NO. II THE RACES OF RUSSIA — HRDLICKA 1 3 



barians who roamed her desolate frontiers. In that more or less grievous 

 plight the southern provinces of Rus remained until well-nigh the middle of 

 the fifteenth century. Meanwhile Southwestern Rus (now beginning to be 

 called in documents of the period " Malaia Rossia " or "Little Russia") had 

 been annexed to the combined state of Poland-Lithuania ; so that of the 

 Empire thus formed the region of the Middle Dnieper — i. e., old Kievan 

 Rus — had now become the southeasternmost province or Ukraine. With the 

 fifteenth century a new colonisation of the Middle Dnieper region began, to 

 which two circumstances in particular contributed: namely, (i) the fact that 

 the Steppes of the South were becoming less dangerous, owing to the dis- 

 persal of the Golden Horde and the rise of Muscovite Rus, and (2) the fact 

 that the Polish Empire was beginning to abolish her old system of peasant 

 tenure by quit-rent in favour of the barstchina system, which tended towards 

 serfdom and therefore filled the oppressed rural population with a desire to 

 escape from the masters' yoke to a region where they might live more freely. 

 These two factors combined to set on foot an active reflex exodus from 

 Galicia and the central provinces of Poland towards the southeasternmost 

 borders of the Polish Empire — i. c, towards the region of the Dnieper and 

 old Kievan Rus. The chief directors of this movement were the rich Polish 

 magnates, who had acquired enormous estates in that part of the world, and 

 now desired to people and reclaim them. The combined efforts of the immi- 

 grants soon succeeded in studding these seignorial domains with towns, 

 villages, hamlets, and detached homesteads ; with the result that we find 

 Polish writers of the sixteenth century at once exclaiming at the surprisingly 

 rapid movement of colonists towards the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the 

 Eastern Bug, and lamenting the depopulation of the central provinces of 

 Poland to which that movement had given rise. All things considered, there 

 can be little doubt that the bulk of the settlers who took part in the recolonis- 

 ing of Southern Rus were of purely Russian origin — that, in fact, they were 

 the descendants of those very Russians who had fled westwards from the 

 Dnieper during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and who, though dwelling 

 since among a Polish and Lithuanian population, had, throughout the two 

 or three intervening centuries, retained their nationality intact. 



The language of the new population of Ukraina developed cer- 

 tain dialectical differences, while in other parts of Russia it was being 

 gradually affected in other ways by association with the Lekhs 

 (Poles), Lithuanians, and the Finnish tribes. In addition there 

 arose in the course of time, as could hardly be otherwise when the 

 great territories over which the Russian people were spread are 

 taken into consideration, some differences in the richness and nature 

 of folk tales, folk poetry, dress, etc. ; differences the perception of 

 which by the Ukrainians has for long before the present war been 

 assiduously fostered by the Germans and Austrians, on the basis of 

 their cherished, old "divide et impera" principle. Finally this 

 region has received, together with Bessarabia, the mass of the Jewish 



