White Russians

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was evidently a disposition among very many of the most ardent Russians to make a merit of this imperfect civilization, and to cultivate hatred for any people whom they clearly saw possessing anything better: hence it came that, just as so many Frenchmen hate Great Britain, and so many in the backward, slipshod regions of our country hate New England, it was quite the fashion among large classes of Russians to hate everything German, and especially to detest the Baltic provinces. ”

“ It is what you are likely to be in this world of enigmas." She loves the white slave, but does not wish to shut her in a home for such. The Russians, so far from segregating the diseased and the fallen, frequently fall in love with them and marry them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This our minister at that time was very successful in doing: his relations with the leading Russians, from the Emperor down, were all that could be desired, and to the work of men like him is largely due the fact that afterward, in our great emergency during the Civil War, Russia showed an inclination to us that probably had something to do with holding back the powers of western Europe from recognizing the Southern Confederacy. ”

“ The Emperor seemed greatly surprised at this, and well he might be, for the ecclesiastics in Russia seem the only exceptions to the rule that Russians speak French and other foreign languages better and more generally than do any other people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One evening during my stay a young Russian at a social gathering of military and other officials voiced this feeling by saying, "I hope the time will soon come when we shall have cleared out all these Germans from the Russian service; they are the curse of the country." Thereupon a young American present, who was especially noted for his plain speaking, immediately answered, "How are you going to do it? I notice that, as a rule, you rarely give a position which really involves high responsibility to a Russian; you generally give it to a German. ”

“ Slavic immigrants gradually repeopled the country. The same intense mixture of different races we find in Asia Minor and Syria, countries which send considerable numbers of immigrants to our shores. The least mixed of all these races are the Slavs of Russia. Yet this people has little in common with the race that settled America. The Russians are behind all other nations of Europe in social and political development. The mass of the people is ignorant, servile, superstitious, and, according to the opinion of a close observer, unfit for self-government. ”

“ The wide horizon of the modern Russian movement will not permit the exclusion of a single capable member of the Tsar’s great realm from the benefits of the future. Not only the Russian people, but the whole of Russia had to be won over to the cause of the great ideal. The regeneration of Russia was to herald the regeneration of the whole of the Slav race, and the Poles as Slavs had a right to help in this work. The Russians have always said that they are very fond of the Poles, but that they are not sufficiently Slav—they ought to be Slavicized. ”

“ The Russians were never really intolerant in racial matters, nor dangerous in commercial rivalry. They intermarried freely with all the so-called inferior races and tribes in the Tsardom, and put all on an equal footing before the law. Twenty-three years ago I paid a visit to my friend General Tomitch, the military governor of Kars, and I found myself sitting at his table beside the Prefect of the city, who was a Mohammedan. The individual Russian is generally free from racial prejudices ”

“ Among the German colonists in Russia the process of assimilation is hardly perceptible. Though their fathers and grandfathers may have been born in the new country, they would consider it an insult to be called Russians. They look down upon the Russian peasantry as poor, ignorant, lazy, and dishonest, fear the officials on account of their tyranny and extortion, preserve jealously their own language and customs, rarely speak Russian well—sometimes not at all—and never intermarry with those from whom they are separated by nationality and religion. ”

“ These are characteristics of Turkish and Finnish. The singular charm with which the melodious sounds of the Russian language greet a stranger’s ears is derived from this Asiatic strain. In spirit also the fundamental fatalism of Russians increases in the eastern sections of the country. The trait can hardly be characterized as Slavic. In the case of the Poles or Bohemians, it gives place to buoyant hopefulness which helps to color life and the world in roseate hues. The fatalism of the Russian is a relic of past habitat in the interminable steppes of central Eurasia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They hate the cross. They are Asiatics; with their faces and affections turning day and night, not towards Moscow and St. Petersburg, but towards Khiva, Bokhara, and Samarcand. A foreign city is their holy place, a foreign ruler their anointed chief. They get their mollahs from Bokhara, and they wait for conquerors from the Kirghiz Steppes. They have not learned to be Russians, and they will not learn; so that, whether the Government wishes it or not, the conflict of race and creed will rage through the coming years, even as it has raged through the past. ”

“ It gave us a high idea of the gigantic resources in men which Russia seemed to have, and their equipment seemed to us also perfect. We commented upon it among ourselves, and we recalled the disparaging remarks often made by the Austrians about Russia. Our idea at that time was that Russia was a gigantic empire of inexhaustible strength and resources. We were proud to be Slavs, and proud to think that the future of our little Slav country would surely be well protected by our great Slav brethren, the Russians. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Both in his first and third movements he reminds us that the Russian, for all his profound religiosity and mysticism, for all his abundance of talent and exquisite courtesy under normal conditions, lives in a cruel country and has it in him to be more cruel than any other modern white man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing, indeed, better illustrates the white world’s unsoundness at the beginning of the present century than its reaction to the Russo-Japanese conflict. The tremendous significance of that event was no more lost upon the whites than it was upon the colored peoples. Most far-seeing white men recognized it as an omen of evil import for their race-future. ”

“ The services were, many of them, magnificent, and the music most beautiful; but it was discouraging to reflect that the condition of the Russian peasantry, ignorant, besotted, and debased, was the outcome of so many centuries of complete control by this great branch of the Christian Church. It had for ages possessed the fullest power for developing the intellect, the morals, and the religion of the people, and here was the result. Experience of Russian life is hardly calculated to increase, in any thinking man, confidence in its divine origin or guidance. ”