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Between East And West

The Origins of Modern Russia: 862â?"1953

PEGASUS BOOKS

THE EURASIAN BACKGROUND AND THE SLAVS

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An area of nine million square miles, almost a sixth of the earth's land surface, and a population of appreciably more than two hundred million of whom three-quarters are Slav but who comprise some sixty different nationalities and more than twice as many ethnic groups of smaller size: such was the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at its apex. How did it come into being?

Look at the map. Geography, which moulds the life of nations, has been a constant determinant of Russian history. In one sense, it still is.

Look at the three basic maps of the physical geography of Russia: the continuous, all but illimitable plain, or series of adjoining plains, the distribution of soil and vegetation, the rivers of western Russia. On these maps are written the commonplaces of eleven centuries of the historical development of the Russian state.

First, the vast level land stretching from the Baltic and the Carpathians across Siberia to the Pacific. East and south on the far rim of the plain are high mountain ranges, but, except for the narrow chain of the Urals running across it from north to south, within all that immensity of space the land is scarcely anywhere more than a few hundred feet above sea level. This is the unbroken mass of Russia in Europe and Russia in Asia. The Ural Mountains, which in the atlas still serve to divide Europe from Asia, are in no sense a natural barrier, since from gradual foothills they rise to a mean altitude of no more than 1,500 feet. Nor, apart from greater extremes of winter cold and storm in the east, does the atlas division mark any natural difference. On either side of the Urals the distinguishing features of soil and vegetation are identical. And through the wide southern passage between the Urals and the Caspian Sea, in historical and pre-historical witness to the geographical unity of the plain, the waves of migration from Asia have flowed westwards across those treeless expanses known as the steppes, their distant horizon evoking in other than landlocked eyes an irresistible image of the expanses of the ocean.

From this absence of any significant natural barrier to stem the tide of internal migration springs the motive force of the Russian past. The history of the Russian people derives in the first place from a continuous and still uncompleted process of colonization. Wanderers in vast and all but empty lands, they extended the boundaries of settlement with what can only be called the sanction of geography. It is this sanction which makes them wanderers still. Where other nations expanded oversea the Russian empire grew by migration into endlessly contiguous territories. The price of empire-building on so vast a scale was eventually paid in the maintenance of autocracy and serfdom—in the ultimate reckoning, in the Russian revolution—but in historical retrospect the whole evolutionary process wears a simple and fateful logic.

Not unlike the United States, Russia has evolved, through still wider spaces and over a larger stretch of time, from an advancing frontier. Northward to the Arctic Circle and beyond to the ice of the ocean, reaching in the easternmost corner the tongue of land separated by only seventy miles of the Bering straits from the American continent; southward to the Black Sea and the Caspian and the Caucasus between; eastward to the Sea of Japan and the border regions of China and India, the frontiers were pushed forward almost entirely by settlement and only in the last resort secured by war. In the west alone, where expansion met the eastward drive of other peoples, was the frontier for so long unsettled—a condition reflecting the age-long problem of the cultural boundary between Russia and Europe.

Next, across the whole of the Eurasian land mass, there is the regular latitudinal succession of distinctive zones of vegetation: tundra, forest, fertile steppe, desert steppe. The zones expand or shrink in depth between the eastern and western extremities and often overlap. In the west, below the forest region which presents to the foreign traveller's eyes the characteristic Russian landscape of pine, fir and birch, the central deciduous forest meets arable steppe in a wide belt of wooded open country which is the vital scene of political growth in Russian history; in the east, the desolation of the tundra merges into the impenetrable northern stretches of the Siberian taiga. But over the whole land the same succession of vegetation zones prevails, with the great stretch of chernozem, the famous black earth, at the agricultural heart of the steppe. This natural scheme has dominated the course of internal Russian development through the centuries.

From the monotony of the infinite plain and its severities of climate came the endurance of the Russian people. And more than all else from the short season between seed-time and harvest came economic backwardness.

The tundra of the northern zone is vast and all but empty still. A wilderness of frozen marsh, over which move the reindeer herds, it has played little part in the march of Russian civilization. Soviet development in the Arctic for strategic ends, however, appears to have brought with it here and there dramatic hints of a transformed scene.

