The Story of Russia

The Story of Russia

For Stephanie.

Again. Always.

By the same author

Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–21

A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924

Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (with Boris Kolonitskii)

Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia

Crimea: The Last Crusade

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991

The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture

Contents

Introduction

1 Origins

2 The Mongol Impact

3 Tsar and God

4 Times of Trouble

5 Russia Faces West

6 The Shadow of Napoleon

7 An Empire in Crisis

8 Revolutionary Russia

9 The War on Old Russia

10 Motherland

11 Ends

Notes

Picture Credits

Index

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

Plate Images

Introduction

On a cold and grey November morning, in 2016, a small crowd gathered on a snow-cleared square in front of the Kremlin in Moscow. They were there to witness the unveiling of a monument to Grand Prince Vladimir, the ruler of Kievan Rus, ‘the first Russian state’, between 980 and 1015. According to legend, Vladimir was baptised in the Crimea, then part of the Byzantine Empire, in 988, thus beginning the conversion of his people to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Russia’s main religious leaders – the patriarch of Moscow and All-Russia, the Catholic ordinariate, the grand mufti, the chief rabbi and the head of the Buddhist Sangha – were all in attendance in their multicoloured robes.

The bronze figure, bearing cross and sword, stood at over twenty metres tall. It was the latest in a long series of elephantine shrines to Vladimir, all erected since the fall of Communism in the same kitsch ‘Russian’ national style developed in the nineteenth century. Other Russian towns – Belgorod, Vladimir, Astrakhan, Bataisk and Smolensk – had built monuments to the grand prince with funding from the state and public subscriptions. The Moscow statue was financed by the Ministry of Culture, a military history society and a motorcycle club.1

Another Vladimir, President Putin, gave the opening address. Even as he spoke he managed to look bored. He seemed to want the ceremony to be done as soon as possible – perhaps the reason why it started earlier than planned, when the film director Fedor Bondarchuk, who had vocally supported the recent Russian annexation of Ukrainian Crimea, invited Vladimir Vladimirovich to the microphone. Reading in a flat tone from his script, Putin noted the symbolism of the date for this unveiling, 4 November, Russia’s Day of National Unity. The grand prince, he proclaimed, had ‘gathered and defended Russia’s lands’ by ‘founding a strong, united and centralised state, incorporating diverse peoples, languages, cultures and religions into one enormous family’. The three modern countries that could trace their origins to Kievan Rus – Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – were all members of this family, Putin continued. They were a single people, or nation, sharing the same Christian principles, the same culture and language, which, he suggested, formed the Slavic bedrock of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. His point was echoed by the patriarch Kirill, who spoke next. If Vladimir had chosen to remain a pagan, or had converted only for himself, ‘there would be no Russia, no great Russian Empire, no contemporary Russia’.

Natalia Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s widow, gave the third and final speech, short and different in tone. The traumatic history of Russia’s twentieth century had, she said, divided the country, and ‘of all our disagreements, none is more divisive than our past’. She ended with a call to ‘respect our history’, which meant not just taking pride in it but ‘honestly and bravely judging evil, not justifying it or sweeping it under the carpet to hide it from view’.2 Putin looked uncomfortable.

The Ukrainians were furious. They had their own statue of the grand prince, Volodymyr as they call him. It was built in 1853, when Ukraine had been part of the Russian Empire, high up on the right bank of the Dnieper River overlooking Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the statue had became a symbol of the country’s independence from Russia. Within minutes of the ceremony’s closing in Moscow, Ukraine’s official Twitter account posted a picture of the Kiev monument with a tweet in English: ‘Don’t forget what [the] real Prince Volodymyr monument looks like.’ The Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, elected in the wake of the 2014 Maidan revolution, accused the Kremlin of appropriating Ukraine’s history, comparing its ‘imperial’ behaviour to the Russian annexation of the Crimea, part of sovereign Ukraine, just before his election.3

Kiev and Moscow had been fighting over Volodymyr/Vladimir for several years. The monument in Moscow had been made a metre taller than the one in Kiev, as if to assert the primacy of Russia’s claim to the grand prince. While Putin had enlisted Vladimir as the founder of the modern Russian state, the Ukrainians claimed Volodymyr as their own, the ‘creator of the medieval European state of Rus-Ukraine’, as he had been described by Poroshenko in a 2015 decree on the millennium of the grand prince’s death in 1015 (the fact that the term ‘Ukraine’ would not appear in written sources until the end of the twelfth century – and then only in the sense of okraina, an old Slav word for ‘periphery’ or ‘borderland’ – was conveniently overlooked). A few months later, Poroshenko added that Volodymyr’s decision to baptise Kievan Rus had been ‘not only a cultural or political decision, but a European choice’ by which Kiev had joined the Christian civilisation of Byzantium.4 The message was clear: Ukraine wanted to be part of Europe, not a Russian colony.

Both sides were calling on the history of Kievan Rus – a history they share – to reimagine narratives of national identity they could use for their own nationalist purposes. Historically, of course, it makes little sense to talk of either ‘Russia’ or ‘Ukraine’ as a nation or a state in the tenth century (or indeed at any time during the medieval period). What we have in the conflict over Volodymyr/Vladimir is not a genuine historical dispute, but two incompatible foundation myths.

The Kremlin’s version – that the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Belarusians were all originally one nation – was invoked to validate its claim to a ‘natural’ sphere of interest (by which it meant a right of interference) in Ukraine and Belarus. Like many Russians of his generation, schooled in Soviet views of history, Putin never really recognised the independence of Ukraine. As late as 2008, he told the US president that Ukraine was ‘not a real country’ but a historic part of greater Russia, a borderland protecting Moscow’s heartlands from the West. By this imperial logic Russia was entitled to defend itself against Western encroachments into Ukraine. Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, the start of a long war against Ukraine, derived from this dubious reading of the country’s history. The invasion was Russia’s response to the ‘putsch’ in Kiev, as the Kremlin called the Maidan uprising, which had begun as a popular revolt against the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich after it had stalled negotiations with the European Union for an Association Agreement promising to bring Ukraine into the Western sphere. Poroshenko meanwhile used the myth of Ukraine’s ‘European choice’ to legitimise the revolution, which had brought him into power, and his later signing of that EU agreement. The people of Ukraine had made their ‘European choice’ in the Maidan uprising.

‘Who controls the past … controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,’ George Orwell wrote in Nineteen EightyFour.5 The maxim is more true for Russia than for any other country in the world. In Soviet times, when Communism was its certain destiny and history was adjusted to reflect that end, there was a joke, which perhaps Orwell had in mind: ‘Russia is a country with a certain future; it is only its past that is unpredictable.’

No other country has reimagined its own past so frequently; none has a history so subjected to the vicissitudes of ruling ideologies. History in Russia is political. Drawing lessons from the country’s past has always been the most effective way to win an argument about future directions and policies. All the great debates about the country’s character and destiny have been framed by questions about history. The controversy between the Westernisers and the Slavophiles, which dominated Russia’s intellectual life in the nineteenth century, came down to a conflict over history. For those who looked to the West for their inspiration, Russia had been strengthened by the Westernising reforms introduced by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century; but according to the Slavophiles, Russia’s native culture and traditions, its national cohesion, had been undermined by Peter’s imposition of alien Western ways on the Russians.

Today the role of history in such debates is more important than ever. In Putin’s system, where there are no left–right party divisions, no competing ideologies to frame debate, and no publicly agreed meanings for key concepts like ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’, the discourse of politics is defined by ideas of the country’s past. Once the regime lays its meaning on an episode from Russian history, that subject is politicised. This is nothing new. Soviet historians were even more the hostages to changes in the Party Line, particularly under Stalin, when history was falsified to elevate his own significance and discredit his rivals. Some were forced to ‘correct’ their work, while others had their works removed from libraries or were banned from publishing again.

Even before 1917, history was carefully censored. It was a question not just of preventing the publication of ideas and facts that could be politically dangerous (anything that portrayed the autocracy unfavourably) but of making sure that the official story of the country’s past was not undermined in a way that challenged current policies. Ukrainian historians were particularly closely watched because of their presumed sympathy for European principles. They were not allowed to publish in Ukrainian, encourage nationalist feelings for Ukraine, or to promote a sense of grievance against Russia.6

Beyond such controlling narratives, history-writing in Russia, since its beginning in medieval chronicles, has been intertwined in mythical ideas – the myths of ‘Holy Russia’, the ‘holy tsar’, the ‘Russian soul’, Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ and so on. These myths became fundamental to the Russians’ understanding of their history and national character. They have often guided – and misguided – Western policies and attitudes towards Russia. To understand contemporary Russia we need to unpack these myths, explain their historical development and explore how they informed that country’s actions and identity.

The great cultural historian of Russian myths, Michael Cherniavsky, proffered a persuasive explanation for their extraordinary power and resilience over many centuries:

It has been observed by many that myths, rather than approximating reality, tend to be in direct contradiction to it. And Russian reality was ‘unholy’ enough to have produced the ‘holiest’ myths of them all. The greater the power of the government, the more extreme was the myth required to justify it and excuse submission to it; the greater the misery of the Russian people, the more extreme was the eschatological jump the myth had to provide so as to justify the misery and transcend it.7

Many writers have observed the Russian people’s need for transcendental myths promising a better version of Russia. In Dostoevsky’s novels, where suffering and salvation are such frequent themes, it appears as the essence of the Russian character. The endurance of these myths explains much in Russia’s history: the lasting force of Orthodox beliefs; the people’s search for a holy tsar, the embodiment of their ideals, to deliver them from injustice; their dreams of building heaven on this earth, a revolutionary utopia, even when this dream turned out to be the nightmare of the Stalinist regime.

All of which is to explain why this book is called The Story of Russia. It is as much about the ideas, myths and ideologies that have shaped the country’s history, about the ways the Russians have interpreted their past, as it is about the events, institutions, social groups, artists, thinkers and leaders that have made that history.

The book begins in the first millennium, when Russia’s lands were settled by the Slavs, and ends with Putin, in the third, examining the myths of Russian history which he has used to bolster his authoritarian regime. Its underlying argument is simply put: Russia is a country held together by ideas rooted in its distant past, histories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future. How the Russians came to tell their story – and to reinvent it as they went along – is a vital aspect of their history. It is the underlying framework of this history.

The cult of the grand prince Vladimir, ‘Equal of the Apostles’, as he’s called, is an illustration of this reinvention of the past. Almost nothing about him is known. There are no contemporary documents, only later chronicles by monks, hagiographic legends of his conversion, which served as a sacred myth legitimising his descendants, the rulers of Kievan Rus. Vladimir was one of many princes to be made a saint in the medieval period. But it was only later, from the sixteenth century, that his cult assumed a more important status, when Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) promoted it as the basis of his bogus claim, as Moscow’s tsar, to be the sole legitimate successor to the Kievan rulers and the emperors of Byzantium. The myth was used as part of Russia’s struggle against Poland and Lithuania, which possessed parts of what had once been Kievan Rus. From Ivan’s reign, Vladimir was hailed as ‘the first Russian tsar’, the holy ‘gatherer of the Russian lands’, in a legendary narrative whose purpose was to trace the roots of Moscow’s growing empire to Kievan Rus and Byzantium as its sacred foundations.8

This foundation myth was fundamental to the Romanovs, who had no descendance from the Kievan princes on which to base their fragile dynasty, founded after years of civil war in 1613. To symbolise a Kievan legacy and strengthen Moscow’s claim to rule Ukraine, Mikhail, the founder of the dynasty, had the relics of Prince Vladimir (except for his head) brought from Kiev to Moscow, where they remained in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral until 1917. As the Russian Empire grew, swallowing most of Ukraine in the eighteenth century, the cult of Vladimir became the focus of its justifying myth. His life was venerated as a symbol of the empire’s sacred origins and the united ‘family’ or ‘nation’ of Russians – the Great Russians, the Little Russians (Ukrainians) and the White Russians (Belarusians) as they were called in this imperial discourse. This was the intended Russian meaning of the Kiev monument to Vladimir when it was unveiled in 1853, although by the end of the nineteenth century it was already being contested by Ukrainian nationalists, who, like Poroshenko, claimed the statue as their own – a symbol of their European nationhood.9

Along with the myths that have shaped Russia’s past, there are a number of recurring themes in The Story of Russia. These themes reflect the structural continuities of Russian history – geographic factors, systems of belief, modes of rule, political ideas and social customs – which remain so important for an informed understanding of Russia today. Contemporary Russian politics are too often analysed without knowledge of the country’s past. To grasp what Putin really means for Russia and the broader world, we need to understand how his governance relates to the long-term patterns of Russian history, and what it means to Russians when he appeals to those ‘traditional values’.

These deep structural continuities will become apparent in my narrative, but it is worth making one or two clear right from the start. The first is the most obvious: Russia’s vast size and geography. Why did Russia grow so big? How was it able to expand so far across Eurasia and incorporate so many different nationalities (194 were recognised by the first Soviet census in 1926)? What was the impact of Russia’s size on the evolution of the Russian state? The eighteenth-century empress Catherine the Great maintained that a country as big as Russia needed to be governed by autocracy: ‘Only swiftness of decision in matters sent from distant realms can compensate for the slowness caused by these great distances. Any other form of government would be not merely harmful, but utterly ruinous for Russia.’10 But did this have to be the case? Were there not other forms of representative or local government that might have taken the place of an autocratic state?

Russia developed on a flat and open territory without natural boundaries. Its position made it vulnerable to foreign invasion but also open to the influence of the surrounding powers – Khazars, Mongols, Byzantines, Europeans and Ottomans – with which its relations were defined by trade. As the Russian state grew stronger, a process we should date from the sixteenth century, its main focus was the defence of its frontiers. This priority involved certain patterns of development that have shaped the country’s history.

It entailed the subordination of society to the state and its military needs. Social classes were created and legally defined to benefit the state as taxpayers and military servitors. It also meant a policy of territorial aggrandisement to secure Russia’s frontiers. From the rise of Muscovy, or Moscow, the founding core of the Russian state, to Putin’s wars in Ukraine, history shows that Russia tends to advance its security by keeping neighbouring countries weak, and by fighting wars beyond its borders to keep hostile powers at arm’s length. Does this mean that Russia is expansionist in character, as so many of its critics in the modern age have said? Or should its tendency to push outwards and colonise the spaces around it be viewed rather as a defensive reaction, stemming from its perceived need for buffer states to protect it on the open steppe?

The nature of state power is the other theme worth mentioning here. Catherine the Great was in the habit of comparing Russia to the European absolutist states. But the Russian state was not like them. It had evolved as a patrimonial or personal autocracy, in which the concept of the state (gosudarstvo) was embodied in the person of the tsar (gosudar) as the sovereign lord or owner of the Russian lands. In medieval Europe the legal separation of the ‘king’s two bodies’ – his mortal person and the sacred office of the monarchy – allowed for the development of an abstract and impersonal conception of the state.11 But that did not happen in Russia. From the reign of Ivan IV, the tsar and state were seen as one – united in the body of a single being, who, as man and ruler, was an instrument of God.

The sacralisation of the tsar’s authority, a legacy of Byzantium, was both a strength and a weakness of the Russian state. The myth of the tsar as a sacred agent was, on the one hand, essential to the cult of the holy tsar that underpinned the monarchy until the twentieth century, when the myth was at last broken by Nicholas II’s repressive measures against popular protests. On the other hand, the same myth could be used by rebel leaders, as it was by the Cossack-led rebellions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to subvert the tsar’s power. In the popular imagination the holy tsar was the deliverer of truth and social justice (pravda) to the people. But if the tsar brought injustice, he could not be the ‘true tsar’ – he was perhaps the Antichrist sent by Satan to destroy God’s work in the ‘Russian holy land’ – and as such should be opposed. By claiming they were fighting to restore the true tsar to the throne, the Cossack rebel leaders were able to attract a mass following in protest movements that shook the state at crisis moments in its modern history.

Similar ideas of truth and justice would underpin the Russian Revolution of 1917. The myth of the holy tsar would also give way to the leader cults of Lenin and Stalin, whose statues would appear on every square. Putin’s regime draws from this monarchical archetype of governance, giving the appearance of stability based on ‘Russian traditions’.

Putin’s cult has not been set in stone. There are no statues of him yet in public squares. But some wits said on the unveiling of the Moscow monument to Prince Vladimir that a statue of his namesake, the Russian president, would soon appear by the Kremlin wall.

1

Origins

All countries have a story of their origin. Some invoke divine or classical mythologies, stories linking them to sacred acts of creation or ancient civilisations, but most, at least in Europe, have foundation myths generally invented in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. This was a time when nationalist historians, philologists and archaeologists sought to trace their nations back to a primeval ethnos – homogeneous, immutable, containing all the seeds of the modern national character – which they saw reflected in whatever remnants they could find of the early peoples in their territories. The Celts, the Franks, the Gauls, the Goths, the Huns and the Serbs – all have served as the ur-people of a modern nationhood, although in truth they were complex social groups, formed over centuries of great migrations across the European continent.1

The origins of Russia are a case in point. No other country has been so divided over its own beginnings. None has changed its story so often. The subject is inseparable from myth. The only written account that we have, the Tale of Bygone Years, known as the Primary Chronicle, was compiled by the monk Nestor and other monks in Kiev during the 1110s. It tells us how, in 862, the warring Slavic tribes of north-west Russia agreed jointly to invite the Rus, a branch of the Vikings, to rule over them: ‘Our land is vast and abundant, but there is no order in it. Come and reign as princes and have authority over us!’2 Three princely brothers, the Rus, arrived in longboats with their kin. They were accepted by the Slavs. Two brothers died but the third, Riurik, continued ruling over Novgorod, the most important of the northern trading towns, until his death in 879, when his son Oleg succeeded him. Three years later, Oleg captured Kiev, according to this story, and Kievan Rus, the first ‘Russian’ state, was established.

The Primary Chronicle reads more like a fairy tale than a work of history. It is a typical foundation myth – composed to establish the political legitimacy of the Riurikids, the Kievan ruling dynasty, as God’s chosen agents for the Christianisation of the Rus lands. Much of it is fictional – stories patched together from orally transmitted epic songs and narrative poems (known in Russian as byliny), Norse sagas, Slav folklore, old Byzantine annals and religious texts. Nothing in it can be taken as a fact. We cannot say for sure whether Riurik even existed. He may have been Rörik, the nephew, son or possibly the brother of the Danish monarch Harald Klak, who was alive at the right time. But there is no evidence connecting him to Kiev, so the founder of the dynasty may have been a different Viking warrior, or an allegorical figure.3 The Kievan monks were less concerned with the accuracy of their chronicle than with its religious symbolism and meaning. The timescale of the chronicle is biblical. It charts the history of the Rus from Noah in the Book of Genesis, claiming them to be the descendants of his son Japheth, so that Kievan Rus is understood to have been created as part of the divine plan.4

The Primary Chronicle was at the heart of a debate on Russia’s origins that goes back to the first half of the eighteenth century, when history-writing in Russia was in its infancy. The new academic discipline was dominated by Germans. Among them was Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–83), who at the age of twenty had joined the teaching staff of the newly founded St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Müller was the founding editor of the first series of documents and articles on Russian history, the Sammlung Russischer Geschichte (1732–65), published in German to inform a European readership, which knew almost nothing about Russia and its history. The peak of his career came in 1749, when he was tasked with giving an oration for the Empress Elizabeth on her name day. His lecture was entitled ‘On the Origins of the Russian People and their Name’.

