Lost Kingdom

INTRODUCTION

IN THE VERY HEART OF Moscow, ACROSS THE SQUARE FROM THE Borovitsky Gate of the Kremlin, stands one of the tallest monuments in the Russian capital. The statue of a man in medieval garb, with a cross in one hand and a saber in the other, is eighteen meters high. The man is Prince Vladimir, as he is known today to the citizens of Russia, or Volodimer, as he was called by medieval chroniclers. He ruled from 980 to 1015 in the city of Kyiv (Kiev), where he is known today as Volodymyr, and left a lasting legacy by accepting the Christian religion for himself and his realm—the medieval state of Kyivan Rus’, which included vast territories extending from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Volga River in the east.

Many in Moscow believe that the impulse to erect the monument—whose height and central location make it more prominent than the one to Prince Yurii Dolgoruky, who is alleged to have founded Moscow in 1147—was based on a desire to glorify none other than St. Volodymyr’s namesake, the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. After all, it was Archimandrite Tikhon, rumored to be Putin’s confessor, who headed the committee that chose the winner of the hastily organized competition. Moreover, the site chosen for the monument was in a historical zone protected by UNESCO and thus required a special permit from the Moscow City Council, which could be obtained only with the blessing of the Russian president.

But the real or imagined connection between Prince Volodymyr and President Vladimir Putin offers only part of the explanation for the importance of the monument and the reasons for its erection in the heart of Moscow. More than anything else the monument symbolizes the Russian claim for Kyivan heritage and underlines the importance of Kyivan Rus’ for the historical identity of contemporary Russia. Otherwise, what would a monument to a prince of Kyiv, the capital of the neighboring state of Ukraine, be doing in such a coveted space in the heart of the Russian capital? The timing and circumstances of the monument’s construction further stress the importance of Ukrainian themes in Russian history and politics. The first stone in its foundation was laid in 2015, soon after the Russian annexation of the Crimea, and was taken from that peninsula in the middle of the Russo-Ukrainian war. It was brought to the Russian capital from the site of the Byzantine city of Chersonesus, the legendary place of the baptism of Prince Volodymyr in 988.

The monument was officially unveiled on November 4, 2016—the Day of National Unity, a statutory holiday in Russia—by Vladimir Putin himself. The Russian president delivered a speech in the presence of the head of the Russian government, Dmitrii Medvedev, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the widow of Russia’s most celebrated national writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Vladimir Putin praised Prince Volodymyr as a “gatherer and protector of the Russian lands and a prescient statesman who laid the foundations of a strong, united, centralized state, resulting in the union of one great family of equal peoples, languages, cultures, and religions.” Putin pointed out that the prince’s choice of Christianity “became the joint spiritual source for the peoples of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, laying the foundations of the morals and values that define our life even to the present day.”

DESPITE WHAT ONE READS IN TEXTBOOKS AND HEARS IN OFFICIAL pronouncements, Russia, especially by European standards, is a relatively young state. Its history as an independent polity officially begins less than six hundred years ago, in the 1470s, when Ivan III, the first ruler of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy to call himself tsar, challenged the suzerainty of the Mongol khans. At stake was not only the independent status of the rulers of Muscovy—the principality centered on the city of Moscow—but also their control over other Rus’ lands, in particular Novgorod, whose independence from Moscow the Mongol khans sought to maintain. It was then that the Kyivan roots of the Muscovite dynasty and church helped form a powerful myth of origin that distinguished Muscovy from its immediate Mongol past and nourished its self-image as heir to Byzantium.

Most of Russia’s wars were fought in its immediate East Slavic neighborhood, motivated and justified by its claim to be the legitimate political, cultural, and religious successor to the medieval state of Kyivan Rus’ and its Byzantine heritage. Even the extension of the Soviet borders westward in the course of World War II was often justified with references to the Rus’ princes and their military exploits. Despite Russia’s long history of imperial conquest, its vision of “gathering the Rus’ lands,” initiated during the reign of Ivan III, was fulfilled only during the brief period from 1945 to 1991—less than half a century. In those years of superpower status, Moscow was able to extend its rule to the westernmost regions of the old Kyivan state, settled predominantly by Eastern Slavs—Ukrainian Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia.

