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  The best surviving key to Rus greatness is Kiev’s Santa Sofia Cathedral, built in 1037 by one of the greatest Riurik princes, Prince Yaroslav the Wise. From the outside it looks much like any other baroque Ukrainian church, its original shallow Greek domes and brick walls long covered in gilt and plaster. But inside it breathes the splendid austerity of Byzantium. Etiolated saints, draped in ochre and pink, march in shadowy fresco round the walls; above them a massive Virgin hangs in vivid glass mosaic, alone on a deep gold ground. Her robe, as described by the travel-writer Robert Byron in the 1930s, is of a ‘tint whose radiant singularity no one that has seen it can ever forget . . . a porcelain blue, the blue of harebells or of a Siamese cat’s eyes’.2 On her feet she wears the crimson slippers of the Byzantine empresses, and she is framed by an inscription taken from Constantinople’s Hagia Sofia: ‘God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be moved; God helps her from morning to morning.’ On the twin staircases leading to an upper gallery, imported Greek craftsmen painted holiday scenes from home – almost the only pictures we have of secular Byzantine life. Four-horse chariots (or the bits of them that survived nineteenth-century overpainting) race up the walls, cheered on from windows and balconies, while outside the hippodrome gates a clown dances and musicians play pipes, cymbals, flute and a bellows-organ.

  Built to celebrate Yaroslav’s father Volodymyr’s conversion to Christianity, Santa Sofia was intended as, and remains, a place of huge political and spiritual significance. Under the tsars, pilgrims came in millions. (A mournful early graffito reads, ‘I drank away my clothes when I was here’.)3 The Bolsheviks desanctified but never quite dared demolish it; during perestroika Ukrainian nationalists demonstrated outside it; in 1993 members of a New Age sect sprayed it with fire extinguishers while threatening mass suicide; and in 1996 Orthodox believers tried – illegally since it is now a museum – to bury their patriarch within its walls, making do with the pavement outside after scuffles with police. Although of course neither ‘Ukraine’ nor ‘Russia’ existed in his day, Volodymyr – Vladimir in Russian – became the patron saint of both Ukrainians and Russians, celebrated in countless folk-tales and in the large statue, erected by the Ukrainian diaspora, that puzzles residents of London’s Holland Park.

  For all Santa Sofia’s passion-stirring power, the conversion that it was built to celebrate was a thoroughly pragmatic one. By the time Volodymyr came to the throne in 980, Christianity was already making itself felt in Rus; his grandmother Olha had privately taken baptism some years earlier. To start with, however, Volodymyr was an enthusiastic supporter of the pagan party. The Chronicle of Bygone Years says he ‘set up idols on the hills outside the castle . . . one of Perun, made of wood with a head of silver and a moustache of gold, and others of Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh. The people called them gods, and sacrificed their sons and daughters to them . . .’4 Worse, the pious chroniclers go on, he was ‘overcome with lust for women . . . he had three hundred concubines at Vyshorod, three hundred at Belhorod, and two hundred at Berestrovo. He was insatiable in vice. He even seduced married women and violated young girls, for he was a libertine like Solomon.’5

  Despite these unpromising beginnings, Volodymyr must at some point have decided that to keep pace with its neighbours his empire needed an advanced religion. All that remained was to choose which one. The first people he consulted, according to the Chronicle, were the Muslim Bulgars: ‘Volodymyr listened to them, for he was fond of women and indulgence, regarding which he had heard with pleasure. But circumcision and abstinence from pork and wine were disagreeable to him: “Drinking,” said he, “is the joy of the Russes, and we cannot exist without that pleasure.”’6 Following this disappointment, he despatched fact-finding missions to research the remaining options. The Jews and Catholic Germans failed to impress. ‘We saw them performing many ceremonies in their temples,’ the emissaries reported back, ‘but we beheld no glory there.’7 But Hagia Sofia bowled the Kievans over: ‘the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations . . .’8

