Slav or Saxon? A study of the growth and tendencies of Russian civilization

Front matter

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Preface To The Third Edition

When the first edition of this study was issued in 1887, my statement of the aspirations of the Muscovite Empire to universal dominion was received with great incredulity, and sarcastic observations were made by critics regarding the Gargantuan meal which Russia proposed to make of the rest of the universe. When the second edition appeared in 1898, such critics had become silent, and since that time the aims and tendencies of Russian civilization have become so generally known that statements which seemed impossible when this book was originally published Qiay now seem superfluous.

Some important events, however, have occurred since the edition of 1898. The evasive diplomacy and broken promises of Russia in regard to Manchuria and Korea have had their natural result in the outbreak of the war with Japan, while the perfidy of Russia towards Finland in withdrawing the constitutional guarantees sanctioned by the oath of every Czar since 1809; the removal from that country of the last vestiges of civil liberty, and the exile of the most distinguished Finnish citizens for venturing to protest against the overthrow of their political and civil rights ; the acts of injustice and outrage committed against the Jews of Russia; and the iv Preface to the Third Edition.

arbitrary appropriation by the Russian Government of the property and control of the Armenian Church, have reinforced so conclusively the original argument of this book that the author is constrained to add these new matters in Chapters VI., X., XL, and XII., as well as to make a number of not very important corrections in the original text. It is believed that the volume, as it now stands, offers a reasonably accurate statement of the Russian question down to the outbreak of the war with Japan.

Preface To Second Edition

The certainty of the coming conflict between the Slav and the Saxon, which was foreshadowed in the edition of this work pubHshed in 1887, has become more generallyapparent during the past year, owing to Russian intrigues in China ; while the cordial friendship between England and America, which has grown up during our war with Spain, has made possible the union of American and English influence for the protection of our common civilization against the encroachments of autocracy.

The time therefore seems opportune for issuing a revised edition, bringing down to the present moment the existing facts relating to the coming struggle, a struggle which seems certain to involve in its results the destiny of the whole human race.

W. D. F.

Among the publications to which I have been under obligations, are " L' Empire des Tsars et les Russes," by Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu ; Rambaud's " History of Russia"; Stepniak's " Russia under the Tsars," " Underground Russia," and "The Russian Storm Cloud"; Vamb^ry's articles in the Nineteenth Century entitled " Will Russia Conquer India ? " ; " The Russians at the Gates of Herat," by Charles Marvin; Tissot's " Russes et Allemands," Wallace's" Russia," and Dixon's" Free Russia"; also "China in Transformation," by A. R. Colquhoun, articles of Stanley, Hallett, Younghusband, and others in the Nineteenth Century ; " Finland and the Tsars," by J. R. Fisher ; " The Russian Advance," by Albert J. Beveridge; and an article of Geo. Kennan on " The KishinefT Horror," published in the Washington Star on January i6, 1904. The literature upon the subject is comprehensive, and I have drawn freely from many sources, but more especially from the foregoing.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I

I. — The Coming Struggle .

Chapter II. The Territory Of Russia

In the matter of land, Russia possesses nearly one sixth of the entire world, and her territory is continually growing larger by conquest and colonization. Her possessions are greater in extent than those of any other nation that exists to-day, or any which has ever existed. With the gradual filling up of the world, this question of land is becoming more and more important. The mere quantity of earth seems to be the only thing which remains constant. If there be only space enough, the same skill which redeemed Holland from the sea, which consigned the Great American Desert to the realms of imagination, which built St. Petersburg upon a marsh, and Archangel upon the shores of the Frozen Ocean, seems able everywhere to transmute that space into a productive agent for supplying the wants of man. The most inhospitable rock yields ore of priceless value. The swamp and bog contain the choicest soil ; the very Arctic teems with exhaustless life. Sahara itself needs nothing but the enterprise and skill of future generations to be transformed into a garden. So long as a nation grows, the value of its land continues to increase. The time has been when the richest soil of Russia had no value. The time may come when the plains of Turkestan and the forests of Siberia will be valuable as the fields of Central Russia are to-day. Formerly great extent of territorial possessions was an element of political weakness. The forces of the state were scattered over a wide region where communication was impossible. When a province was attacked, it took too long to hear from it, too long to send assistance. By the time thought was interchanged, the conditions were all different.

