RUSSIA 
 
 SZSXLOJU&Al
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 GREAT RUSSIA
 
 MR. KNOPF'S NEW BOOKS 
 
 GREEN MANSIONS 
 by W . H. Hudson 
 With an Introduction 
 by John Galsworthy 
 
 MEMOIRS OF A PHYSICIAN 
 by Vikenty Veressayev 
 
 THE LITTLE DEMON 
 by Feodor Sologub 
 
 A HERO OF OUR TIME 
 by M. Y. Lermontov 
 
 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 by Charles Sarolea 
 
 THE OLD HOUSE 
 by Feodor Sologub 
 
 BIRDS AND MAN 
 by W. H. Hudson 
 
 OTHERS 
 
 An Anthology of the New Verse 
 
 SELF GOVERNMENT IN RUSSIA 
 by Paul Vinogradov
 
 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 Her Achievement and Promise 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES SAROLEA 
 
 D. Litt. (Liege) D. Ph. (Brussels) LL. D. (Montreal) 
 D. Juris (Cleveland) 
 
 NEW YORK 
 ALFRED A KNOPF 
 
 1916
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF 
 
 PRINTED IN AMERICA
 
 DK 
 5 14 
 
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 TO 
 BENJAMIN GUINNESS 
 
 most genial of hosts and 
 most loyal of friends 
 
 236778
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 PART I 
 
 The Geographical Foundations of Russian 
 Politics 
 
 I. THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE 3 
 
 II. THE LESSON OF PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 14 
 
 III. THE LESSONS OF ECONOMIC GEOG- 
 
 RAPHY 28 
 
 IV. THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION 
 
 OF RACES 37 
 
 V. THE GEOGRAPHICAL ORIENTATION OF 
 
 RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLITICS 43 
 
 PART II 
 
 What the World Owes to Russia 
 
 VI. RUSSIAN VERSUS GERMAN CULTURE 51 
 
 VII. RUSSIA STANDS FOR DEMOCRACY AND 
 
 LIBERTY 61 
 
 vii
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER p ACK 
 
 VIII. RUSSIA AS THE LIBERATOR OF OP- 
 PRESSED NATIONALITIES 74 
 
 IX. RUSSIA STANDS FOR PEACE AND 
 
 PROGRESS 82 
 
 PART III 
 
 The Great Russian Triumvirate 
 
 X. TURGENEV AND WESTERN INFLUENCE 91 
 XI. TOLSTOY THE BYZANTINE 107 
 
 XII. DOSTOEVSKY AND THE RELIGION OF 
 
 HUMAN SUFFERING 118 
 
 XIII. THOUGHTS ON THE RUSSIAN LAN- 
 
 GUAGE 124 
 
 PART IV 
 
 Russian Problems 
 
 XIV. THE RESURRECTION OF POLAND 139 
 XV. THE PROBLEM OF THE RUSSIAN JEW 153 
 
 XVI. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE 
 
 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 179 
 
 XVII. RUSSIAN POLITICAL EVILS AND THEIR 
 
 REMEDIES 217 
 
 XVIII. THE RUSSIAN WAR OF LIBERATION A 
 
 HUNDRED YEARS AGO 224 
 
 XIX. RUSSIA AND GERMANY 231
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE present volume is not a mere collec- 
 lection of disconnected articles, of dis- 
 jecta membra, on the Russian Empire 
 and on the Russian people. Rather is it an at- 
 tempt to give a systematic and co-ordinated sur- 
 vey of Russian history and policy. 
 
 In the first part I have tried to analyse some- 
 what more consistently than has been done by 
 previous authors how Russian history and Rus- 
 sian policy are rooted in definite geographical 
 conditions. 
 
 In the second part I have tried to indicate the 
 inappreciable debt which the world owes to the 
 Russian people. 
 
 In the third part I have shown how the ideals 
 of Russian culture have found adequate ex- 
 pression in the representative masters of Rus- 
 sian literature. 
 
 In the fourth part I have dealt with the two 
 burning questions of Russian politics, the Polish 
 problem and the Jewish problem. 
 
 In the paper on the abortive Revolution-
 
 x PREFACE 
 
 ary Movement of 1905 I have examined the 
 difficulties which confronted Russian reform- 
 ers. The paper was written ten years ago in 
 Moscow under the direct impression of the 
 tragic events of the Russian Annus Mirabilis. 
 I have analysed the causes why the civil war 
 of 1905 failed and was bound to fail, and I 
 have suggested on what lines any future reform- 
 ing movement is likely to succeed. I have not 
 hesitated to reprint those pages, not only be- 
 cause I was repeatedly urged to do so by the 
 late Count Tolstoy, not only because my fore- 
 casts were verified in every detail, but because 
 those pages are still entirely applicable to the 
 present situation. The difficulties which con- 
 fronted the Russian Revolutionists in 1905, 
 will still confront Russian Reformers in the po- 
 litical reorganization of to-morrow. The reme- 
 dies which were demanded in 1905 are still 
 urgently required to-day. 
 
 I am quite aware that within the narrow com- 
 pass of 200 pages I have only been able to touch 
 the fringe of a huge subject, but I shall have 
 sufficiently attained my purpose if I have suc- 
 ceeded in stimulating some of my readers to 
 think for themselves on those fascinating top- 
 ics, and if I have succeeded in removing some
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 of the most glaring British misconceptions of 
 a wonderful people whose fortunes are hence- 
 forth closely bound up with our own, and who 
 are destined after this war to be the dominant 
 influence in World Politics. 
 
 The Hermitage, Jedburgh 
 November, 1915
 
 PART I 
 
 The Geographical Foundations 
 of Russian Politics
 
 
 SSSSS^ din m
 
 CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION 
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE 
 
 RUSSIA is not a country, but a continent, 
 extending for thousands of miles in 
 one uninterrupted expanse (except for 
 the break of the Ural Mountains) from Cen- 
 tral Europe to the Far East, and from the ice- 
 bound wastes of the White Sea to the sub- 
 tropical shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian 
 Sea. Russia is not a nation, but a bewildering 
 conglomerate of nations, speaking every lan- 
 guage Polish, Finnish, Roumanian, Swedish, 
 German professing every form of religion 
 Pagan, Buddhist, Mahometan, Greek Ortho- 
 
 3
 
 y^ 
 
 4 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 dox, Roman Catholic with every degree of 
 civilization, from the nomadic semi-savage 
 tribes of the Steppes to the progressive Finns, 
 with their Parliament of women and their uni- 
 versal popular education. 
 
 II 
 
 The first and most important fact to remember 
 about the Russians is that they are, with the 
 Chinese, the most prolific people of the earth. 
 Add the aggregate population of Great Britain, 
 France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, 
 Sweden, and Norway, and you will not reach 
 the hundred and seventy-five teeming millions 
 of the Russian Empire. And that population, 
 notwithstanding an awful death-rate, notwith- 
 standing plague and famine, increases auto- 
 matically by three millions a year. Every year 
 three-quarters of the entire population of Scot- 
 land are being added to Russia. In twenty- 
 five years Russia will number two hundred 
 and fifty millions! When we consider that 
 those two hundred and fifty millions will by 
 that time be fully equipped with every instru- 
 ment of modern civilization, we realize that 
 Russia will be one of the most formidable 
 world-forces, for good or evil, before the first
 
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE 5 
 
 half of this century has run its course. We 
 realize that the future belongs, not to England, 
 or to France, or to Germany, but to Russia. 
 After generations of suffering, the Slav is at 
 last coming into his inheritance. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The vast plains of Russia, the most extensive 
 in the planet, include three parallel zones in 
 the north the forest zone, in the centre the 
 agricultural zone with the "black earth" of 
 >r wondrous fertility and in the south the 
 waving prairie inhabited by the Cossacks. If 
 we add to those three zones the vineyards of 
 the Crimea and of the Caucasus, we find that 
 the soil of Russia produces every form of 
 agricultural wealth. And the mineral resources 
 of the country are no less varied and no less 
 inexhaustible. We need only refer to the coal- 
 fields of the Donetz, to the oil-fields of Baku, 
 to the gold and silver mines of the Ural 
 Mountains and of Siberia. If to-day Russia is 
 one of the granaries of the world, to-morrow 
 she will also be one of the greatest industrial 
 areas. 
 
 For the transport of her agricultural and in- 
 dustrial produce Russia possesses not only sixty
 
 6 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 thousand miles of railroad, but what is vastly 
 more important the most magnificent water- 
 ways of Europe. The Russian complains that 
 he has no outlet on the ocean, that all his seas 
 are inland lakes : the Baltic, the Black Sea, the 
 Caspian, and Lake Baikal. But he forgets that 
 he possesses the Don, the Dnieper, and the most 
 glorious river of the world the Volga! Let 
 the tourist take his passage at Tver, where the 
 river becomes navigable, on one of the float- 
 ing hotels of the Kavkaz and Mercur Steam- 
 ship Company Tver is only eight hours' rail- 
 way journey from Petrograd and let him 
 drift in an eight days' journey on the "Mother 
 Volga" down to the Caspian Sea, and he will 
 then conceive the unrivalled possibilities of 
 Russian inland commerce. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is true that a large proportion of the Rus- 
 sian Empire has not yet been assimilated. The 
 alien races the Catholic Poles, even the Ger- 
 mans and Finns, the Jews and Armenians 
 have not yet been won over by the conqueror. 
 Still, the Russian element forms the enormous 
 majority of the population. When the Gov- 
 ernment gives up its stupid methods of com-
 
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE 7 
 
 pulsion, when its alliance with the great liberal 
 Powers of the West will be spiritual as well as 
 political, it is probable that the process of 
 Russincation will proceed at a very rapid pace. 
 For let us not be deceived by superficial ap- 
 pearances. The Russian race possess many of 
 the characteristics of a superior and imperial 
 people. They have survived a struggle for life 
 of ruthless severity. They have resisted the 
 continued pressure of hunger, war, plague, of 
 a cruel climate, and a more cruel Government. 
 The Russians have got a splendid physique, 
 they have a capacity of endurance which is sur- 
 passed by no other race. And although they 
 emerged only yesterday from barbarism, they 
 have already produced giants in every depart- 
 ment of Art, of Literature, and Philosophy 
 scientists like Mendeleieff, philosophers like 
 Soloviov, musicians like Tschaikowsky, painters 
 like Verestchagin, men of letters like Tolstoy 
 and Dostoevsky. 
 
 V 
 
 European Russia is surrounded by an indus- 
 trial belt in the west, in the south, and in the 
 east. But in the meantime Russia remains 
 pre-eminently a nation of peasants. The
 
 8 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 moujik is still the backbone of the Empire. He 
 is a splendid worker when he is given a chance, 
 and in Siberia and Central Asia he proves an 
 ideal colonist. It is true that technically he is 
 still a bad agriculturist. He is ignorant. He 
 has no capital. He scratches the earth with his 
 primitive plough, as in the days of Abraham. 
 But enormous progress is being made, and 
 great changes are impending. The Russian 
 Government is instituting gigantic experiments 
 in land reform, which our own land reformers 
 would do well to follow very closely. Hitherto 
 the communal system of property seems to 
 have proved an insurmountable obstacle to 
 agricultural progress. That form of collective 
 primitive agriculture has now broken down. 
 v The ancient institution of the "mir," or village 
 community, is being disintegrated. Commu- 
 nism is giving way to peasant proprietorship 
 and social co-operation. 
 
 VI 
 
 But it is obvious that no reform of any kind 
 will be carried through successfully until the 
 methods of government in Russia have under- 
 gone drastic changes. Those hundred and 
 seventy millions are still badly ruled. In the
 
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE 9 
 
 first place, they are misgoverned by their 
 spiritual rulers. The Greek Orthodox Church, 
 with her parish priests, or white clergy who 
 are compelled to marry with her hierarchy of 
 monks and bishops, or black clergy who are 
 forbidden to marry remains grossly ignorant 
 and slothful, and maintains the people in sloth 
 and ignorance. She is out of touch with 
 modern life, and continues in abject mental 
 submission to a despotic State. 
 
 Nor do the Russian people fare much better 
 with their temporal rulers.: The Tsar is the 
 nominal head of the Empire. But the reality 
 of power is vested in an irresponsible bureau- 
 cracy, corrupt by tradition, and what is worse, 
 corrupt by necessity, because they are badly 
 paid, because despotism must needs breed cor- 
 ruption, and because the huge distances from 
 St. Petersburg make supervision and responsi- 
 bility impossible. The immortal comedy of 
 Gogol, "The Inspector-General," denouncing 
 the abuses of the provincial bureaucracy, re- 
 mains partly true to this day. No doubt since 
 the heroic rising of 1905 the Russian people 
 have received representative institutions; but 
 the Duma is only a beginning. No reforms 
 can be fruitful unless they are attended by a
 
 10 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 large measure of Home Rule in Finland, in 
 Poland, in Trans-Caucasia, in Little Russia, 
 and unless they are attended by an even larger 
 measure of local self-government, and last, not 
 least, unless they are attended by a concession 
 of religious liberty which has ever been the 
 foundation of political liberty. The main con- 
 dition of any future progress in Russia is that 
 the Edict of Toleration of 1905 shall cease to 
 be a dead letter. 
 
 VII 
 
 Unfortunately for the prospects of reform 
 the ideals and the activity of the Government 
 were still being diverted before the war, by the 
 menace of the German Peril and the fascination 
 of the Far East, from the pressing home-prob- 
 lems. cWhat the Russian people really want 
 are better roads, more railways, better housing, 
 better sanitation, better schools, a more liberal 
 Church, a more liberal administration. / But 
 instead of the activities of the Government 
 being turned in that direction, the huge revenue 
 of the Empire had to be largely spent on in- 
 creasing an already huge and unwieldy army, 
 and the political energies of the ruling classes 
 were being devoted to the ambitious and peril-
 
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE n 
 
 ous schemes of conquest in Persia, Mongolia, 
 and Manchuria. Only ten years ago the jingo 
 policy brought humiliating disaster to the Rus- 
 sian arms. The Government quickly forgot 
 the awful lesson, and soon returned to the evil 
 of its ways. They were "strangling" Persia. 
 They were preparing to annex Mongolia and 
 part of Manchuria. There lay the danger in 
 the immediate future. The pressing necessi- 
 ties of national defence, a crushing military 
 expenditure, a false and obsolete political phi- 
 losophy, the imperialism of the governing class 
 and the spirtual despotism of the Orthodox 
 Church, those were before the war the great 
 obstacles in the way of the moral and intellec- 
 tual enfranchisement of the Russian people. 
 
 VIII 
 
 We have every reason to hope that those ob- 
 stacles will be finally removed on the con- 
 clusion of peace, and that the war will prove a 
 war of liberation for the victorious Russian 
 people as it will prove a war of liberation even 
 for the vanquished Germans. For this war is 
 pre-eminently not a dynastic war or a war of 
 conquest, it is a national and a democratic war. 
 And it is almost a law of Russian history that a
 
 12 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 national and democratic war has ever acted as a 
 revolutionary force in Russian politics. 
 
 ( 1 ) The liberal era of Speranski, perhaps the 
 most picturesque and the most mysterious per- 
 sonality in Russian annals, followed the na- 
 tional war against Napoleon. 
 
 (2) The liberation of the serfs and the 
 epoch-making reform of Alexander II followed 
 the Crimean War. 
 
 (3) Drastic reforms had been decided upon 
 after the Russian-Turkish War of 1878, and 
 would have been granted but for the insensate 
 murder of the Liberator Tsar. 
 
 (4) The establishment of Parliamentary 
 Government followed the Russo-Japanese War. 
 
 The present war will prove no exception. 
 The victory of the Allies will mean the end of 
 militarism and the end of militarism will for 
 the first time release the greater part of the 
 huge financial resources of the Russian Empire 
 for the economic development of the country 
 and for the education of the people. And the 
 victory of the Allies will also mean the end of 
 the baneful activities of German reaction and 
 of the German bureaucrats of the Baltic 
 provinces, activities which, as we shall prove in 
 a subsequent chapter, have been the incubus
 
 THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE 13 
 
 of Russian history. It is inevitable that the 
 Russian Government, closely identified as it is 
 with the great liberal Powers of the West, 
 France and Great Britain, must come under 
 their political and moral influence. We may, 
 therefore, confidently predict that British and 
 French culture will blend with and permeate 
 Russian culture, and will be the leaven of 
 Russian politics for the next generation.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE LESSON OF PHYSICAL 
 GEOGRAPHY * 
 
 RUSSIA is the classic land for geo- 
 graphers. Nowhere else have geo- 
 graphical conditions left a more in- 
 delible imprint. Nowhere else have men felt 
 more deeply the all-pervading influences of 
 physical surroundings, of climate and of race. 
 There are some countries, like England, where 
 man has conquered Nature, where Nature has 
 become the benevolent and ministering servant 
 of man. There are other countries, like Russia, 
 where it is Nature that always threatens to en- 
 slave man. In few other countries have men 
 been compelled to submit to that physical des- 
 
 * I do not in the least pretend to give in the present 
 chapter an "explanation" of Modern Russia. I only de- 
 sire to single out one particular factor which I think of 
 the highest importance. Whilst not underrating the other 
 factors, and least of all the religious factor, I think it de- 
 sirable to draw attention to and to emphasize one essential 
 element in the complex Russian problem which is being 
 constantly ignored. 
 
 14
 
 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 15 
 
 potism with a more passive resignation, the 
 resignation of a Tolstoy so representative of 
 the race. And in no other country has Nature 
 given the lie more cruelly and more emphati- 
 cally to the noble dreams of idealists. Idealists 
 may dream their dreams, proclaim their systems, 
 and claim their reforms. But the great natural, 
 economic, climatic forces in Russia continue to 
 follow their immovable course, heedless of sys- 
 tems and reforms. It would seem as if the 
 political destiny of Russia had been written 
 not in the book of philosophy, but in the stern 
 and sibylline book of Nature; it has followed 
 the bend of rivers and the curves of isothermic 
 lines; and one guesses its mystery, and one 
 catches its meaning more surely and more 
 easily, by listening to the murmur of forest and 
 steppe than by listening to the most plausible 
 theories of revolutionists. 
 
 II 
 
 In this connexion, and to illustrate my meaning 
 from the outset, and to indicate what I am 
 driving at, I would like to point out the utter 
 futility and folly of most newspaper comments 
 and discussions on the political situation in 
 Russia. In speculating on the probable course
 
 16 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 of Russian policy, journalists are constantly 
 reasoning on the childish assumption that the 
 ultimate success or failure of political and social 
 reform must entirely depend on the will, weak 
 or strong, just or wicked, enlightened or ob- 
 scured, of some one man or group of men, the 
 Tsar or the Grand Dukes, their supporters or 
 opponents. If Russia could only be got rid 
 of these Grand Dukes, and "of a few corrupt 
 officials," then all would be right. Not only 
 do they forget that behind the Tsar and the 
 Grand Dukes, and the high court officials, 
 there is the large army of the bureaucracy, mil- 
 lions strong, with their immense power, with 
 their vested interests, who are capable of par- 
 alyzing and neutralizing all the efforts of the 
 most enlightened rulers, and of wrecking all 
 the programmes of reform if they so choose, 
 but they also forget that behind both autocracy 
 and bureaucracy there is a factor infinitely 
 more important still, and that is the passive 
 resistance or active co-operation of one hundred 
 and fifty millions of peasants, whom we totally 
 ignore in our calculations, as if they were abso- 
 lutely of no account. Unfortunately for our 
 speculations and calculations, these one hun- 
 dred and fifty millions, whether active or pas-
 
 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 17 
 
 sive, must be taken into account, as the ulti- 
 mate success of any scheme of reform neces- 
 sarily depends upon them. It may not be 
 true that the people have generally the Gov- 
 ernment they deserve, and that they deserve the 
 Government they have; or to use the language 
 of Carlyle, that the rights of a people are equiv- 
 alent to its mights, its needs and aspirations. 
 But in a country like Russia, the needs and the ; 
 mights of the people cannot be ignored, and 
 those needs and mights are largely determined 
 by the conditions under which they live, and 
 those conditions largely resolve themselves into 
 facts of climate and distance, of soil and of 
 race. 
 
 Ill 
 
 One single illustration applicable to the pres- 
 ent situation will explain better than any argu- 
 ment the interdependence between climate, eco- 
 nomics and politics. All reformers are agreed 
 that the most urgent need of the Russian peo- 
 ple, after the introduction of religious freedom, 
 is the establishment of universal popular edu- 
 cation. So vital is that need, so strongly is it 
 felt that, as far back as the sixties, Tolstoy for 
 several years relinquished his literary activities
 
 18 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 and improvised himself a primary schoolmaster. 
 But Tolstoi was driven by his pedagogical ex- 
 periment to see the futility of all the theories 
 and reforms propounded by doctrinaire pub- 
 licists. The doctrinaire publicists imagine that 
 universal compulsory education could be intro- 
 duced into Russia by a stroke of the autocratic 
 pen, and they blame a reactionary bureaucracy 
 and an obscurantist church for keeping the peo- 
 ple in darkness. But the bureaucracy is really 
 much less responsible than theorists imagine for 
 the backwardness of Russian education. In a 
 country where winter lasts for seven months, 
 where for those interminable winter months the 
 plains are covered with a thick shroud of snow, 
 where roads are few and bad, in a country which 
 is further sparsely inhabited and where the 
 izbas of the moujik are as scattered as the farms 
 of the Dutchmen on the South African veld 
 you cannot possibly have primary schools as in 
 Great Britain or France. Even the most pro- 
 gressive Russian Government could not afford 
 a schoolmaster for every twelve families. It 
 could not even establish itinerant schoolmasters 
 as is done in the Scottish Highlands. For the 
 Highlands are much better provided with roads, 
 and they are more thickly inhabited than many
 
 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 19 
 
 parts of Russia. On the other hand you can- 
 not compel little Russian children to tramp in 
 the depth of winter for ten miles to the nearest 
 school centre. In other words the diffusion of 
 popular education is not mainly a question of 
 political development, but of economic develop- 
 ment. Again it is largely a question of cli- 
 matte, of good roads and of density of popula- 
 tion. 
 
 Let us then constantly keep in mind those 
 physical conditions which are amongst the 
 fundamental factors of the political problem. 
 It would be as idle to ignore those geographical 
 factors as it would be to ignore the intellectual 
 and spiritual factors. Without an accurate and 
 minute investigation of the environment, it is 
 as futile to speculate on the relative strength 
 of the forces of liberty and reaction as it would 
 be to speculate on the resistance of the Forth 
 Bridge or the Tay Bridge, without examining 
 the strength of the foundations, without study- 
 ing the special properties of iron and steel as 
 well as the general laws of dynamics. 
 
 IV 
 
 The first feature and the essential fact in the 
 physical geography of Russia is the infinite
 
 20 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 plain, the uniform steppe and prairie, without 
 any other undulations than the tumuli, or pre- 
 historic tombs, or the high banks of streams, or 
 the insignificant hills which separate the basins 
 of the enormous, slow, aimless rivers. The 
 chain of the Ural Mountains which separates 
 Asiatic Russia from European Russia hardly 
 breaks the continuity of the plain. The slopes 
 of the Ural are a passage rather than a barrier, 
 and between the last slopes of the Ural and the 
 Caspian Sea there opens a gate of three hun- 
 dred miles in width which has always been the 
 highway of invaders and marauders. 
 
 And this unity of the infinite plain is still 
 rendered more striking through the unity of cli- 
 mate. In summer the same Continental cli- 
 mate reigns all over the Empire, the same in- 
 tense heat relaxes and enervates the inhabit- 
 ants of Lake Ladoga in the north and the in- 
 habitants of the Caspian shores in the south. 
 In winter the same shroud of snow buries the 
 whole Russian Continent from Poland to 
 Siberia. The Sea of Azov and the northern 
 Caspian Sea are frozen as well as the Gulf of 
 Finland. And the traveller might drive and 
 glide in his sledge in a straight line for six
 
 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 21 
 
 thousand miles from the Baltic Sea to the Pa- 
 cific Ocean, from Archangel to Astrakhan. 
 
 V 
 
 Now, my point is that this single feature of 
 the physical geography of Russia has deter- 
 mined beforehand the whole history of the 
 Russian people. We are reminded of the ad- 
 mirable sonnet of Wordsworth on the subjuga- 
 tion of Switzerland by Napoleon : 
 
 Two Voices are there; one is of the sea, 
 One of the mountains; each a mighty voice; 
 In both from age to age Thou didst rejoice, 
 They were thy chosen music, Liberty. 
 
 If it be true that the voices of sea and mountain 
 are the two mighty voices of Liberty, on the 
 other it is even more obvious that the plain 
 has ever been the arena and refuge of despotism. 
 The levelling of the soil seems to be significant 
 and symbolical of the levelling of men. Ernest 
 Renan has told us that the desert is mono- 
 theistic, i.e. that the uniformity of the desert 
 suggests and determines a belief in the unity 
 of God. In the same way, one might assert 
 that the plain is monarchic and autocratic. In
 
 22 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 all times and everywhere the plain has invited 
 the invader, and in order to repel and expel 
 that foreign invader the inhabitants have had 
 to submit to the protecting yoke of a master; 
 they have had to accept a military and cen- 
 tralized monarchy. 
 
 Examine on the map the few and scattered 
 historic cities of Russia Moscow, Novgorod 
 the Great, Nijni Novgorod, Kiev, Kazan 
 generally situated on the border of the shelter- 
 ing forest, or at the mouth or on the banks of 
 rivers. The new city or "nov gorod" is gen- 
 erally situated on the lower bank (nijni), but 
 the old city is almost invariably situated on a 
 height, round a Kreml. Each one of those 
 old cities dominating the plain appears to us 
 like a sentinel who watches and like a strong- 
 hold which protects, and that Kremlin which 
 is both an acropolis and a capitol, which is at 
 once a fortress, a church, and a city tells us 
 by its aspect of the violent destinies of the in- 
 habitants. The whole of Russian history is 
 one continued effort to drive out foreign inva- 
 sion. ' In everlasting succession on each fron- 
 tier arises a new enemy Tatars of Kazan and 
 of Crimea, Khirgiz of the Volga, Cossacks 
 of the Steppe, Turks, Poles, Lithuanians, Ger-
 
 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 23 
 
 mans, Swedes, towards the sduth and the west 
 the external peril has never ceased. 
 
 VI 
 
 Speaking of the European coalition against 
 France in 1792, Joseph de Maistre has been 
 able to say that France could only be saved by 
 a Reign of Terror. With how much more 
 reason might one affirm that Russia could only 
 be saved by an autocracy? It is Ivan the Ter- 
 rible, Peter and Catherine the Great who have 
 been the cruel and stern master-builders of the 
 Russian people, the "gatherers" of the Russian 
 soil.* 
 
 It is hard for a Briton, who has an instinctive 
 worship and almost a superstition for liberty, 
 to get reconciled with the principle of des- 
 potism. It is difficult for him not to see in 
 that principle something diabolical, the source 
 of all moral and political evil. And most diffi- 
 cult of all, most repugnant to his feelings, is it 
 to admit that this abhorred autocracy can ever 
 have been the very condition of the salvation 
 of the country. But let us not forget that in 
 the life of nations the principle of authority,' 
 as long as it is accepted by the people, and as 
 
 * See the Russian writings of Danilevski.
 
 24 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 long as it rests on a moral or spiritual basis, 
 may be as necessary and therefore as legitimate 
 as the principle of liberty. Let us not forget 
 that even in our own history two of the most 
 decisive epochs have been the military dictator- 
 ship of Cromwell and the civil dictatorship of 
 Pitt. Let us not forget that the Romans i.e. 
 the nation who, of all ancient nations, have 
 been the most successful in the practice of free- 
 dom and of self-government, did never hesitate 
 to appeal to such dictatorship whenever the 
 country was in danger. Salus populi suprema 
 lex. 
 
 VII 
 
 Now in Russia for centuries the country has 
 always been in danger. Hannibal has always 
 been at the gates of Rome. Tatars and Poles 
 have always threatened the gates of Moscow. 
 And therefore fatally despotism had to be per- 
 petual. Dura lex sed lex: it was a great evil, 
 but a necessary one. 
 
 Let us suppose for one moment that the Rus- 
 sians had adopted another form of government, 
 and had remained loyal to the republican princi- 
 ple which we see prevailing in the most ancient 
 commonwealths of Pskof, Viatka, and My
 
 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 25 
 
 Lord Novgorod the Great. What would have 
 happened if Russia, instead of submitting to 
 the iron hand of the Grand Dukes of Moscow, 
 had risen against them, and if republican free- 
 dom had triumphed"? 
 
 The reply to that question is written in the 
 whole history of Poland which is inseparable 
 from that of Russia. In the life and death 
 struggle between the two great Slav nations, 
 the Poles seemed to have every advantage: 
 they were a race admirably gifted, brilliant, 
 clever, proud, and bold. They lived in close 
 proximity of the centres of civilization, in com- 
 munion of sympathy and interest with West- 
 ern Europe. They were inspired with a pas- 
 sionate love for independence. And yet it was 
 Tartarized and barbarized Russia that tri- 
 umphed, it was civilized Poland which was 
 crushed and blotted from the very map of 
 Europe. Poland perished through freedom, 
 through the abuse of the liberum veto of the 
 elective principle. She perished because, in 
 the supreme hour of danger, the Poles did not 
 rally around their leaders, because they did not 
 make to their Government the sacrifice of their 
 anarchist instincts. Russia, on the contrary, 
 made that sacrifice; she trusted to the sword
 
 26 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 of her princes; she allowed herself to be saved 
 by despotism. "Let Poland perish rather than 
 surrender the privileges of a free aristocracy of 
 the Schlachta !" seems to have been the guiding 
 principle of the Poles. "The safety of the 
 country is the supreme law " remained the motto 
 of the Muscovites. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Let us, therefore, take care not to simplify 
 unduly the tragedy of humanity by rigid ad- 
 herence to a few doctrinaire principles. By 
 all means let us proclaim that in our modern 
 industrial community, liberty with all its risks 
 is infinitely preferable to despotism with all its 
 security/ But do not let us forget the fatality 
 of the past. Let us remember that autocracy 
 is not a mere baneful accident in the annals of 
 Russia, a system born of brutal force and 
 which must perish by brutal force, a despotism 
 only supported by exile and by Cossacks, and 
 only tempered by Nihilism and by assassination. 
 As I said at the beginning of this chapter, al- 
 though nations may not necessarily have the 
 Government they deserve, and deserve the gov- 
 ernment they have, yet when a government has 
 I succeeded in lasting for generations, it thereby
 
 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 27 
 
 clearly shows that it must be adapted to the 
 needs of and in conformity with the aspirations 
 of the inhabitants. Now autocracy in Russia 
 has endured for centuries ; it has survived every 
 revolution. Individual Tsars have been sup- 
 pressed, Peter III, Paul I, Alexander II, have 
 been murdered. The institution itself could 
 not be suppressed. In times of national dis- 
 turbance and national distress it has always ap- 
 peared to the people, rightly or wrongly, as the 
 supreme refuge. It has owed its existence not 
 to chance, but to necessity. And this necessity 
 seems so obvious, so imperative to every Rus- 
 sian who knows his history, that all Slavophiles, 
 even though their tendencies were liberal, as in 
 the case of Aksakov and Yourii Samarine, have 
 upheld the autocracy, the "Samoderjavie," as 
 the corner-stone of the political structure.* 
 
 * In the course of an interview with Tolstoy, the Russian 
 prophet repeatedly emphasized to . me the importance of 
 studying the "Slavophile" theories, in order to understand 
 the present situation in Russia.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE LESSONS OF ECONOMIC 
 GEOGRAPHY 
 
 S 
 
 UCH are the teachings of physical 
 geography. Let us consider what are 
 the lessons of economic geography. 
 
 Leaving aside the frozen marshes of the ex- 
 treme north only inhabited by the Laplander 
 and the reindeer, and the salt deserts of the ex- 
 treme south only crossed by the nomadic tribes 
 and the camel, European Russia is divided into 
 three zones or regions (see map facing page 
 three) : the region of primeval forests in the 
 north, the region of the grassy steppes or prairies 
 in the south, and the intermediate region of 
 arable land, that famous "black soil" of inex- 
 haustible fertility, which it is only necessary to 
 scratch for the harvest to burst out as by en- 
 chantment. Although those three regions are 
 
 clearly characterized and distinct, they are 
 
 28
 
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 29 
 
 nevertheless mutually interdependent. The 
 dwellers of the forest need the produce of the 
 black soil the granary of Russia. On the 
 other hand, the inhabitants of the agricultural 
 plain need the fuel and the building materials 
 of the forest. Coal and stone are generally 
 wanting. All Russian houses in the country 
 are built in wood, and it has been calculated 
 that all the Russian villages are destroyed by 
 fire every twenty years. 
 
 And still more does the plain need the mois- 
 ture of the forest, without which the droughts 
 and famines which at present are only a peri- 
 odical scourge of Russia would be her perma- 
 nent curse. And, finally, the grassy steppe or 
 prairie is the "hinterland" of the black soil. 
 Not only does the arable land encroach every 
 year on the steppe, but without the possession 
 of that "hinterland" the inhabitants of the 
 plain, as in the legendary days of the Cossacks, 
 would have been always at the mercy of incur- 
 sions and invasions. 
 
 Owing to those three zones Russia is a huge 
 agricultural community, distinct from indus- 
 trial and commercial Europe; it is an Eastern 
 Europe of wheat and wood distinct from the 
 Western Europe of iron and stone. The peas-
 
 30 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 antry constitute 80 to 85 per cent, of the total 
 population. 
 
