Chapter I: Land and People and Early History (1)

EXTENT, CONFIGURATION, AND CLIMATE

[Sidenote: [To 1054 A.D.]]

To arrive at a just appreciation of Russia’s genius we must have a knowledge of the soil that nourishes her, the peoples that inhabit her, and the history through which she has passed. Let us begin with nature, soil, and climate.

The first fact that strikes us in regard to the Russian empire is its vastness.[2] Its colossal dimensions are so out of proportion to the smallness of the greatest among European states, that, to bring them within the sphere of human imagination, Alexander von Humboldt, one of the greatest scientists of his century, makes the statement that the portion of the globe under Russia’s dominion is greater than the entire surface of the moon at its full.

The territories of that vast empire acknowledge no limits; its vast plains stretch toward the heart of the old continent, as far as the huge peaks of central Asia; they are stopped between the Black and the Caspian seas by the great wall of the Caucasus, whose foot is planted below the sea-level, and the height of whose summits exceeds by eight hundred feet that of Mont Blanc.

In lakes Ladoga and Onega, in the northwest, Russia possesses the greatest lakes in Europe; in Lake Baikal, in Siberia, the greatest in Asia; in the Caspian and Aral seas, the greatest in the world. Her rivers equal her plains in proportion: the Obi, the Yenisei, the Amur, in Asia; the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga, in Europe. The central artery of Russia is the Volga--a river that, in its winding course of nearly twenty-four hundred miles, is not altogether European. Nine tenths of the Russian territory are as yet nearly empty of inhabitants, and nevertheless the population, according to the census of 1897, taken over all the empire except Finland, numbered 129,000,000; and the annual increase is very nearly two million.

Europe is distinguished from other regions of the globe by two characteristics which make her the home of civilisation: her land is cut into by the seas--“cut into bits,” as Montesquieu says; she is, according to Humboldt, “an articulated peninsula”; her other distinctive advantage is a temperate climate which, in great measure the result of her configuration, is duplicated nowhere under the same latitude. Russia alone, adhering solidly to Asia by her longest dimension, bordered on the north and northwest by icy seas which permit to the borders few of the advantages of a littoral, is one of the most compact and eminently continental countries of the globe.

She is deprived of the even, temperate climate due to Europe’s articulated structure, and has a continental climate--nearly equally extreme in the rigour of its winters and the torrid heat of its summers. Hence the mean temperature varies.

The isothermal lines extend in summer toward the pole; in winter they sink southward: so that the greater part of Russia is included in January in the rigid, in July in the torrid zone. Her very vastness condemns her to extremes. The bordering seas are too distant or too small to serve her as reservoirs of warmth or basins of coolness. Nowhere else in the Occident are to be found winters so long and severe, summers so burning. Russia is a stranger to the great influences that moderate the climate of the rest of Europe--the gulf stream and the winds of the Sahara. The long Scandinavian peninsula, stretching between Russia and the Atlantic, deflects from her coasts the great warm current flowing from the New World to the Old. In place of the gulf stream and the African deserts it is the polar snows of Europe, and Siberia, the frozen north of Asia, that hold the predominating influence over Russia. The Ural range, by its insignificant elevation and its perpendicularity to the equator, is but an inconsiderable barrier to these influences. In vain does Russia extend south into the latitude of Pau and Nice; nowhere this side the Caucasus will she find a rampart against the winds of the north. The conformation of the soil, low and flat, leaves her open to all the atmospheric currents--from the parching breath of the central Asian deserts to the winds of the polar region.

This lack of mountains and inland seas deprives Russia of the necessary humidity brought to the rest of Europe by the Atlantic and laid up for it in the storehouses of the Alps. The ocean breezes reach her only when empty of refreshing vapours; those of Asia are wrung dry long before they touch her confines. The further the continent stretches, the greater its poverty of rain. At Kazan the rainfall is but half that of Paris. Hence the lack, over an enormous southern region, of the two principal elements of fertility--warmth and moisture; hence in part those wide, woodless, arid, un-European steppes in the southeast of the empire.

THE SIMILARITY OF EUROPEAN AND ASIATIC RUSSIA

One whole formed of two analogous halves, Russia is in nowise a child of Europe; but that is not to say that she is Asiatic--that we can shelve her among the dormant and stationary peoples of the far East. Far from it: Russia is no more Asiatic than she is European. But in all physical essentials of structure, climate, and moisture, she is opposed to historical, occidental Europe; in all these she is in direct relation with the bordering countries of Asia. Europe proper naturally begins at the narrowing of the continent between the Baltic and the Black seas.

In the southeast there is no natural barrier between Russia and Asia; therefore the geographers have in turn taken the Don, the Volga, the Ural, or again the depression of the Obi, as boundaries. Desert steppes stretch from the centre of the old continent into Russia by the door left open between the Ural chain and the Caspian. From the lower course of the Don to the Aral Sea, all these low steppes on both banks of the Volga and the Ural rivers form the bed of an old, dried-up sea, whose borders we can still trace, and whose remnants constitute the great salt lakes known as the Caspian and the Aral seas. By a hydrographical accident which has had an enormous influence upon the character and destinies of the people, it is into one of these closed Asiatic seas that the Volga, the great artery of Russia, empties, after turning its back upon Europe almost from its very source.

