Raising the question of the right of Eastern Slavic peoples to the old Kyivan heritage is a natural result of modern historical thinking, when the interpretation of history is the chief method of reconstructing the life stories of nations and defending their supposed historic right. As US scholar Benedict Anderson notes in his famous study, Imagined Communities, “The awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity — a product of the ruptures of the late eighteenth century — engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity’.”
While the traditional genealogies of nations — which presupposes validation of their historical rights, in this case the right to the heritage of Kyiv Rus’ — emerged in modern times, the question of dynastic and governmental continuity was formulated by the political practice and ideology of medieval Rus’.
After the death of Grand Prince of Kyiv Vsevolod Olhovych in 1146, the assassination of his heir Ihor Olhovych and invitation for Iziaslav Mstyslavovych to ascend the grand princely throne in 1147, Kyivan Rus’ sank into bitter internecine warfare. It was basically a struggle between princely coalitions. One of them was headed by Rostov-Suzdal Prince Yury Dolgoruky (the Long-Armed; we render the name in Russian, for here Russian, as distinct from Ukrainian, history begins — Ed.), allied with Volodymyr of Halych and Sviatoslav Olhovych of Chernihiv. The other coalition was headed by Iziaslav Mstyslavych, Prince of Volhyn and later of Kyiv. He enjoyed the support of influential boyars from Kyiv and Novgorod, as well as of his brother Rostyslav, prince of Smolensk. Yury managed to take over the grand prince’s throne once and for all only after Iziaslav Mstyslavych’s death. Having gained a strong foothold in Kyiv, Yury sent his elder sons (by marriage to Polovtsian Khan Ayepa’s daughter) to Southwest Rus’ — Pereyaslav, Turov, Peresopnytsa, Vyshhorod, Kaniv, while the children by marriage to Olha, a Byzantine princess from the House of Comnenus, were delegated to the north of Rus’ — Novgorod, Suzdal, and Rostov.
Andrei, who ruled in Vyshhorod, the place closest to his father, seems to have been the first in the large family to realize the futility of Yury’s claims on Kyiv. Firmly established in the Kyiv region in 1149-1150, Andriy was still not satisfied with Vyshhorod and headed for Suzdal in 1155 to rule. Once there, he resolutely fought his rivals: expelled Greek Bishop Leo, his stepbrothers, and nephews from Suzdal. Andrei seemed to have come back home with a well-considered plan of action.
In late 1168 through spring 1169 Andrei, the son of Yury, organized a politico-military coalition and conducted a successful expedition to Kyiv. Kyiv was seized by the coalition troops after a brief siege and storm. Mstyslav, son of Iziaslav, fled to safety. This seemingly left no obstacles for Andrei to ascend the Kyiv throne. However, he challenged common practice and did not go to Kyiv, choosing to give up this place to his stryi (uncle) Hlib.
Andrei Bogoliubsky (the lover of God — Ed.) nurtured ambitious plans of vying with Kyiv for supremacy in Rus’. Even in 1155 he took the icon of the Holy Virgin, a local sacred relic venerated all over the Orthodox world, from Kyiv and “having brought over thirty hryvnias of gold, silver, precious stones and many pearls from Pyrohoshcha and Constantinople in one ship, he thus adorned and placed the icon at his Church of the Holy Virgin in Vladimir.”
In distant perspective, this act played an important role in the struggle of Northeastern Rus’ for the ideological legacy of Kyiv. Even in the times of Andrei Bogoliubsky, a tale was written in Rostov-Suzdal Principality, referred to by scholars as The Tale of Miracles Wrought by the Vladimir Icon of the Holy Virgin, which defends this action by Andrei Bogoliubsky. The story claims that the Holy Virgin “disliked” staying in the Kyiv land because the latter had lost and handed over to the city of Vladimir the status of a sacred Orthodox place.
The transfer of the Holy Virgin’s icon to Vladimir was part of Bogoliubsky’s extensive scheme. The latter called for building new churches, defensive structures, including the Golden Gate, the symbol of a princely city, in the capital of Rostov-Suzdal. All this was to show the transfer of the Rus’ governmental center and pave the way for Vladimir to establish ideological supremacy over Kyiv, the Second Jerusalem.
