A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Read online

  The new religion had to be made to fit a society very different from the sophisticated urban world of Byzantium. The introduction of Christianity did not bring with it other aspects of Byzantine civilization, for the tradition of the eastern churches was one of a vernacular liturgy. In Kiev Rus the mass was not in Greek but in a ninth-century Bulgarian dialect scholars call Old or Church Slavic. At that time the Slavic languages were all very similar to one another, so this was a readily comprehensible language in Kiev. The use of Church Slavic implied that the liturgy, the scriptures, and other holy books had to be translated into Slavic, an arduous task but one that removed the need to learn Greek for all but a few learned monks. Much Christian literature and all of the secular literature of Byzantium remained unknown in Kiev Rus and later societies. The Russians would discover Greek antiquity in the eighteenth century from the West.

  The relations of Rome and Constantinople in these early centuries were complicated. The famous mutual anathema of the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople of 1054 was not the decisive break that it seemed to later historians, and the people of Rus were barely aware of it. One of Kiev’s Greek metropolitans did write a short tract denouncing the Latins, but native writers did not join him and the Primary Chronicle is silent on the events. It was only with the Fourth Crusade, the destruction and conquest of the Byzantine Empire by the crusading armies from Western Europe in 1204, that the people of Rus took notice of the division and where their loyalties lay. The Rus chroniclers covered this event in extensive and bloody detail – the massacre of the people and the desecration of the churches. The Rus people were not just Christians, they were Orthodox Christians.

  Orthodox Christianity would determine the character of Russian culture until the eighteenth century and in some ways beyond it. For the Western observer, it has always presented a problem, seeming familiar, but actually not. Most Westerners know more about Buddhism than about Orthodoxy, as the latter forms no part of daily experience nor is it encountered in the course of a normal education. Analogies do not help much. Orthodoxy is not Catholicism with married priests.

  The differences between Orthodoxy and the Western Catholic church that emerged during the Middle Ages were of a different order than those that later divided the western church at the time of the Refomation. Theological issues were not central, and were to some extent exaggerated to provide more convincing explanations for the hostilities. The difference over how the doctrine of the Trinity should be expressed in the Nicene Creed, that is, the Catholic addition of the words filioque (“and the son”) to the mention of the “Holy Ghost, which proceedeth from the father” does not signify any important difference in the actual understanding of the Trinity. The main issue in 1054 was one of church governance. The eleventh century was the time of the gradual emancipation of the papacy from the power of the Holy Roman emperors, and the path chosen was the centralization of ecclesiastical power in the person of the pope. The traditions of the eastern patriarchs were those of a conciliar church. Only the assembled patriarchs and the rest of the higher clergy could determine doctrine or matters of church government. The Patriarch of Constantinople was not a pope. The papacy also managed to assert its independence from the emperors and other rulers in matters of church government and certainly in doctrine, whereas the Eastern Church operated with the more nebulous notions of “symphony” of emperor and patriarch. Lesser matters, like the celibacy of the parish clergy in the west, flowed from these basic decisions. A celibate clergy was free of the entanglements of secular powers; a married priest was part of his local society.

  Many differences between the eastern and western churches arose in matters that are hard to pin down and included differences of culture and attitudes rather than dogma and basic belief. The notion of the church building and the liturgy as the meeting points of the divine and human worlds, of spirit and matter, was and is central to Orthodox life and devotion. Preaching and the minute examination of behavior in sermons and in the confessional were not central, even if practiced to some extent. Orthodox monasticism was much less organized, as the monasteries did not form orders with a recognized head and the rules were much less detailed and specific. At the same time, Orthodox monasticism had a prestige and charisma in the east that even the most revered Catholic orders did not approach. For most of the history of Rus until the sixteenth century, we know far more about monasteries than bishops, many of whom are only names to us. By contrast, the western medieval church’s annals are filled with saintly and powerful bishops. Finally, the Eastern Church had a rather different attitude toward learning. For the Catholic church of the Middle Ages, the great intellectual enterprise was the interpretation of Aristotle’s corpus of writings in the light of revelation and the teachings of the church. The Orthodox, save a few late Byzantine imitators of the West, did not bother with philosophy or Aristotelian science. These were exterior knowledge, not bad in itself but not the final truth. The truth was in Christianity, best studied by monks in isolation from the world, not only from its temptations but also from its secular writings. This attitude fit well into Byzantine society, with its flourishing secular culture, but less so in Rus. In Rus, and later in Russia, there was no secular culture of the Byzantine type, so it was only the Christian monastic culture that flourished.

