A Separate Essay, overview, of Eurasia
A Talk about the two births of Russia; one in the I century AD, and the second in the XIII century, and what terrible reduction went on in-between. Not part of Rus 2 Russia.
This is not part of our current book from Rus 2 Russia. I insert it here because it is sort of an overview of what has been covered, and a projection of what’s to come. (Sorry, there are no pictures.) This essay also details what we have just read, about the Mongol influence in Russia.
The Western intelligentsia, (19th century historians), believed that it was somehow wrong to talk about the oppression of Russia by Europeans. They created the myth of the “Mongol Yoke”. In reality the Germans and Lithuanians, the Latin Church, were much more devastating to Russia than the Tartars (Mongols). (Catholics were much more the real barbarians.)
If you have understood the complex progression of Kievan Rus; for 100’s of years, you will wonder at how these warring (Russian) princes could be considered anything but villains. There were about eight Russian principalities, that were constantly slaughtering each other. (And what to say, people were pressed into these armies, and a lot of mercenaries were hired.) There is much to be said about it, but I really have to study it deeper.
Lev Gumilev (9,500 words) A Dialog.
They call me a Eurasian
AP: Lev Nikolaevich, let's start with the "origins". Today you represent the only serious historical school in Russia. The last such school was Eurasianism — a powerful trend of historical thought in the first half of our century, represented by such names as N. S. Trubetskoy, P. N. Savitsky, G. V. Vernadsky, partly L. P. Karsavin and G. P. Fedotov. To what extent can the Eurasians be considered the precursors of L. N. Gumilev's theory of ethnogenesis?
L. G.: In general, I am called a Eurasian — and I do not refuse. You're right: it was a powerful historical school. I have carefully studied the works of these people. And not only studied. For example, when I was in Prague, I met and talked with Savitsky, corresponded with G. Vernadsky. I agree with the main historical and methodological conclusions of the Eurasians. But they did not know the main thing in the theory of ethnogenesis — the concept of passionarity. You see, they really lacked natural science. Georgy Vladimirovich Vernadsky, as a historian, really lacked the assimilation of the ideas of his father, Vladimir Ivanovich.
When we say "history" — we are simply obliged to note or mention what kind of history is this, the history of what? There is a simple enumeration of events — this is a chronicle; there is an economic history describing the production of material goods; there is a legal history, sufficiently developed in Russia in the XIX century, studying the evolution of socio-political institutions; there is a history of culture, military affairs, and so on. I am engaged in ethnic history, which is a function of the natural process — ethnogenesis and studies naturally formed non-social collectives of people - various peoples, ethnic groups. What is the fundamental difference between ethnic history and the historical sciences that study social structures? Ethnic history differs from all others primarily by its discontinuity. This happens because the process of ethnogenesis itself (as, indeed, any other natural process) is finite and is associated with a certain form of energy discovered by our great compatriot V. I. Vernadsky — the energy of the living matter of the biosphere. The effect of an excess of this energy in a person, your humble servant called passionarity. Any ethnos arises as a result of a certain explosion of passionarity, then, gradually losing it, passes into an inertial period, inertia ends, and the ethnos disintegrates into its component parts…
AP: Lev Nikolaevich, tell us about the application of the theory of ethnogenesis to Russian history.
L. G.: Even in general terms, this is quite a long conversation. Apparently, it is necessary to start with the fact that the history of Ancient Russia, and Russia are the result of two different explosions of passionarity, two different passionate impulses. The explosion of passionarity that brought Ancient Russia to life occurred in the 1st century A.D. from Southern Sweden (the movement of the Goths) to the mouth of the Vistula and to the Carpathians, where the ancestors of the Slavs lived then; then it passed through the territory of modern Romania — Dacia: The Dacians were burned by this passionarity, because they rushed to fight with the mighty Roman Empire and as a result of this war, they were essentially all exterminated. Then this explosion passed through Asia Minor and Palestine, where Orthodox church Christianity emerged, which later took shape in the Byzantine Empire. Furthermore, the same impulse can be traced in Abyssinia (Aksum). All this happened, I repeat, in the I century. But it was by this time (I–II centuries), as my late teacher, Professor Artamonov, proved, that the first archaeological monuments that can be attributed directly to the Slavs appeared. It was this Slavic (or rather, Slavic-Gothic) ethnogenesis that later gave rise to Ancient Kievan Rus. And here I must once again turn to ethnology.
Ethnos is a long—running process defined by three parameters: spatial (geographical landscape), temporal (change of passionarity from birth to disintegration through a certain sequence of phases) and contact, (interaction with other ethnic systems, which causes mixing, and violation of the direct process).
The duration of the ethnogenetic process, if we count with the incubation period of the ethnos' life at the beginning and with the inertial one at the end, is about one and a half thousand years. The same thing happened with the Slavs. In the middle of their development, in the so-called fracture phase, they split into separate tribes and peoples, although they continued to feel their unity, they still used the generally accepted language. But languages and cultures gradually but steadily diverged: Czechs and Poles turned out to be Catholics, Serbs and Bulgarians became Orthodox, but opponents of Byzantium; Pagan Polabian Slavs were conquered by the Germans, although Slavic languages were spoken on the banks of the Elbe until the XVIII century.
Part of the ancient Slavs moved to the East, reached the border of the Dnieper and Lake Ilmen. This part was the ethnic basis of the Old Russian period of the Slavs. Naturally, during their settlement, the Slavs, meeting with neighboring peoples, married them, including them in their ethnic system. So, if Slavic tribes of Slavs and Drevlyans lived on the right bank of the Dnieper, then on the left bank there lived, to the east of Chernigov, Sabirs — Northerners who changed their ancient language (which was unknown), into Slavic and became part of Kievan Rus. By the XIV–XV centuries Slavic unity no longer existed, but the memory of it had been preserved. In the XV century, the Czech Hussites tried to return to Orthodoxy, preached among them by Saint Methodius. But since Byzantium was weak, and Russia as a whole state did not exist, they did not succeed — they remained within the framework of Western European superethnoses and suffered greatly from this. If in the time of Jan Huss there were three million Czechs in Bohemia, then after the Battle on the White Mountain in 1618 there were only 800 thousand of them left. The reason for such a terrible loss of the gene pool was the victorious war of 1419-1458. In victorious wars, people die just as much as in defeats.
