Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/36

 12 secondary part; their action decided nothing. As to the influence of the Finnish element on the evolution in question, if the fact that a conquered people has imposed its ways, its ideas, its customs on its conquerors is not altogether undiscoverable in history, we must at least conclude, in every example known to us, that this triumph was accounted for by some superiority of culture. In this case no such hypothesis can be entertained. The Russian colonists of the thirteenth and fourteenth century were certainly barbarians, but those they had to deal with were more barbarous still, and it was not force of numbers which gave them the victory.

The key to the riddle lies, as it seems to me, in the combined action and mutual reaction of two phenomena to which I have previously referred: the absence of any organic development in the heart of Russian society, and the military form imposed on that society by the circumstances attending the constitution or reconstitution of its new settlement in the north-east. Here Russian colonization found itself, for many years, in a hostile country, hemmed in by foes. Thus the Sovereign became the leader of an army. In this quality he naturally acted as a dissolvent on social elements which possessed no sufficient coherence, and, as they crumbled to atoms, his power fed on their weakness.

The origins of most States have witnessed the reproduction of these phenomena. The curious thing, in the case of this eccentric community, is that after long tarrying on the outer borders of European life, it was suddenly initiated into certain of Europe's noblest conquests, and into the refinements of a culture according but ill with the backwardness of its organization, social and political. Everything in it was done all at once, and the normal course of progress was often reversed. In a certain sense, the civilizing current, coming from without, has favoured the development of absolutism in this country, by endowing the personal power with resources and means of action it could never have drawn from the heart of a barbarous society. Ivan IV. was an 'intellectual,' and as such a far more redoubtable despot than Louis XI., who professed scorn for literature, science, and the arts. He only took men's bodies, but Ivan was to take their souls, and shut them up in that iron cage of his, within which all Russia was to live, bent double, for centuries to come.

It is easy to show how this cage was built. When a sufficient tale of 'comrades,' tempted from neighbouring Princes, had been enticed away, and Moscow was overflowing with men fit for service, the lord of the city grew eager to put down the system of free enlistment which had enabled him to fill up his fighting corps. His neighbours, indeed, had begun the work