The study of the Mongol-Tatar invasion in our country has a long history. It began from that distant time, when Russian chroniclers - contemporaries of the invasion, returning to the cities defeated by Batu, described the events of the "Batu pogrom" and made attempts to assess the disaster that had befallen Russia. All chronicles, regardless of their political orientation, call the Tatar pogrom a terrible disaster for the Russian land, "evil to Christians." Contemporaries bitterly recalled the former power and wealth of the Russian land, "decorated by many cities," and painted pictures of the terrible defeat after the invasion of Batu.

However, already in the first decades after the “Batu pogrom”, a feature characteristic of the subsequent historiography of the Mongol invasion can be traced: the desire to subordinate the coverage of events to immediate political goals. In the analysis of chronicles about the invasion of Batu in various vaults, a different attitude of the chroniclers to the events is noticeable. If the southern Russian chronicle (Ipatiev Chronicle) strongly emphasized the cruelty of the Mongols and their treachery (numerous references to Tatar "flattery"), colorfully described the defense of Russian cities (Kozelsk, Kyiv and others), then the Suzdal chronicler (Laurentian Chronicle), reflecting a conciliatory attitude towards to the Horde, the policy of the northern Russian princes, tells about the invasion of Batu in a more restrained and loyal way. The Laurentian Chronicle does not mention the treachery of the Mongols-Tatars at all, persistently carries out the idea of ​​the impossibility of resistance to the conquerors (for this purpose, the news of the heroic resistance of Kozelsk and a number of southern Russian cities was probably completely missed), and further notes that the Horde khans accepted those who came from the obedience of the Russian princes "with honor" and released "much respectfully."

A conciliatory attitude towards the Tatar rule, reflecting the real policy of the Russian feudal lords, was generally characteristic of the chroniclers in the first century and a half after the invasion of Batu; only in the years when troubles occurred in the Horde did records denouncing the yoke appear in the annals (for example, under 1262 and 1409).

New trends in the assessment of the Mongol-Tatar dominion are taking shape in the process of the struggle of the Russian people for the overthrow of the foreign yoke. In the Moscow chronicle, the idea of ​​the period of the Mongol-Tatar yoke was established as a time of oppression, incitement by the Horde khans of "strife" and "disorganization" of Russia. This time is contrasted with the pre-Mongolian history of Russia, and the time of the unification of the Russian lands "at the hand" of the great Moscow prince (Kazan chronicler of the 16th century). From the same position, he evaluates the yoke "Book of Powers" and "Synopsis" by Archimandrite Innokenty Gizel (1674), which went through 30 editions and for a long time became the most popular Russian historical work.

An attempt to give a general picture of the events of the Mongol-Tatar invasion and assess its role in the history of Russia dates back to the 18th century (V.P. Tatishchev, I.N. Boltin, M.M. Shcherbatov, etc.).

Of great importance in the further study of the whole range of issues related to the Mongol-Tatar conquest was played by competitions for the development of this topic, announced by the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1826, the “Program of tasks proposed by the Russian Academy of Sciences” included the question of the consequences of the Mongol-Tatar conquest for Russia.

In 1832, the Russian Academy of Sciences again announced a competition to develop the question of the Mongol conquest of Eastern Europe and the history of the Golden Horde, setting the first prize at 200 chervonets. “The program of tasks proposed by the Academy of Sciences for competition in 1834 and 1835. on the part of history ”, compiled by the famous orientalist of the first half of the 19th century. Academician X. Fren, was, in essence, a presentation of the views of the author of the program on the role of the Mongol-Tatar conquest.

In the 30s of the 19th century, immediately after the publication of the "Program" of the Academy of Sciences, two large courses of Russian history appeared: "History of the Russian people" by N.A. Field and "Russian History" N.G. Ustryalova. ON THE. Polevoy wrote that in the “Mongolian period” before the “storm” of the invasion, “original particulars disappear” and “the great Russian state appears from the small Russian principalities.” However, in his opinion, the formation of a unified Russian state did not take place thanks to the assistance of the Mongols: the Horde had no idea that "the grandson of Kalita, the destroyer of relatives, a generous admirer of the khans, would already draw a sword against the Horde." N.G. Ustryalov recognizes the well-known assistance of the Horde khans "in the preponderance of the prince of Moscow over the appanage", but also emphasizes that this assistance should not be exaggerated. Tatar influence, according to N.G. Ustryalov, manifested itself in a change in the ideas of the people about the supreme power, in strengthening the power of the princes over all layers of Russian society, in some changes in the tax system and criminal law (death penalty, corporal punishment), but the Tatars did not change the "originality of the people."

Further development of views on the Mongol invasion is contained in the works of historians of the "state school" K.D. Kavelin and S.M. Solovyov.

K.D. Kavelin formulated his point of view on the Mongol-Tatar yoke in the article "A look at the legal life of ancient Russia" (1846). In his opinion, the Tatars did not introduce any new “beginnings” into the development of the Russian historical process that could destroy the “tribal life of the Slavs”, and “all Mongol influence was limited to a few words, maybe, and even probably, a few customs, not entirely flattering for us. , what are: torture, whip, right. However, K.D. Kavelin notes that “the Mongols are destroying the appanage system”, and the Tatar rule “strengthened the power of the Grand Duke and thus recreated the visible center of the political unity of Russia”, contributing to a certain extent to the formation of “monocracy”.

In general, the historiography of the 30-40s of the XIX century. characterized by great attention of historians to the events of the Mongol-Tatar invasion, the raising of fundamental questions about the role of the Mongol yoke in Russian history and the degree of influence of the conquerors on various aspects of the life of Russian society. At this time, the official-monarchical concept of the historical development of N.M. Karamzin and in a number of works and articles, especially in the works of revolutionary democrats, formulated an advanced view of that time on the Mongol-Tatar invasion and its consequences.

50-60s of the XIX century. brought little new to the historiography of the Mongol invasion. A few articles devoted to particular issues of the topic, works by church authors (in which the interpretation of historical material, as a rule, was entirely subordinated to the task of praising the church and the clergy) and several brochures from the Readings for the People series - that is, perhaps, all that was added these decades to the historiography of the invasion.

In the 70s, a number of university courses and general articles appeared, in which attempts to assess the consequences of the Mongol conquest for the history of Russia are noticeable. In 1870 N.I. Kostomarov in his long article "The Beginning of Autocracy in Ancient Russia" spoke out against S.M. Solovyov, who denied the positive influence of the Tatar yoke on the formation of a "single-power state". Unlike S.M. Solovyova, N.I. Kostomarov argued that "in North-Eastern Russia, no step was taken before the Tatars to destroy the specific veche system" and only in Tatar "slavery did Russia find its unity, which it did not think of during the period of freedom." In general, according to N.I. Kostomarov, "the Tatar conquest gave Russia an impetus and a sharp turn to the monarchy," which came about as a result of the weakening of the Golden Horde and "the transfer of supreme power to the great Moscow prince."

80-90s of the XIX century. contributed little to the historiography of the Mongol invasion. The only general course of this time - "History of Russia" by D. Ilovaisky (1880) - does not contain any assessment of the Mongol conquests; the section of the second volume of the History of Russia, devoted to the invasion of Batu, is a simple compilation. The few articles published in the 80s - early 90s dealt mainly with private issues of the Mongol invasion.

At the beginning of the XX century. continued publication of sources related to the history of the Mongols and the Mongol-Tatar conquest of Russia. In 1907 V.O. Popov published "Yasa Genghis Khan" and "The code of the Mongolian dynasty Yuan-chao-Dian-zhan".

In general, Russian bourgeois historiography of the period of imperialism is characterized by the absence of new ideas in covering the history of the Mongol conquest, a return to the theory of the “decisive influence” of the Tatar yoke on the formation of Russian statehood, and an underestimation of the devastating consequences of the Tatar pogroms. In a number of works of historians of this period, there is no assessment of the Mongol-Tatar invasion of Russia and its consequences (D.I. Troitsky, M. Dyakonov) or is an eclectic combination of the views of previous researchers (D.I. Bagalei, S.K. Shambinago) .

Summing up the development of Russian pre-revolutionary historiography of the Mongol invasion, it can be noted that Russian pre-revolutionary historians accumulated significant factual material on the conquest of the Russian principalities by the Mongol-Tatars, made a number of valuable observations and interesting conclusions on particular issues of the topic and source analysis of documents. In Russian bourgeois historiography of the period of imperialism, there is a departure from many of the correct propositions worked out by the historiography of the middle of the 19th century. (especially in the writings of revolutionary democrats), the tendency to downplay the devastating consequences of the Tatar pogroms and the desire to find the "positive influence" of the conquerors on Russian history (on the question of the formation of a unified Russian state). The source base of Russian pre-revolutionary historiography of the Mongol invasion was insufficient; Eastern sources were little used, and almost no archaeological material was involved in the study. One can fully agree with the assessment of the state of the historiography of the invasion, made in 1913 by K.A. Stratonitsky: “Not a single book, not a single article, where this or that side of our life is considered, at least from a historical point of view, does not do without mentioning the Tatars, Tatars, Tatar customs ... But meanwhile, hardly one can point to any other question in Russian history that would be so little developed as the question of the Tatars.

N.S. Trubetskoy in his article "On the Turanian element in Russian culture" (1925) emphasized the idea of ​​a huge positive influence on Russian culture and statehood of the Mongols and, in general, the "Turanian people". According to N.S. Trubetskoy, the adoption by the Russian people of the traits characteristic of the “Turanian psychological type” (stability of beliefs, strength, religiosity) was a “favorable condition” for the formation of the Russian state, and the “Turanian influence” for Russia was “generally positive”: “The Muscovite state arose thanks to Tatar yoke. The Russian tsar was the heir of the Mongol khan: "the overthrow of the Tatar yoke" was reduced to the replacement of the Tatar khan by an Orthodox tsar and the transfer of the khan's headquarters to Moscow. The Russification and Orthodoxy of the Tatars took place, and the Muscovite Tsar turned out to be the bearer of this new form of Tatar statehood.

In 1926, in the book “Eurasianism. The experience of a systematic presentation”, which was, in essence, the official presentation of the program of the “Eurasians”, such a scheme of Russian historical development was again confirmed. In the section “General Provisions” it was stated: “The term “Eurasia” means a special continent, as a place of development of a specific culture, Eurasian and Russian. The cultural and geographical unity of Eurasia is reflected in its history, determines its economic development, its self-consciousness and its historical mission in relation to Europe and Asia... For the first time, the Eurasian cultural world appeared on the scene as a whole in the empire of Genghis Khan. The Mongols formulated the historical task of Eurasia, laying the foundation for its political unity and the foundations of its political system. They oriented the Eurasian national states to this task, first of all and most of all - the Moscow ulus. This Muscovite state, which organically grew out of North-Eastern Russia, took the place of the Mongols and took over their cultural and political heritage.

G. Vernadsky also belonged to the number of historians of the "Eurasian school" in the 1920s and early 1930s. He fully agreed with the traditional for the Eurasianists scheme of the Russian historical process and the place in the Russian history of the Mongol-Tatar conquest.

In the article “Two Labors of St. Alexander Nevsky, published in 1925 in the Eurasian Times, G. Vernadsky wrote that the Mongol conquest of Russia was largely justified by the fact that otherwise the Russian lands would have fallen under the rule of Western states, and only the Mongols prevented this. “Russia could die in a heroic struggle, but it could not resist and save itself in a struggle simultaneously on two fronts. We had to choose between West and East. Daniil Galitsky chose the West... Alexander Nevsky chose the East and, under its protection, decided to fend off the West.” G. Vernadsky praised Alexander Nevsky for his “humility” in relation to the Horde and assessed Russian-Tatar relations in this way: “Alexander saw in the Mongols a culturally friendly force that could help him preserve and assert Russian cultural identity from the Latin West.”

The "historical school of the Eurasians" of the 20s - early 30s left a whole system of views on Russian history and especially on the role of the Mongol conquests in the history of the Russian people and other peoples of Eastern Europe as a legacy to foreign historiography. In general terms, the views of the "Eurasians" boiled down to the following:

• 1) the Mongol-Tatar conquests were seen as a historically necessary and progressive phenomenon;
• 2) the level of culture, statehood, military art of the Mongols was exaggerated; the "genius" and "wise state activity" of the Mongol khans and commanders were idealized;
• 3) the predatory nature of the Mongol-Tatar conquests, which destroyed the productive forces and culture of settled countries, was hushed up;
• 4) Russian history was considered only in connection with the history of the Mongol Empire as the history of one of the "Mongol uluses", devoid of independent historical existence;
• 5) the great achievements of the Russian people in the creation of their original national culture and statehood were attributed to the "beneficial" Mongolian influence, the perception of the "Mongolian state idea";
• 6) declaring the Russians a “Turanian people”, close to the Mongols and Turks, the “Eurasians” emphasized their “opposite” to the Western European peoples, preached an “eternal conflict” between East and West.

The development by Soviet historians of issues related to the assessment of the Mongol conquests and their role in the history of the settled peoples of Asia and Eastern Europe showed the complete scientific inconsistency of the conclusions of the "Eurasians". B.Ya. Vladimirtseva, A.Yu. Yakubovsky, M.G. Safargaliev showed that the Mongol-Tatars in terms of economic, political and cultural development were much lower than the peoples they conquered and could not give them anything "positive" and "historically valuable". Excavations by Soviet archaeologists B.A. Rybakova, M.K. Kargera, N.N. Voronina, A.L. Mongait, V.K. Goncharov and others, using a huge amount of factual material, proved the destructive nature of the Mongol-Tatar conquest, which was accompanied by the devastation of entire countries, the death of cities and rural settlements, mass massacre of the population and led to a long decline in crafts, trade, and culture. In the studies of A.N. Nasonova, B.D. Grekova, L.V. Tcherepnin refuted the opinion about the supposedly "positive" influence of the Mongol-Tatars on the process of folding the Russian centralized state and the Great Russian people.

After World War II, works appeared in foreign bourgeois historiography in which many of the conclusions of the "Eurasian school" were repeated in one form or another. Of course, in the new historical conditions, when the Soviet Union headed the mighty camp of socialism, when our country entered a period of full-scale construction of communism and the advantages of the socialist system became obvious, even the most fierce enemies of communism do not dare to talk about the "crisis" of the Bolshevik ideology and the imminent "death" Soviet power. But the main historical conclusions of the Eurasianists about the "progressiveness" of the Mongol conquests, that Russian culture and statehood were formed under the Mongol influence, about the "eternal conflict" between the West and the East, about the supposedly natural aggressiveness of the "East", etc. still exist in bourgeois historiography.

Such old “bison” of Eurasianism as Professor (now American) Georg Vernadsky have moved into the forefront of modern bourgeois historical science. In the book "Mongols and Russia" (1953), G. Vernadsky repeats many of the positions of the Eurasians on this important problem of Russian history. He completely dissolves the history of Russia as a "subvassal" of the Mongol Empire in the history of the great and Golden Horde khans, tries to downplay the devastating consequences of the invasion, and gives a positive assessment of the influence of the Mongol-Tatar yoke on the formation of Russian statehood.

The active preaching of the "progressiveness" of the Mongol-Tatar conquests, which can be traced in the works of G. Vernadsky, is quite common in modern bourgeois historiography. This is how, for example, the Mongol conquest is considered in the Illustrated History of Russia, published in 1957 in New York. The theory of the influence of various foreign "cultures" on Russian history, which explains the formation of statehood, law, the development of culture, etc., has become widespread. various "influences": in antiquity - the Varangians, with the adoption of Christianity - Byzantium, in the Middle Ages - the Mongols, and from Peter I - "European civilization".

The history of the Mongol-Tatar conquest of the XIII century. and its influence on Russian history is the subject of constant falsification by West German revanchist historians as well.

The former Nazi Sonderführer, and now the West German historian G. Rauch even excludes Russia from the number of European states. According to him, the Mongol conquest turned the "Muscovite state" into an "Asiatic power".

Another West German historian G. Stöckl also claims that Russia, starting from the Mongol invasion of the 13th century, which destroyed all “European tendencies”, turned out to be “outside of Europe”, became hostile and threatens “eternal Eastern imperialism”. Following the example of his American associates, G. Stöckl refuses to allow Russia to develop independently and calls the influence of Byzantium and Tatar domination as the determining factors of Russian history.

The West German historian Mikhail Pravdin (pseudonym of Mikhail Harol) writes that various foreign “influences” played a decisive role in the historical development of Russia until the beginning of the 17th century, and they called Kievan Rus a “European-Byzantine” state, and the Muscovite state “Varangian-Byzantine-Mongolian” . Gerhard Timm also writes about the “decisive influence of the Mongol yoke on the formation of a unified Russian state on the “Russian character”.

The assertions of modern bourgeois historians about Russia as the bearer of a special "Asian culture", profoundly different from the culture of the "West", Russia as an "Asiatic country" pursue far-reaching political goals. The thesis about the “exclusivity” of Russian history, “deeply different” from “European”, is used by the apologists of modern capitalism to declare the socialist revolution in Russia and still “in the East” a historical accident, not obligatory for the “West”, to preach “eternal conflict” between "East" and "West" to intimidate the masses with some kind of "Eastern imperialism", allegedly left as Russia's legacy from Genghis Khan. Arguing that Russian culture and statehood were formed under Mongol influence, bourgeois historians are trying to prove the incapacity of the Russian people for independent historical development, they are trying to belittle the heroic deed of the peoples of the USSR.

The views of Soviet historians on the Mongol-Tatar invasion and its consequences for Russia took shape in the process of overcoming the erroneous tendencies inherited from Russian bourgeois historiography and in the struggle against the "theories" of reactionary foreign historians.

Soviet historiography of the 20s was characterized by great attention to the history of the Golden Horde, without studying which it is impossible to resolve the issue of the degree of influence of the Mongol-Tatar conquests on Russian history (works by N.I. Veselovsky, F.V. Ballod, V.V. Barthold, F.I. Uspensky and others). However, while rightly criticizing the idea of ​​the complete "savagery" of the Tatar-Mongols, these researchers, in turn, made a serious mistake, expressed in exaggerating the social and cultural level of the Golden Horde and its influence on the conquered peoples. So, F.V. Ballod ascribes to the Mongol conquerors "some kind of especially careful attitude towards representatives of science, art and craft" and considers them "a cultured people engaged in industry and trade", having "their own Golden Horde art and architecture, the flesh of the flesh of Muslim art, as an independent branch ". In the book of N.K. Arzyutov "Golden Horde", the Golden Horde state is characterized as a "power of merchants". A well-known reassessment of the role of trade in the economy of the Golden Horde is also contained in A. Yakubovsky's article "The Feudal Society of Central Asia and its trade with Eastern Europe in the 10th-15th centuries."

In the works of the 1920s concerning the Mongol-Tatar invasion of Russia and its consequences, the views of pre-revolutionary historians on this problem have not yet undergone a radical revision. Even in the works of M.N. Pokrovsky, there is a noticeable underestimation of the devastating consequences of the invasion, the recognition of a certain role for the conquerors in the formation of the Russian centralized state. M.N. Pokrovsky, for example, questioned “the current opinion that the Tatar invasion was the destruction of a cultured country by “wild nomads.”

A great contribution to the study of the Mongol-Tatar conquest was made by the historical literature of the middle and second half of the 1930s. Among the works devoted to the socio-economic history of the Mongols, the book by B.Ya. Vladimirtsev “The social system of the Mongols. Mongolian nomadic feudalism. B.Ya. Vladimirtsev defines the social structure of the Mongol-Tatars as a peculiar form of feudalism, "nomadic feudalism", the economic basis of which was feudal ownership of pastures. Vladimirtsev's research showed the inconsistency of the idea of ​​the "commercial nature" of the Golden Horde state and its higher level of development compared to feudal Russia.

The work of A.Yu. Yakubovsky about the craft of the capital of the Horde - Saray-Berke. A.Yu. Yakubovsky convincingly proves that the culture of the Golden Horde cities had an eclectic, dependent character, and was not at all an original "Tatar culture". The results of studying the history of the Golden Horde were summed up by A.Yu. Yakubovsky in the book "Golden Horde".

In 1937, with a generalizing article on the Tatar invasion of Russia, he appeared in the Historical Journal by B.D. Greeks. He pointed out that the policy of the Horde khans not only did not contribute to the formation of the Russian centralized state, but even, on the contrary, it happened "against their interests and against their will." A general description of the grave consequences of the Mongol-Tatar conquest for the development of Russia was contained in the collection “Eastern Europe under the rule of the Mongol conquerors”: “Tatar rule was negative and regressive for the Russian people. It contributed to the growth of feudal oppression and delayed the economic and cultural development of the country. The regressive influence of the Mongol-Tatar conquest on the economic and political development of feudal Russia was shown by V. V. Mavrodin on the material of the Left-Bank Ukraine. In a long article “Left-bank Ukraine under the rule of the Tatar-Mongols”, V.V. Mavrodin traces some of the consequences of the invasion: the devastation of entire regions by “Tatar pogroms”, the weakening of princely power and the intensification of feudal fragmentation, the outflow of the population into forest areas - a picture typical of the whole Russia after the Batu pogrom. An assessment of the Mongol invasion as a terrible disaster that “delayed the economic and cultural development of the Russian lands” is also contained in the works of K.V. Bazilevich and V.N. Bochkareva.

