for a very long time from the Slavonic chronicler as behind an
impenetrable curtain. A shrewd man, Guedimin appointed a Slavonic
prince to rule over the city and permitted the inhabitants to practise
their own faith, Greek Christianity. Prior to the Mongol invasion,
which brought conflagration and ruin, and subjected Russia to a
two-century bondage, cutting her off from Europe, a state of chaos
existed and the separate tribes fought with one another constantly and
for the most petty reasons. Mutual depredations were possible owing to
the absence of mountain ranges; there were no natural barriers against
sudden attack. The openness of the steppe made the people war-like.
But this very openness made it possible later for Guedimin's pagan
hosts, fresh from the fir forests of what is now White Russia, to make
a clean sweep of the whole country between Lithuania and Poland, and
thus give the scattered princedoms a much-needed cohesion. In this way
Ukrainia was formed. Except for some forests, infested with bears, the
country was one vast plain, marked by an occasional hillock. Whole
herds of wild horses and deer stampeded the country, overgrown with
tall grass, while flocks of wild goats wandered among the rocks of the
Dnieper. Apart from the Dnieper, and in some measure the Desna,
emptying into it, there were no navigable rivers and so there was
little opportunity for a commercial people. Several tributaries cut
across, but made no real boundary line. Whether you looked to the
north towards Russia, to the east towards the Tatars, to the south
towards the Crimean Tatars, to the west towards Poland, everywhere the
country bordered on a field, everywhere on a plain, which left it open
to the invader from every side. Had there been here, suggests Gogol in
his introduction to his never-written history of Little Russia, if
upon one side only, a real frontier of mountain or sea, the people who
settled here might have formed a definite political body. Without this
natural protection it became a land subject to constant attack and