Russia

RUSSIAPart I.— General Survey of the Russian Empire.

THE Russian empire is a very extensive territory in eastern Europe and northern Asia, with an area exceeding 8,500,000 square miles, or one sixth of the land surface of the globe (one twenty-third of its whole superficies). It is, however, but thinly peopled on the average, including only one-fourteenth of the inhabitants of the earth. It is almost entirely confined to the cold and temperate zones. In Nova Zembla (Novaya Zemlya) and the Taimyr peninsula, it projects within the Arctic Circle as far as 77° 2' and 77° 40' N. lat.; while its southern extremities reach 38° 50' in Armenia, about 35° on the Afghan frontier, and 42° 30' on the coasts of the Pacific. To the west it advances as far as 20° 40' E. long, in Lapland, 18° 32' in Poland, and 29° 42' on the Black Sea; and its eastern limit—East Cape in the Behring Strait—extends to 191° E. longitude.

The Arctic Ocean—comprising the White, Barents, and

Kara Seas—and the northern Pacific, that is, the Seas of Behring, Okhotsk, and Japan, bound it in the north and east. The Baltic, with its two deep indentations, the Gulfs of Bothnia and Finland, limits it on the north-west; and two sinuous lines of frontier separate it respectively from Sweden and Norway on the north-west and from Prussia, Austria, and Roumania on the west. The southern frontier is still unsettled, and has never remained unaltered for so many as twenty consecutive years. Quite recently it has been pushed southwards, on both the western and the eastern shores of the Black Sea, parts of Roumania and Asia Minor having been annexed in 1878. In Asia, beyond the Caspian, the southern boundary of the empire remains vague; the advance into the Turcoman Steppes and Afghan Turkestan and on the Pamir plateau is still in progress. Bokhara and Khiva, though represented as vassal khanates, are in reality mere dependencies of Russia. An approximately settled frontier-line begins only farther east, where the Russian and the Chinese empires meet on the borders of Eastern Turkestan, Mongolia, and Manchuria. But even there, the province of Kuldja has recently been occupied by Russia, and again restored to China; while in eastern Mongolia, the great overland route from Kiakhta to Peking, via Urga, is in fact in the hands of Russia, and it is difficult to predict how far Russian influence may extend should circumstances lead it to seek a footing on the thinly-peopled plateaus of Central Asia.

Russia has no oceanic possessions, and has abandoned those she owned in last century; her islands are mere appendages of the mainland to which they belong. Such are the Aland archipelago, Hochland, Tiitters, Dagö, and Osel in the Baltic Sea; Nova Zembla, with Kolguefi and Vaigatch, in the Barents Sea; the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea; the New Siberian archipelago, and the small group of the Medvyezhii Islands off the Siberian coast; the Commandor Islands off Kamchatka; the Shantar Islands and Saghalin in the Sea of Okhotsk. The Aleutian archipelago was sold to the United States in 1867, together with Alaska, and in 1874 the Kurile Islands were ceded to Japan.

A vast variety of physical features is obviously to be expected in a territory like this, which comprises on the one side the cotton and silk regions of Turkestan and Transcaucasia, and on the other the moss and lichen-clothed Arctic tundras and the Verkhoyansk Siberian pole of cold —the dry Transcaspian deserts and the regions watered by the monsoons on the coasts of the Sea of Japan. Still, if the border regions, that is, two narrow belts in the north and south, be left out of account, a striking uniformity of physical feature prevails. High plateaus, like those of Pamir (the “Roof of the World”) or of Armenia, and high mountain chains like the snow-clad summits of the Caucasus, the Alay, the Thian-Shan, the Sayan, are met with only on the outskirts of the empire.

Viewed broadly by the physical geographer, it appears as occupying the territories to the north-west of that great plateau-belt of the old continent—the backbone of Asia —which spreads with decreasing height and width from the high tableland of Tibet and Pamir to the lower plateaus of Mongolia, and thence north-eastwards through the Vitim region to the furthest extremity of Asia. It may be said to consist of the immense plains and flat lands which extend between the plateau-belt and the Arctic Ocean, including also the series of parallel chains and hilly spurs which skirt the plateau-belt on the north-west. It extends over the plateau itself, and crosses it, beyond Lake Baikal only.

This belt—the oldest geological continent of Asia— being unfit for agriculture and for the most part unsuited for permanent settlement, while the oceanic slopes of it have from the dawn of history been occupied by a dense population, has long prevented Slavonian colonization from reaching the Pacific. Russians happened to cross it in the 17th century, only in its narrowest and most northerly part, thus reaching the Pacific on the foggy and frozen coasts of the Sea of Okhotsk; and two centuries elapsed ere, after colonizing the depressions of the plateau around Lake Baikal, the Russians crossed the plateau in a more genial zone and descended to the Pacific by the Amur, rapidly spreading farther south, up the nearly uninhabited Usuri, to what is now the Gulf of Peter the Great. In the south-western higher portions of the plateau-belt the empire has only recently planted its foot on the Pamir; as we write, it is endeavouring to get command of the lower passages which give an easy access to the Afghan portion of the plateau; while already, within the present century, it has established itself firmly on the plateaus of Armenia.

A broad belt of hilly tracts—in every respect alpine in character, and displaying the same variety of climate and organic life as alpine tracts usually do—skirts the plateau-belt throughout its length on the north and north-west, forming an intermediate region between the plateaus and the plains. The Caucasus, the Elburz, the Kopet-dagh, and Paropamisus, the intricate and imperfectly known network of mountains west of the Pamir, the Thian-Shan and Ala-tau mountain regions, and farther north-east the Altai, the still unnamed complex of Minusinsk mountains, the intricate mountain-chains of Sayan, with those of the Olekma, Vitim, and Aldan, all of which are ranged en échelon— the former from north-west to south-east, and the others from south-west to north-east—all of these belong to one immense alpine belt bordering that of the plateaus. These have long been known to Russian colonists, who, seeking to escape religious prosecutions and exactions by the state, early penetrated into and rapidly pushed their small settlements up the better valleys of these tracts, and continued to spread everywhere as long as they found no obstacles in the shape of a former population or in unfavourable climatic conditions.

As for the flat-lands which extend from the Alpine hill-foots to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and assume the character either of dry deserts in the Aral-Caspian depression, or of low table-lands in central Russia and eastern Siberia, of lake-regions in north-west Russia and Finland, or of marshy prairies in western Siberia, and of

tundras in the far north,—their monotonous surfaces are diversified by only a few, and these for most part low, hilly tracts. Recently emerged from the Post-Pliocene sea, or cleared of their ice-sheet coverings, they preserve the very same features over immense stretches; and the few portions that rise above the general elevation have more the character of broad and gentle swellings than of mountain-chains. Of this class are the swampy plateaus of the Kola peninsula, gently sloping southwards to the lake-regions of Finland and north-west Russia; the λ'aldai table-lands, where all the great rivers of Russia take their rise; the broad and gently-sloping meridional belt of the Ural Mountains; and lastly, the Taimyr, Tunguska, and Verkhoyansk ridges in Siberia, which do not reach the snow-line, notwithstanding their sub-Arctic position. As to the picturesque Bureya mountains on the Amur, the forest-clothed Sikhota-alin on the Pacific, and the volcanic chains of Kamchatka, they belong to quite another orographical world; they are the border-ridges of the terraces by which the great plateau-belt descends to the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

It is owing to these leading orographical features— divined by Carl Ritter, but only within the present day revealed by geographical research—that so many of the great rivers of the old continent are comprised within the limits of the Russian empire. Taking rise on the plateau-belt, or in its Alpine outskirts, they flow, first, like the upper Rhone and Rhine, along high longitudinal valleys formerly filled up with great lakes; next they find their way through the rocky walls; and finally they enter the lowlands, where they become navigable, and, describing great curves to avoid here and there the minor plateaus and hilly tracts, they bring into water-communication with one another places thousands of miles apart. The double river-systems of the Volga and Kama, the Obi and Irtish, the Angara and Yenisei, the Lena and Vitim on the Arctic slope, the Amur and Sungari on the Pacific slope, are instances. They were the true channels of Russian colonization.

A broad depression,—the Aral-Caspian desert—has arisen where the plateau-belt has reached its greatest height and suddenly changes its direction from a northwestern into a north-eastern one; this desert is now filled only to a small extent by the salt waters of the Caspian, Aral, and Balkash inland seas; but it bears unmistakable traces of having been during Post-Pliocene times an immense inland basin. There the Volga, the Ural, the Sir Daria, and the Oxus discharge their waters without reaching the ocean, but continue to bring life to the rapidly drying Transcaspian Steppes, or connect by their river network, as the Volga does, the most remote parts of European Russia.

The above-described features of the physical geography of the empire explain the relative uniformity of this wide territory, in conjunction with the variety of physical features on its outskirts. They explain also the rapidity of the expansion of Slavonic colonization over these thinly peopled regions; and they also throw light upon the internal cohesion of the empire, which cannot fail to strike the traveller as he crosses this immense territory, and finds everywhere the same dominating race, the same features of life. In fact, in their advance from the basins of the Volkhoff and Dnieper to the foot of the Altai and Sayan Mountains, that is, along nearly a quarter of the earth’s circumference, the Russian colonizers could always find the same physical conditions, the same forests and prairies as they had left at home, the same facilities for agriculture, only modified somewhat by minor topographical features. New conditions of climate and soil, and consequently new cultures and civilizations, the Russians met with, in their expansion towards the south and east, only beyond the

Caucasus, in the Aral-Caspian region, and in the basin of the Usuri on the Pacific coast. Favoured by these conditions, the Russians not only conquered northern Asia— they colonized it.

The total population of the Russian empire was stated at 102,000,000 by estimates made in 1878-82; but it is multiplying rapidly, and, as the surplus of births over deaths reaches nearly 1,250,000 every year, it must now be somewhat more than 106 millions.

Within the empire a very great diversity of nationalities is comprised, due to the amalgamation or absorption by the Slavonian race of a variety of Ural-Altaic stems, of Turco-Tartars, Turco-Mongolians, and various Caucasian stems. Statistics as to their relative strength are still very imperfect, and their ethnical relations have not as yet been completely determined; but, considered broadly, they may be classified as follows:—

A. The Letto-Slavonians comprise ( a ) the Lithuanians and Letts on the lower Niemen and Düna, and ( b ) the Slavonians, that is, the Poles on the Vistula and Niemen and the Russians—Great, Little, and White—whose proper abodes are in European Russia, south of a line drawn from the Gulf of Finland to the middle Volga. Spreading from this region towards the north-east, east, and south-east, they have colonized north-east Russia, the Ural region, Caucasus, Siberia, and large parts of the Kirghiz Steppe,—the leading feature of their colonization having always been penetration in compact masses among the original inhabitants. Thus, on northern Caucasus the Russians (chiefly Little Russians) already constitute a compact rural population of nearly 1,500,000, that is, about a quarter of the total population of Caucasia. In Western Siberia the Great Russians already number more than 2,300,000 agriculturists, constituting four-fifths of the entire population; in Eastern Siberia they number more than 1,000,000, that is, probably more than the original inhabitants; and the Kirghiz Steppe has also begun rapidly to be colonized within the last twenty years. It is only in the more densely peopled Turkestan, and in the recently annexed Transcaspian region, that Russian settlers continue to bear but a small proportion to the natives (who are more than 4,600,000 strong). The Slavonians altogether number more than 75,000,000, of which number 5,600,000 are Poles.

Swedes (310,000), Germans (1,240,000), Roumanians, Serbs, <kc., may number altogether about 2,500,000.

B. A great variety of populations belonging to the Caucasian race, but not yet well classified, some of which are considered to be remainders of formerly larger nationalities pushed aside into the mountain tracts during their migrations, are met with on Caucasus. Such are the Georgians, Ossetes, Lesghians, who fall little short of 2,500,000, and the Armenians, about 1,000,000.

C. The Iranian branch is represented by some 130,000 Persians and Kurds in Caucasia and Transcaucasia, and by Tajiks in Turkestan, mixed with Turco-Tartar Sarts. The nomad Tsigans, or Gipsies, numbering nearly 12,000, may be mentioned under this head.

D. The Semitic branch consists of upwards of 3,000,000 Jews in Poland, in west and south-west Russia, and on Caucasus and in the towns of Central Asia, and of a few thousand Karaite Jews.

E. The Ural-Altaic branch comprises two great subdivisions—the Finnish and the Turco-Tartarian stems, mixed to some extent with Mongolians. The former (see below) occupy, broadly speaking, a wide stretch of territory to the north of the Slavonians, from the Baltic to the Yenisei, and include the Baltic Finns, the Northern Finns, the Volga Finns, and the Ugrians. The Russians have already spread among the last two in compact masses,

and, while some stems, like the Ostiaks, are rapidly disappearing, others, like the Mordvinians, Permians, &c., are losing their national character, and becoming assimilated to the Russians. The West Finns alone have fully maintained their national features, and happen to have constituted a nationality developing into a separate state.

The Turco-Tartars (nearly 10,000,000) comprise the Tartars, the Bashkirs, the Kirghizes, the Uzbegs, and the Turcomans of the Aral-Caspian region, the Yakuts on the Lena, and a variety of smaller stems in East Russia and Caucasia. They occupy another broad belt which extends from the Aral-Caspian depression to the eastern parts of the Arctic coast.

F. The Mongol-Manchurian stems of the Tunguses, and the Golds, and the Manchus proper, come next, occupying the eastern parts of the mountain-belt and the plateau itself in Siberia, the Tunguses also projecting north-westwards, so as to separate the Yakuts from their southern Turkish brethren. Small stems of the same family also pass a nomad existence in the basin of the Amur. They are rapidly diminishing in number, and can hardly be estimated at more than 50,000.

G. The Mongolian branch is represented by nearly half a million of Kalmucks on the Altai outskirts of the great plateau and around the Caspian, and by nearly 250,000 Buriats in and around the Baikal depression.

H. A variety of stems, not yet well classified, are met with on the Pacific coasts. Such are the Tchuktchies, the Kamchadales, the Koryaks in the north-east, the Ghilyaks on the Amur, and the Ainos in Saghalin.

Statistics of the relative strength of different nationalities in the Russian empire, which, however, must be considered only as rough estimates, are given (in millions) in the following table (I.) :— [table]

The area and population of the various divisions of the Russian empire are given in the following table :— [table]

[table]

Of the areas given in the table, the following (298,636 square miles) are occupied by internal waters (larger lakes and estuaries) :—

The islands included in the above statement have the following .areas (total 91,182 square miles) :— [table]

The Russian empire falls into two great subdivisions, the European and the Asiatic, the latter of which, representing an aggregate of nearly 6,500,000 square miles, with a population of only 16 million inhabitants, may be considered as held by colonies. The European dominions comprise European Russia, Finland, which is in fact a separate nationality treated to some extent as an allied state, and Poland, whose very name has been erased from official documents, but which nevertheless continues to pursue its own development. The Asiatic dominions comprise the following great subdivisions :—Caucasia (q.v.), under a separate governor-general; the Transcaspian region, which is under the governor-general of Caucasus; the Kirghiz Steppes; Turkestan (q.v.), under separate governors-general; Western Siberia and Eastern Siberia (see Siberia); and the Amur region, which last comprises also the Pacific coast region and Kamchatka (see Kamchatka and Maritime Province). The administrative subdivisions, with their populations, as estimated for 1882 for European Russia, Poland, and Caucasus, 1881 for Finland, and 1878-82 for the remainder (no regular census having been taken since 1858), are shown above in Table II.

The empire contains only twelve cities with a population exceeding 100,000:—St Petersburg, 929,090 (1881); Moscow, 753,469 (1884); Warsaw, 406,260 (1882); Odessa, 217,000(1882); Riga, 169,330 (1881); Kharkoff, 159,660 (1883); Kazan, 140,730 (1883); Kishineff, 130,000; Kieff, 127,250 (1874); Lodz, 113,146, in Poland (1884); Saratoff, 112,428 (1882); Tiflis, 104,020 (1883); and Tashkend, 100,000. According to the most recent returns Vilna, Orel, Rostoff, Astrakhan, Nikolaieff, Dünaburg, Tula, Samara, Taganrog, Kherson, Nijni-Novgorod, Berditcheff, Bobruisk, Zhitomir, Minsk, Vitebsk, Elisabetgrad, Reval, and Voronezh had from 94,000 to 50,000 inhabitants, while 61 towns more in European Russia, Finland, and Poland, and 20 in the Asiatic dominions, had from 50,000 to 20,000 inhabitants. The number of towns above 10,000 is considerable, but they are mostly mere administrative centres; many villages have greater importance.

Only 9,263,000 (or 9 per cent.) of the aggregate population of Russia inhabit towns, the number of which is 601 in the 50 Russian governments. The great number of the Russian towns are mere villages; their inhabitants depend on agriculture, and the houses are mostly built of wood, only 127,000 out of about 787,000 houses in towns being built of stone. Of the 68,600,000 who in 1882 formed the rural population of European Russia the greater part were settled in 555,278 villages, almost entirely built of wood; nearly one-seventieth of the houses are destroyed by fire yearly (164,400 out of 10,649,000 in 1882).

Russia is an absolute and strongly centralized monarchy. The primary unit of state organization is the village community, or mir. A number of such communities are united into volosts, whose peasant inhabitants elect an elder (yolost-noy starshina) and a peasants’ tribunal ( yolostnoy sud). Placed, however, under the uncontrolled rule of a state official—the mirovoyposrednik— and of the police, the elder of the volost and his clerk have become mere organs of the local police and tax-gatherers, while the tribunal of the volost is at the mercy both of influential land-proprietors and of the wealthier peasants or merchants. The system of local self-government is continued in the elective district and provincial assemblies—the zemstvo— on the one hand, and on the other in the elective justices of the peace (mirovoy sudia), whose periodical gatherings (mirovoy syezd) are courts of appeal against the decisions of the individual justices. But neither of these institutions—and least of all the zemstvo—is capable of acquiring the necessary independence. The zemstvos—one for each district, and another for the province—consist of a representative assembly (zemskoye Sobraniye) and an executive Gemskaya τιprava) nominated by the former. The sobraniye consists of three classes of delegates :—the landed proprietors (all nobles possessing more than 590 acres, and delegates from the remainder, along with delegates from the clergy in their capacity of landed proprietors); representatives of the merchants, artisans, and urban population; and representatives of the peasants, indirectly elected,—matters being usually so adjusted that this class is less numerous than the aggregate of the other two. In theory the zemstvos have large powers in relation to the incidence of taxation, as well as in matters affecting education, public health, roads, &c. But in reality they are for the most part compelled to limit themselves to the adjustment of the state taxation, which is so high that new taxes for education, sanitary purposes, and so on, must necessarily be very limited. Moreover, the decisions of the zemstvos are jealously controlled by the representative of the central Government,— the governor,—and promptly annulled whenever they manifest a different spirit from that prevailing for the time at the court. Disobedience is punished by dissolution, sometimes by administrative exile. These circumstances have helped to eliminate from the zemstvos the better elements which at first entered into their composition. The greater number of them are inspired now with the same red-tapeism as the ministerial chancelleries, or are refuges for proprietors in search of a salary. Still, in several provinces a good deal of most useful work has been done, especially educational, by those zemstvos in which the peasants are in a majority or the proprietors are inspired with a more liberal spirit; while several other zemstvos have recently made extensive and most valuable inquiries into the condition of agriculture, industry, &c.

Since 1870 the municipalities have had institutions like those of the zemstvos. All owners of houses, and tax-paying merchants, artisans, and workmen, are enrolled on lists in a descending order according to their assessed wealth. The total valuation is then divided into three equal parts, each of which elects an equal number of representatives to the duma. The executive is in the hands of an elective mayor and an u prava which consists of several members elected by the duma. Both are, in fact, functionaries under the governor, and the municipal institutions have no real independent life.

The organs of the central government in the provinces are the uryadniks (a kind of gardes-champetres) in the villages, the stanovoys and ispravniks (chiefs of the police) in the districts, and the governors (a kind of Napoleonic prefect) in each government—all invested, the uryadniks included, with powers which are the more extensive as they are totally undefined. There is also in each government a special gendarmerie under the “chief of gendarmes,” who usually is also the head of the “third section” of the Imperial Chancery. The name of the third section has been recently abolished, but the institution still continues. It has charge of the secret police of the state, and has most varied functions, such as the arrest of supposed political offenders, their exile to Siberia, the delivery of separation papers to spouses desiring divorce, and so on. Several governments are placed under special governors general, whom the recent law on the “state of siege” invests with almost dictatorial powers.

The higher administration is represented by the emperor, who unites the supreme legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and is surrounded by four distinct councils—the committee of ministers, the council of the empire, the senate, and the Holy Synod. The ministers, who are considered as executing the will of the czar, and are nominated by him, are invested with very extensive powers; their circulars for the interpretation of laws have greater weight than the laws themselves. The council of the empire, which consisted in 1881 of 64 members, nominated by the emperor, besides the ministers and several members of the imperial family, is a consultative body for matters of legislation. The senate, also nominated by the emperor, has two distinct functions. Seven “departments” of it are administrative; they promulgate the laws, examine the acts of governors, adjudicate in their conflicts with zemstvos, and, in theory, can make remonstrances to the emperor,— in fact they merely register and promulgate laws. Two other “departments” are courts of cassation. A special department, reinforced by representatives of nobility, pronounces judgment in political cases. The Holy Synod, consisting of metropolitans and bishops who sit there in turn, has the superintendence of religious affairs.

The judicial system introduced in 1864 was conceived in a very liberal spirit, which, unfortunately, has not been maintained. Thus a “preliminary instruction,” made by the “third section” in political cases, Jor by the police, has been subsequently introduced. The “judges of instruction,” irremovable by law, have not yet been nominated, their functions being discharged by substitutes entirely dependent upon the ministry. Elective justices of the peace decide in all cases involving less than 500 roubles, or less than six months’ imprisonment. Their decisions can be brought by appeal before the district gathering of the justices of the peace, and thence before the senate. All criminal cases involving severer penalties are tried by juries, whose verdicts can be set aside only by a court of cassation, but are not respected in cases having a so-called “political” aspect. Political offences are tried by tribunals composed ad hoc. Civil cases in which more than 500 roubles are involved are tried by courts of justice, with appeal to chambers of justice.

In 1879 in European Russia,—exclusive of six Lithuanian and White Russian governments,—42,530 persons were tried before the courts, and 59,600 before the justices of the peace, the convictions being respectively 27,397 and 36,742. The aggregate number of condemnations pronounced in 1882 was 46,018 in European Russia, that is, 5 - 9 condemned in each 10,000; only 4836 of them were women. On January 1, 1882, 93,108 persons were in jail; 530,307 men and 66,073 women (the latter with 30,769 children) were imprisoned during the year, while 625,280 prisoners were liberated or exiled, and on January 1, 1883, the number of prisoners in jail (excluding those of Saghalin and Caucasus) was 97,337. More than 20,000 are annually transported to Siberia.

The empire is divided for administrative purposes into governments ( guberniya) or territories ( oblast), of which there are 50 in European Russia and 10 in Poland. Each government, or territory, is divided into eight to fifteen districts Guyezd). The Asiatic dominions are divided into one lieutenancy ( namyestnitchestvo), that of Caucasia, and four general governments—Turkestan, Stepnoye (Kirghiz Steppes), East Siberia, and Amur. They comprise thirty-three governments and territories, besides a few districts GJkrug, Otdyel) in Transcaucasia and the Transcaspian region, regarded almost as separate governments. In Siberia the governors and governors-general are assisted by councils which have a consultative voice. The Baltic provinces have some peculiar institutions. Finland is a separate state, having its own finances, army, and representative institutions, with limited rights, but its ministers of war and the exterior are those of the empire, and its institutions are not always respected by the emperor.

The emperor is not the head of the church, all decisions in theological matters having to be given by the Synod. His influence, however, is very great, as the nomination of the bishops rests with him. In 1882 there were in Russia 40,569 Orthodox churches and about 14,000 chapels, with 37,318 priests, 7009 deacons, and 45,395 singers. There were also 6752 monks and 3957 aspirants, 4945 nuns and 13,803 female aspirants. The church budget was 18,974,887 roubles in 1884. The monasteries and churches are possessed of great wealth, including 2950 square miles of land (a territory greater than that of Oldenburg), an invested capital of 22,634,000 roubles, an annual subsidy of 408,000 roubles from Government, and a very great number of inns, shops, printing establishments, burial grounds, &c., with whole towns covering an aggregate area of 10 1/2 square miles. Their total annual revenue is estimated at 9,000,000 roubles.

Much still remains to be done for the diffusion of the first elements of a sound education throughout the empire; unhappily the endeavours of private persons in this field and of the zemstvos are for political reasons discouraged by the Government. There are seven universities—Dorpat, Kazan, Kharkoff, Kieff, Moscow, Odessa, and St Petersburg—to which may be added those of Warsaw and Helsingfors. In 1883 the seven Russian universities had 605 professors and 10,528 students, and there were 81 professors and 1228 students at Warsaw. The standard of teaching on the whole is high, and may be compared to that of the German universities. The students are hardworking, and generally very intelligent. Mostly sons of poor parents, they live in extreme poverty, supporting themselves chiefly by translating and by tutorial work. Severe measures have been taken in 1885 in regard to the universities. Explicit regulations for the interpretation of science have been issued, and restrictions laid upon the teaching of philosophy and natural science generally; comparative legislation has been excluded from the programmes; teaching in Russian (instead of German) has been ordered at Dorpat. The students are placed under rigorous regulations in regard to their life outside the university. About 950 students in theological academies and 2500 in higher technical schools must be added to the above.

The state of secondary education still leaves very much to be desired. There were in 1883 180 gymnasiums and progymnasiums for boys in European Russia, and 24 in the Asiatic dominions, and 27 and 10 respectively for girls; there were also 73 “real” schools in European Russia and 8 in the Asiatic dominions, and 48 normal schools in Russia and 10 in the Asiatic dominions. To these must be added the 14,800 pupils in 53 theological seminaries, and about 3000 in various secondary schools. The steady tendency of Russian society towards increasing the number of secondary schools, where instruction would be based on the study of the natural sciences, is checked by Government in favour of the classical gymnasiums. The aggregate number of schools for secondary instruction in European Russia in 1882 was 456 for boys and 384 for girls, with 107,930 male and 79,625 female scholars. Of these, 355 schools (45,303 boys and 3199 girls) give professional education.

For· primary instruction there were in 1882 in European Russia proper 28,329 schools, with 1,177,504 male and 362,471 female pupils. Of the 6,231,160 roubles expended on primary schools only 747,772 roubles were contributed by Government, the remainder being supplied by the zemstvos (2,512,113 roubles), by municipalities, or by private persons. Sunday schools and public lectures are virtually prohibited.

A characteristic feature of the intellectual movement in Russia is its tendency to extend to women the means of receiving higher instruction. The gymnasiums for girls are both numerous and good. In addition to these, notwithstanding Government opposition, a series of higher schools, where careful instruction in natural and social sciences is given, have been opened in the chief cities under the name of ‘‘Pedagogical Courses.” At St Petersburg a women’s medical academy, the examinations of which were even more searching than those of the ordinary academy (especially as regards diseases of women and children), was opened, but after about one hundred women had received the degree of M.D., it has been suppressed by Government. In several university towns there are also free teaching establishments for women, supported by subscription, with programmes and examinations equal to those of the universities. In 1882 the students numbered 914 at St Petersburg, about 500 at Moscow, and 389 at Kazan.

The natural sciences are much cultivated in Russia, especially during the last twenty years. Besides the Academy of Science, the Moscow Society of Naturalists, the Mineralogical Society, the Geographical Society, with its Caucasian and Siberian branches, the archaeological societies and the scientific societies of the Baltic provinces, all of which are of old and recognized standing, there have lately sprung up a series of new societies in connexion with each university, and their serials are yearly growing in importance, as also are those of the recently founded Moscow Society of Friends of Natural Science, the Chemico-Physical Society, and various medical, educational, and other societies. The work achieved by Russian savants, especially in biology, physiology, and chemistry, and in the sciences descriptive of the vast territory of Russia, are well known to Europe.

The finances of the empire are in a most unsatisfactory condition. Although the revenue has doubled since 18δ6, and had reached 697,980,983 roubles (£69,798,098) in 1883, the expenditure, which was estimated at 721,337,844 roubles the same year, is always in excess of the income. The national debt is rapidly augmented both by loans and by issues of paper money so depreciated as to be worth only about 60 to 63 per cent, of its nominal value. On January 1, 1884, no less than 1,085,000,000 paper roubles were in circulation; and the national debt, the paper-money included, reached about £578,000,000, inclusive of the railway debt. The great defect of Russian finance is that its direct taxes are chiefly paid by the peasantry (91 per cent, of the whole), and the revenue is chiefly based on excise duties (direct taxes, 136,105,320 roubles; excise duties on spirits, 250,291,380; duties on tobacco and sugar, 28,569,500; import duties, 101,053,000). Of the yearly revenue no less than 436,000,000 roubles are spent in interest and sinking fund on the debt, and for war purposes.

The zemstvos, which have an aggregate yearly income of about thirty million roubles, have also a yearly deficit of from three to five million roubles. The municipalities had in 1882 an income of only 40,076,748 roubles, there being only nine cities which had a budget of more than 500,000 roubles, and five above one million.

The Russian army has been completely reorganized since the Crimean War, and compulsory military service was introduced in 1874. In 1884 the strength of the army on a peace footing was 532,764 men serving with the colours, 68,786 reserve troops, 55,599 Cossacks and irregulars, 72,626 local, depot, and instruction troops, 27,468 officers, 129,736 horses, and 1844 guns. On a war footing there were 986,000 in the active army, 563,373 in the reserve, 148,057 Cossacksand irregulars, 178,450 local, depôt, and instruction troops, 41,551 officers, 366,354 horses, and 3778 guns; that is, about 1,300,000 men in field, to which number 1,000,000 untrained militia could be added in case of need. These high figures, ought, however, to be much reduced on account of the deficiencies of mobilization.

The irregular troops consist of ten voiskos— Don, Kubafi, Terek, Astrakhan, Orenburg, Ural, West Siberia, Semiryetchensk, Transbaikalia, and Amur. All the men of these voiskos between sixteen and forty-one years of age are bound to be ready for service in turn in time of peace, and to equip themselves at their own expense, train and artillery being provided by Government. In their twofold capacity as peasant settlers and a military force, these men have contributed much to the conquest of Asia.

Since 1878 compulsory military service has been introduced in Finland. The Finnish troops (nine battalions of 4833 riflemen) must bo employed, as a rule, for the defence of their own country.

Notwithstanding large recent outlays, the Russian navy is by no means adapted to the exigencies of modern warfare; much stress is therefore laid on the good organization of the torpedo flotilla. The navy consists of 358 vessels, of 196,575 tons, carrying 24,500 men and 671 guns. Only 40 of these are armoured ships, the remainder being unarmoured frigates, corvettes, and cruisers, or torpedo boats (119), while a great number are mere transports and small craft.

The extensive frontier is defended by many fortresses, chiefly on the west. Poland to the west of the Vistula remains quite unprotected, fortifications being only now in course of construction in the south-west; but the Vistula is defended by the first-class fortresses of Modlin (Novogeorgievsk), Warsaw, and Ivangorod, with Brest-Litovsk in the rear. For protecting this line in rear new fortifications are being erected. The space between Poland and the Diina is protected only by the citadel of Vilna and the marshes of the Pripet. The second line of fortresses has been erected on the Diina and Dnieper,—Riga, Diinaburg, Vitebsk, Bobruisk, and Kieffi The south-western frontier is under the protection of the advanced works of Bendery and Akerman, while the Black Sea coast is defended by Kinburn and Otchakoff at the entrances of the Dnieper and the Bug, Sebastopol in the Crimea, batteries at Odessa and Nikolaieff, and a series of minor fortifications. Formidable defensive works have been erected on the Baltic at Dünamünde, Reval, Narva, Cronstadt, Wiborg, Frederikshamn, Rohtensalm, Sveaborg, Hangoudd, and in the Aland Islands. A great number of minor forts are scattered throughout Caucasia, Transcaucasia, and Turkestan; but the Pacific coast has only earth-works at Vladivostok and Nikolaievsk.

Pakt II.—European Russia—Geography.

The administrative boundaries of European Russia, apart from Finland and Poland, broadly coincide on the whole with the natural limits of the East-Europcan plains, where they suddenly take, eastward of the Baltic Sea, a great extension towards the north. In the north it is bounded by the Arctic Ocean; the islands of Nova Zembla, Kolguefl', and Vaigatch also belong to it, but the Kara Sea is reckoned to Siberia. To the east it has the Asiatic dominions of the empire, Siberia and the Kirghiz Steppe, from both of which it is separated by the Ural Mountains, the Ural river, and the Caspian—the administrative boundary, however, Partly extending into Asia on the Siberian slope of the Urals. To the south it has the Black Sea and Caucasia, being separated from the latter by the double valley of the two Manytches—a channel which in Post-Pliocene times connected the Sea of Azoff with the Caspian. The western boundary is purely conventional: it crosses first the peninsula of Kola from the Varanger Fiord to the northern extremity of the Gulf of Bothnia, making an arbitrary deflexion towards the west; thence it runs to the Kurische Haff in the southern Baltic, and thence to the mouth of the Danube, taking a great circular sweep to the west to embrace Poland, and separating Russia from Prussia, Austrian Galicia, and Roumania.

Of this immense frontier line less than one-half is bordered by seas—nearly all of them inland seas. For it is a special feature of Russia—a feature which has impressed a special character on its history—that she has no free outlet to the high seas except on the ice-bound shores of the Arctic Ocean. Even the White Sea is merely a ramified gulf of that ocean. Another warmer gulf of the Arctic Ocean—the Varanger Fiord—separated from Russia by the uninhabitable plateaus of the peninsula of Kola, has been abandoned to Norway. The deep indentations of the Gulf of Bothnia and Finland wash the shores of Finnish territory, and it is only at the very head of the latter gulf that the Russians happen to have taken a firm foothold by erecting their capital on the marshes at the mouth of the Neva. The Gulf of Riga and the south-eastern Baltic belong also to territory which is not inhabited by Slavonians, but by Finnish stems, and by Germans. It is only very recently, within the last hundred years, that the Russians definitively took possession of the northern shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azoff. The eastern coast of the Black Sea belongs properly to Transcaucasia, a great chain of mountains separating it from Russia. But even this sea is an inland one, the only outlet of which, the Bosphorus, is in foreign hands, while the Caspian is but an immense shallow lake, bordered mostly by deserts, and possessing more importance as a link between Russia and her colonies than as a channel for intercourse with other countries.

The great territory occupied by European Russia—1600 miles in length from north to south, and nearly as much from west to east —is on the whole a broad elevated plain, ranging between 500 and 900 feet above sea-level, deeply cut into by river-valleys, and bounded on all sides by broad hilly swellings or mountains :—the lake plateaus of Finland and the Maanselka heights in the northwest; the Baltic coast-ridge and spurs of the Carpathians in the west, with a broad depression between the two, occupied by Poland; the Crimean and Caucasian mountains in the south; and the broad but moderately high swelling of the Ural Mountains in the east.

From a central plateau which comprises Tver, Moscow, Smolensk, and Kursk, and projects eastwards towards Samara, attaining an average height of 800 to 900 feet above the sea, the surface gently slopes in all directions to a level of from 300 to 500 feet. Then it again gently rises as it approaches the hilly tracts enclosing the great plain. This central swelling may be considered a continuation towards the east-north-east of the great line of upheavals of western Europe; the heights of Finland would then appear as continuations of the Scanian plateaus, and the northern mountains of Finland as continuations of the Kjolen, while the other great line of upheaval of the old continent, which runs north-west and south-east, would be represented in Russia by the Caucasus in the south and the Timan ridge of the Petchora basin in the north.

The hilly aspects of several parts of the central plateau are not due to foldings of the strata, which for the most part appear to be horizontal, but chiefly to the excavating action of rivers, whose valleys arc deeply dug out in the plateau, especially on its borders. The round flattened summits of the Valdai plateau do not rise above 1100 feet, and they present the appearance of mountains only in consequence of the depth of the valleys—the levels of the rivers which flow towards the depression of Lake Peipus being only from 200 to 250 feet above the sea. The case is Similar with the plateaus of Livonia, "Wendish Switzerland,” and Kovno, which do not exceed 1000 feet at their highest points; so also with the eastern spurs of the Baltic coast-ridge between Grodno and Minsk. The same elevation is reached by a very few flat summits of the plateau about Kursk, and farther east on the Volga about Kamysnin, where the valleys are excavated in the plateau to a depth of from 800 to 900 feet, giving quite a hilly aspect to the country. It is only in the south-west, where spurs of the Carpathians enter Volhynia, Podolia, and Bessarabia, that ridges reaching 1100 feet are met with, intersected by deep ravines.

