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(3) The profound poverty and hopeless subserviency of the Russian people – those who are robbed and ruined by the grafters and hoodooed by the Church.

XVIII
En Route to Moscow – Under Military Guard – Suspected of Designs on Life of the Czar

Moscow, Russia, September 19, 1902, 10 P. M.

We took the Imperial Mail train as determined. Foreign travelers generally journey by the night express, which arrives at Moscow only an hour behind the Imperial Mail, but it leaves St. Petersburg at so late an hour that there is little chance to see the country traversed. We made up our minds to take the more democratic train, which goes in the middle afternoon and stops at all way-stations. This would give us an opportunity to see more of the people as well as a longer season of daylight to watch the passing panorama of the land. We knew no reason why we should not take the train of our choice. It was true that our guide urged us to go by the night express. It was also true, when I presented my passport to the ticket agent at the railway station, the day before, and requested tickets, that he advised us to make the journey by the night express, nor would he at first agree to sell us tickets by the Imperial Mail, but told us to come back again two hours later, when he would let us know whether there were any berths unsold in the train’s through sleeper. It was also true that when we returned, he again advised us to take the night express. But our minds were made up, and we at last secured the tickets we wanted, and became entitled to an entire stateroom upon a designated car.

When we left the Hotel de l’Europe, the government official to whom I had returned my passport, after having bought my tickets, emerged from his office, received graciously his ten rubles, and again handed me the document; the sundry flunkies in liveries and spies in uniforms obsequiously bowed us out of the establishment, and our very competent guide immediately packed us into several droschkies and galloped us along the Nevsky Prospekt to the huge government station of the railway running to Moscow. The instant our izvostchiks brought their horses to a stop, we were surrounded by a swarm of porters clad in white tunic aprons and flat caps, who seized our bags, and preceded us through the large waiting room to the gates admitting to the train platform. Here our tickets were scrutinized, and a group of uniformed officials, who seemed to be awaiting us, informed us that the car in which our stateroom had been sold being already filled, another stateroom in another car was placed at our disposal. They then led the way to the front of the long train, and showed us into a large combined sleeper-and-chair car immediately back of the engine. Several soldiers were standing guard near by. We were evidently expected and were especially provided for. We almost had the car to ourselves. The only other passengers were a Russian officer and his orderly. We were at the head of a train made up mostly of mail cars locked and sealed, having at the rear several passenger coaches. But we were separated from all these latter, and we seemed to be objects of unusual interest. Many strange faces flattened against our windows, peering in at us, and the orderly locked up with us never took his eyes away from us. This did not annoy me, however, for I presumed he was admiring the beauty of our American women.

The train was a long one, – and such huge cars. The Russian gauge is five feet, the cars are long, and half as big and wide again as are the American cars, and are heated by steam, having double windows prepared against the cold. We had secured a whole compartment in which the two seats, facing each other, pull out and the backs lift up, making four berths, two lower, two upper, placed cross-wise. You pay one ruble (fifty cents) for blankets, sheets and towels. We put H and Mrs. C in the lower berths. Mr. C and I took the uppers. The car had only two more staterooms, one on each side of our own, and then a large drawing-room with reclining chairs. The stateroom ahead of us was occupied by the officer; his orderly slept on a chair in the salon. In the stateroom behind us were two railway guards. After we entered the car, the door was closed and locked by an official who stood on the outside. The officer and his orderly were locked in with us. Our trunk was checked through to Moscow by the guide, very much as we would have done it at home. He gave me the check, and I paid him his last pourboire before we entered. This was the only daily local train going southeastward, and whoever would leave St. Petersburg for the way stations must travel by it.

Our first impression, after leaving the city, was that of the flatness and the vacantness of the land; the landscape was marked here and there with insignificant timber, birches, firs and wide reaches of tangled grasses, and seemed uninhabited. There were no sheep, no hogs, no goats. Occasionally we saw herds of cattle and some horses, but very little tillage anywhere. The few houses, mostly low built, were of small-sized logs, or slabs. Towns and villages were few and far apart. In the towns were rambling wooden buildings, all just alike; in the villages were log and wooden cabins, scattered along a single wide street, and these streets were deep mud and mire from door to door. Here and there was a wooden church painted green, with onion-shaped steeple gilded or painted white, but there were no schoolhouses anywhere. At all the railroad stations were many soldiers, and dull-looking, shock-headed peasants, men clad in sheepskin overcoats with the wool inside, and women in short skirts wearing men’s boots, or with their legs wrapped in dirty cotton cloth tied on with strings, their feet bound up in twisted straw. It was a desolate, monotonous, dreary, sombre land. We saw no smiling faces anywhere, but always were the corners of the mouth drawn down. Now and then we passed a large town, with a commodious, well-built station of brick and stone. Here and there we saw huge factories and mills, all belonging to the government of the Czar.

