Russia under the Old regime

34

principalities. The pull, of course, was not all in one direction. The country as before, continued to be ruled by members of a single dynasty and to profess one and the same faith - a faith which sharply separated it from its Catholic and Muslim neighbours. These centripetal forces eventually enabled Russia to reunite. But this occurred several centuries later. In the meantime, the dominant force was centrifugal. The impetus was towards the creation of regions composed of economically self-sufficient principalities, each of which, by virtue of an inner logic, tended to divide and subdivide without end.

In the initial stage of its disintegration, the Kievan state broke up into three major regions: one in the north, centred on Novgorod; a second one in the west and south-west, which Lithuania and Poland soon took over; and a third one in the north-east, in the area between the Oka and Volga, where power was eventually assumed by the principality of Moscow.

The most affluent and culturally advanced of these regions lay in the north-west. After Byzantium had collapsed, what was left of Russia's foreign commerce shifted to the Baltic, and Novgorod, with its dependency Pskov, replaced Kiev as the business capital of the country. Like the Khazars and the Normans before them, the merchants of Novgorod sold raw materials and imported luxuries. Owing to its extreme northern location, Novgorod could not grow enough food for its needs and had to buy cereals in Germany and the Volga-Oka mesopotamia. The slaves, traditionally Russia's major export commodity had no market in western Europe, where human bondage had become virtually extinct by this time; slaves, therefore, were left in Russia, with important economic and social consequences which will be noted later. The prosperity of Novgorod rested on close collaboration with the Hanseatic League of which it became an active member. German merchants established permanent settlements in Novgorod, Pskov and several other Russian cities. They had to pledge to deal with the producers only through the inter-mediacy of Russian agents; in return, they obtained full control of the entire foreign side of the business, including shipping and marketing. In search of commodities to trade with the Germans, the Novgorodians explored and colonized much of the north, extending the frontier of their state all the way to the Urals.

Politically, Novgorod began to detach itself from the other Kievan principalities around the middle of the twelfth century. Even at the height of Kievan statehood, it had enjoyed a somewhat privileged position, possibly because it was the senior of the Norman cities and because proximity to Scandinavia enabled it somewhat better to resist Slavization. The system of government evolved in Novgorod resembled in all essentials that familiar from the history of medieval city-states of western