A concise history of modern india

To cover everything from the origins of theRussian people to the collapse of the Soviet Union in one short bookrequires great skill, but Paul Bushkovitch is one of the leading experts on

Tai Lieu Chat Luong

Accessible to students, tourists, and general readers alike, this bookprovides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century.Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in theunderstanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the SovietUnion in 1991 Since then, new material has come to light on the history

of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia’s revolutionary past The book traces not only the political history ofRussia, but also developments in its literature, art, and science.Bushkovitch describes well-known cultural figures, such as Chekhov,Tolstoy, and Mendeleev in their institutional and historical contexts.Though the 1917 revolution, the resulting Soviet system, and the ColdWar were a crucial part of Russian and world history, Bushkovitchpresents earlier developments as more than just a prelude to Bolshevikpower

pre-Paul Bushkovitch is a professor of history at Yale University, where he

has taught for the past 36 years He is the author of Peter the Great: The

Struggle for Power, 1671–1725 (Cambridge 2001); Religion and Society

in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1991); and The Merchants of Moscow, 1580–1650 (Cambridge 1980) His articles have

appeared in Slavic Review, Russian Review, Jahrbücher für Geschichte

Osteruopas, and Kritika He is a member of the editorial board for the Cahiers du Monde Russe.

“For any student trying to get a grasp of the essentials of Russian historythis book is the place to start To cover everything from the origins of theRussian people to the collapse of the Soviet Union in one short bookrequires great skill, but Paul Bushkovitch is one of the leading experts onRussian history in the world and he manages this task with great insightand panache.”

– Dominic Lieven, Trinity College, Cambridge University

“This is a lively and readable account, covering more than a thousandyears of Russian history in an authoritative narrative The author dealsperceptively not only with political developments, but also with thoseaspects of modern Russian culture and science that have had an

– Maureen Perrie, University of Birmingham

“If you want to understand Russia, and the story of the Russians, you can

do no better than Paul Bushkovitch’s A Concise History of Russia.

Bushkovitch has performed a minor miracle: he’s told the remarkablycomplicated, convoluted, and controversial tale of Russian history simply,directly, and even-handedly He doesn’t get mired in the details, lost inthe twists and turns, or sidetracked by axe grinding He tells you whathappened and why, full stop So if you want to know what happened andwhy in Russian history, you’d be advised to begin with Bushkovitch’smasterful introduction.”

– Marshall Poe, University of Iowa

“Both learned and accessible, this short history of Russia’s troubledpassage to the present tells a story of a state and a people who created

an empire that much of the world saw as a threat Whether as the

‘Gendarme of Europe’ or the ‘Red Menace,’ Russia and its Sovietsuccessor (even Putin’s Russia today!) have been as muchmisunderstood as they have been feared Paul Bushkovitch brings us asober reading of Russia’s difficult rises and falls, expansions andcontractions, reforms and revolutions Rather than seeing the precedingmillennium as a prelude to the seventy years of the Soviet Union, hegives us a rounded portrait of a country hobbled and humbled by its owngeography, institutions like autocracy and serfdom, and grandiose plans

to create utopia Judicious in its judgments, this gracefully written workranges from high politics to music and literature to open a windowthrough which a reader might begin or renew an acquaintance with theenigmas that were Russia.”

– Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan

This is a new series of illustrated “concise histories” of selected individualcountries, intended both as university and college textbooks and asgeneral historical introductions for general readers, travelers, andmembers of the business community

Paul Bushkovitch

Yale University

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

BRBML

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript LibraryLOC

Library of Congress

LOC PG

Library of Congress, Prokudin-Gorsky CollectionNASM

Smithsonian National Air and Space MuseumNYPL

New York Public Library

YCBA

Yale Center for British Art

The first chapters of this book were written at the University of Aberdeen,Scotland, during a semester of residence with the support of theCarnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland Without the CarnegieTrust and Aberdeen University the beginning would have been muchmore difficult I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Paul Dukes, RobertFrost, Karin Friedrich, Jane Ohlmeyer, and Duncan Rice, in their differentways my hosts for an eventful time Over the years my colleagues havekindly read and commented on many of the chapters, letting me knowwhen I was on the right track and when I was not For reading as well asdiscussion and bibliographical help, I thank Nikolaos Chrissidis, LauraEngelstein, Hilary Fink, Daniel Kevles, John MacKay, Edgar Melton,Bruce Menning, and Samuel Ramer Many years of conversation aboutRussian culture with Vladimir Alexandrov, Katerina Clark, Nikolai Firtich,Harvey Goldblatt, Vladimir Golshtein, Andrea Graziosi, Charles Halperin,Moshe Lewin, Alexander Schenker, and Elizabeth Valkenier made manychapters much richer than I could have made them alone ValerieHansen and Frank Turner provided more help than they ever realized Asever, Tatjana Lorkovic was invaluable

I would also like to thank Tom Morehouse of the New England AirMuseum, Kate Igoe of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum,Maria Zapata of the Haas Art Library of Yale University, David Thompsonand Maria Singer of the Yale Center for British Art, and Kathryn Jamesand E C Schroeder of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

of Yale University Their courtesy and professionalism were invaluable inthe search for suitable images

Maija Jansson suffered through the long gestation and birth pains ofthe book, putting up with a distracted and often crabby author She readthe whole manuscript, some of it several times, and kept reminding methat it would come to an end, and so it did To her I dedicate the result

Russia is not an idea It is a specific country, with a particular place onthe globe, a majority language and culture, and a very concrete history.Yet for most of the twentieth century, outside of its boundaries, it hasbeen an idea, not a place – an idea about socialism Tremendousdebates have raged over its politics, economics, and culture, most ofthem conducted by and for people who did not know the language, neverwent there, and knew very little about the country and its history Eventhe better informed wrote and spoke starting from presuppositions aboutthe desirability or undesirability of a socialist order Some were crudepropagandists, but even the more conscientious, those who learned thelanguage and tried to understand the country, began by posing questionsthat came from their assumptions about socialism The result was anarrow agenda of debate: was a planned economy effective or not? Howmany political prisoners were there? How could the Soviets put a man inspace? Should the system be called socialism, communism, ortotalitarianism? Was “communism” a result of Russian history? Did theRussian intelligentsia prepare the way for communism, unintentionally ornot? Did the gradual modernization of Russia make 1917 inevitable? Inall these debates the history of Russia up to the moment of the revolutionwas just a preface

