Gostomysl The Wise.
The legend of Gostomysl is important for the understanding of the nature and the rationale of Stalinism, and of Soviet totalitarianism as such. It answers the following question: How did the first foreigner end up as the ruler of Russia at the dawn of Russian history, which officially takes off on its course in the year 862 AD?
(For history buffs, it is said, furthermore that, having found Rurik, the Novgorodians nextfound a way to marry him to the granddaughter of the late Elder Gostomysl, so that in the veins of every Rurikid, starting with Rurik’s immediate children, ran Russian blood! There is an alternative version of Rurik’s marriage to a Scandinavian princess, but, considering that Rurik himself is a basically legendary figure, and his wife, even more so, anybody’s version of Russia’s royal ancestry is just as good or just as shaky as another one. As far as I am concerned, it makes no sense to argue about such silly trifles as the ancestry of Russian rulers. We know that the later Russian rulers had practically no Russian blood in them anyway, but the instructive story of Catherine the Great gives us a sufficient answer already to the question of this fact’s importance. In other words, Russia has always been bigger than the specific national origin of her rulers, from Rurik to Catherine to Stalin. Her only demand to them has been that they embrace the Russianness of their sacred mission, and wholeheartedly and capably serve Russia’s national interest.)
Comrade Stalin liked this Gostomysl legend very much, and no wonder! It legitimized strong authoritarian (totalitarian, in Stalin’s case!) rule, and then Stalin was himself something of a “foreigner,” a Georgian who spoke Russian rather poorly and with a heavy accent. Yet, Russia had embraced him and given him the keys to the Kremlin, for, as long as he was in it not for his own aggrandizement, but only for the glory of Mother Russia, he was an acceptable choice. Well, Stalin the Georgian (like Rurik the Varangian before him, and a few others in between) did measure up to the task!
…A lesson to those who may profit from it.
Kiev And Rus.
Every educated person in the world reasonably interested in Russian history is familiar with the term Kievan Rus, which refers to the early period of Russian history from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when Russia had came to be identified with her principal city and capital which happened to be Kiev. One of the defining events of Russian history, her acceptance of Christianity, is directly linked to Kiev, where--in the year 987--Russia’s ruler St. Vladimir was baptized by an emissary of the Patriarch of Constantinople, following which event all Russia, starting with Kiev and spreading north, was Christianized in the course of the next couple of years. (For "monumental-historical" reasons, 988 has been stated as the official year of Russia’s acceptance of Christianity, although this may not be technically correct. But then, such technicalities are not important, and even trivial and annoying, as long as the official year is understood as a symbolic date, thus parrying the nitpicking epées of the critical historians.)
The colossal importance of this fact must not be dismissed or misinterpreted. Today Kiev is the capital of an independent state, which is not Russia, but Ukraine. Who has more historical right to Kiev, the Russians or the non-Russian Ukrainians? Mind you that ethnic Russian Ukrainians, who constitute a large portion of the Ukrainian population with overwhelming majorities in Eastern Ukraine and in the Crimea, are quite anxious to rejoin the Russian Federation, but they will never be allowed by Russia to separate from Ukraine, leaving the holy city of Kiev under foreign occupation… (A very similar argument was raised by the State of Israel against Palestine and in that dispute the majority of the Western supporters of Ukrainian independence from Russia have resolutely taken the opposite stand.)
Ironically, there is a third claimant to Kiev’s ownership, which is Poland, but the Polish chances of having a say in this matter are slim, to put it mildly. Still, in the messy state of the present-day world order, no claims of this nature ought to be casually dismissed. (As a matter of fact, the most nationalistically-minded parts of Ukraine, her Western territories, are actually the most contested ones, with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania claiming adjoining parts of Ukraine for themselves, and Ukraine responding with counterclaims of her own!)
To be quite honest, modern independent Ukraine is a rather artificial entity, containing parts that historically had never belonged to her. Which makes it all the more important to understand the historical reality behind the historical entity known as Kievan Rus. I encourage all interested readers to personally dig into the great multitude of available sources on this subject, as in this entry I won’t attempt to discuss its many details and aspects. What I am offering here is perhaps a teaser, touching on a few relevant historical facts and nuances.
As I already noted, in the earlier Gostomysl/Rurik entry, Prince Rurik was established as the Grand Prince of Novgorod, and also of all Russia, which was centered around Novgorod at the time. His brothers Sineus and Truvor received smaller towns from him, which, too, were part of the Russian Principality, and thus counted under Rurik’s domain. Having been established, Rurik was eager to take control of the known trade route “from the Vikings to the Greeks,” and with this in mind, he sent two of his men, Askold and Dir, to Constantinople. On their way south along the river Dnieper they saw a settlement, which the inhabitants called Kiev, after its legendary founder Kiy (he had three participating siblings of lesser importance), who is said to have founded Kiev in 482 AD (one of those symbolic dates which make life easier to all non-critical historians). Askold and Dir with their entourage then decided to take over the settlement, and were effective rulers of Kiev, until Prince Oleg who ruled Russia as regent after Rurik’s death showed up, accused them of usurping power in Kiev, killed them both, and himself became the ruler of Kiev, moving the Russian capital from Novgorod to Kiev, thus laying the foundation of Kievan Rus.
