Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

I believe it will take several hundred years before the mass of the people of Russia will have attained a mental capacity on a par with the civilization which we know. They are still in the dim twilight of medieval times, though they are playing with modern machinery.

And when it comes to turning such a nation from an absolute autocracy into a liberal republic, in which one man’s vote is as good as another’s, it is impossible without the element of time. A country so vast and so various, with the blood of so many nations running through the people, and especially a people holding the Asiatic viewpoint of government, cannot be administered immediately according to our ideal. The best that can be hoped for is a constitutional monarchy, and even if that form of government is gained, it will be for some time a dictatorship.

I am forced to this conclusion. All the pity, all the sympathy we may feel for this benighted people, will not alter the facts. We cannot swing a magician’s wand and hand freedom to these people on a silver salver. We have got to face facts, and realize that the Tolstoys and Gorkys have misled us about the Russian peasant. For once given a free hand, this sublimated peasant has produced a tragedy, with himself the victim, which outdoes any tragedy the human race has ever wished itself into.

The peasant has been described by Russian novelists as “inscrutable,” the inference being that behind the “dreamy eyes” and simple expressions on the faces of these people there were deep thoughts and a yearning for an ideal existence—some mysterious greatness which if we could once understand it, would reveal to us a wonderful race.

I consider this inscrutability to be of the same quality which exists in the eyes of a simple old cow, which being invited into the parlor and turned loose, kicks the walls out of the building and dies under the wreckage of the roof. It is an ignorance deeper than we of the United States are capable of comprehending—a childish mentality in a white person who appears good-natured, religious, kind and hospitable under a restraining government, but who will kill his neighbor simply for the purpose of doing something dramatic.

It may be charged that my pessimism on the peasant is exaggerated, and that the Russian in this country disproves my assertions that hundreds of years must elapse before the peasant can meet our standards of intelligence. What the Russian peasant does in this country has nothing to do with the case except to show that removed from Russia he forges ahead. But the Russian who comes here is of a higher type than those of his fellows he leaves behind—he must be energetic, ambitious, adventurous, aspiring to better things to take the trip of his own initiative and to have acquired by himself passage-money. If he gets aid from relatives already here in order to make the journey, there are members of his family who have shown ability in getting ahead. If he is compelled to escape from his country, that fact indicates that he was not satisfied with his lot at home—he is not given to dumb submission.

But we cannot import to this country all the peasants in the Russian Empire in order to advance their education to our standards. Their future is in their own hands, no matter how much we may attempt to aid them. And my pessimism toward the peasant is primarily an attitude toward him as he exists in his native environment. I am not attempting to judge him by our standards. I am attempting to show him in such a light that our people will give up attempting to judge him by our standards, so long as he remains at home.

We must stop considering Russia and Siberia as filled with people much like ourselves. They must be considered from an entirely new angle—much as if they were people of another planet. In fact, that has been and is our difficulty with all Asia. And when I say Asia, I do not mean so much a place, as I mean a state of mind.

The question may be raised as to why we should consider the peasant seriously. We do not have to if we do not want to, but we should, for what happens in Russia during the next decade or two will have serious effects upon us, our national existence, and the future of our children. I do not mean this in a sense of what they may do to us, but in the sense of what they may do with themselves. What has happened in Siberia and all Russia during the last couple of years has alarmed us. The happenings were the result partly of our belief in the last fifty years, that what happened in Russia was no concern of ours. We have suddenly awakened to the fact that injustice and intrigue and a weak monarch on the other side of the world, can have a most decided effect upon us. We got a good deal of amusement out of Wilhelm of Germany and his “mailed fist” and “shining armor”—it was all a merry show to us. We are just beginning to pay the piper. We have had a demonstration that what foreign princes may do is decidedly our business. We may not have learned the lesson fully.

It is apparent that Bolshevism made a powerful appeal to the peasants of Siberia, as it did to the submerged class of all Russia. The readiness with which these benighted people took up a saturnalia of crime in order to right certain crimes which had been committed against them, startled the world. The universality of Bolshevism in Russia actually led many people of peasant-minds here and abroad, to suspect that there was something good behind it all—it was hard to believe that a nation of two hundred million human beings supposedly civilized, could be so utterly wrong.