the townsfolk are Jews and Germans with a few Poles, and the
aristocracy until 1914 was to some extent German. Farther east
the aristocracy was Polish and largely anti-German, the peasantry
Polish, and the intermediate people still largely German and Jew.
Farther east still the middle class of the towns continued the
same general character, but while the aristocracy was Polish,
the peasantry was Lithuanian or White Russian or Ruthenian,
according to district. One needs but to play upon the possible
combinations among these elements to realize how difficult it is
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to secure unity. It is often the natural fate of aristocracies to
fade out unless they can recruit themselves from below, and that
recruitment has usually meant the ultimate merging of the
aristocracy in the tradition of the simple folk, the classic case
being the merging of the Norman aristocracy of Britain in the
Anglo-Celtic heritage of the commoners. But the merging of
aristocracies would not bring unity because of the burgher
element, largely German, and the labouring element, largely
Jewish. Farther west the petit-bourgeois element of the market
towns has often mediated differences between peasant elements
of different regions, but as in Poland the former is not to any
extent Polish, it is inconceivable that it should mediate between
the Polish peasantry farther west and the Ruthenian and other
elements farther east. In Rumania the difficulties are analogous,
and so are those of Hungary. Parts of Yugoslavia seem fortunate
in having a simpler problem.
A mere catalogue of the peoples of East-Central Europe with
appended notes would hardly justify the space it would need in
this small book, especially as information of the kind is easily
available in standard works of reference. It therefore seems more
useful to sketch in broad outline the physical and vegetational
facts of East-Central and Eastern Europe in order to bring out
the essentials of the setting of human life and the variation of
that setting with the region so that peoples of diverging outlook
and traditions have grown up in those regions.
The first and simplest physical fact is the immense broadening
out of the European plain, which, in the region between the Rhine
and Vistula, is practically Prussia alone, while farther east it has
added to it the ancient land-elements of the north, so that its
effective extent is from the White Sea to the Black Sea through
degrees of latitude, and consequently through marked gradations
of climate. The climatic facts are equally well known. The
great extent of the land surface, and still more the fact that it
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is but a small extension of the far greater land surface of the
Asiatic interior, give it a condition of dense dry cold air through
the winter.
The form of the plain, with the consequent possibility of ingress
of westerly winds eastwards along the plain in summer, i.e. when
the cold anticyclone has gone, gives a wedge of summer rain,
alternating with considerable warmth, and this wedge is of the
utmost importance in human geography. It is the area in which
the summer green and winter black and white forest can grow,
but as already stated the beech grows only in its western portion,
and stops along a line from about Danzig or Königsberg to the
east of Bukovina.
Farther east the wedge is occupied by oak and elm, but the
valuable beech is absent. The deciduous forest region includes
South-west Finland, and its northern boundary runs eastward
from the vicinity of Petrograd past Vologda. In many current
maps its southern boundary is made much too sharp; the
possibility of its growth depends here largely upon moisture, so it
spreads into the drier south-east along river and other lines of
relative dampness. The country with zones of deciduous forest
interspersed with grass land is known as the 'Ukraine' or 'Border',
and on its border towards the grasslands and semi-desert we have
the Cossack country, with the Don Cossacks on the western side
of the barren patches near the lower Volga, and the Orenburg
Cossacks on their eastern side. The Ukraine and its eastern
extensions are floored to a large extent with earth rich in organic
matter (black earth, Tchernoziom), and have possibilities of
considerable agricultural development if a settled scheme of life can
be devised. In the south-west the language of the peasantry is
Ruthenian, farther east Russian, both variants of Slavonic speech,
but variants which seem fated to diverge from one another more
and more. The climate of the Russian plain largely inhibits the
higher grades of intellectual activity during the seasons of severe
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cold and heat, with the result that those whose circumstances
do not give them artificial protection from the weather must
depend to a large extent on routine for the continuance of social
organization. Conditions are thus not favourable for development
of a complex unity over a wide area, and localism is therefore
the prevailing tendency, carrying with it probabilities of
maintenance and even of development of dialect-differences rather
than of linguistic unification. These brief indications give us an
insight into some of the more serious, if less appreciated, problems
of governmental schemes in the varied vegetative regions of what
was once Russia, which yet lacks convenient orographical boundary
lines between its different parts.
