Rodric Braithwaite - Russia: Myths and Realities

RUSSIA: MYTHS AND REALITIES RODRIC BRAITHWAITE For Sue C ONTENTS In writing about Russian history, you are faced by an immediate problem: what do you call the country you are writing about? It has been known as Rus, Muscovy, Russia, the Russian empire, the Soviet Union, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Russian Republic. Not only Russians live in this country: at various times its inhabitants have included Ukrainians, Poles, Tartars, people from the Baltic, the Caucasus, Central Asia and many other places. Each name has political and historical overtones about which there is passionate disagreement among scholars, politicians, journalists and ordinary people.There is a particular problem about how to name the state based on the medieval city of Kiev. Most Russians call it Kievan Rus and believe that their modern state is its direct descendant. That is something that many Ukrainians vehemently deny. They call the city Kyiv, and insist on the Ukrainian spelling of other proper names too. I have tried to use whichever spelling seemed appropriate to the historical period. But many people will inevitably disagree with me.Part of the book that follows is an attempt to explain why these differences are so important. I apologise for nevertheless finding it simplest to use the words Russia, Russian and Kiev for much of the time.*In transcribing Russian words into English, I have deliberately avoided the standard scholarly systems. I have tried instead to make things as easy as may be for the non-Russian speaker (Russian speakers will be able to work out the original spelling for themselves).The sounds should therefore be spoken as written. Sounds that do not exist in English are represented thus: kh, sounds like ch in loch; zh sounds like ge in rouge. An e at the beginning of a Russian word is usually pronounced ye. Thus Yeltsin, not Eltsin; but Mount Elbruz, not Mount Yelbruz (because in Russian the E in this case is a different letter). While is pronounced yo. Thus Fedor is pronounced Fyodor, and I so spell it and similar names such as Semen/Semyon. Khrushchev and Gorbachev are pronounced Khrushchyov and Gorbachyov, but I have chosen to stay with the more familiar spellings.I use familiar English versions: Moscow, not Moskva; Peter, not Ptr; Alexander, not Aleksandr. But I depart from consistency when that feels best. So, for example, I prefer Mikhail to Michael.People unfamiliar with them find Russian names very hard to remember. Its almost impossible to make it easier, but it may help occasionally if you remember that between the first name and the surname in Russian comes the patronymic, which ends in -ovich/-evich for a man and -ovna/-evna for a woman. One cant distinguish in English between two men both called John Johnson. But Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov is John Johnson son of John, and Ivan Stepanovich Ivanov is John Johnson son of Stephen. It is perfectly proper to refer to someone by his or her first name and patronymic. Thus the last President of the Soviet Union and the first two Presidents of the Russian Republic could be respectfully addressed as Mikhail Sergeevich, Boris Nikolaevich and Vladimir Vladimirovich.I have spelled the last syllable of Russian names, where appropriate, as -sky. I have left Polish names ending in -ski, since that is how they are spelled in Polish.This book is too short to support scholarly notes or a bibliography. I have, however, attributed direct quotations in endnotes. And I have added a very short and personal list of books.Russia is a country with an unpredictable past. Popular Russian saying Everyone has a national narrative, constructed from fact, fact misremembered and myth. People tell themselves stories about their past to give some meaning to the confusions of their present. They rewrite their stories from generation to generation to adapt them to new realities. They omit, forget or wholly reinvent episodes that are uncomfortable or disgraceful.These stories have deep roots. They feed our patriotism. They help us understand who we are, where we come from, where we belong. Our rulers believe them no less than we do. They hold us together in a Nation and inspire us to sacrifice our lives in its name.The British have their Island Story of undeviating progress from Magna Carta towards power, freedom and democracy, punctuated by shining victories over the French: Winston Churchill wrote it up in his grandiloquent A History of the English-Speaking Peoples . The English acquired, exploited and then lost three empires in 600 years. The descendants of their imperial subjects think of them as greedy, brutal, devious and hypocritical. That is not at all how they think of themselves.But the Nation is a slippery thing. Nations are like amoebas. They emerge from the depths of history. They wriggle around. They split by binary fission, recombine in different configurations, absorb their neighbours or are absorbed by them, and then disappear. War, politics, dynastic marriage, popular referendums shift provinces from one side of a frontier to the other. Ordinary people can be born in one country, grow up in another and die in a third, all without leaving their home town. Ask a Frenchman who was born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1869. Ask an Austrian Jew who was born on the border of Slovakia and Hungary in 1917. Ask a Pole who was born before the Second World War in what is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv, which since its foundation as Levhorod in the thirteenth century has been known to its Polish, Austrian, German and Russian rulers as Lww, Lemberg and Lvov.Few of the states in todays Europe existed before the First World War. When Columbus discovered America, Germany, Italy, Russia and even France and Britain were still fragmented and the Polish-Lithuanian Union was on the way to becoming the largest state in Europe.The idea of Europe is itself largely an artificial construction, an attempt to bring under one roof a collection of countries at the western end of the Euro-Asian land mass, each very different from the others, ranging from Iceland to Romania, from Norway to Greece, from Spain to Estonia, loosely bound together by a tradition of Christianity and a murderous record of domestic persecution, bloody rebellion and violent religious conflict at home, endless war for power and loot, genocide, slavery and imperial brutality abroad.By those depressing standards Russians have as good a claim to be European as anyone else. Partly because of its huge extent eastwards into Asia, both Russians and foreigners nevertheless wonder whether Russia is part of Europe at all. Many of their immediate neighbours consider them Asiatic barbarians, and point angrily to the sufferings that the Russians have inflicted on them over the centuries. Napoleon was right, they think, when he allegedly said, Scratch a Russian and youll find a Tartar.More than a thousand years ago a people arose on the territory of todays Russia whose origins are disputed. They adopted the Orthodox version of Christianity from Byzantium, thus irrevocably distinguishing themselves from those elsewhere in Europe who chose Roman Catholicism. They developed their own Slavonic language. They created Kievan Rus, which for a while was the largest and one of the most sophisticated, if also one of the most ramshackle, states in Europe. It is from here that todays Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians trace their origins.But Kievan Rus was invaded and destroyed in the thirteenth century by the Mongols. Its splintered fragments were reassembled over the following centuries under the name of Muscovy by the hitherto insignificant northern city of Moscow. The new state was struck down by internal strife, economic disaster and Polish invasion. It recovered, and Peter the Great and his successors transformed it into an imperial Great Power, a dominant force in European politics. In the nineteenth century Russia helped to define the nature of modern European culture.Russias existence was again seriously challenged by Napoleon, by the Germans and as a result of the wounds the Russians inflicted on themselves in the twentieth century. Stalin put Russia back on the map, transformed the economy and won the war against Germany, all at a horrendous human cost. Then in 1991 the empire flew apart. Russia collapsed again into poverty, incoherence and international irrelevance. For many Russians it was Vladimir Putin, whom they elected president in 2000, who saved them from unbearable humiliation and restored Russia to something like its rightful place in the world.Edward Gibbon said that History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. Russians, like the rest of us, prefer to believe that their history has progressed in a straight and positive line. They explain away troubling events such as the brutal reigns of Ivan the Terrible or Stalin as necessary stages on the path to greatness.The Russians are fascinating, ingenious, creative, sentimental, warm-hearted, generous, obstinately courageous, endlessly tough, often devious, brutal and ruthless. Ordinary Russians firmly believe that they are warmer-hearted than others, more loyal to their friends, more willing to sacrifice themselves for the common good, more devoted to the fundamental truths of life. They give the credit to the Russian soul, as broad and all-embracing as the Russian land itself. Their passionate sense of Russias greatness is paradoxically undermined by an underlying and corrosive pessimism. And it is tempered by resentment that their country is insufficiently understood and respected by foreigners.Russian reality is coloured by the disconcerting and deeply rooted phenomenon of vranyo. This is akin to the Irish blarney, but lacks the overtone of roguish charm. Individuals, officials, governments tell lies if they believe it serves their interests, or those of their bosses, their organisation or the state. They were doing it in the sixteenth century, when English traders advised their colleagues