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The Eurasian Politician - Issue 1 (May 21st, 2000)
Antero Leitzinger:
(Translation by Anssi Kullberg)
Empires are not born or killed, but transform themselves, disintegrate and reintegrate, reduce and enlarge their territory. An empire is preserved even when its dynasty changes, because the change of regency does not necessarily imply changes in the culture of governance and strategic position of the empire.
Kipchak was the name of a region that corresponds to present-day South Russia and Ukraine. It existed already before the conquests of Genghis Khan. The diversity of the peoples of Kipchak renders them uncountable, because they had, from the times of the Goths and the Huns, been moving around the steppes, within the entire area stretching from the Great Wall of China up to the Hungarian puszta: the Avars, the Magyars, the Pechenegs, the Kumans... At the northern borderlands roamed Finno-Ugric and Slavonic tribes, in the south lay the great empires of Byzantium and Arabia.
The first empire was born in the Kipchak steppes when the successors of Genghis Khan shared and divided between themselves the empire that, at its largest, stretched from the Adriatic to the China Sea, and from the North Polar Sea to the Indian Ocean. Kipchak ‘belonged’ to Batu Khan (died in 1256), whose descendants ruled the Kipchak people until 1360. After that the throne was inherited within the family of Batu’s brother Orda. Therefore the empire is better known as the Golden Horde (Golden Orda).
The Golden Horde weakened during the 1400s, and finally the empire was split into several parts: among others, the Khanates of Kazan, Kasimov, Crimea, Sibir, and Astrakhan. Usually Muslim regents were called khans, but also Christian grand-dukes were rivaling of the heritage of the Golden Horde. The most unscrupulous of them was ruling from the Moscow citadel, the Kremlin.
The grand-duke of Muscovy won the struggle for power by cunning and by talented use of the “divide and conquer“ policy. The last khan of the Golden Horde, Khan Shaih Ahmed, lost the war in June 1502, escaping to Lithuania, where he was, however, hanged in 1505. The grand-duke of Muscovy declared himself not only the khan of all the territory he had conquered, but also the czar of all Russias. By the end of the 1500s, most of the khanates were vanquished, but the Crimean Peninsula was not annexed to Russia until 1783.
The roots of the Russian state are usually formally led from the Medieval grand-duchy of Kiev, and the declaration of Moscow being a “Third Rome“ attempted to bind it with the legacy of the Byzantium. However, in everything that was relevant, Russia became the very successor state of the Golden Horde. In the political mythology of Moscow, the Golden Horde was connected with Islam and with the Tatars, whereas the “new“ Russia with Christianity and Slavic tradition. The religion was, however, more important than mother tongue – for example the Finno-Ugric nations of the Mid-Volga became assimilated into either Tatars or Slavs according to which one of the time’s dominant religions they finally adopted.
With this background it may be easier to understand that Russia’s aggressive expansionism was directed primarily towards East and not towards West. Russia aimed at completing the great task that the Golden Horde had left unfinished: to unite all Eurasia from the Adriatic to the China Sea, and from the Polar Sea to the Indian Ocean under one rule. Thus, Russia conquered Siberia already in the 1500s, and in the 1800s Russia conquered Turkestan. Finally in Stalin’s era Russia’s power stretched as far as to the whole vast continental China. The only part that remained non-conquered (of the Golden Horde’s task) was the empire of the Il Khan.
Namely, the conquest of Byzantine and Arab empires had been left to the responsibility of Batu Khan’s uncle Hülagu (died in 1265) and his descendants, the Il Khans (“vice khans“). They failed in mission, and the empire split up in the 1330s. In these times it happened in the westernmost frontier of the empire that a representative of the house of Osman declared himself as Sultan, and started to collect the splinters of the empire, but just when the Osmans (Ottomans) had finally defeated both Byzantium (in 1453) and Arabia (in 1517), the Persian Shah Ismail (1501-1524) had risen to challenge the Osmans. The legacy of the Il Khan empire was permanently divided into two parts: the Sunnite empire of Turkey, and the Shi’ite empire of Iran. Russia never managed to defeat any of them, although the conquest of Constantinople has been close, and Täbriz was occupied by Russians in the 1900s.
Russia is the worst enemy of Russians. Many people are so conditioned to nationalism that they are incapable of distinguishing state and people from each other. If Russia would again be the Soviet Union, this could perhaps be easier to explain – or if the state of Russia would still be called the Kipchak. Then it would be better understood that the interests of the Russians are not necessarily guarded or advocated by a state that, by its form, borders, and strategy, belongs to the world 800 years ago.
Russia has carried the Kipchak curse since it, 500 years ago, vanquished the Golden Horde and took the latter’s place as the heir of the empire. Russia would have had an alternative – it could have developed as a loosely decentralized alliance or confederation of independent city states and principalities. This would have been the model favoured by Novgorod, but Moscow defeated its intra-Russian rival in 1478. Moscow was never happy with conquest and uniting of the Christian peoples, but took its model from the Spanish “reconquista“, and Moscow’s very desire was to overthrow the Golden Horde in order to unite the Kipchak, and after the Kipchak, all the legendary mythical world empire of Genghis Khan. At least Spain did not seek the conquest of all North Africa and Middle East.
The Kipchak curse means for the 21st century Russia a same kind of state-ideological burden as if Germany or France would still dream about the heritage of Charlemagne. In a way, the European Union represents the same idea, but Russia’s version of the European Union would be as absurd as was its imitation of Spain’s policy over 500 years ago. Spain directed its most furious imperial dreams to the West, across the ocean. Germany and France have accepted that none of them can integrate Europe alone. However, Russia has never quite found its limits, and it has never accepted plurality of states in the region of Kipchak – unless the independence of Belarus and Ukraine is established in the same way as the divorce of Germany and France was established more than thousand years ago.
The Kipchak curse chains the imperial ambitions of Russia to the heritage of the Il Khans (Turkey, Iraq, Iran), Chagatai (Turkestan), and China. It causes a conflict against Europe when Europe is trying to recover the memory of the Roman Empire by uniting the West Roman Empire (Charlemagne’s Frank Empire and the Holy German-Roman Empire) with the East Roman Empire (Byzantium). At that stage the old struggle of the possession of the Bhosporus will return to the era of the Il Khans and crusades, as far as to the year 1204. The strategies of empires remain unchanged easily for 800 years.
Instead of the Huntingtonian antagonism of cultures, I would prefer a strategic model with empires, whose strategies are preserved and power inherited in spite of language, nationality, religion, and ideology.