Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/146

around him, and gradually formed a strong national unit. Then using Moscow as a kind of fulcrum he began the great work of expanding over the great plain, a very curious expansion which apparently by a strange historical necessity could not stop until the limits of the plain were reached. The Moscow rule extended southward, and subdued the Tartars. Then it began to extend westwards, and came into contact with the Poles. There was a great crisis. There seemed to be a danger of the Russian state disappearing entirely under the blows of the Poles and the Swedes. There was absolute anarchy and absolute disorganisation, and the Russian state was saved by the heroism of the Russian people who took the work of evicting the invaders into their own hands. Then the work of building up began again. It continued throughout the seventeenth century, continued slowly, with a tendency towards the west, towards the Baltic, and with a steady tendency towards the Black Sea, and then finally Peter the Great, by a stroke of genius, decided upon a new capital. He wanted a new fulcrum for the more critical leverage of the century that was to come. He founded Petrograd, and using Petrograd as a lever Russia continued her work of expansion along the Baltic seaboard. First of all the Baltic provinces were secured. Then the northern shore of the Black Sea was secured by the annexation of the Crimea in the reign of Catherine the Great. Next the kingdom of Georgia became annexed to Russia by the voluntary act of its own ruler. That was the beginning of the conquest of the Caucasus. Then after the shock of the Napoleonic wars, during the nineteenth