Chapter 22 Europe or Asia

From the perspective of the US government, Russia is a country that does not exist.Outlaws served as leaders of Russia, and Russian diplomatic envoys were rejected. The US government also warned Americans that if they ventured to visit Russia, Washington would not be responsible for their safety.However, one-seventh of the land of the human planet is occupied by Russia. The land area of ​​Russia is twice that of Europe and three times that of the United States. Her population is equivalent to the sum of the populations of the four largest countries in Europe.But while the United States sent diplomats to Monrovia (the capital of Liberia——Translator's Note) and Addis Ababa (the capital of Ethiopia——Translator's Note), it turned a deaf ear to Moscow.

There is always a root cause for all this.On the surface, it seems to be a political reason, but, in fact, this reason comes from geographical factors.Russia has more of a geographical background than any country.Does it belong to Europe or Asia?Even Russia itself is indecisive and difficult to choose.This indecision led to a clash of civilizations which forged the status quo in Russia.To illustrate, I use a simple map. However, first of all, let’s answer whether Russia is a European country or an Asian country? You can assume that you are a Chukchi, a member of a tribe that lives on the shore of the Bering Strait, and assume that you have a way of life ( It's not your fault either, because making a living in the ice and snow of Eastern Siberia is too hard a job) doesn't like it, and suppose you decide to be like Horace Greeley (American newspaper editor, reformer, 18ll— 1872———Translator's Note) said—"go west", and, you don't like living in mountains, you yearn for a big plain, just like the plain of your childhood hometown, so, You set off westward.You have walked unimpeded for two years, and there is no other obstacle except a dozen broad rivers.Finally, you came to the foot of the Ural Mountains.The Ural Mountains are marked on the map as a boundary mountain, which is a natural barrier between the two continents of Asia and Europe. This mountain is actually not enough to be a barrier. The first batch of Russian explorers (actually a group of desperadoes) , they got away with it, once they found something of value, they were immediately promoted as "explorers") carried the boat across the Ural Mountains, and then entered the vast Siberian Great Plain.Carrying a boat to climb the Rocky Mountains or the Alps, try it!

After crossing the Ural Mountains, you have to trek for 6 months or more before finally reaching the Baltic Sea.It is a long journey from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean (the Baltic Sea is also part of the Atlantic Ocean), and you are traveling on flat land from beginning to end.It is a large plain, but it is only part of a larger plain, and the largest plain covers a third of Asia and Europe (because this great plain joins the German plain to the North Sea) half.However, Russia faced a fatal disadvantage because of it, and had to face the Arctic Ocean directly. This is the bane of the great Russian empire in the past, and it is also a heart disease of the Soviet Union.For hundreds of years the Russians spent money and blood in vain trying to get closer to the "warm sea."After the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, a new regime, the Soviet Union, was established, but she is like a building with 80 floors and 8,000 rooms. Except for two small windows connected to the fire escape behind the third floor, there is no other building. There is an entrance.

Perhaps, you will think that the United States is big enough, but in fact, it is only because Britain and France are pitifully small.And the Great Plains, where the Soviet flag flies everywhere, is 40 times the size of France and 160 times the size of Great Britain.The Ob is her first river, nearly as long as the Amazon, and her second, the Lena, is as long as the Missouri.The Caspian Sea in the west --- her inland sea has a total area almost equal to that of Lake Huron, Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, and Lake Erie combined.The Aral Sea in her center is 4,000 square miles larger than Lake Huron, while Lake Baikal in the east is almost twice the size of Lake Ontario.

