THE OLD RUSSIA
Meanwhile the patient peasants continued to increase their numbers as they had done during the last ten thousand years and, once more finding themselves in need of more farms, they burst the bonds of their homeland, that fertile valley of the Ukraine, the richest granary of Europe, and they began to move into the central Russian plateau. As soon as they had reached the highest point, they followed the river that ran eastward. Very slowly (what is ‘time’ to the Russian peasant?) they crept down the valley of the Oka until at last they reached the Volga and founded another New-town or Novgorod, which was to command the plains that were to be theirs for all eternity.
But ‘all eternity,’ in history at least, never seems to last so very long. For early in the thirteenth century the Great Disaster put a temporary check upon their ambitions. Through the wide gap that lay between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea, the salt-infested wilderness of the Ural River, thousands of little yellow men came trotting westward until at last it seemed as if Asia was to pour its entire population into the heart of Europe. The little Norse-Slavic principalities of the west were caught completely by surprise. In less than three years the whole of the Russian plain, rivers, seas, hills, was in the hands of the Tartars, and it was only a matter of great good luck (an epidemic among the Tartar ponies) which saved Germany and France and the rest of western Europe from a similar fate.
As soon as they had raised a new crop of horses, the Tartars once more tried their luck. But the bulwark of Germany and Bohemia held fast, and the invaders, describing a wide circle, hacked and plundered and burned and murdered their way through Hungary and then settled down in eastern and southern Russia to enjoy the spoils of victory. During the next two centuries Christian men and women and children were forced to kneel in the dust whenever they met a descendant of the terrible Genghis Khan and kiss the stirrup of his horse or suffer the penalty of instant death.
Europe heard of this, but Europe did not care. For the Slavs worshipped God according to the Greek rites and western Europe worshipped God according to the rites of the Romans. Therefore, let the heathen rage and let the Russian people become the most abjectly miserable slaves that ever trembled at the crack of a foreign whip, for they were heretics and deserved no better fate. In the end, this indifference was to cost Europe very heavily, for those patient Russian shoulders, which accept whatever burden is put upon them by ‘those in power,’ acquired that disastrous habit of unreasoning submission during the two and a half centuries of Tartar domination.
Left to themselves, they would never have been able to throw off that terrible yoke. The rulers of the little principality of Moscow, an old frontier post of the Slavs in the east, were responsible for setting their country free. In the year 1480, John III (the Ivan the Great of Russian history) refused to pay the annual tribute to the master of the Golden Horde. That was the beginning of open resistance. Half a century later the foreign visitation came to an end. But although the Tartars disappeared, their system survived.
THE NEW RUSSIA
The new rulers had a fine natural feeling for the ‘realities’ of life. Some thirty years before, Constantinople had been captured by the Turks, and the last of the Eastern Roman Emperors had been killed on the steps of the church of the Holy Sofia. But he left a distant relative behind, a woman called Zoe Palaeologa. She happened to be a Catholic. The Pope, seeing a chance of bringing the straying sheep of the Greek Church back into his own fold, suggested a marriage between Ivan and Zoe. The wedding took place and Zoe changed her name to Sophia. But nothing came of the deeply-laid plans of the Pope. Instead, Ivan grew more independent than ever. He realized that this was his opportunity to assume the rôle formerly played by the rulers of Byzantium. He adopted the coat-of-arms of Constantinople, the famous double-headed eagle, representing both the eastern and western Roman Empires. He made himself sacrosanct, He reduced his nobles to the rank of servants. He introduced the old strict etiquette of Byzantium at his own little Court of Moscow. He played with the idea that he was now the only “Caesar” left in the world, and his grandson, emboldened by the continued success of his house, finally proclaimed himself Emperor or Caesar of all the parts of Russia he was able to conquer.
In the year 1598 the last descendant of the old Norse invaders, the last scion of the Rurik family, died. After fifteen years of civil war, a member of the Romanov family—Moscow nobles of no particular consequence—made himself Tsar, and from that time the geography of Russia is merely the reflection of the political ambitions of these Romanovs, who had many positive faults but a corresponding number of such very positive virtues that we may well overlook some of their failings.
