From the Days of A

By OTTO FRIEDRICH Research by Anne Hopkins

The Soviet Empire, like many such conglomerations, slowly evolved out of centuries of aggression, anarchy and pure accident. About 500 years ago, the Muscovy state that was beginning to emerge from Mongol rule extended over just a few hundred miles on the upper reaches of the Volga. Today the U.S.S.R. represents one-sixth of the world's landmass, and its 289 million people include Armenians, Buddhists, Muslims, Tatars, Uzbeks, Yakuts -- more than a hundred different national and religious groups united mainly by their mistrust of their rulers and one another.

Before this empire was even born, the fertile steppe north of the Black Sea was repeatedly swept by nomadic tribes from Central Asia. The first known invaders were the fierce Scythians, who swarmed in from the east around 700 B.C., driving out the resident Cimmerians. The Greek historian Herodotus, who lived for a time in the Black Sea trading post of Olbia, wrote with a shudder that the Scythians' customs "are not such as I admire." Among them: human sacrifice, blinding of slaves and drinking from the skulls of fallen enemies. Still stronger tribes kept invading and conquering this region that is now the Ukraine: first the Sarmatians; then, in Roman times, the Goths and Huns; then, after the fall of Rome, the Avars and Khazars. The Khazar dynasty took the unusual course of adopting Judaism in about A.D. 740, whereupon Jewish refugees from Christian Constantinople helped create a Golden Age of trade and learning on the Black Sea.

Somewhat to the north, a people known as the East Slavs began settling in the dense forests in about A.D. 500, finally occupying an area from what is now Leningrad to Kiev. From their forests, they shipped furs and honey down the Dnieper to the imperial capital of Constantinople. In 862, according to a 12th century document known as the Primary Chronicle, there occurred a semi- legendary encounter when the quarreling Slavs sent a delegation to Scandinavia to negotiate with the Vikings, whom they called Varangians, specifically with a tribe known as the Rus. "Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it," said the Slavs. "Come to rule and reign over us." Though patriotic Soviet historians have strenuously challenged this % saga, the Chronicle reports that a Viking Rus named Rurik went to take over the region, and that it "became known as the land of the Rus."

Rurik's sons and grandsons not only united the Slavs of the Dnieper Valley but also were soon trying to expand. In 907 Prince Oleg invaded the Eastern Roman Empire with 2,000 ships, "accomplished much slaughter among the Greeks" and supposedly nailed his shield to the imperial gates of Constantinople. From this foray, the Russians brought home to their capital in Kiev an advantageous trade treaty and an even more advantageous contact with the Christian religion and sophisticated culture of Constantinople. Thus emerged the first Russian state, known as Kievan Russia.

When Oleg's successor Igor was killed in battle by a tribe known as the Drevlianians, his widow Olga took over in 945 and reigned for the next 17 years, thus becoming the first celebrated Russian woman. When the Drevlianian prince proposed that she marry him, she asked him to send envoys to bring her to him by boat; she then had the envoys and their boat flung into a pit, where they were buried alive. She next asked that the Drevlianians send their leading men to provide an escort, then offered them a bath, locked them in the bathhouse and set it afire. Thus avenged, Olga became the first Slav ruler to convert to Christianity, and the Orthodox Church allied itself to the ruling family by making her its first Russian saint.

Kievan Russia prospered for about three centuries, dominating the main trade route from Scandinavia to Constantinople. Then there suddenly sounded new hoofbeats from the East.

The Mongol Empire forged by Genghis Khan in 1206 was one of the most astonishing creations in history. His cavalry pierced the Great Wall of China and overwhelmed the Chin Empire in what has been described as the conquest of 100 million people by 100,000 soldiers. It was Genghis Khan's grandson Batu who first swept into Russia. When Kiev resisted, Batu besieged the city in 1240, burned it to the ground and massacred all its inhabitants. "When we passed through that land," wrote Archbishop Plano Carpini, a papal legate bound for the new power center in Mongolia, "we found lying in the field countless heads and bones of dead people. This city had been extremely large and very populous, whereas now it has been reduced to nothing."

Batu charged onward to conquer Poland and Hungary, and it was probably only the death in 1242 of Batu's uncle, the Great Khan Ugedey (he was apparently - poisoned by a jealous woman in his entourage), that saved Western Europe from the fate of Kiev. Batu decided to retrench and consolidate his rule over the khanate of the Golden Horde. Spread thin though they were, the Mongols of the Golden Horde ruled Russia for more than two centuries, and it was a harsh rule. Mongol tax collectors beggared the peasantry, and occupied Russia remained completely isolated from what the West came to know as the Renaissance. One unexpected consequence: the devastation of southern Russia stimulated the growth of the north, of the trading center in Novgorod and the nearby town of Moscow.