The mountains in the southern part of the Soviet Union straddling the Eurasian border are almost as tall as the tallest peaks in the United States, with Mount McKinley in Alaska at 20,300 feet and Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus at 18,200 feet.The northeast corner of Siberia is the coldest region on earth, and the territory of the Soviet Union within the Arctic Circle is almost as large as the combined areas of France, Britain, Germany and Spain. No matter how you look at it, the Russians like to go to extremes.They live in the bare wasteland and permafrost all year round. The living environment undoubtedly has a deep impact on them. In the eyes of other countries, their behavior and principles must be absurd.For thousands of years, they have been very devout to God and prayed to God non-stop. Then one day, they suddenly abandoned God and kicked God out of school.For hundreds of years they had willingly obeyed the orders of a man whom they regarded as supreme and sacrosanct, but one day they suddenly rose up and brought him down, accepting another promise that would bring Great happiness brought to their regime.

Apparently, the Romans had never heard the name "Russia".When the ancient Greeks went to the Black Sea to pan for gold (do you still remember the story of the "Golden Fleece"?), they encountered some barbaric tribes. These people were called "horse milk drinkers" by the ancient Greeks. It can be judged from the bottle paintings that the ancestors of the Cossacks were the people they met at that time.When the Russians first appeared on the stage of history, they lived in a square land.The land extends from the Carpathian Mountains and the Dniester River to the south, the Vistula River to the west, the Pripet Marsh to the north, and the Dnieper River to the east.In the northern part of the Quartet, the great plain along the Baltic Sea, are inhabited the Lithuanians, the Letts, and the Prussians, the close relatives of the Russians.As the rulers of modern Germany, the Prussians are nothing more than descendants of the Slavs.The Finns lived in the eastern part of the Quartet, and today they are confined to the little piece of land between the Arctic Ocean, the White Sea, and the Baltic Sea.In the south of Sifang, there are Celts, Germans, or mixed races of these two peoples.

Not long afterward, Germanic tribes wandering the plains of central Europe found that they could get the servants and drudges they needed simply by raiding the camps of their northern neighbors.These northern neighbors were a docile people, and no matter how badly fate dealt them, they shrugged and muttered, "Forget it, that's the way life is." These northern neighbours, too, seem to have had names of their own, which to Greek ears sounded like Slavoni.Those slave traders often attacked the Carpathian Mountains in order to plunder the population, and they often said how many slaves or Slavs they had captured.Later, the word "slave" became a commodity designation, specifically referring to those who were unfortunate enough to become the legal property of others.And these earliest slaves or Slavs gradually became stronger and created the most powerful centralized state in the world today.They played a big joke with history, and we have the misfortune to be the object of this joke.If our ancestors had had a little foresight, we would not have fallen to where we are today.I will elaborate further on this.

In the beginning, the Slavs still stayed in their small piece of homeland, honestly and silently. Later, they gave birth to more and more children.Due to the rapid expansion of population, more and more land is needed.And they wanted to go west, but the way forward was blocked by powerful Germanic tribes; they wanted to go to the colorful world of the Mediterranean, but Rome and Byzantium were isolated in the middle, and only the east had no strong enemies.As a result, the Slavs flocked to the east and expanded a wider land.They crossed the Transnistria and the Dnieper and ran to the banks of the Volga.This big river provided them with inexhaustible fresh fish and fed tens of thousands of Russians. This big river was called "Mother River" by Russian farmers.

The Volga is the largest river in Europe, and its source is in the mountains of the Central Plateau in northern Russia.The earliest Russians also built a large number of castles and fortresses in these mountainous areas, and built most of the early cities in Russia.In order to finally return to the embrace of the sea, the Volga River twists and turns between the mountains, and after making a big bend, it turns around and roars eastward.Due to the compression of the mountains, the west bank of the Volga River is low and flat, while the east bank is towering and steep.Although the straight-line distance from Tver near the source to the Caspian Sea at the end is only 1,000 miles, after repeated twists and turns, the Volga River is 2,300 miles long.The Volga has a basin of 563,000 square miles, about the same size as Germany, France, and Great Britain combined, and 4,000 square miles larger than the Missouri River.But, like everything in Russia, the Volga has its oddities.The Volga River is world-famous as a shipping canal (the fleet on this river had more than 4,000 ships before the World War), but when she flowed to Saratov, the river was level with the sea level, and hundreds of hundreds of ships downstream Miles of the river are all below sea level.In fact, it is not surprising, because the end of the Volga River is the Caspian Sea, and the Caspian Sea is in the middle of a salty desert. The current altitude of the Caspian Sea is 85 feet lower than that of the Mediterranean Sea. In a million years, the Caspian Sea will be about as high as the Dead Sea. up.The Dead Sea is currently at 1,290 feet below sea level --- the lowest altitude recorded in the world.

