How did the Mongols conquer Russia given that nations like Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany failed plus natural forces such as the scourge of winter?

 

Dima Vorobiev

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Former Soviet propaganda executive

The Mongols simply didn’t do the stupid move of Napoleon and Hitler: they didn’t venture into the thick of our woods.

No forensics

There are no Mongol artifacts in our woodlands, nor any considerable traces of Mongol DNA

. No extant documents attributed to the rule of the Empire of Jochi over our lands are written in the Mongolian language. Our chronicles from that era know no “Mongols”. The Mongol “yoke” was first mentioned in Polish documents in the 17th century, then elaborated by Germans in the 18th century and later popularized in the West by Karl Marx in the 19th century as an explanation of our “backwardness”.

Impenetrable taiga

In the 13th century, Rus didn’t have land roads that the Mongol cavalry could use. It was a wall of mosquito-infested trees and bushes, passable on foot but impenetrable for horses. Our populace used rivers for personal and cargo transport. Neither had we grazing lands where their horses could find grass. Getting inside the thick taiga deeper than a couple of day’s ride would be pure suicide for the Mongols.

Nothing to loot

What’s equally important, the Rus fiefdoms were utterly impoverished after the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 by the Crusaders. The ensuing collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean trade hit us hard. Our lands ran out of silver. In the markets, people paid each other in pelts, glass beads and seashells. The Mongols, who liked to travel light, would find very little of value to loot.

Local helpers

This is why the Mongols didn’t occupy Rus. What seems to have happened is that they simply outsourced the subjugation of our lands to the forest Turks (Tatars) and local Slav collaborators. St Alexander Nevsky played the seminal role in making us a part of the Golden Horde.

(The first census taken by the Mongols occurred in 1257. In other words, it took St Alexander Nevsky and his father at at least one and a half decades to impose Mongol control over the forested parts of Rus lands.)

German success

Many centuries later, the “Mongol approach” in conquering Russia was used by Germany. During WW1 they paid the Bolsheviks

to disorganize our troops and war logistics, and in 1917–18 Lenin and Trotsky famously delivered. Only the defeat in the Western front prevented the Germans from following through and securing their huge conquests in the east under the Brest Litovsk Peace treaty

.

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Below, Rus dukes pay homage to the Golden Horde.

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