White Russia

“ The Russian people have shown not stupidity but eminent wisdom in repudiating both Communism and the alternative to it presented by the landlords and the generals. Their tolerance of the Red in preference to the White is based upon the conviction, universal throughout Russia, that the Red is a merely passing phenomenon. Human nature decrees this, but there was no such guarantee against the Whites with the support of the Allies behind them. ”

“ It is Yalta, beloved of all Russians, and I have come tramping to it—which Russians never do—and I am intending to spend lazy days looking with the gay town and all its white villas at the glorious spectacle of the southern sea. All the rest of Russia is gripped by winter, but here there is sanctuary and forgiveness. I have been tramping on the cold, cold steppes, frozen, forced to get back into myself and hide like the trees, and when I came here it seemed somehow as if Nature herself had been angry with me, relented, and was now showing me all her tenderness again. ”

“ They occupy the heart of Russia with Moscow as the center. Second is the Little Russian, about 37,000,000 strong. He holds the territory south and southwest, including the Don Cossacks, and his center is at the old and first capital of the Russians, on the Dnieper at Kiev. Third is the White Russian, about 5,000,000 in number, in lands east of Poland and northward around Lithuania. The land of the White Russian is heavily wooded and in parts marshy, the soil like that of the Baltic provinces being poor and unproductive. ”

“ The Russian Slavs are divided by philologists into three divisions: Great Russians, White Russians and Little Russians. The Great Russians occupy a large quadrangular area in Russia consisting of the central governments, from Novgorod and Vologda on the north to Kiev on the south; from Pensa and Simbirsk on the east to the Polish provinces on the west. The White Russians number less than four millions and occupy some of the western governments adjoining Poland. Great Russians and White Russians do not emigrate. ”

“ Such a view is also shared by some countries in Asia. This country is Russia. At present, Russia is attempting to separate from the White peoples in Europe. Why? Because she insists on the rule of Right and denounces the rule of Might. She advocates the principle of benevolence and justice and refuses to accept the principles of utilitarianism and force. She maintains Right and opposes the oppression of the majority by the minority. From this point of view, recent Russian civilization is similar to that of our ancient civilization. ”

“ Persons who clamor for governmental control of American railways should visit Germany, and above all Russia, to see how such control results. In Germany its defects are evident enough; people are made to travel in carriages which our main lines would not think of using, and with a lack of conveniences which with us would provoke a revolt; but the most amazing thing about this administration in Russia is to see how, after all this vast expenditure, the whole atmosphere of the country seems to paralyze energy. ”

“ Once more a mist comes down—a thin white veil, which passes like a pout from an infant's face. The city is the same in size, in splendor, in the fullness of her fearful life. The Tsar, who went away from her gates low and humble, has come back, like a wild beast thirsting for blood and prey. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not only the abstract ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity; but more concrete and more recently popularized ones such as proletariat, bourgeois, soviet, are already surrounded with a sort of fungous growth concealing their real meaning, so that every time they are employed they have to be freshly defined.
The phenomenon of Red Russia is a supreme example of the triumph over reason of the shibboleth, the slogan, and the political catchword. War-weary and politics-weary, the Russian people easily succumbed to those who promised wildly what nobody could give, the promisers least of all. ”

“ While they are strangely interesting as a study they are never attractive, with their cringing, servile manners and dirty gabardines, their cadaverous faces, piercing black eyes, their hooked noses and ringleted locks. Wherever met they are keen-witted, avaricious, patient, frugal, long-suffering. The race is now banished from what is known as Great Russia, and so far as Government is concerned is barely tolerated in Russian Poland; but to drive them hence would be to decimate the country in population. ”

“ The general impression was that it was the Slavic race sentiment that inspired Russia’s quick action. Servia, a country of Slavs, brothers in race to a large section of the people of Russia, was threatened with national annihilation and her great kinsman sprang to her rescue, determined that she should not be absorbed by her land-hungry neighbor. This seemed to many a sufficient cause for Russia’s action. Not many years before, when Austria annexed her wards, Bosnia and Herzegovina, both Slavic countries, Russia protested against the act. ”