In it Müller summarised the findings of other German scholars, who had concluded from their reading of the Primary Chronicle that Russia owed its origins to the Vikings. The Rus, he said, were Scandinavians, whose tribal name derived from Ruotsi, a term used by the Finns to describe the Swedes from Roslagen. But this was not the moment to suggest that Russia was created by the Swedes, or any other foreigners. Russia’s victory in the recent war against Sweden (1741–3) had bolstered patriotic sentiments, which extended to the country’s past. Müller’s lecture was roundly criticised at the Academy. A scrutiny committee was appointed to decide whether it could be delivered – if not on the empress’s name day on 5 September then on the seventh anniversary of her coronation on 25 November – without bringing Russia ‘into disrepute’. Mikhail Lomonosov, Russia’s first great polymath, led the attack on the German, accusing him of setting out to denigrate the Slavs by depicting them as savages, incapable of organising themselves as a state. The Rus, he insisted, were not Swedes but Baltic Slavs, descendants of the Iranian Roxolani tribe, whose history went back to the Trojan Wars. National pride coloured Lomonosov’s criticisms, along with a personal dislike of the German. He wrongly claimed that Müller was unable to read Russian documents, that he made gross errors as a consequence and that, like all foreigners, he could not really know the country’s history because he was not Russian.

Six months of academic arguments ensued. On 8 March 1750, the scrutiny committee banned Müller’s lecture and confiscated all the printed copies of it in both Russian and Latin. Lomonosov took part in the raid. The German was demoted to a junior post and barred from working in the state archive, supposedly to defend the Russian Empire from his attempts to ‘besmirch’ its history. Müller’s academic career never fully recovered, but he published many books, including Origines gentis et nominis Russorum (1761), which developed the ideas of his lecture. Published first in Germany, Origines did not appear in Russian until 1773, a decade after Lomonosov’s Ancient Russian History, a book written as a refutation of Müller’s argument.5

The debate on Russia’s origins has continued to this day. Known as the Normanist Controversy (because the Vikings were Normans), it is highly charged with politics and ideology. The question at its heart is whether Russia was created by the Russians or by foreigners.

In the final decades of the eighteenth century, Müller’s ‘Norman theory’ gained acceptance in the St Petersburg Academy, where German-born historians were dominant. They propagated the theory that Riurik had belonged to a Germanic tribe of Scandinavia and that Russia as a state and culture had thus been founded by Germans. Catherine the Great (herself German-born) supported their position, because it suggested that the Russians were of European stock, a viewpoint she promoted in her many works. In German hands the Normanist position entailed sometimes racist attitudes towards the Slavs. Typical is this passage from a study of the Primary Chronicle by August Ludwig von Schlözer in 1802:

Of course there were people there [in Russia], God knows for how long and from where they came, but they were people without any leadership, living like wild beasts and birds in their vast forests … No enlightened European had noticed them or had written about them. There was not a single real town in the whole of the North … Wild, boorish and isolated Slavs began to be socially acceptable only thanks to the Germans, whose mission, decreed by fate, was to sow the first seeds of civilization among them.6

The Norman theory appealed to defenders of autocracy, supposing as it did that the warring Slavic tribes were incapable of governing themselves. Foremost among them was Nikolai Karamzin, Russia’s first great writer and historian, who leaned heavily on Schlözer’s work in his History of the Russian State (published in twelve volumes between 1818 and 1829). Before the establishment of foreign princely rule, Karamzin declared, Russia had been nothing but an ‘empty space’ with ‘wild and warring tribes, living on a level with the beasts and birds’.7

These views were challenged in the nineteenth century by philologists and archaeologists. Often motivated by nationalist pride in Russia’s ancient Slav culture, they looked for evidence that underlined its advanced social life in the first millennium. The anti-Normanists, as they were called, argued that the Rus were not from Scandinavia (they were not mentioned in the Old Norse sources or sagas) but were Slavs, whose name, they argued, had appeared in Greek sources from the second century and in Arab from the fifth. The Rus homeland, they maintained, was in Ukraine and was marked by Slavic river names (Ros, Rosava, Rusna, Rostavtsya and so on). Excavations of their settlements revealed that they were built in a defensive circle, in stark contrast to the Vikings’ open settlements, and that they had attained a high level of material culture from their contacts with Hellenic, Byzantine and Asiatic civilisations long before the Vikings had arrived.

The fortunes of the anti-Normanists rose in line with the influence of nationalism on the Russian state. They peaked in Stalin’s time, particularly after 1945, when a Great Russian chauvinism, boosted by the victory over Nazi Germany, was placed at the heart of Soviet ideology. The ethno-archaeology of early Slavic settlements became heavily politicised. Massive state investments were made in excavations whose remit was to show a ‘Slavic homeland’ stretching from the Volga River in the east to the Elbe River in the west, from the Baltic in the north to the Aegean and Black Seas – in other words the area that Stalin claimed as a Soviet ‘sphere of influence’ during the Cold War. The idea that Russia owed its origins to any foreign power – least of all to the ‘Germanic’ Vikings – became inadmissible. Scholars who had dared to suggest so were forced by the Party to revise their work.8

The Soviet view of Russia’s origins was thus entangled in a concept of ethnicity, in which the ethnos was regarded as an ancient core of national identity, persisting throughout history, despite changes in society. At a time when Western scholars were coming to the view that ethnic groups were modern intellectual constructions, invented categories imposed on complex social groups, their Soviet counterparts were analysing them as primordial entities defined by biology. Through the study of ethnogenesis they traced modern Russia to a single people in the Iron Age, claiming that the Russians were descendants of the ancient Slavs.

This approach resurfaced with an even greater force after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalists competed with each other for an ethnic claim of origin from the Kievan legacy. Here was Putin’s purpose in his speech on the unveiling of the Moscow monument to Prince Vladimir. Asserting Russia’s inheritance from Kiev, he invoked the old imperial myth that the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Belarusians were historically one people, three ethnic sub-groups of a single nation, thus establishing a ‘natural’ sphere of influence for today’s Russia in its original ‘ancestral lands’. History of course is more complex – even if it is a story too.

Russia grew on the forest lands and steppes between Europe and Asia. There are no natural boundaries, neither seas nor mountain ranges, to define its territory, which throughout its history has been colonised by peoples from both continents. The Ural mountains, said to be the frontier dividing ‘European Russia’ from Siberia, offered no protection to the Russian settlers against the nomadic tribes from the Asiatic steppe. They are a series of high ranges broken up by broad passes. In many places they are more like hills. It is significant that the word in Russian for a ‘hill’ or ‘mountain’ is the same (gora). This is a country on one horizontal plain.

On either side of the Urals the terrain is the same: a vast steppe, eleven time zones long, stretching from the borderlands of Russia in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. This territorial continuum is made up of four bands or zones that run in parallel from one end to the other, more or less. The first of these zones, around one-fifth of Russia’s land mass, is above the Arctic circle, where the treeless tundra remains under snow and ice for eight months every year. Nomadic reindeer-herders, fur-and walrus-hunters were the only people to inhabit these regions until the twentieth century, when the discovery of coal, gold, platinum and diamonds in the permafrost led to the Gulag’s colonisation of the Arctic zone, where 2 million Russians live today. Most of them are descendants of the Gulag’s prisoners.

Moving south, we come next to the taiga forest zone, the largest coniferous forest in the world, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific. It is made up of pine trees, spruce and larch, interspersed with marshes, lakes and gentle-running rivers, the fastest means of travel in this zone until the nineteenth century.

Pine forests give way to mixed woodlands and open wooded steppelands to the south of Moscow, where the rich black soil is in places up to several metres deep. This third band of Russia’s land, known as the central agricultural zone, is wide at the western end, where it merges into the Hungarian plain, but narrows in the east, towards Siberia, where the taiga takes over. The fertile zone was secured by the Russians from the sixteenth century.

Finally, in the far south, we come to the Pontic steppe, the semi-arid grasslands and savannas running from the Black Sea’s northern coastline in the west to the Caspian Sea and Kazakhstan in the east. The area was conquered by the Russians from the nomadic Turkic tribes only from the eighteenth century. It forms the religious fault line between Russia and the Muslim world.

The earliest recorded settlers in the lands that became known as Kievan Rus were the Slavs, although there were Finno-Ugric tribes, such as the Estonians, in the northern forest zones from the middle of the first millennium. According to the story told by most historians, the Slavs were forced to flee to the forests of the north by the Turkic tribes, whose military power gave them control of the grasslands further south. The Slavs spread out through the great primeval forests in small groups, clearing trees and burning their debris to sow crops in the ashen ground (a method known as slash and burn). Farming in the northern forest zone was arduous. A strong collectivism was essential to survive. Labour teams were needed to clear the trees, and to sow and harvest all the crops during the short growing season between the thaw and spring floods of April and the beginning of the winter freeze in October. The soil is poor, sandy, thin, on top of rock. Only rye, among the cereals, could be grown here, and the harvest yields were low. Yet the forests gave the peasants other means of livelihood: furs, honey, wax, fishing, carpentry.

The Slavs lived in settlements enclosed by wooden walls. Democratic in their character, they were governed by assemblies of the adult men (the Byzantines considered their democracy ‘disorder and anarchy’).9 Masters of the axe, the Slavs were skilled in turning trees into buildings, longboats and canoes, meaning they were able to add fishing and trade along the rivers to their means of livelihood. Their numbers grew, forcing the Finno-Ugric tribes to retreat deeper into the forest. By the end of the first millennium, the Slavs had developed a durable, adaptive peasant culture, based on collectivism and a spirit of endurance which have characterised the Russians for much of their history.

The Vikings came to Russia, not to loot, as they did in England (Russia was too poor for that), but to use its many waterways for long-distance trade between Europe and Asia. The name of the Rus was probably derived from the Old Norse word róa, which means ‘to row’, suggesting that the Rus were known as boatmen and most probably were quite diverse in ethnic terms. They were not a tribe united by a common ethnic origin but an army based on a common business enterprise. They sailed in their longboats from the eastern Swedish coast to the mouth of the Neva River, the location of St Petersburg today. From there they rowed up the Neva to Lake Ladoga, an important trading post, where they obtained slaves and precious furs from the Slavs and other peoples of the north (the words ‘Slav’ and ‘slave’ became synonymous in the Viking lexicon). The cargo was transported south along the Dnieper, Don and Volga rivers, across the Black Sea and the Caspian, to the markets of Byzantium and the Arab caliphate, where slaves and furs were highly prized. The Rus returned with silver coins, glass beads, metalwares and jewellery – artefacts retrieved by archaeologists from graves at Old Ladoga, thought to be the earliest Viking settlement, dating back to the eighth century. The graves also contained leather shoes, combs made of bone and antlers, runic amulets and wooden sticks of a kind found in Scandinavia too.10

The Rus quickly settled down and assimilated into the Slav populace. Settlements like Old Ladoga were polyethnic communities with a Viking warrior elite, Slav and Finnic farmers and craftsmen. The Rus adopted the Slavs’ language, names, customs and religious rituals, a process of assimilation accelerated by their shared conversion to Christianity during the tenth century. For this reason there are few Scandinavian traces in the Russian language or place names in Russia – a marked contrast with the heavy Viking influence on both language and place names in England and Germany.11

The Rus made a strong impression on the Arabs who encountered them. Ibn Fadlan met a group of merchants at Itil, on the Volga near the Caspian Sea, in 921:

I have seen the Rus as they came on their merchant journeys and encamped by Itil. I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy; they wear neither tunics nor kaftans, but the men wear a garment which covers one side of the body and leaves a hand free. Each man has an axe, a sword, and a knife, and keeps each by him at all times. Each woman wears on either breast a box of iron, silver, copper, or gold; the value of the box indicates the wealth of the husband. Each box has a ring from which depends a knife. The women wear neck-rings of gold and silver. Their most prized ornaments are green glass beads. They string them as necklaces for their women.12

Itil was the capital of the Khazar state, or khaganate, a multi-confessional trading empire, headed by a Turkic warrior elite, which extended from the Aral Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, from the Caucasus to the upper Volga forest lands. It had an ordered government, efficient means of tax collecting and the military power to protect the river trading routes against the nomadic tribes, the most dangerous being the Polovtsians (also known as Kipchaks or Cumans). Founded as a series of scattered settlements in the middle of the first millennium, Kiev had developed as a Khazar stronghold controlling the Dnieper River on the trading route between the Baltic and Byzantium.

The Khazar influence on the development of Kievan Rus is a matter of controversy. Some scholars think that Khazars played a more important part than the Vikings or the Slavs.13 Byzantine and Arab writers described the Rus as vassals of the khaganate, linked to it through marriages. The first Rus rulers called themselves khagans, suggesting that they derived their authority from the Khazars. They certainly had better relations with the Khazars than allowed by the medieval chronicles, which paint a picture of unending raids and violence by the Turkic-speaking Khazar tribes against peaceful Russian settlers. Historians of Russia in the nineteenth century relied completely on these chronicles. They told a story of the nation’s beginnings as an epic struggle by the agriculturalists of the northern forest lands against the horsemen of the Asiatic steppe. This national myth became so fundamental to the Russians’ European self-identity that even to suggest that their ancestors had been influenced by the Asiatic cultures of the steppe was to invite accusations of treason. In fact raids by the steppeland tribes were infrequent, and there were long periods of peaceful coexistence, trade, cooperation, social intermingling and even intermarriage between the Slavs and their nomadic neighbours on the steppe. The influence of the steppeland tribes was manifested in the Rus elite’s adoption of their dress and status symbols, such as the wearing of belts studded with heavy metal mounts and bridles with elaborate sets of ornaments.14 We need to think of early Rus, not as a story of hostile confrontation between the forest settlers and steppe nomads, but as one of largely peaceful interaction between all the peoples of Eurasia. We should think of it, perhaps, not in terms of ethnic groups at all, but as a trading union of diverse groups – Slavs, Finns, Vikings and Khazars.15

Kievan Rus emerged as the Khazar state declined. The growing military power of the Rus enabled them to free themselves from paying taxes to the khaganate; it also allowed them to assume the latter’s role as the protector of the northern borders of Byzantium, a role which brought them rich rewards in the form of trade concessions in Constantinople, the Byzantine capital. As their power grew, the Rus warriors attacked the Khazar tribute-paying lands between the Volga and Dnieper. In 882 they captured Kiev, which became the capital of Kievan Rus.

Under the first Rus princes Kiev developed into an important trading centre between the Black and Baltic seas. In the Podol district of the city archaeologists have found large quantities of Byzantine coinage, amphoras and the weights of scales, as well as the remains of log houses built in a technique (without using nails) associated with the Russian north. To grow the population and tax base of the new state the grand prince Vladimir forcibly transported entire Slav communities from the northern forests to the regions around Kiev. It was the start of a long tradition of mass population movements enforced by the Russian state.16

Establishing their power-base in Kiev entailed two important changes for the Rus. First there was a shift in focus from long-distance trade to the business of collecting tribute, from which they had seen the Khazars thrive. Lands once controlled by the khaganate were now taxed by Kiev, which built forts and towns to protect its dominion of the western steppe. Secondly, the main flow of trade moved from the Volga and the Muslim world to the Dnieper and Byzantium. This turn to the south was consolidated by a series of commercial treaties between Kievan Rus and the Byzantine Empire. Each was preceded by a Rus attack on Constantinople whose aim was to force the Byzantines to open up their markets and improve the terms of trade. The first of these treaties, in 911, made generous concessions to the Rus traders.

Through trade and diplomacy pagan Rus was drawn into the Christian civilisation of the Byzantine Empire. Princess Olga, who reigned as a regent of Kievan Rus between 945 and 960, led the way. She had herself baptised in Constantinople, where she cemented a military alliance with the emperor by adopting for herself the same name as the reigning empress Helen (Elena in Russian). Her son Sviatoslav remained a pagan, but her grandson, the grand prince Vladimir, had not just himself but all his realm converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church in 988.

According to the Primary Chronicle, Vladimir’s conversion was the outcome of his search for the True Faith. The story goes that he was visited by representatives of the neighbouring states, each one seeking to convert him to their religion. First came the Islamic envoy of the Volga Bulgars, who enticed Vladimir with promises of carnal satisfaction in the afterlife (this was a man who, according to legend, had 800 wives), but put him off entirely with the Muslim ban on alcohol (‘Drinking is the joy of the Rus. We cannot live without it,’ the prince declared). Next came the German papal emissaries, followed by a Khazar delegation of rabbis (the Khazar leaders had embraced Judaism during the ninth century). Neither impressed Vladimir. Finally the Byzantines arrived. Their arguments persuaded him to send his envoys to observe the various faiths in their own environment. Among the Volga Bulgars they found only ‘sorrow and a dreadful stench’. In Germany they ‘beheld no glory’. But in the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople, ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth,’ they reported on the liturgy in the basilica, ‘for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere on earth. We cannot describe it to you. We only know that God dwells there among men. For we cannot forget that beauty.’17

Like the rest of the Primary Chronicle, the story is apocryphal. Vladimir’s conversion had more to do with statecraft and diplomacy than with the aesthetics of religious rites. The acquisition of a single, unifying religion could help to legitimise the Kievan state and extend its authority throughout its multi-ethnic territory, where various beliefs and pagan cults militated against princely rule. The existence of a readily translated Church Slavonic literature – enabling the dissemination of its teachings over a large area – gave the Orthodox Christians a clear advantage over other religions whose scriptures were not yet in Slavonic. The key factor here was the work of the brothers Cyril and Methodius, the ninth-century missionaries sent by the Byzantine emperor to spread Christianity among the Slavs. They had translated the Greek Gospels into the Glagolitic script (an early version of Cyrillic, named after Cyril by his followers). This had made it possible to have a Christian service in the Slavic tongue rather than in Greek, which the population did not understand.18

At this point in the Primary Chronicle we are told that Vladimir converted in the Crimea, where he had gone with 6,000 of his warriors to crush a rebellion against the Byzantine emperor Basil II. The prize for his service was the hand of Anna, the emperor’s sister, upon his conversion to Christianity. After he had put down the revolt, the Chronicle informs us, he had to threaten an attack on Constantinople before Basil honoured his end of the bargain and the marriage was secured. All this may be nothing but legend, a story later told by the monks in Kiev to depict Vladimir and therefore Kievan Rus as an equal to Byzantium, instead of a vassal state. It is just as likely that Vladimir had put down the uprising as an agent of the Byzantines, and as such had been made to convert before his departure for the Crimea.19 Instead of the act of self-determination celebrated by the modern Russian and Ukrainian states, Vladimir’s conversion to the Eastern Church may have been a declaration of his kingdom’s subjugation to the Byzantine Empire.

Vladimir’s conversion brought Russia into the cultural orbit of Byzantium. This involved a revolution, not just in the country’s spiritual life but in its art and architecture, literature, philosophy, in the symbolic language and ideas of the state.

Byzantium was a universal culture, a ‘commonwealth’, to adopt the term of its great Anglo-Russian scholar Dimitri Obolensky. Its peoples were united by the dual symbolic power of the emperor (the basileus in Greek or tsar in Church Slavonic) and the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, who appointed Kiev’s metropolitan, the head of the Russian Church.20 The role of Byzantium was thus similar to that of Rome in the Latin West. Just as the Latins looked to Rome as the centre of their civilisation, so the Russians saw Constantinople (which they called Tsargrad, the Imperial City) as their spiritual capital.

Through Byzantium the Russians were connected to the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians and Romanians, all affiliated to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Through its broader links to Christendom, they also entered into closer contact with Europe, becoming conscious of themselves as Europeans belonging to a common faith. As Obolensky put it, ‘Byzantium was not a wall, erected between Russia and the West: she was Russia’s gateway to Europe.’21

Although Vladimir had converted Rus to Christianity, it was his son Yaroslav who built most of its first great churches as grand prince of Kiev from 1019 to 1054. Having fought his brothers for the throne, Yaroslav had come to see that building churches would advance his prestige and secure his power-base in Kiev. The most important was the Church of St Sophia, closely modelled on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople with its simple cross-in-square formation, Greek inscriptions, monumental frescoes and colourful mosaics, dominated by the massive, solemn face of Christ Pantokrator staring down from the heaven of the central dome. Beneath him are mosaics of the apostles, the Mother of God and the Eucharist, the three avenues by which the holy spirit descended to the earth, symbolising Christ’s incarnation in nature.

