When the ‘high place’, or capital city, of the Rus-ian lands was transferred from Novgorod to Kiev in 882, it shifted power from the north to the south. The Kievan ruler assumed the title of Grand Prince to distinguish himself from the lesser princes in the realm’s component city states. He was entitled to receive tribute, as a formal acknowledgement of his supremacy, from the princes of Ryazan, Suzdal, Rostov, Yaroslavl, Murom, Chernigov, Pskov, Vladimir, Polotsk, Galich, Belgorod and Novgorod. It was a delicate arrangement because it took only one prince with a grudge, a sense of injustice or exaggerated ambition to trigger conflicts like the one that put paid to poor Boris and Gleb. In the end it would be the consequences of such recurrent crises and internal divisions that would weaken and ultimately destroy Rus in the thirteenth century. But the 200 years after the death of Vladimir the Bringer of Christianity, roughly the eleventh and twelfth centuries, saw the development of a remarkably cultured and, by the standards of the day, liberal society.
Despite the looming political fragmentation, the middle years of Kievan Rus were one of those remarkable periods in Russian history when autocracy was tempered with a measure of democratic participation. The city state of Novgorod, in particular, had developed procedures of governance so far in advance of the rest of Europe at that time that I set out to look for evidence of it.
In the Novgorod kremlin, I located the site next to St Sophia’s Cathedral where citizens were regularly summoned to public consultations to discuss the running of the city. And over the river, in the trading district of Yaroslavovo Dvorishche, I found the spot where the merchant classes held their own meetings next to St Nicholas’s Church. Both sets of meetings were known as veches, from the ancient Russian verb ‘to speak out’, and they were announced by the ringing of the city’s veche bell, with a distinctive note and ringing pattern used for that purpose alone.
I was eager to find the veche bell and was tremendously encouraged when a complex, decorative carillon struck up in the belfry of St Sophia’s. Looking up, I could see that the myriad bells, small and large, were being rung in ever more dazzling combinations by a bell-ringer who walked back and forth between the belfry’s high, open-sided arches, tugging ropes and flicking clappers with astounding dexterity. Bells were clearly an important part of Novgorodian culture, and I found a kremlin official who looked as though he could explain it to me. My guide took me to the side of the belfry where a row of ancient bells, each of them taller than a man, stood clapperless, waiting – he claimed – to be hoisted back skywards and rehung. I asked how long they had been waiting. ‘Since 1437,’ he smiled, and took me inside to see the ancient Plague Bell, now also decommissioned (luckily, the last plague warning was in the time of Ivan the Terrible).
But nowhere could I find the veche bell. My guide looked serious: ‘You know what happened? Moscow came and stole our veche bell. They didn’t like the democracy we had here. They wanted to rule with a silnaya ruka and they thought the bell was a symbol of freedom. They took it away. They’ve always been the same.’
I smiled, but he was deadly serious.
‘You know all the rights our citizens enjoyed back then [before the rule of Moscow]?’ he asked. ‘They could decide for themselves how Novgorod was run, and who ran it! The people had the power to elect city officials and they even had the power to elect and fire the prince!’
I tried to point out that the only people who could do all these things were male heads of households, so it was no good if you were a woman or you didn’t own property, but he was dismissive.
‘If you look at the records1,’ he said, ‘you’ll see that many of the veche meetings included representatives from all social classes. We have documents to show that the archbishop took part, the posadniki [magistrates], the tysiatskiis [representatives elected on the basis of one per thousand citizens], the boyars [noblemen], the zhitye liudi [middle-class citizens], the merchants and even the chernye liudi [literally the ‘black folk’, meaning lower-class, taxpaying citizens]. Don’t you think that’s a fantastic achievement? It’s so far ahead of anywhere else at that time. We were a model of democracy. The veche ratified treaties, declared war and peace, set taxes, conducted foreign relations and served as a court to settle public disputes. It also elected officials and invited the city prince [to govern]. Did you know that when our citizens got fed up with Prince Vsevolod Mstislavich in 1136, they got together and decided to give him the boot? What do you think about that? And afterwards they were equal partners in the way power was wielded. From then on, they elected the prince and they told him he couldn’t live inside the city walls. He had to live out at Rurikovo Gorodishche, south of here, as a sign that he was subservient to the will of the people!’
I nodded. My guide was undoubtedly exaggerating the extent of democracy in Novgorod, but the essence of what he said was true. Similar institutions existed in Kiev and Pskov.
‘And by the way,’ he offered as a parting shot, ‘you should go over to the State Museum have a look at our birch barks.’
In the early 1950s, when the foundations of a new housing estate were being dug on the outskirts of Novgorod, workmen made a fascinating discovery. A hoard of ancient documents written on strips of bark cut from silver birch trees dating back to the eleventh century had been immaculately preserved in the peaty subsoil of the East European Plain. Archaeologists took over the site and eventually dug up hundreds of birch barks spanning a period of 400 years.
