Chapter II: The Russian Mind

Ever since the dawn of her history Russia has vegetated, rather than lived, apart from the main European currents--social, religious, political, and scientific--untouched by the prevailing tendencies of the times and with a decided drift of her own to political decomposition. As the democratic spirit progressed in the rest of Europe, Russia more and more resembled the iceberg floating into warm climes and thawing as it moved. Her rulers would appear to have had no clear conception of the baleful kind of international entity into which their predatory State had become, of its essential antagonism to the European community of nations, or of the utter collapse of the whole fabric that must ensue upon a serious endeavour to change its nature and bring it into line with the communities of the West. It was only by dint of circumstance and brute force that the people, naturally rebellious to social discipline, had been knit into a loose organisation which aimed not merely at protection from outside aggression but also and especially at territorial expansion, and in this way had to dispense with creating conditions favourable to the highest social life.

The most merciless, if not the most convincing, analyses of the national character have been made by Russians themselves, who are prone to morbid introspection and also to exaggeration and often indulge in self-abasement. Take, as example, the utterance of Peter the Great, "Other European peoples one can treat as human beings, but I have to do with cattle." The celebrated Tshaadayeff, who headed the reform movement in the reign of Nicholas I. and bade his countrymen look to the West for light and guidance, described Russia as a superfluous member of the body of humanity. "No great truth," he affirmed, "ever came from out of our people. We have discovered nothing, and {12} from all the discoveries made by other nations we have borrowed only the outward simulacrum of useful luxury."[1] For these and similar opinions Tshaadayeff, the officer of the Guards, was shut up in a mad-house. It may not be amiss, therefore, to quote one of the few native psychologists who is free from those defects of self-castigation and over-statement and paints the generality of his countrymen in colours the effect of which is relatively bright. "The Russian man," writes M. Nikitenko,[2] "knows neither law nor justice. His morality is the outcome of his good humour, which being neither developed nor strengthened by conscious principles, sometimes sprouts forth into an action, but is frequently swallowed up by other and more savage instincts. A Russian may steal and booze and cheat until you find it irksome to live with him. And yet in spite of it all you feel that there is something in him that captivates and draws you towards him, something good, intelligent, fraught with promise, something that raises him above the level of every German, every Frenchman, and even Englishman you ever met."[3]

Now that undefined something is, I take it, the psychical undercurrent inherent in certain representatives of the race, the latent spiritual force which assimilates fleeting moods or, as mystics would say, fleeting moods to fitful memories of a pre-natal state or fleeting presentiments of a wondrous future. For the higher type of Russian, educated or illiterate, is attracted, at least speculatively, to lofty ideals, and is also capable of striving after them for a time with a superb contempt of consequence, heroically heedless of the route he traverses, but without method or perseverance. The result is often as tragi-comical as was that of the genius who with his gaze fixed on the stars tripped and fell into a boghole. The limits of the sphere of dream and waking, the bounds of true and false, the line of demarcation between the sublime and the ridiculous, pale and vanish as the fanatical Russian follows a Jack-o'-lantern into the enchanted land of fantasy. {13} On the absurd incongruities and follies to which visionaries are led by these vain strivings to bring down the ideals of the millennium to the earth and clothe them in the garb of every-day reality it is needless to dwell. One has but to cast a glance at the horrors enacted in Petrograd and Odessa after the Maximalist revolution or, indeed, to recall certain of the other revolting exhibitions that followed that sinister outburst.

Some observers are struck with what they consider the contrast in the Russian people between the effects of historic forces on the one hand and those of racial tendencies on the other. I venture to think that these effects were largely caused by the blending of widely different races. That they exist and that Russia is the synthesis of contradictions cannot be gainsaid by those who have studied the origins of her people. "Meekness and brutality, communism and the most advanced individualism, the strongest state and the weakest political consciousness, absence of race-hatred and the most cruel pogroms, the deepest religious nature and the most abject superstition, an all-pervading democracy and the most absolute monarchy, all these contradictions and more are the result of this unique jostling of mythical antiquity and stark reality--an eternal and inextricable enigma to the Western observer."[4] After ages of spiritual stagnation and politico-social bondage the Russian man is still half a child and half an imperfectly tamed beast. But if he lacks culture he has a rich experience and a stoical life-philosophy enshrined in picturesque proverbs of which the basis is resignation to Fate and pity for his ill-starred fellows; his language is rich, coloured, and forcible, but his thinking lacks sequence and his reasoning logic; his action begins in hesitation, is continued with intervals of quiescence, and almost always ends before achievement. Deeds belie words, means hinder ends, indifference compensates for lack of constancy. In his dealings with his fellows the Russian often runs through the entire gamut of temperament from feminine gentleness to bestial ferocity.