We stopped at Lubin for supper. The guard unlocked our car, opened the door and pointed to the station, where we found a monster eatingroom with huge lunch counters on either side and long rows of tables down the middle. Everybody was standing up; there were no seats anywhere. Hot soft drinks were served at the side counters and smoking coffee and tall glasses of hot, clear tea. The Russian swallows only hot drinks and eats only hot foods. On the center tables, set above spirit lamps, were hot dishes with big metal covers. There were glasses of hot drink for a few kopeeks, which the Russian pours down all at once. Taking a plate from a pile standing ready, you help yourself to what victuals you choose. There were hot doughnuts with hashed meat inside, hot apple dumplings, hot juicy steaks, hot stews, hot fish; all H-O-T. When you have eaten your fill, you pay your bill at a counter near the entrance, according to your own reckoning. The Russian is honest in little things, and nobody doubts your word or questions the correctness of your payment. The eatingroom was full of big, tall, robust, fair-haired, blue-eyed men and a few women. The Russian is big himself, he likes big things, he thinks on big lines, he sees with wide vision, too wide almost to be practical. Hanging around the station were groups of unkempt, dirty peasants. We see such groups of gaping peasants at every station, always a hopeless look of “don’t care” in their eyes.

The train ran smoothly and we slept well. All Russian cars are set on trucks, American fashion, and there is no jarring and bouncing as in England’s truckless carriages. We traveled over an almost straight roadway, traversing the Valdai hills, the brooks and rivulets of which, uniting, give rise to the mighty Volga, and crossing the river passed through the city of Tver during the night. It was just daylight when I awoke. I at once arose, and then waked Mr. C and afterward we aroused the ladies. A different military officer and a different orderly were now traveling in our car. The officer seemed to have kept vigil in the compartment ahead of our own. When I came out of the stateroom, he was standing smoking a cigarette in the aisle just outside our door. When I went to the toilet-room he followed me and then returned to the door of our stateroom. He watched us all, even standing guard at the door of the toilet-room when occupied by the ladies. We were evidently in his charge. Later, I made acquaintance with him, accosting him in German, to which he readily replied. He was a medium-sized, wiry man with dark hair and eyes, close-cropped beard and long moustaches. He was a “lieutenant-colonel of infantry,” he said.

The night before, as we rode along, we noticed many soldiers gathered everywhere at the stations. Now there were none, but instead there was a soldier pacing up and down each side of the track, a soldier every sixteen seconds! His gun was on his shoulder. He wore a long brown overcoat reaching to his heels, and a vizored brown cap. At all the bridges there were several soldiers, at each culvert two. After a few miles of soldiers, I commented on this, to me, extraordinary spectacle, and asked the colonel what it meant. “Do you not know,” he said, “the Czar is coming in half an hour? He is returning from the autumn manoeuvers in the south!” Presently, we drew in on a siding. I wanted to go out with my kodak and take a snapshot. He said, “Es ist verboten (It is forbidden). You cannot go out.” He then asked to see my kodak, which he examined with the greatest care, taking it quite apart. He then handed it back to me saying, apologetically, “Bombs have been carried in kodak cases, you know.” Soon we heard the roar of an approaching train. The ladies pressed to the windows. The uniformed attendant stepped up and pulled down the shades right in their faces. I demurred to this and appealed to the colonel, who then directed the guard to raise the curtains, seeming to censure him in Russian. The ladies might look. A train of dark purple cars richly gilded flashed by. Was it the Czar? No! Only the Court. Another train just like the first would follow in half an hour and the Czar would be on that. But none of the public might know on which train he would ride. The colonel turned to me and said, “You kill Presidents in America. We would protect our Czars here! We also have Anarchists.”