In the same year, a monograph by A.N. Nasonov Mongols and Russia. History of the Tatar policy in Russia. The main conclusion of A.N. Nasonov that "the policy of the Mongols in Russia consisted not in the desire to create a single state from a politically fragmented society, but in the desire to prevent consolidation in every possible way, to support the mutual discord of individual political groups and principalities", convincingly refutes the opinion prevailing in Russian pre-revolutionary and modern bourgeois historiography about the "positive influence" of the Mongols on the process of folding a single Russian state.

Among the works of the late 30s, concerning certain issues of the Mongol-Tatar invasion of Russia, one can name the works of V.T. Pashuto and N.I. Sutta, section of M.D. Priselkov on the decline of Russian chronicle writing after the invasion of Batu, several works on the history of individual cities and principalities of Russia, as well as two articles that appeared in the early 40s - S. Ilyin "The Seliger path of Batu to Novgorod" and N. Lebedev "Byzantium and Mongols in the 13th century.

Soviet historiography of the 30s - early 40s thus developed a unified scientifically based view of the consequences of the Mongol-Tatar invasion as a terrible disaster for the Russian people, which for a long time delayed the economic, political and cultural development of Russia. The source study base has significantly expanded during this period. In 1937, a new translation of D "Osson's History of the Mongols" and an interesting collection "The History of Tataria in Documents and Materials" were published, containing numerous excerpts from contemporary Eastern and Western sources of invasion. In 1940, S.A. Anninsky published news about the Tatars and Eastern Europe of the Hungarian missionaries of the 13th century (Julian and "brother Johanka"). By 1941, S.A. Kozin published the "Secret Tale" - the only accessible Mongolian source of the 13th century. In the same year, the second volume was published "Collection of materials relating to the history of the Golden Horde. Extracts from Persian writings" by V. G. Tizenhausen. This collection, prepared for publication by A. A. Romaskevich and S. L. Volin, is a valuable collection of eastern sources on the history of the Mongols and Mongolian conquest of Eastern Europe.

The post-war period in the development of Soviet historiography is characterized primarily by the extensive use of archaeological material in research. Archaeological data fully confirmed the assessment of the Mongol-Tatar invasion developed by Soviet historiography as a severe disaster for the Russian people, accompanied by colossal destruction of productive forces and innumerable victims. Archaeologists have recreated vivid pictures of the heroic resistance and death under the blows of the Mongol-Tatar conquerors of a number of Russian cities (Murom, Ryazan, Vladimir, Chernigov, Kyiv, Kolodyazhin, etc.), the decline of a Russian city after the “Batu pogrom” is shown on archaeological material. The wide use of archaeological material allowed Soviet historians to solve many issues that were considered insoluble in pre-revolutionary historiography. B.A. Rybakov in the capital study "Craft of Ancient Russia" shows the terrible consequences of the Tatar pogrom for the craft and trade of the Russian city; his conclusions about the destruction of handicraft production by the Mongol-Tatar invasion, about the rupture of trade relations between the city and the countryside, about the disruption of the wide trade of large shopping centers with the periphery, and about the general decline of urban crafts in the second half of the 13th-first half of the 14th centuries, made on the basis of the richest factual material , reveal one of the most severe consequences of the invasion - the decline of the Russian medieval city. Materials of excavations by L.P. Zyablin of the so-called "Tatar burial mounds" were given the opportunity to refute the opinion prevailing in historiography about the existence of some kind of "Tatar culture" in the southern Russian steppes and its "great influence" on the surrounding areas. “The Tatar-Mongol invasion,” writes L.P. Zyablin, “did not lead to the emergence of a new culture in the steppes after the 13th century, and the Mongolian elements of this culture themselves occupy an insignificant place.” The involvement of archaeological materials made it possible to restore the history of the struggle of the peoples of the Volga region against the Mongol-Tatar conquerors. Significant material has been accumulated by Soviet archaeological science on the rural settlements of feudal Russia (village-type settlements and settlements), the generalization of which sheds light on another side of the consequences of the Mongol-Tatar conquest - the influence of the "Tatar pogroms" on the history of the Russian feudal village.

In the historical literature of the post-war period, the question of the first invasion of the Mongols into the Russian lands and the battle on the Kalka River underwent further development. Article by L.A. Serdobolskaya “On the question of the chronology of the campaign of the Russian princes against the Tatars and the Battle of the Kalka River”, published in 1947, significantly supplemented the article on the same topic by A.B. Saltykov. Article by K.V. Kudryasheva clarified the location of the Kalka River based on an analysis of written sources. Articles by N.V. Vodovozov and A.V. Emmaus.

The undoubted merit of Soviet historiography in recent years is the exposure of the legend that existed in modern bourgeois historiography about the desire of the papacy to provide effective assistance to the Russian people in the fight against the Mongol conquerors. In the works of V.T. Pashuto and B.Ya. Ranma shows the perfidious, self-serving policy of the papal curia, which tried to use the disaster that had fallen on the Russian lands and, under the cover of hypocritical promises of help against the Tatars, prepared the enslavement of Russia.

In Soviet historiography, the set by the leading representatives of Russian social thought in the first half of the 19th century was further developed. the question of the world-historical significance of the heroic struggle of the Russian people against the Mongol-Tatar conquerors, which saved the countries of Central and Western Europe from defeat by nomads. As the works of Soviet historians have shown, "the decisive factor that predetermined the unsuccessful campaign in Western Europe was the four-year struggle of Russia with the Mongols."

Of great fundamental importance was the posing in Soviet historiography of the question of the peculiarities of the class struggle under the conditions of a foreign yoke and its role for the Russian people to preserve the possibilities of their independent historical existence, of the regressive influence of the Mongol-Tatar conquest on the process of formation of the Russian centralized state and the Great Russian nationality, of the consequences of the Tatar pogrom for Russian cities and the conditions of their development during the period of foreign yoke, about the influence of the invasion and the heavy centuries-old yoke on the development of Russian socio-political thought, etc.

Soviet historians resolutely opposed the idealization of Genghis Khan and his aggressive followers, against the statements of some foreign historians about the "progressiveness" of the Mongol conquests. In a meaningful article by N.Ya. Merpert, W.T. Pashuto and L.V. Cherepnin “Genghis Khan and his legacy”, which to a certain extent summed up the results of the research of Soviet scientists on this issue, convincingly shows that “the bloody deed begun by Genghis Khan and continued by his descendants cost the Russian people and other peoples of our Motherland dearly, brought them innumerable calamities. Therefore, some historians are trying in vain to justify the actions of Genghis Khan by the fact that he allegedly put an end to feudal isolation and contributed to the rapprochement of peoples. These historians turn a blind eye to the fact that the conquests of Genghis Khan, having undermined the economies of a number of countries, slowed down their consolidation and mutual rapprochement for many decades. The liberation struggle of the peoples against the despotism of Genghis Khan and his successors was an act of the greatest progress.

The study of the history of the Golden Horde itself and its relationship with Russia received further development in Soviet historiography of recent years. In 1950, a book by D.B. Grekov and A.Yu. Yakubovsky "The Golden Horde and its fall", which supplemented and continued chronologically the pre-war research of the same authors. A significant contribution to the historiography of the Golden Horde was the work of M.G. Safargaliev. His book "The Decay of the Golden Horde" (1960) summed up the author's many years of research. The study of the Mongol-Tatar conquests also continued in historiographical terms.

A consistent presentation of the events of the Mongol-Tatar invasion of Russia is contained in the relevant sections of general historical works and in a number of popular science works by Soviet historians. These works give a correct assessment of the consequences of the Mongol conquest, contain valuable observations on the course of the invasion of Batu, on the international situation of that time, and outline the events of the establishment of the yoke and the struggle of the Russian people against the Horde rule.

Sources containing information about the Mongol-Tatar invasion and the establishment of a foreign yoke over Russia are quite numerous and varied. The terrible “Batu pogrom”, which disrupted the normal development of the peoples of Eastern Europe for a long time and was accompanied by innumerable victims, left a deep mark on the minds of contemporaries. Russian chroniclers, Persian historians, authors of Western European chronicles, missionary monks who traveled to the Great Khan's headquarters, and compilers of official Chinese histories wrote about the invasion. True, in most of their records (with the exception of Russian chronicles) they are fragmentary and fragmentary, but in total they still give a fairly detailed picture of the Mongol-Tatar conquests.

The most valuable, one-of-a-kind source on the history of the Tatar-Mongol invasion of Russia in the 13th century. are Russian chronicles containing a systematic account of the events of the Mongol invasion of Russia. Chronicles make it possible to trace the main stages and find out the direction of the blows of the conquerors, they characterize the terrible consequences of the Tatar pogrom for the Russian lands. Almost exclusively on the basis of Russian chronicles, one can trace the process of establishing the Tatar yoke over Russia, the class struggle and the struggle within the class of feudal lords during this period, the system of organizing Horde power over the Russian principalities. Russian chronicles, as monuments of the socio-political thought of that time, show the attitude of various classes of Russian feudal society towards the foreign yoke and the pernicious influence of the heavy and shameful yoke on the development of the national self-consciousness of Russia. An analysis of chronicles of various political orientations (Vladimir, Novgorod, South Russian, Moscow) makes it possible to restore an objective picture of the Mongol-Tatar invasion and the establishment of the yoke, to show the heroic struggle of the Russian people against foreign conquerors in the 13th century.

The use of Russian chronicles as the main source of research was greatly facilitated by the fact that Russian historical science has accumulated significant material on the critical analysis of chronicle collections, the political orientation of individual chroniclers, the separation of original texts from later collections, and the assessment of the reliability of the information they report.

To study the events of the invasion of Batu and the process of establishing the Mongol-Tatar yoke, the Lavrentievsky, Academic (Suzdal), Tver, Simeonovsky, Voskresensky and Nikonovsky lists of the Russian chronicle, as well as the Novgorod vaults and the southern Russian chronicler (Ipatiev Chronicle) are of the greatest interest. The reliability of information from various lists of Russian chronicles is far from equal. The Laurentian Chronicle, copied in 1377 from the “old chronicler” of 1305, contains a description of the Mongol-Tatar invasion of Russia according to the Rostov vaults of 1239 and 1263, i.e. made shortly after the "Batu pogrom". On the other hand, the Rostov origin of this part of the Laurentian Chronicle is the reason for the silence about some episodes of Batu’s campaign (for example, about the defense of Kozelsk), the mitigation in some cases of the brutality of the Tatars, the tendentious coverage of Russian-Horde relations in the first decades after the invasion (the Rostov princes are known for their close connections with the Horde khans and a loyal policy towards the Horde). The same remark, although to a lesser extent, applies to the Academic copy of the Suzdal chronicle (XV century), the section of which from 1237 to 1418. goes back to the set of the Rostov Bishop Ephraim, and to the Ermolin Chronicle (second half of the 15th century), which also widely reflected the Rostov chronicle.

The Tver Chronicle reports in some detail about the events of the invasion of Batu and the period of the establishment of the Mongol-Tatar yoke, in which, in addition to the Tver chronicle material, Novgorod and Pskov chronicles, as well as Rostov records (according to A.A. Shakhmatov) are reflected. A large section on the invasion of Batu is contained in the Simeon Chronicle (list of the first half of the 16th century). According to A.A. Shakhmatova and M.D. Priselkov, the Simeon Chronicle restores the text of the most ancient Moscow chronicle of 1490 (the Trinity Chronicle), which burned down in 1812, and is highly reliable. The question of the degree of reliability of the Nikon (Patriarchal) chronicle (XVI century) is very complicated. Being an extensive compilation of various sources, the origin and composition of which is not always possible to find out, the Nikon Chronicle contains many interesting details of Batu's invasion and the establishment of the Mongol-Tatar yoke. The records of the Nikon chronicle are by no means always confirmed by other chroniclers, which makes it very difficult to use it as a source. Somewhat apart in the list of annalistic sources of the invasion are the South Russian chronicles. The events of Batu's invasion of North-Eastern Russia in the Ipatiev Chronicle are given very briefly and inaccurately, their sequence is violated, many details of the campaign, known from the North Russian chronicles, are completely absent. However, the data of the Ipatiev Chronicle are valuable in that they cite episodes of Batu's invasion, missed by tendentious Rostov chroniclers. Such episodes include, for example, information about the surrender of the sons of Grand Duke Yuri, who led the defense of Vladimir (which the Suzdal chronicles report very vaguely), about the defense of Kozelsk, about Tatar "flattery", etc.

A valuable addition to chronicle news are historical stories, hagiographic literature and act material (very few). Russian historical stories of the time of the Mongol invasion (“The Tale of Batu’s Invasion of Russia”, “The Tale of Batu’s Devastation of Ryazan”, “The Tale of Mercury of Smolensk”, etc.) supplement the annalistic news about Batu’s campaign with new materials, cite colorful episodes of the struggle of the Russian people against conquerors 3. “The Tale of the Ruin of Ryazan by Batu”, preserved as part of “The Tale of the Arrival of the miraculous Nikolin of the image of Zaraisky from Korsuni-grad to Ryazan”, serves as a very valuable addition to the annalistic news about the defeat of the Ryazan principality by Batu. Only in the composition of this “Tale” does the well-known legend about Yevpatiy Kolovrat, recreating the heroic episode of the struggle of the Russian people against the conquerors, be contained. According to N. V. Vodovozov, The Tale was written in the 13th century, following the fresh traces of events, and had an undoubted historical basis. Opinion N.V. Vodovozov seems to be quite reasonable. In the final part of the "Tale" it is indicated that its author was "Eustafey the second, Eustafeev's son of Korsunsk", who lived no later than the second half of the 13th century. The time of writing the Tale can be further specified: “Oleg Krasny, mentioned by the author of the Tale among the princes who fell in battle in 1237, was captured and returned to Ryazan in 1252. It can be assumed that the Tale was written before 1252, immediately after the invasion of Batu, since the author, of course, would have known about the return of Prince Oleg to Ryazan. The fact that the "Tale" was written in the fresh wake of the invasion and its author was a participant, or at least a contemporary of the events, is evidenced by a detailed description of the funeral of each prince killed in battle, the destruction of churches in Ryazan, etc.

Interesting data on the period of the establishment of the Mongol yoke and the relationship of Russian feudal lords with the Horde khans are provided by the "Lives of the Saints", the question of using which as a historical source has long been raised in Russian historiography. Well known to researchers and repeatedly involved in the study of the history of Russia in the second half of the XIII century. "lives" of Mikhail Chernigovsky, Alexander Nevsky, Fyodor Yaroslavsky, "St. Peter, Tsarevich of the Horde” and others. The value of hagiographic literature as a historical source lies in the fact that the “lives” provide many interesting details, everyday details, specific episodes of the relations between Russian feudal lords and the Horde khans, which were missed by official chroniclers.

A significant place in the source base of the Mongol-Tatar invasion of Russia is occupied by eastern sources: Persian, Arabic, Mongolian, Chinese, Armenian. Among the publications of Eastern sources, collections of translations of Persian and Arabic authors on the history of the Golden Horde by V.G. Tizenhausen. Two volumes of these materials, containing excerpts from the writings of 41 Arabic and Persian authors, are an exceptional collection of factual material for studying the Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe and the history of the Golden Horde. Of the Persian authors, the most reliable and detailed information about the Mongol campaign against Eastern Europe is given by Rashid ad-Din. Rashid ad-Din (Fazl-Allah Abu-l-Khair Hamadani, 1247 - 1318) was the official historian of the Ilkhans of the Khulagid dynasty and the grand vizier of the Mongol ruler Ghazan Khan. The main work of Rashid-ad-Din - "Collection of Chronicles" ("Jami at-tavarih") - was written, according to D "Osson, on the basis of the Mongolian archives in Persia (where "historical fragments of recognized authenticity, written in the Mongolian language and alphabet"), information from "scientists of various nationalities", oral stories of representatives of the Mongol feudal nobility and was distinguished by reliability and critical selection of sources. I.P. Rashid ad-Din not only reports on the preparation of the Mongol offensive against Eastern Europe, but also describes in some detail the events of Batu's campaign against the Russian principalities, in some cases supplementing and clarifying the evidence of Russian chroniclers. -ad-Din, "Collection of Chronicles", was repeatedly published in excerpts (publications of I. Berezin, V. Tizenhausen), and in 1948 - 1952 published in scientific translation, supplying with numerous comments. Less reliable information about the Mongol conquests of another Persian historian - Juvaini (1226 - 1283). The work of Juvaini, the court historian of the Khulagid dynasty (History of the Conquerors of the World), is a frank apology for the Mongol conquests. D "Osson calls Juvaini a "panegyrist of the barbarians" and questions the value of his work as a historical source. Of particular interest is that part of Juvaini's work, which is devoted to the preparation of the Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe (1223 - 1236). Mainly for the same period reported information "The Secret Legend", the only available Mongolian source of the XIII century. , and the Chinese history of Yuan-chao-mi-shih, extracts from which were published in 1866 by Pallady. Fragmentary records of Batu's campaign, selected from Chinese sources, are available in the interesting publication by A.I. Ivanov "The Mongols' campaigns against Russia according to the official Chinese history of Yuan-shih." They wrote in some detail about the Mongol conquests of the 13th century. Armenian historians. True, they touched upon the invasions of Russian lands only in passing, but records about the organization of Mongol rule over the conquered countries, about the policy of attracting local feudal lords to their side, about the size and organization of tribute collection help to clarify, for example, the principles of organizing Tatar rule over Russia.

Another group of sources is represented by the notes of Western European missionary travelers of the 13th century. and Western European "chronicles" (French, Hungarian, etc.). About the state of Eastern Europe on the eve of the invasion of Batu, the armed forces of the Mongols and their preparation for the invasion, about the conquest of the Lower Volga region and Volga Bulgaria, interesting information is provided by the notes of the Hungarian missionary of the 13th century. Juliana. Plano Carpini, Rubruk and Marco Polo in their writings wrote about the consequences of the Mongol conquests, about the organization of their power over the conquered countries, about the internal life of the Golden Horde and Central Mongolia, about the policy of the Horde and great Mongol khans. Some information about the Mongol conquests is given by Western European chronicles, excerpts from which were published in 1937 in a collection of documents on the history of Tataria.

Introduction.

The contradictions that exist in the world between different countries appeared in the deep past, and it is fundamentally important for you and me to consider the development of the territories of Russia in the period of feudal fragmentation.

Understand and consider complex issues that reveal the problem of the existence of the "Golden Horde", the Mongol-Tatar invasion and its impact on the development of our territories.

The theoretical and methodological basis of the study was the historiography of the issue, including all its directions, which is based on one source base: these are the “Secret Legend of the Mongols”, “The History of the Conquest of the World” by Juvaini, Russian chronicles, epics and legends.

Based on these sources, many domestic scientists have formed a point of view, which has become predominant in the course of teaching national history, that the Tatar-Mongolian yoke was on the territory of Russia from 1237-1480. This point of view is shared by such famous historians as Vernadsky G.V., Klyuchevsky V.O., Karamzin N.M., Isaev I.A.

However, a group of scientists and historians led by Nosovsky G.M., Fomenko A.T. and Gumilyov L.N. adhere in their works to the point of view that there was no Tatar-Mongol yoke.

The main goal of the study– highlight some general and theoretical aspects of the historical existence of the Tatar-Mongolian yoke in Russia, as well as identify the possibility of denying this fact in Russian history. For this purpose, many historical and local history sources are analyzed.

Relevance is determined by the need for a theoretical understanding of the Tatar-Mongol yoke in Russia when considering the events due to which the Mongols took their place in the history of mankind and Russia.

To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks:

Consider the theoretical aspects and scientific justification for the existence of the Tatar-Mongol yoke in Russia;

Analyze and compare the probable points of view of historians on this issue.

The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that on the basis of a comprehensive study and use of sources and literature, the problem of the emergence of the Tatar-Mongol yoke in Russia was studied and investigated and the probability of its existence in general was challenged.

The practical significance of the work lies in the fact that the materials obtained as a result of this study can be used for an in-depth study of history, application for the development of teaching materials, extracurricular activities and for writing scientific articles.

The work consists of an introduction, three chapters, a conclusion, a list of references.

Chapter 1. "Traditional" point of view on the Tatar-Mongol yoke in Russia.

If we believe what we were taught at school, then the Tatar-Mongol invasion of Russia took place in the first half of the 13th century. The "relationships" of the Tatars and the Russian princes began with the following episode: the Tatars attacked the Polovtsy, who could not resist them and fled to the Dnieper. Their Khan Kotyan, who was the father-in-law of Mstislav Galitsky, came with a bow to him and to all the Russian princes and said: “The Tatars have taken our land today, and tomorrow they will take yours, so protect us; if you do not help us, then today we will be cut off, and you will be cut off tomorrow.” The princes decided to help Kotyan.