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To bring out these characteristics of the dominant race, foremost among which is a marked tendency to embroider truth and subject the call of duty to the passing mood, and to trace them to their sources was one of the objects of a book of mine[5] written many years ago which has since received the hall-mark of approval from the greatest Russian authority[6] on these questions.[7] I there pointed out that a careful survey of the leading elements of social life in that country must convince the unbiassed of the need of a standard of judgment wholly different from that which we are wont to apply to other European races, the Russian being still, so to say, in the gristle, not yet hardened in the bone of manhood.

By nature the Northern Slavs are richly gifted. A keen subtle understanding; surprising quickness of apprehension--a changeful temper; an inexhaustible flow of animal spirits; a rude persuasive eloquence; and a capacity for self-denial equalled only by that of the early Christian ascetics and for fiendish cruelty comparable to that of the Redskins of North America,[8] to which may be added an imitative {15} faculty almost simian in range and intensity--constitute an adequate equipment for the discharge of what worldly-minded statesmen were wont to term their "heaven-sent mission to civilise the world." But these and other gifts were blighted and turned into curses by influences--natural and artificial--that made their free exercise impossible and rendered their possessors as impersonal as the men who raised the pyramids in the desert or the builders of the coral reefs in the Pacific. The resultant is an easy-going, patient, shiftless, ignorant, unveracious, and fitfully ferocious mass whom the German writers flippantly connect by an isocultural line with the Gauchos of Paraguay.

Incapacity to gauge and maintain the proper relation in which words should stand to things lies at the root of one Russian quality hardly distinguishable from the mythopœic faculty among primitive races, but which Anglo-Saxons bluntly label unveracity. It is beyond question a trait of the Northern Russ. The masses display scant reverence for facts, refuse to acknowledge their finality, and argue as though they could be safely disregarded, nay, even altered at a pinch. Their imagination is powerful enough to fuse, recast, and readjust them to their velleities. To time, space, and causality they ascribe but a shadowy existence, and even that they often ignore in practice. Thus a whole generation of professional revolutionaries passed their time fruitlessly operating with words and doing nothing. The life of the reformer Bakunin was a continuous battle--fought with empty phrases for a mere negation.

Congruously with this mental cast the Russians are free and easy in their use of words as exponents of facts, or symbols of ideas, and set so much less value than Western peoples on assurances and promises, however solemn, that they rob praise of its worth and calumny of its sting. I shall never forget an anecdote told me many years ago by my friend the novelist, Leskoff, of an Englishman invited to Russia by Nicholas I. for the sole purpose of becoming acquainted with Gogol's story _Dead Souls_, which had not yet been translated into any foreign tongue. A nobleman {16} equally well at home in English and Russian was told off by the Emperor to visit the new-comer daily and translate the book orally chapter by chapter. At the farewell audience accorded to him on his departure the guest was asked by the Tsar how he relished the novel. The Briton reflected a moment and then exclaimed with an air of deep conviction, "The Russians, sire, are unconquerable." "Unconquerable?" queried the Tsar, puzzled by the seemingly irrelevant reply. "I don't quite see the nexus." "Well, your Majesty, no other people on the face of God's earth could have produced such a consummate cheat as Gogol's hero. The nation that brought him forth is sheer unconquerable."