 No doubt in the last generation the existence 
 of prodigious mineral wealth has been revealed 
 in the centre, in Poland, in the Donetz, in the 
 Ural. The industrial exploitation of these 
 regions has begun and very rapidly developed, 
 partly through the enterprise of Belgian en- 
 gineers. But for ages to come the industrial 
 production of Russia will scarcely meet the de- 
 mand of the home market. Russia will con- 
 ^-4^'tinue to buy from the foreigner and will remain 
 an agricultural nation, and one of the granaries 
 of the world. 
 
 II 
 
 Now in all countries and in all times an agri- 
 cultural, non-industrial, non-commercial nation 
 is essentially conservative, almost blindly re- 
 spectful of all traditions and all authorities. 
 Its political progress is much slower, even 
 though it may be safer. But in Russia the 
 peasantry are incomparably more conservative 
 than anywhere else. In the first place they are 
 more religious, or, in the opinion of doctrinaires, 
 more superstitious. For centuries they have 
 identified themselves with the cause of the
 
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 31 
 
 Greek Orthodox Church. In the Russian lan- 
 guage the same word means peasant and Chris- 
 tian: krestianine. For centuries the Russian 
 peasant has in turn repelled the Mohammedan 
 invasion of Tartars, the Catholic invasion of 
 Poles, the Protestant invasion of Teutons, the 
 freethinking invasion of Jews. To the Rus- 
 sian peasant, and mainly owing to the geo- 
 graphical position of the country, nationality 
 and religion are synonymous terms. Religious 
 unity has been the foundation of political unity. 
 The Pravoslavie, or orthodoxy, has become the 
 second principle in the Slavophile Trinity, 
 and even the liberals who reject a State Church 
 believe in a National Church. 
 
 But, in addition to this religious cause of the 
 conservatism of the peasantry, all physical con- 
 ditions seem to neutralize and check political 
 movements. Nature herself seems to conspire 
 against political conspirators and seems to de- 
 feat their schemes: climate, the enormous dis- 
 tances and the difficulties of communication, 
 the absence of roads, the scarcity of cities, ex- 
 plained by the absence of a middle class 
 which is itself explained by the primitive con- 
 ditions of trade and industry all these causes 
 are in the way of political agitation.
 
 32 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 III 
 
 To understand the radical differences of the 
 conditions of life in Britain and in Russia, 
 compare a British village with a Russian vil- 
 lage. The British village appears to us as a 
 highly differentiated political organism with its 
 hierarchy of classes, its division of social labour : 
 at the summit a small aristocratic community 
 of landed proprietors presided over by the lord 
 of the manor or the local magnate; an inter- 
 mediate middle class of farmers and trades- 
 people led by the clergyman and the schoolmas- 
 ter; at the base a democracy of artizans and 
 farm labourers: from the highest to the lowest 
 rung of the social ladder, an intense political 
 and religious life, which is favoured by the close 
 proximity of the town, the continuous inter- 
 change between town and country, the rivalry 
 of sects, the grouping of parties, the establish- 
 ment of clubs and societies for the enlighten- 
 ment and diversion of the inhabitants. 
 
 Now practically none of these conditions ex- 
 ist in the Russian village. There is no ruling 
 class. Estates are too scattered, too wide 
 apart to render social relations possible. The 
 landowner, if he is rich, will spend his income
 
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 33 
 
 in the Russian capital or in European health 
 or pleasure resorts ; for life is so dreary, solitude 
 is so oppressive, winters are so long that noth- 
 ing except a high sense of duty could induce 
 the magnate to reside. If he is poor, and com- 
 pelled to remain on his estate, he will vegetate 
 in the most lamentable intellectual isolation. 
 The clergy are demoralized by their bureau- 
 cratic subjection, by their ignorance and pov- 
 erty, and have very little moral influence over 
 the peasants. There is no middle class, for 
 either trade does not exist or is in the hands 
 of the Jews and the Germans. The peasantry, 
 absolutely abandoned to themselves, are with- 
 out any contact with civilization. Isolated 
 from the city, riveted to the soil, nearly all il- 
 literate, the din and turmoil of life only reaches 
 them as a distant murmur. I do not mean to 
 say that these peasants are by any means dead 
 to political life. On the contrary, the Rus- 
 sians have a much healthier political and demo- 
 cratic instinct than the Germans, they possess 
 a very active local government, and that local 
 government, represented by the "Mir," or vil- 
 lage community, and the "Zemstvo," or County 
 Council, may even be said to be by far the most 
 original and interesting of Russian institutions.
 
 34 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 But the activities of the "Mir" and of the 
 "Zemstvo" are above all of an economic and 
 administrative order. They do not extend be- 
 yond the border of the village. They do not 
 free the peasant from his intellectual isolation. 
 
 IV 
 
 To imagine that those one hundred and 
 twenty millions of Russian peasants, thus riv- 
 eted to the soil, thus living under the pressure 
 of poverty, in ignorance and isolation, should 
 be mature for revolutionary Utopias, seems to 
 me to be the wildest of dreams. However 
 prodigiously fertile the Russian soil may be, 
 and however gifted the Russian people, politi- 
 cal discipline does not grow in a day like the 
 grass of the steppe, it is not a plant without 
 roots in the past, in the traditions and the man- 
 ners of the people. No doubt the peasantry 
 may be got to rise in some bloody "jacquerie." 
 They might be drawn into some agrarian revo- 
 lution like the Pougatchef revolt in the 
 eighteenth century which would satisfy their 
 craving for possessing and extending the soil 
 they cultivate. But the hunger for land once 
 satisfied, the peasantry would again become 
 conservative, like the French peasant proprietor
 
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 35 
 
 after the French Revolution, and so far from 
 joining any mere "intellectual" revolution, they 
 would dread such a revolution as a possible re- 
 action and as a menace to their newly acquired 
 rights. 
 
 No doubt the political awakening of the rural 
 masses is coming. Popular instruction is 
 spreading. Proprietors will be induced more 
 and more to reside on their estates. Religious 
 freedom and the threefold struggle against 
 Catholicism, Nonconformity, and rationalism 
 will compel the Orthodox clergy to emerge from 
 their ignorance and their subjection. The 
 priests will receive a better education and 
 thereby acquire a moral authority which will 
 enable them in turn to educate their flocks, 
 hitherto so sadly neglected. And, above all, 
 with the progress of trade and industry there 
 will arise a middle class, and with the middle 
 class a strong and independent opinion, which 
 is the prime condition of all political liberty. 
 But even when these great changes are accom- 
 plished, when a ruling class and an independent 
 class are constituted, the rural masses and their 
 leaders, the clergy will continue to respect the
 
 36 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 established authorities. For generations to 
 come the peasantry and the clergy will continue 
 to see in the Emperor and in the Church their 
 spiritual and temporal Providence, a patri- 
 archal and beneficent despotism. In one word, 
 Political Reform in Russia shall be conserva- 
 tive, or will be a failure.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRI- 
 BUTION OF RACES 
 
 WE have seen so far that physical 
 geography and economic geography 
 are both on the side of tradition 
 and conservatism. What can we learn further 
 from the geographical distribution of races $ 
 
 We have already emphasized the fact that for 
 ten centuries Russia has been a debatable land, 
 a terra nullius, open to all barbarians and to 
 all nomads. For ten centuries these barbarian 
 hordes have swept like torrents over the plain. 
 But ever on the fertile steppe the green grass 
 would grow again after the horse of Attila had 
 passed. The forty-eight races which are scat- 
 tered all over the empire represent the alluvial 
 strata of these barbaric invasions. The ethno- 
 graphical map of Russia tells us of the migra- 
 tions and revolutions of races, even as the 
 
 37
 
 38 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 geological map tells us the revolutions of the 
 crust of the earth. Tchoudes and Tchouvachs, 
 Tatars and Tcheremissans, Kalmouks and 
 Khirgiz, Finns and Samoyedes, Georgians and 
 Lesghians, Persians and Armenians, Jews and 
 Roumanians, Germans and Swedes, Poles and 
 Lithuanians, Great Russians, White Russians, 
 Little Russians each unit of this Babel of na- 
 tions is a living witness of a tragic past. 
 
 II 
 
 At first sight the geographical distribution of 
 races seems to contradict the political lessons 
 of physical and economic geography. Physical 
 and economic geography proclaim the unity of 
 the Russian Empire and the historical necessity 
 of a strong central government. Ethnography, 
 on the contrary, seems to proclaim the infinite 
 diversity of the Tsar's dominions and the ne- 
 cessity of autonomy. It seems as if so many 
 heterogeneous races could not possibly live un- 
 der one power and one law. 
 
 But let us observe that these races are not 
 only different, but irreconcilably hostile. And 
 the instinctive hostilities of race are compli- 
 cated by differences of language, of religion, 
 and of habits. To compel all those races
 
 DISTRIBUTION OF RACES 39 
 
 whom the vicissitudes of history have thrown 
 together on the same territory to live in peace, 
 we again must have an energetic, military, cen- 
 tralized government, which shall play the part 
 of umpire and peacemaker, and which may re- 
 frain and repress spontaneous anarchy and civil 
 war which are always ready to burst out. To 
 all these people the Russian Empire has brought 
 the same supreme benefit as the Roman Em- 
 pire : Pax Romana, the Peace of the Tsar. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Therein precisely consists the civilizing part 
 which Russia has played for centuries. Recent 
 events, the anti-Semitic pogroms, the massacres 
 of Jitomir and Odessa, the Beiliss trial, so far 
 from contradicting this truth, only confirm it. 
 As soon as, in consequence of the external dis- 
 asters and the internal agitations, the Russian 
 Government began to lose its authority, to- 
 gether with its prestige, as soon as it had to re- 
 call its regiments and to send them to the Far 
 East, at once the destructive forces reigned su- 
 preme, and religious passions, racial hatreds, 
 got free play. The Baltic peasants murdered 
 the German barons, the Poles murdered the 
 Russian officials, the Russian peasants mur-
 
 40 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 dered the Jews, the Tatar insurrectionists, as I 
 saw myself in Tiflis, murdered the Armenians. 
 I know full well that these massacres have 
 been attributed to the Government itself, 
 which wanted to create a diversion, carrying 
 out the old device: Divide ut zmperes. The 
 massacres have been imputed to agents of the 
 secret police, to the famous "black gang" or 
 "tchornia sotnia." But I must frankly confess 
 that I would rather believe in the most absurd 
 legends of the Middle Ages, in the ritual 
 murders, in the crimes of witches, than believe 
 in the monstrous folly of a Government which 
 would have organized those very riots and 
 disorders which it was its vital interest to 
 suppress. No doubt subordinate agents may 
 have taken advantage of the prevailing anarchy 
 to achieve their wicked ends; but they only 
 obeyed their own evil instincts, not any order 
 of the Government. How could the Govern- 
 ment have organized massacres, when it had 
 practically ceased to exist"? And let it not be 
 said that such a design would be worthy of a 
 "diabolical" Russian Government! For such 
 a policy would not even deserve to be called 
 "diabolical," it would be simply idiotic and 
 imbecile, because any disorder would ultimately
 
 DISTRIBUTION OF RACES 41 
 
 turn against the Government itself. And not 
 even the Evil One has ever been accused of 
 stupidity. 
 
 IV 
 
 No, in truth, the explanation is less monstrous. 
 The lamentable recent events are simply the 
 outbreak of what Taine has called "spon- 
 taneous anarchy," or the spontaneous genera- 
 tion of anarchy. It is the primitive instinct of 
 race antagonism, fostered by pestilential Ger- 
 man theories, the barbarous passions of the 
 mob, which, hitherto dormant and latent, 
 hitherto repressed by the iron hand of Govern- 
 ment, suddenly burst out and swept every- 
 thing before them as soon as that obstacle 
 disappeared. If autocracy or a strong military 
 power did not exist in Russia the massacres of 
 Jitomir and of Odessa would alone suffice to 
 demonstrate the necessity of its existence in the 
 interests of humanity and civilization. 
 
 And thus we again have to revert to the 
 same political conclusion: the ethnography of 
 Russia teaches us exactly the same lessons as 
 physical and economic geography the vital 
 necessity of a strong government. /It shows 
 the danger, not to say the impossibility, of the
 
 42 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 principal article of the revolutionary pro- 
 gramme an absolute parliamentary regime on 
 the most approved British pattern. The rem- 
 edy might be worse than the disease; it most 
 probably would kill the patient. A central- 
 ized Parliament in which twenty nationalities 
 would be represented by twenty irreconcilable 
 parties would deliver Russia to legal anarchy. 
 And legalized anarchy has ever been the very 
 worst of all forms of government.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE GEOGRAPHICAL ORIENTA- 
 TION OF RUSSIAN FOREIGN 
 POLITICS 
 
 IF there is one eternal and universal instinct 
 in human nature, it is the irresistible 
 impulse which attracts the inhabitants 
 of northern countries to the sunny climes of the 
 South and the East. It is the heliotropic in- 
 stinct which directs the flower towards heat and 
 light. It is the instinct to which Goethe has 
 given immortal expression in the "Song of 
 Mignon." It is the instinct which for ages has 
 transformed Italy, the land of beauty, into a 
 land of servitude. It is the instinct which has 
 directed the colonial expansion of Great Britain, 
 and which in our own day has been drawing 
 Germany to the East. 
 
 II 
 
 With no other nation has this "Drang nach 
 Siiden" and this "Drang nach Osten" been so 
 natural and so intense as with the Russian 
 
 43
 
 44 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 people. For no other nation has been so dis- 
 inherited by Nature, no nation has been so en- 
 tirely bereft of heat and light. In the empire 
 of the Tsar there are only two regions which 
 are not subjected to the dominion of winter, 
 the Crimea and Transcaucasia. Hence the 
 value and prestige which for every Muscovite 
 attach to those "Diamonds of the Crown." 
 Hence the great part which these southern 
 provinces have played in the Russian poets and 
 novelists, in Pushkin's "Caucasian Prisoner," in 
 Lermontov's "A Hero of our Time," * in Tol- 
 stoy's "Cossacks." The Crimea and Transcau- 
 casia are to a Russian what Switzerland and 
 the Riviera, what Italy and Greece, are to an 
 Englishman or a Teuton. 
 
 Geography itself therefore seems to be in 
 Russia the accomplice of that "Drang nach Os- 
 ten" and that "Drang nach Siiden" in which 
 we in the West have only seen a spirit of aggres- 
 sion. It is a most significant and far-reaching 
 fact that the three great rivers of Russia, the 
 Dnieper, the Don, and the Volga, all flow east- 
 wards and southwards. As these three rivers 
 are the vital arteries of Russia, as they are the 
 
 * This has just been added to Alfred A. Knopf's series of 
 translations from the Russian.
 
 RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLITICS 45 
 
 three great routes of migration and invasion, 
 the three highways of commerce, as they have 
 determined the direction of the whole history 
 of the Russian people we may say that Rus- 
 sia, in "orientating" her foreign policy south- 
 wards and eastwards, has not only obeyed an 
 instinct common to all that lives and breathes, 
 but has merely followed the trend of her enor- 
 mous rivers, carrying slowly but surely the des- 
 tinies of those Northern Barbarians towards the 
 Sunny South. 
 
 Ill ^ 
 
 But in addition to the helio tropic instinct char- 
 acteristic of all Northern peoples, in addi- 
 tion to the "oriental" trend of the great rivers, 
 there is still another potent impulse which has 
 given its direction to Russian history, and which 
 an Englishman ought to be the last to ignore, 
 and that is the desire to possess a free outlet to 
 the sea the sea which, so far from separating 
 nations, binds them together, the sea which will 
 bring Russia nearer to the cradle of religion 
 and civilization, which will transform the ag- 
 ricultural Russia into a commercial and indus- 
 trial Russia, which will bring trade and wealth, 
 freedom and power.
 
 46 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 Remember the famous page where the Greek 
 historian describes the solemn and blessed mo- 
 ment when, after long months of expectation 
 and suffering, the Ten Thousand Companions 
 of Xenophon finally perceived the sea, the 
 supreme object of their desires. 6dXaaaa\ 
 Thalassa! the cry which two thousand years ago 
 burst from the breast of the Greeks, has also 
 been the sacred cry of the Russians! Tha- 
 lassa! This cry sums up their whole history. 
 For Russian history in modern times is noth- 
 ing but an endless "Expedition of the Ten 
 Thousand," a long effort to reach the "open 
 Sea." Thalassa! expresses both the past and 
 the future of the people; all the realities which 
 they covet and all the ideal things which they 
 dream of. 
 
 IV 
 
 For the aspirations of religion combine to 
 strengthen and to sanctify the blind desires of 
 political instinct; for the "Drang nach Os- 
 ten" will not only bring material wealth, the 
 contact with civilization; it also means the re- 
 alization of the religious destiny of Russia. 
 The protectorate over Turkey and Asia Minor
 
 RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLITICS 47 
 
 will be the enfranchisement of the Slav nations 
 of the Balkans, of the Orthodox brethren 
 weighed down by the cruel yoke of the Turk, 
 and it will involve the protectorate over Byzan- 
 tium and Jerusalem, the two holy cities of the 
 "Pravoslavs." 
 
 The Oriental and Asiatic policy of Russia is, 
 therefore, not a policy of adventure and con- 
 quests. It is a natural and national policy. 
 From the Russian point of view it is a perfectly 
 legitimate and indeed a necessary one. The 
 will of Peter the Great, whether it be authentic 
 or not, corresponds to a political reality; it is 
 the sacred inheritance and the historic mission 
 which Russians for the last three centuries 
 have transmitted from generation to genera- 
 tion. The struggle for the possession of Con- 
 stantinople, "Tsargrad," both the capital of the 
 Cross and of the Crescent, is the only one which 
 has always rallied all the subjects of the Tsar, 
 all political opinions, and all political aspira- 
 tions. The conservatives, the Church, and the 
 peasantry desire this policy because it must en- 
 sure the triumph of Orthodoxy. Liberals and 
 "Occidentals" and intellectuals desire it because 
 it will compel Russia to emerge from her isola-
 
 48 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 tion, and must bring her nearer to the centres 
 of civilization. Realists and Jingoists desire 
 it because it must bring with it wealth and em- 
 
 pire! 
 
 All these desires and all these dreams suf- 
 fered a terrible check ten years ago through the 
 disasters in the Far East. Therein mainly re- 
 sides the pathetic interest of the Russo-Japa- 
 nese War. Therein also lies largely the ex- 
 planation of the internal convulsions which 
 followed. For generations Russia had been 
 advancing slowly but surely towards the ulti- 
 mate goal of what she considers her "historic 
 mission." Like a weary traveller, exhausted 
 by a long march, and who, arriving near the 
 end, wanting to make one supreme effort to has- 
 ten on the desirable consummation falls down 
 prostrate, in view of the promised land even 
 so the Russians, on the eve of achieving their 
 dreams, after patiently waiting for centuries, 
 were suddenly seized with a feverish impatience 
 and tried to precipitate events. They failed, 
 and they paid for their impatience with the tem- 
 porary ruin of their hopes, with unheard-of dis- 
 asters and with a tragic revolution.
 
 PART II 
 What the World Owes to Russia
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 RUSSIAN VERSUS GERMAN 
 CULTURE 
 
 I. The Fallacy of the Russian Peril 
 
 WHEN we assert that in this war of 
 the nations the Allies stand as the 
 champions of Democracy and Lib- 
 erty and Civilization versus Militarism, Des- 
 potism and Reaction, we are almost invariably 
 met with the ironical question: "What about 
 Russia?" And when we assert that it is Prus- 
 sia which is primarily and solely responsible for 
 the appalling tragedy, the pro-German cham- 
 pions invariably retort with the counter-propo- 
 sition that Germany is only waging a defensive 
 war, that she is protecting herself, that she is 
 protecting Europe against the "Slav peril," 
 against "Russian barbarism," against the 
 "Asiatic hordes," against the persecutors of the 
 Jews, against a greedy and reactionary Govern- 
 ment. 
 
 I have had to face this commonplace of the 
 Russian peril in almost every meeting which I 
 have recently addressed in the United States 
 
 Si
 
 52 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 on behalf of the cause of the Allies. The 
 "Russian Peril" was the great argument ad- 
 duced by my pro-German opponents. But not 
 only does the prejudice do considerable harm 
 in the United States, it still wields considerable 
 influence in England. Times have no doubt 
 changed since the "Russian Peril" was de- 
 nounced in this country and since the capture 
 of Merv produced a frantic attack of "Mervous- 
 ness." But the old "Mervousness" still seems 
 to possess the faithful Radical guard and the 
 old-fashioned commonplaces continue to be 
 voiced even by such "advanced" people as Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw, who does not generally deal in 
 commonplaces. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in his 
 "Common Sense About the War," where so 
 much common sense is mixed up with so much 
 nonsense, seems to have written on the assump- 
 tion that genius and wit can take the place of a 
 knowledge of the elementary facts of Russian 
 history of which he is unfortunately totally de- 
 void. 
 
 II. A Conspiracy of Slander Against 
 Russia 
 
 There never was a race more continuously and 
 more systematically maligned than the Slav
 
 RUSSIAN v. GERMAN CULTURE 53 
 
 race. Truly, it is significant that the word 
 "Slav," which in the native speech means 
 "glorious and illustrious," has become synon- 
 ymous with "Slave." It is a tragic paradox 
 that the very people who have been the one 
 bulwark against Asiatic hordes and a protection 
 against the Tartar invasion should still be de- 
 nounced as a people of Asiatics and Tartars, 
 /it is a paradox that we should revile as bar- 
 barians the very nation whose sublime mission 
 in history has been to win over the barbarians 
 of Asia to Christianity and to European civili- 
 zation. 
 
 III. Why the Russian People Are 
 Misrepresented 
 
 The plain truth is that for practical purposes 
 Russia still remains a "terra incognita!'' to the 
 vast majority of Britishers and Americans. 
 Even to-day there are probably not half a dozen 
 writers of standing who have a first-hand knowl- 
 edge of that great nation, with her population 
 of 175,000,000. And the reasons for that 
 ignorance are not far to seek. There are first 
 the difficulties of the language. The Russian 
 language is very beautiful, but it is also very 
 difficult. It seems to be almost inaccessible
 
 54 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 to a people who in the past have been so refrac- 
 tory to the study of foreign languages as the 
 British people. There are, further, the diffi- 
 culties of distance and size. Russia is not a 
 country which can easily be overrun by hur- 
 ried holiday trippers. Even as you cannot 
 learn the Russian language in two months, so 
 you cannot "do" the Russian Empire in two 
 weeks. 
 
 In the presence of those formidable obstacles, 
 it is scarcely to be wondered at that the field of 
 Russian controversy should have been left free 
 to the enemies of Russia. And, unfortunately, 
 Russia has many irreconcilable enemies. There 
 are the Russian Nihilists and Revolutionists 
 who have legitimate grievances against an auto- 
 cratic Government, and who for generations 
 have made London a hot-bed of political plots. 
 There are the Polish refugees who for a hun- 
 dred years have pleaded the cause of Polish 
 freedom in every capital of Europe. And, 
 above all, there are the Russian Jews who in 
 every country have constituted themselves the 
 passionate apostles of an anti-Russian propa- 
 ganda. 
 
 The Jewish problem is a difficult problem in
 
 RUSSIAN v. GERMAN CULTURE 55 
 every country. It is becoming a difficult prob- 
 lem even in the United States. But it is es- 
 pecially acute in Russia. Russia has a larger 
 Jewish population than all the other countries 
 of the world together. Russian Poland alone 
 has a Jewish population of five millions. Nor 
 has she ever been able to assimilate or to con- 
 ciliate her Jewish population. As Mr. Stephen 
 Graham points out in his recent book, "Russia 
 and the World," there has been in the past 
 an irreconcilable conflict between the Russian 
 and Jewish racial elements. At various times 
 Russia has made desperate efforts to reject 
 the alien element from her body politic. The 
 deliberate and often cruel and always fu- 
 tile policy of the Government towards the He- 
 brew race, and the instinctive hatred of the 
 people, have frequently resulted in pogroms and 
 in organized massacres. And the victims of 
 Russian persecution have naturally avenged 
 themselves by maligning their oppressors. 
 Surely no member of the Hebrew race can be 
 blamed if he is not enamoured of the Russian 
 Government. 
 
 All these hostile elements: Revolutionists, 
 Polish refugees, and Polish-Russian Jews have
 
 56 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 conducted and are still conducting in Great 
 Britain a systematic campaign of calumny such 
 as the Irish irreconcilables have conducted, and 
 are still conducting, in America, against Great 
 Britain. 
 
 IV. Geographical Surroundings in Russia 
 
 If we wish to be just to the Russian Govern- 
 ment and to the Russian people the first condi- 
 tion is that we should try to discriminate be- 
 tween what is owing to the fatality of Nature 
 and what is owing to the intervention of Man. 
 No one will ever understand Russia's political 
 history who does not constantly keep in mind 
 the close interdependence which exists in Rus- 
 sia between physics and politics, between the 
 economic and the moral factors. This truth 
 is so essential that I may be permitted to em- 
 phasize a paragraph in a previous chapter be- 
 cause that paragraph gives the key to the Rus- 
 sian problem. 
 
 "In no other country have geographical con- 
 ditions left a more indelible imprint. Nowhere 
 else have men felt more deeply the all-pervad- 
 ing influence of physical surroundings, of cli- 
 mate and of race. There are some countries,
 
 RUSSIAN v. GERMAN CULTURE 57 
 
 like England, where man has conquered Na- 
 ture, where Nature has become the benevolent 
 and ministering servant of man. There are 
 other countries, like Russia, where it is Nature 
 that always threatens to enslave man. In few 
 other countries have men been compelled to 
 submit to that physical despotism with a more 
 passive resignation, the resignation of a Tolstoi, 
 which is so representative of the race. And in 
 no other country has Nature given more cruelly 
 and more emphatically the lie to the noble 
 dreams of idealists. Idealists may dream their 
 dreams, proclaim their systems, and claim their 
 reforms. But the great natural, economic, cli- 
 matic forces in Russia continue to follow their 
 immovable course, heedless of systems and re- 
 forms. The political destiny of Russia seems 
 to have been written not in the book of philos- 
 ophy, but in the stern and sibylline book of 
 Nature ; it has followed the bend of rivers and 
 the curves of isothermic lines; and one guesses 
 its mystery, and one catches its meaning more 
 surely and more easily by listening to the mur- 
 mur of forests and steppes than by listening to 
 the most plausible theories of revolutionists."
 
 58 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 V. The Essential and the Accidental 
 in Russian History 
 
 And the second condition which any fair and 
 judicious student of Russian history will have 
 to take into account is a judicious discrimina- 
 tion between what is essential and what is 
 merely accidental. The insensate murder of 
 Alexander II, the emancipator of 40,000,000 
 serfs, the liberator of Bulgaria and Serbia, a 
 crime which took place on the very eve of the 
 proclamation of a new Russian Constitution, 
 and which deflected the whole course of con- 
 temporary Russian history, was an accident and 
 a catastrophe. On the contrary, the near East- 
 ern and Far Eastern policy of Russia has been 
 throughout the ages one of the dominating 
 forces of Russian history. To the philosophi- 
 cal historian it is the general law, it is the nor- 
 mal development, it is the dominating forces 
 and not the accidents and catastrophies which 
 matter. It is the traditional policy, it is the 
 popular aspirations and ideals which alone pro- 
 vide a firm and safe foundation for historical 
 judgment. 
 
 Unfortunately it is the sensational accidents 
 and not the unsensational developments of Rus-
 
 RUSSIAN v. GERMAN CULTURE 59 
 
 sian history which have arrested the attention 
 of historians and publicists. Popular Russian 
 history continues to be written, as if Nihilism 
 and regicide, as if persecutions and pogroms 
 were the one normal and characteristic develop- 
 ment of the Russian people. We are told lit- 
 tle of the nobler traditions of the Government, 
 of the deeper instincts of the people. We are 
 told little of all that Russia has done for Chris- 
 tian civilization, through her victory over the 
 Tartars, for European political freedom, 
 through her victory over Napoleon, for the 
 emancipation of small nationalities through her 
 victories over the Turks. It is just as if Great 
 Britain were to be judged solely by her pitiful 
 failure in Ireland, or as if the evictions of small 
 crofters in the Highlands were described as the 
 characteristic event of Scottish history. 
 
 VI. Necessity of Distinguishing Between 
 the Government and the People 
 
 We have already cautioned the student of 
 Russian history against the axiom that every 
 nation has the Government it deserves, and de- 
 serves the Government it has. That axiom 
 is only true, and even then only partially 
 true, when the people, as is the case in Prus-
 
 60 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 sia, have no profound sense of political liberty 
 and of personal dignity, where they abjectly 
 and willingly submit to that Government. It 
 is only true where the subjects accept the full 
 responsibility for the policy of their rulers, 
 where they glorify, as the Prussians do glorify, 
 every evil deed of the civil and military author- 
 ities. 
 
 On the other hand, it may happen that the 
 people are much better than their Government, 
 when it would be odiously unfair to hold them 
 responsible for its excesses and abuses, where 
 both Government and people are the victims of 
 circumstances and accident, where the nation 
 have made heroic efforts to reform their abuses. 
 
 And every student of Russian history knows 
 that the Russian people are infinitely better 
 than their bureaucracy, and that the bureau- 
 cracy is not representative of the people, who 
 in cases innumerable have fought the battles of 
 civic liberty. Russian history is an inspiring 
 history, where even the ignorant moujik, where 
 even feeble women have laid down their lives in 
 defence of popular rights and human freedom.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR DEMOC- 
 RACY AND LIBERTY 
 
 IF there is any truth in the Darwinian doc- 
 trine of "the survival of the fittest," the 
 Russian people must be one of the strong 
 nations of the earth. From early history they 
 have been schooled in the stern discipline of 
 privation and suffering. For centuries they 
 have borne the brunt of the Tartar invasion. 
 Their physical power of resistance and their 
 moral fibre have been tested periodically by 
 plague and famine, by war and political per- 
 secution. They have at all times been tested 
 by poverty and by the severity of a relentless 
 climate. In the process the weak have been 
 eliminated and the strong have become stronger. 
 The result has been a sturdy, hardened people, 
 with a magnificent physique and of extraor- 
 dinary vitality. The final outcome has been 
 
 one of the creative civilizations of the world, 
 
 61
 
 62 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 equally original in religion and politics, in art 
 and literature, a civilization which is rapidly as- 
 similating all the best elements of Western cul- 
 ture. 
 
 II. Russia Stands for Essential 
 Christianity 
 
 Superficial publicists have identified Russia 
 with Nihilism, and especially with that Nihil- 
 ist type impersonated in the character of the 
 Atheist Revolutionist Bazarov in Turgenev's 
 "Fathers and Sons." As a matter of fact, 
 Revolutionary Atheism is an entirely German 
 importation. In no other country has the 
 Christian religion struck deeper root than in 
 Russia. The typical Russian believes not in 
 the gospel according to St. Marx, but in the 
 gospel according to St. Mark. Orthodoxy, the 
 pravos slavie of the Slavophiles, has been one 
 of the three factors of Russian nationality. 
 As the Prussians are certainly to-day the least 
 religious people in Europe, the Russians are 
 probably the most religious. As I pointed out 
 in a previous chapter, in the Russian language 
 the same word Krestianine means both "peas- 
 ant" and "Christian." Even unsympathetic 
 observers like Mr. Wells have been profoundly
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR LIBERTY 63 
 
 impressed by the childlike and simple faith 
 of the people. Cynics have railed at the su- 
 perstition of the ignorant moujik, as if Chris- 
 tianity were a monopoly of the wealthy, the 
 educated, and the learned. The truth is, that 
 the religion of the moujik is the nearest ap- 
 proach to primitive Christianity and to the 
 faith of the Golden Age of St. Francis of Assisi 
 and St. Thomas Aquinas. To visit the Cata- 
 combs of Kiev or the Troitsa Lavra on a holi- 
 day, to accompany the Russian pilgrims to 
 Jerusalem, is to travel back to the Middle 
 Ages. The Russian Church may have badly 
 suffered from the confusion of spiritual and 
 temporal power introduced by Peter the Great. 
 Formalism and ritualism may play an exces- 
 sive part in the economy of religion, but the 
 spirit is everywhere alive, and the ideals of 
 Christianity continue to inspire the individual 
 lives of the people. Nowhere is the "Niet- 
 schean" spirit so little prevalent. Nowhere is 
 the Christian temper of meekness and humility, 
 of charity and brotherhood, of self-surrender 
 and self-sacrifice so common as in Russia. 
 
 And the Christian spirit is a no less potent 
 force in the public life of the nation. As I 
 have amply proved in a subsequent chapter
 
 64 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 dealing with the revolutionary crisis of 1905, 
 it was an unpardonable blunder of the so-called 
 "Intelligensia" of the doctrinaire revolutionists 
 of 1905 to ignore the spiritual force of the 
 Church. When drastic religious reforms were 
 originally proposed by the clerical members of 
 the Church in the first Duma, their demands 
 were contemptuously dismissed by a superior 
 "Intelligensia." Those doctrinaires ignored the 
 vital fact that no Revolution has ever bee n 
 s uccessful unless it ass umed a religio us form, 
 and that this truth applies to Russia even 
 more completely than to England or America 
 or France. In 1905 the Press of the world 
 unanimously predicted the downfall of the 
 Monarchy and the triumph of the Revolution- 
 ists. I confidently predicted that nothing 
 would happen. And nothing did happen. 
 The political leaders, disciples of the super- 
 thinkers Marx, and Haeckel and Nietzsche, 
 leaders whose revolutionary theories had been 
 almost entirely "made in Germany" that is 
 to say, in the very country which never had 
 the courage to carry through a successful revo- 
 lution were neither understood nor followed 
 by the people. The only leader who in that 
 eventful year had a powerful following pre-
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR LIBERTY 65 
 
 cisely happened to be a priest. If Father Ga- 
 pon had been an honest man and an enthusiast, 
 he would have succeeded where all the orators 
 of the "Intelligensia" ignominiously failed. 
 
