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THE LIBRARY

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

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A WORD "FROM THE TRANSLATOR.

It is not for the modest translator to preface by any words of
personal appreciation a work such as this, which, as a Russian, I
feel it an honor and a great privilege to be allowed to present in
English garb to the nation of all others whose friendly, enlight-
ened, and unbiassed judgment of us and our country we all are
most anxious to secure. But inasmuch as my work is not
altogether merely a literal translation, I may be permitted to point
out in how far a slight amount of editing has been called for.

It was thought desirable by the publishers to let a moderate
thread of annotation accompany the text, so as to bring into yet
stronger light the masterly pictures of Russian life — historical,
social, popular, — which Mr. Leroy-Beaulieu unfolds before the
reader in a series as varied as that life itself. I gladly take this
opportunity of answering the many questions which I have been
asked during my twenty years of life in America, among Americans,
and try to tell them not only what I know they want to know in
the way of characteristic details, but also, as far as the necessarily
limited space at my disposal will allow, some of the things which
I think they ought to know and do not as yet. I imagined myself
reading the book with a circle of interested friends, and from
time to time laying it down to discuss some point, to elucidate
some historical allusion, to illustrate some description, and some-
times— ^very rarely, very respectfully — to offer some slight objec-
tion. Where I was drawn into a discussion or narrative too long
to be placed at the bottom of a page, I gave the note at the end
of the chapter, in the form of an appendix. To distingniish my

v.l

Rf^dOGG

iv A WORD FROM THE TRANSLATOR.

annotations from the author's own, I adopted the simple expedient
of marking them with figures, while the usual signs — stars, dag-
gers, etc. — were retained for the author's notes, thus doing away
with the cumbersome initials or "Translator's note" at the end
of each annotation.

However sparingly I made use of the latitude left me in the
matter of annotation, this addition to the original work threatened
to swell the English volume to a more than reasonable bulk. It
became necessary, therefore, to have recourse to condensation.
This delicate and responsible operation being necessarily left to my
discretion, caused me more care and anxiety than all the rest of
the work put together. Very rarely, very cautiously and lightly,
with a fear on me as of committing sacrilege, I proceeded to abbre-
viate a paragraph here and there. Not so much by elimination —
for it is but seldom that several lines or as much as half a page at
once have been omitted — as by persistent compression, on the
same principle as a pound of down, when compressed, is a pound
still, though its volimie is diminished. " What will the author
say to this passage ? — or this ? — or this ? ' ' was the test question
always present before my mind, and it was my standard that he
should not be able to detect the abbreviations at the first reading
unless he knew where they were made.

After long and careful deliberation, it was thought advisable to
depart from the ordinary custom of having but one index for a
work of so great compass, and of placing this complete index at
the end of the last volume. Every student knows how utterly
unpractical and disconcerting such a system is, and udll thankfully
welcome an innovation which places all the references within easy
reach and frees him from the necessity of cumbering himself with
a big book otherwise unneeded, not to speak of the discomfort of
doing without an index at all until the publication of the third
volume, which naturally cannot take place for some consider-
able time after the first appears. The innovation was the more
appropriate in the present case that the three volumes of Mr.

A WORD FROM THE TRANSLATOR. V

Leroy-Beaulieu's work are in a great measure independent of one
another, as they treat three entirely separate divisions of his
immense subject, — the first volume being devoted to " the Country
and People," the second to " The Institutions," and the third to
' ' Religion ' ' and Church matters.

In the preparation of this first index, I have classed the items
more according to subjects than to names and words, with the
exception of the ethnographical chapters. This subject being the
most unfamiliar and bewildering, from the great number of races,
peoples, and tribes, with their strange, hard names, I took particu-
lar care to include all these names in the index, in a manner to
facilitate immediate reference and cross-reference.

The transliteration of Russian words and names, I believe, to
render the original sound as nearly as the writing of one language
can render the pronunciation of another. This result will be helped
by the system of accentuation I have adopted, using both the ac-
cents— ^ and ' — in this way, that the first marks a short vowel, and
the second a long one. Take, for instance, o in "hot" and in
"hole." In " hot " it would have a \ so: "h6t," and in "hole"
a ', so : hole ; — ^ on i makes the sound short, as in " fin " ; ' makes
it long, as in "eat," " beet." The * gives the vowel a very open
sotmd, as that of a in "hand," " man." A few simple rules for
the pronunciation of the different vowels, some consonants, etc.,
are given in notes, as the need of them occurs.

Z. A. Ragozin.
New York, April, 1893.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

WRITTEN EXPRESSI^Y FOR THE AMERICAN EDITION.

The work herewith oflfered to the English-reading public is
forbidden in Russia. The English or American reader will
wonder at this : he should not. The Anglo-Saxon who wishes
to judge of Russian matters must begin by divesting himself
of American or British ideas. For a book to become ofl&cially
naturalized in the domains of the Tsar, it is not enough that it
should breathe the spirit of sympathy with the great Slavic peo-
ple and respect for its sovereign. Autocracy, like faith, has its
noli me tangere. It cannot allow either its acts or its principles
to be discussed. And this is just what this book does, with
a freedom obviously incompatible with the autocratic system.
It would, therefore, be unreasonable to complain of the ostracism
decreed against these volumes ; it rather claims the author's
thanks, as being tribute to his sincerity from the Russian censure.
Indeed, he can boast a rare good fortune — that of being able to
freely express all his friendliness towards Russia and her people,
without a doubt being cast on his independence of spirit.

One thing I cannot too much impress on my readers, and
that is that we are not justified, we Westerners, in applying to
Russia the same notions and the same rules as to Europe or
America. To do so would be the height of ignorance and unfair-
ness. Yet this is the very error into which most foreigners fall.
They suffer themselves to be imposed upon by the geographers,
who assure them that Europe extends to the flat-topped ridge

viu . AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

of the Ural and to the peak-crowned steeps of the Caucasus. All
this college ballast must be thrown overboard, these conventional
limits be done away with. Russia is neither Europe nor Asia ;
she is a world by itself, situated between Europe and Asia, and,
in a way. belonging to both. The Russian Empire — I trust
I have succeeded in demonstrating thus much — is indeed, in a
sense, a European state, as it is a Christian one ; but it is not
a state of our time. If it does belong to Europe, it is to a
Europe of another age, not to our modem Europe. If one
would really understand Russia, one should, to look at her,
recede some three or four centuries into the past. To imagine, on
the faith of the almanacs, that Russia as she is and the Emperor
Alexander III. belong to the end of the nineteenth century, is,
in spite of all chronological tables, a gross anachronism. The
Tsar Alexander Alex^ndrovitch, crowned in the Kremlin of
Moscow, is not so much the contemporary of Queen Victoria as
of Queen Isabel of Castile. The uprightness of his intentions,
the loftiness of his character are beyond all doubt, but neither
he nor his people live in the same intellectual atmosphere with
ourselves. He can with a good conscience sign ukhzes that our
conscience condemns. If, at the distance of four centuries, the
Russian Tsar takes against his Jewish subjects measures which
recall the edicts issued in 1492 by los Reyes CatSlicos, it is because
Orthodox Russia is not unlike Catholic Spain of the fifteenth
century.

Between this ' ' Holy Russia ' ' and the democratic republics
and constitutional monarchies of the West there lies, for any
mind trained to observe, an interval of several hundred years.
Even tourists, as, with their habitual presumptuous flippancy,
they steam by express across the Russian plains, are struck
with this anomaly. What makes it so very hard to understand
Russia is that, modem as she is if we look to dates, to the exter-
nal side of her civilization, to all that she has appropriated of
our mechanical sciences, to her army and her bureaucracy, she is

AUTHORS PREFACE. ix

mediaeval still in the manners and spirit of her people. Urban or
rural, the Russian masses have not felt the breath of either
Renaissance, or Reformation, or Revolution. All that has been
done in Europe or America for the last four centuries, since the
time of Columbus and I,uther, Washington and Mirabeau, is, as
far as Russia is concerned, non-existent.

Not that she kept entirely aloof from the West or never tried to
enter into closer relations with it : all her history ever since Peter
the Great, and even before him, may be described as one contin-
uous eflFort to " catch up " with Europe. I have shown in what
sense Peter and his descendants succeeded and in what sense
they failed. No, the Russia of the Romauofs certainly never
stood still. She has advanced since Peter the Great ; at times
even her rulers, in their haste to get ahead, attempted to push on
the ponderous and compact empire at an accelerated pace which
the heavy popular masses could not keep up. Contrary to all
that we have seen in Europe, the initiative, the impulse has
always come from above, from those in power, and never had
monarchs, or ministers such a weight to lift.

But, if Russia kept progressing in all directions, Europe, too—
the West — was advancing at an increasing pace, into all sorts of
new roads, so that Russia, massive and slow, instead of "catch-
ing up," always found herself at a great distance behind.
Another thing, at which we should surely not wonder : our nimble
West (Europe and America both, which to remote Russia are all
one) — our unstable West, in its precipitous race for that which it
calls Progress, ended by arousing a feeling of uneasiness in the
religiously attuned soul of old Russia. As far back as the time of
Peter the Great, there were the so-called "old Russians" — har-
dened Moscovites, who were scandalized at the overt imitation of
Europe — the Europe of L,ouis XIV. and of Queen Anne. With
what feelings, then, must such men, in our days, view our repub-
lics and our parliaments, our class strifes, our governments and
our parties, which give to our political life the semblance of a

X AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

perpetual civil war, in which the weapons are lies and slander?
Our liberties, too often meaning oppression of the weak, and our
license, spreading itself to the destruction of all tradition and
reverence ; our democracies with their thirst for novelty and their
appetite for wealth, too often inspired by a gross and unblushing
materialism ; our incessant agitation, similar, from afar, to the
idle plashing of the waves of the sea — all our restless instability, in
short, have alarmed Russia and the Tsar. After having long
believed, with a childlike faith, that to be civilized meant
to resemble us, imitate us, numbers of Russians, even of the
thin cultivated ' ' upper crust, ' ' have come to ask themselves
whether the wide road to " progress" opened out by our politicians
and our thinkers does not end in a precipitous cliff. And so, after
placing all her pride and vain-glory in copying us and standing
by our side, Russia became distrustful, disturbed in spirit at the
excesses produced within her domains by our imported ideas, and
her government stopped her with a jerk. She is no longer anx-
ious to resemble us, nor to keep up with us. She thinks it safer
to remain herself, to retain — or to recover — her own individuality.
Such is the prevailing feeling in the surroundings of the
Emperor Alexander III. For the last two centuries, his country's
history has been that of a pendtdum drawn alternately towards
two opposite poles. It oscillates between European imitation and
Moscovite tradition. Just now, the attraction of Moscow and the
Russian pole prevails, as it did at one time under Nicolas. The cur-
rent is no longer, as under Catherine, Alexander I. , and Alexander
II., set towards Europe. Alexander III. prides himself in being,
first and foremost, a national ruler. He is the Orthodox Tsar of
popular tradition. Russian, and nothing if not Russian. He
seeks for no glory save that of embodying in himself his people.
To him, the Russian Tsar is Russia incarnate. With whatever
feelings we may regard certain of his acts, it is impossible to
deny the dignity of his personal character. Never, perhaps,
has Russia had a ruler more profoundly imbued with his

AUTHOR'S PREFACE. Xl

duties, more earnestly thoughtful for the welfare of his people.
His qualities as a sovereign, his virtues as a man, are his own ;
his government methods are not. They are the outcome of the
soil, of the autocratic system of which he is the representative
and which he deems it his mission to maintain in its integrity.
This man, invested with the omnipotence which breeds the Neros
and the Caligulas of the world, is an upright, honorable man.
He is brave, simple, modest ; he is calm and patient. He has
shown a quality most rare with those possessed of absolute power :
self-control. The protracted resistance encountered by his policy
in Bulgaria has not goaded him into one act of passion. This auto-
crat who, with one sign, can put in motion ten millions of men, is
a lover of peace. He has made war, and he dislikes it ; he has
seen its horrors too closely in the Balkan. It is repugnant to his
conscience as a Christian and as a ruler of men. If Europe , all brist-
ling with bayonets, is still at peace, the merit thereof lies, in a
great measure, with the Emperor Alexander III. Self-constituted
warder of the peace of the world : — a grand r6le for an autocrat,
and we in France wish that he may long continue to enact it.

Whatever the future may bring, whatever the results the Tsar's
policy, domestic and foreign, may be, — whether Russia is weak-
ened or strengthened thereby, — whether the sovereign's authority
is shaken or confirmed by it in the end, one thing is certain, and
that is that this huge country will remain, in any event, one of the
three or four great states of the globe. It will, in our hemisphere,
balance the United States in the other. That alone should sufl&ce
to arouse on behalf of the Empire of the Tsars, the interest of
whoever is a passionate student of the destinies of the human kind.
However remote this ponderous Russian people may appear to us,
however backward its civilization and institutions may seem to
us, this new-comer among nations has already manifested an
original genius in all branches of human activity — in arts, in
science, in letters. Therefore, even while noting its defects or
even vices, we have not the right, we Occidentals of Europe or

Xii AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

America, — we, its elders, to deal contemptuously with it. Its
youth may have many surprises in store for us. L<et us then,
whether we call ourselves Neo- Latins or Anglo-Saxons, beware of
the inane race-pride which is too often aired by the Teuton, on
the Elbe and the Visla, towards the Slav. The Slav has by no
means had his final say — indeed he has scarcely yet lisped his first
words. Because he is different from us, and because nature and
history have retarded his development, we are not to pronounce
him doomed to everlasting inferiority. Such presumption may
bring its own punishment To show us that he has in him the
stuff that goes to make a great people, all the Russian Slav needs
is a chance and a couple of centuries' credit.

January, 1893.

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.

NATURE, ClylMATE, AND SOIL.
CHAPTER I.

PACB

Difficulty of Knowing Russia — Description of the I,and — In What does

it Differ from Western Europe ? — In What is it European ? . . i

CHAPTER II.

The Two Great Zones — The Zone of Forests and the Woodless Zone —
Subdivisions of the Latter — The Black Mould Zone — The Steppe
Region — Accidental Steppes — Primeval Steppes .... 15

CHAPTER III.

Homogeneousness of the Country — Its Vast Plains were Destined to
Political Unity — Uneven Population — How, for a Length of Time,
it was Distributed after an Utterly Artificial Manner — Relative
Importance of the Various Regions — Vital and Accessory Parts —
Russia a Country Born of Colonization — Her Double Task and
Consequent Contradictions 35

BOOK II.
RACES AND NATIONALITY.

CHAPTER I.

Are the Russian People a European People ? — Is there in Russia a
Homogeneous Nationality ? — Interest Attaching to these Questions
— The Ethnographical Museum at Moscow — Causes of the Multi-
plicity of Races on this Uniform Land — Reasons why their Fusion
is not yet Completed — How it is that Ethnographical Maps can
Famish only Insufficient Data 54

xiv CONTENTS.

CHAPTER II.

The Three Chief Ethnic Elements of Russia — The Finns — Are they
an Element that has no Parallel in Western Europe? — Diversity
and Isolation of such Finn Groups as still Survive — Their Part in
the Formation of the Russian People — The Russian Type and the
Finn Stamp — Is this Relationship a Cause of Inferiority for Russia ?
— Capacity of the Finns for Civilization 63

CHAPTER III.

The Tatar or Turk Element — Tatars and Mongols — The Kalmyks —
What is the Proportion of Tatar Blood in the Russians? — The
Tatars in Russia and the Arabs in Spain — Slow Elimination of the
Tatar Element — Ethnical Influence of the Turk Tribes Previous to
the Mongol Invasion — Varieties of Type amidst the Modem Tatars
— ^Their Customs and Character 77

CHAPTER IV.

The Slavic Element and Russian Nationality — Slavs and Panslavism —
Slavs and Letto-Lithuanians — Formation of the Russian People : Its
Different Tribes — Differences between them, of Origin and Char-
acter— Great-Russians ( Velikoriiss) — White-Russians {Bielorilss) —
Little-Russians {Malordss) — Ukrainophilism 95

CHAPTER V.

Russia and the Historical Nationalities of her Western Boundaries —
Obstacles to Russification — Germans and German Influence — An-
tipathy against the Niitnets — Germans in the Baltic Provinces and
in Poland — The Polish Question — Mutual Interest of Russians and
Poles in a Reconciliation — Plebeian Nationalities and Democratical
Policy laa

BOOK III.

THB NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER.

CHAPTER I.

Utility and DiflBculty of Studying the National Character — Russia One
of the Countries where Material Surroundings Act Most on Man —
Some Effects of the Climate — ^The North, and Sluggishness Brought
on by Cold — Winter and the Intermittence of I^abor — Lack of
Liking for Physical Exertion — Habitual Insufl&ciency of Food;
Drunkenness ; Hygiene and Mortality — Cold and Uncleanliness at
Home in the North — Are Northern Countries More Favorable to
Morality? 138

CONTENTS. XV

CHAPTER II.

PACE

The Russian Character and the Struggle against the Climate — The
North far from Being the Natural Cradle of Liberty — Resignation,
Passiveness, and Hardening in Evil — Practical Spirit and Realistic
Instincts — Impressions Received from Nature ; her Sadness — Her
Grandeur and Poverty — Effects of these Contrasts — On the So-
Called Nomadic Tendencies of the Russians — The Monotony of
Great-Russia and the Lack of Originality i6i

CHAPTER III.

The Variety of Russian Nature Lies in the Alternations of Seasons —
In what Way the Contraries of Winter, Spring, and Summer have
Reacted on the National Temperament — Russian Character is all
in Extremes, as the Climate — Its Contradictions — Its Flexibility —
Its Adaptability — An Historical Embodiment of the National
Character 79

CHAPTER IV.

The Russian Character and Nihilism — Origin and Nature of Nihilism —
Its Three Successive Phases — By what Sides it Belongs to the
National Temperament — Combination of Realism and Mysticism —
In what Sense Nihilism is a Sect — Manner of Nihilistic Propaganda
— Radical Instincts of the Russian Mind — The Slav Woman and the
" Woman Question " in Russia 195

BOOK IV.

HISTORY AND THE ElvEMENTS OP CIVILIZATION.

CHAPTER I.

Has Russia an Historical Inheritance ? — Is it True that she Differs from
the West by the Principles of her Civilization ? — Various Theories
on this Subject — Slavophils and Occidentals — Origin and Ten-
dencies of the Slavophils — In what Way the Apologists of Russian
Civilization Meet the Detractors of Russia — Secret Affinities
between Slavophilism and Nihilism — The Three Conceptions of
the National History and Destinies . . . . • . 223

CHAPTER II.

The Eirst Russia and Europe — Traits of Kinship — Similarities and
Dissimilarities — The Varangians — Christianity and Byzantine
Training — The Principalities and Frequent Shiftings of the National
Centre — ^The Great Unhingement of Russian History . . .241

Xvi CONTEI^TS.

CHAPTER III.

PAOt

The Tatar Domination, its Effects on the National Manners and Char-
acter— On the Reigning Family and Political Status — Causes and
Character of the Moscovite Autocracy — In what the Russia of the
Seventeenth Century Differed from the West of the Same Period —
Gaps in Russian History 256

CHAPTER IV.

Russia's Rettim to European Civilization — Antecedents of the Work
of Peter the Great — The Reformer's Character and Way of Pro-
ceeding— Consequences and Defects of the Reform — Moral and
Social Dualism — In what Manner Autocracy Seems to have Ful-
filled its Historical Task 282

BOOK V.

THB SOCIAI, HIERARCHY : THE TOWNS AND URBAN CI^SSKS.

CHAPTER I.

Class Distinctions in Russia : In what Respects they are Superficial
and External, in what Deep and Persistent — Blow Struck at the
Old-Time Social Hierarchy by the Emancipation — All Subsequent
Reforms Tending to the Lowering of Class Barriers — How, in this
Respect, the Work Done by Alexander II. Resembles that Done by
the French Revolution, and how it Differs therefrom — Character
and Origin of all these Social Distinctions — Privileged and Non-
Privileged Classes — Lack of Solidarity between the Former ; Lack
of Homogeneousness in Each — Accessory Classes .... 305

CHAPTER IL

Disproportion between the Urban and Rural Populations — Relatively
Small Number of Towns and Cities in Russia and all Slavic
Countries — Explanation of this Phenomenon — Reasons which
Hinder the Agglomeration of the Population — The Towns and
their Inhabitants before Peter the Great — Efforts of Peter and
Catherine to Create a Middle Class 322

CONTENTS. XVII

CHAPTER III.

rACB

Classification of the Urban Population since Catherine II. — The
Mechanic and the Miish-tchanln or "Small Burgher" — Urban
Proletariate — How this Class has, as a Rule, Preserved the Same
Spirit as the Rural Population — The Merchant Guilds and their
Privileges — How Emancipation has Made it Possible for them to
Own Real Estate— The "Honorary Citizens" or "Notables"
among the Townspeople — Russia, till very Lately, had none of
the Professions out of which the Western Bourgeoisie Used to be
Recruited — In how far the Reforms Help Create a Middle Class
in the European Sense 334

BOOK VI.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN.

CHAPTER I.

The Nobles and the Peasants, Personifying the Two Russias, Appear
,_ like Two Different Nations — By its Origin and Manner of Recruit-

M- ing, the Russian Dvorihnstvo Differs from all Corresponding In-

stitutions in Western Europe — Personal and Hereditary Nobility —
Great Number of the Nobles — Russian Titles — The Descendants ,

of Rurik and Guedimin — Why this High-born Nobility does not
Form an Aristocracy — Constitution of the Russian Family — Equal
Division among the Males — Political Consequences of this System
— Attempts to Introduce Entails and Primogeniture . . 346

CHAPTER II.

How the Monopoly of Territorial Proprietorship could not Confer on
the Nobility any Political Power — Historical Reasons of this
Anomaly — The Drujina of the Kniazes and the Free Service of
the Boy&rs — Ancient Conception of Property : the Vdt-tchina and
the Pomiistiyi — The Service of the Tsar the only Source of Fortune
— ^The Disputes about Precedence at Table — Why no Real Aristoc-
racy could Come out of all this — The Hierarchy of Families Suc-
ceeded by the Hierarchy of Individuals — The "Table of Ranks,"
and the Fourteen Classes of the Tckin —Results of this Classification 362

CHAPTER III.

Effects of the " Table of Ranks " on the Nobility— The Functionary
and the Landlord, Formerly Combined in the Person of the
Dvorianln, Frequently Dissevered in the Nobility of our Day —
Hence Two Opposite Tendencies : Radicalism and Tchindvnism —
Revolutionary Dilettanteism — High Society and the Aristocratic
Circles — The French Language as a Social Barrier — Cosmopolitism
and Lack of Nationality . . 381

XVIll CON TEN TS.

CHAPTER IV.

TKQM

Personal Privileges of the Nobles, and Prerogatives of their Order —
What Emancipation has Taken from the Nobles besides Landed
Property — The Dvoridnstvo Threatened with Gradual Expropria-
' tion — How, though not Despoiled, it Practically Lost all its Privi-
leges— Importance of the Prerogatives Conferred on the ' ' Nobiliary
Assemblies " by Catherine II. — Why they did not Manage to Benefit
by them — Has Russia the Elements of a Political Aristocracy ? . 390

BOOK VII.

THB PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION.

CHAPTER I.

Russian Literature and the Apotheosis of the Mujik — Various Classes
of Peasants — Origin and Causes of Serfdom — Labor Dues and the
Obrdk — Situation of the Peasants before Emancipation — Napoleon
III. , Liberator of the Serfs 403

CHAPTER II.

Questions Raised by the Emancipation — Expectations and Disappoint-
ments of the Nobility — Agrarian Laws — Was it Possible to Free
the Serfs without Giving them Lands ? — Reasons and Conditions
of the Territorial Endowment of the Peasants .... 433

CHAPTER in.

Manner and Conditions of Redeeming the Lands — ^Advances Made
by the Exchequer — Actual State of the Operation — Slackening
in the Last Years of Alexander II. — How there still Subsisted, in
the Form of Labor Dues, a Sort of Half Servitude, which was
Abolished only under Alexander HI. — Why Landed Property is
often a Burden to the Freedmen — Unequal Treatment of the Peas-
ants in the DiflFerent Regions — The Gratuitous "Quarter Lot" —
The Peasant's Disappointment — In what Manner he Understood
Liberty 436

CHAPTER IV.

Results of the Emancipation — How the Manners and Social Status
were less AflFected by it than was Expected by either Adversaries
or Partisans — Disappointments and their Causes — Economic Re-
sults— They Differ according to the Regions— How it is that the
Conditions of the Master's Existence have been Modified by the
Emancipation, on the Whole, more than the Peasant's — Moral
and Social Consequences 450

CONTENTS. xix

BOOK VIII.
MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGR COMMUNITIES.

CHAPTER I.

PAGB

Land Tenure Unchanged by Emancipation — Is the Mir a Slavic Insti-
tution ? — Antiquity and Origin of Communal Property in Russia —
DiflFering Views on the Subject — Difference between Moscovite
Russia and Western Europe from the Standpoint of the Agrarian
System 474

CHAPTER IL

The Village Communities Have their Prototype in the Family —
The Commune Frequently Looked upon as an Enlarged Fam-
ily— Filiation of the Village Communities from the Family Com-
munities— The Peasantry's Patriarchal Manners and the Ancient
Village Family — Authority of the Head of a Household — Com-
munity of Possessions — Domestic Bonds Relaxed by the Eman-
cipation— Increase of Family Partitions — Material Inconvenience
and Moral Advantages Accruing Therefrom — Servitude of the
Women — Progress of Individualism ; its Consequences . . . 486

CHAPTER IIL

Village Communities : Manner of Division and Allotments — Large
Communities and Free Use of Vacant Lots — The Mir of the Present
Day and Periodical Re-allotments — Division by " Souls " and by
Tidglos — Epochs of Division ; Disadvantages of Frequent Re-
allotments — A Portion of the Defects Charged to the Mir Due
to the Large Agglomerated Villages — Consequences of Excessive
Parcelling 505

CHAPTER rv.

The Mir in Theory and Practice — The Material Equality of the Lots
does not Always Imply Equitable Distribution — Division Accord-
ing to the Working Capacity or Resources of the Laborers — Story
of One Commune — " Sovilless " Fainilies ; Strong, "Half-Power,"
Weak Families — The Mir as a Providence — Arbitrariness and In-
justice— Usury — The Vampires or " JT/ir-Eaters " — Rural Oligar-
chy— Landless Peasants and Rural Proletariate .... 521

XX CONTENTS,

CHAPTER V.

VACS

Partisans and Opponents of the Communal System — Frequent Exag-
gerations in Both Camps — Are the Faults most Justly Imputed to
the Mir All Inherent to Collective Tenure ? — How Many are Due
to Communal Solidarity and to the Fiscal System — Sittiation Cre-
ated for the Communes by Emancipation and Redemption — The
Extent of Peasant Lots — The Mir does not yet Really Own the
Land — The Village Communities will be in a Normal Condition only
after they have done Paying the Redemption Annuities . . 534

CHAPTER VI.

The Manner of Dissolving a Community — The Peasants of Any Village
are Always Free to Suppress the Mir — Why they don't Do it
more Frequently — What they Think of the Mir — How the Mir
has No Objection whatever to Individual I*roperty, even though
it Usually Upholds the Communal System — Purchases of Land by
Peasants — Distribution of the Arable Lands between the Com-
munes and Other Proprietors — Utility and Functions of Personal
Property— Can Both Modes of Tenure Co-Exist Some Day ? . 548

CHAPTER VII.

The Communal System and the Struggle between " Great" and
" Small " Landed Property — The Mir, the Peasant's Entail —
Transformations which the Agrarian Commune Might Undergo —
Can this System be Adapted to Modem Manners ? — What is Legis-
lature to Do with Regard to Collective Tenure ? — Can we See in
the Mir a Palladium of Society ? — Illusions on this Subject — The
Communal System and the Population Problem — Collective Ten-
ure and Emigration — Village Communities and Agrarian Socialism 563

INDEX 581

PART I.

The Country and Its Inhabitants

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. RACES AND NATIONALITY

THE NATIONAL CHARACTER AND NIHILISM

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION

THE SOCIAL CLASSES

THE PEASANTRY AND THE EMANCIPATION

THE MIR

/^^

^^^

^^Mi

^^®

^^ii^^i

0^^^f3l

^^m

^^^

I'^p^^

THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS

AND

THE RUSSIANS.

BOOJ^ I.
NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOII*

CHAPTER I.

DiflBculty of Knowing Russia — Description of the Land — In What does it
Differ from Western Europe? — In What is it European?

Ignorance of all that is foreign has always been one of France's
chief blemishes, one of the chief causes of her disasters. This
vice of our national education we are at present seeking to remedy :
we are making up our minds to let our children learn the lan-
guages of our neighbors ; but, if it is effectually to benefit us in
our politics, our knowledge of foreign things must not be limited
to those nations only who actually touch our boundaries. Like
ancient Greece, modern Europe forms one family, the members of
which, even in the midst of their quarrels, keep mutually depen-
dent on one another. The interests of external politics are com-
mon to all ; not much less so are those of internal politics.

There is, amidst the European states, one which, notwithstand-
ing its remoteness, has more than once weighed heavily on West-
em Europe. It is backed up against the East, and, between it
and France, there is only Germany. It is the largest of European

2 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

States, the one which has the greatest number of inhabitants, and
it is the least known ; in many ways the Mussulman East and the
two Americas are known better. Distance no longer can separate
Russia from the West ; it is Russia's manners, institutions, lan-
guage, which keep up the high barriers that rise between her
and the rest of Europe ; political and religious prejudice raise up
others. lyiberals or Democrats, Catholics or Protestants, all alike
find it difficult to keep their Western ideas from imparting a false
coloring to the pictures they draw of the Empire of the Tsars. The
pity aroused by the victims of her official poHtics has for a long
time warped our judgment of Russia,' She was seen only through
Poland and was mostly known only from the pictures drawn by
her adversaries.

Russians are fond of saying that only Russians are competent to
write about Russia. We should be perfectly willing to leave to
them the task of depicting themselves, could they bring to it the
same earnestness, the same sincerity, the same interest that we
bring to the study of them." Moreover, if foreigners are preju-
diced, so naturally is each nation on its own accoimt. To
national prejudice are added party views, school theories. No-
where have I heard a greater diversity of judgments on Russia
than in that country itself.

How can we expect to understand a nation that is still endeav-
oring to read its own riddle, that moves on with jerky, unsteady
gait, with no well-defined goal as yet, that — to quote one of its own
sayings — has left one bank, but has not as yet reached the opposite
one ! In these successive transformations we must discriminate
between what is superficial, external, official, and what is deep-
lying, permanent, national. No people known to history, possibly
no country in the world, has undergone so many changes in the

' Earnestness and especially sincerity have hardly been tmtil now the
distinctive qualities of foreigners' study of us, — if the name " study " may be
applied to what has always been more like a blind, hostile arraignment. It
is only, so to speak, since yesterday that things have begun to mend in this
respect.

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 3

course of one or two centuries ; not one, with the exception of
Italy and Japan, has seen similar ones in the course of a score of
years. The reforms of all sorts have been so numerous that the
most attentive observer finds it difficult to keep track of them. The
application of them is still so recent, at times so incomplete and so
much disputed, that it is not easy to appreciate all their effects.
Old-time Russia, the Russia of which we had some kind of a
knowledge, has perished with the abolition of serfdom. New Russia
is a child whose features are not yet fixed, or, better still, a youth
at the critical age at which face, voice, and character are in the
act of being moulded for life.

Does this imply that in studying contemporary Russia we
should forget the past ? By no means : the past everywhere
shows through the present. All the institutions, all the charac-
teristics peculiar to Russia, all that makes her different from
Western Europe, has deep roots which must be exposed to the
light, or the troubles under which she labors will remain incom-
prehensible. Whatever violence the hand of a despot gifted with
genius may seemingly have done to her destiny, her people were
not exempted from the laws which regulate the growth of every
society. Her civilization is bound up in the land, in the people's
life-blood, in its. historical training of centuries. As is the case
with all states, and in spite of seeming breaks, the present of Rus-
sia is the outcome of her past, and the one is not to be understood
without the other. If we wish to gain a profitable knowledge of
this people, at once so similar to and different from their European
brethren, the first thing needful is to realize the grand physical
and moral influences which ruled its growth and helped fashion it,
which, even in spite of itself, will for a long time yet hold it under
their sway. The real bearing, the probable results in the near
future of all the changes which are going on in Russia escape our
grasp if we remain in ignorance of the conditions under which
labor the development and capabilities for civilization of the
country and the people.

4 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

This is a great, an immense question, and, as though not yet
sufl5ciently swathed in darkness, it is further obscured by invet-
erate prejudices. It is, in fact, the first and last problem, and if that
is unsolved, any study of Russia must remain both baseless and
barren of results. In order to appreciate her genius and resources,
'her present and, still more, her future, it is imperative to know the
soil which nourishes her people, the races that compose it, the
history she has lived, the religion to which she owes her moral
training. I^et us begin with nature, soil, and climate ; let us see
what kind of moral and material development they allow of, what
is the population, and what the power the promise of which they
hold out to her.

The first thing that strikes one at the first glance at a map of
the Russian Empire, is its extent.* It covers over twelve million
square miles ; of these, something over three fall to the share of
Europe, i. e. , about eleven times the size of France in her mutila-
ted condition, fifteen or sixteen times the size of imited Italy, or
the three United Kingdoms, f These colossal dimensions are so
much out of proportion with the smallness of the so-called " great
European States," that, in order to bring it fairly within the grasp
of our imagination, one of this century's greatest scientists sought
the help of astronomy. According to Alexander von Humboldt,
the portion of our globe which owns the sway of Russia, is larger
than the face of the moon at its full. J In that empire, the vastness

* I would remind the reader that all this description of Russia and the
people who inhabit her was written before the volume of the GSographie
Universelle of Mr. Elis^e Reclus, devoted to Scandinavian and Russian
Europe, saw the light. (See Revue des Deux Mondes, 15th August, 15th
September, 1873.)

t It is no longer correct to say that the Russian Empire is the most ex-
tensive in the world. The British Empire, continually enlarged as it is by
annexations in Asia, Australia, and especially Africa, surpasses it in acreage ;
as to its population, it nearly trebles that of the Northern Empire, but to
the latter remains the twofold advantage of compactness of territories and
greater homogeneousness in the population.

X Central Asia, vol. iii., p. 34.

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 5

of which can be realized only with the help of the stars, the land
has no visible boundaries. Its plains, the hugest on our planet,
stretch on into the heart of the old continent until they reach the
mountain masses of Central Asia ; between the Black and Caspian
Seas they are barred by the gigantic bulwark of the Caucasus, the
foot of which lies partly below the level of the sea, while its sum-
mits rise near on 3,000 feet above the height of those of Mont
Blanc. To the northwest Russia owns the lakes I^^doga and
Oni6ga, the largest of Europe ; to the northeast, in Siberia, that
of Baikal, the largest of Asia ; to the south, the Caspian and Aral
Seas, the largest lakes in the world. Her rivers are in proportion
with her plains ; in Asia she has the Obi, the Yeniss^y, the Lena,
the Amoor ; in Europe, the Dniepr, the Don, the Volga, that
central artery of the countrj^ a river that, with its sinuous course,
measuring nearly 2,400 miles, does not altogether belong to
Europe. Nine tenths of the Russian territory are as yet almost
untenanted, and Russia already numbers over ninety million souls,
twice as many as the most populous of European states.

If we look only at European Russia, from the Glacial Ocean
down to the Caucasus, we ask ourselves : Does this country really
belong to Europe ? Are only the proportions laid out on a larger
scale and is nothing changed but these? or is not rather this
prodigious expanding of land sufl5cient to separate Russia from
Western Europe ? Are not the conditions of civilization modified
by the ungainly enlargement of the stage which is to be filled by
man ? The contrast of size alone would make out between Old
Europe and Russia a difference of capital importance, but is this
diflference the only one ? Do not other and no less important con-
trasts flow from this primeval contrast? Russia's climate, her
soil, her geographical structure — are all these European ?

Instead of being, like Africa, attached to the common trunk of
the Old World by a narrow joint, Europe is shaped like a triangu-
lar peninsula, the whole broad base of which leans against Asia
anr" is one body with her. There is only a slight ridge between

6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

them, a mountain chain remarkable neither for width nor
height, and below this chain which is really no partition at all,
there is nothing but a gap wide open and unprotected. Thus
soldered on to Asia, Russia is similarly shaped.

Two main features distinguish Europe amidst all the regions
of the globe : in the first place, her piecemeal structure — ' ' all cut
up into small pieces ' ' by the sea, to use the words of Montesquieu ;
^'peninsular articulate ^^' to use those of Humboldt ; in the second
place, a climate temperate as no other under the same latitude —
a climate which is in a great measure the consequence of this
very structure. Russia, on the other hand, adhering to Asia by
her longest side, bordered to the north and northwest by ice-
bound seas which yield to the shoreland but few of the advantages
usually enjoyed by littorals, — Russia is one of the most compact,
most eminently continental countries on the face of the globe.

Differing thus from Europe in structure, Russia also lacks
Europe's climate — temperate, softened by the encompassing waters.
Russia's climate is continental, i. e., almost equally extreme in
winter-cold and summer-heat. Hence the averages drawn from the
varying temperatures are deceitful. The isothermal lines rise up
towards the pole in summer ; sink low down southward in win-
ter, so that the greater part of Russia is comprised, in January,
within the fiigid zone, and within the torrid zone in July. The
very breadth of her lands condemns her to extremes. The seas
that bathe some of her boundaries are either too distant or insuffi-
cient in exte",t to be to her what they are to other countries
by turns — ^reservoirs of warmth and breeders of coolness. No-
where in the west of Europe, do we see winters so long and
severe, or summers so hot. Russia remains excluded from the
influences which temper the cold to the rest of Europe, from the
Ocean ciurents as well as from the winds of the Sahara. The
long Scandinavian peninsula, which stretches out between her
and the Atlantic, turns away from her shores the great stream
of warm water, the gift of the New World to the Old. Instead of

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 7

these mild influences, it is the polar ices, Siberia, the Arctic region
of Asia, that hold Russia under their sway. Against that proxim-
ity, the Ural chain is but an apparent defence, neutralized by its
inconsiderable elevation and by its position, nearly perpendicular
to the equator. Vainly Russia stretches down to the latitude
of Pau and Nizza, she must go down all the way below the
Caucasus to find a bulwark against the north wind. The bulk of
the land being perfectly flat, is open to all the atmospheric currents,
to the arid breath from the deserts of Central Asia no less than
to the winds from the polar circle.

This absence of mountains and consequently of valleys is
another of the broad distinctive features of Russian nature, as
opposed to European nature. This horizontality of the soil, we
may say, is not merely a superficial characteristic, it is an essential
featinre of the geology as well as the geography of the country.
The flattening of the outer crust is only a result of the parallelism
of the underground stratification. Instead of frequently rising
to the surface, as in the West, and oflering a rich variety of land-
scape, soil, and culture, the divers geological tiers remain hori-
zontally stratified, presenting immense tracts of identical soil, re-
quiring identical agricultural treatment. On the greater part of
this vast expanse, one would think that the crust of the earth has
been spared the commotions which have everywhere left so many
traces in the other half of Europe. The most ancient formations
are there found without a break, apparently unaltered by either
fire or water. Slowly emerged out of the sea, the land pre-
serves its marine aspect in its immense, slightly undulating plains,
which easily carry fancy back to the relatively recent period when
across this depression the Baltic blended its waters with those
of the Black Sea and possibly the Caspian with those of the Arctic
Ocean, separating Europe from Asia. The mind's eye has no
difl&culty in figuring to itself the Glacial period, when the floating
icebergs carried into the heart of Russia, even to Vorbnej on the
Don, the erratic blocks of Finnic granite with which the centre

8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

of the empire is to this day thickly studded, down to, if not be-
yond, the line of the Black Mould zone.

Another great blessing of European nature is almost lacking
in Russia — the proper degree of moisture, which the Atlantic
brings and the Alps store up for the West. Russia, debarred from
her share in this blessing by the remoteness of seas and want of
mo tm tains, is thereby deprived of a principal source of wealth.
The winds from the ocean reach her almost totally robbed of their
water-vapors ; those from Asia have lost all theirs long before
they touch Russian soil. From west to east moisture goes
steadily decreasing until it is reduced to the barest minimum in
Central Asia. The wider the continent expands the poorer it
becomes in rain. At Kaz^n already it rains only half as much
as in Paris. Hence, over a vast region in the south, the two
principal factors of fertility, warmth and moisture, are dis-
joined ; hence, in part at least, those woodless, arid steppes, so
un-European to the eye, that cover the entire southeast of
the empire.

If in all that concerns the physical conditions — structure, cli-
mate, moisture — Russia stands in complete opposition towards
Western Europe, she is in all of them narrowly related to the
Asiatic countries she touches on. If we go by natural land-
marks, Europe proper begins at the narrowing of the continent be-
tween the Baltic and Black Seas ; and Russia fits better the thickset
bulk of Asia, of which she is a prolongation and from which the
geographers' fictitious boundaries cannot separate her.

In the southeast there are no natural boundaries at all, and
that is why geographers have by turns proposed the Don, the
Volga, the Ural or Yaik, or even the depression of the Obi, as
firontier landmarks. The desert steppes that make up the centre
of the old continent stretch into Russia by the wide gap opening
between the Ural chain's southern links and the Caspian. From
the lower course of the Don to the lake of Aral, all these low
steppes that lie on both sides of the Volga and the Ural River,

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 9

form a peculiar region, the dried up bed of an ancient sea, of which
the shores are quite distinguishable, and of which the vast salt
lakes known as the Caspian and Aral Seas are the remnants. By
a hydrographic freak which has exercised a considerable influence
on the destinies of the Russian people, it is into one of those
locked-up seas, decidely Asiatic as they are, that the great artery
of Russia, the Volga, debouches, after turning her back on Europe
nearly from her very source.

North of the Caspian steppes, from the 52d degree of latitude to
the uninhabitable polar regions, a long chain of mountains, the
longest meridian chain of the ancient continent, seems from a
distance to place a wall between Russia and Asia. The Russians
of old used to call it " the stone belt," — indeed the word " Ural "
means ' ' belt ' ' ; yet and in spite of its name, the Ural marks the end
of Asia on one side, only to mark its fresh start nearly unaltered
on the European slope. Slowly descending in terraces into
Europe, the Ural is not so much a chain as " a table-land crowned
with a line of moderately high summits." Most of the time it
presents only low-rounded ridges covered with forests, like those
of the Vosges and the Jura. The central portion is depressed to
such a degree that in the principal passes from Siberia into Russia,
for instance from Perm to Yekaterinbiirgh, the eye vainly seeks
for summits, and that in order to conduct a railroad through the
pass, the engineers had neither tunnels nor any other great works
to execute. In this high latitude, where the plains remain seven
or eight months under snow, none of the summits of this long
chain reaches the line of everlasting snows, none of its valleys
encloses a glacier. The Ural really does not separate either the
climates or the floras or faunas of its two sides. Owing to its
direction which runs nearly perpendicularly due south, it allows
the winds from the pole to blow almost equally imhindered along
both its opposite slopes. Russia is the same on both, or rather
Siberia is only an exaggerated edition of Russia, or Russia a toned
down edition of Siberia. The Russian plains start afresh east of

lO THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

the Ural, as vast, as monotonous in the basin of the Obi as in that
of the Volga ; offering the same uniform platitude, the same
horizontality of the soil and geological sediments. On both
sides the vegetation is identical. One solitary tree, — the arole of
the Alps, Pinus umbra — scarcely marks the difference between
the forests on the respective sides. Not until one reaches the heart
of Siberia, the Yeniss^y in its higher course, and I^ake Baikal,
does one encounter, springing from a different soil, a new flora, a
new fauna. The upheaval which raised the Ural was not suffi-
cient to disjoin the two regions separated by the ridge in all
that concerns appearance and real unity. Instead of being a
boundary or bulwark, it is to the two Russias only the reposi-
tory of precious mineral wealth. The rocks of eruptive or
metamorphic origin bear ores which were lacking in the regu-
larly stratified subsoil of the wide plains. The Ural chain no
more separates the two than does the river to which it gives
its own name, and one day when Eastern Siberia will be more
densely peopled, the Ural will be looked upon as the central
axis, the spinal coltunn equally belonging to both great halves
of the empire.

Considered thus as a whole, consisting of two similar halves,
Russia proves herself decidedly different from Europe. Shall we
therefore pronounce her part and parcel of Asia ? Shall we, in the
name of nature, cast her back on the Old World, in one lot with the
sleeping or stationary peoples of the Far East ? Far from it. Russia
is no more Asiatic than she is European. By her soil and her
climate, by the bulk of her natural conditions, she differs no less
from historical Asia than from Europe proper ; it is not by mere
accident that the Asiatic civilizations have all been wrecked on
her. Astride on the Ural, Russia, by herself, forms an isolated
region, with physical characteristics peculiar to herself, a region
enclosing all the northern plains of the old continent, descending
too low down to be called boreal, but which the name of " Russian
Region " would suit well, and which, from the deserts of Central

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. II

Asia to the " tundras^' ' of the polar circle, from the estuary of
the Danube to the sources of the Yeniss^y and the Lena, comprises
nearly the whole of the colossal depression which covers the north
of the ancient world, Humboldt's " I/)wer Europe " and " I^wer
Asia." "Russia is a sixth part of the world," the Emperor
Alexander III. is reported to have once said — and geography has
nothing to object to the haughty utterance.' Russia's natural
afl&nities point to North America rather than to old Asia or West-
em Europe — to that America towards which she reaches out by
her eastward stretching dependence, Siberia. With her climate
always in extremes and her viewless expanses of territory, she
was too rough a land, constructed on too wide a scale, ever to
have been the cradle of civilization, but was one of the countries
most admirably fitted for its reception. Like North America, like
Australia, Russia, short of her extreme parts, offers to Europe an
assimilable soil, a field where human activity can unfold itself on
the very widest scale.

With her unkind climes, her meagre forests and woodless
steppes, with her lack of stone and building materials, Russia may
seem but a poor shelter for the gorgeous plant of European culture.
But what man needs is less the spontaneous yield of a given soil,
than the facility to master it, bend it to his requirements, to domes-
ticate it, if we may so word it. Many countries externally better

' The Russian tundra forms a belt of varying, but always considerable,
■width, skirting the polar sea across the north of European Russia and Sibe-
ria, that may be described as the arctic Prairies. Only in lieu of tall,
waving grasses — clinging lichens on low rocky knolls, and wet mosses that
softly yield under the reindeer's dainty hoof, cover the level ground.
Here and there a clump of the dwarf shrub-birch, the kind that does not rise,
but spreads, crawling on the ground with thin, sapless, serpentine limbs,
twisted and gnarled. And this is summer. Nine months out of the twelve
this comparative variety disappears under a brittle crust of frozen snow, which
the reindeer finds it easy to break with short, dry raps of his nervous and
vigorous little foot, to get at the fodder kept fresh and juicy beneath. Lapp
and Esquimau villages are sparsely scattered over the face of the Siberian
tundra, with their relays of dogs for travelling.
* See Appendix to Chapter I.

12 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

endowed, oflfer to civilization a less secure field. There is, in the
New World, a state to which the forests and savannahs of South-
em America open a career nearly as vast, as boundless as Russia.
The sun of the tropics, rivers the largest on our globe, the
moisttu-e brought to it by the trade winds, give to its vegetation
and animal life, in all their forms, a matchless vigor. Its
flora and fauna rejoice in the most marvellous variety and
vitality ; but this very bounteousness of nature is hostile to man,
who knows not how to conquer it. Grasses and forests, wild
beasts and insects alike strive with him for the possession of
Brazil. Nature there is too rich, too independent and powerful, to
easily accept the post of handmaiden, and even when, as in India,
man will have materially mastered the soil, he will still be in dan-
ger of morally bending under the yoke, enervated by the climate,
enslaved by deteriorating influences.

Not such is Russia. If the forests cover very nearly the same
area, there are none of those creepers, of those beautifiil parasites
of all shapes and colors, which turn tropical forests into inextri-
cable tangles. Like the flora, the fauna, too, is poor for so vast a
land ; but then there are few insects, no snakes, no wild beasts, if
we except a few wolves in the woods, a few bears in the wastes of
the North. Barring the great deserts, there is, perhaps, not
another such wide expanse on the face of the earth where the
manifestations of life present so little variety and so little power.
Inanimate nature alone, only the earth is great in size ; animate
nature is puny, not abounding in species, not robust in its births,
quite incapable to cope with man. From this point of view, of
such capital importance as it is, Russia is as European as any part
of Europe. The land is docile, easily made subservient. Unlike
the most magnificent countries of both hemispheres, it seems made
for free labor. The Russian soil does not require the toil of the
slave ; it needs neither the African negro nor the Chinese coolee.
It does not wear out him who tends it, does not threaten his race
with degeneration, it gives no half-breeds. Man there encounters

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 1 3

only two obstacles— cold and space. Cold, wkich is less difi&cult
to conquer than extreme heat. Space, in the present the already
half-tamed foe of Russia, and, in the future, her greatest ally.

APPENDIX TO BOOK I., CHAPTER I. (See p. ii, note 3.)

The same conclusion — practically amounting to this : that Russia is and
ought to be herself and not somebody else — is arrived at by Mr. N. Danilef-
sky in his remarkable book, Russia and Europe, an exhaustive investiga-
tion of the questions implied by the title in all their phases and bearings.
He contends, however, that the question, " Is Russia Europe ? " does not
admit of a categorical answer, inasmuch as the question, " What is Europe ? "
would first have to be answered, which it is not by saying it is "a part of
the world," since the division of the world — especially the Old — is purely
arbitrary, disjoining regions which have the greatest natural affinity,
such as the south of Europe and Asia Minor, Lybia and Arabia, — and
bracketing others which having nothing in common, such as Central Asia
and India (with the Himalaya, too, between), Italy and Norway, Sahara and
the Cape. But Africa at least is a separate continent, almost an island ; so
are America, Australia. But Asia and Europe are essentially one, or rather
"Europe is only the peninsular western portion of Asia, at first differing from
her less strikingly than her other peninsulas, then more and more, as it
becomes more dismembered and attenuated." Geographically, then, the
question, " Is Russia Europe ? " answers itself: it is and it is not ; it is in
part. How much ? that depends, and greatly, on personal views. But
Europe is a reality after all ; it represents something definite : " Of course
it does ! Something very real and weighty. For Europe is not a geographi-
cal, but an historical and cultural term. Europe is the stage of the Teutono-
Roman civilization, neither more nor less, — indeed ' Europe ' is that civili-
zation itself." Not by any means a " universal culture," for no such is pos-
sible ; nor yet the old Greco-Roman culture, which had its roots and affinities
in Asia, and its own very definite area : the shores and isles of the Mediter-
ranean basin, Asiatic, European, and African alike, thus bringing geography
and cultural history into beautiful agreement. No. Teutono-Roman
culture built up on the ruins of the Greco-Roman, and on another stage;
just that and nothing more. But that is a great deal. Now again in this

14 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

sense, " Is Russia Europe ? " "To the questioner's sorrow — or pleasure, for
Russia's woe — or weal, NO," answers our author. "She was not nourished
on one of those roots by which Europe absorbed the wholesome as well as
the baleful saps of the ancient world first destroyed by her, — nor on those
roots which brought up nutriment from the depths of the Teutonic spirit"
I shall have to refer more than once to Mr, Danilefsky's book, and it is a
pity it should have been unknown to Mr. Leroy-Beaulieu, for had he known
of it he could not have ignored it, and it might have modified some of the
views of so conscientious an inquirer.

BOOK I. CHAPTER II.

The Two Great Zones — The Zone of Forests and the Woodless Zone — Sub-
divisions of the Latter — The Black Mould Zone — The Steppe
Region — Accidental Steppes — Primeval Steppes.

Russia's chief characteristic is unity in immensity. At the first
glance, while comparing the ice-bound tundras of the North to the
scorched wastes that skirt the Caspian, the lakes that sleep within
their granite banks in Finland, to the warm terraced slopes of the
Crimean shore, one is struck with the grandeur of these contrasts.
The impression conveyed is that between these boundaries —
between Lapland, the reindeer's domain, and the Caspian steppes,
where the camel is at home — lies a space so vast as to need many
widely differing regions to fill it up. Nothing of the kind. Rus-
sia at all her extremities, even where she touches on Europe,
yields specimens of all the climates. Yet the territories that bear
the most marked aspects — Finland, Caucasus, Crimea — are merely
annexations, natural appendages, though greatly differing from
Russia proper. In the interval, between the projecting spurs of
the Karpathian Mountains and the Ural chain, there spreads a
region unmatched, on any like area, for similarity of climate and
sameness of nature's aspects. From the huge Caucasian bulwark to
the Baltic, this empire, surpassing in size the rest of Europe put
together, really offers less variety than western countries, owning
an area ten or twelve times smaller. This comes from the uni-
formity of the plain-structure. The west of the empire is more
temperate, more European ; the east more barren, more Asiatic ;
the north is colder, the south warmer. Yet, the south, being un-

lO THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

protected against the polar winds, cannot differ from the north,
either in landscape or vegetation, as markedly, abruptly as France
from Italy or Spain.

At the same time, under the ftmdamental unity through the
homogeneousness of structure and climate, Nature has stamped sev-
eral regions with singular clearness and precision. These regions,
offering each a number of well defined special characteristics, split
into two great groups or zones which, between them, cover the
whole of European Russia. Both equally flat, with a nearly
equally extreme climate, these two zones, mutually analogous as
they are, present the most singular contrast. As concerns the
soil, vegetation, moisture, indeed most physical and economical
conditions, their differences amount almost to complete opposition.
Setting apart the uninhabitable northern extremity, the two re-
gions divide the empire into nearly equal halves, cutting through
it diagonally, from west to east, and both cross the Ural, project-
ing their prolongation into Asia. One is the region of forests and
peat-swamps, the other is the woodless zone of the steppes.

From the opposition of these two zones, from the natural anti-
thesis of steppe and forest, has proceeded the historical antagonism,
the strife of many centuries, which has divided the two halves of
Russia, — the warfare between the sedentary North and nomadic
South, between Russian and Tatar, and, later on, between the
Moscovite state, founded in the heart of the forest-region, and the
sons of the steppes, the free Cosacks.*

The forest zone, although steadily reduced by excessive cutting,
still remains the vaster of the two. Taking in all the north and
centre, it goes tapering from west to east, from Kief to Kazin.

At the northern extremity beyond the polar circle, as on the
summits of high mountains, no tree can withstand the intensity

' In the case of this name as of most others, mispronunciation in the
month of foreigners led to mis-spelling. The " free sons of the steppes " are
named Kazclk, a form much easier to eye and tongue than the faulty, gen-
erally accepted Cossack. But any correction of the kind is apt to bewilder
foreigners, and is therefore, as a mle, to be avoided.

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 1/

and permanency of the frost. On both sides of the Ural there is
nothing but the tundras, vast and dreary wastes, where the earth,
permanently hardened by frost, is clothed with moss. In these
latitudes no culture is possible ; there is no pasture but lichens, no
cattle but the reindeer, who knows no home but these arctic re-
gions. Hunting and fishing are the only pursuits of the inhabi-
tants, few and far between, of these ice-bound tracts.

The forests begin about the 65th or 66th degree of northern lat-
itude, the atmosphere being slightly warmed by the neighborhood
of the Atlantic and the deep gash cut into the shore by the White
Sea. From here the forests, interspersed with boggy clearings,
descend beyond Moscow, as low down as Kief. From north to
south, the kinds of trees succeed one another much in the same
order as in the Alps from summit to base. The fir and larch
come first, then the forest pine and the birch. The birch, the
pine and the fir, the three trees most common in Russia, mingle
with the wniow and the aspen. Further southward grow the
linden, the maple, the elm, and towards the centre the oak at last
makes its appearance. There are in these regions, especially in
the northeast, immense forests virtually primeval from lack of
thoroughfares, but they are sparse, rambling, broken up by large
fallow tracts, where nothing grows but meagre brushwood.

The soil that bears the greatest portion of these forests, at least
in the northwest, from the White Sea to the Ni^men and the
Dniepr,^ is a low plain, spongy and abounding in peat, intersected
with arid banks of sand. The highest tableland, the Valday Moun-
tains," scarcely reaches 1,000 feet. This region aboimds in water

' Consonants preceding the n in the beginning of a word or syllable in
Russian -words and names should be clearly sounded. Thus "Dniepr"
must not be read " Niepr," or " Dniestr " " Niestr,^^ but " D-niep-er" and

* The short or truncated y with which so many Russian words and names
end, and which will be rendered by y, always follows a vowel and offers no
difficulty in the pronunciation, being exactly similar to the same sound in
the English, "toy," "boy " (ex.: Tolstdy). The difference is that in Russian
it is combined not with o alone, but with all other vowels. And here it

1 8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

and springs ; here lies the starting-point of all the great rivers,
the chief tributaries of Russia's four seas. The little relief of the
soil frequently robs the various streams of a clearly defined water-
shed. No ridge separates the basins, and at thaw-time the
future tributaries of the various seas sometimes get mixed and
produce huge swamps. On a very slightly inclined soil the rivers'
course is sluggish and hesitating ; the waters, ignoring the un-
certain slope, lose themselves in endless marshes, or flow together
into numberless lakes, some of which form immense expanses, like
the Ladoga, a real little inland sea, while the vast majority resolve
themselves into miserable ponds, like the eleven hundred lakes of
the government of Arkhangelsk.

All over this zone winter, whose sway lasts through half the
year, leaves littie room for vegetation and culture. The earth fre-
quentiy lies over two hundred days under snow ; the rivers do not
cast off their icy fetters until May or the end of April. But for
the impetuous northern spring, which carries all before it, and at
whose touch vegetation springs into life as by a sudden explosion,
tilling the ground would be simply useless. Barley and rye
are the only cereals that will thrive in that stingy soil. Wheat is
seldom raised and does not pay ; flax and buckwheat are the only
plants that really prosper under that severe sky. The soil,
indeed, in all this region does not provide sufficient food for the
population, which, dispersed though it be over vast tracts, and
never averaging over fifl;een to the square mile, and frequentiy
faUing below even this figure, can never force fi-om the soil a
sufficiency of bread. Small crafts have to eke out the livelihood
refiised by agriculture. Sparse as it is, the population of these
poverty-stricken countries increases but imperceptibly ; it has, so
to speak, reached the point of saturation. From this whole
northern half of her European territory, Russia can hope for some

should be remembered that the Russian vowels have the same value as in
all European lauguages except English : a like a in far, star ; e like e in
grey, or the letter "a "/ i like ee in eel, or i in bit, whip ; u like oo in 6oor,
moor (not door KtiiS. floor).

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 1 9

increase of population and national wealth only by favoring indus-
trial pursuits, which flourish especially in the region of Moscow
and that of the Ural. *

Very difierent as regards promise for the future is the woodless
zone — the most peculiar, un-European of all. Originally less ex-
tensive than the forest zone, it is constantly gaining ground in
consequence of reckless tree-felling, a proceeding which by de-*
priving the earth of moisture and shelter makes the climate even
worse than it naturally is. Stretching over the whole south, it
broadens from west to east, crosses the Ural and extends far into
the desert waste of Asia. This zone is flatter still than the forest-
bearing one ; on an area several times the size of France it cannot
show one hill 350 feet in height. In the west the Karpathians
throw out a spur of granite rock which turns off the course of
rivers, some of which, like the Dniepr, it encumbers with falls, with-
out the aspect of the country around being in the least altered.
Now it stretches into undulating plains, now again relapses into
the horizontal monotony of the sea in repose. At times it slowly
grades down towards the Black Sea and the Caspian ; at others
it lapses abruptly in tiers or terraces of imeven height, but all
equally flat. There is no boundary to these viewless expanses, save
the horizon line, into which they hazily merge. Not the slightest
swelling, save in certain parts innumerable small artificial knolls,
known under the name of ^' kurgans'' (mounds), or " moghili^^
(tombs), rounded in shape, from twenty to forty or fifty feet in
height, at times apparently disposed in regular lines, as though
to mark a road through these wastes — they are tombs of extinct
peoples, or landmarks along obliterated highways, from the tops
of which the herdsman of the steppes can survey his flock at a
distance.*

* See Appendix to Chapter II., No. i.

* Such kurgcLns or moghili are met with in the north, in Siberia as
well as in Russia. Numerous diggings made within the last few years
leave no doubt whatever concerning their destination.

20 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

No mountains, no valleys. The rivers skirting the outline of
the above mentioned terraces mostly flow along at the foot of a
sort of downs, which, however, in obedience to a general law,
accompany the course of the rivers, — the Don, the Dniepr, the
Volga — and are, as a rule, nothing more than the supports of a
higher tier, and just as even, just as flat on the top as the low plains
on the opposite bank, which the overflow of the river in spring
converts into a marsh. The small rivers and rivulets bom of the
thaw dig their beds in the ground, but do not form valleys any
more than the great rivers do. They usually roll along in deep
ditches, fissures, or ravines, with abrupt banks, under which
villages seek shelter from the winds that sweep the plains.

The absence of trees is the distinctive feature of this entire zone.
In the northern portion of it, that is undoubtedly brought about
by man's own hand, often quite recently, or even in our own time.
Farther southwards, on the contrary, in the steppes properly so
called, nature alone seems responsible. Soil and climate, and,
above all, lack of water and of shelter, are the causes of these
steppes being entirely bare of trees. Such few as do spontane-
ously grow there keep to the ravines, which, at the proper season,
become beds for the rivulets. The plain is frequently covered
with a layer of fertile earth, somewhat too loose, and certainly too
exposed to every wind that blows for trees to take root there,
while the subsoil, being generally chalky, does not favor the
growth of forests. In other parts, again, we find the soil too
much impregnated with saline substances, where nothing grows
but meagre tufts of grass. It is drought which everywhere im-
pedes the growth of woods, while, on the other hand, the want of
woods increases the drought ; so we find ourselves moving in
a circle fi-om which there is no escape.

This region, then, through which course the greatest rivers of
Europe, suffers from want of water. Heaven grudges it rain,
earth grudges it springs. This evil goes on growing from north
to south, from west to east. The rainfalls, jfrequently separated by

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 21

long intervals and always irregular, at least as to quantity, come
only in spring and in autumn. All through summer the denuded
earth, parched by such a sun as Asia knows, yields up all her moist-
ure to an atmosphere which in no shape returns it, for the clouds
keep at an elevation which does not allow of their condensing into
water. In certain districts of the farthest south such a thing as
a whole year, nay, eighteen months, without a drop of rain, is not
unknown. The penury of water in summer is often such that in
many villages the peasants, lacking spring or brook, are reduced
to drink the liquid mud of the blackish pools wherein they have
tried to keep the spring waters.

This southern zone, too, which would seem entitled to a more
temperate climate, is, on the contrary, the very home of abrupt
contrasts. It passes, within the year, through arctic cold and all
but tropical heat, swayed by turns by the atmospheric influences
of Siberia and Central Asia, the icy wastes of the north and the
sandy wastes of the southeast. Under the latitude of Paris and
Vienna, the countries north of the Black and Caspian Seas have
in January the temperature of Stockholm, in July that of Madeira.
Two extreme seasons, with next to no transition, scarcely a few
weeks of spring and of autumn. In this southern zone the winters
are shorter than in the north, but scarcely less severe. The
vicinity of Siberia and Central Asia robs the Caspian of the prop-
erty usually belonging to vast sheets of water, that of moderating
the temperature. Along the shores of this continental sea, almost
at the foot of the Caucasus (44° northern latitude, which is that
of the south of France), the thermometer descends to 30° below
freezing point (Centigrade),* while in summer it rises to 40° above.
On the confines of Asia, in the parched Kirghiz steppes, i. e.^
under the latitude of Central France, the mercury at times con-
geals and remains congealed through several days, while in July
the thermometer may burst in the sun. It is in the interior of

*The temperature is given throughout according to the Centigrade
measurement.

22 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the continent, in Siberia and Turkestan, that these excessive tem-
peratures attain their maximum. Round about the Aral the
difference between the greatest cold and the greatest heat amounts
to 80° and even to 90°, so that the Russian troops in their expedi-
tions to Central Asia have had to face by turns the extremes of both
winter and summer. Even to the north of the Black and Azof
Seas the seasons are markedly exaggerated. There also the dif-
ference between the hottest and coldest day of the year sometimes
exceeds 70°. The Crimean peninsula itself, though bathed by
two seas, does not escape these terrible contrasts.

These extremes of temperature are among the obstacles that
civilized life has to battle with in Russia, but they nowhere
amount to an insurmountable barrier. It should not be forgotten
that of all the privileges enjoyed by Western Europe her temperate
climate is the one most rarely fotmd even in the finest of her colo-
nies. The other continents frequently, and from analogous causes,
labor under the same disadvantages as Russia. The climate of
the Northern States of the North American Union greatly resem-
bles in this respect the south of Russia ; the most populous States,
those of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, pass through
very nearly the same extremes of temperature as the steppes of
the Black Sea.

If denuded of trees, Southern Russia is far firom lacking vegeta-
tion. Over a great portion of this vast territory the richness of
the soil makes up for the scantiness of water, and in such places
as do not suffer from too hostile atmospherical conditions its fer-
tility is really marvellous. As concerns soil, cultivation, and
population, the woodless zone naturally falls into three different
regions, into three strips or bands, which tend firom northeast to
southwest. They are : the region of Black Mould, that of fertile
steppe land, and that of sandy or saline steppes.

The Black Mould belt, one of the most fertile as well as most
extensive arable plains on the globe, occupies the upper part of
the woodless zone, immediately below the zone of forests and

NATURE, CL/MATE, AND SOIL. 23

lakes. Deriving still some moisture and shelter from the latter,
the Black Mould region is placed in much less unfavorable climatic
conditions than is the steppe region of the farthest south. It owes
its name (Jchemozibm) to a layer of blackish humus, varying
in thickness from, on the average, one foot and a half to five.
This mould consists chiefly of loam, and, in lesser proportion, of
oily clay mixed with organic matters. It dries up rapidly and
becomes pulverized in the process ; but it becomes, with equal
rapidity, impregnated with moisture, and, tmder the action of
rain, returns to its original condition of a sort of dough as black
as coal. The formation of this layer of wonderfiil fertility is
attributed to the slow decomposition of the steppe grasses, accu-
mulated in the course of many ages.

The tchemoziom stretches in one long band across the whole
of European Russia. Starting from the provinces of Podolia
and Kief in the southwest, it ascends towards the northeast to
Kaz^ and beyond ; after the break occasioned by the Ural, it
reappears in Siberia, in the southern part of the government of
Tobolsk. On its upper edge, the tchemoziom still shows some
woods. As we advance towards the south, these woods get
sparse and stunted in size, until they gradually vanish. In the
midst of boundless plains, the last clumps of oaks, aspens, or
elms look like small islets lost in space. The trees grow single,
even the brushwood disappears. Nothing remains save arable
lands, one vast plain to which no end is seen, uniformly stretching
away into distance for hundreds of miles.

Notwithstanding its faulty cultivation, by means of rather
primitive implements, this region together with the Mississippi
valley, is one of those immense storehouses of grain which bid
our modem world defy any famine. The fertility of this soil,
which may even yet be called new, till very lately seemed inex-
haustible, and the agricultiuist has long had reason to believe
that it would never need manure or any fertilizer. Just now,
however, it is not only conceded that this fertility should be

24 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

entertained artificially, but there already are complaints about
exhaustion, and experts foretell that, unless there is a change of
method, ignorance will have achieved the feat of ruining the richest
soil in all the world.' This part of Russia, as a consequence of its
fertility, is the most populous. On an average it already numbers
from sixty to sixty-five inhabitants to the square mile, and in
certain western portions of it, over seventj'^-five. And the popu-
lation increases as new issues are opened by the railways, and as
agriculture progresses in its conquest of the neighboring steppes.

Between the ichemozibm and the southern seas lie the steppes
properly so called, as distinct from the Black Mould fields, which
are frequently so designated, so that at last any treeless plain
comes under that name. It is in these steppes that the flatness
of the soil, the absence of all tree-vegetation, and the summer
droughts reach their maximum. Slightly inclined towards the
Black, Azof, and Caspian Seas, they take in the lower basins of
the Dniepr and the Don, the Volga and the Ural. I^ft to itself,
with little or no cultivation, the steppe is a desert plain, without
trees, or shade, or water. For days and days the traveller looks
in vain for a shrub, a hut ; still it is not always the barren waste
for which the word stands in the Western mind. These immense
tracts, covering in European Russia alone over half a million
square miles, include lands of very different qualities, which,
therefore, notwithstanding a certain outward likeness, are called
to widely different uses in the future. Steppes are of two kinds,
two types clearly defined : the steppe with productive soil, not
unlike the tchemozi'dm, and the steppe made up of sand, stone,
and salt. The former, much the most extensive in European
Russia, are ready for cultivation and full of rich promise ; the
latter, apparently, will ever be unfit for it. The former are
steppes only accidentally, owing to the absence or scarcity of
man. The latter are everlasting steppes, by nature's own decree.

The fertile steppes fill the greater portion of the space that

*See Appendix to Chapter II., No. 2.

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 2$

lies between the tchernozibm, of which they are a continuation,
and the Black and Azof Seas. They include the lower course of
all the rivers that flow into those two seas, from the Dniestr and
Bug to the Don and Kub^n ; they stop a long way short of the
delta of the Volga, but turn up towards the northeast, where
they spread between the great river and the southern spurs of the
Ural chain. The subsoil generally consists of a layer of vege-
table humus, identical with that of the Black Mould belt. I^eft
to themselves, these steppes bear splendid witness to their natural
fertility, in the shape, not of forests, but of a gorgeous garment
of grass and flowers all their own, so they have nothing to envy
the richest forests. Such a steppe is to be likened not to an
African desert, but to an American prairie. The exuberance of
life shown there by nature is marvellous. The grass shoots up to
a height of five or six feet, even higher in rainy years. Well
may the legends of Ukraina tell how the Cosacks, in their venture-
some expeditions, used to hide in the grass-thickets, horse and
all. This excessive vigor of grass-vegetation may be accounted
as one among the causes of the lack of woods : the tall grass, in
its rapid growth, would smother young saplings. It is, however,
not the gramineous tribe, or grass properly so called, that yields
the bulk of steppe- vegetation, nor do they lend it that look of
vigor ; the steppe owes those to other and taller plants — umbel-
liferous, leguminous, labiate, composite — which abound in spring-
time, and whose blossoms clothe it with a thousand colors. The
species, too, are few, just as in the north the forests offer no
great variety. They are mainly of the so-called " social " species,
growing in large patches, and mostly annual plants, as others find
it rather hard to weather a climate which combines Baltic winters
with Mediterranean summers. Besides, the steppes are not wholly
wanting in ligneous plants : a few shrubs are to be met with,
trees even occasionally, though small and stunted ; among others,
the wild pear, which the Cosack ballads have made the emblem
of slighted love.

26 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

During the brief spring of this region, the vegetation of the
steppes, like that of Northern Russia, unfolds with prodigious
rapidity. The spring rains supply it the wherewithal to resist
the intense summer heat ; but if the rains fail to arrive in time,
it fails too, a victim to drought. In certain districts, or certain
years, ail this gorgeousness lasts only a few weeks : in July all is
gone, — wilted, parched. The blaze of the sun, untempered by
shade, scorches everything, and the tall plants, which converted
the steppe into an ocean of verdure, now raise their bare stalks,
spikelike and ghastly ; the steppe is transformed into a dried up
patnpa, yet, even in this shape, this once beautiful wealth of
vegetation is not wasted. These grasses, scorched by the sun in
the fulness of their ripeness, yield to the flocks a sort of naturally
cured hay, on which they feed through the rest of the season.
Each year the entire vegetation disappears at the approach of
winter : whatever has survived the sun, perishes under the snow.

This primeval steppe with its spontaneous wealth of flowers,
the steppe of history and the poets, gets narrowed every year,
and will soon vanish before the encroachments of agriculture.
The Ukraina of the Cosacks and Mazeppa, with all her legends,
has already lost her wild beauty. The plough lords it over her ;
the wilderness where Charles XII. and his army could lose
themselves, is now under regular cultivation. Gbgol's steppe,
like Cooper's prairie, will soon be a memory ; it will join the
confining tchemozibm. It is difl&cult to draw an exact boun-
dary line between the two zones, one of which is steadily increas-
ing at the expense of the other, and must end by absorbing it
altogether. For the causes of so unequal a development we must
question history as much as nature. For hundreds and thousands
of years, these steppes have been the great thoroughfare followed
by all the migrations from Asia into Europe ; as lately as the end
of the eighteenth century they were exposed to the inroads of
nomadic tribes from Crimea, the Caucasus, and the lower Volga.
But for the submission of the Crimean Tatars, the Nogays that

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 27

dwell on the shores of the Azof Sea, and the Kirghiz of the Caspian
region, these steppes never could have been opened to agricul-
ture, under whose yoke they will soon have completely passed,
thus becoming assimilated to the Black Mould territory of which
they have for centuries been the neglected prolongation.

Two things, besides the scarcity of working-hands, have
delayed the breaking of these grassy steppes, — two things partly
connected with each other : drought and want of wood. Against
drought it is difl&cult to find a remedy ; from lack of water, the
most fertile of these plains will always be exposed to an alterna-
tion of good and bad years. Hence frequently recurring dearth,
sometimes actual famine, in provinces which, at other times,
might be regarded as the granaries of the empire.

The want of trees is perhaps a greater drawback still to the
inhabitants, whom it affects in twofold guise — lack of fuel and
building materials, since stone also is not to be had most of the
time. For cooking and heating they have nothing but the dry
stalks of the tall steppe-grasses and the dung of the flocks, of which
they rob the soil. Such resources cannot suffice a population at
all dense ; but the opening of roads and railways, of coal and
anthracite mines, will gradually remedy these discomforts, by
bringing in wood or substitutes for wood and restoring the manure
to its proper agricultural uses. One great advantage these steppes
possess in their geographical position : the vicinity of the g^eat
rivers' estuaries and of the Black Sea opens out to them the
greatest facilities for trade with Europe. It is the only region in
the empire that has access to a sea free from ice at all seasons. *

Between the arable steppe and the tchernoztdm proper, the
mode of culture and the density of the population are the only

* Mr. Beaulieu forgets the Baltic provinces, which jHjssess a first-class
harbor, Libava (Germanized into Liebau), which never freezes, on a deep
gulf of the Baltic, open to navigation all the year round. The immense
importance of this fact to commerce secures to Liebau a great future, of a
different kind of greatness from that of Cronstadt of course, which owes
more than half its glory to its military qualities.

28 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

distinctions to be drawn with any degree of accuracy. In the
steppe the poptdation is scant, the culture still nomadic. With
only 35 or 36 inhabitants to the square mile, the culture by
triennial rotation — the farming system in general use all over the
Black Mould region — must soon prevail. Thus the annexation of
the steppe to the tchemozibm is eflFected easily, without hurt to
anybody, without martyrs to civilization. The fertile steppe,
covering 300,000 or 400,000 square miles, is still nearly as extensive
as the Black Mould region now under regular cultivation. In
the near future both will form one agricultural region, occupying,
in Europe alone, from 600,000 to 800,000 square miles, about double
the total area of France. The American prairie, which is passing
through analogous phases, will probably be the only cereal-bearing
country that may outdo it, and if its development is more rapid,
it will be owing to the abundance of capital and to European
immigration.*

South and east of the fertile steppe come the barren steppes,
forever unapt for cultivation. No vegetable layer there — nothing
but sand, or a soil impregnated with salt, still more for-
bidding. Such is the vast Uralo-Caspian depression, the bottom

' Sheep-breeding is carried on in the south of Russia on nearly as large
a scale as in Australia or New Zealand. It is a pity, for that is the resource
of tracts that are not good for much else. But while the hands that should
put them to their proper use are not forthcoming — kept busy, most of them,
in the north scratching the earth for a sustenance which, less fortunate
than the barnyard fowls, they do not obtain from it, — this immense region
must be made to yield income of some sort. But unless this makeshift
industry soon yields the place to the legitimate one of agriculture, there
may be danger of that gorgeous wheatland permanently deteriorating. The
huge tracts of plain and hill-land on the east side of the Adriatic used as
sheep-walks by the ancient Roman non-resident landlords, and those in the
south of Italy which continued to be so used by the various foreign kings
and feudal lords down to almost modern times, are made forever unfit for
culture, or if they can be reclaimed it would be at a cost which well justifies
the hesitations of closely ciphering financiers. Sheep-breeding is the surest
and quickest mode of enriching the present to the destruction of the future,
and should be confined to unproductive, poor-soiled steppeland, which still
grows natural fodder of a quality sufficient for that most easily contented
and most close-nibbling of browsers — the sheep.

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 29

of a sea but lately desiccated, where the evaporating waters have
left behind a deposit of salt, and which, here and there, is still
studded with small salt lakelets, — remnants of an inland sea of
old, now reduced to the proportion of the Caspian. This is as
genuine a desert as the Sahara itself, with but few oases. Starting
from Tsaritsin, on the lower course of the Volga, which they
include, these salt deserts mingle with or join the immense
Kirghiz steppe, a region of stone and sand, and stretch on and on
into the very core of Turkestan. Part of these salt steppes lies
below the level of the sea, and the Caspian itself, of which they
were once the bed, lies about eighty-five feet below the surface
of the Black Sea.

This Uralo-Caspian steppe is, of all European Russia, the
driest, most denuded, most exposed to excessive seasons. It is a
decidedly Asiatic country, by virtue of its soil and climate, by its
flora and fauna, by the race of its population and their mode of
life. If there is, in these parts, a natural boundary line between
Europe and Asia, it should be sought for, not in the Ural River,
(the Yaik), but at the western end of that Caspian hollow, the
prolongation of the deserts of Central Asia ; around the point
where the Don and the Lower Volga come nearest each other,
though art has not yet contrived to unite them, so very marked is
the physical boundary of the two regions.

A glance at the other side of the Azof Sea, shows us the
northern half of Crimea and the neighboring shoreland, that lies
between the Isthmus of Perekop and the mouth of the Dniepr,
forming a little region of itself, scarcely less unfit for agriculture —
a bit of Asia dropped north of the Black Sea. Here the sandy and
rocky steppes predominate. Even where we catch a glimpse of
vegetable land, the scarcity of springs and rain would seem to
doom to sterility, for a long time to come, this upper half of Tauris,
of which such great things were expected in the time of Catherine
the Great. From the mountains of Southern Crimea and the coast
of the Caspian to the fertile steppeland, the barren steppeland,

30 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

this side of the Ural River, covers nigh on 300,000 square miles
which cannot show as much as a million and a half of population.
On all this area it seems hopeless to attempt growing trees, an
operation already very difficult in the Black Mould region and
the adjacent fertile steppes. Unfit for agriculture, indeed for life
in permanent settlements, these vast tracts, like the neighboring
pordons of Asia, appear to be good for nothing but cattle-raising
and nomadic life. Hence these are the only regions of European
Russia still held by Asiatic tribes — Kalmyk and Kirghiz and, until
quite lately, the Crimean Tatar and the Nogay. They feel as
much at home on these steppes as in their orig^al Asiatic homes.
They lead the same life, driving their flocks to pasture on the
scant grass that grows on sand, and the meagre plants impreg-
nated with salt which stud in tufts the arid soil.

At this southeastern extremity of European Russia we meet
with the same mode of life that we observe in the extreme
north, amongst the Lapps and Samoy^ds: a nomadic existence
under the tent made of hides, only substituting the camel for the
reindeer. But then, these two regions are the least populous of
the entire empire this side of the Ural. Including the numerous
fishermen on the Volga, and the laborers in the salt works, the
steppes of the southeast cannot show an average of six people to
the square mile. In certain portions of the Kalmyk steppe in
particular, there are not quite two inhabitants to the square mile.
Not until we reach the mouths of the Dvina in the government
of Arkhangelsk do we find another as scanty population. The
northern coast of the Caspian is not much better off than the ice-
bound coast of the White Sea, nor has it a much more promising
future to look forward to.

This review would be incomplete did we not mention one more
region, less extensive and but lately annexed, which, fi-om its
mountainous soil and southern climate, holds a peculiar position.
This region comprises the Caucasus and the southern coast of
Crimea, which, with its abrupt steeps, is merely a prolongation of

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 3 1

the Caucasian chain. Nature, which nowhere marked out a
boundary for Russia, neither towards Europe nor towards Asia,
appears to have raised at least one very efficient barrier in this
one direction, between the Black and Caspian Seas. What
boundary could be better carried out than this ridge, measuring
from 14,000 to 18,000 feet in height, towering between two seas?
It is as though another Pyrenees had been heaped up to twice the
height of the chain that separates France from Spain. And yet
this barrier, which seemed to stand athwart Russia's way, has
been crossed. Nature herself, indeed, even while raising, fur-
nished the means to defeat it. Thrown across an isthmus, be-
tween two inland seas, fated to be subjected to Russian influences,
the Caucasus, in the logical order of things, had to be entered
from both sides, and could not but easily succumb to a back-
handed stroke of strategy. This bulwark of Asia could not hold
out against the necessity for Russia to step over it in order to
reach the South, that everlasting allurement of all Northern nations.
The Caucasus and the southern coast of Crimea cannot be
accounted a new region of the Russian soil, — Russian nature ends
with the plain ; they are an entirely difierent country, as varied of
aspect as the regions of Russia proper are monotonous. There,
on the steep sides of the mountains, we find forests, the counter-
part of those that have vanished from the centre of the empire
downward, not meagre, sparse, and monotonous as in the north,
but dense, vigorous, displaying a vegetative power unknown to
Moscovia proper. There, too, fruit-trees thrive, along with that
variety of plants and culture which Russia would vainly look for
on her plains, from the shores of the glacial seas to those of the
Euxine, — the vine, which on the banks of the Don still enjoys
but a precarious shelter, the mulberry, the olive-tree. It appears
as though the various zones of culture characterized in other
countries by these three trees, unite into one on the slopes of
these mountains, as though to compensate Russia for the monot-
ony of her plains. Few are the varieties of fruit not acclimated

32 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

in these Crimean hanging gardens suspended above the sea, or
in Transcaucasia, where Russian merchants, not content with
having succeeded in the cultivation of cotton and sugar-cane, are
discussing the introduction of tea plantations.

APPENDIX TO BOOK I., CHAPTER II.— NO. i. (Seep. 19, note 4.)

The misery is increased and made wellnigh hopeless by the prohibition
laid on the peasants to leave the land allotted them at the time of emancipa-
tion. The Emperor Nicolas took pride in proclaiming that Russia was "an
agricultural country." So agriculture was " encotu-aged " at the expense
of everything else, and the fiction was kept up during the great crisis which
was to decide Russia's economical future. The unfortunate peasants of the
north, while nominally set free, were given over to a bondage worse than
the last. An intelligent landlord could and would allow numbers of his
people, for a moderate yearly payment, to go to any place where they could
earn a good living. Now they were made bond-slaves, not to men, but to a
soulless thing, a soil incapable of rewarding their most assiduous toil with
enough of mere rye alone to last the family to the year's end, not to speak
of the seed grain for the following season. So they were burdened over and
above the taxes, with a considerable purchase sum for the land allotted
them, and placed in the impossibility of paying either, even at the cost of
half-starvation to themselves, by being " fastened " to a soil absolutely unfit
for cultivation under any conditions whatever. The reason given is that
"had they their will, they would rush down en masse to the south, south-
west, and southeast, — (which, nota bene, are as good as uninhabited !) — and
the north would become a waste." As if that argument did not work pre-
cisely the other way: will people — and such conservative people as the
Russian peasants — rush away from their homesteads to unknown lands
unless they have nothing left to lose and all change is gain ? Whj', that
is just what the North ought to be. The forests should be nursed back to
their former richness and re-stocked with the wild beasts whose extermina-
tion has robbed the country of a real and bountifal source of national
wealth. When one thinks that the forests about Ndvgorod and Pskof, all
cut up by streams and interspersed with lakes, teemed with beavers only a
century and a half ago ! Then the whole great North is undermined with
ores — copper, lead — so rich that huge lumps of pure metal crop up under
the plough and are taken to cities by the peasant- wives along with their flax
or eggs, carefully hidden under their aprons, and sold for a few coins with

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 33

fear and trembling— for it is forbidden to take notice of such things, as they
might be to the prejudice of the administration pet — agriculture ! Besides,
the share demanded by the exchequer on all such finds, and the charges for
licenses to extract ore are so exorbitant that no native company can stand
them, not to speak, of individual effort, which is totally inadequate. So that,
with wealth untold under one's feet, it is cheaper for Russian manufacturers to
import their raw material, even though we by no means rejoice in free trade.
Then a German or American syndicate comes along, goes into things, makes
an oflfer, and lo ! all doors open before them, and though red tape and "to-
morrows " are not spared even to them, favors, privileges, exemptions are
showered upon them. They go to work, and make colossal fortunes, which
they carry out of the country — and sneer at the Russians for a set of im-
provident, narrow-minded, short-sighted sluggards, too ignorant and lazy
to pick up the wealth which is simplj' wasted on them. There is no doubt
that this state of things, especially the mistake of maintaining compulsory
settlement and culture, have much to do with the present disaster. The
liberal press cried itself hoarse at the time, foretelling the logically impend-
ing ruin, which has come to pass, for logic does not deceive as statistics
sometimes do. The present emperor, Alexander III., has come to the relief
of the peasantry in every way ; remitted arrears, paid up large instalments
of the so-called "redemption certificates" (the purchase money for their
lands, paid out to the proprietors in a lump), distributed large quantities
of grain against seeding time, fed thousands of families, rebuilt bumed-
up villages. His great heart is ever open to their needs, his hand never
closes — all in vain ! A column of figures can add up in only one way. And
until the evil is struck at the root, and the grown-up men of Russia are
officially acknowledged capable to discriminate what is best for them and to
know their own minds, and allowed to act accordingly, there is no salvation.
This compulsory coupling of man and earth is unnatural, and has come to
be like the binding of a living body to a corpse. And all the time there
lies the immense South in the sun, wide open, awaiting only hands to treble
the wealth of the empire, and that for all times, inexhaustibly.

APPENDIX TO BOOK I., CHAPTER II.— NO. 2. (See p. 24, note 5.)

Not ignorance entirely. When it is the Russian people that are in
question, the word comes glibly to the lips or pen of even our friends,
when " poverty " should stand instead, — and other things. If the peasants
could have aflforded more cattle and horses through all these years, and if the

34 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

few poor beasts they did manage to keep had not been so often sold oflF for
arrears of taxes and to satisfy the claims of the local bloodsucker, the ruth-
less usurer, known under the graphic nickname of "village fist" (kuldk),
to whom they are fatally driven by the absolute necessity of procuring grain
against seeding time, or money for the collector or something as vital, —
things might be different. The reason why the exhaustion of the soil has
been progressing at so frightful a rate of late years is that freedom has come
to the peasant weighted with the taxes which did not concern him under
the old rigime, besides the obligation of paying for his land to the State,
which had advanced the money to buy off the former landlord. He has
succumbed under the load, that 's all. And the land, which was to a
certain extent looked after by the landlord, has simply gone to rack and
ruin because its present owner is not allowed to keep a sufficient percentage
on the produce of his labor upon it to secure a bare sustenance to himself and
his, let alone improving the soil. This is one of the reasons — which I have
not seen mentioned anywhere — why the present famine is not only so
universal, but so permanent, a phenomenon not to be explained by a couple
of bad seasons in such a land. It is the general deterioration of one of the
granaries of the earth. It would take millions for fertilizers and years
of rest to restore the soil to its natural richness. So where is there hope ?
It might be done, if the people were freed from compulsory residence on
their lands. They would gladly pay the taxes for them and — rush into
the glorious South, which is virtually virgin soil and is being wasted for
lack of hands. The Government might then take in hand the temporarily
half-deserted region, which would fill quickly enough once it became its
old self again. It is a simple plan, and. Heaven knows, feasible enough
with the untold millions of vacant acres, but — it won't be done ! " Igno-
rance " is easily said, but so conscientious an inquirer, so good a friend, as our
author should not be quite so quick with the word. What, then, shall we say
of the New England farmers as a body, who, with nothing to hamper or
hinder them, have allowed land throughout their States, ever since they first
took possession of it, to go down to nominal value and deteriorate till it is
impossible for an ordinary family to make more than a bare living out of a
hundred-acre farm with unceasing toil and the plainest of fares— just in the
same way : by taking and taking from the soil without putting enough in —
and that originally not from lack of means, but from the thrift that hates to
lay out to-day a dollar that is to bring a return, and an ample one, not to-
morrow, but in a year or perhaps two. Now of course it is different : the
means are wanting, and the farms to be had for the asking.

BOOK I. CHAPTER III.

Homogeneousness of the Country — Its Vast Plains were Destined to Politi-
cal Unity — ^Uneven Population — How, for a Length of Time, it was
Distributed after an Utterly Artificial Manner — Relative Importance
of the Various Regions — Vital and Accessory Parts — Russia a Country
Bom of Colonization — Her Double Task and Consequent Contradictions.

The physical diversity of the various regions of the country
must not blind us to their homogeneousness. Russia is so natu-
rally one, that, short of an island or a peninsula, no country in the
world is more clearly stamped for the dwelling-place of a nation.
Through all their dijBferences, all their physical and economical op-
positions, the two great zones of North and South belong together
like two halves that complete each other and cannot be separated.
In the first place they have in common the soil, the plain, which
admit of no barrier, no possible boundary ; in the second place,
the climate is common to both ; the winter, which for weeks and
weeks gathers them under one mantle of snow. In January you
can sleigh it from Arkhangelsk or Petersburgh to Astrakhan.
The absence of snow would be for the South as dire a calamity,
and nearly as rare as for the North. As in the southern steppes,
so in the forests that skirt the polar circle, the rivers- are ice-bound
for months. The Sea of Azof freezes just like the White Sea, and
the northern half of the Caspian just as the Gulf of Finland.
The Black Sea is the only one of Russian seas the ports of which
are not all closed by ice in exceptionally severe winters * ; but the
limanSy or broad estuaries of the great rivers, do freeze up almost
regularly. As a rule, the navigation on the Black Sea is not in-
' See preceding Chapter, note 6.
35

36 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

terrupted ; but under the breath of the north wind, along the
coast of Crimea just as along that of Canada, vessels not unfre-
quently have their rigging hardened by frost, and their hulls
coated with a congealed crust, which make them heavy and
stiflF, and seriously imperil them.

With no mountains to part them, the two zones, with their
forests and steppes, are linked together by their rivers. Of these the
greatest have their sources in the one, their estuary in the other.
The difiFerent natural regions do not correspond to the various
basins : that of the Arctic Sea holds only the extreme north, that
of the Baltic only the western provinces ; the entire centre and
the east incline southward, as represented by their rivers, the
Dniepr, the Don, and, above all, the Volga, the Russian Missis-
sippi, which carries to the Caspian the melted snows of the
Ural, together with the waters from the lakes of the low table-
land of Valday.

It is not only by what they have in common, but just as
much by their discrepancies that the two great zones are united.
The more widely their soil, their products differ, the more exclu-
sive the call which they seem to have received from nature, com-
pelling each to seek assistance from the other. The central region
alone, where forests and cultivated fields touch and mingle, the
principality of Moscow of old, might be all-sufficient to itself.
Neither the North nor the South could. The North needs the
grain of the South, the South wants the wood and timber of the
North. If ever nature herself traced the outline of an empire, it
was when she drew the lines from the Baltic to the Ural, from the
Arctic Ocean to the Black and Caspian Seas. The frame was
clearly marked, history had only to fill it out. These vast regions
were as fatally doomed to political unity as countries ten or twelve
times smaller, like France or Italy ; and not only that, but the
plain was to make the process both easier and more rapid.

In this respect Russia has the advantage of another colossus
of the modem world. In the general flatness of the soil, in the

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 37

relative sameness of the climate, she has more solid guaranties for
her unity than the United States of North America, the North and
South of which are, indeed, also strongly linked together by a
great river, but where contrasts of every kind are more accentu-
ated, and could be still increased by territorial acquisitions to the
North and to the South.

In Asia, as in Europe, it is nature that has marked out the
field for Russia's sway. From the high tablelands of the Ural
her rule spreads over the Siberian plains ; from the low flats of
the Don and the Volga, over the depressed basin of the Caspian
and over Central Asia. Asiatic Russia, especially Western Siberia,
is not to the Russians an alien colony, impossible to assimilate,
diflScult to keep ; it is a prolongation, a natural continuation of
their European territory. Far from resembling the ephemeral
creations of the Asiatic conquerors, the Russian Empire is a solid
structure, of which Providence itself has laid the foundations.
There may be some uncertainty about its definitive boundaries,
more especially towards the West, the line of contact with Western
Europe, where history has created live forces independent of
physical conditions. But, no matter whether she win or lose a
few provinces between the Baltic and the Karpathian Mountains,
Russia is sure to remain one whole, with her two grand zones,
sure to keep her sway over the low and cold region of the old
continent, an immense region created for unity and therefore
doomed for a long time to centralization and absolutism.

Nature drew the plan of the Russian Empire even before Peter
the Great ; when and how will that immense frame be filled out ?
How many hundreds of millions will be accounted subjects of the
Tsar ? What figure will the population of this empire reach, the
vastest on earth, and so far, in proportion to its extent, the least
populous ?

One fact strikes you at the first glance: it is the uneven density
of the population. Even in Russia proper, situated in Europe,
there are districts which have, to the same area, a hundred times

38 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the population of others. The influences which have been at
work to regulate this uneven distribution are twofold — ^historical
and physical : the latter, essential, permanent ; the former, acci-
dental, transitory, and consequently bound to yield to the others
in the end. History, owing to their geographical position, has
for a long time shaped the two zones' destinies, but little in accord-
ance with the nature of the soil and the climate. Confining with
the steppes of Central Asia, the woodless zone was the first
exposed to the inroads of the Asiatic nomads, and the last wrested
from them. Hence an abnormal development of the two regions
and a distribution of the population to some extent artificial.
Leaving out the West, which, being far away from Asia, worked
out a destiny of its own, the most fertile regions were the last to
be inhabited, the last to be cultivated. Agriculture, hence
wealth and civilization, could not for centuries thrive and blossom
on the spot marked out to them by nature. Replied from the
south by the inroads of the nomads, the Russians were relegated
to the regions of the north, incapable as these are to support a
numerous population, a great civilization.* The eflFects of this
anomaly, which were still keenly felt in the eighteenth centurj^
are now rapidly vanishing. The southern half of the empire
already holds a far greater number of inhabitants than the north ;
there are certain tracts of the Black Mould region which lay in
great part waste a century or two ago, and are now counted
among the most populous. Population still crowds chiefly
around the two historical centres of old Russia — Kief and
Moscow. But old habit is no longer the principal cause of
this. At Kief the attraction lies in the soil and the climate ; at
Moscow it is the central position and industry that detain and
draw people, while the fallen queen of the North, Great N6v-

* Nothing but the utter ignorance of Western Europe concerning
Russia could -warrant the saying that "the Russians must be sent back
into their steppes, whence they never should have issued." Far from com-
ing out of the steppes, it is only at a comparatively recent date they set
their foot in them.

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 39

gorod, sees around her forsaken kremlin '^ a sparse sprinkling of
inhabitants as poor as the wretched resources of her surrounding
fields.

Physical conditions being identical, the population of a country
increases in proportion to its civilization. Every transition from
one stage of culture to another : from pastoral and nomadic to
settled agricultural life, — from purely agricultural to commercial
and industrial life — every step even from one way of working the
ground to another, more productive one ; for instance, from such
desultory agriculture as is practised in the steppes to the method
of triennial rotation, from ^;rtensive to /^tensive farming — every
such step enlarges the field for population. In Russia, where,
even in the European part of it, can be found all the modes of
existence from that of the nomad hunter, the only regions cap-
able of considerable increase in the population are those which
can pass from one stage of culture to another. But there are
several that are debarred by nature fi-om such an advance : the
extreme north is set apart by nature for fishing and the chase, as
the Uralo-Caspian steppes for pastoral life.'

As industrial life is only just budding in Russia,* it is to agri-

* Kremlin (more correctly kreml), the thing and the word, is the exact
equivalent of the Greek akropolis. Every old Russian city had its kremlin
It is the central fortified enclosure, always on an elevation, however slight;
the place of shelter in danger, of safe-keeping of the city's treasury and
shrines in peace.

* The trouble is that nature is systematically thwarted, at least in the
case of the north, with results that go widening in their effects as the circle
in the water. See preceding chapter, appendix.

■* Industrial life would be much more than " budding," the decided
forte of the Russian genius being applied science, if things and people
were let alone. But one cannot open a laundry or lunch-room without a
special license. Red tape and the exorbitant dues and percentages, not to
mention the " sundry " cost item, devour the possible future profits before
work has begun, in a country where capital is not yet equal to such drains.
They may, in the end, not amount to more than advertising comes to in
this country ; but then advertising is a voluntary outlay, under the enter-
priser's control, and materially helps his business, while the disproportion-
ate tribute levied at every step by the Russian exchequer yields no return
whatever to the undertaking which it cripples beforehand.

40 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

culture we must look for nearly all the development of population
to be expected in the near future. But then agricultiire is, more
than industrial enterprise, immediately dependent on physical
conditions, therefore the increase of poptdation in Russia is
almost entirely controlled by climate, the degree of moisture, the
geographical situation, and, above all, the fertility of the soil.
Were it not for the delay which history has imposed on the
southern regions, the density of the population would be in
almost direct ratio to the fertilitj' of the soil.

This tendency gives the key to a curious phenomenon in
statistics. Take European Russia with Poland, and you will see
that two thirds of the entire population do not occupy quite one
third of the territorj', and, more singular still, it is in the most
populous region that population increases most rapidly. This
seeming anomaly is easily explained : the zone where population
is densest and increases most includes the most productive por-
tions of the empire. It comprises the two regions which own the
best lands, the Black Mould belt and the arable steppes ; it takes
in the great industrial tract around Moscow, and, lastly, along
the western frontier, a mixed region, at once agricultural and
industrial, composed of the quondam kingdom of Poland, and a
portion of the adjoining provinces — a country whose rise was
favored both by its geographical situation and ancient civilization.
The industrial region of Moscow owes its numerous population
not so much to historical causes as to its central situation between
the two great river thoroughfares, the Volga and its aflBuent the
Ok^, and to the twofold vicinity of the finest forest lands of the
north and the richest Black Mould lands. Put together, these
four regions cover, this side of the Ural, not more than about
1,000,000 (one million) square miles out of an area of over three
millions, while they number 55,000,000 or 60,000,000 people out
of a total population of about 90,000,000. It is at their point
of junction, near the meridian of Moscow, that Russia's natiu^l
centre of gravity may be located. Tliere lie the vital parts of

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 4I

the empire. The other regions, covering two thirds of its Euro-
pean territor>', are only more or less necessary appendages ; their
degree of importance is determined by their relations with the
central nucleus, some linking it to one or other sea by means of
long rivers, which open to it the issues on Europe and Asia, —
others presenting it with the precious mineral wealth hidden in
their mountains, — others again, the largest number too, keeping
for it in their forests immense reserves of timber, while some few
in the south are its gardens, hot-houses, and orchards.

The uneven distribution of inhabitants over the various prov-
inces aflfects the statistical averages in a way to greatly mislead
on the subject of the real relation between the population and the
area it covers. If the empire, as a whole, has only eight inhabi-
tants to the square mile ; if European Russia herself numbers only
twenty-eight or thirty, the most productive parts, the industrial
region of Moscow, the agricultural one of Black Mould, are very
nearly as densely peopled as Central Europe, and already have
got ahead of Spain. Instead of being sprinkled over immense
areas till they are almost lost to sight, two thirds of Russia's
entire population are concentrated within an area scarcely more
than thrice the size of France. Now, in Russia as everyivhere
else, the compactness of the population gives greater facilities to
civilization, more power and cohesion to the people, more means
of action to the government.

From one half of her European territory and from three quar-
ters of her Asiatic possessions, laboring under the curse of either
extreme cold or extreme drought, Russia cannot expect any nota-
ble increase of population. Asiatic Russia, although three times
the size of European Russia, seems incapable of feeding even an
equal population. With eighty millions, Siberia, Turkestan, and
Transcaucasia put together might be comparatively as well off as
the Russia this side of the Ural with a hundred. Taking into
consideration the physical and economical conditions of the em-
pire, also the demands of life as to food, clothing, warmth, Russia

42 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

seems fated to drop behind the United States in regard to popula-
tion, and even, it may be, in two or three centuries from now,
behind Brazil. Notwithstanding the vastness of her domain, she
is not at all sure ever to exceed India's 250,000,000, or, conse-
quently, China's half milliard. Indeed, it is not impossible that
innumerable hordes from the latter country may at some future
time push up northward and strive to wrest from the Russian
colonists the possession of Siberia, if not of Central Asia itself.

Whatever may be the probabilities for or against these remote
prospects, Russia already has 1 15,000,000 of inhabitants, and about
the year 1950 she will have 180,000,000 on one continuous territory,
a thing not to be thought of for any other European nation, unless
the Germans, with their persistent "eastward push" {^'^ Drang
nach Osten "), succeed in extending their rule, at the cost of the
Slavs, over the greater part of ancient Poland, on Austro-Hungary,
and possibly over the Balkan peninsula.

In Europe as well as in Asia it is principally to the soil and
agriculture that the Tsar must look for an increase, in the near
future, of the number of his subjects. Field labor, however, is
far from being their only resource. In many a district, notably in
the central region, industrial enterprise already contributes to the
increase, not only of wealth, but of the population too. Russia is
already far better equipped in this respect than she was ever
thought to be. Industry will sooner or later take a vigorous
start, and even now is progressing rapidly. Should they ever be
allowed to draw their means of sustenance from abroad, the
number of inhabitants might, on the strength of this one item,
multiply indefinitely.

Russia not only finds within her own boundaries the raw
material for almost every possible fabrication — thus, for instance,
Russian cotton factories use scarcely any cotton but that grown in
Turkestan — but nature has endowed her with the two great agents
of modem labor — iron and coal. It is not half understood what
immense coal mines underlie the Russian plains. They keep

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 43

showing up on all sides, every kind and quality — in the north, in
the centre, around Moscow ; the southeast (basin of the Donets) ;
in the southwest in the governments of Kief and Khers6n ; in
Poland and on both sides the Caucasus ; in Asia itself in the
Kirghiz steppes ; in the basin of the Amoor and the isle of Sak-
halin. To coal and anthracite the Caspian coasts add naphtha and
petroleum. After being trammelled in the north by the lack
of openings, in the south by the lack of combustible materials, the
industrial development will soon be quickened, once the railway
lines are completed and some of the coal mines are worked. And
industry will open the way to agriculture by opening out regions
now lying waste and enticing the tiller of the earth to follow.
Thus the mines of the Ural lead to the fertile plains of Western
Siberia ; those of the Altay and Amoor Mountains will draw cul-
ture into the very heart of Asia, just as, in California and Aus-
tralia, culture came at the heels of the goldseekers.

If Russia's mineral wealth has long slept inactive under the
grass of the steppes or the trees of the forests, the reasons have
been many ; the most bountiful stores unfortunately lie at the
confines of Asia, in places of difficult access, some of them half-
desert still or insufficiently connected with the centre of the empire ;
then there are the distances and the high cost of transport ; then,
again, the scarcity of the population, and worse still, their poverty
and ignorance— all serious obstacles to industrial development.
The nature of the soil, the rigor of the climate, history, the habits
of the people, even to the social conditions — these were so many
drawbacks which condemned the eastern plain-land of Europe
to remain stationary a long time as an essentially rural and
ag^cultural country.

In order to gain a proper appreciation of the economical con-
dition of Russia we must not lose sight of the fact that, under
Peter the Great she had not quite fifteen millions of inhabitants ;
that as late as the middle of last century her population did not
yet equal that of France under I^ouis XV., and at the beginning

44 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

of the present century that of the German Empire of to-day.* If
we take up the successive censuses and examine into their statis-
tics it will be seen that Russia is a country in the process of making
up its population. She is, in many respects, just a colony ; and
this is a fact of capital importance to any one desirous of seriously
gauging both her resources and her difficulties. Yes, Russia is a
colony, and her history is really that of her colonization. The
first turn was the west's, then came the north and centre, and
now the turn has come to the south and the east. The lower
basins of the Dniepr, the Don, the Volga can be, in this respect,
compared to those of the Missouri and the Mississippi, the Russian
East to the American West. The colonial character shows in the
dates of the foundation of cities, as well as in the rapidity of their
progress, and their very looks. Sebastbpol, Khers6n, Nicol^yef,
Kh^rkof, Taganr6g, Rost6f, Saratof, Samdra, Perm, Orenburg,
the greater part of the capitals of governments or districts in the
south and east, are younger than the capitals of the Atlantic
States in North America. Odessa, a creation of the Due de Riche-
lieu, is not quite a century old, and already holds as many
inhabitants as Rouen and Hdvre put together. The region named
New Russia, of which Odessa is the capital, is as felicitously
named as the New England of the United States, and the coloni-
zation of it is far more recent. This country, wellaigh a desert at
the beginning of the century, has actually increased its population
tenfold within less than a hundred years. The growth of the
towns and the rural districts on the banks of the Don and the

* The so-called *' revisions," operated at irregular intervals, for the
single purpose of ascertaining the numbers of the taxable population, took
in only the males of the classes subject to the capitation tax, and can, con-
sequently, furnish only approximative data. These revisions suppose the
entire population, in its successive increase, to amount to the following
figures in the given years : 14 or 15 millions in 1723 ; 16 or 17 in 1742 ; 19
or 20 in 1762 ; 28 or 30 in 1782 ; 36 in 1796 ; 41 in 1812 ; 45 in 1815 ; 65 in
1835 ; 68 in 1851 ; 75 in 185^. See Schnitzler's Empire of the Tsars, v. ii.,
pp. 5 ff. In 1889 it was calculated that the population had already reached
the figure of over no millions.

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 45

Volga, in the latitude of Vor6nej and Sardtof, has scarcely been
less rapid.

The aspect of all these- cities in the south and the east is just
what would be expected from their recent origin. As in the Far
West of the United States, they are all built on a large scale, all one
like the other, with no feature of interest, without individuality,
with no other difference than that of site. I^ike those of America,
they cover far more space than European cities with an equal
number of inhabitants. One feels that they were constructed less
for the present than for the future, in view of an indefinite growth
which has not always progressed as fast as it was hoped. With
their huge public buildings, their ambitious boulevards, and their
broad streets to be filled by coming generations, the most prosper-
ous have an unfinished look, temporary yet pretentious, which is
not pleasing to travellers. As in America, the cities, instead of
following in the track of agriculture, have preceded it ; but then
more than one of these presumptuous cities has been, on the
morrow of its foundation, forsaken in favor of a better situated
rival, and left with its huge square and mute avenues which no
crowd will ever enliven.

It is curious to measure even at this early hour the conquests
of Russian colonization, to calculate how many parallels of lati-
tude, or how many degrees of longitude, from north to south, from
east to west, it has won from nature or from barbarism : there is
all the vast region of the steppes and the Black Mould, the haunt
of the horseman of old, Scyth, Tatar, or Cosack, there are the
shores of the Black and Azof Seas, where in the beginning of
modem times the Genoese still held fortified counting-houses,
such as the French keep along the coast of Guinea. This is the
greatest, possibly the only conquest of the West from the East,
of Europe fi-om Asia ; it were more correct to say that Europe,
thanks to the Russians, has nearly doubled her area at the
expense of Asia.

Have we not there a grand result ? And with what resources,

46 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

what elements has this immense and rapid colonization been
achieved ; is it going on still ? With the Russian people, who, to
effect this great work, have received from abroad none but ineflfi-
cient, insignificant assistance. The two Americas, Australia, all
the colonies of both hemispheres, receive every year a consider-
able contingent of emigrants and European capital. Russia has
been compelled to colonize herself without anybody's aid, either
in men or money. A colonization carried on without immigra-
tion, by a country itself deficient in population, by a nation itself
only half civilized — such has been the task accomplished by
Russia.

If Russia has colonized herself it is not that she did not ask
Europe for emigrants. Many did come from two sides — ^first from
Germany, then from the Greek-Orthodox provinces of Turkey and
Austria. These two classes of colonists, who arrived in the middle
of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century,
played an unequal part, but both had only a secondary local share
in the immense work. The Germans are the most numerous. Rus-
sia in modem times has offered the first opening to Teutonic emi-
gration, which has not worked as well there as in America.
Called in by Catherine II. and other Russian sovereigns, settled
on the choicest lands, sprinkled a little all over, from Peterhof at
the gates of St. Petersburgh to beyond the Caucasus, but especially
in New Russia and along the Lower Volga, these Germans have
kept well together in separate groups, alien patches in the midst
of the native population, not mixing with it nor exerting any
influence over it.*

At the present day they number many hundred thousands, that
preserve their religion, their language, their manners and customs,
bearing the name of colonists, and forming under this designation
a separate class which, until very lately, enjoyed particular privi-

* Besides these German colonists, there are the Germans of the Baltic
provinces, about 160,000 of them, then the tradesmen and craftsmen of Ger-
man or Austrian origin, dispersed over the various cities.

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 4/

leges, — exemption from military service in the number.* I^iving
as foreigners in the state whose subjects they are, these colonists
are distinguished by many essentially Teutonic qualities, such as
the spirit of order, of economy, of family solidarity. In the isola-
tion of their small communes, they have made for themselves a
small civilization of their own, a domestic civilization so to speak.
They have formed agricultural colonies, very curious for the poli-
tician and the philosopher to observe. They have achieved a
moderate competence without being able ever to rise any higher.
Hence it is that their influence on the Russian people, which in
material things is almost naught, is still less morally.f Whatever
share Germany has had — and it is a large one — in the develop-
ment of Russia, she has owed it much less to these rustic colo-
nies, self-centred as they are, than to the German nobility of the
Baltic provinces and the German scientists invited to settle in
Petersburgh.

Rather different has been the part played by the Greco-Slav
immigrants. If they have not yet quite become merged into the
Russian people, they do not, like the Germans, form a separate
body within the empire. The kinship of language where Slavs
are concerned, the unity of faith which is a bond between all, or
nearly all, have been powerful links between these immigrants and
their adopted country-. Among them are to be met all the Chris-
tian tribes of the East : Greeks, Rumanians, Serbs, Dalmatians,
Bulgarians, Armenians, Ruthenians, former Turkish or Austrian
subjects, attracted of old to Russia by political and religious sym-
pathies. This emigration, co-temporary with their first national
awakening, gradually ceased parallelly to the political emancipa-

* The suppression of this exemption in 1874, by the law introducing
universal military service, has caused a number of these colonists to emi-
grate. Many, however, after unsuccessful attempts at settling in Brazil and
elsewhere, went back to Russia.

t When we come to the study of Russian sects, we shall have, in dealing
with the Stundists, to quote a recent exception to this rule. See vol. iii.,
book iii., ch. ix.

48 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

tion of the small oriental nations on their native soil. Most of
these colonies, organized like the German ones, in villages and
districts, have settled preferably in the south and in Crimea. The
region around Odessa, before it bore the name of New Russia,
received from its Serbian colonists that of New Siberia. Many of
these Orientals took in Crimea and the adjacent coast-lands, the
place vacated by Tatar or Nogay emigrants, so that between the
two empires — the Russian and the Turkish, a double current was
established of emigration and immigration, the one drawing to
itself the Christians, the other the Mussulmans. These small ori-
ental colonies, some of them scarcely inferior to the German ones
in the matter of agriculttu-e, have given their first impulse to the
navy and to commerce ; they furnished to them both merchants
and sailors. The ports of the Black and the Azof Seas — Odessa,
Khersbn, Mari6pol, Taganr6g, are so many former Greek cities,
and remain partly Greek still.

Neither Germans nor Orientals, however, no matter how great
their services, can claim any large share in the millions of inhabi-
tants and the millions of acres of cultivated soil which have been
added in less than a century to the wealth of Southern and
Eastern Russia. The great colonizer of the Russian land is the
Russian people, the mujik. * How many difl5culties, what inferiority
in every branch are implied in this seemingly so simple fact, if
closely looked into ! Instead of the most enterprising men from
the most advanced European states, as in America or in Australia,
the agent is a people that has long been kept back by nature and
history, serfs but yesterday ; instead of all political and civil
liberties, of the independence and almost royalty of the individual
— an autocratic state, a meddlesome and nagging administration,
the solidarity of the commune, which binds man to man and the
laborer to the soil.*

* They to be pronounced as in French : je^ joli ; the u like oo in moor.

• This paragraph can scarcely be accepted unconditionally, at least as
applied to the Russian people. It is doubtful whether too much culture, —

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 49

The Russians have had a twofold task set them, of apparently-
irreconcilable elements : to borrow civilization from Europe on
one side, and on the other to carry civilization to desert lands.
They have had a nation to educate, all but virgin lands to break.
This task they had to accomplish under conditions the most
repugnant to colonial growth, burdened with standing armies and
a long term of military service, under a system of strict centraliza-
tion and an omnipotent bureaucracy. It is owing to these incon-
sistencies much more than to the inferiority of soil and clime, if
their development has been less rapid, and, above all, less
productive than that of Northern America ; that is what has kept
European emigration away from the steppes and will keep it
away for ever. No matter that Russia owns on both sides the Ural
admirable land, which but awaits the plough — colonists from the
West wiU not look that way. Even her neighbors of the Scandi-
navian North prefer the American "Far West" and the wastes
of Canada.^

developed liberties, ready-made institutions, the "royalty of the individual,"
— ^is a good thing in the beginnings of colonies. Colonies founded in this way
are bom old, like the Chinese philosopher Lao-tze, of whom the legend has
it he was bom eighty years old with a flowing white beard. And they do
not aggrandize or strengthen* the mother country. They are separate
organisms from the first and very soon assert their independence, — if neces-
sary, with arnaed hand. See the ancient Greek colonies and the American
colonies. Or else such colonies, if even outwardly thriving, are consumed
by a blight at the core, they bear a curse of moral depravity, of lack of
vitality, of restlessness and inability to settle down to the wholesome, nor-
mal, work-a-day routine which builds up a solid nation as well as a healthy,
prosperous individual. See the South American Republics of Latin race.
For, planting in rows full-grown trees with ripe fruit on them will never
make a forest or an orchard. While the kind of colonization of which Mr.
Beaulieu speaks so slightingly is the only kind that gives to the state not an
insecure dependence, but a vigorous offshoot, fed on the same sap, living the
life, growing the growth of the whole. Secession is an impossibility : can a
limb secede from its trunk ?

' Be it so and may it remain so. Therein lies the country's future, and
it does not matter if we do not live to see it. The American States cannot
dispense with immigration ; but for immigration they would not exist, and
their vital principle was, from the beginning, under a great show of gentle-

50 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Russia, then, is a recently colonized country. This is a fact
which should not for a moment be lost sight of. Many of her
peculiarities, many of her faults, private and public, come from
this simple fact. This partly explains a certain remnant of crude-
ness in so many cultured Russians; for instance, the puzzling
mixture of hyper-refined tastes and savage instincts, and a certain
superficiality in all but the mere luxury of intellectual culture and
civilization. ' Such inconsistencies are more or less noticeable among
the Americans and in all ' ' new ' ' countries, where civilization,
being too young and hasty, still has about it something unbalanced.

Russia is a colonj- one or two centuries old, and at the same
time an empire of a thousand years." She has some affinities with
America and some with Turkey. This opposition alone gives

ness and moderation, Conquest, — the most ruthless conquest that ever
Europeans perpetrated : taking possession of a continent by exterminating
the only landlord, the native race. The case is different where a homo-
geneous, compact race owns an area of land too extensive for its present use ;
it naturally considers it a precious safeguard for future times ; for the race
has vitality and it will increase and expand and cover its own land, never
fear. The times are gone by for offering " inducements " to foreign immi-
gration, and our experience with our German colony is not such as to make
us call for more. And do not the American States begin to look apprehen-
sively on the human tide that keeps rolling in across the Atlantic and
already take active measures to stem it ? If Russia continues unattractive
to emigrants, she will at least have no Chinese question to face — and solved
such questions can never be, only cut, more or less cruelly.

* A word concerning which it were desirable to come to a generally ac-
cepted mutual imderstanding. As commonly understood just now, it
appears to mean principally what house-speculators call " modern improve-
ments," mechanical appliances of physical science (telephones, phono-
graphs, electric lights) and — light opera, and to have nothing whatever to
do with culture or the highest capacity for culture. The Khedive of Egypt,
Ismail Pasha, returned home an enthusiastic convert to "European civili-
zation," announcing his intention to introduce it in his dominions, and,
on his arrival at Cairo, straightway established a cafk-concert with the
"stars" and all belongings imported from France.

' Scarcely an empire or even a state. These names cannot be given to
a loose agglomeration of principalities, held together merely by the bond
of race and, as regards their respective rulers, the all but fictitious one of
family "seniorship" and precedence. The Empire does not trace its
existence beyond the close of the fifteenth century, when Ivan III. assumed

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 5 1

the key to her national character as well as to her political situa-
tion. It is a country at once new and old, an ancient, half
Asiatic monarchy, and a young European colony ; a double-faced
Janus, turned westward and eastward, one face old and decrepit,
the other youthful, nay almost boyish."

This sort of duality is the principle which underlies the con-
trasts that strike us in Russian life everywhere — contrasts so
frequent as to have become the rule and to justify us in saying
that, in Russia, contradiction might be erected into a law. Every-
thing has worked towards that result : the geographical situation
between Europe and Asia astride on the Ural ; the mixture of
ill-amalgamated races ; an historical past claimed by two worlds,
and made of violently opposed phases. This law of contrasts
rules everything. Hence the variety of judgments pronounced
on Russia, and generally so false only because showing up one
side alone. This law of contrasts turns up everywhere — ^in
society, owing to the deep chasm that divides the higher
from the lower classes; in politics and the administration;
because of slight leanings towards liberalism in the laws,
and the stationary inertness of habit ; it shows even in the
individual, — in his ideas, his feelings, his manner. Contrast
lies in both substance and form, in the man as in the nation;
you discover it in time in all things ; it strikes you at the first
glance in the clothes, in the houses, in those wooden cities with
wide parallel streets, so similar to the new cities of America and
not unlike the stopping-places along the steamer route in the East.

This duality, which sways all the conditions of Russian life,
also directly influences Russia's material and political growth as

Hhe double-headed eagle of Byzance, the extinct Empire of the East and the
title of *' Caesar," — Tsesar, according to the pronunciation still in use in the
Russian schools, whence — Tsar.

'^ Old, Russia never can be called on any account. Whatever of "old"
and even "decrepit" there may be about her, is what came to her from
Byzance, whose effete and doting age made her but an indifferent associate
and mentor to a hardy, doughty young nation in her teens.

52 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

well as her moral development. At once a military monarchy
and a young colony, she has the weakness peculiar to both without
the full strength of either. Belonging to a new world, having
deserts to people, Russia, owing to her contact with Europe, is
subject to the same burdens, military and financial, that the old
crowded and civilized states have borne for ages. When, under
President I,incoln, the United States were threatened with seces-
sion, what they had reason to dread most was not a curtailing of
their territory, it was a radical change in their whole economical
and political existence, which would have been caused by the
creation of two rival powers on the same continent.

Geography has placed Russia in the very position into which
the secession of the South or the West would have forced the
United States. Isolated from Europe by an ocean, as America is,
she would have had a far readier and safer development ; she need
not then have divided her eflforts between two contradictory tasks.
The discomforts of such a material situation are singularly in-
creased for Russia by moral disadvantages : she has before her
the tasks of both Europe and America at once, and in her inhabi-
tants she possesses tools inferior in quality to those of both. She
is like an actor who was compelled to appear on the stage before
he could learn his part, or to a man whose education had been
neglected in his childhood and who is forced to complete it in the
midst of the labor and strife of manhood."

The Russians are a people in the act of getting itself into
shape, and that from the moral as well as the material stand-

" Russia is behindhand not from lack of gifts, but from the simple fact
that she is the youngest of the European family — a fact of which not even
our best friends seem willing to give us the benefit. She can answer most
accusations bearing on such shortcomings in the words of Pitt when, to
attacks from the ministerial bench on account of his youth, he serenely
replied : " I plead guilty to the accusation, but it is a fault that will mend
itself." And it is not only unjust but cruel to assert like that, as a matter of
course, that the Russian people, as tools of civilization, are " of inferior quali-
ty." The way in which they are every day coming to the front in all branches
of culture, science and art both, is more eloquent than any words in defence.

NATURE, CLIMATE, AND SOIL. 53

point. In no respect can they, without injustice, be compared
with the nations of Western Europe. Towards the latter, Russia
stands in the position of an army just forming and still scattered,
who should have to face an army with full numbers and con-
centrated corps. She may be weak to-day before nations who, in
a hundred years from now, will be unable to cope with her. In
this respect, the Bulgarian war has not erased the impressions
left by the Crimean war. To this day, Russia's power is not in
proportion to her bulk, nor to her population. The Russians
know this ; but they also know that time will raise their power
to the level of the size of their territory.*

* See France, Russia, and Europe. Calmann I/4vy, 1888.

m
^

^/c^^ '- ^-77—

RACES AND NATIONALITY.

CHAPTER I.

Are the Russian People a Bnropean People ? — Is there in Russia a Homo-
geneous Nationality? — Interest Attaching to these Questions — The
Ethnographical Museum at Moscow — Causes of the Multiplicity of
Races on this Uniform Land — Reasons why their Fusion is not yet Com-
pleted— How it is that Ethnographical Maps can Furnish only
InsuflBcient Data.

Wkre Russia a lately discovered virgin land, devoid of jwpu-
lation, or roamed over only by a few nomadic tribes, she would
soon oflFer to the world the same spectacle as the United States or
Australia. She would rank with those countries where civilization,
having left behind her the old institutions which protected her
infancy, opens out for herself, on a new soil, a wider and more
independent career. I<eft entirely to European civilization, Russia
would quickly have rivalled America, for — according to a remark
made by Adam Smith as early as the eighteenth century — nothing,
once the foundations are solidly laid, can equal the rapidly increas-
ing prosperity of a colony which, in a free land, is at liberty to
construct an entirely new building. What makes Russia's
inferiority is her elderly population, with its antiquated customs
and old traditions ; it is this indigenous population which, by
shutting out immigration from the West, robs her of the
advantages of the usual marvellous growth of colonies. '

' Once for all, we must protest against this off-hand acceptation of
"Russia's inferiority" as a thing understood, not even needing proof or

RACES A ND NA TIONA LITY. 55

Crudely contrasting with Western Europe, the Russian land was
unfit to be the cradle of European culture, but is perfectly fit to
receive it. Can the same be said of the different peoples that
occupy those vast plains? Physical conditions cannot alone
determine a country's fate ; in fact they can do nothing with-
out man, without the race that dwells there. Nature has marked
Russia for the seat of a great empire ; but has history' placed there
a people capable of making a great nation ? We must ask the
same question about the people as about the country. Does it
belong to Europe or Asia ? Has it a kinship with us, giving it
an inborn aptitude for our civilization ? or is it an alien in the
European family, in blood as well as education, and condemned
from its birth to remain an Asiatic people under the clothes bor-
rowed from Europe ?

This question which the Russians, as well as their antagonists,
have turned in and out and from all sides with equal passion,
amounts to nothing more nor less than the question whether or no
the Russian people are capable of civilization at all. In our times,
ethnography and the study of races has been made in certain
countries to play a most untoward and equivocal part, even to
being deferred to in the highest instance for judgment in ques-
tions of nationality, which, in any case, ethnography never could
settle by itself. These exaggerations, prompted by self-interest,
must not induce us to lose out of sight the real bearing of
such studies. In order to know a people, a young people too,

discussion. Once for all let it be understood at last, — what is so plain as to
•'put out one's eyes," in the graphic French phrase, cela crhve les yeux, —
that Russia is inferior in the way that the youngest of a family, who is not
yet out of college, is to his elderly brothers who have had the time and
opportunity to make their mark in the world. And it is notorious how
often the youngest is the most gifted ; then, adding to his own attainments
his elders' experience, the future is his when he survives them, as, in the
course of nature, he must. There is nowadays but one opinion on the
superior intellectual endowments of the individual Russians ; how then can
their country be inferior? As to the blessings of immigration, see preced-
ing chapter, note 7.

56 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

which has had no chance as yet to manifest its own genius,* a
knowledge of the elements of which it is composed, of the races
from which it has issued, is imperative. To propound such a
problem with regard to Russia amounts to asking whether Peter
the Great could succeed in grafting Western civilization on the
Moscovite wilding or whether, for lack of European sap, it
cannot "take " on the alien trunk.'

Side by side with this question of the filiation and intrinsic
value of the Russian people, another arises, quite as important to
the philosopher as to the politician : that of the degree of cohesion
possible to so vast an empire. The physical unity of the land is
not suflScient to ensure political unity, there goes to that also the
material and moral vmion of the populations, a certain kinship of
blood or brain, without which national unity is impossible. Is
there in Russia, as in France or Italy, a compact nationality,
strongly cemented by history, — or is it, like Turkey till very
lately and Austria to this day, a patchwork of heterogeneous
peoples, each with traditions and interests of its own ?

* Here the fact of its being '■'^ & young people," laboring under the difl&-
culties peculiar to youth alone, is admitted unconditionally. Is there not a
slight inconsistency in speaking almost in the same breath (see the first
paragraph) of Russia's " elderly population " as a drawback and a source of
" inferiority " too ? This unconscious fluctuation occurs repeatedly in the
present volume.

* Why should the Western type of civilization — " our civilization " — be
the only type to be aimed at ? and indeed — see a few lines higher — the only
possible one at all, so that, as the question is plainly put, if the Russian
people turn out incapable or unwilling to be exactly like the French, the
Germans, the English, they are to be set down "incapable of civilization "
generally ? Why — to keep up a simile which always fits — Why should the
growing young giant's proudest ambition be to wear out his elders' old
clothes or buy, at a high price, ready-made ones of precisely the same cut
and material, though they are a manifest misfit and so much too tight
that at each movement of his vigorous limbs they will crack at all the
seams? Let him profit by their taste and experience so far as to take
from their apparel whatever suits his figure and conditions of life
and carefully modify the cut better to adapt it to both and secure free-
dom of movements, moreover leaving ample margin for growth and final
development.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 57

The Russian soil is made for unity. Nowhere do we find so
vast an area so thoroughly homogeneous ; at the same time, no-
where do we find so many different races. The contrast which
appears everywhere in Russia is most striking in this respect.
The most uniform of geographical areas is occupied by the most
motley human families. Races, peoples, tribes, are all tangled
together ad infinitum, and their diversities are brought out and
made conspicuous by the diversity of their modes of life, their
languages, their religions. Among them are found all the ChriS'
tian confessions : Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Catholics, Protes*
tants, sundry sects unknown to the West ; all the beliefs of Asia
face to face with those of Europe ; Jews — Talmudists, and Kara-
ites ; Mahometans — Sunnites and Shiites ; Buddhists, Shamanites,
and heathens of all descriptions. The bare enumeration of the
various races encountered in European Russia is something Mght-
fill — no less than twenty ; and if no group, no smallest tribe is to
be overlooked, this figure would have to be doubled, nay, trebled.

We possess several ethnographical maps of Russia. One of
these, by Mr. Rittich, is both recent and excellent. But the
Russians have done more : in the Dashkofi" Museum, founded in
Moscow on occasion of the Slavic Congress in 1867, they have
attempted to give a presentation at once scientific and picturesque,
something like an animated map, of the various peoples of the
Empire. By means of mannikins of life-size and of waxen fig-
ures moulded after the exactest casts from nature, the peoples and
tribes of Russia have been assembled there, in all the variety of
their several types and garbs. On the north side of the vast hall,
which is laid out after the fashion of a map, next to the Tung^z,
the YakM, the Buri^t of Siberia, we see, in his garments of rein-
deer hide, the Samoyed, who recalls the Esquimau, and the
I^app, who puts one in mind of the Mongol. I^wer down, to
the west, come the Finn peasant of Finland, and the Ehst
of the Baltic provinces, both of them betraying, by their flattened
fiaces, a distant kinship with the I^app and the Samoyed. On

58 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the eastern side we behold representatives of other groups of the
Finnic race scattered over the basin of the Volga, and showing
features less and less European, less and less noble : Permians,
Voti^ks, Tcheremiss, Mordvins and Tchuv^h, in the midst of
whom a young Tatar woman from Kazin, disrobed of her veil,
is noticeable for her Oriental beauty. Facing this group, on the
western side, are the Lett, Samogitian, and lyithuanian peasants,
and at last the Bielor^ss, — i. e., the denizen of Western or White
Russia, square-faced, in striking contrast to a Jewish tradesman
and a Jewish mechanic, with their long faces and sharp, thin
noses.

In the middle of the hall, on a wide platform, is enthroned the
master of the empire, the " Velikoriass " (Great- Russian), in all
the variety of his diflFerent crafts and provincial costumes ; the men
in high top-boots, or low, slipper-like lapti, plaited of tree-bast,
in the red shirt or long-skirted kaftan; the women in rich sarafhns,
with their diadem-shaped kokbshniks. Below the " Velikortiss "
comes the " Malor6ss " (Little- Russian), with more refined
features, garments of more elegant cut and material ; the men
wear high sheepskin caps, the girls flowers interlaced with rib-
bons. Behind the Little-Russians appear the Poles, then, from
west to east, all the numerous tribes of the south of the empire :
a Moldavian couple from Bessarabia, a murzh or Tatar prince
from the Crimea, with his neighbor, a Tsigctn (gypsy) beggar, a
Karaite bride, a daughter of one of those Jews, enemies of
the others, who pretend to be descended from the ten tribes trans-
ported by Nebuchadnezzar, — lastly two German colonists from
New Russia or the Lower Volga, as different from the Russians to
this day, in type and garb, as on the day of their immigration.

In the southwestern portion of the hall we are met by the
Mussulman and Buddhist tribes of the oriental steppes, with their
Asiatic features and resplendent costumes : the Kirghiz with his
tall, pointed cap, Kalm>^ks from the governments of Stavrbpol
and Astrakhan, with narrow-slit eyes, yellow-skinned, wearing

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 5^

the beshmet of silk or velvet in the tenderest colors. Next to
these a Bashkir woman from Orenburg or Ufa, in her red cloth
robe — khal^t — and head-dress fringed with coins. In the extreme
south we greet the tribes of the Caucasus, the handsomest in the
world as to features, the most elegant as to dress. Here an Armen-
ian merchant in plain black kafthn ; further a Tcherkess (Circas-
sian) in crimson morocco shoes, his kafthn bristling with cartridge
pockets on the breast, and the camel's-hair bashlik slung round
his neck ; next, a Gruzin (Georgian) with lapti woven of leather
straps, the arkkalouk,* and the tchokka or surcoat with the long em-
broidered sleeves, open in front ; a Mingrelian woman in a gown
of light-blue silk and the long veil of transparent muslin, and a
Kurd woman from the banks of the Araxus, in her silken timic and
wide crimson satin trousers, a ring passed through her nose ; the
Armenian woman in a green robe — khalht, — wrapt up in one of
those immense veils which the women of the Caucasus enshroud
themselves in to walk abroad ; the Gruzinka (Georgian woman)
in a black satin petticoat with lavender bodice, and a band of
brocade round her head, dances as she brandishes a tambourine.
At the farthest end of the great hall, in a dark niche, a group of
half-naked Ghebers from Baku, the last survivors of the sect, wor-
ship the sacred fire.

The impression produced by this museum, where one single
state exhibits so many human types, a plain ethnographical map
would not produce in the same degree. The colors hardly have
shadings enough to spare one to each tribe ; by their motley color-
ing, as by the puzzling intricacy of their lines they recall the
geological maps of countries of the most complicated formations.
It seems, at the first glance, as though in this coimtry, where land
and inanimate nature show such unity, all is confusion in the races
of men.

* A sort of close-fitting doublet, with short but rather ample, gathered
skirts. A becoming and comfortable garment, often worn, of soft quilted
silk, by gentlemen as home costume.

6o THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

The configuration of the Russian soil accounts for this quan-
tity and diversity of races, apparently so little in harmony with it.
Having no well-defined boundary line either to the east or west,
Russia has always stood wide open to all invasions ; she was the
highway of all the migrations from Asia into Europe. Nowhere
have the strata of human alluvions been more numerous, nowhere
more mixed, more broken and disjointed, than on this smooth,
flat bed where each wave, as it was pressed upon and pushed on
from the rear by the following one, met no obstacle ahead, save in
the wave that had preceded it. Even as recently as in historical
times, it were hard to enumerate the people that have settled
on Russian land and established there more or less lasting empires
— Scyth, Sarmatian, Goth, Avar, Bulgar, Ongre or Hungarian,
Khaz^r, Petchen^g, I^ithuanian, Mongol, Tatar, — to say nothing
of the migrations of the Celts and Teutons of old, and others,
whose very name has perished, but who, obscure as they were,
may have left in the population a trace, undiscoverable at this day.

If the configuration of the country left Russia open to invasion,
the structure of the soil made it impossible to the invaders to
settle down on it in organized nations, independent of one another.
The multiplicity of races and tribes is not the consequence of a
slow working of physical causes, but an historical heirloom. Set-
ting aside the icy fields of the north, where none but hunting
tribes can exist, — also the sandy and salt steppes of the southeast,
impracticable to any but pastoral nomads, this complexity of races
and tribes, far fi-om being a result of their adaptation to the soil,
far from being in harmony with their physical surroundings, is in
direct opposition to it. The natural tendency of the land was not
to diversify and break up races, but to bring them together to
unity. To all these different peoples the country refiised the
comfort of boundaries within which they might have intrenched
themselves, formed groups, led an isolated existence.