To the north of the Caspian steppes, from latitude 52° to the uninhabitable polar regions, the longest meridional chain of mountains of the old continent forms a wall between Russia and Asia. The Russians in olden days called it the “belt of stone,” or “belt of the world”; but, despite the name, the Ural indicates the end of Asia on the one side, only to mark its recommencement, almost unaltered, on the European slope. Descending gradually by terraces on the European side, the Ural is less a chain than a plateau crowned with a line of slight elevations. It presents principally low ridges covered with forests, like those of the Vosges and the Jura. So greatly depressed is the centre that along the principal passes between Russia and Siberia (from Perm to Iekaterinburg, for example) the eye looks in vain for the summits; in constructing a railroad through the pass the engineers had no long tunnels to build, no great difficulties to surmount. At this high altitude, where the plains are snow-bound during six or seven months, no peak attains the limit of eternal snows, no valley enbosoms a glacier.

In reality the Ural separates neither the climates, nor the fauna and flora. Extending almost perpendicularly from north to south, the polar winds blow almost equally unhindered along both sides; on both, the vegetation is the same. It is not till the heart of Siberia is reached--the upper Yenisei and Lake Baikal--that one finds a different soil, a new flora and fauna. The upheaval of the Ural failed to wipe out the resemblance and the unity of the two regions it divides. Instead of a wall between the Russias, it is merely a storehouse of mineral wealth. In the rocks, of eruptive or metamorphic origin, are veins of metals not found in the regular strata of the great plains. It no more separates one from the other than does the river of the same name; and when one day Siberia shall boast a denser population, the Ural will be regarded as the axis, the backbone of the two great halves of the empire.

THE DUALISM OF NORTH AND SOUTH

Unity in immensity is Russia’s chief characteristic. From the huge wall of the Caucasus to the Baltic this empire, in itself greater than all the rest of Europe, in its numerous provinces presents perhaps less variety of climate than west European countries whose area is ten or twelve times less. This is on account of the flat uniformity. And yet, underlying this homogeneity of climate and configuration, nature has marked with special characteristics and a distinct individuality a number of regions which, divided into two groups, embrace all European Russia. Equally flat, with a climate nearly equally extreme, these two great zones, notwithstanding their similarity, present a remarkable contrast in soil, vegetation, moisture, and most other physical and economic conditions. One is the forest region, the other the woodless zone of the steppes; they divide the empire into almost equal halves.

From the opposition, from the natural dualism of the steppe and the forest, has sprung the historical antagonism and the now-ended strife between the two halves of Russia--the struggle between the sedentary north and the nomad south; between the Russian and the Tatar; between the Muscovite state laid in the forest region, and the free Cossacks, children of the steppes. The forest region, though ceaselessly diminished by cutting, still remains the more extensive. Occupying the entire north and centre, it grows wider from east to west, from Kazan to Kiev.

Beyond the polar circle no tree can withstand the intensity and permanence of the frost. On both sides of the Ural, in the neighbourhood of Siberia, stretch vast boggy plains (_toundras_), perpetually frost-bound, and clothed with moss. In these latitudes no cultivation is possible, no pasturage but lichens is to be obtained, no animal but the reindeer can exist. Hunting and fishing are the sole occupations of the few inhabitants who make their dwelling in these lands of ice.

The soil of the wooded plains, at least in the northwest, from the White Sea to the Niemen and the Dnieper, is low, swampy, and peaty, intersected by arid sandy hills. The Valdai Hills, the highest plateau, scarcely attain the height of one thousand feet. This region is rich in springs and is the source of all the great rivers. The flatness of the land prevents the rivers from assuming a distinctly marked course, and as no ridge intervenes, their waters at the thaw run together and form enormous swamps; or, travelling slowly down undefined slopes, form at the bottom vast lakes like the Ladoga, a veritable inland sea, or strings of wretched little pools, like the eleven hundred lakes in the government of Archangel.

The population, though scattered over wide expanses and averaging less than fifteen to the square mile, fails to wring from the unfriendly soil a sufficient nourishment. Wheat will not thrive; barley, rye, and flax alone flourish. A multitude of small industries eke out the livelihood for which agriculture is insufficient.

The augmentation of the scattered population is scarcely perceptible having, so to speak, reached the point of saturation. Russia can hope for an increase of wealth and population in this desolate northland only upon the introduction into it of industrial pursuits, as in the case of Moscow and the Ural regions.

Russian civilisation finds a great, though by no means insurmountable obstacle in the extremes of temperature. It must be remembered that Europe enjoys a temperate climate unparalleled in her fairest colonies, while other continents, for analagous reasons, labour under much the same disadvantages as Russia. The climate of the northern portion of the United States greatly resembles that of south Russia, while New York, Pennsylvania, and the New England states pass through the same extremes of temperature as the steppes of the Black Sea.

THE SOIL OF THE BLACK LANDS AND THE STEPPES

The Black Lands, one of the largest and most fertile agricultural tracts in the world, occupy the upper part of the woodless zone at its juncture with the forest and lake district. Obtaining moisture and shelter from the latter, the Black Lands enjoy much more favourable climatic conditions than the steppes of the extreme south. They derive their name (_tchernoziom_) from a stratum of black humus, of an average depth of from one and a half to five feet, consisting partly of loam, partly of oily clay mixed with organic substances. It dries rapidly and is thereupon reduced to a fine dust; but it absorbs moisture with equal promptitude, and after a rain takes on the appearance of a coal-black paste. The formation of this wonderfully fertile layer is attributed to the slow decomposition of the steppe grasses, accumulated during many centuries.

