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all Swedes—as has already been explained (p. 206),Muscovy made great gains against Poland—Smolensk,Kiev, and Little Russia. But there had been dividedcounsels in Moscow, and Sweden and the Baltic hadbeen far from forgotten. One of the most experiencedof the counsellors of tsar Alexis, Ordin-Nashchokin(d. 1680), a lifelong westernizer, who hailed from Pskovthen on the Swedish frontier, argued that Sweden was agreater danger than Poland and that the Dvina and Rigawere better prizes than the Dnieper and Kiev. Therewas a brief, and in the end fruitless, war against Sweden(1656-58); then the policy of concentrating againstPoland won the day again: "It is not meet," tsarAlexis wrote, "for a dog to eat even one morsel ofOrthodox bread." In the Ukraine but not in the Balticlands there were Orthodox to be redeemed. In contrastwith Ivan the Terrible Alexis avoided challenging Swedenand Poland at one and the same time. Forty years laterOrdin-Nashchokin's idea of alliance with Poland againstSweden bore fruit with Peter the Great.Peter had begun facing towards the Black Sea not theBaltic, having inherited the new offensive policy againstthe Crimean Tatars and the Turks, which was combinedwith alliance with Poland—another legacy of Ordin-Nashchokin—and Austria (cf. p. 207). But his famousfirst visit to the West (1697-98) showed him that Austriawas now thinking mainly of Louis XIV and the Spanishsuccession question, not of the sultan, and that Poland'snew king, Augustus II, elector of Saxony, was concertingwith Denmark an elaborate combination against Sweden.Into this Peter entered. Within a fortnight of concludinga hasty peace with Turkey he began the great reckoningwith Sweden that was to drag on for twenty-one yearsand be known as the Great Northern War (1700-21).No great war seemed so easily won before its start.Sweden stood alone, assailed by Denmark, Saxony,Poland, and Russia. Her empire included all told notmore than about 2,500,000, and of them only 1,500,000were Swedes, whereas Russia alone had a population ofperhaps eight million Russians, apart from others. Ageneration of absolutism at the expense of the nobles had262