The Historical Place of Russia and Ukraine in the European Cultural Space

THE HISTORICAL PLACE OF RUSSIA AND UKRAINE IN THE EUROPEAN CULTURAL SPACE IN SEARCH OF A EUROPEAN CHRISTIAN IDENTITY WIL VAN DEN BERCKEN* The geographical East of Europe – Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – is more related to the rest of Europe than it may seem at first glance. The great dif- ferences in political and social development of Eastern and Western Europe and the ecclesiastical separation between Orthodox and Catholic Churches notwithstanding, Rus’ or Russia has during its thousand year history belonged to what I call, the European cultural space.1 It is sometimes a hidden relationship, less visible than the political and ecclesiastical differ- ences, but nevertheless, Russia and Europe stand in a common historical cultural context. Religiously and ideologically Russia has never been an oriental or Asiatic culture, despite its autocratic and sometimes despotic political system. It has developed its national identity on the basis of Christian political ideas which in turn have been shaped by (East) Roman imperial heritage. This heritage has played an important role in the formative phases of Moscovian and Petersburg Russia. Ukraine is a more complicated story: for three centuries (from the beginning of the fourteenth until the mid-seven- teenth century) half of this country has belonged to the central European sphere, and a smaller part of it, Galicia, even until 1939. But its history has also always remained closely linked to Russia. The common roots of Ukrainian * Wil van den Bercken is professor of Russian Church History at the Radboud Univer- sity Nijmegen. This article is the elaborated version of an address held at a meeting with directors of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian theological institutes on 12 December 2004 in Nijmegen. 1 Rus’ (Rusà) is the name of the mediaeval princedom with Kiev as its capital (9th until 13th century). It is not identical with later Ukraine or Russia. The name Ukraina was used for the first time in 1187 in a Northern Russian chronicle. In 1355 the region is indicated by the Patriarch of Constantinople as Mikra Rwsia (Latin Russia Minor). Rossia (Rossiq) is the later name for tsarist Russia. 238 WIL VAN DEN BERCKEN and Russian cultures lie in mediaeval Kievan Rus’. So we start our survey there. KIEV: CHRISTIANISATION IN A EUROPEAN CONTEXT Christianity in mediaeval Rus’ started as an undivided church. The region was christianised in the same period as Hungary, Poland, Denmark and Norway. Although christianised from different centres, Rome and Constantinople, it was the same kind of Christianity. This extension of Christianity on the European continent around the year 1000 is sometimes called “the second wave of the conversion of nations” in Europe, after that of the Franks and the Anglo-Saxon peoples centuries earlier. It was a further step in the formation of a “Christian Europe”. It were emotional-aesthetical reasons rather than ideological (anti-Catholic) ones that brought of Kievan Rus’ into the Christian world in 988, as one can read in the chronicle Tale of Bygone Years: it was the Byzantine liturgy in the majestic church of the Hagia Sophia that overwhelmed the Kievan envoys. This is a romantic interpretation from a century after the event. The real reasons were more practical: the geographical vicinity of Constantinople and the fact that conversion was a condition for prince Vladimir of Kiev to marry the sister of the Byzantine emperor, Anna. But it was obviously not a choice against Latin Europe. Thirty years earlier Vladimir’s grandmother Olga had not hesitated to invite missionaries from the German king Otto I. He sent bishop Adalbert of Trier, but his task failed because Olga died in 961. Vladimir’s support of the German missionaries who travelled through Kiev to preach Christianity to tribes east of Kiev, on which one can read in the letter of Bruno of Querfurt of 1008, offers further testimony for the uncom- plicated attitude toward Catholicism in eleventh-century Rus’.2 There was some kind of an awareness of a common Christian identity in the middle of the eleventh century, as becomes clear from the beautiful Ser- mon on Law and Grace by metropolitan Ilarion of Kiev. Ilarion praises his peo- ple’s joining of ‘the other Christian nations’, including the ‘the Roman land’. 