Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/83

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RUSSIA STANDS FOR LIBERTY
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countries are like Russia peasant communities. The Serbian statistics of the division of land, with its total absence of large estates, are a revelation of the social and economic conditions of gallant little Serbia. Such statistics are, perhaps, unparalleled in European history. They show to what extent the old aristocracy has been stamped out, and how completely Serbia, like Bulgaria and Russia, is a country of small landholders, and in the strictest sense of the word, a peasant democracy.


IV. Russia Stands for Freedom

Russia stands for freedom, for the untrammelled freedom of the nomad roaming over the steppe. The Russians carry freedom to the verge of anarchy. It is not a mere accident that the three most consistent theorists of anarchism, Bakounine, Kropotkin and Tolstoy, are typical Russians. All through the Middle Ages a considerable part of civilized Russia was inhabited by free tillers of the soil. She glorified the free republics of Novgorod, Pskov, and Viatka. As was pointed out in Chapter II, it was only the necessity of national defence and the incessent incursions of Tartars in the East and of Poles in the West which