Almost all the caviar on the human table comes from the Volga River, which is regarded as the mother river of caviar.I use the term "received" because the Volga does not directly produce caviar, it is tuna that provides mankind with this famous Russian delicacy. Before the railway was laid, the main channels for human trade or plunder and conquest were rivers and oceans.Because the powerful enemy in the west—the Teutonic tribe—cut off the road to the sea, another group of competitors—the Byzantines blocked the way to the south again, and the Russians did not find new territory. Before, they could only rely on their own rivers.From AD 600 until today, the history of Russia has always been inseparable from the two major rivers, the Volga and the Dnieper, among which the Dnieper is particularly important because the Dnieper belongs to the important trade route from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.This trade route is no doubt as old as the one on the German plain.Please see the map.

Starting from the north, the first thing to see is the Gulf of Finland, which is connected by the Neva River to Lake Ladoga (which is about the same size as Lake Ontario).Leningrad, a famous city on the Neva River.The small river flowing southward from Lake Ladoga is the Volkhov River, and Lake Ladoga and Lake Ilmen are connected by her.The Lovati River is located in the south of Lake Ilmen, and the distance from the Lovati River to the Danube is very short. The terrain between the two rivers is flat, and water and land transport can be carried out.In this way, tourists can start from the north, travel all the way south leisurely, and then take the Dnieper River to the Black Sea.The mouth of the Dnieper River in the Black Sea is just a few short miles from the Crimea. Commerce knows no borders and no racial distinctions.It was profit that drove humans to ship Scandinavian goods all the way to the Byzantine Empire, and it was because of the profit that people established themselves in these regions.In the first five or six hundred years of the Christian era, this convenient trade route led directly to the Russian Great Plain along the trough formed by geological subsidence between Galicia and Podolia (outer Carpathian Mountains). But everything changed when Slavic immigrants flooded the area.At that time, the merchants transformed themselves and became the overlords of the world, occupying one side, and established their own dynasty, instead of running around.Although the Russians are extremely smart, they have never been good at governing the country.They lack logical thinking and cannot be as meticulous as the Teutons.They have too many doubts and cannot concentrate.They like to meditate the most and are keen on debating, but they are not good at concentrating power and dealing with world affairs decisively.However, being a local prince is not difficult.In the beginning, the Russians were not very ambitious. All they needed was a place to settle down. The semi-monarchy was established, and the servants and subjects also had a place to live. Thus, the first batch of Russian cities appeared. Cities, especially vibrant emerging cities, are particularly attractive.When the priests in Constantinople heard that there were a number of good places to save souls, they hurriedly rowed their boats up the Dnieper River, just like the Scandinavians rowed south hundreds of years ago.Soon, they became acquainted with the local princes, and the monastery became part of the royal palace.Next, the Romanov Dynasty appeared on the big stage of history.At this time, the famous cities in the world include Kyiv in the south and Veliky Novgorod, a wealthy commercial city (built on the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers, and has nothing to do with Nizhny Novgorod), and even here The scene of prosperity is known even to Western European countries. At the same time, just as Russian farmers had done for thousands of years, they patiently continued to reproduce.When they realized that they needed more land, they expanded their territory again, starting from the Ukrainian River Valley, the richest granary in Europe, and advancing towards the Great Russian Plain.After reaching the plains and highlands, they moved eastward along the river.They marched unhurriedly (for Russian farmers, time has no meaning) along the Oka Valley, and finally reached the Volga River, and the new city of Novgorod was built, which became the permanent jurisdiction of the surrounding plains place. However, for history, "forever" is not eternal. In the early thirteenth century, Russian ambitions were temporarily dampened by a