World Order

by Henry Kissinger

The most profound disjunction had come with the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, which subdued a politically divided Russia and razed Kiev. Two and a half centuries of Mongol suzerainty (1237–1480) and the subsequent struggle to restore a coherent state based around the Duchy of Moscow imposed on Russia an eastward orientation just as Western Europe was charting the new technological and intellectual vistas that would create the modern era. During Europe’s era of seaborne discovery, Russia was laboring to reconstitute itself as an independent nation and shore up its borders against threats from all directions. As the Protestant Reformation impelled political and religious diversity in Europe, Russia translated the fall of its own religious lodestar, Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, to Muslim invaders in 1453 into an almost mystical conviction that Russia’s Czar was now (as the monk Filofei wrote to Ivan III around 1500) “the sole Emperor of all the Christians in the whole universe,” with a messianic calling to regain the fallen Byzantine capital for Christendom.

The Russian Victim mentality post-Mongol invasion looks very similar to the Chinese victim mentality post-Opium Wars