Icon and Axe

1. Kiev

REDUCED TO ITS SIMPLEST OUTLINE, Russian culture is a tale of three cities: Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. None of them is really old by the standards of world history. The first was probably founded sometime in the eighth century, the second in the twelfth, the last at the beginning of the eighteenth. Each served as the capital of a sprawling Slavic empire on the eastern periphery of Europe; each left a permanent impact on the culture of modern Russia.

The emergence of Moscow and then that of St. Petersburg are decisive events of modern Russian history, and the profound if subtle rivalry between the two cities is one of the recurring themes of its mature cultural development. Yet the cultural context for this drama was provided by Kiev: the first of the three great cities to rise and to fall. However weakened and transformed in later years, however subject to the separate claims of Polish and Ukrainian historians, Kiev remained the “mother of Russian cities” and “joy of the world” to the chroniclers.¹ Memories of its accomplishment lingered on in oral folklore to give the Orthodox Eastern Slavs an enduring sense of the unity and splendor that had been theirs. In the words of the popular proverb, Moscow was the heart of Russia; St. Petersburg, its head; but Kiev, its mother.²

The origins of Kiev are still obscure, but its traceable history begins with the establishment by northern warrior-traders of a series of fortified cities along the rivers that led through the rich eastern plains of Europe into the Black and Mediterranean seas.³ The main artery of this new trade route down from the Baltic region was the Dnieper; and many historic cities of early Russia, such as Chernigov and Smolensk, were founded on strategic spots along its upper tributaries. Kiev, the most exposed and southerly of the fortified cities on this river, became the major point of contact with the Byzantine Empire to the southeast, and the center for the gradual conversion to Orthodox Christianity in the ninth and tenth centuries of both the Scandinavian princes and the Slavic population of this region. By virtue of its protected location on the raised west bank of the Dnieper, Kiev soon became a major bastion of Christendom against the warlike pagan nomads of the southern steppe. Economically, it was an active trading center and probably the largest city in Eastern Europe. Politically, it became the center of a Slavic civilization that was less a distinct territorial state in the modern sense than a string of fortified cities bound by loose religious, economic, and dynastic ties.

Kievan Russia was closely linked with Western Europe—through trade and intermarriages with every important royal family of Western Christendom.⁴ Russia is mentioned in such early epics as the Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied.⁵ Indeed, the cultural accomplishments of the high medieval West which these works represent might not have been possible without the existence of a militant Christian civilization in Eastern Europe to absorb much of the shock of invasions by less civilized steppe peoples.

These promising early links with the West were, fatefully, never made secure. Increasingly, inexorably, Kievan Russia was drawn eastward into a debilitating struggle for control of the Eurasian steppe.

The political history of this the greatest undivided land mass in the world has been only very partially recorded. Like the Scyths, Sarmatians, and Huns before them (and their Mongol contemporaries and adversaries), the Russians were to acquire a reputation in more stable societies for both ruggedness and cruelty. But unlike all the others who dominated the steppe, the Russians succeeded—not just in conquering but in civilizing the entire region, from the Pripet Marshes and the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas in the east.

The inspiration for this accomplishment came from neither Europe nor Asia, but from a Byzantine Empire that lay between the two, Greek in speech but Oriental in magnificence. The Byzantine capital of Constantinople lay on the strait of water separating Europe from Asia and connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea and the rivers leading into the heartland of Central and Eastern Europe: the Danube, the Dnieper, and the Don. Known as the “new” or “second” Rome, this city of Constantine continued to rule the Eastern half of the old Roman Empire for almost a thousand years after the Western Roman Empire had crumbled.

Of all the cultural accomplishments of Byzantium, none was more important than the bringing of Christianity to the Slavs. When the Holy Land, North Africa, and Asia Minor fell to Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, Byzantium was forced to turn north and east to recoup its fortunes. By the ninth century, Constantinople had regained the self-confidence needed for fresh expansion. The long-debated questions of Christian doctrine had been resolved by the seven councils of the Church; Islamic invaders had been repelled from without and puritanical iconoclasts rejected within the capital. Emperors and Patriarchs had both begun to challenge the authority of a West not yet clearly emerging from the Dark Ages.

