Costume worn by Cossack of the Ukraine
While the configuration of Russia has left her open to every invader, the structure of her soil forbade the development of the invaders into organised nations independent of one another. Instead of being the consequence of slow development by physical causes, this multiplicity of races and tribes is an historical heritage. Without considering the glacial regions of the north, uninhabitable save for hunters and fishers, or the sandy and saline steppes of the southeast, where wander only pastoral nomads, this complexity of races and tribes, far from being a result of adaptation to the soil — far from being in harmony with physical conditions, is directly opposed to them. Far from having a tendency to race diversion, the natural conditions made for unity and harmony. The absence of boundaries made it impossible for the different tribes to isolate themselves.
In the immense quadrilateral comprised between the glacial ocean and the Black Sea, between the Baltic and the Ural, there is not a single mountain — not a single dividing line. Over this even surface the different tribes have been obliged to scatter at random — just as the waters have flowed together, having no ridge to separate them, no banks to contain them. Thus, while custom, religion, and language prevented their mingling, they were yet obliged to live side by side: to invade one another, to mingle one with another without loss of individuality, as the rivers which flow together without confounding their waters. Exhausted in the effort to spread over too large expanses, or broken up into fragments, all these races have the more easily submitted to the domination of one rule; and under this domination they have been the more rapidly unified and mingled. From this fusion, begun centuries ago under the Christian empire and the Muscovite sovereignty, have sprung the Russian people — that mass of about 129,000,000 souls, which, compared with other peoples, resembles the sea devouring its own shores, a sea dotted with islands which it swallows one by one.
Out of the seeming chaos of Russian ethnology emerge definitely three principal elements — Finn, Tatar, and Slav, which last has to-day to a great extent absorbed the other two. Not counting the three millions of Jews in the west, the seven or eight hundred thousand Rumanians in Bessarabia, the eight or nine hundred thousand Germans of the Baltic provinces and the southern colonies; without counting the Kalmucks of the steppe of the lower Volga, the Circassians, the Armenians, the Georgians, and the whole babel of the Caucasus — all the races and tribes which have invaded Russia in the past and all which inhabit her to-day can be traced to one of these three races. As far back as history goes, are to be found upon Russian soil, under one name or another, representatives of all these three groups; and their fusion is not yet so complete that we cannot trace their origin, their distinctive characteristics, or their respective original dominions.
The Finnish tribe seems in olden times to have occupied the most extensive territory in what is to-day called Russia. It is manifestly foreign to Aryan or European stock, whence, with the Celts and Latins, Germans and Slavs, most of the European peoples have sprung. Ethnological classifications usually place the Finns in a more or less comprehensive group known variously as Turanian, Mongolian, and Mongoloid.
The Mongols, properly so called, with the Tatars are usually arranged beside the Finns in the Ural-Altaic group; which, on the other hand, rejects the Chinese and other great nations of oriental Asia. This classification appears to be the most reasonable; but it must be noticed that this Ural- Altaic group is far from presenting the same homogeneousness as the Aryan or Semitic group. The relationship between the numerous branches is far less fundamental than between Latin and German; it is probably far more remote than that between the Brahman or Gheber of India and the Celt of Scotland or Brittany; at bottom it is perhaps less close than between the Indo-European and the Semite.
The Finns
The Finnish race, which outside of Hungary is almost entirely comprised within European Russia, numbers five or six millions, divided into a dozen different tribes. To the Hungarian family in the north belongs the only Finnish people which ever played an important role in Europe, or arrived at a high state of civilisation — the Magyars of Hungary. Inthe northwest we find the Finns properly so called; they are subdivided into two or three tribes, the Suomi, as they designate themselves, constituting the only tribe in the whole empire that possesses a national spirit, a love of country, a history, and a literature; also the only one that has escaped the slow absorption by which their kindred have been swallowed up. They form five-sixths of the population of the grand duchy of Finland — a population almost wholly rural. A Swedish element mingled with German and Russian is predominant in the cities.
St. Petersburg is, truth to tell, built in the midst of Finnish territory; the immediate surroundings only are russified, and that quite recently:
even half a century ago Russian was not understood in the hamlets lying at the very gates of the capital. To this Finnish branch belong the Livs, a tribe nearly extinct, which has given its name at Livonia; also the Lapps—the last, physically the ugliest, morally the least developed, of all the branches of this tribe.
The race is almost infinitely subdivided; its members profess all the religions from Shamanism to Mohammedanism, from Greek orthodoxy to Lutheranism. They are nomadic, like the Lapp; pastoral, like the Bashkir; sedentary and agricultural like the Esth and the Finn. They have adopted the customs and spoken the language of each and all, have been ruled by peoples of different origins, have been russified after having been partially tatarised — all these influences contributing to break up the race into insignificant fragments. As numerous as their Hungarian kindred, the Finns of the Russian Empire are far from being able to claim an equal political significance.
A Tatar (Rassian)
Is it true that the alliance with the Finns is for Russia an irremediable cause of inferiority? It is doubtful. In their isolation and disruption, hampered by the thankless soil upon which they dwell, the Finns have been unable to achieve an original development; as compensation, they have everywhere manifested a singular facility of assimilation with more developed races with which they have come in contact; they allowed themselves easily to be overwhelmed by a civilisation which they themselves were unable to originate: if they possessed no blood-ties with Europe, they placed no obstacles in the way of annexation by her. Their religion is the best proof. The majority have long been Christians; and it is principally Christianity which has led the way to their fusion with the Slavs and their assimilation into civilised Europe. From Hungary to the Baltic and the Volga, they have accepted with docility the three principal historical forms of Christianity; the most modern, Protestantism, has thriven better among the Finnish and Esthonic tribes than among the Celtic, Iberian, and Latin peoples.
If we seek in language an unmistakable sign of race and intelligence it must be admitted that certain Finns — the Suomi of Finland like the Magyars of Hungary — have brought their agglutinated languages to a perfection which for power, harmony, and wealth of expression well bears comparison with our most complex flexional languages. If it is true that the Finns are related to the Mongols, they have certainly the virtues of that race, which holds its own so well in its struggle with Europe: they possess the same stability, patience, and perseverance; hence perhaps the fact that to every country and every state which has felt their influence the Finns have communicated a singular power of resistance, a remarkable vitality.