In Russia the collapse of the Soviet Union brought to light a flood ofhistorical publications These publications include numerous monographs

on a great variety of topics, many biographies, and a massive quantity ofpublications of the various records of the Soviet regime, including thedeliberations of its leaders The aim of these publications was toilluminate the areas previously closed to investigation, and naturally thefirst post-Soviet writings were devoted to the most controversial ormysterious issues Books on the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939,collectivization, and famine; publications of Stalin’s privatecorrespondence; and other issues were first on the agenda Westernhistorians participated in these publications, which gave a whole newunderstanding of the contentious issues of Soviet history Yet the result isfar from perfect As the document publications and monographs continue

to pour out in Russia and abroad, they pose more and more questionsthat historians used to the politicized debates of the Cold War era never

thought about Paradoxically, it seems harder rather than easier tounderstand the story of the Soviet era of Russian history The presentwork reflects this difficulty, and the reader will find many questions leftunresolved.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, paradoxically, has had as much ormore effect on the writing about Russia’s history before 1917 Now theearlier history is not just a preface but a millennium of time that no longerends in the Soviet experience, however important that may be The flood

of new publications, in this case mainly from historians in Russia,includes virtually every period and aspect of Russian history before 1917.There are now not just biographies of tsars and empresses, but also ofmajor and minor political figures and fairly ordinary people Local historyhas come into being, providing the kind of concrete knowledge of thevariety of the country’s history that has been routine in other countries for

a long time

Russia in its history and in its present is a mix of many different elements.Until the fifteenth century the people called themselves and their land

“Rus,” not Russia (“Rossiia”), and it included many territories not nowwithin Russian boundaries From its inception it contained peoples whowere not Russian or even Slavic, but whom Russians understood asintegral parts of their society By 1917 the tsars and millions of Russiansettlers in the steppe and Siberia had acquired a territory far beyond theoriginal medieval boundaries, and the Soviet state conserved most of thatarea Consequently its history has to extend beyond the boundaries oftoday’s Russian Federation and incorporate the various incarnations ofRussia as well as its diversity

A society economically backward until the twentieth century, Russiashared many traits with nearly all pre-industrial societies – primitiveagriculture, small and few cities, mass illiteracy Russia’s historical fatewas to become the largest contiguous political unit in the world andeventually expand over the whole of northern Asia It was a realm equallydistant from Western Europe and from the Mediterranean world Itcovered huge areas but was extremely thinly populated until the end ofthe seventeenth century For the first seven hundred years its peripheralstatus was strengthened by its adherence to Europe’s minority Christianfaith, Orthodoxy, rather than any of the Western European churches.Then, with Peter the Great, Russia entered European culture within asingle generation and participated in all phases of European cultural life

onwards, starting with and including the Enlightenment Cultural evolutionwas easier and faster than social and political change, creating a societywith a modern culture and an archaic social and political structure Therapid industrialization of Russia after 1860 in turn created tensions thatled to the spread of Western ideas that were not necessarily thedominant ones in the West Thus for most of the twentieth centuryMarxism, an ideology born in the Rhineland out of the philosophy of G.

W F Hegel combined with British economics and French utopiansocialism, reordered Russian society while remaining marginal in thelands of its birth

In the West itself, Russia was simply remote For the English poet JohnMilton it was “the most northern Region of Europe reputed civil.” Milton’sview reflected the way Europeans perceived Russia from theRenaissance onward, as part of Europe and as “northern” rather than

“eastern.” It is only in the nineteenth century that Russia became

“eastern” to Europeans, and to many Russians as well In century Western Europe, “eastern” was not a compliment: it implied thatRussia, like the lands the West was then colonizing, was barbaric,despotic, and dirty, and the people probably were inferior in some way.Europeans did not learn Russian, and they did not study the country, andneither did Americans, until the beginning of the Cold War Even whenTolstoy and Tchaikovsky had become part of the Western pantheon, thecountry as a whole was still a mystery, as Winston Churchill insisted Theuniqueness of the Soviet order only increased that element of mystery Incontrast, when the French Revolution occurred, it took place in the center

nineteenth-of Western Europe among a people whose language had become theprinciple language of international communication The RussianRevolution took place in a far country, and few outside Russia knew thelanguage or had any understanding of the country and its history Eventhough the Bolsheviks created a new society following a Westernideology, it necessarily remained an enigma in the West

Had the Russian Revolution found no followers abroad, perhaps Sovietsociety would have remained a peculiar system studied only by a fewdevoted scholars Its impact however, was enormous, and remains so tothis day China, the world’s most populous country is still ruled by aCommunist Party that shows no signs of sharing power, whatever itseconomic policies Communism was the central issue of world politics fortwo generations of the twentieth century The inevitable consequencewas that commentators in the West, journalists or scholars, even ordinary

tourists looked at an idea, the Soviet version of socialism, not at aspecific country with a specific history With the end of the Soviet Union,Russian history no longer has to be the story of the unfolding of one oranother idea It has become the continuous history of a particular people

in a particular place The present book is an attempt to reflect thatchange It seeks above all to tell the story and explain it where possible

In many cases explanations are hard to come by, but it is the hope thatthe reader will find food for reflection in a history that is nothing if notdramatic

Map 1 Kievan Rus’ in the Eleventh Century

Map 2 Russia in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century

Map 3 Russia at the Time of Peter the Great

Map 4 Russia in 1796

Map 5 Russia in 1913

Russian history begins with the polity that scholars have come to callKiev Rus, the ancestor of modern Russia Rus was the name that theinhabitants gave to themselves and their land, and Kiev was its capital Inmodern terms, it embraced all of Belarus, the northern half of the Ukraine, and the center and northwest of European Russia The peoples of thesethree modern states are the Eastern Slavs , who all speak closely relatedlanguages derived from the East Slavic language of Kiev Rus In the westits neighbors were roughly the same as the neighbors of those threestates today: Hungary , Poland , the Baltic peoples, and Finland In thenorth Kiev Rus stretched toward the Arctic Ocean, with Slavic farmersonly beginning to move into the far north

Beyond the Slavs to the east was Volga Bulgaria , a small TurkicIslamic state that came into being in about AD 950 where modernTatarstan stands today Beyond Volga Bulgaria were the Urals andSiberia , vast forests and plains inhabited by small tribes who lived byhunting and gathering food The core of Kiev Rus was along the routethat ran from northern Novgorod south to Kiev along the main rivers.There in the area of richest soil lay the capital, Kiev Even farther to thesouth of Kiev began the steppe

The lands of Kiev Rus lay in the forest zone of the great East Europeanplain There are no mountains or even large ranges of hills to break thisplain between Poland and the Urals The forest zone is deciduous in thesouth around Kiev – oak, beech, chestnut, and poplar trees, while farthernorth the predominant forests were and are composed of the northernconiferous trees: pine, fir, and birch The best soil, dark and moist, was inthe south, where fields opened out among the trees closer to the steppe

