Russia under the Old regime

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heavily populated areas - Novgorod, Pskov and the Volga-Oka region -the population density in the sixteenth century averaged at most three persons per square kilometre, and it may have been as low as one; in the west, the corresponding figure was twenty to thirty. Most of Russia was virgin forest, and large stretches of it were complete wilderness. Between the Urals and Tobolsk, the capital of Siberia, over a distance of 750 kilometres, lived an estimated 10,000 inhabitants. Such low population density goes far to explain the poverty of the Muscovite state and its limited manoeuvrability.

But such considerations did not trouble the country's sovereigns. They were conscious of the unlimited power they held and pleased to learn from westerners that their patrimony exceeded in size the surface of the full moon. Having been eminently successful in acquiring power through the accumulation of real estate, they tended to identify political power with the growth of territory, and the growth of territory with absolute, domainial authority. The idea of an international state system with its corollary, balance of power, formulated in the west in the seventeenth century, remained foreign to their way of thinking. So did the idea of reciprocal relations between state and society. Success, as they then understood it, bred in the Muscovite government a remarkably conservative frame of mind.