The _tchernoziom_ circles like a belt across European Russia, from Podolia and Kiev on the southwest beyond Kazan in the northeast; after the interruption of the Ural ridge it reappears in Siberia in the southern part of Tobolsk. The trees disappear altogether as we advance southwards, till not even a bush is to be seen. Nothing is visible to the eye but hundreds of miles of fertile black soil, a limitless field stretching beyond the horizon. As a consequence of its fertility this portion of Russia is most populous; the population increases steadily, as railways are constructed and as agriculture gains upon the surrounding steppes.

Between the Black Lands and the southern seas lie the steppes proper wherein the dead level of the country, the absence of all arboreal vegetation, and the summer droughts attain their maximum. These great plains, covering over half a million miles of Europe, include many different qualities of soil, destined to as many different ends.

The sandy, stony, saline steppes will forever be unfit for cultivation. The fertile steppes which occupy the greater part of the space between the Black Lands and the Black Sea and the sea of Azov consist of a layer of black vegetable mould ready for cultivation and teeming with fertility. The grass, growing five or six feet high, in rainy seasons even higher, accounts in some measure for the absence of woods: its rapid luxuriant growth would smother young trees.

The virgin steppe with its rank vegetation--the steppe of history and poetry--diminishes day by day, and will soon disappear before the agricultural invasion. The legendary Ukraine has almost lost its wild beauty; Gogol’s steppe, like Cooper’s prairie, will soon be but a memory--lost in the black belt. The long delay in opening up these grassy plains is due as well to the lack of water and wood as to the lack of workers. The lack of water is difficult to remedy, hence the plains are bound to experience alternately good and bad years; hence, also, the frequent famines in lands which otherwise might be regarded as the storehouse of the empire.

Perhaps an even greater drawback is the lack of trees; thereby the population is deprived both of fuel and of materials for building. Stalks of the tall steppe-grasses and the dung of the flocks, which otherwise would go to the soil, supply it with a fuel that would not suffice for a dense population. The introduction of railroads and the opening of coal mines will, however, remedy little by little these evils, by supplying fuel and restoring the manure to the soil. The proximity to the estuaries of the great rivers and to the Black Sea renders the position of these steppes especially favourable to trade with Europe.

The Ural-Caspian depression is as truly a desert as the Sahara. It contains but few oases. These saline steppes sink in part below the sea level, like the Caspian itself, whose ancient basin they formed, and which now, narrowed and sunk, lies about eighty-five feet below the Black Sea’s surface. This region is of all European Russia the barest, the driest, and the most exposed to extreme seasons. It is decidedly Asiatic in soil, climate, flora, fauna, and inhabitants. This barren steppeland, covering three hundred thousand square miles, has less than a million and a half inhabitants. It is good for nothing but pasturage; and is therefore overrun with nomad Asiatic tribes.

We cannot consider as Russian in character the Caucasus and the southern coast of the Crimea; these present an entirely different aspect, and are as varied as the real Russia is monotonous. In the valleys of the Caucasus appear again forests--absent from the centre of the empire southwards--dense and vigorous, not thin and scattered and monotonous as in the north. Here fruit-trees thrive, and all varieties of plant life for which Russia seeks in vain over her wide plains, from the shores of the ice-bound north to the Black Sea--the vine, which on the banks of the Don finds but a precarious existence; the mulberry-tree; the olive. Few are the fruits that cannot prosper in the hanging gardens of the Crimea suspended above the sea, or in Transcaucasia where, not content with having introduced successfully the cultivation of cotton and the sugar cane, the Russian merchants are anxious to establish tea plantations.

DIVERSITY OF RACES

The number of diverse races is accounted for by the configuration of Russia. Lacking defined boundaries to east and west, Russia has been open always to invasion--she has been the great highway of emigration from Asia into Europe. The strata of human alluvions have nowhere been more numerous, more mingled, more broken or inharmonious than on this flat bed, where each wave, pushed by the one behind it, encountered no obstacle other than the wave which had preceded. Even since historical times it is difficult to enumerate the peoples who have followed one another upon Russian soil--who have there formed empires more or less durable: Scythian, Sarmatian, Goth, Avar, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Chazar, Petcheneg, Lithuanian, Mongol, Tatar; without counting the previous migrations of the Celts and Teutones, or of peoples whose very names have perished, but among whom even the most obscure have left upon the population some impression whose origin to-day it is impossible to trace.

While the configuration of Russia has left her open to every invader, the structure of her soil forbade the development of the invaders into organised nations independent of one another. Instead of being the consequence of slow development by physical causes, this multiplicity of races and tribes is an historical heritage. Without considering the glacial regions of the north, uninhabitable save for hunters and fishers, or the sandy and saline steppes of the southeast, where wander only pastoral nomads, this complexity of races and tribes, far from being a result of adaptation to the soil--far from being in harmony with physical conditions, is directly opposed to them. Far from having a tendency to race diversion, the natural conditions made for unity and harmony. The absence of boundaries made it impossible for the different tribes to isolate themselves.

