RUSSIA

The Slav Russians emerged as a recognizable people in the ninth century from a welter of tribal movements, Scythian, Sarmatian, Hunnish and Bulgar. They were thinly spread but occupied the greater part of ‘European’ Russia within an area flanked by Novgorod, Pskov and Polotsk in the north, Smolensk and Rostov in the centre, Kiev and Chernigov in the south. Ever since, Russia has been both in and beyond Europe and its civilization. Until the seventeenth century the whole land of Russia was in constant flux. Its princes were adventurers and empire builders in near empty lands. At the beginning of that century Russia stretched to the Caspian sea, the Ural mountains and the Arctic ocean. Swedish and Polish lands barred her from the Baltic. Novgorod, recovered from the Swedes in 1617, Smolensk (1657) and Kiev (1667), both acquired from Poland, subsequently extended the frontier to the west. In 1648 Oknotz was founded on the Pacific shore. Siberia had already been penetrated by a few fur traders and colonists. With its nomad tribesmen and its handful efforts, Siberia, Russia’s backyard, was as yet of little economic importance. The historic role of Russia, according to Klyuchevsky, had been to act as guardian of the eastern gate of Europe ‘which it defended against the attacks of the nomad plunderers of Asia’. In the process ‘it saved European civilization from the onslaught of the Tartars’ but so ‘fell behind the rest of Europe’. The process can be studied in the events of 1632-4 when an invasion of southern Russia by the Crimean Tartars contributed to the failure of Russian attempts to seize Smolensk from Poland. It should be added, however, that during the two expansionist reigns of Ivan III (14621505) and Ivan IV (1533-84) it was not so much the drive across the steppes to the Ukraine and Black Sea as the effort to secure a footing on the Baltic shore that strained the resources of Muscovy. The Baltic had to be reached and colonized if Russia were not to retreat upon herself and lose fruitful contacts with the west. In the sixteenth century Russia was not, in the opinion of Western diplomats, a European power. It was still fashionable to despise the Russians in the next century. Descartes, for example, wrote in 1648 that a small piece of the Palatinate was worth more than all the empire of the Tartars or the Muscovites. Yet by then the process had already begun which was to bring Russia into the front rank among states.