Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/88

72 millions of acres of the best agricultural lands were owned by them, as well as thousands upon thousands of the most profitable industrial, banking, and commercial concerns. In some lines they enjoyed complete monopolies. The electrical power and gas companies, supplying Petrograd, Moscow, Kiev, and many other cities, were completely in their hands. Their land holdings, concentrated on the shores of the Black and the Baltic Seas, in Volhynia, Podolia and the Polish provinces, were doubled during the last decade, land being bought at exorbitant prices with money supplied by the Deutsches Bank of Berlin. There is no doubt that it was premeditated colonization, conducted by the German government, and located in the border regions especially important for their strategical value to an invading army. Every fortress in Poland, and as far as the Dwina river, was surrounded by such German farms. All these people were closely banded together, helping one another. They did not mingle with the local Russian population, but constituted an Empire of their own, with exclusive organizations of all kinds, governed only by the political and economic interests of their Vaterland, and an open contempt for the people and the country in which they were living. Practically all of them enjoyed special privileges of one kind or another.

The Hohenzollerns fought democracy at home with better success than any reigning dynasty in Europe. They maintained the divine rights of kings persistently and openly, and sustained and helped the reactionary forces of Russia in their fight against political freedom all through the nineteenth century and up to the outbreak of this war. The Russian people had no more bitter foes anywhere. Wilhelm I. blocked the Russian constitution in 1881; Wilhelm II., in 1905. They were constantly afraid that political freedom in Russia would quickly undermine their own feudal institutions; they carefully watched Russian internal affairs and helped the Russian reactionary forces every time opposition pressed them. This help was of course rendered secretly, but always by orders to the Germans within Russia. It must be borne in mind that no important state institution in Russia was ever free of the Germans, and very often they were at the head, having full knowledge of the innermost state secrets, and acting always in concert with the ultra-reactionaries. The reader will understand why independent Russian public opinion, led by the intelligentsia of the country, came to detest and dread everything German. Backed by the Germans at home and by the Hohenzollerns abroad, Russian absolutism stood like a stone wall against any political reform.

The nobility of Russia, (who, with the bureaucracy and the black clergy, constitute the main support of the reactionary forces), imported German superintendents for their estates, German directors for their industries, German teachers and governesses for their children. While the French language and French manners prevailed in the upper circle, the whole business structure of the country was German. There is no type of man more detested throughout Russia than the German superintendent,