Before we move forward with this story, the origin of Kiev and its native inhabitants is of great interest. The tribe that had settled in these mid-Dnieper lands is known as Polyane. Curiously, the Polish nation claims its ancestors also to be of the Polyane tribe, and on these grounds has claimed Kiev and much of Ukraine as its rightful domain. There is a lingering confusion about this still going on, I suspect deliberately, on the part of Poland. But here is the historical reality which is admittedly confusing indeed. Polyane means people of the fields, and the privilege of living in the fields was not limited to the early inhabitants of Poland, who were in fact a West Slavic tribe. At the same time there was an East Slavic tribe also called Polyane, and the original Kievans belonged to it, and not to the West Slavic tribe which populated ancient Poland… (End of story, as far as I am concerned, but, I am sure, not, as far as many others are.)
Returning to the history of Kievan Rus, Kiev, thus, became “the mother of all Russian cities,” a place sacred to the Russian heart. It was in Kiev that Russian Christian Orthodoxy was born in 988. The peak of Kievan power falls upon the reign of the great Russian ruler Yaroslav Mudry (1019-1054) who has been named as the greatest Ukrainian in a recent Ukrainian national poll. (Which makes no sense, as there was nothing that can be identified as “Ukrainian” in him! Moreover, the pride of Russia’s Baltic Fleet today is the recently commissioned frigate The Yaroslav Mudry.) Ironically, the glorious period of Yaroslav’s greatness followed by a decline parallels the experience of Charlemagne whose Empire was split between his sons. Yaroslav’s five sons (later down to three) inherited a divided domain, and, although Kiev’s supremacy was not brought down right away, it was badly shaken then and there, and could not possibly survive for too much longer.
Indeed, after a protracted series of internecine struggles Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky son of Yuri Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow, perpetrated the act of ultimate disrespect: having defeated his rivals to the Prince of Kiev title, he gave the city away to his vassals, while transferring the Russian capital to the northern city of Vladimir, which he liked much more, and where he had his private residence Bogolyubovo. This event took place in 1169, after which the city of Kiev lost its political and administrative significance. (This Karamzin version has been contested by more recent historians, but it does not differ in principle from the commonly accepted assertion that the great city of Kiev had already lost its importance as the Russian capital prior to it being sacked and burned by the Mongols in December 1240.)
The subsequent history of Kiev has it under the control of the Golden Horde from 1240 to 1362, annexed to Lithuania from 1362 to 1569 and declared part of the Polish Kingdom after the 1569 merger of Poland and Lithuania. After the Bogdan Khmelnitzky rebellion, and the 1667 Treaty of Andrusovo between Russia and Poland, Kiev was returned to Russia. Kiev and Ukraine would remain an integral part of the Russian Empire until the chaos of the 1917 and the Russian Civil War, during which time Ukraine either fell under German occupation or split into parts declaring themselves “independent” for different conflicting reasons, and with different conflicting allegiances. As soon as the chaos of 1918-1921 settled down, Ukraine was whole again and again as part of the Russian Empire, this time (since 1922, to be precise) called the USSR.
The tragic farce of the Soviet Union’s collapse brought about the “independence” of its former constituents, some of them with fairly legitimate claims to national identity, while others quite preposterous. Ukraine was among the latter kind.
To sum it up, speaking of Kiev’s (or Ukrainian) “independence,” such a notion is a demonstrably artificial construct. Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea are predominantly Russian entities, while most parts of Western Ukraine are being claimed by other nations.
On the other hand, despite Kiev’s decline in the twelfth century, its destruction in the thirteenth, and foreign occupation thereafter, it has never ceased to be the mother of Russian cities, the cradle of Russian Orthodox Christianity, one of the most intensely Russian places anywhere in the world.
Saint Prince Alexander Nevsky.
Saint Alexander Nevsky has been voted The Greatest Russian in the recent Russian national poll, conducted under the designation Imya Rossiya (Name Russia). For the details on this poll and its results, please consult the Imya Rossiya project, which was discussed in a series of entries, in my Russia section.
The story of the greatest Russian and canonized Russian Saint, Prince Alexander Nevsky presents us with a veritable treasure trove of understanding the sources and motivations of Soviet and modern Russian foreign policy. The far-reaching historical significance of this story is capsulated in the incisive question of how and why Prince Alexander Nevsky got his sainthood from the Russian Church. Asking this question allows us to get straight to the point, bringing us face to face with one of those gems, which reflect light not so much into the eerie darkness of the past, as into the foggy dimness of the future. Not surprisingly, therefore, Alexander Nevsky was one of Stalin’s favorite historical personages, and Stalin even commissioned a movie about his heroic deeds, which broadly hints, but does not tell the whole story.
The standard story of Alexander Nevsky (leaving aside his Christian hagiography) pictures him as a warrior of extraordinary might and skill since an early age, who distinguished himself against foreign invaders from the West (Swedes, Germans, and Lithuanians, under King Mindaugas, the founder of the Lithuanian State). He is also known for having refused help against Russia’s enemies, self-servingly offered by Pope Innocent IV, in exchange for Russia’s submission to Catholicism. To the contrary, his decision was to snub the West altogether, making a deal with the Mongols instead. Under this deal, Russia was to pay tribute to the Golden Horde, which was tantamount to submission, in the eyes of some unsympathetic historians, who questioned Alexander’s greatness and eligibility for sainthood on the grounds of this deal and also on the grounds of his rather extraordinary cruelty in dealing with domestic opposition and internal rebellions.
