Empires Apart (10 page)

Novgorod withstood the Mongol siege, and as a consequence was able to maintain a degree of the early Rus enlightenment through the dark centuries of Mongol rule. In the long run that may not have helped the city. When Mongol rule finally ended Ivan the Terrible inflicted his own terror on the still independently minded citizens.

Having failed to take Novgorod, the Mongols casually mopped up the remaining Rus opposition over the next two years. At the city of Kozelsk they were taken by surprise when the besieged garrison counter-attacked. Their response was to sack the city with a brutality that even they had not known before.

In 1240 Kiev fell. The Mongols realised that the city was a treasure worth preserving and sent envoys to demand submission. The governor had the envoys killed, and the Mongols wreaked a terrible revenge. The cathedral of St Sophia was the only building they left standing in the whole city. They showed their bizarre sense of honour among the carnage by sparing the life of the governor, who had demonstrated his bravery by executing their envoys.

The Mongols ruled Russia for 250 years, but it is difficult to find anything positive to say about any stretch of their reign. They ended the squabbling of warring princes and imposed central control, but other than that they contributed virtually nothing, destroying what went before without creating what came after. They left a tradition of absolutism, a resigned acceptance of arbitrary authority, an abiding fear of invasion and a distrust of all things foreign. The areas of greatest Mongol influence can be seen in the Russian language – with Mongol or Tartar roots found on the one hand in words relating to whips, chains and slavery and on the other in words like treasury, customs duty and money. What they did not leave was any contribution to culture: no magnificent buildings, no art, no music. They had no significant impact on religion. They produced no heroic kings or mythical sagas. During the Mongol period economic development virtually stagnated. Histories of Russia can leap from 1223, when the Mongols arrived, to 1480, when Ivan III formally ended Muscovy's subjection to the Golden Horde. In between lay the Russian Dark Ages, during which the power of the Mongols slowly disintegrated. They were always more interested in extracting tribute than in administering their empire, and over time the Russian nobility assumed more and more of the effective authority. In particular the dukes of Muscovy came to exercise the power that the Mongols in their distant capital of Sarai lacked the desire or ability to exercise themselves. The cultural developments of the period, like the construction of the Kremlin, started 130 years after the Mongol invasion, and a century later the construction of the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow, owed everything to the re-empowering of the Russian nobility and virtually nothing to their Mongol overlords.

On 8 September 1380 there occurred what has often been described as the most important event in the history of medieval Russia. Indeed, in a survey of schoolchildren in one of the former Soviet Asian republics held in the year 2000 it was cited as the most important event in the previous millennium. The battle of Kulikovo saw Russia throw off the Mongol yoke and unite around the banner of Muscovy. About 200,000 died and the Russian dead, it is said, took seven days to bury.
The Muscovite grand duke Dmitri Donskoy whose military prowess determined the course of the battle is one of Russia's most celebrated heroes; the communists named a Typhoon-class nuclear submarine after him. Kulikovo is Yorktown and Gettysburg combined: it both liberated and defined a nation.

If world history is determined in battle, Kulikovo must rank alongside Châlons and the Mongols' earlier defeat at Ayn Jalut outside Nazareth. At Châlons Attila was stopped in his tracks, saving western European civilisation from being consumed by a barbaric east. At Ayn Julut the Mongol general Kitbogha was killed, and the Mongols never again threatened Islamic civilisation. At Kulikovo the forces of Khan Mamai were destroyed, allowing Russian (and by implication European) civilisation to throw off the chains of Asiatic slavery.

There are, however, some important differences between the three battles. The details of the fighting are unimportant, although it is worth noting that Donskoy's victory was largely because the Mongols' Lithuanian allies failed to turn up. It was also helped by internecine conflict within the Mongol Golden Horde; Sarai had fourteen different khans in the space of twenty years.

