![]() ![]() ![]() When the reforming Muscovite Czar Peter the Great successfully concluded the Great Northern War, which toppled Sweden as the dominant regional power in 1721, he declared himself “Emperor” of a “Russian” - not a “Muscovite” - Empire. Erased as a nation it would leave a golden legend with many rival claimants, including the arriviste dukes (later czars) of Muscovy who, after collaborating with the Mongols, would gradually fill the power vacuum in the vast, devastated territories left behind as the Mongol threat receded.Įventually, the Muscovites even co-opted the name “Rus” from the Ukrainians. The problem goes back at least as far as the mid-13th century when Kyivan Rus, a prosperous, Christianized empire founded by Viking invaders in the 10th century who intermingled with local Slavic tribesmen, was obliterated by the Mongol Horde. The very name of their country means “frontier” or “borderland” and the fact that it sits on a geopolitical fault line - periodically invaded or occupied by Poles and Turks, Russians and Mongols, Austrians and Swedes - has dictated its grim history. Consider the case of the long-suffering Ukrainians. ![]() In geopolitics as well as real estate, location can be everything. ![]()
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