to deal with Russians only in writing, For they bee subtill people, and do not alwaies speake the trueth, and think other men to be like themselves. They are doing it today. They are little concerned if their interlocutor is aware that they are lying, though that does not stop Russian governments from punishing those who challenge their veracity.Ordinary Russians may find it easier to believe what their government says. But there are limits. Disgust with the entangling lie drives many of the characters in Dostoevskys novels to extravagant confession. The systematic mendacity of Soviet officials and ideologists was a constant theme of dissident writers such as Alexander Solzhenistyn. As repugnance grew among ordinary people too, it helped to bring down the Soviet regime.Churchill remarked that Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. That has become an excuse for intellectual laziness. But understanding Russia is a challenge, and you have to start by trying to disentangle the facts from the myths created both by the Russians themselves and by those who dislike them. The Encyclopdia Britannica described Russia in 1782 as a very large and powerful kingdom of Europe, governed by a complete Some argue that there was never anything as coherent as a Russian national state. Most Russians, though, seem to have little doubt. Whatever is meant by a nation, they believe that theirs is exceptional, chosen by God or History to bring enlightenment to a benighted world. This Messianic sense of mission was born out of Orthodoxy in medieval Muscovy and has survived ever since. It was promoted by Dostoevsky and a host of others in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the Bolsheviks shared the sense of mission, although for them God was replaced by History working its way through the instrument of Communism. But their Brave New World began to look suspiciously like the old Russian empire under another name.Russians and those who wish them well can be forgiven for despairing at the disasters they so regularly inflict on others and on themselves. After the Soviet collapse they returned to the idea that modern Russia had an exclusive claim to the inheritance of the Orthodox state of Kievan Rus. Vladimir Putin was consumed by the idea that our great common misfortune and tragedy was the division since 1991 between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what he called essentially the same historical and spiritual space. The obsession fuelled his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.*A fascination with Russia and its people has occupied me for much of my life. I was there as the Soviet Union collapsed. That colours some of the judgements that follow in this short and, I hope, measured history.Even before the Berlin Wall came down it seemed as if Ukraines desire for independence might trigger the disintegration of the Soviet Union. By the early 1990s neither a war between Russia and Ukraine nor the possibility that the Russian democratic experiment would fail as disastrously as Germanys Weimar Republic seemed beyond imagination.Some of my other judgements were sadly wrong. Russia has not yet lost its imperial itch. Putins brutal invasion of Ukraine has postponed for many decades the prospect that Russia will become the modern democratic state at peace with its neighbours which so many courageous Russians had fought so hard to create.But no people should ever be written off as beyond redemption. I hang on to the golden image of the Firebird, which flits through the dark forests of Russian folklore to symbolise the hope that Russia will see better days. Notes Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1989), vol. 1, Chapter 3. George Kennans The Marquis de Custine and His Russia in 1839 (London, 1972) is a necessary corrective to Custine himself. Are you Christians or some sort of Catholics? Elderly Russian village lady, 1991 In 1952 Vladimirs grandmother had him baptised into the Orthodox Christian faith even though Stalin was still alive, and the Soviet Union was still the first atheist state in history. As President Vladimir Putin half a century later, that baby regularly attended the great ceremonies of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was reverting to an ancient tradition. The Lesson of Byzantium More than a thousand years ago, Russians chose Orthodox Christianity in preference to Catholicism. That choice profoundly affected their history and still dramatises the differences between Russia and the rest of Christian Europe.When the Soviet Union collapsed, lifelong Communists discovered that they had been believers all along. By 2008 nearly three-quarters of adult Russians identified themselves as Orthodox Christians. Whether their faith and that of their president was genuine, whatever that might mean, was not the point. It was a matter not of faith but of identity. Orthodox Christianity was once more a central factor in Russian life and politics. Orthodox Christianity replaced Communism as the professed ideology of the Russian armed forces. In 2020 the armed forces got their own ornate cathedral in Moscow. Orthodox priests routinely sprinkled new missiles with holy water and in 2022 the Patriarch blessed the soldiers invading Ukraine.Rumour said that Putin had a spiritual confessor, Father Tikhon Shevkunov, the head of the Sretensky Monastery, just up the road from the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the secret police, the KGB, for which Putin once worked. In 2008 Shevkunov produced a television film entitled Fall of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium , about the sacking of Byzantium, the capital of Orthodox Christendom, by a motley gang of Crusaders in 1204. Only by commandeering Byzantiums material and intellectual riches, claimed Shevkunov, could Catholic Europe become civilised.Shevkunov comes to a forceful conclusion: The vengeful hatred of the West towards Byzantium and its heirs continues to this day. [] Without understanding this shocking, but undoubted, fact, we risk not understanding not only the history of long gone days but also the history of the twentieth and even the twenty-first century.To Western ears that sounds extreme. For many Russians it nevertheless reflects an emotional and historical reality. What happened in Byzantium still affects their view of the world. Christianity Divided Christianity was divided from the beginning. Christs followers soon split between St Paul, who wanted to carry the Gospel to the outside world, and those who believed it should be reserved to the Jews, among whom it was first propounded.Christs favourite disciple, Peter, was the first bishop of Rome. His successors claimed to be the guardians of the truth he had received from Christ himself, and therefore entitled to act as the spiritual head of all Christians.But the Emperor Constantine the Great transferred his capital from Rome to the Greek city of Byzantium in 324, and renamed it Constantinople after himself. It became the Christian as well as the imperial capital. Its inhabitants had no doubt that theirs was the only truly Orthodox faith. For them the Roman Church was uncultured and uncivilised, barbarians almost without writing, altogether illiterate, as one Byzantine historian put it in the twelfth century.The split widened. In the name of the same loving God, all sides anathematised, persecuted and often killed those they considered heretics. All over Christendom Church and state competed for authority. Disputes over doctrine acted as a surrogate for conflicts over power. Byzantine emperors claimed to rule by divine right. So did European kings such as Charles I of England and Louis XIV of France. The Papacy, for centuries a powerful secular state itself, never hesitated to meddle in the affairs of those around it. Those who escaped from the grip of the pope fell into that of their local monarch. Religious conflict soaked Europe in blood until the late seventeenth century. But with the Enlightenment scepticism grew, until by the twentieth century many Europeans believed that religion was a declining force that would eventually disappear.That belief was, to put it mildly, premature. Although that quintessential product of the Enlightenment, the American constitution, separates Church and state, no American politician dares openly disbelieve in God. In 2011, 60 per cent of the British population still called themselves Christian. Militant Islam once again began to play a major part in national and international politics.In Eastern Europe the Roman Catholic Church helped oppressed peoples preserve their identity under Communism. Orthodoxy helped the Russians to survive occupation by the Mongols, the oppressions of the tsars, the relentless atheistic brainwashing of the Bolsheviks and Stalins bloody repression.The Orthodox connection runs like a thread through Russian history. Sometimes the Church has been in collusion with the secular power. Sometimes it has been in violent conflict. Sometimes it has been almost lost to sight. But from the tenth century, when Prince Vladimir of Kiev chose to be baptised, to the twenty-first, when President Putin embraced it for his own purposes, the Church has always been present. Byzantium The Byzantine empire was the longest-lived in history. It lasted for twice as long as the Roman empire which preceded it, and much longer than the Ottoman empire which replaced it. A thousand years ago the city of Rome was ten times smaller than Constantinople. Its churches could not compete in grandeur with Hagia Sofia. The Roman nobility was still camping in palaces carved out of the imperial ruins. Byzantium was the centre of the Christian world for art, for literature and law, for military and diplomatic skill.Byzantium has had a bad press. The word Byzantine conjures up a picture of decadence, duplicity, useless ceremony and tortuous bureaucracy. The luminaries of the Enlightenment saw Byzantium as the negation of everything they believed in. Voltaire condemned it as a disgrace for the human mind. Edward Gibbon assailed the crooked and malignant Byzantine Greeks