It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that Russian archaeologists, ethnographers and orientalists began to take a serious interest in the Mongols and their influence. Archaeological excavations showed that Sarai had not been a settlement of tents, as imagined by the Russians until then, but a large medieval city of 75,000 people with stone buildings, well-laid-out streets and hydraulic systems, craft workshops and schools. Philologists established the Tatar origins of many of the basic Russian words in administration and finance – dengi (money), kazna (treasury), tamozhna (customs duty), barysh (profit) – suggesting that the Mongols had an impact in these spheres.
Many Russian families had Tatar names. Some descended from the Mongols who had stayed in Russia and entered into service in the Moscow court following the break-up of the Golden Horde. According to one estimate, 156 of the 915 noble families in the service of the tsar in the 1680s were of Tatar or other Asiatic origins. They were not as many as the Lithuanian and western European families, which made up almost half the noble class. But the true figure was probably higher because many Tatars Russified their names when they entered the nobility. Among these were some of the most famous names in Russian history: writers (Karamzin, Chaadaev, Turgenev, Bulgakov), composers (Rimsky-Korsakov), tsars (Boris Godunov) and revolutionaries (Bukharin).
It was not just the elites that stayed behind in Russia when the Mongols left. What we call ‘the Mongol invasion’ was in fact a gradual migration of nomadic tribes. They came in search of new pastures because of overpopulation in Mongolia. The populations of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are of mainly Mongol origin. But the nomads also settled further west. Some gave up their herds and became peasant farmers in Russia. Others took up trades and crafts, particularly those that serviced livestock herds, in which many of the basic Russian words have Tatar origins—loshad (horse), bazar (market), bashmak (shoe) and so on. Many towns in southern Russia and the Volga lands still have Tatar names—among them Penza, Chembat, Ardym, Anybei, Ardatov and Alatyr.