 III. Russia Stands for Democracy 
 
 The spirit of equality and brotherhood is uni- 
 versally prevalent in Russia, and I need hardly 
 add that that spirit is the spiritual foundation 
 of all democratic government. Strange as it 
 may sound to the English theorist, Russia 
 stands for democracy. To outward appear- 
 ance the Russian Government is an autocracy, 
 but that autocracy is of an essentially demo- 
 cratic nature. The Russian Empire is a huge 
 peasant commonwealth, a federation of forty 
 thousand democratic republics, thousands of 
 which have retained the socialist and collectiv- 
 ist organization of the "Mir" or village com- 
 munity. 
 
 For the Russian is not like the Scot or the 
 American a born individualist, rather is he a 
 born Socialist. Now, individualism generally 
 creates for itself an aristocratic or bourgeois or 
 middle class form of society. The Socialist 
 spirit finds its most fitting expression in democ- 
 racy.
 
 66 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 There is in Russia no caste or class, there is 
 no pride of birth. The mercantile and indus- 
 trial class is only just emerging, and its place 
 is largely taken by Jews and foreigners. From 
 85 to 90 per cent, of the people remain peas- 
 ants. There is no organized nobility, and 
 whatever nobility exists possesses no such feu- 
 dal basis as in Prussia and even as in England. 
 There is no right of entail ; there are no privi- 
 leges of the elder son. Every child, son or 
 daughter, inherits an equal share of the parental 
 property, and inherits the rank and title of the 
 family. We often hear members of the Russian 
 nobility described in the British Press as Prince 
 Troubetzkoy or Prince Galitzine. The fact is, 
 that there are hundreds of Princes Troubetzkoi 
 and Princes Galitzine, and the title of prince 
 carries with it neither wealth nor political dis- 
 tinction. A man's position in the State is en- 
 tirely determined by the "Tchin" i.e. by the 
 rank he has attained in the civil and military 
 service. 
 
 It is interesting to note that at the other ex- 
 tremity of Europe the same democratic feature 
 should be the outstanding characteristic of two 
 other Slav and Greek orthodox commonwealths 
 the Serbians and the Bulgarians. Both
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR LIBERTY 67 
 
 countries are like Russia peasant communities. 
 The Serbian statistics of the division of land, 
 with its total absence of large estates, are 
 a revelation of the social and economic con- 
 ditions of gallant little Serbia. Such statistics 
 are, perhaps, unparalleled in European history. 
 They show to what extent the old aristocracy 
 has been stamped out, and how completely 
 Serbia, like Bulgaria and Russia, is a country 
 of small landholders, and in the strictest sense 
 of the word, a peasant democracy. 
 
 
 
 IV. Russia Stands for Freedom 
 
 Russia stands for freedom, for the untram- 
 melled freedom of the nomad roaming over the 
 steppe. The Russians carry freedom to the 
 verge of anarchy. It is not a mere accident 
 that the three most consistent theorists of an- 
 archism, Bakounine, Kropotkin and Tolstoy, 
 are typical Russians. All through the Middle 
 Ages a considerable part of civilized Russia 
 was inhabited by free tillers of the soil. She 
 glorified the free republics of Novgorod, 
 Pskov, and Viatka. As was pointed out in 
 Chapter II, it was only the necessity of national 
 defence and the incessent incursions of Tartars 
 in the East and of Poles in the West which
 
 68 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 compelled the Russian people to accept the 
 protection of a strong Government, and to 
 surrender their liberties to the Grand Dukes 
 of Muscovy. And it was only in the six- 
 teenth century that serfdom was established, 
 namely, in the troubled times of the Smoutnoe 
 Vremia of Boris Godounov. It is strange that 
 serfdom should have been established in Rus- 
 sia at the very moment when everywhere else 
 in Europe it was being abolished. But it is 
 stranger still that the Russian peasants should 
 have been free at the time when everywhere 
 else in Europe peasants still were slaves. In 
 the words of a famous French writer : "C'est la 
 liberte qui est ancienne en Russie et non le des- 
 potisme." 
 
 Freedom with the Russians is an elemental 
 instinct, a fanatical passion, the passion which 
 creates martyrs, which sends its votaries to Si- 
 beria and to the scaffold. Political freedom 
 in Russia has often been repressed, it has never 
 been destroyed, as it has been destroyed in Prus- 
 sia. In Prussia the people have had the bene- 
 fit of universal education. They have attained 
 to a high degree of industrial development. 
 The German Socialists are strongly organized 
 in a party, they command many millions of
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR LIBERTY 69 
 
 votes. Yet they have never had the courage 
 of asserting their rights. They have been ready 
 to hold processions innumerable. But they 
 have always forgotten that political liberty is 
 not gained by talking, by making demonstra- 
 tions. They have always forgotten that men 
 must be prepared to make sacrifices in order to 
 conquer their freedom. 
 
 The one uprising of the Prussian people was 
 the abortive revolutionary movement of 1848, 
 which mainly resulted in the people offering the 
 Imperial Crown of Germany to the reactionary 
 King of Prussia. 
 
 Compare with the attitude of the German 
 people to their oppressors the attitude of the 
 Russian people. It is true, the vast majority 
 are poor, illiterate, inarticulate peasants. They 
 have no Press to voice their demands. They 
 are not organized in a party. Yet again and 
 again they have challenged reactionary Gov- 
 ernments. We may condemn the Terrorist 
 crimes, we may come to the conclusion that they 
 were not only political crimes, but tactical blun- 
 ders, but we cannot help admiring the spirit 
 which animated the Russian revolutionists, 
 even when those revolutionists had their minds 
 poisoned with the dreary philosophical material-
 
 70 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 ism of Buchner and Haeckel, and the economic 
 materialism of Marx. Russians, even when 
 they are materialists in theory, remain incur- 
 able idealists in practice. 
 
 And it is because the Russian is animated 
 with that noble passion for freedom, it is be- 
 cause he is not politically servile like the Prus- 
 sian, it is because the Slav refuses to be a slave, 
 that we may look forward with every confi- 
 dence to the result of the new Liberal Constitu- 
 tion which the Russian people conquered in 
 1905. J The Russian Duma is only a few years 
 old, but representative institutions have already 
 struck deeper roots in Russia in five years than 
 they have in Prussia in fifty years. And the 
 Russian people have proved their capacity for 
 self-government even more conspicuously in 
 their local administration, in their Zemstvo 
 which, as well as Zemski Sobor, can be traced 
 back to the remotest traditions of Russian his- 
 tory. The Zemstvo is destined more and 
 more to encroach on the activities of the Cen- 
 tral Parliament. For decentralization and 
 Home Rule, Voluntary Association and Co- 
 operation are the watchwords of all Russian 
 Liberals. And it is certainly a significant fact 
 that in a few years twenty thousand agricul-
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR LIBERTY 71 
 
 tural co-operative societies have renewed the 
 economic life of the country. 
 
 V. Intellectual Freedom in Russia 
 and the Russian Censorship 
 
 A legend has grown up in England, and still 
 largely obtains, that intellectual freedom does 
 not exist in Russia, that every original thinker 
 has been ruthlessly suppressed. It is true that 
 Russian literature has known many dark days 
 of implacable reaction and has produced many 
 martyrs. But even in those dark days a Gogol 
 or a Tolstoy could not be prevented from giv- 
 ing their message. And the fact is, that before 
 the revolutionary movement of 1905 greater in- 
 tellectual freedom existed in Russia than even 
 in Great Britain, that revolutionists were al- 
 lowed almost untrammelled to carry on their 
 propaganda through the written word, that the 
 Russian Empire was flooded with subversive 
 and anarchist literature, and that a young 
 writer's best chance to please a large section of 
 the Russian public was to be sufficiently "ad- 
 vanced" and in opposition to the Government. 
 It is also true that even at the present day pub- 
 licists and journalists continue to be subjected 
 to the censorship. But so are playwrights sub-
 
 72 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 jected to dramatic censorship in Great Britain. 
 And British censorship is in many cases more 
 severe than Russian. "Monna Vanna," of 
 Maeterlinck, was widely circulated in Russia. 
 It was prohibited in Great Britain. It is also 
 true that any personal attack on members of the 
 Government or the bureaucracy might lead to 
 unpleasant encounters with the police, but any 
 personal attack in Great Britain might lead to 
 even more unpleasant prosecutions under the 
 libel law. 
 
 I hold no brief for the Russian censorship, 
 which is a survival of a regime which is rap- 
 idly passing away, and which is a disused 
 organ of a vanishing autocracy. But the Rus- 
 sian censorship, even in its palmiest days, was 
 utterly futile, and for the last generation it has 
 interfered with the liberty of the Press just as 
 little as French censorship interfered with the 
 freedom of French literature in the days of 
 Voltaire and Rousseau, in the days when 
 "Emile" was burned by the hangman. Rus- 
 sian censorship does not even prevent an amount 
 of intellectual licence which would stagger the 
 British public. It is the impulsive and irre* 
 sponsible violence of a section of the opposition 
 Press which largely explains the retention of
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR LIBERTY 73 
 
 the censorship. The Russian extremists have 
 not yet learnt the lesson of British political his- 
 tory, that self -go vernment is impossible with out 
 self-control and sel f-restraint .) If the Russian 
 Press used but a fraction of the self-restraint 
 which in Britain is imposed either by public 
 opinion or by the libel law, Russian censorship 
 would have long ceased to exist.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 RUSSIA AS THE LIBERATOR OF 
 OPPRESSED NATIONALITIES 
 
 THE Russian people have not only 
 wished freedom for themselves. Long 
 before they succeeded in conquering a 
 measure of political liberty for themselves, 
 they had conquered it for their brethren in the 
 Balkan States. Whereas Austria has always 
 stood for the oppression and suppression of 
 small nationalities, whereas Prussia has only ex- 
 panded by suppressing the Danes in Schleswig- 
 Holstein, the Poles in Posen, the French in Al- 
 sace-Lorraine, the Russian Empire has again 
 and again stood for the emancipation of small 
 nationalities. Most of the wars of Russia have 
 been holy crusades, wars for the liberation of 
 other countries. The Battle of Navarino gave 
 freedom to Greece. The Turkish-Russian War 
 of 1878 gave freedom to Roumania, Serbia, and 
 Bulgaria. If we study closely the historical 
 record of the Russian Empire, we come to the 
 
 74
 
 RUSSIA AS THE LIBERATOR 75 
 
 conclusion that Russia, almost as much as 
 France, has been the great crusading nation of 
 history. The glorious title of "Tsar Osvobo- 
 ditel," or "liberator Tsar," which is inscribed 
 on the statue of Alexander II in the Govern- 
 ment Square at Sofia, has been earned in like 
 measure by Alexander I and by Alexander II. 
 
 II. The Tragedy of Poland 
 
 In at least one case Russia has been guilty of 
 an odious crime against a weaker nationality. 
 The suppression and oppression of Poland is 
 the dark spot in the political history of the Rus- 
 sian Empire, even as the oppression of Ireland is 
 the dark spot in the history of the British Em- 
 pire. In both cases the oppression has been 
 largely a case of religious intolerance, and has 
 been partly a tragic inheritance of the past. 
 But in the case of Poland it is not Russia, but 
 Prussia, who is the main culprit. It was Fred- 
 erick the Great who took the initiative of the 
 partition of Poland, and who secured and com- 
 pelled the complicity both of Russia and Aus- 
 tria. 
 
 Maria Theresa, after the partition of Poland, 
 prophesied only too accurately all the evil con- 
 sequences which would result from the crime.
 
 76 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 But Maria Theresa, however penitent, never 
 surrendered the spoils. Russia, on the con- 
 trary, again and again offered to restore the 
 independence of Poland. It was the dream 
 of Alexander I to re-establish an autonomous 
 Polish kingdom. All his efforts proved of no 
 avail, partly owing to Prussian influence, partly 
 owing to the uncompromising attitude of the 
 Polish patriots. After the Revolution of 1830 
 the opportunity passed away, and the Russian 
 Government entered an era of reaction, and 
 from 1815 to the present day the history of the 
 relations between Russia and Poland has been 
 a succession of lamentable misunderstandings 
 and political blunders. 
 
 But, however severely we may condemn Rus- 
 sian misgovernment in Poland, Russian policy 
 has been enlightened compared to Prussian mis- 
 government in Posen. Whilst Alexander II 
 did for the Polish peasantry what Great 
 Britain was to do forty years after for the 
 Irish peasantry, whilst he transferred, with the 
 assistance of Nicolas Miloutine, the Polish 
 land from the Polish nobles to the Polish peas- 
 ants, and tried to create a class of Polish 
 peasant proprietors, Prussia systematically at- 
 tempted to expropriate the Polish peasantry,
 
 RUSSIA AS THE LIBERATOR 77 
 
 and transfer the Polish land to German settlers. 
 And whilst Prussian Poland has been sacrificed 
 to Prussian interests, Russian Poland has be- 
 come the richest and most thriving province 
 of the Russian Empire. 
 
 It is true that even that prosperity has not 
 reconciled the Poles to the rule of an alien Gov- 
 ernment and to the loss of their national tradi- 
 tions, of their political and religious freedom. 
 The Russian Government have understood in 
 the end, under the pressure of national danger, 
 that a great Slav nation with the glorious past 
 of Poland cannot be reconciled, and will not 
 be satisfied until it has recovered complete au- 
 tonomy. That autonomy is coming at last. 
 One of the first pronouncements of the Russian 
 Government at the beginning of the war was 
 the new charter of Polish freedom. Like the 
 war of 18 12 liberating Europe, like the war of 
 1825 liberating Greece, like the war of 1878 
 liberating Bulgaria, the war of IQ15 will ulti- 
 mately be a war of emancipation. The Treaty 
 of Peace which will destroy German milita- 
 rism will also culminate in the reconciliation of 
 the two great representatives of the Slavonic 
 stock, who both in the past have been the vic- 
 tims of Teutonic militarism.
 
 78 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 III. The Quixotic Foreign Policy 
 of Russia 
 
 Russia has not only defended the rights of 
 small nationalities, she has also consistently fol- 
 lowed a disinterested foreign policy. Accord- 
 ing to his lights, the Russian statesman has 
 been a good European; he has waged war not 
 in pursuance of national ends, but of general 
 ends. There is even a great deal to be said 
 in favour of the theories which the Slavophil 
 Danilewski expounded in his famous book 
 " Russia and Europe." For the Russian pol- 
 icy has been frequently Quixotic and regard- 
 v less of Russian interests. At the beginning of 
 the nineteenth century the one end of Russian 
 policy was to liberate the world from the 
 tyranny of Napoleon. The Tsar might have 
 divided the spoils with his ally of Tilsit. Rus- 
 sia resisted the arch-tempter and persistently 
 saved an ungrateful Prussia from annihilation. 
 But even more wonderful than the disinter- 
 estedness of Russia has been her restraint and 
 moderation in victory. After the invasion of 
 France, Bliicher insisted on continuing the war 
 to the bitter end. What Russia considered 
 as a war of liberation Prussia considered as a
 
 RUSSIA AS THE LIBERATOR 79 
 
 war of revenge. He even proposed a punitive 
 expedition against Paris and to blow up the 
 Tena Bridge in mere wanton vindictiveness. 
 Alexander I insisted that not a stone of the 
 French capital should be touched, although the 
 French armies only two years before had de- 
 stroyed Moscow, the heart and sanctuary of 
 Holy Russia. Prussia also demanded that a 
 despotic Government should be imposed upon 
 the French people, even as in 1873 Bismarck 
 demanded that a revolutionary Government 
 should be imposed on the French people. 
 Alexander I insisted that the Bourbons should 
 grant a constitutional Government. 
 
 Unfortunately the disinterested foreign pol- 
 icy of Russia was generally placed at the serv- 
 ice of Prussia and Austria. On the assumption 
 that a political understanding of the three Con- 
 servative Empires was a necessary condition of 
 the preservation of law and order, Russia made 
 common cause with her neighbours. As M. de 
 Wesselitsky recently abundantly proved in his 
 illuminating book, the Triple Alliance has been 
 the most sinister influence of Russian and Euro- 
 pean politics in the nineteenth century, and the 
 only Power to profit by the Alliance of the 
 Emperors was the Kingdom of Prussia. No
 
 80 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 wonder that the expression travailler pour le 
 Roi de Prusse should have become as proverbial 
 in Russia as in France. 
 
 The huge area of the Russian Empire has 
 naturally encouraged the belief that Russian 
 policy is determined by lust of territory, that 
 Russia must be systematically aggressive, and 
 must have ever encroached on her neighbours. 
 We forget that Russia is only obeying the irre- 
 sistible expansion of the race, that Russia al- 
 ready in the seventeenth century had reached 
 the far eastern plains of Asia. We forget 
 that the growth of Russia is but the natural 
 growth of a prolific race which increases at pres- 
 ent at the rate of more than three millions a 
 year, notwithstanding an enormous infant mor- 
 tality. Even if Russia did not add one square 
 mile to her territory, her population in twenty- 
 five years would still have increased by one hun- 
 dred millions. But notwithstanding that enor- 
 mous accretion of population, Russia for the 
 last hundred years has not expanded in Eu- 
 rope, and her expansion outside of Europe is 
 small compared with the expansion of the Brit- 
 ish Empire. The huge Siberian plain was a 
 terra nullius and the hinterland of the Euro- 
 pean plain.
 
 RUSSIA AS THE LIBERATOR 81 
 (We have seen that the chief national aim 
 of Russian foreign policy from the times of 
 Peter the Great has been the acquisition of a 
 harbour on the open sea. )That aim is per- 
 fectly justified. The wonder is not that Rus- 
 sia should have pursued that policy undiscour- 
 aged by persistent obstacles, but that she should 
 have had to wait for two centuries before 
 achieving her ends. The present war has 
 proved once more how her national security, 
 her trade and industry, are at the mercy of her 
 enemies for want of an outlet on the sea. For 
 want of an outlet on the sea Russia through- 
 out the war has been at the mercy of Germany 
 and Turkey, and has been unable to equip her 
 heroic armies. Great Britain in the past has 
 thwarted legitimate Russian aspirations, she 
 has sacrificed the Balkan nationalities to the 
 unspeakable Turk; Great Britain is now pay- 
 ing the penalty, and is now discovering that 
 she also through her anti-Russian policy in the 
 past has only played the game of the King of 
 Prussia.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR PEACE 
 AND PROGRESS 
 
 I 
 
 FROM the foregoing considerations it is 
 obvious that those who denounce the 
 aggressive policy of the Russian Gov- 
 ernment are little acquainted either with Rus- 
 sian history or with the Russian character. 
 
 The history of Russian expansion has been 
 one mainly of peaceful penetration. Even to- 
 day over a million peasants cross the Ural 
 Mountains every year to settle in Siberia. The 
 providential mission of Russia seems to be the 
 colonization of the semi-barbarous populations 
 of the Asiatic continent. And in that mission 
 the Russian people have been eminently suc- 
 cessful. The Russian is the ideal settler. He 
 does not possess the commercial instinct of the 
 Jew or of the Armenians; he does not possess 
 the industrial capacities of the Anglo-Saxon. 
 But as an agriculturist, as a colonist, he is un- 
 surpassed. 
 
 82
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR PROGRESS 83 
 
 A peaceful policy is in conformity with the- 
 Russian character. The most typical Russian 
 writer is also the most uncompromising apostle 
 of peace. There is nothing aggressive in the 
 Russian temperament. Its strength lies in pa- 
 tience and stoical endurance, in passive resist- 
 ance. Even the military history of Russia il- 
 lustrates that character. The French and the 
 Germans are strong in the offensive, the Rus- 
 sians are mainly strong on the defensive. The 
 war of 1812, the retreat to Moscow, the dra- 
 matic duel between Napoleon and Kutusov, 
 are striking illustrations of that characteristic in 
 the national temperament. 
 
 To-day more than ever peace is a Russian 
 necessity. Russia is only at the beginning of 
 her industrial expansion, and she has still to 
 pass through the ordeal of a profound political 
 transformation. She needs peace to exploit 
 her immense resources. She needs peace even 
 more urgently to carry her political experiments 
 to a successful issue. At the beginning of his 
 reign, Nicholas II, in issuing his famous peace 
 rescript, took the initiative of the modern peace 
 movement and of the Hague Conference. It 
 is not the fault of Russia, but of Prussia, that 
 the Hague Conferences should have failed in
 
 84 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 their object, and that the ideals of Nicholas II 
 should have remained a noble dream. The 
 crushing of German militarism will make the 
 dream of the White Tsar a glorious reality. 
 
 II 
 
 In the opinion of the average Englishman, Rus- 
 sia is identified with reaction . The Russian 
 moujik we are told is a clumsy, unwieldy 
 giant, who is only beginning to stretch his limbs. 
 Russia moves as slowly as her own rivers, so 
 sluggish that it is almost impossible to tell in 
 which direction the currents move. 
 
 Like most other ideas about Russia, this con- 
 ception of a reactionary Russia is a delusion. 
 So far from being stationary Russia is, per- 
 haps, the most progressive nation in Europe, 
 and her rapid advance has only been paralleled 
 by the advance of America. Only two hun- 
 dred years ago the Russian Empire was still 
 plunged in utter darkness. At the beginning 
 of the eighteenth century the Russian Govern- 
 ment was of so little account that when Peter 
 the Great offered to visit the Court of Versailles, 
 he met with a polite refusal. To-day the suc- 
 cessors of Louis XIV celebrate a visit of the 
 Russian Tsar as a great national event.
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR PROGRESS 85 
 
 Everything in Russia has had to be built up 
 in a few generations. The Trans-Siberian 
 Railway is as stupendous an achievement as the 
 Canadian Pacific Railway. The cyclopean 
 highway through the Caucasus is one of the 
 wonders of modem engineering. Ten years 
 ago I witnessed for six months the horrors of 
 the Civil War and the disasters of the Japanese 
 War. Returning to Petrograd after five years 
 I expected to find a ruined, disorganized State. 
 I found instead an extraordinary change for the 
 better: the public exchequer full to overflow- 
 ing, a thriving industry, universal optimism, a 
 superb confidence in the future. We notice the 
 same progress in every province of human ac- 
 tivity. No British newspaper would think it 
 worth while to report about those twenty thou- 
 sand agricultural co-operative societies which 
 have risen in recent years in the Empire of 
 the Tsars. One Nihilist plot or one Jewish 
 Pogrom would have attracted more attention. 
 Yet think of the enormous significance of those 
 twenty thousand autonomous social organiza- 
 tions which everywhere are reforming agricul- 
 tural methods and stimulating the most impor- 
 tant national industry. 
 
 Russia is the country of gigantic social and
 
 86 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 political experiments. To use the three favour- 
 ite expressions of the German megalomaniacs, 
 everything in Russia is "Kolossal," "grossar- 
 tig," "im grossen Stil." There is no parallel 
 in history, to the emancipation of the serfs, or 
 to that expropriation of the Polish landlords, 
 with which the name of Nicholas Milutin is as- 
 sociated. By one stroke of the Imperial pen 
 forty million peasants were liberated, and tens 
 of millions of acres of land changed hands. 
 The recent far-reaching prohibition measure is 
 another bold innovation of the Russian Gov- 
 ernment. In other countries thousands of en- 
 thusiasts have been speaking about temperance 
 reform and denouncing the appalling results of 
 the drink evil. The Russian Government 
 alone has had the courage of grappling with the 
 evil, and that courage is all the more admirable 
 because in suppressing the sale of vodka the 
 Russian Government have deprived themselves 
 of one-fourth of the Imperial revenue. Surely 
 two such far-reaching achievements, either 
 promised or accomplished in the throes of a 
 great war the charter of Polish freedom and 
 the prohibition of vodka are of good omen for 
 the future liberation of the Russian people.
 
 RUSSIA STANDS FOR PROGRESS 87 
 
 III. The Coming of the Slav 
 
 After a thousand years of striving and suffer- 
 ing, of oppression and suppression, the Russian 
 is at last coming into his inheritance. This 
 war, which will end in the collapse of the three 
 Empires, Prussia, Austria, and Turkey, will 
 also result in the advance of the Russian Em- 
 pire as the controlling power of Continental 
 Europe. The future Peace Congress will real- 
 ize the dream of ages. Byzantium Tsargrad 
 will become the capital of Holy Russia. 
 
 But Europe need take no umbrage. The 
 Russian Empire of to-morrow will not be a cen- 
 tralized military Power like Rome or Germany. 
 It will take the form of a federation of self- 
 governing communities. The logic of the Slav 
 political tradition, the pressure of economic and 
 political circumstances, the shaking off of the 
 German influence, the influence of the allied 
 democracies, all point to a Liberal Orientation 
 of Russian politics. 
 
 The other Slav States will be finally liber- 
 ated. Poland, Serbia, Bulgaria will be drawn 
 into the orbit of the leading Power to which 
 they owe their independent national existence. 
 Russian influence will be all the stronger as
 
 88 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 it ceases to be a menace to their independence. 
 Attracted by the affinities of language and race, 
 of religion and tradition, the Slav communities 
 will constitute one integral whole, the United 
 States of Eastern and Southern Europe. 
 
 That federation of Slavonic States will be 
 the dominant power in the old Continent, and 
 the other States will have to follow their lead. 
 The economic and political interests of the other 
 nations will be so closely identified with the fu- 
 ture of Russia, that they will have to seek a 
 closer political understanding and to constitute, 
 in combination with Russia, those United 
 States of Europe which hitherto had been the 
 vain political dream of generations of idealists 
 and visionaries.
 
 PART III 
 The Great Russian Triumvirate
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 TURGENEV AND WESTERN 
 INFLUENCES 
 
 I. Russian Ideals as Revealed 
 by Russian Literature 
 
 IN the previous chapters I have attempted 
 to give the meaning of the political 
 achievements of the Russian people, and 
 to vindicate the prominent place which they 
 may claim in the history of modern civiliza- 
 tion. I have described the guiding principles 
 which, amidst many errors and deflections, have 
 directed Russian policy. I have also shown 
 how the internal and external policy of the 
 Government is rooted in the ideas and aspira- 
 tions of the people, and how those ideas have 
 been affected by the peculiar geographical and 
 physiographical conditions of the Russian Em- 
 pire. No survey of Russian history would, 
 however, be complete which would fail to ex- 
 plain, however briefly, how those Russian ideals 
 and inspirations have found adequate expres- 
 sion in the masterpieces of Russian literature. 
 
 9i /
 
 92 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 In one sense it may be asserted that the Rus- 
 sian people are inarticulate, as the great mass 
 of the people are illiterate peasants. But the 
 instincts and aspirations of those inarticulate 
 peasants have been voiced by some of the great- 
 est creative artists of world literature. No 
 modern literature certainly can boast of pro- 
 ducing in one and the same generation such a 
 triumvirate as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dos- 
 toevsky. To outward view there seems very 
 little in common between them: yet all three 
 writers are pre-eminently representative men. 
 Turgenev is an agnostic and a Liberal, a cynic 
 and, a sceptic, enamoured of Western habits 
 and ideas, and he spent the greater part of his 
 life outside of Russia. Tolstoy is a believer, 
 an enthusiast and a passionate reformer, and 
 he spent all his life between Moscow and his 
 paternal estate. Dostoevsky's life is a pa- 
 thetic tale of hardship and suffering. An epi- 
 leptic on the verge of insanity, he spent part 
 of his life in prison and in exile. Yet those 
 three great writers, so different in their per- 
 sonal characteristics, are bound by a unity of 
 ideals. They are all characterized by the same 
 Russian depth, the same love of reality and 
 veracity. They have all the same hatred of
 
 WESTERN INFLUENCES 93 
 
 cant and convention; they have all the same 
 unconquerable love of freedom; they are all 
 democrats and pacifists. And although typical 
 Russians, they are equally good Europeans. 
 Although educated in the darkest days of po- 
 litical reaction, they all have the same generous 
 and magnanimous belief in humanity. They 
 all repudiate the gospel of Prussianism; they 
 are all in communion and sympathy with the 
 common people. And if we may judge of the 
 aspirations of the Russian nation from the 
 writings of her greatest sons, we can be left in 
 no doubt as to the ultimate Orientation of the 
 Russian people. 
 
 II 
 
 Russian literature is the finest of all heroic 
 literatures. No other has raised to a higher 
 level the dignity of a novelist. The Russian 
 novelist is at the same time a man of thought 
 and a man of action. He has a cure of souls; 
 he is an apostle. The Russian novel of the 
 nineteenth century, like the French novel of 
 the eighteenth, has been the chief and almost 
 the only instrument of political and social free- 
 dom. The novel in Russia under Nicholas I 
 took the place of the newspaper, the pulpit, and
 
 94 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 the platform, for under his autocratic Govern- 
 ment the Press was gagged, the Church had 
 sold her birthright for a mess of pottage, and 
 no Duma existed. 
 
 Nothing is more sad or more tragic, more 
 monotonous, and at the same time more touch- 
 ing and more glorious, than the life-story of 
 Russian writers of an earlier generation. 
 Nearly all these lives resemble one another. 
 What a lamentable list of martyrs! Radi- 
 schef, one of the first who dared to expose the 
 horrors of serfdom, exiled to Siberia by Cath- 
 erine the Great and forced into committing 
 suicide! Pushkin and Lermontov killed in 
 a duel! Griboiedov assassinated! Bielinski, 
 the greatest of critics, Soloviov, the greatest of 
 philosophers, and Chekhov, the most celebrated 
 of story writers, carried off prematurely by 
 a pitiless climate! Herzen, Saltikov, Tcher- 
 nitchevski, and Kropotkin condemned to exile ! 
 Dostoevsky, sentenced to the mines damnatus 
 ad metalla and spending the best of his years 
 in "The House of the Dead." Plescheeff, Pi- 
 sarev, Maxim Gorky, put in prison! All sus- 
 pected, hunted, and condemned under a hostile 
 Government to a life of sickness and misery. 
 
 On this list of martyrs, in this struggle for
 
 WESTERN INFLUENCES 95 
 
 freedom of thought and of conscience, Tur- 
 genev occupies, in spite of his failings, a place 
 of honour. He also knew what prison life 
 meant. He was exiled to his distant property. 
 He was placed under police vigilance, and if 
 he suffered less than others from the harshness 
 of those in power it is because he put the fron- 
 tier between himself and the police. Far from 
 his country, he continued to fight the good fight. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Born in 1818, that is ten years before Tolstoy, 
 in the Province of Orel, in old Russia, and on 
 the borders of that black soil which is the 
 granary of Europe, Turgenev belonged to the 
 illustrious liberal and liberating generation 
 of the forties. Attaining his intellectual ma- 
 jority when the despotic power of Nicholas I 
 was at its height, he bore the marks of that ter- 
 rible regime^ and the misery of serfhood 
 branded itself indelibly upon his soul. De- 
 scended from the country aristocracy, and bred 
 of a long line of noblemen, he was the last wit- 
 ness of feudal customs, and became the acknowl- 
 edged chronicler of a society now for ever abol- 
 ished. A sad childhood was his, whose mem- 
 ory served to darken his whole life. His
 
 96 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 father was a rake. His mother, a strange, des- 
 potic woman, who lorded it over an estate of 
 5000 souls, quarrelled with him, and never 
 forgave him for losing caste by becoming an 
 author, when he might have achieved a bril- 
 liant military career in the Tchin. He re- 
 ceived a double education a la frangaise, at 
 the hands of indifferent preceptors and dancing 
 masters, and a la Tartare, that is, at the point 
 of the lash. At eighteen he was glad to escape 
 from the maternal home, with its atmosphere 
 of violence and servility, and to make his way 
 first to Moscow for a season of pleasure, then 
 to Petrograd to taste the comparative lib- 
 erty of student life. These were the darkest 
 days of political despotism, and the temptation 
 to breathe the air of freer lands was very 
 strong. At twenty Turgenev left Russia, and 
 spent three years at the University of Berlin. 
 
 IV 
 
 This first absence of three years determined his 
 future life. On his return to Russia he could 
 no longer breathe his native air, at twenty-nine 
 years of age, in 1847, he returned to a wan- 
 dering life, and left his country for good, re- 
 turning to it only for a few weeks each year in
 
 WESTERN INFLUENCES 97 
 
 order to settle his business affairs. And if at 
 first the love of his native land seized upon the 
 exile and brought him back for a time to Spass- 
 koi, the tyrannical reign of Nicholas did its 
 best to kill these regrets. In 1852, the day 
 after the publication of "A Sportsman's 
 Sketches," he received in prison, as did every 
 ame bien nee in the Russia of those days, his 
 baptism of liberty. His crime was the discreet 
 praise he had given to Gogol and his "Dead 
 Souls," just as Lermontov had been punished 
 for praising Pushkin. It was a warning. 
 From henceforth Turgenev was cured of his 
 nostalgia. He became more and more "West- 
 ernized." For years he wandered across Eu- 
 rope in the pursuit of his artistic ideal, and in 
 the train of Madame Viardot, the famous prima 
 donna and sister of Malibran, to whom he was 
 united by a friendship which death alone was 
 to end. He resided alternately in Germany 
 and France, and built himself a villa at Baden- 
 Baden. He, the Scythian and the Tartar, be- 
 came a type of the uprooted absentee landlord. 
 Far from Russia, he understood her no more, 
 and was no more understood by her, and he 
 lived to be depreciated and disowned by the 
 coming generation of his compatriots.
 
