More from Professor Quigley,which has made me think about how much we overlook all the small things, it also reminded me on how well England has done with the average reader covering up it's imperialistic past...

... In the nineteenth century most historians regarded Russia as part of Europe but it is now becoming increasingly clear that Russia is another civilization quite separate from Western Civilization. Both of these civilizations are descended from Classical Civilization, but the connection with this predecessor was made so differently that two quite different traditions came into existence. Russian traditions were derived from Byzantium directly; Western traditions were derived from the more moderate Classical Civilization indirectly, having passed through the Dark Ages when there was no state or government in the West.

Russian civilization was created from three sources originally: (1) the Slav people, (2) Viking invaders from the north, and (3) the Byzantine tradition from the south. These three were fused together as the result of a common experience arising from Russia's exposed geographical position on the western edge of a great flat-land stretching for thousands of miles to the east. This flat-land is divided horizontally into three zones of which the most southern is open plain, while the most northern is open bush and tundra. The middle zone is forest. The southern zone (or steppes) consists of two parts: the southern is a salty plain which is practically useless, while the northern part, next to the forest, is the famous black-earth region of rich agricultural soil. Unfortunately the eastern portion of this great Eurasian plain has been getting steadily drier for thousands of years, with the consequence that the Ural-Altaic-speaking peoples of central and east-central Asia, peoples like the Huns, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols, and Turks, have pushed westward repeatedly along the steppe corridor between the Urals and the Caspian Sea, making the black-earth steppes dangerous for sedentary agricultural peoples.

The Slavs first appeared more than two thousand years ago as a peaceful, evasive people, with an economy based on hunting and rudimentary agriculture, in the forests of eastern Poland. These people slowly increased in numbers, moving northeastward through the forests, mixing with the scattered Finnish hunting people who were there already. About A.D. 700 or so, the Northmen, whom we know as Vikings, came down from the Baltic Sea, by way of the rivers of eastern Europe, and eventually reached the Black Sea and attacked Constantinople. These Northmen were trying to make a way of life out of militarism, seizing booty and slaves, imposing tribute on conquered peoples, collecting furs, honey, and wax from the timid Slavs lurking in their forests, and exchanging these for the colorful products of the Byzantine south. In time the Northmen set up fortified trading posts along their river highways, notably at Novgorod in the north, at Smolensk in the center, and at Kiev in the south. They married Slav women and imposed on the rudimentary agricultural-hunting economy of the Slavs a superstructure of a tribute-collecting state with an exploitative, militaristic, commercial economy. This created the pattern of a two-class Russian society which has continued ever since, much intensified by subsequent historical events.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2020/06/part-3-tragedy-hopecreation-of-russian.html