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By the late fifteenth century Moscow emerged as the capital of
the fledgling centralizing state that had successfully brought
under its control formerly disunited Russian lands. In contrast
to Western Europe, where flourishing towns and trade links
became the cementing force that bound the edifice of national
states, the unification of the Russian lands around Moscow
proceeded mainly under the pressure of external political
factors, such as the necessity of achieving national
independence from the Mongols. Ultimately, it was the
military-political power wielded by the Moscow grand princes,
rather than the development of economic ties between Russian
principalities, that proved to be a decisive factor in the
rebuilding of a Russian unified state and repelling of the
Mongols. |
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The freedom
from the Mongol yoke did not bring with it an automatic return of
Russia to the mainstream of European civilization. After the final
schism of the Churches in the early fifteenth century, Muscovy
regarded the West with deep suspicion as a world given over to the
‘Latin heresy’. Militarized by its two-century struggle against the
Mongols and infused with the messianic zeal of spreading the ‘true’
Christianity, the autocratic Muscovite state began to expand
continually. By 1600, it had grown twelvefold to become the largest
state in Europe. |
In the
early seventeenth century, having survived “the Time of Troubles” -
the devastating period of the dynastic crisis and the Polish-Swedish
intervention, Russia proceeded to rebuild its statehood under the
leadership of the new dynasty of the Romanovs, established in 1613.
By the middle of that century, under the second of Romanov tsars,
Alexis, it acquired Siberia in the east, while in the south-west it
re-established its authority over the Ukraine which sought
protection of an Orthodox nation against the Roman Catholic Poles.
In the eighteenth century Peter I and Catherine the Great annexed
the present-day Baltic states and the lion’s share of Poland, thus
giving the Russian empire its basic modern form. To consolidate this
development and to assert the rising status of Russia among the
European powers, Peter took the Imperial title of old East Rome
(Byzantium), thereby claiming for the Muscovite state the mantle of
the successor to the Roman Empire. At Peter’s command Moscow had to
yield its status of the capital city to the new imperial capital of
Saint Petersburg.
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Tsarist Russia |
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