for their dead uniformity of abject vices, which are neither softened by the weakness of humanity, nor animated by the vigour of memorable crimes. One Victorian pundit considered that Byzantium constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed.Byzantiums institutional arrangements were far from perfect. It never created an orderly principle of succession. Emperors came to power as the result of palace or military intrigue, and were confirmed by popular acclamation, then surrounded by a deliberately manufactured but stultifying court procedure designed to enhance their authority and grandeur.But it worked. Byzantium was efficiently run by competent bureaucrats, underpinned by a reliable system of taxation. Its legal system, codified by the Emperor Justinian, remains the basis for most legal systems in the West. It encouraged foreign trade: its coins became the common international currency. Intelligent diplomacy and well-organised force preserved it from external enemies. Women played a significant role in its politics and even in the settlement of theological disputes. The Church drew on the authority of deeply pious and thoughtful men. The Catholic St Thomas Aquinas claimed to read the writings of the Orthodox St John of Damascus every day.For a thousand years Byzantium was the only stable long-term state in Europe. Until its fall it stood as a barrier against Persians, Arabs and Turks, who were pressing on Europes eastern and southern borders. Without that protection, some think, among the Orthodox, the western Europeans would never have been able to develop their own political and economic institutions. Some modern scholars also believe that the explosion of literary creativity in Byzantium in the eleventh century did indeed prefigure the Renaissance in the West.The conflict between the two versions of Christianity culminated in the Great Schism of 1054. There were two main issues. The first was a doctrinal dispute about the nature of the Trinity. Roughly speaking, the Orthodox believed in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father; the Romans believed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, in Latin filioque . The mutual hatred generated by these obscurities is hard for an outsider to comprehend. It still divides Orthodox from Catholics.The second issue was political. Both sides deplored the split. But who was to be the supreme authority in a reunified Church? The Westerners had no doubt that it should be the pope of Rome, St Peters successor. The Orthodox saw no reason to relinquish authority to a man they were inclined to regard as a heretic.At the beginning of the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III called a new Crusade, the Fourth. The Venetians financed it, primarily to promote their commercial interests in the eastern Mediterranean. On the way to the Holy Land the Crusaders stopped off in Constantinople, where they hoped to install their own candidate as emperor. The townspeople murdered him instead. In revenge the disorderly, brutal and illiterate Crusader soldiery stormed the city in April 1204, massacred its inhabitants, desecrated its churches, burned down its great library and carted off its treasures. Among those who died defending the city were the Danes and Englishmen of the Emperors Varangian Guard.The victors set up their own Latin empire on the ruins. The Venetians profited even more than they had hoped. Among the loot they took home were the four bronze horses which still adorn St Marks Basilica.This is the atrocity commemorated by Father Shevkunov in his documentary. In the West it is barely remembered. Among the Orthodox it has never been forgotten.The Latin empire did not long survive: the Byzantines recovered their city in 1261. Their empire lasted for nearly 200 more years thereafter. But it had been fatally weakened in its attempts to defend its diminishing territories against the remorseless depredations of the advancing Turks. By 1365 Byzantium was isolated except by sea. Its Asiatic suburbs were already in Turkish hands.Some of Byzantiums leaders concluded that they would have to make the ultimate compromise: to get The great Orthodox monastery of Mount Athos had no doubt and chose the Sultan.In 1439 the pope called a council in Florence to debate the issues of doctrine, papal authority and union. The Byzantine delegation was led by the Emperor, and included the frail patriarch Joseph II of Constantinople, and the more pliable bishops. It was undisciplined, fractious and poverty-stricken. Outmanoeuvred, with the Turks drawing closer, the delegation agreed to reunification on Roman terms. They were repudiated on their return to Constantinople. One of them, Isidor the Metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus, tried to proclaim the union in the Kremlin. He was imprisoned by the furious grand prince but escaped to Rome, where he converted to Catholicism.The desperate Emperor sent one ambassador after another to plead for help from the pope, from Venice and Genoa, from the monarchs of the West. In his extremity he and many of his senior advisers finally accepted the demands of the Catholics, gambling that the West would help them, and that their people would acquiesce.The gamble failed on both counts. The clergy and people of Byzantium continued to reject any compromise with Rome. The pope and Venice offered mere promises. France, England and Spain were silent. Genoa did send a tiny but invaluable contingent of 700 mercenaries under an experienced commander, Giovanni Giustiniani.Mehmet II, the young Ottoman Sultan only twenty-one years old began his siege in April 1453. There were 50,000 or fewer people inside the city. Apart from Giustiniani and his men, fewer than 7,000 of them were capable of bearing arms, and most of them were untrained. This small band had to defend the citys fourteen miles of wall against an Ottoman army of more than 80,000.After forty days of bombardment the end came on the night of 29 May 1453, as the people of the city interceded with their God in the great church of Hagia Sofia. Greeks and Italians, Orthodox and Catholic, supporters of union and its bitterest opponents, all prayed together without regard for the niceties of doctrine. The first attacks were repulsed. But when Giustiniani was wounded and word got out that the Turks were over the walls, many of the defenders abandoned their positions to protect their families. The Emperor plunged into the thick of the fighting. He was never seen again.The Sultan had promised his soldiers three days of plunder. When he arrived to survey his conquest, he found it in ruins. He is said to have been moved to tears. He did not change its name. The city continued to be called Constantinople until Turkish nationalists renamed it in 1925. Ironically they gave it the name by which it had been colloquially known to the defeated Greeks eis ten polin , into the City, Istanbul.The West showed few pangs of conscience. They took the convenient view that Constantinople had been divinely punished for its failure to accept the authority of That view still underlies Western prejudices about the Orthodox Church.For the Orthodox world, including the Russians, the fall of Byzantium was a lasting tragedy. But for the Russians the tragedy was also a historic opportunity: they now commanded the only Orthodox state of any substance. Kievan Rus The Byzantine empire had already lived out nearly more than half its life when a new people emerged to found what became its eventual successor.Some time in the eighth century the evidence is sparse and historians disagree on what it means Vikings (or Varangians) from Sweden began to establish themselves in what is now north-west Russia, a land hitherto inhabited by Finns. They were called, or called themselves, the Rus, a name said to be derived from an Old Norse word for the men who row. They set themselves up in a trading post called Staraya Ladoga which is securely dated by dendrochronology to 753. According to the chronicles, their legendary leader Ryurik went on to found what became the Northern city of Novgorod.About the same time people called Slavs, small groups of raiders who had been a thorn in the flesh of Byzantium, began to move north into the same area. An early Russian chronicle says that these people so despaired of their ability to manage their own affairs that they invited the Varangians to help them restore order: Our land is large and rich, but there is no order in it. The phrase does not appear in the chronicle until well over two centuries after the event. Many Russians regard it as an undocumented and irritating slur on their ability to look after themselves. That does not stop them quoting it whenever Russian affairs take a lurch for the worse.Whatever the truth, the Slavs increasingly began to call themselves Rus, the Varangians began to adopt the language of the Slavs and it is from those times that Russians date their history. But these diverse peoples did not become one tribe, as Catherine the Great was later to claim. Their ethnic diversity lay at the origin of that differentiation between Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians which marked their affairs right up to the twenty-first century.The Varangians were not content to remain cooped up in the north. They moved on down the great Russian rivers, the Volga, the Don and the Dnepr, to trade fur, wax, honey and slaves for fine fabrics, jewellery, glass, wine and olive oil. The Dnepr, which led directly to the Black Sea, was barred in places by impassable rapids. The Varangians circumvented them to settle on the lower reaches of the river. There Ryurik is supposed to have established the trading post that by the ninth century had become Kiev (or Kyiv, as Ukrainians call it), the capital of an increasingly extensive but loosely ordered state.By 860 Kievs predatory rulers were sufficiently sure of themselves to mount a raid on Constantinople itself. The city was saved by the intervention of the Mother of God. From then on Constantinople set out to develop a solid relationship with the new power to the north. The