History of Russia/Chapter 1

Contents

I. Geography of Russia
 * Eastern and Western Europe compared: seas, mountains, climate
 * Russian rivers and history
 * The four zones
 * The geographical unity of Russia
 * Footnotes

Eastern and Western Europe compared: seas, mountains, climate
Europe may be roughly divided into two unequal parts. If we give 4,000,000 square miles to the whole of Europe, only 1,800,000 belong to the western, 2,200,000 to the eastern part. The former division is shared between all the monarchies and republics of Europe, Russia excepted; the latter is united under the Russian sceptre. Nature, not less than policy or religion, has established a strong opposition between the two regions, between Eastern and Western Europe.

The shores of the latter are everywhere broken up by inland seas, pierced by deep gulfs, jagged with peninsulas, isthmuses, capes, and promontories; islands and crowded archipelagos are thickly sprinkled along the coasts. Great Britain and the Greek peninsula particularly, which have a coast-line out of all proportion to their area, contrast with the impenetrable compact mass of Eastern Europe. This strongly-marked outline of the western lands is the characteristic feature of European geography, while the immense spaces of which Russia is composed seem the continuation of the plains and plateaux of Northern and Central Asia. No doubt Russia is washed by many seas: in the north by the Icy Ocean, which bites deep into the country through the great fissure of the White Sea; in the south by the Caspian, the Sea of Azof, and the Black Sea; in the north-west by the Baltic and the gulfs of Bothnia, Finland, and Livonia; but, with all these seas, it has only a comparatively meagre share of seaboard. While the rest of Europe has about 15,525 miles of coast, Russia, with a much more considerable surface, possesses only 5514 miles of coast; and of this nearly half (2680 miles) belongs to the Icy Ocean and the White Sea. Now, these two seas are only navigable during a few months of the year, from June to September, at furthest. The Baltic, in its two most northern gulfs, freezes easily; armies have been able to cross on the ice, with all their artillery supplies; navigation is stopped from the month of November to the end of April. The Caspian often freezes, especially in its northern half, which includes Astrakhan, its most flourishing port. The Sea of Azof, here and there, is little better than a marsh. It may be said that, with the exception of the Euxine, the Russian seas have an anti-European character; they cannot be of the same use as our western seas. From this point of view Russia is worse endowed by nature than any other European country; compared with the privileged lands of the West, she might be styled continental Europe, in opposition to maritime Europe.

Western Europe, so jagged in its contour, is no less broken in its surface. Without speaking of the vast central mass of the Alps, there is not one European land which does not possess, either in its length or breadth, a great mountain system forming the scaffolding or the backbone of the country. England has her chain of the Peak and her Highlands; France has her Cevennes and her central support in Auvergne; Spain her Pyrenees and the Sierras; Italy her Apennines; Germany her ranges in Suabia, Franconia, and the Hartz; Sweden her Scandinavian Alps; the Greco-Slav peninsula has the Balkan and Pindus. What mountains Russia possesses on the other hand, are banished, as it were, to the extremities of her territory. She is bounded on the north-west by the granitic system of Finland, on the south-east by the branches of the Carpathians, to the south by the rocky plateaux of the Crimea with the Yalïa and Tchardyr-Dagh (5183 feet), by the Caucasus, extending over 687 miles, where Elburz (18,000 feet) surpasses by more than 2000 feet the highest mountain in Europe, Mont Blanc. To the east is the Oural range, the longest chain of mountains (1531 miles) in Europe or Asia, running parallel to the meridians of longitude, with peaks 6233 feet high. In the Tatar language, the word Oural signifies girdle, but it is not only the Ourals which may be called the mountain girdle; all the mountains of Russia deserve this name. They bound her, they confine her, but have only a slight influence on the configuration of her interior and the distribution of her waters. From the Carpathians and the Caucasus only secondary rivers flow, while the four great Russian streams take their rise in hills not 300 feet high.$1$ We must observe also that none of these great mountains form a separate system; they are nearly all fragments of systems belonging to other countries. The empire of the Tzars is thus a huge plain, which is continued on the west by the level lands of Poland and Prussia, and on the east by the limitless steppes of Siberia and Turkestan, and is in striking contrast with the rugged and multiform soil of the west. From this point of view, Russia may be defined as the Europe of plains, in opposition to the Europe of mountains.

