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#13 - JRL 8023
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004
From: John Varoli <jdvaroli@yahoo.com>
Subject: re 8022-Alcohol

The statement from Jeremy Page's article on alcoholism and the Mongols is quite off the mark, mostly because it perpetuates the myth Russians love to cite, ``Inter-marriage with the Slavs and other ethnic groups was common.''

Though the Mongols were horrible destructive, in fact most historians consider them to have been absentee landlords who did not mingle with the local population. Except for Russians' passion to tell stories how their `beautiful' women were raped by the hordes, the Mongols usually killed everyone during the invasions, and if there was intermingling, it's only because the Mongols took back Russian women as trophies. If anything, there's more reason to be concerned with Mongols and Tatars having Russian blood in them than the other way around.

Again, except for their dozen or so brutal invasions, the Mongols were absentee landlords who left Moscovy alone as long as the tribute kept coming in from the Russian quisling princes (and how ironic that those Moscovite princes today are revered and sainted)