Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

To the south of the Kievan domain was grassy steppe, dominated in the second half of the first millennium by a series of largely Turkic-speaking nomadic peoples on horseback, who kept arriving from the east, conquering and settling down as the new masters: Avars, Khazars, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Kipchak-Polovtsians, Alans, and finally Genghis Khan’s Mongols. There was persistent warfare over the period, immortalised in the first surviving work of Russian literature, Slovo o Polku Igoreve , the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, set in 1054 and apparently written in the twelfth century:

Uže, knyaže, tuga umi polonila;

se bo dva sokola slėtėsta su otnya stola zlata

poiskati grada Timutorokanya ,

a lyubo ispiti šelomomi Donu.

Uže sokoloma krilitsa pripėšali poganïxu sablyami ,

a samayu oputaša vu putinï želėznï…

O Prince, grief has now taken your mind captive;

for two falcons have flown from their father’s golden throne

to gain the city of Tmutorokan, [159]

or else to drink of the Don from their helmets.

The falcons’ wings have now been clipped by the sabres of infidels,

and they themselves are fettered in fetters of iron…

At last the Mongols, constituted as the khanate of the Golden Horde, sacked Kiev and ended that city’s hegemony of the Russians in 1240. Mongol suzerainty, entailing a heavy burden in tribute, came to be recognised all over the Russian territories, even in 1242 by Prince Alexander N yevskiy up north in Novgorod, despite his recent victories over the Swedes and the Teutonic knights. It has been reckoned that this early subjection, which lasted for almost three centuries, and was definitively ended only by the victories of Ivan IV Groznïy (’the Terrible’), planted a lasting pessimism in the Russian soul, establishing a deep-seated tradition of serfdom at the bottom of society, and absolutism at the top.

The new Russian polity, when it came, would be based not on Kiev but on Moscow, 800 kilometres (by Russian measure, 750 vërst ) to the north-east. In 1328 the Orthodox Metropolitan moved his seat accordingly. Moscow had a good central position within Rus, and its triumph over the other city-states was partly due to the fact that it stayed unified, having the luck to produce a single male heir in each generation in the fourteenth century. The Grand Prince of Moscow, Dmitriy Donskoy, defeated the Mongols in 1380, and in 1480 Ivan III finally repudiated their suzerainty. The Moscow princes ( knyazi ) were going up in the world: about the same time, Ivan married Sophía Palaiológou, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor (deposed in 1453), and claimed to have inherited imperial status through a special donation of insignia from Constantinos Monómakhos (Byzantine emperor) to Vladimir Monomakh (Prince of Kiev) in the eleventh century. Moscow began to be represented as the Third Rome, and the monk Filofey of Pskov wrote to Ivan III at the end of the fifteenth century: ‘Thou art the sole Emperor of all the Christians in the whole universe…For two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there shall be no fourth.’ [622]

In 1547, Ivan IV was the first ruler to be crowned not prince but T sar y , that is to say (in Russian pronunciation) Caesar. [160]He went on to prove he deserved it by conquering and incorporating both the major remnants of the Golden Horde, the Turkic khanates of Kazan (in 1552) and Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea (in 1556). The local nobility were absorbed into the Russian, and so a process of assimilation was begun. With these steps, Russians began their career of imposing themselves on other language communities, an imperial expansion of their language zone which would continue for the next three and a half centuries, and end up in the twentieth century with nominal coverage of the whole northern half of the land-mass of Asia.

The greater part of this spread came about without the active initiative of the Tsar, his government or his armies. The immediate effect of the conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan was to remove the barrier to Russian penetration out towards the east; and this opportunity was soon taken up. The Stroganov family happened to hold the monopoly of fur-trading and salt-mining: they now engaged an army of Cossacks from the Don area, initially to protect against the khan of western Siberia, but then to attack the khan’s capital on the lower Irtysh. The capital fell in 1582. Over the next fifty-seven years the Cossacks advanced rapidly and consistently, and in 1639 they reached the Pacific, founding the city of Okhotsk in 1648. They proceeded to move south down the coast to the Amur river, but were soon compelled by the Chinese to give up the area bordering Manchuria; the Sino-Russian border was defined, effectively for two centuries to come, at the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689.

Although their name is Turkic, [161]the Cossacks spoke Russian. They were a large but miscellaneous group of horsemen, militant Christians, disorderly but proud, who had taken up nomadic ways in the long centuries of threat and domination by Turkic nomads, and were found all over the southern steppe country from Poland and Ukraine through to Kazakhstan. During their advance across Siberia, they built fortresses at the major river crossings, some of them now major cities (among them Tomsk in 1604, Krasnoyarsk in 1628, Yakutsk in 1632); but they only scantily settled the lands through which they advanced. They were followed by a dusting of soldiers, missionaries, tax-collectors (exacting the tribute, called by the Turkic name yasak , that was paid in fur pelts) and a very few Russian settlers, either peasants looking for land, or political exiles sent by the government; but the linguistic impact was at first thin. The Russians remained congregated along the major rivers, surrounded at first by a diversity of ancient Siberian peoples. Over the next three centuries, as extractive industries began to develop, they were joined by more settlers from the west.

This early expansion to occupy Siberia, taken together with the Russian heartland in the north European plain, accounts for most of the area that is now part of Russia. The non-Russian populations there were always too sparse, and too remote from any non-Russian source of civilisation, to organise independent states.

This was emphatically not true of Russia’s other neighbours, most of whom found themselves succumbing to Russian conquest in the four centuries of Russia’s expansion. They fall into four groups: the Slavic-language states to the west; the Baltic and Uralic-language states to the north-west; the Caucasian states to the south; and the central Asian states to the south-east. As it happens, at the time of writing in the early twenty-first century, most of them have regained their independence, and are seeking to rebuild links with their pre-Russian pasts; the few that have not, notably the Chechens and Ingush of the Caucasus, are seeking more or less bloodily to secede. It is a notable fact about Russia’s old colonies that very few of them value highly the historic links symbolised by use of the Russian language, or indeed the potential for collaboration that Russian would give them if accepted as a lingua franca. It is worth enquiring why, alone of the European imperial languages, Russian has left this rather poisoned inheritance.

The Slavic-language states of the west include not just Ukraine ( Ukraína , ‘On the Border’) and Belarus ( Byelarús y , ‘White Rus’), but also Poland ( Pól yša , ‘Open Plains’). [162]Early Russian expansion in this direction did not at first expand the area of Russian speakers, since the kingdom of Lithuania had taken advantage of the destruction of Kiev in 1240 to take over most of the western Russian lands. Later, in 1385, Lithuania entered into a close alliance with Poland through a dynastic marriage, and the two countries were formally confederated in 1569, so in attempting to regain the western Russians, the new power centre in Moscow was actually facing a struggle with Poland. When Ivan the Terrible took up arms in the sixteenth century, he was significantly less successful in expanding against this Christian kingdom to his west than he had been against the Tatars to his east. Twenty-five years of Livonian wars from 1558 served only to lose Russia its foothold on the Baltic, and to destabilise its monarchy. In the smútnoye vrémya , the ‘confused time’, that followed, Poland invaded and briefly held Moscow from 1610 to 1612. Nevertheless, when order was restored in Russia under the new Romanov dynasty in 1613, the westward pressure was reasserted, and gradually Moscow’s sway was increased: Smolensk, Kiev and the eastern Ukraine were gained by Tsar Aleksey in 1667; and the rest of the Ukraine and Belarus by Tsaritsa Yekaterina II (Catherine the Great) in 1772 and 1793.