 98 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 After 1870 he left Germany, and settled per- 
 manently in Paris, and France was grateful to 
 the stranger who preferred the hospitality of 
 the Conquered to that of the Conqueror. An 
 intimate friend of Flaubert, who had organized 
 in his honour the famous dinners at Magny, of 
 which Edmond de Goncourt became the chron- 
 icler (see "The Diary of the Goncourts"), trans- 
 lated by Merimee, extolled by About and 
 George Sand, by Taine and Renan, recognized 
 as a master by Zola and Daudet, Turgenev 
 became almost a French classic, and the first on 
 the lists of the new realistic and naturalistic 
 school. In spite of such adulation and affec- 
 tion, exile was not good for him. His popu- 
 larity in France, besides being a little artificial, 
 could never reconcile him to his unpopularity 
 at home, and he carried in his heart till death 
 the wound struck by an alienated and ungrate- 
 ful country. His mental sufferings, his irregu- 
 lar life had prematurely undermined his vig- 
 orous constitution. Turgenev died in 1883, 
 after years of excruciating suffering caused by 
 cancer of the spinal cord. By a strange irony 
 of fate, he who lived as a disregarded exile re- 
 turned after death to his native country, and 
 Russia, who had disowned him, gave to his dead
 
 WESTERN INFLUENCES 99 
 
 body the honours she had refused to his 
 genius. 
 
 V 
 
 It is important for an understanding of Tur- 
 genev to trace the main currents of his tortured 
 existence, to remember at what date and under 
 what influences each of his books came into 
 being, and, above all, to recall the successive 
 environments in which his lot was cast: Old 
 Russia, the Black Soil, Serfdom, German Uni- 
 versities, the Russian Colony of Baden, the cos- 
 mopolitan society of Paris. For Turgenev was 
 a chronicler. He could only describe with mi- 
 croscopic minuteness what he had seen, and 
 make the scenes he had actually passed through 
 live again. If he had had the magnifying im- 
 agination of a Balzac or of a Dickens, he would 
 have transformed actuality; if he had had the 
 historical imagination of Walter Scott, he 
 would have taken refuge in "the past"; if he 
 had had the reforming and Christian tempera- 
 ment of Tolstoy, his books would have been 
 speeches and discussions. But Turgenev had 
 none of these. On the one hand he had scarcely 
 any creative faculty; on the other hand, he was 
 entirely detached from all positive Christianity.
 
 ioo GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 He was a complete Nihilist in religion, and 
 even in politics he disclaimed any didactic in- 
 tention. Possessing to a supreme degree the 
 genius of observation and of psychological anal- 
 ysis, he contented himself with reproducing the 
 reality which surrounded him, and the society 
 and personalities which he knew. This sur- 
 rounding reality, this society, and these person- 
 alities he saw thus through an artistic tempera- 
 ment, which received its profoundest impres- 
 sions from its environment. To understand 
 this temperament of his, his moral physiog- 
 nomy, his jarring discords, his eccentricities, his 
 contrasts, one must transport oneself to the Rus- 
 sia of former days. 
 
 Tradition has it that Turgenev was a fa- 
 therly and patriarchal "grand old man," six 
 feet in height, with white hair and a flowing 
 beard, the soul of a child in the body of a giant, 
 full of kindness and good nature, ingenuousness, 
 and simplicity. In reality, no one was less in- 
 genuous than Turgenev, as Daudet and Zola 
 learnt to their sorrow. The simplicity of the 
 Slav in him was mingled with the duplicity of 
 the Byzantine. 
 
 Turgenev is full of contradictions and fun- 
 damentally obscure; and these contradictions
 
 WESTERN INFLUENCES 101 
 
 explain the contradictory judgments of which 
 he has been the subject, especially in Russia, 
 on the part of the Slavophiles, as well as the 
 "Zapadniki." He is at once a mystic and a 
 mystifier, an enthusiast and a sceptic, keen on 
 revolution, and yet without illusions concern- 
 ing revolutionaries ("Fathers and Children"); 
 gentle and violent; a believer in ideas, and yet 
 knowing all the time that these ideas will be 
 dissipated in "smoke." ("Smoke.") 
 
 Very intelligent, very yielding, and very fee- 
 ble, he was always influenced by his surround- 
 ings. Very young and very old, at once bar- 
 baric and refined, he is the product of a 
 civilization which had a fitful and irregular de- 
 velopment. When it was the fashion to be 
 Byronic, and to assume a romantic pose, Tur- 
 genev startled Herzen and Tolstoy by his dan- 
 dified affectation as he sported an eyeglass in 
 the Perspective Nevski. When he was in Ger- 
 many he was a Gallophobe. When he was in 
 Paris he was a Gallophile ; yet he did not hesi- 
 tate to write some very bitter criticisms on the 
 country of his adoption to his friends in Russia. 
 
 In fine, his was a nature wavering and com- 
 plex, a character profoundly sympathetic, but 
 undecided and vacillating, a luminous intelli-
 
 102 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 gence, but lacking focus. His virtues really 
 belonged to him ; his faults he owed to his edu- 
 cation, and to the demoralizing conditions of 
 his exiled and uprooted existence. 
 
 And as these conditions explained in a great 
 measure the personality of the novelist, they 
 also explained the physiognomy of his charac- 
 ters, the atmosphere of his work. That at- 
 mosphere is depressing, and the physiognomy 
 of the "heroes" is still more so. These heroes 
 have nothing heroic about them. They are 
 nearly all without energy, or they waste what 
 energy they have in words, or in evanescent ac- 
 cessions of violence. They discant incessantly 
 upon the Russian genius, its destiny, and its 
 superiority over the European genius; but they 
 submit to all the indignities of the present mo- 
 ment. Nearly all are "Useless Men." (See 
 "The Diary of a Superfluous Man.") They 
 go from one extreme to another, not having 
 their centre of gravity within themselves. 
 They ask from love both the joys and the suf- 
 ferings of life, but in that very love they reveal 
 the same want of character, of stability and 
 consistence. 
 
 Sometimes they sacrifice to a caprice the 
 woman they love; sometimes they commit sui-
 
 WESTERN INFLUENCES 103 
 
 cide when crossed in love, without any resource 
 against temptation or misfortune. This paral- 
 ysis of the will, this aboulie no one has de- 
 scribed and diagnosed with a surer penetration 
 than Turgenev, because he himself was so pro- 
 foundly affected by it, and because it is the con- 
 stitutional malady of the Russian soul. How 
 can one escape being boulique, like Rudin, at 
 a time when the will of one individual could 
 break everything and substitute itself for every- 
 thing"? How could one help being fantastic, 
 like Irene, in a country where despotism and 
 caprice reign supreme"? How can one avoid 
 violence and Nihilism, like that of Bazarov, 
 under a regime where nothing could be obtained 
 by reason and persuasion, and where one must 
 be either a victim or a despot? 
 
 VI 
 
 As a writer, Turgenev is without a rival. He 
 is the purest of stylists, the first classical prose 
 writer of his country. Like Pushkin, he had 
 the most intimate knowledge and mastery of 
 the resources and the riches of the Russian 
 tongue. I remember once, when in the Crimea, 
 and wishing to learn the Russian language, I 
 asked Maxim Gorky what would be the best
 
 104 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 method to follow. Gorky, the least artistic, the 
 least Westernized of writers, sent me first of all 
 to Turgenev. It is a fact that foreigners begin 
 their study of Russian by reading Turgenev. 
 It is he who initiates them into the secrets of 
 the most complex, the most finely graded, the 
 most varied and most subtle of modern lan- 
 guages perhaps of all languages the sole heir 
 to the genius of the Greek tongue. 
 
 But Turgenev is stj.ll more; he is a master 
 of European literature. He has neither the in- 
 spiration of Gogol, nor the epic grandeur or the 
 prophetic breath of Tolstoy, nor the profound 
 tragedy of Dostoevsky, nor the democratic sen- 
 timent of Gorky and Chekhov. His horizon 
 is as limited and monotonous as the horizon of 
 the steppes. He works with certain ever-recur- 
 ring types of lovers, proprietors, peasants, intel- 
 lectuals, and revolutionaries. If his talent re- 
 mains personal and original, if he has not 
 (whatever may be said against him) copied 
 from his predecessors, he is for ever copying 
 himself. But in his limited world, which is his 
 own, Turgenev is without a rival. The best 
 judges in all countries Merimee, Taine, and 
 Hennequin in France; Brandes in Denmark; 
 Henry James in America; Galsworthy in Eng-
 
 WESTERN INFLUENCES 105 
 
 land have recognized, in spite of the obscur- 
 ing medium of translation, the mastery of his 
 art. He has colour, meaning, order, composi- 
 tion. He has moderation and proportion. He 
 knows how to sum up a situation in a few lines, 
 how to draw a character with a few strokes. 
 He has none of the tedious speeches which make 
 Dostoevsky, and sometimes Tolstoy, so difficult 
 to read. He excels in telling a story. He 
 probably inspired Maupassant, and there is no 
 doubt that Chekhov owed much to him. 
 
 As an artist Turgenev seems to have profited 
 by all his experiences, even by the harshness of 
 the censorship ; and the failings of mankind min- 
 istered to his art no less than its virtues. Nar- 
 rowly watched by censors, he was forced into 
 those reticences and reserves, and into that 
 veiled delicacy of illusion which heightens artis- 
 tic effect. Being a pessimist, he had no illu- 
 sions about his characters, but maintained 
 throughout a Shakespearean objectivity towards 
 them. Had he been more optimistic and ideal- 
 istic, and more of a reformer, he would have 
 interposed his own reflections between his char- 
 acters and the reader, using them, too, as 
 vehicles of his own favourite doctrine. But 
 being a fatalist, he believed in the immutability
 
 106 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 of his characters, and made them all act ac- 
 cording to the strict logic of their tempera- 
 ments. 
 
 It should be added that, though Turgenev 
 contemplates the "Human Comedy" with the 
 disillusioned smile of the sceptic, his smile is 
 often mixed with tears, and his scepticism never 
 excludes tenderness, emotion, and sympathy. 
 So far from excluding goodness and indulgence, 
 his fatalism rather implies them; for to him to 
 understand all is to pardon all. One pre-emi- 
 nently Christian virtue has survived the ship- 
 wreck of his Christianity the virtue of resig- 
 nation, and he has kept the best part of Chris- 
 tian piety, which is pity. Like all great Rus- 
 sian writers, he has, amid the loss of many be- 
 liefs, retained the religion of human suffering.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 TOLSTOY THE BYZANTINE 
 
 I 
 
 THERE are a hundred and forty million 
 peasants settled on the outskirts of 
 Continental Europe, and rapidly taking 
 possession of the Asiatic plain. It seems, in the 
 fitness of things, that Russian expansion should 
 move Eastwards, for it seems almost impossible 
 to consider the Russian as belonging to the 
 West. We are loth to admit him to the fran- 
 chise of European civilization. "Scratch a 
 Russian moujik" we are told, "and you find the 
 Tartar." Let him, therefore, go back to Tar- 
 tary, the cradle of his race. 
 
 The time-honoured saying about the Russian 
 Tartar is only a sorry joke. For if it means 
 that the Russian peasant, being engaged in a 
 perpetual struggle with the hostile forces of Na- 
 ture, with drought and cold, with hunger and 
 plague, is nearer to elemental human nature, 
 then it is only a commonplace and a misleading 
 one. For elemental human nature is not Tar- 
 
 107
 
 y 
 
 108 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 tar, and the stoical and heroic struggle with Na- 
 ture is more characteristic of the West than of 
 the East. If, on the other hand, the saying 
 means that the Russian peasant is at heart a 
 Tartar and a heathen, that his Christianity is 
 only skin-deep, then it entirely misrepresents 
 his character. As a matter of fact, the Rus- 
 sian moujik moves and lives and has his bear- 
 ing in Christianity. 
 
 To anyone who, like the writer of these lines, 
 has lived with Russian pilgrims at Kiev or 
 Jerusalem, it would almost seem as if Russia 
 and Siberia were the only Christian countries 
 left in the world. In Tolstoy's marvellous and 
 gruesome drama, "The Powers of Darkness," 
 Christianity is the one light which illumines the 
 moujik sunk in vice and degradation. On the 
 other hand, if popular Christianity remains the 
 great civilizing force, it is almost equally true 
 to say that official Christianity has itself be- 
 come "a power of darkness." And it is one of 
 the most difficult tasks for the student of mod- 
 ern Russia to dissociate popular Christianity 
 from official Christianity. In Russia religion 
 and humanity are to-day working at cross-pur- 
 poses. The intellectual minority who believe 
 in reform do not believe in Christianity. The
 
 TOLSTOY THE BYZANTINE 109 
 
 masses who believe in Christianity do not be- 
 lieve in reform, and their religion is being ex- 
 ploited in the interests of a corrupt bureaucracy 
 and of an effete Church. 
 
 II 
 
 There lies, to my mind, the deep-seated cause 
 of the ghastly failure of the abortive Revolu- 
 tion of 1905. When, eight years ago, Russia 
 from the Baltic to the Pacific was convulsed by 
 Civil War, publicists confidently foretold the 
 imminent downfall of Tsardom and the tri- 
 umph of liberty. I had not been a month in 
 Russia when I as confidently predicted that ab- 
 solutely nothing would happen, and that reac- 
 tion would emerge from the crisis more power- 
 ful than ever. I realized that an absolute di- 
 vorce existed between the people and its sup- 
 posed leaders. I realized that a band of ag- 
 nostic doctrinaires would never move a pro- 
 foundly religious people. But whilst realizing 
 the helplessness of the present outlook, I felt 
 equally hopeful for the future. I felt that the 
 day would soon come when the tremendous 
 spiritual forces latent in the people would be 
 released, when those inarticulate millions would 
 find their own spokesmen and leaders. Then
 
 no GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 would dawn the day of the Great Russian Rev- 
 olution, compared with which even the French 
 Revolution would have been only a minor epi- 
 sode. 
 
 Ill 
 
 If it is entirely misleading to say that "to 
 scratch a Russian peasant is to find the Tar- 
 tar," it is entirely true to say "that if you scratch 
 the Russian nobleman you find the Byzantine." 
 And if it is pretty easy to understand the mou- 
 jik> even though you may never have seen a 
 single exemplar of the type, it is extremely 
 difficult to understand a Russian Intellectual, 
 even though you may have met him in every 
 corner of Europe, either as a rich absentee or 
 as a poor refugee. 
 
 When, seven hundred years ago, the Cru- 
 saders first came into touch with the Greek Em- 
 pire, they were bewildered by the mental com- 
 plexity and perversity of the rulers and of the 
 people of Byzantium. And the Byzantine 
 soon became a byword for duplicity and per- 
 fidious subtlety. There is a great deal of the 
 Byzantine about the educated Russian. Like 
 the mediaeval Greek, he is elusive and evasive. 
 He is a bundle of contradictions. You never
 
 TOLSTOY THE BYZANTINE in 
 
 know how to get hold of his real opinion, and 
 even when he has a real opinion, it is impossi- 
 ble to get him to carry it into practice. With 
 him it is the unexpected that always happens. 
 He may be at the same time a Reactionary and 
 a Progressive, a Mystic and an Agnostic, an 
 Imperialist and a Pacifist, a Liberal and an 
 Antisemite. 
 
 To wander through the Russian Empire is 
 not only to move through vast distances of space 
 from the ice-bound plain in the North to the 
 vine-clad mills in the South, it is also to wan- 
 der through seons of time, it is to travel down 
 the ages through every stage of human advance. 
 Visit a Moscow drawing-room, and you will lis- 
 ten to the most progressive thought of the twen- 
 tieth century, where even the English Radicals 
 are discredited as old-fashioned. You go to the 
 neighbouring provincial town, and you are 
 transported back to the eighteenth century. 
 You move to one of the cities of innumerable 
 shrines and pilgrimages and convents, to Kieff 
 or Kazan, and you seem to be carried back to 
 the Middle Ages. You take a voyage down 
 the Volga, or you ascend the mountain ranges 
 of the Caucasus, and you leave civilization be- 
 hind.
 
 112 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 IV 
 
 There lies the explanation of the bewildering 
 complexity of the Russian mind. The Russian 
 has a multiple personality, because he lives and 
 moves in contradictory worlds. The Russian 
 Intellectual lives in the Utopian future, while 
 his parents and sisters still live in the days of 
 serfdom. He has assimilated the doctrines of 
 Marx and of Nietzsche, while his rulers are still 
 carrying on the traditions of Peter the Great 
 and the police are still applying the methods 
 of Ivan the Terrible. And the Russian Intel- 
 lectual must needs adapt himself, unless he is 
 prepared to leave the country or to go to prison 
 or to commit suicide. And having thus from 
 childhood learned to adapt himself, he de- 
 velops a pliability, a suppleness, and subtlety 
 which are becoming the main characteristics of 
 his type. 
 
 That versatility and power of adaptation 
 gives us the secret both of the moral weak- 
 ness and of the intellectual quality of Russian 
 culture. 
 
 On the one hand it is obvious that this versa- 
 tility must be injurious to moral character. 
 The co-existence of contradictory ideals must
 
 TOLSTOY THE BYZANTINE 113 
 
 produce indecision of purpose. The contradic- 
 tion between theory and practice, whilst it is 
 perfectly compatable with sincerity, must be 
 destructive of will-power, and must be fatal to 
 political advance. 
 
 On the other hand, it is equally obvious that 
 the extraordinary variety of intellectual and 
 political experiences which any educated Rus- 
 sian has to go through must produce a breadth 
 of sympathy, a range of intellectual vision, a 
 tolerant understanding, a receptivity for ideas 
 which are the charm of the best Russian Society. 
 
 Some years ago a Russian prince sent me for 
 approval a religious tract which proved to be a 
 masterpiece of mystic lore. The writer had 
 been living in a circle of English Puritans and 
 pietists. Shortly after I made his acquaint- 
 ance in England his nomadic instinct took him 
 to Paris. A few months after he had settled 
 in Paris he sent me a literary composition of a 
 very different nature from the first, a Parisian 
 love story, which in its bold cynicism and per- 
 verse wit reminded me of the most realistic 
 tales of Maupassant. It was a characteristi- 
 cally Russian incident. In an incredibly short 
 time, and with Slav thoroughness, my friend 
 had adapted himself to the mystic surroundings
 
 114 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 of English Puritanism, and to the licence of the 
 City of Pleasure. 
 
 This seems to be a devious and circuitous way 
 of approaching the character and work of Tol- 
 stoy, but I am sure it is the only way to reach 
 a deeper understanding of his personality and 
 of his Art. Most critics approach the Russian 
 giant in complete ignorance of the mental and 
 spiritual atmosphere and climate in which his 
 genius developed. They study his character 
 under the strange impression that the preacher 
 of the simple life was himself a simple man. 
 
 As a matter of fact, Tolstoy never was a sim- 
 ple man. Indeed, I do not know in the whole 
 range of European literature a personality more 
 uncannily complex and perplexing. Two 
 years ago, Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote a brief 
 and striking estimate of Tolstoy for the Fabian 
 News, and it was amusing to observe how the 
 great English master of paradox was simply 
 bewildered by the paradox of Tolstoy's per- 
 sonality. 
 
 Tolstoy's biography illustrates better than 
 any other the distracting contrasts of the typi- 
 cal Russian nobleman and Intellectual. He
 
 TOLSTOY THE BYZANTINE 115 
 
 saw from the inside every phase of Russian life. 
 He lived in the soldiers' camp and in the Courts 
 of Royalty, in the drawing-rooms of fashion 
 and in the haunts of Bohemia. He lived the 
 savage life in the Caucasus, and the patriarchal 
 life at Yasnaya Polyana. A man of uncon- 
 trollable passions, he committed every sin that 
 it was fashionable for a man of his caste to 
 commit. He gambled away his ancestral home, 
 he joined the rebels of his fellow-officers, and 
 wasted his substance in the company of gipsy 
 girls. Yet from an early age he aspired to 
 sanctity. Although professionally a soldier, he 
 early became an apostle of peace. A literary 
 lion in the circles of Moscow, he became the 
 exponent of the simple life. An aristocrat to 
 his finger-tips, he preached the gospel of de- 
 mocracy. A big landowner, he ended by being 
 an advocate of the ideas of Henry George. A 
 Christian ascetic and a woman-hater, yet his 
 wife bore him sixteen children. 
 
 VI 
 
 Even as Tolstoy's surroundings provide the key 
 to his life and character, they give us an ex- 
 planation of his art. The one supreme and 
 original contribution of the Russian mind to
 
 n6 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 world literature is its power of psychological 
 analysis, its broad humanity, its manysidedness, 
 its understanding of every type of human char- 
 acter. Those qualities strike us equally in 
 Gogol's "Dead Souls," in Dostoevsky's "Crime 
 and Punishment," in Turgenev's "Sportsmen 
 Sketches." And those qualities reach their ma- 
 turity and perfection in Tolstoy's art. 
 
 His power of sympathy is unlimited. He 
 understands the sinner, because he has been a 
 sinner. He understands the saint, because he 
 has aspired to be a saint. He understands the 
 savage and the tramp and the peasant, because 
 he has lived with savages and tramps and peas- 
 ants. He is a stern moralist, yet his tolerance 
 and charity are infinite. He holds strong 
 views on every problem of life and death, and 
 he expresses those views in stirring pamphlets. 
 But when he writes his stories and delineates 
 his characters, the teacher and preacher vanish. 
 The artist remains. He describes the rake and 
 the drunkard with as much sympathy as the 
 good man. Nay, he describes them more sym- 
 pathetically, for in "Anna Karenina" the profli- 
 gate Oblonski and Anna the adulteress and the 
 drunken brother are more appealing than Levine 
 or Karenine. Anna may break hearts around
 
 TOLSTOY THE BYZANTINE 117 
 
 her, but she continues to cast a spell over the 
 reader, even as she fascinates her victims. 
 
 There exists a mysterious Indian poison, the 
 curare, once dear to the vivisectionist, and which 
 possesses the terrible power of dissociating the 
 sensory nerves and the motor nerves. The sci- 
 entist who curarises a dog can torture him with 
 impunity, for the dog feels the pain but cannot 
 stir a muscle to express his sensations. I often 
 think of this weird poison and of the methods 
 of the physiologist when I read the novels of 
 Tolstoy, and when I observe this complete sev- 
 erance and dissociation of the artist and the 
 moralist. I think of him as the anatomist of 
 the soul, who, unlike the professor of anatomy 
 of Rembrandt, is dissecting living bodies and 
 bleeding hearts, whilst all the time he himself 
 remains unmoved, serene, partial, and absorbed 
 in his creations. 
 
 It is by virtue of that artistic detachment, 
 that absolute truthfulness and sincerity, as well 
 as by virtue of this power of universal sym- 
 pathy, it is as the supreme anatomist of the soul, 
 that Tolstoy occupies his unique position in 
 world literature. It is those qualities which 
 place "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" 
 above any novels that have ever been written.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 DOSTOEVSKY AND THE RELI- 
 GION OF HUMAN SUFFERING 
 
 IT is one of the favourite methods of mod- 
 ern criticism which explains a writer's 
 work and personality by his circumstances 
 and surroundings. But there are some literary 
 miracles which refuse to be explained. There 
 are some writers who rise superior to circum- 
 stances, and who challenge their surroundings. 
 The subject of the present chapter was pre- 
 eminently such a writer. Dostoevsky seems to 
 have been sent into the world by a special 
 decree of Providence to assert the supremacy 
 of the indomitable human spirit over adverse 
 fate. Small and frail and haggard and miser- 
 ably poor, he yet accomplished prodigies of la- 
 bour. Diseased in mind and body, a bundle 
 of twitching nerves, suffering from epilepsy, he 
 yet preserved balance of judgment and sanity 
 of doctrine. Sentenced to death, and the vic- 
 tim of a monstrous miscarriage of justice, he 
 
 118
 
 DOSTOEVSKY AND SUFFERING 119 
 
 yet bore no ill-will against his judges, and he 
 consistently vindicated the cause of law and 
 order against revolution. Ill-used by his own 
 country, he yet repaid that ill-usage with the 
 most passionate tenderness. A martyr who en- 
 dured every extremity of human suffering, he 
 yet remained a cheerful and confirmed optimist. 
 Take him all in all, Feodor Michaelovitch Dos- 
 toevsky, the gambler, the epileptic, the convict, 
 stands out as the most pathetic and most Christ- 
 like figure in Russian letters. 
 
 II 
 
 He was born in a Moscow hospital in 1821 
 the year of Napoleon's death the son of a re- 
 tired army doctor. Belonging to the impov- 
 erished nobility from whose ranks the Russian 
 aristocracy are recruited, he was from his child- 
 hood inured to privation. He fought his way 
 through the University, and he knew from per- 
 sonal experience the dire straits which he de- 
 scribes in "Crime and Punishment." At 
 twenty-one years of age he emerged as a lieu- 
 tenant of engineers, but only to resign his com- 
 mission: he had already discovered his literary 
 vocation. At twenty-three he wrote his first 
 novel, "Poor Folk," which remains one of his
 
 120 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 best. In 1849, on the morrow of the Social 
 Revolution which shook every throne of Europe, 
 when Russia was in the clutches of the iron 
 despotism of Nicholas I, he joined a debating 
 club of political reformers. His adherence 
 was purely platonic. He never took part in 
 any plot, for there never was a less revolu- 
 tionary temperament. Yet, through a grim 
 irony of fate, he was implicated with thirty-six 
 of his companions in a charge of conspiracy 
 and sentenced to death. He was taken to the 
 place of execution on a chill December morn- 
 ing. Standing on a raised platform with 
 twenty-one fellow-prisoners, stripped to his 
 shirt, with twenty-one degrees of frost, he had 
 to listen for twenty minutes to the reading of 
 the death sentence, with the soldiers lined in 
 front of him and ready to shoot. At the last 
 moment he was reprieved; but that cruel scene 
 on that chill December morning remained a 
 haunting obsession and coloured his imagination 
 ever after. 
 
 The death sentence had been commuted into 
 four years of hard labour in a Siberian con- 
 vict station (described in "The House of the 
 Dead"). He spent three more years in exile
 
 DOSTOEVSKY AND SUFFERING 121 
 
 and three years as a private soldier, having mar- 
 ried, in the meantime, the widow of one of his 
 fellow-prisoners. 
 
 When he returned, in 1859, after ten years, 
 his deliverance was but the beginning of a new 
 life of ceaseless privation and suffering. Un- 
 practical, improvident, generous, ruined by 
 journalistic ventures, in the grip of epilepsy 
 and of the moneylender, not a single day was he 
 free from harassing cares, and twice he had to 
 fly abroad to escape imprisonment for debt. 
 When national recognition came at last, when 
 his later books had made him the cynosure of 
 the younger generation, it was too late. His 
 constitution was irretrievably shattered. He 
 died in 1881, one month before the assassination 
 of the Tsar a turning-point in Russian his- 
 tory. The funeral of Dostoevsky was the oc- 
 casion of a demonstration unique perhaps in the 
 history of literature. A procession of a hun- 
 dred thousand mourners and spectators, princes 
 of the Imperial Court, Cabinet Ministers, stu- 
 dents, tradesmen, and artisans conducted to his 
 last resting-place the former Siberian convict, 
 the bankrupt journalist, the idol of the Russian 
 people.
 
 122 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 III 
 
 It is under such circumstances that Dostoev- 
 sky's novels were composed. An existence such 
 as his would have broken the spirit of a Ber- 
 serker, but Dostoevsky (to use his own expres- 
 sion) had the "vitality of a cat." We admire 
 Charles Lamb, Robert Louis Stevenson, and 
 Sir Walter Scott for their gallant struggle with 
 destiny ; but what are the tragic episodes in their 
 life's drama as compared with the lifelong trag- 
 edy of the Russian writer? 
 
 Yet, through twenty-five years of distress 
 and disease, his literary activity continued unre- 
 laxed. One novel succeeded another, all of 
 them overloaded with human documents, some 
 of them a thousand pages long, a thousand 
 pages to be slowly pondered over during the 
 interminable Russian winter evenings. And 
 all those novels strike the same keynote of hu- 
 man misery. A martyr himself, he is the voice 
 of Russian martyrs. s The mere titles of his 
 books "Poor Folk," "The Insulted and In- 
 jured," "The Idiot," "The Possessed" reveal 
 the dreary monotony of the subject matter! 
 
 Yet Dostoevsky had not abandoned hope, 
 for the depths of misery and degradation are
 
 DOSTOEVSKY AND SUFFERING 123 
 
 illumined by faith in Christ and faith in hu- 
 manity. 
 
 Even as his physical vitality resisted the on- 
 slaught of poverty and imprisonment, so did 
 his moral vitality resist the onslaught of scep- 
 ticism and rebellion. Again and again he re- 
 peated that his death sentence was the greatest 
 blessing of his life; that it made him what he 
 was, both as a man and as a writer. Dostoev- 
 sky, in the book in which he records his 
 prison experiences, "The House of the Dead," 
 has no word of bitterness against those who 
 condemned him. It is difficult for an Anglo- 
 Saxon to understand such meekness in the 
 face of such oppression; but Dostoevsky was 
 not an Anglo-Saxon he was a Russian of the 
 Russians. He did not believe in the West. 
 Whereas Turgenev and the Liberals held that 
 the only salvation for Russia was by imitation 
 of European ideas, Dostoevsky believed that 
 Russia had a future of her own, and that this 
 future could only be reached by following her 
 own traditions. He was convinced that it was 
 the shipwrecked and the oppressed, it was the 
 convict and the tramp, who alone possessed the 
 secret of Divine wisdom. It was the meek and 
 the humble who were to inherit the earth.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THOUGHTS ON THE RUSSIAN 
 LANGUAGE 
 
 IT is difficult to interest the educated Eng- 
 lishman in a subject so widely remote from 
 his intellectual horizon as the study of the 
 Russian language ; and even the Oxford classical 
 scholar, who, it is true, is prodigiously igno- 
 rant outside the narrow range of his professional 
 studies, knows nearly as much about the dia- 
 lects of the Bantu tribes of Central Africa, as 
 about the language of Tolstoy. This dense ig- 
 norance and stupid insularity cannot continue 
 for ever. Already the University of Liverpool, 
 under the able leadership of Professor Pares, 
 has done splendid work in promoting intellec- 
 tual intercourse between Great Britain and 
 Russia. Under the stimulus of the modern 
 universities more progressive than the older 
 seats of learning the coming generation will, 
 sooner or later, awaken to the existence of a lan- 
 guage which provides as valuable a mental dis- 
 cipline and gymnastic as any classical language, 
 
 124
 
 THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 125 
 
 which possesses almost as creative and as orig- 
 inal a literature as the Greek, and a much richer 
 one than the Latin, and which has this further 
 claim on our attention that it is the language 
 of an imperial people which will sooner or later 
 dominate the political world. Already Russian 
 is the dominant language of 175,000,000 peo- 
 ple. In ten years it will be spoken by 200,- 
 000,000 people. In 1950 it will be spoken by 
 300,000,000. Nor must we forget the impor- 
 tant fact that Russian is the key to a dozen 
 other Slavonic languages, and especially that it 
 is closely allied to the Bulgarian language, and 
 to the Serbian language, which itself is destined 
 to become one day the language of an imperial 
 federation, extending from Dalmatia and Croa- 
 tia in the West to the Iron Gates in the North 
 and Salonica in the South. 
 
 Finally, it has to be kept in mind that 
 Slavonic or ecclesiastical Russian is the common 
 sacred language of all the Greek Orthodox Slav 
 nations. 
 
 II 
 
 The Russian language is one of the most an- 
 cient of European languages. The structure 
 and morphology of its grammar, as well as its
 
 126 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 vocabulary, bring us nearer than any other liv- 
 ing tongue to the older Indo-European tongues, 
 Sanscrit and Lithuanian. Yet, in another 
 sense, Russian may also be said to be one of the 
 most recent of modern languages. It is true 
 that as a spoken language and as the language 
 of poetry it has produced from the early Mid- 
 dle Ages an inexhaustible literature of epic and 
 song. But as a written and literary language, 
 as a vehicle of prose, the Russian tongue is al- 
 most of yesterday. I have always firmly be- 
 lieved that linguistic development is not an 
 evolutionary, unconscious process, but a con- 
 scious activity, that it is not natural but arti- 
 ficial because artistic. The history of Russian 
 as a literary language fully confirms my theory. 
 It might almost be contended that as a literary 
 medium it has not grown, but has been made, 
 and that even as the Russian State itself, the 
 Russian language has been built up deliberately 
 by philologists and academicians, and that its 
 grammatical laws have been codified almost as 
 autocratically as its political laws, although less 
 arbitrarily. It is strange that reforming Rus- 
 sian despots like Peter, and Catherine the Great, 
 although German princes by origin, should have 
 realized the importance of the Russian Ian-
 
 THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 127 
 
 guage as a great moral and political force, and 
 that they should have encouraged its study at 
 a time when even German rulers, like Freder- 
 ick the Great, professed nothing but contempt 
 for their national German tongue. In one sense 
 it may be said that some of those foreign rulers 
 had a clearer consciousness of the magnificent 
 future which lay before the Russian language 
 than even the Russian aristocracy. For the 
 Russian aristocracy continued to sacrifice native 
 culture to French culture. While they them- 
 selves spoke the language of Voltaire, they left 
 the native tongue to the Muzhik. Readers of 
 Tolstoy's "War and Peace" will remember 
 how, in the salons of Moscow, the Muscovite 
 magnates would use the French language even 
 when cursing their French invaders, and how 
 they would submit to the manners of Na- 
 poleonic France in the very act of repelling her 
 political influence. 
 
 Keeping these historical facts in mind, it 
 may, therefore, be asserted that Russian as a 
 modern vehicle of national culture is barely 
 one century old. The publication of the great 
 "History of Karamzin" may be taken as mark- 
 ing the beginning of the linguistic and literary 
 consciousness of the Russian people. It is all
 
 128 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 the more necessary to impress this fact upon 
 our minds, if we want duly to appreciate the 
 marvellous results which the Russian language 
 has achieved in so incredibly short a time. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Having existed for ages mainly as an oral 
 language, as the language of song and romance, 
 and continuing a precarious and humble ex- 
 istence as the voice of the down-trodden and 
 inarticulate serf, the Russian language would 
 probably have been broken up into dialects in- 
 numerable, and the Russian nationality itself 
 would have been submerged in the nationality 
 of its hereditary enemies, the Poles, if the an- 
 cient speech had not been preserved in its essen- 
 tial forms in the language of the Church and the 
 translation of the Bible. Church Slavonic has 
 done for the Russian people what the transla- 
 tion of Ulfilas did for the Goths, what Luther's 
 Bible has done for the Germans, what the Au- 
 thorized Version has done for the English. It 
 has supplied an ideal standard of speech, a testo 
 de lingua, which makes the study of Slavonic 
 indispensable for literary as well as for political 
 purposes. But Slavonic has done a great deal 
 more for the Russian people; it has welded to-
 
 THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 129 
 
 gether not only the Russian nation but the or- 
 thodox Slav peoples. It is, therefore, not too 
 much to say that the translation of St. Cyril 
 and St. Methodius and the apostolate of the 
 two Slav brothers, has been one of the half- 
 dozen decisive events of the history of the mod- 
 ern world, as decisive as the conquest of Gaul 
 by Julius Csesar or as the Empire of Charle- 
 magne. For it is mainly through the creation 
 of ecclesiastical Slavonic that the southern 
 Slavs have been drawn into and maintained in 
 the orbit of Great Russia, and it is as the result 
 of the achievement of St. Cyril and St. Me- 
 thodius that the Mosque of St. Sophia will be 
 in future ages the metropolitan cathedral of all 
 the orthodox Slavs of Eastern Christendom. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is deeply to be regretted that the academi- 
 cians and philologists who, at the beginning of 
 the eighteenth century, had to fix the standard 
 of the Russian language, and who had to per- 
 form the difficult task of cutting straight roads 
 through the dense forest of the old Russian lan- 
 guage, should not have cut down some of the 
 rank undergrowth of the Russian grammar, 
 and that they should not have taken their cue
 
 130 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 from their French teachers, those great masters 
 of logic and simplicity. Unfortunately, even 
 after the reforming labours of eighteenth-cen- 
 tury grammarians, like Lomonosov, that giant 
 among Russian pioneers, the Russian language 
 remains the most complex of European lan- 
 guages, and the accentuation of its nouns and 
 the flexions and aspects of its verbs are the 
 despair of the bewildered student. It is also 
 unfortunate that, largely under the influence of 
 bad German novels, the Russian writers should 
 favour the ponderous periodical style, and that 
 they too frequently express in an involved 
 participial clause what a French writer would 
 express in a noun clause. I firmly believe that 
 Russian writers would enormously improve if 
 in ninety cases out of a hundred they followed 
 the French analytical way rather than the syn- 
 thetical German way. At the same time it 
 must be admitted that even though many of the 
 grammatical forms are an emb arras de riches ses 
 and might be sacrificed to advantage, the major- 
 ity contribute to the substantial wealth of the 
 Russian speech, and enable it to express the 
 subtlest shades of meaning, and to range over 
 the whole gamut of human emotion. One 
 preposition or prefix like po or za will enable
 
 THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 131 
 
 the Russian to express the beginning or the con- 
 tinuation or the repetition of action. A few 
 suffixes will enable the Russian to give free 
 expression to every contradictory feeling. 
 Whereas the English language probably alone 
 among European tongues has sacrificed such 
 means of expression as diminutives and aug- 
 mentatives, the Russian language has treasured 
 and multiplied this invaluable means of emo- 
 tional expression, and is able to express merely 
 by a slight modification in the ending of a word, 
 every degree of affection and hatred, of famil- 
 iarity or contempt. 
 
 To the uneducated there may be little differ- 
 ence between "ancient mariner" and "old 
 sailor" ; but for literary purposes there is a gulf 
 between the Anglo-Saxon and the French-Nor- 
 man words. Even so, to the uninitiated, the 
 niceties of Russian grammar may be only a 
 game of pedants, but to the artist that game of 
 pedants gives full scope to all the resources of 
 the literary craft; and, therefore, only the lit- 
 erary craftsman can appreciate all the possibili- 
 ties of that wonderful instrument, the Russian 
 language, and only he can realize its tremendous 
 difficulty. I remember Maxim Gorky telling 
 me once that, in his opinion, there were only
 
 132 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 three men in the whole history of Russian lit- 
 erature who had perfect control of their instru- 
 ment, namely, Pushkin, Turgenev, and Chek- 
 hov. Of Turgenev it is certainly true to say 
 that he is the one supreme master of prose 
 whom Russian literature has produced. His 
 intense appreciation of and his intimate famil- 
 iarity with the French language only made him 
 more keenly conscious of the superior beauty 
 and of the wider possibilities of his native 
 tongue. He admired it and loved it, as only a 
 great artist could love the vehicle of his art. 
 During the reign of Nicholas I, in the darkest 
 hour of Russian reaction, when bureaucratic 
 corruption, military despotism, and ecclesiastic 
 obscurantism were supreme, one thought alone 
 kept awake the faith of Turgenev in the future 
 of the race. He only retained his belief for the 
 apparently irrelevant reason that a race which 
 had proved capable of creating such a wonder- 
 ful language as Russian must indeed be called 
 to a glorious destiny. 
 
 V 
 
 Still with all our admiration for the Russian 
 tongue, the question forces itself upon us: Is 
 not the very existence of this wonderful Ian-
 
 THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 133 
 
 guage an obstacle in the path of civilization"? 
 Will it not for ever prevent Western culture 
 from gaining access to the Empire of the Tsars'? 
 Will it not for ever keep Russia isolated from 
 Europe*? It is strange that while Nature has 
 established no physical barrier between Eastern 
 and Western Europe, and has made one un- 
 broken plain extending for thousands of miles, 
 men should have erected this for midable intel- 
 lec tual barrier of lan guage betw een the L atin, * 
 t he Teuton, and^ the Slav. 
 
 But whether the existence of this formidable 
 linguistic barrier is a blessing or a curse, whether 
 we have cause to regret that, merely through the 
 existence of the Russian language Russia can 
 never be assimilated to Europe, or whether we 
 have cause to rejoice that the existence of so 
 difficult a language should maintain inviolate 
 the originality and independence of the Rus- 
 sian people, one fact is certain, that the lin- 
 guistic obstacle will be greater in the future 
 than in the past. And the sooner we realize 
 this and the consequences which it entails, the 
 better it will be for the mutual relationship of 
 European powers. 
 
 If the Latin, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Teu- 
 ton are to be brought into close communion
 
 134 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 with the Slav, they will have to make this ef- 
 fort to meet him on his own linguistic ground. 
 Hitherto, the educated Russian has taken the 
 trouble to learn the European languages, but the 
 time is coming when the European will be ex- 
 pected by the Russian to learn the Russian 
 tongue. As Russian patriotism becomes more 
 self-conscious and, therefore, more sensitive, as 
 Russian culture becomes more self-supporting, 
 there will be a complete change in the relative 
 position of the languages of the world. For 
 instance, the Russian, who neither loves nor ad- 
 mires the Teuton, must necessarily ask himself 
 why he, possessing a more original and a more 
 humane culture than that of the Teuton, should 
 go out of his way to learn German and why he 
 should not expect and compel the German to 
 learn Russian ! 
 
 And from his own point of view the Russian 
 is quite right. There is no answer to his ob- 
 jections, and there is only one way out of the 
 difficulty. If the coming generation wants to 
 derive the fullest advantage of intellectual and 
 moral intercourse with what promises to be the 
 most original culture which the world has seen 
 since the Renaissance, Europe will have to make 
 the study of Russian a compulsory branch of the
 
 THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 135 
 
 humanities. Pedants continue to wrangle 
 whether they should preserve Latin or Greek 
 or both in the education of the young. I am 
 convinced that the near future will force upon 
 us an unexpected solution of the "Battle of 
 Tongues." Although to the pedagogue of to- 
 day it may appear as the wildest of visions, I 
 confidently prophesy that before the schoolboy 
 of to-day will have attained to mature age, the 
 study of Russian will take the place of Greek 
 in the schools of Europe ; the study of Vladimir 
 Soloviov * will take the place of his master 
 Plato; Karamzin and Pushkin will replace 
 Livy and Virgil. Before the first half of the 
 century has run its course, Slav culture will at 
 last come into its inheritance, and will take its 
 revenge for the unjust neglect of the West. 
 
 * A complete English version of "War, Progress and the 
 End of History," Soloviov's best known work, has just been 
 published by Alfred A. Knopf.
 
 PART IV 
 Russian Problems
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE RESURRECTION OF 
 POLAND 
 
 I 
 
 THE English traveller on his way from 
 London to Odessa, after crossing the 
 dreary march of Brandenburg, reaches 
 a vast and monotonous plain where three Em- 
 pires meet, where Prussia ends, where Russia 
 and Austria begin, a region inhabited by one of 
 the most gifted races of Europe, whose suffer- 
 ings are one of the tragedies of history, and 
 whose future is one of the perplexing enigmas 
 of international politics. That vast plain, of 
 which no hill relieves the melancholy uniform- 
 ity, is the once mighty Kingdom of Poland. 
 It is true that neither the name of the country 
 nor that of the people appears on any map of 
 Europe, but then it is often the most important 
 maps that are ignored by the cartographer. In 
 this case it must be confessed in extenuation of 
 the cartographer's omission that the boundaries 
 of that Kingdom of Poland are arbitrary and 
 indefinite. Few geographers will agree as to 
 139
 
 140 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 the exact area occupied by the Polish race. 
 But we shall not be far wrong if we estimate 
 the total number of Polish-speaking people at 
 twenty millions, of whom four millions belong 
 to Austria, and four millions and twelve mil- 
 lions respectively are unwilling subjects of the 
 Kaiser and of the Tsar. And that number is 
 increasing, for amongst many uncertainties one 
 fact is certain, that in the wide expanse where 
 the Pole and the Teuton are confronted, it is 
 the Teuton who is losing ground, and it is the 
 Pole who is gaining. 
 
 II 
 
 Perhaps the simplest way to explain the 
 unique position of Poland to a British reader is 
 to describe her as the Ireland of Central Eu- 
 rope, with this difference, that whereas Ireland 
 has long ago been delivered from the despotism 
 of the Conqueror, Poland is still in the grip of 
 her oppressors. Otherwise the annals of Po- 
 land are very much a repetition of the tragic 
 annals of Ireland, and both countries make a 
 similar appeal to the student of history, of eth- 
 ics, and of politics. 
 
 In the first place, we ought to be interested 
 in Poland on historical grounds. Poland can
 
 RESURRECTION OF POLAND 141 
 
 boast of a heroic past. On more than one oc- 
 casion Poland saved Europe from the invasion 
 of Turk and Tartar, and although the Poles are 
 branded to-day by the Prussians as an inferior 
 race, predestined to slavery, the truth is that 
 Poland was a highly civilized country when the 
 Prussians and the Russians were only hordes of 
 barbarians. 
 
 In the second place, we ought to be interested 
 in Poland on moral grounds, for the Poles have 
 been, and still are, the victims of an odious 
 persecution, which must rouse the indignation 
 of all those who believe in justice, and who be- 
 lieve in freedom. 
 
 In the third place, we ought to be interested 
 in Poland on practical grounds, because the 
 question of Poland remains a burning question. 
 Poland remains an open sore. The map of 
 Europe will be recast by the future Congress, 
 on the principle that each nation has the right 
 to decide its own destinies. It is quite safe to 
 prophesy on the basis of that principle of 
 nationalities, that a not distant future will see 
 the resurrection of the ancient Kingdom of Po- 
 land.* 
 
 This was written in the Spring of 1913. In the Sum- 
 mer of the succeeding year the Grand Duke Nicholas an- 
 nounced the fulfilment of my prophecy in the following
 
 
 
 V 
 
 142 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 III 
 
 The "partition" of Poland, the murder of a 
 great civilized people, is one of the most revolt- 
 ing political crimes of modern times. Of this 
 crime, Frederic, called "the Great," was the in- 
 
 proclamation. The proclamation is a striking and illumina- 
 tive commentary on some of the opinions expressed in this 
 chapter. 
 
 PROCLAMATION 
 - "Poles! 
 
 "The hour has struck in which the sacred dream of your 
 fathers and forefathers may find fulfilment. 
 
 "A century and a half ago, the living flesh of Poland was 
 torn asunder, but her soul did not die. She lived in hope 
 that there would come an hour for the resurrection of the 
 Polish nation and for sisterly reconciliation with Russia. 
 
 "The Russian Army now brings you the joyful tidings of 
 this reconciliation. May the boundaries be annulled which 
 cut the Polish nation to pieces! May that nation re-unite 
 unto one body under the sceptre of the Russian Emperor. 
 Under this sceptre Poland shall be re-born, free in faith, in 
 language, in self-government. 
 
 "One thing only Russia expects of you: equal considera- 
 tion for the rights of those nationalities to which history 
 has linked you. 
 
 "With open heart, with hand fraternally outstretched, 
 Russia steps forward to meet you. She believes that the 
 sword has not rusted which, at Griinwald, struck down the 
 enemy. From the shores of the Pacific to the North Seas, 
 the Russian armies are on the march. The dawn of a new 
 life is breaking for you. 
 
 "May there shine, resplendent above that dawn, the sign 
 of the Cross, symbol of the Passion and Resurrection of 
 Nation ! 
 
 (Signed.) "Commander-in-Chief General Adjutant. 
 
 "NICHOLAS." 
 
 i (14) August, 1914
 
 RESURRECTION OF POLAND 143 
 
 stigator, and he secured impunity for his crime 
 by obtaining the complicity of Russia and Aus- 
 tria, of Maria Theresa and Catherine "the 
 Great." To use the cynical phrase of Frederic, 
 "the three Sovereigns partook of the Eucharistic 
 body of Poland." The three murderers of the 
 Polish nation have tried to justify themselves, 
 and they have justified themselves by slander- 
 ing the Poles. Even thus, in Imperial Rome, 
 the public executioner dishonoured his victim 
 before execution. We are told that the Poles 
 fully deserved their fate. We are told that 
 they were a prey to the Jesuits, or that they 
 were a prey to anarchy, or that they were a 
 prey to an unruly aristocracy. We have been 
 long familiar in the past with similar arguments 
 on the Irish Question, and in both controversies 
 the arguments have about equal value. It is 
 quite true that Poland was a prey to anarchy, 
 but that anarchy was largely caused by the in- 
 trigues of her mighty neighbours. It is quite 
 true that after playing an important part in 
 European culture, after resisting the Tartar and 
 the Turk, the Polish aristocracy oppressed the 
 people whom they had originally saved. But, 
 alas! the oppression of the people by a tyran- 
 nical aristocracy is not a phenomenon peculiar
 
 144 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 to Poland, and it was more apparent in Poland 
 simply because of the total absence of any Mid- 
 dle Class, owing to the poverty of the country, 
 and owing to the insecurity of war. It is only 
 in our own generation that we have witnessed 
 in Poland the gradual emergence of a Middle 
 Class. Even to-day trade and industry are 
 largely in the hands of the Jews, to whom, for 
 historical reasons, Poland has become a country 
 of refuge, and a second Palestine. About five 
 million Jews are living within the limits of the 
 old Kingdom. 
 
 In any case, those accusations against Polish 
 anarchy, against the unruly Polish aristocracy, 
 were only a thinly veiled pretence on the part 
 of the conquerors to excuse their crime. Those 
 excuses were merely used to deceive public opin- 
 ion. In his moments of cynical outspokenness, 
 Frederic, yclept "the Great," never concealed 
 his real motive for the annexation of Poland, 
 which was the same as his motive for the annex- 
 ation of Silesia, namely, self-aggrandisement 
 and the lust of territory. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is, then, under such flimsy pretences, which 
 added insult to violence, that Poland was di-
 
 RESURRECTION OF POLAND 145 
 
 vided amongst the three Empires of Central 
 Europe, and that Poland was deleted from the 
 map of Europe. This is not the place to recall 
 the tragic history of the nation since the Parti- 
 tion. In Austria the Poles rose and failed, they 
 rose again and succeeded, and were granted 
 autonomy. In Prussia the Poles were too weak, 
 and the army of the Hohenzollern too strong to 
 give any chance to the rebels; they had, there- 
 fore, to be content with opposing a passive and 
 sullen resistance to unjust laws. But most 
 poignant of all was the national tragedy in 
 Russia. The Poles rose in 1830, they rose 
 again in 1863, and once more they rose in 1905. 
 Each time they were unsuccessful. After each 
 revolution, they have been governed with more 
 ruthless severity. Oppression, rebellion, and 
 repression have been the three recurrent phases 
 in the monotonous drama of Russian Poland. 
 
 To a superficial observer, the story of the 
 Polish nation may appear to be, on the whole, 
 a history of national failure, but as in Ireland, 
 so in Poland, the people have really triumphed. 
 For their spirit has never been broken. The 
 strength of the three great military powers has 
 not been equal to the indomitable resistance of 
 a poverty-stricken, disarmed, dismembered race.
 
 146 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 The Polish people were determined to live, and 
 as a result they are stronger to-day than they 
 were a hundred years ago. Poland is to-day 
 more than a dream, more than a pious aspira- 
 tion. Unless patriotism is only an illusion, 
 unless nationality is only based on political 
 force, and is to be measured only by commercial 
 success, the Polish nationality is an accom- 
 plished fact, for the Polish people are united 
 by the strongest bonds which can unite any peo- 
 ple: a common language, a common religion, 
 common traditions, the memory of common suf- 
 ferings, and an unshakable faith in a common 
 Destiny 
 
 Of the three component parts of Poland, the 
 Austrian part, Galicia need not detain us, al- 
 though to the ordinary traveller it is far more 
 interesting that the two other parts. Its capi- 
 tal, Cracow, the Polish Rome, is one of the his- 
 torical cities of the world. Austrian Poland 
 possesses in the Carpathian Mountains some of 
 the finest scenery in Central Europe. Its Al- 
 pine resorts attract an ever-increasing number 
 of tourists, and Zakopane is, in summer, a bril- 
 liant and fascinating Kurort, and the gathering
 
 RESURRECTION OF POLAND 147 
 
 place of Polish patriots from the three Empires. 
 But to the student of politics, Austrian Poland 
 appeals much less than Prussian or Russian Po- 
 land, except in so far as it shows the political 
 capacity of the people. After being the most 
 disloyal, Galicia has become one of the most 
 loyal provinces of the Austrian Empire. The 
 influence of the Austrian Poles in politics is 
 shown not on the side of anarchy, but on the side 
 of conciliation and moderation. The result of 
 such Polish autonomy as has been granted to 
 Galicia is the best answer to those that main- 
 tain that the Poles are incapable of self-gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 VI 
 
 If Austrian Poland is the least important, Rus- 
 sian Poland is the most important of the three 
 branches of the Polish family. It is also the 
 most homogeneous. There are some two hun- 
 dred thousand Germans, three hundred and 
 fifty thousand Russian soldiers and officials, 
 and three million Jews, who are the proletariate 
 of Israel. But the bulk of a population of over 
 twelve millions are Poles, and their numbers 
 are rapidly increasing with the industrial ex- 
 pansion and the prosperity of the country, for,
 
 148 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 as Prince von Biilow, the German Chancellor, 
 graciously put it, the Poles breed like rabbits. 
 He might, perhaps, have added that they have 
 often been shot like rabbits. Russian Poland, 
 with the ancient capital of the Kingdom, War- 
 saw (population, 850,000), is one of the busiest 
 centres of the Russian Empire. But this ex- 
 traordinary industrial and commercial expan- 
 sion has brought neither contentment nor real 
 prosperity to the people. Not only has Rus- 
 sian Poland more than her share of the indus- 
 trial unrest, prevalent all over Europe, but that 
 industrial unrest is complicated by constant po- 
 litical and religious troubles, by the conflict be- 
 tween conquerors and conquered, between Greek 
 Orthodox and Uniats and Roman Catholic. 
 Warsaw, once the gayest of cities, is now one 
 of the saddest. Occupied by a Russian army 
 corps, she gives the impression of a beleaguered 
 city. Any autonomous political life, or even 
 any free expression of political opinion, are 
 paralyzed. The writer of these lines was in- 
 vited not long ago by a group of leading Lib- 
 erals in Warsaw to give a lecture describing 
 his impressions of the country. He accepted 
 the invitation, but was given to understand that 
 it would be safer for him not to deliver his ad-
 
 RESURRECTION OF POLAND 149 
 
 dress, and subsequent events clearly proved that 
 it was better to err on the side of caution. 
 
 As there is little political life, so there is lit- 
 tle intercourse between the different sections of 
 the people. The Jew does not mix with the 
 Christian, nor the Pole with the Russian. So- 
 cial life is at its lowest ebb. The police is 
 everywhere visible, and the Polish population 
 lives in an atmosphere of suspicion and sup- 
 pression. 
 
 VII 
 
 It seems inconceivable that national antipathy 
 could go any further than the antipathy which 
 existed between Russian and Pole before the 
 present war of liberation. Yet Prussia has suc- 
 ceeded in inspiring her Polish subjects with a 
 hatred even more deadly. And this is not be- 
 cause Poles and Russians belong to the same 
 Slav race, whilst Poles and Prussians belong to 
 different races. The Pole hates the Prussian, 
 because there is in Prussian despotism some- 
 thing much more odious than in Russian despot- 
 ism. The Russian was content in the past to 
 persecute the Pole. But the Prussian both per- 
 secutes him, despises him, and slanders him. 
 The Russian at least did not use any canting
 
 150 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 phrases. He oppressed the Pole, merely De- 
 cause the Russian was the stronger. The Prus- 
 sian oppresses the Pole, and calls it civilizing 
 him. He brands him as being of an inferior 
 stamp. German Liberals for two generations 
 have denounced the imperial policy of expro- 
 priation and Germanization. But it is getting 
 worse. The Pole is not allowed to hold pub- 
 lic meetings, or to wear his national colours. 
 The Polish child is not allowed to pray in its 
 mother-tongue, because German culture, for- 
 sooth, in virtue of its superiority must stamp 
 out Polish culture. The Polish peasant is not 
 allowed to possess the land of his fathers, and 
 whereas the Russian bureaucracy in the days of 
 Milioutine has distributed millions of acres to 
 Polish peasants, the Prussian bureaucracy have 
 already spent hundreds of millions of marks to 
 expropriate them. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Limitation of space prevents me from dis- 
 cussing the Prussian theory. Nor is it worth 
 discussing. The whole pedantic contention can 
 be disproved by the summary verdict of history, 
 and disposed of in the following single state- 
 ment of fact: Surely a race which in modern
 
 RESURRECTION OF POLAND 151 
 
 times has produced a thinker like Copernic, a 
 hero like Sobieski, a musician like Chopin, a 
 poet like Mickiewicz, a physicist like Madame 
 Curie, a race which still can boast of the most 
 beautiful, the most witty women of Central 
 Europe, cannot be said to be so incurably in- 
 ferior to the heavy-booted, sword-rattling Prus- 
 sian, nor will such a race be subjected much 
 longer to brutal persecution.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF THE 
 RUSSIAN JEW 
 
 I 
 
 EVEN more important, even more urgent 
 than the problem of Poland is the 
 problem of Israel. And, unfortu- 
 nately, the two problems cannot be solved sep- 
 arately. The Kingdom of Poland and the 
 Kingdom of Israel are one for political pur- 
 poses as well as for economic purposes. Not 
 only do Poland and Lithuania, which once 
 formed part of Greater Poland, include within 
 their boundaries the great majority of the Rus- 
 sian Jews nearly five millions -but the fu- 
 ture of the Pole is indissolubly bound up with 
 the future of the Jew. They must prosper or 
 decline together. It is impossible to liberate 
 the one without also liberating the other. It 
 is idle to speak of the resurrection of Poland 
 and at the same time to maintain the Hebrew 
 population in perpetual bondage. You cannot 
 erect in Poland a free self-governing State, and 
 at the same time exclude from that State the 
 
 153
 
 154 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 most enterprising, the most intelligent, the 
 wealthiest section of the community. 
 
 Not only is the Jewish problem the most im- 
 portant and the most urgent of all Russian po- 
 litical problems, it is also the most difficult. 
 Russian reactionaries invariably assume that it 
 concerns Russia alone. Unfortunately it con- 
 cerns the whole wide world. It is impossible 
 to discuss the position of the Jew in the Em- 
 pire of the Tsar apart from his position in 
 Europe and America. Nor is it possible to un- 
 derstand the present legal status of the Jew 
 without recalling the outstanding facts of Jew- 
 ish history. The following brief analysis is, 
 therefore, indispensable to a clear intelligence 
 of the question. 
 
 II 
 
 The Kingdom of Israel is the most ancient 
 kingdom in the world, and withal the most 
 universal and the most exclusive, the most 
 powerful and the most perplexing. The annals 
 of the Jews go back to the dawn of human 
 history, and their records constitute the sacred 
 literature of all Christian nations. They are 
 dispersed over the habitable globe. They were 
 dispersed before the birth of Christ. The
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 155 
 
 Greek geographer, Strabo, for instance, men- 
 tions that there was not a city in the world of 
 Greece and Rome in which there was not to be 
 found a Jewish colony. 
 
 No other people surpass them in versatility 
 and vitality. They adapt themselves to every 
 form of civilization, but they refuse them- 
 selves to be assimilated. They preserve their 
 rites and customs, and retain their pride of 
 birth as the chosen people. For over two thou- 
 sand years they have been persecuted, but they 
 emerge from every persecution more powerful 
 than ever, and their power is everywhere re- 
 sented and everywhere resisted. They are a 
 distracting problem to the philosopher, and 
 their contradictions are bewildering. They are 
 intensely tribal, yet they are cosmopolitan and 
 ubiquitous. They are worshippers of Mam- 
 mon, yet no people has such a passion for ideals. 
 They are in turn extravagantly rich and mis- 
 erably poor, insolently proud and abjectly 
 cringing. They are now on the side of the op- 
 pressor, now heralds of revolt. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Most misstatements and prejudices about the 
 Jew arise from the fundamental misstate-
 
 156 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 ment and assumption that the Jews are a dis- 
 tinct race, one of the few pure races in his- 
 tory. To the Philosemite, they are a superior 
 race. Beaconsfield, in a famous chapter of his 
 "Life of Lord George Bentinck," extols the 
 Jews as the aristocracy of mankind. On the 
 other hand, by the Antisemite, the Jew is 
 branded with irredeemable inferiority. Ac- 
 cording to Houston Stewart Chamberlain the 
 Jews must ever be an inferior type, and espe- 
 cially are they morally inferior to the Aryan. 
 They can never be assimilated. This idea, sys- 
 tematized in the famous thesis of Gobineau on 
 the "Equality of the Races," has been reduced 
 to absurdity in Chamberlain's striking work 
 "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century." 
 The distinguished German Imperialist informs 
 us that the Jews are pre-eminently a servile 
 people, and he draws, amongst many other con- 
 clusions, the startling inference that Christ was 
 not a Jew, but an Aryan. 
 
 I confess that I have little sympathy with 
 this new fetish of race. It is true that, both 
 through intermarriage and social segregation, 
 the Jews retain certain physical Jewish charac- 
 teristics, such as the aquiline nose. But mixed 
 marriages with Christians have for generations
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 157 
 
 blended the type. Mixed marriages in the 
 capital of the German Empire, where anti-Jew- 
 ish sentiment still prevails, have increased to 
 25 per cent. And even if we admit that there 
 still exists a definite Jewish type, that does 
 not prove the unity and fixity of the Jewish 
 race. Even as there exists a Jewish type, 
 so there exists a British type, a French type, 
 and a Russian type. Yet it would be ab- 
 surd to say that there exists one British race, 
 one French race, one Russian race, and it is 
 equally absurd to say that there exists one pure 
 Jewish race. The Jews have themselves rec- 
 ognized two main racial types the aristocratic 
 dolichocephalic type of the Sephardim of Spain 
 and Portugal, and the democratic brachyce- 
 phalic type of the Aohkenarim of Poland and 
 Russia. But, as a matter of fact, there are 
 not two Jewish types, there are fifty. Any- 
 one who has travelled amongst the Jewries of 
 the world (and I have visited every important 
 ghetto in Africa and Asia, in America and Eu- 
 rope) must have been bewildered by the va- 
 riety of physical types. And without visiting 
 the ghettos of the world, anyone who will take 
 the trouble to look at the two hundred strik- 
 ing photographs in Dr. Fischberg's fascinating
 
 158 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 volume will be equally convinced of the fact. 
 In the opinion of an eminent Jewish thinker, 
 Bernard Lazare, the Jewish type has not 
 varied less, but has varied more, than any 
 other racial type. And the reason is obvious: 
 as the result of the diaspora, or dispersion, 
 the Jews have been subjected more continu- 
 ously and more widely than any other nation 
 to different surroundings, and the life of 
 the Jews in such entirely different surround- 
 ings as Morocco and the Caucasus, Salonica 
 and London, Jerusalem and New York, must 
 of necessity have resulted, in the course 
 of centuries, in the most divergent racial 
 types. 
 
 IV 
 
 The truth is that the unity and continuity of 
 the Jew is not physical, it is moral. The 
 Jews are not a race, they are a nation. Wher- 
 ever they have gone, they have remained a na- 
 tion. We are too apt to forget that a nation 
 is not a geographical expression. The Poles 
 are a nation, and are not contained within geo- 
 graphical limits. Nor does a nation imply a 
 common origin or blood relationship. The 
 United States and the Russian Empire are made
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 159 
 
 up of a score of different races. Nor does a 
 nation even imply community of language, for 
 the German-speaking Alsatians were, and still 
 are, passionately French in sentiment, even as 
 the French-Canadians have become loyal Brit- 
 ish citizens. No; a nation is a collective po- 
 litical aggregate, it is a moral personality. It 
 is bound together by common religious ideals, 
 by common institutions, by common traditions, 
 by common loves and hatreds, and, most of all 
 perhaps, by the memories of common glories 
 and common sufferings. The bonds which hold 
 a nation together are sentimental and spiritual, 
 and no nation has ever been welded together 
 by stronger moral and spiritual bonds than the 
 Jewish nation bonds so strong, indeed, that 
 the Jews have remained a State within a State, 
 and that the members of the ghettos all over 
 the world have remained denizens of the same 
 ideal commonwealth. 
 
 The Jews are a prolific race, and they have 
 always obeyed the Biblical command, "increase 
 and multiply." Of late years the Jewish birth- 
 rate has fallen considerably, but that decrease 
 is more than compensated by the decrease in
 
 160 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 infant mortality. It is difficult to get reliaoie 
 statistics, but there are probably more than 
 twelve millions of Jews in both hemispheres. 
 
 Their geographical distribution brings out 
 some striking facts. In the first place, the ma- 
 jority of Jews are congregated in large towns. 
 Of the two million American Jews, nearly one 
 million are settled in New York City. This 
 is, of course, partly due to the fact that the 
 Jews have generally been divorced from agri- 
 cultural pursuits. It is also due to the gre- 
 garious instinct of a weak and persecuted 
 people. 
 
 In the second place, the bulk of the Jews 
 still live within the limits of the ancient king- 
 dom of Poland (see map facing page 153). 
 Whereas the Jewish population of Palestine is 
 only sixty thousand, the Jewish population in 
 Greater Poland is over five millions; that is to 
 say, for every Jew living in Palestine there are 
 .nearly a hundred Jews living in Poland. Po- 
 land, therefore, must be considered as the geo- 
 graphical centre of Israel. In Poland they are 
 still living under the old conditions. They 
 still retain their picturesque costumes, and still 
 keep their old customs. They still live shut up 
 in their ghettos, they still speak their Yiddish
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 161 
 
 language, a savoury mixture of German and 
 Hebrew. Of the many strange paradoxes in 
 the romantic history of Israel not the least 
 strange is this, that the Jewish nation should 
 have found a home and refuge in that desolate 
 and remote corner of Eastern Europe once ruled 
 by the Jesuits, and that the destiny of the Jews 
 should have become so closely associated with 
 the fate of a Catholic people, which, like the 
 Jews, has only an ideal existence; which, like 
 the Jews, has been oppressed and suppressed, 
 and which, like the Jews, has asserted its vital- 
 ity in the face of economic degradation and po- 
 litical martyrdom. 
 
 VI 
 
 A few essential facts emerge from the most 
 cursory analysis of statistical data, and from 
 the most superficial observation of present-day 
 social and political conditions, and those facts 
 emphatically contradict some widespread as- 
 sumptions about the Jews. 
 