In the immense quadrilateral comprised between the Glacial
Ocean and the Black Sea, the Baltic and the Ural, there is not a

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 6l

mountain, not one of the things that divide, that apportion. On
this even surface the various races have been left to scatter appar-
ently at random, not unlike the waters, which find no ridge or shed
to separate from, no banks to contain them. Even when diversity
of customs, religion, language, precluded their mixing, they were
compelled to live side by side, to cross, to interpenetrate one
another in every possible way, just as rivers empty themselves into
one and the same bed and, at their confluent, roll their waters in
the same current without ever confounding them. Thus it is,
that, being scattered yet contiguous, frequently wedged into one
another, the peoples and tribes of Russia have not been able to
attain full national individuaHty. Exhausted in the act of spread-
ing over too great expanses, or thinned down to the merest frag-
ments, broken up into bits, one might say, all these races have
easily allowed themselves to be gathered under one rule, and once
so gathered, were more rapidly unified and merged into one
another. From this fusion, begun centuries ago, under the sway
of Christianity and Moscovite sovereignty, sprang the Russian
people, this mass of sixty-five to seventy millions of men, which,
compared to the other populations, assumes the appearance of a
sea eating away its own shores, a sea strewed with islets that
crumble away in its midst.

This people that calls itself Russian, — ^what is its filiation?.
Occupying, as it does, the centre of the empire, environed by the
various races which it has pushed towards the extremities, it still
contains numerous Finn and Tatar patches, persistent witnesses
to the extent of the area once upon a time covered by similar
tribes. In their ethnographic maps, the Russians represent the
various populations in conformity to their local distribution at the
present day. An external sign — ^language — is taken for a stand-
ard, and all are accounted Russian or Slav who speak the Russian
tongue. No classifying method can be simpler ; only it should
not be forgotten that such a classification proves nothing as to the
origin of a people, and that, in the matter of race, language is of

62 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

all signs the most deceptive. In order to adopt the Russian
speech, Finn or Tatar tribes, in the act of " russification," do not
infuse into their veins Slavic blood, any more than the Celts or the
Gauls or the Iberians of Spain borrowed Latin blood along with
Latin speech. From the point of view of ethnographic gene-
alogy, these maps, based exclusively on language, bring data, not
results. For a research of this sort, it is necessary to collect far
more complex elements ; before we turn to philology, we should
consult anthropology, /. e., the physical constitution, the features,
nay, the structure of the skeleton of each given type of the inhabi-
tants, all that they have inherited directly from their remotest
ancestors ; and, unfortunately, tjrpes are not to be numbered and
classified with the same precision as languages and religions.

However, what matters most in an attempt to determine the
place belonging to the Russians amidst the human family, is not
so much the actual distribution of the various races, as the com-
position of the Russian nationality, which tends to swallow up all
the others. What part in the formation of this people had the
various elements of which, in and around it, we still behold the
scattered traces ? And — ^to propound the main question, as it is
so often propounded by Russia's foes — is the Russian people at
bottom European or Asiatic ? Is it Slav, brother and neighbor
of the Latin and the Teuton, and, by force of the same blood,
called to analogous civilization? or — ^is it Turanian (Tatar or
Mongol), fated by its constitution never to take more than the
forms of a culture alien to its race ? If this problem has received
the most contradictory solutions, the reason lies in the fact that
it has been debated by passion, by grudge, by national pride,
more than by study and observation.

BOOK II. CHAPTER II.

The Three Chief Ethnic Elements of Russia — The Finns — Are they an
Element that Has no Parallel in Western Europe? — Diversity and
Isolation of such Finn Groups as Still Survive — Their Part in the
Formation of the Russian People — The Russian Type and the Finn
Stamp — Is this Relationship a Cause of Inferiority for Russia? —
Capacity of the Finns for Civilization.

Out of the apparent chaos of Russian ethnology three main
elements — Finn, Tatar, Slav — clearly emerge, the last having
by this time in a great measure absorbed the other two. Setting
aside the three or four millions of Jews in the West, the eight or
nine hundred thousand Rumanians in Bessarabia, and one million
at least of Germans, scattered from north to south, — setting aside
also the Kalm5i'ks of the steppe of the Lower Volga ; the Tchet-
chens, the Lezghians, the Armenians, and the entire Babel of
the Caucasus, — all the peoples or tribes that have invaded Russia
in the past, all those that inhabit her to-day, can be traced to one
of these three races. As far back as we may pursue history,
representatives of each of these three groups are found, imder one
name or another, on Russian soil, and their fusion is not even yet
so complete as to conceal from sight the distinctive traits of each,
or the area on which they respectively held their sway.

The Finn or Tchud race * seems to have in olden times occu-
pied the greater part of the territory we nowadays call Russia.

* Tchud, following the Slav etymology, would mean " monsters, won-
ders," or "strangers." The name may possibly contain an allusion to the
"wonders" done by sorcerers, who enjoyed great renown everywhere
among the Finns.

64 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

It is manifestly not of Aryan or Indo-European stock, from which,
jointly with the Celts and the Latins, the Germans and the Slavs,
most peoples of Europe have sprung. Ethnological classifications
generally place the Finns in a more or less extensive group,
labelled "Turanian, Allophyl, Mongolian, Mongoloid," — all more
or less correct designations of a frame with wavering outline,
which at times recalls a sort of " what-not" into which philolo-
gists and anthropologists cast any people of Europe or Asia they
did not succeed in classing with either the Aryans or the Semites.
Within the too extensive group which, from the Pacific to Hun-
gary, comprises so many human families, the Finns mostly are
connected with a branch known under the name of Uralo- Altaic,
because the space between the mountain chains of the Ural and
the Altai seems to have been the starting-point of the peoples
belonging to this family. The Mongols proper, together with
the Tatars, are usually placed side by side in this Uralo-Altaic
group, which, on the contrary, rejects the Chinese and the nations
of Eastern Asia. This classification appears best to fit the facts ;
only it is to be noted that, regarding the two sciences on which
are based all ethnographic studies, — philology and anthropology,
this group is far from offering the same homogeneousness as
the Aryan and Semitic groups. The relationship between its
different branches is far less obvious, less intimate, than that
between Latin and German, and appears far more remote than
that between the Brahman or the Gheber of India, and the Celt
of Scotland or Bretagne ; at bottom it is hardly closer than be-
tween the Indo-European and the Semite.

From the philological point of view, the Uralo-Altaic or Tura-
nian race is distinguished by agglutinative languages, i. e. , such
as form their declensions and conjugations by mere juxtaposi-
tion instead of combining and merging into one another the root
and the desinences tmtil they are unrecognizable, as in our
flexional languages. These agglutinative languages which. Max
Miiller tells us, characterize nomadic peoples, always compelled

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 65

by their roaming life to guard against any alteration of the words,
do not show such intimate mutual relations as do the Aryan or
Semitic idioms, a fact the more remarkable, that, owing to the
absence of flexion, they would seem to be less susceptible of cor-
ruptions and variations. Their relationship, instead of showing
at once in the unity of roots and in the concordance of grammati-
cal forms, is limited to similarities in structure and syntactical
proceedings, so that the flliation between them is more doubtful,
more difficult to trace.

From the anthropological point of view, the unity of this vast
group is possibly still less firmly established, the affinity still
looser. The external, superficial characteristics by which other
races are easily known — ^the color of the skin, the eyes, the hair,
are unreliable guides on this ground, and separate many Finn
tribes. The anatomical characteristics are the only ones that can
apply to all the branches of the Uralo- Altaic trunk ; and even
those, essential ones too, vary greatly in some Finn tribes. The
most important ones are supplied by the shape of the head, and
of these the most general and persistent one is the flattening of
the face and the high cheek-bones. And yet, within the Finn
family alone, these Mongolian survivals are found in very dijfferent
degrees — striking and well-defined in some tribes, — the I^apps, for
instance, — ^very much weakened and modified in others, especially
the Finns of Finland.

It is to be noted that these craniological characteristics as well
as others, even less favorable, as a certain prognatism or promi-
nence of the jaws, have been encountered in many of the old
populations of Europe, whose traces have lately been discovered
by prehistoric archaeology. Most htunan tribes of the unpolished
stone age and especially of the quaternary epoch, the remnants
of which have been unearthed in the caves of Western Europe,
appear to have belonged to these Mongolian races among which
the Finns are classed, or to neighboring races. These primitive

tribes appear to have occupied all of the north and centre of
s

66 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.'

Europe, previous to the coming of the first Aryan immigrants. It
is not in subterranean caves alone, amidst the remains of the
mammals belonging to the geological period immediately preced-
ing our own, that these extinct races have left vestiges of their
passage ; they can be traced even in the features of those European
populations who have taken their place. Covered over by later
invasions, and buried under successive strata of Aryan alluvions,
these old inhabitants of Europe are no longer visible to the
vulgar ; the anthropologist alone at times fancies he can detect
survivals of those primeval Europeans on contemporary faces, in
the midst of the most civilized coimtries.*

Instead of being exclusively Asiatic, the Turanian element
and some other, analogous ones, may possibly have played in
Western Europe a part at once ethnological and historical ; they
may have furnished the bottom layer, the substratum, vanished
long ago, of the peoples of Central Europe. A few scientists have
gone so far as to consider the Finns of the northwest of Russia as
a survival of those quaternary tribes who, driven from the centre
of Europe by Indo-European invaders, would naturally have sought
shelter on the shore of the Baltic, in the lowlands but recently
emerged out of its waters. It is more probable that the Russian
Finns, instead of having sprung directly from those prehistoric peo-
ples, to whom they appear, on the whole, to be vastly superior, are
but very remotely related to them, and have themselves descended
from the Ural at a comparatively late period. Whatever the date
of their migration, they may be considered as established in
Europe at least as fer back as the oldest Aryan populations.
Settled in Europe at a time as remote as any one of our European
families, with as much claim as any to the name of " autochthons"
or "aborigines," the Finns, later on, took a considerable part in

* On this subject we can refer the reader to La Race Prussienng, by
M. de Quatrefages, although this scientist appears to have greatly exagger-
ated the inferiority of the Finn race, and to have, in dealing with Prussia,
magnified beyond measure the part belonging to the Finn element, at the
expense of the Slav and Teutonic elements.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 6'/

the invasions that brought on the end of the Roman Empire.
The most terrible of the Barbarians, the Huns, appear to have
been of Finn extraction, as likewise the Avars, the Bulgars, and
the Hungars — the latter being the only contemporary nation
sprung directly from this stock.

How much should be credited to the Finn family in the forma-
tion of the Russian people, and what physical and moral aptitudes
has it bequeathed to them ? Slowly repulsed or swallowed up by
rival races, the Finns, in their submersion, have left here and
there, scattered over Russia, islets which bear witness to their
former widespread presence, such as mounds of ancient make in
a plain whence the waters have washed away the primeval soil,
and covered everything with their alluvions. The Finn groups
dispersed in the empire differ singularly in degree of culture, in
religion as well as in languages and dialects. They number but a
few millions of souls, yet, as regards all the elements of civilization,
they exhibit more diversity than the great I^atin or Teutonic
families. Their relationship has been established by anthropolo-
gists and philologists ; it has long escaped the ken of those inter-
ested in the question, who never achieved a common national
consciousness and have remained towards one another in a moral
isolation as complete as their geographical isolation.

The Finn race, outside of Hungary, is almost entirely com-
prised within European Russia, where it numbers five or six
millions, divided into a dozen different tribes, classed into three
or four families.* There is first, in the north, the Ugrian family,
the only one that still has representatives in Asia. It comprises
only two small tribes, of a few thousand souls each, leading very
nearly the same life as the Samoy^ds, like them Christians in
name and Shamanites in fact ; the Osti^s, in Western Siberia ;

* All these tribes have, since the Finn scholar Castren, been the subject
of numerous studies : ethnological, statistical, philological, even juridical, on
the part of both Russian and Finn students, — Ahlquist, Mainof, Rittich,
Kuznetsdf, Laptef, Florinsky, Pop6f, Maximof, Yefim^nko, etc., to whose
number should be added Ujfalvy, adopted by France for her own.

68 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the Vogids in the northern part of the Ural. But to this family,
which includes the most miserable Finn tribes, is allied the only
Finn people that ever played a part in Europe and attained a
high degree of civilization — the Magyars of Hungary. In the
northeast comes the Biarmian branch, numbering from three to four
hundred thousand souls, decreasing with every year, however, as
they are rapidly getting russified, and unevenly distributed among
the tribes of the Permians in the basin of the K^a, that of the
Votiaks on the Viatka, of the Zyrians on the Dvina and Petch6ra,
all three orthodox, the two former addicted to agriculture, the
third to hunting and trade. I/)wer down comes the family of the
Volga, with the Finns of the south, more or less crossed with
Tatar elements. To this group belong the three most important
Finn tribes of Russia proper : the Tcheremiss who, about two
hundred and fifty thousand in number, dwell along the left bank
of the Volga, around the government of Kaz^ ; the Mordvins,
who, subdivided into several branches, number near on a million
souls, in the very heart of Russia, between the Volga and the
Ok^, in the governments of Nijni-N6vgorod, Penza, Simbirsk,
Tambbf, Sardtof ; the Tchuvash, rather numerous, scattered along
the banks of the Volga, the ancient territory of the Tatars of
Kaz^, whose language they have adopted.* I<astly, in the
northwest, we have the Finn family proper, whose principal
representatives are the Finns of Finland, subdivided into two or
three tribes — the Suomi, as they call themselves, about the only
ones that have a national feeling, the love of their mother-land,
a history, a literature ; also the only ones who are tolerably sure
to escape the slow absorption that is making an end of all their
kindred races. They make up five sixths of the population in the
Grand Duchy of Finland, but a population almost entirely rural,
as the Swedish element, much mixed with German and Russian,

* All these Finn tribes have long been mistaken by foreigners for
Tatars. The travellers of olden times thus helped to strengthen the fiction
about the Russians being of Tatar origin.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 69

is invariably predominant in the towns. Over and above the
1,800,000 odd they number in Finland, the Suomi come in for about
250,000 more in the population of the adjacent Russian govern-
ments.

St. Petersburgh, sooth to say, is built in the midst of a Finn
land ; the immediate surroundings only are russified, and quite
recently too. Scarcely half a century ago, Russian was not under-
stood in the villages at the very gates of the capital, even nowadays
the latter is surrounded with fragments of Finn tribes. In the
northwest, the Suomi of Finland stretch down nearly to its suburbs ;
in the west, where the great lakes are, the Karels and the Veses,
who appear to have for a long time occupied a vast territory;
in the southwest, nine hundred thousand Ehsts (Esthonians),
who, having been, through four or five hundred years,
subject to the rule of German lords, have resisted germani-
zation in Esthonia and Northern I^ivonia.* To the same Finn
branch belong the Livs, a tribe very nearly extinct, which has be-
queathed its name to I^ivonia, and which, being pressed upon by
both I^etts and Germans, holds only a narrow strip of land along
the sea, at the northern point of Curland. To the same branch
belongs lastly the Lapp tribe — the very ugliest, morally the least
developed, of all its kindred, the only one, perhaps, that has pre-
served the original, primeval features and mode of life of the parent
stock. It appears that the Lapps at one time owned the whole of
Finland, before they were cornered by the Suomi into the hyperbo-
rean regions to which they are to this day confined. On the other
side of the White Sea, a small tribe which also once covered a
far more extensive area, the Samoyeds, get shoved about a good
deal, being numbered now among the Finns, now among the
Mongols. At another extremity of the vast area covered by the

♦According to Mr. Rittich, the Germans in the population of the three
Baltic provinces (Esthonia, Livonia, and Curland) would count only for
something less than y|[^, the Finns for ^^, the Letto-Lithuanians for ^^,
the balance consisting of Russians, Poles, Swedes, and Jews.

70 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Tchuds, another tribe, much more considerable by its numbers,
is also placed on the confine of two ethnic groups : the Bashkirs,
one million strong, dwell on the slopes of the Ural ; they have
been pronounced alternately to be Finns and Tatars ; in reality
they are Mussulmans and speak a Tatar language.

Thus minutely is this race subdivided, — a race whose mem-
bers profess every religion, from Shamanism to Islam, firom the
Greek Orthodox faith to I,utheranism ; — who are nomads, like
the Lapp and Osti^ ; pastoral, like the Bashkir ; farmers, like
the Ehst or Finn ; — a race that has assumed the worship and at
times the language of one and the other, everywhere ruled by
people of diflferent extraction, russified after having been partly
tatarized,' so that every influence has contributed to break it up

' Why not mention the germanization, systematic and aggressive, to
which the Ehsts and I/etts are subjected in the Baltic provinces, where they
make out fully three quarters of the population ? Russification is nowhere
intentional, much less compulsory, beyond demanding a reasonable com-
prehension of the language of the empire, and the passing of a very easy-
grade examination from persons filling or desiring to fill official positions.
The rest accomplishes itself naturally, by inevitable influences, community
of interests, of social and political conditions, intercourse, and, in a very
moderate proportion, mixing of blood. The German aristocracy and
bourgeoisie^ notwithstanding their extremely small numbers (^J^ ; see
author's note on p. 69), have undertaken to germanize the provinces,
and not only did they admit no language but German in private schools,
refusing to send their children to the "gymnasiums" (public schools),
colleges, special schools, etc., provided by the government, or to speak
to the "natives" their own language, or even learn to understand it ; not
only was the same proceeding applied to the Lutheran churches, attend-
ance in which was made virtually compulsory by the wealthy and powerful
noble German landlords ; but when the government, for reasons of states-
manship too obvious to need defence, decreed that business in the public
government oflBces and courts of justice, police, etc., should be transacted
in Russian and that the Russian language should be taught in schools, not
to the exclusion of, but side by side with, German, also that the railway con-
ductors and other public servants should, not necessarily be Russians, but
understand and speak Russian, the discontent of the y^ Germans was not only
loudly voiced but vented in open, active opposition, while the foreign press
was played off to such good purpose that philanthropic Europe soon raised the
usual hue and cry of "tyranny," "oppression," "barbarism," with which
she greeted the simplest measures of national unity and safety in Russian
Poland, though she had never seen an3rthing amiss in Prussia's well-known

RACES AND NATIONALITY. /I

into insignificant fragments. Although equal in numbers to their
Hungarian brethren, the Finns of the Russian Empire are far
from laying claim to an equal political weight.

. If we but consider the distribution of the Finn tribes from the
Ural and the great elbow formed by the Volga to the Neva, we
shall find that the principality of Moscow and the surrounding
appanages were comprised within the former territory of the
Tchuds. Their diffusion will appear greater still if we note the
geographical names ; for, in many a region now thoroughly Rus-
sian, the names of places, villages, rivers, have remained Finnic.
Moscow, as Petersburgh after and N6vgorod before her, was built
on land that was Tchud to the core. The same can be said of
S^dal, Vladimir, Tver, Riazdn — of all the capitals where resided
the kniazes (princes) of the Great-Russians. In the face of such
facts, is it not allowable, in all the centre and north, to look on
the old Finn blood as one of the elements that enter into the
constitution of the young Russian nation ? '

It is not only on history and ethnographic maps that this
induction is based ; it is also justified by the features of the peo-
ple. But for this indelible stamp, it might remain an open ques-
tion whether the colonists who brought the Slavic language into
Russia, mingled with the natives, or, like the Anglo-Saxons in
America, simply pushed them aside to take their place. An atten-
tive investigation shows that both phenomena took place and that,
too, simultaneously. The actual distribution of their tribes leads
to the conclusion that the Finns really were pressed upon on two
sides by the Slavs — ^pushed in the west towards the Baltic, in the
east towards the Ural and the middle course of the Volga.
Anthropology nevertheless proves that there has been a mingling

iron methods of " germanizing " her own " Polish provinces," as also, later
on, Alsace-Lorraine.

"^ This is not the case quite to the extent supposed by Mr. Beaulieu,
owing to the extreme scarcity of marriages, or even love passages, between
members of different races among the lower classes, the only ones that,
making the bulk of the population, count in such matters. This note
should be borne in mind through the following pages.

72 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

of races, of which many a Russian face still bears the imprint.
The way in which the Slavic element at the present day absorbs
the Finn groups under our very eyes helps us understand the
past. The russification of the contemporary Finns, their geo-
graphical distribution, the imprint left by them on the Russian feat-
ures,— these are the three proofs in favor of this secular crossing ;
the two former appeal to the mind, the latter is patent to the eye.

The Finn tribes of Russia differ considerably among them-
selves in physical characteristics as well as in their respective
degrees of culture. A few, such as the Lapps and the Tchu-
■yash, show a strongly marked Mongolian type. Others — the
more important ones, such as the Suomi of Finland and the Ehsts,
owing to the influence of their surroundings or of alliances the
trace of which is lost, show nobler features, more nearly akin to
the Caucasian type than to the Mongolian. Still, all these groups
retain certain characteristics which have not entirely disappeared
even among the Magyars, the people which, having mingled most
with Europe, has undergone the greatest modification. The
structure of the skeleton is less robust than that of the Aryans and
Semites, the legs are shorter and leaner. The head is mostly round,
short, little developed in the back, in a word — ^brachycephalous,
like the heads of one of the chief geological races of Europe, now
extinct. The face is generally flat, with high cheek-bones ; the
eyes are small ; the nose wide ; the mouth large, thick-lipped.
These peculiarities are frequently encountered among Russians of
all classes, but most among the peasants and especially among
women, who everywhere retain more tenaciously the ethnical
stamp.

When confronted by such marks of kindred between this semi-
prehistoric race and the most mighty in numbers of European
nations, the observer inquires what genius, capacities, aptitude for
civilization, we can credit the Finns with. Is it true that kinship
with them must be to the Russians an irremediable cause of infe-
riority ? That may be doubted. Hampered by their isolation and
tbeir disruption into infinitesimal fractions, also by the thankless

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 73

quality of the lands to which they are confined, the Finns never
had a chance of achieving original development. As though in
compensation for this disadvantage, they have everywhere shown
a singular facility to assimilate with the more advanced races
whenever they have come in contact with them. It is with them
as with the country which contains most of their remains, as with
the Russian soil : they readily yield to a civilization which could
not have originated with them ; if they do not, by blood, belong
to Europe, they are quite willing to be annexed by her. The
greater part have long been Christians, at least in name, and it is
Christianity which, more than anything else, has prepared their
fusion with the Slavs, their incorporation into European civiliza-
tion. From Hungary to the Baltic and to the Volga, the Finns
have embraced with equal facility the three principal historical
forms of Christianity ; the latest. Protestantism, thrives better in
their tribes in Finland and Esthonia than among the Celtic,
Iberian, and Latin peoples.

If we would look to language for the clearest test of a race's
intelligence, we must admit that certain Finns — the Suomi of Fin-
land and the Magyars of Hungary — have carried their aggluti-
native languages to such perfection as enables them, for power,
richness, and harmony, to bear comparison with the most complete
of our flexional languages. They have an innate taste for music
and poetry, a taste the embryonic beginnings of which are per-
ceptible among the most barbarous of their nomadic tribes, and
which has endowed Finland with a treasury of popular literature,
an entire cycle of indigenous poetry, — an epos which the most
advanced nations of the West would feel honored to own.* To

* The Kalevala, a collection of popular rhapsodies, connected and put
into shape by the Finn scholar I/6nnrot, and translated into French by
Mr. L^ouzon I,educ, with the assistance of Lonnrot himself (editions of
1845, 1867, 1879).^

* While mentioning the French translator of the Kalevala, the name
of Anton Schiefner should not be ignored, a prominent member of the
Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg, a scholar of
colossal Turanian erudition, who edited most of Castren's works and left a
most scholarly German translation of the Finns' national epic.

74 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

these qualities of heart and mind they add others that do credit
to their intellect and character. If so be that the Finns are akin
to the Mongols and other peoples of the extreme East, they can
lay claim to the virtues of those Asiatic races, which, wherever
they are engaged in strife with ours, stand the competition so
well ; they have the same fortitude, patience, perseverance. That
may be the reason why, in all countries where their influence
can be traced, they seem to have left behind them a leaven com-
pounded of singular power of resistance and singular vitality.

These qualities have most brilliantly manifested themselves
in the Magyars, who, in spite of their scant numbers, have held
their own against Germans, Slavs, and Turks ; the same qualities
are thought to belong to the Bulgars, the most industrious, the
most patient, among the Christian peoples of ancient Turkey.
And if (as M. de Quatrefages asserts and Virchow denies) — if the
Finn element has really played an important part in Old Prussia,
Modem Prussia possibly is indebted to them for some of the
vigor and tenacity of purpose which have made her fortune.* In
Russia itself the Finns, far from being inferior to the Russians,
at times show a real superiority over them. If nothing can be
meaner than a Tchuvash hut on the Volga, with its roof of bark
and its single window, the wooden houses of the peasants in Fin-
land are more roomy, more commodious, than the izbas of many
Russian mujiks.* Settled on a more thankless land, on a granitic
soil which seldom insures their daily food, they work harder and
are more saving. They have earned a reputation for honesty and
uprightness. Only, it is rather difl&cult to make out whether this

■* As regards the Bulgars, there is hardly room for doubt, although a
Russian scholar, carried away by a retrospective Slavophil patriotism, — Mr.
Ilovayski — undertook to demonstrate that the Bulgars are Slavs, pure of all
Uralo-Finn admixture.

* Constructed, however, on precisely the same plan, with identical inte-
rior disposition and furnishings : the immense brick stove, faced with tiles
in the better class of houses, containing the deep, wide-mouthed, vaulted
oven ; the massive wooden benches running round the sides of the room,
and the ponderous family table built into the floor.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 75

moral superiority of the Western Finns should be attributed to
the difference of race, or to the difference of religion, or merely to
a more ancient and wider use of liberty. The fact remains, any-
how, that an European traveller, finding himself in the midst of
Finn peasants, with smooth-shaved chins and short coats, gene-
rally feels more at home with them than with Russian peasants,
nearer to him in blood though the latter may be.

The Finns of Finland have been favored of history. The
long and mild rule of Sweden initiated them to the civilization of
the West and civil liberty.* From a political point of view the
Finlander, to whom, under Alexander II. of Russia, was restored
his archaic constitution and his Diet composed of four orders,! is
the most advanced of the peoples subject to the empire. Their
neighbors and brethren, in religion as well as race, the Bhsts, hav-
ing, until the beginning of this century, held the position of serfs
to German lords, were less fortunate. Nevertheless they too have,
at Revel and Dorpat, their own press and a national literature ;
they too show themselves, in certain respects, superior to the
Russian peasants. They are more patient and hardworking, and
have been invited to settle on the estates of several Russian land-
lords, very profitably for the latter. Such Ehst colonies can be
met with in the governments of St. Petersburgh and Pskof and
even as far as Crimea. And lastly, should we wish to realize
what contact with Aryans, and more especially Slavs, can make
of peoples of Finnic extraction, as regards beauty of body and

* The Grand Duchy of Finland is less a Russian province than an
annexed state, and the tsars have wisely respected its autonomy. Finland
has preserved her own laws and institutions. In certain respects the trans-
fer under Russian rule has been all gain to the Finns of Finland. The
Russian monarchs ennobled the Finnish language, which before was spoken
only by country people, by raising it to the rank of official language on a
par with the Swedish language, which still is that of a portion of the
littoral, the principal cities, and the higher classes of society. See further
on, p. 134.

t Nobility, clergy, town-burghers, peasants, after the old Swedish
constitution.

76 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

vigor of mind,' we have only to look at the Magyars, one of the

handsomest, as well as most energetic races of Europe. If there

is any inferiority, it is certainly not from a political, nor from a

military standpoint, for the Magyars have, at all times, been one

of the most warlike nations of Europe, and through all their

revolutions, have been truer to free institutions than most Aryan

nations, be they Slav, Latin, or German.

* Here at last Mr. Beaulien gives us the real gist of the matter, which
he had somehow missed through the preceding pages : the influence is not
from Finn to Slav, but the other way. Such is ever the relation between
Turanian and Indo-European. To be entirely just, however, the very real
superiority of the Finns of Finland, while certainly not an intrinsic racial
one, as is more than hinted above, p. 75, is not so much due to Slavic influ-
ences as to Swedish ones. As to the Magyars, they owe their aryanization
to vicinity and actual cohabitation with Slavs in the same wide lands.
The KaUvala is full of descriptions of simple rural life, and it is astonish-
ing how many, even to minute details, might just as well apply to Russian
or Swedish peasant life. The same may be said of many of the customs
therein pictured. This goes far to corroborate the latest theories on the
original unity or extremely close affinity of the " primeval Teutonic "
(Ur-deutsch) and "primeval Slavic" [Ur-slamsch) stocks, since it is
undoubtedly from these two elements that the Turanian Finn, from the
first, absorbed those of his own social and national organization.

BOOK II. CHAPTER III.

The Tatar or Turk Element— Tatars and Mongols— The Kalmyks— What
is the Proportion of Tatar Blood in the Russians? — The Tatars in
Russia and the Arabs in Spain — Slow Elimination of the Tatar Ele-
ment— Ethnical Influence of the Turk Tribes Previous to the Mongol
Invasion — Varieties of Type amidst the Modem Tatars — Their Customs
and Character.

Thk second of the great fountain-heads from which the
Russian people might be said to have flowed — the one most pecul-
iar to Russia, more decidedly Asiatic, has received from habit the
name of '* Tatar." Never did more misleading designation steal
into history, philology, ethnography. At its first appearance in
Russia this name was borne by one of the Mongol tribes who
helped found the empire of Djinghiz-Khan. In her terror of
these new barbarians, who seemed to her the outcome of hell,
Europe (it was in the thirteenth century) dubbed them "Tartars,**
and this name, suggested by a classical reminiscence, was ex-
tended to all the heterogeneous crowd of peoples dragged along
after the savage conquerors. As to the old name, "Mongols,"
the tribes to which it belonged by right were robbed of it, and
it came to designate that branch of the Uralo- Altaic stock, of
which Turkestan was the starting-point, and of which the Turks
are the chief representatives. The Tatars who stayed on the
banks of the Volga are nearly related to the Turks, or rather they
are Turks, just as the Ottomans, both risen from the same cradle,
both speaking dialects of the same language ; all the difference
between them being that the Ottomans invaded Europe later and
were converted to Islam only after that invasion. To this day the

78 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

scions of the tribes from Turkestan who, coerced and led by the
Mongols, settled in Russia, have not lost the memory of their
origin : the Tatars of Kaz&n and Astrakhan call themselves Turks,
a name endeared to them by the ancient glory of the Osmanlis and
a common religion.

The Turkish branch is, at present, nearer to the Finnic than to
the Mongolian branches.* Turks and Finns have often met and
mixed to such extent, that there are tribes — the Bashkirs and Tchu-
vashes for instance — in whom it is diflScult to make out the share of
one and the other. The difl&culty is still greater when dealing with
extinct peoples, such as the Huns, the Avars, and the old Bulgars
of the Volga, in whom the Finn blood seems to have predomi-
nated,— the Alans and Roxolans.f who appear to have been
mostly Turks or Tatars. The union of Turk and Mongol, espe-
cially in Asia, has taken place quite as frequently, and it is hard
at times to distinguish between them. One instance of such
fusion still survives in Europe : it is the tribe of the Tatar- Nogay,
who dwelt in the steppes of the Kuban and of the Crimean penin-
sula before they were driven out into those of the Kuma. The
features of these nomads seem to bear out the notion of an alli-
ance with the Mongols. They have the same square, squat figure,
the eyes raised obliquely towards the external angle, the broad,
flat nose, the beardless chin. This case stands alone amidst the
Russian Turks. As a rule, whenever their countenance betrays a
cross, it is rather with the Finns or the peoples of the Caucasus.'

* In their primitive and unalloyed stage, the Turks may have been nearer
to the Mongols. (See Revue cf Anthropologie, vol. iii., 1874, Nos. i and 3.)

t Some Russian scholars make out these Roxolans to be Russian Slavs.

' There certainly is nothing in the features of the Tatars of the Volga,
familiar to all dwellers in large cities, where they ply their traditional trades
of peddlers, restaurant-waiters, and cab-drivers, to recall the no less familiar
type of the Ottoman Turk. The broad face, with slightly salient cheek-bones,
not too oblique eyes, and thickish lips, yellowish skin, and scant beard, is an
attenuated copy of the rampant Mongolian type. The same characteristics
•re observable in the Finns of Finland, further modified by the considerable
strain of Scandina\-ian blood, to which they owe their lustreless dun or
Mndy locks and almost imperceptible eyebrows over dull, fishlike eyes of

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 79

There still exists in European Russia a people of Mongol
origin — the Kalm^^ks — who dwell in the Caspian depression, this
side of the Volga. There are about 130,000 of them, and they
carry around their kibitkas, or felt tents, and drive their camels
and their flocks along in the arid steppes of the governments of
Astrakhan and Stavrbpol. It is these twenty-five or thirty thou-
sand families, roaming about at one extremity of the empire,
whose name has been so frequently applied, as a kind of nick-
name, to the Russian people. At first sight their Chinese type
distinguishes them nearly as markedly from the Tatars as from
the Russians. It is to be noted that these Mongols of the Volga
did not enter Europe in the rear of Batii and the successors of
Jinghiz-khan, but settled down in that forgotten comer of Russia
at a relatively recent period. It was as late as the seventeenth
century that, after a long migration from the confines of China to
the Ural River, these spiritual subjects of the Dalai Lama of Thibet
set foot in the steppes by the Volga. Taking advantage of the
hereditary rivalry between the Mongol and Tatar tribes, Russia
successfully employed these new-comers in her wars against the
Turks and the Khans of Crimea ; but any attempts to get them
into more direct subjection caused numbers of them to return to
their original fatherland. They went en masse, giving the
eighteenth century the spectacle of a wholesale migration, like
those of olden times. During the winter of 1770 from two to
three hundred thousand Kalmyks, with their flocks, crossed the
Volga and Ural upon the ice. Then thaw came on and detained
the rest, who decided to stay in Russia, while their brethren, not-
withstanding repeated attacks from the Kirghiz, plodded on to
their old homesteads on the confines of the Chinese Empire.

washed-out blue. If the long contact with their whilom masters has un-
doubtedly ennobled them morally and intellectually, it has not done the
same service to their personal appearance, for they are the most appallingly
homely people one can meet. It is related of the Emperor Nicholas that,
stopping at a Finn village a hundred miles or so from the capital, he was
so disagreeably struck by the physique of the villagers, that he ordered
one of his handsomest guard-regiments to be forthwith stationed there.

80 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

The Kalmyks who stayed in the cis-Caspian steppes, owning
the Russian sovereignty, were, until very lately, all Buddhists.
They had a chief to whom they gave the title of Grand-Lama,
who, since Alexander I., was nominated by the Tsar, and whose
residence lay somewhere near Astrakhan. There is one fact
which has exercised vital influence on their respective destinies,
it is that the three chief branches of the Uralo- Altaic race have
apportioned to themselves the three chief religions of the old
continent. The Finn has become Christian ; the Turk or Tatar,
Moslem ; the Mongol, Buddhist. To this ethnological distribu-
tion of worships there are few exceptions. It is in this diversity
of faiths, above all, that we must seek for the causes of the widely
diverging destinies of the three groups, especially the Finn and the
Tatar. Religion has prepared the one to European ways of life ;
religion has removed the other from the same influences. Islam
gave the Tatar a more precocious national civilization, and helped
him to build such thriving cities as ancient Saray and Kazan,
and to found, in Europe and in Asia, powerful states. Islam gave
him a more brilliant past, but, on the other hand, prepares for him
more difficulties in the future.

It is to the Tatars that the Russians have long been indebted
for the misnomer of " Mongols " ; yet the Tatars themselves have
but a questionable claim to the name. In any case, it ought
to be dropped when dealing with the Russians, not because in
itself offensive, but because resulting from a misapprehension.

The Russians have scarcely a few drops of Mongol blood ; have
they much more Tatar blood ? Perhaps even less than the Span-
ish people have Moorish or Arab blood. In Spain the Arabs
stayed much longer, occupied a far larger portion of the territory,
settled down in far greater numbers, and held the peninsula under
their own immediate rule. In Russia, the Tatars having entered
the country in the thirteenth century, were, already in the six-
teenth, driven back to the extremities. They ruled hardly more
than one half of European Russia, and the greater part of even

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 8 1

that they did not hold under their direct sway, but merely
under their suzerainty. They did not destroy the Russian princi-
palities, but were content to make them pay tribute. The Arabs
colonized the fairest regions of Spain, those which, to this day,
are the most fertile and most populous. The Tatars spread over
the parts of Russia which are even now the most thinly peopled,
— over the steppes of the south and east. Towards the centre
they advanced only up the rivers, along the Volga and its tributa-
ries, as shown even still by their actual distribution. It was not
even into the midst of the Russians that these colonizers from
Asia broke their way. The Russians at that time had barely
reached the central basin of the Volga and the junction of this
river with the Ok^ at Nijni Nbvgorod. So it was the Finnish
peoples, discussed in the preceding chapter, in whose midst they
appeared ; the peoples whose remains we see in the Mordvins, the
Tcheremiss, the Tchuvash, and of whom several suffered them-
selves to be tatarized. The Russian Turks have not, like the
Arabs in Spain, created a rich and industrious civilization ; far
from devoting themselves to a sedentary agricultural life, they
in part remained nomads. Their cities were not numerous, and
the largest were small in comparison with the Moorish capitals in
Andalusia. With a territory three or four times as extensive, it
is doubtful whether the Golden-Horde ever came up in numbers to
the Khalifat of Cordova. An analysis of the two languages
suggests similar conclusions. The mark left by Arabic on the
Spanish language is incomparably deeper than that imprinted
by the Turkish or Tatar language on Russian.

Have the Moslem Tatars contributed more towards the forma-
tion of the Russian people because, instead of expelling the Ma-
hometans, as did Catholic Castile, Orthodox Moscovia left them
th«ir reUgion and their newly adopted country ? The contrary
appears more probable. In Russia as in Spain the reasons for
separation between victors and vanquished remained the same
during the rule of the Cross as during its subjection, and they all

82 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

centred in one thing— religion, which raised between the two
races an insuperable barrier. From the one to the other, before
as well as after the national deliverance, there was but one road
— apostasy. If preaching and self-interest made many converts
amidst the Mussulmans in Russia, especially amidst the Murzas
or Tatar chieftains, a great many more must have taken place
amidst the Mussulmans in Spain, subjected as they had been
through many long years to the most unscrupulous proselytism,
till the day came when they could keep their faith only at the
cost of wealth and country. In Russia no such alternative was
ever placed before the Mussulmans. The Tsars never had need to
resort to such barbarities in order to decrease in their states the
power of the Tatar element. What was done violently in Spain,
to her eternal damage, did itself, slowly, gradually, in Russia.
All that she had to do was to leave things to take pretty well theii
own natural course.

Simultaneously with the process of absorption, assimilation of
the Finnic elements, another, inverse process has been going on
in Russia, — that of secretion, elimination of the Tatar and Moslem
elements which she could not assimilate. After their submis-
sion numbers of Tatars left Russia, not wishing to remain as
subjects of the infidels, whose masters they had been. Before the
advance of the Christian arms, they spontaneously recoiled back
to the lands where the law of the Prophet still held sway. After
the destruction of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, they
inclined to concentrate in Crimea and the neighboring steppes
which, as late as the eighteenth century, went by the name of
Little Tartary. After the conquest of Crimea by Catherine II.
they resimied their exodus towards the empire of their Turkish
brethren, and even in o'lr days, after the war of Sebast6pol and
the submission of the Caucasus, the emigration of Tatars and
Nogay has begun again on an immense scale, at the same time
as that of the Tcherkess (Circassians), so that they do not at the
present day amount to one fifth of their numbers at the time of

RACES AND NATIONALITY, 83

the annexation to Russia. From i860 to 1863, ^igt^ 011 200,000
Tatars have gone fprth from the government of Tauris (Crimea),
leaving behind 784 aouls or villages, of which three quarters
remained desert like the despoblados left by the expulsion of the
Moors on the map of Spain. Since the introduction of obligatory-
military service, in 1874, this sort of exodus has begun again.
Thus it is that defeat and self-banishment, apart from absorption
and commingling, have reduced the Tatars to small groups — harm-
less islets in the countries v?here they have been rulers for cen-
turies, in such even, like Crimea, of which, some hundred years
ago, they were the sole inhabitants.

Recent examples show us the natural and spontaneous decrease
of the Tatar and Mahometan elements in Russia ; that of Euro-
pean Turkey, where, up to the emancipation of the Danubian
principalities, the Mussulmans made up only one third or one
fourth of the population, from which we see that even at the time
of their sovereignty the Tatars were numerically a minority in
their own empire. The route followed by these invaders and the
actual position of the Tatars along the rivers, in lands occupied
by Finns, lead us to think that they formed a majority only
just around their capitals, on the Volga and in such other coun-
tries hke Crimea and the steppes of the southeast as seem mean.
by nature for pastoral life. The figures to which the armies of the
khans mounted up must not mislead us as to the nimiber of their
subjects. In these armies, every healthy man hastened to
enlist ; lacking fanaticism or patriotism, the bait of booty was
suflScient to keep men from deserting in the course of these expe-
ditions, of which the main object was plunder. A Crimean khan
could call together 100,000 warriors without having a million of
subjects. The Tatars scarcely ever got to the centre of Russia
except with armed hand, and never settled there. Thus Mos-
covia was and remained towards them, from the point of view of
population, in a condition similar to that in which Serbia, Hun-
gary, Rumania, and Greece stood towards the Turks, who in all

84 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

these countries had but few colonies. Rarely have there been
two situations so identical as that of the Russians under the
Tatar yoke and that of the South Slavs under the Turkish yoke.
In both cases the same races face each other, in both the same
religions, so that we have before us the same actors in the same
parts though under diflferent names, with nothing changed but
the stage. With all these analogies the Russian has had a great
advantage over the Bulgar or the Serb, He was vassal and
tributary, but never direct subject. Therefore it may well be
doubted whether there was any mixture of the two races on the
banks of the Volga any more than on those of the Danube. If
there was some, through intermarriage, through slavery, rapes,
and polygamy, a few perhaps through conversions, sincere or
forced, it was perhaps rather at the cost of the Slavs, for through
all these channels Christian blood was introduced into the Mos-
lem's veins far more easily than Moslem blood into the veins of
the Christian.

It has frequently been remarked how rare, how abnormal con-
versions of Mahometans to Christianity have at all times been ;
the opposite phenomenon has attracted less attention : how much
more frequent has been the passage from the doctrine of Christ to
taat of Mahomet. All Western Asia, all Northern Africa, Egypt,
and Barbary but too loudly bear witness to the fact. Even in
Europe, the extremities of which have alone been touched by
Islamism, the Begs of Bosnia, the " true believers" of Albania,
the Pomaks of Mahometan Bulgars, the Mussulmans of Candia
and Crimea, of Greek or Goth origin, are descended from apostate
Christians, while it would be difficult to quote a Mahometan peo-
ple, nay a single tribe, ever having embraced the Christian faith.
The reason does not lie merely in the fact that Islam seems
adapted to certain races and certain modes of life, but also in the
reciprocal position, in the dogma, and, it may be said, in the
respective ages of the two religions. Islam is a more recent
doctrine than Christianity, and, in a great measure, aimed directly

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 85

against the latter. It is, from the standpoint of dogma, a simpler
faith, at least apparently, — more strictly monotheistic freer from
any kind of anthropomorphism.

The Mussulman emigrates or dies out where the Christian
rules, but does not become a convert, so that the mixing of the
two races hardly can take place in any way but exchange of one
&ith for the other. It is certain that, in Russia, the force of
example and self-interest, — ^proselytism, private or official, have, in
the last three or four hundred years, effected many a conquest
amidst the Tatars in favor of Christianity.* Several of the
greatest Russian families come from this source, and, when bap-
tized, the neophytes exchanged the title of a Tatar Murza for
that of a Russian Kniaz %• but such apostasies, even when accom-

* About one-eleventh part (40,000 out of 450,000) of the Tatars residing
in the government of Kazdn were baptized by the Russian authorities in
the eighteenth century. They still are Christian in name ; but, their baptism
notwithstanding, they are not yet russified : they retain their language,
their own peculiar customs, generally even their faith in the Koran. (See
vol. iii., book iii., ch. iii.)

* The thoroughly national title kniaz (the k to be well sounded), is that
■which is uniformly rendered in all other European languages by " prince."
Nothing could be more misleading, for the word " prince " represents
something that does not exist in Russia, at least not in the form familiar to
Other nations, those that have passed through the feudal system, which we
have been spared. The title ought to be retained in its Russian form. A
slightly parallel case is that of the Anglo-Saxon "jarl," now " earl," which
is inadequately rendered in other languages by the lyatin " count " {comes)
and the German " Graf." But more of this in its proper place. — As to the
families of Tatar origin, they are quite numerous in the higher nobility,
and the women especially show it in their hair, which is dark, very long
and silky, without a wave or ripple, and sometimes in the color of their
skin, which is of a warm creamy tinge, not unfrequently leaning markedly
to yellow and, unlike the dead olive complexions of so many Spanish
women, capable of vivid bloom and quick blush. The names of such
families often betray their origin. Thus "Bahmetief" (aspirate the h
strongly) is corrupted from "Mehmet." The coats-of-arms improvised for
the new Russian nobles also show transparent devices, — none prettier than
that of a kinsman of the last Khan of Kazan, who, having adopted Chris-
tianity, was given a wife from among the noblest maidens, with large landed
possessions : the family 'scutcheon bears across the lo^er field a gold
crescent on argent ground — symbol of the ancestral faith, — while the upper

86 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

plished wholesale, have been relatively rare occurrences. They
took place amidst populations in great part already mixed
with new Christian masters or old Finn subjects. Outside of
Russia, nay, in their very cradles, the Tatars must have under-
gone a certain amount of crossing with Caucasian races, — first in
Turkestan, where from times immemorial Eranians have dwelt
in great numbers ; then along the highroads of invasion, especially
in the Caucasus, where the community of religion facilitated
alliances which the beauty of the Tcherkess women made desira-
ble in the eyes of the Turks of the Volga as well as those of the
Turks of the Bosporus.

If then a noticeable strain of Tatar blood has very gradually
filtered into the veins of the Russian people, it possibly came less
fi-om the hordes of Batu and the invaders of the thirteenth cen-
tury than fi-om the kindred tribes who, for thousands of years,
have dwelt or roamed in the south of Russia, from the Sc5rthians
of old to the Khazars, the Petchen^g, the P61ovtsi of the Middle
Ages. Under the vague designations of "Scythians," the
ancients used to mix up populations between whom there was no
ethnical relationship whatever. It appears that amongst these
Scythians there were some Aryan ones ; but the majority of them
seem to have been derived from a Finno-Turkish stock. That
such was the case is more certain still concerning the Khazars,
the Kumans, and other nomads who, up to the great invasion,
wrangled for the possession of the south of Russia. These now
extinct peoples were for a long time the only denizens of this
immense territory, of which the Greeks and Italicans knew only

field is divided in two compartments, one of which has a crooked scimitar
on gules ground — a reminder of the founder's bravery in battle, — and the
other a star on azure ground, in poetical allusion to the lady. It may be
mentioned here that, however correct our author's remarks are concerning
the frequency of Christian apostasy, they do not apply to the Russian Slavs,
who have never been known to forsake orthodox Christianity for any other
religion. The only exception is the adoption of the Jewish religion by a
very few ignorant fanatics, under very peculiar circumstances, — an exceed-
ingly curious phenomenon, of which more hereafter.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 8/

the coastland. Must we infer from this that they were the
ancestors of the thinly scattered population of these even yet half
desert plains? The territory of all these barbarians, was the
"woodless zone," the steppe-zone, where the population is still
either very much scattered or very recent. In order to open
these plains to culture, the nomads had first to be driven off.
The Scythians and all their Turko-Finn kindred were pastoral
nomads, who, with their wagons and flocks, led in the steppes,
this side of the Volga and the Don, the life that their brethren,
the Kirghiz, even now lead on the other side of these rivers. All
these peoples, so much dreaded by the West, and so soon van-
ished from the ken of history, were as insignificant in numbers as
the Asiatic tribes of the same race, who maintain, to this day, the
same kind of existence. One famine, one epidemic, one battle,
suflSced for their annihilation. They destroyed one another,
leaving of themselves no other vestiges but their names. It is
in the southern half of Russia that we must seek for traces of the
Scythian or Tatar element, and it is from the west and north, from
the wooded regions, that the present inhabitants of Southern Russia
have emerged gradually, we might almost say under our eyes.

Great has been the influence of the Tatars, but more histori-
cally than ethnologically ; it had to do with the conquest more
than with the fusion of the races. However, while confuting a
popular prejudice, we should not rush into the opposite excess ;
the Tatar's share in the formation of the Russian people has been
the smallest possible, but cannot be quite explained away. On
more than one point there has been some mingling of blood
between the Turk and Slav tribes whence Russians have sprung,
— on the banks of the Dniepr, when the rulers of Kief were
collecting the remnants of the Pblovtsi and the Petchen^g, — on
the same river, on the Don, on the Volga, amidst the Cosacks,
who, both in peace and war, frequently entertained close relations
with their Moslem neighbors and foes. However that may be,
the ethnical influence of the Tatars, even in the south, always

88 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

remained far behind that of the Finns in the north, all the more
that the Tatars themselves were frequently crossed with Finns.

Crimea and the region which, as late as the last century, went
by the name of I^ittle Tartary, is, after all, perhaps the country
where it is easiest to study the manners and character of the
Tatars. Scarcely a hundred years ago they were the masters
and almost the only occupants of this region. In consequence
of repeated emigrations, they are, this day, two or three times
inferior in numbers to the Russian or foreign colonists who have
taken their place ; in certain portions of the peninsula, however,
you still feel that they are at home. On the steppe-land which
occupies the centre and north, rebellious against culture, they
continue to lead their nomadic life. In the fertile regions, they
still own towns, of which they are themselves the chief and almost
only population, as for instance Karasu-Bazar, or Bakhtchi-Saray,
the old capital of the Crimean khans. There, in a cool and narrow
valley, around the verdant gardens and the marble fountain-basins
of the palace of the Ghir^y, lives a Moslem community more
purely oriental than those of the cities of European Turkey or of
the littoral of Asia Minor. There the Mahometan law holds its
sway in all its rigor, and were it not for the loneliness of the
palace halls, with hangings and furniture all untouched, as they
were under the last of the khans, nothing would recall the fall of
the Tatar's might.

The Turks of Bakhtchi-Saray and KarasA-Bazar are traders
and farmers. So are those of the Volga. Having come to a land
of bountiful soil, they abandoned their nomadic mode of life and
became craftsmen or traders in the cities, tillers of the soil in the
country. At Kaz^, once the capital of the most powerful of
the three khanates which sprang from the dismemberment of the
Golden Horde, the Tatars inhabit a suburb (jslobodd,)* of their own,

• The word slobodd means " a free place," probably because suburban
life may have been free from much of the restraint imposed on those that dwelt
in the city proper; also the suburb may have enjoyed some local franchises.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 89

situated at the foot of their former capital, far removed from the
Kremlin, taken from them by the Orthodox Tsars. Their suburb
looks clean, quiet, and prosperous. They have their mosques and
schools,* with their mollahs elected by the community and acting
as arbiters and judges, according to Moslem custom.

At Kaz^n, as well as in Crimea, the Tatars have preserved the
specialty of certain oriental industries, such as the manufacturing
of articles in leather and morocco : boots, slippers (babushes),
saddles, sheaths for swords and daggers, etc. Many of them still
boast the muscular strength which is proverbially attributed to
the Turks, and the porters at the great Nijni fair are almost all
Tatars. The high walks of commerce are not closed against them,
and at Kaz^n more than one of their merchants have achieved a
considerable fortune. And although there are many differences
among them, as well physical as moral, they are, on the whole,
saving and painstaking, and noted for domestic morality and the
harmony prevailing in their families. In all these qualities, the
Turks of Russia are in no wise inferior to those of the Ottoman
Empire, whose virtues in private life are unanimously extolled by
travellers. For certain pursuits the Tatars are often preferred by
the Russians themselves. Being noted for cleanliness, probity,
sobriety, they are sought for in several crafts, and have made a
sort of monopoly of certain employments, especially such as require
most honesty and trustworthiness. The great Russian families,
who own villas on the south coast of Crimea, are not afraid of
taking into their homes Tatar servants, and in the restaurants
of Petersburgh it is quite "the thing" for the waiters to be
Tatars from the government of Riazan, so that the unsuspecting

* In these, as in all moslem schools, the ground work of instruction is
Arabic, the language of the Koran, which is frequently recited without
being understood. This barbarous method is a great obstacle to the intellect-
ual growth of the Tatars. Therefore the government is making praise-
worthy efforts to introduce among them instruction in the Tatar language,
in expectation of the time when it will be possible to get them to use the
Russian language.

90 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

foreigner who orders his dinner from a French menu, is waited
on, in perfect ignorance of the fact, by descendants of Djinghiz or
Bath's rider-warriors.

The qualities of the Tatars come in part from their religion,
which enjoins temperance as an absolute duty ; their faults, the
causes that hamper their progress, come from the same source.
The race's only apparent inferiority consists in a lack of origi-
naUty. Their ancient cities have perished. In order to find
monuments of their domination, we must go as far as Turkestan,
Samarkand, and there we find buildings entirely in Persian style
and taste. In Russia nothing is so rare as constructions from the
time of the khans. In Crimea, besides the palace of Bakhtchi-Saray,
of late date and poor merit, nothing is left but a few mosques, of
which the handsomest do not amount to much. Kazan boasts a
grotesque brick pyramid in four tiers, held in great veneration
by the Tatars, but probably built after the Russian conquest.
It is in a city destroyed by the Tatars themselves at the time of
Tamerlan's invasion, in Bolgdrj', near the left bank of the Volga,
that the most interesting Oriental ruins of all Russia are to be
seen — two constructions with cupolas, which will soon have
crumbled to pieces, and whose graceful Arabic architecture, seen
from afar, recalls the beautiful tombs around Cairo. The Turks
of the Volga, like those of Central Asia, and the Ottomans of the
Bosporus, show in everything they do, in architecture as well as
in poetry, imitation of the Arabic or Persian genius. Such a
lack of originality makes their entire culture dependent on foreign
contact, and the civilization which they have received from their
Mussulman neighbors, their religion forbids them to improve on,
except with the loss of their independence.

On due reflection, it will appear that the main vice of Islam,
the main cause of its political inferiority, lies neither in its dogma,
nor even in its morals ; it lies in the confusion of things spiritual
and temporal, of the religious and civil law. The Koran being
both Bible and Code, the Prophet's word standing for law, the

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 9I

laws and customs are once for all consecrated by religion." This
one fact is suflScient to keep the entire Moslem civilization at a
standstill. Indefinite progress, which constitutes the very essence
of Christian civilization, is to them an impossibility ; whatever
the seeming rapidity of its development, society, as a whole, is,
with them, in reality and of necessity, immovable. This inferi-
ority of Islam, however, is more felt in public than in private life ;
it aflfects nations rather than individuals, for, when subjected to
foreign influences, Mussulmans can accept ideas and customs
which could not have originated in their midst. The Mahometans
may experience the same thing that happened to the Jews, no
less handicapped by their religious law, in the midst of Christian
society : had the Jews ever ceased to form a compact nation, they
could not, without great effort, have risen to a civilization more
complete than that of the Moslem nations. For these, as for the
Jews, Christian domination may prove beneficial in the end, since
from political subjection can spring moral emancipation. Thus
it is that, wherever the Russian Tatars form a minority, and have
been most affected by alien influences, they have done away with
the external sign of Islam : the veil and seclusion of women.
While yet in strictest use at Bakhtchi-Saray, in the centre of
Crimea, the veil has been doffed by the Moslem women of the
south coast. The same influences are driving out polygamy, as
they put an end to slavery. The Tatars, broken up into small
groups scattered over Russia, are inclined to pass through the
same phases as the Jews, who, while retaining their worship,
gradually fall into our modes of life. Islam would probably
not oppose a greater obstacle to their entrance into our
civilization, than Judaism to that of the Israelites, hampered by

* Yet, must not those who do not dissever religion from practical life, but
try to think and act up to the teachings of what they have accepted as the
"Sacred Word," possess a real moral superiority over those who would
laugh to scorn the notion of introducing what they themselves proclaim as
the standard of absolute goodness and uprightness into, say, their business
dealings ?

92 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

far narrower ritualistic prescriptions. Without amalgamating
with the bulk of the population, the Mussulmans who stayed in
Russia will for a longer or lesser space of time, preserve their
language and customs and form a peaceable, industrious class,
who will play a part very much like that now filled by the Jews
and Armenians, with this difference — that, dwelling in the coimtry
as well as in the cities, practising agriculture as well as trade,
their agglomeration in the eastern provinces can never give rise
to the same economical disasters which are caused, in the west,
by the agglomeration of the Jews, who are almost exclusively
devoted to city life and trade.* *

From the political point of view, the Tatars of European
Russia even now are scarcely more troublesome to the government
than its Russian or Finn subjects. This was seen during the
Crimean war : although they made at the time a full half of the
population, they rendered hardly any service at all to the invaders,

* The polonized Tatars, who, residing in Lithuania, lost their language
centuries ago, yet preserved their religion, and who are mostly tanners and
traders, afford a glimpse of what their brethren of the Volga may become
one day, when they are russified.

* It is a fact which cannot be sufficiently emphasized, in view of the
senseless accusations oi religious animosity continually thrown in our faces,
that there is not and never was the slightest ill-feeling on the part of
the Russian people towards any of the numerous aliens who live side by
side with them as fellow-subjects — with the single exception of the Jews,
meaning of course not the educated Jews, the "gentlemen," who practise
various liberal professions, who have crafts, commercial and industrial
positions, or those who, in Russia as everywhere else, rule the financial and
high business world, but those wretched, squalid millions which, granting
it is their misfortune and not their fault, still certainly are a terrible evil ;
and the animosity of the lower classes — exasperated because of the close
companionship forced on them, from which they have no possible escape —
has nothing whatever to do with either religion or race. Naturally benig-
nant and tolerant, the Russians know not of such feelings. Beyond good-
natured banter, expressed in some long-standing nicknames, proverbial saws,
their race feeling does not go ; only they do not intermarry, a few may
not like to eat at the same board with their alien fellow-subjects. This
latter, however, is the case with many religious sects composed of none
but thorough-going Russians.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 93

in whose ranks were their brethren of the Bosporus. The Bul-
garian war, the fall of Khiva, and the submission of the other
khanates of Turkestan robbed them of their last illusions. Divided,
even more than the Finns, into minute scattered groups, locked
in on all sides by Russians, the Russian Turks are no longer a
people ; religion has, for them, necessarily stepped into the place
of nationality, and repeated emigrations rid them of their fanatics.
Everywhere in Emrope, in the very places where they ruled
longest, the Tatars incline to become a minority and this dispro-
portion will go on increasing as the colonization of the Russian
Bast progresses. In Europe, including the inhabitants of Northern
Caucasus, Russia numbers only 3,200,000 Mahometan subjects.
Setting aside the Caucasus, both slopes of which are comprised
in the same political circumscription, the number of the Mussul-
mans sinks to 2,500,000 and from this figure we must, if we wish
to deal with genuine Tatars, descendants of the invaders of the
Golden Horde, deduct the Bashkirs and the tatarized tribes in
which Finnic blood is predominant. Not quite 1,200,000 is all
that remains of that Turk or Tatar race which so long ruled
Russia and terrified Europe. In Russian Asia, their kindred by
blood and brethren in religion are, in the first place, the Klirghiz,
the most extensive of all the Turkish branches ; in Turkestan,
the Turkmen or Turcomans, and the Uzbegs ; in the Caucasus,
the Tatars (Sunnites or Shiites) from the banks of the Kura and
the Araxus, the Kumuhs and a few other small tribes ; lastly, in
Siberia, some few Mahometans with more or less claim to the
name of Tatars, with sundry tribes, now Christian and three
quarters russified.* In Europe the Mussulmans exceed a half
of the population only in one government, that of Ufa, and that
only, thanks to the Bashkirs, in a half Asiatic region which is

* We do not cotint here the Tunguz, nor the Mandshu, nor even the
Yakut, who are ranked amongst the peoples of Turkish stock, but who
are separated from the Tatar group proper by distance and religion.

94 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

just being colonized. In those of the other provinces where they
are most numerous — in the Governments of Kaz^n, Orenburg,
Astrakhan, the Mahometans do not number even one third of the
entire population. Even along the Lower Volga, the majority
has passed over to the Christians.

BOOK II. CHAPTER IV.

The Slavic Element and Russian Nationality — Slavs and Panslavism — Slavs
and Letto-Litliuanians — Formation of the Russian People : Its Different
Tribes — Differences between them, of Origin and Character — Great-
Russians ( Velikorhss) — White-Russians {Bieloriiss) — Little-Russians
{Malordss) — Ukrai'nophilism.

Above the Finns and Tatars, whose ethnological part in the

making of Russia has been very unequal, comes the race which has

subjugated or absorbed all the others, the race whose name sounds

proudly to every Russian ear — the Slav race. On the place

belonging to the Slavs and their kith and kin there is no possible

doubt. lyike the Celts, the I<atins, the Teutons, they are part

of the great Aryan race to which the sovereignty over the world

seems to have fallen. To this common origin their physical type

bears witness ; so do their language and primeval traditions. I^ike

Greek, Latin, and German, the Slavic languages are, sooth to say,

but dialects of that Indo-European speech, of which Sanskrit is

the oldest known form. The Slavic legends and tales, like the

German ones, complete the data from which sprang the myths of

India and Greece.* The Slavs are no more Asiatic than we are,

or, if they are, it is only in the manner and degree that we are

ourselves. Their establishment in Europe dates back beyond all

historic times. It is not known whether the Teutons or they

were the first to leave Asia ; at all events there can have been but

a short interval between the two migrations. Between the great

* We have at present a great number of collections of Slavic tales from
all the Slav countries. For Russia, must be quoted first of all Afandssiefs
Collection : Narddnyia Riisskiya SkAzki (Popular Russian Tales) ; then
come those of Khudiakdf, Erlenwein, Tchudinsky, etc. For Little -Russia,
those of Rudch^nko and K^lish.

96 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Aryan tribes who have divided Europe amongst themselves, it is
difficult to decide the question as to degree of consanguinity.
The philologplsts insist on a closer tie between the Slavs and the
Teutons ; but if the Slavs, as to language, seem to stand somewhat
nearer to their Teutonic neighbors, they lean more, in character,
towards the Europeans of the West and South. From the remotest
times we find them settled in Europe, on the Visla and the Dniepr.
Through the obscurities of primeval history it is difficult to
make out the original type of these Slav tribes. Classical an-
tiquity confounds all alien peoples, whether Celts, Teutons, or
Slavs, under the sweeping designation of "barbarians," paint-
ing them with the same colors, attributing to them the same
customs, from which it would appear that these tribes did not
then differ as much as they have done subsequently, and showed
more traces of their common origin. From these descriptions
(often just as applicable to the barbarians of neighboring races),
the ancient Slavs, whom we recognize under the names of the
Antes, Vends, Slovens, appear to have been of large, robust
build, with blue or gray eyes, hair yellow, chestnut, or auburn, —
all features frequently met with in the Russians.* Prehistoric

* It is perhaps at Petersburgh, in the Museum at the Hermitage, that
•we are to look for the portraits of the first Russian Slavs, on the admirable
jewels found in the tumuli of Crimea, at the gates of Panticapaeon (modem
Kertch), the ancient capital of the Cimmerian Bosporus. There, on golden
belt-buckles or silver cups and dishes, we have before us, after a lapse of
over twenty centuries, the live presentation of the Scythian horseman and
archer, in high boots, tight-fitting trousers, short tunic, recalling the Russian
shirt or blouse. Besides the Greek jewels from Kertch, as superior to those
from Pompeii, as Athenian art was to Roman art, similar figures ornament
less handsome jewels which were discovered in the tombs of the southern
steppes, and appear to be the handiwork of the Scythians themselves,
already suflBciently in love with Greek art to try and imitate it On all these
jewels occur types belonging to other races, some of them manifestly Aryan,
others showing a mixture of Finno-Turkish blood.'

' This, then would be the first historical instance of one of our race's
chief characteristics : its rare aptitude in appropriating every kind of learn-
ing, art, or craft, every trick of brain, or tongue, or hand, and its facile
ioutativeness. Most precious qualities these for a young race, the latest
Come among the makers of human culture, who had to master all that had
been done before it could produce original work of its own.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. gj

archj3eology seldom yields information more precise. As the
Germans, so the Aryans of the East appear to have greatly
changed in the course of the ages. Thus, for instance, the oldest
tombs of the Slavic countries, in the neighborhood of Cracow,
to name one place, have supplied skulls of elongated shape or
dolichocephalous — of the purest Aryan type. Many Slav peoples
of our day have lost this feature, so long regarded as characteristic
of the Indo-European race, or have it in a degree inferior to most
I^atin or Teutonic peoples. Therefore, in the ethnological classi-
fications founded solely on the shape of the skull, they have some-
times been placed side by side with the Finns amongst the
brachycephalians or shortheads, while their Aryan brethren were,
together with the Semites, classed with the longheads. However
imperfect such a classification may be, it has the advantage of
showing that, even if crossed with Finns, the Russians are not
removed as far from the other Slavs as is often fancied.*

It is no easy task to depict the intellectual qualities of this
race, which strives for the sovereignty of the world with the
Latins and Teutons. It needs a long career of civiUzation to
bring out the genius of races and nations in literature, in art, in
political institutions. Most Slavs are too young, too new to
independent life and to European culture, for their national
individuaUty to have come out in as strong relief as that of their
rivals. They were long despised by the nations of the West, who,
out of their name (as ikey pronounced it), Schiavoni, Esdavons,
made the word schiavo, esdave, — slave ; scorned to this day by
their German neighbors, who persist in seeing in them mere
"ethnological material" {ethnologischer Stoff) ; yet they owed

* It is notorious that, in our modem races, all produced by mixture, too
much importance has been given this trait, and that, on the showing of the
latest researches, many Germans, especially of South Germany, are, as well
as numbers of French, shortheads. It would be of greater importance,
should it turn out, as some scientists assert, that the Slavs had a smaller
head and a brain less voluminous than the Western Europeans. But even
should the fact be proved, it would be sufficiently accounted for by the
relative antiquity of culture in Western Europe.

98 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

their inferiority probably only to their geographical position.
Standing, as they did, in the East, so to speak at the entrance of
Europe, in the most massive part of the continent and the most
exposed to invasions from Asia, they were naturally the last to
become civilized and the least deeply aflfected by civilization.
Feeling themselves unqualified to lay claim to the culture of
modem Europe, some Slavs have claimed that of the ancient
world. Certain Serb and Bulgar writers have taken it into their
heads to demand as their rightful patrimony the greater part of
Greek civilization, from Thracian Orpheus to Macedonian Alex-
ander. Such vindications, based on popular Bulgarian songs of
doubtful authenticity, unfortunately rest more on patriotism than
on science.*

Having been and remained almost total strangers to the dis-
cipline of Rome and Greece, the Slavs, by their situation, by their
lang^iage and religfion, have stood more or less aloof from the
chief intellectual centres of modem Europe, nor could they have
taken the same share in her work as did the two other great
European families. It is no use denying it ; as the ancient civili-
zation, so the modem, which they are enjoying themselves and of
which, in the East, they have made themselves the apostles, was
accomplished nearly without their help. Neither the Russians
nor the Southern Slavs have contributed one stone to the build-
ing, and it could easily have dispensed with the assistance of the
Western Slavs likewise— those of Poland and Bohemia. Had
there been no Slavs at all, — had Europe ended at the foot of the
Carinthian Alps and the Boehmerwald, her civilization would
not have been less complete, while it could not have been robbed,
without mutilation, of the share borne in the work by either of
the great Latin or Teuton nations. Relegated to the uttermost

* This system has been more particularly formulated by Mr. Verkovitch
in a collection entitled The Slavic Veda ( Veda Slavena, Belgrad, 1874), a
work which the more competent Slavists regard as a mystification. See on
this subject 1,. L^ger, Nouvelles Etudes Slaves (New Slavic Studies J, Paris,
1880.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 99

end of Christendom, the Slavs hardly cotild serve it in any way
but with their arms, guarding its boundaries, from the Save and
Danube to the Dniepr and Volga, against invasion from Asia.'

Is the race deficient in genius ? Assuredly not. It is a note-
worthy fact that it was Slavs who opened the way to the West in
the two great movements which inaugurated the modem era — in
the Renaissance and the Reformation, in the discovery of the laws
that rule the universe, and in the vindication of freedom for human
thought. The Pole Kopernik was the forerunner of Galileo, the
Tchekh John Huss that of I^uther. These are great titles to glory
for the Slavs, — so great that they are contested by the Germans.
For, as ill luck would have it, a rival race, after settling down in the
land of their great men, managed to deny them even their names.
If we take into consideration the secular encroachments of Ger-
many, and the fact that the bulk of the population is Slav in
Saxony and Eastern Prussia, the Slavs, very likely, would have
more right to claim as theirs many of the great names of which
Germany brags. In the wake of Kopernik and Huss, the two
Slav peoples most closely connected with the West through
religion and vicinity, Poland and Bohemia {Tchekhid) could
read oiGf a long roll of men distinguished in letters, sciences,
politics, and war. And among the Southern Slavs {Yugoslavs)
a small republic like Ragusa could, alone, furnish an entire
gallery of men gifted in all lines.* Where remoteness from the
West and foreign oppression made study impossible and prevented
individual proper names from coming up, the people has mani-

■^ This is not, after all, such a very trifling service — to guard the door of
the chamber of knowledge and with one's life blood secure to the workers
within the necessary leisure and safety, — and in this sense at least it is
probable that European civilization could not have dispensed with the
assistance of the Slavs.

* On these various Slav tribes, The Slavic World (Le Monde Slave)
and the Slavic Studies (Etudes Slaves) by Mr. Louis L^ger may be profit-
ably consulted. Mr. L^ger has done most of all Frenchmen since Cyprien
Robert, to give us a knowledge of peoples who, by their struggle against
Germanism, are of particular interest to France.

lOO THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

fested its genius in such minstrelsy as has nothing to envy in the
finest poetry of the West. In that kind of popular, impersonal
poetry which we so greatly admire in the romanceros of Spain, the
ballads of Scotland or the songs {chansons) of France, the Slav,
far from yielding the prize to the Latins or Teutons, possibly
surpasses both. There is nothing more truly poetical than the
piSsnte ("lays ") of Serbia, and the diimy (" reveries ") of Little-
Russia ; for, by way of natural compensation, it is among the
Slavs least initiated into Western culture that popular poetry has
blossomed out most freely.'

What will these new-comers bring to West-European culture ?
In poetry, in the novel, they already have struck some new notes ;
what will they contribute to scientific research, philosophical
conceptions, religious and political ? This, for Western civiliza-
tion, is a momentous question. May be the Slavs have come in
too late to create for themselves a Pantheon or Walhalla as
gloriously filled as those of the Latins and Teutons. May be, in
literature and art generally, the heroic age, the age of the sub-
lime, has passed away ; may be even in science, the great laws
easily accessible to the human mind have all been discovered,
and mankind is reduced, for a long period, to their application and
to inventions of details. The Slavs, especially the Russians, are
endowed with ambition, intellectual no less than material. With
the recklessness of the youth who, ere he has learned all his
masters can teach him, already dreams of distancing them in the
race, they look on the old peoples of the West with a scorn that
should be forgiven their youthful presumption. They flatter
themselves they will solve the problems which the West boot-
lessly agitates ; they think they own the secret of the social
and political regeneration of Europe and the Christian world.*

' Is not this a sign that " Western culture " had better be dispensed
with, or rather — not to be sweeping and misleading — that it should not be
forced in its entirety on a race which, as a whole, it does not fit and whose
individuality it smothers whenever it is given its own way.

* Naturally, the future being theirs. It is easy to see that the predomi-

RACES AND NATIONALITY. lOI

l*he future will judge. Meantime, let them widen and renew
morally the Western civilization, which they are appropriating and
extending territorially. After having been so long merely the
warders of its frontier, they carry it forward. From being the
rear-guard of Europe, they have become her vanguard in the
conquest of Asia and the East.

By temperament and character the Slavs present an assort-
ment of defects and qualities which places them nearer to the
I^atins and Celts than to their neighbors, the Germans. In the
place of the Teutonic phlegm, they frequently exhibit, even under
the northernmost skies, a liveliness, quickness, warmth, at times
a mobility, petulance, exuberance, not to be found in the same
degree even among southern nations.* In the political life of

sating bent of their mind — especially that of their main tribe, the Russians
—lies towards the practical, the positive, that they will make the field of
scientific research pre-eminently their own. In chemistry and medicine
they are already avowedly in the van. In the arts, especially in music, it is
no longer a question of what they will do. But in philosophy and political
science they undoubtedly will have, in good time, some weighty words to
say, and such as will probably astonish their older sister nations not a little.
That they have no part or share in the great Ivatino-Teutonic civilization,
•which has never till lately had anything for them but ignorant contempt
and utter lack of comprehension — is most true, just what Mr. Danilefsky
so ably sets forth. (See p. 13.) Their mission will be to correct its faults,
to fill its gaps, to rejuvenate it by bringing plain-speaking and genuineness
to bear against the shams, catchwords, and cant phrases which are the
rotten props of many an empty shell, — the stage of decadence to which
every great civilization in the world has arrived after a long and glorious
course, when the exhaustion of age puts an end to self-renewal and renewal
has to come from outside. This renewal, in the sequence of ages and the
logic of history, it is the Slavs' turn to bring, and when the Slavic spirit
stands revealed and unfettered before the world in its solemn simplicity, its
earnestness, sincerity, and broad tolerance, such glaring fallacies as those
of the " Contrat Social'' in politics, and the elucubrations of Voltaire and
the Encyclopedists on religion and history, left to stand on their own mer-
its, will fall to pieces of themselves, and their practical applications with all
their dire train of consequences of course become impossible.

* There is, perhaps, no national character with so many sides to it as
the Slavic. By this — the emotional and mercurial — side it is nearly akin to
the Irish, especially the Southern or Little-Russians, with their love of
melody, beauty, and — idling. There is an intellectual counterpart to this

I02 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

thase Slavs whose blood is least mixed, this natural disposition
has produced a mercurial, mutable, anarchical spirit, a spirit of
incoherence, division, separatism, which has thrown great diflS-
culties in the way of their national existence, and which, to-
gether with their geographical position, has been the main
obstacle to the progress of their civilization. The distinctive
quality which pervades the entire race independently of the
various crosses of its several peoples, is a flexibility, an elasticity
of temperament and character, of the organs and the intellect,
which enable it to receive and reproduce any and all ideas or
forms. The gift of imitativeness characteristic of the Slavs has
often been spoken of. This gift extends to everything, to words
and thoughts alike ; it belongs to all ages, and both sexes. This
peculiar malleability, the property of both Russian and Pole, is at
bottom, possibly, only a result of the race's history, and, conse-
quently, of their geographical situation. Being the latest comers,
and for a long while inferior to the neighboring races, they have
always been going to school to somebody or other. Instead of
living on their own capital, they have lived on loans, until
imitativeness became their leading faculty, because the most use-
ful as well as the most constantly called into play.

too. Quick to seize, tenacious in retaining, and exceedingly prompt, in
common parlance, in "putting two and two together," our children guess
fully as much as they learn, and do not take kindly to the slow and ponder-
ously thorough educational methods so dear — and necessary — to the Ger-
mans. Thus Kindergarten instruction has to be considerably modified to
please and therefore benefit them, as a tot of five resents as an insult, for
instance, to be gravely shown "at school" an article in papifr mdcAS and
be told to learn that it represents the familiar rye-bread which he lustily
munches in natura three times a day with his milk. Our youth have brains
active to restlessness and vastly prefer to exercise them by " making things
out " themselves, rather than learn things as they are set down in books,
by a mere effort of memory. It is very possible that this trait lies at the
root of the almost universal predilection for experimental and inductive
science, and the very general disfavor into which historical branches have
fallen. This peculiar quickness and intellectual bent, with its advantages
and drawbacks, we have in common with the Americans, — nor is it, by far,
the only point of similarity and, therefore, mutoal sympathy and compre-
hension, between the two nations.

RACES AND NA TIONALJTY. IO3

This in no wise means that the Slavs differ too little from the
others to form distinct nationalities, each having its own separate
language, literature, traditions, a character or genius proper to
each. Far from it. History, geography, religion, the rule or
contact of aliens, have separated them but too well, making a
complete fusion impossible ; impossible, also, for consanguinity of
race and language to effect forgetfulness of their different nation-
alities. Panslavism would prove as impracticable as Panlatin-
ism. At bottom it really is nothing but a scarecrow invented by
the Germans to arouse the mistrust of the West against the small
nationalities engaged in a life-struggle against Germanism. The
" Slavic rivulets " have no inclination whatever to lose themselves
in ' ' the Russian ocean. ' ' Catholic or Orthodox, neither Tchekh
nor Croat, neither Serb nor Bulgar ever envied the fate of the Poles
on the Visla. What these little ' ' younger brothers ' ' expect
from Russia is not absorption into the domain of the Tsar, but
the shielding of their independence. That is known in St.
Petersburgh. It is also known that the empire incloses within
its boundaries peoples and nationalities enough as it is, —
enough not to want to increase their numbers any more. Even
in Moscow, the dreamers of Panslavism, with the exception
of a very few utopists, do not let their dreams carry them
farther than a sort of ' ' patronate " to be extended to the south-
em Slavs, a sort of Slavic hegemony ; and even this suzerainty
may encounter opposition from the most devoted of the kindred
peoples.

As far back as we can trace the past, we find the Slavs
divided into two principal groups, which historical influences were
to impel to fatal antagonism. In the east, towards the Dniepr,
were the eastern Slavs, from whom, along with the Russians, the
southern Slavs appear to have sprung : Bulgars, Serbs, Croats,
Slovens.' In the west, on the Visla and the Elb, are the west-

* The Bulgars were originally a Turanian tribe that lived on the Volga,
towards its lower course, and it is very likely that the river Ra took its

104 "^^^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

em Slavs : the Liakhs, Poles, Tchekhs, Slovacks, with others,
since destroyed or absorbed by the Germans ; a survival of these
still confronts us in the Vends of Saxon and Prussian Lausitz.
The geographical situation of each of these tribes determined
their history and made enemies out of the two chief ones. In
the west the western Slavs were met by the influence of Rome ;
in the east the eastern Slavs encountered that of Byzance ; hence
the antagonism which, for centuries, has kept the two greatest
Slavic nations in strife with each other. The bond of a common
origin and affinity of language was severed by that which most
binds men — religion, writing, calendar, — ^by the very elements of
civilization. Hence, between Russian and Pole, a firmly rooted
hostility, moral as well as material, — a struggle which, after all
but annihilating the one, cost the other its life, as though, from
the Karpathians to the Ural, on that immense, smooth and even
area, there were no room for two distinct states.

Between these two main branches of Slavs, south of the Baltic
Finns, there appears in the northwest, on the Ni^men and the
Dvina, a strange group, of incontestably Indo-European origin,
yet quite isolated amidst the peoples of Europe, linked on to the
Slavs, yet forming rather a parallel branch than a twig of the
Slavic branch : — this group is the I/Ctto-Iyithuanian.

Relegated in the north, shut in by marshy forests, pressed
upon closely by powerful neighbors, the I^ithuanian g^oup was
closed to any outer influences, be it from the East or West. Of
all the peoples of Europe, this was the last to accept Christianity,

modem name from them. They became considerably aryanized in the
course of time, and migrated southwards, and turned up in the Balkan
Peninsula — in Ancient Thracia — as a Slavic tribe. But after the Turkish
conquest, contact with their Turanian masters restored them in a great
measure to their original race-affinities, and now the most cursory glance
at a group of Bulgarian peasants shows that they have far more Turkish
than Slavic blood. Heavy and stolid in looks and mind, they are strikingly
unlike the other members of the family, of which, however, they are
admitted to be a branch. And the race bond alone would hardly be very
■trong but for their common Orthodox Christianity.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. I05

and to this day its languages are, of all European tongues, the
nearest to Sanskrit. No human family had so few migrations ;
none ever occupied so compact a territory, and none ever was so
cut and slashed into bits by conquests and by religions. Wedged
tight between more races stronger in numbers which gradually
drove them back, the Letto-I^ithuanians, at the present time, are
reduced to scarcely three million souls, speaking three languages :
Lithuanian, Samogit, and l^ett. They are divided between two
states, Russia and Germany, not to mention the whilom kingdom
of Poland, of which they occupy the northeast. Wrangled over
by three nations — the Germans, the Poles, the Russians, — who
by turns obtained a footing in their country, they accepted the
religions of all three, some becoming Protestants, some Catholics,
and some Orthodox. Their two principal groups, the Letts and
Lithuanians, have gone through experiences suflSciently opposed
to answer to all these contrasts.

The Lithuanian element, as the strongest in numbers, has for a
long time played a considerable part between Russia and Poland ;
indeed at one time, under the Yagellons, it was on the point of
seizing on the leadership of the entire Slavic world. After four
centuries of union with Poland, never, however, culminating in
fusion, — after being aggrandized at the expense of old . Russian
principalities, the country that had its name from the Lithuanians
was annexed to Russia at the time of the dismemberment of
Poland, and became, between these two countries, the permanent
object of an historical contest which was the chief obstacle to a
reconciliation. Mixed with the Poles and Russians, who both
threaten them with absorption, the Lithuanians and the Samogits,
their brethren by race and language, still number in old Lithu-
ania nigh on two million souls, mostly Catholics ; they constitute
a majority of the population in the Governments of Vilna and
Kovno. Hard by, in Prussia, a group of 200,000 Lithuanians
still subsists. They are the representatives of the ancient popu-
lation of Kast Prussia, — a country that has its name from a peo-

I06 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSAKS AND THE RUSSIANS,

pie of the same race (Bo-russians, Po-russians),' and preserved its
language up to the seventeenth centur>-. The second now living
group of this family, the Letts, possibly crossed with Finns,
amounts to quite a million souls. They form the majority in
Curland, and the southern half of Livonia. They were subju-
gated, made serfs of, and converted by the German Knights-
Sword-bearers, and became Protestants along with their German
lords. Like the Finn tribes who dwell out of Finland, the Letts
and Lithuanians, from their scant numbers and division into small
fragments, are incapable, by themselves, of forming a nation, a
state.

It is from the upper course of the Dniepr and the Dvina, near
the watershed which divides the waters between the Baltic, the
Caspian, and the Black Seas, that those Slavs went forth who were
to become the cement of the great race fated to rule within the
area bordered by the three seas. Slowly they advanced along the
rivers from west to east, radiating northward and southward ;
they pushed on into the very hearts of forests, driving before
them the Finn tribes, or cutting them asunder into isolated patches
to be absorbed at leisure by and by. Out of the mingling of the
two races, the ruder one being assimilated by the more cultivated
one, imder the twofold action of a common religion and common
surroimdings, tending to lead both to unity, sprang new people,
an homogeneous nation. For, contrary to certain prejudices,
there are in Russia not merely races more or less amalgamated, —
there is a nation, or what, in our days, goes by the designation
of " a nationality," as compact, as imited, as self-conscious as
any in the world. With all her various races, her '* allogens " or
aliens, Russia is by no means an incoherent mass, a sort of
political conglomerate or patchwork of peoples. It is not Turkey
or Austria, it is rather France she resembles as regards national
tinity. If Russia is to be compared to a mosaic, it should be to

' Bo-russi, probably a corruption of Po-russi, which would mean "(the
f^opXt) alongside of the Russians," i. e. their nearest neighbors.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 107

one of those antique pavements the ground of which is made out
of a single substance and a single color, the border alone showing
different pieces and colours. Most of these populations of alien
origin are relegated to the extremities, and form around Russia,
especially towards the east and west, a sort of belt, of uneven
width and density. The centre is entirely filled with a nationality
endowed with the twofold property of absorbing and expanding,
in the midst of which vanish a few meagre German colonies
or insignificant Finn or Tatar patches, devoid of cohesion or
national bond.

In the interior of this Russia, instead of dissimilarities and
contrasts, what strikes the traveller, is the uniformity of the
population and the monotony of their lives. This uniformity,
which civilization tends to spread everywhere, is found in Russia
in a higher degree than in any people of Europe. I^anguage,
from end to end of the empire, has fewer dialects and patois,
fewer fluctuations and gradings off of shadings, than most West-
em languages have on a far smaller area. The cities are all alike ;
so are the peasants, in looks, in habits, in mode of life. In no
country do people resemble one another more ; no other country
is so free from that provincial complexity, those oppositions in
type and character, which even yet we encounter in Italy and
Spain, in France and Germany. The nation is made in the like-
ness of the country : it shows the same unity, we might say the
same monotony, as the plains on which it dwells.

Yet there are in the nation, as in the soil, two principal types,
almost two peoples, speaking two dialects, different and most
clearly separate even in their mutual resemblance : they are the
' ' Great-Russians ' ' and the ' ' I^ittle-Russians. ' ' By their qualities
as by their defects they represent, in Russia, the everlasting con-
trast of North and South. History has done no less than nature
in this direction. The Great-Russians have their principal centre
in Moscow, the I^ittle-Russians in Kief. Stretching away, the
one to the northeast, the other to the southwest, these two uneven

108 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

halves of the Russian nation do not exactly correspond to the
great physical zones of Russia. The fault lies partly with nature
herself, partly with history, which hampered the development of
the one and favored that of the other. The steppes of the south,
open ever to invasion, have for a long time hindered the expansion
of the Little-Russian, or Maloross, who was, through centuries,
kept shut up in the basins of the Dniepr, the Bug, and the Dniestr;
while the Great-Russian, or Velikoruss, freely spreading to the
north and east, went on settling in the immense basin of the
Volga, and, after taking possession of nearly the whole of the
forest land, from west to east, from the great lakes to the Ural,
slowly turned southward, to the Black- Mould belt and the steppes,
along the Volga and the Don.

Between these two principal elements there is a third, less im-
portant one, to which history, as well as nature, has left a more
thankless part to play. It is the Bieloruss or White-Russian,
who dwells in the governments of Mohilef, Vitebsk, Grodno,
Minsk, a region owning some of the finest forests in Russia, but
the soil of which, all cut up by marshes, is meagre and unwhole-
some. More nearly connected with the Great-Russian by his
dialect, the Bieloruss has been brought nearer to the Little-
Russian by the vicissitudes of politics. The two tribes have often
been classed together under the name of Western-Russians.
Early subjected to the rule of Lithuania, whose dialect became
her official language, White-Russia, like the greater part of Little-
Russia, was joined to Poland, and remained, through centuries,
the stakes for which the Polish Commonwealth and the Moscovite
Tsars played a game from the eflFects of which she still bleeds.
Of the three Russian tribes, this is certainly the one whose blood
is purest ; nevertheless it has always been the poorest and least
advanced in civilization.

The White-Russians number about four million souls, the
Little-Russians seventeen to eighteen, the Great-Russians forty-
seven to forty-eight miUions, which means that these alone, by

RACES AND NATIONALITY. I09

themselves, amount to about half the entire population of the
European portion of the empire.

The Great-Russians constitute the most vigorous and expan-
sive element of the Russian nation ; but it is the most mixed.
The Finnic blood shows most in their features, the Tatar rule in
their character. Before the Romdnofs were raised to the throne,
this element, all alone, formed the empire of the Moscovite Tsars ;
also, they assumed the title of sovereigns "of all the Russias"
long before Alexis, the father of Peter the Great, began, by-
annexing Ukraina, to have some claim to the title. Hence the
Great-Russian has, under the name of Moscovite, been held
by sundry foreigners to be the true, the only Russian. The
name is a misnomer. The Great-Russian, the product of
the colonization of Central Russia by the Western - Russians
prior to the Tatar invasion, is anterior to the state and
even the city of Moscow. If out of it did emerge the Mos-
covite autocracy, still it is impossible to sever the bonds which
unite to it the great Slavic Commonwealth of the West, the
name of which has remained a symbol of activity and Hberty,
Nbvgorod the Great.

The least Slavic of all the peoples who claim the name, the
Great- Russian * has been the great colonizer of the Slavic race. His
enemies call him Turanian, Mongol, Asiatic ; but, in point of fact,
he, like the other Russians, had his starting-point in the West, —
i. e. in I^ittle-Russia, White-Russia, and N6vgorod. He marched
from Europe towards Asia. It is from the banks of the Dvina
and the Dniepr that he started on that gigantic Odyssey which
was, in the course of five or six centuries, to take him beyond the
Ural, beyond the Caspian and the Caucasus. We have a good

» Yet the peasantry of the central governments, bom tradesmen and
industrials, are considered to present an Indo-European type of a hand-
some and noble order, with eyes blue, gray, or hazel, hair dark blond or
light chestnut, and beard always a shade or two lighter, and uncommonly
white skins. The children are absolutely rosy wherever their bodies are
exposed to the air.

no THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

presentment of the Great-Russian's destiny and route in the river
whose downward course he followed, from source to mouth. The
Volga has traced out his itinerary for him ; like the Volga, he
flowed from Europe to Asia. When with Ivan III. and Ivan IV.,
and, later, with Peter the Great, he turned his face aggressively
towards the Baltic and the West, he merely went back to his
source, seeking for his European basis of yore. ' His entire history
has been one long struggle against Asia ; his conquests en-
larged Europe, every one. Though so long the vassal of the
Tatar khans, the Asiatic sway never made him forgetful of
his European origin, and in the farthest comer of Moscovia the
very name "Asiatic," "Asiat," is even still an insult in the
ear of the peasant.

Having won the victory over Asia, the Great-Russian
could not traverse the space of six centuries, nor the distance
fr-om the Dniepr to the Ural without adopting by the way
more than one trait, both moral and physical, of the popu-
lations assimilated or subjugated by him. These influences
have left him a something harsher, but also more robust, than
the gifts the other Slavs are endowed with. He has less
spirit of independence, less pride, less individuality ; but these
qualities are made up to him by greater patience, unity of views,
consistency. According to a remark made by Herzen, the Great-
Russian, if, in getting crossed with more ponderous races, he
has lost some of the lightness peculiar to pure Slavic blood,
has also lost some of the mercurial mobility which has become
fatal to other Slavic tribes. The extreme Slavic ductility has
been corrected by foreign alloy. In its fusion with the Tatar
copper or the Finnic lead, the Russian metal has gained more in

* It should be remembered that Ndvgorod was a member of the Hansa,
and that Anne, a daughter of Yaroslav the Great and granddaughter of
Vladimir of Kief, of Christian and epic memory, was wife of Henri I. King
of France, one of the first Capetians. These two facts imply a good deal
of mutual knowledge and congeniality, as well as pretty regular and
frequent intercourse.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. Ill

solidity than it has lost in purity. It is perhaps owing to this
cross that the Great-Russian has distanced all his rivals and
become the nucleus of the greatest empire in the world. The
triumph of such mixed blood in certain tribes over competitors
more free from mis-alliances, far from being an anomaly, is on the
contrary a phenomenon frequently recurring in history. These
peoples, sprung from various races, make up in vigor for what
they lack in delicacy. Thus Prussia in Germany, Piedmont in
Italy, have given to the two countries the unity they could not
derive from less mixed national elements and, in ancient times,
Macedon and Rome herself have yielded analogous examples.

For being crossed with Finn or Tatar blood, the Great-
Russians have not themselves become either Finns or Tatars ; for
not being of pure Indo-European race, they are not Turanians.
I^anguage and bringing up do not constitute their only claim to
the name of Slavs. The Russian of Great- Russia is not a Slav
merel}'- in the way that the French and Spaniards are lyatins — by
traditions and civilization, by adoption so to speak ; he is Slav by
direct filiation. A notable portion of the blood in his veins is
Slavic. The proportion is difl&cult, or rather impossible, to specify ;
it varies according to the regions, to the classes, which have long
ago formed themselves into more or less closed castes. It is
larger in the regions more anciently colonized, such as the banks
of rivers along which the Slavs formerly advanced. At times,
when journeying from the banks of rivers into the interior, we
pass from a type almost entirely Slavic to one almost entirely
Finnic until we come to barely russified Finns who, while losing
their language, have preserved their garb and customs. The por-
tion of Slavic blood in the mass of the nation is nevertheless very
considerable, if not predominant. The same arguments which
demonstrate a Finnic alloy in the Great-Russian also show us
that he is Slav at bottom.

Great- Russia was not subdued by the Slavs of Novgorod and
Kief in a few brief military expeditions. It was not a conquest,

112 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

a mere armed occupation, with no more important revulsion than
a change of dynasty or landlords ; it was a long, slow immigra-
tion, a sort of scarcely perceptible infiltration of the Slavic ele-
ment, that went on for centuries, almost escaping the notice of
contemporary annalists, and only guessed at by history, and that
not with sufl&cient precision to mark off the stages. There is
nothing to compare with this in the West. The colonization of
Great-Russia by the western Russians must have been some-
thing very like what is going on even now in the half-desert
provinces of the east and south. We cannot picture to ourselves
the forests of the north, in the Finnic period, being as densely
peopled as those of Gaul or even Germany, before the Roman
wars. The climate, soil, mode of life of these frequently still
half-nomadic populations are opposed to such an idea. The littie
resistance met by the Russian invasion also bears witness to the
small numbers of the natives. It is the same with the physical
and moral differences which we can note among the few Finns
still scattered on Russian soil. So great a diversity among mani-
festiy kindred tribes must have been anterior to the Slavic coloni-
zation and proves the dispersion and extreme parcelling of the
native tribes. It was easy for the Slavs to settle in the midst of
these scattered tribes, more than one of which probably owed
them its concentration into a comparatively compact group. Pos-
sibly even, the russification of the Finns did not proceed on a large
scale until these tribes, packed close by pressure from the new
arrivals, were closely encompassed on all sides by them.

It should not be forgotten, moreover, that mingling of blood
is not the only way in which two hostile races react upon one
another. Their mere coming into contact on the same soil, even
without armed strife, is frequentiy sufficient to cause the decrease
of one to the advantage of the other. This phenomenon so strik-
ingly illustrated in our time in America and Australia by what fol-
lowed on the coming of the Europeans, appears to have taken place
in Europe itself, in prehistoric times, when the primeval popula-

RACES AND NATIONALITY. II3

tions began to vanish before the Indo-European race. Is it not
probable that in Russia the Slavic, /. e. the Indo-European blood,
may have had the same advantage over Turanian blood that it had
in the other parts of Europe ? Although we have, unforttmately, no
statistical data on the subject, some observers assert that, at this
very day, the Finn population tends to diminish in numbers
wherever it is placed in direct contact with a Russian population,
and that too, independently of intermarriages, very rare between
Finns and Russians, independently of all mixture, from the mere
fact of vicinity. Could not the mysterious laws of the ' ' struggU
for life ' ' have acted in a more perceptible manner when, instead
of Russians already crossed with them, the Finns found them-
selves face to face with Slavs of purer blood ?

Tradition equally bears out the Great-Russian's claim to the
name of Slav. Indeed, language is not the only link that con-
nects him with the Slav family, and, through that, with the other
nations of Europe ; the chief link consists in his folk-lore ; popu-
lar stories and songs, chips of mythology and still living beliefs
and superstitions, — all documents that cannot be ignored when the
genealogy of a people is inquired into. A noticeable fact is that
it is in the north, in regions incontestably Finnic, on the shores of
Lake Onega for instance, that modem scholars have collected the
largest numbers of tales and ballads in prose or verse — skazkas and
bylinas,^" — although the farther the Russian Slav penetrated into
the northern forests, the more careful he was to take along with
him his family titles.*

JO The>' in this word, as in Aa/wj»/fe(Kalmuk) is an attempt to approximate
an untranscribable Slavic sound -which comes nearest to we ; so that bylina,
Kalmyk, would read something like bwelina, Kalmweek, with the w much
weakened. Bylina literally means "something that has been," while
skhzka, from skas&ti, "to tell," answers exactly to "tale" or the I^atin
equivalent, "legend."

* On this subject, which has given rise to so many controversies, see,
apart from Russian writers : Mr. Ralston, Russian Folk Tales, and Songs
of ihe Russian People ; M. A. Rambaud, La Russie Jkpique ; and M. A.
De Gubematis, in his Zoological Mythology.

I 14 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

The upshot of all this is that, on the plains of the Upper
Volga and the Ok^, heterogeneous, scattered, and loosely consti-
tuted tribes somehow congregated, and, out of all these bits and
patches, a compact whole was formed, the various elements of
which, associated before fusion, are still recognizable ; just as in
granite, quartz, feldspath, and mica, mixed without being assimi-
lated, together form one of the hardest substances in existence.
Thus it is that in the Russian people, especially the Great- Rus-
sian, various national elements often are discernible to the eye :
they are as yet in the aggregate stage ; the physiological fusion,
begun centuries ago, is not completed yet ; the moral and political
fusion, the only one that matters to a nation's constitution, has
been beforehand with it. In certain senses the national type is
still being elaborated and in what may be called the ' ' sketchy
stage" ; but the same cannot be said of the Russian nationality,
even if at times it seems less finished than that of one or other
Western people : there would be no gain for it in the obliteration
of traces of an origin which the people do not perceive and the
causes of which are to them unknown or matter of indiflference.
In their greatest divergence, the populations of Russia do not
show oppositions in types and colors so violent as not to yield
even to centuries of race mixing, — such oppositions as entail on
the American States strife and race rivalries capable of endanger-
ing their liberty and safety. In all that concerns ethnological
unity as well as the physical unity of soil and clime, Russia has
the advantage of the United States and still more of Brazil.

In spite of the traces of crosses which he often bears on his
face, the Great- Russian maintains imbroken his community with
the Caucasian race, by the external signs which most clearly
characterize it : stature, color of skin, hair and eyes. His stature
is more often high than low, his skin is white, his eyes are fre-
quently blue ; his hair is mostly blond, light chestnut or auburn, —
all shades which almost exclusively belong to the Caucasian or
Mediterranean stock. The long, thick beard which is the pride of

RACES AND NATIONALITY. Hj

the peasant's heart, and which all the persecutions of Peter the
Great could not induce him to cut ofF," is in itself a sign of race,
as nothing can be barer than the chin of a Mongol or a Chinese.*

Thus then, with regard to race as well as soil, Russia, if she
does differ from the West, differs still more from old Asia ; from
both points of view, she embodies the conquest of the latter by
the former. The Russian people, both by blood and tradition, is
directly linked to the noblest, most progressive, most intellectual
family in the world, but to the branch thereof the least illustrious
so far. Of the two chief ethnical elements that enter into the
making of Russia, the most European — the Slavic element — is, as
regards its genius, nearly as unknown to the West as the other ;
what surprises the singular people issued from their fusion re-
serves to the future, cannot even be conjectured.

The lyittle-Russians (Maloross) are Russia's Southerners.
It is calculated that two thirds of them have brown or dark-
chestnut hair. Of purer race than their brethren of Great-Russia,
located nearer to the West, they glory in their comparatively
unmixed blood, their milder climate, their cheerier land. They
are handsomer of countenance and taller in stature, have finer
limbs and are of slighter make ; they are livelier and more alert
in mind, but at the same time more changeable ahd more indo-
lent, more meditative and less determined, consequently more
apathetic and less enterprising. Their climate having been less
of a trial to them, and Oriental despotism having sat lighter on
them, the Little- Russian and White-Russian have more personal

" Peter never meddled with the peasants in any way. His high-handed
reforms in dress and mode of life did not go beyond the nobility and the
urban classes. If he could have taken in hand all classes equally, there
might not be now such a chasm between "the million" and the social
"upper ten thousand."

* If these traits, unfamiliar to the races of Upper Asia, are more or less
frequently encountered in certain Finn or Tatar tribes, that presupposes
alliances, in remote antiquity, between these and peoples of Caucasian
stock, and this very fact bringjs the Russians into closer relationship with
the Western Europeans.

1 1 6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

dignity, more independence, more individuality than the Great-
Russian ; their mind is less positive, more open to sentiment and
fancy, more dreamy and more poetical.* All these shades of
character are reproduced in the melodies and songs of both groups,
in their holidays and customs, although provincial diversities are
gradually dying out under the influence of the Great-Russian
branch, which bids fair to assimilate the western Russians as the
other populations of the empire. The contrast is still visible in
family and commune, in the house and the villages of both tribes.
Amidst the Little- Russians the individual is more independent,
woman is freer," the family is less compactly agglomerated ; the
cottages have more room between them and are frequently sur-
rounded with gardens and flowers.

These people, who were subjected to western influences under
the rule of Poland, were, towards the seventeenth century, the
first intermediate agents between Europe and Moscovia, to which,
besides vicinity, they were attached b)' mutual afl&nities of lan-
guage and religion. Prior to Peter the Great, and partly even in

* For a knowledge of the Little-Russian songs {piisni), which vie with
those of Serbia for the palm of Slavic popular poetry, consult Bodenstedt,
Dig Poetische Ukrain (1845), andRambaud, La Russie J^pique (1876).

'* In what way ? No peasant housewife could have a position more
honored, independent, masterful than the mate of the Great-Russian and
northern husbandman. As among the Spartans and early Romans, she is
subject and responsible only to her "man," but even he does not interfere
with her house-rule and her own specially feminine branches of farming.
The produce of dairy and poultry left over from home use, the surplus of
her spinning and weaving, are hers to sell, and the money, by immemorial
unwritten, but all the more compelling law, is awarded her as her property
to hold or spend, and many a husband has received a flogging by decree of
the mir (village assembly), for having robbed the housewife of her private
hoard. Aud many a heifer or colt finds its way to a peasant's stable
that would never have come there but for her savings — and many a log
house has been roofed, and repaired, and made snug against the winter
with money from the same source. The southern woman may dance and
sing more in the young folk's chorus on moonlight nights on the broad
village street, and sport more many-colored ribbons and gay silk ker-
chiefs, and be freer of talk and manner with the village swells, but hardly
to the increase of her dignity and moral worth.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. \\J

his reign, it was chiefly through their instrumentality that Europe
exerted her influence over Moscow and Russia.

To ]vittle-Russia belonged the Zapor6gs, the most famous of
those Cosack tribes which played so prominent a part between
Poland, the Tatars, and the Turks, in the Ukraina or southern
steppes, and whose name will ever be to Russians the symbol of
free and independent life. Kazhtchestvo — Cosackdom — with its
liberal or democratical traditions, is to this day the more or less
conscious, more or less avowed ideal of a great many I^ittle-
Russians. Another thing, also connected with the history of
Ukraina, the foreign descent or denationalization of a great
portion of the upper classes, half Polish and half Great-Russian,
equally favors democratic instincts in the I^ittle-Russian people.
For this twofold reason, the Little-Russian is perhaps less imper-
vious to political aspirations, and consequently more open to
revolutionary blandishments than his brother of Great-Russia.*

Of the Cosacks of our day, those of the Black Sea, transferred
to the Kuban between the Azof Sea and the Caucasus, are alone
lyittle-Russians ; those of the Don and Ural are Great-Russians.
To the seventeen or eighteen millions of Little- Russians residing
in Russia, should be added, on ethnological grounds, about three
millions more, dwelling in Austria, on both sides of the Kar-
pathian Mountains, in Kastem Galicia, formerly " Red- Russia,"
in Bukovine, and in the " comitats " of Northern Hungary.

The claim of the Little- Russians to the name and quality of
Russians has been contested, as well as that of the White- Rus-
sians,— virtually one third of the Russian people. In order to
separate them from the Great- Russians, different national designa-
tions have been sought out for them. At one time the name of
"Russian" would be reserved for the Great-Russian, and the
others would be given the Latin name of " Ruthenes," or the

* This seems to be borne out by several political trials that took place
between 1879 ^^^ \^^, and in which several Ukmna peasants were im-
plicated.

Il8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Hungarian one of " Russni^," both of which are merely a tran-
scription and synonym of the name they were to supplant. At
another time the title of " Russian " would be reserved for the
Slavs of Little-Russia and White-Russia, the first centres of the
empire ruled by the descendants of Rurik, while it would be
denied to Great-Russia, on which was inflicted the name of
"Moscovia." These bickerings on words, gotten up not by
Little- Russians, but by Poles, in no wise alter the facts. Their
only effect was to keep up between luckless Poland and Russia
irreconcilable pretensions, which have brought the stronger
nation to igfuore the nationality of the weaker, as Poland once
had ignored that of her Russian subjects. Sufi&ce it here to
establish the fact that these designations: "Ruthene," " Russ-
ni^k," "Russin," like those of "Russ" and "Russian," used
indifferently and interchangeably by old writers and old travellers,
are at bottom merely forms of the same name, designating the
same nationality at least within the limits of the empire.*

Separated from Great- Russia at the time of the Tatar invasion
Little-Russia was through five centuries subject to Poland and
Lithuania, not to much purpose. Only the polished surface, —
the nobility of Kief, Volhynia, Podolia, became polonized.f It is

* Nowadays these diflFerent terms, particularly that of " Ruthene,"
ordinarily applied to Uniats, have assumed a more definite sense. Besides,
the Little-Russians are divided into three distinct types with as many prin-
cipal dialects: that of the plain of Ukraine, that of the "Poli^ssiye" or
"forest region " of Kief, and that of Galicia and Pod61ia.

t Russian statisticians have long ago called attention to the fact that in
the provinces of the southwest— Podolia, Volhynia, Kief^usually consid-
ered as Polish by the Poles, these latter are in reality numerically inferior
to the Jews. The same observation applies to Lithuania and White-Russia,
i. e. to all the provinces annexed in one of the three divisions of Poland.
According to Mr. Tchubinsky, who has published some very detailed statis-
tical tables on this very subject, the Poles could not muster 100,000 strong
in the above three governments put together. Even allowing for some
exaggeration in the Russian documents, still so much remains — that the
figure of the genuinely Polish population is extremely low. In those three
governments, the number of the Catholics, among vphom there certainly
are non-polonized Little-Russians, amounted to scarcely 400,000, — or less

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 1 19

owing pre-eminently to the Greek Orthodox rite that the bulk
of the people, the immense majority of the inhabitants of Kief
and Ukraina have turned out quite as Russian as the people
of Moscow. It matters little that the I^ittle-Russian idiom
deserves the title of language rather than that of dialect ; such
was the case with the Provencal in France ; — ^it matters little
even that the people of I^ittle- Russia and Ukraina are entitled to
be considered as a nation or a distinct nationality. This question,
ardently discussed by scholars as well as by Ukrainophil patriots,
is one of those which should not be settled with the assistance of
ethnological or linguistical arguments, for nationality does not
really reside in race any more than in language, but in a people's
consciousness. What admits of no doubt whatever is that, in
the eyes of Western Europe, the L^ittle- Russian is as much a
Russian as the Great-Russian.

If a few thinkers, such as the poet Shevtchenko * and the
Ukrainophils, have been suspected of a wish to erect I^ittle- Russia
into a nation, independent of both Russia and Poland, to resume
the projects of Khmelnitsky and Mazeppa, such dreams foimd
not much more echo among the Little- Russians than, in 1870-71,
the projects of a southern league met with in the south of France.
The contemporary writers, natives of Little- Russia, are almost
unanimous in discountenancing any leaning towards secession,
and the most renowned of them, Kostomarof, severely condemns
Mazeppa, the last statesman who seriously undertook to separate
Ukraina from Russia. Ukrainophilism and the Little-Russian
poets are scarcely more dangerous to Russia than are to France's

than a seventh of the entire population (16.94 per cent.). In these same three
governments, on the contrary, the number of the Israelites rose to over 750,000,
nearly double that of the Catholics. See Labors of the Ethnographico-
Statistical Expedition ; Materials and Investigations, by P. Tchubinsky,
vol. vii., pp. 272-290.

* On Shevtchenko, orginally a serf, then by turns footman and soldier,
painter and poet, the reader might look up an interesting study by M.
Durand, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, of June 15, 1876.

I20 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

unity the revival of a Provencal literature, and those "fSlibres''
of the south in whose language an over-fastidious police might
easily detect more than one imprudent expression. Even among
their partisans the tendencies accused of separatism are mostly
limited to wishes for decentralization aud provincial autonomy, to
regrets about the suppression, by Peter the Great and Catherine
II., of ancient franchises, to a feeling of repulsion towards the
bureaucracy imported from Moscow and Petersburgh. The most
determined of Ukrainophils do not go beyond federalistic dreams,
and the assertion that federalism can alone g^ve satisfaction to the
numerous peoples of alien origin scattered over the vast empire.*
At all events, the obstacles blunderingly thrown by the authori-
ties in the way of the difiiision of I^ittle-Russian literature and
press, even of the use of a dialect which alone is understood by
the people, are not exactly calculated to stifle in the I^ittle-
Russian's heart the hankering after autonomy which it is expected
to destroy in the germ by such means.

It is a notable portion of the national genius that Russian
censure dooms to silence and obscurity by the proscription of an
idiom spoken by more mouths than Serb and Bulgar put together ;
a notable portion of the Russian people, perhaps the best gifted
for art and poetry, that Petersburgh bureaucracy deprives of all
means of expression, all means of instruction. In Russia less
than anywhere else, spirits scornful of languages restricted within
narrow bounds and provincial dialects should indulge in any
illusions ; popular speech, doomed to perish in the course of time,
does not suffer itself to be evicted in a few years ; it is easier to
forbid the use of it by ordinances and decrees than to substitute
for it in daily practice the official literary language. In the inter-
val, the hand which, under pretence of opening to them a wider
window on the world, closes the humble transom through which

* See especially Hrotndda of Mr. Dragom&nof and, by the same
author, Historical Pbland and Great-Russian Democracy, Geneva, 1882.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 121

light could reach them, consigns to ignorance millions of human
creatures.

The diflferences in race, dialect, character, which distinguish
the two chief Russian tribes, are not greater than those which exist
between the north and south of the Western states whose unity,
whether ancient or recent, is best assured. As to the race itself
in the name of which certain ethnologists pretend to separate
them, there is far less distance between the Russian tribes than is
commonly imagined. If the Great-Russian has been mixed more
with Finns, the lyittle- Russian perhaps mixed more with Tatars,
of whom his princes at Kief received and sheltered whole tribes,
while his Cosacks of the steppes recruited from among them
numbers of fugitives and comrades for their life of adventure.
Far from being naturally antagonistic to each other, the Little-
Russian and the Great- Russian have much in common : geogra-
phy, which would hardly allow of the weaker party having a
separate existence ; historical traditions and antipathies, common
to both ; religion, still regarded by both as the foremost power of
all; and lastly, the twofold kinship of language and origin.
They mutually complete each other, and lend their common
country that complex character and genius, which, when enfolded
in tmity, has made the greatness of all the great nations in history.

BOOK II. CHAPTER V.

Russia and the Historical Nationalities of Her Western Boundaries — Ob-
stacles to Russification — Germans and German Influence — Antipathy
against the Niimets — Germans in the Baltic Provinces and in Poland
— The Polish Question — Mutual Interest of Russians and Poles in a
Reconciliation — Plebeian Nationalities and Democratical Policy.

The Russian nation, including even the Little-Russians and
White-Russians, occupies the interior of the empire, but does not
begin to fill out the frame. On no side, unless it be the Black and
White Seas, and unless we take the Ukrainians skirting Eastern
Galicia, does the Russian people reach the limits of Russia. On
nearly all its frontiers, it is encompassed by populations of alien
origin, divided into two principal bands : one in the east, towards
Asia, composed of Finns, Bashkirs, Tatars, Kirghiz, Kalmyks ;
the other, more considerable but not more homogeneous, in the
west, facing Europe, along the most vulnerable flank line of
Russia, the only one on which she confines with powerful neigh-
bors. At certain times the government at St. Petersburgh may
well find there material for weighty and apprehensive thought.

It is to be noted that the main element of the nation — the
nucleus of it — the Great- Russian — comes into actual contact with
these western populations on one point only, and that the least
exposed, the shore of the Gulf of Finland, by a region, moreover,
that counts among the poorest and least peopled. In the centre
and south, between ancient Moscovia and the conquests of Peter
the Great and Catherine II., between Great- Russia on one side
and Livonia, Lithuania, Poland, on the other, lie White- Russia

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 1 23

and Little- Russia, which being, as one might say, Russian only
in the second degree are far less proper to russify others. This
inconvenience is increased by the scantiness of the population in
White-Russia and the swamps of Pinsk in the region bordering
on Little-Russia. These two districts have dug, between the
best-peopled regions of old Moscovia and her conquests of the last
two centuries, a sort of half-desert gulf, which, in spite of the fine
draining works going on in the marshes of the Pripet,* cannot
possibly fill rapidly. The Poles, lyithuanians, Letts, and Germans
of the west thus find themselves protected against russification
by a double barrier ; and this accounts for the trifling progress it
makes. The same phenomenon can be explained by still another
consideration. Population, like water, naturally inclines towards
a vacuum and finds its own level. So it is towards the east and
Asia, not towards the west and Europe — towards the oriental
regions, insufficiently peopled as yet, and not towards provinces
peopled frequently more densely than the interior of the empire,
that the surplus of Russian population naturally flows.

With sixty-eight or seventy millions of Russians, it is no very
great thing to have some fourteen or fifteen millions non-russified,
which is all that European Russia has to show, outside of Fin-
land, Poland, and the Caucasus, — those being, moreover, divided
into over ten peoples and nearly as many languages and religions.
If we take in the kingdom of Poland and Finland, the figure will
mount up to twenty-four or twenty-five millions, and to three or
four more if we add thereto that Babel — the Caucasus, which
should rather be considered as a colony, and which, alone, num-
bers about as many peoples and tribes as all the rest of the
empire.! All these populations are for the most part too weak,

* The works carried out in this region constitute one of the finest under-
takings of the kind in Europe. In 1889 a good deal over two million acres
had been already drained.

t According to Mr. Rittich, the population of the Caucasus, even prior
to the annexations sanctioned by the treaty of Berlin, was divided into
twelve principal groups, speaking sixty-eight diflFerent dialects.

124 TH^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

too fragmentary, to have any claim to independence ; they will let
themselves be assimilated by the mere force of progressing civili-
zation, everywhere unfavorable to small tribes and shut-in
languages. Many of these aUogens (aliens), as the Finns of the
interior or the Gmzins (commonly called Georgians) of Trans-
caucasia, are nearly as devoted to the Tsar as his natural-bom
Russian subjects. Others, such as the two million Ehsts and
Letts of the Baltic provinces, find in the Russian government
a protection against the aristocratical oligarchy and the burgher
arrogance of 160,000 Germans. These latter and their kindred of
the interior are urged by self-interest, in spite of enticements from
abroad, to remain subjects of a state in which, notwithstanding
their scant numbers, they occupy so ample a place ; where,
thanks to the antiquity of their civilization, thanks to certain
Teutonic qualities — a taste for work, the spirit of order and ex-
actness,— thanks also to comradeship, worldly connections, and
influences at court, they have for a long time filled the high
posts of the military and civil careers, so that, in the vast Slavic
Empire, the Germans, until very lately, appeared to be the
privileged race.*

* The proportion of Germans goes on increasing progressively from the
lower to the highest charges, both civil and military. It is notorious how
Alexander III., then heir to the crown, at a reception of the highest stafiF
oflBcers, after several generals with German names had been presented to
him, exclaimed, " At last ! " at the first Russian name he heard. Yet there
have been stories current about the antipathy of the future Alexander III.
and his wife against the Germans, which got some Frenchmen, who took
them literally, into sad trouble. Thus once, at an official dinner, the then
French ambassador having thanked the Cesar6vitch for the sympathy he had
shown France in the war of 1870-71, the latter turned his back on him with-
out vouchsafing a word in reply.'

' There is a very popular story, illustrative of this galling state of
things, about General Yermolof, one of the heroes of the now epic war
against Shamil and his fanatical robber tribes of the Caucasus, — a blunt
old warrior, as notorious for plain speaking as for bravery and military
genius. It is said that the Emperor Alexander II. received him at a private
audience, to congratulate him on a victory which prepared the final one by
which Prince Bari^tinsky, another Theseus, freed Russia from the annual
blood tribute which she had been paying for half a century to the murderous

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 1 25

This sort of supremacy, which the Germans exert both in pri-
vate and public life, cannot but excite in the Russians feelings of
distrust and jealousy which, at times, break out into loud protest.
The national feeling rebels against the sway of the Germans,
accused as they are of forming in the administration as well as in
business a sort of corporation, the members of which support one
another at the cost of the state and of private persons.' In Peters-
burgh, and especially in Moscow, the periodical press continuously

'There are sundry trades and professions of which the Germans have
appropriated the monopoly, which they guard as fiercely as though it had
been legally bestowed on them. Twenty years ago the bakers and the
apothecaries (druggists and pharmacists) were all German, and that all over
the country. It was impossible for a Russian to get into a bakery as appren-
tice or even errand boy. At last an enterprising Moscow man started in
Petersburgh, in a fashionable quarter, a "Moscow bakery." The venture
was a success, the number of " Russian bakeries " and " Moscow bakeries "
increased rapidly — at first in the two capitals — till it rivalled that of the
German ones. This was partly, of course, a " demonstration," but what
made the success a permanent one, is the fact that there are some special
kinds of plain and fancy breads, thoroughly national in quality and shape,
which the Germans never could produce, and which, until this popular
movement was started, could be got only from itinerant sellers or at open-
air stands in the more populous commercial quarters. The pharmacists'
"ring" was more diflBcult to break. On no consideration whatever could
a Russian obtain access to a prescription counter or laboratory. I have
personally known young men of good family, university graduates, having
brilliantly passed all the examinations required by the law of pharmacists'
assistants ("pro visors") whose continuous efforts were met with as con-
tinuous defeats, till they were forced into some other work than that for
which they had spent their youth preparing themselves. When I left,
eighteen years ago, one Russian drug store had just been started, and the
success was still uncertain.

Minotaurs of the mountain labyrinth. Alexander was a kind man and a
generous master, and the thanks and praise he bestowed on his faithful old
servant were meted out unstintingly, winding up with the command to
select any favour within the power of the imperial hand to bestow. Where-
upon the General is reported to have replied that his gracious sovereign's
bounty had left him nothing to wish for — " Unless," bethinking himself of
a crowning boon — " Unless it might be your Majesty's pleasure to promote
me into a German ! " The point of the story is greatly sharpened by the
fact that the first half of the General's career had been one long struggle
against German esprit de corps and nepotism. Whether the thing occurred
just so or not — who shall tell? At all events it is eminently a case of " ^^
non h vero, i ben irovatoV

126 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Stimulates Russia to throw oflf the political and economical yoke
of the niimets^ — a yoke the weight of which certain patriots
very greatly exaggerate, and which they seem as unable to shake
off entirely as to bear it patiently. To the twofold jarring pro-
duced by individual self-love and by national pride, is added the
antipathy in both mind and character which of yore exists between
the Slav and the Teuton. This secular antipathy has repeatedly
manifested itself in Russian society, especially since the treaty of
Berlin, in rather curious ways : by more or less malicious jeers
at the Teutonic accent and manners, in petty, often puerile,
taunts, by affecting a more or less sincere contempt for the arts,
literature, and products of Germany — affecting indeed to be ignor-
ant of the German language or purposely disfiguring it, so that it
came to pass that I, a Frenchman, more than once took up the
cudgels in defence of the conquerors of Alsace-Lorraine against
their neighbors, the Russians.

This repulsion against the Germans, which breaks out in
periodical spells, might appear excessive and ridiculous, were it
not justified by the political apprehensions aroused by the resur-
rection of the German Empire and the invasive propensities of the
Germanic race. Had Alexander II. followed the national instinct
and shared the preferences of his subjects, he should not have
congratulated his uncle, Wilhelm, on the battle of Sedan, nor
should he have connived at the mutilation of France. In un-
prejudiced eyes, Germany is assuredly more dangerous to Russia
than to France, In France's case, indeed, the empire of the
Hohenzollems encounters a compact nationality, difl&cult to break
into, offering no handle to Teutonic assimilation. The same
cannot be said of the east of Europe, where Germany, jointly with
Prussia, has been steadily aggrandizing itself, century after cen-
tury. Now, the Russians don't care to see their Western neigh-
bor carry on at their expense on the Visla, the Ni6men, or the

* Niimets originally means '• dumb," one who cannot speak ; therefore
"•foreigner," a German.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 12/

Dvina, his secular encroachments on territory belonging to the
Slavs or to the I^etto-Iyithuanians.

There are no German provinces in the Russian Empire. This
designation, often used by the Germans and even by the French,
as applied to the three Baltic provinces, is absolutely incorrect,
and it is easy to understand why the Russians will decidedly not
tolerate the misnomer. Statistics have long ago established the
fact that, in these pretended * ' German ' ' provinces — Uvonia or
lyiefland, Esthonia or Esthland, and Curland, — the Germans do
not, in reality, make out one tenth of the population, the immense
majority of which consists of I>tts in the south and Finns in the
north. The modem principle of nationality, which, by the way,
when not grounded in national consciousness, merely furnishes a
novel instrument of oppression, supplies, from this side, no pre-
tence for the clamoring for restitution kept up by the Germans.
But neither numbers, nor race, nor language are everything in a
country. It matters little that the Germans, on the lower course
of the Dvina, constitute a minority amounting to a minimum ;
they have ruled the land too long by force of arms, by trade, by
religion, by all that goes to make up civilization, not to have
impressed their stamp on it.

The mark of the Hansa is discernible ever5rwhere in the cities,
and that of feudal Germany everywhere in the country, owned
by the heirs of the " Sword-bearers. ' ' Take it all in all — ^manners,
history, traditions — ^the Baltic country is far more German than
was Alsace-Lorraine in 1870. It might even be said without para-
dox, that these Russian provinces, peopled by Letts and Finns,
were the most German country on the continent, so largely had
mediaeval Germany survived there.

It is but natural that the Russian government, who has ruled
them for the last two centuries, should seek to de-germanize and
to modernize its Baltic provinces, in spite of charters or privileges
granted to the Lieflanders by Peter the Great on the occasion of
their annexation. It is but natural that, in order to diminish the

128 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

German preponderance, Petersburgh and Moscow should call in
the aid of the former Finn or I,ett serf ; but such an undertaking
everjrwrhere requires more than average prudence, patience, mod-
eration.

The German spirit and moral influence are too deeply rooted
in the soil to allow of easy eradication, nor can a country's attach-
ment be obtained without taking into account its customs and
traditions. Were it to follow all the inspirations of ultra-zealous
russifiers, the Russian government, on the plea of assimilating the
Baltic country, would run the risk of alienating it, nay, of creating
in it a separatist party, by irritating the ruling classes, and those
German-Russians whose allegiance to the Tsars has always been
untainted and who, from Barclay-de-Tolly down to Totleben, and
from Ostermann to Nesselrode, have furnished more than one
illustrious general or distinguished statesman." On the Dvina,
just as on the Visla and on the Dniepr, the best way of securing
the Russian rule is, after all, to make it mild, not to do violence
to the local manners and traditions, at least in so far as they are
compatible with the spirit of the age and the preservation of the
empire's integrity.*

The Baltic provinces are not the only ones where the Russians
have to keep an eye on germanism. In reality, it is not even

* It were a great mistake to imagine that a German name is a sure index
of anti-Russian feeling, or a Russian one is a sure pledge of patriotism.
Men with uncompromising German names, like Hilferding, historian-archae-
ologist ; Orestes Miller, philologist and folk-lorisf, Dahl, the compiler of
the great national dictionary, collector of the popular proverbs and saws,
are found foremost in the front ranks of Russian nationalist workers, with
a moderate leaning towards slavophilism, while a Count Shuvilof was a
notorious contemner of all things national, and did his best to scare Alex-
ander II, out of his fixed purpose of freeing the serfs, by conjuring up
insurrections, wholesale massacres of landlords, and other like bugbears.

* Perhaps no question in Europe has given rise to so large a quantity of
writings of all sorts as this question about the Baltic provinces, which it is
impossible to enter into here with any details. A whole library might be
made up of nothing but the Russian and especially German books and
pamphlets called forth by George Samarin's Borderland of Russia.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 1 29

die niimets who is most to be dreaded. Curland, lyiefland, and
Esthland are, by their geographical position, bound to the great
empire of which they occupy the coastland, and whose trafl&c is
carried on by their seaports. Severed from Russia, the three
provinces would be as good as cut off from the continent and
would fall into a situation analogous to that of Austrian Dalmatia
before the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina gave her a "back-
ground," And it is not even in the Baltic provinces that there
are most Germans.

Apart from their trading colonies in the cities and from their
rural agricultural colonies, also scattered from end to end of the
empire, the Germans gradually filtered into the provinces confin-
ing with Prussia and Austria — into Poland, Lithuania and I^ittle-
Russia.* On many points they slowly gained possession of the
soil and capital, notwithstanding the competition of the indigenous
Jews, who, moreover, might, under certain cfrcumstances, as it
happened in Poznania (Posen), become their auxiliaries and
smooth the way for germanization.f In the Kingdom of Poland
more particularly, the Germans are already more numerous in
proportion than they are in the Baltic provinces, which are
regarded as their main centre.

The Polish question, so many times settled in so many contra-
dictory ways in the course of the last century, is, in reality, lined
with a German question also. The fault is, partly, the Russian
policy's, which, in its dread of polonism, favored germanism,
permitting Germans, until 1884, to purchase land, while denying
the same privilege to Poles and Jews. "I dread the Germans
less than the Poles," wrote Nicolas MiUMin immediately after

* The statistics of travellers crossing the frontiers show that 30, 40, and
sometimes 50,000 more Germans enter Russia every year than leave it, not
counting 30 or 40,000 Austrians, part of whom are Germans.

t To prevent rural real estate passing into the hands of Germans, Alex-
ander III. has proceeded to radical measures. By an imperial ukhz or decree
dated 1884, foreigners are forbidden from acquiring land in the western
jffovinces, either by purchase or even by inheritance.

130 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the insurrection of 1863.* Miliiitin would hardly speak so to-day.
The most clear-sighted patriots admit that Russia could not solve
this much-vexed Polish question against both Poles and Germans,
any more than the Poles can flatter themselves that it could be
settled against both Russians and Germans. The Russian who
insists on denationalizing the provinces on the Visla, and the
Pole who declines any terms whatever with Russia, are equally
in danger of working for the Prussians, who have not forgotten
that they ruled in Warsaw before Russia did.

There are indeed Russians who, to see the end of this ever-
lasting Polish question, would like to make over to Germany the
whole of Poland proper, f or at least the half of the kingdom situ-
ated west of the Visla, reserving the right to look for a compensa-
tion from Austria or from Turkey. This would be Finis Poloniee
indeed ; yet, though the combination was at one time much ex-
tolled, it would not find many advocates nowadays.

Not to mention a natural repugnance to sacrificing an old
Slavic land to germanism, or the diflBculty of drawing a botmdary
line at the gates of Warsaw, or else give up this capital itself to
Prussia, the Russians understand that, once the Germans are suf-
fered to take firm footing in the heart of Poland, they must fatally
yield to the temptation of gradually absorbing the whole. Warsaw
would be to the Prussians merely a stopping-place. Once installed
on the Visla, they could extend their greed to the rest of the
kingdom, and as far as I^ithuania, Esthonia, and I^ivonia. They
could, alone or jointly with Austria, devour the whole of ancient
Poland, province by province.

* Unpublished letter from N. Miliitin to Tcherkassky, 8/20 February,
1865.

t The kingdom of Poland or " Congress Poland " {KongresSwka) wa»,
as is well known, constructed out of such portions of the ancient " Grand
Duchy of Warsaw " as were awarded to Alexander I. in 1815, and by him
endowed with a constitution. In the eyes of the Russians this " Congress-
kingdom " alone constitutes the whole of Russian Poland. They take their
stand on history and ethnography when they refuse to recognize as Polish
the provinces annexed by Catherine IL at the time of the three divisions of
the eighteenth century.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. I3I

The Poles should dread no less than the Russians any cession
to the heirs of Frederic the Great. Poland's curse is that the
Poles, with all their brilliant qualities, with their noble chival-
rous spirit, their generous patriotism, have always, both before
and after the divisions of the eighteenth century, shown poor
political spirit. Still, in this respect, their long misfortunes do not
appear to have been entirely lost upon them. They have become
more practical, more positive, less inclined to indulge in the vast
dreams and chimerical fancies of old. Many of them have found
out that, for their nationality, the Russian rule is infinitely less to
be dreaded than the German, and that Warsaw cannot nurse the
hope of wholly escaping both. The reunion of Russian Poland
with Austrian Galicia, the day-dream of certain patriots, is a
mere Utopia, which geography alone would effectually dispose of.
There exists a project, put forward at times in Germany, propos-
ing the erection of the ' ' Congress-kingdom ' ' into a vassal state
or confederate of Germany, but it is only a piece of delusive mirage
behind which lurks German absorption. A fifth or sixth division
would be the saddest thing that could befall Poland, and her
patriots surely must regret that, in 181 5, France caused the
propositions of Alexander I. to be rejected, and suffered Poznania
(Posen) to be made over to Prussia and germanization.

When we consider what history has done with Schlesien (Sile-
sia), Poznania, and Old Prussia, we can assert that the Russian
rule is, for the Poland of the Visla, for Warsaw and Mazovia, the
best, perhaps the only, possible guarantee against germanization.
The Poles, in declaring themselves irreconcilable toward Russia,
appear to an impartial outsider to be committing a sort of national
suicide.

This is felt more and more on the banks of the Visla, and anx-
iety for the future prevails over old grudges. Fear of Germany
balances hatred of Russia. Economic considerations too work in
the same direction. From a material point of view, Poland has
everything to gain from union with the great Slavic Empire, which
offers immense openings to her industry. Russian Poland has

132 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

greatly changed since the insurrection of 1863. She is beyond
comparison wealthier than Galicia and Poznania. Agriculture
has prospered. The peasant, now a landholder, has enjoyed com-
forts hitherto unknown to him. The cities have become crowded
with factories ; Warsaw's population has been doubled, that of
Lodzi and other cities quadrupled, and more, all within twenty
years. The rise of tariffs, the exaggeration of which is, in our
belief, one of the obstacles to the development of Russia, has been
of considerable advantage to Poland, placed as that country is in
better conditions for production. A great portion of the empire
pays tribute to Poland's industry — itself, it is true, frequently placed
in German hands. Any custom-house barrier raised between the
two countries would kill the industry of the kingdom, which then
would find it hard to hold out against the competition of Schlesien
and Westphalia. In our day material interests are a strong chain ;
and Russia, by suppressing the custom-house system between the
kingdom and the empire, has, perhaps unconsciously, bound the
Poles by the only tie which Polish hands would be loth to sever.

Thus the two main and often hostile springs which govern
men and nations — material interests and abstract considerations —
are at one in this case, to bring about the reunion to Russia of the
most unmanageable among the peoples subject to her imperial
sceptre. In spite of irritating memories, of the blundering at-
tempts at russification pursued since 1864, stubbornness is no
longer so deeply rooted in Polish hearts. The conciliating policy
of Vi61op51sky — a policy which, imfortunately for both nations,
numbered so few partisans about i860 — would now command an
immense majority.*

* According to Russian statistics, the nnmber of the Poles subject to the
empire scarcely reaches six million souls. They form a large majority in
the kingdom created by the Vienna Congress, where they amount to
about seventy per cent of the total population, but in the other parts of an-
cient Poland they constitute a feeble minority. To these genuine Poles of
Polish descent must be added, in order to calculate the efficient force of
" Polonism," a certain number of Lithuanians, Little-Russians, White-R\i»-
sians, and even of Germans, and more or less polonized Jews.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 1 33

The trouble is that in the Russian "borderlands " {pkrhiny)^
as in Austria, as in Turkey, these questions of nationalities are
far from being as plain as they appear in theory. With the best
will in the world it is frequently impossible to solve them to every-
body's satisfaction. Side by side with regions held by a clearly
defined nationality, possessed of continuous historical traditions,
there are countries inhabited by mixed races, often openly hostile
to one another. The Baltic provinces are a case in point— but by
no means the only one. The greatest portion of ancient Poland,
the provinces annexed to Russia at the time of the three first par-
titions, are more or less in a like predicament. That indeed was
one of the things which made the dismemberment of the Common-
wealth easy, and reconciliation between the former and the new
masters of the soil very difficult to achieve.

The chief obstacle to an agreement between Russians and Poles
has always been the part of Ukraina situated on the right bank of
the Dniepr, and especially Lithuania, these provinces being looked
upon by the former as Russian and by the latter as Polish, the
Poles taking preferably the standpoint of the wealthy and culti-
vated classes, the landlords or the city burghers ; the Russians,
instead, taking thought of the rural classes, the peasant, the
manumitted serf freed by Alexander II.

In the greater portion of ancient Poland — not the ' ' Congress-
kingdom" — as well as in the three Baltic provinces, national
rivalries often are made more complicated by strife between the
classes. Nationalities, and at times religions, are, in a way, dis-
posed in layers. While the upper classes — the nobility and
landlords — are Germans or Poles, by race or by tradition, the
bulk of the people is Lithuanian, White-Russian (Bielorhss),
Little-Russian {Maloross), not to mention the Jews who, gen-
erally addicted to trade, form an additional class and nation-
ality too. It is easy to perceive the difficulties of such a state
of things and the temptations into which it can lead those
in power.

