the Roman Empire. For such flight or desertion the 
 Rom^nofs, in 1658, established the penalty of death. 
 
 Yet there was in the Russian towns a sort of privileged class : 
 the wealthy merchants, wholesale dealers, especially those who 
 traded with foreign lands. They were called "guests " (g'bsti'), 
 probably because originally the greater number of them were for- 
 eigners. There are mentions of these ' ' guests ' ' in the times of the 
 Varangians. In primitive Russia, where the vast distances and 
 the internecine wars made commerce at once more precarious and 
 more profitable, the men who were sufficiently enterprising to 
 devote themselves to it were surrounded with a respectful consid- 
 eration, which remained their due even in the midst of the abase- 
 ment into which the quarrels of the princes and the Tatar domi- 
 nation plunged the national trade. This name of gbsti, prob- 
 ably of Teutonic origin,* was awarded by the princes as a title 
 of honor, and many of them served the kniazes in the capacity of 
 advisers or ambassadors.* After the gbsti came the merchants 
 of lower standing and the mere townsmen -possbdskiyl,^ both of 
 which classes were divided into sundry categories, each of which 
 
 4 It must be traced much farther back. It is part of the word-treasure 
 which primitive Sanskrit bequeathed to all her daughters, among whom Old 
 Slavic and Old Gothic claim equal rank. The original word meant " cow- 
 killer," in appropriate, if slightly realistic, allusion to the ponderous 
 hospitalities of primitive ages. 
 
 * It is from these gdsti, in the sense of merchants, that the Russian 
 equivalent for the Oriental bazar is called gostinoy-dvor. 
 
 t From possad, a " borough" ; the chief magistrate of Ndvgorod was 
 called Possadnik.* 
 
 * The title corresponds to " mayor," but with more power ; rather to the 
 podesta of the Italian Republics. The word possad is derived from siditti, 
 " to sit, settle " = sedere.
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY: TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 331 
 
 had its own council or Duma," 1 invested with the right of 
 deciding questions arising between its own members. 
 
 It was difficult for these merchants and townsmen to develop 
 into an influential class, in a country cut off from Europe and the 
 sea, and from all the commercial highroads by Lithuania, the 
 Teutonic Order, and the Tatars. Ivan IV. the Terrible, the foe 
 of the old princely and boyar races, strove to raise the people of 
 towns, especially those of Moscow. But the hand of the tsars 
 could not implant in Moscovia the liberties it was rooting out in 
 Nbvgorod and Pskof, where they had long flourished. The 
 absence of feudalism or aristocracy, which at first sight would seem 
 to favor the development of a town-class, rather proved an obstacle. 
 The sovereigns had not so much interest in leaning on the cities 
 for support, and the cities did not find in the dissensions between 
 the great vassals and the central power opportunities for rising and 
 obtaining franchises. 
 
 Thus, then, when Peter the Great came to the throne, there 
 was, in spite of some attempts made by his father Alexis, nothing 
 at all answering to what Europe knows under the name of 
 bourgeoisie in all these towns, devoid of industry, unprovided 
 with means of communication, with scarcely any permanent 
 population. 
 
 Such a gap could not but strike the practical Tsar, whose 
 favorite model was Holland, the most bourgeois country in Europe. 
 A middle class, unfortunately, could not be improvised as quickly 
 as a fleet or army. Peter's special regulations, the administrative 
 self-government with which he endowed the cities, probably did 
 not help to create an urban class as much as the reformer's general 
 activity, the introduction of new industries and new means of 
 communication, and especially the opening up of Russia to Europe. 
 
 1 D&ma, from d^mati, " to think." It is the name given to all the town- 
 councils and extended to the buildings in which they are held. The Paris 
 H6tel-de-Ville and the New York City-Hall would both be translated Duma 
 in Russian.
 
 332 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Yet the progress was slow. The maladministration of Peter's 
 successors, the restrictions imposed on the franchises of the towns 
 and merchants, and, lastly, under Elizabeth, the erection of the 
 chief branches of commerce into monopolies, to be granted to court 
 favorites, delayed the birth of a middle class over half a century. 
 Catherine II., in this as in everything, took up and carried on 
 Peter's work. She wished to constitute at the same time a nobility 
 and a bourgeoisie, both which things Russia equally lacked.* It 
 was Catherine who divided the inhabitants of towns and cities 
 into the different groups which still exist. Merchants, trades- 
 men, small burghers, mechanics, received from her a corporative 
 organization. Each of these groups had elective ' ' heads, ' ' and 
 all were united into municipal corporations, to which was restored 
 the right of doing justice and of internal administration or 
 self-government. 
 
 In organizing the urban class, both Peter and Catherine nat- 
 urally imitated the contemporary institutions of Western Europe, 
 especially those of Teutonic countries England and Germany, 
 Holland and Sweden. Hence, partly, the faultiness and failure 
 of a work, mistakenly copied from foreign models already in the 
 stage of decay. Just when they were on the point of disappearing 
 from the more enlightened Western states, the craft corporations 
 and the merchant guilds were introduced into Russia. Whatever 
 its merits and demerits, this corporative organization, which sits 
 so easy on the German, does not fit the Russian at all. He has, 
 according to a very just remark of Haxthausen, the spirit of asso- 
 ciation, not that of corporation, and they are two very different 
 things. He has a national form of association, the artel, of which 
 
 * In this respect, as in several others, some of Catherine's advisers 
 sometimes commended singular devices or gave way to strange delusions. 
 Nicolas Turgue'nief (La Russie et les Russes, v. ii., p. 221) tells how one of 
 the most prominent men of this grand reign took a great and active part in 
 the foundation, in both capitals, of gigantic foundling houses, because he 
 flattered himself that he was thereby preparing the creation of a third 
 estate!
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 333 
 
 all the members have equal rights and work for the common good, 
 under chiefs freely elected by their peers. He does not care for 
 closed corporations, bristling with privileges and monopolies, 
 hierarchically subdivided into unequal ranks or grades, like the 
 craft-corporations of old in Western Europe, with their " masters, " 
 "companions," and "apprentices." The corporative spirit was 
 only a form of the feudal spirit, which had introduced into the 
 world of labor the same principle of privilege and vassalage that 
 prevailed in the nobility and the tenure of property, and therefore 
 is nowhere to be found in old-time Moscovia, nor could it obtain 
 in modern Russia. Vainly Catherine II. strove to combine the 
 mechanics into crafts or tsekhs the word being taken bodily 
 from the German Zeche they remained lifeless registers, to serve 
 little else than the uses of police registering, and wherever the 
 unwieldy things with their superannuated pomp and circumstance 
 still survive, we cannot see that either the mechanic or national 
 industry has derived much profit from them.* 
 
 * On this point, as on so many others, there is, in the laws and adminis- 
 tration, a lack of unity and precision, which too often breeds confusion and 
 arbitrariness. The law does not define the crafts that must be made into 
 corporations ; accordingly such or such a trade is free in certain cities, while 
 in others it is bound by licenses, which are delivered by a board of experts 
 on the applicant's passing an examination.
 
 BOOK V. CHAPTER III. 
 
 Classification of the Urban Population since Catherine II. The Mechanic 
 and the Mitsh-tchanln or "Small Burgher" Urban Proletariate How 
 this Class has, as a Rule, Preserved the same Spirit as the Rural Popula- 
 tion The Merchant Guilds and their Privileges How Emancipation 
 has Made it Possible for them to Own Real Estate The " Honorary 
 Citizens " or " Notables " among the Townspeople Russia, till very 
 Lately, Had none of the Professions out of which the Western Bour- 
 geoisie Used to be Recruited In how far the Reforms Help Create a 
 Middle Class in the European Sense. 
 
 THE town population, ever since Peter I. and Catherine II., 
 has been classed under five or six rubrics, themselves divided into 
 two main categories: the wholesale traders, forming a superior 
 class, which was long a privileged one ; and the retail traders, the 
 mechanics of all sorts, subdivided into several categories, differing 
 only in name. There are the poorer townspeople, the mechan- 
 ics, the members of trade corporations, and lastly the ' ' miscel- 
 lany, ' ' a sort of town-rabble, containing all those who do not fit 
 into any particular class. Of these categories, the first is the 
 most important, and can be regarded as the type of the entire 
 lower class of the urban population. Its name, miesh-tchariln^ 
 is usually translated in French bourgeois, yet the man thus 
 designated answers little enough to the French term. The mitsh- 
 tchanln * is a person who dwells in towns and who, being neither 
 noble nor priest, is not rich enough to inscribe his name on the 
 roll of the merchants, yet does not belong to a trade corporation. 
 He usually gets his livelihood from some small business or some 
 
 * Miish-tchanln, plural mifsh-tchdnie, from mitsto, "a place," which 
 gives the diminutive mits-tietch-ko, " a borough, a small town." 
 
 334
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 335 
 
 manual trade. Many have no assured means of existence. Their 
 business or real property is, or was until lately, subject to limita- 
 tions : they could not do business beyond a certain figure, or own 
 real estate worth more than five or six thousand roubles. If they 
 passed that line, they had to register as merchants. Although 
 legally a townsman, indeed, the typical townsman, the mihh- 
 tchanln is frequently compelled to migrate to the country to seek 
 a living. In some governments there is quite a number of them 
 settled in villages, while the peasant, to whom the working of the 
 soil does not always yield permanent occupation or sufficient 
 returns, often crowds the cities, where he has appropriated the 
 monopoly of sundry crafts. In St. Petersburgh alone there live 
 over two hundred thousand peasants.* The two classes fre- 
 quently exchange residences, now opening a competition in man- 
 ual labor and retail trade on the smallest scale, in the factories or 
 at the fairs ; now again keeping each to its own favorite pursuits, 
 the townsman carrying into the country city ways and crafts, the 
 peasant bringing to town his pair of arms, his axe, his horse, both 
 taking many risks, often more to the prejudice of the townsman 
 than the countryman. 
 
 This class of mttsh-tchdnti and the kindred groups of mechanics 
 form the large majority of the town populations. It is perhaps 
 the portion of the Russian people least favored by fortune. The 
 peasant is given his cabin and small enclosed house-lot by the 
 ^mancipation Act ; he also has his share of the commons the 
 communal land. Very different is the condition of the mi$sh- 
 tchariln. He lives, like the working population of Western 
 Europe, from hand to mouth. The law has no guarantee for him, 
 the commune is usually unable to supply him with any certain 
 share of land or work. If a few do achieve a competence, or even 
 wealth, the greater part lead a precarious existence. Perhaps one 
 tenth of them own houses in the towns. The rest hire lodgings. 
 
 * According to some statistical reports, the peasants would average 20 
 per cent, of the urban population.
 
 336 THE EMPIRE Of THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS, 
 
 Those who go to seek a living in villages are not entitled to a 
 share in the communal good things. Some, now and then, elect 
 to become peasants : they have to obtain admittance into the rural 
 commune, and pay cash down for a right to the land to which the 
 peasant is entitled by birth. 
 
 Until very lately it was these two alone the poor townsman 
 and the mechanic who, along with the peasant, bore the two 
 heaviest burdens of the state : the poll-tax or capitation, and the 
 blood-tax or military conscription. Alexander II. lightened the 
 latter burden, by imposing it equally on all classes. Alexander 
 III. freed them from capitation in 1883. The law has given to 
 the townspeople equality in burdens and rights ; it cannot go 
 further and give them real property, as to the husbandman. The 
 Russians, disposing of vast communal lands, boast that they have 
 no proletarians, and bend a scornful gaze on the dangers with 
 which this social plague threatens the West. In reality, however, 
 Russia already has an urban proletariate, always the most trouble- 
 some, in some nations in France at any rate the most riotous, 
 the only one to be dreaded. There are certain social troubles 
 which no country, be it never so new and bold, so vast and rich 
 in land, seems fated to be exempted from ; of this number are 
 urban proletariate and the wages question in cities. If the Rus- 
 sian proletariate is not more numerous, the reason is that the 
 cities themselves are relatively neither many nor populous. The 
 progress of industry and civilization, the very increase of the 
 population will necessarily have their usual effect of increasing 
 the proletariate by enlarging the towns. This class has already 
 received from the emancipation an important reinforcement : it 
 has become the refuge of several categories of former serfs, 
 especially the so-called ' ' court-people, ' ' i. e. the house-serfs. 
 These people, who, by virtue of their attendance on their 
 masters' persons, had been estranged from the village commune 
 through generations, were not in a condition, on finding them- 
 selves free, to vindicate their share of the communal land. Freed
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY.- TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 337 
 
 from the control of their masters, they must live by their labor, 
 owning no right to the land they tread or the house they live in, 
 with no other inheritance to hand down to their children than the 
 light hoard of their slender savings. No ; Russia has not yet 
 found, any more than any other country, the secret of securing to 
 each man a permanent dwelling, to each family an hereditary 
 homestead, to place the ever increasing swarms of human units 
 above the reach of vice or improvidence. 
 
 As to their mode of life, these miesh-tchanit and mechanics come 
 very near to the least favored classes of the western cities of 
 Europe. They differ from them, however, in an important point : 
 the absence of class spirit, of ' ' city feeling, " so to speak. They 
 have not, like the corresponding classes in the rest of Europe, the 
 spirit of opposition against both the upper bourgeoisie and the 
 rural population. In ideas, beliefs, and feeling, as well as in garb 
 and manners, they differ very little as yet from the latter. Re- 
 ligion, which, in Russia, still is one of the great social forces, still 
 holds under control those urban masses which, in the rest of 
 Europe, it appears to have irretrievably lost, be its name Catholi- 
 cism or Protestantism. Thus it is that the Russian people are 
 pervaded at bottom by a unity, a harmony of feeling which de- 
 serves the more to be noticed that it is getting so rare elsewhere, 
 and that, even where it still prevails, time will inevitably weaken it. 
 This moral condition of the urban working classes accounts for 
 the failure of the nihilistic propaganda to influence it. Sundry 
 tokens, however, warrant the fear that the Russian workingmen 
 may not always remain deaf to revolutionary incitements. Wage 
 questions and strikes may yet do their wonted evil work. 
 
 In this state of things Russia has, for a more or less prolonged 
 period, a principle of strength and stability which all the other 
 nations of the European continent lack. She is less exposed to 
 those struggles for influence between town and country from 
 which the West has suffered so much and which, by causing per- 
 petual disturbances and reactions, hinder any kind of progress,
 
 33^ THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 and is exempt for a while longer from those intermittent collisions 
 between the sceptical and at the same time utopistic spirit of the 
 city workingman and the coarsely conservative and blindly posi- 
 tive spirit of the peasant. 
 
 Russian legislation separates the inhabitants of cities into two 
 accurately defined groups : the mechanics or townspeople who 
 have not risen above the foot of the social ladder, and those towns- 
 men who have swung themselves up to the higher rungs. The 
 latter are usually designated as "merchants" (kuptsy). This 
 title is legally awarded only to such as own a certain capital and 
 pay certain license-dues. The merchants, long in possession of 
 important privileges, never could constitute themselves into a 
 closed class : the poor townsman, the peasant, the nobleman even 
 who devotes himself to commerce, can have his name inscribed on 
 their roll ; it is a question of means. These ' ' merchants ' ' again 
 are subdivided into several categories, known under the foreign 
 name of "guilds," introduced by Peter the Great. There are 
 three of them, which for a long time enjoyed very different pre- 
 rogatives, but at the present day have identical civil rights. The 
 distinction between the guilds is based only on the figure of the 
 capital declared and the proportionate dues they pay the State for 
 their license. The members of the first guild have the freedom of 
 trading through the entire extent of the empire, as well as abroad ; 
 they pay five hundred roubles a year. The members of the second 
 are limited to home trade. The guilds have in every city their 
 boards and elective "heads" or syndics. The merchants, how- 
 ever, rise or descend from one to another, as their fortune grows or 
 decreases, and if business is very bad they are always in danger 
 of falling down into the lowest urban class, the mi$sh-tch&nit. 
 
 The merchants of the two first guilds belong, or rather be- 
 longed, to the privileged classes. The emperors had granted 
 them all the personal rights which the nobility enjoyed : exemp- 
 tion from the poll-tax, from military conscription, from corporal
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 339 
 
 punishment. In a country like Russia, nothing more could be 
 done for the encouragement of trade and bourgeoisie. The 
 merchants were free to acquire wealth, free to enjoy it. One 
 thing only was refused them, and this restriction itself well could 
 pass, in the lawgiver's eyes, for a stimulus to trade. Merchants, 
 as all persons not belonging to the nobility, were forbidden to own 
 "inhabited lands," which means that they could not hold serfs. 
 This virtually excluded them from owning rural property and 
 limited them to houses in the towns and cities, and country houses 
 in the suburbs or environs. This lessened the temptation to with- 
 draw from commerce the capital that had been launched into it. 
 
 This prohibition had a surer and less beneficial effect : it kept 
 apart commerce and agriculture, by maintaining a chasm between 
 the merchant or manufacturer and both the noble landowner and 
 the husbandman. While serfdom made the formation of a middle 
 class in the country almost impossible, the monopoly held by the 
 nobility prevented the middle class slowly forming in the cities 
 from spreading over the country. The merchants were as good as 
 prisoners in the towns, tied down to business. Now that the 
 abolition of serfdom has, ipso facto, done away with the distinction 
 between ' ' inhabited ' ' and ' ' non-inhabited ' ' real estate, rural 
 property has become free to all classes. By this indirect conse- 
 quence emancipation closely touches the middle class, and this 
 fact alone amounts to a social revolution of deep bearing on the 
 future of Russia. 
 
 The merchants of the first guild were possessed of nearly all 
 the nobility's personal privileges ; the wealthier ones nevertheless 
 strove to get out of their condition. They coveted, for themselves 
 or their children, the shadow of which the substance was theirs, 
 and many took a road which led to it rapidly : state service. 
 This was another cause of enfeeblement to the middle class, which 
 seemed to grow and thrive only to benefit another class, which, in 
 its turn, felt this accession as rather an encumbrance. Yet it 
 would be unfair to see mere puerile vanity in this chase after
 
 34O THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 such functions and decorations as conferred nobility. For if the 
 merchant enjoyed all the substantially useful privileges of the 
 nobility, his tenure of them was entirely dependent on his name 
 being inscribed in the guild roll. One stroke of ill luck could 
 take them from him and lower him to the level of the mitsh- 
 tchaitin, subject to capitation, conscription, and corporal punish- 
 ment. Hereditary nobility and state service could alone protect 
 a family from such a fall. 
 
 To remedy the precarious position so galling to the merchants, 
 the Emperor Nicolas created a new category for them, which, 
 while straitening the road to nobility, secured to them the advan- 
 tages they were striving for. This new rung of the Russian 
 social ladder has name, " honorary citizen," nearly answering the 
 "town-notable" of old. These "notables" enjoy the same 
 privileges as the merchants of the first guild without being bound 
 to be inscribed on the guild rolls. It was in reality a new variety 
 of nobility, a sort of burgher-nobility conferred by the sovereign 
 or by letters-patent from the Senate as a reward for certain ser- 
 vices and the performance of certain functions. As the nobility 
 proper, this one was divided into two categories. There was 
 the " personal " and the " hereditary " " honorary citizen," the 
 latter transmitting to his posterity his qualities and exemptions. 
 This rubric still exists, but has become a merely nominal distinc- 
 tion, the main exemptions attached to it having been extended to 
 all the inhabitants of cities. The abrogation of capitation and 
 corporal punishment on one side and the institution of universal 
 obligatory military service on the other have left but little value 
 to all these distinctions. Town notables and merchants can 
 scarcely retain many privileges when so few are left to the 
 nobility. 
 
 Nowadays it is education, manners, the degree of culture, which 
 keep the different classes of society separate. The habits of life 
 raise between them barriers which the law is powerless to pull 
 down. In this respect, the distinctions are more marked than even
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 341 
 
 in Western Europe. From the uneven manner in which civilization 
 entered the various layers of society, it could not be otherwise. 
 The nobility, which has long had the monopoly of European in- 
 struction, continues to live apart from the merchants and a middle 
 class whom wealth has not yet lifted over the threshold of culture. 
 Thus, in large cities, there always are two clubs : one for the 
 nobility, the other for the merchants. The two classes, socially, 
 form two separate towns, which mix very little in private life, 
 differing even in their mode of life. There are, however, signs of 
 a change in the near future. The nobility and the bourgeoisie 
 now meet not only in public assemblies to deliberate on the affairs 
 of town or province, but begin to draw nearer together by man- 
 ners, tastes, and culture, the one becoming more national, the 
 other more European. 
 
 Some years back, a Russian merchant usually was a man with 
 a long beard, in a long-skirted kaftan, and high leather boots ; he 
 remained as faithful as the peasant himself to Moscovite traditions 
 and the national garb. Nowadays there is the old-time merchant, 
 strict guardian of old customs ; sometimes owner of a large for- 
 tune, yet not the less attached to the old mode of life ; orthodox 
 or dissenter (raskblniK), like the common people, the peasant or 
 small townsman, from whom he really differs only by his wealth ; 
 a faithful observer of fasts and holidays, combining to a singular 
 degree superstition and slyness, plain living and vastness of 
 commercial operations. Then there is the modern merchant, 
 often the son or grandson of the other, with clean-shaved chin, 
 anxious to give up ancestral customs and to imitate the nobility 
 and assume French fashions. The number of such naturally in- 
 creases daily ; they have palatial houses, drawing-rooms furnished 
 luxuriously if not always tastefully, and all the comforts of the 
 West. Their sons learn French and travel abroad ; many already 
 lead in Paris an existence as worldly, as dissipated as the young 
 nobles, and many contrive, after coming home, to get themselves 
 admitted into the drawing-rooms of the nobility.
 
 342 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Between these two types there is an intermediate one, which 
 marks the transition from one to the other and frequently com- 
 bines the pretensions and foibles of both ; it is the tradesman who 
 has made money, in love with modern luxury, yet unable to get 
 used to it, surrounding himself with furniture and bric-a-brac 
 the use of which is a puzzle to him, always ill-at-ease in his own 
 house, in his own clothes. Be it love of luxury or the tradesman's 
 calculating instinct and the wish thus to strengthen his credit, the 
 merchant of this kind often develops a taste for show and gor- 
 geousness seldom to be met with in other classes, even though the 
 whole country has a leaning that way. There are provincial 
 merchant-nabobs who have splendid apartments where they do not 
 live, sumptuous drawing-rooms which are opened only to strangers, 
 plate and china which they don't use, richly appointed beds to 
 which they prefer rugs and divans, after the old Russian fashion. 
 
 There is nothing in the Russian "guilds" that recalls the 
 "third estate" of Western Europe, with its stirring spirit, its 
 varied information, its pushing, ambition. ' There is scarcely yet 
 the least stir of political or intellectual leaven to be felt. Until 
 these latter years, science and literature owed nearly nothing to 
 the middle class.* As the name itself (kuptsy) indicates, there 
 has been in Russia until now only a counting-house middle 
 class, representing trade and industry, swayed by an exclusively 
 mercantile, conservative, and routine-ridden spirit. Most of the 
 professions commonly called ' ' liberal ' ' were almost as much 
 wanting in the Russia of Peter I. and Catherine II. as in the 
 Moscovia of the Ivans and Vassilis. No lawyers, no physicians, 
 
 1 Because Russian society is not based on feudalism. We never can 
 have a "third estate" like that of Western Europe, because there it was 
 the embodiment of a continuous protest and struggle against feudal arro- 
 gance and oppression. In Russia there is nothing for it to protest against. 
 
 *The only two exceptions are, in the first half of the present century, 
 the provincial poets, Koltsof and Nikitin, twins in gifts, inspiration, and 
 origin ; one a tradesman in a small way, the other a mere mish4chan\n of 
 the poorest class. Some writers and scientists risen from that class might 
 be quoted at the present time.
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 343 
 
 no engineers, no writers, no professors, not even notaries or attor- 
 neys ; nothing but clerks and scriveners, uneducated, and as 
 unlike as possible, as to personal dignity and social standing, to 
 their congeners of the West. There could not be many lawyers 
 in a country where, until 1865, the procedure was secret and writ- 
 ten, while legislation was a chaos, and justice an object of traffic, 
 where functions of all orders were performed by the same class of 
 functionaries, frequently by the same persons, unqualified by pro- 
 fessional training or the choice of a specialty. The Russia of the 
 first half of the nineteenth century was, in this respect, behind 
 the France of the sixteenth. 
 
 The reforms of Emperor Alexander II., especially the judicial 
 reform, will help fill this gap, by creating pursuits and professions 
 requiring serious intellectual culture and providing for it mani- 
 fold and honorable openings. The universities and the progress 
 made in instruction, the railroads and greater rapidity of inter- 
 course, the widening of commerce and industry work in the same 
 direction. The result will be a new middle class, liberal, wide- 
 awake, with varied aptitudes. But this future, truly Russian 
 middle class will have to be looked for outside of all official rolls. 
 It is being recruited from all classes, among the sons of merchants 
 and still more of the nobility. This middle class, which is, sooner 
 or later, to be the directing class, will grow up outside of all class 
 distinctions, and will have little trouble in overcoming birth-preju- 
 dices, because, contrary to appearances, they have never been 
 very strong in Russia. 
 
 The chief outcome of the eighteenth century and the reforms 
 of Peter and Catherine was the formation of a cultured upper 
 class, a nobility brought up after the European manner ; one of 
 the chief outcomes of the nineteenth century and the reforms of 
 Alexander II. will be the creation of a truly European and mod- 
 ern middle class. The progress made in this direction during the 
 last fifty years is easy to follow. ' ' There is no third estate in Rus- 
 sia," wrote Madame deStael in the reign of Alexander I. ; " it is
 
 344 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS, 
 
 a great inconvenience as regards the progress of letters and arts, 
 . . . but the absence of an intermediate class between the high 
 and the low makes them love one another the more. The distance 
 between the two extremes appears greater because there are no 
 degrees between them, but in reality they are more closely 
 in touch with each other for not being separated by a middle 
 class. ' ' * These words give matter for much thought. It is true 
 that the two extreme classes, the noble and the mujik, the lord and 
 the serf, were in close contact, nothing coming between them ; 
 but it was only a material contact. There was between them 
 neither mutual sympathy, nor mutual comprehension, nor moral 
 bond. 3 Between the people, faithful to the old Moscovite man- 
 ners, and the nobility, semi-French, the distance was the greater 
 that there was nothing to bring the ends together. This gap it 
 is that a new and cultured middle class is to fill, belonging to the 
 people by their sympathies and interests, to modEj-n civilization 
 by their bringing up. 
 
 " Heaven guard us from such a thing ! " many Russians will 
 exclaim. For many, whether aristocrats or democrats, are in- 
 clined to resent the harmless word burjoasia, which they have 
 borrowed from us and which, in dealing with the West, they 
 misuse in the strangest manner. Many affect towards it about 
 the same feelings as the proletarians of our large cities. They 
 cannot show sufficient contempt for our bourgeois society and 
 civilization, for our bourgeois liberties and regime. They are 
 quite proud of having nothing of the sort, they don't care to re- 
 semble us in this respect. f In their pretensions to social unity 
 
 * Dix Annies tfExil. 
 
 * Madame de Stael was right. Her woman's intuition guided her more 
 surely and showed her the hidden truth of things more clearly than learned 
 abstractions can do where living souls are in question. 
 
 t This aversion against the bourgeoisie is found equally, and for simi- 
 lar reasons, among the small Slavic nations. True, with most of the latter, 
 it is accounted for by the fact that the bourgeoisie of their cities consists 
 mostly of Jews and Germans a remark which applies in no small measure 
 to the greater part of wealthy Russian cities.
 
 SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 345 
 
 and homogeneousness, in their systematic antipathy against class 
 distinctions, they look on the bourgeoisie as on some sort of a 
 new caste, or an oligarchy hostile to the people, not perceiving 
 that the fusion of classes must necessarily produce a new, inter- 
 mediate class, independent of all caste prejudices and alone capa- 
 ble of realizing that moral unity of a nation which they have so 
 much at heart ; that this alone can put an end to the social dual- 
 ism, the moral schism which, ever since Peter the Great, has been 
 one of Russia's principal diseases and which survives the abolition 
 of privileges and the progress of equality. Then only this nation, 
 once divided against itself and even now cut into two halves, 
 both powerless through their separation, will be in a position to 
 give Europe the measure of its genius.
 
 BOOK VI. 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 / The Nobles and the Peasants, Personifying the Two Russias, Appear Like 
 Two Different Nations By its Origin and Manner of Recruiting, the 
 
 \ Russia \\Dvorictnstvo Differs from all Corresponding Institutions in West- 
 era Europe Personal and Hereditary Nobility Great Number of the No- 
 bles Russian Titles The Descendants of Rurik and Guedimin Why 
 this High-born Nobility does not Form an Aristocracy Constitution of 
 the Russian Family Equal Division among the Males Political Con- 
 sequences of this System Attempts to Introduce Entails and Primo- 
 geniture. 
 
 THE noble and the peasant ; the former landlord and the 
 former serf. These two men, these two classes, even now em- 
 body two different Russias : one modern, the European Russia of 
 Peter and the reforming emperors ; the other old-fashioned, the 
 Moscovite, semi- Asiatic or semi-Oriental Russia of the old tsars. 
 
 Between the noble and the peasant serfdom was, up to Alex- 
 ij 
 ,ander II., a material bond; a moral one it never was. This 
 
 secular bond once broken, the former landlord and former serf 
 found themselves almost as closely linked together as they were 
 before by the soil and the demands of rural life, and nearly as 
 widely separated by intellect, tendencies, and manners. For the 
 difference between them lay not merely in the degree of culture ; 
 it lay in the principle, in the very nature of the civilization. 
 Therefore it is that now, as well as before emancipation, the dis- 
 
 346
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 347 
 
 tance betwixt them is so great that they appear. to the foreign 
 observer to form not so much two classes as two separate nations. 
 
 Of these two men, the mujik and his former master, one is 
 almost an entire stranger to Europe, the other is almost at home 
 with her. France, Germany, Italy, have often harbored the 
 latter as guest ; he cultivates them, as traveller, man of the world, 
 and pleasure-seeker. Western Europe knows the Russian noble, 
 and is utterly ignorant of what Russian nobility is. In this 
 respect the highest order of Russian society is scarcely better 
 known, better understood of Europe than Russian peasantry ; we 
 know neither what their functions have been in the past, nor what 
 part they play in the present, and are therefore not qualified to 
 augur their future. We do not know what place the nobility 
 occupies in the nation and in the state, what prerogatives are con- 
 ceded it by custom and law, what vista the evolution of Russia 
 opens before it. There is much babbling in Europe of aristocracy 
 and democracy ; even in France, aroused at last to some curiosity 
 concerning foreign nations, the latter are often questioned on the 
 point by parties and schools, which like to bring forward, in the 
 form of instances more or less faithfully reported, arguments in 
 favor of this or that thesis, usually settled beforehand. What 
 lessons can Europe learn from Russia in this matter ? Towards 
 which side leans that society, in so many ways dissimilar from 
 the French ? Can it long hold its footing on the declivity down 
 which all the West gradually slides ? Is there in Russia an aris- 
 tocratic force capable of becoming one day a political lever, a sup- 
 port to the throne, and a restraint on the people ? Such questions 
 may appear premature, but they will naturally occur to minds 
 uneasy about the future of Europe and civilization. 
 
 The Russian nobility (dvori&nstvo) has neither the same origin 
 nor the same traditions as what is called by that name in Western 
 Europe. The dvori&nstvo "the hereditary cultured class" a 
 Russian writer with aristocratic tendencies defines it is an insti- 
 tution special to Russia, unknown to Europe, unique of its kind.
 
 348 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Two things especially are distinctive of it : in the first place it 
 never was anything but a tool of the ruling power, being literally 
 nothing but the men in the service of the state united into a 
 body ; in the second place it has always been open to all and, 
 being continually renovated by influx from below, it has been 
 preserved from any tendency towards exclusiveness, all caste 
 spirit. 
 
 Thus the Russian nobility is admitted by its most serious 
 panegyrists to have no counterpart in Western Europe ; some even 
 would fain say no antecedent in history. It is only when they 
 look at their country through foreign glasses and allow them- 
 selves to be taken in by an entirely external likeness, that certain 
 Russians forget their national traditions over their European 
 training and give themselves airs as English lords or German 
 Herren. If we render the term dvori&nstvo by those of noblesse, 
 adel, nobility, it is only from lack of equivalents in the lan- 
 guages as well as in the institutions of the West. The term 
 which designates officially the highest class in the state at the 
 same time tells the story of its origin. The Russian word dvori- 
 anln means "a man of the court" and might be translated 
 " courtier " had not this word taken an entirely different sense.* 
 It appears that originally the dvorianln was an officer or dignitary 
 of the Moscovite court, more or less analogous to the chamber- 
 lains of Western Europe. Later on, this term was extended to all 
 who were in the personal service of the sovereign or, what 
 amounted to the same, of the state. The dvorictnstvo has kept, 
 through history, the stamp of its origin ; it is a court nobility, a 
 serving nobility, which, in our days as of old, can be acquired by 
 the tchin, i. e. , a given grade or rank in the army or administration. 
 
 * Dvorianln, plural dvorutntt, from dvor, "court," also "yard," with 
 all the meanings attaching to these words and a few more besides. Thus it 
 is tha.tdvdmi&, " porter, janitor," and dvordvytt, the " household serfs," are 
 words derived from the same radical as that designating the national nobility. 
 May there not be some affinity between the ideas represented as well as 
 between the words ?
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 349 
 
 Russian legislature distinguishes two sorts of nobility : trans- 
 missible or "hereditary," and "personal," z. <?., not descending 
 from the father to his children. This exactly renders the peculiar 
 character of the Russian hierarchy. The dvori&nstvo being only 
 the servants of the state, it became necessary, when the compli- 
 cated bureaucracy of the West was introduced in Russia, to draw a 
 distinction between high offices and inferior ones. Hence the crea- 
 tion of two nobilities for the use of men in public service. To 
 the subaltern this title of " personal dvoriariln " insured the rights 
 of the freeman, in a country where only the noble or functionary 
 had any recognized rights. In point of fact he has nothing that 
 the privileged town classes do not have. His children enter the 
 rubric of ' ' honorary citizens, ' ' i. e. , hereditary town notables, and 
 really enjoy the same rights as their father, whose nobility they 
 have not inherited. The title therefore is an empty one and its 
 suppression would make no change in the social hierarchy. 
 
 Only hereditary nobility deserves attention as possessing real 
 value. Like personal nobility, it has for centuries been open to 
 all. For over a hundred years, all through the eighteenth century 
 and the first portion of the nineteenth, from Peter the Great to the 
 close of the reign of Alexander I. , hereditary nobility belonged 
 by right to every army officer and every civilian of corresponding 
 grade ; it was won with the first epaulet, with the grade of en- *" 
 sign, which is inferior to that of sub-lieutenant. It is easy to see 
 what a nobility must have been to which the door was so wide 
 and the threshold so low. In order to raise its level somewhat, 
 Alexander I. in 1822, his brother Nicolas in 1845, and Alexander 
 II. in 1854, successively heightened by several degrees the thres- , 
 hold of the entrance to hereditary nobility. Under Alexander II. it 
 was open only to colonels or civilians bearing the title of "Actual 
 State Councillor" (Fourth class). Under Alexander III. the no- 
 bility has at last succeeded in doing away with ennoblement by 
 grade and service. Besides the great gate of the tchin, there were 
 sundry side entrances into hereditary nobility ; certain imperial
 
 350 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 orders used to ennoble ex officio. The monarch still has the 
 faculty, which he seldom uses, of conferring nobility by his 
 sovereign pleasure. 
 
 The first result of such a system is naturally the great number 
 of nobles, accompanied by generally straitened circumstances, lack 
 of education, and the not very high standing of a great many among 
 them. In European Russia alone, statistics give about 600,000 
 souls as the figure for hereditary, and not less than 350,000 
 for personal dvori&nstvo. There is enough to raise an army com- 
 posed entirely of nobles. The consequence is, nobles are found 
 everywhere, on all steps of the social ladder, the top of which 
 should alone be reserved to them. It is there, rather than in 
 official city burgherdom, that the equivalent of the European 
 bourgeoisie might be looked for. ' ' What is your nobility ? ' ' once 
 asked one of my fellow-travellers of a justice of the peace at 
 whose table we sat, on the banks of the Volga. " Our nobility," 
 replied the host, "why, they are my guests we all that are 
 here." This reply could often be given in Russia and abroad too, 
 wherever many Russians come together. The nobles are all that 
 are not peasant, priest, or merchant tradesman or shopkeeper ; 
 all the people you meet in society, all those of a certain culture, 
 in town or country. In this respect one might even still almost 
 say : " In Russia, the nobility is everybody." 
 
 From the obscure background formed by this nobiliary plebs, 
 naturally stand out a certain number of families, of which some 
 shine with a lustre that pierces through the gloom of ages, back 
 to the days of old Moscovia, while others have been more recently 
 brought into prominence by brilliant services. Such families, 
 such "houses " there are in Russia as in most countries that have 
 a past. The Russian language has, to .designate them, a word 
 peculiar to itself ; it calls them collectively ' ' the znat ' ' (from 
 the verb zriati, " to know "). These are, irrespective of titles or 
 antiquity of race, the illustrious or renowned families who have 
 held, down to our days, a high rank in the state or society. In
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 351 
 
 this highest nobility, or, more correctly, in this topmost social 
 layer, there are titled families of ancient pedigree or recent extrac- 
 tion, but there are also untitled families whose nobility and 
 splendor can be traced to the times of the old tsars. This nobility 
 will probably be the only one to survive the gradual fading out of 
 the dvori&nstvo, as the latter has nothing, either in name or form, or 
 in the country's memory, to keep it permanently distinct from the 
 mass of the nation.* The bulk of nobles is not set apart by any 
 external sign, there is nothing to proclaim their quality, they have 
 no title to show but an inscription in the registers of their province. 
 
 There are in Russia several sorts of titles, and something like 
 a nobiliary hierarchy, but this is an importation from the West, a 
 recently borrowed thing. To the Moscovites as to the other Slavs, 
 all these designations of dukes, counts, barons, were unknown, 
 for the reason that they never had anything like feudalism, no 
 duchies and counties, vassals of one another and of the central 
 power. Old Russia knew nothing of all these gradations ; 
 indeed she did not know much even of hereditary qualifications ; 
 herein again the Russian dvori&nstvo differed entirely from the 
 nobility of Western Europe. There was but one exception, and 
 that confirmed the rule : it was in favor of the collateral branches 
 of the reigning dynasty. 
 
 * Many Russians, when abroad, add to their names the French prefix 
 de or the German von. There is nothing of the sort in their own language. 
 Russian names often take the form of a genitive, or rather a nominal adjec- 
 tive : Davydof from David, Semidnof from Semidn (Simon) ; but far from 
 belonging specially to the nobility, such names are met with among the 
 priests, the merchants, the peasantry. If there is any kind of distinction in 
 this matter, it lies not in the family names, but in the desinence vitch 
 (feminine, vna), which the Russians add to their father's given name, which 
 they then use as a patronymic : Alexander Petrdvitch, Alexandra Petrovna. 
 In old-time Moscovia this now almost universal desinence was used only by 
 persons of some standing. Only one merchant family, which formed in 
 itself a sort of privileged class, the Str6gonofs (now counts), were entitled to 
 it. To this day the desinence of instead of bvitch is used in this way for the 
 lower classes : you say Ivan Petrdf, Alexis Iva*nof. This is probably the 
 origin of the many names in of.
 
 35 2 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 The descendants of the kniazes> the appanage-princes, con- 
 tinued to bear the title after the incorporation of their princi- 
 palities into that of Moscow. All other dignities or distinctions, 
 especially that of doyhr, were conferred directly by the sovereign 
 and only for a lifetime. It was only when brought into contact 
 with Europe and on annexing provinces that had long been sub- 
 ject to Teutonic influences, that Russia appropriated some of the 
 nobiliary denominations produced by feudalism. So she made 
 counts and later on barons, but had to borrow foreign names for 
 these imitative creations.* Peter the Great and his successors 
 began to vie with Western monarchs in conferring hereditary titles. 
 They were not as lavish, though, with these distinctions as other 
 sovereigns, and the number of families bearing foreign titles is 
 comparatively small. A hundred or so of counts,! some fifteen 
 princes, and a few more barons, the latter mostly financial men, 
 such is the approximate number of titles created by imperial 
 diploma. They all are naturally of more or less recent date, few 
 going back a century, and these families do not enjoy any high 
 degree of popularity and consideration. There are, side by side 
 with them, others, more ancient, whose names are sufficiently 
 illustrious not to need the glamour of title. The Naryshkins, for 
 instance, have none, and appear to deem it an honor to dispense 
 with one. 
 
 One thing strikes you in the Russian znat, that of St. Peters- 
 burgh especially : it is the great number of families of foreign 
 extraction. Probably one half of this court aristocracy comes 
 from abroad ; the blood in their veins is Tatar, Gruzin (Georgian), 
 Greek, Valachian, Lithuanian, Polish, Swedish, German, even 
 
 * Graf for " count," and Baron. The old title kniaz is the only Slavic 
 and rational one. I cannot see why we translate "grand-duke," and not 
 " grand-prince," the ancient title veliki-kniaz, formerly borne by the 
 sovereigns of Kief, Vladimir, Moscow, and now by the members of the 
 imperial family. 
 
 t There are said to have been, from Boriss Shereme'tief in 1706 to 
 General Totleben in 1879, 157 creations of counts ; but many left no 
 posterity. The Emperor Alexander II. alone created over twenty.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN, 353 
 
 French and English. All the tribes subject to the imperial scep- 
 tre, all the adjoining nations, have contributed their contingent 
 to the dvori&nstvo. Thus the most exalted class is the least 
 national of all, in origin as in manners and breeding. Here lies 
 another source of weakness, another cause for its lack of influence 
 and authority. 
 
 In the midst of all these families of doubtful origin and date, 
 the kniazes, the lineal descendants of the ancient Russian rulers, 
 occupy a separate place. In the state, founded and so long 
 governed by their forefathers, these scions of the house of Rurik 
 represent a native aristocracy, which, in virtue of its secular glory, 
 claims high consideration. No aristocracy in Europe boasts a 
 loftier and longer pedigree. ' ' In Russia, ' ' once said M. de Talley- 
 rand, " they are all princes." This opinion is still widely spread 
 in Western Europe. Yet nothing can be falser. Setting aside the 
 foreign intruders, and the families deriving their nobility from all 
 sorts of sources, the number of national princely families, in that 
 immense empire, scarcely exceeds sixty . * Nearly forty write them- 
 selves from Rurik, the founder, and from Vladimir, the apostle of 
 the empire ; they are the representatives of the dynasty which 
 reigned from the ninth down to the end of the sixteenth century. 
 This house, probably the most prolific sovereign race known to 
 history, had as many as two hundred different branches a century 
 or two ago. Many have no living scions left ; others, the Tatish- 
 tchefs for instance, have dropped or lost the title. Another group, 
 composed of four Russian and four Polish families, comes from a 
 no less illustrious stock and nearly as national in the eyes of the 
 Russians : they are the descendants of Guedimin and the ancient 
 sovereign house of Lithuania, known in Europe under the name of 
 the Yagellons, and which, before it ascended the throne of Poland, 
 at one time ruled the whole of Western Russia. From Rurik and 
 
 * We mean here only -the genuinely Russian families, not those who, 
 by their nationality, belong to the alien dependencies of the empire, espe- 
 cially the Caucasus, where Gruzia (Georgia) alone has contributed quite a 
 bevy of native princes.
 
 354 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the first Russian dynasty are descended the Dolgorukis,the Baridtin- 
 skys, the Obole'nskys, the Gortchak6fs, the Mossalskys ; from Gue- 
 dimiu and the Lithuanian dynasty, the Khovdnskys, the Galitsins, 
 the Kurdkins, the Trubetsk6ys in Russia, the Czartoryskis and the 
 Sanguszkos in Poland. To this double line, issued from the oldest 
 native rulers, should be added seven or eight families descended 
 from Tatar, Tcherkess, and Gruzm chieftains, formerly admitted 
 into the ranks of Russian kniazes, and most of whom the 
 Tcherkasskys, the Meshtche'rskys, the Bagrations bear his- 
 torical names. 
 
 A mere roll-call shows that these Russian kniazes are not 
 behind any nobility in Europe in antiquity and renown ; to this 
 day there is none that can show more men of distinction. Never- 
 theless, in all of these houses of quasi-royal blood, by whose side 
 rank many old boyhr families, in all this brilliant national nobility, 
 there are not the elements for a political aristocracy, there are not 
 the materials to make, say a House of lyords, a house of hereditary 
 boykrs. There is a twofold reason for this disqualification : one 
 lies in the historical constitution of Russian society ; the other and 
 main reason lies in the constitution of the Russian family itself. 
 
 Equality among all the children equal rights, title common 
 to all is the law of the Russian family, as well that of the plain 
 dvorianln as that of the kniaz, the merchant, and the mujik. This 
 democratical principle, always staunchly maintained by the Rus- 
 sian nobility, stifled in the sprouting such germs of aristocracy as 
 sank here and there into the soil. In these princely houses, the 
 recipients of the blood of Rurik and Guedimin, as in the poorest 
 nobleman's house, there is no " eldest son," no "head of the fam- 
 ily," as far as any special rights go. The father's possessions are 
 divided equally among the sons ; the ancestral title is transmitted 
 to all without distinction, and, as it is the only property that is not 
 impaired by successive partitions, it frequently is the only inheri- 
 tance that remains to them. Hence the frequent debasement of a 
 title which, while belonging to but few families, can at the
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 355 
 
 same time belong to many individuals. By dint of branching and 
 ever more branching out, many of these princely families and 
 sometimes the most illustrious end by forming a bushy shrub, 
 the boughs of which are so intertwined that they hide and choke 
 one another. 
 
 Some of these houses of kniazes, the unity and fortune of which 
 are secured neither by primogeniture nor by the entrance of the 
 younger sons into the Church, have become veritable tribes or 
 clans, with no bond between them but the name and the title. 
 Thus there are some four hundred princes and princesses Galitsin 
 by right of birth. In these huge families grown out of the same 
 trunk, there are naturally, by the side of limbs that spread in 
 the sun, blossom-crowned and overflowing with sap, branches 
 pining away for want of air and nourishment and bare of foliage. 
 As early as in the sixteenth century, when Rurik's dynasty still 
 ruled, Fletcher remarked that many kniazes owned no inheritance 
 save their title, with nothing to support it. ' ' There are so many of 
 them in this position," wrote the envoy of aristocratic England, 
 " that these titles do not amount to much. Accordingly you see 
 princes only too happy to serve a man of no account for a salary 
 of five or six roubles a year." Matters have not much improved 
 with time and the multiplying of more families. At this very 
 moment one meets in Russia descendants of Rurik and Guedimin 
 following more than modest pursuits. In Petersburgh I have seen 
 one conduct the orchestra of a cafe-concert ; in Italy I have met, 
 on second- and third-rate stages, princesses singing under assumed 
 names, and I was told there had been princes who drove cabs and 
 princesses who took positions as lady's-maids. Such things 
 account for the fact that several families issued from Rurik dropped 
 their title. With such division, such crumbling away of families 
 and fortunes, it were vain to look for family feeling or esprit de corps 
 in the high nobility. 
 
 Would you know whether a country inclines to aristocracy, 
 first of all inquire into the laws or customs that regulate the dis-
 
 356 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 tribution of wealth. According to a remark of Tocqueville's, it is 
 the laws on succession which, by centring, grouping around a few 
 heads first property, then power, force aristocracy, in a manner, to 
 spring from the soil, or, by dividing, frittering, and scattering 
 property and power, pave the way for democracy. Now^h the 
 Russian nobility, the custom of dividing the property equally 
 among the sons has always prevailed, that levelling law, which, 
 ' ' passing over the soil again and again, razes the walls of dwell- 
 ings to the ground and pulls down the enclosures of fields. ' ' If 
 in Russia the law of equal division has not yet reduced all the 
 large estates into house lots, destroyed all possibilities of living 
 broadly, the reason is that Russia, so far, has been placed in 
 exceptional economic conditions. It was, at first, the immensity 
 of the territory ; then the rapid rise in the value of land owing to 
 the opening of new issues ; lastly, serfdom and the nobility's 
 exclusive right to own ' ' inhabited estates. ' ' In many a region the 
 land revenue has increased so fast, in proportion to the population 
 and means of communication, that the properties would double, 
 treble their value, sometimes increase it tenfold, in the space of 
 twenty or thirty years. At this rate, it was not impossible for two 
 or three sons, after dividing among themselves the paternal inheri- 
 tance, to find themselves each as rich as their father had been at 
 their age. 1 There was another cause still, at least to all appear- 
 ance, for large fortunes : that is the fact that property is divided 
 only among the male children. 
 
 The sons, being those whom it behooves to perpetuate the 
 family, share the estate. To the daughters who have living 
 brothers, the law awards an almost nominal portion : one four- 
 teenth of the paternal inheritance, at least of the real estate. Often 
 
 1 In the present and for the future the true safeguard is that we Russian 
 nobles have been led by the late economic revolution to work, and to like it ; 
 so that a moderate inheritance becomes what alone inheritances should be 
 in an ideal state of society an encouragement and aid to effort, a stepping- 
 stone, a. stirrup, a reserve fund, not a bed to lie down on and idle away the 
 best forces of manhood and the few years given to use them in.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 357 
 
 they get only their marriage outfit. In the spirit of ancient 
 civilizations, a wedded and dowered daughter is put out of the 
 family. A slice of bread once cut off, in the popular saying, 
 does not belong to the loaf any longer. True, the dowry given to 
 the daughters sometimes amounts to more than what would be 
 their legal share ; there even are cases where the daughters had, 
 in this way, received a portion as large or larger than that of their 
 brothers. This law by no means proceeds from contempt of the 
 female sex ; for Russian law, so niggardly in its provision for 
 them, is in many ways more liberal towards women than the 
 French Code, which, with regard to inheritance, places them on an 
 equal footing with the men.* If the Russian Code awards to the 
 daughter but a trifling portion of her father's property, it ensures 
 to the wife the free enjoyment and independent management of 
 her own property, even in her husband's lifetime. The married 
 woman is never, as in France, a ward under her husband's guar- 
 dianship, and, in a general way, it may be stated here that, with 
 regard to the emancipation, or rather independence, of women, no 
 society in Europe is more advanced or more liberal than the higher 
 classes of this same Russia, whose laws, in other respects, treat 
 them so meanly." 
 
 The mode of succession which consecrates the inequality of 
 man and women, even still numbers partisans in the countries 
 ruled by the Napoleonic Code. Even in France it has the sympa- 
 thies of those who dread the inroads of democracy, and is avowedly 
 preferred by a whole school of contemporary publicists, packing 
 
 * It should be mentioned that the Emperor Alexander III., in 1882-83, 
 appointed a commission to set up a project for a new civil code, better 
 adapted to the conditions of modern life. 
 
 * One often hears expressions of blame and indignation against the care- 
 lessness, if not heartlessness, of Russian customs in the matter of marriage 
 settlements which are not used, from which it is inferred that the Russian 
 man is careless of the interests of his daughters and their children. Whereas 
 the reason is that settlements are not much needed in a country where a 
 husband has not the right of cutting down a tree on his wife's property 
 against her will !
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 primogeniture, the privilege of one sex over the other appears to 
 them as a social guaranty, a way of protecting the transmission 
 of property and of perpetuating families. This opinion, however, 
 is not always borne out by the example of the Russian nobility. 
 Where the law recognizes all the children's equal right to the 
 paternal inheritance, the curtailed portion of the sons is re-com- 
 pleted by marriage ; on the average, the wife restores to the hus- 
 band what the sister took from the brother. If the division 
 between the males alone cuts up lands and fortunes less, that 
 between all the children offers greater facilities for reconstitut- 
 ing or rounding them up by means of alliances. Nowadays, 
 when almost the only factors of wealth are industry, banking, 
 and trade, there is no other bridge between the opulence of 
 the new-made families and the neediness of the old ones but 
 the girls' right of succession. With the opposite rtgime, power 
 and wealth are in danger of passing wholesale to a ruling class 
 of parvenus. 
 
 The exclusive division of property between the males has, from 
 a conservative point of view, another disadvantage, which must 
 make itself specially felt in Russia : it disturbs the balance of for- 
 tunes and the relative position of families more quickly, in a man- 
 ner more subject to chance than the equal division between all the 
 chiMren. Two fathers, owning equal fortunes and having an equal 
 number of children, leave their male descendants in very different 
 plight according as they happen to have more sons or more 
 daughters. On the whole, the Russian custom does not seem to 
 foster aristocratic influences any more than the French, seemingly 
 more democratic, custom. However, public opinion in Russia 
 leans so much in favor of the independence of women, that legis- 
 lation or custom may very possibly in the near future refuse to 
 sanction any longer the curtailing of those children's birthright 
 who are by nature less apt to make a fortune for themselves, and 
 then the equality of the sexes would prevail in the North as it 
 does in France.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 359 
 
 From the day when they began to associate with the nobilities 
 of Western Europe, the Russian dvoribnstvo understood that, with 
 the succession laws as they stood, there could be no real aris- 
 tocracy. Then some of the descendants of kniazes and boyhrs at- 
 tempted to implant in their country the foreign custom of entail. 
 Singularly enough it was one of the least aristocratically minded 
 of sovereigns, Peter the Great, who was the first to start this inno- 
 vation. Was it done merely to imitate the West and better to 
 assimilate Moscovia to Europe ? Was the object really to place 
 between the people and the throne an exalted and influential 
 nobility ? Such views fit ill with the conduct of the monarch who 
 made all rank in the state dependent on the grade in the state 
 service. The most likely explanation is that he wished, by the 
 help of this new loan from Europe, to secure to his own country, 
 then just thrown open to civilization, a rich and well informed, 
 consequently a European and civilized class. As instituted by 
 Peter, nothing could be more manifestly overdone and so mani- 
 festly opposed to the national customs. In order to give the new 
 institution some chance of life, the first thing to do was to abolish 
 and then transform it. By an ukciz (decree) of 1714 all the landed 
 estates belonging to the nobility were made subject to entail, or, 
 more correctly, were to pass to one single heir. Personal property, 
 at that time amounting to very little in Russia, alone remained at 
 the free disposal of the dvoriariln during his lifetime, and alone 
 was to be divided among his children at his death. 
 
 This system differed from that in force in Western Europe in 
 one essential point. Instead of ensuring the paternal estate to the 
 eldest son, Peter the Great gave the father the faculty to appoint 
 his heir. This entail without primogeniture introduced into the 
 family an autocratic element : the private succession law seemed 
 copied from the law on succession to the throne, which Peter, in 
 memory or in defiance of his son Alexis, left to the choice of the 
 sovereign. Such a system could hardly produce better consequences 
 in private than in public life. This sort of artificial primogeniture
 
 360 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 did not work well, as it made the succession to depend on the 
 paternal arbitrary pleasure and not on the chance of birth. Peter's 
 ukdz was revoked as early as 1730, having been, during its brief 
 existence, an occasion of endless trouble in families. The old 
 national custom of equal division was restored, and entails, when 
 they were once more authorized, had to be made in favor of the 
 eldest sons, all the way down the line, as in England and Germany.' 
 
 Under these new conditions, entails have not yet become pop- 
 ular with the Russian nobility. Notwithstanding the favor with 
 which they are apparently regarded in some high social regions, 
 their number as yet is very small. It was of little use that an 
 ukclz of the Emperor Nicolas, dated 1845, granted to all nobles the 
 right of establishing one or more entails : the nobility never 
 availed themselves to any extent of the prerogative. The high 
 value of such entailed estates demanded by the law only in part 
 accounts for the abstention. According to the terms of the ukhz of 
 1845, the land thus set apart must be entirely free from mortgage, 
 peopled with at least 2,000 peasants, and bring an unencumbered 
 yearly income of not less than 12,000 roubles. Thus regulated, 
 the institution was within the reach of only the very wealthy ; but 
 then, to be of some political efficiency, an entail should always 
 represent something big ; else it would be to society only a useless 
 and cumbersome sort of mortmain. The chief obstacle lies in the 
 national custom and tradition and in the democratic instincts of 
 the nation. The Russian spirit shows itself in this respect very 
 different from the Polish as well as the German spirit, which 
 latter, in the Baltic provinces subject to Russia, has hitherto suc- 
 ceeded in affording predominance to its aristocratic propensities. 
 
 s In the succession law as it now stands there is a provision which, if 
 not exactly equivalent to entail, nearly approximates it in spirit. A 
 landholder cannot dispose by will of landed property that has come to 
 him or her by inheritance, but only of such as he or she may have ac- 
 quired by purchase. As, however, there is no law preventing landhold- 
 ers to dispose of their patrimony in their lifetime, they have the resource 
 of selling them or alienating them by deed of gift in favor of any 
 chosen heir.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 361 
 
 There are, indeed, partisans of the right of primogeniture in 
 theory who, from the fear of breeding discord between their sons, 
 do not dare to choose an heir from amongst them. I am acquainted 
 with a nobleman, the owner of vast estates, and infatuated with 
 English institutions, yet who, having three sons, and being un- 
 willing to rob any of them, divided his property between them, 
 entailing each lot. 
 
 Notwithstanding such examples and the encouragements given 
 by a certain world, the custom of entails has remained in Russia 
 an exotic plant which does not seem inclined to spread very fast. 
 Such as it exists to-day, in a limited number of families in whom 
 the others acknowledge no superiority, this foreign importation 
 cannot have the political effects which, in other countries, justify 
 its existence.* In Russia it is simply inconvenient economically 
 and morally a piece of public wealth withdrawn from circulation 
 and the wealth of a privileged few artificially insured against the 
 punishment due to improvidence or vice. The Russian dvori&nstvo, 
 deprived, in the case of the great majority of its members, of any 
 legal protection against the competition of the other classes, cannot, 
 by merely concentrating property and perpetuating it, insure to 
 itself the hereditary authority and independence which go to the 
 making of genuine aristocracies, f 
 
 * In Russia proper there were lately, I am assured, not forty entailed es- 
 tates. In the old Polish provinces, the government has itself founded, by 
 means of crown demesnes and confiscated estates, small entails, in lots 
 bringing a yearly income of 2,000 or 3,000 roubles. In this there is, evidently, 
 less an aristocratic intention than a political expedient. The object is to 
 forestall the sale of lands granted to Russians, and thus to retain a Russian 
 element in the country. 
 
 t Since Alexander III. came to the throne various systems have been 
 mooted to prevent the increase of poverty amongst the nobility and the 
 frittering away of its lands. Some have suggested that entails should be 
 placed within the reach of all purses ; others, that the law should hinder 
 further steps in this direction, by instituting " normal indivisible lots " ; Mr. 
 Pobiedonostsef advises to adopt the American homestead law, and allow 
 landholders of all classes whatever to shield estates of a certain standard 
 value, to be determined, from division and seizure by having them entered 
 on a special register.
 
 BOOK VI. CHAPTER II. 
 
 How the Monopoly of Territorial Proprietorship could not Confer on the 
 Nobility any Political Power Historical Reasons of this Anomaly 
 The Drujina of the Kniazes and the Free Service of the Boy&rs 
 Ancient Conception of Property : the Vdt-tchina and the Pomi6stiy6 
 The Service of the Tsar the Only Source of Fortune The Disputes about 
 Precedence at Table Why no Real Aristocracy could Come out of all 
 this The Hierarchy of Families Succeeded by the Hierarchy of Indi- 
 vidualsThe "Table of Ranks," and the Fourteen Classes of the 
 Tchin Results of this Classification. 
 
 THIS authority, this independence of political aristocracies, the 
 Russian nobility never possessed, not even at the still recent time 
 when it enjoyed the exclusive privilege of owning the soil, and 
 when those who tilled its lands were its slaves. In order to 
 account for this apparent anomaly : a nobility in exclusive posses- 
 sion of the soil, yet debarred from the power which such possession 
 imparts everywhere else, we must work our way back into the past, 
 to the roots of the Russian nobility and the Russian system of prop- 
 erty. An aristocracy is the work of centuries, the strength of it 
 can be tested only by the depth to which its roots have reached. 
 Those of the Russian nobility are easily laid bare. From a 
 remote period history shows us the dvori&nstvo under the two 
 aspects it has preserved ever since : as servant of the state and as 
 holder of the soil. History shows us the bond between the land- 
 lord and the state functionary ; it shows us how the one has always 
 kept the other dependent and subordinate. 
 
 Among the ancient Russian Slavs there does not appear to 
 have been either a nobility or an aristocracy of any kind. The 
 original progenitor of the Russian dvorihnstvo is the drujfna, which 
 
 362
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 363 
 
 makes its appearance among the Slavs of N6vgorod and Kief 
 with Rurik and the Varangians from the North. Originally of 
 the same race and rank as the founders of the Russian Empire, 
 the drujina were the companions of the kniaz, his peers. Such 
 associations are met with everywhere ; they surround the person 
 of the Teutonic chieftains who were the founders of all the mod- 
 ern European states. The word drujina, from drug, " friend," 
 recalls the trustes of the Frank kings, so that the drujinniki (mem- 
 bers of the drujina) answer to the antrustions. Only in Russia 
 this body preserved its primitive features longer and more faith- 
 fully, although circumstances did not allow of a feudal class 
 springing from it. 1 What did come of it was the boyar, a title 
 which confronts us at a very early time, with the meaning of 
 "prince's councillors," and which at first seems to have merely 
 indicated a high rank in the drujina, as suggested by the word, 
 derived as it is from the radical bblti, "more, greater," thus liter- 
 ally corresponding to the familiar European form of speech : ' ' the 
 great of the land, " ' ' les grands. ' ' 
 
 The essential quality of the drujinnik was that of free com- 
 panion, voluntary associate and follower. He served the kniaz, 
 he left him, at his own will and pleasure ; he was free to exchange 
 the service of one kniaz for that of another. That was his only 
 right, his only prerogative, one, however, which was to him the 
 safeguard of all others, for, if the kniaz wished to keep his drujina 
 
 1 There is nothing but what is perfectly natural and logical in the fact 
 of no feudal class or social system having sprung up out of the occupation 
 of Russia by the Varangians, once we admit that they were Slavs ; whereas, 
 if the German theory is accepted, this same fact becomes an anomaly and 
 a puzzle. Why should a band of Scandinavian Northmen have abstained 
 from treating this one country in the same way that their brethren had 
 treated all the countries in which they had obtained a footing ? Because 
 they had been invited over ? So were the Saxons by the Britons and used the 
 invitation only as a stepping-stone to conquest. No ; nothing but race- 
 kindred explains the difference, but that explains it fully and satisfactorily, 
 with all its sequels, such as the prompt adoption by the new-comers of the 
 lateral order of succession, so distinctively Slavic. (See Appendix to Book 
 IV., Ch. II., p. 253.)
 
