Natasha's Dance (61 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Of course the schism separated us from the rest of Europe and we took no part in any of the great events which stirred her; but we have had our own mission. It was Russia who contained the Mongol conquest within her vast expanses. The Tatars did not dare cross our western frontiers and so leave us in the rear. They retreated to their deserts, and Christian civilization was saved. To this end we were obliged to lead a completely separate existence which, while it left us Christians, almost made us complete strangers in the Christian world… The Tatar invasion is a sad and impressive history… Do you not discern something imposing in the situation of Russia, something that will strike the future historian? Do you think he will put us outside Europe?… I do not by any means admire all that I see around me… but I swear to you that not for anything in the world would I change my country for another, nor have any history other than that of our ancestors, such as it has been given us by God.
¹
’

    Pushkin’s willingness to embrace this legacy was exceptional, given the taboo which Asia represented to the educated classes of Russia at that time. Perhaps it was explained by Pushkin’s origins - for he himself was of African descent on his mother’s side. Pushkin was the great-grandson of Abram Gannibal, an Abyssinian who had been found at the palace of the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul and purchased by the Russian ambassador as a present for Peter the Great. A favourite at Peter’s court, Gannibal was sent to study in Paris. He rose to become a major-general under the Empress Elizabeth, who granted him an estate with 1,400 serfs at Mikhailovskoe, near Pskov. Pushkin took much pride in his great-grandfather - he had inherited his African lips and thick black curly hair. He wrote an unfinished novel,
The Negro

of Peter the Great
(1827), and in the opening chapter of
Eugene Onegin
he appended a long footnote on his ancestry to the line (no doubt composed to necessitate the note) ‘Beneath the sky of my Africa’.
²⁰
But Russian Europhiles like Chaadaev found nothing to impress them in the Mongol legacy. Seeking to explain why their country took a separate path from Western Europe, many Russians blamed the despotism of the Mongol khans. Karamzin pointed to the Mongols for the degeneration of Russia’s political morals. The historian V. O. Kliuchevsky described the Russian state as ‘an Asiatic structure, albeit one that has been decorated by a European facade’.
²¹

    The Asiatic character of Russia’s despotism became a commonplace of the nineteenth-century democratic intelligensia and was also later used as an explanation for the Soviet system. Herzen said that Nicholas I was ‘Genghiz Khan with a telegraph’ - and, continuing in that tradition, Stalin was compared to Genghiz Khan with a telephone. The Russian autocratic tradition had many roots, but the Mongol legacy did more than most to fix the basic nature of its politics. The khans demanded, and mercilessly enforced, complete submission to their will from all their subjects, peasants and noblemen alike. Moscow’s princes emulated the behaviour of the khans when they ousted them from the Russian lands and succeeded them as Tsars in the sixteenth century. Indeed, they justified their new imperial status not just on the basis of their spiritual descent from Byzantium but also on the basis of their territorial inheritance from Genghiz Khan. The title ‘Tsar’ had been used by the last khan of the Golden Horde and for a long time the Russian terms for Tsar and khan were interchangeable. Even Genghiz Khan was rendered Genghiz Tsar.
²²

    As the Golden Horde broke up and the Tsarist state pushed east, many of the Mongols who had served the khan remained in Russia and entered into service in the court of Muscovy. Genghiz Khan’s descendants held a prominent position in the Moscow court and, by any estimate, a sizeable proportion of the Russian aristocracy had the great khan’s blood running through their veins. There were at least two Tsars who were descended from the Golden Horde. One was Simeon Bekbulatovich (also known as Sain Bulat), who was Tsar of part of Russia for the best part of a year, in 1575. The grandson of a khan of the Golden Horde, Bekbulatovich had joined the Moscow

    court and risen through its ranks to become a retainer of Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’). Ivan set Bekbulatovich to rule over the
boyars’
domains while he himself retreated to the countryside, taking the title ‘Prince of Moscow’. The appointment was a temporary and tactical manoeuvre on Ivan’s part to tighten his control of his rebellious guards, the
oprichnina.
Bekbulatovich was only nominally in charge. But Ivan’s choice was clearly motivated by the high prestige which the Golden Horde retained within society. At the end of his short ‘reign’, Ivan rewarded Bekbulatovich with a rich estate of 140,000 hectares along with the title of the Grand Prince of Tver. But under Boris Godunov Bekbulatovich was accused of treason, deprived of his estate and forced into the monastery of St Cyril, near Belo Ozero. Boris Godunov was the other Tsar descendant of the Golden Horde - the great-great-great-great-grandson of a Tatar khan named Chet who had entered the service of the Moscow princes in the middle of the fourteenth century.
²³

