Harold Whitmore Williams

“ The difference between the British Empire and the Russian Empire is that in Russia there are no dividing oceans. If we could think of the British Empire as being all of a piece, with all its great variety of people jostling each other on a great plain, we should realise more clearly the national problems of the Russian Empire. ”

“ Then again, Russian civilisation, while it has an assimilating effect, while it seems to mould the various peoples of the Empire after one type, has at the same time the effect of creating a new variety. First of all, you have an apparent assimilation. You find the old customs disappearing and people becoming simply modern. You find a dreary monotony in dress, in habits, in amusements. You see the cinematograph in all corners of the Empire, flashing out the same pictures that are shown in Paris, and London, and New York. ”

“ But in Russia the Jewish question is most acute, first of all because nowhere else are there so many Jews in a compact mass, and in the second place because of the marked inadequacy of Russian administrative methods as they are brought to bear on the complex necessities of the case. These are the two elements which make the Jewish problem in Russia so acute and perplexing. On the one hand you have the cruel and intolerable oppression of the Jews. You have the perpetual humiliation and irritation of the Jews in the small towns, who have no room for expansion, who live poor and miserable lives ”

“ For years we had heard of suffering and oppression, for years we had heard of protests from all sides of the Empire against police and government measures of all kinds, and it appeared on a superficial view that there was no general interest at all, that the various nationalities were simply waiting for an opportunity to break away from Russia, that Russia at the first shock might fall asunder. ”

“ There is conflict, there is movement, there is progress, there is disappointment, there is hope, there is tragedy. In the vast process that is Russia, we find as it were cosmical forces at work, tremendous cosmical forces of good and evil, on a scale that we in our quieter empire are hardly able to realise. ”

“ Russia is one huge process of evolution, in which all these various nationalities play a very important and very hopeful part. We hardly realise, I think, that Russia is only beginning to be. Russia has been forming. Russia has during the centuries of her long struggle on the great plain been gathering together the materials for a great existence, for some great new experiment in human life in this world of ours. ”

“ The Esthonians are related to the Finns, and the common people of Esthonia and the Finns understand one another perfectly well, although the educated Finns and Esthonians understand one another with greater difficulty. The Letts are an entirely different people, and are akin to the Lithuanians who live farther south. The Esthonians and the Letts owe the beginnings of their own culture to their hard training under the Germans. There are no people in the world who hate the Germans more than the Esthonians and Letts do, because of the bitterness of their serfdom. The hatred is simply elemental. ”

“ On the one hand there is a constant fight to secure elementary rights of existence in Russia on a level with the other inhabitants of the great plain, and at the same time there is an effort, which is now largely crowned with success, to bring about a new Jewish national revival, and the inner life of the Jews in Russia is extremely interesting because of this conflict of aims and ambitions, and because in the long run this movement is illumined by a spiritual light. ”

“ I have said there are over one hundred languages in the Russian empire, but that does not mean that there are a hundred nationalities. A great many of these languages are spoken only by what we may call ethnic units which still linger in the region of mere folk-lore, which have not obtained any grasp upon civilisation, which are liable to assimilation, which will probably in process of time disappear as separate ethnic communities. In this way, in the north-west of Russia, Finnish tribes are being assimilated and are gradually disappearing. ”

“ Many of these tribes are extremely interesting in themselves, and few parts of the world are so interesting for the ethnologist as is Russia, with its great variety of local customs, its myths, its religions, the wonderful traditions of many of the tribes in the Caucasus, the many strange customs, going back to ancient times, leading back to all kinds of strange and unexpected connections with older civilisations, so that in the far north of Siberia you may find curious reminiscences of the wisdom of the Ganges, all kinds of curious relics of customs, half familiar to us and half unknown. ”

“ Thus the main body of the Finns were almost exclusively under the influence of Swedish civilisation, and there was practically no Finnish movement until after the Finns came under Russian rule. The very peculiar conditions under which Finland became incorporated into the Russian Empire, with complete internal autonomy, with a kind of ring-fence separating the Finns from the rest of the peoples of the Empire, made it possible to develop within Finland a very interesting and a now very strong national movement, which first of all fought very hard against Swedish predominance. ”

“ During the nineteenth century Russia became a very active participant in western civilisation, and there was an extraordinary development of civilisation in Russia, expressing itself in a very great variety of ways, in literature, in art, in economic and social life and in the development of political forms. ”

“ I must admit that the Ukraine movement is a very puzzling movement, because if you look at the Great Russian and Little Russian languages you will see that practically there is hardly more difference between them than between English and Scotch. When I was in Galicia last year, I spoke with Ruthenian peasants. I spoke Russian with slight modifications and they spoke their own language, and we understood each other perfectly. ”

“ Moreover in the last fifty years the Great Russian language has made great progress over the whole of Southern Russia, and although the population of Southern Russia is now in the bulk Little Russian, there is a big streak of Great Russian population amongst the Ukrainians. Sometimes there are islands of Great Russians, sometimes they are to be found in broad strips, and the language spoken in the towns is not the Little Russian but rather a variety of Great Russian with Jewish and occasionally Polish and Little Russian elements. ”

