During the long dark centuries whose annals we have endeavoured to reconstruct, the tide of conquest ran westwards. It was checked at times by the might of civilisation or fanaticism, but its flow was tolerably steady and quite beyond control. Had it not been for the evolution of a still greater force on her eastern borders, the whole of Europe would have been enveloped in the coils of a Mongolian invasion. The world was saved from this calamity by the unconscious agency of Russia. It remains to trace succinctly the history of her rise, and to show how she combated the Yellow Terror, and, by a reflex action, carried the banner of European civilisation eastwards.

Long ages before the Christian era the vast plains of Eastern Europe were invaded by an Aryan race called the Veneti by Ptolemy.520 In the fourth century we find them struggling for existence with the Goths on the plains watered by the Vistula.521 They afterwards split into three branches—the Veneti proper, afterwards known as the Wends, the Antes, and Slavi. The first-named pitched their tents in north-eastern Europe, and have left indelible traces in the Baltic provinces of Prussia.522 The second spread over the plain between the Dnieper and Dniester; while the Slavs523 occupied the land between the latter river and the Vistula. Their progress was impeded for a while by contests with the Huns, but the overthrow of their fierce foes which followed the death of Attila gave full scope to their expansion. They crossed the Danube and occupied the rich country between the Adriatic and the Black Sea; then, spreading northwards, they took possession of the lake region of Pskov and Novogorod. These movements ceased in the seventh century, the close of which saw the Slavs firmly established in European Russia, Illyria, and Bulgaria. They were employed in agriculture and stock-raising, and their characteristics appear to have been much the same as those observed at the present day in the rural populations of Eastern Europe. Ancient writers agree in depicting them as being hospitable and cheerful, firmly attached to ancient customs, courageous, and fighting only in self-defence. In point of culture the Slavs of a thousand years ago failed to reach the low standard attained by their contemporaries of the West; for they were sparsely scattered over vast areas and plunged in continual warfare with aggressive neighbours. Society was organised on a patriarchal basis. The soil was held in common by the tribe or “land,” whose affairs were discussed and whose chiefs were elected at a general gathering of the members. The religion of the Slavs betrayed its Eastern origin. The supreme deity was called Bog, his wife Siwa; but there were good spirits (belbog) to be worshipped and evil ones (chernebog) to be propitiated, and every village had its patron divinity.524

It is possible to carry too far the theory on which Mr. Buckle insisted so strongly—that the destinies of a race are moulded by their physical environment; but its general truth is demonstrated by the history of Russia. The European dominions of the Tsar are an unbroken plain. They contain no mountain fastnesses serving as a refuge for inferior races, and were thus fit arenas for a struggle for existence in which the most vigorous stem of the human family was sure to survive and to expand. And then, Russia lay on the highway of commerce between the East and West. The silks, spices, and sugar of China traversed her plains on their passage to mediÆval cities, and the growth of local trade was fostered by the 35,000 miles of navigable river which the empire possesses. To this cause is due the accretion of great urban centres, which played as great a part in Muscovite history as they did in that of Western Europe. These cities were fortified to serve as rendezvous for the surrounding population in time of stress. Their government was strictly democratic; affairs being directed by a general assembly of the citizens, which elected a mayor, a commander of their trained bands, and, later, a bishop. Traders and merchants, who were the backbone of the urban population, were divided into self-governing guilds; and the city, not the individual, sent out its fleets and caravans and colonised distant regions. Each town became a nucleus of a territory whose peasant-inhabitants rendered the City Fathers the allegiance formerly paid to the tribe. With the decay of the tribal conception came radical modifications in the tenure of land. Individualism slowly triumphed over socialism; a class of agriculturists sprang up, who long remained free yeomen. But prisoners of war were reduced to slavery, and freemen who continued in service for more than a year encountered a similar fate. Hence the origin of a great body of serfs, tied down to the soil and acknowledging the mastership of their wealthier brethren. Such was the Russian township in its earlier stages of growth. It was the nidus of a self-governing republic, impelled to expand and conquer by the growth of population which follows increased material prosperity, but powerless to defend itself against foreign aggression. The consciousness of this defect led the citizens to invite soldiers of fortune to lead their militia and give organised means of repelling attack. These adventurers were styled princes (kniaz). They were called on to engage to rule according to custom and law. They were bound to keep a body of armed retainers, who were paid by a stipulated tribute.

