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July 15 - July 21, 2023
But Russia also faces a major issue that most former imperial powers, especially the maritime empires, did not encounter—the definition of the Russian nation per se. In the words of the British historian Geoffrey Hosking, “Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire—and perhaps still is.” The traditional view holds that Russia’s problem with self-identification derives from the fact that it acquired an empire before it acquired a nation. This is probably true for a number of empires, including the British, the Spanish, and the Portuguese, but what makes the Russian situation unique is that
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My book differs from them by narrating the invention and life of a nation that does not exist in institutional terms. The pan-Russian nation described in these pages is not to be found on any map and never materialized as a political entity, but it exists in the minds of political and cultural elites and, if one trusts opinion polls, of tens of millions of Russians as well. Its political influence exceeds that of many very real nations easily located on the political map of the world.
As discussed in Part I of the book, in the course of the eighteenth century Russian imperial rulers and intellectuals managed to combine the medieval concepts of dynasty and religion with an emerging national consciousness in a new construct of Russian imperial nationhood.
As detailed in Part III, the Russian imperial authorities tried to accommodate rising Ukrainian nationalism by promoting the concept of a tripartite Russian nation consisting not of a monolithic Russian people but of three tribes: Great Russian, Little Russian (Ukrainian), and White Russian (Belarusian). The authorities also tried, not without success, to stop the development of non–Great Russian literary languages and high cultures.
From the rise of the independent Muscovite state on the ruins of the Mongol Empire to the reinvention of Russian nationhood after the fall of the USSR, my book follows the efforts of the Russian elites to restore the territorial unity of the “lost kingdom”—the medieval Kyivan state that provided all Eastern Slavs with much of their cultural legacy.
For all its modest appearance, the wedding had major symbolic significance: the ruler of Moscow became a relative and continuator of the Byzantine emperors. Sophia’s uncle, Constantine XI Palaiologos, had died in May 1453 defending Constantinople against the Ottoman assault. The Byzantine Empire died with him, but not the imperial ambitions of Orthodox rulers. By marrying Sophia, Ivan III of Moscow was putting on the mantle of the Byzantine emperors.
Scholars point out the dual origins of the power of the Muscovite prince, who functioned as both khan and basileus (the Byzantine emperor)—at once the secular and religious ruler of the realm. Often overlooked in this focus on dual origins is the continuing importance of the title of grand prince, which would remain central to the identity of Ivan III and his successors right up to the mid-sixteenth century. The title associated the princes of Moscow with the long-deceased rulers of Kyivan Rus’, allowing the princes to claim supremacy over the Rus’ lands—the former Kyivan possessions extending
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At the time of the Mongol invasion, most of the northeastern Rus’ princes, who ruled the lands of today’s central Russia, recognized the suzerainty of the princes of Vladimir. Southwestern Rus’, including the city of Kyiv, was ruled by the Galician-Volhynian princes, while the Republic of Novgorod in northeastern Rus’ conducted its affairs quite independently of the other Rus’ lands. If anything, the Mongol invasion worsened the political fragmentation of the Kyivan Rus’ realm. Mongol rule over what are now the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands was largely indirect, lasting only a few decades.
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The princes of Moscow belonged to a junior line of the Rurikids, but thanks to the location of their principality at the crossroads of various trade routes and to their political skills, they became the most powerful princely house in northeastern Rus’. In 1317, the prince of Moscow married a sister of the khan of the Golden Horde, thereby gaining the title of grand prince of Vladimir and the power inherent in the post of the khan’s representative in Rus’
A significant factor in the unexpected and steady rise of Moscow was the policy of the metropolitan of all Rus’, the head of the Orthodox Church, who had moved from Kyiv to Vladimir at the turn of the century. He now established himself in Moscow, making it the new capital of his vast metropolitanate, which covered all the lands of Mongol Rus’ and extended into Lithuanian Rus’ as well. The Moscow princes and the Rus’ metropolitans both professed loyalty to the Golden Horde, and their alliance helped turn Moscow into the true capital of northeastern Rus’
IN 1471, ONE YEAR BEFORE HIS MARRIAGE TO SOPHIA PALAIOLOGINA, Ivan III had scored a major victory in the struggle to consolidate his power over the former Mongol Rus’. His troops had captured and subjugated the Republic of Novgorod, by far the largest and richest polity of the realm.
