In spite of all the reproaches hurled at the church, it must be admitted that it had all the education in its hands. In Russia, however, the case was different. From the very beginning, ever since Christianity was introduced, ever since Vladimir had accepted baptism in Kiev, the Russian people as Christians were divided into two distinct groups. Whilst the enthusiastic adherents of the new religion endeavoured to introduce the piety of Byzantium, the mass of the people, although nominally Christian, remained heathen in reality and has remained so up to the present. This was due to two reasons. Vladimir had accepted the Greek form of worship with its asceticism. Asceticism and monasticism, a retirement from the world, became the Christian ideal. This ideal was too high, too unattainable and too foreign for reality and for daily life, whilst on the other hand the perfect Christians considered the life of the world as sinful and dangerous. Thus the clergy sought retirement in cloisters and monasteries and the mass, whilst accepting the ceremonies of Byzantium, had learned nothing of its eithical teachings. The gulf thus arising between clergy and people was also due to another reason. The first members of the clergy were Greeks, monks coming from Byzantium, who spoke a language incomprehensible to the Slavs. The Russian bishops, who gradually took the place of the learned eastern monks, and who could communicate with the people, were still too ignorant themselves. And then suddenly the Tatar invasion came. Connection with Byzantium was cut off. The influx of the Greek clergy and Byzantine learning had ceased too early, before the 'Russians had had time to acquire some amount of knowledge to replace it. Thus whilst the intellectual development of the mass took place very slowly, the intellectual level of the clergy sank rapidly. The consequence was that when the Russian clergy met the people they were both on the same intellectual level, the priests had nothing to teach and had no prestige. This also explains, psychologically, the origin of so many religious sects in Russia. Having no respect and no admiration for the ignorant priest, addicted to drink, the peasant goes his own way when he suddenly feels a craving for religious ideals.
Thus the Mongolian invasion had cut off Russia from Europe and whilst the latter was passing through the phases of transition, approaching slowly but gradually the times of light and learning, Russia stood still. The Europe of the Renaissance was not a creatio ex nihilo. It was the result of a slow process of development. The barbarians who had built their realms on the ruins of the ancient worlds, Hellas and Rome, had taken over the classical heritage left to them after the disappearance of the Roman Empire. Rude and barbarous, however, these new conquerors had no understanding for the value of the heritage and destroyed many of its richest treasures. Worlds of intellectual culture were lost. But slowly the age of understanding dawned and the former barbarians brought forth many of the treasures which they had relegated to the lumber-room, added many of their own, and blended them into one whole. The result was the Grseco-Roman, Romance, and Teutonic civilisation. Crusades, Arabian civilisation passing by way of Spain, scholasticism, Reformation, Renaissance, revival of learning, the discovery of new worlds, the spread of commerce, scientific inventions and discoveries, stimulating the desire for learning and creating impulses in every new direction—all these new and stirring events were so many phases through which European society and European life passed before they reached the state of modern development. Many were the streams and cross-currents that traversed Europe separately before they united and continued the more rapid advance of a new life and civilisation. All this was lacking in Russia. Russia missed during its Mongolian period, the time of general transition. None of the forces which, although invisibly, were steadily furrowing the European soil and preparing it for the influx of fresh air and new light, were at work in Russia. The phase of transition had not yet commenced. That period of constant change, of mingled decadence and spiritual growth, that ceaseless blending of the old and the new, unnoticed at the time but clearly distinguished from the distance of later ages, was lacking in Russia. There was no pope, no powerful church, and consequently no Reformation and no spirit of individualism — no feudalism, no knights, no Crusades and no acquaintance with foreign lands, no spread of commerce, and no widening of the mental horizon of the people. There were no learned monks copying Greek and Latin manuscripts, paving the way for scholasticism and modern thought. There was even no language in which the treasures of the ancient world could be communicated to the Slavs. Few people could write, few even count properly.
