Russians

“ No foreign influence shall exist in Russia under any form whatever. To maintain this position the Russians have sacrificed more than any people in Europe; and in many senses they have accomplished more. ”

“ All priests, policemen, post office officials, schoolmasters, squires, commercial travellers, and Russian-speaking foreigners will bear witness to how they have been pestered with simple Russians asking for an explanation of passages in the Bible, or asking questions about God. So Russia shows herself alive. Even the taverns, in which there is so much drunkenness and debauch, the Russians have made into something like free churches or open debating societies. ”

“ Russians of all classes, from the peasant up, possess a naturally simple, sympathetic disposition and manner, as a rule, tinged with a friendly warmth whose influence is felt as soon as one crosses the frontier. Shall I be believed if I say that I found it in custom-house officers and gendarmes? For the rest, characters vary quite as much as they do elsewhere. It is a question of individuals, in character and morals, and it is dangerous to indulge in generalizations. ”

“ Look first of all at the Russians, of whom there are nearly one hundred millions in all, of all types, the Great Russian, the Little Russian, and the White Russian, the three great divisions of the Russian people. You have heard in other lectures the history of the elements that made up the Russian people, of the wandering Slav tribes which gradually assimilated a great many of the peoples of the plain. Thus in the north and centre, in Great Russia, there is a very large admixture of Finnish blood, whilst in the south, among the Little Russians, there is a large admixture of Turkish blood. ”

“ Therefore, if we go to the root of this matter, it comes to this: that the Russians are more broadly and widely human than the people of other European or Eastern countries, and, being more human, their capacity of understanding is greater, for their extraordinary quickness of apprehension comes from the heart rather than from the head. ”

“ The Russians alone number about 110 millions, and these millions occupy a vast country reaching from the snows of the far North, to lands where the orange-trees bloom all the year round. The Russian holds that his dear “little mother Russia” is the most beautiful land of all the earth. ”

“ 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 surpassed by no other race. ”

“ It is the general view that Russians differ from Europeans; but we have to remember that the French and the Italians differ from the English; and we have to ask what precisely are the genuine and true characteristics of the Russians and of the Europeans respectively, and how much independence and originality is possessed by the other peoples. ”

“ I like the Russians; they are good fellows, and are greatly slandered in the West. They have a moral code, and with some exceptions, they live up to it, and any nation that crosses arms with them will pay a heavy toll. ”

“ Scores of the Russians of the upper classes, I have heard, say the same thing, notwithstanding their own vanity, which so blinds their eyes that they imagine that by imitating the exterior polish of the French—although omitting the solid enlightenment of that nation—they have really become civilized, and many, I verily believe, think that they have even surpassed them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Russian nation is composed of more than a hundred different races, speaking forty languages. The Russians—properly so called—are the inhabitants of Great and Little Russia, who are from the Slavic races. Besides these, there are Tartars, Poles, Germans, Jews, Finns, Mongols, Persians, and others, who have been united in one nation. The government has permitted these people, as their territory was conquered and annexed to the empire, to retain their own laws and customs, so far as they were not inconsistent with the general code of Russia. ”

“ The Russians are, generally speaking, a good-hearted people, and would eventually become a noble nation under a freer and better government. Many of their vices and crimes proceed from ignorance and fear.
That fine carriage with six horses, the two first bearing postilions in long frock-coats and prodigious cocked hats, putting us in mind of our respected friend Punch on horseback, the two footmen behind in the same becoming costume, and the coachman holding the reins à la Russe with outstretched arms, contains the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg. ”

“ In Russia, it's different. Their souls are more awake, and less covered. The Russians are not businesslike, and they're not sentimental, or humorous. They are spiritually naked by contrast. An odd, moody people. ”

“ It always seems to me that the Russians pronounce their words with more syllabic distinctness than either the French or Germans. And that natural kindness and friendliness of the whole people, of which I have already written, makes them wish to be understood and to help those with whom they are speaking to grasp their meaning. ”

“ But behind this ludicrous theory stood the terrible reality of the Russian Empire; that empire which by every movement proclaims the pretension of considering all Europe as the domain of the Slavonic race, and especially of the only energetic part of this race, of the Russians ”

“ Thus he goes on steadily as long as he lives, with no other thought but that of duty, until he lies down beneath the ikon, and, with the wax candle in his hand just as he had always wished, passes away at peace with every living creature and with God.
There are no peasants like the Russians, or who think as they do. They are young, one feels, and “The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” and that is just what those who know them best find out. ”

“ This ought to be remembered also when we are thinking over future relations between our own people and theirs. The Russians are not a downtrodden and oppressed people struggling to throw off the yoke of a harsh and despotic rule, but are contented, loyal, and law-abiding. ”

“ On the other hand, the Russian peasants of the South, a race altogether distinct in sentiment and imagination from the phlegmatic people of the Central and Northern provinces—Little Russians as they are called—had examples before their eyes of men leading upright, God-fearing lives, modelling their conduct on New Testament teachings, cleanly, thrifty, able agriculturists. ”