Like other Russian churches, St Sophia had a row of icons on a low screen between the altar and the worshippers. Later it would be replaced by a high wall of icons, the iconostasis, whose visual beauty is a central feature of the Eastern Church. Seeing is believing for the Orthodox. Russians pray with their eyes open – their gaze fixed on an icon, which serves as a window on the divine sphere.22 The icon is the focal point of the believers’ spiritual emotions – a sacred object able to elicit miracles. Icons weep and produce myrrh. They are lost and reappear, intervening in events to steer them on a divine path. Not only paintings had this status in Russia: wood carvings, mosaics, even buildings could be icons too.23 In contrast to the Western Christian mind, where the divine existed only in the heavens, in Russia the divine was immanent in worldly existence. Here were the roots of the utopian consciousness which lay at the heart of the Russian peasant religion: the belief in the certainty of building heaven on this earth, and specifically on Russian soil, according to the early Christian myth of Holy Russia, a new land of salvation where Christ would reappear.

Icons came to Russia from Byzantium. To begin with, they were painted by Greek artists, and remained austerely Greek in style. It was only from the thirteenth century that a more distinctive Russian style appeared. This native mode was distinguished by a simple harmony of line and colour, graceful movements and a skilful use of inverse perspective (where lines seem to converge on a point in front of the picture) to draw the viewer in and guide him in his prayers by symbolising how the icon’s sacred action takes place in a sphere beyond the normal laws of existence.24

A similar transition towards Russian native forms can be seen in literature. Church Slavonic became the foundation of a literary language in Russia. Based on the South Slav dialect spoken around Thessaloniki, where Cyril and Methodius had lived, it followed Greek syntax – an influence that flowed into Russian. But the Greek influence was not entirely dominant. In the Primary Chronicle there is a distinctly Russian ideology.

At the heart of the Primary Chronicle is a myth that was to play a central role in the Russian political consciousness. Its basis is the sacred nature of the prince who dies as a martyr for the ‘Holy Russian land’. The origins of this idea can be traced back to the cult of Boris and Gleb, the first saints of the Russian Church. The two brothers had been killed in the dynastic wars following the death of their father Vladimir in 1015. But their hagiographers, beginning with Nestor in the Primary Chronicle, presented them as ‘passion-sufferers’ (strastoterptsy), who had willingly laid down their lives for the salvation of the Russian land, as Christ had done for Palestine. Their sacrifice was venerated by the Church as the forging of a covenant between God and the newly baptised Rus, a new Terra Sancta, which was thus endowed with special grace (the origins of ‘Holy Rus’ and the ‘Holy Russian land’). Churches of Boris and Gleb were built. The two saints were venerated in icons. They gave their name to monasteries and towns (and much later on to tsarist dragoon regiments, Soviet airbases and submarines). From the worship of these ‘saintly princes’, the cult of the holy prince or ruler would develop in Russia (as would the cult of the revolution’s fallen heroes, who were also venerated as the ‘people’s saints’ during 1917).25 Of the 800 Russian saints created up until the eighteenth century, over a hundred had been princes or princesses.26 No other country in the world has made so many saints from its rulers. Nowhere else has power been so sacralised.

Christianity was slow to spread through Kievan Rus. Long after Vladimir’s conversion, paganism remained deeply rooted in the countryside and many towns. In 1071, when the clergy came to Novgorod and threw the pagan idols into the Volkhov River, there was a popular rebellion. The uprising was suppressed and a wooden church of St Sophia built; but only slowly did the Novgorodians exchange the amulets they wore to ward off evil spirits for crucifixes and icons.

Pagan idols were not gods in the Greek sense but natural forces and spirits, which appeared in ordinary people’s daily lives. There was Perun, god of lightning and thunder; Volos, protector of the herds; Rozhanitsa, goddess of fertility; Mokosh, goddess of the earth (reincarnated as Mother Russia later on); Dazhborg and Khors, who were both sun gods. With the arrival of Christianity these gods did not disappear but were incorporated into the new system of beliefs and rituals. Saints and natural deities were frequently combined in the peasants’ Christian–pagan religion. Poludnitsa, the old pagan goddess of the harvest, was worshipped through the placement of a sheaf of rye behind an icon; Volos morphed into St Vlasius; and Perun became St Elias. The Christianisation of the pagan deities was practised by the Orthodox Church itself. At the core of the Russian faith is a distinctive stress on motherhood which never really took root in the Latin West. Where the Catholic tradition placed its emphasis on the Madonna’s purity, the Russian emphasised her divine motherhood (bogoroditsa). This is reflected in the way that Russian icons tend to show her with her face pressed tight against the infant’s head in maternal devotion. It may well have been a conscious effort on the Church’s part to supplant the pagan mother cults of Rozhanitsa and Mokosh.27

This ‘dual belief’ (dvoeverie) can be seen most clearly in the burial rites of the Russians during the medieval period. In the Upper Volga region, for example, archaeologists have excavated thirteenth-century barrow graves or mounds, the old pagan funeral practice, in which the dead were buried with both pagan amulets and Christian artefacts such as crosses and icons.28 Pagan rituals continued to be practised in the Russian countryside for centuries. Soviet ethnographers found evidence of them in the 1920s, and there are parts of the Russian north where they can be found today.

From the beginning of his reign, Grand Prince Vladimir had placed his sons in charge of the various principalities within his realm. Each prince was equipped with an army or druzhina of a few thousand horsemen led by warriors, known as boyars, who received part of the prince’s land. These landowners came to play a leading role in government through the Boyars’ Council, which advised the prince, eventually forming something like an oligarchy of the major boyar clans. They were in charge of tax collection, military recruitment and justice in the provinces. The boyars were army men, often absent on campaigns; they took little interest in their land, which was farmed by the peasants in exchange for dues in labour or in kind. Land was plentiful but labour scarce – that was the basic fact of the seigneurial economy which guaranteed the peasants’ access to the land and their freedom of movement, until the imposition of serfdom from the sixteenth century.

On the death of the grand prince or one of his sons there was a reshuffling of the principalities held by the remaining kin. Normally the throne of the grand prince would pass, not from father to son, but from the elder brother to the younger one (usually until the fourth brother). Only then would it pass down to the next generation. When the eldest brother took the throne in Kiev, all the others moved up to the principality on the next step of the ladder. It was a system of collateral succession not found elsewhere in Europe.29

Because there were no clear rules of primogeniture, family squabbles were a major source of instability during the eleventh century. It was not until the Liubech Conference, in 1097, that a set of principles was finally agreed, and then only because unity was seen as essential by the princes for the defence of their realms against the external threat of the Polovtsians and other warring tribes. The conference confirmed that all the princely brothers were collectively responsible for defending Kievan Rus. But otherwise their principalities became patrimonial domains (otchiny), ruled as extensions of their household property, and belonging solely to their own branch of the dynasty. Only Kiev remained subject to collateral succession, the principle of passing power from one brother to another in order of their seniority.

Kievan Rus was a loose dynastic federation of principalities rather than a kingdom in the European sense. Kinship not kingship was its constitutional principle. The grand prince was not the equal of a king, but primus inter pares, a figurehead of unity. Outside Kiev itself, in the principalities, his authority was limited. This was a polycentric state, in which every prince was in theory equal, although hierarchies did emerge as some principalities became more successful than others. Novgorod emerged as a growing economic force and potential rival to Kiev because of its access to the Baltic Sea and flourishing commerce with the Hanseatic Germans and Europe. Located on Lake Ilmen, an important waterway, it was the main transit point for the east–west river trade. It grew in wealth by collecting taxes from the furs and slaves that went from northern Russia to the West, and imposing duties on the cloth, wool, salt and metal goods that went the other way. Vladimir, Suzdal, Riazan, Polotsk, Smolensk, Chernigov, Galich and Vladimir-Volhynia all emerged as independent economic centres during the eleventh century.

Much has been made of these separatist tendencies. They have been blamed for the disunity of Kievan Rus that supposedly led to its destruction by the Mongols in the early thirteenth century. Many historians have argued that Kiev went into decline before the Mongol invasion. Their argument is based on three main points: chronicle accounts of petty wars between the principalities and regular incursions by the Polovtsians; the idea that the trade along the Dnieper to Byzantium declined after 1204, when the Fourth Crusade attacked Constantinople, leading to a shift in commerce from the Dnieper to the West; and the nationalist assumption that a European country such as Kievan Rus would not have fallen to the Asiatic Mongols if it had not been already weakened from within. Their arguments do not stack up. The rise of thriving centres such as Novgorod was a sign not of the weakening of Kievan Rus, but of its regional prosperity.30 It was the wealth of these trading towns that helped them to become more independent of the political centre. Kievan Rus fell victim to its own success.

All the indications point to a flourishing economy and culture during the twelfth century. In the major towns churches and cathedrals were being built in stone instead of wood. Monasteries were established. Kiev’s trades and crafts were doing well, judging from the large amounts of glazed pottery, ceramic tiles, glassworks, jewellery, metal locks and looms found by archaeologists. Birch-bark writings (carved into the inside of tree bark) suggest a thriving urban life and widespread literacy in towns such as Novgorod, where these fragments have been best preserved because of the muddy soil. Nothing indicates that any of the towns were in decline prior to the Mongol invasion. Kiev had a population of 40,000 people, more than London and not much less than Paris, at the start of the thirteenth century.31

Links to Europe were developing. In Novgorod, heavily involved with it through trade, Anglo-Saxon and German coins have been found in far larger quantities from the twelfth than from any earlier century. Kiev was increasingly connected to the European dynasties through marriages: Vladimir Monomakh was married to the daughter of the English king Harold, killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066; his son was married to the daughter of the Swedish king; and his grandson to the daughter of the Serbian prince.

Politically, Kievan Rus was moving along European lines. The landowning rights of the boyar class gave it the potential to become an independent aristocracy as a counterbalance to the power of the crown. There was a kernel of democracy in the veche or town assembly, at which the freemen were allowed to speak and vote on civic appointments, domestic laws and taxes, even questions of war and peace. The veche was particularly powerful in Novgorod, where from 1126 it was responsible for electing the city’s mayor or posadnik, previously appointed by the prince. The posadnik, once elected, acted as a check on monarchical power. Ten years later, the city also won the right to choose its prince and define his powers in a contract drawn up by the veche. Here was a city state similar to Venice and other city republics where the ruler was elected, and his powers checked, by a council of the leading men. The democratic potential of Novgorod captured the imagination of succeeding generations in Russia. In the nineteenth century the long-lost freedoms of the city were an inspiration to republicans and democrats.

How does the period of Kievan Rus connect with the rest of Russian history? Is there any meaningful sense in which modern Russia can lay claim to it as the foundation of its nationhood, as Putin did at the unveiling of the monument to the grand prince Vladimir? Russian historiography has taken it for granted that Muscovy was the successor to the Kievan state. This assumption is rooted in the writings of Moscow’s churchmen and imperial ideologists from the later fifteenth century. After the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, in 1453, they had asserted Moscow’s claim to inherit the authority of the Byzantine Empire, including all the lands of Kievan Rus. But the claim was based on myth, a story of succession to buttress the imperial pretensions of the tsar of Muscovy. In fact, politically, Muscovy was different from Kievan Rus. Two hundred and fifty years of Mongol occupation had created a fundamental break between the two.

The lasting legacy of Kievan Rus was in religion and the cultural sphere, where Byzantium would permanently mark Russian civilisation. Some of the fundamental ideas that would shape the course of Russian history – the idea of Holy Rus, the sacred status of the monarchy, the principle of oligarchic power – can be traced back to the Byzantine inheritance. But it is absurd to claim that Kievan Rus was the birthplace of the modern Russian or Ukrainian state. Perhaps, in the end, we should look at Kievan Rus as part of Russia’s ‘ancient history’ – a period related to its later history in the same sense as Anglo-Saxon Wessex is part of English history or Merovingian Gaul is linked to modern France – namely as a source of the country’s religion, its language and its artistic forms. The rest of the Kievan heritage in Russia has been lost.

2

The Mongol Impact

In 1223, a new army appeared on the southern steppe. Its horsemen quickly overran the Polovtsian lands and headed west, easily defeating a combined force of the Rus princes on the banks of the Kalka River, just north of the Azov Sea, before retreating east with equal speed. They arrived and disappeared so fast, leaving so much devastation in their wake, that the Russians were dumbfounded. ‘We know neither from whence they came nor whither they have gone,’ recorded a chronicler. ‘Only God knows that, because he brought them upon us for our sins.’1

The mysterious raiders had been sent on a reconnaissance by Chingiz Khan, chief of the Mongolian tribes, whose armies had already conquered China, Central Asia and the Caucasus. In 1237, they appeared again, this time in much greater numbers, around 50,000 warriors, not just Mongols but with Polovtsians and other Turkic tribes absorbed into their army, under the command of Batu Khan, the grandson of Chingiz Khan, who had died ten years previously. They were driven west by ideas of a world empire, by the aim of controlling the Eurasian trade routes and by the prospect of war booty. The horsemen destroyed Riazan, Suzdal, Vladimir and other northern Russian towns, before turning south to capture Kiev on 6 December 1240, an event that marked the end of Kievan Rus, and continuing on their westward path on to the Hungarian plain. From this resting place, where they could feed their horses, the Mongol army was in a good position to conquer Europe, whose disunited countries had little chance of withstanding the onslaught. But the West was saved by the death of the great khan Ögedei, the favourite son of Chingiz Khan, in December 1241. When Batu received the news, the following spring, he called off the western offensive and took his army back to Karakorum, the empire’s capital on the Mongolian steppe, to stake his claim to the succession.2

In their accounts of the Mongol invasion the Russian chronicles invariably emphasised how heavily the Russians were outnumbered by their Asiatic conquerors. It was the only way they were prepared to explain their defeat. But the Mongol victory had less to do with numbers – the Kievan princes had twice as many warriors at their disposal – than with the superiority of the Mongol cavalry. It was the best mounted army in the world. From early childhood their horsemen had been trained to ride at speed and accurately shoot with a reflex bow and arrow by standing semi-erect in a high stirrup. Their skills had been perfected by hunting, an important means of livelihood in nomadic societies, through which young boys were also trained to scout new territory. The seasonal migrations of the Mongol clans, when they would move with their cattle over thousands of kilometres, had endowed their horses and riders with extraordinary stamina. They could ride for days without food or rest, undeterred by heat or frost (the Russian winter was no obstacle to them because their horses had been trained to paw the snow-covered ground like reindeer to reach the grass beneath). They preferred indeed to fight in the winter when the rivers and marshlands – the main impediment to their horses – were frozen. Their success on the battlefield was explained by the well-drilled flanking movements the Mongol horsemen used to surround the enemy – something they had practised all their lives by hunting animals – before sending in the heavy cavalry to finish them with sabres, lances, battle axes and lassos. Although new to siege warfare, they had copied the designs of catapults and battering-rams captured in their conquest of China, where they had also learned to use gunpowder for incendiary missiles.3 Their machines were too powerful for the fortifications of wood and beaten earth built by the Russians to protect their towns.

The destruction caused by the invasion was immense, although not as great as claimed in the later chronicles, whose accounts of atrocities were integral to their religious narrative about Holy Russia being punished by the Tatar infidels for its sins (they called them the ‘Tartars’, with an extra ‘r’, to associate them with Tartarus, the Greek name for ‘hell’). In Riazan, the first town they sacked, the Mongols ‘burned this holy city with all its beauty and wealth’, according to The Tale of the Destruction of Riazan by Batu. ‘And churches of God were destroyed and much blood was spilled on the holy altars. And not one man remained alive in the city. All were dead … And there was not even anyone to mourn the dead.’4

An estimated two-thirds of the towns of Kievan Rus were totally destroyed. Their populations disappeared, killed or taken off as slaves, or fleeing to the forests where the Mongols did not go. So many craftsmen were captured by the Mongols that practically no stone or brick buildings were built in the half-abandoned towns during the next fifty years.5

Batu Khan did not succeed the great khan Ögedei but returned to the Russian steppe a few years later to establish his own dynasty, the Golden Horde, which ruled the western sector of the Mongol Empire from the Urals to Bulgaria. The focus of the Golden Horde was not the Russian forest lands (they had no use for them) but the grassland pastures of the southern steppes and the trading routes connecting Central Asia and Persia to its capital Sarai, on the lower Volga near the Caspian Sea. The revenue the Mongols could derive from the Russian river trade with Europe was relatively minor compared to the wealth that flowed into their coffers from the silk routes between Samarkand, Baghdad and the Black Sea. The European trade was not enough to warrant the expense of ruling Russia directly. Instead the Mongols remained on the steppe, where they could graze their horses and cattle, and did not settle in the forest zone, which they ruled indirectly from Sarai. They collected tribute from the Russian lands, over which they exercised their dominion through a network of officials (baskaki) stationed in strategic positions with military detachments, which carried out ferocious raids to punish towns if they were slow to pay their dues, and set an example to others. Almost every year, there was an attack on at least one Russian town. Vladimir and Suzdal were each sacked five times during the last quarter of the thirteenth century.6

One of Batu’s first moves was to summon the Russian princes to Sarai to swear an oath of allegiance to the Mongol khan. These trips became a regular phenomenon, for no prince could rule without a patent (yarlyk) from the khan. The prince was forced to dress in Mongol clothes and undergo a ritual that involved passing between flames and kneeling at the feet of his sovereign to beg for his patent. If there was more than one candidate, the yarlyk would be given to the prince who promised the most revenue, offered the most soldiers for the Mongol army and gave the best assurance of maintaining order over his people. To fix the tax and number of recruits from each region the Mongols instituted censuses – a practice they had learned from the Chinese – which the baskaki and their military units oversaw. The general Mongol practice was to take one-tenth of everything, ‘men and girls as well as possessions’, according to a papal missionary who passed through Russia on his way to Karakorum in 1245–6.7

The Russian princes and boyars went along with the Mongol system, helping it to carry out the censuses and enforce the taxation. To resist meant inviting destruction. Their collaboration posed difficulties for the Russian chroniclers, who told a story of the saintly princes as the helpless victims of the infidels (almost all the princes killed in battle by the Mongols were later canonised). The most problematic example was Alexander Nevsky, prince of Novgorod and Pskov. Nevsky was a Russian hero for his leading role in the defeat of the Swedes on the Neva River (from which he received his name Nevsky) in 1240. Two years later, he defeated the Teutonic Knights, German crusaders, in a battle on the ice of Lake Chud near Livonia – a victory that looms large in the national consciousness because it forms the central episode of Alexander Nevsky (1938), Sergei Eisenstein’s great patriotic film, which was seen by millions in the Soviet Union during the war against Hitler.

In 1252, Nevsky travelled to Sarai, where Batu Khan appointed him the grand prince of Vladimir, the most senior of the princes following the fall of Kiev. He acted as the Mongols’ loyal servant, suppressing a rebellion in Novgorod and other towns against their census officials. Nevsky’s collaboration was no doubt motivated by his mistrust of the West, which he regarded as a greater threat to Orthodox Russia than the Golden Horde, generally tolerant of religions. He recognised the Mongols as powerful protectors of the lucrative north Russian trade with the Baltic Germans and Sweden. But Nevsky’s realpolitik caused a problem for the chroniclers, particularly after he was made a saint by the Russian Church in 1547, for in their terms he had colluded with the infidel. They got around the issue by presenting his collusion as a gracious sacrifice – imitating Christ in his humility – to save Holy Russia from an all-conquering ‘Eastern tsar’ sent by God to punish Russians for their sins.8 Nevsky’s sacrifice would also feed into the myth of Russia saving Christendom. By placating the Mongols, he had stopped them from progressing further west.