In the northern part of the forest zone the soil was sandy and marsheswere frequent, thus agriculture was rarer and concentrated around lakesand along the great rivers The great rivers were the arteries of life TheDniepr, Western Dvina, Volga, Oka, and the smaller rivers aroundNovgorod (the Volkhov and others) provided routes to the south and eastvia Lake Ladoga to the Baltic Sea Along them princes and warriors,merchants and peasant farmers could move freely, at least in the

In the west and east of Kiev Rus the boundaries were those of politicalcontrol and ethnicity In the south the ethnic and political boundary was atits basis an ecological boundary South of the Kievan lands to the Blackand Caspian Seas lay the great steppe – flat grasslands with few treesand the “black earth” – dry but not arid The long grass concealedenormous numbers of animals, including antelopes, wild horses, andeven panthers, while the rivers supported myriad ducks and wild geese

as well as sturgeon and other fish Centuries later, the Russian writerGogol wrote of the steppe: “The farther along in the steppe the morebeautiful it became…The plow had never touched the infinite waves ofwild growth Only the horses that hid in the grass as in a forest hadstamped it down Nothing in nature could have been better The wholesurface of the earth was like a green and gold ocean, on which millions of

various flowers splashed” (Taras Bulba) This steppe was actually the

western extension of the great Eurasian steppe that extended all the way

to Manchuria, which covers today’s Mongolia , northern China , Xinjiang,and Kazakstan From time immemorial it was the land of the nomads andthe great nomadic empires – first the Iranian Scythians and Sarmatians

of classical antiquity, who were then later replaced by the fearsome Hunsand then wave after wave of Turkic people s These nomads did notwander aimlessly over the landscape, but instead they followed a regularannual migration over a greater or lesser area They kept close to thevalleys of the great rivers – the Danube, Dniepr, Don, and Volga – wherethey found winter and summer pastures for their animals The nomadsdid not try to settle in the forests, but they used them as a source of bootyand slaves, and when they could, they also laid tribute on the settledpeoples For centuries this had been the relationship of nomad andfarmer throughout northern Asia and beyond The steppe and its nomadswere to form a crucial element in the history of Kiev Rus, and laterRussia, into the eighteenth century

Archeology tells us a great deal about the settlement and life of theearly Eastern Slavs They were certainly the predominant group alongthe central axis of Rus from Kiev to Novgorod by at least AD 800, andwere still moving north and east, settling new lands They had built manyvillages and fortifications of earth with wooden palisades, and they buriedtheir dead with the tools and weapons necessary for life in the next world.From other sources we have some idea of their gods: Perun, the god ofthunder and the sky, was apparently the chief god, but there was also

Veles, the god of cattle; Stribog, the wind god; and the more shadowyfertility gods, Rod and Rozhanitsa Around Kiev there were round spacesformed of stones that seem to have been sites of the cult, but Slavicpaganism never had any written texts (or none that survived) to give us aglimpse of their actual beliefs.

Reconstructing the political history of the early Slavs is equallycomplicated Legend says that the Viking Rurik came from over the seawith two brothers to rule Novgorod in AD 862 This is a classic foundationlegend found in many cultures and as such was crucial to the self-consciousness of the subsequent ruling dynasty The text, the Kievan

Primary Chronicle of 1116, which recounts the legend, is vague about the

establishment of Rurik’s descendants in Kiev Supposedly the VikingOleg went down the rivers and took the city in 882, but his relationship toRurik was not specified Did either of them even exist? Prince Igor,allegedly Rurik’s son, was a real person who did rule from Kiev (913–945), until a rebellious tribe killed him The clan ancestor remained Rurik,who thus gave his name to the ruling dynasty, the Rurikovichi

The Rurikovich dynasty was originally Scandinavian, as legend and theearly names suggest: Oleg from Norse Helge and Igor from Ingvar Our

unique written source, the Primary Chronicle, called them Varangians,

one of the names for Scandinavians used in Byzantium In other places itsaid they were called Rus, not Varangians Further on, the text localizedRus in the Kiev area, but most it often called the whole state and peopleRus The author was serving his rulers, identifying princes and people,and leaving the historian with a muddle virtually impossible to sort out Inany case the first Rurikovichi were undoubtedly Scandinavian and theirappearance in Rus was part of the expansion of the Scandinavianpeoples in the Viking age Unfortunately the archeological evidence does

not fit the legends in the Primary Chronicle very well Viking finds are

concentrated for these early centuries around the southern rim of LakeLadoga and in the town of Old Ladoga The chronicle stories tried toplace them in Novgorod , but Novgorod did not even come into existenceuntil about AD 950, after the dynasty of Rurik was already established inKiev And in Scandinavia itself there were no sagas of Viking triumphsand wars in Russia to match those recounting the conquest of Icelandand the British Isles In the lands that were once part of Kiev Rus, thereare no runestones memorializing the great warriors and their deaths,such as those that cover Scandinavia and the western islands where theVikings roamed All we can say for sure is that a group of warriors whose

base was probably Ladoga, with its Scando-Slavic-Finnish community,came to Kiev around AD 900 and began to rule that area, quicklyestablishing their authority over the whole vast area of Kiev Rus.

The world of AD 950 looked very different from how we might imagine

it today Western Europe was an impoverished collection of weak pettykingdoms and local dynasties The great Carolingian Empire was now acentury in the past and the classic feudal society of medieval Europe wasjust coming into being In France the great regional lords and baronsowed only the most theoretical obedience to their king The greatestpower in the north for the moment was Denmark , as the Danish kingscontrolled much of England and the Vikings had small kingdoms inIreland and Scotland The Emperor still reigned in Germany , and in Italythe papacy was still under his thumb, while the regional rulers ofGermany and Italy grew more and more independent Most of the IberianPeninsula was under Arab rule, with a few tiny Christian principalitieshanging on in the north

The great powers and centers of civilization were the Arab Caliphateand the Byzantine Empire Only a few centuries earlier the Arabs hadtaken Islam to the far corners of western Eurasia, to Central Asia andSpain , and the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad was now the center of thatworld These were the great centuries of medieval Arab culture – the time

of the translations of Aristotle and other works of Greek learning and ofthe Islamic commentary and development of Greek ideas and Greekscience The Caliphate was immensely rich, and the many coin hoardsfound on the Rus lands testify to its trade with northern neighbors Evenmore important to Kiev Rus was Byzantium The Greeks had recoveredfrom the immense shock of the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighthcenturies, and by AD 900, a revived Byzantium was master of Anatoliaand the southern Balkans Theirs was a complex civilization, a Christiansociety with a rich monastic culture and at the same time the heir ofclassical antiquity While monks spent their days in liturgy andcontemplation, their relatives and patrons were reading Homer andThucydides , Plato and Demosthenes Laymen wrote the empire’s historynot as monkish chronicles in simplified language like those of WesternEurope, but in pure Attic Greek following the models of the ancients TheByzantine Empire was also a bureaucratic state on the late Romanmodel, dependent on written Roman law and paper documentation Boyswere set to learn all this material from a young age, following thesequence of subjects and texts already laid down in Roman times For