You see, the very problem of breaking ethnic tradition, the problem of ethnic decline, is therefore complicated because the current interpretation of history is at the level of the beginning of the XIX century. At that time, straight-line mechanistic evolutionism prevailed in all sciences, now discarded even in zoology and replaced by mutogenesis. Since the deaths of huge civilizations are inexplicable from such positions, then barbarians, Christians, slaves and slaveholders, but not the Romans themselves, were considered to be to blame for the death, for the example of the Roman Empire. But the reason for the death of the Roman Empire and its culture was nested in them, although it is also wrong to consider them guilty: after all, you can't blame an old man for not doing boxing or mountaineering, referring to his sick heart.
By the fourth century, the Romans had forgotten how to fight and even how to defend themselves. Suffice it to recall that after the destruction of Rome by the Vandals in 455, the Romans discussed not how to restore the city, but how to arrange a circus performance: they were no longer capable of any more. And they submitted to the leader of the Heruli — Odoacer in 476 without resistance.
The Roman example is not the only way of the death of "civilization", Byzantium died courageously and tragically. Therefore, death can be chosen, although the choice itself is always prompted by the course of events of the distant past. All systems that have arisen during a passionate push are disintegrating, but each in its own way…
A. P.: So, according to your theory, Ancient Russia ended its existence around the XIV–XV centuries. A legitimate question: where did Russia come from — the Russia in which we live?
L. G.: The new Russian ethnic integrity is the result of the push of the XIII century, which passed somewhat to the east of the previous push of the I century. It can be traced from Finland through Belarus (between Vilna and Moscow), through Asia Minor, which was already in the hands of the Turks at that time (the push gave rise to the mighty Ottoman Empire there) and to Abyssinia, which was again restored from the wreckage of the previous Aksum era. We cannot determine the exact date of the push and its geography, but we can name the first passionaries who created two great powers — Lithuania and Russia: Alexander Nevsky in Russia and Prince Mindovga in Lithuania. The whole history of Lithuania at the beginning of the XIV century, that is, before (the prince) Gediminas — a period of small troubles, disorder, strife, increasingly bloody and violent — the beginning of a passionate upsurge. The forces of the newly emerged and renewed ethnic groups went into internecine wars. In this respect, the destinies of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Grand Duchy of Vladimir were different. The fact is that in the XIII century Batu's troops came from Mongolia.
A. P.: Here, in the assessment and interpretation of this event, you will probably agree — the main point of your differences with the majority of historians: both Western, liberal, and patriotic (for example, A. Kuzmin or V. Chivilikhin) directions.
L. G.: I agree, but there is a certain difference here. As for the "Westerners", I do not want to argue with ignorant intellectuals who have not learned either history or geography. In science, only an empirical generalization is considered correct, that is, a consistent version based on all known facts. I will repeat only the facts that I have cited repeatedly.
In the XIII century. all the Mongols were about 700 thousand people: 130 thousand soldiers. They fought on three fronts: in China, where there were about 60 million people in the Jin Empire, and 30 million in the Southern Sum Empire; in Iran with its 20 million population and in Eastern Europe with a population of 8 million, of which a well-trained army was more than 110 thousand people. And besides that — Kama Bulgars, Mordvins and Polovtsy. It is clear that the Mongols could only transfer a very small number of troops to the West in 1236-1237. A remarkable polymath, a famous archaeologist, Professor Nikolai Veselovsky defines them as 30 thousand people, and, apparently, there were so many of them. Naturally, with such forces, Batu could not conquer Russia, which had 110 thousand armed soldiers. His campaign in 1237-1240 was nothing more than just a big raid, and the purpose of this raid was not the conquest of Russia, but a war with the Polovtsians, with whom the Mongols already had a blood feud, a steppe vendetta. Since the Polovtsians firmly held the line between the Don and the Volga, the Mongols used a well—known tactical technique of a long detour - and made a cavalry raid through the Ryazan, Vladimir principalities, then took Kozelsk, terribly exterminating its population, then moved to Kiev, which, in fact, no one came to defend: the prince fled, and the governor could not gather an army, because after the three-fold defeat of the neighboring Russian principalities, Kiev was turned into ruins. Then the Mongols left for the West.
The question arises: what was the reason for such a brutal massacre of Kozelsk, which the Mongols called the "evil city"? The title is the answer. The Mongols called the cities where their parliamentarians were killed "evil". The murder of a parliamentarian, from the point of view of the Mongols, was the gravest crime. Mongol ambassadors were killed at Kalka, and Mstislav, Prince of Chernigov, was among their assassins. Of course, it can be argued that the townspeople are not guilty of the prince's crime, but the Mongols had an extremely developed concept of collective responsibility: if the inhabitants of a given city recognize their prince, they share his fate.
A similar case took place in 1945, when our troops surrounded Budapest, it was clear to everyone that the city would not stand. To avoid the destruction of the city and unnecessary bloodshed, a surrender was offered. Three Soviet parliamentarians agreed on the terms of surrender with the Hungarian command. But on their way back, the German patrol fired an automatic burst at the car. The driver managed to give gas, the car was brought into our location, and our soldiers and officers found three dying comrades in it. After that, it was impossible to keep the troops from attacking. I was near Berlin at that time, but if I had been near Budapest, I can assure you that they would not have deterred me either, because I fully share the opinion that the Mongols tried to plant all over the world: the identity of the ambassador is inviolable.
But if I have no questions in connection with the Western concept of the "yoke", then the recognition of this concept by historians of the national trend is truly strange. It is even unclear how historians dare to claim that their interpretation in this case is patriotic. So, a group of nomads without bases, without replacements, with a constant shortage of arrows that need to be spent, beat and conquered our ancestors?! But if little Kozelsk resisted for so long, then it is obvious that the attacking forces were small. It was far from three hundred thousand, as liberal historians of the last century assumed. But it was from them that Chivilikhin borrowed this figure. The real value, as we have already said, is an order of magnitude smaller. I do not understand why patriotic people so adore the myth of the "yoke", invented, as V. Kargalov showed, in the XVI century. the Germans and the French, in order to win over Belarusians and Ukrainians to their side.