The zone of arid steppe in the east and south-east, equally vast, includes the regions of many ancient cultures of central Asia, destroyed by barbarian war and conquest. Here modern technique has most sharply modified the old complex of geographical factors. Soviet development in these salt wastes, following on tsarist attempts to sow the desert, seems to prefigure a process of radical transformation. In the swift rise of industry, the growth of communications and the promise of ambitious works of irrigation the present appears to be joining hands with the remote past. For it was from these plains that the pastoral culture of the nomads reached across the fertile steppe to the agricultural settlements and commercial centres at the forest edge of the nascent Russian state, leaving in their passage to and fro enduring marks upon the whole order of Russian society.

Forest and steppe; steppe and forest. It is the shifting of the seat of power between them which points the logic of Russian political development. The original line of demarcation, which in the west reached from Kiev to just south of Moscow and thence to Kazan, near the junction of the Volga with the Kama, has long been obliterated in the creation of a single tract of agriculture. But it represents the axis upon which internal growth revolved. For long centuries forest and steppe constantly collided in war and as constantly met in commerce. They contributed twin and mutually conflicting impulses to the evolution of a migrant society. The Russia of the forest lived in constant peril from the Russia of the steppe, and the political institutions originating in the one were shaped by struggle with the menace from the other. Yet at the same time it was out of the exchanges between them that, first, Kievan Rus, the earliest but abortive Russian state, and then Muscovy, its successor, proceeded to develop a social habit and tradition of their own. In the formative phases of the unification of the east Slavs the nomads alone served as a link between the widely separated centres of an embryonic Russian civilization.

Between them the relative security of the forest and the nomadic freedom of the steppe established a pattern of cohesion and anarchy in the national life. The task of centuries was to unify forest and steppe in a stable political order. Although immense steppe areas were conquered earlier, not until the middle of the eighteenth century was the task of integrating them in a unified scheme of administration effectively begun. It has not yet been completed.

Finally, there are the great rivers of Russia in Europe, broad and slow, their tributaries too numerous to be shown on the map, flowing through forest and steppe in all directions but none issuing into a truly open sea. Russia, its endless distances for so long traversed by this single means of communication, has always been, and still is, a land of countless river roads. Along the dense forest and marshland reaches of these roads in the west, a barrier against the incursions of the nomads in possession of the steppes, the early tide of Slav settlement advanced. Linked by easy portages, the great river system originating in the Valdai hills signposts the trail of Russian colonization: the upper and middle reaches of the Dnieper flowing southwards into the Black Sea, the upper Volga farthereast, and the whole system of the Western Dvina and the Volkhov flowing northwards into the Baltic, formed a close network of waterways, along which the east Slav tribes spread out across the plain.

Frozen for a third of the year or more, their steppe reaches perilous, the greatest of them, the Volga, discharging its waters into the landlocked Caspian, the rivers in the west were the prime agent of unity among the migrating east Slav tribes. Kievan Russia itself originated as a loosely unified state in 'the road from the Varangians to the Greeks', the river road from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea.

The history of Russia is ordinarily taken to begin in the ninth century with 'the coming of the Varangians', a wave of the astonishing tidal flow of Viking exploration and conquest which swept over Europe and the Mediterranean. But there were Scandinavian outposts of piracy and trade along the river roads of Russian some two centuries or more before, and it is to the still earlier centuries of the movement of the Slav tribes in ancient Russia that we must look for the rudimentary beginnings of a Russian state.

The Slavs make their earliest recognizable appearance in history in the northern Carpathians and on the Vistula, in the fifth century, as subjects of the Huns, the most predatory of the nomadic invaders from Asia. But by then the recurring pattern of invasion of the Slav tribal lands had already been established. Russian pre-history echoes with the onrush across the steppe of the mounted nomads. Archaeological, linguistic and other studies within the past sixty or seventy years have filled in a remarkable picture of the earliest civilizations on Russian soil, above all in the Black Sea region, where a cluster of Greek colonies fringed the camping and trading ground of the Iranian tribes known to Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. as Scythians. Its most striking feature—a key to Russian historical continuity—is the evidence of the interchange between the desert and the sown, between the economy of the pastoral steppe and the developing agriculture and handicrafts of the settled or half-settled areas.

From the Scythians and their successors, the Sarmatians, through the Goths who descended from the north in the third century and the Huns from the Mongolian desert at the end of the fourth, to the Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century, the Russian steppe-lands experienced a succession of great waves of migration. It was the collapse of the Hun power after the death of Attila that set in motion all the peoples under that barbarian sway, the Slav world among them. From this wide dispersion came the eventual division into east Slavs, west Slavs and south Slavs. Assimilated in time to the culture of the west were the Slav tribes who became Poles, Czechs and Slovaks; into the pattern of disparate cultures in the Balkans were drawn the south Slavs—Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bulgarians. The east Slavs became Russians, the largest of the Slavonic family of Indo-European peoples.

