The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-02-15 00:00:00

RUSSIA.

(From Blackwood's Magazine.)

Russia is the most extraordinary country on the globe,
in the four most important particulars of empire,—its his-
tory, its extent, its population, and its power. It has for
Europe another interest,—the interest of alarm, the evi-
dence of an ambition which has existed for a hundred and
fifty years, and has never paused; an increase of territory
which has never suffered the slightest casualty of fortune;
the most complete security against the retaliation of Eu-
ropean war ; and a government at once despotic and po-
pular; exhibiting the most boundless authority in the so-
vereign, and the most boundless submission in the peo-
ple ; a mixture of habitual obedience, and divine homage:
the reverence to a monarch, with almost the prostration
to a divinity. Its history has another superb anomaly :
Russia gives the most memorable instance in human an-
nals, of the powers which lie within the mind of indivi-
dual man. Peter the Great was not the restorer, or the
reformer of Russia ; he was its moral creator. He found
it, not as Augustus found Rome, according to the famous
adage, " brick, and left it marble ;" he found it a living
swamp, and left it covered with the fertility of laws,
energy, and knowledge ; he found it Asiatic, and left it
European : he removed it as far from Scythia, as if he had
placed the diameter of the globe between ; he found it not
brick, but mire, and be transformed a region of huts into
the magnificence of empire.
Russia first appears in European history in the middle
of the ninth century. Its climate and its soil had till then
retained it in primitive Isarbarism. The sullenness of its
winter had prevented invasion by civilized nations, and
the nature of its soil, one immense plain, had given full
scope to the roving habits of its half-famished tribes. The
great invasions which broke down the Roman empire, had
drained away the population from the north, and left no-
thing but remnants of clans behind. Russia had no sea,
by which she might send her bold savages to plunder or to
trade with Southern and Western Europe. And, while
the man of Scandinavia was subduing kingdoms, or carry-
ing back spoil to his northern crags and lakes, the Rus-
sian remained, like the bears of his forest, in his cavern
during the long winter of his country; and even when the
summer came, was still but a melancholy savage, living
like the bear upon the roots and fruits of his ungeuial
soil.

It was to one of those Normans, who, instead of steer-
ing his bark towards the opulence of the south, turned
his dreary adventure to the north, that Russh owed her
first connexion with intelligent mankind. The people of
Novgorod, a people of traders, finding themselves over-
powered by their barbarian neighbours, solicited the aid
of Rurie, a Baltic Chieftain, and, of course, a pirate and a
robber. The name of the Norman had earned old renown
in the north. Ruric came, rescued the city, but paid him-
self by the seizure of the surrounding territory, and found-
ed a kingdom, which he transmitted to his descendants,
and which lasted until the middle of the 16th century.