Putin

Apart from the words for money and customs control, the Mongols left little trace in Russia’s culture or language, but they changed its history and mentality. The force of the Mongol invasion shifted the center of Slav civilization from south to north. Eventually Moscow, until those times a tiny settlement of no importance whatsoever on the bend of a muddy river, emerged as the new power center under the various Ivans of the sixteenth century, the fourth of whom, known as the Terrible, was also the first to assume the title of tsar. The south languished over the centuries to such an extent that when Catherine the Great entered on her grand tour of her newly acquired lands in Ukraine and Crimea in the late eighteenth century she was simply shocked by Kiev, calling it “abominable.”

Moscow and Muscovite Russia were the historical success stories, of that there can be no doubt. The southern lands were called ukrainia, meaning “borderlands.” The Mongol domination taught Russia the lesson that Putin summed up laconically as “the weak get beaten.” The state must be strong and centralized; top-down one-man rule was the most effective model. The state alone could provide security and order. The state was a fortress, a kremlin, to which people fled in time of attack. And if attack came once, it could come again. From any direction, any nation—humanistic France, scientific Germany. A case could be made that after the Mongol invasion and rule all Russian politics were post-traumatic.

The Mongols left the Russians with a culture of invasion. The driving force of Russian civilization became the avoidance of and preparation for the next invasion. This has induced suspicion and conservatism, xenophobia, paranoia, and an imperialism that seeks to buffer the heartland with as much territory as possible.

In an invasion-minded culture special attention is paid to the enemy within, the traitors who would open the gates to the enemy. The free city-states like Novgorod that resisted Moscow’s centralizing will were subjected to intense, focused cruelty. Ivan the Terrible created the oprichniki: black-clad horsemen answerable only to the tsar, their symbols the dog’s head that sniffs out treason and the broom that sweeps it away. They were the world’s first secret police, the archetype and granddaddy of them all, including the KGB that Vladimir Putin so longed to join in his youth.

* * *

Russia became imperialistic as a defense against invasion, not that any nation worried overmuch about justifying its land grabs back then. Harried by Swedes, Lithuanians, and Poles from the north and west, steppe tribes and Turks from the south and east, Russians considered every acre of land won not only possession but protection. Russia became a nation-state and an empire at the same time; imperialism was thus fused with its very sense of identity.

Inevitably, there would be some people who saw no place for themselves in the new Russia forming around Moscow. Some of the more adventurous sorts joined the expeditions to the east, Siberia, where the natives were few and far between and easy to subdue. But most of the freebooters and free spirits who rejected Kremlin rule and, later, the imposition of serfdom headed south to the wide-open spaces of the steppe, the grasslands they called the “wild fields.” The weather was better, the black earth richer, and Moscow’s arm could not yet reach that far. People lived a life something like that of the early Romans, every man a farmer and a soldier. They won the respect of the fierce Turkic-speaking nomadic tribes they encountered in battle, who called these transplanted northerners “free warriors,” Kazaks (Cossacks), a name they took on for themselves. A heterogeneous bunch, their numbers included “escaped serfs, indebted nobles, defrocked priests, pioneers, fortune-hunters, fugitives of various sorts.”

By the mid-1500s, the time of Ivan the Terrible, Mongols were no longer the problem. Poland was the problem. Having combined with the then good-sized Lithuania to form a commonwealth that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Poland routinely trounced Russia and put Moscow to the torch on more than one occasion.

Poland was part of the Catholic West, even calling itself antemurale Christianitatis, the outer wall of Christendom, protecting Europe from savages like Mongols and Russians. Poland went through the developmental stages of European civilization, participating vigorously in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The Mongol invasion not only had cut Russia in two, north and south, but had cut it off from Europe and its great fugue of development. Leonardo da Vinci had lived and died before Ivan the Terrible was even born.

Polish domination over much of Ukraine had deleterious effects. The Ukrainian elite adopted “the faith, language and manners of the ruling Poles,” Ukrainian becoming the “language of serfs and servants.”