Russia – Sphinx. Rejoicing and mourning,
And shedding black blood,
She looks, looks, looks at you,
And with hatred and with love!..”
Alexander Blok “Scythians”
This strange question: “Who are the Russians?” – not as simple as it might seem at first glance. When we were in school, the history of the country began with Kyivan Rus. Of course, the Tatars looked like a horror story there, but at least everything was clear with the Russians. Today, even with the Russians, everything is confused. Kyiv, the mother of Russian cities, turned out to be the capital of another state, and Ukrainians do not want to have anything to do with the “Muscovites.” Slavic friendship was shattered by household gas. Now it is not clear where to start the story. The East is not taken into account. Beginning with Peter I, who opened a window to Europe, all eyes are directed only to the West.
Russian historians had in reserve the so-called Norman theory, which was remembered in the Year of Russian History. It says that the Rus are one of the Viking tribes, and Rurik is the first Russian prince, where the story began. Now the story must begin with Ladoga and Veliky Novgorod, that is, with Holmgard, founded by the Swedes. We will learn a new history. Rurik is Rurik. We will call Oleg Olgert, Vladimir – Voldemar. It is no coincidence that during the Time of Troubles, the Novgorodians called for the reign of the Swedish Prince Philip, the son of Charles IX. But where did the Slavs go? Not clear. Without the Tatars, the history of Russia looks very strange, but without the Slavs, it is completely absurd.
It is difficult to say how much better Veliky Novgorod, as a forerunner of Russia, is than Kyiv. The rest of the nations inhabiting the country are not taken into account, since Russians are considered the only state-forming people. The times of the great migration that took place from East to West are also not considered, because everything begins and ends with Europe. Apparently, there is no land beyond the Volga…
On the one hand, it is clear that before the Tatar-Mongol invasion, the Slavs lived in separate principalities, and therefore bore the discordant names of a dozen tribes (Krivichi, Radimichi, Vyatichi, etc.) or were called by inheritance (Tverich, Ryazan, Muscovites, etc.). d.), that is, each tribe had its own special “fatherland”. The economy was weak, politics even more so. The ancient Russian tribes were united only by Orthodoxy.
Lev Gumilev believed that the all-Russian consciousness emerged during the Battle of Kulikovo. “The ethnic significance of what happened in 1380 on the Kulikovo Field turned out to be colossal,” he writes. “The people of Suzdal, Vladimir, Rostov, and Pskov went to fight on the Kulikovo Field as representatives of their principalities, but they returned from there as Russians, although living in different cities. Therefore, in the ethnic history of our country, the Battle of Kulikovo is considered the event after which the new ethnic community – Muscovite Russia – became a reality, a fact of world-historical significance.”
For contemporaries, this was not as obvious as Gumilev interprets it. They were more concerned with protecting their market from the Genoese than with fighting the Tatars. As for the Nizhny Novgorod, Ryazan, and Tver residents, they were completely against Moscow’s hegemony. The Suzdal princes stood for appanage systems. They were satisfied with the Tatar tribute, which the rich Volga cities, including Nizhny Novgorod, paid without difficulty. Their efforts were aimed at developing trade, not at uniting the country. They were friends with the Tatars, but unlike the Muscovites, they did not mix, but coexisted. Therefore, after the collapse of the Golden Horde, along with Muscovy, independent Tver, Ryazan, and other principalities emerged, although the very idea of unifying the Russian principalities under the aegis of Moscow was already wandering in people’s minds.
MOSCOW WAS HALF TATAR
Moscow rose as an “international” city. Built on Mordovian lands, surrounded by miracles and mari, it was also half Tatar. Vasily Klyuchevsky wrote about the Moscow princes that they were distinguished by “remarkably stable mediocrity.” People were busy with private affairs, no floating thoughts, no state ideas, just hoarding, which was especially characteristic of Ivan Kalita (the nickname means “money purse”) and his family. “These princes are without any splendour, without signs of either heroic or moral greatness,” continues Klyuchevsky. – Firstly, these are very peaceful people; they are reluctant to enter into battles, and when they enter into them, they more often lose them; they know how to sit out from the enemy behind the oak trees, and with Dmitry Donskoy behind the stone walls of the Moscow Kremlin, but even more willingly, when the enemy attacks, they leave for Pereyaslavl or somewhere further away, on the Volga, to assemble regiments, leaving the protection of Moscow with the Metropolitan and his wife and children. Not shining with great talents or brilliant virtues, these princes were also not distinguished by great vices or passions.” The character of the Russians begins to change with the appearance of Tatars and Lithuanians, and then Germans, in the Moscow service.