The Emperor Adrian relinquished vast provinces because it weakened Rome to defend them. But now in a week we can make the journey of a year ; in the transmission of thought, space is annihilated altogether. The extent of its territory is the strongest security of Russian despotism ; it prevents opposing forces from concentrating, while the central authority, which controls the avenues of communication, can speedily bring its whole force to bear upon a single point anywhere in its dominions.

Not only does the Russian Empire stand pre-eminent in mere extent of territory, it is equally remarkable for the homogeneity of its possessions. " Its principal characteristic is unity in immensity." Western Europe is broken by mountain ranges and divided by seas, gulfs, and bays; there is diversity everywhere. Commerce is largely external, agriculture is of every kind, natural barriers separate great countries like Spain, England, Scandinavia, and Italy from the rest. But the Europe of Russia is one vast plain. The same physical unity prevails in Siberia and Turkestan. " Russia in Asia is not an exotic colony impossible to assimilate or difficult to keep. It is a prolongation and natural dependence of the European territories."

The monotony and level character of the land is not with )ut its influence upon the temperament of the people. The lack of originality and individuality noticed by travellers in Russia is partly due to this cause. From an industrial point of view this unity has its disadvantages ; the employments of the people are not diversified. Russia is too much an agricultural state. But from a political point of view nothing could be better adapted to the concentration of power. The people become a unit like the land, their occupations are the same, their thoughts, their aspirations. They are much more easily subjected to the control of a single will. Their separate interests are not blowing toward every quarter like the winds from the cave of Eolus.

There is, however, one great variety in nature — the change of the seasons. It is only a few weeks from the bitter cold of an arctic winter to the heat of a summer which is more than tropical. The transformation of nature is brilliant and startling. The winters are dazzling, the nights of summer are one long twilight. The peasants' songs of spring, which celebrate the arrival of the " birds from paradise," the harvest melodies, which have for their theme the sudden ripening of the grain, and the songs of autumn, lamenting the departure of all fruitfulness in nature, are evidences of the effect upon the Russian temperament of these transformations. The flexibility of Russian character owes much to these sudden changes. If they lack originality in intellect, there is great originality in their feelings, tastes, and habits. The innumerable sects of religious fanatics, the strange types of character of which Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great are illustrations, the capacity of the Russians for tremendous efforts upon occasions rather than for sustained endeavor, are not without relation to their long winters of torpor and inactivity, and their short, burning summers, when the work of a year must be compressed into a few brief m.onths. To this, in part, may also be due the twofold character remarked by students of Russian life, the excesses of liberalism and conservatism, of veneration and cynicism, of hope and despondency, of intelligence and ignorance ; the boldness in projects of reform, the timidity in execution. These contradictions, however, are modified by the practical good-sense of the Russians, their tendency to realism rather than abstract thought, their leaning toward physical science rather than intellectual philosophy. In all these things the nation shows the impulses and tendencies of childhood, and further culture and development may correct its shortcomings. The desire for reforms of a tangible and physical nature remind one much of the same tendency among our own people. With greater education and more liberty the Russians would hardly be behind us in this respect.

The introduction of steam for travel and transportation will give greater advantages to Russia than to any other country. Its weakness in early days was its want of access to the sea. It was to remedy this that Peter the

Great conquered the Baltic provinces and built St. Petersburg. It was in great part for this that he and Catharine and Nicholas plotted to overthrow the Ottoman Empire, to gain possession of the Bosphorus. But in these latter days, when communication by land is easier and swifter than by sea, this disadvantage is scarcely felt. From her present position Russia could overrun the whole Eastern Continent without a navy. For the purposes of international, as well as internal commerce, the railroad will soon supersede the ship and the steamer. In a struggle between England and Russia the maritime supremacy of England would be of little avail.