Sympathetic historians, on the other hand, like to stress Alexander’s pragmatism in dealing with the Mongol situation, which was militarily hopeless for Russia at the time, and left him no choice but to accept the yoke. It was not so lopsided however as Alexander extracted a lot of benefits for Russia from his deal. As a result, Russia was spared from further plunder and destruction by the Mongols, was able to regroup, and to prepare militarily for a future war of national liberation, choosing the proper time, when Russia was stronger and the Golden Horde was weaker… In other words, Alexander Nevsky can be properly called Russia’s savior at a time, when the nation’s fate was hanging in the balance, and on all accounts, he well deserved his sainthood. As for his manifest cruelty, well, it was a sure-footed sign of strong leadership; the alternative, being a sign of weakness, was unacceptable.
Let us now get back to the Alexander Nevsky movie.
The movie’s centerpiece is Alexander’s victory over the Teutonic knights in 1242, and his stern warning to all enemies of Russia that, although all foreigners were welcome guests, “all those who come with a sword shall perish by the sword.” There is an interesting personage in the movie, one of Alexander’s most trusted lieutenants, played by the great Russian actor Nikolai Okhlopkov, whose character’s name is Buslay, which sounds a lot like a Tatar name… This matter, however, is left unclear in the movie, although Okhlopkov’s distinctly Russian facial features leave an impression that Buslay is Russian through and through. There is a suggestive hint, behind the scenes, that this Buslay may indeed have been a Tatar troop commander helping the Russian troops to achieve their victory over the Teutons, with all that this implies.
It is a lesser known fact, therefore, perhaps, completely unknown to my readers, that prior to the decisively won battles with the invaders from the West, Alexander had made a sweet deal with the invaders from the East, namely, the Mongols and the Tatars, who had ravaged most of Southern Russia, under the banners of Genghis Khan’s heirs. Choosing the lesser of the two evils, he had become a blood brother of Temuchin’s great-grandson Sartak, who was also the elder son of the great Batu Khan. (Curiously, the above-mentioned Pope Innocent IV later insisted that Sartak was a Christian, probably based on a rumor that he, Sartak, was a blood-brother to a Christian prince?) Alexander’s bold move thus killed three birds with a single stone: he deflected the onslaught of the fierce Mongol invaders away from Northern Russia sending the main Mongol armies westward (that is, against Russia’s actual and potential enemies!); he also found himself a powerful ally against the West, who sent him troops to help defeat the Western invaders. Perhaps, there was indeed a historical Buslay, commanding those troops, but, whoever he was, Alexander’s plan had indeed succeeded, as evidenced by the fact that the Russian Church was sufficiently moved by his achievement, to bestow on him her highest honor, which is sainthood. There was, of course, a third bird: by becoming “related” to the great Batu Khan, Alexander received a markedly preferential treatment from the Golden Horde in Russia’s domestic squabbles. Becoming the most powerful Prince in Russia was helpful not only to him personally, but, eventually, to Russia’s consolidation under one strong leadership. (Historically, Russia was still a long way from achieving this goal, but Alexander’s elevation was a good step toward it.)
As for Stalin, he learned most from history, more, in fact, than from the life surrounding him, and in World War II, his grand strategy vis-à-vis Japan was based on two preeminent whales: Saint Alexander Nevsky’s lesson of how to use the East against the West, and also on… Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly. (I trust that my reader is sufficiently well educated to know what this opera is about, and to understand its long-reaching implications for the East meets West relationship, considering that Russia, being neither, or, perhaps, both, can thus successfully play the two against each other…)
(And as a postscript to this entry, even if I have mentioned this in a couple of places elsewhere, my parents gave me the name Alexander in honor of Saint Alexander Nevsky, Russia’s Patron Saint in World War II, which makes my interest in this great Russian Prince even more personal.)
The Two-Headed Eagle.
Everybody with an elementary interest in world history seems to know that before Catherine the Great and Peter the Great, there was another Great Russian ruler, Tsar Ivan Grozny, known to the English-speaking countries as Ivan the Terrible. Some visitors to Moscow, familiar with her Kremlin, further assume that its ‘Belfry of Ivan the Great’ was a relic of Grozny’s reign. This is not the case, however.
Well before those two certified Greats, Peter and Catherine, and a good hundred years before Tsar Ivan IV Grozny, his grandfather Ivan III was the ruler of Russia, and it was he who is officially known as Ivan the Great in Russian history.
And it was Ivan III, from whose momentous, yet somehow undervalued, reign originates Russia’s Manifest Destiny, the tale of Three Romes, and a Fourth shall not be.
The Russian Double-Headed Eagle has been the most recognizable symbol of Russia’s nationhood (except for the intensely familiar Soviet State symbols: the red flag with its hammer and sickle, and the distinctive star-crowned emblem of the globe, embraced, inside a semi-wreath, by the two heaps of wheat), ostensibly since times immemorial, but more accurately, yes, since the reign of Ivan the Great!
Originally, however, the Russian double-headed eagle was not Russia’s at all, but had been the proud coat of arms of the illustrious house of the Paleologs, of the Byzantine fame. The eagle’s two heads, looking left and right, represented the two parts of a divided Roman Empire, whose sole heir the Byzantine Empire had claimed to be. Just as the Turks were demolishing the remnants of that Byzantine Empire, Thomas Paleolog, the brother of the last Emperor of Byzantium escaped, rather ignominiously, the dangers of the invasion by seeking refuge in Rome, where he speedily arrived with his little daughter Sophia. The reason why his flight can be justly called “ignominious” is that, although he was a Greek Orthodox Christian by religion, yet he had the nerve to seek protection from the biggest nemesis of Eastern Orthodoxy, the “Apostate Bishop of Rome,” a.k.a. the Pope.
