NEW VIEW OF RUSSIANS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18267, 7 December 1922, Page 7

NEW VIEW OF RUSSIANS.

_i, — n MAXIM GORKY'S INDICTMENT. I

BRUTALITY AND SELFISHNESS. J Maxim Gorki has written a new book, g which is about to appear in Russian and e German, states the Rica correspondent of ! e the London Times. 'I he most important x subject of this new work is the Russian ■* peasant, whom Gorki now paints in the j darkest colours as a monster of priralj tively cunning brutality. A few extracts will show how far Gorki's views have changed during the past few years on the people whom he really ought to know and . understand. " I think that just as a sense of humour ! ■ is the Englishman's exceptional pecu- : : liarity, the Russian people'* outstanding '' quality is a sense of special cruelty," he says. " There is a diabolical sharpness , about Russian cruelty, something exquisite and refined. I believe that women are nowhere else so pitilessly and' terribly beaten as in the Russian village, and probably no other country has such advisory maxims as : ' Beat your wife with the butt-end of an axe; if she fails down, sniffs, and gasps, she is deceiving : give her some more!' Or, ' A wife is twice kind : on her wedding day and at her funeral.' Or, 'Do what you like with | women and cattle !' Or, ' The more you beat your wife, the better will be your soup.' " " Children are also thoroughly beaten. Russians like beating generally, and it is all the same whom they beat." No Horror of Civil War. About the civil war Gorki 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 it; he has a gun, I have a gun, we are equal. One kills the other, more room for the rest.' One replied:—'War at homo is nothing. Against strangers it is djfficujt; it goes against the grain. It is much easier to kill Russians. There are so many of us; we have no order. Burn a village, ' what is it ? It would bum down of itself sooner or later in any case. Besides, that is our own matter, a sort of manoeuvre, as it were, for the sake of experience. I But when I was in Prussia at the he- J ginning of the war, you can't think how sorry I was for the people there, their villages, their towns, their order. What wo destroyed, and didn't know why! Truly I was nearly glad when I got wounded; I was so sick of it all.' " "Men Are Now Cheap." Gorki relates that a scientific expedition in the Urals was met in 1921 by a ' peasant with these words:—" You are scholars; tell me what to do. A Bash- ! kir killed my cow; I, of course, killed the Bashkir. But now I have stolen a cow I from the Bashkir's family; will anything be done to me?" He was asked whether he did not expect to be punished for kill- . ing the man, but he quietly answered, I i " Oh, that is nothing: men are now cheap." j The peasantry, Gorki says, has become very ill-disposed toward the towns, regarding the townspeople as parasites, liv- [ nig on the labour and products of the . country, and producing only unnecessary things with which they inposo on the aim- , plicity of the country people. " Some- j ' times," he says, "you hear such sentiments as these :—' We must wipe out all the educated people from the face of the earth; then it will be easier for us fools ' to live.' " "But the Russiant peasant,", continues Gorki, "is not malicious; he forgets the evil ho himself commits, and at ' the same time he does not remember the ' good anyone else does him." "All the More For Us." Then Gorki goes on to deal with the r well-fed Russian peasant's attitude toward r I those suffering from ffmune. He quotes " a "real Russian peasant " as follows:— J " Don't cry in Riazan about the poor har--1 vest at PEkoff. The evil is great. Many people are dying. Who is dying? The * weak, the worn-out. All the better for 1 those who remain alive. We don't notice !i that the war cleared much space, but now' 1 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 we shall have! Then i we'll show how we can work. All the e- world will be The peasant can '■• work, only make it worth his while, o There will be no strikes; the land will ? give him too much to do for that." "On e the whole," says Gorki, " the well-fed a and semi-fed peasant regards the famine a with composure, just as of old they rei- garded the pestilential visitations of nad ture." e Gorki declares that the Russian nation i- is " a community of semi-savage people." He then goes on :—" The cruel form of the revolution I explain by the excepj tional brutality of the Russian people. Goraki nevertheless looks upon the future '• of the Russian people optimistically. I- " Now," he says, "we may with ««• *• viction affirm that at the price of the £ •• tellectual and working classes, the B» n sian peasantry has come to life. ~» ™T the Jews whom Moses led out of Egyp- * t, an bondage, the semisavwe, .foolish, apae tfetic inhabftent* of the Russ an /#&£> *> tneuciiiu" monitors described 'ibove, ! Snffikt h6 a ndK"pIS will be taken t K Z «. new race, literate, intelligent,, courby ™,J?v healthy Ido not think this will ffa very gentle or kind people; but it will bT2» Active ' ~ Sdlffewnt to everything for wiich it cot , have no direct need. • »