The reference to “old tradition” was a fairly new feature of Muscovite political culture. The Kyivan lineage of the Muscovite princely line had hardly been mentioned by chroniclers before Ivan III took Novgorod. Until then, the princes of Moscow had competed for power with those of Tver and other centers by appealing to the khans of the Horde. References to Kyiv and the Rurikid origins of the ruling dynasty had no value in the eyes of the khans, who were the heirs of Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol Empire. But that situation changed with the continuing disintegration of the Horde.
With Novgorod defeated and Tatar dominance thrown off, the foundations of Muscovite sovereignty had been laid.
Muscovy, which got to keep Novgorod, began its history as a fully independent state by crushing a democratic rival that had sought to distance itself from the heirs of the Golden Horde.
By 1490, Ivan’s chancellery had begun to use the Kyivan descent of the Muscovite princes as grounds to extend his claim from those two principalities to Kyiv itself.
The extension of Muscovite patrimonial claims to the Rus’ lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the direct outcome of a series of successful Muscovite wars against Lithuania in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They began with border skirmishes in the 1480s. The first actual war was waged in 1492–1494, to be followed by the wars of 1500–1503, 1507–1508, 1512–1522, and 1534–1537—altogether almost half a century of warfare. For most of that period, the Muscovites were on the offensive, their advance checked for the first time in the early sixteenth century. By that time, the
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Prince Mykhailo Olelkovych, who came to Novgorod in 1470 to help defend the republic against Muscovy, was a member of the Kyivan branch of the family. His departure from Novgorod in 1471 was motivated in part by his hope of assuming his father’s office in Kyiv. But he was in for a surprise. Not only did Casimir not allow him to become the next prince of Kyiv, but he abolished the office and the principality altogether, appointing his own representative to administer the region.
The Muscovite wars with Lithuania, triggered by the conflict over the fate of Novgorod and continued under the banner of gathering the patrimony of the Kyivan princes, made Muscovy a major actor on the East European scene. It was no longer just a country fighting for its independence, but one expanding beyond its “natural” Mongol borders.
IN THE 1520S, MUSCOVITE INTELLECTUALS PRODUCED A NEW genealogical tract, the Tale of the Princes of Vladimir, which associated the rulers in the Kremlin, the former grand princes of Vladimir, with Emperor Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire. The link was established though a legendary personality called Prus, allegedly the brother of Augustus. Thus the founder of the Roman Empire and the rulers of Moscow had the same forefather. But how were the grand princes of Vladimir (and later, Moscow) related to Prus? The solution proposed by the Muscovite authors was quite simple: the missing link
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The Monomakh Cap and the Augustus–Prus–Monomakh account of the origins of the Moscow rulers’ sovereign and imperial power would have a spectacular career in Muscovite political thought.
The Roman connection served Ivan well both at home, by distinguishing the ruling dynasty from the rest of the princely elite, and abroad, by putting him on a par with Western rulers.
In 1552, he defeated and annexed the Khanate of Kazan. The city’s inhabitants were resettled and replaced by subjects of the tsar—the policy applied earlier in Novgorod and Smolensk. In 1556, Ivan’s troops defeated another successor to the Horde, the Khanate of Astrakhan, and Muscovy took control of the all-important Volga trade route.
In 1558, with his tsar’s title recognized by the patriarch of Constantinople but not by Western rulers, Ivan turned his troops westward. The Livonian War, which would last a quarter of a century, until 1583, started with an attack on a declining regional power, the Livonian Order, a state established by Teutonic knights that encompassed parts of Estonian, Latvian, and, to a lesser extent, Lithuanian territories.
