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steppe since the seventeenth century, the feather-grasssteppe only during the last century. He is but now,with the aid of science, at the beginning of the masteryof the arid and semi-desert steppes. These masteries,still far from complete, slow in comparison with theAustralian, Canadian, or American onrush, have beenup till now the great historical achievement of the Russianpeople, until the last fifty years pitifully equippedmaterially, but superbly equipped in spirit, a people ofwhom it has been written with just pride (1942): "' Youcould make nails of them, and never would nails bestronger.' . . . 'Yes, of these people you can makeeverything—nails, tanks, poetry, victory.'"(i) The Zone of Mixed ForestsThe western part of the great triangle of mixedforest lands, that lead on to the west beyond thePripet marshes to the Vistula basin and to the southwestto the Carpathians, was the centre of the easternSlavs, when at least fifteen hundred years ago theywere centred along the upper courses of the Dniester,Dnieper, Niemen, and Dvina and were pushing throughthe Novgorod lake region, draining into the Nevaand Lake Ladoga (see map 3). They had succeededin combining agriculture with a forest way of life,instead of becoming enchained by the forest at thelevel of semi-nomadic hunter-fisher folk. Most ofthe land was poor and difficult, the climate severe,and their implements, cropping, and stock-raising wereon an elementary level, dominated by forest, scrub,and marsh. Hence the great eastward colonizingmovement of the eastern Slavs was much slower inconquering the wilderness than the somewhat similaradvance eastwards of the Germans from the Elbeand the Main, which began rather later, at the expenseof the western Slavs, in the tenth century. The extensivecharacter of the economy of the Slav tribes andthe comparative rarity of suitable sites and naturalclearings led them to push on, mainly along the rivers,in scattered, strung-out settlements. Apart from the21