Expansions of Russia and China in Northern Asia

Abstract

During the long centuries when Asiatic races dominated the Eurasian plain, little is heard of its present day masters, the Slavs. The first mention of the Slavs is as subjects of the kingdom of the Dacians on the middle Danube. This kingdom was destroyed by the Roman Emperor Trajan, and the Slavs then moved towards the Carpathian mountains.¹ In the seventh century, the Avars, then the rulers of the Russian plain, reduced the Slavs to slavery. Gradually the Slavs moved eastward into Russia and colonized the Dnieper and Don regions.² It is important to note that the Slavs came into Russia from the west and that their history has been a continuous movement across the great plain from west to east. In the ninth century, because the nomads threatened the trade route of the Dnieper from Scandinavia to Byzantium, the Norsemen helped the Russians set up the dynasty of Rurik which, through one branch or another ruled Slavic Russia down to the end of the sixteenth century. Under this dynasty the various territories occupied by the Russians were united into a powerful state of which Kiev, by the logic of its geographical position, became the capital.