After all, it is absurd to talk about the Mongols' conquest of Russia, because the Mongols left Russia in 1249, and the question of the relationship between the Great Mongol Ulus and the Grand Duchy of Vladimir was raised later and was already resolved during the reign of Alexander Nevsky, when he, having first agreed with Batu, then befriended his son Sartak, and then and with the next khan, the murderer of Batu and Sartak, the Muslim Berke, he achieved a profitable alliance with the Golden Horde, which was located in the lower reaches of the Volga. Around the Barn, which lay between Volgograd and Astrakhan, near the village of Saltpetre, there were wide and, in general, uninhabited steppes, so that the Horde could not exert any political or military pressure on the Vladimir Principality. And they didn't.
Moreover. At this time, a civil war broke out in the Mongolian ulus itself. Batu held out only because Alexander Nevsky gave him his additional troops consisting of Russians and Alans, which helped Batu win a feud with the great Khan Guyuk, who died during the campaign. Batu's forces after a quarrel with relatives, according to authoritative sources, there were only 12 thousand Mongol soldiers divided between three large hordes, led by Batu's brothers. Four thousand Mongols were naturally not enough to control such a huge territory. It is absolutely impossible to wage war with such forces. Therefore, the Horde khans — Batu, Berke, Mengu-Timur — were primarily looking for reliable allies. But Russia also needed allies, because at that time (1245) at the Lyon Cathedral, Pope Innocent IV declared a crusade against the schismatics — the Greeks and Russians. Russians and German Crusaders in the Baltic States, the Germans, having captured the city, turned the local population — Latvians and Estonians — into serfs, and Russians, including infants, were hanged by the whole. The Germans waged a war of extermination against the Russians. Alexander Nevsky stopped the Swedish offensive in 1240, two years later he won the battle of Lake Peipsi, and this delayed the inevitable end. Alexander needed allies in order to resist the schismatic crusades, the consequences of which were well known by the example of the defeat of Byzantium, the campaign in Palestine, Antioch, all those atrocities that the crusaders committed in the southern territories captured in their first colonial war. And he managed to form an alliance with the Golden Horde. The benefits of this were enormous.
The small Baltic served as a convenient springboard for the entire Western European knighthood — armed detachments from France, Lorraine, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries poured into the Baltic states — the Livonian order, thus, could create any army in order to achieve victory over the schismatics. In 1269, after the Battle of Rakovor (1268), which the Novgorodians won by defeating a German detachment, the Germans prepared for a decisive blow and concentrated significant forces to strike Novgorod. And then the battle formations of the Tatar horsemen appeared in Novgorod, and, I quote, "the Germans, having made peace with all the will of Novgorod, zelo bo boyakhus and the name of Tatarsky." Pskov and Novgorod were saved. And indeed, the military equipment of the Tatars was much higher than the European one. True, they did not have heavy armor, but robes in several layers of felt protected them from arrows better than iron. In addition, the range of the arrow of the English archers, the best in Europe, was 450 meters, and the Mongols up to 700 meters, because they had a complex bow, glued, with a horn base. In addition, Mongolian archers have been specially trained for certain muscle groups since childhood. In general, the Vladimir Principality survived, undoubtedly, only thanks to the alliance that Alexander Nevsky concluded with the Golden Horde Khans.
It was difficult for him. Most of his contemporaries, as often happens, did not understand him. He didn't die of poison — it's fiction. He died in the same year as his ally Mindovg, who was going to throw the Germans into the Baltic Sea. Mindovg died, apparently, by the hand of a murderer or by the poison of a murderer in Lithuania, and Alexander, as is known, died in Gorodets, where German agents could not penetrate. He was dear to the Tatars as an ally and friend.
An interesting question arises: why did the Orthodox Church declare Alexander Nevsky a saint? Winning two battles is a fairly simple matter, many princes have won battles. Alexander Nevsky was not a very kind man — he dealt hard with his opponents — so this is not a reason to make him a saint and honor him to this day — right now a memorial service was served for Alexander Nevsky in memory of the Battle of the Neva. Obviously, the main thing was the correct political choice made by Alexander, which was of enormous importance. In his person, the Russians realized that they should look not for enemies, which are always enough, but for friends.
At the end of the XIII century the Golden Horde on the Lower Volga experienced a lot of severe upheavals: the Nogai temnik rebelled; there was a long civil war, and at that time Smolensk, to which the Mongols did not come close, in 1274 sent ambassadors with a request to take the city under his hand. The expression "under your arm" should not deceive the reader — that was the name of the defensive-offensive alliance in those days. The diplomatic etiquette of the XIII century assumed that the petitioner already thereby recognizes the priority of the one from whom he asks.
But at the beginning of the XIV century. there was a shock that cost the Horde its existence: Prince Uzbek converted to Islam, poisoned his predecessor Khan Tokhta and declared Islam the state religion of the Horde. All the subjects of the Jochi ulus — that is, the Golden Horde on the Volga, the Blue Horde in Tyumen, the White Horde on the Irtysh — had to convert to Islam. But the subjects protested, saying: "Why do we need the faith of the Arabs when we have our own faith — the Yasa of our great Genghis Khan?"
A civil war broke out, in which a fairly large population of the Volga region, already converted to Islam, supported the Uzbek. But there were no such claims against the Russians. No one was going to convert Russians to Islam. It also shows that here we have an ethnic symbiosis and an alliance of two major powers that need each other, and not the conquest of Russia by the Golden Horde. By this time in Russia, the princes — heirs of the already decayed and already decaying Ancient Rus were gradually pushed out of power by the metropolitans. Metropolitan Peter, who in 1300 from Volhynia was invited to Russia to rule in the capital city of Vladimir, was a very gentle, kind and educated man. This, of course, caused displeasure among his subordinates, who, according to the old Russian custom, began to write denunciations against him to Grand Duke Mikhail Yaroslavich of Tver.
