Muscovy (Central Russia)

The core of the Russian state, and the smallest of its regions relative to its weight. This is the mixed forest and forest-steppe around Moscow, the land the Grand Duchy of Muscovy expanded out of after the fourteenth century, and the reason it could is partly geographic: the Oka and upper Volga gave it river access in several directions at once, and the surrounding forest was defensible in a way the open steppe further south was not. The soil is mediocre, and central Russia has never been the country's granary. What it accumulated instead was people, administration and, from the eighteenth century, manufacturing - textiles at Ivanovo, metalwork at Tula, and eventually the largest concentration of industry in the empire. Moscow's role has been unusually continuous: capital of the grand duchy and the tsardom, displaced by St Petersburg for two centuries, restored in 1918, and dominant ever since to a degree that has few parallels among large countries. Serfdom bound the region's peasantry more tightly and later than elsewhere in Europe, ending only in 1861, and the landholding pattern it left shaped rural politics into the revolution. The Soviet period concentrated further, ringing the capital with defence plants and closed research cities. Today the region contains roughly a quarter of the country's population and produces a far larger share of its output, a centralisation that is the recurring complaint of every other region in this list. The region is drained by the upper Volga, Europe's longest river. Tula has made firearms for the state since the seventeenth century. Ivanovo was once called the Russian Manchester. Moscow alone holds more people than the next three Russian cities combined.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history