“ The Russian Empire, sown by Vikings, Slavs, and Mongols, has a rich racial flora, including Germans, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Letts, Roumanians, Afghans, Tartars, Finns, and scores of others. The Great Russians, the White Russians, and the Little Russians may each claim to have sprung from the purest Russian stock, but no one has as yet been able to settle satisfactorily the meaning of that claim. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Besides the mildness of their government, the Russians have a claim to every praise for the pains they have bestowed, and which have been attended with great success, in converting them to Christianity, there remaining, at present, very few idolaters among them. ”

“ The Russians of the lower class are just like overgrown children: they are as much pleased with a ride on a wooden horse, or in one of the boats of a whirligig, in a swing, or down an ice-hill, as a party of school-children would be. In the grand theatre this last Carnival they have been intensely gratified with the “glorious battle of Sinope,” fought over for their amusement about twelve times every day, in which not a single Russian got wounded, although the heads of the poor Turks were rolling by scores in all directions. ”

“ I should doubt if any peasantry in the world live so simply and frugally or, as they say in the North of England, “thrive so well on it,” as the Russians. The men are of huge stature, and their wives are strong, comely, and wholesome-looking also. Their boys and girls are sturdy, vigorous, and full of life ”

“ Those who have lived long among the Russians, and ought to know them, say the venerative feeling among the common people is very great, and more so among the higher classes than in the Latin countries of Europe. ”

“ All the Society of those times passes before the reader, from its highest spheres, with their heart-rending levity, conventional ways of thinking, and superficiality, down to the simplest soldier in the army, who bore the hardships of that terrible conflict as a sort of ordeal that was sent by a supreme power upon the Russians, and who forgot himself and his own sufferings in the life and sufferings of the nation. ”

“ They are a great contrast to the Russians, who are careless and inexact, and in their worship often nonchalant to their God; to the Russians, who wear nothing correctly and come out in almost any sort of attire ”

“ The tales and descriptions of that time without exception speak only of the self-sacrifice, patriotic devotion, despair, grief, and the heroism of the Russians. ”

“ Besides these Russians and foreigners who propounded new and unexpected ideas every day—especially the foreigners, who did so with a boldness characteristic of people employed in a country not their own—there were many secondary personages accompanying the army because their principals were there. ”

“ I understand only too well why wealthy Russians all flock abroad, and more and more so every year. It’s simply instinct. ”

“ No German-Russians contribute to it. Of all the names by which Russia is known as a nation mighty in art and in thought, not one belongs to the subject nations. In literature—Dostoieffsky, Turgenief, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhof, Gorky, Balmont; in painting—Vasnetsof, Nesterof, Verestchagin, 91Sierof ”

“ “We Russians are always like that. ”

“ This is true of the educated classes of society; but the peasants do not talk of these things so much—the peasants’ talk nearly always turns to God and religion. The Russians are always en route for some place where they may find out something about God, and if there is a particularly animated conversation in the hostelry of a monastery, a third-class carriage, or a tea-shop or Russian public-house (traktir) , it is almost always sure to be about religion. ”

“ It might also be stated that Russians in general, and the peasants in particular, are a singularly adaptable race, as is proved by the ease and the speed with which those 182who emigrate to Europe and America adapt themselves to their altered circumstances. ”

“ Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French—all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm—was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors—that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history. ”

“ The boatmen are like the peasants, with long beards and loose shirts, and generally civil and obliging; indeed, it must be allowed that the lower class of the Russians are remarkably so, not only to their superiors, but to each other. The most unpolished boor in the country will always take off his hat when he meets a companion or acquaintance, and that with quite as much respect as to a person above him in rank. ”

“ secondly, we Russians never can say anything in our own language.... ”

“ It was estimated that one hundred and twenty thousand were killed in the various battles with the Russians, one hundred and thirty thousand died of disease, cold, and hunger, and not far from two hundred thousand were captured, or voluntarily left the army and remained with the Russians. ”

“ He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it. ”

“ We mustn’t despise the Russians, we must help them. And we can’t do that unless we understand them. Take, for example, the army situation. It is very bad. The mass of the soldiers are in rebellion against all authority. But consider the past history, the very recent past history of those soldiers. Aside from brutal personal treatment at the hands of some of the officers, they were cheated and starved and neglected by the bureaucracy in Petrograd, and then again by their commanders at the front. ”

“ This western-front business couldn't be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn't. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren't any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. ”

“ For the Russian loves the soil with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his mind. His folk-songs are full of affectionate descriptions of it. His plough and his harrow are to him more than mere wood and iron. He loves to think of them as living things, as personal friends. Barbaric instincts have been aroused by the Revolution, and this simple but exalted mentality will remain in abeyance as long as those continue to rule who despise the peasant’s primitive aspirations and whose world-revolutionary aims are incomprehensible to him. ”