The early history of the development of the national music, like that of most popular movements in Russia, has its aspects of oppression and conflict with authority. On the one hand we see a strong natural impulse moving irresistibly towards fulfilment; on the other, a policy of repression amounting at moments to active persecution. That the close of the nineteenth century has witnessed the triumph of Russian music at home and abroad proves how strong was the innate capacity of this people, and how deep their love of this art, since otherwise they could never have finally overcome every hindrance to its development. That from primitive times the Slavs were easily inspired and moved by music, and that they practised it in very early phases of their civilisation, their early historians are all agreed. In the legend of "Sadko, the Rich Merchant" (one of the _byline_ of the Novgorodian Cycle) the hero, a kind of Russian Orpheus, who suffers the fate of Jonah, makes the Sea-king dance to the sound of his _gusslee_, and only stays his hand when the wild gyrations of the marine deity have created such a storm on earth that all the ships on the ocean above are in danger of being wrecked. In the "Epic of the Army of Igor," when the minstrel Boyan sings, he draws "the grey wolf over the fields, and the blue-black eagle from the clouds." In peace and war, music was the joy of the primitive Slavs. In the sixth century the Wends told the Emperor in Constantinople that music was their greatest pleasure, and that on their travels they never carried arms but musical instruments which they made themselves. Procopius, the Byzantine historian, describing a night attack made by the Greeks, A.D. 592, upon the camp of the Slavs, says that the latter were so completely absorbed in the delights of singing that they had forgotten to take any precautionary measures, and were oblivious of the enemy's approach. Early in their history, the Russian Slavs used a considerable number of musical instruments: the _gusslee_, a kind of horizontal harp, furnished with seven or eight strings, and the _svirel_, a reed pipe (chalumet), being the most primitive. Soon, however, we read of the _goudok_, a species of fiddle with three strings, played with a bow; the _dombra_, an instrument of the guitar family, the forerunner of the now fashionable _balalaïka_, the strings of which were vibrated with the fingers; and the _bandoura_, or _kobza_, of the Malo-Russians, which had from eight to twenty strings. Among the primitive wind instruments were the _sourna_, a shrill pipe of Eastern origin, and the _doudka_, the bagpipe, or cornemuse. The drum, the tambourine, and the cymbals were the instruments of percussion chiefly in use.