Genghis Khan and the Communists

Genghis Khan, the Napoleon of the steppes, is one of the great figures of world history, the creator of a huge nomadic Mongol empire which went on expanding after his death in 1227 until it extended from Poland to Korea. The sheer range of Mongol military operations is stupendous. The same conquerors who in 1242 were chasing the fugitive King of Hungary down the Adriatic coast were forty years later subduing the island of Java. Europe and Asia were forced into a kind of union that lasted a century and a half. The world was terrified by the swiftness and brutality of the conquests, which were marked by genocide on a hideous scale. The fervent prayer ‘From the fury of the Tartars, good Lord deliver us!’ went up from many stricken lands; and it was long before men ceased to tremble at the recollection of the wiry little horsemen who rode to bloody victory across whole continents. 

Such tremendous events, which shook the globe, cried for explanations. How had it all happened? The first instinct of a religious age was to see the Mongol devastations as a terrible divine punishment for the sins of men. Like Attila many centuries before, Genghis Khan appeared as the Scourge of God, the chastiser under Heaven of human wickedness. Others believed that the Mongols or Tartars - the names were interchangeable - were the two great races of Gog and Magog whom Alexander had shut up behind the Caucasus Mountains, and who had now broken out with intent to destroy the world. The Mongols themselves were not in the least surprised by their dazzling victories: the Great Khan, they knew, had received a divine commission to conquer the earth, and all who resisted must be struck down. When Pope Innocent IV sent an embassy to the Mongol court in 1246, to complain of the dreadful atrocities the Mongol armies had perpetrated in Poland and Hungary, he was told that the punishment inflicted on the peoples of those countries was fully deserved, since they had refused to submit to God and the Khan; and that, if the Pope himself wished to escape destruction, he must present himself in person at the Khan’s camp and humbly acknowledge Mongol universal lordship. 

To contemporaries it was a perplexing mystery. But when, after the Renaissance, the study of history became more secular and sophisticated, and Montesquieu initiated the quest for ‘general causes’, the rise of the Mongol Empire was more rationally attributed to the military genius of Genghis Khan; his political skill in dividing his enemies and turning yesterday’s foes into today’s allies; the quarrels and divisions of his opponents; and his possession of interior lines in the heart of Asia, from which he could strike out in any direction without ever being imperilled by the formation of a united front against him. These political and military considerations were reinforced half a century ago by a sociological analysis of Genghis Khan’s Mongolia. Around 1911-12, the Russian scholar B. J. Vladimirtsov (1) put forward a theory that, in the twelfth century, the old Mongol tribal society was decaying, and a class conflict was developing between the nobles (noyan), who owned the biggest flocks and herds, the only real wealth among nomads, and the commoners, among whom were prisoners taken in the endemic tribal wars, who, though not strictly speaking slaves, were at least in an inferior position and much exploited. Genghis Khan represented the aristocracy; and his rival Jamuka, a chief who was his anda or blood brother, and who was later killed by him in the struggle for the leadership of the Mongol people, stood for the democracy of the masses. Genghis exploited these social conflicts to his own advantage; but, later, he played them down by leading nobles and commons alike to plunder and victory all over Asia, and, indeed, deliberately ignored class distinctions in creating new institutions, such as the keshig, or Imperial Guard, the crack troops of the Mongol Army, entry to which was open to members of all social groups. 

