Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/147

 century, Russia completed her great work of expansion by extending out to the far east of Siberia and by conquering Central Asia. Just before the Napoleonic wars there happened that very tragical and very strange and mysterious thing, the partition of Poland, the three partitions of Poland, which placed a very large territory in the west and south-west under the rule of Russia.

During the nineteenth century Russia became a very active participant in western civilisation, and there was an extraordinary development of civilisation in Russia, expressing itself in a very great variety of ways, in literature, in art, in economic and social life and in the development of political forms. This new and energetic and growing Russia, that was for the first time conscious of her great power and her great resources, that threw itself as a people heart and soul into the work of civilisation, had around it a great variety of nationalities, and it is a very remarkable thing that during the nineteenth century in Russia there was not only a very great and very brilliant Russian national movement, but several other national movements were either revived or began their work on the territory of the Russian Empire. You have heard of the magnificent Polish revival that gained its power and its pathos from the intense suffering of the Poles who had lost their inheritance. The nineteenth century saw the beginning and the rich development of the Finnish national movement. In the Caucasus, the ancient civilisations of Armenia and Georgia, which had sunk into decrepitude, which had lost their vigour and their power, were revived very largely because of