Russia, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers

PART III. Descriptions

DESCRIPTIONS

St. Petersburg J. Beavington Atkinson.

Finland Harry De Windt.

Lapland Alexander Platonovich Engelhardt.

Moscow (The Kremlin and its treasuries--The Ancient Regalia--The Romanoff House) Alfred Maskell.

Vassili-Blagennoi (St. Basil the Blessed) Theophile Gautier.

Poland Thomas Michell.

Kief, the City of Pilgrimage J. Beavington Atkinson.

Nijni-Novgorod Antonio Gallenga.

The Volga Basin. (The Great River--Kasan--Tsaritzin--Astrakhan) Antonio Gallenga.

Odessa Antonio Gallenga.

The Don Cossacks Thomas Michell.

In the Caucasus J. Buchan Teller.

Khiva Fred Burnaby.

The Trans-Siberian Railway William Durban.

PART IV. Manners and Customs

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

High Life in Russia The Countess of Galloway.

Rural Life in Russia Lady Verney

Food and Drink H. Sutherland Edwards.

Carnival-Time and Easter A. Nicol Simpson.

Russian Tea and Tea-Houses H. Sutherland Edwards.

How Russia Amuses Itself Fred Whishaw.

The Kirghiz and their Horses Fred Burnaby.

Winter in Moscow H. Sutherland Edwards.

A Journey by Sleigh Fred Burnaby.

PART V. Art and Literature

ART AND LITERATURE

Russian Architecture Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.

Sculpture and Painting Philippe Berthelot.

Russian Music A. E. Keeton.

Russian Literature W. R. Morfill.

PART VI. Statistics

STATISTICS

Present Conditions E. S.

ILLUSTRATIONS

MOSCOW ARCHANGEL REVEL SIBERIAN NATIVES SAMOJEDES OF NOVA ZEMBLA ROOM OF THE TSAR MICHAILOWITCH, MOSCOW CHURCH OF THE ASSUMPTION A RELIGIOUS PROCESSION, KOLA SHRINE IN THE CONVENT SOLOVETSKII, KOLA ST. PETERSBURG THE HERMITAGE, ST. PETERSBURG HELSINGFORS, FINLAND REINDEER TRAVELLING MOSCOW THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW VASSILI--BLAGENNOI (ST. BASIL THE BLESSED), MOSCOW NOWO ZJAZD STREET, WARSAW HOTEL DEVILLE, WARSAW THE DNIEPER AT KIEF LA LAVRA, KIEF NIJNI--NOVGOROD (BRIDGE OF THE FAIR) FROM THE RAMPARTS OF THE KREMLIN, NIJNI--NOVGOROD PLACE TUREMNAJA, ODESSA SEBASTOPOL KHARKOFF TIFLIS THE WINTER PALACE, ST. PETERSBURG RUSSIAN FARM SCENE THE TSAR'S DINING-ROOM, MOSCOW ST. ISAAC'S CATHEDRAL, ST. PETERSBURG ST. ANNE RESTAURANT, WIBORG THE RED SQUARE, MOSCOW CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER, MOSCOW STATUE OF PETER THE GREAT AND THE ADMIRALTY PALACE, ST. PETERSBURG THE THEATRE, ODESSA THE LIBRARY, ODESSA THE TSAR NICHOLAS THE TSARINA KALKSTRASSE AND PROMENADE, RIGA

THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

PRINCE KROPOTKINE

The Russian Empire is a very extensive territory in eastern Europe and northern Asia, with an area exceeding 8,500,000 square miles, or one-sixth of the land surface of the globe (one twenty-third of its whole superficies). It is, however, but thinly peopled on the average, including only one-fourteenth of the inhabitants of the earth. It is almost entirely confined to the cold and temperate zones. In Nova Zembla (Novaya Zemlya) and the Taimir peninsula, it projects within the Arctic Circle as far as 77 deg. 2' and 77 deg. 40' N. latitude; while its southern extremities reach 38 deg. 50' in Armenia, about 35 deg. on the Afghan frontier, and 42 deg. 30' on the coasts of the Pacific. To the West it advances as far as 20 deg. 40' E. longitude in Lapland, 18 deg. 32' in Poland, and 29 deg. 42' on the Black Sea; and its eastern limit--East Cape in the Bering Strait--extends to 191 deg. E. longitude.

The Arctic Ocean--comprising the White, Barents, and Kara Seas--and the northern Pacific, that is the Seas of Bering, Okhotsk, and Japan, bound it on the north and east. The Baltic, with its two deep indentations, the Gulfs of Bothnia and Finland, limits it on the north-west; and two sinuous lines of frontier separate it respectively from Sweden and Norway on the north-west, and from Prussia, Austria and Roumania on the west. The southern frontier is still unsettled. In Asia beyond the Caspian, the southern boundary of the empire remains vague; the advance into the Turcoman Steppes and Afghan Turkestan, and on the Pamir plateau is still in progress. Bokhara and Khiva, though represented as vassal khanates, are in reality mere dependencies of Russia. An approximately settled frontier-line begins only farther east, where the Russian and Chinese empires meet on the borders of eastern Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria.

