Alfred Rambaud
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 FRANK J. KLINGBERG
 
 ^fefe
 
 THE 
 
 EXPANSION OF RUSSIA: 
 
 PROBLEMS OF THE EAST AND PROBLEMS 
 OF THE FAR EAST. 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED ;RAMBAUD. 
 
 <: BURLINGTON, VERMONT: 
 THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY. 
 
 '7^^ 1900.
 
 Copyright by 
 FREDERICK A. RICHARDSON, 
 
 1900.
 
 n,<^ 
 
 
 
 . e* 
 
 ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 Books upon Russia, her people and history 
 are attracting their share of attention. That 
 great, mysterious, distant empire, with a con- 
 tinuous history of conquests since the day when 
 the Mongol yoke was thrown off, with an 
 heroic age whose traditions are as attractive as 
 any of Western Europe; an absolute despotism, 
 rooted in the despotism of its former Asiatic 
 conquerors, superseding the more primitive but 
 freer communities, having the one aim since the 
 time of Peter the Great, to find an outlet on 
 an unfrozen sea. Baffled in Southeastern Eu- 
 rope, Russia has pressed at the points of least 
 resistance until now she is about to emerge on 
 the Persian Gulf, as she has already on the 
 shores of Manchuria. 
 
 Great Britain and Russia, "the elephant 
 and the whale, " the great rivals in Asia, so 
 different in their origins, their constitutions, 
 their power of assimilation, are now face to face. 
 
 M. Alfred Rambaud, the author of a history 
 of Russia which was at once recognized by 
 Russian and British students of Russian history 
 as most authoritative and the best of all ac- 
 cessible histories, is a Senator of France and 
 has held important government positions. He 
 is the translator of Seeley's " Expansion of 
 
 T> f " <"> 
 
 1 bS93oo
 
 England" and has written many important 
 works, relating to his own country and Russia. 
 He is a member of the Institute and his '' History 
 of Russia " was crowned by the French Acad- 
 emy in 1883. 
 
 The present little volume is a reprint of an 
 essay written for The International 
 Monthly and first printed in the September 
 and October issues of that journal. It meets 
 the demand for a condensed yet authoritative 
 history of that Russia known to the world. The 
 onward course of Russia is forcibly told in 
 these pages. The great demand for the maga- 
 zine numbers has induced the publishers to 
 issue the essay separately, with a table of con- 
 tents and divided into chapters with topical 
 headings, knowing that as a brief presentation 
 of Russia's development, her aims, and prob- 
 abilities of success, there is no other book 
 accessible to the American public which sur- 
 passes it.
 
 CONTENTS : 
 
 Chapter I. — The Origin of the Russian State and Nation. 
 The Tartar-Mongols, Principality of Moscow. The 
 Unity of Russia. Isolation. The Aim of Russian Diplo- 
 macy. 
 
 Chapter II. — Peter the Great. Poland. The Eastern Ques- 
 tion. Latin and Greek Churches. Catherine the 
 Great. Turkish Wars. Greek Independence. Crimean 
 War. The Balkan States. Nihilism. Results of Euro- 
 pean Wars. Nicholas ii. 
 
 Chapter III. — An Asiatic Power. Wars and Treaties with 
 Persia. A Way to the Indian Ocean. In the Caucasus. 
 Paramount in Persia. 
 
 Chapter IV. — Expansion Towards India. Napoleon. The 
 Conquest of the Khans. In Afghanistan. The " Key 
 OF THE Indies." In Touch With India. Abyssinia. 
 British Over-Confidence. 
 
 Chapter V. — The Opening of Siberia. Value of Siberia. 
 Chinese Wars. Settlements on the Pacific. Chinese 
 Cessions. Vladivostock. Russian Influence at Pekin. 
 
 Chapter VI. — The China-Japan War. Interference of Russia. 
 Conflict With Japanese Interests. Russia's Gain. 
 
 Chapter VII. — Russian Concessions. Port Arthur. Railways. 
 Loans. Corea. Germany. Great Britain. The United 
 States. 
 
 Chapter VIII. — Fruits of Diplomacy. Absolutism of Russian 
 Government. An Enlightened Despotism. Russian Colon- 
 ists. Race Characteristics. Religion. Population. 
 Franco-Russian Alliance. From the Baltic to the Pacific.
 
 The 
 
 Expansion of Russia
 
 THE EXPANSION OF RUSSIA. 
 
 The Origin of the Russian State and Nation — The 
 Tartar-Mongols — Principality of Moscow — The Unity 
 OF Russia — Isolation — The Aim of Russian Diplomacy. 
 
 E fail to discover, however far 
 back we go towards the begin- 
 nings of the Russian State, 
 any indication that this was 
 ever destined to become a 
 maritime power. In the ninth 
 centurv, the Slavic tribes that 
 were to form the first political 
 organization designated by the name Russian, — the 
 Slavo-Russian tribes, — occupied a territory securely shut 
 in on the west, by the Poles and the Lithuanians ; on 
 the north, by the Finnish tribes, the Livonians, the 
 Tchudis, and the Ingrians; on the east, Finnish tribes 
 again, the Vesi, the Merians, the Muromians, and 
 two Turkish tribes, the Meshtcheraks and the Khazars, 
 that occupied all the northern coast of the Bl^ck Sea ; 
 allowing but a single one of the Slavo-Russian peoples 
 to hold a position upon its shores. Except at this point, 
 
 (I)
 
 2 RUSSIA OF THE IXth CENTURY. 
 
 these Slavo-Russian tribes nowhere had access to the 
 coast. The shores of the White Sea and the Arctic 
 Ocean were Finnish ; those of the Baltic, Finnish or 
 Scandinavian ; those of the Black Sea were held by the 
 Khazars, the Caucasian tribes, the Byzantine Empire, 
 and the Bulgarians, a Finnish tribe that had imposed its 
 name and sovereignty upon a certain number of Slavic 
 tribes. 
 
 In the East and North, the Slavs were not to be found 
 even in those regions where afterwards rose the Russian 
 capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg. Beyond began 
 those immense spaces that stretch away into the depths 
 of Central Asia, and even to the Pacific Ocean, spaces 
 peopled with Finnish and Turkish tribes, and other 
 branches of the Uralo-Altaic family. Then, still fur- 
 ther east, were to be found certain peoples of the yellow 
 race. 
 
 To speak now only of the Russia of Europe, how did 
 the Slavo-Russians, who in the ninth century held 
 scarcely a fifth part of their present territory, succeed in 
 securing possession of it all ? A two-fold change came 
 about during the centuries. On the one hand, the Slavo- 
 Russians, very venturesome in disposition, following, at 
 first, the course of the rivers and their tributaries, spread 
 out over the vast plains that stretch away to the Ural 
 Mountains ; founding everywhere cities, villages, and 
 markets right in the midst of the territory of the aborigi- 
 nal tribes. On the other hand, they absorbed the greater
 
 THE WELDING OF THE TRIBES. 3 
 
 part of those tribes, and imposed upon them their lan- 
 guage, religion, and even their manners and customs. A 
 double colonization, therefore, took place, a colonization 
 of the soil and a colonization of the native. The ancient 
 Uralo-Altaic tribes, subjugated or absorbed by the Rus- 
 sians, have disappeared from the map of the empire. 
 There persist still only some scattered remnants of them, 
 surrounded by men of Russian race and speech, and 
 destined soon to disappear. These aborigines are to be 
 found in fairly compact groups only in those places where 
 the severity of the climate, the barren character of the 
 soil, the thickness of the forest, and the desert steppes 
 check Russian civilization, an ethnographical medley, 
 moreover, occupying only a very small and indifferently 
 valuable part of the European Russia of to-day.' 
 
 Thus the primitive tribes of the Slavo-Russians formed 
 an agglomeration which was everywhere well-nigh 
 entirely shut off from any sea. This had a character 
 essentially continental; the population was wholly agri- 
 cultural in character, and, except as fleets of light boats 
 descended the Dnieper in the tenth century to harass 
 Constantinople and to commit piracy on the Byzantine 
 shores of the Black Sea, there was nothing to indicate 
 that it would one day come forth as a maritime power. 
 
 (i) Thus the Suomi, the Karelians, and the Laplanders in Finland ; 
 the Zyrians and the Permians, in the northeast ; the Tcheremisa, 
 the Mordva, the Votiaki, the Meshtcheraks, and the Bashkirs on 
 the river Volga, or between the Volga and the Ural Mountains and 
 river.
 
 4 THE ORTHODOX CHURCH. 
 
 The Russia of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was 
 scarcely European. She was bound to Europe only by 
 her form of religion, and even that, borrowed from Byzan- 
 tium, was an Oriental, an almost Asiatic form of Chris- 
 tianity. When there came about in the eleventh century 
 the rupture between the Latin and Catholic Church of the 
 West, and the Greek and Orthodox Church of the East, 
 a still higher barrier was raised between the two parts of 
 Europe. To the Western Christians, the Greeks and 
 the peoples that they had evangelized, the Bulgarians, 
 the Servians, the Moldavo-Wallachians, and the Rus- 
 sians, were only schismatics. Now, while the Catholic 
 peoples of the West, thanks to more favorable historical 
 circumstances, began to take shape as powerful nations 
 in which an already well-advanced civilization went on 
 developing, the schismatic peoples of Eastern Europe, 
 assailed by successive invasions from Asia, and after 
 having long served as a living bulwark against barbarism 
 for ungrateful Europe, were checked in their historic 
 evolution, and fell one after the other into servitude to 
 pagan Mongols or Mohammedan Turks. 
 
 The country where the Slavo-Russians first established 
 themselves was only a prolongation of the great plains 
 which, scarcely broken by the Ural Mountains, extend 
 to Behring's Sea, Okhotsk Sea, and the Sea of Japan. 
 Geographically, topographically, this primitive Russia 
 was already Asiatic. Just as the winds from Asia swept 
 unhindered all this immense plain, so could the migration
 
 THE TARTAR-MONGOLS. 5 
 
 of peoples and invading expeditions, at times originat- 
 ing near the Great Wall of China, pour unchecked over 
 the Russian plains as far as the Carpathian Mountains 
 and the Vistula. 
 
 One of those revolutions, so frequent among the 
 nomadic tribes of Asia, brought together from 11 54 to 
 1227 under the blue banner of Temuchin, called Jenghis 
 Khan, numerous tribes of shepherds and mounted 
 nomads. They adopted as their collective name that 
 of the Tartar-Mongols. At their head " the Inflexible 
 Emperor," " the Son of Heaven," conquered Manchuria, 
 the kingdom of Tangut, North China, Turkestan, and 
 Great Bokhara, and founded an empire which extended 
 from the Pacific to the Ural Mountains. Under the 
 successors of Jenghis Khan, these mounted hordes, mad- 
 dened by the fury of war and conquest, crossed into 
 Europe, fell upon Russia, then divided into numerous 
 principalities, carried the capital cities by assault, anni- 
 hilated, one after the other, the armies of foot and horse 
 sent against them, and in 1240 converted all Russia into 
 a mere province of the Mongol Empire. The Russian 
 princes and the chieftains of the Finnish tribes became 
 vassals of the Great Khan,' who held his court on the 
 banks of the Onon, an affluent of the Amur, or at 
 
 (1) Consult Howorth, History of the Mongols, London, 1876. 
 Wolff, Geschichte der Mongolen, Breslau, 1872. Leon Cahun, 
 Introduction a V histoire de r Asie, Paris, 1896.
 
 6 A PROVINCE OF THE MONGOL EMPIRE. 
 
 Karakorum on the Orkhon, a stream emptying into Lake 
 Baikal. They were also more directly the vassals of one 
 of his vassals, the Khan of the Golden Horde, vi^ho was 
 stationed at Sarai on the lower Volga. 
 
 At this period the Tartar-Mongols, among whom 
 Mohammedanism was disseminated until about 1272, 
 were still Buddhists, Shamanists, or fetich worshipers ; at 
 heart very indifferent in matters of religion, and strangers 
 to any thought of propagandism or of intolerance. 
 They, therefore, left the Russians in undisturbed posses- 
 sion of their religion, their laws, and their own princely 
 dynasties. They merely exacted tribute, and, in certain 
 contingencies, military service ; and every new Russian 
 prince must go to receive his investiture either at Sarai, 
 or even by a journey that would occupy years, at the court 
 of the Great Khan. There they were compelled to 
 prostrate themselves at the foot of his throne, to defend 
 themselves against the accusations of enemies, or of their 
 Russian rivals ; and the Khan disposed of their heads as 
 of their crowns. Many Russian princes were executed 
 before his eyes. Some among these, the Russian Church 
 honors as martyrs. 
 
 Among the Russian princes who went there to pros- 
 trate themselves before the Horde were those who had 
 founded round about a little market-town, the name of 
 which is met with for the first time in 1 147, anew 
 principality, that of Moscow, one of the most insignifi- 
 cant of the Russian states of that period. It was estab-
 
 MOSCOW— GRAND PRINCE DMITRI. 7 
 
 lished in the midst of a Finnish country, among the 
 Muromians. It formed, therefore, a colony of primitive 
 Russia. The princes of Moscow knew how to turn to 
 their own advantage the Mongol yoke that weighed on 
 all Russia. They were more adroit than the others in 
 flattering the common master and the agents that repre- 
 sented him in Russia. One of them, George (1303— 
 1325), even married a Tartar princess. In their strug- 
 gles against other Russian princes, they always carried 
 the controversy to the court of the Khan, who almost 
 always decided in their favor, and sent them away 
 with the heads of their rivals. They secured from the 
 Khan the privilege of collecting the tribute, not only 
 from their own subjects, but from the other princes of 
 Russia. This function as tribute collector for the Khan 
 raised them above all their equals ; and the more humble 
 vassals of the barbarians they showed themselves to be, 
 the better did they establish their suzerainty over the 
 other Christian states. They succeeded thus in building 
 up a powerful state, which was called the " Great 
 Principality " of Moscow. When they felt themselves 
 to be strong enough, and perceived that the Mongol 
 Empire had grown sufficiently weak through internal 
 dissension and divisions to warrant the attempt, they 
 turned against the barbarians the power that they owed 
 to them. In 1380, the Grand Prince DmiVri, having 
 refused payment of tribute, defeated Mamai, the Khan 
 of the Golden Horde, at Kulikovo on the Don. But the
 
 8 IVAN THE GREAT. 
 
 Mongols were not yet as weak as Dmitri Donskoi (hero 
 of the Don) had thought. Tamerlane, or Timur-Leng, 
 had just conquered Turkestan, Persia, Asia Minor, and 
 North Hindustan. One of his lieutenants, Tokhtamysh, 
 having vainly summoned the Grand Prince Dmitri to 
 appear before him, marched against Moscow, captured 
 the city and its Kremlin, sacked the other cities of the 
 principality, and everywhere reestablished Asiatic 
 supremacy. Nevertheless, the Mongol yoke was not to 
 survive long the heroic effort made at Kulikovo. The 
 great barbarian empires founded by Asiatic conquerors 
 quickly fall to pieces. This historical law was verified 
 in the Empire of Tamerlane, as in that of Jenghis Khan. 
 Towards the end of the fifteenth century, the Mongol 
 Empire of Asia was divided into the Mongol Empire of 
 China, the Mongol Empire of India, the Mongol King- 
 dom of Persia, and a large number of khanates in Turk- 
 estan and Siberia; and all those states were scarcely 
 any longer Mongol save in name. In Russia itself, the 
 Golden Horde was broken up. From its debris were 
 formed the czarate of Kazan on the middle Volga, the 
 khanate, or czarate, of Sarai, or Astrakhan, on the lower 
 Volga, the horde of the Nogais, and the khanate of the 
 Crimea. In 1476, Akhmed, the Khan of Sarai, sent a 
 demand for tribute to the Grand Prince of Moscow, 
 Ivan the Great. Ivan put the ambassadors to death. 
 Four years later, the Khan Akhmed marched upon Mos- 
 cow with a large army. Near the rivers Oka and Ugra
 
 END OF THE MONGOL RULE. 9 
 
 he met the army of Ivan the Great ; but neither of the 
 adversaries dared force the passage of the two rivers. 
 They remained there several days exchanging insults and 
 darts from the opposite shores. Then a panic simultane- 
 ously arose in both armies ; the one fleeing in the 
 direction of Moscow, the other in the direction of Sarai. 
 It was in this bloodless, inglorious way that the Mongol 
 power in Russia came to an end. 
 
