The Lithuanians had never been Christianized; they still adored Perun and their pagan deities; and the only bond uniting them with Russia was the tribute they had for years reluctantly paid.  They were ripe for rebellion; and when after long years of conflict with the Livonian and Teutonic Orders, Latin Christianity obtained some foothold in their land, they began to gravitate toward Catholic Poland instead of Greek Russia; and when a marriage was suggested which should unite Poland and Lithuania under their Prince Iagello, who should reign over both at Cracow, and at the same time give them their own Grand Prince, they consented.  The forces instigating this movement had their source at Rome, where the Pope was unceasingly striving, through Germany and Poland, to carry the Latin cross into Russia.  Again and again had the Greek Church repulsed the offers of reconciliation and union made by Rome.  So, much was hoped from the proselyting of the German Orders, and of Catholic Poland, and from the union effected by the marriage of the Lithuanian Prince Iagello with the Polish Queen Hedwig.

The threads composing this network of policies in the West were altogether ecclesiastical, until Lithuania began to feel strong enough to wash off her Christian baptism and to indulge in ambitious designs of her own:  to struggle away from Poland, and to commence an independent and aggressive movement against Russia.

There was an immense vigor in this movement.  The power in the West, sometimes Catholic and at heart always pagan, absorbed first towns and cities and then principalities.  It began to be a Lithuanian conquest, and overshadowed even Mongol oppression.  The Mongol wanted tribute; while Lithuania wanted Russia!  But one of the gravest dangers brought by this war between the East and the West was the standing opportunity it offered to conspirators.  An army of disaffected uncles and nephews and brothers, with their followers, could always find a refuge, and were always plotting and intriguing and negotiating with Lithuania and Poland, ready even to compromise their faith, if only they might ruin the existing powers.

Such, in brief, was the great conflict between the East and West, during which Moscow came into being as the supreme head, the living center and germ of Russian autocracy.

It seems to have been the extraordinary vitality of one family which twice changed the currents of national life:  first drawing them from Kief to Suzdal, then from Suzdal toward Moscow, and there establishing a center of growth which has expanded into Russia as it exists to-day.  This was the family of Dolgoruki.  Monomakh and his son George Dolgoruki, the last Grand Prince of Kief, were both men of commanding character and abilities; and it will be remembered that it was Andrew Bogoliubski, the son of George (or Yuri), who effected the revolution which transferred the Grand Principality from Kief to Suzdal in the bleak North.