From Frontier To Empire: the Concept of the Frontier in Russia, Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, an advertisement by the British Ministry of Defense asked readers: "Isn't it better to have our frontier on the Elbe than on Brighton beach?" In sixteenth-century Muscovy there were no readers to ask a similar question, but the answer was obvious all the same. It was incumbent upon the rising Orthodox Muscovite state to expand its frontier in the east, where neighboring lands populated by the non-Christian peoples could be easily vanquished, and to secure its frontier in the south in order to prevent devastating nomadic raids.