  So Orthodoxy it was. In 988 Volodymyr ordered that the old thunder-god Perun be dragged down to the river and beaten with sticks, and herded the Kievans into a tributary of the Dnieper for mass baptism. ‘Some stood up to their necks,’ wrote the chroniclers, ‘others to their breasts, and the younger nearer the bank, some of them holding children in their arms . . . there was joy in heaven and upon earth to behold so many souls saved.’9 It was one of the single most important events in the history of Europe. By choosing Christianity rather than Islam, Volodymyr cast Rus’s ambitions for ever in Europe rather than Asia, and by taking Christianity from Byzantium rather than Rome he bound the future Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians together in Orthodoxy, fatally dividing them from their Catholic neighbours the Poles.

  The drawbacks of the new religion lay in the future; its benefits made themselves felt straight away. By the time of its conversion, Rus already had well-established contacts with Byzantium. In 911 the first historically verifiable Riurik, Oleh, had raided Constantinople, nailing his shield, legend says, to the city gates, and outfitting his homebound fleet with sails of silk. Half a century later Princess Olha fascinated Emperor Constantine when they met to negotiate trading treaties, and her son Svyatoslav allied with Byzantium in a war against the Bulgars. With the Riuriks’ accession to religious respectability the foreign-policy field widened, and they set about forging dynastic alliances with half the royal houses of Christendom. Having captured Chersonesus, a Greek town on the Black Sea, Volodymyr forced Byzantium’s Emperor Basil II to let him marry his sister Anna, a move which enormously enhanced Rus’s prestige. His son Yaroslav earned the nickname ‘Father-in-law of Europe’ by marrying his sons to Polish and Byzantine princesses, and his three daughters to the kings of Hungary, Norway and France.

  Unlikely though they seem, these were not unequal matches, for Kievan Rus impressed Europeans with its sophistication as well as its size and power. Bishop Gautier Saveraux, sent by Henri I of France to ask for Yaroslav’s daughter Anna’s hand in marriage, reported home that This land is more unified, happier, stronger and more civilised than France herself.’10 Dispossessed princes such as Olaf of Norway and Aethelred and Edward (later the Confessor) of England, were happy to while away exiles at the Kievan court, and Anna amazed the Franks by being able to read and write: a document from her brief regency after Henri’s death shows her signature – ‘Anna Regina’ – in Cyrillic alongside illiterate French crosses. Hundreds of Byzantine clerics and scholars came to Kiev to staff Yaroslav’s new churches and translate the scriptures, and Kievan nobles adopted Byzantine dress – illuminated manuscripts show them in red and purple silks cuffed and belted with gold brocade. Good manners, as laid down by one of Yaroslav’s successors, required them to get up early, praise God, ‘eat and drink without unseemly noise’ and refrain from beating their wives. Customary law, codified on Yaroslav’s orders, was remarkably humane, stipulating fines rather than corporal punishment.

  But Kievan Rus’s glory days were short-lived. Lying on his deathbed in 1054 Yaroslav had pleaded with his offspring to ‘love one another’ for ‘If ye dwell in envy and dissension, quarrelling with one another, then ye will perish yourselves and bring to ruin the land of your ancestors . . .’11 They took no notice, and the empire disintegrated into a clutch of warring princedoms: Kiev, Chernihiv and Turov in the south; Galicia and Volhynia in the west; Novgorod, Polotsk and Smolensk in the north; Vladimir-Suzdal, Ryazan and Tver on the Volga. Kiev itself degenerated from imperial capital into just another petty fiefdom, ruled by twenty-four different princes in a hundred years. A twelfth-century ballad, The Song of the Host of Igor’, deplored the mess:

  brother says to brother:

&
nbsp; ’this is mine

  and that is mine too’

  and the princes have begun to say

  of what is small: ‘this is big’

  while against their own selves

  they forge discord

  while from all sides with victories

  pagans enter the Russian land.12

  Nemesis came in the thirteenth century, at the hands of the Mongols. Originating on the north-western borders of China, these superbly organised warrior nomads had already conquered southern Siberia, Central Asia and Iran. In 1237 an army under Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis, swept across the Urals into Rus, as swift and terrifying, in the words of an Arab chronicler who saw them strike elsewhere, as ‘a darkness chased by a cloud’. Swearing to ‘tie Kiev to his horse’s tail’, Batu captured the city in 1240, after a long siege and savage street fighting. All but a handful of its 400 churches were burned, and its earth ramparts, pierced by the three Great Gates, were razed to the ground.

