January 15, Strayer, chapter 13 pg.572 ."Russian attention was drawn first to the grasslands south and east of the Russian heartland, an area long inhabited by various nomadic pastoral peoples, who were organized into feuding tribes and clans and adjusting to the recent disappearance of the mongol empire. from the viewpoint of the merging Russian state, the problem was security because these pastoral peoples, like the mongols before them, frequently raided their agriculture;; Russian neighbors and sold many into slavery. To the east, across the vast expanse of Siberia, Russian motives were quite different, for the scattered peoples of its endless forests and tundra posed no threat to Russia. numbering only some 220,000 in the seventeenth century and speaking more than 100 languages, they were mostly hunting and gathering and herding people living in small scale societies and largely without access to gunpowder weapons. What does Russians across Siberia was opportuinity primari...
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