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Kyivan Rus’: the war between Ukraine and Russia is (also) a medieval matter / Ukraine / Areas / Home

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Kyivan Rus’: the war between Ukraine and Russia is (also) a medieval matter / Ukraine / Areas / Home

The Baptism of Volodymyr/Vladimir in a painting by Viktor Vasnetsov – Wikipedia Creative Commons


To legitimize his political plans for modern Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly referred to Kyiv Rus’, the early medieval principality of Eastern Slavs that developed between the 9th and 13th centuries. An insight

The famous item of Putin’s “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, in reviewing the millennial relationship between the two communities, starts right from 988, the year in which the Grand Prince of Kyiv Volodymyr (in Russian, Vladimir) converts his pagan people to Christianity of the Byzantine rite.

Volodymyr’s Orthodox baptism in the waters of the Dnipro, near Kherson, was a strategic decision taken by the ruler of Rus’, who for various reasons rejected Judaism and Islam, moving instead towards Constantinople.

In Putin’s vision, which is also that of Russian historiography, it was instead a “civilizing choice”: it sanctioned the creation of an irreversible “common spiritual space”, as well as the same historical trajectory of the three countries. The peoples of today’s Ukraine, Russia and Belarus would have divided, according to Putin, only as a result of their own mistakes and external influences deliberately aimed at destroying this unity. Both Russia (“Kyiv mother city of all Russia”) and, of course, Ukraine, proclaim Kyiv as the cradle of their culture.

Putin’s vision has obvious roots in the imperial era. The lands of contemporary Ukraine had never been subject to Russian rule, meaning the Grand Duchy of Moscow as the historical predecessor of the Empire, at least until the Treaty of Perejeslav of 1654, with which the Ukrainian Cossacks asked for protection from Tsar Alexei against – Polish.

The ethnogenesis of the three East Slavic peoples had passed through different contexts and contaminations following the fall of Rus’: the Russian territories were subjected to the Tatar yoke of the Golden Horde, while the Ukrainian and Belarusian ones were gradually incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then in Republic Polish-Lithuanian.

Yet, during the wave of colonization initiated by Catherine II they were presented as historical territory of Russia. The ethnonyms themselves betrayed the assimilative will of the Romanov dynasty towards Ukrainians (defined malorossiianiLittle Russians, north and novorossianiNew Russians, in southern Ukraine last assimilated into imperial domains) and Belarusians (bielarusyWhite Russians) to the “general” category of Great Russians.

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Already in 1547, when Muscovy became a tsarist, Ivan the Terrible had proclaimed himself “tsar of all Rus'”. This is where one was born linguistic manipulation which helped legitimize the imperial narrative. After the fall of Kyivan Rus’, the area inhabited by the people of present-day central Ukraine was commonly referred to as Little Rus’, while those of present-day Belarus as White Rus’. From the term Rus’ derives Ruthenia, and Ruthenians will be called the Ukrainians and Belarusians until the 19th century. Instead, Rus’ was read in Greek Russia, and the Grand Duchy of Moscow adopted this term to claim the inheritance over the Kyiv kingdom; the subsequent delegitimization of the Ruthenian, Ukrainian and Belarusian populations as sub-ethnic groups of the Great Russians was therefore a consequence.

Russian historiography places a strong emphasis on the autochthonous Slavic role, in a pan-Slavic perspective functional to “nationalising” the myth of Kyiv as the identity cradle of a single people. However, already the most ancient source about Rus’, the breaking latest news of past years written by the monk Nestor of Kyiv around 1116, it presents a picture of high fragmentation of the Slavic populations. This favored the settlement of Viking tribes, called by the locals Rus’ (“the men who row”), whose elite dominated the various principalities of the area, even though they quickly allowed themselves to be Slavicized.

The Rjurikid princes and the boyar aristocracy made the principality and the capital Kyiv flourish until the second half of the 11th century. After the death of Yaroslav the Wise, bloody wars of succession and threats from the nomadic Turkic-speaking peoples of southern Ukraine ushered in an era of instability.

