Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/340

314 inhabitants of Russia (European and Asiatic) comprise at least forty-eight distinct nationalities. Many of the inhabitants are not even of Indo-European origin, but have sprung from Finnish, Turkish, Mongolian, and other nonaryan stocks. Some of these peoples are very numerous, the Finns, for instance, the Tatars, the Kirghiz, and above all the Jews. If we leave out of account fragmentary Bulgarian colonies, the only non-russian Slav people under Russian rule are the Poles, and the relationship of the Russians to the Poles is sui generis. The Little Russians are not yet recognised as a separate folk, and consequently as far as Russia herself is concerned there is no ground for panslavism. The Russians have religious ties of old standing with some of the southern Slavs, but the Russian boundary does not march with that of the southern Slavs. Speaking generally we may say that the frontier between Russia proper and the Slav dependency of Russia, the frontier between Poland and Little Russia, does not possess the political significance of the other Russian lines of demarcation, those which separate European Russia from the Germans, the Swedes, and the Rumanians, and those which separate Russia in Asia from the Chinese, the Japanese, the Turks, and the Persians. If, under Nicholas II panasiatism has been officially proclaimed as the program of Russia, we cannot but recognise that this program is more in conformity with actual relationships than is the panslavist program.

A panslavist program does indeed exist, but is taken seriously by no more than a few Russians. This is proved by the fiasco of the so-called neoslavism, the name coined within the last few years for a réchauffé of panslavist slavophilism—a dish that has speedily cooled.