Russia

At first the crops would be good. The ground, after all, was rich in potash and humus. Meanwhile wild plants, which had colonized the uncultivated parts of the clearing, provided good fodder for the newcomers’ domesticated animals. The method was comparatively cheap in terms of energy invested. However, after two, three or at most four seasons the harvests became sparse and poor, so the little community which depended on it had to move on and start the process again. Since the land had to be left fallow for at least fifteen years (and in some areas as long as thirty) before it regained strength, slash-and-burn agriculture demanded a large area of prospective as well as actual cultivation. It could not support a population of any density, though it certainly encouraged expansion of the land area farmed. Swidden farming was practised in Russia as early as 1000 BCE, and it was to be used by colonizing venturers for centuries afterwards in the course of taming the Russian land.

And swidden agriculture also had implications for private land-ownership. What point could there be in owning land when one’s family moved on regularly (if not necessarily far) every few years and there was no shortage of land anyway? ⁹ The angry protests in Russia against the denationalization of land at the beginning of the present century may not be directly attributable to the historical effects of swidden farming, but the technique may have left a mark on the Russian mentality. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the distinctive character of certain Russian institutions originated in the particular nature of Russian farming, developed in response to difficulties posed by soil and climate.

The swidden farmers who had moved northward and those who remained in the Ukraine area shared much the same culture as well as much the same blood. However, differences in conditions and the availability of materials dictated variations in the houses they built for themselves. To the north, where timber was plentiful, houses came to be built entirely of logs, rather than the use of timber being confined to frames and battens; and the pitch of the roofs was much steeper, to facilitate the shedding of snow. And if differences of environment promoted change in aspects of physical culture, they are associated with developments in language too.

What is now northern Russia was inhabited at that time by small groups of people speaking Finnic dialects. The Russians-to-be were only beginning to penetrate these areas, and their language came, as they themselves had done, from the south. Scholars are still divided over the issue of whether cereal-farming was introduced at the same time as the Indo-European group of languages (to which Russian belongs but Finnish does not) by people who had originated in the so-called ‘fertile crescent’ of the Near East (the area of modern Iraq); the views of Sir Colin Renfrew on the spread of Indo-European languages have been challenged by another brilliant anthropologist, J. Mallory. ¹⁰ But it is certain that the proto-Russians, like the proto-Ukrainians and proto-Poles and others, spoke Slavonic.

Linguistics experts can tell how, and roughly when, modern languages diverged from a common root like Latin or Old Slavonic. Thanks to them we know that Slavonic, like Latin, derived in its turn from a common Indo-European ancestor. Where Slavonic actually originated, however, has long been disputed: several Slavonic-speaking nations, from Russia to the Czech Republic, insist that it was on their territory In effect the issue has become a point of modern nationalistic pride. It seems certain, however, that speakers of Slavonic in its earliest form centred on areas east of the river Vistula and west of the river Dnieper in what is now eastern Poland and Ukraine. But, as Russia’s earliest chronicler knew, all Slavs spoke the same language, and other sources from Byzantium confirm the fact. Differences were to set in with the movement of populations and the passage of time, creating distinctive Russian, Czech, Bulgarian and other forms of Slavonic. But whereas another Indo-European language, Latin, began to dissolve into Italian, Spanish, French and the other Romance languages between 1,200 and 1,600 years ago, Old Slavonic was not to disintegrate into the variety of different eastern-European languages we know today until much later. ¹¹

As they moved north to the Baltic and east to the foothills of the Urals, the east Slavs, including the proto-Russians, were not alone in the wilderness they were reclaiming. They had encountered people speaking Finno-Ugrian dialect in the north, and to the south and south-east they were to encounter peoples who had originated in the Caucasus and in the steppes of Asia. Traces of these contacts are seen in traded objects found by archaeologists, in physical (especially facial) characteristics recorded by physical anthropologists, and in singularities of language studied by philologists.