But much remains fundamental, with continuities running across the centuries, from earliest times to the present. One is the role of geography: although one must be wary of geographical determinism (the notion that geography predetermined development), it certainly has had an enormous impact on Russia’s historical development. On the one hand, it has blessed the inhabitants of Russia with extraordinary natural resources—rich farmland, especially the black-earth areas to the south, and vast mineral resources (from energy like coal, natural gas, and oil, to a vast range of ferrous and non-ferrous metals). On the other hand, not all was blessed. Most fundamental is Russia’s great northern location; the Russian heartland is in a belt lying between 50 and 60 degrees northern latitude (roughly equal to central Canada); St Petersburg has the same latitude as southern Alaska. All this has meant a harsh climate, not the temperate conditions enjoyed by the United States and Europe; it also means a shorter growing season—several months fewer, giving tillers of the soil far less flexibility in adapting to the vagaries of weather. Rainfall is also fickle; it tends to be heaviest in the north-east (where the soil is less fertile) and less predictable in the south-east (the heartland of black-soil agriculture along the Volga River). And the natural resources, while rich, are dispersed; not until the coming of the railway was it possible to bring together the country’s vast reserves of iron ore and coal in areas like the Don Basin. The first millennium of Russian history, up to the nineteenth century, thus unfolded under conditions of a marginal economy—one continually visited by disaster, constrained by backward agriculture, and separate from the emerging world economy.
The sheer vastness of the land mass also had a profound impact. It not only ensured access to land, but encouraged an incessant migration that made governance and control extremely difficult. The scale and continuity of such migration led V. O. Kliuchevskii, the doyen of pre-revolutionary historians, to make internal ‘colonization’ a key factor in Russian history, even explaining the shift the political centre from Kiev to the northeast. No doubt, population movement in this immense expanse made labour (not land) the scarce resource, and that significantly complicated the task of governing, taxing, and conscripting. These problems steadily intensified since the seventeenth century, as the state steadily expanded its borders to include new regions—first in the east (Siberia) in the seventeenth century, then in the south and west in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (incorporating border territories from Finland to the Caucasus to Central Asia). As the Empire grew, indeed exponentially (from 1,554 square kilometres in 1328 to 14.1 million in 1646, then to 21.8 million in 1914), even extraordinary demographic growth (far higher and longer than in Western Europe) could do little to increase population density. As a result, by 1913 the inhabitants per square kilometre in Russia were just 7.5 (compared to 182 in Great Britain, 124 in Germany, and 74 in France).
That population was not only dispersed but increasingly diverse: expansion brought an increasing proportion of non-Russians into the Empire. The non-Russians were hardly new; some small ethnic minorities were already incorporated in Muscovite Rus’ by the sixteenth century; already by 1719 ethnic Russians comprised only 70.7 per cent of the population (with Ukrainians representing another 12.9 per cent, along with various other groups). That was but a prelude to the rapid growth of non-Russian minorities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1914 Russian had decreased from a majority to the largest minority (44.6 per cent) of the Empire; other major groups included Ukrainians (18.1 per cent), Belorussians (4.0 per cent), Poles (6.5 per cent), Jews (4.2 per cent), Tatars (1.8 per cent), and a kaleidoscopic array of many others—Estonians, Chuvash, Kalmyks, Bashkirs, Finns, Latvians, Germans, Kazakhs, Armenians, Azeris, Uabeks, Lithuanians, Georgians, Moldavians, and numerous tiny ethnic groups. The 1917 Revolution initially reduced the quotient of non-Russians, but the re-acquisition of old territories (for example, in the South Caucasus and Central Asia) and absorption of new territories in 1939 and 1945 replenished the number of non-Russians. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians comprised a bare majority (50.8 per cent) of the USSR. In the post-Soviet era ethnic Russians again constituted a dominant, but shrinking contingent; by the early twenty-first century they comprised only 79.8 per cent of the Russian Federation (2002 census). In short, the ‘Russian’ Empire was multinational, at times reducing ethnic Russians to the status of ‘largest minority’. Not without cause did the term rossiiskii—‘Russian’, a Latin derivative used to refer to statehood, not ethnicity—come to dominate discourse in the Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras: rossiiskii became a political, not ethnic, identity.
Not only ethnicity but another key aspect of culture—religion—has figured prominently in shaping Russia and its identity. On the one hand, ‘Russian’ seems coterminous with ‘Eastern Orthodoxy’—perhaps not in a real sense since the symbolic conversion of élites in 988, but certainly since the ‘Christianization’ of the popular classes in the late medieval and early modern periods. One key difference between Russia and the West has been the role of religion: in contrast to the dechristianization that beset Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Russian Orthodoxy retained a firm grasp on popular culture, with observance rates several times higher than in the West. Even Stalin’s anti-religious campaign in the 1930s proved futile; the Church recovered its presence, despite persecution, in the remaining years of the Soviet regime and experienced a major upsurge in post-Soviet Russia. But this multi-ethnic land is also multi-confessional, with an array of other Christian and non-Christian subjects. The non-Orthodox became increasingly numerous and assertive in the Imperial period, especially from the mid-nineteenth century, and survived the Stalinist and post-Stalinist anti-religious campaigns to comprise a significant element in post-Soviet Russia, with approximately one-sixth of the population professing Islam in addition to many other, if smaller, religious communities.
To cope with so complex, dispersed, and heterogeneous a country, for centuries the élites have engaged in a protracted, laborious process of state-building. That process commenced in the Kievan era, with the creation of the first institutions and the adoption of the first law code, but the results were mainly symbolic; governmental institutions remained incomplete and vulnerable, quickly dissolving under the impact of invasion from without and revolution from within. The main phase of building state institutions came after the sixteenth century, but took on a systematic, conscious form in the eighteenth century with the Petrine reforms. Even the wilful rulers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found it difficult to construct, finance, and staff the instruments of rule; compared to contemporary European states (and contrary to Gogolian stereotypes), Russia was woefully undergoverned, a state where the autocrat had unbounded authority but limited operational power. Only in the late nineteenth century did the regime construct a more substantial set of institutions and impose its will, and its law, on the everyday lives of the tsar’s subjects. That all ended in the 1917 revolution and the tumultuous years of civil war that followed; it took the Bolsheviks more than a decade to re-establish some semblance of rule, but only incompletely—as the chaos and irrationality of Stalinist rule in the 1930s would attest. The ensuing decades sought to build a more efficient state, but continuously encountered the same set of recurring problems—a dearth of human and material resources, the mind-boggling complexity of ruling so immense and so diverse a realm. The year 1991 brought not only the break-up of the USSR but the disintegration of central government; Russia became a ‘failing state’, without the rudimentary capacity to make and implement law. Only the accession of Putin in 2000 brought a renewed attempt to re-establish ‘law and order’—to adopt laws, implement them, and ensure what Putin grandiloquently called the ‘dictatorship of law’.