The first Russian state had emerged in Kiev in the
ninth century A.D.
through a fusion of a Viking dynasty and a Slav peasantry; it adopted
the Orthodox Christianity of the eastern Roman Empire in 989 (the ruler
is said to have considered the alternative of converting to Islam, but
to have rejected it on the ground that the Russians could not do
without their liquor). This state was destroyed by the Mongols in the
thirteenth century. But already in the next century a Russian state
based in Muscovy was expanding eastward, and by the middle of the
seventeenth century it had reached the Pacific. Among other things,
this expansion represented a slow but significant triumph of peasants
over nomads in northern Eurasia. By the same token, though, the
territories accumulated by the Russians prior to the late eighteenth
century lay too far to the north for the process to impinge very
seriously on the major civilizations of Eurasia; none of these
civilizations, after all, had much stake in Siberia. Thus the overland
expansion of Russia, unprecedented though it was, did not mark any
drastic shift in the balance of power between one Eurasian civilization
and another.