the Byzantines did not call themselves Greeks but Romans, Rhomaioi,

and their country was to them still Rome

The Byzantines were not the immediate neighbors of Kiev Rus andcommunication was difficult The most intimate contact was with theTurkic nomads of the great steppe From about AD 750, the steppe wasruled by the Khazars , a nomadic people whose center was on the lowerVolga and who laid tribute on the southern Rus tribes The Khazars were

a unique people, for their rulers, their kagans, had converted from Turkicpaganism to Judaism and had copies of the Hebrew Bible Nomadicempires were short-lived, and in the middle of the tenth century the TurkicPechenegs replaced the Khazars, only to be supplanted about a centurylater by another Turkic people , the Kipchaks – or Polovtsy, as the Ruscalled them In the steppe the Kipchaks lived in a series of large groups,each on one of the main rivers, the most important to Rus being those onthe Dniepr, Northern Donets, and Don Their annual migration betweenwinter and summer pastures involved great herds of horses, cattle,sheep, and even camels, with the Kipchaks following them in felt tentsmounted on carts Their religion was the ancient Turkic paganismcentered on the sky and the ancestors Farther east the Kipchaks spread

to the lower Volga and the Caucasus and traded with the Byzantine cities

in the Crimea For long periods the Rus and the Kipchaks raided oneanother’s lands almost annually, each group seizing animals, slaves, andhostages from the other Relations were not only hostile, for the Rusprinces took wives among the daughters of the Kipchak chiefs, who inturn took an active part in the internal feuds of the Rurikovich dynasty.Some of the Kipchaks eventually adopted Christianity, apparently fromRus or the Greeks

WARRIORS AND CHRISTIANS

In the tenth century, Kiev Rus was hardly a state at all Rather it was anassembly of tribes – Poliane/Rus around Kiev, Slovene in Novgorod ,Krivichi and Viatichi in between, and several others – ruled from Kiev by

a prince of the dynasty of Rurik and his warrior band or druzhina The

tribes paid tribute to the Kiev princes, who visited them occasionally forthat purpose Otherwise the vast majority of the people were peasantfarmers scattered in the clearings of the forests and owning no master

but the princes of Kiev This was still a pagan world, as the legend of thedeath of Prince Oleg suggests The story was that a wizard predicted thathis horse would cause the prince’s death Oleg put the horse out topasture and forgot the prophecy, but years later he heard that the horsewas dead and remembered it Oleg went out to see the skeleton of thehorse as it lay in a field As he placed his foot on the skull to lament, apoisonous snake crawled out and bit him Thus the prophecy wasfulfilled.

These Kiev princes spent their time on wars that were essentiallyraiding expeditions against the Khazars , their successors thePechenegs, and the richest prize of all, the Byzantines In log boats theycould follow the coast to Constantinople itself, and they raided it severaltimes before they made treaties with the emperor regulating their status

as traders Princess Olga, the widow of Prince Igor, became a Christianabout this time, perhaps after a journey to Constantinople She ruled theland until about AD 962, but her son did not follow her beliefs Sviatoslav,the son of Igor, was the last pure warrior chieftain in Rus; he spent histime fighting the Greeks and other rivals on the Danube and in thesteppe On his campaigns he slept on the ground with his saddle for apillow and cut strips of raw horsemeat to roast for his food He met hisdeath in the steppe coming home from a raid on Byzantium, and thePechenegs made a drinking cup of his skull

His son Vladimir (AD 972–1015) at first followed in his father’s path Hetoo was a great warrior, and he maintained control over the Kiev lands byplacing his many sons to rule over distant territories He tried to organizetheir pagan beliefs and set up a temple in Kiev to Perun, the god ofthunder, and other deities Soon, however, he turned to the religion of hisgrandmother Olga, the Christianity of Constantinople The chroniclerecords several stories of his conversion, probably none of them true, butthey remain a part of Russian conceptions of the past to this day Onestory was that the decision grew out of a raid on the Byzantine town ofChersonesus in the Crimea The raid ended in a compromise, according

to which the Greeks kept their town but Vladimir married a Byzantineprincess and became a Christian Another story was that his neighborsproposed that he adopt their religion First a Muslim came from VolgaBulgaria and seemed very persuasive until Vladimir learned of theprohibition on alcoholic drinks “The joy of Rus is drinking,” he told theBulgarian, and sent him away Then Vladimir turned to Rome, and therituals and fasts seemed attractive but the objection was that the

of God’s wrath Then a Greek “philosopher” came and explainedChristianity, giving a brief account of the Old and New Testaments,emphasizing the fall and redemption of man He was very convincing, butthe prince wanted final proof and sent a delegation to Bulgaria, Rome,and Constantinople The services of the Muslims and Latins failed to winapproval, for they lacked beauty Then the Rus went to Constantinopleand attended the liturgy in Saint Sophia, the great cathedral built byJustinian, and reported that they were so impressed that they did notknow if they were on earth or in heaven The choice was for Christianity

as understood in Byzantium, and it determined the place of Kiev Rus,and later of Russia, in European culture for centuries

Vladimir ordered the people of Kiev to be baptized in the river Dniepr,but the new religion caught on slowly outside the major centers Vladimirhimself put away his concubines and married the Byzantine princess, but

in many of his values he remained part of the pagan world of the warriorprince Once, several years after the conversion (AD 996), his warriorsbegan to complain to him that at banquets they had to eat with woodenspoons, not with silver The prince replied, “it is not for me to get warriorswith silver and gold, I shall get silver and gold with my warriors, as myfather and his father did” – hardly a sentiment for a Christian ruler In andaround the greater towns, however, Christianity gradually made its way.The Greek clergy in Constantinople supplied the heads of the newchurch, the metropolitans of Kiev, but other bishops were mostly natives.The founding of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves in the 1050s, dedicated

to the Dormition of the Virgin, provided Rus with its first monastery, thekey institution for Byzantine Christianity The monastery produced notonly its own saints in its founders Antonii and Feodosii but also thebishops for the eparchies outside of Kiev The Caves Monastery and theothers that soon arose around Kiev and Novgorod also provided the

libraries and writing skills that produced the Primary Chronicle and other

records, but of course their main role was spiritual It was the monks whoprovided the charisma to spread a new religion

The new religion had to be made to fit a society very different from thesophisticated urban world of Byzantium The introduction of Christianitydid not bring with it other aspects of Byzantine civilization, for the tradition

of the eastern churches was one of a vernacular liturgy In Kiev Rus themass was not in Greek but in a ninth-century Bulgarian dialect scholars

call Old or Church Slavic At that time the Slavic languages were all verysimilar to one another, so this was a readily comprehensible language inKiev The use of Church Slavic implied that the liturgy, the scriptures, andother holy books had to be translated into Slavic, an arduous task butone that removed the need to learn Greek for all but a few learnedmonks Much Christian literature and all of the secular literature ofByzantium remained unknown in Kiev Rus and later societies TheRussians would discover Greek antiquity in the eighteenth century fromthe West.