The prince was not only the head of the executive, but the right arm of the general assembly (vetche), which still arrogated to itself the right of deciding on peace and war. He exercised judicial functions, pronouncing sentence on the findings arrived at by the jurors525 who decided civil and criminal suits, and levying the fine adjudged, which he appropriated to the maintenance of his dignity. The Russian princes of the tenth century held a position analogous to that occupied by the podestÀ of the Italian republic; and, indeed, the political evolution of the two countries for many years proceeded on parallel lines. It was reserved for Christianity, which had played so vast a part in the disintegration of the Roman Empire, to modify profoundly the relations between prince and city. The form in which this highly militant creed reached the cities of Russia was that which had ruled supreme in Byzantium. It was first preached in northern countries in the ninth century by two monks named Cyrillus and Methodus, who are still venerated as the “Apostles of the Slavs.” They are also regarded as the founders of the national literature, for they reduced the melodious accents of the Slavonic tongue to writing, and translated into it the Holy Writings and the Byzantine ritual. The seed thus sown fell upon fruitful soil; for the impulsive, dreamy character of the Slavs, a heritage from their remote Indian ancestors, was powerfully attracted by the gorgeous and rather sensual rites whose glory is still faintly shadowed in the desecrated splendours of St. Sophia. Russia soon swarmed with missionaries preaching a creed which appeals with greater force than any other to the idiosyncrasies of Aryans. The princes themselves were carried away by the movement, and paused in their career of tyranny and bloodshed to bow before the emblems of peace and goodwill to men.

In 987 Vladimir of Novogorod was baptized at Kieff526 with his warrior band. He married a Greek princess named Anna, who was a powerful ally of the priests in maintaining her half-savage husband in the path which he had adopted. The influence of these churchmen was by no means an unmixed blessing for Russia; for they brought with them conceptions of government which were wholly alien to Slav traditions. In the great Eastern Empire, which had inherited no small share of the power and glory of Rome, the chief of the state was much more than a first magistrate. He was the head of the Church, Pontifex Maximus as well as Autocrat, and exacted implicit allegiance and submission. His sovereignty was transmissible to his heirs; and a wide gulf separated the imperial family from the noblest subject. The law in Byzantium was mainly that of Rome, which regarded offences as injuries to the state and as calling for sanguinary punishments rather than compensation to the private individual aggrieved. Women there occupied a position of inferiority. They were jealously guarded, and were forbidden to show their faces in public or in the church. The Russian priests sought in a monarch of the European type a secular arm for the defence of their privileges. Their teachings were eagerly assimilated by Vladimir, who, at his death in 1015, parcelled out his domains amongst twelve sons. The new theory of kingship received a wider extension at the hands of Yaroslav the Wise, a politic sovereign whose chief care it was to elevate the status of his caste. Henceforward Kieff was regarded as the mother city, and the seat of the eldest of his kin. The other centres—Novogorod, Pskov, Smolensk, and Polotsk—were free to select their own princes, with the proviso that the chosen one must be descended from Yaroslav. But the narrow tyranny of the Church and the growth of a royal caste were not the only cankers eating into the heart of the Russian commonwealths. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the rise of the Bolars, or Boyars, a class of great proprietors descended from successful warriors, or citizens enriched by commerce, who engrossed huge tracts of soil and reduced the free cultivators to a status of bondage. Their power as councillors of the prince soon ousted that of the popular assemblies, and its expansion was furthered by the importation from Germany of the worst features of feudalism, unillumined by the tender light of chivalry. The revolution received a vast impetus by the transfer of the seat of power from Kieff to Suzdal and Rostov, peopled by the colonisation of the territories watered by the Oka and Upper Volga. The inhabitants of the Great Russia which thus took its origin were without traditions of independence, and offered their necks willingly to the feudal yoke. In the twelfth century the prince of Suzdal built the town of Vladimir and subdued Kieff, making his own metropolis the centre of Russian politics. Then, pushing their boundaries ever in advance, his people founded Nijni Novogorod at the confluence of the Oka and Volga, which soon eclipsed the glories of its namesake. Thus, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Russia was studded with republics governed by oligarchies, and resembling in most essentials those which were in process of formation in Italy. The popular liberties were already undermined by the encroachments of prince and noble, fostered, for selfish ends, by the Church; but material civilisation was on the increase, and, had it been permitted to grow on Slavonic lines, the arts which adorn and sweeten life would have found a home in Russia. This nascent culture was destroyed by an eruption of foes more ruthless than those who had completed the ruin of imperial Rome, and the clock of moral and industrial advance was put back by several centuries.