A grandiose construction campaign aimed to make the Vladimir- Suzdal Principality a mirror reflection of Kyiv and its environs. For instance, Andrei’s country retreat Bogoliubovo was patterned after Vyshhorod. Vladimir’s main temple, the Assumption Cathedral, was copied from that of Kyiv Pechersk. Likewise, the Golden Gate, built in 1164, also patterned the Kyivan original. Quite significantly, both the Vladimir and the Kyiv Gates were dedicated to the Holy Virgin. According to the Northeastern Rus’ clerical and political elite, instilling the cult of the Holy Virgin, the traditional patron saint of Kyiv, in Vladimir was aimed at enhancing its prestige and importance in a historically acceptable way.
Then, as Andrei Bogoliubsky conceived, Vladimir was to become a New Kyiv/Jerusalem whose beauty and magnificence were to eclipse the authority and sanctity of Kyiv. As to Andrei Bogoliubsky himself, he — after Volodymyr the Great and Yaroslav the Wise, the founders of the Kyivan state “protected by God — was likened to the Biblical King Solomon, the wisest of kings, the unsurpassable example of a medieval ruler.
The “God-loving” prince tried — without apparent success — to set up a separate diocese or at least an autocephalous episcopate directly subordinated to the Constantinople Patriarchate. Andrei Bogoliubsky’s attempt to establish an autocephalous diocese in Vladimir on the Kliazma as a counterweight to that of Kyiv was a graphic illustration of political disintegration.
The Patriarch of Constantinople had long viewed the Rus’ church organization as an unbreakable entity. Kyiv metropolitans consistently favored unity of the overall Rus’ church organization. It is perhaps for this reason that the attempt to establish an autocephalous religious and political center in Vladimir on the Kliazma, so that the lands of Northeastern Rus could form a sovereign state, never succeeded.
When Moscow’s scholastic historiographers formed at the turn of the seventeenth century (actually Peter I imported a German named MЯller to do it — Ed.), the concept of the identity of Kyiv Rus’ and Muscovite Tsardom was affirmed, they proclaimed Andrei Bogoliubsky founder and architect of Rus’-Russia. As modern Russian researcher Maria Pliukhanovaya rightly notes, “Andrei Bogoliubsky, who left Kyiv for the Northeast with the Kyivan icon and corresponded with the Byzantine emperor on the establishment of a diocese, is, of course, the key figure in the historical picture that equates Rus’ with the Muscovite Tsardom. It is not only the seventeenth-century scholastic historical writers, who finally drew up the concept that Rus’ and Muscovy were identical, but also the like-minded latter-day Russian historians, that preserved and developed the myth of Andrei Bogoliubsky.
The political successes of Muscovite rulers inspired local scholars to create a series of legends about transferring the hub of worldwide Christianity from the two fallen Romes to a third Rome, the Muscovite state. Continuing the old religious and political tradition of Kyivan thinkers, they were inspired by a mystical function somewhat different from the previous ones. Moscow scholiasts proclaimed Rus’ as Russia, a “new Israel,” the Kingdom of Zion which “Holy Christ likened to the old state of Jerusalem, the promised land.”
In the second half of the fifteenth century, when Ottoman Turks had conquered the Balkans and seized Constantinople, Muscovite Rus’ remained the last independent Orthodox state. These political realities brought forth the idea of Moscow’s religious supremacy as well as the desire to inherit the theology of a universal imperial state. The medieval Kyivan state and its ideological heritage of early Christianity was the source from which Moscow drew the idea and patrimonial concept of a tsar’s omnipotence as well as the political parallel “Jerusalem- Rome-Moscow” in this new historical dimension.
In the works of Muscovite scholiasts, the history of regal Moscow starts in the period of Kyiv. This city was allegedly founded by Prince Oleh during his “reunification expedition” in 882 from Novgorod to Kyivan south. The Tale of Monomakh’s Crown and The Tale of the Vladimir Princes clearly intend to show a direct genealogical link between the Kyivan and Muscovite princes.