The relations of Rome and Constantinople in these early centurieswere complicated The famous mutual anathema of the Pope and thePatriarch of Constantinople of 1054 was not the decisive break that itseemed to later historians, and the people of Rus were barely aware of it.One of Kiev’s Greek metropolitans did write a short tract denouncing the

Latins, but native writers did not join him and the Primary Chronicle is

silent on the events It was only with the Fourth Crusade, the destructionand conquest of the Byzantine Empire by the crusading armies fromWestern Europe in 1204, that the people of Rus took notice of thedivision and where their loyalties lay The Rus chroniclers covered thisevent in extensive and bloody detail – the massacre of the people andthe desecration of the churches The Rus people were not just Christians,they were Orthodox Christians

Orthodox Christianity would determine the character of Russian cultureuntil the eighteenth century and in some ways beyond it For the Westernobserver, it has always presented a problem, seeming familiar, butactually not Most Westerners know more about Buddhism than aboutOrthodoxy, as the latter forms no part of daily experience nor is itencountered in the course of a normal education Analogies do not helpmuch Orthodoxy is not Catholicism with married priests

The differences between Orthodoxy and the Western Catholic churchthat emerged during the Middle Ages were of a different order than thosethat later divided the western church at the time of the Refomation.Theological issues were not central, and were to some extentexaggerated to provide more convincing explanations for the hostilities.The difference over how the doctrine of the Trinity should be expressed in

the Nicene Creed, that is, the Catholic addition of the words filioque (“and

the son”) to the mention of the “Holy Ghost, which proceedeth from thefather” does not signify any important difference in the actualunderstanding of the Trinity The main issue in 1054 was one of church

governance The eleventh century was the time of the gradualemancipation of the papacy from the power of the Holy Roman emperors,and the path chosen was the centralization of ecclesiastical power in theperson of the pope The traditions of the eastern patriarchs were those of

a conciliar church Only the assembled patriarchs and the rest of thehigher clergy could determine doctrine or matters of church government.The Patriarch of Constantinople was not a pope The papacy alsomanaged to assert its independence from the emperors and other rulers

in matters of church government and certainly in doctrine, whereas theEastern Church operated with the more nebulous notions of “symphony”

of emperor and patriarch Lesser matters, like the celibacy of the parishclergy in the west, flowed from these basic decisions A celibate clergywas free of the entanglements of secular powers; a married priest waspart of his local society

Many differences between the eastern and western churches arose inmatters that are hard to pin down and included differences of culture andattitudes rather than dogma and basic belief The notion of the churchbuilding and the liturgy as the meeting points of the divine and humanworlds, of spirit and matter, was and is central to Orthodox life anddevotion Preaching and the minute examination of behavior in sermonsand in the confessional were not central, even if practiced to someextent Orthodox monasticism was much less organized, as themonasteries did not form orders with a recognized head and the ruleswere much less detailed and specific At the same time, Orthodoxmonasticism had a prestige and charisma in the east that even the mostrevered Catholic orders did not approach For most of the history of Rusuntil the sixteenth century, we know far more about monasteries thanbishops, many of whom are only names to us By contrast, the westernmedieval church’s annals are filled with saintly and powerful bishops.Finally, the Eastern Church had a rather different attitude toward learning.For the Catholic church of the Middle Ages, the great intellectualenterprise was the interpretation of Aristotle ’s corpus of writings in thelight of revelation and the teachings of the church The Orthodox, save afew late Byzantine imitators of the West, did not bother with philosophy orAristotelian science These were exterior knowledge, not bad in itself butnot the final truth The truth was in Christianity, best studied by monks inisolation from the world, not only from its temptations but also from itssecular writings This attitude fit well into Byzantine society, with itsflourishing secular culture, but less so in Rus In Rus, and later in Russia,

there was no secular culture of the Byzantine type, so it was only theChristian monastic culture that flourished.

druzhina and various “distinguished men,” his boyars All of them lived in

Kiev, though they seem to have had lands around it and elsewhere The

druzhina, the old warrior band, seems to have become more organized

and settled down and behaved more like an army and a group ofadvisors than simple warriors They were not alone on the politicallandscape, for the people of Kiev occasionally played a part as well,

assembling on the town’s main square to form a veche, or popular

assembly

We know a certain amount about the society and legal system of KievRus because shortly after Iaroslav’s death his sons put together a list oflaws and regulations called “Rus Justice,” a brief but illuminatingdocument Most of the provisions seem to have reflected existingtraditions, but in the first articles Iaroslav’s sons began with aninnovation: they banned blood revenge in cases of murder Instead theysubstituted an elaborate system of payments The murderer was to pay acertain amount if he killed a boyar or man of distinction, less for a

member of the druzhina, still less for an ordinary person or a peasant,

and least of all for a slave Generally, for killing a woman the criminal had

to pay half of the fine for killing a man of the same status The laws gavemuch space to listing the payments for insults of all kind, ranging fromslandering a woman’s virtue to harming a man’s beard The judges ofthese and other cases were to be the administrators of the princelyestates who thus took on a much larger role than that of simple economicadministrators The “Rus Justice” must have been written for them, asmuch of it was taken up with complex rules for debt-slavery, various

forms of temporary or limited bondage, and relations with the villagecommunity This was a law code entirely appropriate for Rus society, onethat, needless to say, bore no relationship whatsoever to Byzantine law.Nor did the Kievan state establish a hierarchy of administrators relying onwritten documents in imitation of Byzantium In Rus the basic laws might

be written down, but administration was in the hands of a tiny group ofservants of the prince’s household relying on oral communications,tradition, and only a very few written texts like the “Rus Justice.”