According to the Laurentian Chronicle, the battle took place on May 31, 1223 near the Kalka River. The Mongols laid siege to the hill, where the Kyiv day was strengthened. On the third day of the siege, Mstislav Romanovich believed the promise of the enemy to honorably release the Russians in the event of voluntary surrender and laid down his arms. He and his warriors were brutally killed by the Mongols. The Mongols reached the Dnieper, but did not dare to enter the borders of Russia. Russia has not yet known a defeat equal to the battle on the Kalka River. Only a tenth of the troops returned from the Azov steppes to Russia.

This was the last major joint military offensive of the Russian princes on the eve of the invasion of Batu (only the powerful Russian prince Yuri Vsevolodovich of Vladimir-Suzdal, son of Vsevolod the Big Nest, did not participate).

The military council of 1235 announced a general Mongol campaign to the west. Batu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, the son of Djuga, was chosen as the leader. Throughout the winter, the Mongols gathered in the upper reaches of the Irtysh, preparing for a big campaign. In the autumn of 1236, their army attacked the Volga Bulgaria, having a huge superiority of forces, they broke through the defense line of the Bulgars, the cities were taken one by one. Bulgaria was terribly destroyed and burned. In the autumn of 1237, the main forces of the Mongols concentrated on the Voronezh River, aiming at the Russian lands. In Russia, they knew about the impending danger, but the princely feuds prevented them from joining forces to repel a strong and treacherous enemy. Fortifications of cities were erected for defense against neighboring Russian principalities, and not from steppe nomads. The princely cavalry squads were not inferior to the Mongol noyons and nukers in terms of armament and fighting qualities. But the bulk of the Russian army was made up of the militia - urban and rural warriors, inferior to the Mongols in weapons and combat skills. Therefore, combat tactics were designed to deplete the enemy's forces.

The first city that stood in the way of the conquerors was Ryazan. The Princes of Vladimir and Chernigov refused to help Ryazan. The Mongols laid siege to the city and sent envoys to demand obedience and one-tenth "in everything". To which the Ryazans boldly replied: "If we are all gone, then everything will be yours." After that, on the sixth day of the siege, the city was taken, the princely family and the inhabitants were killed.

Further, the army of Batu moved to Kolomna. On the way, they were suddenly attacked by a detachment led by Evpaty Kolovrat - Ryazan. His detachment consisted of about 1700 people. Despite the numerical superiority of the Mongols, he boldly attacked the hordes of enemies and fell in battle, causing great damage to the enemy. The Grand Duke of Vladimir Yuri Vsevolodovich, who did not respond to the call of the Ryazan prince to jointly oppose Batu Khan, himself was in danger. But he made good use of the time that passed between the attacks on Ryazan and Vladimir (about a month). He managed to concentrate a rather significant army on the proposed path of Batu. The city of Kolomna became the place where the Vladimir regiments gathered to repulse the Mongol-Tatars. In terms of the number of troops and the stubbornness of the battle, the battle near Kolomna can be considered one of the most significant events of the invasion, which predetermined the fate of northeastern Russia.

Having defeated the army and defeated the city, Batu headed towards Moscow. The inhabitants of the city offered strong resistance to the attacks of the enemy for five days. The city was burned, and the inhabitants were almost all killed. After that, the nomads went to Vladimir. On the way from Ryazan to Vladimir, the conquerors had to storm every city, repeatedly fight with Russian warriors in the "open field"; defend against sudden attacks from ambushes. The heroic resistance of the common Russian people held back the conquerors. On February 4, 1238, the siege of Vladimir began. Grand Duke Yuri Vsevolodovich left part of the troops for the defense of the city, and on the other hand went to the north to collect an army. The defense of the city was led by his sons Vsevolod and Mstislav. But before that, the conquerors stormed Suzdal (30 km from Vladimir), and without much difficulty. Vladimir fell after a hard battle, causing great damage to the conqueror. The last inhabitants were burned in the Stone Cathedral. Vladimir was the last city of North-Eastern Russia, which was besieged by the combined forces of Batu Khan. The Mongol-Tatars had to make a decision so that three tasks were completed at once: cut off Prince Yuri Vsevolodovich from Novgorod, defeat the remnants of the Vladimir forces and go along all river and trade routes, destroying cities - centers of resistance. Having reached the Ignach Cross, an ancient sign on the Valdai watershed, the Mongols retreated south, to the steppe, in order to restore losses and give rest to the troops. This retreat was in the nature of a "raid". The troops of Batu were divided into three parts: to the north to Rostov and further to the Volga, to the east - to the middle Volga, to the north-west to Tver and Torzhok. Rostov surrendered without a fight, as did Uglich. As a result of the February campaigns of 1238, the Mongol-Tatars destroyed fourteen Russian cities in the territory from the Middle Volga to Tver. Kozelsk offered the greatest resistance to the Mongols. His defense lasted seven weeks. Even when the Tatars broke into the city, the Kozeltsy continued to fight. They went to the invaders with knives, axes, clubs, strangled with their bare hands. Batu lost about 4 thousand soldiers. By order of Batu, all the inhabitants of the city, down to the last baby, were destroyed, and the city was destroyed to the ground. The Mongols called Kozelsk an "evil city".

Batu led his heavily battered and thinned army beyond the Volga. In 1239 he resumed his campaign against Russia. One detachment of Tatars went up the Volga, devastated the Mordovian land, the cities of Murom and Gorokhovets. Batu himself with the main forces went to the Dnieper. Bloody battles between Russians and Tatars took place everywhere. After heavy fighting, the Tatars ravaged Pereslavl, Chernigov and other cities. In the autumn of 1240, Tatar troops approached Kyiv. Batu was struck by the beauty and grandeur of the ancient Russian capital. He wanted to take Kyiv without a fight. But the people of Kiev decided to fight to the death. Prince Michael of Kyiv left for Hungary. The defense of Kyiv was led by voivode Dmitry. The Tatars broke through the gates, but ran into a stone wall, which the Kievans laid down in one night. Finally, the enemy managed to destroy the fortress walls and break into the city. The battle continued for several days. The wounded governor Dmitry was brought to Batu. But the bloody khan spared the head of the defense of Kyiv for his courage.

Then the Tatars went to the Galicia-Volyn land. There they destroyed many cities and villages, littering the whole land with corpses. Then the Tatar detachments invaded Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Weakened by numerous battles with the Russians, the Tatars did not dare to move to the West. Batu understood that Russia was defeated, but not conquered, in the rear. Fearing her, he refused further conquests. The Russian people took upon themselves the brunt of the struggle against the Tatar hordes and thereby saved Western Europe from a terrible, devastating invasion.

In 1241 Batu returned to Russia. In 1242, Batu-khan in the lower reaches of the Volga, where he sets up his new capital - Sarai-bata. The Horde yoke was established in Russia by the end of the 13th century, after the creation of the state of Batu Khan - the Golden Horde, which stretched from the Danube to the Irtysh.

Russian principalities made attempts not to obey the horde. However, the forces to overthrow the Tatar-Mongol yoke were still not enough. Understanding this, the most far-sighted Russian princes - Alexander Nevsky and Daniil Galitsky - undertook a more flexible policy towards the Horde and the Khan. Realizing that an economically weak state would never be able to resist the Horde, Alexander Nevsky set a course for the restoration and recovery of the economy of the Russian lands.

At this time, Alexander, at the head of the Nizhny Novgorod squad, fought with the German invaders. Pskov was not recaptured, but Koporye was cleared of the Germans. After such actions of the eastern and western neighbors of Russia and the Grand Duke of Vladimir Yaroslav, the question arose: how to fight on all sides. Analyzing the military-political situation of that time, Yaroslav had to choose the path for the further development of Russia. Having correctly assessed the situation, Yaroslav, and then Alexander Nevsky, decided to secure, first of all, his eastern borders, so that later he would turn his eyes against the crusaders and Lithuanian princes. This step did not reflect the mood of the people, whose patriotism has always been very strong, but brought to the Russian land, though not stability, but time for a respite. The figure of Alexander Nevsky acquired a huge influence during this period. Batu, seeing the deterioration of the political situation on the western borders of the Novgorod and Pskov lands, again installed Alexander Yaroslavich in Novgorod, capable of stopping the movement of the crusaders. After a trip to the Horde in 1242, Alexander gathered the Novgorod regiments, and calmly behind his rear moved to Pskov, drove out the crusaders from there and entered the Chudskaya Land, into the possession of the Order. There, on Lake Peipus, one of the largest battles of the Middle Ages unfolded, in which Alexander's talent as a commander was brilliantly manifested.

The victory on Lake Peipsi very highly raised the authority of Alexander and at the same time strengthened the political influence of his father, Prince Yaroslav of Vladimir. It should be noted here that immediately after Batu's invasions of North-Eastern and Southern Russia, the decisive word in political life belonged to the Horde khans, since any disobedience was like death. Batu immediately reacted to the strengthening of Yaroslav's house. He called him to the Horde along with his son Konstantin. Establishing a connection, to some extent similar to vassalage, made it possible to restore the ruined and preserve the rudiments of the statehood of Russia. Constantine brought to Russia a "label" for the reign of Yaroslav. Vladimir was considered the center of attraction for all Russian forces.

Since the occupation of North-Eastern Russia was actually beyond the power of the Horde, despite its magnificent military machine, the Horde needed these lands as a permanent and reliable source of income in the form of tribute. And, seeing that other neighboring countries of Russia, primarily the Swedes, claim this, they put a strong and politically flexible Alexander Yaroslavich on the Russian throne, however, in opposition to which the Catholics put Daniil Galitsky, again playing on the internal strife of the Russian princes. Daniel took the position of the enemy of the Horde, but, not having enough strength, was forced to lay down his arms. Alexander, realizing that in military terms, Russia was powerless before the Horde, bowed to the khans, giving North-Eastern Russia the necessary time to restore the destruction inflicted by Batu.

Daniel, in fact the master of Southern Russia, decided to join the fight against the Horde. In 1257, he expelled the Horde from the Galician and Volyn cities, which brought on himself in 1259 the army of Burundu, which Daniil had no strength to resist.

In North-Eastern Russia, the struggle also developed on two fronts: an invasion from the West began. The Germans, the Swedes and the Lithuanian principalities that entered the process of centralization saw an opportunity to expand their possessions at the expense of Russian lands. Lithuanian lands were collected under his own hand by Mindovg. Lithuania's success in annexing Russian lands led to its war with the Order. In 1259, he suffered a crushing defeat from Mindovg, in 1260 Mindovg himself invaded the possessions of the Order: the Lithuanian principality declared itself a significant force, annexing the Polish lands, weakened by the invasion of Batu. Alexander Nevsky saw one way for Russia: the power of the Grand Duke of Vladimir should become autocratic in North-Eastern Russia, although, perhaps, for quite a long time dependent on the Horde. Peace with the Horde, peace on Russian soil had to be paid for. Alexander had to assist the Horde officials in the census of Russian lands for the regular collection of tribute. The influence of the Horde extended both to the political and economic aspects of the life of North-Eastern Russia. But Alexander developed a very stormy activity, concluding an agreement with Mindovg against the Order in 1262, which frightened the Horde diplomacy. Not without her participation in 1263, Mindovg was killed in a princely civil strife, and Alexander was summoned to the Horde and died on the way back under mysterious circumstances. The Horde benefited from the death of Alexander, and the policy of pushing applicants for the throne after his death.

The majority of the population of the country stood for the unification of Russia, the feudal lords exhausted its strength, hindered the development of trade. The idea of ​​a single state was supported by medium and small feudal landlords. These were the servants of the Grand Duke, who received land estates from him for the duration of their service. In case of war, they had to come to the prince with a detachment of armed horsemen. The landowners were interested in strengthening the power of the Grand Duke and expanding his land holdings. They needed a strong centralized government to protect themselves from strong estate owners and to suppress peasant unrest.

The Russian people and other peoples of Eastern Europe waged a tense struggle against the Tatar-Mongol rule. The success of this struggle depended on the unification of all the forces of the country. In the XIV - XV centuries in Russia there is a gradual overcoming of feudal fragmentation and the formation of a single centralized state.

Russian lands united around Moscow. In the second half of the XIV century, the expansion of the Moscow principality continued. The Golden Horde, on the contrary, was weakening, exhausted by the civil strife of the khans. From 1360 to 1380, 14 rulers of the Horde were replaced. In the Russian lands, popular resistance to the Tatar-Mongol yoke intensified. In 1374, an uprising broke out in Nizhny Novgorod. The inhabitants of the city killed the ambassadors of the Horde Khan and their entire detachment.

From 1359 to 1389 the grandson of Ivan Kalita Dmitry Ivanovich reigned in Moscow. He was a talented military leader and a courageous patriot. If Ivan Kalita obtained peace from the Horde for the Russian people with gold, then his grandson led the people's struggle against the Mongol conquerors. In 1378, the Tatar governor Begich attacked the Ryazan principality with a large army. Dmitry Ivanovich came to the aid of Ryazan. On the banks of the Vozha River, a tributary of the Oka, his soldiers surrounded and almost completely destroyed the Tatar troops.

The Golden Horde Khan Mamai decided to deal with recalcitrant Moscow. He decided to repeat Batu's invasion. Mamai gathered hundreds of thousands of soldiers, entered into a military alliance with the Lithuanian prince Jagiello, and in August 1380 set out on a campaign against Moscow. Prince Dmitry, having learned about the movement of the Tatar troops, called on the Russian princes to unite to fight for liberation from the Tatar-Mongol yoke.

Dmitri's call to Moscow was attended by princely squads and militias of peasants and artisans from Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Rostov, Kostroma, Murom and other principalities. About 150 thousand horse and foot soldiers gathered.

On the night of September 8, 1380, Russian troops crossed the Don and settled on the plain, which was called the Kulikovo field. In the center, Dmitry placed a large regiment, in front of him was the "advanced" regiment, on the right flank the regiment of the right hand, on the left - the regiment of the left hand. During the battle, Mamai's cavalry took to flight and crushed their infantry. Mamai watched the battle from a high hill. Seeing the defeat of his troops, he threw a rich tent and rode away. The Russians pursued the enemy to the Beautiful Mecha River.

After the annexation of the Novgorod land, the Moscow principality turned into a large and strong state. By this time, the Golden Horde had collapsed. The Kazan, Astrakhan, Crimean and Siberian khanates separated from it, living in constant enmity among themselves. Having concluded an alliance with the Crimean Khan Mengli Giray, Ivan III began to prepare for a break with the Horde. In 1478, Ivan III, in the presence of the Moscow boyars and Horde ambassadors, broke and trampled on the agreement with the Horde, declaring that he would no longer obey the khan and pay tribute. Khan's ambassadors were expelled from Moscow.

Khan Akhmat of the Golden Horde decided to fight against recalcitrant Moscow. In the summer of 1480, with a large army, he approached the Ugra River, which flowed into the Oka near Kaluga. The Polish-Lithuanian king Casimir IV, dissatisfied with the fact that he had not been able to capture Novgorod, promised to help Akhmat and also began to prepare for a campaign against Moscow.

Ivan III set up his regiments on the opposite bank of the Ugra, blocking the way for the Tatars to Moscow. Many times the Tatar horsemen tried to cross the river, but the Russians met them with a rain of arrows and cannon fire. The battle on the Ugra continued for four days. Having lost a fair number of his soldiers, Akhmat abandoned the crossing.

Weeks, months passed, and Akhmat was still waiting for help from the Poles. But Casimir IV was not up to him. The Crimean Khan Girey, an ally of Ivan III, attacked the southern lands of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Akhmat received news that Russian detachments, sent on ships along the Volga by Ivan III, attacked the territory of the Golden Horde. November has come. Frosts have begun. The Tatars, dressed in summer, began to suffer greatly from the cold. Akhmat went with his army to the Volga. Soon he was killed by his rivals.

Thus, the unification of Russian lands into a single centralized state led to the liberation of Russia from the Tatar-Mongol yoke. The Russian state became independent.

Chapter 2. Alternative points of view on the Tatar-Mongol yoke in Russia.

2.1. Contradictions of the traditional version.

Official history claims that the Cossacks are the descendants of fugitive convicts and serfs or evicted to the outskirts of Russia. But this point of view does not stand up to scrutiny. If we follow this theory, then the Cossacks would be found only on the outskirts of Russia. But this is far from true! Already in the XVII century, the Cossacks were distributed throughout the territory of Russia. The sources of that time mention the Cossacks: Yaik, Don, Volga, Terek, Dnieper, Zaporozhye, Meshchersky, Pskov, Ryazan, and also city. The Cossacks of the Horde, Azov, Nogai, etc. are also mentioned. As you can see, the geography of the Cossacks is very diverse: they live both in the center and on the outskirts, which is quite natural - they protect the borders of the state, and in the center of the country it is also justified: the Cossacks must keep order - after all, at that time there was no police yet, and therefore the functions of the police were assigned to the Cossacks. Everything is logical. But why did the convicts come running to Pskov and Ryazan, having formed Pskov and Ryazan Cossacks in them? Unknown! Logically, they should flee to the south of the country, and not to the center: after all, Pskov and Ryazan have always been the center of Russia, and have never been the outskirts. But I wonder who formed the city Cossacks? Also from runaway peasants who fled from the center to the south?

As usual, we again met with another tale of Romanov historians. Here, for example, from the “Cossack Dictionary-Reference Book”, published in the USA in 1966, we learn that the Zaporizhzhya or Dnieper Cossacks were called Horde Cossacks. Moreover, "Zaporizhzhia Niz was considered a yurt of the Crimean Cossacks." Let us pay attention to the fact that the Mongolian word "yurt" was constantly used in Cossack everyday life to designate their camps and settlements.

So, the Mongolian word "yurt-yurt" is one of the Cossack terms. From the same reference dictionary we learn that the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks separated from the Crimean state only in the 15th century. Isn't it an interesting detail? The Zaporizhian Cossacks, it turns out, “ran away” not from the central regions of Russia, as Romanov historians say, but from the Crimean state, i.e. "ran" from the outskirts of Russia to its center, as follows from the reference dictionary published in the USA!

Historical statements must be based on reliable documents. Let's see if there are written indications of the Tatar-Mongolian yoke in Russian history. Strange, but all contemporaries are silent about the Mongols. They write about everyday affairs: what churches were built at that time, who married whom, etc., but not a word about the Mongols, as if Russia was not under their yoke! One gets the impression that the chroniclers, as if by agreement, decided not to touch on the topic of the day. But then we have the right to accuse them of not patriotism! How can one hush up a national misfortune? It can be assumed that the Russian chronicles were subject to Mongolian censorship, but this version has objections. Firstly, the Mongols did not know the Russian language, and secondly, they were illiterate. True, it can be assumed that the Mongols imposed a ban on the mention in the annals of the yoke in Russia. But a natural question arises, how could the Mongols check this, firstly, and secondly, why did they need such a ban? To nothing!

There is another version: the annals underwent late censorship, which removed all references to the Mongols. In this case, it is necessary to indicate those to whom it was beneficial and for what purpose. Romanov to confuse history? But they already confused her. And their goals are directly opposite - to flood the documents of Russian history with information about the Tatar-Mongol yoke. It turns out that the silence about the Mongols in the Russian chronicles is not a late edition of historians, but a natural fact.

It is known from school history that any Russian prince had to receive the label of the great khan for reign, for which he must personally go to Karakorum. Over the 300 years of Mongol rule, a large number of khan's labels must have accumulated in the Russian archives. But what does it actually turn out to be? These labels are not in the archives. We emphasize that there are no documents giving the right to the princely throne. It would seem that any prince should have cherished such a document as the apple of his eye, but no, they (the princes) threw them away, apparently, immediately after the abolition of the Tatar-Mongol yoke in 1480. It would be interesting to see this process? But the fact remains: the labels were all either thrown out, or destroyed, or ... they did not exist in nature - the fact is that not a single one remained in the archives!

What kind of hatred for the Mongols lived in the Russian princes? She forced them (princes) to throw out everything from their archives so that nothing would remind of the Tatar-Mongol yoke! Ordynka, mosques, turbans, pits and other remnants of the Mongol yoke - do not count! This can be tolerated. It is impossible with labels - it was very insulting to receive them from the hands of the great khan.

Everything is clear with Russian labels, as soon as the opportunity presented itself to get rid of them, the Russian princes immediately threw them away without delay, as an unpleasant reminder of the yoke, well, God bless them, with the princes, but where did their Mongolian duplicates go, and they had to be sure exist? How else to manage the empire without strict office work, based on scrupulous workflow. Everything should be in openwork: the number of labels issued, for example, should be equal to the number stored in the imperial archive - anything can happen: two princes argued about succession to the throne, how to prove the truth without documents? No way! We need written evidence. But it turns out that there are no labels from the Mongolian side either - historians have been looking for them for decades, but they cannot find them - they seem to have disappeared through the ground! Sounds like a beautiful fairy tale? Highly!