He convened a special Council in order to find out whether Metropolitan Peter really takes bribes. And something unusual happened. In general, it is believed that only clergy have the right to vote at the Council. But the congregation gathered at this Cathedral. This, by the way, is a purely Mongolian custom — in the Horde, all believers had equal rights in this sense. And the congregation said: "Yes, we know our lord. He doesn't take any bribes. And in general, he lives very modestly. Where does he put the money?" And Metropolitan Peter really lived very modestly, the only thing he had, in modern terms, was a hobby — he loved to paint icons, which he did in his spare time. After all this, Metropolitan Peter, very offended, began to go to Moscow, and not to Tver. And he was very well received in Moscow. Gradually, the center of spiritual life was concentrated in Moscow.
Peter's heir, the Greek Theognost, was a very intelligent man. One day he went to the western possessions, already captured by Lithuania, for missionary purposes. He miraculously returned alive from this trip. It turned out that that part of the huge state of Ancient Russia had split into two parts — one that voluntarily submitted to the Tatars, and the other that was captured by Lithuania — Gediminas, Olgerd, Vitovt and Jagaila.
In general, the Lithuanians inflicted much more insults on the captured subordinates of Black Russia. White Russia, Volhynia (and the Poles captured Scarlet Russia — Galicia), and everywhere the Russians found themselves in a very depressed state. And the Tatars, who did not want to convert to Islam, found refuge in Russia. They mostly went to the city of Rostov — it was the most cultured city in Great Russia. Half of its population was pagan Merya. There was even a large temple in Rostov to Keremet, their god. And on the other side, in the center of the city, there was the church of St. Nicholas, to which the other half of the city — Russian Christians - went. There was a bazaar in the middle. Both Russians and Merya got along great with each other. And after a while, Merya quietly and calmly accepted Orthodoxy. By the way, in fact, the Russians adopted Orthodoxy rather sluggishly, too, remaining for a long time a dualist: they recognized both the Christian religion and the evil spirits, which they tried to appease with gifts.
Such a double-belief is still widespread, when people believe that there is no need to quarrel with either God or the devil. It's not good with God, but the devil can do something unpleasant. The priests who were sent to the villages were simple Russian people, and they perfectly understood — that is, the devil! And that's why they didn't punish the dual-believers in any way. Condemned, but not punished. Therefore, this duality became the religious basis of Ancient Russia. "Pure" Orthodoxy was preserved only in the Vladimir Metropolia. Metropolitan Alexey (Byakont), the heir of Feognost, ruled in it at that time, although most often he lived in Moscow. His godfather was none other than Ivan I Kalita. Under Ivan II, the son of Ivan Kalita, Alexey was the de facto ruler of the state.
An event happened here that deepened the friendship between the Horde and (now we can say), Moscow. In the Horde lived the widow of a terrible tyrant, a merciless conqueror and a cruel ruler of the Uzbek. Her name was Taidula. She was the first lady of the Muslim world. In all sources, she is referred to as an exceptionally kind, friendly and beautiful woman. She never did harm to anyone, protected people from the anger of her husband, and then from the anger of her son Janibek, who, in fairness, I must say, was, unlike his father, a kind and just man.
But after the death of the Uzbek, the most influential person in the Horde was Taydula. And suddenly she went blind. Apparently, she developed an ordinary trachoma. Since no shamans could help her, she turned to Metropolitan Alexei. He invited her to come to the border, which was near Tula (by the way, the later name of the city of Tula is from the name of Taidula). He took her to a church lit by wax candles, read prayers for a long time and smeared her eyes with water. That is, in fact, it was not water, but alcohol, which Moscow already knew how to make. It is known that trachoma is quite easily removed with alcohol. And Taidula saw the light. This incident strengthened the friendship between the Golden Horde and the Grand Duchy of Moscow. This friendship was extremely necessary, since Lithuania was pressing the Russian lands with terrible force and had already subdued Kiev — after the Battle of Irpen, and Chernigov, and Kursk. Then Vytautas captured Smolensk, Vyazma and Bryansk. That is, the Lithuanians had much more power than the Tatars, and brought Russia much more disasters. It is curious that this side of Russian history is hushed up by historians of the XIX century. The Western intelligentsia believed that it was somehow wrong to talk about the oppression of us by Europeans. And only Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov devoted his two best poems — "Boyar Orsha" and "Litvinka" — to the conflicts of Russians with Lithuanians, and not with Tatars, which corresponded to actual historical trends. The chronicles show that the raids of the Lithuanians, although on foot, were much more brutal than the raids of Tatar robbers, of whom there were many, as in any country at that time, but who were punished by the Tatar khans themselves.
And everything would be good for the Horde, if not for the extreme diversity of its population. Rulers are as dependent on their subjects as subjects are on the ruler. And when individual Tatar Bagadurs ("heroes") tried to strengthen themselves either at the mouth of the Kama River, among the Kama Bulgars, or in the forests of Mordovia, they gained independence for a while. And when the son of the "good" Janibek, the scoundrel Berdibek, killed his father and seized power — a lot of impostors appeared in the Horde, who were supported by separate tribes: the Nogai, the Bulgars, the remnants of the Cumans, the Mordvins — the "great jam" in the Horde began. But it is curious that the Russian princes, even during the "zamyatni", when the khans changed almost every year, continued to carry the "exit" (tribute) to the Horde — that is, the contribution for which the Horde maintained its army, which helped in the wars with the Germans, Lithuanians and all the enemies of the Grand Duchy of Vladimir. All this went on for quite a long time — until the local Horde dynasty, the local government, completely fell in the Horde. And then the Blue Horde stood out from the Horde, which was the “most wild", the most backward, as they say, “country”. They still retained their ancient valor and ancient militancy. Khizr Khan of the Blue Horde captured the Golden Horde, and in this feud, Taydula herself, the defender of the Russians, died. Then Mamai, who relied on the Black Sea steppes and the Polovtsians, not being a Genghisid, began to put the Genghisid princes on the throne and ruled on their behalf. He was a pronounced Westerner. He made an agreement with the Genoese, received money from them. And on them he maintained an army by no means Tatar, but consisting of Chechens, Circassians, Yasov and other nationalities of the North Caucasus. It was a mercenary army.
