Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/83



In my first lecture I endeavoured to give an historical account of the colonial character of Russian economic life. I shall now try to sketch, as before, in the most general outlines, what this colonial character means, when considered, not historically, but from the point of view of the present day. Every State of any size represents a considerable variety of natural and historical conditions. This variety it is which determines the division of a nation into different economic regions. The extent, however, to which such individual regions differ from each other is different in different countries. It perhaps reaches its maximum precisely in the case of Russia. Here the population, while under one government, and while the predominance of the Russian element, in point both of numbers and of culture, is overwhelming—and I am leaving out of account such regions as Poland and, Finland which constitute entirely separate entities from the cultural point of view —the population, I say, lives on an enormous