"Siberia," he said, "was an even more isolated region in those days than it is to-day. It was more truly Siberian, and the bureaucratic influence of St Petersburg was less, though," he added, "it must be confessed, we suffered more in those days under irresponsible Government officials who enjoyed almost arbitrary powers. Now, however, the dead hand of St Petersburg is on Siberia. It is becoming Russified and absorbed into the bureaucratic vortex; but how can St Petersburg officials know our wants here? Siberia is for the Siberians." As I listened I seemed to hear echoes of similar denunciations by Canadian patriots at Ottawa concerning the actions of Downing Street politicians in London.
He seemed despondent about Russia's future, feared the corrupting influence of bureaucratic government, and only smiled when I suggested that possibly they were merely passing through the intermediate phase which might bring better conditions in the end. "If it has done nothing else," I suggested, "autocracy has surely held Russia together, while its evils are diminishing with the march of progress and reform." But he did not reply. Mankind, it seems, is ever ready to see the dark side of a change, and I have often noticed amongst Russians generally, something more than an innate conservatism. A passive apathetic fatalism, characteristic of Eastern minds, dominates them, and, as it were, overshadows their public spirit. And small wonder, when one thinks of the monotony of the country, with its endless plains and melancholy groves of stunted birch, and of the heavy hand of bureaucracy which so effectually stultifies individual effort. Hour after hour, mile after mile, each as the
