Travels in Siberia (20 page)

Batu sent envoys accompanied by an enchantress to Ryazan. The envoys asked the city to give them a tenth of everything—one in ten princes, one in ten horses, a tenth of all citizens, a tenth of all products. The leaders of Ryazan answered that when none of them were left alive, what remained would belong to Batu. The Mongols enclosed Ryazan in a wall, reduced it with siege engines that shot burning projectiles, and took the city in December 1237. Cinders, stones, and dead bodies strewed the ground when they were through. From Ryazan, Batu continued to Moscow, where he killed 270,000. Ordinary people were just killed, while those of distinction were flayed alive, crucified, or burned. At the city of Vladimir, Batu’s next target, the Mongols overcame the defenses by building an earth mound higher than the walls and then crossing down into the city from it. When the Mongols finally departed Vladimir, there were no cries, because all were dead.

The Mongols—or Tatars, as the Russians and others called them, a generic term for Asiatic horsemen—returned to pillage Russia each winter after that for four years, taking the cities of Pereyaslavl, Chernigov, Smolensk, and Suzdal. When the Tatars approached Kiev, the most beautiful of Russian cities and the capital of ancient Rus, a contemporary chronicler wrote: “Like dense clouds the tatars pushed themselves forward towards Kiev, investing [surrounding] the city on all sides. The rattling of their innumerable carts, the bellowing of camels and cattle, the neighing of horses, and the wild battle-cry, were so overwhelming as to render inaudible the conversation of the people inside the city.” When Kiev fell, the Tatars outdid themselves in killing and burning, and even opened the tombs to scatter the bones and crush the skulls beneath their heels. Five years later, when Friar Carpini passed by on his embassy from the pope, he saw “an innumerable multitude of dead men’s skulls and bones lying upon the earth.” After the razing of Kiev, the Tatar attacks stopped for a while; in most of southern Russia there was nothing significant left to destroy.

During these events, the rulers of the Russian cities did not particularly cover themselves with glory. Historians have noted that often a
prince would find it necessary to be elsewhere when the Mongols came to attack his city, while the prince’s family and subjects stayed behind and took their chances. Often the princes were hampered in their resistance by feuds among themselves, or would even side with the Mongols in order to eliminate a rival. After Batu’s attacks of 1237–41, the Mongols settled in and oppressed Russia with varying degrees of severity for the next two hundred years; they were not totally removed as a force in the region for another hundred years after that. The western branch of the Mongols became known as the Golden Horde. In theory, the Golden Horde was subject ultimately to the Great Khan in Peking or Mongolia, but that tie weakened over time.

The Mongols did not like trees. A people who lived on horseback needed open space, as well as grazing for their animals. For his capital, Batu chose a spot in the steppe country of the lower Volga where he and his family lived in large linen tents previously owned by the king of Hungary. The Mongols called this capital Sarai; later they would move to a new site, also called Sarai, a bit farther downstream. From Sarai they pulled strings in the Russian cities to the north and west, using as their agents, instead of their own men, the Russian princes themselves. These princes often served as proxy Mongols, collecting taxes and tribute and enforcing Mongol decrees. Sometimes the cities rebelled, and the Mongols had to come back and show who was boss. For one political misstep or another, Moscow was sacked and burned many times during the Mongol years.

To escape the Mongol influence, a population shift took place in Russia, with people moving into the forests and northward to more remote cities where the horsemen were unlikely to come. Russian culture, too, stunned by the occupation, retreated into its spirituality, and into monasteries deep in the woods. Russia survived as itself mainly in the monasteries during this hard period. The Mongols, with their unlikely reverence for things of the spirit, allowed the institutions of the Orthodox church to be exempt from taxes; as a result, during these centuries the Russian church did all right. Some Russian historians say that the spiritual growth and sense of self that Russia found during the Mongol period formed the beginnings of the Russian empire, or that the later Russian state combined the continental vision inherited from the Mongols with Russian spirituality.

My own theory about Russia and the Mongols is more psychological or fanciful, and addresses the question I said I had stopped thinking about but actually can’t help returning to: namely, how Russia can be so great and so horrible simultaneously. I think one answer is that when other countries were in their beginnings, developing institutions of government and markets and a middle class and so on, Russia was beset with Mongols. That is, Russia can be thought of as an abused country; one has to make allowances for her because she was badly mistreated in her childhood by the Mongols.