Uniformity of surface is never quite complete, and Russia does present inequalities of soil, though these are far less notable than the depressions and elevations of the West. In the faintly-marked soil of Russia, we must notice, in the centre of the country, a kind of square table-land, called the central plateau, or the plateau of Alaoune, from the name of its northern part. The north-eastern angle is formed by the heights of the Valdaï plateau, where the hills are 300 feet high; the western side of the central plateau by the small hills of the Dnieper, which extend as far as the Cataracts; the southern side by the heights which reach from Koursk to Saratof; the eastern side by the sandy stretches which extend along the right bank of the Volga and the Kama; the northern side by the undulations of the land which separate the basin of the Volga from the rivers that drain into the Icy Ocean. The central plateau is besides divided into two unequal parts by the deep valleys of the Upper Volga, of the Oka, and their tributaries.

Considerable depressions correspond to this swelling in the centre of the Russian plateau:—1. Between the plateau of the Valdaï and the north-east slope of the Carpathians lies a deep valley, in which during the quaternary age the Baltic and Euxine mingled their waves. It is traversed on the north by the southern Düna or Dwina, and the Niemen; on the south by the Dnieper, and its affluents; it reaches its lowest level in the wide marshes of Pinsk. 2. Between the low rocks on the right bank of the Volga and the spurs of the Oural (obchtchiisirt), the soil gradually sinks throughout the whole length of the Volga, and reaches the level of the sea at the Caspian, which is 80 feet lower than the Black Sea: here are the steppes of Kirghiz, the lowest part of European Russia, formerly the bed of a great inland mere which was gradually dried up, and of which the Caspian, the Lake of Aral, and other sheets of water are only the remains. If the Caspian could only regain the level of the Black Sea, a large part of this sterile plain, now covered with saline efflorescence, would be inundated anew. 3. The third great depression of the Russian soil is the slope of the north, covered with lakes and marshes, where the frozen toundra are lost amongst the ice-fields of the Polar Ocean and the White Sea. 4. The region of the lakes Saïma, Onega, Ladoga, which is continued by the sandy tracts of the Baltic, and which forms a series of deep cavities, where the waters of the Baltic and the White Sea must once have found a meeting-point.

From the fact that Russia, taken as a whole, is only a vast plain, it follows that her surface is swept by Polar winds, which no mountain barrier keeps out, for the Oural chain runs in a direction parallel to their course. From the fact, again, that Russia is only washed by seas, small in proportion to the extent of the land, it results that the temperature is modified neither by sea-breezes, which in the West warm in winter and refresh in summer, nor by the aërial and marine current of the Gulf Stream, which finally expires on the coasts and on the mountains of Scandinavia, without being able to influence the shores of the Baltic. In parallel latitudes this Scandinavian mountain-chain makes a notable difference between the Norwegian and the Swedish-Russian climate.

Russia then, like the interior of Asia, Africa, or Australia, has to undergo the effects of a purely continental climate. The first of these effects is a violent contrast between the seasons. The Russian plain is subject in turn to the influences of Polar regions and to those of Central and Southern Asia, of the deserts of ice and the deserts of burning sand. “Under the latitude of Paris and of Venice,” says M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, “the countries situated to the north of the Black Sea and the Caspian have the temperature of Stockholm in January, and the temperature of Madeira in July. At Astrakhan, in the latitude of Geneva, it is by no means rare for the temperature to vary from 70 to 75 degrees [centigrade] in a period of six months. On the coasts of the Caspian, in the latitude of Avignon, the cold descends to 30° below freezing; in summer, on the contrary, the heat rises to upwards of 40°. In the steppes of the Kirghiz, in the latitude of the centre of France, the mercury is sometimes frozen for whole days; while in the summer the same thermometer, if not carefully watched, bursts in the sun. Near the shores of the Sea of Aral these extremes of temperature reach their maximum; there are intervals of 80°, perhaps of 90° centigrade, between the greatest cold and the greatest heat.” Even at Moscow, they have had cold of 33° and heat of 28°; at St. Petersburg, the temperature may shift between the extremes of from 30° to 35° of cold to 31° of heat.

The second consequence of the continental climate of Russia is that the winds do not reach the country till they have lost on the way part of their humidity. Russia suffers generally from dryness. At Kazan the rainfall is only half that of Paris; it is for this reason that Russia contains so many barren and unwooded plains, while this absence of forests all through the south is, in its turn, an obstacle to the formation of hills and springs and to the development of a healthy moisture.

St. Petersburg, situated on the 60th parallel of northern latitude, is the most northern capital of the whole world. The longest day in this city lasts 18 hours 45 minutes; the sun rises on that day at 20 minutes to three, and sets at 25 minutes past 9, but the twilight is prolonged to the moment of dawn. For two months there is no night. The shortest day is 5 hours 47 minutes; the sun rises at 5 minutes past 9, and sets at 8 minutes to 3. The Aurora Borealis is frequent in the north of Russia, while the mirage is often seen in the steppes of the south.

