Note 1042 — Chapter XIV · —Plains, Steppes And Deserts

This uniformity is advantageous to early development in a small plain, because of the juxtaposition of contrasted environments, but is stultifying to national life in an immense expanse of monotony like that of Russia. Here sameness leaves its stamp on everything. Language is differentiated with only two dialects, that of the Great Russians of the north and the Little Russians of the southern steppes, who were so long exposed to Tartar influences. Most other languages of Europe, though confined to much smaller areas, show far greater diversity.1042 While the Russian of Kazan or Archangel can converse readily with the citizen of Riga or St. Petersburg, Germans from highland Bavaria and Swabia are scarcely intelligible to Prussian and Mecklenberger. And whereas Germany a few decades ago could count over a hundred different kinds of national dress or Tracht, Great Russia alone, with six times the area, had only a single type with perhaps a dozen slight variations. Leroy-Beaulieu comments upon this eternal sameness. "The cities are all alike; so are the peasants, in looks, habits, in mode of life. In no country do people resemble one another more; no other country is so free from political complexity, those oppositions in type and character, which even yet we encounter in Italy and Spain, in France and Germany. The nation is made in the likeness of the country; it shows the same unity, we might say the same monotony, as the plains on which it dwells."