Episode 1.01 The Plain and the Steppe

The Russian Empire History Podcast

Episode 1.01 The Forest, the Steppe, and the Birth of the Russian Empire

Hello everyone and welcome to Season 1, Episode 1 of the The Russian Empire History Podcast, the history of all the peoples of the Russian Empire, I’m your host, JP Bristow. This is season 1 The Forest, the Steppe and the Birth of the Russian Empire, Episode 1 part 1 The Plain and the Steppe.

In this episode I would like to set the scene for our story of the creation of the Russian Empire, and the various ideas of Eurasia that will develop in and beyond that story over the course of the podcast, by taking a look at the location, geography and climate of the region where it takes place.

Defined at its simplest, Eurasia is the world’s biggest land mass, extending from the Western European Peninsula in the west to Korea in the east, from the Arctic circle to the Indian Ocean. Parts of it are separated from each other by lofty mountain ranges or deserts, but within it, there is one part that is the key focus of our story in this podcast. This region is known as the Great European Plain, an area that runs from the Mongolian Steppe through Central Asia, into the massive East European Plain and out to the North Sea shores of France and the Netherlands.

The East European Plain, which Russians also refer to as the Russian Plain, is a huge 4 million square kilometre (1.5 million square mile) area containing most of Eastern Europe, and is the largest mountain-free part of of Europe. 

Today, the plain encompasses European Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, the European part of Kazakhstan, Moldova, and parts of Romania and Bulgaria, almost all of which have been parts of the Russian Empire at one time or another.

If you’re not familiar with this area, picture for yourself a vertical rectangle sitting between Western Europe and Asia. At the top of the rectangle, the north, the right hand side, the west, is where you will find the Baltic coast, naturally, the Baltic states, and Poland. Moving south, we have Ukraine, where the plain runs up to the Carpathian mountains. Further south, we have what is now Moldova and a bit of Romania. The central part runs from the White Sea down to the Black Sea and the Caspian, which was significantly larger when our story begins. Russia will appear in the forests of the upper part and spread down towards the south over several centuries. The righthand side ranges from the northern forests down along the Ural mountains to the Caspian sea, with the steppe as a long tail going around the south of the Urals and out to the East. This area has seen wave after wave of migration from the East and even today is extensively populated by non-ethnic Russian, non-Slavic peoples. Some of these peoples have retained their identities, Tatars, Bashkirs, Mari, Komi-Permyaks, Chuvash, Kalmyks and others. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of them, we’re going to cover them all.

If you’re not sure what the steppe is, essentially it is open grassland plains. The steppe  ecology does not support forest, the dominant vegetation is drought and frost resistant perennials that spring up each year as the snows melt. A 19th century German traveller, J.G. Kohl travelling east across Eurasia, described it as follows, quote:

“an expanse of swaying milkweed, a thousand million nodding heads, then sage and lavender for the duration of the afternoon, then tulips as far as the eye can see, a bed of mignonette two miles across, whole valleys of caraway and curled mint, endless hills covered in resurrection plant and six days’ journey with nothing but dried up grass.” 

End quote.

The steppe passes its way as a kind of natural corridor, sometimes narrower as it goes around a mountain range, sometimes expansive across the plateaus of Central Asia, funnelling people and trade from East to West.

The plain is crossed by some of Europe’s biggest rivers, generally running in a more or less north-south direction.

The mighty Volga river rises in the highest part of the plain, the Valdai Hills northwest of Moscow, flowing east through the forested northern lands into the forest steppe and then turning south to reach the Caspian Sea just after Astrakhan 3,500 kilometres (2,200 miles) later. In ancient times, the Volga would have been 2 to 4 kilometres wide in the lower river from Kazan to the Caspian, while Soviet era dams for hydroelectric stations have created reservoirs up to 40 kilometres wide. 

The Volga looms so large in the geography and collective imaginations of the peoples that have lived in the plain that it has become a kind of archetypal river. It is called Volga-Matushka in Russian folklore, Mother Volga. Тhe name Volga itself means ‘the wetness’ in Proto-Slavic, with the derivation vlaga in many modern Slavic languages. In other ancient languages of the region its name has the same root as artery or sea. Turkic peoples call it the Idel or Atil, the great river. The river would become one of the main highways for humans living in and passing through the plain. Today, over 40% of the Russian population lives along the the Volga, 4 of the 10 biggest cities and 11 of the 20 biggest cities in Russia are on the river, and more than half of its river traffic goes along the Volga and the canal system that connects it to the northern seas.