 The first current assumption is that the Jews 
 as a nation are rich. As a matter of fact, the 
 enormous majority of the Jews are wretchedly 
 poor, the enormous majority are a proletariate 
 exploited and sweated by ruthless capitalists.
 
 162 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 Nothing could exceed the misery and squalor 
 of the ghetto of Old Warsaw, unless it be the 
 ghetto of New York. 
 
 The second assumption is that the bulk of 
 the Jews have now received equal political 
 rights, and that the persecution of ages has at 
 last come to a close. As a matter of fact, the 
 enormous majority of Jews still suffer from 
 civil and political disabilities. ' It is only in 
 Anglo-Saxon communities that they have at- 
 tained to political equality. But even there 
 their position is uncertain, and in the United 
 States there are already clear indications of a 
 rise of anti-Semitism. As for France, the re- 
 cent formidable epidemic of anti-Semitism and 
 the terrible crisis of the Dreyfus affair clearly 
 show how precarious the condition of the Jews 
 still remains, even under the most favourable 
 conditions. In Germany no Jew before this 
 war could hold a commission in the army or 
 hold a post in the diplomatic service, and they 
 are shut out from the higher ranks of the Civil 
 Service. 
 
 But it is especially to the north-east of Eu- 
 rope, inhabited by two-thirds of the Jewish 
 population of the world, that we must look to 
 form a true idea of the present position of the
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 163 
 
 Jews. In Roumania they are denied the right 
 of citizenship, notwithstanding the solemn 
 pledges of the Treaty of Berlin inserted by 
 Lord Beaconsfield. In Russia they are still 
 subjected to mediaeval oppression. They are 
 periodically expelled and systematically massa- 
 cred. Jew "baiting" is a political Russian 
 sport, and "pogroms," or organized massacres, 
 are resorted to by the black hundreds with the 
 complicity of the Russian Government when- 
 ever the reactionary parties find themselves in 
 a difficulty. 
 
 VII 
 
 In the course of their tragic history the Jew- 
 ish nation have revealed certain striking pecul- 
 iarities which distinguish them from all others. 
 Morally, they are presumably neither better 
 nor worse than other communities. If their 
 morality is inferior in their relations to alien 
 nations, on the other hand their tribal and do- 
 mestic morality is probably higher. They are 
 sober and thrifty, industrious and charitable. 
 Intellectually, they are one of the most gifted 
 peoples of the world. The Jewish mind has 
 been developed in the hard school of persecu- 
 tion. All through the severe struggle for life
 
 164 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 to whicn tney have been subjected intellect, 
 cunning, shrewdness, were the only weapons 
 that could be opposed to the brutal force of 
 their Christian enemies. Nor ought we to for- 
 get that their wandering habits, their linguistic 
 attainments, their world-wide experience, must 
 needs have broadened their outlook, and must 
 have predestined them for their special func- 
 tion as intellectual middlemen and interpre- 
 ters. Every educated Jew knows half a dozen 
 languages, has travelled in a dozen countries, 
 in each of which he has probably a family con- 
 nexion. The Jews have always respected in- 
 tellect and ability. Like the Christian nations, 
 they have had their conflicts between philosophy 
 and theology, between the letter and the spirit. 
 Readers of Mr. Zangwill's "Children of the 
 Ghetto" and "Dreamers of the Ghetto" know 
 that they have had their Obscurantists in the 
 Talmudists and the Kabbalists. They have 
 persecuted their Spinozas and their Mendels- 
 sohns. But seldom with the Jews have ideas 
 been at a discount. They may worship money 
 greatly, but they worship intellect more, with 
 the result that in the specifically intellectual 
 professions, in medicine, in law, and in science, 
 the proportion of distinguished Jews is much
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 165 
 
 larger than that of Christians. In journalism 
 they have attained a redoubtable position ; they 
 may be said to control the world's Press, and 
 through the Press they control public opinion 
 and public policy. 
 
 Keen and subtle as the Jewish intellect has 
 been, and occasionally powerfully constructive, 
 from the days of Spinoza to the days of Berg- 
 son, it was, perhaps, to be expected that they 
 should be even more successful in destruction 
 than in construction. As has been pointed out 
 by a French critic, Monsieur Muret, the Jews 
 have ever been heralds of revolt. In Slav 
 countries they have played a conspicuous part 
 in the revolutionary movement. Even in Ger- 
 many they have been in the forefront of pro- 
 gressive politics. The German Socialists have 
 produced leading men of action, like Liebknecht 
 and Bebel, but practically all the thinking 
 heads of the social democracy have been Israel- 
 ites Lassalle and Marx, Engels and Singer, 
 Kautsky, and Bernstein. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Of all the peculiar Jewish characteristics, the 
 capacity for finance is the most conspicuous. 
 Almost from the beginning of the diaspora the
 
 166 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 Jews have been the moneylenders and usurers 
 of the world. And it is because of their pro- 
 pensity to usury as much as for their national 
 exclusivism that they have drawn upon them- 
 selves the hatred of the community. 
 
 Of course, the Jews argue, and rightly argue, 
 that they have been compelled to become the 
 cosmopolitan moneylenders, simply because 
 they have been systematically debarred by 
 Christian intolerance from any other profession. 
 They could not be agriculturists, because they 
 were not allowed to own land, because land in 
 the Middle Ages was only held by military ten- 
 ure. They could not be artizans, because they 
 could not be admitted to the semi-religious 
 trade guilds and corporations. They could not 
 be soldiers, because they were not allowed into 
 the army on equal conditions. 
 
 But there is a further plea of justification 
 which may be adduced by the Jews. The ulti- 
 mate reason why the Jew became the inevitable 
 broker was the fact that moneylending was 
 strictly forbidden to Christians, both by the 
 Canon Law and the Civil Law. The Roman 
 Catholic Church, acting on the counsel of per- 
 fection contained in Luke vi, 35, prohibited all 
 lending out of money at any interest whatso-
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 167 
 
 ever. To lend money to the necessitous was a 
 work of piety, hence the origin of the "Mont de 
 Piete," or public gratuitous pawnshop, which 
 even to-day still retains the spirit of the original 
 institution, and which is peculiar to Roman 
 Catholic countries. The Roman Catholic 
 Church took the heroic and quixotic policy of 
 branding all acceptance of interest as usury. It 
 was a suicidal policy, for it paralyzed the trade 
 of the Middle Ages. It proved an impossible 
 policy, because the Catholic precept had to be 
 constantly infringed, and it was violated even 
 by Bishops and Popes. Popes were compelled 
 to appeal to Jewish usurers in their financial 
 need, as they were compelled to appeal to Jew- 
 ish physicians in their physical need. Whole 
 libraries of casuistical treatises were written 
 trying to relax the original Catholic precept, 
 and to reconcile it with the practical require- 
 ments of the day. The final result was that, 
 first, the Jews and, later on, the Lombards and 
 Cahorsins obtained the monopoly of European 
 finance. The Mediaeval Church reasoned with 
 regard to the Jewish moneylender as the mod- 
 ern State reasons with regard to the prostitute. 
 We are told that prostitution is an inevitable 
 evil. Therefore some women must be set
 
 168 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 apart, and their infamous but necessary trade 
 must be regulated. Similarly, moneylending is 
 an inevitable evil; therefore some people 
 the Jews must be allowed to practise it. But 
 their odious business must be strictly controlled, 
 and they must be periodically deprived of part 
 of their spoils. 
 
 IX 
 
 Medieval intolerance has gone. Religious 
 persecution and religious wars have ceased. 
 Yet the Jewish problem remains as acute as 
 ever. Politically, it remains as acute because 
 the national exclusivism of the circumsized 
 people still survives. The Jews still consider 
 themselves as exiles in the land where they 
 choose to settle. Economically, the Jewish 
 problem is even more acute than ever, because 
 the enormous development of national and in- 
 ternational finance has given to the Jewish peo- 
 ple opportunities which they never had before. 
 National exclusivism and international 
 finance, and not religious intolerance, are the 
 root causes of anti-Semitism, and as long as 
 those causes are operative the effect will remain. 
 As long as the Jews constitute distinct colonies
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 169 
 
 within the community, as long as the Jews spe- 
 cialize in the predatory and parasitic activities 
 of finance, so long shall we witness outbursts of 
 anti-Semitic feeling. 
 
 But signs are not wanting that far-reaching 
 changes are taking place. Intermarriages be- 
 tween Jews and Christians have, as we pointed 
 out, enormously developed in recent years; so 
 rapidly, indeed, have they developed that Pro- 
 fessor Ruppin, in his recent striking book, an- 
 nounces the impending absorption of the Jewish 
 people. On the other hand, the exploitation of 
 capitalism is threatened by the universal ad- 
 vance of Socialism and the awakening of the so- 
 cial conscience. With the decrease of the om- 
 nipotence of capitalism the power of the Jews 
 will also decrease. It has been said that the 
 Jew is a microbe which only attacks unsound 
 constitutions, but which is harmless to healthy 
 constitutions. This much is true, that the Jew 
 is not a cause, but a result. It is the bad con- 
 stitution of the body politic which develops the 
 bad qualities of the Jew. The Jews cannot be 
 held responsible for the tyranny of modern capi- 
 talism, even though they have profited by it. 
 On the contrary, no writers have denounced
 
 170 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 more fiercely than Jewish writers the iniquity 
 of modern conditions. 
 
 With the breakdown of Jewish national ex- 
 clusivism, with the dawn of social justice, the 
 last vestiges of anti-Semitism will probably 
 disappear, and the Jewish problem will solve it- 
 self. 
 
 X 
 
 But the Jewish problem cannot solve itself in 
 other parts of the world as long as it has not 
 found a solution in Russia, which is the new 
 Palestine, which is the very heart and centre 
 of Israel. The Jewish problem cannot solve 
 itself as long as five million Hebrews remain 
 the victims of a most odious mediaeval oppres- 
 sion. Unfortunately, in the course of the last 
 twenty years, the position of the Jew in Russia 
 has not become better, rather has it become 
 worse. The Jew is still cooped up within that 
 huge Polish ghetto called the "Pale." He is 
 still forbidden access to the land. He is still 
 tracked by the police and periodically deci- 
 mated by organized massacre. And the po- 
 groms are becoming more frequent and more 
 savage. He is still forbidden entrance to the 
 Civil Service. He is still largely excluded
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 171 
 
 from the Liberal Professions, only from 5 to 
 7 per cent, of Jews being allowed into the Rus- 
 sian Gymnasia and the Universities. The Jew 
 has had no share in the partial political enfran- 
 chisement which followed the Russo-Japanese 
 War, and he is suffering throughout the present 
 war more than any other nation, more even than 
 the martyred Belgians and Serbians. 
 
 XI 
 
 The greatest religious philosopher and political 
 leader the Russian race has produced, the Cath- 
 olic Vladimir Soloviov, has put in a nutshell the 
 arguments in favor of the Jews : 
 
 "Poland presents a remarkable phenomenon. 
 The social elements there are represented by 
 separate nationalities. The Russians consti- 
 tute the agricultural population of the villages. 
 The Upper Class is constituted by Poles. The 
 Industrial population of the towns by Hebrews. 
 If the Hebrews, not only under favourable but 
 generally under most unfavourable circum- 
 stances, manage to establish a firm hold in the 
 cities of Western Russia, that simply proves 
 that they are more capable than the Russian 
 peasant or the Polish nobility to constitute an 
 industrial class. If, on the other hand, such an
 
 172 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 industrial class in every country instead of 
 helping the agricultural population is found to 
 live at their expense, it is not to be wondered 
 at that the Hebrews, wherever they constitute 
 the whole industrial class, should also appear 
 as the exploiters of the people. It is not they 
 who created such a situation. They were 
 schooled too long in the school of the Polish 
 nobility which equally oppressed both the Jews 
 and the Polish serfs. But quite apart from the 
 Polish nobility, is not the selfish oppression of 
 one class over the others the universal rule of 
 social life in the whole of Europe? If our 
 peasants suffered from the oppression of the 
 Jews, who only exist by virtue of the helpless 
 social economic situation of those peasants, 
 that situation was not caused by the Hebrews. 
 The needy peasant goes to the Jew simply be- 
 cause his own people refuse to help him. And 
 if the Jews who assist the peasant exploit him, 
 they do not do so because they are Jews, but 
 because they have obtained the monopoly of 
 national finance which is entirely based on the 
 exploitation of the people. The evil is not due 
 to the Jew, nor to finance, but to the immoral 
 supremacy of finance, and that supremacy was
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 173 
 
 not created by the Jews. It is not the Jew 
 who separated the provinces of political econ- 
 omy from that of morality and religion. It is 
 civilized Europe which, having based political 
 economy on impious and inhuman principles, 
 reproaches the Jew because they follow their 
 principles." 
 
 XII 
 
 The worst of the present legislation against the 
 Jew is that it defeats its purpose. It is not 
 only odious; it is gratuitous. It is futile. It 
 is politically insane. We are told that the Jew 
 must be denied access to the land for the pro- 
 tection of the helpless moujik, but the present 
 legislation by preventing the Jew from owning 
 land, from becoming an independent fanner, 
 makes him instead a constant menace to the 
 independent farmer, dooms him to the odious 
 profession of a usurer and a publican. The 
 Jew may not own land, but he may lend money 
 at usurer's interest to the peasant who owns the 
 land, and may thus have the peasant and land- 
 owner at his mercy. 
 
 We are told that if the Jew were admitted 
 in any large numbers to the Liberal Professions,
 
 174 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 he would in a short time invade every career to 
 the detriment of the Russian born. That as- 
 sumption is a gratuitous insult to the intelli- 
 gence and the ability of the Russian people. 
 It is an admission that a Russian doctor, a 
 Russian lawyer, a Russian engineer have no 
 chance in any fair competition with the He- 
 brew. I cannot believe that the Russian is 
 so hopelessly inferior to the Hebrew. I do 
 not dread competition for the Russian. I be- 
 lieve, on the contrary, that all that the Rus- 
 sian people want is competition and not Govern- 
 ment protection. Competition with the Jew, 
 so far from being detrimental to the Russian, 
 will awaken his dormant capacities. One ex- 
 planation of the present arbitrary legislation, 
 and that is probably one reason why it is being 
 retained, is that it gives both the police and 
 the bureaucracy unlimited opportunities of 
 graft. It is an open secret that the regulations 
 which restrict to the proportion of 5 to 7 per 
 cent, the admission of the Jew to the Higher 
 Government Schools, are being constantly 
 evaded, and that wealthy Jews by paying a 
 sufficient bribe to the authorities can always 
 secure admission.
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 175 
 
 XIII 
 
 We are further told that the Jew must not be 
 given the same civil rights as the Russian, 
 because even when he becomes naturalized 
 he remains an alien. But the present legisla- 
 tion only succeeds in making him an irresponsi- 
 ble enemy of Russia, whilst at the same time 
 keeping him settled in huge numbers in one of 
 the most vital parts of the Empire, like a fes- 
 tering wound in the Russian body politic. 
 
 If it be really true that the Jew is a hostile 
 alien, and that he can never be assimilated, 
 then the logical policy for the Government 
 would be to expel that alien even as Louis XIV 
 expelled the Huguenots, even as the Spaniards 
 expelled the Moors. But the existing legisla- 
 tion inflicts a maximum of suffering without 
 producing any political result. 
 
 We are finally told that even as the Russian 
 people must be protected by depriving the Jew 
 of civil rights, so the Russian State must be 
 protected by depriving the Jew of political 
 rights. For the Jew is a Revolutionist, an 
 Anarchist and no Government could be carried 
 on if he were conceded full political rights.
 
 176 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 But here, again, the present legislation entirely 
 defeats its purpose. It only makes the Jew 
 into a passionate opponent of the existing 
 Government. If it be difficult to govern with 
 the Jew, it is impossible to govern with the 
 Jew as an irreconcilable enemy. For even the 
 strongest Russian Government is not a match 
 for the Jew. For the Jew is able to use 
 against the Government all the driving power 
 of hatred and revenge, all the resources of a 
 subtle intellect, all the power of the Press, and 
 he also has the power of turning against the 
 established authorities the two most potent 
 forces in the world international finance and 
 international opinion, as the allies are finding 
 out to their cost. 
 
 XIV 
 
 There is only one solution to the Jewish prob- 
 lem, and that is a complete reversal of the old 
 policy of intolerance and inequality and iniq- 
 uity, an uncompromising acceptance of the 
 principle that liberty with all its risks and perils 
 is preferable to protection with all its false se- 
 curity. 
 
 That solution is imperative not only in the 
 interests of the Jew but in the interests of the
 
 PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW 177 
 
 Russian people, and in the interests of political 
 freedom generally. A political freedom which 
 would be doled out to some sections of the peo- 
 ple and withheld from others, a freedom of the 
 Press which would be granted to some papers 
 and refused to others, a religious toleration 
 which would be conceded to the Catholics and 
 refused to the Jews or the Armenians will 
 not work. There is a limit to political con- 
 tradiction, even in a land of contrasts such 
 as Russia. The Russian bureaucracy and the 
 Russian Church must give up their traditional 
 policy of racial and religious antagonism, or 
 they will inevitably revert to the evil of their 
 ways. 
 
 And let us hear no more of the feeble argu- 
 ment that the Russian people have perfectly 
 legitimate grievances against the Jews, that they 
 have old scores to pay off. I know they have. 
 It would have been a miracle, indeed, if the de- 
 grading legislation imposed for centuries upon 
 the inmates of the ghetto and the ghastly perse- 
 cution they have suffered had not left its mark 
 on the Hebrew race. But what have a thou- 
 sand legitimate grievances to do with the con- 
 cession of political rights? In so far as the 
 Jews act dishonourably in private life, they
 
 178 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 must be prepared to pay the penalty, and no 
 State can protect them against the contempt or 
 the hatred of the community. But the retali- 
 ation of individuals for injustice done in pri- 
 vate life cannot be allowed to the Government. 
 The argument of revenge or retribution is there- 
 fore entirely irrelevant. To indulge in a spirit 
 of vindictiveness is not a duty of the State. 
 The State is not a Corsican community organ- 
 ized for vendetta, it is not even an instrument 
 of moral retaliation. Its function is not to dis- 
 pense retributive justice. The one primary 
 and essential duty of a State is to secure equal 
 and civil rights to all its citizens, and the Rus- 
 sian State of to-morrow will have to discharge 
 that duty to all the members of the Hebrew 
 race. \
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND 
 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 
 
 THE following pages were written in 
 Moscow nine years ago under the di- 
 rect impression of the Civil War which 
 shook the Russian Empire to its very founda- 
 tions. Such was the elemental violence of the 
 political hurricane that every European pub- 
 licist predicted the imminent fall of Russian 
 Tzardom. From a close examination of the 
 situation and from a systematic calculation of 
 the political forces at work, I was driven to 
 adopt quite a different conclusion. I confi- 
 dently predicted that nothing would happen. 
 Nothing did happen. Tzardom weathered the 
 storm. (The Government was stronger after 
 the war than before. The revolution proved 
 abortive. 
 
 The revolution collapsed. But it was easy 
 to foresee that the revolutionary forces would 
 only be driven back to gather strength for an- 
 other and a more determined onslaught. The 
 
 great Italian thinker, Vico, the father of the 
 
 179
 
 180 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 modern philosophy of history, tells us that 
 human history is only a succession of corsi 
 and ricorsi of periodical recurrences that 
 mankind moves in a spiral, each successive gen- 
 eration, reverting to the point from which it 
 started, but each time starting afresh on a 
 higher level. Contemporary Russian history 
 strikingly illustrates this theory of "recur- 
 rences." The internal political situation in 
 Russia after the European War will be sub- 
 stantially the same as that which existed after 
 the Russo-Japanese War. All the difficulties 
 which confronted the Government in 1906 will 
 still confront the Government in 1916. Nearly 
 all the reforms which demanded a solution then 
 still demand a solution to-day. The land ques- 
 tion is still largely unsolved. Decentralization 
 and Home Rule are wanted as urgently as ever. 
 Finland and Poland still demand autonomy. 
 An independent judicature, an independent 
 Church, an independent Press, are still pious 
 desiderata. Armenians and Jews are still suf- 
 fering from shocking disabilities and still re- 
 quire protection against organized massacre. 
 
 The only difference between the political 
 situation in 1906 and the situation to-day is 
 this, that the demands for reform will be far
 
 THE REVOLUTION 181 
 
 more pressing, and that the reforms themselves 
 have come much more nearer maturity.; It will 
 be far more difficult to refuse satisfaction after 
 a great democratic and national conflict. As I 
 have attempted to prove in the course of this 
 book, a great national war in Russia has al- 
 ways acted as a Revolutionary force in the po- 
 litical development of Russia. It seems, there- 
 fore, a safe prediction that the Russian Empire 
 after this war will undergo a more far-reaching 
 transformation than at any other period since 
 Peter the Great. The only doubtful point is 
 whether the Government will take a bold 
 initiative as Alexander II did in the sixties, 
 or whether reform will come as the result of a 
 social upheaval as happened in 1906. 
 
 Whatever the immediate future may have in 
 store for the Russian people, I have no hesita- 
 tion as to the policy which ought to be followed 
 on the morrow of the war, nor is there a single 
 paragraph in the following pages which I would 
 be prepared to alter. The forecasts which I 
 made then I still confidently make to-day. The 
 remedies which I propounded then I propound 
 still more emphatically to-day. More firmly 
 than ever do I believe that salvation will not 
 come through a perennial and sterile conflict
 
 182 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 between two irreconcilable hostile forces, be- 
 tween a powerless Executive and an all-power- 
 ful Revolutionary Convention. Rather will 
 salvation come through the systematic co-oper- 
 ation between a strong Executive and an Assem- 
 bly of wise, moderate, practical and patriotic 
 representatives ready to meet the Government 
 half-way in the path of necessary reforms. 
 More firmly than ever do I believe that salva- 
 tion will come not primarily through a central- 
 ized Parliament superimposed upon a central- 
 ized bureaucracy, but through the releasing of 
 new political forces, through the establishment 
 of Autonomous Provinces and Independent Na- 
 tionalities, and especially through the releasing 
 of the spiritual forces, through the creation of 
 Independent Churches. More firmly than ever 
 do I believe that an unconditional concession 
 of religious liberty, an honest application of 
 the Edict of Toleration of 1905, must be the 
 antecedent of political liberty. 
 
 Russian reformers are too much inclined to 
 believe in the servile imitation of the British 
 Parliamentary regime, in the adoption of the 
 British Party System. The trouble is that 
 whereas there are only three Parties in the 
 British House of Commons there are twenty
 
 THE REVOLUTION 183 
 
 conflicting Parties in the Russian Duma, and it 
 will readily be conceded that even an ideal 
 British Parliament could not work very 
 smoothly under such conditions. If the Rus- 
 sian Reformers must be guided by British prece- 
 dents, let them be inspired by the wonderful 
 example of the British Empire, which is not a 
 centralized Empire, but a world-wide feder- 
 ation of self-governing communities, and where 
 the Crown is but the visible symbol of political 
 unity, the arbiter of all nationalities, the rally- 
 ing centre of Imperial loyalty. It is only 
 through the Russian Empire being converted 
 into such a federation of free communities, it is 
 only through deliberately renouncing national 
 and racial antagonism, through repudiating re- 
 ligious intolerance, that the Russian people will 
 work out their own destinies. 
 
 The historical inquiry before us is not one of 
 purely academic interest. It is one of supreme 
 practical importance. The political condition 
 of Russia to-day is very like the political con- 
 dition of France in 1789. To the Russian 
 Revolutionists, the French Revolution is not a 
 dead and distant past, it is a living present; it 
 continues, and it will continue for a generation 
 to come, to exert a subtle and profound influ-
 
 184 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 ence which it is impossible to overrate. Even 
 as the leaders of the French Revolution were 
 haunted by the memories of ancient Rome, and 
 by the heroes of Plutarch, the Russian Revolu- 
 tionists are obsessed and possessed by the tragic 
 events of 1789, and the heroes of the Terror. 
 These events and these men are to them a per- 
 manent source of inspiration. Every psycholo- 
 gist and sociologist who has investigated the 
 power of hypnotic suggestion and the laws of 
 imitation will realize the enormous significance 
 of the fact, all the more so because the Russian 
 Revolution must be to some extent a purely 
 artificial revolution and not a spontaneous out- 
 burst of elemental forces. Nearly all the lead- 
 ers belonged to the intellectual classes, to 
 what is characteristically called in Russia the 
 "Intelliguenz" And these leaders have been 
 brought up on the theories of 1789, they have 
 been fed on the "Immortal Principles." They 
 appear to me like students who are repeating 
 to themselves lessons vaguely understood, or 
 like actors who want to rehearse the same tragic 
 parts over again. They would like to persuade 
 the world that the Russian people are engaged 
 in the same struggle for freedom and equality, 
 and that their triumph would inaugurate a new 
 
 Ki
 
 THE REVOLUTION 185 
 
 era for Russia and for mankind. They insist 
 that the one event is as inevitable as the other, 
 that resistance is equally futile, that any form 
 of opposition will only make the ultimate tri- 
 umph more decisive and more bloody, and that 
 Russia is doomed to travel the same road as 
 the France of 1789 from Despotism through 
 Terror, towards Liberty. 
 
 We saw in 1905 the scenes familiar to every 
 student of history, the same passions, the same 
 demagogues, the same spirit of optimism; we 
 listened with the same grim irony to the same 
 debates on the abolition of the death penalty on 
 the very eve of a life-and-death struggle in 
 which the same philanthropists threatened us 
 that rivers of blood must flow. And did we not 
 seem to hear the ring of the same historical 
 words'? How many revolutionists must have 
 repeated on the dissolution of the first Duma the 
 words of Mirabeau: Nous sommes ici par la 
 Volonte du peuple et nous n'en sortirons que par 
 la force des bayonnettes! How many of them 
 were nerving themselves to action with the 
 dictum of Danton: De VAudace, et encore de 
 Vaudace et tou jours de Vaudacel How many 
 of them challenged their enemies with the 
 Frenchman's outburst : Jetons leur en defi une
 
 186 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 tete de roil And how many Conservatives did 
 repeat the pathetic lamentation: Liberte. 
 que de crimes sont commis en ton noml 
 
 It must, therefore, be a subject of the most 
 absorbing interest closely to investigate how 
 far the analogies are real or misleading, and 
 whether we may infer and expect similar con- 
 clusions from similar causes and similar ante- 
 cedents; whether history is actually repeating 
 itself and will give us a rehearsal, on a larger 
 scene, of the tragedy which was enacted a hun- 
 dred and twenty years ago. 
 
 I. Analogies Between the French Revo- 
 lution and the Russian Revolution 
 
 But it must be understood that the question 
 before us is not merely whether there are cer- 
 tain broad and general resemblances between 
 the two situations. Such broad analogies are 
 only what one would naturally expect. All 
 revolutionary outbursts, like the catastrophes of 
 elemental nature, have some common features, 
 because human nature in such emergencies re- 
 mains the same in all times and in all climes. 
 Everywhere, whether in Athens, in Rome, or in 
 London, we find at work the same forces, the 
 same motives disguised under different princi-
 
 THE REVOLUTION 187 
 
 pies. Eve rywhere the people are used as t ools 
 and dupes in a movement which succeeds only 
 through t hem, but not alw ays ^with ben efit to 
 them. Sic vos non vobis. Everywhere we wit- 
 ness the same plot unfolding in the same man- 
 ner : first an effete and corrupt Despotism then 
 Anarchy and Terror, and finally a Military Dic- 
 tatorship: Caesar or Medici, Cromwell or Na- 
 poleon. CV Ttlhs % 
 
 It is not such broad human analogies whicn 
 we are investigating. It must be obvious to 
 the most superficial observer that there are be- 
 tween the two situations analogies much more 
 special, much more unexpected, much more 
 striking. Indeed so striking do they seem, that 
 the Russian Revolution of 1905 may verily ap- 
 pear at first sight as a second edition, alas, not 
 always corrected nor improved, but only ex- 
 panded of the Revolution of 1789! 
 I (a) In both countries do we find at work the 
 same political causes, the same political evolu- 
 tion. The reforms of Peter the Great seem 
 copied from the administrative reforms of 
 Louis XIV, with Provincial Governors taking 
 the place of the French Intendants, with a mock 
 aristocracy, only on court parade not on active 
 duty. We find the same arbitrary autocracy,
 
 188 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 the same absentee landlords, the same corrupt 
 bureaucracy, the same all-absorbing .centraliza- 
 tion killing all local initiative. 
 
 (b) In both countries we are struck with the 
 same sudden paralysis of the executive power, 
 the same wavering and divided counsels, the 
 same court intrigues, the same good intentions, 
 the same absence of a man strong enough to 
 control the destructive forces. 
 
 (c) In both countries we find the same in- 
 tellectual and spiritual antecedents, and just as 
 in France all through the eighteenth century, 
 so in Russia all through the nineteenth, the po- 
 litical revolution has been preceded and partly 
 caused by a philosophical revolution. In both 
 countries we witness a shaking of religious be- 
 liefs by the leaders of thought, a criticism of all 
 existing institutions. In both cases we are con- 
 fronted with the same striking contradiction be- 
 tween political despotism and spiritual anarchy, 
 we see the same gathering of positive and nega- 
 tive electricities, bound to end in the same ex- 
 plosion. Almost every epoch-making writing 
 of Voltaire and Montesquieu, of Diderot and 
 Rousseau, has its counterpart in Russian litera- 
 ture. For Russian literature in the nineteenth 
 century is not a purely artistic or contemplative
 
 THE REVOLUTION 189 
 
 literature. Each masterpiece has its political 
 tendencies, is written with a purpose. Already, 
 sixty years ago, the "Revizor" of Gogol was 
 a blow dealt at bureaucracy. His "Dead 
 Souls," as well as Turgenev's "A Sportsman's 
 Sketches," are an attack on serfdom. Turge- 
 nev's novel, "Fathers and Sons," is an analysis 
 of nihilism. Dostoevsky's "The House of 
 the Dead" is a revelation of the horrors of 
 Siberian convict life. And to take the work 
 of the two men, who in both countries have 
 had the most magnetic influence would it 
 be possible to imagine a writer more like Rous- 
 seau than Tolstoy? No doubt Tolstoy is by 
 far the more consistent thinker, the stronger 
 personality, the nobler character, and the more 
 creative and more original artist, indeed the 
 most original artist the world has seen since 
 Shakespeare; but apart from these personal 
 characteristics, the work of the two men presents 
 the most extraordinary similarity, and the influ- 
 ence of the one on the other is obvious and 
 openly admitted by Tolstoy himself. In both 
 we find the same extreme doctrines preached 
 with the same earnestness and passionateness, 
 the same subjective individualism, the same un- 
 expected interpretation of Christianity, the
 
 190 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 same Confession of Faith of the Savoyard Vi- 
 car, the same attack on a Temporal Church in 
 the name of an Eternal Gospel, the same at- 
 tacks on society and civilization, the same op- 
 timism and appeal to the original goodness of 
 man, the same return to Nature, to the Simple 
 Life. And although Tolstoy's consistent an- 
 archism prevents him from accepting the prin- 
 ciples of Rousseau's Social Contract, these prin- 
 ciples have found universal favour with the 
 Russian Revolutionists. 
 
 And both in France and in Russia, the party 
 of revolution seems to hold the field unchal- 
 lenged. Just as the Gallican Church was silent 
 after the golden age of Bossuet and Fenelon, 
 even so the Russian Church has not produced, 
 in the hour of need, one single great thinker, 
 one single statesman. The only theological 
 thinker Russia has produced in the nineteenth 
 century, Vladimir Soloviov, so far from defend- 
 ing the Orthodox Church, preaches the reunion 
 with Roman Catholicism. 
 
 (d) But not only do we find in both coun- 
 tries the same intellectual antecedents, with the 
 same humanitarian creed, with the same radical 
 uncompromising spirit, the same absence of the 
 historical sense, the same belief in the regenera-
 
 THE REVOLUTION 191 
 
 tion of mankind, the same attitude to the 
 Church and to positive Christianity, so different 
 from the attitude of the English Puritan and 
 Scottish Covenanters but in Russia, as in 
 France, the impulse has come from abroad.' 
 The Anglomania of the French thinkers is 
 paralleled by the Cosmopolitanism of the Rus- 
 sian writers. Whilst Russian imaginative 
 literature is supremely original, political litera- 
 ture is almost entirely borrowed from the West. 
 The great Slavophile writers, Samarine, Aksa- 
 kov, Chomiakov, Danilevski, have found little 
 hearing. Even Tolstoy was repudiated since 
 he expressed his disbelief in Western Parlia- 
 mentary Institutions. The only doctrines that 
 find favour are imported from England, France, 
 and especially Germany. The present political 
 philosophy in Russia is an olla podrida, a dis- 
 cordant pot pourri of Spencer, Buckle, Rous- 
 seau, Proudhon, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzs- 
 che. The destructive thought of the whole 
 world is made tributary to the Russian revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 (e) In both countries the revolution finds 
 its chief supporters in the upper classes. Mira- 
 beau, La Rochefoucauld, La Fayette, Lameth, 
 Noailles, the Duke of Orleans, have found their
 
 192 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 successors in the three Princes Troubetzkoy, in 
 Prince Dolgoroukov, in Prince Lvov, in Count 
 Hey den. The aristocracy join the movement 
 partly from dilettantism, partly from generous 
 convictions, partly from ambition. They have 
 been ruined by luxury, and by the emancipa- 
 tion of the serfs. They have been ousted from 
 high places by the bureaucracy. They would 
 like to play a part in the new regime. They 
 hope that whilst leading the revolutionary 
 forces they may be able to control them, but 
 being generally absentee landlords they have 
 lost touch with the people; being imbued not 
 with the national spirit, but with foreign the- 
 ories, they have forfeited their confidence. 
 