two signed agreements on trade and military assistance, though periods of cooperation were still interspersed with bouts of armed hostility. The Rus Become Christian At the end of the tenth century the Rus adopted Christianity: an event, one enthusiastic scholar maintains, comparable to the rise of Islam or the discovery of America.Around the beginning of the tenth century Olga, probably from Pskov in northern Rus, married Igor, the son or grandson of Ryurik: the facts are, typically, obscure. When Igor was killed in 945 in a minor skirmish, Olga obliterated the perpetrators in an ingeniously brutal campaign, and took over as regent for her young son Sviatoslav. She was an effective reformer and successfully defended Kiev against the perpetual plague of nomadic raiders from the eastern steppes.Christianity was already spreading northwards. There was a church in Kiev when Igor died, and some of his warriors were Christian, though he himself remained a pagan. Some time in the 950s, Olga visited Constantinople and was baptised into the Byzantine Church. Six centuries after her death in 969 the Orthodox Church proclaimed Olga a saint equal to the apostles, one of only five women so honoured.Her son Sviatoslav remained a determined pagan. He destroyed Olgas new churches and re-erected the pagan shrines. He was a formidable warrior. But when he attempted to conquer Bulgaria from the Byzantines, he was defeated and treacherously murdered by his nomadic allies. His son Yaropolk ruled for eight years and was killed in his turn by his illegitimate brother Vladimir, who had been running Novgorod on behalf of his father.Vladimir was one of Kievs greatest rulers. It was he who adopted Christianity as Kievs state religion, perhaps in 988: once again the date is uncertain. The chronicles say that in his search for a suitable religion he rejected Islam because it prohibited alcohol and Judaism because the Jews had been abandoned by God after losing Jerusalem. But his envoys told him that the rituals in Constantinople were so impressive that it seemed as if God himself dwelled among the people. So he adopted Orthodox Christianity as his grandmother had before him.Thus the legend. It is more likely that his motives were political. He may have concluded, as other contemporary rulers were doing, that the imposition of a single religion on his heterogeneous subjects would help to unify and discipline them. The Byzantine empire was by far the most powerful and sophisticated power in his neighbourhood. An alliance with Byzantium made more geographical, commercial and military sense than an alliance with Catholics or Muslims.It also made sense for the Byzantines. The Emperor Basil was so anxious to turn Kiev into an ally against his other foreign enemies that he offered Vladimir his sister Anna in marriage, something no emperor had ever before conceded to a foreigner. In return Vladimir converted to Christianity and supplied 6,000 soldiers to help Basil suppress a rebellion. The soldiers remained as an important and well-paid component of the Byzantine army. Some served in the Emperors Varangian Guard, which later recruited Englishmen exiled after the Norman Conquest. This reliance on mercenaries fuelled Western contempt for Greek military capacity: Edward Gibbon is noisy on the subject.According to the chronicle, Vladimir was baptised in 988 in Kherson, in Crimea, a colony of the Greeks in ancient times. On his return to Kiev, he ordered his subjects to follow suit. The people of Kiev accepted with reasonable grace. In the north, the people of Novgorod had to be converted by force. Vladimir added a ring of defensive fortifications around Kiev to keep out the nomads. He built the first stone church there, the Church of the Tithe. He founded a library, imported teachers from Byzantium to promote literacy, minted gold and silver coins, set up charitable projects and encouraged the spread of literacy. He thus created one of the largest and most sophisticated European states of the day. Known as a fornicator immensus et crudelis , with many wives and many concubines, he was nevertheless later sanctified by the Orthodox Church. Ukrainians called him Volodymyr, and claimed him for their own.Kievan Rus was not a coherent state but a collection of princely domains bound by loyalty to the Grand Prince of Kiev, who kept it together by appointing his sons, each accompanied by a small military force, a personal druzhina , to represent him in towns across the country. These princelings enforced the law, collected tribute from the locals, defended them from raiders and ensured that they accepted Christianity from the churchmen serving in the princely entourage. There were princedoms in Smolensk, Rostov and Polotsk in the north and Chernigov, Pereiaslavl and Vladimir-Volhynia in the south, all still flourishing today.Novgorod was in a special position. A trading post even before Kiev, it was the northern anchor of the route through Kiev to Constantinople. It traded busily with the members of the Hanseatic League along the Baltic coast. It acted as a funnel for the lucrative fur trade from the forests and territories to its north and east, over which it exercised a loose control that made it nominally one of the largest states in medieval Europe. The illuminating hoard of business and personal correspondence written on birch bark and preserved in Novgorods clay soil is almost the only exception to the lack of anything in the medieval Russian historical record to match the copious records of everyday life elsewhere in Europe.In the twelfth century Novgorod still had a prince from the Ryurik dynasty, but he had to negotiate the terms of his tenure with the merchants who effectively ran the city. He had no right to raise taxes: instead he received a gift for performing his duties. The citys popular assembly, the veche , elected its mayor, the posadnik , and chose its own archbishop, subject to confirmation by the Church. This comparative independence was brutally terminated in the fifteenth century by the increasingly powerful rulers of Muscovy, who had come to see it as a provocation.Kievs ramshackle political system had an obvious flaw. Its rulers never managed to produce an orderly and durable system of succession, despite intermittent attempts to establish agreed rules. Its history was punctuated by coups, assassinations and fratricidal warfare. Each princeling could hope that, if he played his cards right, he might end up as Grand Prince of Kiev. The greater landlords, collectively known as boyars, resembled the feudal lords of kingdoms further to the west. They too derived their power from land and the people who lived on it. Until Peter the Great more or less settled the matter, much of Russias domestic history is about the determination of successive rulers to assert their authority over the boyars, whose support and advice they could nevertheless hardly do without.Vladimirs death in 1015 was followed by a murderous struggle between his numerous sons. Two of the casualties were Boris, who may have been favoured by Vladimir to replace him, and his younger brother Gleb. The story is that they refused to joined in the fratricidal bloodletting, and were murdered by their elder brother Sviatopolk, the Accursed. Both were canonised as martyrs, the first in a long line of Russian Orthodox saints. But it was Yaroslav, another brother of Sviatopolk, who emerged victorious from the bloodbath.Yaroslav too had served as prince in Novgorod in the north, and founded a city on the Volga which he named after himself. His wife was from Sweden, and he was perhaps the last of the Rus princes who retained a sense of the relationship with Scandinavia. Yaroslav proved a worthy successor to Vladimir. He campaigned successfully against the nomads. He married his son to a Byzantine princess. He promulgated Kievs first code of law, the Russkaya Pravda . He built the magnificent cathedral in Kiev named after Hagia Sofia in Constantinople. His son founded Kievs Monastery of the Caves, which became a centre of Orthodox scholarship, the first of the great monasteries that spread the length and breadth of Kievan Rus over the next two centuries, and carried with them the secular power of the state as well as the spiritual power of the Church.Under Yaroslav, Kiev became a sought-after partner for the rest of Europe. His daughter Anna married Henry I of France. Unlike him, she could read and sign her name, and found France a barbarous and ugly country where the customs were revolting. His second daughter, Elizaveta, married Harald Hardrada of Norway, who had served in the Varangian Guard, and was killed trying to take the English crown from Harold of England just before Harold marched off to lose the Battle of Hastings. A third daughter, Anastasia, married King Andrew of Hungary. Yaroslavs granddaughter Eupraxia married Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, but later divorced him, allegedly because of his bizarre sexual practices.For his achievements Yaroslav became known to history as the Wise. Three of his sons became rulers of Kiev. But his most distinguished successor was his grandson, Vladimir Monomakh, who founded the northern city of Vladimir, a future capital of Russia. He too had many connections with the outside world: his mother was a Byzantine princess, his first wife may have been a daughter of Harold of England and his second was another Byzantine princess.By the time Monomakh died in 1125, Kievan Rus was one of the largest polities in Europe, stretching at its widest extent from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south, and from the Vistula in todays Poland in the west to the upper reaches of the Volga in the east. Its princes built extensively across the whole of Rus stone cathedrals, monasteries and churches, palaces, sophisticated fortifications. Kiev was a major European city, pious, prosperous and increasingly literate, with a magnificent architectural ensemble that still dominates its skyline. Novgorod became increasingly cosmopolitan as traders flocked to it from Scandinavia, Germany and the east and