  DRUZHINAS AND PRINCES

  Vladimir’s son Iaroslav “the Wise” ruled Kiev Rus from 1016 until his death in 1054 after a contentious and violent beginning in which two of his brothers, princes Boris and Gleb, perished at the hand of their elder brother, Iaroslav’s rival. They became the first Russian saints. Iaroslav’s state was no longer the primitive band of warriors of the previous century ruling over distant tribes. Kiev had become a substantial town with a princely palace and Iaroslav ruled over the land with his retinue, the druzhina and various “distinguished men,” his boyars. All of them lived in Kiev, though they seem to have had lands around it and elsewhere. The druzhina, the old warrior band, seems to have become more organized and settled down and behaved more like an army and a group of advisors than simple warriors. They were not alone on the political landscape, for the people of Kiev occasionally played a part as well, assembling on the town’s main square to form a veche, or popular assembly.

  We know a certain amount about the society and legal system of Kiev Rus because shortly after Iaroslav’s death his sons put together a list of laws and regulations called “Rus Justice,” a brief but illuminating document. Most of the provisions seem to have reflected existing traditions, but in the first articles Iaroslav’s sons began with an innovation: they banned blood revenge in cases of murder. Instead they substituted an elaborate system of payments. The murderer was to pay a certain amount if he killed a boyar or man of distinction, less for a member of the druzhina, still less for an ordinary person or a peasant, and least of all for a slave. Generally, for killing a woman the criminal had to pay half of the fine for killing a man of the same status. The laws gave much space to listing the payments for insults of all kind, ranging from slandering a woman’s virtue to harming a man’s beard. The judges of these and other cases were to be the administrators of the princely estates who thus took on a much larger role than that of simple economic administrators. The “Rus Justice” must have been written for them, as much of it was taken up with complex rules for debt-slavery, various forms of temporary or limited bondage, and relations with the village community. This was a law code entirely appropriate for Rus society, one that, needless to say, bore no relationship whatsoever to Byzantine law. Nor did the Kievan state establish a hierarchy of administrators relying on written documents in imitation of Byzantium. In Rus the basic laws might be written down, but administration was in the hands of a tiny group of servants of the prince’s household relying on oral communications, tradition, and only a very few written texts like the “Rus Justice.”

  Iaroslav’s reign represented a high point of stability in Rus. Norwegian princes took refuge with him from civil wars in their home
land, and one of his daughters married the king of France. In the 1030s he inflicted a decisive defeat on the Pechenegs that kept the steppe frontier quiet for a generation. He was patron of the building of the Saint Sophia cathedral and the Caves Monastery, as well as other foundations. His sons and nephews ruled distant territories without much contention. Relations with the Greeks were regular, if occasionally unharmonious. The first (and last for a long time) native metropolitan of Kiev, Ilarion (1051–1054), praised him as a new Constantine and a new David. The apparently idyllic calm would not last for long.

