Divided Sovereignty in the Genghisid States as Exemplified by the Crimean Khanate :“Oriental Despotism” à rebours?

Abstract

In 1957, when Karl Wittfogel published his seminal book on “Oriental Despotism", it was evident from the outset that the author’s arguments were heavily biased against Russia and deeply rooted in the Cold War atmosphere. Wittfogel’s chief argument about the liaison between irrigation and state despotism had to wait for its critics until more recent times, but his treatment of Russia as an example of a “hydraulic society” was immediately perceived as an intellectual aberration. Nonetheless, the notion of Russia as an “Oriental Tyranny” or “Asiatic Tyranny” proved handy in journalistic efforts to explain the Soviet system to a Western reader, and it has retained some popular cur¬rency up to the present day. In a paragraph of his book, headed “The Introduction of Oriental Despotism into Russia,” Wittfogel blamed the Tatars for being “decisive both in destroying the non-Oriental Kievan society and in laying the foundations for the despotic state of Muscovite and post-Muscovite Russia.” In doing so, he invoked such different authorities as historians Vasilij Ključevskij and George Vernadsky, and... the poet Alexander Pushkin. Among the tremendously rich literary tradition that blames the Mongols and Tatars for infecting the Russian soul with the spirit of despotism, two other influential writers can be named here: a nineteenth-century French author Marquis de Custine and an early twentieth-century Polish historian Jan Kucharzewski.