134 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

In order to check the historical nationalities, with their old-
established nobility and burgherdom, which still hold the power
by virtue of wealth and education, the Russian government has
been induced to seek the support of the petty rural and, so to
speak, "plebeian" nationalities,* until quite lately unknown to
foreigners and scarcely self-conscious. To the Swede of Finland,
to the German of lyiefland or Curland, to the Pole of lyithuania
or Ukraina, it opposed the Finn, the Ehst,.the I^ett, the Samog^t,
the White- and lyittle- Russian, thus making use for its own ends
of ethnology and the principle of nationality and turning them
against its adversaries, re-kindling national feeling in populations
in whose breasts it had lain extinct for ages, with the mental re-
servation that it might be smothered again the moment it showed
inclination to encroach. This is one of the reasons for "peasant
policy," called by some democratic, by others socialistic, being
adopted more than once by the tsars towards subject provinces,
more especially those that constituted ancient Poland. Along her
western frontiers Russia had two or three Irelands, which she felt
all the more tempted to deal with on the principle of agrarian law,
as the landlords, through their origin or tradition, were more
obnoxious to her. What Alexander II. did in I^ithuania, Podolia,
even in Poland, sundry patriots should like to see done again in
the Baltic provinces, at the cost of the German barons, for the
benefit of the I^ett and Ehst peasantry.f

At a time when conflicts of nationalities and class jealousies
breed so much animosity, it is easy to see how greatly the social
status would be endangered by a policy that would take pleasure

* The expression belongs, unless I am mistaken, to Mr. Dragomdnof, in
his Historical Poland.

t In order to appreciate the conduct of the Russian government, it must
not be forgotten that, at the time of the emancipation, the whole empire
was placed under agrarian laws more or less favorable to the quondam serfs.
The Baltic provinces alone were exempted, because emancipation had taken
place there under Alexander I., on different principles. See farther on,
Book VI., Chapter. II.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. 1 35

in envenoming and doubling, the one by the other, two of the
weightiest incentives to antagonism that can divide those that
dwell on one soil. The internal difl&culties under which Russia
labors, and the geographical situation of the provinces exposed
to such divisions, would render such a game very dangerous for
the empire. Far from having any interest in nursing the passions
of the various races subject to its rule, the Russian government
would find it to its advantage to get them to live peaceably
together. Having once taken on himself the character of pro-
tector to the lowly and weak, of patron to long-enslaved majori-
ties, the tsar might find himself called upon to take a turn at
defending, against them, powerful minorities. Nothing could be
less profitable to Russia than a renewal, directed against the
Germans, of the popular riots against the Jews, or the perpetra-
tion of rural wholesale risings against the Baltic barons of I^ief-
land or the Polish pans (squires, lords) of Lithuania and Podo-
lia. It matters greatly to the empire not to allow racial rivalries
to degenerate into class strife, so as to oflfer a handle to revolu-
tionary agitation or foreign interference. The safest course for a
government as well as for a dynasty, is to arbitrate between the
different nationalities and the different classes without sacrificing
the ones to the others. If the task is often difficult for Russia
in those of her provinces that adjoin Europe as well as on the
confines of Asia, this difficulty is but the price she has to pay for
her greatness.

To escape paying it, Russia would have to give up the annexa-
tions of the last two centuries, the conquests of Alexander I.,
Catherine II., nay, of Peter the Great himself. If, on the con-
trary, she wishes to strengthen her authority over the various
peoples of her immense domain, her best course is, after all, to
show respect of their nationality, their language, their religion,
so as to take fi-om them all incentives to discontent, leaving it to
time, to reason, to their self-interest, to the natural attraction of
a great country, to bind them more and more firmly to the

136 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

empire.* Unfortunately for herself, Russia lacks the most potent
charm of all in the eyes of modem nations — lacks the magnet most
powerful to attract them — lacks liberty. And one may, without
claiming a prophet's gift, venture the prediction, that only on that
day she can be certain of keeping all her European borderlands —
Ujy^uies — when she will have contrived to raise them to the same
political level as the rest of Europe.

The Emperor Alexander III. appears to have set himself the
task of russifying Poland, Lithuania, and, above all, the Baltic
provinces. He has successively introduced in the Baltic country
Russian administration and courts of justice,* substituting every-
where— in the university, the schools, the mtmidpalities, the
courts, Russian to German.f Hofgericht, Manngericht, Land-

< That is what Russia has always done and is doing all the time, following
in the footsteps of Rome's wise statesmanship. Not many chapters back, our
author praised the Russian government for having respected the autonomy
and self-government, customs and laws, of the annexed Grand Duchy of
Finland. In the same way it leaves to all its own Russian rural populations
their communal self-government, based on custom-laws of immemorial eld,
easily traceable, many of them, to a primeval Aryan social status, such as
is revealed to us by the Veda and later, but still very ancient, Sanskrit litera-
ture. As to the alien subjects, their manners, their religions are not less
scrupulously respected. Thus religious teaching is an integral and obliga-
tory part of the course of instruction in all public schools of every grade.
But this instruction is imparted to the children and youths in their respec-
tive religions, by teachers engaged and paid by the State. Should there be
in a school one Hebrew boy, or one Mussulman, there will be a Rabbi or a
Mollah to teach him the Thora or the Koran, and he will not be required to
assist at the Greek-Orthodox catechism. In the army all allowances are
made for Jewish and Moslem soldiers, that are compatible with service and
discipline, in the matter of food, religious observances, and the like. In
return for this more than tolerance the state surely has a right to decree
that the state language shall be used in public schools, courts of justice,
and government offices, understood and partiy spoken by the officials of
railway companies and other public servants, and that the state institutions
shall be accepted by all its subjects. Otherwise where would be the
state?

* The judicial organization of the empire was not enforced until 1890.

t There are exceptions, especially in favor of the rural courts where it
would have been impossible to enforce the use of the Russian language ;
bat the exception is made in favor of the local languages, Ehst and I^ett.

RACES AND NATIONALITY. I37

gericht^ all these are now memories — ^no more.* It is to be feared
that, along with these Gothic institutions, may perish the self-
government which was the pride and prosperity of the three
provinces. Russification is everywhere carried on to the benefit of
centralization. There lies the evil. Possibly, it might have been
to the imperial government's advantage to proceed with greater
gentleness. In its religious policy at least, it would have shown
greater wisdom by acting in a more liberal spirit. It is not by
wounding the consciences of her Catholic or Protestant subjects,
that Russia will win their hearts.*

* Perfectly right and proper. Why should mediaeval survivals, denounced
and swept away through all Europe, be treasured only just here where they
do infinite harm by fostering a rebellious and aggressive spirit, and per-
petuating oligarchical oppression under the guise of a self-government
which may have been the pride and prosperity, not of the three provinces
but of the small minority of aliens that rules them, much against the feel-
ing prevailing among the native population, which gravitates steadily
towards the Russian element, especially as represented by the mild, unob-
trusive, uninterfering Orthodox Church. Centralization ? Well, no social
or political life is possible without some — without much — of it, especially
where heterogeneous elements have to be welded together, and where
decided centrifugal tendencies have to be counteracted. Bven in a repub-
lican confederacy, what is a federal government with its one executive
bead but centralization? And as to gentle and gradual means, Germany
in like cases shows herself neither so lenient nor so long-suffering ; she
makes repression unnecessary by at once, and on principle, laying on her
iron hand, without the velvet glove, and leaving no room for unruliness.
And Germany succeeds and is approved by the world.

* See Vol. III., Book IV., Chap. III.

BOOK III.
THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTBR.

CHAPTER I.

Utility and Difficulty of Studying the National Character — Russia One of
the Countries Where Material Surroundings Act Most on Man — Some
Effects of the Climate — The North, and Sluggishness Brought on by
Cold — Winter and the Intermittence of I^abor — Lack of Liking for
Physical Exertion — Habitual InsuflBciency of Food ; Drunkenness ;
Hygiene and Mortality — Cold and Uncleanliness at Home in the North
— Are Northern Countries More Favorable to Morality?

It is something to know the origin of a people and the land
they inhabit. It is not much if one cannot account for the influ-
ence of nature on man. From this action of the outer world
and from the people's historical or religious training results the
national character. Now nations do their politics as private
people transact their business, temperament being a factor as
well as self-interest.

For the character of a nation, like that of a man, depends on
the temperament or blood, on the physical surroundings and on
the moral training, not to mention what, in an individual is con-
tributed by age, and, in a nation, by a long course of civilization.
Between these three orders of influences — ^race, nature, history —
now one, now another, has been awarded pre-eminence in the
study of nations. All three have their importance ; but, nations
being, even more than individuals, of mixed blood, what is most
difficult to determine is the share to be allotted to race and hered-

138

THE N^ATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 39

ity. In Russia itself discussion is rife about the character of the
Great- Russian : what distinguishes him from the western Russian
tribes, what must be credited to his mixing with Finns and
Tatars, what to his own settling on a new land. Both causes
must have acted concurrently ; but the latter, being the more per-
sistent, must have been the more powerful. Two circumstances
combined to lend it a peculiar stress. It is one of the effects of
civilization to neutralize the influences of clime and soil by lifting
man beyond their action. In Russia, culture being of more
recent date and therefore going less deep, the bulk of the people
have remained nearer to nature, more submissive to her sway.
Moreover, under northern skies, the domination of climate is
more absolute, its yoke more difl&cult to shake off. The Russian
soil is no pleasant habitation, fashioned and furnished for man
by nature's kindly hand ; it must be conquered with armed hand
and so maintained. How, then, in such a country, with a civili-
zation not as yet very advanced, should not nature have imprinted
on both the temperament and character an indelible stamp ? Thus
it is that, in dealing with Russian character, a goodly proportion
of defects and qualities for which race, history, religion, are
usually held responsible, should be credited to physical nature.

In order to appreciate how much, we must transfer ourselves
into the northern half of modem Russia, the region which has
been the cradle of the Great-Russian, and formed the nucleus of
ancient Moscovia. Owing to the Tatar raids, this region lies
entirely north of the 50th degree of northern latitude. There,
besides N6vgorod and Pskof, the two semi-republican cities,
which on all accounts deserve to be set apart, we find Tver, Yaro-
slavl, Kostrom^, Vladimir, Suzdal, Riaz^ — all the ancient
capitals of the Russian kniazes,^ — describing a sort of circle
around Moscow. That part of the country is essentially con-
tinental, colder than Petersburgh, with greater extremes of
climate, where the average winter temperature is from thirteen
' See Appendix to this Chapter, No. i.

I40 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

to fourteen degrees below that of Paris. Setting aside Scandi-
navia and Scotland, both warmed by the nearness of two seas, this
is the only region of both hemispheres that has a sedentary, agri-
cultural population in such close proximity to the Polar Circle.
At so great a distance from any sea and from the equator, it is
only thanks to its want of elevation that it is inhabitable at all.

The action of such a climate on the life and body of man must
be enormous. One feels that, but it is hard to demonstrate. Within
a century or two, there has been in Europe much discoursing on
the political effects of climate ; there are few subjects that recur
more often and on which we know less. In the actual state of
our knowledge we cannot even determine scientifically the direct
effects of external nattu'e on organism and temperament. Montes-
quieu was the first to attempt a political theory of climates ; but
this experiment, being based on unreliable narratives of travellers
and on incomplete observations, was premature. Since the last
century, science, which has shed light on so many questions, has
had scarcely a ray to spare for this one.

The most general effect of cold on vegetal or animal life is
to produce numbness, sometimes even suspension of the vital
energies. The sap stops coursing in plants ; the blood coagulates
in the veins of animals. Many of the latter hibernate in a state
of somnolence, and, during the very coldest months, lie down in
temporary graves. Man escapes this deathlike lethargy by force
of his industry and civilization as much as by his constitution,
but cannot entirely withstand the sluggishness which is so general
a phenomenon throughout nature.

Montesquieu made out the North to be the home of activity,
courage, liberty. This theory may be correct as far as moderately
cold countries are meant ; but extreme cold in the North produces
effects analogous to those of extreme heat in the South, so that
in tropical countries the sleep of summer siestas during the hottest
hours or seasons corresponds to that of hibernation in polar ones.
Bracing and stimulating for lungs and general activity, as long as it

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 14I

keeps within certain limits, cold becomes depressing as soon as it
reaches too low a degree, or lasts too long. It then disposes to a
certain indolence, physical and moral, to a sort of passiveness of
mind and soul. To the excitement of the first frosts succeeds
the torpor brought on by intense cold. Winter like summer, the
North like the South, have each its own kind of sloth ; fire in cold
weather exerts the same influence as shade in hot weather, both
equally invite to dawdling and idleness. The mere weight of the
garments is oppressive, their length is in the way.

With all this the North has a great, an immense advantage
over the South. If cold counsels rest, it by no means makes it
imperative ; action is one of the remedies against it. Instead of
reducing man's needs, it increases them and thereby incites to
work. Moreover, the cold is rarely unendurable out-doors in the
centre of Russia, in the latitude of Moscow, and even Petersburgh,
or severe enough to compel Russians to burrow, like the Lapps
and Esquimaux, in their huts. When the air is calm — and in
very severe cold it generally is — a temperature of from 20° to
25° below freezing point is quite endurable, 10° or 12°, the
average temperature of the coldest months, gives very fine,
even pleasant weather, very favorable to out-door exercise. In
those latitudes it is the motion of the air, the wind, and not
the degrees of temperature, which produces the sensation of cold
and makes it painftil.

Winter has its own peculiar tasks as it has its pleasures. In
Russia as everywhere else, it is the season of city life, society,
festivities. In the country it is the time of freight carrying — a
most important item in a country where distances are such a draw-
back. In summer the peasant has roads which are insufl&cient
both in quality and quantity. In winter frost and snow construct
splendid roads for him, and traffic is at once enlivened. The
opening of sleighing is sometimes delayed by scarcity of snow,
and that is a calamity. It is during the transition weeks between
firost and thaw in spring and auttunn, that the peasant is con-

142 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

dernned to in-door life. The long winter leisure created in the
North all the handicrafts on which so many villages subsist, and
which in their turn gave rise to peddling and to the numerous
fairs where the products of rustic industries are bartered. It is
in winter that the girls and women work those drawn-work laces
which are being imitated in France, and those red and blue em-
broidered tovfeis—polotintsa — the designs of which seem in great
part borrowed from the symmetrical flower patterns traced by
frost on the window panes.*

There is in the North, over and above the direct action of cold
on the organs, one thing which places labor under conditions
less favorable than in tempered countries, and that is the violent
alternation and opposition between the seasons. If we find it
difl&cult to determine the physiological effiects of climate, we per-
ceive rather more clearly some of its economic influences. An
English historian, Buckle, has noticed that nations living under
high latitudes did not show the same taste for labor, the same
energ>', as those living under gentler skies. He attributes this
defect to the interruption enforced by winter, which, by the
rigor of its weather and the shortness of its days, breaks every
year, for months, the sequence of agricultural pursuits. " Why

'The patterns are rather architectural — /. e., they reproduce the
national architectural ornament-motives in sawed woodwork. Besides that,
they conventionalize every possible natural object — trees, flowers, animals,
birds — in a very origfinal and consistent manner, which gives a perfectly
well defined and individual art type. The standing combination of such
designs is : two birds, sometimes, but very rarely, quadrupeds, — facing
each other, with a tree or plant of some sort between them — precisely after
the manner of the Assyro-Babylonian ornamental art and its derived
branches. The women have of course no patterns to work from. The
designs are "stitched" and handed down through generations, from
mother to daughter, and may be, nay probably are, many hundred years old.
These towel-embroideries — which are used as well, only much wider, for
borders of table-cloths and bed-sheets, for aprons, petticoats, men's shirts,
etc. — are the most venerable and authentic documents we have for a history
of national art. All Slavic nations and tribes have this cunning, but the
characters of the designs, the stitches and the combinations of color vary
according to country or even province.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 43

sleepest thou, mujik ? ' ' says a popular song, in whix:h the peas-
ant is reproved for sleeping all day on top of the stove while
Want comes and sits down at his door. If he sleeps, it is
because his crops have been taken in, the autumn sowing has
been attended to, and the snow has come, so there is no more
work for him in the fields.* This intermittence of labor causes
a certain desultoriness and instability which interfere with con-
sistency and regular habits. The North throws peculiar obstacles
in the way of agriculture and industry, by making them depend-
ent on a climate at once rugged and whimsical, and it is not
impossible that these failings may extend to the character. Here
again, should not nature by rights be held responsible for some
of the propensities or defects usually imputed to the Slavic
temperament ?

Foreigners who have had work done in Russia have generally
noticed that Russians, like southerners, are better capable of a
vigorous spurt of energy than of continuous steady eflfort. With
more vivacity, probably an inheritance of his Slavic blood, the
Russian frequently displays less activity than the northerners of
Teutonic race ; he even often shows, in the lower as well as in the

' Accordingly the poet does not rebuke the peasant for sleeping, but for
sleeping too long, for being caught napping by Spring who is at the door,
as the second line explains. The author of this pretty poem and many
more short pieces, all in lyrical-idyllic strain, remarkable for the sadly
pensive, pathetic vein, sometimes deepening to passion, which runs
through them like a rich minor harmony, is Koltsof, often called the
"Russian Bums." He was born in 1809, and died at thirty-three — at an
age when achievement, even the best, is still promise. He belonged by
birth to a lowly class, though not to the peasantry, as has often been
averred ; his father traded in cattle, and he worked under him. In the midst
of uncongenial surroundings and disapproving relatives, who did not spare
him their jeers, and taunts, and wise saws, he faithfully plied the humble "
duties to which he was called, and only two or three times, business trips
in his father's interests gave him the golden opportunity of snatching
glimpses of the world of intellect, of literature and art, the world to which
he was bom, yet where he never could be but a passing guest, to join
hands with men whose peer he was, yet whose society was not for him. He
was patient, dutiful, profoundly unhappy — and died.

144 ^^^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

higher classes, less taste for bodily exercise. He appears to like it
only in the shape of fast sleighing and driving, and that to an
extent at which foreigners are amazed, and which may probably
be accounted for by the long distances and the cold, which make
it desirable to get to one's destination as quickly as possible, and
thus a certain hastiness becomes a habit. Bodily exercise, violent
games, sport and athletics in all their forms, do not seem more
attractive to these sons of the North than to the modem nations of
the South. Even skating is less in favor than in countries where
it is not so easily to be had. In this respect as in so many others,
the Russian may be said to be the very antipodes of the English-
man. Travellers have often been struck by the disinclination of
Russian peasants to physical exertion ; at their numerous festivals
their chief delight appears to be rest and immobility. Their fav-
orite pastime is swinging ; nor do they boldly launch into space
as Western children do, but are content with a soft, swaying
motion.* Their habitual dances, such as the khorovdd, a sort of
chaunted dance in a circle, apparently originating in old heathen
rites, are slow and monotonously indolent. Climate and race may
have something to do with this impassive laziness of mind and
body ; the people's diet is also in g^eat part responsible for it.

The principal physiological ejffect of cold is to activate respira-
tion, to determine in lungs and blood a more rapid combustion
and, as a consequence, to demand more substantial nourishment.

* I cannot imagine what could give Mr. Beaulieu this entirely mistaken
impression. The passion for swinging with dizzy recklessness is character-
istic of Russians of all classes, and not of children and very young people
alone, for swinging is the national amusement par excellence. The slow
" chorus-dance" mentioned in the next line (a gentle swa3nng of a circle of
maidens and women, holding hands, performed to their own singing) and the
beautiful national attitude-dance too have their counterpart in the wildly
delirious solo steps executed by men alone. One invariably follows and
completes the other. This character of our national dancing was appropri-
ated and intensified in their world-renowned csardal by the Hungarians,
whose culture-life, with much of their vocabulary, came to them from the
Slavs, with whom they mixed for centuries before German influences began
to make themselves felt

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 145

The nearer we are to the pole, the more man needs food rich in
carbon and azote, animal food. Now in the extreme north, as an
effect of the cold itself, the fertility of the soil is rarely in propor-
tion with the demands of the climate. This is nowhere more
obvious than in the northern half of Russia, unfavorable to the
growth of wheat, and beset by such obstacles to cattle raising as
are unknown to temperate climes. Throughout this region the
earth is niggardly in granting to man the food indicated by heaven
itself : such a lack of balance between needs and supplies has very
disastrously reacted on the temperament of the people ; they have
through many centuries been condemned to meagre, almost
entirely vegetable fare. Under a Northern sky they have lived
as people do in the South. The' use of meat, bacon, of salt pork
even, is only now beginning to gain ground amongst them.
Although great progress has been made in this direction since
the emancipation, the majority of peasants even yet taste meat
only on holidays. Their staple food consists of rye bread, broken
into the shtshi, a sort of soup made of fermented sour cabbage
— this latter dish being the national one par excellence.* To these
edibles are added dried mushrooms and frozen or salted fish — two
articles of food that are nowhere consumed in such quantities as
in Russia. A religion imported from the South, with four lents
and several oriental fasts, the strictness of which has been proof
against centuries, increased the evil inflicted by nature. ' However,
the demands of the climate could not be entirely eluded, and —
drink had to supply the lack of food.

The Russians have two national beverages : kvass, a sort of
rye water, slightly fermented ; and tea, the use of which is well-
nigh as universal as in China.* The tea-kettle — the brass samovar,

' See Appendix to this Chapter, No. 2.

• See Appendix to this Chapter, No. 3.

* To judge by the Russian name, tchay (which is a Chinese word,
icha, as is, at the other end of Europe the Portuguese cha), the Russians
had tea directly from China. There are in Russia two more beverages in
use among the people ; one, called miod (honey), is mead or the hydromel

146 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

is always tlie first and chief utensil of a household ; no hut, be it
ever so poor, is without it. Tea, especially in a country where
the water is frequently of poor quality, is a great help, but,
under such a sky, it is insufl&cient as a tonic. It is supplemented
by grain whiskey, the pale, white vodka.'' It has long been
noticed that drunkenness increases along with the degrees of lati-
tude. The taste for alcohol is as natural to the Russian peasant
as temperance is to the SiciHan or Andalusian : it is not so much
the man's vice as the climate's fault. As long as the fare is not
better, whiskey will be to the peasant a tonic and stimulant, un-
wholesome, but difl&cult to find a substitute for. What is most
to be deplored is, not that it cannot be proscribed entirely, but
that it is impossible to regulate the use of it, so that on a " spree
day ' ' one inevitably beholds the absorption (for they do not
drink liquor, they gulp it down) — of such quantities of vodka as,
wisely dealt out, would further the peasant's health instead of
helping to degrade him into a brute.

In point of fact, the intemperance of the Tsar's subjects has
been greatly exaggerated. The Russian drinks less than the
Dane, perhaps less than the Englishman, the German, the
Frenchman.* Many peasants who get dnink on every holiday,

so much in favor with barbarians ; the other is beer — which, judging from
the etymology of the name it bears both in Russian and Polish — {pivo, from
piti, "to drink,") must have been known to the Slavs in remote antiquity.
Beer is also called, only by the people, when they prepare it themselves,
Brhga, — the identical name of the Scandinavian, or rather Northern and
Teutonic, god of feast-drinking with its exalted exhilaration and the obli-
gatory post-prandial bragging which is a distinctive feature of all archaic
Aryan mythical and epical hero life.

'' Vodka is the diminutive of vodi, " water" — a contemptuous diminutive.

* What a relief to find one man — of those who know and whose words
have weight — find out and proclaim this fact, and lift from the Russian peas-
ant this unthinking, cruel charge, doubly' cruel because there seems to lurk
in it a mockery ! Of course he drinks less than his neighbors, because, poor
thing, he is so much poorer. Only when he drinks, which he cannot afford
very often, he is very drunk, and the worst is they usually get drunk all to-
gether, which makes it conspicuous. The evil is much greater in the towns,
among the artisans and especially among the factory people, where there is

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 147

go for weeks without a drop of spirits. Moreover, the consump-
tion had noticeably diminished during the second half of Alex-
ander II.' s reign, doubtless owing to the rise in the taxes, and
also perhaps to the moral upraising of the former serfs.* Not-
withstanding this progress, drunkenness, with all its attendant
vices and evils, remains one of the plague-spots of rural life.

As a rule, the villages thrive in opposite ratio to the number
of kabhks, i. e. , taverns or tap-rooms ; therefore both public func-
tionaries and private persons strive to reduce that number. The
peasants are not always deaf to the preachings of the apostles of
temperance. Certain communes forbid the opening of any tavern
whatever on their territory, and when Alexander II. was mur-
dered, several villages are known to have closed their kabhks, in
token of mourning for the " lyiberator." In former times such
doings would not have been viewed favorably by the administra-
tion, from the fear of letting the most bountiful source of revenue
run dry. Indeed the tax on the national vice brings in every
year over two hundred and fifty million roubles, in other words,
nigh on one quarter of the entire income of the exchequer, so that
the wag who said that Russia paid her debts by getting drunk was

always a little money on hand. But where the eflfects are most deadly is
in the upper classes, where the spirit fiend so frequently gets holds of the
choicest, most gifted individuals, especially among writers and artists, who
can afford to satisfy its insatiable demands in the present, even though at the
cost of financial ruin in the end. To explain why this should be so, why
the most fatally doomed should be preferably among the noblest and best,
the salt of the land, would take us into such hidden and dark depths of
national life and misery, both material and psychical, as would require a book
by itself to explore. The deadly flatness and ennui of provincial life, and,
for the army, of garrison life in the interior and on the far outskirts of the
empire, suck into perdition thousands more of a race among whose qualities
self-discipline and firmness of character are not the most prominent.

* From 1863 to 1879 the consumption had decreased 7 per cent, notwith-
standing the increase of the population. The number of tap-rooms had
gone down still more rapidly; from 257,000 (1863) to 139,000 (1875); true, it
rose again to 146,000 (1881). For so vast an empire, even this is a very low
figure. (See Mme. O. Novikof 's paper. The Temperance Movement in
Russia, in the Nineteenth Century for September, 1882.)

148 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

not so very far wrong. It was calculated, in 1882, that the nation
spent half a milliard roubles yearly on whiskey, the real value
of which amounted to not over fifty millions, the margin being
divided between the liquor sellers and the government. Yet in
these latter days the government, even while it is the party most
interested in the sale of vodka, has spared no efforts to free the
peasant from the bondage of drunkenness. One of the first acts
of Alexander III. was the convocation of a sort of temperance
parliament, the sessions of which kept Russia and the peasantry
much interested up to the autumn of 1881.

The sorry hygienic conditions react on the economical condi-
tions. The poorness of the fare lowers the peasant's capacity for
work, and destroys, together with the necessary vitality, the taste
and need for labor. Accustomed to his meagre pittance, he ends
by being content with it. Like the Southerners, he often allows
his indolence to benefit by his frugal habit of life.

Such a diet, in such a climate, cannot fail to exert a deplorable
influence on health and even on the duration of life. The effects are
apparent in the statistics of the country. We here meet with two
extremes, — another of those anomalies which have led us to set up
contrast as the law of Russia. This is one of the countries where
mortality is highest, the average of life shortest ; it is also one of
those where we find the most numerous cases of longevity, where
human life attains its uttermost limits. This opposition is espe-
cially striking in the northern regions. Thus, in the government
of Novgorod, out of a population of one million souls, there died in
one year (1871), thirty-nine persons a hundred years old or more,
a fact which presupposes the existence of others of the same age.*
Side by side with this phenomenon, the number of persons who
have passed their thirty-fifth year is, in all Russia, proportionately
lower than in France, while those having passed their sixtieth

* In 1878 the Procurator of the Holy Synod, in his report for 1875, gave
362 as the number of all the centenarians deceased in that year in the Ortho-
dox population.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. I49

year are only half as numerous — not fifty in a thousand, to a
hundred and over, in France.*

It is especially the children on whom mortality descends.
Under such a sky, the apprenticeship to life is harder, the child
needs more care, and the care is not so easy to give. It suffers
from the difficulty of breathing the air, from that of artificial
nursing ; it suffers even from the distances which, during the
working season, compel the mother to leave it untended for many
long hours. Delicate infants are doomed ; only the stronger ones
survive, to be subjected to an ordeal which, every year, is fatal
to many. They undergo, at the hand of death, a series of sitt-
ings which successively eliminates the weaklings, until only the
robust are left, for life and reproduction.

It would seem as though, in a population subjected to this kind
of continuous selection, a vigorous temperament should be a com-
mon thing. Unfortunately it is far from always being the case. In
this country of high statures and frequent longevity, where men
six feet high live to a hundred, strength is more frequently appar-
ent than real. The climate, which in a few years corrodes granite,
is, in the long run, exceedingly depressing, debilitating. The
lymphatic temperament prevails in Russia. Scrofula is habitual,
contagious diseases are common, easy to take and difficult to cure.
What is most to be dreaded is not severe frost, nor even the great
contrast between the rigor of winter and the blazing heat of
summer ; it is the intermediary seasons, with their long alterna-
tives of frost and thaw, lasting sometimes for months, with
abrupt variations of temperature, the difference amounting to as
many as 20°. In these oppositions, in this instability of the
climate, all diseases, all epidemics find favorable conditions,
intensified, too, by insufficient nourishment. Owing to greater
drjnaess of the atmosphere, at least in the centre and east, lung

* In the northern governments, the proportion is greater, reaching sixty-
three to the thousand, while in some of the southern ones, as in that of Kief,
it descends under thirty.

ISO THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

diseases are less prevalent than they are in England. In com-
pensation, however, smallpox, typhoid fevers, puerperal fevers,
diphtheria, and many more, break out periodically amidst the
ill-fed, ill-sheltered populations, and their ravages are terrible.*

If the higher classes have a diet more in accordance with the
latitude, their mode of life frequently robs them of the benefit
they should derive from it. Nowhere else is the natural order
of waking and sleep inverted to such an extent ; nowhere else
is night so universally turned into day. That also may be an
indirect eflfect of the climate, which, in the North, suppresses by
turns both day and night, or exaggerates beyond measure the one
at the expense of the other.

To the debilitating influence of the climate are added habits
tending to intensify the nervous sensibilities. The very precau-
tions to which the cold compels are unhealthy. To resist the
winter, people must live in a heavy, thick atmosphere of vitiated
air, rarely renewed : to protect themselves against excessive cold,
they must accumulate beforehand a reserve fund of warmth, and
fabricate in the house, with the help of fires and stoves, an arti-
ficial climate almost as hot as summer in the south of Europe.

* For the greater part of the popalation who include meat into their
habitual diet, this article of food may have lost some of it properties in
consequence of the proceeding used in preserving it The meat and fish
needed through the season are allowed to freeze hard in the beginning of
the winter. This singularly facilitates transport and provisioning ; but it
is just possible that such meat, thawed before cooking, may be less whole-
some than fresh meat.*

• This evil is really not as great as it would seem. When properly treated
just before cooking, the meats and certain large fish, fresh and salt, do not
perceptibly lose in flavor smd nutritiveness, and as to game and venison, we
almost never get it any other way in large cities in winter. For long winter
journeys in the north, where travellers would go hungry but for the provi-
sions they carry, certain articles of food containing minced meat are
cooked, then frozen, and packed into boxes. As much as is required for
a meal is thawed, seasoned, and warmed at the stopping-places. The plan
works admirably. The greatest inconvenience of the frozen-meat system
is that it gives facilities to unprincipled dealers for disposing of wholesale
quantities of tainted meat, and the fraud is discovered only in the pur-
chaser's kitchen. The police have much to do to watch the winter markets
on account of this abuse.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. Ijl

Tbe lower the temperature out-doors, the higher it must rise
in-doors. Behind their double windows, calked with oakum and
putty for the entire season, city folks convert their apartments
into hothouses, where they breathe the same air as the tropical
plants with which they love to decorate their dwellings. In his
log cabin — izbh, — frequently surrounded with a rampart of manure,
the peasant and his whole family crowd around the huge oven,
on top of which they all sleep at night. Out of this enervating
atmosphere people must, every day, emerge into the icy out-door
air ; after laying up a supply of warmth for the blood and limbs,
a supply of air must be taken into the lungs. And so they go
continually, during several months, back and forth, from house
to street, the difference between the two temperatures oscillating
between 40° and 50°, — ^which is the same as though one were to
pass several times in the same day from a southern summer to a
northern winter, from the shores of the Red to those of the
White Sea.

The climate is hardly more favorable to cleanliness than to
health. The houses, every chink of which is hermetically stuffed
up against the winter, are difficult to keep clean. The stoves, the
only agents of heating, cannot purify the air of the rooms into
which they do not open. Wealthy or well-to-do families remedy
this inconvenience by the size of the apartments, which open into
one another and are kept in constant free communication, with
frequent burning of perfumes. The peasant is condemned to live
in a stifling atmosphere redolent with miasms. The warm and
infected air of his cabin hatches out myriads of insects ; it teems
with all kinds of vermin. Out-doors, the filth thrown out all
around the house vanishes in the snow to reappear with unim-
paired fetidity in spring. Even in the cities the refuse is not
always carried away by the sewers, as these are often shut off by
ice ; rendered harmless by frost, it keeps, and on the first warm
days, fills the streets with pernicious exhalations. Nothing can
equal the stench of a Russian thaw in the cities. The snow which,

152 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

under the sleighs' runners, was like sand or pounded glass, is
transformed into a thick, nauseous slush, which pedestrians bring
into the houses on their feet." Under such sanitary conditions,
is it to be wondered at that the people fall an easy prey to every
epidemic, and that even the plague itself still occasionally puts
in an appearance in European Russia ? *

The necessity of keeping the body well covered is in itself,
for the people, an obstacle to cleanliness as well as to hygiene.
The peasant sleeps in his clothes, and lives night and day in the
same sheepskin — tulhp. True, he takes a vapor bath once a
week, on Saturdays, the Sabbath eve, as an act of ritualistic puri-
fication. Unfortunately, he is compelled to get into the same
clothes, teeming as they are with vermin. In winter he rarely
takes them oflf on any other day, the only one, too, on which he
changes his underwear, when he has some ; ofttimes, when he
owns no change, he washes his shirt after his bath, before putting
it on again. Every village has its vapor bathhouse, — wretched
wooden hovels, where vapor is generated by pouring water on a
hot stone hearth ; a few inclined boards are used as couches by the
bathers ; handfuls of shredded bark or linden rods take the place
of sponges and washing-gloves. Whether it came down from the
Greeks, the ancient Slavs, or the Finns, f this custom is perhaps
more conducive to health than even to cleanliness. The vapor
bath, often followed by an immersion into snow or ice-water, is a
violent stimulant under a debilitating climate ; the only one,
besides alcohol, within the mujik's means ; they are to him an

"* See Appendix to this Chapter, No. 4.

♦ The contact with Asia is, in this respect, a great danger ; that is why
the plague is so often reported in the Russian annals. That which raged
in the government of Astrakhan, in 1879, was probably imported from
Turkish Asia in consequence of the Armenian campaign. It performed
one good office anyhow, by drawing the attention of the government and
the local authorities to the badness of popular hygiene.

t Vapor baths are still in general use among the Finns of Finland,
where they appear to have been handed down from remote antiquity. They
are frequently mentioned in the Kalevala. See, f. ex.. Rune iv. and 1.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 153

equivalent of the mineral waters to which, and for the same
reasons, the Russians of the higher classes are so partial. '

Public opinion, which credits northern countries with a higher
degree of morality, is not always more correct in this than when
it ascribes to them greater cleanliness. In Russia the climate does
not favor, if not morality, at least refinement. True, the great
number and precocity of marriages diminish the number of natural
children ; this however, is an unreliable gauge to measure popular
virtue by. It is to be noted that in Russia, from various causes,
the illegitimate births are much more numerous in the north than
in the south, although the former counts fewer cities.* The winter
redusion, the long nights, the crowding of the family within one
room, around one hearth, the sleep in common on top of the broad
stove that serves as bed to the entire household — all these condi-
tions are not exactly conducive to the sanctity of domestic life.
Dreadful abuses frequently resulted therefrom in the times, quite
recent still, when several families dwelt together under the roof of
the family-chief. The custom of bathing in common, even though
the sexes are kept strictly separate, so that none of those scenes
come to pass for which travellers formerly used to reprove them,t —
this most wholesome custom may have tended to entertain in the
peasant a certain coarseness. With both sexes decency seems less
strict than in the West, modesty is less easily alarmed, both men
and women appear to take less thought of their nudity. In summer,

" See Appendix to this Chapter, No. 5.

* One cause of the greater proportion of natural children in the north
is the absence of so many of the men, who go towards the centre in search
of work, leaving the female population greatly in excess of the male. The
average rate of illegitimate births in Russia is about three per cent., one
of the lowest figures in Europe, outside of Greece.'*

f For instance the Abb6 Chappe d'Auteroche, to whom Catherine 11.
took the trouble of replying herself in her Antidote.

'* Matters of course were a great deal worse in the times of Emperor
Nicolas, when a man could be taken from his family to be sent away as
soldier, for a term of service never under twenty years. The young wife's
utter helplessness under these unnatural conditions could not but produce
great leniency in the local public opinion.

154 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the traveller is often shocked in this respect. Along the rivers, in
the towns and villages on the Don and the Volga more particularly,
it is not unusual, especially on Saturdays, the day set apart for
ablutions by custom and religion, to see girls and women, with no
garment of any kind, disport themselves in troops in scarcely
sheltered spots, sometimes even under the most frequented bridges.
If, as people say, temperaments are colder and the senses blunter
in the North, there is, as a set-off, less delicacy in feelings and
sensations.

APPENDIX TO BOOK IIL, CHAPTER I.— NO. i. (See p. 139, note i.)

The title kniaz (sound the A strongly) is usually rendered "Prince,"
which is terribly misleading, but probably not to be helped. The only
proper way would be to use original national titles without translating them.
But all nations object to that, and so the Anglo-Saxon " Earl " has become
" Graf" in the Teutonic languages, and " Count " in the Latin ones. Histori-
cally the kniaz was the sovereign of a given domain, or principality. The
first known kniazes were Rurik and his immediate descendants. At first
they were few, and the domains, continually enlarged by conquest, exten-
sive, so there was great power and real royalty attached to the title. But
the families multiplied, and as no privilege belonged to primogeniture in
the matter of landholding, the domains, which were treated as private pos-
sessions, — the state-idea being embodied only in the various kniazes' alle-
giance to the head of the family, the " Grand-Kniaz" (commonly translated
" Grand-Duke), who resided in Kief, — were parcelled and re-parcelled out
to provide for all the young kniazes bom into Rurik's house, just as com-
munal lands in our day are re-distributed to meet the needs of a village
community. So there came to be a very multitude of kniazes, with ever
decreasing power and territories ; moreover, habitually and hereditarily at
daggers drawn with one another. These two hundred years — eleventh to
thirteenth centuries — are the "dark ages" of our history, and it is im-
possible to say to what depth of degradation and even penury the House of
Rurik might have sunk, had not the Tatars come, and, in a certain sense,
wiped out the past and made of the future a tabula rasa, on which the
kniazes of Moscow, risen from obscurity, in obscurity and even meanness
grown and strengthened, with a grand polaf purpose ever before them, to

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 155

redeem and ennoble their apparently abject policy, were to write a new and
very diflFerent tale. The kniazes of the old and degenerated line still
remained, a title being an unalienable birthright common to all the members
of a family down to all times and posterity, but gradually settled into the
condition of mere landlords, owners of estates — in a word, country gentle-
men, with a claim, by courtesy, on court favours, state charges, honorable
missions, and the like. Then came a time when the title — the only national
one — began to be conferred at pleasure as a reward for state services, usually
with lands attached. After this all vestiges of lingering royalty departed
from the kniazes, who merely form a higher layer of nobility, whose posi-
tion in life — eminent or obscure, wealthy or penniless — has nothing to do
with their title, but is subject to the usual conditions and vicissitudes.
There stiU are a number of families who can trace themselves back to
Rurik, but several have lost or dropped the title by the way.

As for the word itself, it has come down a long way and tells the story
of its mighty past : it is the Slavic equivalent of the Teutonic chuning,
konung, konig, king, and equally derived with the Sanskrit jdnaka, which
originally meant both "king " and " father."

APPENDIX TO BOOK IH., CHAPTER I.— NO. 2. (See p. 145, note 5.)

The cabbage soup referred to is made out of sour cabbage (almost identi-
cal with the German Sauerkraut) and water, without meat, and has received
from the people the grimly humorous designation of "empty shtshi."
Cooked with fresh fat beef, which is served in it cut up into good-sized
pieces, and enriched with a teacupful of thick sour (or clotted) cream —
stnietdna — it is the national soup and — a dish for kings. Mr. Beaulieu for-
gets the obligato accompaniment — buckwheat baked porridge. It is much
like oatmeal, only that, after having been steamed for a while, it is finished
in the oven, — invariably in an earthenware pot of a peculiar shape, probably
as old as the race. This is the renowned kctsha, the fragrance of which,
when the thick, hard crust has been removed and the rich golden butter
mixed in, haunts an exile's hours of gloom and gives homesickness a tan-
gible form. For this porridge and the cabbage pottage — shtshi da kdsha —
are the staple standby of every Russian table without exception, beginning
with the Emperor's own, and the very name is replete with associations,
national and personal, since there is not one of us but has grown up on it
and the wholesome, toothsome, literally " black bread," made of honest.

156 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

unmixed, unbolted rye meal ; and the same triad, so national as to have be
come almost symbolical, has greeted us on every board we have been invited
to, both where it was merely an accessory, ushering in an elaborate French
banquet in graceful acknowledgment of the common bond of nationality —
and where hospitality had nothing else, besides a hearty welcome and " with
God's blessing" (s Bbgomt) to bestow. Yes ! Shtshi da khsha, and black
ryebread (tchdmoy hliib, the latter word, by the way, identical with the
Anglo-Saxon hlaib, "bread," and German laib, "a loaf"), and the ubiqui-
tously steaming, friendly samovhr, whether of silver or brass, with its glit-
tering tea-equipage, whether of egg-shell china or homely stoneware — these
embody Russian family life, from tsar to peasant, from cradle to grave.

APPENDIX TO BOOK III., CHAPTER I.— NO. 3. (See p. 145, note 6.)

The name "I/ent " properly belongs only to the forty days of fasting,
meagre fare, and mortification of the flesh generally, preceding the Easter
festival in the Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches and their branches.
But what other name can be found for the three analogous periods in the
Greek Church year ? Six weeks before Christmas, a fortnight before the
feast of Peter and Paul (29th of June), and another fortnight before the
Assumption of the Virgin (15th of August). The fare prescribed is the same
for all and makes us smile at what the Catholics call Lent : it means simply
abstention from all animal food, under which head come not only the various
meats of fowl and quadruped, but milk, butter, and eggs. The almost uni-
versal use of fish is in reality a concession to the degeneracy of modem con-
stitutions and religious zeal, not extended to the clergy, especially the Black
Clergy (monks and nuns). The moderately pious among laymen abstain from
fish during the first week of I/cnt, the fourth and the last (Holy Week). It is
astonishing how far mushrooms will go as substitute for meat. We have a
dozen edible varieties, all of them wholesome, nourishing food, and some
ranking with the choicest delicacies. The woods are as full of them as of
berries, and the children of each family spend half the long summer days
gathering them. Indeed, that and "berrying" are the chief national sum-
mer amusements in which young and old share with almost equal zest in
the better classes, affording endless fun in the way of family and social pic-
nicking, hay rides in springless farm wagons, etc. For the poor it is not a
question of amusement and housewives' rival display of skill in preserving,
pickling, drying, but actually a vital matter ; and dire indeed would be the

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 157

■winter prospects but for the chaplets of little shrivelled, leather-like black-
ish morsels strung up along the rafters of the living-room in the izbcL, eked
out by a few strings of onions and, down in the cellar, a heap of those huge
black-skinned, terribly strong radishes, — half-way between the pink-and-
white table radish and the violent tear-compelling horseradish, — which,
seasoned with various kinds of oil, yield a wholesome though coarse relish
to relieve the monotony of the everlasting dry black bread. Green hemp-
seed oil is the staple article of the poor, though, as an acquired taste, with
that same black radish, it is cultivated by many a blast aristocratic palate.
Not, however, with k&sha, in lieu of butter, as the common people use it in
I^nt time. Other oils, as rape seed and especially sunflower-seed oil, are very
acceptable substitutes in cooking, and even pastry. The Lenten fare of the
average well-to-do-family table, by long practice and ingenuity, reaches a
highly respectable standard of excellence. It is a special branch of the art,
and the skill and inventiveness displayed by high-toned club and restaurant
cooks are crucial tests, so that many a church magnate — bishop or archbishop
— takes pride in his Ivcnten fare as the crowning perfection of his establish-
ment. Indeed the variety that can be attained in this seemingly poor and
limited field — of course with fish included — is a constant source of amaze-
ment to foreigners. The fish soups are renowned, and the king of them all,
the sterlet soup, can compare, for richness of flavor and costliness of material,
only with the turtle soup of aldermanic fame. The daintiness of the des-
serts is unsurpassed — and no wonder, when there is the whole range of dried
and candied fruits, jellies and syrups, and the place of milk and cream is
taken by a substitute which every Russian woman knows how to prepare
out of almonds pounded in a mortar with water measured according to the
thickness and strength desired. That tea and coffee whitened and flavored
with "almond milk" or " almond cream " are uniquely delicious beverages,
is known to few outside of Russia. To sum up : the wealthy and fairly
prosperous are not as much to be pitied as would seem at first sight if they
are rigid observers of the Church canons in matters of food, although the
prolonged deprivation of meat, milk, and eggs tells on most modem consti-
tutions, for the palate is as frequently the gainer as the loser. How far such
I/cnten fare, requiring far more thought, care, and elaborateness in the prep-
aration than ordinary meat fare, answers the original religious object of the
institution, is a question which does not belong here. For the poor, the Lent
periods are times of increased hardship and most debilitating want of nour-
ishment The specially appointed fast-days are equally severe for all. The

158 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

two principal are the eve of Christmas and that of Twelfth Night. On these
days neither food nor water must pass the lips from midnight until the
rising of the evening star. This is the reason why a Christmas tree on
Christmas Eve is an impossibility. The tree may be lit on Christmas night
or any night of the ensuing week (the school holidays lasting from Christ-
mas Eve to Twelfth Night — 6th of January), but the usual time is New Year's
Eve. It is a comfort to know that children, up to seven years, are exempted
both from fasting and Lent fare ; from seven to fourteen the severity of the
observances is considerably alleviated for them. A far larger proportion of
the higher classes than is usually suppKJsed are church goers and strict
observers of Lents, fasts, etc. Then there are those who do in this line as
much as they think fit or absolutely necessary for their souls' welfare, or —
for respectability. The entirely emancipated, to which number the bodies
of literature, science, and art belong almost without exception, form the
class best known to foreigners. In this respect again Petersburgh is far
ahead of Moscow, where it is not impossible to find old-time piety combined
with distinction in these careers.

APPENDIX TO BOOK UI., CHAPTER I.— NO. 4. (See p. 152, note 10.)

All that our author says about the out-door eflFects of the spring thaw and
about the atmosphere in the rural izbh is unfortunately true in every detail.
But his strictures on the city dwellings in this respect are unfounded. Our
heating system, which we have in common with all the extreme north of
Europe — Sweden, Norway, Denmark and some of the northernmost parts of
Germany — is the only perfect one, combining the power of regulating the
heat within half a degree, evenness of temperature throughout the dwelling,
active ventilation, and great economy of fuel. The valves in the flues, by
which we can let in the outer air, are six or eight inches in diameter ;
there are two by the side of each stove, accessible by a little door opening
into the room, and can be opened just as much or as little as desired. They
are of course wide open during the hour or so which it takes the stove to
consume its daily armful of wood, or — in the south — pail of coal. Such is
the allowance for twenty-four hours, and only on extremest cold days, not
thirty in the winter, is it doubled and the firing operation repeated after
twelve hours. The perfect protection afforded by the putting up for winter
of duplicate window frames calked all round the edges, with sometimes a
strip of felt nailed over the putty for greater security, is scarcely to be counted

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 59

a defect, and is surely preferable to the expensive and only half-efficient
weatherstrips of this and other countries. In one at least of the windows
of each room there is a pane made with hinges, to open and close. It is
kept open in the morning while the chamberwork is being done, and is
opened for as long as the cold allows several times in the day, though to do so
is not always easy, as the edge often freezes hard and the ice must be broken
to get the pane to work. On the sill the interval between the two window
frames is filled, to the height of some three inches, with sand, in which are
stuck a few small paper cornucopias filled with coarse salt, a great absorber
of moisture. Owing to all these precautions the atmosphere of the dwel-
lings is singularly free from dampness, consequently cannot be called "a
hothouse atmosphere" ; and it is further corrected by the universally popu-
lar window-gardens, and the tall, large-leaved foliage plants which are such
favorites for both decorative and sanitary reasons.

APPENDIX TO BOOK III., CHAPTER I.— NO. 5. (See p. 153, note 11.)

A man who takes an obligatory thorough washing once a week, cannot
be personally very dirty. For a Russian of the lower classes it is, besides,
a matter of religious duty to wash his hands before " touching bread." For
the same reason the table is kept scrupulously scoured, and is washed down
every time a meal is to be spread on it, and the dishes, bowls, and platters are
treated likewise. If the family can aflFord it, the table is covered with a
snow-white linen cloth, homespun and homewoven. " Bread," the symbol
of food, of life, has still much of the veneration of primeval ages clinging to
it ; it is not to be played with or frittered away by the children or wasted in
any way, and no crumbs must be suffered to fall to the ground ; they may be
collected and served as food for the chickens, or scattered about for " God's
little birds," — a pretty custom which we can trace to one of the daily offer-
ings prescribed to the Brahmans by ancient Hindu law. What Mr. Beaulieu
says about the condition of the peasants' clothing neutralizing the effects of
the daily bath, cannot be disputed, but it applies only to the very poor. A
well-to-do peasant family often has a bathroom of its own and always suffi-
cient change of raiment. In this as in so many respects, things stand worst
in towns, in factory quarters, and others crowded with the poorer laboring
class. But in the capitals, and in due time in the larger cities, great and
thoughtful improvements have been made in the public baths. The most
to the point is the arrangement providing for the bather's shirt and trousers

l60 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

being laandried and dried ready for him when he retnms to the dressing-room
if he has no change, and a certain iron press closet in which his tulUp (sheep-
skin) is subjected to a degree of dry heat which entirely frees it from vermin.
They say that the floor of that closet seems strewn with a black powder
and most be swept out every couple of hours. These two items, incalculably
beneficial as they are, are included in the charge for the use of the bath-
rooms— from two to five cents, according to accommodation, of which there
are three grades for the common people, apart from the really luxurious pub-
lic bathrooms, with carpets, marble swimming basins, attendants, etc. (from
fifteen to twenty-five cents a person), and the private suites of three rooms —
dressing-room, washing-room with wooden benches all around, bath tub, and
a sufficiency of wooden buckets and brass basins, and the small vapor room
with its shelves along one wall. These suites, which occupy a separate part
of the building, opening on both sides of a long corridor, cost from fifty cents
to two dollars, according as they are fitted up, and you are not limited as
to time — within reasonable boimds, say an hour and a half, or two houis.

BOOK III. CHAPTER II.

The Russian Character and the Struggle against the Climate— The North
far from Being the Natural Cradle of Liberty— Resignation, Passiveness,
and Hardening in Evil— Practical Spirit and Realistic Instincts — Impres«
sions Received from Nature ; her Sadness — Her Grandeur and Poverty-
Effects of these Contrasts— On the So-Called Nomadic Tendencies
of the Russians — The Monotony of Great-Russia and the Lack of
Originality.

The direct influence of climate on the human organ-
ism and habits, on the physical and economical conditions of
existence, is neither the only nor perhaps the deepest one. Nature
indirectly exerts a considerable influence over the thoughts, the
feelings, the entire character, by the passions she provokes and
the faculties she calls into play. The first remark suggested by
the physical formation of Great-Russia is that life there, more than
anjrvehere else, is a strife against nature, a hand to hand combat
against an ever-present and unvanqtiished foe. Under that sky
man cannot, as in more temperate climes, forget his adversary ;
nor can he ever completely triumph over that foe, and even while
struggling for the land foot for foot, he is often made to yield
before a superior force. Hence several apparently incompatible
traits of the Russian national character. This warfare is first of
all a school of patience, resignation, submissiveness. Unable to
sUp his neck from under the yoke of nature, he has borne that of
man more patiently ; the one has bent and fashioned him for the
other. The tyranny of climate prepared him for man's absolute
power. The object of all his striving being bare existence, des-
potism weighed on him less. We should not indiscriminately
II

l6i

l62 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

acquiesce in the ancient theory which set down the peoples of the
North as apt for freedom and those of the South as doomed to
bondage. At a certain latitude, in a g^ven environment of phys-
ical conditions, the North can bow the souls as well as the bodies,
and culture alone can raise and straighten them. The grand
advantage the North possesses, is that there the liberating
eflficiency of culture is always possible, while in tropical countries
the final success remains still doubtful.

One of the qualities that have been most developed by the
climate and the strife against nature, is passive courage, endur-
ance, negative energy, the power of inertia. Hardening endurance
has long been the Great-Russian's popular ideal. This feeling is
very apparent in an old national game, a sort of rustic boxing
match, in which the combatants vied not in strength and skill,
but in endtu^ance, the victor being not he who floored his antago-
nist, but he who could take most hard knocks without crying out
for mercy. I^ife, at one with history, has fashioned the Great-
Russian to a stoicism, the heroism of which he himself is not
conscious of. Nobody can suflFer like a Russian ; no one can die
like him. In the quiet courage with which he faces suffering and
death, there is something of the stolid resignation of the captive
Indian, ennobled, however, by serene religious conviction.'

The first time I met a Russian peasant was is 1868, in Palestine,
in March, at the beginning of I^nt. I was camping out, under a

' Nowhere does the Riissian's genuineness, earnestness, simplicity shine
forth with a steadier and clearer light than on the deathbed, the battlefield,
the scaffold. His inveterate hatred of cant, his contempt of " phrase,"
" attitude," catchwords (which, by the way, makes him out of sympathy with
hero-worship or what is commonly called so) never leaves him, least of all at
critical points and tragic climaxes. This is why the effective " last words,"
the deliberate " posings " and self-drapings with which men of other nations,
even the great ones, generally think it necessary to emphasize their public
acts and especially the last one of all — death under the public eye with a
view to producing a certain impression, not only does not warm the Russian's
heart or appeal to his admiration, but either jars on him and puts him out
of patience, or leaves him coldly critical, with a curl of the lip not unlike
a sneer.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 63

tent, on the margin of Solomon's Ponds, not far from Bethlehem.
The night had been disturbed by one of those tempests, bearers of
wind and rain, which are of frequent occurrence in Syria at that
time of the year. We had been joined by one of those groups of
Russian pilgrims that walk over the Holy I^and in small gangs,
staff in hand, with no other luggage than a canvas bag and a
wooden bowl. They were all peasants ; there were among them
both men and women ; most of them were aged.* Tired out with
the hardships of a distant journey and a long march, they were
seeking around our tents, or at the foot of ruinous walls, for shelter
against the driving rain. At dawn they wanted to return to the
Greek Convent at Bethlehem ; but, although the distance was not
over a few miles, cold and fatigue prevented several from reaching
it. When their strength gave out, they would drop down on the
ground, and the others would silently pass on, giving them up as
they gave up themselves. We followed them very closely, on
horseback, numb with cold too, and worn out, making for the
lyatin Convent at Bethlehem. I thus came on two of these
peasants, lying on the rocky ground in the pathway, which the
rain had transformed into a rivulet. It was in vain I tried to
raise them, to revive them with rum, to haul them up on a horse ;
they seemed bent on letting themselves die.' When we reached
Bethlehem, we could send out assistance to them. That very
morning one man and two women, Russians, had been found dead
on roads and buried.

It was with the same feeling, the same calm and gentle fatal-
ism that, during the Crimean war, Russian soldiers followed their
leaders across the steppes of the south, marching until totally

* Household cares and the communal authorities rarely allow young
people to embark on these long pilgrimages, whether within the empire or
abroad, of which the lower classes are so fond.

' They probably were. Death such as this, at the goal of the long, weary
pilgrimage on the sacred earth of the Holy Land, is a beatific vision to these
simple, loving souls, as stire and short a cut to Paradise as death in battle to
the Moslem.

164 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

exhausted, when they would die along the roads, by the hundred
thousand, with not a cry of revolt, almost without a moan or
murmur. It was with the same patience, the same resigned
energy that, in the Balkan wars, they stood the extremes of cold,
of heat, of fatigue, of hunger. The Russian soldier is the most
enduring in Europe ; in this respect no other can be compared to
him but his secular adversary, the Turkish soldier. Both have a
capacity for suflfering unknown to the nations of the West. And
yet the Russian people are naturally the least pugnacious, the
least warlike in the world. They never were, at any time.
Whatever conquests they have achieved, they are devoid of con-
quering instincts. Essentially peace-loving, the Russian sees in
war only a scourge to which he submits out of obedience to God
and the Tsar.

From this strife against the climate, which has fashioned him
so well for resignation, the Great-Russian derives two opposite
qualities. Together with a singular mixture of strength and
weakness, of tenacity and elasticity, it has given him a curious
mixture of roughness and good nature, of insensibility and kind-
ness. The ruggedness of the world around him, while hardening
him for himself, teaches him compassion for others. He knows
what it is to suffer, so can sympathize with his neighbor, and
succors him as much as lies within his power. Family feelings,
beneficence towards the poor, pity for the unfortunate of all sorts,
— these are some among the most marked features of the national
character. Contrary to a vulgar prejudice, the Russian, under
his rugged shell, is generally affectionate, gentle, even tender ;
but let him encounter an obstacle, let him engage in a struggle
with an adversary, the latent ruggedness and harshness at once
take the upper hand. In the unceasing struggle against a ruthless
nature, he has learned to respect the laws of war, which he applies
as he endures them — ^with inflexibility.'

*The Russian's mind is intensely theoretical, his conscience rigid in the
extreme, holding all compromises with existing things as dishonest or, at

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 65

It is in those struggles in which Russia's very existence seems
at stake that all these contrasts appear. Otherwise — as was
shown in the French campaign of 18 14, as well as in the Crimean
war — the Russian is the most generous of enemies. Gentle and
compassionate in his private capacity, he can, in his national and
civil struggles, become pitiless as soldier or public servant ; but,
the victory won, he often shows himself again as simply kind as
he just was ingenuously stem. In the country whose sad privi-
lege it was to draw on itself his worst severities, in Poland, I have
sometimes heard pathetic stories told of this contrast in the
Russian character. Here is one, told us by Poles : In one of those
terrible insturrections, the consequences of which still weigh so
heavily on this hapless land, a Russian non-commissioned ofl&cer,
quartered on a Polish family, took the liberty of kissing the child
of the house. In the eyes of the mother, who, like all the Polish
women, was an exalted patriot, this Russian kiss was pollution.
She was pregnant at the time, and committed the imprudence of
giving the offender a box on the ears. Instead of getting angry
or complaining to his chiefs, the Russian sergeant offered his
other cheek and allowed himself to be turned out of the room.
Soon after, he left the town, and, having requested a comrade to
inform him of the birth of the expected child, sent it little chris-
tening gifts.

The Russian has not much comprehension for resistance
unencouraged by the hope of success. Himself accustomed to bow
before fatality, he thinks it but just that other people should do

the best, cowardly. Therefore, once possessed of an idea, they go all
lengths, and therefore, too, should there ever be a Russian revolution, —
which Heaven in its mercy forefend, — the horrors of French '93 will pale
before it. How otherwise could we find among the most ruthless of "ter-
rorists," ready at any moment for wholesale massacre, gentle, soft-eyed
creatures that would take to their bosoms a hurt cur of the streets and go
out of their way not to tread upon an insect? Remember the youth placed
in charge of the mine under " Mikhaylofsky Street " in Petersburgh, who,
when he left his basement chamber, flying from the police, did not forget
to leave on the table the money due to his cat's butcher.

1 66 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

SO too. If he does not worship force, he certainly respects it.
Something like this medley of contrasting feelings is found amongst
the Germans, especially the Prussians * ; but with the latter the
affectionate side is more exclusive, more turned inward, more
selfishly domestic, while the rugged, brutal side is turned more
outward to the world, with a superadded supercilious arrogance
to which the Russian, as a rule, is a stranger.

The faculty which has been aroused most thoroughly in the
Great-Russian by this struggle against a cold and implacable
nature is a practical, positive spirit ; this is the feature by which
chiefly he differs from the L,ittle- Russian and from the western and
southern Slavs.' This predominant quality of his shows in every-
thing, and everything tends to account for it. As one of his '
writers remarks,* it was in the secular labors of colonization that
he contracted this disposition to see in everything the immediate
aim and the realities of life. Hence that presence of mind, that
fiacility in devising ways and means, that wealth of resovu-ces, that
tact in dealing with men and things, which characterize the Great-
Russian. Very perceptible in the people's manners, politics,
literature, this tendency is not less apparent in things where it

* The Prussian people are much mixed with Slavs, and a great part of
them are Prussian only politically and from long habit, not in blood. This
is especially noticeable in the Pomeranians, who, along with their purely
Slavic name — PomoriilniS, " the people by the sea" — have retained a very
pure and handsome Slavic type of features. Morally they are almost en-
tirely germanized, with a superadded stolid obstinacy of their own, much
like that of the Bretons of old Armorica. Does association with the rugged
northern sea produce it in the course of time ?

• This is a feature of our national character very patent to us Russians,
but until now scarcely even suspected by foreigners, who thus lost an im-
portant clue to the Russian nature and its practical workings. The first to
point it out with a precision and surety due to intelligent observation, and to
bring it out in the living form of an artistic creation, was Henri Gr^ville, in
her admirable novel, Un Violon Russe. In this book, by far the best of her
Russian series, everything is caught warm from life — even to the servant
girl who appears just once, to open the door to visitors and go on with her
scrubbing.

♦ Mr. Kav^lin : Thoughts and Notes on Russian History.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 167

would seem most out of place, such as poetry and religion. The
Great-Russian popular songs show little taste for abstractions or
personifications of any sort. No nation has a less metaphysical
turn of mind, or takes less thought of the essence of things. His
favorite sciences, those that most attract him, are the physical sci-
ences, the natural sciences, the social sciences. The whole nation,
the educated classes as well as the ignorant masses, is pervaded
by a more or less conscious positivism. The quality most
esteemed by the peasant is common-sense ; he says his worst
about the Pole when he calls him " brainless." Few nations are
more devoid of sentiment, even while pluming themselves on it.

Indeed, the pretension to practical sense, with the Great-Rus-
sian, at times verges on brutality. Was it not a Russian who
said that a piece of cheese was worth more than a Pushkin ? *
These realistic instincts make themselves felt in literature and in
all the lines of art, notably in painting, in criticism, in history, in
philosophy, or, more correctly, in the absence of philosophy and
metaphysics. The romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth
century, like the classicism of the preceding century, and notwith-
standing the genius of Pushkin and Lermontof, was little else than
an importation fi-om abroad. Nowadays the national literature
belongs, and has belonged for quite a while already, almost
entirely to realism or naturalism. Of all foreign writers, the one

* This piece of criticism was beaten by one of the would-be prophets of
" the last word of science," (how sick Russian ears have grown of the sound
of that phrase — and a few others !) magazine reviewers, who retailed at third
hand the materialistic theories of Feuerbach, Moleschott, etc. On one
occasion he went into a rage against poetry in general, and became especially
rampant against Shakespeare. Shakespeare ? Faugh ! What was the good
oi him ? What was" the sense of him ? Why, there was more sense in " soft-
boiled boots." The expression has become a by-word and a classic. It was
the same wiseacre — or another of that ilk — who, in reviewing Victor Hugo's
Toilers of the Sea, fell foul of one of the poet's sweetest creations, his
" Bird-Girl," and triumphantly demonstrated in a lengthy anatomical
dissertation that only an ignorant fool could liken a human being to a
bird. Pretty work he would make of Austin Dobson's gem, charming
Avice !

l68 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

most read and relished is Zola, whom one of their novelists * calls
*' The Hercules of Naturalism," — Zola, who has long numbered
more admirers among the Russians than among his own
countrymen.

Nothing is as complex as the character of a man, how much
more that of a nation. After having portrayed one side of it, one
is bound to present the opposite side, under penalty of producing
a deceptive likeness. In Russia, as elsewhere, nature, which
influences man in so many divers and roundabout ways, does not
always impel him in the same direction. She not only acts on
the temperament through the climate, the diet, and the habits, on
the character through the needs which she imposes, or the faculties
which she stimulates ; she acts, with no less force, on the imagina-
tion and the entire soul through her aspects, through the pictures
she presents, the impressions she arouses. Now, as nature is
nowhere simpler, these impressions are nowhere clearer. One of
the first to be perceived by the traveller is a feeling of sadness.
This sadness emanates from the sky and the climate ; Northern
nations are all more or less touched with it ; in Russia the very
earth, flat and monotonous, exhales it. The Russian of the south
— the Little-Russian — ^is not less subject to it than is he of the north.

The Russian soul is melancholy. If incurable boredom, if
hypochondria or British " spleen " are nevertheless of rarer ocoir-
rence than in England, it is because the climate, being more
rugged, is far less moist and misty ; possibly also because the
Russian's sadness is tempered or dispelled by his sociability, one
of the qualities most generally common to all the Slavs, one
which, in Russia, the enforced seclusion of winter with its long
nights has done most to foster and develop. The Russian's relish
for pleasure and emotions, his love of travelling, his passion for
gambling, even his propensity to drink, frequentiy are with him,
as with many other nations of the North, only an effort to forget,
or to fill an inner void.

* Bobor^kin.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 69

It is in the poetry and music of the people, in the songs or
**pihni'' of Great-Russia, — those songs which Herzen used to
call "sounding tears," — in those "airs" of slow rhythm and in
minor keys, that the native melancholy, bred of soil and clime,
finds its fullest expression. Between the Russian songs and the
canzoni of Naples and Sicily, all sun-imbued, there is a distance
as between the antipodes. In these popular songs, a cloud of soft
sadness casts elegiac shades over the realistic background of the
national character. In literature and cultured poetry, this sadness
assumes a bitterer, intenser flavor. From I^ermontof and Pushkin
to Nekrdssof and Tititchef, the poetry of all the schools is impreg-
nated with it ; it makes itself felt in the life as well as in the works
of all these poets, most of whom died young, and some tragically.
" Sadness, scepticism, irony — these are the three chords of Russian
poetry " wrote Herzen, who might have quoted himself as an ex-
ample. "Our laugh," he further remarked, " is but an imwhole-
some grin." * The fact is that Gbgol's sarcastic mirth is at times
more heartrending than that of the sombrest English humorists.

This sort of melancholy, inspired by the climate and entertained
by the political rSgime, at times inclines the Russian soul to a
mysticism which prevails over its realistic instincts, or combines
with them in strange ways — witness more than one popular reli-
gious sect, and many a national writer, such as Juk6vsky, G5gol,
Dostoy^fsky, Tolstoy. Between this spontaneous sadness, at
times streaked with spells of joviality, and the kind of pessimism
so prominent in several ignorant sects as well as in the nihilism
of literary youths, it is equally easy to find a link.

In the lower classes, this unconscious melancholy frequently
appears wedded to a resigned fatalism, and the outcome is a
tranquillity, a sort of placidity which fills one with wonder. In
crowds, in games, in his cups even, the Great-Russian is, as a
rule, peaceable and not noisy. Very little quarrelling or riot-
ousness, among men as well as among children. A crowd, silent
* TTie Russian People and Socialism.

I70 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

as nature herself,— as the snow, which, in the streets of cities,
muffles the sound of footsteps.

In order better to enter into the feelings of such a crowd, let
us figure to ourselves the impressions gathered through centuries
by the colonists from the West, during their slow settling on the
soil of Great-Russia. Face to face with these expanses as bound-
less as the sea, man felt small. The consciousness of his power
dwindled before the vastness of the land which encompassed him,
and which, down even to our own times, he felt incapable of
filling. These lakes and swamps, unntmibered and unbounded,
these rivers which no bridge could span, these forests without
end, these steppes with no horizon but the sky-line, — all these
things brought home to him his inferiority.

If we would analyze the chief outer features, we shall see that
all the impressions produced by Russian nature can be summed
up in the word ' ' contrast ' ' : the pictiures presented to man by
Great-Russia show him his own smallness without making him
realize the energies of nature. It is not only by its extent that this
land dwarfs man : it attunes the imagination to dreams and vague
musings, without supplying, as in the South, materials for food
and warmth, /. e. , that which trains it to the gorgeous poetry which
we admire in the poems of India or Greece. Flat and bare, dull
and inert, this nature has not much to stimulate the mind with,
little nourishment for poetry and art. It is not very apt to suggest
powerful conceptions or brilliant imagery. Even by its meagre
fertility, the Russian soil is often inferior to the desert in its nudity,
where, at least, nothing dwarfs the impression of immensity.'

^ It is natural for a foreigner to think so, -whose necessarily transient
stay could not attune his soul to the tranquillity and inner silence, — fr-
cuHllement — which would open it to the subtle charm, the mystery of local
influences, repugnant, moreover, with their northern and oriental melan-
cholia to his Latin temperament. But we are passionately fond of our
steppe, our plains, our woods, and even a cursory acquaintance with our
poets, novelists, and painters would suffice to show that art and poetry find
therein ample and substantial food.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. \J\

The land formerly called Moscovia is devoid of all those grand,
spectacular attractions by which nature amazes and uplifts the
spirit. It has neither motmtains nor sea, and lacks the impulse
which life by the sea or in the mountains gives to individuality.
Its forests, sparse and stunted in size, lack majesty ; most of its
numerous lakes have flat margins, like big pools. Russia has
been denied the grand scenery of the North. She has no surf-
beaten coasts ; no steep, beetling islands ; no gulfs or sinuous
fjords; no granite rocks or glaciers; no torrents or waterfalls.
She has no share in the mighty nature which has begotten the
rugged myths of the North ; she has little of anything that stirs
and stimulates the personaUty.

Russian nature has two opposite characteristics : amplitude and
vacuity — ^wealth of space and scarcity of contents to fill it. Huge
areas show no variety, either of forms or colors. In live and
inanimate nature alike, there is an absolute want of grandeur and
power. Picturesqueness is either totally absent or appears on
such a minimum scale as leaves it imperceptible to a foreigner's
eye. Travelling over these undulating plains, where towns and
villages are sparsely scattered, produces almost the same feeling
of satiety as a sea-voyage. When embarked on a long railway
trip, one can, just as on board a steamer, close one's eyes at night
and reopen them the next morning without being made aware of
a change of locality. Only some few cities, rising in tiers on the
margin of rivers or lakes, with their old walls and colored
cupolas, such as Kief, the two Nbvgorods, Pskof, Kazan, present
from a distance an imposing front. The very size of the rivers
impairs their beauty ; it is in vain that one bank rises into high
acclivity, sometimes overgrown with handsome trees ; no matter
how fine in themselves, they are always too low for the width of
the stream and look crushed. This disproportion mars the most
beautiful portions of the Dniepr, the Don, the Volga. For instance,
in the great bend the latter describes between Stavrbpol and
Syzr^, where " Mother Volga " opens a road for herself through

1/2 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

a range of steep hills, perhaps equal in height to those on the
Rhine, the Danube, or the Nile, the width of the river exceeds the
height of the hills, so they look dwarfed and the effect is lost.
Everything in Russia suffers from this want of proportion between
the vertical section and the horizontal plan of the landscapes.
Perhaps the most truly picturesque scenery is presented by the
calm ponds that lie in the desert forests, the ravines dug in the
steppe by the melting snows, the wooded glens through which a
slow river winds its silent course.

This reliefless soil is overspread by a vegetation lacking both
vigor and variety. Nature repeats herself everywhere, — same
species, same plants, same trees. The similarity that pervades
the conditions of life brings about the sameness of live creatures,
while the rigor of the climate weakens them. Free nature in
Great-Russia shows the monotony that, in other parts of the
world, man inflicts on nature enslaved. In this respect, the
wooded zone, which comprises the vastest and oldest portion of
Great-Russia, has not much the advantage of the zone denuded
of trees. The forests are, if an5rthing, of poorer aspect than the
steppe, since the latter, in spring, dons its luxuriant grass robe.
Fine trees are rare and scarcely to be met with outside of certain
favored regions of the centre or west. The species are the same
as in Sweden and Norway, but without their vigor. Instead of
giving vent to the exuberance, the energy of an ever-youthful
nature, these forests give you an impression of powerlessness, of
indigence, lassitude. The trees now are poorly, stunted, small,
and old-looking, now again they are slim and lanky, without
being tall, and cast but scant shade on the bare ground beneath
them. What most strikes the eye is the everlasting contrast of
pine and birch, with their respectively reddish and white-bark
trunks ; the pine straight and bare with its meagre head, the
birch with its slender limbs, with its minute foliage.

The fields offer still less variety than the woods. The soil does
not receive at man's hands the animation and variety which they

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 73

impart to it in other countries. The cultivated crops are stricken
with the same monotony as the spontaneous vegetation. You
seldom see those different and adjoining crops which lend such
life to the fields in the West. You might take it all for one and
the same field, stretching away into the infinite, were it not
broken now and then by a strip of fallow land. No hamlet, no
homestead, not even isolated farmhouses. In the steppe as well
as in the forest, the Russian husbandman seems afraid of finding
himself alone in the midst of the immensity which encloses him
on every side. Community of landed property, in general use
among the peasants, increases the defect of nature ; it deprives
Russian rural scenery of those enclosures, those fancifully shaped
fences which go for much in the charm of the villages in England
and Normandy. Thence partly come the sad flatness, the dull
wearisomeness of this impersonal, collective country, where the
fields are undivided or cut up into long, even, and symmetrical
strips.

This liking for common property, for association and the kind
of organization known in Russia under the name of arf^l, has
frequently been ascribed to Slavic blood. It is more likely that
it has its chief sources not so much in race as in nature on one
hand, and in a given stage of civilization on the other. The
persistency of agricultural communities in Great-Russia, this
desire to crowd together, to live in close vicinity, is certainly not
unconnected with the cold immensity of space wherein man, if
isolated, feels lost and powerless.*

' Isolation in the midst of hostile populations has the same effect, and
produced among the Balkan Slavs — Serbs, Bosnians, Bulgars — those famous
family communes or "brotherhoods" — the Zadrugas — to which those
persecuted branches of our race owe the preservation of their national
consciousness, their inspiriting traditions, and — more prosaically — their
safety. Each is an embryo state, a survival of primeval patriarchism ; a
fossil, but instinct with life and with beating heart. When the necessity for
them ceases, they cease to exist, naturally, of themselves — as the bodies in
the old Btruscan tombs, seemingly unaffected by ages of sepulchral gloom,
crumble to dust when touched by a ray of the sun of the living.

174 "^^^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

From the same roots springs another inclination tending in
an opposite direction : the love of adventure, of travelling, of
vagrancy — what foreigners designate by the high-sounding word
" nomadic tastes." The little love the peasant bears to the sorry,
thankless soil of old Moscovia is easily accounted for ; besides, if
the peasant at times really deserves this stricture, it should be set
down for a good part to the institutions, serfdom, and the current
form of property-holding.

There is, to this phenomenon, another reason still, which also,
though indirectly, is bred of local conditions, and weakens the
attachment to house and home : it is the materials of which the
dwellings are built, more particularly the peasant's cabin — the
izb^, — and the consequent frequency of conflagrations.

In Russia, especially Northern Russia, poor in stone and
abounding in forests, in that region which the historian Soloviof
'calls "Wooden Europe" in opposition to Western or "Stone
Europe," all villages, from the peasants cabin to the church and
the old manor house, are built of fir-wood. So were most towns
until quite lately, even the capitals. In such a country, fire —
" the Red Rooster," such being the homely name for it among the
people — is a terrible foe, both for the individual and for society.
It is in vain that, to lessen the danger, a certain distance is left
between the houses in the villages ; they are about certain to
bum down some time or other, every one of them. The chances
of duration of a dwelling can, according to the region, be cal-
culated with as much accuracy as those of human lives, only
that the dwelling's term is frequently considerably the shorter.
One feels how discouraging must be the prospect of destruction
by fire, which overshadows a family's whole life, how hampering
to any thought of embellishment, consequently to any added
comfort or improvement. What is the use of getting attached to
the frail construction of wood which is liable to be consumed by a
spark and a breath ? So the peasants often listlessly allow their
izhh to lean off its basis, as though ready to tumble down, and

THE NATIOMAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 75

appear to wait for the flames to consume it, before they set it
straight.

Independently of the chances of fire, the facility with which
the peasant of the north-country constructs his house is not apt
to inspire him with sedentary tastes. A peasant, up to very lately,
was able to build a house in a few weeks, and all he wanted in
the way of tools was an axe. In the times when the land had not
been so denuded of woods, the izba^ though otherwise roomy and
comfortable, could be replaced almost as easily as the Arab's
hut, or gurbi. That may have been another of the causes of
those * ' nomadic tastes, ' ' much too freely ascribed to the
nation. At all events, the frequency of fires, which have
not been stopped by the recently created insurance offices,
still remains an obstacle to steadiness of habits, to the feeling
of stability and permanency, to care for the morrow. This
calamity, ever hanging over the villages, diminishes the love
of home, a feeling which has everywhere been one of the
greatest factors of morality, order, and economy, and which
comes more naturally to the Russian than to any other people,
as, since the emancipation, every peasant owns the house in
which he lives.

As a rule, the people of the North are less attached to the land
than those of the South. Emigration is less hard to them ; we
see that in Germany and England, and in the Scandinavian
countries, which, from a not very dense population, send oflf each
year to Canada a considerable contingent of emigrants. The
Russian — at least the peasant — does not easily leave his country ;
he is held there by the institutions, by his prejudices, by his
religion ; but Russia is vast enough to open a field to him when
the wandering himior comes over him. The plain lures on the
pedestrian ; nothing on his monotonous way invites him to loiter,
to settle down. Hence, in the Cosack of old and the modem
peasant, the ease with which they go from place to place, an
instinct which manifests itself in so many ways — fairs, pilgrim-

176 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

ages, seeking new land, — and which, historians tell us, was one
of the reasons for establishing serfdom.*

This readiness to go ahead, at random, corresponds to a moral
tendency perhaps more worthy of note, though less generally
taken notice of. This is the adventurous inclination of the Rus-
sian nature, often longing to rush blindly into the most feckless
speculations, impatient of obstacles, not shrinking before any
extreme of boldness, be it in philosophy, religion, or social
science, with a general tolerance or indulgence for all such
flights at which other nations stand aghast. Russian thought
is frequently not more conscious of limitations than are Russian
plains and horizons ; it revels in the boundless, goes straight the

• From earliest times land used to be given as a reward for public ser-
vices. This was only just, since public servants would have considered the
oflFer of pay or salary as an insult. They defrayed all the expenses entailed
by their respective posts out of their personal means, and some charges were
so onerous as to leave them well-nigh penniless — for instance, embassies
to foreign lands, or even only to other Russian princes' courts, with the
numerous suite and the representation such a post necessitated. The people
on the estates were not slaves to the landlord, though owing them certain
service and dues, and in a great measure dependent on their pleasure and pro-
tection, much as Roman clients of the early times on their patrons. When
they were or thought themselves ill-used, they would migrate en masse to the
estates of some other landlord, of more popular fame, till some lands would
become overcrowded and some remain almost deserted, to the destruction
not only of the owners* interests, but of the country's economic balance.
It was attempted to stem the current by an ordinance, forbidding change of
land throughout the year, and permitting the peasants to leave their home-
steads on one single day, the feast of St. George, 26th of November, when
their work for the year was done and they had several months before them
in which to eflfect their emigration and get settled on the new land. When
even this restriction did not suflBciently reduce the peasant migrations, the
decree "attaching them to the glebe" was issued by Boriss Godundf
(contemporary of the last years of Elizabeth and the first of James I.), an
usurper and a murderer, yet a wise and careful sovereign, somewhat after
the manner of Richard III. Thus serfdom came into being, and thence
the dread of leaving free play to the supposed " migratory instincts " of the
peasant, a dread which has become a sort of obsession, so that, even now
that he is nominally freed, in another age and under entirely altered con-
ditions, the main feature of his bondage — bondage to the soil — is still
maintained.

>«.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 177

whole length of ideas at the risk of encountering the absurd. By
this logical consistency, this longing for the absolute, the Russian
mind betrays a certain affinity to the French mind, only the latter
submits to correction by positive practical sense, which will not
suflFer it to stray beyond the domain of speculation. Hence the
striking contrast, in so many Russians, of great audacity in
intellectual spheres joined to as great timidity in real life, of
excessive temerity in the one and the most cautious reserve in
the other.

The levelness of the soil and the debility of the Russian
nature ought to be held responsible for one of the accusations
most frequently, and possibly with least justice, brought up
against the Russian people : lack of individuality, of originality,
want of creative faculties. The history of the nation and the
tardiness of its civilization are certainly not blameless in this ; but
if — a thing we may be permitted to doubt — if this defect should
prove universal and incurable, the blame should first of all be laid
on the country's physical nature. If he is lacking in personality,
the Russian, in this particular again, reflects the characteristics
of the land of his birth. To its poverty, to its sameness, he is
indebted for the comparative barrenness of his mind. This land,
indeed, offers but few images to the poet, or colors to the painter ;
it does not lend itself to a renewal of impressions and ideas.* If
this unproductiveness is to be corrected in the future by the
enlarged horizons which are opening out on all sides into the

* On this occasion I shall make bold to remark on the great and pro-
lific influence brought to bear on Russian literature by the mountainous
regions remote from the empire's centre and more or less lately annexed to
it, — Crimea and Caucasus more particularly. Owing in a great measure to
the mistrust of a suspicious police, always ready to banish writers to the
extremities of the empire, national poetry, as represented by Pushkin and
Lermontof, has found there a source of inspiration by which romanticism
has largely profited. In this respect the influence of the Caucasus on Rus-
sian poetry, in the first half of the nineteenth centmry, might be likened to
that which the Alps exercised on French and German literature in the
eighteenth century, after Rousseau.

178 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

world of science and culture, is it not the land itself which should,
in a great measure, be charged with the long inferiority of the
Russian — nay, the Slav genius, such as, for instance, the lack
of vitality and vigor in the ancient mythology of the Russian
Slavs, when compared to the fables of the Greeks or the Scan-
dinavians ? *

* On the religious and mystical proclivities of the Russian soul, see VoL
ni., Book L

BOOK III. CHAPTER HI.

The Variety of Russian Nature Lies in the Alternations of Seasons — In what
Way the Contraries of Winter, Spring, and Summer have Reacted on the
National Temperament — Russian Character is all in Extremes, as the
Climate — Its Contradictions — Its Flexibility — Its Adaptability — An His-
torical Embodiment of the National Character.

We have perhaps dwelt too persistently on the imiformity of
Russian rural scenery ; it has, after all, a variety of its own, which
powerfully reacts on man, and helps to account for the seeming
contradictions of the national character. This principle lies not
so much in the soil as in the climate.

Variety in Russia, and the beauty and picturesqueness it brings
with it, come more from weather than space, from the succession
of seasons more than from that of scenery. It is the opposite of
what we see in southern countries, especially tropical ones, where
vegetation and the outward appearance of earth and sky change
little, where the seasons are known only by shadings, and life flows
on amidst these conditions, even and monotonous in tenor. In
the North, especially in a continental region like Great-Russia,
the seasons forcibly contrast with one another ; they clothe the
earth alternately in garments violently difiering in coloring.
They lend nature the variety of aspect which enables the Russian
to imbibe from them the variety of impressions and feelings he
never could draw from the soil. Without leaving his village, he
passes, at intervals of six months, through climates and pictures
as different as though he were oscillating between pole and
equator, scaling back and forwards a ladder of from twenty-five

179

l8o THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

to thirty degrees of latitude. Such changes tell no less on the
character than on the temperament, on the imagpination than on
the mind. In Russia each season has its own labors, festivities,
and pleasures ; each has its own songs, and even sometimes its own
dances. In fact, the seasons hold so great a place in the popular
life and poetry, that they might very well serve as frames to
classify many of the piesni sung by the peasant. When we wish
to describe Russia, it is not enough to depict the soil ; it is, above
all, the seasons which must be portrayed. Nothing in the climate
of Western Europe, marked as the contrast is there between winter
and smnmer, can give an accurate idea of what that contrast is by
the Volga or the Neva : who has seen Russia under one only of
these two aspects does not know the country.

Of Russian seasons, winter is the longest and most original ;
in its very monotony partly lies its picturesqueness and beauty.
It casts over that lustreless nature the most gorgeous of bridal
robes. Snow is the most brilliant of ornaments, and its cold
whiteness, by turns sparkling and dull, is enhanced by the pearly
iridescence supplied by ice and frost. Everything vanishes under
the snow, — land, sea and rivers, roads and fields ; but in this
viewless uniformity nature assumes a majesty with which the
meagre variety of spring or summer never could invest her.
Under this thick mantle the eye detects nothing but hollows and
swellings, depressions and unevenness ; but this monochrome
ground-tone receives from the sun the most dazzling splendor,
from night and the moon the tenderest, the daintiest tints. In the
glare of fine sunny winter days the eye can scarcely bear the even
and continuous blaze ; so that in the north, where the snow lies
on the g^oimd five or six months at a stretch, there are nearly as
many eye-diseases, as many blind people, as in the lands of
the south.

It is in the forests that the beauties of winter should be pref-
erably sought. There rime decks the birch and the aspen with
crystal flowers more brilliant and delicate than their leaves would

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. l8l

be, while, on the background of white snow, shot with bluish
streaks, the sombre masses of the pines and firs take on warm,
velvety tones, which make them appear almost black. At night
these landscapes loom in solemn grandeur. By moonlight the
cold plains, in their spectral pallor, recall to the mind the limbos
of Catholic poets. On trees or monuments the snow assumes
fantastical light effects, and crowns the cupolas of the churches
with a mystic halo. On moonless nights the stars scintillate with
the vibrating intensity which is theirs in severe frost. The gloom
of the darkest nights is lightened by the reverberation of the snow ;
it is then as though the light, instead of coming down from the
sky, were rising from the earth. In winter, night is the favorite
time for sleigh-rides and country picnicking. Coming out of
theatre or ball, young women, wrapped in furs, get into open
sleighs, and, carried along by swift troykas (the Russian teams of
three abreast) , are driven ' ' to the Islands, " or to some ' * resort ' ' just
outside St.Petersburgh, to enjoy the threefold sensation of fleetness,
cold air, and night. In the streets of cities, or on the high-roads,
the sleighs give you a peculiar impression, due to the combination
of motion and silence. On the most frequented ' ' perspectives ' ' the
horses, stimulated by cold, are started at a gallop, or at the high-
stepping trot known only in Russia. Sleighs and vehicles of all
kinds crowd, press, pass one another on the white carpet which
kills sound, giving to the eye the spectacle of life at its wildest,
while the ear receives the impression of absolute repose.

The long winter nights, so highly prized in the capitals, are
not devoid of pleasure for the peasants. They too are impelled
to assemble together, for work or recreation. Quite lately, in the
northernmost provinces, the women and girls used to flock into
the most spacious izbh of the village, sometimes clubbing together
to rent it for the purpose. In the wavering light of the lutchinas
(a kind of torches made out of resinous chips) * they held their

' These lutchinas are long chips of pine or fir, carefully cut from the
portions of the logs most saturated with resin. They are stuck into some

1 82 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

possidiilki, the rustic "sociables" of a people whom winter dis-
poses to good fellowship. After spinning flax or wool, talking
all the while, the young maidens, now joined by their lovers or
betrothed, begin to sing some of those /z<?jn? with choral burdens
so dear to the Russian people, or to dance one of their slow dances
with balalayka accompaniment, but too often superseded nowa-
days by the vulgar accordeon.*

Spring puts an end to these village parties, by restoring to the
peasant the grass and sward and fetching the khorovbd out into the
open air. The end of winter or the first dawn of spring is, of all
times of the year, the dullest and most disagreeable. Instead of
the green grass, a sea of mud ; in place of rural scents, the stench
of the thaw. It is something like a decomposition, a general cor-
ruption, of nature, coming just before her yearly resurrection ; but
how thrilling this resurrection, how longed for and joyfully hailed
after the long winter mourning ! Nothing in moderate climes can
give an idea of such a rejuvenation. The spring recalls to life
both earth and water. After a hundred and fifty or two hundred

fissure in the wall, those interstices between the natural logs which are
stopped up — most eflFectively too, so closely do the logs fit — with oakum
and moss. The other end of the lutchina is lit and a tin or sheet-iron drip-
ping pan placed under it on the floor, for droppings of hot resin, sparks,
and bits of burnt off tinder. The name of this primitive torch, which begins
to grow rare, is an ambitious one, being derived from lutch, " a beam, a ray "
which reproduces exactly the Greek lyki, the Latin lux, Italian luce, and
the Teutonic /mtA/, English light. — PossidUlki literally means "sittings,"
fixjm sidiiti = sedere, " to sit"

* The balalh^ka is the national strumming-instrument, a genuine antique,
the body nearly triangular in shape. The stringfs are not pinched, only
strummed by a very rapid wrist motion, up and down, with the ends of the
fingers (the nail side) ; the range of harmony and melody is limited to the
tonic and fifth or dominant chords, and the effect produced is as rakishly
merry and " devil-may-carish " as ever drove "blues" away. When it is
used as an accompaniment to chorus singing and round-chain dancing
(khorbvdd J in the silent moonlight in the middle of the broad village street,
the girls swaying gracefully from side to side, scarcely stirring their long be-
ribboned braids, and one solo voice launching into space on a high end-note
held out ad infinitum, then broken clean off without grading, — the whole scene
has a weird, penetrating, poetic beauty that leaves an indelible impression.

THE 'NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 83

days of snow, it brings back to light the green earth which had
totally vanished ; it reopens the rivers, lakes, and gulfs, converted
by winter into sullen, dead surfaces ; breaks up the ice that fettered
them ; restores their color, murmuring, the mobility of dancing
waves ; makes them over new, so to speak. It is a whole element — the
entire liquid world, which April or March thus reawakens to life.
When nothing has fallen from the sky but snow, even the first
rains bring something of surprise and almost joy, not unlike the
pleasure experienced in Southern countries at the first drops of
rain after long weeks of heat and drought. And indeed the
children greet the rain and welcome it by traditional songs.
Together with the rivers and all the watery realm, leaves and
flowers come to life once more in forests and meadows, preceded
by the birds who had fled to softer climes And whose return is
kept daily track of in a naive popular calendar : to-day the lark,
to-morrow the swallow, of which a Russian legend will have that
it comes down firom Paradise and brings warmth firom thence.
Nature, in all her forms, appears alive and young in proportion to
her previous deep and death-like trance.

Man accepts this renewal of all things with a gladness that
would be inconceivable elsewhere. The peasants of the north,
in their popular songs, celebrate the departure of winter and
return of spring in simple poetic strain. From hiU-top or house-
roof they greet his coming in the far distance, and sing to him as
early as March : " Come, O Spring, beautiful Spring, come with
joy, bring flax tall-grown and plenty of grain ! " In many parts
of the country they call on spring some time ahead, bidding it
hasten, with rites and incantations of heathen origin. In others
the festivities that celebrate the resurrection of nature mingle
with those held for the resurrection of Christ, as though the one
were the type or symbol of the other. The first day of May is a
people's holiday almost everywhere : tliej' wander about the woods,
whence, like the dove of the Ark, they take home young tree-
sprouts as testifying to the return of verdure and the disappear-

1 84 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

ance of winter. The sun and the tepid vernal breezes give a
delicious sensation, perfect in itself. The body, freed from its
heavy wrappings, feels lighter as well as younger. '

The Russian spring is brief. From the nastiness of the thaw
it quickly passes into midsummer heat ; but this very shortness
enhances its eflFectiveness. There is something wonderful in the
sudden outbreak of vegetation which bursts into life all on a
sudden. The eye all but follows its unfolding day by day, and
the laborer's gladness is more intense as he watches the grain,
which he has just laid in the ground, sprout, rise, color, and
ripen all in six weeks. In the north the rapid growth of the days
rivals that of the plants. In proportion as the interval is greater
from the long winter nights to the long summer days, the days
lengthen by a more notable piece in each twenty-four hours.
Thus everything combines — earth and water, plants and light —
to make more intense the impression of universal renovation.

• The glad feeling of deliverance, of revival, forcibly strikes the poetic
vein which is never far away from the people's heart, and sometimes finds a
vent in the quaintest bits of word-painting. One morning in early spring I
asked my maid who had just been out on an errand what kind of weather
it was. " Beautiful," she answered, her eyes still dancing with the exhilara-
tion of exercise in mild unaggressive air ; "there is a wind, but it is so
warm when it blows against you, it wraps you round as with a fur robe."
I knew a grand, venerable old man, of mighty build and majestic simplicity
of mind and manner. There was something heroic, epic about him. He
had been bom a serf, but manumitted by a wise master in time to make some-
thing of his life, and was now consciously enjoying the last years of it in
wealth and comfort, the father of many sons who all had made their mark
in science, art, or the service of the State. He was so near the end that even
Solon might, after some demurring, have pronounced him a happy man.
There never was a spring, since he began to consider each added year as one
of grace, that he missed walking to the mighty granite embankment of the
Neva, — and as he gazed on the great floes of Ladoga ice drifting and dancing
down the current, jostling and crunching one another with the cool slushy
sound of melting cracked ice in motion, under the turquoise blue of the
cloud-flecked sky and on the deeper blue of the boisterous river, he bared his
head and, crossing himself with the broad gesture of the Russian peasant
at prayer, spoke aloud : "I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast vouchsafed
to let Thy servant behold Thy spring once more ! "

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 8$

The old-time Russians did not count this fleeting spring as a
season ; they acknowledged only three : autumn, winter, and
summer. Summer, with some of the inconveniences it entails on
.southern countries, such as heat — at times oppressive — dust, and
often drought, brings also some of the southern loveliness: the
beauty of sky and atmosphere, the mildness of the air, the trans-
lucent haziness of the horizon, the coolness of shade and waters,
the delicious freshness of earliest morning and of the last hours
of eve. In the northern half of the empire, summer has pictures
exclusively its own, which fancy could not conjure without having
enjoyed them in reality. The nights of the southern summer,
with their soft temperature and their diaphanous sky, are beauti-
ful ; but those of the north are no less so, and surprise you more.
No brush could render the delicacy of their tints, the fineness of
their gradations. On those nights on which the sun scarce dips
below the horizon, the lively colors of a spring sunset are suc-
ceeded by opalescent and pearly tints which might belong to
another planet. The light, in paling, assumes a semblance
almost ethereal. It is neither night nor day, neither dawn nor
twilight — or rather it is both. As we near the Polar Circle, sun-
set and dawn follow each other more nearly, in both space and
time. Towards midnight, the pallor of the one and the blush of
the other are very close together at both ends of the north, light-
ing up the heavens simultaneously, as though mutually reflecting
each other.

Under the 6oth degree — the latitude of St. Petersburgh — there
is already no night at the end of June, although not until we
reach the 66th degree, just above Arkhangelsk, do we actually see
the sun on the horizon at midnight. These weird nights, so
soothing to the eye and imagination, have in them something
exciting to the nerves ; they seem to repudiate sleep. Therefore,
in order to better enjoy the long evenings, many Russians take
a siesta in the daytime, as do all southern peoples. There is
in this continuous daylight a subtle stimulant which renders it

1 86 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

quickly wearisome to foreigners and makes them wish for the
return of normal nights. They do return soon, and begin to in-
crease just as fast as they had decreased. Already in the numer-
ous and wholly pagan rites that celebrate the summer solstice on
St. John's Eve, through the joyful songs in praise of the sun,
arrived at the zenith of his ascent, some sad strains are heard,
mourning beforehand his rapid descent towards winter.

With the lengthening nights autumn returns, the least con-
spicuous and least original of Russian seasons, but not the least
beautiful. The forests don those hues, warm and varied, whose
richness summer cannot match. The frequent atmospheric
changes lend to the sky tones of a sombre and fitful beauty, and,
on the boughs in the woods, or on the grass of the steppes, the first
morning frosts descend, shedding over the scenery charms scarcely
familiar to any eye but that of the early huntsman. Moreover,
there is in this decadence of light and vegetation a feeling of sad-
ness, a poetic vein of mild melancholy, which suits well with this
northern nature. Autumn always lasts a long time ; the days
shorten ; the leaves fall ; the birds depart on their migration,
species by- species, — the cuckoo, the most sensitive to cold, some-
times starts as early as the end of July ; — the rains come, then
snow ; but winter, the genuine Russian winter, does not arrive
until the earth lies enfolded in the heavy shroud which spring
alone will lift.

All these vicissitudes of the seasons are strongly felt by the
Russians, and nobody has rendered them more beautifully by
word and brush. Not a shading of that pallid nature, not a gleam
of light or color in the sky, not a deepening shadow on the face
of the earth, has escaped their eye, not a mvumur their ear. " By
nothing but the motion of the leaves, I could, with closed eyes,
tell the season or the month of the year," says one of their writers,
somewhere.* They have lovingly depicted this land of theirs,

* Ivan Torgu^nief, the greatest word-painter amidst the great Russian
novelists.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 187

whicli, in the long run, does assume a penetrating charm for any-
body that has once felt it, like a face the beauty of which lies in
the expression. Their painters have portrayed it in those alterna-
tions of the seasons which, at few months' interval, oflfer to their
brush diflferent worlds. Hence the twofold talent which often
strikes one in their pictures, the feeling of color and that of
shading, — the comprehension of great lines and large masses, and
that of detail and accessories. It is because in these vast plains,
usually devoid of successive plans, there is not much of a medium
between the general effects and the isolated ones, — between the
long-stretched forest and a clump of trees, — between the boundless
steppe and a bunch of shrub. As immensity draws the eye till it
loses itself in the horizon, so every slightly conspicuous detail irre-
sistibly attracts attention in the end. Nothing could render the
grandeur of a sunset in the southern steppes, say between the
Azof and Caspian Seas. At the same time, on these level plains,
as on an empty stage, every human figure, every object, stands out
with singular vigor on the uniform immensity ; a tree, a hut, a
man, a horse, assume an unusual importance, and almost appear
larger than nature in size. It is thus, to make use of a homely
simile, that the Russians have a rare facility to contemplate nature
through both ends of their spy-glass, to see it by turns as a near-
sighted person sees it or a far-sighted one. With this faculty
they possess the gift of accuracy, of hitting the right expression.
Things appear to them precise and lifelike — a gift which they
derive from that same nature whose forms and colors impress
themselves by perpetual iteration or are brought into relief by
their isolation.

The influence of these vicissitudes of seasons makes itself felt
especially in the temperament and the character of the nation.
To them the Russian owes the flexibility, the elasticity of organs
which have been fashioned by the alternations of winter and
summer, so as to adapt themselves to any climate ; to them
he is indebted for his intellectual plasticity, the ease with which

l88 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

he passes from one idea to another, a faculty which matches the
former, and makes moral as easy as physical acclimatization
wherever he may be.

To these oppositions of climate I am tempted to ascribe also
whatever at times appears in the Russians ill-regulated, exagger-
ated, disorderly, unbalanced. They are frequently accused of
want of originality. Now we should arrive at an understanding
as to what is meant by that word, that rebuke. If they lack
originality in intellect, in ideas, on the other hand they have a
great deal of it in character, mind, and expression. Russian
poetry, novels, music, often show remarkable originality. What,
perhaps, the Russians are wanting in — or, more correctly, what
time and education have prevented their showing, as yet, as much
as some other nations — is the genius of invention. Far from
being generally deficient in individuality, the Russian often
abounds in it — in feelings, taste, and habits. He is firequently
original, in the new and commonly accepted sense of the word, —
in tastes and manners. This originality, indeed, often degenerates
into peculiarities, eccentricities, nay, into insanity. Ivan the Ter-
rible, Peter the Great, Paul I. , are appalling instances in point.
If, among sovereigns, this defect shotdd be laid to the account of
personal temperament or of that unwholesome effect of absolute
power which, among the Roman Caesars has produced so many
monstrosities, signs of the same disposition can be traced far
below the level of the throne. It would be an easy task to report
many a trait of Russian originality, and in the course of over two
centimes more than one nobleman in Petersburgh or Moscow,
besides Suvbrof or Rostoptchin, has made for himself a European
reputation in this line. Eccentricity and singularity, in fact, are,
on the whole, less rare in northern countries than in southern
ones, — in England and the United States than in Italy or Spain.
In the Russia of the times of serfdom, moreover, eccentricity could
also be bred of the accumulation of riches in few hands, of the
inordinate license afifected by the owners of vast wealth, to whom

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER, 1 89

the habit of indulging every whim and wish was like another
kind of absolute royalty, who became as quickly satiated and
blasi, and, to force some new sensation, exhausted the round of
fancies.

In Russia the absence of political life, the frequently enforced
idleness of talent, have for a long time done their work of warping
the most active faculties. Even in the low classes the weight of
want and bondage has not always suppressed eccentricity ; only it
assumes a religious disguise. It were a vain attempt to try and
catalogue all the singular sects with which the dregs of Russian
society teem, for there is no extravagance too great to attract
adepts. In spite of appearances, such abnormal or inordinate
propensities, in religion or daily life, are not irreconcilable with
a practical turn of mind or realistic common-sense in a nation any
more than in an individual. The most positive, most matter-of-
fact people — the American nation — are a proof in point.

If the aflSnities between man and climate easily turn to fancifiil-
ness, there is, between the Russian temperament and Russian
nature, as manifested in the opposition of the seasons, a likeness
not easily to be denied. Both are immoderate, both easily rush
from one extreme to another. Alternations of all kinds, changes
of moods, ideas, feelings, are always strongly marked ; a wide
margin is open to the oscillations of mind and heart ; the various
stages of life differ perhaps more than anywhere else. The
Russian soul easily passes from torpor to buoyancy, from meek-
ness to wrath, from submission to revolt ; in all things it appears
to naturally incline to extremes. By turns submissive and irrita-
ble, apathetic and impetuous, jovial and morose, indifferent and
passionate, the Russian, perhaps more than any other people, runs
all the gamut of cold and heat, of calm and tempest. The Russian
is prone to sudden infatuation, to unbridled whims, to impulses
and transports of passion for things either serious or futile — an
opinion, a writer, a singer, a dancer, a fad of fashion. This dis-
position makes itself felt as well in public as in private, in national

igO THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

as in individual life, all the more that it is indirectly favored
by the political riginu, which, forbidding one day a thing
it tolerates the next, seems to encourage to-day what it will
proscribe to-morrow.

The individual, society, the government, seem equally inclined
to think, to will, to act by fits and starts, so that periods of fever,
energy, and confidence are closely followed by spells of flat calm,
of inertia, of languor, during which a feeling of despair, a lack of
interest in things in general, overcasts the soul. This accounts for
many of the contradictions and alternations of Russian life. In the
same persons or in the same sphere there is the strangest inter-
weaving and intertangling of doubt and conviction, of indifference
and enthusiasm, and initiative in ideas is often seen attended by
routine in action.

Being made like that, the Russian at times yields to infatua-
tion, to impulses at which he is the first to wonder. The Eastern
war of 1877-78 is a striking instance of this. Owing to the lack
of liberty and the want of interest in the political life at home ;
owing also to the urging of a press which enjoys getting excited
about something with impunity, and, lastly, to the need of emotion
vaguely felt by a public disgusted with the emptiness of daily life
and made hungry by a system of dieting and fasting, a sceptical
and chaffing society, lately almost indifferent to the sufferings of
the Balkan Slavs, becomes in the course of a few months fired with
an ardent and irresistible enthusiasm for the Serbs and Bulgars.
In the face of the reluctance manifested by the sovereign and
ministers, in spite of the bantering incredulity expressed in the
drawing-rooms of Petersburgh, Russia, stirred up from high to
low, starts on a sort of crusade, and wages a great national war in
which no one would have believed two or three years before, — a
war which, the suspicious attitude of the West notwithstanding,
was decided on not so much out of political calculations as from
a sudden explosion of feelings long suppressed and eager to
find a vent.

THE N-ATIOJSTAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. I9I

This mobility, this impressionability, so often pointed out in
Slavs, especially Russians and Poles, this lack of balance, of
measure, so repeatedly deplored by the Russian writers them-
selves, show too great an affinity with a climate persistently given
to excesses not to be derived therefrom, at least in part. The
successive oppositions of nature in her various phases seem to
have stamped their impress on man. We should not wonder
therefore at the Russians exposing to view so many contrasts, or
our being continually forced into contradiction when we speak
of them.

In the Great-Russian, moreover, this changefulness is usually
moderated by practical sense, and, like a child, being but young
as a nation, he can correct it by training, age, and experience.
To look at it more closely, this defect may, after all, turn out to
be the obverse side of a quality, itself ascribable to climate
no less than to the Slavic trait of malleability. I mean that
facility of adaptation, that faculty of comprehension, which so
eminently distinguish the Russian, and for which Herzen coined
the word "receptivity." This imitative instinct, this innate
talent of assimilation, so striking in the cultivated Russian, has
sometimes been doubted when discussing the common people.
Yet we surely can trace it even in the latter in the technical
sphere, the only one ordinarily open to the peasant, in that versa-
tility which renders all work easy to him, and frequently enables
him to ply ten crafts at once ; lastly, in that suppleness of the
Russian soldier and the Cosack, so promptly ready to meet all
demands of either war or peace. Half hidden and as though
paralyzed in the lower classes by the monotony of their existence,
by habitual routine, attachment to ancient customs or half-oriental
prejudices, this quality takes its free development in the higher
classes, among the Russians who have shaken themselves free of
popular prejudice ; there it unfolds itself in all spheres at once —
in ideas, manners, customs, literature, even language. In this
respect, as in a great many others, the Russian is the exact

192 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

opposite of the Englishman. The suppleness of his intellect
appears to be unlimited, and the ease with which he appropriates
may have been an obstacle to the spontaneous development of
national originality.

With its inconveniences and its advantages, this flexibility
remains one of the most marked features of the Russian nature.
Were it not that it always is a somewhat arbitrary proceeding to
establish a hierarchy among simultaneous faculties and intercon-
nected moral leanings, one might say that this is the Russian's
pre-eminent faculty. It shows in every part of him, in his intel-
lect as much as in his body and organs, all of which are tempered
and tested by those trying alternations of the seasons as by a sort
of gymnastics, to which nature, stem mother, subjects him every
year. Hence the success of the Great-Russian in colonizing the
vast plains of his continent, spreading northward and southward
with an almost equal facility of acclimatization under every or any
sky ; hence, in the course of the last two centtuies, the surprises
g^ven to aged and scornful Dame Eiu'ope by a people so long
considered as an alien in the European world, and rebellious
to its civilization ; hence, lastly, the diflficulty for the observer
of discerning what is possible in Russia from what is not.
For this faculty of adaptation, confined until now to private
life, to external politeness, to arts and sciences, can any day
extend into novel spheres, such as government, institutions,
pubHc liberties.

Should an historical type be asked for, a living type of this
Russian nature, which the weight of events has so long hindered
from blossoming out into great men, — there is the Tsar Peter the
Great. All through his semi-barbarism, in his very excesses and
contradictions, with his foibles and infatuations, with his innovat-
ing recklessness and his practical good-sense, his scorn of obstacles
and his positive instinct, his wide open mind and his marvellously
cunning hand, his universal aptitude for all crafts and callings,
Piotr Alex6yevitch remains the national type/ar excellence. Few

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. I93

of the national defects are lacking in the great reformer, and
many have reached in him the limits of the possible ; few of the
national qualities but come to light in him, and several have, in
him, risen to genius. The imperial carpenter of Zaandam may-
seem to us of a harder and stronger temper than most of his
countrymen, but he is unmistakably wrought out of the same
metal.* In the g^eat reformer, the two extremes of the nation,
the two Russians, so different even yet, that the one does not
always appear to be evolved from the other, — the vtujik and the
cultured nobleman, the former with his stolid, massive stubborn-
ness, the latter with his alert and mobile suppleness, seem com-
bined and merged together, as though to correct and complete one
another. Peter has shown that Russian flexibility need take
nothing from energy, that Slavic ductility can abide together with
solidity.

If one is astonished at finding, in on& people, so many traits of
character different or even opposite, one can, in the person of
Peter the Great, behold them all united and centred in one man.
This converging, in one individual, of so many qualities and defects,
so many features scattered through a nation, has shaped a queer
and well-nigh monstrous man, but, at the same time, one of the
most mighty, most enterprising, the best endowed for life and
action, whom the world has seen. No other nation can boast of
owning a g^eat man in whom it can embody all itself, who, in his
very vices, stands out, a colossal incarnation of its genius. Peter,
the pupil and imitator of foreigners, — Peter, who seemed to have
set himself the task of violently breaking his people's nature, and
who has been regarded by the old-time Moscovites as a sort of
Ante-Christ, — Peter is the Russian, the Great-Russian par excel-
lence. Standing before his face, one may say that sovereign and
nation explain each other. A nation that resembles such a man
is sure of a great future. If it is apparently wanting in some of

* Or he could not have succeeded, even with his force of will and sum-
mary methods.

194 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

those highest or most refined qualities on which mankind prides
itself, it owns those which give power and political greatness.* '

* For personality, energy, consistency, — qualities too often denied the
Russians, three men, vastly dififerent, might be mentioned from among our
own contemporaries : N. Milidtin, G. Samdrin, and Prince V. Tcherkassky.
See Un Homme d'etat Russe, dfapris sa Correspondance Inidite ("A
Russian Statesman, from his Unpublished Correspondence ").

' This chapter is one of great beauty — of an order of beauty one would
least have looked for from an historian and political writer. And the com-
prehension of the Russian nature, both human and physical, the insight
into the connection, the interdependence of both, must be a revelation to
foreign readers. Mr. Beaulieu has here said things that no one said before
him, because he has seen things that must remain a sealed book to any but
a poet's eye, sharpened by science and scholarship.

BOOK III. CHAPTER IV.

The Riissian Character and Nihilism — Origin and Nature of Nihilism — Its
Three Successive Phases — By What Sides it Belongs to the National Tem-
perament— Combination of Realism and Mysticism — In What Sense
Nihilism is a Sect — Manner of Nihilistic Propaganda — Radical Instincts
of the Russian Mind — ^The Slav Woman and the " Woman Question " in
Russia.

By its rigor and demands the Russian climate inclines man to
realism ; by the vastness and sameness of her plains, by her im-
mensity and poverty, nature predisposes him to mysticism and
melancholy. Therein lies the key to many of the contrasts with
which the Russian nature abounds. Of this conflict or this union
of tendencies often opposed to one another or apparently irrecon-
cilable, several illustrations might be found in the bulk of the
people themselves, in the ignorant sects of Great-Russia. We
will take instead as a specimen a phenomenon not less curious,
although less spontaneous, less thoroughly native. This is the
development called "nihilism," or, as the Russians pronounce it :
nighilhm^

lyike nearly all the theoretical conceptions of the Russians,
"nihilism," in its principle, is simply an importation from the
West. It was from Europe and especially from German philosophy
that, under Nicolas, the first intellectual seeds came into Russia
of that spirit of negation and revolt which, in the land of autocracy,

' The letter h is lacking in the Russian alphabet, and the letter^ does
duty for it in words of foreign extraction. The Little-Russians sound it with
a strong guttural aspiration, which makes a sort of compromise between the
two. Concerning the pronunciation of the », see note 3, on p. 18,

195

196 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

under the shades of a secular absolutism, found a soil more apt
than their own original native sod. It was from the latest sons of
Kant and the revolutionary children of the peaceable and conserva-
tive Hegel, from the most extreme representatives of the Hegelian
Left, that the first ancestors or first apostles of Russian nihilism
drew their inspirations, if not their theories. In all that regards
ideas and views, negations and dreams, nihilism is nothing but a
corrupted extract from French philosophy, criticism, and socialistic
schools. The interest and orig^ality of Russian radicalism are
not there to be found, not in speculations and abstractions un-
familiar to most young adepts of contemporary nihilism. What
the latter holds of truly original, it owes to Russia's political and
to her economic situation, to social and religious status, and above
all to the national temperament.

At bottom, nihilism is simply the Russian form of the negative
and revolutionary spirit of the age. Far from being an aflfection
peculiar to Russia, it is a moral epidemic of which the germ has
been imported, and with which all Europe, nay, the whole civil-
ized world is more or less ajQfected ; only the symptoms and the
consequences of the disease vary with each people, according to
the patient's age, constitution, and habits. If, in the low plains
of the Neva or the Volga, the attacks of this revolutionary fever,
nowadays, become endemic, offer peculiar symptoms, that is due
to the people's idiosyncrasies and also to their diet.

Nihilism, which has made so much noise from 1878 to 1883, is
not exactly a novelty. It can register, even under this uncouth
name, a long existence, for it is not necessarily associated with
revolutionary conspiracies or with political crimes. It is anterior
to all such attempts, and may survive them or again become, as
formerly, a stranger to them,*

* Among the conspirators, many and not nnfrequentlj the most enter-
prising are of Jewish extraction. This gave occasion to certain Russian
papers, happy to find an alien scapegoat, to assert that all the trouble came
from abroad and from the Jews. This should not be taken seriously.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. igj

Few designations have lent themselves to more misunderstand-
ings than this term "nihilism," which, in reality, is only a witty
nickname, disowned by the greater part of those to whom it is
applied.* As often happens with such misnomers, the word has
changed meaning three or four times, — or rather, this contempt-
uous surname has been successively applied to diflferent doctrines
or tendencies, nattu^ally, however, connected with one another by a
more or less direct filiation. Three phases are distinguishable, or,
so to speak, three stages and metamorphoses. In its first acception,
" nihilism " was untinged with politics ; it was little more than a
certain way of bearing oneself, thinking, talking, — a mannerism,
a fashion, one might say a pretence and attitude, that came into
favor among the young people of i860 to 1870, among the students
at the universities, and the girl-students with cropped hair re-
siding abroad or in the provinces. This designation was pointed
at a spirit of revolt against received ideas and social convention-
alities, against all traditional authorities and antiquated religious
or political dogmas, a spirit of negation, stamped with an intolerant
materialism and naive radicalism ; nothing more, at bottom, than
a violent reaction of the Russian soul against the system of govern-
ment and the intellectual yoke under which it had long been
bent. This was the first and, properly speaking, the true nihilism,
the nihilism which has been depicted in immortal strokes by
the most famous Russian novelists, the nihilism of which Tur-

Nihilism is a genuinely Russian thing, although there are numbers of
nihilists outside of Russia. As to the Israelites, it might be said that there
exists a kind of Jewish nihilism which naturally amalgamates with the
Slavic nihilism. The inferior situation, created for the numerous Jews of
Russia by laws or custom, has, moreover, much to do with their readiness
to take part in plots.— See Vol. III., Book IV., Ch. Ill,

* The name is taken from a novel by Ivan Turgu^nief, Fathers andSons^
where, about i860, the first generation of " nihilists " was taken oflF. The
Russian revolutionists usually style themselves "socialist-democrats," or
simply "propagandists." Their various factions are mostly named after
the clandestine periodicals which they issue as their organs. (See Vol. XL,
Book v., Ch. III.)

198 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

gu6nief's Bazdrof and Plssemsky's Helen will remain undying
presentations.*

After this theoretical and abstract nihilism, frequently dabbled
in by amateurs, at times all made up of posing and outward show,
and which did not attempt to carry out its maxims except in
individual life and private relations, came, about 1871, under the
twofold influence of the Paris Commune and the International,
a nihilism all action and agitation, transformed into a militant
socialism, which strove to spread its ideas among the people, a
nihilism already given to politics and revolution, having recourse
to association and secret propaganda, though not to plots and
murder. It is only after several years of disappointment and
bitterness, towards 1877-78, that this peaceably preaching nihilism,
transformed into a violent party seeking redress from conspiracies
and assassinations, takes for its weapon d5mamite and for its
watchword — terror, f Under the threefold aspect of speculative
radicalism, socialistic apostolate, revolutionary terrorism, ' ' nihil-
ism ' ' has shed on the Russian temperament a totally novel light.
It has laid bare before the world a power of logic as to intellect,
a force of will as to character, a capacity for passion, for fanaticism,
stubbornness, and self-devotion, which might be matched among
popular sects, but which, as found in civilized Russians, have been
to Europe a veritable revelation.

However nihilism may reach out from afar towards Western
metaphysics, it never was a system after the manner of Schopen-
hauer's pessimism or Auguste Comte's positivism ; it is not a new
form of old scepticism or old naturalism. In its philosophy it is
little more than a coarse and boisterous materialism, almost devoid

* Bazdrof, the medical student, the hero of Fathers and Sons ; Helen
Jigllnsky, the heroine of Pissemsky's novel, which has been translated
into French, under the title of Dans le Tourbillon (In the Whirlpool),
Charpentier, 1882.

t What caused this abrupt evolution of socialism into terrorism will
be made clear in Vol. II., Book VI., Ch. II., where we shall study the form-
ation and organization of the revolutionary party.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 1 99

of any scientific apparatus. In its politics it is a socialistic radi-
calism, fomented by bureaucratic despotism and exasperated by
the capricious severities of an irresponsible power. It is not a
party, for under its banner march revolutionists of all kinds —
authoritarians, terrorists, federalists, anarchists, mutualists, com-
munists— who keep on terms of mutual understanding only by
putting off till the day of their triumph all discussion on future
organization.*

In the midst of all its exaggerations, through its successive
phases, nihilism has been little else than the pupil of the revolution-
ists of the west, a pupil, indeed, who flatters himself that he will
outdo his masters, and who magnifies at will their boldest teach-
ings. Russian radicalism can, it is true, claim one national theo-
retician, who, for talent, character, or influence, does not remain
behind any one of his rivals and co-religionists of the west. This
legislator of Utopia-land is neither Herzen nor Baktmin, — ^neither
of those exiles, agitators, so long friends and associates, yet so
profoundly different in genius and sentiment that, in spite of their
common aspirations, they coUld fitly represent each one of the
fares of the national radicalism, or, more correctly, of the Russian
spirit itself t It is not Herzen, the paradoxical and fascinating
writer, the great railer and great dreamer, whose eloquence is so
warm and highly colored that his true home might be the land
of the sun ; Herzen the poet and minstrel of negation, ever

* Under the influence of Bak^nin and the Internationale the greater part
of Russian revolutionists appear to have adopted for their formula the fede-
ration of productive independent communes, suggested to them by their own
communal organization. (See further in Book VIII.) In 1874, after the
foundation of the paper Vperidd (Go Ahead), by I^avrdf, discussions having
arisen within the " emigration " on the manner of preparing the revolution,
the most ardent ones declared with Tkatchof that, instead of taking thought
for future organization, "the action party " should keep in view only the
work of destruction. This advice became a rule with the immense majority
of nihilists.

fl had better recall to the reader's mind that Herzen died at Nice in
1869, and Bak^nin at Bern in 1878.

200 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

romantic and idealist in spite of himself, sceptical and sad at
bottom, driven into revolutionism by his sympathies, by the crav-
ing for hope and faith ; a heart open to all the passions as to every
noble feeling ; a mind accessible until the end to all ideas and even
to the rough teachings of experience. Nor is it Bakiinin, the
narrow, incorrigible sectarian, the logician, colder and harder than
the ice of his native land, systematic as a geometrician, declam-
atory as a rhetorician, the fanatic of negation, the maniac with
mind shut tight against all that is foreign to his craze, impervious
to doubt, to discouragement, to all the teachings and deceptions
of life.

Herzen, by the amplitude of his intellect, which, undisciplined,
was ever in search of new things, by the breadth and winged flight
of his imagination, which would carry him beyond his own system,
strangely overlapped the scant frame of doctrinal nihilism ; he was
less its lawgiver than its involuntary, free harbinger. With all his
weaknesses and generous rushes, with his spells of unrealizable
hopes and his numerous lapses into hopelessness, with his
disappointment in revolution as well as in civihzation, with
all the inconsistencies and contradictions of his mind and
of his life, Herzen, a sort of revolutionary Faust, remains one
of the most living types of the modem Russian, thrown oS" his
bearings by a civilization from which he demands more than it
has to give.

Bak^nin, on the other hand, ' ' the apostle of destruction, ' ' the
prophet of anarchy and amorphism, or social formlessness, the
involuntary disintegrator of the Internationale, and the founder of
the hooWoss Alliance Universelle, — Bakunin, the cosmopolitan con-
spirator, the man of deeds, more mighty by his word and personal
magnetism than by the pen and written exhortation, has, not-
withstanding his relations with Nietchdyef and the conspirators of
the north, had more influence, perhaps, abroad, over the working-
men of Switzerland, Spain, Italy, than in his own country, more
power over professional conspirators than over the young people

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 20I

at school.* All through his long career, animated by a single idea,
and that a barren one, he was not so much the theoretician or
codifier of the national nihilism, of which he had appointed himself
the peddler in the west, as its living impersonation, and, we might
say, its blind and sterile incarnation.

The chief master and inspirer of nihilism was not, like Herzen
and Bak^in, an aristocrat brought up in the drawing-rooms of
Petersburgh and Moscow, and whose existence was passed in
great part abroad. He was a child of the people, the son of a country
priest, who never stepped off the Russian soil and never spoke in
favor of the West ; who, instead of preaching ' ' from the other
side," z. e. from London or from Paris, wrote in Petersburgh,
under the censors' eyes. This man, who during his brief apostolic
career, from 1855 to 1864, had over young people an influence
which his sufferings served to increase, — this man was Tchemy-
sh^fsky. This Russian Proudhon or Lassalle, sentenced to hard
labor for revolutionary propaganda, lived twenty years in Siberia,
of which seven in the mines. Then he aged in solitude and in-
action, having been sent to reside at one of the uttermost stations
nearest the polar circle, far removed from all intercourse with
Europe and the outer world, f Well informed as a writer and
unwearying as a worker, his weapon at one time a redoubtable
logic, at another a biting irony, gifted with an intellect both vig-
orous and supple, an energetic and all-of-one-piece character, — in
so far like the rest that he too mixed the intoxicating fumes of
sentimental idealism with the crudities of realism, Tchernysh^f-
sky, by his faults not less than by his qualities, is and remains a

* Nietchdyef was a man of intrigue, who, under Bakuniu's inspiration, but
in view of personal advantages, had organized in Russia a revolutionary
society. He was arrested in Switzerland and tried in Petersburgh in 1871,
for the assassination of one of his accomplices, from whom he dreaded
betrayal, and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labor.

t In 1889 the papers announced his death at Sardtof, in the southeast of
Russia, whither he had been transferred at his urgent request. He had
resided in Siberia until 1883, ttaen had been confined within the city of
Astrakhan.

202 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

representative Russian. Philosopher, economist, critic, novehst,
and everywhere the propagator of the cheerless doctrines of which
he was the first victim, Tchernysh^fsky, in his scientific treatises,
has given the theory or summing up of Russian radicalism. In a
queer and indigestible novel, written in the gloom of a prison, he
has given its poetry and its gospel.*

We shall hardly be wronging Tchemyshefsky if we ascribe to
his long and tedious novel more ascendancy over youthful Russian
heads than his didactical treatises eVer achieved. This man, whose
influence had dethroned that of Herzen, and whom Siberia and
long sufferings had circled with the martyr's halo, was regarded by
many of his countrymen as one of the giants of modem thought,
one of the great pioneers of the future, as a Russian Fourrier, or,
better still, Karl Marx.f In spite of all the admiring homage of
which he was the object, notwithstanding the sterling originality of
his mind, his ideas have nothing very original about them, either
in political economy or philosophy. The form and the details may
be novel and marked with individuality, but the substance of
his theories takes us to Germany, England, France.' What gives to

* Tchemyshefsky opened fire, about 1855, by a treatise on naturalistic
esthetics, his subject being The Relations between Art and Reality. A
little later, in an essay entitled The Anthropological Principle in Phi-
losophy, he expounded a system of transformistic materialism, defended
the unity of principle in nature and in man, and reduced ethics to pleasure
or utility. In i860 he published in the Sovretniknnik (Contemporary),
conducted by the poet Niekrdssof, a review of the Political Economy of
Stuart Mill, on wholly socialistic lines. This review was translated into
French under the title, Economic Politique JugSe par la Science ; Critique des
Principes de Stuart Mill (Bruxelles, 1874). — (Political Economy Judged
by Science : a Criticism on the Principles of Stuart Mill.) Lastly, in 1863,
\h& SovremiSnnik, which was soon after suppressed, published anonymously
his novel. What is to be Done? It was written in prison, in Petersburgh.

t See, for instance, the introduction to a pamphlet entitled Unaddressed
Letters, a little book that was never finished, but was published in French,
1874, and also in Russian, in the same year, in the revolutionary review
Vperidd.

* Farther away and back too, as far as ancient India. Our theoreticians
fall into plagiarism continually, but most innocently, from simple ignorance,
since they deliberately throw the ptist overboard, under the name of " use-

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 203

Tchemysh^fsky's works, leastwise to this novel, the most native
soil-flavor, is possibly that kind of mystic and visionary realism
which we find in so many nihilists. Moreover, however great
may have been the ascendant of Tchemysh^fsky and a few other
writers of that ilk, nihilism is far from having followed in servile
fashion the masters it glorifies, it is more indebted to their
romantic fictions than to their scientific deductions.

From the psychological point of view, one might say that the
nihilism of Turguenief's and'Pissemsky's heroes is the outcome
of the union between the two opposite inclinations of the Russian
character — that to the absolute and that to realism. From this
unnatural connubium was bom that repulsive monster, one of the
sorriest births of modem thought. There again we encounter an
instance of that impatience under restraint of any sort, that reckless
boldness in speculation, which are frequently found among the
Russians, but which, with them, lay less claim to science and method
than among the Germans. From the moral and political stand-
points, nihilism was first of all a sort of pessimism, half instinctive
and half thought out, a form of pessimism not uninfluenced by
nature and climate, fostered and intensified by history and the
political order of things.* Seeing nothing around but evil, it longed
to demolish everything — government, religion, society, family —
in order to reconstruct, all in one block, a better world. Doc-
trinary nihilism, the oldest and most ordinary form, has never had
anything in common with the critical scepticism which compares
and analyzes, reserving its judgment and liberty. Being in sub-
less ballast" (not a felicitous simile, as no ship can go straight and steady
without ballast). So they keep every now and then stating what they fancy
to be novelties, in beautiful unconsciousness that they propound theories
that have been tried and exploded hundreds of years ago ; they are all the
time, in the pregnant Russian phrase, "discovering Americas."

* Herzen ( The Russian People and Socialism) wrote already about 1848,
long before nihilism had a name : " The real character of Russian thought
was developed in all its force under Nicolas. The distinctive feature of
that movement is a tragical emancipation of conscience, an implacable
negation, a bitter irony."

204 7'^^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Stance a negation which affirms itself and admits of no inquiry, it
was ftx)m the very first a sort of dogmatism the wrong way, as
narrow, as blind as, and no less imperious, no less intolerant, than
the traditional creeds the yoke of which it throws off.

In the intemperateness and coarseness of their negation, flung
in the face of all that humanity holds it an honor to respect,
something could be felt in Bazdrof s imitators of the boyish-
ness of incredulity when it is as yet a novelty, something of the
ill-regulated excesses of minds but recently set free. In these
pretensions to maturity, advanced by a youthful generation disil-
lusioned before having lived, something like depraved childish-
ness peeps through. For many adepts the nihihstic theories
were only a sort of protest against the old-time superstitions which
still sway the masses, against the political servilit}', the intellectual
hypocrisy, or conventional belief in dogmas which still prevail too
generally among the higher classes.

A nihilist of the first manner was asked in what his doctrine
consisted. "Take earth and heaven," he replied; "take State
and Church, kings and God, and spit on it all — that is our
symbol." Were it the raillery of an adversary, this definition
still would be exact. The word, however, is less shocking to the
ears of Russians, for spitting plays a great part in their life and
superstitions. You spit to turn aside an evil omen ; you spit to
express wonder or contempt ; you spit everywhere and all the
time.f The nihilist took pleasure in spitting on everything ; he
delighted in challenging and defying the spirit of veneration and
humility so tenaciously rooted in the Russian * ' of the people, ' ' who

t Turgu^nief somewhere tells that at Heidelberg, frequented at the time
by many Russian students who had been expelled from their own national
universities, there appeared, about 1865, a nihilist paper entitled On All
Comers I Spit. When a Russian means "I don't care a snap," he says
"I spit on it."»

* Spitting, in the Greek Church, is a form of exorcism. Thus at baptisms,
at the point of the service where the godfather and godmother, in the
infant's name, renounce Satan and his pomps, they emphasize the renuncia-
tion by thrice spitting at the Enemy— over their shoulder.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER, 20$

even yet bends in twain before his superiors, as before the holy
etkons or images. Herein lies an indication of the profound dis-
cordance in thoughts and feelings under which the nation labours.
Morally and physically, in man and nature alike, the two extremes
meet : to the most naive veneration, political as well as religious,
corresponds the most barefaced cynicism, intellectual and moral.

The coarse and repulsive realism, so obtrusively apparent in
nihilism, so perceptible in the Russian schools, among the major-
ity of students, could not fail to attract the attention of enlightened
minds and the government. Against this unwholesome bent of
the young and of the national mind a remedy had to be sought for,
a counterpoise, primarily in the education of the young. Religion
could not be relied on overmuch, for in Russia it has but little
hold on the cultured classes, and orthodoxy is weakened rather
than strengthened by the compromising support of the govern-
ment and the imperfection of religious liberty. I^acking better
means, recourse was had to classical studies, but in vain. I^itera-
ture and the dead languages being the studies most disinterested,
most removed from actual preoccupations, were thought to be the
best corrective to the exaggerated naturalism of embryo Bazdrofs.
Under the influence of Katk5f and his Moscow Gazette, the ministry
of public instruction, directed by Count Tolstoy, has been long at
work, striving to subject the entire young generation to this classi-
cal discipline, and, through that, to a sort of idealistic gymnastics
Dr drilling. The most singular thing about the business is that
the languages and literatures, now suddenly called in to the rescue
of society, had long been held " suspicious." Under the Emperor
Nicolas the Greek and I^atin classics had been denounced as
fostering the spirit of revolt. Demosthenes and Cicero, all the
republicans of Athens and Rome, were supposed to kindle revolu-
tionary sentiments. In point of fact, they have been undesirable
teachers of children destined to live and die under an autocratic
rule. If not exactly proscribed, instruction in ancient history
and literature had certainly been curtailed and lowered. In the

206 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

schools tolerated by Nicolas, precedence had been g^ven to the
sciences, especially the nattiral sciences ; that meant pushing the
Russian mind down the very incline to which it was naturally
drawn.

By one of those abrupt changes so frequent in Russia, and
quite compatible with the nature of the government, there was,
imder Alexander II. , a sudden return to the classics and antiquity.
It was announced as a discovery that the exclusive study of
physical and natural sciences must lead to positivism. To coun-
terbalance their realistic influence, the ancient literatures, treated
but lately with distrust, were summoned in. After having been
accounted the accomplices of revolution, Greek and I^atin became
the supporters of moral order. This restoration of classical studies
in a country which pretended to have no use for Greeks and
Romans, butted straight against the national inclinations which
it was expected to correct. Accordingly it was violently kicked
against by all the instincts, practical and positive, of the Great-
Russian, the more outraged at such a treatment, as the awkward-
ness and harshness of the hand that inflicted it made it more pain-
ful and irritating. Notwithstanding the efforts made by Count
Tolstoy, through fifteen years,* the study of antiquity could not
restrain the realistic and radical tendencies of the contemporary
young generation. As a protest against classicism, materialism
and, along with it, revolutionary nihilism have never stopped
increasing in the schools, irritated by petty restrictions and puerile
vexations, which hit the teachers almost as hard as the learners.
For, to prevail against such inclinations, indirectly encouraged by
the social and political order of things, it is not enough to change

* Count Tolstoy became the most unpopular of ministers, and had to
give up the portfolio of Public Instruction in 1880. In 1883 he was ap-
pointed Minister of the Interior, and died in 1889. Under Alexander III.
another abrupt change. After having done everything to attract students
to the classical universities and gymnasiums, regulations were issued in
1887, calculated to keep away from them young people not possessed of
large means or influential family connections.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 20/

the school curriculum and make over the programmes of lessons
and lectures.

Coarse negative materialism is not the whole of nihilism.
This Janus has another face still, very different, yet equally
Russian — mysticism. These men, so scornful of all creeds, all
dreams, metaphysical or religious, themselves have speculations
and dreams of their own ; and not the most timid or best regulated
either. At the bottom of this naturalistic realism lurks a kind of
idealism, anxious to take its flight through all the unexplored
fields of possibilities. From out this pessimism, which curses the
actual social order, issues an unbridled optimism, which ingenu-
ously draws on the marvels of a Utopian future. In Russia, a
number of young people of both sexes, who would consider it the
most cutting of insults to be called idealists, and the depth of
humiliation to be held for such, do not hesitate, in matters the
least apt, it would seem, for such treatment, to give themselves
up to the most foolhardy dreams. It is in the domain of social
and economical theories, in the field of positive realities, that the
Russian, whether nihilist or not, loves best to indulge in the
fumes of Utopia and the search for the absolute. By entangling
himself too deeply in realism and utilitarianism, he falls back
into theories and chimeric vagaries, as though wandering in a
circle; it is when he has apparently strayed farthest that he
returns to abstract spectdation, as a traveller, after getting to the
antipodes, might land on another part of the shore of the country
he had quitted. The sphere which demands most moderation
and intellectual sobriety is precisely that in which the Russian —
and in that he does not stand alone — leaves the widest scope
to his imagination. With a great difference in knowledge and
method, have we not seen something of the same wrong-headed
speculativeness among the most declared opponents of metaphysics
— ^for instance, among certain positivists who, in economical and
political questions, have at times arrived at conclusions so little
in unison with their method and in reality so anything but posi-

208 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

tive? This contradiction, which is quite habitual with the
majority of sociahsts or radicals, this sort of wheeling-round,
which, in the most negative schools is so easily accounted for by
an unconquerable craving for an ideal and for faith jn a better
world, is nowhere less rare or more striking than among the
Russians. On this ground their natural turn of mind shows oflf,
with all its contrasts, its distrust and contempt for generally
received creeds, with its naive trust in doubtful positions and its
love of paradox.