Thus hampered alike by their qualities and their defects, the bulk of the nation--I am dealing now exclusively with the Great Russian, who represents only 48 per cent. of the population[9]--is obviously still unfitted to discharge the functions that devolve upon a self-governing democracy. And interest as well as duty made it incumbent on the popular leaders to give practical recognition to this decisive fact while endeavouring to modify it by educating the people. This step presupposed a high degree of moral courage; and it was never taken. One prominent man, my friend, Maxim Kovalevsky, fearlessly proclaimed the truth and garnered in unpopularity. And yet a policy of this limited scope need not have damped the reformers' ardour nor affected their ultimate aims. After all, politics is the art of the possible, and the possible is gauged by studying the material to be handled, and is attained by accepting compromises after having balanced the inconveniences. But even the educated class of the Russian population, the "intellectuals," are admittedly deficient in political sense as well as in deep-rooted concrete interests. One cannot affect surprise at this, considering their origin as a class, their status in the community, and the ruthless way in which the Tsar's government {17} suppressed the application of individual thought and energy to all national and most international concerns. Neither is it to be wondered at that so many Russian reformers were impractical day-dreamers, willing to sacrifice the feasible good for the unattainable best, and always liable to run off at a tangent in quest of some secondary aim. Had it been otherwise, had the party chiefs, who in October, 1905, aspired to lead the Russian masses, drawn a lesson from the events of that time and borne that lesson in mind in 1917 when surveying the new situation and gauging its trend and possibilities, they would have shrunk from the destruction of their last plank of safety, the Duma, and the abolition of the Tsardom, and abstained from the acts that led up to these suicidal measures. For say what we may, the blast that destroyed the monarchy and shattered the nation came directly from the Duma leaders, semi-consciously aided and abetted by the simple-minded representatives of the Entente, whom history may come to regard as drowsy, if not sleeping, partners of the active plotters.

One can feel for the Entente powers who nobly set out to do battle for the weak and oppressed nationalities in the company of the greatest oppressor of weak nationalities the world had ever seen--the one predatory State in Europe which glutted its piratical appetites not only on foreign peoples but also on its own. It was like the shepherd's dogs taking a pack of wolves with them to look after the defenceless sheep. And the Entente governments were painfully alive to all that was ridiculous and embarrassing in their position, especially when they had been bullied into promising Constantinople to Russia and agreeing to treat the fate of Poland as a domestic Russian concern. Naturally they were impatient to see the Tsardom democratised and, ignorant of the State structure with which they were dealing, they bent its pillars and pulled down the whole fabric.

Not only were the character and defects of the predominant element of the population--the Russian race--uniformly misunderstood by the chiefs of the parliamentary party in Petrograd and their friends abroad, but the further {18} all-important circumstance was unheeded that there was no ethnic unity in the Empire, nor anything more politically than a loose amalgam of conflicting nationalities and mutually conflicting classes knit together by awe of imperial authority and the pressure exerted by an omnipotent bureaucracy. Internal cement there was none. For ages the souls of the many subject races had been waiting for some great crisis to fuse them in one and embody them anew in the product of a cultural blend. Some onlookers imagine that the present world-war was destined to be the Medea's cauldron that would transform or kill, but, whether this was likely or not, it behoved those politicians who imagined that they held the nation's future in their hands to eschew everything calculated to intensify the mutual aversion of the ethnic ingredients whose fusion was the preliminary condition to the formation of a homogeneous people in a united and indivisible Russia. The chiefs, however, unconscious of the danger and solicitous about their parties, suddenly removed the one force that could have kept the nationalities and classes together, whereupon these collapsed like the staves of a barrel from which the hoops have been knocked off. And their collapse was so natural, so necessary, the elements being juxtaposed as they were, that it could and should have been foreseen. One of the main objects of my articles and book written in the years 1891-93 was to prepare the public for the downfall of the Tsardom.

It is fair to say, however, that the coalescence of all Russia's peoples being neither feasible nor desirable, that of the principal culture-bearers would have sufficed. Slav and Turk, German and Calmuck, Jew and Mongol, Tunguz and Georgian, Armenian and Bashkir, display physiological and psychical differences so vast that the resultant of assimilation must be in every respect unsound. In all such cases the moral grade is lowered, for great racial divergences in the elements of an ethnic blend necessarily beget degeneration. In a ruling or self-governing race it is basic character that regulates the morality of the community, shapes its destinies, determines its place in the world. Consequently {19} history is at bottom the manifestation of national character rather than of average intelligence, the working of the moral bent much more than of the intellectual gifts and attainments of the people. And under normal conditions neither in the race nor in the individual is character liable to change. It is my belief, however, that an exception is made by the character of the Russian which is marked by variability. Soft, receptive, and pliant it lacks grit and backbone. In initiative, self-mastery, and staying power the individual is sadly deficient and the people have less than an average nation's share of cohesiveness. To use a picturesque American expression they are not "self-winders." Indeed, one might aptly term Russia "the boneless man of Europe."