The rapid extension of Byzantine political and cultural influence into the Balkans during the ninth century dramatized the exuberance of this “second golden age” of Byzantine history. The key moment in this penetration was the mission to the Slavs of two Greek brothers from the borderlands of the Slavic world in Macedonia: Cyril, a widely traveled and renowned scholar, and Methodius, an administrator with experience in Slavic-speaking areas of the Byzantine Empire. In distant Moravia and later in Bulgaria, they helped turn vernacular Slavic into a written language suitable for translating the basic books of Orthodox Christendom. They apparently did their first work with the exotic and specially invented Glagolitic alphabet; but their followers soon concentrated on the Cyrillic alphabet, which had many relatively familiar Greek letters. A rich store of Christian literature was transcribed in both alphabets within a half century of the missionaries’ death.⁶ Slavonic became the language of worship of all Orthodox Slavs; and Cyrillic, which bore the name of the more scholarly brother, became the alphabet of the Bulgarians and South Slavs.

When the followers of Cyril and Methodius extended these liturgical and literary activities to Kievan Russia in the tenth and the early eleventh century, the Eastern Slavs acquired a language that had become (together with Latin and Greek) one of the three languages of writing and worship in medieval Christendom. Though subjected to many changes and variations, Church Slavonic remained the basic literary language of Russia until late in the seventeenth century.

Among the many Slavic principalities to accept the forms and faith of Byzantium, Kievan Russia—or Rus’, as it was then called—occupied a unique place even from the beginning. Unlike the Balkan Slavic kingdoms, the Kievan domain lay entirely beyond the confines of the old Roman empire. It was one of the last distinct national civilizations to accept Byzantine Christianity; the only one never clearly to accept political subordination to Constantinople; and by far the largest—stretching north to the Baltic and almost to the Arctic Ocean.

Culturally, however, Kiev was in many ways even more deeply dependent on Constantinople than many regions within the empire. For the Russian leaders of the late tenth and the early eleventh century accepted Orthodoxy with the uncritical enthusiasm of the new convert, and sought to transfer the splendors of Constantinople to Kiev in the wholesale manner of the nouveau riche. Prince Vladimir brought the majestic rituals and services of Byzantium to Kiev shortly after his conversion in 988; and, particularly under his illustrious son Yaroslav the Wise, learned churchmen streamed in from Byzantium bringing with them models for early Russian laws, chronicles, and sermons. Great churches like Santa Sophia and St. George were named for their counterparts in Constantinople, as were the “golden gates” of the city.⁷

Suffused with a “Christian optimism, a joy that Rus’ had become worthy of joining Christianity at the ‘eleventh hour’ just before the end of the world,”⁸ Kiev accepted more unreservedly than Byzantium itself the claim that Orthodox Christianity had solved all the basic problems of belief and worship. All that was needed was “right praising” (the literal translation of pravoslavie, the Russian version of the Greek orthodoxos) through the forms of worship handed down by the Apostolic Church and defined for all time by its seven ecumenical councils. Changes in dogma or even sacred phraseology could not be tolerated, for there was but one answer to any controversy. The Eastern Church first broke with Rome in the late ninth century, when the latter added the phrase “and from the Son” to the assertion in the Nicene Creed that the Holy Spirit proceeds “from God the Father.”

Nowhere was the traditional Eastern formula defended with greater zeal than in Russia. As if compensating for the relative lateness of their conversion, Russian Orthodoxy tended to accept unquestioningly Orthodox definitions of truth and Byzantine forms of art; but the complex philosophic traditions and literary conventions of Byzantium (let alone the classical and Hellenic foundations of Byzantine culture) were never properly assimilated. Thus, fatefully, Russia took over “the Byzantine achievement … without the Byzantine inquisitiveness.”⁹

Working within this ornate and stylized Byzantine heritage, Kievan Russia developed two distinctive attitudes which gave an all-important initial sense of direction to Russian culture. First was a direct sense of beauty, a passion for seeing spiritual truth in concrete forms. The beauty of Constantinople and of its places and forms of worship was responsible for the conversion of Vladimir according to the earliest historical record of the Kievan period. This “Primary Chronicle”—itself a vivid, often beautiful work of literature—tells how Vladimir’s emissaries found Moslem worship frenzied and foul-smelling, and “beheld no glory” in the ceremonies of Western Christians. But in Constantinople

the Greeks led us to the buildings where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty. Every man, after tasting something sweet, is afterward unwilling to accept that which is bitter.…¹⁰

The Kievan princes sought to re-create this experience of beauty in the Byzantine-style cathedrals that sprang up in every important city of Eastern Slavdom. The panoply of heaven was represented by the composed central dome; its interior was embellished with the awesome image of the Pantokrator, the Divine Creator of both heaven and earth. Prominent among the other mosaic and frescoed figures that beautified the interior walls and domes was the Theotokos, the “God-bearing” Virgin. The cathedrals provided a center of beauty and a source of sanctification for the surrounding region. The word sobor, used to describe the gatherings in which the authority of God was invoked on all communal activities, also became the word for cathedral;¹¹ and the life of each “gathering” was built around the liturgy: the ritual, communal re-enactment of Christ’s saving sacrifice.

