Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1917. THE GERMAN CANKER IN RUSSIA

Evening Post, Volume XCIV, Issue 114, 10 November 1917, Page 6

Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1917. THE GERMAN CANKER IN RUSSIA

The change in the name of the Russian capital from St. Petersburg to Petrograd towards the beginning of the war was received by the Russian people with an enthusiasm which it was not easy for 'foreigners to understand. The foundation of the city and its substitution for Moscow as the capital of Russia had been accomplished by one of the greatest of her Sovereigns, and the courage and foresight which inspired his enterprise had been fully justified by the result. The' site was a pestilential swamp when Peter the Great took it from the Swedes added it to his dominions: ■ To the ordinary eye few sites could have appeared more dismal or more unsuitable for a great city. The neighbourhood was one vast morass, with fever as its chief product. It did not contain a particle of stone, and labour was as far to seek as material. But Peter, says the historian, " who could not be turned asi3e from his purposes by ordinary obstacles, collected, a vast concourse of people from a variety of countries, including Russians, Tartars, Kalmucks, Cossacks, Ingrians, and Finlanders, and employed them, without intermission and without shelter from an inclement climate of sixty degrees of latitude, in deepening the channels of the rivers and raising the general level of the islands, which were in the winterseasons usually sunk in the floods." A hundred thousand of this polyglot collection of involuntary labourers are said to have perished in the first year, but the iron will of Peter persisted. In due course he got his piles in, and built first a fort and then a city. The same compulsion which had / provided the labour was at first required to provide a population. Mainly by this _ means Peter, and his daughter Elizabeth had given the new capital 150,000 inhabitants within half a century of its foundation, and before the century was out the number had been doubled under Catherine 11.

But the foresight of Peter the Great had not to wait as long as that for its justification. Within six months after its foundation a Dutch vessel with a full cargo had dropped anchor in the-river, and before the year was out another vessel from Holland and one from England. Russia had been brought .into touch with Western commerce and Western culture in a way that would have been impossible if she had continued to be content with a capital 400 miles from the sea, and the mouth of the Neva had remained an intractable swamp. The contrast thus indicated between the old capital and the Jiew has been continued to the present day. Moscow remains the spiritual capital of Ihe old Russia; Petrograd, as it has now become, is the gateway of Western commerce and Western ideas, and, without the inspiration or the ineumbrance of ancient traditions, presents the paradox of one of the most cosmopolitan of capitals in one of the most self-contained and impervious of nations. Yet it was not on this account that the heart of Russia rejoiced when the name of her capital was changed.

This enthusiasm was inspired not by the*,general susceptibility of the capital to foreign influences, but by the hold that a special kind of foreign influence had acquired on the capitaland the whole .country. The change of name was welcomed as implying a repudiation of an influence which was poisoning the national life. As one of the most enlightened of Russian patriots has said :—

" One of the mpst popular among the latest Imperial decisions was the Russifieatioii o£ the name of the capital.. It symbolised the end of the German domination in Russia, and the beginning of a national period of Russian history. But it is only the first step towards the de-Germanisation of Russia. ,To defeat the German armies, to break the power of Germany, is comparatively an easier task than to pull out the innumerable fangs of Germanism which had systematically fastened themselves into Russia, like the tentacles of an octopus clutching its intended prey. One of the leaders of the Russian national thought wrote lately to; the writer: 'We are still living in " Russlandia." ; "Rossia" (Russia) is yet to be created!'"

Our authority is M. G. de We3selitsky, whose book on " Russia and Democracy : The German Canker in Russia," written some two years ago, makes pathetic reading now in the day of his country's humiliation. It looks to-day as though the canker of which he speaks may accomplish its deadly work and render all the labours and all the sufferings of Russian patriotism during the last three years of no avail. Yet even if the worst should be realised, and M. de Wesselitsky's hopes be shattered, the result will not be to impugn his sagacity. It will, as he says, be " the innumerable fangs of Germanism," the " peaceful penetration '*' of Germany into Russian commerce and politics and journalism, that will have accomplished this disaster, and not her armies in the field.

The general nature of the German cancer in Russia has been made fairly familiar to ns by the enlightenment which the war has forced upon us, but the merit of M. de Wesselitsky's book is that in a rapid survey of Russian history during the last two centuries he enables us to realise how persistent, how insidious, nnd how pervasive the evil has been. At the very time when Peter the Great was opening his country to Dutch and English commerce, .he was employing the services of the robber barons of Esthonia and Livonia after his conquest of those provinces for the purposes of his own

government. This small beginning of evil was carried much further by Peter's successors. Of P au l we are toW that ' loving humanity above all, he saw its highest expression in Germany, by promoting whose interests he believed himself to be working for the greatest good of mankind.". But the complicity of Catherine the Great in the partition of Poland was, in M. de Wesselitsk/s opinion, the greatest help ever given to Germany and the greatest injury ever inflicted upon Russia by a Russian Government. That infamous proceeding, which was engineered by Frederick the Great, used to be called the greatest crime of. modern history until in July, 1914, another Hohenzollern eclipsed his ancestor in infamy, if not in wickedness.

From Frederick to Bismarck M. de Wesselitsky traces the bondage of Russia to the evil genius of Germany, but the present Kaiser's abandonment of the Bismarckian tradition gave her a chance of freedom which seemed two years ago to have been effectively seized. As the late Mr. Henry Cust wrote in his eloquent preface to " Russia and Democracy " : imr n T°'d Ty R.USS^ is, Settin S rid of Germany. Two hundred years of tyranny of suppression, of paralysfs are being realised almost for the first time, and in that realisation are being swept away. Two lons centuries of reaction, of intrigue, of exploitation, of perfidy, and of {also sacrihce are going up ; n gunpowder along the banks of the San. And millions of men j a i"T V llope in a n(hv heart, and lift undazzled eyes to a dawn which they had grown at last to believe would never break. The mighty work p£ Peter is purged of the long slow poison it trailed , at last " °eS> Russ'a comes to her own Could Russia have held on for another year the purge would doubtless have been,complete, but her present troubles have, to say the least,, both proved the'; vitality of the German microbe and given 1 it a new lease of life.