Of all the individual and, therefore, also racial traits of the Northern Slav the most noteworthy to my thinking, and one to which I have never seen any allusion in books or articles, is precisely this variability of character. I mention this peculiarity only after long years of observation and merely as a surmise which still needs verification. Impressibility to certain classes of motive and corresponding indifference to others constitute the woof and warp of human character, and character--the bedrock of personality--is deemed to be almost as unchangeable as the inherent properties of things. It may sound rash, therefore, to affirm that the Russian differs from other Europeans in the inconstancy of his impressibility to a given class of motive in its liability to vary in response to inner and outer influences which generally elude analysis. But to my thinking the facts warrant the assumption. And for this reason the most careful estimates of what a Russian will do under a given set of circumstances, even though his antecedents be known and examples of his past conduct be there to guide one, cannot be taken as trustworthy and are often belied by the event.

When during a critical stage in the process of racial amalgamation a politico-social upheaval brings turbulent chaos in its train, as in the year 1917, the danger is indeed formidable. It is then touch and go with the inchoate nation. The ethnic elements either combine definitely, forming a {20} _tertium quid_ as did the heterogeneous races of France, or else repel each other violently as do the nationalities of Austria. The former result was rapidly brought about by the French Revolution which smoothed away the jarring traits of Picards and Normans, Bretons and Provençals, Flemings and Basques, producing a one-souled, united French people. The latter consummation is now making headway in Russia, whose Germans, Jews, Finns, Tartars, Mongols, Armenians, Georgians, scornfully refuse to commingle with, and lose themselves in, the passive unassimilating Slav. Their racial and political differences are accentuated as never before, the general tendency is centrifugal, and the desire for union, where union until recently seemed possible, is weakened or gone.

But a still worse calamity threatens the inhabitants of the new republic. Baleful though a revolution may be, it does not necessarily involve the ruin of a country. Indeed, it very often clears the way for a fresh period of evolution under the sway of a new idea. National upheavals generally coincide with the spiritual seed-time of which later generations reap the harvest. In Russia's case, however, the germs of a new order are as yet nowhere visible. Far from this, the loosening of all social and other bonds is the inevitable if not the wished-for goal. No positive idea has been propounded, no constructive effort put forth by any one there. Dogmas on which a section of the nation has been living for ages are now thrust aside as antiquated prejudices and their negatives are gaining a temporary hold over the minds of earnest and hot-headed men. But only their negatives. It is not as though new, untried ideas were sprouting up, from which in time good fruit might reasonably be expected. The barren denial of old ones is judged sufficient, as though mere negatives could serve as the groundwork of a vast social and political structure. The attempted realisation of these negations is now turning the country upside down and inside out; and there is reason to fear that the one practical outcome will be a superfluous and catastrophic demonstration that a mere negation is not a constructive force.

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Since March, 1917, the sole effect of these solvents has been to produce that anarchic decomposition the germs of which were inherent in the Tsardom ever since its birth. In lieu of an ideal leaven to raise and lighten the inert lump, we descry only powerful explosives capable of shattering it. The leading classes had long since forsaken the old tenets, religious and political, and their example contributes to undermine the unreasoning faith of the common people, whose selfish savage instincts superstition or force had so often checked without transforming. Crude notions of an anthropomorphic God and of an apotheosised Tsar continued to be the Hercules' Pillars beyond which the benighted peasant seldom ventured before his emancipation by Alexander II. They marked the end of his world of ideas--the Chinese wall that shut in his horizon. But after that reform they imperceptibly began to lose their significance as moral or political boundaries. In September, 1917, I wrote: "Now that the Tsar is thrust aside and Russia's gods are dead or dying, it is become manifest that there is no more powerful solvent of human communities than the dust of dead divinities. Bestial passions, formerly subdued by ascetic self-restraint or physical fear, are now unleashed; all deterrents are gone since that of capital punishment was abolished, and for the time being anarchy is supreme. The nation is suffering from _delirium tremens_. If Russia has not yet touched bottom in the Slough of Despond her frenzied chiefs may yet sink her deeper. Her revolutionary leaders have no longer a living faith in the principles that lie at the roots of civilised community life, and without the faith which justifies hope even nations cannot be saved."

