states which made up pre-modern Russia fell under the control of the Mongols resulting in Russia's being cut off for more than two centuries from the Renaissance and technological and other developments in Europe. Prior-to then, there had been intermittent contact with the West and a lively trade in Russian furs, timber and flax. As early as the third century A.D. the inhabitants of European Russia dealt with European traders and other foreign interlopers, including the Norse Vikings, who plied its rivers and raided its villages. In 862 the Norse prince Ruric founded in Novgorod the beginnings of the first Russian state which evolved into the Slav Kievan Rus. In the thirteenth century, the Swedes and the Teutonic Knights took advantage of Russia's misfortunes with the Mongols, "the Swedes seizing what is now Finland" (Maclean 17). In 1237, Prince Alexander Nevsky repelled Swedish attempts to take Novgorod. In 1480 Muscovy Tsar Ivan the Great expelled the Golden Horde. He and his successors, Vasili III and Ivan the Terrible, expanded the frontiers of the new Russian state in Livonia, Siberia and at the expense of the Tartars in the South. Ivan the Great forced Novgorod to submit to Russian rule in 1478. In the Livonian war (1557-1582) between Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Sweden, "Ivan's . . . attempt to break through to the sea . . . failed disastrously" (Maclean 40). In 1583, "the Swedes took back the strip of territory the Russians had won from them in the Gulf of Finland and . . . annexed Estonia" (Maclean 40). Livonia fell under Swedish control under the Treaty of Tarzin in 1595 with Russia. Sweden further consolidated its hold on the northeastern Baltic coast during the early seventeenth century. According to Anisimov, "Sweden . . . managed from the 1610s to the 1620s to take Russia's Baltic territories (the Karelia district, Ingria, Izhora and Novgorod lands)" (52). Novgorod was returned to Russia under the 1617 T...