BRUTAL AND SELFISH

Evening Star, Issue 18159, 27 December 1922, Page 5

BRUTAL AND SELFISH

NEW VIEW ON RUSSIANS. MAXIM GORKY’S INDICTMENT. Maxim Gorky has written a new book, which is about to appear :n Russian and German, states the Riga correspondent of the London ‘Times.’ Tho most important subject of this new work is the Russian peasant, whom Gorky now paints in tho darkest colors os a monster of primitively cunning brutality. A few extracts will show.how far Gorky’s views have changed during the past few year’s on tho people whom he really ought to know and understand. “I think that just as a sense of humor is tho Englishman’s exceptional peculiarity, tho Russian people’s outstanding quality is a sense of special cruelty,” ho says. “There is a diabolical sharpness about Russian cruelty, something exquisite and refined. 1 believe that women are nowhere else so pitilessly and terribly -beaten as in tho Russian villhge, and probably no other country has such advisory maxims as ‘ Beat your wife with the butt-end of an axe; if she falls d OWTI ) sniffs, and gasps, sho is deceiving; give her some morel’ Or, ‘A wife is twice kind—on her wedding day and at her funeral.’ Or, ‘Do. what you like with women and cattle 1’ Or, ‘The more you beat your wife tho better will bo your soup.’ “ Children are also thorouhgly beaten. Russians like beating generally, and it is all! tho same whom they beat.” .NO HORROR OF CIVIL WAR.

About the civil war Gorky writes; “ I asked some participants in the civil war whether they did not feel any compunction against killing one another,, and they said: ‘No, we don’t mind; he lias a gun, I have a gun, we are equal. On© kills the other, more room for the rest.’ One replied: ‘War at home is nothing. Against strangers it is difficult; it goes against tho grain. It is much easier to kill Russians. There are so many of ns; we hqvo no order. Burn a village, what is it? It would burn down of itself sooner or later in any case. Besides, that is our own matter, a soft of manoeuvre, as it were, for tho sake of experience. But when I was in Prussia at the beginning of the war, you can’t think how sorry I was for the people therj, their villages, ther towns, their order. What we destroyed, and din’t know, why! Truly I was nearly glad when I got wounded; 1 was so sick of it all.’” “MEN ARB NOW CHEAP.” Gorky relates that a scientific expedition in the Urals was met in 1921 by a peasant with these words: “You are scholars; tell mo what to do. A Bashkir killed my cow; I, of course, killed the Bashkir. But now I have stolen a cow from tli© Bashkir's family; will anything be done to me?” He was naked whether ho did not expect to be punished for killing the man, but ho quietly answered: “Oh, that is nothing; men are now cheap.” The peasantry, Gorky says, has bocomo very ill-disposed toward tlio towns, regarding the townspeople ns parasites living on the labor and products of the country, and producing only unnecessary things with which they impose on the simplicity of the country people. “Sometimes,” he says, “you hear such sentiments as these : ‘ We-must wipe out all the educated people from the face of the earth; then ft will be easier for us fools to live.’ But the Russian peasant,” continues Gorky, “is not malicious; he forgets the evil he himself commits, and at the samo time he does not remember the good anyone else does him.” “ALL THE MORE FOR US."

Then Gorky goes on to deal with the well-fed Russian peasants’ attitude toward those suffering from famine. He quotes a “real Russian peasant” as follows: “Don’t cry in Riazan about the poor harvest at Ps'koff. The evil is great. Many people are dying. Who is dying? Tho weak, tho worn-out. All the hotter for those who remain alive. We don’t notice that the war cleared ranch space, hut now they say millions are dying out. We shall notice that. Think of it! _ Reckon five acres of land to each who dies. What a lot of free land; w r o shall have! Then we’ll show how we can work. All the world will be agape. The peasant can work, only make it worth his while..

There will ho no strikes; the land will give him too much to do for that.” "On the whole,” says Gorky, “tlio well-fed. .and semi-fed peasant regards the famine with composure, just ap of old they regarded the pestilential visitations of Nature.”

Gorky declares that the Russian nation is “a community of eemi-savage people.” Ho then goes on: “ Tho cruel form of tho revolution 1 explain by; tho exceptional brutality of tho Russian people.” Gorky nevertheless looks upon tho future of the Russian people optimistically. "Now,” lie says,, "we may with conviction affirm, that at the price of the intellectual and working classes tho Russian peasantry has come to life. As with the Jews whom Moses led out of Egyptian bondage, tho somi-aavago, foolish, apathetic inhabitants of the Russian villages, including the monsters described, above, will die out, and their place will bn taken by a now race, literate, courageously healthy. I do not think this will be a very gentle or kind people;; but it will bo an active people, suspicious and indifferent, to everything for which it can have no direct need.”