Complete Works

by only one reader out of each hundred, there must be something subtly noxious to the human brain in the composition of newspaper ink; or else it is that the large page, the columns of words, the leaded headings, exalt the mind into a state of feverish credulity.  The printed page of the Press makes a sort of still uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of genuine feeling; leaving them only the artificially created need of having something exciting to talk about.
    The truth is that the Russia of our fathers, of our childhood, of our middle-age; the testamentary Russia of Peter the Great — who imagined that all the nations were delivered into the hand of Tsardom — can do nothing.  It can do nothing because it does not exist.  It has vanished for ever at last, and as yet there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill-omened creation, which, being a fantasy of a madman’s brain, could in reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a monument of fear and oppression.
    The true greatness of a State does not spring from such a contemptible source.  It is a matter of logical growth, of faith and courage.  Its inspiration springs from the constructive instinct of the people, governed by the strong hand of a collective conscience and voiced in the wisdom and counsel of men who seldom reap the reward of gratitude.  Many States have been powerful, but, perhaps, none have been truly great — as yet.  That the position of a State in reference to the moral methods of its development can be seen only historically, is true.  Perhaps mankind has not lived long enough for a comprehensive view of any particular case.  Perhaps no one will ever live long enough; and perhaps this earth shared out amongst our clashing ambitions by the anxious arrangements of statesmen will come to an end before we attain the felicity of greeting with unanimous applause the perfect fruition of a great State.  It is even possible that we are destined for another sort of bliss altogether: that sort which consists in being perpetually duped by false appearances.  But whatever political illusion the future may hold out to our fear or our admiration, there will be none, it is safe to say, which in the magnitude of anti-humanitarian effect will equal that phantom now driven out of the world by the thunder of thousands of guns; none that in its retreat will cling with an equally shameless sincerity to more unworthy supports: to the moral corruption and mental darkness of slavery, to the mere brute force of numbers.
    This very ignominy of infatuation should make clear to men’s feelings and reason that the downfall of Russia’s might is unavoidable.  Spectral it lived and spectral it disappears without leaving a memory of a single generous deed, of a single service rendered — even involuntarily — to the polity of nations.  Other despotisms there have been, but none whose origin was so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of whose end was so gruesomely ignoble.  What is amazing is the myth of its irresistible strength which is dying so hard.
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    Considered historically, Russia’s influence in Europe seems the most baseless thing in the world; a sort of convention invented by diplomatists for some dark purpose of their own, one would suspect, if the lack of grasp upon the realities of any given situation were not the main characteristic of the management of international relations.  A glance back at the last hundred years shows the invariable, one may say the logical, powerlessness of Russia.  As a military power it has never achieved by itself a single great thing.  It has been indeed able to repel an ill-considered invasion, but only by having recourse to the extreme methods of desperation.  In its attacks upon its specially selected victim this giant always struck as if with a withered right hand.  All the campaigns against Turkey prove this, from Potemkin’s time to the last Eastern war in 1878, entered upon with every advantage of a well-nursed prestige and a carefully fostered fanaticism.  Even the half-armed were always too much for the might of Russia, or, rather, of the Tsardom.  It was victorious only against the practically disarmed, as, in regard to its ideal of territorial expansion, a glance at a map will prove sufficiently.  As an ally, Russia has been always unprofitable, taking her share in the defeats rather than in the victories