Alas for the Christian honor of the Byzantine Empire, he was not the only one to seek the Pope’s help. Even the highest leaders of the Byzantine Orthodox Church were doing exactly the same thing, and to no avail, as it turned out, but to the greatest humiliation and utter discreditation of their Church, leaving the Russian Orthodoxy standing alone, for everybody to see, as the last bastion of pure Christianity on the face of the earth. (For more on this subject, see my entry The Three Romes of Russia in the Russia section, and similar entries elsewhere.)
With this windfall in his possession, Pope Paul II devised a rather clever plan, in his own mind. He was also afraid of the fierce power of the Turks himself, but, at the same time, he never forsook his Christian duty to convert the world into the Roman-Catholic faith. The splendid opportunity to impose the Unia on the Greek Church had already been taken by the late Pope Eugenius IV (with mixed success, I might add). But Paul II now had a plan to convert Russia to Catholicism, at the same time seeking a united military front against the Turks with the mighty ruler of Russia Grand Duke Ivan III, who, as I said before, is remembered by history (deservedly) as Ivan the Great. And all of this hinged on marrying the widowed Russian ruler to the heiress of the old Byzantine glory, for which purpose the Pope started playing the hallowed role of an international matchmaker.
His mission was successful, insofar as that royal marriage was concerned, even though he did not live to see the fruit of his labor, that was to be reaped by his successor Pope Sixtus IV of the Sistine Chapel fame. (The ignorance exhibited by both these Popes regarding the Russian determination to cling to Orthodoxy, and to snub any effort at conversion can be excused: after all, this stratagem was worth a try!) The wedding of Ivan and Sophia was lavishly celebrated in Moscow in the spring of 1472 with just one small twist, which should not surprise history buffs: Sophia was a bride in absentia.
She arrived in Moscow six months later, when the wedding was properly celebrated again, and now, at last, properly consummated. Sophia was to become the mother of many children to Ivan’s delight (even though he already had a son from his first marriage), but, in the meantime, she came bearing an amazing gift, which was of such extraordinary consequence that it is hard to imagine that even Ivan, who was brilliant enough to recognize its potential significance, could have foreseen that it was fated to exceed his wildest expectations, to have an enduring effect on the ages to come, and to shine even brighter in the next millennium of Russian and world history.
Sophia presented her husband with nothing less than the Paleolog Coat of Arms, the double-headed eagle, and by its virtue the Russian ruler was now the legitimate inheritor of the glory of the Roman Empire! Her symbolic dowry explicitly meant that the Byzantine Empire was no longer capable of carrying the torch of uncorrupted Christianity, passed from Rome to Constantinople during the heretical reign of Charlemagne, according to the traditional version elaborated by the Orthodox Church, and, subsequently, by the rulers of Russia. So, now this torch, or, to be precise, this double-headed eagle coat of arms, originally representing East and West, but now coming to represent the whole world, was passed to Moscow, Rome Number Three and the Last!
But this is not the end of our story of the two-headed eagle. With the realization that Russia had officially become the sole heir to the glory of Rome came the compulsion to capitalize on it. The legend was born, by artificial insemination, at Ivan’s royal court, of how Tsar Ivan, the descendant of Prince Rurik, was also an heir to the most respected Emperor of the original Roman Empire Augustus Caesar. According to it, there came a time, during Augustus’s long reign, when the Emperor became old and tired, and decided to divide his vast domain among his younger brothers. (Sic! That was how the matter of succession was decided in Russia at the time, and, as they say, all politics are local, and, in this case, “when in Moscow, Rome does as the Russians do!”) One of the brothers, Prussus, received the lands in the East, which subsequently were to be known as Prussia. Prussus, of course, was himself the father of a long and splendid dynasty, and his heir, in the fourteenth generation, was none other than Prince Rurik, the more recent ancestor of Ivan the Great! (…Eureka! Russia and Prussia are related, after all! I wonder if Mr. Putin has already shared this wonderful news with Frau Merkel?!)
Sorry to spoil the charm, but this hastily manufactured legend turned out to be so embarrassing, in the eyes of Ivan’s heirs, that it could not possibly survive as a credible reconstruction of Russia’s royal family tree. I am, however, reluctant to dismiss it, as it throws a revealing light on Russia’s disposition at the time, not to seek her Third Rome legitimacy in the much-discredited Byzantium (except for her eager appropriation of the Second Rome’s emblem), but, cutting out the middleman, to go straight to the source of royal authority, the first Emperor of the First Rome ipse.
By the same token, Ivan the Great no longer had an interest in the skills of the Byzantine artists, choosing Westerners instead (and thus breaking with the tradition), for Moscow’s rebuilding spree, which included a major reconstruction of Moscow’s greatest pride, the Kremlin.
The legend of Gostomysl is important for the understanding of the nature and the rationale of Stalinism, and of Soviet totalitarianism as such. It answers the following question: How did the first foreigner end up as the ruler of Russia at the dawn of Russian history, which officially takes off on its course in the year 862 AD?
This legend is told somewhat differently, depending on who is telling it. As is always the case with legends, historians are split on the historicity of Gostomysl, but this is a matter of little importance. As Pushkin says,
“The tale is a lie, but it contains a hint;
A lesson to those who may profit from it.”
