Russia

Politics continued in its bloody tradition. Sviatoslav’s three sons, who had been acting as his viceroys in Kiev, Novgorod and Derevliania, fell out with one another, and two of them lost their lives. The survivor was Vladimir, the ruler who brought Russia into the Christian fold and became its founding saint. His image, created by a grateful Church, gives a misleading impression of the man, however. The real Vladimir was visibly his father’s son: a commercial slave-owner who became the proud possessor of several hundred concubines; a ruthless politico, little moved by considerations of brotherly love. With the help of a band of Viking mercenaries he had disposed of his brother Iaropolk of Kiev, who favoured Christianity, and promised to maintain the cause of paganism. Many years were to pass before he recanted, and then only for compelling political reasons.

Vladimir had sent a contingent of warriors to help Emperor Basil II defeat a rebellion, and the grateful Basil had offered his own sister Anna to Vladimir in marriage — an alliance which would confer considerable prestige. No princess born in the purple had ever before been offered in marriage to a foreigner, however useful, however powerful. The price was conversion, but it seemed a price worth paying. Then the Emperor and his entourage began to have second thoughts about the merits of the match. This hitch led Vladimir to launch a campaign against Byzantine holdings in the Crimea. Only when Anna was finally delivered did Vladimir fulfil his side of the bargain.

The statue of Perun the Thunderer and the other idols he had had erected on a hill that dominated Kiev were now pulled down. They were then subjected to a humiliating ritual flogging by twelve men as they were dragged to the river Dnieper and then hurled into it. ²³ The entire population of the city is said to have been driven into the river too — to be baptized. Russia now was part of Christendom.

A splendid monument celebrating the conversion still stands in Kiev: the cathedral church now known as St Sophia, though the original foundation had been dedicated to Kiev’s carefully chosen patron saint, Elias. Vladimir’s sponsor, the Emperor Basil, was, after all, a devotee of St Elias. Moreover, the saint was associated with thunder and lightning, which made his cult particularly attractive to worshippers of Perun. ²⁴ The choice was calculated both to ingratiate Russia’s ruler with the great Emperor and to help wean pagan subjects from their addiction to Perun. The pressing need for St Elias eventually passed, however, and so when a new cathedral was built it was dedicated to Santa Sophia, the Holy Wisdom.

It was not Vladimir who built it, however, but his son laroslav the Wise, who lies buried in it still, in a white stone sarcophagus. Begun in 1017 and dedicated in 1037, a year after laroslav inflicted a decisive defeat on the Pechenegs, the cathedral in Kiev has thirteen domes — one for Christ, and one for each of the Apostles. Its impressive massing recalls Justinian’s basilica of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, and Byzantine masons, engineers and artists were undoubtedly involved in its creation, as they were in the cathedral of Santa Sophia which laroslav built in Novgorod. Aspects of the Kiev structure, indeed, recall Novgorod rather than Byzantium, and are said to represent something distinctively Russian in style. ²⁵ The building, on which so many nameless craftsmen lavished their skills, symbolized both Russia’s coming of age as an independent state and its membership of what has been called ‘the Byzantine Commonwealth’ of Christian Orthodoxy. The first priests there had been Greek, but now that more Russians were becoming literate and ordained priests a Russian church hierarchy was being formed. Indeed some of the more able of them were to serve the Grand Prince and help him build an efficient administration for his far-flung realm. The new cathedral symbolized Russia’s membership of Christian civilization, just as it reflected the state’s considerable wealth.