Chapter I: Some False Impressions

In my travels over European and Asiatic Russia, I have often been asked by apparently intelligent Russian people whether, in view of the Indian and negro admixture, it will ever be possible to civilize the American masses. My own sister anxiously asked me what was the ratio of white people in such Indian cities as New York and Chicago. I couldn’t help laughing at such questions, and often answered by telling my curious Russian friends that there are practically only Indians in this country of expectation and promise--white Indians!

Further discussion of American topics often brought out the fact that having learned that mob violence occurred in the United States and that negroes were burned at stake, my friends came to the conclusion that a people displaying such barbarism could only be the progeny of inferior Indian and negro admixture. For this reason, they believed one could find white people only in certain parts of the country and that yellow or swarthy hybrids filled the other sections.

Built on the spot where Alexander II was killed]

On one occasion a Russian Countess, who lived in the interior of one of the Black Belt provinces, and had a national reputation as a philanthropist and social worker, hotly and rudely retorted to a remark of mine, that the lynchings of the United States ought to be stopped by the well-drilled soldiers of Europe, that the President ought to be executed for not exercising his power to stop these inhuman and outrageous death penalties, which proved conclusively that the Americans were not entitled to be called a civilized people. It did require some explanation indeed to convince her that our President could hardly be held responsible for mob violence, that it was discountenanced by all good American citizens as well as by the major portion of the press. To further free the mind of the Countess from these erroneous impressions, I reminded her that even in her own Russia men have been known to take the law into their own hands under pressure of circumstances, and cited a case, then in the public eye, of a certain Count of Crimea who was killed by his nephew for having compromised the wife of the latter, and that a jury of twelve representative Russian gentlemen adjudged the culprit “not guilty,” and that, too, when the Count had been one of Russia’s richest and most influential noblemen, and a member of the Emperor’s Council. But the Countess would not be wholly persuaded. “If your President,” she persisted, “should not be held accountable for these horrible lynchings--of which we read pages and pages--why do you Americans hold our gracious Emperor responsible for the deeds of criminals--deeds which often make us blush for our country--and this when your own United States seem to have their share of the lawless and unrestrained!”

“Is not the excuse for such degeneracy greater with the Russians,” continued she, “since we have been the slaves of the barbarous Mongol-Tartars for three hundred years and it has been our hard lot to have had to assume the responsibility of educating fifty-three millions of peasants, slaves for three hundred years, and who were only liberated about the time your negroes became free men? Then, too, some of our best people had become hybridized by the injection of the dreadful Mongolian Tartar blood, the demoralizing influence of which can be only likened to the awful effect of wolf blood when introduced into a Scotch collie. To this day still applies the French proverb ‘_Gratez le russe et vous trouvez le tartar_’ (Scratch the skin of the Russian and you will find the Tartar).”

Of a similar trend was the opinion of Prince Khilkoff, who, in order to learn railroading, spent twelve years in America. “Instead of having practically every race on earth to contend with,” he had stated, “your people are rather homogeneous. They have not had to fight Asiatic hordes of Mongols and Malays for nearly a thousand years. They are not shut off from the world as we are by the jealousy of Europe, which has denied us an outlet. We have no access to the Atlantic Ocean--and that is practically true of the Pacific, and little can be gained by sailing on the frozen Arctic seas. Why do your people,” he asked, “insult our Emperor, who is the kindest-hearted man in the world, and who suffers more than any other Russian when mob law becomes rampant in certain communities? Moreover,” the Prince continued, “having been the Minister of Railways during the Japanese-Russian war, and having had _entrée_ into the court of our ruler, I know how he suffered because the war with Japan could not be averted. The senseless attacks made upon him by the all-powerful Semitic newspapers in the United States were certainly uncalled for, and what especially pained me was the fact that these papers were able to turn the entire country against our government and our nation, all of which we resented and which cost your people millions in loss of trade.”

Such, then, are some of the ideas current in Russia concerning America and Americans. Are the conceptions of Russia and the Russians given credence in the United States as true or just?

