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29 January 2007
Kievan Rus‘ and the Greeks.
I don’t know if this is supported by scholarly sources or archaeological evidence in any way. So by the same token, I don’t know is refuted by them either. I paid my dues looking through scholarly journals about Russian History in Undergrad. So there. Anyways, this is the result of some random conjecture between myself and Russian-American at a coffee shop. Lots o’ fun.
Around 800 AD, all the Eastern Slavs lived in was called the Kievan Rus’. They were basically a bunch of city-states in what is now Ukraine. The relationship between the city-states was somewhat akin to that of the ancient Greeks during the time of Thucidides. Around 1000 AD, the Mongols rolled through the area. Kiev was the strongest and richest city in all of Europe at the time. So the Mongols send their emissaries to demand tribute from Kiev, and the Kievans send back the Mongol emissaries without their heads. Genghis Khan doesn’t take rejection particularly well, so he kills almost everyone in Kiev. Game over, Kievan Rus’.
There is a pretty interesting historiographical question here. The Soviets described the Kievan Rus’ as a feudalistic culture, so that it would fit into their model of dialectical materialism. The Ukrainians describe the Kievan Rus’ as a pinnacle of governance and culture, and proceed to take all of its symbology as their own (hrybna, the currency, and trizub, the symbol of the Kyivan grand princes.) Both the Soviets and the Ukrainians have (had) agendas wrapped around their perspectives on the Kievan Rus’, and that influences their respective viewpoints. Of course.
So here is my uninformed and relatively insignificant argument. First, feudalistic economies are fundamentally agrarian. The Kievan Rus’ economy was based around taxing the trade routes coming out of Constantinople. A large amount of revenue was generated by a large number craftsmen and merchants, who capitalized on the trade routes, importing and exporting large numbers of goods. These craftsmen and merchants were decidedly bourgeoisie, and were not particularly beholden to any feudal lords. A trade based economy with a large middle class points far more to an advanced capitalistic economy than a feudal economy.
Second, the Kievan Rus’ system of governance could be described as ‘frontier Athenian.’ Three branches of government, for lack of a better term, came together to produce policy. Any two could trump the third, and when they did so, people generally died. There was an executive-type figure in the Grand Prince (Veliky Knyaz,) who was a hereditary monarch. There was a legislative-type body in the Veche, a council of landowners and merchants who discussed and voted on all laws. There was a judicial-type entity in the Boyars, hereditary wealthy nobles independent of the Grand Prince. Each city-state had a different mix of these three (Novgorod had most of its power with the Veche, for example,) and while far from the staid Greek philosophers (Impeachment was accomplished by decapitation, usually,) it was far less authoritarian than any other significant European systems of the time.
There is a line of argumentation that believes Russia to be the ‘Third Rome.’ While now mostly a symbolic feature embraced by the Russian Orthodox Church, there was once truth in it. I remember writing a paper comparing the Kievan Rus’ with the Greek city states. I think I had only cited the parallelism, and I neglected to look to lineage. The primary influence on the culture, economy and governance of the Kievan Rus’ was Constantinople. There was a conscious choice to model the society on the Eastern Seat of the Church, stunning in its splendor at that time. Constantinople, in turn, owed its model of society to both the Romans and the Greeks. So there was something decidedly Greek that flowed into Kiev through the rivers that were its trade routes. Cyrillic, after all, was based on Greek.
How did we get from there to here? Moscow is my guess. Sergei Eisenstein aside, Moscow gained its power by collecting taxes for the Mongol Golden Horde. Though rivers and forests played some role in its defense, Moscow profited greatly under the Mongol yoke, evolving from a small outpost into a powerful city. As the Golden Horde declined, the Muscovites eventually became strong enough to drive the Mongols out. In the process, though, Muscovite governance picked up a strong flavor of corruption and authoritarianism, whether from the Mongols or from what had become of the House of Rurik. The rise of Moscow was at about the same time as the decline of Constantinople. Moscow’s distance from Constantinople and the decay of Byzantine influence meant that the Greek flavor that shaped Kiev would have little influence on Moscow.
The synopsis of my argument is that 1) There was a continuity between the ancient Greeks and the Kievan Rus‘ by way of Byzantium and 2) That continuity was broken under the Mongol yoke and the rise of Moscow. This is doubtless controversial, and sides pretty strongly with the Ukrainian historiography on the subject (with the notable exception of affirming that the Ukrainians and the Russians came from the same Kievan stock.) So, in terms of ‘the past that never was,’ Democracy is actually quite Russian. But if it is Russian the way we understand Russian still remains to be seen. The unique thing about a ‘past that never was’ is that if you recover it, you get to make it your future.
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