The March of Muscovy begins with a strange, exotic narrative of an isolated, primitive Slavic people living alongside an insignificant river on the edge of the great Eurasian forest belt. In his forward, author Harold Lamb writes, “In the beginning, there was only a town on a river, and not a very notable town at that. Upon that town of Moscow certain forces acted, and around it outward events took shape, resulting in migration and colonization across the breadth of the Eurasian continent, and even bridging the sea to the New World. What were those forces? Why did such a mass movement take place? And why did it move the way it did?”

In answering these questions, Lamb provides the background for the larger and more puzzling query: how was the giant Russian nation born, and how did it grow? To address these issues, the author has skillfully called forth the voices of contemporary visitors, merchants, Cossack explorers, diplomats from far away European courts, exiled priests, and the words from among the most acute Russian observers themselves. Lamb has a way of breathing life into the past, of combining the best of scholarly research with an artistic vitality and narrative velocity. The March of Muscovy is the story of the ambitious work that was begun by Ivan the Terrible. And Russia is a work in progress that continues to this day.

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