To the American who has made no special study of Russian conditions, Russia is a country without a summer, with frozen landscapes, midnight sun, and everywhere a covering of snow. He pictures the sleigh with its troika as the mode of transportation, the wolves chasing behind; buildings in wild and gaudy colors, terminating in bulb-like steeples, resembling Mohammedan mechets; private houses, barbarously decorated inside and out. The people of Russia, in his mind, are divided into several highly dramatic types: diplomats hiding behind tapestry to hear the state secrets of unsuspecting foreigners, crooked generals who can be bribed for a dollar, gendarmes and Nihilists, poor, starving peasants, who are always being knutted, robbed by the police or the Russian priests, cigarette-smoking Nihilist princesses, who have sacrificed themselves to secure liberty for the peasants. And if his mind goes beyond this, the American layman fills in the picture with gendarmes of the Ochrana constantly plotting against peaceful citizens and arranging for their deportation to Siberia, without giving them even a trial; with dreaded Cossacks, who, in conjunction with the police, delight in chopping Jews to pieces or knocking them senseless with knotted wire whips called “knuts”; with brilliantly dressed Tartars, swooping down upon the people and gouging out their eyes. And these divers classes are supposed to be ruled by a bloodthirsty Tzar, who lives somewhere in dreaded Russia, and who is in perpetual fear of being transported to another sphere by way of a Nihilistic bomb.

Built in 1554 by Tzar Ivan IV, and at that time said to have been the most beautiful in the world]

These are some of the mistaken impressions of Russia prevailing in this country. To trace their origin, we must bear in mind that all peoples have a love of the sensational and will more readily accept as true a highly colored tale of adventure than a calm, dispassionate statement of facts. Then, too, a certain element of the press delights in pandering to the appetite for the marvelous.

Some six years ago, I had an experience which vividly illustrated this point. I was in Odessa at the time, and that city was then considered one of the quietest in Europe. I remember being amused by reading in the Paris edition of the New York _Herald_ an Associated Press despatch announcing another dreadful Jewish massacre in that city. On the night of the supposed massacre, I had been with a party of friends, motoring through Odessa, until three o’clock in the morning, and we had been aware of no disturbance of any kind, nor saw nor heard anything that might have been construed as a commotion. When, later, we showed the paper to Governor Tolmatchoff, he laughingly remarked that if we stayed long enough in Odessa, we would have a chance to read more such despatches, as they were being sent to New York from time to time, and from there cabled back to Paris, by a certain class of anarchistically inclined Hebrews, to stir up the minds of the better class of their own people and of the Gentiles, and open a channel of revenue, supposedly for the cause of the downtrodden Jews. The means so obtained, the Governor told us, seldom reached the people for whom they were intended, and generally went to further the ends of the anarchists and revolutionists and, he laughingly concluded, to contradict these false reports would consume the entire Russian budget!

Practically everything written on the subject frightfully exaggerates the worst conditions of Russia and projects those false impressions into intelligent American thought. Even Tolstoy, the most popular Russian author in America, has not helped the American people to get an unbiased view of the Russians, and many there are who do not realize that the social evils he so ably depicts in his books are universal maladies--alike in one way or another in all countries.

Its weight is 440,000 pounds. It is 20 feet in height and 60 feet in circumference. The value of the metal in the bell is estimated at $2,000,000. Originally it hung in a tower, which was burned in 1737, and now it lies at the foot of the “Tower of Veliky,” built in 1600 by Ivan the Terrible]

The truth of the situation was well expressed by the English girl who said she greatly preferred English stories of Russia to Russian stories because the Russian accounts lacked local color, while the English tales of Russia were so much more Russian.

Careful observers have noticed that in the past twenty years, England, Germany and France have tried in every possible way to influence our people in favor of their countries. Their ambassadors delivered numerous lectures, never missed a national convention, and inspired many newspaper and magazine articles to turn the trend of public opinion in the United States their way. We cannot say the Russian representatives made many efforts to defend their country, nor have Russian writers done even as much.

It seems deplorable that the Russian Department of Foreign Affairs has not always exercised the best judgment in the selection of its consuls, and has sent men to represent her here whom it would have been best not to introduce to the American public. This fact has been brought to the attention of the chief officials, but since the United States showed a hostile attitude toward Russia in the Japanese war, and in various other ways have expressed their unfriendliness, it seemed to them that Russia’s efforts to cope with the situation here were futile, and even should she send her most capable diplomats to America, the press would hear no word in her defense, thanks mostly to a certain hostile Hebrew influence. Only this year, one of the principal directors of the Ministry told me that he was assured by some of the men who had in the past represented the Department in America, that nobody could say anything in favor of Russia on account of the attitude of the press. I did not hesitate to produce numerous articles, written by my friends and myself, and published by some of the largest newspapers in the country in defense of Russia, and proved that some of the consuls had apparently tried to hide their criminal inactivity by making false statements.

