Turning south of the line from Petrograd to Vologda we are, at least theoretically, in the zone of the forest of leaf-fall, that is a forest with the oak and birch, not, however, the beech. Here again the Baltic coast lands have peoples strongly marked off by culture associations from those of the interior, but, as regards the interior, the penetration of Finnish or more broadly Asiatic influences is not nearly so marked until we come to the Volga below Kazan, where are to be found the Mordva. In this eastern region are also found groups of Tatar speech and Asiatic origin, some of whom were gradually forced by past Russian governments to give up nomad pasturing and become settled cultivators. A Tatar republic now centres round Kazan (1921). An Asiatic influence may nevertheless be traced far and wide in the physique of the Russian people of Muscovy, though they owe their main inheritance to the broad-headed, dark, central European stock which has colonized the Russian forest bit by bit from the more {75} open lands of the Polish-Galician platform, moving around the south side of the Pripet Marshes and entering the Muscovite forest via the Dnieper crossing at Kief. An important element in the life of the people has been their association with the mediaeval fur trade of the Hanse, and a study of Russian physique suggests a Nordic sprinkling all over the country, and especially among the landowners; but the villagers are mainly of the broad-headed type, characteristic of the mountain axis of Europe, albeit in the better lands taller than they are in the Alps and Cevennes, and in other ways also more like some types found in the Balkan Peninsula. The social study of the people of Central Russia is probably one of the best clues to the understanding of that stage of our own past, in Western Europe, when settlement in forest-clearings was the most marked feature of development of social organization. The Tsar's Government had in recent years persisted in a policy of modernization of rural arrangements, but, in the words of a supporter of that policy, the villagers fell back upon their old communist schemes as soon as the war crisis made them rely on themselves; it was the one scheme they understood.