Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/79

 Nature have yielded almost nothing in the shape of economic culture.

It is a remarkable fact that apparently no one has described with such power and insight the great cultural work which has been done here by the Russian people and the Russian State, as one German writer, Kohl, a traveller and geographer of some merit. Kohl (1808–1878) travelled in the Ukraina and in New Russia in the thirties and forties of last century and afterwards related the results of his personal investigations. He tells how in the space of 60 years Russia changed a land of Scythians and Cimmerians—"the Siberia of the Greeks and Romans," to use his apt expression—into a temple of Ceres, "denomadised" and civilised it.