Russia eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 979 pages of information about Russia.

Russia eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 979 pages of information about Russia.

Before passing sentence with regard to these charges we must remember the circumstances in which the Zemstvo was founded and has grown up.  In the early times its members were well-meaning men who had had very little experience in administration or in practical life of any sort except the old routine in which they had previously vegetated.  Most of them had lived enough in the country to know how much the peasants were in need of medical assistance of the most elementary kind, and to this matter they at once turned their attention.  They tried to organise a system of doctors, hospital assistants, and dispensaries by which the peasant would not have to go more than fifteen or twenty miles to get a wound dressed or to have a consultation or to obtain a simple remedy for ordinary ailments.  They felt the necessity, too, of thoroughly reorganising the hospitals and the lunatic asylums, which were in a very unsatisfactory condition.  Plainly enough, there was here good work to be done.  Then there were the higher aims.  In the absence of practical experience there were enthusiasms and theories.  Amongst these was the enthusiasm for education, and the theory that the want of it was the chief reason why Russia had remained so far behind the nations of Western Europe.  Give us education, it was said, and all other good things will be added thereto.  Liberate the Russian people from the bonds of ignorance as you have liberated it from the bonds of serfage, and its wonderful natural capacities will then be able to create everything that is required for its material, intellectual, and moral welfare.

If there was any one among the leaders who took a more sober, prosaic view of things he was denounced as an ignoramus and a reactionary.  Willingly or unwillingly, everybody had to swim with the current.  Roads and bridges were not entirely neglected, but the efforts in that direction were confined to the absolutely indispensable.  For such prosaic concerns there was no enthusiasm, and it was universally recognised that in Russia the construction of good roads, as the term is understood in Western Europe, was far beyond the resources of any Administration.  Of the necessity for such roads few were conscious.  All that was required was to make it possible to get from one place to another in ordinary weather and ordinary circumstances.  If a stream was too deep to be forded, a bridge had to be built or a ferry had to be established; and if the approach to a bridge was so marshy or muddy that vehicles often sank quite up to the axles and had to be dragged out by ropes, with the assistance of the neighbouring villagers, repairs had to be made.  Beyond this the efforts of the Zemstvo rarely went.  Its road-building ambition remained within very modest bounds.

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Russia from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.