THE HISTORIANS

In his 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne entitled “What Is a Nation?”, Ernest Renan argued that memories, however inaccurate, of a shared past, of victories and defeats – and forgetfulness as well – are fundamental to the formation of a nation.^[1] The writing of national histories has played a central role in preserving, and creating, memories of a nation’s shared past. In the age of nationalism that followed the French Revolution of 1789, historians everywhere in Europe were busy creating suitable historical memories for their respective nations.
The nineteenth-century Russian Empire, a political community defined by subjection to a common dynasty and the regime that served it, was an aggregate of an ever increasing number of cultural communities as the state expanded in eastern Europe, the Transcaucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East. Despite or in part because of the nature of the empire, ethnically Russian intellectuals, who had been open to European influence since the mid-eighteenth century, were far from immune to the attractions of nationalism. The historians among them took a leading role in disseminating memories of a shared past among the literate minority of the Russian-speaking population, thereby consciously strengthening the sense of cultural community, of Russian-ness, among those with whom the dynasty and government were ethnically identified. In this way the historians contributed to the project of nation-building, in the first instance among ethnic Russians but implicitly, with the ultimate aim of including in the nation, culturally defined, as many as possible of the emperor’s non-Russian subjects.
Most influential among the historians were the authors of widely read survey histories, articles in serious journals aimed at the general public, and widely used school and university textbooks. In the first half of the century this group consisted of Nikolai Karamzin, Nikolai Polevoi, Mikhail Pogodin, and Nikolai Ustrialov. They were followed in the second half of the century by Nikolai Kostomarov, Konstantin Kavelin, Sergei Solov’ev, Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin, Dmitrii Ilovaiskii, Vasilii Kliuchevskii, and Sergei Platonov. Despite their many differences, attributable both to their individual personalities and the periods in which they wrote, they were all engaged in constructing a narrative linking the past and present of the Russian state, and secondarily, of its nineteenth-century inhabitants.
Karamzin’s Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskago went through six editions between the 1820s and 1853 and seven more by 1903. Polevoi, founder and publisher-editor of the influential Moskovskii Telegraf, published his Istoriia russkogo naroda in 1829-1833 and his Russkaia istoriia dlia pervonachal’nogo chteniia in 1835-1841. Pogodin held the chair of Russian history at Moscow University and published, in addition to much scholarly work, Nachertanie russkoi istorii dlia gimnazii in 1835; a second edition followed two years later. Ustrialov, professor of Russian history at St. Petersburg University, apart from his secondary- and elementary-school textbooks, published his Russkaia istoriia in 1837-1841, the fifth edition of which appeared in 1855. Kostomarov occupied a unique place among the historians treated here. A Ukrainophile, he conceived of Russia as a country of distinct regions and cultures and advocated a decentralized state. Banned after 1861 from continuing as a professor, Kostomarov devoted himself fully to writing. Among his many books, the most widely read was his Russkaia istoriia v zhizneopisaniiakh eia glavneishikh deiatelei, published in eight editions between 1873 and 1915. Kavelin taught the history of Russian civil law for brief periods at both Moscow and St. Petersburg universities and published influential books and articles.
Solov’ev, Pogodin’s successor at Moscow University, published his Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen in twenty-nine volumes at the rate of one per year from 1851 to 1879, the year of his death. By 1893 several volumes were in their sixth editions; between 1893 and 1911 the entire work was republished in three popular editions. Even more widely read was Solov’ev’s Uchebnaia kniga russkoi istorii for gimnaziia students, first published in 1859-1860, which reached its fourteenth edition in 1915. Solov’ev’s influence on Russian historiography in the second half of the nineteenth century was comparable to Karamzin’s in the first half. The works of Ilovaiskii and Kliuchevskii, members of the next generation of historians after Solov’ev, clearly reflect his impact. Kliuchevskii was both Solov’ev’s student and his successor as professor of Russian history at Moscow University. Through his own writings and those of his disciples, Solov’ev’s approach reached every literate Russian in the last six decades of the old regime.
Bestuzhev-Riumin, a student of both Kavelin and Solov’ev, and later professor of Russian history at St. Petersburg University, published his Russkaia istoriia in 1872-1885. Ilovaiskii’s textbooks were probably read by more school students than those of any other historian. His secondary-school text (Kratkie ocherki russkoi istorii) ran through 36 editions between 1860 and 1912; his primary-school text (Sokrashchennoe rukovodstvo k russkoi istorii) appeared in 44 editions between 1862 and 1916. Less successful was his five-volume Istoriia Rossii for adults. Although Kliuchevskii’s Kurs russkoi istorii was published only in 1904-1921, it was based on a popular lecture course he had delivered at Moscow University regularly since the beginning of the 1880s. His Kratkoe posobie po russkoi istorii for adults appeared in eight editions between 1897 and 1917. Platonov, a student of Bestuzhev-Riumin, subsequently occupied his mentor’s place at St. Petersburg University. Platonov’s Lektsii po russkoi istorii, which went through ten editions between 1900 and 1917, and Kliuchevskii’s Kurs were the major sources for Russian history for university students and educated laymen of the generation before 1917. Platonov’s Uchebnik russkoi istorii dlia srednei shkoly, moreover, appeared in ten editions in the period 1909-1918.
Over a span of a hundred years, these historians contributed to the shaping of Russian national consciousness by offering the educated public a proud narrative of the empire’s past. Among its major themes were: 1) the state’s unprecedented territorial growth, achieved during centuries of struggle; 2) its European identity; 3) its role as the champion of European civilization against Asiatic barbarism; 4) the formation within this state of a specific Russian nationality; and 5) Russia’s efforts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century to re-establish close contact with Europe. But all these historians had somehow to deal with the fact that for almost one fourth of her history Russia had lived under the Tatar Yoke – a term apparently first used in the 1660s which became current only after M. M. Shcherbatov employed it in his Istoriia Rossiiskaia ot drevneishikh vremen (1770-1791).^[2] How they treated the Mongol period may be analyzed under the following rubrics: the horror and shame of conquest and rule by Asiatic barbarians, the Mongols’ influence on Russia’s political development, this period’s place in the history of Europe’s encounters with Asia, the Mongols’ impact on Russian culture, and their role in isolating Russia from Europe.