“ Would it then be true that the Slav people, so powerful in their literature and in their imaginative art, so original in their temperament, as soon as they apply themselves to political action are only capable of fitful impulses, and unable to strike out a path of their own? Would it be true that 180,000,000 of Russia people are only to be like puppets in the hands of a few thousand bureaucrats or a few hundred agitators, who pull the wires, think out the plot and apportion the parts? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Out of this intermixture of races by the assimilation of the ruder by the more civilised, was formed a new people—a homogeneous nation. In fact, contrary to popular prejudice there is in Russia something more than an intermixture of diverse races—there is what we to-day call a “nationality”—as united, as compact, and as self-conscious as any nation in the world. Russia, notwithstanding all her various races, is yet no incoherent mass, no political conglomeration or mosaic of peoples. She resembles France in her national unity rather than Turkey or Austria. ”

“ In one house you fall among the Whites—a charming set of men to meet in drawing-room or club; urbane, accomplished, profligate; owners who never saw their serfs, landlords who never lived on their estates; fine fellows—whether young or old—who spent their lives in roving from St. Petersburg to Paris, and were known by sight in every gaming-house, in every theatre, from the Neva to the Seine. These men will tell you, with an exquisite smile, that Russia has come to the dogs. "Free labor!" ”

“ Many of the inhabitants are not even of Indo-European origin, but have sprung from Finnish, Turkish, Mongolian, and other nonaryan stocks. Some of these peoples are very numerous, the Finns, for instance, the Tatars, the Kirghiz, and above all the Jews. If we leave out of account fragmentary Bulgarian colonies, the only non-russian Slav people under Russian rule are the Poles, and the relationship of the Russians to the Poles is sui generis. The Little Russians are not yet recognised as a separate folk, and consequently as far as Russia herself is concerned there is no ground for panslavism. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But even Vera did not seem to care for Russia as Russia. ‘What can Siberia be to me?’ she would say. ‘Why, Nicholas, it is no more than China.’
“But it was more than China; when I looked at it on the map I recognised it as though it were my own country. Then the war came and I thought the desire of my heart was fulfilled. At last men talked about Russia as though she truly existed. For a moment all Russia was united, all classes, rich and poor, high and low. Men were patriotic together as though one heart beat through all the land. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is the age of colossal enterprises and combinations in every direction, in politics as well as in other branches of human activity. In Russia Slavophilism, gave way to Panslavism, that is, the scheme to unite all Slav (p. 246) nations. Germany was quick to respond with Pan Germanism, that is, to bring all German-speaking nations under one scepter. The czar, obeying this impulse, made every effort to convert the Baltic provinces,—which Germany called the German Provinces,—into Slavs by making the Russian language the only language that was taught in the schools ”

“ To conclude, we may say that, while the contrast between the slavophils and the westernisers is striking, in concreto, in the phenomenal world of history, manifold and numerous transitional phases exist, and the representatives of the two trends mutually influence, correct, and supplement one another. The contrast between Russia and Europe is no more absolute than the contrast between present and past. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And how pointed is all that which has proceeded from the depths of Russia, where there are neither Germans nor Finns, nor any other strange tribes, but where all is purely aboriginal, where the bold and lively Russian mind never dives into its pocket for a word, and never broods over it like a sitting-hen: it sticks the word on at one blow, like a passport, like your nose or lips on an eternal bearer, and never adds anything afterwards. ”

“ The mingling of nations and races has important bearings upon the origins of Kiev and Novgorod. It is unquestionable that Finnish and other European and Asiatic racial elements enter into the composition of the Russian people, but it is today impossible to ascertain with anything approaching precision, when, whence, and how these interminglings and Russifications occurred. In the present state of research it is extremely hazardous to make extensive use of theories of race and nationality to explain the characteristics of Kievic Old Russia. ”