  When the Mongol army withdrew two years later Kiev went into a long, near-terminal decline. Trade along the Dnieper had already dried up following the Crusades, which opened the eastern Mediterranean to Christian shipping. In 1299 Kiev lost its religious status too, when the Metropolitan, Rus’s senior churchman, transferred his see to Vladimir, and thence, a few decades later, to Moscow. Constantly raided by Crimean Tatars, the city shrank to three barely connected settlements – the ‘High City’ around Santa Sofia and the old Golden Gate, the Cave Monastery on the hills opposite, and Podil, the old trading district on the river flats.

  For the next half-millennium Kiev languished, a stagnant, forgotten backwater. A Venetian visiting in the 1470s described it as ‘plain and poor’.13 Catherine the Great, passing through on her way to Crimea in 1787, could hardly believe that this was Kiev the City of Glory, Kiev the New Jerusalem. Trom the time I arrived/ she complained, ‘I have looked around for a city, but so far I have found only two fortresses and some outlying settlements.’14 On into the 1800s, visitors bemoaned its wood-paved streets, crowds of crippled beggars, frequent floods and fires, lack of good stone buildings and dreadful drinking water – so bad, apparently, that even horses wouldn’t touch it. The city only began to revive mid-century, with the arrival of the railways and the sugar boom.

  Despite its short lifespan Kievan Rus – ancient, vast, civilised, impeccably European – makes history to be proud of. But whose history is it? According to the Russians, on the Mongols’ retreat the population of Kievan Rus migrated north-east, taking their culture and institutions with them. While the old capital crumbled, Kievan splendour was reborn in Moscow, the fast-expanding principality that became Muscovy and thence Great Russia. Thus the heirs of Rus are not the Ukrainians, with their funny language and quaint provincial ways, but the far more successful Russians themselves.

  Ukrainians, led by the turn-of-the century historian Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, say this is all nonsense. Muscovy bore no more relation to Kievan Rus than Gaul to Rome, and treating one as the continuation of the other is like tacking the history of France on to that of the Roman Empire. As for the actual population of Rus, it stayed exactly where it was – or if a few people did move north, they quickly came home again. The Kievan State, its laws and culture, were the creation of one nationality, the Ukrainian-Rus,’ Hrushevsky wrote firmly, ‘while the Volodimir-Moscow State was the creation of another nationality, the Great Russian.’15 Russia, in other words, is not Ukraine’s ‘elder brother’, but the other way round. Rather than calling Ukrainians ‘Little Russians’, perhaps Russians should be calling themselves ‘Little Ukrainians’.

  The official Soviet line on the dispute emphasised harmony, homogeneity, Brotherhood. Kievan Rus was inhabited by a single monolithic ‘ancient Rus’ nationality, from which Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians all descended; for them to argue over Volodymyr and Yaroslav made no more sense than for the English and French to squabble over Charlemagne. The languages of all three nations descend from the ancient Slavs’, and all three inherited Orthodoxy.

  The Soviets had a point. But even as far back as Yaroslav, there were differences between northern Rus (the future Russia), and southern (future Ukraine and Belarus). The most obvious derived from climate and geography. Northerners lived in pine-forests, in log cabins; southerners amid oak and ash, in cottages of wattle and daub. Northerners, with their poor soil and never-ending winters, ate black breajd made from rye; southerners, with their rich black earth and longer growing season, ate white bread, made from less hardy wheat. Only the northerners took steam baths. ‘They warm themselves to extreme heat,’ the chroniclers had St Andrew, on a mythical journey from Kiev to Novgorod, report, ‘then . . . take young reeds and lash their bodies . . . so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water and are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day, and actually voluntarily inflict such torture upon themselves.’16

