A Short History of Russia

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Title: A Short History of Russia

Author: Mary Platt Parmele

Release Date: October 23, 2005 [EBook #16930]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA ***

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[Frontispiece: Peter the Great.]

A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA

BY

MARY PLATT PARMELE

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1907

Copyright, 1899, 1904, 1906,

BY MARY PLATT PARMELE

PREFACE.

If this book seems to have departed from the proper ideal of historic narrative—if it is the history of a Power, and not of a People—it is because the Russian people have had no history yet. There has been no evolution of a Russian nation, but only of a vast governing system; and the words Russian Empire stand for a majestic world-power in which the mass of its people have no part. A splendidly embroidered robe of Europeanism is worn over a chaotic, undeveloped mass of semi-barbarism. The reasons for this incongruity—the natural obstacles with which Russia has had to contend; the strange ethnic problems with which it has had to deal; its triumphant entry into the family of great nations; and the circumstances leading to the disastrous conflict recently concluded, and the changed conditions resulting from it—such is the story this book has tried to tell.

M. P. P.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

Natural Conditions

Greek Colonies on the Black Sea

The Scythians

Ancient Traces of Slavonic Race

CHAPTER II.

Hunnish Invasion

Distribution of Races

Slavonic Religion

Primitive Political Conceptions

CHAPTER III.

The Scandinavian in Russia

Rurik

Oleg

Igor

Olga's Vengeance

Olga a Christian

Sviatoslaf

Russia the Champion of the Greek Empire in Bulgaria

Norse Dominance in Heroic Period

CHAPTER IV.

System of Appanages

Vladimir the Sinner Becomes Vladimir the Saint

Russia Forcibly Christianized

Causes Underlying Antagonism Between Greek and Latin Church

Russia Joined to the Greek Currents and Separated from the Latin

CHAPTER V.

Principalities

Headship of House of Rurik

Relation of Grand Prince to the Others

Civilizing Influences from Greek Sources

Cruelty not Indigenous with the Slavs

How and Whence it Came

Primitive Social Elements

The Drujina

End of Heroic Period

Andrew Bogoliubski

New Political Center at Suzdal

CHAPTER VI.

The Republic of Novgorod

Invasion of Baltic Provinces by Germans

Livonian and Teutonic Orders

Russian Territory Becomes Prussia

Mongol Invasion

Genghis Khan

Cause of Downfall

CHAPTER VII.

The Rule of the Khans

Humiliation of Princes

Novgorod the Last to Fall

Alexander Nevski

Russia Under the Yoke

CHAPTER VIII.

Lithuania

Its Union with Poland

A Conquest of Russia Intended

Daniel First Prince of Moscow

Moscow Becomes the Ecclesiastical Center

Power Gravitates Toward that State

Centralization

Dmitri Donskoi

Golden Horde Crumbling

CHAPTER IX.

Origin of Ottoman Empire

Turks in Constantinople

Moscow the Spiritual Heir to Byzantium

Ivan Married to a Daughter of the Caesars

Civilizing Streams Flowing into Moscow

Work for Ivan III.

And How He Did it

Friendly Relations with the Khans

Reply to Demand for Tribute in 1478

The Yoke Broken

CHAPTER X.

Vasili the Blind

Fall of Pskof

Splendor of Courts Ceremonial

Nature of Struggle which was Evolving

CHAPTER XI.

Ivan IV.

His Childhood

Coup d'État

Unmasking of Adashef and Silvester

A Gentle Youth Developing into a Monster

Solicitude for the Souls of his Victims

Destruction of Novgorod

England Enters Russia by a Side Door

Friendship with Elizabeth

Acquisition of Siberia

The Sobor or States-General Summoned

Ivan Slays his Son and Heir

His Death

CHAPTER XII.

Boris Godunof

The Way to Power

A Boyar Tsar of Russia

Serfdom Created

The False Dmitri

Mikhail the First Romanoff

CHAPTER XIII.

Time of Preparation

The Cossacks

Attempt of Nikon

Death of Mikhail

Alexis

Sympathizes with Charles II.

Natalia

Death of Alexis

Feodor

CHAPTER XIV.

Sophia Regent

Peter I.

Childhood

Visit to Archangel

Azof Captured

How a Navy was Built

Sentiment Concerning Reforms

A Conspiracy Nipped in the Bud

Peter Astonishes Western Europe

CHAPTER XV.