Towards the middle of the seventh century empire over an immense area of the Russian land, stretching from the Urals to the Dnieper, was firmly held by the Khazars, in whom were probably mixed Hun elements and Caucasian tribes. Theirs was the first real attempt to unify steppe and forest. The Khazars cultivated the land, engaged in cattle-breeding and fishing, but remained essentially nomadic. Their empire was above all a trading empire, in which the exchange of horses, cattle, hides and wool for grain and handicrafts of metal and leather extended to Byzantium and to Arab and eastern lands. The east Slavs were an integral factor in this trade. The rule of the Khazar khan—who, according to legend, had adopted the religion of Judaism—was mild, even beneficent, and was marked by exemplary religious tolerance; the pagan Slav tribes were in a sense allies rather than Khazar subjects. But Arab encroachments in the south of the empire culminated in a disastrous military defeat of the Khazar host in 737, in which great numbers of Slavs were taken prisoner. It was evidently in these circumstances of growing insecurity that the Slav tribal leaders turned to the Northmen—the Varangians—for aid and protection.

No less intrepid as explorers and warriors than the Vikings in England, France or Sicily, their fellow Northmen in Russia had already penetrated from the Baltic into the region of the upper Volga and then moved westwards and to the south. Some had reached as far afield as the Sea of Azov. Pirates, traders and mercenaries, they soon came to share power in the trading towns on the banks of the Dnieper with the Slav merchants there. At the time the Khazar power was at its height they were concentrated along that great river road to the Black Sea and the rich markets of Byzantium. The Varangians levied tribute, fought and plundered, gave armed support to Slav trading expeditions and mounted trading expeditions of their own. A Varangian military company or companionship—the druzhina of the princes of the Kiev era—usually guarded merchandise in transit.

With the progressive weakening of the Khazar power Varangian leadership grew steadily along the river road from Novgorod on the Volkhov in the north to Kiev on the Dnieper in the south. The Northmen pressed hard upon the Khazars as the organizers of commerce with Byzantium. To meet the challenge, the Khazar khan fortified the lower reaches of the rivers of the steppe to bar the trade routes to the Black Sea. It was to re-open these trade routes that a Varangian expedition in some strength crossed the Baltic either in the year 862 or some years earlier. This is the origin of the legend, dramatically commemorated in the ancient Russian chronicles, of Rurik, the founder of the ruling dynasty of Kievan Russia.

The story tells of a Slav revolt against the Northmen in the service of Novgorod and of popular dissensions and disorder after they were driven out. The decision was then taken to invite a prince to govern Novgorod and to dispense justice. 'Our land,' went the appeal, 'is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come and rule over us.' Here, in an evident rationalization of history, is the chronicler's version of things.

In the event, an expeditionary force set sail under the leadership of Rurik, ruler of south Jutland. After spying out the land from the region of Lake Ladoga, he re-established order in Novgorod, without himself attempting to penetrate farther south. It was a partly Slav force led by two Varangian adventurers in his following, Askold and Dir, which advanced towards the edge of the southern steppe and possessed itself of Kiev. In 878 or thereabouts Rurik's successor, Oleg, took the river road south, captured Smolensk on the way, and in turn seized Kiev from its Varangian overlords.

Oleg was the real founder of the primacy of Kiev in the Russian land. 'The mother of Russian cities', it was to unite under its power the principal Slav tribes scattered along the great river road of the plain and so bring into being the loosely organized state of Kievan Rus.

Rus was the ancient name of what became known popularly as Russia only in the late seventeenth century. Its origins have been endlessly debated and are still problematical. Was it, as scholars on the whole are inclined to think, the name of either a Scandinavian tribe or military retinue, or of the place near Kiev where the Northmen first settled? The whole notion of a foreign derivation for Rus is strongly distasteful to the temper of Russian nationalism to-day. But one thing is certain: the use of the name spread from the Varangian-Slav heart of Kiev to all the lands conquered or assimilated to their cause by the princes of Kiev.

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Excerpted from Between East And West by R. D. Charques. Copyright © 1956 R. D. Charques. Excerpted by permission of PEGASUS BOOKS.
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