There is no greater delusion than the supposition that we have to deal with the Russians as a warlike people. Why, the army is so unpopular,* that when the Russian peasant* is torn from his village by the conscription,* there is a procession in the village, of which the priest is the leader, which resembles a funeral ceremony.
When I was at St Petersburg,* an English merchant described to me a striking scene, in order to illustrate the repugnance of the Russian people to enter the army. He said that he entered a street in St Petersburg where a surgeon was examining the conscripts, in order to ascertain whether or not they were fit for the service. Some conscripts had entered a house. They were there denuded and examined, in order that it might be seen whether they were fit to be admitted into the army. One of the men was declared to be unfit for the service; and so great was his excitement, that in the frenzy of his delirium and joy, he actually rushed from the house into the street in the state of nudity in which he had been examined. Well, now, I say the character of the Russian people is a gentle character.
* At the time, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia was pouring money into military interventions in Europe: a recent example was his campaign to help Austria put an end to Hungary’s shortlived independence. Cobden was therefore glad that the Russian public and most of the ruling class wanted no part of it. In 1853, however, three years after he gave this speech, The Crimean War broke out, and the West brought war to Russian soil — with perplexing self-contradiction, the Foreign Office thought these warlike hordes would offer little resistance, and they were very much surprised by the tenacity of the Russian fighters. Cobden, who knew something of where the Crimea figured in Russian history, was not. “Nobody who knows the history of Russia” he said in 1854 “can think for a moment that you are going permanently to occupy any portion of her territory, and, at that same time, to be at peace with that empire.”
* This was in 1850, when Russia was a still a feudal society and peasants’ legal rights were limited. Following the torrid Crimean War of 1853-1856, Nicholas I’s successor Emperor Alexander II declared the Emancipation of the Serfs on March 30th, 1856, believing that the war had shown that free men fight for their country better than slaves. Unlike Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of American slaves on January 1st, 1863, the Russian edict went through without precipitating civil war.
* In contrast to most large European states, Britain technically had no conscription prior to the Great War of 1914-1918, though press-gangs ‘crimped’ (forcibly recruited) for the Navy without restraint until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, almost strangling the industrial revolution in its cradle: see Press Pass. Regulations introduced by the Continuous Service Act of 1853 effectively put Royal Navy press-gangs out of business, but the practice of kidnapping vulnerable citizens for merchant shipping in the Far East continued for several years afterwards, especially in London, Liverpool and ports on the west coast of the USA, giving rise to the verb ‘shanghai’, meaning ‘force someone to do something or go somewhere’.
* St Petersburg, in the far northwest, was at this time the capital of the Russian Empire.