Our memories from earliest years are stored largely in verbal
forms, and as a consequence the language of our early youth
has deep-seated associations, which remain as conscious or
unconscious memories, the latter if we forget our early speech
and learn a new language. That the old language is not
completely lost seems to be proved by experiments in
hypnosis, which show that the associations of that old language
remain, and that therefore the associations with the second
language learnt tend to remain incomplete unless a very special
personal effort is made, made therefore by a supernormal mind,
to overcome this difficulty. Common language-associations of
early childhood are thus a most important link between men,
promoting mutual understanding and easing intercourse and
mutual confidence for the subnormal and normal, rather than
supernormal, individuals who form the bulk of a population,
and this helps us to see why the linguistic unit is so important in
political matters, and unity of language is so often the basis of
the successful state, which is consequently so difficult to organize
in Eastern Europe.
These reflections apply more particularly to the region formerly
known politically as Russia, but they also apply to some extent
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in South-east Europe, though the phenomena of language are there
to some extent masked by others. The region commonly known
as the Balkan Peninsula is to a very large extent high land, with
opportunities for seasonal pasturage on the hills, and this, together
with the unsettlement due to the strikingly contrasted life of the
thin coastal fringe and to the pressures from Asia Minor and from
the North, has impeded the evolution of the settled life, the
market town, and the nation-state.
The thin coastal fringe is a zone of Mediterranean life in which,
already prior to classical times, hoe-culture and the tending of
fruit trees had become one of the mainstays of life, but commerce
was almost equally important. It is the home of the city-state,
and in times of peace Greek became the chief language, with
Latin, and later Italian, on the Adriatic coast. In times of
disturbance the commercial element seems to have been partly
submerged, and Slavonic or Slavonized elements have spread in,
so that in Dalmatia it is possible to debate indefinitely the affinities
of the people's social heritage, and much the same might be said
of various portions of the north coast of the Aegean.
Inland the great height implies cold winters, and these supervene
even in the lowlands when the latter are open to the north
(Vardar) or to the east (Danube). The conditions here are thus
practically those of Central and even of East-Central Europe, and
as social evolution has been impeded we find here still a good deal
of seasonal nomadism or _transhumance_ (p. 90), a marked survival
of the large family unit holding and working lands in common
(the Serb Zadruga), and an early and still feebly organized type
of town (especially the lesser towns of Rumania). A Jewish
element (Ashkenazim in Rumania) is valuable commercially in
most of the towns, and the vestiges of the Turk are found far
and wide.
Whereas lands which now have Romance, Celtic, or Teutonic
speech have received large elements of civilization, and therewith
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of religion, from or through Rome and the western Mediterranean,
the east of Europe has been largely outside the sphere of Roman
influence, and has received contributions to its civilization and
religious organization from Constantinople, with results that are
different in many ways, though Constantinople owes a great deal
to Rome, and though both Rome and Constantinople look back
to ancient Mediterranean civilization.
Rome, through empire or through church, has spread her ideas
to the eastern bounds of Europe-of-the-Sea, to the border of the
Pripet Marshes in the centre, and farther north, to the surround
of the Baltic Sea. On the south the boundary of Roman work
persistent in the Church is largely the periphery of the Adriatic
Sea, with complex interrelations between Rome and Byzantium
all over South-east Europe. In the parts of the Balkan Peninsula
more easily reached from Constantinople, and on the Russian
plain with its prehistoric links via Kief, &c., with Byzantium and
the Aegean, the Byzantine organization of the Church has
persisted. In South-east Europe, the Danubian lands and the
Carpathian arc, we have the debatable zone between the two
organizations, the wedge of weakness into which Islam was able
to penetrate, as Prof. Stanley Roberts has pointed out to me.