Russia being a country of plains, the geological beds of which the soil is formed are nearly always horizontal; no raising of the soil has broken them, rent the beds of stone, and driven the fragments through the layers of mould or sand. It follows that, except in the neighborhood of mountains, stone is very scarce in Russia. This fact has had much influence on the economic and artistic development of the country. The people were obliged to build with other materials than in the West. The public buildings were everywhere of oak and pine, or of brick; the old churches, the palaces of the Tzars, the ramparts of the towns, were of wood; of wood are the present houses of the citizens, and the isbas of the peasants. Russian villages, and most of the towns, are a collection of combustible materials: hence the fires which break out periodically, and justify the saying that Russia, as a rule, was burned every seven years. Buildings of such materials cannot assume the colossal proportions of the castles of the Isle de France, or of the Rhenish cathedrals; the old churches of Russia are small. It is only since the conquest of the Baltic and the Black Sea that the empire has had cities of stone. Peter the Great gave Russia her first stone capital. From the geological point of view, then, Russia may be defined, according to the expression of M. Solovief, as the Europe of wood, in opposition to the Europe of stone.

Russian rivers and history
In a country so extensive and so destitute of seaboard as Russia, rivers have an immense importance, and with rivers Eastern Europe is well endowed. It is her watercourses which prevent Russia from being a continent closed and sealed, like Africa or Australia. In place of arms of the sea, she has great rivers which penetrate to her centre, and have sometimes almost the proportions of seas. In the level plains they have not the impetuous current of the Rhone, they flow peacefully through great beds cut in the sand or clay. The rivers were for a long while the only means of communication. When the Russian princes wished to make a progress through their dominions, or begin a campaign, they had either to take advantage of winter, which from the Dnieper to the Oural gave them a flat surface for their sledges, or await the thaw and follow the course of the rivers. Boats in summer, sledges in winter, were the only means of conveyance; in spring, the thaw and floods, which transformed the plain into a marsh, brought the raspoutitsa (the season of bad roads). Commerce followed the same routes as war or government. The rivers which, in Russia especially, are “the roads that run,” explain the rapidity with which we see the characters of Russian history traverse immense spaces, and go as easily from Novgorod to Kief, from Moscow to Kazan, as a French king from his good city of Paris to Rheims or Orleans. The rivers are the allies of the Russians against what they call “their great enemy”—space. Russian conquest or colonization has everywhere followed the course of the waters; it was on the banks of the Oka, the Kama, the Don, and the Volga, that the Russian element of the population chiefly gathered, the aboriginal races everywhere retreating into the thickness of the primitive forests.

The plateau of Valdaï is the dominant point in the river-system of Russia. It is near this plateau, in the lake Volgo, that the Volga, which ultimately falls into the Caspian, takes its rise. In this neighborhood also are the sources of the Dnieper (flowing to the Black Sea), the Niemen, the Dwina, which falls into the Baltic, the Velikaïa, a tributary of the Peïpus, the rivers forming lake Ilmen, and those which feed the lakes Ladoga and Onega, whence rises the Neva. The hydrographic centre of Russia being at the north-west angle of the central plateau, it follows that the slopes are turned to the south and to the east; a disposition which has had its influence on the development of the national history. This history, indeed, begins in the north-west, near the Valdaï plateau; on the Peïpus and the Ilmen the old commercial cities of Pskof and Novgorod are established. What is their opening to the sea? Not the Narova, which falls out of lake Peïpus, and of which the course is broken by cataracts, but the network of rivers and lakes which terminates in the Neva, the Thames of Russia, a river of little length but immense breadth, on which St. Petersburg, the Novgorod of the 18th century, was afterwards to be built. In primitive times Novgorod was safer in the centre of this network of rivers and lakes than she would have been on the Neva. By the Volkhof her vessels sailed from the Ilmen to the Ladoga, and by the Neva from the Ladoga to the Gulf of Finland, and the great Baltic Sea. Other small rivers put her in communication with the lake Onega and the White Lake (Biéloe-Ozéro); by the Soukhona and the northern Dwina she had relations with the White Sea, where later the port of Arkhangel arose. By the tributaries of the Dwina the Novgorod explorers penetrated deep into the northern forests, peopled by aboriginal races, on whom they imposed tribute. The watersheds between the slope to the White Sea, the basin of the Novgorod lakes, and the basin of the Volga, are scarcely marked at all. The rivers seem to hesitate at their rise between two opposite courses: some of them never make up their minds, like the sluggish Cheksna which connects the White Sea and the Volga. This interlacement of the water-system, which makes the northern Dwina, the Neva, the Niemen, and the southern Dwina mere prolongations of the Volga and the Dnieper, and puts the four Russian seas in unbroken communication, is in itself a sufficient explanation of the extent of the conquests and great commercial position of Novgorod the Great.

