2 - Russia’s geographical environment

Summary

Any attempt to discuss Russia’s environment over the long period covered by this book immediately faces a problem: what is the geographical extent of the territory which is our focus? For whereas the ‘Rus’ of the ninth century AD wandered through the forests of the East European plain between the Baltic and the middle Volga, the vast Muscovite state (soon to become the Russian Empire) of the late seventeenth century stretched almost from the Baltic across Eurasia to the Pacific, and from the Arctic Ocean in the north down towards the Black Sea steppe in the south – a territory which very nearly corresponds with that of the Russian Federation today. Clearly both the geography, and what might be understood as ‘Russia’, had changed profoundly over the intervening centuries. Any discussion of Russia’s geographical environmentmust take such considerable changes into account.

A partial answer to our problem of defining territory might be suggested by the work of the Berkeley cultural geographer, Carl Sauer. In an essay of 1925, Sauer asserted that the focus of any geographical study should be the ‘cultural landscape’, which is that territory ‘fashioned from a natural landscape by a culture group’. ‘Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result.’ In accordance with Sauer, then, this chapter should focus on the Russian ‘cultural landscape’, that portion of the earth’s natural landscape which was modified by Russian settlement, economic activity and ways of life over the period in question. The obvious objection is that humankind cannot be subdivided into cultural units as easily as the anthropologically inclined Sauer imagined.