ABSTRACT
It is widely accepted that the capture of Kazan, the capital of Tatar Khanate on the Volga, by Ivan the Terrible in 1552 was the key event in the rise of the Russian state. From the mid-thirteenth to the late fifteenth centuries (about 250 years), the Tatar yoke completely excluded Russia from the mainstream of European civilization, relegating it to the continental periphery, squeezed between Lithuania and the Horde. A religious and national revival, started in the fifteenth century, was followed by the assembly of the Russian lands during the emergence of the Moscow Principality (Muscovite state) as ‘an essentially modern phenomenon’2 in the words of Sergey Medvedev, one of the top political analysts in Russia. It was during this period that the messianic geopolitical idea of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ took shape and the double-headed eagle, the icon borrowed from the Byzantine empire, was introduced. This eagle, with one head looking West and the other East, is still Russia’s coat of arms.
