Russian settlement

“ Russia is building up her culture not in a confined space already occupied and settled, but in a free colonial area which is continually expanding, and at the same time is constantly connected territorially with the centre from which it expands. When the Russian State was being formed, the Moscow region was such a centre. ”

“ These village republics are confined in practice to Great Russia, and the genuine Russ. In Finland, in the Baltic provinces, they are unknown; in Astrakhan, Siberia, and Kazan, they are unknown; in Kief, Podolia, and the Ukraine steppe, they are unknown; in the Georgian highlands, in the Circassian valleys, on the Ural slopes, they are equally unknown. In fact, the existence of these peasant republics in a province is the first and safest test of nationality. Wherever they are found, the soil is Russian, and the people Russ. ”

“ They belong to one of the great races of pioneers and backwoodsmen. All the history of the Russian people, from the foundation of Moscow, is that of their advance into the forest, into the Black Land, into the prairie. ”

“ Nothing stands in Russia’s way, and she is always quietly colonising the empty East.
An interesting yearly chart might be issued by the Russian Government showing the waves of colonisation: the new spots in forests and deserts that have been given names, the new farms, the thickening of the population in the nearer-in districts, the efflorescence of Russian enterprise at the farthest-out points whither they have gone. Several hundred Russian families are settled in Northern Persia, several hundred also in Mongolia and China. ”

“ I hope, moreover, that the Russian people, after the conquest of their armies, will free themselves from Tsarism through an internal movement by which the present political Russia will be resolved into its natural units, namely, Great Russia, the Caucasus, Little Russia, Poland, Siberia, and Finland, to which probably the Baltic Provinces would join themselves. ”

“ Division of the Russians of to-day into three branches—How Russia was colonized In the time of Nestor (end of the 11th century) , the Russian Slavs confined between the Lithuanians on the west, the Finns on the north, and the Turks on the east, hardly occupied one-fifth part of Russia in Europe. To-day we see the Russian race extend from Finland to the Oural, from the Icy Ocean to the Caucasus and Crimea, amounting to 56,000,000 men, besides 3,000,000 colonists in the Asiatic provinces. The Letto-Lithuanians on the contrary are reduced to 2,420,000 souls ”

“ In 1887, Alexander ordered that, when a foreign landowner in Poland died, his estate must be sold unless his heirs had been residents of Poland before this order was published. Germany, suffering from Pan-Germanism, collected several thousand Russian Poles who had settled in Germany, and put them across the frontier. Russia replied by making a law in the Baltic provinces that nothing but Russian could be taught in any school, and that no more Lutheran churches could be built without the permission of the Holy Synod. ”

“ The enemy is in deserted Moscow as in a tomb, without means of domination or even of existence. He entered Russia with three hundred thousand men of all countries, without union or any national or religious bond;—he has lost half of them by the sword, famine, and desertion: he has but the wreck of this army in Moscow; he is in the heart of Russia, and not a single Russian is at his feet. ”

“ The Russians took possession of the city, prosecuted the war vigorously through the summer, and the tzar, on the 20th of October, which was his birthday, received the gratifying intelligence that every foe was quelled, and that the Russian government was firmly established on the shores of the Caspian. Well might Russia now be proud of its territorial greatness. The opening of these new realms encouraged commerce, promoted wealth, and developed to an extraordinary degree the resources of the empire. ”

“ The system of giving a separate dominion to every son of a grand prince had ruined Russia. These small potentates were constantly at war, confusion reigned supreme, Kief was taken and degraded and a new capital, Vladimir, established, and Moscow, which was to become the fourth capital of Russia, was founded. Such was the state of affairs when Batou, with his vast horde of savage horsemen, fell on the distracted realm.
Defence was almost hopeless. Russia had no government, no army, no imperial organization. Each city stood for itself, with great widths of open country around. ”

“ Such, in brief, was the great conflict between the East and West, during which Moscow came into being as the supreme head, the living center and germ of Russian autocracy.
It seems to have been the extraordinary vitality of one family which twice changed the currents of national life: first drawing them from Kief to Suzdal, then from Suzdal toward Moscow, and there establishing a center of growth which has expanded into Russia as it exists to-day. ”

“ As for saying that the inhabitants of New Russia are nothing but Finns and Russified Turks, one might as well pretend that the 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 of North America are Red-skins who have learnt English and embraced Protestantism.
We must recognize that the Russian, almost as much as the Anglo-Saxon, has the instinct which drives men to emigrate and found colonies. The Russians do in the far East of Europe what the Anglo-Saxons do in the far West of America. ”

“ Russia is, in itself, a land of contradictions. The proverb, that extremes meet, might have originated there. The Russian empire is too large and diversified to be characterised by a single epithet. It includes a larger number of distinct races blended together than any other country in the world: it is the home of almost unnumbered tribes, bound together by the tie of a common government, but separated from each other in every other respect. There you may see, in one nation, all the grades of civilisation, from the most primitive barbarism to the highest refinement. ”

“ Land that had belonged to the Russian peasantry was taken over by the foreign parasites, and while the Tsar’s Minister, were toiling and moiling to transport hundreds of thousands of Russian husbandmen and their families in search of land beyond the Ural Mountains to the virgin forests of Eastern Siberia, there in the very heart of European [66] Russia were hundreds of thousands of intruders, who, with the help of their German Colonial banks, were acquiring additional tracts of land from which their native owners had been ousted. ”

“ Moscow should have remained the Russian capital. With an admirable climate, at once keen enough to keep the human frame in its vigour, and with the warm summer of the south, to supply all the vegetable products of Europe; its position commanding the finest provinces of Western Asia, Russia would have been mistress of the Black Sea a century earlier, had probably been in possession of Asia Minor, and have fixed a Viceroy in the city of the Sultans. ”

