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01 July 1998
Scotland and Russia
By
Gordon Liddell
This is the noblest of ventures and even if the Society was not represented, individual members may have encountered it in their holiday itineraries. Put aside intellectual doubts about whether 'Scottish culture' is best represented by picturesque tartanry which Sir Walter Scott invented to show King George we were no longer a threat to the British Constitution; by games which were invented by the absentee landlords of the Scottish aristocracy to keep up their status in the Highlands while they lived in London; and by the rabble-rousing choruses and lamentable bleatings of the folk-song fraternity. Put aside all that, put a dram in your glass, prepare to be astounded by just a smidgen of the full story of Scots' influence on Russia.
FOR FIVE HUNDRED YEARS, while most Scots stayed at home to be colonised, cowed and beguiled, to whimper, complain and dig the peats, a large number of the most intelligent, energetic, entrepreneurial and imaginative Scots, seeking deliverance from poverty or religious and political persecution or from the general lack of opportunity of Scottish culture, carved careers of distinction in Russia (as nearly everywhere else). Scottish mercenaries served in the Russian Army from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Some were only that, soldiers; but others were educated, gifted men who spread their contribution into commerce and culture. One notable mercenary of the 17th Century was Tam Dalyell of the Binns (Yea, verily, an ancestor of 001' ain Tam!). Put in the Tower of London, he escaped and fled to Russia where he achieved high rank under Czar Mikhailovitch. Returning home to fight against the Covenanters for Charles II, the Muscovite De'il (a pun on hisname) was also known as 'The Muskovia Beast who used to roast men' or 'Bluidy Tam' for his suppression of the Pentland Rising at Rullion Green.
IN THE 18TH CENTURY, under Catherine the Great, Scottish seamen joined the soldier mercenaries, many rising through the ranks to become Rear and Vice Admirals: of these, Samuel Greig was Catherine's most successful naval commander. In gratitude Catherine made him Knight of the Order of St Vladimar and of St. Andrew (St. Andrew is also Russia's patron saint!); and when he died Catherine had a gold medal struck in his memory and gave him a State funeral. You can still recover the fuller story of these exploits from the exhibits at Greig's home town of Inverkeithing in Fife. BUT BY FAR the most astonishing contribution by the Scots to Russian culture was through medicine. Between 1704 and 1854 a dozen or so Scottish doctors transformed Russian medical practice. The first, Robert Erskine born in 1677 became chief physician to Peter the Great by the age of 29, having overall responsibility for civilian and military medical practice in Russia. But the most remarkable, and last, of the doctors was James Wylie. Wylie was at the heart of one of the most intriguing mysteries of Russian history. His diary provides an account of Czar Alexander I's death of a fever at Taganrag in Southern Russian in 1825. But Alexander may not have died but lived on as a hermit in Siberia for another forty years. In 1933 it was claimed that Wylie's 'memoirs', found among the imperial Secret Archives reveal that a courier, killed in an earlier incident, was embalmed instead of the Czar while the latter boarded a ship at Taganrag on the night of 18/19 November 1825. In 1841 Nicholas I asked Wylie to write' a single copy of his 'memoirs' of these happenings after which each Czar undertook to reveal the truth of Alexander's 'death' to his successor or as he came of age. The signatures of several Czars are said to be on the memoir, the last being Czar Nicholas II and his brother, Grand Duke Michael.
THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT saw the beginning of the remarkable literary influence of Scotland on Russia, Catherine's reign saw an explosion in translating and publishing, but the most powerful influence was that of Sir Walter Scott in the 19th Century, even to the weanng of tartan! Pushkin, in exile in 1824, asked his brother to send him wine, rum, Limburg cheese, and the new Sir Walter Scott as 'food for the soul', THE POPULARITY OF BURNS among ordinary Russians came after the Revolution when the poet Marshak devotedly translated much of Burns into Russian verse. It may be difficult to believe but these translations have given Russians as strong a sense of ownership of the poet as we have. Emrys Hughes, MP for Ayrshire in the late 1950's records in his Pilgrim in Russia the most moving occasion when Marshak, now an old man, gave The Immortal Memory in the huge Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow: "He ended with the last verse of 'A Man's a Man for a' That' - the Russian words - spoken with great force and vigour, picked up his notes and moved away again, slowly leaning onhis stick. The audience rose and cheered him. They recognised the genius of the old master and his work." When Marshak died, among the medals which lay beside his coffin, was his much treasured badge of the Honorary President of the Scottish Burns Federation,
COMING FORWARD into the 20th Century, one of the most remarkable diaries IS that of Ethel Moil' who volunteered during the 1st World War to go as a nurse to the Eastern Front. She offers first hand horrific accounts of her work with the wounded and dying (mostly Russian, some Serbs) in and around Petrograd; but her diary is also remarkable for its insightful commentary on the socio-political reverberations just before the Russian Revolution. "March 1917, Petrograd . , .The cold is terrific and people are suffering terribly. If the Czarina and her party think they'll starve them into making peace, they're mistaken. They'll rebel. Already there have been bread riots all over the town and a little more and there will be a general upheaval - and a big one too!" The steadfast concern for suffering humanity shown by Ethel Moir and other Scottish nurses in Russia in the 1st World War has a remarkable counterpart in the Second. In the autumn of 1941, the German Panzers cut off the last overland link between Leningrad and the outside world. More than two and a half million citizens, most of them women and children, were encircled by three quarters of a million German troops. They were under daily bombardment and were reduced to eating the last horses, dogs and even rats left alive in the city. When, in Airdrie, the Anglo-Soviet Aid Committee heard that Leningrad was encircled, the women's section gathered 5000 signatures, pasted them into an album, decorated it with the Buchanan tartan and lines from 'A Mans A Manfir a' That' and on 15th December 1941, sent it through the British Soviet Friendship Society. The response of the Leningrad women was as heroic as it was deeply moving. Though literally dying on their feet, the women of Leningrad created their own album. On every page there are photographs, watercolours, prints, etchings many contributed by famous artists depicting Leningrad before the German attack, alongside 3,200 messages from women scientists, scholars, artists, musicians and ballet dancers as well as women workers from the factories, particularly the Kirov works only four kilometres from the German front line.
The Leningrad Album can still be seen in Glasgow's Mitchell Library while the album sent by the Scottish women is in the Museum of Leningrad's History, So our exports to Russia have been infinitely more substantial than whisky. It is now exported there in significant quantities and we must hope that at the Moscow Festival, dazed wi the skirl 0 the bagpipes, hoarse efter a hundred and thirty seeven verses 0 jist yin 0 the muckle sangs, deeply disillusioned wi whits under the kilt 0 the average Scotsman, daunert wi the Highland Dancing, clunked oan the heid wi the 16 pund hammer, and wi still the Ceilidh to go, Muscovians will alight at last on the only cure for Scottish 'culture'. I am deeply in debt, fir this article, to the helf) given by the staff of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.
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