“Until the half of the 14th century, the mass of the Russian population, knocked down by enemies in the interfluve of the Oka and the Upper Volga, timidly huddled here, among the forest and swamps, along strips of comfortable land. The Tatars and Lithuania blocked the exit from this triangle to the west, south and southeast. The way to the north and northeast remained open - beyond the Volga,”wrote Klyuchevsky.
At the end of the fifteenth century, Moscow Russia had only 2 million people living in an area of 50 thousand square kilometers. On a territory very far from all the then cultural centers of the world, devoid of seas, located in a harsh climate and open to attack from the east and west, north and south.
The then Russia was immeasurably less likely to survive than the Swedes, Poles and Turks. And Russia not only survived, but even, having defeated all its enemies, including the greatest conquerors of the world, created the largest state in the world, uniting 165 peoples and tribes within its borders. For four hundred years, the Russian people have increased their territory four hundred times.
The growth of the Russian state, in spite of the incessant wars that it waged with all its enemies, proceeded rather quickly.
In 1480, European Russia had only 2.1 million people. (Almost 5 times smaller than Austria, half the size of England, four and a half times smaller than Italy, four and a half times smaller than Spain and 9 times smaller than France). A hundred years later, in 1580, Russia had 4.3 million.
In 1648, when Dezhnev, having rounded the cape that now bears his name, sailed from the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific, there were only 12 million inhabitants in Russia, and 19,000,000 in France.
In 1480, the population of Muscovite Rus was equal to only 6% of the largest states in Europe at that time: England, Germany, Spain, France, Austria and Italy. In 1680 - 12.6 million, in 1870 - 26.8 million, in 1880 - 84.5 million, two and a half times more than Austria, Italy, France, England, more than three times more than Italy and four and a half times the size of Spain. And on the eve of the First World War, Russia had about 190 million population. (130 million Russians), and all six previously named countries had only 260 million inhabitants.
If there were no revolution, in 1950 Russia would have had more than three hundred million inhabitants.
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“… Russia groaned under the Tatar yoke for 250 years. The Battle of Kulikovo (1380) did not end him. Two more centuries of Tatar campaigns against Moscow followed, accompanied by massacres and destruction of everything on the way. Already in 1382, Khan Tokhtamysh with an army appeared from Sarai (Golden Horde), burned and devastated Moscow. In 1395, Tamerlane ravaged Russia up to Yelets. In 1408, Murza Yegidey ravaged Russia, reached Moscow, took a ransom, and resumed paying the tribute. In 1439, Khan Ulu-Makhmet came from Kazan and defeated the Moscow region; in 1445 he appeared again, defeated the Muscovite kingdom, defeated the Russians at Suzdal and took the Grand Duke Vasily II the Dark as prisoner. In 1451 the invasion of Mazovsha followed. In 1472 the Sarai Akhmet reached Aleksin, and in 1480 to Vorotynsk. From the beginning of the 16th century, the raids of the Crimean Tatars began: they acted.together with the Kazan Tatars, for example, in 1521, when Russia was devastated by two brothers Makhmet Giray Crimean and Saip-Giray Kazan. In 1537 the Kazan khan Safa-Girey (Crimean prince) will devastate the entire east and north-east of the Muscovy, namely the Murom and Kostroma lands. In 1552 Kazan was again allied with the Crimea, the Crimean army reached Tula. So the Tatars smashed the Muscovy from three sides: from Kazan, from Sarai and from the Crimea. The last time Moscow was burned under Ioann the Terrible in 1571 by the Crimean Khan Devlet Girey and besieged by Kazy-Girey in 1591 under Fyodor Ioanovich. The Tatars burned, crushed and plundered, killed the bravest Russian soldiers in battles, forced them to pay tribute and gifts, and corrupted Christian Russia with fear, the habit of plunder and pogrom, a thirst for revenge,ferocity and all sorts of wild customs. After the Battle of Kulikovo, for example, then Russia was so drained of blood that in 1382 Dmitry Donskoy could not even recruit an army against Tokhtamysh.
Moscow had every reason to consider Kazan its most dangerous enemy; Kazan Tatars were the closest, and therefore the most enterprising thugs. Platonov writes: the Kazan Tatars, in an alliance with the Cheremis and Mordovians, “fell in exile on the Russian outskirts, destroying dwellings and arable lands and taking them away; The Cheremis war lived without stopping in the Russian Trans-Volga region, it not only oppressed the farmers' economy, but littered trade and colonization routes. " "Communication with the Russian northeast, with Vyatka and Perm, should have been made by a detour far to the north." Prince Kurbsky writes: “both from the Crimea and from Kazan - to the half-earth it is empty byasha”. All that remained for Russia was to either fade away and not be, or to pacify its violent neighbors with weapons.
The then “full” was a cruel phenomenon: it led to lifelong slavery with the right to sell to other countries. According to the chronicle: Russian Tatars “forge (in chains) and bury them full of holes”. Immediately after the conquest, Kazan gave out 2,700 Russian prisoners at once; 60,000 prisoners returned from Kazan only through Sviyazhsk; and countless numbers returned to Vyatka, Perm, Vologda. The total number of those liberated from Kazan alone probably reached 100,000. This means that the Tatars eradicated Russia not only by plunder, fire and a battle sword; they tormented her with the slavery of captivity.
