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.[1]
- ↑ In the west people continue to talk of the Slav Welfare Association, although less is now heard of it than during and after the Russo-Turkish war. Founded in Moscow by Pogodin in 1858, called at first the Slav Welfare Committee, in 1877 its name was changed to Slav Welfare Association. Branches were formed in St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Odessa, in 1868, 1869, and 1870, respectively. Pogodin's chief object in launching the committee was to use it as a weapon against Roman Catholic propaganda in the Balkans. According to the published accounts for the years 1868 to 1893 the receipts of the association during this period amounted to 2,629,247 roubles. Of this sum, 2,403,379 roubles were spent in the Slav lands of the Balkans for the maintenance of the churches; 25,395 roubles went to the schools; the remainder was devoted to literary and other purposes. Historically the association was analogous to the Gustavus Adolphus Association, and this also was stigmatized by the Catholic clericalists as a body constituted solely for purposes of political agitation. (Between 1832,