THE HORROR AND SHAME OF MONGOL RULE

Karamzin used his literary talents to depict the horrors of the Mongol conquest in detailed, graphic terms which left little to be supplemented by the historians who followed him: “ruins and corpses,” “universal devastation,” “churches and homes burned,” “heaps of ashes and corpses.” In the few years it took Batu to conquer Russia, according to Karamzin, she “experienced all the disasters suffered by the Roman Empire” during two and a half centuries of invasions by Germanic barbarians. Kostomarov asserted that barely one tenth of the former population was left in the areas devastated by the Tatars. “The minority who remained alive,” Kostomarov continued, “no longer had the strength to think about rebelling; they were forced to tremble in the face of their wretched life, but had to get used to their new conditions.”^[3]
Conquest was followed by almost two and a half centuries of “enslavement (poraboshchenie),” a term used repeatedly by Karamzin and his successors. Russian princes were compelled to travel to the center of Mongol power, at first Karakorum in Mongolia but later Sarai on the Volga, to prostrate themselves before their masters and to buy with expensive gifts their favor, confirmation in office, and sometimes even permission to remain alive. Rivalries among the princes were no longer settled on the battlefield but at the khan’s court by means of bribery and intrigue. Such “humiliation (unizhenie),” not only for the prince but for Russia herself, was at least partly compensated for and converted into a virtue by historians when they praized the wisdom of princes who realized the futility of resistance in the face of overwhelming power.^[4]
Karamzin and Polevoi were particularly troubled by the shame of Russia’s long subjection to the Mongols. A major motivation of Karamzin’s history was to demonstrate that Russia has a proud history, the equal of that of any European state. By annexing Kazan and Astrakhan, she had wiped out the stain on her honor caused by the Mongol conquest. In treating this accomplishment of Ivan IV, Karamzin emphasized the reversal in roles. He interpreted the fierce resistance of Kazan’s inhabitants to the Russian siege in 1552 to their desire to preserve their political independence, customs, laws, and religion, a desire “strengthened by memories of olden times; [it was] inflamed by hatred of Christians, their former tributaries, who were now the oppressors of Batu’s descendants...” In similar fashion, Karamzin described with satisfaction the scene two years later, as Ivan IV’s troops descended the Volga on their way to conquer Astrakhan: “The Russians sailed past Batu’s capital, Sarai, where for 200 years our sovereigns had debased themselves before the khans of the Golden Horde; but now there were only ruins! To see memorials of past shame is easier in time of glory than to see memorials of past glory in time of humiliation!”^[5]
Polevoi was equally disturbed over the shame Russia had endured from Mongol rule, but he emphasized the despicable nature of her masters: “A yoke imposed by the foreigner is always hard; but the living envy the dead if the foreign conquerors are ferocious barbarians, alien to the most elemental civilization, who also in their savage pride consider themselves somehow superior to their unfortunate slaves. Then there is no limit to the sorrow and shame of those subject to them.”^[6] By employing the word “slave” to portray both Russia’s former subjection and the reversal in roles, Polevoi could minimize, if not wholly eliminate, the shame of that subjection. But by the reign of Ivan III, khan Mehmet-Amin of Kazan “seemed to be the complete slave of the Russians.”^[7]
Another means of minimizing somewhat the disaster of conquest by the Mongols was to compare it to other misfortunes in Russia’s past. Ustrialov, who published his survey of Russian history in the wake of the Polish revolt of 1830-1831, asserted that an important reason for studying that history was “to resolve in the most positive manner the great contemporary question of Poland and Western Russia.”^[8] Accordingly, he emphasized that while Russia reached her nadir in the century after the Mongol conquest, she suffered no less from “the devastating invasions” of Swedes, Livonian Knights, and Lithuanians. Catholic “religious fanaticism” from the West was “no less strong and threatening” than “martial fanaticism” from the East. In fact, Russia suffered more lasting harm from her Western neighbors, who seized much of her territory and kept it long after the demise of the Golden Horde. Even during their subjection to the Mongols, the eastern Russian lands continued to be ruled by princes descended from Saint Vladimir.^[9] In short, the Tatar Yoke was far from the worst chapter in the agelong history of Russia’s struggles against her neighbors.
Could the Mongol conquest have been avoided? Karamzin’s answer was yes. In his view, Kievan Rus’ was “a power founded on conquest by one-man rule (edinovlastie).” She soon caught from the German peoples the political disease of fragmentation into appanages (udely) and was thereby undermined and divided against herself.^[10] Had Russia remained “a monocratic (edinoderzhavnoe) state,” Karamzin argued, she would have been equal in power to any of her contemporaries and “would probably have been saved from the Tatar Yoke.” Because the Russians failed to unite, however, “Batu’s strength was incomparably greater than ours and was the sole cause of his successes.”^[11] Karamzin’s was willing to accept Russia’s responsibility for “one of the greatest misfortunes known to us in the chronicles of any state”^[12] because of his conviction that Russia had flourished, and could flourish, only under strong centralized authority.
Polevoi, on the contrary, absolved Russia of any responsibility for the Mongol conquest. He described Russia as “the perpetual arena for the passage of peoples from Asia into Europe,” the last of whom were the Mongols. Their migration was “like a terrible storm, a flood, an earthquake,” which human action could not have halted. Polevoi cited the fact that the European states to Russia’s west proved as incapable of resisting the Mongols as did Russia, and were saved from a fate identical to hers only by the intercession of Providence – the death of Great Khan Ogodai in Mongolia in 1241 and the consequent withdrawal of the Mongols from Europe.^[13]