Concrete beauty rather than abstract ideas conveyed the essence of the Christian message to the early Russians, and inspired a fresh flowering of Byzantine art and letters on Russian soil. Man’s function was not to analyze that which has been resolved or to explain that which is mysterious, but lovingly and humbly to embellish the inherited forms of praise and worship—and thus, perhaps, gain some imperfect sense of the luminous world to come. Within a few decades of Vladimir’s conversion Kiev was transformed into a majestic city. A visiting Western bishop referred to it as “the rival of Constantinople”;¹² and its first native metropolitan, Ilarion of Kiev, spoke of it as

a city glistening with the light of holy icons, fragrant with incense, ringing with praise and holy, heavenly songs.¹³

In all early Russian writings about a Christian prince “the mention of physical beauty is never lacking. Together with mercy and almsgiving, this is the only constant feature of an ideal prince.”¹⁴

Literacy was more widespread than is generally realized, among those with a practical need for it; but literature was more remarkable for its aesthetic embellishments than for the content of its ideas. The oldest surviving Russian manuscript, the Ostromir Codex of 1056-7, is a richly colored and ornamented collection of readings from the gospels which were prescribed for church services and arranged according to the days of the week. There were no complete versions of the Bible, let alone independent theological syntheses, produced in early Russia. Most of the twenty-two surviving manuscript books from the eleventh century and of the eighty-six from the twelfth¹⁵ were collections of readings and sermons assembled for practical guidance in worship and embellished both verbally and visually by Russian copyists. From the beginning there was a special preference not for the great theologians and lawmakers of Byzantium, but for its preachers, like the “golden-tongued” John Chrysostom. Cascading images of the beauties of resurrection swept away all subtlety of thought in the preaching of the greatest Kievan writers: Ilarion of Kiev and Cyril of Turov.

There was, indeed, no independent critical theology of any sophistication in Old Russia. Even in the later, Muscovite period, “theoretical” was rendered by zritel’ny, “visual,” and esteemed teachers were known as smotrelivy, “those who have seen.”¹⁶ Local and contemporary saints assumed a particular importance in Russian theology. They had performed deeds that men had seen in their own time: Theodosius of Kiev, turning his back on wealth and indeed on asceticism to lead the monastery of the caves into a life of active counsel and charity in the city of Kiev; Abraham of Smolensk, painting as well as teaching about the Last Judgment and bringing rain to the parched steppelands with the fervor of his prayers. Above all stood the first Russian saints, Boris and Gleb, the innocent young sons of Vladimir who accepted death gladly in the political turmoil of Kiev in order to redeem their people through innocent, Christ-like suffering.¹⁷

Theology, “the word of God,” was found in the lives of saints. If one could not be or know a saint, one could still have living contact through the visual images of the iconographer and the oral reminders of the hagiographer. The holy picture or icon was the most revered form of theological expression in Russia. Indeed, the popular word for “holy” or “saintly” was prepodobny, or “very like” the figures on the icons. But the life of a saint, written to be read aloud “for the good success and utility of those who listen,” was also highly valued. The word for monastic novice or apprentice in sainthood was poslushnik, “obedient listener”; as one of the greatest Russian hagiographers explained, “seeing is better than hearing”; but later generations unable to see may still “believe even the sound of those who have heard, if they have spoken in truth.”¹⁸

There was a hypnotic quality to the cadences of the church chant; and the hollow, vaselike indentations (golosniki) in the early Kievan churches produced a lingering resonance which obscured the meaning but deepened the impact of the sung liturgy. Pictorial beauty was present not only in mosaics, frescoes, and icons but in the vestments worn in stately processions and in the ornate cursive writing (skoropis’) with which sermons and chronicles later came to be written. The sanctuary in which the priests celebrated mass was the tabernacle of God among men; and the rich incense by the royal doors, the cloudy pillar through which God came first to Moses, and now to all men through the consecrated bread brought out by the priest at the climax of each liturgy.

