16e: Conclusions

1. No boundaries
The most noticeable thing is that Russia - even in its very earliest days - was a land with no natural, defensible frontiers. This is unusual. The Roman Empire and the United States both started out with natural, defensible frontiers. Latium, the original home of the Romans, is bounded by the Apennine Mountains to the east and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. As Rome became a world power its home - that is, the Italian peninsula - was bounded on the north by the Alps and by the sea everywhere else. Whatever else might befall the Roman Empire, Rome herself and the Italian homeland were safe behind the Alps. The United States likewise first sprang up between the Appalachian Mountains and the Great Lakes to the west, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. But the Rus, and after them the Russians, could always be attacked over land from any direction; invaders from the north or south had the added option of using the Russian river system as if it were a freeway. From the earliest times on, Russian leaders realized that adding territory was an effective means of defense. Moscow escaped the worst of the Mongol domination because it was too far north and west to be controlled effectively; Novgorod escaped it almost completely.

2. Autocracy and centralization
The Russian people have never known anything besides autocracy. As the mythical tale of Rurik's invitation in 862 indicates, autocracy was an improvement over what the Slavs had previously. Certainly nothing in the Slavs' experience steered them in the way of democracy. Nor did the Mongols make any strong case for representative government. In fact, the division of Rus into smaller, "appanage" principalities made the nation both weaker and less centralized, making it comparatively easy pickings. The only Russian principality to maintain any democratic traditions was Novgorod, which would eventually fall to Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow in 1478. Ivan the Terrible summoned Russia's first zemsky sobor, or National Council, in 1549, primarily to approve his plans. In 1613 the zemsky sobor selected Mikhail Romanov to become Tsar, but this was the exception to the rule that it was mostly for show.

3. The Orthodox Church
The myth of Russia's conversion to Orthodoxy in 988 AD contains the fact that church and state began together and grew together. Although pagan ways survived among the peasantry for three or four centuries, the Orthodox Church played an enormous role in the Russian culture's growth. It brought literacy in its wake (at least to some of the well off) and a link to the Byzantine Empire. Unlike western Europeans, who worshipped in Latin whether they understood it or not, Russians worshiped in Old Church Slavonic, an older variant of Russian. During the Mongol domination the Church held the Russian people together and preserved Russian customs. Yet the mass of Russian peasants did not fully embrace the practice of Orthodoxy until roughly 1400, by which time it had taken on a uniquely Russian character. In 1453 the Byzantine Empire fell once and for all, leaving Russia as the most important Orthodox country in the world, which was a great source of pride.

4. Rule of Law
Kievan Rus had its own great lawgiver in Yaroslav the Wise, who set forth the Russkaya Pravda. Yet even this was far from an all-encompassing code of laws. Rather, like Rome's Code of Twelve Tables, the Russkaya Pravda specified penalties for a wide range of actions but again like the Twelve tables the justice it upheld was fundamentally unequal. In both cases, poorer individuals possessed less status and therefore were penalized more heavily than their wealthier, nobler counterparts. In any event, in the Rus' principalities everything belonged to the prince himself, and the people who lived there were subjects, not citizens. This did not change until the Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917, and even then it was not much of a change.