The future metropolis was still an insignificant place. On the death in 1263 of Alexander Nevsky, who had defended Novgorod from the attacking Swedes and Teutonic Knights, the division of his lands gave the 500-sq.-mi. principality of Moscow to his youngest son Daniel. This son and his successors began buying and occasionally seizing more land, and unlike most Russian princes, they used primogeniture to preserve what they acquired. Ivan I, who became Grand Prince of Moscow in 1328, increased his territory fivefold, and the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church moved his headquarters there.

In 1378 Prince Dmitri refused to pay tribute to the Mongols, then raised an army of 150,000 and defeated the Golden Horde on the banks of the Don. Ivan III, known as Ivan the Great (1462-1505), carried this "gathering of the Russian land" to a new height when he took over Novgorod and its extensive territories to the northeast. He also attacked the Lithuanians and captured Smolensk and the Volga trading center of Tver.

Ivan saw himself as far more than a prince. He married Sophia Paleologus, a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, who had been killed in battle when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453. Ivan thereupon laid claim to the title of Russian Emperor and took to calling himself a Czar, or ruler. He added to his family crest the two-headed eagle that had once stood for the Eastern Roman Empire. Muscovy's hereditary aristocrats, known as boyars, resisted Ivan's imperial pretensions, but the Russian clergy reassured him that he was personally descended from Augustus Caesar and that since Constantinople had fallen, Moscow was now "the Third Rome." Though the Mongols might once have punished such claims, their long-invincible empire was disintegrating. The Golden Horde dissolved into three different territories, the khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and Crimea.

The first two lasted only until the reign of Ivan's grandson, Ivan the Terrible (a term that in Russian means awesome rather than horrifying), who invaded Kazan in 1552 and routed all opposition. Ivan built Moscow's beautiful onion-domed St. Basil's Cathedral at the edge of Red Square to celebrate his victory, but he is mainly remembered for his pathological cruelty. Even as a boy, he liked to throw animals off the Kremlin's towers. "If hee misliked a face or person of any man whom hee met by the way," British Ambassador Sir Giles Fletcher reported on the young Czar, "hee would command his head to be strook off." Ivan had a paranoid suspicion that the boyars were scheming to overthrow him, and anyone he suspected, he killed. He not only liked to imagine new forms of torment (e.g., vertical impalement) but also liked to watch them being carried out.

Ivan killed his eldest son, apparently in a fit of rage, and so the throne passed to a second son, Fedor, who was mentally retarded and spent most of his time in prayer. The real ruler of Russia was Czar Fedor's brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, and when Fedor died childless in 1598, the dynasty that traced its origins back to the Varangian Rurik came to an end. An assembly of nobles elected Godunov Czar, but a rival faction in Poland began an insurrection. It was led by a youth known as the False Dmitri, who claimed to be the third son of Ivan the Terrible. Godunov had nearly defeated Dmitri's forces when he sickened and died. The False Dmitri ruled for a year, then was overthrown and executed. Sweden and Poland both laid claim to the throne and invaded. The Roman Catholic Poles even seized Moscow, but the Orthodox Church issued an appeal for the salvation of Holy Russia. A huge army soon gathered and expelled the invaders. In 1613 the victors then elected a new Czar to begin a new dynasty, the 16-year-old Michael Romanov.

Almost unnoticed during this extended Time of Troubles was an event immensely important to the growth of the Russian Empire, the gradual takeover of Siberia. This remarkable process started back in the 14th century, and it was spearheaded not by the government but by the church. From the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery just north of Moscow, dozens of monks set forth into the forests to establish new monasteries where they could pray in isolation. In their footsteps came hunters and trappers, fortune hunters and hard-bitten frontiersmen known as cossacks. The remnants of the Mongol Empire were powerless to stop them.