In the State Museum’s collection I was shown a selection of them. They ranged from official notices to merchants’ bills to simple accounts of daily life in Novgorod between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. And they provide startling evidence of widespread literacy and impressive cultural development. I read love letters exchanged between teenagers and crib sheets prepared for school exams. ‘I love you and you love me2,’ writes one woman. ‘So why don’t we get married?’ ‘You owe me money – please send it with your servant … ’ warns another. And my own favourite: a line drawing from the 1240s by a young boy showing a man raising his hands in the air – each of them has six fingers and the text surrounding the drawing is full of spelling mistakes. The seven-year-old author’s name is Onfim, and from what the experts can decipher, he appears to be asking his friend Dmitry for a loan.
Visitors to Novgorod in the eleventh century describe women being equal to men and prominent in the affairs of the city. The city had a sewage system and reinforced wooden pavements on the streets – 200 years earlier than the pavements in Paris, my guide proudly told me, and 500 years earlier than London.
The birch barks reveal that there was a well-developed judicial system with juries and mediation procedures. The courts relied on fines rather than corporal punishment, and fragments of Kievan legal practice that have come down to us do sound remarkably modern. If, for example, a merchant hired a worker and then changed his mind, the contract was regarded as binding and the employer was obliged to pay; if he hired him through an intermediary who failed to give the man his wages, the employer was held liable. Of course, it was a far cry from our idea of a modern democracy, but Novgorod offers a startling glimpse of the pravovoe gosudarstvo, the law-governed state that Russia might have become.
The period of Kievan Rus was a potential turning point, the first of several in Russian history, at which the country could have gone either way. If the Kievan model had been allowed to develop, if the forces of autocracy had not ultimately gained the upper hand, Russia today might be a very different place. But Kievan Rus was not given the chance to perpetuate its model of society. Even at the height of its success, Rus was divided at home and threatened from abroad.
Although the Grand Prince in Kiev was nominally the country’s supreme ruler, the city states – Novgorod among them – were led by individual princes with their own armies. Their power was not absolute and there was an absence of coordination, civil or military, between the various principalities. That lack of centralised government made Rus vulnerable. Her semi-independent fiefdoms had been locked in decades of feuds and dissension and potential enemies were well aware of her weakness.
In 1241, the Teutonic Knights – a highly militarised order of Prussian crusaders – launched a blitzkrieg attack on Rus’s northwest border. It was a shock of immense proportions that would mark the Russian psyche for centuries to come. The Teutonic Knights were universally feared for their ferocious determination to spread the Catholic faith, and the Orthodox Rus-ians feared both political and religious domination. Led by Prince Bishop Hermann of Dorpat, the Knights advanced swiftly and seized the city of Pskov. In early 1242, they defeated a Novgorodian force at the battle of Tartu and began to march on Novgorod itself. The city’s prince, the 20-year-old Alexander Nevsky, rode out to meet the invaders near the series of lakes that lie to the west of Novgorod. The fate of Novgorodian civilisation hung in the balance.
Centuries later, Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky (1938) would capture the horror and dismay of the invasion: the serried ranks of Russian soldiers are shown suffering appalling casualties but standing firm against the overwhelmingly superior German forces. We see the young Nevsky rallying his troops and turning back the enemy hordes, then luring them onto the thin ice of the Chudskoe lake. Eisenstein depicts the success of Nevsky’s tactics as their horses and heavy armour sent the Knights plunging to their deaths in the chilly waters, a possibly legendary event that the director took directly from the account of the Russian Primary Chronicle:
And Prince Alexander’s men were filled3 with the lust for battle, for they had hearts like lions and said, ‘Oh mighty Prince, today shall we lay down our lives for you!’ And when the sun did rise, the armies clashed and the Germans fought their way into our ranks. Chudskoe lake was covered by their masses. In fierce battle came the crash of breaking lances and the ringing of sword on sword, until the ice turned red with the blood of men, and then the frozen lake did seem to give way … and in the sky appeared God’s hosts of heavenly troops, aiding our Prince to victory … I know this is true, for an eyewitness hath told me so …
The Chronicler’s delightful reassurance about God being on our side because ‘an eyewitness hath told me so’ shows how Russia has long used its history and associated myths to shape its present and its future, a practice that has continued well into our own times.fn1
Far from securing Russia’s survival, however, Nevsky’s exploits in 1242 were in reality a minor victory, the last glorious swansong of Kievan Rus before an even greater enemy overwhelmed it from the south.