For one thing, they were all possessed of the fixed idea that no sacrifices were too great when it was a question of giving their subjects direct access to ‘open water.’ They tried it in the south and hacked their way through to the Black Sea, to Azov and Sebastopol, only to find that the Turks cut them off from the Mediterranean. But these campaigns assured them the royal allegiance of the ten Cossack tribes, the descendants of the old Kazaki or free-booters, adventurers or runaway serfs who during the previous five centuries had fled into the wilderness to escape from their Polish or Tartar masters. They engaged in a war with the Swedes who had held practically all the territory around the Baltic since their successful participation in the Thirty Years War, and finally, after half a century of fighting, Tsar Peter could order hundreds of thousands of his subjects into the marshes of the Neva to build him Ms new capital of St Petersburg. But the Finnish Gulf was frozen over for four months of every year, and ‘open water’ was as for off as ever. They followed the Onega River and the Dwina River right through the heart of the Tundra region—the mossy plains of the Arctic—and they built themselves a new city on the White Sea which they called after the Archangel Michael; but the inhospitable Kanin peninsula was as far removed from Europe as the frozen shores of the Hudson Bay, and the Murman coast was carefully avoided by all Dutch and English skippers. The task seemed hopeless. There remained no other way out than to try the eastern route.
In 1581 a band of runaway slaves and adventurers and prisoners of war from half a dozen European nations, all in all some sixteen hundred men, had crossed the Ural Mountains and, driven by necessity, had attacked the first Tartar Khan whom they met on their way east, the ruler of a region called Sibir or Siberia. They had defeated him and had divided his possessions among themselves. But knowing that the arm of Moscow reached far, they had offered this territory to the Tsar rather than await the day the troops of the Little Father should follow them to hang them as deserters and rebels, instead of rewarding them as true patriots who had contributed to the glory of their beloved sovereign.
This strange method of colonization was kept up for almost a century and a half. The vast plain that lay stretched out before these ‘bad men’ was sparsely populated. It was fertile. The northern half was prairie but the southern half was covered with forests. Soon they had left the river Ob behind them. Then the Yenisei was reached. As early as 1628 the advance-guard of this unsavoury army of invasion reached the Lena, and in 1639 they stood on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk. Further towards the south they built their earliest fortress on Lake Baikal, shortly after 1640. They explored the Amur River in 1648. In the same year a Cossack, Dejnev by name, had sailed down the Kolyma River in northern Siberia, had followed the shores of the Arctic Ocean until he reached the strait that separates Asia from America and had returned to tell the tale, which, however, attracted so little attention that when Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator in Russian employ, rediscovered these straits eighty years later he was permitted to give them his own name.
From 1581 till 1648 is a period of 67 years. When you consider that it took the American colonists about two centuries to cover the distance between the Alleghenies and the Pacific coast, it becomes evident that the Russians are not always as slow as we are sometimes led to believe. But not content with having added the whole of S
iberia to their original holdings, the Russians finally crossed from. Asia into America, and long before George Washington was carried to his grave there was quite a thriving Russian colony around a fort called after the Archangel Gabriel, now known as Sitka, the town in which the formal transfer of Alaska from Russia to America took place in the year 1867.
EASTERN SIBERIA
As for as energy and personal courage and reckless bravery were concerned, these earliest Russian pioneers compared more than favourably with the early American settlers. But the Asiatic conception of Empire that still dominated the minds of those in power in Moscow and St Petersburg prevented the normal development of a region where riches of every sort awaited the men who would know how to exploit them. Instead of developing the pastures and the forests and the mines, Russia turned Siberia into a gigantic gaol.
