# Great Russia/Chapter 3

​CHAPTER III
THE LESSONS OF ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
SUCH are the teachings of physical geography. Let us consider what are the lessons of economic geography.
I
Leaving aside the frozen marshes of the extreme north only inhabited by the Laplander and the reindeer, and the salt deserts of the extreme south only crossed by the nomadic tribes and the camel, European Russia is divided into three zones or regions (see map facing page three): the region of primeval forests in the north, the region of the grassy steppes or prairies in the south, and the intermediate region of arable land, that famous "black soil" of inexhaustible fertility, which it is only necessary to scratch for the harvest to burst out as by enchantment. Although those three regions are clearly characterized and distinct, they are ​nevertheless mutually interdependent. The dwellers of the forest need the produce of the black soil—the granary of Russia. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the agricultural plain need the fuel and the building materials of the forest. Coal and stone are generally wanting. All Russian houses in the country are built in wood, and it has been calculated that all the Russian villages are destroyed by fire every twenty years.
And still more does the plain need the moisture of the forest, without which the droughts and famines which at present are only a periodical scourge of Russia would be her permanent curse. And, finally, the grassy steppe or prairie is the "hinterland" of the black soil. Not only does the arable land encroach every year on the steppe, but without the possession of that "hinterland" the inhabitants of the plain, as in the legendary days of the Cossacks, would have been always at the mercy of incursions and invasions.
Owing to those three zones Russia is a huge agricultural community, distinct from industrial and commercial Europe; it is an Eastern Europe of wheat and wood distinct from the Western Europe of iron and stone. The ​peasantry constitute 80 to 85 per cent. of the total population.
No doubt in the last generation the existence of prodigious mineral wealth has been revealed in the centre, in Poland, in the Donetz, in the Ural. The industrial exploitation of these regions has begun and very rapidly developed, partly through the enterprise of Belgian engineers. But for ages to come the industrial production of Russia will scarcely meet the demand of the home market. Russia will continue to buy from the foreigner and will remain an agricultural nation, and one of the granaries of the world.
II
Now in all countries and in all times an agricultural, non-industrial, non-commercial nation is essentially conservative, almost blindly respectful of all traditions and all authorities. Its political progress is much slower, even though it may be safer. But in Russia the peasantry are incomparably more conservative than anywhere else. In the first place they are more religious, or, in the opinion of doctrinaires, more superstitious. For centuries they have identified themselves with the cause of the ​Greek Orthodox Church. In the Russian language the same word means peasant and Christian: krestianine. For centuries the Russian peasant has in turn repelled the Mohammedan invasion of Tartars, the Catholic invasion of Poles, the Protestant invasion of Teutons, the freethinking invasion of Jews. To the Russian peasant, and mainly owing to the geographical position of the country, nationality and religion are synonymous terms. Religious unity has been the foundation of political unity. The Pravoslavie, or orthodoxy, has become the second principle in the Slavophile Trinity, and even the liberals who reject a State Church believe in a National Church.
But, in addition to this religious cause of the conservatism of the peasantry, all physical conditions seem to neutralize and check political movements. Nature herself seems to conspire against political conspirators and seems to defeat their schemes: climate, the enormous distances and the difficulties of communication, the absence of roads, the scarcity of cities, explained by the absence of a middle class—which is itself explained by the primitive conditions of trade and industry—all these causes are in the way of political agitation.
III
To understand the radical differences of the conditions of life in Britain and in Russia, compare a British village with a Russian village. The British village appears to us as a highly differentiated political organism with its hierarchy of classes, its division of social labour: at the summit a small aristocratic community of landed proprietors presided over by the lord of the manor or the local magnate; an intermediate middle class of farmers and trades-people led by the clergyman and the schoolmaster; at the base a democracy of artizans and farm labourers: from the highest to the lowest rung of the social ladder, an intense political and religious life, which is favoured by the close proximity of the town, the continuous interchange between town and country, the rivalry of sects, the grouping of parties, the establishment of clubs and societies for the enlightenment and diversion of the inhabitants.
Now practically none of these conditions exist in the Russian village. There is no ruling class. Estates are too scattered, too wide apart to render social relations possible. The landowner, if he is rich, will spend his income ​in the Russian capital or in European health or pleasure resorts; for life is so dreary, solitude is so oppressive, winters are so long that nothing except a high sense of duty could induce the magnate to reside. If he is poor, and compelled to remain on his estate, he will vegetate in the most lamentable intellectual isolation. The clergy are demoralized by their bureaucratic subjection, by their ignorance and poverty, and have very little moral influence over the peasants. There is no middle class, for either trade does not exist or is in the hands of the Jews and the Germans. The peasantry, absolutely abandoned to themselves, are without any contact with civilization. Isolated from the city, riveted to the soil, nearly all illiterate, the din and turmoil of life only reaches them as a distant murmur. I do not mean to say that these peasants are by any means dead to political life. On the contrary, the Russians have a much healthier political and democratic instinct than the Germans, they possess a very active local government, and that local government, represented by the "Mir," or village community, and the "Zemstvo," or County Council, may even be said to be by far the most original and interesting of Russian institutions. ​But the activities of the "Mir" and of the "Zemstvo" are above all of an economic and administrative order. They do not extend beyond the border of the village. They do not free the peasant from his intellectual isolation.
IV
To imagine that those one hundred and twenty millions of Russian peasants, thus riveted to the soil, thus living under the pressure of poverty, in ignorance and isolation, should be mature for revolutionary utopias, seems to me to be the wildest of dreams. However prodigiously fertile the Russian soil may be, and however gifted the Russian people, political discipline does not grow in a day like the grass of the steppe, it is not a plant without roots in the past, in the traditions and the manners of the people. No doubt the peasantry may be got to rise in some bloody "jacquerie." They might be drawn into some agrarian revolution—like the Pougatchef revolt in the eighteenth century—which would satisfy their craving for possessing and extending the soil they cultivate. But the hunger for land once satisfied, the peasantry would again become conservative, like the French peasant proprietor ​after the French Revolution, and so far from joining any mere "intellectual" revolution, they would dread such a revolution as a possible reaction and as a menace to their newly acquired rights.
V.
No doubt the political awakening of the rural masses is coming. Popular instruction is spreading. Proprietors will be induced more and more to reside on their estates. Religious freedom and the threefold struggle against Catholicism, Nonconformity, and rationalism will compel the Orthodox clergy to emerge from their ignorance and their subjection. The priests will receive a better education and thereby acquire a moral authority which will enable them in turn to educate their flocks, hitherto so sadly neglected. And, above all, with the progress of trade and industry there will arise a middle class, and with the middle class a strong and independent opinion, which is the prime condition of all political liberty. But even when these great changes are accomplished, when a ruling class and an independent class are constituted, the rural masses and their leaders, the clergy will continue to respect the ​established authorities. For generations to come the peasantry and the clergy will continue to see in the Emperor and in the Church their spiritual and temporal Providence, a patriarchal and beneficent despotism. In one word, Political Reform in Russia shall be conservative, or will be a failure.