Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition reaches its musical climax in a movement titled ‘The Heroes’ Gates in Kiev’ (usually translated as ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’ and given various orchestral makeovers by artists ranging from Maurice Ravel to the 1970s progressive rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer). In reality, Mussorgsky’s Gates were never actually built – they were merely an architectural study in a painting by his recently deceased friend Viktor Hartmann – but that doesn’t stop Kiev tour guides taking visitors to see them. What the tourists actually see are Kiev’s Zoloti Vorota (Golden Gates), a towering brick and wood structure built in the eleventh century as part of the city’s defensive wall.
The walls have gone now and the gates are little more than a decorative adornment in a grassy park behind the Opera House. But in 1240 the citizens of Kiev were desperately relying on their protection from a very real enemy. Khan Batu was a grandson of Genghis Khan and commander of the Mongol troops – called ‘Tartars’ by the Russians – who conquered nearly all of Kievan Rus between 1237 and 1240. According to the chronicler who recorded Batu’s seizure of the city of Ryazan, his methods were, to say the least, uncompromising:
The accursed Batu1 … stormed the city with firebrands, battering rams and scaling ladders. In the Cathedral of the Assumption, the Tartars seized Princess Agrippina and hacked her into pieces together with the other princesses. The bishops and the priests they burned alive and set fire to the churches, killing men, women and children with their swords, drowning others in the river. The Tartars burned our holy city with all its beauty and its wealth and spilled our blood on its holy altars. Not one person remained alive. Parents could not mourn their children, nor children their parents, for all alike were dead. All had drunk to the dregs from the same bitter cup.
After Ryazan, Batu marched on the principalities of Suzdal and Vladimir, Kolomna, Chernigov and the still minor city of Moscow. By 1240, the Mongols were approaching the capital of the Russian lands, the great city of Kiev. At the top of the Golden Gates, from the ancient lookout post (recently reconstructed by the city authorities), you can see where the Mongols pitched their camp, surrounding the city on all sides. For the thousand or so defenders of Kiev it must have been a heart-stopping sight because the attackers had many thousands of troops and their tents stretched as far as the eye could see. Unusually, the Mongol commander dispatched envoys offering the chance to surrender, but the Kievans refused. After a week-long bombardment that breached the city walls, the Mongols poured in, wreaking death and destruction.
The terrified civilians sought shelter in the Desyatinna Tserkva (Church of the Tithes), in the Old Town area of the city. The church was a stone structure that housed the remains of Grand Prince Vladimir the Bringer of Christianity, his wife and family, but it was not built to withstand the weight of so many people and its upper floor collapsed. Hundreds died in the crush and the rest were burned to death by the besieging Mongols.fn1 By nightfall, the Mongols had set Kiev ablaze. Some 48,000 of its 50,000 inhabitants were dead and the civilisation that was Kievan Rus, the culture and beauty, the embryonic democracy, the respect for legality and civic values – all had been destroyed for ever. A papal envoy travelling through the Kievan lands in 1245 has left us a vivid snapshot of the Mongols’ destructive ruthlessness:
When we passed through this region2, we found lying in the fields countless heads and bones of dead people … The pagans had enacted a great massacre in the Russian lands and destroyed towns and fortresses. Kiev had been large and populous, but now it was reduced to nothing – barely 200 dwellings remain and those inhabitants are held in the cruellest slavery.
It was a ruthlessness that had helped the Mongols conquer vast swathes of Asia and would soon bring much of Eastern Europe under their control. Their method was to wage total war, with blitzkrieg tactics of speed and surprise. All the resources of the Mongol state were devoted permanently and exclusively to military campaigning. This was not so much a society as a perpetual war machine.
But what the Mongols didn’t have was the manpower to administer the territory they had seized. In Russia they selected puppet rulers from among the princes, demanding penal tribute from them and humiliating shows of servility. Appointed and dismissed at the whim of the Mongol overlords, the princes were summoned to prostrate themselves before the Khan in mocking, degrading rituals. One who refused was summarily executed.
The Mongol yoke would last for 240 years, from 1240 to 1480, subjugating Russia’s population, disrupting her economy and setting back her development as a European state. Nikolai Karamzin, the first great Russian historian, writing in the 1820s, identifies Mongol rule as the moment when Russia became separated from the West, when the commercial and cultural links that flourished under Kiev were broken and Russia was plunged into darkness and isolation:
In former times3, we had a civic society that equalled the leading European powers, with the same character, the same laws, customs and state structures … But see now the consequences of our two centuries of slavery: … Russia’s progress was halted: we stood still as Europe sped forward on the path to enlightenment … and her rulers willingly conceded civil rights to her citizens. The prison of barbarism cut us off from Europe, just when Europe was acquiring the benefits of knowledge, freedom and civilisation.
