In this forest land of the Northern Slays nomad pastoral peoples find conditions which are unfamiliar to them, and with which they do not know how to cope. Here the Avars and the other nomads never came, and the Northern Slays found some measure of protection in clearings comparatively easily made among the pines. Separate and isolated communities, however, and situated far to the north out of touch with the stimulating influences which had developed round the Mediterranean, they naturally were long in taking their place in the civilized world, and the first stimulus came, as might be expected, from the sea.
About 800, as the result of the expansion of the great German Empire to which we shall presently refer, the inhabitants of what are now Denmark and Scandinavia had been stimulated into activity. Charles the Great's conquest of the Saxons had forced the attention of these northern peoples to be directed southward. The minds of some were fired by desire for plunder ; others had visions of northern kingdoms where there had been but small communities, but these communities were small and isolated because food could not be obtained in any considerable amount in any one place; the younger men were accustomed to the idea of leaving the parental home; they were all accustomed to danger and hardship in obtaining the necessaries of life from sea or land. They were accustomed to thinking and acting for themselves, and by themselves, or with a few supporters ; many could lead and comparatively few could be led. There was, then, for two centuries an exodus in all directions of these Norsemen or Normans, exploring, fighting, settling, giving dynasties to England and other states.
At first destructive in all the older lands, their influence on the less civilized areas, where dwelt the Northern Slays, was constructive from the first. Novgorod, the centre most easily reached by these seamen, took pre eminence over all the other forest settlements, and the area which owed allegiance to the ruler in Novgorod gradually grew greater, till Russia extended southward to the parkland on the edge of the forest. Further it did not extend, but here it was within touch of Byzantine civilization and the Greek Church, so that the people were influenced by both.
Internal divisions natural in forest regions, where communication is difficult, caused the state to split up in the eleventh century, and sometimes one, sometimes another of the minor states was pre-eminent, but the tie connecting them, as we might expect, was but slight. Later, they passed to a greater or less extent under the control of the Mongols. Even these terrible people, however, horse-riders as they were, failed to penetrate to the old centre of Novgorod, and here in the forest there always remained the nucleus of Russia, as the nucleus of Spain remained in the Pyrenees among surroundings unfamiliar to the horse-riding Moham medans. With the decay of Mongol rule there grew up,
stimulated by the unconquered Russia to the north, near the borders of the forest, but still within the forest, the state of Muscovy round the centre of Moscow, which might act as an intermediary between the Mongols without and the Russians within forced to unite by the external pressures. Eventually, throwing off the yoke of Mongol rule, Muscovy became the centre for a real independent centralized Russia in the end of the fifteenth century. After one strong central government had been established, it did not take long to realize that the power of the steppe people lay in their union and mobility, but that their very mobility might be a source of weakness, as it arose from the fact that they had no definite centre. If a centralized settled power could organize a mobile force to meet these nomads, they could at least be brought into control. This Russia did ; within fifty years the greater part of the steppeland of what is now Southern Russia was organized under Russian rule, and by the end of the seventeenth century this rule was ex tended over the vast plains of Central Asia, which till then had been a menace to all the civilizations on the border lands. Elements which had been disturbing to civilization during the whole of history were finally removed and, further, were so organized as to become sources of energy, not means of its destruction.
Here, then, is Russia organizing the whole plain from the forest land to the North ; thereafter allowing the gradual settlement of those areas where the nomads had swept the land bare ; bringing into cultivation by means of irrigation lands where pastoral peoples could find but scanty herbage for their flocks ; driving railways over a land void of stone and therefore without the possibility of making roads ; and centralizing the whole life of many varied peoples in Moscow rather than Petrograd.
Occupying this central land of Euro-Asia, the great continent, Russia is cut off from the ocean, except on the useless frozen North, and the external policy of the country for two centuries has consisted in attempting to reach the open ocean ; now by the Gulf of Finland through the Baltic, now by the Bosporus and the Mediterranean, now across Afghanistan or Persia, now southward from her far eastern borders on the Pacific; but till the present time without great success, for west wards states had crystallized earlier into stable forms, and southwards and eastwards there lies the great and almost impassable mountain barrier. But with vast areas capable of supporting great populations and yet vacant, with a territory even now so organized as to be practically self-sufficing, occupying the heart land of the old world, and breeding men who must be brave and hardy to stand her climate, Russia is not yet at the end of her resources, and is obviously another of the Powers of the modern world.