 The Mongol yoke had continued two hundred and 
 fifty-six years (i 224-1480). It left in Russia traces 
 that were for a long time ineffaceable. Before the Tartar 
 conquest, the power of a Russian prince was founded 
 upon European origins. It recalled the patriarchal 
 authority of the old-time chieftains of the Slavo-Russian 
 tribes ; the martial authority of the heads of the Scandi- 
 navian or Variagian clans, like Rurik and other Variagian 
 chiefs, called into Russia, it is said, by the Slavs ; and 
 the authority, at once civil and religious, of the Byzan- 
 tine-Roman emperors, whom the successors of Rurik, 
 like all the barbarian chieftains of Eastern Europe, liked 
 to take as models. After the Tartar conquest, on the 
 contrary, the Russian princes, and especially the Grand 
 Princes of Moscow, selected as prototypes of their own 
 authority the Khans and Great Khans with their auto- 
 cratic power, — coarse, irresponsible, Asiatic. From that 
 time forward, they treated their vassals as they themselves 
 had been treated by the Khans. Between the Grand 
 Prince and his vassals, and between these and the peas-
 
 lo NATIVE RULERS— COSTUME. 
 
 ants, the relations were those of brutal masters and 
 tembling slaves. The sovereign of Moscov^^ did not differ 
 from a Mongol Khan, from a Persian Shah, or from 
 an Osmanli Sultan, save as he professed the orthodox 
 religion. He was a sort of a Christian Grand Turk. 
 When the title of Grand Prince seemed to him unworthy 
 of his increased power, the title that his ambition chose 
 was none of those that the Christian rulers of the West 
 then bore; it was the one which the Khans of Siberia, 
 of Kazan, or of Astrakhan had arrogated ; it was the 
 title of Czar, which, of course, has not any etymological 
 connection with that of Caesar, a fiction invented very 
 much later. Such was the title that the heir of the 
 Grand Princes of Moscow, Ivan the Terrible, solemnly 
 took in 1547. Many other facts attest the predomi- 
 nance of Asiatic influences over the Russia of the six- 
 teenth century. The costumes of the Czar of Moscow 
 and of the other great lords, the princes and boyars, were 
 Asiatic ; Asiatic was the servile etiquette of the court ; 
 touching with the brow the foot of the throne, and the 
 humble formulas in which the highest personages declared 
 themselves to be slaves; Asiatic was the seclusion of the 
 women in the terem^ which, was a Russian harem ;' Asiatic 
 was the equipment of the royal cavalry with their high 
 
 (i) However, it is proper to call attention to the fact that the 
 servile character of the court etiquette may also have been borrowed 
 from Byzantium, and that the Russian terem may have had its 
 original in the gynascium of the Greeks.
 
 THE UNITY OF RUSSIA. ii 
 
 saddles and short stirrups ; their boots with the toe in 
 the form of an upturned crescent ; their armor remind- 
 ing one of the . Chinese and Japanese ; their curved 
 swords, their bows and quivers, and their head-dress, 
 which resembled a turban surmounted by an aigrette. 
 All this Oriental apparel was to continue in vogue until 
 the time when Peter the Great, with the violent meas- 
 ures of an Asiatic despot, forcibly introduced into Russia 
 the short clothing of the West, — " German dress," that 
 is, European. With this change in costume, he also 
 brought in the fashion of shaving the face; the holding 
 of social gatherings, which the recluses of the terem were 
 compelled to attend ; the etiquette of the Christian 
 courts ; the formulary of the German bureaucracy, and 
 the uniforms, equipments, and tactics of the armies of • 
 the West. 
 
 While Russia was still groaning under the Mongol 
 yoke, the Grand Princes of Moscow, utilizing their ser- 
 vitude as an instrument of power, caused the other 
 princes to bow before the terror of the Mongol, and 
 brought about "the consolidation of the Russian territory," 
 that is to say, they founded the unity of Russia. When 
 the family line of the Grand Princes and Czars of Mos- 
 cow died out in 1598, and when there began for Russia 
 " those troublous times {smoutnoi'e Vremia)" which the 
 accession of the Romanofs brought to an end in 16 13, 
 the czarate of Moscow was already a very powerful 
 state.
 
 12 CONQUESTS. 
 
 In the North especially, by the annexation of the ter- 
 ritories of the ancient republics of Novgorod and Pskof, 
 the Muscovite supremacy was extended to the White 
 Sea and the Arctic Ocean. On the west, in a series of 
 wars against the Lithuanians and the Poles to "recover" 
 from them Russian territory which they had formerly 
 conquered, the Moscow czarate had carried its power 
 beyond Pskof and Lake Peipus, and had reached the 
 Dnieper at Kiev and Smolensk. In the South, it had 
 reached neither the Black Sea nor the Sea of Azov, from 
 which it was separated by the Ukraine that still belonged 
 to the Poles, by a republic of adventurers and pirates 
 called the Zaporovians, by the khanate of the Crimean 
 Tartars, by the camping grounds of the Nogaian Tar- 
 tars, and, finally, by the maritime power of the Ottomans 
 on the Euxine. Eastward, Russian conquest and col- 
 onization had made great advances. The uniting of the 
 old territories of Novgorod, and the annexation of those 
 of the republic of Viatka, brought the Muscovite domi- 
 nation to the Ural Mountains. The conquest of the 
 czarate of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible, in 1552, gave 
 him all the region of the middle Volga, and the conquest 
 of the czarate of Astrakhan, two years later, placed in 
 his power all the lower Volga country, with a part of the 
 coast of the Caspian Sea. Finally, the conquest of the 
 khanate of Sibir, between the years 1579-1584, by the 
 Cossack Irmak, carried the Russian eagles beyond the 
 Urals, and opened before them the immensities of Siberia.
 
 IVAN THE TERRIBLE. 13 
 
 But the more extensive the Muscovite Empire became, 
 the more it suffered from not having access to any sea 
 which was all the year free from ice, or which would 
 afford an outlet to the ocean. The harbors of the White 
 Sea were closed with ice eight months of the year ; the 
 Caspian Sea is only a great lake without an outlet. 
 To reach the Baltic Sea, it would be necessary to battle 
 against the Germans, the Poles, and the Swedes, the mas- 
 ters of all its shores. To gain access to the Black Sea, 
 there were, again, the Poles to be fought, as well as the 
 Tartars, the Zaporovians, and the Grand Turk. Now, 
 the European neighbors of Russia were beginning to fear 
 this great barbarian empire. They were convinced that 
 it would become truly a terror to them the day on which, 
 by obtaining regular communication with the West, it 
 could thereby learn somethmg of their civilization, their 
 industries, and, above all, their military art. They under- 
 stood that the backward condition of its civilization was 
 the only safeguard against its ambitions. They, there- 
 fore, closed against it their eastern frontiers, and barred 
 it out of the Baltic. At the time when Ivan the Ter- 
 rible, profiting by the decadence into which the Sword- 
 Bearers, the religious military order of the Livonians, had 
 fallen, took their lands away from them, and raised his 
 flag at their port of Narva, Poles, Germans, and Swedes 
 united against him ; they incited fresh invasion^ of the 
 Crimean Tartars, conspiracies and rebellion among his 
 nobility ; and, after a bitter struggle of twenty-four years.
 
 14 ISOLATION OF RUSSIA. 
 
 compelled him to abandon his conquest in 1582. So 
 long as Narva was in the hands of the Czar, Sigismund, 
 King of Poland, did not have a moment's peace. When 
 English merchants began to resort there, he wrote threat- 
 ening letters to Oueen Elizabeth, summoning her to for- 
 bid that traffic. " Our fleet will seize all those who con- 
 tinue to sail thither ; your merchants will be in danger of 
 losingtheir liberty, their wives and children,and theirlives." 
 And this confession escaped him : " We see by this new 
 traffic the Aiuscovite, who is not only our enemy to-day, 
 but the hereditary enemy of all free nations, furnishing 
 himself thoroughly, not only with our guns and muni- 
 tions of war, but, above all, with skilled workmen, who 
 continue to prepare equipments of war for him, such as 
 have been hitherto unknov/n to his barbaric people. * * * 
 It would seem that we have thus far conquered him 
 because he is ignorant of the art of war and the finesse of 
 diplomacy. Now, if this commerce continues, what will 
 there soon be left for him to learn ? " 
 
 Thus, it was not merely unpropitious nature that kept 
 Russia in a condition of blockade ; but the jealousy of 
 her neighbors mounted a most rigorous guard around 
 these "barbarians" of the North. The empire of 
 Moscow remained condemned, like the agglomeration of 
 Slavic tribes of the ninth and tenth centuries from which 
 it had sprung, to a purely continental life. It was shut 
 up to its vast northern plams like the Swiss to his moun- 
 tains, and seemed to have as little chance of ever becom- 
 ing a maritime power.
 
 THE AIM OF RUSSIA. 15. 
 
 Hitherto, the Muscovite Empire with its military 
 organization wholly Asiatic, with its noble-born knights 
 and free peasants, with its infantry militia, the streltsy^ 
 with its old-fashioned artillery, with its irregular troops 
 of Cossacks, Tartars, and Calmucks, had been able to 
 withstand victoriously Asiatic forces ; but it could not 
 maintain a struggle against the regular troops and im- 
 proved weapons of the western nations. In order to 
 make her mark in Europe, it was necessary for Russia to 
 become European ; but she could not become European 
 if Europe persisted in holding her in a condition of 
 blockade. It was a " vicious circle "; and it was 
 reserved for the genius of Peter the Great to succeed in 
 breaking that circle. 
 
 Henceforth, we see Russian diplomacy, with tireless 
 patience, with a shrewdness equal to its persistency, 
 endeavoring simultaneously in all directions to pierce the 
 blockade. She strives to secure access to the Baltic Sea ; 
 and we shall have the Northern War of Peter the Great, 
 the partition of Poland under Catherine II., the Einland 
 question under the Czarina Elizabeth, and under Alex- 
 ander I. She strives to secure access to the Black Sea ; 
 and we shall have the Eastern Question in all its forms, 
 from the first efforts of Peter the Great down to the war 
 of 1877-78. of Alexander II. She strives to make her- 
 self mistress of the Caspian Sea, and the attempt made 
 by Peter the Great will reach an end only under Alex- 
 ander III. She strives to secure access to the Indian
 
 i6 THE AIM OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Ocean, and we shall have the wars and treaties with 
 Persia, Afghanistan, and England. She strives to secure 
 access to the Okhotsk Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the 
 Pacific Ocean, and we shall witness the work of Siberian 
 colonization and all the phases of the Far Eastern Ques- 
 tion. The matter of securing new territory concerns 
 her much less. It has been the supreme end of her 
 efforts, at times continued for centuries, to reach a sea, 
 — a sea free from ice, a sea opening into the ocean.
 
 THE EXPANSION OF RUSSIA IN EUROPE. 
 
 Peter the Great — Poland — The Eastern Question — Latin 
 AND Greek Churches — Catherine the Great — Turkish 
 Wars — Greek Independence — Crimean War — The Balkan 
 States — Nihilism — Results of European Wars — Nicholas ii. 
 
 E know with what energy and 
 alternation of success and fail- 
 ure Peter the Great struggled 
 against the Swedish masters of 
 the eastern and southern shores 
 of the Baltic. We are amazed 
 when we reflect that a war, 
 lasting more than twenty-one 
 years ; a war that convulsed all Europe ; that brought 
 the Swedes into the heart of Russia and the Russians 
 into the centre of Germany ; that brought about the 
 creation of a Russian army and navy under the fire of the 
 enemy, and that numbered a score of battles on land and 
 sea, — should have ended in results apparently so meagre 
 as were those gained by Russia in 1721 at the Treaty of 
 Nystad ; namely, the acquisition of four small provinces, 
 Livonia, Esthonia, Ingria, and Karelia. But these prov- 
 
 (17)
 
 1 8 FINLAND— POLAND. 
 
 inces gave him on the Baltic the ports of Riga, Revel, 
 and Narva ; they gave him also the mouths of two riv- 
 ers, the broad Neva and the Diina, or Dvina (not to be 
 confounded with the other Dvina that empties into the 
 White Sea). It was on the islets of the Neva that Peter 
 the Great had founded in 1703, on lands still disputed 
 by the Swedes and by the floods, the capital of European 
 Russia, St. Petersburg, protected on the west by the 
 maritime fortress of Kronstadt. Yes, " the Giant 
 Czar " considered himself amply repaid for his efforts of 
 twenty-one years by the fact that for his vast continental 
 empire, still wrapped in Asiatic darkness, he had been 
 able "to open one window on Europe." 
 
 This window was still a very narrow one. It was 
 somewhat enlarged by Elizabeth, when, after a war fool- 
 ishly undertaken by Sweden, she made that country, in 
 the Treaty of Abo, 1743, surrender some districts in 
 Finland. Later, Alexander I., during his short-lived 
 alliance with Napoleon, conquered from his recent ally, 
 Gustavus III., all of Finland (Treaty of Fredericksham, 
 1809). Russia had now no longer anything to seek in 
 that direction. 
 
 Westward, between Russia, already powerful and 
 always war-like, and Prussia, now grown great in glory 
 and strength, lay an extremely weak state made up of 
 the kingdom of Poland, the grand duchy of Lithuania and 
 some old-time Russian districts. The first three par- 
 titions of this state (1772, 1793, 1795)5 carried the
 
 PARTITION OF POLAND. 19 
 
 Russian frontier to the Niemen, the Warthe, and the 
 Dniester. Catherine II. completed these conquests by the 
 annexation of Courland, which had been a vassal depen- 
 dency of the fallen kingdom. It is to be noted, how- 
 ever, that in what is called " the partition of Poland," 
 Catherine II. did not acquire any Polish, but merely 
 Lithuanian territory that formerly had been Russian. If 
 Napoleon I. had not attempted to reestablish on the Rus- 
 sian frontier a Polish kingdom under the name of " the 
 grand duchy of Warsaw," perhaps Russia would not 
 have been ambitious to secure possession of any former 
 Polish territory. After the fall of Napoleon, the Czar 
 Alexander I. was obliged to appropriate a considerable 
 part of this under the name of " the kingdom of Poland," 
 were it for no other reason than to prevent an increase 
 of territory upon the part of the two German powers. 
 Henceforth the western frontier of Russia was fixed. It 
 has not changed since 1815, and, to admit the possibility 
 of a change in the future, it would be necessary to admit 
 the possibility of a total overturning of the European 
 balance of power. 
 
 Though Russian expansion towards the north was 
 stopped by the icy solitudes of Lapland, westward by the 
 frontiers of states as firmly established as the German 
 and Austro-Hungarian Empires, yet for a long time a 
 broad way remained open to Russia in the direction of 
 the south. The decadence of the Ottoman Empire 
 seemed to offer her the same favorable opportunities as
 
 20 THE DREAM OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 
 
 did the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire. In 
 this direction, acquisition of territory promised to be 
 infinitely more precious. The Russians could dream of 
 the Black Sea, the Propontis, and the ^^gean Sea becom- 
 ing Russian lakes ; of Christian peoples of the same 
 religion (Roumanians and Greeks), — and of some of the 
 same religion and race (Bulgarians, Servians, Croatians, ' 
 Bosnians, Herzegovinians, and Montenegrians), — wel- 
 coming the armies of a Liberator Czar, and joyfully 
 accepting the domination of Russia in exchange for that 
 of the Ottoman ; and, finally, they could dream of Con- 
 stantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, 
 freed from the yoke of the infidel, and of the cross taking 
 the place of the crescent on the dome of Saint Sophia. 
 Nevertheless, it was, perhaps, in the direction of the 
 south that Russia, in her schemes for expansion, after 
 some brilliant successes, found herself the most com- 
 pletely deceived. 
 
 For a long time the sovereigns that sat upon Russia's 
 throne at Moscow, and then at St. Petersburg, were 
 infatuated with this Oriental mirage. The Russian 
 Orthodox Church urged them on in this course through 
 sympathy with the Orthodox Christians who were in 
 subjection to the infidel. Even the Roman Catholic 
 Church at a certain time encouraged them in the hope 
 that the sword of the Czar might accomplish both the 
 deliverance of the Christians and the union of the two 
 churches., that is to say, the subordination of the Greek
 
 THE LATIN AND GREEK CHURCHES. 21 
 
 Church to the Roman. It was Pope Paul III., who, at 
 the advice of the Greek cardinal, Bessarion, offered to 
 the Grand Prince of Moscow, Ivan the Great, the hand 
 of his ward, Sophia Palasologus, the niece of the last 
 Christian emperor of Constantinople. It was at Rome 
 that the marriage took place, and it was the Pope who 
 gave a dowry to the heiress of the Caesars of the East.' 
 It is from the time of this marriage that the double-headed 
 eagle of the Palaeologus took its place on the escutcheons 
 and standards of the Russian sovereigns. Paul III. was de- 
 ceived in both his hopes ; for the union of the two churches 
 was never accepted at Moscow, and many years passed 
 before a Russian army was able to advance a step southward. 
 The second of the Romanofs, Alexis, father of Peter the 
 Great, set the first landmark southward in the Treaty of 
 Andrussovo with Poland, in 1667, by acquiring a part 
 of the Ukraine, extending as far as the upper course of 
 the Dnieper. Vast spaces still separated the Russian and 
 the Ottoman Empires. Nevertheless, in the coolest and 
 shrewdest minds brooded the idea of a holy war against 
 the infidel. Peter the Great, still young and journeying 
 in Western Europe, learning its arts and himself wield- 
 ing the carpenter's axe at Saardam, wrote, in 1697, ^° 
 Adrian, the Patriarch of Moscow : " We are laboring in 
 order thoroughly to conquer the art of the sea, so that 
 
 (i) Le R. P. Prerling, La Russie et V orient — mariage d'un tsar 
 au Vatican, Paris, 1891 ; La Russie et le saint-siege, 2 vols. Paris, 
 1896— '97.
 
