The origins of the Moscow Kremlin are found in its central square deep within the walls, where six beautiful cathedrals rise up with gleaming domes and dazzling white façades. Their foundations were laid, and the word ‘kremlin’ first used (it means ‘fortress’ or ‘citadel’) in the early fourteenth century, and they are graphic evidence of how Moscow’s fortunes had begun to take off. The man who ordered the construction of those earliest cathedrals, and who launched Moscow on its rise from minor princedom to capital city at the heart of the expanding Grand Duchy of Muscovy, was Prince Ivan I. Nicknamed Kalita, or ‘Moneybags’, Ivan spent the whole of his reign (1325–40) under Mongol domination, but his skill at wheeling and dealing carved out a rich and powerful place for his city and for himself.
I found Ivan Kalita’s tomb in the Cathedral of Archangel Michael at the heart of the Kremlin he founded. With its carved stone covered in decorated brass and standing at the very beginning of the long rows of tsars down the centuries, it looks quite splendid. Ivan would probably have appreciated the flashiness of his memorial. He certainly liked money and he amassed lots of it by cosying up to the Mongol Khans, throwing himself at their feet and offering to oversee the collection of taxes in Russia on their behalf. Ivan Kalita was undoubtedly a toady. He even volunteered to help the Mongols crush a Russian uprising led by a rival prince. But it brought him power, and by his fortieth birthday Ivan had persuaded the Mongols to name him Grand Prince, the pre-eminent ruler of the Russian lands.
On my way out of the cathedral, I paused to take in the breathtaking view across Moscow from the heights of the Kremlin wall. It is hard to imagine that this sprawling city, with its high-rises, traffic-clogged streets and smoking chimneys as far as the eye can see, was until the fourteenth century a mere backwater in the constellation of Russian towns, dwarfed by Kiev, Novgorod, Smolensk, Vladimir and even Polotsk. The speed and scale of Moscow’s rise to pre-eminence makes Ivan Kalita’s achievement – and that of his heirs – doubly remarkable.
Typical of Kalita’s canny knack for seizing the main chance was his courtship of the Orthodox Church. The Chronicles record that in 1325 he persuaded the embattled head of the Church, Metropolitan Pyotr, to move his seat from Kiev, via Vladimir, to Moscow. It bestowed Ivan’s city a mantle of authority it could never have gained from political power alone:
For Kalita won the favour of1 Metropolitan Pyotr, and Pyotr exhorted him to build a cathedral made of stone, saying: ‘My son, if you obey my command to build this shrine to the Holy Mother of God and grant me my final resting place within it, you shall reap great glory – more than all the other princes – and your sons and grandsons shall be glorified. Your city will be praised, for it will be home to the fathers of the Church, and all other cities will bow down to it.’
Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1969 film Andrei Rublev vividly illustrates the hold that Orthodox Christianity exerted, and still exerts, on the Russian consciousness. Its hero, the fourteenth-century Muscovite icon painter, born in the period soon after Ivan Kalita had begun to establish Moscow as the leading Russian city, struggles to remain true to his art amid the horrors of Mongol occupation. The exquisite sequences of Rublev’s work, as the film bursts into radiant colour, bear witness to Tarkovsky’s own belief in the transcendent power of religion, and hint at why the endorsement of the Church is so vital to those who would claim worldly authority. The concept of the tsar as God’s true representative would become immensely important, and the Moscow princes who ruled after Kalita’s death were quick to exploit it. For centuries, Russia’s Orthodox Christian faith would remain a vital buttress of her autocratic rulers.
In a disturbing scene in the film, Tarkovsky shows the Mongols torturing Russian priests and sacking their churches. But after the initial invasion, its organised harassment of religion seemed to subside. Orthodoxy became a powerful unifying force for the subject people, a first hint of a pan-Russian identity that would emerge from the Mongol years focused on the Grand Prince and later the tsar. I remember from my own time as a student in Russia in the 1970s how religious observance took on a similar role in the latter years of the USSR, a shared belief that this was the repository of true Russianness amid the alien Communist occupation. In 1969, Tarkovsky’s film hinted at the same spirit of stoic opposition and, not surprisingly, it was banned.
In the fifteenth century, the rise of Moscow gathered pace under Ivan Kalita’s immensely pragmatic descendants. They were willing to fight against the Mongols – leading the way in 1380 at Kulikovo Polye (see here) – and then to reverse their position and fight with them, earning rich rewards in the form of vast new territories. Whatever served Moscow’s interests, Moscow was happy to do.
