Natasha's Dance полностью

It is hard to overstress the sense of national shame which the 'Mongol yoke' evokes in the Russians. Unless one counts Hungary, Kievan Rus' was the only major European power to be overtaken by the Asiatic hordes. In terms of military technology the Mongol horsemen were far superior to the forces of the Russian principalities. But rarely did they need to prove the point. Few Russian princes thought to challenge them. It was as late as 1380, when the power of the Mongols was already weakening, that the Russians waged their first real battle against them. And even after that it took another century of in-fighting between the Mongol khans - culminating in the breakaway of three separate khanates from the Golden Horde (the Crimean khanate in 1430, the khanate of Kazan in 1436, and that of Astrakhan in 1466) - before the Russian princes found the wherewithal to fight a war against each one in turn. By and large, then, the Mongol occupation was a story of the Russian princes' own collaboration with their Asiatic overlords. This explains why, contrary to national myth, relatively few towns were destroyed by the Mongols; why Russian arts and crafts, and even major projects such as the building of churches, showed no signs of slowing down; why trade and agriculture carried on as normal; and why in the period of the Mongol occupation there

was no great migration by the Russian population from the southern regions closest to the Mongol warriors.¹⁶

According to the national myth, the Mongols came, they terrorized and pillaged, but then they left without a trace. Russia might have succumbed to the Mongol sword, but its Christian civilization, with its monasteries and churches, remained unaffected by the Asiatic hordes. This assumption has always remained central to the Russians' identity as Christians. They may live on the Asiatic steppe but they face towards the West. 'From Asia', wrote Dmitry Likhachev, the leading twentieth-century cultural historian of Russia, 'we received extraordinarily little' - and his book, called Russian Culture, has nothing more to say on the Mongol legacy.¹⁷ This national myth is based on the idea of the Mongols' cultural backwardness. They ruled by terror, bringing (in Pushkin's famous phrase) 'neither algebra nor Aristotle' with them when they came to Russia, unlike the Moors when they conquered Spain. They plunged Russia into its 'Dark Age'. Karamzin, in his History of the Russian State, did not write a thing about the cultural legacies of Mongol rule. 'For how', he asked, 'could a civilized people have learned from such nomads?'¹⁸ The great historian Sergei Soloviev devoted just three pages to the cultural influence of the Mongols in his 28-volume History of Russia. Even Sergei Platonov, the leading nineteenth-century Mongol scholar, suggested that the Mongols had no influence on Russian cultural life.

In fact the Mongol tribes were far from backward. If anything, particularly in terms of their military technology and organization, they were considerably in advance of the Russian people whose lands

they mastered for so long. The Mongols had a sophisticated system of administration and taxation, from which the Russian state would develop its own structures, and this is reflected in the Tatar origins of many related Russian words like dengi (money), tamozbna (customs)

and kazna (treasury). Archaeological excavations near the Mongol capital of Sarai (near Tsaritsyn, today Volgograd, on the Volga river) showed that the Mongols had the capacity to develop large urban

settlements with palaces and schools, well laid-out streets and hydraulic systems, craft workshops and farms. If the Mongols did not occupy the central part of Russia, it was not, as Soloviev suggested, because they were too primitive to conquer or control it, but because,

without rich pastures or trade routes, the northern forest lands were of little benefit to their nomadic life. Even the taxes which they levied on the Russians, although burdensome to the peasantry, were insignificant compared to the riches they derived from their silk-route colonies in the Caucasus, Persia, Central Asia and northern India.

The Mongol occupation left a profound mark on the Russian way of life. As Pushkin wrote to Chaadaev in 1836, it was then that Russia became separated from the West. That history posed a fundamental challenge to the Russians' European self-identification: