Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/27

Rh traverse many hundreds of miles of steppe in open carts or crawl wearily with pack horses over the barren plateaus.

Moscow is indeed a fitting starting-place for a wanderer on Russia's eastern frontiers. The old walls of the Kremlin, which witnessed the growth of the principalities of Moscovy and the birth of Russian nationality, the power of Ivan the Terrible, and the victory of 1812, remind one that this is the ancient kernel from which this peculiar, semi-Oriental Slavonic Empire sprung. Looking eastward from the walls of the Kremlin, the eye meets naught but a boundless plain of pine forest. The kite soars above the old city, as above every Eastern town, while beyond the horizon lie the steppes across which the door lies open to Asia. What was there to stop the Slavs from penetrating eastward? What other means had they to keep themselves secure at home? From the eastern steppes they received the Tartar yoke, and the Tartar influence; back to the eastern steppes they have imparted, in the course of five centuries, their Slavonic civilization with just something of that Western culture which they have, I will not say assimilated, but acquired since the days of their leader, Peter the Great.

And yet one sees around one in the modern town the factories, workshops and offices of a European industrial system, with an industrial proletariat emerging from the old semi-feudal Slavonic Society. The Western influence which Peter let in through his window on the Finnish Gulf is being felt at last, and, through the Slavs, we here have it in process of transmission to the East. As we arrive at the station