 364 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 and his boyhrs, he was fain, on occasion, to ask their advice, and 
 take it, too. This right of free service the boybrs, heirs to the dru- 
 jfna, treasured long. At Moscow itself, under the first " Grand 
 Kniazes" of the new line, there was a formula to that effect: "the 
 boykrs and free servitors " . . . ("are free to come and go," com- 
 pletes the saying). This freedom and choice of service, however, 
 could last only as long as the system of appanages and the division 
 of sovereignty. The drujtna's ancient privilege went with the 
 last appanages, and in fact itself contributed to bring about the fall 
 of the appanage-principalities, without which it could not subsist. 
 The boy&rs naturally made use of their freedom by tendering their 
 services to the wealthiest and most powerful, around them they 
 crowded. The ' ' Grand- Kniazes ' ' of Moscow gradually drew them 
 to their court, and, by forsaking and consequently weakening 
 the other kniazes, the boy&rs undermined the appanage system and 
 themselves prepared the incorporation of the smaller principalities. 
 The reins of sovereignty once gathered into one hand, the boy&rs, 
 from companions and voluntary associates of the "Grand-Kniaz," 
 quickly became his servants or, as they entitled themselves, his 
 "varlets" kholbpy. 
 
 The boy&rs, then, to begin with, lacked the base on which 
 rested the feudal aristocracies of the West : the territorial base, a 
 hold on the soil of the country. The drujtnnik, attached to the 
 person of the kniaz, whom he followed in all his expeditions, was 
 bound to the soil by no permanent tie ; he lived on his share of 
 the booty and on his prince's bounty. The very right, so jealously 
 guarded, of free service, hindered the drujina, ever on the move, 
 from settling down anywhere and striking roots into the soil. 
 Thus the prerogative, so precious a safeguard of the boyars 1 per- 
 sonal independence, became an obstacle to their political emancipa- 
 tion ; another lay in the constitution of the property tenure. 
 
 Two things above all others decide a country's social status : 
 the mode of holding property, and the laws regulating inheri- 
 tances. Now in Russia the legislation on landed property lingered
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 365 
 
 long in stages which it traversed rapidly in the West ; it never 
 had either the same fixity or the same precision, nor, consequently, 
 could it have the same importance. These differences can be ac- 
 counted for by various causes, by custom, by the grade of civiliza- 
 tion and the training of the country, by the immensity of the 
 territory coupled with the scantiness of the population. 
 
 Among the early Russians, the right of proprietorship seems as 
 yet ill denned, not clearly distinct from the right of sovereignty. 
 The soil, at that time so imperfectly and scantily settled, was long 
 regarded as a public demesne. In those vast plains, unprovided 
 with natural divisions, it seems less natural than elsewhere to 
 fence up the land and award the ownership of it to individuals.* 
 The Russian of Moscovia inclines to a twofold conception of land- 
 tenure, closely akin at bottom and similar. In his eyes, the land 
 belongs to the prince, the sovereign of the country, or else to the 
 commune, to the body of men who till it. In both cases it is 
 public property, inalienable in principle, a common good, of which 
 the individuals, be they noble or simple, enjoy only the use, in 
 exchange for certain services and dues. 
 
 The kniaz in appanaged Russia, the tsar in unified Moscovia, 
 considered himself as the owner, the supreme landlord, whose will 
 is law. His quality of landlord for a long time even took pre- 
 cedence of his quality as sovereign : it is as landlord that the 
 ' ' Grand- Kniaz " of Moscow rules and manages the territory of his 
 state, as he would a private domain. These, his own lands, 
 the kniaz distributes to his drujina, the tsar to his boy&rs, as 
 guerdon for their services. In a country of sluggish trade and 
 
 * American readers will need no explanation of this seeming incon- 
 sistency. They have only to look to their own West and Southwest for a 
 similar state of public feeling. In Texas, it is to this day a serious matter 
 requiring some nerve, to fence in a property and limit the general right of 
 way through it and over and across it. Such attempts are frequently met 
 by systematic fence-cutting ; and as both the wooden stakes and the barbed 
 wire are expensive affairs, many a ranch-owner has desisted, especially in 
 the remoter and more lawless districts, where public irritation is apt to take 
 even more direct and dangerous forms than fence-cutting.
 
 366 THE EM 2*1 RE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 little wealth, where coined money comes in late and remains scarce 
 always, land is for the sovereign the most handy thing to use for 
 compensations and rewards ; it is pay for the captain, salary for 
 the functionary, pension for the retired servant, and in these 
 capacities it is received, not as a perpetual, hereditary homestead ; 
 it is neither the centre of a family, nor a focus of influence. 
 
 For the drujfna, and later on for the nobility, landed property 
 became a bond of dependence, a fetter anything but an agent of 
 independence and power. Two modes of personal land-tenure 
 confront us in ancient Russia, and, consequently, two categories 
 of landed property : the vbt-tchina and the pomihtiyg the land 
 inherited from ancestors, the patrimony, and the land awarded by 
 the sovereign, a grant to be enjoyed by the servants of the state.* 
 These grants somewhat recall the fiefs or benefices of the West. 
 In Moscovia, as in Western Europe, the land grants, conferred as 
 recompenses for services done, early superseded the patrimonial 
 estates; the pomihtiyt absorbed the vbt-tchina. From the pomits- 
 tiyg proceeds the present nobleman's estate, so that the term 
 pomiesh-tchik has come to mean merely " landlord. ' ' There was an 
 important class of vbt-tchinnikt, or men who held land in their own 
 right, and as an inheritance from their ancestors : it was the kniazes, 
 the appanage princes, with whom the ownership of land sur- 
 vived sovereignty. The Moscovite princes undertook to remedy 
 this state of things which, under their rule, was a sort of anomaly. 
 The Grand-Kniaz took care not to leave to his kinsfolk of 
 the collateral lines the proprietorship of demesnes annexed to 
 the main principality. The mediatized princes were reduced to 
 exchange their hereditary vbt-tchinas against pomiestiyts situated 
 far from the regions where their fathers had reigned and of which 
 themselves sometimes bore the name. The Englishman, Fletcher, 
 Queen Elizabeth's envoy, noticed, as late as the end of the sixteenth 
 
 * Vdt-tchina or Ot-tchina, "patrimony," from otitts, "father" ; pomils- 
 tiyi, "rural estate," from mitsto, "place," a word which, like its French 
 and English equivalents, designates both locations and employments or 
 functions.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 367 
 
 century, how persistently the Moscovite tsars strove to weaken, to 
 eradicate so to speak, the families descended from Rurik, by tearing 
 them from their native soil and transplanting them into a strange 
 one. The only Russian families who had a territorial footing, the 
 only ones that seemed destined to found an aristocracy as opposed 
 to the " Grand-Kniaz," the heirs of the appanaged princes, were 
 thus lowered to the level of mere pomiGsh-tchiki, men who held 
 their land and fortune from the master's pleasure. 
 
 The Moscovite tsar remained the only supreme landlord as well 
 as the only sovereign. The most illustrious families were scat- 
 tered here and there over the land, owning no traditional home- 
 stead, no centre of local influence, similar to that singular herb 
 of the steppes, which the autumn winds wildly chase across the 
 plain haphazard in dry bunches. Between the dvorihnstvo and the 
 soil there never has been the same bond, the same association as in 
 the West. The nobility is not identified with the soil as in the 
 rest of Europe, nor with the region in which it resides. The 
 nobles do not bear the name of their estate or their township, as 
 indicated by the French de and the German von prefixed to the 
 names.' Now, every aristocracy resembles the giant of the 
 Greek myth, who derived his strength from contact with his 
 mother, Earth. This lack of localization, of centre, of territorial 
 basis, sufficiently accounts for the incurable feebleness of the boyhrs 
 as a class, and the failure of all aristocratical attempts in ancient 
 Russia. Nothing there recalls the proud dwellings of the Western 
 aristocracies, the inheritors of feudalism ; nothing resembles those 
 
 1 This remark, though correct on the whole, is somewhat too sweeping. 
 Several old princely families bear the names of their former principalities, 
 as the author himself remarked just now ; so, for instance, the MossEllskys, 
 some branches of whom have dropped the title, were named for a small 
 principality, the capital of which, Mossalsk, is even yet a flourishing third- 
 class city. Many noble families were originally named after their oldest or 
 finest estate. The frequent name-ending sky, which takes gender and 
 number, is an adjective desinence, so that " the Mossdlskys " really means 
 "those of Mossalsk," and might very well be rendered by de or -von 
 Mossalsk.
 
 368 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 mediaeval castles, so solidly squatting on the soil, so haughtily 
 pervaded with the might of the families whose strongholds they 
 were. 4 Russian nature herself seems to repudiate these domestic 
 fortresses, by providing neither the sites nor the materials for 
 them the rocky steeps whose brow they should crown, the stone 
 of which they should be built. The wooden house, so often 
 burned down, so quickly worm-eaten, so easy to transport or to 
 reconstruct, is a meet emblem of Russian life ; the very dwellings 
 aptly represent the precariousness of the aristocracy's destinies. 
 
 Owing to the pomitstiyt, the Russian noble appears before us, 
 ever since the Middle Ages, in the twofold aspect in which we see 
 him to this day : that of owner of the soil and servant of the state. 
 These two qualities, sometimes separated in later times, at first 
 hold closely together ; the latter is the condition, the cause, of the 
 former. It is as servant of the Grand-Kniaz that the noble 
 receives ltos>pomtistiy, it is as such that his children retain pos- 
 session of it. The pomitsh-tchik remains dependent on the sov- 
 ereign who gave him his land, and, later on, when serfdom is 
 established, gives him, in the peasants attached to the glebe, the 
 instruments of cultivation. For the Russian noble, landed prop- 
 erty is a bread-giver, a means of subsistence, of maintenance ; he 
 does not settle on it, does not become attached to it, for he knows 
 that the river of his fortunes flows from another source. 
 
 Under the old tsars, as under the successors of Peter the Great, 
 it was in the capital, at court, that government places were 
 obtained, that wealth and influence were to be acquired. The 
 fascination which Versailles under I/mis XIV. exerted on the 
 high French nobility was wielded no less imperatively by the 
 barbarous Kremlin over Moscovite kniazes and boy&rs. The court 
 spirit, so opposed to the true aristocratical spirit, already per- 
 
 4 Families, no matter how " mighty," needed no strongholds, since they 
 were a growth of the same soil as the people, scions of one race, unlike 
 feudal aristocracies, which, being based on an iniquitous thing conquest 
 naturally were the objects of both race-hatred and class-hatred, and conse- 
 quently in constant danger.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 369 
 
 vaded the entire dvorianstvo. In France, even when most under 
 control, the noblesse maintained the gentleman's outward dignity ; 
 in Russia it was not supported by ancient traditions, nor by the 
 conventional code of ' ' honor, ' ' nor by the habitual politeness 
 which tempers the master's arrogance and gilds over the cour- 
 tier's humility. At the semi-Byzantine court of Moscow, the 
 tsars did not take much thought of disguising under a becoming 
 garment the bondage of the doykrs, or the boyars of throwing a 
 veil over their servility. Everybody knows the saying reported 
 of the Emperor Paul I. by J. De Maistre or Segur. " Sir," he is 
 said to have remarked to a foreigner, ' ' I know of no grand seig- 
 neur but the man to whom I am speaking, while I am speaking 
 to him." An Ivan or a Vassili might already have spoken in the 
 same way. Outside of their sovereign favor, the tsars did not 
 like to concede to their subjects any personal advantage, any 
 superiority of birth. If a subject was allowed to derive any glory 
 or profit from his ancestor's titles, it was from the rank obtained by 
 them in the service of the veliki-kniaz. This gave rise to a novel 
 hierarchy, a peculiar order of precedence, which, under the name 
 Qtmiht-ni-tchestvo, was in force as late as in the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries. 
 
 At the Moscovite court, precedence gradually ceased to depend 
 on birth and the rank of blood ; all the subjects of the veliki-kniaz 
 were measured by one common standard state service. The 
 "place occupied " mihto was the only gauge applied to every 
 one's claims and titles, and the rank it conferred extended not to 
 individuals alone, but to their families as well. In force of the 
 precedence thus obtained, a man could not serve under another 
 who had at any time been placed under the orders of his father. 
 Such a system must in time have led to heredity of office. The 
 dignity of boyar, the highest in old-time Russia, although 
 nominally enjoyed only for life, was in reality fast getting to pass 
 from father to son. Sixteen families, the historian Solovibf tells 
 
 us, had received the right of having their members enter at once 
 
 24
 
 370 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the ranks of the boy&rs. In some fifteen others the young men 
 began in the rank of the okblnik, the second Moscovite dignity. 
 Of these privileged families, twenty bore the title of kniaz and 
 were descended from Rurik or Guedimln. In the other families 
 a son entered service two grades below the grade attained by his 
 father ; if he did not advance, his son started two grades lower 
 still, and, if this went on, the family of course dropped into 
 obscurity. For the regulation of each individual's rights and 
 each family's claims, special registers or service-lists were kept. 
 
 It is easy to see how great must have been, in the eyes of the 
 vettki-kniazes, the advantages of this system, out of which a 
 new aristocracy seemed sure to grow. In Moscow itself, the side 
 branches of the reigning house naturally enjoyed, at first, a 
 special consideration. In order to deprive them of it, the veliki- 
 kniazes began to raise their boy&rs to the same level as that on 
 which stood the descendants of Rurik, reserving the right of 
 lowering by and by both kniazes and boy&rs at one stroke. The 
 law of precedence obliged the heirs of the dispossessed princes to 
 renounce all tradition of independent greatness. Not otherwise 
 than all other subjects of the tsars, they were reduced to seek 
 lustre and nobility only in the favor and service of the sover- 
 eign. The effect of the iron rule of precedence was to merge both 
 the former appanage-princes and the Moscovite boydrs into one 
 court nobility, holding all dignities and prerogatives from the 
 pleasure of the tsar. In less than a century the fusion was so 
 complete that, when the reigning dynasty became extinct, it was 
 not from its side branches that the new head of the state was taken. 
 
 This artificial hierarchy was, in the course of nature, to make 
 things awkward for the monarch, who at first had made himself 
 a tool out of it. The effects proved especially disastrous in war, 
 by strictly limiting the choice of officers, and to this the frequent 
 defeats endured by Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- 
 ries are partly to be imputed. No aristocracy could have been 
 more exclusive, more stationary, more rife with rivalries, owing
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 3/1 
 
 to the difficulty of settling the rights of each man and putting a 
 stop to the altercations which occurred even on the battle-field 
 itself. Ivan the Terrible, indeed, had, in 1550, attempted to re- 
 strain these unseemly wranglings, not only by forbidding disputes 
 on rank to any noble who was not the head of his family, but by 
 prohibiting all nobles, while on active military duty, to raise in the 
 army any question of the kind with voyevbds (generals) of families 
 inferior to theirs, so long as they were not themselves voyevbds* 
 
 To have held its ground so long in spite of such intrinsic faults, 
 this institution must have had some moral hold on the nation. 
 This the historians think to find in the strong family feeling, the 
 sort of patriarchal tie that narrowly bound together men of one 
 blood, and made these bonds of kindred the stronger that 
 in Moscovia there were no others. The individual could not be 
 conceived apart from the kin, the rod (I^atin gens). The honors 
 conferred on a man were in a measure bestowed on his people 
 also ; when one of its members was raised to a certain dignity, 
 the whole family felt lifted in rank along with him. Thus, in 
 our days, a general does not like to serve under another general 
 whom he ranks in grade. Death was as nothing to a Russian 
 when his ancestral rank was in question ; to yield would have 
 been to write himself a traitor. The kniaz who titled himself 
 the tsar's slave, who almost cringed out of existence before him, 
 refused to sit at his table below a man whom he ranked by the 
 law of precedence. In vain, the chroniclers tell us, the tsar 
 would command him to be seated by force in the place appointed 
 him at the table ; the offended guest would resist, rise from his 
 seat opposing violence to violence, and leave the hall, shouting 
 that he would lose his head before he would give up the place 
 which he could claim by right. These disputes about precedence 
 are perhaps the only indication of the feeling of right in the 
 old Moscovite nobility, or of the feeling of honor, both so 
 mighty in the feudal society of the West. 
 
 * See A. Rambaud, Histoire de Russie, p. 241.
 
 372 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 In spite of appearances, this order of hereditary precedence, 
 so unfavorable to personal merit, was incapable of producing a 
 genuine aristocracy. What was consecrated by mtfstnitchestvo 
 was not the rights of a class, the prerogatives of a caste : it was a 
 set of individual, private claims, the rights of such or such a per- 
 son, of such or such a family. Even among these privileged ones 
 the order of precedence created, instead of solid bonds, an ever- 
 lasting antagonism. Even for the kind of oligarchy that was 
 benefited by it, it was a source of rivalry and discord. It made 
 impossible the first condition of an aristocracy homogeneous- 
 ness, solidarity ; it kept each noble in strife with his equals, each 
 family at war with its rivals. The motto of the system might 
 have been : " Each against all." There was nothing there out of 
 which to build up an enduring force. Accordingly, when its in- 
 conveniences became too obvious, the rival claims and competi- 
 tions too complicated, it collapsed, with the consent of the very 
 families who were benefited by it. It was abolished without effort, 
 under the reign of one of Old Russia's feeblest tsars, Feodor 
 Alexe'yevitch, the half-brother, and, in that as in sundry other 
 things, the pale foreshadowing of Peter the Great. All he had to 
 do was to order the public burning of the books, to which was 
 substituted a plain genealogical register, which, under the name of 
 Velvet Book exists to this day ; an interesting relic, as it gives a 
 census of the high nobility previous to Peter. It shows that then 
 already the greater part of noble families, about five hundred, 
 were of foreign or half- foreign extraction : Lithuanian, Polish, 
 Tatar, German, etc. About a hundred were of unknown extrac- 
 tion, and two hundred only pure Russian, among these one hun- 
 dred and sixty-four families of kniazes, descended from Rurik. 
 
 The natural successor of a hierarchy classified after the func- 
 tions exercised by families was a hierarchy classified after the posts 
 filled by individuals. The standard of rank remained the same 
 state service still. But the services of ancestors ceased to be 
 taken into account. It was not noble birth that gave a right to
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 373 
 
 certain posts, but the posts which conferred and perpetuated the 
 titles of nobility. Every dvorianln was bound to enter service, 
 military or civil. Thus the entire body once again became a class 
 strictly of servants of the state, and, the hereditary titles of some 
 families being overlooked, there was in its midst no other classifica- 
 tion, no other order of precedence, but those instituted by service. 
 
 Peter the Great abolished the old title of boyar, which recalled 
 antiquated claims. To the barbarous and ponderous Moscovite 
 hierarchy he substituted the "Table of Ranks," which, in its 
 fourteen classes, encloses to this day the entire Russian official 
 world. The civil functions, even the ecclesiastical dignities, are 
 there assimilated to the grades in the army and, from the ensign 
 and "college registrar" who stand on the lowest rung of the 
 ladder (fourteenth class), to the field marshal and the chancellor 
 who are alone enthroned on the top, all the servants of the state 
 are distributed in tiers, each according to his tchin or grade, in a 
 double parallel series, on fourteen numbered rungs or ranks. It 
 is not in the darkness of the Middle- Ages, under the Tatar yoke 
 it is in the eighteenth century, by the hand of the greatest of 
 modern reformers, that this institution of the tchin was established 
 with its Chinese sounding name, and indeed recalling that of the 
 mandarins with their classes symbolized by buttons of different 
 colors.* It was from Europe, though mainly from Germany, 
 that Peter borrowed most of these titles, obsolete and devoid of 
 
 5 What is here incidentally and jestingly remarked has been seriously 
 advanced as proof of the alleged Mongolian origin of the Russian people 
 and its national institutions (a wholesale recast of the German, bureau- 
 cratic hierarchy, with even the titles either retained or translated). Now 
 the word tchin is a good Slavic radical with the meaning of "action, work," 
 the progenitor of a vast family of derived words, which, by the aid of 
 desinences, prefixes, suffixes, and the like, express every shade and grade of 
 the parent idea : pri-tchin-a, "cause " ; tchin-iti, " to do, operate, repair " ; 
 so-tchin-itel, "composer''; u-tchin-i&ti, "to cause, to make" (trouble, 
 good, evil), etc., etc. Tchindvnik, therefore, which has become the typical 
 word for "bureaucrat," " employe"," "red-tape-man," originally meant 
 simply "a worker" (but not a manual laborer). Tchin-dvnitchestvo (tchin- 
 dom) is the entire system or regime, as well as the whole class as a body.
 
 374 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 meaning nowadays: "college registrar," "college assessor," 
 "State councillor" (StaatsratK), "actual State councillor" 
 (wirklicher StaatsratK), " privy councillor " (GeheimeratK), etc. ; 
 all foreign designations which in Russia never designated any 
 real functions, and which now, as from the first, represent only 
 a sort of civil grade, often unconnected with any duties. If the 
 names were foreign, however, the spirit of the institution was 
 thoroughly Russian, well adapted to this autocratic soil where 
 neither a strong aristocracy nor a free democracy ever could 
 thrive. In establishing his " Table of Ranks," the great imitator 
 of Europe only took the old Moscovite traditions and tricked out 
 in modern garb the policy of the old tsars. 
 
 During a century and a half Peter's "Fourteen Classes" 
 have made of Russia a sort of army in which each man was 
 ranked according to his grade. Such a hierarchy could be good 
 for a period of transition, for a people still full of prejudices, poor 
 in trade and industry, at a time when the only road to greatness 
 was the service of the state, when public functions were the only 
 school of a higher culture. \ By tying down the nobles to ser- 
 vice, Peter made of the nobility the instruments and support of 
 a reform which in itself did not inspire it with much sympathy.' 
 There was some sense in the thing when the men enrolled in the 
 fourteen classes were alone possessed of the rights of freemen, 
 when a diplomat laughingly proposed, as a means of freeing 
 Russia from corporal punishment, to raise the whole people to the 
 fourteenth (lowest) class. In a more advanced state of society, 
 with a civilization so varied and manifold, which opens so many 
 outlets to intellect and activity, such an artificial classification 
 according to services becomes an idle hindrance. It is, to say 
 the least, an anachronism. At a time in which private initiative 
 under all its forms, in which science and art, commerce and 
 
 A great stroke of genius which more than counterbalances any drawbacks 
 or faults. Peter usually had a choice of evils, and his greatness showed in 
 choosing the evil from which good was likely to come in some form.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 375 
 
 industry, hold so large a place, the men on public duty are not 
 always the most useful or notable servants of their country. 
 It is getting more and more awkward to class talents, impossible 
 to stamp each man's rank and merits with an external sign, a 
 figure. There is no longer an accepted weight to weigh minds, 
 no longer a legal, official standard, one common measure suiting 
 so many different capacities. The effort is vain to assimilate to 
 military grades professions naturally independent and rebellious 
 to every kind of hierarchy, or careers from their nature subject to 
 all the hazards of competition. 
 
 In Russia, the habit of fitting all things into the fourteen 
 pigeon holes of the "Table of Ranks" is such that not even 
 the arts have escaped it. The actors and singers of the imperial 
 theatres are officially divided into several categories, each having 
 its own particular rank and rights. Hence the ridiculous 
 Russian titles and designations, such as "candidate," "com- 
 merce councillor," "manufacture councillor," (German, Kandi- 
 dat, Kommerzienrath, ManufakturratK), appellations which raise 
 a merchant with a fortune of several millions to the level of the 
 seventh or eighth class, i. e., to the rank of a major or lieutenant- 
 colonel. With such a method it would have been but logical to 
 create generals of commerce, and we ought to have marshals of 
 science or poetry. There was a story current at the time I was 
 travelling in the Bast, of the Sultan's having raised his physician 
 to the rank of general of division to reward him for having cured 
 him of an anthrax. Nominations, or rather promotions, of this 
 kind are habitual in Russia ; the Official Journal is full of 
 them. It would be difficult to count the physicians who have a 
 tchin ; there are among them ' ' actual state councillors ' ' (fourth 
 class), answering to the rank of major-general, ' ' privy councillors ' ' 
 (third class), ranking with generals of division. The same with 
 scientists, professors, writers ; tricked out in the same titles 
 as administrators or magistrates, they may advance part passu 
 with them in the civil career.
 
 376 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS, 
 
 All these promotions in the line of the tchin do not hinder 
 others in that of imperial ' ' orders. ' ' There are five or six of 
 these orders of knighthood, some more, and some less sought 
 after, mostly divided into two, three, even four classes. There 
 are the orders of St. Andrew, of St. Alexander Nevsky, of Ste. 
 Anna ; of St. Vladfmir, of St. George, not to mention those of 
 St. Stanislaus and the White Eagle, originally Polish orders. 
 Since the last war in Bulgaria, one more order has been invented, 
 for services to the wounded, the order of the Red Cross, which the 
 empress distributes to ladies. There was already a decoration 
 specially reserved to women, the order of Ste. Catherine. There 
 is besides, for the army in time of war, the sword of honor with 
 eulogy ; for civilians or for generals in time of peace, there are 
 diamond rings with the imperial monogram, and at all times 
 golden snuff-boxes set with diamonds and adorned with the 
 emperor's portrait or monogram. Few are the high functionaries 
 who cannot show on their bric-a-brac shelves one of these imperial 
 snuff-boxes. The ladies of high rank also can receive analogous 
 distinctions ; no one has read memoirs on the court of St. Peters- 
 burgh but knows about the " maid of honor with portrait." 
 
 Over and above the tchin and the orders of knighthood, 
 Russia possesses quite a number of social distinctions conferred 
 somewhat indiscriminately and therefore comparatively little 
 prized. These are the court charges, graduated after the manner 
 of the " Table of Ranks," and, like the titles in the civil service, 
 for the most part purely honorary and nominal. To the ' ' state 
 councillors" and "privy councillors," "actual" or not, who 
 never assist at any council, correspond the "court masters" 
 (Hofmeister), who have nothing to do with the palace ceremonial. 
 In no other country are the means of classing men, of stamping 
 merit and putting it, so to speak, at a premium, so numerous, so 
 varied, and so unproductive. If the fruits of this system of 
 official encouragement are not more plentiful, the fault lies only 
 with its natural barrenness.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 377 
 
 In such a scale of classification, science and public instruction, 
 which has always been one of the imperial government's chief 
 cares, could not be ignored. University degrees accordingly con- 
 fer a tchin > the graduating examination at the end of a gymnasium 
 or college course entitles to the lowest class of the bureaucratic 
 hierarchy. Thus, by the fact of entering the university, the 
 student already has his foot on the ladder, and each diploma 
 raises him one rung. As it is work which, with the assistance 
 of the "Table of Ranks," gives access to places and opens the 
 ranks of the nobility, it may be said that, rank depending on 
 grade, and that again on success in study, the entire Russian 
 hierarchy is but the hierarchy of labor and knowledge, and that 
 the nobility which results therefrom is a nobility of knowledge 
 and culture. Such, indeed, is the case, and this it is that justifies 
 the tchin or rather justified it in the past. Such a method, 
 though good in a school or one particular career, is inadequate, 
 as every artificial hierarchy must be, when applied to an entire 
 society. Such attempts at numbering and pigeonholing men and 
 merits have almost always missed their aim ; or if, exceptionally, 
 they seemed to succeed, it was only by swathing society in un- 
 comfortable bands. 
 
 We can match the hierarchy of the tchin with examples taken 
 from Asia for instance, China and Turkey. We can even find 
 in modern Europe a few more or less analogous institutions, such 
 as the first Napoleon's Region of Honor and his nobility. The 
 latter, in its fundamental conception, was much like Peter's 
 "Table of Ranks." The founder of the "lyegion d'Honneur" 
 also claimed that he would enroll, dispose in a given order, all the 
 social forces of the nation ; but, having to do with a later and 
 more advanced stage of society, he was even less successful than 
 Peter the Great ; his institution survived as a mere order of 
 knighthood, with no greater social value than any other decora- , 
 tion. All goes to show that, in our state of civilization, it is not 
 any easier to invent a rational way of classing individuals than to
 
 378 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 do so for families. Any such hierarchy can have no other type 
 than the service of the state, no other standard than public func- 
 tions ; therefore it can, in the end, only encourage place-hunting 
 and correspondingly discourage free labor, whether intellectual 
 or material, and weaken the great mainspring of our civilization 
 individual enterprise. 
 
 The tchin, which makes rank to depend on post and post on 
 merit, appears at first sight to be an altogether democratic insti- 
 tution ; it is so, in certain ways ; in others it is, on the contrary, 
 a brake to any kind of healthy, free democracy. The practical 
 perfection of the tchin and the fourteen classes would be the 
 triumph of tchiribvnism the exclusive and absolute reign of 
 bureaucracy, to the profit of despotism and the detriment of 
 democracy and aristocracy both. And in the inner workings of 
 this sovereign bureaucracy, this system, which from afar appears 
 so favorable to personal merit, is so in reality to routine, sloth, 
 and mediocrity. It can be asserted without injustice that the 
 ' ' Table of Ranks, ' ' in the end, has lowered the level of state 
 service which it was instituted to raise. 
 
 In the transformation which Russia is undergoing, the tchin 
 naturally forfeits much of its importance ; its sway is less tyran- 
 nical, and liberties are sometimes taken with it. The new provin- 
 cial institutions, the electoral system founded on the free choice 
 of persons, the representative system founded on the appointment 
 of a representative by his peers these things are not easy to con- 
 ciliate with the " Table of Ranks," and will sooner or later make 
 short work of it. The extension of public liberties will leave 
 both the sovereign and the country free to choose the servants of 
 the state outside of all categories, and will destroy the privileges 
 of the tchin, which has been substituted for the privilege of birth. 7 
 The suppression of the " Table of Ranks " has been spoken of 
 already, both under Alexander II. and Alexander III. If it has 
 not been done yet, it is probably due to reluctance to change old 
 * See Appendix to this chapter.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 379 
 
 habits and to the dread of having to pay higher salaries to func- 
 tionaries whom it will no longer be so easy to satisfy with titles. 
 There also is perhaps a lurking fear that such a measure may 
 prove too profitable to favoritism and nepotism. 
 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK VI., CHAPTER II. (See note 6, p. 374.) 
 
 That the system, faithfully described in this chapter, could be so easily 
 adopted and so promptly acclimated, is owing to the fact that, however 
 clumsy in the application, it appeals in principle to the inborn, sturdy 
 democratism of the Russian nature, which boasts that "it has no nonsense 
 about it." " Be a worker, not a drone ; service and knowledge, not birth," 
 is the demand made of each member of the community ; " what is he ? " not 
 "who is he?" the ever ready question. Both these feelings respect for 
 personal merit, contempt for claims based on the achievements of others 
 are embodied in the famous apologue, The Geese, of our great fabulist, 
 Kryldf, as perfect a representative and exponent of the Russian spirit, 
 as Lafontaine, with whom, both as writer and man, he has remarkable 
 affinities, was of the national French spirit. We will give the apologue 
 complete (in Mr. Ralston's translation) for our readers' delectation and 
 to complete their comprehension of the complicated subject treated in the 
 present chapter. 
 
 " A peasant, with a long rod in his hand, was driving some geese to a 
 town where they were to be sold ; and, to tell the truth, he did not treat 
 them over-politely.. In hopes of making a good bargain, he was hastening 
 on so as not to lose the market-day (and when gain is concerned, geese and 
 men alike are apt to suffer). I do not blame the peasant ; but the geese 
 talked about him in a different spirit, and, whenever they met any passers- 
 by, abused him to them in such terms as these : 
 
 " ' Is it possible to find any geese more unfortunate than we are ? This 
 mujik harasses us so terribly, and chases us about just as if we were com- 
 mon geese. The ignoramus does not know that he ought to pay us rever- 
 ence, seeing that we are the noble descendants of those geese to whom 
 Rome was once indebted for her salvation, and in whose honor even feast- 
 days were specially appointed there.' 
 
 "'And do you want to have honor paid you on that account?' a 
 passer-by asked them. 
 
 " ' Why, our ancestors '
 
 380 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 " ' I know that I have read all about it ; but I want to know this of 
 What use have you been yourselves ? ' 
 
 " ' Why, our ancestors saved Rome ! ' 
 
 " ' Quite so ; but what have you done ? ' 
 
 "We? Nothing.' 
 
 " 'Then what merit is there in you ? Let your ancestors rest in peace 
 they justly received honourable reward ; but you, my friends, are only fit 
 to be roasted ! ' 
 
 "It would be easy to make this fable still more intelligible ; but I am 
 afraid of irritating the geese." 
 
 Kryldf (Ivan Andre"yevitch), who flourished under Alexander I. and 
 Nicolas (1768-1844), was much seen at court, where he was a greater favor- 
 ite with the sovereigns than with the courtiers, and often read by imperial 
 request his latest productions, of which the satire or pathos was brought 
 out by the inimitable humor of his diction. There is a literary tradition 
 that when he thus gave The Geese to a select and only too appreciative 
 audience, he read or rather spoke the two last lines as a spontaneous after- 
 thought, and, pausing after the first, to send a circular glance round the 
 company, added the second with a malice of eye and lip which did not les- 
 sen the number of his enemies.
 
 BOOK VI. CHAPTER III. 
 
 Effects of the " Table of Ranks " on the Nobility The Functionary and the 
 Landlord, Formerly Combined in the Person of the Dvoriantn, Fre- 
 quently Dissevered in the Nobility of our Day Hence Two Opposite 
 Tendencies : Radicalism andTchindvnism Revolutionary Dilettanteism 
 High Society and the Aristocratic Circles The French Language 
 as a Social Barrier Cosmopolitism and Lack of Nationality. 
 
 ON the Russian nobility the more than secular rule of the 
 " Table of Ranks " has laid an impress which not even the aboli- 
 tion of this official hierarchy would avail to remove. The strict 
 dependence to which it reduced the entire nobility was by no 
 means the only result of this institution, which estranged it from 
 the other classes, and especially from the soil, the only natural 
 basis of all lasting influence. The service of the state drove the 
 nobility from their estates to launch them in the army or the 
 administration, in the cities in every case, and detained the better 
 part in the capitals, where alone rank and importance were at- 
 tainable. The rich landowner, compelled to start out on the 
 conquest of a tchin, left his property in the hands of stewards who 
 frequently ruined him by their ill management or their dishonesty. 
 The institution which bound the dvori&nstvo to the service of the 
 state thus at the same time loosened his ties to soil and hearth, 
 and did much to cast him adrift. The "Table of Ranks" 
 robbed of all social influence the very nobility it had created. 
 Hence the loathing of a portion of this same /c^m-born nobility 
 for the parent that kept them in a perpetual nonage and forbade 
 all thoughts of emancipation. 
 
 According to the law, as established by Peter the Great, a 
 family which, for two successive generations, abstained from 
 
 381
 
 382 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 public service, forfeited its nobiliary rights. Peter III. set the 
 dvori&nstvo free from this obligation. Nowadays, if most nobles 
 still enter service, they stay there but a short time. After a few 
 years of youth spent in . the Guards or in a civil career, such 
 gentlemen as are endowed with an independent fortune devote 
 themselves freely to study or pleasure, to work or rest. This is 
 how we can at present make out two vocations, two different types 
 of men in the nobility, and, consequently, two parallel currents of 
 ideas. As not every noble landowner nowadays remains in " the 
 service," as not every public servant obtains landed property, as 
 well as nobility, the two qualities, the two social functions, for- 
 merly united and co-ordinate in the body of the dvori&nstvo, have 
 now been severed and have entered a stage of more or less overt 
 antagonism. Since they are no longer the two aspects of one 
 and the same man, the landlord and the functionary, the 
 pomihh-tchik and the tchiribvnik occasionally become rivals. 
 
 In the great landowner, free of his time and fortune, new 
 aspirations are coming to light, aristocratic pretensions, more or 
 less discreetly advanced in the name of the rights of culture and 
 property, ostensibly based on conservative considerations, on the 
 interests of social order and the throne. In the functionary, held 
 in the dependence of service by lack of means, survives the old- 
 time spirit of the tchin, occasionally surging up into instincts of 
 equality, of levelling, more or less openly acknowledged, in the 
 name of the rights of intellect and personal merit, and ostensibly 
 based on the love of progress, on the interests of the state and the 
 people. Of these two men, the former is naturally more of an 
 aristocrat, and frequently more of a liberal ; the latter more of a 
 democrat, but also more of a martinet. 
 
 The two rivals are both quite right : they represent and 
 embody two tendencies which are at odds in every society. The 
 one the great landowner has on his side and in his favor the 
 apprehensions inspired by the instability of affairs and the revolu- 
 tions of Western Europe ; also the conservative scares and secret
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 383 
 
 influences at court. The other the functionary has the advan- 
 tage that he represents more faithfully the national tradition and 
 at the same time follows the most manifest drift of modern civili- 
 zation. The tchiribvnik throws in the face of the landlord, with 
 his aristocratical pretensions, a shortness of memory as to the fact 
 that he himself, as a rule, holds his rights and lands only from 
 state service. The Russian nobility, indeed, such as it was fash- 
 ioned by history, is a sort of double-faced Janus : on one side the 
 face of the noble and landowner ; on the other the face of the 
 functionary or bureaucrat ; and when one face looks at itself in the 
 glass, it is tempted to forget ' ' the other ' ' at the back. 
 
 In the eyes of certain Russian aristocrats the bureaucrat has 
 grown into the natural adversary, the hereditary foe. It is him, 
 it is tchiribvnism, as embodied in Nicolas Miliutin, that a number 
 of landholders hold responsible for the sacrifices imposed on the 
 former lords by the liberation of the serfs. The tchiribvnik, espe- 
 cially of humble origin, frequently taken out of the rank of semi- 
 narists the class which one of its noble adversaries scornfully 
 refers to as the "crimped and curled proletariate," is the target 
 at which are aimed all the sarcasms of a world which yet does not 
 itself always keep out of the service. And yet, as a witty writer, 
 Samarin remarks : ' ' The noble is just a bureaucrat in a dressing- 
 gown, while the bureaucrat is a noble in uniform." This his- 
 torical truth does not always prevent mutual envy and ill-will 
 between the two, although, even yet, they are often one man ; the 
 distinction lies between the needy tchiribvnik and the wealthy 
 pomish-tchik. In the higher nobility there is a marked tendency 
 to restore the close union of landholder and functionary, but in a 
 manner the reverse of the old Moscovite tradition, i. e., by mak- 
 ing authority and power dependent on property, not rank and 
 property on state service. 
 
 The aristocracy numbers its most determined opponents 
 amidst the legal gentry, which would seem to be naturally sub- 
 servient to it. Too numerous, poor, and mixed to expect a share
 
 384 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 of aristocratical privileges, the bulk of the nobility does not forgive 
 such of its members as dream of prerogatives in which all could 
 not share. Out of the tchin and small land gentry issued a needy 
 and envious nobility, a semi-cultured proletariate which civiliza- 
 tion has endowed with more wants and covetous longings than 
 means of enjoyment or instruction. In Russia, this class, the 
 most restless and embittered all the world over, is the offspring 
 of either the nobility or the clergy, and comes out of the govern- 
 ment offices or the church seminaries. The students who are so 
 fond of dazzling the eyes of the ignorant with the glitter of an 
 approaching golden age unshackled by property or family, are 
 mostly nobles ; so are nearly all the young men who go about 
 distributing among the peasants and laboring-men revolutionary 
 primers and catechisms. Nobles, too, are the emigrants or 
 refugees who, in the clandestine press of the interior or in the 
 Russian publications edited abroad, preach to their countrymen 
 revolution and socialism ; and nobles are the greater number of 
 those champions of demagogy of both sexes, at home or abroad, 
 who set themselves up as apostles of nihilism. 
 
 It is not only on the lower rungs of the social ladder, on the 
 threshold, so to speak, of official nobility, that these radical ten- 
 dencies confront us, but frequently much higher, in families 
 placed by rank or fortune above the jealousy and cupidity proper 
 to the lower middle classes. Nor is this merely the result of a 
 national propensity towards theorizing radicalism, or of the blind 
 and reckless generosity natural to youth, which, all over the 
 world, hankers after risky and advanced ideas, as those that ap- 
 pear to it the noblest and bravest. To look closely into the 
 matter, this phenomenon is not as singular as it may seem at first 
 sight. More than one Western country might, at certain given 
 epochs, have supplied material for observations of the same kind. 
 As long as revolutionary ideas still retain something speculative 
 about them, as long as they have not passed the test of practice, 
 they easily find partisans in the midst of the very classes that are
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 385 
 
 marked for their victims. Much painful experience is needed, to 
 teach the young of the nobility and the bourgeoisie to resist its 
 inclination towards all things new, towards overbold thought and 
 humanitarian dreamings. Russia, until quite lately, had been 
 almost entirely spared these costly lessons ; but then nations, 
 like individuals, seldom benefit by any but their own experience. 
 Men who have never felt the earth quake under their feet, gaily 
 engage on a run amid the misty mazes of theory. On the thick ice 
 of northern winters, which he never heard crack beneath his tread, 
 the skater fearlessly indulges in the maddest flourishes. In this 
 respect Russian society more than once presented the same spec- 
 tacle as the French aristocracy just before the Revolution, so that 
 many of the traits in the brilliantly life-like picture presented in 
 Taine's Ancien Regime apply perfectly to the society of St. 
 Petersburgh during the eighteenth century. There, too, the 
 beau monde for quite a while loved to play with ideas : ' ' good 
 society " juggled the more freely with the most inflammable or 
 explosive of them, that they were not likely to burst on the 
 thickly carpeted drawing-room floors, and that the walls of the 
 splendid private palaces held no hiding-places for combustibles. 
 
 There was another reason besides to all this boldness and reck- 
 lessness. The nobility, the cultivated class, while trained to the 
 customs and ways of thinking of Europe, could not freely practise 
 them after the European manner, and therefore felt constrained 
 and oppressed in the very country where it held so privileged a 
 position. Superior education only made the moral inferiority of 
 Russian life more keenly felt. In Russia as it was before the late 
 reforms, a cultivated man felt the lack of air and elbow-room ; he 
 easily passed from a state of morbid depression to one of no less 
 morbid exaltation, from the numbness of prostration to the high 
 pressure of fever. True, the reforms have greatly lightened the 
 social atmosphere ; yet civilized man cannot always fill his lungs 
 to their full capacity ; he often experiences a vague and irritating 
 feeling of discomfort. There as everywhere else it is reserved to
 
 386 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the growth and free practice of public liberties to weaken the 
 revolutionary spirit. 
 
 It was impossible that, in the midst of so accessible, so motley 
 an assemblage as this Russian dvori&nstvo, there should not be 
 deposited and crystallize a narrower, more exclusive society, 
 jealously keeping aloof from its surroundings, anxious to rise 
 above the plebs of the tchin, which threatened a general levelling. 
 In this sense, there does exist an aristocracy in Russia, based on 
 manners, position, family an aristocracy of the drawing-room, 
 of which the members know one another not by titles and heraldic 
 bearings, but by connections and bringing up. For even in this 
 exalted sphere, so full of the consciousness of its own superiority, 
 caste-spirit and birth-prejudice are less controlling than in most 
 other monarchies. There are in it old families and families of 
 recent date, large fortunes and mere competences. Birth, wealth, 
 position, intellect all these, to be sure, smooth the way into this 
 social sanctum, but none of these things alone can open it with 
 unfailing key. This drawing-room aristocracy is the more exclu- 
 sive, or rather the more guardedly reserved, that, having no legally 
 determined boundaries, it is compelled to defend the line it has 
 itself drawn. Almost everywhere in Europe one of the results of 
 victorious democracy, next to the overthrow of the old landmarks, 
 is to. raise around ' ' society ' ' gossamer barriers woven of threads 
 so light and delicate as to be imperceptible to the vulgar eye, and 
 these are of all the most indestructible. Nowhere, perhaps, does 
 this art of keeping up real distinctions in the midst of nominal 
 equality, an art, which marks distances so effectively, nowhere 
 does this science of society manners and conventionalities reign 
 supreme as in Russia. 1 
 
 1 Could this not stand just as it is for a picture and explanation of Ameri- 
 can society, the "upper ten thousand" of it? It is thus that, by piercing 
 into the essence and core of things, one gradually discovers the innumer- 
 able subtle affinities that are at the root of the strange and, to the unphilo- 
 sophical observer, puzzling sympathy which mutually draws two seemingly so 
 different countries as Russia and America.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 387 
 
 The Russian nobility prides itself on its culture and takes pleas- 
 ure in referring to itself as ' ' the cultivated class ; ' ' the ' ' upper 
 crust ' ' improves on this claim and pushes culture to the verge of 
 hyper-refinement. The very manner in which European civiliza- 
 tion was introduced into Russia laid it open to a twofold danger : 
 it could not but remain for a long time an alien and a surface 
 thing. These two defects were historically unavoidable, and the 
 national bent, the aristocratic instincts, the desire to operate a 
 reaction against the tchin, intensified and confirmed them. The 
 more imminently the dominant class was threatened with a flood 
 of parvenus, the more it strove to keep them at a distance ; the 
 easier official assimilation, the harder social assimilation was made 
 to them. Thence the great importance attached to foreign 
 languages, especially to French. 
 
 French in Russia was not so much an instrument of study, a 
 means of instruction, as a sign of higher education. It was the 
 polished language, that of society and the drawing-room, the 
 standard and test of culture and " tone." For this, it was not 
 sufficient to understand French and speak it like any foreign 
 language ; purity of accent, ease of elocution, were accounted 
 essentials ; for French was before and above everything else a 
 shibboleth, a token of social free-masonry, a barrier to keep in- 
 truders out. No society, no aristocracy legally open to all, could 
 possibly barricade itself more efficiently. French became a sort 
 of society passport, without which no naturalization papers could 
 be obtained in the higher circles. There would have been no 
 great harm in that, but for the fact that the habitual use of a 
 foreign language became the sign and symbol of foreign habits, 
 ideas, and affectations. 
 
 In the spheres naturally the most aristocratic, this anti-national 
 craze, confirmed and transmitted by heredity, threatened to develop 
 into a constitutional taint. The high and middling nobility, the 
 cultivated class, prompted by fashion, "tone," ("good form" it 
 would be called now), by exclusivism, widened the chasm that
 
 388 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 separated it from the masses, not perceiving that it was aggravat- 
 ing the disease of modern Russia, not realizing that, for classes as 
 well as individuals, isolation means weakness. With face forever 
 turned toward the frontier, Russian society ended by not seeing 
 Russia any more, or, at all events, not comprehending her. Open 
 to every breath from the West, it grew cosmopolitan and lived as 
 an alien in its own native land, somewhat after the fashion of an 
 European colony in the midst of barbarians. By sheer contact with 
 the West,by dint of dyeing and anointing itself with imported ideas, 
 the man of the world lost all trace of national coloring ; his suc- 
 cess in society was in proportion as the Russian was most com- 
 pletely obliterated in him. Brought up by French or German 
 tutors, in ignorance or contempt of all that was indigenous, the 
 heir of the Moscovite boyhrs came to look on his father's tongue 
 as a boors' dialect, or rather patois. ' ' I have been married twenty- 
 five years," said a Russian gentleman to me, " and I am not sure 
 that I have addressed my wife in Russian twice." The time is 
 not so far behind us, when almost any well-bred man might have 
 said as much. This contempt for the Russian people was extended 
 to the Russian books, which was a great hindrance to the growth 
 of the young national literature, a drawback which, added to the 
 craze of servile imitation, accounts for its prolonged, pallid infancy. 1 
 
 *So far from being overdrawn, this sketch gives an inadequate idea of the 
 state of things it depicts and of which even we of my generation were the 
 victims in childhood, especially the girls. No fault was so severely punished 
 as a word spoken in Russian to anybody but the servants. The discovery of 
 a book of Zola in a convent cell could scarcely cause greater horror and com- 
 motion than that of an inoffensive Russian book in a schoolgirl's room. I 
 myself learned Russian when I was about ten or eleven, fluently using 
 French, German, Italian, and English, and spoke it at first with a purely 
 French accent which was the delight of my elders, and which only my own 
 common-sense made me feel ashamed and get rid of, to their great concern. 
 I was just past twenty when I discovered my country, my people, their his- 
 tory, and literature. It was on returning from an almost life-long residence 
 abroad, in the middle of the sixties, when I found our national Renaissance 
 in full swing. The revelation was dazzling and my intense joy in it only 
 comparable to my sorrow remorse it could not be, not being my own doing 
 for the time and all I had lost.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 389 
 
 The nobility at length felt how debilitating for Russian civiliza- 
 tion, especially for the so-called, "cultivated class," was this 
 unnatural denationalization and this superficial cosmopolitism. 
 Already under Nicolas a marked reaction took place in literature, 
 in public opinion, in private feeling, although not yet in the ideas 
 and manners, and, like all reactions, it soon tipped over to the 
 opposite extreme. Under the influence of the Slavophils, the 
 Russian name, the Russian language, the Russian man were 
 restored to honor. Some fanatics or eccentrics, like the poet 
 Khomiak6f, went the length of parading the sleeveless armicik and 
 the kaft&n. Nationality, so long scorned and trodden down, became 
 universally glorified. Fashion and the readiness of society to take 
 up ' ' crazes ' ' had much to do with this sudden revulsion. But 
 even where conversion is sincerest it is often unenlightened and 
 inconsistent. After having so long held aloof and played at cos- 
 mopolitism, the higher classes could not all in a moment divest 
 themselves of the second nature which they had so laboriously 
 cultivated. After having kept themselves estranged from the 
 people for a century and a half, they could not clear at one bound 
 the chasm which they had so long and patiently dug with their 
 own hands. 
 
 And now the two uneven halves of the nation are still morally 
 estranged, to their mutual harm and that of the country and of 
 civilization. There are only two ways out of such a situation. 
 One is to recognize officially, to sanction legally the scission of the 
 two classes, by placing the one under the other's guardianship. 
 The other is to create an intermediate class for the purpose of 
 bringing the other two together and serving as link between them. 
 Of these two alternatives, the first has in its favor the aristocratical 
 theories and artificial combinations which, in one or other form, 
 tend to place the people under the exclusive control of the nobility 
 and of the landlords ; the other has for it the facts, the drift of 
 civilization, and the natural creation of a middle class, a bourgeoisie, 
 of which the nucleus is already formed.
 
 BOOK VI. CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Personal Privileges of the Nobles, and Prerogatives of their Order What 
 Emancipation has Taken from the Nobles besides Landed Property 
 The Dvori&nstvo Threatened with Gradual Expropriation How, though 
 not Despoiled, it Practically Lost all its Privileges Importance of the 
 Prerogatives Conferred on the " Nobiliary Assemblies " by Catherine II. 
 Why they did not Manage to Benefit by them Has Russia the Ele- 
 ments of a Political Aristocracy ? 
 
 A NOBILITY can have two kinds of privileges : personal, which 
 each noble enjoys individually ; collective, belonging to all the 
 nobles as a body. The law awards the Russian dvori&nstvo 
 prerogatives of both kinds, both greatly reduced in our day by 
 the extension of public liberty. The nobility, as a rule, has not 
 been despoiled of its rights ; but that which was the privilege of 
 one class has become the right of all. Its prerogatives, collective 
 or personal, the dvori&nstvo held not from the will of the rest of 
 the nation, nor from its own achievements or ancestral conquests, 
 but wholly and entirely as a gift of sovereign bounty, and they 
 were all comparatively recent still when they were extended to 
 the rest of the nation. Before Catherine II. the nobility had no 
 sort of corporative rights, and if the nobles did claim some indi- 
 vidual rights, they were ill-defined and ill-observed. 
 
 The nobles were not only, like all the rest, subject to the 
 sovereign's will and pleasure ; there was no coarse freak of whim 
 or impertinent fancy which the sovereigns or their favorites 
 scrupled to indulge in at the expense of members of the most 
 illustrious families. The reign of Anna Ivanovna and Biron is 
 full of instructive anecdotes to the point. The inheritors of the 
 greatest names could be compelled to play clown for the delec- 
 
 390
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 391 
 
 tation of the court. One day, wishing to punish a Prince Galitsyn 
 for some trifling misdemeanor, the Empress Anna ordered him to 
 personate a hen, and the descendant of the Yagellons actually had 
 publicly to squat on a heap of straw and make believe to hatch 
 eggs, imitating the clucking of a sitting hen. Another time her 
 fit of pleasantry was not so harmless, when she forced the same 
 Galitsyn to wed an idiotic old woman. Such freaks show what 
 respect, what authority the high nobility enjoyed in the middle of 
 the eighteenth century, under the reign of the very princess whose 
 power those same Galitsyns and the Dolgorukis had at one time 
 attempted to limit in favor of a kind of oligarchy. 
 
 Up to the last reforms of the reign of Alexander II. the nobles 
 were in the personal enjoyment of only three main privileges, and 
 even these they had long shared with the so-called ' ' privileged 
 classes," i. <?., with the clergy and the merchants. They were 
 exempt from military conscription, from direct or poll-taxes, and 
 from corporal chastisement. Of these three immunities the first 
 fell away in 1876, when universal military service was introduced ; 
 the last has been extended to all classes ; the second also has 
 already ceased to be a privilege, the abolition of the poll-tax 
 having been decided on by Alexander III. For the mujik as well 
 as for the noble landowner, a property tax is to be substituted to 
 the tax on persons. The Russian nobility has no immunity from 
 taxes. In the times of serfdom, the poll-tax indirectly fell on 
 the nobility, who were responsible for their serfs, and now that 
 their estates are curtailed by the emancipation, they are directly 
 subject to taxation. The burdens that weigh on the noble land- 
 owners are even now, it is true, less heavy than those borne by the 
 peasant communes ; but this difference comes partly from the 
 difference in the constitution of property, partly from a just con- 
 sideration for the interests of the nobility, which has been sorely 
 tried by the emancipation itself and the succeeding period of 
 transition. As to the exemption from corporal punishments, now 
 extended to all classes, two things astonish one : that it should so
 
 392 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 long have been a privilege, and that the nobility should have ac 
 quired it so late. Scarcely a century did it rejoice in it, and it 
 was put in possession of it only some twenty years sooner than the 
 town-merchants. It was Peter III., Catherine IF s husband and 
 predecessor, who, in 1762, delivered it from the cudgel and the 
 knut. As long, however, as the rods were not suppressed for all, 
 even the noble was not wholly safe from them. To make him 
 liable to corporal chastisement, nothing more was needed than a 
 condemnation which degraded him from his nobiliary rights, or 
 an order to serve in the army as common soldier. 
 
 In the same way as the immunity from corporal punishment, 
 the greatest part of the rights and privileges ensured by the code 
 to the nobility are of a nature to be easily extended to all the 
 other classes of the nation, which shows that they were not, in 
 reality, nobiliary prerogatives, but only freemen's rights, such as 
 a civilized country recognizes as belonging to all its inhabitants. 
 The dvorianln, says the law, cannot be, without a trial, deprived of 
 life, or of the rights belonging to his class, nor yet of his posses- 
 sions. Such articles of the law help one to comprehend the 
 notions about nobility of such Slavs as have remained untouched 
 by the passion of imitating the aristocratic West. The Serbs, for 
 instance, since their deliverance from the Ottoman yoke, take 
 pride in saying that all Serbs are now noble, which means free- 
 men. In this sense, the Russians will soon all be nobles too. 
 
 The real, substantial privilege of the Russian nobility, that 
 which, belonging to that class alone, gave it a distinctive charac- 
 ter, was the right of owning " inhabited lands," /'. <?., lands peo- 
 pled with serfs. The eniancipation has carried away that privilege 
 along with serfdom, but could not quite obliterate the traces of 
 what had existed for nearly three centuries. To this prerogative 
 the nobility owed, down to our day, the almost exclusive monopoly 
 of landed property, individual and hereditary. The day after the 
 emancipation there were, outside of the lands it retained in its 
 hands, only those just made over to the emancipated peasants,
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 393 
 
 and the immense "state demesnes." In every-day language the 
 term "landlord" pomihh-tchik is still synonymous with 
 " noble," dvorianln. It is from this quality of individual land- 
 lord that the dvorihnstvo derives one of its chief claims on the 
 sympathies of Western countries, where the same mode of land 
 tenure is customary. Compared to the mujik, who merely has 
 the use of collective property, the pomiesh-tchik may be looked on 
 as the representative of personality, of modern individualism, as 
 well as of European culture. It. is also from the same source that, 
 in renovated Russia, the nobility derives its importance as well as 
 its claims. It has to-day what it lacked in the Middle Ages : a 
 basis of influence in the soil ; and it is on this relatively recent 
 basis that the theorizing partisans of hierarchy would like to rise, 
 for the good of the richer nobility, a sort of landed aristocracy. 
 What is needed to give such views as these a chance of success, to 
 insure, in this rural and agricultural country, the rule of the great 
 landlord, the noble pomi$sh-tchik ? In the first place, property 
 should be more stable and the monopoly of it should be guaran- 
 teed to the nobility in the future as it was in the past. Now there 
 is nothing of the kind. With serfdom and the designation ' ' inhab- 
 ited lands, ' ' fell the only barrier which defended the noble land- 
 lord against the encroachments of the other classes. 
 
 But for this protection, but for this sort of legal prohibition, the 
 greater part of the land would have slipped from the dvori&nstvo 1 s 
 hold long ago, as proved by the burdened condition of landed 
 property on the very eve of the emancipation. In 1859, nigh on 
 two thirds of it (-iVir) were mortgaged in the lombards, as the state 
 credit institutions are called, and the remaining third was in great 
 part mortgaged to private persons. Had there been in Russia at 
 the moment of the abolition of serfdom, a numerous and wealthy 
 middle class, the first order of the state would have been despoiled of 
 the greater portion of its estates. As it was, the absence of competi- 
 tion, the scarcity of available capital, the penury of the peasants 
 -all these favorable conditions did not avail to maintain it in
 
 394 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the possession of all the lands that were not taken from it legally. 
 It has been calculated that the nobility lost one fourth of its 
 estates since the emancipation, in some provinces even more. 
 The Emperor Alexander III., to help them out, instituted a special 
 bank, which lends on land at reduced rates of interest. Unfor- 
 tunately, such facilities often prove ruinous temptations : the 
 easier to borrow, the deeper the nobility gets into debt. 
 
 There is then already a noticeable tendency in landed property 
 to change hands, to the prejudice of the dvorielnstvo. To rescue 
 its old land monopoly, there is really but one thing to do : to 
 entail the lands and thus make them inalienable. The expedient 
 would be unfailing, and there have been men bold enough to pro- 
 pose it. But such a proceeding applied to the totality or generality 
 of private estates would only tend to propagate the inconveniences 
 inseparable from entails and to paralyze property, capital, in fact 
 the country. Individuals may yield to the temptation of placing 
 their name and their descendants beyond the reach of ruin and 
 above the chances of competition ; a modern government will 
 never allow one class to insure to itself for all time the possession 
 of the soil. And yet, in Russia as elsewhere, the legal and indis- 
 soluble bond of entail is the one thing that can insure to the 
 nobility this exclusive possession. No longer protected against 
 itself and others by the impossibility of selling to members of 
 mother class, nor by the system of succession, the Russian nobility 
 is threatened with slow expropriation in favor of a middle class 
 or of the peasantry, both of which lay hands on a larger share of 
 the lands each year at its expense ; and, together with the monop- 
 oly of individual land-holding, it will lose its distinctive character, 
 all social preponderance, nay, all reason for existing at all. * 
 
 * Another thing contributes to lessen the influence of the nobility : it is 
 the small number of wealthy landlords residing on their own estates. So 
 that certain political writers with aristocratical tendencies Prince Miesh- 
 tchersky for example, while claiming the principal local functions for the 
 landed nobility of each given district, propose, more or less seriously, that 
 the nobles should be bound to reside on their lands during a certain portion 
 of each year.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 395 
 
 After the ancient prerogatives have fallen off one by one, or 
 degenerated into fictions, what will remain to this nobility, shorn 
 of privileges, to distinguish it from the rest of the nation ? Very 
 little. So little, that the question obtrudes itself : what would the 
 nobles lose if the nobility were to be suppressed ? Nobody inten- 
 tionally raised a hand against it ; nobody thought of despoiling 
 it in any way ; yet the dvori&nstvo saw nearly all its rights drop 
 from it by the mere fact of the changes that took place around it. 
 The nobility practically found itself abrogated by the reforms of 
 Alexander II. , without being so much as mentioned by name. If 
 it is still standing, it is as the tree stands, around whose foot the soil 
 has been dug up, touching its roots by mistake, so that it finds no 
 support in the loosened earth against the first gust of storm wind. 
 Nobility will end, in Russia as in other countries, by being a mere 
 honorary distinction, without social importance or political mean- 
 ing, a bauble to flatter vanity, with value all the smaller for being 
 more common and having fewer external signs to facilitate mut 
 
 recognition. In reality the dvoriantn has only one personal privi- \'- 
 lege left, that of enjoying certain facilities for entering the service 
 
 <*-.. _- 
 
 of the state and for making his way therein more rapidly.* To 
 this latter advantage the nobility will perhaps cling the more 
 tenaciously that the others are slipping from them. Despoiled of 
 their prerogatives and threatened with expropriation, the im- 
 poverished dvori&nstvo will have no other refuge left but their 
 original cradle state service and tchin. And even on this 
 ground, the privileges still accorded them by law and custom 
 will gradually fall away before the levelling of culture or the 
 demands of equality. Service, like other careers, will have no 
 
 * This privilege draws after it another analogous one that of getting 
 their children admitted into certain educational establishments, such as 
 the Alexander Lyceum in SL Petersburgh, or the Smolnoy Institute of 
 Noble Damsels. In 1880 the Alexander Lyceum, until then reserved for 
 the more ancient portion of the nobility, was thrown open to the entire 
 dvori&nstvo, '. e., to the children of all state functionaries of a certain 
 rank.
 
