Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
bility. And so, the first great attempt at Russian imperial expansion over the Eurasian heart-
land was overrun.
The result was that, through innumerable movements and countermovements, as well
as political dramas that were the stuff of human agency, Russian history shifted gradually
north to cities like Smolensk, Novgorod, Vladimir, and Moscow, with Moscow emerging
strongest in the later medieval centuries: these medieval centuries were in turn character-
ized by, as we have seen, autocracy and paranoia, which were partly the consequence of
Mongol pressure. Moscow's rise to prominence was helped by its advantageous position
for commerce, on the portage routes between the rivers in the basin of the mid- and upper
Volga. Bruce Lincoln writes: “Moscow stood at the center of the upland in which the
great rivers of European Russia had their beginnings … it was a hub from which Russia's
river highways zigged and zagged outward like the irregularly shaped spokes of a lopsided
the Tatars roamed, they concentrated on further developing the impenetrable forest tracts,
locked. To the east was only taiga, steppe, and Mongol. To the south, the Turks and Mon-
gols on the steppe denied Muscovy access to the Black Sea. To the west and northwest the
Swedes, Poles, and Lithuanians denied it access to the Baltic Sea. Ivan IV, “the Terrible”
(1553-1584), had access to only one seaboard, barely usable, in the far north: the White
Sea, an inlet of the Arctic Ocean. Threatened on all sides of the infinite plain, the Russians
had no choice but to try to break out, which they did under Ivan IV.
Ivan the Terrible is a historical figure of controversy, both a monster and folk hero,
whose sobriquet is a misleading translation of
Groznyi
, the Dread, given to him by support-
ers for his punishment of the guilty. Ivan showed that in his time and place the only antidote
to chaos was absolutism. Ivan was Russia's first great imperialist, a role that was partially
thrust on him by history and geography. For in 1453, Greek Byzantium was overrun by
the Ottoman Turks, and Greek refugees filtered north from Constantinople into Moscow,
bringing with them political, military, and administrative expertise vital to empire building.
Ivan, upon becoming czar, defeated the Kazan Tatars, which gave him access to the Urals;
while later in his reign he took a major step toward the conquest of Siberia by defeating the
Mongol khanate of Sibir near the Irtysh River, northwest of present-day Mongolia. Ivan's
cruelty and cunning summarized what his people had learned from generations of “patient
landscape was such that less than six decades later, in the early seventeenth century, Russi-
ans were at the Sea of Okhotsk, on the margins of the Pacific Ocean.
Ivan also eyed the south and southeast, specifically the Muslim khanate of Astrakhan, an
offshoot of the Golden Horde which oversaw the estuary of the Volga and the roads to the
Caucasus, Persia, and Central Asia. Here was the land of the Nogai Horde, Turkic nomads
