by Morley Evans
Understanding Russia:
The Continuum of History
By Yameen Khan
(edited by Pepe Escobar)
June 22, 2017 "Information Clearing House"
The United States is actively committed to bringing Russia into submission via encirclement and a two-pronged attack.
NATO’s expansion of bases in vassal states right up to Russia’s borders, coupled with an attempt at encroachment in Syria, should allow The Hegemon to undermine Russia’s underbelly from the Caucasus to Central Asia.
To understand how Russians usually respond to Western power a little time travel, starting 1219 AD, is more than useful.
This was a time when a cataclysmic event left deep scars on the Russian character; an abiding fear of encirclement, whether by nomadic hordes then or by nuclear missile bases today.
Russia then was not a single state but consisted of a dozen principalities frequently at war with each other. Between 1219 and 1240 all these fell to the Genghis Khan hurricane, whose lightning-speed cavalry with his horse-borne archers, employing brilliant tactics unfamiliar to Europeans, caught army after army off guard and forced them into submission.
For more than 200 years Russians suffered under the Golden Horde of the Mongol – named after their great tent with golden poles. They left the Russian economy in ruins, brought commerce and industry to a halt, and reduced Russians to serfdom. Asiatic ways of administration and customs were superimposed on the existing Byzantine system.
Taking full advantage of its military weakness and of its reduced circumstances, Russia’s European neighbours started to help themselves to its territory, starting with German principalities, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden. The Mongols couldn’t care less so long as they received their tribute. They were more concerned with their Asiatic dominions.
European cities did not match the riches of Samarkand and Bukhara, Herat and Baghdad, whose incomparable wealth and splendour outshone wooden-built Russian cities.
Russia’s greatest fear begins here – crushed between their European foes to the West and the Mongols to the East. Russians were to develop a paranoid dread of invasion and encirclement which has tormented their foreign relations ever since. Hardly ever has an experience left such deep and everlasting scars on a nation’s psyche as this cataclysm did on Russians. This explains, among other things, their stoical acceptance of harsh rule at home.
And then came Ivan III – the man who freed the Russians from the Golden Horde.
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