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which lies under the curving overhang of Scandinavia. Its southern, mountain border becomes the magnificent Balkan and Carpathian Mountains which guard the north of Greece. And then it opens out.
    Russia: where the plain is endless.
    Russia: where east and west meet.
    Here, at the beginning of Russia, the northern border of the mighty plain starts to sweep up, to the Arctic Sea. In this northern land begins the world’s greatest forest – the cold, dark empire of firs called the taiga , that stretches for thousands of miles to the Pacific shores. In the middle section of the plain is a huge, mixed forest. And in the south begins the endless, grassy steppe land, that leads down, at this point, not to desert or mountain, but to pleasant, sunny sea shores, like those of the Mediterranean.
    For the southern border of the Russian heartland is the warm Black Sea.
    The Black Sea, lying as it does above the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is rather like a reservoir. The great southern crescent of mountains hold it in like a vast dam: to the south-west, the Balkans of Greece; to the south, the mountains of modern Turkey; to the south-east, the soaring Caucasus Mountains. Between the Balkans and the mountains of Turkey, a narrow channel allows the Black Sea to connect with its greater sister sea. This connecting link is known, at the Black Sea end, as the Bosphorus, and at the southern end as the Dardanelles.
    The sea is large – some six hundred miles from west to east and four hundred north to south. It is fed by innumerable rivers including, on its western side above Greece, the stately River Danube. Its waters contain traces of sulphur, which may at some point have caused it to be called ‘Black’.
    In the centre of the northern, Russian shore, jutting far out into the sea’s warm waters and shaped like a flat fish, is a broadpeninsula. This is the Crimea. On each side of it, nearly four hundred miles apart, two enormous river systems descend across the steppe from the distant forests. On the western side, the broad River Dniepr; on the eastern, the mighty Don.
    Between these two river systems therefore, the Dniepr and the Don, and from the steppe above the Black Sea shore all the way up into the northern forests, lies the huge, ancient Russian heartland.
    Russia the borderland.
    For still the great plain continues, ever eastwards. At its southern border, east of the Black Sea, the huge range of Caucasus Mountains stretches for another six hundred miles. Famous for their wines and fighting men – Georgians, Armenians, and many others – their shining peaks reach several thousand feet higher than any in the Alps or Rocky Mountains.
    They end at a remarkable phenomenon, the second of the two seas inside the mountain crescent of the south. It is huge, running north to south – roughly the same shape as the Florida peninsula but twice as long – and the great crescent of mountain ranges makes a downward loop to accommodate it. This is the Caspian Sea.
    Technically, it is the world’s largest lake for it has no outlet. It is surrounded by steppe, mountain and desert, and loses its water by evaporation into the desert air. And it is fed, on its northern shore, by Russia’s best-known river.
    Mother Volga.
    The Volga starts her great journey far away in the central forests of the Russian heartland. From there she makes a huge loop, up through the distant forests of the north, before turning southwards; then, having embraced the northern heartland, she turns away and flows across the Eurasian plain eastwards and then southwards until at last she makes her way slowly down, out of the forest, across the windblown steppe to the distant desert shores of the Caspian Sea.
    And still, beyond the Volga, the mighty plain sweeps on, becoming less and less hospitable. In the south there are terrible deserts. In the north, dark taiga and permafrost spread down and finally conquer all the plain. To this day, these vast regions are scarcely