FRIENDLY RUSSIA.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVI, Issue 72, 25 March 1915, Page 7

FRIENDLY RUSSIA.

JSE REAtwAND UNREAL. LAND- OpJ THECZAR. (By-SIDNEY DARK.) *"" ■ y Certain English writers, acting unconidonsly in the interests of Germany /persist in describing Russia, to quote air. H. G. Wells, as "a penny-dreadful .-country of hardship and wickedness" It is quite certain that wheii*Germany thinks that the momont has come to endeavour to arrange peace terms, the Potsdam pacificists will. at once begin to tell us that the German Codlin is the friend and not the Russian Short I have tried in various -articles hi the -TDaily Express" to show that to the Russian people this-war-is a holy war. Tneaning for them a release from a tyranny invented by Prussianised ofß•eials. and consequently the power to -develop their own national life alou°- its characteristic lines. ° The real Russia lias been in the last few years admirably described by such writers as Mr. Manrice Baring. Mr. Stepben-Grabam.-ajid Mr. Wells, but this has not prevented the-repetition of the gtale-old fictions, by Bernard Shaw, who better, b-r feather-headed Sociafiste like Mr. Keir Hardie. and by Mr. Israel .Zangwill. whose judgment is qmte naturally influenced by Russia's treatment-of "the Jews. A SIMPLE PEOPLE. ,4s I have suggested before, the actual Russia, the country of infinite pity, can best be discovered in the novels of Dostoievsky, and this is the Russia that has been discovered by the Englishmen to whom I have referred, and which lives very vividly in the pages of an extremely ir.terestmg new book—"Friendly .Russia," by Dennis Garstin (Fisher Unwin. 3/6.) Mr. Garstin says:— "Nowhere else-do people live together in such a friendly way. After some few months- Lfelt that I knew them better than many persons I have known for years. There was no pretence about them. They were like children without the veneer of convention putting an annonnal gloss upon their manners. I have seen them playing like children, and furious like children, saying un 7 imaginable things in wild bursts of anger, and smiling again almost before the frown had passed from their foreheads. "And so the romance of Russia lies, not in passionate savagery, but in a charming simplicity— at least, that is the charm-of the Russia I hase visited, and where I hope to return. The pleasant easy life among pleasant, easy people comes back to mc sometimes with an insistence that makes mc smell again the hot dust and the leather and the cabbage soup, and the amber-coloured tea. and Iheard the kindly "Zdrast'ee. Dennis Xormanovitch"' from blackbearded workmen stopping their songs, as they trudged home over the dunes, to wish mc well." Mr. Garstin found no wolves in Russia .and no brutality. To him it was the country of friendship, of tolerance, and of a curious realisation of the mystery of life. STRUGGLE OF THE SLAV. He was in Russia when war broke out, and he describes very vividly how the whole soul, of the people is" with the Government in this struggle of the Slav to direct his own destiny. He tells us how the Russian army has been almost miraculously changed since the war with Japan. -'The dissolute officer of Tolstoy's day has gone, and is replaced by a hardworked, well-trained soldier, encouraged to take a personal interest in his work and his men. . . * "Except for the Guards and the crack cavalry regiments, the officers come for the most part from the intelligenzia, tho mainspring of the army, as of all else, while the troops, cheery, rough, and faithful, will do anything in the world —except think: they will obey, they will follow, they will die. and die gamely. "They will march with a spring though their only food is rice; they will laugh working in the hottest sun, though ther have only a pocketful of sunflower seed to gladden them; and. fatalists, they will attack grimly over the bodies of their own dead, though they have only the blessing of a longhaired priest to hearten them with dim assurances." The Russian as Mr. Garstin saw him has something of the unconquerable cheerfulness that is the glory of the British soldier, and this is a little surprising to those of us who only know Russia from Tolstoy or Maxim Gorky. Mr. Wells says in a preface he has written to Mr. Garstin's book:—'"I believe that the superstition that Russia is a wretched country is even more deeply ingrained m the Western imagination than that it is a mysteriously wicked tyranny." As a matter of fact no people who have learnt to pity could ever be quite unhappy. GLIMMER OF HOPE. For nearly two hundred years Russia has been governed on lines devised by Prussianised bureaucrats. To-day there is a giimmer of hope in the sky. and when this war is over Russia will be great in its own way. I have referred to the-efforts made by Mr. Zingwill and other Jewish leaders to prejudice Great Britain against tbe Russian people. As a matter of fact, the pogroms, in common with most of the other brutalities of Russian life, are directly due to the influence of the small class in Petrograd-full of Frederick the Great Traditions, and mainly concerned with retarding the natural progress of the Russian people. At the same time it'eannot be denied that the Jew is unpopular in Russia owing to his possession of certain qualities of shrewdness which are antipathetic to the Slav character. The-Russian is of himself a protest against the commercialism of the modern world. The Jew X its embodiment. Nevertheless anything like persecution certainly does not come natural to the Russian, and, left to himself, there woulcTbe no fear of his mdulging in bloodthirsty pogroms. It should also be remembered that, despite the Kaiser's patronage of Herr Baffin and Herr Dernburg, the Jew is <trn something of a pariah in the Ger*han Empire. He is not allowed to be *n officer in the army.. and certainly no Prussian junker would dream of regarding him as an equal. All snbject peoples and aH~fr«=e peoples *nst. pray for Germany's defeat—the *ise Jew among them.