Charles XII.

Battle of Narva

St. Petersburg Founded

Mazeppa

Poltova

Peter's Marriage with Catherine

CHAPTER XVI.

Campaign against Turks

Disaster Averted

Azof Relinquished

Treaty of Pruth

Reforms

The Raskolniks

Visit to France

His Son Alexis a Traitor

His Death

CHAPTER XVII.

Catherine I.

Anna Ivanovna

Ivan VI.

Elizabeth Petrovna

French Influences Succeed the German

Peter III.

His Taking off

Catherine II.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Conditions in Poland

Victories in the Black Sea

Pugatchek the Pretender

Peasants' War

Reforms

Partition of Poland

Characteristics of Catherine and of her Reign

Her Death

CHAPTER XIX.

Paul I.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Franco-Russian Understanding

Assassination of Paul

Alexander I.

CHAPTER XX.

Plans for a Liberal Reign

Austerlitz

Alexander I. an Ally of Napoleon

Rupture of Friendship

French Army in Moscow

Its Retreat and Extinction

The Tsar a Liberator in Europe

Failure of Reforms

Araktcheef's Severities

Conspiracy at Kief

Death of Alexander I.

CHAPTER XXI.

Constantine's Renunciation

Revolt

Succession of Nicholas I.

Order Restored

Character of Nicholas

His Policy

Polish Insurrection

Reactionary Measures

Europe Excluded

Turco-Russian Understanding

Beginning of the Great Diplomatic Game

Nature of the Eastern Question

Intellectual Expansion in Russia

CHAPTER XXII.

1848 in Europe

Nicholas Aids Francis Joseph

Hungary Subjugated

Nicholas claims to be Protector of Eastern Christendom

Attempt to Secure England's Co-operation

Russia's Grievance against Turkey

His Demands

France and England in Alliance for Defense of Sultan

Allied Armies in the Black Sea

The Crimean War

Odessa

Alma

Siege of Sevastopol

Death of Nicholas I.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Alexander II.

End of Crimean War

Reaction Toward Liberalism

Emancipation of Serfs

Means by which It was Effected

Patriarchalism Retained

Hopes Awakened in Poland

Rebellion

How it was Disposed of

CHAPTER XXIV.

Reaction toward Severity

Bulgaria and the Bashi-Bazuks

Russia the Champion of the Balkan States

Turco-Russian War

Treaty of San Stefano

Sentiment in Europe

Congress of Berlin

Diplomatic Defeat of Russia

Waning Popularity of Alexander II.

CHAPTER XXV.

Emancipation a Disappointment

Social Discontent

Birth of Nihilism

Assassination of Alexander II.

The Peasants' Wreath

Alexander III.

A Joyless Reign

His Death

CHAPTER XXVI.

Nicholas II.

Russification of Finland

Invitation to Disarmament

Brief Review of Conditions

SUPPLEMENT.

Conditions Preceding Russo-Japanese War

Nature of Dispute

Results of Conflict

Peace Conference at Portsmouth

Treaty Signed

A National Assembly

Dissolution of First Russian Parliament

Present Outlook

LIST OF PRINCES.

INDEX.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

Peter the Great . . . . . . Frontispiece

The Czar Iván the Terrible and his son Iván Ivánovitch

The Coronation of the Czar Alexander III., 1883

Scene during the Russo-Japanese War:

Russian soldiers on the march in Manchuria

A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA

CHAPTER I

PRIMITIVE CONDITIONS AND RACES

The topography of a country is to some extent a prophecy of its future. Had there been no Mississippi coursing for three thousand miles through the North American Continent, no Ohio and Missouri bisecting it from east to west, no great inland seas indenting and watering it, no fertile prairies stretching across its vast areas, how different would have been the history of our own land.

Russia is the strange product of strange physical conditions. Nature was not in impetuous mood when she created this greater half of Europe, nor was she generous, except in the matter of space. She was slow, sluggish, but inexorable. No volcanic energies threw up rocky ridges and ramparts in Titanic rage, and then repentantly clothed them with lovely verdure as in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere. No hungry sea rushed in and tore her coast into fragments. It would seem to have been just a cold-blooded experiment in subjecting a vast region to the most rigorous and least generous conditions possible, leaving it unshielded alike from Polar winds in winter or scorching heat in summer, divesting it of beauty and of charm, and then casting this arid, frigid, torpid land to a branch of the human family as unique as its own habitation; separating it by natural and almost impassable barriers from civilizing influences, and in strange isolation leaving it to work out its own problem of development.