The depressions on the borders of the central plateau thus acquire a greater importance than the small differences in its height. Such is the broad depression of the middle nVolga and lower Kama, bounded on the north by the faint swelling of the Uvaty, which is the watershed between the Arctic Ocean and the Volga basin. Another broad depression, from 250 to 500 feet above the sea, still filled by Lakes Peipus, Ladoga, Onega, Bieto-ozero, Latche, Vozhe, and many thousands of smaller ones, borders the central plateau on the north, and follows the same east-north-east direction. Only a few low swellings penetrate into it from the north-west, about Lake Onega, and reach 900 feet, while in the north-east it is enclosed by the high Timanskiyridge (1000 feet). A third depression of a similar character, occupied by the Pripet and the middle Dnieper, extends to the west of the central plateau of Russia, and penetrates into Poland. The immense lacustrine basin is now broken up into numberless ponds, lakes, and extensive marshes (see Minsk). It is bounded on the south by the broad plateaus spreading east of the Carpathians. South of 50° N. lat. the central plateau gently slopes towards the south, and we find there a fourth depression spreading west and east through Poltava and Kharkoff, but still reaching in its higher parts 500 to 700 feet. It is separated from the Black Sea by a gentle swelling which may be traced from Kremenetz to the lower Don, and perhaps farther south-east. This low swelling includes the Donetz coal-measures and the middle granitic ridges which cause the rapids of the Dnieper. Finally a fifth immense depression, which descends below the level of the ocean, extends for more than 200 miles to the north of the Caspian, comprising the lower Volga and the Ural and Emba rivers, and establishing a link between Russia and the Aral-Caspian region. The depression is continued farther north by plains below 300 feet which join the depression of the middle Volga, and extend as far as the mouth of the Oka.

The Ural Mountains present the aspect of a broad Swelling whose strata no longer exhibit the horizontality we see in Russia, and moreover are deeply cut into by rivers. It is connected in the west with broad plateaus joining those of central Russia, but its orographical relations to other upheavals must be more closely studied before they can be definitely pronounced on.

The rhomboidal peninsula of the Crimea, connected by only a narrow isthmus with the continent, is occupied by a dry plateau gently sloping north and east, and bordered in the south-east by the Yaita Mountains, the summits of which range between 4000 and 5113 feet (see Crimea and Tavrida).

Owing to the orographical structure of the East-European plains, which Iiasjust been described, the river-system has attained a very high development. Taking their origin from a series of great lacustrine basins scattered over the surface of the plateaus and differing slightly in elevation, the Russian rivers describe immense curves before reaching the sea, and flow with a very gentle gradient, receiving numerous large tributaries, which collect their waters from vast areas. Thus the Volga, the Dnieper, and the Don attain respectively a length of 2110, 1330, and 1125 miles, and their basins cover 645,000, 244,600, and about 115,000 square miles respectively. Moreover the chief rivers of Russia—the Volga, the Diina, the Dnieper, and even the Lovat and the Oka—take their rise in the north-western part of the central plateau, so close to one another that they may be said to radiate from the same marshes. The sources of the Don are ramified among the tributaries of the Oka, while the upper tributaries of the Kama join those of the Dwina and Petchora. In consequence of this, the rivers of Russia have been from remote antiquity the true channels of trade and migration, and have contributed much more to the elaboration of the national unity than any political institutions. Boats could be conveyed over flat and easy portages, from one river-basin to another, and these portages were subsequently transformed with a relatively small amount of labour into navigable canals, and even at the present day these canals have more importance for the traffic of the country than most railways. By their means the plains of the central plateau—the very heart of Russia, whose natural outlet was the Caspian—were brought into water-communication with the Baltic, and the Volga basin connected with the Gulf of Finland. The White Sea has also been brought into connexion with the central Volga basin, while the sister-river of the Volga —the Kama—became the main artery of communication with Siberia.

- It must be observed, however, that, though ranking before the rivers of western Europe in respect of length, the rivers of Russia are far behind as regards the amount of water discharged. They freeze in winter and dry up in summer, and most of them are navigable only during the spring-floods; even the great Volga becomes so shallow during the hot season that only light boats can pass its shoals.

Russia has a very large number of lakes. The aggregate area of the largest ones is stated at 25,800 square miles.

The following is a descriptive list of the principal rivers of European Russia.

A. Artic Ocean Basin.— (1) The Petchora (1025 miles) rises in the northern Urals, and enters the ocean by a large estuary at the Gulf of Petchora. Its basin, thinly peopled and available only for cattle-breeding and for hunting, is quite isolated from Russia by the Timan ridge. The river is navigable for 770 miles; grain and a variety of goods conveyed from the upper Kama are floated down, while furs, fish, and other products of the sea are shipped, up the river to be transported to Tcherdyn on the Kama. (2) The Kara (139 miles) enters the Kara Sea. (3) The Mezen (510 miles) enters the Bay of Mezen; it is navigable for 450 miles, and is the channel of a considerable export of timber. (4) The northern Dwina, or Dvina (950 miles), with a basin of about 150,000 square miles, is formed by the union of two great rivers, the Yug (270 miles) and the Sukhona (330 miles). The Sukhona has its origin in Lake Kubenskoye, in north-west Vologda, and flows rapidly southwards and eastwards, having a great number of rapids. It is navigable throughout its length, and, as Lake Kubenskoye communicates by the Alexander of Wurtemberg Canal with Lake Bietoye, it is connected with the Caspian and Baltic. The Vytchegda (685 miles), which flows west-south-west to join the Sukhona, through a woody region, thinly peopled, is navigable for 500 miles and in its upper portion is connected by a canal with the upper Kama. The Dwina flows with a very slight gradient through a broad valley, receiving many tributaries, and reaches the White Sea at Archangel by a number of branches. Notwithstanding serious obstacles offered by shallows, corn, fish, salt, and timber are largely shipped to and from Archangel. (5) The Onega (245 miles) rises in Lake Latche in the south of OIonetz, and flows into Onega Bay; it has rapids; timber is floated down in spring, and fishing and some navigation are carried on in the lower portion.

B. Baltic Basin.— (6) The Neva (46 miles) flows from Lake Ladoga into the Gulf of Finland (see Sτ Petersburg). (7) The Volkhoff (135 miles), discharging into Lake Ladoga (see Ladoga), and forming part of the Vyshnevolotsk system of canals, is an important channel for navigation; it flows from Lake Ilmen (367 square miles), which receives the Msta (250 miles), connected with the Volga, the Lovat (310 miles), and many smaller tributaries. (8) The Svir (135 miles), also discharging into Lake Ladoga, flows from Lake Onega (4925 square miles), and, being part of the Mariinsk canal system, is of great importance for navigation (see Volga). (9) The Narova (46 miles) flows out of Lake Peipus into the Gulf of Finland at Narva; it has remarkable rapids, notwithstanding which an active navigation is carried on by means of its waters. Lake Peipus, or Tchudskoye (136 square miles), receives —(10) the Velikaya (210 miles), a channel of traffic with southern Russia from a remote antiquity, but now navigable only in its lower portion, and (11) the Embach (83 miles), navigated by steamers to Dorpat. (12) The Düna, or West Dwina (577 miles), with a basin area of about 75,000 square miles, rises in the Ostashkoff district of Tver, and falls into the sea below Riga, after having described a great curve to the south. It is shallow above the rapids of Jacob-stadt, but navigation is carried on as far as Vitebsk,—corn, timber for shipbuilding, potash, flax, &c., being the principal shipments of its navigable tributaries (the Obsha, Ulla, and Kasplya); the Ulla is connected by the Berezina canals with the Dnieper. (13) The Niemen (Memel), with a course of 470 miles in Russia, rises in the north of Minsk, leaves Russia at Yurburg, and enters the Kurische Haff; rafts are floated upon it almost from its sources, and steamers ply as far as to Kovno; the export of corn and timber to Prussia, and import of fish, grocery, and manufactured ware are considerable; it is connected by the Oginski Canal with the Dnieper. The chief tributaries are the Viliya and the Shara. For (14) the Vistula, with the Bug and Narew, see Poland.

C. Black Sea Basin.— (15) The Pruth (505 miles) rises in Austrian Bukovina, and separates Russia from Roumania; it enters (16) the Danube, which flows along the Russian frontier for 100 miles below Reni, touching it with its Kiliabranch. (17) The Dniester (530 miles within Russia and about 330 miles in Austria) rises in Galicia. Light boats and rafts are floated at all points, and steamers ply on its lower portion; its estuary has important fisheries. (18) The Dnieper (1330 miles), with a basin of about 245,000 square miles, with tributaries, waters thirteen governments, of which the aggregate population numbers about 15,000,000. It also originates in the north-western parts of the central plateau, in the same marshy lakes which give rise to the Volga and Düna. It flows west, south, south-east, and south-west, and enters a bay in the north-western part of the Black Sea. In the middle navigable part of its course, from Dorogobuzh to Ekate-rinoslaff, it is an active channel for traffic. It receives several large tributaries :—on the right, the Berezina (285 miles), connected with the Diina, and the Pripet (400 miles), both most important for navigation,—as well as several smaller tributaries on which rafts are floated; on the left the Sozh (330 miles), the Desna (590 miles), one of the most important rivers of Russia, navigated by steamers as far as Bryansk, the SuIa (252 miles), the PsioI (415 miles), and the VorskIa (268 miles). Below Ekaterinoslaff the Dnieper flows for 46 miles through a series of thirteen rapids. At Kherson it enters its long (40 miles) but shallow estuary, which receives the West Bug (450 miles) and the Ingut (220 miles). The traffic of the Dnieper and its tributaries reached in 18S2 an aggregate of 12 ’ 9 million cwts. shipped and 6'7 discharged, the principal items being com, salt, and timber. (19) The Don (1125 miles), with a basin of about 120,000 square miles, and navigable for 880 miles, rises in south-eastern Tula and enters the Sea of Azoff at Rostoff by thirty mouths, after describing a great curve to the east at Tsaritsyn, approaching the Volga, with which it is connected by a railway (40 miles). Its navigation is of great importance (5 - 4 million cwts. shipped, and 5Ί discharged), especially for goods brought from the Volga, and its fisheries are extensive. The chief tributaries are the Sosna (175 miles) and North Donetz (615 miles) on the right, and the Voronezh (305 miles), Khoper (565 miles), Medvyeditsa (410 miles), and Manytch (295 miles), on the left. (20) The Ylya (192 miles), (21) the Kubah (510 miles), and (22) the Rion belong to Caucasia.

D. The Caspian Basin.— (23) The Volga, the chief river of Russia, has a length of 2110 miles, and its basin, about 648,000 square miles in area, contains a population of more than 40,000,000. It is connected with the Baltic by three systems of canals (see Volga). (24) The Great and the Little Uzen no longer reach the Caspian but lose themselves in the Babinskoye Lakes. (25) The Ural (1475 miles), in its lower part, constitutes the frontier between European Russia and the Kirghiz Steppe; it receives the Sakmara on the right and the Ilek on the left. (26) The East DIanytch (175 miles) is on the Caucasian boundary. (27) The Kuma (405 miles), (28) the Terek (360 miles), and (29) the Kura (about 650 miles), with the Arax (about 650 miles), which receives the waters of Lake Goktcha, belong to Caucasia. 1

. Almost every geological formation, from the oldest up to the most recent, is met with in Russia; but, as they are almost horizontal, they for the most part cover one Another over immense spaces, so that the lower ones appear only at the bottom of the deeper valleys, and the oldest are seen only on the borders of the great Russian plain.

At the beginning of the Palaeozoic period only a very few portions of what is now Russia—Finland, namely, and parts of Olonetz— rose above the surface of the sea; but, as the result of a gradual upheaval continued through Palaeozoic times, it is supposed that at the end of this epoch Russia was a continent not greatly differing from tho present one. In DIesozoic times the sea began again to invade it, but, while in the preceding period the oscillations resolved themselves into a gradual upheaval extending from west to east, in Mesozoic times the upheaval went on from north-west to south-east. The Dlcsozoic sea, however, did not extend beyond what is now central Russia, and did not cover the “Devonian plateau” of western Russia, which remained a continent from the Carboniferous epoch. A gradual rising of the continent followed, and was continued through Neozoic times, with perhaps a limited subsidence in tho Post-Glacial period, when the actual seas extended their narrow gulfs up the valleys now occupied by the great rivers. During the first part of the Glacial period, Russia seems to have been covered by an immense ice-sheet, which extended also over central Germany, and of which the eastern limits cannot yet be determined.

The Archaean gneisses have a broad extension in Finland, northern Russia, the Ural Mountains, and the Caucasus; they form also the back-bone of the ridge which extends from the Carpathians through southern Russia. They consist for the most part of red and grey gneisses and gτanulites, with subordinate layers of granite and granitite. Tho Finland raρpa-kivi, the Serdobol gneiss, and the Pargas and Rustiala marble (with the so-called Eozoon cana∙ dense) yield good building stone; while iron, copper, and zinc-ore are common in Finland and in the Urals. Rocks regarded as representing the Huronian system appear also in Finland, in northwestern Russia, as a narrow strip on the Urals, and in the Dnieper ridge. They consist of a series of Unfossiliferous crystalline slates. The Cambrian is represented by blue clays, ungulite sandstones, and bituminous slates in Esthonia and St Petersburg.

The Silurian system is widely developed, and it is most probable that, with the exception of the Archaean continents of Finland and the Urals, the Silurian sea covered the whole of Russia. Being concealed by more recent deposits, Silurian rocks appear on the surface only in north-western Russia (Esthonia, Livonia, St Petersburg, and on the Volkhoff), where all European subdivisions of tho system have been found, in the Timan ridge, on the western slope of the Urals, in the Pai-kho ridge, and in the islands of the Arctic Ocean. In Poland it is met with in the Kielce mountains, and in Podolia in the deeper ravines.

1 IiibHography.— The Icngthaof the rivets of European Kussiaasascertaincd by accurate measurements are given by Tillo, in Izrestia of Geogr. Soc., 1883. See also Stuckenberg, Hydr. des It. Iieichs ; Semcnoff 1 Geogr. Statist. Dictionary (the most reliable source for all the geography of Kussin). Strelbitzky 1 Super-Jicies de l'Europe ; H. Wagner, “Studien im Geb. d. Areal-Statistik,” in the Slat. Monatsschrift, viii.; official Svod Materialoff, with regard to Kussian rivers, 1876; Statistical Sbornii of the Mln. of Communications, vol. x. (freezing of Kussian rivers, and navigation). Besides the Jnilitarv-statistical descriptions of separate governments, a great variety of monographs dealing with separate rivers and basins are also available; e.g., Sidoroff, The Petchora Region, and North Russia; Hehnersen, Olonetzer Dergrerier; Turbin, The Dnieper; Kraso-Ienko 1 “The Dniester,” in Engin. Joum., 1881; Danilevsky, “Kubnft,” in Mem. Geogr. Soc., i.; Baer, Caspische Studien ; Kagozin, Volga; Keretyatkovitch 1 Volga; Mikhailoff, Rama; Ac. An Orohydrograpliieal map of Kussia in four sheets was published in 1878; sec also Tillo, Orogr. Map of Russia ; the ordinance maps of Russia; and Tillo, “Magnetical Maps of Russia," in Jzv. of Geogr. Soc., 1881 and 1883.

The Devonian dolomites, limestones, and red sandstones cover immense tracts and appear on the surface over a much wider area. From Esthonia these rocks extend north-east to Lake Onega, and south-east to Moghileff; they form the central plateau, as also the slopes of the Urals and the Petchora region. In north-western and middle Russia they contain a special fauna, and it appears that the Lower Devonian series of western Europe, represented in Poland and in the Urals, is missing in north-western and central Russia, where only the Middle and Upper Devonian divisions are found.

Carboniferous deposits cover nearly all eastern Russia, their west boundary being a line drawn from Archangel to the upper Dnieper, thence to the upper Don, and south to the mouth of the last-named river, with a long narrow gulf extending west to encircle the plateau of the Donetz. They are visible, however, only on the western borders of this region, being covered towards the east by thick Permian and Triassic strata. Russia has three large coal-bearing regions—the Moscow basin, the Donetz region, and the Urals. In the Valdai plateau there are only a few beds of mediocre coal. In the DIoscow basin, which was a broad gulf of the Carboniferous sea, coal appears as isolated inconstant seams amidst littoral deposits, the formation of which was favoured by frequent minor subsidences of the sea-coast. The Donetz coal-measures, containing abundant remains of a rich land-flora, cover nearly 16,000 square miles, and comprise a valuable stock of excellent anthracite and coal, together with iron-mines. Several smaller coal-fields on the slopes of the Urals and on the Timan ridge may be added to the above. The Polish coal-fields belong to another Carboniferous area of deposit, which extended over Silesia.

The Permian limestones and marls occupy a strip in eastern Russia of much less extent than that assigned to them on geological maps a few years ago. The variegated marls of eastern Russia, rich in salt-springs, but very poor in fossils, are now held by most Russian geologists to be Triassic. Indisputably Triassic deposits have been found only in the two Bogdo mountains in the Kirghiz Steppe [Campilcr-Sefiichtcn) and in south-western Poland.

During the Jurassic period the sea began again to invade Russia from south-east and north-west. The limits of the Russian Jurassic system may be represented by a line drawn from the double valley of the Sukhona and Vytchegda to that of the upper Volga, and thence to Kiefl', with a wide gulf penetrating towards the northwest. Within this space three depressions, all running south-west to north-east, are filled up with Upper Jurassic deposits. They are much denuded in the higher parts of this region, and appear but as isolated islands in central Russia. In the south-east all the older subdivisions arc represented, the deposits having the characters of a deep-sea deposit in the Aral-Caspian region and on the Caucasus.

The Cretaceous deposits—sands, loose sandstones, marls, and white chalk—cover the region south of a line drawn from the Niemen to the upper Oka and Don, and thence north-east to Simbirsk, with the exception of the Dnieper and Don ridge, the Yaita Dlountains, and the upper Caucasus. They are rich in grinding stone, and especially in secondary layers of phosphorites.

The Tertiary formations occupy large areas in southern Russia. The Eoccne covers wide tracts from Lithuania to Tsaritsyn, and is represented in the Crimea and Caucasus by thick deposits belonging to the same ocean, which left its deposits on the Alps and the Himalayas. Oligocene, quite similar to that of North Germany, and containing brown coal and amber, has been met with only in Poland, Courland, and Lithuania. The Miocene (Sarmatian stage) occupies extensive tracts in southern Russia, south of a line drawn through Lublin to Ekaterinoslaff and Saratoff Not only the higher chains of Caucasus and Yaita, but also the Donetz ridge, rose above the level of the DIiocene sea, which was very shallow to the north of this last ridge, while farther south it was connected both with the Vienna basin and with the Aral-Caspian. The Pliocene appears only in the coast region of the Black and Azoff Seas, but it is widely developed in the Aral-Caspian region, where, however, the Ust-Urt and the Obshchiy Syrt rose above the sea.

The thick Quateniary, or Post-Pliocene, deposits which cover nearly all Russia were for a long time a puzzle to geologists. They consist of a boulder clay in the north and of loess in the south. The former presents an intimate mixture of boulders brought from Finland and Olonetz (with an addition of local boulders) with small gravel, coarse sand, and the finest glacial mud,—the whole bearing no trace of ever having been washed up and sorted by water in motion, except in subordinate layers of glacial sand and gravel; the size of the boulders decreases on the whole from north to south, and tho boulder clay, especially in northern and central Russia, often takes the shape of ridges parallel to the direction of the motion of the boulders. Its southern limits, roughly corresponding with those established by Murchison, but not yet settled in the south-east and east, are, according to M. Nikitin, the following :— from the southern frontier of Poland to Ovrutch, Uman, Kremen-tchug, Poitava, and Razdornaya (50° N. latitude), with a curve northwards to Kozelsk (?); thence due north to Vetluga (δ8° north latitude), east to Glazova in Vyatka, and from this place towards the north and west along the watershed of the Volga and Petchora (?). South of the 50th "parallel appears the loess, with all its usual characters (land fossils, want of stratification, &c. ), showing a remarkable uniformity of composition over very large surfaces; it covers both watersheds and valleys, but chiefly the former. Such being the characters of the Quaternary deposits in Russia, the majority of Russian geologists now adopt the opinion that Russia was covered, as far as the above limits, with an immense ice-sheet which crept over central Russia and central Germany from Scandinavia and north Russia. Another ice-covering was probably advancing at the same time from the north-east, that is, from the northern part of the Urals, but the question as to the glaciation of the Urals still remains open. As to the loess, the view is more and more gaining ground which considers it as a steppe-deposit due to the drifting of fine sand and dust during a dry episode in the Pleistocene period.

The deposits of the Post-Glacial period are represented throughout Russia, Poland, and Finland, as also throughout Siberia and central Asia, by very thick lacustrine deposits, which show that, after the melting of the ice-sheet, the country was covered with immense lakes, connected by broad channels (the fjdrden of the Swedes), which later on gave rise to the actual rivers. On the outskirts of the lacustrine region, closely resembling the area of the actual continent, traces of marine deposits, not higher than 200 or perhaps even 150 feet above present sea-level, are found alike on the Arctic Sea and on the Baltic and Black Sea coasts. A deep gulf of the Arctic Sea advanced up the valley of the Dwina; and the Caspian, connected by the Manytch with the Black Sea, and by the Uzboy valley with Lake Aral, penetrated north up the Volga valley, as far as its Samara bend. Unmistakable traces show that, while during the Glacial period Russia had an arctic flora and fauna, the climate of the Lacustrine period was more genial than it is now, and a dense human population at that time peopled the shores of the numberless lakes.

The Lacustrine period has not yet reached its close in Russia. Finland and the north-west hilly plateaus are still in the same geological phase, and are dotted with numberless lakes and ponds, while the rivers continue to dig out their yet undetermined channels. But the great lakes which covered the country during the Lacustrine period have disappeared, leaving behind them immense marshes like those of the Pripet and in the north-east. The disappearance of what still remains of them is accelerated not only by the general decrease of moisture, but also by the gradual upheaval of northern Russia, which is going on from Esthonia and Finland to the Kola peninsula and Nova Zembla, at an average rate of about two feet per century. This upheaval,—the consequences of which have been felt even within the historic period, by the drainage of the formerly impracticable marshes of Novgorod and at the head of the Gulf of Finland,—together with the destruction of forests, which must be considered, however, as a quite secondary and subordinate cause, contributes towards a decrease of precipitation over Russia and towards increased shallowness of her rivers. At the same time, as the gradients of the rivers are gradually increasing on account of the upheaval of the continent, the rivers dig their channels deeper and deeper. Consequently central and especially southern Russia witness the formation of numerous miniature canons, or ovraghi (deep ravines), the summits of which rapidly advance and ramify in the loose surface deposits. As for the southern steppes, their desiccation, the consequence of the above causes, is in rapid progress.

The soil of Russia depends chiefly on the distribution of the boulder-clay and loess coverings described above, on the progress made by the rivers in the excavation of their valleys, and on the moistness of climate. Vast areas in Russia are quite unfit for cultivation, 27 per cent, of the aggregate surface of European Russia (apart from Poland and Finland) being occupied by lakes, marshes, sands, &c., 38 per cent, by forests, 14 per cent, by prairies, and only 21 per cent, being under culture. The distribution of all these is, however, very unequal, and the five following subdivisions may be established :—(1) the tundras ; (2) the forest region; (3) the middle region, comprising the surface available for agriculture and partly covered with forests; (4) the black-earth {tchernoziom) region; and (5) the Steppes. Of these the black-earth region,—about 150,000,000 acres,—which reaches from the Carpathians to the Urals, extending to the Pinsk marshes and the upper Oka in the north, is the most important. It is covered with a thick sheet of black earth, a kind of loess, mixed with 5 to 15 per cent. of humus, due to the decomposition of an herbaceous vegetation, which developed richly during the Lacustrine period on a continent relatively dry even at that epoch. On the three-fields system corn has been grown upon it for fifty to seventy consecutive years without manure. Isolated black-earth islands, less fertile of course, occur also in Courland and Kovno, in the Oka, Volga, and Kama depression, on the slopes of the Urals, and in a few patches in the north. Towards the Black Sea coast its thickness diminishes, and it disappears in the valleys. In the extensive region covered with boulder-clay the black earth appears only in isolated places, and the soil consists for the most part of a sandy clay, containing a much smaller admixture of humus. There culture is possible only with the aid of a considerable quantity of manure. Drainage finding no outlet through the thick clay covering, the soil of the forest region is often covered with extensive marshes, and the forests themselves are often mere thickets spreading over marshy ground; large tracts covered with sand appear in the west, and the admixture of boulders with the clay in the north-west renders agriculture increasingly difficult. On the Arctic coast the forests disappear, giving place to the tundras. Finally, in the south-east, towards the Caspian, on the slopes of the southern Urals and the Obshchiy Syrt, as also in the interior of the Crimea, and in several parts of Bessarabia, there are large tracts of real desert, covered with coarse sand and devoid of vegetation.

Notwithstanding the fact that Russia extends from north to south through 26 degrees of latitude, the climate of its different portions, apart from the Crimea and the Caucasus, presents a striking uniformity. The aerial currents—cyclones, anti-cyclones, and dry south-east winds—extend over wide surfaces and cross the flat plains freely. Everywhere we find a cold winter and a hot summer, both varying in their duration, but differing relatively little in the extremes of temperature recorded. From Table III. (page 76) it will be seen that there is no place in Russia, Archangel and Astrakhan included, where the thermometer does not rise in summer nearly to 86° Fahr, and descend in winter to -13° and - 22°. It is only on the Black Sea coast that we find the absolute range of temperature reduced to 108°, while in the remainder of Russia it reaches 126° to 144°, the oscillations being between - 22° to - 31°, occasionally - 54°, and 86° to 104°, occasionally, 109°. Everywhere the rainfall is small: if Finland and Poland on the one hand and Caucasus with the Caspian depression on the other be excluded, the average yearly rainfall varies between the limits of 16 and 28 inches. Everywhere, too, we find that the maximum rainfall does not take place in winter (as in western Europe) but in summer, and that the months of advanced spring are warmer than the corresponding months of autumn.

Though thus exhibiting all the distinctive features of a continental climate, Russia is not altogether exempt from the moderating influence of the ocean. The Atlantic cyclones also reach the Russian plains, mitigating to some extent the cold of the winter, and in summer bringing with them their moist winds and thunderstorms; their influence is chiefly felt in western Russia, but extends also towards and beyond the Urals. They thus check the extension and limit the duration of the cold anticyclones.

Throughout Russia the winter is of long continuance. The last days of frost are experienced for the most part in April, but also in May to the north of 55°. The spring is exceptionally beautiful in central Russia; late as it usually is, it sets in with vigour, and vegetation develops with a rapidity which gives to this season in Russia a special charm, unknown in warmer climates; the rapid melting of snow at the same time raises the rivers, and renders a great many minor streams navigable for a few weeks. But a return of cold weather, injurious to vegetation, is observed throughout central and eastern Russia between May 18 and 24, so that it is only in June that warm weather sets in definitely, reaching its maximum in the first half of July (or of August on the Black Sea coast). The summer is much warmer than might be supposed; in south-eastern Russia it is much warmer than in the corresponding latitudes of France, and really hot weather is experienced everywhere. It does not, however, prevail for long, and in the first half of September the first frosts begin to be experienced on the middle Urals; they reach western and southern Russia in the first days of October, and are felt on the Caucasus about the middle of November. The temperature descends so rapidly that a month later, about October 10 on the middle Urals and November 15 throughout Russia, the thermometer ceases to rise above the freezing-point. The rivers rapidly freeze; towards November 20 all the streams of the White Sea basin are covered with ice, and so remain for an average of 167 days; those of the Baltic, Black Sea, and Caspian basins freeze later, but about December 20 nearly all the rivers of the country are highways for sledges. The Volga remains frozen for a period varying between 150 days in the north and 90 days at Astrakhan, the Don for 100 to 110 days, and the Dnieper for 83 to 122 days. On the Diina ice prevents navigation for 125 days, and even the Vistula at Warsaw remains frozen for 77 days. The lowest temperatures are experienced in January, in which month the average is as low as 20° to 5° Fahr, throughout Russia; in the west only does it rise above 22“. On the whole, February and March continue to be cold, and their average temperatures rise above zero only on the Black Sea coast. Even at Kietf and Lugaft the average of March is below 30°, while in central Russia it is 25° to 22“, and as low as 20“ and 16“ at Samara and Orenburg.

Isotherms.— All Russia is comprised between the isotherms of 32° and 54“. On the whole, they are more remote from one another than even on the plains of North America, those of 46° to 32“ being distributed over 20 degrees of latitude. They are, on the whole, inclined towards the south in eastern Russia; thus the isotherm of 39“ runs from St Petersburg to Orenburg, and that of 35“ from Torneà to Uralsk. The inflexion is still greater for the winter isotherms. Closely following one another, they run almost north and south; thus Odessa and Königsberg are situated on the same winter isotherm of 28“; so also St Petersburg, Orel, and the mouth of the Ural river (about 20“); Mezen and Ufa (9°). The summer isotherms cross the above nearly at right angles, so that Kieff and Ufa, Warsaw and Tobolsk, Riga and the upper Kama have the same average summer temperatures of 64°, 62∣ o , and 61“.

The flora of Russia, which represents an intermediate link between those of Germany and Siberia, is strikingly uniform over a very large area. Though not poor at any given place, it appears so if the space occupied by Russia bo taken into account, only 3300 species of phanerogams and ferns being known. Four great regions may be distinguished the Arctic, the Forest, the Steppe, and the Circum-Mediterranean.

The Arctic Region comprises the tundras of the Arctic littoral beyond the northern limit of forests, which last closely follows the coast-line, with bends towards the north in the river valleys (70° N. lat. in Finland, on the Arctic Circle about Archangel, 68“ N. Iat on the Urals, 71“ on West Siberia). The shortness of the summer, the deficiency of drainage, and the thickness of the layer of soil which is frozen through in winter are the elements which go to the making of the characteristic features of the tundras. Their flora is far nearer those of northern Siberia and North America than that of central Europe. Mosses and lichens cover them, as also the birch, the dwarf willow, and a variety of shrubs; but where the soil is drier, and humus has been able to accumulate, a variety of herbaceous flowering plants, some of which arc familiar also in western Europe, make their appearance. Only from 275 to 280 phanerogams are found within this region.

The Forest Region of the Russian botanists occupies the greater part of the country, from the Arctic tundras to the Steppes, and it maintains over this immense surface a remarkable uniformity of character. M. Bcketoff subdivides it into two portions—the forest region proper, and the “Ante-Steppe” ( predstepie) The northern limit of the Ante-Steppe would be represented by a line drawn from the South Pruth through Zhitomir, Kursk, Tamboff, and Stavropol-on-Volga to the sources of the Ural. But the Winds l Moisture, Rainfall.— The investigation of the cyclones and anticyclones in Russia cannot as yet be regarded as completed. It appears, however, that in January the cyclones mostly cross north-west Russia (north of 55° and west of 40° E. long.), following directions which vary between north-east and south-east. In July they are displaced towards the north, and cross the Gulf of Bothnia, while another series of cyclones crosses middle Russia, between 50“ and 55° N. lat. The laws of the anticyclones are not yet established. The winds closely depend on the routes followed by both. Generally, however, it may be said that alike in January and in July west and south-west winds prevail in western Russia, while eastern ones are most common in south-eastern Russia; northern winds are most common on the Black Sea coast. The strength of the wind is greater, on the whole, than in the continental parts of western Europe, and it attains its maximum in winter. Terrible gales blow from October to March, especially on the southern steppes and on the tundras. Gales with snow ( burans, myatels), lasting from two to three days, or northerly gaies without snow, are especially dangerous to man and beast. The average relative moisture reaches 80 to 85 per cent. in the north, and only 70 to 81 per cent. in southern and eastern Russia. In the steppes it is only 60 per cent. during summer, and still less (57) at Astrakhan. The average amount of cloud reaches 73 to 75 per cent. on the AVhite Sea and in Lithuania, 68 to 64 in central Russia, and only 59 to 53 in the south and south-east. The amount of rainfall is shown in the subjoined table (IIL):— [table]

forest region proper itself presents a certain variety of aspect in its northern and southern parts, and must in turn be again subdivided into two parts—the coniferous region and that of the oak forests,—these being separated by a line drawn through Pskoff, Kostroma, Kazaft, and Ufa. Of course, the oak occurs farther north than this, and conifer forests extend farther south, advancing even to the border-region of the Steppes; but this line must still be considered as important. To the north of it we have dense forests, covering very largo areas, and interrupted offener by marshes than by meadows or cultivated fields. A'ast and impenetrable forests, unpassable marshes and thickets, frequent lakes, swampy meadows, with cleared and dry spaces here and there occupied by villages, are the leading features of the region. Fishing and. hunting are the important sources of livelihood. The characteristics of what may be described as the oak region, which comprises all central Russia, are totally different. The surface is undulatory; marshy meadow lands no longer exist on the flat watersheds, and only a few shelter themselves in the much deeper and broader river valleys. Forests are still numerous where not destroyed by man, but their character has changed. Conifers are rare, and the Scotch pine, which covers the sandy plains, has taken the place of the Abies ; birch, oak, and other deciduous trees compose the forests, the soil of which is dry, and the extension of which is interrupted by green prairies. Viewed from a rising ground, the landscape presents a pleasing variety of corn-field and forest, while the horizon is broken by the bell-towers of numerous villages along the banks of the streams.

Viewed as a whole, the flora of the forest region must be regarded as European-Siberian; and, though certain Species disappear towards the east, while new ones make their appearance, it maintains, on the whole, the same characters throughout from Poland to Kamchatka. Thus the beech (Fagus Sylvatica), a characteristic tree of western Europe, is unable to face the continental climate of Russia, and does not penetrate beyond Poland and the southwestern provinces, reappearing again in the Crimea. The silver fir (pichta) does not extend over Russia, and the oak does not cross the Urals. On the other hand, several Asiatic species (Siberian pine, larch, cedar) grow freely in the north-east, while several shrubs and herbaceous plants, originally from the Asiatic steppes, have spread into the south-east. But all these do not greatly alter the general characters of the vegetation. The coniferous forests of the north contain, besides conifers, the birch (Betula alba, B. pub-escens, B. fruticosa, and B. verrucosa, which extend from the Petchora to the Caucasus), the aspen, two species of alder, the mountain-ash (Sorbus aucuparia), the wild cherry-tree, and three species of willow. South of 62° - 64° north latitude appears the lime-tree, which multiplies rapidly and, notwithstanding the rapidity with which it is being exterminated, constitutes entire forests in the east (central Volga, Ufa). Farther south the ash (Fraxinus excelsior} and the oak make their appearance, the latter ( Quercus pedunculata) reaching in isolated groups and trees as far as to St Petersburg and South Finland (Q. Robur appears only in the south-west). The hornbeam is prevalent in the Ukraine, and the maple begins to appear in the south part of the coniferous region. In the forest region no fewer than 772 flowering species are found, of which 568 dicotyledons occur in the Archangel government (only 436 to the east of the White Sea, which is a botanical limit for many species). In central Russia the species become still more numerous, and, though the local floras cannot yet be considered complete, they number from 850 to 1050 species in the separate governments, and about 1600 in the best explored parts of the south-west. Corn is cultivated throughout this region. Its northern limits—which are sure to advance still farther as the population increases—almost reach the Arctic coast at the Varanger Fiord; farther east they hardly extend to the north of Archangel, and the limit is still lower towards the Urals. The northern frontier of rye closely corresponds to that of barley. Wheat is cultivated in South Finland, but in western Russia it hardly passes 58° K. lat. Its true domains are the oak region and the Steppes. Fruit-trees are cultivated as far as 62° N. in Finland, and as far as 58° in the east. Apricots and walnuts flourish at Warsaw, but in Russia they do not extend beyond 50°. Apples, pears, and cherries are grown throughout the oak region.

The Region of the Steppes, which covers all southern Russia, may be subdivided into two zones—an intermediate zone and that of the Steppes proper. The Ante-Steppe of the preceding region and the intermediate zone of the Steppes include those tracts where the West-European climate struggles with the Asiatic, and where a struggle is being carried on between the forest and the Steppe. It is comprised between the summer isotherms of 59° and 63°, being bounded on the south by a line which runs through Ekaterinoslaff and Lugan. South of this line begin the Steppes proper, which extend to the sea and penetrate to the foot of Mount Caucasus.

