My old friend D----, who in the winter lived alone in the country,
while his wife, whom he went to see but rarely, lived in Paris,
used to talk during the long autumn evenings with an illiterate,
but very clever and respectable peasant, an elder, who came in the
evening to report, and my friend told him, among other things, of
the superiority of the French political order over our own. This
was on the eve of the last Polish insurrection and the interference
of the French government in our affairs. The patriotic Russian
newspapers at that time burned with indignation on account of such
interference, and so heated up the ruling classes that they talked
of a war with France.
My friend, who had read the papers, told the elder also of these
relations between Russia and France. Submitting to the tone of the
papers, my friend said that if there should be any war (he was an
old soldier), he would serve and fight against France. At that time
the "_revanche_" against the French seemed necessary to the Russians
on account of Sevastopol.
"But why should we wage war?" asked the elder.
"How can we permit France to manage our affairs?"
"But you say yourself that things are better arranged with them than
with us," the elder said, quite seriously. "Let them arrange matters
in our country, too."
My friend told me that this reflection so startled him that he was
absolutely at a loss what to say, and only laughed, as laugh those
who awaken from a deceptive dream.
Such reflections one may hear from any sober Russian labouring
man, if only he is not under any hypnotic influence of the
government. They talk of the love of the Russian masses for their
faith, their Tsar, and their government, and yet there will not
be found one commune of peasants in the whole of Russia, which
would hesitate for a moment, which of the two places to choose
for its colonization,--Russia, with the Tsar, the little father,
as they write in books, and with the holy Orthodox faith in its
adored country, but with less and worse land, or without the little
father, the white Tsar, and without the Orthodox faith, somewhere
outside of Russia, in Prussia, China, Turkey, Austria, but with some
greater and better advantages, as indeed we have seen before and
see at present. For every Russian peasant the question as to what
government he will be under (since he knows that, no matter under
what government he may be, he will be fleeced just the same) has
incomparably less meaning than the question as to whether, I will
not say the water is good, but as to whether the clay is soft and as
to whether there will be a good crop of cabbage.
But it may be thought that the indifference of the Russians is due
to this, that any other government under whose power they may come
will certainly be better than the Russian, because in Europe there
is not one that is worse than the Russian; but that is not so: so
far as I know, we have seen the same in the case of the English,
Dutch, German immigrants in America, and of all the other colonists
in Russia.
The transference of the European nations from the power of one
government to another, from the Turkish to the Austrian, or from
the French to the German, changes the condition of the nations so
little that in no case can they provoke the dissatisfaction of the
working classes, so long as they are not artificially subjected to
the suggestions of the governments and the ruling classes.