THE RUSSIAN MIND
Ever since the dawn of her history Russia has vegetated, rather than
lived, apart from the main European currents--social, religious,
political, and scientific--untouched by the prevailing tendencies of
the times and with a decided drift of her own to political
decomposition. As the democratic spirit progressed in the rest of
Europe, Russia more and more resembled the iceberg floating into warm
climes and thawing as it moved. Her rulers would appear to have had
no clear conception of the baleful kind of international entity into
which their predatory State had become, of its essential antagonism
to the European community of nations, or of the utter collapse of the
whole fabric that must ensue upon a serious endeavour to change its
nature and bring it into line with the communities of the West. It
was only by dint of circumstance and brute force that the people,
naturally rebellious to social discipline, had been knit into a loose
organisation which aimed not merely at protection from outside
aggression but also and especially at territorial expansion, and in
this way had to dispense with creating conditions favourable to the
highest social life.
The most merciless, if not the most convincing, analyses of the
national character have been made by Russians themselves, who are
prone to morbid introspection and also to exaggeration and often
indulge in self-abasement. Take, as example, the utterance of Peter
the Great, "Other European peoples one can treat as human beings, but
I have to do with cattle." The celebrated Tshaadayeff, who headed
the reform movement in the reign of Nicholas I. and bade his
countrymen look to the West for light and guidance, described Russia
as a superfluous member of the body of humanity. "No great truth,"
he affirmed, "ever came from out of our people. We have discovered
nothing, and {12} from all the discoveries made by other nations we
have borrowed only the outward simulacrum of useful luxury."[1] For
these and similar opinions Tshaadayeff, the officer of the Guards,
was shut up in a mad-house. It may not be amiss, therefore, to quote
one of the few native psychologists who is free from those defects of
self-castigation and over-statement and paints the generality of his
countrymen in colours the effect of which is relatively bright. "The
Russian man," writes M. Nikitenko,[2] "knows neither law nor justice.
His morality is the outcome of his good humour, which being neither
developed nor strengthened by conscious principles, sometimes sprouts
forth into an action, but is frequently swallowed up by other and
more savage instincts. A Russian may steal and booze and cheat until
you find it irksome to live with him. And yet in spite of it all you
feel that there is something in him that captivates and draws you
towards him, something good, intelligent, fraught with promise,
something that raises him above the level of every German, every
Frenchman, and even Englishman you ever met."[3]
Now that undefined something is, I take it, the psychical
undercurrent inherent in certain representatives of the race, the
latent spiritual force which assimilates fleeting moods or, as
mystics would say, fleeting moods to fitful memories of a pre-natal
state or fleeting presentiments of a wondrous future. For the higher
type of Russian, educated or illiterate, is attracted, at least
speculatively, to lofty ideals, and is also capable of striving after
them for a time with a superb contempt of consequence, heroically
heedless of the route he traverses, but without method or
perseverance. The result is often as tragi-comical as was that of
the genius who with his gaze fixed on the stars tripped and fell into
a boghole. The limits of the sphere of dream and waking, the bounds
of true and false, the line of demarcation between the sublime and
the ridiculous, pale and vanish as the fanatical Russian follows a
Jack-o'-lantern into the enchanted land of fantasy. {13} On the
absurd incongruities and follies to which visionaries are led by
these vain strivings to bring down the ideals of the millennium to
the earth and clothe them in the garb of every-day reality it is
needless to dwell. One has but to cast a glance at the horrors
enacted in Petrograd and Odessa after the Maximalist revolution or,
indeed, to recall certain of the other revolting exhibitions that
followed that sinister outburst.
Some observers are struck with what they consider the contrast in the
Russian people between the effects of historic forces on the one hand
and those of racial tendencies on the other. I venture to think that
these effects were largely caused by the blending of widely different
races. That they exist and that Russia is the synthesis of
contradictions cannot be gainsaid by those who have studied the
origins of her people. "Meekness and brutality, communism and the
most advanced individualism, the strongest state and the weakest
political consciousness, absence of race-hatred and the most cruel
pogroms, the deepest religious nature and the most abject
superstition, an all-pervading democracy and the most absolute
monarchy, all these contradictions and more are the result of this
unique jostling of mythical antiquity and stark reality--an eternal
and inextricable enigma to the Western observer."[4] After ages of
spiritual stagnation and politico-social bondage the Russian man is
still half a child and half an imperfectly tamed beast. But if he
lacks culture he has a rich experience and a stoical life-philosophy
enshrined in picturesque proverbs of which the basis is resignation
to Fate and pity for his ill-starred fellows; his language is rich,
coloured, and forcible, but his thinking lacks sequence and his
reasoning logic; his action begins in hesitation, is continued with
intervals of quiescence, and almost always ends before achievement.