I first became familiar with the legend of Gostomysl at a very young age from a superb reproduction of Karl Bryullov’s painting The Death of Gostomysl in a folder of Treasures of Russian Art in my home library. Its hint to me has been that personal freedoms are not exactly among Russia’s national desiderata. According to the legend, the Russians used to be free once, and the freest of them was the great city of Novgorod. In fact, at a certain point its “freedom” had grown so great that violence had become rampant, corruption pervasive, and moral depravity had struck at the very heart of Russia’s beleaguered communities. Therefore in the year 862 a delegation of respectable Novgorodian citizens visited their ailing Elder Gostomysl, who was lying in bed ready to die. “Our freedom has got out of hand. Tell us what to do!” they complained. With his dying effort, Gostomysl rose up in bed. "Go abroad," he rasped, "Find there a great warrior, the sound of whose name alone can strike fear in the hearts of his neighbors. Tell him then: ‘Great is our land, but there is no order in it. Come, rule over us!’” With these last words Gostomysl died. The delegation was determined to follow their beloved elder’s last will and testament to the letter, and soon after that, the capable Varangian warlord Rurik was installed in Novgorod as the first autocratic ruler of Russia.(For history buffs, it is said, furthermore that, having found Rurik, the Novgorodians nextfound a way to marry him to the granddaughter of the late Elder Gostomysl, so that in the veins of every Rurikid, starting with Rurik’s immediate children, ran Russian blood! There is an alternative version of Rurik’s marriage to a Scandinavian princess, but, considering that Rurik himself is a basically legendary figure, and his wife, even more so, anybody’s version of Russia’s royal ancestry is just as good or just as shaky as another one. As far as I am concerned, it makes no sense to argue about such silly trifles as the ancestry of Russian rulers. We know that the later Russian rulers had practically no Russian blood in them anyway, but the instructive story of Catherine the Great gives us a sufficient answer already to the question of this fact’s importance. In other words, Russia has always been bigger than the specific national origin of her rulers, from Rurik to Catherine to Stalin. Her only demand to them has been that they embrace the Russianness of their sacred mission, and wholeheartedly and capably serve Russia’s national interest.)
Comrade Stalin liked this Gostomysl legend very much, and no wonder! It legitimized strong authoritarian (totalitarian, in Stalin’s case!) rule, and then Stalin was himself something of a “foreigner,” a Georgian who spoke Russian rather poorly and with a heavy accent. Yet, Russia had embraced him and given him the keys to the Kremlin, for, as long as he was in it not for his own aggrandizement, but only for the glory of Mother Russia, he was an acceptable choice. Well, Stalin the Georgian (like Rurik the Varangian before him, and a few others in between) did measure up to the task!
…A lesson to those who may profit from it.
Kiev And Rus.
Every educated person in the world reasonably interested in Russian history is familiar with the term Kievan Rus, which refers to the early period of Russian history from the ninth to the thirteenth century, when Russia had came to be identified with her principal city and capital which happened to be Kiev. One of the defining events of Russian history, her acceptance of Christianity, is directly linked to Kiev, where--in the year 987--Russia’s ruler St. Vladimir was baptized by an emissary of the Patriarch of Constantinople, following which event all Russia, starting with Kiev and spreading north, was Christianized in the course of the next couple of years. (For "monumental-historical" reasons, 988 has been stated as the official year of Russia’s acceptance of Christianity, although this may not be technically correct. But then, such technicalities are not important, and even trivial and annoying, as long as the official year is understood as a symbolic date, thus parrying the nitpicking epées of the critical historians.)
The colossal importance of this fact must not be dismissed or misinterpreted. Today Kiev is the capital of an independent state, which is not Russia, but Ukraine. Who has more historical right to Kiev, the Russians or the non-Russian Ukrainians? Mind you that ethnic Russian Ukrainians, who constitute a large portion of the Ukrainian population with overwhelming majorities in Eastern Ukraine and in the Crimea, are quite anxious to rejoin the Russian Federation, but they will never be allowed by Russia to separate from Ukraine, leaving the holy city of Kiev under foreign occupation… (A very similar argument was raised by the State of Israel against Palestine and in that dispute the majority of the Western supporters of Ukrainian independence from Russia have resolutely taken the opposite stand.)
Ironically, there is a third claimant to Kiev’s ownership, which is Poland, but the Polish chances of having a say in this matter are slim, to put it mildly. Still, in the messy state of the present-day world order, no claims of this nature ought to be casually dismissed. (As a matter of fact, the most nationalistically-minded parts of Ukraine, her Western territories, are actually the most contested ones, with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania claiming adjoining parts of Ukraine for themselves, and Ukraine responding with counterclaims of her own!)
To be quite honest, modern independent Ukraine is a rather artificial entity, containing parts that historically had never belonged to her. Which makes it all the more important to understand the historical reality behind the historical entity known as Kievan Rus. I encourage all interested readers to personally dig into the great multitude of available sources on this subject, as in this entry I won’t attempt to discuss its many details and aspects. What I am offering here is perhaps a teaser, touching on a few relevant historical facts and nuances.
As I already noted, in the earlier Gostomysl/Rurik entry, Prince Rurik was established as the Grand Prince of Novgorod, and also of all Russia, which was centered around Novgorod at the time. His brothers Sineus and Truvor received smaller towns from him, which, too, were part of the Russian Principality, and thus counted under Rurik’s domain. Having been established, Rurik was eager to take control of the known trade route “from the Vikings to the Greeks,” and with this in mind, he sent two of his men, Askold and Dir, to Constantinople. On their way south along the river Dnieper they saw a settlement, which the inhabitants called Kiev, after its legendary founder Kiy (he had three participating siblings of lesser importance), who is said to have founded Kiev in 482 AD (one of those symbolic dates which make life easier to all non-critical historians). Askold and Dir with their entourage then decided to take over the settlement, and were effective rulers of Kiev, until Prince Oleg who ruled Russia as regent after Rurik’s death showed up, accused them of usurping power in Kiev, killed them both, and himself became the ruler of Kiev, moving the Russian capital from Novgorod to Kiev, thus laying the foundation of Kievan Rus.