Vladimirtsov was not a Marxist; and his theory was worked out before the Russian Revolution. But it proved congenial to Soviet historians, as it fitted into Marxist categories, and was generally accepted by them. The Russians have always taken a deep interest in the Mongol Empire, because their country was part of it for over two centuries, a bitter experience they have never fully got over. Devastated by the invasion led by Genghis’s grandson Batu in 1237-40, the Russian principalities were reduced to vassalage; and for years every Russian prince on his accession was required to journey to the camp of the Khan at Sarai on the Volga, there to do homage and receive investiture. Russia was, so to speak, dragged away from Europe and forced to face Asia; and the Mongols imposed their brand of despotism on Russian political institutions. It is now generally agreed that the Tsarist monarchy of post-Mongol Russia was modelled on the Mongol khanate, rather than on Imperial Byzantium: the word ‘Tsar’ was first applied by the Russians to the Khan, and not to their own native ruler. In Karl Marx’s words, “The bloody mire of Mongolian slavery forms the cradle of Muscovy’, a judgement that has, of course, influenced all Soviet writing on the subject. Russian bitterness at the Mongol conquest has been sharpened by the fact that it contributed not a little to the country’s subsequent backwardness and left it reactionary, ignorant, semi-Asiatic and serf-ridden. Nor did the Mongols, unlike the Arabs or Moors in Spain, bring any compensating cultural benefits. As the poet Pushkin remarked: 

‘The Tartars had nothing in common with the Moors. They conquered Russia, but gave it neither algebra nor Aristotle’. 

Not only did the Mongols tear Russia away from Europe; but by doing so they prevented her from sharing the stimulating experience of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution - cultural and intellectual revivals that were themselves largely due to the fact that Western Europe escaped Mongol conquest. 

So far as we can judge, the Mongols were no more popular in China. Their rule here was much shorter: Genghis Khan only conquered the territory north of the Yellow River, and not from the native Chinese but from foreign, barbarian regimes that had long been established there. His grandson, the celebrated Kubilai Khan, was the first Mongol to rule all China by destroying, in 1279, the native dynasty of the Sung, which had governed the south for decades. Kubilai was much impressed by Chinese civilization, as Marco Polo tells us; he moved the Mongol imperial capital from Karakorum in Mongolia to Khan-Balik, Polo’s Cambulac, or ‘the Khan’s City’, modern Peking, adopted Chinese dress and manners, and granted privileges to the Chinese Buddhist clergy; though he never learnt to speak Chinese, and refused to employ Chinese officials in any but the lowest grades of the administration. The Chinese always hated their conquerors, but conceded that, for a while, they had been granted the Mandate of Heaven; not long after Kubilai’s death in 1294, the Mongol regime began to be shaken by peasant revolts, which ended up as a widespread national uprising. In 1368, the last Mongol emperor was chased out; and the native dynasty of the Ming ruled over a united and liberated China. In time, the victims of the Mongols had their revenge. By the seventeenth century, the Russians moving eastwards beyond the Urals and the Chinese moving up north towards the Gobi Desert began to close in on the old grazing-lands of the nomads; peasant settlers came in to practise agriculture and craftsmanship; and resistance from the Mongol shepherds was broken by the use of firearms and artillery, which the nomads did not possess. The gun of the civilized Powers defeated the bow and arrow of the barbarians. The Russians and Chinese caught their ancient enemy in a vice: his last struggles have been graphically depicted in De Quincey’s essay ‘The Revolt of the Tartars’. 

The Mongols submitted: they had no choice. So long as Russia and China acted together, they had no hope of regaining their freedom. Their first chance came with the Chinese Revolution which overthrew the Manchus in 1911; the Mongols declared their independence, with the support of Tsarist Russia; and, in 1913, Republican China recognized the autonomy, but not the full sovereignty, of ‘Outer’ Mongolia. The Russian Revolution of 1917 checked Chinese attempts to re-establish full control over the Mongols; the Bolsheviks, having defeated the ‘Whites’ in the Civil War and regained all the former Tsarist territories in Asia, saw a chance of spreading Communism in the East. Soviet troops occupied Mongolia on the plea of defending it against ‘Whites’ and Chinese; and, in 1924, the Mongolian People’s Republic was proclaimed, now the second oldest Communist State in the world; though China did not recognize its independence until 1945. In fact, it was and is a Soviet satellite; and its social policies, which included the destruction of the old princely houses and the Buddhist shrines and monasteries which embodied most of the country’s wealth, were dictated by Moscow. The old decayed city of Urga blossomed into a smart modern capital under the new name of Ulan Bator, or ‘Red Hero’, and the nomadic population was gradually transformed, under the usual intensive Communist pressures, into a nation of farmers and industrial workers. Yet the People’s Republic contains only a minority of the Mongol race: the rest, some two millions, live in Inner Mongolia, an Autonomous Province of Communist China. Thus two revolutions, in China in 1911 and in Russia in 1917, enabled the Mongols to reappear on the stage of history. Though they could not recover their complete freedom, they did secure a certain degree of autonomy; and the present conflict between the two Communist Powers might win them something more. 

