Ferdinand Ossendowski

“ And thus passes night after night for weeks and months, till the unemployed peasants, with the perfect education of the night asylum, give themselves up to the employer of "black labour." Now they have become familiar with the city; they know how to retort boldly and quickly, have forgotten to bow low, looking insolently straight into people's eyes; they do not uncover their heads before holy images any more; they have a look of hatred and of resignation.
Now they start the true factory life, leading either to prison or back to the village, carrying with it new customs and diseases. ”

“ Upon the morning, at dawn, the old witch arrives, frees the unfortunate one from her fetters, wakes her up out of the swoon by pouring brandy down her throat, and salutes her with a magic formula, no doubt as old as the Slav world. From that day the girl has become a witch, and starts her own practice. The old woman fears no longer that her young disciple will escape, as the news of her having been betrothed to the devil has already reached the village, and if the latter dared to appear there, she would find certain death at the hands of the superstitious peasant women. ”

“ And he will be for Christian civilisation an Antichrist, black or red, an antithesis of the evolution of the spirit and of progress—the first harbinger of the approaching doom of mankind.
That terrible shadow coming from the East has happened more than once before in the history of mankind, and has been always gloomy, like autumnal night, like the soul of suicide. ”

“ Full-fledged autocracy is being floated upon the sea of social-communistic slogans, which remain an empty sound.
Europe, enchanted, listens to the wonderful song of words—fetishes—and does not perceive the spreading licence, disease, famine, and death, remains deaf to the cracking of human bones devoured by human beings, does not look into the caves of the Cheka, does not want to understand that everything in Bolshevism is and will remain as of old, although the scenery is changed, and sometimes the names and even the persons are changed. ”

“ But reality presents an entirely different picture.
Never before flourished In such fame and such glory the powerful mystic charms of the Church. Never before have the once secret Sectarian temples attained to such gower, have the mysteries of the "floggers" been frequented by such multitudes, has the "seal of the white dove" been preserved with such precision, the simple, fatigued, and hungry folk thronged so passionately to the wizards, and last, but not least, never before has sorcery had such amazing success and importance in the life of the whole Russian nation. ”

“ The witch herself is not allowed to appear in the street. If she were not seized at once by the police or priest, she would fall into the hands of peasant women. Every one of them turns to her in case of need, bringing rich presents or money, but every one of them knows that all misfortunes befalling the inhabitants of the village are the result of demoniac curses. And should the peasant women behold the poor, friendless old hag in the street, they might pursue her in a crowd, surround her and beat her, beat her womanlike with gradual, pitiless, tormenting torture. ”

“ But the attention of the crowd was riveted, not by the habit, the face and the black hair, not even by the undefined mysteriousness of the portrait. One and all were looking into the black, piercing eyes, vivid and watchful, like the eyes of an animal preparing for a sudden and dangerous assault. When in turn I looked, approaching the portrait, the eyes vanished behind the radiant veil which emerged from the mysterious black profundity of those piercing pupils.
"It's not a man, it's the devil," said someone among the spectators.
"It's Rasputin!" explained another. "What do you want?" ”

“ One day the news came that during one of his love excursions in a village a fight ensued, and that Grishka knifed one of the peasants. After this he did not return to the monastery, but in the disguise of a monk wandered a long time in Siberia, till he reached the Volga. Here he soon acquired fame as a "saint," "God's man," among the elderly women devotees of the rich merchant class.
Of course, it was impossible to deny that this man possessed some extraordinary powers, his wild, catlike, glowing eyes seemed to pierce into the brains of men, to enter into their very souls. ”

“ I perceive the menace of the East, In whose vanguard marches the Russian multitude of Mongolian half-breeds, followed by swarming hosts of utterly despondent Asiatics, burning with hatred, demoralised and revolutionised by Soviet diplomatists, with the bloodstained gold taken from the murdered, broken off the sacred images and crosses, carried away from temples of learning. ”

“ The tribal bonds of the peoples and races constituting Russia have loosened, and there now remains nothing to bind them together again.
Terror, famine, disease, a struggle for existence baffling all imagination, have demoralised the whole of Russian society. The educated man has become degraded, has let himself go, has again approached the state of primitive nomad who only fights for his crumbs of bread, and is even unable to find sustenance for his own family, which has broken up completely, if not physically, sometimes certainly morally. ”

“ It may be that just this position of the Russian woman drove her so often into the bloodstained, fiery embrace of revolution, into Bolshevik madness and its abominably cruel revenge, or into those extreme associations or groups which are entirely outside even Soviet law.
It may be this position made the woman generally ant easy prey to man, a being not desirous of tenderness of feeling, but only of excitement, and the easiest way of self-forgetfulness. ”

“ He was one of the first Russians who had the courage to foretell openly that Russia was sinking fast into the abyss of anarchy and revolution, and forecast with great precision—as the history of the Empire proved—the immediate fate of his country.
Stolypin maintained that the revolution would be started by the working masses, the bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia, and that it would quickly spread to the peasants and the army. In the whirl of struggles would perish the dynasty, the aristocracy, the landed gentry, and the educated classes. ”

“ Having lived in Tsarist and later on in Soviet Russia, I have had the opportunity of observing such a decline of morality among the workmen and peasant youth, that I could not, without offending the ethical sense of my readers, describe adequately the terribly filthy, abominably criminal life of the Russian youth, which will replace the present generation in the social and national life, and which constitutes a terrible menace, not only to the Russian nation, but to the whole world. ”

