--- Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> Given the multitude of his immediate progeny, isn't
> it very likely
> that anyone in Muscovy can legitimately claim to be
> "a descendant
> [on the left side] of Genghiz Kahn?"
>
Nah, not that many. About 7% of the population of Central Asia carries the genetic marker that is postulated to have come from Genghis. (We don't have a sample of his DNA or even know where his tomb is, so this is speculation.) In Muscovy it would be even lower since the Mongols worked through Russian princes as intermediaries and didn't have much physical presence when they werent actually doing their marauding. Anyway Nabokov claimed to be a DIRECT MALE LINE descendent of Genghis, which is part of the snobbish tradition of the Russian aristocracy of trying to find/invent Mongol/Tatar roots for their families to establish antiquity. (Even the Romanov family has some Mongol blood.) Akhmatova did the same thing when she took her Tatar grandmother's last name -- even though there is some doubt she even had a Tatar grandmother. Though to be fair to Akhmatova, her father disowned her IIRC because he didn't want a poet in the family, so she changed her name.
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