New Zealanders suffer from a number of the small country syndromes, one of which is the need to know what others think of us. There is good reason to be alert in a turbulent world, but also, over history, the eyes of the world (or some of them) were on us as we took a lead in social progress.

Such was the case at the turn of the 19th C, with Seddon’s liberal government, and it appears that some of those external eyes were Russian. In 1904, the Ukrainian political activist Sofia Fedorivna Rusova  wrote a small book, fictionalising a visit to New Zealand by a young man, Levko, which enabled her to provide her Russian, late Tsarist, readers with a a great deal of information on how New Zealand turned itself from a wild country into an agricultural and worker’s paradise, no less for women as well with the success of suffrage. Māori, however, were in a declining and sorry state, betrayed by the Treaty of Waitangi into giving up their lands.

Rusova’s book is extremely rare, but you can read about it here.