“Russians… tread in the steps of European elegance, without knowing that refinement of habits has no value except as it announces the existence of something better in the heart of its possessor. These apprentices of fashion, who confound the appearance with the reality, are trained bears, the sight of which inclines me to regret the wild ones: they have not yet become polished men, although they are spoiled savages…
Among this people deprived of leisure and of will, one sees only bodies without souls, and one shudders upon reflecting that for so great a multitude of arms and legs there is only one head…
Russia had herself become a semi-Asiatic country. And having been for centuries oppressed and humiliated by the Tatar hordes, Russian rulers were now inspired by a subconscious desire to compensate for these humiliations by inflicting them on others—at home and abroad. Suffering, after all, did not make people humane. It was a habit of princes and of people to take their revenge upon the innocent. They fancied themselves strong when they created victims. Thus the Russians had now come to occupy with relation to Europe the place the Mongols had once occupied with relation to Russia The role of buffer between Europe and Asia, once filled by Russia herself, had come now to be assumed by the Poles.
The patriarchal tyranny of the Asiatic governments, in contact with the theories of modern philanthropy, the character of the people of the East and West, incompatible by nature, yet united together by coercion in a state of society semi-barbarous, but kept in order by fear, present a spectacle that can be only seen in Russia, and, assuredly, one which no man who thinks, would regret the trouble of going to contemplate.
That nation, essentially aggressive, greedy under the influence of privation, expiates beforehand, by a debasing submission, the design of exercising a tyranny over other nations the glory, the riches, which are the objects of its hopes, console it for the disgrace to which it submits. To purify himself from the foul and impious sacrifice of all public and personal liberty, the slave, sunk to his knees, dreams of world domination.”
