ABSTRACT
Forging human security cross-culturally is often challenging, no more so than where East meets West. Modern China and Russia are both cultures built less on specific foundational documents such as a declaration of independence or constitution than on long histories that stretch into prehistory and myth. The relationship between these two vast empires astride the Eurasian heartland has historically been ‘complicated’ [fuza], as the Chinese diplomatically put it. On the one hand, there are certain broad similarities: both were vast bureaucratic autocracies, agriculturally based, with a presumed ideological significance to the rest of the world. Each acquired a vague dread of the other – to Russia the East represented backwardness, despotism, the threat of demographic inundation; to China, the North (and the West) was the chronic source of barbarian invasions. Russia, though its imperialist thrust was toward the East and the South, was culturally oriented to the West; as Dostoevsky put it, ‘In Europe we are too Asiatic, whereas in Asia we are too European.’ China's self-image was that of the self-sufficient ‘central kingdom’, expecting tribute from abroad with little need for international reference groups. And there are ample historical reasons for this mutual averseness. In 1223–40, Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis and leader of the Golden Horde, and his main strategist, General Subutai, invaded the Russian principalities, sacking and burning Moscow, Kiev and 12 other cities, sparing only Smolensk and Novgorod (which agreed to pay tribute). This was no mere raid: the Golden Horde built themselves a capital called Sarai on the lower Volga, where they continued to collect tribute and exercise dominion until around 1480. The impact of what became known as the ‘Tataro-Mongol yoke’ has been mythologized as one of terrible suffering, the source of Oriental despotism (as subsequently practised by Ivan the Terrible), the death penalty, long-term imprisonment and torture, even Russia's dilatory involvement in the European Renaissance and Reformation. But the Mongols also contributed to the development of a postal road network, census, fiscal system and Russian military organization. Actually, they did not interfere much in social life; as Shamanists they were quite broadminded about other religions and permitted subject populations to retain their own customs and culture, even allowing Russian princes to collect taxes on their behalf. 1 Though the descendants of the Golden Horde were swept aside in imperial Russia's expansion into Siberia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Mongol heritage is still visible in that some 15 per cent of the families of the Boyars, or Russian nobility, claim Mongol descent (e.g., Boris Godunov, Bakhmetaev).
