Russian history has long been the plaything of the propagandists. The tradition of rewriting the past to bolster current political priorities did not begin with Josef Stalin, but dates back to the very earliest times. The problem when sources are a millennium old is that checking their integrity isn’t easy.
The only source available for the earliest years of Russian history is the Primary Chronicle and it was produced centuries after some of the events it describes. ‘This is the tale of bygone years1 (the Povest’ Vremmenykh Let),’ it says, ‘the tale of the origins of the Russian land, of who first ruled in Kiev and from which origins the Russian land had its beginning.’ But if I was going to trust the Primary Chronicle, I wanted to find out a bit more about its shadowy author. The identity of most of the ancient chroniclers has been lost in the mists of time. For even the chief among them, our knowledge is limited to a title, some approximate dates and a place of work …
I arrived at the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev with little more than a name, Nestor the Chronicler, but the old lady at the gate was unfazed. ‘Nestor,’ she said. ‘Yes, he’s in the Near Caves, the Blizhnie Pechery. Go past the cathedral, take the road down the side of the hill and you’ll see a white building. Ask again when you get there.’ Considering that Nestor died in 1114, people around here seemed remarkably familiar with him. I walked through the monastery grounds, past a collection of golden-domed churches dominated by an ornate eighteenth-century bell tower and down a steeply descending path. The Monastery of the Caves has been one of the holiest places of Eastern Orthodoxy since it was founded over a thousand years ago. Back then it really was just a cave – or a series of caves – that Greek Byzantine monks had colonised in the hope of bringing Christianity to their pagan neighbours. Over the centuries it has expanded into an architectural ensemble that has recently been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
At the designated white building I was ushered into a small doorway leading down some steps and into what looked like a narrow tunnel. Just before I entered, another old lady said, ‘Here. You’ll need this,’ and thrust a lighted wax candle into my hand. She was right. At the bottom of the steps I found myself in a rabbit warren of tunnels, just wide enough for my shoulders to scrape the wall on either side, and high enough for me to feel a constant urge to duck. There was no light of any sort and the tunnels were deathly silent. The realisation that the guttering wax taper in my hand was the only means of finding my way was worrying. I advanced with tentative steps. From time to time I came to lateral tunnels in which similar flickering candles, held by invisible hands, were advancing and retreating. I had noticed stone niches carved into the walls and bent down to glance inside one. Within a glass-topped coffin lay the body of a monk draped in a green satin cloth with a mummified hand protruding from it. Every few yards another niche revealed another glass-topped coffin, another dead monk. I was just getting used to the strangeness of it all when a flicker of light swept towards me, lighting up the cave walls. Somewhere behind the light a low voice mumbled over and over ‘Gospodi pomilui, gospodi pomilui! Gospodi I vladyko zhivota moego …’ (‘Lord have mercy! Lord God and master of my life …’) and I made out the figure of a diminutive old lady, bent nearly double yet constantly bowing lower. In her hand was a cloth with which she rushed from one niche to another, wiping the coffin tops, then reverentially kissing the glass that covered the holy relics. As fast as she had appeared, she disappeared off down the corridor. Just as suddenly, another light rushed up, another hectic mumbled prayer, another old woman bending, bowing, kissing. The spectacle of fervent Christian devotion was shockingly unfamiliar to my blasé Anglican eyes. There was something medieval about it, a sort of living relic of the time when these caves had first been occupied.
At an intersection of four tunnels I found an Orthodox priest and asked him where I could find Nestor the Chronicler. He nodded down one of the corridors: ‘Nestor is at the end, on the left.’
I found the man I had come here to see and peered into his coffin. His remains differed little from those of all the other monks – 123 of them – preserved in the eternal gloom of the Near Caves. But it was quite something to see at first hand the man to whom we owe our knowledge of the most mysterious periods of Russian history. Without his record, fragmentary and tendentious as it is, we would indeed be in the dark. We will never know the personal history of Nestor, his experiences, emotions and motivations. But I had the feeling that my visit had brought me closer to his spirit and to the spirit of the times he lived in. Most dramatically, it had put me in contact with the intense, anxious fanaticism that had marked the Christianity of those centuries, when offering the right prayers, atonements and bows were matters of life and death – when the wrong words or obeisances could bring eternal damnation.
Hurrying a little too quickly, I managed to extinguish my candle. With a slight feeling of panic, I latched on to one of the mumbling women and followed her closely in the hope that she was heading out. Thankfully, she was.