Tocqueville has remarked that in our days the revolutionary
spirit acts after the manner of the religious spirit. This is more
true in contemporary Russia than anywhere else. For many
young people revolution has become a religion, of which the dog-
mas are as little to be discussed as a revealed "creed," which has
its confessors and martyrs as well as its gods and idols. With
them negation has taken the aspect and character of a faith — the
same enthusiastic fervor, the same sombre and contagious ex-
altation. From this point of view, the opinion of the ignorant
abroad, who used to take nihilism for a sect, is not as false as it
seemed at first sight. With its absolute spirit, intolerant of any
criticism, with its blind faith and passionate self-devotions, it is
indeed a sort of cult of which the god, deaf and unfeeling, is "the
people," worshipped in its abasement, — a sort of church, kept
together by the bond of love to that misjudged deity, and whose
law is hatred to its persecutors.

These nihilists, detractors of all hope in the supernatural and
contemners of every kind of spiritualism, are themselves, after a
fashion of their own, believers and mystics. This can often be
perceived in their manner of speech, in their writings, although
most of them profess to despise poetry as babyish stuff. These
foes to all superstition and veneration, who, in the noblest self-
sacrifice pretend to see nothing but a reflex action or a refined
form of egotism, honor the heroes and heroines of their struggle
against might with a sort of poetical canonization. They celebrate

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 209

the martyrs of their cause with a lyrism and a sort of piety which
seems addressed rather to saints enthroned in their shrines than
to modem conspirators.*

Read Tchemysh^fsky's famous novel, What is to be Done f f
(Shfb Diilatf), and you will be surprised at the singular medley
of mysticism and realism, of practical, wholly prosaic obser-
vations, and vague, visionary aspirations, all huddled together
in this strange work of the radical doctrinarian. In this long,
slow story, which claims to depict for us the reformers of society
and the sages of the future, it is through symbols, in dreams, that
to the heroine are revealed her own destinies, together with those
of woman generally, and the human race. True, these suflSciently
transparent allegories may have been suggested to the author,
then already imprisoned, by the necessity of not arousing too much
the distrust of the censors' office. In the prisoner's novel, side
by side with this humanitarian mysticism, a sort of naturalistic
asceticism shows itself, which to foreigners appears more peculiar
/ still. His ideal revolutionist, the finished type of the "new
men, ' ' Rakhmietof, not only owns all the moral perfections of the
brotherhood and universal solidarity, but, like a Christian ancho-
rite, or a Hindoo yogee, takes delight in renouncing the joys of
life and the pleasures of the senses ; inflicts privations on himself,
hardships ; loves to mortify his flesh, so as to make himself like
his suffering deity — the oppressed "people." When fruit was

* Take, for instance, the following translation of verses addressed to one
of the heroines of one of the great political trials, Lydia Figner, •who had
studied medicine at Zurich and Paris : " Mighty, O maiden, is the impres-
sion produced by thy witching beauty ; but mightier than the. witchery of
thy countenance is the charm of thy soul's purity. . . . Full of pity is the
image of the Saviour, full of sadness are his divine features ; but in thy eye
of fathomless depth there is even more love, more pain still." — Infanticide
Perpetrated by the Russian Government, Geneva, 1877. Compare the por-
traits of revolutionists given under the nam, de plume Stepniik in Russia
Sotterranea (Underground Russia), a small volxmie published in Italian, in
Milan, 1882, with a preface by I^avrof.

f This novel has been translated, or rather epitomized, in bad French,
in an edition published in Milan in 1878.

2IO THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

placed before him, he ate none but apples, because in Russia
apples are the only fruit ' ' the people ' ' can partake of. If he did
not wear a horse-hair shirt, this vindicator of the rights of the
flesh used, instead of sleeping in a bed, to lie on a felt rug all
studded with short nails, points upwards.*

Men like Rakhmi^tof, doubtless, are rare outside of fictions.
Of Tchemysh^fsky's admirers, only too many give themselves up
to the unbridled license authorized by their wretched doctrines.
This stoicism, this contempt of material delights, imperatively
demanded for others, does, however, show up sometimes in real
life. Among the innovators of either sex who profess and fre-
quently practise free love, I have known such as considered it
incumbent on their honor not to use for their own benefit the
rights which they, claimed.* This naturally is the case more often
with women, as they are always more given to inconsistencies, more
anxious to ennoble all sorts of aberrations. It is there, among
some of these votaresses of nihilism, these young girls who are
its most ardent proselytes and most courageous missionaries, that
one can best see how much generous feeling and unconscious
idealism can thrive under the mantle of this repulsive materialism.

^ This feat of asceticism, from its imf>ossibility, has become proverbial,
an equivalent of the rediictio ad absurdum of classical rhetoric. So that a
translator familiar only with the dictionary, in tackling very modem stories,
sketches, comedies, etc., might at any time be nonplussed by phrases like the
following, and not to be rendered in any other way : — "Oh, come now, you
are talking yourself to nails " ; or : — " We talked and talked for hours ; but
when they got to nails, I got up and left " ; or yet : — "At this rate we shall
soon get to nails."

*Here is one of Rakhmidtof's maxims: " Seeing we demand that all
men should be free to enjoy life in its entirety, we must prove, by our exam-
ple, that our object in making the demand is not the satisfaction of our own
personal passions, but the happiness of all." *

' This identical plea was put forward against the Neo-Christian reformer,
P^re Hyacinthe, when he took to himself a wife, — by his opponents and
even by not a few of his followers. While he claimed that it was his duty
to marry in order to enforce by his example his denunciations of clerical
celibacy with its inevitable consequence — gross immorality, — he was
accused of having made the point solely in order to justify in the world's
right his own self-indulgence.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 211

Among these women who preach the suppression of family life
and the free union of the sexes, — among these maidens with the
close-cropped hair, who delight in mimicking the ways and tricks
of speech of the young men, it is by no means rare to discover
such, whose conduct, far from harmonizing with their cynical
principles, remains pure and blameless, in spite of all the ap-
pearances of a life of adventure and lawlessness, in spite of a
sort of moral promiscuity in which the best behaved appear to
find pleasure.*

Nihilism has its virgins. Many girl-conspirators of twenty,
exiled within the last few years, have carried into Siberia an im-
maculate virtue, the more meritorious that their doctrines do not
inculcate it. Stranger still, nihilism has had its mystical or pla-
tonical unions, its married couples that were not such in reality,
z. e. ostensibly married in the eyes of the world, but preferring to
live as though they were not. These unions went in the sect by
the name of ' ' fictitious marriages. ' ' Since the trial of Nietchdyef,
/ in 1 87 1, few political trials failed to reveal some of these singular
unions. For many — especially young girls — it was a welcome
means of emancipation, which made it easy to carry on
political propaganda. The young girl, won over to the sacred
cause, was offered a husband, so she might enjoy the freedom of
a married woman. Sometimes it was the man who had catechised
and converted her, oftener an old friend, sometimes a stranger,
enlisted for the purpose. Solovi5f, one of those who attempted

* In the university cities, students of both sexes were often known to
dwell side by side. Their several rooms were divided only by a thin parti-
tion, or a door, barricaded merely by a bed or wardrobe. "Young men,"
says a man who has been established in Russia a long time, "look out for
furnished rooms where some are occupied by women-students, who do them
a hundred little services. It is not superfluous to mention that the greatest
morality reigns in these mixed colonies." — Edm. de Molinari, yournal of the
Economists, ist of May, 1880. This frequent cohabitation, however, even
though unprejudicial to the morals, helped to increase the exaltation
of young people of both sexes, who mutually excited and, so to speak,
wound one another up.

212 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the Emperor Alexander II. 's life, had contracted a marriage of
this sort. In reality the bride had espoused only the sect, her
slender dowry went into the common till, and the couple separated
frequently on the very day of their wedding, to go their different
ways, "to make propaganda" at some distant spot. That is
what Solovi5f had done, and when he and his wife left the
province for Petersburgh, they took separate lodgings. To
some this " fictitious marriage " was an association, a sort of co-
operation between two comrades. Others regarded it as a fine
chance to show their contempt for an institution blessed by the
Church and sanctioned by the State, a way of placing themselves
above society while pretending to obey its laws. The husband
took no advantage of the rights awarded him by religion and
law ; the wife preserved her liberty while legally bound. After
thus practically sneering at regular unions and denying herself
to her husband, she could, with his consent, go and practise fi-ee
love. For some few, again, "fictitious marriage " became a sort
of novitiate or test stage, which, after a few months' or years'
trial, made room for a more natural union. Thus it is that, in
Tchemysh^fsky's novel, V6ra and Lapukhbf live together at first
as brother and sister ; they occupy under the same roof two sepa-
rate apartments, divided by a neutral ground, until one day they
move into a common chamber, when the husband finds out that
a mutual attachment has sprung up between his wife and one of
his friends, and discreetly disappears, in order not to place them
in an awkward position, or cause them to feel any scruple, mean-
ing to return under another name, at the end of a few years, and
witness in good comradeship the happiness of the new couple.

It was in the manner of carrying on the nihilistic propaganda,
during its period of secret socialistic preaching, that the faith,
enthusiasm, and religious devotion of the adepts shone forth most
brightly, and that not only in the recklessness of their attempts,
or in the doggedness with which they braved deportation and
death. Such pathetic courage before judge and hangman other

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 21$

sectarians, revolutionists of other countries, have often shown as
well ; there is no folly however perverse but has had its believers
and martyrs. The power of exaltation characteristic of the Slavic
soul only manifests itself here in a more singular manner. What is
peculiar to contemporary Russian nihilism is its way of appealing
to the masses ; " going forth among the people " — (itti v-narbd)
— is the consecrated phrase. In order better to understand the
people whom they wish to indoctrinate, to make themselves better
understood by them, they go forth and mix with them, strive to
assimilate with them, to live their own Hfe of privation and man-
ual labor, discarding the prejudices and habits of their bringing up.
In this the missionaries of nihilism apparently propose to imitate
the first apostles of Christianity. What other country has seen
young men of good family, university students, cast off the garb
and habits of their class, put away books and pen, to labor like
workmen in factories, so as to be in a position enabling them
better to understand ' ' the people ' ' and initiate them to their own
doctrines ? * In what other country do we see young ladies, well-
bred and well-informed, on their return from foreign countries,
rejoice at having obtained the position of cook in the family of a
superintendent, so as to get nearer to ' ' the people ' ' and personally
study the labor question ? f

In Russia, where manners, ideas, even clothes, place a greater
distance between the different classes, this sort of disfranchise-
ment must assuredly be more painfully felt than anywhere else.
In this manner of "making propaganda," getting into direct
contact with the people, do we not recognize, through all its
attractions, the practical sense, the realistic turn of mind of the

* That is what, to quote one instance, Prince Titsi^nof and his accom-
plices did (trial of 1875) ; also Solovidf till 1878. Others learned trades and
opened workshops in various cities : a locksmith's shop at Tula, a carpen-
ter's at Moscow, a shoemaker's at Sar^tof, etc.

t Testimony of a young lady in the trial of Prince Titsi^nof (1877), The
trials of 1878-1882 have brought to light other facts of the same kind.
From such models Turgu^nief drew the heroine in his novel, Virgin Soil.

214 7'A^^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Russian ? Instead of holding aloof and hovering in the misty-
regions of theory, he descends to the laborer's level and the
peasant's, associates with him in the factory or the workshop, in
the school or the common dwelling.* With him practical sense
combines in quaintest guise with his speculative eccentricities ;
thus a sort of idealism is grafted on the most uncompromising
naturalism.*

Scarcely anything can be more heartrending to the observer
than this combination, among the young of both sexes, of qualities
and defects opposed to one another and almost equally extreme,
than this pledging to nefarious doctrines of the loftiest, most gen-
erous capabilities of the human heart. However that may be,
however repulsive in its principles and odious in its practical
attacks on life and property nihilism may show itself, it cannot be
denied that it reveals several of the finest qualities of the Russian
mind and character, and precisely those which foreigners are most
apt to deny. If it brings out into the glare of daylight some of
the most unlucky traits of the Russian temperament, its sinister
blaze illumines one of that temperament's noblest and least showy
phases. This people, so often accused of passiveness and intel-
lectual torpor, is shown to us capable of energy and initiative, of
sincere and active enthusiasm, capable of devotion to ideas. From
this point of view I will venture to say that this terrible phenome-
non does credit to the nation which suffers under it. In Russia
it is not, as elsewhere, want and ignorance, cupidity and ambition,
that are the most active leavens of the revolutionary spirit ; fre-
quently they are noble and lofty passions, feelings generous in
their very errors. The men who claim to be the apostles of human

* One of the means of propaganda revealed by the political trials is for
the adept to procure an appointment as village schoolmaster or communal
scribe. Solovidf had served in both capacities. Many agitators of both
sexes embraced, for the same reasons, the medical profession.

• All this forcibly recalls the ground taken by Walter Besant in that
wonderful book of his, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, which is as much a
darion-note and call to arms, though only spiritual, as Uncle Tom's Cahin.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 21$

solidarity can, when called upon, share in the labors of the lowly
and in the sufferings of the poor. They are not unaware that, in
their country, a revolution is not as yet a career nor a game at
which ambition has all to win and nothing to risk.

The greater part of the nihilists, of those at least who fig^e
in the trials, are very young — mere boys and girls. It is among
such that the revolutionary faith enrolls almost all its neophytes.
Among sentenced or arrested conspirators, men of thirty are
rare, few are over twenty-five, many are not of age. On the
other hand, nothing can be more common than to see young
people, inclined to every kind of visionary chimeras, become, at
the end of ten or fifteen years, practical men of the earth earthy,
of the world worldly, who deem it a good bargain to get rid of
principles in order to further their interests. Russia is not the
only country where such transformations are habitual, but in
Russia this contrast between the seasons of life — youth and
maturity — appear prompter and more marked than elsewhere.
Maybe, in matters concerning politics, the Russian, with his
practical sense, sooner becomes undeceived regarding revolutionary
vagaries, is more quickly struck with the disproportion between
the aim and the means of the agitators. Maybe, again, we have
here another trait of the national character, a new indication of its
propensity to fall from one extreme into the other. Anyhow, there
are few countries where parents and children have so much diffi-
culty in understanding one another. In this respect the pictures
drawn by Turgudnief in his Fathers and Sons are in great part
true even now. At the contact of real life, the practical and
positive instincts, as well as the egotistical, usually restune the
upper hand over revolutionary romance and utilitarian idealism,
until the latter are completely choked up or waved away into
the quietude of dreamland, where the most reckless theories do
not interfere with the most matter-of-fact prudence. Hence so
many young utopists swearing to demolish everything, and so
many mature men resignedly bearing everything ; hence, in

2l6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

one word, so many Russians with whom ideas do not interfere
with material interests, with whom the most daring radicalism
jogs along comfortably with the care of a fortune and the vulgar
anxieties about a career. True, such a moral collapse after the
sure excitation of several years is only too natural, no matter
where : has not France herself, after each of her revolutions, had
her hours of exhaustion and prostration. The phenomenon is,
nevertheless, to be noted in Russia. In the Russian soul dis-
couragement seems to follow ever close at the heels of enthusiasm,
dejection on exaltation. With whom lies the fault? — with the
political rigime or with the people's temperament? Perchance
with both !

With the Russians nihilism and radicalism are mostly a matter
of age ; it might be called a disease of childhood, — and that would
be true, not only of individuals, but of the nation at large.* It is
owing to his intellectual and political youth, to his country's
political inexperience, that the Russian is so eager on so many
questions, in the pursuit of daring speculations, so scornful of
other people's experience, so confiding in the easy achievement
of a social regeneration. To this propensity is added a secret
feeling of conceit. Even while accepting the ideas of the West,
the Russian likes to magnify them, he takes pleasure in overdoing
things, and pride in overleaping the West, in revolutionary as
well as other matters. Being engaged in growing when the other
nations had long been grown up, compelled to be their pupil, and

* A humoristic writer with tendencies at once national and aristocratic,
Prince Mesh-tch^rsky, has given in a pamphlet. Exposing the Times, 1879,
a pathological explanation of nihilism, which, paradoxical though it be, is
not wholly devoid of truth. According to him it is a sort of neurosis, pro-
duced by anaemia caused by the lack of muscular exercise in the schools.
It were easy to generalize the observation, and to say that, aside from the
lack of equilibrium between the bodily exercises and those of the intellect,
bad hygienic conditions, the students' poor fare, and their being for the
most part badly lodged, and even poorly clad, — all these things have much
to do with the morbid cerebral exaltation of so many young people of both
Bexes. (See Vol. H., Book VI., Ch. II.)

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 21/

mortified at the necessity, he longs to get ahead of his masters in
all things. The new-comer is apt to think his elders timid and
backward. The Russian of whatever persuasion frequently feels
towards the West as young people do towards mature or elderly
men ; even while enjoying the West's ideas or lessons, he is
inclined to think of it as lagging behind, vows to go the whole
length of the roads and ideas that same West has opened before
him. " Between ourselves, to what amoimt your European
nations?" said to me, fully twenty years ago, one of the first
Russians I have known, ' ' Old fogies who have given all they had
to give. It would be unreasonable to expect anything more from
them. When our turn comes, we shall not have much diflSculty
in beating them hollow." But when ze//// their turn come ? Many
get tired waiting. Unfortunately this piece of national bragging
is far from always implying effort. Too many Russians await
their country's grand future as a thing that must come on its
appointed day, as a fiiiit ripening on the tree. Too many others,
scorning the possible, rail at the liberties of which the West offers
them the models, as insufficient, adopting the attitude of sceptics
and blasSs ; while the most impatient, fancying that they can
revolutionize the country with one wave of their magic wand,
do not scruple to have recourse to the maddest, most odious
machinations.

The radical instincts of the Russian mind, or, if preferred, its
propensity to novelties and bold strokes of theory, firequently
manifest themselves in other things besides nihilism as practised
in schools, or the ignorant sects of the lowest classes. I will
mention one instance only, taken from the last fifteen or twenty
years. I mean the movement in favor of the emancipation, or,
more correctly, the independence of women. * Very different

•The Russians do not like to use the word "emancipation" in this
case. They will tell you that, with them, woman is emancipated, since the
law allows her to manage her own property in wedlock. Therefore this
subject is referred to, in Russia, as " The Woman Question."

2l8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

fix)ni nihilism, although in its vagaries it associated with it too
closely not to get compromised by it, this remarkable movement
of public opinion has its principle partly in that same side of the
Russian character — the contempt for prejudices, the taste for
daring propositions and social reforms. In the beginning of the
last century the Russian woman was, like the Turkish woman of
to-day, kept under lock and veil. Nowadays she, like man, more
than man, perhaps, aspires to enfranchisement and liberty.
Through all the exaggerations which expose them to ridicule,
these feminine pretensions are less out of place and less surpris-
ing than they would be elsewhere. The sex, emancipated by
the rough hand of Peter the Great, profited most, it may be, by a
civilization which, in giving it freedom, singularly flattered its
natural tastes. If in the empire, so many times and so gloriously
governed by women, the woman of the people is still kept in a
sort of servitude,' it is very different in the cultivated classes.
In intelligence and power of will, as well as in knowledge and
in the rank she holds in the family, the Russian woman is already
the equal of the man ; in some ways she even seems superior to
him, perhaps through the fact of this very equality which, by
exalting one sex, seems to lower the other.

This remark on the Russian woman might be extended to the
Slav woman in general. Polish society, for instance, would lend
itself to similar observations. It would appear as though, in this
race, the psychological differences between the sexes are at times
less marked, the moral or intellectual chasm less wide. Between
the Slav man and woman there is not imfrequently a sort of ex-
change and indeed of inversion of faculties and qualities. If the
men may sometimes be accused of a certain femininity, i. e.y of
something mobile, flexible, ductile, or impressionable to excess,
the women, as though in compensation, have, in their minds and
characters, something strong, energical, in one word, virile, which,

^ Not as much as it seems. See note on p. 1 16.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 219

far from robbing them of any portion of their grace and charm,
often adds to them a strange and irresistible attractiveness.

Feeling herself the equal of man in character and intellect,
the Russian woman is inclined to claim the recognition of this
equality, with its advantages and drawbacks : equality in labor
and instruction, equality in rights, equality in duties. Girls and
married women — and that in well-to-do families too — have been
known to take pride in providing for themselves, making it a point
to earn their livelihood without the assistance of their husbands
or fathers. Women, and especially young girls, have rushed
into all the careers open to their sex, loudly clamoring for new
openings.* The passion for knowledge, even for science, has been
one of the consequences of this desire for moral and material
independence. Young girls crowded the courses of lectures,
gymnasiums, universities. A few took hold of the classic lan-
guages— a much greater number went in for natural science and
medicine, t

The revolutionary spirit could not fail to turn to its own profit
these pretensions and aspirations of a sex always more prone than
the other to give way to impulse and infatuation. Among these

* It should be mentioned that this feminine movement is partly due to
economic causes which should be taken into account : perturbations in many
a family budget in consequence of the emancipation of the serfs, growing
difficulties in family life in consequence of the increase in prices ; difficulty
for the young girls of a certain class to settle in their own circles, especially
in cities, where the number of marriages has greatly diminished ; lastly,
certain legal restrictions, which allow to the women of a family only a very
small share of the paternal inheritance.

t Under the pressure of similar moral or economical causes, the same
longing for independence, the same striving to provide for themselves, have
grown up among the young girls of Hebrew parentage. In the number of
the female medical students registered in 1878, the Jewesses represented -^^^.
This steadily increasing percentage reached y%% in 1879, /. e., a full third of
the total. This figure is accounted for by the fact that, owing to legal ob-
structions or to custom, the medical career is about the only one open to
Jewish women. [See RazsviSt (The DaztmJ, an Israelitic organ, Sept. 11,
1880.] Since 1887 the Jews have been systematically excluded from the
liigher lines of instruction. See Vol. III., Book IV., Ch. III.

220 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

women, hungering for knowledge and liberty, among these strong-
minded young g^rls, sometimes too careless of the proprieties,
who combined a sort of instinctive idealism with an affected
realism, and substituted humanitarian dreams for the religion of
their childhood, the coarse seductions of nihilistic radicalism have
made all the more victims that many of these coursistes or
students could find no way of putting their studies to practical
uses and making a livelihood out of the acquired knowledge.
The evil was often made worse by the remedies which distrust
inopportunely suggested to the authorities, who, instead of
widening the field of feminine activity, in some cases half shut
in its face even those careers which they had but lately opened
before it.*

Thus it was that, in the large cities, sprang up a sort of femi-
nine proletariate — ^if the word may be applied to young girls,
well informed, enthusiastic, more diligent and usually not, less
revolutionary than their school brethren. The West, especially
Ziirich in Switzerland, has lately seen numerous specimens of
these girl-students, who strove to eradicate in themselves all
the qualities natural to their sex, in order better to establish
their right to the pursuits of the other sex, — of these, as Shake-
speare says, unsexed girls, who, the better to rise to the level of
men, worked hard to cease being women. Many noble and gen-
erous natures were hopelessly warped and worn out in the effort.
The most ardent and energetic, arrested in the front ranks of the
conspirators, in the flower of their youth, got themselves sent off
to Siberia. Others, less lofty or upright of soul, fell into excesses,
which must have been to them a severer punishment still.

*That is what happened about medicine, under Alexander III., as well
as under his father. The government, dreading the propaganda which
women doctors would carry on in the rural districts, more than once opposed
the appointment of a great number of them by the provincial assemblies
(Zemstvo); at other times, and notably in 1882, it suppressed the special
courses of medicine for women, allowing, however, others to be opened by
private subscription.

THE NATIONAL TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 221

All this cannot hinder the movement in favor of feminine
emancipation from being one of the most interesting and most
characteristic phenomena of contemporary Russia. Of all con-
tinental states, Russia, by this side, comes up nearest to the
Anglo-Saxon countries, though in the two cases claims in reality
analogous present themselves under very different aspects. If a
revolution of this kind is ever to take place, Russia will doubtless
be one of the first countries on the old continent to give the new
order of things a trial.' In the meantime she has already made,
in the matter of higher female education, experiments of which
some might serve as models to states that think themselves much
more advanced,* The Russian mind does not shrink from daring
initiatives, even risky ones. From that side, to which we do not
much look for examples, we shall some day receive more than one
lesson.

In no other nation have the traditions of the past at one and
the same time wielded more power and less authority, or been
venerated more superstitiously below, cast off more scomftdly
above. At the two extremities of the same people the opposite

* There will be no need of a revolution. There would be no " woman
question " but for the mania of aping the West. The law lays no restriction
on our women ; whatever opposition they encounter comes from public
habit and prejudice, and these are by no means stubborn in Russia; the
educated Slav is not conservative. It is not only that our women have full
control of their property, married or single, from the age of eighteen ; they
also vote in local elections — for instance, when the so-called " marshal of
the nobility " is appointed, a functionary whose duty it is to represent the
nobility of each government (province) on gala occasions, to look after their
interests as a class, to be their spokesman and entertainer. The right to
vote on these and other public local occasions is conferred by a property
census, from which women are not excluded, only it is customary for them
to send in their vote in writing or by power of attorney, as their presence
would be undesirable at these usually pretty festive celebrations.

* The "BestAjef Courses" (pronounce they as in the French /<?//) in
Petersburgh, the courses of Mr. Guerrier in Moscow, both founded by private
endowment, gave young girls a genuine " higher education." To these free
institutions the state substituted, in 1888-9, higher courses for boarders and
day scholars, the access to which is much less easy.

322 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

exaggerations meet. Of all men the Russian, once rid of his tra-
ditional ideas, of his national prejudices, is the most completely
freed. In this respect no other can be compared to him but the
Jew, the modem IsraeUte. He, too, at the contact with aliens,
passes from the extreme of the spirit of veneration to the extreme
of free-thinking, from the oriental traditionalism, to which the
bulk of his brethren stubbornly cling, to the most daring feats of
the spirit of innovation. By one of those contrasts perpetually
recurring in Russia, while the peasant, like the humble oriental
Jew, remains obstinately conservative, guardian of rites and
forms, the man of the cultured classes glories in having cast
behind him all the old traditions together with the old creeds.
Some people liken the Russian intellect to those virgin steppes,
where the ages have left no imprint and which have treasured up
for the future all their fertility. We shall see in the following
chapters in what sense such beliefs are justifiable. At all events,
we can say even now that the feeble hold of national tradition, the
poorness of the inheritance bequeathed to Russia by ten centuries,
have something to do with the radical propensities of the Russian
mind and "nihilism," — or rather, to borrow a barbaric but
graphic word from Joseph de Maistre, the nothingism (rienisme)y
more or less thought out, of the contemporary generations.

BOOK IV,
HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OE CIVILIZATION.

CHAPTER I.

Has Russia an Historical Inheritance ? — Is it True that she DiflFers from the
West by the Principles of her Civilization ? — Various Theories on this
Subject — Slavophils and Occidentals — Origin and Tendencies of the
Slavophils — In what Way the Apologists of Russian Civilization Meet
the Detractors of Russia — Secret Affinities between Slavophilism and
Nihilism — The Three Conceptions of the National History and
^Destinies.

After wandering over the Russian soil and successively
examining into the genealogical titles and the national temper-
ament of the Russian Slav, we should like to find out what
elements have been brought to him by history, how the ages in
their cotirse have confirmed or corrected the influences of clime
and race, what features they have added to the character of the
people, what bases given to its culttire and institutions. ' ' We
know enough of the history of barbarous times when we know
that they were barbarous, ' ' says one of the eighteenth-century
philosophers, referring to Russia before Peter the Great.* This
sa3ring bears the stamp of the ignorant and naive presumption
which, in the matter of historical and political sciences, has led
that century into so many mistakes and deceptions.

The Russians themselves will say at times they have no
history. Some, like Tchaaddyef of old, deplore the fact in

* Condillac, Modem History, vol. vi.
223

224 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS

melancholy strain, passionate and eloquent,* nor can anything
console them for having missed the most brilliant epochs of
European life, or allay their fears that, for lack of the same trials
and upbringing, their country never can achieve the same civili-
zation, for that a nation without a past is also without a future.
Others, more numerous, boldly congratulate themselves on the
same fact, boasting of their freedom from the trammels of all
tradition and all prejudice, from the fetters of a past in which, in
spite of her revolutions, old Europe remains entangled, f Look-
ing on all the bequests of past ages as on so many burdens and
hindrances for the present generations, they make light of the
inheritance left them by their forbears, and rejoice that they have
received from them nothing worth handing down to their chil-
dren. They delight in considering their country' as free land, as
a tabula rasa, on which science and reason are free to construct,
with materials all new, the building of the future. This point of
view, dear to radicalism, is the one which most revolutionists
hold. In that, it must be confessed, they really do little else than
appropriate the views or imitate the examples of the authorities,
who, ever since Peter the Great, have been the first to teach the
subjects to make stable litter of the national past and history.

In a state which, in 1869, celebrated its tenth centennial, such
views cannot be accepted literally. Many of those Russians who
express them would be justly indignant if they were taken at
their word. If a past of a thousand years has merely littered the
national soil with useless rubbish or brittle structures lacking base
and cement, it is that past itself which should tell us the reason.

* " We belong to none of the great families of nations, either Oriental
or Occidental ; we have the traditions of neither. We live, so to speak,
outside of time, untouched by the culture of mankind," etc. — Letters of
Tchaad&yef, 1836. For these letters, written in French, the author was
officially declared insane. (See Herzen, Revolutionary Ideas, and Pypin,
Characteristics of Literary Views, Petersburgh, 1869).

t In his Apology of a Madman, subsequently written, Tchaaddyef him-
self, changing his mind about the gloomy pessimism of his letters, partly
adheres to this opinion.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 22$

The taste for historical studies, the crown of honor of the nine-
teenth century, made itself felt in Russia as well as in the West.
For the last fifty years, especially the last twenty-five years, a
band of historians who in nothing — number, intelligence, or con-
scientiousness— are behind those of England, France, or Germany,
study with passionate zeal the annals of their country, and seek in
its past the key to its destinies.*

Russia has a long history, but the chain of her national exist-
ence has once or twice been so rudely snapped that it is an arduous
task even yet to reunite the severed links, and there remains in
the popular consciousness a sort of blank. This history the
Russian people have sufiered rather than made ; it was not, as in
the countries of the West, the people's own personal work, sprung
from the free development of their national genius ; it was passive
rather than active. In this respect the history of Russia resem-
bles not so much the histories of European nations as the annals
of Asiatic ones. Whether it came fi-om abroad or from above,
from aliens or from its own rulers, it often remained all external
or superficial ; it has, so to speak, passed over the people's head,
and, having at times bowed it low, still weighs heavily on its
shoulders.

It is neither in the climate nor in the race, it is in history and

geography that we should seek the causes of the inferiority of

Russian civilization. Many foreigners, the Catholics especially,

account for it by the adoption of a barren form of Christianity ;

others, chiefly Germans, by the absence of Teutonic influence, a

double defect sometimes lumped under the designation of hyzantin-

istn. Some see the cause of it in the lack of the classical heritage,

* In the foremost rank of contemporary historians are especially dis-
tinguished : Solovidf (died in 1879), Kostomdrof (died in 1885), Bestfijef-
Rimnin, Zabi61in, Ilovaisky, etc. Contrary to what is usual in other coun-
tries, most Russian historians bravely undertake a general history of their
coiintry since Rurik's times, and each usually has an historical, more or less
original, theory of his own. As very few reach the end of their task, it
follows that the initial periods of Russian history have perhaps be-n more
studied than the epochs nearer our own.

226 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the greater number in the Mongolian domination. The Russian
historians everlastingly face the same problem ; placed between
Europe and Asia, Russia is, so to speak, the offspring of both.
But of which is she morally or politically the daughter ? We have
to ask the same question in its bearing on social development, only
as regards soil and race : In what is Russia European, in what
Asiatic, in what merely Slav and Russian ? Have the centuries
of her long infancy disposed her, by an appropriate education, to
European life, or have they fashioned her for a culture of her own
— original, substantially distinct from that of the West ? To bor-
row the expression used by a native writer, does the difference
between Russia and Europe lie in the degree or in the principle
itself of civilization ? *

That is the point round which revolve most of the serious ques-
tions that have come up in Russia. The question under discussion
is no less a thing than the vocation of a country, of a people. To
acclimate a civilization, it is not sufficient that the soil should be
apt, it is imperative that the nation into which it is transplanted
should be prepared by the elements of culture. When it is
the Russian people we have to deal with, so long buffeted
between opposing influences, the question is far from being a
merely theoretical one ; it is a live one, the solution of which
awaits a practical application, and must decide the way the coun-
try shall go.

What we must find out is this : what attitude is Russia to
assume towards Europe ? Is she to consider herself Europe's
pupil ? as such to submit to Western schooling and persist in
imitating and adapting Western things ? Or, on the contrary, is
she to proclaim herself a stranger to the West ? give up borrowing
things which suit neither her genius nor her temperament, and
stand up unfettered, once more her own self? ' On the way that this
fundamental conception of her national destiny is decided depend

* Youri Sam^n : The Jesuits and their Relations to Russia, p. 364.
' See appendix to this chapter.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 22'J

all the views the Russians shall hold on their civil and political
life. Accordingly it is on the view they take of their history that
their diversity of opinions is mostly based. Historical parties take
the place of political parties, or, rather, the tendencies which are
in the stead of parties have for their point of departure a different
conception of their national history. Such is the substance of the
battle which, under various names, has been raging, ever since
Peter the Great, between the Old- Russians and their adversaries,
between Moscow and St. Petersburgh, between the Slavophils and
the Occidentals.'^

In the eyes of the Zdpadniki, or partisans of the West, there ;
is, in Russia's past and her traditions, nothing that need radically \
separate her from Europe. She has no culture of her own, really •
original, national, indigenous ; she is only behindhand with her '
Western neighbors. She still is a mediaeval state, an ancien
rigime state ; but there is no reason why she should not appro-
priate all the culture of more advanced nations, why she should not
do for Teutono-Ivatin civilization what the Teutonic peoples once
did for Roman civilization.

In the eyes of the Slavophils, on the contrary, and of many
patriots instinct with the same spirit, Russia is substantially dif-
ferent from Europe. Having received from the past peculiar
institutions, she is, by her origin, her beginnings, and bringing
up, by the elements of her culture, called to entirely different for-
times. In the manner in which her land has been peopled, in >
which her state has been founded, her territories have been occu-^^
pied, — in her conception of family, property, authority, Russian
possesses the principle of a novel civilization, and, naturally, if I
local patriotism is to be believed, of a better balanced civilization, j
more stable and harmonious, more really capable of progress ad
infinitum than the senile and effete Occidental civilization, threat-

* " Occidentals " {Zdpadniki) : partisans of European imitation. As to
the name of " Slavophils " {SlavianopMly), it is frequently mistaken in the
West for a synonym of " Panslavists."

228 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

ened, as the latter already is, with decomposition, as a restdt
Vof its internal conflicts.

One of the most curious phenomena of Russian life in the nine-
teenth century is undoubtedly "Slavophilism." The ascendancy
it has gained over the contemporary thinking heads is entirely
out of proportion with the number of its adepts. The little Slavo-
phil Church, with its exclusive beliefe, its stiff" dogmas, numbers
as yet few declared followers, few faithful orthodox believers ;
but the sort of national apotheosis which lies at the bottom of it
draws to it many more or less imconscious proselytes, among men
apparently strangers to Slavic fetishism of any kind. Then, too,
one not unfrequently stumbles on some Slavophil dogma or super-
stition, among people of the world, or writers who make it a point
to have nothing to do with such idolatry. As sometimeshappens
in the domain of thought, the Slavophil formulas and positions
were shattered in the shock of discussion, but the contents, the
spiritual essence, escaped out of the broken vessels and spread far
away into the air.

A remarkable and characteristic thing is that this Russian
school, which claims that it is to shake off" the intellectual domina-
tion of Europe, was itself formed under Occidental impulses, imder
the influence of European thought. Not in the direct study of
national history or popular life, but in the study and pondering
of foreign writers, have the founders of Slavophilism taken their
method, their dialects, and, indirectly, their ideas.

This vindication of the Russian spirit, this rebelling against
foreigA sway, was itself, at its origin, a loan or imitation, an adap-
tation of foreign things. The period between 1830 and 1840 was
one of debating, of theoretical speculations and hypotheses of all
kinds, a time when everywhere, but more especially in Germany,
systems sprang up full-fledged, philosophical, historical, political.
And it was from German metaphysics, from Hegel's logic and
philosophy of history, that the Slavophils of Moscow took the first
elements of their ideas, the shape and mould of their doctrines.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 229

To Russia and the Slavs they applied Hegel's proceedings, claim-
ing for their race and country the overlordship which the Prussian
philosopher, in the history of mankind, ascribed to the Teutonic races.
Slavophilism was entirely a birth of the speculative spirit, originally
merely a combination of the abstractions of German metaphysics
with literary romanticism, and with the reUgious mysticism, this
latter representing the contribution of the national element. The
originality and virtual superiority of the Russian or Graeco-Slavic
over the Occidental civilization were proclaimed a priori, by de-
duction. Later on, in order to adapt the facts to their theory,
these philosophers of the national idea began to turn their atten-
tion towards history and the people.

Putting away metaphysics, the Slavophils began to search in
the religion and the character of the people, in the regulation of
property, and in the constitution of authority, for the principles
on which rests Russian life. In their quest after all the original
features of the national civilization, they solemnly condemned the
moral subjection of the Petersburgian period ; they declared the
foreign intellectual yoke all the more intolerable that Etu-ope,
whose pupil Russia avowed herself, was going full tilt the way of
decadence.

Russian history, at that time but little studied, lent itself better
than any other to the vagaries of systematizing. To this day, many
fine works notwithstanding, it is for many writers a field open to
any and all hypotheses. In this career, the Slavophils were, by
their point of departure, exposed to commit remarkable blunders.
They were more than once to mistake for essential traits of the
social and political life of the Slavs things which, in the eyes of
their adversaries, were only survivals of an obsolete past crumbled
to ruins long ago. They were to proclaim as signs of race or
nationality what ofttimes was but a token of infancy or childhood.
They brought out into relief all the real or imaginary differences
which, in the past, had distinguished Russia firom the "West, and
of all these distinctive traits, more or less well-sorted, they made

230 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

up the elements of a Russian civilization. With the help of a
little generalizing they discovered and endowed their native land
with a civilization of its own ; indigenous, complete in its prin-
ciple, though abruptly arrested in its growth by the hapless
' ' Petersburgh period. ' ' This culture is, after a fashion, European,
but not after the manner of Western Europe — of Italy, France,
England, Germany. To Teutono-Latin culture, a Graeco-Slavic
culture was opposed, of which the broad and solid basis had been
preserved intact in the lower layers of the people below the surface,
where nationality had been undone by imitation of foreign things,
j Once they had entered on this way, the Slavophils were not con-
f tent with bringing into relief the features by which Russia differs
1 from the West ; not content with pointing out differences too great
to stand in need of exaggeration. They delight in transforming
this diversity into opposition ; they undertake to prove that the
national traditions are incompatible with the principles that rule
Occidental life.*

The long and arduous campaign of Bulgaria, the " attempts "
of the nihilists, ascribed to European contagion, the advent of
Alexander III,, loudly greeted in Moscow as that of the old-
Russian spirit incarnate, had restored to the but lately obsolete
inheritors of Slavophilism a fleeting ascendancy. In the life of
nations there come hours of patriotic fever and public ang^sh,
when all that bears a national semblance easily commands
applause. The battles fought on behalf of the Bulgars tem-
porarily raised to high honor on the other bank of the Pruth all
that, in name or appearance, is Slavic, just as in Germany the
struggle against Napoleon brought into vogue once more all that
was or seemed Teutonic. In Russia this tendency is, at certain
epochs, all the more urgent for the many reasons which patriotism

* That is what Aksikof did in his paper, Rus, up to his death (1886),
what more than one writer did even outside the circle of " neo-Slavophils " —
Prince Vassiltchikof for instance. (Landholding and Farming, St. Peters-
burgh, 1878, pp. 24, 30, and ff.)

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 23 1

has at others to feel discouraged and apprehensive. National
feeling gets wound up the more wilHngly for the self-delusion
it has to practise in order to work itself up to sticking point.
That is what excuses the ranting of certain Russians anent the
superiority of their Slavic culture, the intellectual decadence of
Western Europe, its political decomposition and rottenness.

Slavophihsm was bom, under Nicolas, of a violent and legiti-
matcfecoir against the long intellectual enslavement of the
eighteenth century. 'By re-awakening in the country's breast
reverence for its history and traditions and a liking for its national
antiquities, by winning the attention and aflfection of the higher
classes back to the mujik and the rural population, by serving
as counterweight to the systematic copyists of the West and the
innovators of the bureaucracy at St. Petersburgh, the Slavophils
have rendered their country a most undoubted service. Thanks
to them, Russia has recovered her national consciousness, which
threatened to become obliterated under a vain and sterile cosmo-
politism. At one time it was a wholesome reaction of " home "
against "abroad." With nations even more than with indi-
viduals, the feeling of personality is a great power, but on the
understanding that the over-excited national feeling do not
degenerate into a sort of intellectual "Chauvinism," or moral
protectionism. When it goes the length of depreciating and con-
temning all that is foreign, it becomes the worst adviser a nation,
no matter how great, can have ; but in no country could this
exclusive self-admiration, self-deification, be so baneful as in
Russia.' In his most exaggerated aberrations,' the least moderate
of Slavophils is not more laughable than the Teutonic patriot,

■^ Is it not rather the only safeguard when a nation's righteous self-
consciousness is in danger of being sneered away from abroad, stamped
out by self-abasement within ? It is only a wholesome reaction. The quali-.
ties demanded of nations are different from those that become individuals.
Amiable qualities are not necessary — only such as secure the existence, —
and self-assertion is the most directly to the point. We all admire England
for " not knowing when she is beaten."

232 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

who, in the wide modern world, perceives nothing but German
culture, German science, Teutonic influence. But of the two the
Slavophil is certainly the worst inspired as regards the good of his
country, for in preaching the contempt of the West and of the
nations out of which have come art, science, and the whole of
modem civilization, he runs the risk of teaching Russia the con-
tempt of all these things themselves, and of liberty and progress
to boot. Thus it is that Slavophilism and all analogous doctrines
involuntarily join hands on one side with revolutionary nihilism,
and on the other with the Western detractors of Russia.

When, under pretence of bringing out the originality of their
country, Russians are not content with accentuating the really
existing features of their national individuality, but insist on
placing Russian history and culture, Slavic genius and society, in
complete opposition, in radical incompatibility, with European
civilization, they unawares arrive at the same position, the same
conclusions, as their foreign opponents and contemners. The
Slavophil of Moscow echoes the Russophobes of London or Pesth,
who represent the "Muscovite" as substantially foreign to
European civilization, as incapable of appropriating it as the
Ottoman of Stamboul. The extremes of eulogizing and depreciat-
ing meet, as other extremes do. There is nothing in that to flatter
the reasonable patriotism of the Russians, for Western civilization
has traversed crises enough, has taken strength enough from its
various revolutions, to have little cause to dread the scorn of those
who take pride in remaining strangers to it, let such pretensions
come from Stamboul, Pekin, or elsewhere.

Another no less remarkable thing : Moscovite Slavophilism,
by its point of departure as well as by its attitude towards Occi-
dental civilization, is not without some analogy with the revolu-
tionary nihilism which would appear to be the opposite pole of
Russian thought. This name, "nihilism," which it repudiates,
Russian radicalism has earned chiefly perhaps by its disrespect
to that civilization on which it has more than once passed

HISTOR Y AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZA TION. 233

condemnation, and to which it also loves to oppose an ideal
Russia, if not of the past, then of the future. It was the classico-
Christian culture, as it came out of the Teutono-I^atin peoples,
that the fathers of nihilism chiefly denounced. What they
aimed at, what they denied, was not so much Russia as the
West. Russia, her customs and traditions, most modem Rus-
sians had long ceased to believe in ; in this respect all but
the Slavophils had long been nihilists. They had pinned their
faith on Western culture, with which they strove to become
impregnated. In the beginning of Nicolas' reign, as in the
eighteenth century, the civilization of which Peter the Great and
Catherine had been able to import only the outer shell and
formtilas, still was to the literary world a reUg^on which, outside
of a few belated conservatives, counted in Russia neither incred-
ulous nor indifferent spirits. The young generation were more
fervent believers than the Occidentals themselves in the lights and
the liberties that came from the West ; they believed, with the
ardor of a neophyte's faith, in the efficiency and sacredness of
" the principles of '89," in the infallibility of the human revela-
tion brought by the great Revolution,

Towards the middle of the century, a sudden and violent re-
vulsion occurred, as we have already seen, in the Russian intellect ;
but this evolution was not always to turn out favorably to the
Slavophils and the admirers of the national past. On a closer
view of this civilization, to which he looked for salvation, when he
touched its failings and heard it cursed and denied by many of
those who had been nurtured by it, the Russian began to doubt
it. He saw that, against ills and suffering, it had only uncertain
remedies or idle palliatives, and its liberty, its science, its wealth,
appeared to him but as a lie, a cheat. All the institutions and
formulas he had learned to reverence, became to him a hypocriti- I
cal and sacrilegious profanation of the truths half perceived in the 1
days of simple, youthful fervor. The modem Scythian fancied he 1
had found out the emptiness of that Graeco-I/atin culture whose

234 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

splendor had dazzled him, and, with his race's versatility and
proneness to rush from one to the other extreme, with the bittei
wrath of a believer undeceived and ashamed of his long credulity,
he blasphemed what he had worshipped but yesterday. The
Russian of the nineteenth century renounced his childhood's faith
as a puerile superstition ; he made it his study and pleasure to
insult, the while he could not yet shatter them, the false gods to
whom he had lovingly burned his incense ; he hurled from the
pedestal his own hands had raised, all those brilliant but worth-
less idols whose seductive beauty had fascinated his youth ; he
swore to tear down the proud temples erected for these deceitful
modem deities who,. under the ill-gotten names of liberty, equality,
fraternity, keep up amidst men error, discord, and the sordid
bondage of poverty. Such was, for its most illustrious founders,
the starting-point of nihilism.
^ Looked at in this light, nihilism, instead of being a produce

of the West and European contagion, becomes a sort of protest of
Russia against Europe, a ' ' tragic emancipation of the Russian con-
sciousness." If we consider, not the logical sequence and the
historical filiation of ideas, but the feelings it nourishes, often
unknowingly, nihilism turns out to be, like Slavophilism, a sort
of violent reaction against the long intellectual domination of
Europe, against her society, her science, against the whole modem
world. It is the rebellion of a child indignant at having been
deceived by his master ; and the more confiding, the more respect-
fiil his docility has been, the more bitter, the more passionate

will the rebellion be.

r —

The spectacle of Western Europe's incessant and barren revo-
/ lutions was not calculated to lead Russian radicalism back to
i admiration and imitation of the Occident. After having, like
Herzen, eulogized with ingenious enthusiasm its various revolu-
tionary experiences, they proclaimed, like Herzen still, that it was
as narrow as inconsistent, as incapable of progress in revolution
as in conservatism. This Europe towards which he kept turning

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 235

his eyes and his heart's desires, as the Mussulman towards Mecca,
he despaired of it ; he proclaimed it decrepit and " played out " ;
he turned his back on it, and sought elsewhere, on a younger soil,
the site for his New Jerusalem, for the humanitarian earthly para-
dise, to be opened by revolutions. By an abrupt revulsion quite
in accord with the national character, always prone to sudden
changes of front, Russian radicalism overthrew its own position
and turned its own theory inside out. The part of initiator and
rescuer, lately held to be the undoubted privilege of the West, it
suddenly transferred to its own ignorant and belated native land.
The light it had looked for from abroad and from Europe's enlight-
enment, it took to expecting from out of the darkness at home.
In losing faith in the West, the radical, like the Slavophil, went
back to his faith in Russia, but for reasons the opposite of the
Slavophil's. In this native land of his, so severely scorned by
him, he all at once discovered a secret superiority, bom of its
very inferiority.

And this recoil was logical. Modem civilization, modem
society once condemned, the country most apt for future creations
is that where the past leaves the most widely open field to the
present, where the land is easiest to clear. Now in this respect
Russia manifestly heads the list. Of all civilized states, it is that
where the institutions and the arts which are the pride and joj^
of the modem world have struck their roots least deeply and bear
the least luscious fruits ; where it is easiest to destroy, and where
destruction would be effected at a minimum cost to imagination,
heart, reason, prejudices. The Russians are the veritable chosen
people of revolution, because they are the people that has least to
lose by it. By this sort of rehabilitation and glorification of the
land, lauded up by its children not for its wealth, real or fancied,
but for its barrenness and poverty, the revolutionary spirit has
assumed in Russia a singular vigor and confidence ; it has, so to
speak, taken a national and patriotic character, through its very
negation of nationality and love of country.

236 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Thus, even apart from their common origin from German phi-
losophy and Hegel, Slavophilism and nihilism, as doctrines, have
had the same points to depart from and to arrive at. Both these
' ' hostile brothers ' ' departed from the insufl&ciency of the bour-
geois civilization and the disappointment it entailed ; then, after
keeping their backs turned on each other a while, they unexpect-
edly met on the ground of the glorification and apotheosis of
Russia, to whom they both promise a sort of primacy, leadership
in the future, though they all find to praise at present but one thing
— ^the 7«zr, or the collective property scheme of the peasant class.

One of the causes of the waverings, the inconsistencies, the
worries which the tsars undergo in their home politics in this
nineteenth century is the violence with which they, no less than
their subjects, are tugged at and pulled different ways by the two
chief tendencies that strive together for the direction of the public
spirit. Under Alexander I. the influence of Western Europe and
her admirers was almost constantly predominant. Under Nicolas
public sympathy veered round to the so-called national spirit.
Under Alexander II. the government yielded to each current by
turns, to successive but opposite impulses.

^ Since Alexander III. came to the throne, greeted by a portion
of the nation as a sort of Messiah, destined to restore Russia to her
own real self, the neo-Slavophil or national tendencies once more
came to the fore, both at court and in the government. It can be
predicted without much risk of going wrong, that Russia will pass
through many more such oscillations, driven this way to-day and
that to-morrow by the contrary winds which fight for the control
of her. That alone accounts for many of the difl&culties among
which she flounders, for her uncertainties, her reluctance to enter
on the road of political transformations. As long as she cannot
make up her mind and choose between the neo-Slavophils and
their opponents, Russia will drift along rudderless.

Against the Slavophils who claim for their country a culture all
its own, original, capable of indefinite development as soon as it

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION, 237

will be rid of the false gods of the foreigner, the " Occidentals "
(Zdpadniki) will long struggle, — they who will not allow the
Slavs to possess the elements of a new civilization, and are bent
on carrying on the tradition inaugurated by Peter the Great.
Between the two hostile camps nihilism stands up, grown tall in
their shade, under cover of their wrangles, — nihilism which sports
the armor of both, and, taking its cue from the negative portions
of both their doctrines, denies Russia with one breath and the West
with the next.

Such are the three extreme directions between which, under
various names, with more or less determined opinions, the Russian
mind oscillates. Some assert that Russia has enough stuff in her
traditions to provide for herself ; others derive from imitation of the
foreigner all the ills of society and the government. Others again,
not allowing their country any social or political principle of its
own, look on it as on a belated member of the great European
family and see no chance of progress for it except along the lines
opened to it by the West. Still others will have it that, in the
shapeless survivals of the past, there is nothing worth preserving,
and call for the destruction of all that now exists, so as to clear
the ground for putting up a building constructed after no known
model whatever, either native or foreign. A glance down Russian
history will show us how these three seemingly incompatible con-
ceptions can all emerge out of the same past, and in what measure
each may consider itself justified by facts.

APPENDIX TO BOOK IV., CHAPTER I. (See p. 226, note i.)

ONCS FOR. AI,I« — ^WHAT IS RUSSIA'S REI,ATlON TO RUROPB ?

This question, which continually turns up in any earnest discussion of
Russia's historical position and the future that must spring therefrom,
being as difficult to settle as impossible to dismiss, was already touched
upon by Mr. Leroy-Beaulieu in the initial chapter of this, his great work.
We there supplemented his remarks with some pithy lines from Mr. Dani-

238 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

lefsky's thoughtful book, Russia and Europe. In the present chapter ova
author is brought back to this master-question, on which he rests with
greater insistence. It may not be out of place to follow his lead and here
present our readers, as briefly as possible, with the sequel of Mr. Danilef-
sky's argument — or, more correctly, review of facts, and the conclusions,
they force on him.

Russia is not Europe, either geographically or historically, is his verdict
(see pp. 13, 14), supported by a breadth and wealth of illustration at which
limited space does not allow of our even hinting here, and concludes :
"Having no part either in the European good or the European evil, how
can she belong to Europe ? Neither true modesty nor true pride allow her
to assume that she does. Only low-bred upstarts posh their way among
their betters. . . . But, it will be said, if Russia does not belong to
Europe by right of birth, she does by right of adoption. She has appro-
priated to herself (or should strive to do so) all that Europe has worked out ;
, she takes (or at least should take) her share of Europe's labors, Europe's
' -triumphs. But who has done the adopting ? We don't, somehow, perceive
much of Europe's parental feeling in her relations with Russia. But there
lies not the point. It lies in this : is such adoption a possible thing any-
how ? Can an organism, so long nourished on its own saps, drawn by its
own roots out of its own soil, fasten itself by suction on to another organ-
ism, let its own roots dry ofiF, and, out of a self-dependent plant, become a
' parasitical one ? . . . But, for the sake of argument, let us have it so :
Russia, though not by birth European, has become so by adoption. Why
then, of course, our motto should be : Europcsus sum et nihil europcei a
me alienum esse puto. All Europe's interests must also be Rtissia's interests,
her wishes must be our wishes, her aspirations — ours ; ilfaut les ipouser — we
must become wedded to them — in the expressive French phrase. We may
dififer in details with France or Italy, England or Germany, but with Europe
as a whole, i. e., with otu-selves, we cannot possibly difiFer or disagree : we
must be conscientious, consistent.

"What rdle on the universal stage does Europe assign us, her adopted
children ? To be the bearers and propagators of her civilization in the East
— that is the lofty mission allotted to us, the task in which Europe will sym-
pathize, which she will advance with her blessings, her best wishes, her ap-
plause, to the edification and delight of our humanitarian progressists. Very
well. Eastward-ho ! then. But stop — what East ? We had thought to begin
with Turkey. What could be better ? There live our brethren, in blood and
spirit, — live in agonies and yearn for deliverance. ' Whither away ? You

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 239

kave no business there,' thunders Europe; 'that is not the East iox you ;
there 's more Slavic trash there than I like, and /'m going to manage them.
My Germans have done such work before. Clear out of there.' — We
tackled the Caucasus — that 's a sort of East too. Mamma got very mad :
' Don't dare to touch the noble paladins of freedom ! much it becomes you
to meddle with them. Hands off ! ' — For once, thank goodness, we did not
obey, and forgot our Europeanism. There is Persia now ; something might
be done there in the way of sowing the seeds of European civilization. The
Germans would not have minded ; their Drang nach Osten ('Eastward Push '),
scarcely would reach so far ; but out of respect to England we had to be
checked: 'Too near India. Move on!' — To China, perhaps? — 'Well,
no. Is it tea you need ? We '11 bring you all you want from Canton. China
is a wealthy country — we can teach her without your help. She is smoking
our Indian opium like a charm — let her alone.' — But, for mercy's sake,
where is our East, the East which it is our sacred mission to civilize ? —
'Central Asia, that's the place for you, do not forget it. We could not
get there anyhow, besides it would not pay. There lies your sacred histori-
cal mission. . . .' — So then we shall have gone through a thousand years
of labor, streaming with sweat and blood ; we shall have built up an empire
of a hundred million souls (of which sixty millions of one race and blood,
a thing unequalled in the world, except in China), — all to tender the bless-
ings of Exiropean civilization to five or six millions of tatterdemalions, the
denizens of Kokan, Khiva, and Bokhara, with two or three millions of Mon-
golian nomads thrown in — for that is what the high-sounding phrase about
bearing European civilization into the heart of the Asiatic continent really
amounts to, — an enviable lot indeed, and a mission to be proud of. In sooth,
PaHuriunt montes, nasdtur ridiculus mus. . . ." Then the author
depicts in glowing colors what a glorious thing it would have been foi Eu-
rope had Russia existed only as an empty space, with no tiresome Russian
and other Slavs to exercise there a sort of right of pre-emption, and only
savages of the Red-Indian type to be summarily dealt with — what a fine set
of United States, with all European improvements, would have grown up
there, opening out to Europe a gorgeous " Far-East," in an unending golden
perspective ! Curious enough, the identical thought came, in a somewhat
different spirit, to Mr. I^eroy-Beaulieu, and, our sincere friend and earnest
well-wisher as he is, much of the regret which the Russian writer banter-
ingly supposes and expatiates upon, shows, seriously, between his lines.
Even he cannot help grudging us Slavs, the Europeans not of Europe, a
little, and, perhaps unconsciously, our broad place in the sun (see p. 54).

240 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

What wonder then if Mr. Danilefsky, dropping banter for the graver tone
becoming the subject, announces this result :

" Thus, then, after conceding that Russia is European by adoption if not
by birth, we are led to the conclusion that she is not merely a colossal
superfluity, a huge historical pleonasm, but a very positive, hard-to-be-over-
come hindrance to the evolution and propagation of the alleged only uni-
versal— in reality European, i. e., local Teutono-Latin — civilization. In this
light — and in this light only — Europe regards /Russia."

BOOK IV. CHAPTER II.

The First Russia and Europe — Traits of Kinship — Similarities and Dissimi-
larities— The Varangians — Christianity and Byzantine Training — ^The
Principalities and Frequent Shiftings of the National Centre — The Great
Unhingement of Russian History.

European civilization grew upon a triple foundation : the
Christian element, the Graeco-Roman or classical element, the
Teutonic or barbaric element.* All the Western states were
erected, so to speak, with identical materials, in the same style, on
a more or less similar plan. The three great bases on which re-
poses the culture of the West, are they found in the foundations
of Russia ? If we dig deep enough, we do come upon them, but
they have neither the same proportions nor the same importance
as in the other countries.

The ancients knew of Russia only the shores of the Euxine.
The Greeks dropped colonies only on those shores ; the Romans
scarcely held a nominal sway over them. With the former those
wide plains passed for the home of the Cimmerians' eternal night ;
to the latter the regions north of the Danube and the Black Sea
were a sort of Siberia, whither they sent state criminals. Russia
was too compact, too continental for antique civilization, which,
wending its way along shorelands, could gain a hold only on essen-
tially maritime countries. Germany already had proved too solid
a mass and too severe a clime for it ; Russia was just touched by
it along her southern beaches. The Greeks had had some preco-

* It should be mentioned that the following pages were mostly written
before Mr. Alfr. Rambaud's admirable History of Russia came out. See
Revue des Deux Mondes, January 15, 1874.
16 241

242 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

cious intercotirse with the natives. They have themselves pre-
served for us the memory of the Scythian — alias the Russian —
Anacharsis,' and the jewelry discovered in the graves of the steppes
shows that these remote wildernesses were not closed to Hellenic
art. As has been the case with all great states of Europe, some
portions of Russia's territory have been under Greek or Roman
rule. It was not, however, till the Middle Ages that the Rus-
sians, through Constantinople, came, though remotely, under the
influence of Greece and Rome ; and the channel was a round-
about and corrupt one. Byzance, at the time of her decadence,
was the only Rome they knew, the Lower-Empire was the only
model supplied them by Greek and I^atin civilization.

Very different were the part and importance of the barbaric
element. Like the states of Western Europe, the Russian state
appears to have been founded by Teutons amidst a people that
was soon after to be won to Christianity. This, to begin with, is
a patent similarity to all those European histories which all seem
to be the repetition of one and the same occurrence. Yet, under
the similarity, the difference already shows. Russia was a different
material, though of kindred substance — Slavic material, instead
of Celtic or Teutonic. What is the Slavs' original contribution
to civilization ? The Russians would fain base on them their cul-
ture as well as their nationality. History unfortunately knows
little about them at the time of their separate existence. There

' This young prince is the first-known prototype of the much-travelled,
brilliant, cosmospolite Russian of our day. He, too, fell down and wor-
shipped "civilization," "progress," "liberalism," which the Athens of the
Pisistratidse and of Solon, no doubt, embodied in a form no less entrancing
than the Paris of to-day. And when recalled by duty to his "barbaric"
realms, the poor fellow sweetened his exile by initiating his companions
into the delights of Hellenic culture and easy social manners. But there
was a stem elder brother — the Slavophil of the time — ^who made it his mis-
sion to guard his people from the pollution and dangers of foreign innova-
tions, and, in the name of nationality, put an end to all attempts at reforms
by taking the would-be reformer's life. Things were simple in those days,
and if the end was admitted to be desirable, the surest and shortest means
to it were naturally the best. — See Herodotus, iv., 76, and l/ucian, Scytha.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 243

was no Tacitus to leave us a Slavia to match the Germania of
Agricola's son-in-law. In old-time Sarmatia we find the Slavs at
their earliest known stage in contact with Teutonic or Finnic
' ' allogens. ' ' Since some time before Rurik, the Slavs of the Dniepr
and the Volkof were settlers and farmers ; already they lived in
solid wooden houses; already they had cities or "enclosures"
that served for shelter, the so-called gorodish-tshi,^ thence
grM or gdrod* like Kief and N6vgorod ("new enclosure,"
or " new city "), the very names of which presuppose other older
ones. The different tribes lived in isolated clans, which do not
seem to have had much cohesion, since, to shape them into a state
or nation, foreign alloy was needed. Compared to the Teutons,
the Russian Slavs appear to have had a preference for association
and community as forms of social life, to have possessed a more
peaceable and less hierarchical spirit, a more outspoken or more
persistent leaning towards patriarchal life, or, more correctly, tow-
ards family life on a large scale. The rod, or " family," in the
sense of the I^atin gens, seems to have been the only basis of their
entire social organization. These tendencies, so blurred and in-
distinct at this distance of time, perhaps contained the first germ
of Russian institutions.

The Teutonic element, which in all Europe has played a part,
rather too promptly contested just at present, was not entirely

' The peculiar and rather vigorous Slavic double sibilant compounded
of the sounds sh and tch is so puzzling to foreigners that the only way to
make the pronunciation clear to them is to separate the two component
sounds by a hyphen, which at once shows how really simple and easy it is.
This is the sound which the Latin alphabet of the Poles and the Tchekhs,
inadequate for Slavic phonetics, renders by the bewilderingly bristling com-
bination, szcz, the conventional sign for sh (as in shy) being sz and that
for tch or ch (as in church) cz. The old Slavic alphabet (adopted by the
Orthodox Slavs), compiled half of Latin, half of Greek characters, has signs
specially invented for this and a few other peculiarly Slavic sounds. But
when the Western Slavs accepted Latin Christianity, they had to accept
also the Latin alphabet of the Latin prayer-books, and to twist and force it
into phonetic uses for which it was insufficient.

* Identical with Lithuanian grod, English garden and yard, German
garten, Latin horius, Greek khortos.

244 ^^^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

missing in Russia. It was most probably Norman adventurers,
like the Vikings that were at the same period ravaging the West-
em countries and founding there their various dynasties, who, in
the ninth century, laid the -grounding of the state out of which
was evolved the Russian Empire. The Kief chronicler, Nestor,
shows us Rurik and his brothers called by the Slavs of N5vgorod,
tired of their intestine squabbles.* The chronicler of the eleventh
century may already have, out of national conceit, disguised a Nor-
man conquest or invasion under the veil of a voluntary call from the
Ndvgorod Slavs. In our days a new-fangled historical criticism
and retrospective patriotism have attempted to wrest from the
Scandinavians Rurik and his companions, the Varangians. The
Russians have looked about for a more national genealogy to
endow the founders of their empire with. No historical question
has called forth more passionate discussions among the scholars
of Moscow and Petersburgh. They have applied Niebuhr's
proceedings with Roman history to their own country rather late
in the day. One scholar holds Rurik and the Varangians to be
exiled N6vgorodians, another — Slavs from the southern coast of
the Baltic, or from the Isle of Riigen ; another takes them for
Lithuanians ; others still for bands of adventurers of mixed races,
Slavs and Scandinavians. In these latter days some have gone
so far as to make of this most essential incident a myth invented
by the self-conceit of the monks of the twelfth or thirteenth cen-
tury, anxious to discover an illustrious origin for their nation or
their princes, after the fashion of the French chroniclers who
brought down the Merovingians from Priam of Troy.f In spite
of the latest researches, the Varangians will have to be left to

* On this legendary call the Slavophils lately constructed a whole hi»-
torical system, which placed the Russian state, based on the people's vol-
untary submission, on a different footing from the Western states, all based
upon conquest This position, now abandoned in history, can still be found
in the economical or political theories of many a Russian writer.

t This position, very ably upheld by Ilovaisky, has been refuted by
Solovidf, one of Russia's most eminent historians.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 245

Scandinavia. This filiation accords better with the Byzantine
annalists and with Nestor as well.* The names of Rurik and his
comrades betray their Teutonic stock ; the character of the leaders'
authorit3% their method of parcelling out occupied lands, and even
to their manner of warfare confirm this origin. They were Nor-
mans, seeking for a road to Constantinople, and who, having
gained possession of N6vgorod and Kief, founded a military and
trading state between the Baltic and the Black Sea, along the
Dniepr, then one of the great commercial thoroughfares of the
East. Like their brethren in the West, these Russian Northmen
were, as Gibbon observes, more formidable by water than by land ;
on their small barges they went down and attacked Constantinople,
and imposed on it tributes or commercial treaties, of which the
chronicles have preserved the very practical clauses.*

The first Russian law-book, Riisskaya Prdvda — the Russian
Right — still bears the Teutonic impress. In this code, put
into shape by Yarosl^v, over a century and a half after Rurik,
some have fancied they could trace more than one custom of Nor-
mandy. Like the Western nations, the Russians then had the
ordeal and the judicial duel ; like them, they admitted, for murder
and other crimes, compounding in a sum of money ; the very name
of this fine, vira^ answers to the German Wehrgeld. Between
this first Russian and the European states founded by Teutonic
tribes, numerous similarities can be adduced. The difl&culty Ues
in discriminating what belongs to the Varangians and to the Scan-
dinavian influence and what should be credited to the Slavs. In

•♦ See appendix to this chapter.

* The Western scholars, especially those of Scandinavia, stand up for the
old tradition which, to use a Russian writer's expression, stands firmly based
on two hitherto unshaken pillars : the names of the first Russian princes,
and the names of the falls of the Dniepr. (See, for example the learned
researches of the Rev. Fath. Martynof, in the Revue des Questions Histo-
rigues, July, 1875, and the Polybiblion, May, 1875.) W. Thomson, Profes-
sor at Copenhagen, has given three lectures on this subject. They were
translated into German under the title, Ursprung des Russischen States
{Origin of the Russian State), 1879.

246 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Russia even more than in the West, we run the risk of ascribing
to the Teutons what the Barbarians can lay claim to, of attributing
to race the effects of culture. Slavs or Teutons, no matter which,
all these tribes had similarities of customs and character which
render it no easy task to make out in the institutions the part of
each.

The Teutonic impress, having gone less deep, was also less
enduring in Russia than in the West. The absorption of the
Scandinavian top-layer by the Slavic subsoil was rapid and com-
plete. No matter how many recruits from Scandinavia the Va-
rangian princes kept calling in during more than a century, their
settling in Russia is rather to be compared to that of the Normans
in Neustria than that of the Merovingians and the Carlovingians
in Gaul. Rurik's grandson, Sviatosl^v, already bears a Slavic
name and worships Slavic gods.*

In Russia, as everywhere else, it was a woman who opened
the way to Christianity. Olga, the Russian Clotilda, was bap-
tized in Constantinople. Her example, scorned by her son
Sviatosl^v, was followed by her grandson Vladimir, who was
Russia's Clovis and Charlemagne in one. No nation ever ac-
cepted Christianity more easily ; it had been prepared for it all
through the last century by its relations with Byzance, and Chris-
tianity itself had been prepared for the Russian people by the
translation of the Gospels and of the liturgy into Slavic. By
ushering his subjects into Christianity, Vladimir at the same
time introduced them amongst the European nations. Although
Christ's creed has been to our civilization much more a nurse
than a mother, still this civilization never could become natural-
ized in any nation but such of which the majority were Christian.
Even at this present day, when it seems most free of its infancy's
swaddling-clothes, it is doubtful whether it could become entirely
acclimated among people professing alien religions. No country

* On the drujina of the kniazes, as on the boydrs of the next following
epoch, see, further on. Book VI., Chap. II, TTie Nobility.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 247

yet has entered into civilization by another gate than that of
Christianity.* In Vladimir's time more particularly the Christian
faith drew the moral boundary line of Europe. This boundary
was crossed by Russia as early as the tenth century ; but the
Gospel was not to clear a place for her in the family into which it
had just introduced her. Here, again, through the resemblance
of Russia to the West, shows an essential dissimilarity. The Cross
comes to her by another road — from Byzance, not from Rome, and
thus the very bond which appeared to link her to Europe, in
reality, was to hold them apart.

To gain a knowledge of the elements of Russian civilization, it
were needful to appraise this oriental form of Christianity, to de-
termine its value as a civilizing agent. Unfortunately this is too
lofty a question to be lightly touched upon in passing ; it will
have to be reserved for our study of the Russian Church, t I^t it
suffice here to remark that, if less favorable to the progress of its
proselytes, the Greek creed need not, therefore, be inferior to the
Latin. By sequestering Russia from the West, the Eastern
Church took from her one of the principal advantages of her con-
version ; she robbed her of the benefit conferred by membership
in that vast intellectual community of which Rome was the cen-
tre, and which, for the West, was one of the most favorable condi-
tions of civilization. Russia remained, as though excommuni-
cated, outside the pale of the Christian republic ; morally as well
as physically, she was banished to the frontiers of Europe.

Christianity, through Constantinople, brought Russia into some
sort of connection with antiquity. Under the " Grand-Kniazes "
of Kief, she became a sort of colony of Byzance. That is what
one of her writers calls by the name of ' ' the first of her intellec-
tual bondages." The Russian Metropolitans were Greeks, the

* This precisely is one of the things that lend so fascinating an interest
to the grand experiment that is being tried in Japan.

f The third volume of the present work will be devoted to the Russian
Church and sects. It will there appear in what measure heathen ideas and
practices have at times persisted under Christian rites.

248 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

"grand princes" took pleasure in marrying Greek princesses
and visiting the Bosporus. The numerous schools endowed by
Vladfmir and Yarosl^v were founded by Greeks, after Byzantine
models. For over two centuries, Constantinople and her daughter
entertained a close intercourse, by means of commerce, religfion,
arts, etc. Byzance impressed on the Russians' manners, character,
taste, a stamp which was not quite obliterated by the Tatar
impression which came on top of it.

The first social tjrpe which civilization held out to the young
Russian Empire was the autocracy of the I,ower Empire, a state
without political rights, ruled by Imperial Omnipotence, aided by
a close hierarchy of functionaries and employes.

This Byzantine training was corrected by Kiefs relations with
the other European states. The isolation to which geography,
religion, and, later on, the Mongol yoke condemned Russia, was
not as severe then as it soon became. The schism between
the two churches, undecided as yet, had not brought about the
hostility in which the crusades resulted. It had not yet vetoed
unions between worshippers of the two rites. The Russia of the
eleventh century was part of the political system of Europe.
Yarosl^v, Vladimir's son and continuator, was connected, through
his children, with the King of France, Henry I., as well as with
the Eastern emperors, the rulers of Poland, Norway, Hungary,
with German princes and with the Saxon Harold, the hapless
rival of William the Conqueror. At the time of Kief's suprem-
acy Russia was more European than at any other time before the
eighteenth century. Her relations with Constantinople, the last
refuge of the arts and sciences of antiquity, gave her an easily
gotten advantage over the West. Kief, beautified by Greek
builders and limners, came to be, as one would say, a reduced
copy of Byzance, a Ravenna of the north. The superb mosaics
of her grand Cathedral of St. Sophia, the magnificent insig^a
now to be seen in the treasury at Moscow, bear witness even yet
to the wealth of this capital, the wonder of chroniclers — German,

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 249

Greek, and Arab. The Russian state was already then the vastest
of Europe, one of the most active in trade and by no means the
least cultivated. In the eleventh or twelfth century it could seem
more favored than Northern Germany, which at that time still
was in great part under Slavic or I^ithuanian rule, sunk in heathen-
ism and barbarism. It was an empire firmly seated on European
foundations, yet possessed of elements of originality already clearly
marked ; a country which in the midst of Christendom appeared
called to some special mission, that of serving as a link between
the Greek Orient and the I^atin Occident. But history denied to
it the simple boon of a normal development. On the threshold
of youth its growth was stopped by one of the greatest perturba-
tions recorded in human annals. The Mongol invasion was not
merely to put back the hand of Russia's timepiece three hundred
years, it was to turn her from the European road on which she
was travelling, bend her to alien manners, and, in a measure,
twist her out of shape. It was in the early years of the thirteenth
century, at the very dawn of Western civilization, when mediaeval
Europe was on the point of blossoming out on all sides — in poetry,
in architecture, in scholasticism, — that the hordes of Djinghiz-
Khan cut away from Europe Russia's co-operation.*

Long before the Mongol invasion the development of the first
Russian Empire had been hampered by an internal evil, the division
of sovereignty. All the descendants of Rurik were entitled to

* But what a compensating boon to have escaped such influences as
those of Innocent III. and the Albigensian wars ! Terrorizing Christianity
is uncongenial to Russian nature, and would have warped it, ruined it irre-
trievably. Not even the divine trio, Dante, Giotto, and sweet Francis of
Assisi, could have made up for the moral havoc that would have been
wrought by these two things alone — the blasphemous Albigensian " crusade "
and the Inquisition. Catholicism, being hostile to the Slavic nature, must
have destroyed, defaced, perverted — {dinaturS) — what is best in it. See
what became of Poland in the hands of Rome ! Thus the Mongolian
visitation was really an escape. How, in other ways it brought out and
strengthened the best in the nation, we shall see farther on. Another
escape — no scholasticism. Better a thousand times the naive poetry of pop-
ular beliefs.

250 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

some share in the common inheritance, or rather the common
property. The eldest, the head of the house, the ' ' Grand-Kniaz, ' '
residing in Kief, had over the others a merely nominal supremacy.
In the course of two or three generations this system of absolute
equality of rights had brought about a parcelling out of the country
nearly amounting to trituration. This Russian system of appa-
nages was not the feudal system of the West ; it diflFered from
that in many particulars, and instead of favoring the introduction
thereof, rather hindered it. Notwithstanding all these successive
di\dsions and subdivisions, the sovereignty, like the nation, re-
mained one and indivisible, or, at least, was regarded as such.
The kniazes, who divided it among themselves, held only a life
interest in it, very much as to this day in the rural communes
each member of the mir has only the temporary use of his lot, the
land itself remaining the property of the community.*

As though to make this resemblance more complete, the appa-
naged princes frequently passed from one appanage to another.
The national unity was maintained by, or, more correctly, was
vested in, the unity of the reigning family, the claims of the kniazes
to one another's inheritance and to the title of "Grand-Kniaz."
Russia formed a sort of patriarchal federation composed of princes
of one and the same blood, having at their head their "senior,"
or, rather, the oldest of the line. From such a constitution or
custom naturally sprang civil wars, which mutually enfeebled
the princes. This and their frequent transfer from one appanage
to another enabled a few cities, as, for instance, Nbvgorod, to
preserve their liberty and to rise to a high pinnacle of power, t

* See, further on, the chapters on collective property and the village com-
munities. The Russian word for the princely appanages, udiil, signifies
" portion," "share," " lot " ; it has the same radical and nearly the same
meaning as the word nadiil, designating the lot of each peasant in the com-
munal land.

t The appanage system has given rise to many discussions and various
hypotheses, an epitome of which will be found in Mr. Ralston's excellent
volume. Early Russian History, pp. 192, 193.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 25 1

The period which these competitions made one of misery
was still not barren of good. In the midst of these dissensions,
possibly thanks to them, Russia was accomplishing the great
work set her by destiny : the colonization of the vast regions
now known under the name of " Great- Russia, " — a colonization
entirely continental and, as a rule, peaceable, which lasted
through centuries, and is going on still, and which, with regard
to results, is no whit behind the maritime colonization of the
Western nations. The Slavs of the Dniepr or V6lkof, turning their
backs on Europe, marched eastward into the wilderness, looking
out for new lands. Ambition or religious zeal urged each kniaz
to extend his dominions and to found new cities to endow his
children with. The peoples of Turkish race, who called the
steppes of the south their own, headed the new-comers oflf towards
the centre and the north, the wooded region, which, owing to the
nomads, was for a long time the only one fit for settled life.
Between the Slav immigrants and the Finn aborigines Christian-
ity served as link ; it became the cement of a new people.

To judge by the very vague memory which the Great-Russian
retains of the old Slavic gods, compared to his brethren of Little-
Russia and White-Russia, this colonization proceeded on a large
scale only after the conversion of the Russians to Christianity, — a
conversion so rapid, so easy, that in a short hundred years these
central colonies rivalled the cities of the West, and tended to
become the centre of the empire. In the middle of the twelfth
century, a kniaz of Vladimir on the Kliazma took, without
changing his capital, the title of "Grand-Kniaz," exclusively
reserved, so far, to the prince ruling at Kief. A little later the
holy city on the Dniepr was captured and sacked by Russian
hands. In these strifes between prince and prince there was,
however, no strife of race, no national scission between the new
Russians of Suzdal and the original Russ, as those have since pre-
tended who would fain make two different nations of the Great-
and the lyittle-Russians. If this war between Stizdal and Kief

252 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

had any historical sense, it was as the first collision between the
patrimonial rigime of the north and the patriarchal anarchy of the
south, as the first triumph of the autocracy just sprouting amidst
the forests of the east over the family traditions of the kniazes and
the traditions of independence boasted by the cities or tribes
of the west.

On the banks of the Volga, the Klikzma, the Moskv^, the
mutual relations between Rurik's heirs had been but little modi-
fied. In the feeble cities founded by the kniazes in the midst of
countries either desert or inhabited by heathen natives, there
were few or no popular assemblies or viitchis,^ to limit the author-
ity of the kniaz. In these remote regions the prince clings to the
soil conquered or colonized by him ; he settles down in a fixed
residence, instead of passing fi-om one appanage to another. To
the imdivided sovereignty vested in Rurik's house is substituted
the patrimonial hereditary rigime, which, by inheritance or con-
quest, is one day to unite the entire nation under one single rule.

From the fertile banks of the semi-classical Borysthenes, the
centre of Russia had been shifted to a land farther removed from
Europe, and diflfering more widely from it, to a poorer soil and a
severer clime, to a people more mixed, more foreign to all Teu-
tonic or Byzantine influence. The Western customs, which in the
Russia on the Dniepr had but feeble roots, were not given time to
strike any at all in this ungracious soil. There we find still fewer
European elements, fewer political rights for the individual, for
corporations or cities. A country almost entirely rural, where the
base and type of social order is the " house and yard," the dvor,
with the head of the family at the top. Already so distant from
Europe, this nation was to be removed still farther away by two
centuries of the domination of tribes the most impermeable to the
manners, religion, civilization of Europe.

* Viitchi (from viish-tch&ti, " to speak, to discourse — " cfr '* parliament •'
from parler) — the public popular assembly, long retained in Ndvgorod and
Pskof, -while in Rostdf and the cities of the province of Sdzdal, Moscovia
that was to be, the viitchi was early suppressed or shorn of all power.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 253
APPENDIX TO BOOK IV., CHAPTER II. (See p. 245, note 4.)

Mr. Beaulieu dismisses this question far too summarily and with less
of his habitual conscientious deliberation than might be expected when
treating a subject of such vast import and capital bearing on a host of Rus-
sian issues, one moreover that so nearly touches the very core of the
nation's patriotic sensitiveness. He passes sentence on it from evidence
taken for granted at second hand ; there is no trace of personal investiga-
tion in these pages, and they are, accordingly, not up to date. Mr. Zabi^lin,
in the second chapter of his sterling work, A History of Russian Life
(1876), gives an exhaustive history of the momentous question of the racial
identity of the Varangians, as presented by both sides. It is most instruc-
tive and, if not absolutely conclusive, leaves the onus probandi very much
to the German party — abroad and at home, — who had settled the matter
for us after the most ponderous scientific methods, never dreaming of an
appeal to a later tribunal, with added materials and new lights for the
revision of the old. The merest epitome of these most interesting two
hundred pages is far beyond the limits of even the most liberal appendix,
though it would yield the substance of a fascinating magazine article, and
we must be content with emphasizing the following facts : that the entire
southern littoral of the Baltic, as well as several islands of the same, are
irrefragably proved to have been thickly peopled with Slavs and, in some
parts, wholly occupied by them ; that the Isle of Riigen was one of their
chief centres, emporiums, gathering-points, for, like their Scandinavian
brethren and neighbors, the Northmen of various tribes, they were profes-
sional pirates, as indicated by the designation of Varihgy, Vagre, Vargy
— all more or less incorrect phonetic approximations of, not a proper, but a
common Scandinavian noun, vargr, meaning "wolf, fugitive, robber,"
etc., and still surviving in the modern vagrant — which they by no means
exclusively owned, but shared with the other Northmen ; that the partic-
ularly warlike and powerful tribe of Slavic Varangians or Vagrians with
which we are concerned, sailors as fearless, robbers as fierce as their
southern brethren of the Adriatic, were next-door neighbors to the Anglo-
Saxons from before their wholesale invasion of Britain, occupied the
sheltered and convenient comerland by the sea and the mouth of the Elbe,
which to this day teems with Slavic names of places, some only slightly
germanized, like Liibeck = Liiibitch, Wismar = Vsetnir, or translated, like
Oldenburg or Aldenburg from the Slavic StargrM. That these things
and many others to the point were really so is amply established by the

254 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

testimony of mediaeval North German chroniclers, naturally hostile to the
Slavs, bat simple and honest in their work. Helmold (twelfth century)
writes expressly : " The city of Aldenburg, the same which in Slavic bears
the name of Starygrdd, i. e., ' the Old City,' lies in the land of the Vag-
rians, on the western shore of the Baltic Sea, and on the furthest confines
of Slavia. This city and all the Vagrian land were, from of old, inhabited
by very brave men, because, standing in the front of all the Slavic peoples
and bordering on the Danes and Saxons, they always were first and leaders
in the warlike expeditions against their neighbors and bore the brunt of
their blows." Helmold mentions having been told that the Varangians
"at one time ruled many very distant Slavic peoples^ These Slavic
Northmen differed from their Scandinavian rivals chiefly in this ; that,
famous as they were for their "excessive prowess by land and sea," they
were not content with the precarious gains of a piratical existence, but early
turned their attention to the arts of peace, especially agriculture and com-
merce, until, in the words of eye-witnesses, this northern part of modem
Germany became " like unto a promised land, full to overflowing with all
good things, unless it were grapes, figs, and dates." Adam, the venerable
canon of Bremen, who wrote a most valuable geographical work in the
eleventh century, waxes enthusiastic as he describes the glories of the Slavic
cities of Pomerania {Potndriyi), while Jomandes, the Gothic monk-chron-
icler and secretary of the Gothic kings in Italy, as early as the sixth
century mentions the brisk trade in furs between the Baltic Slavs and the
"Roman South," and remarks that their name was made famous by the
extraordinary beauty and natural black color of the sables which they
brought to the Italian markets.

As for Nestor, the Russian monk-chronicler of the twelfth century,
first and only native authority concerning the beginnings of Russian^state
life, and who might be less misleading were he not unfortunately rather
deeply versed in the confused and misty erudition of the age, — his hand, in
an evil hour, while telling the famous story of the delegation sent from
Novgorod to invite the Varangian princes over to rule a " vast and rich,
but ill-ordered land," penned the following luckless sentence : " They went
beyond the sea, to the land of the Varangian Russ. These Varangians
called themselves Russ; just as some were named Swedes, others North-
men, Angles, others again Goths, so these ones are named Russ." This
sentence of Nestor's is brought forth as the strongest possible proof that
they were undoubtedly Scandinavian. Why? "On the strength," says
Mr. Zabi^lin, " of the following logical argument : If in a room there are

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 255

five inmates, of whom four are Germans, the fifth must of necessity be a
German also; indeed the word 'inmate' itself must mean 'a German.'
Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Englishmen, are called Europeans. It is well
known that these peoples are German. Consequently, the Russians, who
also call themselves Europeans, must be Germans too."

Strange that such a fallacy should have been accepted by numbers of
respectable scientists for sound, conclusive reasoning ! Sad efiects of parti-
sanship in science !

It is hard to have to abstain from developing in its principal phases and
following out to its conclusions this most interesting theme. But it would
seem as though a little reflection must show which way lie the probabilities,
the natural and easy solution of many problems of national history and life
which, under the other hypothesis, have always remained puzzles that
vainly exercised the ingenuity of its own propounders.

(Besides Mr. Zabi^lin's History of Russian Life, consult Alexander
Hilferding's classical History of the Baltic Slavs, a very valuable work
bearing the same title by Kotliarefsky, and the works of the Tchekh
historian Schafdrik.)

BOOK IV. CHAPTER III.

The Tatar Domination, its Effects on the National Manners and Character
— On the Reigning Family and Political Status — Causes and Character
of the Moscovite Autocracy — In what the Russia of the Seventeenth
Century Differed from the West of the same Period — Gaps in Russian
History.

The invasion of the Mongols, in the beginning of the thirteenth
century, snapped the thread of Russia's destinies. The conse-
quences of this terrible event were peculiar to Russia ; the causes
were not. This catastrophe, seemingly isolated, was only an
incident in the great struggle between Europe and Asia, of which
the crusades were the chief incident. In this collision of two
worlds the same causes were at work from the Russian steppes to
the Spanish sierras. Russia defended the left wing of Christen-
dom against the immense converging host which advanced from
Asia and Africa, in the shape of a gigantic crescent, ready to
extend its extremities so as to coil itself round Europe, while^
Spain defended the right wing, and France and England, Italy
and Germany, boldly taking the offensive, attacked the enemy's
centre by means of the crusades. Russia had done that sort of
fighting, in her own southern deserts, against the Petchen^gs, the
P61ovtsy , and other nomads of Turkish race, bearing the brunt of
the strife against Asia, long before the great invasion of the thir-
teenth century. Being placed at the most perilous outpost, in the
neighborhood of the most extensive gathering-place of the Bar-
barians, her fall was a foregone conclusion. The Russian princes,
united against the hosts of Djinghiz-Khan, had valiantly held out
against the first shock on the Kalka (1224), A second invasion

256

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 2$/

encountered resistance only behind the walls of cities. The two
capitals, Vladimir and Kief, were taken at the first onslaught. It
seemed as though the Russian nation was to vanish, and those
immense plains, a prolongation of Asia, were to become, definitely,
Asiatic.

Nature, after preparing the invasion, herself marked its bounds.
The Tatars, now masters of the steppes in the southeast, which
felt to them very much like home, grew ill at ease as soon as they
began to lose themselves in the forests of the north. They did
not settle there. These regions were too European to suit their
Tialf-nomadic habits, and they cared more for tribute-payers than
for subjects. So the kniazes received their principalities back
from the hands of the Mongols — as fiefs. They had to submit to
the presence near their person of a sort of Tatar "residents," —
the baskcLkSy whose duty it was to take the census and to collect
the taxes. They were compelled to take the long, long journey
to the " Horde," often encamped in the heart of Asia, in order to
receive their investiture from the successors of Djinghiz, and ended
by becoming the vassals of a vassal of the " Great-Khan." At
this price Russia retained her religion, her dynasties, and — thanks
to her clergy and her princes — ^her nationality.

Never yet was nation put through such a school of patience

and abject submission. St. Alexander Nevsky — the Russian St.

Louis — is the type of the princes of that epoch, when heroism was

taught to cringe. Alexander, the victor over the Swedes and the

German knights of the Baltic, who, instead of assisting Russia,

strove to wrest from her a few wretched roods of land, was forced,

if he would protect his people, to make himself very small indeed

before the Tatars. The Russian princes, in their dealings with

them, had no weapons but supplication, presents, and — intriguing.

Of these they made use largely for the preservation, or even

aggrandizement, of their power, freely denouncing and slandering

one another to the foreign masters. Under this humiliating and

impoverishing domination the germs of culture kid in the old
17

258 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

principalities withered up. The meagre and marshy region of the
northwest alone, the land of N6vgorod and Pskof, secure against
invasion, could, undercover of a merely nominal subjection, lead
a free and European life.

Of the manifold eflfects resulting from the yoke imposed on the
cotmtry, the moral ones are perhaps the least obscure. For nations,
as for individuals, slavery is unwholesome ; it bows their souls so
low that, even after deliverance has come, centuries are needed to
straighten them again. The oppressed are all alike ; bondage
breeds servility ; abasement breeds baseness. Craft takes the
place of strength, which has become useless ; finessing, being most
called for, becomes the universal quality. The Tatar domination
developed in the Russians faults and faculties of which their
intercourse with Byzance had already brought them the germs,
and which, tempered by time, have since contributed to develop
their diplomatic gifts. / '

Spain and Russia, standing isolated, one at each end of Europe,
both fell under the Mussulman rule, and, as a consequence of this
similarity in their position, the destinies of both also are com-
parable. Between the political and religious development of these
two countries, different as they are, this double analogy created
peculiar resemblances ; but on the character of the two nations, a
yoke, apparently identical, has had the most opposite effects. ^The-
Spaniard, conquered, but never cowed into submission, the Cas-
tilian, who, to drive out the infidel, had recourse to the sword
alone, retains, to this day, as an effect of the invasion, an over-
weening haughtiness, an excessive national pride, a scornful stiff-
ness in his demeanor to strangers. The Russian, forced to g^ve
up his arms, compelled to look for help exclusively to his own
patience and suppleness, has brought down from the time of his
bondage a character perhaps less dignified, but of which the very
faults are less of a danger to the progress of his country than are
the Spaniard's qualities. The oppression by man, added to the
oppression by the climate, deepened certain traits already sketched

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 259

in by nature in the Great- Russian's soul. Nature inclined him to
submission, to endurance, to resignation ; history confirmed these
inclinations. Hardened by nature, he was steeled by history. '

One of the chief effects of the Tatar domination and all that
makes up Russian history, is the importance given to the national
worship. That again reminds one of Spain. Suffering opens to
faith the hearts of a people as well as those of individuals ; reli-
gion draws new vigor from public calamities as well as from
private misfortunes. Such an impulse must have been deep and
enduring in the thirteenth century and in such a country as
Russia. On all sides sprang up prophecies and apparitions, every
city had its wonder-working eikon that could stay the hand of the
foe. In the midst of universal penury, wealth flowed freely into the
churches. The black Byzantine paintings were cased in massive
gold and silver, and set with those gorgeous jewels which even
yet astound the traveller. The men crowded into the monasteries
whose battlemented walls afforded the only retreat within which
peace of mind and security of life and limb could be found. The
policy of the Tatars was wholly favorable to religion and the
clergy. The khans, desirous to conciliate the conquered through
their religion, almost became its protectors. Church property
was by them exempted from taxes, and the Metropolitans re-
ceived from the Horde the confirmation of their dignity, like the
" Grand-Kniazes."

The domination of an enemy who was a stranger to Christian-
ity fortified the sufferers' attachment to their worship. Religion
and native land were merged into one faith, took the place of

' The Spaniards had mountains, where a few can hold their own, where
independence can always be bought at the price of hardships and watchful-
ness,— mountains, which demand and fashion a character and qualities the
exact opposite of those which alone can ensure the preservation of the races
that dwell on plains, open to all attacks, for whom danger and disaster are
one, from the lack of fastnesses to fall back upon. Where successful resist-
ance is physically impossible, unbending stubbornness would be suicidal, —
and natvire forbids wholesale self-destructiou.

26o THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

nationality and kept it alive. It was then that the conception
sprang up which still links the quality of Russian to the pro-
fession of Greek orthodoxy, and makes of the latter the chief
pledge of patriotism. Such facts occur in other nations, but it is
Russia's peculiarity that all her wars have had the same eflfect.
Owing to the differences in worship, her wars with Pole, Swede,
or German have assumed a religious character, just as her long
crusade against Tatar or Turk. Every war has been to this peo-
ple a religious war, and patriotism was reinforced by piety and
fanaticism. In his battles against infidel, heretic, or Latin, the
Russian learned to consider his native land, the only one exempt
from both the Mussulman and the Popish spiritual yoke, as a
blessed land, as sacred soil, and came at last to regard himself,
after the fashion of the Jew, as the chosen of God, until, filled
with religious reverence for his own country, he named it ' ' Holy
Russia." \/

Upon Russia's political sovereignty the Tatar domination had
two parallel effects : it hastened national unity and it strengthened
autocracy. The country which, imder the appanage system, was
billing to pieces, was bound together by foreign oppression as by
a chain of iron. Having constituted himself siias^ain of the
" Grand-Elniazes, " whom he appointed and dethroned at will,
the Khan conferred on them his authority. The Asiatic tyranny
of which they were the delegates empowered them to govern
tjaannically. Their despotism over the Russians was derived
from their servitude under the Tatars. Thus, thanks to the Horde,
there ensued a territorial concentration of the different principali-
ties in the hands of the Veliki- Kniaz of Moscow, transformed
into the general agent of the conquerors, as well as a political con-
centration of authority. All liberties, all rights and privileges
disappeared. The bell of the vi^tche ceased to call the citizens to
the popular assemblies. The boyhrs and the princes who used to
hold appanages in their own right no longer had any dignities
but those which the Tatar suzerain conferred on them. Every

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 26 1

germ of free government, whether aristocratic or democratic, was
stifled. Nothing remained but one power, the Veliki-Kniaz, the
autocrat, — and such now, after more than five hundred years,
still is the basis of the state.

To the Mongols, said Karamzln in the beginning of the pres-
ent century, Moscow owes her greatness, and Russia owes autoc-
racy. This opinion nowadays is contested by Russian patriots :
they prefer to seek for the foundations of Moscovite autocracy in
the physical and economical conditions of Great-Russia, in the
character of the people themselves, in the primitive or patriarchal
form of their institutions, in their conception of the family and of
domestic sovereignty.

Formerly it was the fashion to account for everything in Russia
and for Russia herself, for the character of the nation as for the
nature of its government, by the Mongol domination. Nowadays
this view is almost entirely exploded. Of the contemporary his-
torians, the greater number regard the long rule of the Tatars
merely as the superposition of an alien element, which by its
weight, it is true, lay heavily on the conquered people, but with-
out the manners or mind of the Asiatic invaders having at all
penetrated as far as the hearth or the soul of their Russian vassals.
This contact of three centuries is admitted to have had scarcely
more than indirect effects, through the isolation into which it
threw Russia, and the abrupt stoppage to which it brought her
moral growth.'' Indeed Solovi5f, the great Moscovite historian,
has gone so far as to say that the three centuries of subjection left
hardly more traces in Russia than the raids of the Petchenegs and
P61ovtsy of yore.

There is nothing astonishing in this reaction against the old
historians and their antiquated views. All nations just now are
rehandling their histories in the same sense, trying hard to reduce
to a minimum or to eliminate altogether out of their national life

' Not a very close contact either, since the conquerors did not live
among the conquered, but only sent their agents and collectors.

262 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

all that comes from abroad, and especially from conquest. So the
English often do with regard to the Norman conquest ; so do the
French with regard to German invasions. The reason is twofold.
On one side, the modem historian treats the evolution of nations
much as the geologist does that of our globe, and both reduce
more and more the importance of revolutions and sudden catas-
trophes in favor of slow, continuous action and permanent
causes. On the other side, under the influence of frequently un-
conscious patriotism, historians set aside impulses received from
abroad, smooth over the violent shocks of invasions, that their
peoples may appear to owe nothing but to themselves, and give
all their attention to the spontaneous and internal development of
the national genius. The new scientific methods, the tendencies,
— one might call them naturalistic and biological, — of modern criti-
cism and history, strengthen this bias. One takes pleasure in
considering nations as living organisms, each of which has in itself
the principle and the law of its own growth. In accordance with
this conception, each nation loves to vindicate the spontaneity of
its genius and of its historical development.

What the Russians do with regard to the Tatars, the Spaniards
do with regard to the Arabs. The peninsula which, more unfor-
tunate than Russia, has for centuries, almost the whole of it,
been under the direct rule of Semites or Berbers, denies having
undergone any moral fashioning at the hands of its Mussulman
masters.

In such vindications there is much truth : it is neither the
Tatar who has made Russia, nor the Moor who has made Spain.
If, by a natural reaction against antiquated and exaggerated views,
we now fall at times into the opposite extreme, forgetting that,
after all, a people could not, without retaining some mark of it,
be for several centuries in a state of subjection, it appears beyond
doubt that the Mussulman influence on Russia formerly used to be
greatly overestimated, even to forgetting that, besides their religion,
the Russians have always preserved their own form of government

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 263

and their own laws, and that all these things protected them
against too servile an imitation of their foreign masters.

The nomads from the steppes of Asia are far from having been
the only historical teacher of Moscovia. Side by side with the
Asiatic influence of the Mongol or Turk conquerors, Russia, as has
already been said, was early subjected to a more discreet but not
less powerful influence which both preceded and survived that of
the Tatars, — an influence which, instead of being combated by the
beliefs and prejudices of the people, was strengthened by their
sympathies and superstitions. From Vladimir down to Peter the
Great, Russia never quite got clear of the Byzantine ascendancy
which was exercised through the clergy, the schools, the laws,
and literature. Is not Moscovite aristocracy, for instance, as much
indebted to the Orthodox court of the emperors on the Bosporus
as to the half nomadic seraglio of the Mongol khans ? If the
rigime of the Horde, which might also be decorated with the
epithet of "patriarchal," could give so Asiatic a coloring to
Tsarism, grown up beneath its shade, was it not of Byzance and
the Greeks of the I/)wer Empire that the Russian princes bor-
rowed the t}^ and the model, together with the forms, the eti-
quette, and the very name of their autocracy, when, after the fall
of Constantinople, Ivan III. assumed the imperial eagle, as an
inheritance from the Paleologues.*

What applies to autocracy and government, applies to a good
many other things. A great part of what, in the manners, the
fashions, arts, laws of the Moscovite state, we are tempted to as-
cribe to the Tatars, might with equal justice be traced to the By-
zantines. The veiling and sequestration of women, shut up in
the tirem,\ were customs quite as much at home at Byzance as

* The Russian title, Samodiirjets, is nothing but the literal translation
of the Greek autocrator (" self-ruler ").

t Tiretn, the Russian for "gynaeceum," comes from the Greek tirem-
non, signifying "chamber, house." *

^ Compare the German thurm and the curtailed English tower, from
the French tour—vn'Ca. this again Italian torre, from the Latin turris, which
brings us back to the Greek word.

264 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

with the Tatars ; to Byzance also very likely belong the prostra-
tions, ' ' with brow beating the ground ' ' (JchelobitiyS), and other
humiliating formalities observed at the court of the ' ' Grand-
Kniaz " ; to Byzance, lastly, the long garments, the kafthn and
armicik^ to this day worn by the Old-Russians. And Byzance
too may be credited, through the codes of her emperors, with the
scourging with rods, if not with the kniit itself, with corporal
punishments and elaborate tortures. The same question may be
asked concerning art and poetry, in which Asiatic inspiration used
to be too hastily taken for granted. We may venture to doubt
the opinion of those scholars who, in the historical poptdar songs,
the Bylinas, insist on recognizing imitation of Tatar lays,t or of
those archaeologists who, in the Russian bulb-shaped cupolas, flat-
ter themselves they have found a Mongolian type, in vogue from
the Ganges to the Dniepr, wherever the successors of Djinghiz
and Timur ruled. %

Generally speaking it is no easy task to apportion their several
parts to the Mussulman oppressor and the Orthodox instructor,
either in private or in public life, as the peaceable^teacMngs of the
one generally confirmed the rough examples set by mfe\Other.
Between the lessons taken at the schools of two such different

* Still ka/tdn comes from a Turkish or Tatar word, and armidk is an
Armenian one.*

t On the Aryan vs. Turanian origin of these songs, see Mr. A. Rambaud'a
Russie ^pique.

X Viollet-le-Duc, in his book on Russian Art, claims that he can trace
everywhere — in architecture, in ornamentation, in calligraphy even — an
influence decidedly Tatar or Indian. Russian scholars, such as Count S.
Strdgonof and Busljlyef, have shown how fanciful and erroneous this theory
is, when thus generalized. They have proved, vrith the help of the monu-
ments, that most of the strokes and ornaments, which the French architect
wanted to force on the Mongols and on India, came in reality from the
Southern Slavs and from the Byzantines. (See especially Busldyef, in the
Critical Review, published in Moscow — January and March, 1879 ; also the
pamphlet of the learned Father Mart^of, in DArt Russe, Arras, 1878.)

* Probably indicating an originally Armenian garment, a lighter, sleeve-
less kaftiM, which leaves the arms, in their wide, long colored shirt-sleeves,
pleasantly cool and free for work or exercise.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 265

masters, it is the more difficult to discriminate that, through all
the oppositions of the two races and the two civilizations, both, on
the whole, taught young Russia very much the same things.
From Byzance and from Sarai, — from the effete cotut of the super-
annuated empire in its second infancy and from the half nomadic
camp of uncouth shepherds, — from the pale heirs of classical tra-
ditions and from the sturdy hordes who had become, through their
conversion to Islam, the disciples of the Arabs and Persians, —
what most regularly came to Russia were models of despotism
and examples of servitude. Therefore, in the coarse web of pop-
ular Russian life, it is often difficult to separate these two threads,
both equally Oriental, so similar do their colors appear to us. Un-
fortunately for the Russians, the threadbare civilization of their
Christian instructors, the stationary barbarism of their Moslem
conquerors, instead of mutually acting as correctives, or neutral-
izing each other, only confirmed them in the same faults. Far
from each counteracting the other, the double impulse drove them
along in the same direction, and almost equally isolated them
from Europe. Either as the Tatar's vassal, or as the Byzantine's
pupil, the Moscovite breathed an air, Oriental if not Asiatic, for
the Byzance of the Lower Empire was as much related to Asia as
to Greece or Rome.

A terrible and wonderful story is that of Moscow's autocracy,
growing up under the protecting shade of the Horde. Never did
such lowly beginnings leap up so rapidly to greatness ; never was
there more striking instance of the power of tradition in a sover-
eign house, whose members, along with blood and inheritance,
transmit, from child to grandchild, a sacred goal and task, whose
views, at first narrow, go widening from generation to generation,
the faculties themselves seeming to grow by a kind of natural
selection. *

* The beginnings and destinies of the House of Savoy — its straggles, self-
imposed patriotic mission, and ultimate glorious success — are no unapt
counterpart of those of the House of Moscow. And the personally not very

266 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

As men they were crafty, grasping, anything but chivalrous,
of few scruples, patiently building up greatness on self-abasement ;
as princes they were mostly of mediocre parts, far from shining
with the brilliant qualities that distinguished the kniazes of the
preceding epoch ; dull-faced, with countenances devoid of relief,
of individuality, with features that from afar seem to run into one
another.* All these Ivans and Vassilis of the fourteenth century
kept on hoarding wealth in their treasury and aggrandizing
their patrimony after the fashion of a private inheritance, and, as
it appears from treaties and wills, without any very well-defined
political idea, more after the manner of landholders anxious to
" round up " their estates, than of sovereigns ambitious of extend-
ing their territories, f This character — private, domanial — the vast
Moscovite Empire was to preserve in its government and adminis-
tration, through all its achievements and conquests, down to the
reforms of Peter the Great.

The establishment of heredity in the direct line gave Moscow

the advantage which enabled her to triumph over all her rivals,

Asiatic or European." A kniaz of Moscow, Ivan Kalit^, obtained

amiable but politically invaluable qualities of the early princes of the Italian
house — their craft, stinginess, stubbornness, queerly combined with a sup-
pleness often verging on unscrupulousness, — all these forcibly recall the
unsympathetic yet venerable figures of the kniazes and tsars of the Russian
house. Before the magnitude and righteousness of the results achieved in
both cases, history forgets to moralize, and is compelled to own that here,
if ever, the end justified the means.

* "All these Moscow kniazes,'' says Soloviof, " look like one another.
In this passionless mask it is difficult for the historian to make out the
characteristic features of each. They are all imbued with the same idea;
they all tread the same path, slowly, cautiously, by fits and starts, yet
inflexibly."

t The word gossudar, which now signifies "sovereign," and is used
only in speaking of the Emperor, had then the meaning of khozidtin,
"thrifty landlord and farmer" (a sort of domestic economist much in the
spirit and after the pattern of Cato the Elder).

* Among the sources of discontent and dissensions with which the old
appanage system abounded, one of the most unfailing was the law regulating
succession — or rather inheritances, since it has already been observed that
the House of Rurik treated the land it was their lot to rule after the manner

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 267

from the Horde, about 1330, the title of " Grand- Kniaz " ; he also
constituted himself general collector of taxes for the Tatars, and
thus rapidly increased his wealth as well as his power. His grand-
son, Dimitri Donsk6y, the only hero of the family, already felt
strong enough to put his diflferences with the Horde to the test of
arms. Crowned with victory on the field of Kulikovo, on the Don
(1380), he paid the price of heavy reverses for his premature suc-
cess. Sometimes in open rebellion, more often the Tatar khans'
humble tributaries, Dimftri's successors restored, by finessing, the
Moscovite power momentarily endangered by his bravery. ' While
Russia, under their rule, was working out her unity, the Golden
Horde was dismembered into three Khanates. At the end of the
fifteenth century appears Ivan III., a really great monarch, after
the manner of the greatest among his contemporaries, Louis XI.

of a private patrimony. By this law — an immemorially old Slavic one, which,
if duly pursued, might very probably be traced back to nearly primeval
Aryan antiquity — it was not the eldest son who succeeded or inherited, but
the next brother, or cousin — in short, the oldest of the race, the " Senior."
This institution, which may be designated as " lateral heredity," was never
cordially accepted by those who, from a very natural feeling, law or no law,
felt disinherited and aggrieved. Thus there was a standing feud between
uncles and nephews, brimming with incidents of violence, treachery, and
cold-blooded cruelty, such as would have enlivened the chronicles of rival
tyrant houses in mediaeval Italy. It was Dimftri, the victor of the Don,
who, with far-sighted political wisdom, realized the absolute necessity of a
change in the order of succession. But it was like cutting off an entail : he
could do nothing without the consent of the person immediately concerned.
This, fortunately for Russia, was Vladimir the Brave, his heroic cousin and
life-long friend. For the good of the country for whose deliverance they
had fought side by side at Kulikovo, Vladimir renounced his right and claim
forever, and pledged himself to hold his young nephew, Dimftri's eldest son
Vassili, ' ' in the place of elder brother. ' ' Thus the ancient unnatural custom
was broken at last and a rational order of succession established, cutting
off for all future times one mainspring of civil strife.

' Yet the *' Mama^ Massacre " — as the battle on the Don is often called,
from the name of the defeated Tatar general — is universally acknowledged
to have " broken the back " of the Tatar domination, to borrow the pictu-
resque expression with which Southerners describe the effect of the first cool
showers, which are said to have " broken the summer's back," though they
may be followed by many more warm days, or even weeks.

268 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

of France and Ferdinand the Catholic. Ivan III. reduces the
Khanate of Kazan to vassalage. His grandson, Ivan the IV.,
brings Kazan and Astrakhan into subjection. Ivan III. despoils
the appanage-holding princes ; Ivan IV. abases the boyhrs and
ancient families. The former compels N5vgorod's submission, the
latter completes the proud republic's ruin by executions and trans-
portation. The last principalities, the last free cities disappear,
and with them all traces of individual rights, alike for princes,
nobles, and people. Russia is one, from the White to the Caspian
Sea, and in this empire, already the most extensive of Europe, there
(j is only one master — the Tsar. Under Ivan IV. — the Terrible —
,1 autocracy, arrived at its zenith, became a sort of methodical Reign
\\oi Terror. A strange compound of craft, mysticism, inhuman in
his piety, sarcastic in his atrocities, bloodthirsty in his reforms,
bred in the midst of plots and suspicion, possessed of a mind sin-
gularly free and inquiring for his time and country,* combining
the Russian's practical sense with the ravings of a maniac, the
assassin of his own son and husband of as many wives as
Henry VIII., Ivan IV., the enemy of the boyhrs, has, like Nero,
remained popular. Too much reviled at one time, possibly over-
rated at the present day, this royal leveller is the fierce fore-
runner of Peter the Great, with whom the ballads sometimes
confound him, and who also might aptly have been sumamed
"The Terrible.""

Scarcely delivered from the Tatar domination, the Russians
spread themselves in all directions across their vast plains. Then

* See the curious correspondence between Ivan IV. and the rebel, Prince
K^bsky, also with Queen Elizabeth,

* It might help the imagination to form some adequate presentment of
this unique and wellnigh monstrous historical figure, were we to try to mix
together, then cast into one mould, Tiberius, Louis XI., and Richelieu, not
only with their horrible individual instincts and qualities, but also with their
very real greatness of political genius, statesmanship, and patriotism. The
objects of the French king's and minister's life-long endeavors — their coun-
try's aggrandizement and unity and the abasement of an ambitious nobility —
were also those of the Moscovite tsar. Even the means used were of much
the same nature.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 269

they descended the Volga and came out into the Caspian Sea,
entered the Caucasus and Central Asia, ascended the Kama,
crossed the Ural, and a Cosack outlaw conquered Siberia.'

Under the Tatars, "the Plain" {pNie), i. e., the southern
steppe region, had temporarily domineered over the northern forest
lands, although unable to assimilate them. Under the Moscovite
tsars, the forest region, now the seat of an agricultural state, stable
and centralized, such as never could have developed on the ' ' dry
sea " of the steppes,* in its turn subjects the woodless region, and,
by the defeat of the nomads, by colonization and farming, incor-
porates it into Europe.

At the same time, the Russians quickly turn towards the West,
towards the Baltic and the Dniepr, their European starting-points.
The Mongol invasion had separated Moscovite Great-Russia from
the cradle of Rurik's empire, from White-Russia and I^ittle- Russia,
which, in the meanwhile, had fallen into the hands of the I^ithu-
anians and the Poles. In the north, the Swedes and the Teutonic
Knights, after the Sword- Bearers, were holding the shores of the
Baltic. So that Moscovia was compressed between two rows of
hostile states which seemed ready to choke out her breath : in the
east the Tatars, in the west the I^ithuanians and the Teutonic
Order. And after Russia was free from the Tatars, there still
remained, between her and the West, a broad Christian barrier, a
hostile wall, built up out of her own ruins. She had to cut her
way through, to Europe and to the sea ; hence her strife with
Sweden, the inheritor of the German Knights on the Baltic, —
against Poland, the inheritor of I^ithuania,— a strife which, after all
but making an end of Moscovia, did end by costing Poland her life.

The death of Ivan the Terrible' s sons ushered in a crisis in
which Russia nearly fell to pieces ; the great work of the Mosco-
vite princes, barely achieved, seemed on the point of perishing
along with their family. In this country, where sovereignty was

• See appendix at the end of this chapter.

♦ A word of Sclovidf, the historian.

2/0 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

everything, it suddenly failed. The condition of Russia at that
period recalls that of France at the death of Charles VI., when an
English king lorded it in Paris. The Tsarian house was extinct ;
the Kremlin was wrangled for by a series of usurpers and pretend-
ers, supported by foreign arms. At one moment, the Poles were
encamped in Moscow, and I^adislas, a son of the King of Poland,
was proclaimed Tsar. Russian nationality and Greek Orthodoxy,
equally endangered, foimd salvation in their union. It was from
the lower ranks of this people, to all appearance inert, that the
movement was started which put an end to internal anarchy and
foreign rule. A butcher of Nijni-N6vgorod, Mmin by name, pro-
voked the popular rising, the direction of which was entrusted to
Prince {kniaz) Poj^sky. The Poles having been repulsed, a
new family, that of the Romdnofs, was called to the throne by the
zemsky sobbr, i. e., " popular assembly," a sort of States-General.
In this people who had just rescued themselves by their own act,
the fact of the throne being vacant awakened neither the sense of,
nor the wish for, liberty. In the words of the Slavophil Khomiakbf,
' ' the people, having restored order and made another tsar, retired
from political life." The new Tsarian House was to have the
same power as the old, only it invested that power with a more
religious, more paternal character. In vain the example of the
Polish nobility and the Swedish aristocracy aroused the emulation
of the boyhrs ; in spite of a few empty formulas,* in spite of the
"■zimsky sodbr," autocracy remains the law of Russia. The serf-
dom of the peasant, tied to the glebe by Bonss Godun6f, the
usurper, was the only advantage won by the nobles. Neither
minorities, nor interregnums, nor invasions could give to any class
of the nation any rights or liberties before the face of the sovereign.
A Russian was saying to a foreigner that autocracy raised
Russia from the groimd, where she lay prostrate at the Tatars'
feet ; to which the foreigner remarked that it had raised her to

*The formula, "The boyhrs have deliberated, the tsar has ordained,"
is well known.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 2/1

her knees. The habitual formulas used by the Moscovites in
addressing their sovereigns leave far behind all that was ever
invented in the way of servility by the courts of the West. In
the public petitions or declarations high and low entitled themselves
the tsar's serfs, his varlets or kholbpy. Catherine II. was the first
to show a repugnance against these abject designations ; they
were so deeply seated in the nation's habits that they were fre-
quently employed as synonyms for "subjects." In his famous
letters to Prince K^rbsky, Ivan IV. calls the King of Poland a
"slave of slaves," meaning that he was the subject of his own
subjects. Peter the Great himself, in reporting about the siege of
Azof, which he was conducting, to Rodom^novsky whom he had
appointed, in play, to act the part of tsar, took to himself, in
addressing this sham sovereign, the qualification of kkolbp.*

*Ustridlof, History of Peter the Great. Russian scholars, indeed, main-
tain that these designations were in no way abject originally ; kholdp
meaning simply "servant.""*

10 These and other similar conventional forms, waifs and strays of the
Tatar domination and of Byzantine influence since Ivan III., certainly
have come to be as meaningless as the letter endings of European episto-
lary etiquette, especially in countries of the so-called Latin race. One might
as well exclaim at the " servility " of the Spanish national character because
the Castilian winds up the long rigmarole of "service " and "devotion"
and " humbleness " which precedes his signature with the initials Q. S. P. B.,
which stand for " Qui Sus PiSs Besa " — " who kisses your feet." The Rus-
sian of the lower classes never loses personal dignity in his demeanor to
superiors, even while using the traditional forms of speech, and one of his
chief objections to the Pole of the same and indeed a far higher class — even
to the lower nobility — is the cringing manner of the latter, not merely in
words, but in acts, such as kissing the hand, the hem of the garment, or — if
the difference of rank be not quite so great— the shoulder. Such things should
not be taken too literally. And as an offset to a few offensively humble forms,
we have the fact that the peasant to this day addresses his landlord and lady
and his superiors generally as "father" and "mother" {bcitiushka^ tncitushka),
while they respond with the affectionate " brother," " little brother " {bril,t,
brhtiets), both using the familiar "thou," the only form of address known
in Russian, as in Latin, Greek, and all ancient or root-languages, until
Peter's wholesale innovations, extending to language itself, introduced the
absurd use of the second person plural. The "Occidentals" strenuously
advocate, in word and practice, the use of the European forms of politeness
in the intercourse with the lower class — and it is notorious that since they
have in great part succeeded, the two classes are further from mutual under-
standing than they were before. The old cordial familiarity is being frozen
out, and it will be long before there is between them the common level of
average culture which might take its place.

272 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

Nor was this an empty form under Peter any more than undei
Ivan : the sovereign did dispose at will of the property as well as
the lives of his subjects. Being in the habit of prostrating them-
selves before their masters until their brows struck the ground,
the Russians gave the name of "brow-beating" (JchelobUiyS'), to
the written petitions placed in the tsar's hands. In token of
self-abasement before the sovereign, even when not personally
admitted to his presence, the Moscovite boyhrs, instead of signing
their full names in their petitions, used servile diminutives.
These degrading formulas descending from class to class, every one
making himself small before his superiors, baseness, hand in hand
with arrogance, permeated the entire nation down to its lowest
depths.

It is but just to note that these formulas, so repugnant to West-
erners, were ennobled by religfious sentiment and simple earnest-
ness ; there also lingered in the custom some of that patriarchal
feeling which we encounter everywhere in Russia even to
this day. The tsar, as the landlord, was called "father," and
these names, taken from the dearest family ties, which even yet
lend the forms of popular politeness a character so primitive and
aflfectionate, were not, to the people, empty titles. The last of the
peasants in speaking to the tsar, could say ' ' thou ' ' to him ; he
saw in him a natural protector against the oppression of the
boyhrs, and all tsars have regarded themselves as such. The
sovereign was at the same time the father, wielding absolute
authority over his children, and the master, the supreme landlord,
disposing of the land and of all things therein as of his property.

An incident from the history of the sixteenth century places in
bold relief, together with the rigorous severities of tsarism, the
submissiveness of the subjects, dignified and touching even in its
self-abasement. The occasion was the reduction of Pskof, N6v-
gorod's sister city, by Vassili, son of Ivan III., and father of Ivan
IV., both decorated by their contemporaries with that surname of
" dread " or " terrible " (grdzny), which appears to suit the entire

HISTOR Y AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZA TION 2/3

dynasty or rigime. ' ' Thy patrimony, the city of Pskof, throws
itself at thy feet, ' ' said the delegates of one of the two or three
Russian cities which have known liberty, to Vassili, come to take
from them their last franchises. " Deal mercifully by thy old
patrimony. We, thy orphaned children, are attached to thee and
thine unto the end of time. To God and thee all is lawful in your
patrimony."* Vassili sent them word that it was his will to
suppress the viitchi and all the privileges which his ancestors had,
under oath, awarded to Pskof." "It is written in our annals,"
said a citizen at the last popular assembly called together in the
city, ' ' that the men of Pskof swore allegiance to the ' Grand-
Kniaz, ' who thereupon permitted them to live freely according to
their customs. It is said that the Divine Wrath shall smite him who
shall not keep his oath. By the grace of God, our lord this day
disposes after his pleasure of Pskof, his patrimony, of us all and
the bell that was wont to call us together. We have not perjured
ourselves, we will not raise our hand against our sovereign ; we
are rejoiced at his presence, and only beseech him not to annihi-
late us quite." The Pskovites, with tears, took down the bell
which, for centuries, had been wont to call them to the vietchi,
Vassili, having entered the city, assured them of his good graces,
and having bidden together the chief inhabitants, ordered the
announcement to be made to them, that they should, with their
wives and children, depart from their native city, to settle down
in the centre of Russia, and * ' live there happily by the grace of
the tsar." That same night, three hundred families were started
on their way to Moscow, and soon after, Moscovites from the basin
of the Volga came, by Vassili's order, to occupy on the shores of
lyake Peipus the place of the transported Pskovites. Similar pro-
ceedings, renewed from the usages of ancient Nineveh and Baby-

* Chronicle of Pskof quoted by Karamzin. This parallel between God
and the Tsar often recurs in the Russian Chronicles, and still survives in
popular adages. " It has pleased God and the Tsar "— " God and the Tsar
will see to it " — are proverbial expressions.

274 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Ion, had been employed towards N6vgorod. By such means did
the tsars work out the unification and levelling of their empire.
Such examples help us to comprehend the autocracy of Peter
and Nicolas.

This concentration of all branches of authority and of the
whole of national life in one hand — ^was it entirely a produce of
history, of Tatar oppression, and Byzantine teachings ? By no
means, and the Russian historians are justified in denying it.
The cause lies in the country's nature and the soil itself, in the
physical and economic conditions of Russia, in the extent and
poverty of the meagre forest regions in which the Moscovite state
g^ew up ; it lies in the disproportion between the immensity of
the territory and the sparseness of the population ; and these
things, from Rurik to Peter the Great, account for the mould into
which the Russian government has been cast, for the slowness of
the country's political and civil development. By these, too, the
long period of formation, and, so to speak, of the country's
embryonic historical life, is accounted for ; these explain what
Solovibf calls "the long duration of the fluid state period."
What, indeed, can be more difl&cult than to base something solid
and lasting on those boundless plains, over which freely rolled the
swell of invasion, where the population forever seemed about to
sink and be lost, like streamlets in the sands of the desert, so that,
to keep it in place and fix it to the soil, recourse had to be had to
serfdom !

In such a country, the frailer the bonds between the various
regions and the various tribes, the stronger the authority had to
be, that was to be capable of creating and keeping alive a state.
Thus Solovibf could say that the excessive energy, the boundless
strain of the government organism, was a natural consequence of
the feebleness and incomplete development of the body politic.
The weakness of internal and spontaneous ties was compensated
by external centralization, by the mechanical concentration of all
the national forces in the hands of autocracy.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 27$

In what way did the Russia of the first Romdnofs, the Mosco-
via of the seventeenth century, belong to Europe ? Constructed
on Slavic foundations by Teutonic leaders, cemented by Chris-
tianity under the influence of the "New Rome," the Russia
which the Tatars laid low did have European bases. The
Russia which Moscow raised on her own ruins was patched out
of heterogeneous materials, partly borrowed from Asia : it was a
building of mongrel architecture, made up of Byzantine and
Mongol, of Gothic and Renaissance, a building resembling the
church of Vassili Blajennoy, quaint wellnigh to monstrosity,
which was built in Moscow under 'Ivan the Terrible.

One thing strikes the student of Russian history : its barren-
ness, its comparative lack of interest. Through all its vicissitudes,
it is wanting in those large movements, religious or intellectual,
those broad epochs, social or political, which are the landmarks
of the stormy and active lives of the Western nations. In fact, the
history of Russia differs from that of other nations more by what
it lacks than by what it possesses of its own, and to each gap in
her past answers a gap in the present, which time could not fill, —
a gap in her culture, her society, at times in the Russian mind
itself. This blank in the country's history, this absence of certain
traditions and institutions in a people who has not yet learned
how to appropriate those of others, seems to me one of the secret
causes of the negative bent characteristic of the Russian intellect,
one of the remote sources of nihilism, or " nothingism," in morals
and in politics.

In this state, over which ten centuries have already passed,
nothing is consecrated by time. The country is old, yet all therein
is new. " In your country," one of the men who have known
Russia best wrote to a Russian, ' ' nothing is reverenced, because
nothing is old." *

* Joseph de Maistre, letter to Prince Kozldfsky, dated October 24,
1815. Twenty years later Tchaaddyef expressed an idea the same in sub-
stance, when he said: ''The civilization of mankind has not touched us.

276 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Russian history, compared to that of the Western nations,
appears entirely negative. Moscovia never had a feudal system
which, along with the conception of reciprocity in service and
duty, fostered the feeling of right ; nor chivalry, from which the
West received the feeling of honor, — according to Montesquieu,
the foundation of the monarchy, — and which, where liberty
became extinct, still maintained alive human dignity. Russia
never had any class of men answering to the French gentilhomme,
and her only apology for a chivalry was the Cosacks — bands of
deserters and runaway serfs, republics of adventurers, half
crusaders, half pirates, whose savage freedom was guaranteed
them by the steppe. n~^

Russia never had communes, nor charters, nor a real burgher-
dom, nor a third estate. N6vgorod, Pskof, Vi^tka, stationed at
the uttermost ends of the country, were exceptions, creditable to
the genius of the nation, but which did not perceptibly influence
its development. Besides, the cities were too few. Moscovia,
but just freed from the Tatar yoke and forthwith levelled by
autocracy, could scarcely be said to have in reality more than one
dty, the monarch's residence, and this capital itself was nothing
but a huge village. Moscovia was a commonwealth of peasants,
a rural empire. Now, without cities there can be no wealth," nor
art, nor science, nor political life ; in short, etymology tells the
story : without cities — civitates — no civilization.

As in the countries of the West, so in Russia, centralization
meant monarchy ; but Russia had had none of the instruments or
institutions of European monarchies ; neither parliaments nor
universities, men of the robe, nor the pen. She had sovereigns ;
she never had a court. Shut up in the tirem^ — the gynaeceum
bequeathed by the Tatars or Byzance, — the tsaritsas and tsarevnas

What with other nations has long since passed into their life, with us is to
this day speculation and theory." Herzen himself said much the same
thing, when he wrote {On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in
Russia) : " We are untrammelled by the past, because our past is empty,
poor, narrow."

HISTOR Y AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZA TION. 2//

left the tsars to the coarseness of their sex. Moscow had neither
castles nor palaces. The Kremlin was nothing but a combination
of fortress and convent, where low pleasures fit for common
soldiers alternated with a tiresome ecclesiastical pomp,*

The Russian Church had a national clergy, patriotic and
respected. She also had her monasteries, and, later on, her
synods or national councils. But she had no religious orders, no
scholastic training, no great heresies, nor the grand councils of
the I^atin Church. Russia had ignorant sects — has them still —
rustic, with no knowledge of the ancient tongues. She remained
outside of the Reformation, of the learned and literary polemics,
which, through the liberty of thought, led to political liberty. A
stranger to the Reformation, she was one also to the Renaissance.
Classical antiquity, which once upon a time had just brushed her,
did not become naturalized in Russia, as it did in Germany, as by
a second education.

Bound to Byzance by the ties of religion and neighborliness,
Russia probably sheltered a greater number of Greek emigrants
than Italy and the West. After the fall of Constantinople and
the marriage of Ivan III. to the heiress of the last emperors, the
Greeks began to flock to Moscow. Thither they brought Byzan-
tine etiquette and devotional tracts. They did not find there, as
in the West, the classical letters and genius smouldering under
the ashes of antiquity, w^aiting to be revived. Though Russia
did, besides the Greeks, import a few Italian artists and a few
German artificers, she harbored neither the arts nor the literature
of Europe, nor printing, the propagator of thought, nor the
geographical discoveries which, together with the conception of
the world, widened the modem mind.*

In emerging from under the Tatar domination, Moscovia

* See the two works of Zabidlin, on the Domestic Life of the Russian
Tsars and Tsarltsas.

* Ivan the Terrible patronized the introduction of printing in Moscow,
but the first presses, looked on suspiciously by the people, produced only
books of devotion.

278 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

awoke in the midst of the Middle Ages — minus crusades and
knighthood ; minus troubadours and trouvires, scholastics and
legists — the Middle Ages shorn of romance. No Reform, no
Renaissance, no Revolution — Russia's later history must needs be
more incomplete still. Of the great facts and great epochs of
European life, from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, she
felt only a feeble shock. What would a Western nation be that
had missed all that ? And with what could such gaps be filled ?
In the seventeenth century, Russia was as yet but a rudimen-
tary embryonic organism ; outside of the Church, she possessed
only two institutions, one at the basis, the other at the summit, of
the state, and both not particularly favorable to the development
of individuality : the commune with mutual solidarity of the
members, and autocracy ; the bond between them — serfdom.
The Tatar oppression and the struggle for life against Poland
had absorbed all the country's vitality. Siey^, to those who
asked him what he had been doing during the Terror, used to
reply : "I lived." To a similar question concerning her long
inertness Russia might have given a similar answer. In order
not to get crushed quite out of existence by the Mongols, she was
compelled to sham death for centuries. The whole task of
Moscovia consisted in making, materially, a nation of herself.
Similar to a child of a robust temperament, she came strengthened
and steeled out of trials that should have killed her ; but the
assaults which gave her bodily vigor hindered her intellectual
development. Compared to the other nations of Europe, she had
but a coarse, rustic bringing up ; the masters, and even the time
for cultivating the mind, were wanting.

APPENDIX TO BOOK IV. CHAPTER HI. (See note 9, p. 269.)

THE FIRST CONQUEST OF SIBERIA.

Unlike so many important names of peoples and places that of Siberia

gives no occasion for learned disputes as to its origin. There is no obscurity

about it — of course up to a certain point, beyond which our interest does

not extend. We know that, as early as the beginning of the sixteenth cen-

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 279

tury, Sibir was the name of a Tatar kingdom on the Asiatic side of the Ural,
along the rivers Tob61, Irt^-sh, and T<ira. After the conquest, by Ivan the
Terrible, of Kazdn and Astrakhan the Siberian Khan Yediger tendered his vol-
tintary submission, in the hope of finding protection against the rebels and
pretenders who beset his life and throne. In vain ; he soon after lost both at
the hands of the neighboring Kirghiz Khan Kutch^m, who immediately pro-
ceeded to make trouble for the Russian pioneer-borderers on this side the
mountain chain, which, from its peculiar tameness and want of altitude,
never was a serious obstacle to raids and invasions. The greatest sufferers
from this state of things were the Strdgonofs, a wealthy, enterprising family
who owned untold thousands of acres — to be had for the taking — in the wild
borderland which now is the government of Perm. The founder of this famous
family's greatness had gone out into the wilderness early in the fifteenth cen-
tury, and towards the end of the sixteenth they were the centre and soul of a
large Russian colony, and had opened the industries — especially salt-boiling,
and fur trade — which have always been this region's main source of wealth.
In 1581, finding themselves unable to cope with the many nomadic tribes —
Ostizlk, Vogul, Tcheremiss, etc., — who harassed the Russian settlements on
all sides, with more united and imremitting efforts since they were sure of
support from the Siberian khan beyond the mountains, the Strogonofs
obtained from the Tsar an order to the Voyevdd or military commander of
the Permian region enjoining him to lend them armed assistance and author-
ize them to enlist men from the colony and supply them with arms. They
stretched this rather elastic decree to its widest reach and, in 1582, sent across
the Ural a regular expedition, under command oi ataman Yerm^k Timof^ye-
vitch, a Cosack ofl5cer in the government's service stationed at Perm, thus
taking a decidedly aggressive attitude instead of limiting their measures to
self-defence. When Ivan IV. heard of this undoubtedly arbitrary proceeding,
he was very angry and sent off post-haste special messengers to inform the
Strdgonofs of the fact and order them to recall their forces and send Yermdk
back to Perm, to his post of service, and, furthermore, to beware how they
attacked or provoked any quarrel with the Siberian "Sultan." Themes-
sage came too late ; the Cosacks had already half achieved their won-
derful venture.

It will be seen from this that Yermjlk can in no wise be described as a
brigand or "outlaw," — an error, however, which has crept into popular
history and has only recently been rectified. What gave rise to it may have
been the fact that the men under his command were picked for bravery but
certainly not for law-abiding morality. It was a handful of daredevil adven>

280 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

turers, of the same mettle as those of Cortez and Pizzaro, of the kind that do
great things and shrink from few. His own chosen lieutenant, Ivan Koltsd,
was an outlaw, under sentence of death, for capturing and sacking a small
town of the Nogay. They had a few cannon and muskets, and were well
supplied with all things needful, including guides and interpreters. Beyond
that, no resources nor real knowledge of the country. They started in boats
up a not very considerable river, from which they soon had to strike inland.
The boats had to be left. But whenever possible, they still kept to the
rivers, a mode of transit familiar to them from their experience in navi-
gation on the Volga, and each time had to build new boats, an operation
fraught with delay and danger in the midst of a hostile countrj', notwith-
standing the abundance of material. At times, where the distance was
short and the soil even from one river to another, they carried or dragged
them across. Thus they came to a town ruled by a third-class khan tribu-
tary to Kutchiim. The natives were taken utterly by surprise ; besides, they
had never seen firearms, so fled at the first discharge. Some never stopped
till they had reached the presence of KutchAm, who heard from them the
first tidings of the Russian invasion : " Warriors have come into our land,"
the fugitives reported, "with bows which give forth flashing fire, and strike
like to the lightning from heaven. No arrows are to be seen, yet they wound
and kill, and no armor avails for protection. They pierce clean through
our plate and mail armor."

Now that Kutchim was aroused, the crisis came quickly. The Cosacks
were pursuing quite a triumphant course doMm the river Tobdl, when they
were arrested by a large and comparatively regular army, gathered from all
the tribes subject to Kutchdm, and led by a son or nephew of his own.
There were thirty Siberians to one Russian. The Cosacks held a council of
war. Several advised retreat. The greater part applauded Yerm^ when
he said : "Retreat? Whither? It is autumn. The rivers are beginning
to freeze. Do not let us lay up an evil name for ourselves. Let us be
mindful of the promise we made to honorable men (the Strdgonofs), before
God. If we turn back, shame will be ours and the name of word-breakers.
Whereas, if God Almighty help us, our memories shall not die out among
men, and glory will be ours forever." One would almost think that Shake-
speare had inspired himself from the old Russian chronicler, when he
penned the famous harangue of Henry V.

The Tatars fought desperately, but the Cosacks routed them completely,
though with the loss of 107 men — a large one for their small force.
Kutch^m himself snatched together all he could of his treasure and disap-

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 28 1

peared into the woods. When Yerm^k entered the capital, Sibir, or Isker,
it was empty, and yielded a mighty booty in furs, precious tissues, and all
sorts of valuables. Soon the surrounding princelings began to drop in
and make their submission ; Yerm^k, suddenly developing remarkable
statesmanship, treated them with great kindness and courtesy, and, after
receiving their oath of allegiance in the name of the Tsar, forbade his men,
under the severest penalties, to offer the slightest violence to the natives.
At the same time he made good use of the enforced idleness of the long
winter, by sending his lieutenant, Ivan Koltsd, with a small retinue, to the
Tsar, to inform him that God had given into his hand the land of Sibir, and
beg for reinforcements, also request that a Voyevdd might be sent, to
take official possession of the country. Ivan the Terrible received Koltsd
most graciously, granted him a free pardon, and sent him back with presents
to Yerm£Lk, — the fur robe he was wearing in the number, than which no
greater mark of sovereign favor could be given. The Voyevdd Yerm^k had
asked for accompanied Koltsd, also a considerable detachment of soldiers.