THE MONGOLS’ IMPACT ON POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

Despite the horrors and shame of the Mongol conquest, Karamzin nevertheless asserted that “its beneficial consequences are not to be doubted.” And many of his successors agreed. For them, as for Karamzin, the most beneficial consequence was the development of one-man rule (edinovlastie, edinoderzhavie) in a stronger form than Kievan Rus’ had ever known it. For this achievement, Karamzin concluded, “Moscow is obliged to the khans for her greatness.”^[14] As his mention of Moscow indicated, this benefit was at first limited to northeastern Russia, the area tributary to the Golden Horde and united in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the princes of Moscow.
The definitive split of Russia into a northeastern and a southwestern region, a split already in progress in the late Kievan period, was noted by many of the historians as a significant negative result of the Mongol conquest. Ustrialov deplored this development for its impact on the southwest, “The larger, better part of the ancient Rus’ of Iaroslav,” which fell first to Lithuania and then to Poland. “It preserved its religion, language, mores, habits, its very civil structure,” but having lost “the rule of its natural princes, it had... to share Poland’s fate, to participate in all her wars, in all her internal disorders, and to suffer persecution for its religion.”^[15]
For Solov’ev, the split ran counter to nature’s intention that the entire East European Plain constitute a political, as well as a geographical, entity. Russia belongs to the class of “new European Christian states,” endowed at birth by nature with broad boundaries and a united population – unlike Asiatic empires, which are unnatural and non-organic agglomerations of regions and peoples meant by nature to be separate. States like Russia may collapse into several parts; the larger the expanse given them at birth, the more time and effort it takes to regain their unity. But nature will eventually win out.^[16] The split, then, was only a temporary phenomenon. Following Solov’ev, Kliuchevskii credited Ivan III and IV and Catherine II with assisting nature, by reuniting the two branches of the Russian nationality (narodnost’) and expanding the state’s territory to its natural geographic frontiers.^[17]
All the historians viewed the main stage of Russian history as having shifted to the northeast when it split from the southwest.^[18] Although subject to the Golden Horde, the northeast retained internal autonomy under its Riurikid princes. At the time of the Mongol conquest, the principalities and appanages (udely) of the region were still conceived of as the common inheritance of the clan (rod) consisting of Iurii Dolgorukii’s descendants. Leadership of the clan was transferred on the death of each grand prince of Vladimir to its next most senior member. Moscow began as a very minor udel in the late thirteenth century. Inheritance of her throne was from the start governed by primogeniture, and her prince’s power was never limited by an urban popular assembly (veche) nor, from a very early period, by his retainers (boiars). By 1480, when payment of tribute to the Mongols ended, virtually the entire northeast had been unified under the rule of the grand prince of Moscow.
Karamzin framed this process of political development in the northeast in terms that were followed by most of his successors. The resurrection of Russia, “a vast corpse after Batu’s invasion,”^[19] was due “solely to an intelligent political system consistent with the circumstances of the time. Founded [in the ninth and tenth centuries] by victories and by one-man leadership (edinonachalie), Russia had perished from divided authority (raznovlastie) and was saved by wise autocracy (samoderzhavie).”^[20] Karamzin identified this “intelligent political system” with Ivan I of Moscow and his descendants, who humbled themselves before “the Horde – an action insulting to our pride, but salutary for Russia’s existence and might!”^[21] Ivan I, according to Karamzin, laid out an agenda completed by Ivan III: the manipulation of the Golden Horde to Russia’s advantage, uniting the appanages under Moscow, and reinforcing one-man rule with autocracy.^[22] Thus “good” resulted from the “evil” of the Mongol conquest.^[23] Unity under Moscow was vital to save Russia from probable dismemberment by her European neighbors once Mongol rule had ended. Although in the process the veche had disappeared and the boiars had lost their significance, these changes, by strengthening the state, “turned out to be fate’s greatest blessing for Russia.”^[24]
Polevoi agreed that the division of Kievan Rus’ into appanages among the descendants of Iaroslav the Wise led only to bloodshed among them, and that one-man rule is “the single means for a solidly based political existence.”^[25] He added that Mongol rule was in fact necessary for Russia’s achievement of political unity, playing the same role in Russian history as did the Crusades in the history of the West. Both lead to the rebirth of effective state power after a period of political weakness.^[26] Pogodin made the same equation between Europe and Asia in the medieval period, arguing that in place of the feudal system, Russia had the appanage system, “a phenomenon of the same kind.” What in Europe “the consequences of the Crusades [did] for political relationships, i.e., the weakening of feudalism and strengthening of monarchical authority, were produced for us by the Mongol Yoke...”^[27] Pogodin praized Ivan I for realizing that a better way than war to get the upper hand over his rivals was to win the Mongol khan’s favor by continually visiting the Horde to pay his compliments and bring valuable gifts, and by faithfully and unquestioningly carrying out all the khan’s commissions. He was rewarded with seniority among the other princes and the role of tribute-collector from them, with the title of grand prince of Vladimir, authority over Novgorod, and much money and land. Ivan’s son and successor Simeon used the wealth his father had accumulated to outbid all rivals “in the Tatar auction” for preeminence in the northeast.^[28]