A cossack pirate named Yermak Timofeyevich, in the employ of the Stroganovs (later famous for their beef stew), led a band of 840 musket-armed men through the Urals and defeated the lancers of the Khan of Sibir in 1572. He offered this doorway to Siberia to the Czar, who happily accepted. More cossacks came pouring in, for the profits were enormous. Two sable skins could buy a house, yet nearly 7,000 sables were trapped in one year. The conquest of this frozen wilderness took only 80 years. By 1647 the cossacks had established one of their ostrogs (forts) on the Sea of Okhotsk. Pressing southward to the Amur valley, they encountered the soldiers of China's Manchu Empire, who halted the cossacks' advance at the northern frontier of Manchuria.

What lay to the east of Kamchatka Peninsula remained a mystery, so Czar Peter the Great assigned a Danish shipmaker, Vitus Bering, to find out. It took him eight years to work his way across Siberia, then build a ship and sail across the strait that now bears his name. On July 18, 1741, he spotted the snow-covered mountains of Alaska. Cruising offshore for several months, he finally ran aground on a desolate island, and there Bering and many of his men died. But in his wake, more fur trappers peacefully took possession of Alaska and established forts as far south as California.

The Czar who sent Bering to death and fame had larger projects on his mind. A giant of 6 ft. 7 in., reputedly strong enough to roll up a silver plate like a parchment scroll, Peter was determined to wrestle his nation into the modern world of the West. Defeated by a smaller Swedish force at Narva in 1700, he rebuilt, retrained and rearmed his entire military, then routed Sweden's King Charles XII at Poltava in 1709. His victory eventually gave the Russians control of the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, and thus a large window to the West. In the swamps at the mouth of the Neva River, he had already begun building himself a modern capital. He dragooned tens of thousands of soldiers, peasants and prisoners into laboring under such appalling conditions that the city was said to be built on bones. But in ten years he laid the foundations for one of the wonders of the world, the parks and canals and esplanades of St. Petersburg, now Leningrad.

The process of Westernization continued under Catherine the Great, a highly intelligent German princess of polyandrous tastes (one husband, murdered under mysterious circumstances, and 21 known lovers). In the previous century the ^ Poles had occupied Moscow, but now Catherine wrote to King Frederick II of Prussia, "We will give a King to Poland." Moving Russian troops across the Polish border and spreading bribes liberally, Catherine got one of her discarded lovers, Stanislaw Poniatowski, elected King of Poland in 1764. This led to civil strife and a sudden intervention by the Turks. Catherine defeated both Poles and Turks handily, then joined with Prussia and Austria in a partial dismemberment of Poland.

By this partition of 1772, Russia acquired 55,000 sq. mi. of White Russia. From the Turks it won control of that Mongol relic, the khanate of Crimea. Both Turks and Poles tried to retake the conquered land and were again defeated. Russia annexed not only Crimea but the adjoining Ukrainian lands between the Bug and the Dniester. The Poles were partitioned again in 1793, with Russia gaining an additional 130,000 sq. mi., and then, in a third partition in 1795, all of Poland disappeared from the map for the next 125 years. "The more she wept for Poland, the more she took of it," said Prussia's admiring King Frederick II. Catherine had thus advanced Russia's western borders to the Prussian frontier and the headwaters of the Vistula.

The next man to attack Russia was Napoleon Bonaparte, and the man who had to defend it was Catherine's enigmatic grandson Alexander I, whom Napoleon once described as "the northern Sphinx." France and Russia were allies when Alexander came to the throne after the murder of his father in 1801, but he soon joined the British-led coalition against France. Napoleon skillfully defeated the coalition, captured Vienna and Berlin, then met with Alexander in 1807 on a raft in the Neman River, which separated their two empires. In the manner customary during this period, the two enemies pledged friendship and proceeded to redraw the map. Napoleon endorsed the idea of Alexander seizing Finland from the Swedes, which he did a few months later. The treaty also freed Alexander to expand southward in the Caucasus. Clashing with both the Persians and the Turks, he annexed the autonomous Christian state of Georgia and Muslim Azerbaijan. From the Turks he also took a slice of Bessarabia and won extensive rights in the Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Walachia (now Romania).

In June 1812, Napoleon tried to redraw the map once again by invading Russia. His Grande Armee of 600,000 men seemed invincible, and the Czar ordered a scorched-earth policy while his army retreated eastward. Seventy- five miles outside Moscow the Russians made a stand at Borodino (a battle later immortalized by one of the participants, Count Leo Tolstoy, in War and Peace). After a slaughter that inflicted 100,000 casualties, the Russians withdrew again, and Napoleon marched into deserted Moscow unopposed, the last invader ever to do so.

