From the 1250s on, the dominion of the Rus by the Golden Horde was uncontested. Mongol officials expected the population of the country to pay heavy tribute to their conquerors. In the Rus there appeared the baskaks, who gathered this tribute and committed acts of violence over population. The baskaks were Horde representatives sent to collect the tolls, tributes, or taxes from the Slavic population and to exercise control over the local local rulers who were subordinate to the Mongol khans.

The Rus princes were dependent on the khans and were obliged to ride hat in hand to the distant khan capitals where the conquerors decided whether a prince would return with khan grant and permission to reign or would be killed, charged by rivals with grave crimes before the mighty sovereigns. Often new Mongol hordes were sent to the Rus to support one prince against another or to suppress resistance to the occasion. And again the Rus land was ablaze, people perished, and buildings, frescos, and books were destroyed.

For 250 years the Mongol yoke hung over the Rus, and for a long time after its overthrow, the Rus still carried on an exhausting struggle against the forays of Kazanian, Astrakhanian, and Crimean khans who were supported by the sultan of Turkey. The invasions of conquerors from the East, superior in their numerical strength and military organization, exhausted the Rus for almost half of a millennium--throughout the Middle Ages of Russia--had left a black mark in the history of Russia.

The grave condition of the destroyed Rus of the second half of XIIIth century is well reproduced in the words of contemporaries, who saw the surprise invasion of the terrible and numerous enemy in light of a cosmic catastrophy. In the eyes of the Old Russian churchmen of the day, the Baty-khan was the embodiment of the biblical Nebuchadnessar, and they emphasized the ruinous results of the invasion not only for Rus but also for all Christianity.

The Mongol invasion brought enormous damage to the productive forces of the country. It was especially marked on the Russian towns, the hearths of the medieval culture. The extermination of the urban artisans undermined the very base of the development of the urban economy, handicrafts. The well-being of communities in the Middle ages rested on manual labour and labour was connected with professional training over many years. Following the Mongol invasion, some technical methods known in the Kievan Rus had been lost; in the archeological inventory, many objects, usual for the preceding epoch, were lost. Among them were the slate pryaslitses (a little weight of burnt clay or stone that was used to impede the rotation of the spindle), which was known from Neolithic times, and cornelian beads, glass bracelets, and amphoras-korchagas (large vessels, usually made of clay, that were used in the village household). Forever was lost the art of preparing ultra-thing enamel. Polychrome building ceramics also disappeared. For one hundred and fifty years there was no filigree or stamping of metal.

The destructive results of the foreign invasion also affected the economy. The links between town and country that had begun to arise were severed. The trade of great cities with the outlying districts was interruped. The Rus was cut off from world-trade routes at a time when to West European countries there enriched with the stream of gold, jewels, and spices from newly discovered overseas lands.

The Rus towns were weakened because of the systematical robbery, the heavy tribute required by the Horde. The weakening of Rus towns to a great extent delayed the formation of capitalist relationships and the development of bourgeois elements. Russia society for a long time remained feudal. If the pre-Mongol Rus developed to the level of the advanced countries of Europe at the time, the predominance of serfdom and the continuation of the feudal system impeded the social progress of Russia.

The detriment to the material base of the Rus and the hampering of her links with West European culture resulted in the weakening of her cultural development at the end of 13th and 14th centuries. This affected the literature of the day. An enormous number of written records and monuments perished. The chronicles record some instances of the destruction of books, but by them one may imagine to what extent the Russian written language had suffered. In 1328, when Muscovites were repelling the surprise attack of Tokhtamysh, the town-dwellers and neighboring villagers brought together their books to the stone churches to save them from the flames, and there there were so many of these books that they packed the inner rooms of the Kremlin's temples right up to the summits. All this wealth was destroyed when Tokhtamysh managed to treacherously burst into the town. In the Old Rus, books were loved and valued very much, and not without reason a chronicler of the 12th century called them "rivers, filling the universe." It is no mere chance that many of the undamaged manuscripts of the Old Russian literature had come to us through Novgorod, a city that was not destroyed. The discovery at the end of X18th century of the only manuscript of "The Lay of the Host of Igor" (also called "The Song of Igor's Campaign") perfectly demonstrates what masterpieces of the Old Rus literature simply disappeared with the invasions of the mongols, and the extent to which our understanding and appreciation of the Old Rus culture of the pre-Mongolian time are limited.

The invasion inflicted heavy damage upon Russian architecture which had reached amazing heights in pre-Mongolian times. Due to lack of materials and masters, construction of stone buildings ceased for half of a century. Revived at the end of XIIIth century, the practices suffered as masons working in architecture had lost many of the techniques of construction. Moscow's masters builders of the XIVth and XVth centuries revived the masonry of trimmed stone, though in the first half of XIIIth century, Vladimirian and Suzdalian architects were able to combine stone and brick, thick lime-tone and lime tuft. ???? The fine art of white-stone carving which made buildings of the preceding period so attractive had simply disappeared. Both the art of painting and the applied arts also declined.

Gradually Russia recovered from the Mongol invasion. Until the middle of the XIV century, lower standards in different spheres of material and spiritual culture were notable. New cultural and trade centers, Pskov and Novgorod, appeared, which established ties with the countries of the West. In the middle of 14th century, there was a period that showed the economic rise of the Rus, and there was a strengthening of local state formations. The battle of Kulikovo Field was a milestone on the way to the liberation of the country from foreign invaders.