As we go through our story of the birth of the Russian Empire, the Volga is going to play an increasingly important role and be the location of many events, so let’s take a trip along the river now. 

The Volga starts as a small stream in what is now Tver Region and would have been deep forest at the time our story begins. To begin with, it is a smallish river, shallow, with occasional rapids, becoming wider at Rzhev, a trading center and site of a major Second World War battle. From this point, it becomes a shipping artery for goods and people, flowing past Tver, capital of the medieval principality of the same name that was Moscow’s chief rival as the Rus began to cast off the Mongol yoke, and on to Rybinsk, where the Volga now connects to the canal system that carries river vessels up to St. Petersburg and into the sea. At the lock where ships enter the river, there is a 20 meter tall statue of Mother Volga with arm outstretched to welcome travellers.

The river continues to flow east through Yaroslavl, the oldest city city on the Volga still inhabited today. Following 8th century Viking settlements in the area, the city of Yaroslavl proper takes 1010 as its foundation date. In the 17th century, it became the capital of Russia for a time after Poland took and occupied Moscow.

From Yaroslavl, the river continues to Nizhny Novgorod, which means lower new town, the original new town, now Novgorod the Great being further north. Around 250 km east of Moscow as the crow flies, the city was founded with the express intention of rivalling the non-Russian cities controlling trade along the river. Novgorod marks the boundary between the upper and middle Volga, which is both due to the river becoming significantly larger as major tributaries join, and to it marking the point at which it passes out of the area controlled by the early Russian state.

The next city along the river is Cheboksary, capital of Chuvashia. The Chuvash are a people descended from an intermingling of Turkic Bolgars from the steppe and Finno-Ugric forest dwellers from the Urals. 

At around 800 km (500 miles) from Moscow by road, we arrive at Kazan, current capital of Tatarstan, officially the third capital of the Russian Federation after Moscow and St. Petersburg, former capital of the Kazan Khanate, the last independent state of the Volga Bolgars, the major power on the Volga for much of the medieval period. It is the conquest of Kazan that it usually taken as marking the birth of the Russian Empire. 

Kazan lies at the forest-steppe boundary, and here the Volga turns south and begins its journey across the steppe to Ulyanovsk. Simbirsk in Tsarist times, the city was renamed in 1924 to commemorate its role as birthplace of one of history’s great villains, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin.

The great bend in the river stretching from Ulyanovsk to Samara was for centuries the haunt of pirates who would prey on shipping and hide on its sparsely inhabited shores. In 1737, a group of Kalmyks, descendants of a Mongol tribe now living in the North Caucasus who are Europe’s only traditionally Buddhist people, converted to Christianity and established a fortress called Stavropol, renamed Tolyatti in Soviet times after the Italian communist leader who played a role in FIAT building the Lada plant there. 

Samara, 1000km from Moscow, marks the boundary between the middle and lower Volga. It also began life as a military base on the wild frontier, was a major centre of opposition to the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, and was the reserve capital in World War 2, to which the government was to be evacuated if Moscow fell to the Germans. The Vostok launch vehicle that took Yuri Gagarin into space was built here.

South of Samara, we come to Saratov, another city founded as a frontier fort. Saratov became a boom town under Catherine the Great when it was designated as the administrative centre for the German colonists she invited to settle. Tens of thousands would answer her call and move to the Steppe. 

Some historians argue that this part of Russia, lying outside of the traditional heartland in the forest belt, has also been treated and ruled as colonies, despite being “Russian”. We will be coming back to this idea later on in the podcast.

Below Samara came Tsaritsyn, subsequently renamed Stalingrad, and now Volgograd, the Volga City. Stalingrad had strategic value as a key hub in Russia’s railway system and was the scene of maybe the bloodiest battle in history, now commemorated by the massive Mamaev Kurgan memorial and the 85 meter tall statue The Motherland Calls.

Nearby lies Sarai, capital of the Golden Horde, which was built on or near Itil, the capital of Khazaria. 

The river here passes through arid, low quality land towards Astrakhan, former capital of the Astrakhan Khanate, in the delta, Europe’s largest, where the Volga discharges into the Caspian Sea. A few years after taking Kazan, Ivan the Terrible will conquer Astrakhan, completing Russian ownership of all three and a half thousand kilometers of the Volga.

If you look at a map, you can see that the Volga does kind of split the plain in half, and we have Russian cities on the Western side and non-Russian cities on the East side, but the Volga has never really been treated as the border of Europe, like the Danube or the Ural Mountains. It has been seen as a sort of border between European Russians and “Asiatic” Turkic people, between Christian Slavs and Muslim Tatars and Pagan Finno-Ugrics. When Catherine the Great visited Kazan, she wrote a letter to Voltaire saying “I am in Asia”.