“ First of all, Finland is mainly populated by the Finnish people, who are composed of three Finnish tribes, who, driven there by the northern movement of the Slavs, in their turn drove the Lapps to the far North. The Finnish people of Finland are not isolated. Their territory is geographically and geologically distinct from the neighbouring Russian territory, but they themselves as a people are by no means wholly isolated. ”

“ It is a harsh language. It is a kind of new dialect of Great Russian, and you will find that as economical development progresses, as the industrial centres in Southern Russia increase, as the population migrates and mingles with other elements, the confusion will grow greater—you will find a sort of admixture between Great Russian and Little Russian, and the process of assimilation will develop more rapidly. And all this makes it difficult to determine how far any independent Ukrainian civilisation is possible in Southern Russia. ”

“ Others are weak and feeble. Some of the movements draw their vigour from sources of their own. Others are dependent almost entirely upon Russian civilisation, drawing their material from Russian civilisation translated into their own tongue, and using it as a stimulus of the national force of their own people. Some are independent of Russian civilisation. Some are more or less dependent. Some are dependent partly on Russian and partly on Western civilisation. ”

“ Appeals have been made to our human instincts. The generous sympathies of English men and English women have been enlisted on behalf of many causes. But if we were to put some of these causes side by side and compare them, we should find ourselves confronted by perplexing anomalies. Consider together, for instance, the Finnish and the Jewish questions, or again the Armenian and the Georgian questions. You will discover strange contradictions that are at first sight startling and perplexing. You will ask questions and will probably arrive at broader and more general conclusions. ”

“ The nineteenth century saw the beginning and the rich development of the Finnish national movement. In the Caucasus, the ancient civilisations of Armenia and Georgia, which had sunk into decrepitude, which had lost their vigour and their power, were revived very largely because of the contact of this old stream of civilisation with the new stream of Russian civilisation. ”

“ Some are dependent exclusively on Russian civilisation for the material with which they are building their new national home.
There is an extraordinary variety in these movements, and where there is movement there is conflict, there is conflict with the dominant people, with the Russians, or rather less with the people than with the policy of the Government. Then there are fierce conflicts of the various nationalities amongst themselves, and the quarrels between the nationalities"are very often much more violent than the conflict between Russia and any of the nationalities. ”

“ On the one hand, you have Russian administration, a very complex organisation, a very deep-rooted organisation, which is now undergoing a change, is very slowly and with great pain adapting itself to new economic and social conditions, is being loosened so as to allow greater space and room for economic and national development. ”

“ At the same time it is perfectly obvious that if there is a genuine demand for instruction in Ukrainian in the schools, if it is found that Ukrainian children grow more rapidly into intelligent citizens if they receive primary instruction in their mother-tongue, if there is an increasing development of Ukrainian literature—it seems to me perfectly obvious that no administrative obstacles should be put in the way of the movement ”

“ It was won by the Finns, and Swedish and Finnish gained equal rights in public life. The Finnish movement rapidly developed and during the last thirty years its progress has been most extraordinary, and so the Swedes, who were once predominant, find themselves being elbowed out of the land in which they were masters. The new Finnish literary language is in spirit, though not in structure or vocabulary, Scandinavian. ”

“ I think the natural tendency is for the Russian literary language to gain the upper hand, even if all the present administrative restrictions were removed, because the removal of administrative restrictions would give Russian civilisation even greater power than it has now. ”

“ The new civilisation of the Letts and the Esthonians is partly of German origin and partly Russian, but the intercourse of both peoples with the Russians is growing closer, and they are subjected more and more to the influence of Russian civilisation and culture. ”

“ But the interesting thing in Russia is that the very intensity of Jewish suffering in Russia stimulates the efforts of the Jews, and of those who understand who the Jews are and what they are, to find a real solution. ”

“ Thus the languages of the empire represent an extraordinary variety of linguistic tendencies and of lines of linguistic evolution. Within this broad expanse of Russian territory men have elaborated various forms of speech, which mean various ways of thinking, various ways of looking at the world, various efforts to rise to a spiritual consciousness. ”

“ Then in the Caucasus you have those extremely interesting languages related to Georgian, and also to Armenian, languages which are believed by the scholar who knows them best, Professor Marr, of Petrograd, the son of a Scotch father and a Georgian mother, to form what he calls a Japhetic group, which is a kind of cousin to the Semitic group of languages. ”

“ In 1905, the embargo on the Ukrainian language was removed in Russia, great activity was developed, various works appeared, newspapers, novels, histories, poetry, translations, and so on in great quantities, and the Ukrainian movement gained a new life in Russia. ”

“ Here in Cambridge there are, or were, English students from various countries, there are Scotchmen, Irishmen, South Africans, English and Dutch, there are Indians from various parts of India, there are French Canadians and British Canadians, there are many from the Straits Settlements, from Australia and New Zealand. ”