Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
It was the Romanov dynasty that came to define modern Russia, to give mechanization
and further administrative organization to Russian imperialism, an improvement over the
somewhat romantic, ad hoc forays of medieval Muscovy. Under the three-hundred-year
rule of the Romanovs, Russia subdued Poland and Lithuania, destroyed Sweden, humbled
Napoleonic France, took back the Ukraine, expanded into the Crimea and the Balkans at
the expense of the Ottoman Turks, and both extended and formalized its hold on the Cau-
casus, Central Asia, and Siberia unto China and the Pacific. Russia recovered from reverses
in the Crimean War (1853-1856) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). And in keep-
ing with the grand theme of Russian history, that of momentous expansions and equally
momentous retreats against the backdrop of a vast, unimpeded geography, the Romanovs
lost both Poland and western Russia to Napoleon's Grande Armée in 1812, only to recover
within a few weeks and hasten a French withdrawal back to Central Europe that reduced
Napoleon's forces to ashes.
Peter the Great, who ruled Russia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
was to the Romanov dynasty what Ivan IV had been to medieval Muscovy: an extraordin-
ary individual whose actions demonstrate that geography is only part of the story. Of
course, Peter is most well known to history for his building of St. Petersburg on the
shores of the Baltic, which he began in 1703, and which entailed a grueling war against
the Swedish Empire: with Sweden invading across the Masurian Marshes in the area of
Belarus, and the Russians burning crops as part of a scorched earth policy in the dry areas,
a tactic that they would later use against both Napoleon and Hitler. And yet Peter's grand
achievement of consolidating Russia's Baltic coast, establishing a new capital there that
faced toward Europe, in an effort to change Russia's political and cultural identity, would
ultimately fail. For with conquests in every other direction, too, Russia remained more
properly a Eurasian country, arguably the archetypal one, the only one in fact, straining to
be European even as geography and the history of invasions exemplified by the Mongols
denied it that status. Alexander Herzen, the great nineteenth-century literary intellectual of
Russia, remarked:
To this day we look upon Europeans and upon Europe in the same way as provin-
cials look upon those who live in the capital, with deference and a feeling of our
own inferiority, knuckling under and imitating them, taking everything in which
we are different for a defect.
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Though Russians should have had nothing to be ashamed of, for they could only be what
they were: a people that had wrested an empire from an impossible continental landscape,
and were consequently knocking at the gates of the Levant and India, thus threatening the
empires of France and Britain. For at about the same time that Herzen wrote those words