 22 DEFEAT BY THE TURKS. 
 
 having completely learned it, on our return to Russia, we 
 may be victorious over the enemies of Christ, and by His 
 grace be the liberator of the down-trodden Christians. 
 This is what I shall never cease to desire until my latest 
 breath." 
 
 Upon his return to Russia, however, his struggle with 
 Sweden occupied all his attention. It was only in 171 1, 
 when his enemy, Charles XII., a refugee in the domains 
 of the Grand Turk, earnestly sought to have the latter 
 take up arms against Russia, that Peter the Great allowed 
 himself to be tempted by the appeal which the hospodars 
 of Moldavia and Wallachia, Montenegrian envoys, and 
 Greek agents addressed to him in the name of Christians 
 who were oppressed and ready to rise in revolt. He 
 found immense spaces to be traversed ; and crossed the 
 Pruth with only thirty-eight thousand starving and har- 
 assed soldiers. He discovered that all the promises of 
 the Levantines were unwarranted ; he met neither allies 
 nor help ; and beset by two hundred thousand Turks, or 
 Tartars, he had to consider himself fortunate to get back 
 again across the rivers, after having signed the Treaty of 
 Falksen, or of the Pruth, which restored to the Ottomans 
 his first conquest, the city of Azov. 
 
 The second southward step of the Russians was the 
 conquest of a bit of territory that was peopled with Ser- 
 vian colonists, and that was called New Servia. This 
 acquisition was won by the Treaty of Belgrade in 1 739 ; 
 but it had cost the Empress Anna Ivanovna three years
 
 CATHERINE II. 23 
 
 of war and useless victories, and nearly one hundred 
 thousand men. 
 
 The third was a gigantic step. After the first war 
 against the Turks, Catherine II. found herself checked 
 by the intervention of Prussia and Austria, who com- 
 pelled her to renounce nearly all her eastern conquests, 
 and to accept a compensation in Poland. Nevertheless, 
 by the Treaty of Kairnaji, in 1774, she had ceded to her 
 Azov on the Don, and Kinburn at the mouth of the 
 Dnieper. She forced the Sultan to recognize the inde- 
 pendence of the Tartars of the Bug, of the Crimea, and 
 of the Kuban. This was to prepare for their annexation 
 to Russia, which was successfully accomplished and sanc- 
 tioned by the Constantinople Compact of 1784. All 
 the north shore of the Black Sea and of the Dniester, as 
 far as the Kuban River, now became Russian. The last 
 Mohammedan states of Russia were converted into 
 provinces of the empire, and the last vestige of " the 
 Tartar yoke" was effaced from Russian soil. 
 
 At once in the Tauric peninsula and at the mouths of 
 the rivers arose formidable fortresses, Kherson, Kinburn, 
 and, on a bay of the Crimea, Sevastopol was made ready 
 to control the Black Sea. An entire Russian fleet was 
 built up, which could in two days cast anchor before the 
 walls of the Seraglio. The conquest of the Turkish 
 Empire, impossible to Peter the Great, seemed\to become 
 easy for Catherine the Great. In the triumphant journey 
 that she next accomplished through the conquered pro-
 
 24 SECOND TURKISH WAR. 
 
 vinces, her route was crowded with triumphal arches, 
 bearing this inscription : " The way to Byzantium." 
 She herself provoked the second Turkish war (1787- 
 1792). The Russian armies, everywhere victorious, 
 advanced to the Danube. The janissaries and spahis of 
 the Sultan could not stop them in their course. But 
 again did European diplomacy intervene. Catherine II. 
 had to give up the Roumanian hospodarates^ which had 
 been entirely subdued, and be satisfied with Otchakov, 
 and a strip of territory between the Bug and the Dniester, 
 and with guarantees more explicit than those of 1774 
 in favor of the Roumanian principalities. This arrange- 
 ment, accomplished at the Treaty of Yassy, 1792, 
 established over these principalities a sort of distant 
 Russian protectorate. Thus, although four Russian 
 interventions had already occurred, not an inch of 
 Christian territory had been wrested from the Sultan, and 
 not a Christian tribe had been delivered from his yoke. 
 
 The fifth intervention took place under Alexander I. 
 So long as his alliance, made at Tilsit in 1807 with 
 Napoleon continued, his armies were victorious. The 
 Roumanians were again conquered as far as the Danube ; 
 Bulgaria, conquered as far as the Balkans ; and under 
 George the Black (Kara-Georges), Servia won her inde- 
 pendence with her own forces alone. The rupture with 
 Napoleon compelled the Czar to sign the peace of 
 Bucharest with the Sultan in 1 8 1 2. Of all his conquests, 
 he retained only a bit of Roumanian territory, Bessarabia
 
 GREEK INDEPENDENCE. 25 
 
 between the Dniester and the Pruth — as also Ismail and 
 Kilia on the lower Danube. The Roumanians and 
 Bulgarians fell again under the Ottoman yoke, and Servia 
 was abandoned to herself. Nevertheless, an amnesty 
 was stipulated in favor of the Servians, and guarantees 
 were given in favor of the Roumanians. In 1827, 
 Nicholas I., by the Akerman Agreement, which was an 
 explanation of the Treaty of Bucharest, caused the 
 guarantees accorded the Roumanians to be clearly defined. 
 As for the Servians, crushed for a time by Ottoman 
 retaliation, they had taken up arms under Milosh Obre- 
 novitch, and, thanks to European intervention, they 
 obtained, with certain restrictions, their autonomy. 
 
 The sixth intervention of Russia occurred on the 
 occasion of the Greek revolution. On July 8, 1827, 
 Russia, France, and England entered into concerted action 
 by the Treaty of London. The united fleets of the 
 three powers annihilated the Turkish and Egyptian fleets 
 at Navarino (October 20). While a French army was 
 operating in the Morea to insure Greek independence, 
 Nicholas I. took it upon himself to settle the rest of the 
 Eastern Question, His European army again conquered 
 the Roumanians and Bulgarians, invaded Thrace, and 
 entered Adrianople. In Asia, his forces occupied Turkish 
 Caucasia. The Treaty of Adrianople, concluded in 1829, 
 guaranteed the autonomy of Moldavia, of Wallachia, 
 and of Servia, and consummated the independence of 
 Greece, which was formed into a kingdom. Thus were
 
 26 THE CRIMEAN WAR. 
 
 the hopes that Peter the Great had entertained respecting 
 the Christians of the East partially realized ; but Russia 
 did not secure any territory in Europe except the isles of 
 the Danubian delta ; reserving for herself freedom of 
 navigation in the Black Sea, and an open way through 
 the straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. Only 
 in Asia did she secure a territorial indemnity. 
 
 The second eastern war, undertaken by Nicholas I., 
 and which began like the others by the conquest of the 
 Roumanians, brought about ♦^he intervention of France 
 and England in the Crimea, which caused the Czar 
 Nicholas to die of grief, and which ended in the Treaty 
 of Paris (March 30, 1856). By this treaty, his successor, 
 Alexander II., had to renounce all the advantages gained 
 in Europe by the Treaty of Adrianople ; to give back 
 the delta of the Danube ; to consent to the limiting of 
 his military power in the Black Sea ; and to abdicate his 
 exclusive right of protection over the Danubian principal- 
 ities, which were henceforth placed under the collective 
 protectorate of the great powers. 
 
 When France found herself engaged in a bloody duel 
 with the German Empire, Russia profited by the occasion 
 to have a conference called at London in March, 1871, 
 by which she secured the suppression of article two of 
 the Treaty of Paris, which limited her military power in 
 the Black Sea. 
 
 The last and the most decisive Russian intervention 
 was the one provoked in 1877 by the Bulgarian massacres.
 
 THE BULGARIAN MASSACRES. 27 
 
 the Bosnian and Herzegovinian revolution, and the 
 uprising in Servia and in Montenegro. In addition to 
 the help of these different forces, Russia made sure of 
 the armed assistance of the principality of Roumania, 
 that had been formed in 1859 by the union of the two 
 old-time hospodarates of Moldavia and Wallachia. She 
 again made the conquest of Bulgaria and of a part of 
 Thrace. This time, it was in plain sight of Constanti- 
 nople that the victorious armies of Alexander II. halted. 
 The Sultan had with which to oppose them only twelve 
 thousand men, encamped on the heights of Tchadalcha. 
 It seemed, therefore, to be in the power of the Czar to 
 bring to an end the Ottoman domination in Europe, to 
 proclaim the liberation of all the Christian peoples, and 
 at last to plant the cross on the dome of Saint Sophia. 
 But before the threatening demonstration of England 
 and the disquieting attitude of Austria and Germany, he 
 did not dare to do so. He contented himself with impos- 
 ing upon the Porte the Treaty of San Stefano (March 
 3, 1878), which secured for the proteges of Russia an 
 actual dismemberment of European Turkey. Montenegro 
 saw its territory doubled in extent ; Servia and Roumania 
 were declared entirely independent. The first received 
 the districts of Nisch, Leskovatz, Mitrowitz, and Novi- 
 bazar; the second acquired Dobrudscha, but on the 
 condition that it return to Russia the delta of the Danube, 
 which Wallachia had acquired in the treaty of 1856. 
 Bulgaria was to form a vassal principality of Turkey.
 
 28 LAST TURKISH WAR. 
 
 Her territory extended from the Danube to the Black 
 and JEgezn Seas, leaving around Constantinople and 
 Salonica only some fragments of Ottoman territory. In 
 Asia, Russia acquired the fortresses and districts of 
 Batum, Kars, Ardahan, and Bayazid. Moreover, Turkey 
 was to pay a war indemnity of three hundred and ten 
 million rubles. 
 
 Thus Russia took, so to speak, nothing for herself in 
 Europe. It was sufficient for her that Roumania, Servia, 
 Montenegro, and Bulgaria were completely liberated and 
 organized. Of course, she hoped that these petty states 
 that owed their very existence to her would be more 
 docile to her influence than to that of the Sultan ; less 
 accessible to the hostile influences of the German and 
 English powers ; that their ports would be open to her, 
 and that their armies would constitute auxiliary corps of 
 the Russian army. 
 
 An early disillusion came to the " Liberator Czar." 
 The relative disinterestedness of which he had given 
 proof at San Stefano did not foresee the jealousy of 
 Austria, fostered as this was by Germany and England. 
 Under threat of a general war, they demanded a revision 
 of that treaty. England would have even desired that 
 the treaty of 1856 should be taken as a basis for discus- 
 sion, as if she could proceed with the victorious Russia 
 of 1878 as she had done with the Russia of 1856, con- 
 quered in the Crimea. The Czar agreed to the calling 
 of a congress in Berlin. The treaty that was signed
 
 TREATY OF BERLIN. 29 
 
 there July 13, 1878, curtailed Montenegro of half the 
 part assigned her, and forbade her having a navy ; took 
 back Novibazar and Mitrowitz from Servia, and was 
 particularly harsh towards Bulgaria ; reducing her territory 
 by one third, and carving the remainder into two pro- 
 vinces : Northern Bulgaria, with the title of " vassal 
 principality," and Southern Bulgaria, under the name of 
 the province of Eastern Roumelia, which continued under 
 Turkish domination, but which was to be administered 
 by a Christian government. Increase of territory was 
 granted to Greece by the addition of a district of Epirus 
 (Arta) and almost all of Thessaly. There was even 
 quibbling over the territory that Russia had retained in 
 Asia. Bayazid was taken from her, and Batum was to 
 be dismantled and to become an open port. What 
 especially irritated the Czar was the fact that the two 
 powers that were thus depriving him of the fruits of his 
 victories found means to slice ofF a share for themselves. 
 Under the pretext of administering their affairs, Austria 
 secured Bosnia and Herzegovina, and, by a separate 
 treaty, England had given to her by the Sultan the island 
 of Cyprus (30th of May and 4th of June) and a control- 
 ling situation in Anatolia.' 
 
 Emperor Alexander II. had run the danger of a 
 European war in order to carry out his programme of 
 " liberation." The danger still remained imminent, so 
 
 (i) A. d' Avril, Negociations relatives au trait'e de Berlin et aux 
 arrangements qui ont suivi. Paris, 1886.
 
 30 THE PANSLAVIC AGITATION— NIHILISM. 
 
 long as he did not accept the provisions of the Berlin 
 Treaty. There threatened to spring up again, at each 
 of the manifold incidents that arose over the task of sett- 
 ling the boundaries of the ceded countries, armed protests, 
 now by Greece, and now by the Albanians, against cer- 
 tain decisions of the powers that were not to their fancy, 
 and intrigues by Austria and England for the purpose of 
 alienating from Russia the sympathies of the nations 
 emancipated by her victories. In addition to this, the 
 Panslavic agitation, which had been sufficiently strong in 
 Russia to lead the government to run those risks in the 
 East, did not subside. The most impetuous minds found 
 cause of grievance against the Czar, that he had not 
 carried out his undertaking to the end, and had his 
 victorious regiments enter Stamboul, at the peril of a 
 conflict with the English in the very streets of that 
 capital. 7"he Liberals made a pretext of the constitutions 
 granted the Roumanians, the Servians, and the Bulgarians, 
 to demand a constitution for Russia. The Panslavist 
 and Liberal agitation had, perhaps, some connection with 
 the rise of another agitation which soon made its appear- 
 ance, an agitation called Nihilism, of a character entirely 
 revolutionary and subversive, and which fitly terminated 
 on that tragic day of March 13, 1881, when the " Lib- 
 erator Czar " became the " Martvr Czar." 
 
 For his successor, Alexander IIL, the results of the 
 eastern war were preparing another series of disillusions. 
 The only fruit that Russia could still expect from her
 
 THE INGRATITUDE OF NATIONS. 
 
 sacrifices and her victories was the strengthening of her 
 influence over the Christian peoples emancipated by her, 
 — and their eternal gratitude. Now immediately after 
 this war the most short-sighted Russian statesmen were 
 constrained to confess that the success of their arms had 
 just created on that " Way to Byzantium " which 
 Catherine 11. had so thickly strewn with premature 
 triumphal arches, obstacles more insurmountable than 
 those which the armies of the Sultan had ever been able 
 to oppose to the armies of Alexander I. or of Nicholas 
 I., — more insurmountable than the Danube or the Bal- 
 kans, formerly bristling with the fortresses of the Otto- 
 mans. These new obstacles consisted in the existence 
 itself of the emancipated nations, and their attachment 
 to their newly found freedom. Thus it was that France, 
 after she had emancipated Belgium under Louis-Philippe 
 and Italy under Napoleon III., found that she had raised 
 upon her northern and southeastern frontiers barriers far 
 more impregnable than the armies or the fortresses of 
 Austria ; that she had closed forever against herself those 
 Belgian and Lombard battlefields over which her ensigns 
 of victory had so often floated. In the formation of an 
 Italian kingdom, France created the chief obstacle in the 
 way of her own expansion on the shores of the Mediter- 
 ranean. 
 
 The French have naturally and repeatedly denounced 
 the ingratitude of Italy ; nor can the Russians be blamed 
 for their grief over the ingratitude of the Roumanians,
 
 32 ROUMANIA. 
 
 the Servians, the Bulgarians, and the Greeks. But such 
 is human nature ! The feeling of independence and of 
 national pride among newly born peoples will always 
 outweigh the feeling of gratitude towards their liberators. 
 In this respect there was no difference between the 
 peoples joined to the Russians merely by religion, like 
 the Roumanians and the Greeks, and those who were 
 related to them both by religion and race, like the 
 Bulgarians and the Servians. In former times, when 
 the Ottoman yoke rested upon them with its frightful 
 burden, assuredly thev would all have joyfully accepted 
 the lordship of the Czar in exchange for that of the 
 Sultan ; but now, when it was a question of choosing 
 between the domination of the Czar and their own inde- 
 pendence, there could be no hesitation with any of them. 
 The Russians had done much for the Roumanians. 
 Even when they had been unsuccessful in wresting their 
 territory from Turkey, they had in the treaties of 
 Kairnaji, Yassy, Bucharest, Akerman, and Adrianople, 
 stipulated precious guarantees for their proteges and then, 
 later, secured for them an almost complete autonomy. 
 In concert with France, in 1861, they had made the 
 Sultan accept the union of Moldavia and Wallachia into 
 one province. In 1878, they assured this principaHty 
 of Roumania its full independence, and, in 188 1, they 
 consented to its being organized into a kingdom. But 
 the new King of Roumania, Charles of Hohenzollern, 
 and his new subjects meant to remain independent of
 
 SERVIA. 33 
 
 every other power, to have their own army and navy, 
 their own national policy and diplomacy, and to exercise 
 the right, whenever their liberators showed themselves 
 in the slightest degree meddlesome, to seek help even 
 from Russia's rivals, Austria, Germany, and England, 
 or, even more than this, from their old-time oppressor, 
 the Sultan of Constantinople. More than once, the 
 Roumanians raised complaint against Russia, because, in 
 1 8 12, she had annexed the little Roumanian district of 
 Bessarabia, and because, in 1878, she compelled them to 
 give back to her the islands of the Danubian delta. 
 