set up their own quarters within the city.Several of Russias most beautiful churches were built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In Vladimir they rivalled, perhaps deliberately, the buildings in Kiev itself. Some of the churches in Novgorod were built by wealthy merchants rather than princes. The style of all these churches originated in Byzantium, but it evolved into something distinctively Russian. They were gloriously illuminated by icons and frescos also based on Byzantine formulas. The icon painters worked anonymously, but the names of a few survived: Theofan the Greek, Dionisi, Daniil Cherny, Andrei Rublev. Many icons were destroyed or sold abroad by the Bolsheviks after the revolution. But their hold on the Russian imagination was so strong that Stalin is said to have allowed the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God to be brought out to protect Moscow from the approaching Germans in 1941.Kievs size was also its weakness. Its borders were ill defined and hard to protect. It was always vulnerable to raiding nomads from the eastern steppe, who robbed merchants on their way down the rivers, sacked and looted outlying villages and took their people as slaves. For two centuries the most formidable of these raiders were the Pechenegs, who sometimes attacked Kiev itself and sometimes allied themselves with Kiev against Byzantium. They were decisively defeated by Yaroslav in 1036. They were succeeded by their distant relatives the Polovtsy, who raided Rus, Poland, Hungary and Lithuania for the next two centuries. Russian princes allied themselves with the Polovtsy against domestic and foreign enemies: that ambiguous relationship drives the story behind Borodins opera Prince Igor . A combined force of Russians and Polovtsy was soundly defeated by the Mongols in 1223, and the Polovtsy began to fade from history thereafter.The raiders were sometimes held in check by the Khazars, who for three centuries dominated an area from the middle Volga to the Caucasus, astride the trade route between Europe and Asia. Little is known of their origins, organisation, language or beliefs. One disputed theory is that the Khazars converted to Judaism in the ninth century, migrated westwards when their empire fell apart and became the ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jewish population of Eastern Europe. For many years the Varangians dealt with them profitably as they ventured southward along the great rivers. By the tenth century the Khazars power was crumbling. In 965 Sviatoslav I of Kiev captured their capital and destroyed their state.Another power on the river routes were the Bulgars, Turkic nomads who established their capital, Bolgar, at the end of the seventh century on the Volga near the modern city of Kazan. Bolgar too was a trading centre. After the Bulgars converted to Islam it became a major city of the Islamic world until, after a long decline, it was overwhelmed by the Mongols.A second group of Bulgars crossed the Danube into south-east Europe. They too established a powerful state, but unlike their cousins they converted to Christianity and adopted a version of the Slav language. Their relationship with their Byzantine neighbours was mixed. They assisted them against the Arabs, but themselves besieged Constantinople unsuccessfully. In 1018 they were finally crushed by the Byzantine Emperor Basil II. For this achievement Basil the Bulgarslayer remains popular among modern Greeks.A dispute over language was one reason why the Bulgars adopted Orthodoxy rather than Catholicism. The Roman Church insisted that Christians should worship only in Latin, Hebrew or, at a pinch, Greek. The Orthodox believed that people should be allowed to praise God in their own language, whether it was Greek, Latin, Georgian, Armenian or Slav. The Emperor sent two young monks, Cyril and Methodius, to persuade Rome to allow the use of Slavonic in the liturgy. They failed, but their lasting contribution was to devise an alphabet derived from Greek, much better adapted to Slav languages than the Latin alphabet. Versions of their Cyrillic alphabet are still used by Orthodox Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians, Bulgarians and Macedonians. That too helped to consolidate the divide between Orthodoxy and the West.Disaster struck Kiev in 1242, when it was overwhelmed by the Mongols, the last and by far the most formidable of the successive waves of predatory horsemen from the east. Kievan Rus ceased to exist as a political organisation. The principalities of Galicia and Volhynia struggled on until they succumbed to the Poles and the Hungarians. An independent state based on Kiev did not re-emerge until 1918.But in the north-east of what had been Kievan Rus the principalities under princes from the Ryurik dynasty preserved their identity as a new power slowly emerged from the ruins, the state of Muscovy, still profoundly Orthodox, even more divided from the rest of Europe by the experience of Mongol domination. Notes The Byzantine historian Nicetas, quoted in Gibbon, Decline and Fall , vol. 7, p. 188n. Gibbon, Decline and Fall , vol. 9, Chapter 48; W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals (London, 1869). J. J. Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium (London, 1998), p. 21. Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity (London, 2010), p. 471. Mark Whittow, The Making of Byzantium, 6001025 (Berkeley, CA, 1996), pp. 239, 242. For our sins unknown heathens arrived in the summer of that year. They are called Tartars, but no one knew their origin or whence they came, or what religion they practised. That is known only to God, and perhaps to wise men learned in books. A Russian chronicler Moving with tireless speed on their wiry ponies, the Mongols burst without warning on Europe in 1223. Twenty years later they shattered Kievan Rus to pieces. For more than two centuries the surviving princedoms paid them tribute. Many Russians and many of their foreign detractors believe that the Mongol Yoke was crucial in shaping the Russian character and Russias political institutions. They exaggerate. Who Were They? Nomadic and tribal, the Mongols had only recently been forged into one of the most formidable fighting forces the world has ever seen, by a young man who in 1206 was proclaimed Genghis Khan, the Great Khan. In two centuries they extended their empire from China and the Sea of Japan to India, Burma and Vietnam, westwards to Europe and south to Persia, the Caucasus, the Levant. They provided China with a new dynasty. No other armies in history have won so many battles or conquered so much territory. But for them the main aim of empire was not occupation but loot and then trade. While they were in charge, merchants could travel safely from Europe to the Pacific.People also called them Tatars or Tartars, after one of the prominent Mongol tribes, and their descendants who remained in Crimea and the lands around what became the capital of the Golden Horde are still so called. For the fearful Europeans the Tartars were demons out of Tartarus, as the Romans had called Hell. In Russia fear of the Mongols was perpetuated in folklore and popular sayings. Children were told that the Tartars would get them if they didnt behave.Not all views of the Mongols were negative, even at the time. A contemporary English monk, Roger Bacon, believed that the Mongols owed their success to science rather than to martial superiority. Geoffrey Chaucer called Genghis Khan a noble king, excellent in everything. Edward Gibbon preferred their judicial methods to those of the Inquisition. Modern historians portray Genghis Khan and his people as more sophisticated and less bloodthirsty than their reputation. Imposing the Yoke Even though its proportions were overwhelming, the first Mongol incursion into Europe was little more than an armed raid.The Polovtsy warned their old enemies the Russians what was coming: These terrible strangers have taken our country, and tomorrow they will take yours if you do not come and help us. But the Russians were ill prepared to resist.Kiev was still one of the largest states in Europe, but by now its poorly designed system of inheritance had led to great confusion. The authority of the Grand Prince over the principalities in the north had all but frayed away. The armies of Kievan Rus were a mixture of heavily armed cavalrymen from the nobility and peasant conscripts barely armed and trained. The ambitious stood on their honour and quarrelled about who was to command. These forces may have been adequate to confront similar armies from eastern Europe. They were ill adapted to conduct an orderly battle against a disciplined foe.The Mongol armies relied on intense training, iron discipline, meticulous supply and a willingness to delegate command. They were masters of tactics, and of strategy on the broadest scale. Their mounted archers manoeuvred with great flexibility, not moving in for the kill until their foes had sustained sufficient losses. They could operate over long distances and many days without a cumbersome supply train. They employed Chinese doctors to tend their wounded, and Chinese siege technology and artillery when they encountered fortified towns as they campaigned beyond the steppe. They were careful to spare their own men. They made up their losses by conscripting the defeated and sending them into the forefront of the battle. When they came up against resistance, their reaction was deliberately terrifying. They destroyed cities and villages until nothing was left but smoking ruins and rotting corpses. It worked. Their reputation preceded them, and their enemies often gave up without a fight.On hearing of the approach of these hitherto unknown tribesmen in 1223, the Russians put together a substantial but motley army of some 20,000 soldiers, composed of contingents from the Russian princedoms jointly commanded by Mstislav the Bold of Galich and Mstislav III of Kiev, backed by a contingent of Polovtsy under Khan Kotyan, the Christianised father-in-law of Mstislav the Bold.The Russians began by making a great and