Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History

by Charles J. Halperin

Release Date: July, 1987

Edition: Paperback

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The Central Asian School

The irony of Halperin's piece is that the records that would substantiate Tatar Mongol influence in Russia were all destroyed when Timur the Tatar sacked the capital at Serai. This is evidence of the sort of thing that Helperin tends to gloss over. While his attempt at revision is not meticulously and intentionally mendacious, he has a tendency to mince words in such a way that he over-compensates for the legitimate biases that he finds in previous accounts. He may be raising the curtain a little, but only the part he wants you to see.

In a general sense, I accept his thesis that both primary sources and modern historians have probably tended to dismiss the Mongols as barbarians at the gates. In fact, I would go one step further. Whereas Halperin points to academia's tendency to rely on source material, I would suggest that the arguments against the Mongols probably lie in 19th and 20th century historical phenomena, specifically the development of intense Russian nationalism and, later, socialism. Nationalists of course abhor the Mongols because they inflicted a great national tragedy on the Russians. In a more modern sense, they represented the immediate foes of the Russian state in the Caucasus and on into Turkey, as well as in Central Asia. Socialists, alternatively, are likely to view the Mongols poorly because they represent a reversion to a lesser stage of history in the dialectic, directional history of Marx. Thus, revisionists like Halperin are an important counterweight to historians projecting modern ideologies on the past.
Halperin's argument does suffer, though, from some of the same problems that his opponents' arguments exhibit. Most importantly, Halperin accuses his rivals of basing their claims on snippets and stories that avoid the essence of Mongol domination. Yet, Halperin is forced to do the same in making his case. He must rely on unsystematic linguistic evidence, snippets of stories, and tangential evidence to make his case.

Let us delve into Halperin's arguments in order to demonstrate his over-compensating ideology and unsystematic use of evidence.
Take, for example, Halperin's evidence of substantial steppe-forest interaction prior to the Mongol invasion. His evidence for Khazar interaction is based on a single linguistic tie in the use of a word relating to the ruler. Though he is quick to dismiss Primary Chronicle stories as apocryphal, he accepts a story about a boy who can communicate with Patzinaks without any similar suggestions. His argument in favor of Chernye Klobuky influence on Russian society simply states that it must have occurred. None of this represents an unshakable case. An argument less inclined to elevate the steppe nomads might suggest that the Kievan state exhibited some ties to the steppe because of shared ancestry and not the interaction of distinct communities. It was the Kievan state that broke the two into distinct communities by strengthening the settled communities.
Some of the same tendencies come out in his argument on behalf of the original Mongol conquerors. His description of Mongol religion as a 'sophisticated blend' is merely a tainted way of saying that they borrowed religious concepts from a number of the peoples that they had met. This is not evidence of an advanced culture. Often, the most sublime religious and philosophical works are notable for their simplicity and endogenous roots.

Again, in his attempt in this section to explain the failure of the Mongols to occupy Russia he relies on biased phraseology and an over-rationalization of Mongol behavior. He suggests that the Mongols did not occupy Russia as they had Persia or China because they performed a variety of cost-benefit analysis on the bureaucracy required to govern the territory versus the extraction of wealth that would come from it. In fact, it is far more likely that Russia was spared by its own comparative lack of sophistication. The Turkic peoples that eventually settled in China, Persia, Egypt, India and Istanbul found fantastically wealthy cities with well-established courts. They adopted the trappings of these courts because they were incredibly more luxurious than life on the steppe. Russia, however, was bitterly cold, not yet nearly as wealthy and culturally enriched, and certainly not as attractive as a capital in which to settle down. Witness the reluctance of the Byzantine court to send wives off to the apparently 'barbaric' Russians. The Mongols did not make some elaborate governmental decision based on the interests of the state; they did what was best for their own passion for booty and ease.

The same problems arise in the sections regarding Mongol administration and its corresponding effect on the rise of Muscovy. Halperin describes the changes in the Mongol system of rule as dynamic and effective. But then he argues that the autocratic Muscovite state found 15th century Mongol bureaucracy to be insufficient and relied instead on Mongol models from the 14th century that, he admits, are difficult to link. If changes in Mongol institutions like the systems of taxation, customs, census, and post were dynamic and effective, then why would the Muscovites switch back? The only consistency in this argument is that of favoring Mongol action and influence. More likely, changes to the Mongol system represent a desire for more control, in the form of more money, but a lack of ability to exercise that control directly. The return to policies similar to 14th century Mongol policies is thus either a conscious decision of the Muscovites to adopt historically more effective policies or a coincidental parallel, whereby both the Mongols and the Muscovites used the same bureaucratic systems because of the effectiveness of that system, not because of any causal link between the two.

Halperin is far better when he is arguing over the effects of Mongol devastation than he is on direct Mongol policy. His suggestion that the Mongol invasion redirected the nature of the Russian economy is sound. His arguments that the invasion reduced the authority of the veche and the boyarstvo and increased that of the Orthodox Church are hardly debatable.
His attempts to counter more exotic theories on the impact of Mongol devastation are more checkered. He is effective in assailing the argument that the seclusion of women was attributable to the Mongols. His arguments against serfdom and bond slavery are curt but effective. A little more elaboration and evidence would have made them more certain. As it stands, it is difficult to tell whether his dismissal is so obvious as to not require further explanation or so tenuous that he cannot provide evidence. His argument against the suggestion that the Mongols made Russia miss the Renaissance is particularly convincing.

Halperin's indictment of most of the scholarship on the Mongol invasion of Russia is well founded. His treatment of the resulting devastation is objective and intelligent. However, his depiction of the Mongols themselves is overly rosy, more akin to a sympathetic ethnographer than a discerning historian. More importantly, his revisionist proposals regarding the long-term effect of Mongol administration are difficult to swallow, if only because the evidence on his side is as scanty as the evidence against.

While Russian patriots have pulled up the northern curtain of this debate, Halperin has snuck us a peak of what lies behind the southern curtain. Without a systematic raising, it is difficult to tell which is more akin to the set and stage of the medieval Russian steppe. Clearly, if only by the fact of their victory, there was something notable in the Mongol clan and military structure that made it more competitive than the settled societies it encountered. Free from Marxist dialectical history, it is unfair to say that all the Mongols brought was devastation and regression. The Mongols deserve a historical treatment that accounts for their interests and their successes and failures, as Halperin has given us. Unfortunately, it is far more difficult to tell what positive effect Mongol administration had on the development of Russian society after the Tatar way of life joined the backwater of world political history in the face of the new gunpowder empires.

Scholarly, detailed, objective

Not a quick read, this book will probably tell you lots more than you wanted to know if you have just a casual interest in the subject. That aside, it covers its subject thoroughly. Analyzing word etymology, documents, and institutions, Halperin shows that the Russians borrowed quite a bit from the Mongols -- and that the 300-year "Tatar Yoke" was far from being a dark age for Russia. One thing that particularly grabbed me: Halperin indicates that pre-conquest Russian scribes attributed nomad raids to punishments from God. So, how did the scribes handle the situation after the conquest, when Christians were under the domination of infidels? By denying the conquest had occurred!