Great Russia/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
RUSSIA STANDS FOR PEACE AND PROGRESS
I
FROM the foregoing considerations it is obvious that those who denounce the aggressive policy of the Russian Government are little acquainted either with Russian history or with the Russian character.
The history of Russian expansion has been one mainly of peaceful penetration. Even to-day over a million peasants cross the Ural Mountains every year to settle in Siberia. The providential mission of Russia seems to be the colonization of the semi-barbarous populations of the Asiatic continent. And in that mission the Russian people have been eminently successful. The Russian is the ideal settler. He does not possess the commercial instinct of the Jew or of the Armenians; he does not possess the industrial capacities of the Anglo-Saxon. But as an agriculturist, as a colonist, he is unsurpassed.
A peaceful policy is in conformity with the Russian character. The most typical Russian writer is also the most uncompromising apostle of peace. There is nothing aggressive in the Russian temperament. Its strength lies in patience and stoical endurance, in passive resistance. Even the military history of Russia illustrates that character. The French and the Germans are strong in the offensive, the Russians are mainly strong on the defensive. The war of 1812, the retreat to Moscow, the dramatic duel between Napoleon and Kutusov, are striking illustrations of that characteristic in the national temperament.
To-day more than ever peace is a Russian necessity. Russia is only at the beginning of her industrial expansion, and she has still to pass through the ordeal of a profound political transformation. She needs peace to exploit her immense resources. She needs peace even more urgently to carry her political experiments to a successful issue. At the beginning of his reign, Nicholas II, in issuing his famous peace rescript, took the initiative of the modern peace movement and of the Hague Conference. It is not the fault of Russia, but of Prussia, that the Hague Conferences should have failed in their object, and that the ideals of Nicholas II should have remained a noble dream. The crushing of German militarism will make the dream of the White Tsar a glorious reality.
II
In the opinion of the average Englishman, Russia is identified with reaction. The Russian moujik we are told is a clumsy, unwieldy giant, who is only beginning to stretch his limbs. Russia moves as slowly as her own rivers, so sluggish that it is almost impossible to tell in which direction the currents move.
Like most other ideas about Russia, this conception of a reactionary Russia is a delusion. So far from being stationary Russia is, perhaps, the most progressive nation in Europe, and her rapid advance has only been paralleled by the advance of America. Only two hundred years ago the Russian Empire was still plunged in utter darkness. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Russian Government was of so little account that when Peter the Great offered to visit the Court of Versailles, he met with a polite refusal. To-day the successors of Louis XIV celebrate a visit of the Russian Tsar as a great national event.
Everything in Russia has had to be built up in a few generations. The Trans-Siberian Railway is as stupendous an achievement as the Canadian Pacific Railway. The cyclopean highway through the Caucasus is one of the wonders of modern engineering. Ten years ago I witnessed for six months the horrors of the Civil War and the disasters of the Japanese War. Returning to Petrograd after five years I expected to find a ruined, disorganized State. I found instead an extraordinary change for the better: the public exchequer full to overflowing, a thriving industry, universal optimism, a superb confidence in the future. We notice the same progress in every province of human activity. No British newspaper would think it worth while to report about those twenty thousand agricultural co-operative societies which have risen in recent years in the Empire of the Tsars. One Nihilist plot or one Jewish Pogrom would have attracted more attention. Yet think of the enormous significance of those twenty thousand autonomous social organizations which everywhere are reforming agricultural methods and stimulating the most important national industry.
Russia is the country of gigantic social and political experiments. To use the three favourite expressions of the German megalomaniacs, everything in Russia is "Kolossal," "grossartig," "im grossen Stil." There is no parallel in history, to the emancipation of the serfs, or to that expropriation of the Polish landlords, with which the name of Nicholas Milutin is associated. By one stroke of the Imperial pen forty million peasants were liberated, and tens of millions of acres of land changed hands. The recent far-reaching prohibition measure is another bold innovation of the Russian Government. In other countries thousands of enthusiasts have been speaking about temperance reform and denouncing the appalling results of the drink evil. The Russian Government alone has had the courage of grappling with the evil, and that courage is all the more admirable because in suppressing the sale of vodka the Russian Government have deprived themselves of one-fourth of the Imperial revenue. Surely two such far-reaching achievements, either promised or accomplished in the throes of a great war—the charter of Polish freedom and the prohibition of vodka are of good omen for the future liberation of the Russian people.
III. The Coming of the Slav
After a thousand years of striving and suffering, of oppression and suppression, the Russian is at last coming into his inheritance. This war, which will end in the collapse of the three Empires, Prussia, Austria, and Turkey, will also result in the advance of the Russian Empire as the controlling power of Continental Europe. The future Peace Congress will realize the dream of ages. Byzantium Tsargrad will become the capital of Holy Russia.
But Europe need take no umbrage. The Russian Empire of to-morrow will not be a centralized military Power like Rome or Germany. It will take the form of a federation of self-governing communities. The logic of the Slav political tradition, the pressure of economic and political circumstances, the shaking off of the German influence, the influence of the allied democracies, all point to a Liberal Orientation of Russian politics.
The other Slav States will be finally liberated. Poland, Serbia, Bulgaria will be drawn into the orbit of the leading Power to which they owe their independent national existence. Russian influence will be all the stronger as it ceases to be a menace to their independence. Attracted by the affinities of language and race, of religion and tradition, the Slav communities will constitute one integral whole, the United States of Eastern and Southern Europe.
That federation of Slavonic States will be the dominant power in the old Continent, and the other States will have to follow their lead. The economic and political interests of the other nations will be so closely identified with the future of Russia, that they will have to seek a closer political understanding and to constitute, in combination with Russia, those United States of Europe which hitherto had been the vain political dream of generations of idealists and visionaries.