The Steppes proper are very fertile elevated plains, slightly undulated, and intersected by numerous ravines which are dry in summer. The undulations are scarcely apparent to the eye as it takes in a wide prospect under a blazing sun and with a deep-blue sky overhead. Not a tree is to be seen, the few woods and thickets being hidden in the depressions and deep valleys of the rivers. On the thick sheet of black earth by which the Steppe is covered a luxuriant vegetation develops in spring; after the old grass has been burned a bright green covers immense stretches, but this rapidly disappears under the burning rays of the sun and the hot easterly winds. The colouring of the Steppe changes as if by magic, and only the silvery plumes of the kovyl (Stipa pennata) wave under the wind, giving the Steppe the aspect of a bright yellow sea. For days together the traveller sees no other vegetation; even this, however, disappears as he nears the regions recently left dry from the Caspian, where salted clays covered with a few Salsolaeeae, or mere sands, take the place of the black-earth. Here begins the Aral-Caspian desert. The Steppe, however, is not so devoid of trees as at first sight appears. Innumerable clusters of wild cherries (Prunus Chamaecerasus), wild apricots (Amygdalus nana}, tchilizhnik (Caragana frutescens}, and other deep-rooted shrubs grow in the depressions of the surface and on the slopes of the ravines, giving the Steppe that charm which manifests itself in the popular poetry. Unfortunately the spread of cultivation is fatal to these oases (they are often called “islands” by the inhabitants); the axe and the plough ruthlessly destroy them.

The vegetation of the poimy and z aimischas in the marshy bottoms of the ravines, and in the valleys of streams and rivers, is totally different. The moist soil gives free development to thickets of various willows (Salieineae), bordered with dense walls of worm-wood and needle-bearing Composita, and interspersed with rich but not extensive prairies harbouring a great variety of herbaceous plants; while in the deltas of the Black Sea rivers impenetrable masses of rush (Arundx Phragmites) shelter a forest fauna. But cultivation rapidly changes the physiognomy of the Steppe. The prairies are superseded by wheat-fields, and flocks of sheep destroy the true steppe-grass (Stipa pennata), which retires farther east.

A great many species unknown in the forest region make their appearance in the Steppes. The Scotch pine still covers sandy spaces, and maple (Acer tatariea and A. campestre), the hornbeam, and the white and black poplar become quite common. The number of species of herbaceous plants rapidly increases, while beyond the Volga a variety of Asiatic species join the West-European flora.

The Circum-Mediterranean Region is represented by a narrow strip of land on the south coast of the Crimea, where a climate similar to that of the Mediterranean coast has permitted the development of a flora closely resembling that of the valley of the Arno. Of course, human cultivation has not yet acclimatized there the same variety of plants as that imported into Italy since the Romans. It has even destroyed the rich forests which sixty years ago made deer-hunting possible at Khersones. The olive and the chestnut are rare; but the beach reappears, and the Rinus Pinaster recalls the Italian pines. At a few points, such as the Nikitsky garden and Alupka, where plants have been acclimatized by human agency, the Californian Wellingtonia, the Lebanon cedar, many evergreen trees, the laurel, the cypress, and even the Anatolian palm (Chamaerops excelsa) flourish. The grass vegetation is very rich, and, according to lists still incomplete, no fewer than 1654 flowering plants are known. On the whole, the Crimean flora has little in common with that of the Caucasus, where only 244 Crimean species have as yet been found.

The fauna of European Russia does not very materially differ from that of western Europe. In the forests not many animals which have disappeared from western Europe have held their ground; while in the Urals only a few—now Siberian, but formerly also European—are met with. On the whole, Russia belongs to the same zoo-geographical region as central Europe and northern Asia, the same fauna extending in Siberia as far as the Yenisei and Lena. In south-eastern Russia, however, towards the Caspian, we find a notable admixture of Asiatic species, the deserts of that part of Russia belonging in reality rather to the Aral-Caspian depression than to Europe.

For the zoo-geographer only three separate sub-regions appear on the East-European plains—the tundras, including the Arctic islands, the forest region, especially the coniferous part of it, and the Ante-Steppe and Steppes of the black-earth region. The Ural mountains might be distinguished as a fourth sub-region, while the south coast of the Crimea and Caucasus, as well as the Caspian deserts, have their own individuality.

As for the adjoining seas, the fauna of the Arctic Ocean off the Norwegian coast corresponds, in its western parts at least, to that of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream. The White Sea and the Arctic Ocean to the east of Svyatoi Nos belong to a separate zoological region connected with, and hardly separable from, that part of the Arctic Ocean which extends along the Siberian coast as far as to about the Lena. The Black Sea, of which the fauna was formerly little known but now appears to be very rich, belongs to the Mediterranean region, slightly modified, while the Caspian partakes of the characteristic fauna inhabiting the lakes and seas of the Aral-Caspian depression.

In the region of the tundras life has to contend with such unfavourable conditions that it cannot be abundant. Still, the reindeer frequents it for its lichens, and on the drier slopes of the moraine deposits four species of lemming, hunted by the Canis lagοpus, find quarters. Two species of the white partridge (Lagopus albus, L. alpinus), the lark, one Plectrophanes, two or three species of Sylvia, one Phylloscopus, and the Motacilla must be added. Numberless aquatic birds, however, visit it for breeding purposes. Ducks, divers, geese, gulls, all the Russian species of snipes and sandpipers (Limicula, Tringa), &c., cover the marshes of the tundras, or the crags of the Lapiand coast.

The forest region, and especially its coniferous portion, though it has lost some of its representatives within historic times, is still rich. The reindeer, rapidly disappearing, is now met with only in Olonetz and Vologda; the Cervus pygargus is found everywhere, and reaches Novgorod. The weasel, the fox, and the hare are exceedingly common, as also the wolf aud the bear in the north; but the glutton (Gulo borealis), the lynx, and even the elk (C , . alecs) are rapidly disappearing. The wild boar is confined to the basin of the Diina, and the Bison europea to the Bielovyezha forests. The sable has quite disappeared, being found only on the Urals; the beaver is found at a few places in Minsk, and the otter is very rare. On the other hand, the hare (rοussαk), and also the grey partridge (Perdix cinerea), the hedgehog, the quail, the lark, the rook ( Trypanocorax frugilega), and the stork find their way into the coniferous region as the forests are cleared (Bogdanoff). The avifauna of this region is very rich; it includes all the forest and garden birds which are known in western Europe, as well as a very great variety of aquatic birds. A list, still incomplete, of the birds of St Petersburg shows 251 species. Hunting and shooting give occupation to a great number of persons. The reptiles are few. As for fishes, all those of western Europe, except the carp, are met with in the lakes and rivers in immense quantities, the characteristic feature of tho region being its wealth in Coregoni and in Salmonidae generally.

In the Ante-Steppe the forest species proper, such as Pteromys Volans and Tamias Striatus, disappear, but the common squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris), the weasel, and the bear are still met with in the forests. The hare is increasing rapidly, as well as the fox. The avifauna, of course, becomes poorer; nevertheless the woods of the Steppe, and still more the forests of the Ante-Steppe, give refuge to many birds, even to the hazel-hen ( Tetrao bonasia), the woodcock, and the black grouse (Tetrao tetrix, T. urogallus). The fauna of the thickets at the bottom of the river valleys is decidedly rich, and includes aquatic birds. The destruction of the forests and the advance of wheat into the prairies are rapidly impoverishing the Steppe fauna. The various species of rapacious animals are disappearing, together with the colonies of marmots; the insectivores are also becoming scarce in consequence of the destruction of insects, while vermin, such as the suslik (Spermo-philus, see Marmot), become a real plague, as also the destructive insects which have been a scourge to agriculture during recent years. The absence of Coregemi is a characteristic feature of the fish-fauna of the Steppes; the carp, on the contrary, reappears, and the rivers are rich in sturgeons (Acipenserides). On the Volga below Nijni Novgorod the sturgeon (Aeipenser rιιthenus), and others of the same family, as also a very great variety of ganoids and Teleostei, appear in such quantities that they give occupation to nearly 100,000 people. The mouths of the Caspian rivers are especially celebrated for their wealth of fish.

Prehistoric anthropology is a science of very recent growth in Russia; and, notwithstanding the energy displayed within that field during the last twenty years, the task of reconstructing the early history of man on the plains of eastern Europe is daily becoming more complicated as new data are brought to light. Remains of Palaeolitlhic man, contemporary with the large Quaternary mammals, are few in Russia; they are known only in Poland, Pottava, and Voronezh, and perhaps also on the Oka. Those of the later portions of the Lacustrine period, on the contrary, are so numerous that scarcely one old lacustrine basin in the regions of the Oka, the Kama, the Dnieper, not to speak of the lake-region itself, and even the White Sea coasts, can be mentioned where remains of Neolithic man have not been discovered, showing an unexpected variety of minor anthropological features, even at that remote period. The Russian plains have been, however, the scene of so many migrations of various races of mankind, the dwelling-places of prehistoric man and the routes followed during his migrations were so clearly indicated by natural conditions, and so often reoccupied, or again covered by new waves of colonization and migration, that at many places a series of deposits belonging to widely distant epochs are found superposed. Settlements belonging to the Stone age, and manufactories of stone implements, burial grounds (kostishehas) of the Bronze epoch, earthen forts (gorodishchαs), and grave mounds (kurgans)- of which last four different types are known, the earliest belonging to the Bronze period—are superposed upon and obliterate one another, so that a long series of researches is necessary in order that sound generalizations may be reached.

Two different races—a brachycephalic and a dolichocephalic—can be distinguished among tho remains of the earlier Stone period (Lacustrine period) as having inhabited the plains of eastern Europe. But they are separated by so many generations from the earliest historic times that sure conclusions regarding them are impossible; at all events, as yet Russian archaeologists are not agreed as to whether the ancestors of the Slavonians were Sarmatians only or Scythians also (Samokvasoff, Lemiere), whose skulls have nothing in common with those of the Mongolian race. The earliest points that can, comparatively speaking, be regarded as settled must thus be taken from the 1st century, when the Northern Finns migrated from the North Dwina region towards the west, and the Sarmatians were compelled to leave the region of the Don, and to cross the Russian steppes from east to west, under the pressure of the Aorzes (the Mordvinian Erzya ?) and Siraks, who in their turn were soon followed by the Huns aud the Ugur-Turkish stem of Avars.

It appears certain, moreover, that in the 7th century southern Russia was occupied by the empire of the Khazars (q.v.), who drove the Bulgarians, descendants of the Huns, from tho Don, one section of them migrating up the Volga to found there the Bulgarian empire, and the remainder migrating towards the Danube. This migration compelled the Northern Finns to advance farther west, and a mixture of Tavasts and Karelians penetrated to the south of the Gulf of Finland.

Finally, it is certain that as early as the 8th century, and probably still earlier, a stream of Slavonian colonization, advancing eastward from the Danube, was thrown on the plains of southwestern Russia. It is also most probable that another similar stream—the northern, coming from the Elbe, through the basin of the Vistula—ought to be distinguished. In the 9th century the Slavonians already occupied the Upper Vistula, the southern part of the lake region, and the central plateau in its western parts. They had Lithuanians to the west; various Finnish stems, mixed towards the south-east with Turkish stems (the present Bashkirs); the Bulgars, whose origin still remains doubtful, on the middle Volga and Kama; and to the south-east the Turkish-Mongolian world of the Petchenegs, Potovtsi, Uzes, &c.; while in the south, along the Black Sea, extended the empire of the Khazars, who kept under their rule several Slavonian steins, and perhaps also some of Finnish origin. In the 9th century also the Ugrians are supposed to have left their Ural abodes and to have crossed south-eastern and southern Russia on their way to the basin of the Danube.

If these numerous migrations on the plains of Russia be taken into account, and if we add to them the Mongolian invasion, tho migration of South Slavonians towards the Oka, tho North Slavonian colonization extending north-east towards tho Urals and thence to Siberia, the slow advance of Slavonians into Finnish territory on the Volga, and at a later period their advance into the prairies on the Black Sea, driving back the Turkish stems which occupied them,—if we consider the manifold mutual influences of these three races on one another, we shall be able to form a faint idea of the present population of European Russia.

If the Slavonians be subdivided into three branches—the western (Poles, Czechs, and Wends), the southern (Serbs, Bulgarians, Croa-tians, &c.), and the eastern (Great, Little, and White Russians), it will be seen that, with the exception of some 3,000,000 Ukrainians or Little Russians, in East Galicia and in Poland, and a few on the south slope of the Carpathians, the whole of tho East Slavonians occupy, as a compact body, western, central, and southern Russia.

Like other races of mankind, the Russian race is not a pure one. The Russians have taken in and assimilated in the course of their history a variety of Finnish and Turco-Finnish elements. Still, Craniological researches show' that, notwithstanding this fact, the Slavonian type has maintained itself with remarkable persistency— Slavonian skulls ten and thirteen centuries old exhibiting the same anthropological features as are seen in those of our own day. This may be explained by a variety of causes, of which the chief is the maintenance by the Slavonians down to a very late period of gentile organization and gentile marriages, a fact vouched for, not only in the pages of Nestor, but still more by deep traces still visible in tho face of society, the gens later on passing into the village community, and the colonization being carried on by great compact bodies. This has all along maintained the same characters. The Russians do not emigrate as isolated individuals; they migrate in whole villages. The overwhelming numbers of the Slavonians, and the very great differences in ethnical type, belief, mythology, between the Aryans and Turanians, may have contributed in the same direction, and throughout the written history of the Slavonians we see that, while a Russian man, far away from his home among Siberians, readily marries a native, the Russian woman seldom does the like. All these causes, and especially the first-mentioned, have enabled the Slavonians to maintain their ethnical features in a relatively high degree of purity, so as to assimilate foreign elements and make them reinforce or improve the ethnical type, without giving rise to half-breed races. The maintenance of the very same North-Russian type from Novgorod to the Pacific, with but minor differentiations on the outskirts—and this notwithstanding the great variety of races with which the Russians came in contact— cannot but strike the observer. But a closer observation of what is going on even now on the recently colonized confines of the empire —where whole villages live, and will continue to live, without mixing with natives, but very slowly bringing them over to the Russian manner of life, and then very slowly taking in a few female elements from them—gives the key to this prominent feature of Russian life, which is a colonization on an immense scale, and assimilation of foreigners, without in turn losing the primary ethnical features.

Not so with the national customs. There are features—the wooden house, the oven, the bath—which the Russian never abandons though lost amidst alien populations. But when settled among these the Russian—the North-Russian—readily adapts himself to many other differences. He speaks Finnish with Finns, Mongolian with Buriats, Ostiak with Ostiaks; he shows remarkable facility in adapting his agricultural practices to new conditions, without, however, abandoning the village community; he becomes hunter, cattle-breeder, or fisherman, and carries on these occupations according to local usage; he modifies his dress and adapts his religious beliefs to the locality he inhabits. In consequence of all this, the Russian peasant (not, be it noted, the trader) must be recognized as the best colonizer among the Aryans; he lives on the best terms with Ostiaks, Tartars, Buriats, and even with Red Indians when lost in the prairies of the American Far-West.

Three different branches, which may become three separate nationalities, can be distinguished among the Russians since the dawn of their history :—the Great Russians, the Little Russians (Malorusses or Ukrainians), and the White Russians (the Biélorusses). These correspond to the two currents of immigration mentioned above, the northern and southern, with perhaps an intermediate one, the proper place of the White Russians not having as yet been exactly determined. The primary distinctions between these branches have been increased during the last nine centuries by their contact with different nationalities,—the Great Russians taking in Finnish elements, the Little Russians undergoing an admixture of Turkish blood, and the White Russians submitting to Lithuanian influence. Moreover, notwithstanding the unity of language, it is easy to detect among the Great Russians themselves two separate branches, differing from one another by slight divergences Of language and type and deep diversities of national character,— the Central Russians and the Novgorodians; the latter extend throughout northern Russia into Siberia. They correspond, perhaps, to subdivisions mentioned by Nestor. It is worthy of notice, moreover, that many minor anthropological features can be distinguished both among the Great and Little Russians, depending probably on the assimilation of various minor subdivisions of the Ural-Altaians.

The Great Russians number about 42,000,000, and occupy in one block the space enclosed by a line drawn from the White Sea to the sources of the western Düna, the Dneiper, and the Donetz, and thence, through the mouth of the Sura, by the Vettuga, to Mezen. To the east of this boundary they are mixed with Turco-Finns, but in the Ural Mountains they reappear in a compact body, and extend thence through southern Siberia and along the courses of the Lena and Amur. Great Russian nonconformists are disseminated among Little Russians in Tchernigoff and Moghileff, and they reappear in greater masses in Novorossia, as also in northern Caucasia.

The Little Russians, who number about 17,000,000, occupy the Steppes of southern Russia, the south-western slopes of the central plateasu and those of the Carpathian and Lublin mountains, and the Carpathian plateau. The Sitch of the Zaporog Cossacks colonized the Steppes farther east, towards the Don, where they met with a large population of Great Russian runaways, constituting the present Don Cossacks. The Zaporog Cossacks, sent by Catherine II. to colonize the east coast of the Sea of Azoff, constituted there the Black Sea and later the Kuban Cossacks (part of whom, the Nekrasovtsy, migrated to Turkey). They have also peopled large parts of Stavropol and northern Caucasia.

The White Russians, mixed to some extent with Great and Little Russians, Poles, and Lithuanians, now occupy the upper parts of the western slope of the central plateau. They number about 4,300,000.

The Finnish stems, which in prehistoric times extended from the Obi all over northern Russia, even then were subdivided into Ugrians, Permians, Bulgarians, and Finns proper, who drove back the previous Lapp population from what is now Finland, and about the 7th century penetrated to the south of the Gulf of Finland, in the region of the Lives and Kurs, where they mixed to some extent with Lithuanians and Letts.

At present the stems of Finnish origin are represented in Russia by the following:—(α) the Western Finns; the Tavasts in central Finland; the Kvanes, in north-western Finland; the Karelians, in the east, who also occupy the lake-regions of Olonetz and Archangel, and have settlements in separate villages in Novgorod and Tveι ’; the Izhora and Vod, which are local names for the Finns on the Neva and the south-eastern coast of the Gulf of Finland; the Esthes in Esthonia and northern portion of Livonia; the Lives on the Gulf of Riga; and the Kors, mixed with the Letts; (δ) the Northern Finns, or Lapps, in northern Finland and on the Kola peninsula, and the Samoyedes in Archangel; (c) the Volga Finns, or rather the old Bulgarian branch, to which belong the Mordvinians (g ’ .r.) and perhaps the Tcheremisses in Kazan, Kostroma, and Vyatka, who are also classified by some authors with the following; ( d) the Permians, or Cis-Uralian Finns, including the Votiaks on the east of Vyatka, the Permians in Perm, the Zyrians in Vologda, Archangel, Vyatka, and Perm, and the Tcheremisses; (c) the Ugrians, or Trans-Uralian Finns, including the Voguls on both slopes of the Urals, the Ostiaks in Tobolsk and partly in Tomsk, and the Madjares, or Ugrians.

The Turco-Tartars in European Russia number about 3,600,000. The following are their chief subdivisions. (1) The Tartars, of whom three different stems must be distinguished :—(α) the Kazan Tartars on both banks of the Volga, below the mouth of the Oka, and on the lower Kama, penetrating also farther south in Ryazan, Tamboff, Samara, Simbirsk, and Penza; (δ) the Tartars of Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga; and (c) those of the Crimea, a great many of whom have recently emigrated to Turkey. There are, besides, a certain number of Tartars from the south-east in Minsk, Grodno, and Vilna. (2) The Bashkirs, who inhabit the slopes of the southern Urals, that is, the Steppes of Ufa and Orenburg, extending also into Perm and Samara. (3) The Tchuvashes, on the right bank of the Volga, in Kazan and Simbirsk. (4) The Mescheriaks, a tribe of Finnish origin which formerly inhabited the basin of the Oka, and, driven thence during the 15th century by the Russian colonizers, immigrated into Ufa and Perm, where they now live among Bashkirs, having adopted their religion and customs. (5) The Tepters, also of Finnish origin, settled among Tartars and Bashkirs, together with the Mescheriaks, also in Samara and Vyatka. They have adopted the religion and customs of the Bashkirs, from whom they can hardly be distinguished. The Bashkirs, Mescheriaks, and Tepters have rendered able service to the Russian Government against the Kirghizes, and until 1863 they constituted a separate Bashkir and Mescheriak Cossacks army, employed for service in the Kirghiz Steppe. (6) The Kirghizes, whose true abodes were in Asia, in the Ishim and Kirghiz Steppe; but one section of them crossed the Urals and occupied the Steppes between the Urals and the Volga. Only the Horde of Bukeeff inhabits European Russia, north-east of Astrakhan, the remainder belonging to Turkestan and Siberia.

The Mongolian race is represented in Russia by the Lamaite Kalmuks, who inhabit the Steppes of Astrakhan betw τ een the Volga, the Don, and the Kuma. They immigrated to the mouth of the Volga from Dzungaria, in the 17th century, driving out the Tartars and Nogais, and after many wars with the Don Cossacks, followed by treaties of mutual assistance for military excursions, one part of them was taken in by the Don Cossacks, so that even now there are among these Cossacks several Kalmuk sotnias or squadrons. They live for the most part in tents, supporting themselves by cattle-breeding, and partly by agriculture.

The Semitic race is represented in Russia by upwards of 3,000,000 Jews and 3000 Karaites. The Jews first entered Poland from Germany during the crusades, and soon spread through Lithuania, Courland, the Ukraine, and, in the 18th century, Bessarabia. The rapidity with which they peopled certain towns and whole provinces was really prodigious. Thus, from having been but a few dozens at Odessa some eighty years since, they make now one-third of its population (73,400, out of 207,000). The law of Russia prohibits them from entering Great Russia, only the wealthiest and most educated enjoying this privilege; nevertheless they are met with everywhere, even on the Urals. Their chief abodes, however, continue to be Poland, the western provinces of Lithuania, White and Little Russia, and Bessarabia. In Russian Poland they are in the proportion of 1 to 7 inhabitants. In Kovno, Vilna, Moghileff, Grodno, Volhynia, Podolia, and probably also in Bessarabia and Kherson, they constitute, on the average, 10 to 16 per cent. of the population, while in separate districts the proportion reaches 30 to 36 per cent. (50 '5 in Tchaussy). Organized as they are into a kind of community for mutual protection and mutual help (the Kahal), they soon become masters of the trade wherever they penetrate. In the villages they are mostly innkeepers, intermediaries in trade, and pawnbrokers. In many tow ’ ns most of the skilled labourers and a great many of the unskilled (for instance, the grain-porters at Odessa and elsewhere) are Jews. In the 16 western provinces of Russia they numbered 2,843,400 in 1883, and about 432,000 in five Polish provinces. Less than 600,000 of them inhabit villages, the remainder being concentrated in towns.

The Karaites differ entirely from the Jews both in worship and in mode of life. They, too, are inclined to trade, but also success fully carry on agriculture. Those inhabiting the Crimea sneak Tartar, and the few who are settled in western Russia speak Polish. They are on good terms with the Russians.

Of West Europeans, only the Germans attain considerable numbers (upwards of a million) in European Russia. In the Baltic provinces they constitute the ennobled landlord class, and that of tradesmen and artisans in towns. Considerable numbers of Germans, also tradesmen and artisans, were scattered throughout many of the larger towns of Russia as early as the 16th century, and to a much greater extent in the 18th century, German artisans having been invited by the Government to settle in Russia, and their numbers having steadily increased since. Finally, numbers of Germans were invited in 1762 to settle in southern Russia, as separate agricultural colonies, which gradually extended in the Don region and in northern Caucasia. Protected as they were by the right of self-government, exempted from military service, and endowed with considerable allotments of good land, these colonies are much wealthier than the neighbouring Russian peasants, from whom they have adopted the slowly modified village community. They are chiefly Lutherans, but many of them belong to other religious sects,—Anabaptists, Moravians, Mennonites (about 40,000). In certain districts (Akkerman, Odessa, Berdiansk, Kamyshin, Novouzensk) they constitute from 10 to 40 per cent. of the total population. The Swedes, who number about 300,000 in Finland, hardly reach 12,000 in European Russia, mostly in the Baltic provinces.

The Roumanians (Moldavians) number not less than 800,000, and are still increasing. They inhabit the governments of Bessarabia, Podolia, Kherson, and Ekaterinoslaff. In Bessarabia they constitute from one-fourth to three-fourths of the population of certain districts. On the whole, the Novorossian governments (Bessarabia, Kherson, Ekatcrinoslaff, and Taurida) exhibit the greatest variety of population. Little and Great Russians, Roumanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Germans, Greeks, Frenchmen, Poles, Tartars, and Jews are mixed together and scattered about in small colonies, especially in Bessarabia. Of course, the Greeks inhabit chiefly the towns, where they carry on trade, as also do the Armenians, scattered through the towns of southern Russia, and appearing in larger numbers only in the district of Rostoff (10 per cent. of population).

However great the variety of nationalities inhabiting European Russia, its ethnological composition is much simpler than might at first sight be supposed. The Russians—Great, Little, and White —largely prevail over all others, both numerically and as respects the territories they occupy in compact bodies. Central Russia is almost purely Great Russian, and represents a compact body of more than 30,000,000 inhabitants with but 1 to 5 per cent. of admixture of other nationalities. The governments on the Dnieper (Kieff, Volhynia, Tchernigoff, Podolia, and Pottava), as also the adjoining districts of Kharkoff, Voronezh, Kursk, and Don, are Little-Russian, or Ukrainian, with but a slight admixture of White and Great Russians, and some 12 per cent. of Jews. The Poles there number only 3 to 6 per cent. of the population—chiefly landholders—and are hated by the Ukrainians.

Moghileff, Vitebsk, and Minsk are White Russian, the Poles constituting only 3 per cent, of the population (16 in Minsk). In other Bielorussian provinces, the White Russians are mixed either with Lithuanians (Vilna), or Ukrainians (Grodno), or Great Russians (Smolensk), and their relations to Polish landlords are no better than in the Ukraine. The Lithuanians prevail in Kovno, where they are 80 per cent, of the population, the remainder being chiefly Jews(10 per cent.), Poles (3 per cent.), Great Russians (3 per cent.), Germans, &c.

In the Baltic provinces (Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland) the prevailing population is Esthonian, Curonian, or Lettish, the Germans (landlords, or tradesmen and artisans in towns) being respectively only 3 ’ 5, 6 - 8, and 7'6 per cent, of the population. In the three provinces, Riga included, they hardly reach 120,000 out of 1,800,000 inhabitants. The relations of the Esthes and Letts to their landlords are anything but friendly.

The northern governments of St Petersburg (apart from the capital), Olonetz, and Archangel contain an admixture of 12 to 28 percent, of Karelians, Samoyedes, and Zyrians, the remainder being Great Russians. In the east and south-east provinces of the Volga (Nijni, Simbirsk, Samara, Penza, and Saratoff) the Great Russians again prevail (88 to 65 per cent. ), the remainder being chiefly AIordvinians, rapidly Russifying, as also Tartars, Tehuvashes, and Bashkirs, Germans in Samara and Saratoff, and Little Russians in the last-named. Only in Kazain and Astrakhan do the Great Russians number less than one half of the aggregate population (42-43 per cent.). In the Ural provinces of Perm and Vyatka Great Russians are again in the majority (92 and 81 per cent.), the remainder being a variety of Finno-Tartars. It is only in the southern Ural governments (Uralsk, Orenburg, Ufa) that the admixture of a variety of Turco-Tartars—of Kirghizes in Uralsk (23 per cent.), Bashkirs in Orenburg and Ufa (22 and 23 per cent.), and less important stems—becomes considerable, reducing the number of Great Russians respectively to 72, 67, and 32 per cent, of the aggregate population of these three provinces.

Of the Turco-Tartars of eastern Russia, the Bashkirs often revolted against Russian rule, and the traffic in Bashkir lands, recently carried on by the Orenburg administration, certainly does not tend to reconcile them. The Tcheremisses have often joined the Bashkirs in their revolts, but are rapidly losing their nationality. As regards the other Turco-and Finno-Tartars 1 the Mordvinians really have been assimilated to the Russians; the Moslem Tartars of Kazan lived till recently on excellent terms with their Russian neighbours and would have continued to do so had no attempts been made to interfere with their land-laws.

In western Russia, while an antipathy exists between Ukrainians and Poles, the Russian Government, by its harassing interference in religious, educational, and economical matters, has become antagonistic, not only to the Poles, but also to the Ukrainians; printing in Ukrainian is prohibited, and “Russification” is being carried on among Ukrainians by the same means as those employed in Poland. The same is true with the Esthes and Letts, whom the Government, while countenancing them to some extent in their antipathy to the German aristocracy, has not yet found means to conciliate.

The relative strength of the different ethnical elements of which the population of European Russia and Poland is composed may be seen from the following figures (Table IV.). They must be regarded, however, as rough estimates only. They were originally computed by AL Rittich for an aggregate population of 69,788,240, and in the following table they have merely been increased in pro-portion to the actual population of 84,495,000. [table]

[table]

Part III. European Russia—Statistics.

Russia is on the whole a thinly-peopled country, the average - population being but 42 to the square mile. The density of population varies, however, very much in European Russia—from one inhabitant per square mile in the government of Archangel to 102 in that of Moscow (exclusive of the capital) and 138 in Podolia. Two-thirds of the whole population are concentrated upon less than one-third of the whole surface. The most thickly-peopled parts form a strip of territory which extends from Galicia through Kieff to Moscow, and comprises partly the most fertile governments of Russia and partly the manufacturing ones; next come a strip of fertile country to the south of the above and the manufacturing provinces of the upper Volga. The black-earth region has an average of 90 inhabitants per square mile; the central manufacturing region, 85; the western provinces, 79; the black-earth and clay region, 38; the black-earth Steppes, 33; the hilly tracts of the Crimea and Caucasus, 31; the forest-region proper, 26; the Steppes, 9; tħe far north, less than 2.

The rate at which the population is increasing throughout the empire is very considerable. It varies, however, very much in different parts, and even in European Russia, being almost twice as high in the fertile tracts of the south as it is in the north (1 ’ 8 to PO). The rapid increase is chiefly due to early marriages, the peasants for the most part marrying their sons at eighteen and their daughters at sixteen. The resulting high birth-rate compensates for the great mortality, and the Russian population is increasing more quickly than the Polish, Lithuanian, Finnish, or Tartar. In 1880 the marriages, births, and deaths were returned as follows (Table V.) [table]

These figures agree pretty nearly with those for a series of years (1871-78), which gave an annual surplus of 945,000 for European Russia alone. In 1882, throughout the empire—leaving out of account Caucasus and Turgai—the births numbered 4,403,555 and the deaths 3,464,404, for an estimated population of 95,565,100. But the birth-rate and death-rate were very different in Russia proper and in the Asiatic dominions; in the former they reached respectively 4 - 8 3 and 3 - 77, and in the latter only 3 - 75 and 2 - 84. The low birth-rate in Asia counterbalances the low mortality. So also within Russia proper: in the central provinces the high mortality (35 per thousand) is compensated by a high birth-rate (49), while in the western provinces, where the mortality is relatively small (27), the number of births is also the lowest (37).

On the whole, the mortality in Russia is greater than anywhere else in Europe. The lowest figures are found in Courland (20), the Baltic provinces (22), and Poland (30). Within Russia itself the rate varies between 29 and 49 (30 to 38 in towns). In 1882 the average mortality in the 13 central governments reached the exceptional figure of 62, so that there was a decrease of 1 - 7 per cent, in the aggregate population. The mortality is highest among children, only one-half of those born reaching their seventh year. From military registers it appears that of 1000 males born only 480 to 490 reach their twenty-first year, and of these only 375 are able-bodied; of the remainder, who are unfit for military service, 50 per cent, suffer from chronic diseases. Misery, insanitary dwellings, and want of food account for this high mortality, which is further increased by the want of medical help, there being in Russia with Poland only 15,348 males and 66 female surgeons, 7679 assistants, and ohe bed in hospital for every 1270 inhabitants. The hospitals are, however so unequally distributed, that in 63 governments having an aggregate country population of about 76,000,000 there were only 657 hospitals with 8273 beds, and an average of two surgeons to 100,000 inhabitants.

The rate of emigration from the Russian empire is not high. In 1871-80 the average number was 280,700 yearly, and the immigration 245,500. But within the empire itself migration to South Ural, Siberia, and Caucasus goes on extensively; figures, however, even approximate, are wanting. During the ten years 1872-81 no less than 406,180 Germans and 235,600 Austrians immigrated into Russia, chiefly to Poland and the south-western provinces.

A very great diversity of religions, including (besides numerous varieties of Christianity) Mohammedanism, Shamanism, and Buddhism, are found in European Russia, corresponding for the most part with the separate ethnological subdivisions. All Russians, with the exception of a number of White Russians who belong to the Union, profess the Greek Orthodox faith or one or other of the numberless varieties of nonconformity. The Poles and most of the Lithuanians are Roman Catholics. The Esthes and all other Western Finns, the Germans, and the Swedes are Protestant. The Tartars, the Bashkirs, and Kirghizes are Mohammedans; but the last-named have to a great extent maintained along with Mohammedanism their old Shamanism. The same holds good of the Mescheriaks, both Moslem and Christian. The Mordvinians are nearly all Greek Orthodox, as also are the Votiaks, Voguls, Tcheremisses, and Tchuvashes, but their religions are, in reality, very interesting modifications of Shamanism, under the influence of some Christian and Moslem beliefs. The Voguls, though baptized, are in fact fetichists, as much as the unconverted Samoyedes. Finally, the Kalmucks are Buddhist Lamaites.

All these religions are met with in close proximity to one another, and their places of worship often stand side by side in the same town or village without giving rise to religious disturbances. The recent outbreaks against the Jews were directed, not against the Talmudist creed, but against the trading and exploiting community of the “Kahal.” In his relations with Moslems, Buddhists, and even fetichists, the Russian peasant looks rather to conduct than to creed, the latter being in his view simply a matter of nationality. Indeed, towards paganism, at least, he is perhaps even more than tolerant, preferring on the whole to keep on good terms with pagan divinities, and in difficult circumstances— especially on travel and in hunting—not failing to present to them his offering. Any idea of proselytism is quite foreign to the ordinary Russian mind, and the outbursts of proselytizing zeal occasionally manifested by the clergy are really due to the desire for “Russification,” and traceable to the influence of the higher clergy and of the Government.

The various creeds of European Russia were estimated in 1879 as follows :—Greek Orthodox and Raskolniks, 63,835,000 (about 12,000,000 being Raskolniks); United Greeks and Armenio-Gregorians, 55,000; Roman Catholics, 8,300,000; Protestants, 2,950,000; Jews, 3,000,000; Moslems, 2,600,000; Pagans, 26,000. In 1881 the number of Greek Orthodox throughout the empire, excluding two foreign bishoprics, was estimated at 61,941,000.

Nonconformity (Raskoi) is a most important feature of Russian popular life, and its influence and prevalence have rapidly grown during the last twenty-five years.

When, towards the beginning of the 17th century, the Moscow principality fell under the rule of the Moscow boiars (one of whom, Godunoff, reached the throne), they took advantage of the power thus acquired to increase their wealth by a series of measures affecting land-holding and trade; they sanctioned and enforced by law the serfdom which had already from economical causes found its way into Russian life. The great outbreak of 1608-12 weakened their power in favour of that of the czar, but without breaking it; and throughout the reigns of Michael and Alexis the ukazes were issued in the name of “the czar and boiars.” Serfdom was reinforced by a series of laws, and the whole of the 17th century is characterized by a rapid accumulation of wealth in the hands of boiars, by the development of luxury, imported from Poland, and by the struggle of a number of families to acquire the political power already enjoyed by their Polish neighbours. The same tendency pervaded the church, which was also accused by the people of having introduced “Polish luxury,” “Polish creed,” and the tendencies towards supremacy of the Polish clergy. The patriarch Nikon was a perfect representative of these tendencies. Opposition resulted, and the revision of the sacred books, which was undertaken by Nikon, gave the opposition acute character. The Raskoi (lit. “splitting” or “schism ”) made its appearance, and gathered under its banner, not only those who accused Nikon of “Polish” and “Latin” tendencies, but also all those who were for the old customs, for federative and communist principles of social organization, and who revolted against serfdom, centralization, and the suppression of municipal life. A series of insurrections broke out under the banner of the “eight-ends” cross of the Raskolniks. Barbarous persecutions by Alexis, Peter I., and their followers did not kill out an opposition which inspired with fanatical enthusiasm the best elements among the Great Russians, and induced its supporters to submit to the fire by thousands at a time, while others rather than submit w τ ent to colonize the forests of the Arctic littoral, or betook themselves to Siberia. Profound modifications have taken place in Russian nonconformity since its first appearance. It would be impossible to enumerate them all here, but the following points of primary importance must be mentioned. (1) The mere protest against Nikon s “innovations” (novshestvas) led, in the course of two centuries, to a mere servile adherence to the letter of the vernacular Scriptures—even to obvious errors of earlier translators— and to interminable discussions about minor points of ritual and about unintelligible words. (2) Another current which now pervades the whole of Russian nonconformity is that proceeding from rationalist sects which had already spread in north-west Russia in the 16th century, and even in the 14th. These have given rise to several sects which deny the divinity of Christ or explain away various dogmas and prescriptions of orthodoxy. (3) Protestantism, with its more or less rationalistic tendencies, has made itself increasingly felt, especially during the present century and in southern Russia. (4) Hostile critics of the Government, and especially of the autocracy, with its army of officials and its system of conscriptions, passports, and various restrictions on religious liberty, are found more or less in all the nonconforming bodies, which see in these manifestations of authority the appearance of the Antichrist. Several of them refuse accordingly to have any dealings whatever with the official world. (5) Another tendency pervading the whole of Russian nonconformity is that which seeks a return to what are supposed to have been the old communist principles of Christianity in its earlier days. All new sects start with applying these principles to practical life; but in the course of their development they modify them more or less, though always maintaining the principle at least of mutual help. (6) Finally, all sects deal more or less with the question of marriage and the position of woman. A few of them solve it by encouraging,—at least during their “love-feasts,”—absolutely free relations between all “brethren and sisters,” while others only admit the dissolubility of marriage or prohibit it altogether. On the whole, leaving the extremer views out of account, the position of woman is undoubtedly higher among the dissenters than among the Orthodox.