The early Russians were drawn to Christianity by the aesthetic appeal of its liturgy, not the rational shape of its theology. Accepting unquestioningly the Orthodox definition of truth, they viewed all forms of expression as equally valid means of communicating and glorifying the faith. Words, sounds, and pictures were all subordinate and interrelated parts of a common religious culture. In Russia—as distinct from the Mediterranean and Western worlds—“Church art was not added to religion from without, but was an emanation from within.”¹⁹

The same desire to see spiritual truth in tangible form accounts for the extraordinary sense of history that is a second distinguishing feature of early Russian culture. As with many simple warrior people, religious truth tended to be verified by the concrete test of ability to inspire victory. The miraculous pretensions of Christianity were not unique among world religions; but Orthodox Christianity offered a particularly close identification of charismatic power with historical tradition: an unbroken succession of patriarchs, prophets, and apostles that stretched from creation to incarnation and on to final judgment. A sense of majesty and destiny was imparted by the Church, which had sprung up around the original sees of Christendom, and by the Empire, which centered on the city of Constantine the Great, the man who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity and took part in the first ecumenical council of the Church at Nicaea. Tales of the great empires of the East and of the holy lands were brought back to Kiev by merchants and pilgrims alike; and these were interwoven into the sacred chronicles with no sense of conflict or incongruity. Whereas Western and Northern Europe had inherited a still primitive and uncodified Christianity from the crumbling Roman Empire of the West, Russia took over a finished creed from the still-unvanquished Eastern Empire. All that remained for a newcomer to accomplish was the last chapter in this pageant of sacred history: “the transformation of the earthly dominion into the ecclesiastical dominion”:²⁰ preparation for the final assembly (ekklēsia) of saints before the throne of God.

“Because of the lack of rational or logical elements, ancient Russian theology was entirely historical.”²¹ The writing of sacred history in the form of chronicles was perhaps the most important and distinguished literary activity of the Kievan period. Chronicles were written in Church Slavonic in Kievan Russia long before any were written in Italian or French, and are at least as artistic as the equally venerable chronicles composed in Latin and German. The vivid narrative of men and events in the original “Primary Chronicle” struck the first Western student of Russian chronicles, August Schlözer, as far superior to any in the medieval West, and helped inspire him to become the first to introduce both universal history and Russian history into the curriculum of a modern university.

The final form of the Primary Chronicle, compiled early in the twelfth century, was probably based on the work of many hands during the preceding century; and it became, in turn, the starting point for innumerable subsequent chronicles of even greater length and detail. The reverence with which these sacred histories were regarded soon made slight changes in narration or genealogy an effective form of political and ideological warfare among fractious princes and monasteries. Variations in the phraseology of the chronicles remain one of the best guides to the internecine political struggles of medieval Russia for those able to master this esoteric form of communication.²²

Much more than most monastic chronicles of the medieval West, the Russian chronicles are a valuable source of profane as well as sacred history. A miscellany of non-Christian elements, political and economic information, and even integral folk tales are often presented within the traditional framework of sacred history. In general, Kiev was a relatively cosmopolitan and tolerant cultural center. The chronicles frequently testify to the persistence of older pagan rites. The hallowed walls of the Santa Sophia in Kiev contain a series of purely secular frescoes. The first and most widely copied Russian account of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land includes more dispassionate geographical and ethnographic description than do most contemporary accounts by Western pilgrims and crusaders.²³ The famous epic The Lay of the Host of Igor is far more rich in secular allusions and subject matter than epics of the Muscovite period. If one considers it an authentic work of this period, both the worldliness and literary genius of Kievan Russia become even more impressive.²⁴

Secular literature no less than theology was infused with a sense of history. As a leading Soviet historian of old Russian literature has written:

Every narrative subject in Russian medieval literature was looked on as having taken place historically.…

The active figures of old-Russian narrative tales were always historical figures, or figures whose historical existence—even when apocryphal—permitted of no doubt. Even in those cases where a contrived figure was introduced, he was surrounded with a swarm of historical memories, creating the illusion of real existence in the past.

The action of the narrative always took place in precisely delineated historical circumstances or, more often, in works of old Russian literature, related directly to historical events themselves.

That is why in medieval Russian literature there were no works in the purely entertaining genres, but the spirit of historicism penetrated it all from beginning to end. This gave Russian medieval literature the stamp of particular seriousness and particular significance.²⁵

The desire to find both roots and vindication in history grew partly out of the insecurity of the Eastern plain. Geography, not history, had traditionally dominated the thinking of the Eurasian steppe. Harsh seasonal cycles, a few, distant rivers, and sparse patterns of rainfall and soil fertility controlled the lives of the ordinary peasant; and the ebb and flow of nomadic conquerors often seemed little more than the senseless movement of surface objects on an unchanging and unfriendly sea.

