We were looking at the physical geography of Russia and the former soviet republics. In this article we're going to look at the history of the region that has helped shape the people today. Now right off we get to talk about the movement theme of geography as we explore how humans settled the region. 

 

 

It is largely the belief that the human species originated in Africa and then moved out of Africa to spread to the rest of the world. This brought them through the Middle East and from there some moved into the Caucasus and then into central Asia. For example in western Kazakhstan the remains of what anthropologists called? The ust issue man were discovered and his bone actually goes back to 45000 years ago and is believed that mankind has been in the region ever since. 

 

 

Now for the next 40000 years humans would continue to migrate across Eurasia including those who would go across. The Bering Strait into what is today the America's? The region around Transcaucasia and what is now eastern Russia would become home to a series of nomadic Slavic tribes who would later be influenced by the ancient Greeks and other dramatic tribes such as the Goths, but it would be the Vikings that would set into motion the events that created. 

 

 

The Russia of today and its former republics in the 9th century the Scandinavians moved down from the Baltic Sea in the north to the black and Caspian seas by boat and took control of the Slavic tribes establishing their capital where Ukraine is today. The name of their empire would come from the Nordic word rus which means the men that row and the kievan roost empire was born. 

 

 

By the way it is the kievan rus where we get the name Russia today. Now the kievan Roosevelt wealth has kiev's relocation and Ukraine allowed the empire to control the trade between Scandinavia and the byzantine empire for various different goods including furs and slaves. 

 

 

This connection with the Byzantine Empire not only brought wealth but it also intrudes several cultural aspects to the region. For example when saint sorrell a byzantine missionary began to translate Christian texts into the Slavic languages of the kievan rus he used his own Greek alphabet and then added 19 additional letters for sounds specific to the Slavic languages. 

 

 

The result is this Cyrillic alphabet named after him which is used by many of the region's languages to include Russian Ukrainian and most of the primary languages of central Asia such as kaza, luzbek, Turkmenistan and many of the others. It wasn't only the alphabet that Russia and its republics got from the byzantine; it was also religion in 987 A.D Vladimir the great sent emissaries to the three great religions of the time. 

 

 

This was Islam, Judaism and Christianity. In order to pick the religion that would be best for the empire. Vladimir automatically dismissed Islam because of its prohibition on drinking alcohol remarking that drinking was the joy of other roofs. Judaism was discounted due to their believers being expelled from Jerusalem. Vladimir believed that this was a sign of god's displeasure with the Jews, so didn't want to pick Judaism as the religion. 

 

 

This left orthodox Christianity of the Byzantines to become the religion of the land. The preacher Sulavera in kiev also known as the monastery of the caves was founded in 1051. Soon after the Orthodox Church became the religion of the land and the lava has been an important site of eastern orthodox religion ever since now. 

 

 

Unfortunately for the kievan rus in 1223 the golden horde of the Mangols swept the cross and captured the empire. The 240 years of Mangol control caused several changes within the land. The Mangol influences are seen in the Russian languages in art and even in the church. The Orthodox Church which was largely left alone by the Mangols, actually grew in power among the people and ultimately became a source of resistance to the Mangols. Some historians point to more troubling influences however the Mangols constricted hundreds of thousands of slaves and concubines into the Mangol army. 

 

 

The tributes this is money that was demanded by the Mangols prevented the region from really developing any wealth skilled labour such as artists, masons and carpenters were moved from Russia cities to Mangol areas depriving the cities of their expertise and additionally the Mangol influence in Russia left most European states to cut ties off from Russia. 

 

 

This isolation of Russia from the rest of Europe has been cited, by many historians have to have lessened the impact of the renaissance of the art and sciences within Russia, moreover with the fall of the kievan rus. The importance of the city of Kiev declined in the city of Moscow grew in importance interestingly is also the Mangol's trade routes that others have pointed as the reason why the bubonic plague came from Asia to the Crimean peninsula from there. It spread into the rest of the Europe as the Black Death. Now the 240 year rule of the Mangols ended with Ivan the great, who would defeat the Mangols in 1480. 