 It was the same with the principality of Servia, also 
 made into a kingdom in 1882, and which, according to 
 the needs of its national or dynastic policy, did not cease 
 to oscillate between Russian and Austro-German influ- 
 ences. It was the same also with the kingdom of 
 Greece, which paid no heed to the remonstrances of 
 Russia, when her national ambition was involved, and 
 which had no scruples in troubling the peace of the East 
 every time that it was possible for her to raise the question 
 of uniting to the Hellenic state either Epirus or Northern 
 Thessaly or Macedonia or Crete. 
 
 The country that was under the greatest obligation to 
 Russia was Bulgaria. If France or England had at times 
 assisted in the liberation of the Roumanians, the Servians, 
 and the Greeks, it was to Russia alone that the BWgarians 
 were indebted for this deliverance. Immediately after 
 the " Bulgarian atrocities " of 1875, Russia had hastened
 
 34 BULGARIA. 
 
 to her help. From the condition of simple ra'ias oppressed 
 by Turkey and cruelly treated by the Tcherkesses and 
 the Bashi-Bazouks, she had caused them to be instantly 
 'raised to the dignity of a free people. At San Stefano, 
 she had endeavored to unite them into one state, the 
 most powerful of the Balkan peninsula ; which would 
 have extended from the Danube to the Black and ^Egean 
 Seas ; and she accepted only with deepest reluctance the 
 mutilation and dismemberment that the Treaty of Berlin 
 imposed upon " Great Bulgaria." She gave the restricted 
 principality of Bulgaria at least a constitution when she 
 herself had none. It was the Russian commissioner in 
 Bulgaria, Prince Dondukof-Korsakof, who, on February 
 23, 1879, convoked at Tirnovo the first "constituency 
 assembly " ; it was he who presided at the meeting of the 
 first " legislative assembly," or Sobranie ; it was he who 
 espoused the cause of their prince, Alexander of Batten- 
 berg ; it was he who organized a Bulgarian army of one 
 hundred thousand men supplied with valiant Russian 
 officers, well equipped, well drilled, and provided with 
 excellent artillery. Nevertheless, this people and this 
 prince, who owed everything to Russia, began at once 
 to practice a policy in which the advice of the Czar 
 Alexander III. was no longer heeded. They set out to 
 remove the Russians who had portfolios in their ministry 
 and positions in their army. In spite of the Czar, they 
 brought about the revolution of Philippopolis in September, 
 1885, which ended in the union of the Bulgarian princi-
 
 RESULTS OF EUROPEAN WARS. 35 
 
 pality and the Bulgarian province of East Roumelia, but 
 which provoiced a bloody war with Servia, jealous at see- 
 ing her neighbor's increase of territory. When Alexander 
 of Battenberg had to renounce his throne in 1887, it 
 was a prince that posed as a client of Austria and of 
 Germany, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, whom the Bulgar- 
 ians called to rule them. With his Prime Minister, 
 Stambulof, he governed, — resolutely set against the in- 
 fluence of Russia ; he discriminated against her partisans, 
 and surrounded himself with her adversaries. And, thus, 
 the liberation and the organization of Bulgaria, which 
 the Czar had hoped to be able to direct, have gone on 
 independently of him, and, in certain respects, in opposi- 
 tion to him. Sic vos^ non vob'ts ! Alexander III.'s 
 resentment against Bulgaria and her prince was very 
 bitter. The somewhat imperious and meddlesome affec- 
 tion of the early days soon turned into hostility. When 
 Alexander III. died, in 1894, the rupture was complete 
 between the intractable principality and the powerful 
 empire. 
 
 Thus all the wars undertaken in Eastern Europe by 
 Russia, from Peter the Great in 171 1, down to Alexan- 
 der II. in 1877, have ended, except in Asia and on the 
 north coast of the Black Sea, so far as territorial expan- 
 sion is concerned, in most meagre results. Se^ven great 
 wars have brought her only a strip of Roumanian terri- 
 tory between the Dniester and the Pruth, and another 
 Roumanian bit of land in the delta of the Danube.
 
 36 NICHOLAS II. 
 
 Even this last morsel, acquired in 1829 and restored in 
 1856, was won back in 1877 only at the cost of vehe- 
 ment faultfinding upon the part of the Roumanian people. 
 Russia, whose fleets have twice — at Tchesme in 1770, 
 and at Navarino, in 1827, — annihilated the naval power 
 of Turkey, have never been able to secure even an island 
 in the ^gean Sea. 
 
 Thus much for material advantages. As to satisfac- 
 tion of a moral character, the Russian soldiers have never 
 been able to enter Stamboul, nor to pray in Saint Sophia ; 
 and as to gratitude upon the part of the liberated peoples, 
 we have seen what Alexander II. and Alexander III. 
 could never have dreamed of. 
 
 Their successor, the present Emperor, Nicholas II., 
 seems to have taken it for granted that in the direction 
 of the Danube, of the Black Sea, and of the ^gean Sea 
 the destiny of Russia is fixed for a long time to come. 
 In these directions, she has no longer any moral or 
 material advantages to gain, and the age of sentimental 
 undertakings is also at an end. Unless there should 
 come some European overturning, the famous " Eastern 
 Question " will have for Russia only an archaeological 
 interest. All that Nicholas II. is doing seems to indicate 
 that this is his conviction. He shows no interest in the 
 party struggles and ministerial crises in the Roumanian 
 and Servian kingdoms ; towards the Bulgarians, he shows 
 neither jealous affection not the irreconcilable rancor of 
 his father. Whenever the Prince and people of Bulgaria
 
 THE TURKO-GRECIAN WAR. 
 
 37 
 
 have manifested a desire for reconciliation with Russia, 
 he has cordially welcomed them ; he sent a representa- 
 tive to the orthodox baptism of the Crown Prince Boris, 
 but apparently without forming any illusions as to what he 
 might expect of his proteges. When the Cretan insurrec- 
 tion occurred, and the war foolishly undertaken by the 
 Greeks against Turkey was declared, he was careful not 
 to assume a leading role., something that his three prede- 
 cessors would not have failed to do. On the contrary, 
 he seemed to sink Russia in the " European Concert," 
 to associate her in all the decisions of the five other great 
 powers, and purely and simply to accept accomplished 
 facts. Also, when the Armenian troubles and massacres 
 took place, he did not attempt to intervene, nor to arro- 
 gate to himself, either by land or sea, the role of liberator 
 of this other oppressed people. He has rather favored a 
 temporizing policy, and has discouraged the plans formed 
 by the other powers to send European fleets to the very 
 walls of the Seraglio, and to impose by force reforms 
 upon the Sultan Abdul-Hamid. On the other hand, in 
 certain other directions, in that of the Indian Ocean, in 
 that of British India, and in that of the China and Japan 
 Seas, Russia has followed a very formal, a very decided 
 policy. At once very energetic and skillful in this policy, 
 she has, at the same time, acted in entire independence 
 of the " European Concert."
 
 Russia in Asia
 
 THE SOUTHWARD EXPANSION OF RUSSIA 
 
 IN ASIA. 
 
 An Asiatic Power— Wars and Treaties with Persia— A 
 Way to the Indian Ocean— In the Caucasus— Paramount 
 in Persia. 
 
 F the policy of the present 
 Emperor of the Russias seems 
 to beinspired byothcrprinciples 
 than those of his predecessors ; 
 if this policy has shown itself 
 to be essentially peaceable and 
 disinterested in Europe; if it 
 has shifted its sphere of activity 
 from the West in order to devote all its efforts to South- 
 ern and especially to Eastern Asia, — this is perhaps due 
 to the impressions made upon the Czar during his 
 extended travels in the years 1890 and 1891, while he 
 was still only the Czarovitch Nicholas. He visited 
 Greece, Egypt, British India, French Indo-China, Japan, 
 and China. Then, disembarking at Vladivostock, a 
 powerful Russian naval station on a bay of the Sea of 
 Japan, he returned overland to St. Petersburg, crossing 
 the whole extent of Siberia. The Czarovitch, of course, 
 did not give his impressions a literary form ; but one of 
 
 (40) 
 
 p 
 
 w 
 
 s 
 
 fi 
 
 1 
 
 i 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 p 
 
 s 
 
 s 
 
 M
 
 TO THE INDIAN OCEAN. 41 
 
 his travelling companions, Prince Oukhtomski, has pub- 
 lished his in two luxurious volumes, magnificently 
 illustrated by the Russian artist Karazine.' 
 
 The opinions of Prince Oukhtomski seem to reveal a 
 new element in Russian policy. Formerly the Russians 
 were indignant over Prince Bismarck's reported observa- 
 tion that " Russia has nothing to do in the West. Her 
 mission is in Asia; there she represents civilization." 
 Prince Oukhtomski is not far from holding the same 
 opinion as did this envious foe of his country. For a 
 few parcels of territory conquered with such difficulty in 
 the West, what bloody wars has she not endured ? Her 
 efforts to obtain access to the sea have been but half 
 successful. The White Sea, blocked with ice ; the 
 Baltic, as much Scandinavian and German as Russian, 
 closed to her on the west by the Sound and the Belts ; 
 the Black Sea, only yet half Russian, and closed on the 
 southwest by the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles ; and 
 the Mediterranean itself, with England holding Gibraltar, 
 Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, and the Suez Canal, — are these 
 seas, so little available, sufficient for the needs of the 
 expansion of the mighty continental empire that Russia 
 is to-day ? In Asia, on the contrary, who knows whether 
 by the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, by Afghanistan 
 and the Indus, she is not going to be able to open her 
 way to the Indian Ocean ? Who knows whether, 
 
 (i) Le prince Oukhtomski, Voyage de Son Altesse Imperiale le 
 Czarevitch en orient, Paris, 1898.
 
 42 AN ASIATIC POWER. 
 
 already mistress of the Okhotsk Sea, she will not become 
 mistress also of the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea, 
 both opening with broad outlets into the immensity of the 
 Pacific ? Now, the importance that in ancient times 
 the Mediterranean had for mankind, and which the 
 Atlantic possessed from the fifteenth to the nineteenth 
 century, seems to-day to be shifting to the Pacific Ocean. 
 Of all the nations bordering on this truly universal 
 ocean, the Russian Empire is destined to be one of the 
 most powerful. As to territorial conquests, how are 
 those that Russia won in little Europe, where every 
 square mile cost her a battle, to be compared with those 
 which, with infinitely less sacrifice and effort, she 
 has already won, or can yet win, in Asia .? Bismarck 
 spoke in disdain of the mission of Russia in Asia. Prince 
 Oukhtomski speaks of it with pride : "The time has 
 come for the Russians to have some definite idea regarding 
 the heritage that the Jenghis Khans and the Tamerlanes 
 have left us. Asia ! we have been part of it at all times -, 
 we have lived its life and shared its interests -, our 
 geographical position irrevocably destines us to be the 
 head of the rudimentary powers of the East." 
 
 From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, Russia 
 was a province of the Mongol Empire. Everything that 
 constituted that Mongol Empire, however, is perhaps 
 destined to become only a province of Russia. The 
 capital will simply be transferred from Karakorum or 
 from the shores of the Amur to the banks of the Neva.
 
 HEIR TO THE MONGOL EMPIRE. 43 
 
 Asiatic in their mixture of races, Asiatic in their his- 
 tory (conquered in the thirteenth century, conquering 
 since the sixteenth), the Russians possess to a higher 
 degree than either the French or the Anglo-Saxons an 
 understanding of things Asiatic. They have all the 
 right that is possible to supplant " those colonies of the 
 Germanic and the Latin races that are taking unwilling 
 Asia under their tutelage." Moreover, the true succes- 
 sor in Asia of the old-time czars or khans of the Fin- 
 nish race is not the Bogdy— Khan who rules at Pekin, 
 but " the White Czar who reigns at St. Petersburg." In 
 one of the pagodas of Canton are to be seen, as Prince 
 Oukhtomski assures us, four colossal figures, called " the 
 kmgs of the four cardmal points," and Prince Oukh- 
 tomski felt confident that it was to " the King of the 
 North " that the people rendered the greatest homage. 
 
 Laying aside these dreams of the future, let us see 
 what, up to the present time, has been actually accom- 
 plished to bring about their realization. The efforts of 
 the Russians throughout their history as an Asiatic power 
 are connected with one or the other of two great move- 
 ments : her southward expansion towards Persia and 
 British India, and her eastward expansion in the regions 
 bordering on China, Corea, and Japan. 
 
 In 1554, during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the 
 Russians gained a foothold on the Caspian Sea by the 
 conquest of the czarate of Astrakhan and of the lower 
 Volga. Towards the close of his life, Peter the Great
 
 44 EARLY PERSIAN WARS. 
 
 waged war on Persia, captured Derbend on the Caspian, 
 and occupied the provinces of Daghestan, Shirvan, 
 Ghilan, and Mazandaran, and the cities of Rasht and 
 Astrabad. The unhealthy character of these regions 
 made them " the cemetery of Russian armies," and the 
 successors of the great Czar had to abandon them. A 
 war undertaken by Catherine II., also in the last years of 
 her reign, ended in the same result, and her son, Paul I., 
 recalled the troops. In the region of the Caucasus, the 
 Russians had gained a foothold, between the years 1774- 
 1784, by the acquisition of the Kuban as far as the 
 Terek, and, strangely enough, it was not on the northern 
 slope of the mountains, but upon the southern that they 
 were to begin the conquest of this Caucasus. In 1783, 
 the King, or Czar, of Georgia, Heraclius, declared him- 
 self to be the vassal of Catherine II. in order that he 
 might have her assistance against the Persians and the 
 Ottomans. In 1799, his son, George XII.,' formally 
 ceded his state to Paul I., although his son, David, con- 
 tinued to govern until 1803, when the annexation was 
 consummated. This acquisition brought Russia into 
 collision with the Persians and the Ottomans on one 
 hand, and, on another, with the independent tribes of the 
 Caucasus. By the Treaty of Gulistan, in 1813, Persia 
 ceded to Russia Daghestan, Shirvan, and Shusha, and 
 
 (i) Dubrovine, Georges XII., dernier tsar de Georgie, el T annex- 
 ion a la Russie (in Russian), St. Petersburg, 1897.
 
 IN THE CAUCASUS. 45 
 
 renounced all claims upon Georgia and other territories 
 of the Caucasus. Another war broke out in 1826, 
 which was terminated by the Treaty of Turkmanshai, 
 February 22, 1828, by which Persia surrendered her two 
 Armenian provinces', Nakhitchevan and Erivan. The 
 same year, in the Treaty of Adrianople, Turkey gave 
 over to Russia the fortresses and districts of Anapa, Poti, 
 and Akhalzikh, and all rights (bitterly contested by the 
 inhabitants) over Imeritia, Mingrelia, and Abkhasia. 
 Then began, in the new possessions, the task of pacify- 
 ing the wild mountaineers of these regions, and, also the 
 Tcherkesses, or Circassians, of the northern slope. 
 The Circassians and the Abkhasui roused to fanaticism 
 by the soldier priest, the Imam Shamyl, held out against 
 the Russians for nearly thirty years. In 1844, Russia had 
 in the Caucasus two hundred thousand soldiers, com- 
 manded by her best generals. The capture of Vedeni, 
 in 1858, and the surrender of Shamyl, a year later, 
 assured the pacification of the Caucasus. The increase 
 of territory that Russia made at the expense of Turkey, 
 in 1878, by the Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin, 
 included the districts of Kars, Ardahan, and Olty, and 
 the port of Batum, and fixed the boundary line between 
 Turkey and Russia as it has since remained. 
 
 Since the Treaty of 1828, Persia under the Shahs, 
 Fet-Aly-Khan, Mohammed, Nasr-ed-Din, and Muzafer- 
 
 (i) Lord Curzon, Persia and the Persian Sluestion, London, 
 1892.
 
