Novgorod Republic

The  (Russian: Новгородская республика, romanized: Novgorodskaya respublika) was a medieval state that existed from the 12th to 15th centuries in northern Russia, stretching from the Gulf of Finland in the west to the northern Ural Mountains in the east. Its capital was the city of Novgorod. The republic prospered as the easternmost trading post of the, and its people were much influenced by the culture of the Byzantines, with the Novgorod school of icon painting producing many fine works.

Quotes

 * Moscow scholars continue to ignore Novgorod’s creation of a truly effective Russian democratic state preferring instead to draw their models of such a system from antiquity or Western Europe, thus failing to make clear that Russians can build a democracy because they already have, Viktor Sbitnev says. By their silence, they implicitly accept the Muscovite view that the only kind of Russian state possible is a highly centralized and authoritarian one, despite the fact that in Novgorod the Great for more than 500 years there was more liberalism “than in Ancient Greece and the Venetian Republic taken together,” the Literaturnaya Rossiya commentator continues.
 * , "Moscow Scholars Ignore Novgorod and Its Russian Democratic Tradition at Nation’s Peril, Sbitnyev Says", Window on Eurasia (June 24, 2019)