I could not forbear remarking upon the excessive number of men in uniforms, soldiers apparently, I met everywhere in Russia, as well as the great expanse of vacant land, saying to him, “You have too many soldiers in Russia. You should have fewer men in the army and more men out on the land tilling the soil and supporting themselves. It is unfair to those who work to be compelled to feed so many idle mouths.” He answered me frankly. He said, “It is necessary to have these soldiers. The peasants are ignorant. We take their young men and make soldiers and good citizens out of them. The army is a school of instruction; it is there the peasant learns to be loyal and to shoot.” And then he said with emphasis, “Ah! In America you don’t need to learn to shoot, you are like the Boers, you all know how to shoot,” which view of American dexterity, I, of course, readily acceded to. And when I asked him why it was there were no schools or schoolhouses in all this journey, he replied that it was useless to build schools for the peasant, for he did not wish to learn. He had no desire to improve. “You in America,” he said, “are every year receiving the energetic young men of all Europe. You are constantly recruiting with the vigor and energy of the world. You can afford to have schools. Your people want schools, but the Russian people want no schools. They will not learn, they will not change, and no young men ever come to Russia. We receive no help from the outside. Nobody comes here. Nobody. Nobody (Niemand, Niemand). We have always the peasant, always the peasant (Immer der Bauer).” And then he asked me about President Roosevelt, and inquired whether he would succeed himself for a second term, remarking that “Mr. Roosevelt was greatly admired by the Russian army.” “The Russian army sees in your President Roosevelt a great man,” he said, then added, “in France the Jews and financiers set up a President, but in America you choose a man who is a man.” We became very good friends, and he accepted from me an American cigar, one of a few I had brought along and saved for an emergency. At subsequent stations he allowed me to get out in his company, and even let me take his picture along with some of the other officers who stood about. The Czar had passed. The weight of responsibility was off his shoulders, he had discovered no evidence of our being conspirators. He now treated us as friends. He even directed the car attendant to clean from the windows their accumulated dust.

During all the early hours of the morning we came through the same flat, desolate, uninhabited country. It was a landscape of profound monotony, with the dark green of the firs, the frosted yellow of the birches, the withering browns of the tangled grasses, the black and sodden soil. Even the crows were dressed in melancholy gray.

XIX
Our Arrival at Moscow – Splendor and Squalor – Enlightenment and Superstition – Russia Asiatic Rather Than European

Moscow, Russia, September 20, 1902.

It was toward ten o’clock when we drew near the suburbs of Moscow, a city of more than a million inhabitants. We saw straggling wooden houses, mostly unpainted, rarely ever more than one story high, and unpaved streets filled with country wagons, not the great two-wheeled carts of France, but long, low, four-wheeled wagons with horses pulling singly, or hitched three and four abreast; and I noted that the thills and traces of these wagons were fastened to the projecting axles of the fore wheels, the pull being thus directly on the axle, so as to lift the wheel out of the ever present mud holes. So universal has become this method of hitching up a wagon that I observed it even used on the vehicles in the cities where the streets are paved. Men in high boots and sheepskin coats and felt caps were walking beside the wagons, cracking long whips. The roads appeared to be frightful sloughs of bottomless mire.

Our train drew into a long, low, brick station, the Nicholas Depot. The door of the car was unlocked, porters came in and seized our bags, and we followed them. Our military escort did not even deign to say good-bye. He was writing up his note book and seemingly preoccupied. The instant we emerged from the station portal we were surrounded by a mob of roaringizvostchiks; a pandemonium. We picked out two of the cleaner-looking droschkies; the porters who had taken our checks came with the trunks on their shoulders, and we started off for our hotel. Although a dozen izvostchiks will wrangle and war for your custom, until you fear for your very life, yet the instant you pick your man, the others retire and peace reigns. There is no attempt to make you change your mind.

The sky was overcast, drops of rain were falling, and there had been more rain earlier in the day. The cobble-paved streets were thickly overlaid with mud. Surely, they had never been cleaned in a century! Moscow is a city of low, one and two story buildings, generally of stone or stucco, but there are many of wood. It is a city full of reek and accumulated filth, and is apparently without sewers, or with sewers badly laid and long ago choked up. It is a city of narrow streets with many turns, and narrow sidewalks or none at all. It is an old city, the ways and alleys and streets of which have grown up as they would. The people we met were ill-clad, unwashed, unkempt, wild-eyed, shock-polled, dull-faced. They were a meaner multitude of men and women than I had ever before set eyes upon.