Deeds belie words, means hinder ends, indifference compensates for
lack of constancy. In his dealings with his fellows the Russian
often runs through the entire gamut of temperament from feminine
gentleness to bestial ferocity.
{14}
To bring out these characteristics of the dominant race, foremost
among which is a marked tendency to embroider truth and subject the
call of duty to the passing mood, and to trace them to their sources
was one of the objects of a book of mine[5] written many years ago
which has since received the hall-mark of approval from the greatest
Russian authority[6] on these questions.[7] I there pointed out that
a careful survey of the leading elements of social life in that
country must convince the unbiassed of the need of a standard of
judgment wholly different from that which we are wont to apply to
other European races, the Russian being still, so to say, in the
gristle, not yet hardened in the bone of manhood.
By nature the Northern Slavs are richly gifted. A keen subtle
understanding; surprising quickness of apprehension--a changeful
temper; an inexhaustible flow of animal spirits; a rude persuasive
eloquence; and a capacity for self-denial equalled only by that of
the early Christian ascetics and for fiendish cruelty comparable to
that of the Redskins of North America,[8] to which may be added an
imitative {15} faculty almost simian in range and
intensity--constitute an adequate equipment for the discharge of what
worldly-minded statesmen were wont to term their "heaven-sent mission
to civilise the world." But these and other gifts were blighted and
turned into curses by influences--natural and artificial--that made
their free exercise impossible and rendered their possessors as
impersonal as the men who raised the pyramids in the desert or the
builders of the coral reefs in the Pacific. The resultant is an
easy-going, patient, shiftless, ignorant, unveracious, and fitfully
ferocious mass whom the German writers flippantly connect by an
isocultural line with the Gauchos of Paraguay.
Incapacity to gauge and maintain the proper relation in which words
should stand to things lies at the root of one Russian quality hardly
distinguishable from the mythopœic faculty among primitive races,
but which Anglo-Saxons bluntly label unveracity. It is beyond
question a trait of the Northern Russ. The masses display scant
reverence for facts, refuse to acknowledge their finality, and argue
as though they could be safely disregarded, nay, even altered at a
pinch. Their imagination is powerful enough to fuse, recast, and
readjust them to their velleities. To time, space, and causality
they ascribe but a shadowy existence, and even that they often ignore
in practice. Thus a whole generation of professional revolutionaries
passed their time fruitlessly operating with words and doing nothing.
The life of the reformer Bakunin was a continuous battle--fought with
empty phrases for a mere negation.
Congruously with this mental cast the Russians are free and easy in
their use of words as exponents of facts, or symbols of ideas, and
set so much less value than Western peoples on assurances and
promises, however solemn, that they rob praise of its worth and
calumny of its sting. I shall never forget an anecdote told me many
years ago by my friend the novelist, Leskoff, of an Englishman
invited to Russia by Nicholas I. for the sole purpose of becoming
acquainted with Gogol's story _Dead Souls_, which had not yet been
translated into any foreign tongue. A nobleman {16} equally well at
home in English and Russian was told off by the Emperor to visit the
new-comer daily and translate the book orally chapter by chapter. At
the farewell audience accorded to him on his departure the guest was
asked by the Tsar how he relished the novel. The Briton reflected a
moment and then exclaimed with an air of deep conviction, "The
Russians, sire, are unconquerable." "Unconquerable?" queried the
Tsar, puzzled by the seemingly irrelevant reply. "I don't quite see
the nexus." "Well, your Majesty, no other people on the face of
God's earth could have produced such a consummate cheat as Gogol's
hero. The nation that brought him forth is sheer unconquerable."
