Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/34

 their name and their customs, together with the designations of a few articles of civilization, to whose use they had introduced their new subjects.

The territory held in the ninth century by these Slavonic tribes of the eastern division, who came collectively to be called Russians, included the whole of the basin of the Dnieper and the upper reaches of the Volga, the Vólhov, and the Western Dviná. It is noticeable that, while at no point maritime, yet this territory included the waterways which in the Middle Ages were the principal arteries of communication between the Baltic and the Black Sea, between Scandinavia and Byzantium. Situated on this valuable economic and strategic thoroughfare were Kiev, Smolensk, and Novgorod, the centres of early Russian political and commercial life. The northward and eastward current of colonization that had already accounted for the foundation of Novgorod, the 'New Town', received impetus when the mediaeval Tatar invasions in the southeast and the encroachments of Lithuania on the west displaced the political centre from Kiev to Moscow, and occasioned its concentration there. This current has continued without intermission eastward and northward, and latterly to the south, till the extent of the empire, and of the geographical limits within which the Russian language is spoken, have reached their present extent.

The expansion to the east and north has always been at the cost of Finnish tribes, which accounts for the numerous islands of Finnish nationality still existing in Great Russia, but the influence of the Finnish languages on Russian has been absolutely minimal. That also of the Tatar languages, spoken by the migratory hordes, who for so long held Russia in subjection, and still pullulate in the southeastern part of the country, has been infinitesimal and is often grossly exaggerated; it is confined to a few names of objects introduced from Asia, and to the more numerous category of family names, the result of intermarriage with the Tatars.

The continued presence on the one hand of these Finnish and Tatar racial remnants, together with the official