The Mongols behaved no better. Particularly surprising in the behavior of the Mongols after the conquest of Russia, their complete religious tolerance. In the written sources of this period, persecution for faith is not noted. In addition, the Mongols did not impose their faith on the conquered people. Moreover, they, on the contrary, did not interfere with the religious practices of the Russians.

The behavior of the Russian clergy may also seem strange. After the conquest of Kyiv by the Mongols, to the great surprise of all the people, Metropolitan Kirill voluntarily leaves Novgorod, which was not conquered by the Mongols, and moves to Kyiv, defeated by enemies and destroyed, and not only moves himself, but also transfers the Orthodox Metropolis of All Russia into it! The Metropolitan at that time enjoyed significant benefits from the Mongols; his power, in comparison with the princely, was extensive: while the power of the prince was limited to the possessions of his principality, the power of the metropolitan extended to all Russian principalities, including the people settled in the steppe zone in the direct possessions of nomadic uluses. Such behavior of the conquerors - the Mongols, inveterate pagans, as traditional history is trying to assure us, cannot be called more than strange.

In addition, which is already out of the ordinary, the Mongols, with the formation of military settlements within the Horde, began to build Orthodox churches everywhere, in which services were held without hindrance! One can fantasize about the generosity of the Mongols and assume, for example, that the Mongols gave each family a horse, and in addition to this they also built a new five-walled hut. But to assume that the Mongols would allow Orthodox churches to be built in their possessions, and to send services to them, at which they themselves would be present - such an absurdity could not be dreamed of by anyone even in a nightmare! And this is not all the quirks of the Mongols - intensive construction of Orthodox monasteries began throughout the country. From the point of view of official history, such behavior of the Mongols does not fit into any gates! But Karamzin writes, and he can in no way be accused of antipathy towards the Romanovs: “One of… the consequences of the Tatar domination… was the rise of our clergy, the multiplication of monks and church estates…”. In addition, "very few of the current Russian monasteries were founded before or after the Tatars: all others have remained a monument of this time." Karmazin wants to convince us that almost all Russian monasteries were founded under the Tatar-Mongols. The question is, why did the Mongols need such charity in relation to their enemies? For what purpose did the Mongols care about the spirituality of the Russians? Reason refuses to obey the strange logic of the winners. In this situation, the laws of logic are powerless to explain the behavior of the enslavers.

The era of the Tatar-Mongol yoke is the time of the beginning of the emergence of the first religious doubts, which later gave rise to various religions: Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Islam, Nestorianism, Arianism, etc. Paganism and Shamaism, widespread in the east, must be added to these confessions. It would seem that the Mongols, according to the generally accepted theory, being themselves pagans, according to the position of the invaders, should oppress and persecute Orthodox believers. But for some reason this expected action does not occur. The opposite happens: Orthodoxy is supported in every way by the invaders, and moreover, the invaders all at once suddenly become Orthodox and begin to go to the same church with the vanquished! Very strange for the invaders! But this fact is noted by many foreign travelers. And against the facts, facts must also be presented that refute them. But official historians do not have these facts, and therefore they tell tales about the bloodthirsty and wild Mongols who drowned Russia in blood, plunging it into the flames of conflagrations.

Unlike modern historians who tell us about how the Mongols ravaged and burned villages and cities, in the documents of contemporaries they look not like conquerors, but like zealous owners who care not only about material wealth, but also think about spiritual values, who have been associated with the Orthodox Church for many years. With the arrival of the Mongols, the Orthodox Church not only did not lose its significance in public life, but, on the contrary, strengthened its position, which resulted in the expansion of benefits from the central government. In this case, the church was exempt from Horde and princely taxes. Karamzin writes like this: “The possessions of the church, free from Horde and princely taxes, prospered.” The structure of taxes should be clarified. Taxes were divided into three components: monetary, natural and human, the latter, in turn, was also divided into three varieties: children's, men's and women's. So the church was exempted from all types of taxes, including the human component. Here it must be borne in mind that the tax exemption extended to all church lands and to all church people who owned these lands.

The atypical behavior of the Mongols invaders seems strange to official historians. But even more strange is the behavior of the Russian Church during the period of the Tatar-Mongol yoke. We know from reliable history that the Russian Church has always called on the people to fight against foreign invaders. The only exception is her behavior towards the "foreign Mongols conquerors". Moreover, from the very first days of the conquest, the Russian church has provided direct support to foreign pagans - the Mongols. Let us recall once again that immediately after the "capture" of Kyiv, Metropolitan Kirill leaves Novgorod, which was not occupied by the Mongols, and arrives in Kyiv "into the hands of the Mongols." On this occasion, we can say that the Russian Church was corrupt. Moreover, we can say that everyone sold out and bent: both the church and the princes, and in general the entire Russian people. Strictly speaking, this is the concept of the historians of the XVIII century and their modern followers.

One can wonder endlessly at the inability of the Mongols to be invaders! The way the Mongols behave in the territory they conquered cannot be called anything other than carelessness. Judge for yourself!

It is generally accepted that the Mongols did not use Russians in responsible positions, attracting them only to perform rough and hard physical labor. Moreover, the attraction was purely coercive. Only much later, historians were forced to admit that, "...probably later, the forced participation of Russian soldiers in the Tatar army ceased. There were mercenaries who had already voluntarily joined the Tatar troops," writes M.D. Poluboyarinov. But this is not entirely true. It turns out that the Russian people put up with the yoke and forgave the Mongols burned cities and villages, thousands taken captive, tens of thousands killed and voluntarily went to serve in the army of the enemy to devastate Russian cities? Why, then, was the Battle of Kulikovo, standing on the Ugra (and someone says that there was no standing, but there were bloody battles)? It turns out an interesting collision: traditional Russian historians were then forced to admit that in the Battle of Kulikovo, Russian troops had to fight the Russians as part of a horde! But this should not be according to the same traditional version! It turns out a paradox!

And here is what A.A. wrote. Gordeev in the book "History of the Cossacks": "The main mass of the armed service and labor forces of the Golden Horde were Russian people." Imagine the absurdity of the situation: for some reason, the victorious Mongols hand over weapons to the “Russian slaves” they conquered, and those (being armed to the teeth) calmly serve in the conquering troops, making up the “main mass” in them! Let us recall that the Russian troops were recently utterly defeated by the Mongols in an armed struggle!

History since the time of Rome knows no such precedent: not a single victorious state has acted in this way! There has always been an immutable rule: the defeated people were disarmed with a prohibition to have weapons in the future, reduced to the level of slaves with the right to be submissive and obedient.

If the presence of Russians in the Mongol service during the yoke is surprising, then the service of the Russians among the Mongols before the invasion should cause astonishment, no less! And the facts say just that! Here, for example, in ancient documents it is said that even before the conquest of Russia, the Mongols had Russians in the army, led by their leader Plaksin. It turns out a very peculiar picture: the Russians as part of the Mongol army go to enslave the Russians! Doesn't fit very well logically. Although it is quite possible that at that time there were already “gentlemen of fortune”, a kind of “privateers”, who, like “tumbleweeds”, wandered from one military group to another in search of military happiness, and, most likely, military booty. But it is unlikely that medieval chroniclers began to mention such a rabble of volunteers? Apparently, the interest of the chroniclers was attracted by a numerically significant grouping of Slavs, which is of no small importance within the Mongol army.

The presence of Russian troops in the Mongol ranks is noted by historians not only at the time of the conquest of Russia, but also at the time of the heyday and decline of the Mongol Empire. A vivid example of what was said earlier are the primary sources in Gumilev's transcription, telling about the composition of the Russian army before the Battle of Kulikovo: "Moscow ... demonstrated loyalty to the alliance with the legitimate heir to the khans of the Golden Horde - Tokhtamysh, who is at the head of the Volga and Siberian Tatars." Those. Volga and Siberian Tatars fought in the Russian army. A strange composition for the Russian army, which went to battle with the Tatar yoke! And here is who was part of Mamai's Mongol army: "The Volga Tatars were reluctant to serve Mamai and there were few of them in his army." Interestingly, both here and there the Tatars! Russians here and there. It turns out that it is impossible to distinguish between the rati of Mamai and Donskoy by nationality! I wonder who Dmitry fought against if there were Tatars in his army? Against the Russians?

According to official history, Genghis Khan created (how does he know it?) An excellent administrative system in his empire, in key places of which were the Mongols. But what do we see in Russia immediately after its capture by the Mongols? The Italian traveler Plano Carpini, passing through Kyiv, which had just been defeated by Batu, does not mention a single Mongol chief. And as tenth in Kyiv, Vladimir Yeikovich sits quietly, as before Batu. A somewhat strange and incomprehensible picture for wartime, given that Yeikovich should not have been on the sidelines of organizing a rebuff to the Mongols during the storming of Kyiv.

In theory, during and after any assault, a massacre takes place in the city, which usually lasts three days, but Yeikovich not only survived this massacre, but also retained his post under the Mongols. One must think that the Mongols rewarded him with this for a poorly organized rebuff to them. By the way, Karpini saw the first Tatars only outside the city of Kanev.

The case with Vladimir Yeikovich is not the only one. Although it is believed that there were a lot of alien Tatar-Mongols, in fact, modern historians, i.e. historians of those times paint a different picture: there are few Mongols in Batu, and therefore there are not enough of them, and they are replaced almost everywhere by Russians. Here is what Rubricus, the ambassador of King Louis IX, writes: “Russian settlements are scattered everywhere among the Tatars; Russians, mixed with Tatars ... All routes of transportation in a vast country are served by Russians; at river crossings, Russians are everywhere.”

It would be interesting to analyze the question of the influence of the Tatar-Mongolian yoke on the Russian language. It is quite clear that the Horde of barbarians, which flooded the country, hopelessly distorted and trampled the native Russian speech, lowered the level of literacy and plunged the people into the darkness of ignorance and illiteracy. Official historians are trying to assure us that the Tatar conquest stopped the development of Russian culture for several centuries and threw the country into the darkness of the past. Is it so?

One of the generally accepted indicators of the level of culture is the "correctness" of the written language. What happened to the written Russian language after the conquest of Russia by the Mongols? How did it degrade under the influence of the Mongols for 300 years? Let us turn to our official historian N. Karamzin. Here is what he says: "Our language from the 13th to the 15th century acquired more purity and correctness."

Unfathomable! There has never been such a precedent in history for an illiterate wild nomadic people to increase their literacy as a result of the enslavement of the settled population of a civilized state!? The literacy of a people who have mastered the culture of agriculture and have a religious cult of Christianity! The question is, how could the wild people raise the culture of the Russian people? With your darkness? Illiteracy? Wildness?

Historian N. Karamzin argues that under the Tatar-Mongols, instead of the former "Russian, uneducated dialect, writers (which writers in Mongolian times? -author) carefully adhered to the grammar of church books or ancient Serbian ... which they followed not only in declensions and conjugations, but and in speech. Like this! I wish I knew where you would fall... If the Mongols hadn't conquered us, maybe we wouldn't have had a culturally literate Russian language!?

And here is another interesting and incomprehensible mystery of the Mongol yoke! On old coins, sometimes there are inscriptions made with strange letters or signs that are unusual for us today. Historians usually tell us about this, they say, the Russian princes, in order to please the Tatars, were forced to write on coins in Tatar. True, the researchers, despite their assurances, cannot read these inscriptions themselves and are forced to recognize them as "meaningless." The same picture was observed on Russian seals. It turns out, indeed, a mysterious picture: the text is written in clear letters, but it is impossible to read it - it does not look like either Tatar or Russian texts. Apparently, the charge of subservience to the Mongols can be removed from the Russian princes.

The assumption about the encoding of the text on the coins is no longer used: the ciphertext on the coins is not used. What's the point? It must be read! After all, the native people use the coins, and Russian coins also get to foreigners, who will try to decipher this text by any means. What then? It turns out that all the "kabalistic" texts were written in characters that did not look like Cyrillic, some old Slavic language, the alphabet of which we already (or still) do not know.

True, two amateurs independently deciphered one text written in such signs. The decryption results matched. The deciphered text sounds approximately like this: “This is the book of the stolnik Mikhail Petrovich Boryatinskov,” etc. The meaning turned out to be surprisingly simple and understandable! Apparently, in the old days, the Slavs (yes, maybe not only them) had a different alphabet in addition to the Cyrillic alphabet, i.e. there is written bilingualism. And from here we must state that Russian princes did not write any Tatar texts on coins and seals - in Russia a different version of writing Russian (Tatar) letters was used.

And the last fact that refutes any involvement of the Mongol yoke in the "secret writing" on coins: incomprehensible inscriptions are found even under Ivan IV, when the Tatar yoke was long gone, i.e. according to traditional chronology, Russia finally threw off the Tatar-Mongol yoke in 1480.

One must think that, having freed itself from the hated foreigners who allegedly oppressed the country for almost two and a half centuries, Russia finally breathed a sigh of relief and tried to quickly forget the terrible years of enslavement. In any case, she tried to revive the old Russian names of regions, localities, cities and erase the hated "Tatar-Mongolian" from people's memory. The process is completely natural: every nation that has thrown off the bloody and merciless foreign yoke revives the original national names on the map of their homeland. Nothing happened!

If you look at the map of Asia in 1754 (how many years have passed since the yoke?), you can see that the inscription “Emperie Russienne” stretches across the entire territory from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Everything is correct! But below this inscription in three times large letters is the second inscription "Grande Tartarie", i.e. Great (Big) Tataria.

How could this happen? After all, the Romanov story assures that the "Tatar-Mongol yoke" in Russia disappeared long ago, at least 300 years before the creation of this map. Was three centuries really not enough to forget the Tatar-Mongolian name of Russia? But besides this inscription, other Tatar inscriptions can be seen on the map: Tartarie Independente; Tartarie Chinoise, etc. Looking at the map, you might think that the Russians lived surrounded by all kinds of tartars.

But this was not the end of the matter. Russians, after the fall of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, continued to wear Tatar clothes, in particular, a turban.

In one of the portraits, Stepan Razin is depicted in a turban. And this is not a mistake or an artist's fantasy! On the head of Razin, indeed, a real turban is depicted! Let's take the monument to Bogdan Khmelnitsky in Kyiv on Khreshchatyk: the same Tatar headdress flaunts on the hetman's head. There was a custom in the Horde: all commanders wore a turban, or, in other words, a turban was a distinctive accessory of a noble Horde.

Such facts somehow do not fit with the "evil" inflicted by the Tatar-Mongol yoke. One gets the impression that the Tatar-Mongol yoke was not yet tired of the Russian people and continued to exist among the people even after 1480! As if real life had no idea that historians had already lifted the Mongol yoke! And in the XIV century they erected the Intercession Orthodox Church, crowned with seven Muslim turbans at once, and not just anywhere, but in the very center of the state and not only the state, but in the very center of the capital!? Even the Mongols could not have imagined this even in the most daring forecasts.

2.2. Positions of the Opponents of the Historical Reality of the Tatar-Mongol Yoke in Russia.

These positions can be combined into two concepts that have become most widespread among opponents of the historical reality of the Tatar-Mongol yoke in Russia. This is the concept of L.V. Gumilyov and the concept of Nosovsky G.V. and Fomenko A.T.

A feature of the concept of Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov is the assertion that Russia and the Golden Horde until the XIII century. not only were they not enemies, but even were in some allied relations. In his opinion, the overly active expansionist actions of the Livonian Order in the Baltics became the prerequisites for such an alliance. Moreover, the union for the most part had a military rather than a political character. This union was expressed in the form of protection of Russian cities by Mongolian detachments for a certain fee: “...Alexander was interested in the prospect of receiving military assistance from the Mongols to resist the onslaught of the West and internal opposition. It was for this help that Alexander Yaroslavovich was ready to pay, and pay dearly. So, according to Gumilyov, with the help of the Mongols, cities such as Novgorod, Pskov in 1268, and Smolensk in 1274 escaped capture: “But here, in accordance with an agreement with the Horde, a Tatar detachment of 500 horsemen appeared in Novgorod ... Novgorod and Pskov survived ". In addition, the Russian princes themselves helped the Tatars: "The Russians were the first to provide military assistance to the Tatars, taking part in the campaign against the Alans." Lev Nikolaevich saw only positive aspects in such an alliance: “Thus, for the tax that Alexander Nevsky undertook to pay to Sarai, Russia received a reliable strong army that defended not only Novgorod and Pskov ... Moreover, the Russian principalities that accepted the alliance with the Horde completely retained their ideological independence and political independence... This alone shows that Russia was not a province of the Mongol ulus, but a country allied to the Great Khan, paying a certain tax on the maintenance of the army, which she herself needed. He also believed that this alliance led to an improvement in the internal situation of the country: "The alliance with the Tatars turned out to be a boon for Russia in terms of establishing internal order."

In arguing his idea, LN Gumilyov cites the following facts. Firstly, there were no detachments of the Tatar-Mongols constantly in Russia: "The Mongols did not leave garrisons, they did not think to establish their permanent power." Secondly, it is known from many sources that Prince Alexander Nevsky often went to Khan Batu. Gumilev connects this fact with the organization of the union: “In 1251, Alexander came to the Horde of Batu, made friends, and then fraternized with his son Sartak, as a result of which he became the adopted son of the khan. The union of the Horde and Russia has come true…”. Thirdly, as mentioned above, Gumilyov cites the fact that the Mongols defended Novgorod in 1268. Fourthly, in his books, Gumilyov mentions the opening of an Orthodox bishopric in the Golden Horde, which, in his opinion, would hardly be possible in the event of enmity between these countries: “In 1261, through the efforts of Alexander Nevsky, as well as the Mongol khans Berke and Mengu - Timur, the courtyard of an Orthodox bishop was opened. It was not subjected to any persecution; it was believed that the Bishop of Sarsky is the representative of the interests of Russia and all Russian people at the court of the great khan. Fifthly, after Berke came to power in the Horde, who established Islam as the state religion, religious persecution of the Orthodox Church did not begin in Russia: “... After the victory of the Muslim party in the Horde represented by Berke, no one demanded that Russians convert to Islam.”

In addition to the concept of L.N. Gumilyov, there is another “original” concept of Nosovsky G.V. and Fomenko A.T., which does not coincide with the traditional history at all. Its essence lies in the fact that, in their opinion, the Horde and Russia are practically one and the same state. They believed that the Horde was not a foreign entity that captured Russia, but simply an eastern Russian regular army, which was an integral part of the ancient Russian state. From the point of view of this concept, the “Tatar-Mongol yoke” is simply a period of military government, when the commander-khan was the supreme ruler, and civil princes sat in the cities, who were obliged to collect tribute in favor of this army, for its maintenance: “Thus , the ancient Russian state seems to be a single empire, within which there was a class of professional military (Horde) and a civilian part that did not have its own regular troops, since such troops were already part of the Horde. In the light of this concept, frequent Tatar-Mongol raids were nothing more than a forced collection of tribute from those areas that did not want to pay: “The so-called “Tatar raids”, in our opinion, were simply punitive expeditions to those Russian regions that, according to what -they refused to pay tribute to considerations. Nosovsky and Fomenko argue their version of events as follows. Firstly, they share the opinion of some historians that as early as the 13th century Cossacks lived on the borders of Russia. However, there is no mention of clashes between the Mongols and the Cossacks. From here they conclude that the Cossacks and the Horde are Russian troops: “The Horde, wherever it comes from, would inevitably have to come into conflict with the Cossack states. However, this was not noted. The only hypothesis is that the Horde did not fight the Cossacks because the Cossacks were an integral part of the Horde. Our version: the Cossack troops were not just part of the Horde, they were also regular troops of the Russian state. In other words, the Horde was Russian from the very beginning.” Secondly, they point out the absurdity of the use of Russian troops by the Mongols in their campaigns; after all, they could rebel and go over to the side of the Mongol enemies: “Let's stop for a moment and imagine the absurdity of the situation: the victorious Mongols for some reason transfer weapons to the “Russian slaves” they conquered, and they calmly serve in the troops of the conquerors, making up the “main mass” there “!.. Even in traditional history, Ancient Rome never armed newly conquered slaves.” Karamzin wrote in his writings that most of the current temples were built during the period of the yoke. This fact also confirms the basis of the concept of Nosovsky and Fomenko: “Almost all Russian monasteries were founded under the “Tatar-Mongols”. And it's clear why. Many of the Cossacks, leaving military service in the Horde, went to monasteries. Thus, they write, “The Mongol conquerors turn into some kind of invisible people, who for some reason no one sees.”

Chapter 3. Proof of the historical reality of the Tatar-Mongol yoke in Russia.

Almost all other well-known historians believe that the relationship of the Golden Horde to Russia cannot be called allied. In their opinion, the Horde still had power over Russia, and the word “yoke” characterizes this power most accurately.

