1
Land, People, and Global Context
By the eighteenth century the Russian empire extended across forest and steppe
from eastern Europe to the Pacific and from the White Sea to the Black. Since the
mid-eighteenth century European and Russian cartographers had ended Europe at
the Urals, but modern scholars have coined the term Eurasia to connote both the
political space straddling Europe and Asia and also the geographical connectedness
of this part of the world. In this chapter we will explore the deep material
foundations of Eurasia—its topography and climate—and the social and economic
connections that have shaped Eurasian space over time.
GEOGRAPHY AND CLIMATE
The Russian empire’s northern latitude and distance from warming oceans make it
a cold and inhospitable place (Map 1). Before late seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century expansion into the steppe, most of the empire lay at or above the 50th
latitude, above a steppe-forest line that stretches from around Kyiv eastward to the
southern Urals and western Siberia. Expansion into the Black Sea steppe took it not
farther south than the 45th latitude, whereas Americans will recall that all of the
United States minus Alaska is south of the 49th parallel. Moscow is north of
Edmonton, Alberta, the most northerly of Canadian cities; St. Petersburg is at the
same latitude as southern Alaska.
Compounding the northern latitude is the effect of surrounding topography.
Russia’s forest and steppe lands continue the plain that starts in the Atlantic and
stretches, with a modest interruption of the weathered Urals (heights around 3,000
to 6,000 feet along 1,550 miles), to the impressive mountains of the Pacific rim.
The plain is rimmed by mountains to the south, stretching from the Carpathians
and Caucasus to the Pamirs, Tian Shans, and Altais of Central Asia (here numerous
peaks reach 15,000–18,000 feet), continuing to the Sayan and Stanovoi ranges
north of Mongolia and China through the Anadyrs on the far northeastern corner
of the continent and volcanic Kamchatka. This arc of mountains creates a“bowl”
that obstructs theflow of tropical air and captures frigid Arctic air. Oceanic warmth
is also of little help: the Black Sea provides some warming for its environs, but
otherwise these lands are too far from the Atlantic to benefit from the Gulf Stream
that warms western Europe.
Such a geographical position gave these forest and steppe lands an extreme
version of the continental climate (Figure 1.1). Here, relatively short but warm