In the immense quadrilateral comprised between the glacial ocean and the Black Sea, between the Baltic and the Ural, there is not a single mountain--not a single dividing line. Over this even surface the different tribes have been obliged to scatter at random--just as the waters have flowed together, having no ridge to separate them, no banks to contain them. Thus, while custom, religion, and language prevented their mingling, they were yet obliged to live side by side: to invade one another, to mingle one with another without loss of individuality, as the rivers which flow together without confounding their waters. Exhausted in the effort to spread over too large expanses, or broken up into fragments, all these races have the more easily submitted to the domination of one rule; and under this domination they have been the more rapidly unified and mingled. From this fusion, begun centuries ago under the Christian empire and the Muscovite sovereignty, have sprung the Russian people--that mass of about 129,000,000 souls, which, compared with other peoples, resembles the sea devouring its own shores, a sea dotted with islands which it swallows one by one.

Out of the seeming chaos of Russian ethnology emerge definitely three principal elements--Finn, Tatar, and Slav, which last has to-day to a great extent absorbed the other two. Not counting the three millions of Jews in the west, the seven or eight hundred thousand Rumanians in Bessarabia, the eight or nine hundred thousand Germans of the Baltic provinces and the southern colonies; without counting the Kalmucks of the steppe of the lower Volga, the Circassians, the Armenians, the Georgians, and the whole babel of the Caucasus--all the races and tribes which have invaded Russia in the past and all which inhabit her to-day can be traced to one of these three races. As far back as history goes, are to be found upon Russian soil, under one name or another, representatives of all these three groups; and their fusion is not yet so complete that we cannot trace their origin, their distinctive characteristics, or their respective original dominions.

The Finnish tribe seems in olden times to have occupied the most extensive territory in what is to-day called Russia. It is manifestly foreign to Aryan or European stock, whence, with the Celts and Latins, Germans and Slavs, most of the European peoples have sprung. Ethnological classifications usually place the Finns in a more or less comprehensive group known variously as Turanian, Mongolian, and Mongoloid.

The Mongols, properly so called, with the Tatars are usually arranged beside the Finns in the Ural-Altaic group; which, on the other hand, rejects the Chinese and other great nations of oriental Asia. This classification appears to be the most reasonable; but it must be noticed that this Ural-Altaic group is far from presenting the same homogeneousness as the Aryan or Semitic group. The relationship between the numerous branches is far less fundamental than between Latin and German; it is probably far more remote than that between the Brahman or Gheber of India and the Celt of Scotland or Brittany; at bottom it is perhaps less close than between the Indo-European and the Semite.

_The Finns_

The Finnish race, which outside of Hungary is almost entirely comprised within European Russia, numbers five or six millions, divided into a dozen different tribes. To the Hungarian family in the north belongs the only Finnish people which ever played an important rôle in Europe, or arrived at a high state of civilisation--the Magyars of Hungary. In the northwest we find the Finns properly so called; they are subdivided into two or three tribes, the Suomi, as they designate themselves, constituting the only tribe in the whole empire that possesses a national spirit, a love of country, a history, and a literature; also the only one that has escaped the slow absorption by which their kindred have been swallowed up. They form five-sixths of the population of the grand duchy of Finland--a population almost wholly rural. A Swedish element mingled with German and Russian is predominant in the cities.

(Russian)]

St. Petersburg is, truth to tell, built in the midst of Finnish territory; the immediate surroundings are russified, and that quite recently: even half a century ago Russian was not understood in the hamlets lying at the very gates of the capital. To this Finnish branch belong the Livs, a tribe nearly extinct, which has given its name at Livonia; also the Lapps--the last, physically the ugliest, morally the least developed, of all the branches of this tribe.

The race is almost infinitely subdivided; its members profess all the religions from Shamanism to Mohammedanism, from Greek orthodoxy to Lutheranism. They are nomadic, like the Lapp; pastoral, like the Bashkir; sedentary and agricultural like the Esth and the Finn. They have adopted the customs and spoken the language of each and all, have been ruled by peoples of different origins, have been russified after having been partially tatarised--all these influences contributing to break up the race into insignificant fragments. As numerous as their Hungarian kindred, the Finns of the Russian Empire are far from being able to claim an equal political significance.

Is it true that the alliance with the Finns is for Russia an irremediable cause of inferiority? It is doubtful. In their isolation and disruption, hampered by the thankless soil upon which they dwell, the Finns have been unable to achieve an original development; as compensation, they have everywhere manifested a singular facility of assimilation with more developed races with which they have come in contact; they allowed themselves easily to be overwhelmed by a civilisation which they themselves were unable to originate: if they possessed no blood-ties with Europe, they placed no obstacles in the way of annexation by her. Their religion is the best proof. The majority have long been Christians; and it is principally Christianity which has led the way to their fusion with the Slavs and their assimilation into civilised Europe. From Hungary to the Baltic and the Volga, they have accepted with docility the three principal historical forms of Christianity; the most modern, Protestantism, has thriven better among the Finnish and Esthonic tribes than among the Celtic, Iberian, and Latin peoples.

