The Urge to the Sea

The Course of Russian History: The Role of Rivers, Portages, Ostrogs, Monasteries, and Furs

Robert Joseph Kerner

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520374768
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520350304
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Urge to the Sea by Robert J. Kerner offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Russian expansion by centering the humbler infrastructures—rivers, portages, ostrogs (frontier forts), monasteries, and the fur trade—that powered a continental "urge to the sea." Moving across the long durée from the earliest chronicles to the Muscovite and imperial frontiers, Kerner shows how waterways and portage chains linked interior heartlands to distant seas, how monastic networks anchored colonization, and how fur economies financed and incentivized movement across Eurasia. Geography, economy, religion, and statecraft emerge not as siloed explanations but as interlocking mechanisms of mobility and control. Written as a focused monograph within a larger research program on eastward expansion, the book advances a clear thesis: these material and institutional vectors formed the mechanics of empire-building, steering Russian society from river sources to ocean outlets. Kerner situates his argument within, and against, classic historiography—acknowledging Z. Khodakovskii's early study of communication routes, N. P. Barsov's chronicle-based geographic insights, and S. M. Solov'ev's seminal reflections—while probing V. O. Kliuchevskii's notion of a self-evolving "colonization" for evidence of deliberate "river policy." The result is both synthetic and provocative, inviting readers to reconsider causality in Russian state formation: not only grand strategy, but also the routinized labor of portaging, the siting of forts and cloisters, and the commercial magnetism of sable and sea otter pelts. With extensive notes pointing to underused sources and avenues for new research, The Urge to the Sea will engage historians of Russia and empire, historical geographers, and social scientists interested in how infrastructures and ecologies shape expansion. This is a model of rigorous, agenda-setting scholarship—concise in scope, ambitious in implication. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1942.

Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 1
• Chapter I * Introduction: The Valdai Hills Region
• Chapter II * “The Road from the Varangians to the Greeks”— The Kievan State
• Chapter III λ Novgorod, Gateway to Europe and the Urals
• Chapter IV & Moscow, Pivot of Eurasian Empire
• Chapter V & Waterways, Railroads, and Land Highways
• Chapter VI * General Observations and Conclusions
• APPENDIXES
• Appendix ι Ά Portages and the Important Russian River Systems
• Appendix 2 & Extracts from the Smolensk Trade Codes of 1229 and 1274, Illustrating the Regulations in Regard to the Portage from the Western Dvina to the Dnieper96
• Appendix3 Extracts from Documents and Other Sources Illustrating the Fortified Line of 1571 and Its Successors
• Appendix 4 Ά Seventeenth-Century Descriptions of Portages and Ostrogs, and River and Land Transportation in Siberia
• Appendix5 A List of the More Important Monasteries in Their Relation to the River Systems and the Ostrogs
• Appendix 6 & A List of Important Siberian Ostrogs
• Index