nity. Prior to the Mongol invasion, which brought
conflagration and ruin, and subjected Russia to a two-century bondage,
cutting her off from Europe, a state of chaos existed and the separate
tribes fought with one another constantly and for the most petty
reasons. Mutual depredations were possible owing to the absence of
mountain ranges; there were no natural barriers against sudden attack.
The openness of the steppe made the people war-like. But this very
openness made it possible later for Guedimin's pagan hosts, fresh from
the fir forests of what is now White Russia, to make a clean sweep
of the whole country between Lithuania and Poland, and thus give the
scattered princedoms a much-needed cohesion. In this way Ukrainia was
formed. Except for some forests, infested with bears, the country was
one vast plain, marked by an occasional hillock. Whole herds of wild
horses and deer stampeded the country, overgrown with tall grass, while
flocks of wild goats wandered among the rocks of the Dnieper. Apart from
the Dnieper, and in some measure the Desna, emptying into it, there were
no navigable rivers and so there was little opportunity for a commercial
people. Several tributaries cut across, but made no real boundary line.
Whether you looked to the north towards Russia, to the east towards the
Tatars, to the south towards the Crimean Tatars, to the west towards
Poland, everywhere the country bordered on a field, everywhere on a
plain, which left it open to the invader from every side. Had there been
here, suggests Gogol in his introduction to his never-written history
of Little Russia, if upon one side only, a real frontier of mountain or
sea, the people who settled here might have formed a definite political
body. Without this natural protection it became a land subject to
constant attack and despoliation. "There where three hostile nations
came in contact it was manured with bones, wetted with blood. A single
Tatar invasion destroyed the whole labour of the soil-tiller; the
meadows and the cornfields were trodden down by horses or destroyed
by flame, the lightly-built habitations reduced to the ground, the
inhabitants scattered or driven off into captivity together with cattle.
It was a land of terror, and for this reason there could develop in it
only a warlike people, strong in its unity and desperate, a people whose
whole existence was bound to be trained and confined to war."

This constant menace, this perpetual pre