The Church too collaborated with the Golden Horde. The khan exempted it from taxation, protected its property and outlawed the persecution of all Christians, on condition that its priests said prayers for him, meaning that they upheld his authority. These dispensations allowed the Church to thrive. Under the Mongols it made its first real inroads into the pagan countryside. Peasants flocked to the church lands where they were free from Mongol taxes and military service. It was at this time that the most used word in Russian for a peasant changed from liudi, a general term for ‘people’, to krestianin, derived from khristianin, meaning a Christian.9 Monasteries grew as landowners bestowed estates on them in the belief that it would save their souls – and save themselves from the infidels. Around thirty monasteries were founded during the first century of Mongol rule, and five times that number in the second century.10

An important part of this monastic movement was led by men of deep religious feeling who rebelled against the worldly hierarchies of the Orthodox Church and went into the wilderness to live an ascetic life of private prayer and contemplation, book-learning and manual work. They took their spiritual guidance from the hesychasm of Byzantium, a contemplative mysticism (from the Greek hesychia, meaning ‘quietude’) founded on the idea that the way to God was through a life of poverty and prayer under the guidance of a holy man or elder. The centre of the movement was Mount Athos in northern Greece, a monastic retreat since the early Christian era, whose hermitic monks inspired imitators in Russia. The most important was Sergius of Radonezh, who in 1337 established a church of the Holy Trinity at Sergiev-Posad, north-east of Moscow, which became a monastic community populated by his followers (today it is known as the Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, the spiritual centre of the Russian Church). By his death in 1392, Sergius’s pupils numbered several hundred monks, who went on to found new monasteries, many in the remote north-east regions of Russia, which in this way were colonised, as peasants went where the monks led. Among these colonial missionaries were Stephen of Perm, the bringer of Christianity to the Komi people, who fought hard to defend their animist beliefs (the artist Kandinsky found them still in existence when he visited the remote Komi region in 1889), and the elder Zosima, who went as far as the White Sea to found a monastery on Solovetsky Island (converted into a prison after 1917, it is better known today as the prototype of Stalin’s Gulag labour camps).

The religious arts flourished, icon painting in particular. In these years of isolation from Byzantium, icon painters developed a more specifically Russian style characterised by greater animation and plasticity, warmer colours, simpler lines and softer tones than those found in the Greek tradition they had previously followed. That style reached its supreme heights in Andrei Rublev’s icons of the early fifteenth century. No other icon painter could match their poetic qualities – their graceful harmony and sense of movement, their transparency of colour that makes their sacred figures appear illuminated from within. A notable example is the Trinity he painted for the Holy Trinity Church in Sergiev-Posad between 1408 and 1425.

The miracle of Rublev’s art occurred as Russia was emerging from two centuries of Mongol rule. It became a marker of the nation’s spiritual unity in later stories of this period. What defined the Russians, what became the focus of their spirit of endurance at this dark moment in their history, was their Christianity. Readers may recall the final glorious scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev (1966), in which a group of craftsmen, led by the orphan of a bell maker, cast a giant bell for the town of Vladimir, sacked many times by the Mongols. The first ringing of the bell, watched by a delegation of Italians, along with the grand prince and people of the town, is a moment of pure joy, a symbol of the ways in which the Russians have survived through their spiritual strength and creativity.

The Mongol conquest destroyed Kievan Rus and turned its princes into vassals of the Golden Horde. The leadership of Kiev was replaced by that of Vladimir, whose grand prince was appointed by the khan. The contenders travelled to Sarai to pledge their allegiance to the Golden Horde and plead their case, as they did for the patent to their principalities. The successful candidate was accompanied by the khan’s ambassadors to Vladimir, where they installed him on the throne.

Within a century of the Mongol invasion the make-up of the lands once constituting Kievan Rus had changed dramatically – so much so that neither modern Russia nor Ukraine nor Belarus can lay any general claim to them. Kievan Rus was cut in two by the Mongol occupation, with each half set upon a different path of political development. The south-western principalities (Polotsk, Vitebsk, Minsk, Chernigov, Kiev, Volhynia and Galich) were drawn into the orbit of Poland and Lithuania, which offered them protection from the Mongols and continued access to the West. These lands’ political development was later shaped by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a constitutional monarchy with an elected king and parliament dominated by the local landed nobles, which would rule this polyethnic area from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The north-eastern (Russian) half of Kievan Rus followed a quite different path. The six principalities conquered by the Mongols (Moscow, Tver, Vladimir, Novgorod, Rostov-Suzdal and Riazan) were sub-divided into fourteen fiefdoms (known as apanages) with their own tax systems and armies. In each of these domains the ruling prince was deemed to own the realm (and all the land and people within it) as his patrimonial property. These lands would form the nucleus of Muscovy, where patrimonial autocracy emerged from the Mongol occupation as a ruling principle.

The apanage system had begun in Kievan Rus, but it was reinforced by the Mongols, who found it advantageous to have small but stable principalities headed by a strong but compliant grand prince based in Vladimir. Tver and Moscow were to play key roles. Tver was the patrimonial property of the descendants of Iaroslav Iaroslavich, the younger brother of Alexander Nevsky, whom he had succeeded as grand prince of Vladimir in 1263. Moscow, meanwhile, belonged to the heirs of Daniil Alexandrovich, the Daniilovichi as they are called. Daniil Alexandrovich was Nevsky’s youngest son (he was only two when his father died) and was given Moscow as (at that time) the least significant of all his lands.

Moscow is first mentioned in the chronicles in 1147. It was just a village on the western border of the principality of Rostov-Suzdal. By the time of the Mongol conquest, it had grown in size and become fortified. But it was only in the second half of the thirteenth century that it became a major force among the Russian principalities. Geography was part of its success. Located on the Moscow River, which connected it to the Volga and Oka, it was at the centre of the Russian river network, which allowed it to become an affluent commercial hub. It had a natural defence system in the dense forests and marshlands around it, making it attractive to peasants fleeing the Mongols in the east and south. As Moscow grew in population and military strength it annexed nearby principalities. By the mid-fourteenth century, it had become so rich that its prince, Ivan Daniilovich, popularly known as Kalita (‘Moneybags’), purchased further territories or made them loans enabling him to annex them when they were unable to repay their debt. Thus began a process that would become known as Moscow’s ‘gathering of the Russian lands’.

The only serious rival to Moscow was Tver, the domain of the Iaroslavichi. Only Tver and Moscow had the economic base to compete for control of the Grand Principality of Vladimir. Like Moscow, Tver was favoured by geography. Located on the Volga, it was well connected by its river network to the most important trading towns of the Russian forest zone. While it had few natural defences, its relative remoteness from the Mongol forces, allied to its good communications, enabled Tver to sustain a growing population in the century following the invasion.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, when their rivalry began, Moscow and Tver were more or less equal. But by the end of the century there was no doubt that Moscow was the supreme force – the only Russian principality capable of challenging the Golden Horde. What were the reasons for its victory?

The outcome of their rivalry was ultimately decided by the Golden Horde, whose policies were guided by divide and rule. Wanting neither Tver nor Moscow to become too powerful, the khan would always back the weaker of the two. Diplomacy was therefore more effective than military strength in winning favour from Sarai. Ivan Kalita was more shrewd and cravenly submissive in his dealings with the Mongols than his rival, Prince Mikhail of Tver, who led his city in a failed rebellion against a combined Muscovite and Tatar force in 1317. Kalita cultivated his relations with Khan Uzbek, who reigned from 1313 to 1341. He travelled at least five times to Sarai, collected Mongol taxes with efficiency and led his army against other principalities showing any sign of rebellion against the Golden Horde. After his suppression of a second Tver uprising, in 1327, Kalita was promoted by Uzbek to the title of grand prince of Vladimir, the most senior Russian power in the former lands of Kievan Rus. When Kalita put down a rising in Smolensk, in 1339, the khan rewarded him by giving legal sanction to his will, conferring the succession of his sons to the Moscow throne.11 The office of grand prince of Vladimir was henceforth held by the Daniilovichi. It was incorporated into the all-Russian powers of the grand prince of Muscovy.

The Mongols’ growing fear of Lithuania was also an important factor in their promotion of Moscow. In the early fourteenth century the Lithuanians were steadily expanding their control to the former western lands of Kievan Rus. Where they were unable to annex them by pressure or persuasion, the Lithuanians turned to religion. They established a separate metropolitan to prise away the western territories from the rest of Orthodox Russia. By the 1330s, Smolensk, Novgorod and Tver were all close to throwing in their lot with Lithuania; Moscow was struggling to rein them in through military threats; and the Mongols were confronted by the danger of a powerful new state appearing on their western frontier that might undermine their empire in the Russian lands. Building up the power of Moscow to resist the Lithuanians was the khan’s best policy. It was also successful. Novgorod was brought back into Moscow’s fold. Tver disintegrated into warring boyar fiefdoms. And Smolensk was annexed by Moscow in 1352.

As Moscow grew in power, the Mongols tried to contain it by divide and rule again. In the west they encouraged it to grow as a buffer state against Poland and Lithuania, but in the north and east, where their own control depended on its weakness, they encouraged anti-Moscow elements. By the second half of the thirteenth century, it was too late for the Golden Horde to contain the rise of Moscow, however. The city had become an important trading hub, thanks in large part to the Mongols’ protection and encouragement of international trading routes via Moscow’s waterways. The European trade through Novgorod alone brought great wealth to Muscovy, which kept a good share of the taxes it collected for the Golden Horde. New towns appeared, large stone churches were constructed and Moscow’s crafts and industries revived. The first stone walls and churches of the Moscow Kremlin were built around this time – the walls by order of the grand prince Dmitry in 1366–7. Over 50,000 cubic metres of stone were hauled from distant quarries by massive teams, far larger than the labour forces that Europe’s rulers were able to obtain for projects of this kind. The building of the Kremlin was a symbol of the power of Moscow.

It was also the result of a new deal with the Church, which allied itself to Moscow’s cause as a national power centre to liberate the Orthodox from Mongol rule. The alliance had begun in 1325 when the Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus, Peter II, moved his see from Vladimir to Moscow at the request of Ivan Kalita. To mark his arrival Ivan promptly ordered the construction of the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin, the first stone church within its walls. From this point, Ivan endowed the Church with large estates. These lands became so extensive that a contract was drawn up to define the obligations of the metropolitan to the ruling dynasty. It confirmed his position as a vassal, in effect, to the grand prince.12

Moscow’s standing with the Church was boosted by its military defeat of a large Tatar army in 1380. It was the first time a Russian force had scored any kind of victory against the Mongols. The conflict had its roots in the Golden Horde’s demands for tribute payments from Moscow. Mamai Khan was counting on the grand prince Dmitry to deliver ever greater revenues. But Moscow’s income was suffering at this time from a trade dispute between Novgorod and its partners in the West. Matters came to a head in 1378, when Sarai was attacked by a rival Mongol khan, forcing Mamai to supplement his army, at that time depleted by the plague, and demand an extra payment from Moscow. A Mongol force of 30,000 men was sent to collect it from Moscow. Dmitry raised an army of equal size, marched it south to meet the Mongols and defeated them at Kulikovo near the River Don. The victory earned him his nickname, Dmitry Donskoi (meaning ‘of the Don’).13

To celebrate the victory the Church in Moscow introduced an annual holiday on the Day of St Dmitry, the grand prince’s patron saint. From that point Kulikovo featured in the national story as the start of Russia’s liberation from the Tatar infidels, later as the moment of its ‘national awakening’. Kulikovo is still celebrated in Russia. Putin has frequently referred to it as evidence that Russia was already a great power – the saviour of Europe from the Mongol threat – in the fourteenth century. This idea – Russia as a guard protecting Europe from the ‘Asiatic hordes’ – became part of the national myth from the sixteenth century, as Muscovy began to see itself as a European power on the Asian steppe. The idea reached its apogee with the ‘Scythian’ poets in the early twentieth century, among them Alexander Blok, who reproached a thankless Europe for its failure to recognise that Russia had protected it from the Asiatic tribes:

Like slaves, obeying and abhorred,

We were the shield between the breeds

Of Europe and the raging Mongol horde.14

Today the Kulikovo victory is linked in the nationalist consciousness to other episodes when Russia’s military sacrifice ‘saved’ the West, in 1812–15 (against Napoleon) or 1941–5, for example; each time its sacrifice had been unthanked, unrecognised by its Western allies in these wars. The country’s deep resentment of the West is rooted in this national myth.

Kulikovo had shown that the Mongols could be beaten on the battlefield. But their defeat was not the end of Mongol rule. Moscow suffered heavy losses in its victory. Two years later it was too depleted to defend itself when Tokhtamysh, the new khan, sent his army to exact revenge. After three days of fighting, the Mongols sacked the city, killing half its people.15 Moscow’s status was weakened. Acknowledging their defencelessness, the Russian princes hurried to Sarai to pledge their submission to the Golden Horde.

Just as the Mongols were dealing with the challenge from Moscow, they faced a new threat from the Central Asian empire that was then emerging under the command of Timur, better known as Tamerlane. Timur’s army conquered Persia and the Caucasus and then went on to destroy the key trading bases of the Golden Horde, which began a slow but terminal decline. The weakening of the Horde, however, was due less to outside military threats than to the Black Death, which began on the Central Asian steppe in the mid-fourteenth century. The pandemic turned trade routes into plague routes, devastating the economy and killing perhaps half the population of the Golden Horde, which over the next century broke up into three khanates (Kazan, Crimea, Astrakhan). None of them was powerful enough to threaten Russia as the Golden Horde had done.

Muscovy remained a vassal of the khans until 1502. Long before, however, it began to act as if it were an independent state. In 1480, in a bid to reassert his dwindling authority, Khan Ahmed advanced with his army on Moscow. The Muscovites assembled their own troops and met the Mongols at the River Ugra, south of Moscow, where the two sides faced each other for two weeks, without any arrows being fired, the Muscovites on the west bank, the Tatars on the east. Finally, the Mongols turned around and retreated. The Russian chronicles would tell the story of the ‘Great Stand on the Ugra’ as the ‘overthrow of the Tatar yoke’, an event of world historical significance. In fact it was a relatively minor episode, similar to many such encounters in the past, different only because it would be the last.

The Mongols stayed in Russia for more than three centuries. It was not until the 1550s that the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan were finally defeated by Ivan IV (the khanate of Crimea survived until 1783). How much impact did these centuries have on the course of Russian history?

There are three main Russian views. In most accounts, the Mongol impact is entirely negative. This was a time of suffering and sacrifice, humiliation and oppression. Russia languished under the ‘Tatar yoke’, which prevented its progression on the European path. In this narrative the Mongols have been blamed for everything that held Russia back. They isolated it from Europe and the cultural advances of the Renaissance. They plunged Russia into its ‘Dark Age’, coarsening every aspect of the Russian way of life. The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky made a list in 1841:

The seclusion of women, the habit of burying money in the ground and of wearing rags from the fear of revealing one’s wealth, usury, Asiaticism in the way of life, a laziness of the mind, ignorance, contempt for oneself – in a word, all that Peter the Great was uprooting, everything that was in Russia opposed to Europeanism, everything that was not native to us but had been grafted on to us by the Tatars [emphasis in original].16

A second view was advanced by a number of Slavophiles, the nineteenth-century nationalists opposed to Russia’s following the Western model of development. While accepting the destructive impact of the Mongols on Russia, they saw the period of Mongol occupation as one in which there had been some positive developments for the foundation of the later Russian state. In particular, Russia’s isolation from the West had allowed it to preserve its Byzantine inheritance, its old Slavonic culture and its Orthodox beliefs, untouched by the secular and individualistic trends of Renaissance humanism in Europe.

A third, more common view was to deny that the Mongols had an influence at all: they came, they terrorised and they plundered, but then they left without a trace. Karamzin, for example, in his History of the Russian State, did not write a word about the cultural legacies of Mongol rule. ‘For how’, he asked, ‘could a civilised people have learned from such nomads?’ This remains the dominant perspective of the Europeanised intelligentsia, which sees Russia facing west. ‘From Asia we received extraordinarily little,’ wrote the revered historian Dmitry Likhachev in his book Russian Culture (2000). He had nothing more to say about the Mongols or any other oriental influence on Russia’s cultural history.17

This denial of the Mongol legacy is rooted in a sense of national humiliation that a European country such as Russia should have been subjected for so long to the domination of an Asiatic empire, deemed by the Russians to be culturally inferior. It can be traced from the medieval chronicles, which portrayed the Mongols as plunderers of Russia (sent by God to punish Russians for their sins) but not as its conquerors.18 Russia’s first historians were heavily dependent on the chronicles. Grounded as they were in the Eurocentric views of the Enlightenment, they took little interest in the Mongol state or Mongol–Russian relations, which barely featured in their histories. In his History of Russia from the Earliest Times (published in twenty-nine volumes between 1851 and 1879), the great historian Sergei Solovyov dismissed even the possibility of ‘any Mongol influence on Russia’s internal administration, because we do not see any trace of it’.19 Vasily Kliuchevsky, who had studied under Solovyov, hardly mentioned the Mongols in his five-volume History of Russia (1904–11), preferring to explain the development of Russia at this time exclusively in terms of its own internal changes rather than through foreign influence (a rule he broke for the influence of Europe from the eighteenth century).20

It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that Russian archaeologists, ethnographers and orientalists began to take a serious interest in the Mongols and their influence. Archaeological excavations showed that Sarai had not been a settlement of tents, as imagined by the Russians until then, but a large medieval city of 75,000 people with stone buildings, well-laid-out streets and hydraulic systems, craft workshops and schools.21 Philologists established the Tatar origins of many of the basic Russian words in administration and finance – dengi (money), kazna (treasury), tamozhna (customs duty), barysh (profit) – suggesting that the Mongols had an impact in these spheres.

Many Russian families had Tatar names. Some descended from the Mongols who had stayed in Russia and entered into service in the Moscow court following the break-up of the Golden Horde. According to one estimate, 156 of the 915 noble families in the service of the tsar in the 1680s were of Tatar or other Asiatic origins. They were not as many as the Lithuanian and western European families, which made up almost half the noble class. But the true figure was probably higher because many Tatars Russified their names when they entered the nobility. Among these were some of the most famous names in Russian history: writers (Karamzin, Chaadaev, Turgenev, Bulgakov), composers (RimskyKorsakov), tsars (Boris Godunov) and revolutionaries (Bukharin).22

It was not just the elites that stayed behind in Russia when the Mongols left. What we call ‘the Mongol invasion’ was in fact a gradual migration of nomadic tribes. They came in search of new pastures because of overpopulation in Mongolia. The populations of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are of mainly Mongol origin. But the nomads also settled further west. Some gave up their herds and became peasant farmers in Russia. Others took up trades and crafts, particularly those that serviced livestock herds, in which many of the basic Russian words have Tatar origins – loshad (horse), bazar (market), bashmak (shoe) and so on. Many towns in southern Russia and the Volga lands still have Tatar names – among them Penza, Chembar, Ardym, Anybei, Ardatov and Alatyr.