It was in such an atmosphere of Christian piety, apocalyptic fear and national claustrophobia that Nestor wrote, or at least compiled the text of the Chronicle. He was working 200 years after the arrival or Rurik at a time when Kievan Rus had expanded considerably. Through a mixture of trade and military aggression, its territories now stretched to the Black Sea in the south, the Volga in the east and the kingdoms of Poland and Lithuania in the west. But the Rus-ian lands were still an uneasy confederation of Slavic tribes, tenuously held together by the descendants of the first Viking overlords. Rus was divided, fearful and surrounded by enemies. Its survival was far from certain. To exist at all, it had to unite.
And this is where the element of propaganda creeps into the Primary Chronicle. Nestor and the other monks working on it knew their interests were inextricably linked with the interests of the princes of Rus. Christianity was still vying with the old pagan gods – with sacred oak trees and the spirits of earth, wind and thunder. So there is a real sense that the Chronicle’s version of history has been shaped to promote the supremacy of the state, to support the rule of the Grand Princes of Kiev and to present Christianity as a stabilising, unifying force.
Nestor’s account of the advent of Christianity in 988, just 70 years before his own birth, credits the then Grand Prince of Rus, Vladimir, with taking the first crucial steps towards the creation of a unified nation and a princely state. The adoption of Greek Orthodoxy as its official religion would set Kievan Rus on a course that has shaped Russia’s national identity right down to the present day. But according to the Primary Chronicle, things could have been very different.
Vladimir was something of a pragmatist who saw the political advantages of adopting a new state religion. He appears to have set up a sort of bidding war, sending envoys to canvass offers from the Islamic Ottoman Empire, the Jewish Khazars and the Western Christian Church in German, as well as that of the Eastern Greeks. The Chronicle explains Vladimir’s choice as a spiritual awakening:
When the envoys returned2 they made their report and said: ‘We saw men worship in a temple that is called a mosque, where they sit and bow and look like men possessed; but there is no happiness among them, only sorrow and a dreadful stench. And we went among the Germans and saw their ceremonies, but we beheld no glory there. But when we entered the edifices of the Greeks we knew not whether we were on Earth or in Heaven. For on Earth there is no such splendour or such beauty and we knew not how to describe it. God doth truly dwell among men and there we saw beauty that we can never forget.’
Nestor’s account is undoubtedly romanticised and partial. Quite apart from the beauty of their religion, it was almost certainly the Greeks’ offer of gifts and trade privileges that convinced Vladimir to opt for Christianity. Islam he rejected because of its ban on alcohol, declaring, some might say prophetically: ‘Drinking is the joy of the Russians3. We cannot live without that pleasure!’
So Rus became the easternmost bastion of Orthodoxy, on the front line with the forces of Islam, and it would have long-term consequences for her future. If Vladimir had chosen differently, Russia today could conceivably be part of the Islamic world. But Christianity was to prove a powerful binding element, and it brought with it something else that helped unite the nation.
In the centre of Kiev, outside St Michael’s Monastery, a white marble monument commemorates two Greek monks, later beatified as Saints Cyril and Methodius. They were two brothers, born in the Greek city of Thessaloniki in the early ninth century, and in mid life they came to Eastern Europe as missionaries for Christianity. But as well as religion, Cyril and Methodius brought with them an alphabet. If they wanted to introduce the Slavs to the Bible, they knew they had to create a standardised written language for the various dialects that had hitherto lacked a written tradition. Even today, if you look at Russian script – it’s known as Cyrillic, after the man who invented it – you can see striking similarities with the Greek letters Cyril and Methodius based it on. The new alphabet was initially used for Old Slavonic, the language of the Church and scholarship. Later it was adapted for vernacular Russian, the language of the people, and – from the time of Pushkin in the early nineteenth century – of Russia’s magnificent literature.
It is hard to overstate the importance of the Russian language in the development of a unified national identity. Over the centuries, Russians came to regard it, and the literature it produced, as the very essence of Russianness. When the Bolsheviks drove millions into exile after 1917, the consolation for many was that while they could be deprived of their native land, they could not be deprived of their native tongue. The poet Vladislav Khodasevich wrote on his departure from Russia in 1922 that he was taking with him the eight-volume set of Pushkin’s collected works. ‘All I possess are eight slim tomes4, but they contain my native land.’
With its new religion and new written language, Kievan Rus found a voice in the world, and a belief that it had joined the community of pious Christian kingdoms. In 988, Vladimir married a Byzantine princess to seal the sacred union, but he insisted on the Russian Church retaining a large measure of independence from the mother Church in Constantinople. It was a state of affairs that would endure for many centuries and imbue Russia with a sense of its individual Christian mission. A crusading zeal became an important element in the nation’s character. It would intensify after the fall of Byzantium in 1453 and take on many forms over the years. But all of its manifestations have their roots in the conviction that Russia is the spiritual inheritor of something unique – be it Christianity, peasant collectivism or Communism – that destiny has decreed it must teach to other nations.