Before the official collapse of Rus’ in 1240 – when Kyiv was sacked by the Mongols – other principalities increased their autonomy and claimed the privileges of Kyiv. In addition to the principality of Novgorod, that of Vladimir-Sundzal developed around today’s Moscow, the latter mentioned for the first time only in 1147. In those years, the prince of Vladimir Andrej Bogoljubsky exploited the weakness of Kyiv to reverse the relationship between center and periphery. Gradually the Rjurikid dynasty moved to the area of ​​central Russia, and in 1299 the seat of the metropolis moved from Kyiv to Vladimir, while from 1325 the center of Orthodox power became Moscow – here religion soon became an instrument of soft power at the disposal of the Russian rulers.

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At the same time, the opening of two Metropolises, one in Ukraine and one in Belarus, signaled a political rivalry between Ruthenians and Muscovites for Orthodox supremacy of Rus’ during the 19th century, with the Patriarchate of Constantinople supporting the latter in order not to decentralize religious authority. However, when Constantinople itself collapsed in 1453, it was Moscow that prevailed, proclaiming itself the Third Rome.

According to Slavist Jane Burbank, in ainterview a The worldthe period after the fall of Rus’ is characterized by the continuation of the dynastic line in Moscow until the seventeenth century, while the territory of the principalities of Kyiv and Galicia remained linked to the west, under a more benevolent Lithuanian domination than the authoritarianism developed in Russia .

The debate around the historical legacy of Rus’ intensified during the 19th century, the century of the revival of the great national narratives. Where Russian imperial historiography underlined the unity, when not the subordination of the Little Russian Ukrainian people to the Great Russian one, the the father of history Ukrainian Mikhaylo Hrushevsky argued that the heir of Kyivan Rus’ was the principality of Galicia and not that of Vladimir, focusing on the continuity of populations rather than the Rjurikid dynasty.

In the populist Ukrainian historiography, of which Hrushevsky was the greatest exponent and canonized source in the modern post-Soviet one, strong emphasis is placed on the fact that, while Kyiv was one of the largest European cities, Moscow was not even born and until the middle of the thirteenth century an insignificant village, in whose forests the Russians were formed, a people therefore separated from the Ukrainians and a union of Slavic and Finno-Ugric populations.

This narration made it possible to give new ferment to the Ukrainian national sentiment, flourishing in the Austrian Empire and repressed in the Russian one, becoming one of the founding myths of Ukrainian statehood. It was about reversing the inferiority complex of the Ukrainians assimilated by the Tsarist Empire; in proclaiming Kyiv’s heritage, Ukrainians could now boast of a culture older than Russia’s.

During the first brief experience of Ukrainian independence in 1918, the trident symbol of Volodymyr the Great became the official coat of arms still adopted by Ukrainians today, the tryzub. After independence in 1991, the Ukrainian currency was called hryvnianamed after the currency of Rus’, and the main ones were depicted on the banknotes prince’ of the principality.

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Hrushevsky’s historiographical line was canceled during the Soviet era, and resumed after independence: even before 2014, the history lessons in Ukrainian and Russian schools regarding Rus’ started from assumptions, and reached clearly different conclusions, equally exploited by politics.

Second Ukrainian historian Mykola Ryabchuk, the Russian heritage of the principality of Kyiv is one of the most uncritically accepted historical myths – in academia, mass media and common discourse – as an undisputed truth for centuries: internally, it has influenced Ukrainian identity, internationally , the western perception of the relations between the two countries. Fighting it is therefore an existential question for Ukrainian identity, but the risks of remaining trapped in a medieval trap are just around the corner.

Political disputes around medieval or even earlier issues are nothing new introduced by Russian-Ukrainian relations. Especially in the Balkans, think of Kosovo and Macedonia, the struggle for the historical legacy of ancient cultures and states is still today the center of debate between different ethnic groups. Almost always, on the one hand there is a dominant narrative, and on the other a fragile identity desperately seeking proof of its legitimacy in a given historical period.

The official statements of various Ukrainian presidents and himself ZelenskyOf Putinand to a lesser extent of Lukashenko, become more and more irreconcilable on July 28 of each year, the day of the official celebrations of the baptism of Rus’. Similarly, Ukrainian and Russian historiographies did not seem to speak to each other, and are unlikely to start doing so anytime soon. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues with no short-term solution, the historical memories of both countries are struggling to reconcile even on the Middle Ages.

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