Tracing the Tsarist lineage from Volodymyr Monomakh and other Kyiv-era princes, whose efforts supposedly helped create Moscow’s statehood, Muscovite ideologists thus laid claim to the heritage of Kyivan Rus’. This concept that Kyivan Rus’ and the Muscovite Tsardom were identical was to demonstrate the perpetual presence of the latter in the world Christian history. It should be also noted that this grandiose historiographical myth was created not without the assistance of Ukrainians. The books and ideas they produced, as well as migrating savants, rolled like powerful waves from Kyiv to Moscow in the seventeenth century and, as Harvard Professor Edward Keenan noted, taught the Russians how to perceive in new terms not only Orthodoxy and cultural authenticity but also East Slavic unity; it is they who brought to Russia the irredentist and national historical patterns of thinking which later became ‘typically Russian...;’ it is they who revived, directly or indirectly, the idea of the ‘Third Rome’ and other dubious myths.”
The sense of a common historical experience, then widespread in Russian historical perception, was uncritically inherited and further developed by subsequent generations who wrote history, some of whom share even today the view that only the Great Russian state was heir to the governmental and political institutions, spiritual, cultural, and religious traditions of Kyivan Rus’.
Almost a century ago Mykhailo Hrushevsky offered an alternative concept in his fundamentally important and often published lecture, “The Customary Pattern of Russian History and a Rational Scheme of the History of Eastern Slavs.” The historian thought it irrational “to link the old history of southern tribes, the Kyivan state and its sociopolitical system, law and culture, to the thirteenth and fourteenth century Vladimir-Moscow Principality, as if the latter were the continuation of the former.” At the same time he claimed that “the Kyivan period gave way not to that of Vladimir and Moscow but to that of Halych-Volyn in the thirteenth century and that of Lithuania and Poland in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The Vladimir-Moscow state was neither the heir nor the successor to Kyivan Rus’, for it grew from its own roots, and its relations with the Kyivan state could be compared to, for example, relations between the Roman state and its Gallic provinces rather than to the succession of two periods in the political and cultural life of France.”
A similar concept of the continuity of Ukrainian history and statehood was also framed, among other representatives of the statist school in Ukrainian historiography, by Yevhen Malaniuk. He claimed in his historical and philosophical Essays on the History of Our Culture that Kyiv had lost its metropolitan status in the thirteen century. At the same time, “the western part of the erstwhile Kyivan empire was increasingly emerging, by force of circumstances, as the independent Halych- Volyn State. The latter bore the political and cultural burden of the Kyivan heritage for another century or so, maintaining statehood of the Ruthenian Land.”
This development pattern of Ukrainian medieval history and statehood, based on a clear division into the Kyivan and Halych-Volyn periods, rests on the same historiographical foundations as does that the “customary” model of Russian history. It relies on the idea, advanced by a later historiographical tradition, that Kyiv lost its metropolitan status and Prince Roman Mstyslavych moved the Rus’ capital to Halych at the turn of the thirteenth century. The Halych, Second Kyiv, theory first formulated by Polish chronicler M. Stryjski and then by later seventeenth century Ukrainian scholiasts failed, however, to instill the identity of Kyivan Rus’ and Ukraine in the public mind. Ukraine would recognize itself, so to speak, in a yellow-blue Cossack zhupan (traditional coat — Ed.). In the question of the right to the heritage of Old Kyiv, as German historian Andreas Kappeler rightly notes, the Ukrainians usually emphasized “territorial and demographic gravitation of the state-forming area, while the Russians focused on dynastic and state continuity.” This is why, in my opinion, Ukrainian scholars lost the struggle for Kyivan heritage to Moscow scholiasts who were more stubborn and consistent in bending and adjusting the Kyivan historical tradition to their own needs, in perceiving it in the context of their own Muscovite history.
This is the reason why further exploration of the specific ways and mechanisms of continuity or transformation from Kyiv Rus’ of this enormous, even by Eastern European standards, “empire of the Rurik dynasty” into Rus’-Ukraine, Rus’-Russia, and Belarus, is an important scholarly task, not just a plaything for political journalists and nationalist dilettantes. I am convinced that scholarly research on public attitudes toward the Kyivan past at the turns of various historical epochs opens up far broader prospects than does clamorous patriotic rhetoric for understanding East Slavic unity and disunity, the national and cultural authenticity of the East Slavic peoples and the partition, or rather, sharing out of the Kyivan Rus’ heritage.