Before that conflict broke out in the 1960s, Russian, Chinese and Mongol scholars had begun to re-examine Mongol history, the conquests and the role of Genghis Khan. Although zealous Communists had destroyed many old libraries housed in Buddhist monasteries, a fair amount of historical documentary material survived, and could be studied and interpreted, though, of course, within a rigid Marxist-Leninist framework. A leading Mongol historian, Yü Yuan-an, published a new Life of Genghis Khan in 1955. It showed a remarkable dependence on the work of Vladimirtsov, whose theories he largely adopted as his own. Thus he describes Genghis’s Mongolia as a ‘feudal’ land, in which the old clan system was breaking up and a real sense of nationality had not yet emerged. The nobles were all powerful, and were buttressed by warrior-clients known as nökör, companions, free fighters, similar to the armed feudal retainers of late medieval Europe. The rise of Genghis was helped by the growing desire of the Mongol people for unity to end inter-tribal war and halt foreign aggression, especially from the barbarian rulers of North China. Genghis was no democrat; but neither had he any strong race or class feeling, and employed talent wherever he could find it. 

Within Mongolia his role was ‘progressive’ (a Marxist phrase) in that he unified the country and brought to his people the art of writing and new and better institutions. Outside Mongolia, he was the reverse of ‘progressive’, a brutal and ruthless destroyer who inflicted terrible injuries on civilized lands. Mongol savageries in Russia are documented from a standard book on the khanate of the Golden Horde by two Soviet scholars, Grekov and Yakubovsky, published in 1937. Yü Yuan-an’s picture of Genghis is a balanced one: the Conqueror is neither a culture hero nor a bloodthirsty monster. 

In a later book, an Outline History of Inner Mongolia (1958), Yü Yuan-an deals with the post-Genghis history of the Mongol conquests and is noticeably sympathetic to the Russians. Describing the invasion of Europe by Batu in 1237-42, he discusses the reasons for the withdrawal of the undefeated Mongol armies in 1242, just when they seemed on the point of smashing their way into Germany and Italy. The common explanation is that the death of the Great Khan Ogedei in December 1241, by raising in an acute form the problem of the succession, induced Batu to pull his forces back to the Volga, so as to be near at hand to influence the election of the new Khan, which was actually delayed till 1246 because of the rivalries and intrigues within the reigning family. Yü Yuan-an argues, however, that Ogedei’s death was only a pretext: what really happened was that ‘the heroic struggle of the Russian people’ had used up Mongol men and resources at such a rate that the conquest of the rest of Europe ceased to be practicable. Thus the Russians virtually sacrificed themselves to save Europe. Turning to China, the Mongol historian condemns the rule of his countrymen there as a harsh tyranny; even Kubilai is criticised for his extravagance and waste of the national resources, his unintelligent use of paper-money which led to uncontrolled inflation, and his excessive favour to the parasitic Buddhist clergy. Kubilai’s reputation, resting largely on Marco Polo’s uncritical eulogies, is grossly exaggerated: his grandson and successor, the Emperor Temür, who stopped foreign wars and reduced taxes, was a better ruler. In the end, the oppression of the peasants, the backbone of the nation, by these uncouth nomads, who never understood the value of agriculture, became unendurable; and a series of rural revolts brought the dynasty to ruin. Under the Ming, China became strong, united and free at last from barbarian rule. 

