PANSLAVONIA.
Until a year ago, these Panslavonic dreamers were a party in the
State; and even now they have powerful friends at Court. Their cry is
Panslavonia for the Slavonians. Last year the members of this party
called a congress in Moscow, to which they invited--first, their
fellow-countrymen, from the White Sea to the Black, from the Vistula
to the Amoor; and next, the representatives of their race who dwell
under foreign sceptres--the Czeck from Prague, the Pole from Cracow,
the Bulgar from Shumla, the Montenegrin from Cettigne, the Serb from
Belgrade; but this gathering of the clans in Moscow opened the eyes of
moderate men to the dangerous nature of this Panslavonic dream. A deep
distrust of Russian life, as now existing, lies at the root of it; the
dreamers hoping to fall back upon forms inspired by what they call a
nobler national spirit. They read the chronicles of their race, they
collect popular songs, they print peasant tales; and in these Ossianic
legends of the steppe they find the germ of a policy which they call a
natural product of their soil.
Like the Old Believers, these Panslavonians deny the Emperor and own
the Tsar. To them Peter the Great is Antichrist, and the success of
his reforms a temporary triumph of the Evil Spirit. He left his
country, they allege, in order to study in foreign lands the arts by
which it could be overthrown. On his return to Russia no one
recognized him as their prince. He came with a shaven face, a pipe in
his mouth, a jug of beer in his hand. A single stroke of his pen threw
down an edifice which his people had been rearing for a thousand
years. He carried his government beyond the Russian soil; and, in a
strange swamp, by the shores of a Swedish gulf, he built a palace for
his court, a market for his purveyors, a fortress for his troops. This
city he stamped with a foreign genius and baptized with a foreign
name.
For these good reasons, the Panslavonians set their teeth against all
that Peter did, against nearly all that his followers on the throne
have done. They wish to put these alien things away, to resume their
capital, to grow their beards, to wear their fur caps, to draw on
their long boots, without being mocked as savages, and coerced like
serfs. They deny that civilization consists in a razor and a felt hat.
Finding much to complain of in the judicial sharpness of German rule,
they leaped to the conclusion that every thing brought from beyond the
Vistula is bad for Russia and the Russ. In the list of things to be
kept out of their country they include German philosophy, French
morals, and English cotton-prints.
A thorough Panslavonian is a man to make one smile; with him it is
enough that a thing is Russian in order to be sworn the best of its
kind. Now, many things in Russia are good enough for proud people to
be proud of. The church-bells are musical, the furs warm and handsome,
the horses swift, the hounds above all praise. The dinners are
well-served; the sterlet is good to eat; but the wines are not
first-rate and the native knives and forks are bad. Yet patriots in
Kief and Moscow tell you, with gravest face, that the vintage of the
Don is finer than that of the Garonne, that the cutlery of Tula is
superior to that of Sheffield. Yet these dreamers say and unsay in a
breath, as seems for the moment best; for while they crack up their
country right and wrong, in the face of strangers; they abuse it right
and wrong when speaking of it among themselves. "We are sick, we are
sick to death," was a saying in the streets, a cry in the public
journals, long before Nicolas transferred the ailment of his country
to that of his enemy the Turk. "We have never done a thing," wrote
Khomakof, the Panslavonic poet; "not even made a rat-trap."
A Panslavonian fears free trade. He wants cheap cotton shirts, he
wants good knives and forks; but then he shudders at the sight of a
cheap shirt and a good fork on hearing from his priest that Manchester
and Sheffield are two heretical towns, in which the spinners who weave
cloth, the grinders who polish steel, have never been taught by their
pastors how to sign themselves with the true Greek cross. What shall
it profit a man to have a cheap shirt and lose his soul? The Orthodox
clergy, seizing the Panslavonic banner, wrote on its front their own
exclusive motto: "Russia and the Byzantine Church;" and this priestly
motto made a Panslavistic unity impossible; since the Western branches
of the race are not disciples of that Byzantine Church. At Moscow
every thing was done to keep down these dissensions; and the question
of a future capital was put off, as one too dangerous for debate. Nine
men in ten of every party urge the abandonment of St. Petersburg; but
Moscow, standing in the heart of Russia, can not yield her claims to
Kief.
The partisans of Old Russia join hands with those of Young Russia in
assailing these Panslavistic dreamers, who prate of saving their
country from the vices and errors of Europe, and offer--these
assailants say--no other plan than that of changing a German yoke for
either a Byzantine or a Polish yoke.
The clever men who guide this party are well aware that the laws and
ceremonies of the Lower Empire offer them no good models; but in
returning to the Greeks, they expect to gain a firmer hold on the
practices of their Church. For the rest, they are willing to rest in
the hands of God, in the Oriental hope of finding that all is well at
last. If nothing else is gained, they will have saved their souls.
"Their souls!" laugh the Young Russians, trained in what are called
the infidel schools of France; "these fellows who have no souls to be
saved!" "Their souls!" frown the Old Believers, strong in their
ancient customs and ancient faith; "these men whose souls are already
damned!" With a pitiless logic, these opponents of the Panslavonic
dreamers call on them to put their thoughts into simple words. What is
the use of dreaming dreams? "How can you promote Slavonic
nationality," ask the Young Russians, "by excluding the most liberal
and enlightened of our brethren? How can you promote civilization by
excluding cotton-prints?" The Old Believers ask, on the other side,
"How can you extend the true faith by going back to the Lower Empire,
in which religion was lost? How can you, who are not the children of
Christ, promote his kingdom on the earth? You regenerate Russia! you,
who are not the inheritors of her ancient and holy faith!"
Reformers of every school and type have come to see the force which
lies in a Western idea--not yet, practically, known in Russia--that of
individual right. They ask for every sort of freedom; the right to
live, the right to think, the right to speak, the right to hold land,
the right to travel, the right to buy and sell, _as personal rights_.
"How," they demand from the Panslavonians, "can the Russian become a
free man while his personality is absorbed in the commune, in the
empire, and in the church?"
"An old Russian," replies the Panslavonian, "was a free man, and a
modern Russian is a free man, but in a higher sense than is understood
by a trading-people like the English, an infidel people like the
French. Inspired by his Church, a Russian has obtained the gifts of
resignation and of sacrifice. By an act of devotion he has conveyed
his individual rights to his native prince, even as a son might give
up his rights to a father in whose love and care he had perfect trust.
A right is not lost which has been openly lodged in the hands of a
compassionate and benevolent Tsar. The Western nations have retained a
liberty which they find a curse, while the Russians have been saved by
obeying the Holy Spirit."
Imagine the mockery by which an argument so patriarchal has been met!
"No illusion, gentlemen," said the Emperor to his first deputation of
Poles. So far as they are linked in fortune with their Eastern
brethren, the Poles are invited to an equal place in a great empire,
having its centre of gravity in Moscow, its port of communication in
St. Petersburg; not to a Japanese kingdom of the Slavonic tribes, with
a mysterious and secluded throne in Kief.
Yet the Poles and Ruthenians who people the western provinces and the
southern steppe will not readily give up their dream; and their genius
for affairs, their oratorical gifts, their love of war, all tend to
make them enemies equally dangerous in the court and in the field.
Plastic, clever, adroit, with the advantage of speaking the language
of the country, these dreamers get into places of high trust; into
the professor's chair, into the secretary's office, into the
aide-de-camp's saddle; in which they carry on their plot in favor of
some form of government other than that under which they live.