But those who want to understand the full significance of the capture of Kazan must open the map of Russia and trace the flow of Russian rivers. Since ancient times, Russian rivers have been the country's trade routes. One great trade route went “from the Varangians to the Greeks”: from the Neva and Volkhov through the Dnieper to the Black Sea; the other from the great northwestern lakes through Sheksna and Mologa, across the Volga to the Caspian Sea to Persia and India; the third, additional, from the Northern Dvina through Vyatka and Kama to the Volga. At that time, rivers were the arteries of life - colonization, trade (transit, export and import) and culture. By its very position, by its very fate, Moscow was in the river center of the country and the struggle for river freedom and river peace was an iron necessity for it. In the deep mainland, in a harsh climate, held back by the yoke, distant from the west, besieged from all sides - by the Swedes, Livonians, Lithuania,Poles, Hungarians, Turks, Crimean Tatars, Saraysk (Golden Horde) and Kazan Tatars - Russia for centuries suffocated in the struggle for national freedom and faith and fought for its rivers and free seas. This was her so-called "imperialism, about which her obvious and secret enemies love to talk."
To a large extent, it is because of this that the history of Russia is a history of almost incessant wars. The history of Russia is the history of a besieged fortress. From 1055 to 1462, according to the calculations of the historian Soloviev, Russia suffered 245 invasions. Moreover, 200 attacks on Russia were committed between 1240 and 1432, that is, attacks occurred almost every year.
From 1365 to 1893, over 525 years, Russia spent 305 years in the war. It is not surprising that the battle-hardened Russian, accustomed to sacrifice, wins more often than the inhabitants of the country, in whose history wars played a lesser role.
For many centuries, Russia suffered heavy casualties from the attacks of enemies.
How can you explain that a small, “ignorant” people who lived in a harsh area, managed to overcome all their strong, cultured enemies and create the greatest state. There are only two reasons for this, no other explanation can be found:
The first - by the spirit of the people, the second - by the state organization of the forces of this people. The amazing steadfastness and energy of the Russians and the fact that the Moscow principality, and then the kingdom, as Solonevich rightly points out in the "People's Monarchy", "always represented a higher type of state than the states that attacked them." Because "the state organization of the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Russian Empire has always exceeded the organization of all its competitors, opponents and enemies - otherwise neither the Grand Duchy, nor the Kingdom, nor the Empire could withstand this struggle for life and death."
Then Solonevich justly emphasizes that: “All our failures and failures occurred precisely when we replaced our organizational system with someone else. Failures and failures were rectified when we returned to our organization.”
What explains the success of the Russian national state?
The fact that Russia has always had a better state organization than the peoples of Europe. Let's reduce getting along with conquered enemies. The extraordinary spiritual steadfastness of the Russian people and their persistence in the struggle for the set goals. And finally, the fact that all strata of the people throughout the entire Russian history have always amicably supported the national power.
"If the organizational side of Russian statehood were equal to its contemporary Western European, then Russia simply would not exist: it would not have been able to withstand."
“Russia was falling in those epochs when Russian organizational principles were undergoing restructuring in a Western European way: the specific successors of Yaroslav the Wise led to the defeat of Kievan Rus, the absence of central power led to the Tatar yoke, Peter's Europeanization led to serfdom (and the birth of an anti-national European the spirit of the intelligentsia. B. B.), Lenin's "catch up and overtake America" - to the Soviet.
“Now we can say that the state-building of Europe - despite all its technical achievements, was an unsuccessful building.
And we can say that the state building of Russia, despite today's revolution, was a successful building."
The most superficial researcher of the historical past of the Russian people cannot fail to notice all this. Nevertheless, neither foreign nor Russian historians stubbornly noticed this, with very rare exceptions. Why didn't you notice? Because “The Russian state endowment in Europe must be denied at all costs, contrary to the most obvious facts of history, contrary to the most generally accepted laws of logic. For if we recognize the success of our methods of action, then we will have to pronounce judgment on ourselves. It will be necessary, following our Slavophiles, and then Spengler and Schubart, to say that Western Europe is dying, that its state paths - from the conquest of Rome to the Second World War, as they began with the Middle Ages, and end with the Middle Ages, and, therefore,this psychic material is not suitable for any imperial construction project by its very essence.
Then it will be necessary to admit that the arrangement of human society, starting from the defeat of the Roman Empire and ending with the Second World War, despite all technical achievements, was a complete failure, and that the attempts of fifteen centuries are now ending with a return to the methods of the Vandals, Lombards and Franks. And that, consequently, any better order of life for European peoples should be expected either from Russia or from the Anglo-Saxons. But this would mean a rejection of the state national independence of all the tribes of Western Europe. This would mean the recognition of the reactionary nature and meaninglessness of its political history of Europe over the past fifteen hundred years: nothing but continuous massacre has turned out. And there is absolutely no reason to assume that anything will work out: those methods of conquest, inclusion, colonization and otherwhich were practiced by vandals and Lombards one thousand five hundred years ago - are repeated now, with a truly enviable degree of consistency and consistency.
B. Bashilov