If we seek in language an unmistakable sign of race and intelligence, it must be admitted that certain Finns--the Suomi of Finland like the Magyars of Hungary--have brought their agglutinated languages to a perfection which for power, harmony, and wealth of expression well bears comparison with our most complex flexional languages. If it is true that the Finns are related to the Mongols, they have certainly the virtues of that race, which holds its own so well in its struggle with Europe: they possess the same stability, patience, and perseverance; hence perhaps the fact that to every country and every state which has felt their influence the Finns have communicated a singular power of resistance, a remarkable vitality.

ETHNOLOGICAL DISTRIBUTION OF RELIGIONS

The Finn has become Christian; the Turk or Tatar, Moslem; the Mongol, Buddhist: to this ethnological distribution of religion there are few exceptions. Hereto are attributable the causes of the widely different destinies of these three groups--particularly the neighbouring Finns and Tatars. It is religion which has prepared the one for its European existence; it is religion which has made that existence impossible for the other. Islam has given the Tatar a higher and more precocious civilisation; it has inspired him to build flourishing cities like the ancient Sarai and Kazan, and to found powerful states in Europe and Asia; it has achieved for him a brilliant past, while exposing him to a future full of difficulties: while saving him from absorption into Europe, it has left him completely outside the gate of modern civilisation.

It is the Tatars who have given to the Russians the name of Mongols, to which the Tatars themselves have but a questionable right. In any case the title is not applicable to the true Russians, who have at most but a drop or two of Mongol blood in their veins, and less of Tatar than the Spaniards have of Moorish or Arab.

At the same time with the process of absorption and assimilation of the Finnish element, another process has for centuries been going on--an inverse process of secretion and elimination of the Tatar and Moslem elements which Russia found herself unable to assimilate. After their submission a great number of Tatars left Russia, being unwilling to become the subjects of the infidels whose masters they had been. Before the progress of Christianity they spontaneously retreated to the lands still dominated by the law of the prophet. After the destruction of the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, they tended to concentrate in the Crimea and the neighbouring straits--in what up to the eighteenth century was known as Little Tartary; after the conquest of the Crimea by Catherine II they took their way still farther toward the empire of their Turkish brethren. Even in our own time, after the war of Sebastopol and after the conquest of the Caucasus, the emigration of the Tatars and the Nogaians began again on an enormous scale, together with that of the Circassians. In the Crimea the Tatar population, already diminished by one-half in the time of Catherine II, is to-day scarcely one-fifth of what it was at the time of the annexation to Russia. The introduction of obligatory military service in the year 1874 drove them out in large numbers. By defeat and voluntary exile have the Tatars been reduced to insignificant groups in a country where, formerly, they reigned for centuries--in some parts of which even they were the sole inhabitants.[b]

THE SLAVS

As to the Slavs, who form the nucleus of the Russian population, it is now generally recognised that they migrated to Russia from the neighbourhood of the Carpathian Mountains. The Byzantine annalists of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh centuries, speaking of the Slavs, whom they called Sklaboi, a name appearing as early as the end of the fifth century, distinguish two branches of them: the Ants, living from the Danube to the mouth of the Dnieper; and the Slavs, properly so named, living northeast of the Danube and as far to the east as the source of the Vistula, and on the right bank of the Dniester. In this, their statement agrees with that of Jornandes,[l] the historian of the Goths. Some Russian scholars suppose that before coming to the Danube the Slavs lived near the Carpathians, whence they invaded the Byzantine empire. These encroachments, beginning as far back as the third century, resulted in the penetration of the Slavs into southern Austria and the Balkan peninsula. Byzantine annalists of the sixth and seventh centuries, Procopius and the emperor Maurice, who had to fight the Slavs in person, speak of them as being ever on the move: “They live in woods and on the banks of rivers, in small hamlets, and are always ready to change their abode.” At the same time these Byzantine annalists describe this people as exceedingly fond of liberty. “From the remotest period,” says Procopius,[d] “the Slavs were known to live as democracies; they discussed their wants in popular assemblies or folkmotes.” “The Slavs are fond of liberty,” writes the emperor Maurice[e]; “they cannot bear unlimited rulers, and are not easily brought to submission.” The same language is used also by the emperor Leo.[f] “The Slavs,” says he, “are a free people, strongly opposed to any subjection.” If the Byzantine historians do not speak of the invasion of the Slavs into the limits of the empire during the second part of the seventh century, it is because their migration took at this time another direction: from the Carpathians they moved toward the Vistula and the Dnieper.

During the ninth century, the time of the founding of the first principalities, the Dnieper, with its numerous affluents on both sides, formed the limit of the Slavonic settlements to the east. This barrier was broken only by the Viatitchi, stretching as far to the northeast as the source of the Oka. On the north the Slavs reached the great Valdai plateau from which Russia’s largest rivers descend, and the southern part of the great lake region, that of Ilmen.[c]

There is no indication that the race is deficient in genius. It was the Slavs who opened the way to the west by two great movements which inaugurated the modern era--the Renaissance and the Reformation; by the discovery of the laws that govern the universe, and the plea for liberty of thought. The Pole Copernicus was the herald of Galileo; the Czech, John Huss, the precursor of Luther. Poland and Bohemia, the two Slav peoples most nearly connected with the west by neighbourhood and religion, can cite a long list of men distinguished in letters, science, politics, and war. Ragusa alone could furnish an entire gallery of men talented along all lines. There where remoteness from the west and foreign oppression have made study impossible and prevented single names from becoming widely known, the people have manifested their genius in songs which lack none of the qualities inherent in the most splendid poetry of the west. In that popular impersonal literature which we admire so frankly in the _romanceros_ of Spain, the ballads of Scotland and Germany, the Slav, far from yielding the palm to the Latin or the Teuton, perhaps excels both. Nothing more truly poetical exists than the _pesmes_ of Servia or the _doumas_ of Little Russia; for, by a sort of natural compensation, it is among the Slavs least initiated into western culture that popular poetry has flowered most freely.