What part, one may fairly ask, had all those unheeded traits of the Russian people in bringing about the March revolution, and what were its more proximate causes? When and why did the minds of the people first begin to ferment and effervesce, and who was responsible for under-estimating the intensity of the fever and doing nothing to allay it? Does the movement which has culminated in the overthrow of the Tsardom and the disruption of the State involve the {22} utter ruin of both, or is it only one of those violent breaks in the continuous development of a community which mark the close of an epoch of decadence and the opening of an era of fresh vitality and energy? Are the proletarian republics ruled by Lenin, Trotsky, and the more obscure administrators the types of State best adapted to the new cultural plane in which humanity is about to enter after the great world war? To suggest tentative answers to these questions is the main object of the following pages.

The simplest and most reasonable account of the matter would seem to be that a number of widely different causes, racial, political, religious, and others, combined to form both the ethnic clay and the political mould, the material and the instrument, for the work of the fashioning potter, and the finished product could not possibly live in the democratic environment of to-day. Now so far as I know the part attributable to the inborn predispositions of the people has in no previous analysis been clearly stated, nor even the influence of institutions on their leanings, ideals, and moral temper. The lightning-flare of the revolution by revealing the ex-subjects of the Tsar in an unfamiliar, not to say repellent, aspect has whetted curiosity as to the sources whence the race drew its social life-current. And I have long believed that the best materials for a satisfactory answer to this question might be found in a study of its racial origins and transmitted tendencies.

When assigning to political institutions their part in bringing about the great national crisis, native and foreign writers are wont to lay all the stress on the practical abuses of the administration which in the last two reigns were in truth not only at odds with the spirit of the age but almost absolutely unbearable. I venture to go further and maintain that not merely the human instruments but the system itself was vicious, and that it was easy to see that the administration at its best, when public servants were, not indeed more honest, but less recklessly dishonest, when the problems confronting them were fewer and simpler, and when control by the central government was easier, was rooted in conceptions {23} which rendered its maintenance in an enlightened community of nations sheer impossible. For Russia never ceased to be what its founders had made it, a predatory State without, like Prussia, and a predatory State within, unlike any other out of Asia. All its internal arrangements were adjusted to foreign conquest, which lent to its policy a steadfastness and uniformity that were currently attributed to the fixity of a grandiose Machiavellian scheme. The internal ordering of the country, the suppression of free speech, the prohibition of education, the racking of the peasantry, and the persecution of religious nonconformity were more or less effective means to the unchanging end. To have purified such a system from the abuses introduced by personal negligence, greed, or depravity would, therefore, not have altered its trend nor saved the country from the disaster towards which it was steadily wending.

It is impossible to approach the ethnic enigma with any sense of reality without allowing largely for the circumstance that the Russians, far from being pure Slavs, absorbed the various indigenous races, mostly Finnish nomads, whom they found in the land between the Upper Volga and the Oka. And the descendants of these various and disparate elements inherited many of the salient intellectual and moral as well as physical traits of the lower races, their lack of social cohesiveness, their leanings towards anarchism--their restlessness, intellectual and physical, displayed in biting criticism of all social and political arrangements and by an irresistible passion for roaming. The Russian is a born critic and satirist. An illiterate peasant from the remote and uncultured provinces who drives a public conveyance will turn to his fare and in picturesque, richly-coloured phrases utter severe strictures on everything that is. To him nothing is sacred. Again, a lad from a squalid hamlet will pass through the school and university into the civil service, and in the course of his career be sent from Ryazan to Samarkand, from Odessa to Archangel, thus moving thousands of miles about the country, yet he never thinks of going back to end his days in his native village. In this and most other things he {24} offers a striking contrast to the Teuton who is hierarchical, attached to his birthplace, imbued with a sense of measure, and contented with the relative bliss of domesticity.