On the Dnieper, Russia, to rival the Russia of Novgorod, founded at a very early date the Rouss of Kief. She too followed the line marked out for her by the course of the Dnieper, which necessarily led her to the Black Sea and the Byzantine world.

It was by the Dnieper that the fleets of war descended against Constantinople; it was by this river too that Greek civilization and Christianity reached Kief. The Dnieper, which had made the greatness of Kief, hastened its decay. As a medium of communication it was imperfect. The celebrated cataracts below Kief formed an insurmountable barrier to navigation, and consequently the city could not remain the political and commercial capital of Russia.

The Don, notwithstanding its length of 621 miles, has had little influence on the evolution of Russian history. During the whole period of the growth of the nation it remained in the power of the Asiatic hordes. In later years it fell, with Azov, into the possession of the Turks. The sandy shallows near its mouth would in any case have proved fatal to its commercial importance. The Dwina and the Niemen also remained till the 18th century in the hands of the native Finns and Lithuanians, or of the German conquerors.

The river, par excellence, of Russia is the Volga—the “mother Volga,” as the popular singers call it. If the Neva, with the great lakes which feed it, may be compared to the St. Lawrence, the Volga may be compared to the Mississippi. With a length of 2336 miles, it has a course 250 leagues longer than that of the Danube. Many of its tributaries may be reckoned among the great rivers of the world. The Oka, with its 633 miles of length, surpasses the Meuse and the Oder; the Kama, 1266 miles long, outvies all other European rivers except the Danube; for the Elbe is only 643 miles, the Loire 681, and the Rhine 812 in length. The junction of the Volga and Oka at Nijni-Novgorod is like the meeting of two arms of the sea; it is an imposing spectacle to contemplate from the hill on which the upper town is built, while the lower town or the fair, with its 100,000 fluctuating inhabitants, spreads its buildings on the banks of both rivers. The Volga, which near Iaroslavl is 2106 feet broad, has a breadth of 4593 above Kazan; towards Samara sometimes it decreases to 2446 feet; sometimes it spreads, with its tributary streams and lateral branches, over a breadth of 17 miles. At the Caspian it divides into seventy-five branches, forming numerous islands, and its delta spreads over 93 miles. This immense river, the waters of which abound with fish as large as sea-fish,—sturgeon, salmon, lampreys,—and where the sterlet sometimes weighs 1073 pounds, would be the wonder of Europe, if it was not frost-bound during many months in the year. But at the thaw the ports, the dockyards, the wharves, are full of life. Two hundred thousand workmen flock from all parts of Russia to its banks. Fifteen thousand ships and 500 steamboats plough its waters. Kostroma, Nijni-Novgorod, Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara, Saratof, Astrakhan, are filled with noise and movement. The whole life of Russia seems concentrated on the Volga.

The basin of the Volga and its tributaries embraces an extent of surface nearly treble that of France. The basin of the Oka alone has three times the extent of the basin of the Loire. In her vast domain the Volga included nearly the whole of the Russia of the 16th century, and has exercised an irresistible influence over the destiny of the land. From the day that the Grand Princes established their capital on the Moskowa, a tributary of the Oka and sub-tributary of the Volga, Russia turned to the east, and began her struggle with the Turks and Tatars. The Dnieper made Russia Byzantine, the Volga made her Asiatic: it was for the Neva to make her European. The whole history of this country is the history of its three great rivers, and is divided into three periods: that of the Dnieper with Kief, that of the Volga with Moscow, that of the Neva with Novgorod in the 8th century, and St. Petersburg in the 18th. The greatness of this creation of Peter I. consisted in his transporting his capital to the Baltic, without abandoning the Caspian and the Volga, and in seeking for the great Eastern river a new outlet which should open a communication with Western seas. Thanks to the canals of the Tikvinka and of the Ladoga, which furnished that outlet, the Neva has become, as it were, the northern mouth, the European estuary of the Volga.

The four zones—The geographical unity of Russia
From the point of view of production, Russia may be divided into four unequal bands, which run from the south-west to the north-east, namely: the zone of forests, that of the Tchernoziom or Black Land, that of the arable steppes or prairies, and that of the barren steppes.