Russia has no oceanic possessions, and has abandoned those she owned in the last century; her islands are mere appendages of the mainland to which they belong. Such are the Aland archipelago, Hochland, Tuetters, Dagoe and Osel in the Baltic Sea; Nova Zembla, with Kolgueff and Vaigatch, in the Barents Sea; the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea; the New Siberian archipelago and the small group of the Medvyezhii Islands off the Siberian coast; the Commandor Islands off Kamchatka; the Shantar Islands and Saghalin in the Sea of Okhotsk. The Aleutian archipelago was sold to the United States in 1867, together with Alaska, and in 1874 the Kurile Islands were ceded to Japan.

A vast variety of physical features is obviously to be expected in a territory like this, which comprises on the one side the cotton and silk regions of Turkestan and Trans-caucasia, and on the other the moss and lichen-clothed Arctic tundras and the Verkhoyansk Siberian pole of cold--the dry Transcaspian deserts and the regions watered by the monsoons on the coasts of the Sea of Japan. Still, if the border regions, that is, two narrow belts in the north and south, be left out of account, a striking uniformity of physical feature prevails. High plateaus, like those of Pamir (the "Roof of the World") or of Armenia, and high mountain chains like the snow-clad summits of the Caucasus, the Alay, the Thian-Shan, the Sayan, are met with only on the outskirts of the empire.

Viewed broadly by the physical geographer, it appears as occupying the territories to the north-west of that great plateau-belt of the old continent--the backbone of Asia--which spreads with decreasing height and width from the high table-land of Tibet and Pamir to the lower plateaus of Mongolia, and thence north-eastwards through the Vitim region to the furthest extremity of Asia. It may be said to consist of the immense plains and flat-lands which extend between the plateau-belt and the Arctic Ocean, including all the series of parallel chains and hilly spurs which skirt the plateau-belt on the north-west. It extends over the plateau itself, and crosses it beyond Lake Baikal only.

A broad belt of hilly tracts--in every respect Alpine in character, and displaying the same variety of climate and organic life as Alpine tracts usually do--skirts the plateau-belt throughout its length on the north and north-west, forming an intermediate region between the plateaus and the plains. The Caucasus, the Elburz, the Kopetdagh, and Paropamisus, the intricate and imperfectly known network of mountains west of the Pamir, the Thian-Shan and Ala-tau mountain regions, and farther north-east the Altai, the still unnamed complex of Minusinsk mountains, the intricate mountain-chains of Sayan, with those of the Olekma, Vitim, and Aldan, all of which are ranged en echelon,--the former from north-west to south-east, and the others from south-west to north-east--all these belong to one immense Alpine belt bordering that of the plateaus. These have long been known to Russian colonists, who, seeking to escape religious persecutions and exactions by the state, early penetrated into and rapidly pushed their small settlements up the better valleys of these tracts, and continued to spread everywhere as long as they found no obstacles in the shape of a former population or in unfavourable climatic conditions.

As for the flat-lands which extend from the Alpine hill-foots to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and assume the character either of dry deserts in the Aral-Caspian depression, or of low table-lands in central Russia and eastern Siberia, of lake-regions in north-west Russia and Finland, or of marshy prairies in western Siberia, and of tundras in the north,--their monotonous surfaces are diversified by only a few, and these for the most part low, hilly tracts.

As to the picturesque Bureya mountains on the Amur, the forest-clothed Sikhota-alin on the Pacific, and the volcanic chains of Kamchatka, they belong to quite another orographical world; they are the border-ridges of the terraces by which the great plateau-belt descends to the depths of the Pacific Ocean. It is owing to these leading orographical features--divined by Carl Ritter, but only within the present day revealed by geographical research--that so many of the great rivers of the old continent are comprised within the limits of the Russian empire. Taking rise on the plateau-belt, or in its Alpine outskirts, they flow first, like the upper Rhone and Rhine, along high longitudinal valleys formerly filled up with great lakes; next they find their way through the rocky walls; and finally they enter the lowlands, where they become navigable, and, describing great curves to avoid here and there the minor plateaus and hilly tracts, they bring into water-communication with one another places thousands of miles apart. The double river-systems of the Volga and Kama, the Obi and Irtish, the Angara and Yenisei, the Lena and Vitim on the Arctic slope, the Amur and Sungari on the Pacific slope, are instances. They were the true channels of Russian colonization.

A broad depression--the Aral-Caspian desert--has arisen where the plateau-belt has reached its greatest height and suddenly changes its direction from a north-western into a north-eastern one; this desert is now filled only to a small extent by the salt waters of the Caspian, Aral and Balkash inland seas; but it bears unmistakable traces of having been during Post-Pliocene times an immense inland basin. There the Volga, the Ural, the Sir Daria, and the Oxus discharge their waters without reaching the ocean, but continue to bring life to the rapidly drying Transcaspian Steppes, or connect by their river network, as the Volga does, the most remote parts of European Russia.

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