Iaroslav’s reign represented a high point of stability in Rus Norwegianprinces took refuge with him from civil wars in their homeland, and one ofhis daughters married the king of France In the 1030s he inflicted adecisive defeat on the Pechenegs that kept the steppe frontier quiet for ageneration He was patron of the building of the Saint Sophia cathedraland the Caves Monastery, as well as other foundations His sons andnephews ruled distant territories without much contention Relations withthe Greeks were regular, if occasionally unharmonious The first (and lastfor a long time) native metropolitan of Kiev, Ilarion (1051–1054), praisedhim as a new Constantine and a new David The apparently idyllic calmwould not last for long

After Iaroslav’s death more disputes arose, but unity was soon restoredand persisted throughout the reign of Iaroslav’s grandson VladimirMonomakh (1113–1125) and his son Mstislav (1125–1132) In the middle

of the twelfth century several centers of power began to emerge,although Kiev itself and the land around it were in decline The city andtitle of Grand Prince of Kiev became the prize for contending regionalpowers In the northeast, the core of the later Russia, the principality ofVladimir emerged as the main power, and in 1169 its ruler prince, AndreiBogoliubsky, sacked Kiev and took the title of Grand Prince of Kiev Hefell victim to a conspiracy of his own boyars in 1174 Through Andrei’sbrother Vsevolod (1176–1212) the Vladimir dynasty would rule thenortheast for the next several centuries For the time being, their attentionwas elsewhere, for the Vladimir princes had rivals in the west and south,especially in Galich near the Polish border The territories of Kiev Ruswere growing apart

The increasing vitality of local centers also produced a town unique inRussian medieval history, Novgorod Novgorod had been the secondcenter of Kiev Rus, legendarily the first stop of the Viking dynasty It was

an important city that traded in the Baltic in the eleventh century, and itswealth was reflected in the Novgorod cathedral of Saint Sophia, built

around 1050 Early Novgorod was a typical princely city, and the Kievprinces often sent their eldest sons to rule in their names In the twelfthcentury, however, Novgorod set out on its own path The Novgorodiansexpelled their prince in 1136 and chose another From that moment on,they treated the prince as an elected general rather than a ruler Before

1136 the princes had appointed a deputy with the title of posadnik, and now the popular assembly, the veche, elected the posadnik from among

the boyars of the town In 1156 the people even elected the archbishop,choosing from among three candidates proposed by the local clergy Thispractice was contrary to Byzantine canon law, but the metropolitan ofKiev never challenged it

Thus Novgorod developed into a unique polity among the princelystates of medieval Rus Novgorod was not a commercial republic, such

as medieval Florence or the Flemish cities, for it was not merchants,bankers, and cloth manufacturers who sat in the city’s council Merchants

and artisans in Novgorod remained humble folk, present in the veche but

with little real influence The city’s elite consisted of boyars, richlandholders with large houses in the town and extensive possessions inthe surrounding countryside Many of the richest also controlled thenorthern forests, for it was the forests that were the real source ofNovgorod’s wealth After 1200 the Novgorodians ceased to travel westwith their goods, as the league of north German trading cities, the Hansa,had come to dominate the trade of all countries around the Baltic Sea.The Germans journeyed to Novgorod to buy furs, beeswax for candles,and other forest products The furs ranged from simple squirrel skins tothe sables of the northern forests that fetched high prices in the west Inreturn, the Novgorodians bought Flemish and English cloth and a host ofsmaller items from the western towns

By 1200 Kiev Rus was a single state in name only; the ruler of Kievitself was either an outsider or a minor princeling Other than Novgorod,each territory had a local princely dynasty springing from the old Kievdynasty of the Rurikovichi Because Kiev Rus did not knowprimogeniture, each of a prince’s sons had to be provided for, and in anycase the eldest uncle could also be considered the rightful ruler Thus,innumerable small principalities emerged, though at the same timeseveral regional centers of power – Vladimir, Smolensk , Chernigov, andGalich – maintained control over lesser princes These were agrariansocieties, each with a small boyar elite that ruled the peasants andadvised the prince, though some of the towns, especially Smolensk, had

wider commercial ties The towns were becoming wealthier, for in theregional centers like Vladimir, magnificent stone churches arose andmonasteries with stone churches and walls were also founded near thetowns Builders and icon painters came from Byzantium, and the Ruspeople began to learn their skills.

Figure 1 The Twelfth Century Dormition Cathedral in Vladimir (c.1900)

Byzantine contacts were easy, for the one single institution remainingwas the church As Metropolitan of Kiev, a Greek usually headed thechurch that oversaw the whole breadth of the land The Greek clergy andthe priests and monks of the Rus had their hands full with theChristianization of the people and the creation of a new culture that wentwith the new religion The Christianization of the people went slowly, andoutside of the towns there were few churches While Kiev rapidly became

a major center of the new faith, provincial towns still celebrated burials inwhich warriors were put to rest with their weapons, horses, slaves, andfood for their journeys to the other world In 1071 there was a wave ofincidents of revolt and resistance led by pagan priests in Novgorod and in

some of the towns of the northeast In these circumstances the clergyconcentrated on very basic issues From a series of questions put to themid-twelfth century bishop Nifont of Novgorod, we know some of theseconcerns The clergy tried to enforce the rules of Christian marriage (thatdictated which cousins could be married to each other) and rulesgoverning sexual behavior Many of these questions were about timing,that is, if intercourse between man and wife was proper during Lent orwhen it was proper for priests Ritual purity for both clergy and laityfigured more largely than sex itself Which animals were “clean” andwhich not and the prohibition on eating the meat of strangled animalswere prominent issues in these questions For all of the various sins, thepunishments were denial of communion and penance for greater orlonger periods The exposition of Christian doctrine to the laity remained

on a very elementary level

Even Christian works in this situation retained pre-Christian elements

The Primary Chronicle , the work of Christian monks, denounced the

pagan customs of the early people of Rus but in the same pages glorifiedits pre-Christian rulers, recounting stories like the death of Oleg withoutcomments The princes of the ruling dynasty were generally known bytheir pagan names until about 1200 For most princes we do not even

know the baptismal names At the very end of the Kievan period, the Igor

Tale, a brief story of an unsuccessful raid on the Kipchaks, called the Rus

the children of Dazhbog, the sun god, but ends with praise of the princesand warriors who fought for the Christians against the pagans The oldways had power almost to the end of Kiev Rus

The new culture that came with Christianity brought with it writing andvarious types of Byzantine devotional literature The most widelydisseminated, and anchored in the liturgy (and thus open to the illiterate)were the lives of the saints Alongside the lives of the Byzantine saints,Rus itself very quickly began to glorify its own holy men, and these worksmore than any other give some insight into the religious world of KievRus

The first saints were Princes Boris and Gleb, younger sons of Vladimirmurdered in 1015 by their brother Sviatopolk “the Cursed” during thesuccession struggle after the death of Vladimir By the end of theeleventh century, the two brothers were the objects of reverence andtheir bodies moved to a shrine near Kiev Commemoration of the brothersbegan to appear in the liturgy, and the monk Nestor of the CavesMonastery wrote an account of their lives and death Boris and Gleb were

unlikely Christian saints Though they led a blameless life and diedyoung, it was their death that made them saints, but they were notmartyrs for the faith Sviatopolk was not challenging Christianity, merelyeliminating potential rivals in a political struggle The message of Nestor’stext is the humility and meekness of the two boys, the wickedness of theirmurderer, and by implication, the need for harmony and virtue in theruling dynasty.

