This is because Russia's activity has been absorbed and diverted by the conquest of a new territory, destined to widen the field of her efforts yet further—to the Chinese Seas on one side, to the Persian Gulf on the other. But the problems momentarily put aside are ripening all the same, slowly but surely, and beware of the avalanche!
The predecessor whom Peter the Great invoked was a contemporary of the last Valois Kings, and to this period we must go back, indeed, to discover the reformer's political and intellectual origins. The task is a heavy one, but it is the price which must be paid for our comprehension of the final result, and it is the raison d'être of the volume I now place in my readers' hands. I shall be told, no doubt, that I ought to have begun with it; but in history, as in anatomy, it would be foolhardy to go, in the first place, to the very beginnings, to the embryo, to the cell-and in reality I am only following the regular order and method of every study.
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, then, Russia dwelt apart, or almost apart, from the European community and from civilization. But she had made a previous effort to enter both, and the work to which Voltaire lent his aid and gave his praise was begun when Charles IX. and Henri III. reigned over France. At that moment Muscovy, huge and barbarous, set forth to enter into contact with her Western neighbours. She found the road barred. Poland, with Sweden, threw herself athwart it, and the removal of the obstacle was the work of more than a hundred years. But, if it had not been for Batory, the hands of the clock which marks the hours of all great historical evolutions might have whirled round the dial a century before. Externally, the acquisition of the Baltic seaboard, the destruction of the last vestiges of the Tartar power, the conquest of Siberia, the opening up of political and commercial relations with all the European countries; internally, the introduction of the elements of foreign culture, the reorganization of the State on the very basis we see at the present day—all this, accomplished by Peter and Catherine, was undertaken, outlined, even partly realized, in the course of that first morning on which an all too speedy evening fell.