The great khans treated Russia as a vassal state, whose helplessness was supported by large tributes and recruitment kits. They justify their position with the following facts. Firstly, for the great khans, the Russian princes were like a cross between vassals and slaves. So, every time after the change of khan, they went to bow to him and ask for a label for reigning: “Back in 1242, the Grand Duke of Vladimir Yaroslav I went to Batu’s headquarters, where he was confirmed in office. His son Konstantin was sent to Mongolia to assure the regent of his and his father's commitment. This is also confirmed by the facts of the execution of Russian princes by the Mongol khans, for example, the execution of Mikhail Chernigovsky: "... He was executed together with one of the boyars loyal to him, who accompanied him to the khan's house...". Secondly, history knows that during the entire time of ruling, the Golden Horde sent many punitive detachments to Russia, which fought against non-payment of tribute, as well as uprisings of princes or ordinary people. The clearest example of this is the “Nevryu’s army”, sent against Grand Duke Andrei Yaroslavich, and which, according to many historians, caused Russia more harm than Batu’s campaign: “In 1252, Vladimir Russia was attacked by Tatar tumens under the command of the commander Nevryuy.

The regiments of Andrei Yaroslavich and his brother Yaroslav were defeated in a fierce battle near Pereyaslavl-Zalessky, and the Grand Duke himself fled to Sweden, from where he returned only a few years later. Also, one cannot ignore the frequent censuses of the population of Russia conducted by the khans. Their results were used to collect taxes, as well as to recruit warriors. This version of events is also supported by the fact that in Russia there was a decline in culture: some crafts were lost, many books were burned.

In general, the concepts of L.N. Gumilyov, Nosovsky G.V. and Fomenko A.T. don't seem very plausible to me. Rather, they are based on inference and arbitrary interpretation of historical facts. The arguments that they cite in their defense, in my opinion, are not very reliable: for example, why only they speak about the protection of Russian cities by the Mongol-Tatar detachments, and not a single well-known historian, except for them, mentions this fact. Thus, in the historical concept, the concepts of L.N. Gumilyov, Nosovsky G.V. and Fomenko A.T. there are many "dark spots". Most researchers of the yoke believe that the results of the Mongol-Tatar yoke for the Russian lands were destruction and regression, which in no way confirms the “noble” intentions of the Horde. At present, most historians also emphasize that the yoke threw the Russian principalities back in their development and became the main reason for Russia's lagging behind the Western countries. “Rus was thrown back several centuries, and in those centuries when the guild industry of the West was moving to the era of primitive accumulation, the Russian handicraft industry had to pass part of the historical path that had been done before Batu for the second time.”

In general, supporters of the traditional point of view assess the impact of the yoke on various aspects of the life of Russia extremely negatively: there was a massive movement of the population, and with it the agricultural culture, to the west and northwest, to less convenient territories with a less favorable climate; the political and social role of cities is sharply reduced; the power of the princes over the population increased. The invasion of nomads was accompanied by mass destruction of Russian cities, the inhabitants were ruthlessly destroyed or taken into captivity. This led to a noticeable decline in Russian cities - the population decreased, the life of the townspeople became poorer, many crafts withered. The Mongol-Tatar invasion dealt a heavy blow to the basis of urban culture - handicraft production. Since the destruction of cities was accompanied by mass withdrawals of artisans to Mongolia and the Golden Horde. Together with the artisan population of the Russian city, they lost their centuries-old production experience: the craftsmen took their professional secrets with them. Complex crafts disappear for a long time, the ancient craftsmanship of enamel has disappeared forever. The appearance of Russian cities has become poorer. The quality of construction subsequently also dropped significantly. No less heavy damage was inflicted by the conquerors on the Russian countryside, the rural monasteries of Russia, where the majority of the country's population lived. The peasants were robbed by all the Horde officials, and numerous Khan's ambassadors, and simply robber gangs. The damage inflicted by the monolo-Tatars on the peasant economy was terrible. In the war, dwellings and outbuildings were destroyed. Working cattle was captured and driven to the Horde. The damage inflicted on the national economy of Russia by the Mongols-Tatars and the conquerors was not limited to devastating robberies during the raids. After the yoke was established, huge valuables left the country in the form of “tributes” and “requests”. The constant leakage of silver and other metals had dire consequences for the economy. Silver was not enough for trade, there was even a "silver hunger". The Mongol-Tatar conquests led to a significant deterioration in the international position of the Russian principalities. Ancient trade and cultural ties with neighboring states were forcibly severed. Trade went into decline. The invasion dealt a strong devastating blow to the culture of the Russian principalities. The conquests led to a long decline in Russian chronicle writing, which reached its dawn by the beginning of the Batu invasion. Mongol-Tatar conquests artificially delayed the spread of commodity-money relations, subsistence economy did not develop.

All of the above facts speak in favor of the reality of the Tatar-Mongol yoke in Russia. The main ones are given in the conclusion to this paper.

Conclusion

The proof of the historical reality of the Tatar-Mongolian yoke are the following facts: the Russian lands lagging behind the developed countries of Western Europe, the huge damage to the economic, political and cultural development of Russia. Tens of thousands of people died in battle or were driven into slavery. A significant part of the income in the form of tribute went to the Horde.

The old agricultural centers and the once developed territories were abandoned and fell into decay. The border of agriculture moved to the north, the southern fertile soils were called the "Wild Field". Russian cities were subjected to mass ruin and destruction. Many crafts became simpler and sometimes even disappeared, which hindered the creation of small-scale production and, ultimately, delayed economic development.

The Mongol conquest preserved political fragmentation. It weakened the ties between the various parts of the state. Traditional political and trade ties with other countries were disrupted. The vector of Russian foreign policy, which took place along the “south-north” line (the fight against the nomadic danger, stable ties with Byzantium and through the Baltic with Europe), radically changed its focus to the “west-east”. The pace of cultural development of the Russian lands slowed down.

All of the above proves the inconsistency of the point of view of opponents of the historical reality of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, indicates that there is no question of any "cooperation" and of any "neighbour-sister" relations between the Tatar khans and the Russian princes in this case (as and the assumption that the Horde is part of Ancient Russia, its military component), being tributaries of the Golden Horde, the Russian princes simply needed to establish some kind of diplomatic relations with it, if only because of preventing the loss of their power. And not the planting of Islam by the Horde in Russia and loyalty to Christianity can be explained not by good intentions on the part of the first, but by some kind of move that made it possible not to provoke the wrath of the church and, accordingly, the entire Russian people. Perhaps the preservation of Orthodoxy can also be attributed to the merits of the diplomacy of the Russian princes in the Horde.

It should also be noted that the point of view of historians - opponents of the historical reality of the Tatar-Mongol yoke is based more on conjecture and conjecture and is not documented.

List of sources used

1. Vernadsky G.V. History of Russia: Mongols and Rus. – M.: Tver: Agraf: Lean, 2000.

2. Gumilyov L.N. Ancient Russia and the great steppe. – M.: Thought, 1993.

3. Gumilyov L.N. From Russia to Russia. – M.: Progress, 1995.

4. Egorov V.L. Golden Horde: myths and reality. – M.: Knowledge, 1990.

5. Karamzin N.M. History of the Russian State: Book. 2. -Rostov-on-Don, 1994.

6. Klyuchevsky V.O. Russian History Course: Vol.2, Ch.2. –M.: Sotsekgiz, 1937.

7. Kargilov V.V. "Mongol-Tatar invasion of Russia", Moscow, 1966.

8. Kulepov G.V. "Our Fatherland", Terra, 1991.

9. Lyubimov L. "The Art of Ancient Russia", Moscow, 1986.

10. Nosovsky G.V., Fomenko A.T. New chronology and the concept of ancient Russia, England and Rome: V.1. - M, 1996.

Eremkin Valentin

In this work, the student studies the positions of famous historians regarding the events taking place in Russia in the 13th century and makes an attempt to draw his own conclusions about what kind of relationship there were in reality between the Russian principalities and the Golden Horde, whether it was a yoke or an alliance, and what consequences these relationships had .

Download:

Preview:

Municipal educational institution

secondary school No. 7 of the city of Segezha

student of grade 11B MOU secondary school No. 7

2011

Segezha

page

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………3- 4

Chapter I. Source study base……………………………………………………………… 5-10

Chapter II. "Moscow ... owes its greatness to the Khans"………………………………………...11-15

Chapter III. Minor impact………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Chapter IV. Negative impact………………………………………………………………….18-20

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..21-22

References………………………………………………………………………………….23

Introduction

Historiography is a collection of historical studies related to some period or problem. Among historians studying the Mongol-Tatar invasion, there is no consensus on two main problems: 1) whether there was a Mongol-Tatar yoke; 2) what impact it had on the Russian lands.

The views characteristic of the "Eurasian historical school" were even more clearly manifested in G. Vernadsky's article "The Mongol Yoke in Russian History". G. Vernadsky considers Russian history only as an integral part of the history of the Mongol Empire, which is typical of Eurasians. G. Vernadsky did his best to downplay the negative impact of the Mongol-Tatar invasion on the historical development of Russia. This goal was also served by the statement that “the Mongol invasion was not something fundamentally new” in comparison with other movements of the nomads (Pechenegs, Polovtsy), a reference to the fact that the Mongol yoke “put the Russian land in the closest connection with the steppe center and the Asian peripheries of the mainland", since "Russian land fell into the system of the world empire - the empire of the Mongols", etc. G. Vernadsky considered the Mongolian yoke not burdensome for Russia. He wrote that, unlike Poland, Lithuania and Hungary, which established their power over part of the Russian lands, “the Mongol empire did not interfere with the internal cultural life of its parts, including the Russian land ... This state was a world empire, and not a provincial power.” Moreover, "the Mongol-Tatar wave supported on its crest the defense of the Russian people against the Latin West."

Some ideas of the "Eurasians" were also reflected in the works of L.N. Gumilev, based on them, we can conclude that the author believes that the Mongol-Tatar invasion marked the beginning of a new ethno- and cultural genesis"the clash of different fields of attitude always gives rise to a violent reaction - the death of excess passionaries, bearers of different traditions, the emergence of conflicts within."

In addition to the concept of L.N. Gumilyov, there is another “original” concept of G.V. Nosovsky and A.T. Fomenko, which does not coincide with traditional history at all. However, these historians interpret the entire history of Russia differently from others. Its essence lies in the fact that, in their opinion, the Horde and Russia are practically the same state. They believe that the Horde was not a foreign entity that captured Russia, but simply an eastern Russian regular army, which was an integral part of the ancient Russian state. From the point of view of this concept, the “Tatar-Mongol yoke” is simply a period of military government of the state, when the commander-khan was the supreme ruler, and civil princes sat in the cities, who were obliged to collect tribute for the maintenance of the army: “Thus, the ancient Russian state appears a single empire, within which there was a class of professional military (Horde) and a civilian part that did not have its own regular troops, since such troops were already part of the Horde. In the light of this concept, the frequent Tatar-Mongol raids were nothing more than a forced collection of tribute from those areas that did not want to pay. Nosovsky and Fomenko argue their version of events as follows. Firstly, they share the opinion of some historians that as early as the 13th century Cossacks lived on the borders of Russia. However, there is no mention of clashes between the Mongols and the Cossacks. From here they conclude that the Cossacks and the Horde are Russian troops: “The Horde, wherever it comes from, .. would inevitably come into conflict with the Cossack states. However, this was not noted. The only hypothesis is that the Horde did not fight the Cossacks because the Cossacks were an integral part of the Horde. “Our version: the Cossack troops were not just part of the Horde, they were also regular troops of the Russian state. In other words, the Horde was Russian from the very beginning.” Secondly, they point out the absurdity of the use of Russian troops by the Mongols in their campaigns; after all, they could rebel and go over to the side of the Mongol enemies.

Mintimer Shaimiev, the 1st President of Tatarstan, believes that the period of the Golden Horde cannot be painted only in black colors. It is necessary to see the creative side of this state, which has built dozens of prosperous cities. The merit of that era is that a vast state made it possible to connect the West and the East, laying new safe trade routes. Before the era of the Genghisids, the West and East were mostly isolated, independent worlds. In the 13th-15th centuries. The Great Steppe united them into one whole. “Thanks to the Golden Horde, the Russian principalities, engaged in internecine struggle, united around Moscow. If there hadn't been a khan with his strict laws, a system of communications and a universal accounting of the population, there would have been no great Russia. The Russians would have continued to sort things out with each other for a long time to come, and thus would have given up the historic initiative to their neighbors.”

It is worth paying attention to the fact that a number of historians hold a positive point of view regarding the Mongolian culture, since it contributed to and made it possible to isolate the Russian, Orthodox culture from the Western one, which was close to the Russian people, but was changed, since it was based on Catholicism. This point of view, in particular, was held by the Slavophiles.

Chapter III. Minor impact.

The above opinions related to the point of view, which we conventionally designated as the first. Now consider the following view of the Mongol-Tatar procession. The point of view, designated as the second, whose supporters consider the influence of the Mongol-Tatars on Russia to be insignificant.

One of the most famous supporters of this point of view is the Russian historian S.M. Solovyov. It is characterized by an almost complete denial of the role of the Mongol-Tatars in the history of Russia. In several of his works, one of the reasons for the lack of influence, he considers that the Mongols were located, lived far from the Russian principalities. Their main concern was the collection of tribute, and the lack of interest in the relations that developed between principalities and princes in particular. In his "History of Russia" he practically ignored the Mongol element, except for its destructive aspects - raids and wars. Although briefly mentioning the dependence of the Russian princes on the khan's labels and tax collection, Solovyov opined that "we have no reason to recognize any significant influence (of the Mongols) on the (Russian) internal administration, since we do not see any traces of it"

K.D. Kavelin, in his review, objects to S. M. Solovyov, while citing a number of reasons. One of the accents is made just on insufficient attention to this issue:“Citizen Solovyov speaks of tribal relations, then of state relations, who at first fought against them and, finally, replaced them. But in what relation they were with each other, where did state relations come from in our everyday life, following the rank and file, does not explain or explains too unsatisfactorily.But at the same time, it is worth noting that K.D. Kavelin largely adheres to the same point of view as S.M. Solovyov. K.D. Kavelin says that the Tatars did not make a special contribution to the development of the civilizational process of the Russian nation, and also did not damage it. However, K.D. Kavelin also expresses a point of view, which is more associated with the first, about the fact that Tatar rule"strengthened the power of the Grand Duke and thus recreated the visible center of the political development of Russia".

I.N. Boltin also makes a remark about the fact that the Mongol-Tatars did not influence the peoples they conquered, while contrasting them with the Romans. A similar point of view is shared by V.I. Kelsiev, who protests to the supporters of the first point of view, speaking about the exaggeration of the role of foreign, especially the Mongol-Tatar influence on Russia.

Another supporter of the second point of view is V.O. Klyuchevsky, yes, he is also of the opinion that it was the Mongol-Tatars who influenced the formation of the centralized Russian state, which is an aspect of the first, but he tends to underestimate the Mongol-Tatar invasion. IN. Klyuchevsky does not pay attention to the fact that after the conquest the Russian principalities found themselves in new conditions of their existence. Thus, he emphasizes that the Horde khans do not impose their orders on Russia. Among historians of Russian law and the state, Solovyov's ideas were followed by M.A. Dyakonov, although he expressed his views more cautiously.

There are also scientists who express in their writings the idea of ​​the superficiality of the Mongol-Tatar influence. The supporters of this view include N. Rozhkov, S.F. Platonov.

Chapter IV. Negative influence.

We remain unlit by the third point of view, which refers to the negative impact of the Mongol-Tatar invasion on Russia and its further history as a whole.

Let us first turn to the point of view of A. Richter, which was based on the "History of the Russian State", but unlike its author, N.M. Karamzin, a supporter of the first point of view, A. Richter chooses the opposite to the author. Yes, he also believes that the impact was significant, but mostly negative. According to A. Richter, under the influence of the Mongol-Tatars, Russian“were accustomed to low cunning, to deceit, to greed”, the attitude towards the head of state, military tactics and weapons were adopted (we will make an amendment to the fact that this is still a plus, since the military affairs of the Mongols were one of their strongest points), the influence on civil laws, as well as on literature (the appearance of a large the number of words of Tatar origin in Russian). I would like to add that this phenomenon did not frighten the Slavophiles at all (see the first point of view), which, in our opinion, is somewhat contradictory.

Opinion of M.S. Gasteva also refers to the third view of the Mongol-Tatar invasion and its further influence on Russia. M.S. Gastev believes that the Mongol yoke is one of the reasons that influenced the further slowdown in Russia's development. He characterizes it as"a time of the greatest disorder, the greatest misfortune for our fatherland, one of those times that weigh on a person, suffocate him."It is also worth noting that M.S. Gastev does not believe that the rule of the Mongol-Tatars contributed to the eradication of civil strife, that the successes of the Russian people in agriculture were very small, and that constant raids simply changed and interfered with the usual and familiar way of life. Drawing a conclusion, M.S. Gastev says:“What benefit did the Tatars bring to us? It seems none. Autocracy itself, taken by many as the fruit of their dominion, is not the fruit of their dominion.

Now I would like to draw attention to the view of A.N. Nasonov. Most researchers, on the issue we are considering, believe that his opinion belongs to the second point of view, but I would like to object and attribute it to the third. Since, according to his opinion, the Mongols tried in every possible way to prevent the formation of a single state in Russia, trying to increase its fragmentation. Thus, he vividly expresses his negative in relation to what kind of influence the Mongol-Tatars had on Russia. However, some of those who study this issue believe that A.N. Nasonov considers the influence insignificant, based on the foregoing, we express disagreement on this matter.

Academician H. Fren believed that the Mongol-Tatar invasion was the gravest disaster for the Russian people. V.G. Belinsky called the Tatar yoke the "fettering beginning" of the Russian people, which delayed its development. N.G. Chernyshevsky expresses the opinion that this invasion played a negative role in the development of Russia, but the Russian people literally saved European civilization from destruction. A. I. Herzen adheres to a similar point of view, considering the Mongol-Tatars as the main brake mechanism for the further development of Russia. A.S. Pushkin spoke about this, also stating that it contributed to the slowdown in the development of Russia compared to Western Europe:“Russia was assigned a high destiny, its boundless expanses swallowed up the forces of the Mongols and stopped their invasion on the very edge of Europe ... The emerging enlightenment was saved by torn and dying Russia”

Opinion B.D. Grekova also tends to the third point of view. He points out that the policy of the Mongol khans not only did not contribute to the formation of a single centralized state, but rather, on the contrary, it happened against their will and contrary to expectations:“Tatar domination had a negative and regressive character for the Russian people. It contributed to the growth of feudal oppression and delayed the economic and cultural development of the country.

K.V. is also inclined to a similar opinion. Bazelevich and V.N. Bochkarev. Their works also contain an assessment of the Mongol invasion as a terrible disaster that delayed"economic and cultural development of the country".

Candidate of Historical Sciences Marina Poluboyarinova believes that the attitude of the khan's administration towards the Russian people was based not on legal norms, but on brute force. The invasion dealt a terrible blow to the economy and culture of the Russian principalities, to their human resources. Only in the 14th century did Russia begin to recover from the blow and gather strength to fight the invaders.

A well-known archaeologist, who has been studying Russian cities that died in the fire of the Mongol invasion for many years, Doctor of Historical Sciences V.Darkevich, believes that L.N.Gumilyov turned Russian history of the 13th-14th centuries inside out. According to the scientist, the consequences of the Mongol invasion of Russia were truly catastrophic. Hundreds of settlements, small towns and cities, capitals of lands-princes - cultural and administrative centers, where distant trade and all types of handicrafts flourished, were wiped off the face of the earth. Life in many of them never recovered.

“From about the second half of the 13th century, when tormented and dying Russia became an ulus of the vast Mongol empire, a significant part of the ancient Russian girls and women, from those that, according to Ibn al-Asir, were suitable for captivity, ended up in it,” writes N .Pushkareva, candidate of historical sciences. According to Plano Carpini, the Tatars demanded that “the conquered peoples give them a tenth of everything, from people and from property ... They count ten youths and take one, they do the same with girls. They take them back to their country and keep them there as slaves.” “Where they take us, we go there, where they take us, we go there ...” the above line is a typical exclamation of “captive wives” in epics. The women taken away "in full" represented for the invaders only spoils of war, equated to gold or cattle. The prospect of saving life at the cost of abandoning moral values ​​was rejected by both Russian princes and Russian princesses and princesses themselves. Therefore, the image of the wife of Fyodor Yuryevich Evpraksia, “rushing from her lofty temple with her son with Prince Ivan to the midst of the earth,” is a poetic generalization of the idea of ​​the shame of dishonor, the preference for death over the humiliating fate of “led to fornication”

Conclusion

The Mongol-Tatar invasion and the yoke of the Golden Horde that followed it played a huge role in the further history of our country. The rule of the nomads lasted two and a half centuries and, of course, it could not pass without a trace. In addition to the deaths of a large number of people, the devastation of lands, this tragedy affected many aspects of society.