    It was not just Mongol nobles who settled down in Russia. The Mongol invasion involved a huge migration of nomadic tribes who had been forced to find new pastures on the steppe through the overpopulation of Mongolia. The whole Eurasian steppe, from the Ukraine to Central Asia, was engulfed by incoming tribes. Many of the immigrants became absorbed in the settled population and stayed behind in Russia when the Golden Horde was pushed back to Mongolia. Their Tatar names are still marked on maps of southern Russia and the Volga lands: Penza, Chembar, Ardym, Anybei, Kevda, Ardatov and Alatyr. Some of the settlers were cohorts of the Mongol army stationed as administrators in the southern borderlands between the Volga and the river Bug. Others were traders or artisans who went to work in the Russian towns, or poor nomads who were forced to become peasant farmers when they lost their herds. There was such a heavy influx of these Tatar immigrants, and so much intermingling with the native population over several centuries, that the idea of a peasantry of purely Russian stock must be seen as no more than myth.

    The Mongol influence went deep into the roots of Russian folk culture. Many of the most basic Russian words have Tatar origins -
loshad
(horse),
bazar
(market),
ambar
(barn),
sunduk
(chest) and several hundred more.
²⁴
As already noted, imported Tatar words were particularly common in the languages of commerce and adminis-

    tration, where the descendants of the Golden Horde dominated. By the fifteenth century the use of Tatar terms had become so modish at the court of Muscovy that the Grand Duke Vasily accused his courtiers of ‘excessive love of the Tatars and their speech’.
²⁵
But Turkic phrases also left their mark on the language of the street - perhaps most notably in those
‘davai’
verbal riffs which signal the intention of so many daily acts: ‘
davai poidem’
(‘Come on, let’s go’),
‘ davai posidim’
(‘Come on, let’s sit down’), and
‘ davai popem’
(‘Come on, let’s get drunk’).

    Russian customs were equally influenced by the Tatar immigration, although this is easier to establish at the level of the court and high society, where Russian customs of hospitality were clearly influenced by the culture of the khans, than it is at the level of the common Russian folk. None the less, the archaeologist Veselovsky traced the Russian folk taboos connected with the threshold (such as not to step on it or not to greet a person across it) to the customs and beliefs of the Golden Horde. He also found a Mongol origin for the Russian peasant custom of honouring a person by throwing them into the air - a ceremony performed by a crowd of grateful peasants on Nabokov’s father after he had settled a dispute on the estate.
²⁶

    From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvellous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curious casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of fold in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute Flames in the midst of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.
²⁷

    There is also reason to suppose that the shamanistic cults of the Mongol tribes were incorporated in the Russian peasant faith, as

    Kandinsky and his fellow anthropologists had argued at the end of the nineteenth century (although it is telling that they found no trace of the Muslim religion which the Golden Horde adopted in the fourteenth century).* Many of the peasant sects, the ‘Wailers’ and the ‘Jumpers’, for example, used techniques that were highly reminiscent of the Asian shamans’ to reach a trance-like state of religious ecstasy.
²⁸

    The Holy Fool
(yurodivyi)
was probably descended from the Asian shamans, too, despite his image as the quintessential ‘Russian type’ in many works of art. It is difficult to say where the Holy Fools came from. There was certainly no school for Holy Fools and, like Rasputin (who was in his way a sort of Holy Fool), they seem to have emerged as simple men, with their own techniques of prophecy and healing, which enabled them to set out on their life of religious wandering. In Russian folklore, the ‘fool for the sake of Christ’, or Holy Fool for short, held the status of a saint - though he acted more like an idiot or madman than the self-denying martyr demanded by St Paul. Widely deemed to be clairvoyant and a sorcerer, the Holy Fool dressed in bizarre clothes, with an iron cap or harness on his head and chains beneath his shirt. He wandered as a poor man round the countryside, living off the alms of the villagers, who generally believed in his supernatural powers of divination and healing. He was frequently received and given food and lodgings in the households of the provincial aristocracy.

    The Tolstoy family retained the services of a Holy Fool at Yasnaya Polyana. In his semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical
Childhood,
Tolstoy recounts a memorable scene in which the children of the household hide in a dark cupboard in Fool Grisha’s room to catch a glimpse of his chains when he goes to bed: