Russia under the Old regime

54

disobedience was invariably punished in a most brutal fashion.* The Mongol khan became the country's first undisputed personal sovereign. In post-1240 Russian documents he is customarily referred to as the tsar or Caesar (tsezar'), titles previously reserved for the Emperor of Byzantium. No prince could assume authority without first obtaining from him an investiture charter called iarlyk. To secure it, appanage princes had to make pilgrimages to Sarai and sometimes even to Karakorum in Mongolia. There, dressed in Mongol clothes they were required to undergo a ritualistic passage between two flames, and then kneel before the sovereign to beg for title to their votchiny. On occasion, terrible indignities were inflicted on them, and some princes lost their lives at Sarai. Iarlyki were disposed of by means of virtual auctions, the prizes going to them who promised the most money and men, and gave the best assurance of keeping the restless population under control. In effect, behaviour contrary to what may be called national interest became the prerequisite to princely authority. Closely watched by agents of the khan dispersed throughout Russia (they still kept permanent missions in Moscow in the late fifteenth century), the princes had to keep on squeezing tribute and recruits without being allowed to consider the effects of these measures on the population. Any false step, any arrears, could mean a summons to Sarai, the loss of the charter to a more compliant rival, and possibly execution. Princes who under an impulse sided with the people against the Mongol tribute-collectors - and there were such - suffered prompt retribution. In these circumstances something like a process of natural selection began to operate under which the most opportunistic and ruthless survived, and the rest went under. Collaboration, or what Karamzin called 'the base cunning of slavery', became the highest political virtue for Russians. The veche, never strong in the north-east, declined drastically after a short period of ascendancy in the twelfth century. The Mongols did not like it, seeing in the veche a troublesome focus of popular discontent, and. they prodded the princes to liquidate it. By the middle of the fourteenth century little remained of the veche except in Novgorod and Pskov. With it vanished the only institution in some measure capable of restraining political authority.

There is considerable disagreement among historians as to the effect which Mongol rule produced on Russia; some regard it as paramount,

* I do not mean to imply that the Mongols and Turks of the Golden Horde were nothing but savage barbarians. At the time, they were in almost every respect culturally superior to the Russians: as late as 1591 the English traveller Giles Fletcher described them in these terms. But as the Germans and Japanese amply demonstrated during the Second World War, people with a high level of culture at home can behave on conquered territory in an odious manner. The greater the cultural difference separating conqueror from the vanquished, the more likely is the former to regard his victim as subhuman, and to treat him as such. In the words of a Japanese proverb: 'A man away from home has no neighbours.'