But Russia is deficient in still another essential feature. Every
other European country possesses a mountain system which gives form and
solidity to its structure. She alone has no such system. No skeleton
or backbone gives promise of stability to the dull expanse of plains
through which flow her great lazy rivers, with scarce energy enough to
carry their burdens to the sea. Mountains she has, but she shares them
with her neighbors; and the Carpathians, Caucasus, and Ural are simply
a continuous girdle for a vast inclosure of plateaus of varying
altitudes,[1] and while elsewhere it is the office of great mountain
ranges to nourish, to enrich, and to beautify, in this strange land
they seem designed only to imprison.

It is obvious that in a country so destitute of seaboard, its rivers
must assume an immense importance. The history, the very life of
Russia clusters about its three great rivers. These have been the
arteries which have nourished, and indeed created, this strange empire.
The _Volga_, with its seventy-five mouths emptying into the Caspian
Sea, like a lazy leviathan brought back currents from the Orient; then
the _Dnieper_, flowing into the Black Sea, opened up that communication
with Byzantium which more than anything else has influenced the
character of Russian development; and finally, in comparatively recent
times, the _Neva_ has borne those long-sought civilizing streams from
Western Europe which have made of it a modern state and joined it to
the European family of nations.

It would seem that the great region we now call Russia was predestined
to become one empire. No one part could exist without all the others.
In the north is the _zone of forests_, extending from the region of
Moscow and Novgorod to the Arctic Circle. At the extreme southeast,