Russians

The Russians occupy a pivotal place in the book’s account of the First Men: their collective, intuitive outlook seems capable of joining Eastern mysticism to Western critical intelligence, a synthesis that might have renewed a civilization in decline. After the Bolshevik revolution, this possibility took institutional form in a culture that weakened class hierarchy and the prestige of wealth. But isolation, doctrinal rigidity, and economic dependence made the promise unstable. The Russo-German War and its aftermath dealt a final blow to the Russian cultural enterprise, leaving Europe more unified in hostility than in shared understanding.

A Distinctive Cultural Temperament

The narrator distinguishes Russian thought from the individual-centered outlook attributed to Americans and Western Europeans. In the West, the person is treated as the primary object of interest, and social loyalty can seem like a sacrifice made by an individual of exceptional ability. Russians, by contrast, are described as more spontaneously interested in groups and more ready to revere what is regarded as greater than the individual: society, God, or the forces of nature. The account allows two possible sources for this disposition—an innate gift or the long effects of political tyranny, religious devotion, and social revolution—without settling the question.

This collective orientation is paired with an unusual capacity for detachment. Western Europe might reach a sense of humanity’s smallness in the cosmos through a difficult intellectual argument; the Russian mind, whether orthodox, Tolstoyan, or fanatically materialist, is said to apprehend something similar intuitively and even to rejoice in it. Yet intuition without intellectual discipline can become confused and erratic. Its consequences, the narrator argues, are more likely to be explosive than directive. The Russians’ strength therefore carries a corresponding vulnerability: their perception of a reality beyond private interests needs critical thought to give it durable form.

The New Russia and Its Promise

After the Bolshevik revolution, the old regime gave way to a proletarian government that the account describes as an oligarchy, and at times bloody and fanatical, but which abolished the old class tyranny and encouraged even humble citizens to take pride in their participation in the community. Political change reinforced an existing Russian indifference to material possessions. The resulting freedom from the snobbery of wealth distinguished the country from the West: attention that elsewhere went to accumulating or displaying money could instead turn toward spontaneous enjoyment or cultural activity.

Among Russian townspeople, less constrained by tradition than other urban populations, the spirit of the First Men appeared to be adjusting sincerely to a changing world. Elements of this new life spread from the towns toward the peasants, while the growing population of Asia looked to Russia not only for machinery but for ideas. The narrator consequently presents Russia as a possible source of renewal—one that might turn the widespread autumn of the race into a new spring—rather than merely as another state competing for power.

Isolation, Dogma, and Cultural Exchange

The promise was compromised when the West boycotted New Russia. In response, the isolated state passed through a phase of self-conscious extravagance: communism and naïve materialism hardened into doctrines of a new crusading atheist church. Criticism was suppressed, and Russians were taught to see themselves as humanity’s saviors. The irony is central to the account: a culture with a native capacity for detachment became less able to examine its own claims.

Economic isolation eventually hampered the Bolshevik state, and intercourse with the West gradually resumed. Cultural exchange grew alongside it. Russian mystical intuition began to take clearer shape through contact with Western intellectual detachment; iconoclasm was brought under discipline, and sensory life and impulse were tempered by a critical movement. The resulting synthesis was not simply a victory of Western reason over Eastern feeling. Through contact with peasant culture and the peoples of Asia, the new Russia also began to hold together the disillusion associated with France and England and the ecstasy associated with the East. The narrator treats this integration as mankind’s most urgent spiritual need, and suggests that Russian thinkers might have completed it if they had remained longer under the influence of the West.

Economic Dependence and the Road to War

That development did not last. In Russia, German-derived doctrines of communism and materialism survived without adequate criticism even as communist practice was gradually undermined by Western finance, especially American finance. Russian industrial organization had proved impossible without American capital. Across a vast territory—from the Baltic to the Himalayas and the Behring Straits—pasture, timber, machine-cultivated grain, oilfields, and industrial towns increasingly depended on American money and organization. The official materialism, meanwhile, remained alien to the Russian mind. The result was a widening split between theory and practice, and a culture the narrator describes as having become insincere.

This contradiction helped create hostility toward Germany, although the deeper economic influence on Russia came from America. Germany became, in the Russian mind, the symbol of capitalism, and self-righteous hatred of Germany served as compensation for Russia’s own betrayal of the communist ideal. Americans encouraged the antagonism while securing their influence over Russian finance. They were, the narrator emphasizes, in reality more alien to the Russian spirit than Germany was. German resentment over American success in Russia, particularly in Asiatic oil, added an economic pressure to a conflict already distorted by ideology and sentiment.

The European Confederacy formed amid distrust of human nature and fear of American power, but Russia stood outside it. Although the Confederacy pooled the armaments and sovereignty of the other European nations, its apparent unity remained insecure. The Russo-German War eventually consolidated European sentiment, but not through the completion of Russia’s cultural rapprochement with the West. The war instead left Europe more united by hatred of America and helped drive Russian culture further from its earlier promise.

A Promise Lost in the First Men’s Decline

The war’s consequences extended beyond political alignments. Poison spread across the continent, leaving part of the rising generation sickly for life; during the thirty years before the Euro-American War, Europe carried an exceptional burden of invalids, and first-class intelligence became rarer and more concentrated on practical reconstruction. The narrator also identifies the destruction of Russia’s effort to harmonize Western intellectualism and Eastern mysticism as an even greater loss for the human race.

This collapse belongs to the book’s larger account of the First Men, whose growing powers and rapidly changing social world outstripped their ability to govern themselves. The narrator describes the European War as a conflict in which peoples could display both brutality and exceptional generosity, while failing to sustain the impulse toward a united world. Later, the fear that individuals might succumb to an epidemic of patriotism made peace itself feel precarious. Russia’s importance lies in the alternative its cultural development briefly suggested: a collective outlook capable of joining cosmic humility to disciplined understanding. Its failure is not presented as inevitable from the start, but as the result of an unrealized synthesis undone by dogma, dependency, and war.