foolish error. The Mongols sent ambassadors to say that their quarrel was not with them but with the Polovtsy. Instead of standing aside, the Russians killed the envoys. They thus let themselves in for a fight to the death.The Mongols withdrew eastwards, leaving behind a rearguard as bait, a standard tactic: the feigned retreat. The Russians fell for it. They scattered the rearguard and pursued the main Mongol force for several days. Their armies had become uncoordinated and dispersed when the Mongols turned to stand their ground on the River Kalka, in what is now Eastern Ukraine. Mstislav the Bold attacked across the river without waiting for his allies, and was defeated. He made an inglorious escape, followed by the Polovtsy, and destroyed the bridge behind him. Mstislav of Kiev was trapped and surrounded. His soldiers and he himself were slaughtered. The chroniclers say twelve Russian princes were killed, and that only one in ten of the Russian soldiers returned home. By comparison the Mongol losses were minimal.Their whole campaign had been little more than a reconnaissance in force, which served to prepare for a more ambitious attack, aimed at conquering the whole of Europe. They returned in the winter of 1237, led by Genghis Khans brilliant grandson Batu.The Russian armies were again bamboozled by the Mongols mastery of military deception and were defeated piecemeal. The Mongols first stormed Ryazan and massacred the inhabitants. They then moved on Vladimir, whose Grand Prince, Yuri II, left to gather an army. His wife and family remained behind, to die in the blazing cathedral when the Mongols stormed the city. When Yuri returned too late his force was surrounded by the Mongols on the River Sit and massacred. Yuri died with three of his sons and two of his nephews.Novgorod and Pskov prudently surrendered before the Mongols reached them. Yaroslavl, Rostov and Tver survived unscathed. But the battle on the River Sit marked the end of unified resistance to the Mongols in the Russian north-east.Kievs turn came in 1242. Batu summoned the city to submit. Mikhail of Chernigov, the Grand Prince, executed his envoys and fled. None of those who had vied with him to become the Grand Prince of Kiev stayed to assume its defence. The Mongols sacked the city and massacred its inhabitants. Six years later, according to the Popes envoy to the Mongol Khan, there was still nothing to see but ruined buildings and the skulls and bones of dead men.Now Batu forced the submission of the south-western princedoms of Galicia and Volhynia, and brushed aside the armies of Poland, Germany and Hungary. The Mongols were poised to sweep right across the continent. Instead they withdrew to their homeland. The reasons are debated. The Great Khan Ogadei, the successor of Genghis Khan, had died in his capital of Karakorum, and the generals were called back to settle the succession. They may have been deterred by the absence in more heavily populated Europe of the broad steppeland pastures they needed to fuel their horse armies. Or they may have decided that adding Europe to their conquests was beyond their administrative capacities. For whatever reason, Europe was saved.But not all the Mongols went home. Batu remained at Sarai, on the Volga. His force became known as the Golden Horde, and eventually adopted Islam and a Turkic language similar to those spoken in Central Asia. The Horde and its political organisation remained mobile. The town Batu set up at Sarai was not a political capital but a centre of trade on the Silk Road, a permanent base for merchants, craftsmen and foreign visitors, with paved streets, mosques, madrasahs and caravanserais, tolerant enough to allow an Orthodox bishopric and a German trading office.The Mongol invasion left many of Russias main cities in ruins, their populations reduced to a shadow, the surrounding villages and fields ravaged. The Ryurik dynasty was decimated. A kind of Russia nevertheless survived. What in later centuries the Russians called the Tartar Yoke did not prevent life from continuing much as before. The ruined cities recovered. Princes from the Ryurik dynasty continued to rule them. The people who lived there still spoke Russian, and still followed Russian customs, and were heartened and encouraged by their common Orthodoxy. The Church became the rallying point for Russians, whose secular rulers were dead, dispersed or collaborating with the enemy, much as the Catholic Church later did in Poland when it was partitioned between Prussia, Austria and Russia in the eighteenth century.After the initial violence the Mongols main aim was to exploit Russia, to exert a profitable control with a minimum of force. They did not occupy Russia itself, and unlike the Normans in conquered England, they did not live alongside the conquered or share their cities. Instead they preferred to manage Russia from a distance, though they speedily uprooted any challenge to their authority, removing or killing any prince who was insubordinate, wiping out towns and villages in reprisal, looting, seizing slaves. Allowing for many obvious differences, the Mongol system of indirect hegemony in Russia somewhat resembled that of the British in India.The Mongols replaced casual looting by a system of effective taxation based on a meticulous census. Tolerant towards religion, they exempted the Church. At first they maintained tax gatherers across Russia. But as soon as they could, they delegated the tax-gathering function to the Russian princes, though they kept their own supervisors on the spot. The princes regularly travelled to Sarai to receive their patent of office, the yarlyk , to pay their tribute and to conduct profitable business.Kiev remained an ecclesiastical and intellectual centre, with the Monastery of the Caves at its core. Later it became a focus of religious, educational and cultural activities opposed to Polish Catholic authority, and a source of modernising thought for the Russian Orthodox Church.But Kiev was no longer a territorial entity or a political force. With its surrounding princedoms it fell for many centuries under the control of Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Turks and Tartars, and became a battleground for religious warfare between Catholics and Orthodox. At first Galicia to the south-west survived under an independent prince from the Ryurik dynasty. But the dynasty died out, and Galicia was incorporated into Catholic Poland. The Lithuanians took over much of the rest. More open than the Poles to local influence, their leaders married into local families, adopted Orthodoxy and used Church Slavonic as their language of administration and a version of Russian justice as their law.In the north people still called themselves Rus, and kept the language of Kiev, its unifying religion and local versions of its political system. The northern cities Suzdal, Vladimir, Tver, Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk continued to be ruled by princelings of the old dynasty. The complicated intrigues between them shaped the future of their country, much as the bloody complexities of the Wars of the Roses were then shaping England. The height of their ambition was to become Grand Prince of Vladimir, a post that had acquired some of the prestige, though less of the real power, previously enjoyed by the Grand Prince of Kiev. At first the Mongols were content to let questions of succession among the princes follow the unsatisfactory rules laid down in Kiev. But increasingly they found it convenient to throw their weight behind whichever contender seemed most likely to collect their taxes and maintain order in their Russian domains. The smarter princes retained a degree of autonomy by a supple and unheroic policy of cooperation with their Mongol overlords, competing for their favour, collaborating with them when it seemed useful and defying them when they thought they could get away with it.The Horde now secured Russias eastern and southern borders against the nomad raids that had hitherto plagued them. But turbulence continued to the north and west, with pressure from the Poles, the predatory campaigns of the Lithuanians, the rising power of the Swedes and the aggressive Northern Crusades of the Teutonic Knights, aimed at converting the pagans along the Baltic Sea. Much of the defence of those frontiers fell upon the Russians, though the Mongols intervened if necessary.It was here that Alexander Nevsky (12211263), Prince of Novgorod and Vladimir, made his military reputation. Alexander was the great-grandson of Yuri Long-Arm Dolgoruky ( c .10991157), the sixth son of Vladimir Monomakh, and grandson perhaps of Harold of England. He ambushed the Swedes on the River Neva (hence his title): a welcome success for Russian armies three years after they had been so disastrously defeated by the Mongols on the River Sit. Two years later he defeated the Teutonic Knights on the frozen Lake Peipus outside Novgorod: the Battle on the Ice memorably depicted in the film of Sergei Eisenstein. These were comparatively small-scale affairs. But for Russians they have remained part of the story of age-old conflict between Catholicism and Orthodoxy.Alexander never confronted the Mongols on the battlefield. On the contrary, he collaborated profitably with them for most of his career and regularly visited Sarai to pay his respects. His defence of Novgorod, and his later suppression of a rebellion there, were directly in their interests: the city was a main source of the trade in luxury goods and silver on which they levied their most profitable tribute.Alexander bequeathed Moscow, still little more than a fortified settlement founded by his great-grandfather, to his youngest son, Daniil (12611303). Daniils descendants, the Danilovichi, ruled the city until the end of the sixteenth century. None of the other princely families could match their sustained cunning, determination, political skill and ruthlessness. Their formal position within the Ryurik dynasty was undistinguished, so they bolstered it by acting as particularly assiduous agents, tax collectors and enforcers for the Mongols. They