 46 PARAMOUNT IN PERSIA. 
 
 ed-Din, has fallen almost entirely under Russian influ- 
 ence. In 1837-38, the Shah Mohammed, with an army 
 commanded by Russian officers, besieged Herat, defended 
 by Afghans under the leadership of English officers. In 
 1856, the Shah Nasr-ed-Din, at the suggestion of Rus- 
 sia, besieged and captured Herat; but the English com- 
 pelled him to abandon his prize, by making a descent on 
 the Persian Gulf, where they captured the port of Bushire 
 and the island of Karrack, which they have kept. In 
 1841, Persia ceded to Russia the Caspian port of Ashu- 
 rada, near Astrabad ; in 1881, Askabad was given to the 
 same power, and, in 1885, Serakhs, — ^^all three places 
 very important strategic points on the eastern frontier. 
 Persia has also agreed to the building of Russian railroads 
 that are to pass through her territory and terminate on 
 the Persian Gulf. The present year, she has negotiated 
 a loan of twenty-two million five hundred thousand 
 rubles through the agency of the " bank of Persia," 
 established under Russian auspices. This loan is pay- 
 able in seventy-five years, and the interest is secured by 
 all the customs revenues of the kingdom, save those of 
 the Persian Gulf. The Shah has bound himself not to 
 seek further loans of any other European power, and has 
 thereby placed himself financially in the hands of Russia. 
 It is thus that Russia, by her diplomacy, by her banks, 
 and by her railroads, making Persia her political and com- 
 mercial vassal, has succeeded in furthering her scheme of 
 expansion towards the Persian Gulf and the shores of 
 the Indian Ocean.
 
 FURTHER CONQUESTS. 
 
 Expansion Towards India — Napoleon — The Conquest of 
 THE Khans — In Afghanistan — The "Key of the Indies" — 
 In Touch With India — Abyssinia — British Over-Confidence. 
 
 OWARDS British India Rus- 
 sian expansion was to seek still 
 other channels. The con- 
 quests in the Caucasus, which 
 we have been reviewing, open- 
 ed the way along the western 
 and southern sides of the Cas- 
 pian Sea. But for a long time 
 the Russians had been endeavoring to turn the sea from 
 its northern side. In the reign of the Empress Anna 
 Ivanovna, hordes of Kirghiz, whose camping grounds 
 lay to the east of the Ural River, submitted to Russia 
 (1734). Her sway was then extended into Turkestan, 
 that expanse of steppes and oases watered by the Jax- 
 artes (Sir-Daria) and the Oxus (Amu-Daria), that empty 
 
 (47)
 
 48 TURKESTAN. 
 
 into the Aral Sea, a region that is bounded on the west by 
 the Caspian Sea, on the south by Persia and Afghanistan, 
 on the east by the Chinese Empire, and on the north by 
 Siberia. Here was located ancient Djagatai, the debris of 
 former Mongol Empires.' 
 
 When the Russians saw these vast plains spread out 
 before them, they at first thought that they were near 
 British India, and that an entrance to that rich peninsula 
 would be as easy to them as it had been to so many 
 Asiatic conquerors that had gone forth from the steppes 
 of Turkestan or the valleys of Afghanistan. From this 
 conviction was born the first schemes that the Russians 
 entertained for the conquest of Hindustan. Even Peter 
 the Great thought of it. In 171 7, he sent against Khiva 
 an expedition under Peter Bekovitch that perished on the 
 way, A certain A. M. de Saint Genie proposed a plan 
 for the conquest of Hindustan to Catherine II. in 1791 ; 
 but the most celebrated of all these projects was the one 
 
 (1) Subsequently it was broken up into numerous states, the 
 principal ones being the khanate of Khokand, with its chief cities 
 Turkistan, Tashkend, Tchimkend, and Khodjend on the upper 
 Jaxartes, or Sir-Daria ; the khanate of Balkh (ancient Bactria), and 
 the khanate of Samarkand, fallen into dependency upon the khan- 
 ate of Bokhara, on the upper Oxus, or Amu-Daria ; the khanate of 
 Khiva on the lower Oxus; and on the Kashgar and Yarkand Rivers 
 emptying into Lake Lob-Nor, and the Hi flowing into Lake Balkash, 
 khanates (Kashgar, Yarkand, and Kuldja) that belonged to China. 
 Outside of the districts inhabited by a settled people are the deserts
 
 PLANS FOR INDIAN CONQUESTS. 49 
 
 that Paul I. submitted to Napoleon Bonaparte, then first 
 Consul of the French Republic, whose ally against Eng- 
 land he had become. The plan was to place two armies 
 in the field. General Knorring, with the Cossacks of 
 the Don and other Russian troops, was to march by 
 Khiva and Bokhara to the upper Indus, while thirty-five 
 thousand French and thirty-five thousand Russians, that 
 Paul I., inspired by chivalric generosity, proposed placing 
 under the command of Massena, the conqueror of the 
 Russians at the battle of Zurich, were to unite at Astra- 
 bad on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. Thence 
 they were to make their way by Herat and Kandahar to 
 the upper Indus to join forces with the other army. 
 Then, altogether, French, Russians, Persians, Turcomans, 
 and Afghans, they would pour down into India, proclaim- 
 ing to the princes and the people of the peninsula the fall 
 of English tyranny and their independence. " All 
 the treasures of India were to be their recompense." 
 The execution of this plan was even begun. The Cos- 
 
 of sand over which wander nomadic tribes. To the north of the 
 Jaxartes, are the Kirghiz, divided into several hordes, and the 
 Turkomans, or Turkmens, on the east of the Caspian Sea. — Con- 
 sult Krahmer, Russland in Asien, vol. i., Transkaspian und seine 
 Eisenbahn, vol. ii., Mittel-Asien, Leipzig, 1898-99. Makcheef, 
 Coup d'oeil historique sur le Turkestan et la marche pr ogres si'ue des 
 Russes (in Russian) St. Petersburg, 1890. Albrecht, Russisches 
 Central-Asien, Hamburg, 1896. H. Mozer, A tra'vers T Asie cen- 
 trale, Paris, 1885.
 
 50 OASES OF TURKESTAN. 
 
 sacks of the Don, under their ataman^ Orlof-Denissof, 
 were already across the Volga, when the news of the 
 death of Paul I. recalled them to their camps.* 
 
 The visionary character of this scheme has been 
 demonstrated, during the present century, by the difficul- 
 ties that the Russian armies have had to encounter in 
 winning their wav over a very small fraction of the 
 immense journey marked out in 1800. At the cost of 
 enormous effort, the oases of Turkestan, which in the 
 mind of Paul I. were to be simply halting places in the 
 long march, have had to be conquered one by one ; one 
 by one, deep valleys and rocky bluffs, defended by war- 
 like tribes, have had to be captured and held. To-day, 
 even with these avenues of approach secured, the goal 
 seems as far off as it did to the optimistic imagination of 
 the Czar Paul I. In i8;:59, Nicholas I., wishing to punish 
 the Khan of Khiva, who was capturing Russian mer- 
 chants and pillaging Russian caravans, despatched a body 
 of troops commanded by General Perovski. The severe 
 
 (i) General Batorski, Projets d' expedition dans r Indoustan sous 
 Napoleon, Paul I., et Alexandre I., (in Russian) St. Petersburg, 
 1886. H. S. Edwards, Russian Projects against India. On the 
 Russian Expedition in Turkestan, see Hugo Stumin, Rapports, 
 A:/!)/x'a (translated from the German), Paris, 1874; A. N. Kou- 
 ropatkine (at present Russian Minister of War), Turcomania and 
 the Turcomans (translated into English from the Russian by Robert 
 Mitchell); Skobelef, Rapports sur les campagties de iSyg-iSSi 
 (English translation, London, 1881); Mar\'in, Russian Campaigns 
 Among the Tekke-Turcomans (from Russian official sources).
 
 DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY TO INDIA. $1 
 
 winters of the steppes and the deep snow compelled him, 
 when half wav to his destination, to return. Neverthe- 
 less, the Khan, intimidated by this demonstration, liber- 
 ated the Russian prisoners (1840), and in 1842 con- 
 sented to acknowledge the over-lordship of Russia. 
 Two years later, the eastern Kirghiz also submitted. In 
 order to protect these new subjects against the Khan of 
 Khokand it was necessary to wage war with the latter. 
 From i860 to 1864, the leaders of the Russian troops, 
 Perovski, Kolpakovski, Verevkine, TchernaiefF, captured 
 the fortresses of Ak-Mesjed, Turkestan, Aulie-Ata, 
 Tchimkend, and finally, Tashkend, a city of one hun- 
 dred thousand souls, and the commercial emporium of 
 that region. 
 
 The Emir of Bokhara attempted to intervene, and had 
 a " holy war " preached by the fanatical Mollahs ; but 
 he was conquered in the battle of Irjar (1866), and 
 promised to pay a war indemnity. 
 
 However far the Russians might still be from the 
 frontier of India, England was nevertheless disturbed at 
 their success. The official journals of St. Petersburg 
 amused themselves with pacific declarations, announcing 
 that there was no intention of conquering Bokhara ; but 
 the Czar organized the territories, already submissive, 
 into " the general government of Turkestan," and Gen- 
 eral Kaufmann was placed in control. The Emir of 
 Bokhara, having refused to deliver the war indemnity 
 that he had promised, was defeated at Zera-Bulak, and
 
 52 CONQUEST OF THE KHANS. 
 
 was compelled to sign the treaty of 1868, by which he 
 ceded to the Russians the khanates of Samarkand and 
 Zerafshan ; recognized a Russian protectorate, and paid 
 an indemnity of two million rubles. The khanate of 
 Khokand became, likewise, a vassal state. 
 
 The Khan of Khiva continued to pillage caravans, 
 and to hold in slavery Russian merchants. In 1873, 
 three bodies of troops were sent against him ; one com- 
 ing from the shores of the Caspian Sea under General 
 Markozof, the second from Orenburg under General 
 Verevkine, the third from Tashkend under Governor- 
 General Kaufmann. The first, after a difficult march 
 through the burning sands of the desert, was compelled 
 to fall back. The other two entered Khiva almost with- 
 out striking a blow. The Khan was obliged to acknowl- 
 edge himself the vassal of " the White Czar," to cede 
 all that part of his territory situated on the right bank of 
 the Oxus ; to grant the Russians the rights of naviga- 
 tion and commerce, and to submit to a war indemnity 
 that exhausted his finances. The Khans that had yielded 
 to the Russians were now the objects of the scorn and 
 hatred of the more fanatical among their Mohammedan 
 subjects. These did not cease to rise in revolt against 
 them. The Khan of Khokand preferred to surrender 
 his territories to Russia ; and thev were formed into the 
 new province of P'erghana, in 1875. The same year, 
 the Khan of Khiva offered to surrender his in exchange 
 for a pension. The Russians did not wish to annex
 
 THE CHINESE KHANS. S3 
 
 either this khanate or that of Bokhara, less through fear 
 of English protests than because the existence of two 
 vassal Khans would allow them to conceal the better 
 their political plans. They maintain them on their 
 thrones by paying them a pension. To-day, the Khan 
 of Bokhara is captain of a regiment of Terek Cossacks, 
 and the Khan of Khiva is lieutenant-general of the 
 Orenburg Cossacks. 
 
 In 185 1, the Russians had obtained from China some 
 commercial advantages in the Kuldja province. Twenty 
 years afterwards a Mohammedan adventurer, Yakub- 
 Khan seized the Chinese khanates of Kashgar and Yar- 
 kand, and incited a Mohammedan rebellion in Kuldja. 
 The Russians entered the province, giving China to 
 understand that they would remain there until order was 
 reestablished (187 1). They would gladly have annexed 
 it ; but Chinese troops had been despatched ; and, after 
 years of marching, they arrived in Kashgar (where 
 Yakub had been assassinated in 1877), and upon the 
 Kuldja frontier. The Russians first thought of resisting 
 the troops and holding the province ; but the territory in 
 dispute did not seem worth the risk of a war with China. 
 By the St. Petersburg Treaty of 1881, they gave back 
 Kuldja, except one district on the river Hi, and renounced 
 their military position in Kashgar in exchange (or certain 
 commercial advantages. 
 
 To complete the conquest of Turkestan, it remained 
 for them to subdue the nomadic Turcomans (Tekke-
 
 54 THE TURCOMANS. 
 
 Turcomans). This was the object of the brilliant cam- 
 paigns directed by Skobelef, who carried by assault the 
 fortress of Geok-Tepe on January 24, 1881, with a loss 
 to the enemy of eight thousand men. Then he took 
 Askhabad, which was afterwards ceded by Persia.' 
 
 The agreement with Persia and the conquest of 
 Turkestan brought Russia's power to the frontier of 
 Afghanistan, which the English regard as the protecting 
 wall of their Indian Empire. At every forward move- 
 ment of the Russians, they protested or endeavored to 
 secure guarantees against a new advance or tried to gain 
 for themselves some new strategic point that would 
 strengthen their position. They were not always suc- 
 cessful. After the first siege of Herat by the Persians, 
 in 1840, the English made the conquest of Kabul. 
 Their army was driven out by an insurrection, and totally 
 annihilated while retreating (1841). If, to save their 
 honor, they afterwards recaptured Kabul, prudence led 
 them to adandon it as quickly as possible (1842). After 
 the annexation or subjection of the khanates by the 
 Russians, the English again made their way into Kabul, 
 and left there a resident representative, Cavagnari ; but a 
 
 (i) Colonel Mallesson, The Rus so- Afghan ^estion, 1864. Sir 
 Henry Rawlinson, Later Phases of the Central Asia Sluestion, 1875. 
 Kouropatkine, Les confines anglo-russes (translated from the Russian 
 by G. le Marchand), Paris, 1879. P. Lessar, La Russie et 
 r Angleterre en Asie centrale, Paris. Marvin, The Russians at 
 Mer'v and Herat, etc.
 
 AFGHANISTAN. 
 
 55 
 
 popular uprising, in 1879, brought about the murder of 
 Cavagnari and eighty-seven of his retinue. The expedi- 
 tion sent to avenge this insult was led by General 
 Roberts,' whom we see to-day in South Africa operating 
 against the Boers. This expedition, however, brought 
 about as little definite result as did the former intervention 
 in Afghanistan. 
 
 In 1 88 1, the English had gained from the Russians 
 the assurance that they had no intention of annexing the 
 city of Merv, a very important strategic point ; but in 
 1884, the notables of that city presented themselves to 
 the Russian commander at Askhabad, and made declara- 
 tion that they accepted the lordship of" the White Czar." 
 The English made complaint to the cabinet at St. Peters- 
 burg. They were answered that the action of the people 
 of Merv had been a surprise to the Russians themselves ; 
 but that they believed that they would have committed a 
 great mistake by rejecting a submission that was so 
 entirely voluntary. The English had secured the appoint- 
 ment of an Anglo-Russian commission for settling the 
 disputed boundaries, which was to decide whether Penjdeh, 
 another very important point, belonged to their client, 
 the Emir of Afghanistan, or to the Turcoman subjects 
 of Russia. The English commissioners, presided over 
 
 by General Lumsden, were the first to arrive at the place 
 
 \ 
 
 (i) General, now Marshal, Lord Roberts has published a work, 
 Forty -one Years in India.
 
 56 BRITAIN VS. RUSSIA. 
 
 of meeting. They began by fortifying Herat and inciting 
 the Afghans to seize Penjdeh. Seeing this, the chief 
 Russian commissioner, General Komarof, at the head of 
 a strong Russian force, occupied the Zulfikar Pass, and 
 made ready to march upon Penjdeh. While on the way 
 thither, he was attacked by the Afghans at Kushk. He 
 slew five hundred of their men, captured two of their flags 
 and all their artillery (March 30, 1885). Then the 
 English commissioners withdrew, charging Komarof with 
 having been the aggressor. Great Britain was much 
 irritated. Gladstone, who had the Egyptian Soudan and 
 the Upper Burmah wars on his hands, called upon Parlia- 
 ment for subsidies. The belief was general that a war was 
 about to ensue between "the whale and the elephant." 
 Then England calmed down, and accepted the explanation 
 of the Russians, that the fight at Kushk was the result of a 
 "mistake." In 1885 and 1887, she agreed to the Rus- 
 sian occupation of Merv, Penjdeh, Kushk, and the 
 Zulfikar Pass. The Russians were now within one 
 hundred and twenty kilometres of Herat, known for so 
 long a time as the "key of the Indies." 
 
 The question of the settlement of the boundaries was 
 scarcely disposed of, when another question presented 
 itself in the settlement of the boundaries of the Pamirs. 
 These form a plateau of from four to five thousand 
 metres in altitude, known as the " roof of the world," 
 with a rigorous climate and sparse population. This 
 plateau commands both Afghanistan and Cashmere,
 
 THE PAMIRS— IN TOUCH WITH INDIA. 57 
 
 those two ramparts of India and Chinese Turkestan. 
 It was broken up into petty khanates, over which the 
 Khan of Bokhara, the vassal of the Russians, and the 
 Emir of Afghanistan, the client of the English, laid 
 claim to sovereignty. Neither of them had recognized 
 until then the value of the territory. An " expedition 
 for study," accompanied by six hundred Russian soldiers, 
 made its appearance in Pamir in the summer of 1891, 
 and aroused, by its presence there, the protests of the 
 English. At the approach of winter, the Russians with- 
 drew ; but they again appeared the following summer, in 
 larger numbers, under the command of Colonel Yanof. 
 They claimed that they were insulted by the Afghans, 
 for which they inflicted upon them the bloody defeat of 
 Somatash (July 1 2,), after which they fell back and took 
 up their position at Kalabery on the Oxus. This clash 
 of arms was succeeded by a diplomatic controversy. It 
 was not until 1895, after a keen discussion between the 
 two great powers, each contending for its own client, that 
 they reached an agreement. The disputed region was 
 divided between Bokhara and Afghanistan, the former 
 receiving the little khanates of Shugnan and Roschan, 
 and the latter the khanate of Wakhan, a narrow strip of 
 territory, from twenty to thirty kilometres wide, which 
 now forms " a buffer state " between the great empires 
 of Russia and Great Britain. Even after this agreement, 
 Russia found a pretext in 1899 for occupying the district 
 of Sirikul, which belongs to Chinese Pamir, and which
 
 58 ARABIA— ABYSSINIA. 
 
 commands the source of the Kashgar and Yarkand Rivers 
 (March, 1899). 
 