These deep Asian elements of Russian culture were the main concern of the Eurasianists, a diverse group of émigré scholars scattered over Europe and America after 1917. In their first collection of essays, Exodus to the East (1921), Prince Nikolai Trubetskoi, a philologist, maintained that Russia was at root a Eurasian steppeland culture formed by the Russians’ intermingling with the Finno-Ugric peoples, the Mongols and other Turkic-speaking tribes over many centuries. Byzantine and European influences, which had shaped the Russian state and its high culture, barely penetrated to the lower strata of Russia’s folk culture, its music, dancing, belief system and psychology, which had all developed more through contact with the East. Russian folk song was derived from the pentatonic (five-tone) scale common to the music of Asia. Folk dance, too, according to Trubetskoi, shared much with the dancing of the East, especially the Caucasus, where, as in Russia, it was done by groups in lines and circles, its rhythmic movements performed by hands and shoulders as well as by the feet, rather than in pairs, as in the European tradition. All these cultural forms were, he said, expressions of an ‘Eastern psyche’ – an inclination for abstract symmetry, a tendency to contemplation and fatalistic attitudes, and the primacy of the collective over individual interests – which explained the sacred nature of monarchical authority and the Russians’ willingness to submit themselves to it.23

Among the founders of the Eurasianist theory was George Vernadsky, an émigré historian, teaching then in Prague but soon to move to the United States, where he embarked on his six-volume A History of Russia (1943–69). Vernadsky presented the Mongol occupation as the key turning-point in Russian history. It set Russia on a path towards autocracy, serfdom and imperial expansion into Asia, although its effects would not become apparent until later in a process he described as ‘influence through delayed action’. To overthrow the Mongols, he argued, the Russians had to absorb many features of their government: the dragooning of society into service to the state; the control of the steppe’s nomadic tribes through imperial conquest. As he wrote in The Mongols and Russia (1953), ‘Autocracy and serfdom were the price the Russian people had to pay for national survival.’24

One might question Vernadsky’s theory of delayed influence. How could Russia’s rulers borrow institutions that no longer existed? The link he made between the Mongols and the introduction of serfdom is particularly dubious, for while it may be true that the first restrictions on peasant movement were imposed in the Mongol period, the laws enforcing serfdom were not passed until 1649. Two hundred years is a long ‘delay’. Nonetheless, Vernadsky’s analysis has encouraged a more nuanced view of the Mongol impact than those contained in narratives about the ‘Tatar yoke’.

In fact the impact of the Mongols was immense, and not long delayed at all. The adoption of Mongol political institutions began from as early as the first half of the fourteenth century. The Muscovite princes made frequent visits to Sarai, where they obtained first-hand knowledge of the Golden Horde’s administrative practices, at that time far superior to anything developed in Russia. Most of the methods of the Golden Horde were adopted by Ivan Kalita when he replaced the Mongol baskaki with his own tax-collecting officials (known as danschiki) to collect tribute. The Mongol tamga, a customs duty, became the commercial tax of Muscovy.

One of the mechanisms used by tax collectors in Russia was known as krugovaya poruka, meaning joint responsibility. It was a method of collecting taxes in which a village or community was made collectively responsible for their payment. Although it had existed under Kievan Rus, the system emerged greatly strengthened from the period of Mongol rule. The Mongols employed coercive means, such as beating shins with rods or taking hostages until the tax was paid. Krugovaya poruka would be used in later centuries both by tsarist and (more coercively) by Bolshevik officials to squeeze taxes from a population barely able to pay them. To distribute the burden of these taxes fairly between their household members, communities developed institutions of self-government – the veche in the towns and the mir or peasant commune in the villages – which reinforced these collective practices.25

The Mongol period brought some positive advances for Russia. The postal system was the fastest in the world – a vast network of relay stations, each equipped with teams of fresh horses capable of carrying officials to all corners of the Mongol Empire at unheard-of speeds. It became the basis of the Muscovite system, which so impressed foreigners. Sigismund von Herberstein, an early sixteenth-century Habsburg envoy, was astounded by the speed of the post in Muscovy. A letter sent from Moscow would arrive in Novgorod, a journey of 660 kilometres, in less than three days. In sixteenth-century Germany a letter would have taken twice as long to travel that distance.26

Moscow’s army also improved from its contacts with the Mongols, the best mounted forces in the world. It owed much to the Mongol military, from its flanking tactics in the field to its highly mobile cavalry formations, armour and weapons. Richard Chancellor, an English traveller to Muscovy in 1553, noted that the Russian horsemen rode half standing up in a ‘short stirrup after the manner of the Turks’. He also remarked that, like the Mongol archers, they wore silk with their coat of mail. He thought they did so to display their wealth. But that was not the reason. The Russians had learned from the Mongols that the barbed tip of an arrow does not pierce through silk on entering the body. This meant it could be removed without worsening the wound.27

Economically the impact of the Mongols was not as harmful as once thought by Russian chroniclers of the ‘Tatar yoke’. The Golden Horde was a powerful protector of the international trading routes that enriched Russia’s towns. Money earned from trade and customs poured into the towns, which were rebuilt and re-energised once they had recovered from the devastation of the Mongol invasion. Novgorod and Moscow became large and rich cities, equal in their architecture and artistic riches to many other cities in Europe.

The legacy that dominates historical debates is the Mongol impact on autocracy. The Asiatic character of Russia’s despotism became a commonplace of the Western-oriented intelligentsia. The nineteenth-century socialist Alexander Herzen compared the repressive Nicholas I (who reigned from 1825 to 1855) to ‘Chingiz Khan with a telegraph’. The Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin said that Stalin was like ‘Chingiz Khan with a telephone’.

The Russian autocratic tradition had many roots, but the Mongol legacy did more than most to fix the basic nature of its politics. From the sixteenth century, the first tsars of Muscovy drew upon the Mongol imperial tradition, adapting it to their own purposes. Beginning with Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’), they justified their claim to an imperial status not just on the basis of their spiritual descent from Byzantium but also on the basis of their territorial inheritance from Chingiz Khan. The title ‘tsar’ was used for both emperors – the Byzantine basileus and the khan of the Golden Horde – so the two became confused. Russian images of the Mongol khan depicted him in the regalia of the Byzantine emperor. There was equally confusion between the Russian terms for ‘tsar’ and ‘khan’, which for a long time were practically interchangeable. Even Chingiz Khan was rendered Chingiz Tsar.28

Moscow’s princes emulated the behaviour of the khans when they drove them out of Russia and succeeded them as tsars. The khans had demanded, and mercilessly enforced, complete submission to their will from all classes of society – a principle continued by the Russian tsars. Along with the khans’ despotic power came the idea of their ownership of all the land, an idea that the Mongols took from the Chinese. By the fourteenth century, this ideology of ownership had also entered Muscovy. It reinforced the patrimonial principle of princely power inherited from Kievan Rus. Now, more than before, the power of the state was invested in the person of the tsar as the lord or sovereign owner of the land. Like the Mongol khans, the grand prince claimed the domain he ruled as his household property. He was free to give his land (along with the dues owed by the peasants on it) to his servitors; and free to take it from them if they displeased him. Whereas previously, in Kievan Rus, the boyars owned their land as private property, which they kept if they left the service of the prince, henceforth they were deemed to own their land on condition of their service to the prince. They lost it when they left him. Here was the fundamental weakness of the Russian aristocracy. The most senior boyar clans – those who were closest through marriage or royal favour to the Moscow court – formed an oligarchic ruling class, which at times, when the grand prince was weak, might direct his government. But their wealth and power came from him. They kept them only for as long as they retained his protection. It was a system of dependency upon the ruler that has lasted to this day. Putin’s oligarchs are totally dependent on his will.

The supporting structures of this patrimonial autocracy were also built in the period of Mongol rule. One was the system of mestnichestvo (literally ‘placement’) by which the princes and the boyar clans were ranked officially not just by their service record but by their genealogical relation to the ruling family. Because wealth and power came with rank, the boyars attached immense significance to their position in this ranking system, which affected every aspect of their lives, right down to their place at table during feasts (a matter of no little importance to the boyars, who were quick to take offence if seated lower than demanded by their rank). This hierarchy was more stable than the system that pertained in the princely courts of Kievan Rus, where the boyar clans had openly competed for positions and power, a system that could lead to bitter infighting and even civil war. In post-Mongol Muscovy only the Daniilovichi could hold the office of grand prince; the rules of dynastic succession switched to primogeniture; and the boyars closest to the throne occupied the senior positions in the state and military. It was like the Mongol system, on which it was probably modelled, where only Chingizids, the direct descendants of Chingiz Khan, could rule as the great khan of the empire, and where the ranking order of the Mongol clans was determined by their relation to the ruling family.29

Another element of this emerging system of autocracy was the ‘feeding’ of officials from the land (kormlenie). The practice had its origins in Kievan Rus but became widespread in the Mongol period. Because he lacked the currency to pay his officials’ salaries, the ruling prince allowed them to ‘feed themselves’ by extracting goods and money from the population under their control. This ‘feeding’ system was an easy means of self-enrichment for the boyars, who competed with each other to get their noses in the biggest trough. Their abuse of office was so rife that, even when the people complained to the prince about overfeeding by a district chief and succeeded in getting him removed, the replacement might be worse. The kormlenie system was formally abolished in 1556, but the corrupt practice which it legitimised would long be carried on by local officials through other means (taking bribes, extorting money from the population, pocketing state revenues, and so on). Here was the root of the corruption that has plagued the Russian state for centuries. Here indeed was the origin of the oligarchic system that operates today, in which the only way to become rich is to be a member of the highest ruling circles or enjoy their protection.

It was in the north and east of Russia, the domain of Muscovy, that the legacies of Mongol rule were most lasting. In the south and west, corresponding to Ukraine and Belarus, the Mongol hold was weaker and broken earlier, as most of these territories were drawn to Poland or Lithuania from the early fourteenth century. To some extent this greater freedom from the Mongol influence set the lands of Kiev on a different historical trajectory from Muscovy. The Kievan lands were more oriented to the West, less exposed to the institutions of patrimonial autocracy. But this contrast was not so great as to justify the claims of today’s Ukrainian nationalists – namely that Russia became despotic and Asiatic, and its people servile, because of the ‘Tatar yoke’, whereas the Ukrainians were always freedom-loving and more ‘European’ because they had not been ruled by the Mongols. These are distinctions that belong to nationalist myth-making, although of course, like many myths, they contain elements of truth.

The Russian lands controlled by Muscovy emerged strengthened, their people toughened by the harsh experience of Mongol rule, better equipped to survive the hardships that awaited them and more united nationally than they had been previously. Only Moscow was now capable of liberating them from the Mongols, of ruling all the Russians in a single state. As Karamzin put it, ‘Moscow owes its greatness to the khans.’30

3

Tsar and God

On 16 January 1547, the grand prince of Moscow, Ivan IV, became the first tsar and autocrat of all Russia. Ivan the Terrible, as he is better known, was just sixteen when he was crowned in the Cathedral of the Dormition, the main church of the Moscow metropolitan Makary, head of the Russian Church. Most of the ceremony’s ritual elements had been invented or adapted from the Byzantines. They signified a new imperial myth about Russia and its tsars.

On his entry to the candlelit cathedral, Ivan was greeted with a choral chant of mnogoletie (‘many years’) and a large assembly of the highest dignitaries. He climbed twelve steps to a dais where, in front of the high iconostasis, there were two thrones, one for Makary, the other for Ivan, symbolising the Byzantine ideal of a ‘symphony’ of Church and state ruling God’s dominion. Ivan listed his ancestors, grand princes of Moscow and all Russia, and proclaimed his wish to be recognised ‘with all our ancient titles’. Makary crowned him, blessed him with the cross and seated him upon his throne. At this point Ivan made a new demand to be crowned tsar ‘according to our ancient custom’. Makary assented, proclaiming, ‘Now thou art anointed and titled Grand Prince Ivan Vasilevich, God-crowned Tsar and Autocrat of all great Russia.’1 The clergy broke into a sacred chant as Makary blessed him with a cross, anointed him with oil, conferring sacred charisma on him, placed a sceptre in his hand and crowned him with the Cap of Monomakh, a golden skullcap trimmed with sable, inlaid with jewels and surmounted by a cross. Legend said that it had been presented by the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos to his grandson Vladimir on his coronation as grand prince of Kiev. The cap was meant to symbolise the new tsar’s claim to the imperial title of the Byzantines. In fact Vladimir was only two years old when his grandfather died, and would not be crowned grand prince of Kiev until almost fifty years later. As for the cap, it was almost certainly not Byzantine but from Central Asia, probably a gift from Khan Uzbek to the Daniilovichi in the early fourteenth century.2 But facts were not really the point.

Makary gave a sermon on the tsar’s sacred duties to protect the Orthodox by ‘ruling with the fear of God’. Most of the sermon was taken from the Patrologia Graecae, a series of maxims addressed to Emperor Justinian by Agapetus, deacon of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, around the time of his coronation in 527. Makary emphasised the sacred source of the tsar’s authority. In the coronation ceremony this was symbolised by the act of anointment linking Ivan to David, ‘whom God anointed to be king over the people of Israel’. In the ideology of sacred kingship (‘Wisdom Theology’) embraced by Makary, the tsar, like Christ, contained within his body both the mortal and the divine. He had divine charisma, a gift of grace that made him appear in his power like a god. As it was expressed in the fourteenth-century Church Slavonic version of the Agapetus text which Makary used in his sermon: ‘The Tsar’s mortal body is like that of any man, but in his power he is like Almighty God.’3 The lesson was self-evident: if the tsar embodied God on earth, it was heresy to oppose him.

The dual nature of the Christian ruler – fallible in his humanity but divine in his princely functions – was a common notion in Europe.4 The tension it created in the monarch’s image was resolved in western Europe by distinguishing between the mortal person and the sacred office of the king. This distinction would allow the concept of an abstract state to develop in the West as a counterbalance to the king. But that did not happen in Russia, where tsar and state were considered one – united in the body of a single mortal being, who as man and ruler was an instrument of God.

The title ‘tsar’, the anointment of Ivan, the Byzantine regalia and the sermon – these were modern reinventions of Byzantine traditions to create the aura of an ancient lineage and imperial status for Ivan. The legend of the Cap of Monomakh had circulated only from the early sixteenth century. It appeared in The Tale of the Princes of Vladimir, which spuriously claimed that Moscow’s princes were descended from the Byzantine emperors through the grand prince Vladimir (the one who had converted to Christianity in 988). Illustrations of The Tale were carved in bas-relief on Ivan’s throne in the Dormition Cathedral. The Book of Pedigrees, commissioned by Makary, went one step further in this invention of Moscow’s past. It traced Ivan’s descent from the Roman emperor Augustus, preposterously claiming that the Riurikids were descendants of the emperor’s brother Prus, the Roman ruler of Prussia. Ivan was thus hailed as the blood heir to the emperors of Rome and their successors in Constantinople, the ‘new’ or ‘second’ Rome as it was called. By inventing this imperial heritage, Moscow claimed the right to rule the former lands of Kievan Rus that had been under the spiritual authority of the patriarch in Constantinople – including territories (in today’s Ukraine and Belarus) that had since passed to Poland–Lithuania.

Ivan’s elevation to the status of a tsar was a statement about Russia’s status in the world. Derived from the Roman term ‘Caesar’, the title had been given by the Russians to the khan of the Golden Horde, the Ottoman sultan and the Old Testament kings. By being crowned a tsar, Ivan would become the equal of the Holy Roman emperor, the secular head of Western Christianity, rivalling his authority through his leadership of Eastern Christianity.

Ivan was the first of the grand princes to be crowned tsar, but the title had been used on occasion by his predecessors Ivan III (reigned 1462–1505) and Vasily III (1505–33) to aggrandise their status. They sought the recognition of Europe, and taking on the mantle of Byzantium was their way to achieve this. Through his marriage to Sophia Paleologue, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Ivan III had staked his claim to the imperial role vacated by the Paleologues. He made the double-headed eagle Russia’s coat of arms, although this was in imitation more of the Habsburgs than of the Byzantines.5 Ivan IV carried this claim for recognition to a higher level still. He insisted that European rulers call him ‘tsar’. As his megalomania grew, he took it as an insult and broke off diplomatic relations if they did not. He looked down on monarchs like Elizabeth I, the English queen, who had to rule with the consent of their people. No such limits had been placed on him.

Crowning him as tsar was equally important to Makary’s mission to promote Moscow as the last true seat of the Christian faith, the successor to Byzantium, following the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. The Russian Church had been moving to the idea of this role since the Council of Florence (1438–9), when the Byzantine emperor and many other leaders of the Eastern Church had pressed for a reunion with Rome to secure the assistance of the Catholic powers against the Muslim infidels. In 1448, in a declaration of their independence from Constantinople, the Russian bishops took it on themselves to name Iona of Riazan their metropolitan, an office normally appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople. The fall of the Byzantine capital, only five years later, confirmed to the Russians that they had done well to create an independent national church. Their conviction grew in 1458, when Lithuania broke off its ecclesiastical relations with Moscow and placed its Orthodox population under the spiritual authority of the Uniate Church in Rome.

To defend its independence the Russian Church developed the idea that Moscow had replaced Constantinople as the authentic capital of Orthodoxy. Church leaders glorified the Muscovite grand princes as the only true defenders of the Christian faith, God’s chosen saviours of humanity. By the 1530s the idea had been fleshed out in church tracts and legendary tales into what would later become known as the ‘Third Rome doctrine’. It was best expressed by a monk named Filofei in a letter to Vasily III’s representative in Pskov around 1523. Because both Rome and Byzantium had fallen into apostasy, Moscow’s grand prince was ‘the only Tsar for Christians in the world’. Moscow had become the last capital of the true faith, Filofei argued, ‘for two Romes have fallen, the Third stands, and there shall not be a fourth’.6

The Third Rome doctrine was quickly taken up by Russia’s Church leaders, none more so than Makary, a champion of Moscow’s imperial ambitions. He cited it in his sermon on Ivan’s coronation to underline the sacred duties of the tsar to defend the purity of Russian Orthodoxy against foreign and internal heresies. If Ivan failed and Russia also fell into apostasy, as Rome and Byzantium had done, the end of the world, no less, would be the result, because, as Filofei had warned, there would not be a fourth Rome. Such apocalyptic warnings were to play a crucial role in Ivan’s reign. He ruled with terror in the firm belief that the Day of Judgement was at hand, that the world would end and that it was his divine duty to purge the Russian land of sin in preparation for that end.

Ivan’s elevation to the status of a tsar was also meant to help him reassert the crown’s authority after fourteen years of boyar fighting for the throne during his minority. He was only three when his father, Vasily III, died in 1533. Ivan’s mother, Elena Glinskaya, at first acted as regent, but she died, probably from poisoning, in 1538, whereupon the major boyar clans, the Glinskys, Belskys and Shuiskys, engaged in a brutal and chaotic struggle for power, in which there were fourteen murders, two forced depositions of metropolitans and three changes of the ruling clique before Ivan came of age in 1546. According to his own account, Ivan had a miserable childhood, neglected and mistreated by ‘uncaring boyars’, especially the princes of the Shuisky clan.7 At the age of just thirteen, he took revenge on them by ordering the killing of Prince Andrei Shuisky, the last of the Shuiskys at his court. As soon as he came of age, Ivan took a wife to secure his dynasty by fathering an heir that might reach maturity before he died. Political stability depended on eradicating rival claims to the succession. His choice fell on Anastasia Romanova, the daughter of a boyar clan that had stood aside from the power struggles during his minority. By promoting a neutral family to the highest rank at court, Ivan hoped to unite the boyar clans by giving them an undisputed heir to recognise. However much the clans might fight among themselves, they depended on stability to defend their oligarchic interests.

