RUSSIA AND THE INDEPENDENT HEARTLAND - The Revenge of Geography - page 121

Ivan was indefatigable. On the heels of his victory in the south, he made war in the re-
gion of present-day Estonia and Latvia in order to secure a perch on the Baltic, but was
defeated by a combination of the Hanseatic League and the German Order of Livonia. This
crucially cut Russia off from the West, even as it was being influenced by its newly taken
lands in the Middle East and Asia.
Russia's first thrust at a continental empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries established the reputation of the Cossacks, employed by the Russian state to firm
up its position in the Caucasus. Though the word “Cossack,” or kazak , originally referred
to a freelance Tatar warrior, the Cossacks came to be individual Russians, Lithuanians, and
Poles, who, despairing of the harsh conditions on the estates of their homelands, migrated
to the Ukrainian steppes. Here amid the chaotic conditions of a former Mongol frontier,
they made their livings as thieves, traders, colonists, and mercenaries, gradually coalescing
into irregular units of Ivan's army because they were tough and came cheap. Cossack set-
tlements emerged in the river valleys, principally those of the Don and the Dnieper. 14 As it
happens, Nikolai Gogol's classic Taras Bulba , published initially in 1835 with a final ver-
sion a decade later, is a story of the Dnieper Cossacks. Gogol was a Russian nationalist but
he saw the real, primordial Russia in the Ukraine (a word meaning “borderland”), whose
unremitting and unimpeded steppes—lacking natural boundaries and drained by relatively
few navigable rivers—had made its colliding peoples warlike. Although Gogol used the
words “Russian,” “Ukrainian,” and “Cossack” to denote specific identities, he also recog-
nized that these identities overlapped (as local identities still do). 15 Gogol's story is dark
with unredemptive violence. While the utter lack of humanity portrayed in these pages is
the work of individuals making their own awful choices, it is also true that the violence of
Taras Bulba is at least partly an expression of the geography of the Russian and Ukrain-
ian steppes, where flatness, continentality, and migration routes lead to conflict and swift
changes of fortune.
Ivan IV's empire continued to expand under Boris Godunov (1598-1605), particularly
in the southeasterly direction of Stalingrad, the Urals, and the Kazakh steppe. But then
medieval Muscovy collapsed, as Kievan Rus had before it, this time with Swedes, Poles,
Lithuanians, and Cossacks carving pieces out of the carcass. Medieval Muscovy had fash-
ioned itself as the “Third Rome,” the rightful successor of both Rome itself and Con-
stantinople. Hence Muscovy's undoing, known as the Time of Troubles—the result of fac-
tionalism in the capital—made it appear that an entire world and civilization were ending.
And yet Russia was not finished, in spite of how it seemed at the time. Within a few short
years, in 1613, Michael Romanov was installed as the czar, and a new dynasty as well as a
new chapter in Russian history commenced.