But it was also the place where cultures met and mingled. The peoples of the forest and the steppe traded along the river for centuries before rival states appeared. Cities along the river had their Jewish, Persian, Armenian and even Indian merchant communities. 

There has always been a wide diversity of people along the river. Finno-Ugric groups preserved shamanistic practices into the twentieth century and unique superstitions and beliefs can still be found among them in rural areas today. At least the rulers of Khazaria converted to Judaism. The Kalmyks remained Buddhists after other Mongols converted to Islam, and are still Europe’s only native Buddhist population. The Golden Horde converted to Islam, taking the Volga Bolgars with them. The frontier regions attracted Old Believers, schismatics who rejected religious reforms in the Orthodox church and other sects as a place they could practice their beliefs away from central controls. 

In the west of the plain, the Dnieper, Europe’s fourth longest river, rises like the Volga in the Valdai hills, and flows 2,200 km (1,400 miles) through modern-day Belarus and Ukraine to the Black Sea. Between the Dnieper and the Volga, Europe’s fifth longest river, the Don, flows 1,900 km (1200 miles) from Central Russia to the Sea of Azov. The Don curves east through the plain, almost meeting the Volga as it curves west before turning back east towards the Caspian.

Here, in the Volga-Don plain and the steppe north of the Caspian, 6000 years ago, Bronze Age cultures would appear that went on to play a key role in shaping the future of the whole of Europe, the Middle East, and India.

Although these great rivers provided opportunities for navigation, they were not without problems. The Dnieper had a 60 km stretch of rapids between what is now called Dnipro but it probably still best known by its Soviet era name of Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia that was impassible to shipping. Travellers on the river were required to portage around the rapids, exposing them to the risk of raiders.  The Volga flows from north to south, goods travelling up from the Mediterranean or Persia had to be hauled in barges by people or animals walking along the shore, slow, backbreaking work, pulling the boats from sandbank to sandbank. 

In the Kurgan hypothesis, or Steppe Theory, the grasslands across the southern reaches of the Don and Volga formed the Proto-Indo-European homeland, the point of origin for the ancient languages that would go on to become Russian, Persian, Greek, German, Hindi, Urdu and hundreds of other languages spoken today by over 3 billion people. 

The word ‘kurgan’ comes from the burial mounds they left behind them across the steppes. Their ability to spread so far and wide is associated with the domestication of the horse. 

5000 years ago, the grasslands of the Steppe and Great European plain were roamed by massive herds of equids, wild horses, like the buffalo in North America. One species of wild horse remains today, Przewalski’s horse, also sometimes referred to as the Mongolian wild horse or Dzungarian horse. Unlike American mustangs or Australian brumbies, which are feral horses, Przewalski’s horse is a true wild, undomesticated horse with distinct genetics showing that they split from what would become domestic horses before domestication. They are shorter and stockier than domesticated horses, with bigger hooves.  They also give off an incredible stench. For a couple of years, I lived over the wall from the Przewalski’s horse enclosure at Moscow Zoo, when the wind was in the wrong direction you could not open the windows for the smell. And there were only two of them in the enclosure, one can only imagine the eye watering impact of a whole herd of them just up wind.

Although domesticated by cattle herders, horses were initially domesticated for for their meat, rather than for transportation. Horsemeat remains important to Tatars, Kazakhs and the peoples of the Central Asian steppe to this day. It was the first meat my children ate, I was repeatedly assured that it is the “cleanest” meat, and even multinational conglomerates like Nestle make horsemeat baby food products at their subsidiaries in Tatarstan. I highly recommend kazylyk, Tatar horsemeat salami, and horsemeat jerky if you get the chance to try it.

Horses were also used for milk production, a practice that likewise continues today. The milk is fermented into a drink called kumis in Turkic languages or ayrag in Mongolian. Unlike horsemeat, kumis is rather an acquired taste. I always advocate trying anything once, but personally, in this case, I am not a fan and I can’t provide any assurances that you will enjoy it. 

The Steppe, also called the Eurasian Steppe or the Great Steppe begins far in the east in the area including Mongolia and Inner Mongolia and flows 8000 kilometers (5000 miles) west to Hungary, a belt of grassland forming a natural corridor. The steppe skirts around the Tian Shan, Altai and Urals mountains, running up to the forest in the north and desert in the south. The transition from the harsh climate of the Eastern steppe, which is colder, with less rainfall and lower quality grazing land, to the softer, lusher climate of the European Steppe, which moderated by the atmospheric effects of the ocean and sea, creates the steppe gradient, which has pushed successive waves of migration westwards for millennia. 

