ABSTRACT
The Great Russian people were hammered out of peaceful, silent, pacific elements by constant and cruel blows from enemies on all sides, which implanted in the least intelligent of Russians an instinct of national defence and of the value of a national dictatorship. Russian history has centred on the great rivers. Upon Moscow the unification of Russia centred; but with the unification of this great Nation-state the present narrative can deal only in barest outline. At Moscow the Russian Church wisely established its ecclesiastical capital and made it in 1325 the seat of the Metropolitan. The whole of south-western Russia up to and beyond the borders of Poland and Hungary was ravaged by the invaders. Before the end of the tenth century Byzantine influence had begun to manifest itself in Russia, and Christianity in the Eastern or Orthodox form had obtained a foothold which it steadily extended down to the fall of the Monarchy, and has never entirely lost.