Isolated from Europe, Russia missed out on the Renaissance, her national progress interrupted for more than 200 years. In some respects, she would never fully catch up with Western Europe’s cultural and social values. The radical political philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, a contemporary of Karamzin, identifies the Mongol occupation as the genesis of Russia’s enduring failure to develop as a European state:
Our history began in barbarity4 and backwardness, followed by brutal foreign oppression whose values were imbibed by our own rulers. Cut off from the rest of humanity, we failed to acquire the universal values of duty, justice and the rule of law. The new ideas that blossomed in Western Europe did not penetrate our state of oppression and slavery.
Instead, in a strange version of Stockholm Syndrome (where kidnap victims embrace the beliefs of their kidnappers), the Russians began to adopt features of the Mongol system for themselves. Forced to kowtow before the Khan, the princes started to demand the same thing from their own followers. The practice of chelobitie (literally beating one’s forehead on the ground) was adopted as part of Russian court etiquette and would remain in use for four centuries. Prince vied with prince to prove their commitment to the Mongol cause, becoming zealous collaborators and willing collectors of tribute. Some of them adopted the Tartar language. And, most significantly for Russia’s future development, a profound admiration for the Mongol model of an autocratic, militarised state began to enter the Russian psyche. Karamzin described the assimilation of Mongol values:
The princes crawled on their knees5 to the Golden Horde and, returning with the approval of the Tartar Khan, began to rule with greater boldness than in the days when we were politically free … So, uprooting little by little the traditions of the old social order, they introduced instead the beginnings of genuine autocracy.
Karamzin recognises the legacy of the Mongol period as a decisive shift from fragile, embryonic democracy to flourishing and durable autocracy. Mongol viceroys and their client princes abolished Kievan Rus’s consultative assemblies – the remarkable veches at work in Novgorod, Pskov and Kiev – and assumed unchecked authority to take decisions on war and peace, taxation, conscription and the appointment of state officials. Justice became the plaything of despots; cruel new punishments and judicial torture were introduced. Civic participation and respect for the law, glimpsed in the legal code of Novgorod and elsewhere, were replaced by the absolute, unchallengeable diktat of an all-powerful state.
Russian historians have debated whether the advent of autocracy was a positive or negative development. The commonly held view is the one put forward by the liberal Chaadayev – that the Mongol period was a national catastrophe and the absolutist state model it implanted in Russia was her great misfortune. But some Russian nationalists disagree. Karamzin, for instance, is a convinced defender of autocracy and suggests the strength and political unity it engendered among the formerly feuding Russian lands outweighed all the negative effects:
Batu’s invasion brought destruction6, death and slavery to Russia; it was, of course, one of our greatest national woes … but its consequences were undoubtedly a blessing in disguise, for the destruction brought with it the gift of unity. It would have been better if our princes could themselves have established unity and autocracy, but they had failed to do so for two centuries. If another century had passed in princely feuds what would have been the result? Almost certainly the downfall of our country. Our Christian faith and our very survival would have been lost. It may be said, therefore, that Moscow’s future greatness was created by the Mongol Khans.
It is true that the need for unity in the face of Mongol oppression would eventually force the rival princes into a national alliance (see here). It is also true that the autocratic, centralised power system they assimilated from their occupiers would endure in Russia long after the Mongols had departed. For a state in constant danger of annihilation, the unifying force of autocracy seemed a necessity. In the centuries beyond the Mongol era, it would become a default position for governance in Russia.
The period of Kievan Rus was the first of Russia’s ‘moments of unruly destiny’, the first key juncture at which she could have gone either way – down the path of civic society and participatory government; or down the route of centralised autocracy, the silnaya ruka of Asiatic despotism.
On a rainy autumn day in a muddy field by the River Don, southeast of the city of Tula, I waited with a regiment of fierce-looking Russians in chain mail. We expected the enemy cavalry at any moment. The Russian troops were understandably nervous. They had swords and lances and a few of them were swinging spiky iron maces in a distinctly menacing manner. But word had come in that they were badly outnumbered and that the Mongols had orders to take no prisoners.