In 1453, the destruction of Christian Byzantium by the Turks left Muscovy as the sole remaining bastion of the Orthodox faith, directly exposed now to the expanding empire of Islam. The sense of a God-given mission to defend the civilised world against the infidel was embraced by the emerging nation. It was a time of fear but also of pride and opportunity, and Moscow used the crisis to cement its claim to religious and political supremacy.
A mystical prophetic text known as ‘The Legend of the White Cowl’ circulated, causing great excitement among the population. The so-called prophecy was probably a forgery created for political purposes. In the growing spirit of symbiosis between the Orthodox Church and the Muscovite state, it claimed to consecrate Moscow as the ‘third Rome’ (after Constantinople, the ‘second Rome’), the true guardian of God’s rule:
For the ancient city of Rome2 hath departed from the true faith of Christ … and the second Rome, which has been the city of Constantinople, hath perished through the violence of the Muslim sons of Hagar. But in the third Rome, which shall be the land of Rus, the grace of the Holy Spirit will shine forth … all Christians will unite into one Russian Orthodox realm and the crown of the imperial city shall be bestowed upon the Russian Tsar. The Russian land will be elevated by God above all nations and under its rule will be many heathen kings. The Russian land shall be called Radiant and glorified with blessings. It shall become greater than the two Romes which went before it.
Thus armed with the authority of the Church and with the vast material wealth accumulated in the century since Ivan Moneybags, Moscow emerged immensely strengthened when the Mongol yoke was finally thrown off in 1480. Within a few decades, its rulers adopted the title of ‘tsar’, derived from the Roman ‘Caesar’, in place of the old appellation of Grand Prince. They called themselves samoderzhets (autocrat) and ‘sovereign of all the Russias’.
But that claim was premature. The departure of the Mongols left a power vacuum, and there were several contenders vying to fill it. In the west, Lithuania had united with Catholic Poland and their powerful empire was expanding vigorously into the western Russian lands. In the north, Novgorod had avoided direct Mongol occupation, becoming a rich trading state while preserving many of the old quasi-democratic values of Kievan Rus. If Moscow wanted to consolidate its pretensions to sole supremacy among the Slavs, it would need to deal with each of them.
Back in Novgorod, the news from Moscow was becoming increasingly worrying. Threatening rumours of impending military action were emerging daily, and in the summer of 1470 the veche bell announced an emergency meeting to consider the looming crisis. The gathering was told a choice would have to be made – either submission to the rule of Moscow or a concerted, potentially perilous, campaign of resistance. Novgorod had become accustomed to existence as a peaceful trading state and its army had been allowed to wither. On their own, the Novgorod forces would stand no chance against the army of the Muscovite Grand Prince, Ivan III. The only way to defend the city would be to sign a military and political accord with Ivan’s other potential enemies, the Lithuanians.
The veche debate was fierce. Union with Lithuania would mean sacrificing Novgorod’s independence and – perhaps more importantly – compromising its Russian Orthodox faith. After their union with Poland in 1385, the Lithuanians had adopted Roman Catholicism, and their price for helping Novgorod against Moscow would most probably have meant conversion. The issue of ‘the Latin faith’, as it was contemptuously dubbed by its Orthodox opponents, featured heavily in the discussions at the veche. Two distinct camps emerged, one advocating the acceptance of Muscovite rule, the other urging joint resistance together with the Poles and Lithuanians. By a small majority, the second group carried the day: the people of Novgorod decided to invite King Kazimierz IV of Poland and Lithuania to take power in their city. It was a radical move, and if the plan had been realised, it would have formed a potent anti-Moscow bloc. A Novgorod–Lithuanian alliance could possibly have kept Ivan at bay. It could have assumed future dominance in the Russian lands. And it could have meant a wholly different course for Russian history, with Novgorod or Vilnius assuming the role of capital and Catholicism replacing Orthodoxy as the state religion.
But before the alliance could be consummated, the news reached Moscow, and Ivan III responded furiously. Muscovite troops arrived on the outskirts of Novgorod in July 1471 and defeated the inexperienced Novgorod army in the Battle at the River Shelon.
At first, Ivan tried to reach a peaceful accord with the city’s leaders, but their continuing defiance – and alleged continuing contacts with the Lithuanians – goaded him into punitive action. He sent a powerful army to occupy Novgorod and impose Muscovite rule. The advent of government by Moscow would have profound implications for the city’s future and for the embryonic institutions of democracy it had developed.