More conventionally Christian were the accounts of the lives of thefounders of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, Saints Antonii andFeodosii Antonii’s life was that of a hermit seeking salvation andnearness to God by prayer, tears, and fasting Feodosii’s portrait was that

of the abbot, hegumen in the Eastern Church, who also fled thetemptations of the world but built a great institution to make this pathpossible for others It was he who sought out a rule of liturgicalobservance and monastic life from the great monastery of the Studiou inConstantinople and it was he who built the church, the monastery wallsand buildings, and supervised the monks until his death The CavesMonastery, like its prototype in Constantinople, was not physically remotefrom the city of Kiev: today it is well within the city boundaries andFeodosii’s monks withdrew from the world, in part, to serve it better Inlater accounts the monks perform acts of heroic asceticism, but alsodemonstrate to the people of Kiev the superiority of Orthodox Christianity

by predicting the future and healing the sick, often in direct competitionwith representatives of the Latin faith, Armenian Christianity, and Judaism, as well as pagan sorcerers In Nestor’s account of Feodosii’s life thehegumen was not shy in condemning acts of the Kiev princes that hethought to be unjust In 1073 Princes Sviatoslav and Vsevolod expelledthe rightful ruler, their elder brother Iziaslav The usurpers sent forFeodosii to join them at a feast to celebrate their victory, but the holymonk replied, “I will not come to the table of Beelzebub and eat foodsoaked with blood and murder.”

In Kiev, Vladimiir’s son Iaroslav built the cathedral of the Holy Wisdom,Saint Sophia, in 1037 The dedication was in imitation of the great church

of Constantinople, the sixth century cathedral of the Emperor Justinian.Later rebuilding conceals the original look of the exterior, which probablyfollowed the Greek norms of the time The basic plan was a nave andtransept of equal length (the “Greek cross”), which gave the building asquarish look, and the roof surmounted with round drums supporting thedomes These would have been the Byzantine hemispherical domes, not

the characteristic onion shape of later Russian churches The KievanSaint Sophia was also a much more modest creation than its grandprototype and followed middle Byzantine style in using several smallerdomes instead of the enormous central dome created by Justinian’sarchitects.

The Kievan Saint Sophia was also connected with the prince’s palace

by galleries, with a special place reserved for the prince and his family –

a Byzantine touch later abandoned in Rus The magnificent mosaics andfrescoes, still extant today, also followed the Greek prototype, withinscriptions everywhere in Greek At the top was (presumably) Christ asPantocrator, the ruler of the universe, below him the extant images of theapostles, the Mother of God, and then the Eucharist On the walls werethe life of Christ and his Mother, prophets, and saints This order putChrist in heaven, then symbolically depicted his movement down fromthe world of the spirit to the earth The path lay through his Mother, hisapostles, and the Eucharist, three ways in which the spirit of Christreached the material world and thus to all men The physical structure ofthe church signified the presence of Christ in the world in consequence ofthe Incarnation

The Kievan Saint Sophia, like Greek and other Rus churches of thetime, presumably had a row of icons along the altar rail This row was notyet the high icon screen of later Russian churches, and thus thecathedral may have contained only a dozen or so images Few iconsexist today that can be surely dated to Kievan times, and none can beplaced with any certitude in Kiev’s cathedral The twelfth century is richer

in surviving icons, the most famous example being the image of theVladimir Mother of God, a Greek (probably Constantinople) icon thatfound its way to Vladimir in the northeast, where it rested in the Cathedral

of the Dormition of the Mother of God in that city It is a typical work of theperiod, with Mary in fine dress holding the infant Christ in her arms, againthe visible image of the Incarnation and the presence of Christ in theworld that is the center of the Orthodox understanding of his role Thephysical image itself was crucial to belief in Christ’s presence As theByzantine monk Saint Theodore of the Studiou monastery put it: “Ifreverence toward the image of Christ is subverted, then Christ’sincarnation is also subverted”

As the peasants cleared the land and tended their crops, and the princesbuilt churches and warred on one another, a cloud was gathering on the

horizon In 1223 a new and strange people appeared on the southernsteppes, and the Kipchaks hastened to assemble allies from among theRus princes The combined army went out to meet the newcomers andfound them on the River Kalka, just north of the Sea of Azov Thestrangers were the Mongols, who utterly destroyed the Kipchak/Rus armyand went on to raid the area of Kiev “They returned from the river Dnieprand we know not whence they came or whither they went Only Godknows whence they came against us for our sins,” said the Novgorodchronicler They would come again.

2 Moscow, Novgorod , Lithuania , and the Mongols

After the gradual disintegration of Kiev Rus, the regional powers thatsupplanted it began to grow apart In these centuries the territories ofNovgorod and the old northeast began to form a distinct language and

culture that we can call Russian Though the older term Rus persisted until replaced by Russia (Rossiia) in the fifteenth century, for this period

we may begin to call the area Russia and the people Russian In these

centuries, Russia, like the other territories of Kiev Rus that would fall toLithuania, experienced a cataclysm in the form of the Mongol invasion,one that shaped its history for the next three centuries

The Mongol Empire was the last and largest of the nomadic empiresformed on the Eurasian steppe It was largely the work of Temuchin, aMongolian chieftain who united the Mongolian tribes in 1206 and took thename of Genghis Khan In his mind, the Eternal Blue Heaven hadgranted him rule over all people who lived in felt tents, and he was thusthe legitimate ruler of all inner Asian nomads The steppe was notenough In 1211 Genghis Khan moved south over the Great Wall andoverran northern China His armies then swept west, and by his death in

1227, they had added all of Inner and Central Asia to their domains

The astonishing success of the Mongols came from their ability tobalance the advantages of nomadic society with the benefits of sedentarycivilizations The basic unit of Mongol society was the clan, and in eachclan the women tended to the animals and the men learned the arts ofwar Genghis Khan mobilized the whole of his people for war, and theMongols were superb horsemen, disciplined and skilled warriors, andruthless conquerors They could not take cities with cavalry, however,and thus the Mongols recruited men from China and Central Asia whoknew how to make and use siege engines This combination wasunbeatable Rich cities like Khwarezm in Central Asia that tried to resistwere exterminated Spreading terror before them, the Mongol armiesoverwhelmed Iran and Iraq and took the rest of China A typhoon

prevented them from taking Japan, but only in Viet Nam was humanresistance strong enough to defeat them.