Stability was also crucial to the building of a centralised political system capable of governing the growing empire of Moscow. Like other European monarchs at this time, Ivan aimed to forge a single kingdom from the loose network of principalities, each one ruled by its own princes and boyars, which had developed in the fifteenth century as Moscow swallowed up new lands. This kingdom-building had begun in the reign of Ivan’s grandfather Ivan III, and had been continued by his father Vasily. Between 1462 and 1533, the Muscovite state expanded more than three times in size and population, as it annexed and absorbed the principalities and republics of Iaroslavl (in 1471), Perm (1472), Rostov-Suzdal (1473), Tver (1485), Viatka (1489), Pskov (1510), Smolensk (1514) and Riazan (1521).

Its most important conquest was the city republic of Novgorod, with its extensive northern lands. Novgorod had signed a treaty recognising Moscow’s sovereignty in 1456. But there remained a faction of its leaders that still looked to Lithuania to protect the city’s liberties against Moscow. When Novgorod requested Lithuania’s military help in 1470, Ivan III declared war on the republic and defeated it, forcing it to renew the 1456 accord. The city’s patriots would still not submit, so, once again, in 1478, Ivan sent his armies in. This time Moscow annexed Novgorod, confiscating all its agricultural territories. In a symbolic act to underline the end of the city republic, the Kremlin’s forces took away the bell that Novgorod had used to summon its veche, the assembly of its citizens.

Moscow was enriched by these conquests. By the end of the fifteenth century it had become one of the wealthiest trading cities in Europe. Merchants came from Germany, Poland, the Habsburg lands and Italy to buy its precious furs and the horses which were brought by Tatars to Moscow in their tens of thousands every year. Moscow itself had a population of perhaps 100,000 people by the early sixteenth century, almost twice as many as London. Although the houses were all built of wood, the city contained large stone churches, many in the Kremlin, whose thick stone walls were completed at this time.

The Kremlin was a symbol of Moscow’s power and arrival on the European scene. Its vast complex of palaces and churches was constructed largely by Italians. The Hall of Facets (the tsar’s palace) was the work of the Venetian architects Marco Ruffo and Pietro Antonio Solari, who built the Kremlin’s walls in the style of the Sforza castle in Milan. Aristotele Fioravanti was responsible for the newly rebuilt Dormition Cathedral (1475–9) and Alevise Novi for the Archangel Cathedral, completed twenty years later. Over centuries many of the Kremlin’s buildings became Russified – Russian architectural elements and ornaments were gradually added – so that today visitors will not easily recognise its Italianate character.

There was an important contrast between the Kremlin and the great Renaissance fortresses of northern Italy. The Kremlin’s walls enclosed the city’s most important churches, whereas the cathedrals of northern Italy were always built outside the castle walls. It was a symbolic difference. In Latin Europe the Church and state were close allies but separate entities, and sometimes in conflict, particularly when the pope attempted to depose or restrain kings, a right claimed and practised by the papacy before the rise of the absolutist state in the sixteenth century. But in Russia Church and state were meant to rule as one. The location of the tsar’s palace next to the Dormition Cathedral may be taken as a symbol of this symphony between the two. They were united in a theocratic empire where the tsar in office was revered as sacred because his power came from God.

Autocracy in Russia developed differently from the European absolutist monarchies. If it took its theory from Byzantium, it owed more in practice to the legacies of Mongol rule. There were of course some common patterns of state-building shared by Russia and the West. From the reign of Ivan III, Moscow’s aim, like that of any state, was to extend its power to all corners of the realm and roll back the powers of those princes and boyars who blocked a unified authority. As in Europe, the main function of this centralising state was to finance armed forces. The ‘military revolution’ of the early modern period – in which the medieval lance and pike were rendered obsolete by mobile siege artillery and gunpowder weapons – massively increased the cost of war. Monarchies built larger standing armies in their pursuit of territorial aggrandisement; they fought more wars; and they needed bigger and more centralised bureaucracies to collect the taxes that financed these wars. Muscovy was no exception to this European trend. It was in many way a typical example of the ‘fiscal–military state’ that emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century.

From the beginning of his reign Ivan IV set out to increase the powers of his state. He appointed his supporters to the Boyars’ Council, or Duma, and created an Assembly of the Land (Zemsky Sobor) that brought together representatives of the three main social classes (the nobility, the clergy and the commoners) to consult on policies. He expanded the treasury bureaucracy by employing secretaries, scribes and clerks to manage tax collection; tightened Moscow’s hold on the administration of the provinces by replacing boyar governors with centrally appointed officials; and introduced a new legal code to standardise the laws of the former principalities and make their rulers more dependent on Moscow. All these measures were in line with the reforms carried out by European monarchs to forge one kingdom from the various territories, each with their own legal structures and customs, which came under their control.

Other elements of Ivan’s state-building were taken from the Mongols, however. There was nothing like them in the West. European visitors to Moscow were astounded by the extent of the tsar’s power over his subjects, including the nobility. ‘All the people consider themselves to be the slaves of their Tsar,’ remarked Herberstein, who thought that ‘in the sway which he holds over his people, he surpasses the monarchs of the whole world’.8 Ivan referred to his servitors as ‘slaves’ (kholopy). Protocol required every boyar, even members of the princely clans, to refer to themselves as ‘your slave’ when addressing him – a ritual reminiscent of the servility displayed by the Mongols to their khans. This subservience was fundamental to the patrimonial autocracy that distinguished Russia from the European monarchies. The concept of the state was embodied in the tsar as sovereign or lord of all the Russian lands. The system placed his servitors at his mercy. If they displeased him, he could take away their land. They had no rights of property to protect them from their sovereign.

In 1556, Ivan decreed mandatory military service for all Russia’s landowners – whether they were boyars, who had owned their land for centuries, or pomeshchiki, a new class of servitors rewarded by the tsar with grants of land (pomeste). For every 100 chetverty (55 hectares) of arable land in his domain, the landowner had to give one fully equipped soldier and one horse to the army. He also had to serve himself, or send a retainer in his place. There were laws like this in other countries in Europe, but what made this one different was its novel principle, unknown in the rest of Europe, that the landowner held his land on condition of performing state service. He did not own it as private property. Whatever land he had in his possession could not be sold or passed on to his sons without the service obligations attached to its ownership.

Through the system of pomeste the tsar was able to raise a force of 20,000 soldiers at short notice. The system was similar to one developed in the khanate of Kazan and was probably derived from it. There was nothing like it in the West where feudalism entailed private landed property with individual rights attached to it. The pomeste system had been inaugurated by Ivan III after the defeat of Novgorod in 1478. Lands confiscated from the city state were given as pomeste to the victorious servicemen, mostly sons of the low-ranking boyars, who thus became pomeshchiki. The tsar’s granting of pomeste became widespread throughout Muscovy (except in the north where there was no foreign threat, so no militias were needed). Older forms of landed property (votchiny) were gradually eliminated by laws restricting their sale or inheritance. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the granting of pomeste had created 23,000 new landholding servitors, a number that would double over the next hundred years.9 As this service class increased in size, the pressure on the state to find more land for it intensified. This became a major driving force of Russia’s territorial expansion – the conquest of new lands for the military servitors.

One result of the pomeste system was the creation of a landowning service class with only weak ties to a particular community. The pomeshchiki were creatures of the state. Despatched from one place to another in the tsar’s empire, they had neither time nor inclination to put down roots in one locality. The pomeshchik looked on his estate as a source of revenue and readily exchanged it for another closer to his place of service, if this was for any length of time. All the things that connected the nobility of feudal Europe to a village or county – networks of charity and patronage, parish life, corporate bodies and local government, in short everything that fosters regional identities and loyalties – were thus missing in Russia. It was only from the middle of the nineteenth century that these local networks and identities began to evolve – too late, as it turned out, to sustain the development of an independent civil society or a democratic form of government.

The persistence of autocracy in Russia is explained less by the state’s strength than by the weakness of society. There were few public institutions to resist the power of the monarchy. The landowning class was overly dependent on the tsar. Its members were too supine and malleable to play the role of Europe’s independent aristocracy, whose rights of landed property and standing as the leaders of communities enabled it to oppose the encroachments of the absolutist state and defend local liberties. The Boyar Councils and Assemblies of the Land cannot be compared to Europe’s parliaments and estates general, which became national assemblies, eventually leading to democracy. The boyar assemblies were not representative, for no one had elected them. They had no power to restrain the tsar, who summoned them when he saw fit to consult them but did not have to follow their opinion. This imbalance – between a dominating state and a weak society – has shaped the course of Russian history.

The reign of Ivan the Terrible marked the start of Russia’s growth as an imperial power. Between 1500 and the revolution of 1917, the Russian Empire grew at an astonishing rate, 130 square kilometres on average every day.10 From the nucleus of Muscovy it expanded into the world’s largest territorial empire. The history of Russia, as Kliuchevsky put it, is the ‘history of a country that is colonizing itself’.11

How can we explain this extraordinary growth, unparalleled by any other power in the history of the world? From the early nineteenth century, when the European powers first began to fear it, the most common Western explanation was that Russia was expansionist in character. This has been a long-held view, reinforced in the Cold War when Soviet expansion into eastern Europe was explained in part by Russophobic stereotypes about the ‘Russian menace’ dating from the nineteenth century. But it cannot be applied so easily to the sixteenth century, when Russia’s territorial spread was comparable in its ambition to that of other powers on the European continent, such as Poland–Lithuania and the Habsburgs, or to those with overseas empires, such as England, France and Spain.

Russia’s enlargement in the sixteenth century was facilitated by the lack of any natural frontiers, which also made it vulnerable to attack. The greatest danger was in the west, where it was threatened by Poland–Lithuania (united in 1569), which blocked Russia’s access to the Baltic Sea and claimed most of the former western territories of Kievan Rus. To the south, the khanate of Crimea was another major threat, not least because of its close alliance with the Ottoman Empire. The Crimeans blocked the Russians’ access to the Black Sea and the Muslim world beyond. Their raids were a constant problem for the Russians on their southern frontier, which traversed the grasslands east of Kiev. They necessitated the construction of defensive lines and fortresses manned by a new border force made up of Cossacks.

The Cossacks’ name derived from the Turkic word qazaqi, meaning ‘adventurers’ or ‘vagrant soldiers’ who lived in freedom as bandits on the steppe. Many of the Cossacks were remnants of the Mongol army (Tamerlane had started out as a qazaq). They were joined by Russians from the north who fled in growing numbers to the ‘wild lands’ of the south because of the economic crises caused by wars, rising taxes and crop failures in the ‘little ice age’ of the sixteenth century. There was no ethnic barrier to ‘cossacking’. Forming themselves into military fraternities, the Cossacks were recruited by the Lithuanians and then by the Russians to defend their southern borders against the Crimean Tatars, the Nogais and other steppeland tribes. For their services they were rewarded with money, grants of land, tax exemptions and other rights and privileges which they guarded jealously as symbols of their freedom and superiority to the farming peasantry.

Meanwhile, to the east, Russia’s neighbour was the khanate of Kazan, which occupied the middle Volga lands between Viatka in the north and Saratov in the south. On its own it was not strong enough to threaten Moscow. But if it joined Crimea, the strongest of the khanates, it could form an advance base for an attack on Muscovy. The only way for Moscow to prevent this danger was to conquer Kazan first. Because Moscow was not strong enough to fight on two fronts at once, Ivan reasoned that he needed to eliminate the danger of Kazan before any clash with Poland–Lithuania, whose gunpowder army was a greater challenge than the khanates’ bow-and-arrow cavalry.

Ivan led the first campaign against Kazan in 1547–8. The Russian archers were unable to defeat the khanate’s cavalry and, with their supply lines overstretched, they had to retreat. For their second campaign, in 1552, the Russians changed their strategy. They switched to gunpowder war and established an advance fortress at Sviazhsk on the Volga near Kazan to maintain munition supplies. They used fixed artillery and musketeers (streltsy), newly formed as the first standing units of the Russian army, to deliver concentrated fire. They employed Dutch engineers to mine under Kazan’s walls, where they managed to position forty-eight barrels of gunpowder, enough to blast a massive hole in the city’s defences when they were exploded in the early hours of 2 October. The Russians stormed the city, killing everyone in sight.

The conquest of Kazan was celebrated as a providential victory for the Orthodox, the first against Islam since the fall of Constantinople almost a hundred years before. The Russian Church portrayed it as the start of a crusade. It called for the forcible conversion of the Muslim infidels. To mark the victory a large horizontal icon, The Blessed Host of the Heavenly Tsar, was painted facing the tsar’s throne in the Dormition Cathedral. Known as The Church Militant, it shows the mounted figure of Ivan following the Archangel Michael in a procession of Russian troops from the hell-like burning city of Kazan to Moscow, depicted like Jerusalem, where they are received by the Madonna and Child. The iconography borrows from the Book of Revelation, in which Michael defeats Satan before the Apocalypse. Ivan appears as a new King David and the Russians as God’s Chosen People, the new Israelites, reinforcing Moscow’s mythic status and mission in the world as the Third Rome.12

Four years later, in 1556, the Russians scored another victory, this time defeating the khanate of Astrakhan. The tsar commemorated his triumph by ordering the construction of a new cathedral on Red Square in Moscow, so named because the word for ‘red’ (krasny) was connected to the word for ‘beautiful’ (krasivyi). The Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat became popularly known as St Basil’s. Loosely modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it was meant to reinforce the notion of Moscow as the New Jerusalem. Its main chapel was devoted to Christ’s entry into the Holy City on Palm Sunday. It became the focus of the annual Palm Sunday procession, when the tsar, on foot, led his people to the cathedral – a ritual to symbolise his divine role as the leader of the Orthodox – followed by the metropolitan, seated on a horse, as Christ had been on a donkey when he came to Jerusalem.

Completed in 1560, St Basil’s was more than a symbol of Russia’s victory over the khanates. It was a triumphant proclamation of the country’s liberation from the Tatar culture that had dominated it since the thirteenth century. With its showy colours, its playful ornament and outrageous onion domes, St Basil’s was intended as a joyful celebration of the Byzantine traditions to which Russia now returned (although it was more ornate and oriental in its style than any church to be found in Byzantium).

The dedication to St Basil was also rather strange, because Basil was the city’s favourite Holy Fool (iurodyvy), a figure without parallel in the Orthodox or any other Christian tradition. In Russian folklore, the ‘fool for the sake of Christ’, or Holy Fool, held the status of a saint, though he acted more like a madman or a clown, dressed in bizarre clothes, with an iron cap or harness on his head and chains beneath his shirt, like the shamans of Asia. He wandered as a poor man round the countryside, living off the alms of villagers, who found portents in his strange riddles and believed in his supernatural powers of divination and healing. Unafraid to speak the truth to the rich and powerful, he was frequently received by the nobility and became a common presence at the court. Ivan enjoyed the company of Holy Fools.

The conquest of Kazan was of huge symbolic importance. It gave the tsar a new status, increasing his prestige among the steppe nomads as a legitimate successor to the Mongol khans, at the same time as confirming his imperial claim to be a universal Christian ruler, heir to the emperor of Byzantium. In 1557, Ivan requested confirmation of his title ‘tsar’ from the patriarch of Constantinople. It was recognition he had merited, he argued, as a liberator of Orthodoxy from Islam. His request was granted in 1561. To secure his dynasty Ivan also sent a long list of his ancestors and relatives to be sanctified as tsars by the patriarch, thereby inventing a genealogy that linked his family to the emperors of Byzantium stretching back to ancient times.

With Kazan in their hands, the steppelands to the east were opened up to the Russians. Their armies could push on to control the riches of Siberia and the trading routes to Central Asia and China. But the newly conquered Tatars were not so easy to control. There were revolts against the Russians and their religious missionaries. Moscow feared that the Ottomans and Crimeans would intervene to defend their co-religionists. The Russians backed off from forcible conversions and resigned themselves to a long period of pacification, while they built a defensive line of fortress garrisons and monasteries between Kazan and Arzamas.

Buoyed by their success in the east, Ivan turned his armies to the west, where Russia’s access to the Baltic Sea was blocked by Sweden, Lithuania and the Livonian Order of Teutonic Knights. Capturing the Livonian territories (Estonia and the northern half of Latvia today) would allow Moscow to control the ports on Russia’s European trading routes. With the acquisition of Kazan and Astrakhan, which had controlled the Volga route, such a victory would give the Russians the entire river network between the Baltic Sea and the Caspian, enabling them to profit from the silk roads between Asia and Europe.

In 1558, the Russians captured Narva, a crucial port on the Gulf of Finland, and seized Dorpat, deep in the Livonian lands. The other Baltic powers intervened to block the Russians’ advance and obtain portions of Livonia for themselves. A local frontier war thus became a regional conflict in which Russia, Poland–Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark and Livonia were involved. The Crimean Tatars, smarting from the loss of Kazan to Russia, supported Poland–Lithuania, so that the Russians had to fight a two-front war. Twice the Crimeans attacked Moscow – in 1571, when they burned the wooden city to the ground, and the next year, when they were defeated by the Muscovites. The Crimeans would continue to harass the Russian lands in the 1570s. Under these conditions it was practically impossible for Moscow to sustain its early victories in the Livonian War. Without a Baltic fleet it could not hold on to Narva (which fell to the Swedes in 1579) nor take the ports of Riga or Revel (Tallinn) because any siege by land alone was bound to be defeated by defenders able to receive supplies and reinforcements from the sea. The war dragged on until 1583, when the Poles expelled the Russians from Livonia, which they then divided with the Swedes. Its economic cost to the Russians was immense. Entire regions of the country were abandoned by the peasants, who fled to the ‘wild lands’ of the south.

There was an important lesson to be learned from the Livonian War. Russia could more easily expand in Asia, where it was a European power, than it could in Europe, where its western neighbours were stronger.

The long Russian conquest of Siberia began with the annexation of Kazan. After the downfall of the khanate of Kazan, its tributaries, including Udmurt and Bashkiria, recognised Ivan as their new khan. The Siberian khanate in Tiumen also began paying annual tribute to Moscow. Ivan was reluctant to send troops to occupy these lands. He did not want a war with the khanates. Instead he licensed private entrepreneurs to settle on the land, allowing them to exploit it for their own economic purposes and defend themselves with mercenary troops, usually Cossacks.

The Stroganovs were the first big beneficiaries of this colonial policy. A wealthy merchant family with interests in saltworks and mining, in 1558 they leased vast tracts of land on the Kama River between Kazan and Perm. Their only obligation was to report on any copper, gold or silver they might find. More grants of land were leased by them over the next decade, making the Stroganovs the masters of a domain not much smaller than England. As they explored and began to settle on the borderlands of the Siberian khanate, in the early 1570s, they were attacked by the khan’s troops. A hundred settlers were killed in the first of these attacks, and with each assault the khan’s forces seemed to grow.

The Stroganovs appealed to the tsar to let them take the fight into the heart of the khanate rather than continue fighting a defensive war. Angered by the killing of one of his envoys to the khan, Ivan gave them permission to conquer the Siberian khanate. At once he had second thoughts and reversed his decision, fearful that he might become embroiled in a general war if the Crimeans joined their co-religionists; but the Stroganovs ignored his counter-order and recruited Cossack fighters under the command of a chieftain known as Ermak to invade the khanate of Siberia.