Even as far west as Bohemia the first arrival of Christianity
was due to Byzantine work, but the conflict of Constantinople
with Asia and the difficulty of communications were against the
persistence of this element, and the Roman tradition established
itself in Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, and largely in Slavonia.
In the eastern Carpathians an interesting compromise was
reached in the seventeenth century by the recognition of the
Uniate Church acknowledging the Pope, but keeping a Slavonic
ritual. The persecution of that church by Romanizers in Poland
and by the Byzantine Church of Russia is a great difficulty at
the present time, but it should be understood that the Roman
Church does not dispute the validity of Byzantine orders of
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priesthood and sacraments, so that the difference between Roman
and Greek Christianity does not cut so deep as that between
the Roman Church and western schismatics, such as Calvinists,
Lutherans, Anglicans, and so on.
On the other hand, very important divergences have grown up
in organization between the two churches in ways which deeply
affect the life of the people. The western church, based upon
the Roman Empire, has had its waves of enthusiasm in the early
Middle Ages and during the Counter-Reformation for the unity
of Europe, and the differentiation of religious organizations within
the various language groups of Western Europe has been checked.
As a result the more distant ones have seceded from Rome, but
those which remain Roman all own allegiance to the Pope, an
allegiance that creates problems for many a modern state. Reference
has already been made to the vast importance of the Jesuits
in maintaining this 'universalist' feature of religious and social
life.
In the east, Constantinople, long involved in her ultimately
unsuccessful conflict with Asia and Islam, was not sufficiently
strongly placed to spread analogous waves of enthusiasm. Also
her lines of communication were decidedly difficult, and her
ambassadors of religion depended more on local factors and local
aid. Then again some of the lands reached from her knew nothing
of Rome, and here her influence persisted, while others like
Hungary, &c., had been for a time in the empire ruled from
Rome and gravitated to the Roman Church. The case of Wallachia
and Moldavia must be left for discussion later on.
The Eastern Church has thus carried the universalist idea less
far than the Roman. It has developed daughter churches, sometimes
with well-marked peculiarities, within the language groups,
so that now allegiance to one or another branch of the Eastern
Church is often made a criterion of nationality in the Balkan
areas of linguistic gradation and confusion. Religious
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organization has tended to be within the State, and often a substitute
for the State in Eastern Europe, instead of being above the State,
at least in its claims, as in the west.
With these facts of situation, physiography, people, languages,
and religion in mind, we may now proceed to a somewhat closer
survey of the peoples in the chief natural regions of Europe east
of the Teutonic and Romance areas, allowing that the Bohemian
(Czechoslovak) hill people and the Poles have already been dealt
with to a large extent.
To the north of the forest of autumn leaf-fall swamps spread
far and wide between Petrograd and Vologda, and on their
northern flanks the coldness of the soil restricts root action so
much that the pines and the birch are the chief forest trees, and
the forest is only here and there worth clearing for corn growing.
This is a region for hunters and fishers and gatherers, with a few
animals and poor crops in small patches. Its peoples include
a large element related to and derived from the peoples of Arctic
Asia, Samoyedes, and Lapps, and an element among the Finns,
and it is this element which has provided the languages of the
region in several parts. The Finn is a mixture of this Asiatic-Arctic
stock of broad-headed, dark-skinned people with the tall,
fair, long-headed peoples of North Europe, and as it is the former
who have provided the language, it is probable that they also
provided the women, i.e. that the Nordics were forest hunters
and adventurers, moving about without many women. In
Karelia (east of the new republic of Finland) the Finn is more
Asiatic in appearance than he is in Finland itself, and for the
latter people Miss Czaplicka suggests the use of the name
'Finlanders'. In Karelia and the river basins feeding the White Sea
there is naturally also a considerable Slavonic admixture. The
antiquity of the Asiatic immigration is a disputed point: it may
be very old, as Peake once argued, but he and others incline to
make the movement fairly recent, and to connect the ancient
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Arctic cultures of the region with old types of long-headed men.