“ We are the freest of all the peoples in the world. Now we may ourselves plunder gold, teach the bourgeois to sweep the streets or to scrub the floors, we can battle in the streets of our own cities carolling: 'Let the three of us attack courageously yon man, for victory is good to drink after the stress of the laborious day!'
"We are free, but liberty has brought us an uncommon gift—hunger, a famine the like of which the world has never seen before. ”

“ The commonest forms of soothsaying among Russian people are those which have descended from the age of heathenism. These are the auguries from blood and from water. I have seen all such forms of fortune-telling in the province of Pskov, the most backward of all the provinces of Russia. There they thrive among the marshy wastes, in the thick forests, or the sandy shores of the River Wyelika and the banks of the Pskov Sea, the embodiment of heathen superstitions. ”

“ All these personalities were proved on inquiry to have had relations with the monarchist party in Siberia; it may be that those relations extended even further to the die-hard monarchists of the Markov group in Berlin and the Dumbadse group in Yokohama.
For the monarchists refuse to understand that times have changed, and that their programmes are a hopeless anachronism. They still work feverishly for their political aims in all the capitals of the world, poor dreamers whom reality has long ago thrown on to the blood-stained scrapheap of history. ”

“ I knew Russia from her Western confines right to the Pacific and the Pamir, and I think I understand the psychology of the peoples of that vast, mysterious land, where modern civilisation of the West and the ideology of Mongolian nomads, the asceticism of orthodox Christianity and heathenism exist together in weird confusion to this very day. The Russian intelligentsia, spiritualised and rising to the loftiest idealism, has long ago cut adrift from the people ”

“ In such moments of fear of the East my mind recalls the cynical words of Engelhard, one of the more distinguished Russian publicists, with which he depicted the coming destinies of Russia:
"We are an anarchic, Tartar people, recognising only the superiority of physical strength, of the armed force, of the mailed fist, of the whip! When we refused to pay taxes, the Government gave us spirits, made us drink everywhere, on each step, even in the streets. ”

“ It was to them that the old wizard was talking; he was whipping them gently; he would not see or understand that they were nothing but the fleeting shadows of the flickering light which darted about, flashing and vanishing away.
"Now they won't come!" said the old man at last in a tone of thorough conviction.
Of course they did not come and I had an excellent bath.
The passion for horse-stealing is characteristic of the Russian nation. It is undoubtedly an atavistic remnant inheritant from their forefathers, the Mongol nomads and Finnish pagans. ”

“ Bolshevism rolls on like a ball of snow, and threatens, not only through the propagation of its slogans, but through millions of hungry, despondent men, grown wild, whom it can throw against the West; threatens through "awakened Asia," where the conflagration is already blazing. The flame will have abundant food—eight hundred million men—who gnash their teeth and clench their fists, while treacherous Bolshevism and Communism, concealing its true face, whispers:
"Forward against the white man! ”

“ IT must be clear to everybody whose eyes have seen and whose ears have listened that Russia is lost morally, and that she now stands on the edge of the abyss of physical perdition.
The policy of the Soviets, which was always and is still directed towards the ruin of family, Church, morality, and society, has conquered.
The women, cast into the whirl of a ruthless struggle for the day that is, have ceased to be wives and mothers.
The men, young or old, working hard, have drifted away from the family and are not in a position to assure its existence, to give it protection and moral influence. ”

“ ALWAYS and ever during the Christian era Russia, having accepted the cross as her emblem, has maintained in the customs of her sects the ancient pagan ritual, and has desired instinctively, even subconsciously, from motives hidden in the depth of the souls of those tribes which live amid forests, fields, and mountains, and preserve in their blood so many elements inherited from the primitive nomads—to preserve some link with the "old gods," who, it seemed, perished long ago, annihilated either by the hand of man or the grinding of time. ”

“ After a long silence Witte said:
"Those two always dreamed of war. The Tsar wanted it to come in fifty years' time, the Kaiser wanted it at once. The Tsar knew that the people are bereft of patriotism, intelligence, nerves; that the Treasury is empty; that there are no resources in the stores! The Tsar knew that the revolutionary spirit penetrated deeply the popular masses. ”

“ Why, the favourite subjects of the lofty and rapturous orations of the Russian intelligentsia which captured the ears of Europe were freedom and self-government for the oppressed peoples of Russia, emancipation of women, the education of the masses of the common people, and called forth the enthusiasm of even the most critical political thinkers and philosophers acquainted with Western culture. ”

“ The heroism, high courage, and magnanimity of the Russian woman are the instinctive protest against such enslavement, against such degradation to the position of a mere factor, an outlaw in the social and national life.
At present, under Soviet rule, having obtained the rights of a "human being and citizen," woman was torn from the family frame, compelled to hard work equal to that of man, carried away by the whirl which tossed her on the men, who more and more lose the sense of respect for the woman that becomes gradually "socialised." ”

“ The spiritual, refined culture of the highly educated Russian class and aristocracy, the genuine idealistic impulse of Russian arts, the piety and asceticism of the higher clerical hierarchy, the general very high level of education and intelligence of the middle classes, the profound learning of the most prominent scientists, the true heroism and high courage of military officers in the most aristocratic of Russian units, the æsthetic life and thought of the nobility—all these were eloquent witnesses soliciting the sympathies of the world for the Russian nation. ”