In temperament and character the Slavs present an ensemble of defects and qualities which unite them more nearly with the Latins and Celts than with their neighbours the Germans. They are characterised by a vivacity, a warmth, a mobility, a petulance, an exuberance not always found to the same degree among even the peoples of the south. Among the Slavs of purer blood these characteristics have marked their political life with a mobile, inconstant, and anarchical spirit which has rendered extremely difficult their national existence and which, taken with their geographical position, has been the great obstacle in the way of their civilisation. The distinguishing faculty of the race is a certain flexibility and elasticity of temperament and character which render it adaptable to the reception and the reproduction of all sorts of diverse ideas; the imitative faculty of the Slavs is well known. This gift is everywhere distributed among them; this Slav malleability, peculiar alike to Pole and Russian, is perhaps fundamentally but a result of their historical progress and of their geographical position. But lately entered in at the gate of civilisation, and during long years inferior to the neighbouring races, they have always gone to school to the others; instead of living by their own invention, they have lived by borrowing, and the imitative spirit has become their ruling faculty, having been for them the most useful as well as the most widely exercised.

In the west the Slavs fell under the influence of Rome; in the east, under that of Byzantium: hence the antagonism which during long centuries has set strife in the midst of the two chief Slavonic nations. United by their common origin and the affinity of their languages, they are, however, separated by the very elements of civilisation--religion, writing, and calendar; therein lies the secret of the moral and material strife between Russia and Poland--a strife which, after having nearly annihilated the one, actually cost the other its life; as though from the Carpathian to the Ural, on those vast even plains, there was not room at one time for two separate states.

In the northwest, on the banks of the Niemen and Dvina, appears a strange group, incontestably of Indo-European origin yet isolated amidst the peoples of Europe; harking back to the Slavs, yet forming a parallel branch rather than offshoot--the Letto-Lithuanian group. Shut away in the north by marshy forests, restricted by powerful neighbours, the Lithuanian group long remained closed to all outer influences, whether of East or West. Last of all the peoples of Europe to accept Christianity, its language even to-day is the nearest of European tongues to the Sanskrit. The bone of contention among the Germans, the Poles, and the Russians, who each in turn obtained a footing among them and left an influence on their religion, they found themselves divided into Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox.

Mixed with Poles and Russians, menaced on both sides with complete absorption, the Lithuanians and the Samogitians, their brothers by race and language, still number in ancient Lithuania nearly two million souls, Catholics for the most part; they formed the majority of the population of Vilna and Kovno. In Prussia some two hundred thousand Lithuanians constitute the representatives of the ancient population of oriental Prussia, whose name is derived from a people of that race which kept its language intact up to the seventeenth century.

The second existing group of this family, the Letts, crossed probably with Finns, number more than a million souls; they inhabit chiefly Courland, Vitetesk and Livonia; but, converted, subjected, and made slaves of by the Teutonic knights, they still live under the dominion of the German barons of the Baltic provinces, with whom they have nothing in common but their religion--Lutheranism. Like the Finnish tribes outside of Finland, the Letts and Lithuanians, scanty in number and widely scattered, are incapable of forming by themselves a nation or a state. Out of this intermixture of races by the assimilation of the ruder by the more civilised, was formed a new people--a homogeneous nation. In fact, contrary to popular prejudice there is in Russia something more than an intermixture of diverse races--there is what we to-day call a “nationality”--as united, as compact, and as self-conscious as any nation in the world. Russia, notwithstanding all her various races, is yet no incoherent mass, no political conglomeration or mosaic of peoples. She resembles France in her national unity rather than Turkey or Austria.

If Russia must be compared to a mosaic, let it be to one of those ancient pavements whose scheme is a single substance of solid color edged with a border of diverse forms and shades--most of Russia’s original alien populations being relegated to her borders and forming around her a sort of belt of uneven width.

It is in the centre of Russia that is found that uniformity of much more marked among the Russians than among all other peoples of Europe; from one end of the empire to the other the language presents fewer dialects and less localisms than most of our western languages. The cities all look alike; the peasants have the same customs, the same manner of life. The nation resembles the country, having the same unity, almost the same monotony as the plains which it peoples.

_The Great Russians and the Little Russians_

There are, however, two principal types, almost two peoples, speaking two dialects and wholly separated from each other: the Great Russians and the Little Russians. In their qualities and in their defects they represent in Russia the eternal contrast of north and south. Their history is no less diversified than their nature; the first have their centre at Moscow, the second at Kiev. Stretching, the one to the northeast, the other to the southwest, these two unequal halves of the nation do not precisely correspond to the two great physical zones of Russia. This is due partly to nature, partly to history, which has hindered the development of the one and fostered that of the other. The southern steppes, open to every invasion, long arrested the expansion of the Little Russians, who for centuries were shut up in the basins of the Dnieper, the Bug, and the Dniester; while the Great Russians spread freely in the north and east and established themselves in the enormous basin of the Volga; masters of nearly all the forest regions and of the great Ural Lake, they took possession of the Black Belt and the steppes along the Volga and the Don.

