Nelson Evening Mail. MONDAY, MARCH 4, 1918. STRUCTURE OF RUSSIA.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LII, Issue 54, 4 March 1918, Page 4

Nelson Evening Mail. MONDAY, MARCH 4, 1918. STRUCTURE OF RUSSIA.

MUCH, of the difficulty which Western onlookers experience in their efforts to understand the course of events in Russia is probably due to the general unfamiliarity of Western peoples with Russian history, and the composite nature of the empire over which Tsar Nicholas 11. ruled. Some of the forces which have been at work since the revolution of last year to produce the present state of hopeless chaos, now : being so ruthlessly exploited by Germany for her own ends can he more or less clearly appreciated- by means of analogies drawn from episodes in the history of Western - Europe—from the mediaeval "jacqueriesi," (peasant risings) in England and France, for example, the French of 1789 and 1848, or the tragedy' of., the Commune in 1870. Those are mainly social forces affecting tne (relations of different classes within the community; but the other forces:—more potent still perhaps in the process of disintegration—derive their strength from the internal composition of the empire which entered three years and a. half ago into the great world war. They are the outcome pf the conditions under which the empire grew to its vast dimensions, of the historical experiences of the various nationalities it absorbed, and of the hetei-ogeneous character of its large population, which ranged. in the scale of civilisation from a primitive savagery at least as low as that of our own aborigines at the time when the white man first came to this continent to a culture as high as that ot the most enlightened classes in the advanced na tions of the West. We give here a very concise and explanation written for the Argus. The most of the characteristics which differentiated the Russian Empire Irom the other Stages of Europe arid from the France of the revolutionary epoch, it commences, was its enormous bulk and large but imperfectly amalgamated population. It covered about one-sixth of the habitable globe, its European territories alone being seven-tenths the size of Australia, and carrying a population of nearly 140,000,000. Asiatic Russia was three times the area of European ißussia, and® the difficulties of administration there were accentuated by the comparatively sparse and diverse character of its population of some 34,000,000 souls. The mere extent of the empire and number of people in it would have been enough to multiply greatly the disturbing and disruptive effects of a revolution which overthrew the old central authority of Tsar and bureaucracy, and sought to establish in its place a complete system of popular self-government. In the course of such an upheaval ail the subversive forces which evolved - Jacobinism, Louis Blanc socialistic experiments, and rampant Communism in the three successive Frerich revolutions, as well as the agrarian dreams of the older "jacqueries," were bound to reappear. To them were added, in the case, of Russia, further subversive forces of nationality, for the empire, was comparatively new in its existing fo>m, its constituent parts had not had time to be welded together, and unfortunately the central government had been clumsy, as well as oppressive, in its treatment of_ some of the different national elements in the mixed empire. The Government's < methods of consolidation had been borrowed from Prussia, ancl as such were alien to the genius of the Slav majority of the empire. They were, moreover, singularly lacking in the scientific effi-. ciency of tßeir Russian models. Let us glance first at European Russia, which was by far the more important "half of the Empire, and the "half" upon which in the main would depend the course of the revolution. An analysis of its population would give four main" divisions :—(1) A central mass of Russian race, divided into three sub-nat-ionalities, between two ot which there had been but slight distinctions, and practically no serious causes of dissension, but the third of them being for historical, linguistic, and .administrative reasons more or less in a state of smouldering discontent; (2) a western fringe of non-Russian, and' in some instances non-Slav nationalities, _with separatist tendencies born of their early history but varying in strength according to the treatment doled out 'to them' by the generally inept official bureaucracy which had its headquai'ters at Petrograd and was inspired by German ideals of unification,- (3) a comparatively negligible factor in the political uation, the uncivilised TJgro-Finnifh tribes of the far norfh-east, with the few remnants of the same stock scattered about the northern regions of the central area occupied by the Russians

proper; (4) nomadic Turkish-speaking communities near the Urals and along the border of the steppes the Moslem Tartars of the Lower Volga Khanates, conquered in the 16th century, consisting of peasants and traders who had drawn such culture as they had from Persia and the. old Bagdad Caliphate, and the civilised agricultural Tartars of the Crimean peninsula, an ethnographical and Moslem relic of that old Turkish dominion on the northern shores of the Black Sea, the sovereignty of which Russia wrested from the Porte towards the end of the 18th century. The Turkish and Tartar Moslem elements grouped together in the fourth subdivision of the above analysis are neither numerous nor politically influential, being mainly quite content with Russian rule, but in the event of a break-up of the Russia that once constituted the empire of the Czars there is a possibility that they might become infected by Ottoman propaganda with panislamic ideas. They are however, in the immediate presence of little, if any more, account in the political situation than the Ugro-Finnfsh tribes, though they must, of course, help to increase the general disintegration resulting from the loosening of the bonds of union that bound the empire together under the autocratic regime.