Whatever else the Mongols did to Russia, they turned her attention toward the east. When the Mongols first appeared, the Russians understood only that this nightmare had come from the eastern wilderness, as the church chronicles had prophesied that the savage tribes banished by Gideon would do in the final days. And after Batu’s conquests, Russians began to make their first journeys deep into Asia—at Mongol command, and of course unwillingly. Thousands of Russian prisoners were sent eastward to add variety to Mongol harems or fill out Mongol armies. Russian princes, too, often had to cross Asia to present themselves to the khan, in obedience to a summons or to secure favor, on the general principle that it was somewhat better to visit the Mongols than to have them visit you.

Trips to Sarai, relatively close by on the Volga, were bad enough. But sometimes that show of submission did not suffice, and the princes had to go on to the Great Khan’s capital, a city called Karakorum, perhaps a year’s travel away in Mongolia beyond and to the south of Lake Baikal. When Friar Carpini was in the court of the Great Khan in 1246, he saw Grand Duke Yaroslavl of Suzdal treated with disdain, forced to walk behind and sit behind his Mongol attendants, pitiably waiting their pleasure. Yaroslavl died on that trip, possibly poisoned by a woman in the khan’s retinue.

Yaroslavl’s son Alexander, later called Alexander Nevsky because of his victories against the Swedes and the Teutonic Knights at the Neva River, knuckled under to the Mongols just as his father had done. Though later a saint of the Orthodox church described as possessing supernatural powers—he was said to have sailed up the Neva River on a grindstone—Nevsky
still could not get out of making many trips to Sarai, and also went on a journey to Karakorum that lasted for two years. It was on a trip returning from Sarai that Nevsky died.

Maybe the reason that no Russian tsar (until Alexander II) ever ventured east of the Urals, and that the tsars instead used Siberia as a place to send their enemies, was that they still had a historic memory passed down from medieval Russia of those cross-continental visits to the Great Khan.

In time, like a drunk forgetting some mischief he had set out to do, the Golden Horde and its oppression of Russia succumbed to entropy. Russians point to the defeat of Khan Mamai at Kulikovo Field in 1380 as the beginning of the Golden Horde’s eclipse and the corresponding rise of Russian power. It is also true, however, that Tokhtamysh, a renegade general formerly under Tamerlane, defeated Mamai, took over the Golden Horde, and burned Moscow to the ground two years after Kulikovo. Real and lasting withdrawal of Tatar power dated from a century later, when Ivan III (“the Great”), prince of Moscow, managed a long standoff with Akhmet Khan and the reduced Golden Horde at the Oka River. When Akhmet finally withdrew without a battle, Tatar domination of Russia had come to an end.

By then the Mongol multitudes in much of Asia had been absorbed into the people they’d overrun, and had taken up the faiths they’d encountered—Buddhism, Islam, even Nestorian Christianity. As the Mongol empire shrank and the feared horsemen retreated to the steppes where the empire had begun, many Mongols converted to the Tibetan version of Buddhism, persuaded by its leader, Sonam Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, who made a missionary trip to Mongolia in 1577. According to Tibetan Buddhist belief, Sonam Gyatso lives today in the person of Tenzin Gyatso, his latest incarnation and the current Dalai Lama, known to many from his political activism and his computer ads. As Tibetan Buddhists, the Mongol descendants of Genghis’s legions renounced not only warfare but all other forms of violence, including hunting and hawking. From being the most violent people on the planet in the thirteenth century they became, within a few hundred years, some of the most peaceable.