catastrophe.Countless short yellow people galloped from east to west along the wide valley between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea. The continuous stream of cavalry made people mistakenly think that all Asians had migrated westward to the center of Europe. The little Norwegian-Slavic princes in the West were stunned.In just three years, the Tatars (Tatars were destroyed by Mongolia long ago, and the West generally refers to Mongolia as Tatars——Translator’s Note) occupied all the plains, rivers, inland seas, and mountains in Russia.Germany, France, and the rest of Western Europe were spared purely by chance (the Tartars had plague on their horseshoes). When a new group of war horses were fed, the Tatars once again launched a western expedition.However, because the castles of Germany and Bohemia were impenetrable and indestructible, these invading troops had to look at the "city" and sigh. They made a big circle, burned, killed and looted in Hungary happily, and then returned to southeastern Russia , settled down there, and began to enjoy the fruits of the war.For the next 200 years, as long as they see the descendants of Genghis Khan, men, women and children who believe in Christianity must bow down and kiss the soil under their feet. Whoever dares to disobey will be executed immediately. All these atrocities were known to the Europeans.However, since the Slavs worshiped God according to the Greek way, while Western European countries worshiped God according to the Roman etiquette, the Europeans just watched the fire from the other side and ignored it.They said in their hearts, who made you lowly Russians not belong to the orthodox sect?Let the wrath of the heretics burn unbridled!Let the heretics beat loudly with the whip!Although the fate of slavery is tragic, it is your retribution.In the end, the Europeans paid a heavy price for their own ruthlessness.These Russians persevered, and they carried all the burdens imposed on them by those in power with generous shoulders.During the 250 years of Tatar rule, they developed the bad habit of submissiveness. Let them bear this heavy shackle!This unfortunate burden they can never shake off.The later Principality of Moscow developed from an ancient frontier post in the eastern part of the Russian Plain.In order to establish a free country, the ruler of this small principality made great achievements. In 1480, John III (that is, the famous Ivan the Great in Russian history) refused to submit to the Golden Horde (the fief of Yuchi, the eldest son of Genghis Khan). The masters of the Paul region——Translator's Note) paid the annual tribute, and from then on, open rebellion began. Fifty years later, this group of foreign invaders collapsed.But while these tyrannical rulers died, their institutions survived. The new ruler is a very "pragmatic" person. Thirty years ago, the Turks captured Constantinople, and the last emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire was assassinated on the steps of Hagia Sophia.But he also had a distant relative named Zoe Pariologas, who also happened to be Roman Catholic.The Pope of Rome thought that this was a great opportunity to recruit the lost lamb of the Holy See of Greece into his own sheepfold, so he tried his best to get Ivan and Zoe to marry.The wedding was held as scheduled, and Zoe changed her name to Sofia.However, the wishful thinking of the Pope in Rome has come to nothing.Ivan became more rebellious, and he saw this as a godsend opportunity for him to replace the Byzantine dynasty.The coat of arms of Constantinople representing the Eastern and Western Roman Empires is the famous double-headed eagle. He used it as his own coat of arms, and established his supreme, sacred and inviolable imperial power, treating courtiers and nobles as slaves.In his little Moscow court he practiced the Byzantine rites of old, and he regarded himself as the only "Caesar" powerful figure in the world.Inspired by the family honor, his grandson finally declared himself emperor of all Russian territories. With the death of the last nobleman of the Rurek dynasty in 1598, Scandinavian rule in Russia came to an end.After 15 years of civil war, a member of a Moscow aristocratic family, the Romanov family, proclaimed himself the Tsar. As the political ambitions of the Romanovs continued to expand, Russia gradually expanded.The Romanov rulers had as many virtues as they had many obvious vices, so we'd better forget their mistakes. They all have a common firm belief—as long as they can open a channel to the sea for their people, they don't care about any cost.They finally cut a bloody road in the south, and they were