Not only has Russia a vast extent of dominion, but a considerable portion of her territory is the most fertile land in the world. Across European Russia extend, from Northeast to Southwest, three great belts — the forests, the black land, and the steppes. Over the entire North of Russia extend these great forests. Many of the oldest cities have been built in the clearings. In the extreme North the land is barren, elsewhere it is fairly productive. South of the forests comes the great belt of black land. There is no richer soil anywhere. It has been farmed for centuries without fertilization ; but the most ruinous system of agriculture has failed to weaken its powers. " A little rest," as the farmers call it, has been all that has been needed. South of the black land extend the steppes, the prairies of Russia, where the grass grows higher than men's heads. The Northern part of these prairies is also fertile ; to the South they are adapted to pasturage only. The barren lands were formerly the depths of a great inland sea. The area of this district is much less than that of the fertile steppes.

These great belts are prolonged into Siberia. In the early history of Russia the South line of the forests was the boundary line which divided the agricultural from the nomad population, the Russians from the Tartars, the Muscovites from the Cossacks. In the forests, the population grows more slowly than farther South, and the peasants add to their farming a great variety of little industries in their agricultural villages, in which they engage during the long winter when there can be no labor in the field. More fruitful in agricultural promise are the unwooded zones of the South, which are increased from year to year by the cutting away of the forests.

The black land and the Northern steppes, like our basin of the Mississippi, constitute one of those great storehouses of grain which seem to guarantee an unlimited supply for the future. The fertile steppes, like our prairies, are a vast sea of verdure, which is gradually falling into the hands of the husbandmen. It is destined to be conquered, by the peasants until " the steppes of Gogol, as in America the prairies of Cooper, will soon be nothing but a remembrance."

During thousands of years, the great migrations from Asia into Europe have passed across these plains, and until the present century, the steppes have remained exposed to the encroachments of nomads. The settlement of- much of the best land in Russia has been thus delayed. It has been since the subjugation of the Crimean Tartars and the Kirghis of the Caspian that this vast region has become secure for the development of systematic agriculture. Twt, natural obstacles remain — the absence of trees and the great dryness of the climate. But the discovery of oil and coal in these regions, and the improved facilities for commerce, are soon to furnish the steppes of Russia with sufficient fuel and building material, while the planting of trees, which is even now commenced in some places, is likely to overcome the seasons of barrenness occasioned by the excessive drought.

The present system of agriculture is very wasteful. Large tracts are abandoned successively every few years by the communities that farm them in most primitive fashion. But this is an evil which improved methods of culture are already beginning to overcome.

The mineral resources of Russia are almost wholly undeveloped, though we know that rich mines of gold, silver, lead, copper, and platinum lie hidden in the depths of the Ural and Altai mountains. These regions seem destined to open up a new civilization in the same way as California and Australia.

At a time when water-power was so essential to manufactures, Russia was behindhand in this great department of industry ; but now that steam has usurped the place of this old motive-power, her advantages are equal to any. In natural facilities for agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, as well as in mineral resources, Russia is not inferior to the most favored nations. Her natural productions render her wholly self-sustaining. If the ports of every civilized nation were closed against her, Russia would feel the loss less than any country in the world.

In this, too, we see a great advantage in a military point of view.

There is some drawback in the matter of cHmate ; the whole of Russia and Siberia is subject to intense cold in winter. The heat of summer is scarcely less intense ; the climate has great extremes. The Northern plains of Siberia, stretching away into the Arctic Circle, as well as a considerable portion of Northern Russia, seem uninhabitable. In the whole North the period of vegetation is shorter, and the product of the earth more limited on that account. It looks to us now as though a great part of Russia must always remain a waste. But it is probable that we little know the powers of the civilization of the future for utilizing the most dreary and barren regions. The ancient world would never have dreamed that a great city could be built on the shores of the White Sea. Russia has one compensation for this climate : It has produced a race, hardy, patient, and energetic ; the only civilized beings who can endure the rigors of its dreadful winters. The perseverance of Russian colonists and soldiers in overcoming obstacles which would be insurmountable to others, has long been recognized by the world.

Herbert Spencer says that the earliest civilization began in warm countries, where men did not have to wrestle with the elements for life alone ; where there was some surplus energy for the formation of society ; but that as civilization went on, and as the means of overcoming natural objects became greater, the highest social development moved into colder regions, where natural obstacks brought out a corresponding energy, which not only overcame them, but strengthened the type. It is rather Northward than Westward that the course of empire moves ; beginning in India, Egypt, and Carthage, it has crept gradually up to Greece, Rome, Spain, France, till the sceptre passed to England, as it is now passing to Russia. The reign of the Normans in Sicily, France, England, and Russia itself, attests the supremacy of Northern vigor.

The very fruitfulness of nature is sometimes hostile to the development of mankind. " Russia," in the words of Leroy-Beaulieu, " while it is ill-fitted to nourish the infancy of civilization, is one of those countries which is admirably adapted to receive it and give it further growth." " The Russian soil does not use as its mere instrument him who cultivates it. It does not threaten his race with degeneration. It makes no Creoles. Man meets there only two obstructions — cold and space. Cold, more easily overcome than extreme heat and less to be feared by our civilization ; space, an enemy already mastered by Russia and its great ally for the future."

The great extent of its territory, the sternness of its climate, and the absence of large centres of population, make a conquest of the country all but impossible. Russia can be invaded, many of its towns destroyed, and perhaps, even its capital taken ; but the patience of a people who are willing to sacrifice their homes at the command of their emperor, to submit and to suffer as long as it may be necessary, and who alone are able to endure the rigors of a Russian winter, is sufficient to secure the ultimate annihilation of any army which attempts the sudden conquest of Russia. There is too much of it to overrun. Nature combines with man to exterminate the invader.

The only manner in which this vast empire could ever be subdued or reduced to an inferior position, is the manner in which Russia has herself spread her dominion, that is by the conquest in detail of small portions of her immense possessions (for instance, the Baltic Provinces, Poland, or Finland); the conqueror gradually consolidating his power in the conquered provinces. This would require not only superior strength, but a persistent purpose, extending over many years and probably generations. What nation is in a condition to undertake so vast an enterprise ?

Chapter III. The Russian People

The present population of the Russian empire is about one hundred and twenty-five millions. That of the British empire, embracing the dense masses of India and Africa, is about four hundred millions. But the strength of a nation is not to be reckoned by mere numbers. The population of the Chinese empire is the greatest in the world, yet its solid and lifeless mass cannot resist the most trifling aggressions. The Indian empire of Her Majesty is composed of material of much the same sort. The soldiery has been greatly improved by European training, but it is still far behind that of Russia in those patient and enduring qualities which ofTer the only assurance of success in a long and desperate struggle.

The population of Russia is distributed very unevenly. In the North and South it is extremely sparse; in the centre it is comparatively dense. This comprises the southern part of the forest zone, the black land, and Poland. Here manufactures and other branches of industry are most fully developed. The centre of gravity of population is near Moscow — a little to the South of the ancient capital. In the central districts it is nearly as dense as in continental Europe, and it grows most rapidly in these places.

The Russian race is a compound of many elements, welded and fused together, sometimes by the most violent means. This process is still going on among the frontier races, especially among the Asiatic peoples. These are first conquered and then absorbed. The orginal stock, the Slav, which has retained the predominance in this work of compounding and re-compounding, belongs to the great Aryan family. Its kinship to the races of West Europe is shown by its language as well as by its physical and intellectual traits. The Slavs are most closely connected with the Germans in language, but they are nearer the Greeks and Latins in character. They are mobile, enthusiastic, intelligent, quick to perceive and act ; they lack the phlegmatic temperament of the Teutonic race. They are the latest grown of the Aryan children. Even to-day they are not sufficiently developed to reveal fully their intellectual aptitudes. Their country was exposed to continual Asiatic incursions, in past times, and their growth and civilization were greatly retarded. It is only in our generation that they have begun to assume any intellectual prominence ; but those who are acquainted with the Russian literature of the present time, with the masterpieces of Tolstoi, Turgeneff, and Gogol, will hardly fail to foresee a brilliant future for a people capable of producing such works. Among the branches of the Aryan stock, those later in civilization have successively asserted their superiority over their elder brethren. The Greek yielded to the Roman, the Roman to the Teuton and the Anglo- Saxon, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibiHty that even these may in turn give way to the Slav. Up to the present time the Slav peoples have been thought to lack originality. They have been learners at the schools of more enlightened nations, but their present literature shows that they are by no means wanting in the higher qualities of intellect.

The parent people took up their abode in Western Russia, at an early day, while other branches of the same stock in Poland, Moravia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Servia, Bohemia, and elsewhere, became the ancestors of many of the various peoples now subject to Austrian and German rule, and of some that dwell in the Balkan Peninsula in a chaotic and unstable condition of semi-independence. There was also, at an early period, a small infusion of Byzantine blood, together with a large infusion of Byzantine influence, and later, some admixture with Teutonic stock, especially in the Baltic provinces ; also an amalgamation with the Lithuanians, an ancient Aryan race, who preserved their primitive habits and their paganism to a late period. But the great bulk of the tribes and races which the Slavs have absorbed were of Mongolian or Turanian origin. Most important among these during the early process of amalgamation, were the innumerable Finnish tribes. Nestor, the oldest historian of Russia, gives us such a multitude of names of strange peoples which have disappeared from history, that it confuses us. Gradually these races were absorbed ; a few remnants are all that tell us where the rest have gone.

Then came the fusion with Turks and Tartars, each change strengthening the Slav stock, while many of the Mongolian characteristics faded away. The Slavs of Great Russia (the Eastern portion surrounding Moscow) became gradually predominant and multiplied most rapidly. It was they who acquired (mostly from the Finns, but also in part from the Tartars) the largest share of Mongolian blood. The Slavs of White Russia in the West, and Little Russia farther South, of purer ancestry, remained subordinate and increased more slowly. Russian and Pole were once of the same race. Differences in religion and habits of political thought, during several centuries, have made the Poles the most intractable among the subjects of the Czar.

The work of fusion, which has been going on for centuries, has thus developed the present Great Russian nationality, which now comprises a majority of the subjects of the Czar, and forms the ethnical basis of the Russian Empire. This process of race change and amalgamation is still going on at points farther removed from the centre of the empire. Even the savages of Eastern Siberia are gradually being Russianized. Russian colonists go everywhere, mingle with the original peoples, and soon absorb them. There are to-day some eighty different races of men subject to the autocrat ; races that speak every possible language ; races that come from every parent stock ; races of every religion — Buddhists, Lamaists, Jews, Protestants, Greeks, Catholics, Mohammedans, and pagans of many varieties ; peoples that follow every pursuit in life — savages and nomads, as well as pastoral, agricultural, and industrial communities.

But, in the language of Leroy-Beaulieu :

With all its diverse races, Russia is by no means an incoherent mass, a sort of political conglomerate or marqueterie of peoples. It resembles rather France than Turkey or Austria in the matter of national unity. If Russia can be compared to a mosaic, it is one of those ancient pavements where the basis is of a single substance and a single color, whose surface only is made of an embroidery of different pieces and diverse colors. The greater part of the population of foreign origin is thrown out on the extremities of Russia and forms around her, especially toward the East and West, a sort of girdle of greater or less thickness. All the centre is filled by a nationality, at once absorbing and expansive, in the midst of which are hidden some small German colonies and weak Finnish or Tartar communities, without coherence or national bond. In the interior of Russia, in place of unlikenesses, varieties, and contrasts, that which strikes the traveller is the uniformity of population and the monotony of life.