The Novgorod Chronicle had been in existence since 1016, recording events with a critical eye for four and half centuries, pointing out failings in the city’s government and shortcomings among its officials, but always taking Novgorod’s side when its interests were threatened by outside forces. After 1471, however, the change in the Chronicle’s tone is striking. It is immediately clear that it is now being written by the new Muscovite boss. Ivan’s men had taken over the running of the city and the dramatic events of the summer were shaped and slanted in the best traditions of political spin to give him the best possible press:
AD 1471. The Grand Prince Ivan Vasilievich3 marched with a force against Novgorod because of its wrongdoing and lapsing into Latinism [Lithuanian Roman Catholicism] … The Grand Prince Ivan Vasilievich was beloved for his righteous acts, yet the deceitful people would not submit to him. Stirred by a savage pride, the men of Novgorod would not obey their sovereign … Their faces were covered with shame, for they did leave the light and give themselves over in their pride to the darkness of ignorance, saying they would draw away and attach themselves to the Latin King … bringing evil to all Orthodoxy. The Grand Prince Ivan Vasilievich did frequently send messengers to them calling on them to live according to the old ways. But he suffered much from their vexatious ways … Therefore has he laid his anger upon them, upon Great Novgorod …
Written at the command of Ivan and his successors, the Chronicle makes great play of Moscow’s long-suffering efforts to reason with the errant Novgorodians. But in the end, says the pro-Moscow chronicler, Ivan’s patience ran out and he was forced to teach the traitors a lesson:
Thus did Great Prince Ivan advance4 with all his host against his domain of Novgorod because of the rebellious spirit of its people, their pride and conversion to Latinism. With a great and overwhelming force did he occupy the entire territory of Novgorod from frontier to frontier, inflicting on every part of it the dread powers of his fire and sword. As in biblical times, the prophecy did speak: ‘From the rumbling and thunder of his chariots and from the neighing of his horses the very earth shall tremble,’ so in our time was the same prophecy fulfilled over the wicked men of Novgorod for their abjuration of the true faith and their ill deeds …
The description goes on for several pages and it is easy to conclude that Ivan doth protest too much. The Chronicle reads like a rather over-insistent attempt to justify an act of expansionist aggression. But, as we know, it is the victors who write the history books.fn1
With Novgorod safely subdued, Ivan set about imposing Muscovite rule and Muscovite forms of governance. In an act that signalled his intentions for the future, he tore down the veche bell, the ancient symbol of participatory government, civic society and legal rights. The Russian lands had come to another turning point in their history: from now on, Ivan was clearly saying, they would be run on very different principles.
Under Ivan III and his successor Vasily III, the first signs of the modern Russian state began to emerge – the formerly warring princedoms were bought up or conquered by Moscow and a fragile national unity imposed by Ivan’s autocratic rule. Muscovy also began to play a role on the international scene, opening diplomatic relations with a series of foreign powers.
Autocracy gave Ivan the strength he needed to embark on a vigorous campaign of territorial expansion. Under his leadership, Muscovy tripled in size. He was glorified as the Gatherer of the Russian Lands, initiating the relentless empire-building that would continue unabated into the twentieth century. Yaroslavl, Rostov, Tver and Ryazan were all gobbled up; Pskov, with its own tradition of veches and local democracy survived until 1510, when it too fell to the Muscovite forces. In the west, the Lithuanians were slowly driven out of the provinces they had occupied over the preceding century.
But it was expansion eastwards that was to make Russia the world’s greatest land empire; and from the fifteenth century onwards the drive into Asia would bring her face to face with important questions about her identity. In contrast to Novgorod, Muscovy’s state structures were broadly Asiatic – centralised, militarised and inherited in large part from the Mongols. But the quasi-European legacy of Kievan democracy still loomed large in how Russians thought of themselves. Even as autocracy took root, Kiev remained in Russians’ minds as a sort of romanticised golden age. It was the beginning of an uncomfortable split in the national psyche, an unresolved stand-off between the values of East and West that would endure for many centuries.
fn1 I heard a very different version from a historian at the Novgorod State Museum, where I went to see the city’s remarkable birch-bark documents. She claimed there had never been a plot to join forces with the Lithuanians, and Novgorod had never seriously contemplated military aggression against Moscow. Ivan’s charges of consorting with Lithuania were a trumped-up excuse to stage an invasion that was going to happen anyway.