The Soviet Union [antikvár]

The history of the USSR is the record of the life of the peoples who for thousands of years have inhabited the vast expanses from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan and from the Arctic Ocean to the Pamirs. According to legend, our ancestors may have met the Argonauts who came to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece and heard the groans of Prometheus chained to a rock in nearby mountains, and the sweet voice of Orpheus. Recorded history is more precise. It says that, back in the Ist millennium B.C., slave-owning states existed in Transcaucasia, along the Black Sea coast and in Central Asia. The late 4th century B.C. saw the birth of Great Armenia which challenged Romé itself. In those ancient times Central Asia was conquered by Alexander the Great. Certainly not all the peoples now inhabiting the Soviet Union can trace leir history back into antiquity: for somé of the , it only began this century. The history of Ru; ia began, for all practical purposes, in the 9th century A.D., when the energetic Prince Oleg subdued the cities and rich lands lying along the way from the Varangians to the Greeks, the route linking Northern Europe with Byzantium and the countries of the Orient. Oleg chose Kiev as his capital, which is rightly called "the mother of Russian cities". In 988, a great event came to pass in Kievan Rus, as the state was then called. Prince Vladimír drove the residents of Kiev into the River Dnieper and baptized them, while the wooden statutes of their pagan deities were burned on the bank. Thus Orthodox Christianity became the state religion. Eventually, however, Kievan Rus feli into decline and broke up, leaving a number of lasting monuments of national culture. In the early 13th century the Russian lands were invaded by the conquering army of Genghiz Khan, and for almost two centuries the Russian people suffered under the heavy Mongol yoke. Using modern political terminology, Genghiz Khan and his grandson, Batu Khan, were patent hegemonists: they sought world superiority and used barbarous means to subjugate other countries and peoples. The Mongols' horses would have surely drunk from the Seine and the Rhine, which the rulers of the Golden Horde strove to reach, if the heroic resistance of the Russian people had not compelled them to change their plans. In the 15th century Russia finally shook itself free of the Golden Horde. and the principalities united to form a single state with Moscow as its capital. Founded in the 12th century Moscow was then a major trading and political centre visited by merchants from Poland, Hungary, Denmark and Sweden, and by the ambassadors of Germán sovereigns.