There still exist in Russia several establishments for the education of officers and civil and military engineers. The Institute of Ways and Communications was established in the reign of Alexander, under the superintendence of four pupils of the Ecole Polytechnique of France, MM. Potier, Fabre, Destreme, and Bazain, who entered the service of Russia, at the request to that effect preferred by the tzar to Napoleon. This school (which I have not visited) might have rendered great service to the empire, had the government been discreet enough to leave it its foreign professors, and not subject it to the absurd interference of the Russian military drill. Very few able men have issued from this institution, and the profound ignorance I have seen exhibited in all the great works executed at a distance from the capital, attests the decay of a school which at first promised so fairly. Again, it must be owned, that from the time when engineers enter on active service, they have no leisure to complete their studies; as soon as they receive an appointment, their whole time is taken up with reports, accounts, writings without end, and all the countless formalities devised by the quibbling and captious spirit of the Russians. I have known several engineers at the head of important works; they had not a moment to themselves, their whole day being spent in writing and signing heaps of paper. The same observations apply to the military, for whom secondary manoeuvres and minute costume observances form a never relaxing and stultifying slavery. Under such a system, all the germs of instruction implanted in the schools, soon disappear in service.
Besides, it must be admitted that the generality of Russians have a natural indifference to the sciences and the arts, which will long defeat the efforts of sovereigns desirous of effecting an intellectual regeneration. Though I have gone over a large portion of the empire, I have found very few persons, young or old, who were really studious and well-informed, and too often I have met with nothing but the most utter apathy, where I had a right to expect interest and enthusiasm. It matters not that the emperor showers tokens of favour and respect on his savans, the Russians themselves continue, notwithstanding, to treat them with great disdain. The reason is, that the arts and sciences do not lead to fortune in Russia, and as they fall exclusively to the lot either of foreigners, or of the petty nobles, they cannot enjoy high consideration in a form of society which respects only might and authority, and consequently recognises but two vocations worthy of ambition, viz., the military profession and the civil service.
But independently of the influence of a bad social organisation, the Russians seem to me to be at this day the least apt by nature of all the nations of Europe to receive solid instruction. The Sclavonic race may be divided into two great branches: the first of these, which contains the Poles among others, has felt the influence of the west, with which it has been in long and immediate contact, and so enabled to adopt its civilisation more or less closely; the second, on the contrary, has acknowledged the paramount influence of Asia, and the Russians who compose it, are still in our day under the action of the Mongol hordes, to which they were enslaved for more than three centuries. Again, Russia is absolutely and entirely a novice in civilisation; go over her whole history, and you will not find a single page which gives proof of a really progressive tendency. It is a very remarkable fact that her political and commercial relations with the Lower Empire were entirely barren of result upon her civilisation, which remained completely stationary, even in circumstances most favourable to its development: it is therefore by no means surprising, that despite all the efforts of her sovereigns, she has been unable to place herself on the level of the other nations of Europe within the space of a hundred years.
The results of our civilisation, more than twenty centuries old, are not to be inculcated so rapidly: there needs we think, a long series of progressive initiations, so that the moral constitution reacting on the physical, may render the perceptions and the organs of the latter more delicate, and more suited to intellectual development: and this period of transition must necessarily be very long for a nation to which the past has bequeathed only reminiscences of slavery and destruction. Look, on the other hand, at Greece, Moldavia, and Wallachia, countries which have all had glorious periods in history; they have made great strides within ten years, and have in that short space of time established their claim to rank as members of the European family of nations. To their past history belongs in part the honour of their present advancement. That thirst for instruction, that incredible aptitude to seize and understand every thing, which is characteristic above all of the Greeks, are evidently but old faculties long sunk in torpor under the pressure of slavery, and which waited but for a little freedom to break forth with new energy.