THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1908. BACKWARD RUSSIA.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9069, 21 April 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1908. BACKWARD RUSSIA.

People are often at a loss- to> explain why Russian institutions are so far behind those of any other European State. The question is answer-, ed by history. In the.- 9th centmry A.D. the Northmen,, or Normans, spread over Russia, and intermingled. with the Slav population, and there, as elsewhere, infused the element of culture. For a while Russia was on a level with the rest of Europe, since the Normans maintained commeictal and intellectual relations with, the whole of the Western world. But in 1235 A.D. a Mongol horde swept over the land, and corrupted the whole of their social life. The result was to swamp the nascent Norman, and to plunge the country into utter barbarism. Thus a gulf was formed between the Russian and the Teutonic worlds .which practically no one attempted to bridge before the time of Peter the Great (1672). But the good intentions of this monarch were largely discounted by his precipitancy. He forced his subjects to swallow Europeanism, and sought to introduce civilisation like an exotic plant without first preparing the soil. With the masses his measures failed, but he left behind an intellectual coterie, the so-called "intellegenzia," which stands for Russian culture today. The masses are still held, though not without occasional bloody

protests, in the grip of a Government which, "with its Mongolian / traditions of autocracy, threw the' great nation into complete indifference and anarchy, into a state of submissive contentment, when, like a chi'd, it kisses the rod that punishes it, and is lulled to sleep by the whisperings of a mystic superstition and the vapours of vodka."