 Great Britain having; occupied in Arabia the island 
 of Perim in the imamate of Muscat, in order to control 
 the outlet of the Red Sea, and to establish a coaling sta- 
 tion in her maritime route, Russia, in 1899, also 
 endeavored to obtain from the Imam the grant of a coal- 
 ing station on his coast. From this arose new complaints 
 and strenuous opposition on the part of England. Rus- 
 sia also established herself, under color of orthodox prose- 
 lytism, at a point quite as annoying to British interests, 
 on the coast, and at the very capital of Menelik, Emperor 
 of Abyssinia. A first attempt in this direction was made 
 in 1889 by a Russian adventurer, calling himself 
 Achinof, " the free Cossack." He took possession of the 
 dismantled fort of Sugallo on the territory of the French 
 colony of Obock. The former " fl«ott«<7</^ of Sugallo " 
 drove him away, and the Russian government disavowed 
 his action. The mission of Lieutenant Machkof (1889- 
 1892), and the so-called "scientific mission" of Cap- 
 tain Leontief in 1894, thanks to the ready assistance of 
 the French authorities, succeeded much better. Thus 
 was Russian influence, in close harmony with French 
 influence, established almost upon the British Nile. In 
 1898, the Russian Colonel, Artamonof, with some 
 Abyssinian troops, endeavored to meet Major Marchand, 
 who was moving upon Fashoda, and to reinforce him on 
 the great river.
 
 INDIA THE GOAL. 59 
 
 The English alternate between doubting and believing 
 that these expansive movements of Russia by vi^ay of the 
 Caucasus, by way of Turkestan, and by way of the 
 Pamirs, are all directed towards one goal, the very one 
 that the Czar Paul proposed to the first Consul Bona- 
 parte in 1800 ; Alexander I. to the Emperor Napoleon 
 (1807); and General Duhamel to Nicholas I. (1855), 
 and the ardent Skobelef to his government. To many 
 intelligent Englishmen, the goal of so much effort can 
 be no other than the conquest of India. Now that the 
 frontier of the Russian Pamir is not more than twenty or 
 thirty kilometres from the kingdom of Cashmere, and 
 now that Kushk, the terminus of the Turkestan railroad 
 system, is only one hundred and twenty kilometres from 
 Herat, the problem of invading India is infinitely more 
 easy than it was in the time of Bonaparte and Paul I. 
 Why have the Russians spent so much money and blood 
 in the conquest of the impoverished and barbarous 
 nations of those sandy deserts and almost inaccessible 
 mountains, if they did not have before them, as a recom- 
 pense for their sacrifices, what Paul I. called " all the 
 riches of the Indies." 
 
 A recent historian of Russian expansion,' Alexis 
 Krause, reviewing all the hardships endured by Russia 
 and the thankless task that she has assumed, adds, " On 
 
 (i) Alexis K.TB.\ise,Rusjia in Asia, a Record and a Study, Lon- 
 don and New York, 1899.
 
 6o RUSSIA'S OPPORTUNITY. 
 
 its own account, the conquest of Central Asia is worth- 
 less. It is not done in ignorance, but by carefully 
 thought-out design, as part of a programme, the execu- 
 tion of which its possession will assist. The capture of 
 the khanates was attempted, not as a pathway towards 
 the coveted Persian Gulf, but as a road which would lead 
 to the Panjab and all that is beyond. And now that 
 preliminary steps have been completed, the serious under- 
 taking is about to be begun," 
 
 James MacGahan, one of the best informed men on 
 Eastern affairs, wrote from the shores of the Oxus in 
 1876: "The Russians are steadily advancing towards 
 India, and they will, sooner or later, acquire a position 
 in Central Asia which will enable them to threaten it. 
 Should England be engaged in a European war, then, 
 indeed, Russia will probably strike a blow at England's 
 Indian power." 
 
 Other Englishmen pretend to believe that the hypoth- 
 esis of a conquest of India " is too preposterous to 
 be entertained. It would involve the most terrible and 
 lingering war the world has ever seen. On the day that 
 a Russian army leaves Balkh or Herat for Kandahar, well 
 may the British commander exclaim : ' Now hath the 
 Lord delivered them into my hand ! ' " 
 
 It is thus that Lord Curzon, the present Governor- 
 General of India, expresses himself. It seems, however, 
 that he is but assuming a tone of assured certainty to 
 conceal his deep anxiety. This plan of conquest that
 
 BRITISH OVER-CONFIDENCE. 6i 
 
 he considers " too preposterous to be entertained," has 
 been discussed by other, and very competent persons, 
 who do not reach conclusions so optimistic as regards 
 Great Britain.' Perhaps, however, the Russians are at 
 present pressing so closely towards the frontier of British 
 India in order to have at their disposal a means of intim- 
 idation, or even of coercion, for use in those very frequent 
 occasions in which Great Britain sets herself in stubborn 
 opposition to Russia's plans in other parts of the world. 
 For, at the present moment, the Czar Nicholas II. 
 seems much more interested in expansion in the Far 
 East than in any movement towards the south of Asia. 
 
 (i) Maximilian Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, Das Vordringen 
 der Kussischen Macht in Asien, Berlin, 1900.
 
 In the Far East 
 
 V
 
 THE EXPANSION OF RUSSIA IN THE FAR 
 
 EAST.' 
 
 The Opening of Siberia — Value of Siberia — Chinese Wars 
 
 Settlements on the Pacific — Chinese Cessions — Vladi- 
 
 vosTOCK — Russian Influence at Pekin. 
 
 HE eastward expansion of Rus- 
 sia through the solitudes of 
 Siberia and among its barbar- 
 ous tribes began about the 
 close of the sixteenth century, 
 immediately after the conquest 
 of the Tartar czaratcs of 
 Kazan and Astrakhan, It 
 was between the years 1579 and 15 84 that the Cossack, 
 Irmak Timofevitch, fleeing from the punishment of the 
 law and the wrath of the Czar, Ivan the Terrible, with 
 a handful of brigands like himself, Russians, Cossacks, 
 Tartars, German and Polish prisoners of war, to the 
 number of six hundred and fifty men, crossed the Ural, 
 
 (i) Krahmer, Russland in Alien, vol. iii. Sibirien und die grosse 
 sihirische Eisenbahn, vol. iv. Russland in Ost-Asien, Leipzig, 1897, 
 1898. Legros, La Siberie, Paris, 1899. 
 
 (64)
 
 THE OPENING OF SIBERIA. 65 
 
 traversed the immense, untrodden forests of the Tobol, 
 defeated the Tartar Khan, Kutchum, took Sibir, his 
 capital, and subjected to tribute the tribes of the Irtysh 
 and the Obi. When Irmak Timofevitch was drowned in 
 the Irtysh, dragged to the bottom of the river by the 
 weight of the cuirass given him by the Czar, Russia 
 made a hero, and the Orthodox Church a saint, of the old 
 outlaw. Along the pathways that he had marked out, 
 there soon followed a stream of " good fellows " of 
 every description , gold-seekers, fur-hunters, and peasants 
 fleeing the estates of their feudal lords in search of gov- 
 ernment lands that they might cultivate as freemen. 
 Hither also flocked religious dissenters, persecuted by the 
 Orthodox Church, who found a shelter in the immensity 
 of the Siberian forest, retreats concealed from all man- 
 kind. Into this same wilderness escaped the German, 
 Polish, and Swedish prisoners of war of Peter I. and of 
 Catherine II. Then, in long, wretched troops came in 
 chains or in fetters the unhappy serfs deported by their 
 masters, often bearing the marks of cruel beating and 
 mutilation ; their sides scarred by the knout, and nostrils 
 or tongue cut by the executioner; strewing the highways 
 with their corpses. This barbarous feature of the old 
 Russian penal code came to an end at the close of 
 the last century, and it is known that the present Czar, 
 Nicholas II., has suppressed deportation into Siberia for 
 common law crimes in order to purify that colony of a 
 reproach like to that against which the English colonies of
 
 66 VALUE OF SIBERIA. 
 
 Australia long protested. The rapidity with which 
 colonization of every kind was spread over the millions 
 of kilometers which the immensity of Siberia measures, 
 is shown by the dates of the founding of the principal 
 towns : Tobolsk on the Tobol in 1587 ; Tomsk on the 
 Toms, a branch of the Obi, in 1604 ; Yeniseisk on the 
 Yenisei in 1619; Yakoutsk in 1632; Atchinsk in 
 1642 ; Nertchinsk on the Shilka, a branch of the Amur, 
 in 1654; Okhotsk on the sea of the same name in 
 
 1638. 
 
 Siberia, even to our own times, has been valuable 
 mainly on account of its immense extent and the liberty 
 that free immigrants have found there. It may be 
 divided into three divisions : in the north, the toundra^ 
 marshy in summer, a mass of ice in winter ; in the centre, 
 the tdiga^ or forest, dear to the hunter ; in the south, the 
 cultivated region, of an area thrice that of all France. 
 Even this last division, except in the districts where the 
 " black earth " is found, is not characterized by a fertility 
 that redeems the severity of a climate, extreme in its 
 summer heat as in its winter cold. In the seventeenth 
 century a belief was current that the region about the 
 Amur was, on the contrary, of great fertility, a belief 
 which experience has shown to be ill-founded. It was, 
 therefore, in this direction that the most venturesome 
 Cossacks and the most energetic settlers hastened. They 
 were not disturbed by the fact that the country belonged 
 to the Chinese Emperor. In 1649, ^ young officer
 
 EARLY CONTESTS WITH CHINA. 67 
 
 named Khabarof, undertook to descend the still unex- 
 plored river, building forts at the junction of the tribu- 
 taries, conquering rebellious tribes of natives, and fight- 
 ing troops of Manchurian horsemen (1649— 1652). ^^ 
 1658, Pachkof, governor of Yeniseik, founded Nert- 
 chinsk on the Shilka, a branch of the Amur. Five years 
 later Albasin vi^as founded. This was a fortress with 
 ramparts of wood, and in its vicinity there arose many 
 Russian villages. Finally, the Chinese, irritated at seeing 
 these adventurers assume rulership over them, several 
 times attacked Albasin with armies of from fifteen to 
 twenty thousand men ; but were invariably repulsed. 
 Upon receiving tidings of these events, the court at 
 Moscow sent envoys to that of Pekin with a letter written 
 in Latin and in Russian. After long deliberation at 
 Nertchinsk a treaty was signed in that city, in 1689, in 
 accordance with the terms of which the heroic fort of 
 Albasin was to be razed ; and the frontier between the 
 two empires was definitely fixed as it continued to be 
 observed by both countries down to the treaties of 1858. 
 On their side, the Russians renounced further forcible 
 encroachment and settlement on Chinese territory ; but 
 they did not renounce their efforts to gain a foothold by 
 commerce, religious mission work, and diplomacy in the 
 Middle Kingdom, and even in Pekin itself. The Russians 
 that had been made prisoners at Albasin, or in battles at 
 other places, had been taken to the capital of the empire. 
 Some of them had established themselves there as artisans
 
 68 RUSSIAN RESIDENTS IN PEKIN. 
 
 or merchants ; others formed the Russian guard of the 
 " Son of Heaven." At Moscow it was known that these 
 men were well treated at Pekin, but that they had neither 
 church nor priest of their religion. Peter the Great 
 resolved to send an embassy to Pekin to secure satisfactory 
 concessions on this point. This, indeed, was the object 
 of a mission entrusted to Eberhard Ysbrand, who reached 
 Pekin in 1693, ^"'^ there obtained what the Czar wished. 
 In 1 72 1, Tsmailof was despatched to the Chinese capital 
 to secure from the Emperor Kanghi the privilege of 
 establishing there a permanent Russian legation. He 
 gave the Bodgy-Khan a letter from the Czar and left 
 M. de Lange as charge d'' affaires ; but the latter almost 
 immediately after Tsmailof's departure was dismissed by 
 the Chinese court. In 1727, a treaty that secured 
 greater commercial privileges for the Russians was signed 
 at Kiakhta. In 1806, Golovine, another envoy, was 
 sent to Pekin with a view to obtaining the free navigation 
 of the Amur River. This mission failed ; nevertheless 
 the position of Russia in the Asiatic East was continually 
 growing stronger. In 1807, they had annexed the 
 peninsula of Kamtchatka. In 1847, Count Nicholas 
 Muravief, who was to win the surname of Amourski, 
 became governor of Eastern Siberia, and set himself to 
 develop and strengthen the colony. He perceived that 
 it would have no future if possession was not secured of 
 the chief river and the richest province of the region, 
 that is, of the Amur and of Manchuria. The river was
 
 FURTHER EXPANSION. 69 
 
 Still so incompletely known that the Grand Chancellor 
 Nesselrode declared to the Emperor Nicholas that its 
 outlet was inaccessible. In 1848, a Cossack expedition, 
 under Vaganof, perished without the escape of a single 
 person to tell the tale. Two years afterwards Captain 
 Nevelskoi' discovered that Saghalin is really an island, 
 separated from the mainland by the channel or strait of 
 Tartary, and, in the course of his exploration, came upon 
 the mouth of the Amur, entered it in a small boat, and 
 planted the Russian flag on its banks ; proclaiming to 
 the natives that the country belonged to the " White 
 Czar" at St. Petersburg. The Grand Chancellor was 
 terrified at Nevelskoi's audacity ; he already saw himself 
 at war with China ; he insisted that the daring captain's 
 action be discountenanced, but the Emperor replied : 
 " When Russia's flag has been raised anywhere it should 
 not be taken down." On his part. Governor Muravief 
 endeavored to persuade the local mandarins that the best 
 thing to do was to leave the Russians alone. The 
 Chinese demanded that negotiations be entered upon 
 with their Emperor ; Muravief thought that Pekin was 
 too far away for that and that Chinese diplomacy was 
 too slow. He continued to act, therefore, as if the 
 country was already a Russian province, and strengthened 
 his position by building along the river the forts Alexan- 
 drovsk, Mikhailovsk, and Nicolaievsk, — all of these 
 baptismal names of the royal family. Petropavlosk, on 
 the southeast coast of Kamtchatka, had been established
 
 70 DEMAND FOR MANCHURIA. 
 
 in 1740. Other fortresses arose at the junction of the 
 several principal tributaries of the Amur River. " The 
 Amur will be the death of you," said the Emperor 
 Nicholas jestingly to Muravief. 
 
 During the Crimean War the Anglo-French fleet 
 blockaded the Russian Pacific coast, and destroyed a part 
 of the military establishments and of the infant marine. 
 This blockade, by threatening to starve out the colony, 
 only hastened a decision upon the part of Muravief, vv'ho 
 had need of Manchuria to furnish food for his colonists. 
 Its annexation was already an accomplished fact, when, 
 in 1857, Admiral Putiatin dropped anchor in the Gulf of 
 Pechili and proposed to the Chinese Emperor, in con- 
 sideration of Russia's armed intervention in the Taiping 
 rebellion, the cession of Manchuria. China's only reply 
 was a vigorous protest against Russian encroachment. 
 War seemed imminent between the two empires. For- 
 tunately for Russia, just at that time came the Anglo- 
 French expedition and the march of the allies upon 
 Pekin. The Russians profited by this event to complete 
 the annexation of the coveted territory. The Czar sent 
 a fleet into the Chinese waters, and the Celestials did 
 not relish having a third European power to deal with. 
 By the Treaties of Aigun and Tientsin in 1858, they 
 granted to Russia the entire left bank of the Amur, the 
 entire territory between that river and the ocean as well 
 as its tributary stream, the Ossuri, the bay on which 
 there was, in time, to rise the fortress of Vladivostock,
 
 VLADIVOSTOCK. 71 
 
 with its prophetic name (Dominator of the East). These 
 newly acquired lands formed two provinces, the Amur 
 Province and the Maritime Province. By the Treaty of 
 Pekin, in i860, China ceded to Russia the region adja- 
 cent to the lakes Balkash and Issik-kul ; the boundary line 
 between Manchuria and Siberia was re-adjusted, and the 
 Russians were granted the right to trade in all parts of 
 the empire. Fifteen years more, and Russia obtained 
 from Japan the abandonment of the latter's rights over 
 Saghalin in exchange for the North Kurile Isles. 
 
