Southern Russia

“ The southern advance of Russia on European ground has been during this century an advance less of territory than of influence. The frontier of 1878 is the restored frontier of 1812. It is in the lands out of Europe that Russia has in the meanwhile advanced by strides which look startling on the map, but which in truth spring naturally from the geographical position of the one modern European power which cannot help being Asiatic as well. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As a result there are to-day in southern Russia in the governments immediately north of the Black Sea thousands of Germans who speak only German, who are in religion Lutherans and who are by far the most prosperous agricultural class in Russia. ”

“ Russia.—Russia comprises more than one-half the area of Europe; the Russian Empire embraces about one-half of Europe and Asia combined, and constitutes more than one-seventh of the land surface of the earth. East and west, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, the distance is about six thousand miles. It has a similar position with respect to southern Europe and China as has Canada to the United States.
In latitude the country is unfortunately situated. North of the latitude of St. Petersburg the climate is too cold to grow bread-stuffs; a large part of the country is, therefore, unproductive. ”

“ The southern frontier is still unsettled. In Asia beyond the Caspian, the southern boundary of the empire remains vague; the advance into the Turcoman Steppes and Afghan Turkestan, and on the Pamir plateau is still in progress. Bokhara and Khiva, though represented as vassal khanates, are in reality mere dependencies of Russia. An approximately settled frontier-line begins only farther east, where the Russian and Chinese empires meet on the borders of eastern Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria.
Russia has no oceanic possessions, and has abandoned those she owned in the last century ”

“ In their qualities and in their defects they represent in Russia the eternal contrast of north and south. Their history is no less diversified than their nature; the first have their centre at Moscow, the second at Kiev. Stretching, the one to the northeast, the other to the southwest, these two unequal halves of the nation do not precisely correspond to the two great physical zones of Russia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It would seem that the great region we now call Russia was predestined to become one empire. No one part could exist without all the others. In the north is the zone of forests, extending from the region of Moscow and Novgorod to the Arctic Circle. At the extreme southeast, north of the Caspian Sea and at the gateway leading into Asia, are the Barren Steppes, unsuited to agriculture or to civilized living; fit only for the raising of cattle and the existence of Asiatic nomads, who to this day make it their home. ”

“ The topography of a country is to some extent a prophecy of its future. Had there been no Mississippi coursing for three thousand miles through the North American Continent, no Ohio and Missouri bisecting it from east to west, no great inland seas indenting and watering it, no fertile prairies stretching across its vast areas, how different would have been the history of our own land.
Russia is the strange product of strange physical conditions. Nature was not in impetuous mood when she created this greater half of Europe, nor was she generous, except in the matter of space. ”

“ The sun was sinking over the low, hazy ridge of the Sparrow Hills as we left Moscow; and we enjoyed one more glimpse of the inexhaustible splendor of the city's thousand golden domes and pinnacles, softened by luminous smoke and transfigured dust, before the dark woods of fir intervened, and the twilight sank down on cold and lonely landscapes.
Thence, until darkness, there was nothing more to claim attention. Whoever has seen one landscape of Central Russia is familiar with three fourths of the whole region. ”

“ Yet there is a strange resemblance between the rough type and the handsome type analogous to that which a careful observer cannot fail to notice between the different types of Russian landscape. For though the steppe is grey, and the fields of Caucasia are green, yet both are animated by something that wears the same countenance, breathes the same purely Russian atmosphere, and is suffused with the same wonderful charm. It is the charm of perfectly balanced contrast. The soil of Russia has a soul like the soul of her children, for whom she cares and lives and breathes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not until the middle of the ninth century, that we obtain any really reliable information respecting the inhabitants of central Russia. They are described as a light-complexioned, flaxen-haired race, robust, and capable of great endurance. Their huts were cheerless, affording but little shelter, and they lived upon the coarsest food, often devouring their meat raw. ”