The battle on the Kalka had been part of a reconnaissance In 1236 thefull force of the Mongol army moved west under the command of thegrandson of Genghis Khan, Batu, son of Jochi With perhaps a hundredthousand warriors at his disposal, Batu first subdued Volga Bulgaria andthe Kipchaks, and then during the years of 1237 through 1240, in a series

of campaigns, he smashed Vladimir and the other northeastern towns

He razed Kiev to the ground, wiping out the people or selling them intoslavery The old center of Kiev Rus was gone, and would not recover for

a century and a half Batu continued on to the west, defeating a hastilygathered army in eastern Germany , and then turning south to Hungary ,

a suitable terrain for a nomadic host There Batu’s army wintered overand Europe was in panic Suddenly in the spring of 1242 the supremeKhan Ogedei died, and the army returned home to Mongolia toparticipate in the succession, never to return

The great Mongol empire soon split into four large domains (or ulus):China, Central Asia, Iran with Iraq, and the western steppe The last wasthe ulus of Jochi in Mongol terminology, the heritage of Jochi’s son theconqueror Batu The Persians and later scholars would call it the Golden

Horde , while the Russians just referred to it as the Horde (or Orda, a

military camp, in Mongol) The Golden Horde was a nomadic state whosecenter lay on the lower Volga, in the city of Sarai , near the laterStalingrad As a nomadic state, its people followed the annual migration,wintering near the mouths of the rivers and moving north with the meltingsnows This had been the pattern of the Kipchaks and the Khazarsbefore them, but the Golden Horde was on a much grander scale Itstretched from Rumania in the west to the eastern parts of Kazakstanand included Khwarezm in Central Asia , the latter a bone of contentionwith the Central Asian ulus of Chagatai Like most nomadic states, theGolden Horde included agricultural lands along the borders One of thesewas Khwarezm, others were the land of the Volga Bulgaria ns, theCrimea , and the Rus principalities, both in the southwest and thenortheast In the Rus principalities the khans experimented with their owntax collectors, but eventually they simply required the Grand Prince ofVladimir, the nominal supreme ruler of the northeast, to send the annualtribute to Sarai The Horde demanded tribute and obedience, nothingelse The center of attention of the Khans of the Golden Horde was not

on the Rus lands but on the south, and on the contested borderlands with

Central Asia (Khwarezm) and Persia (Azerbaidzhan ) These were richterritories that also included important trade routes By comparison, thenorthern pine forests of Rus, with their sparse population, were not much

of a prize

Thus the Rus principalities, and especially those of the northeast andNovgorod , were included on the fringes of a vast Eurasian empire.Historians often speak of this period as one of “Mongol rule,” but the term

is misleading, for the actual population of the Golden Horde includedalmost no actual Mongols outside of the khan’s household Batu hadincorporated the Kipchaks and other Turkic peoples into his army and

soon all that remained of the Mongols was the name Tatar, the name of

one of the leading Mongol clans In Russian it came to signify thenomads of the Horde and the peoples who descended from them Thelanguage of the Horde was not Mongolian but Kipchak Turkic, the linguafranca of the steppe and of the Horde’s winter capital at Sarai Sarai was

a great city, with much of it made of felt tents and considered animportant waystation on the trade route from Europe to Inner Asia andChina The population of the city included all sorts of people: Tatars ,Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Persians, and many of the Muslims of CentralAsia There was even an Orthodox bishop of Sarai, which became aneparchy of the metropolitanate of Kiev The Mongols had been tolerant ofvarious faiths, and the Horde continued this policy even after itsconversion to Islam under Khan Uzbek in the 1330s

During the succeeding centuries, life continued much as before for thepeople of the former Kiev Rus The princes feuded with one another overland and power, the cities slowly came back and the churches wererebuilt The tribute to the Horde must have been a burden, but notenough to prevent the recovery of the devastated areas In the northeast,the main prize of political contest was the Grand Principality of Vladimir,which not only gave control of that town and its lands but a theoreticaloverlordship of the whole area and even of Novgorod The GrandPrincipality of Vladimir was now in the gift of the khan in Sarai Thus,Alexander Nevsky, who ruled in Vladimir (1252–1263), came to thethrone after more than a decade as Novgorod’s elected prince He went

to Sarai to the khan for confirmation of his title and power From 1304,however, Vladimir ceased to be an independent center of power, and likeKiev earlier, it became the prize in the struggle for power among thenortheastern princes of Tver and Moscow Ultimately the Moscowdynasty would secure the Vladimir land and title for itself, forming in the

process the Russian state Medieval political rivalries make dull readingfor the modern reader, for they were an endless chain of petty conflicts,military and diplomatic; appeals to higher authorities; and short-lived andquickly reversed alliances.

Moscow first appears in written sources in 1147 as a small fortress, but

it seems to have been Daniil, Prince of Moscow (circa 1280–1303) andgrandson of Alexander Nevsky who consolidated the small territory alongthe Moscow River His son Iurii Danilovich expanded that territory, but hispower was limited by Prince Michael of Tver’s acquisition of the Vladimirthrone in 1305 From that moment Moscow and Tver were locked in abitter struggle for that throne that included the Moscow-inspired execution

of Michael of Tver in 1318 Eventually Michael became a saint, honoredmost of all in Moscow The murders and denunciations to the Hordecontinued until Iurii’s son Ivan (“Kalita,” the Moneybag) finally secured theVladimir throne from Khan Uzbek in 1328 and held it until his death in

1340 His success guaranteed Moscow the leading position among thenortheastern princes, and with time his descendants came to be the

Grand Princes of Moscow and Vladimir The new town had eclipsed

Vladimir and Ivan proceeded to fortify Moscow with the first woodenKremlin

It was not only the Vladimir title and suzerainty over the Russianprinces of the northeast that came to rest in Moscow The Mongolconquest and destruction of Kiev had left the Metropolitan of Kiev, thehead of the church, without a home until Metropolitan Maximos, a Greek,moved his residence to Vladimir in 1299 His successor was Peter(1306–1326), not a Greek but a nobleman from southwest Rus, whoidentified himself with Moscow and on his death was buried in theKremlin’s Dormition Cathedral Ivan Kalita convinced his successor, theGreek Theognostos, to remain in Moscow as well The Moscow princesnow had at their sides the Metropolitans of Kiev and All Rus

By the middle of the fourteenth century Moscow was in a secureenough position to dominate the politics of the area It had incorporated anumber of lesser principalities and exerted hegemony over almost allothers Only Novgorod had real freedom of action The limit to the power

of the Moscow princes came not from their neighbors but from the Khans

of the Golden Horde; however, here as well the situation was changing, ifonly gradually, and it was changing in Moscow’s favor Dmitrii Ivanovich,the grandson of Ivan Kalita, inherited these advantages when he came tothe Moscow and Vladimir throne in 1359 His early years were spent