Châlons changed history because after the battle Attila went back home and was never heard of again. The outcome at Ayn Jalut was if anything even more decisive. After Kulikovo, however, although Mamai, the Mongol leader, went home, he returned with a vengeance the next year, driving all before him and attacking Moscow. As late as 1451, seventy years after Kulikovo, Mongol armies still raided up to the walls of Moscow. In fact it was to be a century after Donskoy's supposedly epic victory before Russia threw off the Mongol yoke, and then not because of a glorious battle but because the Turkic leader Tamurlane turned all eyes elsewhere and Muscovy was able to creep out of the Mongol tent.

The significance of Kulikovo lies not in the historical reality but in today's perceptions. Kulikovo is the crucible in which modern Russia was born, a furnace of fire and steel that reflects the character of the nation. Donskoy is to Russians in many ways the equivalent of Thanksgiving to
Americans. The Pilgrim Fathers are held up as the first religious refugees fleeing to a promised land, which was destined to be built in their image; Kulikovo is held up as the symbol of Holy Russia, surrounded by enemies and surviving only through its own strength and inspired leadership. Historically both stories are largely fiction. The Pilgrim Fathers were not the first Protestant refugees in the New World (French Huguenots had beaten them to it) and America was taken not with the piety of the Pilgrims but by sheer brute force. The bullet, not the bible, was the true symbol of the new nation across the Atlantic, just as intrigue rather than the blood of Kulikovo was the symbol of the nation forming between the Urals and the Baltic. When Russia at last broke free of its Asian overlords it was less thanks to the valour of Dmitri Donskoy than it was to the diplomatic manoeuvring of leaders such as Ivan I, revealingly known to history as Ivan Moneybags.

It was not until the reign of Ivan III, Ivan the Great, that Muscovite Russia was finally established as a truly independent power. Not only did he end formal subservience to the Mongols, but he also defeated the other two forces that could have smothered the infant state: the Lithuanians and the Khazars. Ivan III also started the tradition of deporting troublesome groups, which was to become such a feature of both Russian and American history. After capturing Novgorod and incorporating it into Muscovy he dispossessed most of the landowners and deported them to the east.

At exactly the same time another corner of Europe was also throwing off the shackles of its Islamic conquerors. But if in Russia the shackles were iron and rusted away, in Spain the shackles were gold and were torn asunder. In Iberia the infidels who had brought culture, tolerance and harmony were replaced by a regime bringing aggression, the Inquisition and Christopher Columbus. In Russia the infidels were replaced by something just as bad, indeed worse: the pure evil of Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible.

The one tsar most westerners have heard of lived nearly half a millennium ago. Ivan the Terrible ruled for half a century from 1533 to 1584. While
the Spanish were destroying the great empires of the Incas and Aztecs, Ivan IV turned a middle-ranking eastern European duchy into the Russia still recognisable today. If any one man can truly be called the father of Russia it is Ivan IV. His greatness is undeniable. Unfortunately for those who lived under him, he was also quite clearly mad.

It has been argued that Ivan's mental problems had roots in genetic and physical illness. His father, although himself the son of Ivan the Great, was a simpleton, his brother a deaf-mute, and most of his legitimate children died in infancy. Almost certainly Ivan the Terrible suffered from encephalitis, a disease with schizophrenia-like symptoms: aggressive behaviour, marked character change and rapid mood swings. On the other hand, for those who blame mental illness on nurture rather than nature Ivan the Terrible is a classic case study. Rarely can a child's upbringing have foreshadowed so clearly the mania to come. His father died when Ivan was three, leaving the throne to Ivan and effective power to his mother, a foreigner with little love for Russia but greater love for various Russian men. His uncle Yuri challenged Ivan's right to the throne and was thrown into a dungeon to starve. Ivan's mother was poisoned five years later, and within a week the eight year old is said to have arranged for her lover to be arrested and beaten to death. After his mother's murder Ivan escaped from the violent intrigues of the court into such hobbies as pulling the wings off birds and poking sticks in their eyes. With his deafmute brother, another Yuri, he wandered around his own palace often hungry and dressed in rags. From this he graduated to roaming the streets with a gang of friends, attacking passers-by. His speciality was inventing ever more ingenious ways of murdering young women, always raping them first. He retained his interest in animals, spending hours throwing cats and dogs from the castle walls.