Such an interpretation commended itself to Russians and Chinese alike; but from 1960 onwards, as the Sino-Soviet quarrel burst on an astonished world, Mongolia, its past and its great conqueror, was drawn into the dispute. The position of Mongolia, wedged between the two contending giants, acquired an increasing significance, both political and strategic. It became sound Chinese policy to conciliate the bulk of the Mongol people, who lived in the Autonomous Province of Inner Mongolia, to lay stress on Mongol unity, and to seek to draw the Mongolian People’s Republic out of the Soviet orbit. On the Russian side, it was equally natural to consolidate Soviet control over the MPR; to sharpen its anti-Chinese attitudes; and to indicate that the reunion of the Mongol peoples (divided like Germany, Korea and Vietnam, but for a much longer period) could only be directed from and centred on Ulan Bator. The Mongolian People’s Republic had for years been more and more closely linked to the Soviet Union; in 1946 the Russian Cyrillic script was adopted for the writing of the Mongolian language; and in 1961, under Soviet sponsorship, the Republic was admitted to membership of the United Nations. 

The first notable sign of Russo-Chinese divergence over the treatment of Mongolia’s history came with the celebrations in 1962 of the eight-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Genghis Khan. It is curious to reflect, in the light of what took place, that Western scholars profess no certainty about when Genghis was born, or where he was buried. The Mongols and other Asian peoples reckon time according to a twelve-year cycle named after animals (rat, horse, dog, pig, etc); and there is a strong tradition that Genghis was born in a Rat Year, but this could have been 1155 or 1167. Other authorities - none contemporary, however - give 1162 as the year. Hitherto nobody had bothered to commemorate such centenaries; certainly nothing was arranged in 1862! But now people other than Mongols had an interest in the matter; and 1962 was selected as the appropriate year. As for Genghis’s burial place, the Chinese discovered that this was at Ejen Koriya in Ordos, the area between the Great Wall and the northern bend of the Hwangho, in Inner Mongolia; a shrine was built there to house the supposed relics of the Conqueror. There is, in fact, rather stronger evidence that his grave was at Burqan-Qaldun, a holy mountain in the Onon valley near the present Soviet-Mongolian frontier. However that may be, the Chinese made a far greater fuss of the occasion than the Russians; and shrine and relics were conveniently in their part of Mongolia. The Mongolian People’s Republic could not entirely ignore the celebration, but contented itself with issuing a commemorative postage-stamp! 

Even more striking was the literature called forth by the anniversary. This came mostly from the Chinese side: the People’s Republic has done some useful work on Mongolian history, but has produced no new life of Genghis. The Chinese periodical, Historical Studies, published in 1962 an article ‘On Genghis Khan’ by Han Ju-lin, a pupil of the great French sinologist Paul Pelliot and author of several works on the Yuan dynasty, as the Mongol line of emperors is called in China. Han’s treatment of the Conqueror marked a significant shift from the interpretation given by Yü Yuan-an in his 1955 biography. One must remember that the author of the book was a Mongol, the author of the article a Chinese; yet the latter’s view of Genghis Khan is by far the more favourable, though certainly not uncritical. He praises Genghis for having built a nation out of a hundred warring tribes, apportions the blame for the horrors attending the conquest of North China equally between the Mongol invaders and the armed landlords who treated the peasants savagely, and, while not able to deny the revolting massacres of civilians - men, women, children and old people - in so many towns captured by the Mongols in China, Persia, Russia and elsewhere, claims that this horrible practice was abandoned when Genghis saw that it brought him few military advantages. He criticizes the Khan for preferring plunder to husbandry, and notes that the flood of war-booty, pouring into Mongolia from the conquests, reduced the level of domestic production and upset the economy of the country. But he stresses that, by levelling frontiers, crushing so many independent kingdoms, and politically unifying the greater part of Asia, he brought many barbarous nations within the ambit of Chinese civilization and erected a bridge between East and West, across which many technological inventions, such as printing, gunpowder and the mariner’s compass, travelled to the ultimate enrichment of humanity. 