 (/) In Russia as well as in France we find 
 the same financial and economic distress, the 
 same agrarian fermentation. In both countries 
 the peasantry form the backbone of the popu- 
 lation, and their condition is lamentable. We 
 all know the lurid picture in La Bruyere of the 
 "wild beasts in human form." We have all 
 read the gloomy accounts of Tolstoy, and the 
 "power of darkness" in Russian villages. The 
 peasant in 1905 was the silent pathetic chorus 
 in the tragedy, at first keeping in the back- 
 ground whilst aristocrats and journalists fill the
 
 THE REVOLUTION 193 
 
 foreground. He is the dumb inarticulate ac- 
 tor whom nobody understands, whom hitherto 
 everybody has neglected, but in whose name 
 every one now claims to speak, whose interests 
 every one claims to defend, because all feel that 
 on him depends the ultimate success or failure 
 of the revolution. 
 
 (g) In both countries the revolution begins 
 with the same experiment of a centralized Par- 
 liament superimposed upon a centralized bu- 
 reaucracy, doomed to end in failure, because it 
 is without any root in the past, and cannot meet 
 the needs of the people. And in both Parlia- 
 ments we hear the same palaver, the same 
 speeches, earnest yet hollow, sincere yet with 
 the ring of rhetoric. In those long speeches of 
 the first Duma on the abolition of the death 
 penalty, do we not hear some echo of "Sea- 
 green" Robespierre, who resigned his position as 
 a judge because he could not muster the courage 
 to inflict a death penalty, and who yet did not 
 hesitate to send thousands of his opponents to 
 the guillotine, and to wade to power through 
 those same "rivers of blood" which his Russian 
 imitators are prepared to cross ! 
 
 (k) And do we not see the same strange 
 contrast between the tragic magnitude of events,
 
 194 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 the immensity of the scene, and the mediocrity 
 of the heroes *? Even Michelet confesses to this 
 mediocrity of the heroes of 1792. Speaking of 
 the Club des Jacobins, he tells us "that collec- 
 tive action was far more powerful there than 
 individual action, that the strongest, the most 
 heroic individual, lost his advantages. In such 
 associations, active mediocrity rises to impor- 
 tance, genius weighs very little." * Mirabeau 
 is left without a successor, and even in his life- 
 time it is now historically proven that his real 
 influence was very limited, and that his fiery 
 speeches seldom turned the votes of the Con- 
 stituent Assembly. Even so in Russia. The 
 scene extends from the Baltic to the Pacific 
 Ocean. The issues at stake are tremendous. 
 And yet the chief actors are ordinary human 
 beings like ourselves, honest and inconsistent, 
 clever and weak, themselves led by events in- 
 stead of being born leaders and rulers of men. 
 We are still waiting for the one great Russian 
 statesman to appear. 
 
 (1) And finally, both revolutions were 
 greeted by the unanimous applause of a sympa- 
 thetic world. At the beginning of the French 
 Revolution, not only poets like Wordsworth 
 
 Michelet, "Revolution Franchise," II, 75, 76.
 
 THE REVOLUTION 195 
 
 and Schiller, philosophers like Kant and Fichte, 
 even practical statesmen hail the event as the 
 beginning of a new era. The leader of the 
 Liberal Party, Fox, indulges in the same decla- 
 rations as his successor, Sir Henry Campbell- 
 Bannerman. But in both cases the sympathy is 
 equally hollow, because based on a complete 
 ignorance of the real state of affairs. Very 
 few Englishmen then knew the situation in 
 France. And there were not in 1905 in Great 
 Britain six publicists who had taken the trou- 
 ble to study the Russian language and litera- 
 ture, who were able to read Russian news- 
 papers, and who were able to investigate the sit- 
 uation at first hand. And therefore it hap- 
 pened in 1905 that, just as in 1792, sympathy 
 speedily evaporated, and was followed by an 
 equally unjustifiable outburst of hatred and 
 contempt when these poor misguided "Tartars 
 and barbarians" proved themselves unworthy 
 of and unprepared for liberty, and happened to 
 deceive the expectations of an enthusiastic 
 world. 
 
 Few readers will be inclined to deny that 
 the resemblances just indicated are most strik- 
 ing and most unexpected. And yet we have 
 not altered the facts, we have not strained them,
 
 196 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 we have not even arranged them. Compared 
 with its predecessor, the Russian Revolution of 
 1905 seems like one of those French plays which 
 a resourceful stage manager adapts to the Rus- 
 sian stage. The names and places, the dresses 
 and local colouring are alone changed. The 
 characters are identical, and the plot is hurry- 
 ing through the same thrilling episodes to the 
 same denouement. It seems as if we might 
 accuse the Muse of History of plagiarizing her- 
 self, as if Fate had exhausted her possibilities, 
 or as if she wanted to teach us the great moral 
 lesson that mankind, untaught by the sufferings 
 and the catastrophes of previous generations, 
 shall be ever doomed to repeat the same blun- 
 ders and the same crimes. 
 
 II. The Differences 
 
 Would it then be true that the Slav people, so 
 powerful in their literature and in their imagi- 
 native art, so original in their temperament, as 
 soon as they apply themselves to political action 
 are only capable of fitful impulses, and unable 
 to strike out a path of their own? Would it 
 be true that 180,000,000 of Russia people are 
 only to be like puppets in the hands of a few 
 thousand bureaucrats or a few hundred agita-
 
 THE REVOLUTION 197 
 
 tors, who pull the wires, think out the plot and 
 apportion the parts'? And will the Russian 
 people be doomed in a national emergency to 
 borrow once more their reforms, their institu- 
 tions, their whole machinery from their West- 
 ern neighbours'? 
 
 To this we might reply in the first place that 
 the analogies we have noticed may be easily 
 explained by the fact that the two nations pos- 
 sessed the same political organization a com- 
 bination of autocracy and centralized bureau- 
 cracy, that both nations have been largely 
 agricultural, and that the intellectual classes 
 have been imbued by the same principles. 
 They may, perhaps, be further explained by 
 some resemblances between the Slav tempera- 
 ment and the Celtic temperament, a certain im- 
 pulsivness, an absence of self-control, and a 
 predominance of the emotional qualities. 
 
 In the second place we might reply that, 
 striking though the analogies may appear, they 
 are not fundamental, and do not justify us in 
 drawing out any inferences for the future. So 
 far, in Russia we have only seen the prelimi- 
 nary, the destructive period. Now, destruc- 
 tion is the same in all times and in all places. 
 A building is pulled down very much in the
 
 198 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 same way in every country. Blasting and 
 blowing up are universal processes, dynamite is 
 cosmopolitan; it is only when a building rises 
 above ground that the characteristics of national 
 architecture begin to appear. 
 
 And, therefore, it is only when we begin to 
 think of the possibilities of a constructive revo- 
 lution in Russia that differences arise which 
 are far more important than any analogies and 
 which must entirely change our forecast of 
 events. 
 
 (a) The Russian autocracy have not lost 
 their prestige in the eyes of the peasantry. 
 Whilst in France the peasants, oppressed and 
 exploited by the Crown and the Church and the 
 absentee landlords, joined the ranks of the rev- 
 olutionists in almost every province except Brit- 
 tany and the Vendee, in Russia the peasantry 
 seem to have remained loyal to the existing 
 regime. Now, if this fact be true, it is deci- 
 sive for the peasantry still form 85 per cent. 
 of the population, and whatever preliminary 
 success might be achieved by the revolutionists, 
 the ultimate success would depend on the sup- 
 port of the moujik. 
 
 I have just stated that the peasantry seem to 
 be loyal, for it is almost impossible to know the
 
 THE REVOLUTION 199 
 
 facts with absolute certainty : in the first place, 
 because the peasants have not the same means 
 of expressing their feelings as the intellectual 
 classes; in the second place, because for any 
 information we possess we almost exclusively 
 depend on the revolutionists themselves who 
 control the European Press, and with whom the 
 wish is father both to the thought and to the 
 deed. We, therefore, can only judge from in- 
 ference and arrive at probabilities. 
 
 But in support of the probable loyalty of the 
 moujik I would submit the following important 
 considerations : 
 
 ( 1 ) Loyalty has been for generations a reli- 
 gious tradition, and almost an instinct with the 
 Russian peasantry, and such instincts have a 
 very tough life in them, especially in a slow, 
 patient, passive being like the moujik. After 
 the disaster to the Russian fleet in 1905, I vis- 
 ited many villages in every part of the Em- 
 pire. The image of the Tsar was still hang- 
 ing in every izba with the icons of the saints. 
 The peasants remember the broad fact that 
 Tsardom has ever been on their side, and that 
 whilst they owe their servitude and the krie- 
 postnoe pravo to the aristocracy, they are in- 
 debted for their freedom to the Tsar liberator
 
 200 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 (osvoboditel). There exists a popular prov- 
 erb: do Boga visoko, do Tsaria dalzoko! God 
 is too high : The Tsar is too far ! This proverb 
 indicates the deep-seated belief of the peasant 
 that if it were only possible to let the Tsar 
 know his wishes and his wants relief would be 
 soon at hand. 
 
 (2) The peasantry do not want a central 
 Parliament, they are not susceptible to political 
 metaphysics nor to "immortal principles" which 
 would carry the French off their feet. If they 
 have any desire for political liberty, it only ex- 
 tends to the management of their own affairs in 
 their village communities and in the County 
 Councils or Zemstvos, a measure of political 
 liberty which, however imperfect, they already 
 possess. But what the peasant wants above all 
 is more land; he is clamouring for a drastic 
 agrarian reform". Let the Tsar initiate such a 
 reform, let him satisfy that craving, that hun- 
 ger, let him offer his people a comprehensive 
 scheme of land reform, and the peasant would 
 rather receive his additional plot of land at 
 the hands of the Tsar than at the hands of the 
 aristocracy, whom he suspects, or of the "intel- 
 lectuals," whose language he does not under- 
 stand, or of the Jews, whom he abhors.
 
 THE REVOLUTION 201 
 
 (3) So far, the peasants have given no un- 
 mistakable indication that their loyalty is 
 shaken. No doubt the war has left a very deep 
 impression, and I have myself witnessed in 
 many parts of Russia heartrending scenes. In 
 1905 I saw thousands of families bidding fare- 
 well to young soldiers leaving for the Far East. 
 But these disasters in the Far East have not been 
 brought home to the Tsar himself. Such spo- 
 radic outbursts of discontent as have occurred 
 in the army can be traced to the work of agi- 
 tators, and have only affected those soldiers who 
 have been bred or who have lived in large towns, 
 and who therefore were already disloyal. Such 
 agrarian riots as have taken place can be ex- 
 plained by the prevailing anarchy and by the 
 temporary withdrawing of the strong hand of 
 government. Such popular insurrections and 
 wholesale massacres as have occurred have been 
 directed not against the representatives of gov- 
 ernment, but against the Jews suspected of fo- 
 menting the revolution. I do not wish to enter 
 into the very complicated question of settling 
 the responsibility of these massacres; but the 
 very fact of the accusation that the "black hun- 
 dreds," the "tchornia sotnia," alone are made 
 responsible, and that they have been able to
 
 202 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 organize massacres against hundreds of thou- 
 sands, nay, millions of Jews that fact is suffi- 
 cient to prove how easy it would be to turn the 
 popular passions against the revolutionists. 
 Indeed, if the revolutionary spirit were spread- 
 ing, and if famine were to be the result of an- 
 archy, nothing would be easier than to make the 
 peasants believe that it is the Jews and the 
 landowners who are responsible for the evil, 
 and that it is they who interfered with the good 
 intentions of the Tsar: in which case there 
 would not be one peasant insurrection like the 
 Vendee, but twenty sporadic outbursts all over 
 the Empire.* 
 
 (b) In 1789, the French Church with its 
 Court Abbes, with its Rohans and its Talley- 
 rands was utterly discredited. In Russia the 
 Church seems to have retained its hold over the 
 peasantry. The Russian people are, as I have 
 shown, the most religious nation in the world, 
 as one would expect from people on whom life 
 has always pressed hard, and who must seek in 
 their beliefs an opiate against their sufferings. 
 Even irreligion in Russia retains all the earnest- 
 
 This forecast has been only too fully verified in the 
 epidemic of pogroms which are a blot on the Russian name 
 and which continues unabated during the present war.
 
 THE REVOLUTION 203 
 
 ness, all the single-hearted devotion, all the 
 mysticism, of a belief in the supernatural. Sig- 
 nificantly enough, amongst the four classic nov- 
 elists, three Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy 
 have ultimately been converted from scepti- 
 cism and atheism to Christianity, and the fourth 
 Turgenev only continued to adhere to posi- 
 tivism because he continued to live an exile in 
 Germany and France. The only great philo- 
 sophical thinker Russia has produced Vladi- 
 mir Soloviov may be properly called a Chris- 
 tian Plato, and it is equally significant that the 
 revolutionary leader who hitherto has had the 
 strongest influence over the masses has been a 
 priest. I am therefore not inclined to admit 
 with the extreme Radicals, that the Church has 
 ceased to be a national- force. I have had my- 
 self opportunities of observing tens of thou- 
 sands of Russian pilgrims at Jerusalem and at 
 the great national shrines of Kieff and of Mos- 
 cow, and in no other country have I met with 
 such simple, pathetic, unwavering faith. 
 
 The loyalty to the Church is all the more 
 amazing because the Church, as a body, has 
 done little to deserve it. From my own ob- 
 servation in many Slav countries, in Bulgaria, 
 in Serbia, as well as in Russia, the Orthodox
 
 204 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 Church is at present in a more degraded state 
 than any other Christian Church. The hier- 
 archy are ignorant, contemplative monks. The 
 secular priesthood form a miserable caste, al- 
 most as uneducated as the peasants whom they 
 are supposed to guide and to enlighten. All 
 through the nineteenth century the intellec- 
 tuals, with the exception of a few writers of 
 the Slavophile group, have been on the side of 
 the opposition, as I pointed out before. The 
 Russian Church has not produced one theolo- 
 gian, one writer, one statesman. 
 
 Rut when we consider that the Church, not- 
 withstanding her present degradation, has 
 nevertheless not forfeited the confidence of the 
 peasantry, it seems all the more reasonable to 
 infer that her influence would be tremendous if 
 she were to awaken from her present lethargy, 
 if there were a revival of spiritual energy. And 
 it seems equally reasonable to anticipate that 
 such influence would be exerted on the side of 
 the Government. 
 
 The Church might, no doubt, have a liberal- 
 izing tendency, she might insist on the carrying 
 out of a programme of reform, she might act 
 the part of umpire and peacemaker but her 
 influence would be on the whole a conservative
 
 THE REVOLUTION 205 
 
 one as she herself would have to dread as 
 much as the Government from the party of 
 revolution. 
 
 I am convinced that the revolution is strong 
 only because the Church is weak, and that the 
 Church is weak only because she has been de- 
 graded into a Government department. Let 
 the Government realize that there must be an 
 independent constructive spiritual power to 
 keep in check the destructive intellectual forces. 
 Let the Government realize that it is its own 
 interest to emancipate that spiritual power 
 and it seems probable that a regenerative Rus- 
 sian Church will rally round the Government 
 and use all her increased influence to secure the 
 loyalty of the people. 
 
 (c) The French Revolution, like the Eng- 
 lish Revolution, was essentially a middle-class 
 revolution. Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat? 
 Rien. Que doit-il etre*? Tout. Without a 
 strong middle class, there can be no public opin- 
 ion, and without the constant and jealous con- 
 trol of public opinion, there can be no success- 
 ful liberal regime. 
 
 Now in Russia, no such middle class as yet 
 exists. Russia is still an undifferentiated peas- 
 ant State without either bourgeoisie or aris-
 
 206 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 tocracy. Trade and industry are largely in the 
 hands of Jews and foreigners, Germans, Bel- 
 gians, and Armenians. The only educated 
 class are the bureaucracy, and that fact partly 
 explains why the bureaucracy, notwithstanding 
 its corruption, continues to possess such powers. 
 And it will retain such power as long as there 
 is no other educated class to take its place. 
 
 So far, the revolution has been mainly an 
 intellectual movement. It has proceeded not 
 from the Third Estate, but from what Carlyle 
 has called the "Fourth Estate." The revolu- 
 tion is really managed by a mere band of intel- 
 lectuals, journalists, professors, advocates, and 
 students. It depends for its moral support on 
 public opinion in Europe, and for its material 
 support on the army of industrial labourers in 
 the large cities."" Nothing is more interesting to 
 the foreigner than to observe the extraordinary 
 power wielded by these few thousands of "in- 
 tellectuals" and young students, and nothing is 
 more significant to an Englishman than the fact 
 that whilst in Great Britain the universities are 
 wholly conservative, in Russia they are wholly 
 revolutionary. 
 
 (d) The French Revolution was a national 
 movement. The Russian Revolution, besides
 
 THE REVOLUTION 207 
 
 being an intellectual movement, is also a 
 nationalist movement. In other words the 
 French nation, although distracted by civil dis- 
 sensions, was a homogeneous unit, and it is this 
 unity which made the revolution invincible. 
 So much was this homogeneity the characteristic 
 of France that it was one of the chief accusa- 
 tions against the Girondists that they were 
 "federalists." The revolutionary wars were 
 made in the name of the "Republic one and in- 
 divisible." 
 
 Russia, on the contrary, is a huge heterogene- 
 ous mass, composed of irreconcilable elements. 
 The centrifugal forces in a revolutionary crisis 
 must always be stronger than the centripetal. 
 And the aim of the Russian Revolution is not 
 like the aim of the French, "La Republique une 
 et indivisible" but the division and dissolution 
 of the Empire. The different nationalist ele- 
 ments may combine for that end nationl sep- 
 aration an end perfectly legitimate from their 
 point of view but their interests and tendency 
 are different, nay, contradictory. Once separa- 
 tion granted, there is great danger that the 
 Catholic Pole may turn against the Polish Jew, 
 the Tatar against the Armenian. 
 
 (e) The conjunction of events in 1789 and
 
 208 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 in 1906 is fundamentally different. It is this 
 conjunction which made the movement in 
 France so irresistible. Even at the eleventh 
 hour the revolution in France might have been 
 avoided. What made it inevitable was not any 
 pre-existing "logic of events," but a combina- 
 tion of untoward circumstances: the religious 
 war and the schism stirred up by a non-juring 
 clergy, the class war stirred up by the aris- 
 tocracy, the European war stirred up by the 
 emigres. Had there been neither religious 
 schism, nor class war, nor European interven- 
 tion it is highly probable that a Reign of 
 Terror would never have set in. Once this 
 "conjunction" of events took place, terror was 
 unavoidable, and what is even more important, 
 as Taine himself, the most penetrating critic 
 of the French Revolution, is compelled to ad- 
 mit, France could only be saved by a Reign of 
 Terror. 
 
 Now, in Russia, the situation, the "conjunc- 
 tion" of events, is absolutely different. 
 
 In the first place there can be no religious 
 schism, and therefore no religious war, which in 
 France involved a life-and-death struggle, a 
 war waged with all the fanaticism and horror 
 of a crusade. In Russia the Church is a State
 
 THE REVOLUTION 209 
 
 department, not as in France, a state within the 
 State : imperium in imperio. No religious pas- 
 sions will be stirred, for the hatred against the 
 Jew is economic and racial, not religious. 
 
 In the second place, there can be no class 
 war, for the simple reason that in Russia the 
 aristocracy as a class has ceased to exist. A few 
 noble families who have given up the principle 
 of primogeniture, three hundred princes Obo- 
 lenski, four hundred princes Troubetzkoy, five 
 hundred princes Galitzin, most of whom are 
 poor and have lost their landed property, do not 
 form an Estate of the Empire. 
 
 And finally, there cannot be in Russia any 
 foreign intervention. No doubt the Russian 
 Revolution has its emigres, its exiles, mostly 
 journalists and Jews or Poles, who are stirring 
 up European opinion against the Russian Gov- 
 ernment. But Europe will interfere neither 
 for nor against the revolution. British states- 
 men may have expressed in 1905 their Platonic 
 sympathies for the dissolved Duma. English 
 newspapers may collect subscriptions or send 
 the "moral" support of the British intellectuals 
 to their brethren in Russia. But no democratic 
 Burke will arise to preach the crusade of nations 
 against kings, as Burke once arose to preach the
 
 210 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 crusade of kings against nations. The day of 
 Holy Alliances has gone. The day of the soli- 
 darity and fraternity of nations is only just 
 dawning. Russia, unlike France, must be left 
 to work out her own doom or her own salva- 
 tion. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There now only remains for us to sum up the 
 chief conclusions to be drawn from a compari- 
 son between the situation in France in 1789 
 and the situation in Russia to-day. Not that I 
 entertain much hope that those chiefly inter- 
 ested will give much heed to those lessons of 
 history. Alas ! in times of revolution, men are 
 driven on by their prejudices and their passions, 
 they are seldom guided by the light of reason 
 or the teachings of experience. But this fact 
 does not make it the less imperative for any one 
 wielding a pen in Russia or elsewhere to pro- 
 claim such lessons, and to point out the only 
 way to political and social salvation. 
 
 ( 1 ) The first and the most important lesson 
 is this : the situations in the two cases are so fun- 
 damentally different, that no considerations as 
 to the inevitableness of the one revolution per- 
 mits us to draw an inference as to the inevitable-
 
 THE REVOLUTION 211 
 
 ness of tne other. Even if it were assumed that 
 the forces let loose by the French Revolution 
 were beyond human control, the same could not 
 be asserted of the Russian Revolution. The 
 revolutionary forces are, no doubt, strong, but 
 the Conservative forces are also formidable. It 
 is not true that the less resistance is offered to 
 the energies of destruction, the less bloody the 
 revolution will be. It is not true that it is too 
 late to prevent a catastrophe. No doubt it is 
 so much easier to surrender one's will to the so- 
 called "logic of events," to let the storm rage 
 and pass, to "emigrate" like the French aris- 
 tocracy, and to fly before danger, and if the 
 catastrophe does break out, to make one man or 
 one class the scapegoat of the national sins. 
 But what we call fatality in such cases is noth- 
 ing but the fatality of our own folly and of our 
 own cowardice. 
 
 What made the Reign of Terror inevitable 
 in France was not any mysterious "logic of 
 events," but the criminal interference of Euro- 
 pean Governments, who assumed that the pros- 
 trate and bankrupt condition of France, dis- 
 tracted by a religious war and a civil war, gave 
 them a splendid opportunity of invading the 
 country and dictating their own terms. Russia
 
 1 
 
 212 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 has nothing to dread from her neighbours. So 
 far the revolutionary movement has been noth- 
 ing but a deliberate attempt on the part of a 
 small minority to overturn the existing form 
 of government, and to impose their own re- 
 forms by their own methods. But in that po- 
 litical duel, both parties retain the complete 
 control and the full responsibility of events. 
 If to-morrow the opposition chose to give up 
 their systematic opposition to all government 
 proposals, and if, on the other hand, the gov- 
 ernment gave unmistakable proofs that they are 
 resolved to carry out a far-reaching programme 
 of political and social reform the present an- 
 archy would cease at once, and a constructive 
 revolution would at once be possible. 
 
 It is only if both the opposition and the gov- 
 ernment prove unequal to the great crisis, if 
 they both refuse to come to terms then, but 
 only then, the fatal logic of events will begin 
 to unfold its consequences : but fatality will not 
 have been in the events themselves, but in the 
 weakness and stupidity of a government incapa- 
 ble of steering the country through the tempest, 
 and in the folly of an opposition which sacri- 
 ficed the welfare of their country to their meta-
 
 THE REVOLUTION 213 
 
 physical theories, and to their personal feelings 
 of hatred and revenge. 
 
 (2) The second conclusion which forces it- 
 self upon us is, that Russia cannot be saved 
 mainly by a centralized parliament superim-" 
 posed upon a centralized bureaucracy. If a 
 centralized parliamentary regime without any 
 root or support in local self-government was 
 premature in France and doomed to failure, 
 how much more certain must such failure be 
 in Russia! Russia does not possess as yet, 
 though she may acquire in future, one of the es- 
 sential conditions which make a parliamentary 
 government of the approved British pattern 
 possible. She has no independent aristocracy 
 rooted in the soil, no independent Church, 
 no middle class, no independent judicature. 
 There is no united nation behind the parlia- 
 ment, there is no organized body of public 
 opinion to check and control it, there are no free 9 
 institutions to support it. It hangs in the air. 
 No eloquent speeches can alter that funda- 
 mental fact. 
 
 (3) If there is one other lesson which the 
 French Revolution teaches with irresistible per- 
 suasiveness, it is this : that a country confronted
 
 214 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 with the tremendous tasks of economic, politi- 
 cal, social, and religious reorganization, ex- 
 hausted by a colossal foreign war, and threat- 
 ened by a no less ominous civil war, can only be 
 saved by a strong government and a liberal des- 
 potism. No doubt, the tasks before Russia are 
 very different from those which France had to 
 solve, but they are even more Titanic. A 
 sweeping measure of agrarian reform, and per- 
 haps of land-nationalization, the regeneration 
 of the peasantry, the regeneration of the Church, 
 the establishment of decentralization and of 
 local government, the granting of autonomy to 
 Poland, the solution of the racial problems 
 and especially of the Jewish problem and of the 
 Armenian problem these are some of the tasks 
 before the Russian Government of to-morrow. 
 No government but one invested with plenary 
 powers could ever attempt to grapple with such 
 Herculean labours. 
 
 (4) Such a strong government could not be 
 formed, as in France, with purely revolutionary 
 elements. Even a Reign of Terror could not 
 evolve it, and the above-quoted dictum of 
 Joseph de Maistre does not apply to Russia. 
 The materials of a strong government do not 
 exist in the revolutionary party, nor the possi-
 
 THE REVOLUTION 215 
 
 bility of a strong policy, as the several sections 
 of the party are divided, not on questions of 
 principle, which might be compromised, but on 
 differences of race and nationality, which will 
 ever be conflicting. Unity of action seems im- 
 possible on any constructive programme. No 
 single section of the revolutionary party could 
 secure the support of the others, nor would it 
 have sufficient power to absorb or control them. 
 (5) A strong administration can therefore be 
 only established if all the moderate and liberal 
 elements of the people loyally rally round the 
 present government and if that government 
 boldly initiates and consistently pursues a com- 
 prehensive programme of constructive reform) 
 It is absurd to object that Tsardom and Bu- 
 reaucracy once they had regained their strength 
 would at once abuse it and would again start 
 on a course of reaction. The recent history of 
 Russia abundantly shows that such liberal 
 despotism is possible in Russia. Forty years 
 ago, Alexander II successfully carried through 
 a succession of political, economic, and social 
 reforms, the most gigantic perhaps that have 
 ever been accomplished by one man. Is facie t 
 cut prodest. Even if it had the power, autoc- 
 racy henceforth has no interest to revert to its
 
 216 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 old ways. Neither the Tsar nor his advisers 
 would again place themselves willingly in their 
 unenviable position of 1905. The days of re- 
 action are past, provided the Liberals play their 
 cards well. The danger seems to me hence- 
 forth to lie almost as much in the direction of 
 anarchy as in the direction of reaction. Autoc- 
 racy would only try a return to the past, if all 
 other issues were closed. But in that case, it 
 would probably be the opposition by their un- 
 compromising, purely negative, and destructive 
 policy that would make the Terreur blanche a 
 necessity and a liberal despotism an impossibil- 
 ity. It seems to me, therefore, that the obvious 
 duty of every Liberal in Russia at the present 
 critical juncture, and the only chance for a Lib- 
 eral solution, lies in a loyal adhesion to, and 
 co-operation with, the government. If neither 
 the autocracy nor the opposition rose to a sense 
 of the urgency of the danger, and to the im- 
 mensity of the task to be accomplished, there 
 then would only remain one alternative and one 
 certainty : the infernal circles of anarchy and of 
 red terrorism: facilis descensus Avernil Di hoc 
 omen avertant.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 RUSSIAN POLITICAL EVILS 
 AND THEIR REMEDIES 
 
 FANATICS, extremists, political meta- 
 physicians and doctrinaires of all sects 
 may try to obscure the Russian issues. 
 But the issues are perfectly clear, and the prin- 
 ciples themselves are amazingly simple, al- 
 though their patient and consistent practice may 
 tax all the resources of statesmanship. Both 
 the evils from which the Russian body politic 
 has suffered in the past, and the remedies which 
 will cure the evils are equally obvious to a dis- 
 passionate student of politics. 
 
 The evil is a false philosophy of Imperial- 
 ism. The remedy is the new political philoso- 
 phy of federation. 
 
 The evil is a tortuous Russian statecraft 
 based on intrigue and dissension, a policy in- 
 herited from Frederick the Great. The remedy 
 is a wise and straightforward statesmanship. 
 
 The evil is a mystical belief in an unnatural 
 political unity, in an artificial uniformity. The 
 remedy is the recognition of the complex va- 
 217
 
 218 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 riety of national characteristics, of the rich di- 
 versity of history. 
 
 The evil is a Byzantine immobility, a dread 
 of all fresh revelations of life. The remedy is 
 a belief in movement, in political experiment, 
 even though the experiment may be attended 
 with risk. 
 
 The evil is a belief in State interference, in 
 the magic of regulations, in paternalism and 
 protection. The remedy is a belief in indi- 
 vidual initiative and in individual responsi- 
 bility. 
 
 The evil is a monstrous centralization im- 
 posed upon a heterogeneous conglomerate of 
 one hundred and eighty million human beings. 
 The remedy is systematic decentralization and 
 Home Rule. 
 
 The evil is the inevitable corruption of an 
 arbitrary bureaucracy. The remedy is the pub- 
 licity of the Press denouncing abuses wherever 
 they occur. 
 
 The evil is an exclusive nationalism dis- 
 guised under the name of patriotism. The 
 remedy is equal rights to all nationalities. 
 
 The evil is race fanaticism and race antago- 
 nism. The remedy is race co-operation and 
 race harmony.
 
 RUSSIAN POLITICAL EVILS 219 
 
 The evil is a narrow and shallow policy of 
 obscurantism, sinning against the Holy Spirit. 
 
 The evil is the keeping of the people in igno- 
 rance. The remedy is the spread of popular 
 education, the diffusion of sweetness and light. 
 
 But greatest of all political evils in the Rus- 
 sian Empire has been the insensate dream of re- 
 ligious unity, imposed by authority, the pagan 
 confusion of spiritual and temporal power. 
 The remedy is the separation of Church and 
 State, equal rights to all the Churches, the re- 
 leasing of the tremendous spiritual forces latent 
 in the Russian people. 
 
 The Slavophiles are ever opposing their three 
 mystical and equivocal watchwords : "Samoder- 
 javie," "Pravoslavie," "Narodnost," autocracy, 
 orthodoxy, nationality to the three revolu- 
 tionary watchwords, "Liberty, Equality, Fra- 
 ternity." No doubt it is quite possible to see 
 in the Slavophile doctrine a healthy reaction 
 against a blind imitation of the West, it is quite 
 possible to read a deeper meaning into the 
 Slavophile Trinity, just as it is quite possible 
 to read a perverted meaning into the French 
 Trinity. 
 
 The Slavophile principle of "Samoderjavie," 
 or Autocracy, may only stand for the necessity
 
 220 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 of a strong executive counteracting the cen- 
 trifugal forces and the disintegrating elements 
 of the Russian Empire. It may only express a 
 belief in the value of the Monarchy, as a visible 
 sign of political unity. 
 
 "Pravoslavie," or Orthodoxy, may only stand 
 for the significance of a national Church in the 
 life of the people. It may only mean the rec- 
 ognition of the importance of spiritual unity as 
 the foundation of political unity. 
 
 "Narodnost," or Nationality, may only stand 
 for the recognition of the democratic principle, 
 for loyalty to a national ideal. It may only 
 express a healthy distrust of the many alien 
 races within the Russian Empire. 
 
 But although the Slavophile doctrines are 
 capable of a liberal and democratic interpreta- 
 tion, and have actually received a liberal inter- 
 pretation from noble spirits like Samarine, 
 Aksakov, and Dostoevsky, such certainly has 
 not been the interpretation which they have re- 
 ceived from those pillars of reaction, Katkov 
 and Pobiedonostsev. In recent Russian his- 
 tory, Slavophilism has only been too often a 
 creed of hatred and intolerance, the creed of the 
 Soiouz Ruskago Naroda, "of that infamous 
 League of the Russian people," the oppressors
 
 RUSSIAN POLITICAL EVILS 221 
 
 of the Poles, the butchers of the Jews, the perse- 
 cutors of the Uniats. 
 
 Through the influence of reactionaries it has 
 come about that the theory of "Samoderjavie" 
 has been perverted into a Byzantine despotism. 
 The theory of "Pravoslavie" the principle of a 
 National Church which, as the case of Ireland 
 proves, may be the very reverse of a State 
 Church, has been perverted into the dogma of 
 Csesaro-papism. The democratic principle of 
 "Narodnost" has been perverted into the claim 
 of the stronger nationality to crush the weaker. 
 
