Vladimir N. Rudakov Mongolo-Tatary glazami drevnerusskich knižnikov serediny XIII–XV vv. [The Mongol-Tatars Through the Eyes of Old Rus’ Book-Men from the Middle of the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries]. Izdat. Kvadriga Moskva 2009. ISBN 978-5-904162-09-2

Vladimir N. Rudakov: Mongolo-Tatary glazami drevnerusskich knižnikov serediny XIII – XV vv. [The Mongol-Tatars Through the Eyes of Old Rus’ Book-Men from the Middle of the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries]. Moskva: Izdat. Kvadriga, 2009. 245 S., Abb. ISBN 978-5-904162-09-2.

This monograph continues the recent trend in scholarship in Russia to reassess the Mongol period of East Slavic history. Rudakov examines what the medieval Rus’ sources say about why the Tatars conquered Rus’, the nature of the authority of the Tatar khan, the possibility of opposing Horde rule, and how a Rus’ prince ought to behave toward the Tatars. The book makes a genuine contribution to our understanding of how the religious world-view of medieval Rus’ shaped their perception of the Tatars.

Rudakov’s monograph contains an introduction, six chapters, a conclusion, and two previously published articles reprinted as appendixes. The chapters discuss the battle on the Kalka River, Batu’s campaigns, the sermons of Bishop Serapion of Vladimir, the vitae of Grand Princes Mikhail’ of Chernigov (Chernihiv) and Mikhail of Tver’, the battle of Kulikovo Field, and the “Epistle to the Ugra River” by Bishop Vassian of Rostov. The appendixes contain two articles, the first on two elements of the “Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche,” the supposedly “southern wind” (iuzhnyi dukh) which signaled the Russian counter-attack and the timing of the battle to the “eighth hour” of the day, and the second on the image of Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi in accounts of his flight from the city of Moscow in 1382 as the army of Khan Tokhtamysh approached.

Rudakov demonstrates that the Rus’ sources at first utilized eschatological imagery to describe the coming of the Tatars as God’s punishment for Russian sins, emphasizing the necessity for subordination to the khan’s authority, given to him by God, but then shifted to foregrounding the Devil’s machinations behind the evil designs of Tatar leaders and the necessity for Orthodox military opposition to the Tatars. For this reason Dmitrii Donskoi could be criticized for abandoning Moscow in 1382.

The volume is enhanced by eight full-page color illustrations of events in Rus’-Tatar relations, all taken from the sixteenth-century “Illuminated Codex.”

For every text Rudakov discusses he pays scrupulous attention to previous scholarship on manuscripts, dating, and redactions and does a meticulous job of comparing different presentations of the same event. The most stimulating pages of the book put forward semiotic interpretations of Rus’ images, phrases, concepts, and perceptions of the Tatars by placing them in the context of their scriptural antecedents and analogies in other monuments of Old Rus’ literature. This leads inevitably to the conclusion that seemingly accurate narrative elements are in fact literary inventions and have no value whatsoever as ‘realistic’ history. By far the best chapter in the book is Appendix 1 on the “Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche.”

Rudakov properly eschews ahistorical projections of the “heroic struggle of the Russian people” against the Tatars back to 1237. To his credit Rudakov only once uses the anachronistic phrase the “Tatar Yoke” and never mentions the anachronistic term the “Golden Horde” or the concept of “liberation” from the “Tatar Yoke.”

Rudakov’s exposition does contain some dubious ideas and inconsistencies. He himself shows princes praised for fighting the Tatars before the battle of Kulikovo, so the ‘passive martyr’ image of the ideal prince’s behavior toward the Tatars did not monopolize Rus’ attitudes. Princes who fought the Tatars were not seen as opposing God’s will; if they did, they could hardly be considered martyrs. If Tatar success was the result of Rus’ sins, then praying for forgiveness was not ‘passive,’ since God’s forgiveness would produce Rus’ victory. Indeed, expecting the Rus’ sources to address the question of whether Rus’ military opposition to the Tatars would be successful – one of Rudakov’s central themes – is itself anachronistic because it secularizes the issue; the appropriate question, in Rudakov’s own persuasive explication, is whether the Rus’ could repent of their sins and reform, which would, inexorably, result in divine forgiveness and victory against the Tatars. By depicting Old Rus’ literature after Kulikovo as a patriotic expression of Russia’s messianic destiny to defend Orthodoxy in which princely “new heroes” “no longer had a moral right to refuse to defend [their] Fatherland (otechestvo)” (S. 176) Rudakov falls victim to the modern nationalist prejudices that he is at pains to avoid throughout his monograph. Russia’s “messianic mission” has been contested. Describing the Tatars as zakhvatchiki (conquerors) is not conducive to scholarly study of Rus’-Tatar relations; at the very least, the term does not appear in medieval Rus’ sources.

Rudakov cites only Russian-language publications, including a handful of Western works in Russian translation. Western historians began to pay attention to the religious vocabulary of medieval Rus’ sources about the Tatars over fifty years ago. Rudakov’s failure to engage this scholarship seriously impairs the value of his work for Western readers. The book also almost totally lacks comparative perspective; there are a few comparisons to Catholic reactions to Tatars but none to how Muslims, Armenians, Georgians or Chinese viewed the Mongols.

However, these shortcomings in Rudakov’s monograph do not vitiate the value of this book for specialists in medieval Rus’ history and literature. Rudakov’s emphatic endorsement of the religious, not ethnic, political or national, foundation of Rus’ perception of the Tatars is only to be applauded.

Charles J. Halperin, Bloomington, IN