This remarkable rehabilitation of Genghis Khan may be said to mark Peking’s official recognition of him as a great national hero - recognition flattering to Mongol self-esteem; for he is beyond doubt the greatest Mongol of all time, the one member of his race whom everybody knows. But the Russians were much irritated; and two Soviet scholars, Vyatkin and Tikhvinsky, published in 1964 a sharp rejoinder, which has been translated into English. They accused the Chinese of repudiating the orthodox Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history, of substituting ‘race’ for ‘class’, of replacing a Euro-centric view of the past by an Asia-centric one, and of being guilty of ‘great-power chauvinism’. Commenting on Han Ju-lin’s claim that Genghis brought a higher culture to many peoples by striking down feudal lords and slave-owners, they ask sourly: ‘What higher culture did the Mongols bring toSamarkand?’ They quote another pro-Genghis Chinese historian as saying: ‘Under the rule of the Mongols, scholars from various states to the east and west of the Pamirs had great opportunities of studying Chinese philosophy, literature and art’, and comment sarcastically: ‘Apparently from the ashes of towns and villages destroyed by the Mongols!’ What this leads to, they argue, is the revival of the old idea of China as the Middle Kingdom, the centre of the world, the only truly civilized society, the universal norm, an idea far removed from that of Marxist class-war and proletarian revolution. 

It is clear that the Chinese are striving to build up a kind of Sino-Mongol ‘front’ against Russia. Genghis Khan actually figures in the imperial lists as an Emperor of China, despite the fact that his rule never extended south of the Yellow River, because his grandson Kubilai, the first Mongol to rule the whole Empire, enrolled him as such under the reign-name of T’ai-Tsu. Moreover, it can be plausibly argued that Genghis never subdued the Chinese, but only those barbarians who happened to control North China in his day; and it can be proved that many Chinese cooperated with the Mongols against these other alien conquerors. Soviet propaganda replies by warning the Mongols that Mao Tse-tung wants to reconquer their country and annex it to China; it stresses that Inner Mongolia is being swamped with Chinese peasant colonists, and that the same thing could happen to the Mongolian People’s Republic if it lost Soviet protection. Moscow appeals both to Chinese fear and Mongol patriotism, and reminds Mao that ‘Mongol khans once reigned in Peking’. 

The ‘bourgeois historians’ of the West are perhaps more amused than enlightened by this controversy between the Communist giants over one of the great figures of world history. Yet, if history is what Pieter Geyl said it was, “a debate without end”, such discussion, even if conducted with propagandist acrimony, can be profitable by deepening our grasp of the issues involved. These Communist polemics have obliged us to reexamine the career of Genghis Khan, the social milieu into which he was born, the character and results of his conquests, and the merits and defects of the vast empire he created. To the question, Was he a bloody destroyer or a national hero? we may well reply, a little of both. A more positive view of his achievement is now being taken. Of the three great ‘world destroyers’ - Attila, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane - the Mongol made the strongest impact, and not a merely negative one. The records of Attila and Tamerlane are singularly barren of productive results. Their conquests benefited nobody, and their empires vanished at their death. Merciless killer though he often was, Genghis did confer advantages on some of the countries he so ruthlessly ravaged. Not only did he partly civilize his own barbarous nation. He created a military and administrative machine that long outlived him; he brought China and Europe into direct contact for the first time in history, and so facilitated an exchange of goods and ideas on a scale never before seen; and he opened up Asia to international trade. The Old World was never the same again after him. The backwardness of Tsarist Russia, the shift of cultural world leadership from Western Asia to Western Europe, the rise of the Ottoman Turks, and the European quest for a sea route to the Far East, were all indirect consequences of Mongol imperialism. 

(1) Vladimirtsov died in 1930: his unfinished Social Regime of the Mongols, the fullest exposition of his views, was published posthumously in 1934.