Russification

“ Most of them now own their patches of land, or are buying slowly, by annual payments. They till the ground in summer, and in winter they weave with their own looms, spin with their own spinning wheels, feed the cattle in the barns, and slide the wood over the snow from the forests. It is not a bad kind of life. Compared to ordinary Russian peasants, the people are rich beyond dreams, and things went pleasantly in the Provinces till the hideous system [270] called Russification began just a quarter of a century ago, upon the accession of Alexander III.—“The Camel,” as they still call him. ”

“ The process of Russification may be likewise observed in the manner of building the houses and in the methods of farming, which show plainly that the Finnish races did not obtain rudimentary civilisation from the Slavs. ”

“ The same is true of the Russians, who are acquainted at home only with official nationalism which was working for the Russification of the other races. In fact all of them rejected nationalism as chauvinism. ”

“ In their petition these Russian Mohammedans describe how their religious tribunals have been suppressed, how their children are forced into Russian schools, how when serving in the army they are made to eat food condemned by the law of Islam, and how they are compelled to observe Christian festivals and to abandon their faith.156 But in no part of the Empire was more systematically repeated the process which, under Alexander III., had achieved the Russification of the Baltic provinces than in Finland. ”

“ There will not be that spiritual community without which a free co-existence is inconceivable. This 37 spiritual community did not exist under the Tzarist régime, which however tried to create it by enforced russification, going even so far as to prohibit the use of the mother-alphabet and the public use of the mother-language, and ordering that teaching in the elementary schools should be given in Russian to children who did not understand a word of it. By such proceedings, a kind of spiritual community among the peoples of Russia has indeed been created ”

“ 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. ”

“ How long would it have taken Russia to grow into modern civilization? And what would it be now if there had not been just such a strange being—with the nature and heart of a barbarian joined with a brain and an intelligence the peer of any in Europe, capable of seeing that the only hope for Russia was by force to convert it from an Asiatic into a European state?
One act bore with extreme severity upon the free peasantry. They were compelled to enroll themselves with the serfs in their Communes, or to be dealt with as vagrants. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If it is difficult to civilize one willing barbarian, what must it have been to compel millions to put on the garment of respectability which they hated! Never before was there such a complete social reorganization, so entire a change in the daily habits of a whole people; and so violently effected. It required a soul of iron and a hand of steel to do it; and it has been well said that Russia was knouted into civilization. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is, then, no easy thing to make a good history of Russia. It is no trifling enterprise to traverse this night of time, to compass, among so many contradictory and conflicting narrations, the discovery of truth. ”

“ This is precisely what we have been doing, and woe to us, if we cease to do it, cease to be human beings in order to become Russians.
A forest of national problems has grown around us, and the sounds of the Russian language are being drowned by the voices of all the numerous peoples that inhabit Russia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet in these latter years a resisting spirit, nursed and suckled largely in western Europe, has falsely made it appear that all Russia was in arms, storming with chaotic unity at the church, the state and the army, deluging their ancient customs with the destructive and re-creative might of radicalism. Far and wide of the truth is this! Let no one think the vast heart of Russia has changed! Only the few have cast away the ancient quiet; only the few have the modern consciousness instead of the medieval, theocratic one; only the few are not at heart Slavophiles in feeling and in morality. ”

“ He then, by conquest, extended his empire over vast realms of barbarians, bringing them all under the simple yet effective government of feudal lords. He consolidated this empire, and by sagacious measures, encouraging arts and commerce, he led his barbarous people onward in the paths of civilization. He gave Russia a name and renown, so that it assumed a position among the nations of the globe, notwithstanding its remote position amidst the wilds of the North. His usurpation, history can not condemn. In those days any man had the right to govern who had the genius of command. ”

“ The Russian nation, indeed, is not one of fools, but of potential geniuses. But the trend of their genius is not that of Western races. It lies in the arts and philosophy and rarely descends to the more sordid realms of politics and commerce.
Yet, in spite of a reputation for unpracticalness, the Russians have shown the world at least one supreme example of economic organization. It is forgotten nowadays that Russia deserves an equal share in the honours of the Great War. She bore the brunt of the first two years of it and made possible the long defence of the Western front. ”