Ustrialov’s Russian History also equated feudalism with the appanage period but argued that the latter would eventually have yielded to one-man rule, even without the Mongols. In fact, this process was already under way before the Mongol conquest.^[29] Ustrialov did, however, give credit to the Horde for helping greatly in the fourteenth century to establish the supremacy of Moscow’s princes.^[30] Ustrialov praised Alexander Nevskii for humbling himself before the khan in order to save Russia from total political and cultural annihilation, and Ivan I for serving as the khan’s most faithful servant in order to attain Moscow’s goals.^[31] Ustrialov viewed the Russians’ abandonment of the veche, except in Novgorod and Pskov, and “unconditional submission” to the grand prince as voluntary actions, for in him alone the population “saw their deliverer from hard slavery.”^[32]
Kavelin emphasized that the Muscovite princes had made use of the khan without his realizing that he was serving their interests at least as much as, if not more than, his own: “Strange phenomenon! The Mongols destroyed the appanage system to its very foundations, reconstituted our political unity, in short acted in our interests without their suspecting it!”^[33]
As had several of his predecessors, Solov’ev equated the clan system and its appanages with Western feudalism, both destined to yield to centralized monarchy, although he preferred to describe this process as the substitution of political for kinship relationships.^[34] He, too, placed the beginning of this substitution in Russia in the latter twelfth century, some seven decades before Batu’s conquest. Since the Mongols allowed “to develop in complete freedom those new relationships that had begun in the north before them” and “were only instruments of the princes” in the transition from kinship to political relationships, their “influence was not in this case principal or decisive.” Therefore, argued Solov’ev, “the historian lacks the right to break the natural thread of events in the middle of the thirteenth century... and to insert a Tatar period...”^[35] The “natural thread of events” encompassed the years which Solov’ev designated the second period of Russia’s history, from 1169 to 1462 – beginning with Andrei Bogoliubskii’s moving the seat of the grand prince from Kiev to Vladimir and ending with the accession of Ivan III, who virtually completed the unification of the northeast under Moscow.^[36] By rejecting the legitimacy of the term “Tatar period” for even some of these years, Solov’ev coped with the darkest era in Russia’s history by simply denying its very existence, or at least its significance.
Like his predecessors, Ilovaiskii presented the clan system as being in steep decline before the Mongol conquest, Alexander Nevskii as Russia’s savior from total destruction through his complete submissiveness to the Horde, and Ivan I as the initiator of the policy of using it as an instrument for achieving Moscow’s goals. Ilovaiskii differed from Solov’ev by granting considerable importance to the Horde’s contribution to the rise of Moscow. Exactly how much importance varied over time. In the 1875 edition of his secondary-school textbook, Ilovaiskii ranked “The protection and help of the Golden Horde” fourth in the list of factors which facilitated the rise of Moscow, behind its favorable geographic position, the character of the Great Russian nationality, and a series of talented princes. By the 1912 edition, the role of the Horde had dropped to fifth place, the assistance of the church and boiars having risen from fifth to third.^[37]
Russian and Western scholars, rather unfairly, “have nearly unanimously criticized Kliuchevskii, especially in his Kurs, for failing to pay sufficient attention to the Tatars.”^[38] It’s true that, like Solov’ev, Kliuchevskii refused to treat the more than two centuries of Mongol domination as constituting a separate period in Russian history. For Kliuchevskii, “migration, colonization of the country, was the basic fact of our history, with which were connected, closely or distantly, all its other facts.” He divided Russia’s history accordingly. In the second period, the thirteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries, having migrated from its earlier home on the middle and upper Dnepr, “the principal mass of the Russian population appeared on the upper Volga with its tributaries” and was “politically fragmented... into princely appanages.”^[39] Although Kliuchevskii’s second period was differently defined from Solov’ev’s and began a generation later, their ending points were identical, and both included the years of Mongol domination. Unlike Solov’ev, Kliuchevskii did not explicitly and vehemently reject the notion of a “Tatar period;” he simply avoided using the term.
Kliuchevskii did contribute to what was by now a considerable body of interpretive historiography on the Mongol period by emphasizing even more emphatically than had Karamzin, Kavelin, and Solov’ev, Moscow’s manipulation of the Horde. In the fourteenth century, Kliuchevskii claimed, Moscow’s princes made the Horde “the blind instrument with whose help was created the political and popular force directed against it.”^[40] Thus it was the Russians, not the Mongols, who were actually in control.
