Russia | Page 2

35° on the Afghan frontier, and 42° 30'
on the coasts of the Pacific. To the West it advances as far as 20° 40' E.

longitude in Lapland, 18° 32' in Poland, and 29° 42' on the Black Sea;
and its eastern limit--East Cape in the Bering Strait--extends to 191° E.
longitude.
The Arctic Ocean--comprising the White, Barents, and Kara Seas--and
the northern Pacific, that is the Seas of Bering, Okhotsk, and Japan,
bound it on the north and east. The Baltic, with its two deep
indentations, the Gulfs of Bothnia and Finland, limits it on the
north-west; and two sinuous lines of frontier separate it respectively
from Sweden and Norway on the north-west, and from Prussia, Austria
and Roumania on the west. The southern frontier is still unsettled. In
Asia beyond the Caspian, the southern boundary of the empire remains
vague; the advance into the Turcoman Steppes and Afghan Turkestan,
and on the Pamir plateau is still in progress. Bokhara and Khiva,
though represented as vassal khanates, are in reality mere dependencies
of Russia. An approximately settled frontier-line begins only farther
east, where the Russian and Chinese empires meet on the borders of
eastern Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria.
Russia has no oceanic possessions, and has abandoned those she owned
in the last century; her islands are mere appendages of the mainland to
which they belong. Such are the Aland archipelago, Hochland, Tütters,
Dagö and Osel in the Baltic Sea; Nova Zembla, with Kolgueff and
Vaigatch, in the Barents Sea; the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea;
the New Siberian archipelago and the small group of the Medvyezhii
Islands off the Siberian coast; the Commandor Islands off Kamchatka;
the Shantar Islands and Saghalin in the Sea of Okhotsk. The Aleutian
archipelago was sold to the United States in 1867, together with Alaska,
and in 1874 the Kurile Islands were ceded to Japan.
[ILLUSTRATION: ARCHANGEL.]
A vast variety of physical features is obviously to be expected in a
territory like this, which comprises on the one side the cotton and silk
regions of Turkestan and Trans-caucasia, and on the other the moss and
lichen-clothed Arctic tundras and the Verkhoyansk Siberian pole of
cold--the dry Transcaspian deserts and the regions watered by the
monsoons on the coasts of the Sea of Japan. Still, if the border regions,

that is, two narrow belts in the north and south, be left out of account, a
striking uniformity of physical feature prevails. High plateaus, like
those of Pamir (the "Roof of the World") or of Armenia, and high
mountain chains like the snow-clad summits of the Caucasus, the Alay,
the Thian-Shan, the Sayan, are met with only on the outskirts of the
empire.
Viewed broadly by the physical geographer, it appears as occupying the
territories to the north-west of that great plateau-belt of the old
continent--the backbone of Asia--which spreads with decreasing height
and width from the high table-land of Tibet and Pamir to the lower
plateaus of Mongolia, and thence north-eastwards through the Vitim
region to the furthest extremity of Asia. It may be said to consist of the
immense plains and flat-lands which extend between the plateau-belt
and the Arctic Ocean, including all the series of parallel chains and
hilly spurs which skirt the plateau-belt on the north-west. It extends
over the plateau itself, and crosses it beyond Lake Baikal only.
A broad belt of hilly tracts--in every respect Alpine in character, and
displaying the same variety of climate and organic life as Alpine tracts
usually do--skirts the plateau-belt throughout its length on the north and
north-west, forming an intermediate region between the plateaus and
the plains. The Caucasus, the Elburz, the Kopetdagh, and Paropamisus,
the intricate and imperfectly known network of mountains west of the
Pamir, the Thian-Shan and Ala-tau mountain regions, and farther
north-east the Altai, the still unnamed complex of Minusinsk mountains,
the intricate mountain-chains of Sayan, with those of the Olekma,
Vitim, and Aldan, all of which are ranged en échelon,--the former from
north-west to south-east, and the others from south-west to
north-east--all these belong to one immense Alpine belt bordering that
of the plateaus. These have long been known to Russian colonists, who,
seeking to escape religious persecutions and exactions by the state,
early penetrated into and rapidly pushed their small settlements up the
better valleys of these tracts, and continued to spread everywhere as
long as they found no obstacles in the shape of a former population or
in unfavourable climatic conditions.

As for the flat-lands which extend from the Alpine hill-foots to the
shores of the Arctic Ocean, and assume the character either of dry
deserts in the Aral-Caspian depression, or of low table-lands in central
Russia and eastern Siberia, of lake-regions in north-west Russia and
Finland, or of marshy prairies in western Siberia, and of tundras in the