Near the Baltic coast the physical type of the people becomes
practically pure Nordic in several places, and some districts on
the coast speak Swedish, as do the people of the Aland Islands.
The south-west of Finland is so much influenced by the sea
that it has a zone of the forest of leaf-fall, and thus can grow
reasonable amounts of corn. On it stand the essentially European
cities of Abo and Helsingfors, and the relation to the sea and the
west is shown not only in the fact that 'Baltic' style characterizes
most Finnish things, but also in the fact that Finland became
Roman Catholic under the influence of missions from Sweden
in the twelfth century. It thus contrasts with the regions farther
east, which were Christianized by the Eastern Church. Until
the rise of Russia as a power, Swedish influence was dominant in
Finland, but the growth of Petrograd and the efforts of Russian
power to organize itself in a western fashion altered the balance
and Russia became dominant, taking Finland definitely into the
Tsar's domains in 1809. In the nineteenth century long and
vain attempts were made by autocratic Russia to work in double
harness with Finland, which belonged so markedly to Western
Europe by tradition, had seceded from the Roman Church and
become Protestant at the Great Schism, and was feeling, along
with Western Europe, the nationalist revival with its literary
movement attempting in this case to perpetuate Finnish and
develop it as a culture language. As in some other northern
regions (notably Norway) the aristocracy merged itself in the
people, and became the leader-element in trade and commerce.
The small amount of good land has made it a precious possession,
and the Finlanders are keenly interested in peasant proprietorship.
In all these ways the contrast between them and Russia is strongly
marked, and the new rulers of Russia have evidently recognized
this in their treaty with the now sovereign state of Finland.
Finland's timber is a precious asset, and her cattle are likely to
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bring her some wealth; her future is as a Baltic people, and it
may be hoped a member of a future Baltic federation. The
Alanders inhabit a maze of islands, which are a partially
submerged extension of the Finnish plateau;
their historic associations
have been with Finland, but, like the people of some coastal
regions of Finland, they speak Swedish. The League of Nations
has suggested for them a scheme of local autonomy under Finland,
and this is under consideration, but they seem to wish for a closer
link with Sweden. Such a link educationally and religiously would
be of value, and we have here merely one more example of the
hampering effects of our present undue insistence on the idea
of the sovereign state rather than on that of the United States
of Europe. The Karelians and other Finnish peoples of the
north, east of Finland, have been affected a good deal by monastic
settlements made by the Eastern Church; they may get a living
partly by lumbering and partly in fur trade; cultivation and even
stock-raising must remain poorly developed.
Turning south of the line from Petrograd to Vologda we are,
at least theoretically, in the zone of the forest of leaf-fall, that
is a forest with the oak and birch, not, however, the beech. Here
again the Baltic coast lands have peoples strongly marked off by
culture associations from those of the interior, but, as regards
the interior, the penetration of Finnish or more broadly Asiatic
influences is not nearly so marked until we come to the Volga
below Kazan, where are to be found the Mordva. In this eastern
region are also found groups of Tatar speech and Asiatic origin,
some of whom were gradually forced by past Russian governments
to give up nomad pasturing and become settled cultivators.
A Tatar republic now centres round Kazan (1921). An Asiatic
influence may nevertheless be traced far and wide in the physique
of the Russian people of Muscovy, though they owe their main
inheritance to the broad-headed, dark, central European stock
which has colonized the Russian forest bit by bit from the more
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open lands of the Polish-Galician platform, moving around the
south side of the Pripet Marshes and entering the Muscovite
forest via the Dnieper crossing at Kief. An important element
in the life of the people has been their association with the
mediaeval fur trade of the Hanse, and a study of Russian physique
suggests a Nordic sprinkling all over the country, and especially
among the landowners; but the villagers are mainly of the
broad-headed type, characteristic of the mountain axis of Europe,
albeit in the better lands taller than they are in the Alps and
Cevennes, and in other ways also more like some types found in
the Balkan Peninsula.