The significance of the Mongol-Tatar yoke is well reflected in the various points of view of scientists, writers, historians, and critics. They consider it from different angles, citing all sorts of arguments in their favor. It is worth noting that each thesis has two opposing points of view. What are the main theses and views on them can be identified?

The Mongol-Tatar invasion contributed to the eradication of feudal fragmentation and the unification of the Russian principalities around one center, but this is one view. There are supporters of the opposite opinion, who believe that the Mongol-Tatar yoke, on the contrary, interrupted the desire of pre-Mongolian Russia to eliminate feudal fragmentation and unify the country, intensifying princely civil strife, thereby slowing down the process of unification.

The Mongol-Tatar conquest retarded economic development, and also caused irreparable damage to the cultural and historical monuments of the country.

It is initially wrong to talk about the insignificance of the invasion of the eastern nomads, because the yoke, which lasted 250 years, could not go unnoticed and pass absolutely without a trace for the history of the state. It is unscientific to raise the question of the positive or negative influence of the Mongol invasion on the centuries-old development of Russian statehood; you can talk about how significant it is. The history of the Golden Horde is part of the history of Russia.

Directly three points of view, into which it is conventionally customary to divide researchers on this issue, intersect with each other. Each point of view is closely intertwined with the other, there is no such view and a scientist whose opinion would be clear and not ambiguous. The fact that they are divided into three directions simply shows a greater commitment to a particular point of view.

One could now make several assumptions about what and how it would have been if Russia had not suffered this terrible misfortune. It can be assumed that the current backwardness, in comparison with European countries, has its own response from that ancient past, but history does not tolerate the subjunctive mood. The main thing is that Russia emerged from under the yoke of the Mongol-Tatar yoke as a single state, which, thanks to him, our country united around the center, which is still such.

Bibliography

1. Was there a yoke? // Motherland. - 1997 - No. 3-4. – P.85-92
2. Vernadsky G.V. Two labors of St. Alexander Nevsky // Our contemporary. - 1992 - No. 3. – P.151-158
3. Vernadsky G.V. Mongols and Russia. - Tver: LEAN, M.: AGRAF, 1997, 480 p.
4. Vernadsky G. The Mongolian yoke in Russian history. // Our contemporary. - 1992 - No. 3. – P.158-164
5. Vernadsky G. What the Mongols gave Russia// Homeland. - 1997 - No. 3-4. – P.96-98
6. Golubinsky E. Shield or sword? // Motherland. - 1997 - No. 3-4. – P.77-84
7. Darkevich V. ...And a single bowl//Science and life. - 1997 - No. 3. – pp. 78-86
8. Karamzin N.M. History of the Russian State: Book. 2. - Rostov-on-Don, 1994.
9. Kramovsky M. The Great Golden Horde // Motherland. - 2003 - No. 11. – P.66-74
10. Kuzmin A. “From all sorts of villages for half a ruble ...” // Motherland. - 2003 - No. 11. – P.83-85
11. Makarov N.Rus. Thirteenth century. // Motherland. - 2003 - No. 11. – P.19-24
12. “Our way - an arrow of the Tatar ancient will pierced our chest ...” // Motherland. - 1991 - No. 8. – P.50-56
13. Nefedov S.A. Mongol conquests and the formation of Russian civilization / / Questions of history. - 2006 - No. 2. – P.113-122
14. Poluboyarinova M. Russians in the Golden Horde // Motherland. - 1997 - No. 3-4. – P.53 – 58
15. Pushkareva N. Polonyanka // Homeland. - 1997 - No. 3-4. – P.58 – 61
16. Soloviev S.M. History of Russia since ancient times//Reader on the history of Russia. T.1, M., 1994
17. Shaimiev M. In the history of the people - its present and future // Motherland. - 1997 - No. 3-4. – p.6

Nosovsky G., Fomenko A. What is Mongolia and the Tatar-Mongol invasion? Cossacks and the Golden Horde // Motherland. - 1997 - No. 6. – P.19-21

Introduction

Three points of view

Conclusion

List of used literature

Introduction

Mongol-Tatar rule in Russia lasted about two and a half centuries (1238-1480). This is a long, even huge, period of time, which brought with it significant changes, as well as further consequences for the country as a whole.

But still, to begin with, I would like to delve into the reasons for the defeat of our country before the eastern conquerors. What are they?

Feudal fragmentation of the state (at the time of the invasion, the state consisted of several large principalities that were in competition with each other, which did not have a common army capable of repelling a blow from the conquerors);

· High level of military organization of the Mongolo-Tatars;

· Lack of a unified control center of the Russian army;

· Initially, the wrong choice of the place of battle, tk. the terrain was completely favorable for the Mongol-Tatars.

The question of how the invasion of the Mongol-Tatars influenced Russia and its further development is one of the debatable ones. Based on the above reasons, various opinions are expressed about the Mongol-Tatar invasion of Russia, its further influence on the development of the Russian state. The study of this page of the past of our country has a long history, starting from the contemporaries of this event and ending with our time. Conventionally, for several decades, three points of view have been distinguished:

1. the point of view, according to which the significant and predominantly positive influence of the conquerors on Russia is recognized. The main plus that supporters of this point of view highlight is the creation of a single Russian state. The founder of this opinion is N.M. Karamzin.

2. the point of view, according to which the impact is recognized as insignificant. Supporters of this point of view are S.M. Solovyov, V.O. Klyuchevsky and some others.

3. the point of view according to which the influence of the Mongol-Tatar invasion is assessed as noticeable, but unlike the first point of view, is negative. Also, supporters of this point of view emphasize the point that this influence is not decisive for the further development of the country.

In the future, we will try to consider some points of view and draw conclusions based on them.

Unfortunately, few sources of that time have survived, so the view and opinion of various researchers is subjective, relatively incomplete, since the annals of a single period of time were mainly used, which are also united by the general view of their chroniclers, but this is precisely what contributes to the possibility of their analysis and summing up to some general conclusion.

Three points of view

So, let's consider the first point of view, which reflects the significant and positive impact of the Mongol-Tatar invasion on Russia.

“humiliated humanity itself in our ancestors and left deep, indelible marks for several centuries, irrigated with the blood and tears of many generations”. The basis of the created N.M. Karamzin's teachings are various Russian chronicles, as well as Western European sources in the person of Plano Carpini, Rubruk, Marco Polo.

A similar point of view was also held by N.I. Kostomarov, who in the article “The Beginning of Autocracy in Ancient Russia”, opposes S.M. Solovyov (his point of view will be discussed below), thus the point of view of N. I. Kostomarov partially coincides with the point of view of N. M. Karamzin. N. I. Kostomarov claims that “in North-Eastern Russia, no step has been taken to destroy the specific veche system before the Tatars” and only in Tatar “In slavery, Russia found its unity, which it did not think of during the period of freedom”. In general, according to the author, the invasion and subsequent conquest was the impetus for the transfer of power into the hands of a single Moscow prince.

Another historian who adhered to the first point of view was F.I. Leontovich. In his opinion, the Mongol-Tatars brought many different political and social innovations to Russia, such as localism, serfdom, etc. Thus, the historian concludes that the "Council Code of 1649" resembles the "Great Yasa" of Genghis Khan.

It is especially necessary to single out and pay attention to the views of the “Eurasians”. Here's what they've been reduced to in a nutshell:

· the conquest of the Mongol-Tatars was a historically necessary and progressive phenomenon;

· there was a silence about the predatory nature of the invasion and their destruction inflicted on various aspects of the life of Russia;

Exaggeration of the level of culture, statehood and military affairs of the Mongol-Tatar Khanate, their idealization took place;

· consideration of the history of the Russian people as one of the "Mongolian uluses" deprived of independent historical existence;

· the announcement of the Russians as a “Turanian people”, which was close to the Mongols and Turks, thereby showing that the Russians were the opposite of the Western Europeans, and therefore it led to the “preaching of the eternal conflict” between East and West;

· all the achievements of the Russian nation in the field of culture, statehood were associated directly with the Mongols, their beneficial influence.

Thus, we can conclude that the opinion of the "Eurasians" about the positive influence of the Mongol-Tatars on the further development of Russia was simply brought to the point of absurdity. They saw the advantages of the Mongol-Tatar invasion on all aspects of the life of the Russian people.

Some ideas of the "Eurasians" were also reflected in the works of L.N. Gumilyov, based on them, we can conclude that the author believes that the Mongol-Tatar invasion marked the beginning of a new ethno- and cultural genesis "the clash of different fields of attitude always gives rise to a violent reaction - the death of excess passionaries, bearers of different traditions, the emergence of conflicts within."

It is worth paying attention to the fact that a number of historians hold a positive point of view regarding the Mongolian culture, since it contributed and made it possible to isolate the Russian, Orthodox culture from the Western one, which was close to the Russian people, but was changed, since it was based on Catholicism . This point of view, in particular, was held by the Slavophiles.

The above opinions belonged to the point of view, which we conditionally designated as the first. Now consider the following view of the Mongol-Tatar invasion. The point of view, designated as the second, whose supporters consider the influence of the Mongol-Tatars on Russia to be insignificant.

One of the most famous supporters of this point of view is the Russian historian S.M. Solovyov. It is characterized by an almost complete denial of the role of the Mongol-Tatars in the history of Russia. In several of his works. He believes that one of the reasons for the lack of influence is that the Mongols were located, lived far from the Russian principalities. Their main concern was the collection of tribute, and the lack of interest in the relations that developed between the principalities and princes in particular. The underestimation of these events can also be seen in the fact that S.M. Solovyov devotes very little space to this event in his writings.

K.D. Kavelin, in his review, objects to S. M. Solovyov, while citing a number of reasons. One of the accents is made just on insufficient attention to this issue: “Citizen Solovyov speaks of tribal relations, then of state relations, which at first fought with them and, finally, they were replaced. But in what relation they were with each other, where did state relations come from in our life, following the rank and file, does not explain or explains too unsatisfactorily. But at the same time, it is worth noting that K.D. Kavelin largely adheres to the same point of view as S.M. Solovyov. K.D. Kavelin says that the Tatars did not make a special contribution to the development of the civilizational process of the Russian nation, and also did not damage it. However, K.D. Kavelin also expresses a point of view, which is more associated with the first, about the fact that Tatar rule "strengthened the power of the Grand Duke and thus recreated the visible center of the political development of Russia".

I.N. Boltin also makes a remark about the fact that the Mongol-Tatars did not influence the peoples they conquered, while contrasting them with the Romans. A similar point of view is shared by V.I. Kelsiev, who protests to the supporters of the first point of view, speaking about the exaggeration of the role of foreign, especially the Mongol-Tatar influence on Russia.

Another supporter of the second point of view is V.O. Klyuchevsky, yes, he is also of the opinion that it was the Mongol-Tatars who influenced the formation of a centralized Russian state, which is an aspect of the first, but he tends to underestimate the Mongol-Tatar invasion. IN. Klyuchevsky does not pay attention to the fact that after the conquest the Russian principalities found themselves in new conditions of their existence. Thus, he emphasizes that the Horde khans do not impose their orders on Russia.

There are also scientists who express in their writings the idea of ​​the superficiality of the Mongol-Tatar influence. The supporters of this view include N. Rozhkov, S.F. Platonov.

We remain unlit by the third point of view, which refers to the negative impact of the Mongol-Tatar invasion on Russia and its further history as a whole.

Opinion of M.S. Gasteva also refers to the third view of the Mongol-Tatar invasion and its further influence on Russia. M.S. Gastev believes that the Mongol yoke is one of the reasons that influenced the further slowdown in Russia's development. He characterizes him as "a time of the greatest disorder, the greatest misfortune for our fatherland, one of those times that weigh on a person, suffocate him." It is also worth noting that M.S. Gastev does not believe that the rule of the Mongol-Tatars contributed to the eradication of civil strife, that the successes of the Russian people in agriculture were very small, and that constant raids simply changed and interfered with the usual and familiar way of life. Drawing a conclusion, M.S. Gastev says: “What benefit did the Tatars bring to us? It seems none. Autocracy itself, taken by many as the fruit of their dominion, is not the fruit of their dominion.

Now I would like to draw attention to the view of A.N. Nasonov. Most researchers, on the issue we are considering, believe that his opinion belongs to the second point of view, but I would like to object and attribute it to the third. Since, according to his opinion, the Mongols tried in every possible way to prevent the formation of a single state in Russia, trying to increase its fragmentation. Thus, he vividly expresses his negativity in relation to what kind of influence the Mongol-Tatars had on Russia. However, some of those who study this issue believe that A.N. Nasonov considers the influence insignificant, based on the foregoing, we express disagreement on this matter.

Academician H. Fren believed that the Mongol-Tatar invasion was the gravest disaster for the Russian people. V.G. Belinsky called the Tatar yoke the "fettering beginning" of the Russian people, which delayed its development. N.G. Chernyshevsky expresses the opinion that this invasion played a negative role in the development of Russia, but the Russian people literally saved European civilization from destruction. A. I. Herzen adheres to a similar point of view, considering the Mongol-Tatars the main brake on the further development of Russia. A.S. Pushkin spoke about this, also stating that it contributed to the slowdown in the development of Russia compared to Western Europe: “Russia was assigned a high destiny, its boundless expanses swallowed up the forces of the Mongols and stopped their invasion on the very edge of Europe ... The emerging enlightenment was saved by a torn and dying Russia”

Opinion B.D. Grekova also tends to the third point of view. He points out that the policy of the Mongol khans not only did not contribute to the formation of a single centralized state, but rather, on the contrary, it happened against their will and contrary to expectations: “Tatar domination had a negative and regressive character for the Russian people. It contributed to the growth of feudal oppression and delayed the economic and cultural development of the country.

K.V. is also inclined to a similar opinion. Bazelevich and V.N. Bochkarev. Their works also contain an assessment of the Mongol invasion as a terrible disaster that delayed "economic and cultural development of the country".

Conclusion

The Mongol-Tatar invasion and the yoke of the Golden Horde that followed it played a huge role in the further history of our country. The rule of the nomads lasted two and a half centuries and, of course, it could not pass without a trace. In addition to the deaths of a large number of people, the devastation of lands, this tragedy affected many aspects of society.

The significance of the Mongol-Tatar yoke is well reflected in the various points of view of scientists, writers, historians, and critics. They consider it from different angles, citing all sorts of arguments in their favor. It is worth noting that each thesis has two opposing points of view. What are the main theses and views on them can be identified?

The Mongol-Tatar invasion contributed to the eradication of feudal fragmentation and the unification of the Russian principalities around one center, but this is one view. There are supporters of the opposite opinion, who believe that the Mongol-Tatar yoke, on the contrary, interrupted the desire of pre-Mongolian Russia to eliminate feudal fragmentation and unify the country, intensifying princely civil strife, thereby slowing down the process of unification.

The Mongol-Tatar conquest retarded economic development, and also caused irreparable damage to the cultural and historical monuments of the country.

It is initially wrong to talk about the insignificance of the invasion of the eastern nomads, because the yoke, which lasted 250 years, could not go unnoticed and pass absolutely without a trace for the history of the state.

Directly three points of view, into which it is conventionally customary to divide researchers on this issue, intersect with each other. Each point of view is closely intertwined with the other, there is no such view and a scientist whose opinion would be clear and not ambiguous. The fact that they are divided into three directions simply shows a greater commitment to a particular point of view.

One could now make several assumptions about what and how it would have been if Russia had not suffered this terrible misfortune. It can be assumed that the current backwardness, in comparison with European countries, has its own response from that ancient past, but history does not tolerate the subjunctive mood. The main thing is that Russia emerged from under the yoke of the Mongol-Tatar yoke as a single state, which, thanks to him, our country united around the center, which is still such.

List of used literature

1. Boltin, I.N., Notes on the History of Ancient and Present Russia in Leclerc, composed by Major General Ivan Boltin [Text] / I.N. Boltin. - [B. m.] : Typ. Gor. school.

2. Gumilyov, L.N. , Ancient Russia and the Great Steppe / Gumilyov L.N. - M.: Thought., 1989. - 766 p.

3. Karamzin, N.M., History of the Russian state / N.M. Karamzin. - M .: Alpha book. – 2009.

4. Nasonov, A.N., Mongols and Russia / A.N. Nasonov. - M.-L., 1970.

5. Handbook on the history of the fatherland: for applicants to universities / [ed. collegium A. S. Orlov Shchetinov, Yu. A Polunov, A. Yu.]. - M. : Prostor, 1995.

6. Solovyov, S.M., History of Russia / S.M. Solovyov. - M .: AST, - 2001.

Richard Pipes
The influence of the Mongols on Russia: "for" and "against". Historiographic research

The invasion of the Mongol hordes and the subsequent domination, which stretched for almost two and a half centuries, became a terrible shock for medieval Russia. The Mongol cavalry swept away everything in its path, and if any city tried to resist, its population was ruthlessly massacred, leaving only ashes in place of houses. From 1258 to 1476, Russia was obliged to pay tribute to the Mongol rulers and provide recruits for the Mongol armies. The Russian princes, whom the Mongols eventually entrusted with the direct management of their lands and the collection of tribute, could begin to fulfill their duties only after receiving official permission from the Mongol rulers. Starting from the 17th century, the phrase "Tatar-Mongol yoke" began to be used in the Russian language to designate this historical period.

The destructiveness of this invasion does not raise the slightest doubt, but the question of how exactly it influenced the historical fate of Russia still remains open. On this issue, two extreme opinions oppose each other, between which there is a whole range of intermediate positions. Supporters of the first point of view generally deny any significant historical consequences of the Mongol conquest and domination. Among them, for example, Sergei Platonov (1860-1933), who proclaimed the yoke only an accidental episode of national history and reduced its influence to a minimum. According to him, "we can consider the life of Russian society in the XIII century, not paying attention to the fact of the Tatar yoke." Followers of a different point of view, in particular, the theorist of Eurasianism Pyotr Savitsky (1895-1968), on the contrary, argued that "without the "Tatar" there would be no Russia." Between these extremes, one can find many intermediate positions, the defenders of which attributed to the Mongols a greater or lesser degree of influence, ranging from theses about a limited impact solely on the organization of the army and diplomatic practice, and ending with a recognition of exceptional importance in predetermining, among other things, the political structure of the country.

This dispute is of key importance for Russian self-consciousness. After all, if the Mongols did not have any influence on Russia at all, or if such an influence was negligible, then today's Russia can be considered as a European power, which, despite all its national characteristics, still belongs to the West. In addition, this state of affairs implies that the Russian attachment to autocracy has developed under the influence of some genetic factors and, as such, is not subject to change. But if Russia was formed directly under the Mongol influence, then this state turns out to be part of Asia or a “Eurasian” power that instinctively rejects the values ​​of the Western world. As will be shown below, the opposing schools argued not only about the significance of the Mongol invasion of Russia, but also about where Russian culture originated.

Thus, the purpose of this work is to study the mentioned extreme positions, as well as to analyze the arguments used by their supporters.

The dispute originated at the beginning of the 19th century, when the first systematized history of Russia was published, penned by Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1826). Karamzin, who was the official historian of the Russian autocracy and an ardent conservative, called his work "History of the Russian State" (1816-1829), thereby emphasizing the political background of his work.

For the first time, the Tatar problem was identified by Karamzin in the “Note on Ancient and New Russia”, prepared for Emperor Alexander I in 1811. The Russian princes, the historian argued, who received “labels” for ruling from the Mongols, were much more cruel rulers than the princes of the pre-Mongol period, and the people under their rule cared only about preserving life and property, but not about exercising their civil rights. One of the Mongol innovations was the use of the death penalty for traitors. Taking advantage of the current situation, the Moscow princes gradually approved an autocratic form of government, and this became a boon for the nation: “The autocracy founded and resurrected Russia: with the change of the State Charter, it perished and had to perish ...”.

Karamzin continued the study of the topic in the fourth chapter of the fifth volume of "History ...", the publication of which began in 1816. In his opinion, Russia lagged behind Europe not only because of the Mongols (whom he for some reason called "Moguls"), although they played their negative role here. The historian believed that the backlog began during the period of princely civil strife of Kievan Rus, and continued under the Mongols: “At the same time, Russia, tormented by the Moghuls, strained its forces solely in order not to disappear: we had no time for enlightenment!”. Under the rule of the Mongols, the Russians lost their civic virtues; in order to survive, they did not shy away from deceit, love of money, cruelty: “Perhaps the very present character of the Russians still shows the stains placed on it by the barbarity of the Mughals,” wrote Karamzin. If any moral values ​​were preserved in them at that time, then this happened solely thanks to Orthodoxy.

