We have noticed the Lithuanian conquest which created Western Russia with a capital of Wilna, while the rest of the country which escaped from this influence centered around Moscow, which at an early day became the eastern capital. Eastern Russia was subject, in a religious sense, to the Orthodox-Greek Church, while Western Russia had three religions, Greek, Roman and Protestant.
The result was a natural antagonism between the eastern and western divisions of the country, the former being practically a political vassal of the Great Khan. A race was formed around Moscow under the Mongol yoke, patient and resigned, yet energetic and enterprising, bound in the long run to get the upper hand of the western princes, notwithstanding their genius for politics, their valor and pitiless cruelty.
The princes of Moscow gained their ends by intrigue, corruption, the purchases of conscience, servility to the Khans, perfidy to their equals, murder and treachery.
The above stigma has been put upon then by another writer, but it is well deserved. They, however, did create the germ of the Russian power and caused it to grow, so that henceforward we have a fixed center around which gathers that scattered history of Russia which we have been trying to follow through the previous pages.
Heretofore we have dealt with Novgorod, Smolensk, Tchernigof, Kief, the City of Vladimir and other lesser capitals, each the center of a warring principality. Still the masceration, so to speak, of these lesser Russian states by submission to the Mongols on the one hand, and the Lithuanians, tended in the end to the leveling of all things, and to the preparation for the work of organization into a national solidarity.
In a country thus humiliated and prostrated a potent dynasty such as rose in Moscow found more easy work to build a realm about a new national capital.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