 S9 6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 rights left, only favors ; no advantages save such as everywhere 
 go with credit and position.* 
 
 Personal privileges, inherent to the individual and the family, 
 may constitute a nobility ; but it needs common prerogatives, 
 exercised in a body by the entire class of nobles, to make an 
 aristocracy. Of such prerogatives the dvori&nstvo, though weak, 
 possessed several important ones, too. True, they were no 
 bequest of a remote past, nor a revered survival of ancient 
 national customs, but only an imitation of foreign things, a tardy 
 copy of already antiquated models. Nothing of the kind was 
 known to old Russia, where the servants of the state had no 
 rights save such as they derived from the service itself. As their 
 personal privileges, so their corporative rights were a gracious, 
 free concession from the crown. This, again, was Catherine's 
 doing. Carried away by the liberal spirit of the end of the 
 eighteenth century, in the interval between the American War 
 of Independence and the French Revolution, she endowed the 
 Russian nobility with novel rights and made over to that class, 
 the only cultivated one at the time, the only one capable of exer- 
 cising some political discretion, an important part in the adminis- 
 tration of justice. Until this date there were nobles in Russia, 
 but there was no corporate nobility. Catherine was the first to 
 organize the dvori&nstvo into provincial corporations, with a view 
 to furthering administrative self-government. That was not a 
 solitary innovation. What she did for the nobility, she did at 
 intervals for other classes also, notably for the cities and the 
 town-classes. She aimed at uniting the various parts of the 
 nation into compact groups, organized bodies, having common 
 
 * In the meantime, a thing that always strikes one in Russia is the great 
 number of persons bearing the same name whom one encounters in all 
 official positions. So that there are some fifty perhaps hundred families, 
 forming a sort of bureaucratic oligarchy, whose names reappear these many 
 years on almost every page of the military, diplomatic, administrative 
 annuaries. This, however, is a natural consequence of absolute monarchy 
 and court influences.
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 397 
 
 interests and animated with one spirit, intending to call on them 
 to take part in local affairs, each in its sphere, in the only way 
 in which a nation's participation in its own government was 
 understood at the time by class, order, corporation. 
 
 What caused the failure of this noble attempt ? First and fore- 
 most, the incapacity of the various classes to make use of the 
 rights conceded to them. In order to get any benefit out of these 
 corporative privileges, one thing was absolutely necessary : the 
 corporate spirit {esprit de corps}, and in that all classes were equally 
 lacking. The scant results of the nobiliary assemblies is accounted 
 for in the same way as the failure of merchant guilds and corpora- 
 tions of laboring men. They none of them knew how to form a 
 body, with an instinct of cohesion and a feeling of solidarity, exer- 
 cising co-ordinate rights in view of common aims, and pursuing 
 through generations a well defined political or social object. Nor 
 did the nobility, any more than the other classes, know how to 
 form a living organism, animated with a traditional spirit of its 
 own, binding together its own members and at the same time dis- 
 tinct from that of the other classes. Such a thing might be found 
 on Russian territory in the Polish nobility of the western prov- 
 inces, or the German nobility of the Baltic provinces never in 
 Great-Russia, in the native, national nobility never, at any time. 
 The spirit of caste, of class, is so repugnant to the Russian nature, 
 that it has remained closed hitherto against even the most ele- 
 mentary esprit de corps. 
 
 The patent or charter given by Catherine II. invested the 
 dvori&nstvo with considerable rights : of calling together periodi- 
 cal assemblies ; of making itself heard of the Crown at any 
 time by means of petitions ; of nominating most of the local func- 
 tionaries and judges. In any other country such prerogatives 
 would have resulted in a conflict with the Crown or served as 
 starting-point for an aristocratic constitution. In Russia nothing 
 of the sort. For nigh on a century the nobility of each govern- 
 ment has gone on assembling, electing its presidents or marshals,
 
 398 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 designating functionaries and magistrates, doing police duty, 
 without giving any of Catherine's successors the slightest cause for 
 uneasiness, without ever encroaching on the sovereign's absolute 
 power. The dvori&nstvo had neither tendencies of its own nor 
 traditional views to put in practice ; the functionaries appointed 
 by the nobles did not, in the exercise of their duties, act as 
 representatives of their class. All these ispr&vniks (chiefs of 
 police) and other local administrators did not embody the spirit 
 of a class, nor consider themselves in any way responsible to their 
 electors ; if they did show special zeal to please some, it was only 
 such as were influential. To the central authority they were 
 tools as devoted and docile as the functionaries directly appointed 
 by it. So that any hopes that may have been cherished to coun- 
 teract through this institution the excessive influence of the 
 bureaucracy were deceived. Russia in this case yielded a striking 
 illustration of the inefficiency of institutions which are not rooted 
 in a country's customs, of the inanity of political forms and public 
 liberties unsupported by the public spirit. 
 
 The"recent creation of assemblies in which all the classes of 
 the nation are represented naturally robbed the special assemblies 
 of the nobility of nearly all their prerogatives ; but in these new 
 provincial estates, the ztmstvo of district or government, the 
 nobility, as a rule, retains a decided preponderance. It is, as we 
 shall see, to their marshal that belongs the right of presiding at 
 these gatherings of the different classes ; it is the landholders, the 
 former serf holders, who by number and position, exert over them 
 an overbalancing influence. While reducing the nobility's direct 
 privileges, the extension of public liberties has in reality enlarged 
 its sphere of action. No one disputes its claim to be entitled the 
 controlling class ; its attributions have gone on multiplying along 
 with the institutions ; a place has been reserved to it in all the 
 new creations. The government appeals to it both as the 
 cultivated and as the conservative class. Alexander II., as far 
 back as 1874, solemnly invited it to constitute itself the guardian
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 399 
 
 of popular instruction. Alexander III. has done more : he 
 restored to it, in 1889, a direct influence over the rural adminis- 
 tration and the peasant communes, by creating "rural canton 
 chiefs," invested with both administrative and judicial functions, 
 to be appointed by the governor, with the concurrence of the 
 marshals, out of the noble landowners of the district. Nihilism 
 has turned out profitable to the dvori&nstvo. In the war waged 
 against the conspirators, Alexander III., like his father, has 
 more than once called on the nobility for co-operation. What 
 will come of it all ? One thing is certain : no rights conceded to 
 the nobility can transform the time-honored character of the class. 
 No matter what they are and how broadened, such privileges are 
 not going to turn from its way the historical march of Russian 
 society. In this respect apprehension and hope are equally vain 
 and illusory. 
 
 An examination of the present and a study of the past lead to 
 the same conclusion. There is in Russia a nobility of a kind ; 
 there is no aristocracy, and it is not at this time of day that one can 
 be created. There is a nobility as ancient, as illustridus* > sc^ e atiy if 
 considered in its great families, and, considered as a whole, as 
 civilized, as enlightened as any in Europe, the most open-minded 
 of all, the freest from prejudice, the most exempt of arrogance or 
 caste-spirit, and at the same time the most mixed and motley, the 
 most devoid of tradition, of common life, and esprit de corps. 
 This dvori&nstvo, lacking in homogeneousness and coherence, is 
 totally wanting in the qualities as well as the defects of aristocra- 
 cies. Is it for good ? Is it for evil ? That matters little ; it is a 
 fact : the rest has merely a speculative interest. There is no aris- 
 tocracy in Russia ; there are individual aristocrats. There are 
 men who consider a hierarchical basis to be the only solid founda- 
 tion for societies to rest on. You hear it said and asserted, in a 
 certain sphere, that an aristocracy is as essential to the social body 
 as bones are to the human body, and that the best support for an 
 hereditary monarchy is an hereditary privileged class. In all this
 
 400 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 there may be some truth. But, in order to be to a society a frame- 
 work and skeleton, an aristocracy must have its strength in itself, 
 in its organism, its traditions. How can a state or a throne lean on 
 supports which draw all their strength from favors bestowed by 
 that throne and the laws of the state ? 
 
 And those men who, in Russia, represent the nobility as the 
 natural support of the monarchy, fall into another and peculiar 
 mistake : they misapprehend the nature of the sovereign power 
 as well as the character of the nobility in their own country. Be- 
 tween dvoricinsivo and tsarism there never was any bond but that 
 of service, never any intimacy, affinities, family ties, as have else- 
 where existed between sovereign and nobility. The theory or fic- 
 tion of a king, first among peers, first gentleman of his kingdom, 
 is absolutely foreign to Russian manners and tradition both. 
 The Tsar properly belongs to no order in the state ; he is neither 
 noble nor burgher, neither urban nor rural. Autocracy always 
 has kept outside and above all classes. Therein lie some of the 
 historical motives of its force and popularity ; it never could 
 descend from this height without being untrue to its traditional 
 mission and weakening itself. 
 
 An aristocracy is not the sort of building to be constructed at 
 will, on a marked out spot, after a given plan ; nature herself 
 must have disposed the location and cut and trimmed the materials. 
 These materials the Russian aristocrats are compelled to seek 
 amongst the great landlords, the dvorictnstvo, as a whole, being 
 manifestly unavailable for such a construction. Under Alexander 
 II. and now under Alexander III. , in the very midst of all the 
 transformations of our times, the political builders have been busy 
 setting up all sorts of plans for social reconstruction. Some of 
 these plans and devices are very ingenious and do very well on 
 paper ; we shall come across several as we study local institutions 
 and administration. Unfortunately the social status is indepen- 
 dent of library combinations, however skilful, of governments, 
 however great their authority. Political calculations and reason
 
 NOBILITY AND TCHIN, 4<3I 
 
 itself have little hold on it ; it is altogether at the mercy of the 
 national genius and the spirit of the age. 
 
 Now in Russia, manners, traditions, popular instinct, combine 
 in loudly opposing the restoration of an hereditary privileged class. 
 The entire Russian literature bears witness thereto, although it is 
 almost wholly the work of nobles, written by and for nobles. The 
 antiquity of race is a very feeble claim on the respect of the posi- 
 tive-minded realistic Russian. All class distinctions notwith- 
 standing, he has remained free from caste-spirit, and has not the 
 inborn awe of birth with which the German and Englishman are 
 imbued. ' 
 
 The promoters of hierarchical ideas in Russia fall in reality 
 into the same blunder as the promoters of radical ideas. Aristo- 
 crats and demagogues merely, though unconsciously, ape the 
 West. Both insist on applying to national problems borrowed solu- 
 tions ; both undertake to trick out their own country after foreign 
 fashions. The great difference between them lies in this : that 
 the aristocratical conservatives have chosen the model which is 
 least adaptable to the national ways and clashes most with the 
 new tendencies. If it is easy to discover, in such or such old 
 institutions of England or Prussia, such or such conservative 
 guaranties, it is not so easy to take from foreign countries, to en- 
 dow one's own with, what nature or history have withheld from it. 
 It is with social forms as with the soil, as with a country's natu- 
 ral structure. While racing across his flat steppes of the south 
 or jogging through his peaty woods of the north, a Russian may 
 think how much variety high hills would add to the scenery and 
 to agriculture, what capital bulwarks against the winds, what ex- 
 cellent reservoirs of moisture a few chains of snow-capped moun- 
 tains would make, but it will not enter into his head to go and 
 raise hills and construct mountain chains. Yet such is the pre- 
 tension of men who, in a society denuded of privileges and rolled 
 level by centuries, flatter themselves with the idea that they can 
 1 See the Appendix to the preceding chapter. 
 
 6
 
 402 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 construct steep summits and dig impassable ravines and chasms, 
 i. e. t revive a privileged class and put prerogatives on their feet 
 again. 
 
 Between Russia and France there is greater similarity in this 
 respect than would seem : in both, it is outside of class privileges 
 and artificial combinations, it is down in the depths of the nation's 
 consciousness, that a conservative basis must be sought for. Only 
 in Russia, where equality as yet is not so much in the customs and 
 culture as in the national instinct and the logic of facts, where the 
 old-time framework of society is still outwardly kept up, the delu- 
 sion of aristocratic day-dreams is at once more excusable and not 
 as harmless.
 
 BOOK VII. 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Russian Literature and the Apotheosis of the Mujik Various Classes of 
 Peasants Origin and Causes of Serfdom Labor Dues and the Obrdk 
 Situation of the Peasants before Emancipation Napoleon III., Lib- 
 erator of the Serfs. 
 
 ON one of the Paris stages a French piece has been played of 
 late a play of Russian manners and Russian authorship original 
 and incomplete, a play which was favorably received by the French 
 public, although it is not likely to have been really comprehended : 
 I mean The Danishefs* This comedy, or, more truly, drama, 
 which depicts Russian society prior to the emancipation, has a 
 peasant for hero, and its subject may be said to be the moral pre- 
 eminence of the mujik. The nobility, conceited and frivolous, 
 the clergy, dependent and cringing, the merchant, newly enriched 
 and servile, cut a poor figure by the side of the man of the 
 people, the quondam serf 6ssip. " This man is great, this man 
 is worth more than we are, mother," the young Count Danishef 
 says of him. These words give the keynote to the piece. The con- 
 clusion to which we are led, perhaps unconsciously, by this rustic 
 drama, is the apotheosis of the man of the people to the detriment 
 of the classes privileged by birth, knowledge, or fortune. From 
 
 * This play, whose author signs himself " Nevsky," was rehandled for 
 the stage, as everybody knows, by Alexandre Dumas. 
 
 403
 
 404 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 this point of view, the comedy played at the Od6on, though writ- 
 ten for the French and in their language, belongs by rights to 
 contemporary Russian literature. To use the word of a humorist, 
 Russian literature just now " reeks of the peasant " ; the mujik is 
 its hero, and has been for the last thirty years. At first sight, this 
 strikes us as a singular anomaly ; on closer inspection, the thing 
 explains itself. 
 
 In a state almost entirely rural, such as Russia still is, the 
 peasant forms the most important as well as the most numerous 
 class of the nation. There, more than elsewhere, the workers of 
 the soil embody the country's fund of nationalism. When brought 
 . face to face with the comparative insignificance of the towns and 
 urban population, the peasantry still is the nation or appears to 
 be by comparison. Yet the being who fills so large a place has 
 long been scorned and uncomprehended by a higher class trained 
 to foreign manners and ways of thinking. The reaction of the 
 national spirit against the superficial cosmopolitism of the last 
 century, the rehabilitation of nationality in art, literature, politics, 
 were bound to benefit, in the first place, the peasant, as being the 
 Jlussian man par excellence. This people of the fields and woods, 
 a people of serfs, so long a target for all that weened themselves 
 above it to spurn and hit at, all at once found itself studied in its 
 ways and customs, its songs and beliefs. Finding in the higher 
 classes only colorless reflections or commonplace copies of foreign 
 things, the Russians suddenly felt very happy on discovering, in 
 their own rural people, originality, character, individuality. De- 
 lighted at having at last found her own self again under all her 
 borrowed finery, Russia took to admiring herself in the most rug- 
 ged of her children, her most legitimate representative the peas- 
 ant. For a large proportion of a hyper-refined society, the serf, 
 but just set free, the ignorant villager, unwashed, coarse, became 
 an object of infatuation and enthusiasm, of respect and veneration. 
 The mujik the Russian Man, but lately considered undeserving 
 of a glance, saw himself hoisted on to an altar, and the homage
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 405 
 
 rendered by his devotees of to-day his contemners of yesterday 
 has not always been free from superstition and fetishism. 
 Fashion naturally could not remain a stranger to the success of 
 this new worship, which, amidst its devotees, numbers some 
 hypocrites. In this, as a rule, realistic country, men habitually 
 unbelieving and sceptical turned up amidst the most zealous 
 sectators, the most intolerant priests of the new dispensation. 
 True, this religion, like so many others, often remains a thing 
 of the brain and the imagination, and the idol might not unfre- 
 quently complain of the irreverence with which its most fervent 
 worshippers, in theory, treat it in practice. 
 
 This apotheosis of the mujik the boor, the clodhopper can 
 be accounted for by reasons proper to Russia, and others, taken 
 from the social status of Kurope. As people did in France before 
 the Revolution, a number of Russians profess the doctrine that it 
 is by returning to the people's simple life, by quaffing invigorat- 
 ing draughts at the fount of uprightness and all popular virtues, 
 that the higher classes of society will recover moral vigor and 
 health, will become purified of the corruption with which contact 
 with the West has infected them.* The mystical panegyrists of 
 the mujik do not perceive that they are unconsciously renewing, 
 for their country's benefit, one of the old, old themes of the French 
 eighteenth century, returning to the doctrines of Rousseau and the 
 guileless belief in the perfections of " the natural man." In Rus- 
 sia such tendencies come from a secret discouragement, an invol- 
 untary humility of the cultured classes, and a great national pride, 
 a blind faith in the native energies and the people's future. Men 
 who have grown sick and tired of aping the foreigners, and who 
 feel that they have incapacitated themselves, for a long time to 
 
 * Thus the great novelists, Tolstoy and Dostoyefsky. The latter queries, 
 in A Writer's Diary (February, 1876) : "Which is better, the people or 
 we ? Is it desirable that the people should take examples from us, or we 
 from the people ? I must answer in all sincerity : it is for us to bow down 
 before the people, to take from it both idea and form, to acknowledge and 
 adore its genuineness."
 
 406 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 come, from doing anything but assimilating what others have done, 
 men perforce resigned to their own impotence and all the more 
 ambitious for their country, have come, through lassitude and 
 irritation at their own inability to accomplish more, to glorify that 
 element which has remained free from all outside contact, whose 
 powers are as yet untried, which is new, intact, unpolluted, in 
 one word, the popular force. Hence this adoration of the uncul- 
 tivated by the cultivated man, these kneelings and salutations of 
 lettered and informed men before the armi&k and the tulbp the 
 peasant's sheepskin. 
 
 " We civilized men, we are nothing but old rags ; but the peo- 
 ple oh, the people is great ! ' ' exclaims one of Turgue"mef 's person- 
 ages, in Smoke. Struck with the comparative sterility of the 
 controlling classes, these disillusioned sons of Western civilization 
 turn their backs on it and their faces to the mujik. With glad 
 admiration they contemplate this Russian people, still dumb and 
 uncouth in its swaddling-clothes, this people which covers the 
 widest habitable region of the world, which, in numbers, is already 
 now ahead of every other Christian nation on the globe. With 
 this compact mass of over fifty or sixty million peasants before 
 them, the patriots take to dreaming of the future as a mother or 
 nurse beside a cradle. For this people still in its infancy, still 
 crude and unlettered, they dream of an intellectual greatness, a 
 moral place in the world proportionate to its bulk and the immen- 
 sity of its empire.* This people of peasants is like a gigantic egg 
 as yet unopened. One does not know what will come out of it, but 
 one naturally expects something huge, because, in spite of the fable, 
 it seems as though the mountain ought to give birth to something 
 more than the ' ' ridiculous mouse. ' ' One understands the instinc- 
 tive respect, the semi-religious reverence of the Russian before this 
 
 * " You have only to look on a world's map to be filled with awe before 
 Russia's future destinies," wrote Nadiejdin as early as 1831. "Can such a 
 colossus have been upreared for no purpose by the wisdom of the Creator? " 
 (Fragment from the Telescope, quoted by Pypin in his Studies of the Rus- 
 sian Nationality. European Messenger ( Vitstnik Evrdpy), June, 1882.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION 1 . 407 
 
 incubation, proceeding in mystery and gloom, and on which hang 
 all the destinies of his native land. 
 
 The Russians are fain to look to the mujik for a new departure, 
 a political or social revelation, a renovation of Europe and man- 
 kind. The seers and prophets, who announce his greatness, can 
 prophesy the more freely what this popular sphinx will say, will 
 do, that he has not yet opened his mouth and is not yet awake. 
 Certainly, such soaring hopes cannot prove free from illusion. 
 Not the less, however, we have there a mystery, an occult riddle, 
 which interests civilization very highly, and if patriotism, by dint 
 of meditating over it, somewhat overleaps sober reason, it is to be 
 excused. 
 
 Thus, for one portion of the lettered classes, the man of the 
 people is an unconscious deity, similar to those infant gods, the 
 embryonic gods of Egypt, whose divine force is all in posse still, 
 whose latent energies are adored before they have had a chance 
 of manifesting themselves. For another school, the man of the 
 people, the peasant, is merely a sort of raw material, of human 
 first matter, a potter's clay having no form but that given to it by 
 the higher classes.* It is needless to demonstrate what those two 
 points of view have in common, and wherein both overreach the 
 mark. If literature in Russia has got very near to the people, it 
 too often approached it with preconceived views, seeking in it 
 only what it was determined to find. Some fancied that they 
 could discover in the hidden depths of the popular mind latent 
 forces which they opposed to the barrenness of the vaunted culture 
 of the higher classes ; others, more scornful or more superficial, 
 could see in the people's soul nothing but darkness and barbar- 
 
 * This was the view of one of the most distinguished defenders of aris- 
 tocratic tendencies, General Fadie"yef. In opposition to the higher classes, 
 the nobility, which he habitually refers to as "the cultivated layer," he 
 usually designates the people under the names of " elementary force," 
 "plastic matter," "protoplasm." And this elementary force he considers 
 as being one and the same in all countries, and everywhere devoid of any 
 spirit of its own, everywhere incapable of spontaneous development.
 
 4O8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 ism, emptiness and nothingness. In practical life views concern- 
 ing the peasant clash quite as much and we encounter the same 
 differences as in the literary world. ' ' Why in the world should you 
 be interested in our mujik ?" I was asked by a lady on the Lower 
 Volga. " He is a brute of whom you never will make a man." 
 And the same day, on the same steamer, a gentleman-landholder 
 was saying to me with a conviction just as firm : " The most in- 
 telligent peasant in Europe is, to my mind, the contadino of 
 Northern Italy ; but our mujik could give him points." Thus 
 extolled by some, contemned by others, the Russian peasant's 
 place really should be where Pascal would have placed man in 
 general : neither so high up, nor so low down. 
 
 The mujik' s intelligence is not a matter of doubt, and his pane- 
 gyrists are perhaps nearer the truth than his detractors ; but this 
 intelligence has been hampered and heavily handicapped by the 
 course of events. There is in the Russian legends a giant of 
 prodigious strength, a sort of rustic Hercules or Samson, Iliya of 
 Murom by name, often regarded as an impersonation of the people, 
 the peasant.* This popular colossus could not, for a long while, 
 show his power and genius. Iliya was in bondage. For years 
 he was attached to the glebe and could neither walk nor other- 
 wise act freely. Now that the emancipation has knocked off his 
 fetters, the giant can move once more ; but, after being so long 
 weighed down with chains, he has not yet recovered the free use 
 of his limbs, and has lost the consciousness of his strength. It is 
 only after years of freedom, possibly after several generations, that 
 this so lately enslaved people will learn to know itself and will 
 show what the future has to expect from it. The peasant, with 
 back still bent under the servitude of years, could not straighten 
 himself all at once ; through the freeman of to-day the serf of 
 yesterday still shows. 
 
 The emancipation has been for Russia an event of capital im- 
 
 * See The Songs of the Russian People, by Mr. Ralston, and Alfred 
 Rambaud's La Russie fcpique.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 409 
 
 port, an event unmatched by anything in the history of nations ; 
 for in all, serfdom has died out gradually. The emancipation has 
 been the starting-point of numerous changes and reforms in the 
 entire domain of the nation's life ; but this great revolution could 
 not, in a few years, yield all its fruits. It was the less to be ex- 
 pected that, in reality, this vast operation is not altogether com- 
 pleted even yet ; it is being carried on still, and will not come to 
 an end before the first years of the twentieth century. Until then 
 a study of the free peasant is inseparably linked to that of serfdom 
 and the conditions of his enfranchisement. 
 
 The emancipation, the work of Alexander II., has benefited' 
 only about one half of the peasants of the empire. The others, 
 known as " Crown peasants," and settled on the demesnes of the 
 State, were considered as free, although they, too, were attached 
 to the soil and were virtually serfs of the emperor or the State. 
 The great bulk of the peasants was thus divided into two classes, 
 nearly equal in number, and which, even after the emancipation, 
 have remained separate and distinct. On one side, the free or 
 ' ' Crown ' ' peasants ; on the other, private peasants or serfs, free- 
 men now. Between these two categories there was a third, to a 
 certain extent intermediary one : the peasants of the appanages, 
 or estates reserved for the endowment of the members of the 
 imperial family.* 
 
 * The following were, prior to the emancipation, the relative propor- 
 tions between these three categories of peasants, in European Russia, not 
 including the Caucasus, Poland, and Finland. The entire number of serfs 
 of both sexes was 22,500,000; that of the "Crown peasants" something 
 over 22,000,000, comprising certain odd groups of free peasants, such as col- 
 onists of foreign extraction ; the appanage peasants amounted to about 
 2,000,000. A few years earlier the proportion was more unfavorable. In 
 1838 the serfs numbered 44 to every 100 of the population. The relative 
 number of the serfs was evidently slowly decreasing, owing to individual 
 manumissions, to military service which set the soldiers free, to the 
 mortgaging of estates to the State, which foreclosed on them after the inter- 
 est had remained unpaid a certain time, adding them to the Crown demesnes. 
 In this way serfdom, left to itself, would have become extinct at the end 
 of a few centuries, without the formality of emancipation.
 
 410 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 These peasants, long distributed into groups, originally enjoyed 
 the same liberty and the same rights. In Russia more than in 
 any country of the West, freedom has ever been the normal con- 
 dition of rural man. The bondage of the glebe came very late ; 
 but it gradually became heavier and heavier, until it degenerated 
 into a sort of slavery. Only at the end of the sixteenth century, 
 at the moment when the bonds of serfdom fell off or were much 
 loosened in the greater part of Europe, were they made fast 
 in Russia. 
 
 In old-time Russia there were bondsmen (khol"bpy, ratty). 
 They usually were prisoners of war, insolvent debtors, or men 
 who had sold themselves to escape penury. The number of such 
 bondsmen was small, and the bulk of the peasants were considered 
 as freemen. Yet the men of the country found themselves at an 
 early period in an inferior and despised condition as regards the 
 men of war and the drujina. They were called " little men " 
 mujikl or else ' ' half-men, ' ' in opposition to the warriors, the 
 drujlnniki, who rejoiced in the appellations of "men" miiji 
 and "full men," i. e., complete men. Such is the original mean- 
 ing of the diminutive ending of the word mujik ; it corresponds 
 to the Latin homunculus* In Moscovia this name was given to 
 rurals and urbans indifferently, to tradesmen and villagers. 
 
 Long before the establishment of serfdom the mujiks' or 
 "little-men's " main task was to provide the " men's" muji 
 livelihood, to cultivate for them the lands which the sovereign 
 granted his servants as salary or for their maintenance. The 
 mujiks also called "black [z. e., dirty] men," tchbrnyU liudi 
 were not, however, attached either to the master they served, or 
 to the soil they cultivated. Just as the boyars and the members 
 of the drujtna could pass at will from one kniaz to another, so 
 the peasants could change masters, by passing from one land to 
 
 * This distinction answers that between the leudi and the manni, leutt 
 and manner in old-time Germany. The official name of the Russian 
 peasants as a class is krestiy&ne, singular kresliy&nin Christian a name 
 evidently dating from the days of the Tatar domination.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 41 1 
 
 another. They also, like the boycirs and drujlnniki, enjoyed the 
 right of free service as well as of free passage, and likewise lost 
 the first of these rights when they were deprived of the second, 
 which was its guaranty. 
 
 Under the last of the Rurikovitchs, the peasants usually exer- 
 cised this right of theirs once a year, at the close of the agricul- 
 tural year, nominally on the 26th of November, the feast of St. 
 George, practically all through the week preceding and that 
 following that feast. Prior to the establishment of serfdom when 
 the demand for working hands was already great, the pomiesh- 
 tchik or landlord who wished to retain his peasants had recourse, 
 it is said, to their innate love of liquor, and kept them in a 
 drunken state all through the fateful fortnight. There came a 
 time when the peasant, in the interest less of the landlords than 
 of the state, was deprived of this right of taking short leave of 
 his master, but he never lost the memory of the privilege that 
 was taken from him. Kven now, after three centuries of bondage, 
 the mujik has not forgotten the feast day which once on a time 
 restored him to freedom ; the feast of St. George is incorporated 
 in many proverbial expressions of disappointment. 
 
 In order to attach the peasant to the glebe, all that was needed 
 was to forbid his changing land at St. George's. This prohibition, 
 temporary at first, then renewed and confirmed by successive sov- 
 ereigns, at last became a fundamental law of the state. Thus the 
 chief institution of the Russia of these latter centuries was evolved 
 out of a simple police measure. The most important fact of the 
 people's history passed wellnigh unperceived in the national annals". 
 Serfdom was established, as everywhere else it vanished, almost 
 insensibly, without a shock to the minds of the contemporaries. 
 
 It was the end of the sixteenth century, and the great wars 
 against the Lithuanians and the Teutonic Order were at their 
 height. The servants of the state, supplied with lands by their 
 sovereign, complained that their means of support were inadequate. 
 Labor was scarce and costly in this country where land abounded
 
 412 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 while the population was scant and sparse. The landowners 
 pomihh-tchiks wrangled for men. The lesser accused the greater 
 of enticing and retaining all the laborers. Such a state of affairs 
 imperilled Moscovia's military forces, at the most critical moment 
 of her history. The financial system of the state, no less primitive 
 at the time, saw itself threatened equally with the military system 
 by the frequent Sittings of the taxpayers and laborers, and the 
 liking for a vagabond life which resulted therefrom. It was the 
 age when the Moscovite Empire, recently enlarged at the expense 
 of the Tatars, held out to the tillers of the thankless northern re- 
 gions the allurement of the more fertile southern lands, the age 
 when, to escape from taxes and share the free life of the Cosacks, 
 adventurous men fled to the Volga and the Don, to the Kama and 
 Siberia. In stealing his own person from the landlords, a man 
 also robbed the exchequer of its dues. In order to insure to the 
 country regular financial and military resources, the simplest thing 
 to do was to make man a fixture, to bind the peasant to the field 
 he tilled, the burgher to the town or city where he dwelt. And 
 this is what Boris Godun6f did, and after him the tsars of the 
 seventeenth century. From that time down to Alexander II., a 
 fixture the mujik remained, tied down, " made fast " to the soil, 
 for such is the meaning of the Russian word, krityostriby , which 
 all European languages translate by serf. Russian serfdom had 
 just this origin and no other : it was evolved out of the prevalent 
 administrative system and the economic, indeed the physical, con- 
 ditions of Moscovia, considerably aggrandized as the country was 
 by the last rulers of the house of Rurik, and threatened with the 
 dispersion of its thinly scattered population, which tended to ooze 
 away into the steppes, as a thread of water into the sands of the 
 desert. 
 
 In this Europe of the East, this land of log-cabins, almost as 
 easy to transport or reconstruct as the tent of the Arab, man felt 
 little attachment to the soil, little liking for agriculture. Three 
 centuries of bondage have been unable wholly to eradicate in the
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 413 
 
 mujik his hankering after a wandering life, a propensity en- 
 couraged by the long rivers and endless plains. Serfdom, which 
 bound man to the soil, may be regarded as a reaction of the state 
 against these adventurous instincts, which drew to the uttermost 
 ends of the empire, on the track of the Cosacks, the most vigorous, 
 the most enterprising portion of the Russian people. The less 
 Russia was bounded by nature, the vaster her horizon, the more 
 necessary it became to impose restrictions on her sons : serfdom 
 kept them in place, doomed them to immobility. 
 
 It was in 1593, under Theodor, a son of Ivan the Terrible, and 
 by the influence of Godunbf, his brother-in-law and eventually his 
 successor, that the right of free passage from one estate to another 
 was taken from the peasant. Out of this one, originally temporary, 
 feet resulted his bondage. Something analogous had occurred 
 twelve centuries before, in the Roman Empire, at the time of the 
 institution of the colonate under Christian emperors. 1 Once " made 
 fast ' ' to the soil, the Moscovite peasant gradually lost all his civil 
 rights and fell into a state of dependency which the lawgiver had 
 not foreseen. He became the landlord's property, his chattel. 
 Godun6f s work was confirmed and completed by uk&zes of the 
 first Romanofs. Peter the Great's reforms tightened the peasant's 
 fetters instead of loosening them ; his bondage became more irk- 
 some as it was better regulated. The first general census ("re- 
 vision "), taken in 1722 and renewed since at uneven intervals, 
 provided serfdom with regular registers. With a view to a simpli- 
 fication of the administrative machinery, and also out of economy, 
 the State gave up to the landlords nearly the whole of the local 
 administration as well as the police duties within their domains. 
 Serfdom now became the more difficult to abolish that it had been 
 transformed into a tool of the government's, one of the chief 
 wheels in a political machinery as yet not very intricate. 
 
 1 The colonist could not sell the land that had been allotted to him before 
 a certain, considerable number of years, twenty or more. This, of course, 
 amounted to compulsory residence, as only the poor applied for and re- 
 ceived state lands and naturally they had to cultivate them themselves.
 
 4*4 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Until as late as 1861 the landlord pomiesh-tchik might be 
 considered as an agent of the State, commissioned to see to the en- 
 listment of soldiers in rural districts and to the collection of taxes, 
 in short as a sort of hereditary functionary, invested with adminis- 
 trative powers and the guardianship of the peasants on his lands. 
 
 Serfdom did not spread over Russia evenly. Into the remoter 
 and almost desert parts, where the landlords were few, into the 
 region of the great lakes and of the White Sea, as well as into the 
 portion of Siberia conquered by the Cosacks, the new ordinances 
 had not made their way or had not been enforced. These regions, 
 treated so harshly by nature, have always almost entirely ignored 
 both serfdom and nobility ; primitive liberty and equality kept 
 their ground there down to our own days. In the south the 
 Cosacks also would not hear of the new institution, which swelled 
 their ranks with runaways. Ukrama the portion of Little- 
 Russia situated on the left bank of the Dniepr remained exempt 
 from the bondage of the soil until the reign of Catherine II. When 
 the hour of freedom struck, the historical centre of Russia was also 
 that of serfdom, which, from the lands around Moscow, radiated 
 to the north and to the south, towards Europe and towards Asia. 
 In the west Moscovite serfdom encountered in Lithuania and 
 White-Russia Polish serfdom, to which the entire rural popula- 
 tion, whether Russian or Lithuanian, had long been subject. By 
 a singular anomaly, it was the predominant race the Slavic race, 
 and especially the Russian which, in the Russian Empire, was 
 most generally bowed under the yoke of serfdom. The Tatars in 
 the east, the Rumanians in Bessarabia, the German colonists, even 
 the Finn tribes, had, as a rule, maintained their liberty. 
 
 The condition of the peasants settled on lands belonging to 
 private owners varied greatly according to localities, customs, and 
 masters. To adequately describe all forms of serfdom, it would be 
 necessary to classify the serfs into some twenty different groups.* 
 
 * The reader might profitably consult M. X. Marmier's Voyages, or Mr. 
 de Molinari's Lettres sur la Russic, and, for greater detail, see the works 
 of Haxthausen and Schnitzler.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 415 
 
 These various grades and forms of bondage can be reduced to two 
 types, which were in general use to the last : the labor dues 
 (the French corvge, boy&rsh-tchina, for short bhrsh-tchina), and the 
 dues in money, the obrbk. 
 
 The bhrsh-tchina the personal service rendered by the serf 
 to his landlord in labor was the primitive, the rudimentary form. 
 The peasants worked three days for the landlord, the other half of 
 the week they attended to the lands which he gave up to them, 
 for their support.* The transformation of the labor dues into an 
 annual payment in money was a great improvement, a very real 
 relief. This system prevailed chiefly in the neighborhood of 
 manufacturing centres, or in regions with poor soil. By the pay- 
 ment of the obrbk the peasant temporarily ransomed his personal 
 liberty, and could leave his landlord's estate, to ply a craft in the 
 towns or other country places. This arrangement enabled many 
 peasants to give up rural pursuits altogether. Only, they were 
 liable to be called back to the plough at any moment by a word 
 from the master. This was a way to ' ' get round ' ' the law, to 
 defeat the original object of serfdom, that of attaching each man 
 to the soil : the 0r-paying serf became virtually his own mas- 
 ter. Ostensibly, he was free ; but an invisible link bound him to 
 his landlord. The amount of the yearly payment varied consid- 
 erably according to localities, the master's exactingness, the indi- 
 vidual aptitude of the serfs. On an average the obrbk oscillated 
 between five and ten dollars a year. At this rate a landlord, 
 clearly, could not be really wealthy unless he owned villages or 
 rather, whole districts. The petty landlords were actually com- 
 pelled by penury to draw from their serfs all they could possibly 
 grind out of them. The peasant whose lot was cast with the 
 owner of broad acres, whom wealth enabled to be liberal, was 
 more fortunate ; he was habitually subjected to a fixed rate of pay - 
 
 *By a law issued in 1797, by Paul I., the b&rsh-tchina was fixed at three 
 days. In many communes or families one half of the members worked for 
 the master all the week, while the others worked for the benefit of the 
 household.
 
 416 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 ment. Few masters took advantage of their people's capacity for 
 and success in business to raise their obrbk. Great landlords might 
 be named a Sheremetieff among others who numbered among 
 their serfs millionaire merchants, and who would have scorned to 
 claim any of their wealth, but who indulged their vanity by refus- 
 ing to let them ransom themselves. 
 
 The ' ' Crown peasants " or ' ' free peasants, ' ' settled on State 
 lands, were all on the obrbk system. Over and above the poll-tax 
 and the local taxes, they paid the State a yearly due which might 
 be regarded as a sort of land-rent, and which oscillated between 
 two and three roubles for each male peasant. These peasants, 
 with no landlord but the State, enjoyed two great advantages : 
 the dues they paid were fixed and very moderate ; and they were 
 not exposed to change of masters, variable in their humor and 
 ways of doing business. They were allowed to enjoy some com- 
 munal franchises, and, at the time of the emancipation, their 
 institutions partly served as models for the administrative organi- 
 zation of the liberated serfs. In spite of the oppression and 
 extortions to which they were occasionally subjected by corrupt 
 functionaries, the ' ' Crown peasants ' ' were generally better off 
 than those on private lands. To this day their villages have a 
 look of greater prosperity, by which they are often known at first 
 sight. These peasants of the State demesnes, attached to the 
 glebe like the others, formerly constituted a living treasury or 
 reserve fund, from which the sovereign took the grants which he 
 distributed to his servants in the form of lands stocked with serfs. 
 Catherine II. made use of this fund on a large scale, for the 
 endowment and gratification of her ministers and favorites ; but 
 she was the last to practise these liberties, which are one of the 
 blots on her reign. To the Emperor Alexander I. is due the 
 credit of having put a stop to these gifts of men, and created a 
 class of free husbandmen. 
 
 Serfdom in Russia, like slavery in America, has had its 
 defenders in the past and is not even yet without panegyrists.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 417 
 
 There is no doubt that servitude was not, for the peasant, without 
 some compensation. If the serf endured hardships from being 
 subject to his landlord's guardianship, he also benefited thereby ; if 
 he served the master, the master protected him. Not being based 
 on conquest, as in the Baltic provinces, nor on difference of race, like 
 American slavery, serfdom in Russia preserved to the end a certain 
 benignity, something more paternal, more patriarchal. It is no 
 less certain that, in spite of many attenuating traits due to custom 
 and law, such a system worked harm in the end, harm to the 
 country, harm to the bondsman, harm to the master himself. 
 The peasant who fell into the hands of a whimsical, corrupt, or dis- 
 solute man, was exposed to every kind of wretchedness, oppres- 
 sion, ignominy, the law being unable to shield him efficiently 
 from the landlord's cupidity, brutality, or lawlessness. There 
 was in serfdom one incurable evil : the violence done to the 
 human conscience, the obliteration of moral responsibility. 
 
 Nor was the economic evil less great ; the institution yielded 
 little profit to the class for whose benefit it existed. Although 
 the right of owning ' ' inhabited lands ' ' extended to the entire 
 hereditary nobility, there were, at the moment of the emancipa- 
 tion, not over one hundred odd thousand serf holders, and of these 
 the greater part barely enjoyed a competency. Three or four 
 thousand of them owned no land, for in the eighteenth century 
 serfs had come to be sold without land.* To be at all well off, 
 one had to own hundreds of " souls " ; to be wealthy, thousands, 
 
 * Owing to the imperfection of statistical proceedings, the figures 
 given on the division of properties and serfs present notable discrepancies. 
 A little over two million "souls," i. e., male peasants, the only ones sub- 
 ject to capitation and set down in the " revisions " (census), were divided 
 among less than 80,000 owners, who had from i to 100 "souls" each, and 
 were accounted as " petty landlords." Five and a half millions were allotted 
 to 22,000 owners, having from 100 to 1,000 " souls " each, and regarded as 
 ''medium landlords." Lastly there were 1,400 serf-holders, owning more 
 than 1,000 male peasants each, with a total, between them, of three mil- 
 lion souls, and they were accounted "great landlords." Of these, some 
 few families the Sherem^tieffs for one had on their lands as many as 
 100,000 serfs. 
 27
 
 
 41 8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 so little did serfdom produce, so terrible was the depreciation of 
 labor caused by this confiscation of it through several centuries. 
 The peasants' unpaid labor did not suffice for the support even 
 of those who held the monopoly of it. Servile labor used to be 
 discounted and consumed years ahead by numbers of landlords. 
 At the moment of emancipation, two thirds of the ' ' inhabited 
 lands" peopled with serfs, or, in plainer words, two thirds of the 
 serfs themselves (for it was at the rate of so much per head that 
 the banks effected their loans), were found to be mortgaged in the 
 lombards or credit establishments kept by the State. Frequently, 
 therefore, the pomiesh-tchik had only the semblance of proprietor- 
 ship, and the sums loaned by the State on human capital, instead 
 of being sunk into the ground and there bearing interest, were 
 usually squandered in dissipation and hospitalities. 
 
 One is astonished at such a state of things having lasted so 
 long. In a certain sense serldom might be said never to have 
 been thoroughly accepted by the people themselves. Several 
 times, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the peasants 
 rose to the cry of liberty, under such leaders as Stienka Razin and 
 ugatchbf. The Crown which had imposed it, the nobility which 
 was supposed to benefit by it, had long looked on serfdom as on 
 an irretrievably doomed temporary institution. It is likely that 
 the emancipation would not have been so long delayed, but for 
 the apprehensions aroused by the revolutionary troubles in Europe, 
 which appeared calculated to hasten the operation. The Emperor 
 Alexander I. seemed created for just such work. He prepared 
 the way for it by a partial experiment that of ordering the 
 manumission of the serfs of the three Baltic provinces : the Ehst 
 and Lett peasants, the most oppressed of all, because they were of 
 another race than their German conquerors and masters. The 
 Emperor Nicolas, following his brother's example, lightened 
 and loosened as much as possible the bonds he dared not break. 
 Emancipation was his pet scheme. On the eve of 1848 he had 
 already appointed, to study the question, a secret committee,
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 419 
 
 which the February revolution caused to be dissolved. The 
 disasters of the Crimean War had, in his latter days, led his 
 thoughts back to the same projects. It is affirmed that, on his 
 deathbed, Nicolas bequeathed to his son and successor the task 
 which he himself had been prevented from undertaking. On the 
 whole it may have been fortunate for the empire that the great 
 work was not started sooner : the preparatory studies were more , 
 matured, the task itself was carried out more boldly. 
 
 One of the things that should on no account be lost sight of 
 by any one desirous of fully understanding the transformation of 
 contemporary Russia, is the part taken in it by public opinion 
 and public spirit. Literature which, in modern nations, always 
 opens and shows the way, literature in all its forms : poetry, 
 fiction, drama, history, criticism, had done its work ; it only had 
 to direct the attention of the higher classes towards the people, its 
 life and manners. As in America, the novelists became the 
 apostles and prophets of emancipation. But Russia has some- 
 thing better than Uncle Tom's Cabin and the didactic novels 
 of the American women. In G6gol's Dead Souls, and Ivan 
 Turgunief s Memoirs of a Huntsman, she has pictures admirable 
 for truth and earnestness, or, more correctly, mirrors, in which, 
 as in polished glass, are reflected, unaltered in either outline or 
 coloring, the countenances of both serfs and masters.* The 
 press debated the conditions of the reform, an ardent desire for 
 which was aroused by the novelists. On this one point the two 
 currents which usually carry the Russian mind opposite ways, for 
 once carried it in the same direction. All the schools, whether 
 Slavophils or Occidentals, liberals, or democrats, were at one on 
 .this issue ; the cause numbered amidst its advocates Nicolas Tur- 
 guenief, Samdrin, and Herzen. It was neither a sovereign, soli- 
 tary in his power, nor a few exceptional individuals, fashioned 
 
 * Russia may be said to have her counterpart of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the 
 stories written by a woman, Mme. MarkeVitch (Marko-Vovtchdk). These 
 stories, written in the Little-Russian dialect, had the honor of being trans- 
 lated into Russian by Ivan Turgunief.
 
 420 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 by foreign discipline, who led the nation, using bridle, spur, 
 or whip, as the case might be, it was public spirit, public opin- 
 ion, which gave the impulse. This was a national movement, 
 comparable in a way to that which, in the West, had culminated 
 in the French Revolution. This phenomenon, so novel in the 
 history of Russia, is in itself as worthy of attention as the emanci- 
 pation and all its accompanying reforms. In this respect the 
 work done by Alexander II. is totally different from that accom- 
 plished by Peter the Great, and shows the stride taken by the 
 country in the interval : the first work was that of a man ; this 
 latter one is that of a nation. Russia, on the eve of the emanci- 
 pation, appears not as a sort of inert material, for governments to 
 experiment on, or, to borrow the expression of a frenchified 
 Russian, as a sociological laboratory ; it is a nation that is coming 
 of age and, not content with blindly following the paternal 
 guidance, works out its own development. 
 
 And yet, however carefully prepared, however desired of the 
 nation and public opinion, the emancipation might have hung 
 fire for years still, but for the bitter disappointment entailed by 
 the Crimean War. There are, in the lives of all nations, 
 reforms of such deep import, so complicated, touching on so many 
 interests, that those at the helm make up their minds to tackle 
 them only under the pressure of some mighty event, under 
 the threat of some national peril or calamity. For nations as for 
 individuals, adversity frequently is the best counsellor. A blow 
 dealt from abroad, a military disaster, has more than once been 
 the point of departure of the moral renovation of a great people. 
 What Jena was to Prussia and Germany, what Novara was to 
 Piedmont and Italy, that the Crimean War was to Russia, though 
 it scarcely altered her frontier. This campaign, so barren of 
 results for the Porte, which, under shelter of the West, only grew 
 more and more corrupt, has teemed with results for the vanquished 
 empire. The fall of Sebast6pol was serfdom's death-blow. 
 
 I have been told that a quondam serf kept in his room a
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 421 
 
 portrait of Napoleon III. with this inscription : To the Liberator 
 of the Serfs. After the Crimean War, it appears, the rumor spread 
 among the peasantry of certain provinces, that the Emperor of the 
 French demanded the abolition of serfdom, and had consented to 
 sign a treaty of peace only on condition that a secret clause should be 
 inserted insuring the liberation of the serfs.* May be there lurked 
 in this rumor a vague remembrance of the hopes excited by Napoleon 
 I. in 1812. At all events, this popular belief was nothing less than, 
 under a childish form, an instinctive presentiment of the inevitable 
 connection of events. It was indeed, although they knew it not, for 
 the benefit of the mujik, of the Russian people, that France and 
 England were fighting. In this respect Russia's defeat was a 
 stroke of good-fortune for her ; never perhaps did a country buy 
 its national regeneration so cheap. Of a war of which the issue 
 cost her only some pangs of wounded vanity, of a peace the 
 humiliating clauses of which were promptly obliterated, nothing 
 was left to her but an enduring inner transformation. 
 
 * This rumor is mentioned by Tchernyshefsky, in his Letters without 
 an Address, published in the Vperibd (1874).
 
 BOOK VII. CHAPTER II. 
 
 Questions Raised by the Emancipation Expectations and Disappointments 
 of the Nobility Agrarian Laws Was it Possible to Free the Serfs 
 without Giving them Lands? Reasons and Conditions of the Terri- 
 torial Endowment of the Peasants. 
 
 IT was, then, a national movement which, under the pressure 
 of defeat, urged on emancipation from all sides. Should the 
 nation take a direct part in it ? Should the Tsar, like Catherine 
 II., and with design better defined, call together the delegates of 
 the different classes into a sort of States-General ? Some thought 
 he should. It was announced that, by way of compensation 
 for the loss of their serfs, the nobility were to be given political 
 rights, and that, out of the emancipation, would grow a constitu- 
 tion. This hope did much to enlist the landlords and the nobiliary 
 assemblies in favor of the project. In spite of appearances, it is 
 probably fortunate that things did not take this course ; that the 
 government did not invite the delegates of the nobility to deliber- 
 ate and to pass laws, but only consulted them. On the question 
 of the necessity of the emancipation, opinion was nearly unani- 
 mous throughout the empire ; on that of ways and means, and 
 that of the position to be given the peasants when free, there was 
 in the public and in the government itself a very Babel of confused 
 and discordant views. An elective assembly, numerous and 
 tumultuous, would have had some trouble in sifting and clearing 
 such a chaos. Then, to be equitable or impartial, an assembly 
 should have included representatives of the opposed parties of 
 both serfs and landlords. The former could not be called upon to 
 ordain their own future ; yet it would have been unfair to leave 
 
 422
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 423 
 
 the deliberation to the masters alone. Between peasant and 
 pomiesh-tchik there was but one natural judge, one disinterested 
 umpire : the Crown. The situation was one where autocracy, 
 exalted above all classes and true to its mission impartiality, 
 was the meetest tribunal for rendering an equitable sentence. 
 
 The nobiliary assemblies of the different provinces were invited 
 to investigate the question and report their opinion ; but the 
 inditing of the project was entrusted to commissions directly 
 appointed by the sovereign. These commissions were composed 
 partly of high functionaries, such as Nicolas Miliutin, the chief 
 inspirer of the Statute, partly of landlords or "experts," mostly 
 taken from the minorities of the provincial committees, such as 
 Prince Tcherkassky and Yuri (George) Samarin, allies and fol- 
 lowers of Miliutin. In these " drafting commissions " (Commis- 
 sions de redaction) the interests of the landlords did not lack 
 defenders ; nor was it without arduous struggles that the majority, 
 directed by Miliutin and his friends, brought about the triumph 
 of their ideas and their acceptance by the sovereign.* 
 
 The project, elaborated by the commissions, was incomparably 
 more favorable to the people than the views adopted by most 
 local assemblies. The bases of it, indeed, were considered so 
 democratical, that sundry clauses were modified through court 
 influences. To the end of the reign of Alexander II. , a portion 
 of the official world inclined more or less openly to retract several 
 of the principles proclaimed on the igth of February, 1861. 
 
 The landed nobility did not attempt to conceal their dis- 
 approval as well of the democratic tendencies in favor in the 
 "drafting commissions," as of the manner in which the govern- 
 ment had set them aside from participation in a task in which 
 it had, at first, invited their co-operation. Several of the 
 
 * I have told in another book, from the unpublished correspondence of 
 Miliutin, Tcherkassky, and Samarin, the struggles and vicissitudes through 
 which the emancipation had to pass. See : A Russian Statesman from his 
 Unpublished Correspondence (Un Homme d'tat Russe d'apres sa Corre- 
 spondance Intdite).
 
 424 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 great landlords gave loud expression to their disappointment at 
 being denied a share in a reform which they had hoped to direct ; 
 and that, too, in favor of a bureaucratic commission which 
 appeared to have no other task than that of collecting and reducing 
 into a code the views of the provincial committees of landlords.* 
 This was the nobility's first disappointment, and a heavy one. 
 
 The passions and angry feelings aroused by these questions 
 were so violent that the principal inditers of the Emancipation 
 Act, while they were able to overcome opposition, could not quell 
 the personal grudges which accumulated against them. Imme- 
 diately after the proclamation of the Statute, of which they had 
 been the most zealous instigators, N. Miliutin and his friends, 
 loudly abused as "reds" and "radicals," both at court and in 
 society, fell into a scarce disguised disgrace. The work was sanc- 
 tioned, the makers were sacrificed. Nothing less than the Polish 
 insurrection was needed to cause the government to call once 
 more for the services of Miliutin and Tcherkassky.f This incon- 
 sistency, apparently incomprehensible, was not due solely to the 
 sovereign's hesitations to court intrigues. By dismissing Miliutin, 
 at the very moment when it seemed but natural to entrust him 
 with the practical application of the laws drawn up by his friends 
 and by himself, Alexander intended to pacify public feeling. In 
 order to put an end to the uneasiness and the grumblings of the 
 nobility, half crazed by the phantom of impending ruin, he took 
 the execution of his ukazes out of the hands of a man reputed to 
 be, systematically, opposed to the nobility, and entrusted it to 
 persons who could not be suspected of hostility against it. 
 
 * See, for instance, the Letter from a Committeeman (Count Orldf- 
 Davydof ) to the President of the Drafting Commission, Paris, 1859. 
 
 t " I am given leave of absence for a whole year, or, more correctly, I 
 am shelved by being made a senator ..." wrote N. Miliutin to Tcherkassky 
 in May, 1861. " I had asked only for a four months' leave ; but the reaction 
 helped me out. L,ansk6y and myself [Lanskdy was the Minister of the 
 Interior and Miliutin his assistant] had to clear out of the cabinet to please 
 the nobility."
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 425 
 
 The excessive demands put forward by the peasants gradually 
 reconciled the greater part of the nobility to the Emancipation 
 Act. Once they found themselves face to face with the distrust and 
 the rapacity of their former serfs, the landlords were brought to 
 look on the Statute, so fiercely attacked by many of their number, 
 as on their ' ' anchor of salvation. ' ' Experience soon convinced 
 most of them of the inanity of the illusions they had entertained 
 concerning the mujik's supposed attachment and docility.* 
 
 The advantages provided for the peasants by men like Miliutin, 
 Tcherkassky, Samarin, account for the rancor which they aroused. 
 For truly, nowhere did the lawmaker take such thought for the 
 interests of the quondam serf. The task accomplished by Russia 
 was not unexampled or unprecedented in Europe. To mention 
 only neighboring states, Prussia and Austria had, in this very 
 century, at different intervals, accomplished analogous ones, 
 though on a more modest scale. The emancipation as conducted 
 in Prussia after Jena, under the inspiration of Baron von Stein, 
 was to the Russians a lesson by which they profited, without, 
 however, copying anybody's proceedings.! Two things especially 
 distinguished from others the method adopted at Petersburgh. 
 
 * " What did and still does most contribute to convince the nobility of 
 the absolute necessity of doing as we have done, is the attitude of the 
 peasants, into daily conflicts with whom the landlords are being forced ; it 
 is, more especially, the demands of the peasants, and, above all, the radical 
 distrust of the entire bearded Orthodox population towards the nobles. The 
 latter had, much against the grain, to give up the idea that their former serfs 
 placed in them an unlimited confidence ; the landlords' eyes have been opened 
 in this respect as completely as possible. . . . Everybody, at the present hour, 
 has been made to see how indispensable was a detailed and precise statute, 
 and how unfounded were, for the most part, the malevolent outcries and 
 uproar which have been kept up through two years against the ' drafting 
 commissions ' and their supposed mania for subjecting everything to regu- 
 lations." (Unpublished Letter from Prince Tcherkassky to N. Miliutin, 
 dated July the 23, 1861.) 
 
 f See, for the examples given to Russia by foreign countries, the History 
 of the Abolition of Slavery and Serfdom in Europe, by Samuel Sugenheim 
 (St. Petersburgh, 1861) ; and Samdrin's study on the Abolition of Serfdom 
 in Prussia, reprinted in 1879, in vol. ii. of his collected works.
 
 426 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Not content with giving the peasants their bare, personal liberty, 
 Russia endowed them with lands. Instead of leaving the manu- 
 mitted peasants, as Prussia did in 1809 and 1848, under the 
 patronage and tutelage of their former lords, to linger on in a 
 sort of administrative servitude, Russia at one stroke converted 
 the former serfs into communes independent of their late masters. 
 While the Bauer of Eastern Prussia remained, at least until the 
 reforms of 1872, subject and vassal to the Ritterschaft, the Russian 
 mujik, thanks to his ownership of land and to the autonomy of 
 his commune, was fully emancipated, at once economically and 
 administratively. 
 
 The main object of the system adopted in Russia was to 
 provide the freedmen with lands, to convert the serfs into land- 
 holders. There, naturalty, also lay the main difficulty. In the 
 opinion of a part of the nobility, in that of many politicians, it 
 was sufficient to give the peasants their personal liberty. That is 
 what Alexander I. did for the serfs of the Baltic provinces. What 
 is serfdom ? asked the theoreticians of this system. It is the 
 labor of one man, gratuitously conceded to another man. To 
 abolish serfdom, it is enough to abolish unrequited labor.* How, 
 they went on, was serfdom established ? By a police regulation, 
 forbidding the peasants to pass from one domain to another. 
 How is this institution to be annulled ? By restoring to the mujik 
 the right of coming and going. Conceived in this way, emancipa- 
 tion would have been a very simple operation ; but what would 
 have been the results? The peasant would have recovered his 
 liberty only to fall into a condition often more miserable than 
 that which he endured in the time of his bondage. He would 
 have remained for years, maybe for centuries, totally debarred 
 from the holding of land. All this host of freedmen would have 
 been turned into a nation of proletarians. Thus argued the 
 
 *This opinion, which pretended to be based on the data of political 
 economy, was upheld by numbers of foreign economists. (See, for example, 
 Molinari's Letters on Russia.)
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 427 
 
 partisans of territorial endowment, and their opinion carried the 
 day in the commission, with the public, and with the sovereign.* 
 
 Through these views, most justifiable in all that concerned the 
 liberation of the serfs, showed a high ambition, not exempt from 
 self-delusion. A worthy, tempting object surely : to create not 
 merely a nation of freemen, but one of land-holders. Press and 
 public kept repeating that the only escape from the evils of 
 ancient societies lay in not falling into those of modern societies 
 pauperism and proletariate. By giving lands to the serfs, it 
 was confidently hoped to avoid proletariate, and to avoid prole- 
 tariate was to steer clear of the social and political commotions of 
 the West. 
 
 The Russian government was thus led on to create, in favor 
 of the peasants, a veritable agrarian law, a sort of territorial ex~ 
 propriation for reasons of public weal. It has frequently been 
 blamed for this, so-called, revolutionary measure. This forced 
 distribution of lands taken from the nobility has been compared 
 to the confiscations and creations of national property perpetrated 
 by the French Revolution. Such comparisons are strangely ex- 
 aggerated. In order justly to appreciate these measures, political 
 necessity must not alone be taken into account, but the ambiguous 
 origin, the obscurity, the uncertainty of the Russian laws on 
 property should also be remembered. Whose, in reality, was the 
 soil the landlord's or the peasant's ? Both had claims. If the 
 
 * Address delivered by the Emperor in the "Council of the Empire," 
 on January 28, 1861. In it he openly deplored the manner in which the 
 emancipation had been accomplished in the Baltic provinces and the king- 
 dom of Poland. For Poland, the rising of 1863 was soon to supply the 
 government with an occasion to apply, with the assistance of the same men, 
 Miliutin, Tcherkassky, and their friends, the same principles to the 
 provinces of the Visla. As to the Baltic provinces, the land, according to a 
 system in use in several parts of Germany, has been divided into two cate- 
 gories : the Ho/land, which remains at the free disposal of the former lord, 
 and the Sauerland, which can be sold or rented only to peasants. The 
 agrarian question, repeatedly raised by Russian journalists, produced among 
 the Lett and Ehst peasantry, in 1882 and 1883, an agitation not unlike that 
 of the Irish Laud League.
 
 428 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 law decided officially in favor of the former, the latter could 
 appeal to custom, at least as far as those lands were concerned, 
 the use of which had been conceded to him by the masters, in 
 obedience to traditional habit. If the pomihh-tchik had received 
 his estate from the sovereign in exchange for his services, the 
 mujik could be considered as having lived on and had the use of 
 the land before the grant was made to his landlord.* Going back 
 to the beginning of things, the position could be upheld, that the 
 domains, with their serf population, which often alone gave them 
 their value, never had constituted full property, that they stood 
 less under the jurisdiction of the civil than of the political law, 
 these lands having been granted to the nobility in exchange for 
 services from which they had gradually exempted themselves. f 
 
 If we look at things in this way, the Russian government 
 cannot be said to have taken from one side to give to the other. 
 Rather, it has discriminated between rival claims, arbitrated 
 between conflicting rights and interests, by holding both adverse 
 parties to a compromise. The peasant received a portion of the 
 land, but he was made to indemnify his former landlord. If, on 
 both sides, there were complaints and disappointments, it was 
 because, coming down from theories to practical ground, the 
 
 * There were, indeed, some kinds of lands to which this line of argu- 
 ment did not seem to apply, such as the recently colonized land on the 
 I/ower Volga and in New Russia, the domains on which the landlords 
 had themselves settled peasants, inviting them to come. Unfortunately, it 
 would have been very difficult to take this difference into account. 
 
 t We saw in a preceding chapter (Book VI., Ch. II.), that there were 
 originally in Russia two classes of landed property : the vdt-tchina or 
 " patrimony," land inherited from ancestors ; and the pomistiy&, or 
 "grant-land," conceded to servants of the state for their support. The 
 estates of the modern nobles generally belong to the latter class ; but, by 
 exempting the nobility from the burdens and personal service which had 
 long been obligatory for the pomitsh-tchik, the sovereigns had virtually 
 transformed the pomi&stiyt into a vdt-tchina. So that, in this respect, the 
 Emperor Alexander II. may be said to have strained a point in favor of the 
 peasants, by ignoring what his predecessors had done for the nobility. In 
 strict historical equity, the emancipation ought to have taken place on the 
 day on which the pomish-tchik was freed from the obligation of serving 
 the state.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 429 
 
 umpire's sentence could not satisfy fully either of the two 
 contestants. 
 