Moscow was fascinated by the idea of Chingizid statehood. In contrast to the primitive ideas that prevailed in appanage Rus’, the Horde state idea was grandiose and attractive. Thanks to his friendship with Uzbek Khan, Ivan Kalita received special rights. The chronicler says that when Kalita’s children came to the khan after the death of their father, he met them with honour and love, because he loved and respected his father very much, and promised not to hand over the great reign to anyone beyond them. The eldest son Semyon, as the Grand Duke, was given “under the arms” of all the Russian princes. Semyon the Proud lived up to the Khan’s hopes. Since then, the great reign has become the hereditary right of the princes from the Kalita dynasty. Thus, the political tradition of Kyiv Rus was completely abolished. Muscovite Rus interrupted the Kyivan beginning and gave rise to different principles of state building. The legacy of Kyiv Rus cannot be underestimated – Orthodoxy originates from there, but from the point of view of the state structure, Kyiv represented nothing; by that time it was part of Lithuania. Kalita’s heirs, together with the great reign, received the right to collect tribute from the Russian princes. Moscow blossomed before our eyes since all financial flows were centralized, and instead of the Tatar tribute, Moscow paid “exit” on behalf of all the princes. How long Moscow itself had left, only God knows. With a lot of money, willy-nilly you will think about sovereignty.
Ivan III is credited with the honour of secession from the Horde, which is not true. He opposed the Khan of the Great Horde, Akhmat, as an impostor, but did not fight at all with the Golden Horde and did not shake its foundations. These foundations themselves were shaken without the help of the Russians. Klyuchevsky writes: “Ivan began to act with a more solemn gait in external relations, especially since the Horde yoke fell from his shoulders by itself, without a fight, with Tatar’s assistance.” Ivan III sometimes called himself a tsar in his letters, but no one recognized this, and he complained to the Polish-Lithuanian ambassadors that King Sigismund Augustus did not recognize his titles and rights.
HORDE POWER PLUS ORTHODOXY
After the collapse of the Golden Horde, Russian thought turned to Byzantine traditions, close in faith, united the Horde sovereignty with Orthodoxy, after which Tatar ideas acquired a completely new, Christian-Byzantine shell. Today they like to remember Byzantium appropriately and inappropriately, but by that time “Constantinople” was completely decrepit politically. The authoritative historian V. Platonov writes: “Our ancestors long and closely observed the process of the slow dying of Byzantium. This observation could give lessons of negative meaning and not provoke imitation; it could arouse disgust and not fascination.” Byzantine traditions were interrupted long before the start of Moscow’s expansion, remaining a symbolic memory. On the contrary, the Golden Horde state order was commonplace, and Moscow saw itself as the heir of the Horde, moreover, it called the Tatars into service. Under Vasily, the father of the Terrible, with Prince Glinsky (descendant of Mamai ), a whole “crowd” left Lithuania, located in the Murom district. In 1535, during the reign of Elena Glinskaya, 300 “Lithuanian” families with their wives and children went to the service of the Moscow sovereign. Among this “Lithuania,” most likely, the majority were Tatars, because Moscow invited military people, and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Horde performed military service. Together with Tsarevich Kasim, who was in Kazan captivity under Vasily the Dark, an entire military detachment left and was stationed in Gorodets on the Oka, where the Kasimov Khanate arose as part of the Moscow Principality. Ivan the Terrible invited many Murzas and distributed land in Moscow, Borovsky, Kaluga and other districts.
The appearance of serving Tatars in Moscow, bearers of great-power traditions, pushed public sentiment towards the establishment of Moscow hegemony. P. Savitsky wrote in one of his letters to Gumilev: “As is known, the Great Russian nobility, which played a huge role in the creation of the great Russian state, consisted of 30, 40 and even more percent of the descendants of these Murzas, princes and servants.” The extent to which this changed Moscow’s potential is shown by episodes of military clashes. In the campaign of 1456, 200 Muscovites near Russa completely defeated 5 thousand Novgorod cavalry, who did not know how to fight in the Tatar cavalry. In 1471, Novgorod gathered 40 thousand militia, but their 4,500 Moscow warriors were completely defeated, leaving 12 thousand Novgorodians on the battlefield. In these episodes, one can see the difference between the traditional Russian battle tactics represented by the Novgorodians and the new tactics in the equestrian system introduced by the Tatars. Even quantitatively, Tatars made up a significant proportion of the Moscow troops and civil service. According to Margeret, at the end of the 16th century, among the 100 thousand warriors who were in permanent service and received a salary, 28 thousand were Kazan Tatars, Cheremis and Mordovians. The history of Russia is only half Russian, the other half is Turkic-Tatar and Finnish.