There were no schools and the attempts to establish some such institutions during the seventeenth century failed. A school was founded at Moscow under Alexis, but here only a foreign language or two were taught. Its aim was to train translators for the government. There was no art, nor technical science. There were no medical men. The two or three foreign practitioners were considered as sorcerers.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century therefore Russia had absolutely no culture of her own. All that the Normans had established had been wiped out. The Byzantine influence had no effect. And when after a struggle extending over three centuries the czardom of Moscow had thrown off the shackles of the Great Khan, liberated itself from thraldom and laid the foundations of the great empire of Russia, it had only established, on the ruins of the old Mongolian, a new state which was Mongolian and Tatar in its essence and spirit, in its customs and institutions, and had little or nothing in common with the rest of Europe.
Moscow was the inheritor of Mongolism, the Czar was spiritually, and even physically, a descendant of Mongol princes. Ivan IV married a Mongolian princess, his son married a sister of the Mongol Godunov. They had actually taken over the inheritance of the khans of Kiptchak. It was in this barren soil that Peter sowed the seed of European culture. What happened?
Peter was undoubtedly great and deserves this title. He was one of the great makers of history. But though great in his plans, great in what he wished to accomplish, he was not great in what he really attained. He only saw the superficiality of European civilisation. He introduced it like some foreign product, like some fashionable article, like some exotic plant, without first asking whether the national soil was propitious for its cultivation. He, at the utmost, created a hot-house atmosphere where his plants could vegetate, and they remained what they originally were: exotic. He failed to see that civilisation is the product of a long process of evolution, the natural product of the social and national conditions, drawing its life and sap from the inner forces of the people. Instead of making use of these inner forces of his people, he endeavoured to introduce civilisation by his power of will. He only had an eye for the effects but not for the causes that were working as the hidden springs.
In France, in England, in Germany, in all western Europe, civilisation, the moral and intellectual evolution, was a natural phenomenon, the effect of previous causes. In Russia, civilisation was the outcome of a sudden revolution, the slavish, reluctant and half-hearted compliance with the commands of an individual will. The former was natural, the latter artificial. An evolution is a slow change, an unconscious and imperceptible process, finding a state prepared for innovation, a soil, furrowed and fertile, ready to receive the seed and to bring forth fruit. A revolution, on the other hand, is a radical, sudden change which seldom succeeds and, in most cases, calls forth reactions. In Western Europe there was, as we have see above, a time of transition from the barbarous to the civilised state. The morning of the Renaissance had dawned upon mediaeval Europe and tinted with orient colours the sombre sky. The first rays appeared on the horizon of the Italian poets, dissipating the darkness here and there. The sun gradually rose higher and higher, penetrated the houses of the people and woke them (who had been lulled to sleep by the mysterious whisperings of superstition) from their prolonged slumbers. They awoke, opened their windows and allowed the light of the morning to penetrate into their dark abodes. Not so in Russia. There the people were suddenly awakened, dragged out from the utter darkness, without any transition, into the broad midday of an artificial light. They opened their eyes, but the light was too strong, too glaring; so they shut them again. Peter wanted to jump over three centuries and catch up with Europe. He established a fleet without Russian sailors, an administration with foreign administrators, an academy of science in a land without elementary schools. He began a race with Europe but his people could not follow him. He borrowed everything from Europe and instead of giving his people a chance to develop naturally and freely, he crushed the spirit of independence and introduced a knout civilisation. Everything had to be done by order. He forced his people to swallow Europeanism. The bulk of his subjects, however, could not digest it. The consequence was that they could not follow the few, and remained far behind them. The gulf therefore between the few, who form the present intelligentia, and the great mass — a gulf which was but narrow towards the end of the sixteenth century when by way of Poland and Livonia a glimpse of the western sun penetrated into Russia — suddenly widened considerably. Thus the origin of the striking phenomenon which Russia offers in her intellectually high developed intelligentia and her uneducated, ignorant masses is to be sought in Russia's past, in the absence of a period of transition, and in Peter's misunderstanding the process of European civilisation, in his admiration for the effects, but utter ignorance of the causes that brought about these effects.