It is only fair, however, to mention the fact that at present Russia is very fortunate in having such representatives at Washington as Mr. Bakhmeteff and Mr. Scherbatskoi. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is to be congratulated not only for this wise selection, but for that of Mr. Oustinoff, as consul general at New York, and for that of his able assistant, the courteous Mr. de Routsky. Through these worthy gentlemen, it seems Russia is at last bestirring herself and trying to make an effort to explain to us her many and intricate problems, and to right the wrong beliefs and prejudices fostered in the American mind by misrepresentations and falsehoods.

It would be greatly to Russia’s benefit should she be able to deflect the stream of travel over the eastern continent, and obtain for herself the enormous amounts spent annually by American tourists to see countries no more interesting than her own. To one who knows Russia, it is pleasant to recall some typical country scene. The level land divided into narrow strips, sown with barley, rye, wheat, corn and flax, presents a veritable checkerboard appearance, here and there interspersed with low-housed villages. In southern Russia, these generally consist of squat one-story adobe houses, gorgeously painted in all the shades of blue, vermilion, red and yellow, and often pure white, while in northern Russia, the dwellings are quite presentable frame houses. In the center of the hamlet is the church with its five or more bulb-shaped cupolas crowned with the Greek Catholic cross resting on the crescent, and this edifice, like the “isbas” or peasant huts, is beautifully decorated in and outside. Near the church stand the two most pretentious houses of the village, one for the school-teacher, the other for the priest of the “derevnia,” as the village is termed. Beyond, is the laundry place for the inhabitants. Here the women sing joyously as they work. Close by is the bathing place, a shallow pool in the river, where with the utter unselfconsciousness of children, men and women sometimes bathe together in Nature’s costume. And over all, hovers the beautiful calm--the peace which comes to minds innocent of the thousand conflicting, complicating circumstances of city life. Shakespeare could have spoken as truly of this country as he did of the Forest of Arden, when he made Duke Senior say,

“Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
And this life exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

Russia has thousands upon thousands of such hamlets, yet what a totally different picture of her peasant life is maliciously projected into the minds of those unacquainted with her!

From left to right: (1) The “starosta,” or village elder. (2) Village secretary. (3) Village school teacher. (4) The “Uriadnick,” or chief of village police. (5) The “Schits,” or town crier. Only the “Uriadnick” is a full-blooded Russian Slav. The others are of Teutonic origin]

No less applicable to Russia than to any other nation is the truism that the physical characteristics of a country more than anything else determine the occupation and character of its inhabitants. The two most important features of Russia in this respect are its uniformity of surface and its absence of sea front free from ice. These two characteristics present the keynote to the history of the Russian nation, and to the character of the Russian people. The uniformity of surface and the similarity of surroundings have always given impulse to immigration and expansion.

From the point of view of production, Russia may be divided into four zones of uneven extent: (1) the great forests of the north; (2) the black land of the central provinces; (3) the zone of arable steppes; (4) the deserts of the south and southeast. The largest of these belts is that of the forests, which extends from the center of Russia to the frozen marshes of the north. The so-called “chernoziem” or black belt stretches from the banks of the river Prut to the Black Sea and is a region of wonderful fertility, and forms a wheat-growing section larger by one-third than the State of Texas. It was from this very part of the country that Athens once drew her grain supply. Southeast of this great section is the region of the arable steppes, the prairie home of the Cossack or Russian soldier cowboy, and beyond, lie the great deserts of West Turkestan.

Owing to the level character of the country, the climate of Russia presents great contrasts in temperature. In winter the land is ice-bound from the Arctic more or less to the Black Sea, and in summer, in certain parts, it is too hot to go about in the day-time. Such, then, is the plain of Russia, “mountain begirdled,” as the Tartar puts it; the great plain into which have poured Novgorodians, Laps, Finns, Esthonians, Letts, Lithuanians, Votishs, Tartars, Poles, Kalmucks, Armenians, Circassians, Georgians, Mongolians and countless others; the plain which comprises one-seventh of the world’s area and is the home of a hundred and eighty million souls.