More than 1.5 million Kazan Tatars still live in the Volga and Urals regions, and they constitute about half the population within the republic of Tatarstan. They are now known as Volga Tatars and are the wealthiest and most industrially advanced of the Tatar groups. Almost a million more Tatars live in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, while the Siberian Tatars, numbering only about 100,000, live scattered over western Siberia.
The Crimean Tatars had their own history in the modern period. They formed the basis of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was set up by the Soviet government in 1921. This republic was dissolved in 1945, however, when the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin accused the approximately 200,000 Crimean Tatars of having collaborated with the Germans during World War II. As a result, the Crimean Tatars were deported en masse to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where their use of the Tatar language was forbidden. They regained their civil rights in 1956 under the de-Stalinization program of Nikita Khrushchev, but they were not allowed to return to the Crimea, which had been incorporated into the Ukrainian S.S.R. in 1954. It was not until the early 1990s that many Crimean Tatars, taking advantage of the breakup of the Soviet central government's authority, began returning to settle in the Crimea after nearly five decades of internal exile. They now number about 270,000.
Dmitry (II) Donskoy
▪ prince of Moscow
byname of Dmitry Ivanovich
born Oct. 12, 1350, Moscow [Russia]
died May 19, 1389, Moscow
prince of Moscow, or Muscovy (1359–89), and grand prince of Vladimir (1362–89), who won a victory over the Golden Horde (Mongols who had controlled Russian lands since 1240) at the Battle of Kulikovo (Kulikovo, Battle of) (Sept. 8, 1380).
Son of Ivan II the Meek of Moscow (reigned 1353–59), Dmitry became ruler of Muscovy when he was only nine years old; three years later he convinced his suzerain, the great khan of the Golden Horde, to transfer the title grand prince of Vladimir (which had been held by Muscovite princes from 1328 to 1359) from Dmitry of Suzdal to him.
In addition to gaining the title grand prince of Vladimir for himself, Dmitry strengthened his position by increasing the territory of the principality of Muscovy, by subduing the princes of Rostov and Ryazan, and by deposing the princes of Galich and Starodub. While the Golden Horde was suffering from internal conflicts, Dmitry stopped making regular tribute payments and encouraged the Russian princes to resist the Mongols' raids. In 1378 the Russians defeated an army of the Horde on the Vozha River.
Subsequently, Mamai, the Mongol general who was the effective ruler of the western portion of the Golden Horde, formed a military alliance with neighbouring rulers for the purpose of subduing the Russians. Confronting the Mongols on the Don River, however, in the bloody battle on Kulikovo Pole (“Snipes' Field”), Dmitry routed Mamai's forces; for his victory Dmitry was honoured with the surname Donskoy (“of the Don”). Shortly afterward, however, his lands were resubjected to Mongol domination when the Mongol leader Tokhtamysh overthrew Mamai (1381), sacked Moscow (1382), and restored Mongol rule over the Russian lands.
Kulikovo, Battle of
▪ Russian history
(Sept. 8, 1380), military engagement in which the Russians defeated the forces of the Golden Horde, thereby demonstrating the developing independence of the Russian lands from Mongol rule (which had been imposed in 1240). The battle occurred when Mamai, a Mongol general who effectively ruled the western portion of the Golden Horde, invaded the Russian lands. The Russians, whose respect for Mongol authority had been declining—particularly since a series of dynastic quarrels following the death of the khan Jani Beg (1357) had weakened the Horde—resisted Mamai.
Led by Dmitry Ivanovich (Dmitry (II) Donskoy), prince of Moscow and grand prince of Vladimir, the Russians met Mamai's forces at Kulikovo Pole (“Snipes' Field”) on the upper Don River before Mamai's Lithuanian allies could join him. Although the Mongol armies gained an early advantage, they fled when the Russians sent in a reserve force. The battle was extremely bloody, and casualties on both sides were heavy. In honour of the victory on the Don, Dmitry assumed the surname Donskoy (“of the Don”).