Mamai tried to establish relations with Prince Dmitry of Moscow, who was very young at the time, and Metropolitan Alexei ruled for him. But then Sergius of Radonezh intervened. He said that this union should not be allowed in any case, because the Genoese, Mamai's allies, asked to be given concessions in the North, near Veliky Ustyug. They wanted to buy furs there all the time. Sergius has always stood on the point of view that we do not need to have any contacts with the Latins, since they are a crafty, hypocritical, treacherous people, and moreover, they are not friends of Russia, but enemies. As a result, the Moscow Principality quarreled with Mamai and sided with the legitimate khan of the Blue and White Horde Tokhtamysh.
And that's when the event that marked the beginning of the creation of a new Russia took place — the Battle of Kulikovo. Interestingly, the princes — Novgorod, Tver, Suzdal and others — avoided participating in the campaign against Mamai, and the population of these principalities came to Dmitry as volunteers. Mamai's ally, in addition to Genoa, was also Lithuanian Rus, or the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Grand Duke Jagiello Olgerdovich brought 80 thousand Poles, Lithuanians and Russians to help Mamai. However, he was late, and, apparently, intentionally, by the time of the battle. But all the same, Mamai was on the verge of victory. The cavalry attack on the Russian chains turned out to be disastrous both for the advanced regiment commanded by voivode Melik and for the foot soldiers. And only the use of Tatar tactics of horse combat, the use of an ambush regiment that entered the battle at a critical moment when the Mamaev people lost their formation, led by Vladimir Andreevich the Brave and Bobrok Volynets, turned the tide of the battle in favor of the Russians. The losses in this massacre were colossal. There were a lot of wounded. They were put on carts and taken home. What did our dear western neighbors do? Lithuanians and Belarusians caught up with the carts and slaughtered the wounded.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand: how can you study Russian history and not see where your own and where the others are? This is either deliberate silence, or a complete inability to historical thinking.
After all, Dmitry Moskovsky's ally was Khan Tokhtamysh. When Mamai, who rode away from Kulikov Field, gathered a new army, it was Tokhtamysh with Siberian troops who came to the Black Sea steppes in 1381 and met Mamai, ready for battle. But Mamai's Tatar warriors, seeing the legitimate khan, got off their horses and handed them over to Tokhtamysh. They did not capture Mamai, but let him escape, because they were not traitors. Mamai rode off to his Genoese friends in Kafu (Feodosia), but the European merchants no longer needed him, and they killed him. So different were the concepts of honor and loyalty among the civilized Europeans of the Renaissance and the Eurasian nomads of the Great Steppe.
The author does not impose his assessment — the reader is free to accept any point of view.
AP: Excuse me, Lev Nikolaevich, but Dmitry Donskoy's ally, Tokhtamysh, ruined Moscow already in 1382…
L. G.: Yes, then there was a disaster that destroyed Tokhtamysh, but not Moscow. The Suzdal princes, who had lost the right to Vladimir, were opposed to Moscow. And their intrigues have always been carried out in one way: by writing denunciations. And they informed Tokhtamysh that Dmitry wanted to betray him and join Lithuania. Tokhtamysh was a very nice man — physically strong, courageous, brave, but, unfortunately, uneducated. He was not a diplomat — diplomats all died during the "great jam". And he believed, because in Siberia they do not lie: if their own come and say bad things about another, they must believe it!
Tokhtamysh made a raid on Moscow. As a matter of fact, he could not take Moscow in any way. He crossed the Oka, approached Moscow, while all the princes and boyars went to their dachas and lived there quietly. Moscow was fortified with stone walls. It was impossible to take it — the Tatars did not have any siege guns, they moved at a trot with one cavalry. And then the absence of professional military and professional rulers affected. The masses in Moscow, as always in Russia, decided to have a drink. They began to smash the boyars' cellars, get honey and beer from there, so that during the siege almost the entire Moscow population was drunk. Muscovites went to the fortress walls and extremely insulted the Tatars with obscene behavior — they showed them their genitals. The Tatars were terribly outraged by this. And when everything was drunk in Moscow, the Muscovites decided that it was not worth fighting anymore, let the Tatars agree on everything and leave. And they opened the gates without even putting a guard in front of them. The ambassadors were the first to pass, followed by the entire Tatar army, and twenty thousand corpses lay on the streets of the suddenly sobered city. This was actually the case — all this is described in the chronicles.
They say Tokhtamysh did a very obscene act. But he did not make it so much as the Suzdal princes Vasily Kirdyapa and Semyon Dmitrievich. They caused a massacre with their denunciation. During the time that the Tatars were standing near Moscow, the news of this spread throughout the country. Boyars, voivodes, relatives of the prince gathered their squads and moved to Moscow. The Tatars quickly fled. After that, Tokhtamysh "forgave" Dmitry and decided that he had made complete peace with them. And everything would have gone Tokhtamysh if Timur hadn't attacked him.
Timur walked from Samarkand to the Volga, taking advantage of the spring time. The fact is that the steppe is completely dry in summer and it is impossible to lead horses through it. But when the snow melts, grass grows. In the south, the snow melts, of course, earlier than in the middle and in the north. Therefore, every time Timur stopped his army, fed the horses on fresh grass and made the next transition by the time the grass grew ahead. Thus, he made a dizzying hike, which no one could have done before him. The Tatars heroically resisted. And they demanded, of course, help from Muscovites. Prince Dmitry Donskoy had already died by that time, and his son Vasily seemed to have led the Moscow army, but he had no desire to protect the Tatars. He led them slowly along the Kama, brought Them to the Ik River flowing into the Kama, and when he learned that the Tatars, pressed against the full-flowing Kama, almost all died heroically, he ferried the army back and returned to Moscow without losses. But in fact, he lost a lot, because he himself got lost in the steppe, got into the Lithuanian possessions, was captured by Vitovt and had to buy freedom by marrying Sofya Vitovtovna, who subsequently caused a lot of harm to Russia.