These various currents, combining with and counteracting one another in the most complicated ways, have played and continue to play a most important part in Russian history. The mutual assistance found in dissenting sects has preserved many millions of peasants from falling into abject misery, the nonconformists enjoying, as a rule, a greater degree of prosperity than their Orthodox neighbours. The leading feature of Russian history, the spread of the Great Russians over the immense territory they now occupy, cannot be rightly understood without taking into account the colonization of the most inaccessible wildernesses by Raskolniks, and the organization of this by their communities, who send delegates for the choice of land and sometimes clear it in common by the united labours of all the young men and cattle of the community. On the other hand, the nonconforming sects, while helping to preserve several advantageous features of Russian life, have had a powerful influence in maintaining, especially among the “Staroobr-yadtsy,” the old system of the Moscovite family, subject to the despotic yoke of its chief, aud hermetically sealed against instruction.

It is worthy of notice that since the emancipation of the serfs nonconformity has again made a sudden advance, the more radical sects preponderating over the scholastic ones, and the influence of Protestantism being increasingly felt. Nonconformity, which formerly had no hold upon Little Russia (though it had penetrated among Protestant Esthonians and Letts, and even among Moslem Tartars), has suddenly begun to make progress there in the shape of the “Stunda,” a mixture of Protestant and rationalistic teaching, with tendencies towards a social but rarely socialistic reformation.

The Russian dissenting sects may be subdivided into (1) the “Popovtsy” (who have priests), (2) the “Bezpopovtsy” (who have none), and (3) numerous spiritualist sects, “Dukhovnyie Khris-tiane.” The Popovtsy (5 to 6 millions) are again subdivided into two classes,—those who recognizo the Austrian hierarchy, and those who have only Orthodox “runaway priests” (“Byeglopopovtsy ”). The latter have recently received unexpected help in the accession of three Orthodox priests of great learning and energy. Moreover, there are among the Popovtsy about a million of “Edinovyertsy,” who have received Orthodox priests on the condition of their keeping to the unrevised books. They are patronized by Government.

The Bezpopovtsy embody three large sects—the Pomory, Fedoseevtsy, and Filipovtsy—aud a variety of minor ones. They recognize no priests, and repudiate the Orthodox ritual and the sacraments. They avoid all contact with the state, and do not allow prayer for the czar, who is regarded as the Antichrist. They may number about 5,000,000 in west, north, and north-east Russia, and represent, on the whole, an intellectually developed and wealthy population. Of the very numerous smaller sects of Bezpopovtsy, the “Stranniki” (Errants) are worthy of notice. They prefer to lead the life of hunted outcasts rather than hold any relation with the state.

The spiritualists, very numerous in central and southern Russia, are subdivided into a great variety of schools. The “Khlysty,” who have their “love-feasts,” their “Virgins,” sometimes flagellation, and so on, represent a numerous and strong organization in central Russia. The “Skoptsy” (“Men of God,” “Castrati ”) occur everywhere, even among the Finns, but chiefly in Orel and Kursk, and in towns as money-brokers. The “Dukhobortsy” communities (warriors of the Spirit), chiefly found in the south-east, arc renowned as colonizeι - s. They are spreading rapidly in Caucasia and Siberia. The “Molokany” (a kind of Baptists), numbering perhaps about one million, are spread also in the south-east, and are excellent gardeners and tradesmen. Both are quite open to instruction, and have come under the influence of Protestantism, like the “Stunda” in Little Russia and Bessarabia. The “Sabbathers” and the “Ska-kuny” (a kind of Shakers) are also worthy of notice; while a great variety of new sects, such as the “Nemolyaki” (“who do not pray”), the “Vozdykhateli” (“who sigh”), the “Neplatelshchiki” (“who do not pay taxes”), the “Ne-Nashi” (the “Not-ours ”), and so on, spring up every year.

The aggregate number of Raskolniks is officially stated at nearly one million, but this is quite misleading. The ministry of interior estimated them at 9,000,000 in 1850 and 9,500,000 in 1859. In reality the number is still higher. In Perm alone they were recently computed at a million, and there would be no exaggeration in estimating them at a total of from twelve to fifteen millions.

The old subdivisions of the population into orders possessed of unequal rights is still maintained. The great mass of the people, 81·6 per cent., belong to the peasant order, the others being— nobility, 1·3 per cent.; clergy, O·9; the “meschane” or burghers and merchants, 9·3; military, 6·1; foreigners, 0·2; unclassified, O·5. Thus more than 63 millions of the Russians are peasants. Half of them were formerly serfs (10,447,149 males in 1858),— the remainder being “state peasants” (9,194,891 males in 1858, exclusive of the Archangel government) and “domain peasants” (842,740 males the same year).

The serfdom which had sprung up in Russia in the 16th century, and became consecrated by law in 1609, taking, however, nearly one hundred and fifty years to attain its full growth and assume the forms under which it appeared in the present century, was abolished by law in 1861. This law liberated the serfs from a yoke which was really terrible, even under the best landlords, and from this point of view it was obviously an immense benefit, the results of which are apparent now. But it was far from securing corresponding economic results. Along with the enrichment of the few, a general impoverishment of the great mass followed, and took proportions so alarming as to arouse public attention and to result in a great number of serious investigations conducted by the state, the provincial assemblies, scientific societies, and private statisticians. The general results of these inquiries may be summed up in the subjoined statement.

The former “dvorovyie,” attached to the personal service of their masters, were merely set free; and they entirely went to reinforce the town proletariat. The peasants proper received their houses and orchards, and also allotments of arable land. These allotments were given over to the rural commune (mir), which was made responsible, as a whole, for the payment of taxes for the allotments. The size of the allotments was determined by a maximum and by a minimum, which last, however, could be still further reduced if the amount of land remaining in the landlord’s hands was less than one half of what was allotted to the peasants. For these allotments the peasants had to pay, as before, either by personal labour (twenty to forty men’s days and fifteen to thirty women’s days per year), or by a fixed rent (“obrok ”), which varied from 8 to 12 roubles per allotment As long as these relations subsisted, the peasants were considered as “temporarily obliged” (vremenno obyazannyie). On January 1, 1882, they still numbered

1,422,012 males; but this category is now disappearing in consequence of a recent law (December 28, 1881).

The allotments could be redeemed by the peasants with the help of the crown, and then the peasants were freed from all obligations to the landlord. The crown paid the landlord in obligations representing the capitalized “obrok,” and the peasants had to pay the crown, for forty-nine years, 6 per cent. interest on this capital, that is, 9 to 12 roubles per allotment. If the redemption was made without the consent of the peasants—on a mere demand of the landlord, or in consequence of his being in arrear for the payment of his debts to the nobility hypothec bank—the value of the redemption was reduced by one-fifth. The redemption was not calculated on the value of the allotments, but was considered as a compensation for the loss of the compulsory labour of the serfs; so that throughout Russia, with the exception of a few provinces in the south-east, it was—and still remains notwithstanding a very great increase of the value of land—much higher than the market value of the allotment. Moreover, taking advantage of the maximum law, many proprietors cut away large parts of the allotments the peasants possessed under serfdom, and precisely the parts the peasants were most in need of, namely, pasture lands around their houses, and forests. On the whole, the tendency was to give the allotments so as to deprive the peasants of grazing land and thus to compel them to rent pasture lands from the landlord at any price.

The present condition of the peasants—according to official documents—appears to be as follows. In the twelve central governments the peasants, on the average, have their own rye-bread for only 200 days per year,—often for only 180 and 100 days. One quarter of them have received allotments of only 2 - 9 acres per male, and one half less than 8 ’ 5 to 11'4 acres,—the normal size of the allotment necessary to the subsistence of a family under the three-fields system being estimated at 28 to 42 acres. Land must be thus rented from the landlords at fabulous prices. Cattle-breeding is diminishing to an alarming degree. The average redemption is 8 - 56 roubles (about 17s.) for such allotments, and the smaller the allotment the heavier the payment, its first “dessiatina” (2 - S6 acres) costing twice as much as the second, and four times as much as the third. In all these governments, the state commission testifies, there are whole districts where one-third of the peasants have received allotments of only 2 ’ 9 to 5 - 8 acres. The aggregate value of the redemption and land-taxes often reaches from 185 to 275 per cent, of the normal rental value of the allotments, not to speak of taxes for recruiting purposes, the church, roads, local administration, and so on, chiefly levied from peasants. The arrears increase every year; one-fifth of the inhabitants have left their houses; cattle are disappearing. Every year more than half the adult males (in some districts three-fourths of the men and one-third of the women) leave their homes and wander throughout Russia in search of labour. The state peasants are only a little better off.

Such is the state of affairs in central Russia, and it would be useless to multiply figures, repeating nearly the same details. In the eight governments of the black-earth region the state of matters is hardly better. Many peasants took the “gratuitous allotments,” whose amount was about one-eighth of the normal ones.

The average allotment in Kherson is now only 0 - 90 acre, and for allotments from 2'9 to 5'8 acres they pay from 5 to 10 roubles of redemption tax. The state peasants are better off, but still they are emigrating in masses. It is only in the Steppe governments that the situation is more hopeful. In Little Russia, where the allotments were personal (the mir existing only among state peasants), the state of affairs does not differ for the better on account of the high redemption taxes. In the western provinces, where the land was valued cheaper and the allotments somewhat increased after the Polish insurrection, the general situation might be better were it not for the former misery of peasants. Finally, in the Baltic provinces nearly all the land belongs to German landlords, who either carry on agriculture themselves, with hired labourers, or rent their land as small farms. Only one-fourth of the peasants are farmers, the remainder being mere labourers, who are emigrating in great numbers.

The situation of the former serf-proprietors is also unsatisfactory. Accustomed to the use of compulsory labour, they have failed to accommodate themselves to the new conditions. The 700,000,000 roubles of redemption money received from the crown down to 1877 by 71,000 landed proprietors in Russia have been spent without accomplishing any agricultural improvement. The forests have been sold, and only those landlords are prospering who exact rack-rents for the land without which the peasants could not live upon their allotments.

As showing a better aspect of the situation it must be added that in eighty-five districts of Russia the peasants have bought 5,349,000 acres of land since 1861. But these are mostly village-traders and grain-lenders (kulaks). A real exception can be made only for Tver, where 53,474 householders united in communities have bought 633,240 acres of land. There has been an increase of wealth among the few, but along with this a general impoverishment of the mass of the people.

The ancient Scandinavians described Russia as Gardariki,—the country of towns,—and until now Great Russia has maintained this character. The dwellings of the peasantry are not scattered over the face of the country, but aggregated in villages, where they are built in a street or streets. This grouping in villages has its origin in the bonds which unite the peasants in the village community—the mir, or the o bshchina.

When Haxthausen first described the Great Russian mir, it was considered a peculiarity of the Slavonian race,—a view which is no longer tenable. The mir is the Great Russian equivalent for the German, Dutch, and Swiss “mark” or “allmend,” the English “township,” the French “commune,” the Polish “gmina,” the South Slavonian “zadruga,” the Finnish “pittayä,” &c.; and it very nearly approaches, though differing from them in some essential features, the forms of possession of land prevailing among the Moslem Turco-Tartars, while the same principle is found even among the Mongol Buriat shepherds and the Tungus hunters.

The following are the leading features of the organization of the mir among the Great Russians.

The whole of the land occupied by a village—whoever be the landlord recognized by law—the state, a private person, or a juridical unity, such as the voisko of the Cossacks—is considered as belonging to the village community as a whole, the separate members of the community having only the right of temporary possession of such part of the common property as will be allowed to them by the mir in proportion to their working power. To this right corresponds the obligation of bearing an adequate part of the charges which may fall upon the community. If any produce results from the common work of the community, each member has a right to an equal part of it.

According to these general principles, the arable land is divided into as many lots as there are working units in the community, and each family receives as many lots as it has working units. The unit is usually one male adult; but, when the working power of a large family is increased by its containing a number of adult women, or boys approaching adult age, this circumstance is taken into account, as well as the diminution from any cause of working power in other households.

For dividing the arable land into lots, the whole is parted first into three “fields,” according to the three-field rotation of crops. As each field, however, contains land of various qualities, it is in its turn subdivided into, say, three parts—of good, average, and poor quality; and each of these parts is subdivided into as many lots as there are working units. Each household receives its lots in each of the subdivisions of the “field,” a carefully minute equalization as to the minor differences between the lots being aimed at; and the partition is nearly always made so as to permit each householder to reach his allotment without passing through that of another.

To facilitate this division, the community divides, first, into smaller groups (vyt, Zhxrebyevka, a “ten,” an “eight,” &c.), each of which is composed, by free selection, of a number of householders —the community only taking care that each shall not be composed of rich, of poor, or of “turbulents” exclusively. The division of the land is first made among such groups, and the subdivision goes on within these. The division into groups facilitates also the distribution of such work as the community may have to accomplish— as when a bridge or a ditch has to be repaired, or a meadow mowed —and the work cannot be done by the community as a whole.

As sickness, death, removal, and other incidents bring about changes in the distribution of working power among the different households, or when the number of working units in the community has increased or decreased, a redistribution of land (peredyel) follows. Whether the land be a burden (the taxes exceeding its rental value) or a benefit, its division is equalized; the households whose working power has increased receive additional lots, and vice versa. The peredyel may be “partial” or “general.” In most cases a mere equalization of lots among several families will serve, and a general redistribution is resorted to only when greater inequalities have arisen. On the whole, these redistributions are rare, and the precariousness of land-holding which has been supposed to be a consequence of the mir proves to have been exaggerated. More detailed inquiries have shown that no redistribution is made without urgent necessity. Thus, to quote but one instance, in 4442 village communities of Moscow, the average number of redistributions has been 2.1 in twenty years (1858-78), and in more than two-thirds of these communities the redistribution took place only once. On the other hand, a regular rotation of all households over all lots, in order to equalize the remaining minor inequalities, is very often practised in the black-earth region, where no manure is needed.

Besides the arable mark, there is usually a vygon (or “common ”) for grazing, to which all householders send their cattle, whatever the number they possess. The meadows are either divided on the above principles, or mowed in common, and the hay divided according to the number of lots. The forests, when consisting of small wood in sufficient quantity, are laid under no regulations; when this is scarce, every trunk is counted, and valued according to its age, number of branches, &c., and the whole is divided according to the number of lots.

The houses and the orchards behind them belong also, in principle, to the community; but no peredyel is made, except after a fire or when the necessity arises of building the houses at greater distances apart. The orchards usually remain for years in the same hands, with but slow equalizations of the lots in width.

All decisions in the village community are given by the mir, that is, by the general assembly of all householders,—women being admitted on an equal footing with men, when widows, or when their male guardians are absent. For the decisions unanimity is necessary; and, though in some difficult cases of a general peredyel the discussions may last for two or three days, no decision is reached until the minority has declared its agreement with the majority.

Each commune elects an elder (starosta) ; he is the executive, but has no authority apart from that of the mir whose decisions he carries out All attempts on the part of the Government to make him a functionary have failed.

Opinion as to the advantages and disadvantages of the village community being much divided in Russia, it has been within the last twenty years the subject of extensive inquiry, both private and official, and of an ever-growing literature and polemic. The supporters of the mir are found chiefly among those who have made more or less extensive inquiries into its actual organization and consequences, while their opponents draw their arguments principally from theoretical considerations of political economy. The main reproach that it checks individual development and is a source of immobility has been shaken of late by a better knowledge of the institution, which has brought to light its remarkable plasticity and power of adaptation to new circumstances. The free settlers in Siberia have voluntarily introduced the same organization. In north and north-east Russia, where arable land is scattered in small patches among forests, communities of several villages, or “volost” communities, have arisen; and in the “voisko” of the Ural Cossacks we find community of the whole territory as regards both land and fisheries and work in common. Nay, the German colonists of southern Russia, who set out with the principle of personal property, have subsequently introduced that of the village community, adapted to their special needs (Clauss). In some localities, where there was no great scarcity of land and the authorities did not interfere, joint cultivation of a common area for filling the storehouses has recently been developed (in Penza 974 communes have introduced this system and cultivate an aggregate of 26,910 acres). The renting of land in common, or even purchase of land by wealthy communes, has become quite usual, as also the purchase in common of agricultural implements.

Since the emancipation of the serfs, however, the mir has been undergoing profound modifications. The differences of wealth which ensued, —the impoverishment of the mass, the rapid increase of the rural proletariat, and the enrichment of a few “kulaks” and “miroyedes” (“mir-eaters ”),—are certainly operating unfavourably for the mir. The miroyedes steadily strive to break up the organization of the commune as an obstacle to the extension of their power over the moderately well-to-do peasants; while the proletariat cares little about the mir. Fears on the one side and hopes on the other have been thus entertained as to the likelihood of the mir resisting these disintegrating influences, favoured, moreover, by those landowners and manufacturers who foresee in the creation of a rural proletariat the certainty of cheap labour. But the village community does not appear as yet to have lost the power of adaptation which it has exhibited throughout its history. If, indeed, the impoverishment of the peasants continues to go on, and legislation also interferes with the mir, it must of course disappear, but not without a corresponding disturbance in Russian life.

The co-operative spirit of the Great Russians shows itself further iu another sphere in the artels, which have also been a prominent feature of Russian life since the dawn of history. The artel very much resembles the co-operative society of western Europe, with this difference that it makes its appearance without any impulse from theory, simply as a natural form of popular life. When workmen from any province come, for instance, to St Petersburg to engage in the textile industries, or to work as carpenters, masons, &c., they immediately unite in groups of from ten to fifty persons, settle in a house together, keep a common table, and pay each his part of the expense to the elected elder of the artel. All Russia is covered with such artels,—in the cities, in the forests, on the banks of rivers, on journeys, and even in the prisons.

The industrial artel is almost as frequent as the preceding, in all those trades which admit of it A social history of the most fundamental state of Russian society would be a history of their hunting, fishing, shipping, trading, building, exploring artels. Artels of one or two hundred carpenters, bricklayers, &c., are common wherever new buildings have to be erected, or railways or bridges made; the contractors always prefer to deal with an artel, rather than with separate workmen. The same principles are often put into practice in the domestic trades. It is needless to add that the wages divided by the artels are higher than those earned by isolated workmen.

Finally, a great pumber of artels on the stock exchange, in the seaports, in the great cities (commissionaires), during the great fairs, and on railways have grown up of late, and have acquired the confidence of tradespeople to such an extent that considerable sums of money and complicated banking operations are frequently handed over to an artelshik (member of an artel) without any receipt, his number or his name being accepted as sufficient guarantee. These artels are recruited only on personal acquaintance with the candidates for membership, and security reaching £80 to £100 is exacted in the exchange artels. These last have a tendency to become mere joint-stock companies employing salaried servants. Co-operative societies have lately been organized by several zemstvos. They have achieved good results, but do not exhibit, on the whole, the same unity of organization as those which have arisen in a natural way among peasants and artisans.

The chief occupation of the population of Russia is agriculture. Only in a few parts of Moscow, Vladimir, and Nijni has it been abandoned for manufacturing pursuits. Cattle-breeding is the leading industry in the Steppe region, the timber-trade in the north-east, and fishing on the White and Caspian Seas. Of the total surface of Russia, 1,237,360,000 acres (excluding Finland), 1,018,737,000 acres are registered, and it appears that 39 - 9 per cent, of these belongs to the crown, 1"9 to the domains Guiel),

31 - 2 to peasants, 24'7 to landed proprietors or to private companies, and 2 - 3 to the towns and monasteries. Of the acres registered only 592,650,000 can be considered as “good,” that is, capable of paying the land tax; and of these 248,630,000 acres were under crone in 1884. The crops of 1883 were those of an average year, that is, 2'9 to 1 in central Russia, and 4 to 1 in south Russia, an<∣ were estimated as follows (seed corn being left out of account) :—Rye, 49,185,000 quarters; wheat, 21,605,000; oats, 50,403,000; barley, 13,476,000; other grains, 18,808,000. Those of 1884 (a very good year) reached an average of 18 per cent higher, except oats. The crops are, however, very unequally distributed. In an average year there are 8 governments which are some 6,930,000 quarters short of their requirements, 35 which have an excess of 33,770,000 quarters, and 17 which have neither excess nor deficiency. The export of com from Russia is steadily increasing, having risen from 6,560,000 quarters in 1856-60 to an average of 23,700,000 quarters in 1876-83 and 26,623,700 quarters in 1884. This increase does not prove, however, an excess of corn, for even when one-third of Russia was famine-stricken, during the last years of scarcity, the export trade did not decline; even Samara exported during the last famine there, the peasants being compelled to sell their com in autumn to pay their taxes. Scarcity is quite usual, the food supply of some ten provinces being exhausted every year by the end of the spring. Orach, and even bark, are then mixed with flour for making bread.

Flax, both for yam and seed, is extensively grown in the northwest and west, and the annual production is estimated at 6,400,000 cwts. of fibre and 2,900,000 quarters of linseed. Hemp is largely cultivated in the central governments, the yearly production being [table]

1,800,000 cwts. of fibre and 1,800,000 quarters of seed. The export of both (which along with other oil-bearing plants reached the value of 136,816,000 roubles in 1882) holds the second place in the foreign trade of Russia.

The culture of the beet is increasing, and in 1SS4 7S5,700 acres were under this root, chiefly in Little Russia and the neighbouring governments; 68,900,000 cwts. cf beetroot were worked up, yielding 5,119,000 cwts. of sugar, while fifty-five refineries (twenty-six of them in Poland) showed a production valued at 11 S, 888,530 roubles in 1882. Tobacco is cultivated everywhere, but good qualities are obtained only in the south. In 1876-80 an average area of 101,600 acres was under this steadily increasing culture, and the crop of 1884 yielded 86,400,000 cwts. The vine, which might be grown much farther north than at present, is cultivated only on Mount Caucasus, in Bessarabia, in the Crimea, and on the lower Don for wine, and in Ekaterinoslaff, Podolia, and Astrakhan for raisins. The yearly produce is 10 - 8 million gallons in Russia, 10 0 in the Caucasus, and 24 in Transcaucasia.

Market gardening is extensively carried on in Yaroslavl for a variety of vegetables for exportation, in Moscow and Ryazan for hops, and in the south for sunflowers, poppies, melons, &c. Gardening is also widely spread in Little Russia and in the more fertile central governments. Madder and indigo are cultivated on Caucasus, and the silk-worm in Taurida, Kherson, and Caucasia. Bee-keeping is widely spread.

The breeding of live stock is largely carried on in the east and south, but the breeds are usually inferior. Good breeds of cattle are met with only in the Baltic provinces, and excellent breeds of horses on the Don, in Tamboff, and in Voronezh. Since the emancipation, the peasants have been compelled to reduce the number of their cattle, so that the increase in this department does not correspond to the increase of population, as is shown by the fallowing figures :— [table]

A more thorough registration of horses for military purposes gives a return of 21,203,900 horses in Russia and Poland, that is, 255 horses per 1000 inhabitants—a proportion which is elsewhere approached only in the United States. They are kept in largest numbers in the three Steppe governments and on the Urals (550 and 384 per 1000 inhabitants), while the smallest proportion occurs in the manufacturing region (155 per 1000 inhabitants). 90 per cent, of the total number of horses belong to peasants; these are mostly of a very poor description. Infectious diseases make great ravages every year. In 1882 no less than 121,500 cattle and 14,110 horses perished from that cause.

Fishing is a most important source of income for whole communities in Russia. No less than 2000 to 3000 inhabitants of Archangel are engaged in fishing on the Norwegian coast and in the White Sea, the aggregate yield of this industry being estimated at 200,000 cwts., including 150 million herrings. These fisheries are, however, declining. Fishing in the Baltic is not of much importance. In the estuaries of the Dnieper, Dniester, and Bug it gives occupation to about 4000 men, and may be valued at less than 1,000,000 roubles. The fisheries in the Sea of Azoff, which occupy about 15,000 men, are much more important, as are also those of the lower Don, which last alone are valued at over 1,000,000 roubles a year. The chief fisheries of Russia are, however, on the Caspian and in its feeders: those of the Volga cover no less than 6000 square miles, and those of the Ural extend for over 100 miles on the sea-coast and 400 miles up the river. The lowest estimates give no less than 4 million cwts., valued at 15 million roubles, of fish taken every year in the Caspian and its affluents. The fisheries on the lakes of the lake region are also worthy of notice.

. Hunting is an important source of income in north and northeast Russia, no less than 400,000 squirrels and 800,000 grouse, to mention no other game, being killed in different governments, while sea-hunting is still productive on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

Notwithstanding the wealth of the country in minerals and metals of all kinds, and the endeavours made by Government to encourage mining, including the imposition of protective tariffs even against Finland (in 1885), this and the related industries are still at a low stage of development. The remoteness of the mining from the industrial centres, the want of technical instruction and also of capital, and the existence of a variety of vexatious regulations may be given as the chief reasons for this state of matters. The imports of foreign metals in the rough and of coal are steadily increasing, while the exports, never otherwise than insignificant, show no advance. The chief mining districts of Russia are the Ural Mountains and Olonetz for all kinds of metals; the Moscow and Donetz basins for coal and iron; Poland and Finland; Caucasus; and the Altai, the Nertchinsk, and the Amur mountains.

Gold is obtained from gold-washings in Siberia (63,194 Ib in 1S82), the Urals (16,850 lb), Central Asia (325 Ib in 1881), and Finland (42 lb); silver in Siberia (16,128 lb), and partly on Caucasus (1232 lb), the quantity steadily decreasing; platinum in the Urals (3600 to 4600 Ib every year). Lead is extracted along with silver (19,416 cwts. in 1S81; 357,260 cwts. imported); zinc only in Poland (89,650 cwts.; half as much is imported); tin in Finland (194 cwts.; 40,000 cwts. imported). Copper is worked in several governments of the Ural region, in Kazah, Vyatka, Caucasus, Siberia, and Finland, but the industry is a languishing one, and the crown mines show a deficit (65,000 cwts.; double this amount is imported). Iron-ores are found at many places. Excellent mines are worked on the Urals; and iron mines occur also in large numbers throughout the Moscow and Donetz basins, as also in the western provinces, not to speak of those of the Asiatic dominions, of Poland, and of Finland (bog-iron). In 1881 the annual production of pig-iron (which covered only two-thirds of the consumption) was stated as follows, (in thousands of cwts.):—Urals, 6153; central Russia, 1092; Olonetz, 42; south and south-west Russia, 501; Poland, 951; Finland, 413; Siberia, 85. The iron and steel throughout the empire amounted to 10,720,000 cwts. in 1882. European Russia alone produced in 1882 31,520 cwts. of copper, 7,703,000 cwts. of pig-‘roil, 4,981,300 cwts. of iron, and 3,799,600 cwts. of steel.

The production of coal is rapidly increasing and in 18S2 reached 46,270,000 cwts., three-fourths being produced by the Donetz basin, and one-fifth by that of Moscow. Poland, moreover, yielded 27,950,000 cwts. of coal in 1882, and the Asiatic dominions about 800,000 cwts. Nearly 34,000,000 cwts. are imported annually. The extraction of naphtha on the Apsheron peninsula of the Caspian has been greatly stimulated of late, reaching about 20,000,000 cwts. in 1883 (4,600,000 cwts. of kerosene, 1,000,000 cwts. of lubricating oils, and 300,000 cwts. of asphalt).

Russia and Siberia are very rich in rock-salt, salt springs, and salt lakes (16,360,000 cwts. extracted; 3,746,000 imported). Excellent graphite is found in the deserts of the Sayan Mountains and Turukhansk. Sulphur is obtained in Caucasia, Kazan, and Poland (2000 to 5000 cwts. extracted; 70,000 tc 170,000 cwts. imported). The mining and related industries occupy altogether about an aggregate motive force (steam and water) of 73,500 horse-power and 305,000 hands.

Since the time of Peter I. the Russian Government has been unceasing in its efforts for the creation and development of home manufactures. Important monopolies in last century, and heavy protective, or rather prohibitive, import duties, as well as large money bounties, in the present, have contributed towards the accumulation of immense private fortunes, but manufactures have developed but slowly. A great upward movement has, however, been observable since 1863. About that time a thorough reform of the machinery in use was effected, whereby the number of hands employed was reduced, but the yearly production doubled or trebled. In some branches the production suddenly rose at a yet higher rate (cottons from 12 million roubles in 1865 to 209 million in 1882). The following figures for European Russia, without Poland and Finland, will give some idea of this progress :— [table]

These figures lose, however, some of their significance if the corresponding rate of progress in manufacturing productivity in western Europe be taken into account. Besides, since the great improvements of 1861-70 the industrial progress of Russia has been but slow. The manufactories of rails and railway plan t, and even the Ural ironworks, are in a precarious condition. The textile industries, though undoubtedly they have made great advances, are subject to great fluctuations in connexion with those of the home crops, and are thus in an abnormal state. The artisans labour for twelve, fourteen, and sometimes sixteen hours a day, and their condition, as revealed by recent inquiries, is very unsatisfactory. Many causes contribute to this,—the want of technical instruction, the want of capital, and above all the want of markets. Russia lias not, and cannot have, such foreign markets as the countries which first attained an industrial development. Her colonies are deserts, and in the home markets the manufacturer only finds 80 millions of poverty-stricken people, whoso wants are nearly all supplied by their petty domestic industries.

These, that is, the domestic industries which are carried on by the peasants in conjunction with their agricultural pursuits during the long days of idleness imposed by the climate and by the reduced allotments of land, continue, not only to hold their ground side by side with the large manufactures, but to develop and to compete with these by the cheapness of their products. Extensive inquiries are now being made into these domestic industries kustar-noyie Proizvodstvo). 855,000 Jiersous engaged in them along with agriculture Qcustari) have already been registered, and an unexpected variety of industries, and a still more unexpected technical development in several of them, have been disclosed by these researches. Thie yearly production of the 855,000 kustari who have been registered reaches 218,414,000 roubles; while the total number of Jieasants engaged in the industries, mostly in Great Russia and northern Caucasia, is estimated at a minimum of 7,500,000 persons, with a yearly production of at least 1,800,000,000 roubles, or more than double the aggregate production of the manufactures proper.

Of course the machinery they use is very primitive, and the wages for a day of twelve to sixteen hours exceedingly low. But the industries are capable of being improved, and it has been brought out that “Paris” silk hats and “Vienna” house furniture sold by substantial foreign firms at Moscow are really manufactured in the neighbourhood of the capital by peasants who still continue to till their fields. All these industries suffer very much from want of credit, and the Producers become the prey of intermediaries. But their continued existence and their progress under most unfavourable conditions show that they meet a real want, which is itself the consequence of the peculiar conditions under which Russia, the last to come into the international market, has to develop.

In those very governments where two-thirds of the textile manufactories of Russia are concentrated domestic weaving (for the market, not for domestic use) employs about 200,000 hands, whose yearly production is valued at 45,000,000 roubles. In Stavropol on Caucasus it has so rapidly developed that 42,400 looms are now at work, with a yearly production of 2,007,700 roubles. But no adequate idea could be given of the petty industries of Russia without entering into greater detail than the scope of the present article permits. Suffice it to say that there is no branch of the industries in textiles, leather, woodwork, or metal work, provided it needs no heavy machinery, which is not successfully carried on in the villages. Nearly all the requirements of nine-tenths of the population of Russia are met in this way.

The aggregate production of industries within the empire, inclusive of mining, was stated in 1882 as follows :—European Russia, 1,126,033,000 roubles; Poland, 147,309,000; Finland, 15,130,000. The chief manufactures in European Russia (apart from Poland and Finland), and their yearly production in 1882 in millions of roubles, were as follows :—cotton yarn and cottons, 208 - 6; other textile industries, 103"5; metal wares and machinery, 107'9; chemicals, 6 "6; candles, soap, glue, leather, and other animal Jiroducts, 61 , 4; distillery products, 156.0; other liquors, 39.0; sugar, 140.9; flour, 74.0. The remainder are of minor importance. It must be observed, however, that these figures are much below those given for 1879, when the aggregate production of Russian manufactures was computed at 1,102,949,000 roubles, without the mining and related industries, the distillery products, and the flour.

The geographical distribution of manufactures in Russia is very unequal. The governments of Moscow and St Petersburg, with a yearly production of 173 and 134 million roubles respectively, represent together two-fifths of the aggregate production of Russia. If we add Vladimir (91,766,000 roubles), Kieff (73,300,000), Perm (50,500,000), Livonia, Esthonia, Kharkoff, and Kherson (from 30 to 35 millions each), we have all the principal manufacturing centres. In fact, Moscow’, with portions of the neighbouring governments, contains half the Russian manufactures exempted from excise duties, while the south-west governments of Kieff, Podolia, and Kherson contain two-thirds of those not so exempted.

The main wealth of Russia consisting in raw produce, the trade of the country turns chiefly on the purchase of this for export, and the aale of manufactured and imported goods in exchange. This traffic is in the hands of a great number of middlemen,—in the west Jews, and elsewhere Russians,—to whom the peasants are for the most part in debt, as they purchase in advance on security of subsequent payments in corn, tar, wooden wares, &c. A good deal of the internal trade is carried on by travelling merchants ( ofeni).

The fairs are very numerous; the minor ones numbered 6500 in 1878, and showed sales amounting to an aggregate of 305 million roubles. Those of Nijni-Novgorod, with a return of 400 million roubles, of Irbit and Kharkoff (above 100 million roubles each), of Romny, Krestovskoye in Perm, and Menzelinsk in Ufa (55 to 12 million roubles), have considerable importance both for trade and for home manufactures. The total value of the internal trade, which is in the hands of 681,116 licensed dealers, is roughly estimated at more than seven milliards of roubles.

The development of the external trade of Russia is seen from the following figures (millions of roubles):— [table]

The chief article of export is grain—wheat, oats, and rye— (24,870,000 quarters, 321,042,000 roubles in 1882), to which the increase of exports is mainly due. This increase, however, does not correspond to an increase of crops, only 10 per cent, of which were exported in 1870 and about 20 per cent, in 1882. Next to grain come flax, hemp, linseed, and hempseed (129,370,000 roubles in 1882); oil-yielding grains (441,000 quarters); wool, tallow, hides, bristles, and bone (31,120,000 roubles). If we add to these timber (35,044,000 roubles) and furs (4,147,000 roubles), 95 per cent, of all Russian exports are accounted for, the remainder consisting of linen, ropes, and some woollen stuffs and metallic wares (7,172,000 roubles to western Europe, 2,888,000 to Finland, and 5,763,000 to Asia).

The chief imports from Europe were in 1882 as follows:—Tea (48,091,000 roubles), liquors (16,124,000 roubles), salt, fish, rice, fruits, and colonial wares (38,446,000 roubles), various raw textile wares (127,986,000 roubles—cotton 72,417,000), raw metals (32,630,000 roubles), chemicals (57,894,000 roubles), and stuffs (22,428,000 roubles). The imports from Asia—chiefly tea—in the same year reached 32,853,000 roubles. The chief imports were from Germany (214,000,000 roubles) and Great Britain (124,700,000), the chief exports to Great Britain (210,000,000), Germany (178,000,000), and France (54,000,000). Even in her trade with Finland Russia imports more than she exports,—the chief imports being paper, cotton, iron, and butter; Prohibitory tariffs were imposed on Finnish wares in 1885.

During 1882 the ports of the empire were visited by 13,638 foreign ships (5,337,000 tons), of which number 1436 were to Asiatic ports (391,200 tons). Of the above total only 2489 vessels (628,000 tons) were under the Russian flag (mostly Finnish), while the British alone showed a tonnage of 2,258,000 and the German 639,000. The coasting trade was represented by 35,083 vessels (6,040,000 tons) entering the ports, chiefly those of the Black Sea. The mercantile marine of Russia in 1882 numbered 6383 vessels (727,000 tons), including 604 steamers; of the total number 1593 (254,000 tons) were Finnish. The chief ports are St Petersburg, Odessa, Riga, Taganrog, Libau, and Reval. Baku has recently acquired some importance in consequence of the naphtha trade.