Any steppe people who felt that time really mattered—and that they as a people had a mission to perform in time—was automatically distinct. Conversion to the profoundly historical creed of Judaism had prolonged the life of the exposed Khazar empire to the south; and to the east, the Volga Bulgars had attained an importance out of all proportion to their numbers by accepting Islam. Christianity had appeared in history midway in time between these two monotheisms, and the Christianity which took root among the Eastern Slavs provided many of the same psychological satisfactions as the prophetic creeds adopted by their neighboring civilizations.

There is a historical cast to the most widely reproduced sermon of the Kievan period, Metropolitan Ilarion’s “On Law and Grace.” It was apparently first delivered on Easter in 1049, just two days after the feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin in the church of the Annunciation, near the Golden Gate of the city, to celebrate the completion of the walls around Kiev.²⁶ After contrasting the law of the Old Testament with the grace made possible through the New, Ilarion rushes on to depict something rather like the coming age of glory on Russian soil. He bids Vladimir rise from the dead and look upon Kiev transformed into a kind of New Jerusalem. Vladimir’s son, Yaroslav the Wise, has built the Santa Sophia, “the great and holy temple of Divine Wisdom,” within the walls of “the city of glory, Kiev,” just as David’s son Solomon had raised up a temple within Jerusalem in the time of the law.²⁷ Like the people of Israel, the Kievans were called upon not just to profess the faith but to testify in deeds their devotion to the living God. Thus, churches were built and a city transformed under Yaroslav, not for decorative effect, but for Christian witness. In response to God’s gracious gift of His Son, God’s people were returning their offering of praise and thanksgiving. The forms of art and worship were those hallowed by the one “right-praising” Church in which His Holy Spirit dwelt.

Conservative adherence to past practices was to serve, ironically, to heighten radical expectations of an approaching end to history. Believing that the forms of art and worship should be preserved intact until the second coming of Christ, Russians tended to explain unavoidable innovations as signs that the promised end was drawing near. Though this “eschatological psychosis” was to be more characteristic of the later Muscovite period, there are already traces of it in the dark prophetic preaching of Abraham of Smolensk.²⁸

Kievan Russia received such unity as it attained essentially through waves of conversion—moving north from Kiev and out from the princely court in each city to ever wider sections of the surrounding populace. Conversion was apparently more important than colonization in unifying the region,²⁹ and each new wave of converts tended to adopt not merely the Byzantine but the Kievan heritage as well. The Slavonic language became the uniform vehicle for writing and worship, slowly driving the Finno-Ugrian tongues which originally dominated much of northern Russia to peripheral regions: Finland and Esthonia to the west and the Mordvin and Cheremis regions to the east along the Volga. The sense of historic destiny grew; and the idea of Christianity as a religion of victorious combat increased as the obstacles—both pagan and natural—grew more formidable.

Everywhere that the new faith went it was dramatically translated into monuments of church architecture: the magnificent Santa Sophia in Novgorod, the second city of early Russia and a point of commercial contact with the Germanic peoples of the Baltic; the lavish Cathedral of the Assumption in Vladimir, the favored northern headquarters for the Kievan princes and a key center on the upper Volga. Both of these twelfth-century masterpieces were modeled on (and named after) counterparts in Kiev; but the building of churches extended beyond the cities, even beyond the records of monastic chroniclers, out to such forbidding spots as the shores of Lake Ladoga. There, in the late 1160’s, the church of St. George was built and adorned with beautiful frescoes which illustrate the fidelity to tradition and sense of destiny that were present in the chronicles. The fact that this memorable church is not even mentioned in the chronicles points to the probability that there were many other vanished monuments of this kind. Named after the saintly dragon slayer who became a special hero of the Russian north, St. George’s was probably built as a votive offering for victory in battle over the Swedes.³⁰ Byzantine in its iconography, the surviving frescoes reveal nonetheless a preoccupation with the details of the Last Judgment, which—characteristically in Russian churches—dominated, and even extended beyond, the confines of the inner west wall.

Some of the most memorable figures depicted in the frescoes are the prophets and warrior kings of the Old Testament. The very severity of their stylized, Byzantine presentation makes the compassionate figure of Mary seem a unique and welcome source of relief and deliverance. She was the protectress of Kiev and Novgorod as she had been of Constantinople. Russians were singing hymns to her presanctified state and dedicating churches to her assumption into heaven well before Western Christendom. She alone brought respite from damnation in the famous apocryphal tale of “The Virgin’s Visit to Hell,” which was brought from Byzantium in the twelfth century to new and enduring popularity in Russia.³¹ For the love of departed sinners, she had descended into the Inferno to win them annual release from their suffering during the period from Holy Thursday to Pentecost.