The decisive event in the history of the Golden Horde and the Grand Duchy of Moscow was Timur's second expedition through the Caucasus and the battle on the Terek River. Tokhtamysh mobilized all the Tatars subordinate to him — that is, he organized a militia like Genghisovsky. But its quality was far from what it was under Genghis Khan. Despite the fact that they were excellent horsemen, archers, they clearly lacked sacrifice. In a special term, they were not capable of overstrain. And Timur had a regular army made up of brave Gulyams who fought for money, had military discipline and excellent training. As always, the army was stronger than the militia. Timur won the battle. And, having crossed the Terek, he passed along the Volga, destroying all Tatar cities. But Timur did not go further, as the Tatars rebelled in his rear, the Circassians rebelled in the Kuban, Dagestan rebelled. Timur hurriedly had to return back through the Derbent Passage, after which he went back to his possessions in the beautiful city of Samarkand, leaving his former officers from among the Volga Tatars, Murza Yedigei and Tsarevich Temir-Kutluk. At this time, Vytautas decided to launch an offensive to the East and capture all of Russia. He agreed with Tokhtamysh, who had fled to him — there was nowhere else to run — that he would restore Tokhtamysh to the throne of the Golden Horde, and the Tatars would cede Russian lands to Lithuania for this. A huge army was created from Lithuanian heroes, Polish nobles, German knights and, of course, Belarusians, who were also mobilized.
Temir-Kutluk, with the help of Edigei, completely defeated the best army in Europe in 1399.
And at that time, an event happened that should not be overlooked. Vytautas fled, and was accompanied by a certain Cossack Mamai (a descendant of the deceased, it seems, his grandson). They were walking through some forests belonging to Mamai, and he got lost in them. They wandered for three days, and then Vytautas, who was a very intelligent man, said: "Enough is enough. I will give you the princely title, the Glinu tract and the city of Glinsk. Take him out!" And Mamai immediately took him out. The descendant of this Cossack Mamai (and, consequently, Mamai himself) on the female line was Ivan the Terrible. His mother, Elena Vasilyevna Glinskaya, came from this family. Consequently, when Grozny exterminated the boyars — the descendants of the victors on the Kulikovo Field — he acted logically as a descendant of Mamai. He was avenging the humiliation of his ancestor. Of course, he didn't know about it. But that's the interest! This is how the worldview works at the level of the logic of events!
Thus, it can be said that the Horde has suddenly risen. But Temir-Kutluk died suddenly. The sources say very vaguely that he showed self-will, that is, he began to take care of his people, and not serve Timur. Sometime later, after Timur's death, Temir's brother Kutluk Shadibek became khan in the Horde. Vytautas decided to attack Moscow. This happened in 1406. He reached Tula. But Shadibek came with a Tatar army, and Vytautas immediately retreated, taught by recent experience. Now we can ask: so who helped Moscow to resist the brutal pressure from the south, from the Muslim world, from Timur, and from the west, from Vytautas and Yagaila? Who should be closer to us: Jagailo, whose soldiers were slaughtering Russian wounded after the Battle of Kulikovo, or Shadibek, who came to the rescue at the right time? It seems to me that this issue, in any case, requires revision. The events I mentioned should not be overlooked. And in ordinary textbooks of the XIX century of the liberal direction, they are omitted. In order to learn about them, you need to read detailed essays like Solovyov's "History", which does not interpret in any way, but at least mentions these facts.
And now we can pose a problem: how did the small Moscow principality, having such representatives, among whom were not only the diligent owner Ivan Kalita, but also the unscrupulous Yuri Danilovich, the characterless, gentle Ivan Ivanovich Krasny, quite ordinary as a person Dmitry Donskoy, turn into that Great Russia, in the legacy of which we are with, and you live?
AP: Really, and how?
L. G.: Who has seen, knows today about such ethnic groups as Muroma, Zavolotskaya chud? But it is well known that there was no extermination of these tribes, quite numerous. Russians simply mingled with the newcomers from Suzdal and Tver Slavs, they learned Russian and became part of the Russians. We see that the Great Russians, as they were called, or the Russians, as they are called now, are an ethnos formed of three components: Slavs, Finns and Tatars, and those a mixture of Turks and Mongols. Pagan Tatars, who did not want to convert to Islam and fled to Russia in large numbers, settled in the Ryazan Principality, and in Moscow, and, most of all, in Rostov the Great, where, as I have already said, there was a mixed population. They were eager to marry Russian hawthorns. Their Tatar beauties were baptized to marry Russian boyars. A new mixed ethnic group was formed, which had never existed before. Here the beginning of ethnogenesis is the transition from the incubation period of the ascent phase to its explicit period. As a result, a very strong ethnic formation has turned out, in which there has never been hostility on national grounds.
They may say: how is this so? Are we, the descendants of the Slavs, who have always defeated everyone, the heirs of some Tatars? But we began to win victories from the moment we mixed. However, if you think about it, it turns out that all the European ethnic groups known to us, and Asian ones too, arose in the same way. Whose descendants are English? First, we must take into account the Romanized Celts, who were almost all killed, but their women bore children to the victors. From the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Those, in turn, were defeated by the Normans, whose descendants settled in Northumberland until the XX century. Norse was spoken; and by the Danes who settled in the south until they were driven out by Edward the Confessor; after that the Normans from Northern France and the Plantagenets from Anjou and Poitou arrived.
All these elements blended into a single whole, and it turned out that this system is so strong that the three million English kingdom, defeated the 18 million French during the Hundred Years' War. It ended, however, in defeat for them, but after more than a hundred years of victories. Obviously, the mixture is the initial condition during the passion push, without which a new ethnic group cannot arise. But as soon as an ethnos has emerged, formed and formalized, the entire passionate part of it can mix without harm and even with benefit for itself, and the main part, having shed excess energy, begins to crystallize in any definite forms. This happens in the acmatic phase and, most importantly, in the fracture phase. We do know that the Northerners, descendants of the ancient Savirs, existed until the XVII century. Even in the Time of Troubles, they opposed Moscow and Vasily Shuisky, supporting Bolotnikov, Prince Shakhovsky and others.
