Through Byzantium the Russians were connected to the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians and Romanians, all affiliated to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Through its broader links to Christendom, they also entered into closer contact with Europe, becoming conscious of themselves as Europeans belonging to a common faith. As Obolensky put it, ‘Byzantium was not a wall, erected between Russia and the West: she was Russia’s gateway to Europe.’21
Although Vladimir had converted Rus to Christianity, it was his son Yaroslav who built most of its first great churches as grand prince of Kiev from 1019 to 1054. Having fought his brothers for the throne, Yaroslav had come to see that building churches would advance his prestige and secure his power-base in Kiev. The most important was the Church of St Sophia, closely modelled on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople with its simple cross-in-square formation, Greek inscriptions, monumental frescoes and colourful mosaics, dominated by the massive, solemn face of Christ Pantokrator staring down from the heaven of the central dome. Beneath him are mosaics of the apostles, the Mother of God and the Eucharist, the three avenues by which the holy spirit descended to the earth, symbolising Christ’s incarnation in nature.
Like other Russian churches, St Sophia had a row of icons on a low screen between the altar and the worshippers. Later it would be replaced by a high wall of icons, the iconostasis, whose visual beauty is a central feature of the Eastern Church. Seeing is believing for the Orthodox. Russians pray with their eyes open – their gaze fixed on an icon, which serves as a window on the divine sphere.22 The icon is the focal point of the believers’ spiritual emotions – a sacred object able to elicit miracles. Icons weep and produce myrrh. They are lost and reappear, intervening in events to steer them on a divine path. Not only paintings had this status in Russia: wood carvings, mosaics, even buildings could be icons too.23 In contrast to the Western Christian mind, where the divine existed only in the heavens, in Russia the divine was immanent in worldly existence. Here were the roots of the utopian consciousness which lay at the heart of the Russian peasant religion: the belief in the certainty of building heaven on this earth, and specifically on Russian soil, according to the early Christian myth of Holy Russia, a new land of salvation where Christ would reappear.
Icons came to Russia from Byzantium. To begin with, they were painted by Greek artists, and remained austerely Greek in style. It was only from the thirteenth century that a more distinctive Russian style appeared. This native mode was distinguished by a simple harmony of line and colour, graceful movements and a skilful use of inverse perspective (where lines seem to converge on a point in front of the picture) to draw the viewer in and guide him in his prayers by symbolising how the icon’s sacred action takes place in a sphere beyond the normal laws of existence.24
A similar transition towards Russian native forms can be seen in literature. Church Slavonic became the foundation of a literary language in Russia. Based on the South Slav dialect spoken around Thessaloniki, where Cyril and Methodius had lived, it followed Greek syntax – an influence that flowed into Russian. But the Greek influence was not entirely dominant. In the Primary Chronicle there is a distinctly Russian ideology.
At the heart of the Primary Chronicle is a myth that was to play a central role in the Russian political consciousness. Its basis is the sacred nature of the prince who dies as a martyr for the ‘Holy Russian land’. The origins of this idea can be traced back to the cult of Boris and Gleb, the first saints of the Russian Church. The two brothers had been killed in the dynastic wars following the death of their father Vladimir in 1015. But their hagiographers, beginning with Nestor in the Primary Chronicle, presented them as ‘passion-sufferers’ (strastoterptsy), who had willingly laid down their lives for the salvation of the Russian land, as Christ had done for Palestine. Their sacrifice was venerated by the Church as the forging of a covenant between God and the newly baptised Rus, a new Terra Sancta, which was thus endowed with special grace (the origins of ‘Holy Rus’ and the ‘Holy Russian land’). Churches of Boris and Gleb were built. The two saints were venerated in icons. They gave their name to monasteries and towns (and much later on to tsarist dragoon regiments, Soviet airbases and submarines). From the worship of these ‘saintly princes’, the cult of the holy prince or ruler would develop in Russia (as would the cult of the revolution’s fallen heroes, who were also venerated as the ‘people’s saints’ during 1917).25 Of the 800 Russian saints created up until the eighteenth century, over a hundred had been princes or princesses.26 No other country in the world has made so many saints from its rulers. Nowhere else has power been so sacralised.
Christianity was slow to spread through Kievan Rus. Long after Vladimir’s conversion, paganism remained deeply rooted in the countryside and many towns. In 1071, when the clergy came to Novgorod and threw the pagan idols into the Volkhov River, there was a popular rebellion. The uprising was suppressed and a wooden church of St Sophia built; but only slowly did the Novgorodians exchange the amulets they wore to ward off evil spirits for crucifixes and icons.
Pagan idols were not gods in the Greek sense but natural forces and spirits, which appeared in ordinary people’s daily lives. There was Perun, god of lightning and thunder; Volos, protector of the herds; Rozhanitsa, goddess of fertility; Mokosh, goddess of the earth (reincarnated as Mother Russia later on); Dazhborg and Khors, who were both sun gods. With the arrival of Christianity these gods did not disappear but were incorporated into the new system of beliefs and rituals. Saints and natural deities were frequently combined in the peasants’ Christian–pagan religion. Poludnitsa, the old pagan goddess of the harvest, was worshipped through the placement of a sheaf of rye behind an icon; Volos morphed into St Vlasius; and Perun became St Elias. The Christianisation of the pagan deities was practised by the Orthodox Church itself. At the core of the Russian faith is a distinctive stress on motherhood which never really took root in the Latin West. Where the Catholic tradition placed its emphasis on the Madonna’s purity, the Russian emphasised her divine motherhood (bogoroditsa). This is reflected in the way that Russian icons tend to show her with her face pressed tight against the infant’s head in maternal devotion. It may well have been a conscious effort on the Church’s part to supplant the pagan mother cults of Rozhanitsa and Mokosh.27
This ‘dual belief’ (dvoeverie) can be seen most clearly in the burial rites of the Russians during the medieval period. In the Upper Volga region, for example, archaeologists have excavated thirteenth-century barrow graves or mounds, the old pagan funeral practice, in which the dead were buried with both pagan amulets and Christian artefacts such as crosses and icons.28 Pagan rituals continued to be practised in the Russian countryside for centuries. Soviet ethnographers found evidence of them in the 1920s, and there are parts of the Russian north where they can be found today.
From the beginning of his reign, Grand Prince Vladimir had placed his sons in charge of the various principalities within his realm. Each prince was equipped with an army or druzhina of a few thousand horsemen led by warriors, known as boyars, who received part of the prince’s land. These landowners came to play a leading role in government through the Boyars’ Council, which advised the prince, eventually forming something like an oligarchy of the major boyar clans. They were in charge of tax collection, military recruitment and justice in the provinces. The boyars were army men, often absent on campaigns; they took little interest in their land, which was farmed by the peasants in exchange for dues in labour or in kind. Land was plentiful but labour scarce – that was the basic fact of the seigneurial economy which guaranteed the peasants’ access to the land and their freedom of movement, until the imposition of serfdom from the sixteenth century.