 

 

At this point the Russian empire came back to power and with his capital in Moscow it would begin to spread through the sparsely populated areas to the east and to the south by the 1700s. All of today's Russia was under the empire's control other areas such as Ukraine would become under the empire before the end of the 18th century and Transcaucasia fell to the Russians by the mid-1800s. As would most of today's Kazakhstan it would be the southern central republics upon which the great game between Britain and Russia would be played previously. 

 

 

The southern central republic such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan where the pathway of the silk road the silk road was the network of trade routes stretching over four thousand miles from china to Constantinople and went right through central Asia cities such as Bukhara sparkling and Tashkent were major trading hubs of the silk road. The central republics became the crossroads of the world. As merchants moved in through and out to do trade. 

 

 

This is also the reason why there are so many ethnicities in central Asia. These are the descendants of the merchants who would come around the world and ultimately would settle there but in the 1800s, central Asia was another type of crossroads one that the British felt would bring the Russians down into British India between 1813 and 1907. 

 

 

Britain and Russia was in an economic and military competition to win over the people of central Asia. Their great game, Russia was planned this great game to secure territory in central Asia and the British were planned to keep the Russians from interfering into their lands and territories of British India. The game concluded in 1907 when the Russians allowed the British to draw the borders of Afghanistan and create Afghanistan as a buffer between Russian-controlled. 

 

Central Asia and British India by this time Russia occupied a vast empire. However the Russians realised the very size of their empire would be difficult control. This is an effect of distance decay. We've talked about distance decay before this is the idea that when you have larger distances, you have less influence or control between two different peoples. 

 

Now one of the policies that Russia and then later the Soviet Union used in order to have control was justification. Ramification was the policy in which the Russians imposed the Russian culture upon the peoples of Transcaucasia. In central Asia the idea is these peoples adopted the Russian language Russian orthodox Christianity and the Russian government policies then the people will have no reason to want to separate from Russia another way that the soviet leader Joseph Stalin attempted to keep control was through forced population resettlement such as what happened to the kulaks since the soviet union was a communist country. 

 

It was decreed that all property should belong to the state and the process of bringing that property into the state is known as nationalisation or collectivisation. This put the soviet government in a collision course with the kulaks. The kulaks were relatively wealthy farmers who owned large farms in 1930. Stalin ordered the kulaks to be categorised into three different categories. 

 

 

The first category was those who would be evicted from their farms and forced to work in labor colonies. The second category would be those who would be imprisoned or just shot and the third category were those who would be sent to Siberia. 

 

The northern Urals or Kazakhstan after having their farm seized by the state the result was nearly 2 million kulaks who were moved on top of the 600000 people who died during the period. One soviet historian estimates that the number who died may have been as many as 5 million people. Stalin also used resettlement during World War II fearing that the Chechens of the Indus populations.

 

These are the people who live on the Russian side of the Caucus Mountains. They fear that they would side with Nazi Germany; therefore Stalin called for operation lentil between February and March 1944. Between 500 to 600000 in goose and chickens were deported to central Asia. Another 200 to 400000 may have died due to starvation during this period that is because another tool of control used by Stalin was controlling food. The Ukrainians felt the brunt of this during the halo do more between 1932 and 1933. 

 

In 1932 the Soviet Union imposed high quotas on how much food the farms. Now under government control would have to give to the state however the quotas imposed were far higher than what the farmers could supply leaving very little to survive on or even to use a seed to plant for the next year. The result was that while the soviets were selling the food raised by the Ukrainian food sold for export for money at least 3 million people starved to death. 

 

Many historians suggest that the reason for this soviet indifference in the Ukrainian people was that Ukraine had been an independent country between 1917 and 1922 and Stalin was using food as a weapon to crush European independence movements. Now not all the genocides in the region were committed by the Russians of the soviets however after the 1915 world war one battle of sarcomas between the Russian and ottoman empires the ottomans believed the Armenians that lived in west turkey. 

 

 

Today had conspired with Russia to win the battle in retribution the ottomans killed nearly 1 million Armenians who were living in west. Today turkey argues that this was not a crime but a necessary operation of war however over a hundred years later in 2019. The United States congress and senate voted to recognize this act as genocide. 

 

Now to get back to the Soviet Union the Soviet Union along with its republics and Trans Caucasian in central Asia would continue on until the communist economy began to crash down and finally in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. Each of these republics would find their own independence and are independent countries.