The Russian is never settled; he is so frequently stung with the mania for travelling that it seems to be the call of the blood. He will sometimes rise up suddenly, start off as if in response to a mystic impulse, and wander for days or months or years. The lower orders are oftener possessed by this overmastering passion than their superiors. They are constantly changing their places of abode. It was for their benefit that merely nominal charges were fixed for such long journeys as that from Petersburg to Vladivostok or to Kharbin. And when they had not the wherewithal to buy even these cheap tickets, they would bribe the conductor with sixpence or a shilling to let them travel for nothing and to hide under the seat when the controller came around. Thousands of them flit from western Russia to eastern Siberia, others pilgrimage to Jerusalem and back again to their respective hamlets, then after an interval of rest they trudge to Kieff, afterwards to the Sviatya Gory, next to the northern shrines, and so on they keep roving until they lie down and die. Sectarians scour the country in every direction, preaching, teaching, proselytising. One sect has a rigid rule forbidding its members to tarry longer than three days in one place. I met one of those fanatics at the holy shrine Sviatya Gory many years ago and he explained to me how his co-religionists arranged to be together and to meet from time to time. For eight years he himself had never sojourned longer than three days anywhere. A well-to-do Russian whose sons were grown up would often distribute his property among his children, take a wallet and a staff, and spend the remainder of his days pilgrimaging from shrine to shrine.

Nomads are not usually builders; they usually prey on those who are. Like the Kurdish mountaineers among whom I sojourned several years ago, listening to their tales of predatory expeditions against the Armenian husbandmen, they pillage and destroy. Love of destruction is ingrained; only {25} generations can expel it from the blood. This also is a moral twist that often breaks through in the Russian. Take the merchants, for example, who formed the most conservative class in the Tsardom.[10] When a merchant and his friends went out to drink, he would kick over the traces. His idea of amusement was to smash the costly mirrors in hotels and restaurants, to break the furniture, to maul the waiters or the proprietor, and to ask that these items be included in the bill. The peasants dance and skip for joy when they can pillage, demolish, burn. Whenever the police relaxed their hold, they delighted in breaking into manors, smashing the furniture, cutting the pictures into shreds, burning the houses. In the pogroms against the Jews the same passion for destruction overmastered and goaded them to crimes against property and the person. "We must destroy all the imperial institutions, pulverise them, leave nothing standing," exclaimed a revolutionist, whose parents were nobles, to me. "And what will you put in the place of what you destroy?" I queried. "Nothing yet--that is until we think it out. But that will come in time." In 1905-6 as in 1917 the main achievement of the revolutionists was destruction. And what fiendish joy they displayed in 1905-6 in roasting men alive, or setting them barefoot on sheets of hot iron! And in 1917....

[1] Cf. _Russian Heads_, by Dr. T. Schiemann, p. 231.

[2] _Russian Antiquity._

[3] Cf. _Russian Antiquity_, May, 1891.

[4] Leo Wiener, _An Interpretation of the Russian People_, p. 15.

[5] _Russian Characteristics_, by E. B. Lanin.

[6] Professor Milyukoff, ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs.

[7] Leo Wiener, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Harvard University, in his admirable book _An Interpretation of the Russian People_ (London, 1915), writes: "Several years ago I asked Professor Milyukoff, the distinguished historian of civilisation, what English book he considered the best as regards its analysis of modern Russia. Without a moment's hesitation, and with a twinkle in his eye, he answered: 'E. J. Dillon's _Russian Characteristics_.' The reply betrayed a distinct Russian attitude towards censure, for a more incisive condemnation of everything Russian could hardly be imagined, and any one other than a Russian would have blushed with shame and burned with indignation at the very mention of that brilliant Irishman's mordant attack upon his nation. But Milyukoff does not stand alone in his conviction, for although Dr. Dillon is known to Russian society and to the Government as the author of these sketches he continues to live in Petrograd as an honoured man and perfectly secure in his Avestan studies."

[8] The manner in which the officers were tortured in 1877 cannot even be described in Western countries. General Korovichenko in Tashkent was horribly maltreated until he was agonising. Then he was laid on the floor of his apartment and the crowd was admitted on payment of 30 copecks to enter in and spit on his face. Cf. _Le Temps_, 10th January, 1918.

[9] There are 48 per cent. Great Russians. The remaining 52 per cent. is split into three groups: (1) The White or Little Russians; (2) The non-Russian races of the Caucasus, East Russia, and Silesia; and (3) races of the West (Poles, Lithuanians, Letts, Esthonians, Finns, Swedes).

[10] They were fast losing this conservatism in the cities and towns before the war.

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