The social study of the people of Central Russia is probably one
of the best clues to the understanding of that stage of our own
past, in Western Europe, when settlement in forest-clearings was
the most marked feature of development of social organization.
The Tsar's Government had in recent years persisted in a policy
of modernization of rural arrangements, but, in the words of
a supporter of that policy, the villagers fell back upon their old
communist schemes as soon as the war crisis made them rely on
themselves; it was the one scheme they understood.
How far this is really true, or how far some at least of the
villagers tried to develop individual proprietorship, must remain
doubtful, but there can be no doubt that localism and the Soviet
idea have become marked features in Russia, with the paralysing
of the more modern schemes of life which were previously trying
to spread in the country with the growth of industry and commerce.
That the more modern schemes seemed to permit a larger population
seems clear, but that they were faced with difficulties due
both to climate and to history is not always appreciated. The
west in the nineteenth century was too apt to think its individualism
applicable to all conditions and peoples the world over; it had
not sufficiently understood its individualism as a historic growth
under western conditions which masked the conflict, for example,
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between it and the Christianity the west supposed itself to accept.
Of the life of the Russian village we shall have more to say later
on, but it is well to have its attitude in mind so that we may
contrast this with the characteristics of the Baltic fringe. Here,
since the war, new states have been created and recognized (1921)
by the League of Nations under the names of Esthonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania.
The two first have a Baltic-German element which has in the past
been a land-holding class, and has its historic links both with the
Teutonic Knights and with the Hanse--for Riga is an old Hanse
city of special importance.
The Finnish element is strong enough in Esthonia to impose
its language on the people, but farther south tongues of ancient
Baltic lineage are dominant, and the new states are largely on
a basis of peasant language, the German elements being
disregarded, and to a considerable extent dispossessed. Having
passed through a stage of feudal subjection, the peasants are bent
on individual proprietorship, as they were in the eighteenth
century in France; and the war has brought a social revolution
along this border zone between the domains of the two churches,
with some marked resemblances to that of 1789-93 in France.
In Esth-speaking country there is but little forest that is not pine,
and only 10 per cent. of the soil can be made arable, it is said.
Though the Lett country is better, it can grow neither beech
nor oak to any extent; it is interested in dairying, and in this
matter naturally has commercial links with Denmark. The
Lithuanians are a grave European problem; they escaped the
Germanizing efforts of the Teutonic Knights, and felt instead the
Polonizing of their aristocracy, the abler scions of which have long
found opportunities at Warsaw. Set in the Lithuanian country
is Vilna, the station on the one reasonably dry entry from the
west into Central Russia, and therefore a trading town with large
German, Jewish, and Polish elements illustrating more tragically
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than any other town the difficulty of creation of states in this
eastern boundary zone of Western Europe. The forests of
Lithuania are very important for the country's economic future.
Thus south, as north, of the Petrograd-Vologda line, we have
contrasted conditions in the west, the centre, the east, but on
the south the Finn element is much less marked, and the central
European one much more so. Moving south again beyond the
Pripet marshes we find corresponding contrasts.
On the west the Polish platform grades south-eastward into
the Ukraine or Border Land, with its great stretches of loess,
but also its patches of forest, especially near the waterways.
The forest thins out towards the open steppe of South Russia,
which in turn grades into desert patches near the Caspian. The
open steppe of South Russia is but the continuation of the great
steppes of Asia.
To understand the peoples of this belt let us remember first
that the ancient graves contain many long-headed skulls, and that
this element in the people probably persists to a greater extent
than average figures show, in spite of the pressure of central
European, of late at least Slavonic-speaking, immigrants from the
west via Kief, and of Tatar immigrants from the east. Byzantine
elements from the south need also to be allowed for in the people
as well as in their civilization, in which matter Kief has become
as markedly the Byzantine sacred city of Russia as Canterbury is
the Romano-Gallic sacred city of England.