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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2025
War may cause Russia to lose her best men in enormous numbers - already she has lost millions in soldiers and citizens – and the eugenic welfare of the empire, as of other empires, may suffer. Russia may lose ready-at-hand financial resources; Russia may lose a strip of territory which is enormous compared to Massachusetts but inconsiderable when compared to the area of which it was a part. Russia has lost much and may lose more.
But her gains will be great indeed. She will gain new national unity and new national ideals and new national associations with the outer world. In these Russia will have the opportunity to draw more benefit from the war than all her enemies and all her allies combined.
When regiment after regiment comes marching across the Field of Mars in the Russian capital, splendid men moving forward out of the winter mists with the swing, swing, swing of the Russian marching step, it is tempting to one's heart to beat in time with that swing, and for the breath of one's body to measure itself by the rhythm of the numbers. So the rhythm of the marching step and the unison of the singing express, I think, something of the new Russian spirit of national unity. When the Russian standing army was still in existence all this might have served to express the Army. But these men are reservists and men newly drafted; they express Russia.
These men could not express Russia if it were not for the war. They would not have been able to know so strong a national spirit. A year ago they could have expressed a certain Slav sense common to all, and each could have expressed the village, the canton, or the district from which he came; the national spirit, a year ago, had no such existence as it has today because a national spirit is spread very thinly in an empire where three-fourths of the people live peaceably and isolated in the country, where there are more than thirty acres for every living being, where the miles of railroad for each acre are fewer than in any other sovereignty, and where three persons out of every five cannot read or write. It is the war which knits the empire together.
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