 * 1) The most northerly and largest zone is the poliessa or Russian forest, which borders on one side on the frozen marshes and the toundra of the icy shore, and on the other on the wide clearings formed by the agricultural enterprise of Novgorod, Moscow, and Iaroslavl. In the north the forest begins with the larch; in the centre resinous trees, with their dark foliage, alternate with the small leaves and white bark of the birch; further south come the lime, the elm, and the sycamore, and the oak appears at the southern limit.
 * 2) The Black Land extends from the banks of the Pruth to the Caucasus, over the widest extent of Russia; it even passes the Oural and the Caucasus, and is prolonged into Asia. It derives its name from a deep bed of black mould of inexhaustible fertility, which produces without manure the richest harvests, and may be compared to a gigantic Beauce, 375,000 miles square, a corn-field as large as the whole of France.  From this alone twenty-five millions are fed, and the population increases daily.  From time immemorial this soil has been the granary of Eastern Europe.  It was here Herodotus placed his agricultural Scythians, and hence Athens drew her grain.
 * 3) The zone of arable steppes lies parallel to the Black Land; to the south it descends nearly to the sea: the country is fertile, though it cannot do without manure. It formed before tillage a bare grass-grown plain, completely devoid of wood, and with its 375,000 miles square recalls the American prairie.  The vegetation of the steppe, where men and flocks can hide themselves as in a forest, is often five, six, and even eight feet high.  This monotonous steppe, unbroken except by the barrows that cover the bones of early races,—this steppe, which is an ocean of verdure in spring, but russet and burnt up in the autumn, is very dear to her children.  It was for long the Russia of heroes, the property of nomad horsemen, the country of the Cossack.  The Black Land and the prairie, which is nearly as fertile, have a superficies of 750,000 miles square, or 300,000,000 of acres of excellent earth, a surface equal to that of France and Austrian Hungary united.
 * 4) The fourth zone, that of the barren steppes, steppes which are sandy at the mouth of the Dnieper, clay to the north of the Crimea, saline to the north of the Caspian, only contains 1,500,000 inhabitants in its whole extent of 250,000 miles. “Unsuited to agriculture, and in a great degree to civilized life,” says M. Leroy-Beaulieu, “these vast spaces, like the neighboring plains of Asia, seem only fit for the raising of cattle and the nomad existence.  Of all Russia in Europe, these are the only parts which even at the present day are inhabited by the Kirghiz and the Kalmucks, nomad tribes of Asia, and up to a few years ago by the Tatars of the Crimea and the Nogaīs.  Here the Asiatics appear as much at home as in their native country.”

The productive parts of Russia are these: the prairie, the Black Land, and in the zone of forests the agriculture and industrial region of Novgorod, Moscow, Nijni-Novgorod, and Kazan. Were the sea-level to rise and drown the northern part of the poliessa and the barren steppes of the south, nothing would be taken from the real force and riches of Russia.

These alternations of low plains and plateaux, this diversity in the direction of the great rivers, this division into forests and barren and arable steppes, does not hinder Eastern Europe from presenting a remarkable unity. None of the parts of Russia could remain isolated from the others; the plains admit of no barrier, no frontier; those which the rivers might impose would be effaced in winter under the chariot-wheels of armies, when the land is ice-bound from the White Sea to the Euxine, and the climate is almost as severe at Kief as at Arkhangel. All these regions, which resume their different characters in spring, are kept together by economical interests and needs. The forest zone needs the corn of the Dnieper, the cattle of the Volga; the steppes of the south need the wood of the north. The commerce with Europe, which was conducted by means of the northern Dwina, the Neva and the southern Dwina, was completed by that with the south and the east, carried on by the Dnieper and the Volga.

Only the region of Moscow, where fields and woods alternate, was long sufficient for its own wants; but since Moscow has turned to industrial arts, she needs help from others. In early times she united the products of the north and the south; she thus formed the connecting link between them, and ended by becoming their ruler. Even Novgorod was forced to acknowledge her dependence on the princes established on the Oka, who had only to forbid the transportation of corn from the Upper Volga to the region of the lakes to reduce the Great Republic to obedience.

The wide plains of Russia are as evidently destined to be united as Switzerland to be divided. Between the Carpathians and the Ourals, between the Caucasus and the system of Finland, nature has marked out a vast empire of which the mountain girdle forms the framework. How this framework has been filled in is the lesson that history has to teach us.

 ↑ Top Contents → Next chapter