Thus hampered alike by their qualities and their defects, the bulk of
the nation--I am dealing now exclusively with the Great Russian, who
represents only 48 per cent. of the population[9]--is obviously still
unfitted to discharge the functions that devolve upon a
self-governing democracy. And interest as well as duty made it
incumbent on the popular leaders to give practical recognition to
this decisive fact while endeavouring to modify it by educating the
people. This step presupposed a high degree of moral courage; and it
was never taken. One prominent man, my friend, Maxim Kovalevsky,
fearlessly proclaimed the truth and garnered in unpopularity. And
yet a policy of this limited scope need not have damped the
reformers' ardour nor affected their ultimate aims. After all,
politics is the art of the possible, and the possible is gauged by
studying the material to be handled, and is attained by accepting
compromises after having balanced the inconveniences. But even the
educated class of the Russian population, the "intellectuals," are
admittedly deficient in political sense as well as in deep-rooted
concrete interests. One cannot affect surprise at this, considering
their origin as a class, their status in the community, and the
ruthless way in which the Tsar's government {17} suppressed the
application of individual thought and energy to all national and most
international concerns. Neither is it to be wondered at that so many
Russian reformers were impractical day-dreamers, willing to sacrifice
the feasible good for the unattainable best, and always liable to run
off at a tangent in quest of some secondary aim. Had it been
otherwise, had the party chiefs, who in October, 1905, aspired to
lead the Russian masses, drawn a lesson from the events of that time
and borne that lesson in mind in 1917 when surveying the new
situation and gauging its trend and possibilities, they would have
shrunk from the destruction of their last plank of safety, the Duma,
and the abolition of the Tsardom, and abstained from the acts that
led up to these suicidal measures. For say what we may, the blast
that destroyed the monarchy and shattered the nation came directly
from the Duma leaders, semi-consciously aided and abetted by the
simple-minded representatives of the Entente, whom history may come
to regard as drowsy, if not sleeping, partners of the active plotters.
One can feel for the Entente powers who nobly set out to do battle
for the weak and oppressed nationalities in the company of the
greatest oppressor of weak nationalities the world had ever seen--the
one predatory State in Europe which glutted its piratical appetites
not only on foreign peoples but also on its own. It was like the
shepherd's dogs taking a pack of wolves with them to look after the
defenceless sheep. And the Entente governments were painfully alive
to all that was ridiculous and embarrassing in their position,
especially when they had been bullied into promising Constantinople
to Russia and agreeing to treat the fate of Poland as a domestic
Russian concern. Naturally they were impatient to see the Tsardom
democratised and, ignorant of the State structure with which they
were dealing, they bent its pillars and pulled down the whole fabric.
Not only were the character and defects of the predominant element of
the population--the Russian race--uniformly misunderstood by the
chiefs of the parliamentary party in Petrograd and their friends
abroad, but the further {18} all-important circumstance was unheeded
that there was no ethnic unity in the Empire, nor anything more
politically than a loose amalgam of conflicting nationalities and
mutually conflicting classes knit together by awe of imperial
authority and the pressure exerted by an omnipotent bureaucracy.
Internal cement there was none. For ages the souls of the many
subject races had been waiting for some great crisis to fuse them in
one and embody them anew in the product of a cultural blend. Some
onlookers imagine that the present world-war was destined to be the
Medea's cauldron that would transform or kill, but, whether this was
likely or not, it behoved those politicians who imagined that they
held the nation's future in their hands to eschew everything
calculated to intensify the mutual aversion of the ethnic ingredients
whose fusion was the preliminary condition to the formation of a
homogeneous people in a united and indivisible Russia. The chiefs,
however, unconscious of the danger and solicitous about their
parties, suddenly removed the one force that could have kept the
nationalities and classes together, whereupon these collapsed like
the staves of a barrel from which the hoops have been knocked off.
And their collapse was so natural, so necessary, the elements being
juxtaposed as they were, that it could and should have been foreseen.
One of the main objects of my articles and book written in the years
1891-93 was to prepare the public for the downfall of the Tsardom.
It is fair to say, however, that the coalescence of all Russia's
peoples being neither feasible nor desirable, that of the principal
culture-bearers would have sufficed. Slav and Turk, German and
Calmuck, Jew and Mongol, Tunguz and Georgian, Armenian and Bashkir,
display physiological and psychical differences so vast that the
resultant of assimilation must be in every respect unsound. In all
such cases the moral grade is lowered, for great racial divergences
in the elements of an ethnic blend necessarily beget degeneration.
In a ruling or self-governing race it is basic character that
regulates the morality of the community, shapes its destinies,
determines its place in the world. Consequently {19} history is at
bottom the manifestation of national character rather than of average
intelligence, the working of the moral bent much more than of the
intellectual gifts and attainments of the people. And under normal
conditions neither in the race nor in the individual is character
liable to change. It is my belief, however, that an exception is
made by the character of the Russian which is marked by variability.