In 988, turning towards the Christian world meant shuffling off, at least temporarily, the Asiatic influences that jostled on Rus’s eastern borders. As we’ll discover, Russia’s attempts to embrace the West would rarely run smoothly, but, for the moment, Vladimir succeeded in strengthening contacts with Europe and introducing new societal values. The Chronicle is positively gushing about his civilising influence:
So Vladimir did ordain5 that churches should be built where pagan idols once had stood … And there was rejoicing in Heaven to see the salvation of so many souls, while the Devil said, ‘Woe is me, for I am cast out of the land!’ Then the Prince invited every beggar and pauper to come to his palace to receive whatever he needed – food and drink and money – and to those who could not come, he sent out wagons with supplies of bread and meat, fish and mead, and kvas …
Even allowing for the chronicler’s hyperbole, it seems that Christian Kiev took on a more humane style of governance – if not democratic, then at least more open and even-handed. Trade with the West blossomed. Merchants travelled abroad and traders came in from Germany, Denmark, Armenia and Greece. Vladimir reduced military aggression against his neighbours, and at home there was a new emphasis on the rule of law:
For Vladimir now dwelled in the fear of God6 and did not execute bandits and robbers, for he feared the sin he might commit in doing so. But the bandits multiplied in number, and only when the bishops assured him that he was anointed by God to administer justice … did the Prince set out to punish the wrongdoers and execute them … But always did he insist on following the due process of the law.
The reference to the ‘due process of law’ is tantalising. It hints at a putative weakening in the absolute power of the monarch, a recognition of legal principles that even the greatest princes must respect.
The tenth century was a time of autocrats and despots, when rulers ruled by coercion and military might. Nowhere, not even in the most advanced nations, was anything approaching what we know as democracy remotely on the cards. But Kievan Rus offers an unexpected glimpse of embryonic princely rule based on the tenets of ‘due process of law’. Such episodes would be the exception rather than the rule in the subsequent history of Russian governance.
Revered in folk legend as the nation’s Krasnoe Solnyshko (Beautiful Sunshine), Vladimir was made a saint after his death in 1015. Rather unwisely, though, he had appointed his 12 sons to rule as equals in the city states that made up the Rus-ian lands, and arguments over precedence and rules of succession had led to violent conflicts. Two of Vladimir’s sons, Boris and Gleb, were the victims of this power struggle in 1019. They have long been the most venerated of the early Russian martyrs because they offered no resistance to their murderers. According to the account of Nestor the Chronicler, Boris and Gleb learned that their brother Svyatopolk had sent soldiers to kill them, but refused to respond with violence lest it lead to civil war:
Svyatopolk secretly summoned his men7 and commanded them to go and kill his brother Boris. The sainted Boris was singing vespers, for it was known to him that they intended to take his life. When he saw how men were come to kill him, he arose and began to chant, ‘Lord, help me to endure my passion. For I accept it from the hand of my own brother.’ … He lay down upon his couch and they fell upon him like wild beasts, piercing him with lances. Thus shall the blessed Boris join the choirs of martyrs and be numbered with the prophets and the saints. And Gleb too was offered up as a sacrifice to God, and he too received the crown of glory … Rejoice for our martyrs and intercessors! Now beseech the Lord God that our Princes may live in concord, free from internecine war among them!
The self-sacrifice of Boris and Gleb was an act of Christian humility and – even more important to Nestor – a symbol of the nobility of suffering in the cause of Rus-ian unity. ‘Now may our Princes live in concord,’ he says; ‘may they learn from Boris and Gleb’ to put the good of Rus before their own interests. The moral of the story was a useful piece of propaganda for Nestor, because he was writing nearly 70 years after Boris and Gleb’s demise, at a time when Rus was descending into internal strife. It established the idea that the good of the state justified the ultimate self-sacrifice, an outlook that would endure in one form or another throughout Russia’s history.
Nestor’s account of events was loaded with vested interest and political spin. He promoted, possibly even created, the Boris and Gleb legend to place their deaths in a very Russian tradition of redemption through suffering, with the aim of promoting the unity of Rus’s ruling dynasty as the paramount good. Their legend served a bigger purpose – to give this new state a history of its own and to establish it as one ordained by God.
In the short term, however, their sacrifice was in vain: the fratricidal war they’d sought to avert soon became a reality. It was to be divisive and destructive, and it would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Kievan state.