able to reach the Black Sea, the Sea of ​​Azov, and Sevastopol. However, their way to the Mediterranean was blocked by the Turks.However, as a result of the Russo-Turkish war, 10 Cossack tribes became Russian allies.The ancestors of these Cossack tribes were Kazakhs, pirates, vagabonds or escaped slaves.For the past five hundred years these people have been hiding in the wilderness from the enslavement of their Polish or Tartar masters.The Russians opened fire with the Swedes again. The Swedes fought in the "Thirty Years' War" (an international war in Europe from 1618 to 1648. On one side were the German Protestant princes and Denmark, Sweden, and France, and on the other side were the German Emperor and the German Catholic princes. And Spain. Ended with the failure of the latter——Translator’s Note) gained all the land around the Baltic Sea, and the Russians defeated the Swedes after another 50 years of conquest.So, in the swamp of the Neva River, Peter the Great dispatched thousands of people to build a new capital --- St. Petersburg.But the "open sea" remains a distant dream, as the Gulf of Finland freezes over for four months each year.The Russians went up along the Onega River and the Dvina River in the center of the ice field, and built another city, Arkhangelsk, on the shore of the White Sea—the end of the Arctic Ocean swamp wasteland.But for Europe, the barren lands of the Kanin Peninsula are as far away as the ice and snow coast of Hudson Bay, and even the merchant ships of Holland and England are far away from the Moorman coast. open.It seems that the efforts of the Russians have been in vain again.They had no other way out but to the east. In 1581, a group of fugitive slaves, vagrants and prisoners of war from various European countries, about 1,600 people, crossed the Ural Mountains.On the way to the east, they had to fight to the death with the first Tatar leader they encountered, and they won a complete victory.The property of the defeated was divided up by these criminals.But they understand that the sphere of influence of the Muscovites is too vast. Instead of waiting for the army of the Great Russian Emperor to chase them over and hang them as traitors and deserters, it is better to dedicate this territory to the Great Emperor. This contribution made by the great emperor won the reputation of a true patriot and received a reward. This unique way of colonization lasted for a century and a half.The almost uninhabited great plain stretches infinitely under the feet of these villains, but this plain is very fertile-there is a vast and endless plain in the north, and a vast and dense forest in the south.This is a notorious vanguard.The Ob River was quickly left behind by these people and came to the banks of the Yenisei River. In 1628, they reached the Lena River. In 1639, they came to the coast of Okhotsk. After 1640, they built the first important town on Lake Baikal in the south. In 1648, it reached the Amur River (Heilongjiang River on the Sino-Russian border --- Translator's Note).This year, Dezhnev, a Cossack, descended the Kolyma River in northern Siberia to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, and ran along the coastline of the Arctic Ocean to the strait at the border between Asia and America.When he returned to tell the story of his discovery, it went unnoticed. Eight years later, the Danish navigator Vichus Bering hired by Russia discovered the strait again, so it was approved to name the strait after him. This is the Bering Strait. From 1581 to 1648, in just 67 years, the Russians took the whole of Siberia for themselves.In contrast, it took our American ancestors 200 years to walk from the Allegheny Mountains to the shore of the Pacific Ocean.Apparently, the Russians are not as dull as people think.With Siberia, they were not satisfied, and finally, these Russians also set foot in North America.For a long time before the death of George Washington, the Russian colonies in North America were very prosperous. Today's Sitka is a fortress they named after the ambassador Gabriel. In 1867, Russia and the United States held a formal ceremony for the transfer of Alaska, which was in the city of Sitka. When it came to daring, energy, and daring adventure, the early Russian pioneers were far superior to our American forebears.But those in power in Moscow and Petersburg were still dominated by Asian notions of empire.On the vast land of Russia, there are rich treasures, which are waiting quietly for wise people to develop and utilize them. However, the Russians turn a blind eye to the pastures, forests and mines on the great plain of Siberia. Siberia was treated as a huge prison. Fifty years after Yermak (Cossack,?