centuries have witnessed the overwhelming development of the Slav race, represented in Siberia by the early Cossacks and their descendants, the exiles, and finally the peasant immigrants. Under the Government of the Tsar all are now brought together in one political entity, although the tribal distinctions between Finns, Tartars and Russian are still just discernible. And thus we trace the early development of Russia's Eastern Empire in Northern Asia with all its possibilities of future greatness.
The colonization of Siberia has naturally depended upon the changes and social movements which have gone on in European Russia since the Slavs first crossed the Urals. Through contact with Asia, and through the influence of the Mongol and Tartar invasions during the Middle Ages, the European Russians were prevented from advancing along the same path of agricultural, industrial and social progress as the other nations of Western Europe. Some outlet, therefore, for the increasing population was necessary, and the way was open to the East, where the absence of any considerable natural barrier gave access to the vast regions of Siberia, into which, ever since the fourteenth century, the Slavs of Europe have been gradually penetrating.
Following close after the Cossacks came the commercial pioneers whose object it was to open up trade with the Finnish tribes in the north and the Tartars in the southern steppes, and for a time these two Slavonic social elements were alone in Siberia, uncontrolled by any power in old Russia.
But the authorities in Moscow and St Petersburg were not long content to leave the colonization and