The White Russian inhabits Mohilev, Vitebsk, Grodno, Minsk--a region possessing some of the finest forests in Russia, but whose soil is marshy and unwholesome. United politically with the Little Russian, the two have been classed under the name Western Russians. Subjected at an early date by Lithuania, whose dialect became its official language, White Russia was with the greater part of Little Russia united to Poland, and was for centuries the object of strife between that nation and the Muscovite czars, from the effects of which strife she still bleeds. Of the three Russian tribes this is perhaps the purest in blood; but thanks to the sterility of the soil and the remoteness of the sea, she has remained the poorest and least advanced in civilisation.

The Great Russians are the most vigorous and expansive element of the Russian nation, albeit the most mixed. Finnish blood has left its traces in their physique; Tatar dominion in their character. Before the advent of the Romanovs they formed alone the Muscovite Empire, and their czars took the title “Sovereign of all the Russias” long before Alexis, father of Peter the Great, justified this title by the annexation of the Ukraine. Hence Great Russia, under the name Muscovite, has been considered by certain foreigners the true, the only Russia. This is an error; since the Great Russian, the product of the colonisation of central Russia by the western Russians before the invasion of the Tatars antidates the state and even the village of Moscow. If, therefrom has emerged the Muscovite autocracy, it is impossible to cut the ties that bind it to the great Slav republic of the world whose name is still the active symbol of liberty--Novgorod.

Least Slav of all the peoples that pretend to the name, the Great Russian has been the coloniser of the race. His whole history has been one long struggle against Asia; his conquests have contributed to the aggrandisement of Europe. Long the vassal of the Tatar khans, he never forgot under Asiatic domination his European origin; and in the farthest limits of Muscovy the very name Asiatic is an insult to the peasant.

Conqueror over Asia, influenced morally and physically by all the populations assimilated or subjugated by him in his march from the Dnieper to the Ural, the Great Russian lost something of his independence, his pride, his individuality; but he gained in stability and solidity.

In spite of the obvious evidences of his mixed blood, the Great Russian is in perfect harmony with the Caucasian race by the exterior characteristics which distinguish it--his stature, his complexion, the colour of his hair and eyes. He is apt to be tall, his skin is white, his eyes are very often blue; his hair is usually blond, light chestnut, or red. The long heavy beard so dear to the heart of the moujik and which all the persecutions of Peter the Great failed to induce him to dispense with, is in itself a mark of race, as nothing could be smoother than the chin of the Mongol, the Chinese, or the Japanese.

The Little Russians dwelling in the south have brown or dark chestnut hair, and are of purer race, dwelling nearer to the Occident; they pride themselves upon their comparatively unmixed blood, their more temperate climate, their less dreary land; they are a more imaginative, more dreamy, more poetic people than their neighbours of the north. It is in Little Russia that the Zaparogians belong, the most celebrated of those Cossack tribes which in the Ukraine or the southern steppes played so important a rôle between the Poles, the Tatars, and the Turks, and whose name will ever remain in Russia the synonym of freedom and independence. Even to-day the Zaparogian, with his liberal or democratic tradition, remains the more or less conscious and avowed ideal of the majority of the Little Russians. Another reason, in the history of the Ukraine, which makes for democratic instincts in the Little Russians is the foreign origin and denaturalisation of a great part of the higher classes among the Poles and Great Russians. From this double motive the Little Russian is perhaps more susceptible to political aspirations, more accessible to revolutionary seduction than his brother of Great Russia.

Of the Cossacks of to-day only those of the Black Sea transplanted to the Kuban between the sea of Azov and the Caucasus are Little Russians; the Cossacks of the Don and the Ural are Great Russians.[b]

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANISATION

It is extremely difficult to draw an approximately correct picture of the life of the Russian Slavs even in its barest outlines. Among the widely scattered tribes there was hardly more than one element tending towards union--that of language. Frequent contact with the populations living on their borders and wedged in between them, must of itself have produced considerable modifications in their mode of life.

The entire social organisation of the early Slavs, like that of all other Aryan and non-Aryan peoples, was based upon kinship or descent from a common ancestor.[a] Even in the Varangian period we can discover traces of this primeval organisation in clans among a few tribes. In time of peace these clans were in the habit of meeting together in order to discuss common affairs. The chronicler[h] uses the expression “came together” when he wants to speak of decisions taken in common. This practice seems to have been known to all Slavonic peoples. Among the Russian Slavs these folkmotes were known under the name of _vetché_, and they remained to the end of their existence a necessary part of the political institutions, not only in the northern city republics, Novgorod and Pskov, but also in nearly all the principalities of Russia, with the exception of one of the latest founded, Moscow.

