Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cial intensity in the Russian north,” writes Billington. The traditional Easter greeting “was
not the bland 'Happy Easter' of the modern West, but a direct affirmation of the central fact
of sacred history, 'Christ is risen!' ” And the reply was, “In truth, risen!” This spoke not
only to the ascended Christ but to nature as well. For the long and dark winter was nearly
over, with the trees shedding snow and putting out their leaves. Eastern Orthodox Chris-
tianity contains more than a hint of paganism. And Russian communism with its Bolshev-
ik emphasis on totality was another form of Russian religion—the secular equivalent of
Orthodoxy, according to the early-twentieth-century Russian intellectual Nicolas Berdy-
aev. As the title of Billington's topic shows, the icon was a vivid reminder to the harassed
frontiersmen of the power of their Orthodox faith, and the security and higher purpose it
brought, while the axe “was the basic implement of Great Russia: the indispensable means
of subordinating the forest” to their own purposes.
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Russia's religious and communist totality, in other words, harked back to this feeling of
defenselessness in the forest close to the steppe, which inculcated in Russians, in turn, the
need for conquest. But because the land was flat, and integrally connected in its immens-
ity to Asia and the Greater Middle East, Russia was itself conquered. While other empires
rise, expand, and collapse—and are never heard from again, the Russian Empire has ex-
can never discount Russia. Russia's partial resurgence in our own age following the dissol-
ution of the Soviet Empire is part of an old story.
Russia's first great empire, and really the first great polity of Eastern Europe, was Kievan
Rus, which emerged in the middle of the ninth century in Kiev, the most southerly of the
historic cities along the Dnieper River. This allowed Kievan Rus to be in regular contact
with the Byzantine Empire to the south, facilitating the conversion of Russians to Ortho-
dox Christianity, which, as we know, would be enriched with the particular intensity that
Russians gave to it, on account of their own encounter with a wintry landscape. Geography
also decreed that Kievan Rus would demographically constitute a joining of Scandinavian
Vikings (traveling down rivers from the north) and the indigenous eastern Slavs. The poor
soils in the area meant that large tracts of land had to be conquered for the sake of a food
supply, and thus an empire began to form, which brought together two dynamic regional
forces, those of the Vikings and of the Byzantines. Russia, as a geographic and cultural
concept, was the result.
Kievan Rus perennially struggled against steppe nomads. In the mid-thirteenth century
it was finally destroyed by the Mongols under Batu Khan, Genghis's grandson. Successive
years of drought in their traditional grazing lands had driven the Mongols westward in
search of new pastures for their horses, which were the source of both their food and mo-