The influence of the Mongols on Russia was profound. Russians have long been proud to claim that by absorbing the worst the Mongols could
do they saved Western Europe, and maybe civilization, from destruction. Slavophilic historians have also said that Russia should be grateful to the Tatars for keeping her from becoming subject to the Roman church and a kind of lame imitation of Europe; instead the Tatars “introduced into the Russian soul the Mongolian continental feeling,” as one historian put it. Many Mongol words entered the Russian language. Often these were words like
yamshchik
(driver),
loshad’
(horse),
sunduk
(trunk or box), or
orlov
(from
orluk
, eagle), having to do with travel. As for spanning Asia, the system of post roads that Genghis Khan set up to provide communication in his empire, with relays of horses kept at a series of way stations each a regular distance from the next, continued to serve the Siberian part of the Russian empire in only slightly modified form until the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Some everyday Russian customs have Mongol origins—for example, the superstition against shaking hands or embracing across a threshold. Most Russians refuse to do that. Instead, they step all the way across the threshold and then shake hands and embrace, or insist that you first come inside. This custom is said to derive from the Mongols’ extreme touchiness about stepping on, greeting across, or otherwise behaving carelessly at the threshold of their dwellings.

Mongol influence protected Russian literature, too, from being merely a European copy. Russian writers claimed Tatar ancestry to mark their distinctiveness, as the poet Anna Gorenko did when she became Anna Akhmatova, borrowing the surname from a relative of Tatar blood. Even Vladimir Nabokov, a writer as westernized as they come, said in an interview that his last name was derived from one Nabok, a twelfth-century Tatar prince, and that he, Nabokov, was thus directly descended from Genghis Khan (him and sixteen million other guys).

One of my favorite scenes in Dostoyevsky happens early in
The Brothers Karamazov
, when Dmitri Karamazov is telling his younger brother, Alyosha, about an encounter with the beautiful and proud Katarina Ivanovna some years before. Dmitri, in the army at the time, had just received six thousand rubles owed him by old Karamazov, their father; Dmitri also happened to know that his commander, Katarina Ivanovna’s father, had been guilty of a financial irregularity involving the disappearance of four thousand five hundred rubles from the regimental accounts. When the commander is about to be disgraced, Dmitri tells Katarina Ivanovna’s sister that he will give them the money to repay the
missing funds if Katarina Ivanovna visits his quarters “secretly.” Katarina Ivanovna has no choice, so one evening she appears at Dmitri’s room. The young woman is shaken and pale; but determined to sacrifice her honor to save her father; Dmitri takes out a five-thousand-ruble note, shows it, folds it, hands it to her, makes a bow, and opens the door for her to leave. Katarina Ivanovna accepts the money and (Dmitri says), “All at once, not impetuously, but softly, gently, bowed down to my feet—not a boarding school curtsey, but a Russian bow, with her forehead to the floor.”
Not a boarding school curtsey
; that “Russian bow,” one of the most romantic, not to say erotic, moments in all of Dostoyevsky, comes to Russian literature from the Mongols.

Finally, this thought on the Mongols: When you travel in Russia, especially in the cities, you see a lot of ravens and crows. The ravens are a dark, shiny black, while the crows are duller, many of them with capelike areas of gray on the breast and back. A jet-lagged traveler in Moscow lying awake in the small hours remembers he’s in Russia when at first light he hears the crows’ and ravens’ raspy calls. The birds build large, uncomfortable-looking nests of sticks, fight over crusts of black bread in the snow, and spend much of the day checking out new developments at the large communal garbage bins behind the big apartment buildings. I’ve never seen the black-and-gray crows (called hooded crows, or jackdaws) in eastern Siberia; with that exception, crows, and ravens are ubiquitous in Russia, I’ve found. In fact, there are so many of them that a traveler interested in birds quickly learns not to get his hopes up when seeing something flying in the distance, because at closer view it’s almost always a raven or a crow.

In America, ravens and crows have a shifty, raffish, troublemaking quality; they’re always looking for an easy score. The crows and ravens of Russia, by contrast, are somehow more grave. Like buzzards, they appear ruminative, as if they know that all things will come to them in time. I’d always found the Russian crows and ravens disquieting, though I couldn’t have explained why. Then one day I remembered a notable fact about the small rural town of Hinckley, Ohio. Every year in March, on or near the same day, flocks of buzzards arrive in Hinckley. Tourists gather annually to watch this event, and over the years it has given the town some small fame. People in Hinckley say that this convocation of buzzards began back in the nineteenth century, when Hinckley was a frontier
town. The local farmers, wanting to tame the still-wild neighborhood, staged a big encirclement and drove all the predators to the center, where they killed them in heaps. Soon news of this bonanza reached buzzards all over, and they came to Hinckley and feasted. They’ve been coming back in March ever since, just in case.