After this things went wrong for a time. Most of the first conquerors
perished in one way or another, when spring of 1584 had reopened hostil-
ities, and Yerm^k himself fell into an ambush on the banks of the river
Irtish, and was drowned while trying to swim in his heavy armor, out to
his barge, which was stationed in the middle of the river. But he had done
his work, and it was never abandoned. Slowly but steadily, one Siberian
coimtry after another was subdued and thrown open to colonization from
home ; forests were cleared, towns grew up and, later on, large cities ; trade,
mostly in the form of barter, was established with the natives, who learned
to prize Russian cloths, linens, hides, etc. — and, to their destruction, Russian
whiskey. For a long time furs were the staple and almost only article of Sibe-
rian export ; then came walrus tusks, (that go by the name of " fish-ivory ") ;
it was in the time of Peter the Great that Siberia's inexhaustible wealth in
metals, precious stones, and other minerals was discovered — wherein lies
the chief value of the immense dependency for the possession of which
Russia is indebted to the simple heroism of the Cosack atamhn Yerm4k
TimofSyevitch.

BOOK IV. CHAPTER IV.

Russia's Return to European Civilization — Antecedents of the Work of
Peter the Great — The Reformer's Character and Way of Proceeding —
Consequences and Defects of the Reform — Moral and Social Dualism —
In 'what Manner Autocracy Seems to have Fulfilled its Historical Task.

In this belated and isolated country there arises one day a man
who undertakes to bring it to Europe and make it jump at one
leap all the interval that divides the two. Was it possible for
Russia to snatch at one stroke all that ages had given to her
rivals ? to get at one pull to the term of a long road, the historical
stations of which she had not travelled ? Was this the conception
of a genius or a chimerical dream, an individual fancy doomed to
feilure ? or was it, in spite of its daring, a plan suggested by
nature, facts, and men ? For a long time Peter the Great was
regarded as one of those lawgivers after the antique pattern, who
fashioned states at their will, as a sort of Deucalion, the maker
of peoples. History in Russia has not, any more than elsewhere,
proceeded by leaps and bounds. The Russians have been the
first to feel this ; one of their historians' favorite tasks is to fill
the apparent chasm between ancient and new Russia.

The work of Peter the Great did not lack historical ante-
cedents. In principle, if not in form, it lay in the logical
destinies of the Russian people. Russia was too near Europe,
had too much aflSnity with her, by blood and by religion,
not to feel one day the contagion of her civilization. The two
parts of Peter's work — bringing his people nearer Europe materi-
ally, territorially ; and morally, socially, by imitation of foreign

282

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 283

customs —had been almost equally indicated, attempted, or
prepared by the two preceding centuries.

Ever since Ivan III. , the Russian sovereigns strove to force
their way to the north through the rampart formed by the Swedes,
the Teutonic Order, and I^ithuania ; to the south, through the
Tatars, the Turks, and Poland, in order to reach Europe and
the sea.

In his attempts on Azof and the Black Sea, as in his conquests
over the Baltic, Peter did no more than continue what his prede-
cessors had begun : his father Alexis, who had accepted the
submission of the Ukraina Cosacks ; his sister Sophia, who had
directed two expeditions against Crimea.

Since Ivan III., also, most tsars had called in foreigners,
with a view to introduce in their states the arts and inventions of
the West. The influence of European manners natiu-ally made
itself felt first from the nearest countries — Poland, I^ittle Russia,
Lithuania ; then it came from Germany, Holland, England,
Italy, from France at last, and so from the whole West. As early
as the fifteenth century, Ivan III., who was in this respect, as in
so many others, the precursor of Peter I. , entered into relations
with the sovereigns of Europe and asked them to send him
physicians, artists, and mechanics. From Italy, at that time the
teacher of Christendom, Moscow received through Byzance and
Germany architects and engineers. It was artists from Bologna
and Venice who, under Ivan III. and his successors, built the
handsomest towers of the Kremlin. A noteworthy thing is that,
instead of bringing along their Renaissance style, which, in
Western Europe, they masterfully imposed everywhere, these
Italians took Russian models and constructed the most dis-
tinctively Moscovite edifices of Moscow. This anomaly has an
instructive side. The queer, bulb-shaped cupolas of the
Vassili church bear witness to the condition of foreigners in
Russia at that time : instead of imposing on the Russians their
own tastes and customs, they were compelled to adopt theirs.

284 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Along with artists, Ivan III. called in craftsmen of all sorts —
founders, goldsmiths, miners, masons, pyrotechnists. Thus, from
the first, the road was traced for Peter the Great ; it was from the
material, technical, industrial side that Russia first came in touch
with Europe. As Peter the Great, so Ivan III. and Ivan IV.
before him are more anxious to train their people to mechanical
arts than to sciences or fine arts. After Ivan III., Vassili IV.,
married to a I^ithuanian, not content with calling in foreigners,
goes the length, to please his wife, of adopting their customs and
cutting off his beard. Under Ivan IV., the Terrible, Moscovia,
through Arkhangelsk, enters into relations with England ; he it
is who, despite the monks, introduces printing in Russia. He
sends out emissaries to Europe, to collect skilled workmen for
him ; but the greater part are detained on the way by the military
jealousy of the Teutonic Order, and the commercial jealousy of
the Hansa Cities, which, in the interest of German arms and trade,
attempt to place Russia under an interdict.

The period of usurpers endangered European influence by
giving it too wide a scope. On the point of lording it over Russia
with the false Dimitri or the Polish voyevbds, the foreigners nar-
rowly escaped being driven out with them. The Rominofs seemed
little likely to favor Western civilization. They were carried to
the throne by a national reaction. The first sovereign of their
house had been brought up in a convent by a mother who had
taken the veil, and it was his father Philaret, raised to the rank
of Patriarch, who governed in his name. This dynasty, of Rus-
sian blood and all but sacerdotal origin, made it their task to
restore the old-fashioned manners. It nevertheless contributed to
throw the seeds of European culture, and with the assistance of
certain lyittle- Russians, trained in the sciences of the West under
the Polish sovereignty, founded in Moscow, long before the
majority of Peter the Great, a " Slavo-Graeco-I^tin Academy,"
the name of which sufficiently indicated new aspirations. Michael
Romanof already sends abroad for merchants, craftsmen, even

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 285

soldiers, and concludes commercial treaties with the West.
Alexis, a genuine Moscovite tsar, clad in long Byzantine garments,
which lend him a likeness to the saints on the eikons, acts as his
son Peter's forerunner. Under his reign the foreigners increase in
numbers, as though the father had collected for the son teachers
and materials of instruction. These Occidentals occupy in Moscow
a separate quarter, the ''Slobodd. of the Ni'^mtsy'' (Germans).
They are men of all crafts — skippers, carpenters, mostly Dutch-
men ; a bark of theirs, left for useless on a pond, was to arouse in
Peter the liking for marine things. Some are ofl&cers and in-
structors, as was the future tsar's counsellor Lefort, from Geneva.
Along with mechanical arts, Alexis introduced a few accompUsh-
ments ; he had an opera in Moscow, in a real theatre ; his daughter
Sophia wrote a tragedy, and had a play of Moli^re, translated by
herself, represented in the Kremlin.

Peter grew up among these foreigners. From them he took
lessons in civilization, and also in vice, for the German Slobodit
teemed with drinking dens and places of debauchery. A Hollander
was his tutor, a German girl his mistress ; Europeans of all nations
formed his social circle. Most of them, even Lefort himself, ap-
pear to have been men of middling information, more capable of
exciting the young tsar's curiosity than of imparting to him vast
or profound knowledge. Under his brother Theodor and the
regency of their sister Sophia, the foreigners already were numer-
ous and played an important part, but they did not rise above
subaltern positions. Under Peter, their pupil, they were to be-
come the instructors of the nation ' ; under his niece Anne they
were to be, for a short while, its tyrants. The old tsars had
prepared their rule a long while ahead. Peter did not violently
alter the course already steered by Russia, did not turn her head
forcibly away from Asia and towards Europe ; he only hastened

' Had there been any geniuses among them, Peter would have been
more wary how he trusted them : he was not the man to endanger or
share his authority, or to let the helm slip out of his own hand.

286 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

her progress on a road on which she had entered of her own
accord. He did not throw her off the track ; he only made her
take a short cut, to catch up with Europe.

Tsar at the age of ten,* sole master of the empire at seven-
teen, Peter undertakes to transform the manners of a nation, of all
the most devoted to its ancient customs. Surrounded with for-
eigners— ^the Dutchman Timmermann, the Genevese Lefort, the
Scotchman Gordon, the Frenchman Villebois — he falls deeper and
deeper in love with foreign civilization, and, in I^eibnitz's graphic
phrase, "sets to deharbarizing his native land." Before he at-
tempts to remodel his subjects after the pattern of European ideas,
he makes himself fully familiar with them. He travels in the
West, and, the better to become naturalized there, he lives the life
of the people. He gives his mind less to institutions than to
manners : it is these he is chiefly bent on importing into his own
country. His genius is marred by the faults of his race and his
own education, by his temperament and by the possession of
autocratic power. He may play the European ever so much, he
is unable to ' ' debarbarize ' ' himself ; he continually offends that
same Western culture of which he makes himself the missionary.
Like a child or a savage, he at times appears infatuated with only
the exterior of civilization. In order to polish the Moscovite, he
shaves his beard and makes him change his clothes. He does not
always distinguish between essentials and accessories. He at the
same time creates a navy and introduces smoking ; he pursues
with bitterest hatred beards and long-skirted kafthns. To certain
things, as for instance to the navy, he gives undue importance.
His reformer's zeal at times trenches on mania, his regulations
descend to pettiness. He frequently is content with appearances,

'Jointly with his half-brother, Ivan, a frail and sickly youth. The
brothers were on aflFectionate terms, and for his elder's sake, Peter bore
with the arrogance of the self-appointed regent, his half-sister Sophia, who
had incited a mutiny of the archers of the guard, and attempted his life
before he was ten years old.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 287

altering the garb rather than the man, the names rather than the
things ; he more than once appears satisfied with a mere Western dis-
guise. No matter. In his exaggerations, the indefatigable reformer
is more perspicacious than he seems ; measures, puerile at first
sight, concealed a deep-laid scheme. It is by the outside of things,
fashions, and exterior usages, that the Russians could most easily
be turned back into Europeans. The remainder — the substance,
the essentials — ^^vould follow : after adopting the garb of Europe,
his subjects would want to adopt also her manners and learning.

What in his travels particularly fascinates Peter, what he
strives most earnestly to introduce at home, is every kind of
mechanical inventions, crafts, technical proceedings. In that
again there may have been much of the child or the barbarian,
who is less impressed by theoretical knowledge than by its prac-
tical applications ; still, this certainly is the most accessible side of
a civilization, and in a country like Russia, it was not only the
easiest but the most useful to appropriate. To master the tech-
nical part, Peter at Zaandam becomes a journeyman : he wishes
to be not only the foreigner's pupil but his apprentice. He gives
himself what we would call to-day a professional education. In
his first trip to the West, his initiation trip, it is not to the uni-
versities, the academies, that he goes for lessons, but to the ship-
yard. In his second trip, even if he does give more attention to
arts and sciences, still he is always guided by the Great-Russian's
bent towards the positive, and by the reformer's practical sense.
The natural sciences are those that most exite his interest :
anatomy, surgery, mechanics, nautical sciences, civil and military
engineering. He brings home with him few scientists and fewer
artists, but is followed by an army of mechanics and overseers.

On his return he follows out the same method ; no detail is
too mean for him, and he is bent on teaching everything himself.
In the army, in the navy, he takes pleasure in passing through
all the grades, acting drummer one day, pilot the next. First
of all he teaches his people discipline, — shows them how to sub-

288 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

mit to the foreigners whom he has placed as instructors over them
as well as over himself. In true reformer-guise the first lesson
Peter gives is by example ; of that lesson he is lavish. He puts
his shoulder to everything ; handles the laborer's pick-axe, nay,
the headsman's axe. Never was man seen to practise so many
different crafts at once. He is the true jack-of-all-trades ; there is
nothing he cannot manufacture with his own hand : boats, ship-
models, pulleys, all that has anything to do with marine things,
these latter being his hobby. He produces masterpieces of work-
manship ; he also is an artist, he can engrave, carve. The supple
and versatile genius of the Great- Russians no less than their
realistic tendencies assert themselves in their emperor on a magni-
fied scale. Contrary to the ways of closet-reformers, execution is
what he has most at heart. He takes hold of all things with equal
ardor, reforming the primer and the calendar at the same time as
the administration of church and state and the manners of society,
asking Leibnitz for projects just as he demands models from his
craftsmen, gathering objects of art and scientific collections, even
while he is creating a navy and remodelling the army, endowing
industry with new fabrications, agriculture with foreign breeds of
cattle, and, as though he had had time to accomplish nothing,
leaving to the future numberless plans on each and every subject
and for all the portions of his vast empire,'

This manifold task was in reality one, Peter's conquests and
public labors were the outcome of his social reforms, of which the

■ It is said that Catherine 11., whose reverence for her great predecessor
amounted almost to superstition, never took up any project of reform or of
a new creation, before she had ordered a search in the state archives or
those of the respective departments, to ascertain whether Peter had not left
some memorandum, note, or directions, jotted down in his usual hasty but
clear and comprehensive manner on the particular matter in hand. The
search was scarcely ever in vain, and Catherine found support, encourage-
ment, and luminous guidance every time she sought for them, leaving to
the world a most touching and majestic instance of the communion, for the
good of the living and of those to be bom, of two great spirits across the
dividing gulf of death.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 289

transfer of his capital was both symbol and means. When he
built St. Petersburgh and connected the Neva and the Volga by-
canals, he gave the longest of Russian rivers one European mouth,
and by reversing the current of this great central artery he made
Russia recoil on the West. Morally and physically, it was the
same task still : the emperor suddenly brought back to Europe a
country whose head had for centuries been turned towards Asia.

Unfortimately, man is less easily bullied than nature, and Peter
treated both alike. In his passion for civilization, he inflicts it ;
he goes about it as much after the fashion of a barbarian as of a
great man, of a tyrant as of a reformer. His method at times de-
feats his end. In the words of a modem historian (Kostom^of ),
he employs Asiatic proceedings to europeanize his country. His
most familiar tools are the knut and the axe, to say nothing of thfe
cudgel which he did not spare to his favorites. He civilizes by
means of the rod.

Peter's great motor, great lever, is despotism, autocracy. He
neither corrects nor limits, but regulates and renovates it. He
does for autocracy what he has done for himself and for his people: -
puts it into European clothes, shorter and lighter, so as to give it
greater liberty of movements. To the scandal of the Old- Russians,
the semi-sacerdotal robes of the ancient sovereigns are exchanged
for a military uniform ; the biblical and patriarchal designation of
Tsar makes room for the foreign and heathen title of Emperor *
" Public Weal " is Peter's deity ; to this idol he oflFers up every-
thing in sacrifice — his health, his family, his people ; for its sake
he does not shrink from any measure, not firom a renewal of the
sacrifice of Abraham. As a true revolutionist, he takes no more
account of historical obstacles than of moral or material ones.
Sentiment, tradition, facts — all are equally powerless to arrest
him ; he thinks himself strong enough to break through every-
thing.

♦Whatever its etymology. Oriental or Roman, the title of Tsar'v& the one
usually employed in the Slavic Bible: " Tsar Solomon," " Tsar Herod," etc.

»9

290 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

And he was. But how ? Could the energy of one human will,
with impunity, do violence to nature, history, time? By no
means. The fact is, all those barriers which Peter broke down
with so daring a hand were in reality frail and stood not high
from the ground ; those traditions which he shook so rudely were
not solidly rooted, either in the soil or in history; the people which
he imdertook to turn up as with a plough, having no institutions
of its own, grown out of its own soil, could, without too much
presumption, be treated as a fallow field, or a tabula rasa. With any
other European nation, a reform so radical and so sudden would
have been insensate ; in Russia, it struck less against history and
nature than against preventions and prejudices partly come from
without ; opinions and habits which, although inveterate, had not
been of necessity imposed by either climate or race, or by religion.
The outer side, the manners, the domestic fashions and usages —
these were the things in which Peter encountered the most for-
bidding obstacles, and that alone accounts for the fact that he
waged war most passionately against external things : the long
garments and beards of the men, the veils of the women.

Peter the Great's undertaking was carried out by the most de-
termined genius, assisted by the most formidable array of power ;
that, however, was not what made its success. If his work did
not die with him, it was because it lay in the natural order of his
people's destinies ; it was because, in the words of Montesquieu,
" Peter I. was giving European manners and customs to a nation
"which was of Europe." *

' ' Scratch the Russian and you will find the Tatar " is a sort
of proverb. It were rather more historically correct to reverse the
saying. In shaking ofi" the Mongol domination, in washing off
the stain of bondage, in dofl&ng the garb and habits taken under
alien masters or instructors, the Russian, the Christian Slav,
could not but gradually feel himself European once more. In its
vital portions, Peter's reform was merely a moral throwing off of
* Esprit des Lois, livre xix., ch. xiv.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 29 1

the Tatar or Byzantine yoke, a reclaiming of soil and climate from
the habits of another race and sky, brought by Asiatic conquerors
and Oriental influences. There happened to live in the nineteenth
century a sultan nearly as determined as Peter the Great, armed
with power as absolute, who used nearly the same means in pursu-
ance of a similar design. The people he ruled also belonged, geo-
graphically, to Europe ; but what a difference between a Turk and
a Russian, after both have passed through the reforming process !
The reason is that Mahmud was handicapped in his task by all
those very factors which had prepared the solution of his task for
Peter : the national spirit, religion, the very elements of civilization.
Peter left no heirs. Nevertheless what he had begun was con-
tinued. Never was undertaking seemingly so boimd to one man's
life — ^yet, contrary to all calculations, it survived him. Never
was order of succession more disturbed ; never consistency more
impossible : — four women, partly or wholly foreigners, two boys,
two maniacs — such were, in the course of a century, Peter's suc-
cessors. At each accession — a barrack or bed-chamber revolution,
an overthrowing of ministers and policy. Each new reign takes
its stand in opposition to the preceding one, and the mighty of
yesterday are sent off to Siberia or the scaffold. The history of
Russia through the eighteenth century is one series of alternations
and reactions. It is through a haphazard succession of conspira-
cies and regencies sprinkled with attempts at aristocratic oligarchy,
in the hands of governments at once weak and violent, that Russia
is called upon to pursue the road opened out to her by Peter the
Great. The reform accomplishes itself in the midst of intrigues,
crimes, and debauchery, by the hands of adversaries almost as
much as of partisans. The capital, transferred to Moscow, is
brought back to Petersburgh ; the foreigners, by turns expelled
and recalled, ascend the throne with Peter III. and Catherine II.
In the midst of their bickerings, Peter's successors complete his
task, now correcting it, now overdoing it, but always, willingly
or not, canying it onward.

292 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

To get itself done by such hands, the reform must needs have
been part and parcel of Russia's vocation. What singular guides
to civilization, what mortifying instructors for a great people !
First — a Livonian peasant, who can neither read nor write, assisted
by a former pastry vender, now prince and regent.* Then comes
a boy of twelve, who dies at fourteen, succeeded by a coarse
woman, who is ruled by the son of a Courland groom,* and for the
space of ten years, yields up the empire to the tyranny of Ger-
mans, who despise the Russians as an inferior race, yet do credit
to Russia by their arms, even while they oppress her and suck the
life-blood out of her, as the Spaniards or the Dutchmen did with
both the Indies. Emerging from this foreign domination, the
memory of which has remained as vivid and hatefiil among the
people as that of the Tatars, comes another child, an infant in
arms this time, then again an ignorant and sensuous woman, who
has no policy but the whims of her passions, or the spitefiil
promptings of her vanity.* When at length the crown comes to
a man once more, Peter III. , he proves an idiotic brute and has
to be deposed. The land of autocracy must wait half a century
for a sovereign capable of ruling it, and when that sovereign
appears, it is a woman, a German, a disciple of the French
philosophers.

* Catherine I. and Alexander M6nshikof. The origin and earliest life
of Catherine are and always will be wrapped in uncertainty. There is no
doubt, however, that Peter raised her from a low estate when he made her
his companion. She gave him what he most needed : rest and cheerful un-
ceremonious comradeship, comprehension and sympathy. In marrying
her, he not only discharged a debt of gratitude, but did the best possible
thing for himself. She was to the end a good wife to him, and — what he
most prized with his peculiar tastes — a good, thrifty A<?»5^-wife. As to
Mdnshikof, he was one of Peter's most trusty, zealotis, and intelligent help-
ers. The reformer had need of such and took them where he found them ;
his marvellous, instantaneous insight into character never stood him in
better stead.

* Anne, a niece of Peter the Great, and Biron — a disgrace to humanity,
a foul blot on even the pernicious race of court favorites.

* Elizabeth, youngest daughter of Peter the Great

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 293

At home and abroad, Catherine II. was Peter I.'s true succes-
sor, I^ike him unburdened with scruples and moral sense, wholly
devoid of virtue, and gifted with the highest faculties of states-
manship, Catherine had over Peter the advantage of belonging
by birth to the civilization which she strove to propagate among
her subjects. With her woman's hand the Tsaritsa, who remains
European even in her faults, corrects and softens the reform
initiated by the Moscovite Tsar, invests authority with more
humaneness, lends more decency to the court, to the govern-
ment more polish and dignity, as well as greater regularity to
the working of the institutions. Catherine herself, however,
in her mode of governing, is lacking in one of the chief qual-
ities of her great model : unity of views, logical sequence in
action. With her it is the reverse, especially during the second
half of her reign, when she is too much inclined to neglect
the internal development of the nation in favor of its material
aggrandizement.

The work done by Peter the Great triumphed over the in-
capacity or the vices of his successors as well as over the reluctance
of his people. History has witnessed few such successes. Has
this success been as complete as has long seemed to the West ?
In the material order of things, it has, marvellously so : army or
navy, administration or industry — the whole of modem Russia
was started by the son of Alexis. Some few of his innovations,
such as his " administrative colleges," may have been mistakes ;
others, such as his "Table of Ranks" and his bureaucratic
nobility, good perhaps for a period of transition, have in time
become nuisances. Such an undertaking was doomed to im-
perfection, to ferror even. What it were desirable to know is,
whether, while materially successful in his reform, Pibtr Alex^ye-
vitch morally accomplished his design. Has the steep path up
which he forced his country taken it to Europe and civilization
more rapidly than it would have arrived there by a more circui-
tous and easier road ?

294 7"^^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

However hard on the man's genius and the power of his will
such a verdict may be, the fact may be doubted. It may be that
Russia, left to the sole allurements of contact with Europe, might
have, by degrees, become more deeply imbued with her influence,
opening out wider, because spontaneously, to the breath from
the West, taking from it more discerningly what best suited her
temperament. If he did spare his country a long period of transi-
tion and took it at a leap over one or two centuries of uncertain
gropings, Peter could not achieve this miracle without making his
people pay for it dearly. The abruptness of the proceeding en-
tailed on Russia a fourfold failing : a moral evil, an intellec-
tual evil, a social evil, a political evil, came of it. Considered
from any one of these four points, the reform imposed by Peter the
Great produced sad results which still have much to do with the
woes and uncertainties of contemporary Russia.

In his passion for progress Peter neglected one thing without
which all others are fragile. He left out morals, which may not
be one of the principles of civilization, but which no civilization
can with impunity dispense with. Material culture was what he
envied Europe, what he was chiefly bent on borrowing from her.
There was in that something of the Great-Russian's realistic spirit,
the age was also partly to blame. The moral corruptedness and
intellectual anarchy of the eighteenth century gave pernicious
examples to a semi-barbarous people, more disposed, after such
peoples' wont, to appropriate the vices than the qualities of their
foreign instructors. Peter himself, being no longer a Moscovite and
not yet a European, having the bringing up of neither, owned abso-
lutely no moral restraint. The brutality of his pleasures, the feroc-
ity of his vengeances, made of him a singular apostle of progress.
The Moscovite coarseness combined with the sceptical license of
the West found their climax, around him and his first successors,
in a cynicism as repulsive to the Old-Russians as to Europe.

The means and the men employed by Peter in his work fre-
quently drew on it, instead of sympathy and admiration, the peo-

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION, 295

pie's horror and contempt. How could the latter love and honor
a learning and civilization which, in Herzen's words, were ten-
dered to them at the knuVs end, and that by hands frequently-
impure ? By the rigor of his laws, the indiscretion of his regu-
lations, the cruelty of his punishments, the reformer, busy princi-
pally over external discipline, himself taught hypocrisy and base-
ness. By unscrupulously doing violence to the public conscience,
he weakened it ; while trying to polish, he demoralized. The
men he used as instruments of reform made the evil worse. Peter
often took the boon companions of his drinking bouts for associates
in his work of reformation. Germans and Kuropeans from every
land, — the foreigners who, during a century, kept swarming into
Russia, — generally brought sad moral teachings to the people they
pretended to renovate. Among these missionaries of Western
culture an honest man was perhaps as rare a bird as a great man.
The majority were adventurers, anxious to make a fortune, with no
other civilizing qualification than an immoderate appetite for
power and wealth. The best and most skilled still offended the
popular conscience. Being strangers to the people's customs and
beliefs, they ran their heads straight against prejudices and scru-
ples deserving of respect even in their ignorance.*

The eighteenth century was for Russia a school of demoraliza-
tion. The court of St. Petersburgh is a repulsive spectacle even
in the time of lyouis XV. One feels that, in that young colony of
old Europe, two ages of corruption mix together. Debauchery,
venality, and bloody repression — such are the three stages or the
three acts, of public life. A French philosopher who had been the
guest of Catherine II. said of Russia as it was then, that it was a

* Haxthausen {Studien, vol. i., p. 48) expresses the singular opinion
that the whole evil came from having forsaken German culture, introduced
by Peter the Great, for French culture, which prevailed from Elizabeth on.
This is one of those claims familiar to German arrogance, too naive to merit
discussion. There is only one remark to be made in reply : that in the mid-
dle of the eighteenth century French culture prevailed everywhere, not to
mention that it was, of the two, the more congenial to the Russian nature.

296 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

fruit rotten before it was ripe.' If the censure was merited, Europe
was in great part responsible. The Russians claim a high
standard for the manners of Old- Russia. Without disputing the
West's primacy in matters intellectual and scientific, they are fain
to vindicate for their country and its patriarchal usages a moral
superiority.* They flatter themselves that, by remaining outside
of the West's great historical epochs, it has escaped the threefold
corruption of Middle Ages, Renaissance, and modem times. Pay-
ing tit for tat, they take pleasure in alluding to the rottenness of
the West ; they say that in the ancient empire of the tsars civili-
zation had a basis more moral and religious than in the brilliant
Western societies reared on heathenism ; they are prone to ascribe
the vices of new Russia to European contagion. The pictures
drawn by old travellers do not always endorse these claims, f In
the North, as everywhere, despotism and serfdom were a sorry
school for virtue. Still the traditional foimdations of Moscovite
morality certainly were shaken by the imperial reform and the
teachings from the West. In a large proportion of the nation the
old-time manners and beliefs were destroyed before anything was
ready to take their place. Here, perhaps, lies another of those re-
mote springs of nihilism even in the classes converted to civiliza-
tion. By his way of casting to the winds national traditions,
institutions, prejudices, by his unceremoniousness in dealing with
the past of his people and his scant respect for his subject's cus-
toms, Peter, the most masterful of crowned revolutionists, might
I be looked upon as the true progenitor of modem nihilism or
^^nothingismJ'^

^ With the usual amiable candor of honored and petted guests, of which
this noble country, like our own, has had some edifying experience.

* This opinion of the Slavophils will be found developed at length in the
Histoire de la Civilisation en Russia, from the Russian of JerebtsdfiF. It
crops up at every step in the writings of many of Russia's most popular
•writers. See, for example, A Writer's Diary ^ by Dostoy^fsky, 1880.

t Olearius, Mergeret, Fletcher, draw a black picture of the morality
of both laymen and clergy. Others, it is true, such as Herberstein, give
accounts more favorable to Russian manners.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 297

To the moral evil in Peter the Great's work was added an
intellectual evil, and, by a fatal concatenation, this latter brought
in its train social and political evil. The mind, like the heart,

was forced off the track. The reformer pressed too hard on certain

•

Russian qualities almost imknown before his time and soon to be,
thanks to him, carried to excess: the ease with which the Russians
comprehend and assimilate any and every thing. Or, what comes
to the same, the reform emphasized certain faults which they held
from nature or history, such as the want of originality, insufficient
personality. Peter unconsciously made echoes and reflections of
his subjects. Urging them violently along the road of imitation,
he smothered in them the spirit of initiative and thus deprived
them of the most active leaven of progress. By getting them into
the habit of thinking with other people's brains, he prolonged
their intellectual nonage under the foreigner's tutelage. This
tendenc}'^ to imitation delayed by a century the birth of an original
national literature. The Russian of St. Petersburgh was subjected
to every influence from the West, obediently reproducing the most
contradictory ones, going to school by tmms to the Encyclopedists
and the French emigrants, to Voltaire and Joseph de Maistre, and,
be it from weariness or supineness, too often inclining to a hollow
scepticism, too often carried away by externals and appearances.*
To these intellectual vices corresponds the social vice, — the
denationalization of one half of the nation, the severing of the
classes. By dint of copying the foreigners, the reformed Russian
ceased to be a Russian. All that was national went the way of
the kafihn and the beard, the way of the language too, reduced
to the condition of a dialect left to the "common people." Peter,
so thoroughly Russian in character, seemed to have set himself the
task of germanizing his subjects. To the cities which he founded,

* " Everything is always changing in your country, Prince, the laws like
the ribbons, the opinions like the waistcoats, the systems of all kinds like
the fashions ; a man sells his house as he sells his horse. Nothing is con-
stant but inconstancy." (Letter from Jos. de Maistre to Prince Kozldfsky,
1815.)

298 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

to the institutions which he created or renovated, he gave German
names, often fabricating useless barbarisms, incomprehensible to
the people. At one time, he is said to have been on the point of
making German the ofl&cial language. Under his daughter Eliza-
beth it was the French language's turn, and that stayed over a
century as undisputed sovereign.

The surface layer, the upper classes alone, became impregnated
with the manners and ideas of the West. The substratum, the
bulk of the people, remained impermeable. As the latter re-
mained Russians while the former were transmuted into make-
believe Germans and Frenchmen, Russia split herself into two
peoples, severed by language and habits, unable to understand
each other. The great cities and lordly mansions arose in the
midst of the rural population like foreign colonies. As for the
masses, the precipitancy with which the leading classes rushed
westward rather delayed their progress. Having been left too far
behind ever to join their masters, the common people were aban-
doned to barbarism.

This social evil crops up in politics. Unconnected, unharmo-
nized, the institutions were out of tune with the country.
Imported wholesale and with no roots in the soil, they often were
transplanted before it was made read}'^ for them. While in the
West the modem era rests on the Middle Ages and each century
on the preceding one, in Russia the entire political building, as
the entire civilization, had neither a national basis nor historical
foimdations. The whole government organization was an append-
age, to which the people remained strangers. Most of the laws
were growths of other climes : they resembled borrowed clothes,
suiting neither the figure nor the habits of the wearer.

A contemporary thinker * makes the remark that one of the
characteristics of the modem era, and one of the evils the peo-
ples of the continent have most suffered from since the eighteenth
century, is too much law-making, too great a confidence in the
* Mr. Le Play, Social Reform.

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 299

written letter, regarded as the supreme and irresistible vehicle of
progress. Well, nowhere has this fault been carried to the extent
it has reached in the Russia of Peter the Great and his successors.
No other state perhaps has seen such abundant and intrepid legis-
lating, because the legislator nowhere else disposed of such means
of action. The whole history of Russia, the whole long Mosco-
vite period in particular, apparently served only to fashion in the
person of the imperial autocrat an omnipotent lawgiver, free to
do and dare all things. The heirs of Peter and Catherine outdo
one another in raining ukazes, believing all things lawful to them,
never appearing to doubt the success or efl&ciency of these decrees
so hastily issued and annulled, innovating and modifying without
rest or pause, commanding and forbidding, and frequently — ^by
dint of variations, inconsistencies, contradictions — warping and
discrediting in the public mind the very notion of law itself, which,
in Russia, appears as the expression of an individual will, power-
ful and dread, but fleeting and changeful. The people at last are
reduced to a state like that of an inert patient, if not of an unfeel-
ing corpse, over which the masters of the empire bend in the
g^se of physicians performing dire experiments in anima vili.
More than that, the sovereigns themselves, not of their own will
but by the force of their everlasting altering, remodelhng, upsetting
all that seemed settled and done with, have taught their people to
look on the country as on a tabula rasa, or on the stage of a theatre
the scenes of which are shifted at the whistle of the machinist.

The Russia of Peter the Great, that of Catherine II. and of
Alexander II., afford the best illustration of what written law can
and what it cannot accomplish. In no other state has law-making
so often shown at once the extent and limit of its power. In the
hands of autocracy, modem Russia seems, once or twice in a cen-
tury, on the point of being entirely transformed in the course of
a few years, but the most long-suffering of peoples are not to be
thus kneaded by their masters' knuckles. To look at the laws,
Russia has been more than once upturned from the very bottom ;

300 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

but laws do not reach a people's soul. To be eflScient, the
changes accomplished in the legislation should have a parallel in
the minds and customs. Otherwise, no harmony existing between
law and custom, nothing comes of it but disturbance and a gen-
eral ill-at-ease feeling, and this is what, in the course of the last
two centuries, the Russians have too frequently experienced.

Moral or intellectual, social or political, all the ills under
which Russia suffers ever since Peter the Great may be summed
up in one : dualism, contradiction. The nation's life and con-
sciousness have been cleft in twain ; the country, stirred to its core,
has not yet been able to recover its balance. That is, possibly pn
a larger scale, the uncomfortable feeling familiar to France since
the Revolution. Whether they are started from above or from
below, these violent transformations, which become for a people
the starting-point of a new life, always leave behind them a pain-
ful trail. There remain in society and in the public mind discords
which sway aside the soundest judgments. France had this
advantage, that her Revolution was made by herself, in accord-
ance with her own genius, and that, in its errors as in its successes,
it was wholly French. In Russia the revolution was made by the
authorities, under foreign influence, the schism between the past
and present was deeper, the jar and wrench in the nation's life
more painfiil. To Peter's reforms are traceable many of the oppo-
sitions, or rather anomalies, which, in Russia, caused contrast to
become law. Institutions and customs, ideas and facts find it
hard work to get attuned together. In the nation as in the indi-
vidual, dissonances of all kinds abound. The Russian is divided
against himself, he feels double ; at times he does not know what
he believes, what he thinks, what he is.*

Being no longer herself, and not feeling herself European yet,
Russia is as though suspended between two shores. In order to

* "Peter," wrote Joseph de Maistre in another letter to his Russian
firiend, — "Peter has placed you in a false position towards the other coun-
tries : nee tecum possum vivere, nee sine te [ "I can live neither with nor
without you,"] — that is your motto." (Letter to Prince Kozldfsky, Oo
tober, 1815.)

HISTOR Y AND THE ELEMENTS OF CI VI LIZA TION. 3OI

get out of this duality from which her sufferings come, is she to
lean wholly to one side and rush forward on the West, or to
recoil and resolutely return to old-time Moscovia? What is
best — ^to wade knee-deep into imitation, or, casting aside all foreign
importations, practise rigorous self-sequestration, and return to
all that is national ? But in the scantiness of the inheritance left
by the past, in the midst of the ruins and rubbish accumulated by
Peter and his successors, where is "all that is national " to be
found most of the time ? Russia is physically and morally too
near to Europe, to which in these last two centuries she has drawn
nearer still, to be able to snap the bond. She is European, but
her historical bringing up has given her with regard to the peo-
ples of the West certain dissimilarities which one or two centuries
did not sufl&ce to obliterate. The solution of the problem of her
future lay in the conciliation of these two terms : Russia and
Europe, civilization and nationality.

It is with Peter's reform as with the French Revolution: we may
deplore their violences, we may point out their fallacies ; not the
less for that will both remain, each for the nation it has renovated,
the steadfast basis of all future moral development. Russia's
task with regard to her European reform is the same as France's
with regard to her Revolution : it is no use lamenting and regret-
ting. All there is to do is to carry on the work, correcting it as
we go, but also strengthening and completing it, giving way to
neither discouragement nor precipitancy.

What reason counsels Russia, her own impulse leads her to
carry out through inevitable delays. The three last reigns bear
witness to this, even though two of them were as barren, seem-
ingly, as the third was fertile. Open to all generous illusions, in
love by turns with a vague liberalism and a sort of authoritative
mysticism, Alexander I. was conscious of his people's discomfort,
and dining many years his dream was to heal it. In him the
final reformer appeared to have arisen, the Messiah expected
through centuries ; but he proved only a precursor. He had it not
in him to go beyond feeble flutterings of will, timid attempts.

302 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

All the aspirations and contradictions of his time appeared to be
centred in him, and his time was one of the most troubled in his-
tory, and the most fitted to trouble well-meaning souls.

In him also came out most clearly all the faculties and all the
contrasts characteristic of the modem Russian, the civilized Rus-
sian, frequently at strife and at odds with himself, such as he
came out of the reforms of the eighteenth century, Like Peter
the Great, although in a very different way, Alexander I., with
his nature so weirdly made up of strength and softness, ' ' of
manly qualities and feminine weaknesses ' ' ; with his noble infat-
uations and his facility to become enamoured by turns of the most
divers ideas; with his alternations of illusion and discourage-
ment, of action and apathy, — this monarch of enigmatic char-
acter, so variously and sometimes so unjustly appraised, might be
g^ven as one of the historical types of the national temperament.*
The brilliant, versatile son of Paul I. — the liberal pupil of the
republican I^aharpe — ^the mystic confidant of Madame de Krii-
dener — appears to embody not merely an epoch and a generation,
but an entire race, with its collective intellect, a race that to this
day is alive on the banks of the Neva.

As man and as sovereign, Nicolas was the direct opposite of
his brother and predecessor. In him the old Moscovite tsars
appeared to revive, rejuvenated and polished up after the modem
fashion. Tall, well-built, stem, indefatigable, never doubting
himself or his system, Nicolas was the true, typical autocrat.
Distrustftil of all change, stability was his ideal. The revolutions
in the West scared him, and he cut himself adrift from Europe.
For nigh on a third of a century Russia seemed to be going back-
wards ; but this very reaction served as corrective to the main
blemish of Peter's reform — denationalization. The tyranny of
imitation relaxed, nationality began to crop up ever5rwhere, and
first of all it revived in its proper place — in art and literature.

♦ See the portrait of Alexander I. by Mettemich {Mhnoires, etc., vol.
L, pp. 316, 317).

HISTORY AND THE ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION. 303

Slavophil theories notwithstanding, the European influence did
not sufier. Between the West and his subjects Nicolas had raised
a Chinese Wall, or rather, after the manner of Russian house-
keepers at the approach of winter, he had hermetically closed and
caulked up the windows — carefully going over every chink
through which the outer air might thread its way into the house.
But even if the breath from Europe and the pression of external
air could not have defied the custom-house and the imperial cen-
sure, the Russian atmosphere was already too impregnated with
European ideas to be capable of disinfection. The reign of Nico-
las has shown that, with all its omnipotence, autocracy was not
strong enough to keep Russia long from rolling down the incline on
which Peter the Great had started her. The Crimean War made
patent to all eyes, together with the feebleness of the stationary
system, the necessity for Russia of placing herself, socially, if
not as yet politically, on one level with the West, if only to be
in a condition to stand her own against it.

Under Alexander II. the gates were thrown open and the re-
form came at last that was to reconcile Russia with herself as well
as with Europe. This time it was not a whitewashing or a patch-
ing up of the fagade-stucco, or a mere outer casing ; it was an
upheaving and a remodelling of the very foundations of society ;
it was the whole people, not one class, that was called to liberty
and civilization. Until the emancipation of the serfs, the work of
Peter I., having left out the bulk of the nation, lacked a basis ;
the emancipation gave it one.

lyike Peter's, Alexander's reforms were worked from above, by
the hand of autocracy, but not again were they enacted before a
passive, inert people, through the agency of foreigners called in
from abroad, with the help of rods and knui ; they were accom-
plished with the co-operation and at the demand of a power
entirely new in Russia — ^public opinion. Already the chief motor
of Russian history, its main or indeed only spring, autocracy, does
not appear to be the only factor of progress. It is that, indeed,

304 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

which, as in past times, sets in motion the vast machinery, but the
impulse which formerly had no other spring often now comes
from below. This change is but the prelude to another which
must gradually modify the habits and traditions of the state.
Russian civilization has, so far, been fashioned by ukazes ; it
cannot be completed without the participation of the nation. The
proceedings of Peter the Great and Catherine II. have served their
time ; Russia is sufficiently European now to be associated to the
work. After having compelled her to taste of the arts and sciences
of the West, it becomes awkward to hinder her taking a bite at its
liberties too. The reign of Alexander II., therefore, may be con-
sidered as the closing of a long historical cycle — ^the cycle of
autocratic reforms.

By persisting in maintaining the absolute rSgime in its integ-
rity, autocracy attempts to survive itself. By refusing to lend
itself to transformations that have become unavoidable, it only
risks to make them more difl&cult and perilous without rendering
them less necessary. From Ivan III. and Ivan IV. to Peter,
from Catherine to the three Alexanders, autocratic power appears
to have fulfilled its historical mission. It has been said that states
are preserved by the same means that made them. This seems
to apply particularly to Russia. By her traditions, by her size,
by her social and ethnical composition, colossal Russia manifestly
needs a strong governing power ; but it can be strong without be-
ing absolute — Prussia and the German Kmpire are a proof of that.
After the great economical, social, administrative reforms of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the political reforms must
come sooner or later. However complicated, however arduous they
may be, Russia scarcely can put them oflf much longer. That
task will be the inheritance of the twentieth century. May it be
achieved peaceably, gradually, by the hand of the tsars them-
selves, for the happiness of the people of the great empire ! *

* See, on this weighty matter, Vol. II., Book IV., Chaps. III. and IV.

BOOK V.
THE SOCIAL HIERARCHY : THE TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES.

CHAPTER I.

Class Distinctions in Russia : In what Respects they are Superficial and
External, in what Deep and Persistent — Blow Struck at the Old-Time
Social Hierarchy by the Emancipation — All Subsequent Reforms Tend-
ing to the Lowering of Class Barriers — How, in this Respect, the Work
Done by Alexander II. Resembles that Done by the French Revolution,
and how it Differs Therefrom — Character and Origin of all these
Social Distinctions — Privileged and Non-Privileged Classes — Lack of
Solidarity between the Former ; Lack of Homogeneousness in Each —
Accessory Classes.

The most salient fact presented to the French observer by
Russia's social constitution is the division of the population into dis-
tinct groups, into classes neatly defined, — for a long time one might
almost have said into castes. History and law have divided
the Russian people into compartments, superposed like tiers which,
from base to summit, would go tapering off abruptly. Russian
society thus looks from a distance much like a pyramid in stages —
that of Saqqarah on the Nile, or the pseudo-Tatar four-tiers tower
in Kazan, each tier fturther subdivided into secondary steps. To
look on the outside of it only, this society, elaborately partitioned,
appears made for people who, in the classification of the various
social layers, see the first condition of a nation's greatness. From
afar, with all her denominations and oflScial rubrics, Russia would

seem to realize the dreams of the utopists of hierarchy ; one seems
20

305

306 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

to see a vast Salentum, where every man, at his birth, finds his
place and pursuits marked out for him by the law.

On a nearer view it turns out something quite different. At
the very time when all the demarcations were most precise, those
oflBcial frameworks, in which the different classes are arranged
according to a pre-determined order, might possibly have misled
the theoreticians enamoured of social distinctions. How much
more is it so now, when such manifold reforms have rehandled,
overhauled, altered in a thousand ways the old hierarchical order !
Were Russia's strength there, as foreigners so generally fancy,
Russia would have already lost the inner power long attributed to
her by the prejudiced West.

Russia's social constitution, such as it was, fashioned by the
two or three last centuries, was based on the servitude of the peas-
antry ; the emancipation could not fail to shake it. In this regu-
larly stratified society, it was dijB&cult for the lower tier suddenly
to straighten itself up without distturbing the balance of the
tiers it was supporting. The old-time classification into orders
still subsists before the law — nominally, externally, of course ; in
reality it is considerably honeycombed. This progressive decrease
of class distinctions and social privileges, indeed, proves on a closer
inspection to be one of the main characteristics of contemporary
Russia.

If we attempt to sum up into one all the alterations that have
taken place in our own days in the immense Empire of the North,
it will be found that they all culminate in this one essential fact : the
progressive abrogation of the differences existing between the
classes or castes, or, what amoimts to the same thing — in the suc-
cessive reduction of both prerogatives and burdens peculiar to each
of the various classes. This is the central point towards which
converge the numerous reforms of the last reign, the climax from
which the observer can best appreciate their order and bearing.

Administrative or judicial, ecclesiastical, financial, or military
— all these alterations, which strike at all the branches of public

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 307

life, tend at bottom, more or less directly, more or less consciously,
towards one and the same end — the lowering of caste barriers, the
obliteration of old boundary lines, the widening of social compart-
ments,— in one word, the equal distribution of state favors and
state burdens among all the parts of the nation. Whether or no
the goal were distinctly perceived by the promoters of the reforms,
whether they pursued it of their own free and clearly defined will,
or unknowingly yielded to a secret and involuntary impulse — the
final terminus stands out afterwards with extraordinary distinct-
ness. Whatever branch of administration one may take up to study,
courts of justice, army, taxation, municipal or provincial institu-
tions— the same tendency will invariably assert itself. Therein,
we repeat, lies the bond which links all the late reforms together,
and which, notwithstanding serious breaks and gaps, and singular
inconsistencies, lends them that which is the stamp of great
things — unity.

There certainly are incoherences, restrictions, contradictions,
shortcomings of all sorts ; within the last few years especially
there have been many waverings, side-starts in the direction of
reaction, attempts at backing out ; the fact is not the less there.
In the Russia of Peter the Great and his successors, all the rights,
all the immunities— administrative, judicial, mihtary — ^were be-
stowed on each class separately ; it is the other way now ; the
democratic proceeding prevails, which deals with a people and
wots not of classes. In the midst of the nineteenth century
Russia still clung, in this respect, to mediaeval views and ways ;
under Alexander II, she became a modern country. In this
respect the work, as yet incomplete, of the lyiberator, bears a
striking resemblance to that of the French Revolution ; its final
terminus is civil equality, without distinction of classes, races,
religions.

There are, however, important differences between the two, in
the manner in which each was prepared, and in the manner in
which each was carried out. In the France of the ancien rigime

308 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the moral barriers between the different classes, especially between
the nobility and the middle class (noblesse and tiers-Siat), had
been overthrown and obliterated by custom before they were abol-
ished by law. The distance between noble and burgher, still so
impassable in the seventeenth century, had been bridged over in the
eighteenth. Salons and belles-lettres — the drawing-room and the
study — had brought the two together, frequently even merged
them into one. The only distinction now lay in the outer man,
the costume, and on the day on which the noble laid aside sword
and embroideries the last difference vanished. Uniformity of
garb and manner betokened spiritual similarity. As a living
historian remarks, equality de facto had preceded equality de
jure; noblesse and tiers-itat were placed on a par by education and
mental capacity, even while still separated by privileges.* Not
so in Russia, even on the eve of the latest reforms. The noble,
the priest, the townsman, the peasant, were severed not merely
by legal privileges, but by habits, bringing up, even natural
inclination ; they were so many different men, and in order to
make them alike it was not enough that the law should place them
on an equal footing. The classes not having been brought together
by manners before they were so by law, the taking down of the
legal fences which kept them apart did not suffice to bring about
a fusion ; it is only with time and indirectly that the great results
of the social reforms will unfold themselves.

Between the French Revolution and the imperial reforms
there is another difference, an opposition in the midst of re-
semblances. For reforms made by monarchs and those made
by popular revolutions cannot, even when tending the same way,
be accomplished in the same manner ; the former do not proceed
after the violent, abrupt, uncompromising fashion natural to the
latter. While the revolutions started from below aim first of all
at the outer shell of things and bear a grudge against names as
much as against substance, reforms from above are often inclined

* Taine : Les Origines de la France Contemporaine : PAncien Rigime.

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 309

to respect the shell, content in proportion as the innovations are
less apparent. The class distinctions have not been abolished in
Russia, the forms and moulds are still untouched. Instead of
dropping them as empty shells and taking them down as useless
scaffoldings, the lawgiver has kept them all. The lovers of the
past are thus left free to dream of some day forcing back into them
the various classes of the nation, of reconstructing the social
order on the old lines with some slight modifications.

These distinctions, it should be remembered, have, in history
and manners, roots too deep to be eradicated in a few years. There
are still reasons for their existing in Russia which in Western
Europe have vanished long ago, or never existed at all. One is
the exotic manner of the introduction of modern civilization and,
as a consequence, the enormous, the incalculable difference in
manners and culture ; another is the double system of land tenure,
inalienable and held in common by the recently emancipated
peasants, individual and hereditary for the former serf-owner.

lyCgislation and society itself are, with regard to this matter, in
a state of transition ; a study of the different classes is all the
more arduous and complicated. It is often difficult for a foreigner
to find out what has been abrogated by the recent reforms, and
what has not, to distinguish nominal rights and privileges from
real ones. Yet nothing is of greater importance for the discrimina-
tion of facts from appearances. Outwardly, this society, the best
framed, most neatly partitioned and pigeonholed, seems to be one
of the most aristocratic in Europe. Virtually there is none more
democratic. Here again, there is, between show and reality, one
of those contrasts so familiar to Russia and so bewildering
to strangers.

*' In our country," one of the principal compilers of the Eman-
cipation Act, Prince {kniaz) V. Tcherkassky, once said to me
" the distinctions of classes have never existed but on the sur-
face. From the Varangians of Rurik to Peter the Great and
Catherine II., the nobility has been only a thin and superficial

3IO THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

alluvion. On scratching the soil you find the old Slavic hard-pan
smooth and even."

A foreigner, therefore, must not be beyond measure astonished
if, contrary to the evidence of his own eyes, he hears Russians as-
sert that there are no class-distinctions in Russia, that every kind
of hierarchy has always been repugnant to the Russian nature.
This assertion, first made by the Slavophil school, is joined in by
all the Slavic nations, with the exception of the Poles, who, in this
respect, as in many others, are different from their race-brethren.
Fundamental unity of the people, social homogeneousness, is given
out as the distinctive feature of the Slavic genius, as the charac-
teristic of their civilization and the main condition of their future
development.

In Russia the individual does not, as in France, stand isolated
before the state. Each man is classed in the administrative
nomenclature under some rubric ; each belongs, by birth or pro-
fession, to a given group, of which he shares the rights and obli-
gations. The law distinguishes between the noble, the priest, the
peasant, the townsman. Until the last few years, every one held a
different position as regards taxation, the administration of justice,
and military service. Each order had its own organization, its
co-operation forms, its assemblies and elective officers, sometimes
its own judges and courts ; each assumed guardianship over those
of its members who were under age, and at times was held respon-
sible for its grown-up members. These charges or immunities, as
well as this internal self-government, in many cases still subsist ;
but the various classes are no longer kept apart.

The government of the Emperor Alexander II., in endowing
Russia with provincial assemblies, has for the first time called on
the different orders of the nation to deliberate in common ; but
such is still the distance between them that, in the common sit-
tings of these assemblies, pointedly entitled ' ' of all classes, ' ' each
class usually has its separate representatives, elected in private
partial gatherings. While introducing self-government into local

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 31I

admiuistration, Russia appears to be wavering between the system
which gives to each group of the population special representatives,
and that of mixing all the inhabitants up together in one common
representation. The former method, but lately in general use,
prevails in the provincial councils, in the zSmstvo, the most impor-
tant of deliberative assemblies in contemporary Russia ; the latter
has recently been applied to the municipal town-councils as well as
the jury. Which of the two systems will j5nally triumph ? Which
will be preferred on the day on which the empire will receive a
political constitution ? Will the nobility, the towns, and the
peasants have separate representatives, separately elected, and
deliberating in common ? Or will one of the orders — the nobility,
for instance, with or without the clergy — have a separate house,
as in England ? There lies, concerning the future of Russia, a ques-
tion not unlike that which had to be met at the outset of the French
Revolution, at the time of the convocation of the States-General —
a ticklish question, which no one could solve without first becom-
ing familiar with the social organization of former times, and with-
out having gauged the value and real force of each of the great
groups which, together, constitute the nation.

A whole volume of the bulky Russian Code is devoted to
"classes, orders, or conditions." The Code contains no less than
sixteen hundred articles on this diflScult matter, and numerous
amendments and appendices continually increase its complexity.
The law recognizes in Russia four principal classes : the nobility,
the clergy, the inhabitants of the towns and cities, the rural popu-
lation. This division is the natural outcome of the country's
history — indeed of the social state of all primitive peoples. From
India to Scandinavia, everywhere almost, at a certain stage of
civilization, these four fundamental orders are found, the two
latter either separated, as in Sweden, or united under one name
as in France, without being really one in fact ; the warriors or
nobles at the top, together with the priests or clergy ; lower down
the men of trade and crafts, the burghers {bourgeoisie) ; quite

312 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

below, the peasant or rustic, the husbandman, tiller of the earth.
This similarity in classification and hierarchy does not imply per-
fect identity everywhere. Though the social groups in Russia
may bear in French and German the same names as the classes
of feudal Europe — ^in Sweden's old constitution, for instance, — they
do not differ the less deeply from their foreign homonyms, and it
would be rushing into serious blunders to judge them one by the
others.

In Western Europe, whatever may be the actual social condi-
tion of the different nations — in Spain or in Germany, in Italy or
Belgium, — the words ' ' nobility, " " burgherdom, " " peasantry, ' '
have at bottom the same meanings ; they convey to the mind
analogous notions, because the classes designated by these terms
were bom in the same age, under the same influences, at an epoch
when all Europe, I^atin or Teutonic, had institutions nearly
identical. Russia, in common with most Slavic peoples, was not
then a part of the European community, and therefore the same
names cannot possibly have there the same meanings. These
terms, "nobles," "burghers," we use in speaking of Russia only
fi-om the lack of more fitting ones, and in order not always to utter
sounds unfamiliar to the European ear. This Russian hierarchy,
with all its class denominations, was indeed also bom in the
Middle Ages — but in Middle Ages of her own, different from the
same period in Western Europe. By their origin, by the spirit
of their kind and their historical rdle, the Russian noble (dvorianln)
and burgher {ntiish-tchantn) are probably still further removed
from their European equivalents than the Greek clergy fi-om the
Latin, the Orthodox married priest (^pop) from the Catholic priest
vowed to celibacy. Between the two, there is scarcely as much
as a family likeness.

As all things in Russia, the constitution of the four principal
classes of society in their modem form dates from Peter the
Great, and, after him, from the great Catherine. It was Peter who,
in establishing the ofi&cial hierarchy of ranks according to the

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 313

degree or pursuit of each person, definitely gave its national char-
acter to the Russian dvorihnstvo, the class entitled "nobility " in
the other languages. It was Catherine who, under the influence
of Western models, erected this nobility, as well as the class of
townspeople (so-called bourgeoisie), into corporations, endowed
with certain privileges. In the society regulated by Peter each
citizen seemed to have his place marked by the law, each class its
well-defined sphere of action, its specialty, so to speak. For all
classes or social categories, the nobility, as well as the rest, corre-
sponded at bottom to a determined occupation, and answered to
common charges and obligations, not to exemptions and privileges.
To the peasant fell the working of the land ; to the townsman,
trade and crafts ; to the noble, public service ; to the priest, the
altar. Each wheel, each attachment had its work marked out in
the service of the state, and none might shirk it. These classes,
so precisely outlined, between whom custom and training even
yet draw a harsher line than does the law, were, nevertheless, no
closed castes. The very nature of the governing power, whose
handiwork they were, could not allow them to shut themselves up
within themselves. Superior as well as inferior classes existed
only for the convenience of Throne and State, not in or for them-
selves, and the sovereign was always free to raise or lower his
subjects, in accordance with his needs or views, from one category
to another.

In such a society, where no class held any rights or preroga-
tives on their own merits or their ancestors', or in virtue of a
national tradition, none could have anj^ rights that the governing
power need consider. All remained alike dependent on the
pleasure of him from whom they had received their prerogatives.
There was in these classes, especially in the nobility and burgher-
dom, no living organism instinct with a principle of spontaneous
action ; nothing but an inert mechanism, obedient to the directing
hand. Russia's example shows that hierarchy and class limita-
tions are not always safe pledges for a people's freedom. It is easy

314 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

to lament the crumbling of social forces in countries where the
individuals, in their theoretical equality before the state, are
at once merged together and isolated, like the grains of sand in a
beach. This evil, however great, is difl&cult to remedy artificially.
To give social groups cohesion and unity it needs something more
than taking individuals and agglomerating them into corporations,
orders, classes. From a political point of view, nothing has real
consistency except the spontaneous products of nature and history,
the bodies which have formed and become cemented organically,
that have within and not outside of themselves the principle of
their life and power.

In Russia no class possesses political rights of any sort ; each
insures to its members personal rights and privileges which it
holds from the law and the sovereign's pleasure. In this respect
Russian society is divided — or rather was, for the late reforms
have gradually wellnigh obhterated the distinction — into two
main groups, the privileged classes and the non-privileged. The
former were exempt from military service, from the heaviest of
direct taxes — the poll tax — and from corporal punishment — the
knut and the rods. As everywhere, these privileged ones were
the nobility and clergy, to whom were added the selectest of the
townsmen and tradespeople, what would be called in French, ''la
grosse bourgeoisie, ' ' the big- wigs of the middle class. The rest of
the townsmen — the small fry among tradespeople and mechanics
— ^were, like the serfs, subject to conscription, capitation, and the
rods. Thus the rural and urban pieds formed one great rightless
mass, which from times immemorial went tmder the graphic
appellations of smerd ("the stinking") and tchem (" the dirty ").

But even amidst the privileged classes there was not by any
means the unity of spirit, the uniformity of culture — in a word,
the moral homogeneousness, which was found in other countries
under similar conditions. Between the nobility and clergy there
was nothing like the tmion or solidarity, there were none of the
manifold ties, of family and interests, which, in old-time France,

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 315

made one of the two first orders of the state. Even before Peter
the Great the high church dignitaries had fallen into disfavor
with the nobility. Already the clergy, condemned to recruit
itself out of its own ranks, had become a sort of hereditary caste;
not that it was closed by law against outsiders, but because the
sons of priests were almost the only candidates. Since Peter the
Great, the clergy, confined to its church duties, and long
suspected of ill-will towards the innovations,' had remained,
like the bulk of the people, true to the old customs,
usages, ways — to Old- Russia. The nobility, on the contrary,
recruited from among foreigners of many lands, favorites of the
sovereign and adventurers of all sorts, had, after a short resist-
ance, opened its door to the breath from Europe ; it was the only
class that adopted the garb, the mode of life, the ideas of the
West. This nobility, composed of serf-owners, mostly state
functionaries, and the privileged portion of the urban population,
had not much more in common in the way of interests or senti-
ment, for the tradespeople and " townsmen " generally are less far
removed from the people in tastes or bringing up in Russia than
in any other country.

One of the peculiarities of this social constitution is that each
of the four classes is divided into sub-classes, generally strangers,
frequently quite hostile towards one another. The dualism which
pervades the clergy, divided into priesthood and monkhood — white
and black clergy, — shows up to a certain degree in all the classes
of society. In the nobility there are the personal and the heredi-
tary nobles ; among the townsmen there are the " notables" on
one side, the mechanics and ' ' small people ' ' on the other ; even
the peasantry is divided into peasants attached to private land-
lords and peasants of the Crown demesnes.

'Not "suspected" — convicted. At the head and at the root of all
opposition, the inspirers and instigators of rebellious discontent, the hidden
soul of ever reviving conspiracy, in the van of open resistance, lurking in
the gloom of church and convent cell, ear to lip with fair penitents and
callow youths, inciting to riot, treason — and murder.

31 6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

The complexity of this social order does not stop there. Out-
side of these four great frames, further cut up by inner partitions,
there are smaller compartments, accessory or secondary, some
being remnants of an earlier organization, others destined for the
use of the inhabitants of countries more or less recently annexed,
and fitting but awkwardly into the older frames. Up to the time
of the reforms of Alexander II., the army, no less than the clergy,
could be regarded as a class by itself. In Russian statistics the
soldiers, their wives and children, figured in the midst of the
social nomenclature under a special rubric* This was a conse-
quence of the long term of military service ; when a man knew
that he was to remain in his regiment twenty or twenty-five years
he entered the army very much as one enters the church — for
life.f Once enrolled, the peasant ceased to belong to his native
commune ; once shaved, he never again donned the garb of his
younger days. As a rule, when age shelved him as to active ser-
vice, he would continue, in the humble functions that were gener-
ally awarded him, or in the places where he appealed to public
charity, to wear the military tunic. It is only since 1872 and
1874, i. e., since the reduction of the term of service, that the
recruit is no longer severed from his class and commune by the
call under the flag.

In the first half of the present century, under Alexander I.,
there was a moment when, owing to the military colonies invented
by Count Araktch^yef, the profession of arms seemed on the point
of becoming a livelong and hereditary one. In certain districts,
the inhabitants of which were dubbed "soldier-husbandmen," the
girls were, equally with the boys, devoted to the army, destined

♦These statistics, blundered over by the West, have sometimes led to
singular mistakes. Thus the figure of the class would be given as that of
the army, regardless of the fact that this figure, in the case of the Cosacks,
represented for over half its value women and children.

t The long-term service was partly a consequence of the social organiza-
tion ; frequent levies and large contingents would have ruined the land-
lords by robbing them of their serfs, who, once entered on the army roUSr
were ipso facto manumitted.

SOCIAL HIERARCHY: TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 317

at their birth to marry and bear soldiers. It was a novel sort of
serfdom, the promoters of which flattered themselves that they
would draw great profit therefrom, both for the forces and finances
of the empire. The resistance of the peasants, which sometimes
reached actual revolt, compelled Nicolas to give up this attempt.
Alexander II. , in this respect, followed tendencies directly opposed
to those which prevailed imder Alexander I. The law which
abridged the term of military service at the same time that it
rendered it obligatory to all, struck another hard blow at class
distinctions. Instead of being an isolated body, a recipient of
privileges, or a bond slave, the army will become a levelling agent,
one of the principal factors in the fusion of classes and ranks.*
— There is in the Russian army, or rather military forces, an im-
portant element which continues to form, to a certain extent, a dis-
tinct class, a warrior caste ; it is the Cosacks. Along the southern
frontier of the empire, along the lower course of the Don, the
Volga, the Ural, the Kub^n, the T6rek, there are still foimd
populations of mixed origin, all equally subject to a military
organization. This is the only resemblance the Cosacks bear
to Alexander I.'s soldier colonies or the old-time Granitch^s
("Military Confines") of Austria. In compensation for the
special burdens imposed on them, they have from the oldest
times enjoyed immunities which they always valued very highly ;
hence they were regarded as privileged bodies, although their
individual and corporative privileges were greatly curtailed in the
course of the centuries. Abroad the name of * ' Cosack, ' ' associated
with memories of invasion, awakens the ideas of barbarity and
plunder ; at home, the same name, associated with memories of
the unfettered life of the steppe, recalls the ideas of liberty and
equality. "Free as a Cosack" is to the Russian a deeply sig-
nificant saying, for it designates the man who has never borne

* Obligatory military service, mitigated by certain provisions, was
instituted in 1874. The term of service is, since 1888, five years in the
active army and thirteen in the reserve. A man belongs to the "territorial
army " (landwehr) till he is forty-three.

3l8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

either a foreign yoke or the bondage of the ' ' glebe. ' ' Among the
chief Cosack groups, those of the Dniepr and the Don, equahty
reigned as well as libertj'. Both of them — the former under
Polish sovereignty, the latter under the Moscx)vite sceptre — formed
a sort of democratic republic. They elected their own atamhns,^
and, among themselves, knew of neither nobles nor serfs.*

In this respect the extreme south of Russia used to resemble
certain regions of the extreme north, where serfdom and nobility
never quite struck root. lyike the peasants of Arkhangelsk and
Vi^tka, the Cosacks long preserved the forms of an ancient
Russian commonwealth foreign to class distinctions. These free
colonists of the steppe, for long years partly recruited from among
runaway serfs, had cast behind them, in flying from their old
homes, all traces of social hierarchy. The class distinctions
gradually regained ground among them, together with the
administration of modem Russia. Their ofl&cers were ennobled,
and of the old-time equality, as of old-time liberty, little more is
left than a memory.f

' Hetman is the genuine Little-Russian title. AtanUtn is a Great-
Russian corruption, and has somewhat deviated from the original meaning,
inasmuch as it has come to be used especially for " robber-chi&V^ Thus the
renowned Sti^nka R^in, and, under Catherine II., Pugatchdf, were the
atatnitns of their dreaded bands, but could never, by any possibility, be
entitled hetmans, while even Great-Russian historians never would designate
Hetmans Mazeppa or Khmeln^sky as aiamdns.

* The Cosacks of later times, forming the vanguards of Russian power,
have contributed wonderfully to the conquest and colonization of the steppes
of the southeast and certain regions of Asia. Of all modem states, Russia
perhaps has best known how to utilize military colonization. On the old-
time Cosacks of Little- and Great-Russia, the reader might do well to peruse
the book of Prosper M^rim^e, Les Cosaques d'A utre/ois, in reality an epitome
of the researches of Mr. Kostom^of, one of the most eminent of Russian
historians.

t Even serfdom itself stole in amidst the Cosacks at the last, and, at
the moment of emancipation, there were nowhere so few free peasants as on
the territory of the "Army of the Don." As to the administrative and
financial immunities and privileges, they got gpradually curtailed and almost
annihilated by the constant encroachments of centralization, as well as by
the progress of commerce and means of communication. Thus it is that the

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 319

Among the accessory classes placed outside or, it might be
said, in the gaps between the normal classes, one only deserves
special mention ; it is the class the members of which bear the
quaint name of odnodvbrtsy (jSii^Qxiva^ literally "one-yarders").
They are men who own only one house and yard, and one lot of
land. They are freemen who, unlike the peasants, owned the
land they worked, in full property, individual and hereditary.
In this respect they stand nearer to the nobles, while, by their
bringing up and pecuniary circumstances, and by the fact that
they were subject to poll-tax and conscription equally with the low-
est classes of the nation, they might rather be counted with the
peasantry. This class, intermediate between the two main orders
of the state, numbered somewhere between two or three million
souls of both sexes. Some of them have achieved a degree of
prosperity unusual with the peasant, while others have sunk to
the level of the poorest mujik. I,ike the Cosacks, these people
might be regarded as representatives of another age of Russian
society. Their origin is somewhat obscure ; their ranks appear
to have been filled from several different classes. They them-
selves consider themselves, sometimes rightly no doubt, as nobles
fallen into penury and stripped of their privileges. The greater
part appear to be descended from soldiers, formerly settled along
Moscovia's southern border, and, in acknowledgment of their
services, provided for by gifts of land exempt from taxes for a
long time ahead. These warlike husbandmen formed, in front of
the Tatars, a line of observation and defence which, shifting
slowly southward, gradually strayed down into the steppes. To
this day it is in the Governments of Vor6nej, Kursk, Ori61, in the
provinces confining on Moscovia of old, that these " one-yarders "
are met with in greatest numbers. Whatever their origin, they
are, outside the nobility, almost the only representatives of free land
interest, as known in Europe ; by right of this, they form an in-

individuality, as well as the Self-government, of the Cosacks is steadily
disappearing.

320 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

termediate link between the former serf and landlord, and may,
some day, contribute to endow Russia with one of the things she
is most lacking in — a rural middle class.

Most of the classes into which the Russian population was di-
vided were of their nature so peculiar to Russia, to her social state,
that one hardly sees where alien populations were to come in, with-
out increasing the number of special subdivisions. Accordingly,
in order to do no violence to local customs, not to infringe the
recognized rights of the conquered countries, the Russian govem-
• ment, at each new annexion, be it in Europe or Asia, found itself
compelled to create for its new subjects new rolls, new rubrics.
Each region, each race, each form of worship even, in the act
of being embodied in the empire, gave rise to special divisions,
social categories, each with its own rights and obligations. The
diversity of the nationalities that inhabit Russia is one of those
things which, even in Europe, delay the fusion and legal imifica-
tion of all the peoples scattered over Russian land. The nomadic
tribes, like the Samoy^ds and Kalmyks, are naturally not included
in the four main classes. The Tatars, the Bashkir and all the
Mahometan population, still occupy in the cities or rural districts
a special position. The same applies in some ways to the free
agriculturists of Bessarabia, the burghers of what was once Poland
and of the Baltic provinces, to the German and Greek colonists in
the interior, lastly to the Jews of the western provinces. If they
do not form, as they did in the Polish Commonwealth, a fifth
order in the state, and a veritable caste, the Israelites, even after
the last reforms, are still subject, as to place of residence, property,
and elective functions, to certain restrictions which keep them in
the condition of a special -category in the midst of the very classes
of which they are members. This inferior position in which they
are held has probably much to do with the part taken by many
Jews in the political crimes of the last years. The supineness
with which the government acts in the matter of protecting them
against popular outbreaks, and the severe measures against them

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 32 1

urged from time to time by the patriots of Moscow and Kief, are
not the things to inspire them with love or respect for the laws of
the empire.

Such is, in its archaic complexity, the social structure of
Russia. Under the law, or from custom, it is still, in a great
measure, a country of classes, though not of castes. This char-
acter some contend she must preserve, under penalty of becoming
another China, sacred to the " mandarinate. " The reforms of
Alexander II. tended to a change in this respect, but some laws
of Alexander III. seem rather to favor a retrograde tendency.
The barriers which the father had lowered the son seems inclined
to build up again.

BOOK V. CHAPTER II.

Disproportion between the Urban and Rural Populations — Relatively Small
Number of Towns and Cities in Russia and all Slavic Countries —
Explanation of this Phenomenon — Reasons which Hinder the Agglom-
eration of the Population — The Towns and their Inhabitants before
Peter the Great — Efforts of Peter and Catherine to Create a Middle Class.

The first thing that strikes one about the distribution of the
classes of the Russian population is the proportion — or rather
the disproportion — in their numerical force, and especially between
the population of cities and that of the cotmtry. This latter
rubric alone comprises the vast majority of Russian subjects. In
European Russia, not including the Kingdom of Poland, the
Grand Duchy of Finland, and the Caucasus, the latest census
(1867) gave for the "rural class," comprising the Cosacks, the
figure of about 55,000,000; for the "urban classes" proper —
tradesmen, merchants, mechanics, townspeople, — less than
6,000,000. The nobility and clergy are omitted in this valuation,
the former numbering from 800,000 to 900,000 souls, the latter
about 600,000. The clergy mostly live in the country, while the
nobility are divided about evenly between town and cotmtry.
Notwithstanding the fact that the urban population has been
increasing rapidly for the last twenty years, the peasantry — "the
nirals " — still represent an immense majority. This is a notable
fact, of vital importance to the social, economic, and political
status of Russia.

The disproportion between the two chief elements of the popu-
lation becomes more conspicuous if we realize what goes by the
name of town in Russian statistics. It is not only by their
scarcity, their dispersion over a vast territory, that Russian towns

32a

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 323

diflfer from those of Western Europe. With their wooden houses,
low and far between, with their preposterously wide streets,
for which only the fear of fire accounts, streets usually unpaved,
where, as on country roads, snow, mud, and dirt alternate, these
towns are lacking in what constitutes the first characteristics of
cities in Western eyes. Instead of standing their houses closely
side by side, instead of heaping tier on tier up to the sky, like the
old cities of France, Italy, and Germany, and thus forming a
little world entirely distinct from the country, brimming with
only men and men's works, the Russian towns stretch and sprawl
out into the fields into which they merge, leaving between the
houses and the public buildings acres of waste land that can
never be filled or enlivened. To the traveller arriving from
Europe they appear as something huge, desert, unfinished ; they
often seem to be their own suburbs, and the foreigner expects to
enter the city when he is just leaving it behind him. . To him
they are so many overgrown villages, and, in fact, there is less
difference here than anywhere else, between village and town, as
regards the manner of building and of living. All Russia was,
for centuries, nothing but one village of a great many square
miles. During the whole Moscovite period of her existence, there
was in reality only one city — the capital, the "throne city" or
residence of the sovereign, and even that was nothing but a huge
borough built in wood, scattered around a stone stronghold. It
is only since the fire of 181 2 and the subsequent reconstruction,
since stone, or — more correctly — brick caused wooden buildings
to be reserved for the suburbs and allowed the houses to rise
higher and draw closer together, that Moscow has really assumed
the appearance of a great city. The capitals of governments,
gradually reconstructed on the model of the rejuvenated old
empire capital, are, as a rule, the only cities deserving of the name
in a foreigner's eyes.*

*Ten years ago Russia, apart from Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland,
owned only four cities having 100,000 inhabitants : St. Petersburgh, Moscow,

324 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

In comparing the areas, we find that in European Russia the
cities— even if we award the title to a crowd of boroughs three
quarters rural — are ten, fifteen, twenty times farther apart than in
Western Europe. This is a most striking contrast, and not with-
out influence on all the relations of life. In Russia, the cities are
like islets scattered at great intervals over a rural ocean, while in
the West they press against one another like the islands of a
group : the difference between the Pacific and the ^gean Seas.

The contrast is not less great as regards population. In
France, in Germany, in Belgium, in England, the towns and cities
contain one third, even one half or more, of the entire population ;
in Russia, scarcely more than a ninth, and even of that number
a good many hardly come under the head of townspeople. It is
kept fluctuating by the peasants, who are only temporary residents,
on business, or in pursuit of winter earnings, their great and only
resource during the months of forced inaction in the country.
The little importance, the insignificancy of the towns in Russia,
for which even building materials seem to be wanting, is one of
the historical characteristics of old Moscovia, of what Solovi6f
calls "Wooden Europe" ; and so it is, in due proportion, of
modem Russia, especially Great-Russia, The two main elements
of the population stand towards each other in a very different pro-
portion firom what we see in most coimtries of Europe and America.
What contrasts in manners and customs, ideas, aspirations, what
differences in the whole drift of the two civilizations are implied by
this one fact ! By the light of its statistics, the vast Empire of the
North, in spite of its rapid and imceasing progress, looms before
us as a rural state, an empire of peasants ! ' Russia and the United

Odessa, and Riga, the latter, however, far more German than Russian.
Even at the present time there are scarcely ten cities that reach this figure :
the four just mentioned, Kief, Khirkof, Sardtof, Elazdn, Vilna, perhaps
Lodzy, the Polish Manchester, perhaps Berditchdf, the great Jewish mart in
the West, and possibly Kishinidf, the huge, half Rumanian village-capital
of Bessarabia.

' What a magnificent vista this opens in the future, when freedom will
have become habit, and the normal increase of population will have raised the

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 325

States of America, which, as regards extent of territory and distri-
bution of the population, offer so many points of comparison,
stand in this respect in the most perfect opposition, represent the
two poles of modem civilization. It is to be observed, however,
that even in Russia, amidst the regions which can show the rela-
tively largest urban population, figure Ukraina, New Russia, and
most of the lately peopled tracts. Which goes to show that modem
colonization, there as ever3rwhere, proceeds first of all to create cities.
The same phenomenon, the same disproportion between town
and country, is observable, in various degrees, in most Slavic
peoples — the Slavs of the West as well as of the East and South.
This is, one may say, one of the principal signs, at the same time
as one of the principal causes, of the historical inferiority of the
Slavic nations." At the first glance the Slavs of the West — the
Tchekhs and Poles — appear to differ in this respect as in so many
others, from their Slav brethren, and to lean more towards the
Western Europeans. The Kingdom of Poland especially is, in this
respect, singularly unlike the empire to which it is annexed. The
urban and the rural population there stand to each other in much
the same relation as they do in the wealthiest countries of Teutono-
I^atin Europe, i. e. , as one to three ; about two millions in the cities,
nigh on six in the country. Unfortimately this resemblance is
delusive. The population of these Polish towns is made up in
great part of Jews and Germans, and but too firequently remains a
stranger to the Slav people in the midst of which it lives, in spirit
and interests as well as in origin. Founded mostly by German
colonists, and all more or less peopled with Jews talking a German
jargon, these towns, as a rule, were governed according to the

average of education to that of American farmerdom : acultured.land-owning,
self-governing peasantry ! Wh}-, it 's the ideal, and another affinity between
Russia and America, far rather than polar opposition. (See a few lines lower.)
' The Western mind never can quite divest itself of the feudal point of
view. Centralization is the universal bane bred and bequeathed by
feudalism. There was no need of hiding behind city walls from a brigand
nobility, where no such nobility, born of alien conquest, existed, where all
the classes, high and low, were of one race and blood.

326 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

old Magdeburg code, and remained isolated in the midst of a
commonwealth composed of nobles, confined within their narrow
enclosures, hedged in by their privileges, with no place in the
constitution, no part to play in the state, without influence on the
civilization and politics of the country, for which this lack of a
national middle class was not one of the least causes of ruin. In
ancient Poland the towns were like so many half foreign colonies
in the midst of the people, or, in the picturesque words of a
German journalist, " like drops of oil on a pond." In the whole
of Western Russia, in Lithuania, White Russia, and those parts of
lyittle Russia which once were annexed to Poland, the situation is
still about the same as in Poland proper. The Jews, crowded in
the towns and boroughs, are there also one of the main elements of
the urban population, and no fusion between them and the other
inhabitants has ever taken place.

In Russia proper, on the contrary, the towns were genuine
growths of the national soil ; but they were few, scattered, shabby ;
with no institutions or life of their own, they hardly emerged out
of the immense rural ocean. Under another form the evil was the
same ; the spirit of progress, of investigation, and liberty was
wanting. There were no towns or boroughs in old-time Russia,
hence no burghers, no town-class. N6vgorod and Pskof, both not
distant from the Baltic, both in contact with the merchant asso-
ciation of the Hansa, were a glorious but barren exception. Mos-
covia, which swallowed them up, was an essentially rural country ;
hence in great part, among the Russians as among other Slavs,
the persistence, so often remarked on, of the patriarchal or family
spirit. In this state of peasants and landlords, the manners, insti-
tutions, all the social relations, have long preserved something
simple, primitive, and as though rudimentary.*

*As the historian, Mr. Zabi^lin, observes {History of Russian Life
from the Oldest Times), these patriarchal forms, the persistence of which
amidst the Slavs has so oflen been pointed out, really spring from the
predominance of home life in the absence of public life. As this fact can
be traced mainly to the scarcity and insignificance of urban centres, it is not

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 327

The want of towns had another serious consequence ; it
implied the want of the first economic element of modem civiliza-
tion, liquid wealth — personal efiects, circulating capital, — an essen-
tial principle of all great material development, of all fruitful
social activity.

Is the character of the Russian people, are the supposed
nomadic tastes of the Slavic race, responsible for this long absence
and persistent scarcity of towns ? By no means. We must look
for the reason elsewhere. It lies in the economic habits, in serf-
dom, partly also in the soil, the climate, the very formation of the
land. The Russian market has, so far, no demands capable of
keeping at par the productions of a numerous urban population.
The trades or professions, the crafts of all sorts, which generally
have their seat in towns and cities, are as yet but little developed,
or still remain scattered in the villages. The serf-owners of old
found it convenient to have everything they needed manufactured
on their own estates, articles of luxury alone excepted, and those
they imported from abroad. The severe climate, the huge dis-
tances, have a similar action. In the north especially, the poverty
of the soil, the long, enforced idleness of the winter time, with its
endless nights, compel the peasant to seek means of existence in
other things than the tilling of the ground. Hence it is that this
immense rural population is far from being occupied exclusively
with agriculture. Rural and industrial life are less separated, less
specialized than in the West. Articles which, in other countries,
were manufactured in workshops or city factories, by essentially
urban operatives, were most of the time turned out in villages in
the mujik's cabin.*

to be wondered at that the same historian should admit cities to be the first
nucleus of civil society and the first agent for organizing the Russian state.
Owing to the lack of vigor and the small number of these hearths of civil
life, the private relations between men must necessarily, for a long time to
come, retain a greater importance in Russia than in the Western states.

*This in part accounts for the greater intelligence of the Russian " com-
mon people. ' ' Nothing is so deadening to mind as excessive division of labor.

328 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Thus the towns had against them the social status, which
formerly bound the peasant to the glebe, and to this day binds
him to his commune ; they had against them the few wants and
scant wealth of the masses, and even the rigor of the climate, even
the people's own best qualities. The easy imitativeness, the skill
and deftness of hand, natural to the Russian, discouraged urban
agglomerations by doing away with the need of permanent pro-
fessions, of sedentary trades, of specialties. The peasant, being
amply capable of manufacturing for himself all that his humble
needs require, has rarely occasion for the services of townspeople or
the products of town life. The town is thus reduced to being little
more than an administrative centre and a place of barter — a mart,
lively enough and even crowded at fair times, empty and dreary
during the greater part of the year. Many of these towns are
only artificial creations, bom at the beck of the sovereign hand,
and, were it withdrawn from them, would fall back into rural
nothingness.*

This mode of formation of urban centres accounts for the fact
that, in Russia, town and country differ generally so little, while
sometimes they differ very greatly. While most district towns
look to us like pretentious villages, the large cities, especially the
two capitals, seem colonies of another nation or another civiliza-
tion. There you find all the luxury, all the pleasures, all the
arts of the West ; life seems altogether European, while in the
provinces it seems Moscovite, half Oriental still. The contrast is
thrilling ; yet it is all external, on the siurface : appearances differ,
man is the same. Setting aside a highest class, trained to foreign
discipline, the bulk of the city people, by tastes and bringing up,
by intellect and custom, is very near still to the rural population.
In these cities, frequently built all in a lump and already populous,

* The introduction of machinery, of steam, and the improvement of
means of communication, tend to change this state of things by encouraging
factory industry on a large scale to the detriment of the lowly village
industries. This revolution, which is going on in Russia as everywhere
else, must naturally benefit the urban centres.

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 329

the peasants reside in great numbers, and manners are half rural
still. There is no bourgeoisie, in the French acception of the
word, nor an urban plebs comparable to the working population
of large French cities and their suburbs.

Old-time Moscovia made little difference between town and
countr}', — townsman and husbandman, — of which modem Russia
has made two separate classes. To foreign travellers the condition
of the one appeared to differ very little from that of the other. The
Englishman Fletcher, Queen Elizabeth's envoy at the court of the
son of Ivan the Terrible, looked on the tradesman and craftsman
as part of the lowest class, to which he gives the humiliating
designation of mujiks.'^ Not until the seventeenth century are
the towns habitually treated by the administration as something
separate from the country. Only at this epoch, when serfdom
was established, did the urban populations begin to be regarded
as a separate class and the towns as separate communities, based
on a special scheme, t Until then the towns and boroughs and the
peasantry were, on the whole, subject to one and the same law
{^jus) and authority. The condition of the lower classes in the
towns was little more to be envied than that of the rural classes.
The townsman was " attached " to his native town as the husband-
man to his native glebe, for similar reasons too — that the exchequer

* Ivan the Terrible himself, in his letters to Queen Elizabeth, contemptu-
ously refers to the English merchants, come to Russia for trading purposes,
as trading mujiks.*

f All this and what follows naturally does not apply to either N6vgorod
or Pskof, who had maintained their right of self-government, and where, as
in the Republics of Mediaeval Italy, we find the strife between rich and poor,
between '■'' popolo grasso'''' and ^^ popolo minuto.*'

* This fact alone proves that the designation which so shocks Western
delicacy is, to the Russian ear, neither " humiliating" nor " contemptuous."
It was continually used simply in the sense of " man," and is so still by the
people. When a man is admiringly spoken of as "a handsome, portly,
robust mujik,'^ or as "an honest, quiet ntujik,'" those who so describe him
certainly do not mean to disparage him, but use the word mujik exactly in
the way that Englishmen, in like case, would use " fellow" and Germans
Kerl. The peasant woman who speaks of her mujik does not mean any more
disrespect to him than the English laborer's wife in speaking of her " man."

330 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

might not be defrauded by the departure of the tax-payer, and
that the community, being taxed in a lump and mutually respon-
sible, might not have to pay for the absentees. The prohibition
of going from one town or borough to another was enforced by
measures that recall the laws invented for the curiales in the latter
times of the Roman Empire. For such flight or desertion the
Romdnofs, in 1658, established the penalty of death.

Yet there was in the Russian towns a sort of privileged class :
the wealthy merchants, wholesale dealers, especially those who
traded with foreign lands. They were called "guests " {gbsti^^
probably because originally the greater number of them were for-
eigners. There are mentions of these ' ' guests ' ' in the times of the
Varangians. In primitive Russia, where the vast distances and
the internecine wars made commerce at once more precarious and
more profitable, the men who were sufficiently enterprising to
devote themselves to it were surrounded with a respectful consid-
eration, which remained their due even in the midst of the abase-
ment into which the quarrels of the princes and the Tatar domi-
nation plunged the national trade. This name of ghsti, prob-
ably of Teutonic origin,' was awarded by the princes as a title
of honor, and many of them served the kniazes in the capacity of
advisers or ambassadors.* After the gbsti came the merchants
of lower standing and the m&rQ.\oyrtisrx\s.VL--poss'iidskiyi^^ — both of
which classes were divided into sundry categories, each of which

* It must be traced much farther back. It is part of the word-treasure
which primitive Sanskrit bequeathed to all her daughters, among whom Old
Slavic and Old Gothic claim equal rank. The original word meant "cow-
killer," in appropriate, if slightly realistic, allusion to the ponderous
hospitalities of primitive ages.

* It is from these gdsti, in the sense of merchants, that the Russian
equivalent for the Oriental bazar is called gostinoy-dvor.

t From possdd, a " borough" ; the chief magistrate of Ndvgorod was
called Possddnik.*

* The title corresponds to " mayor," but with more power ; rather to the
podgstd. of the Italian Republics. The word posshd is derived from sidiiti,
"to sit, settle " = sedere.

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 33 1

had its own council or Duma,'' invested with the right of
deciding questions arising between its own members.

It was difficult for these merchants and townsmen to develop
into an influential class, in a country cut oflf from Europe and the
sea, and from all the commercial highroads by I^ithuania, the
Teutonic Order, and the Tatars. Ivan IV. the Terrible, the foe
of the old princely and boyar races, strove to raise the people of
towns, especially those of Moscow. But the hand of the tsars
could not implant in Moscovia the liberties it was rooting out in
N5vgorod and Pskof, where they had long flourished. The
absence of feudalism or aristocracy, which at first sight would seem
to favor the development of a town-class, rather proved an obstacle.
The sovereigns had not so much interest in leaning on the cities
for support, and the cities did not find in the dissensions between
the great vassals and the central power opportunities for rising and
obtaining franchises.

Thus, then, when Peter the Great came to the throne, there
was, in spite of some attempts made by his father Alexis, nothing
at all answering to what Europe knows under the name of
bourgeoisie in all these towns, devoid of industry, unprovided
with means of communication, with scarcely any permanent
population.

Such a gap could not but strike the practical Tsar, whose
favorite model was Holland, the most bourgeois co\xa.\ry in Europe.
A middle class, unfortunately, could not be improvised as quickly
as a fleet or army. Peter's special regulations, the administrative
self-government with which he endowed the cities, probably did
not help to create an urban class as much as the reformer's general
activity, the introduction of new industries and new means of
communication, and especially the opening up of Russia to Europe.

■' Zhima, from d^tnati, " to think." It is the name given to all the town-
councils and extended to the buildings in which they are held. The Paris
H6tel-de-Ville and the New York City-Hall would both be translated Diima
in Russian.

332 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Yet the progress was slow. The maladministration of Peter's
successors, the restrictions imposed on the franchises of the towns
and merchants, and, lastly, under Elizabeth, the erection of the
chief branches of commerce into monopolies, to be granted to court
favorites, delayed the birth of a middle class over half a century.
Catherine II., in this as in everything, took up and carried on
Peter's work. She wished to constitute at the same time a nobility
and a bourgeoisie, both which things Russia equally lacked.* It
was Catherine who divided the inhabitants of towns and cities
into the different groups which still exist. Merchants, trades-
men, small burghers, mechanics, received from her a corporative
organization. Each of these groups had elective * ' heads, ' ' and
all were united into municipal corporations, to which was restored
the right of doing justice and of internal administration or
self-government.

In organizing the urban class, both Peter and Catherine nat-
urally imitated the contemporary institutions of Western Europe,
especially those of Teutonic countries — England and Germany,
Holland and Sweden. Hence, partly, the faultiness and failure
of a work, mistakenly copied from foreign models already in the
stage of decay. Just when they were on the point of disappearing
from the more enlightened Western states, the craft corporations
and the merchant guilds were introduced into Russia. Whatever
its merits and demerits, this corporative organization, which sits
so easy on the German, does not fit the Russian at all. He has,
according to a very just remark of Haxthausen, the spirit of asso-
ciation, not that of corporation, and they are two very diflFerent
things. He has a national form of association, the ari^l, of which

* In this respect, as in several others, some of Catherine's advisers
sometimes commended singular devices or gave way to strange delusions.
Nicolas Turgu^nief {La Russie et les Russes, v. ii., p. 221) tells how one of
the most prominent men of this grand reign took, a great and active part in
the foundation, in both capitals, of gigantic foundling houses, because he
flattered himself that he was thereby preparing the creation of a third
estate !

SOCIAL HIERARCHY: TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 333

all the members have equal rights and work for the common good,
under chiefs freely elected by their peers. He does not care for
closed corporations, bristling with privileges and monopolies,
hierarchically subdivided into unequal ranks or grades, like the
craft-corporations of old in Western Europe, with their " masters, "
"companions," and "apprentices." The corporative spirit was
only a form of the feudal spirit, which had introduced into the
world of labor the same principle of privilege and vassalage that
prevailed in the nobility and the tenure of property, and therefore
is nowhere to be found in old-time Moscovia, nor could it obtain
in modem Russia. Vainly Catherine II. strove to combine the
mechanics into crafts or tsekhs — the word being taken bodily
from the German Zeche — they remained lifeless registers, to serve
little else than the uses of police registering, and wherever the
unwieldy things with their superannuated pomp and circumstance
still survive, we cannot see that either the mechanic or national
industry has derived much profit from them.*

* On this point, as on so many others, there is, in the laws and adminis-
tration, a lack of unity and precision, which too often hreeds confusion and
arbitrariness. The law does not define the crafts that must be made into
corporations ; accordingly such or such a trade is free in certain cities, while
in others it is bound by licenses, which are delivered by a board of experts
on the applicant's passing an examination.

BOOK V. CHAPTER III.

Classification of the Urban Popnlation since Catherine II. — The Mechanic
and the MUsh-tchanln or "Small Burgher" — Urban Proletariate — How
this Class has, as a Rule, Preserved the same Spirit as the Rural Popula-
tion— The Merchant Guilds and their Privileges — How Emancipation
has Made it Possible for them to Own Real Estate — The " Honorary
Citizens " or " Notables " among the Townspeople — Russia, till very
Lately, Had none of the Professions out of which the Western Bour-
geoisie Used to be Recruited — In how far the Reforms Help Create a
Middle Class in the European Sense.

The town population, ever since Peter I. and Catherine II.,
has been classed under five or six rubrics, themselves divided into
two main categories: the wholesale traders, forming a superior
class, which was long a privileged one ; and the retail traders, the
mechanics of all sorts, subdivided into several categories, differing
only in name. There are the poorer townspeople, — the mechan-
ics,— ^the members of trade corporations, and lastly the ' ' miscel-
lany," a sort of town-rabble, containing all those who do not fit
into any partictdar class. Of these categories, the first is the
most important, and can be regarded as the type of the entire
lower class of the urban population. Its name, miesh-tchanln^
is usually translated in French bourgeois, yet the man thus
designated answers little enough to the French term. The miish-
tchariin * is a person who dwells in towns and who, being neither
noble nor priest, is not rich enough to inscribe his name on the
roll of the merchants, yet does not belong to a trade corporation.
He usually gets his livelihood ixova. some «mall business or some

* Miish-tchanin, plural miish-tch&nii, from tni^sto, "a place," which
gives the diminutive miis-tiitch-ko, " a borough, a small town."

334

SOCIAL HIERARCHY ■ TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 335

manual trade. Many have no assured means of existence. Their
business or real property is, or was until lately, subject to limita-
tions : they could not do business beyond a certain figure, or own
real estate worth more than five or six thousand roubles. If they
passed that line, they had to register as merchants. Although
legally a townsman, indeed, the typical townsman, the miSsh-
tchanln is frequently compelled to migrate to the country to seek
a living. In some governments there is quite a number of them
settled in villages, while the peasant, to whom the working of the
soil does not always yield permanent occupation or sufl&cient
returns, often crowds the cities, where he has appropriated the
monopoly of sundry crafts. In St. Petersburgh alone there live
over two hundred thousand peasants.* The two classes fre-
quently exchange residences, now opening a competition in man-
ual labor and retail trade on the smallest scale, in the factories or
at the fairs ; now again keeping each to its own favorite pursuits,
the townsman carrying into the country city ways and crafts, the
peasant bringing to town his pair of arms, his axe, his horse, both
taking many risks, often more to the prejudice of the townsman
than the countryman.

This class of miish-tchdnii and the kindred groups of mechanics
form the large majority of the town populations. It is perhaps
the portion of the Russian people least favored by fortune. The
peasant is given his cabin and small enclosed house-lot by the
Emancipation Act ; he also has his share of the commons — the
communal land. Very different is the condition of the miish-
tchariin. He lives, like the working population of Western
Europe, from hand to mouth. The law has no guarantee for him,
the commune is usually unable to supply him with any certain
share of land or work. If a few do achieve a competence, or even
wealth, the greater part lead a precarious existence. Perhaps one
tenth of them own houses in the towns. The rest hire lodgings.

* According to some statistical reports, the peasants would average 20
per cent, of the urban population.

336 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSA/tS AND THE XUSSJANS.

Those who go to seek a living in villages are not entitled to a
share in the communal good things. Some, now and then, elect
to become peasants : they have to obtain admittance into the rural
commune, and pay cash down for a right to the land to which the
peasant is entitled by birth.

Until very lately it was these two alone — the poor townsman
and the mechanic — who, along with the peasant, bore the two
heaviest burdens of the state : the poll-tax or capitation, and the
blood-tax or military conscription. Alexander II. lightened the
latter burden, by imposing it equally on all classes. Alexander
III. freed them from capitation in 1883. The law has given to
the townspeople equality in btu"dens and rights ; it cannot go
further and give them real property, as to the husbandman. The
Russians, disposing of vast communal lands, boast that they have
no proletarians, and bend a scornful gaze on the dangers with
which this social plague threatens the West. In reality, however,
Russia already has an urban proletariate, always the most trouble-
some, in some nations — in France at any rate — the most riotous,
the only one to be dreaded. There are certain social troubles
which no country, be it never so new and bold, so vast and rich
in land, seems fated to be exempted from ; of this number are
urban proletariate and the wages question in cities. If the Rus-
sian proletariate is not more numerous, the reason is that the
cities themselves are relatively neither many nor populous. The
progress of industry and civilization, the very increase of the
population will necessarily have their usual effect — of increasing
the proletariate by enlarging the towns. This class has already
received from the emancipation an important reinforcement : it
has become the refuge of several categories of former serfs,
especially the so-called ' ' court-people, ' ' i. e. the house-serfis.
These people, who, by virtue of their attendance on their
masters' persons, had been estranged from the village commune
through generations, were not in a condition, on finding them-
selves free, to vindicate their share of the communal land. Freed

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 337

from the control of their masters, they must live by their labor,
owning no right to the land they tread or the house they live in,
with no other inheritance to hand down to their children than the
light hoard of their slender savings. No ; Russia has not yet
found, any more than any other country, the secret of securing to
each man a permanent dwelling, to each family an hereditary
homestead, to place the ever increasing swarms of human units
above the reach of vice or improvidence.

As to their mode of life, these miish-tchdnii ?xA mechanics come
very near to the least favored classes of the western cities of
Europe. They differ from them, however, in an important point :
the absence of class spirit, of " city feeling," so to speak. They
have not, like the corresponding classes in the rest of Europe, the
spirit of opposition against both the upper bourgeoisie and the
rural population. In ideas, beliefs, and feeling, as well as in garb
and manners, they differ very little as yet from the latter. Re-
ligion, which, in Russia, stjll is one of the great social forces, still
holds under control those urban masses which, in the rest of
Europe, it appears to have irretrievably lost, be its name Catholi-
cism or Protestantism. Thus it is that the Russian people are
pervaded at bottom by a unity, a harmony of feeling which de-
serves the more to be noticed that it is getting so rare elsewhere,
and that, even where it still prevails, time will inevitably weaken it.
This moral condition of the urban working classes accounts for
the failure of the nihilistic propaganda to influence it. Sundry
tokens, however, warrant the fear that the Russian working^en
may not always remain deaf to revolutionary incitements. Wage
questions and strikes may yet do their wonted evil work.

In this state of things Russia has, for a more or less prolonged
period, a principle of strength and stability which all the other
nations of the European continent lack. She is less exposed to
those struggles for influence between town and country from
which the West has suffered so much and which, by causing per-
petual disturbances and reactions, hinder any kind of progress,

33^ THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

and is exempt for a while longer from those intermittent collisions
between the sceptical and at the same time utopistic spirit of the
dty working^an and the coarsely conservative and blindly posi-
tive spirit of the peasant.

Russian legislation separates the inhabitants of cities into two
accurately defined groups : the mechanics or townspeople who
have not risen above the foot of the social ladder, and those towns-
men who have swung themselves up to the higher nings. The
latter are usually designated as "merchants" {kuptsy). This
title is legally awarded only to such as own a certain capital and
pay certain license-dues. The merchants, long in possession of
important privileges, never could constitute themselves into a
closed class : the poor townsman, the peasant, the nobleman even
who devotes himself to commerce, can have his name inscribed on
their roll ; it is a question of means. These " merchants " again
are subdivided into several categories, known under the foreign
name of "guilds," introduced by Peter the Great. There are
three of them, which for a long time enjoyed very diflferent pre-
rogatives, but at the present day have identical civil rights. The
distinction between the guilds is based only on the figure of the
capital declared and the proportionate dues they pay the State for
their license. The members of the first guild have the freedom of
trading through the entire extent of the empire, as well as abroad ;
they pay five hundred roubles a year. The members of the second
are limited to home trade. The guilds have in every city their
boards and elective ' ' heads ' ' or syndics. The merchants, how-
ever, rise or descend from one to another, as their fortune grows or
decreases, and if business is ver>' bad they are always in danger
of falling down into the lowest urban class, the mihh-tchdnii.

The merchants of the two first guilds belong, or rather be-
longed, to the privileged classes. The emperors had granted
them all the personal rights which the nobility enjoyed : exemp-
tion from the poll-tax, from military conscription, from corporal

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 339

punishment. In a country like Russia, nothing more could be
done for the encouragement of trade and bourgeoisie. The
merchants were free to acquire wealth, free to enjoy it. One
thing only was reftised them, and this restriction itself well could
pass, in the lawgiver's eyes, for a stimulus to trade. Merchants,
as all persons not belonging to the nobility, were forbidden to own
"inhabited lands," which means that they could not hold serfs.
This virtually excluded them from owning rural property and
limited them to houses in the towns and cities, and country houses
in the suburbs or environs. This lessened the temptation to with-
draw from commerce the capital that had been launched into it.

This prohibition had a surer and less beneficial efiect : it kept
apart commerce and agriculture, by maintaining a chasm between
the merchant or manufacturer and both the noble landowner and
the husbandman. While serfdom made the formation of a middle
class in the country almost impossible, the monopoly held by the
nobility prevented the middle class slowly forming in the cities
from spreading over the country. The merchants were as good as
prisoners in the towns, tied down to business. Now that the
abolition of serfdom has, ipso facto, done away with the distinction
between "inhabited" and "non-inhabited" real estate, rural
property has become free to all classes. By this indirect conse-
quence emancipation closely touches the middle class, and this
fact alone amounts to a social revolution of deep bearing on the
future of Russia.

The merchants of the first guild were possessed of nearly all
the nobility's personal privileges ; the wealthier ones nevertheless
strove to get out of their condition. They coveted, for themselves
or their children, the shadow of which the substance was theirs,
and many took a road which led to it rapidly : state service.
This was another cause of enfeeblement to the middle class, which
seemed to grow and thrive only to benefit another class, which, in
its turn, felt this accession as rather an encumbrance. Yet it
would be unfair to see mere puerile vanity in this chase after

340 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

such functions and decorations as conferred nobility. For if the
merchant enjoyed all the substantially useful privileges of the
nobility, his tenure of them was entirely dependent on his name
being inscribed in the guild roll. One stroke of ill luck could
take them from him and lower him to the level of the miisk-
ichanln, subject to capitation, conscription, and corporal punish-
ment. Hereditary nobility and state service could alone protect
a family from such a fall.

To remedy the precarious position so galling to the merchants,
the Emperor Nicolas created a new category for them, which,
while straitening the road to nobility, secured to them the advan-
tages they were striving for. This new rung of the Russian
social ladder has name, " honorary citizen," nearly answering the
"town-notable" of old. These "notables" enjoy the same
privileges as the merchants of the first g^ld without being bound
to be inscribed on the guild rolls. It was in reality a new variety
of nobility, a sort of burgher-nobility conferred by the sovereign
or by letters-patent from the Senate as a reward for certain ser-
vices and the performance of certain functions. As the nobility
proper, this one was divided into two categories. There was
the " personal " and the " hereditary " " honorary citizen," the
latter transmitting to his posterity his qualities and exemptions.
This rubric still exists, but has become a merely nominal distinc-
tion, the main exemptions attached to it having been extended to
all the inhabitants of cities. The abrogation of capitation and
corporal punishment on one side and the institution of universal
obhgatory military service on the other have left but little value
to all these distinctions. Town notables and merchants can
scarcely retain many privileges when so few are left to the
nobility.

Nowadays it is education, manners, the degree of culture,which
keep the different classes of society separate. The habits of life
raise between them barriers which the law is powerless to pull
down. In this respect, the distinctions are more marked than even

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 34I

in Western Europe. From the uneven manner in which civilization
entered the various layers of society, it could not be otherwise.
The nobility, which has long had the monopoly of European in-
struction, continues to live apart from the merchants and a middle
class whom wealth has not yet lifted over the threshold of culture.
Thus, in large cities, there always are two clubs : one for the
nobility, the other for the merchants. The two classes, socially,
form two separate towns, which mix very little in private life,
differing even in their mode of life. There are, however, signs of
a change in the near future. The nobility and the bourgeoisie
now meet not only in pubhc assemblies to deliberate on the affairs
of town or province, but begin to draw nearer together by man-
ners, tastes, and culture, the one becoming more national, the
other more European.

Some years back, a Russian merchant usually was a man with
a long beard, in a long-skirted kaftan, and high leather boots ; he
remained as faithful as the peasant himself to Moscovite traditions
and the national garb. Nowadays there is the old-time merchant,
strict guardian of old customs ; sometimes owner of a large for-
tune, yet not the less attached to the old mode of life ; orthodox
or dissenter (raskhhiik), like the common people, the peasant or
small townsman, from whom he really differs only by his wealth ;
a faithful observer of fasts and holidays, combining to a singular
degree superstition and slyness, plain living and vastness of
commercial operations. Then there is the modem merchant,
often the son or grandson of the other, with clean-shaved chin,
anxious to give up ancestral customs and to imitate the nobility
and assume French fashions. The number of such naturally in-
creases daily ; they have palatial houses, drawing-rooms furnished
luxuriously if not always tastefully, and all the comforts of the
West. Their sons learn French and travel abroad ; many already
lead in Paris an existence as worldly, as dissipated as the young
nobles, and many contrive, after coming home, to get themselves
admitted into the drawing-rooms of the nobility.

342 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Between these two types there is an intermediate one, which
marks the transition from one to the other and frequently com-
bines the pretensions and foibles of both ; it is the tradesman who
has made money, in love with modem luxury, yet unable to get
used to it, surrounding himself with furniture and bric-a-brac
the use of which is a puzzle to him, always ill-at-ease in his own
house, in his own clothes. Be it love of luxury or the tradesman's
calculating instinct and the wish thus to strengthen his credit, the
merchant of this kind often develops a taste for show and gor-
geousness seldom to be met with in other classes, even though the
whole country has a leaning that way. There are provincial
merchant-nabobs who have splendid apartments where they do not
live, sumptuous drawing-rooms which are opened only to strangers,
plate and china which they don't use, richly appointed beds to
which they prefer rugs and divans, after the old Russian fashion.

There is nothing in the Russian "guilds" that recalls the
"third estate" of Western Europe, with its stirring spirit, its
varied information, its pushing, ambition. ' There is scarcely yet
the least stir of political or intellectual leaven to be felt. Until
these latter years, science and literature owed nearly nothing to
the middle class.* As the name itself {kuptsy) indicates, there
has been in Russia until now only a counting-house middle
class, representing trade and industry, swayed by an exclusively
mercantile, conservative, and routine-ridden spirit. Most of the
professions commonly called "liberal" were almost as much
wanting in the Russia of Peter I. and Catherine II. as in the
Moscovia of the Ivans and Vassilis. No lawyers, no physicians,

' Because Russian society is not based on feudalism. We never can
have a "third estate " like that of Western Europe, because there it was
the embodiment of a continuous protest and struggle against feudal arro-
gance and oppression. In Russia there is nothing for it to protest against.

*The only two exceptions are, in the first half of the present century,
the provincial poets, Koltsdf and Nikitin, twins in gifts, inspiration, and
origin ; one a tradesman in a small way, the other a mere fniish4chan\n of
the poorest class. Some writers and scientists risen from that class might
be quoted at the present time.

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 343

no engineers, no writers, no professors, not even notaries or attor-
neys ; — nothing but clerks and scriveners, uneducated, and as
unlike as possible, as to personal dignity and social standing, to
their congeners of the West. There could not be many lawyers
in a country where, until 1865, the procedure was secret and writ-
ten, while legislation was a chaos, and justice an object of traffic,
where functions of all orders were performed by the same class of
functionaries, frequently by the same persons, unqualified by pro-
fessional training or the choice of a specialty. The Russia of the
first half of the nineteenth century was, in this respect, behind
the France of the sixteenth.

The reforms of Emperor Alexander II., especially the judicial
reform, will help fill this gap, by creating pursuits and professions
requiring serious intellectual culture and providing for it mani-
fold and honorable openings. The universities and the progress
made in instruction, the railroads and greater rapidity of inter-
course, the widening of commerce and industry work in the same
direction. The result will be a new middle class, liberal, wide-
awake, with varied aptitudes. But this future, truly Russian
middle class will have to be looked for outside of all official rolls.
It is being recruited from all classes, among the sons of merchants
and still more of the nobility. This middle class, which is, sooner
or later, to be the directing class, will grow up outside of all class
distinctions, and will have little trouble in overcoming birth-preju-
dices, because, contrary to appearances, they have never been
very strong in Russia.

The chief outcome of the eighteenth century and the reforms
of Peter and Catherine was the formation of a cultured upper
class, a nobility brought up after the European manner ; one of
the chief outcomes of the nineteenth centtury and the reforms of
Alexander II. will be the creation of a truly European and mod-
em middle class. The progress made in this direction during the
last fifty years is easy to follow. " There is no third estate in Rus-
sia," wrote Madame deStael in the reign of Alexander I. ; " it is

344 "^^^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

a great inconvenience as regards the progress of letters and arts,
. . . but the absence of an intermediate class between the high
and the low makes them love one another the more. The distance
between the two extremes appears greater because there are no
degrees between them, but in reality they are more closely
in touch with each other for not being separated by a middle
class." * These words give matter for much thought. It is true
that the two extreme classes, the noble and the mujik, the lord and
the serf, were in close contact, nothing coming between them ;
but it was only a material contact. There was between them
neither mutual sympathy, nor mutual comprehension, nor moral
bond." Between the people, faithful to the old Moscovite man-
ners, and the nobility, semi-French, the distance was the greater
that there was nothing to bring the ends together. This gap it
is that a new and cultured middle class is to fill, belonging to the
people by their sympathies and interests, to modE^rn civilization
by their bringing up.

" Heaven guard us from such a thing ! " many Russians will
exclaim. For many, whether aristocrats or democrats, are in-
clined to resent the harmless word burjoasia, which they have
borrowed from us and which, in dealing with the West, they
misuse in the strangest manner. Many affect towards it about
the same feelings as the proletarians of otu" large cities. They
cannot show sufficient contempt for our bourgeois society and
civilization, for our bourgeois liberties and rigime. They are
quite proud of having nothing of the sort, they don't care to re-
semble us in this respect.f In their pretensions to social imity

• Dix Annies d'Exil.

* Madame de Stael was right. Her woman's intnition guided her more
surely and showed her the hidden truth of things more clearly than learned
abstractions can do where living souls are in question.

t This aversion against the bourgeoisie is found equally, and for simi-
lar reasons, among the small Slavic nations. True, with most of the latter,
it is accounted for by the fact that the bourgeoisie of their cities consists
mostly of Jews and Germans — a remark which applies in no small measure
to the greater part of wealthy Rtissian cities.

SOCIAL HIERARCHY : TOWNS AND URBAN CLASSES. 345

and homogeneousness, in their systematic antipathy against class
distinctions, they look on the bourgeoisie as on some sort of a
new caste, or an oligarchy hostile to the people, not perceiving
that the fusion of classes must necessarily produce a new, inter-
mediate class, independent of all caste prejudices and alone capa-
ble of realizing that moral unity of a nation which they have so
much at heart ; that this alone can put an end to the social dual-
ism, the moral schism which, ever since Peter the Great, has been
one of Russia's principal diseases and which survives the abolition
of privileges and the progress of equality. Then only this nation,
once divided against itself and even now cut into two halves,
both powerless through their separation, will be in a position to
give Europe the measure of its genius.

BOOK VI.
NOBILITY AND TCHIN.

CHAPTER I.

/The Nobles and the Peasants, Personifying the Two Rnssias, Appear Like
/ Two Different Nations — By its Origin and Manner of Recruiting, the

\ "BMs&x&nDvoridinstvo Differs from all Corresponding Institutions in West-
» em Europe — Personal and Hereditary Nobility — GreatNumber of the No-
bles— Russian Titles — The Descendants of Rurik and Guedimin — Why
this High-bom Nobility does not Form an Aristocracy — Constitution of
the Russian Family — Equal Division among the Males — Political Con-
sequences of this System — Attempts to Introduce Entails and Primo-
geniture.

The noble and the peasant ; the former landlord and the
former serf. These two men, these two classes, even now em-
body two different Russias : one modem, the European Russia of
Peter and the reforming emperors ; the other old-fashioned, the
Moscovite, semi- Asiatic or semi-Oriental Russia of the old tsars.
/); Between the noble and the peasant serfdom was, up to Alex-
Vander II., a material bond; a moral one it never was. This
/ secular bond once broken, the former landlord and former serf
found themselves almost as closely linked together as they were
before by the soil and the demands of rural life, and nearly as
widely separated by intellect, tendencies, and manners. For the
difference between them lay not merely in the degree of culture ;
it lay in the principle, in the very nature of the civilization.
Therefore it is that now, as well as before emancipation, the dis-

346

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 347

tance betwixt them is so great that they appear .to the foreign
observer to form not so much two classes as two separate nationsl

Of these two men, the mujik and his former master, one is
almost an entire stranger to Europe, the other is almost at home
with her. France, Germany, Italy, have often harbored the
latter as guest ; he cultivates them, as traveller, man of the world,
and pleasure-seeker. Western Europe knows the Russian noble,
and is utterly ignorant of what Russian nobility is. In this
respect the highest order of Russian society is scarcely better
known, better understood of Europe than Russian peasantry ; we
know neither what their functions have been in the past, nor what
part they play in the present, and are therefore not qualified to
augur their future. We do not know what place the nobility
occupies in the nation and in the state, what prerogatives are con-
ceded it by custom and law, what vista the evolution of Russia
opens before it. There is much babbling in Europe of aristocracy
and democracy ; even in France, aroused at last to some curiosity
concerning foreign nations, the latter are often questioned on the
point by parties and schools, which like to bring forward, in the
form of instances more or less faithfully reported, arguments in
favor of this or that thesis, usually settled beforehand. What
lessons can Europe learn from Russia in this matter ? Towards
which side leans that society, in so many ways dissimilar from
the French ? Can it long hold its footing on the declivity down
which all the West gradually slides ? Is there in Russia an aris-
tocratic force capable of becoming one day a political lever, a sup-
port to the throne, and a restraint on the people ? Such questions
may appear premature, but they will naturally occur to minds
uneasy about the ftiture of Europe and civilization.

The Russian nobility {dvorihnstvo) has neither the same origin
nor the same traditions as what is called by that name in Western
Europe. The dvorid,nstvo — "the hereditary cultured class" a
Russian writer with aristocratic tendencies defines it — ^is an insti-
tution special to Russia, unknown to Europe, unique of its kind.

348 7'^^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Two things especially are distinctive of it : in the first place it
never was anything but a tool of the ruling power, being literally
nothing but the men in the service of the state united into a
body ; in the second place it has always been open to all and,
being continually renovated by influx from below, it has been
preserved from any tendency towards exclusiveness, all caste
spirit.

Thus the Russian nobility is admitted by its most serious
paneg^Tists to have no counterpart in Western Europe ; some even
would fain say no antecedent in history. It is only when they
look at their country through foreign glasses and allow them-
selves to be taken in by an entirely external likeness, that certain
Russians forget their national traditions over their European
training and g^ve themselves airs as English lords or German
Herren. If we render the term dvorihnstvo by those of noblesse,
adel, nobility, it is only from lack of equivalents in the lan-
guages as well as in the institutions of the West. The term
which designates officially the highest class in the state at the
same time tells the story of its origfin. The Russian word dvori-
anin means "a man of the court" and might be translated
*' courtier " had not this word taken an entirely diflferent sense.*
It appears that originally the dvorianln was an officer or dignitary
of the Moscovite court, more or less analogous to the chamber-
lains of Western Europe. I^ater on, this term was extended to all
who were in the personal service of the sovereign or, what
amounted to the same, of the state. The dvorihnstvo has kept,
through history, the stamp of its origin ; it is a court nobility, a
serving nobility, which, in our days as of old, can be acquired by
the tchin, i. e. , a g^ven grade or rank in the army or administration.

* Dvorianin, plnral dvoridnii, from dvor, "court," also "yard," with
all the meanings attaching to these words and a few more besides. Thus it
is thaidvdmik, " porter, janitor," and dvordvyii, the " household serfs," are
words derived from the same radical as that designating the national nobility.
May there not be some affinity between the ideas represented as well as
between the words ?

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 349

Russian legislature distinguishes two sorts of nobility : trans-
missible or "hereditary," and "personal," i. <?., not descending
from the father to his children. This exactly renders the peculiar
character of the Russian hierarchy. The dvorihnstvo being only
the servants of the state, it became necessary, when the compli-
cated bureaucracy of the West was introduced in Russia, to draw a
distinction between high oflSces and inferior ones. Hence the crea-
tion of two nobilities for the use of men in public service. To
the subaltern this title of " personal dvorianln " insured the rights
of the freeman, in a country where only the noble or functionary
had any recognized rights. In point of fact he has nothing that
the privileged town classes do not have. His children enter the
rubric of " honorary citizens," i. e., hereditary town notables, and
really enjoy the same rights as their father, whose nobility they
have not inherited. The title therefore is an empty one and its
suppression would make no change in the social hierarchy.

Only hereditary nobility deserves attention as possessing real
value. Like personal nobility, it has for centuries been open to
all. For over a hundred years, all through the eighteenth century
and the first portion of the nineteenth, from Peter the Great to the
close of the reign of Alexander I., hereditary nobility belonged
by right to every army oflScer and every civilian of corresponding
grade ; it was won with the first epaulet, with the grade of en-
sign, which is inferior to that of sub-lieutenant. It is easy to see
what a nobility must have been to which the door was so wide
and the threshold so low. In order to raise its level somewhgt^^-i
Alexander I. in 1822, his brother Nicolas in 1845, and Alexanderl\\
II. in 1854, successively heightened by several degrees the thres- \^
hold ofthe entrance to hereditary nobility. UnderAlexanderII.it """
was open only to colonels or civilians bearing the title of "Actual
State Councillor" (Fourth class). Under Alexander III. the no-
bility has at last succeeded in doing away with ennoblement by
grade and service. Besides the great gate of the tckin, there were
sundry side entrances into hereditary nobility ; certain imperial

350 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

orders used to ennoble ex officio. The monarch still has the
faculty, which he seldom uses, of conferring nobility by his
sovereign pleasure.

The first result of such a system is naturally the great number
of nobles, accompanied by generally straitened circumstances, lack
of education, and the not very high standing of a great many among
them. In European Russia alone, statistics give about 600,000
souls as the figure for hereditary, and not less than 350,000
for personal dvoricinstvo. There is enough to raise an army com-
posed entirely of nobles. The consequence is, nobles are found
everywhere, on all steps of the social ladder, the top of which
should alone be reserved to them. It is there, rather than in
^Toffidal city burgherdom, that the equivalent of the European
bourgeoisie might be looked for. ' ' What is your nobility ? ' ' once
asked one of my fellow-travellers of a justice of the peace at
whose table we sat, on the banks of the Volga. " Our nobility,"
replied the host, "why, they are my guests — we all that are
here." This reply could often be given in Russia and abroad too,
wherever many Russians come together. The nobles are all that
are not peasant, priest, or merchant — tradesman or shopkeeper ;
all the people you meet in society, all those of a certain culture,
in town or country. In this respect one might even still almost
say : " In Russia, the nobility is everybody."

From the obscure background formed by this nobiliary plebs,
naturally stand out a certain number of families, of which some
shine with a lustre that pierces through the gloom of ages, back
to the days of old Moscovia, while others have been more recently
brought into prominence by brilliant services. Such families,
such "houses " there are in Russia as in most countries that have
a past. The Russian language has, to designate them, a word
peculiar to itself ; it calls them collectively * ' the znat ' ' (from
the verb zruLti, " to know "). These are, irrespective of titles or
antiquity of race, the illustrious or renowned families who have
held, down to our days, a high rank in the state or society. In

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 35 1

this highest nobility, or, more correctly, in this topmost social
layer, there are titled families of ancient pedigree or recent extrac-
tion, but there are also untitled families whose nobility and
splendor can be traced to the times of the old tsars. This nobility
will probably be the only one to survive the gradual fading out of
the dvorihnstvo, as the latter has nothing, either in name or form, or
in the country's memory, to keep it permanently distinct from the
mass of the nation.* The bulk of nobles is not set apart by any
external sign, there is nothing to proclaim their quality, they have
no title to show but an inscription in the registers of their province.

There are in Russia several sorts of titles, and something like
a nobiliary hierarchy, but this is an importation from the West, a
recently borrowed thing. To the Moscovites as to the other Slavs,
all these designations of dukes, counts, barons, were unknown,
for the reason that they never had anything like feudalism, no
duchies and counties, vassals of one another and of the central
power. Old Russia knew nothing of all these gradations ;
indeed she did not know much even of hereditary qualifications ;
herein again the Russian dvorihnstvo differed entirely from the
nobility of Western Europe. There was but one exception, and
that confirmed the rule : it was in favor of the collateral branches
of the reigning dynasty.

* Many Russians, when abroad, add to their names the French prefix
de or the German von. There is nothing of the sort in their own language.
Russian names often take the form of a genitive, or rather a nominal adjec-
tive : Davydof from David, Semidnof from Semi6n (Simon) ; but far from
belonging specially to the nobility, such names are met with among the
priests, the merchants, the peasantry. If there is any kind of distinction in
this matter, it lies not in the family names, but in the desinence vitch
(feminine, vna), which the Russians add to their father's given name, which
they then use as a patronymic : Alexander Petrdvitch, Alexandra Petrovna.
In old-time Moscovia this now almost universal desinence was used only by
persons of some standing. Only one merchant family, which formed in
itself a sort of privileged class, the Str6gonofs (now counts), were entitled to
it. To this day the desinence <?/" instead of dvitch is used in this way for the
lower classes : you say Ivan Petrdf, Alexis Ivdnof. This is probably the
origin of the many names in of.

352 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

The descendants of the kniazes^ the appanage-princes, con-
tinued to bear the title after the incorporation of their princi-
palities into that of Moscow. All other dignities or distinctions,
especially that of boyhr, were conferred directly by the sovereign
and only for a lifetime. It was only when brought into contact
with Europe and on annexing provinces that had long been sub-
ject to Teutonic influences, that Russia appropriated some of the
nobiliary denominations produced by feudalism. So she made
counts and later on barons, but had to borrow foreign names for
these imitative creations.* Peter the Great and his successors
began to vie with Western monarchs in conferring hereditary titles.
They were not as lavish, though, with these distinctions as other
sovereigns, and the number of families bearing foreign titles is
comparatively small. A hundred or so of counts,! some fifteen
princes, and a few more barons, the latter mostly financial men, —
such is the approximate number of titles created by imperial
diploma. They all are naturally of more or less recent date, few
going back a century, and these families do not enjoy any high
degree of popularity and consideration. There are, side by side
with them, others, more ancient, whose names are suflSdently
illustrious not to need the glamour of title. The Nar^shkins, for
instance, have none, and appear to deem it an honor to dispense
with one.

One thing strikes you in the Russian znat, that of St. Peters-
burgh especially : it is the great number of families of foreign
extraction. Probably one half of this court aristocracy comes
from abroad ; the blood in their veins is Tatar, Gruzin (Georgian),
Greek, Valachian, Lithuanian, Polish, Swedish, German, even

♦ Graf for " count," and Baron. The old title kniaz is the only Slavic
and rational one. I cannot see why we translate "grand-duke," and not
" grand-prince," the ancient title veliki-kniaz, formerly borne by the
sovereigns of Kief, Vladfmir, Moscow, and now by the members of the
imperial family.

t There are said to have been, from Boriss Sherem^tief in 1706 to
General Totleben in 1879, 157 creations of counts ; but many left no
posterity. The Emperor Alexander 11. alone created over twenty.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 353

French and English. All the tribes subject to the imperial scep-
tre, all the adjoining nations, have contributed their contingent
to the dvorihnstvo. Thus the most exalted class is the least
national of all, in origin as in manners and breeding. Here lies
another source of weakness, another cause for its lack of influence
and authority.

In the midst of all these families of doubtfiil origin and date,
the kniazes, the lineal descendants of the ancient Russian rulers,
occupy a separate place. In the state, founded and so long
governed by their forefathers, these scions of the house of Rurik
represent a native aristocracy, which, in virtue of its secular glory,
claims high consideration. No aristocracy in Europe boasts a
loftier and longer pedigree. ' ' In Russia, ' ' once said M. de Talley-
rand, ' * they are all princes. ' ' This opinion is still widely spread
in Western Europe. Yet nothing can be falser. Setting aside the
foreign intruders, and the families deriving their nobility from all
sorts of sources, the number of national princely families, in that
immense empire, scarcely exceeds sixty . * Nearly forty write them-
selves from Rurik, the founder, and from Vladimir, the apostle of
the empire ; they are the representatives of the d3ntiasty which
reigned from the ninth down to the end of the sixteenth century.
This house, probably the most prolific sovereign race known to
history, had as many as two hundred different branches a century
or two ago. Many have no living scions left ; others, the Tatish-
tchefs for instance, have dropped or lost the title. Another group,
composed of four Russian and four Polish families, comes from a
no less illustrious stock and nearly as national in the eyes of the
Russians : they are the descendants of Guedimin and the ancient
sovereign house of I^ithuania, known in Europe tmder the name of
the Yagellons, and which, before it ascended the throne of Poland,
at one time ruled the whole of Western Russia. From Rurik and

* We mean here only .the genuinely Russian families, not those who,
by their nationality, belong to the alien dependencies of the empire, espe-
cially the Caucasus, where Gr&zia (Georgia) alone has contributed quite a
bevy of native princes.

354 T'Z/y? EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the first Russian dynasty are descended the Dolgordkis,the Baridtin-
skys, the Obol^nskys, the Gortchakbfe, the Mossilskys ; from Gue-
dimin and the Lithuanian dynasty, the Khovdnskys, the Galitsins,
the Kurdkins, the Trubetskbys in Russia, the Czartoryskis and the
Sanguszkos in Poland. To this double line, issued from the oldest
native rulers, should be added seven or eight families descended
from Tatar, Tcherkess, and Gnizin chieftains, formerly admitted
into the ranks of Russian kniazes, and most of whom — the
Tcherk^kys, the Meshtch6rskys, the Bagrations — bear his-
torical names.

A mere roll-call shows that these Russian kniazes are not
behind any nobility in Europe in antiquity and renown ; to this
day there is none that can show more men of distinction. Never-
theless, in all of these houses of quasi-royal blood, by whose side
rank many old boyhr families, — in all this brilliant national nobility,
there are not the elements for a political aristocracy, there are not
the materials to make, say a House of Lords, a house of hereditary
boyhrs. There is a twofold reason for this disqualification : one
lies in the historical constitution of Russian society ; the other and
main reason lies in the constitution of the Russian family itself.

Equality among all the children — equal rights, title common
to all — is the law of the Russian family, as well that of the plain
dvorianin as that of the kniaz, the merchant, and the mujik. This
democratical principle, always staunchly maintained by the Rus-
sian nobility, stifled in the sprouting such germs of aristocracy as
sank here and there into the soil. In these princely houses, the
recipients of the blood of Rurik and Guedimin, as in the poorest
nobleman's house, there is no " eldest son," no "head of the fam-
ily," as far as any special rights go. The father's possessions are
divided equally among the sons ; the ancestral title is transmitted
to all without distinction, and, as it is the only property that is not
impaired by successive partitions, it frequently is the only inheri-
tance that remains to them. Hence the frequent debasement of a
title which, while belonging to but few families, can at the

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 355

same time belong to many individuals. By dint of branching and
ever more branching out, many of these princely families — and
sometimes the most illustrious — end by forming a bushy shrub,
the boughs of which are so intertwined that they hide and choke
one another.

Some of these houses of kniazes, the unity and fortune of which
are secured neither by primogeniture nor by the entrance of the
younger sons into the Church, have become veritable tribes or
clans, with no bond between them but the name and the title.
Thus there are some four hundred princes and princesses Galitsin
by right of birth. In these huge families grown out of the same
trunk, there are naturally, by the side of limbs that spread in
the sun, blossom-crowned and overflowing with sap, branches
pining away for want of air and nourishment and bare of foliage.
As early as in the sixteenth century, when Rurik's dynasty still
ruled, Fletcher remarked that many kniazes owned no inheritance
save their title, with nothing to support it. ' ' There are so many of
them in this position," wrote the envoy of aristocratic England, —
" that these titles do not amount to much. Accordingly you see
princes only too happy to serve a man of no account for a salary
of five or six roubles a year." Matters have not much improved
with time and the multiplying of more families. At this very
moment one meets in Russia descendants of Rurik and Guedimin
following more than modest pursuits. In Petersburgh I have seen
one conduct the orchestra of a cafe-concert ; in Italy I have met,
on second- and third-rate stages, princesses singing under assumed
names, and I was told there had been princes who drove cabs and
princesses who took positions as lady's-maids. Such things
account for the fact that several families issued from Rurik dropped
their title. With such division, such crumbling away of families
and fortunes, it were vain to look for family feeling or esprit de corps
in the high nobility.

Would you know whether a country inclines to aristocracy,
first of all inquire into the laws or customs that regulate the dis-

356 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

tribution of wealth. According to a remark of Tocqueville's, it is
the laws on succession which, by centring, grouping around a few
heads first property, then power, force aristocracy, in a manner, to
spring fix>m the soil, — or, by dividing, frittering, and scattering
property and power, pave the way for democracy. No^^n the
Russian nobility, the custom of dividing the property equally
among the sons has always prevailed, — that levelling law, which,
' ' passing over the soil again and again, razes the walls of dwell-
ings to the ground and pulls down the enclosures of fields." If
in Russia the law of equal division has not yet reduced all the
large estates into house lots, destroyed all possibilities of living
broadly, the reason is that Russia, so far, has been placed in
exceptional economic conditions. It was, at first, the immensity
of the territory ; then the rapid rise in the value of land owing to
the opening of new issues ; lastly, serfdom and the nobility's
exclusive right to own ' ' inhabited estates. ' ' In many a region the
land revenue has increased so fast, in proportion to the population
and means of communication, that the properties would double,
treble their value, sometimes increase it tenfold, in the space of
twenty or thirty years. At this rate, it was not impossible for two
or three sons, after dividing among themselves the paternal inheri-
tance, to find themselves each as rich as their father had been at
their age.' There was another cause still, at least to all appear-
ance, for large fortunes : that is the fact that property is divided
only among the male children.

The sons, being those whom it behooves to perpetuate the
family, share the estate. To the daughters who have living
brothers, the law awards an almost nominal portion : one four-
teenth of the paternal inheritance, at least of the real estate. Often

' In the present and for the future the true safeguard is that we Russian
nobles have been led by the late economic revolution to work, and to like it ;
so that a moderate inheritance becomes — what alone inheritances should be
in an ideal state of society — an encouragement and aid to efiFort, a stepping-
stone, a stirrup, a reserve fund, not a bed to lie down on and idle away the
best forces of manhood and the few years given to use them in.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 357

they get only their marriage outfit. In the spirit of ancient
civilizations, a wedded and dowered daughter is put out of the
family, A slice of bread once cut oflf, in the popular saying,
does not belong to the loaf any longer. True, the dowry given to
the daughters sometimes amounts to more than what would be
their legal share ; there even are cases where the daughters had,
in this way, received a portion as large or larger than that of their
brothers. This law by no means proceeds from contempt of the
female sex ; for Russian law, so niggardly in its provision for
them, is in many ways more liberal towards women than the
French Code, which, with regard to inheritance, places them on an
equal footing with the men.* If the Russian Code awards to the
daughter but a trifling portion of her father's property, it ensures
to the wife the free enjoyment and independent management of
her own property, even in her husband's lifetime. The married
woman is never, as in France, a ward under her husband's guar-
dianship, and, in a general way, it may be stated here that, with
regard to the emancipation, or rather independence, of women, no
society in Europe is more advanced or more liberal than the higher
classes of this same Russia, whose laws, in other respects, treat
them so meanly."

The mode of succession which consecrates the inequality of
man and women, even still numbers partisans in the countries
ruled by the Napoleonic Code. Kven in France it has the sympa-
thies of those who dread the inroads of democracy, and is avowedly
preferred by a whole school of contemporary publicists. I^acking

* It should be mentioned that the Emperor Alexander III., in 1882-83,
appointed a commission to set up a project for a new civil code, better
adapted to the conditions of modem life.

* One often hears expressions of blame and indignation against the care-
lessness, if not heartlessness, of Russian customs in the matter of marriage
settlements — which are not used, — from which it is inferred that the Russian
man is careless of the interests of his daughters and their children. Whereas
the reason is that settlements are not much needed in a country where a
husband has not the right of cutting down a tree on his wife's property
against her will !

358 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

primogeniture, the privilege of one sex over the other appears to
them as a social guaranty, a way of protecting the transmission
of property and of perpetuating families. This opinion, however,
is not always borne out by the example of the Russian nobility.
Where the law recognizes all the children's equal right to the
paternal inheritance, the curtailed portion of the sons is re-com-
pleted by marriage ; on the average, the wife restores to the hus-
band what the sister took from the brother. If the division
between the males alone cuts up lands and fortimes less, that
between all the children offers gpreater facilities for reconstitut-
ing or rounding them up by means of alliances. Nowadays,
when almost the only factors of wealth are industry, banking,
and trade, there is no other bridge between the opulence of
the new-made families and the neediness of the old ones but
the girls' right of succession. With the opposite rigime, power
and wealth are in danger of passing wholesale to a ruling class
of parvenus.

The exclusive division of property between the males has, from
a conservative point of view, another disadvantage, which must
make itself specially felt in Russia : it disturbs the balance of for-
tunes and the relative position of families more quickly, in a man-
ner more subject to chance than the equal division between all the
chiMren. Two fathers, owning equal fortunes and having an equal
number of children, leave their male descendants in very different
plight according as they happen to have more sons or more
daughters. On the whole, the Russian custom does not seem to
foster aristocratic influences any more than the French, seemingly
more democratic, custom. However, public opinion in Russia
leans so much in favor of the independence of women, that legis-
lation or custom may very possibly in the near future refuse to
sanction any longer the curtailing of those children's birthright
who are by nature less apt to make a fortune for themselves, and
then the equality of the sexes would prevail in the North as it
does in France.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 359

From the day -when they began to associate with the nobilities
of Western Europe, the Russian dvorihnstvo understood that, with
the succession laws as they stood, there could be no real aris-
tocracy. Then some of the descendants of kniazes and boyhrs at-
tempted to implant in their country the foreign custom of entail.
Singularly enough it was one of the least aristocratically minded
of sovereigns, Peter the Great, who was the first to start this inno-
vation. Was it done merely to imitate the West and better to
assimilate Moscovia to Europe ? Was the object really to place
between the people and the throne an exalted and influential
nobility ? Such views fit ill with the conduct of the monarch who
made all rank in the state dependent on the grade in the state
service. The most likely explanation is that he wished, by the
help of this new loan from Europe, to secure to his own country,
then just thrown open to civilization, a rich and well informed,
consequently a European and civilized class. As instituted by
Peter, nothing could be more manifestly overdone and so mani-
festly opposed to the national customs. In order to give the new
institution some chance of life, the first thing to do was to abolish
and then transform it. By an ukctz (decree) of 17 14 all the landed
estates belonging to the nobility were made subject to entail, or,
more correctly, were to pass to one single heir. Personal property,
at that time amounting to very little in Russia, alone remained at
the free disposal of the dvorianln during his lifetime, and alone
was to be divided among his children at his death.