 The government's decision was the wiser, that an opposite 
 resolve would have found the resistance of the peasants difficult 
 to overcome. And under such a system, Russia would have been 
 forthwith converted into an immense Ireland, rife with agrarian 
 troubles. The peasant, serf as he was, never ceased to consider 
 himself as the owner of the land he cultivated, that land at least 
 which the landlords had for generations allowed him to use for his 
 support. "We are yours," said the serfs to their masters, "but 
 the land is ours." To give them their liberty and at the same 
 time to take from them the lands of which they had the use, 
 would have seemed to the mujik a hypocritical form of spolia- 
 tion.* As it is, he finds it hard to understand why, in order to 
 become full owner of this land which he looked on as his own, he 
 should have to indemnify the former landlord, who, anyhow, left 
 it to him. 
 
 When the manifesto of the igth of February, 1861, was pub- 
 lished, setting forth the conditions of the emancipation, the 
 peasants could not conceal their disappointment. In the churches, 
 where the imperial manifesto, announcing freedom, was read to 
 them, they murmured aloud ; more than one shook his head, 
 exclaiming, "What sort of liberty is that?"f The discontent 
 
 * Here is a rather edifying story to the point : A landlord of the govern- 
 ment of Smolensk had, under Alexander I., drawn up a plan of emancipa- 
 tion which would have given to each peasant, besides his liberty, his house 
 with the enclosed yard or "house-lot" thereto belonging. "And how 
 about the arable lands ? " asked the peasants, when he laid his scheme 
 before them. "I shall keep those," answered the philanthropist. "Well, 
 then, father " (bdtiushka), replied the serfs, "suppose we leave things as 
 they are. We are yours, but the land is ours." 
 
 f A word quoted in the memoirs of a country priest, published in 1880. 
 " During the reading," says the priest, "the peasants bowed their heads ; 
 it was easy to see that they expected nothing good from that sort of liberty. 
 They listened as to a sentence of banishment." In several villages the 
 parish priests had to endure all sorts of persecutions at the peasants' hands, 
 who accused them of having suffered themselves to be bribed by the land- 
 lords to conceal from their parishioners the orders of the Tsar.
 
 430 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 was universal. In many localities the peasants suspected a mys- 
 tification. They refused to believe in the genuineness of the 
 manifesto. On many points there were troubles, and the police 
 had to call in the aid of the military, who, in some villages, were 
 compelled to fire. For this unlettered people, accustomed by 
 oppression to incurable distrust, the balls of the soldiers were the 
 only sufficient demonstration of the authenticity of the imperial 
 ordinances.* 
 
 It was rumored in the villages that the manifesto read in the 
 churches was a fabrication of the landlords, and that the genuine 
 Emancipation Act would be forthcoming later on ; there may even 
 yet be peasants who are looking for it to appear. There assuredly 
 are many who in the long winter evenings dream of a new eman- 
 cipation with a redistribution of lands, gratuitous this time. 
 
 It took the peasants several years thoroughly to understand 
 the conditions on which liberty was given them and to become 
 reconciled to them. Truth to say, these poor people were mostly 
 quite unqualified to comprehend the clauses of the Statute. They 
 lacked the knowledge of legal terms, a clear notion of the rights 
 of property, indeed of liberty itself; they also were wanting in 
 confidence towards their masters and the local authorities com- 
 missioned to explain to them the new order of things. Nothing 
 could be more characteristic in this respect than the lines written 
 from a remote province to N. Milititin, by one of his most illus- 
 trious fellow-workers, one of the most earnest and devoted lovers 
 of the people, the Slavophil Samarin, in September, 1861 : " The 
 chief stumbling-block is the peasants' distrust of everything and 
 everybody. Nothing is to them immutable or impracticable. . . . 
 Between them and us there is no common point of view ; they 
 have not a peg on which we could hang our arguments. They 
 
 * " This poor, uncultured mass, imbued with a profound distrust of all 
 that surrounds it, seemed anxious to stimulate the action of the troops, and 
 to challenge repression, because force has until now been to the people the 
 only certain pledge of the sovereign will." [Unpublished letter from Y6ri 
 Samarin to N. Miliutin, dated August 17, 1862.]
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 431 
 
 listen to us attentively, good-naturedly, even with pleasure. But, 
 to anything you say to them, you hear the same answer : ' We 
 are ignorant, bdtiushka ' / we know nothing, but this is how we 
 reason : what the Tsar commands, that should be done. ' ' But 
 this is the Tsar's will ; written down here, in this book.' ' Ah, 
 but how should we know that ? we are ignorant ; what there is 
 in that book, we know it not.' . . . And thereupon you de- 
 spondently feel that all your talk glides off them as water down a 
 slope. The peasants submit to the Statute ; they submit to the 
 Regulation Contracts ; but in their own hearts they remain 
 deeply attached to their own hopes, and it will be long before 
 they give them up. ' ' 
 
 This same spirit shows very plainly in sundry dissident sects, 
 those especially thatforetelltheimpending wz'/fewwzww, the ' ' descent 
 of the Kingdom of Heaven. ' ' Several years after the publication of 
 the Emancipation Act, certain prophets from the people, one Push- 
 kin in the number, announced that, by the will of God, the land 
 was soon to be made over to the peasants, with nothing to pay. A 
 little earlier, in 1861, there appeared, in the region of Kazan, a 
 pretender or pseudo-tsar of the good old Russian type. A certain 
 Antbn Petrbf gave himself out among the peasants for the Em- 
 peror ; driven out of his capital, he told them, by the nobles and 
 the tchiribvniks (bureaucrats), who, between them, had altered 
 his manifesto to the people's detriment. The troops had to 
 be brought out against this embryo Pugatch6f. Thus political 
 vagaries combined with religious delusions, the frauds of im- 
 postors and tricksters with the hallucinations of the illumined. 
 Here is a curious instance in point, that came to my knowledge 
 in the government of Voronej. A seminary student on his vaca- 
 tion trip was returning from the country with no money left and 
 quite at a loss how to procure horses to finish his journey, when 
 
 1 " We are dark people " is the standing expression which peasants use 
 for their profession of ignorance. Could anything be more graphic and 
 more pathetic ? There is great promise in a people who have, unaided, 
 grasped the perception that ignorance is " darkness," blindness.
 
 432 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 he hit on the expedient of taking advantage of the mujik's 
 credulity. " I am," he declared to the peasants, " a Grand Duke 
 travelling incognito, in a plain teltiga (springless village cart) to 
 judge for myself of your condition, and to see what, in your 
 interests, should be altered in the Emancipation Act." The 
 stratagem succeeded ; the seminarist got taken several relays on 
 his road, hospitably entertained and thanked by his dupes. 
 Numerous political trials, from 1879 to 1883, have shown how 
 willingly even yet the mujik lends himself to mystification on 
 this point. 
 
 To comprehend the material position and the feelings of the 
 liberated peasants, one ,must know how. hard are the conditions 
 of this difficult division of land, this sort of liquidation between 
 the noble landlord and his former serf, which Russia is carrying 
 on ever since 1861. The principle adopted by the government is 
 that of a compromise. The peasants were to have the perennial 
 use of their dwelling with its enclosed appurtenances, and, further- 
 more, lands equivalent to the fields which used to be reserved for 
 their support ; but these lands they had to redeem from the owners, 
 who were made to give them up. Yet there is a large class of 
 serfs who have been given no lands, consequently have no pay- 
 ments to make ; they are the domestic serfs (dvordvyit li&di, or 
 " court people "), i. e., the serfs employed in domestic service and 
 personal attendance on their masters. There was a good reason 
 for passing them by that they never had had any land, having 
 generally entirely given up agricultural life. So they received 
 their personal liberty and that was all. Emancipation, for them, 
 was almost immediate ; after two supplementary years of gratui- 
 tous service, they were free to leave their masters, or to stay with 
 them for a salary. It is chiefly among this class, many of whom 
 swelled the ranks of urban proletariate, especially among the old 
 men, that numbers were found unwilling to avail themselves of 
 their freedom. 
 
 At the moment of the emancipation there were about a million
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 433 
 
 and a half of these domestic serfs, an unnecessarily large num- 
 ber. As is the case in all slaveholding countries, the dwellings 
 of the wealthy were cumbered with servants of both sexes, untidy, 
 shiftless, lazy cooks, valets, coachmen, grooms, maids, needle- 
 women, waiting-women, etc. This crowd, half civilized and half 
 corrupted by life in the cities and contact with the masters, 
 frequently was the most objectionable and unwholesome portion 
 of the serf population. The facility of always having at one's 
 beck and call hosts of men and women, the consequent waste of 
 human labor, were for the higher classes one of the great 
 material conveniences, as well as a great moral evil, of serfdom. 
 By this side of it, Russian life came nearer that of the planters in 
 the colonies than the European mode of existence, and gave to 
 the pomihh-tchik the indolent habits which masters of slaves 
 contract everywhere. 
 
 The principle of territorial endowment once accepted, it 
 remained to determine what quantity of land should be conceded 
 to the peasants. In a country so vast, it was impossible to set up 
 a fixed and uniform rule, to allot the same quantity of land to all 
 the late serfs. The government's standard was that each lot should 
 be sufficient to provide for one family, and should be as nearly as 
 possible the equivalent of the lot it had the use of in the old time. 
 This rule also being admitted, it had to be adapted to the differ- 
 ences of soil and climate, to all the inequalities of the population. 
 In spite of the general homogeneousness and uniformity of the 
 Russian soil, this operation alone required colossal labor. Then 
 the relations established by custom between master and peasant 
 had to be taken into consideration. It also became necessary to 
 have recourse to several distinct regulations. Special regulations 
 were made for little-Russia, Lithuania, and the former Polish 
 provinces. Great- Russia and New-Russia thirty-four governments 
 between them, over two thirds of the entire Russian territory in 
 Europe were divided into three wide parallel zones or belts, 
 according to the nature of the soil or the density of the population :
 
 434 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the northern zone, comprising the poorest lands ; the Black-Mould 
 zone, comprising the richest; the Steppe zone, comprising the 
 least populous. Each of these great zones was itself subdivided 
 into ten regions, and for each region a maximum and a minimum 
 were fixed. The average from all these regions gives from three 
 to four dessiatfnas per male head.* This average sometimes rises 
 to seven dessiatfnas in the north, to ten in the steppes of the south ; 
 it sometimes goes down to two dessiatfnas and less in the rich 
 Black-Mould region, f A family numbering three " souls," i. e., 
 three male members, thus received on an average from twenty to 
 twenty-five acres, which, in most parts of the country, was about 
 what they used to have in the times of serfdom. Although this 
 equivalence was admitted in principle, the peasant's advocates 
 Miliutin, Samarin, and their friends were not always able to 
 obtain for him a lot equal to that of which he had the use before 
 his liberation, and, when it came to practice, the manner after 
 which the division was effected frequently still further increased 
 the difference. J This was evidently a great disappointment to 
 
 *The dessiatina is equal to about zf acres. The State performed a 
 similar operation on its own demesnes, and as it had, as a rule, given up to 
 its peasants all the cultivable lands, they have, on the whole, been more 
 favored than the serfs on private estates. 
 
 f Here are the valuations of a Russian statistician, Mr. lanson, concern- 
 ing the distribution of land before and after the emancipation (1876). 
 
 BEFORE. AFTER. 
 
 Lands of the state 64. 6 per cent. Lands of the state 45. 6 per cent. 
 
 " " " nobility... 30.6 " " " " " nobility. ..22.6 " " 
 
 " " " appanages 3.3 " " " " " appanages 1.8 " " 
 
 " " " peasants " " " peasants 
 
 and colonists. . 1.7 " " and colonists. .30. " " 
 
 The nobility, which before 1861, according to the same authority, owned 
 105,000,000 of dessiatinas, (about 280,000,000 acres) had not over 63,500,- 
 ooo left in 1876, while the former serfs owned over 64,000,000 (about 
 176,000,000 acres). 
 
 % Miliutin's adversaries contrived to get the territorial allotments cut 
 down in the Drafting Commission itself. Thus Samarin, in one of his letters 
 to Miliutin (September, 1861) complains with much earnestness that Count 
 Panin, president of the Commission after Rostdvtsef, succeeded in lower- 
 ing the average for the peasants of Samara from 5^ to 5 dessiatinas.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 
 
 435 
 
 begin with, a first cause of discontent for the peasant, all the more 
 that the increase of the population naturally tends to curtail every 
 year more the original allotment. That, however, was not the 
 only source of disappointment. In some regions the territorial 
 concession was manifestly insufficient ; in many others it was as 
 manifestly too onerous for the peasant, owing to the rate at which 
 the redemption was fixed. The extent of the allotted lands is, 
 indeed, only one side of the question ; in order to appreciate the 
 condition of the freedmen, it is necessary to know how much the 
 land cost them, and in what way they were enabled to pay for it.
 
 BOOK VII. CHAPTER III. 
 
 Manner and Conditions of Redeeming the Lands Advances Made by the 
 Exchequer Actual State of the Operation Slackening in the Last 
 Years of Alexander II. How there still Subsisted, in the Form of 
 Labor Dues, a Sort of Half Servitude, which was Abolished only 
 Under Alexander III. Why Landed Property is often a Burden to the 
 Freedmen Unequal Treatment of the Peasants in the Different Regions 
 The Gratuitous " Quarter Lot" The Peasant's Disappointment In 
 what Manner he Understood Liberty. 
 
 So vast a liquidation could not be accomplished in a day. It 
 was important to avoid too abrupt a transformation, which, would 
 have landed the country into the midst of a most dangerous crisis. 
 During the two years which followed the Emancipation Act, all 
 the landlords and their tenants had to draw up by mutual agree- 
 ment an instrument, called ' ' Regulation Charter, ' ' which exactly 
 determined the lands to be ceded by the landlords, and the annual 
 payment, in money or labor, to be effected by the peasants for 
 the same. These things were to be arranged, as much as possi- 
 ble, amicably ; but as the clashing of interests, and, still more, 
 the peasants' distrust, gave little hope of such a solution, the 
 decision, in case of conflict, was left to certain magistrates created 
 on purpose, under the title of Arbiters of Peace. During the 
 first years, men the most independent and superior, such as Prince 
 Tcherkassky, Yuri Samdrin, and others, made it a point to take 
 on themselves these wearisome and delicate duties. These judges, 
 elected by the nobility, were commissioned to approve the con- 
 tracts for both sides, and, if need were, to settle the difficulties, 
 subject to ratification by a provincial court. One would think 
 that these arbiters, appointed by the landlords out of their own 
 
 436
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION, 437 
 
 ranks, would have been inclined to favor those of their own 
 class. Nothing of the kind. By a phenomenon which does honor 
 to the Russian nobility, and which can be, in part, accounted for 
 by the generosity and sensitiveness of the national character, 
 these men, the chosen of the landlords, of whom the majority 
 were opposed to endowing the serfs with lands, took their mission 
 so earnestly to heart, that they quite frequently laid themselves 
 open to the accusation of taking the peasants' side.* Unfortunately 
 for the latter, these first arbiters, who represented the more noble- 
 minded portion of the nobility, were succeeded by men of a very 
 different type, who felt no scruples in sacrificing the peasants' 
 interests and in applying the local regulations in a spirit opposed 
 to the legislator's intentions. 
 
 The Regulation Charters once drawn up (and nearly all 
 110,000 to 112,000 were ready within the prescribed time), the 
 peasants, now free and placed in possession of their lands, still 
 owed the landlord perpetual rent in money or in labor. All the 
 difference was that, since 1863, these dues were freely discussed 
 by the contracting parties or legally fixed by the local regulations. 
 Such a state of things too closely resembled serfdom itself to be 
 regarded as anything more than temporary. The tenants sub- 
 jected to it were designated as being " under temporary obliga- 
 tions." These peasants had only, as it were, traversed the first 
 phase of emancipation ; they were in an intermediate position 
 between freedom and serfdom. 
 
 Then came a second operation, more complicated, more pro- 
 
 * "The ' arbiters of peace,' themselves nobles, even the members of the 
 former 'provincial committees,' have become completely transformed by 
 their new duties" (wrote Samarin to Miliutin in August, 1862) ; "in entering 
 on them they have not only cast from them, but quickly forgotten, all the 
 past. The desire to conquer popularity among the masses has so entirely 
 triumphed over their former sentiments, that the ' peace assemblies ' are 
 flooded with complaints from landlords against the ' arbiters of peace,' on 
 account of their partiality towards the peasants, whereas there is scarcely 
 an instance of the peasants accusing them of partiality towards the land- 
 lords."
 
 43 8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 tracted, which Alexander II. was to leave unfinished : the 
 "redemption," which put an end to the obligatory territorial 
 relations between the two classes. This question did not bear on 
 the serfs' personal liberty the nobility never claimed any indem- 
 nity for that but on the lands allotted to them, or rather in the 
 rents which, in force of the Statute and the local charters, bur- 
 dened those lands. The Redemption Act made the peasants full 
 owners of them ; it freed them from all dues and obligations 
 towards their former masters. 
 
 But the law had regulated neither the mode nor the time 
 of redemption ; it was left to the contracting parties to take up 
 that question, to fix the conditions and the time of the operation. 
 Exceptions were made only for the western former lyithuano- 
 Polish provinces, where the government, immediately after the 
 rising of 1863 and for political reasons, declared redemption obliga- 
 tory. In Russia proper, the State did not interfere in the matter 
 until Alexander III. came to the throne, except by rendering 
 financial aid. 
 
 This operation, if left to the peasants' unaided means, would 
 have presented numerous difficulties, both for them and the mas- 
 ters. It might have lasted centuries and not have been completed 
 then. The State, therefore, whenever requested by the freedmen, 
 advanced to them the necessary sum, or rather four fifths of that 
 sum, calculated at the capitalization rate of the dues with which 
 each given piece of land was burdened.* 
 
 To the landlord, this system offered the immense advantage 
 of converting a private debt on the peasant into a public debt on 
 the State, and the freedman's annual dues into a sort of temporary 
 
 * The redemption price, as a rule, was calculated not after the marked 
 value of the land, but after the sum-total of the obrbk paid by the former 
 serfs for the lands ceded to them by the " Regulation Charters." The legal 
 redemption rate was established by capitalizing at 6 per cent, the dues paid 
 in species in other words, by multiplying the latter by 16%. Hence it is 
 that the redemption rate is frequently quite independent of the real value 
 of the soil, sometimes higher, sometimes lower.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 439 
 
 tax, the collection of which is ensured by the fiscal agents. As 
 to the peasant, his gain was that he became without further delay 
 full owner of the soil, and could break off at once the obligations 
 which still bound him to his former master. The State, for their 
 mutual interests, has, as it were, constituted itself banker for both 
 parties. 
 
 In proffering its aid to the peasants, the State was naturally 
 entitled to determine in what measure and on what conditions it 
 would grant it. In order not to become engaged too deeply, it had, 
 of course, to fix limits to the financial assistance it was willing to 
 render. Such, according to Miliutin, is the true meaning of the 
 official valuations inserted in the Regulation. By fixing before- 
 hand, according to the regions and to circumstances, the figure of 
 the capital which the State was willing to advance, the legislator 
 intended to mark the limits within which the public credit might 
 be pledged. 
 
 Some such precaution was imperative, and this necessity has 
 too often been lost sight of by those who criticised the valuations, 
 some as being inadequate to compensate the landlords, others as 
 being too onerous for the peasants. Both sides were free to con- 
 tract other agreements ; only in that case the peasant was not to 
 count on assistance from the State.* 
 
 The advances made by the government to the freedtnen are to 
 be reimbursed in the course of forty-nine years at 6 per cent. ; 
 the rate of 6 per cent, annual payment covers the interest and 
 extinguishes the debt. Anticipatory payments are permitted, but 
 of course rarely occur. Thus, in half a century, with the govern- 
 ment's aid, the peasant will be finally liberated and the gigantic 
 operation finally closed, f Only in the course of the twentieth 
 
 * Such free contracts have been very rare. 
 
 t These forty-nine years, moreover, are to be counted, not from the 
 promulgation of the Emancipation Act, but from the moment when the 
 contracting parties determine to avail themselves of the facilities for 
 redemption offered by the State. Now not a few peasants had not yet 
 decided on this step when Alexander III. came to the throne.
 
 44 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 century, then, the peasant, freed from all temporary dues to his 
 former master and the State, will have become full owner of the 
 piece of land allotted to him, and will be able to realize all the 
 benefits of emancipation. 
 
 This feature of the great reform the redemption of the lands 
 turned it into a vast credit operation, which, being undertaken 
 immediately after the Crimean war, might be styled daring. The 
 government could not hand over in cash to the landlords the 
 amount of the debt which it undertook to clear in the tenants' 
 name. Two new titles or bonds, therefore, were created to meet 
 this demand, both interest-bearing and guaranteed by the State : 
 one ' ' to bearer, ' ' bringing 5 per cent, interest and negotiable on 
 'Change; the other at 5^ per cent., bearing the holder's name and 
 subject, with a view to prevent crowding the market, to complicated 
 formalities in case of transfer ; these bonds were subsequently and 
 successively converted, by means of lottery -drawing, into titles 
 " to bearer, " extinguishable within thirty-seven years.* It is im- 
 possible to enter here into all the details of this vast and complicated 
 operation, materially assisted by the forced course imposed by the 
 Russian government, with the assistance which such a course af- 
 fords, but also liable to all the risks which it entails on financial en- 
 terprise. The most crying need of the noble landholders, deprived 
 of their human capital, was for capital in money. To help them out, 
 the redemption indemnity should have been immediately realiza- 
 ble, and the paper issued by the government was not, or only on 
 onerous conditions. As the holders of the new bonds were pressed 
 
 * The reader will note that the bonds placed in the landlords' hands 
 were to be extinguished in thirty-seven years, whereas the redemption 
 annuities, paid by the peasants and meant to reimburse the government, 
 are distributed over forty-nine years. The peasants were expected to 
 fall behind with their payments, and that is why the two operations, though 
 connected with each other, were timed differently. These arrears, as antici- 
 pated, have been considerable ; still, they remained below the expecta- 
 tions ; payments have even sometimes been anticipated, so that instead of 
 involving the state in debt, the redemption operation brought in a bonus of 
 several million roubles.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 441 
 
 for money all at the same time, the money market was glutted with 
 them, and a depreciation ensued which the government's precau- 
 tionary measures could but imperfectly forestall. This was one of 
 the chief causes of the pecuniary straits, sometimes amounting 
 almost to want, which the emancipation brought on numbers of 
 landlords. What is really wonderful is that such a transformation 
 should not have determined a radical economic crisis ; that Russia, 
 already laboring under financial perturbations, should have come 
 out of this one as unscathed as she did. When Alexander III. 
 came to the throne, the advances disbursed by the government 
 amounted to something like 750,000,000 roubles, and it is remark- 
 able that the State should have been able to open such a credit to 
 the peasants without embarrassment or loss to the exchequer.* If 
 the operation were ended, if all the peasants had taken advantage 
 of the government's assistance and redeemed all the land they were 
 entitled to by law, the advances made by the State would have 
 risen to over one milliard roubles. As it is, they amounted to 
 862,000,000 on the ist of June, 1886. 
 
 A few figures will make plain the state of the operation at the 
 time of the death of Alexander II. On the first of January, 1881, 
 there still remained, in the thirty-seven governments of the 
 interior, 1,553,000 "revision souls, " f or more than three mil- 
 lions of peasants "under temporary obligations, " i. e. such 
 as still owed their former masters, for a time, either labor or 
 obrok. The number of serfs having proceeded to the redemption 
 
 * The metallic rouble is worth 4 francs or 80 cents. During the years 
 that preceded the Bulgarian war, it was near on 3^ francs, and in 1889 it 
 was quoted at about 2^. On the ist of April, 1880, the total of loans made 
 amounted to 739,000,000; the annuities collected under this head in 1879 
 reached 43,000,000, to which should be added arrears to the amount of 
 17,000,000. The Russian Bank had, on an average, advanced y.%. roubles 
 on the dessiatina (20 dollars on each 2f acres, approximately), and 107 
 roubles or thereabouts (about 60 dollars), per male peasant. 
 
 f As in the times of serfdom, the male peasant alone is understood under 
 the term "soul" (dushii) ; he alone paid poll-tax, and the increase of 
 population from one "revision " (census) to another was not taken into 
 consideration.
 
 442 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 of their lands was 5,750,000 "souls." Of these 5,100,000 
 had availed themselves of the government's aid ; about 645,000 
 had not. To these figures we must add 2,700,000 "souls " for the 
 nine western provinces, where, as a consequence of the Polish 
 insurrection, the bonds of serfdom had been abruptly snapped 
 and immediate redemption made compulsory. This gives us, 
 for these forty-nine governments, which comprised the immense 
 majority of serfs, over eight millions of "revision souls," or 
 about twenty millions of persons, finally delivered from bondage, 
 and having in future only to serve the interest on the redemption 
 loan. The operation was conducted on the same principles in the 
 rest of the empire, even to the remotest provinces, such as, for 
 instance, the Caucasus. 
 
 During the last years of Alexander II, there was a noticeable 
 slackening in the redemption operations. The number of peasants 
 who had recourse to them had steadily decreased since 1873 : 
 there were not 20,000 in 1880. The final cessation of " temporary 
 obligations ' ' seemed, in consequence, about to be delayed some 
 fifteen or twenty years more, and the forms of serfdom threatened 
 to survive in places into the twentieth century. 
 
 Contrary to generally received ideas, there were, at the acces- 
 sion of Alexander III., numerous peasants who, by force of the 
 Statute itself, still remained in a state of legal dependence from the 
 nobility. In 1882 over three million peasants of both sexes still 
 were under their former masters' tutelage and, in plain words, in a 
 state of semi-servitude, since the prerogatives conceded to the 
 landlords by the law were very extensive. The article 148 of the 
 agrarian statute appointed the former master the natural trustee 
 for such communes as still were ' ' under temporary obligations ' ' 
 to him ; article 149 invested him with the police supervision on 
 the domain and the duty of protecting public safety ; he could de- 
 mand of the commune the arrest of guilty or suspected peasants. 
 Article 160 went the length of awarding to the noble landlord the 
 right of revising the communal resolutions and suspending their
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 443 
 
 execution. More than that, the landlord had, in certain cases, 
 
 the right of demanding the destitution of the ' ' elder ' ' (siax&hinci) jd 3A 
 
 or elective head of the commune, and the appointment of another, 
 
 and even of authorizing or forbidding the temporary absence of 
 
 any member of the commune. It is easy to see how abnormal 
 
 such a state of things was twenty years after the emancipation. 
 
 In order to become really free, these peasants, in the words of a 
 
 St. Petersburgh journalist, needed another emancipation. 
 
 This second emancipation had been foreseen and prepared by 
 the law ; it was being gradually accomplished by the redemption 
 which freed the liberated serfs from all obligations towards their 
 late masters. Unfortunately, this great measure was carried out 
 unevenly hi the various provinces. Landlords and peasants were 
 far from showing everywhere the same zeal in settling accounts. 
 In the government of Kursk, for instance, scarcely one half of the 
 peasants, in those of Nijni, Tula, Ori61, Xstrakhan, not over two 
 thirds, had begun operations in 1880. In the eight governments 
 which compose the agricultural zone of the centre, i. <?., in the 
 richest region of the empire, over twenty-five per cent, of the 
 emancipated serfs, z. ., 1,500,000 peasants of both sexes, were 
 still ' ' under temporary obligations ' ' at the same date. Whereas 
 in other governments those of Viatka, Orenburg, Kharkof, 
 Khersbn the operation was very nearly completed. The cause 
 of these fluctuations lies in the diversity of the conditions laid 
 down for the redemption in different regions. 
 
 In the more fertile regions of the Black Mould belt, where, 
 owing to the outlets opened by the railroads, the value of land 
 has rapidly increased, the landlords frequently found it to their 
 advantage not to consent to its redemption, so as to retain the 
 compulsory services of the peasants. Now the Statute did not 
 give the peasant the right to demand the redemption ; this right 
 belonged exclusively to the master, and all that the peasants could 
 do in such a case was to reduce their lots to the legal minimum 
 allowed for that particular locality. Such a law easily accounts
 
 444 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 for the slackening of the operation in the course of these last years. 
 In order to put an end to this anomaly and to hasten the comple- 
 tion of this gigantic liquidation, Alexander III. issued an uk&z 
 making redemption obligatory. Thus to the son belongs the 
 honor of finishing the father's work. 
 
 Strange to say, scarcely two fifths of the redemption operations 
 were undertaken by mutual consent. In over sixty cases out of 
 each hundred, the demand came from the landlords or from the 
 credit institutions where their estates were mortgaged. The 
 peasant's distrust partly accounts for this, and his reluctance to 
 pay for a field to which he considered himself entitled ; but this is 
 not the only, nor even the chief reason. The law itself indirectly 
 encouraged him in his passive resistance. For the Statute, indeed, 
 authorized the landlord to demand the pecuniary settlement with 
 his tenants ; but in this case he was bound to content himself 
 with the sums advanced by the State, i. e. , with only four fifths 
 of the price established by official valuation ; the law forbade him 
 from claiming any more. 
 
 It was therefore manifestly in the peasants' interests to have 
 the redemption forced upon them, since in this way they secured 
 a reduction in the price. The official valuations being based on 
 the capitalization of the dues, they found themselves pledged to 
 the payment of less onerous annuities, even while they gained full 
 ownership of the lands.* This was, in fact, what the sovereign 
 and the members of the Drafting Commission aimed at. Every- 
 thing in this operation seems intended to benefit the freedmen, 
 yet these same peasants, apparently so favored, are frequently the 
 
 * One illustration will make the matter plainer. Certain peasants paid 
 to their former lord, as laid down in the Regulation Charters, a yearly 
 due of seven and a half roubles. The rate of redemption for this due, based 
 on the capitalization at six per cent., was 125 roubles. But of this sum the 
 peasants, being constrained by the landlord to redeem, had actually to pay 
 only four fifths, or 100 roubles, that being the amount advanced by the 
 State ; and for this advance they pay the State only six per cent, interest, 
 which includes the extinguishment of the debt, that is to say, six roubles 
 a year instead of seven.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 445 
 
 most dissatisfied. The reason is simple : the valuations of redemp- 
 tion rates being based on the figure of the annual dues, and not 
 on the actual value of the soil, the land, thus ceded apparently at 
 reduced prices, is frequently far from having in reality the value 
 which the freedmen have to pay for it. That is why numbers of 
 them, on being forced to redeem, availed themselves of their right 
 of acquiring only the legal minimum. 
 
 Compulsory redemption is prevalent in the north : governments 
 of Petersburgh, N6vgorod, Pskof, Tver, Smolensk, Moscow, 
 and in the less fertile regions generally. Redemption by mutual 
 agreement obtains chiefly in the south : governments of Poltava, 
 Tchermgof, Kharkof, Khers6n, and in the rich Black Mould 
 regions generally. In the north, the soil being unproductive 
 and the redemption rates, based on the annual dues formerly 
 paid, comparatively high, it was entirely in the master's interest 
 to get out of his tenants whatever the law empowered him to 
 demand. In the south, the soil generally being remarkably 
 fertile and, owing to the railroads, steadily rising in value, the 
 landlord was by no means anxious to give it up at the legal rate, 
 which, as a rule, fell far short of its actual value.* 
 
 It is plain from this that the emancipation, even while con- 
 ducted everywhere after identical rules, could not everywhere 
 produce the same effects, but must have overburdened at times 
 the landlord, at others the peasants. That, partly, explains the 
 difference in the judgments pronounced in Russia itself on the 
 great reform. Of the noble landholders, the least wealthy came 
 off worst. The State was forced to come to the aid of such among 
 them who, owning only a few serfs, whose labor they rented out, 
 
 * The reports of the agricultural inquest commissions show that the 
 redemption rates, as fixed in 1861, were, in the northern portions of the 
 Black Mould belt and in some western localities, ten, thirty, fifty, and some- 
 times a hundred per cent, below the actual market value of the land. In 
 the northwest, the north, and the east, on the contrary, it was as much 
 above the current prices. It appears that there were only nine governments 
 in which the difference one way or the other did not amount to more than 
 ten per cent.
 
 446 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 found themselves on the verge of total ruin. Among the freed- 
 men, no given class had any claim on indemnities or assistance ; 
 but the State had to help out some indirectly by remitting them 
 part of their tax arrears. This was done, among others, in the 
 government of Smolensk, where the price charged for the land is 
 out of all proportion with its producing capacities, and where the 
 lot which the peasant has been compelled to redeem is notoriously 
 insufficient to cover his taxes and dues.* 
 
 Where the conditions were most favorable to them, the 
 peasants did not always know how to avail themselves of the 
 advantages proffered them. They showed a repugnance for this 
 operation, which could be accounted for only by their prejudices 
 and their distrust. " Why," they objected, " should we redeem 
 land that belongs to us ? " Many saw there a trap and got it 
 into their heads that the land was to be made over to them some 
 day unconditionally, wherefore redemption, they reasoned, was 
 all profit to the master. In a certain village, situated in one of 
 the richest Black Mould governments, a great landlord an 
 upright and liberal man, tried to make his peasants understand 
 that it was in their interest to redeem the maximum allowed them 
 by the local regulation. His insistence only increased their dis- 
 trust, and his proposals were repulsed by the commune after long 
 debates. For the decision in such cases must be passed by the 
 commune as a body, that being an engagement which involves 
 the solidarity of all the peasants. In the communal assembly of 
 this particular village, then, those who were inclined to follow 
 the landlord's advice, and opined for immediate redemption and 
 the legal maximum, were accused of siding with the master. The 
 others pulled their beards and abused them: " You are nothing 
 but serfs ; you are the bdrin's men ; you don't know what it 
 means to be free. ' ' They meant that the land would be coming 
 to them of itself by and by, along with their liberty. 
 
 * Some ten million roubles, taken from the treasury funds and in great 
 part distributed through the provincial nobiliary assemblies, were devoted 
 to this use.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPA TION. 447 
 
 Numbers of communes acted in the same manner under like 
 circumstances. Such facts show that the law-makers had their 
 good and sufficient reasons when they imposed on the peasants 
 the obligation of redeeming a minimum of land. Had the land- 
 lords not been empowered to force them to it, they would have 
 been waiting forever for gratuitous possession and never have 
 come to any understanding at all. So in the village just men- 
 tioned, the peasants now have only two or three dessiatinas (six 
 to eight acres) per " soul," whereas, by accepting the legal maxi- 
 mum, they would have had more than double as much. The 
 lands which they refused to redeem, they now rent from the 
 landlord, at a rate very little below that of the redemption 
 annuities. By paying a few copecks more for the next forty-nine 
 years, they would have become proprietors instead of remaining 
 tenants. That is a point that many peasants never took in, or 
 their courage failed them, being filled with chimerical hopes, and 
 more alive to the burdens of the present than to the fair promise 
 of the future. 
 
 Into the statute which regulates all the details of this immense 
 liquidation, somehow crept a certain "Article 123," which rose to 
 great importance during the first years of the emancipation, owing 
 to the peasants' improvidence. In virtue of this article, the land- 
 lord could, instead of selling to his tenants the quantity of land 
 stipulated by the local regulation, and with their agreement, free 
 himself from this obligation by giving up to them gratuitously 
 one fourth of the legal maximum. This article 123, nicknamed 
 from its inventor, " Gagdrin article," appears not to have been 
 much to the taste of Miliutin, Tcherkassky, Samarin, and others 
 of their stamp, in other words, of the peasants' more ardent 
 champions in the Drafting Commission. Owing to the ignorance 
 of the former serfs, this clause was, at first, in great favor with 
 them, but, of course, caused much disappointment later on. In 
 the rich Black Mould regions, where the soil in most cases rapidly 
 rose to a value far beyond the legal redemption rates, the tenants, 
 who had everything to lose by this combination, ofttimes hailed
 
 448 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSAJfS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 it with joy, and even insisted on its being carried out, glad to be 
 delivered from the burden of the dues and secretly cherishing a 
 vague hope of a new and gratuitous distribution. 
 
 Another noteworthy trait : one of the things that confirmed 
 the hankering of many peasants after this gratuitous ' ' quarter lot, ' ' 
 was the repugnance with which it was at first regarded by most 
 landlords, too shortsighted to understand from the first that it 
 could be to their advantage to sacrifice their indemnity in view of 
 the probable rise of ground-rent. Experience soon opened the 
 peasants' eyes ; most contracts of the kind are dated from the first 
 two or three years. The people gave to this gratuitous ' ' quarter 
 lot " the designation of " orphan's " or " poor man's lot," and, as 
 a matter of fact, the communes which have accepted it are now, 
 as a rule, poorer than their neighbors. * In the rich Black Mould 
 regions, where the increase in value has already taken place, the 
 peasants who have elected this mode of settlement have before 
 this become bitterly aware of their mistake, f They complain 
 and try to make out that they have been cheated. In a village 
 I am personally acquainted with the women now upbraid the 
 men with their improvident decision : ' ' You are wretches, ' ' they 
 repeat to them; "thanks to you, our children will always 
 be beggars. ' ' And to crown all, the workers of disturbances are 
 
 * I just now came across a characteristic page in a letter of Yuri Samarin : 
 "The great popularity, among the peasants, of 'Article 123,' which they 
 have named 'the orphan's lot,' is accounted for principally by a blunder of 
 the landlords themselves, who generally opened the discussion by declaring 
 themselves ready to accede to anything, except ' the gratuitous quarter lot ' 
 (Art. 123). That was sufficient for the peasant to imagine that in that provi- 
 sion lay perfect bliss for him. For myself, I announced that I was willing to 
 agree to anything, without taking exception to any article whatever, so I 
 had not a single demand for ' the orphan's lot.' " Letter to N. Miliutin, 
 August, 1862. 
 
 t It seems at first sight as though the 642,000 peasants who, on the 1st 
 of January, 1882, had accomplished the redemption of their lands without 
 assistance from the State, should be accounted the most fortunate ; that, 
 however, is not the case in reality, since they are mostly those who had 
 been content with the " quarter lot," so that, practically, there had been no 
 redemption at all.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 449 
 
 trying to make capital of this dissatisfaction and the inequality in 
 the condition of the different communes, brought about by an act 
 of their own free will, for the revolutionary propaganda. 
 
 All the peasants are far from having the same cause for regrets, 
 yet nearly all have experienced the same feeling of disappointment. 
 The best treated have failed to find in the longed-for liberty the 
 wonder-working fairy whose wand was to operate a magical trans- 
 formation in their izbb. The expectations aroused in the masses 
 by the very word ' ' emancipation ' ' and overwrought by the long- 
 ings of centuries, were too lofty, too visionary not to shrink and 
 pale before reality. In the serf's dreams the image of liberty 
 took tints the more glowing, a glamour the more radiant, that the 
 form of it was so vague. The liberated peasant forgets the ills of 
 serfdom, the unpaid, compulsory labor, the obrbk ; he inclines 
 to see only the present charges and the vanishing of his dream. 
 ' ' Father, ' ' said an old woman in my presence, speaking of her 
 late husband, "father saw a field in a dream one night, at the 
 time that the manifesto came out, and said to me in the morning : 
 I know what that means we shall never be free. ' ' To the old 
 crone, this word had a profound meaning ; fifteen years after, she 
 still saw in it a sort of prophecy or divination. How did she in- 
 terpret the mysterious dream ? Was the field seen by her hus- 
 band a symbol of servitude in her eyes, or perhaps an emblem of 
 that prosperity which the peasant sees in his dreams but never 
 can grasp ? No matter, the mujik and his bdba * understood each 
 other : they should never be free ! This guileless cry of the heart 
 reveals vague and misty aspirations, not unlike some of the theories 
 of Western socialism on the bondage of the people, and modern 
 servitude generally. This is why a writer of subtle mind gave 
 the advice probably easier to give than to follow : to untie the 
 bonds of serfdom quietly, to free the serfs "without ringing in 
 their ears that terrible word Liberty, for the true meaning of 
 which Western Europe has been seeking through centuries. ' ' 
 
 *Bdba, woman, especially old woman ; babkaMbushka grandmother. 
 39
 
 BOOK VII. CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Results of the Emancipation How the Manners and Social Status were 
 less Affected by it than was Expected by either Adversaries or Par- 
 tisans Disappointments and their Causes Economic Results They 
 Differ according to the Regions How it is that the Conditions of the 
 Master's Existence have been Modified by the Emancipation, on the 
 Whole, more than the Peasant's Moral and Social Consequences. 
 
 IT was not only in the izba that the emancipation left an 
 undercurrent of dissatisfaction. This revolution, which struck at 
 the very bases of society and property, which, in the opinion of 
 statesmen, was likely to imperil the entire social order, was 
 accomplished peaceably, with hardly any disturbance. It was a 
 great success ; yet, to many of those who took part in the work, 
 it proved disappointing. 
 
 At the two extremes of the civilized world in Russia and in 
 the United States of America two tasks of similar import were 
 achieved at nearly the same moment, although by very different 
 means. In America, the liberation of the slaves, bought at 
 the price of a murderous war and carried out by force, without 
 umpires or mediating power, has temporarily cast the white 
 master at the feet of the colored freedman, and established on the 
 shores of the Gulf of Mexico a state of things as saddening, as 
 perilous, as slavery itself. In Russia, on the other hand, the 
 same event has brought about no class strife ; as for race strife, 
 there could be none ; it has bred neither animosity nor rivalry ; 
 the social peace was not disturbed. And yet, of the two countries, 
 the best satisfied with its own work possibly is not the Empire of 
 the North. 
 
 450
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION, 451 
 
 How is this seeming anomaly to be explained ? First of all 
 by the excessive hopes raised a feeling which, with the Russian, 
 beyond every other people, is apt to overleap reality ; then by the 
 passionate longing of desire, of which the joy of possession always 
 falls short. Not less than the ignorant serf, the politician and 
 the literary man, private speculation and public opinion, had 
 built up illusions. The cultivated Russians had conjured up a 
 vision of an Eden very nearly as fanciful as the Eldorado of the 
 peasant's dreams : of a free Russia, all new, all different from the 
 Russia of serfdom. In reality, the change neither was effected as 
 rapidly, nor reached as deep as was expected ; there was no 
 sudden transformation scene. And so, many choice spirits gave 
 way to disenchantment, depression, discouragement. This is a 
 point that should never be lost sight of : the emancipation and all 
 the great reforms which accompanied or followed it have not 
 brought about, in manners, social relations, in the national life, 
 all the changes which both its adversaries and partisans had 
 augured from it. The consequences, for good or evil, have been 
 less great, less visible, less striking than was hoped by the ones 
 and feared by the others. After so much discussing, after such 
 lofty flights of ambition and such sombre forebodings, it was a 
 surprise to both progressists and conservatives to find themselves 
 so nearly at the point whence they started, to have made so little 
 way. In this respect Russia is not unlike a man who, after 
 undergoing a dangerous operation, does not find himself as much 
 benefited by it as he had hoped, and is at once glad to have come 
 out of it alive and dissatisfied at not feeling more relieved. 
 
 Russia is not the only country that has passed through such 
 painful and contrary impressions. France, too, on the eve and 
 on the morrow of her revolutions, has known but too well these 
 alternations of enthusiasm and despondency, that moral collapse 
 which follows on mighty efforts, after the exaltation of the 
 struggle has passed away. In Russia the reaction has been the 
 greater, the disenchantment the bitterer, that the country, being
 
 452 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 younger, had the superb confidence of youth in its own powers. 
 It is therefore not to be wondered at, if, long before the assassina- 
 tion of Alexander II., disappointment showed on all sides, in 
 public opinion and in the press ; nor should too much credence be 
 given to the laments of fashionable pessimism, which, since the 
 nihilists' attempts, has become quite outspoken. In the same 
 way that, in France, the failure of 1789 and the bankruptcy of the 
 Revolution have been proclaimed, the bankruptcy of the emancipa- 
 tion and the failure of the reforms have been denounced in Russia. 
 Public opinion, having declared itself disappointed, lost all 
 interest especially in the provinces in the questions which had 
 roused it to such a passionate pitch under Alexander II. Such 
 hours of depression are inevitable in the lives of nations ; to throw 
 all the blame on the alleged fickleness of the Russian character 
 would be unfair. In all countries trees grow too slowly to please 
 the hand that planted them, and the eyes that watch them are 
 always astonished at the tardiness of the fruit. 
 
 Not content with complaining almost universally of the slow 
 progress effected so far, many Russians proclaim, as a sort of 
 axiom, that the condition of the rural population is worse than it was 
 before the emancipation. This kind of paradox has almost become 
 a commonplace, so quickly are the woes and the shame of serfdom 
 forgotten over the sufferings and difficulties of the present day. 
 
 One would naturally look for such an opinion principally from 
 those men who, from their education, their principles or their age, 
 are all, the world over, prone to laud the past. But they are far 
 from being alone of this mind ; their cue is taken up by pro- 
 gressists, the least apt to shy at innovations. Curiously enough, 
 indeed, it is in this latter camp that pessimism often stalks most 
 rampantly. Those who denounce most vociferously the failure 
 of the i gth of February are not always men who dread and con- 
 demn the principles proclaimed on that day, but more often such 
 as are inclined to regard the agrarian laws of 1861 as inadequate 
 or incomplete.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 453 
 
 One of the causes which account for this anomaly and also, in 
 part, for the general feeling of disappointment left by the Emanci- 
 pation Statute, is the fact that the great reform was not carried out 
 by the same hands that had so laboriously prepared it. It should 
 not be forgotten that, on the very morrow of the day on which 
 their agrarian code was solemnly promulgated, its chief authors, 
 together with their leader, Miliutin, were consigned to disgrace. 
 Whatever one may think of their work and their doctrines, there 
 is scarcely a doubt but that, in their hands, that work, in its prac- 
 tical application, would have been conducted more resolutely, 
 logically, consistently, than in the hands of men antagonistic or 
 indifferent to it. 
 
 One thing is certain, that the same spirit did not preside at the 
 drawing up of the rural charter and at the carrying out of it. This 
 initial reform, like most of those that were soon to follow, labored 
 under incoherences and hesitations, at least in the application, 
 also under lack of conviction and lack of method. 
 
 The most illustrious among the instigators of the Statute of the 
 i gth of February would have wished, as did Miliutin, after observ- 
 ing how it worked, to go over again certain amendments which 
 had been forced on the commission ; to base the new construction 
 on administrative, economic, financial reforms, which were not, 
 after all, undertaken in time or not in the same spirit. Their 
 most earnest wish, it is asserted, was to alleviate the peasant's 
 sufferings, to strive to lighten the burdens which crush him, to 
 seek, among other things, for a way to facilitate the agrarian 
 liquidation by means of a systematic process of colonization, 
 instead of leaving the mujik to go forth at random to look for the 
 promised land. It may be that, even had they been allowed to 
 conduct the practical application of the reform in their own way, 
 they would not have been able to fulfil all their hopes and avoid 
 all disappointment. But it is manifestly unfair to cast all the 
 blame for any mistakes or illusions from which the great work 
 may not have been exempt, on men who were repeatedly compelled
 
 454 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 to introduce into it alterations opposed to their views, and who, 
 after laboriously drawing up and ordering into a code most com- 
 plicated laws, were commanded to entrust the practical application 
 of them to other hands. 
 
 Moreover, the work, though not having yielded all that was 
 expected of it by the impatience of its promoters, is far from 
 having proved as barren of results as certain people would have 
 us believe. Politically, the effects of the emancipation have been 
 almost nil ; but in all other respects its consequences are num- 
 erous and already apparent. It would be difficult to enumerate 
 them in a few pages. Still they might be reduced under three 
 main heads : economic progress, owing to the stimulant applied 
 to production by free labor and free competition ; moral progress, 
 owing to the removal from the public conscience of a long 
 standing stain and to the new-born feeling of responsibility ; 
 social transformation, owing to the slackening of patriarchal 
 habits in favor of individualism. 
 
 The economic results are perhaps the most difficult to appraise, 
 for two reasons : ist, because property, agriculture, and the whole 
 of rural economy have not yet been rescued from the confusion and 
 uncertainty inseparable from any epoch of transition ; ad, because 
 the effects of the emancipation vary , for both classes concerned, 
 according to the regions, the provinces, the communes, and indeed, 
 as regards the former masters, they vary according to the charac- 
 ter, the qualities, good or evil, of individuals. The traveller, 
 therefore, should not wonder at the diversity or even contradictori- 
 ness of the views which he encounters on this subject, or at the 
 complaints which he hears from both landlord and freedman, 
 since both of necessity are temporarily uncomfortable and each 
 considers himself aggrieved. 
 
 As a rule, the landlords have, at all events during the first 
 years, lost a notable portion of their income frequently as much 
 as one third. In the Black Mould provinces, where the soil is 
 generous and the population comparatively dense, the substitution
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 455 
 
 of free for servile labor was not long a matter of regret. In such 
 rich governments as Kursk, Oridl, Tambbf, Vor6nej, the land- 
 lord, if possessed of some capital and a well-ordered mind, fre- 
 quently drew from his diminished acres, at the end of a few years, 
 an income as large, if not larger, as an estate of double the extent 
 yielded in the times of serfdom. In this favored region, where 
 new railroads have opened wide facilities to agriculture, where 
 the land has ofttimes doubled, trebled, quadrupled hi value, both 
 landlords and peasants have been enabled at once to reap benefit 
 from the new dispensation.* 
 
 Not such the state of affairs in the steppes of the south ; still 
 less in the meagre regions of the north and west. In the steppes, 
 where land is plentiful and the population scarce, the suppression 
 of forced labor inflicted on the landlords such losses as could not 
 be made good by the redemption dues. In the thankless plains of 
 the north and northwest, Pskof, N6vgorod, Smolensk, Tver, 
 where the soil is niggardly in bearing and hands are scarce, the 
 lands left to the nobility are far from bringing in what they used 
 to bring when labor was unpaid. So great is the difference, that 
 many landlords, finding farming too burdensome and unremunera- 
 tive a pursuit, have given it up, and gone into the cities, there to 
 live on state service, industry, or commerce. 
 
 These northern pomiesh-tchiks, the most heavily stricken by 
 the expropriation of 1861, are often those who received the highest 
 indemnities. For, if the lands left them have considerably gone 
 down in value, the redemption rates for those which they ceded to 
 
 * The rapid rise in the prices of land, in the more fertile regions, is not 
 due exclusively to the creation of railways ; it is one of the direct conse- 
 quences of emancipation, which frees the soil itself and makes the owning 
 of land accessible to all classes of the nation. It enabled tradesmen and 
 other urban classes to invest capital in land. Accordingly, the reports of 
 tlie agricultural inquest commission of 1873 show that the number of rural 
 landholders had trebled in the ten first years after the emancipation. On 
 the other hand, there is a proportionate decrease in the ranks of the noble 
 landholders. Many pomtish-tchiks, already ill at ease in the time of serf- 
 dom, had now been forced to liquidate.
 
 45 6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the peasants were calculated on a basis much above their real 
 worth. So here again the peasant is most to be pitied of the two. 
 A large proportion of the serfs of these provinces had ceased to 
 work on their masters' estates, and were plying various trades in 
 the cities or villages, paying the usual annual due or obrbk. To 
 avert complete ruin from the landlords, it became imperative to 
 compel these serfs to redeem, equally with the others, lots on 
 which, half the time, they could not make a living, at rates 
 which, being based on the figure of the annual dues they had 
 paid from other sources, was usually much higher than the nor- 
 mal income from the land sometimes than the net income of the 
 best years. For this class of peasants and it was a numerous 
 one the compulsory redemption of the land virtually meant the 
 redemption of their personal liberty. 
 
 The Emperor Alexander II., in his address of the 2jth of Jan- 
 uary, 1861, while commanding the project of emancipation to be laid 
 before him, informed the Council of the Empire that ' ' the funda- 
 mental object of the entire work was to be the amelioration of the 
 peasants' condition, not merely in words, but in deed. ' ' In con- 
 formity with these generous instructions, those who were appointed 
 to draw up the charter calculated the rate of the obligatory re- 
 demption in such a manner as to afford to the peasants immedi- 
 ate relief; but they had left out of their calculations the 
 increase of taxes and contributions of every kind, to be levied on 
 the state in general, on the provinces, the communes. Great is the 
 number of peasants who, to-day, pay taxes and dues as heavy as 
 in the time of serfdom,* while they have less land, less forest, 
 often less live stock, and less credit than before the emancipation, 
 
 * All the local administrations complain of the disproportion between the 
 direct taxes and the income from the land, a disproportion in consequence 
 of which the taxes really fall on the personal labor of the husbandman. 
 Not to lay on too gloomy colors, however, it should be remembered that 
 one half of the rural population the peasants of the Crown demesnes, are, 
 as a rule, much better off than the others. They have more land and pay 
 less for it.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 457 
 
 which, under such crushing conditions, could not rapidly augment 
 the well-being of the people nor improve the culture of the soil. 
 It has frequently enriched wealthy districts and sometimes appears 
 to have still more impoverished poor ones. Official statistics have 
 ascertained that in many localities the cattle had diminished in 
 number ; hand in hand with the lack of cattle, goes that of agri- 
 cultural implements and of manure, so that the peasant's already 
 primitive mode of farming not only has not improved, but has, in 
 places, actually deteriorated since he is free. The soil has become 
 exhausted, the fields have even sometimes been abandoned, so 
 that in many regions bad crops and dearth have come to be of 
 almost regular occurrence. 
 
 In order to compensate all these inequalities, and to distribute 
 all these burdens more evenly among the various regions, the 
 State should have taken upon itself a portion, at least, of the 
 redemption payments, instead of merely advancing the money to 
 the peasants. That in fact, and everything considered, would 
 have been but just, for the State itself and all the classes of society, 
 especially the merchant class, to which the reform opened the 
 access to landed property, were interested in its success. And 
 indeed it was in this very manner, with the co-operation of the 
 State, that the corresponding process took place in the Kingdom 
 of Poland, a few years later, under the direction of Nicolas 
 Miliutin, and that is probably one of the reasons why, notwithstand- 
 ing the harshness of the conditions imposed on the Polish nobility, 
 the agrarian laws have perhaps worked better there than in the 
 centre of the empire. 
 
 The Emperor Alexander III. has alleviated the sufferings of 
 the peasants in twofold guise : by revising the direct taxation, 
 and by reducing the redemption dues. The State has made an 
 effort to equalize the burdens of the former serfs and of the Crown 
 peasants who have been endowed with land from the State 
 demesnes ; it has striven to aid the portion of the rural population 
 whose load was heaviest. The difficulty lay in the financial
 
 458 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 straits of the imperial exchequer. The Bulgarian war, which 
 drew it into unexpected extra costs, to the amount of one milliard 
 of roubles, would, it was feared, stand in the way, for a long 
 time to come, of any such operation. This difficulty has not 
 arrested the Emperor Alexander III. and his councillors. 
 
 In spite of the penury which afflicts the treasury, the imperial 
 government contrived to lighten the burdens which crush the life 
 out of the rural populations. The Emperor Alexander III., con- 
 stantly preoccupied with the welfare of his faithful peasants, 
 appears to have set this task before himself as his main object in 
 life. Already towards the end of his father's reign, the suppres- 
 sion of the poll-tax had been spoken of, as well as the expediency 
 of spreading the sixty million roubles supplied by this tax over all 
 classes. One of the present emperor's first acts was to carry out 
 his father's intentions by abolishing this tax, in use through many 
 centuries, the last relic of serfdom. This was definitely accom- 
 plished in 1886, and a land tax substituted, also an income tax (on 
 incomes derived from other sources than real estate), and a tax on 
 inheritances. As long ago as 1880 the salt excise was suppressed, 
 a tax which, though classed under the head of "indirect," in 
 reality amounted to a sort of poll-tax, weighing most heavily on 
 the poor. 
 
 As to the reduction of the redemption dues, the government 
 of Alexander III. decided in favor of a compromise between two 
 different systems. At first it had been planned to make use of all 
 the resources that the State could dispose of to liberate the poor- 
 est and most overburdened localities. The difficulty of such an 
 undertaking, and the wish to enable the entire rural class to share 
 in the good things provided by the new reign, caused the project 
 to be given up. Alexander III. accepted the opinion expressed 
 by a " Commission of Experts " appointed on this occasion, and 
 a general reduction for all the former serfs of Great- and Little- 
 Russia was decided upon. The imperial uk&z which announced 
 this boon, as a sort of gracious greeting from the new sovereign,
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPA TION, 459 
 
 promised at the same time a further supplementary reduction to 
 the more particularly overburdened villages. This meant twelve 
 millions annually lifted from the mujik's shoulders.* It came to 
 about one rouble per ' ' revision soul, ' ' i. e. per male peasant, an 
 carried on the old capitation rolls. f 
 
 Such an alleviation may seem less than trifling. Yet it gener- 
 ally amounts to about one seventh of the average rate of redemp- 
 tion payments up to 1882. However inconsiderable the reduction, 
 it has nearly everywhere effaced the disproportion between the 
 dues paid by the former serfs and by the Crown peasants. The 
 four or five millions destined to succor the least favored regions, 
 were unfortunately insufficient to ensure the well-being of the more 
 overtaxed among the peasants. It might have been better to 
 reserve for them alone whatever resources were to be got at, instead 
 of scattering them over the whole of Great and Little-Russia. Not- 
 withstanding the government's praiseworthy efforts and the real 
 alleviation awarded them, numbers will, for a long time to come, 
 be weighed down by want and taxes. It is to be feared that in 
 many a region the burdens, of which Alexander III. has done 
 his best to rid the peasant, may fall back upon his shoulders under 
 some other shape. In many instances what the former serfs gained 
 from the reduction of the redemption dues bids fair to be swal- 
 lowed up by the continually increasing provincial and municipal 
 taxes. 
 
 Paradoxical as it may appear at first sight, the emancipation 
 has, on the whole, modified the manner of life of the liberated serfs 
 far less than that of their masters. In truth, the advantages, the 
 conveniences afforded by serfdom to these latter could never be 
 
 * Of this sum three millions were charged directly to the treasury ; two 
 millions were covered by the surplus in the redemption fund ; seven millions 
 by the profits of the State Bank and the liquidation of former credit insti- 
 tutions. 
 
 f This general reduction costs about seven or eight millions of roubles 
 annually, for it does not apply to the peasants of the western provinces, 
 where the dues were reduced as early as 1863, in consequence of the Polish 
 insurrection.
 
 460 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 appraised in money. Unpaid service, with a host of nameless petty 
 privileges, made fanning a far simpler and easier matter than it 
 became under the free labor system. The loss of their hands com- 
 pelled the landlords to rouse themselves out of their traditional 
 indolence, to take thought for their affairs themselves, to adjust 
 themselves to new demands and to struggle with hitherto unknown 
 difficulties, to transform all their methods and proceedings, their 
 mode of administration at the very least, to hire laborers and 
 discuss wages, to let their lands on leases or go halves with their 
 former serfs, a very complicated programme in a country where 
 fanners and capitals are scarce, and where every peasant has his 
 own bit of land to till. 
 
 There are many morose conservative landlords who do not 
 think even an increase of income an adequate compensation for all 
 these worries. And petty worries are frequently more galling than 
 great difficulties. One, in particular, is often complained of: 
 Formerly, the greater part of the manor houses were situated close 
 to the villages, to enable the master always to keep an eye on his 
 subjects. Now, that the peasants' dwellings, with their little en- 
 closures and the communal lands, are their property, the noble 
 landlord, who cannot afford to build himself a new residence on an 
 isolated site, is next-door neighbor to people who are no longer 
 subject to him, who have no kind even of official relations with 
 him, and whose lands are wedged in with his own. This proximity 
 is exasperating ; he does not feel at home any more, has no privacy, 
 and is all the time fuming at the drunken, thievish vicinity he 
 cannot escape from. More than a few, on this seemingly futile 
 ground, declare the country to have become uninhabitable. 
 
 Of all the consequences of emancipation one of the most note- 
 worthy assuredly is the decadence of the old patriarchal manners, 
 not only in the relations between landlord and peasant, but in the 
 mujik's own izbh. Along with the bond between master and serf, 
 that between father and son the family bond, has become slack- 
 ened. They have tasted of freedom, and now, in the same way
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPA TION. 461 
 
 that the serf is rid of the master's yoke, the son strives to rid him- 
 self of the yoke of paternal authority, almost absolute until now. 
 Young couples want to be independent of the old people. They 
 each want a house and lot of their own. 
 
 The awakening of the peasant to a liking for independence 
 and the restoration of his liberty of action must, in the end, benefit 
 the towns and the richer, more fertile regions, possibly to the 
 detriment of the poorer, where the population is no longer held 
 fast by the artificial barrier of serfdom. 
 
 Men, like capital, tend to where labor is most remunerative. 
 The colonization of the arable steppes of the south and the east, as 
 well as of the remoter dependences of the empire, must logically 
 follow on the breaking of the peasant's fetters. If it has not yet 
 taken an active start, it is because of the hindrance opposed to it 
 by the administrative conservatism which still binds the peasants 
 to their lands through the institution known as communal solidar- 
 ity, which forbids a member to absent himself unless by the con- 
 sent of all the others. 
 
 One of the chief, but naturally also slowest, benefits of emanci- 
 pation will be the moral improvement of both serf and master. Both 
 have grown up to man's estate under the reign of serfdom ; both 
 bear the marks of the training they have received from this sorry 
 educator. Many of the faults imputed to the Russian nobility, 
 many of those thrown in the Russian peasant's face, come from that 
 demoralizing training. The vices, opposite, yet connected in their 
 very opposition, of the master and the serf the fatuity, frivolity, 
 prodigality of the one ; the self-abasement, duplicity, thriftlessness 
 of the other ; the laziness and improvidence of both flowed from 
 the same source. The landlord, who was supplied with a certain 
 income despite his incapacity or ignorance, is now compelled to 
 deal with men and things, to study characters, to regulate his 
 domestic as well as his rural expenditure ; he has no alternative 
 but either to bestir himself or to accept ruin. 
 