—1585, fugitive, explorer. Began to conquer Siberia in 1581——Translator’s Note) crossed the Ural Mountains, about the middle of the 17th century, Siberia ushered in her first batch of prisoners.They were priests who were exiled to the banks of the Amur River because they did not want to follow the rules of the Greek church to celebrate mass, where they froze and starved to death.Since then, the exile army has never been interrupted.Countless men and women (and often children) were driven into the Siberian wastelands in droves, for having offended the tyranny of Asia-style monopoly imposed by the tsarist government with the individual will of Europe.Mass exile reached its peak in 1863.After the failure of the last great Polish uprising, 50,000 Polish patriots were forced to relocate from the Vistula River to the Tomsk and Irkutsk regions.How many people were exiled to Siberia?There are no specific statistics.However, from 1800 to 1900, due to the pressure of the governments of various countries, the exile policy was slightly relaxed, but there were still as many as 20,000 people deported to Siberia every year, and ordinary criminals, murderers, thieves, and thieves Classes are not included in this number.Such people are often not compared with those of high spirits, whose only fault is to give too much enthusiasm to their fellow men who are not worthy of love. Once the term of imprisonment is over, a small piece of cultivated land will be allocated to the survivors near the exile village, and these survivors will become self-cultivated farmers.In theory, this was a good idea—by having whites populate the country, the tsarist government could show European shareholders that Siberia was not as bad as the newspapers made it out to be.Sanity is also contained in the madness of Siberia, and the "prisoners" will be educated into useful laborers for society.In practice, however, it was so well executed that the so-called "free immigrants" mostly disappeared without a trace.Perhaps, they ran into the indigenous tribes, became Muslims or atheists, and bid farewell to Christian civilization forever.Perhaps, they were torn off by wolves on the way to escape.We have no way of knowing.Statistics from the Russian police show that there have always been 30,000 to 40,000 fugitives who have disappeared and are at large.Perhaps, these people hid in the deep mountains and old forests, preferring to suffer all kinds of torture from nature, rather than staying in the tsar's prison. As we all know, with the breaking of the former serf system and barter system in Russia, they were quickly replaced by the capitalist system and large-scale industrial production.A few years before Lincoln signed the "Emancipation Proclamation" (January 1, 1863, the US Lincoln government issued the "Emancipation Proclamation", abolishing slavery in the South --- Translator's Note), Russia liberated serfs.In order for them to survive, the Russian government also allocated a small piece of land to each serf, but the land was too small, far from enough for the serfs to survive, and the land allocated to the serfs was taken from the big landlords of.As a result, both big landlords and serfs complained.At the same time, when the rich mineral deposits in the Russian Great Plains were discovered by the people, foreign capital poured in continuously.At this time, people built a railway line and opened up a steamship channel. Engineers from various European countries passed through a circle of semi-primitive villages, wading through muddy water, but came to the door of a luxurious theater. Like the Grand Theater in Paris, at this point, they can't help but ask themselves: how is this possible? The valor which had driven the founders of Russian dynasties to invincibility and invincibility was gradually worn out.Sitting on the throne of Peter the Great was a frail man who wandered around among priests and women all day long .He used the throne as collateral, had to accept the conditions offered by those lenders in London and Paris, and was involved in a war that most people opposed. At this time, he signed his death sentence . The old world has been overthrown by a short man who returns from exile in Siberia, and the drive to rebuild begins.He abandoned the old system in Europe, and he also abandoned the old system in Asia. He abandoned all the old and rotten systems.He builds a new home with the vision of the future. In any case, the Russian Great Plain finally has new vigor and vitality, and the whole world is waiting to see.Perhaps Bolshevism is just a mysterious fantasy, but Russia is a cruel reality.