This system differed from that in force in Western Europe in
one essential point. Instead of ensuring the paternal estate to the
eldest son, Peter the Great gave the father the faculty to appoint
his heir. This entail without primogeniture introduced into the
family an autocratic element : the private succession law seemed
copied from the law on succession to the throne, which Peter, in
memory — or in defiance — of his son Alexis, left to the choice of the
sovereign. Such a system could hardly produce better consequences
in private than in public life. This sort of artificial primogeniture

360 THE EMPIRE OP THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

did not work well, as it made the succession to depend on the
paternal arbitrary pleasure and not on the chance of birth. Peter's
ukciz was revoked as early as 1730, having been, during its brief
existence, an occasion of endless trouble in families. The old
national custom of equal division was restored, and entails, when
they were once more authorized, had to be made in favor of the
eldest sons, all the way down the line, as in England and Germany.*

Under these new conditions, entails have not yet become pop-
ular with the Russian nobility. Notwithstanding the favor with
which they are apparently regarded in some high social regions,
their number as yet is very small. It was of little use that an
ukhz of the Emperor Nicolas, dated 1845, granted to all nobles the
right of establishing one or more entails : the nobility never
availed themselves to any extent of the prerogative. The high
value of such entailed estates demanded by the law only in part
accounts for the abstention. According to the terms of the ukhz of
1845, the land thus set apart must be entirely free from mortgage,
peopled with at least 2,000 peasants, and bring an tmencumbered
yearly income of not less than 12,000 roubles. Thus regulated,
the institution was within the reach of only the very wealthy ; but
then, to be of some political efficiency, an entail should always
represent something big ; else it would be to society only a useless
and cumbersome sort of mortmain. The chief obstacle lies in the
national custom and tradition and in the democratic instincts of
the nation. The Russian spirit shows itself in this respect very
diflFerent from the Polish as well as the German spirit, which
latter, in the Baltic provinces subject to Russia, has hitherto suc-
ceeded in affording predominance to its aristocratic propensities.

' In the succession law as it now stands there is a provision which, if
not exactly equivalent to entail, nearly approximates it in spirit. A
landholder cannot dispose by will of landed property that has come to
him or her by inheritance, but only of such as he or she may have ac-
quired by purchase. As, however, there is no law preventing landhold-
ers to dispose of their patrimony in their lifetime, they have the resource
of selling them or alienating them by deed of gift in favor of any
chosen heir.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 361

There are, indeed, partisans of the right of primogeniture — in
theory — who, from the fear of breeding discord between their sons,
do not dare to choose an heir from amongst them. I am acquainted
with a nobleman, the owner of vast estates, and infatuated with
English institutions, yet who, having three sons, and being un-
willing to rob any of them, divided his property between them,
entaiHng each lot.

Notwithstanding such examples and the encouragements given
by a certain world, the custom of entails has remained in Russia
an exotic plant which does not seem inclined to spread very fast.
Such as it exists to-day, in a limited number of families in whom
the others acknowledge no superiority, this foreign importation
cannot have the political effects which, in other countries, justify
its existence.* In Russia it is simply inconvenient economically
and morally — a piece of public wealth withdrawn from circulation
and the wealth of a privileged few artificially insured against the
punishment due to improvidence or vice. The Russian dvorihnstvo,
deprived, in the case of the great majority of its members, of any
legal protection against the competition of the other classes, cannot,
by merely concentrating property and perpetuating it, insure to
itself the hereditary authority and independence which go to the
making of genuine aristocracies, f

* In Russia proper there were lately, I am assured, not forty entailed es-
tates. In the old Polish provinces, the government has itself founded, by
means of crown demesnes and confiscated estates, small entails, in lots
bringing a yearly income of 2,000 or 3,000 roubles. In this there is, evidently,
less an aristocratic intention than a political expedient. The object is to
forestall the sale of lands granted to Russians, and thus to retain a Russian
element in the country.

t Since Alexander III. came to the throne various systems have been
mooted to prevent the increase of poverty amongst the nobility and the
frittering away of its lands. Some have suggested that entails should be
placed within the reach of all purses ; others, that the law should hinder
further steps in this direction, by instituting " normal indivisible lots " ; Mr.
Pobiedonostsef advises to adopt the American homestead law, and allow
landholders of all classes whatever to shield estates of a certain standard
value, to be determined, from division and seizure by having them entered
on a special register.

BOOK VI. CHAPTER II.

How the Monopoly of Territorial Proprietorship could not Confer on the
Nobility any Political Power — Historical Reasons of this Anomaly —
The Drujlna of the Kniazes and the Free Service of the Boydirs —
Ancient Conception of Property : the Vdt-tchina and the PomiistiyS —
The Service of the Tsar the Only Source of Fortune — The Disputes about
Precedence at Table — Why no Real Aristocracy could Come out of all
this — The Hierarchy of Families Succeeded by the Hierarchy of Indi-
viduals— The "Table of Ranks," and the Fourteen Classes of the
7<rA«»— Results of this Classification,

This authority, this independence of political aristocracies, the
Russian nobility never possessed, not even at the still recent time
when it enjoyed the exclusive privilege of owning the soil, and
when those who tilled its lands were its slaves. In order to
account for this apparent anomaly : a nobility in exclusive posses-
sion of the soil, yet debarred from the power which such possession
imparts everjrwhere else, we must work our way back into the past,
to the roots of the Russian nobility and the Russian system of prop-
erty. An aristocracy is the work of centuries, the strength of it
can be tested only by the depth to which its roots have reached.
Those of the Russian nobility are easily laid bare. From a
remote period history shows us the dvorihnstvo under the two
aspects it has preserved ever since : as servant of the state and as
holder of the soil. History shows us the bond between the land-
lord and the state functionary ; it shows us how the one has always
kept the other dependent and subordinate.

Among the ancient Russian Slavs there does not appear to
have been either a nobility or an aristocracy of any kind. The
original progenitor of the Russian dvorihnsivo is the drujina, which

362

NOBILITY ANi) TCHIN. 363

makes its appearance among the Slavs of N6vgorod and Kief
with Rurik and the Varangians from the North. Originally of
the same race and rank as the founders of the Russian Empire,
the drujina were the companions of the kniaz, his peers. Such
associations are met with everywhere ; they surround the person
of the Teutonic chieftains who were the founders of all the mod-
em European states. The word drujina, jBrom drug, " friend,"
recalls the trustes of the Frank kings, so that the drujinniki (mem-
bers of the drujina) answer to the antrustions. Only in Russia
this body preserved its primitive features longer and more faith-
fully, although circumstances did not allow of a feudal class
springing from it.' What did come of it was the boyhr, a title
which confronts us at a very early time, with the meaning of
"prince's councillors," and which at first seems to have merely
indicated a high rank in the drujina, as suggested by the word,
derived as it is from the radical bUii, " more, greater," thus liter-
ally corresponding to the familiar European form of speech : " the
g^eat of the land, " ' ' les grands. ' '

The essential quality of the drujinnik was that of free com-
panion, voltmtary associate and follower. He served the kniaz,
he left him, at his own will and pleasure ; he was free to exchange
the service of one kniaz for that of another. That was his only
right, his only prerogative, — one, however, which was to him the
safeguard of all others, for, if the kniaz wished to keep his drujina

' There is nothing but what is perfectly natural and logical in the fact
of no feudal class or social system having sprung up out of the occupation
of Russia by the Varangians, once we admit that they were Slavs ; whereas,
if the German theory is accepted, this same fact becomes an anomaly and
a puzzle. Why should a band of Scandinavian Northmen have abstained
from treating this one country in the same way that their brethren had
treated all the countries in which they had obtained a footing ? Because
they had been invited over ? So were the Saxons by the Britons — and used the
invitation only as a stepping-stone to conquest. No ; nothing but race-
kindred explains the diflference, but /Aa/ explains it fully and satisfactorily,
with all its sequels, such as the prompt adoption by the new-comers of the
lateral order of succession, so distinctively Slavic. (See Appendix to Book
IV., Ch. II., p. 253.)

364 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

and his boyhrs, he was fain, on occasion, to ask their advice, and
take it, too. This right of free service the boyctrs, heirs to the dru-
jtna, treasured long. At Moscow itself, under the first " Grand
Kniazes" of the new line, there was a formula to that eflfect: "the
hoyhrs and free servitors " . . . ("are free to come and go," com-
pletes the saying). This freedom and choice of service, however,
could last only as long as the system of appanages and the division
of sovereignty. The drujind's ancient privilege went with the
last appanages, and in fact itself contributed to bring about the fall
of the appanage-principalities, without which it could not subsist.
The boyhrs naturally made use of their freedom by tendering their
services to the wealthiest and most powerful, around them they
crowded. The ' ' Grand-Kniazes ' ' of Moscow gradually drew them
to their court, and, by forsaking and consequently weakening
the other kniazes, the hoyhrs undermined the appanage system and
themselves prepared the incorporation of the smaller principalities.
The reins of sovereignty once gathered into one hand, the hoyhrs,
from companions and voluntary associates of the "Grand-Kniaz,"
quickly became his servants or, as they entitled themselves, his
" varlets "— M^/^/^.

The hoyhrs, then, to begin with, lacked the base on which
rested the feudal aristocracies of the West : the territorial base, a
hold on the soil of the country. The drujinnik, attached to the
person of the kniaz, whom he followed in all his expeditions, was
bound to the soil by no permanent tie ; he lived on his share of
the booty and on his prince's bounty. The very right, so jealously
guarded, of free service, hindered the drujina, ever on the move,
from settling down anywhere and striking roots into the soil.
Thus the prerogative, so precious a safeguard of the hoyars' per-
sonal independence, became an obstacle to their political emancipa-
tion ; another lay in the constitution of the property tenure.

Two things above all others decide a country's social status :
the mode of holding property, and the laws regulating inheri-
tances. Now in Russia the legislation on landed property lingered

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 365

long in stages which it traversed rapidly in the West ; it never
had either the same fixity or the same precision, nor, consequently,
could it have the same importance. These differences can be ac-
counted for by various causes, by custom, by the grade of civiliza-
tion and the training of the country, by the immensity of the
territory coupled with the scantiness of the population.

Among the early Russians, the right of proprietorship seems as
yet ill defined, not clearly distinct from the right of sovereignty.
The soil, at that time so imperfectly and scantily settled, was long
regarded as a public demesne. In those vast plains, unprovided
with natural divisions, it seems less natural than elsewhere to
fence up the land and award the ownership of it to individuals.*
The Russian of Moscovia inclines to a twofold conception of land-
tenure, closely akin at bottom and similar. In his eyes, the land
belongs to the prince, the sovereign of the country, or else to the
commune, to the body of men who till it. In both cases it is
public property, inalienable in principle, a common good, of which
the individuals, be they noble or simple, enjoy only the use, in
exchange for certain services and dues.

The kniaz in appanaged Russia, the tsar in unified Moscovia,
considered himself as the owner, the supreme landlord, whose will
is law. His quality of landlord for a long time even took pre-
cedence of his quality as sovereign : it is as landlord that the
" Grand-Kniaz " of Moscow rules and manages the territory of his
state, as he would a private domain. These, his own lands,
the kniaz distributes to his drujina, the tsar to his boyhrs^ as
guerdon for their services. In a country of sluggish trade and

* American readers will need no explanation of this seeming incon-
sistency. They have only to look to their own West and Southwest for a
similar state of public feeling. In Texas, it is to this day a serious matter
requiring some nerve, to fence in a property and limit the general right of
way through it and over and acro.ss it. Such attempts are frequently met
by systematic fence-cutting ; and as both the wooden stakes and the barbed
wire are expensive affairs, many a ranch-owner has desisted, especially in
the remoter and more lawless districts, where public irritation is apt to take
even more direct and dangerous forms than fence-cutting.

366 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

little wealth, where coined money comes in late and remains scarce
always, land is for the sovereign the most handy thing to use for
compensations and rewards ; it is pay for the captain, salary for
the functionary, pension for the retired servant, — and in these
capacities it is received, not as a perpetual, hereditary homestead ;
it is neither the centre of a family, nor a focus of influence.

For the drujtna, and later on for the nobility, landed property
became a bond of dependence, a fetter — anything but an agent of
independence and power. Two modes of personal land-tenure
confront us in ancient Russia, and, consequently, two categories
of landed property : the vbt-tchina and the pomiestiye — the land
inherited from ancestors, the patrimony, and the land awarded by
the sovereign, a grant to be enjoyed by the servants of the state.*
These grants somewhat recall the fiefs or benefices of the West.
In Moscovia, as in Western Europe, the land grants, conferred as
recompenses for services done, early superseded the patrimonial
estates ; the pomiistiyi absorbed the vbt-tchina. From the pomiis-
tiyi proceeds the present nobleman's estate, so that the term
pomiesh-tchik has come to mean merely * * landlord. ' ' There was an
important class of vbt-tchinnikf, or men who held land in their own
right, and as an inheritance from their ancestors : it was the kniazes,
the appanage princes, with whom the ownership of land sur-
vived sovereignty. The Moscovite princes undertook to remedy
this state of things which, under their rule, was a sort of anomaly.
The Grand-Kniaz took care not to leave to his kinsfolk of
the collateral lines the proprietorship of demesnes annexed to
the main principality. The mediatized princes were reduced to
exchange their hereditary vbt-tchinas against pomiestiyis situated
far from the regions where their fathers had reigned and of which
themselves sometimes bore the name. The Englishman, Fletcher,
Queen Elizabeth's envoy, noticed, as late as the end of the sixteenth

* Vdt-tchina or Ot-tchina, "patrimony," from otiits, "father" ; pomiis-
tiyi, "rural estate," from miisto, "place," — a word which, like its French
and English equivalents, designates both locations and employments or
functions.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 367

century, how persistently the Moscovite tsars strove to weaken, to
eradicate so to speak, the families descended from Rurik, by tearing
them from their native soil and transplanting them into a strange
one. The only Russian families who had a territorial footing, the
only ones that seemed destined to found an aristocracy as opposed
to the " Grand-Kniaz," — the heirs of the appanaged princes, were
thus lowered to the level of mere pomiish-tchikiy men who held
their land and fortune from the master's pleasure.

The Moscovite tsar remained the only supreme landlord as well
as the only sovereign. The most illustrious families were scat-
tered here and there over the land, owning no traditional home-
stead, no centre of local influence, similar to that singular herb
of the steppes, which the autumn winds wildly chase across the
plain haphazard in dry bunches. Between the dvorihnstvo and the
soil there never has been the same bond, the same association as in
the West. The nobility is not identified with the soil as in the
rest of Europe, nor with the region in which it resides. The
nobles do not bear the name of their estate or their township, as
indicated by the French de and the German von prefixed to the
names.' Now, every aristocracy resembles the giant of the
Greek myth, who derived his strength from contact with his
mother. Earth. This lack of localization, of centre, of territorial
basis, sufl&ciently accounts for the incurable feebleness of the boyhrs
as a class, and the failure of all aristocratical attempts in ancient
Russia. Nothing there recalls the proud dwellings of the Western
aristocracies, the inheritors of feudalism ; nothing resembles those

* This remark, though correct on the whole, is somewhat too sweeping.
Several old princely families bear the names of their former principalities,
as the author himself remarked just now ; so, for instance, the Moss^lskys,
some branches of whom have dropped the title, were named for a small
principality, the capital of which, Moss^lsk, is even yet a flourishing third-
class city. Many noble families were originally named after their oldest or
finest estate. The frequent name-ending sky, which takes gender and
number, is an adjective desinence, so that " the Mossdlskys" really means
"those of Moss^sk," and might very well be rendered by de or von
Moss^Isk.

368 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

mediaeval castles, so solidly squatting on the soil, so haughtily
pervaded with the might of the families whose strongholds they
were/ Russian nature herself seems to repudiate these domestic
fortresses, by providing neither the sites nor the materials for
them — the rocky steeps whose brow they should crown, the stone
of which they should be built. The wooden house, so often
burned down, so quickly worm-eaten, so easy to transport or to
reconstruct, is a meet emblem of Russian life ; the very dwelling^
aptly represent the precariousness of the aristocracy's destinies.

Owing to the pomihtiyi, the Russian noble appears before us,
ever since the Middle Ages, in the twofold aspect in which we see
him to this day : that of owner of the soil and servant of the state.
These two qualities, sometimes separated in later times, at first
hold closely together ; the latter is the condition, the cause, of the
former. • It is as servant of the Grand-ELniaz that the noble
receives his pontiistiyS, it is as such that his children retain pos-
session of it. The pomihh-tchik remains dependent on the sov-
ereign who gave him his land, and, later on, when serfdom is
established, gives him, in the peasants attached to the glebe, the
instruments of cultivation. For the Russian noble, landed prop-
erty is a bread-giver, a means of subsistence, of maintenance j he
does not settle on it, does not become attached to it, for he knows
that the river of his fortunes flows from another source.

Under the old tsars, as under the successors of Peter the Great,

it was in the capital, at court, that government places were

obtained, that wealth and influence were to be acquired. The

fascination which Versailles under Louis XIV. exerted on the

high French nobility was wielded no less imperatively by the

barbarous Kremlin over Moscovite kniazes and boyhrs. The court

spirit, so opposed to the true aristocratical spirit, already per-

* Families, no matter how " mighty," needed no strongholds, since they
were a growth of the same soil as the people, scions of one race, nnlike
feudal aristocracies, which, being based on an iniquitous thing — conquest —
naturally were the objects of both race-hatred and class-hatred, and conse-
quently in constant danger.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 369

vaded the entire dvorihnsivo. In France, even when most tinder
control, the noblesse maintained the gentleman's outward dignity ;
in Russia it was not supported by ancient traditions, nor by the
conventional code of * ' honor, ' ' nor by the habitual politeness
which tempers the master's arrogance and gilds over the cour-
tier's humility. At the semi-Byzantine court of Moscow, the
tsars did not take much thought of disguising under a becoming
garment the bondage of the hoyhrs, or the boycirs of throwing a
veil over their servility. Everybody knows the saying reported
of the Emperor Paul I. by J. De Maistre or S^gur. " Sir," he is
said to have remarked to a foreigner, ' ' I know of no grand seig-
neur but the man to whom I am speaking, while I am speaking
to him." An Ivan or a Vassili might already have spoken in the
same way. Outside of their sovereign favor, the tsars did not
like to concede to their subjects any personal advantage, any
superiority of birth. If a subject was allowed to derive any glory
or profit from his ancestor's titles, it was from the rank obtained by
them in the service of the veliki-kniaz. This gave rise to a novel
hierarchy, a peculiar order of precedence, which, under the name
oi miht-ni-tchestvo, was in force as late as in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.

At the Moscovite court, precedence gradually ceased to depend
on birth and the rank of blood ; all the subjects of the veliki-kniaz
were measured by one common standard — ^state service. The
"place occupied " — miisto — ^was the only gauge applied to every
one's claims and titles, and the rank it conferred extended not to
individuals alone, but to their families as well. In force of the
precedence thus obtained, a man could not serve under another
who had at any time been placed under the orders of his father.
Such a system must in time have led to heredity of office. The
dignity of boyhr, the highest in old-time Russia, although
nominally enjoyed only for life, was in reality fast getting to pass
from father to son. Sixteen families, the historian Solovi6f tells

us, had received the right of having their members enter at once

370 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the ranks of the boyHrs. In some fifteen others the young men
began in the rank of the okdlnik, the second Moscovite dignity.
Of these privileged families, twenty bore the title of kniaz and
were descended from Rurik or Guedimin. In the other families
a son entered service two grades below the grade attained by his
father ; if he did not advance, his son started two grades lower
still, and, if this went on, the family of course dropped into
obscurity. For the reg^ilation of each individual's rights and
each family's claims, special registers or service-lists were kept.

It is easy to see how great must have been, in the eyes of the
veliki-kniazes, the advantages of this system, out of which a
new aristocracy seemed sure to grow. In Moscow itself, the side
branches of the reigning house naturally enjoyed, at first, a
special consideration. In order to deprive them of it, the veliki-
kniazes began to raise their boyhrs to the same level as that on
which stood the descendants of Rurik, reserving the right of
lowering by and by both kniazes and boyhrs at one stroke. The
law of precedence obliged the heirs of the dispossessed princes to
renounce all tradition of independent greatness. Not otherwise
than all other subjects of the tsars, they were reduced to seek
lustre and nobility only in the favor and service of the sover-
eign. The effect of the iron rule of precedence was to merge both
the former appanage-princes and the Moscovite boyhrs into one
court nobility, holding all dignities and prerogatives from the
pleasure of the tsar. In less than a century the fiision was so
complete that, when the reigning d5aiasty became extinct, it was
not from its side branches that the new head of the state was taken.

This artificial hierarchy was, in the course of nature, to make
things awkward for the monarch, who at first had made himself
a tool out of it. The effects proved especially disastrous in war,
by strictly limiting the choice of oflficers, and to this the frequent
defeats endured by Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries are partly to be imputed. No aristocracy could have been
more exclusive, more stationary, more rife with rivalries, owing

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 3/1

to the difficulty of settling the rights of each man and putting a
stop to the altercations which occurred even on the battle-field
itself. Ivan the Terrible, indeed, had, in 1550, attempted to re-
strain these unseemly wranglings, not only by forbidding disputes
on rank to any noble who was not the head of his family, but by
prohibiting all nobles, while on active military duty, to raise in the
army any question of the kind with voyevbds (generals) of families
inferior to theirs, so long as they were not themselves voyevbds.^

To have held its ground so long in spite of such intrinsic faults,
this institution must have had some moral hold on the nation.
This the historians think to find in the strong family feeling, the
sort of patriarchal tie that narrowly bound together men of one
blood, and made these bonds of kindred the stronger that
in Moscovia there were no others. The individual could not be
conceived apart from the kin, the rod (L^atin gens). The honors
conferred on a man were in a measure bestowed on his people
also ; when one of its members was raised to a certain dignity,
the whole family felt lifted in rank along with him. Thus, in
our days, a general does not like to serve under another general
whom he ranks in grade. Death was as nothing to a Russian
when his ancestral rank was in question ; to yield would have
been to write himself a traitor. The kniaz who titled himself
the tsar's slave, who almost cringed out of existence before him,
refused to sit at his table below a man whom he ranked by the
law of precedence. In vain, the chroniclers tell us, the tsar
would command him to be seated by force in the place appointed
him at the table ; the offended guest would resist, rise from his
seat opposing violence to violence, and leave the hall, shouting
that he would lose his head before he would give up the place
which he could claim by right. These disputes about precedence
are perhaps the only indication of the feeling of right in the
old Moscovite nobility, or of the feeling of honor^ both so
mighty in the feudal society of the West.

* See A. Rambaud, Histoire de Russie, p. 241.

372 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

In spite of appearances, this order of hereditary precedence,
so unfavorable to personal merit, was incapable of producing a
genuine aristocracy. What was consecrated by miistnitchestvo
was not the rights of a class, the prerogatives of a caste : it was a
set of individual, private claims, the rights of such or such a per-
son, of such or such a family. Even among these privileged ones
the order of precedence created, instead of solid bonds, an ever-
lasting antagonism. Even for the kind of oligarchy that was
benefited by it, it was a source of rivalry and discord. It made
impossible the first condition of an aristocracy — homogeneous-
ness, solidarity ; it kept each noble in strife with his equals, each
family at war with its rivals. The motto of the system might
have been : " Each against all." There was nothing there out of
which to build up an enduring force. Accordingly, when its in-
conveniences became too obvious, the rival claims and competi-
tions too complicated, it collapsed, with the consent of the very
families who were benefited by it. It was abolished without effort,
under the reign of one of Old Russia's feeblest tsars, Feodor
Alex6yevitch, the half-brother, and, in that as in sundry other
things, the pale foreshadowing of Peter the Great. All he had to
do was to order the public burning of the books, to which was
substituted a plain genealogical register, which, under the name of
Velvet Book exists to this day ; an interesting relic, as it gives a
census of the high nobility previous to Peter. It shows that then
already the greater part of noble families, about five hundred,
were of foreign or half-foreign extraction : lyithuanian, Polish,
Tatar, German, etc. About a hundred were of unknown extrac-
tion, and two hundred only pure Russian, among these one htm-
dred and sixty-four families of kniazes, descended from Rurik.

The natural successor of a hierarchy classified after the func-
tions exercised by families was a hierarchy classified after the posts
filled by individuals. The standard of rank remained the same —
state service still. But the services of ancestors ceased to be
taken into accoimt. It was not noble birth that gave a right to

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 3/3

certain posts, but the posts which conferred and perpetuated the
titles of nobility. Every dvorianhi was bound to enter service,
military or civil. Thus the entire body once again became a class
strictly of servants of the state, and, the hereditary titles of some
families being overlooked, there was in its midst no other classifica-
tion, no other order of precedence, but those instituted by service.

Peter the Great abolished the old title of dojyar, which recalled
antiquated claims. To the barbarous and ponderous Moscovite
hierarchy he substituted the "Table of Ranks," which, in its
fourteen classes, encloses to this day the entire Russian ofl&cial
world. The civil functions, even the ecclesiastical dignities, are
there assimilated to the grades in the army and, from the ensign
and "college registrar" who stand on the lowest rung of the
ladder (fourteenth class), to the field marshal and the chancellor
who are alone enthroned on the top, all the servants of the state
are distributed in tiers, each according to his ^chm or grade, in a
double parallel series, on fourteen numbered rungs or ranks. It
is not in the darkness of the Middle- Ages, iinder the Tatar yoke
— ^it is in the eighteenth century, by the hand of the greatest of
modem reformers, that this institution of the icAzn was established
with its Chinese sounding name, and indeed recalling that of the
mandarins with their classes symbolized by buttons of difierent
colors.* It was from Europe, though mainly from Germany,
that Peter borrowed most of these titles, obsolete and devoid of

* What is here incidentally and jestingly remarked has been seriously
advanced as proof of the alleged Mongolian origin of the Russian people
and its national institutions (a wholesale recast of the German, bureau-
cratic hierarchy, with even the titles either retained or translated). Now
the word tchin is a good Slavic radical with the meaning of "action, work,"
the progenitor of a vast family of derived words, which, by the aid of
desinences, prefixes, suflSxes, and the like, express every shade and grade of
the parent idea : pri-tcMn-a, "cause " ; tchin-lti, " to do, operate, repair " ;
so-tchin-itel, " composer *' ; u-tchin-idii, " to cause, to make " (trouble,
good, evil), etc., etc. Tchindvnik, therefore, which has become the typical
word for "bureaucrat," " employ^," "red-tape-man," originally meant
simply "a worker" (but not a manual laborer). Tchin-dvnitchestvo (tchin-
dom) is the entire system or regime, as well as the whole class as a body.

374 7WS EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

meaning nowadays: "college registrar," "college assessor,"
"State councillor" (^Staatsrath), "actual State councillor"
{wirklicher StaatsratK)^ " privy councillor " {Geheimerath), ^ic. ;
all foreign designations which in Russia never designated any
real functions, and which now, as from the first, represent only
a sort of civil grade, often unconnected with any duties. If the
names were foreign, however, the spirit of the institution was
thoroughly Russian, well adapted to this autocratic soil where
neither a strong aristocracy nor a free democracy ever could
thrive. In establishing his * ' Table of Ranks, ' ' the great imitator
of Europe only took the old Moscovite traditions and tricked out
in modem garb the policy of the old tsars.

During a century and a half Peter's "Fourteen Classes"
have made of Russia a sort of army in which each man was
ranked according to his grade. Such a hierarchy could be good
for a period of transition, for a people still full of prejudices, poor
in trade and industry, at a time when the only road to greatness
was the service of the state, when public functions were the only
school of a higher culture. \ By tying down the nobles to ser-
vice, Peter made of the nobihty the instruments and support of
a reform which in itself did not inspire it with much sympathy.*
There was some sense in the thing when the men enrolled in the
fourteen classes were alone possessed of the rights of freemen,
when a diplomat laughingly proposed, as a means of freeing
Russia from corporal punishment, to raise the whole people to the
fourteenth (lowest) class. In a more advanced state of society,
with a civilization so varied and manifold, which opens so many
outiets to intellect and activity, such an artificial classification
according to services becomes an idle hindrance. It is, to say
the least, an anachronism. At a time in which private initiative
under all its forms, in which science and art, commerce and

* A great stroke of genius which more than counterbalances any drawbacks
or faults. Peter usually had a choice of evils, and his greatness showed in
choosing the evil from which good was likely to come in some form.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 375

industry, hold so large a place, the men on public duty are not
always the most useful or notable servants of their country.
It is getting more and more awkward to class talents, impossible
to stamp each man's rank and merits with an external sign, a
figure. There is no longer an accepted weight to weigh minds,
no longer a legal, oflScial standard, one common measure suiting
so many different capacities. The effort is vain to assimilate to
military grades professions naturally independent and rebellious
to every kind of hierarchy, or careers from their nature subject to
all the hazards of competition.

In Russia, the habit of fitting all things into the fourteen
pigeon holes of the "Table of Ranks" is such that not even
the arts have escaped it. The actors and singers of the imperial
theatres are officially divided into several categories, each having
its own particular rank and rights. Hence the ridiculous
Russian titles and designations, such as "candidate," "com-
merce councillor," "manufacture councillor," (German, Kandi-
dat, Kommerzienrath, ManufakturratK), — appellations which raise
a merchant with a fortune of several millions to the level of the
seventh or eighth class, i. e., to the rank of a major or lieutenant-
colonel. With such a method it would have been but logical to
create generals of commerce, and we ought to have marshals of
science or poetry. There was a story current at the time I was
travelling in the Bast, of the Sultan's having raised his physician
to the rank of general of division to reward him for having cured
him of an anthrax. Nominations, or rather promotions, of this
kind are habitual in Russia ; the Official Journal is full of
them. It would be difficult to count the physicians who have a
tchin ; there are among them * ' actual state councillors ' ' (fourth
class), answering to the rank of major-general, "privy councillors"
(third class), ranking with generals of division. The same with
scientists, professors, writers ; tricked out in the same titles
as administrators or magistrates, they may advance pari passu
with them in the civil career.

376 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

All these promotions in the line of the tchin do not hinder
others in that of imperial ' ' orders. ' ' There are five or six of
these orders of knighthood, some more, and some less sought
after, mostly divided into two, three, even four classes. There
are the orders of St. Andrew, of St. Alexander Nevsky, of Ste.
Anna ; of St. Vladimir, of St. George, not to mention those of
St. Stanislaus and the White Eagle, originally Polish orders.
Since the last war in Bulgaria, one more order has been invented,
for services to the wounded, the order of the Red Cross, which the
empress distributes to ladies. There was already a decoration
specially reserved to women, the order of Ste. Catherine. There
is besides, for the army in time of war, the sword of honor with
eulogy ; for civilians or for generals in time of peace, there are
diamond rings with the imperial monogram, and at all times
golden snuff-boxes set with diamonds and adorned with the
emperor's portrait or monogram. Few are the high functionaries
who cannot show on their bric-a-brac shelves one of these imperial
snuff-boxes. The ladies of high rank also can receive analogous
distinctions ; no one has read memoirs on the court of St. Peters-
burgh but knows about the " maid of honor with portrait."

Over and above the tchin and the orders of knighthood,
Russia possesses quite a number of social distinctions conferred
somewhat indiscriminately and therefore comparatively little
prized. These are the court charges, graduated after the manner
of the " Table of Ranks," and, like the titles in the civil service,
for the most part purely honorary and nominal. To the ' ' state
councillors" and "privy cotmcillors," "actual" or not, who
never assist at any council, correspond the "court masters"
(Hofmeister), who have nothing to do with the palace ceremonial.
In no other country are the means of classing men, of stamping
merit and putting it, so to speak, at a premium, so numerous, so
varied, and — so improductive. If the fruits of this system of
official encouragement are not more plentiful, the fault lies only
with its natural barrenness.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 377

In such a scale of classification, science and public instruction,
which has always been one of the imperial government's chief
cares, could not be ignored. University degrees accordingly con-
fer a tchin, the graduating examination at the end of a gymnasium
or college course entitles to the lowest class of the bureaucratic
hierarchy. Thus, by the fact of entering the university, the
student already has his foot on the ladder, and each diploma
raises him one rung. As it is work which, with the assistance
of the "Table of Ranks," gives access to places and opens the
ranks of the nobility, it may be said that, rank depending on
grade, and that again on success in study, the entire Russian
hierarchy is but the hierarchy of labor and knowledge, and that
the nobility which results therefrom is a nobility of knowledge
and cidture. Such, indeed, is the case, and this it is that justifies
the tchin — or rather justified it in the past. Such a method,
though good in a school or one particular career, is inadequate,
as every artificial hierarchy must be, when applied to an entire
society. Such attempts at numbering and pigeonholing men and
merits have almost always missed their aim ; or if, exceptionally,
they seemed to succeed, it was only by swathing society in un-
comfortable bands.

We can match the hierarchy of the tchin with examples taken
from Asia — for instance, China and Turkey. We can even find
in modem Europe a few more or less analogous institutions, such
as the first Napoleon's I^egion of Honor and his nobility. The
latter, in its fundamental conception, was much like Peter's
"Table of Ranks." The founder of the "lyCgion d'Honneur"
also claimed that he would enroll, dispose in a given order, all the
social forces of the nation ; but, having to do with a later and
more advanced stage of society, he was even less successful than
Peter the Great ; his institution survived as a mere order of
knighthood, with no greater social value than any other decora- ,
tion. All goes to show that, in our state of civilization, it is not
any easier to invent a rational way of classing individuals than to

378 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

do SO for families. Any such hierarchy can have no other type
than the service of the state, no other standard than public func-
tions ; therefore it can, in the end, only encourage place-hunting
and correspondingly discourage free labor, whether intellectual
or material, and weaken the great mainspring of our civilization
— individual enterprise.

The tchin, which makes rank to depend on post and post on
merit, appears at first sight to be an altogether democratic insti-
tution ; it is so, in certain ways ; in others it is, on the contrary,
a brake to any kind of healthy, fi-ee democracy. The practical
perfection of the tchin and the fourteen classes would be the
tritunph of tchindvnism — the exclusive and absolute reign of
bureaucracy, to the profit of despotism and the detriment of
democracy and aristocracy both. And in the inner workings of
this sovereign bureaucracy, this system, which from afar appears
so favorable to personal merit, is so in reality to routine, sloth,
and mediocrity. It can be asserted without injustice that the
"Table of Ranks," in the end, has lowered the level of state
service which it was instituted to raise.

In the transformation which Russia is undergoing, the tchin
naturally forfeits much of its importance ; its sway is less tyran-
nical, and liberties are sometimes taken with it. The new provin-
cial institutions, the electoral system founded on the free choice
of persons, the representative system founded on the appointment
of a representative by his peers — these things are not easy to con-
ciliate with the " Table of Ranks," and will sooner or later make
short work of it. The extension of public liberties will leave
both the sovereign and the country fi-ee to choose the servants of
the state outside of all categories, and will destroy the privileges
of the tchin, which has been substituted for the privilege of birth. ^
The suppression of the " Table of Ranks " has been spoken of
already, both under Alexander II. and Alexander III. If it has
not been done yet, it is probably due to reluctance to change old
' See Appendix to this chapter.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 379

habits and to the dread of having to pay higher salaries to func-
tionaries whom it will no longer be so easy to satisfy with titles.
There also is perhaps a lurking fear that such a measure may
prove too profitable to favoritism and nepotism.

APPENDIX TO BOOK VI., CHAPTER n. (See note 6, p. 374.)

That the system, faithfully described in this chapter, could be so easily
adopted and so promptly acclimated, is owing to the fact that, however
clumsy in the application, it appeals in principle to the inborn, sturdy
democratism of the Russian nature, which boasts that "it has no nonsense
about it.'' " Be a worker, not a drone ; service and knowledge, not birth,"
is the demand made of each member of the community ; " what is he ? " not
" who is he ? " the ever ready question. Both these feelings — respect for
personal merit, contempt for claims based on the achievements of others —
are embodied in the famous apologue, The Geese, of our great fabulist,
Kryl6f, as perfect a representative and exponent of the Russian spirit,
as Lafontaine, with whom, both as writer and man, he has remarkable
affinities, was of the national French spirit. We will give the apologue
complete (in Mr. Ralston's translation) for our readers' delectation and
to complete their comprehension of the complicated subject treated in the
present chapter.

" A peasant, with a long rod in his hand, was driving some geese to a
town where they were to be sold ; and, to tell the truth, he did not treat
them over-politely. In hopes of making a good bargain, he was hastening
on so as not to lose the market-day (and when gain is concerned, geese and
men alike are apt to suflFer). I do not blame the peasant ; but the geese
talked about him in a different spirit, and, whenever they met any passers-
by, abused him to them in such terms as these :

" ' Is it possible to find any geese more unfortunate than we are ? This
mujik harasses us so terribly, and chases us about just as if we were com-
mon geese. The ignoramus does not know that he ought to pay us rever-
ence, seeing that we are the noble descendants of those geese to whom
Rome was once indebted for her salvation, and in whose honor even feast-
days were specially appointed there.'

" 'And do you want to have honor paid you on that account?' a
passer-by asked them.

" ' Why, our ancestors — -*

380 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

" ' I know that — I have read all about it ; but I want to know this— oC
what use have you been yourselves ? *

" ' Why, our ancestors saved Rome ! '

" ' Quite so ; but what have you done ? '

"•We? Nothing.'

'"Then what merit is there in you ? Let your ancestors rest in peace
— they justly received honourable reward ; but you, my friends, are only fit
to be roasted ! '

"It would be easy to make this fable still more intelligible ; but I am
afraid of irritating the geese."

Kryl6f (Ivan Andr6yevitch), who flourished under Alexander I. and
Nicolas ( 1 768-1 844), was much seen at court, where he was a greater favor-
ite with the sovereigns than with the courtiers, and often read by imperial
request his latest productions, of which the satire or pathos was brought
out by the inimitable humor of his diction. There is a literary tradition
that when he thus gave The Geese to a select and only too appreciative
audience, he read or rather spoke the two last lines as a spontaneous after-
thought, and, pausing after the first, to send a circular glance round the
company, added the second with a malice of eye and lip which did not les-
sen the number of his enemies.

BOOK VI. CHAPTER III.

Effects of the " Table of Ranks " on the Nobility — The Functionary and the
Landlord, Formerly Combined in the Person of the Dvorianln, Fre-
quently Dissevered in the Nobility of our Day — Hence Two Opposite
Tendencies : Radicalism and Tchindvnism — Revolutionary Dilettanteism
— High Society and the Aristocratic Circles — The French Language
as a Social Barrier — Cosmopolitism and Lack of Nationality.

On the Russian nobility the more than secular rule of the
" Table of Ranks " has laid an impress which not even the aboli-
tion of this oflScial hierarchy would avail to remove. The strict
dependence to which it reduced the entire nobiUty was by no
means the only result of this institution, which estranged it from
the other classes, and especially from the soil, the only natural
basis of all lasting influence. The service of the state drove the
nobility from their estates to launch them in the army or the
administration, in the cities in every case, and detained the better
part in the capitals, where alone rank and importance were at-
tainable. The rich landowner, compelled to start out on the
conquest of a tchin, left his property in the hands of stewards who
frequently ruined him by their ill management or their dishonesty.
The institution which bound the dvoricinstvo to the service of the
state thus at the same time loosened his ties to soil and hearth,
and did much to cast him adrift. The ' ' Table of Ranks ' '
robbed of all social influence the very nobility it had created.
Hence the loathing of a portion of this same tchin-hom nobility
for the parent that kept them in a perpetual nonage and forbade
all thoughts of emancipation.

According to the law, as established by Peter the Great, a
family which, for two successive generations, abstained from

381

382 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

public service, forfeited its nobiliary rights. Peter III. set the
dvorihnstvo free from this obligation. Nowadays, if most nobles
still enter service, they stay there but a short time. After a few
years of youth spent in the Guards or in a civil career, such
gentlemen as are endowed with an independent fortime devote
themselves freely to study or pleasure, to work or rest. This is
how we can at present make out two vocations, two different types
of men in the nobility, and, consequently, two parallel currents of
ideas. As not every noble landowner nowadays remains in '.' the
service," as not every public servant obtains landed property, as
well as nobility, the two qualities, the two social functions, for-
merly united and co-ordinate in the body of the dvorid,nstvo, have
now been severed and have entered a stage of more or less overt
antagonism. Since they are no longer the two aspects of one
and the same man, the landlord and the functionary, the
pomiish-tchik and the tchinbvnik occasionally become rivals.

In the great landowner, free of his time and fortune, new
aspirations are coming to light, aristocratic pretensions, more or
less discreetly advanced in the name of the rights of culture and
property, ostensibly based on conservative considerations, on the
interests of social order and the throne. In the functionary, held
in the dependence of service by lack of means, survives the old-
time spirit of the tchin^ occasionally surging up into instincts of
equality, of levelling, more or less openly acknowledged, in the
name of the rights of intellect and personal merit, and ostensibly
based on the love of progress, on the interests of the state and the
people. Of these two men, the former is naturally more of an
aristocrat, and frequently more of a liberal ; the latter more of a
democrat, but also more of a martinet.

The two rivals are both quite right : they represent and
embody two tendencies which are at odds in every society. The
one — the great landowner — ^has on his side and in his favor the
apprehensions inspired by the instability of affairs and the revolu-
tions of Western Europe ; also the conservative scares and secret

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 383

influences at court. The other — the functionary — has the advan-
tage that he represents more faithfully the national tradition and
at the same time follows the most manifest drift of modern civili-
zation. The tchiribvnik throws in the face of the landlord, with
his aristocratical pretensions, a shortness of memory as to the fact
that he himself, as a rule, holds his rights and lands only from
state service. The Russian nobility, indeed, such as it was fash-
ioned by history, is a sort of double-faced Janus : on one side the
face of the noble and landowner ; on the other the face of the
functionary or bureaucrat ; and when one face looks at itself in the
glass, it is tempted to forget ' ' the other ' ' at the back.

In the eyes of certain Russian aristocrats the bureaucrat has
grown into the natural adversary, the hereditary foe. It is him,
it is tchiribvnism, as embodied in Nicolas Miliutin, that a number
of landholders hold responsible for the sacrifices imposed on the
former lords by the liberation of the serfs. The tchinbvnik, espe-
cially of humble origin, frequently taken out of the rank of semi-
narists— the class which one of its noble adversaries scornfully
refers to as the "crimped and curled proletariate," — is the target
at which are aimed all the sarcasms of a world which yet does not
itself always keep out of the service. And yet, as a witty writer,
Samarin remarks : " The noble is just a bureaucrat in a dressing-
gown, while the bureaucrat is a noble in uniform." This his-
torical truth does not always prevent mutual envy and ill-will
between the two, although, even yet, they are often one man ; the
distinction lies between the needy tchinbvnik and the wealthy
pomiish-tchik. In the higher nobility there is a marked tendency
to restore the close union of landholder and functionary, but in a
manner the reverse of the old Moscovite tradition, i. e., by mak-
ing authority and power dependent on property, not rank and
property on state service.

The aristocracy numbers its most determined opponents
amidst the legal gentry, which would seem to be naturally sub-
servient to it. Too numerous, poor, and mixed to expect a share

384 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

of aristocratical privileges, the bulk of the nobility does not forgive
such of its members as dream of prerogatives in which all could
not share. Out of the tchin and small land gentry issued a needy
and envious nobility, a semi-cultured proletariate which civiliza-
tion has endowed with more wants and covetous longings than
means of enjoyment or instruction. In Russia, this class, the
most restless and embittered all the world over, is the offspring
of either the nobility or the clergy, and comes out of the govern-
ment ofl&ces or the church seminaries. The students who are so
fond of dazzling the eyes of the ignorant with the glitter of an
approaching golden age imshackled by property or family, are
mostly nobles ; so are nearly all the young men who go about
distributing among the peasants and laboring-men revolutionary
primers and catechisms. Nobles, too, are the emigrants or
refugees who, in the clandestine press of the interior or in the
Russian publications edited abroad, preach to their countrymen
revolution and socialism ; and nobles are the greater number of
those champions of demagogy of both sexes, at home or abroad,
who set themselves up as apostles of nihilism.

It is not only on the lower rungs of the social ladder, on the
threshold, so to speak, of official nobility, that these radical ten-
dencies confront us, but frequently much higher, in families
placed by rank or fortune above the jealousy and cupidity proper
to the lower middle classes. Nor is this merely the result of a
national propensity towards theorizing radicalism, or of the blind
and reckless generosity natural to youth, which, all over the
world, hankers after risky and advanced ideas, as those that ap-
pear to it the noblest and bravest. To look closely into the
matter, this phenomenon is not as singular as it may seem at first
sight. More than one Western coimtry might, at certain given
epochs, have supplied material for observations of the same kind.
As long as revolutionary ideas still retain something speculative
about them, as long as they have not passed the test of practice,
they easily find partisans in the midst of the very classes that are

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 385

marked for their victims. Much painful experience is needed, to
teach the young of the nobility and the bourgeoisie to resist its
inclination towards all things new, towards overbold thought and
humanitarian dreamings. Russia, until quite lately, had been
almost entirely spared these costly lessons ; but then nations,
like individuals, seldom benefit by any but their own experience.
Men who have never felt the earth quake under their feet, gaily
engage on a run amid the misty mazes of theory. On the thick ice
of northern winters, which he never heard crack beneath his tread,
the skater fearlessly indulges in the maddest flourishes. In this
respect Russian society more than once presented the same spec-
tacle as the French aristocracy just before the Revolution, so that
many of the traits in the brilliantly life-like picture presented in
Taine's Ancien Rigime apply perfectly to the society of St.
Petersburgh during the eighteenth century. There, too, the
beau nwnde for quite awhile loved to play with ideas: "good
society " juggled the more freely with the most inflammable or
explosive of them, that they were not likely to burst on the
thickly carpeted drawing-room floors, and that the walls of the
splendid private palaces held no hiding-places for combustibles.

There was another reason besides to all this boldness and reck-
lessness. The nobility, the cultivated class, while trained to the
customs and ways of thinking of Europe, could not freely practise
them after the European manner, and therefore felt constrained
and oppressed in the very country where it held so privileged a
position. Superior education only made the moral inferiority of
Russian life more keenly felt. In Russia as it was before the late
reforms, a cultivated man felt the lack of air and elbow-room ; he
easily passed from a state of morbid depression to one of no less
morbid exaltation, — from the numbness of prostration to the high
pressure of fever. True, the reforms have greatly lightened the
social atmosphere ; yet civilized man cannot always fill his lungs
to their full capacity ; he often experiences a vague and irritating

feeling of discomfort. There as everywhere else it is reserved to
25

386 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the growth and free practice of public liberties to weaken the
revolutionary spirit.

It was impossible that, in the midst of so accessible, so motley
an assemblage as this Russian dvoricinstvo, there should not be
deposited and crystallize a narrower, more exclusive society,
jealously keeping aloof from its surroundings, anxious to rise
above the plebs of the ichin, which threatened a general levelling.
In this sense, there does exist an aristocracy in Russia, based on
manners, position, family — an aristocracy of the drawing-room,
of which the members know one another not by titles and heraldic
bearings, but by connections and bringing up. For even in this
exalted sphere, so full of the consciousness of its own superiority,
caste-spirit and birth-prejudice are less controlling than in most
other monarchies. There are in it old families and families of
recent date, — large fortunes and mere competences. Birth, wealth,
position, intellect — all these, to be sure, smooth the way into this
social sanctum, but none of these things alone can open it with
unfailing key. This drawing-room aristocracy is the more exclu-
sive, or rather the more guardedly reserved, that, having no legally
determined boundaries, it is compelled to defend the line it has
itself drawn. Almost everywhere in Europe one of the results of
victorious democracy, next to the overthrow of the old landmarks,
is to. raise around * ' society ' ' gossamer barriers woven of threads
so light and delicate as to be imperceptible to the vulgar eye, and
these are of all the most indestructible. Nowhere, perhaps, does
this art of keeping up real distinctions in the midst of nominal
equality, an art, which marks distances so effectively, — nowhere
does this science of society manners and conventionalities reign
supreme as in Russia.'

' Could this not stand just as it is for a picture and explanation of Ameri-
can society, — the "upper ten thousand" of it? It is thus that, by piercing
into the essence and core of things, one gradually discovers the innumer-
able subtle affinities that are at the root of the strange and, to the unphilo-
sophical observer, puzzling sympathy which mutually draws two seemingly so
different countries as Russia and America.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 387

The Russian nobility prides itself on its culture and takes pleas-
ure in referring to itself as "the cultivated class;" the "upper
crust ' ' improves on this claim and pushes culture to the verge of
hyper-refinement. The very manner in which European civiliza-
tion was introduced into Russia laid it open to a twofold danger :
it could not but remain for a long time an alien and a surface
thing. These two defects were historically unavoidable, and the
national bent, the aristocratic instincts, the desire to operate a
reaction against the tchin^ intensified and confirmed them. The
more imminently the dominant class was threatened with a flood
of parvenus, the more it strove to keep them at a distance ; the
easier official assimilation, the harder social assimilation was made
to them. Thence the great importance attached to foreign
languages, especially to French.

French in Russia was not so much an instrument of study, a
means of instruction, as a sign of higher education. It was the
polished language, that of society and the drawing-room, the
standard and test of culture and " tone." For this, it was not
sufficient to understand French and speak it like any foreign
language ; purity of accent, ease of elocution, were accounted
essentials ; for French was before and above everything else a
shibboleth, a token of social free-masonry, a barrier to keep in-
truders out. No society, no aristocracy legally open to all, could
possibly barricade itself more efficiently. French became a sort
of society passport, without which no naturalization papers could
be obtained in the higher circles. There would have been no
great harm in that, but for the fact that the habitual use of a
foreign language became the sign and symbol of foreign habits,
ideas, and afiectations.

In the spheres naturally the most aristocratic, this anti-national
craze, confirmed and transmitted by heredity, threatened to develop
into a constitutional taint. The high and middling nobility, the
cultivated class, prompted by fashion, "tone," ("good form" it
would be called now), by exclusivism, widened the chasm that

388 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

separated it from the masses, not perceiving that it was aggravat-
ing the disease of modem Russia, not realizing that, for classes as
well as individuals, isolation means weakness. With face forever
turned toward the frontier, Russian society ended by not seeing
Russia any more, or, at all events, not comprehending her. Open
to every breath from the West, it grew cosmopolitan and lived as
an alien in its own native land, somewhat after the fashion of an
European colony in the midst of barbarians. By sheer contact with
the West.by dint of dyeing and anointing itself with imported ideas,
the man of the world lost all trace of national coloring ; his suc-
cess in society was in proportion as the Russian was most com-
. pletely obliterated in him. Brought up by French or German
tutors, in ignorance or contempt of all that was indigenous, the
heir of the Moscovite boyhrs came to look on his father's tongue
as a boors' dialect, or rather patois. * ' I have been married twenty-
five years," said a Russian gentleman to me, " and I am not sure
that I have addressed my wife in Russian twice." The time is
not so far behind us, when almost any well-bred man might have
said as much. This contempt for the Russian people was extended
to the Russian books, which was a great hindrance to the growth
of the young national literature, — a drawback which, added to the
craze of servile imitation, accounts for its prolonged, pallid infancy.*

'So far from being overdrawn, this sketch gives an inadequate idea of the
state of things it depicts and of which even we of my generation were the
victims in childhood, especially the girls. No faidt was so severely punished
as a word spoken in Russian to anybody but the servants. The discovery of
a book of Zola in a convent cell could scarcely cause greater horror and com-
motion than that of an inoflfensive Russian book in a schoolgirl's room. I
myself learned Russian when I was about ten or eleven, fluently using
French, German, Italian, and English, and spoke it at first with a purely
French accent which was the delight of my elders, and which only my own
common-sense made me feel ashamed and get rid of, to their great concern.
I was just past twenty when I discovered my country, my people, their his-
tory, and literature. It was on returning fiom an almost life-long residence
abroad, in the middle of the sixties, when I found our national Renaissance
in full swing. The revelation was dazzling and my intense joy in it only
comparable to my sorrow — remorse it could not be, not being my own doing
— for the time and all I had lost.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 389

The nobility at length felt how debilitating for Russian civiliza-
tion, especially for the so-called, "cultivated class," was this
unnatural denationalization and this superficial cosmopolitism.
Already under Nicolas a marked reaction took place in literature,
in public opinion, in private feeling, although not yet in the ideas
and manners, and, like all reactions, it soon tipped over to the
opposite extreme. Under the influence of the Slavophils, the
Russian name, the Russian language, the Russian man were
restored to honor. Some fanatics or eccentrics, like the poet
Khomiak6f, went the length of parading the sleeveless armihk and
the kafthn. Nationality, so long scorned and trodden down, became
universally glorified. Fashion and the readiness of society to take
up ' ' crazes ' ' had much to do with this sudden revulsion. But
even where conversion is sincerest it is often unenlightened and
inconsistent. After having so long held aloof and played at cos-
mopolitism, the higher classes could not all in a moment divest
themselves of the second nature which they had so laboriously
cultivated. After having kept themselves estranged from the
people for a century and a half, they could not clear at one bound
the chasm which they had so long and patiently dug with their
own hands.

And now the two uneven halves of the nation are still morally
estranged, to their mutual harm and that of the country and of
civilization. There are only two ways out of such a situation.
One is to recognize officially, to sanction legally the scission of the
two classes, by placing the one under the other's guardianship.
The other is to create an intermediate class for the purpose of
bringing the other two together and serving as link between them.
Of these two alternatives, the first has in its favor the aristocratical
theories and artificial combinations which, in one or other form,
tend to place the people under the exclusive control of the nobility
and of the landlords ; the other has for it the facts, the drift of
civilization, and the natural creation of a middle class, a bourgeoisie,
of which the nucleus is already formed.

BOOK VI. CHAPTER IV.

Personal Privileges of the Nobles, and Prerogatives of their Order — What
Emancipation has Taken from the Nobles besides Landed Property —
The Dvoridnstvo Threatened with Gradual Expropriation — How, though
not Despoiled, it Practically Lost all its Privileges — Importance of the
Prerogatives Conferred on the " Nobiliary Assemblies " by Catherine II.
— Why they did not Manage to Benefit by them — Has Russia the Ele-
ments of a Political Aristocracy ?

A NOBILITY can have two kinds of privileges : personal, which
each noble enjoys individually ; collective, belonging to all the
nobles as a body. The law awards the Russian dvorictnstvo
prerogatives of both kinds, both greatly reduced in our day by
the extension of public liberty. The nobiUty, as a rule, has not
been despoiled of its rights ; but that which was the privilege of
one class has become the right of all. Its prerogatives, collective
or personal, the dvoricLnstvo held not from the will of the rest of
the nation, nor from its own achievements or ancestral conquests,
but wholly and entirely as a gift of sovereign bounty, and they
were all comparatively recent still when they were extended to
the rest of the nation. Before Catherine II. the nobility had no
sort of corporative rights, and if the nobles did claim some indi-
vidual rights, they were ill-defined and ill-observed.

The nobles were not only, like all the rest, subject to the
sovereign's will and pleasure ; there was no coarse fireak of whim
or impertinent fancy which the sovereigns or their favorites
scrupled to indulge in at the expense of members of the most
illustrious families. The reign of Anna Iv^novna and Biron is
full of instructive anecdotes to the point. The inheritors of the
greatest names could be compelled to play clown for the delec-

390

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 39I

tation of the court. One day, wishing to punish a Prince Galitsyn
for some trifling misdemeanor, the Empress Anna ordered him to
personate a hen, and the descendant of the Yagellons actually had
publicly to squat on a heap of straw and make believe to hatch
eggs, imitating the clucking of a sitting hen. Another time her
fit of pleasantry was not so harmless, when she forced the same
Galitsyn to wed an idiotic old woman. Such freaks show what
respect, what authority the high nobility enjoyed in the middle of
the eighteenth century, under the reign of the very princess whose
power those same Galitsyns and the Dolgor^kis had at one time
attempted to limit in favor of a kind of oligarchy.

Up to the last reforms of the reign of Alexander II. the nobles
were in the personal enjoyment of only three main privileges, and
even these they had long shared with the so-called ' ' privileged
classes," i. e., with the clergy and the merchants. They were ,
exempt from military conscription, from direct or poll-taxes, and h
from corporal chastisement. Of these three immunities the first
fell away in 1876, when universal military service was introduced ;
the last has been extended to all classes ; the second also has
already ceased to be a privilege, the abolition of the poll-tax
having been decided on by Alexander III. For the mujik as well
as for the noble landowner, a property tax is to be substituted to
the tax on persons. The Russian nobility has no immunity from
taxes. In the times of serfdom, the poll-tax indirectly fell on
the nobility, who were responsible for their serfs, and now that
their estates are curtailed by the emancipation, they are directly *
subject to taxation. The burdens that weigh on the noble land-
owners are even now, it is true, less heavy than those borne by the
peasant communes ; but this difference comes partly from the
difference in the constitution of property, partly from a just con-
sideration for the interests of the nobility, which has been sorely
tried by the emancipation itself and the succeeding period of
transition. As to the exemption from corporal punishments, now
extended to all classes, two things astonish one : that it should so

392 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

long have been a privilege, and that the nobility should have ac«
quired it so late. Scarcely a century did it rejoice in it, and it
was put in possession of it only some twenty years sooner than the
town-merchants. It was Peter III., Catherine II's husband and
predecessor, who, in 1762, delivered it from the cudgel and the
knut. As long, however, as the rods were not suppressed for all,
even the noble was not wholly safe from them. To make him
liable to corporal chastisement, nothing more was needed than a
condemnation which degraded him from his nobiliary rights, or
an order to serve in the army as common soldier.

In the same way as the immunity from corporal punishment,
the greatest part of the rights and privileges ensured by the code
to the nobility are of a nature to be easily extended to all the
other classes of the nation, which shows that they were not, in
reality, nobiliary prerogatives, but only freemen's rights, such as
a civilized country recognizes as belonging to all its inhabitants.
The dvorianiriy says the law, cannot be, without a trial, deprived of
life, or of the rights belonging to his class, nor yet of his posses-
sions. Such articles of the law help one to comprehend the
notions about nobility of such Slavs as have remained untouched
by the passion of imitating the aristocratic West. The Serbs, for
instance, since their deliverance from the Ottoman yoke, take
pride in saying that all Serbs are now noble, which means — free-
men. In this sense, the Russians will soon all be nobles too.

The real, substantial privilege of the Russian nobility, that
which, belonging to that class alone, gave it a distinctive charac-
ter, was the right of owning " inhabited lands," i. e., lands peo-
pled with serfs. The efliancipation has carried away that privilege
along with serfdom, but could not quite obliterate the traces of
what had existed for nearly three centuries. To this prerogative
the nobility owed, down to our day, the almost exclusive monopoly
of landed property, individual and hereditary. The day after the
emancipation there were, outside of the lands it retained in its
hands, only those just made over to the emancipated peasants,

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 393

and the immense ' ' state demesnes. ' ' In every-day language the
term "landlord" — pomihh-tchik — is still synonymous with
"noble," — dvorianln. It is from this quality of individual land-
lord that the dvorihnstvo derives one of its chief claims on the
sympathies of Western countries, where the same mode of land
tenure is customary. Compared to the mujik, who merely has
the use of collective property, the pomiish-tchik may be looked on
as the representative of personality, of modem individualism, as
well as of European culture. It is also from the same sotuce that,
in renovated Russia, the nobility derives its importance as well as
its claims. It has to-day what it lacked in the Middle Ages : a
basis of influence in the soil ; and it is on this relatively recent
basis that the theorizing partisans of hierarchy would like to rise,
for the good of the richer nobility, a sort of landed aristocracy.
What is needed to give such views as these a chance of success, to
insure, in this rural and agricultural country, the rule of the great
landlord, the noble pomihh-tchik f In the first place, property \
should be more stable and the monopoly of it should be guaran-
teed to the nobility in the future as it was in the past. Now there
is nothing of the kind. With serfdom and the designation ' ' inhab-
ited lands," fell the only barrier which defended the noble land- \
lord against the encroachments of the other classes. /

But for this protection, but for this sort of legal prohibition, the
greater part of the land would have slipped from the dvorihnstvo* s
hold long ago, — as proved by the burdened condition of landed
property on the very eve of the emancipation. In 1859, nigh on \
two thirds of it ( AV) were mortgaged in the lombards, as the state \
credit institutions are called, and the remaining third was in great )
part mortgaged to private persons. Had there been in Russia at
the moment of the abolition of serfdom, a nimierous and wealthy
middle class, the first order of the state would have been despoiled of
the greater portion of its estates. As it was, the absence of competi-
tion, the scarcity of available capital, the penury of the peasants
—all these favorable conditions did not avail to maintain it in

394 7Wj5 empire of the tsars and the RUSSIANS.

the possession of all the lands that were not taken from it legally.
It has been calculated that the nobility lost one fourth of its
estates since the emancipation, — in some provinces even more.
The Emperor Alexander III., to help them out, instituted a special
bank, which lends on land at reduced rates of interest. Unfor-
tunately, such facilities often prove ruinous temptations : the
easier to borrow, the deeper the nobility gets into debt.

There is then already a noticeable tendency in landed property
to change hands, to the prejudice of the dvorihnstvo. To rescue
its old land monopoly, there is really but one thing to do : to
entail the lands and thus make them inalienable. The expedient
would be unfailing, and there have been men bold enough to pro-
pose it. But such a proceeding applied to the totality or generality
of private estates would only tend to propagate the inconveniences
inseparable from entails and to paralyze property, capital, in fact
the country. Individuals may yield to the temptation of placing
their name and their descendants beyond the reach of ruin and
above the chances of competition ; a modem government will
never allow one class to insure to itself for all time the possession
of the soil. And yet, in Russia as elsewhere, the legal and indis-
soluble bond of entail is the one thing that can insure to the
nobility this exclusive possession. No longer protected against
itself and others by the impossibility of selling to members of
another class, nor by the system of succession, the Russian nobility
|/is threatened with slow expropriation in favor of a middle class
or of the peasantry, both of which lay hands on a larger share of
the lands each year at its expense ; and, together with the monop-
oly of individual land-holding, it will lose its distinctive character,
all social preponderance, — nay, all reason for existing at all. *

* Another thing contributes to lessen the influence of the nobility : it is
the small number of wealthy landlords residing on their own estates. So
that certain political writers with aristocratical tendencies — Prince Miesh-
tchersky for example, — while claiming the principal local functions for the
landed nobility of each gjiven district, propose, more or less seriously, that
the nobles should be bound to reside on their lands during a certain portion
of each year.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 395

After the ancient prerogatives have fallen off one by one, or
degenerated into fictions, what will remain to this nobility, shorn
of privileges, to distinguish it from the rest of the nation ? Very
little. So little, that the question obtrudes itself: what woidd the
nobles lose if the nobility were to be suppressed ? Nobody inten-
tionally raised a hand against it ; nobody thought of despoiling
it in any way ; yet the dvorihnstvo saw nearly all its rights drop
from it — by the mere fact of the changes that took place around it.
The nobility practically found itself abrogated by the reforms of
Alexander II. , without being so much as mentioned by name. If
it is still standing, it is as the tree stands, around whose foot the soil
has been dug up, touching its roots by mistake, so that it finds no
support in the loosened earth against the first gust of storm wind.
Nobility will end, in Russia as in other countries, by being a mere
honorary distinction, without social importance or political mean-
ing, a bauble to flatter vanity, with value all the smaller for being
more common and having fewer external signs to facilitate mutual^
recognition. In reality the dvorianln has only one personal privi- \\
lege left, that of enjoying certain facilities for entering the service /
of the state and for making his way therein more rapidly.* To
this latter advantage the nobility will perhaps cling the more
tenaciously that the others are slipping from them. Despoiled of
their prerogatives and threatened with expropriation, the im-
poverished dvorihnstvo will have no other refuge left but their
original cradle — state service and tchin. And even on this
ground, the privileges still accorded them by law and custom
will gradually fall away before the levelling of culture or the
demands of equality. Service, like other careers, will have no

* This privilege draws after it another analogous one — ^that of getting
their children admitted into certain educational establishments, such as
the Alexander Lyceum in SL Petersburgh, or the Smolnoy Institute of
Noble Damsels. In 1880 the Alexander I^yceum, until then reserved for
the more ancient portion of the nobility, was thrown open to the entire
dvorihnstvo, i. e., to the children of all state functionaries of a certain
rank.

39^ THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

rights left, only favors ; no advantages save such as everywhere
go with credit and position.*

Personal privileges, inherent to the individual and the family,
may constitute a nobility ; but it needs common prerogatives,
exercised in a body by the entire class of nobles, to make an
aristocracy. Of such prerogatives the dvoridnstvo, though weak,
possessed several — important ones, too. True, they were no
bequest of a remote past, nor a revered survival of ancient
national customs, but only an imitation of foreign things, a tardy
copy of already antiquated models. Nothing of the kind was
known to old Russia, where the servants of the state had no
rights save such as they derived from the service itself. As their
personal privileges, so their corporative rights were a gracious,
free concession from the crown. This, again, was Catherine's
doing. Carried away by the liberal spirit of the end of the
eighteenth century, in the interval between the American War
of Independence and the French Revolution, she endowed the
Russian nobility with novel rights and made over to that class,
the only cultivated one at the time, the only one capable of exer-
cising some political discretion, an important part in the adminis-
tration of justice. Until this date there were nobles in Russia,
but there was no corporate nobility. Catherine was the first to
organize the dvorihnstvo into provincial corporations, with a view
to fiirthering administrative self-government. That was not a
solitary innovation. What she did for the nobility, she did at
intervals for other classes also, notably for the cities and the
town-classes. She aimed at uniting the various parts of the
nation into compact groups, organized bodies, having common

* In the meantime, a thing that always strikes one in Russia is the great
number of persons bearing the same name whom one encounters in all
official positions. So that there are some fifty — perhaps hundred — families,
forming a sort of bureaucratic oligarchy, whose names reappear these many
years on almost every page of the military, diplomatic, administrative
annuaries. This, however, is a natural consequence of absolute monarchy
cmd court influences.

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 397

interests and animated with one spirit, intending to call on them
to take part in local affairs, each in its sphere, in the only way
in which a nation's participation in its own government was
understood at the time — by class, order, corporation.

What caused the failure of this noble attempt ? First and fore-
most, the incapacity of the various classes to make use of the
rights conceded to them. In order to get any benefit out of these
corporative privileges, one thing was absolutely necessary : the
corporate spirit {esprit de corps) y and in that all classes were equally
lacking. The scant results of the nobiliary assemblies is accounted
for in the same way as the failure of merchant guilds and corpora-
tions of laboring men. They none of them knew how to form a
body, with an instinct of cohesion and a feeling of solidarity, exer-
cising co-ordinate rights in view of common aims, and pursuing
through generations a well defined political or social object. Nor
did the nobility, any more than the other classes, know how to
form a living organism, animated with a traditional spirit of its
own, binding together its own members and at the same time dis-
tinct from that of the other classes. Such a thing might be found
on Russian territory in the Polish nobility of the western prov-
inces, or the German nobility of the Baltic provinces — never in
Great-Russia, in the native, national nobility — never, at any time.
The spirit of caste, of class, is so repugnant to the Russian nature,
that it has remained closed hitherto against even the most ele-
mentary esprit de corps.

The patent or charter given by Catherine II. invested the
dvorihnstvo with considerable rights : of calling together periodi-
cal assemblies ; of making itself heard of the Crown at any
time by means of petitions ; of nominating most of the local func-
tionaries and judges. In any other coimtry such prerogatives
would have resulted in a conflict with the Crown or served as
starting-point for an aristocratic constitution. In Russia — nothing
of the sort. For nigh on a century the nobility of each govern-
ment has gone on assembling, electing its presidents or marshals,

398 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

designating functionaries and magistrates, doing police duty,
without giving any of Catherine's successors the slightest cause for
uneasiness, without ever encroaching on the sovereign's absolute
power. The dvorihnstvo had neither tendencies of its own nor
traditional views to put in practice ; the functionaries appointed
by the nobles did not, in the exercise of their duties, act as
representatives of their class. All these isprhvniks (chiefs of
police) and other local administrators did not embody the spirit
of a class, nor consider themselves in any way responsible to their
electors ; if they did show special zeal to please some, it was only
such as were influential. To the central authority they were
tools as devoted and docile as the functionaries directly appointed
by it. So that any hopes that may have been cherished to coun-
teract through this institution the excessive influence of the
bureaucracy were deceived. Russia in this case yielded a striking
illustration of the ine£&ciency of institutions which are not rooted
in a country's customs, of the inanity of political forms and pubUc
liberties unsupported by the public spirit.

The recent creation of assemblies in which all the classes of
the nation are represented naturally robbed the special assemblies
of the nobility of nearly all their prerogatives ; but in these new
provincial estates, the z^mstvo of district or government, the
nobility, as a rule, retains a decided preponderance. It is, as we
shall see, to their marshal that belongs the right of presiding at
these gatherings of the different classes ; it is the landholders, the
former serf holders, who by number and position, exert over them
an overbalancing influence. While reducing the nobility's direct
privileges, the extension of public liberties has in reality enlarged
its sphere of action. No one disputes its claim to be entitled the
controlling class ; its attributions have gone on multiplying along
with the institutions ; a place has been reserved to it in all the
new creations. The government appeals to it both as the
cultivated and as the conservative class. Alexander II., as far
back as 1874, solemnly invited it to constitute itself the guardian

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 399

of popular instruction. Alexander III. has done more : he
restored to it, in 1889, a direct influence over the rural adminis-
tration and the peasant communes, by creating ' * rural canton
chiefs," invested with both administrative and judicial ftmctions,
to be appointed by the governor, with the concurrence of the
marshals, out of the noble landowners of the district. Nihilism
has turned out profitable to the dvorihnstvo. In the war waged
against the conspirators, Alexander III., like his father, has
more than once called on the nobility for co-operation. What
will come of it all ? One thing is certain : no rights conceded to
the nobiUty can transform the time-honored character of the class.
No matter what they are and how broadened, such privileges are
not going to turn from its way the historical march of Russian
society. In this respect apprehension and hope are equally vain
and illusory.

An examination of the present and a study of the past lead to
the same conclusion. There is in Russia a nobility of a kind ;
there is no aristocracy, and it is not at this time of day that one can
be created. There is a nobility as ancient, as illustriSu^'Scf'aiiy if
considered in its great families, and, considered as a whole, as
civilized, as enlightened as any in Europe, the most open-minded
of all, the freest from prejudice, the most exempt of arrogance or
caste-spirit, and at the same time the most mixed and motley, the
most devoid of tradition, of common life, and esprit de corps.
This dvorihnstvo, lacking in homogeneousness and coherence, is
totally wanting in the qualities as well as the defects of aristocra-
cies. Is it for good ? Is it for evil ? That matters little ; it is a
fact : the rest has merely a speculative interest. There is no aris-
tocracy in Russia ; there are individual aristocrats. There are
men who consider a hierarchical basis to be the only solid founda-
tion for societies to rest on. You hear it said and asserted, in a
certain sphere, that an aristocracy is as essential to the social body
as bones are to the human body, and that the best support for an
hereditary monarchy is an hereditary privileged class. In all this

400 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

there may be some truth. But, in order to be to a society a frame-
work and skeleton, an aristocracy must have its strength in itself,
in its organism, its traditions. How can a state or a throne lean on
supports which draw all their strength from favors bestowed by
that throne and the laws of the state ?

And those men who, in Russia, represent the nobility as the
natural support of the monarchy, fall into another and peculiar
mistake : they misapprehend the nature of the sovereign power
as well as the character of the nobility in their own country. Be-
tween dvorihnstvo and tsarism there never was any bond but that
of service, — never any intimacy, afl&nities, family ties, as have else-
where existed between sovereign and nobility. The theory or fic-
tion of a king, first among peers, first gentleman of his kingdom,
is absolutely foreign to Russian manners and tradition both.
The Tsar properly belongs to no order in the state ; he is neither
noble nor burgher, neither urban nor rural. Autocracy always
has kept outside and above all classes. Therein lie some of the
historical motives of its force and popularity ; it never could
descend from this height without being untrue to its traditional
mission and weakening itself.

An aristocracy is not the sort of building to be constructed at
will, on a marked out spot, after a given plan ; nature herself
must have disposed the location and cut and trimmed the materials.
These materials the Russian aristocrats are compelled to seek
amongst the great landlords, the dvorihnstvo, as a whole, being
manifestly unavailable for such a construction. Under Alexander
II. and now under Alexander III., in the very midst of all the
transformations of our times, the political builders have been busy
setting up all sorts of plans for social reconstruction. Some of
these plans and devices are very ingenious and do very well on
paper ; we shall come across several as we study local institutions
and administration. Unfortimately the social status is indepen-
dent of library combinations, however skilful, — of governments,
however great their authority. Political calculations and reason

NOBILITY AND TCHIN. 4OI

itself have little hold on it ; it is altogether at the mercy of the
national genius and the spirit of the age.

Now in Russia, manners, traditions, popular instinct, combine
in loudly opposing the restoration of an hereditary privileged class.
The entire Russian literature bears witness thereto, although it is
almost wholly the work of nobles, written by and for nobles. The
antiquity of race is a very feeble claim on the respect of the posi-
tive-minded realistic Russian. All class distinctions notwith-
standing, he has remained free from caste-spirit, and has not the
inborn awe of birth with which the German and Englishman are
imbued. '

The promoters of hierarchical ideas in Russia fall in reality
into the same blunder as the promoters of radical ideas. Aristo-
crats and demagogues merely, though unconsciously, ape the
West. Both insist on applying to national problems borrowed solu-
tions ; both undertake to trick out their own country after foreign
fashions. The great difference between them lies in this : that
the aristocratical conservatives have chosen the model which is
least adaptable to the national ways and clashes most with the
new tendencies. If it is easy to discover, in such or such old
institutions of England or Prussia, such or such conservative
guaranties, it is not so easy to take from foreign countries, to en-
dow one's own with, what nature or history have withheld from it.
It is with social forms as with the soil, as with a country's natu-
ral structure. While racing across his flat steppes of the south
or jogging through his peaty woods of the north, a Russian may
think how much variety high hills would add to the scenery and
to agriculture, what capital bulwarks against the winds, what ex-
cellent reservoirs of moisture a few chains of snow-capped moun-
tains would make, — but it will not enter into his head to go and
raise hills and construct mountain chains. Yet such is the pre-
tension of men who, in a society denuded of privileges and rolled
level by centuries, flatter themselves with the idea that they can
' See the Appendix to the preceding chapter.

•6

402 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

construct steep summits and dig impassable ravines and chasms,
i. e., revive a privileged class and put prerogatives on their feet
again.

Between Russia and France there is greater similarity in this
respect than would seem : in both, it is outside of class privileges
and artificial combinations, it is down in the depths of the nation's
consciousness, that a conservative basis must be sought for. Only
in Russia, where equality as yet is not so much in the customs and
culture as in the national instinct and the logic of facts, where the
old-time framework of society is still outwardly kept up, the delu-
sion of aristocratic day-dreams is at once more excusable and not
as harmless.

BOOK VII.
THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION.

CHAPTER I.

Russian I/iterature and the Apotheosis of the Mujik — Various Classes of
Peasants — Origin and Causes of Serfdom — Labor Dues and the Obrdk —
Situation of the Peasants before Emancipation — Napoleon III., I<ib-
erator of the Serfs.

On one of the Paris stages a French piece has been played of
late — a play of Russian manners and Russian authorship — original
and incomplete, a play which was favorably received by the French
public, although it is not likely to have been really comprehended :
I mean The Danishefs.^ This comedy, or, more truly, drama,
which depicts Russian society prior to the emancipation, has a
peasant for hero, and its subject may be said to be the moral pre-
eminence of the mujik. The nobility, conceited and frivolous, —
the clergy, dependent and cringing, — the merchant, newly enriched
and servile, — cut a poor figure by the side of the man of the
people, the quondam serf Ossip. " This man is great, this man
is worth more than we are, mother," the young Count Danishef
says of him. These words give the keynote to the piece. The con-
clusion to which we are led, perhaps unconsciously, by this rustic
drama, is the apotheosis of the man of the people to the detriment
of the classes privileged by birth, knowledge, or fortune. From

* This play, whose author signs himself " Nevsky," was rehandled for
the stage, as everybody knows, by Alexandre Dumas.

403

404 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

this point of view, the comedy played at the Od6on, though writ-
ten for the French and in their language, belongs by rights to
contemporary Russian literature. To use the word of a humorist,
Russian literature just now " reeks of the peasant " ; the mujik is
its hero, and has been for the last thirty years. At first sight, this
strikes us as a singular anomaly ; on closer inspection, the thing
explains itself.

In a state almost entirely rural, such as Russia still is, the
peasant forms the most important as well as the most numerous
class of the nation. There, more than elsewhere, the workers of
the soil embody the country's fund of nationalism. When brought
. fece to face with the comparative insignificance of the towns and
urban population, the peasantry still is the nation — or appears to
/"Be by comparison. Yet the being who fills so large a place has
\ long been scorned and uncomprehended by a higher class trained
to foreign manners and ways of thinking. The reaction of the
national spirit against the superficial cosmopolitism of the last
century, the rehabilitation of nationality in art, literature, politics,
were bound to benefit, in the first place, the peasant, as being the
Russian man^ar excellence. This people of the fields and woods,
/ a people of serfs, so long a target for all that weened themselves
\ above it to spurn and hit at, all at once found itself studied in its
\ ways and customs, its songs and beliefs. Finding in the higher
Vclasses only colorless reflections or commonplace copies of foreign
tilings, the Russians suddenly felt very happy on discovering, in
their own niral people, originality, character, individuality. De-
lighted at having at last found her own self again under all her
borrowed finery, Russia took to admiring herself in the most rug-
ged of her children, her most legitimate representative — the peas-
, "aint. For a large proportion of a hyper-refined society, the serf,
but just set free, the ignorant villager, imwashed, coarse, became
an object of infatuation and enthusiasm, of respect and veneration.
The mujik — the Russian Man, — but lately considered undeserving
of a glance, saw himself hoisted on to an altar, and the homage

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 405

rendered by his devotees of to-day — ^his contemners of yesterday
— ^has not always been free from superstition and fetishism.
Fashion naturally could not remain a stranger to the success of
this new worship, which, amidst its devotees, numbers some
hypocrites. In this, as a rule, realistic country, men habitually
unbelieving and sceptical turned up amidst the most zealous
sectators, the most intolerant priests of the new dispensation.
True, this religion, like so many others, often remains a thing
of the brain and the imagination, and the idol might not unfre-
quently complain of the irreverence with which its most fervent
worshippers, in theory, treat it in practice.

This apotheosis of the mujik — the boor, the clodhopper — can
be accoimted for by reasons proper to Russia, and others, taken ^.^
from the social status of Europe. As people did in France before i
the Revolution, a number of Russians profess the doctrine that it |
is by returning to the people's simple life, by quaffing invigorat-
ing draughts at the fount of uprightness and all popular virtues,
that the higher classes of society will recover moral vigor and
health, will become purified of the corruption with which contact
with the West has infected them.* The mystical panegyrists of
the mujik do not perceive that they are unconsciously renewing,
for their country's benefit, one of the old, old themes of the French
eighteenth century, returning to the doctrines of Rousseau and the
guileless belief in the perfections of ' ' the natural man. ' ' In Rus-
sia such tendencies come from a secret discouragement, an invol-
untary humility of the cultured classes, and a great national pride,
a blind faith in the native energies and the people's future. Men
who have grown sick and tired of aping the foreigners, and who
feel that they have incapacitated themselves, for a long time to

* Thus the great novelists, Tolstoy and Dostoyefsky. The latter queries,
in A Writer's Diary (February, 1876) : "Which is better, the people or
we ? Is it desirable that the people should take examples from us, or we
from the people ? I must answer in all sincerity : it is for us to bow down
before the people, to take from it both idea and form, to acknowledge and
adore its genuineness."

406 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

come, from doing anything but assimilating what others have done,
— men perforce resigned to their own impotence and all the more
ambitious for their country, have come, through lassitude and
irritation at their own inability to accomplish more, to glorify that
element which has remained free from all outside contact, whose
powers are as yet untried, which is new, intact, unpolluted, — in
one word, the popular force. Hence this adoration of the uncul-
tivated by the cultivated man, these kneelings and salutations of
lettered and informed men before the armid.k and the tuliip — the
peasant's sheepskin.

" We civilized men, we are nothing but old rags ; but the peo-
ple— oh, the people is great ! " exclaims one of Turgu^nief's person-
ages, in Smoke. Struck with the comparative sterility of the
controlling classes, these disillusioned sons of Western civilization
turn their backs on it and their faces to the mujik. With glad
admiration they contemplate this Russian people, still dumb and
uncouth in its swaddling-clothes, — this people which covers the
widest habitable region of the world, which, in numbers, is already
now ahead of every other Christian nation on the globe. With
this compact mass of over fifty or sixty million peasants before
them, the patriots take to dreaming of the future as a mother or
nurse beside a cradle. For this people still in its infancy, still
crude and unlettered, they dream of an intellectual greatness, a
moral place in the world proportionate to its bulk and the immen-
sity of its empire.* This people of peasants is like a gigantic ^^'g
as yet unopened. One does not know what will come out of it, but
one naturally expects something huge, because, in spite of the fable,
it seems as though the mountain ought to give birth to something
more than the ' ' ridiculous mouse. ' ' One understands the instinc-
tive respect, the semi-religplous reverence of the Russian before this

* " You have only to look on a world's map to be filled with awe before
Russia's future destinies," wrote Nadi^jdin as early as 1831. "Can such a
colossus have been upreared for no purpose by the wisdom of the Creator? "
(Fragment from the Telescope, quoted by P^pin in his Studies of the Rus-
sian Nationality. — European Messenger ( Viistnik Evrdpy), June, 1882,

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 407

incubation, proceeding in mystery and gloom, and on which hang
all the destinies of his native land.

The Russians are fain to look to the mujik for a new departure,
a political or social revelation, a renovation of Europe and man-
kind. The seers and prophets, who announce his greatness, can
prophesy the more freely what this popular sphinx will say, will
do, that he has not yet opened his mouth and is not yet awake.
Certainly, such soaring hopes cannot prove free from illusion.
Not the less, however, we have there a mystery, an occult riddle,
which interests civilization very highly, and if patriotism, by dint
of meditating over it, somewhat overleaps sober reason, it is to be
excused.

Thus, for one portion of the lettered classes, the man of the
people is an unconscious deity, similar to those infant gods, the
embryonic gods of Egypt, whose divine force is all in posse still,
whose latent energies are adored before they have had a chance
of manifesting themselves. For another school, the man of the
people, the peasant, is merely a sort of raw material, of human
first matter, a potter's clay having no form but that given to it by
the higher classes.* It is needless to demonstrate what those two
points of view have in common, and wherein both overreach the
mark. If literature in Russia has got very near to the people, it
too often approached it with preconceived views, seeking in it
only what it was determined to find. Some fancied that they
could discover in the hidden depths of the popular mind latent
forces which they opposed to the barrenness of the vaunted culture
of the higher classes ; others, more scornful or more superficial,
could see in the people's soul nothing but darkness and barbar-

* This was the view of one of the most distinguished defenders of aris-
tocratic tendencies, General Fadi^yef. In opposition to the higher classes,
the nobility, which he habitually refers to as "the cultivated layer," he
usually designates the people under the names of " elementary force,"
"plastic matter," "protoplasm," And this elementary force he considers
as being one and the same in all countries, and everywhere devoid of any
spirit of its own, everywhere incapable of spontaneous development.

408 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

ism, emptiness and nothingness. In practical life views concern-
ing the peasant clash quite as much and we encounter the same
diflferences as in the literary world. ' ' Why in the world should you
be interested in our mujik f " I was asked by a lady on the Lower
Volga. " He is a brute of whom you never will make a man."
And the same day, on the same steamer, a gentleman-landholder
was saying to me with a conviction just as firm : " The most in-
telligent peasant in Europe is, to my mind, the contadino of
Northern Italy ; but our mujik could give him points. ' ' Thus
extolled by some, contemned by others, the Russian peasant's
place really should be where Pascal would have placed man in
general : neither so high up, nor so low down.

The mujik' s intelligence is not a matter of doubt, and his pane-
gyrists are perhaps nearer the truth than his detractors ; but this
intelligence has been hampered and heavily handicapped by the
course of events. There is in the Russian legends a giant of
prodigious strength, a sort of rustic Hercules or Samson, Iliy^ of
Mtirom by name, often regarded as an impersonation of the people,
the peasant.* This popular colossus could not, for a long while,
show his power and genius. Iliy^ was in bondage. For years
he was attached to the glebe and could neither walk nor other-
wise act freely. Now that the emancipation has knocked off his
fetters, the giant can move once more ; but, after being so long
weighed down with chains, he has not yet recovered the free use
of his limbs, and has lost the consciousness of his strength. It is
only after years of freedom, possibly after several generations, that
this so lately enslaved people will learn to know itself and will
show what the futiu-e has to expect from it. The peasant, with
back still bent under the servitude of years, could not straighten
himself all at once ; through the freeman of to-day the serf of
yesterday still shows.

The emancipation has been for Russia an event of capital im-

* See The Songs of the Russian People, by Mr. Ralston, and Alfired
Rambaud's La Russie j^pique.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 409

port, an event unmatched by anything in the history of nations ;
for in all, serfdom has died out gradually. The emancipation has
been the starting-point of numerous changes and reforms in the
entire domain of the nation's life ; but this great revolution could
not, in a few years, yield all its fruits. It was the less to be ex-
pected that, in reality, this vast operation is not altogether com-
pleted even yet ; it is being carried on still, and will not come to
an end before the first years of the twentieth century. Until then
a study of the free peasant is inseparably linked to that of serfdom
and the conditions of his enfranchisement.

The emancipation, the work of Alexander II., has benefited'

only about one half of the peasants of the empire. The others,

known as " Crown peasants," and settled on the demesnes of the

State, were considered as free, although they, too, were attached

to the soil and were virtually serfs of the emperor or the State.

The great bulk of the peasants was thus divided into two classes,

nearly equal in number, and which, even after the emancipation,

have remained separate and distinct. On one side, the free or_

" Crown " peasants ; on the other, private peasants or serfs, firee-

men now. Between these two categories there was a third, to a

certain extent intermediary one : the peasants of the appanages,

or estates reserved for the endowment of the members of the

imperial family.*

* The following were, prior to the emancipation, the relative propor-
tions between these three categories of peasants, in European Russia, not
including the Caucasus, Poland, and Finland. The entire number of serfs
of both sexes was 22,500,000; that of the "Crown peasants" something
over 22,000,000, comprising certain odd groups of free peasants, such as col-
onists of foreign extraction ; the appanage peasants amounted to about
2,000,000. A few years earlier the proportion was more unfavorable. In
1838 the serfs numbered 44 to every 100 of the population. The relative
number of the serfs was evidently slowly decreasing, owing to individual
manumissions, — to military service which set the soldiers free, — to the
mortgaging of estates to the State, which foreclosed on them after the inter-
est had remained unpaid a certain time, adding them to the Crown demesnes.
In this way serfdom, left to itself, would have become extinct at the end
of a few centuries, without the formality of emancipation.

410 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

These peasants, long distributed into groups, originally enjoyed
the same liberty and the same rights. In Russia more than in
any countrj' of the West, freedom has ever been the normal con-
dition of rural man. The bondage of the glebe came very late ;
but it gradually became heavier and heavier, until it degenerated
into a sort of slavery. Only at the end of the sixteenth century,
at the moment when the bonds of serfdom fell off or were much
loosened in the greater part of Europe, were they made fast
in Russia.

In old-time Russia there were bondsmen {kholbpy, raty).
They usually were prisoners of war, insolvent debtors, or men
who had sold themselves to escape penury. The number of such
bondsmen was small, and the bulk of the peasants were considered
as freemen. Yet the men of the country found themselves at an
early period in an inferior and despised condition as regards the
men of war and the drujfna. They were called " little men " —
mujikl — or else "half-men," in opposition to the warriors, the
drujinniki, who rejoiced in the appellations of "men" — milji —
and "full men," i. <?., complete men. Such is the original mean-
ing of the diminutive ending of the word mujik ; it corresponds
to the I^atin homunculus.^ In Moscovia this name was g^ven to
rurals and urbans indifferently, to tradesmen and villagers.

I/ong before the establishment of serfdom the mujiks' or

"little-men's " main task was to provide the " men's" — mUji —

livelihood, to cultivate for them the lands which the sovereign

granted his servants as salary or for their maintenance. The

mujiks — also called "black \i. e., dirty] men," tcKbmyii liMi —

were not, however, attached either to the master they served, or

to the soil they cultivated. Just as the boyhrs and the members

of the drujina could pass at will from one kniaz to another, so

the peasants could change masters, by passing from one land to

* This distinction answers that between the leudi and the manni, — leuU
and manner — in old-time Germany. The oflBcial name of the Russian
peasants as a class is krestiyhne, singular kresiiydnin — Christian — a name
evidently dating from the days of the Tatar domination.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 4II

another. They also, like the boyhrs and drujhiniki, enjoyed the
right of free service as well as of free passage, and likewise lost
the first of these rights when they were deprived of the second,
which was its guaranty.

Under the last of the Rurikovitchs, the peasants usually exer-
cised this right of theirs once a year, at the close of the agricul-
tural year, nominally on the 26th of November, the feast of St.
George, practically all through the week preceding and that
following that feast. Prior to the establishment of serfdom when
the demand for working hands was already great, the pomUsh-
tchik or landlord who wished to retain his peasants had recourse,
it is said, to their innate love of liquor, and kept them in a
drunken state all through the fateful fortnight. There came a
time when the peasant, in the interest less of the landlords than
of the state, was deprived of this right of taking short leave of
his master, but he never lost the memory of the privilege that
was taken from him. Even now, after three centuries of bondage,
the mujik has not forgotten the feast day which once on a time
restored him to freedom ; the feast of St. George is incorporated
in many proverbial expressions of disappointment.

In order to attach the peasant to the glebe, all that was needed
was to forbid his changing land at St. George's. This prohibition,
temporary at first, then renewed and confirmed by successive sov-
ereigns, at last became a fundamental law of the state. Thus the
chief institution of the Russia of these latter centuries was evolved
out of a simple police measure. The most important fact of the
people's history passed wellnigh unperceived in the national annals".
Serfdom was established, as everywhere else it vanished, almost
insensibly, without a shock to the minds of the contemporaries.

It was the end of the sixteenth century, and the great wars
against the Lithuanians and the Teutonic Order were at their
height. The servants of the state, supplied with lands by their
sovereign, complained that their means of support were inadequate,
lyabor was scarce and costly in this country where land abotmded

412 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

while the population was scant and sparse. The landowners —
pomiish-tchiks — wrangled for men. The lesser accused the greater
of enticing and retaining all the laborers. Such a state of a£fairs
imperilled Moscovia's military forces, at the most critical moment
of her history. The financial system of the state, no less primitive
at the time, saw itself threatened equally with the military system
by the frequent Sittings of the taxpayers and laborers, and the
liking for a vagabond life which resulted therefrom. It was the
age when the Moscovite Empire, recently enlarged at the expense
of the Tatars, held out to the tillers of the thankless northern re-
gions the allurement of the more fertile southern lands, — the age
when, to escape from taxes and share the free life of the Cosacks,
adventurous men fled to the Volga and the Don, to the Kama and
Siberia. In stealing his own person from the landlords, a man
also robbed the exchequer of its dues. In order to insure to the
country regular financial and military resources, the simplest thing
to do was to make man a fixture, to bind the peasant to the field
he tilled, the burgher to the town or city where he dwelt. And
this is what Boris Godun6f did, and after him the tsars of the
seventeenth century. From that time down to Alexander II., a
fixture the mujik remained, tied down, " made fast " to the soil,
for such is the meaning of the Russian word, kriipostnby, which
all European languages translate by serf. Russian serfdom had
just this origin and no other : it was evolved out of the prevalent
administrative system and the economic, indeed the physical, con-
ditions of Moscovia, considerably aggrandized as the country was
by the last rulers of the house of Rurik, and threatened with the
dispersion of its thinly scattered population, which tended to ooze
away into the steppes, as a thread of water into the sands of the
desert.

< In this Europe of the East, this land of log-cabins, almost as
feasy to transport or reconstruct as the tent of the Arab, man felt
little attachment to the soil, little liking for ag^culture. Three
centuries of bondage have been unable wholly to eradicate in the

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 413

mujik his hankering after a wandering life, — a propensity en-
couraged by the long rivers and endless plains. Serfdom, which
bound man to the soil, may be regarded as a reaction of the state
against these adventurous instincts, which drew to the uttermost
ends of the empire, on the track of the Cosacks, the most vigorous,
the most enterprising portion of the Russian people. The less
Russia was bounded by nature, the vaster her horizon, the more
necessary it became to impose restrictions on her sons : serfdom
kept them in place, doomed them to immobility.

It was in 1593, under Theodor, a son of Ivan the Terrible, and
by the influence of Godun6f, his brother-in-law and eventually his
successor, that the right of free passage from one estate to another
was taken from the peasant. Out of this one, originally temporary,
feet resulted his bondage. Something analogous had occurred
twelve centuries before, in the Roman Empire, at the time of the
institution of the colonate \iiX\^&[ Christian emperors.* Once " made
fast ' ' to the soil, the Moscovite peasant gradually lost all his civil
rights and fell into a state of dependency which the lawgiver had
not foreseen. He became the landlord's property, his chattel.
Godun6f s work was confirmed and completed by ukhzes of the
first Romdnofs. Peter the Great's reforms tightened the peasant's
fetters instead of loosening them ; his bondage became more irk-
some as it was better regulated. The first general census ("re-
vision "), taken in 1722 and renewed since at uneven intervals,
provided serfdom with regular registers. With a view to a simpli-
fication of the administrative machinery, and also out of economy,
the State gave up to the landlords nearly the whole of the local
administration as well as the police duties within their domains.
Serfdom now became the more difl&cult to abolish that it had been
transformed into a tool of the government's, one of the chief
wheels in a political machinery as yet not very intricate.

* The colonist coiild not sell the land that had been allotted to him before
a certain, considerable number of years, twenty or more. This, of course,
amounted to compulsory residence, as only the poor applied for and re-
ceived state lands and naturally they had to cultivate them themselves.

4^4 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Until as late as 1861 the \a.w^ot^—poiniish-tchik — might be
considered as an agent of the State, commissioned to see to the en-
listment of soldiers in rural districts and to the collection of taxes,
in short as a sort of hereditary functionary, invested with adminis-
trative powers and the guardianship of the peasants on his lands.
V._.. Serfdom did not spread over Russia evenly. Into the remoter
and almost desert parts, where the landlords were few, into the
region of the great lakes and of the White Sea, as well as into the
portion of Siberia conquered by the Cosacks, the new ordinances
had not made their way or had not been enforced. These regions,
treated so harshly by nature, have always almost entirely ignored
both serfdom and nobility ; primitive liberty and equality kept
their ground there down to our own days. In the south the
Cosacks also would not hear of the new institution, which swelled
their ranks with runaways. Ukraina — the portion of Little-
Russia situated on the left bank of the Dniepr — remained exempt
from the bondage of the soil until the reign of Catherine II. When
the hour of freedom struck, the historical centre of Russia was also
that of serfdom, which, from the lands around Moscow, radiated
to the north and to the south, towards Europe and towards Asia.
In the west Moscovite serfdom encountered — in Lithuania and
White-Russia — Polish serfdom, to which the entire rural popula-
tion, whether Russian or Lithuanian, had long been subject. By
a singular anomaly, it was the predominant race — the Slavic race,
and especially the Russian — which, in the Russian Empire, was
most generally bowed under the yoke of serfdom. The Tatars in
the east, the Rumanians in Bessarabia, the German colonists, even
the Finn tribes, had, as a rule, maintained their liberty.

The condition of the peasants settled on lands belonging to

private owners varied greatly according to localities, customs, and

masters. To adequately describe all forms of serfdom, it would be

necessary to classify the serfs into some twenty different groups.*

* The reader might profitably consult M. X. Marmier's Voyages, or Mr.
de Molinari's Lettres sur la Russie, and, for greater detail, see the works
of Haxthansen and Schnitzler.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 415

These various grades and forms of bondage can be reduced to two
types, which were in general use to the last : the labor dues
(the French corvSe, boycirsh-tchina^ for short hhrsh-tchind), and the
dues in money, the obrbk.

~The bhrsh-tchina — the personal service rendered by the serf
to his landlord in labor — was the primitive, the rudimentary form.
The peasants worked three days for the landlord, the other half of
the week they attended to the lands which he gave up to them,
for their support.* The transformation of the labor dues into an
annual payment in money was a great improvement, a very real
relief. This system prevailed chiefly in the neighborhood of
manufacturing centres, or in regions with poor soil. By the pay-
ment of the obrbk the peasant temporarily ransomed his personal
liberty, and could leave his landlord's estate, to ply a craft in the
towns or other country places. This arrangement enabled many
peasants to give up rural pursuits altogether. Only, they were
liable to be called back to the plough at any moment by a word
from the master. This was a way to ' ' get round ' ' the law, to
defeat the original object of serfdom, that of attaching each man
to the soil : the ^^r^/fe-paying serf became virtually his own mas-
ter. Ostensibly, he was free ; but an invisible link bound him to
his landlord. The amount of the yearly payment varied consid-
erably according to localities, the master's exactingness, the indi-
"vidual aptitude of the serfs. On an average the obrbk oscillated
between five and ten dollars a year. At this rate a landlord,
clearly, could not be really wealthy unless he owned villages or
rather, whole districts. The petty landlords were actually com-
pelled by penury to draw from their serfs all they could possibly
grind out of them. The peasant whose lot was cast with the
owner of broad acres, whom wealth enabled to be liberal, was
more fortunate ; he was habitually subjected to a fixed rate of pay-

*By a law issued in 1797, by Paul I., the bhrsh-tchina was fixed at three
^ays. In many communes or families one half of the members worked for
the master all the week, while the others worked for the benefit of the
household.

4l6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

ment. Few masters took advantage of their people's capacity for
and success in business to raise their obrbk. Great landlords might
be named — a Sheremetieflf among others — who numbered among
their serfe millionaire merchants, and who would have scorned to
claim any of their wealth, but who indulged their vanity by refus-
ing to let them ransom themselves.

The ' ' Crown peasants " or " free peasants, ' ' settled on State
lands, were all on the obrbk system. Over and above the poll-tax
and the local taxes, they paid the State a yearly due which might
be regarded as a sort of land-rent, and which oscillated between
two and three roubles for each male peasant. These peasants,
with no landlord but the State, enjoyed two great advantages :
the dues they paid were fixed and very moderate ; and they were
not exposed to change of masters, variable in their humor and
ways of doing business. They were allowed to enjoy some com-
munal franchises, and, at the time of the emancipation, their
institutions partly served as models for the administrative organi-
zation of the liberated serfs. In spite of the oppression and
extortions to which they were occasionally subjected by corrupt
functionaries, the "Crown peasants" were generally better off
than those on private lafldsr - To this day their villages have a
look of greater prosperity, by which they are often known at first
sight. These peasants of the State demesnes, attached to the
glebe like the others, formerly constituted a living treasury or
reserve fund, from which the sovereign took the grants which he
distributed to his servants in the form of lands stocked with serfs.
Catherine II. made use of this fund on a large scale, for the
endowment and gratification of her ministers and favorites ; but
she was the last to practise these liberties, which are one of the
blots on her reign. To the Emperor Alexander I. is due the
credit of having put a stop to these gifts of men, and created a
class of free husbandmen.

Serfdom in Russia, like slavery in America, has had its
defenders in the past and is not even yet without panegyrists.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 417

There is no doubt that servitude was not, for the peasant, without
some compensation. If the serf endured hardships from being
subject to his landlord's guardianship, he also benefited thereby ; if
he served the master, the master protected him. Not being based
on conquest, as in the Baltic provinces, nor on difference of race, like
American slavery, serfdom in Russia preserved to the end a certain
benignity, something more paternal, more patriarchal. It is no
less certain that, in spite of many attenuating traits due to custom
and law, such a system worked harm in the end, — harm to the
country, harm to the bondsman, harm to the master himself.
The peasant who fell into the hands of a whimsical, corrupt, or dis-
solute man, was exposed to every kind of wretchedness, oppres^~
sion, ignominy, the law being unable to shield him efficiently
from the landlord's cupidity, brutality, or lawlessness. There
was in serfdom one incurable evil : the violence done to the
human conscience, the obliteration of moral responsibility.

Nor was the economic evil less great ; the institution yielded
little profit to the class for whose benefit it existed. Although
the right of owning ' ' inhabited lands ' ' extended to the entire
hereditary nobility, there were, at the moment of the emancipa-
tion, not over one himdred odd thousand serf holders, and of these
the greater part barely enjoyed a competency. Three or four
thousand of them owned no land, for in the eighteenth century
serfs had come to be sold without land.* To be at all well off,
one had to own hundreds of " souls " ; to be wealthy, thousands,

* Owing to^ the imperfection of statistical proceedings, the figures
given on the division of properties and serfs present notable discrepancies.
A little over two million "souls," i. e., male peasants, the only ones sub-
ject to capitation and set down in the "revisions" (census), were divided
among less than 80,000 owners, who had from i to 100 "souls" each, and
were accounted as " petty landlords. " Five and a half millions were allotted
to 22,000 owners, having from 100 to 1,000 " souls " each, and regarded as
''medium landlords." Lastly there were 1,400 serf-holders, owning more
than 1,000 male peasants each, with a total, between them, of three mil-
lion souls, and they were accounted "great landlords." Of these, some
few families — the SheremdtieflFs for one — had on their lands as many as
100,000 serfs.

41 8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

SO little did serfdom produce, so terrible was the depreciation of
labor caused by this confiscation of it through several centuries.
The peasants' unpaid labor did not sufl&ce for the support even
of those who held the monopoly of it. Servile labor used to be
discounted and consumed years ahead by numbers of landlords.
At the moment of emancipation, two thirds of the "inhabited
lands" peopled with serfs, or, in plainer words, two thirds of the
serfs themselves (for it was at the rate of so much per head that
the banks effected their loans), were found to be mortgaged in the
lombards or credit establishments kept by the State. Frequently,
therefore, the pomiish-tchik had only the semblance of proprietor-
ship, and the sums loaned by the State on human capital, instead
of being sunk into the ground and there bearing interest, were
usually squandered in dissipation and hospitalities.
/ One is astonished at such a state of things having lasted so
/ long. In a certain sense serldom might be said never to have
I been thoroughly accepted by the people themselves. Several
times, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the peasants
rose to the cry of liberty, under such leaders as Stienka R^in and
;ugatch6f. The Crown which had imposed it, the nobility which
was supposed to benefit by it, had long looked on serfdom as on
an irretrievably doomed temporary institution. It is likely that
the emancipation would not have been so long delayed, but for
the apprehensions aroused by the revolutionary troubles in Europe,
which appeared calculated to hasten the operation. The Emperor
/ Alexander I. seemed created for just such work. He prepared
/I the way for it by a partial experiment — that of ordering the
manumission of the serfs of the three Baltic provinces : the Ehst
and Lett peasants, the most oppressed of all, because they were of
another race than their German conquerors and masters. The
Emperor Nicolas, following his brother's example, lightened
and loosened as much as possible the bonds he dared not break.
Emancipation was his pet scheme. On the eve of 1848 he had
already appointed, to study the question, a secret committee,

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 419

which the February revolution caused to be dissolved. The
disasters of the Crimean War had, in his latter days, led his
thoughts back to the same projects. It is affirmed that, on his
deathbed, Nicolas bequeathed to his son and successor the task
which he himself had been prevented from undertaking. On the
whole it may have been fortunate for the empire that the great J^
work was not started sooner : the preparatory studies were more \
matured, the task itself was carried out more boldly.

One of the things that should on no accoimt be lost sight of
by any one desirous of fully understanding the transformation of
contemporary Russia, is the part taken in it by public opinion
and public spirit. lyiterature which, in modern nations, always
opens and shows the way, — literature in all its forms : poetry,
fiction, drama, history, criticism, had done its work ; it only had
to direct the attention of the higher classes towards the people, its
life and manners. As in America, the novelists became the
apostles and prophets of emancipation. But Russia has some-
thing better than Uncle Tom's Cabin and the didactic novels
of the American women. In Gogol's Dead Souls, and Ivan
Turgu^nief s Memoirs of a Huntsman, she has pictures admirable
for truth and earnestness, or, more correctly, mirrors, in which,
as in polished glass, are reflected, unaltered in either outline or
coloring, the countenances of both serfs and masters.* The
press debated the conditions of the reform, an ardent desire for
which wa^ aroused by the novelists. On this one point the two
currents which usually carry the Russian mind opposite ways, for
,once carried it in the same direction. All the schools, whether
'Slavophils or Occidentals, liberals, or democrats, were at one on
'this issue ; the cause numbered amidst its advocates Nicolas Tur-
guenief, Samdrin, and Herzen. It was neither a sovereign, soli-
tary in his power, nor a few exceptional individuals, fashioned

* Russia may be said to have her counterpart of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the
stories written by a woman, Mme. Mark^vitch (M4rko-Vovtch6k). These
stories, written in the Little-Russian dialect, had the honor of being trans*
lated into Russian by Ivan Turgu^nief.

420 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

by foreign discipline, who led the nation, using bridle, spur,
^XMT whip, as the case might be, — it was public spirit, public opin-
ion, which gave the impulse. This was a national movement,
comparable in a way to that which, in the West, had culminated
in the French Revolution. This phenomenon, so novel in the
history of Russia, is in itself as worthy of attention as the emanci-
pation and all its accompanying reforms. In this respect the
work done by Alexander II. is totally different from that accom-
plished by Peter the Great, and shows the stride taken by the
country in the interval : the first work was that of a man ; this
latter one is that of a nation. Russia, on the eve of the emanci-
pation, appears not as a sort of inert material, for governments to
experiment on, or, to borrow the expression of a frenchified
Russian, as a sociological laboratory ; it is a nation that is coming
I of age and, not content with blindly following the paternal
guidance, works out its own development.

And yet, however carefully prepared, however desired of the
nation and public opinion, the emancipation might have hung
fire for years still, but for the bitter disappointment entailed by^
the Crimean War. There are, in the lives of all nations,
reforms of such deep import, so complicated, touching on so many
interests, that those at the helm make up their minds to tackle
them only under the pressure of some mighty event, under
the threat of some national peril or calamity. For nations as for
individuals, adversity frequently is the best counsellor. A blow
dealt from abroad, a military disaster, has more than once been
—the point of departure of the moral renovation of a great people.
What Jena was to Prussia and Germany, what Novara was to
Piedmont and Italy, — that the Crimean War was to Russia, though
it scarcely altered her frontier. This campaign, so barren of
results for the Porte, which, under shelter of the West, only grew
more and more corrupt, has teemed with results for the vanquished
empire. The fall of Sebast6pol was serfdom's death-blow.

I have been told that a quondam serf kept in his room a

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 42 1

portrait of Napoleon III. with this inscription : To the Liberator
of the Serfs. After the Crimean War, it appears, the rumor spread
among the peasantry of certain provinces, that the Emperor of the
French demanded the abolition of serfdom, and had consented to
sign a treaty of peace only on condition that a secret clause should be
inserted insuring the liberation of the serfs.* May be there lurked
in this rumor a vague remembrance of the hopes excited by Napoleon
I. in 1812, At all events, this popular belief was nothing less than,
imder a childish form, an instinctive presentiment of the inevitable
connection of events. It was indeed, although they knew it not, for
the benefit of the mujik, of the Russian people, that France and
Kngland were fighting. In this respect Russia's defeat was a
stroke of good-fortune for her ; never perhaps did a country buy
its national regeneration so cheap. Of a war of which the issue
cost her only some pangs of wounded vanity, of a peace the
humiliating clauses of which were promptly obliterated, nothing
was left to her but an enduring inner transformation.

* This rumor is mentioned by Tchemysh^fsky, in his Letters zvithout
an Address, published in the Vperidd {1S74).

BOOK VII. CHAPTER II.

Questions Raised by the Emancipation — Expectations and Disappointments
of the Nobility — Agrarian Laws — Was it Possible to Free the Serfs
without Giving them Lands? — Reasons and Conditions of the Terri-
torial Endowment of the Peasants.

It was, then, a national movement which, under the pressure
of defeat, urged on emancipation from all sides. Should the
nation take a direct part in it ? Should the Tsar, like Catherine
II., and with design better defined, call together the delegates of
the difierent classes into a sort of States-General ? Some thought
he should. It was announced that, by way of compensation
for the loss of their serfs, the nobility were to be given political
rights, and that, out of the emancipation, would grow a constitu-
tion. This hope did much to enlist the landlords and the nobiliary
assemblies in favor of the project. In spite of appearances, it is
probably fortunate that things did not take this course ; that the
government did not invite the delegates of the nobility to deliber-
ate and to pass laws, but only consulted them. On the question
of the necessity of the emancipation, opinion was nearly unani-
mous throughout the empire ; on that of ways and means, and
that of the position to be given the peasants when free, there was
in the public and in the government itself a very Babel of confused
and discordant views. An elective assembly, numerous and
tumultuous, would have had some trouble in sifting and clearing
such a chaos. Then, to be equitable or impartial, an assembly
should have included representatives of the opposed parties — of
both serfs and landlords. The former could not be called upon to
ordain their own future ; yet it would have been unfair to leave

422

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 423

the deliberation to the masters alone. Between peasant and
pomiesh-tchik there was but one natural judge, one disinterested
umpire : the Crown. The situation was one where autocracy,
exalted above all classes and true to its mission — impartiality, —
was the meetest tribunal for rendering an equitable sentence.

The nobiliary assemblies of the different provinces were invited
to investigate the question and report their opinion ; but the
inditing of the project was entrusted to commissions directly
appointed by the sovereign. These commissions were composed
partly of high functionaries, such as Nicolas Miliutin, the chief
inspirer of the Statute, partly of landlords or "experts," mostly
taken from the minorities of the provincial committees, such as
Prince Tcherk^sky and Yiiri (George) Samdrin, allies and fol-
lowers of Miliutin. In these " drafting commissions " {Commis-
sions de ridadion) the interests of the landlords did not lack
defenders ; nor was it without arduous struggles that the majority,
directed by Miliutin and his friends, brought about the triumph
of their ideas and their acceptance by the sovereign.*

The project, elaborated by the commissions, was incomparably
more favorable to the people than the views adopted by most
local assemblies. The bases of it, indeed, were considered so
democratical, that sundry clauses were modified through court
influences. To the end of the reign of Alexander II. , a portion
of the official world inclined more or less openly to retract several
of the principles proclaimed on the 19th of February, 1861.

The landed nobility did not attempt to conceal their dis-
approval as well of the democratic tendencies in favor in the
"drafting commissions," as of the manner in which the govern-
ment had set them aside from participation in a task in which
it had, at first, invited their co-operation. Several of the

* I have told in another book, from the unpublished correspondence of
Milidtin, Tcherkslssky, and Samdrin, the struggles and vicissitudes through
which the emancipation had to pass. See : A Russian Statesman front his
Unpublished Correspondence {Un Homme d^tat Russe d'aprh sa Corre-
Spondance Inidite).

424 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

great landlords gave loud expression to their disappointment at
being denied a share in a reform which they had hoped to direct ;
and that, too, in favor of a bureaucratic commission which
appeared to have no other task than that of collecting and reducing
into a code the views of the provincial committees of landlords.*
This was the nobility's first disappointment, and a heavy one.

The passions and angry feelings aroused by these questions
were so violent that the principal inditers of the Emancipation
Act, while they were able to overcome opposition, could not quell
the personal grudges which accumulated against them. Imme-
diately after the proclamation of the Statute, of which they had
been the most zealous instigators, N. Miliutin and his fiiends,
loudly abused as "reds" and "radicals," both at court and in
society, fell into a scarce disguised disgrace. The work was sanc-
tioned, the makers were sacrificed. Nothing less than the Polish
insurrection was needed to cause the government to call once
more for the services of Miliutin and Tcherk^ky.f This incon-
sistency, apparently incomprehensible, was not due solely to the
sovereign's hesitations to court intrigues. By dismissing Miliutin,
at the very moment when it seemed but natural to entrust him
with the practical application of the laws drawn up by his fiiends
and by himself, Alexander intended to pacify public feeling. In
order to put an end to the uneasiness and the grumblings of the
nobility, half crazed by the phantom of impending ruin, he took
the execution of his ukhzes out of the hands of a man reputed to
be, systematically, opposed to the nobility, and entrusted it to
persons who could not be suspected of hostility against it.

* See, for instance, the Letter from a Committeeman (Count Orldf-
Dav^dof ) to the President of the Drafting Commission, Paris, 1859.

t " I am given leave of absence for a whole year, or, more correctly, I
am shelved by being made a senator ..." wrote N. Miliutin to Tcherkissky
in May, 1861. " I had asked only for a four months' leave ; but the reaction
helped me out. I,ansk6y and myself [Lanskdy was the Minister of the
Interior and Miliiitin his assistant] had to clear out of the cabinet to please
the nobility."

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 425

The excessive demands put forward by the peasants gradually
reconciled the greater part of the nobility to the Emancipation
Act. Once they found themselves face to face with the distrust and
the rapacity of their former serfs, the landlords were brought to
look on the Statute, so fiercely attacked by many of their number,
as on their ' ' anchor of salvation. ' ' Experience soon convinced
most of them of the inanity of the illusions they had entertained
concerning the mujik's supposed attachment and docility.*

The advantages provided for the peasants by men like Milititin,
Tcherk^ssky, Samdrin, account for the rancor which they aroused.
For truly, nowhere did the lawmaker take such thought for the
interests of the quondam serf. The task accomplished by Russia
was not unexampled or unprecedented in Europe. To mention
only neighboring states, Prussia and Austria had, in this very
century, at different intervals, accomplished analogous ones,
though on a more modest scale. The emancipation as conducted
in Prussia after Jena, under the inspiration of Baron von Stein,
was to the Russians a lesson by which they profited, without,
however, copying anybody's proceedings.! Two things especially
distinguished from others the method adopted at Petersburgh.

* "What did and still does most contribute to convince the nobility of
the absolute necessity of doing as we have done, is the attitude of the
peasants, into daily conflicts with whom the landlords are being forced ; it
is, more especially, the demands of the peasants, and, above all, the radical
distrust of the entire bearded Orthodox population towards the nobles. The
latter had, much against the grain, to give up the idea that their former serfs
placed in them an unlimited confidence ; the landlords' eyes have been opened
in this respect as completely as possible. . . . Everybody, at the present hour,
has been made to see how indispensable was a detailed and precise statute,
and how unfounded were, for the most part, the malevolent outcries and
uproar which have been kept up through two years against the ' drafting
commissions ' and their supposed mania for subjecting everything to regu-
lations." (Unpublished I,etter from Prince Tcherk^ky to N. Milidtin,
dated July the 23, 1861.)

\ See, for the examples given to Russia by foreign countries, the History
of the Abolition of Slavery and Serfdom in Europe, by Samuel Sugenheim
(St. Petersburgh, 1861) ; and Samdrin's study on the Abolition of Serfdom
in Prussia, reprinted in 1879, in vol. ii. of his collected works.

426 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Not content with giving the peasants their bare, personal liberty,
Russia endowed them with lands. Instead of leaving the manu-
mitted peasants, as Prussia did in 1809 and 1848, under the
patronage and tutelage of their former lords, to linger on in a
sort of administrative servitude, Russia at one stroke converted
the former serfs into communes independent of their late masters.
While the Bauer of Eastern Prussia remained, at least imtil the
reforms of 1872, subject and vassal to the Ritterschaft, the Russian
mujik^ thanks to his ownership of land and to the autonomy of
his commune, was fully emancipated, at once economically and
administratively.

The main object of the system adopted in Russia was to
provide the freedmen with lands, to convert the serfs into land-
holders. There, naturally, also lay the main difl&culty. In the
opinion of a part of the nobility, in that of many politicians, it
was sufficient to give the peasants their personal liberty. That is
what Alexander I. did for the serfs of the Baltic provinces. What
is serfdom ? asked the theoreticians of this system. It is the
labor of one man, gratuitously conceded to another man. To
abolish serfdom, it is enough to abolish unrequited labor.* How,
they went on, was serfdom established ? By a police regulation,
forbidding the peasants to pass from one domain to another.
How is this institution to be annulled ? By restoring to the mujik
the right of coming and going. Conceived in this way, emancipa-
tion would have been a very simple operation ; but what would
have been the results? The peasant would have recovered his
liberty only to fall into a condition often more miserable than
that which he endured in the time of his bondage. He would
have remained for years, maybe for centuries, totally debarred
from the holding of land. All this host of freedmen would have
been turned into a nation of proletarians. Thus argued the

* This opinion, which pretended to be based on the data of political
economy, was upheld by numbers of foreign economists. (See, for example,
Molinari's Letters on Russia.)

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 427

partisans of territorial endowment, and their opinion carried the
day in the commission, with the public, and with the sovereign.*

Through these views, most justifiable in all that concerned the
liberation of the serfs, showed a high ambition, not exempt from
self-delusion. A worthy, tempting object surely : to create not
merely a nation of freemen, but one of land-holders. Press and
public kept repeating that the only escape from the evils of
ancient societies lay in not falling into those of modem societies
— pauperism and proletariate. By giving lands to the serfs, it
was confidently hoped to avoid proletariate, and to avoid prole-
tariate was to steer clear of the social and political commotions of
the West.

The Russian government was thus led on to create, in favor
of the peasants, a veritable agrarian law, a sort of territorial ex-
propriation for reasons of public weal. It has frequently been
blamed for this, so-called, revolutionary measure. This forced
distribution of lands taken from the nobility has been compared
to the confiscations and creations of national property perpetrated
by the French Revolution. Such comparisons are strangely ex-
aggerated. In order justly to appreciate these measures, political
necessity must not alone be taken into account, but the ambiguous
origin, the obscurity, the uncertainty of the Russian laws on
property should also be remembered. Whose, in reality, was the
soil — the landlord's or the peasant's ? Both had claims. If the

* Address delivered by the Emperor in the "Council of the Empire,"
on January 28, 1861. In it he openly deplored the manner in which the
emancipation had been accomplished in the Baltic provinces and the king-
dom of Poland. For Poland, the rising of 1863 was soon to supply the
government with an occasion to apply, with the assistance of the same men,
— Milititin, Tcherk^ssky, and their friends, — the same principles to the
provinces of the Visla. As to the Baltic provinces, the land, according to a
system in use in several parts of Germany, has been divided into two cate-
gories : the Hqfland, which remains at the free disposal of the former lord,
and the Bauerland, which can be sold or rented only to peasants. The
agrarian question, repeatedly raised by Russian journalists, produced among
the Lett and Ehst peasantry, in 1882 and 1883, an agitation not unlike that
of the Irish I/and League.

428 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

law decided ofl&cially in favor of the former, the latter could
appeal to custom, at least as far as those lands were concerned,
the use of which had been conceded to him by the masters, in
obedience to traditional habit. If the pomihh-tchik had received
his estate from the sovereign in exchange for his services, the
mujik could be considered as having lived on and had the use of
the land before the g^ant was made to his landlord.* Going back
to the beginning of things, the position cotdd be upheld, that the
domains, with their serf population, which often alone gave them
their value, never had constituted full property, that they stood
less under the jurisdiction of the civil than of the political law,
these lands having been granted to the nobility in exchange for
services from which they had gradually exempted themselves. t

If we look at things in this way, the Russian government
cannot be said to have taken from one side to give to the other.
Rather, it has discriminated between rival claims, arbitrated
between conflicting rights and interests, by holding both adverse
parties to a compromise. The peasant received a portion of the
land, but he was made to indemnify his former landlord. If, on
both sides, there were complaints and disappointments, it was
because, coming down from theories to practical ground, the

* There were, indeed, some kinds of lands to which this line of argu-
ment did not seem to apply, such as the recently colonized land on the
Lower Volga and in New Russia, the domains on which the landlords
had themselves settled peasants, inviting them to come. Unfortunately, it
would have been very difficult to take this difference into account.

t We saw in a preceding chapter (Book VI., Ch. II.), that there were
originally in Russia two classes of landed property : the vdt-tchina or
*' patrimony," — land inherited from ancestors ; and the potniistiyt, or
" grant-land," conceded to servants of the state for their support. The
estates of the modem nobles generally belong to the latter class ; but, by
exempting the nobility from the burdens and personal service which had
long been obligatory for the pomiish-tchik, the sovereigns had virtually
transformed the pami^sttyi into a vdt-tchina. So that, in this respect, the
Emperor Alexander II. may be said to have strained a point in favor of the
peasants, by ignoring what his predecessors had done for the nobility. In
strict historical equity, the emancipation ought to have taken place on the
day on which the pomiish-tchik was freed from the obligation of serving
the state.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 429

tunpire's sentence could not satisfy fully either of the two
contestants.

The government's decision was the wiser, that an opposite
resolve would have found the resistance of the peasants diflScult
to overcome. And under such a system, Russia would have been
forthwith converted into an immense Ireland, rife with agrarian
troubles. The peasant, serf as he was, never ceased to consider
himself as the owner of the land he cultivated, that land at least
which the landlords had for generations allowed him to use for his
support. "We are yours," said the serfs to their masters, "but
the land is ours." To give them their liberty and at the same
time to take from them the lands of which they had the use,
would have seemed to the mujik a hypocritical form of spolia-
tion.* As it is, he finds it hard to understand why, in order to
become full owner of this land which he looked on as his own, he
should have to indemnify the former landlord, who, anyhow, left
it to him.

When the manifesto of the 19th of February, 1861, was pub-
lished, setting forth the conditions of the emancipation, the
peasants could not conceal their disappointment. In the churches,
where the imperial manifesto, announcing freedom, was read to
them, they murmured aloud ; more than one shook his head,
exclaiming, "What sort of liberty is that?"t The discontent

* Here is a rather edifying story to the point : A landlord of the govern-
ment of Smolensk had, under Alexander I., drawn up a plan of emancipa-
tion which would have given to each peasant, besides his liberty, his house
with the enclosed yard or "house-lot" thereto belonging. "And how
about the arable lands ? " asked the peasants, when he laid his scheme
before them. "I shall keep those," answered the philanthropist- "Well,
then, father" {bdtiushka), replied the serfs, "suppose we leave things as
they are. We are yours, but the land is ours."

t A word quoted in the memoirs of a country priest, published in 1880.
" During the reading," says the priest, " the peasants bowed their heads ;
it was easy to see that they expected nothing good from that sort of liberty.
They listened as to a sentence of banishment." In several villages the
parish priests had to endure all sorts of persecutions at the peasants' hands,
who accused them of having suffered themselves to be bribed by the land-
lords to conceal from their parishioners the orders of the Tsar.

430 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

was universal. In many localities the peasants suspected a mys-
tification. They refused to believe in the genuineness of the
manifesto. On many points there were troubles, and the police
had to call in the aid of the military, who, in some villages, were
compelled to fire. For this imlettered people, accustomed by
oppression to incurable distrust, the balls of the soldiers were the
only suflScient demonstration of the authenticity of the imperial
ordinances.*

It was rumored in the villages that the manifesto read in the
churches was a fabrication of the landlords, and that the genuine
Emancipation Act would be forthcoming later on ; there may even
yet be peasants who are looking for it to appear. There assuredly
are many who in the long winter evenings dream of a new eman-
cipation with a redistribution of lands, gratuitous this time.

It took the peasants several years thoroughly to understand
the conditions on which liberty was given them and to become
reconciled to them. Truth to say, these poor people were mostly
quite unqualified to comprehend the clauses of the Statute. They
lacked the knowledge of legal terms, a clear notion of the rights
of property, indeed of liberty itself; they also were wanting in
confidence towards their masters and the local authorities com-
missioned to explain to them the new order of things. Nothing
could be more characteristic in this respect than the lines written
fi-om a remote province to N. Milititin, by one of his most illus-
trious fellow-workers, one of the most earnest and devoted lovers
of the people, the Slavophil Samdrin, in September, 1861 : " The
chief stumbling-block is the peasants' distrust of everything and
everybody. Nothing is to them immutable or impracticable. . . .
Between them and us there is no common point of view ; they
have not a peg on which we could hang otur arguments. They

* " This poor, uncultured mass, imbued ■with a profound distrust of all
that surrounds it, seemed anxious to stimulate the action of the troops, and
to challenge repression, because force has until now been to the people the
only certain pledge of the sovereign will." — [Unpublished letter from Y6ri
Sam&rin to N. Mili&tin, dated August 17, 1862.]

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 43 1

listen to us attentively, good-naturedly, even with pleasure. But,
to anything you say to them, you hear the same answer : ' We
are ignorant, bdtiushka ' / we know nothing, but this is how we
reason : what the Tsar commands, that should be done. ' ' But
this is the Tsar's will ; written down here, in this book.* ' Ah,
but how should we know that ? we are ignorant ; what there is
in that book, we know it not. ' . . . And thereupon you de-
spondently feel that all your talk glides off them as water down a
slope. The peasants submit to the Statute ; they submit to the
Regulation Contracts ; but in their own hearts they remain
deeply attached to their own hopes, and it will be long before
they g^ve them up. ' '

This same spirit shows very plainly in sundry dissident sects,
those especially that foretell the impending wz7/f««zMW, the ' ' descent
of the Kingdom of Heaven. ' ' Several years after the publication of
the Emancipation Act, certain prophets from the people, one Piish-
kin in the number, announced that, by the will of God, the land
was soon to be made over to the peasants, with nothing to pay. A
little earlier, in 1861, there appeared, in the region of Kaz^n, a
pretender or pseudo-tsar of the good old Russian type. A certain
Ant6n Petrbf gave himself out among the peasants for the Em-
peror ; driven out of his capital, he told them, by the nobles and
the tchinbvniks (bureaucrats), who, between them, had altered
his manifesto to the people's detriment. The troops had to
be brought out against this embryo Pugatch6f. Thus political
vagaries combined with religious delusions, the frauds of im-
postors and tricksters with the hallucinations of the illmnined.
Here is a curious instance in point, that came to my knowledge
in the government of Vor6nej. A seminary student on his vaca-
tion trip was returning from the country with no money left and
quite at a loss how to procure horses to finish his journey, when

' " We are dark people " is the standing expression which peasants use
for their profession of ignorance. Could anything be more graphic — and
more pathetic ? There is great promise in a people who have, unaided,
grasped the perception that ignorance is " darkness," blindness.

432 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

he hit on the expedient of taking advantage of the mujik's
credulity. " I am," he declared to the peasants, " a Grand Duke
travelling incognito, in a plain teliiga (springless village cart) to
judge for myself of your condition, and to see what, in your
interests, should be altered in the Emancipation Act." The
stratagem succeeded ; the seminarist got taken several relays on
his road, hospitably entertained and thanked by his dupes.
Numerous political trials, from 1879 to 1883, have shown how
willingly even yet the mujik lends himself to mystification on
this point.

To comprehend the material position and the feelings of the
liberated peasants, one .must know how. hard are the conditions
of this diflficult division of land, this sort of liquidation between
the noble landlord and his former serf, which Russia is carrying
on ever since 1861. The principle adopted by the government is
that of a compromise. The peasants were to have the perennial
use of their dwelling with its enclosed appurtenances, and, further-
more, lands equivalent to the fields which used to be reserved for
their support ; but these lands they had to redeem from the owners,
who were made to give them up. Yet there is a large class of
serfs who have been given no lands, consequently have no pay-
ments to make ; they are the domestic serfs {dvorbvyii liiidi, or
" court people "), i. e., the serfs employed in domestic service and
personal attendance on their masters. There was a good reason
for passing them by — that they never had had any land, having
generally oitirely given up agricultural life. So they received
their personal liberty and that was all. Emancipation, for them,
was almost immediate ; after two supplementary years of gratui-
tous service, they were firee to leave their masters, or to stay with
them for a salary. It is chiefly among this dass, many of whom
swelled the ranks of urban proletariate, especially among the old
men, that numbers were found unwilling to avail themselves of
their freedom.

At the moment of the emancipation there were about a million

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 433

and a half of these domestic serfs, — ^an unnecessarily large num-
ber. As is the case in all slaveholding countries, the dwellings
of the wealthy were cumbered with servants of both sexes, untidy,
shiftless, lazy — cooks, valets, coachmen, grooms, maids, needle-
women, waiting-women, etc. This crowd, half civilized and half
corrupted by life in the cities and contact with the masters,
frequently was the most objectionable and unwholesome portion
of the serf population. The facility of always having at one's
beck and call hosts of men and women, the consequent waste of
human labor, were for the higher classes one of the g^eat
material conveniences, as well as a great moral evil, of serfdom.
By this side of it, Russian life came nearer that of the planters in
the colonies than the European mode of existence, and gave to
the pomiish-tchik the indolent habits which masters of slaves
contract everywhere.

The principle of territorial endowment once accepted, it
remained to determine what quantity of land should be conceded
to the peasants. In a country so vast, it was impossible to set up
a fixed and uniform rule, to allot the same quantity of land to all
the late serfs. The government's standard was that each lot should
be suj0&cient to provide for one family, and should be as nearly as
possible the equivalent of the lot it had the use of in the old time.
This rule also being admitted, it had to be adapted to the differ-
ences of soil and climate, to all the inequalities of the population.
In spite of the general homogeneousness and uniformity of the
Russian soil, this operation alone required colossal labor. Then
the relations established by custom between master and peasant
had to be taken into consideration. It also became necessary to
have recourse to several distinct regulations. Special regulations
were made for lyittle-Russia, Lithuania, and the former Polish
provinces. Great-Russia and New-Russia — thirty-four governments
between them, over two thirds of the entire Russian territory in
Europe — ^were divided into three wide parallel zones or belts,

according to the nature of the soil or the density of the population :

434 TH^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the northern zone, comprising the poorest lands ; the Black-Mould
zone, comprising the richest; the Steppe zone, comprising the
least populous. Each of these great zones was itself subdivided
into ten regions, and for each region a maximum and a minimum
were fixed. The average from all these regions g^ves from three
to four dessiatinas per male head.* This average sometimes rises
to seven dessiatinas in the north, to ten in the steppes of the south ;
it sometimes goes down to two dessiatinas and less in the rich
Black-Mould region, f A family numbering three " souls," /. e.,
three male members, thus received on an average from twenty to
twenty-five acres, — which, in most parts of the country, was about
what they used to have in the times of serfdom. Although this
equivalence was admitted in principle, the peasant's advocates —
Mililitin, Samirin, and their friends — were not always able to
obtain for him a lot equal to that of which he had the use before
his liberation, and, when it came to practice, the manner after
which the division was effected frequently still further increased
the difference. J This was evidently a great disappointment to

* The dessiatina is equal to about 2f acres. The State performed a
similar operation on its own demesnes, and as it had, as a rule, given up to
its peasants all the cultivable lands, they have, on the whole, been more
favored than the serfs on private estates.

t Here are the valuations of a Russian statistician, Mr. lanson, concern-
ing the distribution of land before and after the emancipation (1876).

BEFORE. AFTER.

I^ands of the state 64. 6 per cent. Lands of the state 45. 6 per cent.

" " «« nobility... 30. 6 " " " " " nobility. ..22.6 " "

" •• " appanages 3.3 " " " " " appanages 1.8 " "

" " '• peasants " " " peasants

and colonists. . 1.7 " " and colonists. .30. " "

The nobility, which before 1861, according to the same authority, owned
105,000,000 of dessiatinas, (about 280,000,000 acres) had not over 63,500,-
000 left in 1876, while the former serfs owned over 64,000,000 (about
176,000,000 acres).

X Miliiitin's adversaries contrived to get the territorial allotments cut
down in the Drafting Commission itself. Thus Samdrin, in one of his letters
to Miliiitin (September, 1861) complains with much earnestness that Count
Pdnin, president of the Commission after Rostdvtsef, succeeded in lower-
ing the average for the peasants of Samdra from 5^ to 5 dessiatinas.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION.

435

begin with, a first cause of discontent for the peasant, all the more
that the increase of the population naturally tends to curtail every
year more the original allotment. That, however, was not the
only source of disappointment. In some regions the territorial
concession was manifestly insufficient ; in many others it was as
manifestly too onerous for the peasant, owing to the rate at which
the redemption was fixed. The extent of the allotted lands is,
indeed, only one side of the question ; in order to appreciate the
condition of the fireedmen, it is necessary to know how much the
land cost them, and in what way they were enabled to pay for it.

BOOK VII. CHAPTER III.

Manner and Conditions of Redeeming the Lands — Advances Made by the
Exchequer — Actual State of the Operation — Slackening in the Last
Years of Alexander IL — How there still Subsisted, in the Form of
Labor Dues, a Sort of Half Servitude, which was Abolished only
Under Alexander III. — Why Landed Property is often a Burden to the
Freedmen — Unequal Treatment of the Peasants in the DiflFerent Regions
— ^The Gratuitous " Quarter Lot" — ^The Peasant's Disappointment — In
what Manner he Understood Liberty.

So vast a liquidation could not be accomplished in a day. It
was important to avoid too abrupt a transformation, which would
have landed the country into the midst of a most dangerous crisis.
During the two years which followed the Emancipation Act, all
the landlords and their tenants had to draw up by mutual agree-
ment an instrument, called "Regulation Charter," which exactiy
determined the lands to be ceded by the landlords, and the annual
payment, in money or labor, to be eflfected by the peasants for
the same. These things were to be arranged, as much as possi-
ble, amicably ; but as the clashing of interests, and, still more,
the peasants' distrust, gave littie hope of such a solution, the
decision, in case of conflict, was left to certain magistrates created
on purpose, under the title of Arbiters of Peace. During the
first years, men the most independent and superior, such as Prince
Tcherk^ky, Ydri Samdrin, and others, made it a point to take
on themselves these wearisome and delicate duties. These judges,
elected by the nobility, were commissioned to approve the con-
tracts for both sides, and, if need were, to settie the diflSiculties,
subject to ratification by a provincial court. One would think
that these arbiters, appointed by the landlords out of their own

436

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 437

ranks, would have been inclined to favor those of their own
class. Nothing of the kind. By a phenomenon which does honor
to the Russian nobility, and which can be, in part, accounted for
by the generosity and sensitiveness of the national character,
these men, the chosen of the landlords, of whom the majority
were opposed to endowing the serfs with lands, took their mission
so earnestly to heart, that they quite frequently laid themselves
open to the accusation of taking the peasants' side.* Unfortunately
for the latter, these first arbiters, who represented the more noble-
minded portion of the nobility, were succeeded by men of a very
diflferent type, who felt no scruples in sacrificing the peasants'
interests and in applying the local regulations in a spirit opposed
to the legislator's intentions.