 As for the peasant, the stigmata left on him are too ancient
 
 462 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 and too deep to allow of the mark being obliterated in a few short 
 years. The mujik is lazy and devoted to routine, he is crafty and 
 untruthful ; a proverb of his own says he would outwit the devil 
 any day. What else could be expected from this long personal 
 bondage superadded to political servitude and which robbed him of 
 his liberty at the very moment when his country had recovered 
 her own ? The liberated peasant is certainly far from showing him- 
 self worthy of the half-idolatrous honors rendered, in his person, 
 to the Russian people by its numerous admirers. The mujik goes 
 on getting drunk and beating his wife ; he has not yet learned to 
 invariably respect the rights of property. But all these evil 
 propensities have long been fostered by servitude : drunkenness 
 comes from a longing for oblivion ; domestic brutality is warranted 
 by that of the master or his bailiff ; pilfering, by the old habit of 
 regarding as in a manner belonging to him what belonged to his 
 master. These faults have not vanished ; some even, if we are to 
 believe the croakers, may have become intensified through the 
 sudden removal of restraint. Drunkenness especially, they aver, 
 has made frightful progress : for drink the peasant will sell even 
 his tools. The evil in this direction is great, undoubtedly : the 
 surplus shown by the State budget is almost invariably supplied 
 by the excise department. Still, as this surplus is generally 
 due to an increase in the taxation of spirits, as it is not accom- 
 panied by a diminution in the revenue yielded by any other 
 branch subject to taxation, it turns out, on the provincial statis- 
 tics' own showing, that, in spite of his poverty, the mujik earns 
 enough to enable him to add to all his compulsory payments the 
 voluntary contribution of the tap-room, apart from the fact that 
 the redemption dues which he annually pays are, in reality, a form 
 of compulsory saving.* 
 
 * The alleged progress of drunkenness is, in fact, very questionable, 
 especially for these latter years. Recent statistical reports show a diminu- 
 tion of 3 % in 1874 in the production of vbdka (rye whiskey), which in 1864 
 reached the figure of 27 millions of vedrd, a measure containing about 
 twelve quarts, while there was in the population an increase of 10 % ; and
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 463 
 
 Another reproach often cast at the freedman is his improvidence. 
 He now knows even less than he did how to protect himself, by lib- 
 eral savings, against the instability of the climate and consequent 
 bad crops, which, in Russia, always threaten even the very best lands. 
 This attack, however, from the advocates of the past turns against 
 themselves, for it is servitude which has accustomed the peasant to 
 rely on the master for everything, as a child on his guardian. 
 
 It appears to be an established fact that since the peasants have 
 no longer their bdrin at their back, they, as a rule, stand accidents 
 of all sorts, so frequent in Russian rural life, worse than they did 
 before : epidemics, epizootics, fires, destructive insects, insufficient 
 crops find them more helpless. It is therefore quite usual to hear 
 regrets about not having an institution which should, as did the 
 landlord in bygone days, succor the mujik when he is the victim 
 of calamities and disastrous visitations. But whatever way you 
 turn whether you appeal to the commune, to the provincial as- 
 semblies, or to the State, or simply have recourse to a credit bank, 
 it is no easy matter to organize such a special providence, all the 
 less that the peasant's own thriftlessness and ignorance prove ob- 
 stacles in the way of every contrivance invented for his benefit.* 
 
 The upshot of it all is that the mujik of to-day is in a phase of 
 transition, he has not yet been able to throw off the faults be- 
 queathed to him by servitude, and now adds to those certain other 
 faults, proper to liberty. After being so long bent double under 
 the yoke, it is not astonishing that he should not yet have straight- 
 ened himself to his full stature, that he should not always know 
 how to conduct himself in a manner becoming a freeman, thati v 
 personal dignity should as yet be as unfamiliar to him as the sense of 
 responsibility. Nor is it to be wondered at that, from the stand- 
 since 1874 another diminution is said to have taken place in the home con- 
 sumption. The number of taverns or taprrooms (kab&ks) is said to have 
 gone down 40 , more particularly in the villages. On the other hand the 
 peasant consumes a greater quantity of tea and sugar a sure token of 
 prosperity. 
 
 * Several popular banks have recently been founded for this very 
 purpose.
 
 464 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 point of intellect and instruction, his progress should not have 
 been more rapid ; that is not entirely due to the inadequacy of the 
 schools and the resources of the State, the provinces, the rural 
 communes ; it comes in great part from the huge thickness and 
 density of the popular layers, and from the absence of an inter- 
 mediate class which would help to reach the bottom of them. 
 
 The portraits or caricatures constantly drawn of the liber- 
 ated mujik, abroad and at home, give no reason to augur badly 
 for his future. Let us recall what sort of a being, under the old- 
 time monarchy, was the French peasant, the animal with two feet 
 and a human face depicted by L,a Bruyere, such as F16chier 
 shows him in his Grands Jours d'Auvergne, or the Englishman 
 Young on the very eve of the Revolution. There is certainly 
 nothing there to put the mujik to the blush or make Russia's 
 friends despair of her civilization. There are countries Egypt 
 for one where the rural man, the fellah, though nominally free, 
 has been so lowered by sixty centuries of oppression, that one 
 wonders whether he will ever have the strength to rise. The 
 Russian peasant never suggests similar thoughts. 
 
 In spite of several centuries of servitude, the manumitted 
 peasant has rapidly become conscious of his rights and is ready to 
 defend them against any and everybody. That is easily accounted 
 for : the former serf, accustomed to look on the tsar as on his 
 natural protector, had never ceased to hope for liberty and, in his 
 relations to his master of yesterday, is always inclined to count 
 on the support of the government. Only a few months after the 
 inauguration of the Statute, one of the principal members of the 
 "drafting commission," himself a great landholder, Yuri 
 Samdrin, in his letters to his friend N. Miliutin, was exult- 
 ing at what he called the "transfiguration of the people" and 
 loudly rejoiced over the manner in which the peasants were get- 
 ting educated by their conflict with the nobility.* For the peas- 
 
 * Samarin who, as a rule, and not without reason, was regarded as a 
 pessimist, wrote the following lines, which may appear at this day sanguine
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 465 
 
 ants' most generous advocates as well as for the eloquent Slavophil 
 journalist, there lay the main point ; in their eyes the material 
 advantages of the emancipation were a secondary consideration. 
 The great object with them we can see that from Miliutin's 
 correspondence was to raise the people, to awaken the peasant 
 to a consciousness of his own personality and of his rights as a 
 freeman, even should yesterday's masters be hurt at times from 
 being "the grindstone on which the people's wits were getting 
 whetted." 
 
 The mujik, as a rule, thoroughly grasped his novel rights ; 
 unfortunately he did not always show as clear a perception of his 
 new duties and obligations. In this respect he promptly unde- 
 ceived his best friends' hopes. One of the faults the famous 
 Statute can most justly be charged with is an excess of faith in 
 the mujik 's honesty, or rather simplicity. Prince Tcherkassky 
 did not hesitate to acknowledge as much in private conversation. 
 He confessed to it in the first years in a confidential letter to his 
 friend and former colleague, Miliutin. While expressing much 
 legitimate pride in the success of their common work, peaceably 
 accomplished in spite of so many ill-natured prophecies, Tcher- 
 kassky regretted only one thing : not having taken more precau- 
 tions against the peasant's unprincipled propensities. 
 
 Among all the faults that can be, on the average, imputed to 
 the liberated serf, there is one from which he seems to be abso- 
 lutely free : it is acrimony or ill-feeling of any kind towards his 
 former master. He is not exactly scrupulous where his interests 
 
 to an excess of optimism : " Without any exaggeration, the people are 
 transfigured, from head to foot. The Statute has loosened their tongues, 
 it has broken through the narrow circle of ideas within which, as though 
 shut in there by a spell, the people vainly went round and round, finding 
 no issue." (Letter to Miliutin, May, 1861.) A few months later, coming 
 back to the same idea, Samdrin again wrote: "The Statute has done its 
 work. The people have straightened themselves and are transfigured : they 
 look, walk, talk differently. That is acquired ; it is impossible to suppress, 
 and that is the point. In their conflict with the other class, the peasants 
 are now getting their civic education." (November, 1861.) 
 
 3
 
 466 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 are at stake ; but he commits his iniquities ingenuously, with a sort 
 of good-natured slyness, without bitterness, without any feeling of 
 envy or animosity, any systematic ill-will. In spite of his incura- 
 ble distrust and all that has been said about his ingratitude,* the 
 mutual relations of the two classes, but lately linked together by 
 so galling a bond, have retained, at least externally, a character 
 of cordiality, both in public and private life. 1 For the provincial 
 assemblies, where the two orders are placed side by side ; the 
 peasants, far from opposing their former lords, are more apt to be 
 led by them. Thus all the speculations on imminent class-strife 
 and popular grudges have proved vain. Provided the late master 
 was not actually a tyrant, the mujik still calls him "his good 
 bdrin " ; if he has no occasion any more to assume an humble 
 demeanor to the pomi$sh-tchik of whom he implores a boon, pros- 
 trate at his feet and touching the ground with his forehead, he 
 has not given up saluting him when they meet with one of those 
 
 * This was, for some years, a source of much heartache for those among 
 the landlords whose rule had been mild and generous. " I have already 
 mentioned," wrote Prince Tcherkzlssky, "and cannot help repeating, how 
 feeble is the feeling of gratitude among the peasants towards even the kind- 
 est masters, even those whose conduct towards them has always been marked 
 not only by conscientiousness but by magnanimity. One reading of the proc- 
 lamation has swept away all memory of benefits received, and unfortunately 
 the nobility could not bear with resignation the thought that this fact, how- 
 ever painful, was, after all, rather natural." Letter to Miliutin, June, 1861. 
 
 1 It can be positively asserted that the character is not "external" 
 merely, but very real. What embitters the mutual relations between two 
 classes is when the superiority of one over the other is due to conquest and 
 difference of race. Where, as in Russia, such is not the case, no bitterness 
 exists, neither at the time nor retrospectively. Certain family differences 
 have been adjusted by umpire, that is all. There is at first some soreness, 
 some difficulty in getting into the new lines, but family feeling prevails 
 through it all and helps over many a hard place. And the distrust is ouly 
 skin deep, in petty matters of pecuniary interests the universal distrust of 
 the peasant all over the world, who feels at a disadvantage before trained 
 intellect and is always afraid it will be used against him. In greater and 
 vital things the mujik instinctively turns to his superior in knowledge and 
 experience for guidance as the author remarks a few lines lower, and that 
 his confidence is not abused, the astonishing experience with the " Arbiters 
 of Peace " (see pp. 436-437) has abundantly proved.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 467 
 
 profound inclinations of the body with which he does homage in 
 church to the holy images (ezkons). I once happened to be present, 
 in a southern government, at a business interview between a dele- 
 gation of peasants and a landlord whose guest I was. There were 
 a dozen of them, come to discuss with the pomi$sh-tchik, on behalf 
 of their commune, the leasing of some land belonging to him. As 
 they neared the manor house, they removed their caps and stood 
 bareheaded at the door, patiently waiting for the master to finish 
 his dinner. When he came out to them at last, accompanied by 
 his bailiff, they stood .before him in a circle, cap in hand, and 
 launched out into a long dissertation. Sometimes they spoke by 
 turns, sometimes all together, frequently lapsing into the old 
 humble forms of speech : "Bdtiushka (father), take pity ; kind 
 bdrin, you would not beggar us," yet never losing ground, hold- 
 ing their own, standing up for their interests, and trying to touch 
 the landlord's heart. 
 
 As a set-off, however, to the profound deference which they in- 
 variably show their former masters, the peasants are very far from 
 always keeping faith with them. They have not yet been able to 
 fully realize that work voluntarily undertaken should be punctu- 
 ally carried out. Respect for agreements, the obligation imposed 
 by a contract, are things that do not at all accord with the idea the 
 mujik has made to himself of liberty ; he takes things easy to 
 such an extent that his unreliability has become one of the sores ot 
 rural life. By a contradiction not unfrequent in simple natures, 
 the same man who would fain dispense with all obligations towards 
 others on the ground that he is a free man, still thinks himself at 
 times entitled to make use of the privileges pertaining to his 
 former condition as serf. Does he need timber ? he serenely cuts 
 some in the master's forest. Just as before the emancipation he is 
 always ready to appeal to the landlord's purse. If a cow is taken 
 sick or a horse is hurt, he quite innocently goes to his former 
 master and asks him for another, forgetting that he has no longer 
 any claim on him.
 
 468 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Yet, though neither landlords nor peasants, so far, bear malice, 
 it is not impossible that the new state of things may contain a 
 latent germ of disaffection and covetousness, for time to mature. 
 We must not forget that the mujik is rarely satisfied with the piece 
 of land allotted him. Instead of appeasing his craving for prop- 
 erty the imperial proclamation of 1861 only aroused and sharpened 
 it. The compromise imposed by autocracy on master and serf is 
 not regarded by the latter and his children in the light of a final, 
 irrevocable thing.* The land liquidation, so boldly undertaken 
 by the sovereign, has stirred in numbers of peasant heads a dull, 
 dim notion of a coming social liquidation, another agrarian oper- 
 ation, more extensive still and more to their advantage a mirage 
 which the people's self-instituted, doubtful friends skilfully play 
 off before his eyes in the distance. The revolutionary propaganda 
 and the radical spirit, both impatient of anything in the shape of 
 compromise and restraint, have been steadily working for the last 
 thirty years to represent the imperial reform as illogical in prin- 
 ciple and inadequate in practice. They are at one in this with the 
 mujik 's secret instincts, and strive with might and main to second 
 them still more by demonstrating to him that another expropri- 
 ation of the noble landholders and a redistribution of the land will 
 be the natural sequel and clinching of the task left incomplete at 
 the first installment. 
 
 It cannot be denied that, in this respect, the entire social edifice 
 has been shaken by this first and great reform, which claimed 
 that it would merely broaden and strengthen the basis of it in a 
 way that has given the moral ideas, the juridical notions, the 
 political conceptions of the people, such a shock as the country, 
 after more than twenty years, has not yet recovered from. All 
 wise precautions, all ingenious temporizing and expedients not- 
 withstanding, it may be said that, in this sense at least, the eman- 
 
 * In one of the districts that had been most favored in 1861, a function- 
 ary asked the peasants a few years later if they were satisfied. "Yes, 
 bdtiushka," they replied ; " but we live in hopes that the tsar will not 
 forget our children and will give them land, too, some day."
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 469 
 
 cipation, so skilfully calculated, so happily conducted, has not 
 been foreign to the progress of the radical spirit ; that, by feeding 
 agrarian cupidity, it has unwittingly supplied weapons, examples, 
 pretences, to the enemies of order and property. 
 
 The ease, the harmlessness, with which this revolution was 
 decreed and carried out, have enticed the people to dream of 
 others, no less lawful and no less easy. For, in the peasant's eyes, 
 the tsar both can and may do anything, and the marvel of a 
 power so great as to transform in one day, by a single uk&z, all the 
 conditions of property, breeds in the popular mind delusions which 
 disappointment may possibly some day turn against that power 
 itself. For the ignorant masses, and this cannot be too much 
 emphasized, the Emancipation Act has effected no final settle- 
 ment whatever : one uk&z can be modified by another ; what the 
 tsar has done in 1861, the tsar is free to undo, twenty or thirty 
 years later, for the greater advantage of his faithful peasants. 
 
 There is nothing surprising in this ; and the most generous 
 promoters of the emancipation, the most stoutly convinced advo- 
 cates of territorial endowment, were too clear-sighted not to per- 
 ceive the truth very quickly. Nothing can be more characteristic 
 in this respect, or go deeper to the root of the matter, than a letter 
 of one of the most illustrious members of the Drafting Commis- 
 sion, Prince Tcherkassky : 
 
 ' ' This transformation, ' ' he wrote confidentially to his friend and 
 former colleague, N. Miliutin, ' ' has another and undesirable side 
 to it, of which I do not speak in public, but which I mention here, 
 so as not to leave the impression incomplete : it is (a thing in- 
 separable from so colossal- a piece of work, from so vast a transfer 
 of rights and obligations) an unhinging of the popular moral 
 consciousness as to right and wrong, possible or impossible, in 
 regard to questions of 'mine and thine.' This feature, the inevi- 
 table accompaniment of every great social revolution, has perhaps 
 never in all history manifested itself with such clearness as at this 
 present moment. Just now, owing to the undying consciousness
 
 470 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 which always abides in our people, but is more than ever wide- 
 awake in them in consequence of the transformation operated 
 before their eyes by one imperial uk&z, the peasant has the profound 
 conviction that there are no limits to the action of the sovereign 
 authority, no end to the things that may be expected of it, and 
 which it can give, no matter at whose cost, as a legitimate com- 
 pensation for the long labor and hardships heroically endured by 
 their class. At the present hour this is the deep-seated thought 
 in the breast of every peasant, and you will admit that it ill-accords 
 with the teachings of the economists. Hence, not to mention 
 more weighty facts, the propensity to cut down our trees, 
 impartially to use our pastures, things that are really very un- 
 pleasant in daily life ; not that they are so very ruinous, but the 
 perpetual worry is wearing. This disrespect of the peasant's for 
 the rights of property has nothing to do with any sort of revolu- 
 tionary spirit ; on the contrary, from a certain point of view, it 
 even is not devoid of method and a semi -juridical character. It 
 is evident that in the people, obscurely, but down to a great 
 depth, a tradition has survived, a memory of a time when landed 
 property was not yet, or not to any great extent, in the hands of 
 the nobles, when nearly all the meadow lands and the forest lands 
 in particular were used indiscriminately and in an undefined way 
 by all. For one brief instant the peasant has had a vision of the 
 return of this good old time, and even now he firmly cherishes the 
 conviction that the government, if it had the right and power to 
 suppress serfdom, has the no less incontestable right and power to 
 change all other conditions of landed property, at least such as are 
 galling to the peasant. I believe, ' ' added the Prince, with entire 
 candor, ' ' that many former delegates of the ' government com- 
 mittees,'* and in particular of the Polish, would-be economists, 
 should these lines come under their eyes, would rub their hands 
 with glee, and would remind us that they had foretold it all. And 
 
 * He means the delegates representing the provincial committees of the 
 nobility before the Drafting Commission.
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 471 
 
 yet, I must say that, in spite of all these worries, inevitable con- 
 sequence as they are of the great transformation, I do not see even 
 now that there was the least possibility of doing the business in 
 any other manner ; even now, taught as we are by experience, I 
 would not hesitate to repeat the same advice that we gave then. 
 To my mind, all these discomforts only prove that, in the best 
 things, there is an alloy of evil. ' ' 
 
 And that is the truth of it. Tcherkassky was quite right in 
 repeating that, outside of the road that had been taken, there was 
 no other to take. In spite of their opponents' gloomy predictions 
 and virulent upbraidings, he and his fellow-workers cannot possibly 
 be held responsible for an evil inherent in the situation, due to the 
 nature of autocracy as much as to the vagueness and obscurity of 
 the property laws in old-time Russia. By liberating the serfs 
 without giving them any share of the soil, the way would have 
 been opened to far worse agrarian troubles, far more dangerous 
 weapons would have been given to the revolutionary propaganda.* 
 
 Deceived in all his hopes, despoiled of the piece of land to 
 which he believed himself entitled by inalienable right, the mujik, 
 had he lost faith in the tsar's paternal power, might have fallen a 
 prey to the anarchist emissaries. If the agrarian laws have stirred 
 in the people a vague sense of covetousness, it is perhaps owing 
 to those same laws that the insidious appeals repeatedly addressed, 
 in the course of these last years, to the rural plebs, calling to them 
 to " strike out for land and liberty," have not found more response 
 in the peasant's smoke-blackened izba, that, notwithstanding the 
 ominous threats of a certain set of propagandists, the Russian 
 fields and villages have not yet had their Jacquerie or their land- 
 league on the Irish model. 
 
 * The revolutionary pamphlets destined to be read by the people, espe- 
 cially insist on the smallness and high price of the lands allotted to the 
 peasants. One of them, analyzed by Mr. Ralston (Nineteenth Century, 
 May, 1877) and entitled From the Frying-pan into the Fire, strives to demon- 
 strate to the mujik that he is worse off than in the old times, and that he 
 soon will fall into a miserable condition similar to that of the English peo- 
 ple, "whom the rich have despoiled and enslaved."
 
 472 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 The nihilists have taken care to keep alive in the people ideas 
 and aspirations which time might already have disposed of had 
 they not been adroitly nourished by interested hands. Ever since 
 the last Oriental war, especially during the years of plotting, 
 1878-1882, the agitators never tired of spreading among the rural 
 population a rumor of an impending redistribution of lands ; so 
 that, on some estates, the peasants actually attempted to proceed 
 to the division of the noble landlord's acres. To put an end to 
 such rumors, the government repeatedly had to assert, solemnly 
 and publicly, by means of official circulars, that the Emancipation 
 Act had settled the conditions of landed property for the future 
 once and forever. But, says the proverb, there is no deafer man 
 than he who won't hear and, on this question, the peasant is 
 wonderfully hard of hearing, and many good stories, true too, 
 are told about it. Thus, in an out-of-the-way village, an educated 
 peasant was reading aloud to the others one of those circulars 
 which gave the lie direct to all rumors of new agrarian laws : 
 ' ' Pshaw ! ' ' exclaimed one of the rustic audience, with a sly 
 smile, ' ' that stuff is written by tchiribvniks (bureaucrats, govern- 
 ment employ6s) ; the tsar is master all the same. ' ' What makes 
 such protests wellnigh hopeless is that the lower police agents and 
 other subaltern functionaries, as well as the village elders, frequently 
 share the delusions which it is their duty to try and dispel. So 
 they compromise with their conscience by announcing to the vil- 
 lagers that the new division of lands is adjourned until further 
 orders, and in the meantime it is not to be talked about. 
 
 What he has long looked for in vain from the generosity of 
 Alexander II., the mujik persists in expecting from Alexander 
 III. With the rural masses, the agrarian question which the 
 Liberator and his advisers flattered themselves they had solved in 
 1861, will long remain an open one. None of the measures taken 
 by Alexander III. to settle it neither the suppression of " tem- 
 porary obligations," nor the abrogation of the poll-tax, nor the 
 reduction of redemption dues seem to have the desired effect as
 
 THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 473 
 
 far as the people are concerned. The kindness and sympathy 
 lavished by the Liberator's son on his faithful peasants rather tend 
 to keep alive their chimerical hopes than to undeceive them. At 
 the time of his coronation, the Emperor made it a point to declare 
 with his own lips to the village-elders assembled in Moscow, that 
 the property question was settled for good and all, that the peas- 
 ants were not to look for any more allotments. Many subsequent 
 facts show that even the Tsar's own loyal word did not set 
 their minds at rest. The smallest spark will kindle the latent 
 fuel. A local inquest, a rural statistical operation suffices to 
 start the rumor afresh. This almost universal expectant state 
 of mind opposes a serious obstacle to a general census, because 
 the rural population is disposed to regard anything of the kind 
 as a forerunner of a redistribution of lands, unless such is the 
 mujik's readiness to give credence to the most contradictory 
 rumors unless, as has happened in some villages, it is regarded 
 as prefacing the restoration of serfdom ! 
 
 To comprehend the whole bearing of these popular notions on 
 land, and the rehandling of property, it is necessary to be familiar 
 with the form of land tenure in use outside of the cities. The 
 vague aspirations called forth by the emancipation are perhaps to 
 be ascribed less to the sudden expropriation of the former lords, 
 than to that immemorial institution the mir and the peasant 
 commune.
 
 BOOK VIII. 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Land Tenure Unchanged by Emancipation Is the Mir a Slavic Institution ? 
 Antiquity and Origin of Communal Property in Russia Differing Views 
 on the Subject Difference between Moscovite Russia and Western 
 Europe from the Standpoint of the Agrarian System. 
 
 WE have seen that the Emancipation Act, while endowing the 
 mujik with land, practically left him very much where he was in 
 the times of serfdom. He now owns the land of which his land- 
 lord formerly let him have the use, but the mode of tenure is the 
 same still. Now as formerly the land belongs to the peasants 
 in common, not personally, not individually, by hereditary right. 
 The lots purchased from the landlords were not distributed to the 
 various members of a village community, but remain the collective, 
 undivided property of the commune. The peasant, decorated by 
 the law with the title of landholder, usually owns permanently 
 and certainly only his cabin, his izbd, and the small adjoining en- 
 closure, iis&dba ; as to the rest he in reality only has the usufruct 
 of the lot he is paying for. 
 
 Such, from times immemorial, has been the form of land 
 tenure in use amidst the peasants of Moscovia or Great-Russia. 
 The emancipation has not changed it. As the tenure of the lands 
 was usually collective, so the redemption of them has also been 
 operated, not individually, but, as a rule, by communes. It is 
 
 474
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 475 
 
 the entire village and not the individual or the family which, un- 
 der the guaranty of mutual solidarity, is answerable to the State 
 or to the landlord for the repayment of the advances made by the 
 former, so that the emancipation has temporarily rather strength- 
 ened the old- Russian commune by giving the State an interest in 
 its preservation until payment in full of the ransom from serfdom 
 this new solidarity being superadded to that for the old taxes. 
 
 The respect shown for the old form of land tenure has greatly 
 simplified the transition from servitude to freedom, removing, 
 together with the advantages, also the dangers which brand-new 
 institutions would have brought on. From dependence on the 
 noble landlord, the mujik has fallen into dependence on his com- 
 mune. The bond that tied him to the soil has, then, not been 
 really broken. He is still bound to it by a double chain : undi- 
 vided property and tax-solidarity. The peasants' liberty is, in a 
 way, like their property : undivided and collective. They still 
 are bound, if not to a master, to one another, and cannot move 
 freely outside of the community. It has been said that the 
 peasant, liberated from the landlord's yoke, had become the serf 
 of his commune. This is a manifest exaggeration. The domi- 
 nation of the commune, which, after all, is only a control exercised 
 by the peasants over themselves, cannot be likened to the control 
 over them of an individual belonging to another class, of different 
 bringing up. 
 
 The Russian rural commune thus presents for study two main 
 sides or faces : the system of land tenure, and the administrative 
 or governing system. Intimately connected and interdependent, 
 the economic and administrative communes are still sufficiently 
 distinct to merit a separate study of each. We will begin with 
 the rural commune, i.e. the commune in its capacity of collective 
 landholder. 
 
 In the eyes of Europe, this sort of agrarian communism is 
 perhaps the most noteworthy feature, and the strangest, of con- 
 temporary Russia. In an age of systems and theories such as
 
 4/6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 ours, a study of this kind is fraught with interesting and priceless 
 lessons to the nations, uneasy as they are about their social status 
 and oppressed by a vague unrest. Unfortunately, our Western 
 bringing up, our national habits and our school prejudices do not 
 exactly predispose us to a calm and impartial comprehension of 
 such a system. When brought face to face with community of 
 property, under no matter how attenuated a form, the most sober- 
 minded find it difficult to forbear from prejudging the question. 
 And yet it is precisely those social phenomena that seem most 
 novel and queerest to us which it is most important to consider in 
 themselves, weighing the facts, unbiassed by any preconceived 
 idea.* 
 
 Collective property as it is in use among the peasantry, while 
 it now strikes us as Russia's most prominent feature, was one of 
 the last things perceived there by Western Europe, one of the last 
 to be noticed by the Russians themselves in their own country. 
 It was a Westphalian gentleman, Baron Haxthausen, who made 
 the discovery during his travels in 1842-43 ; he was, at least, the 
 first to impart it to Europe, in his famous studies on the inner 
 condition of Russia, f Scientific Europe, as was but natural, was 
 immensely struck at encountering, in the autocratic Empire of the 
 
 * Through all the following study of the agrarian system, I shall take 
 my facts from the numerous Russian writings on this subject, especially 
 from the grand agricultural inquest held in 1873, ^^ e results of which were 
 collected by the government under th.e title of : Labors of the Imperial 
 Commission for the Investigation of the Actual Condition of Rural 
 Economy. These documents have been supplemented by the answers to the 
 lists of questions propounded by various learned societies, such as the Col- 
 lected Materials for the Study of the Rural Agrarian Commune, and by 
 divers publications issued by the Central Committee of Statistics, by the 
 Ministry of State Demesnes or by various Provincial Assemblies (Zemstvos), . 
 such as Materials for tJie Study of Contemporary Landed Property and 
 Rural Economic Industries in Russia (St. Pet, 1880), and Statistics 
 of Landed Property and the Inhabited Portions of European Russia 
 (1880-1881). 
 
 t Studien uber die innern Zustdnde, das Volksleben und insbesondere 
 die landlichen Einrichtungen Russlands (1847, vol. i., ch. vi. ; vol. ii., ch. 
 xvii).
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 477 
 
 North, an institution which seemed in a measure to realize the 
 dreams of Western utopists. The Russians, suddenly aroused to 
 a knowledge or a consciousness of this national peculiarity, joyfully 
 took hold of it. Naturally impelled to bring everywhere to the 
 front the originality of the Slavs, as the Germans vindicate that 
 of the Teutons and we ourselves at times that of the Celts, nume- 
 rous Russian writers credited these agrarian communities to the 
 Russian spirit, the Slavic genius. Slavophils, respectful admirers 
 of the past and of Moscovite tradition, democrats, disciples of 
 the West, vied together in extolling the Great-Russian commune. 
 All insisted on seeing in it the primordial institution of the na- 
 tion and, at the same time, the formula of a new civilization, 
 the future principle for the impending regeneration of Europe, 
 actually a prey to class strife and imperilled by the excesses of 
 individualism. In the eyes of a certain class of patriots, land- 
 community, obscurely kept alive by the enslaved peasant, became 
 a sort of secret revelation, confided to a chosen people, and of 
 which the Russians, for the good of humanity at large, were 
 bound to make themselves the apostles and the missionaries. 
 
 The recent studies in comparative history and law have dis- 
 pelled these visions of national self-conceit. Within the empire, 
 agrarian institutions similar to the Slavic communities were dis- 
 covered to exist in most indigenous tribes of alien race, from the 
 I,apps and the Samoy^ds of the north to the Mordvin, the Tchu- 
 vash, the Tcheremiss of the centre. Abroad, agricultural com- 
 munities more or less similar to those which still nourish in 
 Russia, are met with among the most different peoples in India, 
 on the isle of Java, in Egypt. In the past they have turned up at 
 the two extreme ends of the earth in Mexico and Peru, as well 
 as in China and in Europe. To the mir of Great-Russia was op- 
 posed the ager publicus of the Romans (which differed from it in 
 every particular), the Teutonic mark, which appears to have come 
 a little nearer to it, and which can be traced all through the Middle 
 Ages in Germany, in Switzerland, in Scandinavia, in England,
 
 478 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 even in France. On this point the labors of Sir Henry Maine, 
 Maurer, Nasse, E. de Laveleye, leave no doubt.* It little mat- 
 ters that one or other of these scholars should have allowed 
 himself to be carried too far by external analogies or the love 
 of system ; it little matters that, where classical nations are con- 
 cerned, and more notably the Spartans, our historians have been 
 duped by mendacious legends and communistic romancing. The 
 collective mode of tenure appears to have been, with a great many 
 nations, the most ancient form of landholding. It is only after 
 having been for centuries the undivided property of the tribe, the 
 clan, or the commune, that land ended by becoming the perma- 
 nent and hereditary property of individuals. Contrary to the 
 conceptions of certain democrats of Russia or the West, individual 
 property is a comparatively new, modern form of land tenure ; col- 
 lective property is the old, the primitive, archaic form. So that 
 the Russian village community, far from being an innovation, an 
 experiment or a prophecy, is really a block from a vanished world, 
 a witness of a perished past, a sort of fossil, preserved in a country 
 long shut off from the influences which shaped the course of 
 things on the rest of the continent. With regard to this, as to 
 many other things, the originality of Russia and the Slavs has 
 nothing to do with either race or national genius ; it simply means 
 that the Russians and the greater part of the Slavs have stopped 
 * Henry Sumner Maine, Village Communities in the East and West; 
 Maurer, Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-Haf-Dorf und Stadt- Verf as- 
 sung ; E. de Laveleye, De la Propriety et de ses Formes Primitives. It 
 should be noted that, according to one of the most perspicacious investiga- 
 tors of history, M. Fustel de Coulanges, there is nothing to prove the exist- 
 ence of collective property, with periodical divisions, either among the 
 Greeks or the Romans, the Gauls or the Merovingian Franks, or, even Tacitus 
 notwithstanding, among the Germans. The author of the Cite Antique is of 
 opinion that property, with all these nations, was hereditary, mostly in 
 families, in this sense that originally the individual had not the right to 
 alienate any of it. See Fustel de Coulanges, Le Probleme des Origines de 
 la Propriett Fonciere, in the Revue des Questions Historiques, April, 1889 ; 
 further, by the same author, Recherches sur quelques Problemes d'Histoire 
 (1886), and Histoire des Institutions Politiques de fAncienne France ; 
 L'Alleu et le Domaine Rural pendant la Periodt Merovingienne (1889).
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 4/9 
 
 at an economic and hence social status old enough to have sunk 
 into oblivion in other countries. The difference between them and 
 the West in this matter lies less in man and race than in the ex- 
 ternal conditions, less in the nation's character than in the age of 
 its civilization. 
 
 It would be a study of the deepest interest if we could follow 
 through the ages the transformations of the village communities in 
 Russia. Unfortunately it is with them as with most institutions 
 that are emphatically a people's own. For the philosopher and 
 the historian these are the most important, and they are always 
 those wrapped in the thickest, most impenetrable veils ; they rest 
 in the darkness in which the disdain of the chroniclers leaves 
 the popular masses and rural classes to the sleep of oblivion. 
 The obscurity on this subject is such, that, even between Russian 
 writers, there could arise violent discussions, not only on the 
 origin but on the antiquity of the Russian village communities. 
 Distinguished journalists, Mr. Tchftcherin in particular, have 
 contested the antiquity or patriarchal filiation of the commune 
 based on mutual solidarity. lyong before the researches made in 
 the West on this delicate matter, this writer, already preceded by 
 Grandfsky, demonstrated in Russia itself, that far from being a 
 national institution peculiar to the Slavs, village or family com- 
 munities, such as the Russian mir or Serbian zadruga, had long 
 existed in more than one people of alien race. In the face of the 
 prejudices entertained by many of their countrymen, these writers 
 reminded their readers that everywhere property had developed 
 hand in hand with the feeling of individuality ; that the progress 
 of the one is in direct ratio to the development of the other. With 
 seeming inconsistence, the same journalists who brought out 
 into such relief the primitive and cosmopolitan character of the 
 agrarian communities, regarded them in Russia as being compara- 
 tively recent. To hear them, the Slavic race, out of which has 
 come the Russian state, did indeed start from collective property, 
 but there is nothing to prove that the mir based on mutual soli-
 
 480 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 darity the Russian commune in its actual form should be di- 
 rectly descended from this primitive patriarchal communism. 
 Mr. Tchitcherin claims, on the contrary, that communal land 
 tenure, and especially periodical re-allotment, were foreign to Mos- 
 covia so long as the peasant remained free. 
 
 It is serfdom, says this school, it is the solidarity to which the 
 peasants submit in order to ensure the payment of the taxes, 
 and military conscription, which caused the introduction of this 
 kind of equal division. To make their point, they quote ancient 
 historical documents, authentic charters, wills, deeds of division ; 
 they refer to Little- Russia, a radically Slavic and Russian country, 
 where, prior to the Moscovite domination, only personal land- 
 owners were known, noble or Cosack, and peasants attached to 
 the soil by contracts freely entered into. Instead of being a 
 patriarchal or family institution, the Russian commune, Mr. 
 Tchftcherin contends, is merely " a creation of the state." The 
 Moscovite mir, he asserts, has neither the same origin, nor the 
 same character as the zadruga of the Serbs and Bulgars, whose 
 family communities retained, through all these peoples' history, 
 the patriarchal impress. The Russian commune, on the contrary, 
 is not the spontaneous outcome of primitive property or of the 
 free union of husbandmen ; it is an outcome of the bondage to 
 the soil and the imperative wants of political sovereignty, under 
 the influence of certain proceedings of the government. 
 
 To this system, opposed by the greater number of Russian 
 writers, be they historians or critics, may there not be a certain 
 portion of truth ? It is hardly to be admitted that the Russians, 
 who, of all Slavs, have preserved this primitive mode of land 
 tenure in its most unimpaired form, should have come back to it 
 one fine day, after having completely abandoned it. One cannot, 
 on the other hand, bring oneself to believe that, inversely to all 
 known nations, the Moscovite peasants should have stolen a 
 march on the modern utopists and quickly stepped, at the end 
 of the sixteenth century, from personal to collective property.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 481 
 
 What sounds admissible, nay probable, is that the establishment 
 of serfdom and the solidarity in the matter of taxes, strengthened 
 in the people's mind the attachment to a mode of land tenure out 
 of which Russia might otherwise have worked her way as well 
 as the other European nations. Serfs and masters, State and 
 private individuals could very well have found it to their interest 
 to uphold and restore, where it tended to disappear, a system 
 which, owing to regular re-allotments, insured to the country 
 a more equable distribution of taxes and dues. Serfdom, and the 
 entire financial and administrative system of Moscovia based on 
 it, thus could, keeping pace with the regular increase of the 
 population, contribute to the general adoption, if not of the 
 principle itself of village communities, at least of the custom of 
 periodical re-allotments, which at the present day appear to be 
 one of the essential features of the Russian mir. 
 
 In this debate, which we do not pretend to settle one way or 
 the other, care should be taken to discriminate between collective 
 property and the custom of re-allotments. The former can main- 
 tain itself a long time without the latter, and the absence of one 
 is no proof against the existence of the other. So long as pas- 
 toral life prevails, or the still more primitive life of hunting and 
 fishing, so long as, even in the agricultural stage, the figure of 
 the population remains very low in proportion to the area it 
 occupies, there is very little reason to divide the land into regular 
 lots. To this day, in many Siberian villages, even in some 
 districts in the north of the empire, each head of a family is free 
 to till as much land as he can manage. Some writers think they 
 have proved that, up to the eighteenth century, allotment was 
 unknown in the north of Russia, the land still being regarded all 
 the time as common property. Similar remarks have been made 
 about the southern steppes : Mr. Mackenzie Wallace tells us 
 that among the Cosacks of the Don, where land is very plentiful, 
 periodical re- allotments are of recent introduction. So long as 
 the number of Cosacks was insufficient to occupy all the land,
 
 482 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 every one was welcome to as much of it as he could handle, pro- 
 vided he did not encroach on other people's cultivated lots. The 
 increase of population was, in the natural course of things, to 
 put a stop to this unlegalized right of pre-occupancy. In order 
 that each Cosack should have his share of the soil enabling 
 him to acquit himself of his obligations towards the state, reg- 
 ular allotment had to be recurred to. Similar causes may have 
 led to similar results in various regions. 
 
 Many and various causes combined to keep up in the eastern 
 portion of the empire a state of things which had long ceased to 
 exist in the west of it : the degree of civilization and the economic 
 condition of Moscovia, the political system and the patriarchal, 
 or, more correctly, the patrimonial, domanial character of the 
 government, and lastly the very nature of land and soil. In 
 those vast plains, unbounded to the eye, man, living always at 
 large, did not feel the necessity of securing a piece of land for his 
 own use by fencing it in. Where population was dense, crowded 
 on a restricted space, as in Greece and Italy, the god Terminus 
 early became a revered deity, one of the essential wardens of 
 social life. In Russia, where the land was vast and the popula- 
 tion scant, it must have been long before men felt the occasion for 
 such a deity. The crisis that hastened the transition from col- 
 lective to individual property has everywhere been increase of 
 population. Everywhere, the curtailment of each member's lot 
 in consequence of the greater number of sharers was one of the 
 things that put an end to the community, by putting a stop to 
 the periodical re-allotments and leaving each family in full pos- 
 session of the lot of which it had been hitherto usufructuary. 
 "They change fields each year," says Tacitus of the Germans, 
 "and there still remains untenanted land." To whom could these 
 words apply better than to Moscovia? The eastern half of 
 Europe, the richest in land and at all times the least populous, 
 was of necessity to be the last to give up the primeval system. 
 This result was helped by Moscovia' s isolation, moral as well as
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 483 
 
 geographical. Had Russia been more intimately connected with 
 the West, through religion, politics, manners, Latin or Teutonic 
 influences might have accomplished the change much sooner 
 resulting in Roman law or feudal customs. 
 
 In Great-Russia, i. e. in all Moscovia, collective property almost 
 exclusively prevails to this day, both among the former serfs and 
 the Crown peasants. In all that immense region extending from 
 the Neva to the Ural, the number of peasants owning land on 
 personal titles does not exceed i % or 2 % of the totality, and even 
 these few individual possessions are nearly all of recent origin. 
 Down to 1 86 1, the only individual landholders, outside of the 
 nobility and the foreign colonists, were the odnodvbrtsy, who 
 formed a small class by itself.* In Western Russia, at one time 
 subject to the domination of Poland or Sweden, and hence brought 
 into closer contact with Europe, individual property is the rule. 
 The limits of the two systems may almost be said to mark even 
 yet the old boundaries of the Moscovite and the L,ithuano-Polish 
 States, f In some few governments, such as those of Kief and 
 Poltava, there is a mixture of both forms. In one or two, in that 
 of Moghilef for instance, the Russians have attempted, not very 
 successfully, to naturalize the community system. It was intro- 
 duced there after the emancipation and the Polish rising of 1863 ; 
 but, if certain testimony of the agricultural inquest is to be be- 
 lieved, the peasants shirk it in the practice and look on it as 
 another form of serfdom '. In the adjoining government of Minsk 
 
 * See Book V., Chap I. And even with them the mode of land tenure 
 was frequently a sort of family community. See following chapter, p. 491. 
 
 t In Lithuania proper, i. e. in the governments of Kdvno and Vilna, as 
 well as in the three Baltic provinces, no other form of property than the 
 individual is known. The latter has even been introduced in a few com- 
 munes of the government of Pskof, by the Ehst or Lett colonists from 
 Liefland. In White-Russia and little-Russia, individual property takes 
 the lead even yet, though its predominance is no longer as exclusive as it 
 was. In Bessarabia, where the Russians show a mixture of Rumanians, 
 both systems exist side by side. It is to be noted that several of the most 
 prosperous German colonies, especially those on the Lower Volga, have 
 adopted the Russian custom of periodical re-allotments.
 
 484 THE EMPIRE OF TffE TSAKS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 they were not to be induced to exchange the Western, European 
 mode of land tenure for the Great- Russian. The Little-Russians 
 also are reputed to object to community. It is not always so, 
 however : on the eastern bank of the Dniepr, in the government 
 of Voronej for instance, Little-Russians may be met with who are 
 not less accustomed and devoted to the system of common land 
 tenure than their Great-Russian neighbors. 
 
 Elsewhere, in Podolia and Volhynia, where individual tenure 
 appeared rooted in the local manners, there have been cases of 
 peasants, after the emancipation had provided them with lands, 
 overthrowing their landmarks and effecting a new division on the 
 communal basis. It is even said that some villages in these gov- 
 ernments have taken to annual re-allotments. This fact, often 
 quoted in arguments on the side of communal property, can be 
 accounted for in two ways. The method of redemption adopted 
 was so well adapted to the system of village communities that, 
 solidarity being taken as the basis of the payments, it brought 
 about the re-introduction of that system, even if not of periodical 
 re-allotments, in districts where it had long been out of use. 
 The exorbitant taxes, which frequently absorb the greater part 
 of the income yielded by the land, may also have contributed 
 towards the same result, as though to confirm, by modern in- 
 stances, Mr. Tchitcherin's theory concerning the establishment of 
 periodical allotment in old Moscovia. Lastly, as certain observa- 
 tions of the agricultural inquest would lead us to conclude, the 
 vacillating uncertainty of the mujik's ideas on the rights of prop- 
 erty, the confusion of his juridical notions on the subject, the 
 little confidence he reposes in his title, all these things may, in 
 many localities, have swelled the tide in favor of the change. If 
 one of the local " marshals of the nobility" is to be believed, the 
 peasants have not sufficient faith in their permanent right to their 
 property to venture opposing any resistance to the fiat of the 
 commune when it is the majority's pleasure to submit to a new 
 division. The well-to-do peasants this curious document repre-
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 485 
 
 sents as needing to be enlightened concerning the validity of their 
 titles, and to have the ownership of the lands allotted to them in 
 some way guaranteed. However it may stand with these details, 
 it is a fact that the emancipation may have indirectly opened to 
 communal property and re-allotment districts which until now were 
 closed to these institutions.* Singular ! that the Statute of 1861 
 should have apparently, if only for a time, not merely confirmed 
 in its former area, but extended to new villages, a form of land 
 tenure which appears to have been strengthened, if not actually 
 introduced, three hundred years before, by the establishment of 
 serfdom ! 
 
 * The question here is naturally not of isolated cases. In transferring 
 to the peasants the ownership of the lands of which they had the usufruct, 
 the agrarian laws of 1861 respected the form of land tenure current in every 
 region. Though often accused, both at home and abroad, of partiality 
 towards collective tenure, the compilers of the Emancipation Act were 
 merely content to let it alone where it existed and very careful not to in- 
 troduce it anywhere else by legislative authority. N. Miliutin remarked in 
 Paris, in May, 1863, before the Socit6 des Economistes : "The lawgiver 
 does not impose on the rural class any one form of property preferably to 
 others ; it may be individual or communal according to the custom prevail- 
 ing in each given region, and it will be left to the purchasers' own pleasure 
 whether they will transform the lands acquired by the commune into private 
 and individual property." 
 
 This was strictly true ; the communes, even the individuals, were free 
 to pass from communal to personal property. Article 165 of the Statute, it 
 is true, did not empower the peasants freely to dispose of their lots until 
 they had fully redeemed them. The article, even with this restriction, was 
 regarded as a threat to the mir. There have been speculators who have got 
 the peasants to sell them their lots by advancing the redemption money, 
 thus allowing themselves to be despoiled of the property which the law was 
 trying to secure to them. Accordingly, several Russians spoke up in favor 
 of having Article 165 suppressed and making the peasant lots inalienable.
 
 BOOK VIII. CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Village Communities have their Prototype in the Family The 
 Commune Frequently Looked upon as an Enlarged Family Filiation 
 of the Village Communities from the Family Communities The Peas- 
 antry's Patriarchal Manners and the Ancient Village Family Authority 
 of the Head of a Household Community of Possessions Domestic 
 Bonds Relaxed by the Emancipation Increase of Family Partitions 
 Material Inconvenience and Moral Advantages Accruing Therefrom 
 Servitude of the Women Progress of Individualism ; its Consequences. 
 
 To the village communities of Great- Russia a prototype may 
 be found, even simpler and more ancient, yet living still the 
 family. In the mujik's izbk, the family, in truth, has preserved to our 
 day a patriarchal, archaic character. Property remains undivided 
 between the children or between brothers who dwell together 
 under one roof ; each son, each male of the house, has an equal 
 right to it. The agrarian community seems to be contained 
 in embryo in the family, the former being constructed on the 
 model of the latter. So that the Russian commune may be re- 
 garded as an enlarged family, in which the soil remains the col- 
 lective property of the community, each man or each household 
 receiving for his support an equal share thereof. The Moscovite 
 mir is often considered simply as an extension of the family, 
 grown too numerous to reside in the same enclosure or to go on 
 cultivating the land in common. This view, held by many econo- 
 mists, both Russian and foreign, may in many cases be correct, 
 though not invariably. It is not always easy to prove the mem- 
 bers of a village community to be descended from one common 
 ancestor, even when there is tradition to show for it. There may 
 
 486 
 
 \
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 487 
 
 exist reasonable doubts concerning the historical conditions of the 
 filiation from family to commune, even concerning the order of 
 filiation. There may have been in a given generation a sort of 
 alternation between these forms of property, the commune being 
 originally born of the family, and the family communities, in 
 their turn, of sections of the village community.* 
 
 Here is not the place to linger over these curious and obscure 
 questions. By whatever process collective property may have 
 been evolved in the Russian peasantry, the tie between family and 
 commune, between domestic life and mir life, is too close to allow 
 of understanding the latter without the former. A glance at the 
 mujik's home life offers the greater interest that the old manners 
 are fast disappearing. What, up to the emancipation, was the 
 distinctive characteristic of the family in the lower classes, was 
 its unity : joint habitation, undivided property, and paternal 
 authority. These time-honored customs, as already remarked, 
 have, in a few years, been shaken by the emancipation. The 
 
 * The family communities, at least in their actual form, do not always 
 appear to be more ancient than the village communities the Serbian 
 zadruga than the Russian mir. In fact, the former, such as they still exist 
 among certain Southern Slavs, presuppose an hereditary appropriation of 
 the soil in favor of certain village residents ; in this sense we may see in 
 them an advance towards individualization, a transition stage between clan 
 or communal property and personal possession. Moreover, the domain of 
 these family communities is usually far less extensive than that of the vil- 
 lage communities, and the number of members far less considerable. The 
 Serbian zadruga numbers, on an average, between ten and twenty-five 
 members ; those with fifty or sixty are exceptions. When the zadruga 
 grows too numerous, it usually splits itself in two. There are, in Serbian 
 lands, villages that bear the name of one family, and the inhabitants of 
 which do appear to be descended from one stock ; but such villages almost 
 always consist of several communities. [See, for instance, Custom-Law 
 (Droit Coutumier) of the Southern Slavs, after Researches by Mr. Bdgit- 
 chitch, by F. Deine'litch, Paris, 1877.] In brief, then, a Serbian zadruga 
 can, by successive separations, be evolved out of an original family com- 
 munity, whereas it could scarcely be the outcome of village communi- 
 ties, while the Russian mir, by splitting itself into fractions, may very 
 well have begot family communities, very similar to the zadruga. Such, 
 indeed, appears sometimes to have been the case. (See further on, 
 pp. 491-493.)
 
 488 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 same peaceable revolution which has severed the bond between 
 master and serf, has loosened that between father and children. 
 Together with liberty, a taste of independence came to the domes- 
 tic hearth. This was one of the chief and most natural results ; it 
 is at the same time a fact which cannot but react on the commune, 
 indeed on the entire material and moral existence of the mujik. 
 
 The father, according to the ancient Russian custom, is abso- 
 lutely master in his house, like the tsar in the nation, or, as an old 
 saying has it, like the khan in Crimea. To find anything at all 
 analogous in the West, we must retrace our steps back beyond the 
 Middle Ages, to classical antiquity and paternal authority among 
 the Romans. The Russian peasant was not liberated by age 
 from his father's authority ; the adult and married son was still 
 subject to it, until he had himself children arrived to years of dis- 
 cretion, or had in his turn become the head of the family. This 
 domestic sovereignty remained intact through all the revolutions, 
 all the transformations of the country. L,ike the tsar, the father 
 was thought to hold from Heaven a sort of right divine, to rebel 
 against which would have been sacrilege. In the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, in a manual on domestic economy, entitled Domostrby 
 ("House-Order"), the priest Sylvester, the intimate adviser of 
 Ivan IV. , extols the authority of the head of the house and his 
 right of repression not only over the children, but over the wife. 
 In the nobility, this paternal power became worn and blunted 
 through long friction against the West and modern individualism ; 
 little is left of it beyond a few formalities, such as the graceful 
 Slavic custom for children to kiss their parents' hand after meals. 
 In the people, i.e., the peasantry and the merchant class, the old 
 traditions had survived. In these two classes, the most genuinely 
 national ones, the framework of family was, until this last quarter 
 of the nineteenth century, more solidly constructed than in any 
 other European country. In this respect, as in many others, 
 Russia may be said to have been, till very lately, the antipodes 
 of the United States, so deep was the chasm dug by paternal
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 489 
 
 authority between two families based on equality between the 
 children. 
 
 In the Russian people, paternal power is supported by religious 
 feeling and reverence for age. No nation has, in this respect, 
 upheld more faithfully the simple and beautiful habits of another 
 age. The Russian of the lower classes greets men superior to 
 him in years by the names of "father " or " uncle " ; at all times 
 in public as in private, he treats them with a gentle deference. 
 This feeling was until quite lately the foundation-stone of com- 
 munal self-government. ' ' Where white hairs are, there is good 
 sense, there is right " such is, with variations, the burden of many 
 popular proverbs. From an old man from his father especially 
 the Russian peasant used submissively to endure all things. 
 Two mujiks were out on a Moscow street one day a holiday, one 
 of them in the prime of maturity, the other already bent under the 
 weight of years. The old man, who appeared somewhat the 
 worse for drink, was showering abuse on his companion, and even 
 blows. The younger and vigorous man opposed to his violence 
 only expostulation and entreaties, and on some people's wanting 
 to separate them, said: " I,eave us; he is my father." Such 
 traits are by no means rare. The trouble is that, every virtue 
 being apt to encourage to abuse those who profit by it, paternal 
 authority thus pampered frequently degenerated into downright 
 tyranny. The father, coarse and unmannered, with the double 
 model before him of state despotism and landlord's despotism, 
 lorded it in his cabin as a veritable autocrat ; he continually trans- 
 gressed the natural limits of his rights, and the son, fashioned to 
 obedience by both custom and servitude, seldom knew how to 
 assert his own or his wife's dignity as human beings. Pater- 
 nal power but too often got hardened by contact with serfdom ; 
 no wonder that the emancipation loosened the bond, and that 
 young couples, liberated from a master's yoke, should wish to cast 
 off that other and not less irksome yoke. 
 
 In the mujik's patriarchal domestic scheme, undivided prop-
 
 490 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 erty, i.e. community of possessions, was the logical sequence of 
 paternal authority.* Thus the family can be regarded as an eco- 
 nomic association, the members of which are united by the ties of 
 blood, and have at their head, in the capacity of chief and man- 
 ager, the father or " elder," bearing the title of " master of the 
 house" (domokhozicLiri) or "senior "(bolsh&k).^ 
 
 What is the basis, the principle, what the essential character 
 of the undivided Great- Russian peasant family ? These questions 
 have been much discussed. It has been asked whether it was a 
 sort of association or, to use the genuine Russian term, of arttl 
 founded before all on economic relations, on property and pecu- 
 niary interests ; or whether, on the contrary, it rests in the peas- 
 antry as in other classes, principally on personal relations created 
 by affection and sympathy, on blood and kinship. J To this 
 question often settled too peremptorily, too exclusively, in one or 
 the other sense, the best solution would seem to be that the 
 Great- Russian family is founded, like almost every other, on both 
 principles, and that one or the other becomes predominant accord- 
 ing to what side you consider it from. If it is an association, it is 
 a closed one into which there is no entrance except through birth 
 or marriage. 
 
 Certain it is, that, in the peasant class, marriage and the crea- 
 tion of a new household, have at all times been regulated chiefly 
 by utilitarian considerations. In no other country perhaps has 
 personal inclination had as little to do with rural marriages. But 
 is Russia the only country where such cares which, after all, do 
 not necessarity exclude relations born of sympathy and are far 
 
 * Mr. Le Play, in his Ouvriers Europ&ens (first edition, pp. 58 and 59), 
 gives a complete description of the economic system on which a Russian 
 family was based previous to the emancipation. In the same work is found 
 a similar and in many ways analogous description of a Bashkir family on the 
 confines of Asia. 
 
 t Domokhoz&tn, from dom, " house," and khoziain, "master, husband- 
 man, administrator." Bolsh&k from bolshdy, bdlshiy, " big, senior." 
 
 J The former opinion is the more generally adopted ; still the latter has 
 been repeatedly supported by eminent scholars.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 491 
 
 from invariably banishing domestic affections interfere with the 
 foundation of the family? If economic considerations, always 
 particularly powerful in the country, prevail with the mujik more 
 than with other classes, that is a consequence, first of all, of the 
 conditions of rural life, of the habits bequeathed by serfdom, of 
 the mir system and collective property, all things which impress 
 on the union between man and woman a more than usually ma- 
 terialistic, practical stamp. Taken all in all, the distinctive 
 feature of the Great- Russian family does not lie there. Elsewhere 
 too in the West and everywhere the family, composed of father, 
 mother, and children in their nonage, may be regarded as an asso- 
 ciation and a community. The distinctive characteristic of the 
 Great- Russian family, up to these latter times, is that, instead of 
 being habitually limited to father, mother, and unmarried children, 
 it included several households and several generations, united at 
 once by the bond of blood and that of common interests.* 
 
 It often happened that several married sons, several collateral 
 households, would live together in the same house, or round the 
 same enclosure or yard dvor working in common under the 
 authority of the father or grandfather. The family thus became 
 a sort of commune on a small scale, ruled by its natural chief, 
 assisted by his wife for the indoor management, f The principle 
 
 * The Russian economists, who, of late years, have much agitated these 
 questions, frequently draw a distinction between two types of peasant fam- 
 ilies: the "great" or patriarchal (bolshaya or rodovaya, the latter from 
 rod, "race "= La tin gens), and the "small" or "paternal" (malaya or 
 otsbvskaya, from otsy, "fathers") the family in the narrower sense. And 
 indeed, both types are to be found, sometimes side by side in the same 
 regions ; only, contrary to what used to be in old times, the former tends to 
 grow rarer. But between these two forms of family life and farming, the 
 passage from one to the other is too easy and frequent to warrant their being 
 erected into two opposite types. 
 
 t To the head of the household, the Russian domokhoziain, may be 
 compared the domatchin or head of the Serbian zadruga. Indeed, there is 
 between the Great-Russian undivided family and the Yugo-Slavic zadruga 
 an analogy which it were vain to deny. It has been proved that in certain 
 Russian governments, especially in those of Samira and Kursk, there 
 recently still existed family communities very similar, as regards their
 
 492 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSA&S AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 of election asserted itself only in default of the head of the family. 
 When the father died, his place was taken, in the order of patri- 
 archal succession, by one of the oldest members, the brother, or 
 the oldest son, according to local custom. Sometimes it was the 
 widow who took the management of the house, or else as in the 
 mir and in the Serbian zadruga, the elder was chosen from among 
 the members of the family, not for absolute seniority of age but as 
 being the most capable, the most respected.* The father or head 
 of the house had full authority for the management of the prop- 
 erty belonging to the community, and his wife for the direction 
 of operations at home. Still, in large families, composed of sev- 
 eral households, it was usual for the ' ' elder ' ' to take the advice 
 of his relatives and associates. But he was by right the repre- 
 sentative of the family in all business matters, private or public, 
 when he and his peers formed the council of the commune ; but 
 even there he took his seat not as an individual, but as the family 
 representative. 
 
 In the times of serfdom, the rural family loved to keep close 
 together.f Divisions of property were dreaded ; they took place 
 
 organization and juridical character, to the zadruga, which itself presents 
 various types. The family communities in which certain Russian scholars 
 see a special type of land tenure, which they call "landed property consist- 
 ing of a yard or house-lot," are of frequent occurrence among the peculiar 
 small class, called odnodvdrtsy more particularly in the government of 
 Oridl. 
 
 * Such was the case in a family of the government of Kursk of which a 
 special study has been published. This community, known under the name 
 of Sofrdnitch, comprised, in 1872, forty-two persons, all descendants at least 
 the men of one common ancestor, deceased sixty years before, whose sons 
 having died in their turn, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren had 
 agreed to live together and cultivate their lands in common, under the 
 direction of one of their number. In 1872 the family consisted of eight 
 married couples, two widows, and over twenty young people and children 
 of both sexes. They all resided in four izbas built round the same dvor or 
 yard. About 1876, domestic disasters, especially the insanity, then death of 
 the ""elder " who had ruled them through forty years, caused them to sep- 
 arate into four groups, each of which still formed a small community. 
 
 f As in the Serbian zadntga, the house, live stock, tools, furniture, and 
 crops belonged to the community. Nothing was left for individual posses- 
 sion except articles of personal use, such as clothes and trinkets.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 493 
 
 only when the dwelling with its yard had become too small for the 
 number of inhabitants. This necessity was regarded as an evil, 
 and the division of the small patrimony or capital went by the 
 name of "black division." The interest of the landlord, who 
 was bound to furnish the timber and other materials for the con- 
 struction of the new izb&s, was at one with the traditional preju- 
 dice against the separation of families. Owing to these customs, 
 had the land, redeemed by the former serfs, been definitely allotted 
 to the different households, the large village communities would 
 probably have been succeeded by small family communities after 
 the manner of the Serbian zadruga. Now that, in the footsteps 
 of liberty, the spirit of individualism and independence has invaded 
 the dwelling of the mujik, if the collective tenure of land comes 
 to be abrogated, it will be for the benefit of the individual ; the 
 Russian peasant will not pass through the intermediate stage at 
 which other Slavic peoples have stopped. 
 
 In a house in which property remains undivided, it is not so 
 much the decease of members of the family which opens succes- 
 sions, as the separation of the living which becomes the occasion 
 for partitions. The rules for such partitions vary according to 
 localities, but one general feature is that only men or widows 
 with young children are considered. The married daughters 
 have nothing of their own, being regarded as belonging to their 
 husbands' families ; the unmarried daughters can claim only a 
 portion of the furniture and money, sometimes of the cattle, cows, 
 sheep, etc. , according to local custom. 
 
 Among the Great-Russians as well as among the Little-Rus- 
 sians, in the wider as in the more restricted family, the women 
 especially the daughters are not an integral part of the family 
 or community as regards property. The daughter is only a 
 temporary inmate of her father's house, which she is to leave some 
 day, to follow a husband. The wife herself the consort claims 
 no share in the common fund even while she has the internal 
 management of the conjugal home. If sometimes a widow 
 obtains a portion, if she even fills the place of the head of the
 
 494 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 house, it is as the representative of her unmarried children. 
 The woman really has no claim on the property of either her 
 father's or her husband's family. As a compensation, she is 
 allowed the privilege, denied to the men, of saving up a little 
 hoard of her own outside of the common property, on the flax or 
 wool out of which she manufactures her husband's and children's 
 clothing ; these savings, in some provinces, go by the name of her 
 "box" or "casket" (korbbka). This casket, the keys to which 
 the women alone hold, the girl takes away with her when she 
 marries : it is her dowry.* When a woman dies childless, her 
 korbbka, as a rule, returns to her own family, not to her father 
 or his community, but to her mother, or, if she be dead, to her 
 unmarried sisters. Thus there is a sort of feminine line of suc- 
 cession. The mother's money and clothes usually go to the 
 unmarried daughters, and if, in family partitions, custom admits 
 the daughters' claim to a portion of the house-gear and even of 
 the live-stock, the reason probably is that these things are regarded 
 as belonging to and more particularly befitting their sex. 
 