“ For small transactions pieces of marten skins, squirrels’ heads, squirrels’ ears even—the latter less than a farthing in value—had been in vogue, but were gradually displaced, as was the giving of gold and silver by weight, in the larger transactions of commerce.
We have thus traced the development of the Russian state from its inception, to its compacting and centralization as the Grand Duchy, or Principality of Moscow, whose subsequent tsars brought under their sway most of the territory included within the boundaries of the modern empire. ”

“ It is the opposition of German and Russian, for most of the great population of Russia is Slavonic—that is, made up of Slavs—and Russia became the name of most of the immense territory occupied by the Slavs. It is said that the name of Russia had its origin in three great leaders of men who came from a province called Rus, in Sweden. ”

“ Let us think of Russia with her bigness, her space, her consciousness of unity, and of the large thing, and remember we have all the possibilities of health and splendour that the Russians have if we will only face our problems and do the things which are obvious to all except to those who fight in the political arena for fighting’s sake.
To recapitulate:
(1) Russia has at least double the white population in her Empire that we have in ours. Why should we not take steps to transplant from over-crowded Britain to the less crowded parts of the Empire, and so get better families? ”

“ The Russian Empire falls into two great subdivisions, the European and the Asiatic, the latter of which, representing an aggregate of nearly 6,500,000 square miles, with a population of only sixteen million inhabitants may be considered as held by colonies. The European dominions comprise European Russia, Finland, which is, in fact, a separate nationality treated to some extent as an allied state, and Poland, whose very name has been erased from official documents, but which nevertheless continues to pursue its own development. ”

“ The Russia which thus emerged into being was indeed an infant, compared with the gigantic empire in this day of its growing and vigorous manhood. It embraced then but a few thousand square miles, being all included in the present provinces of St. Petersburg, Novgorod and Pskov. But two years passed away ere Sineous and Truvor died, and Rurik united their territories with his own, and thus established the Russian monarchy. The realms of Rurik grew, rapidly by annexation, and soon extended east some two hundred miles beyond where Moscow now stands, to the head waters of the Volga. ”

“ Russia had, besides Novgorod, other commercial cities, with republican institutions. Kief was certainly not without law. And the many tribes of hunters, shepherds, and farmers must have had their legal customs. But with all this there was no code for the empire, no body of written laws. The first of these was prepared about 1018 by Yaroslaf, for Novgorod alone, but in time became the law of all the land. This early code of Russian law is a remarkable one, and goes farther than history at large in teaching us the degree of civilization of Russia at that date. ”

“ Though they have long been an integral part of the Empire, there are thousands of the inhabitants who cannot speak Russian, and refuse to teach it to their children. They are less revolutionary in their ways than the Poles, but none the less desirous of preserving their national characteristics.
"The population of Russia is about one hundred millions," he continued, "and it is spread over an area of nearly if not quite seven million square miles of land. Russia occupies about one-eighth of the land surface of the globe, but is very thinly inhabited. ”

“ There was a national instinct which impelled Russia eastward. Twice had Europe been invaded by Asiatic hordes, and, owing to its position, Russia was doomed to bear the brunt of the onset. Russia's history points out a ceaseless desire to be a European nation, to share with Europe its progress and its burdens. It is within a few years that the heir to the throne first visited the extensive Asiatic dominions. No czar had ever put foot in them. Until the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855) , the Russian Empire spread eastward much as the United States expanded westward, by individual effort. ”

“ Will the Russian sovereigns be content to consolidate what they have acquired? If, on the contrary, they should be influenced by ambition, what extravagant enterprises may they not attempt! And yet they have lost Moscow, her wealth and resources, and those of many other cities! ”

“ The economic and political evolution of Russia, as indeed in no less measure the general cultural development of the land, is marked by one original distinguishing trait. In order clearly to understand this originality, one fundamental all-determining peculiarity of Russian history, and above all of her economic evolution, must be steadily kept in mind. Russia has never ceased to be a land which continues to colonize and be colonized within its own bounds. ”

“ The greatest of these divisions, the Eastern, lies entirely within the boundaries of the Russian Empire. The sub-divisions of the Eastern group are as follows: The Great Russians occupying the vast inland territory and numbering alone between forty and fifty millions, the Little Russians inhabiting the entire south of Russia from Poland to the Caspian, and the White Russians, the least numerous of this division, in Smolensk, Wilna, and Minsk, the west provinces bordering on the Lithuanians and Poles. ”

“ When the steppes of the south became the prey of Asiatic nomads, the Russian population flowed back in a vast wave, from the banks of the Dnieper to the Upper and Middle Volga. We see the princes of Souzdal calling to their aid the inhabitants of the banks of the Dnieper, while in the forests of the north new cities are constantly founded by the people of Novgorod. The Russia of Kief once destroyed, a new Russia begins to form itself, almost out of the same elements, at the opposite extremity of the Oriental plain. ”

“ The flat and monotonous soil has no hold on its inhabitants; they will find as bare a landscape anywhere. As for their hovel, how can they care for their hovel? it is burned down so often. The Western expression, the “ancestral roof,” has no meaning for the Russian peasant. The native of Great Russia, accustomed to live on little, and endure the extremes of heat and cold, was born to brave the dangers and privations of the emigrant's life. ”

“ A Russian feels himself at home everywhere within Russia; and, in a political sense, this rambling disposition of the people, and the close intercourse between the inhabitants of the various provinces to which it leads, contributes to knit a closer bond of union between the people, and to arouse and maintain a national policy and a patriotic love of country. ”