be presented as a phase of development through which a Society, a State,
must pass on the way to the full consciousness of its destiny. It lies
outside the stream of progress. This despotism has been utterly
un-European. Neither has it been Asiatic in its nature. Oriental
despotisms belong to the history of mankind; they have left their trace
on our minds and our imagination by their splendour, by their culture, by
their art, by the exploits of great conquerors. The record of their rise
and decay has an intellectual value; they are in their origins and their
course the manifestations of human needs, the instruments of racial
temperament, of catastrophic force, of faith and fanaticism. The Russian
autocracy as we see it now is a thing apart. It is impossible to assign
to it any rational origin in the vices, the misfortunes, the necessities,
or the aspirations of mankind. That despotism has neither an European
nor an Oriental parentage; more, it seems to have no root either in the
institutions or the follies of this earth. What strikes one with a sort
of awe is just this something inhuman in its character. It is like a
visitation, like a curse from Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon
the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of
two continents: a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East or
of the West.

This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering from an
awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be traced either to
her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a nation so difficult to
understand by Europe. From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence
as a State she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism; she found
nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning
and end of her organisation. Hence arises her impenetrability to
whatever is true in Western thought. Western thought, when it crosses
her frontier, falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a