 In speaking of family partitions, a difference should be made 
 between the bona-fide partitions of the whole estate among all 
 entitled to a share of it, and the dowering of a member on his 
 departure out of the community. The latter is the case when a 
 member of the family, a son for instance, leaves the house in his 
 father's lifetime to go and live somewhere else by himself. The 
 father, then, is free to give him nothing, to let him go ' ' with 
 nothing but his cross, ' ' as the popular phrase has it in allusion 
 
 * Where custom allows young girls to save for themselves a korbbka, 
 indirectly raised on the common property, it is usual for a bridegroom, who, 
 indirectly also, is to benefit by this same korbbka, to pay to the bride's 
 family a certain sum as compensation, either in cash or nature. This con- 
 tribution usually defrays the wedding feast, an item which mounts up con- 
 siderably, all the way from 20 to 80 roubles. This custom must not be 
 confounded with the purchase-money given for the bride, a practice which 
 still flourishes in some parts of Russia, among Finn or Tatar populations. 
 (See for details on these curious customs a study of Mr. Matve"yef, in the 
 Memoirs of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, Ethnographical 
 Section, vol. viii., part ist, 1878.)
 
 MIR t FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 495 
 
 to the brass or silver cross worn round the neck. If, however, a 
 married son leaves with his father's consent, he receives his share 
 of the common patrimony ; but it lies with the father to determine 
 what that share shall be. There even are different words, at least 
 in the government of Samara, to express whether the departing 
 son receives a full pro-rata share of the family property or not. 
 If in a family governed by the eldest brother, one of the younger 
 unmarried ones chooses to settle somewhere else, there is no general 
 partition. But there necessarily is, if it is a married brother who 
 goes, i. e, a man possessed of full rights according to the popular 
 code. Genuine partitions therefore take place only in families 
 bereaved of their natural head and composed of several collateral 
 households, where there are several co-proprietors possessed of 
 equal rights to the common patrimony, for instance married 
 brothers who have lost their father. In this case, the property, 
 real and personal, is divided into so many shares of equal value 
 which are frequently adjudged by drawing lots, just as is done in 
 the mir for communal lands. The married grandsons are entitled 
 to a share only if their father is dead, because the rights of 
 children lie in abeyance during the father's lifetime. 
 
 It is easy to see from all the above what predominance is con- 
 ferred on the father and his authority, and also how great, in these 
 rural customs, is the importance that attaches to marriage, which 
 takes the place of age-majority. It is, in a way, the first condi- 
 tion under which is held the right to succession, or, more cor- 
 rectly, to property. In our study of the commune, we shall soon 
 see that marriage is usually there also the first condition for using 
 the communal lands. The reason of this singular custom is that ^ 
 neither in the home nor in the commune can a man be a complete 
 workman unless he is married, and can place at the community's 
 service, together with his own hands, those of his wife. 
 
 In a certain measure, it might be said that in the peasant fam- 
 ily at least in the large, patriarchal family there is no succession 
 or inheritance at all, but only dissolution or liquidation of an
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 association, each member of which is invested with an equal 
 right to a share in the common capital and stock-in-trade. Though 
 relationship may be one of the conditions of heredity, blood alone 
 does not confer a right to the inheritance : association with the 
 head of the family and labor for the benefit of the community 
 are required over and above that. The only sense in which the 
 term ' ' succession' ' is applicable under this form of family life, is 
 this : that the father's death entitles the married sons to claim a 
 share in the common patrimony. 
 
 It follows from all this, as Mr. Matv6yef remarks, that testa- 
 mentary dispositions and bequests are possible in families in the 
 stricter sense, where in lieu of several associates having equal 
 rights on the family estate, there is only one representative of the 
 family rights. In this case, the father or the mother the latter 
 if, being widowed, she is the recognized head of the house may, 
 in dying, bequeath legacies. These testamentary dispositions, 
 whether made in writing or orally declared before witnesses, are 
 usually admitted by the communes and peasant courts, the more 
 readily that the common people pay a sort of religious reverence 
 to last dying wishes and even regard opposition to them as sinful. 
 The number of such wills naturally tends to increase in propor- 
 tion to the dissolution of large families. By them the father, as a 
 rule, merely distributes his possessions among his children, so as 
 to forestall any disputes between them. If bequests are made 
 beyond the line of direct heirs, they usually are in favor of the 
 widow, sometimes of a married daughter or a son gone out of the 
 house, or perhaps of some orphan nephews or some child taken 
 in by the dying man. Custom, however, would scarcely permit, 
 the father of a family to despoil his children of the house in 
 which they were born and of their entire inheritance, in favor of 
 strangers possessed of no moral title to his estate. How ever 
 great his respect for paternal authority, the peasant does not admit 
 of its being unlimited, under cover of what is elsewhere known by 
 the name of testamentary liberty.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 497 
 
 All that concerns the division of family possessions, as also all 
 that bears on the allotment of lands by the commune, is left by 
 law to custom, to tradition. The Statute says so in the following 
 explicit words : ' ' The peasants are authorized as regards the 
 order of succession to inheritances, to follow the local customs. ' ' 
 By this simple little clause, the rural commune is placed outside 
 of the civil law, outside of all written law.* 
 
 Such liberty is in keeping with the nature and the conditions 
 of self-government which distinguish the Russian mir. Yet 
 these excessive private rights give rise to so much opposition that, 
 in an epoch of transition and ethical transformation like the 
 present, such latitude must needs lend itself to abuses and in- 
 justices. Accordingly, at the time of the agricultural inquest, 
 enlightened men, of most dissimilar tendencies, such as the 
 ex- Minister of the Interior and of the Crown Demesnes, Mr. 
 Valuyef, and Prince Vassiltchikof, requested that the private law 
 of the peasants, instead of being entirely left to custom, might be 
 regulated by official legislation. The difficulty lay in avoiding to 
 do violence to custom while regulating its exercise. lyegal usages 
 vary much, according to provinces and communes, according even 
 to the origin of the population. In one village, for instance, it is 
 the eldest son who, in case of division, retains the homestead ; in 
 another again it is the youngest, as in some parts of Switzerland 
 and Germany, because it is supposed that the oldest had opportu- 
 nities of settling elsewhere during the father's lifetime. In treat- 
 ing of heredity questions among the peasants, it should not be 
 forgotten that the communal lands, although they do not directly 
 fall under it, are obliquely affected by these family partitions, 
 which usually necessitate the allotment of separate lands to the 
 members who depart out of the family community. And, though 
 these are private concerns which do not affect the general distribu- 
 tions of land among all the members of a commune, there are 
 
 * A law of the present Emperor's, however, passed in 1886, regulates 
 such family transactions without infringing these principles.
 
 498 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS, 
 
 villages where a family cannot divide the land allotted to it collec- 
 tively without the commune's consent. 
 
 Such divisions are no longer rare nowadays. Few izbcls 
 shelter several married couples.* Young people, especially young 
 wives, wish to be independent ; newly married couples take delight 
 in feeling themselves the heads of a household, the only position 
 which gives them complete liberty. This spirit, seemingly in 
 opposition with the system of communal land tenure, sometimes 
 finds in it an encouragement, for it is precisely under this system 
 that each man or each couple can claim a lot. On the other hand, 
 the construction of a wooden house costs comparatively little ; 
 every Russian is a born carpenter, every peasant can, in a few 
 days, build a dwelling for himself. So that the number of new 
 izbhs has increased considerably since the emancipation ; to be 
 sure they are generally smaller and poorer. This increase of 
 dvors or separate homesteads is valued at 25 <f, or 30 % at least, f 
 This breaking up of families, though merely an indirect conse- 
 quence of the emancipation, seems to be one of the main causes 
 of the apparently inconsiderable results it has produced, of the 
 scant progress made by agriculture and prosperity in numbers of 
 provinces. These divisions, now of frequent occurrence, bring 
 about two complications almost equally hard on agriculture and 
 popular prosperity. The first is the excessive parcelling of the 
 land, caused by separating the small lots affected by the commune 
 to the support of one family ; the second consists in disabling the 
 peasant from working the soil to its full bearing capacity, owing 
 to the indefinite division of capital, stock, and tools. If the mir 
 furnishes the land, it does not advance the means of tilling it. In 
 
 * Statistics show that, to every 23,000,000 " souls " (male peasants sub- 
 ject to the poll-tax), there were, only a few years ago, 7,220,000 dvors or 
 homesteads, i.e. on an average, taking into consideration the increase of the 
 population since the last census, seven or eight persons to the dvor, which, 
 Russian families being usually prolific, generally represents one household. 
 
 t In some governments, such as that of Tver, the number of the dvors 
 or izb&s is said to have nearly doubled in ten years.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 499 
 
 this manner the disadvantages inherent to the communal system 
 are still more aggravated by family partitions. The peasants 
 themselves admit that this new fashion usually does harm, but 
 give in to it, because it is getting to be the fashion. 
 
 It is thus that the decadence of the old patriarchal ways may 
 indirectly retard the progress of the peasants towards prosperity 
 and even national production. Among these peasant-landlords, 
 impoverished by successive divisions, a great many households 
 are almost wholly destitute of cattle and laboring implements. 
 The depositions of the great agricultural inquest almost unani- 
 mously deplore this tendency of the peasants towards isolation.* 
 It was to remedy these disadvantages by subjecting family parti- 
 tions to legal restrictions that the inquest commission suggested 
 that the possessions of a family, and especially their agricultural 
 implements, should be shared with departing members only 
 within limits determined by the law. The ministry more directly 
 concerned with the peasant affairs, that of Crown Demesnes, more 
 than once went into this question. Thus, for instance, it was 
 proposed to authorize partitions only if there were no arrears of 
 taxes, and if the separation left to each member a lot of an extent 
 sufficient for remunerative cultivation. There was some talk of 
 giving to the parents or to the head of the house the right of 
 authorizing or forbidding the operation instead of leaving it, as 
 
 * This commission, convoked on the proposal and under the presidency 
 of the ex-Minister of Crown Demesnes, Mr. Valuyef, was composed of high 
 functionaries from the ministries of the Interior, of Demesnes, and of 
 Finances. The principal object of their investigations, conducted and 
 directed with the assistance of an extensive list of queries, was the study of 
 collective land-tenure and its effects. The commission received and pub- 
 lished about a thousand reports and written depositions, besides oral ones 
 from over two hundred persons, mostly governors of provinces, marshals of 
 the nobility, members of the provincial assemblies, etc. Unfortunately, Jout 
 of so many witnesses, few are peasants or rural functionaries, men directly 
 concerned in that mode of property which is being investigated. In spite of 
 the high intelligence and impartiality demanded of the compilers of reports, 
 the absence of such naturally indicated representatives of the rural commu- 
 nities partly weakens the commission's conclusions.
 
 500 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 done at present, to local custom. However pressing the interests 
 of agriculture and of the peasant himself, it were difficult to 
 impose such restrictions without encroaching on the liberty but 
 just restored to him, without again placing the individual under 
 the yoke of the family, the commune, or the central admin- 
 istration.* 
 
 Not that this new tendency to individualism should be uncon- 
 ditionally deplored. Disturbing as it is economically, it has some 
 undoubtedly good sides : it compels young people to rely more 
 on their own powers, and, by stimulating individual energy, may 
 increase the sum of labor. It affords advantages especially 
 as regards health and morality. Among coarse, poverty-stricken 
 people, the patriarchal system is not all profit and virtue. It is 
 notorious how many evils of all description, in the great cities of 
 the West, are derived from the closeness and overcrowding of 
 tenements. Things are no better in Russia when one small 
 izbcl shelters several generations and several households, when, 
 through the long nights of an endless winter, fathers and their 
 children, brothers and their wives, lie promiscuously huddled 
 together around the huge stove. Such a promiscuity is as un- 
 wholesome to the morals as to the body. Even when the mar- 
 ried children occupied several izbcts disposed around the one yard, 
 the domestic autocracy was a danger to the family's union and 
 chastity ; the head of the house, "the old man " who, owing to the 
 custom of early marriages, might be scarcely forty, often arroga- 
 ting to himself certain seignorial rights over the women of his 
 family, in imitation of the noble landlord's ways with the serf girls 
 and women on his domains. Nowadays, young couples can more 
 easily escape this paternal rule, and family life becomes purer 
 through isolation. 
 
 * By the terms of the law of 1886, partitions can no longer take place 
 except with the consent of the head of the family, and they must besides be 
 approved by at least two thirds of the communal vote. Moreover, the 
 administrative reform of 1889 places them under the control of " rural 
 chiefs " functionaries elected from among the local landed nobility.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 501 
 
 The old patriarchal manners also contributed as much as serf- 
 dom to the abasement of women, whose subordinate condition is 
 the ugly side of popular life in Russia. In the higher classes the 
 woman is, in culture, bringing up, and manners, the man's equal ; 
 in fact she often is, or seems, superior to him. With the popular 
 classes peasants and tradesmen the case is reversed. In noth- 
 ing does the moral dualism still existing between Peter's Russia and 
 old Moscovia manifest itself more clearly. The common people 
 have retained the ideas and habits of old-time Russia, and it is 
 this side of their life on which Asiatic, or rather Byzantine influ- 
 ences have left the deepest impress. The ill-treatment and con- 
 tempt under which women lived were among the things that 
 most shocked foreign travellers down to the eighteenth century, 
 from the German Herberstein, who was the first to reveal to Eu- 
 rope the inner life of Moscovia, to the French academician Chappe 
 d'Auteroche, whose assertions the Empress Catherine II. herself 
 took the trouble to refute.* There are a great many popular 
 sayings on the subject of wife-beating, some of them purporting 
 to be spoken by women, such as : "A good husband's blows do not 
 hurt long," and the popular songs are full of references to the 
 same custom. f Peasant husbands have not relinquished this 
 patriarchal prerogative, especially when tipsy, and the father-in- 
 law, until quite lately, joined in with his stick. Justice now tries 
 to protect the women, but has not always the power. With such 
 customs it is out of the question to make of wife-beating a serious 
 offence, entailing separation. The mujik still finds it difficult to 
 grasp the idea that anybody should have any business to dispute 
 his right of chastising the wife of his bosom. A peasant, cited 
 before the justice of the peace for this offence, kept repeating in 
 
 * In The Antidote, or an Examination of the Evil Book entitled 
 " Travels in Siberia" a work ascribed to the Tsaritsa herself. 
 
 f " I went along with my true love dear And to my love I said : ' O, 
 darling dear ! Beat not thy wife without a cause, But only for good cause, 
 beat thou thy wife, And for a great offence. Far away is my father dear, 
 And farther still my mother dear ; They cannot hear my voice, they 
 cannot see my burning tears.' " Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, p. n.
 
 502 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 reply to all reproofs : " Why, she is my own." " Whom, then, 
 is one to beat ? ' ' inquired another after listening to a lecture on the 
 respect due to women. Acquitted or fined, it is on his wife, in the 
 end, that the delinquent lets out his wrath at the interference of 
 justice. 
 
 In Great-Russia, the wife has not yet quite got beyond being 
 regarded as a domestic animal, Bielinsky tells us. What the peas- 
 ant seeks in his helpmate first of all, if not exclusively, is a good 
 workwoman. In some provinces at least among the " allogens," 
 or aliens of Finn and Tatar origin, such as the Mordvins of the 
 Volga, the peasant still buys his wife ; at times he carries her away 
 "steals" her is the word, often, without consulting or even 
 knowing her, as she is from another village. In Little-Russia, 
 family life has more of the humane element ; affection plays a 
 greater part in wedlock, the woman's lot is a milder one, she 
 enjoys more consideration and has more rights. This difference 
 may be partly due to the gentler Maloross character, to the milder 
 .climate, and purer Slavic blood ; but especially to the fact that 
 serfdom not having lasted so long in little-Russia, it has not 
 hardened the people's manners to the same extent, and that the 
 Maloross peasant woman, instead of being subject to the often heavy 
 rule of a father- and mother-in-law in a large agglomerated family, 
 usually keeps house by herself for her husband and children. 
 
 Still, even in Little-Russia, the women's lot is far from being an 
 enviable one and only appears so by comparison. On the Dniepr as 
 well as on the Volga, the husband still looks on his wife as on an 
 inferior being. Hence the popular songs bear many a trace of 
 the pain which the woman habitually smothers in her breast, and 
 the so-called "wedding songs " of both North and South, those 
 rhythmical poems with chorus, a rudimentary musical drama 
 enacted by the bride and the various personages who take part in 
 the event, invariably show us the bride full of sadness and fear. 
 True, most of these songs date back to times when she had 
 reason to tremble before "the alien robber," the Tatar or the
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES, 503 
 
 Lithuanian, who came to take or buy her from her people. 
 But even in the latest of these popular poems, whether born in 
 Great- or Little-Russia, or in the freer Cosack-land, the maiden 
 in touching strains gives vent to her grief at leaving her 
 father's house, even though life was not always made very easy 
 to her there, at exchanging her girlish liberty for the matron's 
 subjection. Always life before marriage is extolled as a woman's 
 best time. Serfdom, of course, greatly embittered her lot, for on 
 her head fell the weight of a double bondage. And so heavy is 
 the yoke at times, that to this day many a peasant woman frees 
 herself from it by killing her tyrant. This crime is by no means 
 uncommon, and the woman is, more often than not, acquitted by a 
 compassionate jury who knows what she has gone through. 
 
 But a better time is dawning. The emancipation is not for 
 man alone. Already in the villages, the mother of adult children, 
 especially the widow of the head of a family, enjoys very substan- 
 tial respect ; such a widow is often entrusted with the management 
 of the family affairs, and sometimes, in the communal assemblies, 
 women represent their absent husbands. In this, as in everything, 
 education will do much ; the progress of individualism will have 
 a great share in elevating woman's condition, for it fosters, in both 
 sexes, the feeling of personal dignity. Once alone with her hus- 
 band and children, she will more easily become the companion 
 and equal of the one, the guardian and teacher of the others.* 
 
 Will the spirit of independence and individualism, which is 
 undermining the patriarchal family, end by reaching collective 
 property ? Is the Russian commune of sufficiently solid grain to 
 
 * The popular songs depict in graphic terms the irksomeness, to young 
 matrons, of life in larger agglomerated families. Here is a brief speci- 
 men : " They are making me marry a lout With no small family. Oh ! 
 oh oh ! Oh, dear me ! With a father and a mother And four brothers 
 And sisters three. Oh oh oh ! Oh, dear me ! Says my father-in-law : 
 ' Here comes a bear ! ' Says my mother-in-law : ' Here comes a slattern ! ' 
 My sisters-in-law cry : ' Here comes a do-nothing ! ' My brothers-in-law 
 exclaim : ' Here comes a mischief-maker ! ' Oh oh oh ! Oh, dear me ! " 
 Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, p. 289.
 
 504 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS, 
 
 resist this active dissolvent, which, by attacking the old customs 
 and paternal authority, cuts out the core of despotic communism in 
 the family ? Family and commune, domestic life and public life, 
 the life of the mir, had one and the same basis, principle, and 
 spirit ; it is impossible that the alterations which the one under- 
 goes should not react on the other. Anything that weakens 
 traditions and popular customs must also weaken the village com- 
 munities, in which all rests on custom and tradition. The man 
 who has freed himself from the paternal yoke, will soon want to 
 slip that of the commune. He who is tired of remaining a boy 
 forever in the house, will not like being always a minor before the 
 mir; he who finds family solidarity irksome, will promptly grow 
 tired of the solidarity imposed by the commune. The spirit of in- 
 dependence is, of its nature, a thing that, once it has entered a 
 certain sphere, is not to be shut up within it : close the house as 
 you will, it will find a way out to spread abroad. 
 
 If the commune is to survive the transformation it is undergo- 
 ing at present, it must cease to oppress the individual, it must leave 
 full liberty to persons. The ancient agrarian system's only chance 
 lies in adapting itself to the demands of modern individualism. 
 Now, is the Moscovite mir capable of this ? The communism of 
 the patriarchal family necessarily implies the solidarity of the mem- 
 bers ; there lies one of the reasons of the dying out of the Serbian 
 zadruga and the family communities among the southern Slavs. 
 Is this the case in the same measure with the village communities ? 
 In our age of individual liberty and ardent competition, between 
 nations as between men, an economic or political institution can, 
 in truth, exist only on two conditions, narrowly connected : not 
 to interfere with individual liberty, and not to hinder national pro- 
 duction. A study of the manner in which land is divided and 
 used under the control of the mir will show us what are, in both 
 these respects, the effects and the defects of the Russian rural 
 commune system.
 
 BOOK VIII. CHAPTER III. 
 
 Village Communities : Manner of Division and Allotments Large Com- 
 munities and Free Use of Vacant Lots The Mir of the Present Day and 
 Periodical Re-allotments Division by " Souls "and \>jTid,glos Epochs 
 of Division ; Disadvantages of Frequent Re-allotments A Portion of 
 the Defects Charged to the Mir Due to the Large Agglomerated Villages 
 Consequences of Excessive Parcelling. 
 
 AT the times when population was more sparsely distributed 
 than it is now, the Russian communities, at present limited to 
 mere villages, were able sometimes to cover much more ex- 
 tensive tracts of land. Such instances are still to be encountered 
 at both extremities of Russia in the north, in the government of 
 O16nets, on the confines of Finland, and in the south, amongst the 
 Cosacks of the Ural, Great-Russians by descent, mostly old- 
 believers by religion, and as much attached to the old customs as 
 to the old rites. There, by the river Ural, a vast commune has 
 existed down to our own time, covering an entire extensive geo- 
 graphical region ; there a whole army, sole proprietor of the soil 
 it occupied, formed one undivided community. Here was to be 
 found, nearly intact, in the nineteenth century, the form of prop- 
 erty and usufruct of the tribe or clan of prehistoric ages.* 
 
 Immense steppes, but moderately fertile and almost desert, to 
 say the truth, a space of nearly 27,000.000 acres, composed the 
 collective property of the Cosacks of the Ural. Along the entire 
 
 * Haxthausen (Studien, vol. iii., pp. 153-162) gives a description of the 
 regulations under which these Cosacks lived prior to the recent reforms and 
 the invasion of individual property, gradually introduced to favor the offi- 
 cers in consequence of the constitution of a military hierarchy, opposed 
 both in origin and spirit to the local Cosack traditions. 
 
 505
 
 506 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 course of the river Ural or Yaik, which has been made the con- 
 ventional boundary between Europe and Asia, there was not yet, in 
 the middle of the present century, a single lot of land belonging to 
 any individual man, nor even to a town or stanitsa, as the villages 
 are called, which are also administrative and military centres of 
 Cosack districts. The system of usufruct was common as well as 
 that of proprietorship. On a day fixed by the ataman, at a signal 
 given by the officers of each stanttsa, haymaking began on the 
 meadows along the rivers. All the men bearing the name of Cosacks 
 went to work simultaneously. First, each one cut with his scythe, 
 in the tall grass, a line enclosing the lot which was to be his to mow, 
 and all the land that had in this manner been appropriated by a Co- 
 sack became his by right he could then mow it at his ease, with 
 his family. In this vast community, the land as the water, the 
 meadows and arable fields as the fisheries on the sea or the rivers, 
 were common property and worked after the same manner, all 
 starting at the same moment, by order and under the supervision 
 of the chiefs, but every one working for himself for this common 
 proprietorship and common usufruct had nothing to do with the 
 system of equal remuneration preached by certain socialists. 
 Notwithstanding this important restriction, such a system, from 
 the moment that the inhabitants are numerous enough for the 
 products of the soil to become the subject of dispute, leaves little 
 liberty to individual action ; it leads to despotic democracy or to 
 bureaucratic regulations. That it could survive to our days on 
 the banks of the Ural, was only owing to the military organization 
 of the Cosacks. 
 
 In the steppes of the south, as in the forests of the north, the 
 existence of these vast communities, where periodical re-allot- 
 ments were unknown, depended first of all on the productiveness 
 of the soil and the scarcity of labor. As population increased, 
 the rights of each member had to be defined more strictly, the 
 lands had to be assigned to each village and distributed among the 
 inhabitants. In the more recently colonized regions, the time is
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 507 
 
 still remembered by many when the use of the soil was not con- 
 fined within such narrow limits. With the Cosacks of the Don as 
 well, the time is not so far removed when every Cosack was free 
 to take possession of any vacant piece of steppe-land. In the 
 government of Samdra, on the eastern bank of the Volga, old 
 men recall the time when every man could cut as much hay as 
 would make a wagon-load. 
 
 Similar customs still survive in sundry of the thankless north- 
 ern regions, the rough climate and meagre soil of which offer but 
 few attractions to colonists. This is seen especially in Siberia, 
 where it often happens that the meadow-lands alone are divided, 
 while of the arable lands each man works as much as he is able. 
 In the region north of the Ladoga and One"ga lakes, in the chill 
 wastes of the government of O16nets, the proportion of individual 
 usufruct depends entirely on the amount of efficient work accom- 
 plished by individuals or families. Bach peasant is free to culti- 
 vate as much land as his strength permits him, or the number of 
 hands he disposes of ; all he has to do is to indicate by some sign, 
 generally a notch on the trees, the spot he has selected. .This 
 form of land tenure is usually allied in the province of O16nets, 
 to the system of vast communities comprising ofttimes whole dis- 
 tricts. The reason is simple. The dwellers in one and the same 
 valley form together a community whose domain extends, between 
 forests, along a river or a lake. The traditional boundaries of 
 these immense communal tracts have repeatedly been traced, less 
 in view of agricultural achievements, than for the sake of the 
 fisheries which represent the most unfailing resource of these 
 otherwise disinherited wastes. 
 
 In the district of Olbnets, each community numbers, on an 
 average, a score of villages and hamlets, grouped in vblosts 
 cantons around one large village which often gives its name 
 to the others, the latter regarding themselves as its colonies or 
 offspring. A single one of these rural syndicates comprises, it is 
 said, over one hundred villages and owns 550,000 acres with
 
 508 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 about 40 miles of meadow-land on the river Svir. We learn from 
 recent researches that these associations of numerous villages into 
 huge communities, or, to put it more correctly, this system of 
 appropriation of the soil in vast tracts, with the right for the 
 hamlets and families of freely helping themselves to the land, 
 appears to have been formerly in almost universal use. In this 
 case an investigation of the facts and historical documents but 
 confirms what theory would make us surmise. 
 
 The village federations of O16nets are the last remnants of 
 those huge communities which can no longer subsist in any but 
 half-desert countries, where agriculture itself still holds a very 
 subordinate place. The Russian communities of the present day 
 are generally limited to one village, where the custom of working 
 the land in common, for the good of all, or each for himself, has 
 long become an anomaly. In the remote regions, there still may 
 exist a few commons where the products of the soil and of labor 
 are divided among the co-proprietors. Such a state of things 
 may be met with in a few dissident (raskblniK) villages or out of the 
 way settlements ; but even there it should be ascribed not so much 
 to the persistency of ancient usages as to religious influences and 
 the communistic spirit of monastic associations.* 
 
 With the Russian mir, as a rule, the pasture-lands and woods 
 alone remain undivided. Unfortunately these two kinds of lands 
 represent but an insignificant proportion of the communal lands. 
 In this country so rich in forests, where wood is used so freely, 
 the villages best provided with lands, do not, most of the time, 
 own either a patch of forest or a stick of timber. The reason of 
 this anomaly is very simple. In the times of serfdom, the peasant 
 was generally allowed for his regular use only cultivated lots, 
 with the addition of a few lots of pasture and meadow. The 
 Emancipation Act merely aimed at vindicating for him, as his full 
 
 * Several of the more extreme dissident sects (raskdl) have very pro- 
 nounced socialistic tendencies ; one actually bears the name of " Commu- 
 nists " and orders that all property shall be in common. (See VoLIII. of this 
 work, Book in., Chap. IX.)
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 509 
 
 property, the land of which he had had the usufruct ; and, in the 
 application of the agrarian regulations, the peasants frequently 
 were defrauded of part of those lands which they used for pas- 
 ture. The woods, where they are not the property of the State, 
 were left to the former landlord, a thing the more to be regretted 
 that, originally, the peasant was to have the use of the forests and 
 that, prior to the emancipation, he was generally allowed to get 
 his timber from the master's woods. 
 
 This evidently is one of the weak sides of the new agrarian 
 system and the liquidation of serfdom as it has been enacted. It 
 would have been much to Russia's advantage had she, as has been 
 done in other countries, secured to the rural communes the pro- 
 prietorship of a portion of her vast forests, with the proviso that 
 communal woods should be, as in France, subject to strict govern- 
 ment control. Such a system is entirely favorable to the forests, 
 and free from all the drawbacks it presents when applied to arable 
 lands. That might have been an efficient way of preventing the 
 too rapid denudation of the country with all the evils it entails. 
 By leaving the forests to the former landlord, a double damage 
 has been indirectly inflicted on the forest wealth of the empire, 
 consequently on its entire rural economy, and even, in a measure, 
 on the soil and the climate, which both deteriorate through defor- 
 estation. The pomi$sh-tchik, impoverished by the emancipation, 
 had a double incentive to cut down the woods left in his posses- 
 sion ; it was for him the surest way of making money, and, at the 
 same time, of opposing the depredations of the peasants, insuffi- 
 ciently repressed by the police and by the laws. It is not too much 
 to say that, for having failed to protect the woods against the 
 rapacity of the want-ridden landlord and the plunderous propen- 
 sities of the mujik, the emancipation may be taxed with having 
 helped to bring about the devastation of the forests, so manifold 
 and unforeseen have been the consequences of the great reform.* 
 
 * In the kingdom of Poland, on the contrary, the right of usufruct en- 
 joyed by the peasant over the forests has been maintained and even extended 
 beyond measure, without any compensation to the landlords. This was the 
 opposite extreme and, as such, did not benefit the forests.
 
 510 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 The communal domain is generally composed of arable and 
 pasture lands. These latter, too much restricted by the Statute, 
 are nearly always used in common, each family sending out their 
 cattle, usually marked, under the care of a herdsman hired by 
 the commune. The arable lands are divided and redivided at 
 more or less regular intervals between the members of the com- 
 mune, to be cultivated by each one separately, at his own cost and 
 risk. Thus individual holding habitually goes hand in hand with 
 collective proprietorship. In this mir, apparently wholly commu- 
 nistic, the mainspring of effort is personal interest. In opposition 
 to an idea widely spread abroad, nothing is so repugnant to the 
 peasant as labor in common ; ever since he has been free he almost 
 invariably insists on working for his own account. 
 
 The principle on which the mir is based is that of periodical 
 re-allotments of the soil.* There are, in this, three points to be 
 considered : the claims which entitle to a lot ; the epochs at which 
 the common territory is divided ; the mode of allotment. On 
 these three points, especially on the two first, customs and prac- 
 tices vary greatly according to regions. 
 
 As regards the claimants, the accepted unit is sometimes the 
 " soul " (dushft) or " revision soul," i.e., the taxed male head, and 
 sometimes the household (tihgld)^ taking into account, as a rule, 
 the working capacities of the different households and the propor- 
 tion of tax that each can bear. The first of these modes is more 
 generally in use among the Crown peasants, who were subject to 
 
 * The term mir, the meaning of which shall be inquired into later on, is 
 the only one in use among the peasants. Those of " commune " or "so- 
 ciety " (dbsh-tchina and dbsh-tchestvo), employed by Russian writers as 
 being analogous to the gemeinde and communitas of the West, are foreign 
 to popular speech. 
 
 f The word ti&glo signifies "a burden," "dues," "contribution," and 
 came to be applied to those who carry that burden, who owe those dues. 
 In the time of serfdom this term served to designate the unit of labor to be 
 supplied by each "household," technically meaning a man, woman, and 
 horse. A married couple is most generally understood ; but the meaning 
 undergoes singular changes in different localities. Therefore the divisions 
 made on this basis vary a great deal.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 11 
 
 only one tax capitation ; the second, among the former serfs, who 
 used to distribute their dues to their landlords by households 
 (tihglo), and naturally pursued the same system in distributing the 
 land which he ceded to them. 
 
 The lot awarded each family is in proportion to the number of 
 its male members or of its adult and married members. It is easy 
 to see what encouragement such a system gives to the increase of 
 population. Each son, when born, or when he arrives at man's 
 estate, brings to the family an additional lot. So that a numerous 
 offspring, instead of lessening the paternal resources, increases 
 them. Juridically, the women have no claim whatever to land.* 
 In practice they have about as great a share of it as the men ; for 
 since, under the ti&glo system, a lot is given to each couple, it is 
 the woman who really holds the key to landed property. Hence 
 Russia is, of all European countries, that where marriage is most 
 in honor and most prolific. Owing to this twofold superiority, 
 the average of births is nearly double that in France. The rigor 
 of the climate, the hard life, and above all the mortality among 
 children, are the only hindrances to a marvellously rapid increase 
 of the rural population. 
 
 This very increase compels periodical re-allotments. To sup- 
 ply the new-comers with lots, without every time rehandling the 
 whole land, many communes, especially among the Crown peas- 
 ants, keep on hand reserve lands. These they let for the mir's 
 benefit, or else make use of as commons, for pasture. The grow- 
 ing denseness of the population, the smallness of many of the lots 
 ceded to the peasants at the time of the emancipation, deprive 
 most villages of this resource. The new-comers, then, can enforce 
 their right only by means of a re-allotment. This would be neces- 
 sitated anyhow by the fundamental principle on which com- 
 munal life is based, for otherwise, families increasing unequally, 
 the common property would soon be unequally divided. In this 
 
 * Yet in certain regions the division by "head" or "mouth," indepen- 
 dently of age or sex, is beginning to come up.
 
 512 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 they have to deal with one of the difficulties which beset com- 
 munism of any type, which, left to itself, inevitably tends to self- 
 destruction, absolute equality being an impossibility, unless 
 continually kept up by watchful re-division. Of course, the 
 more frequent the re-allotments, the more faithfully the principle 
 is maintained, but the more agriculture is hampered and general 
 prosperity hindered. 
 
 For meadow-lands, the system of annual re-allotment still pre- 
 vails ; there even are, in the government of Tamb6f, communes 
 which proceed to it twice a year. In others again, the haymaking 
 is done in common and the hay divided afterward.* There are 
 districts where cultivated lands are subject to the same system of 
 annual re-allotment ; they are only too numerous in the govern- 
 ments of Sardtof, Ori61, Kaluga, Nijni-N6vgorod, Vor6nej, etc.; 
 in that of Perm such was the widely spread custom down to 1872. 
 Such a system is too manifestly disturbing, too much opposed to 
 the husbandman's interest to be general. The re-allotments 
 mostly take place every three years, in conformity to the most 
 popular mode of culture, that by triennial rotation. In places 
 this period of three years is doubled, tripled, quadrupled. In 
 others again, as in some communes of the government of Moscow, 
 a decennial period has been fixed upon ; and yet in others, as with 
 the Great-Russians of Vor6nej, they wait till a new "revision" 
 or census takes place. From documents published in 1880, such 
 appears to be the rule among the Crown peasants of the govern- 
 ment of Kazan. These "revisions," which should not be con- 
 founded with what is known in the West under the name of general 
 census, occur at irregular intervals of (until now) over twelve or 
 fifteen years. Since 1719 there have been but fen, the last having 
 taken place in 1858. In the communes which proceed to general 
 re-allotments only at revision time, none have taken place yet 
 
 * The facts and cases here mentioned are mostly taken from the agricul- 
 tural inquests or the statistics kept by the various ministerial departments 
 and the zbmstvos.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 513 
 
 since the abolition of serfdom, and there may be none for some 
 time to come perhaps never, the tax on males having been sup- 
 pressed by the Emperor Alexander III., which measure did away 
 with the necessity for " revisions " on the old line. 
 
 Triennial re-allotment was justified by the mode of culture ; 
 re-allotment timed by ' ' revisions ' ' was based on the system of 
 taxation. From one ' ' revision ' ' to the next, the number of 
 "souls," or male peasants subject to the poll-tax, remained un- 
 changed, no matter how many had been the deaths and births. 
 The commune was mutually responsible before the fisc ; so that, 
 each family, at each new " revision," receiving a lot in proportion 
 to the burdens it bore or the number of hands it disposed of, the 
 tax which, after the letter of the law, bore on the persons, was 
 made indirectly to bear on the lands. 
 
 The fatal effects of frequent divisions of the soil scarcely need 
 pointing out. On this point, opinions are all but unanimous. The 
 peasant does not grow attached to a piece of ground which he 
 does not expect to keep and only strives to draw from it the great- 
 est possible immediate profit, without a thought for the morrow. 
 His care and his foresight he reserves for the house-lot (uscidba) 
 around his izbfr, which cannot be taken from him. The adversa- 
 ries of the mir do not fail to make this point in favor of their 
 theory of the advantages of fixed and individual proprietorship 
 over collective land tenure. The husbandman who tills a com- 
 munal field is unwilling to undertake labor and expenses which 
 are to benefit somebody else. The absolute lack of manure or 
 fertilizer of any kind in so many Great-Russian villages is gener- 
 ally ascribed to this want of interest in the husbandman. Hence 
 the unavoidable impoverishment of the soil and constant aggrava- 
 tion of bad crops. To this evil there formerly was a remedy, or 
 at least a palliative : an exhausted tract of land was abandoned to 
 seek new, sometimes virgin, lands. Nowadays the increase of 
 population and the extension of husbandry render this remedy 
 more and more difficult to apply and less and less efficient.
 
 514 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Is this an irreparable evil, a curse naturally inherent to collec- 
 tive property holding ? An impartial mind must needs reply : not 
 proven. Some few communes in the governments of Penza and 
 Simbirsk have hit on the expedient of imposing on the peasants 
 obligatory manuring, with the alternative of keeping the same 
 lot at the next distribution. This is an example that might be 
 followed, and the communal authorities, being always on the spot, 
 would be better qualified than a non-resident to see that such con- 
 ditions be complied with. There is, moreover, a still simpler and 
 easier way : to put off the re- allotments. And that is precisely, 
 on the showing of the agricultural inquests, what has been done 
 more and more since the emancipation, and almost everywhere, 
 now of their own accord, now at the suggestion of some intelli- 
 gent functionary. Annual re-allotment, at least for cultivated 
 fields, has actually become an exception and even the triennial 
 period is growing rare. Periods of ten, fifteen, twenty, even 
 thirty years are getting more and more frequent. In some dis- 
 tricts, the peasants, made wise by experience, have recourse to a 
 new distribution only at the last extremity. 
 
 For that frequent re-allotments are an evil, the most deter- 
 mined advocates of the mir are the first to acknowledge. It is, 
 therefore, not to be wondered at, in a country always inclined to 
 look to the State for interference, if more than one voice endowed 
 with authority has expressed the wish that law and administra- 
 tion should regulate this vital matter. Some defenders of com- 
 munal institutions, seeing their pet theories endangered before 
 public opinion by the abuse of the right of re-allotment, have 
 besought the government to hasten to the mir's assistance by 
 protecting it against itself, strangely unconscious that, by such an 
 appeal to official interference, they run the risk of striking a mor- 
 tal blow at a system of which the main strength lies in the popu- 
 lar customs, in tradition, in its living spontaneity. 
 
 These evils are far from belonging exclusively to communal 
 lands. Private landed property is not free from them. Many
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 515 
 
 estates are leased for short terms to the peasants of a commune, 
 and they proceed to divide and cultivate them in the same manner 
 as their own lands. " What difference," on this occasion remarks 
 one of the advocates of the mz'r, ' ' between personal property 
 leased out every year, as is customary with so many noblemen's 
 estates, and collective property, re-divided each year ? It is more 
 difficult to bring the noble landlords to lengthen the term of their 
 leases than the peasants to put off their re-allotments. If a law is 
 needed to regulate the latter, why not the former ? ' ' 
 
 The Minister of Crown Demesnes is said to have lately pro- 
 posed for study the question of a minimum term to be fixed for 
 the use of arable lands ; but official measures have already been 
 forestalled and may be rendered unnecessary by the spontaneous 
 resolutions of several rural communes. Thus the natural course 
 of things brings its own remedy to one of the chief evils of col- 
 lective tenure. The beneficial effects of this reform already make 
 themselves felt. In the governments of Tula and Kursk, manur- 
 ing and crops have increased in consequence. And it has been 
 noticed that the wealthiest communes are those that are most back- 
 ward with rehandling their lands. A further good effect is the 
 delay and limitations imposed on family divisions of land. Young 
 men or young couples can either stay at home or go out to work 
 for a salary until a new division gives them a lot of the communal 
 land. 
 
 The manner of allotment is not of less importance nor does it 
 entail less inconvenience than the time of it. Here also the dam- 
 age is greater in proportion as the communistic spirit and practices 
 are more strictly adhered to. The principle of the mir demands 
 that, each lot bearing an equal part of the tax, each should be 
 strictly equal to the next one. This principle the Russian com- 
 mune usually conforms to with servile punctiliousness. It strives 
 to make the pieces of ground equal both in area and value, then 
 lots are drawn for them. This twofold equality cannot, as a rule,
 
 516 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 be arrived at by giving to each one compact lot. So each peasant 
 receives a bit each of as many kinds of soil as there are in the 
 commune. The village surveyors begin by marking off the lands 
 of the different categories, then, in each of these blocks, as many 
 small lots are cut out as there are members to be supplied. When 
 the lands are all of the same quality, a thing which, thanks to the 
 homogeneousness of the Russian soil, is fortunately less rare than 
 in Western Europe, the unequal distance from the village still 
 makes them of unequal value to the peasant. One of the con- 
 sequences of the community of landed property is, indeed, the 
 agglomeration of the dwellings. Isolated houses, dispersed farms, 
 presuppose permanent ownership. To be within reach of the lot 
 which may fall to him, each member of the community must be 
 settled near his brethren, in the centre of the common domain. 
 
 Thus in Great- Russia, peasant houses crowd together into large 
 villages, holding, many of them, several thousands of inhabitants. 
 The log-houses stand on two long straight lines, on both sides of a 
 disproportionately wide street (to obviate the spreading of fire), 
 disposed, if possible, along a stream. The izbas, which never 
 touch, usually present to the street one of their lateral faces, often 
 sporting a balcony, or merely carved wood ornaments. In front of 
 the izbh is a yard with stables and barns ; back of it the enclosed 
 " house-lot " (usadba), exempt from divisions. This manner 
 of clustering together, in harmony with the mode of land tenure, 
 is also justified by the climate and the nature of the Russian 
 soil. In the south and east, where it is most fertile, water is 
 scarce and springs are few ; all over the land communications are 
 impeded in spring, at thaw-time, and in autumn, not to mention 
 the fear of robbery and assassination. These huge villages are at 
 present one of the chief obstacles to the establishment of individual 
 property which, under this system of agglomerated dwellings, can- 
 not enjoy all its advantages. Husbandry, in fact, is nearly as 
 dependent on the manner of residence as on that of tenure. In a 
 country where population is not dense, and distances are great,
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 517 
 
 individual proprietorship can have a fair chance and full play only 
 if the husbandman, with his stock and implements, resides in the 
 middle of his land. Now in Great- Russia, farms with isolated 
 farmhouses (kktitor) are almost unknown ; they are rare even 
 where the peasants have purchased land for their own. They are 
 met with scarcely anywhere but in Little- Russia, where manners 
 are very different in this respect, and lands, even where the 
 communal system prevails, are divided more by the ' ' house ' ' or 
 ' ' yard ' ' (dvor) than by the ' ' soul ' ' or household labor unit 
 (tihglo). 
 
 A goodly portion of the evils ascribed to the communal land 
 system really is caused by that of rural agglomerations. Now it 
 would not be sufficient to abolish collective land tenure in order to 
 substitute isolated farms to the large villages, to what the Germans 
 call das Dorf system. Such a substitution is everywhere a difficult 
 thing and a costly, demanding much time too ; in Russia it would 
 prove so perhaps more than anywhere else. It has been now and 
 then proposed to use the frequent fires as a pretence for scattering the 
 dwellings more. The greater distance between the houses would 
 reduce the losses which the country endures through the yearly 
 burning down of thousands of villages. Unfortunately man- 
 ners, clime, soil, and the eminently sociable nature of the Russian 
 people, are not the only obstacles to such plans. The Emancipa- 
 tion Act has raised one more : the ' ' house-lot ' ' adjoining the izbit 
 and given to the owner thereof in full permanent possession. This 
 little enclosed patch, exempt from the control of the mir, means 
 simply this : that, should the lands now owned by a village in 
 common, be to-morrow distributed finally among the families, each 
 would remain where it now lives, and be a fixture in the village 
 for a long time to come. Even then it would take centuries, most 
 likely, to transform the present mode of residence, and in the 
 meantime Russia would remain subject to all the disadvantages 
 which are entailed on agriculture by the remoteness of the hus- 
 bandman's residence, and which make themselves the more felt at
 
 518 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 present, the larger the villages and the more extensive the terri- 
 tory, increasing by just so much the waste of time, the cost of 
 transportation, and the difficulty of returning to the soil in manure 
 or fertilizers what is taken from it in crops. This again, however, 
 is one of those evils of collective property from which private 
 property is far from being always exempt. Many of the old estates, 
 disproportionately vast even yet, are still less within reach of the 
 hands that are to work them. 
 
 Under the system of division generally in force, the commune's 
 territory is usually divided into three concentric zones or fields, in 
 conformity to the practice of triennial rotation. From the centre, 
 occupied by the village, start as many rays as there are claimants, 
 and the sections thus obtained represent the lots to be awarded 
 each one of them. These lots, therefore, frequently assume the 
 wedge-shape ; but sometimes they take that of long and narrow 
 parallel strips. The drawing of lots is arranged in such a manner 
 that each claimant must receive a portion of all the three fields of 
 each category, without any thought being taken to join together 
 the portions allotted to the same family. Thus each lot (nadi^t) 
 is mostly composed of bits of land, separated from one another and 
 wedged in in other lots. The portion of one ' ' soul ' ' or one ti&glo 
 can be made up of scraps scattered in six, seven, eight, nine, ten 
 distant places, sometimes more. To get an idea of the exceeding 
 smallness of each such particle of land, it is sufficient to keep in 
 mind that the average allowance was from seven and a half to ten 
 acres per male head, and that, the peasants having in many cases 
 redeemed only the legal minimum, the share of each falls much 
 short of that average. In the communes which, while bearing a 
 large population, are ill provided with land, this parcelling of the 
 communal domain leads to an actual trituration of the soil. The 
 agricultural inquest mentions communes in the government of 
 Kursk where fractions of lots have been found measuring not 
 quite seven feet in width. Under the system of individual tenure 
 this infinitesimal parcelling is rarely equalled. Thus the system
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 519 
 
 now in force adds the defect of individualism, chief among which 
 is the excessive parcelling of the land, to those of communism, 
 which weakens the attachment to the soil and the energy in 
 labor.* 
 
 With such scraps of land rational cultivation is impossible. 
 Then, as they are distant sometimes several miles from one an- 
 other, the peasant wastes a large portion of his time and strength 
 in useless journeys, so that it is not unusual for the remoter ones 
 to be simply given up by their temporary owner. Again, a great 
 deal of land is lost in boundaries, and large quantities of grain in 
 seed. Lastl} 1 - they are so entangled that they leave no room for 
 turning round in and no facility of access, so that, from their 
 narrowness, they are exceedingly difficult to plough and harrow. 
 This places the husbandmen in a state of mutual dependence 
 which is fatal to individual enterprise. Neighbors, being unable 
 to act singly, are compelled to combine, and this leads to the 
 so-called ' ' compulsory culture ' ' (Jlurzwang) of the Germans. It 
 becomes necessary to leave the commune to decide as to the time, 
 if not always as to the nature of the work to be done. Mathe- 
 matical impartiality thus really destroys the free enjoyment of the 
 land and brings about, indirectly, a sort of common, or at least 
 simultaneous, cultivation, which might be made profitable by 
 improved proceedings, but which, with the routine at present 
 prevailing, becomes an additional hindrance to progress^ 
 
 Faults such as these cannot be corrected without giving up the 
 deceptive theory of absolutely identical lots and the puerile prac- 
 tice which, by a grossly material interpretation, seems bent on 
 presenting each claimant with a clod of earth exactly like his 
 neighbor's. It would be better to make up well rounded lots, 
 
 * The difficulties and disadvantages of communal allotment are some- 
 times attenuated by dividing the land, and the taxes along with it, among 
 larger and smaller groups, -which then subdivide it among the single 
 members. These preliminary divisions by fractions of villages are usually 
 preferred in the larger communes, where direct division, by the "soul " or 
 ti&glo, would prove too complicated.
 
 52O THE EMPIRE OF THE TSAKS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 well balanced in value, of sizes varying according to the quality 
 of the soil and the distance from the village. Yet even this 
 reform would not remove the evil. In the poorer communes, 
 the lots still would be disproportionately small, and would 
 become smaller still from generation to generation, along with 
 the increase of the population.* 
 
 As a remedy for this evil, one of the most serious that threaten 
 the mir in the future, the usual panacea has of course been pro- 
 posed : the intervention of the State. It has been proposed to 
 establish a legal minimum, below which no lot or fraction of lot 
 should be allowed to descend. Such measures would not only 
 have against them the theoretical principle on which communities 
 are based and according to which each member holds an equal 
 right to the land, they would stumble against serious practical 
 difficulties and would find it hard to triumph over the great 
 diversity of local conditions. It must not be forgotten, moreover, 
 that the excessive parcelling of land is not a fault belonging 
 exclusively to the collective system. Under that of individual 
 property, family divisions can lead to similar results. We see 
 something of this in the West, in certain parts of France for 
 instance. In Russia itself, this evil is encountered, among others, 
 in Lithuania, where the individual system is predominant. From 
 the moment that the peasant is to be a landholder, it cannot be 
 avoided under any system. In one way the collective system even 
 has one indubitable advantage : it would, in case of need, allow 
 of having recourse to uniform culture on a large scale a thing 
 which, keeping pace with the progress of instruction and agricul- 
 ture, might prove as favorable to the productiveness of the soil, 
 as to the interests of the joint proprietors. 
 
 * On the Isle of Java, where collective land tenure also prevails, similar 
 causes have produced similar effects. The rapid increase of the population 
 has reduced the lot of each laborer to particles far more infinitesimal 
 than in Russia. Then also there is a general demand for interference to 
 set a limit to the parcelling of the soil, or, better still, for the substitution 
 of individual and hereditary tenure for that at present in use. See De 
 Laveleye : De la Propriete et de ses Formes Primitives.
 
 BOOK VIII. CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Mir in Theory and Practice The Material Equality of the Lots does 
 not Always Imply Equitable Distribution Division according to the 
 Working Capacity or Resources of the Laborers Story of One Com- 
 mune " Soulless " Families ; Strong, "Half-Power," Weak Families 
 The Mir as a Providence Arbitrariness and Injustice Usury The 
 Vampires or " ^/ir-Eaters "Rural Oligarchy Landless Peasants and 
 Rural Proletariate. 
 
 system of strict material equality is far from implying 
 invariable equity in the distribution of the lands. As a rule, 
 there is nothing fixed and regular about the proceeding, certainly 
 nothing mathematical. The mir deals with its members more 
 paternally, i.e., more arbitrarily: it does not consider merely the 
 number of persons that dwell in a house, but also their ages, their 
 state of health, their resources ; it takes into account natural or 
 accidental inequalities, weighs the strength and capacity of each 
 member, and treats each according to his needs or faculties. 
 
 It would be a great mistake to see in this effort at compensa- 
 tion only a humanitarian instinct or an unconscious socialism, 
 bent on levelling everything in despite of nature. No ; the peas- 
 ants obey very different promptings, more positive, more practical, 
 as is their nature. 
 
 Community of lands stands, as already indicated, in closest 
 relation to solidarity before the fisc. For centuries the two 
 things have been so intimately connected, that it was very possi- 
 ble for a certain school to consider collective property as simply 
 a consequence of that solidarity. In a country where taxes of 
 all kinds have always been very heavy, where the possession of 
 the soil might always have been regarded more as a burden than 
 
 521
 
 522 THE EMPIRE OF T/iE TSAXS AND THE JiUSSJAWS. 
 
 as a privilege, where the sum-total of taxes and dues even now 
 frequently exceeds the normal income from the land, it was but 
 natural that, in distributing the communal domain, the peasants' 
 prime object should always have been the payment of the taxes. 
 Since the emancipation this question controls the entire life of the 
 mir as it did before, and, in distributing the communal ager, it 
 considers less each individual's claim to the land than his paying 
 capacity. Each lot, as a rule, corresponds to a proportionate share 
 of the taxes, and the quantum of land adjudged to each house- 
 hold is in proportion to the burdens it can bear. The distribution 
 of the communal lands is but another form of the distribution of 
 the communal taxes. 
 
 The endowment of families varies not only with the number, 
 but also with the strength and ages, of their members. The most 
 robust and prosperous receive a larger share of the land because 
 they contribute a larger portion of the taxes. Only those com- 
 munes where the income from the land regularly exceeds the 
 annual payments need not give way to such preoccupations but 
 are able simply to divide their fields by the male head or by 
 the household. 
 
 What need to point out all the complications and difficulties 
 of such a system ? The proceedings in use can scarcely be com- 
 prehended without the help of an example or a sort of diagram. 
 We will here find it convenient to borrow Mr. lye Play's system 
 of monographs, though not without warning the reader that 
 such a method can only give the particular facts in a given case, 
 from which it were imprudent to generalize. The Russian mir, 
 we must remember, knows of no uniform laws or rules, the cus- 
 toms vary with the regions, the districts, even the villages, each 
 community being free to regulate these matters to please itself, so 
 it pays the taxes imposed on it. 
 
 An economist, Mr. Trir6gof, seeing in the village communities 
 the organic cells of the great body politic, resolved to investigate 
 one closely ; so to speak, under the microscope. At the end of a
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 523 
 
 few years of patient observation, he gave to the world, in two 
 successive, most curious papers, the results of this sort of socio- 
 histological study. The commune chosen by him is named 
 Arashin and is situated in the government of Sardtof. It is in no 
 wise different from its neighbors. 
 
 When Mr. Trir6gof began his investigation, Ardshin numbered 
 493 inhabitants of both sexes, who formed 87 families, dwelling 
 in the same number of houses. The "souls," as established by 
 the last "revision" and subject to the poll-tax, were 212 iu 
 number. The communal territory covered 846 dessiattnas (about 
 2,327 acres, at about 2^ acres to the dessiatlna) of arable land, not 
 including the vegetable gardens and hemp patches immediately 
 adjoining the village. The arable lands, divided, as usual, in 
 three fields, were broken up into 212 lots, the same number as 
 that of the tax-paying " souls," of about 4 dessiatinas (n acres) 
 each, every lot comprising a portion of each of the three com- 
 munal fields. To the distribution of the property corresponds 
 that of the burdens. All contributions and dues, be they per- 
 sonal or land taxes, charged by the State to the commune of 
 Ardshin, the mir merged into one mass, with no distinction as to 
 name, origin, or destination. The taxes, thus blocked, are then 
 divided into a number of quotas equal to that of the "revision 
 souls ' ' and the corresponding lots. The sum-total of taxes and 
 dues amounted for Ardshin to 2,607 roubles and 30 copecks, 
 which gives 12 roubles and 30 copecks by " soul " and lot. 
 
 If, in conformity with theory and legal fictions, the unit of 
 distribution had been the "revision soul," every such "soul" 
 would have had its 4 dessiatinas and paid its 12 roubles. But 
 Ardshin does not operate per "soul" or "head," nor even by 
 the household. While one family would receive only one lot and 
 pay the 12 roubles and 30 copecks thereto pertaining, another 
 would be put in possession of five and a-half lots and assessed at 
 over 73 roubles a year. The most singular thing about it is that 
 the portion of land and of taxes allotted to certain families flue-
 
 524 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 tuates every year, according as the laboring power of their 
 members increases or decreases. Thus the house of one Vassili 
 Fed6tof held, in 1874, four and a-half lots, five in 1875 and five 
 and a half in 1876. Why this yearly augmentation of half a lot, 
 *>.,of two dessiatinas ? Because Vassili Fed6tof s children were 
 growing up, and the family, therefore, was able to bear an increase 
 of labor and payment. Ivan Fed6tof s share, on the other hand, 
 had, from three lots, fallen to two within the same span of time, 
 because the head of the house was growing old and the laboring 
 power of the family was steadily decreasing. 
 
 It appears from this that, where the commune wishes to keep 
 an account of all the changes brought on by age, sickness, or 
 infirmity, it is compelled to divide the land anew each year 
 unless, as is frequently done, a lot or half lot is simply transferred 
 from one family to another, without touching the whole. At 
 Ardshin the distribution is continually fluctuating according to 
 the means of families, the age and health of their members. In 
 this respect the paternal, if not disinterested, solicitude and cau- 
 tion of the Ardshin mir goes very far ; it investigates all the phases 
 of domestic life, it enters into individual differences. Thus a 
 certain family by the name of Maximof, which, by the "revision 
 lists, ' ' should have received four lots and paid for four ' ' souls, ' ' 
 had only two and a half and paid in proportion, because one 
 of its members was afflicted with bad eyes and another with a 
 chronic throat trouble. 
 
 Age and physical strength are not the only standards of 
 assessment ; the mir also considers the resources, the means of 
 labor of each house or " yard" (dvor), what economists call " the 
 plant. ' ' Thus the mir of Ardshin classes the families into four 
 categories. The first comprises those which, from lack of adult 
 laborers or agricultural implements, are unable to cultivate land 
 profitably and to bear the least part of the communal burdens. 
 Out of eighty-seven families, three were in this condition. They 
 got no land and were exempt from taxes ; in technical jargon,
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 525 
 
 " they had no souls." Next to these " soulless " families come, 
 in the classification adopted by Arashin, the "half-power fam- 
 ilies," i.e., such as do have one valid laborer, but are unprovided 
 with the laborer's indispensable helpmate a horse. There were 
 some ten such families ; they received each one lot, and were taxed 
 accordingly. To the third class, by far the most numerous (45 out 
 of 87), belong the families which have only one laborer, but one 
 or two horses ; they paid each for two ' ' souls ' ' and got two lots. 
 Lastly came thirty families more numerous or wealthier than the 
 others, each of which had charge of more than two lots, most of 
 them having three or four, some five and even five and a half, and 
 naturally taxed in proportion. 
 
 It appears from the above that, in the commune of Arashin, the 
 " soulless " and the " half-power " families, and those having only 
 one laborer, the joint number of which amounted to fifty-seven, i.e. , 
 over two thirds of the whole, held, together, less than half the com- 
 munal lands, while the remaining third, composed of the richer fam- 
 ilies, held between them more than half the lots 112 against 100, 
 and paid more than the other fifty-seven put together 1,377 
 roubles and 60 copecks against 1,230 roubles on a total of 2,607 
 roubles and 60 copecks. 
 
 A rather unexpected deduction is forced on us by this mode of 
 distribution, which is that, with these seemingly wholly commu- 
 nistic proceedings, it is in reality not so much the personal strength 
 of the laborer as the resources he disposes of which constitute a 
 claim to the land. In a mir like that of Ardshin, it might almost 
 be said to be capital ! I^and is preferably awarded to those who 
 have most means to get something out of it. It is less the demand 
 for produce which is considered than the means of production. 
 
 This uneven distribution, whether by "the soul" or the 
 "household" (tiagld), in accordance with the number of able- 
 bodied laborers in each house and their aptitude to work, is ad- 
 duced by certain Russian writers of note, such as Yuri Samdrin 
 and Prince Vassiltchikof, as the distinctive characteristic of the
 
 $26 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 mir, the essential trait by which the Great-Russian commune 
 differs from all agrarian associations or communities, whether of 
 ancient or modern times. They delight in presenting this mode 
 of division as a solution of the property question especially belong- 
 ing to the Russian people, and radically different from all more 
 or less analogous institutions. As a matter of fact it may be so 
 to-day, but from the historical standpoint the correctness of this 
 assertion is questionable. This manner of distributing land seems 
 to be derived, not from a particular conception of property as such, 
 but simply from the application to property of the mode of distri- 
 buting the taxes. The truth of this position is proved by the fact 
 that in certain urban communities the produce of the communal 
 lands is distributed among the inhabitants in proportion to the 
 figure of taxes paid by each of them.* 
 
 Such a standard the working capacity of the husbandmen 
 could hardly suit any but a country where the use of the soil was, 
 for the laborer, less a right than a burden. Take it all in all, the 
 cultivation of the soil may be regarded as a sort of public service, 
 an obligatory service incumbent on every able-bodied man, and 
 from which only age or sickness exempts. It is a fact that in most 
 communes where the income from the land runs short of the dues, 
 the men, from the age of twenty to that of sixty, are accounted as 
 laborers, and, as such, obliged to take their share of the land and 
 of the taxes. In the poorest villages this sort of service begins at 
 eighteen, or even sixteen ; and no one can ask to be freed from it 
 until he is sixty, or fifty-five, at the very least. 
 