The vast expanse of the Great European Plain means that there is considerable climatic variation. Moscow ranges from an average temperature of -10C (-16F) in winter to the high 20sC (80s F) in summer, with over 700mm (27 inches) of precipitation, Astrakhan ranges from -3C (-25F) to +41C (105F), with only 200 mm (9 inches) of precipitation per year. Seasonal variations in daylight can also be extreme, in June, Saint Petersburg gets an average of 276 hours of sunshine, while in December it gets just 13 hours for the whole month. 

The northern reaches are tundra, treeless uplands with short growing seasons characterised by dwarf shrubs, mosses and lichen. With snow and ice and little sunlight in winter, and surface melt transforming the area into bogs and marshes in summer, the tundra is a wild and inhospitable terrain with low biodiversity and little to offer human habitation. This is the land of vechnaya merzlota - the eternal frozenness, the Russian term for permafrost, which is a term that was also actually coined by a Russian, a story we will get to much later on in this podcast. A measure of how inhospitable this country is to human habitation can be seen in the fact that neither of these terms, vechnaya merzlota and permafrost, were coined until well into the twentieth century, people needed no name for an area they simply avoided.

Moving south, we come to the taiga, the worlds largest land biome. Unlike the tundra, the taiga has no permafrost, and although the winters are long and can be harsh, with temperatures of minus 20C (minus 4F) common, and sometimes as low as minus 50C (minus 58F) in Siberia, it also experiences warm summers with temperatures in the 20sC (70s F) and forms a rich environment. The Russian taiga is covered by forest of spruce, pines and larch, with Eastern Siberia in particular being a huge larch forest. As the ice cap of the last ice age retreated, the area was originally steppe, with the forest coming in around 12,000 years ago. 

I’m sure most of you have, like me, been hearing about the Amazon forests, aka the ‘lungs of the planet’ for most of your life, with much hyperbole devoted to the effects of forest fires and activism against logging and land clearance for farming. But the taiga stores more of the world’s carbon than all of the temperate and tropical forests combined. The taiga stores twice as much carbon per hectare as tropical forest. Some 45% of Russian territory remains forested, representing 20% of the world’s trees, around double the amount in the Amazon. Since the fall of the Soviet Union there has been significant deforestation in parts of the taiga that were previously protected, especially in the Far East, although in recent years the government has made moves to regulate the timber industry and improve enforcement.

Moving south, the taiga becomes forest steppe, which, like it sounds, is a transitional belt between the forested taiga and the steppe grassland running from Ukraine through to the Ural mountains. The forest steppe is characterised by more deciduous forest interspersed with rolling grasslands. 

If you are wondering why the forest just doesn’t keep on going into the Pontic steppe and Central Asia, the main reason is precipitation. The further into the Eurasian land mass and away from the oceans, the lower the rainfall and the higher the aridity. Most of the precipitation in the Great European Plain falls as snow in the winter. When it melts in the spring it sinks into aquifers and fills the great rivers flowing south. In the northern latitudes of the taiga, the weak sun is insufficient to evaporate the water away, and it easily supports lush vegetation. As we move south, the sun becomes stronger, summer rain becomes sparser, and the water flowing down from the north is not enough to make up for the evaporated moisture, meaning the land can only support arid grassland. Indeed the deep south of the Pontic steppe is close to desert.

As you might have guessed, this makes for quite a fragile environment. People living on the steppe have always been extremely vulnerable to climatic changes. Even small shifts in climate could have a major impact on rainfall and vegetation, which in turn had an equally significant impact on how people lived, pushing them from sedentary settlements to nomadism, or the other way around, and for agricultural populations devastating droughts and starvation were a regular occurence until well into the modern period.

That is not to say that the steppe and the plain were without resources. At the time the first human inhabitants appeared the Great European Plain, it was a rich environment. In addition to the wild horses we have already mentioned, moose, reindeer and boar roamed the forests. Cattle and goats were introduced early on and thrived in forest and steppe. The rivers were full of fish, including giant catfish and sturgeon that could reach 7 meters in length. The now extinct Caspian tiger roamed the south, while then as now hunters in the northern forests would need to watch out for bears and wolves. 

The Ural mountains have massive copper deposits that have been mined since the earliest metallurgy of the Bronze Age and were a major trading commodity for the inhabitants of the region over 3,000 years ago. 

