She is deprived of the even, temperate climate due to Europe's articulated structure, and has a continental climate — nearly equally extreme in the rigour of its winters and the torrid heat of its summers. Hence the mean temperature varies.
The isothermal lines extend in summer toward the pole; in winter they sink southward: so that the greater part of Russia is included in January in the rigid, in July in the torrid zone. Her very vastness condemns her to extremes. The bordering seas are too distant or too small to serve her as reservoirs of warmth or basins of coolness. Nowhere else in the Occident are to be found winters so long and severe, summers so burning. Russia is a stranger to the great influences that moderate the climate of the rest of Europe — the gulf stream and the winds of the Sahara. The long Scandinavian peninsula, stretching between Russia and the Atlantic, deflects from her coasts the great warm current flowing from the New World to the Old. In place of the gulf stream and the African deserts it is the polar snows of Europe, and Siberia, the frozen north of Asia, that hold the predominating influence over Russia. The Ural range, by its insignificant elevation and its perpendicularity to the equator, is but an inconsiderable barrier to these influences. In vain does Russia extend south into the latitude of Pau and Nice; nowhere this side the Caucasus will she find a rampart against the winds of the north. The conformation of the soil, low and flat, leaves her open to all the atmospheric currents — from the parching breath of the central Asian deserts to the winds of the polar region.
This lack of mountains and inland seas deprives Russia of the necessary humidity brought to the rest of Europe by the Atlantic and laid up for it in the store-houses of the Alps. The ocean breezes reach her only when empty of refreshing vapours; those of Asia are wrung dry long before they touch her confines. The further the continent stretches, the greater its poverty of rain. At Kazan the rainfall is but half that of Paris. Hence the lack, over an enormous southern region, of the two principal elements of fertility — warmth and moisture; hence in part those wide, woodless, arid, un-European steppes in the southeast of the empire.
THE SIMILARITY OF EUROPEAN AND ASIATIC RUSSIA
One whole formed of two analogous halves, Russia is in nowise a child of Europe; but that is not to say that she is Asiatic — that we can shelve her among the dormant and stationary peoples of the far East. Far from it: Russia is no more Asiatic than she is European. But in all physical essentials of structure, climate/and moisture, she is opposed to historical, occidental Europe; in all these she is in direct relation with the bordering countries of Asia. Europe proper naturally begins at the narrowing of the continent between the Baltic and the Black seas.
In the southeast there is no natural barrier between Russia and Asia;
therefore the geographers have in turn taken the Don, the Volga, the Ural, or again the depression of the Obi, as boundaries. Desert steppes stretch from the centre of the old continent into Russia by the door left open between the Ural chain and the Caspian. From the lower course of the Don'to the Aral Sea, all these low steppes on both banks of the Volga and the Ural rivers form the bed of an old, dried-up sea, whose borders we can still trace, and whose remnants constitute the great salt lakes known as the Caspian and the Aral seas. By a hydrographical accident which has had an enormous influence upon the character and destinies of the people, it is into one of these closed Asiatic seas that the Volga, the great artery of Russia, empties, after turning its back upon Europe almost from its very source.
To the north of the Caspian steppes, from latitude 52° to the uninhabitable polar regions, the longest meridional chain of mountains of the old continent forms a wall between Russia and Asia. The Russians in olden days called it the "belt of stone," or "belt of the world"; but, despite the name, the Ural indicates the end of Asia on the one side, only to mark its recommencement, almost unaltered, on the European slope. Descending gradually by terraces on the European side, the Ural is less a chain than a plateau crowned with a line of slight elevations. It presents principally low ridges covered with forests, like those of the Vosges and the Jura. So greatly depressed is the centre that along the principal passes between Russia and Siberia (from Perm to Iekaterinburg, for example) the eye looks in vain for the summits; in constructing a railroad through the pass the engineers had no long tunnels to build, no great difficulties to surmount. At this high altitude, where the plains are snow-bound during six or seven months, no peak attains the limit of eternal snows, no valley enbosoms a glacier.
In reality the Ural separates neither the climates, nor the fauna and flora. Extending almost perpendicularly from north to south, the polar winds blow almost equally unhindered along both sides; on both, the vegetation is the same. It is not till the heart of Siberia is reached — the upper Yenisei and Lake Baikal — that one finds a different soil, a new flora and fauna. The upheaval of the Ural failed to wipe out the resemblance and the unity of the two regions it divides. Instead of a wall between the Russias, it is merely a store-house of mineral wealth. In the rocks, of eruptive or metamorphic origin, are veins of metals not found in the regular strata of the great plains. It no more separates one from the other than does the river of the same name; and when one day Siberia shall boast a denser population, the Ural will be regarded as the axis, the backbone of the two great halves of the empire.
THE DUALISM OF NORTH AND SOUTH
Unity in immensity is Russia's chief characteristic. From the huge wall of the Caucasus to the Baltic this empire, in itself greater than all the rest of Europe, in its numerous provinces presents perhaps less variety of climate than west European countries whose area is ten or twelve times less. This is on account of the flat uniformity. And yet, underlying this homogenity of climate and configuration, nature has marked with special characteristics and a distnct individuality a number of regions which, divided into two groups, embrace all European Russia. Equally flat, with a climate nearly equally extreme, these two great zones, notwithstanding their similarity, present a remarkable contrast in soil, vegetation, moisture, and most other physical and economic conditions. One is the forest region, the other the woodless zone of the steppes; they divide the empire into almost equal halves.
h. w. —vol. xvii. g
From the opposition, from the natural dualism of the steppe and the forest, has sprung the historical antagonism and the now-ended strife between the two halves of Russia — the struggle between the sedentary north and the nomad south; between the Russian and the Tatar; between the Muscovite state laid in the forest region, and the free Cossacks, children of the steppes. The forest region, though ceaselessly diminished by cutting, still remains the more extensive. Occupying the entire north and centre, it grows wider from east to west, from Kazan to Kiev.
Beyond the polar circle no tree can withstand the intensity and permanence of the frost. On both sides of the Ural, in the neighbourhood of Siberia, stretch vast boggy plains (toundras), perpetually frost-bound, and clothed with moss. In these latitudes no cultivation is possible, no pasturage but lichens is to be obtained, no animal but the reindeer can exist. Hunting and fishing are the sole occupations of the [few inhabitants who make their dwelling in these lands of ice.