 Should the antiquity of the tihglo as labor unit be established, 
 it would go far to confirm, at least in part, the views of Mr. Tchi- 
 
 * A large number of cities own cultivated lands. Some let them to farm- 
 ers, others divide them after the manner of the rural mir. The system 
 mentioned in the text is found to exist in Mol6ga, a district city in the gov- 
 ernment of Yaroslavl. The inhabitants are divided into eleven sdtnios, i.e., 
 " hundreds," and the meadows belonging to the city into as many lots, 
 which each sdtnia mows by turns. The produce, instead of being distributed 
 by the " head " or family, is divided among the members of each sdtnia, in 
 proportion to the quota of their respective taxes.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 527 
 
 tcherin and the school which regards the Russian commune as 
 having sprung out of the Moscovite fiscal system. In that case 
 the mode of division and onerous taxation would also mainly ac- 
 count for the general adherence to the communal system. In a 
 state where the fiscal system, through centuries, made of the pos- 
 session of land as much an obligation and burden as a privilege 
 and right, the reasons which elsewhere urged to the dissolution of 
 communities could not have much weight. Why proceed to a 
 final division when it frequently was more in the taxpayer's inter- 
 est to reduce his lot than to extend it ? It is quite possible the 
 mir may have stood its ground through so many centuries because 
 of the burdens which were heaped on it, the individuals dreading 
 to take on their own responsibility the load which it was for the 
 community to bear. 
 
 This lumping and distribution of lands and taxes, in conformity 
 with each member's resources, constitutes what the ingenious inves- 
 tigator of Ardshin calls ' ' the popular tax apportionment, ' ' and in 
 his opinion there is not much need of any other. It little matters 
 what is taxed, or how the state or provinces distribute the direct 
 taxes. The peasant does not care to know whether he pays for 
 the land, or for "souls" or families; poll-tax, land-tax, in his 
 eyes it is all one. All he cares for is the sum-total of the dues 
 and the manner in which the mir distributes it among the mem- 
 bers. 1 So that it was almost an idle trouble to substitute a land- 
 tax or income-tax for the capitation-tax ; any kind of reform is 
 bootless unless it lightens the mass of the peasant's liabilities. On 
 the other hand, the taxes, heavy as they are, do not crush him as 
 utterly as is usually supposed, the assessment in each individual 
 case being proportioned to the taxpayer's means and strength. 
 
 Ardshin shows us the exact nature of what may be called the 
 
 commune's fiscal solidarity and the almost sovereign power with 
 
 which it invests the mir. This power, the apologists of the village 
 
 communes assure us, the mir almost invariably uses for the greater 
 
 1 Does not this practically amount to " single-tax " ?
 
 528 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 good of all its members, striving with the strictest equity, the most 
 scrupulous earnestness, to balance all unevenness, to avoid all un- 
 fairness. Conceived of thus, the mir would be to the peasant a 
 sort of earthly providence ; the commune, a mother ever watchful 
 lest any of her children should be taxed beyond their powers. A 
 village like Arashin appears to our enraptured eyes in the guise 
 of a living rural Utopia, where ignorant boors have been, for 
 several centuries, converting into realities the most daring dreams 
 of the thinkers of the West. To make of these communes 
 veritable Edens, all that were needed, it would seem, is to lighten 
 the taxation. 
 
 Many writers since Herzen have extolled the peasants' sense 
 of solidarity, their good faith and sound judgment in their dealings 
 with one another and matters pertaining to all those delicate 
 questions of measurement and partition. These praises are, on 
 the whole, deserved. But, were they always so, the mujik would 
 not be human. Such proceedings lend themselves too easily to 
 abuses of all sorts for the mir to be quite free from them. Accord- 
 ingly the detractors of the communal principle are not at a loss for 
 flaws and elements of disturbance. 
 
 Fiscal solidarity, which, in a model village like Arashin beams 
 on us as the beneficient wz>-fairy, frowns in others as a tyrant 
 whose yoke is unbearable. To rid themselves of it, many peas- 
 ants of those who are better off try to go out of the community. 
 The discretionary powers of distribution, admired by some as the 
 master stroke of popular genius, is regarded by many even of the 
 advocates of the mir as an ingenious but dangerous piece of 
 machinery, which, in order not to degenerate into an abuse, 
 stands in need of being regulated by the State.* 
 
 The fact is that arbitrariness has opened the way for intrigue 
 and corruption into this system, apparently so strictly equitable. 
 
 * Thus Prince Vassiltchikof, a great admirer of the system not perceiv- 
 ing how difficult and, perhaps, inefficient any legislation in such a matter 
 would be.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 529 
 
 The agricultural inquests have, in this respect, become the vehicle of 
 plaints which come indeed from functionaries or proprietors foreign 
 to the mir but should not therefore be made light of. These small 
 self-governing democracies are exposed to two opposite evils : the 
 tyranny of the crowd and that of individuals. At one time it will 
 be the mass, the poor, who will lay down the law to the rich, for- 
 cing on them supplementary lots and thus compelling them to pay 
 more than their share of the dues. In the north, where the peas- 
 ants frequently make their living chiefly by industry and trade, it 
 is no rare thing for a commune to let in a particularly skilled arti- 
 san or a more than usually successful tradesman for two lots, i. e. t 
 for a double quota of taxes, which is but another way of taxing 
 capital or income. At another time, it will be the rich who, 
 through corruption or bullying, will lay down the law to the 
 majority, gain possession of the best lands, and create in the very 
 midst of the mir a sort of oppressive oligarchy. This latter 
 abuse, although apparently the least reconcilable with the consti- 
 tution of the mir t appears at present to be the more frequent of the 
 two ; at least it is more complained of in the depositions made 
 before the great agricultural inquest. There are in these Rus- 
 sian villages men who would be called in the West exploiteurs, 
 vampires : enterprising, clever men, who fatten themselves at the 
 cost of the community. The mujik has for them the frightfully 
 expressive name of " wzV-eaters" (miro-ytdy). In many govern- 
 ments those of Kaluga, Sardtof, and others most villages are pic- 
 tured as being under the control of two or three wealthy peasants, 
 who beguile the commune out of its best lands " for a song" or 
 for no compensation at all. To achieve this there is no need 
 either of dealing unfairly at the partitions or of cheating at the 
 drawing of lots. 
 
 In these villages as in ancient Rome, it is usually through 
 debt that the poor fall into the power of the rich.* The vampire 
 
 * It must be admitted that in this respect the peasant is wronged not by 
 his brethren alone, but also by middlemen of all sorts, by speculators, 
 either urban or rural, and generally known under the designation of " fists,"
 
 530 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 extends to the peasant reduced to want through improvidence, 
 sickness, or accident, loans beyond his power of repayment. The 
 frequent failures of crops in the southeast are a standing danger 
 to the needy, a standing opportunity for the unscrupulous rich. 
 The insolvent debtor is compelled to give up to his creditor, often for 
 a nominal price, a lot which he has no longer the means of tilling, 
 lyiquor is the bait most freely used, and the keeper of the kab&k 
 (saloon-keeper) the habitual "wzr-eater." Usury is the ulcer 
 that gnaws at the peasants' vitals, and collective land tenure is not 
 free from blame in this. 
 
 Property being common, the mujik cannot mortgage his share 
 of it. Even the us&dba, or house-lot, which is exempt from com- 
 munal handling, cannot, so long as the redemption operation is 
 not completed, be alienated to anybody not of the mir without the 
 latter' s consent. So that among the Russian peasants, as among 
 the Arab tribes of French Algeria, there is no landed, but only 
 personal, credit ; the consequence is the mujik pays for the ' ' mir- 
 eater's " money at the rate of 10 % a month, often as high as 150 % 
 a year.* The administration, the press, the local assemblies have 
 been, for the last twenty years, cudgelling their brains to find a 
 way of coming to the peasant's relief; popular banks have been 
 started by the State and by private enterprise, in vain. The 
 thorny problem of agricultural credit, so complicated everywhere, 
 remains harder to solve in Russia than elsewhere. The peasant 
 
 (kulakl), i.e., monopolizers. There even are cases, if we are to believe the 
 denunciations of a portion of the press and the revelations brought about 
 by certain trials (for instance the affair with Count Bobrinsky's peasants, 
 February, 1891), when former serfs, hopelessly in arrear with their rents for 
 lands farmed by them from their former lords, are actually reduced to a 
 semi-servitude, until they have acquitted themselves in full, by the "count- 
 ing-houses " of great landholders. 
 
 * See reports of the " Inquest " ; also the writings of Prince Vassiltchi- 
 kof and A. V. Yakovlef. The Russian "land-banks," whose bonds are in 
 great demand in the west of the empire, usually lend only to individual 
 landholders pomtish-tchiks, and, owing to the improvident thriftlessness 
 of many of the latter, these advances, meant to support large-scale agricul- 
 ture through the crisis of emancipation, became for numbers of the former 
 serfholders the cause or means of total ruin.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 531 
 
 remains the quarry of Jewish usurers in the west, of vampires 
 and close-fisted speculators in the north, centre, and southeast. 
 According^, penury is frequently met with among these husband- 
 men, who boast the title of landowners. The tendency of a great 
 mass of testimony which, it is true, one should beware of accept- 
 ing literally is to show that since the emancipation there are only 
 two classes of peasants left : the rich and the poor. The middle class 
 would seem to have vanished along with serfdom, which, by bend- 
 ing all heads under a uniform yoke, maintained an artificial kind of 
 level, to fall below which was almost as difficult as to rise above it. 
 The restraint of nobiliary tutelage once removed, free play was left 
 to individual qualities and vices, to industry and laziness, so that, 
 in spite of the common ownership of the soil, one of the first effects 
 produced by liberty was to increase inequalities. 
 
 The picture which results from the investigations of the great 
 agricultural inquest is not attractive. The greater part of the 
 depositions goes to show that the soil is being impoverished from 
 lack of fertilizing, in consequence of the too frequent partitions ; 
 the effort to achieve absolute equality in the allotments leads to 
 an absurd and inconvenient parcelling of the land, which is, so to 
 speak, frittered into dust, while the object is not attained, for all 
 this minuteness cannot maintain even an average semblance of 
 well-being in the families. Undivided property, the commission's 
 report concludes, is an insuperable obstacle to agriculture, a fetter 
 to individual liberty, a hindrance to all spirit of enterprise, a pre- 
 mium to carelessness and indolence. The great advantage of the 
 communal system, the great argument put forward by its advo- 
 cates, is that, by making the holding of land open to all, it does 
 away with proletariate ; and now, if its opponents are to be credit- 
 ed, it already threatens to do in Russia what it has done in Java : 
 to transform the entire rural population into proletarians. 
 
 What is true, in Russia as well as elsewhere, is that the bare 
 owning of land is not much without the means of bringing out its 
 value. Now the commune, while it distributes the land to its
 
 532 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 members, gives them neither working funds, nor livestock, nor 
 agricultural implements. Therefore we often see peasants who, 
 having sold their right in the land "sold their souls" is the 
 technical expression live as day-laborers on wages upon the land 
 assigned them by the mir. The guaranty against proletariate lies 
 less in the even partition of the soil than in the diffusion of capital. 
 
 Besides, even as matters stand now, it is not strictly true that 
 each man has his share of the soil. The universal right admitted 
 by theory cannot always be carried out in practice. Not content 
 with spreading through the cities, where there is nothing to check 
 it, proletariate gradually sneaks into the villages, guarded as they 
 seem to be by that solid rampart, the commune. Numbers of 
 peasants at the present day have not a foot of land to their name : 
 some because they have given up their share, to take up trade or 
 a vagrant's life ; many because their communes, having no reserve 
 lands and putting off the allotments more and more, have not yet 
 given them their share ; others again because they became or- 
 phaned before they were of age and the commune, their legal 
 guardian, has taken from them their father's lot, fearing lest, 
 through their inability or inadequate strength, the commune 
 should be left to pay the dues with which every lot is burdened. 
 
 Popular speech has a special name for these mujiks despoiled 
 of land : it calls them bobyll. Provincial statistics supply some 
 instructive figures on this subject. In 1871, only ten years after 
 the emancipation which had given them land, thousands of peas- 
 ants already were without any, in the rich Black- Mould regions as 
 well as in the meagre ones of the north. In the government of 
 Kostroma alone there were 98,000 such peasants, 94,000 in that of 
 Tambof, and 77,000 in that of Kursk.* This evil, moreover, can 
 
 * In this latter government yfj of the peasants are said to be landless, 
 and almost as many more reduced to the small hereditary "house-lot" 
 (usitdba). Adding to these the people of various classes settled in the vil- 
 lages, it was found that in this government alone over 200,000 persons, *. e. 
 over -fa of the rural population, had no part in the landed property. In 
 that of Kostroma the proportion rose to Jfa.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 533 
 
 only increase, since the families that once have gone out of a com- 
 munity cannot return into it except they buy back their forfeited 
 membership, not to mention the fact that re-allotments are becom- 
 ing more and more rare, the lots smaller and smaller as a natural 
 effect of the increase of the population.* Thus collective tenure 
 stands doubly convicted of inefficiency : first in being unable to 
 really secure a share in the land to every one ; second, in being 
 unable to protect from penury such families as it does provide 
 with land. 
 
 * Rural proletariate would already be a much more numerous class than 
 it is, were it not for the resource opened to it by colonization. (See end of 
 this volume.) The greater part of the peasants who go off into Asia are 
 driven to emigrate by lack of land. Out of each 100 emigrants going to 
 settle in Siberia who passed through the government of Tomsk in 1887, 62 
 owned no land, or very little. Out of a total of 780 families, 479 declared 
 they had left their communes from lack of land, and 278 from lack of work. 
 So it appears that, in spite of the ntir, the causes that lead to emigration 
 are much the same in Russia as in the West. In 1890 the number of 
 emigrants who had gone to Siberia was estimated at 40,000 annually. 
 Emigration was regulated by law only in 1889. Until then it had been 
 going on almost at random.
 
 BOOK VIII, CHAPTER V. 
 
 Partisans and Opponents of the Communal System Frequent Exaggera- 
 tions in Both Camps Are the Faults most justly Imputed to the Mir All 
 Inherent to Collective Tenure ? How Many are Due to Communal Soli- 
 darity and to the Fiscal System Situation Created for the Communes 
 by Emancipation and Redemption The Extent of Peasant Lots The 
 Mir does not yet really Own the Land The Village Communities will be 
 in a Normal Condition only after they have done Paying the Redemp- 
 tion Annuities. 
 
 AT the present day, as in the days of serfdom, the Russian 
 commune generally has two kinds of partisans : the Slavophils, 
 defenders of the national traditions, and the radical democrats, 
 more or less avowed followers of the West. The former see in it 
 a Slavic and patriarchal institution, destined to preserve Russia 
 from the revolutionary throes of the West ; the latter insist on 
 seeing in it a survival of the primeval joint land tenure, and a 
 precious germ of the popular associations of the future. Between 
 these two schools, so different in spirit, and starting from such 
 different premises, orthodox Slavophilism and cosmopolitan 
 radicalism, their common liking for the agrarian commune 
 forms a connecting link. On this neutral ground many con- 
 servatives, with more or less national and sometimes aristocratic 
 tendencies, are willing to make gracious advances to socialism 
 and radicalism with their levelling propensities, and affect to 
 deplore, as incurably tainted, the social conditions of the most 
 thriving Western states, hinting that Russia is the only country 
 where property is organized on rational principles, and, not con- 
 tent with proclaiming that landed property is the indispensable 
 consummation and accompaniment of liberty, to indorse the 
 
 534
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 535 
 
 revolutionary sophisms about paid labor being only another form 
 of serfdom.* 
 
 This queer combination, not unusual in Russia, of the Slavo- 
 phil spirit and socialistic vagaries, is not as unnatural as may 
 seem at first sight. Between these two seemingly diametrically 
 opposed tendencies, between the socialistic innovator, who is 
 nothing if not cosmopolitan and unbelieving, who dreams of 
 annulling political boundaries as well as pulling down private 
 landmarks, and the orthodox Slavophil, austerely in love with 
 the national traditions, sensitively jealous of his country's glory 
 and suspicious of all things foreign, between these two there is, 
 as we have seen,f a hidden link : contempt for modern civilization 
 which both anathematize, an aversion, common to both against 
 European society, against the bourgeois science and political 
 economy of the West, which one party attacks in the name of 
 an unrealizable Utopian future, and the other in that of traditions 
 belonging to an almost as chimerical past. 
 
 The Russian commune's enemies are the habitual opponents 
 of the Slavophil tendencies and socialistic dreams, devoted to 
 Western institutions and anxious for their country's complete 
 assimilation with Europe ; the economists, who take thought, 
 first and foremost, for material production, and are opposed, in the 
 
 * See in the Revue des Deux Mondes of March ist, 1879, m 7 study 
 entitled : Le Socialisme Agraire et la Propriete Fonciere en Europe 
 (Agrarian Socialism and Landed Property in Europe). One of the 
 journalists who have most brilliantly debated these delicate questions, the 
 late Prince A. Vassiltchikof, wrote the following lines in a letter with 
 which he honored me, in reply to the above-mentioned paper : " The 
 communal system having been introduced in Russia centuries ago, it is 
 very natural that, in discussing it, we should meet on common ground with 
 the socialists of the West, and that, in upholding this traditional institution 
 in our country, we should, to a great extent, reproduce the arguments by 
 which the socialists are striving to force it into the Western societies. . . . 
 It is an undoubted fact that, in several social and agrarian questions, we 
 trespass on theories reputed radical and revolutionary in Europe. . . ." 
 (This letter was published in the Revue des Deux Mondes of July isth, 
 
 1879.) 
 
 t See Book IV., Chap. I.
 
 536 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 north as everywhere else, to anything that interferes with indi- 
 vidual and free competition. Besides these, are arrayed against 
 the mir the greater number of landed proprietors and professional 
 agriculturists, these two classes being more nearly concerned in 
 its practical defects than any other. As an offset, however, the 
 majority of desk-and-library-men, the journalists and writers of 
 both capitals, won over by the theoretical advantages of the com- 
 munal principle, hold fast to the mir, and are fond of presenting 
 it as Russia's anchor of salvation. Is this always a tribute to 
 the mir" s own intrinsic merits ? Perhaps not quite. In their 
 paeans on collective tenure, the writers least suspectable of Slavo- 
 philism are prompted by another idea, which unconsciously 
 becomes the main one : that of dealing with an institution 
 essentially national, Russian, Slavic or reputed such.* That 
 is how, in a country sick of imitation, patriotic self-con- 
 sciousness asserts itself and becomes excited to exaltation at 
 sight of an undoubtedly original feature. That is how we can 
 account for the almost religious enthusiasm and fervent partisan- 
 ship with which collective land tenure inspires so many of the 
 most distinguished Russian writers, such men as Samdrin, 
 Ravelin, Vassiltchikof, of the latter of whom it has been in- 
 geniously remarked by one of his countrymen that, under the 
 socialist's working-man's blouse shows the velvet kaft&n of the 
 Moscovite boyhr. 
 
 In the conflict which was raging all round it, since the middle 
 of the reign of Nicolas, the Russian commune, up to the Bul- 
 garian war, seemed rather to be losing than gaining ground. 
 Public prejudice, which had been in its favor, seemed on the 
 point of turning against it. By temporarily raising to high honor 
 all that was Slavic in name or appearance, the last Oriental war 
 
 * In spite of all the proofs at present accumulated against this system, 
 Prince Vassiltchikof, for one, strives at great length to demonstrate that the 
 form of property in use in the mir is peculiar to the Slavs, and, at the same 
 time, that it has been in general use among all the peoples of this race who 
 were preserved from Teutonic influences.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 537 
 
 revived the waning popularity of the mir. The nihilistic agitation 
 at the end of the reign of Alexander II. may also have indirectly 
 contributed to strengthen the village communities, by removing 
 from the administrative mind, for a considerable time, any latent 
 notion of altering the traditional agrarian system, as such a course 
 might have supplied the foes of public order with a dangerous 
 weapon. 
 
 The reckless exaggerations in which the advocates of the com- 
 mune at times indulge may have repeatedly given rise in the op- 
 posite camp to speculations and delusions no less excessive. There 
 are few Russians but have a fixed, determined, and absolute 
 opinion on this complex question. It has often struck me that on 
 no other point dogmatism is so rampant ; on no other do the Rus- 
 sians find it so difficult to keep to the critical point of view. I 
 confess that both the commune's friends and enemies impress me 
 frequently as overrating, respectively, its qualities and faults. 
 The lack of moderation, of impartiality, which prevails in this 
 wordy war is easily accounted for by the vital importance of the 
 issues at stake and by the excitement of battle. 
 
 Prior to the emancipation, all social vices, all economic plagues, 
 used to be ascribed to serfdom. Now there are Russians who 
 would throw every blame on the collective tenure system. If the 
 great reform has not given to agriculture and production all the 
 impetus that might have been expected the fault, to hear them, is 
 the commune's. The temptation is great to create to oneself a 
 scapegoat, that can be made to answer for all one's mistakes or 
 disappointments. Such is the part assigned to the rural commune 
 by many Russians. Public opinion lays on it the heavy load of 
 unavoidable errors and unrealized hopes ; it is charged with all 
 that the liberated peasant is blamed for : with the backwardness of 
 agriculture; the mujik's improvidence or drunkenness; the dearth 
 or high price of labor ; the bad crops ; the premature exhaustion 
 of the soil ; even the famines that visit periodically certain portions 
 of the empire, become so many texts for homilies against the
 
 538 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Slavophils' pet national institution. If we are to believe certain 
 detractors of the mir, all there is to do in order to doom Russia to 
 irretrievable decadence is to treasure this legacy of barbarous 
 ages ; while, to open to agriculture and production an era of 
 unexampled prosperity, it would be sufficient to rid property of the 
 communal swaddling-clothes.* Even did the present system merit 
 all these attacks, such views and hopes would still be dangerous ; 
 for those who gather and merge into one all the evils under which 
 agriculture and rural production are suffering, prepare terrible 
 disappointments for the day when the sore from which they derive 
 them all will be closed if it ever is. 
 
 The Russian commune is most frequently and justly found 
 fault with in the name of agriculture on one side, of individual 
 enterprise on the other. We have discussed the harm to agricul- 
 ture in describing the mode of allotment. It can be summed up 
 under two heads : short term of usufruct and, in consequence, 
 carelessness of the husbandman and exhaustion of the soil ; exces- 
 sive parcelling of the land and dispersion of the lot fractions, 
 rendering rational culture impossible. The sad effects of the sys- 
 tem are mentioned in all the inquests. So in certain districts of 
 the government of Simbirsk, for instance, the rent of communal 
 lands is said to be about half that of private lands. So too, the 
 yield of wheat, oats, rye, is said to be generally one or two tchtt- 
 verts between six and twelve bushels per dessiatfna greater on 
 private than on communal lands. 
 
 Supposing all this to be correct, reply the advocates of the 
 commune, it is so under the system of division in force up to the 
 latter years ; but these methods can be changed they are chan- 
 
 * Thus a gentleman fanner from the south, denouncing, in a most spir- 
 ited pamphlet, the idolatrous infatuation of the men who, from their libra- 
 ries, place the commune on a pedestal, actually dared to assert that, were the 
 communal system suppressed, production would be doubled forthwith, and 
 all demand for police or prisons against the nihilists, communists, anar- 
 chists, would be done away with ! (Deltof, The Crisis of Ignorance, 
 Kharkof, 1879.)
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 539 
 
 ging already. This system can be modified to suit the demands 
 of modern improved modes of culture, in proportion as the great- 
 er number of inhabitants, the opening of new outlets, or the im- 
 poverishment of the soil so lately almost virgin soil make such 
 alterations desirable. Why should the rural communities be 
 more impermeable to progress than the individuals of an igno- 
 rant and conservative class in the matter of personal inheri- 
 tances ? 
 
 And the barriers to individual endeavor, retort the detract- 
 ors of the collective system, are they not the communes' doing? 
 Who else discourages all original enterprise, taking the sinew 
 out of labor and making the soil barren ? Does not the very 
 security which the peasant derives from the certainty of always 
 having a lot, countenance idleness, incline him to drunkenness 
 and improvidence ? 
 
 That may be true, again reply the apologists of the mir, but 
 such habits, long fostered by serfdom, are to be met with in other 
 countries, under a property system as well as a climate wholly 
 different from those of Russia. The remedy, with us as well as 
 in the south of Italy or Spain, lies not so much in a change in 
 the mode of tenure, as in the development of public instruction, 
 of the consumers' demands, in the progress of general well-being. 
 In what way does undivided proprietorship rob the husbandman 
 of that indispensable incentive personal interest? From the 
 moment that the distribution has taken place, proprietorship vir- 
 tually becomes personal, and there is nothing that betokens the 
 application of that most deadening principle : equal remuneration 
 of the laborers independently of each one's efforts and deserts ; 
 every worker is compensated according to his works, every man 
 is free to make savings. Why is it necessary that, to apply all his 
 care and all his powers to the culture of the soil, he should own it, 
 and that not merely personally, but hereditarily ? Is it not enough 
 that the usufruct of it is assured him for a space of time sufficient 
 to enable him to gather all the fruits of his labors ? By length-
 
 540 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 ening the terms of allotment the commune peasant becomes, 
 virtually, a long-lease farmer.* Between these two men, or these 
 two conditions, where is the difference ? There is only one, all 
 to the peasant's advantage, which is that, the last instalment 
 of the redemption debt once acquitted, he will have no other rent 
 than the tax to pay for his land. If, with a usufruct of ten, fif- 
 teen, or twenty years, there are costly works and improvements, 
 wholly with a view to a distant future, which the temporary 
 holder of the land may not dare to undertake, does not the same 
 difficulty exist under the farming system which is in force in the 
 most nourishing agricultural regions of Europe ? Would not, 
 indeed, an equitable solution of this delicate problem be easier 
 with Russian collective than with English individual tenure ? 
 because, in the former case, the proprietor being a body of men, 
 the individual's interests are identical with those of all the others, 
 so their triumph is assured in the end.f 
 
 To an impartially minded observer one thing is clear : that 
 many of the drawbacks to the present system are by no means 
 inherent to it. They frequently depend on local circumstances 
 which react in exactly the same way on individual property : 
 want of instruction, lack of capital, the agglomeration of villages, 
 and the great distances from them to the lots, lastly the condi- 
 
 * The analogy between the temporary usufructuary of a communal lot 
 and the long-lease farmer of a private property is too obvious to need dem- 
 onstrating. Certain defenders of the commune have made it the theme of 
 their arguments in favor of the mir. Others, more uncompromising, like 
 Prince Vassiltchikof, refuse to admit this analogy, proscribe renting land 
 on lease as an irrational form of farming which must fatally impoverish 
 the soil, and invite the State to forbid or restrain by laws this pernicious 
 Western custom, not perceiving that most of these arguments also condemn 
 the temporary use of land in force in the mir. (See Socialisme Agraire, 
 etc, Revue des Deux Mondes, March ist, 1879.) 
 
 t This question of improvements made by the tenant and the compen- 
 sation to which they entitle him at the expiration of his lease is one of those 
 that must preoccupy the English agronomists and economists. Prince 
 Vassiltchikof, more logical on this point, would like the peasants to be 
 given the right to demand an indemnity from the commune for money 
 spent on improving the soil.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 541 
 
 tions created for the commune by law and the rise. Many 
 among the worst faults of the rural regime come from the adminis- 
 trative and financial regime. They should, in part at least, be 
 imputed to the State, which, finding it handy to make use of the 
 mir in the capacity of tax collector, has in many ways converted 
 it into a tool of oppression. The taxation itself is partly respon- 
 sible, as, by loading down the common property under an inordi- 
 nate weight, it has become an instrument of grinding and torture. 
 In short, collective property in Russia is placed in conditions 
 which, far from helping it to work easily and profitably, have 
 completely warped and clogged its action. 
 
 There is one universal fact which is admired too uncondition- 
 ally the solidarity in the matter of taxes. All the holders of 
 communal land are equally and mutually responsible for them. 
 That is a thing which disheartens individual endeavor and slack- 
 ens labor as surely as brief lot-terms, for it is all profit to the 
 idle and ignorant. This solidarity, so highly extolled even by 
 some Western would-be reformers, is too often the mir's scourge 
 and the greatest hindrance to economic progress. The industrious 
 and well-to-do peasant does not care to work for the good of some 
 lazy, drunken neighbor, who does not get out of the soil enough 
 to pay his quota, which, sooth to say, is often out of proportion to 
 the yield of it. Hence we see in Russia a renewal of the heart- 
 rending sight so familiar in pre-revolutionary France that of 
 peasants purposely making themselves outwardly poor and miser- 
 able to avoid being sold out for taxes.* Prosperous husbandmen 
 have been known to rid themselves of this solidarity by renoun- 
 cing all claims to communal lands, or even by purchasing for cash 
 their dismissal from the commune. It is nothing unusual for lots 
 
 * The agricultural inquest reports that some well-to-do peasants in the 
 government of Smolensk hide their money instead of spending it on live- 
 stock, out of fear that the animals may be seized for their neighbors' 
 arrears. In many villages, besides, there is a large class of tax-payers -who 
 have fallen behind and, not unfrequently, become the mir's insolvent 
 debtors.
 
 542 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSAKS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 to be offered to any one who will engage to pay the taxes and for 
 no one to be found willing to take them on the terms. Or, a lot 
 will be let for half the amount of the taxes it is assessed at.* Live- 
 stock is taken for arrears of taxes, and sometimes even the work- 
 ing implements, to the great detriment of the land, which has to 
 do without manure or fertilizer of any kind. Thence an evil 
 greater still : the dependence on the communal authorities of the 
 members, and the embargo laid on the first and simplest of liber- 
 ties that of coming and going. The mir, being responsible for 
 all, cannot consent to the temporary absence of its members, unless 
 they have acquitted their dues or given security for them. All 
 this further indirectly results in handicapping intellectual and 
 moral as well as material progress, blunting the sense of responsi- 
 bility, smothering originality, invention and enterprise. 
 
 If the principle of solidarity were applied to a normal land-tax, 
 taking from the soil only a portion of its yield, there would not be 
 much harm in it ; but we know, unfortunately, that such is far from 
 being the case everywhere, owing : first, to the excessive burden 
 laid on the peasant in the shape of taxes ; and, second, to the still 
 heavier burden of the redemption dues, which will weigh him 
 down through nearly the half of a century, so that he really is 
 called ' ' landowner ' ' very prematurely. When we examine .into the 
 condition of the rural communities, we must not lose sight of the 
 fact that they will fall into a regular normal state only after the 
 last instalment of the redemption indemnities will have been paid. 
 At present everything in them is precarious, temporary, so it is 
 hardly possible to form a definite judgment. 
 
 The emancipation itself, far from improving the mir's condi- 
 tion, has temporarily made it worse : in a general way, by tight- 
 ening the bond of solidarity ; and, in a special, local way, by 
 
 * The number of peasants who voluntarily go out of communes seems 
 to be on the increase. In the government of Vladimir there have been 
 as many 2,266 in fifteen years 390 for the first five years, 739 for the 
 second, and 1,137 for the last
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 543 
 
 imposing a rate of redemption out of proportion to the yield of the 
 soil, or by awarding them an insufficient allotment of land. Of 
 the two latter abuses, the first is unfortunately the most frequent, 
 and it distorts the principle of land community, by transmuting it 
 into a form of servitude. 
 
 In some regions, and sometimes they are the most fertile ones, 
 where the peasants have gone in for the " quarter lot," they have 
 received one half or one third of the land of which they had the 
 use in the times of serfdom. In such communes the lot awarded 
 to each family is quite insufficient for that family's support, and, 
 worse still, cannot be placed under regular cultivation. They 
 suffer already now from the evils with which other communes are 
 only threatened in view of increased population. Unable to exist 
 on the land allotted him, the peasant is forced to seek a living 
 in some industrial craft or to go elsewhere to hire himself out 
 as laborer. The inadequacy of the communal funds where such 
 exist is so notorious that already under Alexander II. several 
 provincial assemblies those of Tver and Tauris among the num- 
 ber were driven to make advances to the communes, to enable 
 them to enlarge the lots, while, under Alexander III., the State 
 itself, and for the same purpose, founded a special real-estate bank. 
 
 The complaints against the exiguity of the peasant lots have 
 become almost universal. Mr. lanson, professor of statistics at 
 the University of St. Petersburgh, has made himself the main 
 organ of them, until they have become, in the Petersburgh press, 
 a sort of commonplace. It has gone so far as to assert that the 
 peasant's hopes had been raised by imperial promises only to be 
 dashed ; that, while he had been promised a lot sufficient to ensure 
 his sustenance and enable him to take care of himself, the lot 
 actually given him is generally too small to meet the needs of his 
 family. 
 
 Now all such complaints are based on a misunderstanding. 
 The instigators of the charter, as we have seen, were everywhere 
 desirous of so extending the territorial endowment, that the peas-
 
 544 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 ants, when free, should own a quantity of land not lesser than that 
 of which they had the usufruct as serfs. But not even those 
 members of the Drafting Commission who most favored the peas- 
 ant ever dreamt of giving him land enough to make it unneces- 
 sary for him to work outside of his own lot. What would, in 
 that case, have become of the estates left to the nobility? By whose 
 hands would they have been cultivated ? And where would trade, 
 industry, large-scale agriculture, have taken the hands they 
 need ? As it is, and in spite of the smallness of the endowment, 
 in spite of the taxes which drive the peasants to look outside for 
 work, complaints of the lack of hands come from nearly all parts 
 of the empire, and, it should be noted, they are often loudest where 
 the mujik's lot is smallest. 
 
 There is still another obstacle to an extension of the peasants' 
 territorial endowment as urged by some journalists who, it seems, 
 would fain demand new agrarian laws, and that is that in many 
 provinces precisely, too, in the richest, comprising nearly the 
 whole of the Black-Mould belt, which is under regular cultiva- 
 tion there is not enough land to cut out for every peasant what 
 the Petersburgh press calls " a normal lot," and there will natu- 
 rally be even less in twenty years from now. Such a demand is 
 knocked on the head by a physical impossibility, against, which 
 all the agrarian laws in the world can avail nothing. 
 
 In reality, many Russian writers, when indulging in specula- 
 tions on the proper dimensions of the peasants' lots, unconsciously 
 start from a principle, too thoughtlessly erected into an axiom : 
 that, under the collective tenure system, nothing should be easier 
 than to ensure a competence to everybody. At the first glance it 
 seems only a question of distribution ; one forgets that collective 
 tenure increases neither the extent nor the bearing capacity of the 
 soil ; that capital and science alone can extract from the earth all 
 that it is capable of yielding. 
 
 If, in some parts of the country, the endowment has been 
 manifestly insufficient to lend itself comfortably to the communal
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 545 
 
 system, such, certainly, was not the case everywhere. The 
 communal lot conceded to much the greater part of the peasants 
 would be accounted considerable in any other country. Statistics 
 give an average of 16 or 17 dessiattnas (about 45 to 48 acres) per 
 dvor or family for the entire empire. True, this average is natu- 
 rally much lowered in the richer and more fertile regions of the 
 Black-Mould belt. There as elsewhere the Crown peasants, being 
 endowed with State lands, almost the whole of which (at least of 
 the arable lands) was made over to them, were placed in more 
 favorable conditions than the former serfs who had to share the 
 land with the masters, and moreover frequently elected the gratui- 
 tous minimum authorized by the law, so as to liberate themselves 
 from all payments and dues.* In those rich provinces, Vorbnej, 
 Tambbf, Kursk, Penza, the average still oscillated between 15 and 
 10 dessiattnas (42 and 28 acres) per family, without descending 
 noticeably below the latter figure ; f but we must remember that, 
 since the agrarian laws of 1861 were promulgated the increase in 
 the population has been considerable, and has reduced each 
 " soul's " or family's lot by just so much. 
 
 *To relieve this class, which numbers about 600, ooo, it has been pro- 
 posed to revise the Statute of 1861, and give such peasants a chance to redeem, 
 even yet, with the assistance of the State, the lands which they had fool- 
 ishly renounced. 
 
 f On the latest showing, the communes of Crown and Appanage peasants 
 situated in the eight governments of the central agricultural zone, and 
 making up between them an actual male population of 2,901,000 souls, of 
 whom 2,318,000 are entered on the " revision " registers, have received 
 11,092,000 dessiatinas (over 30,000,000 acres). To the communes of private 
 noblemen's serfs, with an actual male population of 2,929,000 souls, of 
 whom 2,456,770 registered, only 6,539,000 dessiatinas (about 18,000,000 
 acres) have been given. Which means that the private serfs have, on an 
 average, about 3 dessiatinas (2 T ? 5 ) per "soul" to the Crown peasant's 5 or 
 thereabouts (4^.) But, owing to the rapid increase of the population, that 
 average is at the present writing reduced to 2^ for the former and to less 
 than 4 (3 T 8 ff ) for the latter. Even so the average is still, for the former, of 
 7^, and for the latter, of 13 dessiatinas per family. (These figures are taken 
 from official statements, published in 1880, in St. Petersburgh, by the Cen- 
 tral Committee of Statistics.) The dcssiatina, as already stated, is equal to 
 about 2f acres. 
 
 35
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 Still, when all is said and done, one cannot consider as fatally 
 doomed to destitution peasants who own, on an average, from 
 thirty-eight to fifty acres of land ; who, even in the wealthiest and 
 most populous provinces, still can call some twenty-five acres their 
 own ; whose labor is at a premium in an extensive neighborhood. 
 The insufficiency of the peasant's endowment can hardly be held 
 alone or chiefly responsible for the evil plight of the villagers and 
 of agriculture. Of the advocates of the mir, several and not the 
 least enlightened do not hesitate to admit so much. Not there is 
 the root of the evil : if the peasant's lot so often seems insufficient, 
 it comes half the time from the imperfection of the agricultural 
 methods in use. Ignorance and penury, the lack of intellectual 
 and material capital, the lack of livestock and the necessary im- 
 plements, these are the things which debar the freedman from 
 making more out of his piece of ground ; and this penury of man 
 and impoverishment of the soil are, in a great measure, directly 
 caused by excessive taxation.* There in very truth lies the main 
 sore, the root of the agrarian trouble : in the disproportion be- 
 tween the extent or value of the lands allotted to the peasants, and 
 the burden laid on them ; and the evil is such, that all the measures 
 of relief already effected or promised by the Emperor Alexander 
 III. are inadequate to cope with it. Not only was the land he tills 
 not received by the liberated serf as a free gift, but he is paying for 
 it, in the shape of every manner of taxes and dues, a most exorbitant 
 price. So long as he labors for the fisc and not for himself, the 
 question of tenure is a secondary one. Had the peasants initiated 
 the uniform principle of individual ownership, they would have 
 been beggared all the same. 
 
 The communes, such as the emancipation has left them, are 
 traversing a crisis. We cannot possibly judge of what they 
 can be from what, at present, they are. Before we can do so, 
 
 * Mr. lanson (1881) gives most doleful figures in this respect, in which 
 the Russian journalists of all the different schools have been compelled most 
 unwillingly to acquiesce.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 547 
 
 fairly, they would have to be relieved of their fiscal fetters, of the 
 heavy and demoralizing load of fiscal solidarity and that will not 
 be easy, even after the suppression of capitation and the final wind- 
 ing up of redemption accounts will have made the commune really 
 owner of its lands.* Then, and then only, it can be put to the 
 test and experience pronounce the verdict. The redemption dues 
 figure for nearly sixty per cent, in the burdens borne by the former 
 serfs, and this terrible ransom, distributed over forty-nine years, 
 will not be acquitted before the twentieth century has seen its first 
 quarter wane. It is not likely that the state of the imperial 
 finances should allow of liberating the peasants before the expira- 
 tion of the originally appointed term. It is a great thing gained 
 already, that the Emperor Alexander III. should have been able, 
 without prolonging that term, to alleviate ever so slightly the 
 weight of the annuities paid by the former serfs. 
 
 * Capitation has been abolished by the Emperor Alexander III., not so 
 the redemption dues. Besides, were fiscal solidarity officially suppressed, it 
 might be, in the practice, upheld for a long while still by habit and by the 
 mir's authority. The government has more than once initiated the study 
 of ways and means for the modification of the system of tax-collecting in 
 rural districts. Unfortunately the calls on the imperial budget are so heavy 
 as to make such reforms hardly practicable ; arrears in the payment of 
 taxes might increase unconscionably in the hands of a collector less watch- 
 ful or less interested in the matter than the commune itself.
 
 BOOK VIII. CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The Manner of Dissolving a Community The Peasants of any Village are 
 Always Free to Suppress the Mir Why they don't Do it more Fre- 
 quently What they Think of the Mir How the Mir has No Objec- 
 tion Whatever to Individual Property, even though it Usually Upholds 
 the Communal System Purchases of Land by Peasants Distribution 
 of the Arable Lands between the Communes and Other Proprietors 
 Utility and Functions of Personal Property Can Both Modes of Tenure 
 Co-Exist Some Day ? 
 
 WHAT is the ultimate fate of the rural communes to be ? and 
 shall a decision on this head be postponed until they are free from 
 all the encumbrances which crush them, and have become real 
 and full proprietors of the land allotted them or, do the difficul- 
 ties that at present beset them make it desirable to come to a deci- 
 sion at once and to cut down at the root that gigantic growth of 
 centuries, the mir, without first attempting to trim it down and to 
 rid it of the parasitical plants which choke it ? 
 
 Few are those who demand the immediate abrogation of the 
 mir, but many those who wish for measures that should prepare 
 and ensure its gradual disparition. Even now village communes 
 are not indissoluble. The law, while upholding them, leaves to 
 the members the privilege of abolishing them by instituting a final 
 division of the communal domain between themselves. Nothing 
 more is needed for that than a resolution passed by the assembled 
 community, by a majority of not less than two thirds.* The an- 
 
 * More than that : the Statute, doubtless with a view to safeguard the 
 quondam serfs right of choosing the mode of tenure which best suits him, 
 has an article Art. 165 of the Redemption Regulation which empowers 
 single peasants to withdraw their lot from the common domain, proyided 
 
 548
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 549 
 
 tagonists of collective tenure would like to leave the fate of the 
 communal lands to an absolute majority, in the hope that this 
 would accelerate the suppression of all these agrarian associations. 
 To this demand, at first sight moderate and legitimate, there is 
 one main and weighty objection : the dissolution of the commu- 
 nity is not the only question which, under the existing law, the 
 mir is not allowed to settle by a majority of not less than two 
 thirds. The same rule applies to all questions of any importance. 
 It is the case with all questions that concern the division of land, 
 and this restriction is not without a good reason. It is a useful 
 curb, a wise precaution against the impulsiveness of ignorant villa- 
 gers, who need to be restrained and protected against their own 
 blunders all the more that, in its own sphere of action, the com- 
 mune is all-powerful and paramount. To leave to an absolute 
 majority the most important decision there is for the mir to take, 
 would be to make light indeed of dissolution, to renounce, for any 
 administrative or economic measure, the wholesome protection 
 awarded by an obligatory majority of two thirds. 
 
 Even with this restriction, the Russian law as it actually is, 
 opposes less barriers than almost any other to the alienation or 
 partition of communal lands. In France, where they still take up 
 one eleventh (^T) of the national territory, the communal domains 
 are far more efficiently protected against any sudden whim in the 
 way of selling or dividing them. The law leaves to the communes 
 the faculty of making certain purchases, but forbids their alienat- 
 ing any land without being authorized thereto by the central 
 power. The jurisprudence of the State Council, indeed, is wholly 
 opposed to any kind of division among the villagers. In Eng- 
 land, where they enjoy so large a share of self-government, com- 
 munes cannot alienate their lands without the approbation of the 
 
 they personally pay into the treasury the whole of the redemption sum 
 which falls on that lot. Several among the partisans of the mir wanted to 
 have that article recalled, but it does not seem to have had the effects they 
 dreaded, as few peasants ever were in a position to take advantage of this 
 concession.
 
 550 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 government. Were the system now in force in Russia introduced 
 in France, and were two thirds of the votes sufficient to cut up the 
 communal domains and divide them among the members, they 
 would soon have vanished, to round up the field of Peter and de- 
 fray the expenses of Paul. The wonder is how common property 
 has not yet crumbled away in Russia, with so little protection from 
 the law. 
 
 It has often been asserted that there are instances of lands di- 
 vided long ago among the serfs by the masters, and reconstituted 
 by the former into a communal domain after the emancipation, 
 while there is no instance on record of the opposite proceeding. 
 This is a mistake. Final partitions are rare, exceptional, but 
 they occur. The agricultural inquest mentions several as having 
 taken place in various governments of Great- Russia. There even 
 are districts where such cases are comparatively numerous, show- 
 ing signs of a turn in the tide of popular feeling, favorable to indi- 
 vidual property and principally caused, aside from the wish to 
 escape from fiscal solidarity, by the fear that the increase of popu- 
 lation, by making the lots smaller all the time, may at last deal 
 a mortal blow to the communal system, unless some way is found 
 of substituting some other method for the system of periodical re- 
 allotment.* 
 
 The instances we have of such dissolutions are, in any case, 
 sufficient to show that the law even now is far from opposing an 
 insurmountable barrier to such operations. They occurred very 
 
 * Thus, in one district of the government of Nijni Ndvgorod, 49 villa- 
 ges out of 190, and in a district of Mohilef, 25 out of 344, had given up the 
 communal system. These, however, were exceptional cases. In many 
 villages, in many governments even, only one or two final partitions 
 occurred out of hundreds and thousands of villages (in the government of 
 Kursk, for instance, 2 out of 3,591). It is to be noticed that these resolutions, 
 sometimes suggested by a functionary or by a private landholder who is 
 not of the mir, are not always carried out In the government of Simbirsk 
 some communes are said to have passed such a resolution, only that a few 
 wealthy peasants should be enabled to redeem their individual lots, as pro- 
 vided by Art. 165 of the Regulation ; the rest kept to the old way. In other 
 places sham resolutions are passed just to get rid of fiscal solidarity.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 551 
 
 rarely in the first years, but have been much more frequent of late. 
 The peasants in many cases were ignorant of their rights in this 
 respect, but now that they have found them out they are begin- 
 ning to make use of them.* With the law as it stands, the fate 
 of the collective system is in the hands of the peasants themselves ; 
 the day on which the mir will have against it a considerable 
 majority it will fall at one voting. 
 
 The moment has not yet come for that. Setting aside cus- 
 tom and tradition, which have a great hold on the mujik's mind, 
 sundry reasons and prejudices militate against a final division of 
 lands. To begin with the crowding of dwellings, which makes 
 every man fearful of being given a lot at too great a distance from 
 the village where all live together. Then the fear of drawing a 
 bad lot, without the chance there is now of better luck at the next 
 drawing. Another objection lies in the communistic tendencies 
 of the mir. The peasants dread the unequal increase of families, 
 which, in the course of two generations at most, would mix up 
 everything. I^astly, where the taxes exceed the income, they are 
 afraid of being burdened with too large a lot ; in this case what 
 they dread is not the inequality of possession resulting from 
 the unequal increase of families, but, on the contrary, an excess 
 of it, resulting from deaths or sickness in families. ' ' Bad as it is 
 now," a village elder replied to the questions put to him by the 
 inquest commission, "it would be much worse if the land were 
 not at times re-divided ; the man whose family grew smaller could 
 not at all till his land and pay the taxes." In short, the greater 
 part of the peasants are still attached to the old way, even though 
 they often acknowledge its shortcomings. Of the noble land- 
 
 * In the course of the nine or ten years that followed on the emancipa- 
 tion, there were probably not a hundred communes that renounced collec- 
 tive tenure. But since that, on the showing of the Materials published in 
 1880 by the Ministry of Crown Demesnes, 140 communes were found to 
 have taken this step in only three districts of the government of Tula alone, 
 and analogous facts are reported of other provinces, that of Tver, for 
 instance.
 
 552 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 lords questioned on the subject by the commission, several de- 
 clared that they had tried in vain to get their peasants' consent to 
 a final partition. I myself have heard the same assertion from 
 men who are strongly opposed to the present system. 
 
 It is, moreover, difficult to find out, with any degree of cer- 
 tainty, what the peasants really think on this subject, which so 
 nearly concerns them. Who, in the mir, are the advocates of 
 communal tenure ? Are they the idlers, the drunkards, the im- 
 provident, or are they, on the contrary, the industrious and well- 
 to-do ? On this point the most opposite assertions are found in 
 the reports of the agricultural inquest commission, and elsewhere. 
 The peasants are represented as divided into two classes, without 
 an intermediate class : the rich and the poor. Towards which 
 opinion does each incline? The rich, who have been enriched 
 by the actually subsisting system, are usually considered as its 
 opponents, while the poor, who have reaped from it nothing but 
 penury, are said to be its warmest adherents. Which would 
 mean that the more prosperous, being the most industrious and 
 hard-working, advocate the system which would best ensure to 
 them the fruits of their labor, while the more improvident or 
 indolent hold with that which guarantees them the easiest 
 existence. 
 
 Yet, on the commission's own showing, this distribution is 
 far from universal. For one witness a governor of Kursk 
 among others who testifies that the more well-to-do are those 
 who want the communities to be dissolved, and even sometimes 
 petition the government in this sense, there will be numerous 
 landlords who say and repeat that a few wealthy peasants are the 
 only ones to benefit by the communal system ; that these village 
 oligarchs, who hold the mir under their thumb, exert their 
 authority to uphold it, because it enables them to squeeze their 
 fellow-members dry. One witness, a Mr. Yerem6yef, even goes so 
 far as to aver that, owing to these "vampires," only a power 
 placed above the community can pronounce the sentence of abro-
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 553 
 
 gation. A commission chosen out of the nobility of St. Peters- 
 burgh recently proposed, as a means to facilitate the dissolution, 
 that ill-behaved members, and such as are in arrear with their 
 taxes, should be excluded. To this a writer in Moscow replied 
 that those were precisely the most inclined to a final partition, the 
 most desirous of having a lot all their own, to sell for money or 
 drink, as they pleased ! 
 
 When the Russians themselves, who know the mujik best, 
 give us such contradictory information, a foreigner would find it 
 hard indeed to make a choice and would be overbold to draw a 
 conclusion. Such divergences can be accounted for only in one 
 of two ways : either the peasant puts this big question to himself 
 but rarely as yet, or he has not yet formed a fixed opinion regard- 
 ing it. In the meantime, the greater portion cling to the old 
 customs and the ways of their fathers. The facts nevertheless 
 show that he begins to revolve the question in his mind and that 
 his verdict is not always favorable to the mir. It should not be 
 forgotten either, that a not inconsiderable number of communes, 
 without actually going over to individual tenure, have not pro- 
 ceeded to re-allotments since the emancipation. In such villages 
 it is not impossible that the change may be effected without any 
 harsh revulsion, in a manner almost insensible. 
 
 One thing is certain that the Russian peasants, even while 
 upholding, as a rule, collective tenure where it exists, do not feel 
 that instinctive, unreasoning aversion against the opposite system, 
 with which Herzen and the Russian socialists credit them. They 
 by no means see in communal tenure the only natural and legiti- 
 mate form of landholding, and in personal proprietorship a mon- 
 strous and iniquitous usurpation. Those who can, are fond of 
 purchasing a piece of land for their very own. The liking which, 
 in common with all the peasants in the world, they have for the 
 soil, the earth as such, is counterbalanced in them only by the 
 national taste for trading. All the reasons that seem to carry 
 them along towards the dissolution of the commune, prompt them
 
 554 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 to begin at once acquiring personal property. The liberated serfs 
 buy land, but of their former lords, outside the jurisdiction of the 
 mir. This appetite for property has been noticed of all since the 
 emancipation. The merchants also buy up many lands long in 
 the possession of noble families, but it is usually with a view to 
 reselling to the peasants in small lots. The demand on the 
 latter 's part is such that this speculation has become quite 
 remunerative ; the margin of profit is very considerable. In the 
 single government of Kursk the communal peasants had acquired 
 land for two million roubles in one year. This transfer move- 
 ment, which the agricultural inquest commission pointed out in 
 1872, has steadily increased since. In the government of Tver 
 the peasants, during the last years of Alexander II. , bought up 
 near on 1,250,000 acres, in Tauris 430,000 dessiatinas (about 
 1,180,000 acres), over 300,000 (825,000 acres) in that of Samdra, 
 over 200,000 (550,000 acres) in that of Sardtof, and over 150,000 
 (413,000 acres) in that of Khers6n. And now, since Alexander III. 
 came to the throne, the Peasants' Bank has loaned them, for the 
 purpose of purchasing lands, sixteen millions of roubles in 1886, 
 thirteen in 1887, the average purchase price being, in 1887, 4 1 
 roubles 73 copecks per dessiatina. True, the purchase is generally 
 made in bits, by some one peasant who has somehow made money ; 
 still, sometimes an artel will be formed ; at other times again the 
 communes become purchasers. Vast estates, of thousands of 
 acres, have been known to pass into the hands of peasants' 
 associations in this way. Sometimes they keep the land un- 
 divided, as common property ; but more frequently they divide 
 it among themselves finally, which gives one argument at any 
 rate to the opponents of collective tenure. In this way, many 
 mujiks are at the same time usufructuaries of a communal lot, 
 and full proprietors of a piece of land bought with their pence.* 
 
 * In the government of Tver, for instance, out of 469,000 dessiatinas 
 (1,290,000 acres), 115,000 (317,000 acres) have been bonght up by communes, 
 105,000 (289,000 acres) by arfels or associations, and 248,000 (682,000 acres)
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 555 
 
 There is plenty of room for such operations. For the whole 
 Russian territory is far from belonging to the rural communities. 
 There are the Crown lands, there are the estates of the noble 
 landlords, there are many domains of vast extent, some of them 
 colossal, often badly cared for, if not quite uncultivated, which 
 the owners would be only too glad to alienate or reduce to 
 reasonable proportions.* 
 
 It were highly interesting to have an exact and detailed 
 diagram of the proportion in which lands are divided between the 
 various classes, and especially between individual and collective 
 tenure. Now, on this latter point, we are reduced to estimates 
 which are as yet incomplete. Moreover, the general estimates 
 covering the area of a territory in great part unsuited for agricul- 
 ture, the averages deducted from them, could give only a very 
 misleading idea of the real importance of that or the other mode 
 of tenure. 
 
 The peasant is shown to possess at the present moment an agri- 
 cultural domain at least twice as extensive as the entire European 
 territory of France. Of this vast area the greater part, probably 
 more than two thirds, is subject to communal tenure, which, so 
 
 by individual peasants, in the number of 12,600, so that each buyer comes 
 in, on an average, for a little over 50 acres. In the government of Sardtof, 
 out of 308,000 dessiatlnas (847,000 acres), 187,000 (542,000 acres) have been 
 bought by individuals and 121,000 (332,000 acres) by communes. It is to be 
 noted that even when these purchases are made by a commune or an arttt, 
 the land is seldom left undivided. The new property is usually divided 
 among the purchasers' families, in proportion to the sums contributed by 
 each. 
 
 * There still are in Russia numerous estates of 10,000, 20,000, 40,000 
 dessiatlnas and more, the dessiatina, as already mentioned, being equal to 
 about 2| acres. The great landlords, i. e. those who own over 1,000 dessia- 
 tlnas, still hold, according to the latest information, 53 per cent, of the 
 entire territory on personal tenure in the most fertile agricultural zone. In 
 the eight governments which compose the central agricultural region, 
 where land is the most valuable, official statistics reported 1,800 landlords 
 with from 1,000 to 5,000 dessiatinas ; 141, with from 5,000 to 10,000 dessia- 
 tlnas ; lastly 82 owning each more than 10,000. The number of large 
 estates is probably very much greater in most other regions.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 far, prevails in the whole of Great-Russia. Setting aside the 
 Crown lands, which comprise many inaccessible forests and barren 
 tracts, the peasant already holds more than half the totality of 
 arable lands, and the proportion is still more in his favor if we 
 take into consideration the exceptional value of the Black-Mould 
 belt. 
 
 In this region, according to Mr. lanson, the statistician 
 already mentioned, the lands belonging to the peasant cover from 
 70 to 90 % of the governments of Vor6nej , Kazan, Orenburg, Ufa, 
 Viatka, and something over 50 # in the middle region of the Black- 
 Mould. According to Mr. Semi6nof and the Central Committee 
 of Statistics, the rural communes already owned, in the eight 
 agricultural governments of the centre, 56 % of the entire extent 
 and 66 # of the arable part, while only 37 % of the entire extent 
 and 31 % of the arable lands, i. e. less than half as much, was 
 owned on individual rights, in the same region. Which shows 
 that, in the most fertile portion of Great-Russia, the greater part 
 of the cultivated lands is held by communal tenure. 
 
 Vast as the peasant's possessions are, they are steadily increas- 
 ing, and, to do so, they have not waited for the foundation of the 
 real-estate banks specially created under Alexander III. to 
 quicken that increase. The transfer movement by which the 
 lands are fast passing into the hands of those that till them is so 
 rapid and powerful, that various agricultural societies and a few 
 nobiliary assemblies have already evinced some uneasiness and 
 looked around for ways to forestall the destruction with which the 
 mujik's suddenly developed acquisitiveness threatens large land- 
 holding. 
 
 In the face of these continual encroachments, is there not, 
 indeed, reason to dread an impending expropriation of the nobility 
 for the benefit of a peasantry, ignorant and unprovided with 
 capital, or of tradesmen who have no affection for rural life, who 
 take no interest in the soil, and only hasten to exhaust it by means 
 of proceedings justly stamped with the name of "agricultural
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 557 
 
 brigandage' ' ? Here lurks a question of ominous bearing on the 
 economic development of the empire, and one which many Rus- 
 sians, in their natural desire for the extension of the people's 
 domanial territory, lose sight of. This revolution, which curtails 
 the rural possessions of the nobility, is not all gain for the country 
 and its culture, especially since the peasant, no longer content with 
 occasional bites out of the loaf of huge estates belonging to a few 
 over- wealthy families, is setting his teeth deeper every day into the 
 middling and small landed properties. 
 
 When we speak of ' ' culture' ' suffering from this sort of gradual 
 elimination of the nobility in certain parts of Great-Russia, we do 
 not mean, or not only, that of general civilization intellectual, 
 literary, and scientific culture, of which the old time pomish-tchik, 
 with all his faults and all his frivolity, was, after all, the only 
 representative in the rural districts, but material culture, the 
 culture of the soil, which is seriously endangered ; production, the 
 soil itself, which runs the risk of falling into hands too poor, 
 too ignorant, or too routine-bound, to extract from it all that it 
 ought to yield. 
 
 Exaggerated or premature as such apprehensions may appear, 
 they hardly can be said to be baseless. In the actual stage of the 
 Russian people's development, if private property were to vanish 
 to-morrow and leave the field to the village communities ; if the 
 mujik? s new acquisitions were to become merged in the lands of the 
 mir, Russia, it is to be feared, would have little cause for self- 
 gratulation on having allowed the bulk of the empire to pass 
 under the control of a lot of small rustic democracies, unlettered 
 and superstitious. 
 
 To an impartial mind it is very doubtful whether it would be 
 for the good of the State, to hand over, in the near future, all the 
 arable lands to communes and peasants, whether under collective 
 or individual tenure. Here more than in other countries, the 
 rural masses being so lately liberated and so backward still in 
 development and education, the great and lesser landholders have
 
 558 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 an economic part to play, a local mission to discharge. It is 
 through them through the pomi$sh-tchik preferably to the peasant 
 that belated agronomy is to enter on its career of progress. If 
 too many of the private estates are not in much better condition 
 than the mujik's acres, it is among them, on the other hand, that 
 we occasionally encounter the soundest and most rationally 
 conducted farming. For many long years to come, until the 
 intellectual level of the rural masses is greatly elevated, the com- 
 munities and the peasants cannot be counted on to improve farm- 
 ing. Were the entire territory in their hands, under any form of 
 tenure, the State would find itself compelled, rather than abandon 
 national production to semi-stagnation, to take the direction of 
 farming interests into its own hands, to confide the tutelage over 
 the agrarian communities to a special administration, in a word, 
 it would be driven to call in the doubtful and costly assistance of 
 bureaucracy. Far better that there should be enough private 
 landholders left to lead with their example, to give the needed 
 impulse, to propagate and acclimate the new methods and sound 
 farming practices. Neither the wealthy urban tradesman nor the 
 well-to-do peasant is at present, as a rule, fit for this mission of 
 enlightenment ; such men, as yet, are to be found only in the 
 ranks of the old landholding nobility. 
 
 The fact is, this knotty property problem has two sides, and we 
 should not let one blind us to the other. The social question 
 must not make us lose sight of the economic question, nor must 
 the seeming interests of the husbandman blind us to the no less 
 essential interests of the soil and of agriculture. Of the two, 
 neither can, with impunity, be sacrificed to the other. If certain 
 nations, like England, seem to have taken thought too exclusively 
 for culture and production, certain Russians sometimes seem ready 
 to fall into the other extreme. Between the two errors, the latter is 
 possibly the worse, for the husbandman's interests cannot, for any 
 length of time, be separated from those of the soil and production. 
 If, in a wealthy country, the wealth can become concentrated in
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 559 
 
 too small a number of hands, a poor and badly farmed one cannot 
 place wealth or competence within reach of the greater number. 
 
 Russia presents this sad and instructive anomaly : a people of 
 which the bulk is at the same time landholding and poor. The 
 reason is simple it lies in the ignorance of the people and the ex- 
 cessive taxation ; even more, perhaps, in the lack of capital, with- 
 out which production can never take a soaring flight. Instead of 
 playing as much land as possible into the peasant's hands, his 
 friends might be better employed, perhaps, in thinking out means 
 that would help him to make more out of what he already has. 
 
 This is a vital question for Russia ; one which makes itself more 
 and more urgently felt, and which American competition will not 
 suffer to be ignored. If, owing to the export trade of the United 
 States and the other trans-oceanic countries, the farming interests 
 of old Europe are just now traversing a hard crisis, the ordeal is 
 not less hard on Russian agriculture, which is threatened with ex- 
 pulsion from all the markets of the West by a rival richer in virgin 
 lands, and especially in capital a rival beyond comparison better 
 stocked and less burdened with taxes and hindrances of all sorts. 
 To the great rural empire whose agriculture is far and away its 
 main resource, and whose soil, in places, already seems prema- 
 turely exhausted, this should be matter for serious reflection. 
 What makes the superiority of the United States of America is not 
 so much their fertility and the extent of their arable lands, Russia 
 also has her Far West (or rather, Far East) in the southern stretch 
 of Siberia, which can easily be linked on to Europe by means of 
 railroads and canals ; what makes Russia's inferiority is not so 
 much the imperfection of her tools and communications, it is, 
 above all, the ignorance and poverty of the people, and to remedy 
 these it is not enough let us repeat it again and again to in- 
 crease the peasants' territorial endowment or facilitate for them 
 the purchase of land. Unless Russia is prepared to live entirely 
 in and on herself, to renounce all exchange with the West, and to 
 give up borrowing from it the capital of which she stands so much
 
 560 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 in need, the mujik and fot pomttsh-tchik of the Don and the Volga 
 must not leave the fanner of the Mississippi out of their calcula- 
 tion. This American competition, added to the bad crops and the 
 famines of these latter years, is a new danger that threatens the 
 superannuated agrarian system, the mir and the commune, which 
 many Russians incline to hold responsible for the defeats inflicted 
 on their national agriculture. 
 