Power was exercised by ever-changing alliances of noble families. Rivalry between the Shuisky and the Belsky families escalated, and murders and beatings became common even inside the palace. When Ivan was nine the Shuiskys raided the palace, rounding up his confidants. They had the loyal Fyodor Mishurin skinned alive and left on display in
a Moscow square. Finally at the age of thirteen, over Christmas in 1543, Ivan asserted himself. He ordered the arrest of Prince Andrew Shuisky and set the tone for his reign by having the prince thrown to a pack of ravenous hunting dogs.

In 1547 Ivan was finally crowned Tsar of all the Russians, the first Muscovy grand duke to assume this title. He went about choosing a wife in a typically forthright manner: he held a beauty parade and chose Anastasia Romanovna. Many boyars resented the match because Anastasia's Romanov family was untitled, although not to remain that way for long. Surprisingly the marriage seems to have been a happy one. Ivan called Anastasia his
‘little heifer',
and she bore him six children of whom only two survived infancy. She had a positive influence on him and they apparently enjoyed thirteen years of wedded bliss. During that period Ivan introduced government reforms, reducing the power of the boyars and thus the opportunities for corruption. He also reformed the Church and the army and set out on the first steps to creating a Russian empire. His forces conquered the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan and the Baltic cities of Narva and Polotsk. The first English traders started to appear in Russian markets.

The birth of Russian imperialism was one of Ivan the Terrible's most lasting contributions to history. The people of Muscovy and its predecessor states had been largely Russian or Russified Finns. For the first time Ivan turned their eyes outwards, and the ‘Russia' he left behind had significant non-Russian populations. The way those populations were integrated, or largely not integrated, into the Russian state had ramifications right down to the present day.

In 1553 one of the key events of the reign occurred. Ivan collapsed with what his courtiers imagined was a fatal fever. He demanded that the boyars swear an oath of allegiance to his baby son Dmitri, but most refused. Ivan recovered, but never forgave what he regarded as treachery.

When Anastasia died seven years later Ivan relapsed violently into the ways of his youth. He launched an attack on the German knights to the west, and lost. In a fury he launched a reign of terror on his own
people. Like Stalin centuries later he saw conspiracies on all sides. Almost certainly Anastasia died of natural causes, but Ivan was convinced the boyars had poisoned her and he had many tortured and executed. The boyars were demonised in his mind, just as the kulaks would be later in the mind of Joseph Stalin.

Ivan's behaviour became erratic in the extreme, his moods swinging from violence to repentance, blasphemy to prolonged prayer. Around Christmas 1564 he suddenly announced his intention to abdicate and left Moscow. The populace called for his return, which he eventually agreed to, but only after making clear that he expected absolute power. The tool he used to exercise this power was the oprichniki, the forerunner of secret police everywhere; dressed in black and riding black horses, they created a climate of terror across the empire. Ivan founded a pseudo-monastic order with himself as the ‘abbot' and the oprichniki as ‘monks', and performed black masses that were followed by orgies and torture. He organised rituals in which men's ribs were torn out with red-hot tongs. Afterwards the tsar collapsed prostate on the altar, before rising to preach wild sermons of repentance to the drunken oprichniki. Sadism was routine. Sir Jerome Horsey, Elizabeth I's ambassador to Ivan's court, described how one prince who had displeased the tsar
‘was drawn upon a long sharp-made stake, which entered the lower part of his body and came out of his neck; upon which he languished a horrible pain for fifteen hours alive, and spoke to his mother, brought to behold that woeful sight. And she was given to 100 gunners, who defiled her to death, and the Emperor's hungry hounds devoured her flesh and bones.'
Ivan decided that the citizens of Novgorod were insufficiently respectful, and proceeded to sack the city and massacre its citizens in an orgy of torture, rape and burning. The Volkhov river reportedly burst its banks because of the number of corpses, as men, women and children were tied to sleighs and plunged into the icy waters. The city's archbishop was sewn into a bearskin and then hunted to death by a pack of hounds.

Like Stalin, Ivan frequently turned on his closest advisors: his treasurer was boiled alive and a councillor was strung up, while the oprichniki took turns hacking pieces off his body.