Muscovite Rus is far from Russia, neither in the geographical, nor political or ethnic sense. Russia is distinguished from Muscovite Rus’ by its territorial expansion beyond the boundaries of the historical Russian principalities. Russia emerges as soon as Moscow begins to seize new non-Russian territories. Moscow’s most serious victory was the conquest of the Kazan Khanate in 1552, the first non-Orthodox state. Before that, there was Muscovy, Muscovite Rus’, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, but not Russia. After the capture of Kazan, a new state appears. With the conquest of the “Tatar Kingdom,” writes S. Solovyov, “the Tsar finally appeared in Russia.” What was “Russian land” becomes Russia or, in the words of N.M. Karamzin , “new Russia”. This metamorphosis occurred as a result of the struggle of the post-Golden Horde states for the Tatar heritage remaining in Eurasia.
Prince N. Trubetskoy very categorically stated that “The Moscow state arose thanks to the Tatar yoke. The Moscow tsars, far from having finished “gathering the Russian land,” began to collect the lands of the western ulus of the Great Mongol Monarchy: Moscow became a powerful state only after the conquest of Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia. The Russian Tsar was the heir of the Mongol Khan. The “overthrow of the Tatar yoke” came down to replacing the Tatar khan with an Orthodox king and moving the khan’s headquarters to Moscow. Even personally, a significant percentage of the boyars and other service people of the Moscow Tsar were representatives of the Tatar nobility.” No matter how unusual it may sound today, in the 16th century such an idea was completely natural. During the attack on Kazan and Astrakhan, Ivan the Terrible called them his patrimony. It is no coincidence that his cavalry was Tatar, led by Kasimov’s Khan Shah Ali. Nogai Bey Belek-Pulad addressed Grozny as the direct successor of Genghis Khan: “You are the great Tsingiz king and the direct line of the happy sovereign… If you want to visit, you will, but if you don’t want to visit, you won’t.” After the conquest of Kazan, Grozny quite legitimately accepted the title of Tsar, for he conquered the Khanate, and the title of Tsar was synonymous with Khan.
A different view of Russian history appears much later after Peter destroyed any hint of succession between Russian tsars and Tatar khans.
RUSSIAN, GERMAN, POLE, GEORGIAN, FINN, TATAR – THIS IS RUSSIA
Thus, Russia, and therefore the Russian consciousness proper, as opposed to the Varangian or Slavic, Muscovite, Horde consciousness, appeared after the capture of Kazan and at that time was not national in the European sense of the word, but imperial, that is, Russian. Unlike modern politicians, Russian monarchs understood this well. The Frenchman Custine, who visited Russia, testified about his conversation with the emperor at a ball: “You think that you are among Russians,” the sovereign said in this conversation, pointing to those around him. “You are mistaken: this one is a German, this one is a Pole, this one is a Georgian, there is a Finn, this one is a Tatar… And all together is Russia.”
Russia initially became a symbiosis of Slavic, Turkic and Finnish peoples. If you move your gaze a little from the European part of the country beyond the Urals, to Siberia, Altai and the Far East, this will become even more obvious. From time to time the anti-Tatar, anti-Caucasian, Great Russian chauvinist card is played. Someone needs to destroy this symbiosis, although this is a great achievement of Eurasian culture.
Russia, poor Russia,
Your grey huts are to me,
Your wind songs are to me,
Like the first tears of love!
I don’t know how to feel sorry for you
And I carefully carry my cross…
Whichever sorcerer you want
Give the robber beauty!
Let him lure and deceive,
You will not be lost, you will not perish,
And only care will cloud
Your beautiful features…
Alexander Blok “Russia”
PS: Thanks for the responses. To the best of my ability, I will try to answer some and argue. I will group some into a general topic and present them as a separate article. However, my thoughts are not scientific treatises, and therefore I am forced to minimize references, and, of course, I express my own opinion, rather, than even search for answers to difficult questions. By the way, at the Institute of History. Marjani, not everyone agrees with my interpretations, although we develop a general outline at conferences inviting leading scientists from all over the world. A general understanding of the course of history is gradually emerging. Fortunately, in recent years the number of researchers studying our common history has increased, and every year historical science is freed from ideological clichés, objectivity is growing noticeably, because new information and brave scientists are appearing throughout Russia. Unfortunately, not everything reaches the general reader. This is not our fault, this is our common misfortune.
Thanks again.
Rafael Khakimov
БИЗНЕС Online
