The vast territory which lay open to the colonists consisted of two contiguous regions, separated from each other by no mountains or rivers, but widely differing from each other in many respects.  The one, comprising all the northern part of Eastern Europe and of Asia, even unto Kamchatka, may be roughly described as a land of forests, intersected by many rivers, and containing numerous lakes and marshes; the other, stretching southwards to the Black Sea, and eastwards far away into Central Asia, is for the most part what Russians call “the Steppe,” and Americans would call the prairies.

Each of these two regions presented peculiar inducements and peculiar obstacles to colonisation.  So far as the facility of raising grain was concerned, the southern region was decidedly preferable.  In the north the soil had little natural fertility, and was covered with dense forests, so that much time and labour had to be expended in making a clearing before the seed could be sown.* In the south, on the contrary, the squatter had no trees to fell, and no clearing to make.  Nature had cleared the land for him, and supplied him with a rich black soil of marvellous fertility, which has not yet been exhausted by centuries of cultivation.  Why, then, did the peasant often prefer the northern forests to the fertile Steppe where the land was already prepared for him?

     * The modus operandi has been already described; vide supra,
     pp. 104 et seq.

For this apparent inconsistency there was a good and valid reason.  The muzhik had not, even in those good old times, any passionate love of labour for its own sake, nor was he by any means insensible to the facilities for agriculture afforded by the Steppe.  But he could not regard the subject exclusively from the agricultural point of view.  He had to take into consideration the fauna as well as the flora of the two regions.  At the head of the fauna in the northern forests stood the peace-loving, laborious Finnish tribes, little disposed to molest settlers who did not make themselves obnoxiously aggressive; on the Steppe lived the predatory, nomadic hordes, ever ready to attack, plunder, and carry off as slaves the peaceful agricultural population.  These facts, as well as the agricultural conditions, were known to intending colonists, and influenced them in their choice of a new home.  Though generally fearless and fatalistic in a higher degree, they could not entirely overlook the dangers of the Steppe, and many of them preferred to encounter the hard work of the forest region.

These differences in the character and population of the two regions determined the character of the colonisation.  Though the colonisation of the northern regions was not effected entirely without bloodshed, it was, on the whole, of a peaceful kind, and consequently received little attention from the contemporary chroniclers.  The colonisation of the Steppe, on the contrary, required the help of the Cossacks, and forms, as I have already shown, one of the bloodiest pages of European history.