Among these tribes we also find native princes or clan chieftains (_kniaz_), and it is also certain that as early as the ninth century there were among the Russian Slavs private owners of tracts of land who occupied an advantageous position as compared with the great bulk of the members of the community, and from whom the latter nobles (_boyars_) were descended. But on the whole the village community formed the nucleus of the entire political and economic organisation of the eastern or Russian Slavs. It was a world complete in itself, self-sufficient and independent both economically and juridically. The community was the possessor of the soil, which was periodically redistributed among its component members; the separate patriarchal families, and the assembly of the heads of the families was the body that judged and decided all things pertaining to the community. It is thus that we are to understand the apparently contradictory reports of the Byzantine writers, who say, on the one hand, that the Slavs know of no government and do not obey any individual, and on the other hand speak of a popular government that has existed from ancient times, that discusses all things in common, and that has many petty princes at its head.

It is self-evident that a government adapted to the requirements of a village community must assume a different character as soon as the settlement gains in extent and assumes the character of a city. And cities grew up quite early in northern and southwestern Russia. Toward the end of the ninth century Kiev had a wide fame as a large and populous city. Constantine Porphyrogenitus also knows of Novgorod, Smolensk, Linbetch, Tchernigov, Vishgorod, and Vititchev; in the time of Igor more than twenty cities can be named. The question as to the origin of Russian cities has called forth much debate and an extensive literature.

The chief difficulty lies in a proper understanding of the so-called Bavarian geographer, a writer of the ninth or tenth century, who counts, in his description of the northern Slavs, some twenty peoples with more than 3,760 cities. These latter he calls now _civitates_, now _urbes_, without indicating that there is any distinction of meaning to be attached to these terms, so that we are left to conclude that both names denote settlements. The present consensus of opinion as to those old Russian cities is as follows:

The old word _grad_, (now _gorod_, city) denoted any space surrounded by a palisade or earthworks. Thus there were wooden and earthen cities built for protection in time of war, and every community had its city. But in the regions that offered a natural protection by their inaccessible and swampy character the need for these cities was not so urgent, so that the wooded and marshy north had fewer cities than the open south. Numerous remains of these ancient earth piles enable us to recognise the position and wide extension of these old Slavonic settlements. Sometimes they are circular in form, others consist of a double angular trench with outlying earthworks. These are to be distinguished from the wooden cities, which were originally built for trading purposes, and only later were fenced in and enclosed, so that they could also serve for protective purposes. They were built in favourable situations, adjacent to some trade route. The more complex social relations that grew up in them demanded a more thorough organisation of social and political life, for which the village community did indeed furnish the basis, but which, in the long run, was found to be inadequate. The questions of general interest to the city were settled in the first place by the vetché, which greatly resembled the village gathering of the family elders.

But the need of a power which should decide all questions that might arise while the vetché was in abeyance, was more pressing in the cities, and favoured the development of the power--originally very limited,--of the _kniazes_ or princes, who were elective and whose dignity was neither hereditary nor lifelong. The prince did not even have a permanent military following: his dignity was of a purely personal nature. It is certain that not he but the vetché had the power to make laws. Our information concerning the political organisation of the earliest period of Russian history is very scanty, and we know more of what it lacked than of what it possessed. What strikes us most is the absence of a military organisation. In times of danger, those who could defend themselves took up arms, the remainder fled to places of safety.

Nor can we discern with certainty any social differentiation into classes. On the other hand we know that a thriving trade was being carried on in the ninth century along the route which led from the gulf of Finland through Lake Ilmen to the Dvina and down the Dnieper to the Black Sea and thence to Greece. The oldest wooden cities lay along the famous route of the Varangians to the Greek Empire, along which amidst many dangers, the raw products of the north were exchanged for the finished commodities of the south. It is owing to these dangers that the trader had also to be a warrior, and it is into those ancient trade relations--peaceful intercourse enforced by warlike means--that we are to look for the most important arms of the old Russian state. Who discovered this trade route? We see no compelling reason to deny the honour to the Slavs, although it is established beyond doubt that even before the middle of the ninth century the Northmen reached Byzantium along this route. On the other hand, the marauding and trading expeditions which were carried on by Russians in the tenth century and earlier to the sea of Azov, the Caspian, and further still to the Caucasus and the shores of Persia, emanated from Scandinavians, and not from Slavs.

RELIGION

The religious conceptions of the Russian Slavs were but little developed. All other Aryan peoples, including the western Slavs, excel them in this respect. There was neither a distinct priestly class, nor were there images of the gods, nor were there distinct types of gods. The Arabian travellers almost unanimously ascribe sun worship to the eastern Slavs, and Byzantine writers before the ninth century tell of a belief in a supreme being who rules the universe. It is now generally accepted that this supreme god was called Svarog and was a personification of heaven and light, while sun and fire were regarded as his children. Perun, the thunder god, and Veles, god of herds, both mentioned by the oldest chronicler, must be brought in relation to the sun. But it is highly probable that these two gods were taken over by the Slavs from their Varangian rulers. Water also was regarded as sacred, and, like the forest, it was filled with animate beings which must be propitiated with sacrifices, since they had relations to human beings. Water, fire, and earth were related to death. The _russalki_, shades of the dead, swam about in the water, and the bodies of the dead were given up to the flames in order to make easier their passage to the realm of the dead (_rai_). The slaves, as well as the wife and the domestic animals were burned on the funeral pyre, and cremation was preceded by a feast and games in honour of the dead. But burial also was common.[g]

[Sidenote: [862 A.D.]]