Human progress is stimulated by the tendency exhibited by population to outstrip the means of subsistence. No sooner has a community attained a certain degree of physical well-being than this great natural law comes into play. The numbers begin to press too heavily on the land, and the younger and more vigorous are driven to seek new spheres for their energies. They colonise distant lands, subdue their weaker neighbours, and the mother state becomes a centre of dominion, of luxury and its attendant arts. It is the process which gave the world the priceless boon of Greek civilisation, and made Rome a storehouse whence we moderns have drawn our principles of law and government. In the earlier centuries of our era the regions lying between the Gobi Desert and Lake Baikal were the habitat of a congeries of Mongolian tribes belonging to the Ural-Altaic family.527 They were a pastoral race, living in tents of felt and skins which they moved when the surrounding pastures had been exhausted by their flocks and herds.

The nomad instinct thus became with them a second nature, and as they were tireless horsemen and inured to hardships, it led them to carry bloodshed and rapine over neighbouring territories. In their case the tendency to spread over the face of the earth was keener far than in that of communities engaged in settled avocations. But much of their strength was expended in inter-tribal war, until a man of genius arose who knew how to reconcile discordant interests and to forge a weapon of aggression which no living force could withstand. This Napoleon of Asia was known to his contemporaries as Temuchin, and to posterity as Chingiz Khan. He was born in 1162, the son of a chieftain whose authority was supreme in the tract between the Amur and the Great Wall of China. His youth was spent in struggles for supremacy with rival chieftains, but he at length welded together the whole Mongolian race by sheer personal ascendency, and dangling before his followers the bait of plunder. Then began a career of conquest which finds no parallel save in that of his greater successor Tamerlane. He entered Khwarazm528 in 1218 at the head of three hordes,529 overran Khojend, Samarkand, Bokhara, and devastated Northern Persia. Merv, Nishapur, Herat, and other great and wealthy cities were overwhelmed in the avalanche. After penetrating far into India he returned to his darling steppes in 1225, gorged with booty. The impetus thus given to the teeming forces of disorder continued. Two lieutenants of Chingiz Khan skirted the southern shore of the Caspian and carried ruin through Georgia and the Crimea, returning by way of Bulgaria, while a third subdued nearly the whole of China. The death of Chingiz in 1227 brought no cessation to the movement. The greed of his followers was inflamed by rumours of the wealth and luxury of the Russian republics; and in 1238 his grandson, Batu Khan, headed an invading host which ravaged the central and eastern plains, and ruined Riazan, Rostov, Yaroslav, and Tver. In the following year the cities of South-Western Russia shared their fate; and then the Khan retired to his camp at Serai on the Lower Volga, where he rested awhile from rapine and slaughter. His headquarters became a centre for intrigue among the Russian princes, who were permitted to retain a certain degree of authority by their conquerors.

The Mongols, indeed, interfered but little with the internal affairs of the country. The Church was not molested, taxes were farmed out to merchants, and after a while commerce began to rear its drooping head. With it came a recrudescence of the civil struggles which had made Russia an easy prey to the invaders. The princes sought the countenance of Tartar Khans, and employed their warrior bands against neighbouring states. But the influence of the Mongols was not restricted to the arena of public affairs. It penetrated the social life of the Slav, and produced a strain which is still conspicuous in the physiognomy of every class of the population.530 It leavened the national character, implanting in Russian breasts that nomad instinct which is destined to sweep away the effete political organisations of the Asiatic continent. Intercourse with the West was not without its effects on the conquerors. Dissensions arose among them. The Golden Horde gathered round Batu Khan, and the White Horde separated from the main body. Unity of interests gave place to mutual jealousy and distrust. Batu’s brother Barak embraced Mohammedanism, and with it obtained the thin veneer of Arab civilisation. The Mongolian tent was exchanged for the walled town, and commerce grew apace. But the nomads’ strength lay in their barbarism, and the growth of luxury among them encouraged the Russians to shake off lethargy and dream of political redemption.