The rivers of the empire, mostly connected by canals, play a very important part in the inland traffic. The aggregate length of navigable waters reaches 21,510 miles (453 miles of canals), and 12,600 miles more are available for floating rafts. In 1882 51,407 boats, with cargoes amounting to 153,250,000 cwts., valued at 186,480,000 roubles, left the ports on Russian rivers and canals.

Corn, firewood, and timber constitute two-thirds of the whole cargoes carried. Within Russia proper, from 5740 to 7400 boats, larger and smaller, worth from four to seven millions of roubles, have been built annually during the last five years (7415 boats, valued at 6,758,000 roubles, in 1882,—18 of them being steamers); most of them are light flat-bottomed structures, which are broken up as soon as they have reached their destination. The number of steamers plying on inland waters, chiefly on the Volga, was estimated in 1879 at 1056 (80,890 horse-power).

Twenty-five years ago Russia had only 993 miles of railways; on January 1, 1883, the totals were 13,428 miles for Russia and Caucasia, 8S8 for Poland, 734 for Finland, and 141 for the Transcaspian region, and two years later they had reached an aggregate length of 16,155 miles. The railways chiefly connect the Baltic ports with the granaries of Russia in the south-east, and the western frontier with Moscow, whence six trunk lines radiate in all directions. Several military lines run along the western frontier, while two trunk lines, starting from St Petersburg, follow the two shores of the Gulf of Finland. Of the projected Siberian railway one main line (444 miles), connecting Perm and Berezniki on the Kama with Ekaterinburg and the chief iron-works of the Urals, has been constructed. It has been extended east to Kamyshkofl, and is to be continued to Tinmen, 100 miles farther east, whence steamers ply to Tomsk.

Only 738 miles of the railways of Russia belong to the state, but most of them have been constructed under Government guarantees, involving payment of from 11 to 21 million roubles yearly. On the other hand the yearly increasing debt of the railways to the state amounted to 781,888,800 roubles in 1883. Of the aggregate value of the Russian railways, estimated at 2210 million roubles, no less than 1971 million roubles were held by Government in shares and bonds. The cost of construction has been altogether out of proportion to what it ought to be; for, whereas the average rate per verst (0’663 mile) in Finland was only 20,000 silver roubles, in Russia it reached 60,000, 75,000, 90,000, and even 100,000 roubles. In 1882 21,322 versts (14,136 miles) represented an expenditure of 2,210,047,632 roubles, and their net revenue was only 3'18 per cent, on the capital invested (4982 roubles per English mile in 1882). In 1884 34,674,853 passengers, 2,287,955 military, and 834,500,000 cwts. of merchandise were conveyed by 5808 locomotives and 120,940 carriages and waggons. Fully one-half of the merchandise carried consisted of corn (24 per cent.), coal (13 per cent.), firewood (12 per cent.), and timber (8 per cent.).

For the conveyance of correspondence and travellers along ordi-nary routes the state maintains an extensive organization of post-horses between all towns of the empire, that is, over an aggregate length of 110,170 miles. In 1882 4355 stations, with a staff of 15,560 men and 446,460 horses, were kept up for that purpose. In 1883 242,193,470 letters, newspapers (93,520,000), registered letters, and parcels were carried, of which 29,808,100 belonged to international correspondence. The telegraph system had in the same year an aggregate length of 65,394 miles, with 2,957 telegraph-offices, and 10,222,139 telegrams were transmitted. (P. A. K.)

Part IV. Russian History.

The Russians, properly so called, belong to the Slavonic race, itself a division of the great Aryan family. It cannot be denied that in the northern and eastern parts of Russia large Finnish elements have become mixed with the Slavs, and Mongolian in the south, but this is far from justifying the prejudiced attempts of Duchinski and others to challenge the right of the Russians to be called an Aryan people. The derivation of the words Russia, Russians (Rous, Rossia, Rossiane), has been much disputed. The old-fashioned view was to identify them with the Rhoxolani, who are now generally believed to have been a Medish tribe. The later and probably correct one is to derive the name from the Finnish Ruotsi applied to the Swedes, and considered by Professor Thomsen of Copenhagen to be itself a corruption of the Swedish word rothsmenn, rowers or seafarers. They are Scandinavian vikings with whom we first become acquainted in northern Russia, and who in a way founded the empire, although from Arabian and Jewish writers we have dim records of a Slavonic race inhabiting the basin of the Dnieper about the close of the 9th century. In recent times Ilovaiski and Gedeonoff have again attacked the view of the Swedish origin of the invaders. They see in them only Slavs, but they are not considered to have shaken the theory which derives the name from Ruotsi. As the story goes, three brothers, Rurik, Sineus, and Truvor, were invited to Russia from the north and settled at Novgorod in 862. Nestor calls them Varangians, a name in which most people are willing to see Norsemen. For a long time the Russians and Scandinavians are considered, as we shall find, to be separate races, but at length they are fused, as the Saxons and Normans in England under Henry I. Concerning the origin of the town of Novgorod, which bears a purely Slavonic name, nothing is known; it has been supposed that at first a Finnish settlement existed on its site. According to the legend the three brothers were invited over by a leading citizen named Gostomisl. There is, however, no mention of such a person in the Chronicle of Nestor. There is another story that Rurik was the son of the Swedish king, Ludbrat, a person met with in Scandinavian legend, and his queen Umila, the daughter of Gostomisl, and was born at Upsala in 830. Whatever the variants of the legend may be, we seem to learn one thing,—that a successful Scandinavian invasion occurred in the north of Russia. The three brothers finally settled in the country,—Rurik at Ladoga, where the river Volkhoff flows into the lake, Sineus at Bielo-ozero, and Truvor at Izborsk on Lake Peipus. On the death of his two brothers without heirs, we are told that Rurik annexed their dominions to his own, and took the title of veliki kniaz, or grand-prince. These three brothers are said to have brought two other adventurers with them, Askold and Dir, who, having had a quarrel with Rurik, set out with some companions to Constantinople to try their fortune. On their way they saw Kieff, situated on a rich and grassy plain, in the occupation of the Khazars. Of this city they made themselves masters, and permanently established themselves on the Dnieper. The origin of Kieff itself is involved in mystery. It is first mentioned about the 9th century. Constantine Porphyrogenitus speaks of to καστpbv to Kιοaβa to eπorομaζομeuοu Eaμβa∕raς. This last word has given much labour to scholars; some are disposed to see in it the Norse sandbakki, the bank of sand. It is at Kieff that, according to the legend, St Andrew preached the gospel to the Russians. From this place Askold and Dir sallied forth two years afterwards, with an armament of two hundred vessels, sailed up the Bosphorus, and plundered the capital of the Byzantine empire. The Greek writers give 851 as the date of this enterprise, thus making it precede the arrival of Rurik by eleven years. The emperor at the time of their invasion was Michael III.

Having greatly extended his dominions by subduing the surrounding Slavonic tribes, Rurik died at an advanced age in 879, leaving the regency of the principality and the guardianship of his son Igor to the renowned Oleg. This chief subdued Smolensk, a city of the Krivitchi, in 882. Allured by its wealth and advantageous situation, Oleg now resolved to attempt Kieff, which was held by Askold and Dir. The story goes that he took young Igor with him, and disguised himself and his companions as Slavonic merchants. The unsuspecting Askold and Dir were invited to a conference and slain on the spot. Thus was Kieff added to the dominions of Igor, who was recognized as the lord of the town. In 903 Oleg chose a wife for Igor, named Olga, said to have been a native of Pskoff, the origin of which place, now mentioned for the first time, is unknown. We are told that it was a city of importance before the arrival of Rurik. The derivation of the name is disputed, some deriving it from a Finnish, others from a Slavonic root. Oleg next resolved to make an attack upon Byzantium, and his preparations were great both by sea and land. Leo the Philosopher, then emperor, was ill able to resist these barbarians. He attempted to block the passage of the Bosphorus, but Oleg dragged his ships across the land and arrived before the gates of Constantinople. The Greeks begged for peace and offered tribute. Oleg is said to have hung his shield in derision on the gates of the city. We may believe this without going so far as to give credence to Stryikowski, the Polish writer, who says it was to be seen there in his time (16th century). The atrocities committed by Oleg and his followers are described by Karamzin, the Russian historian; they are just such as the other Norsemen of their race were committing at the same time in northern and western Europe. The Byzantines paid a large sum of money that their city might be exempted from injury, and soon after Oleg sent ambassadors to the emperor to arrange the terms. The treaty was ratified by oaths: the Byzantines swore by the Gospels, and the Russians by their gods Perun and Volos. In 911 Oleg made another treaty with the Byzantines, the terms of which, as of the preceding one, are preserved in Nestor. The authenticity of these two treaties has been called in question by some writers, but Miklosich truly observes that it would have been impossible at the time Nestor wrote to forge the Scandinavian names. Soon after this Oleg died; he had exercised supreme power till the time of his death to the exclusion of Igor, and seems to have been regarded by the people as a wizard. He is said to have been killed by the bite of a serpent, which had coiled itself in the skull of his horse, as he was gazing at the animal’s unburied bones. The story is in reality a Scandinavian saga, as has been shown by Bielowski and Rafn. It is also found in other countries. In the reign of Igor the Petchenegs first make their appearance in Russian history. In 941 he undertook an expedition against Constantinople and entered the Bosphorus after devastating the provinces of Pontus, Paphlagonia, and Bithynia. Nestor has not concealed the atrocities committed by the Russians on this occasion; he tells us of the churches and monasteries which they burned, and of their cruelty to the captives. They were, however, attacked by the Byzantine fleet, and overpowered by the aid of Greek fire; many were drowned, and many of those who swam to land were slaughtered by the infuriated peasants; only one of their number escaped. Thirsting to avenge his loss, Igor fitted out another expedition in the spring of the following year. The Greeks were unwilling to run a risk again; they renewed the treaty which had been signed with Oleg, and were only too glad to purchase deliverance from their adversaries. The Russian at first demanded too much, but was finally persuaded by his more prudent attendants: “If Caesar speaks thus,” said they, “what more do we want than to have gold and silver and silks without fighting? Who knows which will survive, we or they? Who has ever been able to conclude a treaty with the sea? We do not go on the dry land, but on the waves of the sea; death is common to all.”

A treaty of peace was accordingly concluded, which is given at full length by Nestor; of the fifty names attached to it we find three were Slavonic and the rest Norse. The two races are beginning to be fused. From this expedition Igor returned triumphant. He was, however, unfortunate in a subsequent attack on the Drevlians, a Slavonic tribe whose territory is now partly occupied by the government of Tchernigoff. The Drevlians had long suffered from his exactions. They resolved to encounter him under the command of their prince Male; for they saw, as a chronicler says, that it was necessary to kill the wolf, or the whole flock would become his prey. They accordingly laid an ambuscade near their town Korosten, now called Iskorost, in the government of Volhynia, and slew him and all his company. According to Leo the Deacon, he was tied to two trees bent together, and when they were let go the unhappy chief was torn to pieces.

Igor was succeeded by his son Sviatoslaff, the first Russian prince with a Slavonic name. Olga, however, the spirited wife of Igor, was now regent, owing to her son’s minority. Fearful was the punishment she inflicted upon the Drevlians for the death of her husband, and the story lacks no dramatic interest as it has been handed down by the old chronicler. Some of the Drevlians were buried alive in pits which she had caused to be dug for the purpose previously; some were burned alive; and others murdered at a trizna, or funeral feast, which she had appointed to be held in her husband’s honour. The town Iskorost was afterwards set on fire by tying lighted matches to the tails of sparrows and pigeons, and letting them fly on the roofs of the houses. Here we certainly have a piece of a Udina, as the old Russian legendary poems are called. Geoffrey of Monmouth and Layamon give the same account of the capture of the city of Cirencester by Gurmund at the head of the Saxons, and something similar is also told about Harold Hardrada in Sicily. Finally, at the close of her life, Olga became a Christian. She herself visited the capital of the Greek empire, and was instructed in the mysteries of her new faith by the patriarch. There she was baptized by him in 955, and the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus became her godfather. She did not, however, succeed in persuading her son Sviatoslaff to embrace the same faith, although he took no measures to impede its progress among his subjects. This son was as celebrated a warrior as Oleg; his victories were chiefly over the Petchenegs previously mentioned, a people of Mongol origin inhabiting the basin of the Don. He began, however, the fatal custom of breaking up Russia into apanages, which he distributed among his sons. The effects of this injudicious policy, subsequently pursued by other grand princes, were soon felt. Thus was paved the way for the invasion of Russia by the Mongols, who held it for two hundred years, and communicated that semi-Asiatic character to the dress and customs of the country which the ukazes of Peter the Great could hardly eradicate, and which perhaps have not entirely disappeared even in our own times. In his division of the country, Sviatoslaff gave Kieff to his son Yaropolk; to another son, Oleg, the conquered land of the Drevlians; to another, Vladimir, he assigned Novgorod. It would be impossible to interest the reader in the petty wars of these princes. After having gained several victories over the Petchenegs, Sviatoslaff set out on an expedition against the Bulgarians, a Ugro-Finnish tribe, dwelling on the banks of the Volga, the remains of whose ancient capital can still be seen. He made himself master of their country, but his victorious career was cut short at the cataracts of the Dnieper, where he and his soldiers were slain by the Petchenegs. According to the barbarous custom of the times, their prince Kurya made his skull into a drinking-cup. Vladimir, the son of Sviatoslaff, was for some time a monster of cruelty and debauchery. He killed his brother Yaropolk, and seized his dominions; and, Yaropolk having some time before murdered his brother Oleg, Vladimir now became sole ruler. To his hereditary dominions he added Galicia or Red Russia, and subjugated some Lithuanian and Livonian tribes. Suddenly he seems to have been troubled with religious difficulties. According to the chronicler, he sent ambassadors to bring him reports of the different religions—Catholic, Jewish, Mussulman, and Greek. The last of these beliefs seemed the most satisfactory. Vladimir marched south, took the city of Chersonesus in the Crimea, which at that time belonged to the Byzantine emperors, and then sent to demand the hand of the daughter of that potentate. After some deliberation his request was granted on condition that he was baptized. Accordingly he went to Constantinople in 988, and was admitted into the church, and at the same time received the hand of Anne, the Byzantine princess, although he seems to have already had a great number of wives. On his return to Kieff, he caused the image of Perun, the Slavonic god of thunder, which had been erected on an eminence, to be cast into the river, after having been belaboured by the cudgels of his soldiers. After this Vladimir issued a proclamation ordering all the inhabitants to proceed on the following day to the banks of the river to receive baptism. This extraordinary command met with universal obedience, and Russia was Christianized. As Vladimir introduced Christianity into Russia, so Yaroslaff his son was the first legislator. He was prince of Novgorod, and died in 1054. Vladimir on his death divided his dominions among his sons :—to Yaroslaff, Novgorod; to Iziaslaff, Polotsk; to Boris, Rostoff; to Gleb, Murom; to Sviatoslaff, the Drevlians; and a few other provinces to others of his sons. Kieff, his capital, was seized by his nephew Sviatopolk, who murdered Boris and Gleb, now canonized among the martyrs of the Russian Church. Yaroslaff at length drove Sviatopolk from Kieff, and was temporarily restored by the Poles, but only to be driven out again, and he ended his life as an exile. Yaroslaff was successful against the Petchenegs, but failed in an attack on Constantinople. His great claim to be remembered lies in his publishing the first recension of the Russkaia Pravda, the earliest Russian code, which was handed down in the chronicles of Novgorod.

We now leave the earliest period of Russian history, with its romantic stories and embedded sagas, telling us of heroic men, for the second division of our subject. The death of Yaroslaff was followed by the dreariest portion of the Russian annals—the period of the apanages ( udieli ), lasting from 1054 to 1238. The country was now broken up into petty principalities, and we shall understand its condition more clearly if we remember that the chief divisions of Russia from the Ilth century to the 13th were as follows :—

(1) The principality of Smolensk, formerly of great importance, as including in its territories the sources of three of the great Russian rivers—the Volga, the Dnieper, and the Diina.

(2) The principality of Russia, in the early and restricted sense, the original element of the country. The first form of the name is Rous. The word appears to have been a collective appellation of the people; it was under the influence of the Byzantine writers that in the 17th century the form Rossia sprang up, which in time spread over the whole land. We must not forget, however, that to the majority of Englishmen, till the beginning of the 18th century, its name was Muscovy. Its situation on the Dnieper was very advantageous; and the soil was fertile, the black-earth region being at the present time the great wheat-growing district of Russia. Besides, the Byzantine territory was not far oft. On the principality of Kieff depended that of Pereiaslavl; and Vishgorod, Biel-gorod, and Tortchesk were made apanages for princes of the same dynasty.

(3) On the affluents of the right bank of the Dnieper, especially the Sozha, the Desna, and the Seim, stretched the principalities of Tchernigoffwith Staroduband Lubech, and Novgorod Severski with Putivl, Kursk, and Briansk.

(4) The double principality of Ryazan and Murom.

(5) The principality of Suzdal.

(6) The republics of Novgorod and Pskoff, and the daughter-city of the latter, Vyatka.

Iziaslaff, the son of Yaroslaff, seems to have had a troubled reign of twenty-four years, constantly disturbed by civil wars. On his death in 1078, although he had two sons, he left the principality of Kieff to his brother Vsevolod, apparently on a principle common among the Slavs to bequeath the crown to the oldest male of the family; but, on the death of Vsevolod, Sviatopolk, the son of Iziaslaff, succeeded in 1093. At his death Vladimir Monomakh came to the throne, and ruled from 1113 to 1125. He was the son of Vsevolod, and was called after his maternal grandfather, the Byzantine emperor Constantine DIonomachus. The reign of this prince was a very prosperous one. He left a curious treatise called “Instruction” ( Pouchenie), addressed to his sons, in which we get a picture of the simple life in Russia at that period (see below, p. 103). He also founded on the river Kliazma a town which bears his name. There were continual quarrels among his descendants, but it is impossible to go into these minutely here. George Dolgoruki, one of the sons of Vladimir Monomakh, gained possession of Kieff in 1157, but the city soon began to pale before the growing power of Suzdal, and ceased to be the capital. He died the same year, just while a league was being formed to drive him out of it. The confederates entered the city, and their chief made himself prince. In 1169 Andrew Bogolioubski, son of George Dolgoruki, formed a coalition against Mstislaff, who was reigning in Kieff, and a large army was sent against the city. It was taken and pillaged; and the sacred pictures, sacerdotal ornaments, and even bells were carried off. It is on this occasion that the head of St Clement, the Slavonic apostle, which is known to have been preserved at Kieff, was lost.

After the fall of this city Russia ceased for some time to have any political centre. During the fifty-four years previous to the arrival of the Mongols, our chief interest is drawn to Suzdal and Galicia, and the republics of Novgorod and Pskoff. George Dolgoruki had founded the principality of Suzdal; his great anxiety, however, was to make himself master of Kieff. The chief aim of his son Andrew Bogoliubski was to extend his authority in another direction, and to cause it to be recognized at Novgorod the Great, where he had established his nephew as a kind of lieutenant. He attacked the city in 1170, but was completely repulsed from its walls, a panic having seized his army. The Novgorodians put to death many of their prisoners, and sold others as slaves, so that, to quote the words of their chronicler, “six Suzdalians could be bought for a grivna,” an old piece of money. In 1173 Andrew was also defeated by Mstislaff the Brave at Smolensk, and in 1174 he was assassinated by his own nobles. The reign of Andrew was in all respects an important one. From his refusing to divide his dominions among his brothers and nephews, it is plain that he saw the evil effect of the system of apanages and could conceive the idea of a united state. He was a man of iron will, and an astute diplomatist rather than a great soldier. He thus had something of the spirit of the Ivans, and anticipated their policy. He may be said with truth to have been the last of the conspicuous rulers of Russia before the Mongol invasions. As yet we have had but few worthy of the attention of the historian. They are Rurik, the founder of the empire, Oleg the warrior, and Olga the first Christian sovereign. To these succeed the warlike Sviatoslaff, slain by the Petchenegs; Vladimir, who caused the country to be Christianized; and Yaroslaff his son, the legislator. During the second period, in which we find Russia weakened and divided into apanages, we have only two noteworthy princes among a score of unimportant persons,—Vladimir Monomakh and Andrew.

The death of Andrew, whose murderers were not brought to justice, was followed by many petty wars. The only event, however, of any importance for a considerable time is the battle of Lipetsk (near Pereiaslavl Zaliesski) in 1215, in which George, son of Vsevolod, brother of Andrew, was defeated by the combined troops of Novgorod, Pskoff, and Smolensk. In 1220 we hear of Nijni-Novgorod being founded. A prince of considerable importance was Roman of Volhynia, to whom the inhabitants of Galicia offered the government of their principality, but he was superseded by another Vladimir, and did not get the crown till after a great deal of hard fighting. He is said by Kadlubek, the Polish historian, to have acted with ferocious cruelty. In 1205 he was killed in a battle with the Poles. In 1224 we have the first invasion of Russia by the Mongols. Daniel of Galicia was one of the last of the Russian princes to make his submission to Batu (1238). He died in 1264. In the 14th century the principality of Galicia was lost in the Polish republic, having been annexed to Lithuania. It joined the fortunes of that state in its union with Poland at the time of the marriage of Jagietlo with Jadwiga.

AVe now come to the third division of our subject— Russia under the yoke of the Mongols, viz., from 1238 to 1462. This is indeed a dreary period, in which the political and material development of the country was delayed by its complete enslavement. The first occasion on which the Russians came into contact with their Mongolian invaders was in 1224, when, in company with their allies, the Polovtzes, they suffered a complete defeat on the banks of the Kalka, near where it flows into the sea of Azoff, and adjoining the site of the present town of Mariupol. On this occasion, however, the Mongols only marched a little way up the river Dnieper, and retired after devastating the country. In 1238 they reappeared, and after destroying Bolgari, the capital of the Finnish Bulgarians on the Volga, advanced against Ryazan, which was plundered and burned, with adjoining cities. They then defeated the army of Suzdal, at Kolomna, on the Oka; after which they burned Moscow, Suzdal, Yaroslavl, and other important towns. The grand-duke Yuri of Suzdal had encamped on the river Sit, almost on the frontiers of the territory of Novgorod. He was there defeated and was decapitated on the field of battle, while his nephew A’asilko had his throat cut for refusing to serve Batu. After taking Tver and advancing within fifty leagues of Novgorod, the Mongols turned south and occupied the two following years (1239-1240) in ravaging southern Russia. They then burned Pereiaslavl and Tchernigoff, and Mangu, the grandson of Jenghiz Khan, directed his march against Kieff. The noise of the great host proceeding to the capture of the fated city is graphically described by the chronicler. The city was taken and given up to pillage, not even the graves being respected. A olhynia and Galicia followed the fate of the other principalities, and all Russia was now under the yoke of the Mongols, except the territory of Novgorod.

The subsequent movements of these barbarians in Hungary and Moravia cannot be described here. It will suffice to say that soon afterwards Batu turned eastwards. He next founded on the Volga the city of Sarai (the Palace), which became the capital of the powerful Mon-golian empire, the Golden Horde. Here also congregated the remains of the Petchenegs, the Polovtzes, and other tribes, and to these barbarians Russia was for a long time tributary. In 1272 the Mongolian hordes embraced Islam. Yaroslaff, who entered into his territory of Suzdal after the death of his brother Yuri, found his hereditary domains completely devastated. He had commenced rebuilding the ruined town, when he was summoned by Batu to do him homage in his new capital of Sarai. This, however, was not considered sufficient, and the poor prince was obliged to betake himself to the court of the great khan, which was at the further end of Asia, on the banks of the river Amur. His title was confirmed, but on his return he died of the fatigues of the journey. He was succeeded in Suzdal by his son Andrew (1246-1252). His other son Alexander reigned at Novgorod the Great, and gained the surname of Nevski from his celebrated victory over the Swedes in 1240. He and Dmitri Donskoi are the only great figures of this period of national abasement. Alexander Nevski has become consecrated in the memories of the people, and is now one of the leading Russian saints. In spite, however, of his services to the people of Novgorod, he afterwards quarrelled with them and retired to Pereiaslavl Zaliesski. But the citizens were soon glad to betake themselves to his help. On being invaded by the German Sword-bearing Knights, who had established themselves in Livonia in the year 1201, and an army of Finns, Alexander was summoned, like another Camillus, and defeated the enemy on Lake Peipus in what was called the “Battle of the Ice” in 1242. He entered Novgorod in triumph with his prisoners. In spite of all this brilliant success, Alexander was unable to resist the power of the Golden Horde, and was obliged to go to Sarai to do homage to the khan. He was accompanied by his brother Andrew. The ceremony was always attended by many degrading acts of submission on the part of the tributary prince. In 1260 the Novgorodians, who had so long preserved the liberty of their republic uninjured, consented to submit to the khan and pay tribute; Alexander died before reaching VIadimir on his return from one of these humiliating journeys. A great part of western Russia was now consolidated by the Lithuanian princes into a state, the capital of which was Vilna and the language AVhite Russian. To this many of the western provinces of Russia gravitated, and by the marriage of the Polish heiress Jadwiga with Jagiefto of Lithuania these provinces went to Poland and were not reannexed to Russia till a much later period. The eastern portion of Russia grouped itself round Moscow, which is first heard of in the chronicles in 1147. We find four considerable eastern states—Ryazan, Suzdal, Tver, and Moscow. For a century after its foundation we hear nothing of this city, the name of which is certainly Finnish. AVe are told that it was burned by the Mongols in 1237, and that a brother of Alexander Nevski was killed there in 1248, in a battle against the Lithuanians. We have seen that the political centre of the country has constantly changed. From Novgorod it went to Kieff, from Kieff to Vladimir, the capital of Suzdal, and from Vladimir to Moscow; we shall soon find that owing to the vigorous policy of its rulers this principality became the nucleus of the great Russian empire, and gathered round it the adjacent states. Its true founder was Daniel, a son of Alexander Nevski, who added to it the cities of Pereiaslavl Zaliesski and Kolomna. At his death in 1303 he was the first to be buried in the church of St Michael the Archangel, where all the Russian sovereigns were laid till the days of Peter the Great. Since that time, with the exception of Peter IL, they have been interred in the church of the Petro-pavlovski fortress at St Petersburg. Daniel was followed on the throne by his sons Yuri and Ivan in succession. Yuri Danilovich (1303-1326) took possession of Mozhaisk. The reign of Ivan Kalita, or the Purse (1328-1340), still further strengthened the new principality. Tver was added, and the pre-eminence of Moscow was assured by the metropolitan coming to reside there. After Kalita came in succession his two sons, Simeon the Proud (1340-1353) and Ivan II. (1353-1359). Simeon first took the title of grand-duke of all the Russias. He died of the Black Death, which was then devastating Europe. In spite of the efforts of these princes to maintain the supremacy of Moscow, on their death the hegemony of the Russian states went again for a time to Suzdal. It was Dmitri, surnamed Donskoi, the son of Ivan II., who won the battle of Kulikovo (lit. “the field of woodcocks”) over Mamai, the Mongolian chief, in 1380. In spite of this, however, Toktamish their general invaded Russia, burned Moscow to the ground, and put to death a great number of the inhabitants. To Dmitri succeeded his son Vasilii or Basil (1389-1425), who was prince both of Moscow and Vladimir. He in turn was followed by Vasilii the Blind (1425-1462).

We begin to touch firmer ground when we approach the reign of Ivan III., the son of Vasilii, who may be considered the founder of the autocracy. We may take, therefore, as our fourth division the period from 1462 to 1613, which will include the consolidation of the empire under the vigorous rule of Ivan III., Basil V., and Ivan IV., the usurpation of Boris Godunoff, the reign of the false Demetrius, and the troubles following upon it till the accession of the house of Romanoff in the person of Michael in the year 1613. Ivan III. reigned forty-three years, and had as much influence in the consolidation of Russia as Louis XI. had in that of France. It was the great age when throughout Europe absolute monarchies were being created on the ruins of feudalism. On his accession Ivan found himself surrounded by powerful neighbours—to the east the great principality of Lithuania, to the south the Mongols; Ryazan and Tver had not been annexed to the territory of Muscovy; Novgorod and Pskoff were still republics. It was against Novgorod, a wealthy city and a member of the Hanseatic league, that his efforts were first directed. In consequence of its situation, and by its paying the tribute demanded, it had escaped from the ravages which other parts of Russia had undergone. Taking advantage of the factions which harassed this city, he succeeded in creating a party subservient to his own interests, and as early as 1470 had got the control of the government of the city, which a rival faction was anxious to transfer to the Poles. In 1478 the republic of Novgorod ceased to exist; the chief opponents of Ivan were transported to Moscow, and their goods confiscated. The veche, as the public assembly was called, was terminated for ever, and the bell which had summoned the mutinous citizens carried off triumphantly to Moscow. In 1495 the tyrant was so foolish as to confiscate the goods of many of the German merchants who traded at Novgorod. In consequence of this nearly all the foreigners left the city, and its prosperity rapidly declined. It is now a decayed provincial town, interesting only to the antiquary. In 1489 Vyatka, a daughter city of Pskoff, was annexed and lost thereby its republican constitution. In 1464 by giving the hand of his sister to the prince of Ryazan Ivan made sure of the proximate annexation of that apanage. He seized Tver and joined it to his dominions, when the grand-prince Michael had allied himself with Lithuania. The system of apanages in Russia had now to come to an end. But Ivan, who had married the niece of the Byzantine emperor, and assumed as his cognizance the two-headed eagle, was also to come into collision with the hereditary enemies of Russia, the Mongols. The great power of the Golden Horde had been broken up; on its ruins had arisen the empires of Kazan and of Sarai or Astrakhan, the horde of the Nogais, and the khanate of the Crimea. In 1478, when Ahmed, the khan of the Great Horde, whose capital was Sarai, sent his ambassadors with his portrait, to which the Russian was to do homage, Ivan trampled it under foot, and put to death all the envoys, except one, who was deputed to take back the news to the khan. The reply of Ahmed to this outrage was a declaration of war; and the two armies met on the banks of the Oka. Ivan, who, like Louis XI., was much more of a diplomatist than a soldier, according to the accounts of the chroniclers, was in great terror, and could not be induced to fight by the persuasions of his soldiers or the benedictions of his ecclesiastics. He had already, after the armies had been for some time encamped opposite to each other, given the signal of retreat, when, in consequence of a sudden panic the Mongols also retreated, and the armies fled from each other in mutual fear. This invasion, which occurred in the year 1480, was the last great inroad of the Asiatic enemies of Russia, but we shall find some even later than the days of Ivan the Terrible, in whose time Moscow was burned by these barbarians. Meanwhile Ivan went on in his career of annexation. In 1472 he conquered Permia, in 1489 Vyatka. Ten years afterwards he had extended his authority as far north as the Petchora. His good fortune seemed ever on the increase; by a war with Alexander, king of Poland, he gained an accession of territory to the west as far as the river Desna. Upon peace being concluded, Alexander married Helen, the daughter of Ivan, but that monarch, on pretence that no regard had been paid to his daughter’s religious scruples, declared war against his new son-in-law. The Polish monarch could not rely upon the fidelity of many of his vassals, as we find so often the case in Polish history, and suffered a complete defeat at the battle of the Vedrosha. On the other hand, in 1501 the Russians were routed at the battle of the Siritza, near Isborsk, by the grand-master of the Teutonic order, Hermann von Plettenberg. The order had been established in Lithuania as early as 1225; the Sword-bearers amalgamated with them in 1237.

In 1472 Ivan had married a Byzantine princess, Sophia, daughter of Thomas, brother of the emperor Constantine Palaeologus. This Thomas had fled to Rome after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. In consequence of this mar-riage, a great many Greeks came to Moscow, bringing Byzantine culture, such as it was, to Russia, and among other things a quantity of valuable manuscripts, which formed the nucleus of the synodal library. Italians also made their appearance in Russia, among others the cele-brated Aristotle Fioraventi of Bologna, the architect of so many buildings at Moscow. Ivan not only welcomed foreigners in his dominions, but entered into relations with many European powers, among others the Germans, the Venetians, and the Pope. His reign is remarkable, not only for the consolidation of the Russian autocracy, but also for legislation. In 1497 he issued his Sudebnik, or Book of Laws, the second Russian code after the Russkaia Pravda of Yaroslaff. Comparison of the two codes will show how much had been done by the Mongols to lower the Russian character. It is in the reign of Ivan that we first hear of the use. of the knout: an archimandrite and some noblemen were publicly knouted for being concerned in forging a will. At his death Ivan bequeathed his throne to his second son Vasilii or Basil, passing over his grandson, the child of his eldest son Ivan, who had pre-deceased him; he was evidently unwilling to commit his growing empire to the perils of a minority, Vasilii Ivan-ovich (1505-1533) fully carried out the programme of his father. He destroyed the independence of Pskoff in 1510, put an end to the veche or popular assembly, and carried off the bell which summoned the citizens. Thus fell the last of the Slavonic republics. Ryazan was next added to the Muscovite territory. The prince, being accused of having contracted an alliance with the khan of the Crimea, tied to Lithuania, where he died in obscurity. Novgorod Severski was annexed soon after, and by a war with Sigismund I. Basil got back Smolensk. He was doomed, however, to suffer from an invasion of the Mongols of the Crimea, and is said to have signed a humiliating treaty to save his capital, whereby he acknowledged himself the tributary of the khan.

Meanwhile at home Basil exercised absolute authority; Russia now exhibited the spectacle of an Asiatic despotism. He entered into negotiations with many foreign princes. Herberstein, the German ambassador, who has left us such an interesting account of the Russia of this time, has told us of the great splendour of his court. We now come to the reign of the terrible Ivan, who has left his name written in blood upon the annals of Russia, and ruled for the long period of fifty-one years (1533-1584). It was a fortunate thing for the aggrandizement of the empire that, instead of having a succession of weak sovereigns, who only ruled a short time, it had three such vigorous potentates as Ivan III., Basil, and Ivan IV., whose united reigns extended over a hundred and twenty-two years. The grand-duke Basil at his death left two sons, Ivan and Yuri, under the guardianship of his second wife Helen Glinska. She had come into Russia from Lithuania, her family having been proscribed by the Polish king Alexander on the accusation of having plotted against his life. The grand-duchess ruled with great ability, but died in 1538, having been, as is supposed, poisoned. The two young princes then became the victims of the intrigues of the chief families, especially those of Shuiski and Belski. Ivan early gave proof of a vigorous understanding, whereas his younger brother Yuri appears to have been half-witted. In 1543, when only in his thirteenth year, Ivan determined to emancipate himself from the galling yoke of the boiars, and by a kind of coup el'etat threw off their tutelage, and caused Shuiski to be torn to pieces by dogs. After this, for some time, he was under the influence of his maternal relations. In January 1547 Ivan was crowned by the metropolitan Macarius, and took the title of czar, or tsar, a Slavonic form of the Latin Caesar. He soon afterwards celebrated his marriage with Anastasia Romanova. The same year a great conflagration took place at Moscow. The mob affected to believe that this had been caused by the Glinskis, who were very unpopular, and massacred a member of that family.

After this time Ivan seems to have committed himself very much to the guidance of the priest Silvester and Alexis Adasheff. This was the happiest portion of his reign, for he was also greatly under the influence of his amiable wife. To this period also belongs a recension of the Sudebnik of his grandfather Ivan III. (1550), and the Stoglaff, or Book of the Hundred Chapters, by which the affairs of the church were regulated (1551). In the following year Ivan became master of Kazan, and two years later of Astrakhan. The power of the Mongols was no.v almost broken. Triumphant in the south and the east, he then turned his attention to the north, being anxious to open up a means of communication with the west. He anticipated the plans which Peter the Great was destined to carry out long afterwards. He was thus brought into collision with the Swedes and the Teutonic Knights. When Ivan sent a German named Schlitt to procure the assistance of some foreign artisans, they were stopped by the Germans and prevented from entering Russian territory. In consequence of this, war afterwards broke out between Ivan and the Order. In 1558 the

Russian army invaded Livonia, and took several towns, whereupon the Order made an alliance with Sigismund Augustus of Poland. But, while Russia was busy with this war, a great change was taking place in the home policy of Ivan. He threw off the influence of Silvester and Adasheff, who were both banished. From this time may be said to date the commencement of the atrocities of this czar which have earned him the epithet constantly added to his name. He was especially moved by the treason of Prince Andrew Kurbski, who, having lost a battle with the Poles, was too much afraid of the wrath of his imperial master to venture again into his clutches. He accordingly fled to the king of Poland, by whom he was well received, and from his safe retreat he commenced an angry correspondence with the czar, reproaching him with his cruelties (see below, p. 104). The answer of Ivan has been preserved. In it he dwells upon the degrading subjection in which he had been kept by his early advisers, and attempts to justify his cruelties by saying that they were only his slaves whom he had killed, over whom God had given him power of life and death.