Before we move forward with this story, the origin of Kiev and its native inhabitants is of great interest. The tribe that had settled in these mid-Dnieper lands is known as Polyane. Curiously, the Polish nation claims its ancestors also to be of the Polyane tribe, and on these grounds has claimed Kiev and much of Ukraine as its rightful domain. There is a lingering confusion about this still going on, I suspect deliberately, on the part of Poland. But here is the historical reality which is admittedly confusing indeed. Polyane means people of the fields, and the privilege of living in the fields was not limited to the early inhabitants of Poland, who were in fact a West Slavic tribe. At the same time there was an East Slavic tribe also called Polyane, and the original Kievans belonged to it, and not to the West Slavic tribe which populated ancient Poland… (End of story, as far as I am concerned, but, I am sure, not, as far as many others are.)
Returning to the history of Kievan Rus, Kiev, thus, became “the mother of all Russian cities,” a place sacred to the Russian heart. It was in Kiev that Russian Christian Orthodoxy was born in 988. The peak of Kievan power falls upon the reign of the great Russian ruler Yaroslav Mudry (1019-1054) who has been named as the greatest Ukrainian in a recent Ukrainian national poll. (Which makes no sense, as there was nothing that can be identified as “Ukrainian” in him! Moreover, the pride of Russia’s Baltic Fleet today is the recently commissioned frigate The Yaroslav Mudry.) Ironically, the glorious period of Yaroslav’s greatness followed by a decline parallels the experience of Charlemagne whose Empire was split between his sons. Yaroslav’s five sons (later down to three) inherited a divided domain, and, although Kiev’s supremacy was not brought down right away, it was badly shaken then and there, and could not possibly survive for too much longer.
Indeed, after a protracted series of internecine struggles Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky son of Yuri Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow, perpetrated the act of ultimate disrespect: having defeated his rivals to the Prince of Kiev title, he gave the city away to his vassals, while transferring the Russian capital to the northern city of Vladimir, which he liked much more, and where he had his private residence Bogolyubovo. This event took place in 1169, after which the city of Kiev lost its political and administrative significance. (This Karamzin version has been contested by more recent historians, but it does not differ in principle from the commonly accepted assertion that the great city of Kiev had already lost its importance as the Russian capital prior to it being sacked and burned by the Mongols in December 1240.)
The subsequent history of Kiev has it under the control of the Golden Horde from 1240 to 1362, annexed to Lithuania from 1362 to 1569 and declared part of the Polish Kingdom after the 1569 merger of Poland and Lithuania. After the Bogdan Khmelnitzky rebellion, and the 1667 Treaty of Andrusovo between Russia and Poland, Kiev was returned to Russia. Kiev and Ukraine would remain an integral part of the Russian Empire until the chaos of the 1917 and the Russian Civil War, during which time Ukraine either fell under German occupation or split into parts declaring themselves “independent” for different conflicting reasons, and with different conflicting allegiances. As soon as the chaos of 1918-1921 settled down, Ukraine was whole again and again as part of the Russian Empire, this time (since 1922, to be precise) called the USSR.
The tragic farce of the Soviet Union’s collapse brought about the “independence” of its former constituents, some of them with fairly legitimate claims to national identity, while others quite preposterous. Ukraine was among the latter kind.
To sum it up, speaking of Kiev’s (or Ukrainian) “independence,” such a notion is a demonstrably artificial construct. Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea are predominantly Russian entities, while most parts of Western Ukraine are being claimed by other nations.
On the other hand, despite Kiev’s decline in the twelfth century, its destruction in the thirteenth, and foreign occupation thereafter, it has never ceased to be the mother of Russian cities, the cradle of Russian Orthodox Christianity, one of the most intensely Russian places anywhere in the world.
Saint Prince Alexander Nevsky.
Saint Alexander Nevsky has been voted The Greatest Russian in the recent Russian national poll, conducted under the designation Imya Rossiya (Name Russia). For the details on this poll and its results, please consult the Imya Rossiya project, which was discussed in a series of entries, in my Russia section.
The story of the greatest Russian and canonized Russian Saint, Prince Alexander Nevsky presents us with a veritable treasure trove of understanding the sources and motivations of Soviet and modern Russian foreign policy. The far-reaching historical significance of this story is capsulated in the incisive question of how and why Prince Alexander Nevsky got his sainthood from the Russian Church. Asking this question allows us to get straight to the point, bringing us face to face with one of those gems, which reflect light not so much into the eerie darkness of the past, as into the foggy dimness of the future. Not surprisingly, therefore, Alexander Nevsky was one of Stalin’s favorite historical personages, and Stalin even commissioned a movie about his heroic deeds, which broadly hints, but does not tell the whole story.