Most of what we know about Ermak is derived from Russian folklore and legends. He is celebrated as a great hero, Russia’s Columbus, for ‘discovering’ Siberia. All we know is that he had fought in the Livonian War and engaged in banditry along the Volga before he was recruited by the Stroganovs. His mercenary force of 540 Cossacks set off from Perm in 1582. Travelling by river, two months later they reached Qashliq, a fortress stuffed with furs, silk and gold near the modern city of Tobolsk, which they captured easily. Their muskets were too powerful for the Tatar cavalry. Ermak set up his base at Qashliq and set about the subjugation of the neighbouring tribes, forcing them to pay tribute. He was killed by Tatar forces loyal to the Siberian khanate in an ambush by the River Irtysh in 1585. It would take another fifteen years before the Siberian khanate was conquered, and another century before the Russians laid eyes on the Pacific. But Ermak’s bold adventure would go down in the story of Russia as the ‘conquest of Siberia’.13

We know very little about Ivan as a human being. There is no surviving letter or decree in his hand, so we cannot say for sure if he was even literate. We have no record of his personal relations with any of his seven wives or his children; no account of life at Ivan’s court; and no authentic portrait of the tsar – for all such images in Ivan’s lifetime were iconic and imaginary. In 1963, Ivan’s bones were exhumed from his sarcophagus in the Archangel Cathedral in the Kremlin and used to reconstruct a ‘virtual’ bust, which confirms contemporary descriptions of the tsar as tall and strong with a high forehead, looking like an ‘angry warrior’.14

Ivan became ‘the Terrible’ – in the sense we understand today – only in the eighteenth century. The epithet (grozny) was first applied to him in the early seventeenth century, when a rich folklore about the tsar was just developing. At that time the meaning of the word was closer to the sense of awe-inspiring and formidable rather than cruel or harsh – so basically positive. In folklore Ivan was portrayed as a strong tsar, a guardian of justice, who had protected the people by punishing the boyars for their sins. It was only a century later, once historians began to look more closely at the terror he unleashed, that the words ‘Ivan the Terrible’ became synonymous with executions, tortures, grisly massacres and a mad and monstrous tyranny that reason struggles to explain. This was the image of Ivan, terrible and fierce with his all-seeing eye, immortalised by Viktor Vasnetsov in his 1897 painting, Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible.

Perhaps his violence was rooted in his personality. It appears that Ivan was unhinged by the death, in 1560, of his wife Anastasia, who had had a calming influence on his tempestuous character. Ivan suspected the boyars of having poisoned her, a suspicion he connected to the ‘boyar plot’ of 1553, when he had been gravely ill and some of the leading boyar clans had failed to swear allegiance to his infant son Dmitry in the event of his death (Dmitry himself died when he was eight months old). The loss of his younger brother, the deaf and dumb Yuri, for whom he had displayed a tender affection, followed by the death of Makary in 1563, left the tsar even more isolated. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was the defection of Prince Andrei Kurbsky, the tsar’s old friend and commander of his armies in Livonia, who fled to join the king of Poland–Lithuania in 1564. Ivan now saw treason everywhere.

It was at this point that Ivan set up the oprichnina – a separate domain made up of lands confiscated from the princes and boyars. The land was given to oprichniki, a new class of loyal servitors, numbering perhaps 5,000 men, who formed his private army, charged with fighting internal sedition. Recruited on the basis of their loyalty to the tsar, the oprichniki were forbidden to have any contact with the nobles of the zemshchina, the lands that remained outside the oprichnina. They dressed in long black cloaks like a monk’s habit and rode around the country on black horses with dogs’ heads and brooms attached to their bridles – symbols of their mission to hunt out the tsar’s enemies and sweep them from the land.15

The bloodletting began with the slaughter of those clans whose leaders had defected to Poland–Lithuania, the Belskys, Kurbskys and Teterins, and the kinsmen of advisers such as Adashev and Silvester who had fallen from favour. The system of collective responsibility was taken by the tsar to justify the killing of all traitors’ families. From 1569, the scale of the repressions was increased to wholesale massacres in towns such as Tver, Klin, Novgorod and Pskov, which were deemed too independent and freedom-loving, and probably suspected by Ivan of sympathising with the Lithuanians and the Poles. Churches were looted, houses burned and 30,000 people perished by the sword or died from hunger and disease, which took hold of these towns once the raiders left.

The final scene of reckoning with the ‘boyar traitors’ took place on the Poganaya Meadow in Moscow on 25 July 1570. The tsar appeared on horseback dressed in black, accompanied by 1,500 mounted musketeers. Three hundred noblemen, in various stages of decrepitude suggesting the tortures they had undergone, were brought before Ivan. As an act of mercy, he released 184 of them, and then proceeded to supervise the killing of the rest. Some were tied to stakes and cut to pieces, others flayed or boiled in water. An old man who could barely walk was run through with a spear, stabbed and beheaded by Ivan. After a few hours of killing, the tsar had had enough and withdrew to his palace.16

In his correspondence with Kurbsky, Ivan justified this terror on the grounds that he was ordained by God. Any act of treason against him was a sin that he was free to punish in God’s name. Citing Romans 13: 3–4,* Ivan maintained that a tsar ‘beareth not the sword in vain, but to revenge evil-doers, and for the praise of the righteous’.17 In his view the oprichniki were a religious instrument to chastise sinners and cleanse the ‘Holy Russian land’ in preparation for the Last Judgement. The brutal killing methods which he oversaw reflected his ideas of divine punishment. Most of his victims were murdered suddenly (often by beheading) so that they did not have time to receive the last rites and save their souls. Many of his favourite punishments (victims burned alive or devoured by wild animals) were meant to replicate the torments of hell.18 Ivan saw himself as a sword-bearing archangel, an agent sent by God to protect the Orthodox and purge the world of infidels and sinners before the Apocalypse. In his personal mythology there was no contradiction between his status as a righteous Christian king and the cruel violence which he meted out as an expression of God’s wrath.19

The terror ended suddenly, as terror often does, when the tsar had the main oprichnik leader, Alexei Basmanov, executed in 1570. Ivan had suspected him of working for the Poles and Lithuanians. A large-scale purge of the oprichnik leaders then followed. The oprichnina was abolished, never to be mentioned again in the tsar’s presence. Always fearful of treason, Ivan continued to order executions of suspected boyar clans. But his main response to the dangers he perceived was to retire to his residence and surround himself with bodyguards. At one point, in 1575, he even abdicated from the throne and named as tsar his loyal retainer Semen Bekbulatovich, a Tatar descendant of Chingiz Khan.

Was Ivan remorseful in his final years? There is evidence that he tried to redress the injuries which he had caused, forgiving many people in disgrace, endowing monasteries and praying for the dead. In one draft of his will, probably dictated while seriously ill in 1579, the tsar described himself as the ‘worst sinner on earth, corrupt of reason and bestial of mind’. But this may have been religious rhetoric. Throughout his reign, Ivan’s moods swung between mad fits of temper and remorseful prayer. Sometimes he withdrew from public life and retreated to a monastery. He spoke of his desire to become a monk.

His last killing was the murder of his twenty-seven-year-old son and heir, the Tsarevich Ivan, in 1581. The story goes that he came across his son’s wife in her chambers dressed only in her underwear. Considering her conduct indecent, he began to hit her with his staff. His son tried to stop him, only to be killed by a blow to his head. The horror of the scene was captured by Repin in his 1885 painting Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan on 16 November 1581, in which Ivan is shown consumed by remorse.

By one rash act, Ivan had jeopardised his dynasty, for the next in line, the Tsarevich Fedor, the sole surviving son of his first wife Anastasia, was mentally deficient, while his other son, born to Maria Nagaya, the last of his wives, was only one when Ivan died in 1584. The dispute over who should rule would lead to the civil war that engulfed Russia over the next thirty years.

Was Ivan that terrible? Was he any worse than, say, Cesare Borgia, King Henry VIII or Pope Julius II, il Papa terribile? In the Western mind the name Ivan the Terrible is synonymous with the ‘barbaric’ and ‘despotic’ nature of Russia. But were his methods any different to those advised by the great Renaissance thinker of Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Prince?

Men have less scruple in offending one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails.20

Ivan may never have heard of the Florentine philosopher, but he shared his ideas of human nature and kingship, and certainly applied them in Russia.

The modern image of Ivan goes back to Karamzin’s History, where he is portrayed as a tragically divided personality, torn and remorseful about the violence he was forced to use as a ruler. This was the dramatic conception of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944–6), a cinematic commentary on the human costs of tyranny which the director intended as a moral lesson to Stalin. In the first part of the film Eisenstein depicts the heroic aspects of Ivan: his vision of a unified Russia; his state-building; his fearless struggle against the scheming boyars; his strong authority and leadership in the war against Kazan; his ambition to secure a Baltic coastline for the empire. All these virtues were accentuated in the Soviet cult of Ivan the Terrible that Stalin had been actively encouraging since the early 1930s.

In the second part the film switches from the public sphere to Ivan’s inner world. The tsar now emerges as a tormented figure, isolated, paranoid, haunted by the consequences of his violence. The tsar’s remorse was the central theme of a third (unfinished) part. The film was meant to end with a confession scene in which Ivan kneels beneath the fresco of the Last Judgement in the Cathedral of the Dormition and offers his repentance for the evils of his reign while a monk reads out an endless list of people executed on the tsar’s command. Ivan bangs his forehead against the flagstones; his eyes and ears are filled with blood. ‘Stalin has killed more people [than Ivan],’ Eisenstein explained to the actor Mikhail Kuznetsov, ‘and still he does not repent. Let him see this and he will repent.’21

Stalin liked the first part, which received the Stalin Prize. But when he saw a screening of the second part, in March 1946, he reacted violently. ‘This is not a film, it is some kind of a nightmare!’ He was particularly angered by the film’s depiction of the oprichniki who, he said, appeared as ‘the worst kind of filth, degenerates, something like the Ku Klux Klan’, no doubt fearing that the viewing public would see in them a reference to his own political police. The film was banned and not shown publicly until 1958, ten years after the director’s death.

In 1947, Stalin summoned Eisenstein to a late-night meeting in the Kremlin at which he subjected him to a revealing lecture on Russian history. Eisenstein’s Ivan was weak-willed and neurotic, like Hamlet, Stalin said. But the real Ivan was great and wise. He was ‘very cruel’, and Eisenstein could show him in that light. ‘But you have to show why he needed to be cruel’.

One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was to stop short of cutting up the five key feudal clans. Had he destroyed them, there would have been no Time of Troubles [Russia’s civil war after Ivan’s death]. When Ivan had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer. God was a hindrance to him in this respect. He should have been more ruthless.22

* ‘For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.’

4

Times of Trouble

Four years after Ivan’s death, in 1588, the Englishman Giles Fletcher, on a diplomatic mission to the Moscow court, observed that the late tsar’s tyranny ‘hath so troubled that countrey, and filled it so full of grudge and mortall hatred ever since, that it will not be quenched (as it seemeth now) till it burne again into a civill flame’.1

For the next quarter of a century Russia would be torn apart by civil wars and foreign invasion – a Time of Troubles (smutnoe vremia), as it would be known, subsiding only with the ‘election’ of Tsar Mikhail Romanov and the founding of his dynasty in 1613. But not all of Russia’s troubles ended then. Over the next century, the time span of this chapter, the state’s authority was shaken by a series of rebellions. They revealed the problems of establishing the tsar’s authority in the eyes of the people, who believed only in a monarchy that represented their utopian ideals.

The problem had begun on Ivan’s death with the rival claims of his two sons, Fedor and Dmitry, to the throne. Fedor succeeded as the eldest son, but was too feeble-minded for the tasks of government, which were assigned to Boris Godunov, his wife’s brother. Descended from a Tatar prince, Godunov had joined Ivan’s oprichniki and risen to become a senior boyar at his court. As one of the four regents to Tsar Fedor, he proved an able ruler. But from the start he faced the opposition of his co-regent Prince Vasily Shuisky (the grandson of the Shuisky executed by Ivan IV), a descendant of the Riurikids, who looked upon the ‘low-born’ Godunov as an upstart. Reports of the eight-year-old Dmitry’s death in an accident in 1591 led to rumours of his murder at the hands of Boris Godunov. These rumours grew after Fedor’s death, when an Assembly of the Land elected Godunov as the next tsar.

Godunov was never able to establish his legitimacy as tsar. His authority was weakened by the economic crisis left behind by the Livonian War. Up to one-third of the country’s population was lost through hunger and disease; many of the rest fled to the ‘wild lands’ of the south where the famine did not reach. The state was thus deprived of taxpayers, while its military servitors, the pomeshchiki, lost the peasants on whom they relied to work their land. It was in both their interests to stop the peasant flight. Boris tightened the existing laws restricting peasant movement and gave landowners increased powers to reclaim those peasants who had run away. It was a step towards the imposition of serfdom.

People saw the famine as God’s punishment of Russia and its wicked Tsar Boris. Popular legends began to circulate about the reappearance of the ‘true tsar Dmitry’. In some versions Dmitry had not been killed at all but had escaped. In others he was resurrected, like Jesus Christ, to deliver Russia from the usurper tsar and save the people from serfdom. In 1604, such a man appeared, a charismatic twenty-two-year-old, possibly a defrocked monk named Grigory Otrepov, who claimed to be Dmitry. Backed by the Poles to conquer Russia through a popular rebellion, he was supported (and manipulated) by the boyar clans opposed to Boris Godunov. With around 4,000 men, the pretender crossed into Russia from Kiev (then part of the Kingdom of Poland) and advanced towards Moscow. In town after town his authority was recognised as an expression of the people’s hopes for freedom and justice, volia and pravda, the two basic concepts of their revolutionary utopia. As his army moved along the southern borderlands, the ‘wild lands’ of banditry and freedom, its ranks were swelled by Cossacks, peasants and townsmen, who joined its ‘holy war’ for the true tsar.

Here was the fundamental instability of the Russian monarchy. The tsar’s authority was founded on the myth of his divine status as an agent of God’s rule in Holy Russia, the last surviving seat of the true Orthodox faith in the Third Rome ideology. In the popular religious consciousness, always a medium for political ideas, Russia was the land of salvation, a new Israel where freedom, truth and justice would be given to the people by their holy tsar. As Mikhail Bakunin, the nineteenth-century revolutionary, wrote, ‘The Tsar is the ideal of the Russian people, he is a kind of Russian Christ.’2 The ‘littlefather tsar’ or tsar-batiushka was revered in folklore as the people’s protector, an avenger of the evils carried out by his boyars. By the logic of this belief system, if he acted as a ‘tsar-tormentor’ (tsar-muchitel), the Orthodox were justified in opposing him as a ‘false tsar’, as the Antichrist, perhaps, sent by Satan to end God’s rule in Holy Russia, leading to the destruction of the world.3 The crucial factor in the tsar’s authority – his godlike personality projected through the myth of the holy tsar – could thus be turned against him if his actions did not meet the people’s expectations of his sacred cult.

There were dozens of ‘pretender tsars’ (samozvantsy) who stirred the people to revolt by claiming they were the true tsar, the deliverer of God’s justice. At least twenty-three of these pretenders have been documented before 1700, and there would be over forty in the eighteenth century.4 Popular uprisings, by necessity, were monarchical in form. The only way the Russians could legitimise rebellion was in the name of the true tsar. No other concept of the state – neither the idea of the public good nor the commonwealth – carried any force in the peasant mind. This was the outcome of a patrimonial autocracy in which the state was embodied in the person of the tsar.

In April 1605, with the false Dmitry’s forces encamped near Moscow, Boris died. His army soon went over to the rebel side. With the support of the boyar clans, the pretender entered Moscow, where he was crowned Tsar Dmitry, the only tsar raised to the throne by a popular rebellion. The hopes invested in Dmitry were soon dashed. Rumours spread about his heavy drinking and debauchery. His court was filled by Polish nobles. Suspicions of his Catholic persuasion grew when he announced his intention to marry a Pole without her first converting to the Russian Church. Led by Shuisky, a boyar force broke into the Kremlin and murdered Dmitry in May 1606. Shuisky was crowned Tsar Vasily IV.

Once again, rumours circulated that Dmitry was not dead. New Dmitrys soon appeared (a dozen have been counted by historians), each one claiming to be the true tsar.5 Many were proclaimed by Cossack bands to legitimise their banditry. The most dangerous was Ivan Bolotnikov, hailed in Soviet historiography as the first peasant revolutionary. In fact he was a small-scale landowner and military servitor who, like so many of his kind, had fallen on hard times and run away to join the Cossacks, living as a bandit on the steppe. In July 1606, he appeared with a rebel army of Cossacks, peasants and other southern frontiersmen, including small-scale gentry landowners. The army gathered more supporters, swelling to a force of 60,000 men, as it marched towards Moscow, claiming to be fighting for the restoration of the true tsar Dmitry. This was not a peasant or class war, a myth promoted in the name of Marxist ideology, but an uprising by the ‘wild lands’ of the southern frontier against Moscow.6

Bolotnikov was defeated, and in 1608 was killed. His gentry commanders went over to Shuisky’s side, calculating that their own demands for better pay and tax exemptions were more likely to be met by his boyar oligarchy than by the ‘rabble’ that had joined Bolotnikov’s rebellion. By this time, another false Dmitry had appeared. Known as Vor (‘brigand’), the name given to him by Shuisky’s government, he had ties to the Polish aristocracy, and was possibly an agent of the Polish crown, a suggestion disputed by historians. Certainly his army was joined by many Poles. As it advanced on Moscow, it was joined by the remnants of Bolotnikov’s rebellion. In the summer of 1608 they established an armed camp at Tushino, just north of the capital, where they remained for a year with their own court and boyar council, dominated by the Saltykovs and Romanovs, Shuisky’s bitter enemies.

With Russia torn apart by civil war, foreign powers intervened to advance their own interests. The Swedes and Poles were quick to take advantage of the chaos. Shuisky was desperate for Swedish help to defeat the Tushino rebellion. He agreed to cede the coastline of Karelia and Ingria to Sweden in exchange for mercenary troops. Part of the agreement involved Russia’s commitment to supporting the Swedes in their long-running war against the Poles. Sigismund, the Polish king, took this as a pretext to send his armies into Russia. While the Swedes came to the aid of Moscow against the Tushino rebellion, the Poles crossed the border into Russia and laid siege to Smolensk.

Alarmed by the Polish invasion, the boyar clans in Moscow struck a deal with Sigismund under which his son, Prince Władysław, would become tsar after his conversion to the Russian Church. A Polish tsar, whose powers could be limited, was a price they were prepared to pay to consolidate their boyar rights. Deposing Shuisky in a coup, the Moscow boyar leaders swore their allegiance to Prince Władysław, and welcomed the arrival of the Polish troops, which had defeated the Tushino rebels on their advance to the capital. It now emerged that Sigismund intended, not to install Władysław, but to occupy the throne himself, ruling Russia with Poland as one Catholic kingdom. The boyar clans had been deceived.

The Muscovites rose up against the Poles in 1612. United by the defence of their Orthodox religion, their patriotic cause became a ‘national’ uprising when the humble citizens of Nizhny Novgorod and other Volga towns responded to the calls of Hermogen, the Russian patriarch, and organised ‘militias of the land’ to march on Moscow and expel the infidels. In Nizhny Novgorod it was a simple butcher, Kuzma Minin, who led the initiative to raise money for a militia by subscriptions and taxes. He appealed to other towns to do the same. Under the command of Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, scion of an ancient princely family, the militias, joined by Cossacks, liberated Moscow from the Poles – a victory that elevated Minin and Pozharsky to eternal heroes in the story of Russia.