The first fires broke out that same night, and new ones kept starting. The victorious Napoleon offered peace; the beaten Alexander refused to negotiate. The victorious Napoleon decided he had to retreat; the Russians harried him all the way back to Germany. Closer to home, Napoleon was still able to beat back all attackers, but Alexander persuaded the Prussians and Austrians to march directly on Paris. Napoleon's underlings succeeded in persuading him to abdicate. Alexander's triumph made Russia for the first time a great European power, and filled the Russians with an intoxicating sense of greatness. From now on, not only Alexander but his successors felt they had a God-given right to intervene in the Balkans, to keep attacking the Ottoman Empire, to expand anywhere they wanted in the wastelands of Central Asia.

It was Alexander's brother Nicholas I who took over northern Armenia from Persia in 1828, then invaded the Balkans to make the Turks recognize him as the protector of all Christians. The British and French joined in resisting that demand in the bloody stalemate of the Crimean War (1853-56). Resisted in the West, the succeeding Czar Alexander II looked east. He was repeatedly urged in this direction by Prussia's Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. "Russia has nothing to do in the West," Bismarck once declared. "There she can only catch nihilism and other diseases. Her mission is in Asia. There she represents civilization."

This new crusade began with the seizure of the east bank of the Amur valley as far south as Vladivostok, which a now enfeebled China ceded in 1860. On the enormous Pacific island of Sakhalin, the Russians first established a joint "condominium" with the Japanese in 1855, then took over the whole place in 1875. In the rugged and thinly settled borderlands of Central Asia, the Russians simply invaded. They stormed legendary Tashkent in 1864 and turned the whole of Turkistan into a Russian province. They besieged the sacred city of Samarkand, site of the tomb of the medieval chieftain Timur the Great (the Tamburlaine of Christopher Marlowe's epic play), and pillaged it for four days. It was from these little noticed conquests that there emerged the until recently little noticed Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. "The policy of Russia is changeless," said one disapproving observer, Karl Marx. "Its methods, its tactics, its maneuvers may change, but the polar star of its policy -- world domination -- is a fixed star."

The one Eastern outpost where the Russian Empire retreated was Alaska. The U.S. had made an offer for it back during the Crimean War, but the Russians refused. In 1867 Secretary of State William Seward tried again, asking first for various fishing and trading rights. The Russian Minister to the U.S., Eduard de Stoekl, refused. "Very well," said Seward. "Will Russia sell the whole territory?" Stoekl said the Russians might consider it if the price were right. Seward consulted President Andrew Johnson, then offered $5 million. Stoekl, who had been authorized to sell at that price, refused, saying he could not consider less than $7 million. Seward grudgingly raised his bids until they reached $7 million. He then found that the Senate, already embroiled in the post-Civil War quarrels that would lead to the impeachment of President Johnson, refused to ratify "Seward's Folly." Only after Stoekl spread substantial sums of money among influential Senators did the legislators suddenly see wisdom in the spectacular bargain.

Despite the ill-considered sale of Alaska, the Romanov Empire by now extended over nearly 7,000 miles, but the vast structure had little strength. The Empire of Japan, newly reopened after its long isolation, proved that in the war of 1905. Though outnumbered, the Japanese pushed back a Russian invasion of Manchuria and virtually annihilated the Russian Navy. Czar Nicholas II barely survived the humiliation and the subsequent revolution that swept over Russia. Eleven years later he blundered into another war, another defeat, another revolution. In the 1918 Treaty of Brest Litovsk, the Germans' price for making peace with the shaky new Bolshevik regime included stripping away Russia's western holdings: Finland, Poland and the Baltic states all regained their independence.

Other territories the new Bolshevik regime fought to retain. The Ukraine declared its independence in 1918, but the Red Army recaptured it the following year. Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia similarly declared their independence, then formed a Transcaucasian Federation that even won de facto ; recognition from the Western allies, but here too the Red Army soon marched in and took over. And so things remained until World War II, when Joseph Stalin began trying to re-create the empire of the Czars -- and more. By attacking the Finns in 1939, he seized a slice of southern Finland; by making a deal with the Germans, he once again annexed the Baltic states. Then, after repelling the Nazi invasion, he established the Red Army in occupied East Germany in 1945, moved the Polish frontiers some 200 miles to the West and established a buffer zone of Communist satellites all across Central Europe. When China too went Communist in 1949, Stalin could claim suzerainty over the largest empire since that of the Mongols. And though nobody realized it then, it was just as doomed.