Soft, receptive, and pliant it lacks grit and backbone. In
initiative, self-mastery, and staying power the individual is sadly
deficient and the people have less than an average nation's share of
cohesiveness. To use a picturesque American expression they are not
"self-winders." Indeed, one might aptly term Russia "the boneless
man of Europe."
Of all the individual and, therefore, also racial traits of the
Northern Slav the most noteworthy to my thinking, and one to which I
have never seen any allusion in books or articles, is precisely this
variability of character. I mention this peculiarity only after long
years of observation and merely as a surmise which still needs
verification. Impressibility to certain classes of motive and
corresponding indifference to others constitute the woof and warp of
human character, and character--the bedrock of personality--is deemed
to be almost as unchangeable as the inherent properties of things.
It may sound rash, therefore, to affirm that the Russian differs from
other Europeans in the inconstancy of his impressibility to a given
class of motive in its liability to vary in response to inner and
outer influences which generally elude analysis. But to my thinking
the facts warrant the assumption. And for this reason the most
careful estimates of what a Russian will do under a given set of
circumstances, even though his antecedents be known and examples of
his past conduct be there to guide one, cannot be taken as
trustworthy and are often belied by the event.
When during a critical stage in the process of racial amalgamation a
politico-social upheaval brings turbulent chaos in its train, as in
the year 1917, the danger is indeed formidable. It is then touch and
go with the inchoate nation. The ethnic elements either combine
definitely, forming a {20} _tertium quid_ as did the heterogeneous
races of France, or else repel each other violently as do the
nationalities of Austria. The former result was rapidly brought
about by the French Revolution which smoothed away the jarring traits
of Picards and Normans, Bretons and Provençals, Flemings and Basques,
producing a one-souled, united French people. The latter
consummation is now making headway in Russia, whose Germans, Jews,
Finns, Tartars, Mongols, Armenians, Georgians, scornfully refuse to
commingle with, and lose themselves in, the passive unassimilating
Slav. Their racial and political differences are accentuated as
never before, the general tendency is centrifugal, and the desire for
union, where union until recently seemed possible, is weakened or
gone.
But a still worse calamity threatens the inhabitants of the new
republic. Baleful though a revolution may be, it does not
necessarily involve the ruin of a country. Indeed, it very often
clears the way for a fresh period of evolution under the sway of a
new idea. National upheavals generally coincide with the spiritual
seed-time of which later generations reap the harvest. In Russia's
case, however, the germs of a new order are as yet nowhere visible.
Far from this, the loosening of all social and other bonds is the
inevitable if not the wished-for goal. No positive idea has been
propounded, no constructive effort put forth by any one there.
Dogmas on which a section of the nation has been living for ages are
now thrust aside as antiquated prejudices and their negatives are
gaining a temporary hold over the minds of earnest and hot-headed
men. But only their negatives. It is not as though new, untried
ideas were sprouting up, from which in time good fruit might
reasonably be expected. The barren denial of old ones is judged
sufficient, as though mere negatives could serve as the groundwork of
a vast social and political structure. The attempted realisation of
these negations is now turning the country upside down and inside
out; and there is reason to fear that the one practical outcome will
be a superfluous and catastrophic demonstration that a mere negation
is not a constructive force.
{21}
Since March, 1917, the sole effect of these solvents has been to
produce that anarchic decomposition the germs of which were inherent
in the Tsardom ever since its birth. In lieu of an ideal leaven to
raise and lighten the inert lump, we descry only powerful explosives
capable of shattering it. The leading classes had long since
forsaken the old tenets, religious and political, and their example
contributes to undermine the unreasoning faith of the common people,
whose selfish savage instincts superstition or force had so often
checked without transforming. Crude notions of an anthropomorphic
God and of an apotheosised Tsar continued to be the Hercules' Pillars
beyond which the benighted peasant seldom ventured before his
emancipation by Alexander II. They marked the end of his world of
ideas--the Chinese wall that shut in his horizon. But after that
reform they imperceptibly began to lose their significance as moral
or political boundaries. In September, 1917, I wrote: "Now that the
Tsar is thrust aside and Russia's gods are dead or dying, it is
become manifest that there is no more powerful solvent of human
communities than the dust of dead divinities. Bestial passions,
formerly subdued by ascetic self-restraint or physical fear, are now
unleashed; all deterrents are gone since that of capital punishment
was abolished, and for the time being anarchy is supreme. The nation
is suffering from _delirium tremens_. If Russia has not yet touched
bottom in the Slough of Despond her frenzied chiefs may yet sink her
deeper. Her revolutionary leaders have no longer a living faith in
the principles that lie at the roots of civilised community life, and
without the faith which justifies hope even nations cannot be saved."