In the southwest of the plain, the Black Earth region is fertile and lush, supporting early agriculture, helping Greek colonies on the Black Sea turn into grain suppliers to the whole of the Greek world, and later turning the Russian Empire into the breadbasket of Europe.

Two other resources would be essential to the region’s trade in the period we are covering in this season: slaves and furs. The slave trade would be ubiquitous from the Bronze Age until the Russians conquered Crimea. Scythian slaves would serve as policemen in ancient Athens, various peoples of the southern plain would make up entire slave armies in the Islamic world. So many millions of Slavs would be taken in raids or exported and sold into the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern slave markets that we get our English word ‘slave’ from Slav. 

The other resource would be furs. Everyone wanted furs, and the northern forests had seemingly unlimited amounts. The fur trade underpinned the wealth of the Khazars, the Volga Bulgars and Muscovy. It was the fur trade that drew Russians East across Siberia and into Alaska. For centuries, regions would pay taxes to the Tsars in furs.

When one travels across the East European Plain, by train, for example, as is common in Russia, it is easy to understand why succeeding waves of migrating peoples kept coming for millennia. If you picture it in your mind’s eye, the steppe is like an enormous conduit from east to west, with the great rivers providing routes north to south. And so they came Indo-Aryans, Celts, Huns, Finno-Ugric peoples, Slavs, Turks, Mongolians, and Bolgars. What was to stop them? Yes, there are a few large rivers, but they freeze over in winter or can be crossed in hollowed out log canoes. Essentially, though, there are no obstacles, you can ride your horse across the steppe from Mongolia to northern France without ever having to climb a mountain. There is little that could be pointed to as natural borders. 

The first time I arrived in Russia back in the early 90s and got on the train to Kazan, I thought there would be something interesting to look at, but it was just hour after hour of flat grassland with occasional birch trees. 

And I’m not the only person to be disappointed. One of Anton Chekhov’s short stories describes a journey across the steppe, quote:

“The grass drooped, every living thing was hushed. The sub-baked hills, brownish green and lilac in the distance, with their quiet, shadowy tones, the plain with the misty distance, and, arched above them, the sky, which seems terribly deep and transparent in the steppes, where there are no woods or high hills, seemed now endless, petrified with dreariness… they were all alike and made the steppe even more monotonous.”

End quote

As you travel across the steppe, you can easily imagine the Mongols riding west, conquering everything in their path and just not having any reason to stop. Or later, in the time of the Russian Empire, Russians heading the other way, East, thinking, “well, let’s just keep going and see where we get to.” And this movement and interaction lies at the root of the Russian ideas of Eurasia and Eurasianism, in which the history of the Slavs and their relations with Mongols, Tatars, Persians and other neighbours to the south and east has been just as, if not more important to the development of Russia than Western Europe.

Season 1 of this podcast, looking at the origins of the Russian Empire, is going to be focused on the plain, from the Urals to Ukraine, and from the Baltic Sea to the Caspian, with regular involvement from the steppe as various groups migrate into our story. So for now I am going to disregard other parts of the Russian Empire, Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus. They will come into our story later. 

We are going to start in the Southern part of European Russia, the Volga-Don basin and the area around the Caspian Sea, which has been called the Pontus or Pontic Steppe since ancient Greek times. We will look at the Bronze Age cultures of the plain and steppe, an extremely important part of human history about which we still know so little, but which archeologists are opening up more every year.

Then we will consider the Scythians, Sarmatians and the Pontic Greek cities and states, Turkic and Finno-Ugric migrations into the Cis-Urals region, whose descendants are still present in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Perm, Komi and other regions in the east and south of modern European Russia. 

Moving north and west, we will look at the Balts and the origins of the Slavs, the appearance of the Rus and beginnings of statehood in Kyivan Rus. 

Rather than a strictly chronological approach, I will first follow the different peoples through in turn from their origins to the establishment of the early states in the region - the Khazar Qaganate, Volga Bolgaria, Kyivan Rus - bringing the story together as they develop into rivals. 

We will start off at quite at quite a high-level, brisk pace and slow down and zoom in as we move forward in time.

Then the Mongol conquest will turn everything on its head for a couple of centuries, we will tell the story of the Golden Horde in southern Russia and examine the rise of Moscow in the north. Why Moscow, and not Novgorod, Vladimir or Kyiv? A good question that we will try to answer.

Season 1 will end in 1552, when Tsar Ivan the Terrible conquers Kazan, opening the way for Russia to dominate the Volga and giving birth to the Russian Empire, although it would not actually take that name until Peter the Great’s time.

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Thank you for listening, and I hope you will join me next time.