Here, by the way, is another example of a historical myth: "The Time of Troubles is a peasant war." But the main force of Bolotnikov's army consisted of three Ryazan border regiments, headed by Colonel Prokopy Lyapunov. And vice versa: Shuisky was supported, that is, Moscow was defended, datochnye people — mobilized peasants. Thus, what we are trying to portray as a peasant war does not correspond to these well-known facts published in historical literature.
The same situation is with the policy of Alexander Nevsky. The fact that Alexander submitted to the Horde is regarded as a betrayal of the Christian world. Earlier it was written about: the Polish scientist Uminsky, the German Catholic historian Amman, recently published a new series of Western works in which Alexander Nevsky is condemned. When they ask my attitude to this, I say: "Of course, they condemn — they wanted to fight with Russian hands against the Tatars, and then capture the bloodless Russia without any costs. Of course, they believe that Alexander Nevsky, who disrupted this colonial operation for them, did not do well.
But for Russia, Alexander is a hero, a saint and the founder of the new Russian integrity that still exists." "But he submitted to the Tatars," they say. I repeat: at that time, submission corresponded to diplomatic etiquette. Similarly, Bogdan Khmelnitsky submitted to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. But he remained the hetman of Ukraine with full self-government and with all privileges. However, Ukrainians now began to collect more taxes than the Poles collected. But instead of 20 thousand Cossacks that were recorded in the register — that is, freed from all serfdom — 60 thousand. But why then in Ukraine Hetman Vygovsky, a nobleman of Russian origin, Yuri Khmelnitsky, the son of Bogdan, Doroshenko — that is, almost the entire Cossack elite — sought to return from Polish rule, and the bulk of the Cossacks in the Pereslavl Rada declared: "We are begging for an Eastern, Orthodox tsar"?
Very simple. In Western countries, non-Catholics did not have civil rights and opportunities to make a career. And in Russia, the Orthodox were co-religionists, their own. And this is the second reason for the rise of Moscow. We have an institution that is not related to ancestral privileges, but solely on the principle of personal abilities. Anyone could become a patriarch or metropolitan, if they were capable of it. This primarily applies to the church hierarchy of the Moscow Metropolia. By the XV century, the church organization transformed the Moscow Principality from feudal to theocratic. And only in the XVI century, after Ivan the Terrible's attempt to exterminate all the most valuable, the most intelligent, the most talented that was in Russia, for which he paid with two lost wars — the Livonian and Crimean, the situation changed. But everything became the same after the expulsion of the Poles and the return of Fyodor Nikitovich Romanov, in Filaret's monasticism, to power.
The rest is so well known that I don't want to repeat it. But it should be noted that the ease of conquering Siberia was due to the fact that, unlike the Anglo—Saxons, French and Germans, Russians saw people as equals in Siberia, and if they obey, they automatically become equal members of the community, that is, the state. Tatars, Siberians received the right, as well as Ukrainians, to occupy any position, up to the highest. Bezborodko, who did not know Russian, but spoke either Latin, French, or Ukrainian, was a chancellor — that is, the ruler of the empire! Alexey Razumovsky was the married husband of Tsarina Elizabeth. But their marriage was morganatic — their children had no right to the throne. Kirill Razumovsky was the hetman of all Ukraine. Georgia asked to be accepted into the Russian Empire — that is, it wanted to submit to Russia. For a long time, the first Romanovs — Mikhail, Alexey, even Peter — did not want to accept Georgia, to take on such a burden.
Only crazy Pavel allowed himself to be persuaded by George XIII and included Georgia in the Russian Empire. The result was as follows: in 1800 there were 800 thousand Georgians, in 1900 there were 4 million. The fact is that Caucasian mountaineers, Turks and Persians constantly raided Georgia, took away young people, castrated young men and used them for various clerical work, and girls were taken to harems. And when the Russian troops defended Georgia from the mountaineers, they gained a lot from this. In the same way, the Russians saved the Armenians from Persian oppression and the Turkish yoke. The Kazakhs also appealed to the government of Anna Ioannovna so that she would accept their Small Horde — the most active and militant — into Russia. Their request was granted. The only thing they were restricted in was that they were forbidden to steal horses from the Russians. They were imprisoned for this and exiled to Yakutia, where they also began to rob the Yakuts (Korolenko wrote very well about this).
Where did the Buryats come from? When Mongolia in the XVII century found itself in a hopeless situation — the Kalmyks tormented it from the west, the Chinese from the south, they decided that they could not continue to hold on as an independent state. Some of them spoke out in favor of recognizing the power of the Yellow Khan, that is, the Manchu Emperor and the emperor of all China, and the other part decided to speak for the White Khan, for the Russian tsar. They migrated over the mountains, were accepted, and were given the rights of Cossacks — that is, the right not to pay taxes, but to guard the border. This suited them perfectly.
In Siberia, the governor had all the rights over the life and death of his subordinates. He could hang any robber he caught on the first birch tree he came across. But the foreigners included in the yasach lists could be executed only with the permission of Moscow. And Moscow did not give permission for the execution of foreigners. And even when one desperate Buryat converted to Buddhism and decided to raise the Buryats to fight the Russians, he was caught, but Moscow did not give permission for execution.