In December 1564 Ivan retired with a few personal friends to his retreat at Alexandrovskoe, near Moscow, where he passed his time pretty much as Louis XI. did at Plessy-les-Tours, for he resembled the French monarch both in his cruelty and his superstition. The boiars, afraid that the monarch was about to quit them for ever, went in crowds to Alexandrovskoe to supplicate him to return to Moscow. This he finally consented to do, and on his return established his bodyguard of oprùhniks, who were the chief agents of his cruelty. In the year in which he retired to Alexandrovskoe we have the establishment of a printing-press at Moscow. Ivan now commenced a long series of cruelties. To this period belong the deposition and perhaps murder of Philip, the archbishop of Moscow; the execution of Alexandra, the widow of his brother Yuri; the atrocities committed at Novgorod, which seems to have fallen under the tyrant’s vengeance for having meditated opening its gates to the king of Poland; and, lastly, the terrible butcheries on the Red Square [Krasnaia Plostchad).

It was in the reign of Ivan that the English first had dealings with Russia. In 1553, while Edward VI. was on the throne, three ships were sent out under Willoughby and Chancellor to look for a north-east passage to China and India. Willoughby and the crews of two of the ships were frozen to death, but Chancellor arrived safely in the White Sea, and thence proceeded to the court of Ivan, by whom he was favourably received. The English secured great trading privileges from Ivan, and established factories in the country. In one of his mad sallies, Ivan actually wrote to Queen Elizabeth (1570) asking for a safe retreat in her dominions if he should be driven out by his own subjects.

Ivan was continually waging war in the Baltic territory with the Teutonic Knights, in which, although on the whole unsuccessful, he committed great cruelties. But in 1571 he was obliged to suffer another invasion of the Mongols of the Crimea, who, to quote the quaint language of an English resident, burned “the Mosco every stick” (Hakluyt’s Voyages, i. 402). On the death of Sigismund Augustus of Poland in 1572, when the crown of that country had become elective, the family of the Jagiettos being now extinct, Ivan declared himself one of the competitors. The successful candidate was the French prince Henry of Valois, but he soon fled from his new kingdom, and, on the throne again becoming vacant, the redoubtable Stephen Batory was chosen, who proved a formidable foe to the tyrant now growing old. In consequence of the successes of Stephen, Ivan was obliged to abandon all his conquests in Livonia; and the attempt to open up a passage for Russia into the Baltic failed till carried out by the efforts of Peter the Great.

One of the chief events of this reign was the conquest of Siberia by a Cossack named Yermak, who had formerly been a robber, but was pardoned by the czar on laying his conquests at the imperial feet. Among many points in which Ivan resembled Henry VIII. was the number of his wives. On the death of the seventh, he was anxious to procure an eighth from the court of his friend Elizabeth of England, and the daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon was offered to the inspection of the Russian ambassador, Feodor Pisemski, at her own desire and the queen’s. She was presented to him in the gardens of York House. The ambassador prostrated himself before her, and professed to be dazzled by her beauty. Before, however, the negotiations for the marriage were concluded, the young lady, of whom a very favourable account had been transmitted to the court of Moscow, became alarmed. Rumours had reached her about the former wives of the czar and his habits. She therefore declined the brilliant prospect of an alliance associated with so many dangers. Full details of the adventures of the Englishmen who resided at Ivan’s court will be found in Hakluyt’s Voyages. In 1567 Anthony Jenkinson was commissioned by the czar to convey a special message to Queen Elizabeth, “that the Queen’s Majestie and he might be to all their enemyes joyned as one, and that England and Russland might be in all manners as one.” In fact Ivan wanted the assistance of the English in his wars against the Swedes and the Poles; he could appreciate the superiority of their weapons and military tactics; but Elizabeth only cared to secure a monopoly of trade, which the English for a long time enjoyed, and, according to the historian Ustrialoff, the Russians were but little benefited by it.

The declining days of Ivan were embittered by the death of his eldest son, whom he had stricken in a fit of passion with his iron staff. When the paroxysm of his anger was over, his grief was boundless. Full of remorse and continually afraid of conspiracies which might be concocted by his subjects, and harassed by superstitious dread, in which he betook himself to the divination of witches, he expired in the year 1584.

Ivan was succeeded by his eldest surviving son Feodor (Theodore), at that time twenty-seven years of age. He was feeble both in mind and body, and very superstitious. Fletcher calls him “very simple, and almost a natural,” and Solomon Henning, author of a Chronicle of Livonia, says that he was so weak-minded that he could find no greater amusement than tolling the church bells before service. In consequence, the chief power in the empire fell into the hands of Boris Godunoff, the brother-in-law of Feodor, a man of boundless ambition and great capacity. His inordinate lust of rule he concealed under the guise of piety; his commanding presence extorted respect wherever he went. Between him and the throne were only the sickly Feodor and his brother Dmitri, still a child, who had been previously removed to the town of Uglich in the government of Yaroslavl. For a while Boris had nourished the idea of proclaiming Dmitri illegitimate, on the ground that he was the son of Ivan’s seventh wife, a marriage forbidden by the canons of the church. Finally, as there seems every reason to believe, he caused the child to be assassinated at Uglich on the 15th of May 1591. The circumstances of the death of the young prince are involved in mystery; so much, however, is certain. Dmitri was playing in a court-yard; his gover ness Vasilissa Volokhova, his nurse, and a servant-maid were in attendance. Whether from accident or design they all for a time lost sight of him. According to their testimony while under examination, the young prince had a knife in his hand when last seen; he amused himself with sticking it into the ground and cutting pieces of wood. Suddenly the nurse, on looking round, saw him prostrate and covered with blood. He died almost immediately from a large wound in his throat. The account of how the news was brought to Moscow is described in a highly dramatic manner by Horsey. We have no direct evidence of the complicity of Godunoff in this murder; but there seems little doubt of it. A secret inquiry was conducted; the body, however, was not examined, and the commissioners reported that Dmitri had died of a wound accidentally inflicted by himself in a fit of epilepsy. On account of the riot which had taken place at Uglich, Boris proceeded to punish the town. More than two hundred of the inhabitants were put to death and many sent to Siberia. The church bell of Uglich was banished with them and placed in the capital of Siberia; it was not brought back till the earlier part of the present century. The remains of Dmitri, who was afterwards canonized, were deposited in the cathedral of St Michael, the burial-place of the czars. Soon afterwards a great fire broke out in Moscow, and Boris caused many streets to be rebuilt at his own expense, distributed aid, and exempted the sufferers from taxes; but still the people murmured secretly; they felt that the stain of blood was upon him, and ungratefully accused him of having caused the city to be set on fire. In the same year (1591) the khan of the Crimea made one of his periodical raids against Moscow. He set out from Perekop, and marched in a straight line, everywhere plundering and devastating. In these circumstances, Feodor displayed nothing but imbecility. He merely remarked that the saints who protected Russia would fight for her, and again betook himself to his favourite amusement of bell-ringing. Boris, however, showed vigour. In a few days he caused Moscow to be surrounded with palisades, redoubts, and artillery. The Mongols were repulsed with great slaughter; but, although Boris saved his country, he could not secure the goodwill of the people. Indeed, they accused him of having invited the Mongols that the general danger might make them forget the death of Dmitri. The czarina, Irene, wife of Feodor and sister of Boris, about this time gave birth to a female child, which lived but a few days, and Boris was of course accused of having poisoned it. In reality the princess suffered from continual ill-health, and on one occasion we find Elizabeth of England sending her a physician. Boris, however, still persevered in his energetic measures for strengthening the empire. Smolensk was fortified, Archangel built; and a strong cordon was drawn round the territories occupied by the Mongols. The Swedes were driven into Narva, and diplomatic relations were opened with the European powers.

About this time the imbecile Feodor died, and with him became extinct the dynasty of Scandinavian Rurik. This event occurred in 1598, and Boris was elected to succeed him. Godunoff, however, who felt sure of the crown, at first affected to be unwilling to receive it. He retired to a monastery and was followed by the people, supplicating him to be their emperor. He kept Russia in this state of suspense for six weeks, and then relented. As soon as he ascended the throne, the traces of his vigorous hand could be found everywhere. One of his first plans was the abridgment of the power of the nobility, which had been begun by Ivan III. and continued by Ivan IV. By this a benefit was conferred upon Russia; but Boris also served his own ambition. He was particularly severe to all members of the Romanoff family, because they were allied to the house of Rurik, and troubled his dreams of sovereignty. The head of this house was compelled to become a monk; his son, however, was destined to ascend the throne. A famine broke out in 1601, which Boris was unsparing in his efforts to allay. In the midst of all this suffering a rumour spread that Dmitri, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, was not dead.

One day in the year 1603 Prince Adam Wisniowiecki, of Bragin in Lithuania, happening to be very angry with a servant, struck him and used an insulting epithet. The young man, with tears in his eyes, said, “If you knew who I am, you would not treat me so nor call me by that name.” “Who then are you, and whence do you come ?” replied the astonished prince. “I am the prince Dmitri, son of Ivan Vasilievich.” He then recounted a well-concocted tale of his miraculous escape from the assassin whom Boris had employed. This was his physician, who feigned compliance with the usurper’s designs, but only to frustrate them. On the night appointed for the murder, the man, whose name was Simon, put the son of a serf into his young master’s bed (who was accordingly killed), and immediately fled with Dmitri from Uglich. He was then committed to the care of a loyal gentleman, who thought it better for the sake of protection that he should enter a monastery. This gentleman and the physician were dead, but in confirmation of his story the false Dmitri exhibited a seal, bearing the arms and name of the prince, and a golden cross set with jewels which he said was the baptismal gift of his godfather, Prince Ivan Mstislavski. Wisniowiecki believed his tale. There were also other supposed signs. The Polish nobles thronged around the young man, whose manners, as we read in the case of Perkin Warbeck, seemed to bear out his pretensions. Meanwhile Dmitri remained in Poland, enjoying all the lavish attentions of the Polish nobility. Boris was soon made acquainted with his appearance on the scene, and offered the brothers Wisniowiecki money and lands if they would surrender the impostor to him. Without, however, replying to these overtures, they removed him into the interior of Poland, and he was received with royal honours by George Mniszek, the palatine of Sandomir. Here he is said to have entered into a secret understanding with the Jesuits to bring over Russia to the Latin faith, on condition of being supported by the papal nuncio. The pretender privately abjured the Greek faith, and signed a contract of marriage with Marina, the youngest daughter of Mniszek, by which he settled upon her the towns of Novgorod and Pskoff, and engaged to pay her father a million of florins as soon as he had ascended the throne. Afterwards he executed another treaty ceding Smolensk and the surrounding territory to Mniszek and the king of Poland. These proceedings were not likely to recommend him to his Russian subjects. For the present they were concealed, and Dmitri publicly professed the Greek ritual. Soon after this Sigismund of Poland saluted him as czar of Moscow, and assigned him a pension of 40,000 florins. All this time Boris affected to regard the pretender with contempt, and issued a manifesto setting forth that his real name was Grishka (or Gregory) Otrepieff, a renegade monk. Whether this individual was •really the man who personated Dmitri, the son of Ivan, cannot be known for certain; but it seems very probable. Karamzin has adopted this view. Boris soon issued a proclamation against him, calling him an apostate monk, who wished to introduce the Latin heresy into Russia, and to build Romish churches in the Orthodox land. Dmitri entered that country ou the 3lst of October 1604, and marched on Moravsk in Tchernigoff. He met with uninterrupted success, large numbers joining his expedition, and the authorities of the chief towns on his route offering him bread and salt till he came to Novgorod Severski on the 23d of November. This well-fortified place was defended by Basmanoff, a veteran captain, with five hundred streltzi On the arrival of the pretender he was summoned to capitulate, but, standing on the ramparts with a lighted match, he replied: “The grand-prince and czar is at Moscow; as for your Dmitri he is a robber, who shall be impaled, along with his accomplices.” After three months the invaders abandoned the siege, but they had the good fortune soon afterwards to seize a large sum of money which Boris was sending to some of the towns. Shortly after this the important fortresses of Putivl, Sievsk, and Voronezh surrendered to Dmitri. Boris was too ill to go in person against the impostor; he, however, raised an army of fifty thousand men. A great battle took place near Novgorod, and the supporters of the czar would have suffered a most ignominious defeat had it not been for Basmanoff. This captain was recalled to Moscow and loaded with honours by Boris, who, from motives not very evident, unless he had begun to have suspicions of his fidelity, detained him in the city, and committed the care of the new army which he had formed to Shuiski, who was probably only half-hearted in his cause. A great battle took place on the 2d of January 1605, on the plain of Dobrînichi, not far from Orel; here Dmitri was defeated, chiefly through the bravery of the foreign legion. He would have been captured had it not been for the fidelity of his Cossack infantry—for at this time the Cossacks were subject to Poland—who were killed to a man, and probably not a fugitive would have reached Sievsk had not Shuiski acted with duplicity. Meanwhile, the pretender rode as fast as his horse would carry him to Putivl, a strong town on the frontier, from which he could easily beat a retreat into Poland. The followers of Boris remained at Dobrinichi, putting to death their prisoners. The conduct of Shuiski showed with what apathy he viewed the cause of his master; he soon drew off his troops into winter quarters, alleging that nothing more could be done that season, and also wasted time before Kromî, an insignificant place. Meanwhile Dmitri corrupted some of the chief generals of Boris. An attempt to poison him soon afterwards failed, and the pretender sent a message to Boris, recommending him to descend from the throne which he had usurped. But the days of the latter were numbered. On the 13th of April 1605 he presided as usual at the council-board, and received some distinguished foreigners. A grand banquet was given, but suddenly after dinner he was seized with illness; blood burst from his nose, ears, and mouth, and in the brief period before his death, according to the Russian custom, the dress of a monk was thrust upon him, and he was consecrated under the name of Bogolep (“acceptable to God ”). He expired in the fifty-third year of his age, after a reign of six years. Whether he committed suicide or was poisoned cannot now be ascertained; his death could hardly have been natural. Boris was a man of great energy of character, with views singularly in advance of his age. In some respects he anticipated the plans of Peter the Great; thus he caused several young Russians to be sent abroad to be educated, some of whom came to England. By a ukaze, however, binding the peasant to the soil, he began the system which reduced him by degrees to a condition of abject serfdom.

Boris had left a sufficient number of partisans at Moscow to proclaim his son Feodor, a youth of sixteen, and all classes took the oath of allegiance to him. Shuiski and Mstislavski returned to Moscow to assist the young czar in the government. Basmanoff was sent to take the command of the army, but, probably feeling the cause of Feodor to be desperate, on the 7th of May he proclaimed Dmitri. He was now ordered to march on the capital. Feodor, however, and his adherents still held the Kremlin with a large garrison. Accordingly it was resolved to make an attempt on Krasnoe Selo, a large town near Moscow, where many wealthy merchants resided. This was easily taken, whereupon many of its citizens marched to Moscow, and convoking the people called upon them to acknowledge Dmitri as their sovereign. Feodor and his mother were murdered, and buried in a cemetery outside the city walls, whither also the remains of Boris were carried, for they were not allowed sepulture among the tombs of the czars. Petreius, the Swedish envoy, who has left us an interesting account of these times, tells us that the rumour was circulated that these unhappy people had poisoned themselves, but he himself saw their bodies, and the marks on their necks of the cords with which they had been strangled. According to some authorities, Xenia, the daughter of Boris, described as beautiful by the old Russian chronicler Kubasoff, was forced to retire into a convent, but Petreius declares that she was compelled to become the mistress of the conqueror. The usurper now hearing that every obstacle was removed, marched upon the capital, which lie entered on June 20, 1605. We have not space to detail the splendours of his retinue, nor the ceremonies and feastings which attended his arrival. He acted at first with prudence and conciliation towards his new subjects, and even promised to pay the debts of his father Ivan. He received his mother with transports of joy; she professed to identify him, although she afterwards denied that he was her son. She was probably, however, glad enough to get out of the convent into which she had been thrust by Boris. But Dmitri soon gave offence on account of his neglect of Russian etiquette and superstitious observances. It was plain that he held the Greek Orthodox religion very cheap, and his subjects could see that he had a propensity for the Latin heresy. In the following year Marina Mniszek, his bride, made her appearance in Moscow, and the marriage took place on the 18th of May. It was followed by continued banquets. But a rebellion broke out on the 29th, at the head of which was Vasilii Shuiski, whom Dmitri had spared when about to be executed. The czar, hearing a noise in the night, and finding himself surrounded by enemies, opened a window 30 feet from the ground, leapt down, and broke his leg. He was soon afterwards found and killed. Basmanoff was slain while attempting to defend his master. The corpse of the impostor was afterwards burned. Marina was not killed, although there was a great massacre of the Poles in every quarter of Moscow; she and the ladies of her suite were kept as prisoners. Thus ended this remarkable episode of Russian history. The whole period has been aptly termed by the national historians “the Period of Troubles” (Smutnoye Vremya).

The boiars, on being convoked after the murder of Dmitri, elected Vasilii Ivanovich Shuiski for their sovereign, but he found himself in every way disadvan-tageously situated, without an army and without money. He was, moreover, troubled by an announcement which gained credence among the people that Dmitri was not really dead. To put an end to these rumours, Shuiski, entirely changing his policy, and contradicting his previous assertions, sent to Uglich for the body of the unfortunate prince, and caused him to be canonized. Two subsequent impostors, who gave themselves out to be Dmitri, were taken and executed. To complete the misfortunes of Russia, the country was invaded by the Poles in 1609, who laid siege to Smolensk. Shuiski was defeated at Klushino (a village situated to the north-east of Moscow), was taken prisoner, and was set free, to become a monk,—a favourite way of treating troublesome persons in Russia. He was afterwards delivered over to Sigismund, who kept him in prison during the rest of his life. The crown was finally offered to Ladislaus, the son of Sigismund, who in reality for two years was sovereign of Russia, and caused money to be coined in his name at Moscow. Everything seemed to portend the ruin of the country, when it was saved by the bravery of Minin, the butcher of Nijni-Novgorod, who roused the citizens to arms by his patriotic appeal, and was joined by Prince Pozharski. The latter took the command of the army; the administrative department was handed over to the former. The brave prince succeeded in driving the Poles from Russia. In 1612 the boiars resolved to elect a new czar, but they did not actually meet till 1613, and many debates ensued. The sufferings of the country had been great; a considerable part of the city of Moscow (with the exception of the Kremlin and the churches built of stone) was laid in ashes. The treasury was plundered, and its contents sent to Poland. Among other things Olearius, the traveller of the 17th century, quaintly adds, “the Russians lost the horn of a unicorn of great value, set with precious stones,” which was also carried off to Poland; and he tells us that even up to his time the Muscovites bitterly regretted that they had been robbed of it. Princes Mstislavski and Pozharski refused the crown, and finally the name of Michael Romanoff, a youth of sixteen, was put forward as a candidate, chiefly on account of the virtues of his father Philarete. The Romanoffs were connected on the female side with the house of Rurik, Anastasia Romanova having been the first wife of Ivan the Terrible. Before being allowed to ascend the throne, the youthful sovereign, according to some authors, took a constitutional oath. The condition of the country all this time was most critical; large portions of its territory were in the hands of the Swedes and Poles, and the villages were plundered by wandering bands of Cossacks. Ladislaus the son of Sigismund had not yet renounced the title of czar; in 1617 he appeared with an invading army under the walls of Moscow, but was repulsed, and on December 1, 1618, consented to abandon his claims, and conclude an armistice for fourteen years. In 1617 a treaty had been made at Stolbovo, a town near Lake Ladoga, by which the Russians had been compelled to give up a large portion of their territory to the Swedes. Philarete, the father of Michael, who had been for some time imprisoned at Warsaw, was now allowed to return; he entered Moscow in 1619, and was elected patriarch, an office which had been vacant since the death of Hermogenes. Michael associated his father with himself in his power; all ukazes were published in their joint names; the patriarch held a separate court, and always sat at the right hand of the sovereign. The patriarchate was suppressed in 1721 by Peter the Great, who had formed the idea of making himself head of tho church from what he saw in England and other Protestant countries. The reign of Michael was not very eventful; he employed it wisely in ameliorating the condition of the country, which had recently suffered so much, and in improving the condition of his army. Foreigners began to visit the country in great numbers, and Russia was gradually opening itself to Western civilization. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden induced the czar to sign a treaty offensive and defensive, and a Swedish ambassador appeared at the Russian court. The sufferings which had been inflicted upon them by the Poles made the Russians eager to join an alliance which was directed against the Roman Catholic religion. In 1629 a French ambassador appeared at Moscow. Dutch and German artisans were taken into the Russian service to assist in the iron-foundries, with special view to the manufacture of cannon. The country swarmed with English merchants who had obtained valuable privileges. Scottish adventurers were to be met with in the Russian army in great numbers. We And them as early as the reign of Ivan the Terrible, to judge from Horsey’s Diary. The false Demetrius, like Louis XI., had a Scottish guard. In Russian documents we find the names of Carmichaels, Hamiltons (frequently in the corrupted Russified form of Khomutoff), Bruces, Gordons, and Dalziels. From Scottish settlers in Russia sprang the celebrated poet Lermontoff, the first two syllables of whose name fully show his Caledonian origin.

The following are the leading events of the reign of Alexis, who succeeded to the throne on the death of his father Michael in 1645. (1) First comes his codification of the Russian laws (called Ulozhxnie), which was based on the preceding codes of Ivans III. and IV. By the order of the czar, a commission of ecclesiastical and lay members was appointed to examine the existing laws, and make any necessary additions, or to adapt to present needs any which had become obsolete. The work was chiefly carried on by Princes Odoievski and Volkonski, with the assistance of two secretaries. They were engaged over it two months and a half, and the original code is still preserved in the Oruzhennaia Palata at Moscow. Ustrialoff boasts that, by recognizing the equality of all men in the eyes of the law, it anticipated a principle which was not generally acknowledged in western Europe till the 18th century. This doctrine, however, may be considered as only a natural consequence of autocracy. We are told that Alexis allowed access to all petitioners, and at his favourite village of Kolomenskoe, opposite his bed-room window, was placed a tin box; as soon as the czar rose and appeared at the window the suppliants came forward with their complaints, and, making an obeisance, placed them in the box, which was afterwards taken to him. (2) The second great event of his reign was the incorporation of the Ukraine and country of the Cossacks with Russia. For a description of the causes of this war, see Poland. (3) By the treaty of Andruszowo the Russians gained Smolensk, Tchernigoff, and finally Kieff, the Dnieper being the new boundary, and thus the towns which had been taken by the Lithuanians and annexed to Poland by the treaty of Lublin (1569) became Russian again. The only other events of the reign of Alexis of any importance are the great riot at Moscow, on account of the depreciation of the coinage in 1648, and the rebellion of Stenka Razin, a Cossack. The riot is fully described in the interesting letter of an eyewitness which is preserved in the Ashmolean Collection at Oxford. Razin devastated the country round the Volga, and continued his depredations for three years. Alexis, however, captured him, and pardoned him on condition of his taking the oath of allegiance. He soon, however, broke out into rebellion again, and proclaimed himself the enemy of the nobles, and the restorer of the liberty of the people. By various artifices he succeeded in alluring two hundred thousand men to his standard. Astrakhan was surrendered to him, and he ruled from Nijni-Novgorod to Kazan. He was, however, like Pugatcheff in the reign of Catherine II., a vulgar robber and nothing more. His atrocities disgusted the more respectable of his adherents; his forces were gradually dispersed, and in 1671 he was taken to Moscow and executed. The czar Alexis died in 1676 in his forty-eighth year. One of the most eminent men of his reign was Ordin-Nastchokin, who negotiated the peace of Andruszowo. Alexis was a man of broad views, and made many efforts to raise Russia to the level of a European power, by sending competent men as ambassadors to foreign parts, and developing the trade of the country. In these respects he resembled Boris Godunoff. Altogether his reign was one of distiuct progress for Russia.

He was succeeded by his eldest son Feodor, by his first wife Maria Miloslavskaia. Feodor (1676-1682) was a prince of weak health, and his reign was uneventful. A notable occurrence was the destruction of the Tozriadnie knigi, or books of pedigrees. According to the vιiestni-chestυο no man could take any office which was inferior to any which his ancestors had held, or could be subordinate to any man who reckoned fewer ancestors than himself. Feodor, however, finding to what interminable quarrels these pedigrees gave rise, both at court and in the camp, hit upon a bold plan, said to have been suggested by his minister Vasilii Golitzin. He caused all the families to deliver their pedigrees into court that they might be examined, under pretext of ridding them of any errors which might have crept in. The nobles were convoked; and the czar, assisted by the clergy, caused their books to be burned before their eyes.

On the death of Feodor, there seemed every probability that the empire would fall into a complete state of anarchy. The czar Alexis had been twice married: his first wife Maria Miloslavskaia bore him two sons, Feodor and Ivan, and several daughters; his second, Natalia Narishkina, was the mother of Peter and a daughter Natalia. The court was rent by the rival factions of the Miloslavskis and the Narishkins. Ivan was even more infirm than Feodor and the Narishkins strove to bring it about that he should be set aside and Peter should be elected. Sophia, however, the daughter of Alexis by his first wife, was a woman of singular energy of character, the more remarkable on account of the little attention paid to the education of women in Russia and the cloistered and spiritless lives they were compelled to lead. According to some accounts she was a woman altogether wanting in personal attractions. Perry, however, the engineer employed by Peter the Great, speaks of her as good-looking. But the position of the women of the imperial family was even worse than that of the generality; they were not allowed to marry subjects, and in consequence the majority of them led a life of enforced celibacy. Sophia was the favourite daughter of her father, and was assiduous in her attentions to him during his last illness. One of her brothers being an imbecile and the other a child, she hoped to wield the sceptre. She fomented a revolt of the streltzî, and, instigated by her harangues, they murdered some of the family and partisans of the Narishkins. Not content with slaying one of the czarina’s brothers at the beginning of the rebellion, they afterwards dragged another from his hiding-place and cut him to pieces.

The result of all these disturbances was that Ivan and Peter were declared joint-sovereigns, and Sophia was to be regent during their minority. She appointed Vasilii Golitzin to be commander-in-chief of the forces. He marched against the Mongols of the Crimea, but owing to the length of the journey and sufferings of the troops w r as able to effect but little. In 1689 Peter married Eudokia Lopukhina; but the union was by no means a happy one. Two sons were born to Peter, Alexander and Alexis; the first lived six months only, the latter survived to make a sad figure in Russian history. Next we have another revolt of the streltzî, said to have been instigated by Sophia and Golitzin. It is even alleged that the object of this conspiracy was to put Peter to death. His cause, however, prevailed, and the rebels were punished with great severity. Golitzin’s life was spared, but all his property was taken from him. Sophia was now permanently incarcerated in a convent under the name of Susanna, where she remained till her death fifteen years afterwards, at the age of forty-six. Thus from 1689 dates the actual rule of Peter. His brother Ivan, infirm both in body and mind, had but little share in the government; his faculties both of sight and speech are said to have been very imperfect. He took a wife, however, and had three daughters, concerning one of whom, at least, we have much more to hear. Ivan led a retired life, and died in 1696 at the age of thirty.

Want of space compels us to deal here only with the leading facts of the reign of Peter the Great (1689-1725); for more minute details the reader must consult the special article (vol. xviii. p. 698). The great object of the new czar was to give Russia ports in some other direction than the White Sea, constantly blocked with ice. He had already trained an army which was officered by foreigners in his pay. The Turks were the first objects of his attack. At first he was unsuccessful in his attempt to get possession of Azoff at the mouth of the Don,—partly on account of the treason of the Dutch engineer Jansen, who, in consequence of some slight put upon him, went over to the enemy. In 1696, however, he took the fort and soon afterwards made his triumphant entry into Moscow. In the following year Peter, accompanied by Lefort and Generals Golovin and Vosnîtzin, set out on his travels. For some time he worked at the docks of Saardam in Holland, and then he went to England, where he remained three months. The story of his stay at Deptford is too well known to need description here. He left England, taking with him a great number of ingenious men, who were appointed to teach the arts to the barbarous Russians. He was getting ready to go to Venice when he heard of the great revolt of the streltzî. Before his arrival their insurrection had been quelled by Gordon and others, and many of them lay in prison awaiting the sentences to be given by Peter. When he reached Moscow, a series of terrible executions took place, which have been described with only too much accuracy by some eyewitnesses, the chief being Korb, the secretary of the German embassy. In 1706 broke out the revolt of the Cossacks of the Don, and in 1709 that of Mazeppa, the hetman of the Little-Russian Cossacks, who eagerly joined Charles XII. in his struggle with Peter. As early as 1700 the Russian czar had carried on war with this last of the vikings, as he had been called. In that year Charles defeated Peter at the battle of Narva, but the latter, although humbled, was not disheartened. He gathered all his strength for another encounter. In the following year Sheremetreff defeated the Swedish general Schlippenbach in Livonia, and again in 1702. The great object of Peter was to gain possession of the Neva; this he attained, but the Russian arms were disgraced by many cruelties and robberies in the unfortunate Baltic provinces, which had already suffered so much in the wars of Ivan the Terrible.

Charles XII. now abandoned his attacks on the Polish king and invaded Russia. “I will treat with the czar at Moscow,” he said. Peter replied, “My brother Charles wishes to play the part of Alexander, but he will not find me Darius.” At Lesna the Swedish general Löwenhaupt fought a desperate battle with the Russians, in which, although nominally victorious, his losses were terrible. On June 15 (n.s.) was fought the battle of Poltava, which resulted in the complete defeat of Charles. He had brought it on by his recklessness, and, it may be added, complete ignorance of his duties as a general.

With the fall of Mazeppa and the coalition of the Little Russians in aid of Charles fell also the independence of the Cossacks and their sech or republic. They now became entirely dependent upon the Muscovite czar. The hetmanship, which had long been a mere empty title, lasted till the year 1789. In 1712 Peter married Martha Skavronska, a Livonian or Lithuanian peasant who had been taken prisoner at the siege of Marienburg in 1702. But little is known of her previous history; she received the name of Catherine on being baptized as a member of the Greek Church. Peter had previously divorced his wife Eudokia, who was distasteful to him on account of her sympathies with the conservative party in Russia. He now set about his great plan of civilizing the country on the model of the nations of the West. In this he was assisted by many foreigners in his pay. He abolished the patriarchate, probably from dislike of its great power, based nobility entirely upon service either civil or military, and divided the merchants into guilds, but left serfdom still existing in Russia, or perhaps we may say with truth even augmented it, by doing away with the privileges which the odnodvortzi and polovniki had and confounding all in a common category of serfdom. His attempt to introduce primogeniture into Russia did not succeed. He put an end to the Oriental seclusion of women and the Oriental dress of men; for the beard and long caftan were substituted the cleanly-shaved face and the dress in vogue in the West. He abolished also the pravezhe or public flagellation of defaulting debtors. The army was completely remodelled on the European system. During the exile of Charles XIL at Bender Peter drove Stanislaus Leszczynski out of Poland, and Augustus II. reentered Warsaw. Peter conquered Esthonia and Livonia. He was not able to annex Courland, which was a feudatory of Poland, but he negotiated a marriage between the duke and his niece Anna, daughter of the late czar Ivan, who was afterwards empress. A foolish expedition undertaken against Turkey was not successful. Peter found himself but ill-supported by the inhabitants through whose territory he marched, and was compelled to sign the treaty of the Pruth in 1711, whereby he gave back Azoff, one of his most valuable conquests, to the Turks. The story of his having been rescued by the dexterity of Catherine seems to lack confirmation; under any circumstances, he shortly afterwards acknowledged her as his wife. In Alay 17.13 Peter gained some fresh victories over the Swedes. In 1717 he made another European tour, visiting, among other places, Paris. On this occasion he was accompanied by his wife; concerning both strange stories were told, but perhaps we must be cautious how we receive too credulously, as Carlyle has done, the malicious gossip of the margravine of Baireuth. In 1721, by the treaty of Nystad with Sweden, Peter was left master of Livonia, Esthonia, Ingria, and part of Finland. He had begun building St Petersburg, “the window by which Russia looks” at Europe, as early as 1703.

In 1722 we find Peter descending the Volga from Nijni to Astrakhan, and gaining some important points on that river. Previous to this had occurred the sad death of his son Alexis, in which it must be said with sorrow Peter seemed lost to all the feelings of a father. Alexis had undoubtedly given him great cause for dislike by identifying himself in every way with the retrogressive party. The unfortunate young man probably died under the "infliction of torture. In 1721 Peter promulgated the celebrated ukaze (afterwards abrogated by Paul) that the sovereign had the right of naming his successor. On January 28, 1725, the great reformer was dead. An attempt to estimate his character has been made in the separate article assigned to him.

On the death of Peter the country was divided into two factions. The old reactionary party, the Golitzins, Dolgo-rukis, and others, were eager to proclaim Peter the son of Alexis, but those who had identified themselves with the reforms of the late sovereign were anxious that Catherine his widow, who had been crowned empress, should succeed. Menshikoff, the favourite of the late czar, who is said when a boy to have sold cakes in the streets of Moscow, became all-powerful at this period, and the reforms of Peter continued to be carried out. Catherine died in 1727; she appears to have been an indolent, good-natured woman, with but little capacity for government, and accordingly, throughout her short reign, was entirely controlled by others. She designated as her successor Peter the son of Alexis, and, in default of Peter and his issue, Anna, who had married the duke of Holstein, and Elizabeth, her daughters. The regency was exercised by a council consisting of tho two daughters, the duke of Holstein, Menshikoff, and seven or eight of the chief dignitaries of the empire. Menshikoff was still all-important; he had obtained from Catherine her consent to a marriage between his daughter and the youthful czar. But his authority was gradually undermined by the Dolgorukis. The favourite of Peter the Great was first banished to his estates, and afterwards to Berezoff in Siberia, where he died in 1729. The Dol-gorukis were now in the ascendency, and the czar was betrothed to Natalia, one of that family. He showed every inclination to undo his grandfather’s work, and the court was removed to Moscow. Soon afterwards, however, in January 1730, the young prince died of smallpox. His last words as he lay on his death-bed were, “Get ready the sledge; I want to go to my sister,”— alluding to the Princess Natalia, the other child of Alexis, who had died three years previously. The only foreign event of importance in this reign was the attempt of Maurice of Saxony to get possession of Courland, by marrying the duchess Anna, then a widow. She consented to the union, and the states of the province elected him, but Menshikoff sent a body of troops who forced him to quit it. On the death of Peter at the age of fifteen, various claimants of the throne were put forward. The great czar had left two daughters, Elizabeth, and Anna, duchess of Holstein, who had a son, afterwards Peter III. Two daughters were also surviving of his eldest brother Ivan, Anna, the duchess of Courland, and Catherine, duchess of Mecklenburg. Alexis Dolgoruki even had an idea of claiming the crown for his daughter, because she had been betrothed to the young emperor. This proposal, however, was treated with derision, and the High Secret Council resolved to call to the throne Anna of Courland, thinking that, as she was so much more remote by birth than the daughters of Peter, she would more willingly submit to their terms. In fact, they had prepared for her signature something like the porta Conventa of Poland. The following were the terms:—(1) the High Council was always to be composed of eight members, to be renewed by co-option, and the czarina must consult it on state affairs; (2) without its consent she could neither make peace nor declare war, could not impose any tax, alienate any crown lands, or appoint to any office above that of a colonel; (3) she could not cause to be condemned or executed any member of the nobility, nor confiscate the goods of any noble before he had a regular trial; (4) she could not marry nor choose a successor without the consent of the council. In case she broke any of these stipulations she was to forfeit the crown (see Rambaud, p. 425). Anna assented to these terms and made her entry into Moscow, which was now to be the capital. But the empress was soon informed how universally unpopular these pacta conventa were, which in reality put Russia into the hands of a few powerful families, chiefly the Dolgorukis and Golitzins. She accordingly convened her supporters, and publicly tore the document to pieces, and thus ended the last attempt to give Russia a constitution. The new empress was a cold, repulsive woman, whose temper had been soured by indignities endured in her youth; she took vengeance upon her opponents, and threw herself almost entirely into the hands of German advisers, especially Biren, a Courlander of low origin. This is the period called by the Russians the Bironovstchina. The country was now thoroughly exploited by tho Germans; some of the leading Russians were executed, and others banished to Siberia. Among the former was the able minister Volinski, beheaded with two others in 1740. He had fallen under the wrath of the implacable Biren. One of the most important enactments of this reign was the abolition of the right of primogeniture introduced by Peter the Great, which had never been popular in the country. On the crown of Poland falling vacant in 1733, an attempt was again made to place Stanislaus Leszczynski on the throne, but it failed through the opposition of Russia, and Stanislaus escaped with difficulty from Dantzic. Upon this followed a war with Turkey, which lasted four years (1735-1739), in conjunction with Austria. This was not very successful, but the Russian generals gained possession of a few towns, and were indignant when the Austrians signed the treaty of Belgrade with the Turks (1739), and the campaign came to an end. In 1740 the empress Anna died; she had reigned exactly ten years. She left the crown to Ivan, the son of her niece Anna, daughter of her sister Catherine, duchess of Mecklenburg. During the minority of this child Biren was to be regent. By a revolution de palais, however, the German adventurer was hurled from power and sent to Pelîm in Siberia. But matters did not rest here; taking advantage of the general unpopularity of the German faction, the partisans of Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great, were resolved to work their overthrow, and place her upon the throne. They consisted of Alexander and Peter Shuvaloff, Michael Vorontzoff, Razumovski, Schwarz, and a French surgeon named Lestocq. Elizabeth ingratiated herself into the favour of the soldiers, by whom the name of Peter the Great was still so much cherished. Anna Leopoldovna, as she was called, her husband Anthony Ulrich, the infant emperor, Munich, Ostermann, and the whole German faction were arrested in the night, and Elizabeth ascended the throne. Ivan VI. was imprisoned in the fortress of Schlüsselburg; Anna, with her husband and children, was banished to Kholmogori near Archangel, where she died in 1746. Ostermann was banished to Bere-zoff, and Munich to Pelim; they had both been previously sentenced to death. Biren and his family were now recalled and allowed to live at Yaroslavl. Elizabeth

Petrovna (1741-1762) inaugurated the return of Russian influence in opposition to the Germans, from whom the country had suffered so much during the reign of Anna. The people were weary of them, yet they were, as we shall see, to have one German emperor more. On ascending the throne she summoned to her court the son of her sister Anna and the duke of Holstein, who took the name of Peter Feodorovich on assuming the Greek religion, and was declared heir to the throne. In 1744 he married the Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, who by her baptism in the Orthodox Church became Catherine. Thus the line of descent was secured to the direct heirs of Peter the Great. In 1743, the armies of Elizabeth having gained some victories over the Swedes, the treaty of Abo was signed, by which Russia acquired the southern part of Finland, as far as the river Kiumen. The next event of importance is the war between Russia and Frederick the Great (1756-1762). In 1757 Apraksin crossed the frontier with 85,000 Russians, occupied Eastern Prussia, and defeated Lewald at Gross-Jagersdorf; but, instead of taking advantage of the victory, he soon afterwards retired behind the Niemen, having been tampered with by the grand-duchess Catherine and the chancellor Bestuzheff-Riumin. In 1758 Fermor, the Russian general, was completely defeated by Frederick at Zorndorf, but he was allowed to retreat without molestation. In 1759 Saltikoff beat the Prussians at Paltzig, and in the same year Frederick was obliged to submit to a greater defeat at Künersdorf, where he lost eight thousand men and one hundred and seventy-two cannon. It was on the loss of this battle that he meditated committing suicide. In 1760 the Russians entered Berlin, where they committed great havoc and destruction. “We have to do,” said Frederick, “with barbarians, who are digging the grave of humanity.” In the following year they took Pomerania. The cause of Frederick seemed on the verge of ruin; he was saved by the death of Elizabeth in December 1761. The empress was an idle, superstitious woman of lax morals, who was greatly under the influence of favourites. Since the reign of Peter I. no successor had appeared worthy of him. Still Russia made more progress under Elizabeth than it had made under Anna. In 1755 the university of Moscow, the oldest in the country, was founded through the influence of Ivan Shuvaloff. Literature made great advances, as will be seen below.