But the great victory of the Russians was of little political consequence. Two years later (1382) Tokhtamysh, the khan who had overthrown Mamai in 1381 and extended his control over the entire Golden Horde, invaded Russia. He devastated the lands, looted and burned Moscow, and forced the Russians to recognize once again the suzerainty of the Golden Horde.
Ivan III
▪ Russian prince
Introduction
Russian in full Ivan Vasilyevich, byname Ivan the Great, Russian Ivan Veliky
born Jan. 22, 1440, Moscow
died Oct. 27, 1505, Moscow
grand prince of Moscow (1462–1505), who subdued most of the Great Russian lands by conquest or by the voluntary allegiance of princes, rewon parts of Ukraine from Poland–Lithuania, and repudiated the old subservience to the Mongol-derived Tatars. He also laid the administrative foundations of a centralized Russian state.
Early life and reign
Ivan was born at the height of the civil war that raged between supporters of his father, Grand Prince Vasily II of Muscovy (Moscow, Grand Principality of), and those of his rebellious uncles. His early life was dramatic and tumultuous: when his father was arrested and blinded by his cousin in 1446, Ivan was first hidden in a monastery and then smuggled to safety, only to be treacherously handed over to his father's captors later in the year; shortly after his father's release in the same year Ivan was solemnly affianced—for purely political reasons—to the daughter of the Grand Prince of Tver, whom he married in 1452. During the last years of his father's reign, he gained experience in the arts of war and government. At the age of 12 he was placed nominally in command of a military expedition dispatched to deal with the remnants of his father's internal enemies in the far north; and at 18 he led a successful campaign against the Tatars in the south. Vasily II died on March 27, 1462, and was succeeded by Ivan as grand prince of Moscow.
Little is known of Ivan's activities during the early part of his reign. Apart from a series of sporadic and largely successful campaigns against his eastern neighbours, the Tatars (Tatar) of Kazan, there was evidently not much beyond the routine business of ruling to occupy him. But his private life soon changed radically. In 1467 his childhood bride died (perhaps poisoned), leaving him with only one son. In view of the primitive state of Muscovite medicine and the demonstrable reluctance of Ivan's brothers to see the royal line continued longer than was necessary, the likelihood of the son predeceasing his father and thus robbing him of an heir appeared only too real, and another wife had to be sought. Curiously, the initiative seems to have come from outside; in 1469 Cardinal Bessarion wrote from Rome offering Ivan the hand of his ward and pupil, Zoë Palaeologus, niece of the last emperor of Byzantium. It took three years before the fat and unattractive Zoë, who, on entering Moscow, changed her name to Sofia (and perhaps her faith to Orthodoxy), was married to Ivan in the Kremlin.
Middle reign
At Ivan's accession many Great Russian lands were not yet under Muscovite control; the entire Ukraine and the upper Oka districts were part of the Polish–Lithuanian union and Ivan himself, in name at least, was a tributary of the Khan of the Golden Horde. He set himself the task of reconquering from Poland–Lithuania the Ukrainian possessions of his forefathers. But first the independent Great Russian lands had to be annexed or subdued and subservience to the Tatars had to be repudiated.
After rendering the Kazan Horde on his eastern flank temporarily impotent by a series of campaigns (1467–69), Ivan attempted to subdue Novgorod and its huge northern empire. He repeatedly invaded Novgorod, formally forced it to accept his sovereignty (1478), stripped it of the last vestiges of political freedom, secularized large tracts of its church lands, annexed its colonies, and replaced many of its citizens with reliable elements from his own domains. By 1489 Novgorod could offer no more resistance to Ivan. Of the remaining Russian lands still technically independent in 1462, Yaroslavl and Rostov were annexed by treaty (1463 and 1474, respectively). Tver offered little resistance and meekly yielded to Moscow in 1485. Ryazan and Pskov alone retained their independence at the cost of abject subservience to their virtual suzerain.