increasingly attracted people from other cities who sought to settle in the relatively secure and peaceful Moscow lands. Sometimes they fought alongside the Mongols against their brother princes, sometimes they fought against them, always to their own advantage. When the time came, they had little hesitation in breaking out on their own. Over the next 200 years they gathered together the other princedoms to form the increasingly centralised and effective state of Muscovy.They did not have things all their own way. The princes of Tver persuaded the Mongols to give them the prized position of Grand Prince of Vladimir for a few years, but they mismanaged the relationship: three of them in succession were executed in Sarai. When Tver rebelled in 1327, Ivan I, Prince Daniils son, known as Kalita (Moneybags) because of his financial skills, sent forces to join in the Mongols bloody suppression of the rebellion. They rewarded him once again with the Grand Princedom of Vladimir in 1332.By now the Horde was racked by internal rivalries, its leadership passing from hand to hand, decimated by the Black Death, its trading patterns severely disrupted by turmoil at each end of the Silk Road. Rival khans nibbled away at its territory. Its chief cities were ruined by Timur the Great (Tamerlane) on an extended raid northwards from his capital in Samarkand. The Horde was on a slow road to fragmentation and eventual extinction.Ivan Kalitas grandson Dmitri Donskoi (13501389) won the Russians first significant victory over the Mongols. Dimitri was nine years old when his father died. The Mongols briefly transferred the Vladimir title elsewhere. Dimitri was still only in his teens when he recovered the Vladimir patent and saw off a challenge from the princes of Tver. He began building a proper fortress the Kremlin in Moscow, which later withstood two sieges by the Lithuanians.But Dmitri fell out of favour with the Mongols when the trade routes through Novgorod were disrupted by marauding Germans, Swedes and Lithuanians and he was unable to deliver the usual tribute. In 1380 the latest ruler in Sarai, the Emir Mamai, personally led a substantial army against him to enforce the claim. Dmitris army was smaller, but it was well organised and disciplined, a far cry from the motley forces that the Mongols had previously defeated with comparative ease. The two armies met at Kulikovo, on the River Don. Dmitri disposed his forces with care, his flanks protected by woods and a powerful cavalry force held in ambush. It was a hard fight, but the Mongols abandoned the field in disarray. Their Lithuanian allies had prudently kept away from the fighting, and now went home.It was a stunning victory, and it gained Dmitri his name Donskoi, Dmitri of the Don. But it was by no means the end of the story. Mamai was rapidly ousted by Toktamysh, who sacked Moscow two years later. Toktamysh was then expelled by Timur on his northern raid, and took refuge in Lithuania. Dmitri was clever enough to steer his way through these minefields. He returned to the path of collaboration. The Mongols reappointed him as their tax collector, and confirmed him in his position as Prince of Moscow and Grand Prince of Vladimir.Though not as decisive as it has been represented in Russian myth, Dmitris success was unprecedented. The Mongols maintained their grip for many years thereafter, but it was never again so sure. A century after Kulikovo, Dmitris great grandson Ivan III of Moscow refused to pay the customary tribute. Once again the Khan moved to enforce his authority. The two armies glared at one another across the River Ugra, but when the Khans Lithuanian allies failed to turn up, he returned home without a battle. This stand-off may have been inconclusive, but it had great symbolic significance, and is still seen by Russians as a decisive moment in their liberation from Mongol rule.It was significant in another way too. The princes had always expected that the tribute they paid to the Mongols would eventually revert to them. Instead, after seeing the Mongols off, Ivan III took for his own use all the tribute that had hitherto been paid by his brother princes. His action is sometimes described as an example of the way that the Russians took over Mongol institutions. It looks at least as much as though Ivan seized an opportunity that he was already powerful enough to get away with. Either way, he now had a reliable system of extracting revenue, which enabled him to develop his city, build up his army and further strengthen the basis for the future triumph of Muscovy. Since the state did not have the administrative resources to tax peasants as individuals, the village commune was made responsible instead. It thus became an instrument of state power. This further burden on the peasants ability to decide his own fate was finally abolished in 1903, to be reintroduced in a disguised form by the Communists.Alexander Nevsky and Dimitri Donskoi are both national heroes. All Russian schoolchildren know their names. Stalin invoked them as the Germans rampaged through Russia in the summer of 1941. Both have been canonised by the Orthodox Church. Alexander became the patron saint of Russian soldiers and of the secret police. Catherine the Great instituted a military medal in his name. The Mongol Legacy Many Russians and most of their enemies believe that the Mongol occupation left the Russians neither European nor Asian but something in between. Russians blame the Tartar Yoke for the gap that opened up after the fall of Kiev between them and the rest of Europe. Foreigners believe that it explains the brutal nature of Russias domestic politics, its ruthless behaviour abroad, its authoritarian style of government, its fragile grasp of the rule of law, its military practices, the cramped position of its women and even the unexciting fact that the Russian language like all languages contains a number of borrowed words: some Mongol, some French, many German and English.These propositions do not greatly illuminate the concrete mechanisms by which Mongol culture was allegedly embedded into Russian culture. But the lively debate arouses much passion, and will doubtless continue for a very long time.Political life under Genghis Khan was organised along military lines. All reported upwards to the Khan, who took his decisions as he saw fit. The treasury was efficiently fed by taxation and tribute from conquered people. The speed and reliability of the Mongols postal system rivalled that of the Romans. Trade blossomed as caravans of goods travelled safely across the length of the empire.The system was governed by elaborate principles of law and an extensive practice of consultation. The law was based on Genghis Khans codification of customary practice: the arrangements for consultation between tribes culminated in a Council a kuraltai called by the Khan to plan military campaigns or by his relatives to select a successor.The Russian state that emerged after the Mongols left was indeed authoritarian. So at that time were most states in Europe. Authoritarianism was an obvious and practical way of mobilising resources for war and preventing national disintegration in countries with a still underdeveloped system of administration. Throughout early modern Europe the monarch and the nobility struggled for supremacy. In most European countries the monarch prevailed, as he did in Russia. The monarchs claimed that their rule was sanctioned by divine right. They underpinned their pretensions with elaborate ritual: Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, is the glaring example. In Russia both the theory and the rituals derived from Byzantium. Russian autocracy was more absolute, and lasted longer, than similar regimes further west. Explanations vary, but the key may lie not with the Mongols but with geography, poverty and the ruthless ambitions of the dynasty that ruled Moscow.Mongol law was never adopted into Moscows legal system, which remained based on principles laid down in Kiev that did little to limit the power of the ruler. Although the rule of law was shaky enough elsewhere, foreign visitors were nevertheless struck by the absolute authority of the tsar. George Turberville, a young man at the English trade mission at the time of Ivan the Terrible, wrote home that Moscow was a place where lawes do bear no sway, / Where all is at the king his wille, / To save or els to slay.The tradition remained deeply ingrained. Count Benkendorf, the head of the tsarist secret police in the 1830s, put it thus: Laws are written for underlings, not for their bosses. He told a rebel he was interrogating, When you are dealing with me, you have no right to appeal to the law or use it to justify yourself. We will hear of Count Benkendorf again.Russias brutal system of judicial punishment did not differ much from practice elsewhere. Capital punishment, mutilation and torture were regularly applied across Europe. In Britain the peculiarly nasty punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering remained the statutory punishment for high treason until 1870, though it was last imposed, and then in a less barbarous form, in 1820. Russians point to the number of witches and heretics killed and burned by the Inquisition, and the many victims of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. They compare Peter the Greats mass execution of the streltsy , the musketeers, in Moscow in 1698 to the St Bartholomews Day Massacre in Paris in 1572. Neither the Russians nor their critics have much to be proud of. None needed the Mongols to show them the way.Arguments that the Russians acquired many of their military practices from the Mongols are even more flimsy. The Russians, it is said, divided their armies into vanguard, main force, rearguard, left wing and right wing, just like the Mongols. For both, the right wing was the place of honour. Both used the tactics of feigned retreat, outflanking and encirclement. But such things were entirely familiar to the Greeks and the Romans. At Hastings, William the Conqueror tempted Harolds soldiers out of their impregnable position by