Elizabeth was succeeded by her nephew Peter, son of her sister Anna and Charles Frederick, duke of Holstein-Gottorp. He was suspected of German leanings, but his first measures made him very popular. In February 1762 he published an ukaze by which the nobility were freed from the necessity of entering upon any state employment, and he abolished the secret chancery. On the other hand he acted in some matters injudiciously, and offended the prejudices of the Russians, as the false Demetrius had done a century and a half previously. He ridiculed some of the ceremonies of the Orthodox Church, and showed a fondness for the Lutheran. He introduced many German tactics into the army, and evinced a great preference for his German corps of Holsteiners. His personal habits were very coarse: he was constantly seen drunk. Moreover he sent out of the country many of the talented Frenchmen who had during the reign of Elizabeth been helping Russia to get rid of her barbarism. Frederick II. of Prussia, who was at his lowest depths after the battle of Künersdorf, now saw to his delight a complete change in the Russian policy. Peter was an ardent admirer of the Prussian sovereign; in order to ensure peace, Frederick would have ceded Eastern Prussia; but Peter dreamed of nothing of the kind; he restored all the Russian conquests and formed an alliance with him, offensive and defensive. He lived very unhappily with his wife Catherine, and meditated divorcing her and imprisoning her for the rest of her life in a convent. The condition in which she passed her time may be seen from her memoirs, first published by Herzen, the authenticity of which there seems to be no reason to doubt. She, however, quietly waited her time, and a conspiracy was concocted in which she was assisted by the

Orloffs, Potemkin, the princess Dashkoff, and others (see PeteR III.). Leaving her residence at Peterhof, Catherine boldly put herself at the head of twenty thousand men. The miserable emperor abdicated without a struggle, and was soon afterwards secretly assassinated at Ropcha, near St Petersburg. Many of the details of this catastrophe are given in the interesting memoirs of the Princess Dashkoff, which were published by an English lady, Mrs W. Bradford, in 1840, having been taken down from her dictation. Thus had a German woman, by adroitly flattering the prejudices of the Russians, succeeded in making herself head of this vast empire. Two years afterwards Ivan VI., who is said to have become an idiot from his long confinement at Schlüsselburg, was murdered by his guards on account of the attempt of a certain Lieutenant Mirovich to set him free. Whether Mirovich was incited to this adventure. by secret promises of the Government, so that there might be an excuse for the murder of Ivan, has never been clearly shown. He expiated his crime by public execution, and is said to have expected a reprieve till the last moment.

The Seven Years’ War was now over, and the next great European complications were to be concerned with the partition of Poland, throughout the struggles of which country the Russians were constantly interfering; but for a fuller discussion of this subject the reader must be referred to the article Poland. In 1767 Turkey, urged on by France, declared war against Russia; the object was to aid the Poles by creating a diversion. The Russian general Golitzin attacked the grand vizier, took the town of Khotin (1769), and in the following year Rumantzoff defeated the khan of the Crimea, the Turkish feudatory and ally, and in 1770 won the great victory of Kagul. In 1771 Dolgoruki overran the Crimea, and Alexis Orloff defeated the Turks in a naval engagement at Chesme, on the coast of Asia Minor. In their naval expeditions the Russians were at this time greatly assisted by the number of Englishmen in their service. In 1774 was signed the peace of Kutchuk-Kainardji, whereby the sultan acknowledged the independence of the Mongols of the Crimea. The Russians thus detached this province from the sultan’s dominions, and after exercising a kind of protectorate over it added it to their own. He also ceded Azoff on the Don, Kinburn at the mouth of the Dniester, and all the fortified places of the Crimea. The Greeks, who had been induced to rise, were abandoned to the vengeance of the Turks.

In 1771 the plague broke out at Moscow, and many of the inhabitants perished. The archbishop Ambrose was massacred in a popular tumult, while endeavouring to carry out some measures which were necessary for the preservation of the public health. Soon afterwards occurred the rebellion of Pugatcheff, a Cossack of the Don, who declared himself to be the emperor Peter III. The czar, he alleged, had escaped from the hands of his would-be murderers, and would soon regain his throne. A large band of disaffected peasants and Raskolniks gathered round him, and he was joined by many of the Mongol races, who were inimical to the Russian rule. At first the generals sent against him were defeated. The rebel’s path was everywhere marked with bloodshed and pillage; he even got possession of several towns, including Kazan. Had he been something more than a vulgar assassin he might have made Catherine tremble on her throne, but his cruelties estranged his more moderate followers. He was afterwards beaten by Bibikoff and others, and finally surrendered by his accomplices to Suwaroff. He was taken to Moscow in an iron cage and there publicly executed in 1775, together with four of his principal followers. In the same year the empress put an end to the republic, as it was called, of the Zaporogian Cossacks. A great codification of the laws took place under Catherine, which may be styled the sixth great period of Russian legislation. The serfs, however, were not benefited by these changes. In 1767 an ukaze forbade them to bring any complaints against their masters. The latter had the power of sending their serfs to Siberia as a punishment, or handing them over to be enlisted in the army. The public sale of serfs was not put an end to till the reign of Alexander I. The country was now divided into governments for the better administration of justice, each government being subdivided into uiezdi or districts. Catherine also took away from the monasteries their lands and serfs, and allotted them payments according to their importance from the state revenues. The plans of Peter I. were thus fully carried out, and the church became entirely dependent upon the state. In 1783 the Crimea was annexed to Russia. A second war with Turkey broke out in 1787; the Ottoman power had many grounds of complaint, but its suspicions were particularly aroused by the tour of Catherine through the southern provinces of Russia and her interviews with the emperor Joseph II. Turkey declared war that same year; and, to increase the embarrassed position of the empress, Sweden did the same, requiring from Russia the cession of the southern part of Finland which had been taken from her. But King Gustavus III., in spite of some petty successes, was unable to carry on the war, and soon signed the peace of Verela on the footing of status quo ante bellum. The empress met with equal good fortune in the south; Potemkin took Otchakoff and Suwaroff Khotin. In 1789 the latter general won the battles of Fokshani and Kimnik; and in 1790 after a sanguinary engagement he took Ismail. By the treaty of Jassy in 1792 Catherine kept possession of Otch-akoff, and the shore between the Bug and Dniester. She was next occupied with the affairs of Poland, which have been described under that heading. In consequence of the demands of the confederates of Targovica,—men who were prepared to ruin their country for their own private ends,—eighty thousand Russians and twenty thousand Cossacks entered the Ukraine to undo the work of the confederates of Bar. In 1794 Suwaroff stormed Warsaw, and the inhabitants were massacred. In the following year Stanislaus Poniatowski laid down his crown, the third division of Poland took place, and the independence of that country was at an end. In spite of her correspondence and affected sympathies with Voltaire, Diderot, and many of the advanced French thinkers, Catherine showed great opposition to the principles of the French Revolution, and the policy of the latter part of her reign was reactionary. She died suddenly on November 17, 1796. Her character has been amply discussed by foreign writers. It may suffice to say here that, whatever her private vices may have been, she was unquestionably a woman of great genius, and the only sovereign worthy of Russia who had appeared since the days of Peter the Great. Hence the veneration with which her memory is regarded by the Russians to this day.

Paul, who had lived in retirement during the life of his mother, was an object of aversion to her. We are told that she had prepared a will by which he would be disinherited, and the succession conferred upon his son Alexander, but his friend Kurakin got hold of it immediately upon the death of the empress and destroyed it. The events of the reign of Paul ( q.v. ) can be only briefly discussed here. He concluded an alliance with Turkey, and entered into a coalition against the French republic, which he regarded with horror. Suwaroff took the command of the united Russian and Austrian troops at Verona. In 1799 he defeated the French general Moreau on the banks of the Adda, and made a triumphant entry into Milan. After this he won another victory over Macdonald on the Trebbia, and later the same year that of Novi over Joubert. He then crossed the Alps for the purpose of driving the French out of Switzerland, but he was everywhere hampered by the Austrians, and, after fighting his way over the Alps and suffering great losses, he reached his winter quarters between the Iller and the Lech, and soon afterwards he was recalled in disgrace. Paul now completely changed his tactics. Accusing England and Austria of having acted treacherously towards him, he threw himself into the arms of Bonaparte, who had won him over by skilful diplomacy, and, among other pieces of flattery, sent back the Russian prisoners newly clothed and armed. Paul then meditated joining him in a plan for conquering India; but in the night between the 23d and 24th of March 1801 he was assassinated. The chief agents in this catastrophe were Plato Zuboff, Benning-sen, and Pahlen. The rule of Paul had become intolerable, and he was fast bringing on a national bankruptcy.

He was succeeded by his eldest son, Alexander I. (1801-1825). One of the first acts of the new emperor was to make peace with England and France. He, however, soon changed his policy, and in 1805 joined the third coalition against France, to which Austria and England were parties. Events which belong to general European history, and are well known, need only be described briefly here. On December 2d of that year took place the battle of Austerlitz, in which the Russians lost 21,000 men, 133 guns, and 30 flags. They accused their Austrian allies of treachery. The war was soon ended by the treaty of Pressburg. We now come to the fourth coalition against France (1806-7). In 1807 Napoleon engaged the Russian general Benningsen at Eylau. The battle was protracted and sanguinary, but not decisive; both parties abandoned the field and retired into winter quarters. A defeat at Friedland in the same year was followed by the peace of Tilsit. By this treaty the Prussian king, Frederick William III., lost half his dominions. Nearly all his Polish possessions were to go to the king of Saxony under the name of the grand-duchy of Warsaw. By a secret treaty, it seemed as if Alexander and Napoleon almost aspired to divide the world, or at least Europe, between them. The terms, however, were received by a large party in Russia with disgust. The next important event in the reign of Alexander was the conquest of Finland. By the treaty of Frederikshamn, September 17, 1809, Sweden surrendered Finland, with the whole of East Bothnia, and a part of West Bothnia lying eastward of the river Torneâ. The Finns were allowed a kind of autonomy, which they have preserved to this day. The annexation of Georgia to Russia was consolidated at the beginning of this reign, having been long in preparation. It led to a war with Persia, which resulted in the incorporation of the province of Shirvan with the Russian empire in 1806.

In 1809 commenced the fifth coalition against Napoleon. Alexander, who was obliged by treaty to furnish assistance to the French emperor, did all that he could to prevent the war. A quarrel with Turkey led to its invasion by a Russian army under Michelsen. This war was terminated by a congress held at Bucharest in 1812. Russia gave up Moldavia and Wallachia, which she had occupied, but kept Bessarabia, with the fortresses of Khotin and Bender. Gradually an estrangement took place between Alexander and Napoleon, not only on account of the creation of the grand-duchy of Warsaw, but because Russia was suffering greatly from the Continental blockade, to which Alexander had been forced to give his adhesion. This led to the great invasion of Russia by Napoleon in 1812.

On May 9, 1812, Napoleon left Paris for Dresden, and the Russian and French ambassadors received their passports. The grand army comprised 678,000 men, 356,000 of them being French; and, to oppose them, the Russians assembled 372,000 men. Napoleon crossed the Niemen and advanced by forced marches to Smolensk. Here he defeated the Russians, and again at the terrible battle of Borodino, and then entered Moscow, which had been abandoned by most of the inhabitants; soon afterwards a fire broke out (probably caused by the order of Rostopchin the governor), which raged six days and destroyed the greater part of the city. Notwithstanding this disaster, Napoleon lingered five weeks among the ruins, endeavouring to negotiate a peace, which he seemed to think Alexander would be sure to grant; but he had mistaken the spirit of the emperor and his people. On the 18th of October Napoleon reluctantly commenced his backward march. The weather was unusually severe, and the country all round had been devastated by the French on their march. With their ranks continually thinned by cold, hunger, and the skirmishes of the Cossacks who hung upon their rear, the French reached the Beresina, which they crossed near Studianka on the 26th-29th of November with great loss. The struggle on the banks of this river forms one of the most terrible pictures in history. At Smorgoni, between Vilna and Minsk, Napoleon left the army and hurried to Paris. Finally the wreck of the grande armee under Ney crossed the Niemen. Not more than eighty thousand of the whole army are said to have returned.

Frederick William III. of Prussia now issued a manifesto, and concluded an alliance with Russia for the reestablishment of the Prussian monarchy. In 1813 took place the battle of Dresden, and the so-called Battle of the Nations at Leipsic on October 16 and the two following days. In 1814 the Russians invaded France with the allies, and lost many men in the assault upon Paris. After the battle of Waterloo, and the conveyance of Napoleon to the island of St Helena, it fell to the Russian forces to occupy Champagne and Lorraine. In the same year Poland was re-established in a mutilated form, with a constitution which Alexander, who was crowned king, swore to observe. In 1825 the emperor died suddenly at Taganrog at the mouth of the Don, while visiting the southern provinces of his empire. He had added to the Russian dominions Finland, Poland, Bessarabia, and that part of the Caucasus which includes Daghestan, Shirvan, Mingrelia, and Imeretia. Much was done in this reign to improve the condition of the serfs. The Raskolniks were better treated; many efforts were made to improve public education, and the universities of Kazan, Kharkoff, and St Petersburg were founded. One of the chief agents of these reforms was the minister Speranski, who for some time enjoyed the favour of the emperor, but he attacked so many interests by his measures that a coalition was formed against him. He was denounced as a traitor, and his enemies succeeded in getting him removed and sent as governor to Nijni-Novgorod. In 1819, when the storm raised against him had somewhat abated, he was appointed to the important post of governor of Siberia. In 1821 he returned to St Petersburg, but he never regained his former power. To the mild influence of Speranski succeeded that of Shishkoff, Novosiltzeff, and Arakcheeff. The last of these men made himself universally detested in Russia. He rose to great influence in the time of Paul, and managed to continue in favour under his son. Besides many other pernicious measures, it was to him that Russia owed the military colonies which were so unpopular and led to serious riots. The censorship of the press became much stricter, and many professors of liberal tendencies were dismissed from their chairs in the universities. The country was now filled with secret societies, and the emperor became gloomy and suspicious. In this condition of mind he died, a man thoroughly disenchanted and weary of life. He has been judged harshly by some authors; readers will remember that Napoleon said of him that he was false as a Byzantine Greek. To us he appears as a well-intentioned man, utterly unable to cope with the discordant elements around him. He had discovered that his life was a failure.

The heir to the throne according to the principles of succession recognized in Russia was Constantine, the second son of the emperor Paul, since Alexander left no children. But he had of his own free will secretly renounced his claim in 1822, having espoused a Roman Catholic, the Polish princess Julia Grudzinska. In consequence of this change in the devolution of the sovereign’s authority, the conspiracy of the Dekabrists broke out at the end of the year, their object being to take advantage of the confusion caused by the alteration of the succession to get constitutional government in Russia. Their efforts failed, but the rebellion was not put down without great bloodshed. Five of the conspirators were executed, and a great many sent to Siberia. Some of the men implicated were among the most remarkable of their time in Russia, but the whole country had been long honeycombed with secret societies, and many of the Russian officers had learned liberal ideas while engaged in the campaign against Napoleon. So ignorant, however, were the common people of the most ordinary political terms that when told to shout for Constantine and the constitution (constitutziα) they naively asked if the latter was Constantine’s wife. The new emperor, Nicholas, the next brother in succession, showed throughout his reign reactionary tendencies; all liberalism was sternly repressed. In 1830 appeared the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire, which Nicholas had caused to be codified. He partly restored the right of primogeniture which had been taken away by the empress Anna as contrary to Russian usages, allowing a father to make his eldest son his sole heir. In spite of the increased severity of the censorship of the press, literature made great progress in his reign. From 1826 to 1828 Nicholas was engaged in a war with Persia, in which the Russians were completely victorious, having beaten the enemy at Elizabetpol, and again under Paskewitch at Javan Bulak. The war was terminated by the peace of Turkmantchai (February 22, 1828), by which Persia ceded to Russia the provinces of Erivan and Nakhitchevan, and paid twenty millions of roubles as an indemnity. The next foreign enemy was Turkey. Nicholas had sympathized with the Greeks in their struggle for independence, in opposition to the policy of Alexander; he had also a part to play as protector of the Orthodox Christians, who formed a large number of the sultan’s subjects. In consequence of the sanguinary war which the Turks were carrying on against the Greeks and the utter collapse of the latter, England, France, and Russia signed the treaty of London in 1827, by which they forced themselves upon the belligerents as mediators. From this union resulted the battle of Navarino (October 20, 1827), in which the Turkish fleet was annihilated by that of the allies. Nicholas now pursued the war with Turkey on his own account; in Asia Paskewitch defeated two Turkish armies, and conquered Erzeroum, and in Europe Diebitsch defeated the grand vizier. The Russians crossed the Balkans and advanced to Adrianople, where a treaty was signed in 1829 very disadvantageous to Turkey.

In 1831 broke out the Polish insurrection, of which a description has already been given (see Poland, vol. xix. p. 298). Paskewitch took Warsaw in 1831. The cholera which was then raging had already carried off Diebitsch and the grand-duke Constantine. Poland was now entirely at the mercy of Nicholas. The constitution which had been granted by Alexander was annulled; there were to be no more diets; and for the ancient palatinates, familiar to the historical student, were substituted the governments of Warsaw, Radom, Lublin, Plock, and Modlin. The university of Vilna, rendered celebrated by Mickiewicz and Lelewel, was suppressed. By another treaty with Turkey, that of Unkiar-Skelessi (1833), Russia acquired additional rights to meddle with the internal politics of that country. Soon after the revolution of 1848, the emperor Nicholas, who became even more reactionary in consequence of the disturbed state of Europe, answered the appeal of the emperor Francis Joseph, and sent an army under Paskewitch to suppress the Hungarian revolt. After the capitulation of Gorgei in 1849, the war was at an end, and the Magyars cruelly expiated their attempts to procure constitutional government. In 1853 broke out the Crimean War. The emperor was anxious to distribute the possessions of the “sick man,” but found enemies instead of allies in England and France. The chief events of this memorable struggle were the battles of the Alma, Balaklava, Inkermann, and Tchernaya, and the siege of Sebastopol; this had been skilfully fortified by Todleben, who appears to have been the only man of genius who came to the front on either side during the war. In 1855 the Russians destroyed the southern side of the city, and retreated to the northern. In the same year, on March 14th, died the emperor Nicholas, after a short illness. Finding all his plans frustrated he had grown weary of life, and rashly exposed himself to the severe temperature of the northern spring. He was succeeded by his son Alexander II. (1855-1881), at the age of thirty-seven. One of the first objects of the new czar was to put an end to the war, and the treaty of Paris was signed in 1856, by which Russia consented to keep no vessels of war in the Black Sea, and to give up her protectorate of the Eastern Christians; the former, it must be added, she has recently recovered. A portion of Russian Bessarabia was also cut off and added to the Danubian principalities, which were shortly to be united under the name of Roumania. This was afterwards given back to Russia by the treaty of Berlin. Sebastopol also has been rebuilt, so that it is difficult to see what the practical results of the Crimean War were, in spite of the vast bloodshed and expenditure of treasure which attended it. The next important measure was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. This great reform had long been meditated by Nicholas, but he was unable to accomplish it, and left it to be carried out by his son. The landlords, on receiving an indemnity, now released the serfs from their seigniorial rights, and the village commune became the actual property of the serf. This great revolution was not, however, carried out without great difficulty. The Polish insurrection of 1863 has already been described, as well as its fatal effects upon that part of Poland which had been incorporated with Russia. On the other hand Finland has seen her privileges confirmed.

Among important foreign events of this reign must be mentioned the capture of Schamyl in 1859 by Prince Bariatinski, and the pacification of the Caucasus; many of the Circassians, unable to endure the peaceful life of cultivators of the soil under the new regime, migrated to Turkey, where they have formed one of the most turbulent elements of the population. Turkestan also has been gradually subjugated. In 1865 the city of Tashkend was taken, and in 1867 Alexander II. created the government of Turkestan. In 1858 General Muravieff signed a treaty with the Chinese, by which Russia acquired all the left bank of the river Amur. A new port has been created in Eastern Asia (Vladivostok), which promises to be a great centre of trade. In 1877 Russia came to the assistance of the Slavonic Christians against the Turks. After the terrible siege of Plevna, nothing stood between them and the gates of Constantinople. In 1878 the treaty of San Stefano was signed, by which Roumania became independent, Servia was enlarged, and a free Bulgaria, but under Turkish suzerainty, was created. But these arrangements were subsequently modified by the treaty of Berlin. Russia got back the portion of Bessarabia which she had lost, and advanced her Caucasian frontier. The new province of Bulgaria was cut into two, the southern portion being entitled Eastern Roumelia, with a Christian governor, to be appointed by the Porte, and self-government. Austria acquired a protectorate over Bosnia and Herzegovina. The latter part of the reign of Alexander II. was a period of great internal commotion, on account of the spread of Nihilism, and the attempts upon the emperor’s life, which unfortunately were at last successful. In the cities in which his despotic father had walked about fearless, without a single attendant, the mild and amiable Alexander was in daily peril of his life. On April 16, 1866, Karakozoff shot at the emperor at St Petersburg; in the following year another attempt was made by a Pole, Berezowski, while Alexander was at Paris on a visit to Napoleon III.; on April 14, 1879, Solovioff shot at him. The same year saw the attempt to blow up the Winter Palace and to wreck the train by which the czar was travelling from Moscow to St Petersburg. A similar conspiracy in 1881 (March 13) was successful. Five of the conspirators, including a woman, Sophia Perovskaia, were publicly executed. Thus terminated the reign of Alexander II, which had lasted nearly twenty-six years. He died leaving Russia exhausted by foreign wars and honeycombed by plots. His wife and eldest son Nicholas had predeceased him, the latter at Nice. He was succeeded by his second son Alexander, born in 1845, whose reign has been characterized by conspiracies and constant deportations of suspected persons. It was long before he ventured to be crowned in his ancient capital of Moscow (1883), and the chief event since then has been the disturbed relations with England, which for a time threatened war. (w. R. M.)

Pakt V.—Russian Literatuke.

To get a clear idea of Russian literature, it will be most convenient for us to divide it into oral and written. The first of these sections includes the interesting bîlinî, or “tales of old time,” as the word may be translated, which have come down to us in great numbers, as they have been sung by wandering minstrels all over the country. The scholars who during the last forty years have given their attention to these compositions have made the following division of them into cycles:—(1) that of the older heroes; (2) that of Vladimir, prince of Kieff; (3) that of Novgorod; (4) that of Moscow; (5) that of the Cossacks; (6) that of Peter the Great; (7) the modern period. These poems, if they may be so styled, are not in rhyme; the ear is satisfied with a certain cadence which is observed throughout. For a long time they were neglected, and the collection of them only began at the commencement of the present century. The style of Russian literature which prevailed from the time of Lomonosoff was wholly based upon the French or pseudo-classical school. It was, therefore, hardly likely that these peasant songs would attract attention. But when the gospel of romanticism was preached and the History of Karamzin appeared, which presented to the Russians a past of which they had known but little, described in poetical and ornate phraseology, a new impulse was given to the collection of all the remains of popular literature. In 1804 appeared a volume based upon those which had been gathered together by Cyril or Kirsha Daniloff, a Cossack, at the beginning of the 18th century. They were received with much enthusiasm, and a second edition was published in 1818. In the following year there appeared at Leipsic a translation of many of these pieces into German, in consequence of which they became known much more widely. This little book of 160 pages is important in many ways, and not the least so because the originals of some of the bilini translated in it are now lost. Since that time large collections of these poems have been published, edited by Ribnikoff, Hilferding, Sreznevski, Avenarius, and others.

These curious productions have all the characteristics of popular poetry in the endless repetitions of certain conventional phrases—the “green wine,” “the bright sun” (applied to a hero), “the damp earth,” and others. The heroes of the first cycle are monstrous beings, and seem to be merely impersonifications of the powers of nature; such are Volga Vseslavich, Mikula Selianinovich, and Svia-togor. They are called the bogatîri starshie. Sometimes we have the giants of the mountain, as Sviatogor, and the serpent Gorinich, the root of part of both names being gora (mountain). The serpent Gorinich lives in caves, and has the care of the precious metals. Sometimes animal natures are mixed up with them, as zmei-bogαtkr, who unites the qualities of the serpent and the giant, and bears the name of Tugarin Zmievich. There is the Pagan Idol (Idolistche Poganskoe), a great glutton, and Nightingale the Robber (Solovei RazboiniU), who terrifies travellers and lives in a nest built upon six oaks.

In the second cycle the legends group themselves round the celebrated prince Vladimir of Kieff, in whose time the Christian religion was introduced into Russia, as previously mentioned. The chief hero is Ilya Murometz, who performs prodigies of valour, and is of gigantic stature and superhuman strength. The cycle of Novgorod deals with the stories of Vasilii Buslaevich and Sadko, the rich merchant. The great commercial prosperity of Novgorod has been already described. The fourth cycle deals with the autocracy; already Moscow has become the capital of the future empire. AVe are told of the taking of Kazan, of the conquest of Siberia by Yermak, of Ivan the Terrible and his confidant Maliuta Skuvlatovich. It is observable that in the popular tradition Ivan, in spite of his cruelties, is not spoken of with any hatred. As early as 1619 some of these bilini were committed to writing by Richard James, an Oxford graduate who was in Russia about that time as chaplain of the embassy. The most pathetic of these is that relating to the unfortunate Xenia, the daughter of Boris Godunoff. Yermak, the conqueror of Siberia, forms the subject of a very spirited lay, and there is another on the death of Ivan the Terrible. Considering the relation in which she stood to the Russians, we cannot wonder that Marina, the wife of the false Demetrius, appears as a magician. Many spirited poems are consecrated to the achievements of Stenka Razia, the bold robber of the Volga, who was a long time a popular hero. The cycle of Peter the Great is a very interesting one. AVe have songs in abundance on the various achievements of the wonderful czar, as the taking of Azoff in 1696. There is also a poem on the execution of the streltzi, and another on the death of Peter. In the more modern period there are many songs on Napoleon. The Cossack songs, written in the Little Russian language, dwell upon the glories of the sech, the sufferings of the people from the invasions of the Turks and Mongols, the exploits of the Haidamaks and lastly the fall of the Cossack republic. Besides these, the Russians can boast of large collections of religious poems, many of them containing very curious legends. In them we have a complete store of the beliefs of the Middle Ages. A rich field may be found here for the study of comparative mythology and folk-lore. Many of them are of considerable antiquity, and some seem to have been derived from the Midrash. Some of the more important of these have been collected by Beszonoff. Besides the bilini or legendary poems, the Russians have large collections of skazki or folk-tales, which have been gathered together by Sakharoff, Afanasieff, and others. They also are full of valuable materials for the study of comparative mythology.

Leaving the popular and oral literature, we come to what has been committed to writing. The earliest specimen of Russian, properly so-called, must be considered the Ostromir Codex, written by the diak Gregory at the order of Ostromir, the posadnik or governor of Novgorod. This is a Russian recension of the Slavonic Gospels, of the date 1056-57. Of the year 1073 we have the Izbomik or “Miscellany” of Sviatoslaff. It was written by John the diak or deacon for that prince, and is a kind of Russian encyclopaedia, drawn from Greek sources. The date is 1076. The style is praised by Buslaeff as clear and simple. The next monument of the language is the Discourse concerning the Old and New Testament by Ilarion, metropolitan of Kieff. In this work there is a panegyric on Prince Vladimir of Kieff, the hero of so much of the Russian popular poetry. Other writers are Theodosius, a monk of the Pestcherski cloister, who wrote on the Latin faith and some Pouchenia or “Instructions,” and Luke Zhidiata, bishop of Novgorod, who has left us a curious Discourse to the Brethren. From the writings of Theodosius we see that many pagan habits were still in vogue among the people. He finds fault with them for allowing these to continue, and also for their drunkenness; nor do the monks escape his censures. Zhidiata writes in a more vernacular style than many of his contemporaries; he eschews the declamatory tone of the Byzantine authors.

AVith the so-called Chronicle of Nestor (q.v.) begins the long series of the Russian annalists. There is a regular catena of these chronicles, extending with only two breaks to the time of Alexis Mikhailovich, the father of Peter the Great. Besides the work attributed to Nestor, we have chronicles of Novgorod, Kieff, Volhynia, and many others. Every town of any importance could boast of its annalists, Pskoff and Suzdal among others. In some respects these compilations, the productions of monks in their cloisters, remind us of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, dry details alternating with here and there a picturesque incident; but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has nothing of the saga about it, and many of these annals abound with the quaintest stories. There are also works of early travellers, as the igumen Daniel, who visited the Holy Land at the end of the 11th and beginning of the 12th century. A later traveller was Athanasius Nikitin, a merchant of Tver, who visited India in 1470. He has left a record of his adventures, which has been translated into English and published for the Hakluyt Society. Later also is the account written by the two merchants, Korobeinikoff and Grekoff. They were sent with a sum of money to the Holy Sepulchre to entreat the monks to pray without ceasing for the soul of the son of Ivan the Terrible, whom his father had killed. A curious monument of old Slavonic times is the Pouchenie (“Instruction”) written by VIadimir Monomakh for the benefit of his sons. This composition is generally found inserted in the Chronicle of Nestor; it gives a quaint picture of the daily life of a Slavonic prince.

In the 12th century we have the sermons of Cyril, the bishop of Turoff, which are attempts to imitate in Russian the florid Byzantine style. He is very fond of allegorical representations; thus, in his sermon on Holy Week, Christianity is represented under the form of spring, Paganism and Judaism under that of winter, and evil thoughts are spoken of as boisterous winds. An attempt to carry this symbolism through other portions of his writings leads him to many fantastic conceits which are far from being in good taste. And here may be mentioned the many lives of the saints and the Fathers to be found in early Russian literature. Some of these have been edited by Count Bezborodko in his Pametniki Starinnoi Russkoi Literaturi (“Memorials of Ancient Russian Literature”).

We now come to the story of the expedition of Prince Igor, which is a kind of bilina in prose, and narrates the expedition of Igor, prince of Novgorod-Severski, against the Polovtzes. The manuscript was at one time preserved in a monastery at Yaroslavl, but was burnt in the great fire at Moscow in the year 1812. Luckily the story had been edited (after a fashion) by Count Musin-Pushkin, and a transcript was also found among the papers of the empress Catherine. The authenticity of this production has been disputed by some modern scholars, but without solid grounds. The original was seen by several men of letters in Russia, Karamzin among the number. There is a mixture of Christian and heathen allusions, but there are parallels to this style of writing in such a piece as the “Discourse of a Lover of Christ and Advocate of the True Faith,” from which an extract has been given by Buslaeff in his Chrestomathy. Unlike most of the productions of this period, which are tedious, and interesting only to the philologist and antiquary, there is a great deal of poetical spirit in the story of Igor, and the metaphors are frequently very vigorous. Mention is made in it of another bard named Boyan, but none of his inspirations have come down to us. A strange legend is that of the czar Solomon and Kitovras, but the story occurs in the popular literatures of many countries. Some similar productions among the Russians are merely adaptations of old Bulgarian tales, especially the so-called apocryphal writings. The Zadon-stchina is a sort of prose-poem much in the style of the “Story of Igor,” and the resemblance of the latter to this piece and to many other of the skαzαniα included in or attached to the Russian chronicle, furnishes an additional proof of its genuineness. The account of the battle of the “Field of Woodcocks,” which was gained by Dmitri Donskoi over the Mongols in 1380, has come down in three important versions. The first bears the title “Story of the Fight of the Prince Dmitri Ivanovich with Marnai”; it is rather meagre in details but full of expressions showing the patriotism of the writer. The second version is more complete in its historical details, but still is not without anachronisms. The third is altogether poetical. The Povixst ο Drakule (“Story of Drakula”) is a collection of anecdotes relating to a cruel prince of Moldavia, who lived at the beginning of the 15th century. Several of the barbarities described in it have also been assigned to Ivan the Terrible.

The early Russian laws present many features of interest, such as the Ruxskaia Pravda of Yaroslaff, which is preserved in the chronicle of Novgorod; the date is between 1018 and 1054. Large additions were made to it by subsequent princes. It has many points in common with the Scandinavian codes, e.g., trial by wager of battle, the wergild, and the circuits of the judges. The laws show Russia at that time to have been in civilization quite on a level with the rest of Europe. But the evil influence of the Mongols was soon to make itself felt. The next important code is the Sudebnik of Ivan III., the date of which is 1497; this was followed by that of Ivan IV., of the year 1550, in which we have a republication by the czar of his grandfather’s laws, with additions. In the time of this emperor also was issued the Stoglav (1551), a body of ecclesiastical regulations. Mention must also be made of the Ulozhxnix or “Ordinance” of the czar Alexis. This abounds with enactments of sanguinary punishment: women are buried alive for murdering their husbands; torture is recognized as a means of procuring evidence; and the knout and mutilation are mentioned on almost every page. Some of the penalties are whimsical: for instance, the man who uses tobacco is to have his nose cut off; this, however, was to be altered by Peter the Great, who himself practised the habit and encouraged it in others.

In 1553 a printing press was established at Moscow, and in 1564 the first book was printed, an “Apostol,” as it is called, ix., a book containing the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles. The printers were Ivan Feodoroff and Peter Mstislavetz; a monument was erected a year or two ago to the memory of the former. As early as 1548 Ivan had invited printers to Russia, but they were detained on their journey. Feodoroff and his companions were soon, however, compelled to leave Russia, and found a protector in Sigismund III. The cause of their failure appears to have been the enmity which they had stirred up among the copyists of books, who felt that their means of gaining a livelihood were lessened. They succeeded accordingly in drawing over to their side the more fanatical priests, who thought it degrading that the sacred books should be multiplied by such an art, just as at the present day the Arabs refuse to allow the Koran to be printed. The first Slavonic Bible was printed at Ostrog in Volhynia in 1581. Another press, however, was soon established at Moscow; up to 1600 sixteen books had been issued there.