 For nearly thirty years the boundary between China 
 and Russia remained as agreed upon in the treaties of 
 1858 and i860. But already the commercial and polit- 
 ical activity of the Russians was overstepping it. They 
 had established themselves in large numbers in the cities 
 of Chinese Manchuria, — in Kiakhta, Mukden, Kirin, 
 and Tsitsihar, the residence of the mandarin-governor. 
 The navigation of the Ossuri and the Sungari Rivers fell 
 wholly into their hands. The steamships of the Amur 
 Company put Russia in rapid communication with Japan 
 and San Francisco. "Scientific Missions" traversed 
 China in all directions. At Pekin the Russian colony 
 acquired a continually greater importance and the ambas- 
 sador of the Czar wielded more influence at court than 
 the representatives of any other European ppwer. His 
 open handed liberality won him the favor of the cour- 
 tiers, the mandarins, and the generals. In all the sea 
 and river ports, the colonies of Russian merchants mul-
 
 72 NICHOLAS II. AT PEKIN. 
 
 tiplied,~and these seemed to live on better terms with the 
 native population than the traders of other foreign 
 nations. On the arrival of the Czarovitch, in 1891, he 
 wzs honored w^ith a series of royal entertainments.
 
 COREA. 
 
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 1 v'^^ 
 
 «hS^ 
 
 
 ^sSw 
 
 vjffiii 
 
 w 
 
 
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 m. 
 
 ^ 
 
 i 
 
 
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 ^ 
 
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 rCVS 
 
 ^?SSS 
 
 ^ 
 
 M 
 
 The China-Japan War — Interference of Russia — Conflict 
 WITH Japanese interests — Russia's Gain. 
 
 HINA and Japan, " The Mid- 
 dle Kingdom," and "The 
 Land of the Rising Sun," the 
 Bogdy-Khan and the Mikado^ 
 had disputed with each other 
 for a long time, the protector- 
 ate of the kingdom of Corea. 
 War broke out between the 
 two empires in the July of 1894. The Japanese troops, 
 drilled and equipped in the European manner, were 
 everywhere victorious. Their warships, built in the best 
 shipyards of Europe, sank the Chinese vessels. The 
 Japanese occupied all Corea, stormed and captured Port 
 Arthur, conquered a part of Chinese Manchuria, captured 
 Wei-hai-Wei, threatened Pekin, and finally imposed upon 
 China the Treaty of Shimonosaki, April 17, 1895. 
 China was compelled to renounce all her claims with 
 respect to Corea ; to give to her conquerors the Island 
 of Formosa, the Pescadores, the peninsula of Liao-tung, 
 
 (73)
 
 74 JAPAN'S SUCCESS. 
 
 with Port Arthur and Talien-Wan, to open five new 
 ports, including Pekin, to their commerce ; to grant them 
 the right to open manufacturing establishments in the 
 empire ; and to pay a war indemnity of seven hundred 
 and fifty millions.' 
 
 The success of the Japanese had been so rapid that 
 all the European powers were surprised at this sudden 
 revelation of such a military and naval strength in the 
 hands of the Mikado. England, at first hostile and 
 malevolent, hastened to show more friendly feelings for 
 the conqueror ; the United States concluded a commercial 
 treaty with the Japanese government ; and all the plans 
 that Russia had formed for supremacy in the Far East 
 were threatened with failure. She could not allow 
 either Wei-hai-Wei or the peninsula of Liao-tung, with 
 the harbors that she had so long coveted, to remain in 
 the hands of the Japanese. Should she do so, she would 
 see herself relegated to the ports of Siberia and Northern 
 Manchuria, closed by ice for a part of the year, and her 
 hope of unfolding her colors in the seas of the Far East 
 taken from her. She could not permit that the influence 
 of triumphant Japan should be substituted at Pekin for 
 her own influence, already dating back a century or 
 more. It was necessary, at any cost, even should it 
 mean war, to prevent the provisions of the Shimonosaki 
 Treaty being carried out. She was successful in enlisting 
 
 (i) Vladimir, The China-Japan IVar, compiled from Japanese, 
 Chinese, and Foreign Sources, London, Sampson Low, 1896.
 
 RUSSIAN INTERVENTION. 
 
 75 
 
 the cooperation of two states which, although antagonis- 
 tic to each other, had reasons for keeping the good-will 
 of Russia. These three powers : — Russia, France, and 
 Germany, — formed what might be called " A Triple 
 Alliance of the Far East." They forwarded to the court 
 at Tokyo some " friendly advice " regarding the giving 
 up of claims that might bring about a general conflagra- 
 tion. It was hard for Japan to renounce the Liao-tung 
 peninsula, with its harbors of Port Arthur, Talien-Wan, 
 and Wei-hai-Wei, that had been conquered at the price 
 of its blood, and by such brilliant victories ; but the 
 Japanese armies were on the Chinese mainland ; the 
 three powers were masters of the sea; and thus the island 
 empire was left almost without defence. The three 
 protesting powers had the advantage. Russia, in the 
 deliberations over the revision of the treaty, showed such 
 passionate insistence that twice, May 5, and May 8, 
 Admiral Tyrtof made all preparations to meet the Japanese 
 fleet, which probably would have gone to the bottom. 
 By the Treaty of Tokyo, May 8, 1895, Japan agreed 
 to give up the Liao-tung and Wei-hai-Wei ; to be satisfied 
 with Formosa and the Pescadores, positions of the utmost 
 importance in the Pacific ; and to receive the war indem- 
 nity and certain commercial privileges. 
 
 As a matter of fact, Russia had just inflicted upon 
 Japan the treatment that she herself had received from 
 the European powers, after so many splendid victories 
 over the Turks. It was under the pressure of a
 
 76 JAPAN'S LOSS— RUSSIA'S GAIN. 
 
 " European Concert " that Japan lost the most precious 
 fruits of her success against the Chinese, just as the 
 Russian conquerors of the Ottomans had lost theirs. 
 Russia set up against Japan the principle of the integrity 
 of the Chinese Empire in exactly the same way that 
 the powers had imposed upon her the principle of the 
 preservation of the Turkish Empire. The Treaty of 
 Tokyo in 1895, modified the Treaty of Shimonosaki 
 as completely as had the Treaty of Berlin modified 
 that of San Stefano in 1878. Just as Russia, in 1878, 
 had had the mortification of seeing her political foes, 
 Austria and England, enrich themselves with the spoils 
 of that very Turkish Empire that they pretended to 
 protect against her covetousness, laying their hands, 
 the one on Bosnia and Herzegovina and the other upon 
 the island of Cyprus ; so Japan had soon the mortification 
 of seeing Russia violate, for her own profit, that very 
 principle of the continental integrity of the Chinese 
 Empire that she had set up against Japanese ambition.
 
 CHINA. 
 
 Russian Concessions — Port Arthur — Railways — Loans — 
 CoREA — Germany — Great Britain — The United States. 
 
 NGLAND and France, the for- 
 — ^ ^v.,^^^^^,^ ^.-^.- iTisr in particular, obtained 
 kQ^ ^^^^\^'^^ from China numerous import- 
 '" ' ant concessions' ; but of more 
 
 value were those that Russia 
 secured. By the convention 
 of June, 1895, China con- 
 tracted with her, through the 
 intermediary of the Russo-Chinese bank, recently estab- 
 lished at St. Petersburg, and under the direction of Count 
 Oukhtomski, whose Oriental policy we know, a loan of 
 four hundred million francs at four per cent, payable in 
 thirty-six years. On October 25, 1896, this same bank 
 made another agreement with the Pekin government. 
 This agreement, ratified by the Czar, became, on 
 
 (i) R. I. Pinon et J. de Marcillac, La Chine qui s'' owvre, Paris, 
 1900. Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu, La reno-vation de (' Jsie : Siberie, 
 Chine, Japan, Paris, 1900. Chas. Beresford, The Break-up of 
 China, London and New York, 1899. 
 
 (77)
 
 78 RUSSIA OBTAINS PORT ARTHUR. 
 
 December 26, the Treaty of St. Petersburg. It gives 
 the Eastern Chinese Railroad Company the right to 
 build a road through Chinese Manchuria, making it a 
 branch line of the Russian Trans-Siberian Railroad ; to 
 develop coal and other mines in the territory traversed 
 by the road, and to devote itself to all other industrial 
 and commercial enterprises. The stock of the company 
 can be held by Chinese and Russians only, which means 
 that it will fall almost exclusively into the hands of the 
 Russians. A special clause authorized the Czar to station 
 in Manchuria both infantry and cavalry for the protection 
 of the railroad. This was the disguised annexation of all 
 the part of the vast province that had not already been 
 ceded to Russia in 1858 and i860. Furthermore, 
 China leased to Russia for fifteen years a harbor in the 
 province of Shantung, and finally, Russian war-ships 
 were given the privileges of the two harbors of Liao-tung 
 peninsula. Port Arthur and Talien-Wan. 
 
 March 27, 1898, there was formulated a new agree- 
 ment between the two countries. Port Arthur and 
 Talien-Wan and all their dependencies were leased to 
 Russia for a term of twenty-five years. With this was 
 granted the privilege of building through the Liao-tung 
 peninsula a railroad from Vladivostock to Port Arthur, 
 which is to be merely another branch of the Trans- 
 Siberian road. 
 
 Nor is this all. According to a still more recent 
 agreement, a Russian railroad is to be built from Mukden
 
 RAILWAYS. 79 
 
 in Manchuria to Pekin. Another Russian company is 
 to construct a system of Chinese railroads, the three 
 principal lines of which, setting out from Pekin, are to 
 traverse, the first two, the provinces of Shansi and Ho- 
 nan, the third, the province of Hupe and to terminate at 
 Hankow on the Yang-tse-kiang. Against this third 
 railroad, England made a vigorous protest. In her 
 treaties with China, she had secured for herself the build- 
 ing of railroads and the commerce of the valley of the 
 Yang-tse, and here the Russians were coming to cut ofF 
 her railroads, and in the very heart of China to draw off 
 the merchandise that she was counting upon to export 
 by sea, and which was now likely to be carried by the 
 Trans-Siberian line. After having secured the defeat at 
 Pekin of the propositions of a Franco-Russian syndicate, 
 she encouraged two Chinese of high rank to apply for a 
 contract to build the debated railroad. They found 
 themselves unable to raise the necessary funds, and it 
 was then that Russia, thanks to the energy of Count 
 Oukhtomski, had the franchise transferred to a Franco- 
 Belgian company. 
 
 Nevertheless, in November, 1897, Russia had either 
 not the ability or the wish to prevent the Germans from 
 landing in the bay of Kiao-chow, which she seemed to 
 have reserved for herself, or from securing a lease of it 
 for ninety-nine years. Neither could she hinder the 
 English, incensed at the action of the Germans, from 
 obtaining, in April, 1898, a lease of the harbor and bay
 
 8o RUSSIA'S SUPERIORITY. 
 
 of Wei-hai-Wei, evacuated by the Japanese. It thus 
 happens that in the Pechili Gulf, from which Pekin 
 receives the greater part of its supplies, three European 
 powers occupy places very near one another ; the Russians 
 at Port Arthur and Talien-Wan, the Germans at Kiao- 
 chow, and the English at Wei-hai-Wei. The Pechili 
 Gulf has become another Mediterranean, on whose 
 shores rival Asiatic interests continue the rivalries of 
 Europe. The position of Russia is much the strongest. 
 She commands Pekin, not merely by sea, but by all the 
 overland highways. She alone of the three rival powers 
 in the Pechili Gulf possesses a vast continental base of 
 operations. She fronts China along a boundary line 
 several thousand miles in length ; she embraces and 
 penetrates China ; and she alone by her railroads, the 
 Trans-Siberian, the Trans-Manchurian, and the Trans- 
 Chinese, will be able to pour into the very centre of 
 China and into its capital a great European army. 
 Recently in the revolution of the palace, which took 
 place in Pekin in September, 1898, it was manifest to 
 what degree the influence of the Russian legation there 
 was preponderant. The young Emperor, Kwang-Su, 
 supported by Japan, and perhaps also by England, 
 endeavored to shake off the tutelage of the Empress- 
 Dowager, Tsu-Hsi, and of the viceroy, Li-Hung-Chang, 
 the friend of the Russians, in order that he might 
 inaugurate an era of reforms. The plot was discovered, 
 the accomplices of the Emperor were executed or ban-
 
 COREA. 8 1 
 
 ished, and the Empress-Dowager reassumed full power. 
 In Corea, Russia has taken the place of China in the 
 long-standing rivalry that the latter has carried on with 
 Japan. At Seoul, in the palace of King Li-hui, it is the 
 Russian faction which, as a conservative party, has taken 
 the place of the old Chinese faction in opposition to the 
 Japanese faction, which constitutes the progressive party 
 of Corea. Japan and Russia dispute with each other 
 not only political influences, but commercial exploitation. 
 Russia might employ force, but she fears lest Japan, the 
 Great Britain of the Far East, may throw herself into an 
 alliance with the Great Britain of Europe. Therefore, 
 Russia now openly opposes Japan, and now again craftily 
 manipulates her. In spite of the keenness of the conten- 
 tion, she has had the shrewdness never to push matters 
 to a rupture. In a series of agreements, dated May 14, 
 1896, February 24, 1897, April 25, 1898, respectively, 
 the two rivals have attempted to define the conditions of 
 this sort of condominium and to establish an equitable 
 division of commercial advantages, of mail and telegraph 
 monopoly, and of police force. In this division, however, 
 Russia seems to have secured the lion's share. She 
 possesses in Corea a system of telegraph lines which is 
 annexed to her Siberian lines ; she has managed to have 
 the financial administration of the kingdom entri^sted to 
 Russians, and has succeeded in having King Li-hui issue 
 an edict that the future railways of Corea shall be of the 
 same guage as those of Siberia.
 
 82 POLITICAL PROBLEMS. 
 
 With France in Tonquin and the region round about ; 
 Germany in Kiao-chow ; England at Wei-hai-Wei, on 
 the Blue River, and in the peninsula of Kelung before 
 Hong-Kong; with Russia throughout all north China; the 
 Japanese in Corea,in Formosa, and the Pescadores, and the 
 United States in the Philippines, — it can be seen that the 
 political problems of the Far East have become as com- 
 plicated as the like problems have ever been in Europe or 
 America.
 
 THE MEANS AND METHODS OF RUSSIAN 
 
 EXPANSION. 
 
 Fruits of Diplomacy — Absolutism of Russian Govern- 
 ment — An Enlightened Despotism — Russian Colonists — 
 Race Characteristics — Religion — Population — Franco- 
 Russian Alliance — From the Baltic to the Pacific. 
 
 E have followed Russia in all 
 the directions that her policy 
 of expansion has carried her. 
 It now remains for us to study 
 the means that she has em- 
 ployed, especially in what con- 
 cerns her expansion in the East. 
 The essential characteristic that distinguishes her 
 Oriental from her Western policy is, that, while nearly 
 all the progress she has made in Europe has been either 
 the cause or the result of bloody wars like those of the 
 Czars of Moscow against Poland, of Peter the Great 
 against Charles XII., of Catherine II. and Alexander II. 
 against the Ottomans, of Paul I. against the French 
 Republic, of Alexander I. against Napoleon, and of 
 Nicholas I. against the Allies in the Crimea, her Oriental 
 expansions have never brought her into war with a power 
 of the first magnitude, not even with China. However 
 bellicose Russia may have shown herself in Europe, in 
 
 (83)
 
 84 FRUITS OF DIPLOMACY. 
 
 Asia she has exhibited a prudence wholly Oriental. A 
 score of times it has seemed that she was on the brink 
 of a mighty war with Great Britain over the frontiers of 
 India ; with China over Albasin, Kuldja, or Manchuria ; 
 and with Japan over Liao-tung and Corea. Some sort 
 of an agreement has always come in time to ward off an 
 open rupture, as in 1872, 1885, 1887, and 1895, with 
 Great Britain ; and as at Nertchinsk, at Aigun, at 
 Tientsin, and at Pekin with China. In 1871, war with 
 the latter seemed imminent with respect to the Kuldja 
 question, but, rather than proceed to extreme measures, 
 Russia preferred to abandon a part of her conquest. In 
 these agreements Russia, it is found, has generally the bet- 
 ter part of the bargain. She understands how to utilize the 
 amour-propre of her adversaries. Thus, she helped the 
 Chinese " to save their face," for example, by inducing 
 them to lease for twenty-five or ninety-nine years what 
 they would obstinately have refused to cede definitely. 
 Thanks to this expedient, it appeared to the Chinese 
 that the dignity and integrity of their empire would 
 remain inviolate. England also has grown accustomed 
 to allowing herself " to save her face," and to be put to 
 sleep by the mesmeric passes, energetic, and at the same 
 time, caressing of Russian diplomacy. She allows herself 
 to see in the "explanations" brought to London, the 
 proof that some bold Cossack raid, some thorough lesson 
 administered to her Afghan clients, is the result of an 
 " error," a " misunderstanding." A company of six
 
 FRUITS OF DIPLOMACY. 85 
 
 hundred soldiers is almost always a "scientific expedition." 
 The English minister, in order not to stir up strife, allows 
 himself to yield, and hands over to his successor the task 
 of disentangling the knot. This successor is careful not 
 to meddle with what he himself was not mixed up in, 
 and what the jingoes and London cockneys have already 
 forgotten ; and so what the Russians have skillfully 
 acquired remains permanently in their possession. If 
 the occasion demands it, they will declare that they did 
 not intend to conquer Bokhara ; but have they proved 
 that they have not made a vassal state of it, something 
 that will be more useful to them than an annexed pro- 
 vince ? They never intended to advance to Merv ; but 
 if the people of Merv of their own accord came to them, 
 would it be a wise policy to reject a " voluntary " sub- 
 mission ? And thus, slowly, silently, without excessive 
 cracking of her whip, Russian supremacy, in her well- 
 oiled car of progress, has been moving on through all 
 Central Asia. 
 