The Mongols were important in a more active role as well. Foremost among the conditions favoring the rise of Moscow, according to Kliuchevskii, was that the Horde’s relationship to Rus’ “eliminated or alleviated the many difficulties the princes in northern Russia had created for themselves and for their country” by the thirteenth century. “Had they been left entirely to themselves, they would have broken up Rus’ into disconnected scraps of appanages, perpetually at odds with each other. ...The khan’s authority gave at least a semblance of unity to the diminished and mutually estranged patrimonial parcels of the Russian princes. ...Terror of the khan’s anger restrained trouble-makers; thanks to the khan’s favor, i.e., his arbitrariness, devastating intestine strife was more than once averted or halted.”^[41] Like his predecessors, Kliuchevskii found considerable good in the evil the Mongols had brought to Russia.
Contrary to Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii, Platonov claimed that “another period of Russian history” had begun with “the appearance of the Tatars,” who “dealt the final blow” to Kiev and southern Rus’ and accelerated the development of new centers in the northeast, in Novgorod, and in the southwest.^[42] But he largely undermined the notion of a new period by including the years of the Tatar Yoke in his “appanage period,” which coincided exactly with Kliuchevskii’s second period, from the very beginning of the thirteenth century to the mid-fifteenth.^[43] Platonov also denied to the Tatars any real influence on the internal development of the northeast, which continued along the same path on which it had started a generation or two before Batu’s conquest. This path led from a society collective authority over which belonged to a clan led by its senior member to a community of principalities defining their relations with each other by treaties, each regarded as the patrimonial property (votchina) of a particular family within the clan, with rights of rule and ownership descending directly from father to son. The development of the patrimonial principle (votchinnost’) changed the way in which princes related to the people living on their lands. Although the Horde did not interfere in this relationship either, Platonov conceded that its backing of the princes might have contributed to the increase in the latter’s authority. In no other respect was he willing to grant that the Mongols had influenced the political and social development of the northeast.^[44] In short, Platonov agreed with Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii that the Tatar Yoke had little or no impact on Russia’s history.
Kostomarov was the odd man out among the historians, arguing that the Mongol khan, as lord of his Russian vassals, was essential in controlling the internal development of the northeast and thereby changing for the worse the course of Russian history. A lifelong advocate of a federal relationship among Russia’s diverse regions, Kostomarov viewed Russia as moving in that direction until Batu’s conquest forced an abrupt turnaround by imposing centralization.^[45] Before the conquest, moreover, “our princes willy-nilly had to share their authority with the popular authority of the veche or gather adherents among the people. Properly speaking, they were only governors – neither proprietors nor patrimonial lords nor sovereigns.” The entire community of Rus’, the russkaia zemlia (Russian land), “was itself the sovereign (gosudar’), and the prince was the ruler (gospodin) to whom it entrusted and handed over its policing and administration.”^[46] After the Mongol conquest Russia for the first time came to resemble a feudal society. The khan was now sovereign; the prince received his appanage from him as a votchina and was responsible to his lord the khan, rather than to his subjects. “Following both their customs and their self-interest, the Mongols naturally strengthened the authority and significance of the princes at the expense of the veche. It was easier and more convenient for them to deal with submissive princes than with capricious meetings of the veche” and “the Land ceased to be an independent entity. The prince took its place, while its significance fell to that of a material possession.”^[47]
In the second century of their rule, Kostomarov continued, the khans utilized the grand prince as their agent to supervise and control the lesser princes and the general population. In this way all groups, high and low, became equally accustomed to dependence on a “supreme master (vladyka),” and the way was prepared for one-man rule. Far from being used as the blind instrument of Moscow’s princes, moreover, the Mongols, according to Kostomarov, arranged things entirely to suit their own interests, which were hardly those of the Russian people. In the latter half of the Mongol period, “the authority of the senior prince strengthened, while that of the khan weakened, until finally the senior prince replaced the khan, with all of the latter’s attributes as supreme sovereign and proprietor of the Russian land.” Kostomarov’s bitter conclusion: “In slavery [first under the Horde, then under Muscovite autocracy], Rus’ found the unity that she had not achieved in the period of her freedom.”^[48] Alone among the historians, he neither found good in the evil of the Tatar Yoke nor disparaged its importance for Russia’s history.