“Hotel Berlin” we said to our izvostchiks. The word “Berlin” they seemed to comprehend, and they brought us safely to our destination. It is a comfortable inn, on the Rojdestvensky way, kept by a Jew, and recommended to us by the Swiss Concierge of the St. Petersburg hotel. “It is the hotel where the drummers go,” he said. We had learned long ago that “where the drummers go,” is where the best table will be found, for the world over, the drummer loves a knowing cook. So we went to the Hotel Berlin. We were there received by a little weazen-faced, black-eyed, dried-up man, who spoke in voluble German and broken English. “The police had notified him that we would come!” he said. He told us that “He had once lived in London!” – and declared that his rooms were exactly what we wanted, and his table “the best in Moscow.” He also confided to us that he was “fortunate in having at hand, immediately at hand, and now at our service, the most skilled and intelligent guide in Moscow, who would be delighted to serve us, who was altogether at our disposal and whose charge would be ‘only ten rubles a day,’ and the guide ‘talked English.’” We thanked our host, took the rooms and accepted the guide. We have now been in Moscow several days, and the guide has been faithful. He vows he has been twice in Chicago. He says he is from Hungary and he talks excellent German, but Mr. C, who himself hails from Chicago, is quite unable to comprehend the English of his speech. Only my knowledge of German has saved the guide his rubles. Moreover, his remembrance of Chicago is indistinct, as well as of New York. Indeed, his knowledge of America we are fain to believe is altogether hearsay. The nighest he has been to Chicago, we surmise, was when a few years ago he “bought Astrakhan lamb skins at Nijni Novo Gorod for Marshall Field & Company,” whose agent we believe he may really then have been. He is now married to a Russian, and it is many years since he has been back to Hungary, nor does he have much occasion to talk German or English, except when he is acting as guide to Americans. Mr. C now and then forgets and attempts to use American speech in conversation with him, when there is entanglement. I am appealed to in German, the difficulty is cleared up, and so we get on.

To-day, we have taken a landau and have driven all about the city. Just how shall I describe this strange commingling of past and present; of sumptuous splendor and squalor profounder than any seen in St. Petersburg; of modern intelligence and mediaeval superstition; this city which contains a Gostinnoi Dvor, a magnificent building of white stone, extending over many blocks, a bazaar of six thousand shops, with a single steel and glass vaulted roof covering the entire immense series of structures as well as all included streets; this city of beautiful stores, displaying the costliest products of London, of Paris and New York; which is lit with electric lights equal to Berlin, and provided with a telephone service superior to that of London; this city where right alongside this modern bazaar, the handiwork of Chicago builders, stand the towers and ramparts of the ancient Kremlin; a city where at every corner of every street, swarm bowing multitudes worshiping before the innumerable Eikons.

A strange and curious sight it is to see a street packed with people all bowing to a little picture stuck up in the wall. The Eikon to the Russian is even more important than the Czar. He wears a miniature Eikon hung about his neck as a sort of amulet. He puts an Eikon in his house, in his shop, along his streets, and builds cathedrals and lavishes fortunes to house and adorn them. Indeed, Russia might be fitly termed the land of the Eikon, for there, as nowhere else in all the world, has a simple picture been exalted to become an object of worship. The Greek church allows no images. One of the serious causes of the great schism with Rome in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was the strict interpretation by the Eastern Church of the injunction of the II Commandment, “Thou shalt make no graven images,” wherefore they declared the Roman practice rank idolatry, but to the sacred pictures they gave their sanction. These Eikons are mostly painted in the monasteries by monks of recognized holy lives. They are paintings of the Christ, or of a Saint, sometimes the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child together, and are often so overlaid with gold and jewels – tens of thousands of dollars worth of jewels – that only the eyes and the face may be seen, the draperies of the person being scrupulously imitated and concealed by the overlaid plates of gold.