The standard story of Alexander Nevsky (leaving aside his Christian hagiography) pictures him as a warrior of extraordinary might and skill since an early age, who distinguished himself against foreign invaders from the West (Swedes, Germans, and Lithuanians, under King Mindaugas, the founder of the Lithuanian State). He is also known for having refused help against Russia’s enemies, self-servingly offered by Pope Innocent IV, in exchange for Russia’s submission to Catholicism. To the contrary, his decision was to snub the West altogether, making a deal with the Mongols instead. Under this deal, Russia was to pay tribute to the Golden Horde, which was tantamount to submission, in the eyes of some unsympathetic historians, who questioned Alexander’s greatness and eligibility for sainthood on the grounds of this deal and also on the grounds of his rather extraordinary cruelty in dealing with domestic opposition and internal rebellions.
Sympathetic historians, on the other hand, like to stress Alexander’s pragmatism in dealing with the Mongol situation, which was militarily hopeless for Russia at the time, and left him no choice but to accept the yoke. It was not so lopsided however as Alexander extracted a lot of benefits for Russia from his deal. As a result, Russia was spared from further plunder and destruction by the Mongols, was able to regroup, and to prepare militarily for a future war of national liberation, choosing the proper time, when Russia was stronger and the Golden Horde was weaker… In other words, Alexander Nevsky can be properly called Russia’s savior at a time, when the nation’s fate was hanging in the balance, and on all accounts, he well deserved his sainthood. As for his manifest cruelty, well, it was a sure-footed sign of strong leadership; the alternative, being a sign of weakness, was unacceptable.
Let us now get back to the Alexander Nevsky movie.
The movie’s centerpiece is Alexander’s victory over the Teutonic knights in 1242, and his stern warning to all enemies of Russia that, although all foreigners were welcome guests, “all those who come with a sword shall perish by the sword.” There is an interesting personage in the movie, one of Alexander’s most trusted lieutenants, played by the great Russian actor Nikolai Okhlopkov, whose character’s name is Buslay, which sounds a lot like a Tatar name… This matter, however, is left unclear in the movie, although Okhlopkov’s distinctly Russian facial features leave an impression that Buslay is Russian through and through. There is a suggestive hint, behind the scenes, that this Buslay may indeed have been a Tatar troop commander helping the Russian troops to achieve their victory over the Teutons, with all that this implies.
It is a lesser known fact, therefore, perhaps, completely unknown to my readers, that prior to the decisively won battles with the invaders from the West, Alexander had made a sweet deal with the invaders from the East, namely, the Mongols and the Tatars, who had ravaged most of Southern Russia, under the banners of Genghis Khan’s heirs. Choosing the lesser of the two evils, he had become a blood brother of Temuchin’s great-grandson Sartak, who was also the elder son of the great Batu Khan. (Curiously, the above-mentioned Pope Innocent IV later insisted that Sartak was a Christian, probably based on a rumor that he, Sartak, was a blood-brother to a Christian prince?) Alexander’s bold move thus killed three birds with a single stone: he deflected the onslaught of the fierce Mongol invaders away from Northern Russia sending the main Mongol armies westward (that is, against Russia’s actual and potential enemies!); he also found himself a powerful ally against the West, who sent him troops to help defeat the Western invaders. Perhaps, there was indeed a historical Buslay, commanding those troops, but, whoever he was, Alexander’s plan had indeed succeeded, as evidenced by the fact that the Russian Church was sufficiently moved by his achievement, to bestow on him her highest honor, which is sainthood. There was, of course, a third bird: by becoming “related” to the great Batu Khan, Alexander received a markedly preferential treatment from the Golden Horde in Russia’s domestic squabbles. Becoming the most powerful Prince in Russia was helpful not only to him personally, but, eventually, to Russia’s consolidation under one strong leadership. (Historically, Russia was still a long way from achieving this goal, but Alexander’s elevation was a good step toward it.)
As for Stalin, he learned most from history, more, in fact, than from the life surrounding him, and in World War II, his grand strategy vis-à-vis Japan was based on two preeminent whales: Saint Alexander Nevsky’s lesson of how to use the East against the West, and also on… Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly. (I trust that my reader is sufficiently well educated to know what this opera is about, and to understand its long-reaching implications for the East meets West relationship, considering that Russia, being neither, or, perhaps, both, can thus successfully play the two against each other…)
(And as a postscript to this entry, even if I have mentioned this in a couple of places elsewhere, my parents gave me the name Alexander in honor of Saint Alexander Nevsky, Russia’s Patron Saint in World War II, which makes my interest in this great Russian Prince even more personal.)
The Two-Headed Eagle.
Everybody with an elementary interest in world history seems to know that before Catherine the Great and Peter the Great, there was another Great Russian ruler, Tsar Ivan Grozny, known to the English-speaking countries as Ivan the Terrible. Some visitors to Moscow, familiar with her Kremlin, further assume that its ‘Belfry of Ivan the Great’ was a relic of Grozny’s reign. This is not the case, however.
Well before those two certified Greats, Peter and Catherine, and a good hundred years before Tsar Ivan IV Grozny, his grandfather Ivan III was the ruler of Russia, and it was he who is officially known as Ivan the Great in Russian history.
And it was Ivan III, from whose momentous, yet somehow undervalued, reign originates Russia’s Manifest Destiny, the tale of Three Romes, and a Fourth shall not be.
The Russian Double-Headed Eagle has been the most recognizable symbol of Russia’s nationhood (except for the intensely familiar Soviet State symbols: the red flag with its hammer and sickle, and the distinctive star-crowned emblem of the globe, embraced, inside a semi-wreath, by the two heaps of wheat), ostensibly since times immemorial, but more accurately, yes, since the reign of Ivan the Great!
