Those bald-headed hairy9 miserable, arrogant Russians

Press, 29 March 1980, Page 15

Those bald-headed hairy 9 miserable, arrogant Russians

Bv

DERRICK ROONEY

The recent wave of antiRussian sentiment and the official American Olympic boycott, though justified if perhaps not fully explained by the Soviet invasion of Afganistan, should not surprise anyone who has done a little reading. For throughout the history of the Western world the Russians have been the ones you love to hate.

Neither a very deep nor a diligent search of literature is required to find evidence of this. The “Russian bear’’ has been a figure of fear, hidden where necessary behind ridicule, in Western literature right back to pre-Christian days, when the earth was still flat and the maps were ill defined.

In the Roman era the historian Herodotus (484425 BC) gave the impression that where his contemporaries might have sprinkled “Here there be tygers” over uncharted and dangerous areas, he would have written “Here there be Scythians (Russians).” He drew a hideous picture of them as bald monsters living among stones: “As far as the country of these Scythians all the aforesaid land is level and its soil is deep; but thereafter it is stony and rough. After a long passage through this rough country, there are meh inhabiting the foothills of high mountains, who are said to be all bald from their birth (male and female alike) and snubnosed and with long beards. . . but, for what lies beyond the bald men, no-one can speak with exact knowledge: for mountains high and impassable bar the way, and no man can cross them.

"These bald men say (but for my part I believe them not) that the moun-

tains are inhabited by men with goat’s feet; and that beyond these again are men who sleep for six months of the 12.” Hairiness among Rus-, sians, real or imagined, has fascinated numerous Western writers.

“As touching the naturall habite of their bodies, they are for the most part of a large size, and of very. fleshly bodies: accounting it a grace to be somewhat grosse and burley, and therefore they nourish and spread their beards, to have them longand broad. But for the most part they are very unweildy and unactive withal!.

“Which may be thought to come partly of the climate, and the numbness which they get by the cold in winter, and partly

of their diet that standeth most of rootes, onions, garlike, cabbage, and such like things that breede grosse humors . . .” (Richard Hakluyt, 1598). The puritanical poet John Milton visited Russia in the eighteenth century and made similarly unfavourable comments afterwards on the Russians and their diet: “ . . . but there are no people that live so miserably as the poor of Russia: if they have straw and water they make shift to live; for straw dried and stamped in winter time is their bread: in summer grass and roots: at all times bark of trees is good meat for them: yet many of them die in the streets for hunger, none relieving or regarding them.” There is something that smacks of the horror tales of Edgar Allen Poe in these accounts of Russian indifference to suffering; I have no idea whether this

famous American literary figure visited Russia, but another one, John Quincy Adams, did; he was fascinated by the Russian physiognomy rather than by the appetite. His 1810 account of an encounter with r. hairy Russian lady was more rueful than gruesome: “After ■ dinner came some additional company; among whom Princess Woldemar Galitzin, venerable by the length and thickness of her beard. This is no uncommon thing among the ladies of this Slavonic breed. There is at the Academy of Sciences a portrait of/. a woman now dead, but with beard equal to that of Plato. But of living subjects, the , .Princess Woldemar Galitzin is in this respect, - of- all the females that I have seen,

the one who most resembles a Grecian philo* sopher.”

Russian brutality, both real (there is no doubt that for centuries the people of Russia ranked among the most repressed on earth) and imagined, has provided plenty of literary material, and sometimes Westerners hide their distaste for it behind humour; for example, there is a wellknown story about a visit by Peter the Great to Westminster.

The Tsar saw several people in wigs and gowns, and asked who they were. On being told they were lawyers, he cried: “What. All these lawyers. Why, I have only* two in my dominions, and I intend to hang them when I get back.”

Another story, no doubt similarly apocryphal, was told about Ivan the Terrible by a Russian historian, V. 0. Kluchevsky:

“On another occasion he (Tzar Ivan) sentenced to death an elephant which had been sent to him from Persia — simply because it refused to kneel in his presence.”

A romantic side of the Russian nature is reflected in writings about their country-, too; a French nobleman visiting them in the nineteenth century noted that Russian peasants had a fondness for tea, and cited this as proof of “the elegance of their nature.” A century and a half earlier a visiting English physician had reported in wide-eyed wonderment on the bedroom behaviour of the Muscovites: -. .. . -?

“The Muscovites exercise the Venereal Act with a great deal of gravity and circumpsection; for they will never have to do with a Woman, unless

they . first take off the little Cross which is

hang’d about her Neck when she is. Christened; and they are so considerate in their LovePassion, as first to cover the Images of their Saints, if there be any in the Room.”

As for the high mountains of Herodotus, there is an echo of these today in the war in the rugged high passes of Afghanistan, and many’ people might wish to see the name of that country substituted for Russia in these wartime remarks by the late Soviet leader, Josef Stalin:

“The history of old Russia is the history of defeats due to backwardness ... AU beat her for her backwardness — for military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for governmental backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was beaten because to beat her wa-s profitable and could be done with impunity.”