“ It is not the war that I object to, it is the form it takes; and our great, grim, ghostly Russia should evolve out of her soul of ice something much more in consonance with her. Beside the burning of Moscow, the little tin cans and the burrowing like moles underground are commonplace and a little vulgar. Russia is so awful in herself. ”

“ On the surface is absolutism in glittering completeness, and beneath that—chaos. Lying at the bottom of that chaos is the great mass of Slavonic people undeveloped as children—an embryonic civilization—utterly helpless and utterly miserable. In the mass lying above that exists the mind of Russia—through which course streams of unduly developed intelligence in fierce revolt against the omnipresence of misery. And still above that is the shining, enameled surface rivaling that of any other nation in splendor. ”

“ This new and energetic and growing Russia, that was for the first time conscious of her great power and her great resources, that threw itself as a people heart and soul into the work of civilisation, had around it a great variety of nationalities, and it is a very remarkable thing that during the nineteenth century in Russia there was not only a very great and very brilliant Russian national movement, but several other national movements were either revived or began their work on the territory of the Russian Empire. ”

“ And Russia is as heterogeneous in condition as it is in elements. It has accepted ready-made the methods of Greek, of Tatar, and of European; but has assimilated none of them; and Russian civilization, with its amazing quality, its bewildering variety of achievement in art, literature, diplomacy, and in every field, is not a natural development, but a monstrosity. The genius intended for a whole people seems to have been crowded into a few narrow channels. Where have men written with such tragic intensity? ”

“ In Russia the sunflower is queen of the flowers, and as the sunflower is among the flowers so is the Great Russian among32 the Russian peoples. He is the true “tsarkiya Rus.” The Tsar is the sun, the heart of the realm, and the Muscovite people are the “podsolnushki.” Each individual is only one among many, a particle, a seed for the propagation and glorification of his own race. Probably, the Great Russian has no equal in the world as regards idyllic simplicity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her mind seemed incapable of exhaustion, and notwithstanding the number of her successive favorites, with whom she entered into the most guilty connections, no monarch ever reigned with more dignity or with a more undisputed sway. Under her reign, notwithstanding the desolating wars, Russia made rapid advances in power and civilization. She protected commerce, excited industry, cultivated the arts, encouraged learning, promoted manufactures, founded cities, dug canals, and developed in a thousand ways the wealth and resources of the country. ”

“ Petersburg, all was logical, conservative, Christian and anarchic. Russia had nothing in common with any ancient or modern world that history knew; she had been the oldest source of all civilization in Europe, and had kept none for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever known such a phase, which seemed to fall into no line of evolution whatever, and was as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in the twelfth century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth. Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy, Russia became luminous like the salt of radium ”

“ In Russia, ideals are exposed all the time, so that when the time for their application comes, they’re worn so thin they’re useless. Poor Russia,” he sighed. “It has idealized itself to extinction. All my boyhood’s companions—the students, the intelligentsia, as they called themselves, who used to sit and talk and talk for hours of their wonderful theories—you in England have no idea how Russian visionary can talk—and I learned to talk with them—where are they now? ”

“ Great Russians form the strongest and toughest race in the whole empire. They are Slavs who in early times intermingled with the Finns and set up the kingdom of Moscow. These Great Russians gradually succeeded in enlarging their borders, until their territory stretched to the Crimea and Turkestan on the south and south-east, to Manchuria in the far east, and to Germany in the west. The Great Russians are now the largest and most important of all the Russian peoples, and they occupy the bulk of the country. ”

“ Although educated in the darkest days of political 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. ”

“ On a much greater scale than the expansion of France was the expansion of the already vast Russian Empire during this period. The history of Russia in the nineteenth century is made up of a series of alternations between a regime of comparative liberalism, when the interest of government and people was chiefly turned towards the west, and a regime of reaction, when the government endeavoured to pursue what was called a 'national' or purely Russian policy, and to exclude all Western influences. ”