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Rh Kazan to Czaritzin, is a remarkable moat not only to Russia but to Europe. The west shore, known as the Hill Bank, in opposition to the Meadow Bank on the other side, is a hill face, some hundred feet high, which overlooks the river for 700 miles; it is the brink of the inhabited plain, here a little raised above the sea level. Stand on the top of this brink, looking eastward across the broad river below you, and you will realise that you have populous Europe at your back, and in front, where the low meadows fade away into the half sterility of the drier steppes eastward, you have the beginning of the vacancies of Central Asia.

A striking practical commentary on these great physical and social contrasts has been supplied in the last few months by the Civil War in Russia. In all North Russia there are but two or three towns larger than a village, and, since the Bolsheviks are based on the town populations, Bolshevism has had little hold north of the Volga. Moreover the sparse rural settlements, chiefly of foresters, have, in their simple, colonial conditions, no grounds for agrarian political feeling, and there is thus no peasant sympathy for the Bolsheviks. As a result, the railway from Archangel to Vologoda on the Upper Dwina