EUROPE VS. ASIA

The historians’ attitudes toward the period of Mongol domination must be placed in the context of educated Russians’ view of the Orient. That view was very much part of Europe’s conception of the East as the other, as Europe’s opposite. Asia was seen as the home of stagnant ancient civilizations marked by despotism, slavery, and poverty, whose populations were given to emotional behavior, stifling conformity, unbridled indulgence, passive contemplation, and indolence. It was also the home of barbarian nomads, the historic enemy and scourge of civilization, in particular that of the West.^[49]
Although this theme was common to all the historians, it was Polevoi and Solov’ev who placed the opposition between Europe and Asia at the center of their work. They had rather different approaches, however. Polevoi applied Hegelian dialectic to the question: “The whole history of individuals, of nations, of mankind is contained in the distinctions between the two parts of the world and in the fact that the life of each person, of each nation [narod], of all mankind consists of the eternal, never ending struggle of opposite principles; that the end of each struggle is already the beginning of a new one; that each conflict sows the seeds and furnishes supplies for future struggle and life, and everything strives toward mankind’s destined perfection.”^[50]
The struggle between “the two parts of the world,” according to Polevoi, began with Darius’ and Xerxes’ invasions of Greece, in which the Greeks “demonstrated to Asia the advantage of European skill over Asian strength.” This struggle continued throughout the ancient and medieval periods. In the latter, the recently Christianized Teutons and Slavs formed new states which repulsed the Huns and the Arabs in the west, responded with the Crusades to the Muslim attack in the east, and constituted “a barrier against Asia’s last migration, the surging hordes of Mongols...”^[51] Although herself temporarily conquered by them, Russia saved Europe not merely from the Mongols, but from Asia, which they represented: “The second half of the Mongol period... is precisely [that of] the open struggle between Europe and Asia, Spirit and Matter, Nature and Man, Russian and Mongol, ...Muhammedanism and Christianity...”^[52] With “the saving idea of one-man rule, ...an idea brought to Europe from the East” as a result of the Crusades, and the consequent decline of feudalism, republics, communes, and the papacy, the West, joined by Russia, was able to renew its struggle against Asia.^[53]
Polevoi accorded Russia a dual role in the modern phase of this age-old struggle. Having overthrown the Tatar Yoke, she annexed the Golden Horde’s successor states and expanded across Siberia and into Transcaucasia But Russia has an even greater “destiny (naznachenie).” Her location makes her “the intermediary between East and West”^[54] in the largest sense of the word. A new “life-giving principle has already appeared... in the guise of a great nation which unites in itself East and West, Asia and Europe, ...which unites the ideas of East and West, a nation which is the offspring of steadfast Slavs and brave Northmen, a nation kindred to Europe and to Asia. For ten centuries Providence was preparing this principle of new life in the history of a great nation, a history seemingly separate from, but essentially synchronic with, European history. This nation is the Russian nation; this life-giving principle is Russia.”^[55] Thus did Polevoi turn the Tatar Yoke (Karamzin’s unfortunate but avoidable accident) into one chapter in the struggle between Europe and Asia that had been at the center of world history for over two millennia, a chapter in which Russia had played a crucial part. In the final chapter, yet to be written, Russia would have a still more important role.
Solov’ev approached the East-West struggle from a different angle. Nature had destined the entire East European Plain, bounded by mountain ranges and seas and unified by a network of rivers, for Russia, a “European Christian” state. In the Kievan period Russians had colonized the northwestern forested half of the plain while the southeastern steppe half remained the home of successive waves of nomadic Asiatic barbarians. The equilibrium between the two geographic and cultural zones was tipping in favor of Russia and Europe until “Asia, as it were, gathered its last forces to repulse its dangerous enemy and dispatched throngs of Tatars.” At the bend in the Volga where it turns south, there “was ignited the last bitter struggle between Europe and Asia... Sensing misfortune, the Asiatics established in the Bolgar land a strong bastion against the Russians’ aspirations – and, in the person of the Russians, against Europe and Christianity. This bastion was Kazan.” The eastward colonizing movement of Russians was thereby halted for over two centuries.^[56]
Kostomarov also insisted on “the age-old struggle of Christianity with Mahometanism, of Europe with Asia,”^[57] and, more specifically, on “the struggle of the Slavic race against the Turkic,” an example of “the inherited racial hatreds” that endure for centuries and “give direction to a nation’s strength and tone to its thinking.”^[58]