In political terms, according to Karamzin, the Mongol yoke led to the complete disappearance of free-thinking: "Princes, humbly groveling in the Horde, returned from there as formidable rulers." The boyar aristocracy lost power and influence. "In a word, autocracy was born." All these changes were a heavy burden on the population, but in the long run their effect was positive. They brought an end to the civil strife that destroyed the Kievan state, and helped Russia get back on its feet when the Mongol empire fell.

But Russia's gain was not limited to this. Orthodoxy and trade flourished under the Mongols. Karamzin was also one of the first to draw attention to how widely the Mongols enriched the Russian language.

Under the clear influence of Karamzin, the young Russian scientist Alexander Richter (1794-1826) published in 1822 the first scientific work devoted exclusively to the Mongol influence on Russia - "Studies on the influence of the Mongol-Tatars on Russia." Unfortunately, this book is not in any of the American libraries, and I had to form an idea of ​​​​its content based on an article by the same author, which was published in June 1825 in the journal Domestic Notes.

Richter draws attention to the Russian adoption of Mongol diplomatic etiquette, as well as such evidence of influence as the isolation of women and their clothing, the spread of inns and taverns, food preferences (tea and bread), methods of warfare, the practice of punishment (beating with a whip), the use of extrajudicial decisions, the introduction of money and a system of measures, ways of processing silver and steel, numerous language innovations.

“Under the rule of the Mongols and Tatars, the Russians almost degenerated into Asians, and although they hated their oppressors, they imitated them in everything and entered into kinship with them when they converted to Christianity.”

Richter's book prompted a public discussion, which in 1826 prompted the Imperial Academy of Sciences to announce a competition for the best work on "what were the consequences of the rule of the Mongols in Russia and exactly what effect it had on the political relations of the state, on the form of government and on the internal administration of Onago, as well as the enlightenment and education of the people. Interestingly, this competition received a single application from a certain German scientist, whose manuscript was ultimately considered unworthy of the award.

The competition was continued in 1832 at the initiative of the Russified German orientalist Christian-Martin von Frehn (1782-1851). This time, the topic was expanded in such a way as to cover the entire history of the Golden Horde - in the perspective of the influence that "Mongol rule had on the decrees and the people's life in Russia." Again, only one application was received. Its author was the famous Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstahl (1774-1856). The jury, which consisted of three members of the Academy, chaired by Fren, refused to accept the work for consideration, calling it "superficial". The author published it on his own initiative in 1840. In this edition, he briefly covers the background of his research and provides feedback from members of the Russian academic jury.

In 1832, Mikhail Gastev published a book in which he accused the Mongols of slowing down the development of Russia. Their influence on the state was proclaimed purely negative, and even the formation of autocracy was excluded from their merits. This work was one of the first in a long line of historical works, the authors of which insisted that the Mongol invasion did not bring Russia anything good.

In 1851, the first of twenty-nine volumes of a history of Russia was published, written by Sergei Solovyov (1820-1879), professor at Moscow University and leader of the so-called "state" historical school. A staunch Westernizer and admirer of Peter I, Solovyov generally abandoned the use of the concept of "Mongolian period", replacing it with the term "specific period". For him, the Mongol rule was just an accidental episode in Russian history, which did not have significant consequences for the further evolution of the country. Solovyov's views had a direct impact on his student Vasily Klyuchevsky (1841-1911), who also denied the significance of the Mongol invasion for Russia.

A significant contribution to the development of this discussion in 1868 was made by the legal historian Alexander Gradovsky (1841-1889). In his opinion, it was from the Mongol khans that the Moscow princes adopted the attitude towards the state as their personal property. In pre-Mongol Russia, Gradovsky argued, the prince was only a sovereign ruler, but not the owner of the state:

“The private property of the prince existed along with the private property of the boyars and did not in the least constrain the latter. Only in the Mongol period does the concept of a prince appear not only as a sovereign, but also as the owner of all the land. The Grand Dukes gradually became to their subjects in such an attitude in which the Mongol khans stood in relation to themselves. “According to the principles of Mongolian state law,” says Nevolin, “all the land in general, which was within the dominion of the khan, was his property; the subjects of the khan could only be simple landowners.” In all regions of Russia, except for Novgorod and Western Russia, these principles were to be reflected in the principles of Russian law. The princes, as rulers of their regions, as representatives of the khan, naturally enjoyed the same rights in their destinies as he did in his entire state. With the fall of the Mongol rule, the princes became the heirs of the khan's power, and, consequently, of those rights that were connected with it.

Gradovsky's remarks became the earliest mention in the historical literature of the merging of political power and property in the Muscovite kingdom. Later, under the influence of Max Weber, this convergence would be called "patrimonialism".

Gradovsky's ideas were taken up by the Ukrainian historian Mykola Kostomarov (1817-1885) in his work The Beginning of Autocracy in Ancient Russia, published in 1872. Kostomarov was not an adherent of the "state" school, emphasizing the special role of the people in the historical process and opposing the people and the authorities. He was born in Ukraine, and in 1859 he moved to St. Petersburg, where for some time he was a professor of Russian history at the university. In his writings, Kostomarov emphasized the difference between the democratic structure of Kievan Rus and the autocracy of Muscovy.

According to this scholar, the ancient Slavs were a freedom-loving people who lived in small communities and did not know autocratic rule. But after the Mongol conquest, the situation changed. The khans were not only absolute rulers, but also the owners of their subjects, whom they treated as slaves. If in the pre-Mongolian period the Russian princes demarcated state power and possession, then under the Mongols the principalities became patrimonies, that is, property.

“Now the earth has ceased to be an independent unit; […] it descended to the value of a real belonging. […] The feeling of freedom, honor, consciousness of personal dignity disappeared; servility to the higher, despotism over the lower have become qualities of the Russian soul.

These conclusions were not taken into account in the eclectic in spirit "Russian History" by St. Petersburg professor Konstantin Bestuzhev-Ryumin (1829-1897), first published in 1872. He was of the opinion that both Karamzin and Solovyov were too harsh in their judgments, and the influence exerted by the Mongols on the organization of the army, the financial system and the deterioration of morals cannot be denied. At the same time, however, he did not believe that the Russians adopted corporal punishment from the Mongols, since they were also known in Byzantium, and especially did not agree that the royal power in Russia was a semblance of the power of the Mongol Khan.

Perhaps the sharpest position on the issue of Mongol influence was taken by Fyodor Leontovich (1833-1911), professor of law, first at Odessa and then Warsaw universities. His specialization was natural law among the Kalmyks, as well as among the Caucasian highlanders. In 1879, he published a study on a prominent Kalmyk legal document, at the end of which he offered his view on the influence of the Mongols in Russia. Recognizing a certain degree of continuity between Kievan Rus and Muscovy, Leontovich still believed that the Mongols "broke" the former Rus. In his opinion, the Russians adopted from the Mongols the institution of orders, the enslavement of peasants, the practice of parochialism, various military and fiscal orders, as well as criminal law with its inherent torture and executions. Most importantly, the Mongols predetermined the absolute character of the Muscovite monarchy:

“The Mongols introduced into the minds of their tributaries - Russians - the idea of ​​​​the rights of their leader (khan) as the supreme owner (patrimony) of all the land they occupied. Arising from here dispossession(in a legal sense) population, the concentration of land rights in a few hands, is inextricably linked with the strengthening of service and hard-working people who retained the “ownership” of land in their hands only under the condition of proper service and duties. Then, after the overthrow of the yoke [...] the princes could transfer the supreme power of the khan to themselves; why all the land began to be considered the property of the princes.

Orientalist Nikolai Veselovsky (1848-1918) studied in detail the practice of Russian-Mongolian diplomatic relations and came to the following conclusion:

“... The embassy ceremonial in the Moscow period of Russian history bore in full, one might say, the volume of the Tatar, or rather, Asian, character; deviations with us were insignificant and were caused mainly by religious views.

How, according to supporters of such views, did the Mongols ensure their influence, given that they ruled Russia indirectly, entrusting this task to the Russian princes? For this purpose, two means were used. The first was the endless stream of Russian princes and merchants heading to the Mongol capital Saray, where some of them had to spend whole years absorbing the Mongol way of life. So, Ivan Kalita (1304-1340), as is commonly believed, made five trips to Sarai and spent almost half of his reign with the Tatars or on the way to Sarai and back. In addition, Russian princes were often forced to send their sons to the Tatars as hostages, thereby proving loyalty to the Mongol rulers.

The second source of influence was the Mongols, who were in the Russian service. This phenomenon appeared in the 14th century, when the Mongols were at the peak of their power, but it acquired a truly massive character after the Mongol empire broke up into several states at the end of the 15th century. As a result, the Mongols who left their homeland brought with them the knowledge of the Mongolian way of life, which they taught the Russians.

So, the arguments of scholars who insisted on the significance of the Mongol influence can be summarized as follows. First of all, the influence of the Mongols is clearly visible in the fact that the Muscovite state formed after the fall of the yoke at the end of the 15th century was fundamentally different from the old Kievan Rus. The following differences can be distinguished between them:

1. The Moscow tsars, unlike their Kievan predecessors, were absolute rulers, not bound by the decisions of the people's assemblies (veche), and in this respect resembled the Mongol khans.

2. Like the Mongol khans, they literally owned their kingdom: their subjects disposed of the land only temporarily, subject to lifelong service to the ruler.

3. The entire population was considered the servants of the king, as in the Horde, where the statute of bound service was the basis of the khan's omnipotence.

In addition, the Mongols significantly influenced the organization of the army, the judicial system (for example, the introduction of the death penalty as a criminal punishment, which in Kievan Rus was applied only to slaves), diplomatic customs and postal practices. According to some scholars, the Russians also adopted from the Mongols the institution of parochialism and a large array of trading customs.

If we turn to scholars and publicists who did not recognize the Mongol influence or minimized its significance, the fact that they never considered it necessary to respond to the arguments of their opponents immediately attracts attention. They could at least be expected to solve two problems: either to demonstrate that their opponents misrepresented the political and social organization of the Muscovite kingdom, or to prove that the customs and institutions attributed to the Mongol innovations actually existed in Kievan Rus. But neither was done. This camp simply ignored the arguments of its opponents, which significantly weakened its position.

This is equally true of the views advocated by the three leading historians of the late empire - Solovyov, Klyuchevsky and Platonov.

Solovyov, who divided the historical past of Russia into three chronological periods, did not in any way separate the time period associated with Mongol domination. He did not see "the slightest trace of Tatar-Mongol influence on the internal administration of Russia" and in fact did not mention the Mongol conquest. Klyuchevsky in the famous "Course of Russian History" also almost ignores the Mongols, not noticing either a separate Mongol period or the Mongol influence on Russia. Surprisingly, in the detailed table of contents of the first volume devoted to Russian history in the Middle Ages, there is no mention of the Mongols or the Golden Horde at all. This striking but deliberate omission can be explained by the fact that, for Klyuchevsky, colonization was the central factor in Russian history. For this reason, he considered the mass movement of the Russian population from the southwest to the northeast to be the key event of the 13th-15th centuries. The Mongols, even having caused this migration, seemed to Klyuchevsky an insignificant factor. As for Platonov, he devoted only four pages to the Mongols in his popular course, stating that this subject was not studied in such depth that its impact on Russia could be accurately determined. According to this historian, since the Mongols did not occupy Russia, but ruled it through intermediaries, they could not influence its development at all. Like Klyuchevsky, Platonov considered the division of Russia into southwestern and northeastern parts as the only significant result of the Mongol invasion.

Three explanations can be offered as to why leading Russian historians have been so dismissive of Mongol influence in Russia.

First of all, they were not familiar with the history of the Mongols in particular and oriental studies in general. Although Western scientists of that time had already begun to deal with these issues, their work was not well known in Russia.

As another explanatory circumstance, one can point to unconscious nationalism and even racism, expressed in the unwillingness to admit that the Slavs could learn anything from the Asians.

But, probably, the most weighty explanation is found in the peculiarities of those sources that medieval historians then used. For the most part, these were chronicles compiled by monks and therefore reflecting the church's point of view. The Mongols, starting with Genghis Khan, pursued a policy of religious tolerance, respecting all faiths. They freed the Orthodox Church from taxes and protected its interests. As a result, the monasteries under the Mongols prospered, owning about a third of all arable land - a wealth that, in the early 16th century, when Russia got rid of Mongol domination, gave rise to a discussion about monastic property. With that said, it is easy to see why the church viewed Mongol rule quite favorably. The American historian comes to a surprising conclusion:

“There are no fragments in the annals containing anti-Mongol attacks that would have appeared between 1252 and 1448. All records of this kind are made either before 1252 or after 1448.

According to the observation of another American, in the Russian chronicles there is no mention at all that the Mongols ruled Russia, their reading forms the following impression:

"[It seems that] the Mongols influenced Russian history and society no more than the earlier steppe peoples, with many historians sharing a similar view."

This opinion was certainly supported by the fact that the Mongols ruled Russia indirectly, through the mediation of Russian princes, and in connection with this, their presence within its borders was not very tangible.

Among historical writings that try to minimize Mongol influence while neglecting specific issues, the work of Horace Dewey of the University of Michigan is a rare exception. This specialist thoroughly investigated the problem of exposure Mongols to the folding in the Moscow kingdom and then in the Russian Empire of a system of collective responsibility, forcing the communities to answer for the obligations of their members to the state. A vivid example of this practice was the responsibility of the village community for the payment of taxes by the peasants included in it. The very term "bail" in the texts of Kievan Rus was used quite rarely, but Dewey nevertheless argued that this institution was already known at that time, and therefore it cannot be attributed to the acquisitions of the Mongol era. At the same time, however, the historian admits that its most widespread use occurred in the period after the Mongol conquest, when other Mongol practices were actively assimilated.

In the first fifteen years of Soviet power, those sections of historical science that did not deal with the revolution and its consequences were relatively free from state control. For the study of the Middle Ages, this was a particularly favorable period. Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868-1932), the leading Soviet historian of the day, minimized the perniciousness of Mongol influence and downplayed the resistance offered by Rus' to invaders. In his opinion, the Mongols even contributed to the progress of the conquered territory by introducing key financial institutions in Russia: the Mongolian land cadastre - “sosh letter” - was used in Russia until the middle of the 17th century.

In the 1920s, it was still possible to disagree with the fact that the Mongol masters of Russia acted as carriers of only savagery and barbarism. In 1919-1921, in the harsh conditions of the civil war and the cholera epidemic, archaeologist Franz Ballod carried out large-scale excavations in the Lower Volga region. The finds made convinced him that the ideas of Russian scientists about the Horde were largely erroneous, and in the book “Volga Pompeii” published in 1923, he wrote:

“[The studies carried out show that] in the Golden Horde of the second half of the XIII-XIV centuries there lived not savages at all, but civilized people engaged in manufacturing and trade and maintaining diplomatic relations with the peoples of the East and West. […] The military successes of the Tatars are explained not only by their inherent fighting spirit and the perfection of the organization of the army, but also by their obviously high level of cultural development.”

The famous Russian orientalist Vasily Bartold (1896-1930) also emphasized the positive aspects of the Mongol conquest, insisting, contrary to the prevailing belief, that the Mongols contributed to the Westernization of Russia:

“Despite the devastation caused by the Mongol troops, despite all the exactions of the Baskaks, during the period of Mongol rule, the beginning was laid not only of the political revival of Russia, but also of the further successes of the Russian culture. Contrary to often expressed opinion, even the influence of the European culture Russia in the Muscovite period was subjected to a much greater extent than in Kyiv.

However, the opinion of Ballod and Barthold, as well as the Oriental community as a whole, was largely ignored by the Soviet historical establishment. Beginning in the 1930s, Soviet historical literature became firmly convinced that the Mongols did not bring anything positive to the development of Russia. Equally obligatory were indications that it was the fierce resistance of the Russians that turned out to be the reason that forced the Mongols not to occupy Russia, but to rule it indirectly and from afar. In reality, the Mongols preferred the model of indirect control for the following reasons:

“... Unlike Khazaria, Bulgaria or the Crimean Khanate in Russia, it [the model of direct control] was uneconomical, and not because the resistance offered by the Russians was allegedly stronger than anywhere else. […] The indirect nature of the government not only did not reduce the strength of the Mongol influence on Russia, but also eliminated the very possibility of the reverse influence of the Russians on the Mongols, who adopted the Chinese order in China and the Persian order in Persia, but at the same time underwent Turkization and Islamization in the Golden Horde itself " .

While pre-revolutionary historians for the most part agreed that the Mongols, albeit unintentionally, nevertheless contributed to the unification of Russia by entrusting the management of it to the Moscow princes, Soviet science placed the accents differently. The unification, she believed, took place not as a result of the Mongol conquest, but in spite of it, becoming the result of a nationwide struggle against the invaders. The official communist position on this issue is set out in an article in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia:

“The Mongol-Tatar yoke had negative, deeply regressive consequences for the economic, political and cultural development of the Russian lands, was a brake on the growth of the productive forces of Russia, which were at a higher socio-economic level compared to the productive forces of the Mongol-Tatars. It artificially preserved for a long time the purely feudal natural character of the economy. Politically, the consequences of the Mongol-Tatar yoke were manifested in the violation of the process of state consolidation of Russian lands, in the artificial maintenance of feudal fragmentation. The Mongol-Tatar yoke led to the intensification of the feudal exploitation of the Russian people, who found themselves under the double yoke of their own and the Mongol-Tatar feudal lords. The Mongol-Tatar yoke, which lasted 240 years, was one of the main reasons for Russia's lagging behind some Western European countries.

Interestingly, attributing the collapse of the Mongol Empire to purely hypothetical Russian resistance completely ignores the painful blows inflicted on it by Timur (Tamerlane) in the second half of the 14th century.

The position of party scholars was so rigid and unreasoned to such an extent that it was not easy for serious historians to come to terms with it. An example of such rejection is the monograph on the Golden Horde, published in 1937 by two leading Soviet orientalists. One of its authors, Boris Grekov (1882-1953), cites in the book many words used in Russian that are of Mongolian origin. Among them: bazaar, shop, attic, chamber, altyn, chest, tariff, container, caliber, lute, zenith. However, this list, perhaps due to censorship, lacks other important borrowings: for example, money, treasury, pits or tarkhan. It is these words that show what a significant role the Mongols played in the formation of the financial system of Russia, the formation of trade relations and the foundations of the transport system. But, having given this list, Grekov refuses to develop his idea further and declares that the question of the influence of the Mongols on Russia still remains unclear to him.

No one defended the ideas about the positive influence of the Mongols on Russia more consistently than the circle of emigre publicists who acted in the 1920s and called themselves "Eurasians". Their leader was Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy (1890-1938), a descendant of an old noble family, who received a philological education and taught after emigration at the universities of Sofia and Vienna.

History as such was not the primary concern of the Eurasians. Although Trubetskoy gave his main work, The Legacy of Genghis Khan, the subtitle “A look at Russian history not from the West, but from the East,” he wrote to one of his associates that “the treatment of history in it is deliberately unceremonious and tendentious.” The circle of Eurasians was made up of intellectuals who specialized in various fields, who experienced the strongest shock from what happened in 1917, but did not leave attempts to understand the new communist Russia. In their opinion, the explanation should be sought in geographical and cultural determinism, based on the fact that Russia cannot be attributed to either East or West, since it was a mixture of both, acting as the heir to the empire of Genghis Khan. According to the Eurasianists, the Mongol conquest not only had a strong influence on the evolution of the Muscovite kingdom and the Russian Empire, but also laid the very foundations of Russian statehood.

August 1921 is considered the birth date of the Eurasian movement, when the work “Exodus to the East: Premonitions and Accomplishments” was published in Bulgaria, written by Trubetskoy in collaboration with the economist and diplomat Pyotr Savitsky (1895-1968), the music theorist Pyotr Suvchinsky (1892-1985) and theologian Georgy Florovsky (1893-1979). The group founded its own publishing business with offices in Paris, Berlin, Prague, Belgrade and Harbin, which published not only books, but also periodicals - "Eurasian Time" in Berlin and "Eurasian Chronicle" in Paris.

Trubetskoy abandoned the traditional idea of ​​Muscovy as the heir of Kievan Rus. The fragmented and warring Kyiv principalities could not unite into a single and strong state: “In the existence of pre-Tatar Rus there was an element instability prone to degradation, which could not lead to anything other than a foreign yoke. Muscovite Rus, like its successors in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, were the successors of the Mongolian empire of Genghis Khan. The territory occupied by them has always remained a closed space: Eurasia was a geographical and climatic unity, which doomed it to political integration. Although this territory was inhabited by different nationalities, a smooth ethnic transition from the Slavs to the Mongols made it possible to treat them as a single entity. The main part of its population belonged to the "Turanian" race, formed by the Finno-Ugric tribes, Samoyeds, Turks, Mongols and Manchus. On the influence of the Mongols on Russia, Trubetskoy spoke as follows:

“If in such important branches of state life as the organization of the financial economy, posts and communications, there was an indisputable continuity between Russian and Mongolian statehood, then it is natural to assume such a connection in other sectors, in the details of the structure of the administrative apparatus, in the organization of military affairs, etc. ".