On the bicentenary of these events, in 1812, another year of fighting against foreign invaders, this time Napoleon and his Grande Armée, a handsome monument to Minin and Pozharsky was funded by a public subscription in Nizhny Novgorod. Six years later, the statue was unveiled, not in Nizhny Novgorod, as had been planned, but in the middle of Red Square (in 1931 it was moved to its current position in front of St Basil’s Cathedral to allow more space for military parades). From this point, the cult of Minin and Pozharsky was promoted by the state, which needed symbols of the patriotic sacrifice by ordinary Russians united by religion and devotion to the motherland. Their images appeared on coins, medals, postage stamps; books about their deeds were published for a wide range of readers; and films were made, including one by the great director Pudovkin, Minin and Pozharsky (1939). The film was launched and seen by millions during the Red Army’s invasion of Poland, when the events of 1612 were constantly retold by Soviet propagandists to portray the Poles as aggressors, potential allies of Hitler, to justify the invasion. Putin has continued with this anti-Polish theme, using it to justify the Hitler–Stalin Pact and subsequent invasion of Poland as an act of self-defence, and has mobilised the myth of Minin and Pozharsky to add patriotic sentiment to his bogus argument. In 2005 he introduced a Day of National Unity on 4 November, the date of the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow in 1612, whose official celebration focused on the exploits of the butcher and the prince as a symbol of the people’s unity against foreign aggression. It was for a clear symbolic purpose, then, that on his way to the unveiling of the statue to Prince Vladimir on the 2016 holiday, the event with which this book began, Putin stopped before the Minin and Pozharsky monument, where he posed with soldiers for photographers.

As Pozharsky led his forces to Moscow, a military council called on all the towns to send their representatives to an Assembly of the Land to elect a Russian tsar. Several hundred delegates appeared in Moscow for the vote on 7 February 1613. They represented a cross-section of society, from princes, boyars and landowning servitors to clergy, townsmen, Cossacks, even a small number of peasants. Mikhail Romanov was the candidate they chose.

There was nothing particularly distinguished about the man whose name would be given to the ruling dynasty for the next 300 years. Not yet twenty years of age, he was sickly, placid, poorly educated and, like many of his descendants, not especially intelligent. But his father, Filaret, the patriarch of Moscow, was popular with the Cossacks. Filaret had been the leader of the Russian Church at Tushino. He was a supporter of the tsar Dmitry, while his family’s connections to Ivan IV, and the fact that Mikhail was the nephew of Fedor, the last tsar of Riurik’s dynasty, made him seem a natural choice to those whose main priority was to restore the sacred form and content of the antebellum system and reunite the country around a Russian on the throne.

Attempts were made by the boyars to set limits on the tsar’s power. By longstanding tradition the tsar had ruled in consultation with a group of senior nobles in the boyars’ council – a tradition broken only by the tyranny of Ivan the Terrible. The leading boyars now sought to restore that principle. According to Kliuchevsky, they made Mikhail promise, among other things, not to make laws or wars on his own, without the consent of the Boyars’ Council or Assembly of the Land. If this truly was a chance for a limited or oligarchic monarchy, it was a chance the boyars missed. The Assembly of the Land met frequently in the early years of Mikhail’s reign (1613–45), when the tsar was struggling to establish his authority and needed it to restore order, impose unity and raise taxes. But later, when the dynasty became entrenched, the assembly declined in activity, meeting rarely and only when it had been summoned by the tsar to give formal consent to his laws. It failed to develop as a national assembly, a permanent body in the state order, such as one could find, to varying degrees, in Europe’s parliaments. Russia remained on its autocratic path.

The new dynasty faced enormous challenges. Large parts of the country were still occupied by the Swedes and Poles – the former bent on gaining the north-western lands, including Novgorod and Pskov, the latter wanting nothing less than the Russian throne. It took more fighting and expensive treaties to convince them to retreat. The Russo-Swedish treaty of 1617 ceded to the Swedes complete control of the Baltic coast from Finland to Livonia, while the 1618 treaty with the Poles gave up all the western borderlands, including Smolensk and thirty other towns. The situation was no better in the south, where the Crimean Tatars were a constant threat with their raids on Russia’s border towns. The tsar’s ability to get the Crimean khan or his Ottoman protectors to curtail their raids was undermined by the actions of the Don Cossacks, who ignored his pleas to cease their raids on Crimean and Turkish territories. The Cossacks’ capture of the Azov Fortress, in 1637, risked dragging Russia into war against the Ottomans, who suspected the Kremlin of supporting the attack on their northern garrison. The crisis was averted by Mikhail ordering the Cossacks to abandon Azov to the Turks in 1642. But the Tatar raids and Cossack counter-raids continued unabated on the southern frontier, where Moscow reinforced its defences by building yet more garrisons.

It was hard for an elected tsar like Mikhail Romanov to claim the title of autocrat and establish his authority. Pretenders to the throne continued to appear, especially among the Cossacks, who elected their own rebel tsars. Taxation was the hardest task. Russia was involved in thirty years of war between 1613 and 1682. Military costs almost tripled in this period, as Russia grew its standing army and paid for more advanced technologies to compete with the other powers of Europe. The bureaucratic state increased in size and stretched its reach into the provinces to raise more income from taxes. But there was a downturn in the agricultural economy which put a growing strain on the state’s relations with society. It was part of a general crisis across Europe, where expensive wars brought states into conflict with their taxpayers, who were already under stress from crop failures, disease and other miseries.7 The more the state encroached on people’s livelihoods, the more it had to deal with popular revolts against taxes and the centralisation of power.

The first big wave of rebellions took place in response to a large increase in the salt tax in 1646. Salt was a basic household need, essential for preserving food. Under popular pressure the tax was quickly abolished, but it was replaced by other hefty taxes introduced by the young Tsar Alexei, son of Mikhail, who reigned from 1645 to 1676. The biggest protest occurred in Moscow, where the populace was angered by the tax exemptions enjoyed by foreign merchants and members of the ruling circles of the court. On 1 June 1648, returning from his annual pilgrimage to the Trinity-St Sergei Monastery, Alexei was met on the outskirts of the city by a group of townsmen wanting to present him with a petition. They complained about the influence of ‘powerful people’ who ‘by their destructiveness and greed are fomenting trouble between You, the Sovereign, and the whole land’.8

Petitioning the tsar had a long tradition in Russia. It continued through the Soviet period when millions of people wrote to Stalin for his help against the abuses of his officials, and can still be seen in Putin’s annual TV programme Direct Line when viewers call in with their questions for the president. In Russia’s patrimonial autocracy, where the state was embodied in the person of the tsar, it was the most obvious way for the people to seek redress against wrongdoing and injustices. The right to appeal directly to the tsar was fundamental to the myth of the littlefather tsar, the tsar-batiushka, as a righteous and paternal protector of his people. ‘The tsar is good but his boyars bad,’ the Russian proverb said, meaning that the tsar was unaware of the injustices committed by his servitors but would correct them and punish his officials once he had been told of them. This was the idea of the petitioners who met Alexei on that day. On his coronation, they believed, he had kissed the cross and sworn an oath to protect the poor.

Imagine, then, the anger of the Moscow protesters when the young tsar brushed aside their petitions and ordered the arrest of the petitioners. The next day he was heckled by the crowd assembled on Red Square when he emerged from the Kremlin to attend a service in St Basil’s Cathedral. Joined by many of the musketeers, who had mutinied when ordered to disperse them, the crowds broke into the Kremlin fortress, thronged in front of the tsar’s palace and then went off to attack the mansions of the city’s ruling magnates, some inside the Kremlin’s walls, others in the nearby wealthy districts, before going on the rampage and putting wooden Moscow to the torch. Officials blamed for the salt tax were beaten by the mob. One was cut to pieces and thrown onto a pile of dung. In a desperate attempt to end the protests, the tsar ordered the execution of the head of the Artillery Chancellery, a scapegoat to pacify the musketeers. But the real hate-figure of the crowd, the boyar Boris Morozov, the tsar’s childhood tutor and a leading figure in his government, escaped lightly with a short spell of exile in a monastery.

Revolts broke out in other towns – Kozlov, Kursk, Voronezh in the south, Solvychegodsk and Ustiug in the north, and in several districts of Siberia. Frightened of a full-scale revolution like the one in England led by Cromwell at that time, the tsar summoned an Assembly of the Land to introduce reforms. Its main result was a new Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. Cobbled together from Lithuanian and Byzantine statutes, mixed with earlier Russian laws, it was the first such code to be published in Russia. Several thousand copies were rushed out to local governors so that they could let the people know that a new approach was being taken by the government to give every subject equal access to justice. The code’s twenty-nine thematic chapters, covering every aspect of society, would remain the fundamental law until 1833. The fact that it survived so long did not ‘testify to its merits’, according to Kliuchevsky, but rather showed ‘how long we Russians can survive without satisfactory law’.9

The Ulozhenie marks a shift towards the notion of a law-based state. It represents an early form of bureaucratic rule, in which virtually every matter would be regulated by the published law and no longer left to the discretion of the tsar. This was not what the protesters had been asking for. They had wanted the tsar to appoint more ‘godly judges’ and restore the proper functioning of the traditional system, in which the merciful and pious tsar was the highest judge of all. The Law Code swept away these customary norms. It stated, for example, that instead of writing to the tsar the people had to appeal to the relevant department of the state, the chancellery responsible for the matter they had raised. Anyone petitioning the tsar directly was to be punished by having the soles of their feet beaten with bastinadoes.10

The Legal Code was the underpinning for a huge expansion of the bureaucratic state. From a few hundred officials in 1613, the administration grew by the 1680s to over 2,000 secretaries and clerks working full-time in the various chancelleries of Moscow.11 Increasingly these officials came from a new class of men appointed on the basis of their literacy and numeracy, organisational skills and technical expertise, qualities distinctly lacking in most nobles at the court. Taking over more and more responsibilities, they extended the state’s reach to almost every aspect of the people’s lives. Before 1649 the ordinary Russian would have had little contact with the state; afterwards he felt its growing intrusion as new laws regulated everything from blasphemy to gambling, brewing alcohol, foreign travel, vagrants, wandering minstrels and musicians.

Russia was too big for the state to reach everywhere. On the provincial level it looked to appointed governors (voevodas) and magistrates to enforce its authority. In the rural localities it relied on the landowners to exercise judicial powers over the peasants. Further down, at the village level, it depended on the peasants’ own communal institutions, overseen by the landlord’s bailiff, to maintain basic order and collect the taxes levied on the village as a whole. The system of collective responsibility (krugovaya poruka), which we have encountered already, involved the peasants as collaborators in the tax-collecting and judicial functions of the autocratic state. The new Law Code extended their collective duty to mutual surveillance and denunciation of sedition to the state. Every subject of the tsar was legally obliged, under penalty of death, to inform the authorities about ‘any plot or gathering or any other evil machinations against the tsarist majesty among the people’.12 In one section worthy of the Stalinist regime, the code stated that the families of ‘traitors’, even children, were liable to execution if they failed to denounce their seditious relatives. Included in such crimes were expressions of intent to rebel against the tsar or public statements against him. The practice of informing became deeply rooted in society. By the late nineteenth century it was an effective tool of the police.

The Law Code divided the population into legally defined classes, known as estates (sosloviia), strictly ordered in a hierarchy according to their service to the state. Each class was closed and self-contained. The service nobles, townsmen, clergy and peasants could neither leave their class nor hope their children would. This regimentation of society had profound and long-term consequences for Russia’s development. The social mobility that made Western societies so dynamic in the early modern age was basically absent in Russia. The town population in Russia was permanently fixed. Migration in and out of towns became a criminal offence. Urban taxpayers were obliged to live where they were registered in the tax census. Only they had a legal right to engage in urban occupations or even to own property in towns. It was a restriction that deprived Russia’s trades and industries of the entrepreneurial energy introduced by immigrants to Europe’s cities at this time. Russia’s towns were inward-looking by comparison. In Moscow, for example, foreigners were legally forbidden to own houses or have their own church. It was a concession by the government to the petitioners of 1648 who had complained about the threat of foreigners to their livelihood and faith.13

The chief beneficiaries of the Law Code were the military servitors, on whom the state depended for its defence. The pomeshchiki had fallen on hard times. The custom of dividing their estates between their sons had reduced their average landholding. By the 1640s most only had enough land to support half a dozen peasant families. They could not stop the peasants from deserting them for better land and conditions in the south. Many were unable to equip themselves with full armour. They sold themselves as slaves to the richer servicemen, which meant fighting in their place. The struggling pomeshchiki begged the tsar to support them. They wanted stricter laws to bind the peasants to their land. The result of their pleas was the institution of serfdom under the provisions of the new Law Code.

Until the end of the fifteenth century the peasants had been free to move around, provided they had met their obligations to the landowner or, if they lived on the so-called black lands where there were no landowners, had paid their taxes to the ruling prince. Land was plentiful but labour hard to find – a basic fact of life in Russia – which meant that the peasants moved around, looking for the best landlords or settling on the ‘wild lands’ of the south. Peasant flight deprived the pomeshchiki of the labour they needed. It also meant the state lost taxpayers. Laws were passed to restrict the movement of peasants. From the reign of Boris Godunov, they could leave their landlords only in a two-week period around St George’s Day (25 November), and then only on condition that they paid an exit fee to compensate for the housing they had occupied. But these restrictions did not solve the underlying problem, which was peasant poverty.14

The settled peasantry fell into increasing debt, in part because of the general downturn in the agricultural economy, and in part because the flight of their fellows deprived them of the labour and taxpayers they needed. Because taxes were imposed collectively on the commune, the decline of the village population meant an increased burden on those peasants who remained. Many took out loans from the landowners which they contracted to repay by working on their land. These kabala contracts, as they were called (another word of Mongol origin), stipulated how many days each week they would work for the landowner, and how many years they would remain in his employ. Few peasants managed to repay the interest on the loan, let alone the principal. In effect they sold themselves into indentured servitude.

The kabala contracts were a decisive legal step in the direction of serfdom. They obliged the state to tighten its restrictions on peasant movement if it wanted to protect its military servitors from the risk of peasant flight – the simplest way the peasants had at their disposal to avoid repaying the kabala debt. From the 1580s, the state began to tighten up the laws, allowing greater leeway for the landowners to recapture peasants who had run away. In effect it recognised the peasant’s labour as a form of property belonging to his landowner. This recognition was enshrined in the new Law Code of 1649. It bound the peasants to their landlord’s land, without any right of departure, and made the state responsible for catching and returning runaways, now defined as criminals.

The laws of serfdom would remain in place until 1861. They applied to 90 per cent of the peasantry, the vast majority of the Russian population. Once they were no longer free to move, the serfs lost any means of leverage they had to protect their interests. They were now subjected to increasing exploitation by their landowners, who made them work, on average, for three to four days every week in their seigneurial economy (a form of labour service known as barshchina), and made them pay a money rent (obrok) for their own peasant fields by earning cash from handicrafts. The landowners depended on this income for their wants and needs (their salaries as servicemen were too small), so they tried by every means to squeeze more money out of their peasants. Apart from the landlord’s dues, the peasants had to pay their taxes to the state, both in labour duties and in cash. In economic terms they were worse off than most slaves, who did not pay state taxes.

In other terms they were no better off. Some landowners had a sense of paternal obligation to their serfs. But there was no control on their actions, so they were free to punish their serfs pretty much as they saw fit. This impunity was bound to have a coarsening effect on the landowners over time. Arbitrary beatings and floggings, rapes of women and the threat of separating families – these were the means by which they ruled their serfs. The mother of the nineteenth-century writer Ivan Turgenev, Varvara Petrovna Lutovinova, was a good example of the old-style Russian landowner, combining as she did a sense of charity with arbitrary acts of cruelty against her 5,000 serfs on various estates south of Moscow. Once she sent two household serfs into penal exile in Siberia for the sole reason that they had failed to remove their caps and bow to her in the appropriate manner.15 It was the arbitrary nature of these punishments, as much as their violence, that built up peasant hatred of the landowners – a hatred expressed in the peasant violence of 1917.

Peasant flight was the main response to the coming of serfdom. Increasingly the peasants fled south-east, to the Volga lands and the lower Don, where the presence of the state was weaker than it was in the fortified frontier lands on the steppe south of Moscow. The Cossacks, too, were moving east, as it became more difficult for them to live from banditry on the steppelands. It was on the Volga and the Don that the largest popular uprising of the century began, the Razin rebellion, in May 1670.

Stepan Razin was a Cossack from an area of the Don overrun by peasant fugitives. The migrants were ready to become ‘Cossacks’, to live a life of freedom, without masters or taxes. The charismatic Razin, famous for his raids on the Turks and Persians, called on them to join his Cossacks in a war against the boyars and the landowners – a war to ‘win the people’s freedom’ and put a just tsar (a Cossack) on the throne. Soviet historians presented the rebellion as a peasant war, but in fact the Razin army was made up of many elements – Cossacks, peasants, townsmen, poorer clergymen and Tatar, Mordvinian and Chuvash tribesmen who had lost their grazing lands to the Russians. It was a war between the have-nots and the haves.

For a year the Razin army caused havoc. Up and down the Volga River, town after town rose in revolt on his approach – Astrakhan, Tsaritsyn, Saratov, Samara – and in the countryside peasants burned the manors of their landowners. But after a long siege at Simbirsk the tsarist forces pushed the rebels back, and in a campaign of merciless repression, in which perhaps 100,000 rebel fighters lost their lives, reduced them to a handful of small and scattered bands.16 Captured rebel leaders were impaled on stakes, nailed to boards, hung, drawn and quartered in town squares to teach the common people a lesson. Razin himself was captured. Chained to a scaffold on an open wagon, he was taken to Moscow, where he was brutally tortured before being executed on Red Square on 6 June 1671. For many years the legend of his immortality was retold by the peasants and Cossacks. They said that he was hiding in the wilderness, waiting for the moment when the people needed him, when he would reappear in the form of a black raven to deliver them from oppression. At the beginning of the twentieth century the raven image of Razin continued to be seen, flying up and down the Volga River, heralding the advent of the peasant revolutionary utopia.17

Russia doubled in size during the seventeenth century. It grew because it could. From the Mongol conquest it had learned that the best way to defend itself against the Tatar tribes was to control as much as possible of the Eurasian steppe – to conquer any territory from which it could be attacked. The collapse of the Mongol Empire and its successor states opened the Siberian steppe to Russian conquest and colonisation. There were no natural frontiers, no other powers except distant China to prevent the Russians’ eastward march – only the Siberian tribes, the Khantys, Samoyeds, Tungus, Yakuts, Buriats, Chukchis, Daurians and other smaller tribes who were no match with their hunting bows and spears for the Russian muskets and artillery.

The Russians were driven east by fur, the ‘soft gold’ that accounted for one-third of the imperial coffers at the height of the fur trade in the 1680s. Close on the heels of the fur trappers came the Cossack mercenaries, who built wooden forts and exacted a fur tribute from the native tribes by taking hostages (usually women, children, tribal elders and shamans). Locked inside the forts, the hostages were shown to their tribesmen when they brought their tribute in sables, minks, ermines and foxes. The tribute-paying tribes were also made to help the Russians in their conquest of the neighbouring tribal areas by serving them as guides, interpreters, carters and fighters – a duty many tribesmen were eager to fulfil if it meant destroying their rivals.

Not all the tribes were easily subdued. There was stiff resistance from the Tungus and the Buriats, who were more developed in their metalworking crafts and social organisation than most other tribes. Terrible atrocities were carried out by the Russians – the burning of whole villages, executions, mass rape and enslavement of women. Some tribes fled or killed themselves en masse rather than submit to the Russians.

This violence has been played down in the Russian history books, where the conquest of Siberia is usually presented as a peaceful colonisation, in which the native tribes were ‘civilised’ as they were assimilated into Russian culture and society. In this myth the empire colonised or grew into itself, creating harmony between its peoples which in time would form the ‘fraternity of nationalities’ celebrated in the Soviet Union. The narrative the Russians have been taught represents a stark contrast to the violent empire-building of the European powers, which conquered and oppressed lands overseas. It also stands in contrast to America, a territorial ‘empire’ like Russia, where the conquest of the West, unlike the Russian conquest of Siberia, involved genocidal violence against the Native American tribes. This tale underpins the Russians’ image of themselves as benevolent imperialists, ‘naturally’ suited to assume leadership in Asia because of their European character.