The Regulation Charters once drawn up (and nearly all —
110,000 to 112,000 — were ready within the prescribed time), the
peasants, now free and placed in possession of their lands, still
owed the landlord perpetual rent in money or in labor. All the
difference was that, since 1863, these dues were freely discussed
by the contracting parties or legally fixed by the local regulations.
Such a state of things too closely resembled serfdom itself to be
regarded as anything more than temporary. The tenants sub-
jected to it were designated as being " under temporary obliga-
tions." These peasants had only, as it were, traversed the first
phase of emancipation ; they were in an intermediate position
between freedom and serfdom.

Then came a second operation, more complicated, more pro-

* "The ' arbiters of peace,' themselves nobles, even the members of the
former 'provincial committees,' have become completely transformed by
their new duties" (wrote Samdrin to Milidtin in August, 1862) ; "in entering
on them they have not only cast from them, but quickly forgotten, all the
past. The desire to conquer popularity among the masses has so entirely
triumphed over their former sentiments, that the ' peace assemblies ' are
flooded with complaints from landlords against the ' arbiters of peace,' on
account of their partiality towards the peasants, whereas there is scarcely
an instance of the peasants accusing them of partiality towards the land-
lords."

43^ THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS

tracted, which Alexander II. was to leave unfinished : the
"redemption," which put an end to the obligatory territorial
relations between the two classes. This question did not bear on
the serfs' personal liberty — ^the nobility never claimed any indem-
nity for that — ^but on the lands allotted to them, or rather in the
rents which, in force of the Statute and the local charters, bur-
dened those lands. The Redemption Act made the peasants full
owners of them ; it freed them from all dues and obligations
towards their former masters.

But the law had regulated neither the mode nor the time
of redemption ; it was left to the contracting parties to take up
that question, to fix the conditions and the time of the operation.
Exceptions were made only for the western — former I^ithuano-
Polish — provinces, where the government, immediately after the
rising of 1863 and for political reasons, declared redemption obliga-
tory. In Russia proper, the State did not interfere in the matter
until Alexander III. came to the throne, except by rendering
financial aid.

This operation, if left to the peasants' unaided means, would
have presented numerous difl&culties, both for them and the mas-
ters. It might have lasted centuries and not have been completed
then. The State, therefore, whenever requested by the freedmen,
advanced to them the necessary sum, or rather four fifths of that
sum, calculated at the capitalization rate of the dues with which
each given piece of land was burdened.*

To the landlord, this system offered the immense advantage
of converting a private debt on the peasant into a public debt on
the State, and the freedman's annual dues into a sort of temporary

* The redemption price, as a rule, was calculated not after the marked
value of the land, but after the sum-total of the obrdk paid by the former
serfs for the lands ceded to them by the " Regulation Charters." The legal
redemption rate was established by capitalizing at 6 per cent the dues paid
in species — in other words, by multiplying the latter by 16%. Hence it is
that the redemption rate is frequently quite independent of the real value
of the soil, — sometimes higher, sometimes lower.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 439

tax, the collection of which is ensured by the fiscal agents. As
to the peasant, his gain was that he became without fturther delay
full owner of the soil, and could break ofi" at once the obligations
which still bound him to his former master. The State, for their
mutual interests, has, as it were, constituted itself banker for both
parties.

In proffering its aid to the peasants, the State was naturally
entitled to determine in what measure and on what conditions it
would grant it. In order not to become engaged too deeply, it had,
of course, to fix limits to the financial assistance it was willing to
render. Such, according to Milidtin, is the true meaning of the
ofl&cial valuations inserted in the Regulation. By fixing before-
hand, according to the regions and to circumstances, the figure of
the capital which the State was willing to advance, the legislator
intended to mark the limits within which the public credit might
be pledged.

Some such precaution was imperative, and this necessity has
too often been lost sight of by those who criticised the valuations,
some as being inadequate to compensate the landlords, others as
being too onerous for the peasants. Both sides were free to con-
tract other agreements ; only in that case the peasant was not to
count on assistance from the State.*

The advances made by the government to the freedmen are to
be reimbursed in the course of forty-nine years at 6 per cent. ;
the rate of 6 per cent, annual payment covers the interest and
extinguishes the debt. Anticipatory payments are permitted, but
of course rarely occur. Thus, in half a century, with the govern-
ment's aid, the peasant will be finally liberated and the gigantic
operation finally closed, f Only in the course of the twentieth

* Such free contracts have been very rare.

t These forty-nine years, moreover, are to be counted, not from the
promulgation of the Emancipation Act, but from the moment when the
contracting parties determine to avail themselves of the facilities for
redemption offered by the State. Now not a few peasants had not yet
decided on this step when Alexander III. came to the throne.

440 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

century, then, the peasant, freed from all temporary dues to his
former master and the State, will have become frill owner of the
piece of land allotted to him, and will be able to realize all the
benefits of emancipation.

This feature of the great reform — the redemption of the lands
— turned it into a vast credit operation, which, being undertaken
immediately after the Crimean war, might be styled daring. The
government could not hand over in cash to the landlords the
amount of the debt which it undertook to dear in the tenants'
name. Two new titles or bonds, therefore, were created to meet
this demand, both interest-bearing and guaranteed by the State :
one ' ' to bearer, ' ' bringing 5 per cent, interest and negotiable on
'Change; the other at 5^ per cent., bearing the holder's name and
subject, with a view to prevent crowding the market, to complicated
formalities in case of transfer ; these bonds were subsequently and
successively converted, by means of lottery-drawing, into titles
" to bearer, " extinguishable within thirty-seven years.* It is im-
possible to enter here into all the details of this vast and complicated
operation, materially assisted by the forced course imposed by the
Russian government, with the assistance which such a course af-
fords, but also liable to all the risks which it entails on financial en-
terprise. The most crjdng need of the noble landholders, deprived
of their human capital, was for capital in money. To help them out,
the redemption indemnity should have been immediately realiza-
ble, and the paper issued by the government was not, or only on
onerous conditions. As the holders of the new bonds were pressed

* The reader will note that the bonds placed in the landlords' hands
were to be extinguished in thirty-seven years, whereas the redemption
annuities, paid by the peasants and meant to reimburse the government,
are distributed over forty-nine years. The peasants were expected to
fall behind with their payments, and that is why the two operations, though
connected with each other, were timed diflferently. These arrears, as antici-
pated, have been considerable ; still, they remained below the expecta-
tions ; payments have even sometimes been anticipated, so that instead of
involving the state in debt, the redemption operation broaght in a bonus of
several million roubles.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 44I

for money all at the same time, the money market was glutted with
them, and a depreciation ensued which the government's precau-
tionary measures could but imperfectly forestall. This was one of
the chief causes of the pecuniary straits, sometimes amounting
almost to want, which the emancipation brought on numbers of
landlords. What is really wonderful is that such a transformation
should not have determined a radical economic crisis ; that Russia,
already laboring under financial perturbations, should have come
out of this one as unscathed as she did. When Alexander III.
came to the throne, the advances disbursed by the government
amounted to something like 750,000,000 roubles, and it is remark-
able that the State should have been able to open such a credit to
the peasants without embarrassment or loss to the exchequer.* If
the operation were ended, if all the peasants had taken advantage
of the government's assistance and redeemed all the land they were
entitled to by law, the advances made by the State would have
risen to over one milliard roubles. As it is, they amounted to
862,000,000 on the ist of June, 1886.

A few figures will make plain the state of the operation at the
time of the death of Alexander II. On the first of January, 1881,
there still remained, in the thirty-seven governments of the
interior, 1,553,000 "revision souls, " f or more than three mil-
lions of peasants "under temporary obligations, " i. e. such
as still owed their former masters, for a time, either labor or
obrbk. The number of serfs having proceeded to the redemption

* The metallic rouble is worth 4 francs or 80 cents. During the years
that preceded the Bulgarian war, it was near on 3>^ francs, and in 1889 it
was quoted at about 2%. On the ist of April, 1880, the total of loans made
amounted to 739,000,000; the annuities collected under this head in 1879
reached 43,000,000, to which should be added arrears to the amount of
17,000,000. The Russian Bank had, on an average, advanced 31^ roubles
on the dessiatlna (20 dollars on each 2f acres, approximately), and 107
roubles or thereabouts (about 60 dollars), per male peasant.

t As in the times of serfdom, the male peasant alone is understood under
the term "soul" {dushh); he alone paid poll-tax, and the increase of
population from one " revision " (census) to another was not taken into
consideration.

442 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

of their lands was 5,75o,<xx> "souls." Of these 5,100,000
had availed themselves of the government's aid ; about 645,000
had not. To these figures we must add 2,700,000 "souls " for the
nine western provinces, where, as a consequence of the Polish
insurrection, the bonds of serfdom had been abruptly snapped
and immediate redemption made compulsory. This gives us,
for these forty-nine governments, which comprised the immense
majority of serfs, over eight millions of "revision souls," or
about twenty millions of persons, finally delivered from bondage,
and having in future only to serve the interest on the redemption
loan. The operation was conducted on the same principles in the
rest of the empire, even to the remotest provinces, such as, for
instance, the Caucasus.

During the last years of Alexander II, there was a noticeable
slackening in the redemption operations. The number of peasants
who had recourse to them had steadily decreased since 1873 :
there were not 20,000 in 1880. The final cessation of " temporary
obligations ' ' seemed, in consequence, about to be delayed some
fifteen or twenty years more, and the forms of serfdom threatened
to survive in places into the twentieth century.

Contrary to generally received ideas, there were, at the acces-
sion of Alexander III., numerous peasants who, by force of the
Statute itself, still remained in a state of legal dependence from the
nobility. In 1882 over three million peasants of both sexes still
were under their former masters' tutelage and, in plain words, in a
state of semi-servitude, since the prerogatives conceded to the
landlords by the law were very extensive. The article 148 of the
agrarian statute appointed the former master the natural trustee
for such communes as still were " under temporary obligations"
to him ; article 149 invested him with the police supervision on
the domain and the duty of protecting public safety ; he could de-
mand of the commune the arrest of guilty or suspected peasants.
Article 160 went the length of awarding to the noble landlord the
right of revising the communal resolutions and suspending their

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 443

execution. More than that, the landlord had, in certain cases,
the right of demanding the destitution of the ' ' elder ' ' {itarshind.')
or elective head of the commune, and the appointment of another,
and even of authorizing or forbidding the temporary absence of
any member of the commune. It is easy to see how abnormal
such a state of things was twenty years after the emancipation.
In order to become really free, these peasants, in the words of a
St. Petersburgh journalist, needed another emancipation.

This second emancipation had been foreseen and prepared by
the law ; it was being gradually accomplished by the redemption
which freed the liberated serfs from all obligations towards their
late masters. Unfortunately, this great measure was carried out
unevenly in the various provinces. I^andlords and peasants were
far from showing everywhere the same zeal in settling accoimts.
In the government of Kursk, for instance, scarcely one half of the
peasants, in those of Nijni, Tdla, Ori51, Xstrakhan, not over two
thirds, had begun operations in i88o. In the eight governments
which compose the agricultural zone of the centre, i. e., in the
richest region of the empire, over twenty-five per cent, of the
emancipated serfs, i. e., 1,500,000 peasants of both sexes, were
still ' ' under temporary obligations ' ' at the same date. Whereas
in other governments — those of Vi^tka, Orenburg, Kharkof,
Khers5n — the operation was very nearly completed. The cause
of these fluctuations lies in the diversity of the conditions laid
down for the redemption in different regions.

In the more fertile regions of the Black Mould belt, where,
owing to the outlets opened by the railroads, the value of land
has rapidly increased, the landlords frequently found it to their
advantage not to consent to its redemption, so as to retain the
compulsory services of the peasants. Now the Statute did not
give the peasant the right to demand the redemption ; this right
belonged exclusively to the master, and all that the peasants could
do in such a case was to reduce their lots to the legal minimum
allowed for that particular locality. Such a law easily accounts

444 ^^^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

for the slackening of the operation in the course of these last years.
In order to put an end to this anomaly and to hasten the comple-
tion of this gigantic liquidation, Alexander III. issued an ukhz
making redemption obligatory. Thus to the son belongs the
honor of finishing the father's work.

Strange to say, scarcely two fifths of the redemption operations
were undertaken by mutual consent. In over sixty cases out of
each hundred, the demand came jfrom the landlords or fi-om the
credit institutions where their estates were mortgaged. The
peasant's distrust partly accounts for this, and his reluctance to
pay for a field to which he considered himself entitled ; but this is
not the only, nor even the chief reason. The law itself indirectly
encouraged him in his passive resistance. For the Statute, indeed,
authorized the landlord to demand the pecuniary settlement with
his tenants ; but in this case he was bound to content himself
with the sums advanced by the State, i. e. , with only four fifths
of the price established by official valuation ; the law forbade him
from claiming any more.

It was therefore manifestly in the peasants' interests to have
the redemption forced upon them, since in this way they secured
a reduction in the price. The official valuations being based on
the capitalization of the dues, they found themselves pledged to
the payment of less onerous annuities, even while they gained full
ownership of the lands.* This was, in fact, what the sovereign
and the members of the Drafting Commission aimed at. Every-
thing in this operation seems intended to benefit the freedmen,
yet these same peasants, apparently so favored, are frequently the

* One illustration will make the matter plainer. Certain peasants paid
to their former lord, as laid down in the Regulation Charters, a yearly
due of seven and a half roubles. The rate of redemption for this due, based
on the capitalization at six per cent., was 125 roubles. But of this sum the
peasants, being constrained by the landlord to redeem, had actually to pay
only four fifths, or 100 roubles, that being the amount advanced by the
State ; and for this advance they pay the State only six per cent, interest,
which includes the extinguishment of the debt, — that is to say, six roubles
a year instead of seven.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 445

most dissatisfied. The reason is simple : the valuations of redemp-
tion rates being based on the figure of the annual dues, and not
on the actual value of the soil, the land, thus ceded apparently at
reduced prices, is frequently far from having in reality the value
which the freedmen have to pay for it. That is why numbers of
them, on being forced to redeem, availed themselves of their right
of acquiring only the legal minimum.

Compulsory redemption is prevalent in the north : governments
of Petersburgh, Nbvgorod, Pskof, Tver, Smolensk, Moscow, —
and in the less fertile regions generally. Redemption by mutual
agreement obtains chiefly in the south : governments of Poltdva,
Tchemigof, Kh^rkof, Khers6n, and in the rich Black Mould
regions generally. In the north, the soil being unproductive
and the redemption rates, based on the annual dues formerly
paid, comparatively high, it was entirely in the master's interest
to get out of his tenants whatever the law empowered him to
demand. In the south, the soil generally being remarkably
fertile and, owing to the railroads, steadily rising in value, the
landlord was by no means anxious to give it up at the legal rate,
which, as a rule, fell far short of its actual value.*

It is plain jfrom this that the emancipation, even while con-
ducted everywhere after identical rules, could not everywhere
produce the same effects, but must have overburdened at times
the landlord, at others the peasants. That, partly, explains the
difference in the judgments pronounced in Russia itself on the
great reform. Of the noble landholders, the least wealthy came
off worst. The State was forced to come to the aid of such among
them who, owning only a few serfs, whose labor they rented out,

* The reports of tlie agricaltural inquest commissions show that the
redemption rates, as fixed in 1861, were, in the northern portions of the
Black Motild belt and in some western localities, ten, thirty, fifty, and some-
times a hundred per cent, below the actual market value of the land. In
the northwest, the north, and the east, on the contrary, it was as much
above the current prices. It appears that there were only nine governments
in which the difference one way or the other did not amount to more than
ten per cent.

446 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

found themselves on the verge of total ruin. Among the freed-
men, no given class had any claim on indemnities or assistance ;
but the State had to help out some indirectly by remitting them
part of their tax arrears. This v^ras done, among others, in the
government of Smolensk, where the price charged for the land is
out of all proportion with its producing capacities, and where the
lot which the peasant has been compelled to redeem is notoriously
insufficient to cover his taxes and dues.*

Where the conditions were most favorable to them, the
peasants did not always know how to avail themselves of the
advantages proffered them. They showed a repugnance for this
operation, which could be accounted for only by their prejudices
and their distrust. " Why," they objected, " should we redeem
land that belongs to us? " Many saw there a trap and got it
into their heads that the land was to be made over to them some
day unconditionally, wherefore redemption, they reasoned, was
all profit to the master. In a certain village, situated in one of
the richest Black Mould governments, a great landlord — an
upright and liberal man, tried to make his peasants understand
that it was in their interest to redeem the maximum allowed them
by the local regulation. His insistence only increased their dis-
trust, and his proposals were repulsed by the commune after long
debates. For the decision in such cases must be passed by the
commune as a body, that being an engagement which involves
the solidarity of all the peasants. In the communal assembly of
this particular village, then, those who were inclined to follow
the landlord's advice, and opined for immediate redemption and
the legal maximum, were accused of siding with the master. The
others pulled their beards and abused them : " You are nothing
but serfs ; you are the bdrMs men ; you don't know what it
means to be free." They meant that the land would be coming
to them of itself by and by, along with their liberty.

* Some ten million roubles, taken from the treasury funds and in great
part distributed through the provincial nobiliary assemblies, were devoted
to this use.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 447

Numbers of communes acted in the same manner under like
circumstances. Such facts show that the law-makers had their
good and sufficient reasons when they imposed on the peasants
the obligation of redeeming a minimum of land. Had the land-
lords not been empowered to force them to it, they would have
been waiting forever for gratuitous possession and never have
come to any understanding at all. So in the village just men-
tioned, the peasants now have only two or three dessiatinas (six
to eight acres) per ' ' soul, ' ' whereas, by accepting the legal maxi-
mum, they would have had more than double as much. The
lands which they refused to redeem, they now rent from the
landlord, at a rate very little below that of the redemption
annuities. By paying a few copecks more for the next forty-nine
years, they would have become proprietors instead of remaining
tenants. That is a point that many peasants never took in, or —
their courage failed them, being filled with chimerical hopes, and
more alive to the burdens of the present than to the fair promise
of the future.

Into the statute which regtdates all the details of this immense
liquidation, somehow crept a certain "Article 123," which rose to
great importance during the first years of the emancipation, owing
to the peasants' improvidence. In virtue of this article, the land-
lord could, instead of selling to his tenants the quantity of land
stipulated by the local regulation, and with their agreement, free
himself from this obligation by giving up to them gratuitously
one fourth of the legal maximum. This article 123, nicknamed
from its inventor, " Gagdrin article," appears not to have been
much to the taste of Milidtin, Tcherk^sky, Samdrin, and others
of their stamp, — in other words, of the peasants' more ardent
champions in the Drafting Commission. Owing to the ignorance
of the former serfs, this clause was, at first, in great favor with
them, but, of course, caused much disappointment later on. In
the rich Black Mould regions, where the soil in most cases rapidly
rose to a value far beyond the legal redemption rates, the tenants,
who had everything to lose by this combination, ofttimes hailed

448 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

it with joy, and even insisted on its being carried out, glad to be
delivered from the burden of the dues and secretly cherishing a
vague hope of a new and gratuitous distribution.

Another noteworthy trait : one of the things that confirmed
the hankering of many peasants after this gratuitous ' ' quarter lot, * '
was the repugnance with which it was at first regarded by most
landlords, too shortsighted to understand from the first that it
could be to their advantage to sacrifice their indemnity in view of
the probable rise of ground-rent. Experience soon opened the
peasants' eyes ; most contracts of the kind are dated from the first
two or three years. The people gave to this gratuitous " quarter
lot " the designation of " orphan's " or " poor man's lot," and, as
a matter of fact, the communes which have accepted it are now,
as a rule, poorer than their neighbors. * In the rich Black Mould
regions, where the increase in value has already taken place, the
peasants who have elected this mode of settlement have before
this become bitterly aware of their mistake, f They complain
and try to make out that they have been cheated. In a village
I am personally acquainted with the women now upbraid the
men with their improvident decision : "You are wretches," they
repeat to them; "thanks to you, our children will always
be beggars. ' ' And to crown all, the workers of disturbances are

* 1 just now came across a characteristic page in a letter of Ydri Samdrin :
"The great popularity, among the peasants, of 'Article 123,' which they
have named 'the orphan's lot,' is accounted for principally by a blunder of
the landlords themselves, who generally opened the discussion by declaring
themselves ready to accede to anything, except ' the gratuitous quarter lot '
(Art. 123). That was sufl5cient for the peasant to imagine that in that provi-
sion lay perfect bliss for him. For myself, I announced that I was willing to
agree to anything, without taking exception to any article whatever, so I
had not a single demand for ' the orphan's lot.' " — Letter to N. Miliiitin,
August, 1862.

t It seems at first sight as though the 642,000 peasants who, on the ist
of January, 1882, had accomplished the redemption of their lands without
assistance from the State, should be accounted the most fortunate ; that,
however, is not the case in reality, since they are mostly those who had
been content with the " quarter lot," so that, practically, there had been no
redemption at all.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 449

trying to make capital of this dissatisfaction and the inequality in
the condition of the dififerent communes, brought about by an act
of their own free will, for the revolutionary propaganda.

All the peasants are far from having the same cause for regrets,
yet nearly all have experienced the same feeling of disappointment.
The best treated have failed to find in the longed-for liberty the
wonder-working fairy whose wand was to operate a magical trans-
formation in their izbh. The expectations aroused in the masses
by the very word ' ' emancipation ' ' and overwrought by the long-
ings of centuries, were too lofty, too visionary not to shrink and
pale before reality. In the serf's dreams the image of liberty
took tints the more glowing, a glamour the more radiant, that the
form of it was so vague. The liberated peasant forgets the ills of
serfdom, the unpaid, compulsory labor, the obrbk ; he inclines
to see only the present charges and the vanishing of his dream.
" Father," said an old woman in my presence, speaking of her
late husband, ** father saw a field in a dream one night, at the
time that the manifesto came out, and said to me in the morning :
I know what that means — we shall never be free. ' ' To the old
crone, this word had a profound meaning ; fifteen years after, she
still saw in it a sort of prophecy or divination. How did she in-
terpret the mysterious dream ? Was the field seen by her hus-
band a symbol of servitude in her eyes, or perhaps an emblem of
that prosperity which the peasant sees in his dreams but never
can grasp ? No matter, the mujik and his bdba * understood each
other : they should never be fi-ee ! This guileless cry of the heart
reveals vague and misty aspirations, not unlike some of the theories
of Western socialism on the bondage of the people, and modem
servitude generally. This is why a writer of subtle mind gave
the advice — ^probably easier to give than to follow : to untie the
bonds of serfdom quietly, to jfree the serfs ' ' without ringing in
their ears that terrible word Liberty, for the true meaning of
which Western Europe has been seeking through centuries."
*Bdba, woman, especially old woman ; babka,b&bushka — ^grandmother.

BOOK VII. CHAPTER IV.

Results of the Emancipation — How the Manners and Social Statns were
less Affected by it than was Expected by either Adversaries or Par-
tisans— Disappointments and their Causes — Economic Results — ^They
Dififer according to the Regions — How it is that the Conditions of the
Master's Existence have been Modi6ed by the Emancipation, on the
Whole, more than the Peasant's — Moral and Social Consequences.

It was not only in the izbd. that the emancipation left an
tindercurrent of dissatisfaction. This revolution, which struck at
the very bases of society and property, which, in the opinion of
statesmen, was likely to imperil the entire social order, was
accomplished peaceably, with hardly any disturbance. It was a
great success ; yet, to many of those who took part in the work,
it proved disappointing.

At the two extremes of the civilized world — in Russia and in
the United States of America — two tasks of similar import were
achieved at nearly the same moment, although by very diflFerent
means. In America, the liberation of the slaves, bought at
the price of a murderous war and carried out by force, without
umpires or mediating power, has temporarily cast the white
master at the feet of the colored freedman, and established on the
shores of the Gulf of Mexico a state of things as saddening, as
perilous, as slavery itself. In Russia, on the other hand, the
same event has brought about no class strife ; as for race strife,
there could be none ; it has bred neither animosity nor rivalry ;
the social peace was not disturbed. And yet, of the two countries,
the best satisfied with its own work possibly is not the Empire of
the North.

450

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 45 1

How is this seemiilg anomaly to be explained ? First of all
by the excessive hopes raised — a feeling which, with the Russian,
beyond every other people, is apt to overleap reality ; then by the
passionate longing of desire, of which the joy of possession always
falls short. Not less than the ignorant serf, the politician and
the literary man, private speculation and public opinion, had
built up illusions. The cultivated Russians had conjured up a
vision of an Eden very nearly as fanciful as the Eldorado of the
peasant's dreams : of a free Russia, all new, all different from the
Russia of serfdom. In reality, the change neither was effected as
rapidly, nor reached as deep as was expected ; there was no
sudden transformation scene. And so, many choice spirits gave
way to disenchantment, depression, discouragement. This is a
point that should never be lost sight of : the emancipation and all
the great reforms which accompanied or followed it have not
brought about, in manners, social relations, in the national life,
all the changes which both its adversaries and partisans had
augured from it. The consequences, for good or evil, have been
less great, less visible, less striking than was hoped by the ones
and feared by the others. After so much discussing, after such
lofty flights of ambition and such sombre forebodings, it was a
surprise to both progressists and conservatives to find themselves
so nearly at the point whence they started, to have made so little
way. In this respect Russia is not imlike a man who, after
imdergoing a dangerous operation, does not find himself as much
benefited by it as he had hoped, and is at once glad to have come
out of it alive and dissatisfied at not feeling more relieved.

Russia is not the only country that has passed through such
painful and contrary impressions. France, too, on the eve and
on the morrow of her revolutions, has known but too well these
alternations of enthusiasm and despondency, that moral collapse
which follows on mighty efforts, after the exaltation of the
struggle has passed away. In Russia the reaction has been the
greater, the disenchantment the bitterer, that the country, being

452 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

younger, had the superb confidence of j'outh in its own powers.
It is therefore not to be wondered at, if, long before the assassina-
tion of Alexander II., disappointment showed on all sides, in
pubhc opinion and in the press ; nor should too much credence be
given to the laments of fashionable pessimism, which, since the
nihilists' attempts, has become quite outspoken. In the same
way that, in France, the failure of 1789 and the bankruptcy of the
Revolution have been proclaimed, the bankruptcy of the emancipa-
tion and the failure of the reforms have been denoimced in Russia.
Public opinion, having declared itself disappointed, lost all
interest — especially in the provinces — in the questions which had
roused it to such a passionate pitch under Alexander II. Such
hours of depression are inevitable in the lives of nations ; to throw
all the blame on the alleged fickleness of the Russian character
would be unfair. In all countries trees grow too slowly to please
the hand that planted them, and the eyes that watch them are
always astonished at the tardiness of the fruit.

Not content with complaining almost universally of the slow
progress effected so far, many Russians proclaim, as a sort of
axiom, that the condition of the rural population is worse than it was
before the emancipation. This kind of paradox has almost become
a commonplace, so quickly are the woes and the shame of serfdom
forgotten over the sufferings and difl&culties of the present day.

One would naturally look for such an opinion principally from
those men who, from their education, their principles or their age,
are all, the world over, prone to laud the past. But they are far
firom being alone of this mind ; their cue is taken up by pro-
gressists, the least apt to shy at innovations. Curiously enough,
indeed, it is in this latter camp that pessimism often stalks most
rampantly. Those who denounce most vociferously the failure
of the 19th of February are not always men who dread and con-
demn the principles proclaimed on that day, but more often such
as are inclined to regard the agrarian laws of 1861 as inadequate
or incomplete.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 453

One of the causes which account for this anomaly and also, in
part, for the general feeling of disappointment left by the Emanci-
pation Statute, is the fact that the great reform was not carried out
by the same hands that had so laboriously prepared it. It should
not be forgotten that, on the very morrow of the day on which
their agrarian code was solemnly promulgated, its chief authors,
together with their leader, Mililitin, were consigned to disgrace.
Whatever one may think of their work and their doctrines, there
is scarcely a doubt but that, in their hands, that work, in its prac-
tical application, would have been conducted more resolutely,
logically, consistently, than in the hands of men antagonistic or
indifferent to it.

One thing is certain, that the same spirit did not preside at the
drawing up of the rural charter and at the carrying out of it. This
initial reform, like most of those that were soon to follow, labored
under incoherences and hesitations, — at least in the application, —
also under lack of conviction and lack of method.

The most illustrious among the instigators of the Statute of the
19th of February would have wished, as did Milititin, after observ-
ing how it worked, to go over again certain amendments which
had been forced on the commission ; to base the new construction
on administrative, economic, financial reforms, which were not,
after all, undertaken in time or not in the same spirit. Their
most earnest wish, it is asserted, was to alleviate the peasant's
sufferings, to strive to lighten the burdens which crush him, to
seek, among other things, for a way to facilitate the agrarian
liquidation by means of a systematic process of colonization,
instead of leaving the mujik to go forth at random to look for the
promised land. It may be that, even had they been allowed to
conduct the practical application of the reform in their own way,
they would not have been able to fulfil all their hopes and avoid
all disappointment. But it is manifestly unfair to cast all the
blame for any mistakes or illusions from which the great work
may not have been exempt, on men who were repeatedly compelled

454 7'^-^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

to introduce into it alterations opposed to their views, and who,
after laboriously drawing up and ordering into a code most com-
plicated laws, were commanded to entrust the practical application
of them to other hands.

Moreover, the work, though not having yielded all that was
expected of it by the impatience of its promoters, is far from
having proved as barren of results as certain people would have
us believe. Politically, the eflfects of the emancipation have been
almost nil : but in all other respects its consequences are num-
erous and already apparent. It would be difl&cult to enumerate
them in a few pages. Still they might be reduced under three
main heads : economic progress, owing to the stimulant applied
to production by free labor and free competition ; moral progress,
owing to the removal from the public conscience of a long
standing stain and to the new-bom feeling of responsibility ;
social transformation, owing to the slackening of patriarchal
habits in favor of individualism.

The economic results are perhaps the most difl&cult to appraise,
for two reasons : ist, because property, agriculture, and the whole
of rural economy haVe not yet been rescued from the confusion and
uncertainty inseparable from any epoch of transition ; 2d, because
the eflfects of the emancipation vary, for both classes concerned,
according to the regions, the provinces, the commimes, and indeed,
as regards the former masters, they vary according to the charac-
ter, the qualities, good or evil, of individuals. The traveller,
therefore, should not wonder at the diversity or even contradictori-
ness of the views which he encounters on this subject, or at the
complaints which he hears from both landlord and freedman,
since both of necessity are temporarily uncomfortable and each
considers himself aggrieved.

As a rule, the landlords have, at all events dturing the first
years, lost a notable portion of their income — frequently as much
as one third. In the Black Mould provinces, where the soil is
generous and the population comparatively dense, the substitution

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION, 455

of free for servile labor was not long a matter of regret. In such
rich governments as Kursk, Oridl, Tamb6f, Vor6nej, the land-
lord, if possessed of some capital and a well-ordered mind, fre-
quently drew from his diminished acres, at the end of a few years,
an income as large, if not larger, as an estate of double the extent
yielded in the times of serfdom. In this favored region, where
new railroads have opened wide facilities to agriculture, where
the land has ofttimes doubled, trebled, quadrupled in value, both
landlords and peasants have been enabled at once to reap benefit
from the new dispensation.*

Not such the state of affairs in the steppes of the south ; still
less in the meagre regions of the north and west. In the steppes,
where land is plentiful and the population scarce, the suppression
of forced labor inflicted on the landlords such losses as could not
be made good by the redemption dues. In the thankless plains of
the north and northwest,— Pskof, Novgorod, Smolensk, Tver, —
where the soil is niggardly in bearing and hands are scarce, the
lands left to the nobility are far from bringing in what they used
to bring when labor was unpaid. So great is the difference, that
many landlords, finding farming too burdensome and unremunera-
tive a pursuit, have given it up, and gone into the cities, there to
live on state service, industry, or commerce.

These northern pomiesk-tchiks, the most heavily stricken by
the expropriation of 186 1, are often those who received the highest
indemnities. For, if the lands left them have considerably gone
down in value, the redemption rates for those which they ceded to

* The rapid rise in the prices of land, in the more fertile regions, is not
due exclusively to the creation of railways ; it is one of the direct conse-
quences of emancipation, which frees the soil itself and makes the owning
of land accessible to all classes of the nation. It enabled tradesmen and
other urban classes to invest capital in land. Accordingly, the reports of
the agricultural inquest commission of 1873 show that the number of rural
landholders had trebled in the ten first years after the emancipation. On
the other hand, there is a proportionate decrease in the ranks of the noble
landholders. Many pontiish-tchiks, already ill at ease in the time of serf-
dom, had now been forced to liquidate.

456 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the peasants were calculated on a basis much above their real
worth. So here again the peasant is most to be pitied of the two.
A large proportion of the serfs of these provinces had ceased to
work on their masters' estates, and were plying various trades in
the cities or ^dllages, paying the usual annual due or obrbk. To
avert complete ruin from the landlords, it became imperative to
compel these serfs to redeem, equally with the others, lots on
which, half the time, they could not make a living, at rates
which, being based on the figure of the annual dues they had
paid from other sources, was usually much higher than the nor-
mal income from the land — sometimes than the net income of the
best years. For this class of peasants — and it was a numerous
one — ^the compulsory redemption of the land virtually meant the
redemption of their personal liberty.

The Emperor Alexander II., in his address of the 27th of Jan-
uary, 1 86 1 , while commanding the project of emancipation to be laid
before him, informed the Coimcil of the Empire that * ' the ftmda-
mental object of the entire work was to be the amelioration of the
peasants' condition, not merely in words, but in deed." In con-
formity with these generous instructions, those who were appointed
to draw up the charter calculated the rate of the obligatory re-
demption in such a manner as to aflford to the peasants immedi-
ate relief; but they had left out of their calculations the
increase of taxes and contributions of every kind, to be levied on
the state in general, on the provinces, the communes. Great is the
number of peasants who, to-day, pay taxes and dues as heavy as
in the time of serfdom,* while they have less land, less forest,
often less live stock, and less credit than before the emancipation,

* All the local administrations complain of the disproportion between the
direct taxes and the income from the land, — a disproportion in consequence
of which the taxes really fall on the personal labor of the husbandman.
Not to lay on too gloomy colors, however, it should be remembered that
one half of the rural population — the peasants of the Crown demesnes, are,
as a rule, much better off than the others. They have more land and pay
less for it.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 457

which, under such crushing conditions, could not rapidly augment
the well-being of the people nor improve the culture of the soil.
It has frequently enriched wealthy districts and sometimes appears
to have still more impoverished poor ones. Official statistics have
ascertained that in many localities the cattle had diminished in
number ; hand in hand with the lack of cattle, goes that of agri-
ctdtural implements and of manure, so that the peasant's already
primitive mode of farming not only has not improved, but has, in
places, actually deteriorated since he is free. The soil has become
exhausted, the fields have even sometimes been abandoned, so
that in many regions bad crops and dearth have come to be of
almost regular occurrence.

In order to compensate all these inequalities, and to distribute
all these burdens more evenly among the various regions, the
State should have taken upon itself a portion, at least, of the
redemption payments, instead of merely advancing the money to
the peasants. That in fact, and everything considered, would
have been but just, for the State itself and all the classes of society,
especially the merchant class, to which the reform opened the
access to landed property, were interested in its success. And
indeed it was in this very manner, with the co-operation of the
State, that the corresponding process took place in the Kingdom
of Poland, a few years later, under the direction of Nicolas
Mililitin, and that is probably one of the reasons why, notwithstand-
ing the harshness of the conditions imposed on the Polish nobility,
the agrarian laws have perhaps worked better there than in the
centre of the empire.

The Bmperor Alexander III. has alleviated the suiFerings of
the peasants in twofold guise : by revising the direct taxation,
and by reducing the redemption dues. The State has made an
effort to equalize the burdens of the former serfs and of the Crown
peasants who have been endowed with land from the State
demesnes ; it has striven to aid the portion of the rural population
whose load was heaviest. The difficulty lay in the financial

458 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Straits of the imperial exchequer. The Bulgarian war, which
drew it into unexpected extra costs, to the amount of one milliard
of roubles, would, it was feared, stand in the way, for a long
time to come, of any such operation. This diflSculty has not
arrested the Emperor Alexander III. and his councillors.

In spite of the penury which afflicts the treasury, the imperial
government contrived to lighten the burdens which crush the Ufe
out of the rural populations. The Emperor Alexander III., con-
stantly preoccupied with the welfare of his faithful peasants,
appears to have set this task before himself as his main object in
life. Already towards the end of his father's reign, the suppres-
sion of the poll-tax had been spoken of, as well as the expediency
of spreading the sixty million roubles supplied by this tax over all
classes. One of the present emperor's first acts was to carry out
his father's intentions by aboUshing this tax, in use through many
centuries, the last relic of serfdom. This was definitely accom-
plished in 1886, and a land tax substituted, also an income tax (on
incomes derived from other sources than real estate), and a tax on
inheritances. As long ago as 1880 the salt excise was suppressed,
a tax which, though classed under the head of "indirect," in
reality amounted to a sort of poll-tax, weighing most heavily on
the poor.

As to the reduction of the redemption dues, the government
of Alexander III. decided in favor of a compromise between two
different systems. At first it had been planned to make use of all
the resources that the State could dispose of to liberate the poor-
est and most overburdened localities. The difficulty of such an
undertaking, and the wish to enable the entire rural class to share
in the good things provided by the new reig^, caused the project
to be given up. Alexander III. accepted the opinion expressed
by a " Commission of Experts " appointed on this occasion, and
a general reduction for all the former serfs of Great- and Little-
Russia was decided upon. The imperial ukhz which announced
this boon, as a sort of gracious greeting fi-om the new sovereign,

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPA TION. 459

promised at the same time a further supplementary reduction to
the more particularly overburdened villages. This meant twelve
millions annually lifted from the mujik's shoulders.* It came to
about one rouble per " revision soul," i. e. per male peasant, as
carried on the old capitation rolls. f

Such an alleviation may seem less than trifling. Yet it gener-
ally amounts to about one seventh of the average rate of redemp-
tion payments up to 1882, However inconsiderable the reduction,
it has nearly everywhere effaced the disproportion between the
dues paid by the former serfs and by the Crown peasants. The
four or five millions destined to succor the least favored regions,
were unfortunately insufficient to ensure the well-being of the more
overtaxed among the peasants. It might have been better to
reserve for them alone whatever resources were to be got at, instead
of scattering them over the whole of Great and I^ittle-Russia. Not-
withstanding the government's praiseworthy efforts and the real
alleviation awarded them, numbers will, for a long time to come,
be weighed down by want and taxes. It is to be feared that in
many a region the burdens, of which Alexander III. has done
his best to rid the peasant, may fall back upon his shoulders under
some other shape. In many instances what the former serfs gained
from the reduction of the redemption dues bids fair to be swal-
lowed up by the continually increasing provincial and municipal
taxes.

Paradoxical as it may appear at first sight, the emancipation
has, on the whole, modified the manner of life of the liberated serfs
far less than that of their masters. In truth, the advantages, the
conveniences afforded by serfdom to these latter could never be

* Of this sum three millions were charged directly to the treasury ; two
millions were covered by the surplus in the redemption fund ; seven millions
by the profits of the State Bank and the liquidation of former credit insti-
tutions.

f This general reduction costs about seven or eight millions of roubles
annually, for it does not apply to the peasants of the western provinces,
where the dues were reduced as early as 1863, in consequence of the Polish
insurrection.

4^0 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

appraised in money. Unpaid service, with a host of nameless petty
privileges, made farming a far simpler and easier matter than it
became under the free labor system. The loss of their hands com-
pelled the landlords to rouse themselves out of their traditional
indolence, — to take thought for their affairs themselves, — to adjust
themselves to new demands and to struggle with hitherto unknown
difficulties, — ^to transform all their methods and proceedings, their
mode of administration at the very least, — to hire laborers and
discuss wages, — to let their lands on leases or go halves with their
former serfs, — a ver}-^ complicated programme in a country where
farmers and capitals are scarce, and where every peasant has his
own bit of land to till.

There are many morose conservative landlords who do not
think even an increase of income an adequate compensation for all
these worries. And petty worries are frequently more galling than
great difficulties. One, in particular, is often complained of:
Formerly, the greater part of the manor houses were situated close
to the villages, to enable the master always to keep an eye on his
subjects. Now, that the peasants' dwellings, with their little en-
closures and the communal lands, are their property, the noble
landlord, who cannot afford to build himself a new residence on an
isolated site, is next-door neighbor to people who are no longer
subject to him, who have no kind even of official relations with
him, and whose lands are wedged in with his own. This proximity
is exasperating ; he does not feel at home any more, has no privacy,
and is all the time fuming at the drunken, thievish vicinity he
cannot escape from. More than a few, on this seemingly futile
ground, declare the country to have become uninhabitable.

Of all the consequences of emancipation one of the most note-
worthy assuredly is the decadence of the old patriarchal manners,
not only in the relations between landlord and peasant, but in the
mujik's own izbh. Along with the bond between master and serf,
that between father and son — ^the family bond, has become slack-
ened. They have tasted of freedom, and now, in the same way

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPA TION. 461

that the serf is rid of the master's yoke, the son strives to rid him-
self of the yoke of paternal authority, almost absolute until now.
Young couples want to be independent of the old people. They
each want a house and lot of their own.

The awakening of the peasant to a liking for independence
and the restoration of his liberty of action must, in the end, benefit
the towns and the richer, more fertile regions, possibly to the
detriment of the poorer, where the population is no longer held
fast by the artificial barrier of serfdom.

Men, like capital, tend to where labor is most remunerative.
The colonization of the arable steppes of the south and the east, as
well as of the remoter dependences of the empire, must logically
follow on the breaking of the peasant's fetters. If it has not yet
taken an active start, it is because of the hindrance opposed to it
by the administrative conservatism which still binds the peasants
to their lands through the institution known as communal solidar-
ity, which forbids a member to absent himself unless by the con-
sent of all the others.

One of the chief, but naturally also slowest, benefits of emanci-
pation will be the moral improvement of both serf and master. Both
have grown up to man's estate under the reign of serfdom ; both
bear the marks of the training they have received from this sorry
educator. Many of the faults imputed to the Russian nobility,
many of those thrown in the Russian peasant's face, come from that
demoralizing training. The vices, opposite, yet connected in their
very opposition, of the master and the serf — the fatuity, frivohty,
prodigality of the one ; the self-abasement, duplicity, thriftlessness
of the other ; the laziness and improvidence of both — flowed from
the same source. The landlord, who was supplied with a certain
income despite his incapacity or ignorance, is now compelled to
deal with men and things, to study characters, to regulate his
domestic as well as his rural expenditure ; he has no alternative
but either to bestir himself or to accept ruin.

As for the peasant, the stigmata left on him are too ancient

462 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

and too deep to allow of the mark being obliterated in a few short
years. The mujik is lazy and devoted to routine, he is crafty and
untruthful ; a proverb of his own says he would outwit the devil
any day. What else could be expected from this long personal
bondage superadded to political servitude and which robbed him of
his liberty at the very moment when his country had recovered
her own ? The liberated peasant is certainly far from showing him-
self worthy of the half-idolatrous honors rendered, in his person,
to the Russian people by its numerous admirers. The mujik goes
on getting drunk and beating his wife ; he has not yet learned to
invariably respect the rights of property. But all these evil
propensities have long been fostered by servitude : drunkenness
comes from a longing for oblivion ; domestic brutality is warranted
by that of the master or his bailiff ; pilfering, by the old habit of
regarding as in a manner belonging to him what belonged to his
master. These faults have not vanished ; some even, if we are to
believe the croakers, may have become intensified through the
sudden removal of restraint. Drunkenness especially, they aver,
has made frightful progress : for drink the peasant will sell even
his tools. The evil in this direction is great, undoubtedly : the
surplus shown by the State budget is almost invariably supplied
by the excise department. Still, as this surplus is generally
due to an increase in the taxation of spirits, as it is not accom-
panied by a diminution in the revenue yielded by any other
branch subject to taxation, it turns out, on the provincial statis-
tics' own showing, that, in spite of his poverty, the mujik earns
enough to enable him to add to all his compulsory payments the
voluntary contribution of the tap-room, apart from the fact that
the redemption dues which he annually pays are, in reality, a form
of compulsory saving.*

* The alleged progress of drunkenness is, in fact, very questionable,
especially for these latter years. Recent statistical reports show a diminu-
tion of 3 ^ in 1874 in the production of Tfddka (rye whiskey), which in 1864
reached the figure of 27 millions of vedrdy a measure containing about
twelve quarts, while there was in the population an increase of 10 Jf ; and

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 463

Another reproach often cast at the freedman is his improvidence.
He now knows even less than he did how to protect himself, by lib-
eral savings, against the instability of the climate and consequent
bad crops, which, in Russia, always threaten even the very best lands.
This attack, however, from the advocates of the past turns against
themselves, for it is servitude which has accustomed the peasant to
rely on the master for everj'^thing, as a child on his guardian.

It appears to be an established fact that since the peasants have
no longer their bdrin at their back, they, as a mle, stand accidents
of all sorts, so frequent in Russian rural life, worse than they did
before : epidemics, epizootics, fires, destructive insects, insufficient
crops find them more helpless. It is therefore quite usual to hear
regrets about not having an institution which should, as did the
landlord in bygone days, succor the mujik when he is the victim
of calamities and disastrous visitations. But whatever way you
turn — ^whether you appeal to the commune, to the provincial as-
semblies, or to the State, or simply have recourse to a credit bank,
it is no easy matter to organize such a special providence, all the
less that the peasant's own thriftlessness and ignorance prove ob-
stacles in the way of every contrivance invented for his benefit.*

The upshot of it all is that the mujik of to-day is in a phase of
transition, he has not yet been able to throw off the faults be-
queathed to him by servitude, and now adds to those certain other
faults, proper to liberty. After being so long bent double under
the yoke, it is not astonishing that he should not yet have straight-
ened himself to his full stature, that he should not always know
how to conduct himself in a manner becoming a freeman, thati^
personal dignity should as yet be as unfamiliar to him as the sense of
responsibility. Nor is it to be wondered at that, from the stand-
since 1874 another diminution is said to have taken place in the home con-
sumption. The number of taverns or tap-rooms {kabhks) is said to have
gone down 40 ^, more particularly in the villages. On the other hand the
peasant consumes a greater quantity of tea and sugar— a sure token of
prosperity.

* Several popular banks have recently been founded for this very
purpose.

464 THE EMPIRE OP THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

point of intellect and instruction, his progress should not have
been more rapid ; that is not entirely due to the inadequacy of the
schools and the resources of the State, the provinces, the rural
communes ; it comes in great part from the huge thickness and
density of the popular layers, and from the absence of an inter-
mediate class which would help to reach the bottom of them.

The portraits— or caricatures — constantly drawn of the liber-
ated mujik, abroad and at home, give no reason to augur badly
for his future. Let us recall what sort of a being, under the old-
time monarchy, was the French peasant, the animal with two feet
and a human face depicted by I,a Bruyere, such as F16chier
shows him in his Grands Jours d'Auvergnc, or the Englishman
Young on the very eve of the Revolution. There is certainly
nothing there to put the mujik to the blush or make Russia's
jfriends despair of her civilization. There are countries — Egypt
for one — where the rural man, the fellah, though nominally free,
has been so lowered by sixty centuries of oppression, that one
wonders whether he will ever have the strength to rise. The
Russian peasant never suggests similar thoughts.

In spite of several centuries of servitude, the manumitted
peasant has rapidly become conscious of his rights and is ready to
defend them against any and everybody. That is easily accounted
for : the former serf, accustomed to look on the tsar as on his
natural protector, had never ceased to hope for liberty and, in his
relations to his master of yesterday, is always incUned to cotmt
on the support of the government. Only a few months after the
inauguration of the Statute, one of the principal members of the
"drafting commission," himself a great landholder, Yuri
Samdrin, in his letters to his friend N. Mililitin, was exult-
ing at what he called the "transfiguration of the people" and
loudly rejoiced over the manner in which the peasants were get-
ting educated by their conflict with the nobility.* For the peas-

* Samdrin who, as a nile, and not without reason, was regarded as a
pessimist, wrote the following lines, which may appear at this day sangnine

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 465

ants' most generous advocates as well as for the eloquent Slavophil
journalist, there lay the main point ; in their eyes the material
advantages of the emancipation were a secondary consideration.
The great object with them — we can see that from Milititin's
correspondence — was to raise the people, to awaken the peasant
to a consciousness of his own personality and of his rights as a
freeman, even should yesterday's masters be hurt at times from
being "the grindstone on which the people's wits were getting
whetted."

The mujik, as a riile, thoroughly grasped his novel rights ;
unfortunately he did not always show as clear a perception of his
new duties and obligations. In this respect he promptly unde-
ceived his best friends' hopes. One of the faults the famous
Statute can most justly be charged with is an excess of faith in
the mujik' s honesty, or rather simplicity. Prince Tcherk^ssky
did not hesitate to acknowledge as much in private conversation.
He confessed to it in the first years in a confidential letter to his
friend and former colleague, Milititin. While expressing much
legitimate pride in the success of their common work, peaceably
accomplished in spite of so many ill-natured prophecies, Tcher-
k^ssky regretted only one thing : not having taken more precau-
tions against the peasant's unprincipled propensities.

Among all the faults that can be, on the average, imputed to
the liberated serf, there is one from which he seems to be abso-
lutely free : it is acrimonj'^ or ill-feeling of any kind towards his
former master. He is not exactly scrupulous where his interests

to an excess of optimism : " Without any exaggeration, the people are
transfigured, from head to foot. The Statute has loosened their tongfues,
it has broken through the narrow circle of ideas within which, as though
shut in there by a spell, the people vainly went round and round, finding
no issue." (Letter to Milititin, May, 1861.) A few months later, coming
back to the same idea, Samdrin again wrote: "The Statute has done its
work. The people have straightened themselves and are transfigured : they
look, walk, talk differently. That is acquired ; it is impossible to suppress,
and that is the point. In their conflict with the other class, the peasants
are now getting their civic education. " (November, 1861.)

466 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

are at stake ; but he commits his iniquities ingenuously, with a sort
of good-natured slyness, without bitterness, without any feeling of
envy or animosity, any systematic ill-will. In spite of his incura-
ble distrust and all that has been said about his ingratitude,* the
mutual relations of the two classes, but lately linked together by
so galling a bond, have retained, at least externally, a character
of cordiality, both in public and private life.' For the provincial
assemblies, where the two orders are placed side by side ; the
peasants, far from opposing their former lords, are more apt to be
led by them. Thus all the speculations on imminent class-strife
and popular grudges have proved vain. Provided the late master
was not actually a tyrant, the mujik still calls him "his good
bdrin " ; if he has no occasion any more to assume an humble
demeanor to \h& pomihh-tckik of whom he implores a boon, pros-
trate at his feet and touching the ground with his forehead, he
has not given up saluting him when they meet with one of those

* This was, for some years, a source of much heartache for those among
the landlords whose rule had been mild and generous. " I have already
mentioned," wrote Prince Tcherk4ssky, "and cannot help repeating, how
feeble is the feeling of gratitude among the peasants towards even the kind-
est masters, even those whose conduct towards them has always been marked
not only by conscientiousness but by magnanimity. One reading of the proc-
lamation has swept away all memory of benefits received, and unfortunately
the nobility could not bear with resignation the thought that this fact, how-
ever painful, was, after all, rather natural." — I^etter to Miliiitin, June, 1861.

' It can be positively asserted that the character is not "external"
merely, but very real. What embitters the mutual relations between two
classes is when the superiority of one over the other is due to conquest and
difference of race. Where, as in Russia, such is not the case, no bitterness
exists, neither at the time nor retrospectively. Certain family differences
have been adjusted by umpire, that is all. There is at first some soreness,
some difficulty in getting into the new lines, but family feeling prevails
through it all and helps over many a hard place. And the distrust is only
skin deep, in petty matters of pecuniary interests — the universal distrust of
the peasant all over the world, who feels at a disadvantage before trained
intellect and is always afraid it will be used against him. In greater and
vital things the mujik instinctively turns to his superior in knowledge and
experience for guidance — as the author remarks a few lines lower, — and that
his confidence is not abused, the astonishing experience with the " Arbiters
of Peace " (see pp. 436-437) has abundantly proved.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPA TION. 467

profound inclinations of the body with which he does homage in
church to the holy images inkons). I once happened to be present,
in a southern government, at a business interview between a dele-
gation of peasants and a landlord whose guest I was. There were
a dozen of them, come to discuss with the pomiish-tchik, on behalf
of their commune, the leasing of some land belonging to him. As
they neared the manor house, they removed their caps and stood
bareheaded at the door, patiently waiting for the master to finish
his dinner. When he came out to them at last, accompanied by
his bailiflf, they stood before him in a circle, cap in hand, and
launched out into a long dissertation. Sometimes they spoke by
turns, sometimes all together, frequently lapsing into the old
humble forms of speech : '^Bdtiushka (father), take pity ; kind
bdrin, you would not beggar us," — yet never losing ground, hold-
ing their own, standing up for their interests, and trying to touch
the landlord's heart. .

As a set-off, however, to the profound deference which they in-
variably show their former masters, the peasants are very far from
always keeping faith with them. They have not yet been able to
fully realize that work voluntarily undertaken should be punctu-
ally carried out. Respect for agreements, the obligation imposed
by a contract, are things that do not at all accord with the idea the
mujik has made to himself of liberty ; he takes things easy — to
such an extent that his unreliability has become one of the sores ot
rural life. By a contradiction not unfrequent in simple natures,
the same man who would fain dispense with all obligations towards
others on the ground that he is a free man, still thinks himself at
times entitled to make use of the privileges pertaining to his
former condition as serf. Does he need timber ? he serenely cuts
some in the master's forest. Just as before the emancipation he is
always ready to appeal to the landlord's purse. If a cow is taken
sick or a horse is hurt, he quite innocently goes to his former
master and asks him for another, forgetting that he has no longer
any claim on him.

468 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Yet, though neither landlords nor peasants, so far, bear malice,
it is not impossible that the new state of things may contain a
latent germ of disaffection and covetousness, for time to mature.
We must not forget that the mujik is rarely satisfied with the piece
of land allotted him. Instead of appeasing his craving for prop-
erty the imperial proclamation of 186 1 only aroused and sharpened
it. The compromise imposed by autocracy on master and serf is
not regarded by the latter and his children in the light of a final,
irrevocable thing.* The land liquidation, so boldly undertaken
by the sovereign, has stirred in numbers of peasant heads a dull,
dim notion of a coming social liquidation, another agrarian oper-
ation, more extensive still and more to their advantage — a mirage
which the people's self-instituted, doubtful friends skilfully play
off before his eyes in the distance. The revolutionary propaganda
and the radical spirit, both impatient of anything in the shape of
compromise and restraint, have been steadily working for the last
thirty years to represent the imperial reform as illogical in prin-
ciple and inadequate in practice. They are at one in this with the
mujik' s secret instincts, and strive with might and main to second
them still more by demonstrating to him that another expropri-
ation of the noble landholders and a redistribution of the land will
be the natural sequel and clinching of the task left incomplete at
the first installment.

It cannot be denied that, in this respect, the entire social edifice
has been shaken by this first and great reform, which claimed
that it would merely broaden and strengthen the basis of it in a ^
way that has given the moral ideas, the juridical notions, the
political conceptions of the people, such a shock as the country,
after more than twenty years, has not yet recovered from. All
wise precautions, all ingenious temporizing and expedients not-
withstanding, it may be said that, in this sense at least, the eman-

* In one of the districts that had been most favored in 1861, a function-
ary asked the peasants a few years later if they were satisfied. "Yes,
bdtiushka" they replied ; " but we live in hopes that the tsar will not
forget our children and will give them land, too, some day."

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 469

cipation, so skilfully calculated, so happily conducted, has not
been foreign to the progress of the radical spirit ; that, by feeding
agrarian cupidity, it has unwittingly supplied weapons, examples,
pretences, to the enemies of order and property.

The ease, the harmlessness, with which this revolution was
decreed and carried out, have enticed the people to dream of
others, no less lawful and no less easy. For, in the peasant's eyes,
the tsar both can and may do anything, and the marvel of a
power so great as to transform in one day, by a single ukhz, all the
conditions of property, breeds in the popular mind delusions which
disappointment may possibly some day turn against that power
itself. For the ignorant masses, — and this cannot be too much
emphasized, — the Emancipation Act has effected no final settle-
ment whatever : one ukhz can be modified by another ; what the
tsar has done in 1861, the tsar is free to undo, twenty or thirty
years later, for the greater advantage of his faithful peasants.

There is nothing surprising in this ; and the most generous
promoters of the emancipation, the most stoutly convinced advo-
cates of territorial endowment, were too clear-sighted not to per-
ceive the truth very quickly. Nothing can be more characteristic
in this respect, or go deeper to the root of the matter, than a letter
of one of the most illustrious members of the Drafting Commis-
sion, Prince Tcherk^ssky :

* ' This transformation, ' ' he wrote confidentially to his friend and
former colleague, N. Milititin, * ' has another and undesirable side
to it, of which I do not speak in public, but which I mention here,
so as not to leave the impression incomplete : it is (a thing in-
separable fi-om so colossal" a piece of work, fi-om so vast a transfer
of rights and obligations) an unhinging of the popular moral
consciousness as to right and wrong, possible or impossible, in
regard to questions of 'mine and thine.' This feature, the inevi-
table accompaniment of every great social revolution, has perhaps
never in all history manifested itself with such clearness as at this
present moment. Just now, owing to the undying consciousness

470 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

which always abides in our people, but is more than ever wide-
awake in them in consequence of the transformation operated
before their eyes by one imperial ukhz, the peasant has the profound
conviction that there are no limits to the action of the sovereign
authority, no end to the things that may be expected of it, and
which it can give, no matter at whose cost, as a legitimate com-
pensation for the long labor and hardships heroically endured by
their class. At the present hour this is the deep-seated thought
in the breast of every peasant, and you will admit that it ill-accords
with the teachings of the economists. Hence, not to mention
more weighty facts, the propensity to cut down our trees,
impartially to use our pastures, — things that are really very un-
pleasant in daily life ; not that they are so very ruinous, but the
perpetual worry is wearing. This disrespect of the peasant's for
the rights of property has nothing to do with any sort of revolu-
tionary spirit ; on the contrary, from a certain point of view, it
even is not devoid of method and a semi -juridical character. It
is evident that in the people, obscurely, but down to a great
depth, a tradition has survived, a memory of a time when landed
property was not yet, or not to any great extent, in the hands of
the nobles, when nearly all the meadow lands and the forest lands
in particular were used indiscriminately and in an undefined way
by all. For one brief instant the peasant has had a vision of the
return of this good old time, and even now he firmly cherishes the
conviction that the government', if it had the right and power to
suppress serfdom, has the no less incontestable right and power to
change all other conditions of landed property, at least such as are
galling to the peasant. I believe, ' ' added the Prince, with entire
candor, ' ' that many former delegates of the ' government com-
mittees,'* and in particular of the Polish, would-be economists,
should these lines come under their eyes, would rub their hands
with glee, and would remind us that they had foretold it all. And

* He taeans the delegates representing the provincial committees of the
nobility before the Drafting Commission.

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 47 1

yet, I must say that, in spite of all these worries, inevitable con-
sequence as they are of the great transformation, I do not see even
now that there was the least possibility of doing the business in
any other manner ; even now, taught as we are by experience, I
would not hesitate to repeat the same advice that we gave then.
To my mind, all these discomforts only prove that, in the best
things, there is an alloy of evil."

And that is the truth of it. Tcherk^ky was quite right in
repeating that, outside of the road that had been taken, there was
no other to take. In spite of their opponents' gloomy predictions
and virulent upbraidings, he and his fellow-workers cannot possibly
be held responsible for an evil inherent in the situation, due to the
nature of autocracy as much as to the vagueness and obscurity of
the property laws in old-time Russia. By liberating the serfs
without giving them any share of the soil, the way would have
been opened to far worse agrarian troubles, far more dangerous
weapons would have been given to the revolutionary propaganda.*

Deceived in all his hopes, despoiled of the piece of land to
which he believed himself entitled by inalienable right, the mujik,
had he lost faith in the tsar's paternal power, might have fallen a
prey to the anarchist emissaries. If the agrarian laws have stirred
in the people a vague sense of covetousness, it is perhaps owing
to those same laws that the insidious appeals repeatedly addressed,
in the course of these last years, to the rural plebs, calling to them
to " strike out for land and liberty," have not found more response
in the peasant's smoke-blackened izbci, that, notwithstanding the
ominous threats of a certain set of propagandists, the Russian
fields and villages have not yet had their Jacquerie or their land-
league on the Irish model.

* The revolutionary pamphlets destined to be read by the people, espe-
cially insist on the smallness and high price of the lands allotted to the
peasants. One of them, analyzed by Mr. Ralston {Nineteenth Century,
May, 1877) and entitled From the Frying-pan into the Fire, strives to demon-
strate to the tnujik that he is worse oflFthan in the old times, and that he
soon will fall into a miserable condition similar to that of the English peo-
ple, "whom the rich have despoiled and enslaved."

472 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

The nihilists have taken care to keep alive in the people ideas
and aspirations which time might already have disposed of had
they not been adroitly nourished by interested hands. Ever since
the last Oriental war, especially during the years of plotting,
1 878-1 882, the agitators never tired of spreading among the rural
population a rumor of an impending redistribution of lands ; so
that, on some estates, the peasants actually attempted to proceed
to the division of the noble landlord's acres. To put an end to
such rumors, the government repeatedly had to assert, solemnly
and publicly, by means of official circulars, that the Emancipation
Act had settled the conditions of landed property for the future
once and forever. But, says the proverb, there is no deafer man
than he who won't hear — and, on this question, the peasant is
wonderfully hard of hearing, — and many good stories, true too,
are told about it. Thus, in an out-of-the-way village, an educated
peasant was reading aloud to the others one of those circulars
which gave the lie direct to all rumors of new agrarian laws :
' ' Pshaw ! ' ' exclaimed one of the rustic audience, with a sly
smile, ' ' that stuff is written by tchiiibvniks (bureaucrats, govern-
ment employ6s) ; the tsar is master all the same. ' ' What makes
such protests wellnigh hopeless is that the lower police agents and
other subaltern functionaries, as well as the village elders, frequently
share the delusions which it is their duty to Xxy and dispel. So
they compromise with their conscience by announcing to the vil-
lagers that the new division of lands is adjourned until further
orders, and in the meantime it is not to be talked about.

What he has long looked for in vain from the generosity of
Alexander II., the mujik persists in expecting from Alexander
III. With the nu-al masses, the agrarian question which the
I,iberator and his advisers flattered themselves they had solved in
1861, will long remain an open one. None of the measures taken
by Alexander III. to settle it — neither the suppression of " tem-
porary obligations," nor the abrogation of the poll-tax, nor the
reduction of redemption dues — seem to have the desired eflfect as

THE PEASANT AND THE EMANCIPATION. 473

far as the people are concerned. The kindness and sympathy
lavished by the I^iberator's son on his faithful peasants rather tend
to keep alive their chimerical hopes than to undeceive them. At
the time of his coronation, the Emperor made it a point to declare
with his own lips to the village-elders assembled in Moscow, that
the property question was settled for good and all, that the peas-
ants were not to look for any more allotments. Many subsequent
facts show that even the Tsar's own loyal word did not set
their minds at rest. The smallest spark will kindle the latent
fuel. A local inquest, a rural statistical operation suffices to
start the rumor afresh. This almost universal expectant state
of mind opposes a serious obstacle to a general census, because
the rural population is disposed to regard anything of the kind
as a forerunner of a redistribution of lands, unless — such is the
mujik's readiness to give credence to the most contradictory
rumors — unless, as has happened in some villages, it is regarded
as prefacing the restoration of serfdom !

To comprehend the whole bearing of these popular notions on
land, and the rehandling of property, it is necessary to be familiar
with the form of land tenure in use outside of the cities. The
vague aspirations called forth by the emancipation are perhaps to
be ascribed less to the sudden expropriation of the former lords,
than to that immemorial institution — the mir and the peasant
commune.

^;i- ,

■^- ^-^ '■'"Vht^ 1

^y^

i4> vyT-^*<y)

SBS'^

MIR, FAMIIyY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES.

CHAPTER I.

Land Tenure Unchanged by Emancipation — Is the Mir a Slavic Institution ?
Antiquity and Origin of Communal Property in Russia — Differing Views
on the Subject — Difference between Moscovite Russia and Western
Europe from the Standpoint of the Agrarian System.

We have seen that the Emancipation Act, while endowing the
mujik with land, practically left him very much where he was in
the times of serfdom. He now owns the land of which his land-
lord formerly let him have the use, but the mode of tenure is the
same still. Now as formerly the land belongs to the peasants
in common, not personally, not individually, by hereditary right.
The lots purchased from the landlords were not distributed to the
various members of a village community, but remain the collective,
undivided property of the commune. The peasant, decorated by
the law with the title of landholder, usually owns permanently
and certainly only his cabin, his izbh — and the small adjoining en-
closure, iLscidba ; as to the rest he in reality only has the usufruct
of the lot he is paying for.

Such, from times immemorial, has been the form of land
tenure in use amidst the peasants of Moscovia or Great-Russia.
The emancipation has not changed it. As the tenure of the lands
was usually collective, so the redemption of them has also been
operated, not individually, but, as a rule, by communes. It is

474

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 475

the entire village and not the individual or the family which, un-
der the guaranty of mutual solidarity, is answerable to the State
or to the landlord for the repayment of the advances made by the
former, so that the emancipation has temporarily rather strength-
ened the old- Russian commune by giving the State an interest in
its preservation until payment in full of the ransom from serfdom
— this new solidarity being superadded to that for the old taxes.

The respect shown for the old form of land tenure has greatly
simplified the transition from servitude to freedom, removing,
together with the advantages, also the dangers which brand-new
institutions would have brought on. From dependence on the
noble landlord, the mujik has fallen into dependence on his com-
mune. The bond that tied him to the soil has, then, not been
really broken. He is still bound to it by a double chain : undi-
vided property and tax-solidarity. The peasants' liberty is, in a
way, like their property : undivided and collective. They still
are bound, if not to a master, to one another, and cannot move
freely outside of the community. It has been said that the
peasant, liberated from the landlord's yoke, had become the serf
of his commune. This is a manifest exaggeration. The domi-
nation of the commune, which, after all, is only a control exercised
by the peasants over themselves, cannot be likened to the control
over them of an individual belonging to another class, of difierent
bringing up.

The Russian rural commune thus presents for study two main
sides or faces : the system of land tenure, and the administrative
or governing system. Intimately connected and interdependent,
the economic and administrative communes are still sufl&ciently
distinct to merit a separate study of each. We will begin with
the rural commune, i.e. the commune in its capacity of collective
landholder.

In the eyes of Europe, this sort of agrarian communism is
perhaps the most noteworthy feature, and the strangest, of con-
temporary Russia. In an age of systems and theories such as

47^ THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

ours, a study of this kind is fraught with interesting and priceless
lessons to the nations, uneasy as they are about their social status
and oppressed by a vague unrest. Unfortunately, our Western
bringing up, our national habits and our school prejudices do not
exactly predispose us to a calm and impartial comprehension of
such a system. When brought face to face with community of
property, under no matter how attenuated a form, the most sober-
minded find it difl&cult to forbear from prejudging the question.
And yet it is precisely those social phenomena that seem most
novel and queerest to us which it is most important to consider in
themselves, weighing the facts, unbiassed by any preconceived
idea.*

Collective property as it is in use among the peasantry, while
it now strikes us as Russia's most prominent feature, was one of
the last things perceived there by Western Europe, one of the last
to be noticed by the Russians themselves in their own countrj-.
It was a Westphalian gentleman. Baron Haxthausen, who made
the discovery during his travels in 1842-43 ; he was, at least, the
first to impart it to Europe, in his famous studies on the inner
condition of Russia, f Scientific Europe, as was but natural, was
immensely struck at encountering, in the autocratic Empire of the

* Through all the following study of the agrarian system, I shall take
my facts from the numerous Russian writings on this subject, especially
from the grand agricultural inquest held in 1873, the results of which were
collected by the government under the title of : Labors of the Imperial
Commission for the Investigation of the Actual Condition of Rural
Economy. These documents have been supplemented by the answers to the
lists of questions propounded by various learned societies, such as the Col-
lected Materials for the Study of the Rural Agrarian Commune, and by
divers publications issued by the Central Committee of Statistics, by the
Ministry of State Demesnes or by various Provincial Assemblies ^Z^w.s/z'i?^^, .
such as Materials for tJie Study of Contemporary Landed Property and
Rural Economic Industries in Russia (St. Pet., 1880), and Statistics
of Landed Property and the Inhabited Portions of European Russia
(1880-1881).

t Studien iiber die innem Zustdnde, das VolksUben und insbesondere
die Idndlichen Einrichtungen Russlands (1847, voL i., ch. vi. ; vol. ii., ch.
xviL).

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 477

North, an institution which seemed in a measure to realize the
dreams of Western utopists. The Russians, suddenly aroused to
a knowledge or a consciousness of this national peculiarity, joyfully
took hold of it. Naturally impelled to bring everywhere to the
front the originality of the Slavs, as the Germans vindicate that
of the Teutons and we ourselves at times that of the Celts, nume-
rous Russian writers credited these agrarian communities to the
Russian spirit, the Slavic genius. Slavophils, respectful admirers
of the past and of Moscovite tradition, — democrats, disciples of
the West, vied together in extolling the Great-Russian commune.
All insisted on seeing in it the primordial institution of the na-
tion and, at the same time, the formula of a new civilization,
the future principle for the impending regeneration of Europe,
actually a prey to class strife and imperilled by the excesses of
individualism. In the eyes of a certain class of patriots, land*
community, obscurely kept alive by the enslaved peasant, became
a sort of secret revelation, confided to a chosen people, and of
which the Russians, for the good of humanity at large, were
bound to make themselves the apostles and the missionaries.

The recent studies in comparative history and law have dis-
pelled these visions of national self-conceit. Within the empire,
agrarian institutions similar to the Slavic communities were dis-
covered to exist in most indigenous tribes of alien race, from the
Lapps and the Samoy^ds of the north to the Mordvin, the Tchu-
vash, the Tcheremiss of the centre. Abroad, agricultural com-
munities more or less similar to those which still flourish in
Russia, are met with among the most different peoples — in India,
on the isle of Java, in Egypt. In the past they have turned up at
the two extreme ends of the earth — in Mexico and Peru, as well
as in China and in Europe. To the mir of Great-Russia was op-
posed the ager publicus of the Romans (which differed from it in
every particular), the Teutonic mark, which appears to have come
a little nearer to it, and which can be traced all through the Middle
Ages — in Germany, in Switzerland, in Scandinavia, in England,

478 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

even in France. On this point the labors of Sir Henry Maine,
Maurer, Nasse, E. de Laveleye, leave no doubt.* It little mat-
ters that one or other of these scholars should have allowed
himself to be carried too far by external analogies or the love
of system ; it little matters that, where classical nations are con-
cerned, and more notably the Spartans, our historians have been
duped by mendacious legends and communistic romancing. The
collective mode of tenure appears to have been, with a great many
nations, the most ancient form of landholding. It is only after
having been for centuries the undivided property of the tribe, the
clan, or the commune, that land ended by becoming the perma-
nent and hereditary property of individuals. Contrary to the
conceptions of certain democrats of Russia or the West, individual
property is a comparatively new, modem form of land tenure ; col-
lective property is the old, the primitive, archie form. So that
the Russian village community, far from being an innovation, an
experiment or a prophecy, is really a block from a vanished world,
a witness of a perished past, a sort of fossil, preserved in a country
long shut off from the influences which shaped the course of
things on the rest of the continent. With regard to this, as to
many other things, the originality of Russia and the Slavs has
nothing to do with either race or national genius ; it simply means
that the Russians and the greater part of the Slavs have stopped
* Henry Sumner Maine, Village Communities in the East and West;
Maurer, Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-Haf-Dorf und Stadt- Verfas-
sung ; E. de Laveleye, De la PropriSti et de ses Formes Primitives. It
should be noted that, according to one of the most perspicacious investiga-
tors of history, M. Fustel de Coulanges, there is nothing to prove the exist-
ence of collective property, with periodical divisions, either among the
Greeks or the Romans, the Gauls or the Merovingian Franks, or, even Tacitus
notwithstanding, among the Germans. The author of the Citi Aniiqtie is of
opinion that property, with all these nations, was hereditary, mostly in
families, in this sense — that originally the individual had not the right to
alienate any of it. See Fustel de Coulanges, Le Problime des Origines de
la ProprUU Foncihre, in the Revue des Questions Historiques, April, 1889 ;
further, by the same author, Recherches sur quelques Problimes d'Histoire
(1886), and Histoire des Institutions Politiques de V Ancicnne France ;
VAlleu et le Domaine Rural pendant la Ptriode Mkromngienne (1889).

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 479

at an economic and hence social status old enough to have sunk
into oblivion in other countries. The diflference between them and
the West in this matter lies less in man and race than in the ex-
ternal conditions, less in the nation's character than in the age of
its civilization.

It would be a study of the deepest interest if we could follow
through the ages the transformations of the village communities in
Russia. Unfortunately it is with them as with most institutions
that are emphatically a people's own. For the philosopher and
the historian these are the most important, and they are always
those wrapped in the thickest, most impenetrable veils ; they rest
in the darkness in which the disdain of the chroniclers leaves
the popular masses and rural classes to the sleep of oblivion.
The obscurity on this subject is such, that, even between Russian
writers, there could arise violent discussions, not only on the
origin but on the antiquity of the Russian village communities.
Distinguished journalists, Mr. Tchitcherin in particular, have
contested the antiquity or patriarchal filiation of the commune
based on mutual solidarity. lyong before the researches made in
the West on this delicate matter, this writer, already preceded by
Granbfsky, demonstrated in Russia itself, that far from being a
national institution peculiar to the Slavs, village or family com-
munities, such as the Russian mir or Serbian zadrtiga, had long
existed in more than one people of alien race. In the face of the
prejudices entertained by many of their countrymen, these writers
reminded their readers that everj'^where property had developed
hand in hand with the feeling of individuality ; that the progress
of the one is in direct ratio to the development of the other. With
seeming inconsistence, the same journalists who brought out
into such relief the primitive and cosmopolitan character of the
agrarian communities, regarded them in Russia as being compara-
tively recent. To hear them, the Slavic race, out of which has
come the Russian state, did indeed start from collective property,
but there is nothing to prove that the mir based on mutual soli-

480 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

darity — the Russian commune in its actual form — should be di-
rectly descended from this primitive patriarchal communism.
Mr. Tchitcherin claims, on the contrary, that communal land
tenurCj^and especially periodical re-allotment, were foreign to Mos-
covia so long as the peasant remained free.

It is serfdom, says this school, it is the solidarity to which the
peasants submit in order to ensure the payment of the taxes,
and military conscription, which caused the introduction of this
kind of equal division. To make their point, they quote ancient
historical documents, authentic charters, wills, deeds of division ;
they refer to Little- Russia, a radically Slavic and Russian country,
where, prior to the Moscovite domination, only personal land-
owners were known, noble or Cosack, and peasants attached to
the soil by contracts freely entered into. Instead of being a
patriarchal or family institution, the Russian commune, Mr.
Tchitcherin contends, is merely " a creation of the state." The
Moscovite mir^ he asserts, has neither the same origin, nor the
same character as the zadruga of the Serbs and Bulgars, whose
family communities retained, through all these peoples' history,
the patriarchal impress. The Russian commune, on the contrary,
is not the spontaneous outcome of primitive property or of the
free union of husbandmen ; it is an outcome of the bondage to
the soil and the imperative wants of political sovereignty, under
the influence of certain proceedings of the government.

To this system, opposed by the greater number of Russian
writers, be they historians or critics, may there not be a certain
portion of truth ? It is hardly to be admitted that the Russians,
who, of all Slavs, have preserved this primitive mode of land
tenure in its most unimpaired form, should have come back to it
one fine day, after having completely abandoned it. One cannot,
on the other hand, bring oneself to believe that, inversely to all
known nations, the Moscovite peasants should have stolen a
march on the modem utopists and quickly stepped, at the end
of the sixteenth century, from personal to collective property.

MIR, FAMILY^ AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 48 1

What sounds admissible, nay probable, is that the establishment
of serfdom and the solidarity in the matter of taxes, strengthened
in the people's mind the attachment to a mode of land tenure out
of which Russia might otherwise have worked her way as well
as the other European nations. Serfs and masters, State and
private individuals could very well have found it to their interest
to uphold and restore, where it tended to disappear, a system
which, owing to regular re-allotments, insured to the country
a more equable distribution of taxes and dues. Serfdom, and the
entire financial and administrative system of Moscovia based on
it, thus could, keeping pace with the regular increase of the
population, contribute to the general adoption, if not of the
principle itself of village communities, at least of the custom of
periodical re-allotments, which at the present day appear to be
one of the essential features of the Russian mir.

In this debate, which we do not pretend to settle one way or
the other, care should be taken to discriminate between collective
property and the custom of re-allotments. The former can main-
tain itself a long time without the latter, and the absence of one
is no proof against the existence of the other. So long as pas-
toral life prevails, or the still more primitive life of hunting and
fishing, — so long as, even in the agricultural stage, the figure of
the population remains very low in proportion to the area it
occupies, there is very little reason to divide the land into regular
lots. To this day, in many Siberian villages, even in some
districts in the north of the empire, each head of a family is free
to till as much land as he can manage. Some writers think they
have proved that, up to the eighteenth century, allotment was
unknown in the north of Russia, the land still being regarded all
the time as common property. Similar remarks have been made
about the southern steppes : Mr. Mackenzie Wallace tells us
that among the Cosacks of the Don, where land is very plentiful,
periodical re- allotments are of recent introduction. So long as
the number of Cosacks was insuflScient to occupy all the land,

482 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS A.VD THE RUSSIANS.

every one was welcome to as much of it as he could handle, pro-
vided he did not encroach on other people's cultivated lots. The
increase of population was, in the natural course of things, to
put a stop to this unlegalized right of pre-occupancy. In order
that each Cosack should have his share of the soil enabling
him to acquit himself of his obligations towards the state, reg-
ular allotment had to be recurred to. Similar causes may have
led to similar results in various regions.

Many and various causes combined to keep up in the eastern
portion of the empire a state of things which had long ceased to
exist in the west of it : the degree of civilization and the economic
condition of Moscovia, — the political system and the patriarchal,
or, more correctly, the patrimonial, domanial character of the
government, — and lastly the very nature of land and soil. In
those vast plains, unbounded to the eye, man, living always at
large, did not feel the necessity of securing a piece of land for his
own use by fencing it in. Where population was dense, crowded
on a restricted space, as in Greece and Italy, the god Terminus
early became a revered deity, one of the essential wardens of
social life. In Russia, where the land was vast and the popula-
tion scant, it must have been long before men felt the occasion for
such a deity. The crisis that hastened the transition from col-
lective to individual property has everywhere been increase of
population. Everj'-where, the curtailment of each member's lot
in consequence of the greater number of sharers was one of the
things that put an end to the community, by putting a stop to
the periodical re-allotments and leaving each family in full pos-
session of the lot of which it had been hitherto usufructuary,
"They change fields each year," says Tacitus of the Germans,
"and there still remains untenanted land." To whom could these
words apply better than to Moscovia? The eastern half of
Europe, the richest in land and at all times the least populous,
was of necessity to be the last to give up the primeval system.
This result was helped by Mosco^da's isolation, moral as well as

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 483

geographical. Had Russia been more intimately connected with
the West, through religion, politics, manners, Latin or Teutonic
influences might have accomplished the change much sooner —
resulting in Roman law or feudal customs.

In Great-Russia, /. e. in all Moscovia, collective property almost
exclusively prevails to this day, both among the former serfs and
the Crown peasants. In all that immense region extending from
the Neva to the Ural, the number of peasants owning land on
personal titles does not exceed i ^ or 2 j^ of the totality, and even
these few individual possessions are nearly all of recent origin.
Down to 1 86 1, the only individual landholders, outside of the
nobility and the foreign colonists, were the odnodvbrtsy, who
formed a small class by itself.* In Western Russia, at one time
subject to the domination of Poland or Sweden, and hence brought
into closer contact with Kurope, individual property is the rule.
The limits of the two systems may almost be said to mark even
yet the old boundaries of the Moscovite and the Lithuano-Polish
States, t In some few governments, such as those of Kief and
Poltdva, there is a mixture of both forms. In one or two, in that
of Moghilef for instance, the Russians have attempted, not very
successfully, to naturalize the community system. It was intro-
duced there after the emancipation and the Polish rising of 1863 ;
but, if certain testimony of the agricultural inquest is to be be-
lieved, the peasants shirk it in the practice and look on it as
another form of serfdom' In the adjoining government of Minsk

* See Book V., Chap I. And even with them the mode of land tenure
was frequently a sort of family community. See following chapter, p. 491.

t In lyithuania proper, i. e. in the governments of K6vno and Vilna, as
well as in the three Baltic provinces, no other form of prop^y than the
individual is known. The latter has even been introduced in a few com-
munes of the government of Pskof, by the Ehst or I/ctt colonists from
Liefland. In White-Russia and Ivittle-Russia, individual property takes
the lead even yet, though its predominance is no longer as exclusive as it
was. In Bessarabia, where the Russians show a mixture of Rumanians,
both systems exist side by side. It is to be noted that several of the most
prosperous German colonies, especially those on the Lower Volga, have
adopted the Russian custom of periodical re-allotments.

484 THE EMPIRE OF TffE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

they were not to be induced to exchange the Western, European
mode of land tenure for the Great- Russian. The Little-Russians
also are reputed to object to community. It is not always so,
however : on the eastern bank of the Dniepr, in the government
of Vor6nej for instance, Little-Russians may be met with who are
not less accustomed and devoted to the system of common land
tenure than their Great-Russian neighbors.

Elsewhere, in Podolia and Volhynia, where individual tenure
appeared rooted in the local manners, there have been cases of
peasants, after the emancipation had provided them with lands,
overthrowing their landmarks and effecting a new division on the
commtmal basis. It is even said that some villages in these gov-
ernments have taken to annual re-allotments. This fact, often
quoted in arguments on the side of communal property, can be
accounted for in two ways. The method of redemption adopted
was so well adapted to the system of village communities that,
solidarity being taken as the basis of the payments, it brought
about the re-introduction of that system, even if not of periodical
re-allotments, in districts where it had long been out of use.
The exorbitant taxes, which frequently absorb the greater part
of the income jrielded by the land, may also have contributed
towards the same result, as though to confirm, by modem in-
stances, Mr. Tchitcherin's theory concerning the establishment of
periodical allotment in old Moscovia. Lastly, as certain observa-
tions of the agricultural inquest would lead us to conclude, the
vacillating uncertainty of the mujik's ideas on the rights of prop-
erty, the confusion of his juridical notions on the subject, the
little confidence he reposes in his title, — all these things may, in
many localities, have swelled the tide in favor of the cTiange. If
one of the local " marshals of the nobility" is to be believed, the
peasants have not sufiicient faith in their permanent right to their
property to venture opposing any resistance to the fiat of the
commune when it is the majority's pleasure to submit to a new
division. The well-to-do peasants this curious document repre-

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 485

sents as needing to be enlightened concerning the validity of their
titles, and to have the ownership of the lands allotted to them in
some way guaranteed. However it may stand with these details,
it is a fact that the emancipation may have indirectly opened to
communal property and re-allotment districts which until now were
closed to these institutions.* Singular ! that the Statute of 1861
should have apparently, if only for a time, not merely confirmed
in its former area, but extended to new villages, a form of land
tenure which appears to have been strengthened, if not actually
introduced, three hundred years before, by the establishment of
serfdom !

♦ The question here is naturally not of isolated cases. In transferring
to the peasants the ownership of the lands of which they had the usufruct,
the agrarian laws of 1861 respected the form of land tenure current in every
region. Though often accused, both at home and abroad, of partiality
towards collective tenure, the compilers of the Emancipation Act were
merely content to let it alone where it existed and very careful not to in-
troduce it anywhere else by legislative authority. N. Milidtin remarked in
Paris, in May, 1863, before the SociitS des ^conomistes : "The lawgiver
does not impose on the rural class any one form of property preferably to
others ; it may be individual or communal according to the custom prevail-
ing in each given region, and it will be left to the purchasers' own pleasure
whether they will transform the lands acquired by the commune into private
and individual property."

This was strictly true ; the communes, even the individuals, were free
to pass from communal to personal property. Article 165 of the Statute, it
is true, did not empower the peasants freely to dispose of their lots until
they had fully redeemed them. The article, even with this restriction, was
regarded as a threat to the mir. There have been speculators who have got
the peasants to sell them their lots by advancing the redemption money,
thus allowing themselves to be despoiled of the property which the law was
trying to secure to them. Accordingly, several Russians spoke up in favor
of having Article 165 suppressed and making the peasant lots inalienable.

BOOK VIII. CHAPTER II.

The Village Communities have their Prototype in the Family — The
Commune Frequently Looked upon as an Enlarged Family — Filiation
of the Village Communities from the Family Communities — The Peas-
antry's Patriarchal Manners and the Ancient Village Family — Authority
of the Head of a Household — Community of Possessions — Domestic
Bonds Relaxed by the Emancipation — Increase of Family Partitions —
Material Inconvenience and Moral Advantages Accruing Therefrom —
Servitude of the Women — Progress of Individualism ; its Consequences.

To the village communities of Great- Russia a protot3rpe may
be found, even simpler and more ancient, yet living still — the
family. In the mujik's izbh, the family, in truth, has preserved to our
day a patriarchal, archie character. Property remains undivided
between the children or between brothers who dwell together
tmder one roof ; each son, each male of the house, has an equal
right to it. The agrarian community seems to be contained
in embryo in the family, the former being constructed on the
model of the latter. So that the Russian commune may be re-
garded as an enlarged family, in which the soil remains the col-
lective property of the community, each man or each household
receiving for his support an equal share thereof. The Moscovite
ntir is often considered simply as an extension of the family,
grown too numerous to reside in the same enclosure or to go on
cultivating the land in common. This view, held by many econo-
mists, both Russian and foreign, may in many cases be correct,
though not invariably. It is not always easy to prove the mem-
bers of a village community to be descended from one common
ancestor, even when there is tradition to show for it. There may

486

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 487

exivSt reasonable doubts concerning the historical conditions of the
filiation from family to commune, even concerning the order of
filiation. There may have been in a given generation a sort of
alternation between these forms of property, the commune being
originally bom of the family, and the family communities, in
their turn, of sections of the village community.*

Here is not the place to linger over these curious and obscure
questions. By whatever process collective property may have
been evolved in the Russian peasantry, the tie between family and
commune, between domestic life and mir life, is too close to allow
of understanding the latter without the former. A glance at the
mujik's home life offers the greater interest that the old manners
are fast disappearing. What, up to the emancipation, was the
distinctive characteristic of the family in the lower classes, was
its unity : joint habitation, undivided property, and paternal
authority. These time-honored customs, as already remarked,
have, in a few years, been shaken by the emancipation. The

* The family communities, at least in their actual form, do not always
appear to be more ancient than the village communities — the Serbian
zadruga than the Russian mir. In fact, the former, such as they still exist
among certain Southern Slavs, presuppose an hereditary appropriation of
the soil in favor of certain village residents ; in this sense we may see in
them an advance towards individualization, a transition stage between clan
or communal property and personal possession. Moreover, the domain of
these family communities is usually far less extensive than that of the vil-
lage communities, and the number of members far less considerable. The
Serbian zadruga numbers, on an average, between ten and twenty-five
members ; those with fifty or sixty are exceptions. When the zadruga
grows too numerous, it usually splits itself in two. There are, in Serbian
lands, villages that bear the name of one family, and the inhabitants of
which do appear to be descended from one stock ; but such villages almost
always consist of several communities. [See, for instance, Custom-Law
(Droit Coutuinier) of the Southern Slavs, after Researches by Mr. Bdgit-
chitch, by F. Dem^litch, Paris, 1877.] In brief, then, a Serbian zadruga
can, by successive separations, be evolved out of an original family com-
munity, whereas it could scarcely be the outcome of village communi-
ties,— while the Russian mir, by splitting itself into fractions, may very
well have begot family communities, very similar to the zadruga. Such,
indeed, appears sometimes to have been the case. (See further on,
pp. 491-493.)

488 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

same peaceable revolution which has severed the bond between
master and serf, has loosened that between father and children.
Together with liberty, a taste of independence came to the domes-
tic hearth. This was one of the chief and most natural results ; it
is at the same time a fact which cannot but react on the commune,
indeed on the entire material and moral existence of the mujik.

The father, according to the ancient Russian custom, is abso-
lutely master in his house, like the tsar in the nation, or, as an old
saying has it, hke the khan in Crimea. To find anything at all
analogous in the West, we must retrace our steps back beyond the
Middle Ages, to classical antiquity and paternal authority among
the Romans. The Russian peasant was not liberated by age
from his father's authority ; the adult and married son was still
subject to it, until he had himself children arrived to years of dis-
cretion, or had in his turn become the head of the family. This
domestic sovereignty remained intact through all the revolutions,
all the transformations of the country. L,ike the tsar, the father
was thought to hold from Heaven a sort of right divine, to rebel
against which would have been sacrilege. In the sixteenth cen-
tury, in a manual on domestic economy, entitled Domostrby
("House-Order"), the priest Sylvester, the intimate adviser of
Ivan IV., extols the authority of the head of the house and his
right of repression not only over the children, but over the wife.
In the nobility, this paternal power became worn and blunted
through long friction against the West and modem individualism ;
little is left of it beyond a few formalities, such as the graceful
Slavic custom for children to kiss their parents' hand after meals.
In the people, i.e., the peasantry and the merchant class, the old
traditions had survived. In these two classes, the most genuinely
national ones, the framework of family was, until this last quarter
of the nineteenth century, more solidly constructed than in any
other European country. In this respect, as in many others,
Russia may be said to have been, till very lately, the antipodes
of the United States, so deep was the chasm dug by paternal

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 489

authority between two families based on equality between the
children.

In the Russian people, paternal power is supported by religious
feeling and reverence for age. No nation has, in this respect,
upheld more faithfully the simple and beautiful habits of another
age. The Russian of the lower classes greets men superior to
him in years by the names of ' ' father " or " uncle " ; at all times
in public as in private, he treats them with a gentle deference.
This feeling was until quite lately the foundation-stone of com-
munal self-government. ' ' Where white hairs are, there is good
sense, there is right " — such is, with variations, the burden of manj'^
popular proverbs. From an old man — from his father especially
—the Russian peasant used submissively to endure all things.
Two rmijiks were out on a Moscow street one day — a holiday, — one
of them in the prime of maturity, the other already bent under the
weight of years. The old man, who appeared somewhat the
worse for drink, was showering abuse on his companion, and even
blows. The younger and vigorous man opposed to his violence
only expostulation and entreaties, and on some people's wanting
to separate them, said : ' ' lycave us ; he is my father. ' ' Such
traits are by no means rare. The trouble is that, every virtue
being apt to encourage to abuse those who profit by it, paternal
authority thus pampered frequently degenerated into downright
tyranny. The father, coarse and unmannered, with the double
model before him of state despotism and landlord's despotism,
lorded it in his cabin as a veritable autocrat ; he continually trans-
gressed the natural limits of his rights, and the son, fashioned to
obedience by both custom and servitude, seldom knew how to
assert his own or his wife's dignity as human beings. Pater-
nal power but too often got hardened by contact with serfdom ;
no wonder that the emancipation loosened the bond, and that
young couples, liberated from a master's yoke, should wish to cast
off that other and not less irksome yoke.

In the mujik's patriarchal domestic scheme, undivided prop-

490 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

erty, i.e. community of possessions, was the logical sequence of
paternal authority.* Thus the family can be regarded as an eco-
nomic association, the members of which are united by the ties of
blood, and have at their head, in the capacity of chief and man-
ager, the father or " elder," bearing the title of " master of the
house " {domokhozihiri) or " senior '\bolshhk).\

What is the basis, the principle, what the essential character
of the undivided Great- Russian peasant family ? These questions
have been much discussed. It has been asked whether it was a
sort of association — or, to use the genuine Russian term, oiartil —
founded before all on economic relations, on property and pecu-
niary interests ; or whether, on the contrary, it rests in the peas-
antry as in other classes, principally on personal relations created
by affection and sympathy, on blood and kinship. J To this
question often settled too peremptorily, too exclusively, in one or
the other sense, the best solution would seem to be that the
Great-Russian familj-^ is founded, like almost every other, on both
principles, and that one or the other becomes predominant accord-
ing to what side you consider it from. If it is an association, it is
a closed one into which there is no entrance except through birth
or marriage.

Certain it is, that, in the peasant class, marriage and the crea-
tion of a new household, have at all times been regulated chiefly
by utilitarian considerations. In no other country perhaps has
personal inclination had as little to do with rural marriages. But
is Russia the only country where such cares — which, after all, do
not necessaril}'^ exclude relations bom of sympathy and are far

* Mr. Le Play, in his Outrriers EuropSens (first edition, pp. 58 and 59),
gives a complete description of the economic system on which a Russian
family was based previous to the emancipation. In the same work is fonnd
a similar and in many ways analogous description of a Bashkir family on the
confines of Asia.

t Domokhozdtn, from dotn, " house," and khoziain, "master, husband-
man, administrator." Bolshhk from bolshdy, bdlshiy, "big, senior."

X The former opinion is the more generally adopted ; still the latter has
been repeatedly supported by eminent scholars.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 49 1

from invariably banishing domestic affections — interfere with the
foundation of the family? If economic considerations, always
particularly powerful in the country, prevail with the mujik more
than with other classes, that is a consequence, first of all, of the
conditions of rural life, of the habits bequeathed by serfdom, of
the mir system and collective property, — all things which impress
on the union between man and woman a more than usually ma-
terialistic, practical stamp. Taken all in all, the distinctive
feature of the Great- Russian family does not lie there. Elsewhere
too — in the West and everywhere — the family, composed of father,
mother, and children in their nonage, may be regarded as an asso-
ciation and a community. The distinctive characteristic of the
Great- Russian family, up to these latter times, is that, instead of
being habitually limited to father, mother, and unmarried children,
it included several households and several generations, united at
once by the bond of blood and that of common interests.*

It often happened that several married sons, several collateral
households, would live together in the same house, or round the
same enclosure or yard — dvor — working in common under the
authority of the father or grandfather. The family thus became
a sort of commune on a small scale, ruled by its natural chief,
assisted by his wife for the indoor management.! The principle

* The Russian economists, who, of late years, have much agitated these
questions, frequently draw a distinction between two types of peasant fam-
ilies: the "great" or patriarchal {bolshd,ya or rodovdya, — the latter from
rod, "race"=Latin ^^«5), and the "small" or "paternal" {mhlaya or
otsbvskaya, from otsy, "fathers") — the family in the narrower sense. And
indeed, both types are to be found, sometimes side by side in the same
regions ; only, contrary to what used to be in old times, the former tends to
gp-ow rarer. But between these two forms of family life and farming, the
passage from one to the other is too easy and frequent to warrant their being
erected into two opposite types.

t To the head of the household, the Russian domokhozihin, may be
compared the domd.tchin or head of the Serbian zadruga. Indeed, there is
between the Great-Russian undivided family and the Yugo-Slavic zadruga
an analogy which it were vain to deny. It has been proved that in certain
Russian governments, especially in those of Samdra and Kursk, there
recently still existed family communities very similar, as regards their

492 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

of election asserted itself only in default of the head of the family.
When the father died, his place was taken, in the order of patri-
archal succession, by one of the oldest members, the brother, or
the oldest son, according to local custom. Sometimes it was the
widow who took the management of the house, or else — as in the
mir and in the Serbian zadniga, the elder was chosen from among
the members of the family, not for absolute seniority of age but as
being the most capable, the most respected.* The father or head
of the house had full authority for the management of the prop-
erty belonging to the community, and his wife for the direction
of operations at home. Still, in large families, composed of sev-
eral households, it was usual for the ' ' elder * ' to take the advice
of his relatives and associates. But he was by right the repre-
sentative of the family in all business matters, private or public,
when he and his peers formed the council of the commune ; but
even there he took his seat not as an individual, but as the family
representative.

In the times of serfdom, the rural family loved to keep close
together, t Divisions of property were dreaded ; they took place

organization and juridical character, to the zadruga, which itself presents
various types. The family communities in which certain Russian scholars
see a special type of land tenure, which they call "landed property consist-
ing of a yard or house-lot," are of frequent occurrence among the peculiar
small class, called odnodvdrtsy more particularly in the government of
Oridl.

* Such was the case in a family of the government of Kursk of which a
special study has been published. This community, known under the name
of Sofrdnitch, comprised, in 1872, forty-two persons, all descendants — at least
the men — of one common ancestor, deceased sixty years before, whose sons
having died in their turn, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren had
agreed to live together and cultivate their lands in common, under the
direction of one of their number. In 1872 the family consisted of eight
married couples, two widows, and over twenty young people and children
of both sexes. They all resided in four izb^s built round the same dvor or
yard. About 1876, domestic disasters, especially the insanity, then death of
the '"elder" who had ruled them through forty years, caused them to sep-
arate into four groups, each of which still formed a small community.

f As in the Serbian zadruga, the house, live stock, tools, furniture, and
crops belonged to the community. Nothing was left for individual posses-
sion except articles of personal use, such as clothes and trinkets.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 493

only when the dwelling with its yard had become too small for the
number of inhabitants. This necessity was regarded as an evil,
and the division of the small patrimony or capital went by the
name of "black division." The interest of the landlord, who
was bound to furnish the timber and other materials for the con-
struction of the new izbhs, was at one with the traditional preju-
dice against the separation of families. Owing to these customs,
had the land, redeemed by the former serfs, been definitely allotted
to the diflferent households, the large village communities would
probably have been succeeded by small family communities after
the manner of the Serbian zadruga. Now that, in the footsteps
of liberty, the spirit of individualism and independence has invaded
the dwelling of the mujik, if the collective tenure of land comes
to be abrogated, it will be for the benefit of the individual ; the
Russian peasant will not pass through the intermediate stage at
which other Slavic peoples have stopped.

In a house in which property remains undivided, it is not so
much the decease of members of the family which opens succes-
sions, as the separation of the living which becomes the occasion
for partitions. The rules for such partitions vary according to
localities, but one general feature is that only men or widows
with young children are considered. The married daughters
have nothing of their own, being regarded as belonging to their
husbands' families ; the unmarried daughters can claim only a
portion of the furniture and money, sometimes of the cattle, cows,
sheep, etc., according to local custom.

Among the Great-Russians as well as among the I,ittle-Rus-
sians, in the wider as in the more restricted family, the women —
especially the daughters — are not an integral part of the family
or community as regards property. The daughter is only a
temporary inmate of her father's house, which she is to leave some
day, to follow a husband. The wife herself — the consort — claims
no share in the common fund even while she has the internal
management of the conjugal home. If sometimes a widow
obtains a portion, if she even fills the place of the head of the

494 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

house, it is as the representative of her unmarried children.
The woman really has no claim on the property of either her
father's or her husband's family. As a Compensation, she is
allowed the pri\'ilege, denied to the men, of saving up a little
hoard of her own outside of the common property, on the flax or
wool out of which she manufactures her husband's and children's
clothing ; these savings, in some provinces, go by the name of her
"box" or "casket" {korbbkd). This casket, the keys to which
the women alone hold, the girl takes away with her when she
marries : it is her dowry,* When a woman dies childless, her
korbbka, as a rule, returns to her own family, — not to her father
or his community, but to her mother, or, if she be dead, to her
unmarried sisters. Thus there is a sort of feminine line of suc-
cession. The mother's money and clothes usually go to the
unmarried daughters, and if, in family partitions, custom admits
the daughters' claim to a portion of the house-gear and even of
the live-stock, the reason probably is that these things are regarded
as belonging to and more particularly befitting their sex.

In speaking of family partitions, a difference should be made
between the bona-Jide partitions of the whole estate among all
entitled to a share of it, and the dowering of a member on his
departure out of the community. The latter is the case when a
member of the family, a son for instance, leaves the house in his
father's lifetime to go and live somewhere else by himself. The
father, then, is free to give him nothing, to let him go ' * with
nothing but his cross, ' ' as the popular phrase has it — in allusion

* Where custom allows young girls to save for themselves a kordbka,
indirectly raised on the common property, it is usual for a bridegroom, who,
indirectly also, is to benefit by this same kordbka, to pay to the bride's
family a certain sum as compensation, either in cash or nature. This con-
tribution usually defrays the wedding feast, an item which mounts up con-
siderably, all the way from 20 to 80 roubles. This custom must not be
confounded with the purchase-money given for the bride, a practice which
still flourishes in some parts of Russia, among Finn or Tatar populations.
(See for details on these curious customs a study of Mr. Matv^yef, in the
Memoirs of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society^ Ethnographical
Section, vol. viii., part ist, 1878.)

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 495

to the brass or silver cross worn round the neck. If, however, a
married son leaves with his father's consent, he receives his share
of the common patrimony ; but it lies with the father to determine
what that share shall be. There even are diflferent words, at least
in the government of Samdra, to express whether the departing
son receives a full pro-rata share of the family property or not.
If in a family governed by the eldest brother, one of the younger
unmarried ones chooses to settle somewhere else, there is no general
partition. But there necessarily is, if it is a married brother who
goes, i. e. a man possessed of full rights according to the popular
code. Genuine partitions therefore take place only in families
bereaved of their natural head and composed of several collateral
households, where there are several co-proprietors possessed of
equal rights to the common patrimony, for instance married
brothers who have lost their father. In this case, the property,
real and personal, is divided into so many shares of equal value
which are frequently adjudged by drawing lots, just as is done in
the mir for communal lands. The married grandsons are entitled
to a share only if their father is dead, because the rights of
children lie in abeyance during the father's lifetime.

It is easy to see from all the above what predominance is con-
ferred on the father and his authority, and also how great, in these
rural customs, is the importance that attaches to marriage, which
takes the place of age-majority. It is, in a way, the first condi-
tion under which is held the right to succession, or, more cor-
rectly, to property. In our study of the commime, we shall soon
see that marriage is usually there also the first condition for using
the communal lands. The reason of this singular custom is that \
neither in the home nor in the commune can a man be a complete '
workman unless he is married, and can place at the community's
service, together with his own hands, those of his wife.

In a certain measure, it might be said that in the peasant fam-
ily— at least in the large, patriarchal family — there is no succession
or inheritance at all, but only dissolution or liquidation of an

49^ THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

association, each member of which is invested with an equal
right to a share in the common capital and stock-in-trade. Though
relationship may be one of the conditions of heredity, blood alone
does not confer a right to the inheritance : association with the
head of the family and labor for the benefit of the community
are required over and above that. The only sense in which the
term ' ' succession' ' is applicable under this form of family life, is
this : that the father's death entitles the married sons to claim a
share in the common patrimony.

It follows from all this, as Mr. Matv6yef remarks, that testa-
mentary dispositions and bequests are possible in families in the
stricter sense, where in lieu of several associates having equal
rights on the family estate, there is only one representative of the
family rights. In this case, the father or the mother — the latter
if, being widowed, she is the recognized head of the house — may,
in dying, bequeath legacies. These testamentary dispositions,
whether made in writing or orally declared before witnesses, are
usually admitted by the communes and peasant courts, the more
readily that the common people pay a sort of religious reverence
to last dying wishes and even regard opposition to them as sinful.
The number of such wills naturally tends to increase in propor-
tion to the dissolution of large families. By them the father, as a
rule, merely distributes his possessions among his children, so as
to forestall any disputes between them. If bequests are made
beyond the line of direct heirs, they usually are in favor of the
widow, sometimes of a married daughter or a son gone out of the
house, or perhaps of some orphan nephews or some child taken
in by the dying man. Custom, however, would scarcely permit,
the father of a family to despoil his children of the house in
which they were born and of their entire inheritance, in favor of
strangers possessed of no moral title to his estate. How ever
great his respect for paternal authority, the peasant does not admit
of its being unlimited, under cover of what is elsewhere known by
the name of testamentary liberty.

MIRy FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 497

All that concerns the division of family possessions, as also all
that bears on the allotment of lands by the commune, is left by
law to custom, to tradition. The Statute says so in the following
explicit words : ' ' The peasants are authorized as regards the
order of succession to inheritances, to follow the local customs. ' '
By this simple little clause, the rural commune is placed outside
of the civil law, outside of all written law.*

Such liberty is in keeping with the nature and the conditions
of self-government which distinguish the Russian mir. Yet
these excessive private rights give rise to so much opposition that,
in an epoch of transition and ethical transformation like the
present, such latitude must needs lend itself to abuses and in-
justices. Accordinglj', at the time of the agricultural inquest,
enlightened men, of most dissimilar tendencies, such as the
ex-Minister of the Interior and of the Crown Demesnes, Mr.
Val^yef, and Prince Vassiltchikof, requested that the private law
of the peasants, instead of being entirely left to custom, might be
regulated by ofl&cial legislation. The difl&culty lay in avoiding to
do violence to custom while regulating its exercise. I<egal usages
vary much, according to provinces and communes, according even
to the origin of the population. In one village, for instance, it is
the eldest son who, in case of division, retains the homestead ; in
another again it is the youngest, as in some parts of Switzerland
and Germany, because it is supposed that the oldest had opportu-
nities of settling elsewhere during the father's lifetime. In treat-
ing of heredity questions among the peasants, it should not be
forgotten that the communal lands, although they do not directly
fall under it, are obliquely aflfected by these family partitions,
which usually necessitate the allotment of separate lands to the
members who depart out of the family community. And, though
these are private concerns which do not affect the general distribu-
tions of land among all the members of a commune, there are

*A law of the present Emperor's, however, passed in 1886, regulates
snch family transactions without infringing these principles.

3»

498 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

villages where a family cannot divide the land allotted to it collec-
tively without the commune's consent.

Such divisions are no longer rare nowadays. Few izbhs
shelter several married couples.* Young people, especially young
wives, wish to be independent ; newly married couples take delight
in feeling themselves the heads of a household, the only position
which gives them complete liberty. This spirit, seemingly in
opposition with the system of communal land tenure, sometimes
finds in it an encouragement, for it is precisely under this system
that each man or each couple can claim a lot. On the other hand,
the construction of a wooden house costs comparatively little ;
every Russian is a born carpenter, every peasant can, in a few
days, build a dwelling for himself. So that the number of new
izbcLs has increased considerably since the emancipation ; to be
sure they are generally smaller and poorer. This increase of
dvors or separate homesteads is valued at 25 j^ or 30 5^ at least. f
This breaking up of families, though merely an indirect conse-
quence of the emancipation, seems to be one of the main causes
of the apparently inconsiderable results it has produced, of the
scant progress made by agriculture and prosperity in numbers of
provinces. These divisions, now of frequent occurrence, bring
about two complications almost equally hard on agriculture and
popular prosperity. The first is the excessive parcelling of the
land, caused by separating the small lots afiected by the commune
to the support of one family ; the second consists in disabling the
peasant from working the soil to its full bearing capacity, owing
to the indefinite division of capital, stock, and tools. If the mir
furnishes the land, it does not advance the means of tilling it. In

* Statistics show that, to every 23,000,000 " souls " (male peasants sub-
ject to the poll-tax), there were, only a few years ago, 7,220,000 dvors or
homesteads, i.e. on an average, taking into consideration the increase of the
population since the last census, seven or eight persons to the dvor, which,
Russian families being usually prolific, generally represents one household.

t In some governments, such as that of Tver, the number of the dvors
or izbhs is said to have nearly doubled in ten years.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 499

this manner the disadvantages inherent to the communal system
are still more aggravated by family partitions. The peasants
themselves admit that this new fashion usually does harm, but
give in to it, because it is getting to be the fashion.

It is thus that the decadence of the old patriarchal ways may
indirectly retard the progress of the peasants towards prosperity
and even national production. Among these peasant-landlords,
impoverished by successive divisions, a great many households
are almost wholly destitute of cattle and laboring implements.
The depositions of the great agricultural inquest almost unani-
mously deplore this tendency of the peasants towards isolation,*
It was to remedy these disadvantages by subjecting family parti-
tions to legal restrictions that the inquest commission suggested
that the possessions of a family, and especially their agricultural
implements, should be shared with departing members only
within limits determined by the law. The ministry more directly
concerned with the peasant affairs, that of Crown Demesnes, more
than once went into this question. Thus, for instance, it was
proposed to authorize partitions only if there were no arrears of
taxes, and if the separation left to each member a lot of an extent
sufficient for remunerative cultivation. There was some talk of
giving to the parents or to the head of the house the right of
authorizing or forbidding the operation instead of leaving it, as

* This commission, convoked on the proposal and under the presidency
of the ex-Minister of Crown Demesnes, Mr. Val^yef, was composed of high
functionaries from the ministries of the Interior, of Demesnes, and of
Finances. The principal object of their investigations, conducted and
directed with the assistance of an extensive list of queries, was the study of
collective land-tenure and its eflfects. The commission received and pub-
lished about a thousand reports and written depositions, besides oral ones
from over two hundred persons, mostly governors of provinces, marshals of
the nobility, members of the provincial assemblies, etc. Unfortunately, |out
of so many witnesses, few are peasants or rural functionaries, men directly
concerned in that mode of property which is being investigated. In spite of
the high intelligence and impartiality demanded of the compilers of reports,
the absence of such naturally indicated representatives of the rural commu-
nities partly weakens the commission's conclusions.

500 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

done at present, to local custom. However pressing the interests
of agriculture and of the peasant himself, it were difficult to
impose such restrictions without encroaching on the liberty but
just restored to him, without again placing the individual under
the yoke of the family, the commune, or the central admin-
istration.*

Not that this new tendency to individualism should be uncon-
ditionally deplored. Disturbing as it is economically, it has some
undoubtedly good sides : it compels young people to rely more
on their own powers, and, by stimulating individual energy, may
increase the sum of labor. It affords advantages especially
as regards health and morality. Among coarse, poverty-stricken
people, the patriarchal system is not all profit and virtue. It is
notorious how many evils of all description, in the great cities of
the West, are derived from the closeness and overcrowding of
tenements. Things are no better in Russia when one small
izbcL shelters several generations and several households, when,
through the long nights of an endless winter, fathers and their
children, brothers and their wives, lie promiscuously huddled
together around the huge stove. Such a promiscuity is as un-
wholesome to the morals as to the body. Even when the mar-
ried children occupied several izbhs disposed around the one yard,
the domestic autocracy was a danger to the family's union and
chastity ; the head of the house, ' ' the old man " who, owing to the
custom of early marriages, might be scarcely forty, often arroga-
ting to himself certain seignorial rights over the women of his
family, in imitation of the noble landlord's ways with the serf girls
and women on his domains. Nowadays, young couples can more
easily escape this paternal rule, and family life becomes purer
through isolation.

* By the terms of the law of 1886, partitions can no longer take place
except with the consent of the head of the family, and they must besides be
approved by at least two thirds of the communal vote. Moreover, the
administrative reform of 1889 places them under the control of " rural
chiefs " — functionaries elected from among the local landed nobility.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 50I

The old patriarchal manners also contributed as much as serf-
dom to the abasement of women, whose subordinate condition is
the ugly side of popular life in Russia. In the higher classes the
woman is, in culture, bringing up, and manners, the man's equal ;
in fact she often is, or seems, superior to him. With the popular
classes — peasants and tradesmen — the case is reversed. In noth-
ing does the moral dualism still existing between Peter's Russia and
old Moscovia manifest itself more clearly. The common people
have retained the ideas and habits of old-time Russia, and it is
this side of their life on which Asiatic, or rather Byzantine influ-
ences have left the deepest impress. The ill-treatment and con-
tempt under which women lived were among the things that
most shocked foreign travellers down to the eighteenth century,
from the German Herberstein, who was the first to reveal to Eu-
rope the inner life of Moscovia, to the French academician Chappe
d'Auteroche, whose assertions the Empress Catherine II. herself
took the trouble to refute.* There are a great many popular
sayings on the subject of wife-beating, some of them purporting
to be spoken by women, such as : "A good husband's blows do not
hurt long," and the popular songs are full of references to the
same custom. f Peasant husbands have not relinquished this
patriarchal prerogative, especially when tipsy, and the father-in-
law, until quite lately, joined in with his stick. Justice now tries
to protect the women, but has not always the power. With such
customs it is out of the question to make of wife-beating a serious
offence, entailing separation. The mujik still finds it diflScult to
grasp the idea that anybody should have any business to dispute
his right of chastising the wife of his bosom. A peasant, cited
before the justice of the peace for this offence, kept repeating in

* In The Antidote, or an Examination of the Evil Book entitled
" Travels in Siberia,''^ a work ascribed to theTsaritsa herself.

t *' I went along with my true love dear — And to my love I said : ' O,
darling dear ! — Beat not thy wife without a cause, — But only for good cause,
beat thou thy wife, — And for a great ofiFence. — Far away is my father dear,
— And farther still my mother dear ; — They cannot hear my voice, — they
cannot see my burning tears.' " — Ralston, Songs 0/ the Russian People, p. 11.

502 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

reply to all reproofs : " Why, she is my own." — " Whom, then,
is one to beat ? ' ' inquired another after listening to a lecture on the
respect due to women. Acquitted or fined, it is on his wife, in the
end, that the delinquent lets out his wrath at the interference of
justice.

In Great-Russia, the wife has not yet quite got beyond being
regarded as a domestic animal, Bielinsky tells us. What the peas-
ant seeks in his helpmate first of all, if not exclusively, is a good
workwoman. In some provinces at least among the " allogens,"
or aliens of Finn and Tatar origin, such as the Mordvins of the
Volga, the peasant still buys his wife ; at times he carries her away
— "steals" her is the word, — often, without consulting or even
knowing her, as she is from another village. In Little-Russia,
family life has more of the humane element ; aflfection plays a
greater part in wedlock, the woman's lot is a milder one, she
enjoys more consideration and has more rights. This diflference
may be partly due to the gentler Maloross character, to the milder
.climate, and purer Slavic blood ; but especially to the fact that
serfdom not having lasted so long in lyittle-Russia, it has not
hardened the people's manners to the same extent, and that the
Maloross peasant woman, instead of being subject to the often heavy
rule of a father- and mother-in-law in a large agglomerated family,
usually keeps house by herself for her husband and children.

Still, even in Little- Russia, the women's lot is far from being an
enviable one and only appears so by comparison. On the Dniepr as
well as on the Volga, the husband still looks on his wife as on an
inferior being. Hence the popular songs bear many a trace of
the pain which the woman habitually smothers in her breast, and
the so-called " wedding songs " of both North and South, those
rhythmical poems with chorus, a rudimentarj'^ musical drama
enacted by the bride and the various personages who take part in
the event, invariably show us the bride full of sadness and fear.
True, most of these songs date back to times when she had
reason to tremble before "the alien robber," the Tatar or the

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 503

Lithuanian, who came to take or buy her from her people.
But even in the latest of these popular poems, whether born in
Great- or Little-Russia, or in the freer Cosack-land, the maiden
in touching strains gives vent to her grief at leaving her
father's house, even though life was not always made very easy
to her there, at exchanging her girlish liberty for the matron's
subjection. Always life before marriage is extolled as a woman's
best time. Serfdom, of course, greatly embittered her lot, for on
her head fell the weight of a double bondage. And so heavy is
the yoke at times, that to this day many a peasant woman frees
herself from it by killing her tyrant. This crime is by no means
uncommon, and the woman is, more often than not, acquitted by a
compassionate jury who knows what she has gone through.

But a better time is dawning. The emancipation is not for
man alone. Already in the villages, the mother of adult children,
especially the widow of the head of a family, enjoys very substan-
tial respect ; such a widow is often entrusted with the management
of the family aflFairs, and sometimes, in the communal assemblies,
women represent their absent husbands. In this, as in everything,
education will do much ; the progress of individualism will have
a great share in elevating woman's condition, for it fosters, in both
sexes, the feeling of personal dignity. Once alone with her hus-
band and children, she will more easily become the companion
and equal of the one, the guardian and teacher of the others.*

Will the spirit of independence and individualism, which is
undermining the patriarchal family, end b\^ reaching collective
property ? Is the Russian commune of sufficiently solid grain to

* The popular songs depict in graphic terms the irksomeness, to young
matrons, of life in larger agglomerated families. Here is a brief speci-
men : " They are making me marry a lout — With no small family. — Oh !
— oh — oh ! Oh, dear me ! — With a father and a mother — And four brothers
— And sisters three. — Oh — oh — oh ! Oh, dear me ! — Says my father-in-law :
' Here comes a bear ! ' — Says my mother-in-law : ' Here comes a slattern ! ' —
My sisters-in-law cry : ' Here comes a do-nothing ! ' — My brothers-in-law
exclaim : * Here comes a mischief-maker ! ' — Oh — oh — oh ! Oh, dear me ! " —
Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, p. 289.

504 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

resist this active dissolvent, which, by attacking the old customs
and paternal authority, cuts out the core of despotic communism in
the family ? Family and commune, domestic life and public life, —
the life of the mir, — had one and the same basis, principle, and
spirit ; it is impossible that the alterations which the one under-
goes should not react on the other. Anything that weakens
traditions and popular customs must also weaken the village com-
munities, in which all rests on custom and tradition. The man
who has freed himself from the paternal yoke, will soon want to
slip that of the commune. He who is tired of remaining a boy
forever in the house, will not like being always a minor before the
mir; he who finds family solidarity irksome, will promptly grow
tired of the solidarity imposed by the commune. The spirit of in-
dependence is, of its nature, a thing that, once it has entered a
certain sphere, is not to be shut up within it : close the house as
you will, it will find a way out to spread abroad.

If the commune is to survive the transformation it is undergo-
ing at present, it must cease to oppress the individual, it must leave
full liberty to persons. The ancient agrarian system's only chance
lies in adapting itself to the demands of modem individualism.
Now, is the Moscovite mir capable of this ? The communism of
the patriarchal family necessarily implies the solidarity of the mem-
bers ; there lies one of the reasons of the dying out of the Serbian
zadruga and the family communities among the southern Slavs.
Is this the case in the same measure with the village communities ?
In our age of individual liberty and ardent competition, between
nations as between men, an economic or political institution can,
in truth, exist only on two conditions, narrowly connected : not
to interfere with individual liberty, and not to hinder national pro-
duction. A study of the manner in which land is divided and
used under the control of the mir will show us what are, in both
these respects, the eflfec^ and the defects of the Russian rural
commune system.

BOOK VIII. CHAPTER III.

Village Communities : Manner of Division and Allotments — Large Com-
munities and Free Use of Vacant Lots — The Mir of the Present Day and
Periodical Re-allotments — Division by " Souls "and hyTihglos — Epochs
of Division ; Disadvantages of Frequent Re-allotments — A Portion of
the Defects Charged to the Mir Due to the Large Agglomerated Villages
— Consequences of Excessive Parcelling.

At the times when population was more sparsely distributed
than it is now, the Russian communities, at present limited to
mere villages, were able sometimes to cover much more ex-
tensive tracts of land. Such instances are still to be encountered
at both extremities of Russia — in the north, in the government of
016nets, on the confines of Finland, and in the south, amongst the
Cosacks of the Ural, Great-Russians by descent, mostly old-
believers by religion, and as much attached to the old customs as
to the old rites. There, by the river Ural, a vast commune has
existed down to our own time, covering an entire extensive geo-
graphical region ; there a whole army, sole proprietor of the soil
it occupied, formed one undivided community. Here was to be
found, nearly intact, in the nineteenth century, the form of prop-
erty and usufruct of the tribe or clan of prehistoric ages.*

Immense steppes, but moderatel)' fertile and almost desert, to

say the truth, — a space of nearly 27,000.000 acres, — composed the

collective property of the Cosacks of the Ural. Along the entire

* Haxthausen {Studien, vol. iii., pp. 153-162) gives a description of the
regulations under which these Cosacks lived prior to the recent reforms and
the invasion of individual property, gradually introduced to favor the offi-
cers in consequence of the constitution of a military hierarchy, opposed
both in origin and spirit to the local Cosack traditions.

505

5o6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

course of the river Ural or Yaik, which has been made the con-
ventional boundary between Europe and Asia, there was not yet, in
the middle of the present century, a single lot of land belonging to
any individual man, nor even to a town or stanitsa, as the villages
are called, which are also administrative and military centres of
Cosack districts. The system of usufruct was common as well as
that of proprietorship. On a day fixed by the ataman, at a signal
given by the ofl&cers of each stanitsa, haymaking began on the
meadows along the rivers. All the men bearing the name of Cosacks
went to work simultaneously. First, each one cut with his scythe,
in the tall grass, a line enclosing the lot which was to be his to mow,
and all the land that had in this manner been appropriated by a Co-
sack became his by right — he could then mow it at his ease, with
his family. In this vast community, the land as the water, the
meadows and arable fields as the fisheries on the sea or the rivers,
were common property and worked after the same manner, all
starting at the same moment, by order and under the supervision
of the chiefs, but every one working for himself — for this common
proprietorship and common usufruct had nothing to do with the
system of equal remuneration preached by certain socialists.
Notwithstanding this important restriction, such a system, from
the moment that the inhabitants are numerous enough for the
products of the soil to become the subject of dispute, leaves little
liberty to individual action ; it leads to despotic democracy or to
bureaucratic regulations. That it could survive to our days on
the banks of the Ural, was only owing to the military organization
of the Cosacks.

In the steppes of the south, as in the forests of the north, the
existence of these vast communities, where periodical re-allot-
ments were unknown, depended first of all on the productiveness
of the soil and the scarcity of labor. As population increased,
the rights of each member had to be defined more strictly, the
lands had to be assigned to each village and distributed among the
inhabitants. In the more recently colonized regions, the time is

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 507

still remembered by many when the use of the soil was not con-
fined within such narrow limits. With the Cosacks of the Don as
well, the time is not so far removed when every Cosack was free
to take possession of any vacant piece of steppe-land. In the
government of Samdra, on the eastern bank of the Volga, old
men recall the time when every man could cut as much hay as
would make a wagon-load.

Similar customs still survive in sundry of the thankless north-
em regions, the rough climate and meagre soil of which oflFer but
few attractions to colonists. This is seen especially in Siberia,
where it often happens that the meadow-lands alone are divided,
while of the arable lands each man works as much as he is able.
In the region north of the Ladoga and On^ga lakes, in the chill
wastes of the government of 016nets, the proportion of individual
usufruct depends entirely on the amount of efficient work accom-
plished by individuals or families. Each peasant is free to culti-
vate as much land as his strength permits him, or the number of
hands he disposes of ; all he has to do is to indicate by some sign,
generally a notch on the trees, the spot he has selected. This
form of land tenure is usually allied in the province of 016nets,
to the system of vast communities comprising ofttimes whole dis-
tricts. The reason is simple. The dwellers in one and the same
valley form together a community whose domain extends, between
forests, along a river or a lake. The traditional boundaries of
these immense communal tracts have repeatedly been traced, less
in view of agricultural achievements, than for the sake of the
fisheries which represent the most unfailing resource of these
otherwise disinherited wastes.

In the district of Olbnets, each community numbers, on an
average, a score of villages and hamlets, grouped in vblosts —
cantons — around one large village which often gives its name
to the others, the latter regarding themselves as its colonies or
oflFspring. A single one of these rural syndicates comprises, it is
said, over one hundred villages and owns 550,000 acres with

508 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

about 40 miles of meadow-land on the river Svir. We learn from
recent researches that these associations of numerous villages into
huge communities, or, to put it more correctly, this system of
appropriation of the soil in vast tracts, with the right for the
hamlets and families of freely helping themselves to the land,
appears to have been formerly in almost universal use. In this
case an investigation of the facts and historical documents but
confirms what theory would make us surmise.

The village federations of 016nets are the last remnants of
those huge communities which can no longer subsist in any but
half-desert countries, where agriculture itself still holds a very
subordinate place. The Russian communities of the present day
are generally limited to one village, where the custom of working
the land in common, for the good of all, or each for himself, has
long become an anomaly. In the remote regions, there still may
exist a few commons where the products of the soil and of labor
are divided among the co-proprietors. Such a state of things
may be met with in a few dissident (raskblnik) villages or out of the
way settlements ; but even there it shotdd be ascribed not so much
to the persistency of ancient usages as to religious influences and
the communistic spirit of monastic associations.*

With the Russian mir, as a rule, the pasture-lands and woods
alone remain undivided. Unfortunately these two kinds of lands
represent but an insignificant proportion of the communal lands.
In this country so rich in forests, where wood is used so freely,
the villages best provided with lands, do not, most of the time,
own either a patch of forest or a stick of timber. The reason of
this anomaly is very simple. In the times of serfdom, the peasant
was generally allowed for his regtdar use only ctdtivated lots,
with the addition of a few lots of pasture and meadow. The
Emancipation Act merely aimed at vindicating for him, as his full

* Several of the more extreme dissident sects {raskdl) have very pro-
nounced socialistic tendencies ; one actually bears the name of " Commu-
nists " and orders that all property shall be in common. (See VoLIII. of this
work, Book in., Chap. IX.)

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 509

property, the land of which he had had the usufruct ; and, in the
application of the agrarian regulations, the peasants frequently
were defrauded of part of those lands which they used for pas-
ture. The woods, where they are not the property of the State,
were left to the former landlord, a thing the more to be regretted
that, originally, the peasant was to have the use of the forests and
that, prior to the emancipation, he was generally allowed to get
his timber from the master's woods.

This evidently is one of the weak sides of the new agrarian
system and the liquidation of serfdom as it has been enacted. It
would have been much to Russia's advantage had she, as has been
done in other countries, secured to the rural communes the pro-
prietorship of a portion of her vast forests, with the proviso that
communal woods should be, as in France, subject to strict govern-
ment control. Such a system is entirely favorable to the forests,
and free from all the drawbacks it presents when applied to arable
lands. That might have been an efficient way of preventing the
too rapid denudation of the country with all the evils it entails.
By leaving the forests to the former landlord, a double damage
has been indirectly inflicted on the forest wealth of the empire,
consequently on its entire rural economy, and even, in a measure,
on the soil and the climate, which both deteriorate through defor-
estation, the pomiSsh-tchik, impoverished by the emancipation,
had a double incentive to cut down the woods left in his posses-
sion ; it was for him the surest way of making money, and, at the
same time, of opposing the depredations of the peasants, insuffi-
ciently repressed by the police and by the laws. It is not too much
to say that, for having failed to protect the woods against the
rapacity of the want-ridden landlord and the plunderous propen-
sities of the mujik, the emancipation may be taxed with having
helped to bring about the devastation of the forests, so manifold
and unforeseen have been the consequences of the great reform.*

*In the kingdom of Poland, on the contrary, the right of usufruct en-
joyed by the peasant over the forests has been maintained and even extended
beyond measure, without any compensation to the landlords. This was the
opposite extreme and, as such, did not benefit the forests.

5IO THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

The communal domain is generally composed of arable and
pasture lands. These latter, too much restricted by the Statute,
are nearly always used in common, each family sending out their
cattle, usually marked, under the care of a herdsman hired by
the commime. The arable lands are divided — and redivided at
more or less regular intervals — between the members of the com-
mune, to be cultivated by each one separately, at his own cost and
risk. Thus individual holding habitually goes hand in hand with
collective proprietorship. In this mir, apparently wholly commu-
nistic, the mainspring of effort is personal interest. In opposition
to an idea widely spread abroad, nothing is so repugnant to the
peasant as labor in common ; ever since he has been free he almost
invariably insists on working for his own account.

The principle on which the mir is based is that of periodical
re-allotments of the soil.* There are, in this, three points to be
considered : the claims which entitle to a lot ; the epochs at which
the common territory is divided ; the mode of allotment. On
these three points, especially on the two first, customs and prac-
tices vary greatly according to regions.

As regards the claimants, the accepted unit is sometimes the
" soul " idushdi) or " revision soul," i.e., the taxed male head, and
sometimes the household {tihgl6),\ taking into account, as a rule,
the working capacities of the different households and the propor-
tion of tax that each can bear. The first of these modes is more
generally in use among the Crown peasants, who were subject to

* The term mir, the meaning of which shall be inquired into later on, is
the only one in use among the peasants. Those of " commune " or "so-
ciety " {dbsh-tchina and dbsh-tchestvd), employed by Russian writers as
being analogous to the gemeinde and communitas of the West, are foreign
to popular speech.

t The word tihglo signifies " a burden," " dues," " contribution," — and
came to be applied to those who carry that burden, who owe those dues.
In the time of serfdom this term served to designate the unit of labor to be
supplied by each "household," technically meaning a man, woman, and
horse. A marrifed couple is most generally understood ; but the meaning
undergoes singular changes in different localities. Therefore the divisions
made on this basis vary a great deal.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 511

only one tax — capitation ; the second, among the former serfs, who
used to distribute their dues to their landlords by households
{tihgld), and naturally pursued the same system in distributing the
land which he ceded to them.

The lot awarded each family is in proportion to the number of
its male members or of its adult and married members. It is easy
to see what encouragement such a system gives to the increase of
population. Each son, when bom, or when he arrives at man's
estate, brings to the family an additional lot. So that a numerous
offspring, instead of lessening the paternal resources, increases
them. Juridically, the women have no claim whatever to land.*
In practice they have about as great a share of it as the men ; for
since, under the tihglo system, a lot is given to each couple, it is
the woman who really holds the key to landed property. Hence
Russia is, of all European countries, that where marriage is most
in honor and most prolific. Owing to this twofold superiority,
the average of births is nearly double that in France. The rigor
of the climate, the hard life, and above all the mortality among
children, are the only hindrances to a marvellously rapid increase
of the rural population.

This very increase compels periodical re-allotments. To sup-
ply the new-comers with lots, without every time rehandling the
whole land, many communes, especially among the Crown peas-
ants, keep on hand reserve lands. These they let for the mir's
benefit, or else make use of as commons, for pasture. The grow-
ing denseness of the population, the smallness of many of the lots
ceded to the peasants at the time of the emancipation, deprive
most villages of this resource. The new-comers, then, can enforce
their right only by means of a re-allotment. This would be neces-
sitated anyhow by the fundamental principle on which com-
munal life is based, for otherwise, families increasing unequally,
the common property'- would soon be unequally divided. In this

* Yet in certain regions the division by "head" or "mouth," indepen-
dentl)r of age or sex, is beginning to come up.

512 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

they have to deal with one of the difficulties which beset com-
munism of any type, which, left to its«lf, inevitably tends to self-
destruction, absolute equality being an impossibility, unless
continually kept up by watchful re-division. Of course, the
more frequent the re-allotments, the more faithfully the principle
is maintained, but the more agriculture is hampered and general
prosperity hindered.

For meadow-lands, the system of annual re-allotment still pre-
vails ; there even are, in the government of Tamb6f, communes
which proceed to it twice a year. In others again, the haymaking
is done in common and the hay divided afterward.* There are
districts where cultivated lands are subject to the same system of
annual re-allotment ; they are only too numerous in the govern-
ments of Sardtof, Ori61, Kaluga, Nijni-N6vgorod, Vor6nej, etc.;
in that of Perm such was the widely spread custom down to 1872.
Such a system is too manifestly disturbing, too much opposed to
the husbandman's interest to be general. The re-allotments
mostly take place every three years, in conformity to the most
popular mode of culture, that by triennial rotation. In places
this period of three years is doubled, tripled, quadrupled. In
others again, as in some communes of the government of Moscow,
a decennial period has been fixed upon ; and yet in others, as with
the Great-Russians of Vor6nej, they wait tiU a new "revision"
or census takes place. From documents published in 1880, such
appears to be the rule among the Crown peasants of the govern-
ment of Kazkn. These "revisions," which should not be con-
founded with what is known in the West under the name of general
census, occur at irregular intervals of (until now) over twelve or
fifteen years. Since 17 19 there have been but ten, the last having
taken place in 1858. In the communes which proceed to general
re-allotments only at revision time, none have taken place yet

* The facts and cases here mentioned are mostly taken from the agricul-
tural inquests or the statistics kept by the various ministerial departments
and the zitnstvos.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 513

since the abolition of serfdom, and there may be none for some
time to come — perhaps never, the tax on males having been sup-
pressed by the Emperor Alexander III. , which measure did away
with the necessity for ' * revisions ' ' on the old line.

Triennial re-allotment was justified by the mode of culture ;
re-allotment timed by ' ' revisions ' ' was based on the system of
taxation. From one ' ' revision ' ' to the next, the number of
"souls," or male peasants subject to the poll-tax, remained un-
changed, no matter how many had been the deaths and births.
The commune was mutually responsible before the fisc ; so that,
each family, at each new " revision," receiving a lot in proportion
to the burdens it bore or the number of hands it disposed of, the
tax which, after the letter of the law, bore on the persons, was
made indirectly to bear on the lands.

