Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 388, February 1848

BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCLXXXVIII . FEBRUARY, 1848. Vol. LXIII .
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
( Secret History of the Court and Government of Russia, under the Emperors Alexander and Nicholas. By H. SCHNITZLER. Two vols. Bentley: London.)
Russia is the most extraordinary country on the globe, in the four most important particulars of empire,—its history, its extent, its population, and its power.
It has for Europe another interest,—the interest of alarm, the evidence 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 European war; and a government at once despotic and popular; exhibiting the most boundless authority in the sovereign, and the most boundless submission in the people; 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 annals, of the powers which lie within the mind of individual 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 he 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 barbarism. The sullenness of its winter had prevented invasion by civilised 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 nothing 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 carrying back spoil to his northern crags and lakes, the Russian 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 ungenial soil.