We have only to look on the map at the ragged coast-lines of Greece, Italy, and the British Isles to realize how powerful a factor the sea has been in great civilizations. Russia, like a thirsty giant, has for centuries been struggling to get to the tides which so generously wash the rest of Europe. During the earlier periods of her history she had not a foot of seaboard; and even now she possesses only a meager portion of coast-line for such an extent of territory; one-half of this being, except for three months in the year, sealed up with ice.

But Russia is deficient in still another essential feature. Every other European country possesses a mountain system which gives form and solidity to its structure. She alone has no such system. No skeleton or backbone gives promise of stability to the dull expanse of plains through which flow her great lazy rivers, with scarce energy enough to carry their burdens to the sea. Mountains she has, but she shares them with her neighbors; and the Carpathians, Caucasus, and Ural are simply a continuous girdle for a vast inclosure of plateaus of varying altitudes,[1] and while elsewhere it is the office of great mountain ranges to nourish, to enrich, and to beautify, in this strange land they seem designed only to imprison.

It is obvious that in a country so destitute of seaboard, its rivers must assume an immense importance. The history, the very life of Russia clusters about its three great rivers. These have been the arteries which have nourished, and indeed created, this strange empire. The Volga, with its seventy-five mouths emptying into the Caspian Sea, like a lazy leviathan brought back currents from the Orient; then the Dnieper, flowing into the Black Sea, opened up that communication with Byzantium which more than anything else has influenced the character of Russian development; and finally, in comparatively recent times, the Neva has borne those long-sought civilizing streams from Western Europe which have made of it a modern state and joined it to the European family of nations.

It would seem that the great region we now call Russia was predestined to become one empire. No one part could exist without all the others. In the north is the zone of forests, extending from the region of Moscow and Novgorod to the Arctic Circle. At the extreme southeast, north of the Caspian Sea and at the gateway leading into Asia, are the Barren Steppes, unsuited to agriculture or to civilized living; fit only for the raising of cattle and the existence of Asiatic nomads, who to this day make it their home.

Between these two extremes lie two other zones of extraordinary character, the Black Lands and the Arable Steppes, or prairies. The former zone, which is of immense extent, is covered with a deep bed of black mold of inexhaustible fertility, which without manure produces the richest harvests, and has done so since the time of Herodotus, at which period it was the granary of Athens and of Eastern Europe.

The companion zone, running parallel with this, known as the Arable Steppes, which nearly resembles the American prairies, is almost as remarkable as the Black Lands. Its soil, although fertile, has to be renewed. But an amazing vegetation covers this great area in summer with an ocean of verdure six or eight feet high, in which men and cattle may hide as in a forest. It is these two zones in the heart of Russia that have fed millions of people for centuries, which make her now one of the greatest competitors in the markets of the world.

It is easy to see the interdependence created by this specialization in production, and the economic necessity it has imposed for an undivided empire. The forest zone could not exist without the corn of the Black Lands and the Prairies, nor without the cattle of the Steppes. Nor could those treeless regions exist without the wood of the forests. So it is obvious that when Nature girdled this eastern half of Europe, she marked it for one vast empire; and when she covered those monotonous plateaus with a black mantle of extraordinary fertility, she decreed that the Russians should be an agricultural people. And when she created natural conditions unmitigated and unparalleled in severity, she ordained that this race of toilers should be patient and submissive under austerities; that their pulse should be set to a slow, even rhythm, in harmony with the low key in which Nature spoke to them.

It is impossible to say when an Asiatic stream began to pour into Europe over the arid steppes north of the Caspian. But we know that as early as the fifth century B. C. the Greeks had established trading stations on the northern shores of the Black Sea, and that these in the fourth century had become flourishing colonies through their trade with the motley races of barbarians that swarmed about that region, who by the Greeks were indiscriminately designated by the common name of Scythians.

