What did two centuries of Mongol rule leave in Russia?

Administration. The Golden Horde ran a census, a tax system and a postal relay across its territories, and required Russian princes to collect and deliver the tribute - so the machinery of counting people and extracting money from them arrived with the conquerors and stayed after they left.

Moscow's rise is largely a story of exploiting that role. Its princes made themselves the Horde's preferred tax farmers, collected from rival principalities, skimmed, and used the position and the money to absorb their neighbours - so the city that eventually led the resistance had spent generations profiting from the arrangement. The Russian words for money, customs and post office all come through Turkic.

The larger claim - that the Mongol yoke explains Russian autocracy, its separation from the European Renaissance, and its subsequent political character - is a staple of Russian historiography and heavily contested. It was pushed hard by nineteenth-century writers who wanted an external explanation for the country's divergence from western Europe, and later by Soviet and post-Soviet writers with their own reasons. It is one of those explanations that is too convenient to be trusted and too plausible to dismiss.