‘An eagle, many-winged, with lion’s claws, has fallen upon me. He has robbed me of three Cedars of Lebanon : my beauty, my wealth, my children. Our country is deserted, our city is in ruins, our markets are destroyed. My brothers have been carried to a place where neither our fathers, nor our grandfathers, nor our forefathers have dwelt. . . .’
Thus, by the mouth of one of her chroniclers, did Pskov, a free and republican town, absorbed, in the year 1510, into the new Muscovite Empire, lament her lost independence, her broken privileges, and her exiled sons. The father of Ivan the Terrible, Vassili Ivanovitch, had just passed by, had carried off the great bell which for centuries had called the townsmen to the viétchié—the popular meetings of the place—deported hundreds of families—quickly replaced by Muscovite immigrants—to the interior of his territories, and proclaimed the incorporation of the Republic with his State.
And this, in a then unknown corner of the European world, was the repetition, at short notice, of a chapter of European history. Thus, at Liège, in 1467, Charles the Bold had overthrown the famous perron, the ancient bronze column, at the foot of which, for centuries past, the people had been wont to make its laws and accomplish all the acts of its public life. Thus, too, at the same time, and hard by, Louis XL, striving with his vassals of Burgundy, Brittany, and Guyenne, was labouring to ‘ réunir les fleurons ‘ of the crown of France.
From one end of the European continent to the other, this was the decisive hour of great political formations, everywhere attended by the same painful crises. But here, in the far North-East, the task of the ‘ gatherers of the Russian land,’ as they have been called, was especially difficult and arduous. This was, in fact, no matter of welding together provinces already bound by numerous affinities, common traditions, an evident solidarity of interests. Conceive the France of the fifteenth century conquered by the English, and some Burgundian Prince founding, not at Dijon even, but in Germany, in Switzerland, or in Italy, the nucleus of a new monarchy, destined to gather into one whole the remnants of the French fatherland, dismembered, broken into pieces. There you have the equivalent of the obscure and laborious process of gestation which gave birth, in the early days of the sixteenth century, to that new world, the Russia of the Ivans and the Vassilis.
What was that Russia ? Not the country you now traverse in your sleeping-car from Kiev to St. Petersburg, from Warsaw to Irkutsk. The Russia of Kiev had passed away ; as yet the Russia of St. Petersburg was not. Of the lands which in the tenth and eleventh centuries had made up the Empire of the Jaroslavs and the Vladimirs, the Sovereign seated at Moscow held not an inch. He called himself Duke, or Tsar, ‘ of All the Russias ‘ indeed, but his right to assume the title was much on a par with that of the English kings, his contemporaries, to reckon the crown and arms of France in their own patrimony. The Russia of Kiev was now part of the Polish territory ; the Russia of Mokhilev belonged to Lithuania. Red Russia, White Russia, Little Russia, were all held by neighbours. Moscow was but a Russian colony in a foreign—a Finnish—country.
Thus, by the mouth of one of her chroniclers, did Pskov, a free and republican town, absorbed, in the year 1510, into the new Muscovite Empire, lament her lost independence, her broken privileges, and her exiled sons. The father of Ivan the Terrible, Vassili Ivanovitch, had just passed by, had carried off the great bell which for centuries had called the townsmen to the viétchié—the popular meetings of the place—deported hundreds of families—quickly replaced by Muscovite immigrants—to the interior of his territories, and proclaimed the incorporation of the Republic with his State.
And this, in a then unknown corner of the European world, was the repetition, at short notice, of a chapter of European history. Thus, at Liège, in 1467, Charles the Bold had overthrown the famous perron, the ancient bronze column, at the foot of which, for centuries past, the people had been wont to make its laws and accomplish all the acts of its public life. Thus, too, at the same time, and hard by, Louis XL, striving with his vassals of Burgundy, Brittany, and Guyenne, was labouring to ‘ réunir les fleurons ‘ of the crown of France.
From one end of the European continent to the other, this was the decisive hour of great political formations, everywhere attended by the same painful crises. But here, in the far North-East, the task of the ‘ gatherers of the Russian land,’ as they have been called, was especially difficult and arduous. This was, in fact, no matter of welding together provinces already bound by numerous affinities, common traditions, an evident solidarity of interests. Conceive the France of the fifteenth century conquered by the English, and some Burgundian Prince founding, not at Dijon even, but in Germany, in Switzerland, or in Italy, the nucleus of a new monarchy, destined to gather into one whole the remnants of the French fatherland, dismembered, broken into pieces. There you have the equivalent of the obscure and laborious process of gestation which gave birth, in the early days of the sixteenth century, to that new world, the Russia of the Ivans and the Vassilis.
What was that Russia ? Not the country you now traverse in your sleeping-car from Kiev to St. Petersburg, from Warsaw to Irkutsk. The Russia of Kiev had passed away ; as yet the Russia of St. Petersburg was not. Of the lands which in the tenth and eleventh centuries had made up the Empire of the Jaroslavs and the Vladimirs, the Sovereign seated at Moscow held not an inch. He called himself Duke, or Tsar, ‘ of All the Russias ‘ indeed, but his right to assume the title was much on a par with that of the English kings, his contemporaries, to reckon the crown and arms of France in their own patrimony. The Russia of Kiev was now part of the Polish territory ; the Russia of Mokhilev belonged to Lithuania. Red Russia, White Russia, Little Russia, were all held by neighbours. Moscow was but a Russian colony in a foreign—a Finnish—country.