The language has few dialects, the towns are of the same form, the peasants the same in habits and mode of life, " The nation is made in the image of nature ; it shows the same unity, almost the same monotony, as the plains which it inhabits."

The tendency to colonize and incorporate other races is aided by a remarkable physical peculiarity of Russia. Throughout the whole of its great central plain, stone is almost entirely absent ; the buildings are generally of wood. Dwellings of this kind do not last. It used to be said that the towns of Russia were burned once every seven years. This lack of i)ermanence, together with the vast supply of land and the absence of natural barriers, made the people half nomadic. Formerly, great bodies of peasants would leave their farms and start together in search of better lands. This tendency to move on still remains a trait of the Russian people. It is the parent spirit of that enterprise which is to-day civilizing the forests of Siberia and the plains of Turkestan. Russia belongs to one of those races which has been driven to continual motion by an impulse from within, one of those races whose calling is emigration and conquest. Rambaud, in his history of Russia, describes the process very forcibly. He says :

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. They belong to one of the great races of pioneers and back- Vv^oodsmen. All the history of the Russian people, from the foundation of Moscow, is that of their advance into the forest, into the black land, into the prairie. The Russian has his trappers and setders in the Cossacks of the Dnieper, the Don, and the Terek ; in the tireless fur-hunters of Siberia ; in the gold-diggers of the Ural and the Altai ; in the adventurous monks who lead the way, founding in regions ever more distant, a monastery which is to be the centre of a town ; lastly, in the Raskolniki, or Dissenters, Russian Puritans or Mormons, who are persecuted by laws human and divine, and seek from forest to forest the Jerusalem of their dreams.

The level plains of Russia naturally tempted men to migration. The mountain keeps her own, the mountain calls her wanderers to return ; while the steppe, stretching away to the dimmest horizon, invites you to advance, to ride at a venture, to " go where the eyes glance." The flat and monotonous soil has no hold on its inhabitants ; they will find as bare a landscape anywhere. As for their hovel, how can they care for that, it is burned down so often ? The Western expression, "the ancestral roof," has no meaning for the Russian peasant. The native of Great Russia, accustomed to live on little, and endure the extremes of heat and cold, was born to brave the dangers and privations of the emigrant's life. With his crucifix, his ax in his belt, and his boots slung behind his back, he will go to the end of the Eastern world. However weak may be the infusion of the Russian element in an Asiatic population, it cannot transmute itself or disappear ; it must become the dominant power. History has helped to make this movement irresistible. When the Russian took refuge in Suzdal, he was compelled to clear and cultivate the very worst land of his future domain, for the black land was then overrun by nomads. How could he escape the temptation to go back and look in the South for more fertile soil, which, with less labor, would yield four times as great a harvest ? Villages and whole cantons in Muscovy have been known to empty themselves in a moment, the peasants marching in a body, as in the old times of the invasions, toward the " black soil," the " warm soil," of the South. Government and the landholders were compelled to use the most horrible means to stop these migrations of the husbandmen.

Without these repressive measures, the steppes would have been colonized two centuries earlier than they were. The report that the Czar authorized emigration, a forged ukase, a rutQor, any thing was enough to uproot whole peoples from the soil. The peasant's passion for wandering explains the development of Cossack life in the plains of thie South ^ it-explains the legislation which, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, chained the serf to the glebe and bound him to the soil. In the thirteenth century, on the other hand, the peasant was free. His prince encouraged him to emigrate, and hence came the colonization of Eastern Russia. The Russian race has the faculty of absorbing certain aboriginal stocks. The Little Russians assimilated the remnants of the Turkish tribes ; the Great Russians swallowed up the Finnish nations of the East.