This afternoon we saw a big, black, hearse-like carriage drawn by six black horses, harnessed three abreast, accompanied by priests, to which all the people took off their hats and bowed and crossed themselves as it passed along. It was an Eikon being carried to the death-bed of some penitent, who would be permitted to kiss it before death. Sometimes these Eikons work miracles and the dying sinner begins to recover so soon as it enters the room. All Russians keep Eikons in their homes, and generally have one in every room, before which a little candle is kept perpetually burning. And when a Russian enters a house, he at once goes to the family Eikon and bows and crosses himself before he greets his host. To ignore the Eikon would be an unpardonable offense. In St. Petersburg we procured a copy of the famous Eikon which reposes in the little chapel of the house of Peter the Great, the portrait of St. Alexander Nevsky, which Peter always carried with him into battle, and to the power of which he attributed the victory of Pultova. The beautiful cathedral dedicated to “Our Lady of Kazan,” upon the Nevsky Prospekt, in St. Petersburg, was erected in honor of victories brought to Russian arms by the miraculous influence of her Eikon. The Russian lives in an atmosphere of Eikons, and it takes a quick eye and an agile hand to doff your hat and properly bow, as the Russian always does, whenever you pass by one.

In this city of contrasts, in sight of the modern Gostinnoi Dvor, I must take off my hat in going through a “Holy Gate,” and every man, woman and child I here meet are crossing themselves and bowing as they pass along! In Mexico you do not feel so surprised at the superstition of the Indian! But these are white men with blue eyes and yellow hair! This is a city which contains so splendid an edifice as the monster cathedral of Saint Savior, a pile of wonderful beauty, built of white granite, and domed with five gigantic onion-shaped, cross-topped cupolas, all sheathed in plates of solid gold; it is a city which contains four hundred and fifty churches, five hundred chapels, and convents and monasteries, how many I dare not say, all of them begolded and bejeweled inside and out with barbaric emblazonry. And yet it is a city, the streets of which are as ill-paved and as stinking as were London’s five hundred years ago; a city where trade and enterprise are throttled by arbitrary and excessive taxation, while the common people have no schools, even as they have no votes.

We had just left the Imperial palace of the Kremlin, the most gorgeous edifice my eyes have ever looked upon, where I had beheld such chambers of gold and precious jewels and priceless tapestry, as one only reads about in the Tales of the Arabian Nights; where the vast Hall of St. George in the Czar’s new palace is plated with gold from floor to ceiling, and the ceiling is altogether of gold; where is gold along the walls, panels of alabaster showing in between, ivory finish and gold, gold and lapis lazuli, gold and emerald malachite, gold in leaf, gold in heavy plate – gold everywhere. We were but the moment come out from this stupendous display of riches. We had just passed through the Holy Savior Gate. Our senses were still dazzled with this excess of reckless magnificence, when we found ourselves upon the Red Square – “Red” because of the human blood spilled there in the countless massacres of Moscow’s citizens by past Czars, – amidst the swarming throngs of the abjectly poor; men and women, pinched-faced and hollow-eyed; men and women who toil with patient, dull, dumb hopelessness, and who are thankful to eat black bread through all their lives, who are become mere human brutes! We saw many groups of these, gnawing chunks of the black bread for their dinner with all the zest of famished wolves, while they bowed and crossed themselves incessantly, thanking God that they were indeed alive!

The wanton luxury of the rich, the pinching poverty of the poor, so widespread, so universal in Russia, appal and shock me upon every hand. What are the political and social conditions which let these things be possible is the query which constantly hammers on my brain! Until to-day, I have never understood the light and shadow of Roman history, nor what manner of men made up the hosts and hordes of Alaric and of Attila. Here, you see the whole story right upon these streets.

We have not only visited the Kremlin, its cathedrals and its palaces, its museums and its buildings of note, but we have also stood before and gazed upon that wonder of all churches, the cathedral of St. Basil, the weird and gorgeous creation of Vassili Blagenoi, and lasting monument to the artistic sense of that monster-tyrant, Ivan the IV, called the “Terrible.”