The fatal effects of frequent divisions of the soil scarcely need
pointing out. On this point, opinions are all but unanimous. The
peasant does not grow attached to a piece of ground which he
does not expect to keep and only strives to draw from it the great-
est possible immediate profit, without a thought for the morrow.
His care and his foresight he reserves for the house-lot {usMbd)
around his izbd., which cannot be taken from him. The adversa-
ries of the mir do not fail to make this point in favor of their
theory of the advantages of fixed and individual proprietorship
over collective land tenure. The husbandman who tills a com-
munal field is unwilling to undertake labor and expenses which
are to benefit somebody else. The absolute lack of manure or
fertilizer of any kind in so many Great- Russian villages is gener-
ally ascribed to this want of interest in the husbandman. Hence
the unavoidable impoverishment of the soil and constant aggrava-
tion of bad crops. To this evil there formerly was a remedy, or
at least a palliative : an exhausted tract of land was abandoned to
seek new, sometimes virgin, lands. Nowadays the increase of
population and the extension of husbandry render this remedy
more and more difl&cult to apply and less and less efl&dent.

514 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Is this an irreparable evil, a curse naturally inherent to collec-
tive property holding ? An impartial mind must needs reply : not
proven. Some few communes in the governments of Penza and
Simbirsk have hit on the expedient of imposing on the peasants
obligatory manuring, with the alternative of keeping the same
lot at the next distribution. This is an example that might be
followed, and the communal authorities, being always on the spot,
would be better qualified than a non-resident to see that such con-
ditions be complied with. There is, moreover, a still simpler and
easier way : to put oflF the re-allotments. And that is precisely,
on the showing of the agricultural inquests, what has been done
more and more since the emancipation, and almost everywhere,
now of their own accord, now at the suggestion of some intelli-
gent functionar)\ Annual re-allotment, at least for cultivated
fields, has actually become an exception and even the triennial
period is growing rare. Periods of ten, fifteen, twenty, even
thirty years are getting more and more frequent. In some dis-
tricts, the peasants, made wise by experience, have recourse to a
new distribution only at the last extremity.

For that frequent re-allotments are an evil, the most deter-
mined advocates of the mir are the first to acknowledge. It is,
therefore, not to be wondered at, in a country always inclined to
look to the State for interference, if more than one voice endowed
with authority has expressed the wish that law and administra-
tion should regulate this vital matter. Some defenders of com-
munal institutions, seeing their pet theories endangered before
public opinion by the abuse of the right of re-allotment, have
besought the government to hasten to the mir's assistance by
protecting it against itself, strangely unconscious that, by such an
appeal to ofl&cial interference, they run the risk of striking a mor-
tal blow at a system of which the main strength lies in the popu-
lar customs, in tradition, in its living spontaneity.

These evils are far from belonging exclusively to communal
lands. Private landed property is not free from them. Many

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 515

estates are leased for short terms to the peasants of a commune,
and they proceed to divide and cultivate them in the same manner
as their own lands. "What difference," on this occasion remarks
one of the advocates of the mir, ' ' between personal property
leased out every year, as is customary with so many noblemen's
estates, and collective property, re-divided each year ? It is more
difl&cult to bring the noble landlords to lengthen the term of their
leases than the peasants to put off their re-allotments. If a law is
needed to regulate the latter, why not the former? "

The Minister of Crown Demesnes is said to have lately pro-
posed for study the question of a minimum term to be fixed for
the use of arable lands ; but official measures have already been
forestalled and may be rendered unnecessary by the spontaneous
resolutions of several rural communes. Thus the natural course
of things brings its own remedy to one of the chief evils of col-
lective tenure. The beneficial effects of this reform already make
themselves felt. In the governments of Tula and Kursk, manur-
ing and crops have increased in consequence. And it has been
noticed that the wealthiest communes are those that are most back-
ward with rehandling their lands. A further good effect is the
delay and limitations imposed on family divisions of land. Young
men or young couples can either stay at home or go out to work
for a salary until a new division gives them a lot of the communal
land.

The manner of allotment is not of less importance nor does it
entail less inconvenience than the time of it. Here also the dam-
age is greater in proportion as the communistic spirit and practices
are more strictly adhered to. The principle of the mir demands
that, each lot bearing an equal part of the tax, each should be
strictly equal to the next one. This principle the Russian com-
mune usually conforms to with servile punctihousness. It strives
to make the pieces of ground equal both in area and value, then
lots are drawn for them. This twofold equality cannot, as a rule.

5l6 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

be arrived at by giving to each one compact lot. So each peasant
receives a bit each of as many kinds of soil as there are in the
commune. The village surveyors begin by marking off the lands
of the different categories, then, in each of these blocks, as many
small lots are cut out as there are members to be supplied. When
the lands are all of the same quality, a thing which, thanks to the
homogeneousness of the Russian soil, is fortunately less rare than
in Western Europe, the unequal distance from the village still
makes them of unequal value to the peasant. One of the con-
sequences of the community of landed property is, indeed, the
agglomeration of the dwellings. Isolated houses, dispersed farms,
presuppose permanent ownership. To be within reach of the lot
which may fall to him, each member of the community must be
settled near his brethren, in the centre of the common domain.

Thus in Great- Russia, peasant houses crowd together into large
villages, holding, many of them, several thousands of inhabitants.
The log-houses stand on two long straight lines, on both sides of a
disproportionately wide street (to obviate the spreading of fire),
disposed, if possible, along a stream. The izb'hs, which never
touch, usually present to the street one of their lateral faces, often
sporting a balcony, or merely carved wood ornaments. In front of
the izbh is a yard with stables and bams ; back of it the enclosed
" house-lot " iushdbd), exempt from divisions. This manner
of clustering together, in harmony with the mode of land tenure,
is also justified by the climate and the nature of the Russian
soil. In the south and east, where it is most fertile, water is
scarce and springs are few ; all over the land communications are
impeded in spring, at thaw- time, and in autumn, not to mention
the fear of robbery and assassination. These huge villages are at
present one of the chief obstacles to the establishment of individual
property which, under this system of agglomerated dwellings, can-
not enjoy all its advantages. Husbandry, in fact, is nearly as
dependent on the manner of residence as on that of tenure. In a
country where population is not dense, and distances are great,

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 5 17

individual proprietorship can have a fair chance and full play only
if the husbandman, with his stock and implements, resides in the
middle of his land. Now in Great- Russia, farms with isolated
farmhouses {khvLtor) are almost unknown ; they are rare even
where the peasants have purchased land for their own. They are
met with scarcely anywhere but in Little- Russia, where manners
are very diflferent in this respect, and lands, even where the
communal system prevails, are divided more by the "house" or
"yard" (dvor) than by the "soul" or household labor unit
(Ji^glo).

A goodly portion of the evils ascribed to the communal land
system really is caused by that of rural agglomerations. Now it
would not be sufl&cient to abolish collective land tenure in order to
substitute isolated farms to the large villages, to what the Germans
call das Dorf system. Such a substitution is everywhere a diflScult
thing and a costly, demanding much time too ; in Russia it would
prove so perhaps more than anywhere else. It has been now and
then proposed to use the frequent fires as a pretence for scattering the
dwellings more. The greater distance between the houses would
reduce the losses which the country endures through the yearly
burning down of thousands of villages. Unfortunately man-
ners, clime, soil, and the eminently sociable nature of the Russian
people, are not the only obstacles to such plans. The Emancipa-
tion Act has raised one more : the ' ' house-lot ' ' adjoining the izbct
and given to the owner thereof in full permanent possession. This
little enclosed patch, exempt from the control of the mir, means
simply this : that, should the lands now owned by a \allage in
common, be to-morrow distributed finally among the families, each
would remain where it now lives, and be a fixture in the village
for a long time to come. Even then it would take centuries, most
likely, to transform the present mode of residence, and in the
meantime Russia would remain subject to all the disadvantages
which are entailed on agriculture by the remoteness of the hus-
bandman's residence, and which make themselves the more felt at

5l8 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

present, the larger the villages and the more extensive the terri-
tory, increasing by just so much the waste of time, the cost of
transportation, and the difl5culty of returning to the soil in manure
or fertilizers what is taken from it in crops. This again, however,
is one of those evils of collective property from which private
property is far from being always exempt. Many of the old estates,
disproportionately vast even yet, are still less within reach of the
hands that are to work them.

Under the system of division generally in force, the commune's
territory is usuall)'^ divided into three concentric zones or fields, in
conformity to the practice of triennial rotation. From the centre,
occupied by the village, start as many rays as there are claimants,
and the sections thus obtained represent the lots to be awarded
each one of them. These lots, therefore, frequently assume the
wedge-shape ; but sometimes they take that of long and narrow
parallel strips. The drawing of lots is arranged in such a manner
that each claimant must receive a portion of all the three fields of
each category, without any thought being taken to join together
the portions allotted to the same family. Thus each lot {nadiit)
is mostly composed of bits of land, separated from one another and
wedged in in other lots. The portion of one ' ' soul ' ' or one iihglo
can be made up of scraps scattered in six, seven, eight, nine, ten
distant places, sometimes more. To get an idea of the exceeding
smallness of each such particle of land, it is sufficient to keep in
mind that the average allowance was from seven and a half to ten
acres per male head, and that, the peasants having in many cases
redeemed only the legal minimum, the share of each falls much
short of that average. In the communes which, while bearing a
large population, are ill provided with land, this parcelling of the
communal domain leads to an actual trituration of the soil. The
agricultural inquest mentions communes in the government of
Kursk where fractions of lots have been found measuring not
quite seven feet in width. Under the system of individual tenure
this infinitesimal parcelling is rarely equalled. Thus the system

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 519

now in force adds the defect of individualism, chief among which
is the excessive parcelling of the land, to those of communism,
which weakens the attachment to the soil and the energy in
labor,*

With such scraps of land rational cultivation is impossible.
Then, as they are distant sometimes several miles from one an-
other, the peasant wastes a large portion of his time and strength
in useless journeys, so that it is not unusual for the remoter ones
to be simply given up by their temporary owner. Again, a great
deal of land is lost in boundaries, and large quantities of grain in
seed. Lastlj' they are so entangled that they leave no room for
turning round in and no facility of access, so that, from their
narrowness, they are exceedingly difficult to plough and harrow.
This places the husbandmen in a state of mutual dependence
which is fatal to individual enterprise. Neighbors, being unable
to act singly, are compelled to combine, and this leads to the
so-called ' ' compulsory culture ' ' (Jlurzwang) of the Germans. It
becomes necessary to leave the commune to decide as to the time,
if not always as to the nature of the work to be done. Mathe-
matical impartiality thus really destroys the free enjoyment of the
land and brings about, indirectly, a sort of common, or at least
simultaneous, cultivation, which might be made profitable by
improved proceedings, but which, with the routine at present
prevailing, becomes an additional hindrance to progress^

Faults such as these cannot be corrected without giving up the
deceptive theor>^ of absolutely identical lots and the puerile prac-
tice which, by a grossly material interpretation, seems bent on
presenting each claimant with a clod of earth exactly like his
neighbor's. It would be better to make up well rounded lots,

* The difficulties and disadvantages of communal allotment are some-
times attenuated by dividing the land, and the taxes along with it, among
larger and smaller groups, which then subdivide it among the single
members. These preliminary divisions by fractions of villages are usually
preferred in the larger communes, where direct division, by the "soul " or
tihglo, would prove too complicated.

520 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

well balanced in value, of sizes varying according to the quality
of the soil and the distance from the village. Yet even this
reform would not remove the evil. In the poorer communes,
the lots still would be disproportionately small, and would
become smaller still from generation to generation, along with
the increase of the population.*

As a remedy for this evil, one of the most serious that threaten
the mir in the future, the usual panacea has of course been pro-
posed : the intervention of the State. It has been proposed to
establish a legal minimum, below which no lot or fraction of lot
should be allowed to descend. Such measures would not only
have against them the theoretical principle on which communities
are based and according to which each member holds an equal
right to the land, — they would stumble against serious practical
difficulties and would find it hard to triumph over the great
diversity of local conditions. It must not be forgotten, moreover,
that the excessive parcelling of land is not a fault belonging
exclusively to the collective system. Under that of individual
property, family divisions can lead to similar resvdts. We see
something of this in the West, in certain parts of France for
instance. In Russia itself, this evil is encountered, among others,
in Lithuania, where the individual sj'stem is predominant. From
the moment that the peasant is to be a landholder, it cannot be
avoided under any system. In one way the collective system even
has one indubitable advantage : it would, in case of need, allow
of having recourse to uniform culture on a large scale — a thing
which, keeping pace with the progress of instruction and agricul-
ture, might prove as favorable to the productiveness of the soil,
as to the interests of the joint proprietors.

* On the Isle of Java, where collective land tenure also prevails, similar
causes have produced similar effects. The rapid increase of the population
has reduced the lot of each laborer to particles far more infinitesimal
than in Russia. Then also there is a general demand for interference to
set a limit to the parcelling of the soil, or, better still, for the substitution
of individual and hereditary tenure for that at present in use. See De
Ivaveleye : De la PropriiU et de ses Formes Primitives.

BOOK VIII. CHAPTER IV.

The Mir in Theory and Practice — The Material Equality of the Lots does
not Always Imply Equitable Distribution — Division according to the
Working Capacity or Resources of the Laborers — Story of One Com-
mune—" Soulless " Families ; Strong, "Half- Power," Weak Families
— The Mir as a Providence — Arbitrariness and Injustice — Usury — The
Vampires or " i^?>-Eaters "—Rural Oligarchy— Landless Peasants and
Rural Proletariate.

ThS system of strict material equality is far from implying
invariable equity in the distribution of the lands. As a rule,
there is nothing fixed and regular about the proceeding, certainly
nothing mathematical. The mir deals with its members more
paternally, i.e., more arbitrarily: it does not consider merely the
number of persons that dwell in a house, but also their ages, their
state of health, their resources ; it takes into account natural or
accidental inequalities, weighs the strength and capacity of each
member, and treats each according to his needs or faculties.

It would be a great mistake to see in this effort at compensa-
tion only a humanitarian instinct or an unconscious socialism,
bent on levelling everything in despite of nature. No ; the peas-
ants obey verj'- diflferent promptings, more positive, more practical,
as is their nature.

Community of lands stands, as already indicated, in closest
relation to solidarity before the fisc. For centuries the two
things have been so intimately connected, that it was very' possi-
ble for a certain school to consider collective property as simply
a consequence of that solidarity. In a countr>' where taxes of
all kinds have always been very heavy, where the possession of
the soil might always have been regarded more as a burden than

521

522 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS

as a privilege, where the sum-total of taxes and dues even now
frequently exceeds the normal incx)me from the land, it was but
natural that, in distributing the communal domain, the peasants'
prime object should always have been the payment of the taxes.
Since the emancipation this question controls the entire Ufe of the
mir as it did before, and, in distributing the communal ager^ it
considers less each individual's claim to the land than his pa3dng
capacity. Each lot, as a rule, corresponds to a proportionate share
of the taxes, and the quantum of land adjudged to each house-
hold is in proportion to the burdens it can bear. The distribution
of the communal lands is but another form of the distribution of
the communal taxes.

The endowment of families varies not only with the number,
but also with the strength and ages, of their members. The most
robust and prosperous receive a larger share of the land because
they contri]?ute a larger portion of the taxes. Only those com-
munes where the income from the land regularly exceeds the
annual payments need not give way to such preoccupations but
are able simply to divide their fields by the male head or by
the household.

What need to point out all the complications and difficulties
of such a system ? The proceedings in use can scarcely be com-
prehended without the help of an example or a sort of diagram.
We will here find it convenient to borrow Mr. I^e Play's system
of monographs, though not without warning the reader that
such a method can only give the particular facts in a given case,
from which it were imprudent to generalize. The Russian mir,
we must remember, knows of no uniform laws or rules, the cus-
toms vary with the regions, the districts, even the villages, each
community being free to regulate these matters to please itself, so
it pays the taxes imposed on it.

An economist, Mr. Trir6gof, seeing in the village communities
the organic cells of the great body politic, resolved to investigate
one closely ; so to speak, imder the microscope. At the end of a

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 523

few years of patient observation, he gave to the world, in two
successive, most curious papers, the results of this sort of socio-
histological study. The commune chosen by him is named
Arashin and is situated in the government of Sardtof It is in no
wise different from its neighbors.

When Mr. Trir6gof began his investigation, Ardshin ntunbered
493 inhabitants of both sexes, who formed 87 families, dwelling
in the same number of houses. The ' ' souls, ' ' as established by
the last "revision" and subject to the poll-tax, were 212 in
number. The communal territory covered 846 dessiatinas (about
2,327 acres, at about 2^ acres to the dessiatina) of arable land, not
including the vegetable gardens and hemp patches immediately
adjoining the village. The arable lands, divided, as usual, in
three fields, were broken up into 212 lots, the same number as
that of the tax-paying " souls," of about 4 dessiatinas (11 acres)
each, every lot comprising a portion of each of the three com-
munal fields. To the distribution of the property corresponds
that of the burdens. All contributions and dues, be they per-
sonal or land taxes, charged by the State to the commune of
Ardshin, the tnir merged into one mass, with no distinction as to
name, origin, or destination. The taxes, thus blocked, are then
divided into a number of quotas equal to that of the "revision
souls ' ' and the corresponding lots. The sum- total of taxes and
dues amounted for Ardshin to 2,607 roubles and 30 copecks,
which gives 12 roubles and 30 copecks by " soul " and lot.

If, in conformity with theory and legal fictions, the unit of
distribution had been the "revision soul," every such "soul"
would have had its 4 dessiatinas and paid its 12 roubles. But
Ardshin does not operate per "soul" or "head," nor even by
the household. While one family would receive only one lot and
pay the 12 roubles and 30 copecks thereto pertaining, another
would be put in possession of five and a-half lots and assessed at
over 73 roubles a year. The most singular thing about it is that
the portion of land and of taxes allotted to certain families flue-

524 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

tuates every year, according as the laboring power of their
members increases or decreases. Thus the house of one Vasslli
Fed6tof held, in 1874, four and a-half lots, five in 1875 and five
and a half in 1876. Why this yearly augmentation of half a lot,
i.e., of two dessiatinas ? Because Vassili Fed6tors children were
growing up, and the family, therefore, was able to bear an increase
of labor and payment. Ivan Fed6tof s share, on the other hand,
had, from three lots, fallen to two within the same span of time,
because the head of the house was growing old and the laboring
power of the family was steadily decreasing.

It appears from this that, where the commune wishes to keep
an accoimt of all the changes brought on by age, sickness, or
infirmity, it is compelled to divide the land anew each year —
unless, as is frequently done, a lot or half lot is simply transferred
from one family to another, without touching the whole. At
Ardshin the distribution is continually fluctuating according to
the means of families, the age and health of their members. In
this respect the paternal, if not disinterested, solicitude and cau-
tion of the Ardshin mir goes very far ; it investigates all the phases
of domestic life, it enters into individual differences. Thus a
certain family by the name of Maximof, which, by the "revision
lists," should have received four lots and paid for four " souls,"
had only two and a half and paid in proportion, because one
of its members was afflicted with bad eyes and another with a
chronic throat trouble.

Age and physical strength are not the only standards of
assessment ; the mir also considers the resources, the means of
labor of each house or " yard " {dvor), what economists call " the
plant." Thus the mir of Ardshin classes the famihes into four
categories. The first comprises those which, from lack of adult
laborers or agricultural implements, are imable to cultivate land
profitably and to bear the least part of the communal burdens.
Out of eighty-seven families, three were in this condition. They
got no land and were exempt from taxes ; in technical jargon.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES, 525

" they had no souls." Next to these "soulless " families come,
in the classification adopted by Ardshin, the ' ' half-power fam-
ilies," i.e., such as do have one valid laborer, but are unprovided
with the laborer's indispensable helpmate — a horse. There were
some ten such families ; they received each one lot, and were taxed
accordingly. To the third class, by far the most numerous (45 out
of 87), belong the families which have only one laborer, but one
or two horses ; they paid each for two * ' souls ' ' and got two lots.
Lastly came thirty families more numerous or wealthier than the
others, each of which had charge of more than two lots, most of
them having three or four, some five and even five and a half, and
naturally taxed in proportion.

It appears from the above that, in the commune of Ardshin, the
" soulless " and the " half-power " families, and those having only
one laborer, the joint number of which amounted to fifty-seven, i.e. ,
over two thirds of the whole, held, together, less than half the com-
munal lands, while the remaining third, composed of the richer fam-
ilies, held between them more than half the lots — 112 against 100,
— and paid more than the other fifty-seven put together — 1,377
roubles and 60 copecks against 1,230 roubles on a total of 2,607
roubles and 60 copecks.

A rather unexpected deduction is forced on us by this mode of
distribution, which is that, with these seemingly wholly commu-
nistic proceedings, it is in reality not so much the personal strength
of the laborer as the resources he disposes of which constitute a
claim to the land. In a mir like that of Ardshin, it might almost
be said to be — capital ! Land is preferably awarded to those who
have most means to get something out of it. It is less the demand
for produce which is considered than the means of production.

This uneven distribution, whether by "the soul" or the
"household" {tiaglo), in accordance with the number of able-
bodied laborers in each house and their aptitude to work, is ad-
duced by certain Russian writers of note, such as Ytiri Samdrin
and Prince Vassiltchikof, as the distinctive characteristic of the

526 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

mir, the essential trait by which the Great-Russian commune
diflfers from all agrarian associations or communities, whether of
ancient or modern times. They delight in presenting this mode
of division as a solution of the property question especially belong-
ing to the Russian people, and radically different from all more
or less analogous institutions. As a matter of fact it may be so
to-day, but from the historical standpoint the correctness of this
assertion is questionable. This manner of distributing land seems
to be derived, not from a particular conception of property as such,
but simply from the application to property of the mode of distri-
buting the taxes. The truth of this position is proved by the fact
that in certain urban communities the produce of the communal
lands is distributed among the inhabitants in proportion to the
figure of taxes paid by each of them.*

Such a standard — the working capacity' of the husbandmen —
could hardly suit any but a country where the use of the soil was,
for the laborer, less a right than a biirden. Take it all in all, the
cultivation of the soil may be regarded as a sort of public service,
— an obligatory service incumbent on every able-bodied man, and
fi-om which only age or sickness exempts. It is a fact that in most
communes where the income from the land runs short of the dues,
the men, from the age of twenty to that of sixty, are accounted as
laborers, and, as such, obliged to take their share of the land and
of the taxes. In the poorest villages this sort of service begins at
eighteen, or even sixteen ; and no one can ask to be freed from it
until he is sixty, or fifty-five, at the very least.

Should the antiquity of the tihglo as labor imit be established,

it would go far to confirm, at least in part, the views of Mr. Tchi-

* A large number of cities own cultivated lands. Some let them to farm-
ers, others divide them after the manner of the rural »«*>. The system
mentioned in the text is found to exist in Mol6ga, a district city in the gov-
ernment of Yarosldvl. The inhabitants are divided into eleven sdintas, i.e.,
" hundreds," and the meadows belonging to the city into as many lots,
which each sdtnia mows by turns. The produce, instead of being distributed
by the " head " or family, is divided among the members of each sdtnia, in
proportion to the quota of their respective taxes.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 527

tcherin and the school which regards the Russian commune as
having sprung out of the Moscovite fiscal system. In that case
the mode of division and onerous taxation would also mainly ac-
count for the general adherence to the communal system. In a
state where the fiscal system, through centuries, made of the pos-
session of land as much an obligation and burden as a privilege
and right, the reasons which elsewhere urged to the dissolution of
communities could not have much weight. Why proceed to a
final division when it frequently was more in the taxpayer's inter-
est to reduce his lot than to extend it ? It is quite possible the
mir may have stood its ground through so many centuries because
of the burdens which were heaped on it, the individuals dreading
to take on their own responsibility the load which it was for the
community to bear.

This liunping and distribution of lands and taxes, in conformity
with each member's resources, constitutes what the ingenious inves-
tigator of Ardshin calls " the popular tax apportionment," and in
his opinion there is not much need of any other. It little matters
what is taxed, or how the state or provinces distribute the direct
taxes. The peasant does not care to know whether he pays for
the land, or for "souls" or families; poll-tax, land-tax, — in his
eyes it is all one. All he cares for is the sum-total of the dues
and the manner in which the mir distributes it among the mem-
bers.' So that it was almost an idle trouble to substitute a land-
tax or income-tax for the capitation-tax ; any kind of reform is
bootless unless it lightens the mass of the peasant's liabilities. On
the other hand, the taxes, heavy as they are, do not crush him as
utterly as is usually supposed, the assessment in each individual
case being proportioned to the taxpayer's means and strength.

Ardshin shows us the exact nature of what may be called the
commune's fiscal solidarity and the almost sovereign power with
which it invests the mir. This power, the apologists of the village
communes assure us, the m,ir almost invariably uses for the greater

' Does not this practically amount to " single-tax " ?

528 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

good of all its members, striving with the strictest equity, the most
scrupulous earnestness, to balance all unevenness, to avoid all un-
fairness. Conceived of thus, the mir would be to the peasant a
sort of earthly providence ; the commune, a mother ever watchful
lest any of her children should be taxed beyond their powers, A
village like Ar^hin appears to our enraptured eyes in the guise
of a living rural Utopia, where ignorant boors have been, for
several centuries, converting into realities the most daring dreams
of the thinkers of the West. To make of these communes
veritable Edens, all that were needed, it would seem, is to lighten
the taxation.

Many writers since Herzen have extolled the peasants' sense
of solidarity, their good faith and sound judgment in their dealings
with one another and matters pertaining to all those delicate
questions of measurement and partition. These praises are, on
the whole, deserved. But, were they always so, the mujik would
not be human. Such proceedings lend themselves too easily to
abuses of all sorts for the mir to be quite free from them. Accord-
ingly the detractors of the communal principle are not at a loss for
flaws and elements of disturbance.

Fiscal solidarity, which, in a model village like Ardshin beams
on us as the beneficient wzr-fairy, frowns in others as a tyrant
whose yoke is unbearable. To rid themselves of it, many peas-
ants of those who are better off try to go out of the community.
The discretionary powers of distribution, admired by some as the
master stroke of popular genius, is regarded by many even of the
advocates of the mir as an ingenious but dangerous piece of
machinery, which, in order not to degenerate into an abuse,
stands in need of being regulated by the State.*

The fact is that arbitrariness has opened the way for intrigue
and corruption into this system, apparently so strictly equitable.

* Thus Prince Vassiltchikof, a great admirer of the system — not perceiv-
ing how difficult and, perhaps, inefficient any legislation in such a matter
would be.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 529

The agricultural inquests have, in this respect, become the vehicle of
plaints which come indeed from functionaries or proprietors foreign
to the mir but should not therefore be made light of. These small
self-governing democracies are exposed to two opposite evils : the
tyranny of the crowd and that of individuals. At one time it will
be the mass, the poor, who will lay down the law to the rich, for-
cing on them supplementary lots and thus compelling them to pay
more than their share of the dues. In the north, where the peas-
ants frequently make their living chiefly by industry and trade, it
is no rare thing for a commune to let in a particularly skilled arti-
san or a more than usually successful tradesman for two lots, /. ^.,
for a double quota of taxes, which is but another way of taxing
capital or income. At another time, it will be the rich who,
through corruption or bullying, will lay down the law to the
majority, gain possession of the best lands, and create in the very
midst of the mir a sort of oppressive oligarchy. This latter
abuse, although apparently the least reconcilable with the consti-
tution of the mir^ appears at present to be the more frequent of the
two ; at least it is more complained of in the depositions made
before the great agricultural inquest. There are in these Rus-
sian villages men who would be called in the West exploiteurs,
vampires : enterprising, clever men, who fatten themselves at the
cost of the community. The mujik has for them the frightfully
expressive name of '^ mir-^aXers^^ (miro-yMy). In many govern-
ments— those of Kaluga, Sardtof, and others — most villages are pic-
tured as being under the control of two or three wealthy peasants,
who beguile the commune out of its best lands " for a song" — or
for no compensation at all. To achieve this there is no need
either of dealing unfairly at the partitions or of cheating at the
drawing of lots.

In these villages as in ancient Rome, it is usually through
debt that the poor fall into the power of the rich.* The vampire

* It must be admitted that in this respect the peasant is wronged not by
his brethren alone, but also by middlemen of all sorts, by speculators,
either urban or rural, and generally known under the designation of " fists,"

530 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

extends to the peasant reduced to want through improvidence,
sickness, or accident, loans beyond his power of repayment. The
frequent failures of crops in the southeast are a standing danger
to the needy, a standing opportunity for the unscrupulous rich.
The insolvent debtor is compelled to give up to his creditor, often for
a nominal price, a lot which he has no longer the means of tilling,
lyiquor is the bait most freely used, and the keeper of the kabhk
(saloon-keeper) the habitual "wzr-eater." Usury is the ulcer
that gnaws at the peasants' vitals, and collective land tenure is not
free from blame in this.

Property being common, the mujik cannot mortgage his share
of it. Even the ushdba^ or house-lot, which is exempt from com-
munal handling, cannot, so long as the redemption operation is
not completed, be alienated to anybody not of the mir without the
latter* s consent. So that among the Russian peasants, as among
the Arab tribes of French Algeria, there is no landed, but only
personal, credit ; the consequence is — the mujik pays for the " mir-
eater's " money at the rate of lo j^ a tnonth, often as high as 150 ^
a year.* The administration, the press, the local assemblies have
been, for the last twenty years, cudgelling their brains to find a
way of coming to the peasant's relief; — popular banks have been
started by the State and by private enterprise, — in vain. The
thorny problem of agricultural credit, so complicated everywhere,
remains harder to solve in Russia than elsewhere. The peasant

{kulaki), i.e., monopolizers. There even are cases, if we are to believe the
denunciations of a portion of the press and the revelations brought about
by certain trials {for instance the affair with Count Bobrinsky's peasants,
February, 1891), when former serfs, hopelessly in arrear with their rents for
lands farmed by them from their former lords, are actually reduced to a
semi-servitude, until they have acquitted themselves in full, by the "count-
ing-houses " of great landholders.

* See reports of the " Inquest " ; also the writings of Prince Vassiltchi-
kof and A. V. Ydkovlef. The Russian "land-banks," whose bonds are in
great demand in the west of the empire, usually lend only to individual
landholders— ^wt^5A-/cA»^5, — and, owing to the improvident thriftlessness
of many of the latter, these advances, meant to support large-scale agricul-
ture through the crisis of emancipation, became for numbers of the former
serfholders the cause or means of total luin.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 531

remains the quarry of Jewish usurers in the west, of vampires
and close-fisted speculators in the north, centre, and southeast,
Accordinglj'^, penury is frequently met with among these husband-
men, who boast the title of landowners. The tendency of a great
mass of testimony — which, it is true, one should beware of accept-
ing literally — is to show that since the emancipation there are only
two classes of peasants left : the rich and the poor. The middle class
would seem to have vanished along with serfdom, which, by bend-
ing all heads under a uniform yoke, maintained an artificial kind of
level, to fall below which was almost as difficult as to rise above it.
The restraint of nobiliary tutelage once removed, free play was left
to individual qualities and vices, to industry and laziness, so that,
in spite of the common ownership of the soil, one of the first effects
produced by liberty was to increase inequalities.

The picture which results from the investigations of the great
agricultural inquest is not attractive. The greater part of the
depositions goes to show that the soil is being impoverished from
lack of fertilizing, in consequence of the too frequent partitions ;
the effort to achieve absolute equality in the allotments leads to
an absurd and inconvenient parcelling of the land, which is, so to
speak, frittered into dust, while the object is not attained, for all
this minuteness cannot maintain even an average semblance of
well-being in the families. Undivided property, the commission's
report concludes, is an insuperable obstacle to agriculture, a fetter
to individual liberty, a hindrance to all spirit of enterprise, a pre-
mium to carelessness and indolence. The great advantage of the
communal system, the great argument put forward by its advo-
cates, is that, by making the holding of land open to all, it does
away with proletariate ; and now, if its opponents are to be credit-
ed, it already threatens to do in Russia what it has done in Java :
to transform the entire rural population into proletarians.

What is true, in Russia as well as elsewhere, is that the bare
owning of land is not much without the means of bringing out its
value. Now the commune, while it distributes the land to its

532 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

members, gives them neither working funds, nor livestock, nor
ag^cultural implements. Therefore we often see peasants who,
having sold their right in the land — "sold their souls" is the
technical expression — live as day-laborers on wages upon the land
assigned them by the mir. The guaranty against proletariate lies
less in the even partition of the soil than in the diffusion of capital.

Besides, even as matters stand now, it is not strictly true that
each man has his share of the soil. The universal right admitted
by theory cannot always be carried out in practice. Not content
with spreading through the cities, where there is nothing to check
it, proletariate gradually sneaks into the villages, guarded as they
seem to be by that solid rampart, the commune. Numbers of
peasants at the present day have not a foot of land to their name :
some because they have given up their share, to take up trade or
a vagrant's life ; many because their communes, having no reserve
lands and putting ofiF the allotments more and more, have not yet
given them their share ; others again because they became or-
phaned before they were of age and the commune, their legal
guardian, has taken from them their father's lot, fearing lest,
through their inability or inadequate strength, the commune
should be left to pay the dues with which every lot is burdened.

Popular speech has a special name for these mujiks despoiled
of land : it calls them hobyli. Provincial statistics supply some
instructive figures on this subject. In 1871, only ten years after
the emancipation which had given them land, thousands of peas-
ants already were without any, in the rich Black- Mould regions as
well as in the meagre ones of the north. In the government of
Kostrom^ alone there were 98,000 such peasants, 94,000 in that of
Tamb6f, and 77,000 in that of Kursk.* This evil, moreover, can

* In this latter government yf^ of the peasants are said to be landless,
and almost as many more reduced to the small hereditary "house-lot"
(usddda). Adding to these the people of various classes settled in the vil-
lages, it was found that in this government alone over 200,000 persons, t. e.
over ^j of the rural population, had no part in the landed property. In
that of Kostrom^ the proportion rose to ■^.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 533

only increase, since the families that once have gone out of a com-
munity cannot return into it except they buy back their forfeited
membership, not to mention the fact that re-allotments are becom-
ing more and more rare, the lots smaller and smaller as a natural
eflfect of the increase of the population.* Thus collective tenure
stands doubly convicted of inefficiency : first in being unable to
really secure a share in the land to every one ; second, in being
unable to protect from penury such families as it does provide
with land.

* Rural proletariate would already be a much more numerous class than
it is, were it not for the resource opened to it by colonization. (See end of
this volume.) The greater part of the peasants who go off into Asia are
driven to emigrate by lack of land. Out of each 100 emigrants going to
settle in Siberia who passed through the government of Tomsk in 1887, 62
owned no land, or very little. Out of a total of 780 families, 479 declared
they had left their communes from lack of land, and 278 from lack of work.
So it appears that, in spite of the miry the causes that lead to emigration
are much the same in Russia as in the West. In 1890 the number of
emigrants who had gone to Siberia was estimated at 40,000 annually.
Emigration was regulated by law only in 1889. Until then it had been
going on almost at random.

BOOK VIII. CHAPTER V.

Partisans and Opponents of the Communal System — Frequent Exaggera-
tions in Both Camps — Are the Faults most justly Imputed to the Mir All
Inherent to Collective Tenure ? — How Many are Due to Communal Soli-
darity and to the Fiscal System — Situation Created for the Communes
by Emancipation and Redemption — The Extent of Peasant I,ots — The
Mir does not yet really Own the I/and — The Village Communities will be
in a Normal Condition only after they have done Paying the Redemp-
tion Annuities.

At the present day, as in the days of serfdom, the Russian
commune generally has two kinds of partisans : the Slavophils,
defenders of the national traditions, and the radical democrats,
more or less avowed followers of the West. The former see in it
a Slavic and patriarchal institution, destined to preserve Russia
from the revolutionary throes of the West ; the latter insist on
seeing in it a survival of the primeval joint land tentu"e, and a
precious germ of the popular associations of the future. Between
these two schools, so diflferent in spirit, and starting from such
different premises, — orthodox Slavophilism and cosmopolitan
radicalism, — ^thdr common liking for the agrarian commune
forms a connecting link. On this neutral ground many con-
servatives, with more or less national and sometimes aristocratic
tendencies, are willing to make gracious advances to socialism
and radicalism with their levelling propensities, and affect to
deplore, as incurably tainted, the social conditions of the most
thriving Western states, hinting that Russia is the only country
where property is organized on rational principles, and, not con-
tent with proclaiming that landed property is the indispensable
consummation and accompaniment of liberty, to indorse the

534

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 535

revolutionary sophisms about paid labor being only another form
of serfdom.*

This queer combination, not unusual in Russia, of the Slavo-
phil spirit and socialistic vagaries, is not as unnatural as may
seem at first sight. Between these two seemingly diametrically
opposed tendencies, — between the socialistic innovator, who is
nothing if not cosmopolitan and unbelieving, who dreams of
annulling political boundaries as well as pulling down private
landmarks, and the orthodox Slavophil, austerely in love with
the national traditions, sensitively jealous of his country's glory
and suspicious of all things foreign, — between these two there is,
as we have seen, fa hidden link : contempt for modem civilization
which both anathematize, — an aversion, common to both against
European society, against the bourgeois science and political
economy of the West, which one party attacks in the name of
an unrealizable Utopian future, and the other in that of traditions
belonging to an almost as chimerical past.

The Russian commune's enemies are the habitual opponents
of the Slavophil tendencies and socialistic dreams, devoted to
Western institutions and anxious for their country's complete
assimilation with Europe ; the economists, who take thought,
first and foremost, for material production, and are opposed, in the

* See in the Revue des Deux Mondes of March ist, 1879, ™y study
entitled : Le Socialisme Agraire et la PropriHt Fonciire en Europe
(Agrarian Socialism and Landed Property in Europe). One of the
journalists who have most brilliantly debated these delicate questions, the
late Prince A. Vassiltchikof, wrote the following lines in a letter with
which he honored me, in reply to the above-mentioned paper : " The
communal system having been introduced in Russia centuries ago, it is
very natural that, in discussing it, we should meet on common ground with
the socialists of the West, and that, in upholding this traditional institution
in our country, we should, to a great extent, reproduce the arguments by
which the socialists are striving to force it into the Western societies. . . .
It is an undoubted fact that, in several social and agrarian questions, we
trespass on theories reputed radical and revolutionary in Europe. . . ."
(This letter was published in the Revue des Deux Mondes of July 15th,

1879.)

t See Book IV., Chap. I.

536 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

north as everywhere else, to anything that interferes with indi-
vidual and free competition. Besides these, are arrayed against
the mir the greater number of landed proprietors and professional
agriculturists, these two classes being more nearly concerned in
its practical defects than any other. As an offset, however, the
majority of desk-and-library-men, the journalists and writers of
both capitals, won over by the theoretical advantages of the com-
munal principle, hold fast to the mir, and are fond of presenting
it as Russia's anchor of salvation. Is this always a tribute to
the mir's own intrinsic merits ? Perhaps not quite. In their
pseans on collective tenure, the writers least suspectable of Slavo-
philism are prompted by another idea, which unconsciously
becomes the main one : that of dealing with an institution
essentially national, Russian, Slavic — or reputed such.* That
is how, in a country sick of imitation, patriotic self-con-
sciousness asserts itself and becomes excited to exaltation at
sight of an undoubtedly original feature. That is how we can
account for the almost religious enthusiasm and fervent partisan-
ship with which collective land tenure inspires so many of the
most distinguished Russian writers, such men as Samdrin,
Kav^lin, Vassiltchikof, of the latter of whom it has been in-
geniously remarked by one of his countrymen that, under the
socialist's working-man's blouse shows the velvet kafthn of the
Moscovite boyhr.

In the conflict which was raging all round it, since the middle
of the reign of Nicolas, the Russian commune, up to the Bul-
garian war, seemed rather to be losing than gaining ground.
Public prejudice, which had been in its favor, seemed on the
point of turning against it. By temporarily raising to high honor
all that was Slavic in name or appearance, the last Oriental war

* In spite of all the proofs at present accumulated against this system.
Prince Vassiltchikof, for one, strives at great length to demonstrate that the
form of property in use in the mir is peculiar to the Slavs, and, at the same
time, that it has been in general use among all the peoples of this race who
were preserved from Teutonic influences.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 537

revived the waning popularity of the mir. The nihilistic agitation
at the end of the reign of Alexander II. may also have indirectly
contributed to strengthen the village communities, by removing
from the administrative mind, for a considerable time, any latent
notion of altering the traditional agrarian system, as such a course
might have supplied the foes of public order with a dangerous
weapon.

The reckless exaggerations in which the advocates of the com-
mune at times indulge may have repeatedly given rise in the op-
posite camp to speculations and delusions no less excessive. There
are few Russians but have a fixed, determined, and absolute
opinion on this complex question. It has often struck me that on
no other point dogmatism is so rampant ; on no other do the Rus-
sians find it so diflScult to keep to the critical point of view. I
confess that both the commune's friends and enemies impress me
frequently as overrating, respectively, its qualities and faults.
The lack of moderation, of impartiality, which prevails in this
wordy war is easily accounted for by the vital importance of the
issues at stake and by the excitement of battle.

Prior to the emancipation, all social vices, all economic plagues,
used to be ascribed to serfdom. Now there are Russians who
would throw every blame on the collective tenure system. If the
great reform has not given to agriculture and production all the
impetus that might have been expected — the fault, to hear them, is
the commune's. The temptation is great to create to oneself a
scapegoat, that can be made to answer for all one's mistakes or
disappointments. Such is the part assigned to the rural commune
by many Russians. Public opinion lays on it the heavy load of
unavoidable errors and unrealized hopes ; it is charged with all
that the liberated peasant is blamed for : with the backwardness of
agriculture; the wzy^z/fe'.y improvidence or drunkenness; the dearth
or high price of labor ; the bad crops ; the premature exhaustion
of the soil ; even the famines that visit periodically certain portions
of the empire, become so many texts for homilies against the

538 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Slavophils' pet national institution. If we are to believe certain
detractors of the mir, all there is to do in order to doom Russia to
irretrievable decadence is to treasure this legacy of barbarous
ages ; while, to open to agriculture and production an era of
unexampled prosperity, it would be suflScient to rid property of the
communal swaddling-clothes.* Even did the present system merit
all these attacks, such views and hopes would still be dangerous ;
for those who gather and merge into one all the evils under which
agriculture and rural production are suffering, prepare terrible
disappointments for the day when the sore from which they derive
them all will be closed — if it ever is.

The Russian commune is most frequently and justly found
fault with in the name of agriculture on one side, of individual
enterprise on the other. We have discussed the harm to agricul-
ture in describing the mode of allotment. It can be summed up
under two heads : short term of usufruct and, in consequence,
carelessness of the husbandman and exhaustion of the soil ; exces-
sive parcelling of the land and dispersion of the lot fractions,
rendering rational culture impossible. The sad effects of the sys-
tem are mentioned in all the inquests. So in certain districts of
the government of Simbirsk, for instance, the rent of communal
lands is said to be about half that of private lands. So too, the
yield of wheat, oats, rye, is said to be generally one or two tcKtt-
verts — between six and twelve bushels — ^per dessiatfna greater on
private than on communal lands.

Supposing all this to be correct, reply the advocates of the
commune, it is so under the system of division in force up to the
latter years ; but these methods can be changed — they are chan-

* Thus a gentleman farmer from the south, denouncing, in a most spir-
ited pamphlet, the idolatrous infatuation of the men who, from their libra-
ries, place the commune on a pedestal, actually dared to assert that, were the
communal system suppressed, production would be doubled forthzoith, and
all demand for police or prisons against the nihilists, communists, anar-
chists, would be done away with ! (Deltof, Tlte Crisis of Ignorance,
Khirkof, 1879.)

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 539

ging already. This system can be modified to suit the demands
of modem improved modes of culture, in proportion as the great-
er number of inhabitants, the opening of new outlets, or the im-
poverishment of the soil — so lately almost virgin soil — make such
alterations desirable. Why should the rural communities be
more impermeable to progress than the individuals of an igno-
rant and conservative class in the matter of personal inheri-
tances ?

And the barriers to individual endeavor, retort the detract-
ors of the collective system, are they not the communes' doing?
Who else discourages all original enterprise, taking the sinew
out of labor and making the soil barren ? Does not the very
security which the peasant derives from the certainty of always
having a lot, countenance idleness, incline him to drunkenness
and improvidence?

That may be true, again reply the apologists of the mir, but
such habits, long fostered by serfdom, are to be met with in other
countries, under a property system as well as a climate wholly
diflferent from those of Russia. The remedy, with us as well as
in the south of Italy or Spain, lies not so much in a change in
the mode of tenure, as in the development of public instruction,
of the consumers' demands, in the progress of general well-being.
In what way does undivided proprietorship rob the husbandman
of that indispensable incentive — personal interest? From the
moment that the distribution has taken place, proprietorship vir-
tually becomes personal, and there is nothing that betokens the
application of that most deadening principle : equal remimeration
of the laborers independently of each one's eflforts and deserts ;
every worker is compensated according to his works, every man
is free to make savings. Why is it necessary that, to apply all his
care and all his powers to the culture of the soil, he should own it,
and that not merely personally, but hereditarily ? Is it not enough
that the usufruct of it is assured him for a space of time suflScient
to enable him to gather all the fruits of his labors ? By length-

540 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

ening the terms of allotment the commune peasant becomes,
virtually, a long-lease farmer.* Between these two men, or these
two conditions, where is the difference ? There is only one, all
to the peasant's advantage, which is that, the last instalment
of the redemption debt once acquitted, he will have no other rent
than the tax to pay for his land. If, with a usufruct of ten, fif-
teen, or twenty years, there are costly works and improvements,
wholly with a view to a distant future, which the temporary
holder of the land may not dare to undertake, does not the same
difficulty exist under the farming system which is in force in the
most flourishing agricultural regions of Europe? Would not,
indeed, an equitable solution of this delicate problem be easier
with Russian collective than with English individual tenure?
because, in the former case, the proprietor being a body of men,
the individual's interests are identical with those of all the others,
so their triumph is assured in the end.f

To an impartially minded observer one thing is clear : that
many of the drawbacks to the present system are by no means
inherent to it. They frequently depend on local circumstances
which react in exactly the same way on individual property :
want of instruction, lack of capital, the agglomeration of villages,
and the great distances from them to the lots, — lastly the condi-

* The analogy between the temporary usufructuary of a communal lot
and the long-lease fanner of a private property is too obvious to need dem-
onstrating. Certain defenders of the commune have made it the theme of
their arguments in favor of the tnir. Others, more uncompromising, like
Prince Vassiltchikof, refuse to admit this analogy, proscribe renting land
on lease as an irrational form of farming which must fatally impoverish
the soil, and invite the State to forbid or restrain by laws this pernicious
Western custom, not perceiving that most of these arguments also condemn
the temporary use of land in force in the tnir. (See Socialisme Agrairg,
etc, Revue des Deux Mondes, March ist, 1879.)

t This question of improvements made by the tenant and the compen-
sation to which they entitle him at the expiration of his lease is one of those
that must preoccupy the English agronomists and economists. Prince
Vassiltchikof, more logical on this point, would like the peasants to be
given the right to demand an indemnity from the commtine for monej
spent on improving the soiL

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 541

tions created for the commune by law and the fisc. Many
among the worst faults of the rural rigime come from the adminis-
trative and financial rigime. They should, in part at least, be
imputed to the State, which, finding it handy to make use of the
mir in the capacity of tax collector, has in many ways converted
it into a tool of oppression. The taxation itself is partly respon-
sible, as, by loading down the common property under an inordi-
nate weight, it has become an instrument of grinding and torture.
In short, collective property in Russia is placed in conditions
which, far from helping it to work easily and profitably, have
completely warped and clogged its action.

There is one universal fact which is admired too uncondition-
ally— the solidarity in the matter of taxes. All the holders of
communal land are equally and mutually responsible for them.
That is a thing which disheartens individual endeavor and slack-
ens labor as surely as brief lot-terms, for it is all profit to the
idle and ignorant. This solidaritj-, so highly extolled even by
some Western would-be reformers, is too often the mir' s scourge
and the greatest hindrance to economic progress. The industrious
and well-to-do peasant does not care to w^ork for the good of some
lazy, drunken neighbor, who does not get out of the soil enough
to pay his quota, which, sooth to say, is often out of proportion to
the yield of it. Hence we see in Russia a renewal of the heart-
rending sight so familiar in pre-revolutionary France — that of
peasants purposely making themselves outwardly poor and miser-
able to avoid being sold out for taxes.* Prosperous husbandmen
have been known to rid themselves of this solidarity by renoun-
cing all claims to communal lands, or even by purchasing for cash
their dismissal from the commune. It is nothing unusual for lots

* The agricultural inquest reports that some well-to-do peasants in the
government of Smolensk hide their money instead of spending it on live-
stock, out of fear that the animals may be seized for their neighbors'
arrears. In many villages, besides, there is a large class of tax-payers who
have fallen behind and, not unfirequently, become the mir's insolvent
debtors.

542 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

to be offered to any one who will engage to pay the taxes — and for
no one to be found willing to take them on the terms. Or, a lot
will be let for half the amount of the taxes it is assessed at.* Live-
stock is taken for arrears of taxes, and sometimes even the work-
ing implements, to the gjeat detriment of the land, which has to
do without manure or fertilizer of any kind. Thence an evil
greater still : the dependence on the communal authorities of the
members, and the embargo laid on the first and simplest of liber-
ties— that of coming and going. The mir^ being responsible for
all, cannot consent to the temporary absence of its members, unless
they have acquitted their dues or given security for them. All
this further indirectly results in handicapping intellectual and
moral as well as material progress, blunting the sense of responsi-
bility, smothering originality, invention and enterprise.

If the principle of solidarity were applied to a normal land-tax,
taking from the soil only a portion of its j'ield, there would not be
much harm in it ; but we know, unfortunately, that such is far from
being the case everywhere, owing : first, to the excessive burden
laid on the peasant in the shape of taxes ; and, second, to the still
heavier burden of the redemption dues, which will weigh him
down through nearly the half of a century, so that he really is
called ' ' landowner ' ' very prematurely. When we examine into the
condition of the rural communities, we must not lose sight of the
fact that they will fall into a regular normal state only after the
last instalment of the redemption indemnities will have been paid.
At present everything in them is precarious, temporary, so it is
hardly possible to form a definite judgment.

The emancipation itself, far from improving the mir' s condi-
tion, has temporarily made it worse : in a general way, by tight-
ening the bond of solidarity ; and, in a special, local way, by

* The number of peasants who voluntarily go out of communes seems
to be on the increase. In the government of Vladimir there have been
as many 2,266 in fifteen years — 390 for the first five years, 739 for the
second, and 1,137 for the last

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 543

imposing a rate of redemption out of proportion to the yield of the
soil, or by awarding them an insufficient allotment of land. Of
the two latter abuses, the first is unfortunately the most frequent,
and it distorts the principle of land community, by transmuting it
into a form of servitude.

In some regions, and sometimes they are the most fertile ones,
where the peasants have gone in for the " quarter lot," they have
received one half or one third of the land of which they had the
use in the times of serfdom. In such communes the lot awarded
to each family is quite insufficient for that family's support, and,
worse still, cannot be placed under regular cultivation. They
suffisr already now from the evils with which other communes are
only threatened in view of increased population. Unable to exist
on the land allotted him, the peasant is forced to seek a living
in some industrial craft or to go elsewhere to hire himself out
as laborer. The inadequacy of the communal funds — where such
exist — is so notorious that already under Alexander II. several
provincial assemblies — those of Tver and Tauris among the num-
ber— were driven to make advances to the communes, to enable
them to enlarge the lots, while, under Alexander III., the State
itself, and for the same purpose, founded a special real-estate bank.

The complaints against the exiguity of the peasant lots have
become almost universal. Mr. lanson, professor of statistics at
the University of St. Petersburgh, has made himself the main
organ of them, until they have become, in the Petersburgh press,
a sort of commonplace. It has gone so far as to assert that the
peasant's hopes had been raised by imperial promises only to be
dashed ; that, while he had been promised a lot sufficient to ensure
his sustenance and enable him to take care of himself, the lot
actually given him is generally too small to meet the needs of his
family.

Now all such complaints are based on a misunderstanding.
The instigators of the charter, as we have seen, were everywhere
desirous of so extending the territorial endowment, that the peas-

544 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

ants, when free, should own a quantity of land not lesser than that
of which they had the usufruct as serfs. But not even those
members of the Drafting Commission who most favored the peas-
ant ever dreamt of giving him land enough to make it unneces-
sary for him to work outside of his own lot. What would, in
that case, have become of the estates left to the nobilitj' ? By whose
hands would they have been cultivated ? And where would trade,
industry, large-scale agriculture, have taken the hands they
need ? As it is, and in spite of the smallness of the endowment,
in spite of the taxes which drive the peasants to look outside for
work, complaints of the lack of hands come from nearly all parts
of the empire, and, it should be noted, they are often loudest where
the mujik's lot is smallest.

There is still another obstacle to an extension of the peasants'
territorial endowment as urged by some journalists who, it seems,
would fain demand new agrarian laws, and that is that in many
provinces — precisely, too, in the richest, comprising nearly the
whole of the Black-Mould belt, which is under regular cultiva-
tion— there is not enough land to cut out for every peasant what
the Petersburgh press calls " a normal lot," and there will natu-
rally be even less in twenty years from now. Such a demand is
knocked on the head by a physical impossibility, against, which
all the agrarian laws in the world can avail nothing.

In reality, many Russian writers, when indulging in specula-
tions on the proper dimensions of the peasants' lots, unconsciously
start from a principle, too thoughtlessly erected into an axiom :
that, under the collective tenure system, nothing should be easier
than to ensure a competence to everybody. At the first glance it
seems only a question of distribution ; one forgets that collective
tenure increases neither the extent nor the bearing capacity of the
soil ; that capital and science alone can extract from the earth all
that it is capable of 5delding.

If, in some parts of the country, the endowment has been
manifestly insufficient to lend itself comfortably to the communal

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 545

system, such, certainly, was not the case everywhere. The
communal lot conceded to much the greater part of the peasants
would be accounted considerable in any other country. Statistics
give an average of 16 or 17 dessiatinas (about 45 to 48 acres) per
dvor or family for the entire empire. True, this average is natu-
rally much lowered in the richer and more fertile regions of the
Black-Mould belt. There as elsewhere the Crown peasants, being
endowed with State lands, almost the whole of which (at least of
the arable lands) was made over to them, were placed in more
favorable conditions than the former serfs who had to share the
land with the masters, and moreover frequently elected the gratui-
tous minimum authorized by the law, so as to liberate themselves
from all payments and dues.* In those rich provinces, Vor6nej,
Tambbf, Kursk, Penza, the average still oscillated between 15 and
10 dessiatinas (42 and 28 acres) per family, without descending
noticeably below the latter figure ; f but we must remember that,
since the agrarian laws of 1861 were promulgated the increase in
the population has been considerable, and has reduced each
" soul's " or family's lot by just so much.

* To relieve this class, which numbers about 600,000, it has been pro-
posed to revise the Statute of 1861, and give such peasants a chance to redeem,
even yet, with the assistance of the State, the lands which they had fool-
ishly renounced.

t On the latest showing, the communes of Crown and Appanage peasants
situated in the eight governments of the central agricultural zone, and
making up between them an actual male population of 2,901,000 souls, of
whom 2,318,000 are entered on the " revision " registers, have received
11,092,000 dessiatinas (over 30,000,000 acres). To the communes of private
noblemen's serfs, with an actual male population of 2,929,000 souls, of
whom 2,456,770 registered, only 6,539,000 dessiatinas (about 18,000,000
acres) have been given. Which means that the private serfs have, on an
average, about 3 dessiatinas (2^^) per "soul" to the Crown peasant's 5 or
thereabouts (4^.) But, owing to the rapid increase of the population, that
average is at the present writing reduced to 2^ for the former and to less
than 4 (3Tff) for the latter. Even so the average is still, for the former, of
7|, and for the latter, of 13 dessiatinas per family. (These figures are taken
from official statements, published in 1880, in St. Petersburgh, by the Cen-
tral Committee of Statistics.) The dessiatina, as already stated, is equal to
about 2\ acres.

54^ THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

Still, when all is said and done, one cannot consider as fatally
doomed to destitution peasants who own, on an average, ftom
thirty-eight to fifty acres of land ; who, even in the wealthiest and
most populous provinces, still can call some twenty -five acres their
own ; whose labor is at a premium in an extensive neighborhood.
The insufficiency of the peasant's endowment can hardly be held
alone or chiefly responsible for the evil plight of the villagers and
of agriculture. Of the advocates of the mir, several — and not the
least enlightened — do not hesitate to admit so much. Not there is
the root of the evil : if the peasant's lot so often seems insufficient,
it comes half the time from the imperfection of the agricultiwal
methods in use. Ignorance and penury, the lack of intellectual
and material capital, the lack of livestock and the necessary im-
plements,— these are the things which debar the freedman from
making more out of his piece of ground ; and this penury of man
and impoverishment of the soil are, in a great measure, directly
caused by excessive taxation.* There in very truth lies the main
sore, the root of the agrarian trouble : in the disproportion be-
tween the extent or value of the lands allotted to the peasants, and
the burden laid on them ; and the evil is such, that all the measures
of relief already effected or promised by the Emperor Alexander
III. are inadequate to cope with it. Not only was the land he tills
not received by the liberated serf as a free gift, but he is paying for
it, in the shape of every manner of taxes and dues, a most exorbitant
price. So long as he labors for the fisc and not for himself, the
question of tenure is a secondary one. Had the peasants initiated
the uniform principle of individual ownership, they would have
been beggared all the same.

The communes, such as the emancipation has left them, are
traversing a crisis. We cannot possibly judge of what they
can be from what, at present, they are. Before we can do so,

* Mr. lanson (i88i) gives most doleful figures in this respect, in which
the Russian journalists of all the different schools have been compelled most
unwillingly to acquiesce.

MIR, FAMILY y AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 547

fairly, they would have to be relieved of their fiscal fetters, of the
heavy and demoralizing load of fiscal solidarity — and that will not
be easy, even after the suppression of capitation and the final wind-
ing up of redemption accounts will have made the commune really
owner of its lands.* Then, and then only, it can be put to the
test and experience pronounce the verdict. The redemption dues
figure for nearly sixty per cent, in the burdens borne by the former
serfs, and this terrible ransom, distributed over forty-nine years,
will not be acquitted before the twentieth century has seen its first
quarter wane. It is not likely that the state of the imperial
finances should allow of liberating the peasants before the expira-
tion of the originally appointed term. It is a great thing gained
already, that the Emperor Alexander III. should have been able,
without prolonging that term, to alleviate ever so slightly the
weight of the annuities paid by the former serfs.

* Capitation has been abolished by the Emperor Alexander III., not so
the redemption dues. Besides, were fiscal solidarity officially suppressed, it
might be, in the practice, upheld for a long while still by habit and by the
mir's authority. The government has more than once initiated the study
of ways and means for the modification of the system of tax-collecting in
rural districts. Unfortunately the calls on the imperial budget are so heavy
as to make such reforms hardly practicable ; arrears in the payment of
taxes might increase unconscionably in the hands of a collector less watch-
ful or less interested in the matter than the commune itself.

BOOK VIII. CHAPTER VI.

The Manner of Dissolving a Community — The Peasants of any Village are
Always Free to Suppress the Mir — Why they don't Do it more Fre-
quently— What they Think of the Mir— How the Mir has No Objec-
tion Whatever to Individual Property, even though it Usually Upholds
the Communal System — Purchases of Land by Peasants — Distribution
of the Arable Lands between the Communes and Other Proprietors —
Utility and Functions of Personal Property — Can Both Modes of Tenure
Co-Exist Some Day ?

What is the ultimate fate of the rural communes to be ? and
shall a decision on this head be postponed until they are free from
all the encumbrances which crush them, and have become real
and full proprietors of the land allotted them — or, do the diflScul-
ties that at present beset them make it desirable to come to a deci-
sion at once and to cut down at the root that gigantic growth of
centuries, the mzr, without first attempting to trim it down and to
rid it of the parasitical plants which choke it ?

Few are those who demand the immediate abrogation of the
mtr, but many those who wish for measures that should prepare
and ensure its gradual disparition. Even now village communes
are not indissoluble. The law, while upholding them, leaves to
the members the privilege of abolishing them by instituting a final
division of the communal domain between themselves. Nothing
more is needed for that than a resolution passed by the assembled
community, by a majority of not less than two thirds.* The an-

* More than that : the Statute, doubtless with a view to safeguard the
quondam serTs right of choosing the mode of tenure which best suits him,
has an article — Art. 165 of the Redemption Regulation — which empowers
single peasants to withdraw their lot from the common domain, proyided

548

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 549

tagonists of collective temire would like to leave the fate of the
communal lands to an absolute majority, in the hope that this
would accelerate the suppression of all these agrarian associations.
To this demand, at first sight moderate and legitimate, there is
one main and weighty objection : the dissolution of the commu-
nity is not the only question which, under the existing law, the
vtir is not allowed to settle by a majority of not less than two
thirds. The same rule applies to all questions of any importance.
It is the case with all questions that concern the division of land,
and this restriction is not without a good reason. It is a useful
curb, a wise precaution against the impulsiveness of ignorant villa-
gers, who need to be restrained and protected against their own
blunders all the more that, in its own sphere of action, the com-
mune is all-powerful and paramount. To leave to an absolute
majority the most important decision there is for the mir to take,
would be to make light indeed of dissolution, to renounce, for any
administrative or economic measure, the wholesome protection
awarded by an obligatory majority of two thirds.

Even with this restriction, the Russian law as it actually is,
opposes less barriers than almost any other to the alienation or
partition of communal lands. In France, where they still take up
one eleventh (t*!) of the national territory, the communal domains
are far more efl&ciently protected against any sudden whim in the
way of selling or dividing them. The law leaves to the communes
the faculty of making certain purchases, but forbids their alienat-
ing any land without being authorized thereto by the central
power. The jurisprudence of the State Council, indeed, is wholly
opposed to any kind of division among the villagers. In Eng-
land, where they enjoy so large a share of self-government, com-
munes cannot alienate their lands without the approbation of the

they personally pay into the treasury the whole of the redemption sum
which falls on that lot. Several among the partisans of the mir wanted to
have that article recalled, but it does not seem to have had the eiSFects they
dreaded, as few peasants ever were in a position to take advantage of this
concession.

550 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

government. Were the system now in force in Russia introduced
in France, and were two thirds of the votes sufficient to cut up the
communal domains and divide them among the members, they
would soon have vanished, to round up the field of Peter and de-
fray the expenses of Paul. The wonder is how common property
has not yet crumbled away in Russia, with so little protection from
the law.

It has often been asserted that there are instances of lands di-
vided long ago among the serfs by the masters, and reconstituted
by the former into a communal domain after the emancipation,
while there is no instance on record of the opposite proceeding.
This is a mistake. Final partitions are rare, exceptional, but
they occur. The agricultural inquest mentions several as having
taken place in various governments of Great-Russia. There even
are districts where such cases are comparatively numerous, show-
ing signs of a turn in the tide of popular feeling, favorable to indi-
vidual property and principally caused, aside from the wish to
escape from fiscal solidarity, by the fear that the increase of popu-
lation, by making the lots smaller all the time, may at last deal
a mortal blow to the communal system, unless some way is found
of substituting some other method for the system of periodical re-
allotment.*

The instances we have of such dissolutions are, in any case,

sufficient to show that the law even now is far from opposing an

insurmountable barrier to such operations. They occurred very

* Thus, in one district of the government of Nijni Ndvgorod, 49 villa-
ges out of 190, and in a district of Mohilef, 25 out of 344, had given up the
communal system. These, however, were exceptional cases. In many
villages, in many governments even, only one or two final partitions
occurred out of hundreds and thousands of villages (in the government of
Kursk, for instance, 2 out of 3,591). It is to be noticed that these resolutions,
sometimes suggested by a functionary or by a private landholder who is
not of the mir, are not always carried out In the government of Simbirsk
some communes are said to have passed such a resolution, only that a few
wealthy peasants should be enabled to redeem their individual lots, as pro-
vided by Art. 165 of the Regulation ; the rest kept to the old way. In other
places sham resolutions are passed— just to get rid of fiscal solidarity.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 55 1

rarely in the first years, but have been much more frequent of late.
The peasants in many cases were ignorant of their rights in this
respect, but now that they have found them out they are begin-
ning to make use of them.* With the law as it stands, the fate
of the collective system is in the hands of the peasants themselves ;
the day on which the mir will have against it a considerable
majority it will fall at one voting.

The moment has not yet come for that. Setting aside cus-
tom and tradition, which have a g^eat hold on the mujik's mind,
sundry reasons and prejudices militate against a final division of
lands. To begin with — the crowding of dwellings, which makes
every man fearful of being given a lot at too great a distance from
the village where all live together. Then — the fear of drawing a
bad lot, without the chance there is now of better luck at the next
drawing. Another objection lies in the communistic tendencies
of the mir. The peasants dread the unequal increase of families,
which, in the course of two generations at most, would mix up
ever3rthing. I^astly, where the taxes exceed the income, they are
afraid of being burdened with too large a lot ; in this case what
they dread is not the inequality of possession resulting from
the unequal increase of families, but, on the contrary, an excess
of it, resulting from deaths or sickness in families. " Bad as it is
now," a village elder replied to the questions put to him by the
inquest commission, * ' it would be much worse if the land were
not at times re-divided ; the man whose family grew smaller cotdd
not at all till his land and pay the taxes." In short, the greater
part of the peasants are still attached to the old way, even though
they often acknowledge its shortcomings. Of the noble land-

* In the course of the nine or ten years that followed on the emancipa-
tion, there were probably not a hundred communes that renounced collec-
tive tenure. But since that, on the showing of the Materials published in
1880 by the Ministry of Crown Demesnes, 140 communes were found to
have taken this step in only three districts of the government of Tula alone,
and analogous facts are reported of other provinces, that of Tver, for
instance.

553 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

lords questioned on the subject by the commission, several de-
clared that they had tried in vain to get their peasants' consent to
a final partition. I myself have heard the same assertion from
men who are strongly opposed to the present system.

It is, moreover, difl&cult to find out, with any degree of cer-
tainty, what the peasants really think on this subject, which so
nearly concerns them. Who, in the mir, are the advocates of
communal tenure ? Are they the idlers, the drunkards, the im-
provident, or are they, on the contrary, the industrious and well-
to-do ? On this point the most opposite assertions are found in
the reports of the ag^cultural inquest commission, and elsewhere.
The peasants are represented as divided into two classes, without
an intermediate class : the rich and the poor. Towards which
opinion does each incline? The rich, who have been enriched
by the actually subsisting system, are usually considered as its
opponents, while the poor, who have reaped from it nothing but
penury, are said to be its warmest adherents. Which would
mean that the more prosperous, being the most industrious and
hard-working, advocate the system which would best ensure to
them the fruits of their labor, while the more improvident or
indolent hold with that which guarantees them the easiest
existence.

Yet, on the commission's own showing, this distribution is
far from universal. For one witness — a governor of Kursk
among others — who testifies that the more well-to-do are those
who want the communities to be dissolved, and even sometimes
petition the government in this sense, there will be numerous
landlords who say and repeat that a few wealthy peasants are the
only ones to benefit by the communal system ; that these village
oligarchs, who hold the mir under their thmnb, exert their
authority to uphold it, because it enables them to squeeze their
fellow-members dry. One witness, a Mr. Yerem^yef, even goes so
far as to aver that, owing to these "vampires," only a power
placed above the community'' can pronounce the sentence of abro-

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 553

gation. A commission chosen out of the nobility of St. Peters-
burgh recently proposed, as a means to facilitate the dissolution,
that ill-behaved members, and such as are in arrear with their
taxes, should be excluded. To this a writer in Moscow replied
that those were precisely the most inclined to a final partition, the
most desirous of having a lot all their own, to sell for money or
drink, as they pleased !

When the Russians themselves, who know the mujik best,
give us such contradictory information, a foreigner would find it
hard indeed to make a choice and would be overbold to draw a
conclusion. Such divergences can be accounted for only in one
of two ways : either the peasant puts this big question to himself
but rarely as yet, or he has not yet formed a fixed opinion regard-
ing it. In the meantime, the greater portion cling to the old
customs and the ways of their fathers. The facts nevertheless
show that he begins to revolve the question in his mind and that
his verdict is not always favorable to the mir. It should not be
forgotten either, that a not inconsiderable ntunber of communes,
without actually going over to individual tenure, have not pro-
ceeded to re-allotments since the emancipation. In such villages
it is not impossible that the change may be effected without any
harsh revulsion, in a manner almost insensible.

One thing is certain — that the Russian peasants, even while
upholding, as a rule, collective tenure where it exists, do not feel
that instinctive, unreasoning aversion against the opposite system,
with which Herzen and the Russian socialists credit them. They
by no means see in communal tenure the only natural and legiti-
mate form of landholding, and in personal proprietorship a mon-
strous and iniquitous usurpation. Those who can, are fond of
purchasing a piece of land for their very own. The liking which,
in common with all the peasants in the world, they have for the
soil, the earth as such, is counterbalanced in them only by the
national taste for trading. All the reasons that seem to carry
them along towards the dissolution of the commune, prompt them

554 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

to begin at once acquiring personal property. The liberated serfs
buy land, but of their former lords, outside the jurisdiction of the
mir. This appetite for property has been noticed of all since the
emancipation. The merchants also buy up many lands long in
the possession of noble families, but it is usually with a view to
reselling to the peasants in small lots. The demand on the
latter' s part is such that this speculation has become quite
remunerative ; the margin of profit is very considerable. In the
single government of Kursk the communal peasants had acquired
land for two million roubles in one year. This transfer move-
ment, which the agricultural inquest commission pointed out in
1872, has steadily increased since. In the government of Tver
the peasants, during the last years of Alexander II. , bought up
near on 1,250,000 acres, in Tauris 430,000 dessiatinas (about
1,180,000 acres), over 300,000 (825,000 acres) in that of Samdra,
over 200,000 (550,000 acres) in that of Sardtof, and over 150,000
(413,000 acres) in that of Khersbn. And now, since Alexander III.
came to the throne, the Peasants' Bank has loaned them, for the
purpose of purchasing lands, sixteen millions of roubles in 1886,
thirteen in 1887, the average purchase price being, in 1887, 4'
roubles 73 copecks per dessiatina. True, the purchase is generally
made in bits, by some one peasant who has somehow made money ;
still, sometimes an artH will be formed ; at other times again the
communes become purchasers. Vast estates, of thousands of
acres, have been known to pass into the hands of peasants'
associations in this way. Sometimes they keep the land un-
divided, as common property ; but more frequently they divide
it among themselves finally, which gives one argument at any
rate to the opponents of collective tenure. In this way, many
mujiks are at the same time usufructuaries of a communal lot,
and full proprietors of a piece of land bought with their pence.*

* In the government of Tver, for instance, out of 469,000 dessiatinas
(1,290,000 acres), 115,000 (317,000 acres) have been bought up by communes,
105,000 (289,000 acres) by artils or associations, and 248,000 (682,000 acres)

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 555

There is plenty of room for such operations. For the whole
Russian territory is far from belonging to the rural communities.
There are the Crown lands, there are the estates of the noble
landlords, there are many domains of vast extent, some of them
colossal, often badly cared for, if not quite uncultivated, which
the owners would be only too glad to alienate or reduce to
reasonable proportions.*

It were highly interesting to have an exact and detailed
diagram of the proportion in which lands are divided between the
various classes, and especially between individual and collective
tenure. Now, on this latter point, we are reduced to estimates
which are as yet incomplete. Moreover, the general estimates
covering the area of a territory in great part imsuited for agricul-
ture, the averages deducted from them, could give only a very
misleading idea of the real importance of that or the other mode
of tenure.

The peasant is shown to possess at the present moment an agri-
cultural domain at least twice as extensive as the entire European
territory of France. Of this vast area the greater part, probably
more than two thirds, is subject to communal tenure, which, so

by individual peasants, in the number of 12,600, so that each buyer conies
in, on an average, for a little over 50 acres. In the government of Sardtof,
out of 308,000 dessiatinas (847,000 acres), 187,000 (542,000 acres) have been
bought by individuals and 121,000 (332,000 acres) by communes. It is to be
noted that even when these purchases are made by a commune or an artH,
the land is seldom left undivided. The new property is usually divided
among the purchasers' families, in proportion to the sums contributed by
each.

* There still are in Russia numerous estates of 10,000, 20,000, 40,000
dessiatinas and more, the dessiatina, as already mentioned, being equal to
about 2| acres. The great landlords, /'. e. those who own over 1,000 dessia-
tinas, still hold, according to the latest information, 53 per cent of the
entire territory on personal tenure in the most fertile agricultural zone. In
the eight governments which compose the central agricultural region,
where land is the most valuable, official statistics reported 1,800 landlords
with from 1,000 to 5,000 dessiatinas ; 141, with from 5,000 to 10,000 dessia-
tinas ,• lastly 82 owning each more than 10,000. The number of large
estates is probably very much greater in most other regions.

556 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

fiir, prevails in the whole of Great-Russia. Setting aside the
Crown lands, which comprise many inaccessible forests and barren
tracts, the peasant already holds more than half the totality of
arable lands, and the proportion is still more in his favor if we
take into consideration the exceptional value of the Black-Mould
belt.

In this region, according to Mr. lanson, the statistician
already mentioned, the lands belonging to the peasant cover from
70 to 90 j^ of the governments of Vor6nej , Kaz^n, Orenburg, Uf ^,
Viatka, and something over 50 io in the middle region of the Black-
Mould. According to Mr. Semi6nof and the Central Committee
of Statistics, the rural communes already owned, in the eight
agricultural governments of the centre, 56 ia of the entire extent
and 66 ^ of the arable part, while only 37 ^ of the entire extent
and 31 j6 of the arable lands, i. e. less than half as much, was
owned on individual rights, in the same region. Which shows
that, in the most fertile portion of Great-Russia, the greater part
of the cultivated lands is held by communal tenure.

Vast as the peasant's possessions are, they are steadily increas-
ing, and, to do so, they have not waited for the foundation of the
real-estate banks specially created under Alexander III. to
quicken that increase. The transfer movement by which the
lands are fast passing into the hands of those that till them is so
rapid and powerful, that various agricultural societies and a few
nobiliary assemblies have already evinced some uneasiness and
looked around for ways to forestall the destruction with which the
mujik's suddenly developed acquisitiveness threatens large land-
holding.

In the face of these continual encroachments, is there not,
indeed, reason to dread an impending expropriation of the nobility
for the benefit of a peasantry, ignorant and unprovided with
capital, or of tradesmen who have no affection for rural life, who
take no interest in the soil, and only hasten to exhaust it by means
of proceedings justly stamped with the name of "agricultural

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 557

brigandage' ' ? Here lurks a question of ominous bearing on the
economic development of the empire, and one which many Rus-
sians, in their natural desire for the extension of the people's
domanial territory, lose sight of. This revolution, which curtails
the rural possessions of the nobility, is not all gain for the countrj^
and its culture, especially since the peasant, no longer content with
occasional bites out of the loaf of huge estates belonging to a few
over- wealthy families, is setting his teeth deeper every day into the
middling and small landed properties.

When we speak of ' ' culture' ' suflfering from this sort of gradual
elimination of the nobility in certain parts of Great-Russia, we do
not mean, or not only, that of general civilization — intellectual,
literary, and scientific culture, of which the old ixxne. pomiish-tchik,
with all his faults and all his frivolity, was, after all, the only
representative in the rural districts, — but material culture, the
cultm-e of the soil, which is seriously endangered ; production, the
soil itself, which runs the risk of falling into hands too poor,
too ignorant, or too routine-bound, to extract from it all that it
ought to yield.

Exaggerated or premature as such apprehensions may appear,
they hardly can be said to be baseless. In the actual stage of the
Russian people's development, if private property were to vanish
to-morrow and leave the field to the village communities ; if the
vtujik's new acquisitions were to become merged in the lands of the
mir, Russia, it is to be feared, would have little cause for self-
gratulation on having allowed the bulk of the empire to pass
under the control of a lot of small rustic democracies, unlettered
and superstitious.

To an impartial mind it is very doubtful whether it would be
for the good of the State, to hand over, in the near future, all the
arable lands to communes and peasants, whether under collective
or individual tenure. Here more than in other countries, the
rural masses being so lately liberated and so backward still in
development and education, the great and lesser landholders have

558 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

an economic part to play, a local mission to discharge. It is
through them — through the pomiish-tchik preferably to the peasant
— that belated agronomy is to enter on its career of progress. If
too many of the private estates are not in much better condition
than the miijik's acres, it is among them, on the other hand, that
we occasionally encounter the soundest and most rationally
conducted farming. For many long years to come, until the
intellectual level of the rural masses is greatly elevated, the com-
munities and the peasants cannot be counted on to improve farm-
ing. Were the entire territory in their hands, under any form of
tenure, the State would find itself compelled, rather than abandon
national production to semi-stagnation, to take the direction of
farming interests into its own hands, to confide the tutelage over
the agrarian communities to a special administration, — in a word,
it would be driven to call in the doubtful and costly assistance of
bureaucracy. Far better that there should be enough private
landholders left to lead with their example, to give the needed
impulse, to propagate and acclimate the new methods and sound
farming practices. Neither the wealthy urban tradesman nor the
well-to-do peasant is at present, as a rule, fit for this mission of
enlightenment ; such men, as yet, are to be found only in the
ranks of the old landholding nobility.

The fact is, this knotty property problem has two sides, and we
should not let one blind us to the other. The social question
must not make us lose sight of the economic question, nor must
the seeming interests of the husbandman blind us to the no less
essential interests of the soil and of agriculture. Of the two,
neither can, with impunity, be sacrificed to the other. If certain
nations, like England, seem to have taken thought too exclusively
for culture and production, certain Russians sometimes seem ready
to fall into the other extreme. Between the two errors, the latter is
possibly the worse, for the husbandman's interests cannot, for any
length of time, be separated from those of the soil and production.
If, in a wealthy country, the wealth can become concentrated in

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 559

too small a number of hands, a poor and badly farmed one cannot
place wealth or competence within reach of the greater number.

Russia presents this sad and instructive anomaly : a people of
which the bulk is at the same time landholding and poor. The
reason is simple — ^it lies in the ignorance of the people and the ex-
cessive taxation ; even more, perhaps, in the lack of capital, with-
out which production can never take a soaring flight. Instead of
playing as much land as possible into the peasant's hands, his
friends might be better employed, perhaps, in thinking out means
that would help him to make more out of what he already has.

This is a vital question for Russia ; one which makes itself more
and more urgently felt, and which American competition will not
suSer to be ignored. If, owing to the export trade of the United
States and the other trans-oceanic countries, the fanning interests
of old Europe are just now traversing a hard crisis, the ordeal is
not less hard on Russian agriculture, which is threatened with ex-
pulsion from all the markets of the West by a rival richer in virgin
lands, and especially in capital — a rival beyond comparison better
stocked and less burdened with taxes and hindrances of all sorts.
To the great rural empire whose agriculture is far and away its
main resource, and whose soil, in places, already seems prema-
turely exhausted, this should be matter for serious reflection.
What makes the superiority of the United States of America is not
so much their fertility and the extent of their arable lands, — Russia
also has her Far West (or rather. Far Kast) in the southern stretch
of Siberia, which can easily be linked on to Europe by means of
railroads and canals ; what makes Russia's inferiority is not so
much the imperfection of her tools and communications, — it is,
above all, the ignorance and poverty of the people, and to remedy
these it is not enough — let us repeat it again and again — to in-
crease the peasants' territorial endowment or facilitate for them
the purchase of land. Unless Russia is prepared to live entirely
in and on herself, to renounce all exchange with the West, and to
give up borrowing from it the capital of which she stands so much

56o THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

in need, the mujik and th& pomiish-tchik of the Don and the Volga
must not leave the farmer of the Mississippi out of their calcula-
tion. This American competition, added to the bad crops and the
famines of these latter years, is a new danger that threatens the
superannuated agrarian system, the mir and the commune, which
many Russians incline to hold responsible for the defeats inflicted
on their national agriculture.

And yet, with the ideas and prejudices so widely spread among
the people, the immediate abolition of the rural commune would
scarcely improve matters much, because it would make hardly any
change in the farming methods. Whatever we may think of
collective tenure, it is not by modifying this or that system that
production will be increased, but by changing the husbandman,
the man. And such a change — of manners, customs, agricultural
and general notions — cannot, in such huge rural masses, be ac-
complished in a few years. The schools themselves, even could
they be multiplied to meet the demand for them, would be power-
less to achieve, alone, such a transformation. To accomplish this,
there must surge up from the very bottom of the people, from the
midst of the lately liberated peasants, a new class, a comparatively
well-informed, well-to-do class, capable of profiting by the light
and examples shed from above and to propagate and spread them
around. In the villages there must form, what is lacking in the
country still more than in the cities, a sort of third estate, a real
middle class, to fill the gap between the former serf-holders, now
isolated, and the crowd of mujiks, as yet unlettered. The crea-
tion of such a rural class is not less necessary from a political point
of view, if Russia means to have a free government, than from an
economic one, if she means to raise her agricultural production to
the level of her nattu-al resources. Now it rather looks as though
Russia has the germ of such a fiiture rural burgherdom in the
prosperous few among the peasants who are buying land on
individual titles. Another new element, too, has of late years
made its appearance in rural districts, one that seems to have a

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE CUMMUNITIES. 561

a considerable future before it.* It will become the nucleus of a
rural middle class composed of mixed proprietors, interested in
both tenures and better qualified than anybody to appreciate the
strong and weak points of both. This new class, to which alone,
with pecuniary ease, instruction will gradually come, will become
for the mir, wielding powers until now centred in the hands of
poor and ignorant men, a principle either of dissolution or renova-
tion. Under its influence, which will naturally increase, the com-
mune will have to alter its usages, to admit new ideas and new
methods, or else, should it turn out incapable of so doing, succumb
under the onslaught of individualism. Until matters have gone so
far, the abolition of the communal system, before the mujik is in a
condition to ameliorate his agricultural proceedings, would not
only present few economic advantages, but might be fraught with
considerable political danger.

It is the peasant's own business to experiment anent the com-
parative merits and demerits of both tenures. Vast as are to-day
the communal domains, the prosperous and enterprising peasant
can still find land enough to achieve personal proprietorship with-
out being necessarily compelled to abrogate the mit's collective
proprietorship. Russia is not called on to make an immediate
choice between the two systems, both consecrated by time, both
equally suited to the national habits. Each of the two has its

* Notwithstanding their repeated purchases, the total number of peas-
ants who have attained to individual proprietorship is still very small, but is
steadily increasing. In the eight governments of the central agricultural zone
the number of peasants holding land on individual tenure did not yet reach,
toward the end of the reign of Alexander II. , as high as 57,000, not much more
than double that of noble landowners (25,000). If we take the extent of
landed property, we find that four fifths of it (80 per cent) still belong to the
nobility, 1 1 per cent, to the merchant, 2 per cent, to the tniish-tch&nii (towns-
men of average means), and only 7 per cent to the peasants. Of these latter
none as yet were classed under the head of " great proprietors," but several
already came under that of "average proprietors," which means that they
owned anywhere from 100 to 1,000 dessiatinas. The average extent of each
peasant's personal property was, in this region, not quite forty acres. (Stap
tistics of 1880.)

562 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

adepts, each may have its advantages, — social, moral, economic.
Thanks to the extent of the Russian territory, both rival forms
still can co-exist, whether to mutually complete and correct one
another, or for one some day finally to triumph over the other,
after both have had their fair innings.

BOOK VIII. CHAPTER VII.

The Communal System and the Struggle between " Great " and " Small "
Landed Property — The Mir, the Peasant's Entail — Transformations
which the Agrarian Commune might Undergo — Can this System be
Adapted to Modem Manners ? — What is Legislature to Do with Regard
to Collective Tenure ? — Can we See in the Mir a Palladium of Society ?
— Illusions on this Subject — The Communal System and the Population
Problem — Collective Tenure arid Emigration — Village Communities
and Agrarian Socialism.

Thb competition between personal and collective tenure will
be made more complicated in Russia by the habitual competition
between "great " and " small " property, " great " and " small "
culture. There is not only the question as to which mode of
tenure, but also that as to which mode of culture is finally to
carry the day. Habit and succession laws are not alone to regu-
late the extent of the land to be owned or tilled by one individual ;
the structure of the soil, its agricultural aptitude and that of the
climates also have their say. There are localities cut up, slashed
into strips by nature herself, which seem meant for small farms.
There are cultures, that of the vine, for instance, which demand
division of labor, and consequently call for division of the soil.
The question is, what system, from this double point of view,
would be the most remunerative and the most natural to the
country ? If any spot on earth seems to be made on purpose for
wholesale culture carried on by machinery, is it not those immense
tchemozwm plains, where there is nothing to hinder the machines ?
or those boundless steppes where flocks sometimes have to be
taken miles to water? True, just now the g^eat landholders are

563

564 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

selling and the peasants are buying. It is a fact, but perhaps a
fact dependent on transitory rather than permanent and natural
economic conditions. There is nothing to warrant that a reaction
will not set in after a while ; that, as capital becomes more plenti-
ful, population denser, farming more scientific, property and
culture on a large scale will not rapidly regain the upper hand.
There, as in everj-thing pertaining to the economic world, lies a
question of competition. On the day that large farming will
prove more productive, more remunerative, small property will
find itself seriously endangered, and not more fit to hold its own
against such rivalry than are small workshops and small shops to
stand competition with the large factories and immense bazaars.

But the danger is not here yet, and the peasant might lose the
artificial shelter of the mir without fear of other encroachments
than those of his own brethren and of the " vampires," — and it
would take these long to reconstruct large property. Under
present circumstances, with the special conditions in which
Russian agriculture is situated, and those created for European
agriculture by American competition ; — with the inheritance laws
which, at every generation, cut up the land anew, the fall of the
village communities could not result in Russia, as it did in Eng-
land, in the expropriation of the greater part of the peasants.
There is no doubt of that ; still, the defenders of the mir, in spite
of their exaggerations, have good cause to ask whether, if a
change did come, the mujtk would not be glad to find one day in
his commtme a barrier against the invasion of large domains.

For one of the village communities' most salient characteristics
is that they afford the rural population a substantial protection
against competition from the outer world, against the turban and
industrial classes, against what, in Russia as well as elsewhere, is
generally designated as the tyranny of capital. The mir is an
impregnable stronghold for small proprietors. Common property
is inalienable and so constitutes a sort of entail, with this diflfer-
ence that, whereas family entail ensures the future of only the

MIK, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 565

first-bom of the family, communal inheritance provides for all the
members of the community. In both cases the guaranties are of
the same kind ; in both cases unborn generations are protected
against the thriftlessness of the living, the children against the
father's wrongdoing or improvidence. There is a degree of desti-
tution or disaster below which a father cannot drag down his
descendants or himself. To the disinherited the mir offers a
shelter. This is the light in which the peasants themselves
regard the matter, and that is why those of them who. have
achieved competence and become individual landholders, hesitate
to go out of the commune. If they cannot attend to their lot,
they let it or give the use of it to others, looking on the com-
munal lands as a safety plank for their children or for themselves,
should their private fortunes ever be wrecked.*

In this sense it is that Mr, Kav61in, one of the most enlightened
and moderate defenders of the present system, could say that
communal tenure was, for the rural population, a species of insur-
ance trust. It gives each family the certainty of having a bit of
land and a hearth. Without it, the former serf might be tempted
to alienate his lot, to eat or drink away his children's patrimony.
There is no doubt but that the mujik, so recently emancipated,
will ofttimes still need this protection against himself, as proven by

* This is — to give an instance — what the peasants of the government
of Moscow replied at an inquest by the provincial assembly : If the lots
should become personal property, they would frequently be sold to the
detriment of the holders or their descendants. A peasant dies, leaving
infant children ; the head of a household is called off to the army, — an
occurrence by no means rare under the prevailing custom of early mar-
riages ; the widow or the young married woman cannot till the land all by
herself, she has not enough to pay a laborer, nor can she often let the lot,
on account of the taxes it is burdened with. In such a case, were sales
allowed, the lot of course would be sold, whereas now the mir just takes it
away to give to a family numbering more laboring hands, and when, in due
time, the man returns from the army, or his children, if he died, come of
age, they are sooner or later once more provided with land. The same
thing happens, say the peasants, in case of sickness, of fire, loss of
cattle, etc.

566 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the fact that, in spite of this shielding system, it is no unusual
thing for him to fraudulently mortgage to the "vampires," or
" mir-eaters " the lot he cannot sell. Even should the most en-
terprising leave the commune to settle on land of their own, or
devote themselves in the cities to trade or industry, it would still
remain a refuge to the poor, the weak, or the timid. Side by side
with a great development of wealth, it might still subsist, — as a
sort of national agricultural poorhouse, one of its detractors says, —
freely managed by its members and not dependent upon charity,
either public or private.*

Far from lowering it to so humble a function, the progress
of wealth and population may some day strangely transform the
use of undivided property and reveal to it a very diflferent voca-
tion. As things are now, the communal lands, as opposed to the
extensive domains of the former lords, represent small culture as
well as small property. Should the peasants go on breaking
crumbs off the large estates by their small purchases, it would
not be impossible for the two kinds of property, great and small,
to change places some day. Each has its advantages and each
its drawbacks. If, from the social standpoint, one is inclined to
favor the latter, it is difficult not to give the preference to the
former in certain regions, from an agronomic point of view, from
that of production. Now communal property has one singular
faculty, that of adapting itself equally well to culture on a small
and on a large scale, of combining the agricultural advantages of
the one with the social advantages of the other. There is no
reason why, some day, the temporary allotments to families should
not be supplanted by wholesale culture or large farms let on
leases by the communities. That would, indeed, be a trans-
formation which would spoil the mir in the eyes of many of its

* Such might, indeed, be the ultimate fate of the communal lands, were
they not so vast. But in a country where they take up the greater part of
the arable lands, the State hardly could suffer them to become an endow-
ment for the destitute and incapable. That would be the death of progress
and production.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. $67

partisans ; yet it may be found some day, should collective tenure
persist so long, that this is the only means to keep it alive and to
justify its existence. In this respect it really has undoubted ad-
vantages over individual small property. In a country of wide
plains, and in an age of steam-engines, would it not lend itself
better to rational and scientific farming ? Formed into a sort of
permanent syndicate, members of an agricultural association, in
which they would be both shareholders and laborers, the peas-
ants would find in their communal lands a field open to farming
on the largest possible scale.

Even under the system of periodical re-allotments, outside of
all these remote hypotheses, the community, which is apparently
a constant barrier to progress of any kind, still could at times
afford facilities towards the improvement of the lands and the
habitual farming methods. The authority of the mirhas already,
in some few villages, introduced more rational methods. Com-
munes are mentioned as having, upon formal deliberation, aban-
doned the traditional triennial rotation system, others as having
declared manuring to be obligatory. As school-learning pro-
gresses, could not this concentration of rural forces be utilized ? It
would seem as though association alone is capable of drawing out
all the Russian soil's resources and of forestalling its natural de-
fects. How can we contradict the advocates of the commune
when they assert that it is better able than the isolated hus-
bandman to undertake the vast labor needed to bring out the
full value of the national territory, such as draining the marshes
of the north and west, irrigating and restocking with trees the
steppes of the south and east ?

It must be admitted that, in the mujik's present state of ig-
norance and poverty, all these improvements which seem to be the
natural mission of the commune are manifestly beyond him. It
will take generations for these collective proprietors to comprehend
their interests and their duties in this respect, to learn how to
form, at need, associations of several communes, the better to fight

568 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

the climate and the defects of the soil, both frequently made worse
by man's own carelessness. This spirit of enterprise and initia-
tive will probably not descend on the peasant communes for a
long time to come, and the antagonists of the present system
may not be so entirely wide of the mark when they contend
that it has killed the germ of that spirit in peasant and
commune both.

For my own part, I would not, on the whole, venture to af-
firm that the form of land tenure bequeathed by primitive ages
is absolutely incapable of being adapted to the demands of modem
times. Only, of all objections brought out against it, the strongest
in my eyes is precisely that which is founded on its antiquity.

If communal land tenure was good for the people and is con-
formable to natural law, how comes it that it has almost entirely
disappeared from the wealthiest and most civilized countries?
This cannot be attributed to chance. When an institution, which,
once on a time, existed in vast regions, vanishes and leaves behind
mere vestiges of its existence, in isolated localities, is not one
tempted to think it unreconcilable with the development of htunan
societies ? This is, no one can deny it, a serious point against a
belief in the future of collective land tenure. Yet this objection,
however plausible, is not decisive. There is nothing to prove that
an economic proceeding dating from the infancy of social life is
incapable of being renovated and adapted to the spirit of a
mature civilization. Would it not be easy to discover in many a
law or custom of modem Europe — in the trial by jury for exam-
ple— sundry traits descended from the barbarians ? And even
were it not so, would it not be somewhat presumptuous to forbid
human societies all advance aside from beaten tracks, or to assume
that all nations must necessarily travel the same stages ?

In the modem world, ever since the French Revolution, a
great struggle is going on. Two hostile principles, tricked out in
various names and titles and which would centre all things, one in
the individual, the other in the communit>', wage a war the issue

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 569

of which is not to be foreseen. At an epoch when the talk is all of
association and co-operation, when millions of human beings dream
of reciprocity and solidarity, the law-maker must hesitate long be-
fore he strikes out a form of property which partly realizes what
in other countries is accounted an absolute Utopia. By bequeath-
ing to Russia collective land tenure, the past has imposed on her
an experiment which, once it is given up, cannot be resumed
again without a violent revulsion. The more vital its object, the
more complete, the more patient the experiment must be. Russia
owes it to civilization. One of the great boasts of the modem
world is the variety, the individuality of its nations. The vari-
ous states are, with regard to civilization, so many workshops, so
many laboratories, rivalling and differing from one another;
each nation is an artificer, with a genius and tools of his
own, and it is profitable to all that all should not work out the
same pattern, should not continually copy one another. Great
as is this variety on all other points — political, juridical, religious,
— on one point it scarcely exists at all, that point being the regu-
lation of property. Alone in the entire Christian world, the Slavs
show some originality in this respect ; surely they may well pause
before they decide that they will, in this also, discard it for the sake
of prematurely imitating Europe. Alone among the nations of
both worlds, Russia is enabled and qualified, by her traditions
and the extent of her territory, to conduct parallel experiments
with both forms of property. The Slavs of the south — Yugo-Slavs
— cannot be counted on for that, because they are less advanced
in civilization or already bound hand and foot by Teutonic and
Latin influences. If the communal tenure of the soil is to be
tested outside of Utopia and the revolutionary Icarias, it can be
only in Russia and if the test is to be conclusive, it must be car-
ried on at least tmtil the final clearing of the peasants' lands
from all encumbrances.

In the meantime, the attitude indicated for the government
and legislature towards this question which causes such passionate

controversy, appears to me the simplest and easiest in the world.
Between the two modes of tenure, so extolled by one side, so.
reviled by the other, the government has not to decide ; it is not
the judge in the case so tumultuously tried before it. It is for the
country, for the people, aided by time, to render the final verdict.
The governing power has nothing to do but to keep strictly
neutral, showing favor to neither combatant, but leaving both
to fight it out between themselves. If, on the plains of Russia,
collective tenure and individual tenure cannot live side by side,
custom, the facts of the case, the needs of the country, the
husbandman's personal interests, will naturally win the battle for
the stronger, more serviceable, more productive of the two rivals.
If the mir has not sufficient suppleness to lend itself to the pro-
gress of agriculture and the demands of modem life — the mir will
gradually dissolve of itself, with the fi-ee consent of the communes,
without interference from either law or State.

There is no need of new laws against village communities.
Under the law as it stands, they are much easier to destroy than
to build up. Indeed this will be a great point against them
in the coming struggle. If anything, it will be in favor of
communal lands that laws will have to be made in, say, half a
century fi"om now, to protect whatever of them may then have
survived, as is done in France.* Till that time comes, and it is
still far enough, judging by the mujik's present disposition in the
matter, the best thing to do, is to trust to time and nature, to the
progress of instruction and the free play of interests — in a word,
to free competition which, better than anybody, is able to decide
between the various modes of tenure. At the risk of equally dis-
pleasing both the advocates and the detractors of the mir, of
butting against prejudices and economic traditions, I must confess

* Already the partisans of the mir shoiild like the law to interfere and
put difficulties in the way of the dissolution of communes ; several even
insist that the communal domains should be declared inalienable, as a safe-
guard against the encroachments of personal tenure, and virtually be
erected into a perpetual endowment fund for the peasant class.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 57I

that, to my mind, here or never the old economists' ' ' let-things-
alone ' ' principle may properly be applied.

Supposing that collective tenure should come out victorious
from the present contest, could it become acclimated among nations
the extent of whose territory and the density of whose popula-
tion stand to each other in relations entirely different from what
they do in Russia ? Could it be transplanted on old Europe's soil
after having been extirpated thence almost entirely centuries ago ?
On this question even the Russians most enthusiastically in love
with the Moscovite commune rarely indulge in any self-delusion :
very few beheve that their pet institutions ever could be imported
into the West. Not perceiving any other anchor of salvation for
foreign nations, many sincerely bewail the fact that they should
be so wedded to a radically wrong system which must, sooner or
later, bring about the fall of the most flourishing of states.

Those who would, as do so many Russians, see there the
complete and rational solution of what is known as ' ' the social
problem," are manifestly mistaken. It might be, perhaps, in a
primitive country, all rural and agricultural still, such as Russia
has been so long. With modem nations, where labor is evenly
divided between agriculture and industry, between cities and
country, the case is different. What modicum of land should be
allotted to the millions that live in the capitals ? Where is the
endowment fund to come from for the families crowded into the
cities? and, owing to industry and commerce, owing to the
growth of prosperity, the cities will go on sucking into their walls
a larger percentage of the entire population. The principal sore
of Western Europe, almost the only one with which France is
plagued, ^is the urban factory proletariate, and the Russian
remedy, offered as a sort of social panacea, is a purely rural one.

And besides, can collective tenure, in Russia itself, attain the
lofty destinies which are the dream of so many patriots ? Is it
possible that, in the old Slavic empire, preserved from Occidental
contagion by its historical and geographical isolation, the Mosco-

572 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

vite mir should become the foundation of a new and original
civilization, exempt from the vices of the classical civilization,
untainted with proletariate, pauperism, and the wages question ?

For certain Russians would have us believe that all Russia
has to do is to remain true to her history and her rural commune,
in order to bring forth a society as brilliant, as prosperous as those
of the West, and incomparably more harmonious and healthy, — a
society unencumbered with class strife, free from all those morbid
principles which, they aver, threaten the European nations with
premature dissolution.

To what amounts this claim, of founding, with the assistance
of a different agrarian system, a new civilization, unsullied with
the taints of Western societies ? In reality it comes to this : can
there be a high-grade civilization, a high-grade culture, without
large industries, a large commerce, large cities ? Can there be, in
Russia or elsewhere, a prosperous and indefinitely progressive
society if — as is actually the case in Russia — ^the urban element
should remain forever comparatively insignificant and subordinate ?
If, with the help of collective tenure and the mir, it should be pos-
sible to erect a new society on a wider and more firmly established
basis, it could be only an exclusively agricultural and eminently
rural one.

But even as a rural nostrum, is this social panacea of the Slavo-
phils and their followers an absolutely infallible one? Who
does not see that, to work to best advantage, the system of collec-
tive tenure needs unbounded space ? In order that each inhabi-
tant, each adult couple, may have a recognized claim to land, the
first requisite is that there should be land, free land and a great deal
of it. The Russian communes, at least those that are territorially
well endowed, have reserve lands, which are kept for new claim-
ants. That is really the only means of satisfying all those who
are entitled to a share, as they appear on the labor stage ; but such
a system presupposes vacancies, either in the commune or in the
lands. It is a banquet at which it is easy to place the first guests ;

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 573

but it soon becomes a problem how to make room for later comers
without crowding out the early ones. As the number of guests
goes on increasing while the table does not stretch, will it not
end in their all feeling cramped and being cut down to insuf-
ficient rations ? This is perhaps the worst that threatens collective
tentire in the future.

One thing has been ascertained, and indeed is easy to under-
stand : it is that the wzr system encourages marriage and increase
of population, since each family is entitled to land in proportion
to the number of laborers it musters. On the other hand, the com-
munal system, by setting, so to speak, a premiimi on large families
and partly relieving parents from the cares that children bring, is
apt indirectly to foster proletariate, — in other words, the supply
of land being limited, the population, under this system, is apt to
increase faster than the means of subsistence or comfort.* On
this point collective land tenure is at odds with individual, heredi-
tary tenure. The latter, at least under the system of equal divi-
sion, tends to limit, in each family, the number of children who
are to share the paternal loaf. Indeed, this is, in our eyes, about
the weightiest objection to it. Thus it is that, under the prop-
erty question, the population problem is found to lurk.f

Not quite a hundred years ago, Arthur Young, the English
traveller in France, wrote that, at the rate at which property was
being subdivided, the country must soon be converted into a rab-
bit warren. Facts have shown how vain his fears were. But

* It is this consideration, — although it would strike with full force only
were the family to be unpossessed of either working implements or capital
apart from its share of the territorial endowment — which made John Stuart
Mill, among others, so bitter an opponent of communal tenure with peri-
odical re-allotments.

\ Some are of the opinion, not unfounded, that in this lies one of the
causes which render population nearly stationary in France. Analogous
circumstances have been shown to result in the same phenomenon in other
countries also. In Belgium, for instance, Mr. E. de Laveleye has observed
that the two provinces in which property is most subdivided — the Flanders
— are those where the increase of population is least rapid. Switzerland
might give occasion to similar observations.

574 T'ff^ EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,

then the French law set a limit to the excessive increase of the
population by agrarian regulations which prevent indefinite par-
celling of the soil. Now, in many parts of Russia, anything but
dense as the population is, even in the most populous govern-
ments, the efifects of this natural law already make themselves
felt. In numbers of communes the peasants feel cramped and ill
at ease ; the lots awarded to them at the time of the emancipation
are already noticeably reduced, and grow smaller at each new
division. And village communities — partly, it must be admitted,
owing to bad farming — are stifling on lands which, in the West,
would support twice or three times the number of mouths. If it
has come to this not twenty-five years after the emancipation and
the territorial endowment, what will it be in a hundred years from
now — or in two, or in three hundred ?

In an empire such as Russia, where the vacant acres are
counted by hundreds of millions, both in its European and Asiatic
territories, where vast wildernesses vainly wait for somebody to
settle on them, there is no occasion for uneasiness on the score of
lack of land, say the advocates of the mir. In such a state it is
easy to make up for the injustice of nature and society ; easy to
solve the problem, unsolvable by the old states of the West, of a
fair partition of the soil and of wealth. In Russia there is enough
room, there are enough natural resources to smooth out as much
as possible social inequalities, to suppress proletarianism without
interfering with the rights of individual property, of the rural
communes, and of the Exchequer. All there is to do is to regu-
late emigration, or rather internal colonization, to direct and lo-
cate the thousands of peasants who each summer leave their
native communes in gangs, going forth to seek vacant lands,
frequently on the faith of false rumors or lying emissaries.*

Russia, indeed, resembles, on a large scale, one of her own
wealthy communes, endowed with land enough to form vast terri-

* Historically, this is probably the manner in which the mir both pre-
served itself and spread — by colonization — over the plains of Great-Russia.

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 575

tonal reserve funds for the coming generations. The steppes of
the south, certain regions of the Ural and Caucasus, especially
Southern Siberia, are there, ready, for a greater or lesser number
of years, to receive the excess of population of the village com-
munities in the interior. It is the State's business to make use of
these resources to the best advantage and, under Alexander III.,
it has given serious attention to the matter.* These reserve
lands, however vast, will be exhausted some day, probably much
sooner than those patriots imagine who allow the immensity of
the areas comprised in the empire to mislead them. However re-
mote it seems, that day will come in Russia with collective tenure,
as it has come in America with individual tenure, and on that day
the two systems will stand face to face, on their own intrinsic
merits and demerits, with no possibility for either to call emigra-
tion to its aid. Then the critical hour will strike for collective
tenure (if it survives so long), cornered as it will be by the in-
crease of population, charged with failing more and more to do
what is expected of it — to place landed property within everybody's
reach. For there is no getting round this : that no matter what
form of tenure is adopted, men cannot be largely provided with
land, unless there be a great deal of land and few men.

I shall close this most unprejudiced study, with a last remark.
In Petersburgh and Moscow men flatter themselves that, by pre-
serving the peasant's communal domain side by side with the
noble's or merchant's hereditary one, Russia will steer clear of
the class conflicts which disturb the West. This has become,
with many Russians, an uncontested axiom ; but it is to be feared
that, on this point also, they are deceived. If there is not in Rus-
sia at this day conscious and declared antagonism between the

* The emigration question has been debated more especially by the
assemblies of experts convoked by Alexander III. ; moreover, it has made
real progress owing to the creation of colonization agencies and to the law
of 1889.

576 THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

"boss" and the working man, between capital and labor, the
cause lies not so much in the existence of the mir as in the condi-
tion of the people, — social, religious, intellectual. Should the day
come when the revolutionary crop sown by so many youthful
hands should rise, on that day the form of tenure so extolled of
the Slavophils would prove to Russian society a feeble palladium
indeed. For the mir, such as it exists at present, with a whole
class of landed proprietors outside of it, has a great social fault —
that of dividing the rural population as well as landed property
into two categories, two clearly defined classes. While in France
there runs from the largest to the smallest holder of land a con-
tinuous and graded chain of proprietors, of every variety of rank and
fortune, in Russia the holder of large estates — \h& pomiish-tchik —
who stays outside of the mir, is entirely separate from the peasant
communes, and that makes him an object of envy to them, if it
does not some day arouse their cupidity against him. A great
defect of the Russian commime, which is held up to us as the most
certain preventive to the division of society into hostile classes, is
precisely that it does cut the rural population into two classes
having different if not opposite interests.

This would be a substantial danger, but for the £ict that,
through the land-purchases made by peasants, an intermediate
class of small landholders is slowly forming between the pomiesh-
tchik and the mujik of the communes, a class that is in touch with
both. These peasants, who are at the same time members of the
mir and independent of it in their capacity of individual land-
holders, on the same footing as the former lord and the city trades-
man,— these peasants who, in their person, embody both forms of
tenure, will be the very link indicated to connect the two now
widely separated classes. Without this intermediate group,
which is with every year becoming more numerous, Russia
would not long remain free from the class feuds which the revolu-
tionists are working hard to provoke. Even now, when he as yet
turns a deaf ear to all the ' ' nihilistic ' ' preachings, is not the

MIH, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 5/7

tnujik inclined to think himself despoiled in favor of the pomiSsk'
tchik, to dream, for himself or for his children, of new distributions
of lands ?

So that, instead of closing forever the door of the villager's
izb^ against the revolutionist, the mir may very well some day
open it for them.* It will be in the name of the mir, represented
to us as the safeguard of society, that the peasant will be invited to
' ' round up ' ' his lot, to gather all the lands into the communal
domain, t The Russian commune, such as it exists in ancient
Moscovia, is in fact an easy means of gaining possession of the
soil on behalf of the masses ; it is the only practical proceeding
known, so far, for applying to the soil the theories of even dis-
tribution, without seeing inequality reappear out of the distribu-
tion itself. In all other countries, the main obstacle to any
'Attempt at agrarian communism lies in the popular customs and
manners ; in Russia, thanks to the training imparted by the mir,
this obstacle does not exist.

Must we then, from the fact that, at a given hour, the village
communities serve as tools or bait to the revolutionists, conclude
that they should, on shortest notice, be abolished by the law, as
being noxious to society ? By no means, in our opinion, for there
would be, in such precipitate prevention, great risk of increasing
the evil. What can, at a certain moment, give the anarchist
propaganda a hold on the peasant, is not so much the mir itself as
the vague notions set afloat among the people by the customs
bom of the mir; and these ideas, these vague aspirations cannot
be smothered by an uk^z for the suppression of village commu-
nities. So long as the ancient form of tenure retains the
sympathies of the peasantry, the government cannot lift its hand

* In this respect the village communities offer much more hold to the
revolutionary spirit than the family communities of the Yugo-Slavs, as these
latter maintain much more clear the notion of property.

t Since these lines were first printed {Revue des Deux Mondes, May 15,
1876), more than one political trial has shown that these and similar
apprehensions were far from fanciful.

57? THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS.

against the mir without doing violence to the people's customs
and their juridical conscience, and, consequently, without laying
itself open, some day, to perilous retrospective demands.

The Russians are fond of representing collective tenure as a
paramount remedy, an infallible nostrum against socialism and
communism. If the mir really has this property, it must be in
accordance with the theory which, in order to preserve an
organism from a disease, inoctdates it. It would be more correct
to say that, through her communal system, Russia was inoculated
with communism, or rather with agrarian socialism ; that, thanks
to the mir, it circulates, unbeknown to herself, in her veins and
in her blood. Will the virus, at this dose, remain forever harm-
less ? Will it prove a preservative against contagion from abroad,
or will it, on the contrary, call out some day, in the social organism,
unexpected disorders and serious disturbances ? Time will show.
In the meantime this is a treatment which no prudent counsellor
will advise other societies to try, for fear of their taking the
disease in good earnest.

Even now, when he keeps his ear closed against revolutionary
preaching, the mnjik is not always content patiently to wait for
the tsar's bounty, in the form of new land allotments. As he
passes by the lands of his neighbor, the pomihh-tchik, he cannot
help squinting a little that way.* Sometimes, indeed, in his col-
lisions with riverside landlords, he tries to extend the domain of
the mir at their expense. Under the Emperor Alexander III.,
who, at his coronation, had the loyalty to warn the delegates

* " What will be done with the waste lands?" a j>easant inquired of a
certain Mr. Prug^vin. — " What waste lands ? " — "Why, those that the rich
people are keeping from us ; are n't they coming to us ? Is there not going
to be a division ? " — " It is said there will be one," put in another ; — " that
we are to get a little more." — " And where is the land to come from for an-
other distribution ? " — " Sure enough ! Where is it to come from ? There
are the rich though . just a little, now, so every one gets a bit?"

— " Would it be just to take from some, to give to others ? " — " No, indeed."
— Then after a pause : "They do say the lords would be given money instead."
{Hevue des Deux Mondes, January i, 1883.)

MIR, FAMILY, AND VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. 579

of the peasantry that the property question was settled for good
and all, there have been agrarian riots in various provinces.
More than once the military had to be called in to repress them ;
the authorities took advantage of the laws issued against the
revolutionists to send the leaders before a council of war. These
things are hushed up as much as possible ; the papers have strict
orders to keep silence on all affairs of the kind. Thus in 1886,
there was a riot in the government of Penza ; in 1887, in that of
Riaz^ ; in 1888, in that of Kaz^n. Each time the troops were
compelled to charge, and the ringleaders were tried by military
commissions, so that, notwithstanding the abolition of the death
penalty, they were condemned to death, and hung, it is averred,
twelve or fifteen at a time. With less severity, it might have
been difficult to maintain social peace.

As to the belief which makes of collective tenure a sure
antidote against the revolutionary poison, warranted to keep
Russia safe from all political epidemics, that is a prejudice, the
fallacy of which has been too clearly demonstrated by the innum-
erable plots and audacious attempts of the last years of Alexander
II. Mines and bombs, nitro-glycerine and dynamite have under-
taken to undeceive the most confiding. Against the slow mining
process of nihilism and revolutionary explosions, the Moscovite
mir is manifestly an insufficient insurance. After the assassina-
tion of the L/iberator of the serfs, no Russian can assert that all
the periodical troubles which harass the West come from the
Occidental form of land tenure ; that social questions are the only
ones that breed revolutions ; that, in order to escape violent com-
motions, Russia only has to place the land within the reach of all.

58o THE EMPIRE OF THE TSARS AND THE RUSSIANS,
APPENDIX TO BOOK VIII.

The following brief selection from Vladimir Dahl's famous collection of
popular sayings, proverbs, adages, riddles, etc., may not be unwelcome, as
setting forth, after the terse and pointed fashion of their kind, the people's
own estimation of their principal national institution. It will be noticed
that it is by no means one-sided or exclusively admiring.

What the mir has settled, is God's own judgment.

As the mir has resolved, so it shall be.

The tnir will stand up for itself. You can't be the winner in a suit
against the mir.

If the mir gives a whoop, the forests shall groan and bend.

The mir is subject to no jurisdiction but God's.

God alone can judge the m,ir.

The mir is inviolable, but the wtV-members get thrashed.

A man of might is the mir. None may gainsay it.

Should the m,ir heave a sigh, it will reach the Tsar's ears.

If the mir goes mad, it can't- be put in a strait-jacket (literally —
"chained up").

There is no guilt in the mir: how should the guilty be picked out in
the crowd ?

All for one and one for all : that 's the mir.

When the mir comes together, it is ready to fight that minute ; when it
separates, all it does is to lie on the stove-bench.

The m,ir is mighty as water and silly as a babe.

One or other mujik may be wise, but the m,ir is a fooL

It was the people's voice that condemned Christ.

INDEX.

Alans, extinct tribe, of Finno-Turk-

ish blood, 78
Alexander I., the dreamer, 301, 302
Alexander II., the Liberator and

reformer, 303, 304
AUophyl races, see Turanian.
Antes, an ancient Slavic tribe, 95
Appanage system, 250
Aral Sea, second largest lake in the

world, 5 ; remnant of ancient sea, 9
Ardshin, the typical commune, 523-

525 ; deductions it leads to, 525-

528
Avars, an extinct tribe of Finnic

race, 67 ; partly Mongolian, 78

Baikal, Siberian lake, largest in

Asia, 5
Bakiinin, the founder of militant

nihilism, 200, 201
Baltic Provinces, Germans in, 69,

124, 127-129
Baltic Sea, at one time united with

the Black, 7
Bashkirs, probably a Finnic tribe,

along the Ural, 70 ; partly Turkish

or Tatar, 78
Baths, Russian, 159 (appendix)
Biarmian branch of the Finnic race,

comprises Permians, Voti^ks,

Zyrians, 68

Bieloruss, see White-Russians.
Black Mould Zone, the southern

boundary of Finnic erratic blocks,

8 ; described, 22-24
Black Sea, at one time united with

the Baltic, 7
Bohemians, see Tchekhs.
Bo-russi (or Po-russi), name of the

ancient Prussians ; its meaning,

106, note
Bulgars, old, of Finnic race, 67 ; of

the Volga, of Finno-Turkish

blood, 78 ; modern, partly Slavs,

of the southern branch, 103

Caspian Sea, largest lake in the
world, 5 ; remnant of ancient sea,

Catherine II., the true successor of
Peter the Great, 292, 293 ; organ-
izes the nobility and gives it privi-
leges, 313, 397, 398 ; and the town
bourgeoisie, 332

Caucasian region, its wealth and
beauty, 30-32

Caucasus, southern bulwark of Rus-
sia, 5

Central Asia, its highlands the east-
em limit of Russia, 5 ; influences
Russia's climate, 7

Character, national Russian, 138-
144 ; aflfected by the climate, 140,
i6i ; described at large, 162-170 ;

581

582

INDEX.

how influenced by the physical
natnre of the country, 170-178 ;
by the alternations of the seasons,
187 ; full of contrasts and ex-
tremes, 188-194

Christianity, introduced by Olga
and Vladimir, from Constantino-
ple, 246

Church, national Russian, fortified
under the Tatar domination, 259

Climate, continental, always in ex-
tremes, 6 ; wanting in moisture,
8 ; of the northern or forest zone,
18 ; of the steppe zone, 21, 22 ; its
injurious action on the national
character, 140, 143 ; on mortality,
149 ; on popular habits, 150-154 ;
on the national character again,
161-170

Colonization of Russia, by Russians,
44-46 ; by Germans, 46 ; by Greco-
Slavs, 47, 48 ; by Great-Russians,
109, no

Commune, rural, discovered in 1842,
476 ; will it survive the present
crisis ? 503, 504 ; its mutual soli-
darity in the matter of taxes, 521-
523 : description of a typical one,
523-525 ; its control over its mem-
bers based on fiscal solidarity, 525-
531 ; often oppressive, 541, 542 ;
not bettered by emancipation,
542-545 ; yet not fatally doomed,
546, 547 ; its immediate abolition
unadvisable, 560-562

Cosacks, sons of the steppe, natu-
rally antagonistic to the north or
forest zone, 16 ; of the Black Sea —
I^ittle Russians, 117 ; of the Don
and Ural — Great Russians, ib.; a
distinct warrior caste, 317 ; their
free land-tenure on the Don, 481 ;
their communal organization in
the Ural, 505-50?

Crimea, the special home of Russian
Tatars, 88

Croats, Slavs of the southern branch,
103

Danilefsky, from his book, Russia
and Europe, 13, 237-240

DashkofF Museum, 57

Diet, peasants', 145-155 (appendix) ;
lenten, 156-158 (appendix) ; injuri-
ous to health and life, 148

Don, river in southern Russia, 5 ;
proposed by some as frontier line, 8

Drinks, national Russian, 145, 146

Drunkenness of the Russian people
much exaggerated, 146; its de-
crease, 147

Dvorihitstvo, see Nobility.

Bhsts (Esthonians), a Finnic tribe
on the Baltic, 69

Emancipation, Nicolas' pet scheme,
418 ; supported by publfc opinion,
419-421 ; how prepared, 422-426 ;
its main objects, 426 ; its basis,
428 ; its standard of territorial
endowment, 433-435 ; its manner
of proceeding, 436-441 ; breeds
general disappointment, 450-455,
460 ; how it aflFects the people's
character and habits, 460-465;
its temporary evil eflFects on the
condition of the rural communes
(mir), 542-545

Esthonians, see Ehsts.

Ethnological collection in the Dash-
koflF Museum, 57-59 ; three princi-
pal elements of Russia's popula-
tion, 63

Finns, one of the three main ethnical
elements of Russia's population,

INDEX.

583

63; identical with the Tchud, ib.;
of Turanian stock, Uralo-Altaic
branch, 64; classed with Mongols,
65 ; their many tribes and their
wide diffusion, 66-70 ; their char-
acteristics, 71-76 ; their personal
appearance, 79, note
Forest zone, i6-i8

Germans, their small numbers in the
Baltic Provinces, 69, note, 124,
127-129 ; oppose the Russian ele-
ment, 70, note; their oppression
of the Baltic Ehsts and Letts, 124 ;
their appropriation of certain
trades, 125 ; their arrogance to
Russians, 125, 126; gain ground in
all the western borderland, 129

Great-Russians (Velikoruss) the
chief division of the Russian peo-
ple, 107 ; their area the centre,
north, and northeast of Russia,
ib.; the most mixed with Finnic
blood, 109 ; yet predominantly
Slavs, 111-113; the great colo-
nizers of Russia, 109, no; their
physical characteristics, 114

Guilds, merchant, introduced by
Peter the Great, 338 ; their consti-
tution, 338-340

Herzen, patriot and exile, 199, 200

Hierarchy, social, as regulated by
Peter the Great, 313 ; its subdi-
visions and development, 311-325

Hungars (later Hungarians, or Mag-
yars), of Finnic race, 67 ; their
mingling with Aryan elements and
consequent improvement, 75, 76

Huns, of Finnic race, 67 ; yet in
great part Turkish, 78

Ivan IV., the Terrible, the conqueror
of Kazin, 268

Kalevala, the Finnic Epic, 73, note ;
76, note

Kalmyks, an Asiatic tribe, dwelling
by the Azof Sea, 30 ; on the l/ower
Volga, 63 ; of Mongolian origin,
79 ; their history, ib.

Karaites, a Jewish sect, 57, 58

Karels, a Finnic tribe in the West
of Russia, 69

Katkof, Slavophil and publicist, the
champion of classical education,
205

Kirghiz, an Asiatic tribe, dwelling
in the Azof and Caspian steppe-
regions, 27, 30

Kirghiz steppe, once the bed of the
Caspian Sea, 29

Kniaz, the only national Russian
title, 85, note; its history, 154
(appendix)

Knifes (Princes), the lineal de-
scendants of the appanage-princes,
the only national aristocracy, 353-
355

Koltsdf, poet, "the Russian Bums,"
143, note.

Klremlin or Kreml, meaning of the
word, 39, note 2

Kryldf (Ivan Andr^yevitch), the
great fabulist, 379, 380

KurganSy also called Moghili, sepul-
chral mounds of ancient peoples, 19

I/ddoga, Russian lake, largest in

Europe, 5, 18
Lakes, Russian, largest in the world :

Ladoga, On^ga, Baikal, Caspian,

584

INDEX.

Aral, 5 ; eleven hundred pond-like
lakes in Arkhangelsk, i8

Lands, communal, how divided and
re-allotted, 510-520; their excessive
parcelling, 518-520

Land-tenure, collective or commu-
nal, the national form, 474 ; un-
changed by emancipation, 475 ;
historical review of, 476-482 ; its
territorial distribution, 482-485 ; its
inefficiency, 531-533; its advocates
and detractors, 534-536 ; public
opinion divided about it, 536-540 ;
peasants diflFer about it, 552, 553 ;
it shelters them from absolute
destitution, 564-566 ; unfavorable
to the spirit of individual enter-
prise, 568 ; not to be abolished
rashly, 568-571 ; nor to be con-
sidered a universal panacea, 571-
574 ; its impending struggle with
individual tenure, 575 ; not a suflGi-
cient safeguard against class con-
flicts, 575-579

Lapps, a Finnic tribe, 65 ; the most
typical, 69

Lett, one of the three languages
spoken by the Letto-Lithuanians,
105

Letto-Lithuanian group, in the north-
western region of Russia, Indo-
European, but not exactly Slavs,
104 ; their scant numbers and re-
markable languages, 105

Letts, inhabit Curland and Livonia,
106

Lezghians, Caucasian tribe, 63

Liakhs, Slavs of the western branch,
104

Lithuanians, formerly a great nation,
105

Little-Russians (Maloross), occupy
the southwestern part of Russia,
108; their characteristics, 115-117 ;
Russians beyond doubt, 117-119

Livonians, see Livs.

Livs (Livonians), a Finnic tribe on
the Baltic, 69

Magyars, see Hungars.

Maloross, see Little-Russians,

Mir, the assembly of the village

elders, or heads of families ; see

Commune.
"iWr-eaters," or village vampires,

529-531. 566

Moghili, see Kurgd.ns.

Mongolian 1 »,

,, , -, }-race, ^e-^ Turanian.

Mongoloid •»

Mongols, Turanian race, Uralo- Altaic

branch, 64 ; much mixed with

Turks or Tatars, 78
Mordvins, a Finnic tribe of the

southern branch, in the centre of

Russia, 68
Moscow (Moscovia), the rise of, 265-

268
Mountains, scarcity of, 7 ; Ural, 7,

9, 10, 16 ; Valday, 17

Nicolas, the despot, 302

Niekrdssof, poet and editor, 202, note

Nietchdyef, revolutionist, tool of
Bak^nin, 201

Nihilism, originates in German phi-
losophy, 195 ; not peculiar to Rus-
sia, 196 ; its three stages, 197, 198 ;
its repulsive coarseness, 203-206 ;
its affinities with mysticism, 207-
209 ; its apostles, 212-214 ; chiefly
aflFects the youth of both sexes,
215-217 ; its women converts, 217-
222

Nobility {dvori&nstvo), its peculiar
character, 347, 348 ; its constitu-
tion, 349-355 ; its laws of succession,
355-361 ; its origin — the drujina
and the boyd.r, 362-366 ; its land
endowments, 366-368 ; its dissen-

INDEX.

585

sions and jealousies, 368-372 ; in-
vaded by bureaucracy, 373 fF; its
protest in the shape of exclusive-
ness and European cosmopolitism,
381-387 ; its consequent estrange-
ment from the people, 388 ; its
privileges, 390-396 ; its lack of
cohesion and corporate spirit, 397-
402
Nogjlys, a Tatar tribe, in the Azof
and Caspian steppe-region, 27, 30 ;
partly Mongolian, 78

Obi, Siberian river, 5 ; proposed by
some as frontier line, 8

"Occidentals "(Zd^padnikiJ, the par-
tisans of Western Europe, 227 ;
their views of Russian history and
civilization, ib. ; their standing
conflict against Slavophilism, 236,

237
On^ga, Russian lake, second largest

in Europe, 5
Osti£lks, a Finnic tribe in Siberia, 67

Panslavism, its moderate ambition,
103

Peasants, the hope of the country,
403-409 ; their condition before
serfdom, 410 ; " made fast to the
soil," 411-413 ; their condition in
serfdom, 414-418 ; their views of
the land question, 429 ; their dis-
content and distrust, 429-432 ;
placed "under temporary obliga-
tions," 442 ; their suUenness and
blunders, 445-449 ; their pitiable
plight, 456-459 ; how aflFected in
their habits by the emancipation,
460-465 ; their friendly relations
to the former masters, 466, 467 ;
their unreasonable expectations,
468-473 ; their home-life and family

organization, 487-503 ; their grow-
ing appetite for individual prop-
erty, 553-556 ; they buy out the
nobility in places, to the detriment
of farming, 556-560

Permians, a Finnic tribe of the Biar-
mian branch, on the K^ma, 68

Peter the Great, the typical repre-
sentative of the national character,
192-194 ; history of his work, 282-
304; his boyhood among foreign-
ers, 285 ; his travels, 287 ; his
versatility, 287, 288 ; his reforms,
289, 290 ; his successors, 291-293 ;
criticism on his methods and work,
294-303 ; introduces merchant
guilds, 338 ; creates the Table of
Ranks, 373

Plssemsky, novelist, author of In
the Whirlpool, 187

Poles, Slavs of the western branch,
104 ; source of their antagonism
with the Russians, ib. ; at present
dread German rule more, 131

Polish question, 129-137

Population, its sparseness in the
north, 18 ; in the fertile steppe
region, 28 ; in the Kalmyk steppe,
30 ; uneven density of, 38-40 ;
statistical averages consequently
misleading, 41 ; on the future in-
crease of, 41, 42 ; ethnic elements
ofj 57-62 ; urban and rural, 322,
325, 327-330 ; of towns and cities
with their class-divisions, 334-345

Property, undivided in peasant fami-
lies, 490-492 ; when and how di-
vided, 493-495, 497-500

Pskof, submission of, to Tsar Vassili,
272-274

Re-allotment, periodical, of commu-
nal lands, 511 ; at various intervals,
5 1 1-5 13 ; its evil eflfects when too
frequent, 573-575

586

INDEX.

Redemption by the peasants of the
lands taken from the landlords,
428, 438-441 ; proceeds slowly,
under difficulties, 443-445 ; assisted
by the State, 447-449

Reforms, their democratical ten-
dency, 306, 307, 310

Religion, distribution among Finns,
Tatars, and Mongols, 80 ; a barrier
between Russians and Tatars, 81,
82, 84-86 ; its influence on the po-
sition of the Tatars, 90, 91

Romdnofs, called to the throne, 270

Roxolans, an extinct tribe of Finno-
Turkish blood, 78

Russia, other nations' ignorance of,
and prejudice against, 1-3 ; her
civilization the outcome of her
past, 3 ; her vast extent, 4, 5 ; her
structure Asiatic, 6, 8 ; her climate,
continental and Asiatic, 6 ; her
solid, horizontal geological forma-
tion, 7 ; insufficient moisture of her
atmosphere, 8 ; compared to North
America, 11 ; to Brazil, 12 ; is
neither Europe nor Asia, 10, 13,
115 ; poorness of her physical na-
ture, 12 ; her characteristic — unity
in immensity, 15, 35-37 ; divided
into two main zones : the forest
zone and the steppe zone, 16 ; her
population, 37-42 ; her wealth of
natural products, 42, 43 ; her colo-
nization, native and foreign, 43-50 ;
a land and people of contrasts,
50-52 ; her ethnological variety,
57-60; her practical relations to
Europe, 237-240 ; her connection
with Byzance, 246-248, 263-265,
277 ; her condition under the Ta-
tars, 256-263 ; under the Moscovite
princes, 265-270 ; her social con-
stitution, 305-321

Russian people, has very little Mon-
gol or Tatar blood, 80, 81, 86, 87 ;
more Finnic, 81, 82 ; its division

into Great-Russian, Little-Russian,
White-Russian, 107, 108 ; fusion
of its elements, 114, 115, 121

Samogit, one of the three languages
spoken by the I,etto-Lithuanians,
105

Samoy^ds, a Finnic tribe, 67, 69

Seasons, their variety and beauties,
179-187 ; their influence on the
national character, 187-194

Serbs, Slavs of the southern branch,
103

Serfdom, first establishment of, 176,
note, 411-413 ; not universal, 414 ;
its character and effects, 414-418

Siberia, controls Russia's climate, 7 ;
first conquest of, by Yerm^k, 278-
281 (appendix)

Slavophils, the champions of Russian
nationality, their views of Russian
history and civilization, 227 ; their
origin and doctrines, 228-233 \ re-
action in their, favor, 233-235 ; their
standing conflict against Occident-
alism, 236, 237 ; their enthusiasm
over the local commune (inir)y

477, 504

Slavs, one of the three main ethnical
elements of Russia's population,
63 ; an Aryan or Indo-European
race, 95 ; their characteristics, 96-
98, loi, 102 ; their place in the his-
tory of human culture, 98-100;
their geographical distribution,
103-110 ; scant knowledge of them,
241-243

Slovens, a Slavic tribe of the southern
branch, 95, 103

Solovidf, the nihilist and would-be
regicide, 212, 214

Steppes, southeastern, dried-up bed
of an ancient sea, 9 ; one of Russia's
two main zones, 16 ; steppe-zone

INDEX.

587

described, 19-22 ; two kinds of,
fertile and barren, 24 ; fertile, 25-
28; barren, or Uralo-Caspian, 28-
30 ; Kirghiz, 29 ; Kalmyk, 30
Suomi, the Finns of Finland, 68

"Table of Ranks," instituted by
Peter the Great, the foundation
of bureaucracy, 293 ; its scheme
and dispositions, 373-375 ; its ef-
fects, 377-379

Tatars, one of the three main ethnical
elements of Russia's population,
63 ; of Turanian stock, Uralo-Altaic
branch, 64 ; first appeared in Russia
with Jinghiz-khan, 77 ; identical
with Turks, 77, 78 ; their history,
qualities, and position in Russia,
82-94 ; their coming and domina-
tion, 256-263 ; beaten at Kulikovo
on the Don, 267

Tchekhs (Bohemians), Slavs of the
western branch, 104

Tcheremyss, a Finnic tribe of the
southern branch on the Volga, 68

Tchernozidm, see Black Mould.

Tchemysh^fsky, essayist and novel-
ist, the champion of ultra-nihilism,
author of What is to be Done?
201-203, 209

Tchetchens, Caucasian tribe, 63

Tchin (" grade " as instituted by the
Table of Ranks), an old Slavic
word, 373, note

Tchud, etymology, 63 ; see Finn ;
also a separate tribe, 70

Tchuvash, a Finnic tribe of the
southern branch, on the Volga, 68 ;
partly Turkish or Tatar, 78

Tolstoy, Minister, 206, note

Towns, their peculiar character, 323 ;
their sparseness, 324 ; their social
organization, 330-333

Tundra^ what it is, 11, 17

Turanian stock or group of races, as
opposed to the Indo-European or
Aryan and the Semitic, 64 ; Uralo-
Altaic branch of, ib.

Turks, represented in Russia by the
Tatars, 77, 78 ; often mixed with
Mongols, 78 ; their place between
the Finnic and Mongolian
branches, ib.

Ugrians, a Finnic tribe in Asia, 67

Ukrainophilism and its puerile pre-
tensions, 119-121

Ural Mountains, insufficient defence,
7 ; their nature and office, 9, 10 ;
crossed by the forest zone and the
steppe zone, 16

Uralo-Altaic branch of the Turanian
stock, 64 ; comprises Finns, Ta-
tars, Mongols, ib.; its characteris-
tics, 64-66

Uralo-Caspian steppe region, irre-
claimably barren, 28-30 ; fit only
for pastoral life, 39

Ural River, also Yaik, proposed as
frontier line, 8

Vald^y Mountains, the head of all
the great rivers, 17, 18, 36

Varangians, were they Slavs or Ger-
mans ? 244 ; the German theory,
245 ; the Slavic side of the question,
253-255 (appendix)

Velikoruss, see Great-Russians.

Vends, an ancient Slavic tribe, 95 ;
some few still in existence in
Lausitz, 104

Veses, a Finnic tribe in the west of
Russia, 69

Village Communities, have their
prototype in the family, 486-504 ;
large ones, of the Ural Cosacks,
505-507 ; of northern Russia, 507,

588

INDEX.

508 ; manner of dissolving them,
548-550 ; cases of dissolution rare,

550-552
Voguls, a Finnic tribe in the Ural, 68
Volga, river, the central artery of

Russia, 5 ; proposed by some as

frontier line, 8
Voti^ks, a Finnic tribe of the Biar-

mian branch, on the Viatka, 68

White-Russians (Bieloruss), occupy
the •western part of Russia, 108

Winter, its severity in the northern
or forest zone, 18 ; in the steppe
zone, 21, 22 ; its tasks and pleas-
ures, 141, 142 ; impairs moral en-
ergy, 143, and physical, 144 ;
protection of houses from, 158
(appendix)

Women, have no rights to property
in the peasant family, 493 ; their
personal effects and hoard (ko-
rdbkaj, 494 ; their subordinate
and unhappy condition, 501-503

Yagellons, the great royal family of
the Lithuanians, 105

Yaik, see Ural River.

Y^niss^y, Siberian river, 5,11

Yerm^k, the Cosack chief, first con-
queror of Siberia, 278-281 (appen-
dix)

Zadruga, the Siberian form of family
and village communities, 479, 487,
note ; 491, note; 492

Zhpadniki, see "Occidentals."

Zapordgs, Cosacks of Little-Russia,
117

Zones ; forest zone and steppe zone,
naturally antagonistic, 16 ; de-
scribed, 16-22 ; Black Mould, 22-24

Zyrians, a Finnic tribe of the Biar-
mian branch, on the Dvin^ and
Petcli6ra, 68

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