The Russians also adopted Mongolian political habits; having combined them with Orthodoxy and Byzantine ideology, they simply appropriated them for themselves. According to the Eurasianists, the most significant thing that the Mongols brought to the development of Russian history concerned not so much the political structure of the country as the spiritual sphere.

“Great is the happiness of Russia that at the moment when, due to internal decay, it had to fall, it went to the Tatars and no one else. Tatars - a "neutral" cultural environment that accepted "all kinds of gods" and tolerated "any cults" - fell on Russia as a punishment from God, but did not muddy the purity of national creativity. If Russia had gone to the Turks, infected with “Iranian fanaticism and exaltation”, its test would have been many times more difficult and the fate would have been bitter. If the West had taken her, he would have taken her soul out of her. […] The Tatars did not change the spiritual being of Russia; but in their capacity as creators of states, as a military-organizing force, which was distinctive for them in this era, they undoubtedly influenced Russia.

“An important historical moment was not the “overthrow of the yoke”, not the isolation of Russia from the power of the Horde, but the expansion of Moscow’s power over a significant part of the territory that was once subject to the Horde, in other words, replacement of the Horde khan by the Russian tsar with the transfer of the khan's headquarters to Moscow».

As the historian Alexander Kizevetter (1866-1933), who taught in Prague at that time, noted in 1925, the Eurasian movement suffered from irreconcilable internal contradictions. He described Eurasianism as "a feeling that resulted in a system." The contradictions manifested themselves most clearly in the attitude of the Eurasians towards Bolshevism in particular and towards Europe as a whole. On the one hand, they rejected Bolshevism because of its European roots, but, on the other hand, they approved of it, since it turned out to be unacceptable for Europeans. They considered Russian culture as a synthesis of the cultures of Europe and Asia, at the same time criticizing Europe on the grounds that the basis of its being was the economy, while the religious and ethical element prevailed in Russian culture.

The Eurasianist movement was popular in the 1920s, but by the end of the decade it collapsed due to the lack of a common position towards the Soviet Union. However, as we will see below, after the collapse of communism, it was to experience a stormy revival in Russia.

The question of the influence of the Mongols on the history of Russia did not arouse much interest in Europe, but in the United States two scientists were seriously carried away by it. The publication in 1985 by Charles Galperin of the work "Russia and the Golden Horde" opened the discussion. Thirteen years later, Donald Ostrovsky echoed the theme in his study Muscovy and the Mongols. In general, they took a unified position on the issue under study: Ostrovsky noted that he was completely unanimous with Galperin on the main points of Mongol influence on Muscovy.

However, even the existing unprincipled and small disagreements were quite enough to provoke a lively discussion. Both scholars believed that the Mongol influence took place, and it was very tangible. Galperin attributed to the Mongolian borrowings Moscow military and diplomatic practices, as well as "some" administrative and fiscal procedures. But he did not agree that Russia learned politics and government only thanks to the Mongols: "They did not give rise to the Moscow autocracy, but only accelerated its arrival." In his opinion, the Mongol invasion could not predetermine the formation of the Russian autocracy, which had local roots and "drawn ideological and symbolic habits rather from Byzantium than from Saray." In this respect, Ostrovsky's opinion differs from that of his opponent:

“Throughout the first half of the 14th century, the Moscow princes used a model of state power based on the Golden Horde. The civil and military institutions that existed in Muscovy at that time were predominantly Mongolian.

Moreover, Ostrovsky included several more institutions that played a key role in the life of the Muscovite kingdom among the Mongol borrowings. Mentioned among them was the Chinese principle that all land in a state belonged to the ruler; parochialism, which allowed the Russian nobility not to serve those representatives of their estate, whose ancestors once themselves were in the service of their ancestors; feeding, suggesting that local officials lived at the expense of the population accountable to them; an estate, or land allotment, given on the condition of performing conscientious service to the sovereign. Ostrovsky built a relatively coherent theory, which, however, he himself undermined by the statement that Muscovy was not a despotism, but something like a constitutional monarchy:

“Although there was no written constitution in the Moscow kingdom, its internal functioning was in many ways reminiscent of a constitutional monarchy, that is, a system in which decisions are made by consensus between various institutions of the political system. […] Muscovy at that time was a state of law.”

Allowing himself such statements, Ostrovsky ignored the fact that in the 16th-17th centuries there was nothing resembling a constitution in any country in the world, that the Muscovite tsars, according to the testimony of both their own subjects and foreigners, were absolute rulers, and the political the structure of Moscow did not contain any institutions capable of restraining tsarist power.

In a lengthy debate that unfolded on the pages of the magazine "Kritika", Galperin challenged Ostrovsky's enrollment of the estate and locality in the Mongol inheritance. He also challenged Ostrovsky's thesis about the Mongol roots of the boyar duma, which served as an advisory body under the Russian tsar.

Worthy of attention are the little-known views of Polish historians and publicists regarding the relationship between Mongols and Russians. The Poles, who remained for a millennium the neighbors of Russia and lived under its rule for more than a hundred years, have always shown a keen interest in this country, and their knowledge of it was often much more complete than the unsystematic and random information of other peoples. Of course, the opinions of Polish scientists cannot be called absolutely objective, given that the Poles throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries dreamed of restoring the independence of their state. The main obstacle to this was precisely Russia, under whose rule there were more than four-fifths of all the lands that made up the Polish territory before its divisions.

Polish nationalists were interested in portraying Russia as a non-European country that threatened other states of the continent. One of the first supporters of this view was Franciszek Dushinsky (1817-1893), who emigrated to Western Europe and published a number of works there, the main idea of ​​which was the division of all human races into two main groups - "Aryan" and "Turanian". To the Aryans, he attributed the Romanesque and Germanic peoples, as well as the Slavs. The Russians were included in the second group, where they were related to the Mongols, Chinese, Jews, Africans and the like. Unlike the "Aryans", the "Turanians" had a predisposition to a nomadic lifestyle, did not respect property and legality, and were prone to despotism.

In the twentieth century, this theory was developed by Felix Konechny (1862-1949), a specialist in the comparative study of civilizations. In the book “Polish Logos and Ethos”, he talks about the “Turanian civilization”, the defining features of which, among other things, include the militarization of public life, as well as statehood, which is based on private rather than public law. He considered the Russians the heirs of the Mongols and therefore "Turanians." By this he also explained the establishment of the communist regime in Russia.

As soon as the communist censorship, which demanded unambiguousness on the issue of Mongolian influence, ceased to exist, the discussion on this issue resumed. For the most part, its participants rejected the Soviet approach, showing a willingness to recognize the significant nature of the influence of the Mongols on all spheres of Russian life, and especially on the political regime.

The dispute has now lost its scientific character, acquiring an undeniably political coloring. The collapse of the Soviet state left many of its citizens at a loss: they could not figure out which part of the world their new state belonged to - Europe, Asia, both at the same time, or neither. This means that by that time most Russians agreed that it was largely because of the Mongol yoke that Russia became a unique civilization, the difference from the Western one being rooted in the distant past.

Let's refer to a few examples. Medieval historian Igor Froyanov emphasized in his works the dramatic changes that took place in the political life of Russia as a result of the Mongol conquest:

“As for princely power, it receives completely different foundations than before, when ancient Russian society developed on social and veche principles, characterized by direct democracy, or democracy. If before the arrival of the Tatars, the Rurikovichs occupied the princely tables, as a rule, at the invitation of the city council, dressing up on it about the conditions of their reign and taking an oath, secured by kissing the cross, they promised to keep the contract inviolable, now they sat on the reigns at the behest of the khan, sealed with the corresponding khan's label . The princes in a string reached out to the khan's headquarters for labels. So, the khan's will becomes the highest source of princely power in Russia, and the veche people's assembly loses the right to dispose of the princely table. This immediately made the prince independent in relation to the council, creating favorable conditions for the realization of his monarchical potentialities.

Vadim Trepalov also sees the most direct connection between the Mongol yoke and the rise of autocracy in Russia through the downplaying of representative institutions like the veche. This point of view is shared by Igor Knyazkiy:

“The Horde yoke radically changed the political system of Russia. The power of the Muscovite tsars, which dynastically descended from the Kyiv princes, essentially goes to the omnipotence of the Mongol khans of the Golden Horde. And the great prince of Moscow becomes tsar following the fallen power of the Golden Horde lords. It is from them that the formidable sovereigns of Muscovy inherit the unconditional right to execute any of their subjects at their own will, regardless of his real guilt. Arguing that to execute and pardon the tsars of Moscow “are free”, Ivan the Terrible acts not as the heir of Monomakh, but as the successor of Batu, for here neither wine nor the virtue of the subject is important for him - they are determined by the royal will itself. The most important circumstance noted by Klyuchevsky that the subjects of the Tsar of Moscow have no rights, but only duties, is a direct legacy of the Horde tradition, which even the zemstvo of the 17th century did not essentially change in Muscovy, because during the time of the zemstvo councils, the rights of the Russian people did not increase, and even their own. The councils never gained votes.”

Another manifestation of the revived interest in the Mongolian heritage in post-Soviet Russia was the revival of Eurasianism. According to the French specialist Marlene Laruelle, "neo-Eurasianism has become one of the most developed conservative ideologies that appeared in Russia in the 1990s." The bibliography of one of her books lists dozens of papers published on this topic in Russia since 1989. The most prominent theorists of the revived movement were Lev Gumilyov (1912-1992), professor of philosophy at Moscow University Alexander Panarin (1940-2003) and Alexander Dugin (b. 1963).

Post-Soviet Eurasianism has a pronounced political character: it calls on Russians to turn their backs on the West and choose Asia as their home. According to Gumilyov, the Mongolian "scourge" is nothing but a myth created by the West to hide the real enemy of Russia - the Romano-Germanic world. The movement is characterized by nationalism and imperialism, and sometimes also anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Some of its principles were outlined in President Vladimir Putin's November 2001 speech:

“Russia has always felt like a Eurasian country. We never forgot that the bulk of Russian territory is in Asia. True, we must honestly say that they did not always use this advantage. I think the time has come for us, together with the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, to move from words to deeds - to build up economic, political and other ties. […] After all, Russia is a kind of integration hub that connects Asia, Europe and America.”

This anti-European position is shared by a significant part of Russian society. Answering the question "Do you feel like a European?", 56% of Russians choose the answer "practically never".

Modern supporters of Eurasianism pay even less attention to history than their predecessors; First of all, they are interested in the future and Russia's place in it. But when it comes to talking about history, they stick to the manner characteristic of the first Eurasians:

“[Panarin] pays almost no attention to Kievan Rus, since he considers it rather a European than a Eurasian formation (and therefore doomed to death), focusing on the Mongol period. He writes about the "yoke" as a boon that allowed Russia to become an empire and conquer the steppe. Genuine Russia, he declares, appeared in the Muscovite period from the combination of Orthodoxy with the Mongolian statehood, Russians with Tatars.

The totality of the facts presented makes it clear that in the dispute about Mongol influence, those who spoke in favor of its importance were right. At the center of the discussion, which stretched over two and a half centuries, was the fundamentally important question of the nature of the Russian political regime and its origin. If the Mongols did not influence Russia in any way, or if this influence did not affect the political sphere, then the Russian commitment to autocratic power, and in the most extreme, patrimonial, form, will have to be declared something innate and eternal. In this case, it must be rooted in the Russian soul, religion, or some other source that cannot be changed. But if Russia, on the contrary, borrowed its political system from foreign invaders, then there is still a chance for internal change, because the Mongol influence may eventually be replaced by Western influence.

In addition, the question of the role of the Mongols in Russian history is of key importance for Russian geopolitics - this circumstance was overlooked by historians of the 19th century. After all, the perception of Russia as the direct heir to the Mongol empire, or even simply as a country that has survived their strong influence, allows us to justify the legitimacy of the assertion of Russian power over a vast territory from the Baltic and Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean and over many peoples inhabiting it. This argument is of critical importance to contemporary Russian imperialists.

Such a conclusion makes it possible to understand why the issue of Mongol influence continues to cause such heated controversy in Russian historical literature. Apparently, the search for an answer to it will stop very soon.

1) In Russian historical literature, the Asian conquerors of Russia are most often called "Tatars", meaning the Turkic peoples who eventually converted to Islam.

2) Platonov S.F. Lectures on Russian history. 9th ed. Petrograd: Senate Printing House, 1915.

3) On the way. The approval of the Eurasians. Book two. M.; Berlin: Helikon, 1922. S. 342.

4) Pipes R. (Ed.). Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1959.

5) Karamzin N.M. A note about ancient and new Russia. St. Petersburg: A.F. Dressler, 1914. S. 47.

6) He is. History of the Russian State: In 12 volumes. M.: Nauka, 1993. T. 5. S. 202-205.

7) Its second edition came out in 1825.

8) I am indebted for this paper to Professor David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, who provided me with a copy of it. Richter's views are analyzed in the following works: Works by A.P. Shchapova. St. Petersburg: M.V. Pirozhkova, 1906, vol. 2, pp. 498-499; Borisov N.S. Domestic historiography on the influence of the Tatar-Mongol invasion on Russian culture// Problems of the history of the USSR. 1976. No. 5. S. 132-133.

9) A.R. Studies on the influence of the Mongol-Tatars on Russia// Domestic notes. 1825. T. XXII. No. 62. S. 370.

10) Tizenhausen V. Collection of materials relating to the history of the Golden Horde. St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1884. Vol. 1. S. 554.

11) Ibid. S. 555.

12) Ibid. C. VI.

13) Hammer-Purgstall J.F. von. Geschihte der Goldenen Horde in Kiptschak das ist: Der Mongolen in Russland. Pesth: C.A. Hartlebens Verlag, 1840.

14) Gastev M. Reasoning about the reasons that slowed down civil education in the Russian state to Peter the Great. M.: University Printing House, 1832.

15) Gradovsky A.D. History of local government in Russia// He is. Collected works. St. Petersburg: M.M. Stasyulevich, 1899. Vol. 2, p. 150.

16) Kostomarov N. The beginning of autocracy in Ancient Russia// He is. Historical monographs and studies. St. Petersburg: Printing house of A. Transhel, 1872. T. 12. S. 70, 76.

17) Bestuzhev-Ryumin K. Russian history (to the endXVcenturies). St. Petersburg: Printing house of A. Transhel, 1872. T. 1.

18) Leontovich F.I. On the history of the law of Russian foreigners: the ancient Oirat statute of penalties (Tsaadzhin-Bichik) // Notes of the Imperial Novorossiysk University. 1879. T. 28. S. 251-271.

19) Ibid.

20) Ibid. S. 274.

21) Veselovsky N.I. Tatar influence on the Russian embassy ceremonial in the Moscow period of Russian history. St. Petersburg: Printing house B.M. Wolfa, 1911. S. 1.

22) Nasonov A.N. Mongols and Russia (history of the Tatar policy in Russia). M.; Leningrad: Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1940, p. 110; Ostrowski D. The // Slavic Review. 1990 Vol. 49. No. 4. P. 528.

23) Nitsche P. Der Bau einer Großmacht: Russische Kolonisation in Ostasien// Conermann S., Kusber J. (Hrsg.). Die Mongolen in Asien und Europa. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1997. S. 211; Trubetskoy N.S. Story. Culture. Language. M.: Progress-Univers, 1995. S. 41.

24) Vernadsky G. The Mongols and Russia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966, p. 338.

25) Ibid. P. 105, 121-122, 337.

26) Pashchenko V.Ya. Ideology of Eurasianism. M.: MGU, 2000. S. 329.

27) Soloviev S.M. History of Russia since ancient times. T. 3. Ch. 2// He is. Compositions: In 18 books. M.: Thought, 1988. Book. II. pp. 121-145.

28) Halperin Ch. Kliuchevskii and the Tartar Yoke// Canadian-American Slavic Studies. 2000. No. 34. P. 385-408.

29) Klyuchevsky V.O. Russian history course. M.: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1937. T. I. S. 394-395.

30) Ibid. pp. 106-110.

31) Ostrowski D. Muscovyand the Mongols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. P. 144.

32) Halperin Ch. Russia and the Golden Horde. Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1985, pp. 68, 74.

33) Dewey H. Russia's Debt to the Mongols in Surety and Collective Responsibility// Comparative Studies in Society and History. 1968 Vol. 30. No. 2. P. 249-270.

34) Pokrovsky M.N. Essay on the history of Russian culture. 5th ed. Petrograd: Surf, 1923. Part I. S. 140-141; He is. Russian history in the most concise essay. M .: Party publishing house, 1933. S. 27.

35) Ballod F.V. Volga "Pompeii". M.; Petrograd: State Publishing House, 1923. P. 131.

36) Bartold V.V. History of the study of the East in Europe and Russia. 2nd ed. Leningrad: Leningrad Institute of Living Oriental Languages, 1925, pp. 171-172.

37) See Charles Halperin's article on this subject: Halperin Ch. Soviet Historiography on Russia and the Mongols// Russian Review. 1982 Vol. 41. No. 3. P. 306-322.

38) Ibid. P. 315.

39) Nasonov A.N. Decree op. S. 5.

40) Great Soviet Encyclopedia. 3rd ed. M.: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1974. T. 16. S. 502-503.

41) Grekov B.D., Yakubovsky A.Yu. Golden Horde. L .: State socio-economic publishing house, 1937. S. 202.

42) It is generally accepted that the term "Eurasia" was first used by the Austrian geologist Eugen Suess (Eugen Suess) in the three-volume work "The Image of the Earth" ("Antlitz der Erde"), published in 1885-1909 (see: Böss O. Die Lehre der Eurasier. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1961. S. 25).

44) I.R. [N.S. Trubetskoy]. Legacy of Genghis Khan. A look at Russian history not from the West, but from the East. Berlin: Helikon, 1925.

45) Trubetskoy N.S. Story. Culture. Language. S. 772.

46) On the way. Approval of the Eurasians. S. 343.

47) Ibid. S. 18.

48) Ibid. S. 344.

49) I.R. [N.S. Trubetskoy]. Legacy of Genghis Khan. pp. 21-22.

50) This provision is reproduced in the work: Russia between Europe and Asia: the Eurasian temptation. M.: Nauka, 1993. S. 266-278.

51) Halperin Ch. Russia and the Golden Horde.

52) Ostrowski D. Muscovite Adaptation of Steppe Political Institutions: A Reply to Halperin's Objections// Kritika. 2000 Vol. 1. No. 2. P. 268.

53) Halperin Ch. Muscovite Political Institutions in the 14th Century// Ibid. P. 237-257; Ostrowski D. // Ibid. P. 267-304.

54) Halperin Ch. Russia and the Golden Horde. P. 88, 103.

55) Ostrowski D. Muscovyand the Mongols. P. 19, 26.

56) Ibid. P. 47-48. Yaroslav Pelensky, a scholar at the University of Iowa, sees a "striking similarity" between the "estate" and the Kazan "suyurgal" (see: Pelenski J. Stateand SocietyinMuscovite Russiaand the Mongols-Turkish Systemin the Sixteenth Century // Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte. 1980. Bd. 27. S. 163-164).

57) Ostrowski D. Muscovyand the Mongols. P. 199.

58) Idem. Muscovite Adaptation of Steppe Political Institutions… P. 269.

59) Ostrovsky further weakened his position, insisting that the Mongol khan was not a despot, but a ruler primus inter pares(see: Ostrowski D. Muscovy and the Mongols. P. 86; Idem. The Mongol Origins of Muscovite Political Institutions. P. 528). These statements contradict the views of prominent specialists in the history of the Mongols, in particular Bertolt Spuler, who unequivocally stated: "Any restriction of the rights of the ruler in relation to his subjects lay absolutely outside the mental horizon of the Eastern world of that era" (Spuler B. Die goldene Horde: Die Mongolian in Russland (1223-1502) . Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1943. S. 250).

60) Duchinski F.-H. Peoples Aryas et Tourans, agriculteurs et nomades. Paris: F. Klincksieck, 1864.

61) Koneczny F. Polish Logos and Ethos. Roztrząsanie o znaczeniu i celu Polski. Poznań; Warzawa, 1921.

62) Froyanov I.Ya. On the emergence of the monarchy in Russia // House of the Romanovs in the history of Russia/ Ed. AND I. Froyanova. St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg University, 1995. P. 31.

63) See: Russia and the East: problems of interaction/ Ed. S.A. Panarina. M.: Turan, 1993. S. 45.

64) Prince I.O. Russia and the steppe. Moscow: Russian Science Foundation, 1996. P. 120.

65) Laruelle M. Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire. Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008.

66) Modern Eurasians call Russia not a "Eurasian", but a "Eurasian" country.

67) Laruelle M. Op. cit. P. 65.

69) Bulletin of the Moscow School of Political Studies. 1998. No. 10. S. 98.

70) See, for example: Panarin A.S. Russia in the cycles of world history. M.: MGU, 1999.

71) Laruelle M. Op. cit. P. 71.