Ivan the Terrible died in 1584, one year after a peace with Sweden ended the Livonian War. He left his son and successor, Fedor Ivanovich, who would be the last Rurikid on the Muscovite throne, a country economically broken and devastated by war and terror but more centralized than under any previous Muscovite ruler.
Whether the Muscovites sought a Roman connection by way of the Baltics and Prussia or the Black Sea and Constantinople, all ways led through Kyiv, the seat of the first Rurikid princes, without whom there could be no claim to anything but the Mongol tradition.
The vision of Muscovy as successor to Byzantium and the only remaining Orthodox empire on the face of the earth was first developed in the early sixteenth century. That vision, centered on the figure of the Muscovite tsar, was incomplete as long as the country remained without a patriarch of its own—the tsars had to keep turning for spiritual support and legitimacy to the Eastern patriarchs.
Now it seemed that the vision of the true Orthodox empire was about to be realized. In Western and Central Europe, the sixteenth century would be marked by the Protestant Reformation, Catholic reform, and religious wars between Protestants and Catholics. For Muscovy, the ecclesiastical priorities were to win higher status for its Orthodox church.
RELATIONS BETWEEN THE MUSCOVITE CHURCH AND THE EASTERN patriarchs had broken down in the mid-fifteenth century, when Isidore, the Greek metropolitan of Rus’, was arrested and thrown into a Muscovite prison for attempting to introduce a church union with Rome.
Political and cultural differences also pulled the two parts of what had once been the Roman Empire in different directions. In the East, the church was subordinate to the emperor, who exercised both secular and spiritual power. In the West, the pope had to compete with secular rulers, a situation that produced a political culture much more pluralistic than that of the East. In time, the West would come to overshadow its Eastern rival.
Why did Moscow reject church union in 1441? An explanation is to be found in letters signed by Grand Prince Vasilii and sent to the Byzantine emperor and the patriarch of Constantinople, citing theological differences between the Eastern and Western churches. But given that it was the grand prince, not the church hierarchs, who figured as the main actor on the Muscovite side, it may be assumed that at least part of the motivation lay in his own agenda and political aspirations.
It is no accident that the rise of Muscovy as an independent state coincided with the declaration of independence of its church from Constantinople, which had been an ally of the Mongol Horde for decades, if not centuries.
In the early 1490s, the Russian religious elite embraced several notions: that the Muscovite tsars were heirs of the Byzantine emperors, that Moscow was the second Constantinople, and that Muscovy and the Rus’ land were successors to the Byzantine Empire.
To the surprise of the Muscovite churchmen, the world did not end in 1492. With the world continuing to exist, a new calendar problem emerged for the church of Rus’—how to calculate the ever-changing date of Easter.
In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Muscovy was imagined as both a new Jerusalem and a new Rome, but it is the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome that has attracted the most attention from historians, given the metaphor’s inspiration of a new model of relations between church and sovereign. Moscow was called a Third Rome in a number of letters dating from the early sixteenth century and attributed to the monk Filofei, who resided in one of the Pskov monasteries on lands recently annexed by Moscow.
But the price of his release had been the unintended creation of a patriarchate in violation of all existing church ordinances. A few years later, the Eastern patriarchs, impoverished and dependent on the tsar’s alms, approved Jeremiah’s actions.
Godunov was elected to the tsardom by the Assembly of the Land, a consultative body made up of representatives of various strata of Muscovite society, first called into being by Ivan the Terrible.
The Time of Troubles posed new challenges to the Muscovite historical, political, and cultural identity that had taken shape in the previous century and a half, following the end of Mongol rule. On the one hand, the crisis began the process of separating the person of the tsar from the state over which he ruled, laying the foundations for the early modern Russian nation. On the other hand, the patriotic reaction to the Polish invasion that accompanied and exacerbated the crisis closely identified loyalty to the tsar with loyalty to church and fatherland.