 Russia is the only European power which has an 
 absolute government. Its autocratic feature, so fiercely 
 assailed upon the accession of Nicholas I. by the " Con- 
 stitutionals," or "Republicans," of 1825, and under 
 Alexander II. by the Nihilist conspiracies, seems to have 
 taken on a new life in the estimation of tlie Russian 
 people, because, according to the expression of Prince 
 Oukhtomski, it is the necessary condition of the greatness 
 of their nation and of her " supernatural " and provi-
 
 86 THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT. 
 
 dential mission in Asia. If the foundation of the govern- 
 ment remains autocratic, this autocracy, is at least 
 more sincerely an " enlightened despotism " than was 
 the absolutism of the eighteenth century, a despotism 
 thoughtful of the economic interests and the well-being 
 of the people, blending its ambitions with the legitimate 
 aspirations of the nation. It has borrowed from the 
 West municipal or provincial self-government, but not 
 the parliamentary, not even the representative regimen. 
 In Russia there is no minister responsible to legislative 
 bodies, where changeable majorities successively displace 
 one another ; but ministers having the confidence of the 
 sovereign continue in office for a long time, in such 
 manner that from 1815 to 1882 Russia had only two 
 ministers of foreign affairs, Nesselrode and Gortchakof, 
 and since the latter date there have been only three, De 
 Giers, Lobanof, and Muravief. How many have been 
 those that have followed one another during these past 
 eighty-five years in France, England, and even the 
 United States ! This permanency in office allows 
 continuity of the same political views and constancy 
 in realizing them. No parliament, therefore, no ques- 
 tionings, no blue or yellow books. A restricted liberty 
 of the press closes with respect the indiscreet lips of 
 reporters and interviewers. Hence secrecy in both plan- 
 ning and executing is possible. There is no need of 
 throwing dust in the eyes of parliaments, of the news- 
 papers, and of the people ; nor is there any need of
 
 AN ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM. 87 
 
 brag, optimistic proclamations, and of oratorical heroics. 
 Great conquests can be accomplished silently. 
 
 This form of government, though it may appear as 
 archaic as the despotism of Nebuchadnezzar or of the 
 Grand Turk, does not exclude the use of the most 
 modern appliances and scientific methods over which 
 free peoples pride themselves : railroads, telegraphs, tele- 
 phones, improved cannon and rifles, battleships and 
 cruisers of the latest pattern, a thorough knowledge of 
 history, of ethnography, and of all forms of human speech, 
 from those of Finland to those of Kamtchatka. It does 
 not exclude the system of military organization in 
 vigorous operation by the powerful and enlightened 
 nations of France and Germany, nor yet the art of 
 securing from the people the maximum of military 
 power. 
 
 Russia has a regular army like France and Germany, 
 national militia like Switzerland, and irregular troops like 
 those of the Shah of Persia and the Emperor of China. 
 These irregulars date back to the beginning of Russian ex- 
 pansion. The Czars of Moscow had their Cossacks of the 
 Dnieper, of the Don, of the Volga, and of the Ural. In 
 proportion as conquest succeeded conquest, the soldier 
 class of the subdued peoples were amalgamated with the 
 Russians in the " Cossack armies " of the Terek, of the 
 Kuban, of the Caucasus, and of Turkestan. There are 
 to-day Cossacks of the Trans-Baikal, of the Pamirs, and 
 of the Amur. For hundreds and thousands of kilometres,
 
 88 RUSSIAN COLONISTS. 
 
 they constitute the grand guard of the regular army, the 
 mobile curtain of light cavalry that will screen its move- 
 ments, " free lances," for whose too audacious encroach- 
 ment and too bold raids, it will be possible to disavow 
 all responsibility. 
 
 Behind these, like another advance guard, come the 
 merchants, adventurers also, merchant adventurers^ as the 
 English of the fifteenth century said. Behind these, 
 again, sally forth the colonists in search of cheap land, 
 and who, following the course of the rivers and streams, 
 at times venturing into the jungles, found villages over 
 which will soon rise the humble bell-tower of a church. 
 All these people, Cossacks, officers, and soldiers of the 
 regular army, merchants, colonists, and even the tchino- 
 vniks^ or officials, possess to a degree not met with in 
 any other European nation, the gift of adaptation to a 
 new climate and environment, and the gift of assimi- 
 lating native races or of becoming assimilated with them. 
 The peasant of European Russia, very much mixed, 
 especially in the East, with Finnish or Turkish blood and 
 characteristics, does not differ essentially from the Ostiak 
 and the Vogul of Western Siberia. These, in turn, 
 show no marked difference from the Turkish population 
 of Eastern Siberia, such as the Yakuts. From these to 
 the Mongolian races, such as the Tunguses, the Buriats, 
 and the Manchus, and from these to the Chinese popula- 
 tion, there is scarcely any noticeable transition. There was 
 a time when from the Dnieper to the Pacific, all obeyed
 
 RUSSIAN COLONISTS. 89 
 
 the same master, the Grand Khan, " the Son of Heaven," 
 whose heir to-day is the " White Czar." From the 
 Dnieper to the Pacific extends the same plain, are found 
 the same climate and the same soil, barren steppes alter- 
 nating with fertile mould ; the same manner of life, of 
 dwelling, and of dress ; the same endurance of extreme 
 cold, excessive heat, privations, fatigue, long journeys, 
 and a half-nomadic existence ; and the same tendency to 
 Oriental fatalism, which the orthodox term Christian 
 resignation. And thus, as EUsee Reclus remarks, the 
 Yakuts easily become Russians and the Russians as 
 easily become Yakuts, and both Russians and natives 
 possess the same readiness in acquiring the language of 
 the foreigner. 
 
 Does not the difference in religion constitute a barrier 
 between them r The Russian peasant with his rudiment- 
 ary faith, to which, nevertheless, he holds with all his 
 heart, and even the pope^ or parish priest, with his vaguely 
 uncertain theology and his ignorance, are free from all 
 intolerance. Any form of the Christian religion, whatever 
 value it may have, although it clashes with the still less 
 highly developed beliefs of the Mohammedan peoples, 
 makes its way among tribes that are pagan, Shamanist, 
 Fetichist, or vaguely Buddhist. Between the Russians and 
 the pagans there is established a oneness of faith or super- 
 stition. Thereisno question of complicated dogmas devised 
 by the subtle brains of Alexandria or of Bvzantium. 
 The untutored Siberians do not fall into controversies
 
 90 RUSSIAN RELIGIONS. 
 
 over the mystery of the Trinity, the twofold nature of 
 the Redeemer, or transubstantiation. The idea of God 
 is too lofty for these coarse minds, but they all agree in 
 placing on the summit of their Pantheon Saint Nicholas, 
 the Thaumaturgist, and above him, beneath him, or equal 
 with him, Christ and the Virgin. Beneath these come 
 saints. Christian or with a physiognomy that may be 
 pagan. Buddhistic, and at times Mohammedan, And all 
 this multiform worship is in full harmony with the 
 primitive cult of springs and of certain venerable trees, 
 with the belief in demons of the forests and river sprites, 
 and with the custom of wearing certain amulets that the 
 orthodox priest, the Shamanist sorcerer, or the Hadji 
 returned from Mecca, may furnish. What more is 
 necessary in order to be, in this life, successful on the 
 farm, or in fishing, or in hunting, or in war, and, in the 
 next, to be certain of salvation ? The Tunguse, the 
 Buriat, the Vogul, and the Ostiak, who firmly believe in 
 Saint Nicholas, have already become, or are in the pro- 
 cess of becoming, Russian. Are not the Tchuvashi, the 
 Mordva, and the Meshtcheraks all children of the same 
 father, that is, subjects of the same Czar ? Though 
 they may be Mohammedans, do they not still believe in 
 the virtue of certain magical words uttered by the ortho- 
 dox priest, the efficacy of the holy waters in driving 
 away Cheitan (Satan) and evil Djinns, in the protection 
 that Saint Blaise, the old-time god, Valoss, of the Rus- 
 sians, extends over their flocks, and in the cures wrought
 
 FREEDOM FROM RACE PREJUDICE. 91 
 
 in the name of Saint Cosme or in that of Saint Damian, 
 those heavenly physicians, who cure their adherents with- 
 out requiring remuneration ? 
 
 Those two scourges, journalism and theology, being 
 almost unknown in the Asiatic Empire of the Czar, one 
 can live there in a happy confusion of things. Politics 
 does not create any differences among men, and religion 
 scarcely any. There is no time to reflect and subtilize 
 upon the more or less brown or yellow color of the face, 
 the more or less turned-up shape of the nose, the more 
 or less slant of the eyes, or the more or less prominence 
 of the cheeks. In no degree of the social scale is there 
 known the prejudice " of the skin," so pronounced 
 among the English and Americans, and noticeable, but 
 to much less extent, among the French, Portuguese, and 
 Spanish colonists. Russian colonization is not destructive 
 of aboriginal races ; it does not exterminate them, it 
 absorbs them. Marriages, legal or otherwise, are frequent 
 between the conquerors and the conquered. Already, 
 in the days of Ivan the Terrible, Tartar Khans became 
 Russian princes. To her subjects of brown or of saffron 
 complexion, of Buddhist or of Mohammedan religion, 
 Russia has always shown more liberality than France has 
 to her Algerian subjects. In Algeria it has become 
 difficult for an Arab or a Berber to rise above\the grade 
 of captain, but majors, colonels, and even generals of 
 Turkish or Circassian race, and even of the Mohammedan 
 religion, are numerous in the Asiatic armies of the 
 " White Czar."
 
 92 POPULATION. 
 
 The Russians of Europe are fully able of themselves 
 to people their Asiatic colonies without having to assimi- 
 late the natives, and without the assistance of foreign 
 immigration. Russia is fortunate in that her colonies 
 are only a prolongation of her own territories. To 
 become a colonist, there is no ocean to cross, no steam- 
 boat fare to pay. The poorest peasant, a staff in his 
 hand, an axe at his belt, his boots slung from a cord over 
 his shoulder, can pass from one halting-place to another, 
 until he reaches the ends of the empire. Moreover, 
 the population of Russia, by its own birth rate, increases, 
 in spite of insufficient medical care at childbirth, with a 
 rapidity unknown to any other nation of European blood, 
 excepting, perhaps, the Canadian French. In 187S-79, 
 the subjects of the Czar numbered ninety-six millions, in 
 1899 they reached one hundred and twenty-nine millions, 
 an increase in twenty years of thirty-three millions, a 
 number almost equal to the population of the kingdom 
 of Italy, or an annual increase of about one million six 
 hundred thousand souls, a number that about equals the 
 present population of North Carolina or Alabama. With 
 such a treasury of men to draw from, neither military 
 power nor colonial strength will be lacking. In Siberia, 
 before 1895, the increase of population by immigration 
 alone was only about ninety-two thousand per year. 
 Since the suppression of penal transportation, especially 
 since the construction of the Trans-Siberian railroad, 
 immigration has brought in two hundred thousand annu-
 
 THE FRANCO-RUSSIAN ALLIANCE. 93 
 
 ally. The population of Siberia must by this time have 
 reached the figure of seven millions. Of this number at 
 least six millions are Russians. This, however, is one 
 person for each square kilometre of territory, so that 
 neither is there any lack of land. 
 
 For a long time the Russian sovereign needed two 
 things to enable him to boldly plunge into the depths of 
 Asia. First, he lacked the assurance that England or 
 the German powers would not be able to foment on his 
 European frontiers one of those coalitions like those 
 that resulted in the Crimean War or in the revision of 
 the Treaty of San Stefano ; secondly, he lacked " the 
 sinews of war," or, as the English phraseology is, " the 
 Cavalry of Saint George." The alliance with France, 
 outlined at Kronstadt in 189 1, proclaimed at Paris in 
 1896, and at St. Petersburg in 1897, ^^^ given the 
 Czar the two things that were wanting. It assures the 
 safety of the European frontiers against any effort of the 
 Triple Alliance. In the Far East, in 1895, we have 
 seen how, at the same time, France and Germany took 
 in hand the interests of Russia against Japanese ambition 
 and British hostility. The Germany of Bismarck at- 
 tempted to ruin Russia's credit in the Berlin exchange 
 and in the European market. France threw ^pen her 
 market and her credit to Russia, and either in France, or 
 thanks to her, the Czar, within a few years, has been 
 able to borrow several milliards. This has enabled him 
 to strengthen his army, put a powerful navy afloat, con-
 
 94 THE TRANS-SIBERIAN. 
 
 sent to large loans to China and Persia, complete his 
 European railroad system, and push forward the work 
 upon the Trans-Caucasus, the Trans-Siberian, the Trans- 
 Manchurian, and the Trans-Chinese railroads. 
 
 The results of the daring raids through Turkestan, in 
 the direction of the Persian Gulf and of Afghanistan, 
 and towards the Amur and the Japan Sea, are now con- 
 solidated by a wholly modern outfit of war and travel. 
 In Turkestan, the ancient capitals of Tamerlane, the 
 fortresses conquered by the heroism of the Perovskis, the 
 Tchernaiefs and of the Skobelefs, all of which called for so 
 much skill and careful manipulation on the part of 
 Russian diplomacy, are to-day railroad stations. There 
 are dining-room stations at Merv, Bokhara, Samarkand, 
 Kokhand, Andijan, Tashkend, etc., and the Russian 
 station of Kushk is only one hundred and twenty 
 kilometres from Herat. The Trans-Siberian railroad 
 with its numerous stations, its branch lines to Khabarovsk, 
 Port Arthur, and Pekin, and the annexed systems that 
 penetrate the Chinese Empire, has consolidated all that 
 was accomplished by the venturesome explorers of former 
 times, from Irmak or Khabarof to Lieutenant Nevelskoi 
 of our day. The principal line, six thousand two hun- 
 dred kilometres long, with its bridges of eight hundred 
 metres over the Obi and the Irtysh, of one thousand 
 metres over the Yenisei and the Selenga, with its ferry- 
 boat, one hundred metres long, that ferries the trains 
 across the southern bay of Lake Baikal, permits the 
 transportation of colonists, merchants, regiments, and
 
 FROM THE BALTIC TO THE PACIFIC. 95 
 
 brings to bear upon the further side of Asia all the power 
 of the Czar who reigns at St. Petersburg. In 1889, 
 the merchants of Nizhni Novgorod, in an address to the 
 Emperor Alexander III., predicted in these terms the 
 brilliant future of the Trans-Siberian : " It will unite to 
 Europe, through the Russian Empire, four hundred 
 millions of Chinese, and forty-two millions of Japanese. 
 One will be able to go from Europe to Shanghai by 
 Vladivostock in twenty days instead of the thirty-five 
 which the Canadian route requires, or the forty-five of 
 the Suez route." The distance between Europe and the 
 Far East will still be further shortened by the extension 
 of the Russian railroad to Port Arthur. In the commerce 
 of the world, the Trans-Siberian will work as important 
 a revolution as did the discovery of the Cape of Good 
 Hope in the fifteenth century, or the construction of the 
 Suez Canal in the nineteenth. The future policy of 
 Russia will be to secure the full attainment of what she 
 has been striving after for centuries in her onward march 
 through the Siberian wilds, that is, access to seas free 
 from ice, where her fleets of war and commerce may 
 have unhindered course. Russia is attaining this freedom 
 of the sea four hundred years later than Spain, Portugal, 
 France, England, and Holland. She has lost nothing in 
 having waited so long. Thus far, she has passed through 
 the Baltic and the Mediterranean periods, with a power 
 for expansion unknown to her predecessors. She is 
 about to inaugurate a new era in her history ; the oceanic, 
 the world-wide era, is merely beginning for the Slav.
 
 The International Monthly. 
 
 €HE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY 
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 the times, renders it impossible for one person 
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 Fine Art — John C. Van Dyke, Butgers College ; Georges Perrot, 
 Ecole Xorraale, Paris; Adolph Furtwangler, Univ. of Munich. 
 
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 Edouard Rod 
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 Charles De Kay 
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 E. L. Zalinski 
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 Th. Ribot 
 
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 Theodor Barth 
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 Booker T. Washington 
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