Ever since the ancient Scythians, our forebears have yielded more reluctantly than any other people to classical civilisation, and if they distinguished themselves by anything, in the words of Herodotus, it was only by a bent for drunkenness and interneci

Ever since the ancient Scythians, our forebears have yielded more reluctantly than any other people to classical civilisation, and if they distinguished themselves by anything, in the words of Herodotus, it was only by a bent for drunkenness and internecine strife. The father of history says plainly that the Scythians, by their sheer numbers, would have been masters of the world had it not been for their passion for quarrels. He describes a number of occasions when the Scythians, pressed by their enemies, drank away the chance of brilliant victories. Transport yourselves to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of our era. “The Novgorodians drank away their freedom,” says Kostomarov. Peter the Great drank away his dynasty, handing the empire over to the Germans long before the last commander-in-chief. And what was the age of serfdom if not the eating up and living through of Russia by that class which held a dictatorship over the people? Let us be sincere, gentlemen! Let us speak our thoughts to the end! Let us not fear the truth! Here is what I fear mortally for my fatherland: the extinction of even embryonic, but lofty cultures, and the final merging of the notions of belly and life...

Whoever undertakes to save Russia, the one motto I should like to suggest to her saviours is this: do not drink her away, gentlemen, do not eat her up! Individuals and nations alike are saved not by the high salaries of a countless officialdom (an old sin that has become young again), but by heroism and self-denial, by drawing all forces into productive labour.

From the diary of the publicist Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov, 23 April 1918