  Distinctions between north and south were apparent in contemporary nomenclature too. Byzantium’s Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus refers, in his De Administmndo Imperio to ‘near Rus’, around Kiev, and ‘distant Rus’, on the peripheries. Though the term ‘Ukrainian’ did not come into general use until the end of the nineteenth century, the word Ukraina, denoting the lands around Kiev, first appears in a chronicle of 1187. Muscovites started calling themselves the Russky, and their state by the Greek word for Rus, Rossiya, in the fourteenth century, while the future Ukrainians and Belarussians carried on referring to themselves as Russes or Rusyny, rendered in English as ‘Ruthenians’.

  What widened the split between the two halves of Rus dramatically was the arrival of the Mongols. Kiev and southern Rus suffered devastation, but were abandoned again in little over a century. The northern principalities, in contrast, became permanent tributaries of the Golden Horde.

  The Mongols ruled by proxy, granting charters to local leaders in exchange for tribute. The most successful northern princes became those who could squeeze most men and money out of their territories for delivery to the khan at his capital on the Volga. Failure to pay was punished in the cruellest manner, and the death penalty, rare in Kievan Rus, became widespread. Tellingly, the Russian words for ‘chain’ and ‘whip’, as well as ‘money’, all have Mongol roots. ‘The Russians learned from the Mongols,’ writes the historian Richard Pipes, ‘a conception of politics which limited the functions of the state to the collection of tribute (or taxes), maintenance of order, and preservation of security, but was entirely devoid of any sense of responsibility for public well-being.’17 Towards the end of the fifteenth century, invaded from the east in its own turn, the Golden Horde fell apart, and the northern princes stopped paying tribute and ruled independently again. But by then the habit of violent, Asiatic-style despotism was there to stay. Scratch a Russian, as the saying goes, and you find a Tatar.

  Whereas northern Rus fell to the Horde, southern Rus went to the Lithuanians. Warlike and turbulent, worshippers of trees, snakes, hares and streams, they were the only Baltic people to have successfully resisted the efforts of the mighty Teutonic Knights to convert and rule them. When Rus collapsed after the Mongol withdrawal, they filled the vacuum, quadrupling the size of their Duchy in less than a hundred years. In 1362 a Lithuanian army under Grand Duke Algirdas took Kiev, and the following year it inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mongols at the battle of Blue Waters in the bend of the Dnieper. The Lithuanian Grand Duchy now occupied roughly half the territory of old Rus, extending all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

  Despite their fierce reputation, the Lithuanians proved relatively gentle rulers. Without the numbers or resources to colonise or occupy, they adapted to existing arrangements, co-opting the old Rus nobility into government under the motto ‘We do not change the old, nor do we bring in the new’. Many Lithuanians adopted Orthodoxy, and Ruthenian – the precursor to Ukrainian and Belarussian – became the Duchy’s lingua franca. ’Magdeburg Rights’, common throughout medieval
Europe and granted to Kiev and the other old Rus cities in 1494, let burghers elect their own mayors and magistrates, and exempted them from various taxes. All this, according to Ukrainian historians, is why the traditions of Kievan Rus lived on in what was to become Ukraine, while they perished in Mongol-ruled Muscovy.

  In reality, it is doubtful whether much of Kievan Rus survived anywhere. What the Lithuanians did do, with endless consequences for East European history, was forge Ukraine’s centuries-long link with Poland. Soon after conquering southern Rus, the Lithuanians decided that to hold on to their new empire they needed an ally – in practice either the Teutons or the Poles. The Poles seemed the lesser of two evils, and in 1385 Grand Duke Iogaila opened negotiations for the hand in marriage of Poland’s eleven-year-old girl-queen Jadwiga. The Polish barons, preferring a non-interfering Lithuanian to a powerful Hapsburg, agreed, and the following year the hastily baptised Iogaila was solemnly crowned King of Poland.