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. Alexander Nevski, the hero of the Neva and of Novgorod,
was the descendant of this Andrew (of Suzdal), and it was the son of
Nevski who was the first Prince of Moscow and who there established a
line of Princes which has come unbroken down to Nicholas II. Contrary
to all the traditions of their state this dominating family was going
to establish a _dynasty_, and again to remove the national life to a
new center, in a Grand Principality toward which all of Russia was
gradually but inevitably to gravitate until it became _Muscovite_.

The city which was to exert such an influence upon Russia was founded
in 1147 by George (or Yuri) Dolgoruki, the last Grand Prince of Kief.