“ The first thing that strikes the traveler on the threshold of southeastern Russia is the greatness of the country—that is, the enormous extent of its material resources, and the intense commercial activity manifested along its principal lines of communication. The average American thinks of southeastern Russia as a rather quiet, semi-pastoral, semi-agricultural country, which produces enough for the maintenance of its own half-civilized and not very numerous population, but which, in point of commercial activity, cannot bear comparison for a moment with even the most backward of our States. ”

“ Geographically, Russia is a vast plain. The Ural mountains are low and form no barrier against invaders. The rivers are broad but often shallow. It was an ideal territory for nomads.
While the Roman Empire was founded, grew in power and disappeared again, Slavic tribes, who had long since left their homes in Central Asia, wandered aimlessly through the forests and plains of the region between the Dniester and Dnieper rivers. ”

“ 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. European Russia, including Poland, Finland, and other provinces, covers two millions of square miles, while Siberia, or European Asia, extends over at least five millions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ European Russia is an immense plain, its centre elevated scarcely three hundred feet above sea-level; the hills, few, low and unimportant. Lakes are plentiful, and great rivers with many ramifications flow slowly by tortuous channels—mostly towards the north-west or the south-east. Large tracts of forest and marsh in the centre terminate with frozen wastes to the north, and merge with rough, sandy pastures on the south. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From the 11th to the 13th century, in passing from the basin of the Dneiper to the basin of the Volga, we can already watch the formation of Great and Little Russia. The principalities of Kief, Tchernigof, Novgorod-Severski, Riazan, Mourom, and Souzdal, situated on the side of the steppe with its devastating hordes, formed the frontier States, the Marches of Russia. ”

“ But Great Russia is a paradise of monks. In the vast regions stretching from Kem to Belgorod—an eagle's flight from north to south of a thousand miles—from Pskoff on Lake Peipus, to Vasil on the Middle Volga—a similar flight from west to east of seven hundred miles—the land is everywhere bright with cloisters, musical with monastic bells.
Nothing on this earth's surface can be drearier than a Russian forest, unless it be a Russian plain. The forest is a growth of stunted birch and pine ”

“ Russian cities, however, even the capital, though ever becoming more cosmopolitan, still possess their many distinctive and interesting features, costumes, and customs, and are most picturesque and interesting, of course, during the long winter. It gives one a shock almost to go for the first time to Warsaw or Petrograd—at Moscow there is always the Kremlin—in the middle of the summer. There is little to distinguish them then, apart from the ever-glorious beauty of the churches, from Buda-Pest or Vienna.
But in the winter! Then it is everywhere still characteristic Russia. ”

“ Perhaps I am mistaken, but my impression is that a great many Americans think of Russia as an enormous, limitless field covered with eternal snow and ice, deserted, almost uninhabited, where severe Winter reigns all the time and where people can live only when dressed in heavy overcoats made of bear fur. ”

“ Hurrah for freedom! One station after another would flash by, the air would keep growing colder and keener, then the birches and the fir-trees, then Kursk, Moscow. . . . In the restaurants cabbage soup, mutton with kasha, sturgeon, beer, no more Asiaticism, but Russia, real Russia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He must pass through Poland, the Baltic provinces, or Finland, through lands annexed from Europe, whose inhabitants are Catholic or Protestant, and who have a European civilisation of old date. The connection of these regions with Orthodox Russia is still comparatively superficial. But the further eastward we go, the further do we find ourselves from Europe, until at length Europe is represented only by the railway, the refreshment rooms at the stations, and isolated hotels furnished and managed in European style. The same contrast strikes us between Petrograd and Moscow. ”

“ This strongly-marked outline of the western lands is the characteristic feature of European geography, while the immense spaces of which Russia is composed seem the continuation of the plains and plateaux of Northern and Central Asia. No doubt Russia is washed by many seas: in the north by the Icy Ocean, which bites deep into the country through the great fissure of the White Sea; in the south by the Caspian, the Sea of Azof, and the Black Sea; in the north-west by the Baltic and the gulfs of Bothnia, Finland, and Livonia ”