The Russian elites’ claim for the Kyivan inheritance developed from a largely dynastic and religious concept into an ethnonational one with the start of the modern era. As the Russian Empire embraced the idea of nationality in the course of the eighteenth century, it created a particular model of Russian nationhood that included today’s Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians along with imperial elites of non-Slavic origins that were Russified in political and cultural terms. The Russian Revolution began the process of untying this imperial knot of Russian national identity by assigning the status of separate nationalities to the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. Nevertheless, the Soviet project was anything but consistent in terms of its nationality policies. The communist government centralized the decision-making process in Moscow, used the Russian language across the whole expanse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), promoted the cultural Russification of non-Russians, and in doing that created conditions for the development of post-Soviet Russian imperialism after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The emancipation of Russian national identity from this neo-imperialism is the main challenge besetting the country’s current search for a new identity.

Russia today has enormous difficulty in reconciling the mental maps of Russian ethnicity, culture, and identity with the political map of the Russian Federation. In other words, it has a major problem in responding to the key demand of modern nationalism, famously defined by Ernest Gellner as “a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.” Do Russia’s present-day political borders coincide with the borders of the Russian nation? The answer depends on the way in which Russian political and intellectual leaders and Russians in general imagine their nation. The question of Russian identity and its geographic extent is of more than academic interest, as it influences issues of war and peace along Europe’s eastern frontiers today and will influence them for generations to come.

Russia’s problem in defining its political, cultural, and ethnic borders after the fall of the Soviet Union is not unique. Similar issues have faced a number of powers that were constrained to divorce themselves physically and psychologically from their imperial possessions in the twentieth century. The vast Habsburg Empire, which disintegrated in the wake of World War I, shrank to the size of the interwar Austrian and Hungarian states, which left many citizens of German and Hungarian nationality beyond their borders. When the even larger Ottoman Empire collapsed, it left many Turkic-speaking or Muslim inhabitants outside the new Turkish state in lands dominated by non-Turks and non-Muslims. Finally, the disintegration of the British and French Empires, which took place over a longer period after World War II, saw the imperial powers reluctant to abandon their possessions and brought about the formation of states dominated by the indigenous population of the former colonies as well as a mass exodus of descendants of British and French settlers and administrators to their ancestral homeland.

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 none of those empires shared common historical roots and myths of origin with their foreign subjects, as had been the case with Russia throughout a good part of its imperial history.

Does the Russian nation, understood in ethnic and cultural terms, consist only of ethnic Russians within and outside of the borders of the Russian Federation, or does it also include fellow Eastern Slavs—Ukrainians and Belarusians? This is the key question faced today by the Russian elites and the public at large as they try to reinvent themselves and their nation in the post-Soviet world. This is also the core element of the research undertaken in this book. In a manner of speaking, it falls into the familiar category of studies in the “invention” of nations. Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and, last but not least, Russia all have such books about their history reaching to premodern times. 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.

My book is a history of Russian nationalism at its cross section with Russian imperialism. In chronological terms, it begins with the formation of an independent Russian state in the second half of the fifteenth century and continues all the way to the present, covering large swaths of Russian and East European history and territory. 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 shown in Part II, that construct was strongly challenged by the modern European nationalism of the Poles: though defeated in battle, they defiantly refused to give up their claim to the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories annexed to the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth-century partitions of Poland.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the empire had to adjust its model of national identity in order to suppress the rise of modern nationalism among the Eastern Slavs. 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.

The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the subject of Part IV of the book, destroyed the imperial model of a tripartite nation. Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians were recognized as separate nations and pitted against one another (this applied particularly to Russians and Ukrainians). It was the task of the Soviet leaders, whose policies are analyzed in Part V of the book, to establish a hierarchy and modus vivendi between the three nations that constituted the Slavic core of the Soviet Union. Their efforts ultimately proved unavailing, and the USSR disintegrated in 1991. In the final part of the book, I discuss Russia’s post-Soviet attempts to forge a new national identity by reviving some of its imperial legacies—the attempts that eventually led to the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2014–2015.

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. The search for a “lost kingdom” as a phenomenon of European history is hardly unique to Russia. Charlemagne sought to reconstitute the Roman Empire in medieval times, as did the Habsburgs in the early modern era. But a particular feature of the Russian story is that its search for the “lost kingdom,” coupled with its longing for imperial expansion and great-power status, is still going on. It is in the pursuit of that vision that Russia has lost its way to modern nationhood, and in that sense has become a “lost kingdom” in its own right.