feigning retreat. The right of the line remains the place of honour in the British army today. All armies learn lessons from their foes. Medieval Russian armies relied on heavy cavalry supported by infantry, both poorly disciplined, to confront the similar armies to their west. To their east, well before the Mongols turned up, they used archers on horseback to deal with nomadic enemies. As gunpowder, firearms, elaborate fortifications and highly disciplined infantry spread across Europe, the Russians followed suit. In the twentieth century they learned from the Germans and the Americans. Except for a brief period, Russian military organisation owed little to the Mongols.There is no convincing evidence that restraints on women in Russia derived from Mongol practice. Women played a considerable and sometimes decisive role in the Mongol world, even though Mongol society was patriarchal and polygamous. Women rode with the men when the horde was on campaign. The senior wives of the leadership had a set role in the decision-making of the kuraltai . Foreign observers commented on the extent to which women were involved in the management of everyday Mongol life. That remained true after the Mongols adopted Islam.Women ruled as regents in Kiev and Moscow. Indeed their opportunities did not decline in Muscovy until after the Mongols had left, when the state became more centralised, and women were disadvantaged by new property laws. Ivan the Terrible issued the Domostroi , a treatise on good behaviour for the family, which later acquired a bad name as a handbook on patriarchal tyranny. It was then that the ruling classes began to confine their women to separate quarters in the terem .Those constraints were abolished by Peter the Great. Among conservative merchants, especially in the provinces, they applied for longer. Humbler women always enjoyed the freedom to go out, dance and drink in mens company. In the villages, of course, they worked in the open at least as hard as their men.Women ruled as empresses for much of the eighteenth century. Catherine the Greats friend Princess Dashkova was one of the first women in Europe to hold government office, the first to head a national academy of sciences and the first woman member of Benjamin Franklins Philosophical Society in America. By the end of the eighteenth century women in Russia probably had more formal legal rights than elsewhere in Europe. They were admitted to St Petersburg University in 1859. Girton, the first womens college in Cambridge, was founded in the same year, but women were not formally awarded degrees by the university until 1948. Russian women were active revolutionaries in the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth, Russia had more women doctors, lawyers and teachers than almost any country in Europe.*The Mongol occupation naturally generated traumas and myths that left their mark on Russians idea of who they are and where they come from. Russians often use the Mongol Yoke as an excuse for their own failings. Aziatchina (Asiatic stuff) means lack of culture, cultural backwardness, crudeness. Thats what Yasha, the unpleasantly snobbish manservant in Chekhovs Cherry Orchard , calls his employers way of life in the Russian countryside. For foreigners the long-term influence of the yoke is a simple explanation of a country that they find hard to understand.The Moors were in Spain for 700 years. Unlike the Mongols, they lived among the local people. They brought with them the culture of the Arabs and the Jews, and, at one remove, that of Classical Greece as well. They left behind them magnificent examples of Islamic architecture, and a legacy of words, cuisine and social customs that give Spanish culture its unique tinge to this day. Nobody doubts that Spaniards are Europeans.The Mongols, by contrast, were in Russia for a comparatively short 250 years. The main thing they brought was not high culture but the opportunity for peaceful trade throughout their sphere of influence. They left behind no monuments and no identifiable institutions.By the time they arrived, Kievan Rus was already firmly Christian, internationally connected, comparatively literate, with its own strong tradition of art and architecture. It was already distinguished from its western neighbours by its Orthodox religion, and its political institutions were largely based on those of Byzantium.The divide between Russia and the rest of Europe was already getting wider. Western Europe was forging ahead thanks to the convergence of technological advance, political innovation, commercial enterprise, sophisticated finance and, in due course, the new vistas opened up by Columbus and the great explorers. Bankers and merchants, their increasingly sophisticated business methods, the growing, complex and profitable network of economic relationships they fostered and the wealth they generated all began to have a growing influence on great affairs as monarchs, popes and barons increasingly came to rely on their skills.Kievan Rus had no comparably rich secular culture, no growing middle class, no vibrant, enterprising and independent-minded cities except and that largely potentially the northern trading cities of Novgorod and Pskov. Russia never saw the rise of entrepreneurial bankers like the Medici in Italy or the Fuggers in Germany, who raised vast sums for Europes most powerful rulers while making eye-watering profits for themselves. Nothing as sophisticated took secure root in Russia until the second half of the nineteenth century. Until then change in the Russian economy occurred not as a result of the innovative and piecemeal decisions of individuals but almost always in response to military need and under the direction of the state.Russia had always had substantial trading relationships with the outside world. But Russian commerce remained comparatively unsophisticated and traditional, not least because of an unhelpful geography. Until the nineteenth century it was easier to move goods by water than by land. Most Europeans could trade through the Mediterranean, along the Atlantic coast, within the Baltic. Russia could trade southwards and eastwards along the great rivers. But its only direct outlet to the western seas was through Novgorod and its connections with the Hanseatic League, which was destroyed by Ivan III. The acquisition and retention of seaports on the Black Sea and the Baltic became a central objective of Russian policy, as they remain today.Nor did Ivan adopt the transformative technology of printing, which was spreading so rapidly across Europe. Martin Luther used the printing press to split the Roman Church. Ivan had no wish to see anything like that in Russia. His grandson, Ivan the Terrible, did permit a state printing office to be set up in 1564. But a year later it was destroyed by a mob, perhaps with his connivance. Another century passed before the printing industry began to take root. It expanded under Peter the Great, but it only took off when Catherine the Great allowed the creation of private printing companies.The future nature of the Russian state was shaped not by the Mongols but by these economic events, by the states Orthodox religion, by its geography and by the narrow-minded authoritarianism of the rulers of Moscow who triumphed in the competition between the Russian princedoms of the north from the fifteenth century onwards. The Tartars were still a factor in the calculations of the rulers of Muscovy into the following century. But after Ivan the Terrible destroyed the Golden Horde in 1553 their influence fell away and they became little more than an irritation.The Mongol Yoke nevertheless continues to provoke lively discussion among Russian and foreign historians alike. Their debates are encouraged by the inadequacy of the data. Nikolai Karamzin (17661826), one of Russias earliest and most distinguished historians, and himself of Tartar descent, firmly believed that the Russians emerged from under the yoke with their character more European than Asian. Many of his successors agreed. The modern historian Boris Akunin stood near the opposite pole. He considered that the Tartar-Mongol component is not just an organic component of Russian statehood, but that it prevails over its more ancient Varangian-Byzantine and, perhaps, even its Slav components.An elaborate though shadowy theory of Eurasianism emerged among Russian migrs in western Europe after the 1917 revolution. Russia, it maintained, was a unique civilisation, neither European nor Asiatic but drawing on the traditions of both, fitted by its geographical position to span the cultural and political gap between them. The theory gained popularity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an emotional compensation for the humiliations of the Soviet collapse, but it had little solid underpinning in the facts. One of its later proponents, Alexander Dugin, was said to have advised Vladimir Putin as he began to position Russia further away from the West and closer towards China; but there are plenty of good reasons for Putins evolving policies that owe nothing to Dugin or his ideas.The debate sometimes degenerated into farce. The distinguished modern Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko was one of those who believed in a New Chronology, the idea that the commonly accepted order of world events was all wrong. He asserted that the Mongol invasion never happened: it was a fabrication of foreign historians. Since he also proved to his own satisfaction that Christ was born in AD 1152 and crucified in AD 1185, more conventional historians regarded him as an eccentric. Notes Boris Akunin, Istoria Rossiiskogo Gosudarstva . Chast Azii. Ordynski Period (Moscow, 2014), p. 15. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Squires Tale ( c .1380). Akunin, Istoria Rossiiskogo Gosudarstva , p. 15. George Turberville (1553), quoted in Richard Hakluyt, Voyages , vol. 2 (London, 1962), pp. 99 ff. Benkendorf is quoted by Peter Squire in The Third Department (Cambridge, 1968), p. 232. Akunin, Istoria Rossiiskogo Gosudarstva , p. 10. Flow, flow, O bitter tears!
Next page