steppe and the soil becomes progressively darker and richer. This rich, broad swath
of“black earth,”stretches from modern day Ukraine and Moldova, north of the
Black Sea and Northern Caucasus, across the lower Volga, north of the Caspian
Sea, south of the Ural Mountains, into modern Kazakhstan and the southern edge
of Siberia. The steppe ends in the Altay and western Sayan Mountains through
which lay Silk Road routes to China, India, and the Middle East. Since time
immemorial the steppe was home to pastoral nomadists, grazing herds of horses and
other livestock in patterned rotations. They only began to be plowed and farmed
when agrarian empires achieved the military and bureaucratic power to subdue the
nomads, starting in the sixteenth century. The“black earth”topsoil extends two to
six feet deep and could yield as much as tenfold with sufficient annual rainfall
(notably lacking in the steppes of Central Asia).
These soil zones comprised the Russian empire by the second half of the
eighteenth century when Russia conquered the Black Sea littoral, which added
some subtropical climes in Crimea. When the empire reached its peak by the mid-
nineteenth century, with the conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia, more
horizontal geographical bands joined the empire—desert and semi-desert in Central
Asia, high mountains in the Caucasus.
Overlaying this wide forested plain is adense system of rivers and lakes. Since
the plain is at a low elevation (nothing west of the Urals exceeds 350 meters and
western Siberia does not exceed 200 meters), Eurasia is ideal for regional and
international transit trade and movement of peoples. The Russian empire at its
greatest expanse possessed thirteen rivers of over 2,000 km in length, and the
same number of about 1,000 km, comprising six major river systems. Flowing
south were the mighty Volga (to the Caspian), the Don (to the Sea of Azov at
the Black Sea), and the Dnieper (to the Black Sea near the Crimean Peninsula).
The upper stretches of all these rivers reached into the mixed forest zone where
the Russian state coalesced from the fourteenth century. Lesser river systems
moved people and products east–west: the Western Dvinaflowed from the
Belarus’an lands into the Baltic at Riga; the Northern Dvinaflowed to the
White Sea at Kholmogory and Arkhangelsk. In Siberia, major riversflowed
north to the Arctic, but were easily navigable in either direction when frozen in
the winter; on their upper stretches across southern Siberia sprang up the
fortresses that established Russianpower from the late 1500s. Moving west to
east, these rivers were the Ob and Irtysh system, the Enisei, and the Lena. In all
there were over 100,000 rivers and over 200,000 lakes in the Russian empire,
making portages relatively easy even before the building of canals from the
eighteenth century.
CLIMATIC CONDITIONS
Just as the Russian empire shared the European plain and bands of soil and climate
with Europe and Asia, so also did it share deep climatic conditions. In these
centuries the most penetrating was a broad cooling trend known as the Little Ice
Land, People, and Global Context 25