So he went unpunished. Such an attitude towards foreigners has certainly strengthened Russia. I'm not talking about Siberian furs, which were valued at that time as currency: Siberians brought one sable coat a year — it was called yasak. But when it was necessary to fight with Poland, the Cossacks, most of whom were descendants of baptized Polovtsians, helped not to lose this war. When Charles XII, who had won many victories, reached Poltava, he was forced to take the fight, because his intelligence data informed him that Ayuka Khan with the Kalmyk army was going to fight against him. He accepted the fight, which he lost, in order not to deal with the Kalmyks. But when the war dragged on, the government began to send Kalmyk, Bashkir and Tatar horsemen across the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia — it was light cavalry. Light in the literal sense of the word — the riders were dressed in fur coats, on small horses. Ordinary heavy cavalry would have fallen through the ice. Several such campaigns brought peace with Sweden to a large extent, along which the entire Baltic States and the city of Vyborg departed from Russia. It is surprising that now Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians who want to restore the past do not understand that if the past is restored, then we must transfer the Baltic States to the Swedes, the true owners of these lands. And we didn't even fight with the Balts — what can we talk about?!
In order to understand, you need to take the story against a broad background. It is easier to shoot a rifle into a house than into a nickel that is nailed on the wall of the house. Only then can we get the right results when we have a sufficiently abundant and wide material. This technique, which at one time was used in Western Europe, has given way to a narrow specialization in our time. And narrow specialization does not make it possible to draw a correct and convincing conclusion — since there is no comparison against a broad background and we cannot know whether this coincidence is accidental or natural. In the book "Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth" I showed that ethnogenesis is a law of nature, and not the accidents of social development. But in order to discover this natural regularity, we must study actual history as the science of events in their connection and sequence.
A. P.: Lev Nikolaevich, it is absolutely impossible for a mere mortal to get this book of yours. They’re not available. Therefore, answer this, I am convinced, a question of interest to many. Now a lot of people, and very loudly, are talking about the near end of the Russians. What does the theory of ethnogenesis tell us about this?
L. G.: The theory of ethnogenesis tells us that every ethnos that develops independently and does not receive blows from the outside goes through a number of certain phases. At first, the rise of passionarity (I have just told you about this period of the development of the Russian ethnos), it lasted until the XVI century. In the XVI century. there was a passionate overheating. This gave terrible consequences: the Oprichnina, the Time of Troubles, the Schism, the Razin uprising, which was by no means a peasant uprising, but an uprising of borderline half-caste robbers, Streltsy riots; after all this, passionarity somewhat subsided, reached the norm: XVIII century. — optimal time in the sense of passionarity. Of course, there was nothing particularly good in the XVIII century: illiterate landowners who chased hares and foxes, or youngsters who went to Paris and returned from there puffed-up dandies and rather stupid lovers of everything Western. But passionarity, which is a prerequisite for creativity, gave us the opportunity to defeat even Napoleon, whose army was three times superior to the Russian one. "And all of Europe was there, and whose star led it!" wrote Pushkin. This war has brought severe damage to the level of passionarity of our ethnic group. The best part of Russian people served in the army as officers or soldiers at that time. And after the Battle of Leipzig, after the capture of Paris in 1814, Russia already had a significantly weakened army — the heroes had died. After that, painful phenomena began: on the one hand, the development of sectarianism among the people, on the other hand, in the upper strata of society, the development of Westernist trends, Freemasonry, there was German dominance in science, because Catherine's government was already a Westernist government, and Lomonosov had to leave. Gradually, but steadily, the number of passionaries decreased. It is best written about this in "Woe from Wit": Sofia prefers a passionate Chatsky, a clever, strong-willed, lively person, a silent man who will quietly serve and provide for her family. The ideal has changed. By ideal, I mean a distant forecast. They began to believe that the best thing was a philistine existence: to reach Chekhov's heroes. Naturally, Russia weakened, and even lost a lot during the German war. Therefore, it turned out that Western influences, that A. Toynbee called occidentalization (from the English occidentally — "in the Western manner"), they developed very much, which played the most fatal role in our path.
AP: And yet, Lev Nikolaevich, if I understand your theory correctly in general terms, it follows from it: all the current troubles of our country are only a short—term episode, after which we are waiting for the time of the "golden autumn" — a calm and long "dying" for several centuries.
LG: Today's troubles are an inevitable episode. We are at the end of the fracture phase (if you want, in menopause), and this is an age—related disease. (This essay was probably written in 1990 or so). Do we have a chance to survive it? Yes, we have. And the fact that in connection with perestroika there is a complete change in the imperatives of behavior — this can benefit the cause and help us get out of the crisis. But perestroika itself is only a chance for salvation. First of all, we must realize the traditional boundaries — temporal and spatial — of our ethnic community, clearly understand where our own and where the others' are. Otherwise, we cannot hope to preserve the ethno-social integrity that our ancestors created under the grand dukes and tsars of Moscow, under the Petersburg emperors. If we manage to preserve this integrity, we will be able to restore the tradition of tolerant, respectful relations to the forms of life of the peoples close to us — all these peoples will remain within this integrity and will live well and peacefully.
However, it is possible that with the collapse, an external invasion — military or economic, when our lifestyle, behavior patterns are destroyed, our superethnic orientation will change — we will suffer the fate of the Arab Caliphate. There, broad interethnic contacts took place at a superethnic level in all areas of life: in the army, in the bazaar and in the harem, even in mosques — Sunnis, Shiites, Kharijites, and around them Christians, fire worshippers, Jews, pagans of all shades and dualistic Sarmatians. An overabundance of ethnic diversity is as dangerous as its absence: the optimal measure within a superethnos within the boundaries of a landscape region, in our case coinciding with the borders of our state.
I would like to think that the fate of the Arab Caliphate will pass our Fatherland. However, this is possible only if we do not succumb to the temptations we have already experienced and are complacent both in talking about our national greatness and in self-flagellation about our "backwardness" from Europe.
What is "backwardness"? After all, it's just an age difference. And indeed, the impetus that led to the birth of the Western European ("Christian") world occurred in the VIII century A.D. Thanks to this "backwardness", thanks to the excessive forces of ethnic youth, Western Europeans eventually defeated Eastern Orthodoxy in 1204, when Constantinople was barbarously robbed. Since our "Russian" passionate impulse took place in the XIII century, then in relation to Europe we are really younger by as much as 500 years, and this is quite an objective thing. Like any natural given, our youth, of course, cannot and should not be a reason for masochism, because the conscious desire for our old age (and hence death) is nonsense.
.