THE MONGOLS’ IMPACT ON RUSSIAN CULTURE

There was no more sensitive question for the historians than the extent, if any, to which almost two and a half centuries of subjection to the Mongols had influenced the morals, character, and customs of the Russian people. As proud nationalists, the historians were reluctant to admit that nomadic barbarians from Asia, pagan at first and then Muslim, had been able to affect deeply the lives of a European Christian people. As members of Russia’s Westernized elite, however, some of them found the Tatar Yoke a convenient scapegoat on which to pin disagreeable character traits they detected in the unenlightened Russian masses, and customs that did not conform to European standards. Others could not manage to ascribe to the despised alien conquerors even the negative features they found in Russian life.
All the historians did agree on two points, that Russia’s language and religion had survived intact the period of Mongol domination, but that it had had a lasting and coarsening impact on Russian moral attitudes and behavior. Vulnerable before conquerors who could not be openly challenged, princes and commoners resorted to the usual devices by which the weak defend themselves against the powerful. In addition, there were the examples set by the behavior of their barbaric Asian suzerains. Servile behavior betraying a loss of pride, of honor, of a sense of individual dignity and of responsibility to others; cunning, mercenary-mindedness, willingness to resort to any means to gain one’s end; perfidy, mistrust, wariness, fatalistic acceptance of enslavement on the part of the masses – this is the catalogue compiled by the historians.^[59]
In addition, Kostomarov and Ilovaiskii blamed the Mongol period for the elite’s contempt for and oppression of the lower class and for the lower class’s obsequiousness to their social betters.^[60] Kostomarov added intolerance of other religions and contempt for foreigners to the traits he claimed distinguish Great Russians from the more open Ukrainians, who never experienced Mongol rule.^[61] Karamzin and Solov’ev mitigated their indictment of the Mongols only slightly by claiming that even before Batu’s conquest the Russian character had contained some Asiatic traits and the Russian language some Oriental words. Karamzin ascribed the character traits to the probability that the Slavs “came later than other Europeans from the East, the primordial fatherland of nations.” He asserted that Oriental words are found also in other Slavic languages and may have been borrowed from the Mongols’ forerunners on the steppes as far back as the Sarmatians and Scythians. Solov’ev claimed that Russia had contracted the corrupting “influence of Asian-ness (aziiatstvo)” from the Pechenegs and Polovtsi, who had immediately preceded the Mongols on the Pontic Steppe.^[62] This influence became all the stronger, according to Solov’ev, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the Russians’ “removal from other Christian peoples on an identical level of civilization with them, and their entry into constant association only with peoples on a lower level...”^[63]
On the question of Mongol influence on Russian customs, the historians were divided. The introduction of torture, corporal punishment with the knout and cudgel, and the death penalty were laid to the Horde by Karamzin, Polevoi, Ustrialov, and Ilovaiskii. Ilovaiskii added the seclusion of upper-class women,^[64] but Karamzin, Solov’ev, and Bestuzhev-Riumin disagreed. Karamzin claimed that seclusion had been practiced by Slavs and Russians long before the Mongols.^[65] According to Solov’ev, “The seclusion of women in the upper social orders appeared as a consequence not of Byzantine, Tatar, or any other [foreign] influence, but of a certain moral economy in the body of the nation.” The reason: “Women hastened to withdraw, or haste was made to remove them, from male society in order, voluntarily or not, to maintain moral purity and the purity of the family.”^[66] Bestuzhev-Riumin offered a somewhat different explanation. While agreeing that the custom was not borrowed from the Tatars, he explained that well-to-do men shut up their wives in separate living quarters to keep them from being carried off by the Tatars.^[67]
Kavelin, Bestuzhev-Riumin, and Platonov extended their rejection of Mongol influence to other objectionable customs. Kavelin conceded that physical torture, flogging, and cudgeling were willingly borrowed from the Horde, but only because they suited the Russians’ way of life at the time. Without the Tatar Yoke these practices would have developed anyway, “only in other forms and with other names.”^[68] Bestuzhev-Riumin insisted that “one must not consider corporal punishments as completely Tatar; they were known in Byzantium and came to us in collections of church law, and were known in the West as well.” He argued also that “The idea that the origin of the concept of tsarist authority came from the Tatars must, it seems, be completely rejected, especially when we remember the clergy’s constant advocacy of it and Ivan the Terrible’s direct citation of the authority of the Bible and the examples of Roman emperors for it.”^[69] Platonov conceded “a certain influence of Mongol mores and usages,” but argued, “One must not, however, exaggerate the strength of this Tatar cultural influence.” Not, at least, before the fifteenth century, when the despised Mongols no longer held the northeast in their grasp and Russians acquired a taste for Oriental goods, fashions, and customs.^[70]