A curious work of the time of Ivan the Terrible is the Domostroi, or “Book of Household Management,” which is said to have been written by the monk Sylvester, although this statement has been disputed. This priest was at one time very influential with Ivan, but ultimately offended him and was banished to the Solovetzkoi monastery on the White Sea. The work was originally intended by Sylvester for his son Anthemius and his daughter-in-law Pelagia, but it soon became very popular and in general use. We have a faithful picture of the Russia of the time, with all its barbarisms and ignorance. We see the unbounded authority of the husband in his own household: he may inflict personal chastisement upon his wife; and her chief duty lies in ministering to his wants. The Mongols had introduced into Russia the Oriental seclusion of women; those of the older time knew nothing of these restrictions. Sylvester, or whoever wrote the book, was a complete conservative, as indeed the clergy of Russia almost universally were. To the reign of Ivan the Terrible must also be assigned the Chetii-Minei or “Book of Monthly Readings,” containing extracts from the Greek fathers, arranged for every day of the week. The work was compiled by the metropolitan Macarius, and was the labour of twelve years. An important writer of the same period was Prince Alexander Kurbski, descended from the sovereigns of Yaroslavl, who was born about 1528. In his early days Kurbski saw a great deal of service, having fought at Kazan and in Livonia, But he quarrelled with Ivan, who had begun to persecute the followers of Sylvester and Adasheff, and fled to Lithuania in 1563, where he was well received by Sigismund Augustus. From his retreat he commenced a correspondence with Ivan, in which he reproached him for his many cruelties. Ivan in his answer declared that he was quite justified in taking the lives of his slaves, if he thought it right to do so. While living in Lithuania, Kurbski appeared as the defender of the Greek faith, which was being undermined by the Jesuits. He died in exile in 1583. Kurbski was a fluent writer, but Bestu-zheff Riumin thinks that his hatred of Ivan led him to exaggerate, and he regrets that Karamzin should have followed him so closely. Besides the answers of Ivan to Kurbski, there is his letter to Cosmas, and the brotherhood of the Cyrillian monastery on the White Lake (Bielo Ozero), in which he reproaches them for the self-indulgent lives they are leading. Other works of the 16th century are the Stepennaya Kniga, or “Book of Degrees” (“or Pedigrees”), in which historical events are grouped under the reigns of the grand-dukes, whose pedigrees are also given; and the Life of the Czar Eeodor Ivanovich (1584-1598), written by the patriarch Job. To the beginning of the 17th century belongs the Chronograph of Sergius Kubasoff of Tobolsk. His work extends from the creation of the world to the accession of Michael Romanoff, and contains interesting accounts of such of the inembers of the Russian royal family as Kubasoff had himself seen. Something of the same kind must have been the journal of Prince Mstislavski, which he showed the English ambassador Jerome Horsey, but which is now lost.

To the time of the first Romanoffs belongs the story of the siege of Azoff, a prose poem, which tells us, in an inflated style, how in 1637 a body of Cossacks triumphantly repelled the attacks of the Turks. They had seized this town, which they were anxious to hand over to the czar Michael, but circumstances were not ripe for it. There is also an account of the siege of the Troitza monastery by the Poles during the “Smutnoye Vremya,” or Period of Troubles, as it is called,—that which deals with the adventures of the false Demetrius and the Polish invasion which followed. But all these are surpassed by the work on Russia of Gregory Karpoff Kotoshikhin. He served in the ambassador’s office (posolski prikaz), and when called upon to give information against his colleagues fled to Poland about 1664. Thence he passed into Sweden and wrote his account of Russia at the request of Count Delagardie, the chancellor of that country. He was executed about 1669 for slaying in a quarrel the master of the house in which he lived. The manuscript was found by Prof. Solovieff (not the eminent historian lately deceased) at Upsala and printed in 1840. A new edition has recently appeared, and Prof. Grote has collected some fresh facts about the author’s life, but we have no space here for a minute examination of them. The picture which Kotoshikhin draws of his native country is a sad one: ignorance, cruelty, and superstition are seen everywhere rampant. His work is of great importance, since it is from his description, and the facts we gather from the Domostroi, that we can reconstruct the Old Russia of the time before Peter the Great, as in our days the valuable labours of M. Zabielin have done in his work on Russian domestic life. Perhaps, as an exile from his country, Kotoshikhin has allowed himself to write too bitterly. A curious work is the Uriadnik Sokol-nichia Puti (“Directions for Falconry”), which was written for the use of the emperor Alexis, who, like many Russians of old time, was much addicted to this pastime. The Serb, Yuri Krizhanich, who wrote in Russian, was the first Pan-slavist, anticipating Kollar by one hundred and fifty years or more. He wrote a critical Servian grammar (with comparison of the Russian, Polish, Croatian, and White Russian), which was edited from the manuscripts by Bodianski in 1848. For his time he had a very good insight into Slavonic philology. His Panslavism, however, sometimes took a form by no means practical. He went so far as to maintain that a common Slavonic language might be made for all the peoples of that race,— an impossible project which has been the dream of many enthusiasts. From some unexplained cause he was banished to Siberia, and finished his grammar at Tobolsk. He also wrote a work on the Russian empire, which was edited by Beszonoff in 1860. In it he shows himself a widely-read man, and with very extensive Western culture. The picture drawn, as in the corresponding production of Kotoshikhin, is a very gloomy one. The great remedy suggested by the Serb is education. To this period belongs the life of the patriarch Nikon by Shusherin. The struggles of Nikon with the czar, and his emendations of the sacred books, which led to a great schism in Russia, are well known. They have been made familiar to Englishmen by the eloquent pages of Dean Stanley. At Aloscow may be seen the portrait of this celebrated divine and his tomb; his robes, which have been preserved, show him to have been a man of 7 feet in stature. The mistakes which had crept into the translation of the Scriptures, from the blunders of generations of copyists, were frequently of a ludicrous character; still, a large number of the people preferred retaining them, and from this revision may be dated the rise of the Raskolniks (Dissenters) or Staro-obriadtzi (those who adhere to the old ritual). With the name of Simeon Polotzki (1628-1680) the old period of Russian literature may be closed. He was tutor to the czar Feodor, son of Alexis, and may be said in a way to have helped to introduce the culture of the West into Russia, as he was educated at Kieff, then a portion of Polish territory. Polotzki came to Moscow about 1664. He wrote religious works (Vienetz Vierî, “The Garland of Faith,”) and composed poems and religious dramas (The Prodigal Son, Nebuchadnezzar, &c.). He has left us some droll verses on the czar’s new palace of Kolomenskoe, which are very curious doggerel. The artificial lions that roared, moved their eyes, and walked especially delighted him. Alexis had probably ordered something to be constructed resembling the machinery we find mentioned in the Byzantine writers. There does not seem to be any ground for the assertion (often met with even in Russian writers) that Sophia, the sister of Peter the Great, was acquainted with French, and translated some of the plays of Moliere.

And now all things were to be changed as if by an enchanter’s wand. Russia was to leave her martyrologies and historical stories and fragmentary chronicles, and to -adopt the forms of literature in use in the West. One of the chief helpers of Peter the Great in the education of the people was Feofane (Theophanes) Procopovich, who advocated the cause of science, and attacked unsparingly the superstitions then prevalent; the cause of conservatism was defended by Stephen Yavorski. The Rock of Faith of the latter was written to refute the Lutherans and Calvinists. Another remarkable writer of the times of Peter the Great was Pososhkoff, who produced a valuable work on Poverty and Riches, a kind of treatise on political economy. Antiokh Kantemir (1708-1744), son of a former hospodar of Moldavia, wrote some clever satires still read; they are imitated from Boileau. He also translated parts of Horace. Besides his satires, he published versions of Fontenelle’s Pluralité des Mondes and the histories of Justin and Cornelius Nepos. He was for some time Russian ambassador at the courts of London and Paris. But more celebrated than these men was Michael Lomonosofe (q .v.). He was an indefatigable writer of verse and prose, and has left odes, tragedies, didactic poetry, essays, and fragments of epics; without being a man of great genius he did much to advance the education of his country. He also made many valuable contributions to science. Basil Tatistcheff (1686— 1750), a statesman of eminence, was the author of a Russian history which, although written in a confused style and hardly superior to a chronicle, is interesting as the first attempt in that field, which was afterwards so successfully cultivated by Karamzin, Solovieff, and Kosto-maroff. His work was not given to the world till after his death. There had been a slight sketch published before by Khilkoff, entitled the Harrow of Russian History. Basil Trediakovski (1703-1769) was but a poor poetaster, in spite of his many productions. He was born at Astrakhan, and we are told that Peter, passing through that city at the time of his Persian expedition, had Trediakovski pointed out to him as one of the most promising boys of the school there. Whereupon, having questioned him, the czar said, with truly prophetic insight, “A busy worker, but master of nothing.” His Telemakhida, a poem in which he versified the Telemaque of Fénelon, drew upon him the derision of the wits of the time. He had frequently to endure the rough horse-play of the courtiers, for the position of a literary man at that time in Russia was not altogether a cheerful one.

From the commencement of the reign of Elizabeth Russian literature made great progress, the French furnishing models. Alexander Sumarokoff (1718-1777) wrote prose and verse in abundance—comedies, tragedies, idyls, satires, and epigrams. He is, perhaps, best entitled to remembrance for his plays, which are rhymed, and in the French style. It took the Russians some time to find out that their language was capable of the unrhymed iambic line, which is the most suitable for tragedy. His Dmitri Samozvanetz (“Demetrius the Pretender”) is certainly not without merit. Some of the pieces of Kniazhnin had great success in their time, such as The Chatterbox, The Originals, and especially The Fatal Carriage. He is now, however, almost forgotten. In 1756 the first theatre was opened at St Petersburg, the director being Sumarokoff. Up to this time the Russians had acted only religious plays, such as those written by Simeon Polotzki. The reign of Catherine II. (1762—96) saw the rise of a whole generation of court poets, many of whom were at best but poor writers. Everything in Russia was to be forced like plants in a hot-house; she was to have Homers, Pindars, Horaces, and Virgils. Michael Kheraskoff (1733—1807) wrote besides other poems two enormous epics—the Rossiada in twelve books, and Vladimir in eighteen; they are now but little read. Although they are tedious poems on the whole, yet we occasionally find spirited passages. Bogdanovich (1743-1803) wrote a pretty lyric piece, Dushenka, based upon La Fontaine, and telling the old story of the loves of Cupid and Psyche. Perhaps the elegance of the versification is the best thing to be found in it. With Ivan Khemnitzer begins the long list of fabulists; this Iialf-Oriental form of literature, so common in countries ruled absolutely, has been very popular iu Russia. Khemnitzer (1744-1784), whose name seems to imply a German origin, began by translating the fables of Geliert, but afterwards produced original specimens of this kind of literature. A writer of real national comedy appeared in Denis von Visin, probably of

German extraction, but born at Moscow (1745-1792). His best production is Nedorosl (“The Minor”), in which he satirizes the coarse features of Russian society, the ill-treatment of the serfs, and other matters. The colouring of the piece is truly national. He has also left some very good letters describing his travels. He saw France on the eve of the great Revolution, and has well described what he did see. Russian as he was, and accustomed to serfdom, he was yet astonished at the wretched condition of the French peasants. The great poet of the age of Catherine, the laureate of her glories, was Gabriel Derzhavin (1743-1816). He essayed many styles of composition, and was ε great master of his native language. Many of his lyric pieces are full of fire. No one can deny the poet a vigorous imagination and a great power of expressing his ideas. There is something grandiose and organ-like in his high-sounding verses; unfortunately he occasionally degenerates into bombast. His versification is perfect; and he had the courage, rare at the time, to write satirically of many persons of high rank. His Ode to God is the best known of his poems in Western countries. We can see from some of his pieces that ho was a student of Edward Young, the author of the Night Thoughts. Tawdry rhetoric, containing, however, occasionally fine and original thoughts, rendered this writer popular throughout Europe. Other celebrated poems of Derzhavin are the Odes on the Death of Prince Mestcherski, The Nobleman, The Taking of Ismail, and The Taking of Warsaw.

Au unfortunate author of the days of Catherine was Alexander Radistcheff, who, having, in a small work, A Journey to Moscow, spoken too severely of the miserable condition of the serfs, was punished by banishment to Siberia, from which he was afterwards allowed to return, but not till his health had been permanently injured by his sufferings. An equally sad fate befell the spirited writer Novikoff, who, after having worked hard as a journalist, and done much for education in Russia, fell under the suspicion of the Government, and was imprisoned by Catherine. On her death he was released by her successor. The short reign of Paul was not favourable to literary production; the censorship of the press was extremely severe, and many foreign books were excluded from Russia. Authors and lovers of literature were liable to get into trouble, as we see by the experiences of the poet Kotzebue and pastor Seidler.

But a better state of things came with the reign of Alexander, one of the glories of whose days was Nicholas Karamzin (q.v.). His chief work is his History of the Russian Empire, but he appeared in the fourfold aspect of historian, novelist, essayist, and poet. Nor need we do more than mention the celebrated Archbishop Platon (q.v.). Ivan Dmitrieff (1760-1837) wrote some pleasing lyrics and epistles, but without much force. He is like some feeble British poets towards the close of last century, in whom the elegance of the diction will not atone for the feebleness of the ideas. He appears from his translations to have been well acquainted with the English poets. Ozeroff wrote a great many tragedies, which are but little read now. They are in rhyming alexandrines. His form belongs to the false classical school, but he occasionally handled native subjects with success, as in his Dmitri Donskoi and Yaropolk and Oleg. In Ivan Kriloff (1768-1844) the Russians found their most genial fabulist. His pieces abound with vigorous pictures of Russian national life, and many of his lines are standard quotations with the Russians, just as Hudibrax is with ourselves. Long before his death Kriloff had become the most popular man in Russia. He resembled La Fontaine not only in the style of his verse but in his manner of life. He was the same careless, unpractical sort of person, and showed the same simplicity of character. As Derzhavin was the poet of the age of Catherine, so Zhukovski (1783-1852) may be said to have been that of the age of Alexander. He is more remarkable, however, as a translator than as an original poet. With him Romanticism began in Russia. The pseudo-classical school, led by the French, was now dead throughout Europe. In 1802 he published his version of Gray’s Elegy, which at once became a highly popular poem in Russia. Zhukovski translated many pieces from the German (Goethe, Schiller, Uhland) and English (Byron, Moore, Southey). One of his original productions, “The Poet in the Camp of the Russian Warriors,” was on the lips of every one at the time of the war of the fatherland (Otechestvennaia Voina) in 1812. He attempted to familiarize the Russians with all the most striking specimens of foreign poetical literature. He produced versions of the episode of Nala and Damayanti from the Mahabharata, of Rustam and Zohrab from the Shah-Namah, and of a part of the Odyssey. In the case of these three masterpieces, however, he was obliged to work from literal translations (mostly German), as he was unacquainted with the original languages. The Iliad was translated during this period by Gnedich, who was familiar with Greek. He has produced a faithful and spirited version, and has naturalized the hexameter in the Russian language with much skill. Constantine Batiushkoff (1787-1855) was the author of many elegant poems, and at the outset of his career promised much, but sank into imbecility, and lived in this condition to an advanced age. Merzliakoff and Tziganoff deserve a passing notice as the writers of songs some of which still keep their popularity. As the poet of the age of Catherine was Derzhavin, and of that of Alexander Zhukovski, so the next reign, that of Nicholas, was to have its representative poet, by the common consent of his critics the greatest whom Russia had yet seen. During his short life (1799-1837) Alexander Pushkin produced many celebrated poems, which will be found enumerated in the article devoted to him (see Poushkin). It may suffice to say here that he tried almost all styles of composition—the drama, lyric poetry, the novel, and many others. In Alexander Griboiedoff (1794-1829) the Russians saw the writer of one of their most clever comedies (Gore ot Uma), which may perhaps be translated “The Misfortune of being too Clever” (lit. “Grief out of Wit”). The fate of Griboiedoffwas sad; he was murdered in a riot at Teheran, where he was residing as Russian minister at the court of Persia. The poet is said to have had a presentiment of his fate and to have been unwilling to go. Pushkin, while travelling in the Caucasus, in the track of the army of Paskewitch, met the body of his friend, which was being carried to Tiflis for burial. The satirical powers of Griboiedoff come out in every line of his play; he was unquestionably a man of genius. A few words may be allowed to Ivan Kozloff (1774-1838), the author of some pretty original lyrics, and some translations from the English, among others Burns’s Cotter’s Saturday Night. He became a cripple and blind, and his misfortunes elicited some cheering and sympathetic lines from Pushkin, which will always be read with pleasure.

Since the death of Pushkin, the most eminent Russian poet is Lermontoff (1814-41); his life terminated, like that of his predecessor, in a duel. He has left us many exquisite lyrics, mostly written in a morbid and melancholy spirit. In quite a different vein is his clever imitation of a Russian bilina, “Song about the Czar Ivan Vasilievich, the Young Oprichnik, and the Bold Merchant Kalashnikoff.” The poet was of Scotch extraction (Learmont), the termination being added to Russify his name. In one of his pieces he has alluded to his

Caledonian ancestors. His chief poems are “The Demon,” “The Novice” (“Mtziri,” a Georgian word), and “Hadji Abrek.” He also wrote a novel, A Hero of our Time. He has faithfully reproduced in his poems the wild and varied scenery of the Caucasus and Georgia; from them he has drawn his inspiration—feeling, no doubt, that the flat grey landscapes of northern Russia offered no attractions to the poet. A genuine bard of the people, and one of their most truly national authors, was Koltzoff (1809-1842), the son of a tallow merchant of Voronezh. He has left us a few exquisite lyrics, which are to be found in all the collections of Russian poetry. He died of consumption after a protracted illness. Another poet who much resembled Koltzoff was Nikitin, born in the same town, Voronezh. His life was spent in poverty; his father was an incurable drunkard, and brought his family to the greatest distress. Nikitin, to support his relations, was obliged to keep an inn; this he was afterwards enabled to change for the more congenial occupation of a bookseller. He died in 1861. The novel in Russia has had its cultivators in Zagoskin and Lazhechnikoff, who imitated Sir Walter Scott. The most celebrated of the romances of Zagoskin was Yuri Milo-slavski, a tale of the expulsion of the Poles from Russia in 1612. The book may even yet be read with interest; it gives a very spirited picture of the times; unfortunately, as is but too often the case with the writings of Sir Walter Scott himself, a gloss is put upon the barbarity of the manners of the period, and the persons of the novel have sentiments and modes of expressing them which could only have existed about two centuries afterwards. There is also too much of the sentimentalism which was prevalent at the time when the author wrote. Among the better known productions of Lazhechnikoff are The Heretic and The Palace of Ice. A flashy but now forgotten writer of novels was Bulgarin, author of Ivan Vishigin, a work which once enjoyed considerable popularity. The first Russian novelist of great and original talent was Nicholas Gogol (1809-1852). In his Dead Souls he satirized all classes of society, some of the portraits being wonderfully vivid; take, for example, that of Pliush-kin, the miser. Being a native of Little Russia, he is very fond of introducing descriptions of its scenery and the habits of the people, especially in such stories as the Old-fashioned Household, or in the more powerful Taras Bulba. This last is a highly-wrought story, giving us a picture of the savage warfare carried on between the Cossacks and Poles. Taras is brave, but perhaps too much of a barbarian to be made interesting to Western readers. He reminds us of some of the heroes of the Cossack poet Shevchenko. Gogol was also the author of a good comedy, The Reviser, wherein the petty pilferings of Russian municipal authorities are satirized. In his Memoirs of a Madman and Portrait, he shows a weird and fantastic power which proves him to have been a man of strong imagination. The same may be said of The Cloak, and the curious tale Vii (“The Demon”), where he gives us a picture of Kieff in the old days. He has very dexterously interwoven his tales with the traditions and superstitions of Little Russia. The fate of Gogol was sad; he sank into religious melancholy, and ultimately into imbecility. He made great efforts to destroy all his writings, and indeed burnt most of the second part of his Dead Souls ; only fragments have been preserved. His Confessions of an Author is the production of a mind verging on insanity. He died in 1852, aged forty-two. Since his time the novel has been very much cultivated in Russia, the school culminating in Ivan Turgenieff, but it is the school of Thackeray and Dickens, not that of Balzac and George Sand. The Russians seem to affect especially the realistic novels of England. Among the most conspicuous of these writers was the celebrated Alexander Herzen, author of a striking romance, Kto Vinovat? (“Who is to Blame? ”), which he published under the assumed name of Iskander. The public career of Herzen is well known. The freedom of his opinions soon embroiled him with the authorities. He was exiled to Perm, and, seizing the first opportunity which offered itself of passing the Russian frontiers, he spent the remainder of his life chiefly in France and England, and died at Geneva in 1869. His celebrated journal Kolokol (“The Bell ”) had a great circulation. A novelist of repute was Goncharoff, his two chief works being A Common-place Story and Oblomoff. Grigorovich has written The Fisherman and The Emigrants. Pisemski, another novelist of the realistic type, is the author of The Man of St Petersburg and Lieshi (“ The Wood Demons”). Other novelists of celebrity are Saltikoff, who writes under the name of Stchedrin, and whose Provincial Sketches published a few years ago made a great sensation and have been followed by Letters to My Aunt and other works; Dostoïevski (d. 1881), author of Poor People, Letters from the House of the Dead (describing his impressions of Siberia, whither he was banished in consequence of a political offence), a powerful writer; and Ostrovski. We may also add Ryeshetnikoff, who takes his characters from the humbler classes; he died at the early age of thirty-nine. All these are disciples of the school of Dickens and Thackeray. Count A. Tolstoi, also celebrated as a dramatist, has written an historical novel entitled Prince Sert-brianni. Count L. Tolstoi is author of a work of fiction describing the war of 1812, which has gained great celebrity in Russia, Voina i Mir (“War and Peace”). Novelists of the French school are Krestovski, Stebnitzki, and Bobo-rikin. During 1885 a new writer of merit, Kozolenko, appeared, who describes Siberian life.

On September 4, 1883, died Ivan Turgenieff, aged sixty-four, the most eminent Russian novelist, and perhaps the only Russian man of letters universally known. His celebrity dates from his Memoirs of a Sportsman, in which he appears as the advocate of the Russian muzhik or peasant. He had witnessed in his youth many sad scenes at his own home, where his mother, a wealthy lady of the old school, treated her serfs with great cruelty. The poet devoted all his energies to procure their emancipation. This work was followed by a long array of tales, too well known to need recapitulation here, which have gained their author a European reputation, such as Dvorianskoe Gnezdo (“A Nest of Gentle People ”), one of the most pathetic tales in any language, Nov (“Virgin Soil”), and others; nor can the minor tales of Turgenieff be forgotten, especially Mumu, a story based upon real life, for the dumb doorkeeper was a serf of his mother’s, and experienced her ill-treatment. His last two works were Poetry in Prose and Clara Milixh.

In Belinski the Russians produced their best critic. For thirteen years (1834-1847) he was the Aristarchus of Russian literature and exercised a healthy influence. In his latter days he addressed a withering epistle to Gogol on the newly-adopted reactionary views of the latter.

Since the time of Karamzin the study of Russian history has made great strides. He was followed by Nicholas Polevoi, who wrote what he called the History of the Russian People, but his work was not received with much favour and has now fallen into oblivion. Polevoi was a self-educated man, the son of a Siberian merchant; besides editing a well-known Russian journal The Telegraph, he was also the author of many plays, among others a translation of Hamlet. Since his time, however, the English dramatist has been produced in a more perfect dress by Kroneberg, Druzhinin, and others. In the year 1879 died Sergius Solovieff, whose History of Russia had reached its twenty-eighth volume, and fragments of the twenty-ninth were published after his death. This stupendous labour lacks something of the critical faculty, and perhaps may be described rather as a quarry of materials for future historians of Russia than an actual history. During 1885 the Russians have had to mourn the loss of Kostomaroff, the writer of many valuable monographs on the history of their country, of which those -on Bogdan Khmelnitzki and the False Demetrius deserve special mention. From 1847 to 1854 Kostomaroff, who had become obnoxious to the Russian Government, wrote nothing, having been banished to Saratoff, and forbidden to teach or publish. But after this time his literary activity begins again, and, besides separate works, the leading Russian reviews, such as Old and New Russia, The Historical Messenger, and The Messenger of Europe, contain many contributions from his pen of the highest value. In 1885 also died Constantine Kavelin, the author of many valuable works on Russian law, and Kalatcheff, who published a classical edition of the old Russian codes. Hovaiski and Gedeonoff have attempted to upset the general belief that the founders of the Russian empire were Scandinavians. Their opinions have been alluded to above (p. 87). A good history of Russia was published by Ustrialoff (1855), but his most celebrated work was his Tzarstvovanie Petra Velikago (“Reign of Peter the Great”); in this many important documents first saw the light, and the circumstances of the death of the unfortunate Alexis were made clear. Russian writers of history have not generally occupied themselves with any other subject than that of their own country, but an exception may be found in the writings of Granovski, such as Abbé Suger (1849) and Four Historical Portraits (1850). So also Kudriav-tzoff, who died in 1850, wrote on “The Fortunes of Italy, from the Fall of the Roman Empire of the West till its Reconstruction by Charlemagne.” He also wrote on “The Roman Women as described by Tacitus.” We may add Kareyeff, now professor at AVarsaw, who has written on the condition of the French peasantry before the Revolution. Other writers on Russian history have been Pogo-dine, who compiled a History of Russia till the invasion of the Mongols, 1871, and especially Zabielin, who has written a History of Russian Life from the most Remote Times (1876), and the Private Lives of the CzaAnas and Czars (1869 and 1872). Leshkoff has written a History of Russian Law to the 18th Century, and Tchitcherin a History of Provincial Institutions in Russia in the 17th Century (1856). To these must be added the work of Zagoskin, History of Law in the State of Muscovy (Kazan, 1877). Prof. Michael Kovalevski, of the university of Moscow, is now publishing an excellent work on Communal Land Tenure, in which he investigates the remains of this custom throughout the world. Of the valuable history of Russia by Prof. Bestuzheff-Riumin (1872) one volume only has appeared; the introductory chapters giving an account of the sources and authorities of Russian history are of the highest value. It is the most critical history of Russia which has yet appeared. In 1885 Dubrovin published an excellent history of the revolt of Pugatcheff. The valuable work by Messrs Pipin and Spasovich, History of Slavonic Literatures, is the most complete account of the subject, and has been made more generally accessible to Western students by the German translation of Pech. The History of Slavonic Literature by Schafarik, published in 1826, has long been antiquated. Previous to this, a history of Russian literature by Paul Polevoi had appeared, which has gone through two editions. It is modelled upon Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature. The account of the Polish rebellion of 1863 by Berg, published in 1873, which gave many startling and picturesque episodes of this celebrated struggle, has now been withdrawn from circulation. It appeared originally in the pages of the Russian magazine, Starina.

Since the death of Lermontoff the chief Russian poet who has appeared is Nicholas Nekrasoff, who died in 1877. He has left six volumes of poetry, which in many respects remind us of the writings of Crabbe; the poet dwells mainly upon the melancholy features of Russian life. He is of that realistic school in which Russian authors so much resemble English. Another writer of poetry deserving mention is Ogarieff, for a long time the companion in exile of Herzen in England; many of his compositions appeared in the Polar Star of the latter, a medley of prose and verse, which contains some very important papers, including the interesting autobiographical sketches of Herzen, entitled Biloe i Dumi (“The Past and my Thoughts”). Alaikoff at one time enjoyed great popularity as a poet; he is a kind of link between the present generation and that of Pushkin, of whose elegance of versification he is somewhat of an imitator. Another poet of a past generation was Prince Viazemski, "whose works are now being collected. Graceful lyrics have also been written by Mei, Fet (whose name would apparently prove Dutch extraction, Veth), Stcherbina, and, going a little farther back, Yazikoff, the friend of Pushkin, and Khomi-akoff, celebrated for his Slavophile propensities. To these may be added Mdlle Zhadovskaia, who died a short time ago, Benediktoff, Podolinski, and Tiutcheff. It will be seen that in Russia (as in England) lyrical poetry is almost the only form now cultivated. It is becoming more and more coloured with imitations of the bilini and reproductions of the old Russian past, which is perhaps getting treated somewhat fantastically, as was the old Irish life in the Irish melodies of Moore. Occasionally Polonski contributes one of his exquisite lyrics to the Viestnik Yevropi (“European Messenger”).

Excellent works on subjects connected with Slavonic philology have been published by Vostokoff, who edited the Ostromir Codex, mentioned above (p. 103), and Sreznevski and Bodianski, who put forth an edition of the celebrated codex used at Rheims for the coronation of the French kings. Since their deaths their work has been carried on by Prof. Grote (Philological Investigations, also many critical editions of Russian classics). Budilovich, now a professor at Warsaw, Potebnya of Kharkoff, and Baudoin de Courtenay, -who, among other services to philology, has described the Slavonic dialect spoken by the Resanians, a tribe living in Italy, in two villages of the Julian Alps. The songs (bilini) of the Russians have been collected by Zakrevski, Ribnikoff, Hilferding, Barsoff, and others, and their national tales by Sakharoff, Afanasieff, and Erlen-vein. Kotliarevski, Tereshenko, and others have treated of their customs and superstitions, but it is to be regretted that no one as yet has made a complete study of the vexed question of Slavonic mythology. At the present time Stanislaus Alikutzki, professor, at the university of Warsaw, is publishing his Materials for a Dictionary of the Roots of the Russian and all Slavonic Dialects, but, unfortunately, it represents a somewhat obsolete school of philology. The Early Russian Text Society continues its useful labours, and has edited many interesting monuments of the older Slavonic literature. Quite recently two valuable codices have been printed in Russia, Zogra-phus and Marianus, interesting versions of the Gospels in Palaeoslavonic. They were edited by the learned Croat Jagid, who now occupies the chair of Sreznevski in St Petersburg. An excellent Tolkovi Slovar Velikorusskago Yazika (“Explanatory Dictionary of the Great Russian

Language”), by Dahl, has gone into a second edition. Alexander Hilferding published some valuable works on ethnology and philology, among others on the Polabes, an extinct Slavonic tribe who once dwelt on the banks of the Elbe. Although they have produced some good Slavonic scholars, the Russians have not exhibited many works in the field of classical or other branches of philology. Exception, however, must be made in favour of the studies of Tchubinoff in Georgian, Minayeff in the Indian, and Tzvetayeff in the old languages of Italy.

In moral and mental philosophy the Russians have produced but few authors. We meet with some good mathematicians, Ostrogradski among others, and in natural science the publications of the Society for Natural History at Moscow have attracted considerable attention.

Since the Boris Godunoff of Pushkin, which was the first attempt in Russia to produce a play on the Shakespearian model, many others have appeared in the same style. A fine trilogy was composed by Count A. Tolstoi on the three subjects, The Death of Ivan the Terrible (1866), The Czar Feodor (1868), and The Czar Boris (1869). Other plays of merit have been written by Ostrovski and Potiekhin.

Many excellent literary journals and magazines make their appearance in the country; among these may especially be mentioned the time-honoured Viestnik Yevropi (“Messenger of Europe”), which contains some of the most brilliant writing produced in the Russian empire. The Istoricheski Viestnik (“Historical Messenger”) is full of curious matter, and does not confine itself merely to Russian subjects. It is edited by M. Shubinski, the author of some pleasant sketches on the manners of Russia in the old time. On the contrary Starina (the “Antiquary,” if we may so freely translate the original name) is entirely Russian, and is a valuable repertory of documents concerning the history of the country, and memoirs, especially relating to the latter part of the 17th century. The highly interesting magazine Drevnaia i Novaia Rossia did not protract its existence beyond six years, having come to an end in 1881. Many of the best Russian writers contributed to it; it contains much valuable material for the student of history. The Russkii Arkhiv is edited by M. Bartenieff, and has long been celebrated; some of the most important notes on Russian history of the 18th and 19th century have appeared in this journal. During the last few years extensive excavations have been made in many parts of Russia, and much has been done to throw light upon the prehistoric period of the country. A large “kurgan,” called Cherna Mogila, or the Black Grave, was opened by Samokvasoff in the government of Tchernigoff and described in the pages of Old and New Russia. Explorations have been carried on on the site of Bolgari, the ancient capital of the Ugrian Bolgars on the Volga. One of the most active workers in this field was the late Count Uvaroff (d. 1884), who published a valuable monograph on the Stone Age in Russia, and many other important works.

A few words must be said on the literature of the Russian dialects, the Little and White Russian. The Little Russian is rich in skazki (tales) and songs. Peculiar to them is the duma, a narrative poem which corresponds in many particulars with the Russian bilina. Since the commencement of the present century, when curiosity was first aroused on the subject of national poetry, the Little Russian dumî have been repeatedly edited, as by Maksimovich Metlinski and others. An elaborate edition (far surpassing the earlier ones) was commenced by Dragomanoff and Antonovich, but as yet only one volume and a portion of a second have made their appearance. Just as the bilini-of the Great Russians, so also these dumi of the Little Russians admit of classification, and they have been divided by their latest editors as follows (1) the songs of the druzhina, treating of the early princes and their followers; (2) the Cossack period (Kozaehxstvo), in which the Cossacks are found in continual warfare with the Polish pans and the attempts of the Jesuits to introduce the Roman Catholic religion; (3) the period of the Haidamaks, who formed the nucleus of the national party, and prolonged the struggle. The gradual break up of tho military republic of these sturdy freebooters has already been described.

The foundation of the Little Russian literature (written, as opposed to tho oral) was laid by Ivan Kotliarevski (1769-1838), whose travesty of part of the Aeneid enjoys great popularity among some of his countrymen. Others, however, object to it as tending to bring the language or dialect into ridicule. A truly national poet appeared in Taras Shevchenko, born at the village of Kirilovka in the government of Kieff, in the condition of a serf. The strange adventures of his early life he has told us in his autobiography. He did not get his freedom till some time after he had reached manhood, when he was purchased from his master by the generous efforts of the poet Zhukovski and others. Besides poetry, he occupied himself with painting with considerable success. He unfortunately became obnoxious to the Government, and was punished with exile to Siberia from 1847 to 1857. He did not long survive his return, dying in 1861, aged forty-six. No one has described with greater vigour than Shevchenko the old days of the Ukraine. In his youth he listened to the village traditions handed down by the priests, and he has faithfully reproduced them. The old times of Nalivaiko, Doroshenko, and others live over again. Like Gogol he is too fond of describing scenes of bloodshed. In the powerful poem entitled Haidamak we have a graphic picture of tho horrors enacted by Gonta and his followers at Uman. The sketches are almost too realistic. Like Burns with the old Scottish songs, so Shevchenko has reproduced admirably the spirit of the lays of the Ukraine. All those familiar with his works will remember the charming little lyrics with which they are interspersed. The funeral of the poet was a vast public procession; a great cairn, surmounted with a cross, was raised over his remains, where he lies buried near Kanioff on tho banks of tho Dnieper. His grave has been styled the “Mecca of the

South Russian Revolutionists.” He is the great national poet of the Southern Russians. A complete edition of his works, with interesting biographical notices—one contributed by the novelist Turgenieff—appeared at Prague in 1876. Besides the national songs, excellent collections of the South Russian folk-tales have appeared, edited by Dragomanoff, Rudchenko, and others. Many of these are still recited by the “tchumaki” or wandering pedlars. A valuable work is the Zapiski o Yuzhuoi Rossii (“Papers on Southern Russia”), published at St Petersburg in 1857 by Panteleimon Kulish. After he got into trouble (with Kostomaroff and Shevchenko) for his political views, the late works of this author show him to have undergone a complete change. Other writers using the Little Russian language are Marko-Vovchok (that is, Madame Eugenia JIarkovich), and Yuri Fedkovieh, who employs a dialect of Buko-vina. Fedkovich, like Shevchenko, sprang from a peasant family, and served as a soldier in the Austrian army against the French during the Italian campaign. Naturally we find his poems filled with descriptions of life in the camp. Like the Croat Preradovid, ho began writing poetry in the German language, till he was turned into more natural paths by some patriotic friends. A collection of songs of Bukovina was published at Kieff in 1875 by Lona-chevski. At the present time Eugene Zelechowski continues his valuable Dictionary of Little Russian, of which about one half has appeared. This promises to be a very useful book, for up to the present time students have been obliged to rest satisfied with the scanty publications of Levchenko, Piskunoff, and Verchratzki. There is a good grammar by Osadtza, a pupil of Miklosich.

In the White Russian dialect are to be found only a few songs, with the exception of portions of the Scriptures and some legal documents. A valuablo dictionary was published a short time ago by Nosovich, but this is one of the most neglected of the Russian dialects, as the part in which it is spoken is one of the dreariest of the empire. Collections of White Russian songs have been published by Sheiu and others. For details regarding this and the other Russian dialects see Slavs.