By the twelfth century, the nomadic tribes in the steppes on Russia’s southern frontier had grown in strength and ambition. From sporadic border raids, they were now threatening the Rus-ian heartland. Vast swathes of the population lived in terror of the savage Pechenegs and Polovtsians, heathen tribes who would descend on frontier towns and settlements to pillage, murder and kidnap civilians to hold as hostages or trade as slaves. Ukraina, today’s Ukraine, means literally ‘the land on the edge’, and the Rus-ian state was cursed with open borders and no natural defences. The dikoe polye, the wild dangerous steppe and the forces lurking within it, became an enduring terror myth in the national psyche.
The Rus-ian princes knew they should end their divisions and join forces to fight a common enemy, but decades of rivalry ran deep. Fifty years before Nevsky’s Battle on the Ice, Prince Igor Sviatoslavich, whose territory of Novgorod-Severskfn2 on the southern frontier was pillaged by raiders from the steppe, had tried and failed to rally support for an expedition against the Polovtsians. Exasperated by the princes’ disunity, Igor set off on his own with a small band of men. His brave but doomed mission is lodged in the Russian consciousness just as the heroism of Scott of the Antarctic or the Charge of the Light Brigade are lodged in ours. It is captured indelibly in the lyric epic ‘The Song of Igor’s Campaign’:
Then Igor gazed upon the sun4 and said, ‘Brothers! Better it would be to be slain than to be a slave; so let us mount our swift horses that we may look upon the blue waters of the Don. I want to break a lance at the limit of the Polovtsian steppe; with you, O Russians, I will lay down my life, or else drink of the Don from my helmet.’
‘The Song of Igor’s Campaign’ is the first great masterpiece of Russian literature. Every schoolchild knows its strange, disturbing images and its rhythmic, muscular verse. It was a mainstay of the Russian oral tradition, intended to be memorised and recited as patriotic propaganda. But far from being a celebration of victory, ‘The Song of Igor’ is actually a dire warning of the perils of national disunity:
And, brethren, Kiev began to groan from grief5, for the princes had created dissension among themselves. The fortune of the land was destroyed and lives were shortened by the princes’ discord. The ravens cawed and grief like a maiden splashed her wings in the River Don. When the princes argued about trifles, calling them important matters, then brother said unto brother, ‘This is mine, and that also is mine.’ And the infidels from the steppe came to conquer the Russian land.
There’s disagreement about when ‘The Song of Igor’s Campaign’ was written, and even about its authenticity – the manuscript was discovered in 1795 and there’ve been claims that it’s an eighteenth-century fake. Given the vividness of the first-hand descriptions, though, and the detail of the historical references, it seems to me that the poem is the testimony of an eye witness, possibly a combatant. The power of the poetry instils a message that has been assimilated into the collective memory: that the motherland is vulnerable and surrounded by merciless enemies; that Russia’s borders are open and porous, constantly in need of vigilant defence. The lesson promoted by ‘The Song of Igor’ is that all must unite in the service of a strong centralised state or the same lamentable fate will befall her again. It helps explain behaviour that can seem strange to us in the West – the readiness to sacrifice the individual (as we saw in the story of Boris and Gleb), the subjugation of personal interests to the good of the whole, and the collectivist ethos that enshrines the state as the supreme national priority. It’s seen in the unflinching expenditure of Russian lives in battle, the aggressiveness of a military stance that flows from the certainty of national weakness, and the widespread acceptance that the state has the absolute right to murder its supposed political enemies such as Leon Trotsky or Alexander Litvinenko (see here and see here).
Literature, music, art and film have long served as a means of national validation in Russia, a common meeting place, a repository of shared values. In times of censorship and repression, the arts have provided her sole forum of public discourse. And they’ll play an important role in our attempts to explain her history too – for the central theme of Russian culture is Russia herself, reflecting her national identity and also helping to shape it.
Tragically for Kievan Rus, the poetic brilliance of ‘The Song of Igor’s Campaign’ was a gleam of fire in the darkness, after which the lights would go out for many years. The downfall of the divided state, and the foreign domination that Igor’s narrator feared, soon became a reality. For the next two centuries, native culture lay low, and the spirit of Russia embalmed in Igor’s Song could be preserved only in underground memories. The Mongol hordes were massing on the horizon.
fn1 Alexander Nevsky is a case in point. The film was made in 1938, when Moscow had not yet signed its non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and Hitler was still regarded as a future enemy. So the movie is charged with anti-German sentiment and rousing Russian patriotism. Eisenstein – and Sergei Prokofiev, who wrote the marvellous score – were hurried by Stalin to finish it, and prints were rushed into the cinemas. After a hiatus of two years, Alexander Nevsky was re-released when the Germans eventually invaded in 1941, becoming a potent symbol of resistance.
fn2 Not to be confused with the northern city state of Novgorod ‘the Great’.