At the commencement of the fourteenth century Russia was parcelled out into the principalities of Suzdal, Nijni Novogorod, Riazan, and Tver. This age witnessed the rise of a fifth which was destined to subdue them all, and to become the nucleus of a world-shadowing empire. The village of Moscow had been fortified by a Dolgoroucki in the middle of the twelfth century; and its situation, at the point of intersection of many caravan routes, led to the rapid development of its wealth and population. The Church, ever alive to the advantage of recognising the imperial principle, set up its standard in a centre which promised to give full scope to its own influence. The Metropolitan migrated hither from Vladimir in 1325, taking with him a holy image of widely acknowledged efficacy, and the princes were encouraged by the wily priests to persist in a policy of weakening the adjacent states. In 1380 Prince Dmitri, finding his Mongol oppressors distracted with internecine feuds, was emboldened to refuse tribute; and, gathering a huge army, he met the enemy at Kulikovo on the Don. The conflict was indecisive; but the Russians asserted that victory had been bestowed on their arms at the intercession of the eikon which had accompanied their hosts. The claim was acquiesced in by the Russian people, and from this epoch dates the rise of Moscow. But the Mongolian incubus still weighed upon them. A great chieftain named Tokhtamish Khan arose who united the rival hordes, and in 1381 their forces obtained possession of Moscow and massacred 24,000 of its citizens. But the citadel already known as the Kremlin defied his attacks, and became the rallying-point for a state more powerful than that which had undergone a baptism of blood. And now a greater warrior appeared on the scene and became an unconscious ally of the cause of Russian independence.

Timur Leng, or Lame Timur, possessed a genius for civil administration as well as for conquest. He seized the throne of Samarkand and became undisputed master of Central Asia. Then he overran Persia and Georgia in 1369, and came to blows with the redoubtable Tokhtamish Khan. Fierce and prolonged was the struggle for supremacy, but in 1395 it ended disastrously for the western chief. After effectually breaking his rival’s power, Timur destroyed that of the Turkish Sultan Bayazid in Angora, and was on his way to subdue China when death overtook him at Otrar on the Sir Darya, or Jaxartes. With the defeat of Tokhtamish and the disappearance of Timur the Mongolian power steadily declined. In 1408 the Khan Edighei attempted to chastise rebellious Moscow, but was baffled by the ramparts of the Kremlin. The development of the vigorous capital continued under Vassili I., who purchased from the Mongolian Khan the right to reign supreme at Kieff, and afterwards subdued Rostov. He assumed the style of Great Prince, and levied tribute in return for his protection from all the cities of Muscovy. But the real founder of the Russian autocracy was Vassili III., rightly styled the Great. His ambition was fired by the promptings of the priesthood and of his Greek wife Sophia, who was a daughter of the Byzantine emperor, Constantine Paleologus. He persistently undermined the autonomy of other states; and, after adding all but Novogorod to his empire, he finally, with Mongolian aid, crushed that last stronghold of Russian independence. To Vassili the Great, Russia owes its claim to succeed the mighty emperors of the East and the grandiloquent style and title assumed by its Tsars, for he adopted the arms of Byzantium and was proclaimed Ruler of All the Russias. In 1480 he found himself strong enough to throw off the Mongolian yoke, and, when the Khan marched against Moscow with 150,000 men, he was confronted by a Russian army and was fain to abandon his enterprise. Vassili’s grandson Ivan IV., surnamed the Terrible, was crowned Tsar at Moscow in 1547. After a prolonged struggle with the haughty Boyars he shook off their influence and became, in deed as well as in name, an autocrat. Then his restless energies found vent in aggression.

He conquered Kazan and Astrakhan in 1554; but, falling a prey to insanity, he was guilty of excesses which weakened his authority and emboldened the Mongols to make a fresh bid for supremacy. The Khan Dawlat Giray appeared before Moscow in 1571 with 120,000 followers and burnt the suburbs.531 But the Kremlin again held out, and the nomads retreated to the Volga, never to return. Thus was Russia delivered from an influence which had paralysed her energies, and was free to work out her destinies. We shall see how profoundly they were affected by the action of the Mongolian restlessness on the dreamy, sluggish nature of the Slav.