What part, one may fairly ask, had all those unheeded traits of the
Russian people in bringing about the March revolution, and what were
its more proximate causes? When and why did the minds of the people
first begin to ferment and effervesce, and who was responsible for
under-estimating the intensity of the fever and doing nothing to
allay it? Does the movement which has culminated in the overthrow of
the Tsardom and the disruption of the State involve the {22} utter
ruin of both, or is it only one of those violent breaks in the
continuous development of a community which mark the close of an
epoch of decadence and the opening of an era of fresh vitality and
energy? Are the proletarian republics ruled by Lenin, Trotsky, and
the more obscure administrators the types of State best adapted to
the new cultural plane in which humanity is about to enter after the
great world war? To suggest tentative answers to these questions is
the main object of the following pages.
The simplest and most reasonable account of the matter would seem to
be that a number of widely different causes, racial, political,
religious, and others, combined to form both the ethnic clay and the
political mould, the material and the instrument, for the work of the
fashioning potter, and the finished product could not possibly live
in the democratic environment of to-day. Now so far as I know the
part attributable to the inborn predispositions of the people has in
no previous analysis been clearly stated, nor even the influence of
institutions on their leanings, ideals, and moral temper. The
lightning-flare of the revolution by revealing the ex-subjects of the
Tsar in an unfamiliar, not to say repellent, aspect has whetted
curiosity as to the sources whence the race drew its social
life-current. And I have long believed that the best materials for a
satisfactory answer to this question might be found in a study of its
racial origins and transmitted tendencies.
When assigning to political institutions their part in bringing about
the great national crisis, native and foreign writers are wont to lay
all the stress on the practical abuses of the administration which in
the last two reigns were in truth not only at odds with the spirit of
the age but almost absolutely unbearable. I venture to go further
and maintain that not merely the human instruments but the system
itself was vicious, and that it was easy to see that the
administration at its best, when public servants were, not indeed
more honest, but less recklessly dishonest, when the problems
confronting them were fewer and simpler, and when control by the
central government was easier, was rooted in conceptions {23} which
rendered its maintenance in an enlightened community of nations sheer
impossible. For Russia never ceased to be what its founders had made
it, a predatory State without, like Prussia, and a predatory State
within, unlike any other out of Asia. All its internal arrangements
were adjusted to foreign conquest, which lent to its policy a
steadfastness and uniformity that were currently attributed to the
fixity of a grandiose Machiavellian scheme. The internal ordering of
the country, the suppression of free speech, the prohibition of
education, the racking of the peasantry, and the persecution of
religious nonconformity were more or less effective means to the
unchanging end. To have purified such a system from the abuses
introduced by personal negligence, greed, or depravity would,
therefore, not have altered its trend nor saved the country from the
disaster towards which it was steadily wending.
It is impossible to approach the ethnic enigma with any sense of
reality without allowing largely for the circumstance that the
Russians, far from being pure Slavs, absorbed the various indigenous
races, mostly Finnish nomads, whom they found in the land between the
Upper Volga and the Oka. And the descendants of these various and
disparate elements inherited many of the salient intellectual and
moral as well as physical traits of the lower races, their lack of
social cohesiveness, their leanings towards anarchism--their
restlessness, intellectual and physical, displayed in biting
criticism of all social and political arrangements and by an
irresistible passion for roaming. The Russian is a born critic and
satirist. An illiterate peasant from the remote and uncultured
provinces who drives a public conveyance will turn to his fare and in
picturesque, richly-coloured phrases utter severe strictures on
everything that is. To him nothing is sacred. Again, a lad from a
squalid hamlet will pass through the school and university into the
civil service, and in the course of his career be sent from Ryazan to
Samarkand, from Odessa to Archangel, thus moving thousands of miles
about the country, yet he never thinks of going back to end his days
in his native village. In this and most other things he {24} offers
a striking contrast to the Teuton who is hierarchical, attached to
his birthplace, imbued with a sense of measure, and contented with
the relative bliss of domesticity.
The Russian is never settled; he is so frequently stung with the
mania for travelling that it seems to be the call of the blood. He
will sometimes rise up suddenly, start off as if in response to a
mystic impulse, and wander for days or months or years. The lower
orders are oftener possessed by this overmastering passion than their
superiors. They are constantly changing their places of abode. It
was for their benefit that merely nominal charges were fixed for such
long journeys as that from Petersburg to Vladivostok or to Kharbin.
