Of course the schism separated us from the rest of Europe and we took no part in any of the great events which stirred her; but we have had our own mission. It was Russia who contained the Mongol conquest within her vast expanses. The Tatars did not dare cross our western frontiers and so leave us in the rear. They retreated to their deserts, and Christian civilization was saved. To this end we were obliged to lead a completely separate existence which, while it left us Christians, almost made us complete strangers in the Christian world… The Tatar invasion is a sad and impressive history… Do you not discern something imposing in the situation of Russia, something that will strike the future historian? Do you think he will put us outside Europe?… I do not by any means admire all that I see around me… but I swear to you that not for anything in the world would I change my country for another, nor have any history other than that of our ancestors, such as it has been given us by God.1'
Pushkin's willingness to embrace this legacy was exceptional, given the taboo which Asia represented to the educated classes of Russia at that time. Perhaps it was explained by Pushkin's origins - for he himself was of African descent on his mother's side. Pushkin was the great-grandson of Abram Gannibal, an Abyssinian who had been found at the palace of the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul and purchased by the Russian ambassador as a present for Peter the Great. A favourite at Peter's court, Gannibal was sent to study in Paris. He rose to become a major-general under the Empress Elizabeth, who granted him an estate with 1,400 serfs at Mikhailovskoe, near Pskov. Pushkin took much pride in his great-grandfather - he had inherited his African lips and thick black curly hair. He wrote an unfinished novel,
The Asiatic character of Russia's despotism became a commonplace of the nineteenth-century democratic intelligensia and was also later used as an explanation for the Soviet system. Herzen said that Nicholas I was 'Genghiz Khan with a telegraph' - and, continuing in that tradition, Stalin was compared to Genghiz Khan with a telephone. The Russian autocratic tradition had many roots, but the Mongol legacy did more than most to fix the basic nature of its politics. The khans demanded, and mercilessly enforced, complete submission to their will from all their subjects, peasants and noblemen alike. Moscow's princes emulated the behaviour of the khans when they ousted them from the Russian lands and succeeded them as Tsars in the sixteenth century. Indeed, they justified their new imperial status not just on the basis of their spiritual descent from Byzantium but also on the basis of their territorial inheritance from Genghiz Khan. The title 'Tsar' had been used by the last khan of the Golden Horde and for a long time the Russian terms for Tsar and khan were interchangeable. Even Genghiz Khan was rendered Genghiz Tsar.22
As the Golden Horde broke up and the Tsarist state pushed east, many of the Mongols who had served the khan remained in Russia and entered into service in the court of Muscovy. Genghiz Khan's descendants held a prominent position in the Moscow court and, by any estimate, a sizeable proportion of the Russian aristocracy had the great khan's blood running through their veins. There were at least two Tsars who were descended from the Golden Horde. One was Simeon Bekbulatovich (also known as Sain Bulat), who was Tsar of part of Russia for the best part of a year, in 1575. The grandson of a khan of the Golden Horde, Bekbulatovich had joined the Moscow