In the cathedral of the Archangel Michael, within the sacred precincts of the Kremlin, lie now their coffins side by side, costly coverings of gold-bespangled velvet enshrouding each; a strange example of the equality of death. The story runs: so delighted was Ivan with the extraordinary and curious beauty of Vassili’s creation, that he gave a sumptuous banquet in his honor within the Imperial palace and there, lavishly bepraising him before the assembled company, declared that it were impossible for human mind to create another building so wonderful in all the world. Whereupon turning to Vassili, he inquired of the flattered and delighted architect whether this declaration were not the truth. The gratified creator of the wonderful cathedral is said to have replied, “Ah, Sire, give me the money and I will build you another a thousand times more beautiful than the poor work I have already done.” Hearing this, the Terrible Ivan turned to his headsman who stood ever handy at his elbow, and ordered Vassili’s eyes to be immediately burnt out with red-hot irons, in order, as he declared, that there should never be again created so splendid an edifice; then, Vassili dying as a result of the operation, Ivan ordered a magnificent funeral and directed that the body be laid within the consecrated chamber of the cathedral, among the princes of the blood, where even to-day it yet remains.

Our Hungarian guide vowed that this tale was the literal truth, pointing to the coffin which lay at our feet, among the relics of the house of Rurik, as evidence incontrovertible. Nor did we presume to doubt this instance of Ivan’s cruelty, so thick spotted are the pages of history with a thousand other instances of his devilish acts.

Ivan loved the sight and smell of blood. As a boy he delighted to torture domestic animals, and to ride down old women when he caught them on the streets. As a man, he had the Archbishop of Novogorod sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and thrown to savage dogs; frequently he dispatched his enemies with his own sword, and he publicly murdered his eldest son, the Czarevitch. No malevolent scheme of the human mind was too cruel for his enjoyment. By him entire cities were devoted to destruction on the most trifling pretext. For one instance, the inhabitants of the commercial towns of Novogorod (sixty thousand in Novogorod alone) and of Tver and of Klin were massacred in cold blood under his personal supervision. He was more cruel than Nero or Caligula, and compared with the appalling atrocities of his reign, Louis XI and Ferdinand VII were gentle kings.

His presumption was equal to his cruelty, and he did not hesitate to send his Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth to offer her the privilege of becoming his eighth bride. History knows no such other monster as Ivan the Terrible, who was undoubtedly mad; and yet he built beautiful churches and palaces, and did more to encourage art and culture within the confines of the empire than any other of the Russian Czars.

We have also driven about the city and viewed the public buildings, the shops and the markets, and this afternoon have come out across the river Moskva, and climbed the hills of Vorobievy Gory, the “Sparrow Hills,” – from the heights of which Napoleon, on that memorable fourteenth day of September, 1812, fresh from the victory of Borodino, first viewed the city. In superb panorama, Holy Moscow lay stretched before us, its towers, its spires, its red and green and blue and yellow walls and roofs, its golden domes, presenting a most sumptuous harmony of color to the delighted eye.

While St. Petersburg is the political capital, yet Moscow is the real center of Russia. Here is the focus of Russia’s industrial, commercial, financial and religious life. Her “Chinese Bank” cashes notes on Kashgar and Pekin, and sells bills of exchange upon their banks in return. The street-life of this most Russian city, the coming and going of its people, the commingling of these divers tribes and races, strikingly illustrates the heterogeneous character of the cumbrous empire. Here pass me by the blue-eyed, tow-polled mujiks from the provinces; here I meet, face to face, the swarthy skins which tell of Tiflis and of Teheran; here I touch elbows with kaftan-gowned traders from Merv and Samarkand, and silk-clad Chinese merchants from the distant East.

As I stroll along the Nickols-Skaia, the Iliinka-Skaia, or the Rojdestvensky Boulevard, and catch the glances of these faces which stare upon me with constant grave suspicion, doubtful, perchance, whether I am a foreign spy in bureaucratic employ, or a stranger friendly to the held-down people, I am musing upon the curious interweaving of science and superstition, of modern and mediaeval custom, which I here behold, and I ponder how work the hearts and minds behind these masks which alone I see. Profound suspicion and discontent is the impression I receive. Nowhere do I note a single instance of that joyous hopefulness which marks men’s faces in America. The eye which here looks into mine has about it a gaze not frank and sunny, but furtive and melancholy as that of a chained-up wolf. Gradually I am beginning to comprehend that the men I look upon, although clothed in the veneer of twentieth century civilization, are nevertheless in mind and heart barbarians, – barbarians chafing beneath the bitter burden of the hateful auto-bureaucratic rule; they are Asiatic rather than European; even in discontent they lack the open-mindedness of the West; they belong to the mysterious and inscrutable peoples of the East. Napoleon’s saying, “Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar,” now comes to me with redoubled force.