Much of the mythology that had gathered about the holy cities of earlier civilizations was transferred to Kiev and Novgorod; and the lore of ancient shrines and monasteries, to the new ones of the Orthodox Eastern Slavs. The legend that the apostle Andrew had brought Christianity directly to Kiev just as Peter had to Rome was taken over from Constantinople. Legends resembling those about the catacombs at Rome were developed around the caves of Kiev, and the idea subtly grew that Kiev might be a “second Jerusalem.”³²

The unity of Kievan Russia was above all that of a common religious faith. The forms of faith and worship were almost the only uniformities in this loosely structured civilization. Such economic strength and political cohesion as had existed began to break down with the internecine strife of the late twelfth century, the Latin occupation of Contantinople in 1204, and the subsequent assaults almost simultaneously launched against the Eastern Slavs by the Mongols from the east and the Teutonic Knights from the west.

The Mongols, who sacked Kiev in 1240, proved the more formidable foe. They prowled at will across the exposed steppe, interdicted the lucrative river routes to the south, and left the “mother of Russian cities” in a state of continuing insecurity. Cultural independence and local self-government were maintained only by regular payment of tribute to the Mongol khan. Unlike the Islamic Arabs, who had brought Greek science and philosophy with them when they extended their power into the Christian world, the nomadic pagans of Genghis and Batu Khan brought almost nothing of intellectual or artistic worth. The clearest cultural legacy of the Mongols lay in the military and administrative sphere. Mongol terms for money and weapons filtered into the Russian language; and new habits of petitioning rulers through a form of prostration and kowtow known as chelobitnaia (literally, “beating the forehead”) were also taken over.³³

The period of Mongol domination—roughly from 1240 until the termination of tribute in 1480—was not so much one of “Oriental despotism”³⁴ as of decentralized localism among the Orthodox Eastern Slavs. This “appanage period” of Russian history was one of those when, in Spengler’s words,

… high history lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, clinging to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village, the “eternal” peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in mother earth—a busy, not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows.… Men live from hand to mouth with petty thrifts and petty fortunes and endure.… Masses are trampled on, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on.³⁵

The “high history” of the period was that of warrior princes from the east whose enervating struggles further fit Spengler’s characterization of “a drama noble in its aimlessness … like the course of the stars … the alternance of land and sea.”³⁶

Like the Kievan princes before them, the Mongol conquerors adopted a religion (Islam), established a capital on the lower reaches of a great river (Sarai on the Volga), were initially weakened more by a new conqueror from the east (Tamerlane) than by virtually simultaneous assaults from the west (the Muscovite victory at Kulikovo in 1380), and were plagued by inner fragmentation. The khanate of Kypchak, or “Golden Horde,” was but one of several dependent states within the far-flung empire of Genghis Khan; it was a racially conglomerate and ideologically permissive realm which gradually disintegrated in the course of the fifteenth century, becoming less important politically than its own “appanages”: the separate Tatar khanates in the Crimea, on the upper Volga at Kazan, and at Astrakhan, the Caspian mouth of the Volga. Cunning diplomacy and daring raids enabled the Crimean Tatars and other lesser Tatar groups to maintain militarily menacing positions in the southern parts of European Russia until late in the eighteenth century.

The real importance of the Tatars’ protracted presence in the Eastern European steppelands lies not so much in their direct influence on Russian culture as in their indirect role in providing the Orthodox Eastern Slavs with a common enemy against whom they could unite and rediscover a sense of common purpose. Slowly but irresistibly, the Eastern Slavs emerged from the humiliation and fragmentation of the Mongol period to expand their power eastward—beyond the former realm of the Golden Horde, beyond that of the so-called Blue Horde, on the steppes of Central Asia, on to the Pacific. To understand how Russia emerged from its “dark ages” to such triumphant accomplishment, one must not look primarily either to Byzantium or to the Mongols: the Golden Horn or the Golden Horde. One must look rather to the “primitive fertility” which began to bring an agricultural surplus and a measure of prosperity; and, even more important, to “the accumulation of spiritual energies during long silence”³⁷ in the monasteries and to the accumulation of political power by the new city which rose to dominate this region: Moscow.