Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/145

 think of the British Empire as being all of a piece, with all its great variety of people jostling each other on a great plain, we should realise more clearly the national problems of the Russian Empire. Russia has, as it were, its Irish problem, its South African problem, its French-Canadian question, its colonial question; and all these questions are juxtaposed and intermingled very closely and are all entangled in a most extraordinary way with the question of the Russian population which is spread all over the Empire and very often cuts through the territory occupied by other nationalities. You have this great plain which is in a sense a sea. with the Russians as the great colonisers, with the nomad tribes as the pirates who in the long run were subdued and tamed to Russian rule.

How did this very complex organisation, called the Russian Empire, with its great varieties of nationalities, come to be what it is?

I don't want to tell over again the story of Russian history, which has been very ably set before you in several lectures during the week, but there are two or three points to indicate which have a bearing on my subject. If you will remember, first of all a number of loosely organised Slavonic tribes coalesced and formed at Kiev a State which for a time flourished, and was then swept away by the Tartar invasion. Then these Slavonic tribes who by this time were known as Russians transferred their centre to the upper Volga and the Oka river, and afterwards established a new centre in Moscow where they began to collect the scattered fragments of the Russian people. The Russian ruler at Moscow subdued the various Russian principalities