The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

theCHAPTER IX.VOLGA AND URAL BASINS.(Gkeat Russia.)^=j HE river which intersectsRussia obliquely from near the Baltic toI? I'^p-Caspian, and which drains an area thrice the extent of France,has largely contributed to the political development of the Russianpeople. The Dnieper showed the Little Russians the route toConstantinople ;the Vistula, Niemen, and Western Dvina laid openthe West to the White Russians and Lithuanians ; even the Volkhov and theNeva, by placing Novgorod in relation with the Hanseatic towns, withdrew it, soto say, from the heart of the land. But the Volga and the vast system ofits navigable affluents compelled the inhabitants to develop themselves and createtheir civilisation on the spot. Although the water highways facilitated communicationin every direction between the various regions of Great Russia, fewcolonists were attracted to the arid steppes, the salt wastes, and the land-locked basinof the Caspian in the south-east. The bulk of the people were thus confined tothe central region, which they gradually brought under cultivation.Coming incontact at a thousand points with the Asiatic tribes pouring in through thesteppes, the Great Russians intermingled with them, either absorbing or becomingabsorbed, and thus by continuous crossings developing that hardy race whichgradually acquired the supremacy over all the Eastern Slavs. Through husbandry,canals, highways, railways, henceforth relieved from the old limits imposed bytheir swamps and forests, they have been able to reverse the flow of migration,sending forth groups of colonists to the remote shores of the Pacific, girdlinground China with a continuous chain of settlements, and thus bringing a greatpart of the Asiatic continent more and more under European influences. Butthe Volga and its great head-streams still remain the centre of Great Russiannationality ; here they number already upwards of thirty millions, and in someplaces have peopled the land as thickly as many countries in the west ofEurope.