The first prisoners arrived during the middle of the seventeenth century, fifty years after Yermak had crossed the Urals, and they consisted of priests who refused to say Mass according to the orthodox formula and who were therefore sent to the banks of the Amur to starve and freeze to death. Since then there has never been any interruption of that endless procession of men and women (and ofttimes children) who were being driven into the wilderness because their European sense of individualism had come into conflict with the Asiatic notion of conformity that was the basic law of the old Russian form of government. The peak of these deportations was reached in 1863, shortly after the last great Polish revolution when more than 50,000 Polish patriots were moved from the Vistula River to the neighbourhood of Tomsk and Irkutsk. No precise statistics have ever been kept of the total number of these involuntary emigrants, but from 1800 to 1900, when the system was slightly modified under heavy pressure from abroad, the mean annual average of exiles was about 20,000. That, however, did not take into account the ordinary criminals, the murderers and petty thieves and pickpockets, who as often as not were shackled to men and women of great spiritual refinement whose only error consisted in loving their fellow-men more than they deserved.
When their actual time of punishment had come to an end, the survivors were given little pieces of land near one of the exile villages and were allowed to become independent farmers. On paper this was a marvellous scheme to get the country inhabited by white men, and it allowed the Imperial Government to show its European stock-holders that it was really not as bad as it was sometimes painted—that there was some system in all this Siberian madness—the ‘criminal’ was being educated to become a useful and productive member of society. In practice, however, it worked so well that the greater part of these so-called ‘free settlers’ disappeared from the face of the earth without leaving trace of their whereabouts. Perhaps they went to live with one of the native tribes, became Mohammedans or heathen, and bade farewell to Christian civilization. Perhaps they tried to escape and were eaten by the wolves. We don’t know. Russian police statistics show that there were always between thirty and fifty thousand ex-convicts on the loose, hiding in the forest or the mountains, preferring any sort of hardship to the prison-yards of the Little White Father. But the imperial flag no longer flies over the Siberian bullpen. It is now the flag of the Soviets. There has been a new deal. But the cards are the same, and they are of Tartar origin.
What happened to Russia when the old agricultural system of barter and serfdom came to an end and was replaced by capitalism and industrialism is a matter of general knowledge. A few years before Lincoln signed the Act of Emancipation, the Russian serfs had been set free. In order to keep them alive, they were given a little bit of land, but never quite enough, and the land that was given unto the slave was taken away from the master. As a result, neither the master nor his former servant got enough to be able to pay his way. And all the time, foreign capital was reaching out after the hidden mineral treasures of the vast Russian plain. Railways were built, steamship lines were organized, and European engineers waded through the mud of semi-Asiatic villages built round a replica of the Paris Grand Opera and asked themselves whether such things could be.
That primitive barbaric strength that had given the founders of the Russian dynasty the courage to attempt the impossible had spent itself. A weak man dominated by his wife, who in her turn was dominated by a sinister and unscrupulous priest, now sat on the throne of the great Peter. And when circumstances forced him to take part in a war that was incomprehensible to most of his subjects, he signed his death-warrant.
A little, bald-headed man, a graduate of the great Siberian school of exile, took hold of the ruin and began the work of reconstruction. He discarded the old European model and he discarded the old Asiatic model. He discarded everything old. He built ever with an eye for the future, but it was still the eye of the Tartar.
What that future will be we shall know a hundred years hence. Here it is sufficient if we give you a vague outline of the modern Soviet state, but only a very vague one, for the system is in a constant state of flux. The Bolshevists are engaged in an experiment, and they are as ruthless in discarding what proves impracticable as a chemist who suddenly realizes that he has been working according to the wrong formula. Furthermore, the system is so absolutely different from anything to which we ourselves have been accustomed these last five hundred years that it is difficult to reduce it to the usual European or American terminology of statecraft with its continual references to “representative government” and “democracy” and “the sacred rights of the minority.” These terms mean nothing to a youngster brought up in a Bolshevist school. He has never even heard of them, except as an example of the folly of his ancestors.
In the first place, the Bolshevist conception of government is not based upon that rule of government of all the people by all the people for the benefit of all the people, which we teach our children as the most desirable ideal of statesmanship, whether we quite believe in it or not. Bolshevism recognizes only one class of society, that of the proletarians, the wage-earners, the workers, preferably those who work with their hands. And in order that this class may attain, some of the good things of this world of which it has so far been deprived, it has declared a ruthless war upon all those who in any way could remind the people of this year of grace of the old ‘bourgeois’ or middle-class form of government which, was based upon private profit and private gain.
