The history of the golden horde and church-horde relations in soviet historiography

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest among Russian historians in the history of the Golden Horde. Tis also concerns one of the most interesting aspects of Russian-Horde relations: the relations between the Horde and the Church. Russian historical scholarship from before the Revolution also considered the relationship between the Russian Church and hierarchy and the authorities in the Golden Horde. However, those studies on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church only posed more questions while the details of the external contacts of Russian hierarchs during the Mongol period remained unknown. Tis has led to a renewed interest in this topic, which has resulted in a number of historical studies being publsihed during the past twenty years. Undoubtedly, modern studies have been largely based on the scholarship of the Soviet period. For this reason, then, a consideration of Soviet historical scholarship on this topic seems to be in order. In the present article, the author atempts to systematize the historiographical views on the questions of Church history and the history of the Horde in Soviet scholarship. Since the historiographical systems of the Soviet time-period are contaminated by political and ideological stereotypes, they reflect not only the ideas of their time, but also formulate may questions for scholars of history, some of which cannot be answered. As a whole, one finds in the Soviet historiography of this topic several stages of development. Tis reflect not only the evolution of Soviet historical scholarship, but also an evolution on the part of scholars of the level of understanding of the processes occurring inside the Golden Horde and in Russia in the 13th and 14th centuries.