2 In this article I frequently refer to documents that I have used in my book on religious imagery, Holy Russia and Christian Europe: East and West in the Religious Ideology of Russia (London, 1999). There I give a full indication of the sources. THE HISTORICAL PLACE OF RUSSIA AND UKRAINE 239 This was the first and also the last time in Russian history that a Russian church leader refers positively to Rome. Not only religiously, but also politically there was still no East-West separation: Vladimir’s son Yaroslav the Wise and his children married French, German, Polish, Swedish and Hungarian partners, and the last great leader of Kiev, Vladimir Monomach, married an English princess. Admittedly, these are far from major historical events but they are all symbols of how East and West met and were interrelated. This situation ended abruptly with the Mongol invasion of the Kievan territory in the mid-thirteenth century, after which Vladimir-Suzdal and Moscow Rus’ – the successor states of Kievan Rus’ – disappeared from the European horizon for nearly two centuries. Only the Western part of Rus’, Galicia-Volynia, whose prince Daniel accepted the king’s crown from Pope Innocent IV in 1253, remained closely linked to Central Europe, to Polish and later to Habsburg history. Another part of what became known as Ukraine was conquered by Lithuania in the fourteenth century and thus also became part of Central European history. During the dark ages of the Tatar yoke, from the beginning of the thirteenth until the mid-fifteenth century, Moscow Rus’ or Russia was isolated from the cultural developments in Europe. However, there remained some kind of a hidden link. Unaware of each other’s existence, monks in Western and Russian monasteries were writing their chronicles, creating a common European literary heritage. Russian iconographic art and Italian panel and fresco painting had common roots in Byzantine art. The monks Fra Angelico and Andrei Rublyov were the last purely religious painters of mediaeval Chris- tianity. However, these indications of a common Christian identity must be put into the right perspective. The religious-ideological confrontation between Russia and the West, dates back from the mid-thirteenth century and the battle of Alexander Nevski against the Teutonic Order in 1242. This confrontation has settled in Russian historical memory as its first success in stopping Catholic influence in Russia. The year of this victory has been commemorated by the Moscow Patriarchate in recent times. But the nega- tive image was built on the both sides. The Teutonic knights not only wanted to christianise the pagan Baltic tribes, they also considered the Russians as targets of their missionary zeal. And already one century earlier bishop 240 WIL VAN DEN BERCKEN Matthew of Krakow had asked Bernard of Clairvaux to help him ‘extermi- nate the godless rites and customs in Ruthenia, which is at it were another world (quae quasi est alter orbis)’.3 The failure of the Council of Florence in 1439 had an even greater impact. The Moscow Metropolitan Isidor had accepted reconciliation with Rome but it was immediately rejected by the Moscow Grand Prince, and this event has determined the relations between Russian Orthodoxy and Catholicism until today. These latter events may have been much more decisive for the perception of the West in Russian historical memory than the marriages I mentioned above, but one cannot ignore that there have also been some positive moments in relationship between Eastern and Western Europe. It is to these that I now turn. MOSCOW AND THE ADAPTATION OF A EUROPEAN POLITICAL-RELIGIOUS MYTH The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a major factor in creating an awareness of national identity in Russia. In several ways Moscow demonstrated that it stood in the European cultural sphere. Moscow considered itself the successor of the Byzantine empire: Grand Prince Ivan III took the Byzantine two-headed eagle as his arms, he used the titles autocrator and Caesar (not “Khan”), and married the niece of the last Byzantine emperor. Moscow thus placed itself in the European tradition and not that of the Mongols, under which it had lived for nearly two hundred years. Maybe more relevant still is the fact that the Kremlin, this supreme expres- sion of Russia’s political and religious identity, was rebuilt by Italian archi- tects: the Kremlin wall has the swallowtail crenellation of a North-Italian castello; the Faceted Palace resembles the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara; the main church of Russian Orthodoxy, the Uspenskii sobor, was built by the Bolognese Rudolfo Fioravante in authentically Russian style; and the Arkhangelskii sobor, the cathedral in which are buried the Grand Princes, has become a splendid combination of Russian style and Renaissance architec- ture thanks to its Milanese architect Alevisio Nuovo. All these symbols par 3 ‘Matthaei cracoviensis episcopi epistola ad s. Bernardum abbatem clarevallensem’, Mon- umenta Poloniae Historica, ed. A. Bielowski (Warsaw, 1960, reprint of 1864 edition), vol. II, p. 15. THE HISTORICAL PLACE OF RUSSIA AND UKRAINE 241 excellence of Russian power and glory have been built by Western masters. And the irony does not stop here. Both Russian and Western European rulers have come to use the same titles: “most pious” (piissimus or blagoverneishii), “Godloved” (Deoamatus or Bogolyubivyi), “Godcrowned” (Deocoronatus or Bogovenchannyi). But at the same time Russia put itself ideologically against Europe with the doctrine of Moscow as “the Third Rome”.

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