 And yet, with the ideas and prejudices so widely spread among 
 the people, the immediate abolition of the rural commune would 
 scarcely improve matters much, because it would make hardly any 
 change in the farming methods. Whatever we may think of 
 collective tenure, it is not by modifying this or that system that 
 production will be increased, but by changing the husbandman, 
 the man. And such a change of manners, customs, agricultural 
 and general notions cannot, in such huge rural masses, be ac- 
 complished in a few years. The schools themselves, even could 
 they be multiplied to meet the demand for them, would be power- 
 less to achieve, alone, such a transformation. To accomplish this, 
 there must surge up from the very bottom of the people, from the 
 midst of the lately liberated peasants, a new class, a comparatively 
 well-informed, well-to-do class, capable of profiting by the light 
 and examples shed from above and to propagate and spread them 
 around. In the villages there must form, what is lacking in the 
 country still more than in the cities, a sort of third estate, a real 
 middle class, to fill the gap between the former serf-holders, now 
 isolated, and the crowd of mujiks, as yet unlettered. The crea- 
 tion of such a rural class is not less necessary from a political point 
 of view, if Russia means to have a free government, than from an 
 economic one, if she means to raise her agricultural production to 
 the level of her natural resources. Now it rather looks as though 
 Russia has the germ of such a future rural burgherdom in the 
 prosperous few among the peasants who are buying land on 
 individual titles. Another new element, too, has of late years 
 made its appearance in rural districts, one that seems to have a
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE CUMMUNITIES. 561 
 
 a considerable future before it.* It will become the nucleus of a 
 rural middle class composed of mixed proprietors, interested in 
 both tenures and better qualified than anybody to appreciate the 
 strong and weak points of both. This new class, to which alone, 
 with pecuniary ease, instruction will gradually come, will become 
 for the mir, wielding powers until now centred in the hands of 
 poor and ignorant men, a principle either of dissolution or renova- 
 tion. Under its influence, which will naturally increase, the com- 
 mune will have to alter its usages, to admit new ideas and new 
 methods, or else, should it turn out incapable of so doing, succumb 
 under the onslaught of individualism. Until matters have gone so 
 far, the abolition of the communal system, before the mujik is in a 
 condition to ameliorate his agricultural proceedings, would not 
 only present few economic advantages, but might be fraught with 
 considerable political danger. 
 
 It is the peasant's own business to experiment anent the com- 
 parative merits and demerits of both tenures. Vast as are to-day 
 the communal domains, the prosperous and enterprising peasant 
 can still find land enough to achieve personal proprietorship with- 
 out being necessarily compelled to abrogate the mir's collective 
 proprietorship. Russia is not called on to make an immediate 
 choice between the two systems, both consecrated by time, both 
 equally suited to the national habits. Each of the two has its 
 
 * Notwithstanding their repeated purchases, the total number of peas- 
 ants who have attained to individual proprietorship is still very small, but is 
 steadily increasing. In the eight governments of the central agricultural zone 
 the number of peasants holding land on individual tenure did not yet reach, 
 toward the end of the reign of Alexander II. , as high as 57,000, not much more 
 than double that of noble landowners (25,000). If we take the extent of 
 landed property, we find that four fifths of it (80 per cent) still belong to the 
 nobility, 1 1 per cent, to the merchant, 2 per cent, to the mish-tch&ni (towns- 
 men of average means), and only 7 per cent to the peasants. Of these latter 
 none as yet were classed under the head of " great proprietors," but several 
 already came under that of "average proprietors," which means that they 
 owned anywhere from 100 to 1,000 dessiatinas. The average extent of each 
 peasant's personal property was, in this region, not quite forty acres. (Sta- 
 tistics of 1880.)
 
 562 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 adepts, each may have its advantages, social, moral, economic. 
 Thanks to the extent of the Russian territory, both rival forms 
 still can co-exist, whether to mutually complete and correct one 
 another, or for one some day finally to triumph over the other, 
 after both have had their fair innings.
 
 BOOK VIII. CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The Communal System and the Struggle between " Great " and " Small " 
 Landed Property The Mir, the Peasant's Entail Transformations 
 which the Agrarian Commune might Undergo Can this System be 
 Adapted to Modern Manners ? What is Legislature to Do with Regard 
 to Collective Tenure ? Can we See in the Mir a Palladium of Society ? 
 Illusions on this Subject The Communal System and the Population 
 Problem Collective Tenure arid Emigration Village Communities 
 and Agrarian Socialism. 
 
 THE competition between personal and collective tenure will 
 be made more complicated in Russia by the habitual competition 
 between "great " and " small " property, " great " and " small " 
 culture. There is not only the question as to which mode of 
 tenure, but also that as to which mode of culture is finally to 
 carry the day. Habit and succession laws are not alone to regu- 
 late the extent of the land to be owned or tilled by one individual ; 
 the structure of the soil, its agricultural aptitude and that of the 
 climates also have their say. There are localities cut up, slashed 
 into strips by nature herself, which seem meant for small farms. 
 There are cultures, that of the vine, for instance, which demand 
 division of labor, and consequently call for division of the soil. 
 The question is, what system, from this double point of view, 
 would be the most remunerative and the most natural to the 
 country ? If any spot on earth seems to be made on purpose for 
 wholesale culture carried on by machinery, is it not those immense 
 tchernozwm plains, where there is nothing to hinder the machines ? 
 or those boundless steppes where flocks sometimes have to be 
 taken miles to water? True, just now the great landholders are 
 
 563
 
 564 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 selling and the peasants are buying. It is a fact, but perhaps a 
 fact dependent on transitory rather than permanent and natural 
 economic conditions. There is nothing to warrant that a reaction 
 will not set in after a while ; that, as capital becomes more plenti- 
 ful, population denser, farming more scientific, property and 
 culture on a large scale will not rapidly regain the upper hand. 
 There, as in everything pertaining to the economic world, lies a 
 question of competition. On the day that large farming will 
 prove more productive, more remunerative, small property will 
 find itself seriously endangered, and not more fit to hold its own 
 against such rivalry than are small workshops and small shops to 
 stand competition with the large factories and immense bazaars. 
 
 But the danger is not here yet, and the peasant might lose the 
 artificial shelter of the mir without fear of other encroachments 
 than those of his own brethren and of the " vampires," and it 
 would take these long to reconstruct large property. Under 
 present circumstances, with the special conditions in which 
 Russian agriculture is situated, and those created for European 
 agriculture by American competition ; with the inheritance laws 
 which, at every generation, cut up the land anew, the fall of the 
 village communities could not result in Russia, as it did in Eng- 
 land, in the expropriation of the greater part of the peasants. 
 There is no doubt of that ; still, the defenders of the mir, in spite 
 of their exaggerations, have good cause to ask whether, if a 
 change did come, the mujik would not be glad to find one day in 
 his commune a barrier against the invasion of large domains. 
 
 For one of the village communities' most salient characteristics 
 is that they afford the rural population a substantial protection 
 against competition from the outer world, against the urban and 
 industrial classes, against what, in Russia as well as elsewhere, is 
 generally designated as the tyranny of capital. The mir is an 
 impregnable stronghold for small proprietors. Common property 
 is inalienable and so constitutes a sort of entail, with this differ- 
 ence that, whereas family entail ensures the future of only the
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 565 
 
 first-born of the family, communal inheritance provides for all the 
 members of the community. In both cases the guaranties are of 
 the same kind ; in both cases unborn generations are protected 
 against the thriftlessness of the living, the children against the 
 father's wrongdoing or improvidence. There is a degree of desti- 
 tution or disaster below which a father cannot drag down his 
 descendants or himself. To the disinherited the mir offers a 
 shelter. This is the light in which the peasants themselves 
 regard the matter, and that is why those of them who. have 
 achieved competence and become individual landholders, hesitate 
 to go out of the commune. If they cannot attend to their lot, 
 they let it or give the use of it to others, looking on the com- 
 munal lands as a safety plank for their children or for themselves, 
 should their private fortunes ever be wrecked.* 
 
 In this sense it is that Mr. Ravelin, one of the most enlightened 
 and moderate defenders of the present system, could say that 
 communal tenure was, for the rural population, a species of insur- 
 ance trust. It gives each family the certainty of having a bit of 
 land and a hearth. Without it, the former serf might be tempted 
 to alienate his lot, to eat or drink away his children's patrimony. 
 There is no doubt but that the mujik, so recently emancipated, 
 will ofttimes still need this protection against himself, as proven by 
 
 * This is to give an instance what the peasants of the government 
 of Moscow replied at an inquest by the provincial assembly : If the lots 
 should become personal property, they would frequently be sold to the 
 detriment of the holders or their descendants. A peasant dies, leaving 
 infant children ; the head of a household is called off to the army, an 
 occurrence by no means rare under the prevailing custom of early mar- 
 riages ; the widow or the young married woman cannot till the land all by 
 herself, she has not enough to pay a laborer, nor can she often let the lot, 
 on account of the taxes it is burdened with. In such a case, were sales 
 allowed, the lot of course would be sold, whereas now the mir just takes it 
 away to give to a family numbering more laboring hands, and when, in due 
 time, the man returns from the army, or his children, if he died, come of 
 age, they are sooner or later once more provided with land. The same 
 thing happens, say the peasants, in case of sickness, of fire, loss of 
 cattle, etc.
 
 566 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the fact that, in spite of this shielding system, it is no unusual 
 thing for him to fraudulently mortgage to the "vampires," or 
 " wzV-eaters" the lot he cannot sell. Even should the most en- 
 terprising leave the commune to settle on land of their own, or 
 devote themselves in the cities to trade or industry, it would still 
 remain a refuge to the poor, the weak, or the timid. Side by side 
 with a great development of wealth, it might still subsist, as a 
 sort of national agricultural poorhouse, one of its detractors says, 
 freely managed by its members and not dependent upon charity, 
 either public or private.* 
 
 Far from lowering it to so humble a function, the progress 
 of wealth and population may some day strangely transform the 
 use of undivided property and reveal to it a very different voca- 
 tion. As things are now, the communal lands, as opposed to the 
 extensive domains of the former lords, represent small culture as 
 well as small property. Should the peasants go on breaking 
 crumbs off the large estates by their small purchases, it would 
 not be impossible for the two kinds of property, great and small, 
 to change places some day. Bach has its advantages and each 
 its drawbacks. If, from the social standpoint, one is inclined to 
 favor the latter, it is difficult not to give the preference to the 
 former in certain regions, from an agronomic point of view, from 
 that of production. Now communal property has one singular 
 faculty, that of adapting itself equally well to culture on a small 
 and on a large scale, of combining the agricultural advantages of 
 the one with the social advantages of the other. There is no 
 reason why, some day, the temporary allotments to families should 
 not be supplanted by wholesale culture or large farms let on 
 leases by the communities. That would, indeed, be a trans- 
 formation which would spoil the mir in the eyes of many of its 
 
 * Such might, indeed, be the ultimate fate of the communal lands, were 
 they not so vast. But in a country where they take up the greater part of 
 the arable lands, the State hardly could suffer them to become an endow- 
 ment for the destitute and incapable. That would be the death of progress 
 and production.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 567 
 
 partisans ; yet it may be found some day, should collective tenure 
 persist so long, that this is the only means to keep it alive and to 
 justify its existence. In this respect it really has undoubted ad- 
 vantages over individual small property. In a country of wide 
 plains, and in an age of steam-engines, would it not lend itself 
 better to rational and scientific farming ? Formed into a sort of 
 permanent syndicate, members of an agricultural association, in 
 which they would be both shareholders and laborers, the peas- 
 ants would find in their communal lands a field open to farming 
 on the largest possible scale. 
 
 Even under the system of periodical re-allotments, outside of 
 all these remote hypotheses, the community, which is apparently 
 a constant barrier to progress of any kind, still could at times 
 afford facilities towards the improvement of the lands and the 
 habitual farming methods. The authority of the mirhas already, 
 in some few villages, introduced more rational methods. Com- 
 munes are mentioned as having, upon formal deliberation, aban- 
 doned the traditional triennial rotation system, others as having 
 declared manuring to be obligatory. As school-learning pro- 
 gresses, could not this concentration of rural forces be utilized ? It 
 would seem as though association alone is capable of drawing out 
 all the Russian soil's resources and of forestalling its natural de- 
 fects. How can we contradict the advocates of the commune 
 when they assert that it is better able than the isolated hus- 
 bandman to undertake the vast labor needed to bring out the 
 full value of the national territory, such as draining the marshes 
 of the north and west, irrigating and restocking with trees the 
 steppes of the south and east ? 
 
 It must be admitted that, in the mujiKs present state of ig- 
 norance and poverty, all these improvements which seem to be the 
 natural mission of the commune are manifestly beyond him. It 
 will take generations for these collective proprietors to comprehend 
 their interests and their duties in this respect, to learn how to 
 form, at need, associations of several communes, the better to fight
 
 568 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 the climate and the defects of the soil, both frequently made worse 
 by man's own carelessness. This spirit of enterprise and initia- 
 tive will probably not descend on the peasant communes for a 
 long time to come, and the antagonists of the present system 
 may not be so entirely wide of the mark when they contend 
 that it has killed the germ of that spirit in peasant and 
 commune both. 
 
 For my own part, I would not, on the whole, venture to af- 
 firm that the form of land tenure bequeathed by primitive ages 
 is absolutely incapable of being adapted to the demands of modern 
 times. Only, of all objections brought out against it, the strongest 
 in my eyes is precisely that which is founded on its antiquity. 
 
 If communal land tenure was good for the people and is con- 
 formable to natural law, how comes it that it has almost entirely 
 disappeared from the wealthiest and most civilized countries? 
 This cannot be attributed to chance. When an institution, which, 
 once on a time, existed in vast regions, vanishes and leaves behind 
 mere vestiges of its existence, in isolated localities, is not one 
 tempted to think it unreconcilable with the development of human 
 societies ? This is, no one can deny it, a serious point against a 
 belief in the future of collective land tenure. Yet this objection, 
 however plausible, is not decisive. There is nothing to prove that 
 an economic proceeding dating from the infancy of social life is 
 incapable of being renovated and adapted to the spirit of a 
 mature civilization. Would it not be easy to discover in many a 
 law or custom of modern Europe in the trial by jury for exam- 
 ple sundry traits descended from the barbarians ? And even 
 were it not so, would it not be somewhat presumptuous to forbid 
 human societies all advance aside from beaten tracks, or to assume 
 that all nations must necessarily travel the same stages ? 
 
 In the modern world, ever since the French Revolution, a 
 great struggle is going on. Two hostile principles, tricked out in 
 various names and titles and which would centre all things, one in 
 the individual, the other in the community, wage a war the issue
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 569 
 
 of which is not to be foreseen. At an epoch when the talk is all of 
 association and co-operation, when millions of human beings dream 
 of reciprocity and solidarity, the law-maker must hesitate long be- 
 fore he strikes out a form of property which partly realizes what 
 in other countries is accounted an absolute Utopia. By bequeath- 
 ing to Russia collective land tenure, the past has imposed on her 
 an experiment which, once it is given up, cannot be resumed 
 again without a violent revulsion. The more vital its object, the 
 more complete, the more patient the experiment must be. Russia 
 owes it to civilization. One of the great boasts of the modern 
 world is the variety, the individuality of its nations. The vari- 
 ous states are, with regard to civilization, so many workshops, so 
 many laboratories, rivalling and differing from one another; 
 each nation is an artificer, with a genius and tools of his 
 own, and it is profitable to all that all should not work out the 
 same pattern, should not continually copy one another. Great 
 as is this variety on all other points political, juridical, religious, 
 on one point it scarcely exists at all, that point being the regu- 
 lation of property. Alone in the entire Christian world, the Slavs 
 show some originality in this respect ; surely they may well pause 
 before they decide that they will, in this also, discard it for the sake 
 of prematurely imitating Kurope. Alone among the nations of 
 both worlds, Russia is enabled and qualified, by her traditions 
 and the extent of her territory, to conduct parallel experiments 
 with both forms of property. The Slavs of the south Yugo-Slavs 
 cannot be counted on for that, because they are less advanced 
 in civilization or already bound hand and foot by Teutonic and 
 Latin influences. If the communal tenure of the soil is to be 
 tested outside of Utopia and the revolutionary Icarias, it can be 
 only in Russia and if the test is to be conclusive, it must be car- 
 ried on at least until the final clearing of the peasants' lands 
 from all encumbrances. 
 
 In the meantime, the attitude indicated for the government 
 and legislature towards this question which causes such passionate
 
 570 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 controversy, appears to me the simplest and easiest in the world. 
 Between the two modes of tenure, so extolled by one side, so 
 reviled by the other, the government has not to decide ; it is not 
 the judge in the case so tumultuously tried before it. It is for the 
 country, for the people, aided by time, to render the final verdict. 
 The governing power has nothing to do but to keep strictly 
 neutral, showing favor to neither combatant, but leaving both 
 to fight it out between themselves. If, on the plains of Russia, 
 collective tenure and individual tenure cannot live side by side, 
 custom, the facts of the case, the needs of the country, the 
 husbandman's personal interests, will naturally win the battle for 
 the stronger, more serviceable, more productive of the two rivals. 
 If the mir has not sufficient suppleness to lend itself to the pro- 
 gress of agriculture and the demands of modern life the mir will 
 gradually dissolve of itself, with the free consent of the communes, 
 without interference from either law or State. 
 
 There is no need of new laws against village communities. 
 Under the law as it stands, they are much easier to destroy than 
 to build up. Indeed this will be a great point against them 
 in the coming struggle. If anything, it will be in favor of 
 communal lands that laws will have to be made in, say, half a 
 century from now, to protect whatever of them may then have 
 survived, as is done in France.* Till that time comes, and it is 
 still far enough, judging by the mujik's present disposition in the 
 matter, the best thing to do, is to trust to time and nature, to the 
 progress of instruction and the free play of interests in a word, 
 to free competition which, better than anybody, is able to decide 
 between the various modes of tenure. At the risk of equally dis- 
 pleasing both the advocates and the detractors of the mir, of 
 butting against prejudices and economic traditions, I must confess 
 
 * Already the partisans of the mir should like the law to interfere and 
 put difficulties in the way of the dissolution of communes ; several even 
 insist that the communal domains should be declared inalienable, as a safe- 
 guard against the encroachments of personal tenure, and virtually be 
 erected into a perpetual endowment fund for the peasant class.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 571 
 
 that, to my mind, here or never the old economists' ' ' let-things- 
 alone ' ' principle may properly be applied. 
 
 Supposing that collective tenure should come out victorious 
 from the present contest, could it become acclimated among nations 
 the extent of whose territory and the density of whose popula- 
 tion stand to each other in relations entirely different from what 
 they do in Russia ? Could it be transplanted on old Europe's soil 
 after having been extirpated thence almost entirely centuries ago ? 
 On this question even the Russians most enthusiastically in love 
 with the Moscovite commune rarely indulge in any self-delusion : 
 very few believe that their pet institutions ever could be imported 
 into the West. Not perceiving any other anchor of salvation for 
 foreign nations, many sincerely bewail the fact that they should 
 be so wedded to a radically wrong system which must, sooner or 
 later, bring about the fall of the most flourishing of states. 
 
 Those who would, as do so many Russians, see there the 
 complete and rational solution of what is known as ' ' the social 
 problem, ' ' are manifestly mistaken. It might be, perhaps, in a 
 primitive country, all rural and agricultural still, such as Russia 
 has been so long. With modern nations, where labor is evenly 
 divided between agriculture and industry, between cities and 
 country, the case is different. What modicum of land should be 
 allotted to the millions that live in the capitals ? Where is the 
 endowment fund to come from for the families crowded into the 
 cities? and, owing to industry and commerce, owing to the 
 growth of prosperity, the cities will go on sucking into their walls 
 a larger percentage of the entire population. The principal sore 
 of Western Europe, almost the only one with which France is 
 plagued, .is the urban factory proletariate, and the Russian 
 remedy, offered as a sort of social panacea, is a purely rural one. 
 
 And besides, can collective tenure, in Russia itself, attain the 
 lofty destinies which are the dream of so many patriots ? Is it 
 possible that, in the old Slavic empire, preserved from Occidental 
 contagion by its historical and geographical isolation, the Mosco-
 
 572 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 vite mir should become the foundation of a new and original 
 civilization, exempt from the vices of the classical civilization, 
 untainted with proletariate, pauperism, and the wages question ? 
 
 For certain Russians would have us believe that all Russia 
 has to do is to remain true to her history and her rural commune, 
 in order to bring forth a society as brilliant, as prosperous as those 
 of the West, and incomparably more harmonious and healthy, a 
 society unencumbered with class strife, free from all those morbid 
 principles which, they aver, threaten the European nations with 
 premature dissolution. 
 
 To what amounts this claim, of founding, with the assistance 
 of a different agrarian system, a new civilization, unsullied with 
 the taints of Western societies ? In reality it comes to this : can 
 there be a high-grade civilization, a high-grade culture, without 
 large industries, a large commerce, large cities ? Can there be, in 
 Russia or elsewhere, a prosperous and indefinitely progressive 
 society if as is actually the case in Russia the urban element 
 should remain forever comparatively insignificant and subordinate ? 
 If, with the help of collective tenure and the mir, it should be pos- 
 sible to erect a new society on a wider and more firmly established 
 basis, it could be only an exclusively agricultural and eminently 
 rural one. 
 
 But even as a rural nostrum, is this social panacea of the Slavo- 
 phils and their followers an absolutely infallible one? Who 
 does not see that, to work to best advantage, the system of collec- 
 tive tenure needs unbounded space ? In order that each inhabi- 
 tant, each adult couple, may have a recognized claim to land, the 
 first requisite is that there should be land, free land and a great deal 
 of it. The Russian communes, at least those that are territorially 
 well endowed, have reserve lands, which are kept for new claim- 
 ants. That is really the only means of satisfying all those who 
 are entitled to a share, as they appear on the labor stage ; but such 
 a system presupposes vacancies, either in the commune or in the 
 lands. It is a banquet at which it is easy to place the first guests ;
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 573 
 
 but it soon becomes a problem how to make room for later comers 
 without crowding out the early ones. As the number of guests 
 goes on increasing while the table does not stretch, will it not 
 end in their all feeling cramped and being cut down to insuf- 
 ficient rations ? This is perhaps the worst that threatens collective 
 tenure in the future. 
 
 One thing has been ascertained, and indeed is easy to under- 
 stand : it is that the mir system encourages marriage and increase 
 of population, since each family is entitled to land in proportion 
 to the number of laborers it musters. On the other hand, the com- 
 munal system, by setting, so to speak, a premium on large families 
 and partly relieving parents from the cares that children bring, is 
 apt indirectly to foster proletariate, in other words, the supply 
 of land being limited, the population, under this system, is apt to 
 increase faster than the means of subsistence or comfort.* On 
 this point collective land tenure is at odds with individual, heredi- 
 tary tenure. The latter, at least under the system of equal divi- 
 sion, tends to limit, in each family, the number of children who 
 are to share the paternal loaf. Indeed, this is, in our eyes, about 
 the weightiest objection to it. Thus it is that, under the prop- 
 erty question, the population problem is found to lurk.f 
 
 Not quite a hundred years ago, Arthur Young, the English 
 traveller in France, wrote that, at the rate at which property was 
 being subdivided, the country must soon be converted into a rab- 
 bit warren. Facts have shown how vain his fears were. But 
 
 * It is this consideration, although it would strike with full force only 
 were the family to be unpossessed of either working implements or capital 
 apart from its share of the territorial endowment which made John Stuart 
 Mill, among others, so bitter an opponent of communal tenure with peri- 
 odical re-allotments. 
 
 f Some are of the opinion, not unfounded, that in this lies one of the 
 causes which render population nearly stationary in France. Analogous 
 circumstances have been shown to result in the same phenomenon in other 
 countries also. In Belgium, for instance, Mr. E. de Laveleye has observed 
 that the two provinces in which property is most subdivided the Flanders 
 are those where the increase of population is least rapid. Switzerland 
 might give occasion to similar observations.
 
 574 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 then the French law set a limit to the excessive increase of the 
 population by agrarian regulations which prevent indefinite par- 
 celling of the soil. Now, in many parts of Russia, anything but 
 dense as the population is, even in the most populous govern- 
 ments, the effects of this natural law already make themselves 
 felt. In numbers of communes the peasants feel cramped and ill 
 at ease ; the lots awarded to them at the time of the emancipation 
 are already noticeably reduced, and grow smaller at each new 
 division. And village communities partly, it must be admitted, 
 owing to bad farming are stifling on lands which, in the West, 
 would support twice or three times the number of mouths. If it 
 has come to this not twenty-five years after the emancipation and 
 the territorial endowment, what will it be in a hundred years from 
 now or in two, or in three hundred ? 
 
 In an empire such as Russia, where the vacant acres are 
 counted by hundreds of millions, both in its European and Asiatic 
 territories, where vast wildernesses vainly wait for somebody to 
 settle on them, there is no occasion for uneasiness on the score of 
 lack of land, say the advocates of the mir. In such a state it is 
 easy to make up for the injustice of nature and society ; easy to 
 solve the problem, unsolvable by the old states of the West, of a 
 fair partition of the soil and of wealth. In Russia there is enough 
 room, there are enough natural resources to smooth out as much 
 as possible social inequalities, to suppress proletarianism without 
 interfering with the rights of individual property, of the rural 
 communes, and of the Exchequer. All there is to do is to regu- 
 late emigration, or rather internal colonization, to direct and lo- 
 cate the thousands of peasants who each summer leave their 
 native communes in gangs, going forth to seek vacant lands, 
 frequently on the faith of false rumors or lying emissaries.* 
 
 Russia, indeed, resembles, on a large scale, one of her own 
 wealthy communes, endowed with land enough to form vast terri- 
 
 * Historically, this is probably the manner in which the mir both pre- 
 served itself and spread by colonization over the plains of Great-Russia.
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 575 
 
 tonal reserve funds for the coming generations. The steppes of 
 the south, certain regions of the Ural and Caucasus, especially 
 Southern Siberia, are there, ready, for a greater or lesser number 
 of years, to receive the excess of population of the village com- 
 munities in the interior. It is the State's business to make use of 
 these resources to the best advantage and, under Alexander III., 
 it has given serious attention to the matter.* These reserve 
 lands, however vast, will be exhausted some day, probably much 
 sooner than those patriots imagine who allow the immensity of 
 the areas comprised in the empire to mislead them. However re- 
 mote it seems, that day will come in Russia with collective tenure, 
 as it has come in America with individual tenure, and on that day 
 the two systems will stand face to face, on their own intrinsic 
 merits and demerits, with no possibility for either to call emigra- 
 tion to its aid. Then the critical hour will strike for collective 
 tenure (if it survives so long), cornered as it will be by the in- 
 crease of population, charged with failing more and more to do 
 what is expected of it to place landed property within everybody's 
 reach. For there is no getting round this : that no matter what 
 form of tenure is adopted, men cannot be largely provided with 
 land, unless there be a great deal of land and few men. 
 
 I shall close this most unprejudiced study, with a last remark. 
 In Petersburgh and Moscow men flatter themselves that, by pre- 
 serving the peasant's communal domain side by side with the 
 noble's or merchant's hereditary one, Russia will steer clear of 
 the class conflicts which disturb the West. This has become, 
 with many Russians, an uncontested axiom ; but it is to be feared 
 that, on this point also, they are deceived. If there is not in Rus- 
 sia at this day conscious and declared antagonism between the 
 
 * The emigration question has been debated more especially by the 
 assemblies of experts convoked by Alexander III. ; moreover, it has made 
 real progress owing to the creation of colonization agencies and to the law 
 of 1889.
 
 576 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 "boss" and the working man, between capital and labor, the 
 cause lies not so much in the existence of the mir as in the condi- 
 tion of the people, social, religious, intellectual. Should the day 
 come when the revolutionary crop sown by so many youthful 
 hands should rise, on that day the form of tenure so extolled of 
 the Slavophils would prove to Russian society a feeble palladium 
 indeed. For the mir, such as it exists at present, with a whole 
 class of landed proprietors outside of it, has a great social fault 
 that of dividing the rural population as well as landed property 
 into two categories, two clearly defined classes. While in France 
 there runs from the largest to the smallest holder of land a con- 
 tinuous and graded chain of proprietors, of every variety of rank and 
 fortune, in Russia the holder of large estates the pomiesh-tchik 
 who stays outside of the mir, is entirety separate from the peasant 
 communes, and that makes him an object of envy to them, if it 
 does not some day arouse their cupidity against him. A great 
 defect of the Russian commune, which is held up to us as the most 
 certain preventive to the division of society into hostile classes, is 
 precisely that it does cut the rural population into two classes 
 having different if not opposite interests. 
 
 This would be a substantial danger, but for the fact that, 
 through the land-purchases made by peasants, an intermediate 
 class of small landholders is slowly forming between the pomiesh- 
 tchik and the mujik of the communes, a class that is in touch with 
 both. These peasants, who are at the same time members of the 
 mir and independent of it in their capacity of individual land- 
 holders, on the same footing as the former lord and the city trades- 
 man, these peasants who, in their person, embody both forms of 
 tenure, will be the very link indicated to connect the two now 
 widely separated classes. Without this intermediate group, 
 which is with every year becoming more numerous, Russia 
 would not long remain free from the class feuds which the revolu- 
 tionists are working hard to provoke. Even now, when he as yet 
 turns a deaf ear to all the ' ' nihilistic ' ' preachings, is not the
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 
 
 mujik inclined to think himself despoiled in favor of the 
 
 tchik, to dream, for himself or for his children, of new distributions 
 
 of lands ? 
 
 So that, instead of closing forever the door of the villager's 
 izbh against the revolutionist, the mir may very well some day 
 open it for them.* It will be in the name of the mir, represented 
 to us as the safeguard of society, that the peasant will be invited to 
 ' ' round up ' ' his lot, to gather all the lands into the communal 
 domain, f The Russian commune, such as it exists in ancient 
 Moscovia, is in fact an easy means of gaining possession of the 
 soil on behalf of the masses ; it is the only practical proceeding 
 known, so far, for applying to the soil the theories of even dis- 
 tribution, without seeing inequality reappear out of the distribu- 
 tion itself. In all other countries, the main obstacle to any 
 attempt at agrarian communism lies in the popular customs and 
 manners ; in Russia, thanks to the training imparted by the mir\ 
 this obstacle does not exist. 
 
 Must we then, from the fact that, at a given hour, the village 
 communities serve as tools or bait to the revolutionists, conclude 
 that they should, on shortest notice, be abolished by the law, as 
 being noxious to society ? By no means, in our opinion, for there 
 would be, in such precipitate prevention, great risk of increasing 
 the evil. What can, at a certain moment, give the anarchist 
 propaganda a hold on the peasant, is not so much the mir itself as 
 the vague notions set afloat among the people by the customs 
 born of the mir ; and these ideas, these vague aspirations cannot 
 be smothered by an ukciz for the suppression of village commu- 
 nities. So long as the ancient form of tenure retains the 
 sympathies of the peasantry, the government cannot lift its hand 
 
 * In this respect the village communities offer much more hold to the 
 revolutionary spirit than the family communities of the Yugo-Slavs, as these 
 latter maintain much more clear the notion of property. 
 
 t Since these lines were first printed (Revue des Deux Mondes, May 15, 
 1876), more than one political trial has shown that these and similar 
 apprehensions were far from fanciful. 
 
 37
 
 578 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 
 against the mir without doing violence to the people's customs 
 and their juridical conscience, and, consequently, without laying 
 itself open, some day, to perilous retrospective demands. 
 
 The Russians are fond of representing collective tenure as a 
 paramount remedy, an infallible nostrum against socialism and 
 communism. If the mir really has this property, it must be in 
 accordance with the theory which, in order to preserve an 
 organism from a disease, inoculates it. It would be more correct 
 to say that, through her communal system, Russia was inoculated 
 with communism, or rather with agrarian socialism ; that, thanks 
 to the mir, it circulates, unbeknown to herself, in her veins and 
 in her blood. Will the virus, at this dose, remain forever harm- 
 less ? Will it prove a preservative against contagion from abroad, 
 or will it, on the contrary, call out some day, in the social organism, 
 unexpected disorders and serious disturbances ? Time will show. 
 In the meantime this is a treatment which no prudent counsellor 
 will advise other societies to try, for fear of their taking the 
 disease in good earnest. 
 
 Even now, when he keeps his ear closed against revolutionary 
 preaching, the mujik is not always content patiently to wait for 
 the tsar's bounty, in the form of new land allotments. As he 
 passes by the lands of his neighbor, the pomihh-tchik, he cannot 
 help squinting a little that way.* Sometimes, indeed, in his col- 
 lisions with riverside landlords, he tries to extend the domain of 
 the mir at their expense. Under the Kmperor Alexander III., 
 who, at his coronation, had the loyalty to warn the delegates 
 
 * "What will be done with the waste lands?" a peasant inquired of a 
 certain Mr. Prugavin. " What waste lands ? " "Why, those that the rich 
 people are keeping from us ; are n't they coming to us ? Is there not going 
 to be a division ? " " It is said there will be one," put in another ; " that 
 we are to get a little more." " And -where is the land to come from for an- 
 other distribution ? " " Sure enough ! Where is it to come from ? There 
 are the rich though . . . just a little, now, so every one gets a bit? " 
 " Would it be just to take from some, to give to others ? " " No, indeed." 
 Then after a pause : "They do say the lords would be given money instead." 
 (Revue des Deux Mondes, January i, 1883.)
 
 MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 5/9 
 
 of the peasantry that the property question was settled for good 
 and all, there have been agrarian riots in various provinces. 
 More than once the military had to be called in to repress them ; 
 the authorities took advantage of the laws issued against the 
 revolutionists to send the leaders before a council of war. These 
 things are hushed up as much as possible ; the papers have strict 
 orders to keep silence on all affairs of the kind. Thus in 1886, 
 there was a riot in the government of Penza ; in 1887, in that of 
 Riazan ; in 1888, in that of Kazan. Each time the troops were 
 compelled to charge, and the ringleaders were tried by military 
 commissions, so that, notwithstanding the abolition of the death 
 penalty, they were condemned to death, and hung, it is averred, 
 twelve or fifteen at a time. With less severity, it might have 
 been difficult to maintain social peace. 
 
 As to the belief which makes of collective tenure a sure 
 antidote against the revolutionary poison, warranted to keep 
 Russia safe from all political epidemics, that is a prejudice, the 
 fallacy of which has been too clearly demonstrated by the innum- 
 erable plots and audacious attempts of the last years of Alexander 
 II. Mines and bombs, nitro-glycerine and dynamite have under- 
 taken to undeceive the most confiding. Against the slow mining 
 process of nihilism and revolutionary explosions, the Moscovite 
 mir is manifestly an insufficient insurance. After the assassina- 
 tion of the Liberator of the serfs, no Russian can assert that all 
 the periodical troubles which harass the West come from the 
 Occidental form of land tenure ; that social questions are the only 
 ones that breed revolutions ; that, in order to escape violent com- 
 motions, Russia only has to place the land within the reach of all.
 
 580 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS. 
 APPENDIX TO BOOK VIII. 
 
 The following brief selection from Vladimir Dahl's famous collection of 
 popular sayings, proverbs, adages, riddles, etc., may not be unwelcome, as 
 setting forth, after the terse and pointed fashion of their kind, the people's 
 own estimation of their principal national institution. It will be noticed 
 that it is by no means one-sided or exclusively admiring. 
 
 What the mir has settled, is God's own judgment. 
 
 As the mir has resolved, so it shall be. 
 
 The mir will stand up for itself. You can't be the winner in a suit 
 against the mir. 
 
 If the mir gives a whoop, the forests shall groan and bend. 
 
 The mir is subject to no jurisdiction but God's. 
 
 God alone can judge the mir. 
 
 The mir is inviolable, but the >-members get thrashed. 
 
 A man of might is the mir. None may gainsay it. 
 
 Should the mir heave a sigh, it will reach the Tsar's ears. 
 
 If the mir goes mad, it can't- be put in a strait-jacket (literally 
 "chained up"). 
 
 There is no guilt in the mir: how should the guilty be picked out in 
 the crowd ? 
 
 All for one and one for all : that 's the mir. 
 
 When the mir comes together, it is ready to fight that minute ; when it 
 separates, all it does is to lie on the stove-bench. 
 
 The mir is mighty as water and silly as a babe. 
 
 One or other mujik may be wise, but the mir is a fooL 
 
 It was the people's voice that condemned Christ.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Alans, extinct tribe, of Finno-Turk- 
 
 ish blood, 78 
 
 Alexander I., the dreamer, 301, 302 
 Alexander II., the Liberator and 
 
 reformer, 303, 304 
 Allophyl races, see Turanian. 
 Antes, an ancient Slavic tribe, 95 
 Appanage system, 250 
 Aral Sea, second largest lake in the 
 
 world, 5 ; remnant of ancient sea, 9 
 Arashin, the typical commune, 523- 
 
 525 ; deductions it leads to, 525- 
 
 528 
 Avars, an extinct tribe of Finnic 
 
 race, 67 ; partly Mongolian, 78 
 
 B 
 
 Baikal, Siberian lake, largest in 
 
 Asia, 5 
 Bakunin, the founder of militant 
 
 nihilism, 200, 201 
 Baltic Provinces, Germans in, 69, 
 
 124, 127-129 
 Baltic Sea, at one time united with 
 
 the Black, 7 
 Bashkirs, probably a Finnic tribe, 
 
 along the Ural, 70 ; partly Turkish 
 
 or Tatar, 78 
 
 Baths, Russian, 159 (appendix) 
 Biarmian branch of the Finnic race, 
 
 comprises Permians, Votiaks, 
 
 Zyrians, 68 
 
 Bieloruss, see White-Russians. 
 Black Mould Zone, the southern 
 
 boundary of Finnic erratic blocks, 
 
 8 ; described, 22-24 
 Black Sea, at one time united with 
 
 the Baltic, 7 
 
 Bohemians, see Tchekhs. 
 Bo-russi (or Po-russi), name of the 
 
 ancient Prussians ; its meaning, 
 
 106, note 
 Bulgars, old, of Finnic race, 67 ; of 
 
 the Volga, of Finno-Turkish 
 
 blood, 78 ; modern, partly Slavs, 
 
 of the southern branch, 103 
 
 Caspian Sea, largest lake in the 
 world, 5 ; remnant of ancient sea, 
 
 9 
 
 Catherine II., the true successor of 
 Peter the Great, 292, 293 ; organ- 
 izes the nobility and gives it privi- 
 leges, 313, 397, 398 ; and the town 
 bourgeoisie, 332 
 
 Caucasian region, its wealth and 
 beauty, 30-32 
 
 Caucasus, southern bulwark of Rus- 
 sia, 5 
 
 Central Asia, its highlands the east- 
 ern limit of Russia, 5 ; influences 
 Russia's climate, 7 
 
 Character, national Russian, 138- 
 144 ; affected by the climate, 140, 
 161 ; described at large, 162-170;
 
 5 82 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 how influenced by the physical 
 nature of the country, 170-178 ; 
 by the alternations of the seasons, 
 187 ; full of contrasts and ex- 
 tremes, 188-194 
 
 Christianity, introduced by Olga 
 and Vladimir, from Constantino- 
 ple, 246 
 
 Church, national Russian, fortified 
 under the Tatar domination, 259 
 
 Climate, continental, always in ex- 
 tremes, 6 ; wanting in moisture, 
 8 ; of the northern or forest zone, 
 18 ; of the steppe zone, 21, 22 ; its 
 injurious action on the national 
 character, 140, 143 ; on mortality, 
 149 ; on popular habits, 150-154 ; 
 on the national character again, 
 161-170 
 
 Colonization of Russia, by Russians, 
 44-46 ; by Germans, 46 ; by Greco- 
 Slavs, 47, 48 ; by Great-Russians, 
 109, no 
 
 Commune, rural, discovered in 1842, 
 476 ; will it survive the present 
 crisis ? 503, 504 ; its mutual soli- 
 darity in the matter of taxes, 521- 
 523 ; description of a typical one, 
 523-525 ; its control over its mem- 
 bers based on fiscal solidarity, 525- 
 531 ; often oppressive, 541, 542 ; 
 not bettered by emancipation, 
 542-545 ; yet not fatally doomed, 
 546, 547 ; its immediate abolition 
 unadvisable, 560-562 
 
 Cosacks, sons of the steppe, natu- 
 rally antagonistic to the north or 
 forest zone, 16 ; of the Black Sea 
 Little Russians, 117; of the Don 
 and Ural Great Russians, id.; a 
 distinct warrior caste, 317 ; their 
 free land-tenure on the Don, 481 ; 
 their communal organization in 
 the Ural, 505-507 
 
 Crimea, the special home of Russian 
 Tatars, 88 
 
 Croats, Slavs of the southern branch, 
 103 
 
 Danilefsky, from his book, Russia 
 and Europe, 13, 237-240 
 
 Dashkoff Museum, 57 
 
 Diet, peasants', 145-155 (appendix) ; 
 lenten, 156-158 (appendix) ; injuri- 
 ous to health and life, 148 
 
 Don, river in southern Russia, 5 ; 
 proposed by some as frontier line, 8 
 
 Drinks, national Russian, 145, 146 
 
 Drunkenness of the Russian people 
 much exaggerated, 146; its de- 
 crease, 147 
 
 Dvori&nstvo, see Nobility. 
 
 E 
 
 Ehsts (Esthonians), a Finnic tribe 
 on the Baltic, 69 
 
 Emancipation, Nicolas' pet scheme, 
 418 ; supported by public opinion, 
 419-421 ; how prepared, 422-426 ; 
 its main objects, 426 ; its basis, 
 428 ; its standard of territorial 
 endowment, 433-435 ; its manner 
 of proceeding, 436-441 ; breeds 
 general disappointment, 450-455, 
 460 ; how it affects the people's 
 character and habits, 460-465; 
 its temporary evil effects on the 
 condition of the rural communes 
 (mir), 542-545 
 
 Esthonians, see Ehsts. 
 
 Ethnological collection in the Dash- 
 koff Museum, 57-59 ; three princi- 
 pal elements of Russia's popula- 
 tion, 63 
 
 Finns, one of the three main ethnical 
 elements of Russia's population,
 
 INDEX. 
 
 583 
 
 63 ; identical with the Tchud, ib.; 
 of Turanian stock, Uralo-Altaic 
 branch, 64; classed with Mongols, 
 65 ; their many tribes and their 
 wide diffusion, 66-70 ; their char- 
 acteristics, 71-76 ; their personal 
 appearance, 79, note 
 Forest zone, 16-18 
 
 Germans, their small numbers in the 
 Baltic Provinces, 69, note, 124, 
 127-129 ; oppose the Russian ele- 
 ment, 70, note ; their oppression 
 of the Baltic Ehsts and Letts, 124 ; 
 their appropriation of certain 
 trades, 125 ; their arrogance to 
 Russians, 125, 126; gain ground in 
 all the western borderland, 129 
 
 Great-Russians (Velikoruss) the 
 chief division of the Russian peo- 
 ple, 107 ; their area the centre, 
 north, and northeast of Russia, 
 ib.; the most mixed with Finnic 
 blood, 109; yet predominantly 
 Slavs, 111-113; the great colo- 
 nizers of Russia, 109, no; their 
 physical characteristics, 114 
 
 Guilds, merchant, introduced by 
 Peter the Great, 338 ; their consti- 
 tution, 338-340 
 
 H 
 
 Herzen, patriot and exile, 199, 200 
 
 Hierarchy, social, as regulated by 
 Peter the Great, 313 ; its subdi- 
 visions and development, 311-325 
 
 Hungars (later Hungarians, or Mag- 
 yars), of Finnic race, 67 ; their 
 mingling with Aryan elements and 
 consequent improvement, 75, 76 
 
 Huns, of Finnic race, 67 ; yet in 
 great part Turkish, 78 
 
 Ivan IV., the Terrible, the conqueror 
 of Kazan, 268 
 
 Kalcvala, the Finnic Epic, 73, note ; 
 76, note 
 
 Kalmyks, an Asiatic tribe, dwelling 
 by the Azof Sea, 30 ; on the Lower 
 Volga, 63 ; of Mongolian origin, 
 79 ; their history, ib. 
 
 Karaites, a Jewish sect, 57, 58 
 
 Karels, a Finnic tribe in the West 
 of Russia, 69 
 
 Katkof, Slavophil and publicist, the 
 champion of classical education, 
 205 
 
 Kirghiz, an Asiatic tribe, dwelling 
 in the Azof and Caspian steppe- 
 regions, 27, 30 
 
 Kirghiz steppe, once the bed of the 
 Caspian Sea, 29 
 
 Kniaz, the only national Russian 
 title, 85, note; its history, 154 
 (appendix) 
 
 Kniazes (Princes), the lineal de- 
 scendants of the appanage-princes, 
 the only national aristocracy, 353- 
 355 
 
 Koltsdf, poet, "the Russian Burns," 
 143, note. 
 
 Kremlin or Kreml, meaning of the 
 word, 39, note 2 
 
 Kryl6f (Ivan Andre"yevitch), the 
 great fabulist, 379, 380 
 
 Kurg&nSy also called Moghili, sepul- 
 chral mounds of ancient peoples, 19 
 
 Ladoga, Russian lake, largest in 
 
 Europe, 5, 18 
 Lakes, Russian, largest in the world : 
 
 Ladoga, Onega, Baikal, Caspian,
 
 584 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Aral, 5 ; eleven hundred pond-like 
 lakes in Arkhangelsk, 18 
 
 Lauds, communal, how divided and 
 re-allotted, 510-520; their excessive 
 parcelling, 518-520 
 
 Land-tenure, collective or commu- 
 nal, the national form, 474 ; un- 
 changed by emancipation, 475 ; 
 historical review of, 476-482 ; its 
 territorial distribution, 482-485 ; its 
 inefficiency, 531-533; its advocates 
 and detractors, 534-536 ; public 
 opinion divided about it, 536-540 ; 
 peasants differ about it, 552, 553 ; 
 it shelters them from absolute 
 destitution, 564-566 ; unfavorable 
 to the spirit of individual enter- 
 prise, 568 ; not to be abolished 
 rashly, 568-571 ; nor to be con- 
 sidered a universal panacea, 571- 
 574 ; its impending struggle with 
 individual tenure, 575 ; not a suffi- 
 cient safeguard against class con- 
 flicts, 575-579 
 
 Lapps, a Finnic tribe, 65 ; the most 
 typical, 69 
 
 Lett, one of the three languages 
 spoken by the Letto-Lithuanians, 
 105 
 
 Letto-Lithuanian group, in the north- 
 western region of Russia, Indo- 
 European, but not exactly Slavs, 
 104 ; their scant numbers and re- 
 markable languages, 105 
 
 Letts, inhabit Curland and Livonia, 
 1 06 
 
 Lezghians, Caucasian tribe, 63 
 
 Liakhs, Slavs of the western branch, 
 104 
 
 Lithuanians, formerly a great nation, 
 105 
 
 Little-Russians (Maloross), occupy 
 the southwestern part of Russia, 
 108; their characteristics, 115-117; 
 Russians beyond doubt, 117-119 
 
 Livonians, see Livs. 
 
 Livs (Livonians), a Finnic tribe on 
 the Baltic, 69 
 
 M 
 
 Magyars, see Hungars. 
 
 Maloross, see Little-Russians. 
 
 Mir, the assembly of the village 
 
 elders, or heads of families ; see 
 
 Commune, 
 "^/i'r-eaters," or village vampires, 
 
 529-531. 566 
 Moghili, see Kurg&ns. 
 
 Mongolian 1 
 
 > race, see Turanian. 
 Mongoloid i 
 
 Mongols, Turanian race, Uralo-Altaic 
 
 branch, 64 ; much mixed with 
 
 Turks or Tatars, 78 
 Mordvins, a Finnic tribe of the 
 
 southern branch, in the centre of 
 
 Russia, 68 
 Moscow (Moscovia), the rise of, 265- 
 
 268 
 Mountains, scarcity of, 7 ; Ural, 7, 
 
 9, 10, 16 ; Valday, 17 
 
 N 
 
 Nicolas, the despot, 302 
 
 Niekrassof, poet and editor, 202, note 
 
 Nietchayef, revolutionist, tool of 
 Bakunin, 201 
 
 Nihilism, originates in German phi- 
 losophy, 195 ; not peculiar to Rus- 
 sia, 196 ; its three stages, 197, 198 ; 
 its repulsive coarseness, 203-206 ; 
 its affinities with mysticism, 207- 
 209 ; its apostles, 212-214; chiefly 
 affects the youth of both sexes, 
 215-217 ; its women converts, 217- 
 
 222 
 
 Nobility (dvori&nstvo), its peculiar 
 character, 347, 348 ; its constitu- 
 tion, 349-355 ; its laws of succession, 
 355-361 ; its origin the drujlna 
 and the boy&r, 362-366 ; its land 
 endowments, 366-368 ; its dissen-
 
 INDEX. 
 
 585 
 
 sions and jealousies, 368-372 ; in- 
 vaded by bureaucracy, 373 ff ; its 
 protest in the shape of exclusive- 
 ness and European cosmopolitism, 
 381-387 ; its consequent estrange- 
 ment from the people, 388 ; its 
 privileges, 390-396 ; its lack of 
 cohesion and corporate spirit, 397- 
 402 
 
 Nogays, a Tatar tribe, in the Azof 
 and Caspian steppe-region, 27, 30 ; 
 partly Mongolian, 78 
 
 O 
 
 Obi, Siberian river, 5 ; proposed by 
 some as frontier line, 8 
 
 "Occidentals "(Z&padniki), the par- 
 tisans of Western Europe, 227 ; 
 their views of Russian history and 
 civilization, ib. ; their standing 
 conflict against Slavophilism, 236, 
 
 237 
 Onga, Russian lake, second largest 
 
 in Europe, 5 
 Ostiaks, a Finnic tribe in Siberia, 67 
 
 Panslavism, its moderate ambition, 
 103 
 
 Peasants, the hope of the country, 
 403-409 ; their condition before 
 serfdom, 410 ; " made fast to the 
 soil," 411-413 ; their condition in 
 serfdom, 414-418 ; their views of 
 the land question, 429 ; their dis- 
 content and distrust, 429-432 ; 
 placed "under temporary obliga- 
 tions," 442 ; their sullenness and 
 blunders, 445-449 ; their pitiable 
 plight, 456-459 ; how affected in 
 their habits by the emancipation, 
 460-465 ; their friendly relations 
 x> the former masters, 466, 467 ; 
 their unreasonable expectations, 
 468-473 ; their home-life and family 
 
 organization, 487-503 ; their grow- 
 ing appetite for individual prop- 
 erty, 553-556; they buy out the 
 nobility in places, to the detriment 
 of farming, 556-560 
 
 Permians, a Finnic tribe of the Biar- 
 mian branch, on the Kama, 68 
 
 Peter the Great, the typical repre- 
 sentative of the national character, 
 192-194 ; history of his work, 282- 
 304; his boyhood among foreign- 
 ers, 285 ; his travels, 287 ; his 
 versatility, 287, 288 ; his reforms, 
 289, 290 ; his successors, 291-293 ; 
 criticism on his methods and work, 
 294-303 ; introduces merchant 
 guilds, 338 ; creates the Table of 
 Ranks, 373 
 
 Pisseinsky, novelist, author of In 
 the Whirlpool, 187 
 
 Poles, Slavs of the western branch, 
 104 ; source of their antagonism 
 with the Russians, ib. ; at present 
 dread German rule more, 131 
 
 Polish question, 129-137 
 
 Population, its sparseness in the 
 north, 18 ; in the fertile steppe 
 region, 28 ; in the Kalmyk steppe, 
 30 ; uneven density of, 38-40 ; 
 statistical averages consequently 
 misleading, 41 ; on the future in- 
 crease of, 41, 42 ; ethnic elements 
 f> 57~62 > urban and rural, 322, 
 3 2 5> 3 2 7-33o I of towns and cities 
 with their class-divisions, 334-345 
 
 Property, undivided in peasant fami- 
 lies, 490-492 ; when and how di- 
 vided, 493-495, 497-500 
 
 Pskof, submission of, to Tsar Vassili, 
 272-274 
 
 R 
 
 Re-allotment, periodical, of commu- 
 nal lands, 511 ; at various intervals, 
 511-513 ; its evil effects when too 
 frequent, 573~575
 
 586 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Redemption by the peasants of the 
 lands taken from the landlords, 
 428, 438-441 ; proceeds slowly, 
 under difficulties, 443-445 ; assisted 
 by the State, 447-449 
 
 Reforms, their democratical ten- 
 dency, 306, 307, 310 
 
 Religion, distribution among Finns, 
 Tatars, and Mongols, 80 ; a barrier 
 between Russians and Tatars, 81, 
 82, 84-86 ; its influence on the po- 
 sition of the Tatars, 90, 91 
 
 Romdnofs, called to the throne, 270 
 
 Roxolans, an extinct tribe of Finno- 
 Turkish blood, 78 
 
 Russia, other nations' ignorance of, 
 and prejudice against, 1-3 ; her 
 civilization the outcome of her 
 past, 3 ; her vast extent, 4, 5 ; her 
 structure Asiatic, 6, 8 ; her climate, 
 continental and Asiatic, 6 ; her 
 solid, horizontal geological forma- 
 tion, 7 ; insufficient moisture of her 
 atmosphere, 8 ; compared to North 
 America, n ; to Brazil, 12 ; is 
 neither Europe nor Asia, 10, 13, 
 115 ; poorness of her physical na- 
 ture, 12 ; her characteristic unity 
 in immensity, 15, 35-37 ; divided 
 into two main zones : the forest 
 zone and the steppe zone, 16 ; her 
 population, 37-42 ; her wealth of 
 natural products, 42, 43 ; her colo- 
 nization, native and foreign, 43-50 ; 
 a land and people of contrasts, 
 50-52 ; her ethnological variety, 
 57-60; her practical relations to 
 Europe, 237-240 ; her connection 
 with Byzance, 246-248, 263-265, 
 277 ; her condition under the Ta- 
 tars, 256-263 ; under the Moscovite 
 princes, 265-270 ; her social con- 
 stitution, 305-321 
 
 Russian people, has very little Mon- 
 gol or Tatar blood, 80, 81, 86, 87 ; 
 more Finnic, 81, 82 ; its division 
 
 into Great- Russian, Little-Russian, 
 White-Russian, 107, 108 ; fusion 
 of its elements, 114, 115, 121 
 
 Samogit, one of the three languages 
 spoken by the Letto-Lithuanians, 
 105 
 
 Samoyeds, a Finnic tribe, 67, 69 
 
 Seasons, their variety and beauties, 
 179-187 ; their influence on the 
 national character, 187-194 
 
 Serbs, Slavs of the southern branch, 
 103 
 
 Serfdom, first establishment of, 176, 
 note, 411-413 ; not universal, 414 ; 
 its character and effects, 414-418 
 
 Siberia, controls Russia's climate, 7 ; 
 first conquest of, by Yermak, 278- 
 281 (appendix) 
 
 Slavophils, the champions of Russian 
 nationality, their views of Russian 
 history and civilization, 227 ; their 
 origin and doctrines, 228-233 \ re ~ 
 action in their, favor, 233-235 ; their 
 standing conflict against Occident- 
 alism, 236, 237 ; their enthusiasm 
 over the local commune (mir), 
 
 477, 504 
 
 Slavs, one of the three main ethnical 
 elements of Russia's population, 
 63 ; an Aryan or Indo-European 
 race, 95 ; their characteristics, 96- 
 98, 101, 102 ; their place in the his- 
 tory of human culture, 98-100; 
 their geographical distribution, 
 103-110 ; scant knowledge of them, 
 241-243 
 
 Slovens, a Slavic tribe of the southern 
 branch, 95, 103 
 
 Solovidf, the nihilist and would-be 
 regicide, 212, 214 
 
 Steppes, southeastern, dried-up bed 
 of an ancient sea, 9 ; one of Russia's 
 two main zones, 16 ; steppe-zone
 
 INDEX. 
 
 587 
 
 described, 19-22 ; two kinds of, 
 fertile and barren, 24 ; fertile, 25- 
 28; barren, or Uralo-Caspian, 28- 
 30 ; Kirghiz, 29 ; Kalmyk, 30 
 Suomi, the Finns of Finland, 68 
 
 "Table of Ranks," instituted by 
 Peter the Great, the foundation 
 of bureaucracy, 293 ; its scheme 
 and dispositions, 373-375 ; its ef- 
 fects, 377-379 
 
 Tatars, one of the three main ethnical 
 elements of Russia's population, 
 63 ; of Turanian stock, Uralo-Altaic 
 branch, 64 ; first appeared in Russia 
 with Jinghiz-khan, 77 ; identical 
 with Turks, 77, 78 ; their history, 
 qualities, and position in Russia, 
 82-94 ; their coming and domina- 
 tion, 256-263 ; beaten at Kulikovo 
 on the Don, 267 
 
 Tchekhs (Bohemians), Slavs of the 
 western branch, 104 
 
 Tcheremyss, a Finnic tribe of the 
 southern branch on the Volga, 68 
 
 Tchernozidm, see Black Mould. 
 
 Tchernyshefsky, essayist and novel- 
 ist, the champion of ultra-nihilism, 
 author of What is to be Done f 
 201-203, 209 
 
 Tchetchens, Caucasian tribe, 63 
 
 Tchin (" grade " as instituted by the 
 Table of Ranks), an old Slavic 
 word, 373, note 
 
 Tchud, etymology, 63 ; see Finn ; 
 also a separate tribe, 70 
 
 Tchuvash, a Finnic tribe of the 
 southern branch, on the Volga, 68 ; 
 partly Turkish or Tatar, 78 
 
 Tolstoy, Minister, 206, note 
 
 Towns, their peculiar character, 323 ; 
 their sparseness, 324 ; their social 
 organization, 330-333 
 
 Tundra, what it is, n, 17 
 
 Turanian stock or group of races, as 
 opposed to the Indo-European or 
 Aryan and the Semitic, 64 ; Uralo- 
 Altaic branch of, ib. 
 
 Turks, represented in Russia by the 
 Tatars, 77, 78; often mixed with 
 Mongols, 78 ; their place between 
 the Finnic and Mongolian 
 branches, ib. 
 
 U 
 
 Ugrians, a Finnic tribe in Asia, 67 
 
 Ukrainophilism and its puerile pre- 
 tensions, 119-121 
 
 Ural Mountains, insufficient defence, 
 7 ; their nature and office, 9, 10 ; 
 crossed by the forest zone and the 
 steppe zone, 16 
 
 Uralo-Altaic branch of the Turanian 
 stock, 64; comprises Finns, Ta- 
 tars, Mongols, ib.; its characteris- 
 tics, 64-66 
 
 Uralo-Caspian steppe region, irre- 
 claimably barren, 28-30 ; fit only 
 for pastoral life, 39 
 
 Ural River, also Yaik, proposed as 
 frontier line, 8 
 
 Valday Mountains, the head of all 
 the great rivers, 17, 18, 36 
 
 Varangians, were they Slavs or Ger- 
 mans ? 244 ; the German theory, 
 245 ; the Slavic side of the question, 
 253-255 (appendix) 
 
 Velikoruss, see Great-Russians. 
 
 Vends, an ancient Slavic tribe, 95 ; 
 some few still in existence in 
 Lausitz, 104 
 
 Veses, a Finnic tribe in the west of 
 Russia, 69 
 
 Village Communities, have their 
 prototype in the family, 486-504 ; 
 large ones, of the Ural Cosacks, 
 505-507 ; of northern Russia, 507,
 
 588 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 508 ; manner of dissolving them, 
 
 548-550 ; cases of dissolution rare, 
 
 550-552 
 
 Voguls, a Finnic tribe in the Ural, 68 
 Volga, river, the central artery of 
 
 Russia, 5 ; proposed by some as 
 
 frontier line, 8 
 Voti&ks, a Finnic tribe of the Biar- 
 
 mian branch, on the Viatka, 68 
 
 W 
 
 White-Russians (Bieloruss), occupy 
 the western part of Russia, 108 
 
 Winter, its severity in the northern 
 or forest zone, 18 ; in the steppe 
 zone, 21, 22 ; its tasks and pleas- 
 ures, 141, 142 ; impairs moral en- 
 ergy, 143, and physical, 144 ; 
 protection of houses from, 158 
 (appendix) 
 
 Women, have no rights to property 
 in the peasant family, 493 ; their 
 personal effects and hoard (ko- 
 rdbka), 494 ; their subordinate 
 and unhappy condition, 501-503 
 
 Yagellons, the great royal family of 
 the I/ithuanians, 105 
 
 Yaik, see Ural River. 
 
 Ye'nissdy, Siberian river, 5,11 
 
 Yerm&k, the Cosack chief, first con- 
 queror of Siberia, 278-281 (appen- 
 dix) 
 
 Zadruga, the Siberian form of family 
 and village communities, 479, 487, 
 note ; 491, note ; 492 
 
 Z&padniki, see "Occidentals." 
 
 Zapordgs, Cosacks of 1/ittle-Russia, 
 117 
 
 Zones ; forest zone and steppe zone, 
 naturally antagonistic, 16 ; de- 
 scribed, 16-22 ; Black Mould, 22-24 
 
 Zyrians, a Finnic tribe of the Biar- 
 mian branch, on the Dvina and 
 Petch6ra, 68
 
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