The name of the muddy meadow was Kulikovo Polye, literally ‘the Field of Snipes’, and I had come for the annual re-enactment of the decisive battle of the Mongol occupation, the first time the Russians had found the courage to unite and rise up against their ferocious overlords. In 1380, several princedoms, including Moscow, had refused to pay their tribute and the Mongols responded by assembling a powerful punitive expedition to teach them a lesson. In the past, the feuding princes would have run to protect their own fiefdoms, but now – for the first time – 20 of them agreed to work together. Under the leadership of the 29-year-old Prince Dmitry Ivanovich of Moscow, whose forces had already clashed with the Mongols two years earlier, they crossed the Don and took up position in the fields and woods I could see all around me.
The Mongols attacked from the south. By now we could hear the sound of their horses’ hooves growing louder by the minute. The fellows in chain mail exchanged worried glances. Many of them looked a bit old and somewhat on the podgy side to be frontline troops. But Prince Dmitry was a tactical wizard. He had chosen to fight on wooded terrain that slowed down the enemy cavalry and robbed them of mobility.
The Mongols finally galloped into view and swept around the field a couple of times in a show of hippodrome bravado. My companions waved their maces in the air and there was a little polite banging of Russian swords on Mongol shields before everyone agreed to call it a day and headed off to share a beer and some shashlik.
On 8 September 1380, the real Battle of Kulikovo Polye was distinctly longer and bloodier. For over four hours, 60,000 Russians and 100,000 Mongols slashed and hacked with swords and lances. According to the Chronicles, Christian bodies lay like haystacks and the River Don flowed red with blood:
But Prince Dmitry said, ‘Fight on!7 Yield not to the infidels who destroy our land.’ Grey wolves howl at our gates … Prince Dmitry galloped to the River Don … and the princes marched united together. Russian swords rain down on Tartar helmets; black is the earth under their hooves, but they sow the field with Tartar bones. Mighty armies trample down hills and fields, uttering mighty cries. Lightning flashes, thunder claps; our golden armour shines, banners flap in the wind. It is awful to hear … But the infidels run before the princes and Russians cry victory in the field. Trumpets sound; drums are beaten; glory is borne through the land. Dmitry has vanquished the pagans … for the Russian land and the Christian Faith!
Kulikovo Polye is regarded very much as a Christian triumph over the forces of Islam (the Mongols had adopted the Muslim faith in the early fourteenth century), and a 90-foot column with a gilded Orthodox cross now marks the site of the battle. (I also noticed that a lot of the re-enactors when I was there turned up later in the T-shirts of extreme Russian nationalist – some would say racist – groups.) Back in 1380, Christianity and nationalism were just beginning to be influential forces in the formation of the Russian identity. In Russian folk memory, Kulikovo Polye is the place to which Russians came divided but left as a nation (even though at least one Russian prince offered to fight with the Mongols). The victory on the River Don earned Prince Dmitry his enduring nickname – Donskoy, literally ‘man of the River Don’ – and created the notion of Russia’s sacred calling as the standard-bearer of Christianity against the forces of the infidel. Alexander Blok, the great Symbolist poet writing 500 years later, saw it as the starting gun for a millennial clash of opposing values that would define Russia’s historical identity:
O my Rus! My wife!8 Our path is long
And painfully clear!
Our breast is pierced by the ancient arrow
Of the Tartars’ will.
Our path leads through the steppe of endless yearning,
Through your yearning, O Rus! …
In the smoky reaches a holy banner will shine
Aloft beside the Khan’s steel sabre …
And the battle is eternal! We can only dream of peace
Through blood and dust …
The events at Kulikovo Polye had three crucial outcomes: national pride at the unexpected victory over the occupiers; confirmation that if Russians acted together they could achieve greater things than when they squabbled among themselves; and a realisation of the importance of Christian faith as a unifying national value.
The victory of 1380 destroyed the aura of Mongol invincibility, but it didn’t end Mongol domination. For another century, Rus continued paying tribute to the Golden Horde and seething with resentment. What had changed was that the country was united now by what would soon become a national religious myth and by a pan-Russian consciousness of being a unified nation in opposition to external enemies. The leader of that newborn Russia would no longer be Kiev, but Moscow.
fn1 The ruins of the Desyatinna Tserkva still remain in Kiev, rather forlorn behind a rusting iron fence.