 Slavophiles would make us believe that 
 Slavism expresses the pure undiluted Russian 
 spirit. Unfortunately the Slavism of Katkov 
 is often undistinguishable from Pan-Slavism, 
 and Pan-Slavism is but the twin brother to Pan- 
 Germanism. Slavophiles are never tired of ex- 
 tolling their principles as rooted in national tra- 
 dition. Let them beware lest those so-called 
 traditional principles only represent the tradi- 
 tions of a German bureaucracy and of a Pots- 
 dam monarchy: and, unfortunately, it is only 
 too true that those traditions have prevailed at 
 St. Petersburg for two hundred years. At the 
 beginning of the war the German name of 
 Petersburg was changed into the Russian name
 
 222 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 of Petrograd. But, alas! it was not only the 
 name of the capital which had been German. 
 The Russian Government itself was controlled 
 by hyphenated Teutonized Russians, by the 
 German Barons of the Baltic Provinces. Even 
 the Russian Foreign Policy was directed from 
 the Wilhelmstrasse and the politicians who op- 
 pressed the Slav brethren of Poland joined 
 hands with the Prussian Hakatists who op- 
 pressed the Slav brethren of Posen. The All- 
 Powerful Academy of Sciences of St. Peters- 
 burg was a duplicate of the Berlin Academy, 
 and refused to open its doors even to a Men- 
 delieff. The intellectuals of the universities 
 were inoculated with the poison of German 
 economic and political materialism. Bazarov, 
 the Father of Nihilism in Turgenev's "Fathers 
 and Sons," was a disciple of Buchner and 
 Haeckel. 
 
 A hundred years ago, Alexander I, the most 
 liberal ruler of Russian history, was the pupil 
 of Laharpe, himself a disciple of the French 
 Revolutionists, and all through his reign Alex- 
 ander remained under the influence of French 
 Liberalism. The Alliance of the French de- 
 mocracy with the Russian Monarchy is based 
 on political sympathies and elective affinities.
 
 RUSSIAN POLITICAL EVILS 223 
 
 However much the reactionaries of the Katkov 
 School may distrust the principles of 1789, it 
 is under the French banner, it is in the name 
 of the immortal principles of 1789, which were 
 also the guiding principles of the American 
 Revolution, that civilization is taking up arms 
 against Prussianism and Pan-Germanism. 
 After the war those principles adapted to Rus- 
 sian conditions will triumph in the internal pol- 
 icy of the Russian Empire as they are guiding 
 its foreign policy. It would indeed be the 
 most tragic paradox of all human history if 
 millions of Russian patriots had laid down 
 their lives to conquer freedom for their Slav 
 brethren only to be themselves denied freedom 
 at home, and if the Russian Government were 
 fighting for the liberty of the Balkan national- 
 ities only to repress the legitimate aspirations 
 of the nationalities gathered under the Russian 
 flag.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE RUSSIAN WAR OF LIBERA- 
 TION A HUNDRED YEARS 
 AGO, AND TOLSTOY'S 
 "WAR AND PEACE" 
 
 IT is now exactly a hundred years since 
 Napoleon crossed the Niemen and de- 
 clared war to his former friend and ally, 
 Alexander I. Like the passing of the Rubicon 
 by Csesar, the crossing of the Niemen marks a 
 turning-point in human history. Everything in 
 the Russian campaign is stupendous, and stag- 
 gers our imagination. The numbers engaged 
 are on a scale hitherto unexampled in military 
 annals. The most moderate computation ex- 
 ceeds half a million. Nor is the composition 
 of the "Grand Army" less extraordinary than 
 its numbers. It is too often forgotten that in 
 the Russian campaign the French were in a mi- 
 nority. Half the nations of the Continent had 
 sent their contingents to the Lord of the World. 
 
 Danes, Spaniards, Austrians, Poles, had all 
 224
 
 RUSSIAN WAR OF LIBERATION 225 
 
 been coaxed or driven into the service of the 
 Corsican, and were to adorn the supreme tri- 
 umph of Napoleon's career. 
 
 And from beginning to end the Russian Cam- 
 paign is a succession of dramatic contrasts and 
 of tragic incidents. The conflict between the 
 civilized Frenchman and the semi-barbarous 
 Muscovite, the novel theatre of the war, the 
 vast Russian plain alluring and devouring the 
 invader, the guerilla tactics of the Cossacks, the 
 ghastly shambles of Borodino, followed by 
 the victorious entry into Moscow, the burning 
 of the capital in the very hour of victory, the 
 gradual approach of the Arctic winter, the hur- 
 ried retreat, the infinite expanse covered with 
 snow as with a winding sheet, the heroism of 
 Murat and Ney, recalling the Homeric age, the 
 disaster of the Berezina, the secret flight of 
 Napoleon in the dead of night, and, as the last 
 phase, a few straggling and famished hordes 
 returning to the Polish frontier, a remnant of 
 what had been, six months before, a formidable 
 host all those scenes and incidents are written 
 in indelible characters in the annals of human 
 folly and human suffering, and make the cam- 
 paign of Russia one of the most impressive ca- 
 tastrophes of all times.
 
 226 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 II 
 
 It is this catastrophe which is the subject 
 of Tolstoy's novel. Only a literary giant like 
 Tolstoy could have done justice to so gigantic 
 a theme, and it is through this unique combina- 
 tion of a wonderful subject with a wonderful 
 genius that "War and Peace" takes rank as one 
 of the supreme masterpieces of world literature. 
 "War and Peace" is one of the miracles of 
 literary art, and, like every miracle, it neces- 
 sarily evades us. We cannot explain how the 
 miracle came into being. We can only con- 
 template the achievement. We can only ad- 
 mire and inadequately analyse the magic powers 
 displayed: the creative imagination which 
 breathes life into every scene and every charac- 
 ter, and which, indeed, makes the fictitious 
 characters stand out more vividly than the his- 
 torical, the infallible observation and sense of 
 reality which seizes on the most minute details, 
 and which selects with infallible tact the most 
 characteristic touches; the universal outlook 
 which embraces every aspect and every class of 
 society, which introduces us to the drawing- 
 room of the society woman, to the closet of the 
 statesman, and to the hut of the peasant; and,
 
 RUSSIAN WAR OF LIBERATION 227 
 
 above all, the divine gift of sympathy, which 
 can feel with every suffering, which can read 
 into every heart, into the soul of sinner and 
 saint, of young and old, of the worldling and 
 of the common people. 
 
 And as we can only inadequately analyse the 
 powers displayed, so we can only dimly guess 
 the methods employed. One of Tolstoy's fa- 
 vourite methods is the method of contrast, and 
 that method is illustrated in the very title of 
 the book. For we may observe that the title 
 is not "The Great War." The title is "War 
 and Peace." The author gives us the action 
 and reaction of the one on the other. He does 
 not give the military events separately. He 
 gives us the battle scenes on the background of 
 the domestic drama. He makes the pomp and 
 circumstance of war alternate with the peaceful 
 pursuits of everyday life. He shows us events, 
 not merely from the vantage-ground of the bat- 
 tlefield, but from the more important point of 
 view of those who are left at home. He tells 
 us of the war as it affects the old prince on his 
 remote estate, or as it impresses the wives and 
 mothers whose dear ones are taken away from 
 them. Whilst in one scene the hero is dying in 
 the stillness of the starry night, in the next
 
 228 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 scene the heroine is making love, and the little 
 ironies and comedies of ordinary life only 
 heighten the effect of the tragedy. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But "War and Peace" is not only an inspiring 
 epic, the Iliad of the Russian people. It also 
 contains an ethical message of weighty import. 
 From his protracted absorption in his great 
 theme, Tolstoy has emerged with a new concep- 
 tion of war and a new conception of life. De- 
 scribing the military incidents of the campaign, 
 he has come to close quarters with the horrors 
 of modern warfare, with the wholesale and 
 treacherous butchery of gun and grapeshot, 
 which makes no difference between coward and 
 hero. The once dashing young officer of the 
 Crimea is transformed into an ardent anti-mili- 
 tarist. And thus the record of a great patriotic 
 war indirectly becomes a plea in the favour of 
 peace. Or, again, studying the high life of 
 Petersburg and Moscow, Tolstoy cannot help 
 contrasting the selfishness and frivolity of the 
 upper classes with the quiet heroism and the 
 resignation of the illiterate peasant. And thus, 
 what appears at first sight as a description of 
 Russian society life, becomes indirectly the
 
 RUSSIAN WAR OF LIBERATION 229 
 
 glorification of democracy. Or again, tracing 
 the action between cause and effect, Tolstoi has 
 observed how at every stage the individual will 
 is overruled by a Higher Will ; how in the bat- 
 tlefield the leader does not lead, but follows; 
 how victory and defeat are equally at the mercy 
 of forces beyond human control. And thus we 
 see the gambler and Bohemian of earlier years 
 transformed into a Russian Puritan and a Chris- 
 tian Nihilist. 
 
 But although the burning problems of mod- 
 ern life are presented to us in all their aspects, 
 Tolstoy is too much of an artist to obtrude his 
 own theories upon his audience. He lets life 
 teach its own lessons, and he lets the reader 
 draw his own moral. From the first page to 
 the last he remains the objective creator; stand- 
 ing, as it were, outside and above his own crea- 
 tion, he retains his impartiality and his serenity. 
 No doubt he writes with a purpose, but the 
 purpose is hidden from us. The time will soon 
 come in the life of Tolstoy when the story will 
 be overweighted with the message, and when 
 the story-teller will recede in the background 
 and surrender to the leader and preacher. But 
 until the "final conversion" he maintains that 
 perfect equilibrium which is so rarely met with
 
 230 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 in literature, that harmony between the creative 
 artist and the thinker where neither encroaches 
 on the province of the other, and where each 
 remain supreme in his own sphere.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 
 
 PEACE still seems far off. In the words 
 of the King's message: "The end is 
 not even in sight." We do not know 
 when it will come or how it will come, but we 
 do know that the settlement will largely de- 
 pend on Russia. Russia is to-day for the 
 Kaiser the most formidable enemy on land as 
 she was the most formidable enemy for Na- 
 poleon. Russia can be invaded, but she can- 
 not be conquered. She can be beaten, but no 
 people possess greater recuperative power. The 
 Russian Government have pledged themselves 
 that they shall make no separate peace. There 
 is no reason to believe that, if they can help it, 
 they will break their pledge. But in a world 
 conflagration unexpected catastrophes may al- 
 ways happen and it is the duty of a far-seeing 
 statesman to bring even the unexpected into 
 
 their calculations. A hundred years ago the 
 231
 
 232 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 members of the European coalition repeatedly 
 entered into a solemn engagement that they 
 would make no separate peace. The engage- 
 ment broke down under the stress of circum- 
 stances. It is at least conceivable that circum- 
 stances, say the pressure of a national disaster 
 or an internal revolution, might again prove too 
 strong even for the most resolute Government, 
 and no Russian Government would dare refuse 
 a separate peace if the vital necessities of the 
 people demanded it. A few months ago the 
 resistance of Russia was completely paralyzed 
 for lack of ammunition. It might be paralyzed 
 again. Her most prosperous provinces are rav- 
 aged. Grave internal difficulties are ever 
 threatening her. And it is probably in response 
 to popular demand that even so strong a gen- 
 eralissimo as Grand Duke Nicholas was re- 
 moved from the supreme command. One can 
 therefore imagine a combination of tragic cir- 
 cumstances where the Russian Government 
 might be unable to resist the political, financial 
 and military pressure, and might be reduced 
 to accept an inconclusive peace. For Russia 
 as well as for ourselves the danger of an incon- 
 clusive peace is by far the greatest peril which 
 threatens us in the future. The Russian For-
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 233 
 
 eign Secretary recently made a disquieting an- 
 nouncement, that the Russian Government will 
 make no independent peace as long as one single 
 German soldier remains on Russian territory. 
 But what if the last German soldier were to 
 withdraw? Russia will certainly not make a 
 dishonourable peace, but what if financial ex- 
 haustion and internal dissension, aided by Ger- 
 man intrigue and a short-sighted and faint- 
 hearted policy, compelled her to accept an hon- 
 ourable peace, such a peace as Bismarck 
 granted to Austria after Sadowa. 
 
 Let us be under no delusion; as the war is 
 being protracted, as the economic and military 
 pressure increases, as the decision is being de- 
 layed, there exists, at least, a remote danger of 
 a breach in the European Alliance. I admit 
 that the chances are very remote, but Germany 
 may be depended upon to make the most of 
 those chances, and to use all the influence she 
 has got in Russia to compass her ends. It is, 
 therefore, of the greatest practical interest to 
 analyse the nature of the influence which Ger- 
 many actually does wield in the Empire of the 
 Tsar, the precise nature of the relations be- 
 tween Germany and Russia and the means Ger- 
 many possesses of controlling the internal and
 
 234 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 foreign policy of the country, and of eventually 
 deflecting the currents of public opinion. 
 
 II 
 
 The complicated and contradictory relations 
 between the two countries can be summed up 
 very briefly. On the one hand, there existed 
 before the war the closest intercourse between 
 the Russian and the German courts, and that 
 close intercourse extended to the army, to the 
 bureaucracy, to the universities, to the indus- 
 trial and commercial classes. On the other 
 hand, the Russian and the German people are 
 mutually repellent. There is a temperamental 
 antagonism between the two nations, between 
 the dour disciplined Prussian and the easy- 
 going, undisciplined Russian. In the province 
 of ideas, of art and literature, French influence 
 is dominant amongst the intellectual and in the 
 upper classes, but as literature counts for very 
 little, and as trade and industry, the bureaucracy 
 and the court count for a very great deal, and 
 as all these social and political forces hitherto 
 were almost entirely controlled by the Germans, 
 it may be said that before the war German in- 
 fluence was supreme in the Russian Empire.
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 235 
 
 III 
 
 Until Peter the Great, the Romanov family 
 was a national dynasty. It had remained na- 
 tional from sheer necessity, as no European 
 court would have cared to intermarry with Tar- 
 tar and Barbarian princes. Even at the end of 
 Peter the Great's reign, the prestige of Russia 
 had scarcely asserted itself in the politics of the 
 West. Peter the Great expressed a keen desire 
 to pay a visit to the court of Louis XIV. He 
 was politely given to understand that his visit 
 would not be acceptable, even as a poor relation 
 will be told that his visit is not welcome to a 
 kinsman in exalted position. After the death 
 of Louis, the Tsar again asked to be received 
 at Versailles. This time his overtures were ac- 
 cepted, but even at the court of the Regent his 
 visit caused the greatest embarrassment to the 
 masters of ceremonies. The situation was a 
 tragic-comic one. French etiquette could not 
 decide whether the Tartar Prince was to receive 
 the honours which belong of right only to the 
 ruler of a civilized people. 
 
 For the first time in modern Russian history, 
 Peter the Great's daughter, Anne, married a 
 German prince in 1725. With that year be-
 
 236 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 gins that close dynastic alliance with the Ger- 
 man courts which has lasted until our own day. 
 Germany has been carrying on a most thriving 
 export trade of Princes and Princesses with al- 
 most every European monarchy, an export trade 
 of which she is reaping enormous political ad- 
 vantage in the present crisis. But in Russia 
 4 alone she has obtained a monopoly of this royal 
 export trade. All the Russian Tsars have mar- 
 ried German Princesses. For one hundred and 
 fifty years the rule suffered no exception until 
 Alexander II married a daughter of the Danish 
 dynasty, which itself is really the German 
 dynasty of Oldenburg. 
 
 I need not emphasise the supreme importance 
 of those close family relations between the 
 Courts of Russia and Germany, and especially 
 between the Courts of Russia and Prussia. It 
 is the peculiarity of an autocratic Government 
 that the smallest causes are productive of the 
 greatest consequences and amongst those smaller 
 causes none are likely to produce more far reach- 
 ing results than the personal likes and dislikes 
 of the ruler and his family. In the Empire of 
 the Tsars the sympathies of the ruler and of the 
 Imperial family for a hundred and fifty years 
 have generally been German. Women have no
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 237 
 
 less influence in Russia than in other countries, 
 and as every Russian Princess has, for a hun- 
 dred and fifty years, been German in origin, 
 German by training, German by pride of birth, 
 German by prejudice, the Teutonic influences 
 have necessarily been supreme in the Russian 
 Court. Nor must we forget that every German 
 Princess coming to Petrograd would bring with 
 her a numerous suite of ladies-in-waiting and 
 court officials, so that the German Court colony 
 was automatically increasing. Indeed it is no 
 mere chance that the capital, the military har- 
 bour and the chief imperial residences should all 
 have German names Kronstadt Oranienbaum, 
 Schlussenburg, Petersburg and Peterhof. 
 Peterhof has been the Russian Potsdam. 
 Petersburg has been the outpost of Germany in 
 the Russian Empire, the "feste Burg" of Prus- 
 sia until the eve of the war. 
 
 IV 
 
 From what has been said, it is obvious that the 
 national Romanov dynasty, founded in 1613 
 by Michael Romanov, patriarch of all the Rus- 
 sias, ceased to be a Romanov dynasty at the 
 death of Empress Elizabeth in 1761. With 
 Peter III, it is a German dynasty which ascends
 
 \S 
 
 238 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 the throne. Peter III, son of a duke of Hol- 
 stein-Gottorp, is a Romanov in the proportion 
 of one-half; Paul, son of a Princess of Anhalt- 
 Zerlst, in the proportion of one-fourth; Alex- 
 ander I and Nicholas I, sons of a Princess of 
 Wiirttemberg, in the proportion of one-eighth; 
 Alexander II, son of a Princess of Hohenzol- 
 lern, to the extent of one-sixteenth; Alexander 
 III, son of a Grand-Duchess of Hesse-Darm- 
 stadt, to the extent of one thirty-second, and 
 the present ruler, Nicholas II, who married a 
 Princess of the House of Oldenburg, to the ex- 
 tent of one sixty-fourth. One sixty-fourth of 
 the blood of the present Tsar is Russian Ro- 
 manov blood. In the proportion of sixty- 
 three sixty-fourths (*f) it is the blood of Hol- 
 stein, of Anhalt, of Oldenburg, of Hesse, of 
 Wiirttemberg, of Hohenzollern which flows 
 through the veins of the Emperor of all the 
 Russias. 
 
 V 
 
 The history of Russia proves only too con- 
 clusively that again and again her national in- 
 terests have been sacrificed to the German 
 dynastic influences. At the end of the Seven 
 Years' War, Frederick the Great was at his last
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 239 
 
 gasp. Prussia was on the verge of ruin. The 
 Russian army had entered Berlin; the power of 
 the new military monarchy had been totally 
 broken at Kunersdorf. The death of Elizabeth 
 and the accession of her mad nephew, Peter 
 III, retrieved a desperate situation. For the 
 mad nephew was a German Prince, a Duke of 
 Holstein and a passionate admirer of Frederick 
 the Great. Peter III was murdered in 1762. 
 He reigned only a few months, but he reigned 
 sufficiently long to save Prussia from destruc- 
 tion and to surrender all the advantages secured 
 by Russian triumphs and dearly paid for by 
 Russian blood. 
 
 VI 
 
 There is no more fantastic fairy tale and there 
 is no more arresting drama than the life story 
 of Catherine the Great which recently has been 
 so brilliantly told by Mr. Francis Gribble. A 
 Cinderella amongst German royalties, a pauper 
 princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine became the 
 mightiest potentate of her age. Although the 
 nominee of Frederick the Great, she pursued 
 consistently a national Russian policy. And 
 she had good reasons for doing so. For no 
 throne was less secure than the throne of the
 
 240 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 Romanovs. She had had to remove her husband 
 by murder for fear of being removed herself. 
 She continued to be surrounded by a rabble of 
 unscrupulous adventurers and intriguers. Her 
 only safety lay in becoming a patriotic Rus- 
 sian, and in seeking the support of Russian 
 sentiment and Russian opinion. Whilst Fred- 
 erick the Great surrounded himself with French 
 advisers and contemptuously refused even to 
 speak the German language, whilst he declared 
 to the German scholar who presented him with 
 a copy of the "Nibelungen Lied" that this na- 
 tional German epic was not worth a pipe of to- 
 bacco, Catherine the Great systematically en- 
 couraged Russian literature. Whilst Frederick 
 the Great remained the consistent atheist on the 
 throne, Catherine the Great professed the ut- 
 most zeal for Russian orthodoxy. All through 
 her reign she avoided as far as possible a con- 
 flict with Frederick and his successor. She di- 
 vided with them the spoils of Poland, or as 
 Frederick the Great put it in his edifying theo- 
 logical language, she partook of the eucharistic 
 body of the Kingdom in unholy communion 
 with Prussia and Austria. But Catherine saw 
 to it that Russia secured the greater part of the 
 spoils.
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 241 
 
 VII 
 
 There is a curious and uncanny similarity be- 
 tween the character and the reign of Peter III 
 and the character and reign of his son, Paul I. 
 Both reigns were brief, yet both reigns had an 
 incalculable influence on European affairs. 
 Both rulers sacrificed national interests to dynas- 
 tic interests. Both rulers were insane and both 
 engaged in insane enterprises. Both rulers 
 were murdered with the complicity or conniv- 
 ance of their own family. The Russian armies 
 on the advent of Peter III had secured and 
 achieved a dramatic victory over Prussia, but 
 the admiration of Peter III for Frederick the 
 Great prevented Russia from reaping the fruits 
 of victory. Suvorov crossed the Alps and 
 achieved an equally sensational victory over 
 France, but Paul I was prevented from taking 
 advantage of his victories by his admiration for 
 Napoleon. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The reign of Alexander I once more strikingly 
 illustrates the enormous part which subter- 
 ranean German influences have played in the 
 foreign policy of Russia. After the costly vie-
 
 242 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 tories of Eylau, and Friedland, Napoleon I 
 had concluded with Alexander I the Peace of 
 Tilsit. The treaty was fatal to Europe, for it 
 divided the Continent practically between the 
 Russian and French Empires. But it was 
 highly advantageous to Russia and enormously 
 added to Russian power and Russian prestige. 
 
 It was certainly in Russia's interest to main- 
 tain the alliance. It was broken largely 
 through one of those small dynastic incidents 
 which are of such vast importance under an 
 absolute despotism. One of Napoleon's main 
 objects was to establish a Napoleonic dynasty 
 and to be adopted by marriage into one of the 
 ruling families of Europe. The Corsican par- 
 venu passionately desired a matrimonial alli- 
 ance with the House of Romanov, and repeat- 
 edly applied for the hand of one of Alexander's 
 sisters. The dowager Tsarina, Alexander's 
 mother, a daughter of the King of Wiirttem- 
 berg, as persistently refused. She had all the 
 pride of birth of a German Princess and all the 
 hatred of a reactionary against the armed sol- 
 dier of the Revolution. Foiled at the Court of 
 Petersburg, Napoleon was more successful at 
 the Court of Vienna. A few months after Na- 
 poleon's last overtures had been rejected by
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 243 
 
 Russia, the Hapsburgs, who, after the Bour- 
 bons, were the most august, the most ancient 
 dynasty of Europe, eagerly accepted what the 
 Romanovs had refused. The War of 1812 
 with Russia was the result of that pro-German 
 policy of the Russian Court. 
 
 IX 
 
 During the reigns of Nicholas I and Alexander 
 II the German-Austrian influence reached its 
 zenith at the Court of Petersburg. Nicholas I 
 was the brother-in-law of the Prussian Hohen- 
 zollern. An able and an honest man in his pri- 
 vate relations, he was in his political capacity a 
 Prussian martinet, as even Treitschke is com- 
 pelled to admit, and he organized his empire on 
 the strictest Frederician principles. The court, 
 the army, and the bureaucracy were Prussian- 
 ized as they had never been before. A German 
 bureaucrat, Nesselrode, who could not even 
 speak the Russian language, for forty years con- 
 trolled, as foreign minister, the policy of the 
 Russian Empire. Even as his grandfather, 
 Peter III, even as his brother, Alexander I, had 
 saved Prussia from destruction, so Nicholas I 
 saved Austria from a similar fate. Francis 
 Joseph had ascended a throne shaken to its
 
 
 244 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 foundations. Hungary was in open rebellion. 
 The young Austrian Emperor appealed to Rus- 
 sia for help. Nicholas I sent an army to quell 
 the revolution and established his cousin on the 
 Hungarian throne. It is unnecessary to add 
 that Francis Joseph was as loyal and as grateful 
 to Russia as Frederick the Great had been. 
 
 Alexander I had refused to accept Napoleon 
 I as a brother-in-law. Even so did Nicholas 
 I refuse to recognize Napoleon III as Emperor 
 of the French. It was a gratuitous insult in- 
 spired by Prussia, it was opposed to Russian in- 
 terests and it was one of the main causes of the 
 Crimean War. 
 
 X 
 
 Under Alexander II the alliance of the three 
 reactionary empires of Central Europe was 
 welded even more firmly than under his prede- 
 cessor. Bismarck during his tenure of the Prus- 
 sian Embassy at Petersburg was the chosen fa- 
 vorite of the Russian Court. An understanding 
 with Russia became the chief dogma of his po- 
 litical creed and it remained so until the end. 
 It was Bismarck's adherence to the Russian- 
 Prussian Alliance which was one of the causes 
 of the dismissal.
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 245 
 
 Alexander II did nothing to guard against the 
 German peril. He might have been the umpire 
 of Central Europe as Alexander I had been fifty 
 years before. He demanded no compensation 
 for the enormous accession of power and terri- 
 tory which Germany had received through the 
 victorious wars of 1863, 1866 and 1870. He 
 insisted on no guarantees. When after Sedan, 
 Thiers came to St. Petersburg to obtain the in- 
 tervention of the Russian Empire, he was dis- 
 missed with empty words. One year after 
 Thiers' fruitless journey, Emperor William paid 
 an official visit to his nephew, Alexander II, and 
 the Tsar once more proclaimed the indissoluble 
 solidarity of Russia with Germany. Until the 
 end of his reign the German-Austrian-Russian 
 Alliance, the famous dynastic Alliance of the 
 Three Emperors remained the keystone of Eu- 
 ropean policy and the mainstay of Russian re- 
 action. 
 
 XI 
 
 The influence of Germany at the Russian Court 
 was strengthened by the influence of Germany 
 on the Russian bureaucracy. An agricultural 
 community without a middle class, Russia has 
 had to recruit her civil services almost entirely
 
 246 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 from the outside, mainly from Germany and 
 more especially from the German Baltic prov- 
 inces of Esthonia, Livonia and Courland. 
 Teutonic barons from those Baltic provinces 
 have filled the higher ranks of the diplomatic 
 service and of the civil service for a hundred and 
 fifty years. The Russian Tsars found the Ger- 
 man barons far more serviceable tools than the 
 Russian boiars. In a previous age one Em- 
 peror after another had been removed by a re- 
 bellious aristocracy. The highest nobles in the 
 land had been implicated in the Decabrist con- 
 spiracy at the end of Alexander I's reign. Even 
 under Alexander II there were always a few 
 members of the nobility to be found as accom- 
 plices in the revolutionary plots. But there 
 never was one single German from the Baltic 
 provinces implicated in a conspiracy against re- 
 action. It is easy to understand, therefore, why 
 a Russian autocrat should have preferred the 
 services of the German Baltic barons. The 
 Russian nobleman is casual, lavish, a bad econo- 
 mist, easy-going, generous, and he is corrupt be- 
 cause he is easy-going and generous. He is also 
 much more independent. The Junker is punc- 
 tual, precise, disciplined, generally poor always
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 247 
 
 ambitious. He is also tolerably honest. He 
 is the ideal bureaucrat. 
 
 XII 
 
 German influence has been no less dominant in 
 the Russian academies and in scientific institu- 
 tions. The Academy of Sciences of St. Peters- 
 burg was organized on the pattern of the Acad- 
 emy of Berlin. It was an official institution 
 with high privileges and it remained consistently 
 German. Until recently its proceedings were 
 published in the German language and German 
 scientists were invariably preferred rather than 
 Russian scientists. Mendelieff, one of the most 
 creative scientific minds of his generation, was 
 a member of every European academy except 
 the Academy of Petersburg. 
 
 The Germans have been an even greater 
 power in the Russian universities. They took 
 full advantage of the prestige which German 
 science had acquired in Europe, and they largely 
 filled the ranks of the Liberal professions. Ger- 
 man doctors, German veterinary surgeons, Ger- 
 man "Feldschers," German foresters, German 
 engineers, were to be found in every part of the 
 Empire. A casual reading of the post-office
 
 248 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 directories of Moscow, or Petersburg, or Kiev, 
 provides a most instructive commentary on the 
 extent of the German domination. 
 
 XIII 
 
 Securely entrenched in the Russian Court, in 
 the army, in the bureaucracy, in the universi- 
 ties, in the diplomatic service the Germans se- 
 cured a no less commanding influence in trade 
 and industry. As we already pointed out, Rus- 
 sia until recent years had remained an agricul- 
 tural country without a middle class. The 
 trade remained almost entirely in foreign hands. 
 Already in the Middle Ages, Russian cities, like 
 Novgorod, were affiliated to the German Han- 
 seatic League. In the sixteenth century ad- 
 venturous English explorers and traders, whose 
 exploits are amongst the most thrilling of "Hak- 
 luyt's Voyages," tried to oust their German com- 
 petitors, but they utterly failed. The Russians 
 themselves are excellent traders, and the mer- 
 chant guilds of Moscow have been for centuries 
 a powerful commercial organization. Even to- 
 day you will meet in Moscow unassuming Rus- 
 sian merchants leading the simplest of lives and 
 possessed of enormous wealth. But the Rus- 
 sian merchant is generally conservative, unen-
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 249 
 
 terprising, a bad linguist, and servilely attached 
 to ancient usages. He is scarcely a match for 
 the foreigner. In recent years British and Bel- 
 gian traders as well as Jews and Armenians have 
 shared in the enormous trade of the Russian 
 Empire, but the Germans have secured the lion's 
 share. 
 
 And what is true of Russian trade is equally 
 true of Russian industry. The liberal economic 
 policy of Witte has created in one generation 
 powerful industrial centres in Central Russia, 
 and especially in Poland. Here again the Ger- 
 mans have benefited more than all their com- 
 petitors together. Lodz, the "Manchester of 
 Russian Poland," has ceased to be either Polish 
 or Russian, and has become a German manu- 
 facturing town. Caprivi, Bismarck's successor, 
 negotiated with the Russian Government a 
 treaty of commerce which gave enormous ad- 
 vantages to German industry and if the German 
 Government had continued to show the wisdom 
 of Bismarck and Caprivi, Germany would cer- 
 tainly have profited more than any other coun- 
 try by the commercial expansion of the Russian 
 Empire.
 
 250 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 XIV 
 
 It might have been expected that a German in- 
 fluence so absolutely supreme in every sphere 
 of society, in every walk of life should have ex- 
 tended to the lower classes. But the common 
 people were never affected by German methods 
 and remained untainted by the German spirit. 
 To the Russian moujik, the German remained 
 the Niemets, the mute, the alien enemy. The 
 Russian peasant, with his simple ways and his 
 child-like faith, a mystic and an idealist, has an 
 instinctive antipathy to the modern Prussian 
 who is an implacable realist, selfish, calculating 
 and aggressive. The persistence with which the 
 Russian people have resisted and escaped Prus- 
 sian influence is not the least convincing proof 
 of the soundness of the Slav character. 
 
 XV 
 
 We have seen German influence supreme in the 
 province of the practical, the tangible, the use- 
 ful. It is all the more remarkable that it 
 should be insignificant in the sphere of the 
 ideal and of the beautiful. In art and liter- 
 ature the influence of Germany has been 
 purely superficial although the beautiful Rus-
 
 RUSSIA AND GERMANY 251 
 
 sian language has often been spoiled by the 
 influence of a cumbrous German syntax. With 
 the exception of Nietzsche, no German writer 
 has left his mark on Russian literature. The 
 literary influence of Great Britain has been 
 much more extensive and has grown enormously 
 during the last generation. But it is the lit- 
 erature of France which has been the dominant 
 factor in the literary life of modern Russia. 
 The fascination of French culture has been as 
 old as Russian culture. Catherine II was the 
 friend of Diderot and Voltaire and herself trans- 
 lated French masterpieces into Russian. The 
 French language has been the language of 
 diplomacy and society. Readers of "War and 
 Peace" will remember how the noblemen of the 
 Petersburg salons denounced the French usurper 
 in the language of Voltaire. 
 
 XVI 
 
 We have sufficiently proved that Germany has 
 been a formidable factor in the whole past his- 
 tory of the Russian Empire. We may hope 
 that after the war German influence will be a 
 thing of the past. After the war it is not Ger- 
 man political ideas and German institutions, but 
 French and British ideas and institutions which
 
 252 GREAT RUSSIA 
 
 will mould the destinies of the Russian Empire. 
 The elective affinities between the Russian de- 
 mocracy and the French and British democracies 
 will assert themselves and will eliminate the 
 mischievous and reactionary influence of Ger- 
 many. 
 
 We have seen how entirely German power 
 has been artificial and imposed from above, how 
 it has been the outcome of the dynastic connec- 
 tion. But in the meantime the German influ- 
 ence^ supreme before the war, still subsists and 
 still constitutes a danger which it would be ex- 
 tremely unwise and unstatesmanlike to ignore 
 or to under-rate. We must therefore guard 
 ourselves so that when the day of settlement 
 comes the subtle and subterranean German 
 forces shall not make themselves felt, and that 
 the Teutonic monarchies shall be frustrated in 
 their supreme effort to retain a power which has 
 been so fatal to the liberties of Europe and to 
 the free development of the Russian people.
 
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