Russia under the Old regime

CHAPTER 1

Patriotic Russian historians notwithstanding, when the Lord created mankind He did not place the Russians where they happen to be today. In the earliest times for which we have any evidence, the heartland of Russia - the forest zone in the middle of which lies the city of Moscow -was populated by peoples of Finnic and Lithuanian stock, while areas adjoining to the east and south were inhabited by Turks. The Russians first migrated into this territory towards the end of the first millennium of the Christian era. Until then, together with the rest of the Slavs, they had inhabited a region whose boundaries cannot be determined even with approximate precision but which is believed to have lain north of the Carpathian mountains between the Vistula or Oder to the west and what is today Belorussia in the east. Little is known of Slav prehistory. Archaeological artifacts, which cannot be attributed to any specific ethnic or even racial group, linguistic fossils and ethnic names of long defunct nations such as are found in early histories and travellers' accounts, have generated a great deal of theory but concrete evidence is flimsy in the extreme. All that can be said with reasonable certainty is that the early Slavs were nomadic cattle grazers organized into clans and tribes, and that they had neither political nor military forms of organization. Their neighbours to the west and south were die Goths; in the north and north-east they touched on Lithuanian territories. The Venedi or Veneti mentioned by Pliny the Elder and Tacitus were apparently Slavs. This old name is preserved in the German 'Wenden', a now extinct nation of Western Slavs, and 'Venaja', the modern Finnish word for Russia. Other names applied to them by foreign writers were Antae and Sclaveni. The Slavs seem to have called themselves Slovene or Sloviane, which most likely derives from slovo, 'the word', to signify people with the gift of speech, in contrast to Nemtsy, die 'dumb ones', the name given by Slavs to all the Oder Europeans, and, more specifically, their German neighbours. In the age of the Roman Empire, the Slavs lived in central Europe in