German Eyes on Russia.

Hokitika Guardian, 9 March 1922, Page 1

German Eyes on Russia.

(By Andrew Sou tar, author of “The Road to Romance.”) The most intelligent creature in Northern Russia is the pony: the dullest is the peasant. He is too tragic a figure to be described as childlike; his faith is based on fear, not hope. In the winter, when the long Arctic nights seem to be interminable, he has little else to do than crouch beside bis samovar and drink tea until there is none left to drink (I have known one to drink twenty-five glasses of tea at a sitting). There are few villages wherein more than the priest and the headman can read even the simplest of literature.

But in the summer tbene is little or no darkness; the villagers toil in the fields until midnight, and it is then that they are brought into ontact with the imagination of those outside their far-flung boundaries.

For many years the Germans have been seeking to inculcate ; a love of reading among these simple-minded people (the ulterior motive need not be emphasised here). Travellers for German publishing firms cross thle vast distances and sell, on the instalment system, books of the simplest possible character. The headman sits on the edge of a cart and reads aloud to the assembled villagers. Generally it is a fairy story, but his intelligence is extremely limited. Diffident to orthoepy, he frequently spells aloud the words, and his reading is slow and laboured. Just before I left Archangel in 1919 the loyal Russians there were engaged on a scheme whereby advances were to be made to England to take up this matter of educating the Russian peasants. They argued that what the Germans could do the English could do better, if only they were sufficiently interested in the project. I was shown a copy of a German newspaper published in Russian and was assured that copies ale re being freely disseminated. 1 In this particular, copy an appeal was made to the Russians to regard Germany as a friend who wished to forget the battlefield and offer sanctuary and sympathy to those who had lately been their enemies in war. The Allied expedition left Northern Russia towards the end of 1919, so that the scheme being discussed was in all probability dropped, or—handled over to the Germans, whose emissaries were everywhere to be found in that unhappy country. Now that there is a prospect of trade relations being renewed, I wonder if we shall be invited to take over what the Germans began?