And when they had not the wherewithal to buy even these cheap
tickets, they would bribe the conductor with sixpence or a shilling
to let them travel for nothing and to hide under the seat when the
controller came around. Thousands of them flit from western Russia
to eastern Siberia, others pilgrimage to Jerusalem and back again to
their respective hamlets, then after an interval of rest they trudge
to Kieff, afterwards to the Sviatya Gory, next to the northern
shrines, and so on they keep roving until they lie down and die.
Sectarians scour the country in every direction, preaching, teaching,
proselytising. One sect has a rigid rule forbidding its members to
tarry longer than three days in one place. I met one of those
fanatics at the holy shrine Sviatya Gory many years ago and he
explained to me how his co-religionists arranged to be together and
to meet from time to time. For eight years he himself had never
sojourned longer than three days anywhere. A well-to-do Russian
whose sons were grown up would often distribute his property among
his children, take a wallet and a staff, and spend the remainder of
his days pilgrimaging from shrine to shrine.
Nomads are not usually builders; they usually prey on those who are.
Like the Kurdish mountaineers among whom I sojourned several years
ago, listening to their tales of predatory expeditions against the
Armenian husbandmen, they pillage and destroy. Love of destruction
is ingrained; only {25} generations can expel it from the blood.
This also is a moral twist that often breaks through in the Russian.
Take the merchants, for example, who formed the most conservative
class in the Tsardom.[10] When a merchant and his friends went out
to drink, he would kick over the traces. His idea of amusement was
to smash the costly mirrors in hotels and restaurants, to break the
furniture, to maul the waiters or the proprietor, and to ask that
these items be included in the bill. The peasants dance and skip for
joy when they can pillage, demolish, burn. Whenever the police
relaxed their hold, they delighted in breaking into manors, smashing
the furniture, cutting the pictures into shreds, burning the houses.
In the pogroms against the Jews the same passion for destruction
overmastered and goaded them to crimes against property and the
person. "We must destroy all the imperial institutions, pulverise
them, leave nothing standing," exclaimed a revolutionist, whose
parents were nobles, to me. "And what will you put in the place of
what you destroy?" I queried. "Nothing yet--that is until we think
it out. But that will come in time." In 1905-6 as in 1917 the main
achievement of the revolutionists was destruction. And what fiendish
joy they displayed in 1905-6 in roasting men alive, or setting them
barefoot on sheets of hot iron! And in 1917....
[1] Cf. _Russian Heads_, by Dr. T. Schiemann, p. 231.
[2] _Russian Antiquity._
[3] Cf. _Russian Antiquity_, May, 1891.
[4] Leo Wiener, _An Interpretation of the Russian People_, p. 15.
[5] _Russian Characteristics_, by E. B. Lanin.
[6] Professor Milyukoff, ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs.
[7] Leo Wiener, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the
Harvard University, in his admirable book _An Interpretation of the
Russian People_ (London, 1915), writes: "Several years ago I asked
Professor Milyukoff, the distinguished historian of civilisation,
what English book he considered the best as regards its analysis of
modern Russia. Without a moment's hesitation, and with a twinkle in
his eye, he answered: 'E. J. Dillon's _Russian Characteristics_.'
The reply betrayed a distinct Russian attitude towards censure, for a
more incisive condemnation of everything Russian could hardly be
imagined, and any one other than a Russian would have blushed with
shame and burned with indignation at the very mention of that
brilliant Irishman's mordant attack upon his nation. But Milyukoff
does not stand alone in his conviction, for although Dr. Dillon is
known to Russian society and to the Government as the author of these
sketches he continues to live in Petrograd as an honoured man and
perfectly secure in his Avestan studies."
[8] The manner in which the officers were tortured in 1877 cannot
even be described in Western countries. General Korovichenko in
Tashkent was horribly maltreated until he was agonising. Then he was
laid on the floor of his apartment and the crowd was admitted on
payment of 30 copecks to enter in and spit on his face. Cf. _Le
Temps_, 10th January, 1918.
[9] There are 48 per cent. Great Russians. The remaining 52 per
cent. is split into three groups: (1) The White or Little Russians;
(2) The non-Russian races of the Caucasus, East Russia, and Silesia;
and (3) races of the West (Poles, Lithuanians, Letts, Esthonians,
Finns, Swedes).
[10] They were fast losing this conservatism in the cities and towns
before the war.
{26}