Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/67

 colonizing process between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, which created a great part of present-day Germany, and destroyed Slavonic peoples and Slavonic states which have now passed into oblivion. But it must here be noted that Russia has never destroyed other peoples, as the Germans, for instance, destroyed the Baltic Slavs, a brother-people to the Poles of the present day.

The making of Russia is at once a centripetal and centrifugal process. The most fertile provinces or governments of European Russia, those situated in the south, are called New Russia; for these are regions of steppes, of which agricultural colonists took possession only at the close of the eighteenth or at the beginning of the nineteenth century. While the Russian Lancashire is the centre of Russia, the region adjoining Moscow, the chief Russian coalfields are situated in new, colonial Russia. Moreover, the most thickly peopled governments of Russia (excluding Poland) bore and still bear the name Ukraina. This term is now often used in a racial or national sense. But the original and literal meaning of the word, that which, from the present point of view—that is to say, historically—presents most interest, is as follows: Ukraina or Okraina—i.e. "limits," or, if one may borrow the old Roman expression, "Limes" Rossicus or Polonicus,—referred to colonial lands which were still in process of settlement, colonies and outposts at once of both states, Russia and Poland. Now these are the most densely populated governments of Russia. Still a few more examples: Odessa, the largest town on the Black Sea, which is twelve hours by express train from Kiev the