The Greek colonists, who always carried with them their religion, their Homer, their love of beauty, and the arts of their mother cities, established themselves on and about the promontory of the Crimea, and built their city of Chersonesos where now is Sebastopol. They first entered into wars and then alliances with these Scythians, who served them as middle-men in trade with the tribes beyond, and in time a Graeco-Scythian state of the Bosphorus came into existence.

Herodotus in the fifth century wrote much about these so-called Scythians, whom he divides into the agricultural Scythians, presumably of the Black Lands, and the nomad Scythians, of the Barren Steppes. His extravagant and fanciful pictures of those barbarians have long been studied by the curious; but light from an unexpected source has been thrown upon the subject, and Greek genius has rescued for us the type of humanity first known in Russia.

There are now in the museum at St. Petersburg two priceless works of art found in recent years in a tomb in Southern Russia. They are two vases of mingled gold and silver upon which are wrought pictures more faithful and more eloquent than those drawn by Herodotus. These figures of the Scythians, drawn probably as early as 400 B. C., reproduce unmistakably the Russian peasant of to-day. The same bearded, heavy-featured faces; the long hair coming from beneath the same peaked cap; the loose tunic bound by a girdle; the trousers tucked into the boots, and the general type, not alone distinctly Aryan, but Slavonic. And not only that; we see them breaking in and bridling their horses, in precisely the same way as the Russian peasant does to-day on those same plains. Assuredly the vexed question concerning the Scythians is in a measure answered; and we know that some of them at least were Slavonic.

But the passing illumination produced by the approach of Greek civilization did not penetrate to the region beyond, where was a tumbling, seething world of Asiatic tribes and peoples, Aryan, Tatar, and Turk, more or less mingled in varying shades of barbarism, all striving for mastery.

This elemental struggle was to resolve itself into one between Aryan and non-Aryan—the Slav and the Finn; and this again into one between the various members of the Slavonic family; then a life-and-death struggle with Asiatic barbarism in its worst form (the Mongol), with Tatar and Turk always remaining as disturbing factors.

How, and the steps by which, the least powerful branch of the Slavonic race obtained the mastery and headship of Russia and has come to be one of the leading powers of the earth, is the story this book will try to tell.

[1] In the Tatar language the word Ural signifies girdle.

CHAPTER II

SLAVONIC RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS

In speaking of this eastern half of Europe as Russia, we have been borrowing from the future. At the time we have been considering there was no Russia. The world into which Christ came contained no Russia. The Roman Empire rose and fell, and still there was no Russia. Spain, Italy, France, and England were taking on a new form of life through the infusion of Teuton strength, and modern Europe was coming into being, and still the very name of Russia did not exist. The great expanse of plains, with its medley of Oriental barbarism, was to Europe the obscure region through which had come the Hunnish invasion from Asia.

This catastrophe was the only experience that this land had in common with the rest of Europe. The Goths had established an empire where the ancient Graeco-Scythians had once been. The overthrowing of this Gothic Empire was the beginning of Attila's European conquests; and the passage of the Hunnish horde, precisely as in the rest of Europe, produced a complete overturning. A torrent of Oriental races, Finns, Bulgarians, Magyars, and others, rushed in upon the track of the Huns, and filled up the spaces deserted by the Goths. Here as elsewhere the Hun completed his appointed task of a rearrangement of races; thus fundamentally changing the whole course of future events. Perhaps there would be no Magyar race in Hungary, and certainly a different history to write of Russia, had there been no Hunnish invasion in 375 A. D.

The old Roman Empire, which in its decay had divided into an Eastern and a Western Empire (in the fourth century), had by the fifth century succumbed to the new forces which assailed it, leaving only a glittering remnant at Byzantium.

The Eastern or Byzantine Empire, rich in pride and pretension, but poor in power, was destined to stand for one thousand years more, the shining conservator of the Christian religion (although in a form quite different from the Church of Rome) and of Greek culture. It is impossible to imagine what our civilization would be to-day if this splendid fragment of the Roman Empire had not stood in shining petrifaction during the ages of darkness, guarding the treasures of a dead past.

While these tremendous changes were occurring in the West, unconscious as toiling insects the various peoples in Russia were preparing for an unknown future. The Bulgarians were occupying large spaces in the South. The Finns, who had been driven by the Bulgarians from their home upon the Volga, had centered in the Northwest near the Baltic, their vigorous branches mingled more or less with other Asiatic