RUSSIA’S ISOLATION FROM THE WEST

Equating the appanage system, which coincided with Mongol rule, and feudalism, and Mongol rule itself with the Crusades, and applying the term edinoderzhavie to both the Muscovite autocracy and the “new monarchies” of the late Middle Ages in the West provided some satisfaction to her historians that Russia’s medieval history had not been so different from Europe’s. They could derive no satisfaction, however, from comparing Russia’s level of cultural, intellectual, and technological development with Europe’s at the dawn of the modern era. Whatever the influence of the Tatar Yoke on Russia’s internal life, the historians agreed that it had isolated northeastern Russia from Europe at a critical time. Solov’ev and Ilovaiskii compared the Tatar Yoke most unfavorably with Arab rule in Spain. As Solov’ev asked rhetorically: “The Visigoths in Spain and other Europeans borrowed much from the civilized Arab, but what could Russians borrow from the Tatar...?”^[71] Arab rule in Spain brought elements of a sophisticated civilization to the primitive early medieval West; Mongol rule in Russia isolated her from the Europe of the High Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Anxious to prove that Russia has as proud a history as Europe’s, Karamzin wrote at some length about the cultural setback the Mongols had inflicted on Russia by separating her from her European brethren. Had Batu’s conquest not taken place, he confidently asserted, Russia “would not have been behind other European lands in societal development.”^[72] But in a later volume of his history, he contradicted himself. True, Russia “was the equal in strength and in civic development of the leading European powers” in the early eleventh century, when Europe was the scene of “feudal tyranny, weak monarchs, baronial audacity, popular slavery, superstition, ignorance.” But Russia’s subsequent political fragmentation and internecine strife not only sapped her strength but retarded her cultural development, even before the Mongol conquest:

“[W]e stood still or moved forward only slowly, while Europe strode toward enlightenment. ...In a word, from the mid-eleventh century Europe’s situation clearly changed for the better; but Russia from the time of Iaroslav to Batu was bathed in the people’s blood and tears. ...[I]n the thirteenth century we already lagged behind the Western powers in political development.”^[73]

Conquest by the Mongols aggravated the situation. After it, only Novgorod’s trade with the Hansa “made Russia aware of the first fruits of European craftsmanship, the first inventions of the useful arts.” Through this link, Moscow became acquainted with paper, gunpowder, firearms, and cannon.^[74] But otherwise, “The canopy of barbarism... concealed Europe from us at the very time when beneficial knowledge and skills were gradually multiplying” there, when serfdom ended and towns, maritime trade with new and distant lands, and universities developed.^[75] All this occurred, Karamzin explained, while “Russia, torn apart by the Mongols, strained every nerve solely to keep from disappearing.” By the end of the Mongol period, “Europe had far surpassed us... [W]e may say that the Russians of that period, in comparison with other Europeans, might seem in all fairness to have been ignoramuses.”^[76]
There was little Karamzin’s successors could add to his treatment of the cultural backwardness that resulted from the Mongols’ isolation of Russia from Europe. Recognition of this backwardness, however, was a strong argument for applauding the efforts of Muscovite rulers from Ivan III to Peter I to reestablish close contact with the West. But first Russia had to be liberated from the Mongols.

THE END OF MONGOL RULE

Kliuchevskii described Dmitrii Donskoi’s victory over the Horde at Kulikovo in 1380 as both the Russian people’s “first victory over Hagarianism,” and as conferring on the prince of Moscow the mantle of “national leader of northern Rus’ in its struggle against external enemies.”^[77] In a similar vein, Ilovaiskii wrote that Kulikovo awakened in the Russian people “consciousness of its national unity and hope for liberation from the foreign yoke in the near future.”^[78]
For Solov’ev, Kulikovo had an even deeper significance. It “heralded the end of the long domination of nomadic barbarians over the great Eastern plain...” After Kulikovo, “Europe in the person of Russia gets the upper hand; the European part of the great eastern plain begins to expand at the expense of the Asiatic [part].” The Pontic Steppe would thereby be transformed in time from the refuge of nomadism into “the fruitful sanctuary of civil society.”^[79] Polevoi’s interpretation of Kulikovo stemmed from his view of the Horde as typical of Asiatic empires, lacking in coherence and endurance, which he compared to volcanic eruptions: “Such was the history also of the Mongol political explosion and eruption.” For Polevoi, Kulikovo signified that the Horde had reached its final stage, that of “cooling off, of the erupted material’s petrifaction...”^[80]
The end came a century after Kulikovo, when Ivan III terminated the payment of tribute to the Mongols. It remained only to crush the Horde’s successor states. As Solov’ev put it, “In the second half of the fifteenth century, the Golden Horde collapsed, but the amputated limbs of the monster did not cease to move: three Tatar kingdoms appeared.”^[81] The major problem was Kazan, which Platonov, following Solov’ev, saw as blocking “the colonizing movement of Rus’ to the east” into Siberia and down the Volga and, through its frontier raids, constituting “a chronic plague in Muscovite life.”^[82] Ivan IV solved this problem by conquering Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s. The third khanate, the Crimea, described by Solov’ev as “the shameful remnants of the Tatar Yoke,”^[83] was annexed in 1783. Catherine II thereby erased the last physical reminder, if not the memory, of the darkest chapter in Russia’s history. In the nineteenth century, Russia’s historians would help create memories of that chapter suitable to her developing national consciousness. They did so by describing the tremendous obstacles Russia had overcome during her domination by Asiatic barbarians and afterwards, as a result of it. But they also emphasized the advantages this domination had brought and the positive use Moscow’s princes had made of it.