between the old democratic system of self-rule and the new totalitarian one.
Zakhar Berkut’s dignity, his faculty of statesmanship and his convincing, passionate defence of the people’s common right to self-government, free speech, free assembly, equality and justice, were responsible in a large measure for their continued independence. As long as a majority of them kept on struggling to retain their freedom and solidarity, the boyars could not spread their authority as rapidly as they would like and were forced to live agreeably within the communities, peacefully abiding by the laws and rules set up at town-mote at which they also sat among the elders sharing equal rights with all.
But such a state of affairs was exceedingly unpleasant to the boyars. They looked forward to times of war with as much anxious anticipation as to the greatest of feast days for then fortune smiled upon them. At once invoking their royal grant to power, they would use it to the fullest extent to destroy the people’s democratic form of government so that once the authority had passed into their hands it would never again need to be handed back.
But there were no major wars. The king of Red Rus, Danilo Romanowich, though he was very kind to the boyars, but not as kind as his father had been, could not help them very much, for he was too occupied with the competitive elimination of provincial kings in his ambition to acquire the crown of the greater kingdom of Kiev than he was with the protection of his part of the country from the up to then unheard of Mongol hordes, which like a thunder cloud had appeared ten years before on the Eastern border of Rus in the Donets plateau region and slew the defending Rus kings in the fierce onset of the desperate, bloody battle at the river Kalka. Evidently scared by the dauntless heroism of the Rus soldiers who held them at bay, they had then disappeared beyond the Kalka river and nothing more was heard from them for ten years.
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