Spectator. —“It is well that the vague alarm generally inspired in the average Englishman by the thought of Russian successes in Asia should be replaced by exact knowledge. Books without number have already been written upon the several phases of the Russian advance, but Mr. Krausse’s volume is, we think, the first concise presentation in English of its entire history.”...

With the exception of a translation of Rambaud’s somewhat disjointed work, there is no detailed history of Russia in the English language at all approaching modern standards. The reigns of Petr the Great and of some of his successors down to the present day—a period covering only 200 years—have been minutely dealt with, but the earlier history of a nation with whom we are coming ever closer into contact is to the English reader almost a blank. Whether the work now submitted will adequately fill

Karamzin —Histoire de l’empire russe. 1819. (French translation by MM. St. Thomas et de Divoff.) S. Solov’ev —Istoriya Rossie. 1858. Th. Schiemann —Russland, Polen und Livland. 1885. A. Rambaud —History of Russia. 1879. (English translation.) L. Paris (translator)—Chronique de Nestor. 1834. N. Kostomarov —Rousskaya Istoriya v jhizneopisaniyakh eya glavnieyshikh dieyatelen. 1874. N. Kostomarov —Sieverno Rousskiya Narodopravstva. 1886. Sir H. H. Howorth —History of the Mongols. Anonymous —Geschich

Russia, which is blessed with a rich variety of tribes and peoples, the despair of the ethnographical geographer, who can scarcely find enough distinctive colours wherewith to denote them all on his maps, is characterised by a singular uniformity of physical conditions throughout the greater part of its huge extent. Geographically speaking, it is difficult to determine what are the exact limits of the region known as Russia-in-Europe, the Oural Mountains, which look such an excellent political b

Whatever the nature of the causes that led up to this irruption of stranger folk, the fact and, to a certain extent, the manner of their coming is substantially set forth in the old chronicles. Like ocean demi-gods riding out from the sea into the ken of mortal men came three Russ-Varangian brothers, Rurik, Sineus, and Truvor, with a mighty host of kinsfolk and followers, steering eastward in their long, narrow-beaked boats through the waterways that lead from the Finnish Gulf into the lake-land

The history of Russia during the next two hundred years is little more than a long chronicle of aimless and inconsequent feuds between the multiple Princes of the Blood—“the much-too-many” of their crowded little world—overlaid and beclouded with strange-sounding names recurring and clashing in a luxuriant tangle of pedigree, and further embarrassed by a perpetual shifting and reshifting of the family appanages. Here and there the figure of some particular kniaz stands out for a space from the r

As an advancing tide, engulfing in its progression the stretches of ooze-land which lie in its onward path, sends scurrying before it flights of waders and other shore-haunting birds, driven from their feeding grounds, so the great Mongol wave which was creeping upon Eastern Europe drove before it disordered troops of the Polovtzi nomads, seeking among their old enemies the safety which their desert fastnesses no longer afforded. Into the principality of Kiev poured the fugitives, bringing with

While the Golden Horde was dealing out death and destruction in the neighbouring western kingdoms, Russia was exerting her powers of recuperation to regain some of the life that had been crushed out of her. Like unscathed pheasants stealing back one by one to the coverts from which the beaters had sent them whirring forth, the fugitive princes returned to the wrecks of their provinces. Daniel re-established himself at Galitz, Mikhail at Kiev; Tchernigov was still infested by roving bodies of Mon

Never since the overthrow on the Sit had a Russian ruler been as emphatically and unquestionably Grand Prince as was Simeon Ivanovitch, yclept “the Proud.” Some of the most valuable provinces had indeed fallen away from the realm, but if the title Prince “of all the Russias,” which Simeon was the first to adopt, was little justified by the facts, at least he was, among his compeers, master of what remained. The very qualification of his powers which the over-lordship of the Khan implied, was in

With the accession of Ivan III. to the throne of Moskva, Russian history takes new shape and direction. This dark, watchful, brooding kniaz was but the continuator of a dynasty of like princes “of gloomy and terrible mien, whose foreheads were marked by the seal of destiny.” [91] “Time and circumstance and opportunity paint with heedless hands and garish colours on the canvas of a man’s life; so that the result is less frequently a finished picture than a palette of squeezed tints.” [92] Time an

The lapse of 500 years found the principles of settled hereditary government in much the same condition in Russia as they had been when the infant Sviatoslav succeeded to the throne of Kiev under the guardianship of his mother. Despite the fact that two of the late Sovereign’s brothers were yet living, Elena Glinski assumed the regency on behalf of her three-year-old son, supported by a knot of boyarin-princes, whom the circumstances of the time suddenly threw into prominence. The over-shadowing

When the people of Moskva became sufficiently familiar with the fact that their terrible Gosoudar was dead and safely buried, even if their imagination could not picture him, as his son had, in his coronation speech, solemnly assured them, “transformed into an angel,” they began to take stock of the men who had replaced him in the government. The effete and placid Thedor was supported by a Douma (Council) of five. Of these Ivan Petrovitch Shouyskie, member of a family which had tasted the sweets

In all historical ages men have been found ready to believe in the pretensions of the personators who seem to spring up as the natural aftermath of a vanished dynasty or a quenched idol; pre-eminently prone to be deluded by such deceptions were the Russians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Inured by the exactions of their religion to an unquestioning faith in the supernatural, incapable from their teaching, as much as from their want of teaching, of forming a critical opinion upon a m

In the midst of Russia’s direst despondency, when the throne of Monomachus was empty and the lawful Patriarch starving in prison, and when the tombs and temples of Moskva’s sacred past were profaned by the unhallowed presence of strangers and heretics, within the scarred walls of the Troitza the lamp of Orthodoxy and national independence was kept steadily burning. The hegumen Dionosie, as bitter a foe of Catholicism as any of the Reformers who were convulsing Western Europe in their struggle wi

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