  After Iaroslav’s death more disputes arose, but unity was soon restored and persisted throughout the reign of Iaroslav’s grandson Vladimir Monomakh (1113–1125) and his son Mstislav (1125–1132). In the middle of the twelfth century several centers of power began to emerge, although Kiev itself and the land around it were in decline. The city and title of Grand Prince of Kiev became the prize for contending regional powers. In the northeast, the core of the later Russia, the principality of Vladimir emerged as the main power, and in 1169 its ruler prince, Andrei Bogoliubsky, sacked Kiev and took the title of Grand Prince of Kiev. He fell victim to a conspiracy of his own boyars in 1174. Through Andrei’s brother Vsevolod (1176–1212) the Vladimir dynasty would rule the northeast for the next several centuries. For the time being, their attention was elsewhere, for the Vladimir princes had rivals in the west and south, especially in Galich near the Polish border. The territories of Kiev Rus were growing apart.

  The increasing vitality of local centers also produced a town unique in Russian medieval history, Novgorod. Novgorod had been the second center of Kiev Rus, legendarily the first stop of the Viking dynasty. It was an important city that traded in the Baltic in the eleventh century, and its wealth was reflected in the Novgorod cathedral of Saint Sophia, built around 1050. Early Novgorod was a typical princely city, and the Kiev princes often sent their eldest sons to rule in their names. In the twelfth century, however, Novgorod set out on its own path. The Novgorodians expelled their prince in 1136 and chose another. From that moment on, they treated the prince as an elected general rather than a ruler. Before 1136 the princes had appointed a deputy with the title of posadnik, and now the popular assembly, the veche, elected the posadnik from among the boyars of the town. In 1156 the people even elected the archbishop, choosing from among three candidates proposed by the local clergy. This practice was contrary to Byzantine canon law, but the metropolitan of Kiev never challenged it.

  Thus Novgorod developed into a unique polity among the princely states of medieval Rus. Novgorod was not a commercial republic, such as medieval Florence or the Flemish cities, for it was not merchants, bankers, and cloth manufacturers who sat in the city’s council. Merchants and artisans in Novgorod remained humble folk, present in the veche but with little real influence. The city’s elite consisted of boyars, rich landholders with large houses in the town and extensive possessions in the surrounding countryside. Many of the richest also controlled the northern forests, for it was the forests that were the real source of Novgorod’s wealth. After 1200 the Novgorodians ceased to travel west with their goods, as the league of north German trading cities, the Hansa, had come to dominate the trade of all countries around the Baltic Sea. The Germans journeyed to Novgorod to buy furs, beeswax for candles, and other forest products. The furs ranged from simple squirrel skins to the sables of the northern forests that fetched high prices in the west. In return, the Novgorodians bought Flemish and English cloth and a host of smaller items from the western towns.

  By 1200 Kiev Rus was a single state in name only; the ruler of Kiev itself was either an outsider or a minor princeling. Other than Novgorod, each territory had a local princely dynasty springing from the old Kiev dynasty of the Rurikovichi. Because Kiev Rus did not know primogeniture, each of a prince’s sons had to be provided for, and in any case the eldest uncle could also be considered the rightful ruler. Thus, innumerable small principalities emerged, though at the same time several regional centers of power – Vladimir, Smolensk, Chernigov, and Galich – maintained control over lesser princes. These were agrarian societies, each with a small boyar elite that ruled the peasants and advised the prince, though some of the towns, especially Smolensk, had wider commercial ties. The towns were becoming wealthier, for in the regional centers like Vladimir, magnificent stone churches arose and monasteries with stone churches and walls were also founded near the towns. Builders and icon painters came from Byzantium, and the Rus people began to learn their skills.

  Figure 1. The Twelfth Century Dormition Cathedral in Vladimir (c. 1900).