If one considers the main ideological arguments used to mobilize Muscovite resistance to the foreign invasion, religion and the idea of defending the Orthodox Church emerge as by far the most important. In a country without a ruling dynasty or a legitimate secular institution to run the state, the church took on particular importance.
The Byzantine model, in which the emperor held sway over the Orthodox patriarch, had been effectively reversed.
The new Uniate Church, created at the Council of Brest in 1596, recognized the supremacy of the pope and accepted Catholic dogma while maintaining its traditional Byzantine rite.
WITH EUROPE EMBROILED IN THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR (1618–1648), which pitted Catholic countries against Protestant ones, Muscovy was eager to make alliances with the Protestant powers against the Catholic Poles, but was constrained by the refusal of its church to treat the rest of the Christian world as fully legitimate.
Under the influence of church hierarchs, the tsar insisted that Valdemar, who had no plans to stay in Muscovy or claim its throne, convert to Orthodoxy before marrying his daughter. The prince refused. The tsar, for his part, would not let him go. Valdemar was detained and allowed to leave the country only after the death of Tsar Mikhail and the coronation of his son, Aleksei Mikhailovich, in 1645.
Peter Mohyla, who had reformed the Kyiv metropolitanate in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in response to challenges presented by the Protestant Reformation and Catholic reform.
Peter Mohyla, a son of the Moldavian ruler, became the metropolitan of Kyiv in 1633 and worked hard to reform Ukrainian and Belarusian Orthodoxy. He began with the education of the clergy. In 1632, he merged two existing schools for Orthodox youth, establishing a Kyivan college—the first Western-type educational institution in Ukraine, modeled in structure and curriculum on the Jesuit colleges of the era. The Catholic reform, launched by Rome at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), became the inspiration and model for Mohyla’s reform of the Orthodox Church of the Commonwealth.
The Muscovites had sought to remedy problems arising from the self-imposed isolation of their church by returning to the basics of their faith as presented in the uncorrupted texts of the Eastern church fathers. But that required checking the old Muscovite translations of the Greek texts and, if necessary, producing revised ones. Since there were no qualified translators in Moscow, they were summoned from Kyiv, bringing along Kyiv’s understanding of the Greek texts and of Orthodox Christianity in general. The conflict between the Kyivan vision of church reform and the traditionalist Muscovite
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The Cossacks, who had begun as trappers and brigands in the fifteenth century, were now emerging as a major fighting force and demanding special rights and privileges from the Commonwealth government. By 1648, they wanted a polity of their own.
The Orthodox alliance had been born. But whereas the wars of religion in Western and Central Europe had ended with the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, those between Orthodox and Catholics in Eastern Europe were expanding in scope. The Muscovites and the Cossacks disagreed on important elements of their alliance at the Pereiaslav negotiations, including the obligations of the tsar and the duties of his new subjects.
At its core was the notion of the tsar’s status as the only remaining Orthodox emperor after the fall of Byzantium.
Aleksei Mikhailovich and his entourage did not seem to mind that the citizens of Polatsk did not treat them as conationals. Ethnicity did not yet have the political significance that it would acquire in the age of national states. Muscovite thinking was monarchic, patrimonial, and increasingly confessional, but the Muscovite elites rarely thought of themselves in national terms, and to the extent that they did so, they did not include the Rus’ population of the Commonwealth in their nation. The Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) elites, by contrast, did think in national terms, but at this
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What was that nation? In the Synopsis, it was counted as one of the Slavic nations and identified as “Slavo-Rossian.” The Slavo-Rossian nation included those who were living in the territories of the medieval Kyivan state. This was a major departure from the established canon of Ukrainian chronicle writing, which had followed Polish historiography in distinguishing clearly between the two nations (narody) of Muscovy and Rus’.
