Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/82

 it is well known, including the Chancellor Rumyantsev and the famous soldier Kutuzov, then considered the Emperor's decision a mistake. However that may have been, the Napoleonic period brought forward for solution the same problems with which Russia has now once more a full century later been brought face to face, through the combined German-Austrian and Turkish attack on us and on our Allies, and for which a solution is now demanded with all the inexorable force of historical necessity. Germany allied with Turkey decided to throw Russia back from the path we have been treading for the past two centuries, in the course of which we have settled and called into life a whole enormous region. At this solemn moment, so critical for Russia, the position of Russia in the struggle which foes have forced upon her is based upon a living historical right, that is to say, on an historical right which is combined with real strength and living necessity. The historical right in question is the great civilizing work, chiefly economic in character, which has been accomplished by the Russian people on the shores of the Black Sea. The real strength is embodied in the enormous Russian population which lives in that region, and which desires, in order to be able to breathe freely, to receive into its own hands the keys of its own house. This Russian population of Russian lands, which economically gravitates towards the Black Sea, is probably at least twice as great as the combined population of Asiatic and of European Turkey. Not in vain did the fathers and forefathers of that population create out of "the Siberia of the Greeks and the Romans" a new Temple of Ceres: their work it was that won for them the right to breathe freely in their own home.