So far so good. Violent upheavals are nothing new in this world. Charles of England and Louis of France lost their heads a long time before Lenin was born. But when they died, a man, rather than a system, came to an end. When Nicholas II was murdered, it was not only a man but also the entire system this man had embodied and represented which was scrapped and which was forcibly removed from the Russian consciousness. The old account was closed and two little red lines were drawn at the bottom of the page. Then a fresh, new page was started and at the top of it appeared the name, “The Communist Party of Russia, Ltd.”
Now Communism as an economic system is nothing new. The old monastic orders were really communistic institutions and they in turn were based upon the communism of the early Christian Church, which recognized neither rich nor poor and did not believe in private property. The Pilgrims, when they came to America, intended to form a communistic community. But all these efforts to bring about a more equitable division of this world’s goods had been conducted on a relatively small basis. They had never touched the lives of the people at large. And there is where the Bolshevist experiment differs from all others. It has turned the whole of the Russian plain from the Baltic to the Pacific into one vast political and economic laboratory where everybody is supposed to work for just one purpose—the well-being and happiness of the mass, regardless of the present happiness and wellbeing of the individuals. But just as in the older days it was never quite possible for a Russian to rid himself of that duality of character which had been caused by the dual nature of his country, half-Asiatic and half-European, so the new Russian too is suffering’ from a conflict of enthusiasms which very frequently defeat their own end
s.
THE GREAT RUSSIAN PLAIN
The basic structure of the new Soviet Society is undoubtedly of European origin. The methods employed to put it into action are entirely Asiatic. Karl Marx and Genghis Khan have joined forces to bring about the Millennium and what will come of this extraordinary experiment I do not know. One prophecy is as good as the next.
But already Bolshevism has accomplished certain results with which the rest of humanity will have to deal very seriously at the risk of seeing its own civilizations go to pieces.
In the older days Russia was ruled for the sole benefit of a small group of landowners and supporters of the Tsar, just as it had been in the days of the Tartars. It is still being ruled by a small group of people. But now they belong to the inner circle of the Communist party. They are fewer in number than the old-style nobility but even more devoted in their loyalty to the principle of autocracy.
There is however a great difference between the dictatorship of the Tsars and that of the Bolshevists. The small group of people who are now governing Russia are not working for their own benefit. They receive such wages as any British plumber or stevedore would sniff at, provided he happened to have work and was receiving any wages at all. And the truly gigantic energy developed by these new tyrants (who are infinitely more ruthless than the Tsar’s ministers ever dared to be) is directed towards one single object—to make everybody in the world work and to see to it that the workers, in exchange for their labours, are guaranteed enough food, enough living space, and every possible opportunity for leisure of the more intelligent scut.
To our western way of thinking, all this is about as topsy-turvy as Einstein’s conception of a four- or five-dimensional universe. But one-seventh of all the land of this planet, a country three times as large as the United States, is now living under this system, a system that is making itself felt all over the world. It is not being preached by some poor little country like Norway or Switzerland, but by one of the richest nations on earth, possessed of every form of wealth. Pious prayers and angry editorials will hardly upset it, because the Russian people are completely cut off from the rest of the world, read very few foreign books, never see any but strictly censored foreign newspapers, and might as well be living on the planet Mars for all they really know about their neighbours. The leaders, of course, are aware of the criticism that is levelled against them, but they don’t care. They are too busy doing other things, organizing their White Russian Republics and their Ukrainian Soviet Republic and their Trans-Caucasian Federation of Soviet Republics and their Kirghiz Soviet Republic and their Bashkir Republic and their Tartar Soviet Republics, to spend much time worrying about the approval or disapproval of that western world which they profess to regard as a pathetic historical revival, a nice exhibition for the museum of anti-religion, opened some years ago in the Tsar’s former palace.
The Home of Mankind Page 21