The idea of expansion towards the East runs through the whole history of Germany like a scarlet thread, and often lends its successive phases a similarity of design and a certain consistency. The history of this expansion is one of the most fascinating epics in European history and it is the Germans themselves who started calling it Drang nach Osten, ranking the results of this drive among the greatest achievements of Germany's national past. Truth to tell, there is an audacity about this Drang, a fierce and ominous dynamism that cannot be denied, for it created a new Germany from the Elbe to the Oder and beyond, deep into the Vistula region. No other Western European nation can boast such a feat, though in the East the Russians accomplished something similar, only on a vaster scale, when they spread out the old Russia from Kiev, Novgorod and Moscow towards the Volga, the Urals and the Siberian steppes as far as Vladivostok. It is, indeed, a dramatic and tragic turning-point in modern European history when these two nations, which developed their grandiose eastward expansion in their own independent spheres, come to a head-on crash in the present bloody and merciless struggle.