  Byzantine contacts were easy, for the one single institution remaining was the church. As Metropolitan of Kiev, a Greek usually headed the church that oversaw the whole breadth of the land. The Greek clergy and the priests and monks of the Rus had their hands full with the Christianization of the people and the creation of a new culture that went with the new religion. The Christianization of the people went slowly, and outside of the towns there were few churches. While Kiev rapidly became a major center of the new faith, provincial towns still celebrated burials in which warriors were put to rest with their weapons, horses, slaves, and food for their journeys to the other world. In 1071 there was a wave of incidents of revolt and resistance led by pagan priests in Novgorod and in some of the towns of the northeast. In these circumstances the clergy concentrated on very basic issues. From a series of questions put to the mid-twelfth century bishop Nifont of Novgorod, we know some of these concerns. The clergy tried to enforce the rules of Christian marriage (that dictated which cousins could be married to each other) and rules governing sexual behavior. Many of these questions were about timing, that is, if intercourse between man and wife was proper during Lent or when it was proper for priests. Ritual purity for both clergy and laity figured more largely than sex itself. Which animals were “clean” and which not and the prohibition on eating the meat of strangled animals were prominent issues in these questions. For all of the various sins, the punishments were denial of communion and penance for greater or longer periods. The exposition of Christian doctrine to the laity remained on a very elementary level.

  Even Christian works in this situation retained pre-Christian elements. The Primary Chronicle, the work of Christian monks, denounced the pagan customs of the early people of Rus but in the same pages glorified its pre-Christian rulers, recounting stories like the death of Oleg without comments. The princes of the ruling dynasty were generally known by their pagan names until about 1200. For most princes we do not even know the baptismal names. At the very end of the Kievan period, the Igor Tale, a brief story of an unsuccessful raid on the Kipchaks, called the Rus the children of Dazhbog, the sun god, but ends with praise of the princes and warriors who fought for the Christians against the pagans. The old ways had power almost to the end of Kiev Rus.

  The new culture that came with Christianity brought with it writing and various types of Byzantine devotional literature. The most widely disseminated, and anchored in the liturgy (and thus open to the illiterate) were the lives of the saints. Alongside the lives of the Byzantine saints, Rus itself very quickly began to glorify its own holy men, and these works more than any other give some insight into the religious world of Kiev Rus.

  The first saints were Princes Boris and Gleb, younger sons of Vladimir murdered in 1015 by their brother Sviatopolk “the Cursed” during the succession struggle after the death of Vladimir. By the end of the eleventh century, the two brothers were the objects of reverence and their bodies moved to a shrine near Kiev. Commemoration of the brothers began to appear in the liturgy, and the monk Nestor of the Caves Monastery wrote an account of their lives and death. Boris and Gleb were unlikely Christian saints. Though they led a blameless life and died young, it was their death that made them saints, but they were not martyrs for the faith. Sviatopolk was not challenging Christianity, merely eliminating potential rivals in a political struggle. The message of Nestor’s text is the
humility and meekness of the two boys, the wickedness of their murderer, and by implication, the need for harmony and virtue in the ruling dynasty.

  More conventionally Christian were the accounts of the lives of the founders of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, Saints Antonii and Feodosii. Antonii’s life was that of a hermit seeking salvation and nearness to God by prayer, tears, and fasting. Feodosii’s portrait was that of the abbot, hegumen in the Eastern Church, who also fled the temptations of the world but built a great institution to make this path possible for others. It was he who sought out a rule of liturgical observance and monastic life from the great monastery of the Studiou in Constantinople and it was he who built the church, the monastery walls and buildings, and supervised the monks until his death. The Caves Monastery, like its prototype in Constantinople, was not physically remote from the city of Kiev: today it is well within the city boundaries and Feodosii’s monks withdrew from the world, in part, to serve it better. In later accounts the monks perform acts of heroic asceticism, but also demonstrate to the people of Kiev the superiority of Orthodox Christianity by predicting the future and healing the sick, often in direct competition with representatives of the Latin faith, Armenian Christianity, and Judaism, as well as pagan sorcerers. In Nestor’s account of Feodosii’s life the hegumen was not shy in condemning acts of the Kiev princes that he thought to be unjust. In 1073 Princes Sviatoslav and Vsevolod expelled the rightful ruler, their elder brother Iziaslav. The usurpers sent for Feodosii to join them at a feast to celebrate their victory, but the holy monk replied, “I will not come to the table of Beelzebub and eat food soaked with blood and murder.”