Originally, however, the Russian double-headed eagle was not Russia’s at all, but had been the proud coat of arms of the illustrious house of the Paleologs, of the Byzantine fame. The eagle’s two heads, looking left and right, represented the two parts of a divided Roman Empire, whose sole heir the Byzantine Empire had claimed to be. Just as the Turks were demolishing the remnants of that Byzantine Empire, Thomas Paleolog, the brother of the last Emperor of Byzantium escaped, rather ignominiously, the dangers of the invasion by seeking refuge in Rome, where he speedily arrived with his little daughter Sophia. The reason why his flight can be justly called “ignominious” is that, although he was a Greek Orthodox Christian by religion, yet he had the nerve to seek protection from the biggest nemesis of Eastern Orthodoxy, the “Apostate Bishop of Rome,” a.k.a. the Pope.
Alas for the Christian honor of the Byzantine Empire, he was not the only one to seek the Pope’s help. Even the highest leaders of the Byzantine Orthodox Church were doing exactly the same thing, and to no avail, as it turned out, but to the greatest humiliation and utter discreditation of their Church, leaving the Russian Orthodoxy standing alone, for everybody to see, as the last bastion of pure Christianity on the face of the earth. (For more on this subject, see my entry The Three Romes of Russia in the Russia section, and similar entries elsewhere.)
With this windfall in his possession, Pope Paul II devised a rather clever plan, in his own mind. He was also afraid of the fierce power of the Turks himself, but, at the same time, he never forsook his Christian duty to convert the world into the Roman-Catholic faith. The splendid opportunity to impose the Unia on the Greek Church had already been taken by the late Pope Eugenius IV (with mixed success, I might add). But Paul II now had a plan to convert Russia to Catholicism, at the same time seeking a united military front against the Turks with the mighty ruler of Russia Grand Duke Ivan III, who, as I said before, is remembered by history (deservedly) as Ivan the Great. And all of this hinged on marrying the widowed Russian ruler to the heiress of the old Byzantine glory, for which purpose the Pope started playing the hallowed role of an international matchmaker.
His mission was successful, insofar as that royal marriage was concerned, even though he did not live to see the fruit of his labor, that was to be reaped by his successor Pope Sixtus IV of the Sistine Chapel fame. (The ignorance exhibited by both these Popes regarding the Russian determination to cling to Orthodoxy, and to snub any effort at conversion can be excused: after all, this stratagem was worth a try!) The wedding of Ivan and Sophia was lavishly celebrated in Moscow in the spring of 1472 with just one small twist, which should not surprise history buffs: Sophia was a bride in absentia.
She arrived in Moscow six months later, when the wedding was properly celebrated again, and now, at last, properly consummated. Sophia was to become the mother of many children to Ivan’s delight (even though he already had a son from his first marriage), but, in the meantime, she came bearing an amazing gift, which was of such extraordinary consequence that it is hard to imagine that even Ivan, who was brilliant enough to recognize its potential significance, could have foreseen that it was fated to exceed his wildest expectations, to have an enduring effect on the ages to come, and to shine even brighter in the next millennium of Russian and world history.
Sophia presented her husband with nothing less than the Paleolog Coat of Arms, the double-headed eagle, and by its virtue the Russian ruler was now the legitimate inheritor of the glory of the Roman Empire! Her symbolic dowry explicitly meant that the Byzantine Empire was no longer capable of carrying the torch of uncorrupted Christianity, passed from Rome to Constantinople during the heretical reign of Charlemagne, according to the traditional version elaborated by the Orthodox Church, and, subsequently, by the rulers of Russia. So, now this torch, or, to be precise, this double-headed eagle coat of arms, originally representing East and West, but now coming to represent the whole world, was passed to Moscow, Rome Number Three and the Last!
But this is not the end of our story of the two-headed eagle. With the realization that Russia had officially become the sole heir to the glory of Rome came the compulsion to capitalize on it. The legend was born, by artificial insemination, at Ivan’s royal court, of how Tsar Ivan, the descendant of Prince Rurik, was also an heir to the most respected Emperor of the original Roman Empire Augustus Caesar. According to it, there came a time, during Augustus’s long reign, when the Emperor became old and tired, and decided to divide his vast domain among his younger brothers. (Sic! That was how the matter of succession was decided in Russia at the time, and, as they say, all politics are local, and, in this case, “when in Moscow, Rome does as the Russians do!”) One of the brothers, Prussus, received the lands in the East, which subsequently were to be known as Prussia. Prussus, of course, was himself the father of a long and splendid dynasty, and his heir, in the fourteenth generation, was none other than Prince Rurik, the more recent ancestor of Ivan the Great! (…Eureka! Russia and Prussia are related, after all! I wonder if Mr. Putin has already shared this wonderful news with Frau Merkel?!)
Sorry to spoil the charm, but this hastily manufactured legend turned out to be so embarrassing, in the eyes of Ivan’s heirs, that it could not possibly survive as a credible reconstruction of Russia’s royal family tree. I am, however, reluctant to dismiss it, as it throws a revealing light on Russia’s disposition at the time, not to seek her Third Rome legitimacy in the much-discredited Byzantium (except for her eager appropriation of the Second Rome’s emblem), but, cutting out the middleman, to go straight to the source of royal authority, the first Emperor of the First Rome ipse.
By the same token, Ivan the Great no longer had an interest in the skills of the Byzantine artists, choosing Westerners instead (and thus breaking with the tradition), for Moscow’s rebuilding spree, which included a major reconstruction of Moscow’s greatest pride, the Kremlin.
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