Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

220 ORIGIN OF THE RUSSIAN STATE
In the light of this historical evolution, the history and structure
of Kievan Russia, the Russia of the eighth to the twelfth centuries,
assume a new form. The Russia of Kiev was at the same time the last
link of an ancient historical chain and the first of a new one, Kievan
Russia was the immediate successor of the series of commercial states
which had replaced one another in the steppes of South Russia from
time immemorial, and at the same time the mother of the subsequent
Slavonic Russian states in Western Russia (the Galicia of
to-day), on the upper course of the Dnieper (the modern White Russia),
and, most important of all, between the upper Volga and the Oka,
Great Russia, the Russia of modern times.
Kievan Russia, in the first period of her evolution, naturally
inherited all the peculiarities of her predecessors. Like them she was
an almost purely commercial state ; like them she tried to occupy
the shores of the Black Sea ; and her political and cultural life, like
theirs, faced south and east, towards Greece and the Orient, and not
west, towards the Western Roman world. It is only natural therefore
that the civilization of the Russia of Kiev was a southern civilization,
an offspring of classical culture in that Greco-Oriental aspect which
was characteristic of Byzantium and the Byzantine Empire. Kiev
and Novgorod in Russia were little Constantinoples ; so were
Trebizond on the southern shore of the Black Sea, the gorgeous
Georgian capital, Ani, and the various centres of the Balkan Slavs,
especially Sofia in Bulgaria and Belgrade in Serbia. We must not
forget that the main centre of political, social, rehgious and economic
life both at Kiev and at Novgorod was the cathedral of S. Sophia,
which stood in the same relation to the palace and the person of the
Kievan Great Prince (Veliki Knyaz) as the great S. Sophia of Constantinople
to the Byzantine emperor and his residences.
But Russia did not receive the whole heritage of the Greco-
Oriental civilization. She had not the same opportunities in the East
as Italy, France and Spain in the Western classical world. The
strivings of the Kievan princes towards the Black Sea and the Caspian
Orient were not successful. Svyatoslav, of course, nearly succeeded
in destroying and conquering the two strongholds of Oriental civilization
in Eastern Russia—the Kaganate of the Khazars on the Volga and
the Don, and the kingdom of the Bulgars on the Kama. But his
successes were temporary. The Khazars were soon replaced in the
steppes of South Russia by a new Mongolian horde, the Pechenegs
and when the Kievan princes had almost managed to reduce the
Pechenegs to comparative harmlessness, a new and powerful tribe
of Mongolians appeared in the South Russian steppes—the Polovtsy
: