A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  be cut down - a process called podseka - and the ground prepared for sowing. Moreover, when the soil became exhausted, a new field could be obtained only after further hard work. Therefore, the perelog practice emerged: the cultivator utilized one part of his land and left the other fallow, alternating the two after a number of years. Eventually a regular two-field system grew out of the perelog, with the land divided into annually rotated halves. Toward the end of the Kievan period the three-field system appeared, marking a further important improvement in agriculture and a major increase in the intensity of cultivation: the holding came to be divided into three parts, one of which was sown under a spring grain crop, harvested in the autumn, another under a so-called winter grain crop, sown in the autumn and harvested in the summer, while the third was left fallow; the three parts were rotated in sequence each year. Agricultural implements improved with time; the East Slavs used a wooden plough as early as the eighth and even the seventh century a.D. Wheat formed the bulk of the produce in the south; rye, also barley and oats, in the north. With the evolution of the Kievan state, princes, boyars, and monasteries developed large-scale agriculture. It may be noted in this connection that, in the opinion of some scholars, private ownership of land in Kievan Russia should be dated from the eleventh century at the earliest, while, on indirect evidence, other specialists ascribe the origins of this institution to the tenth or the ninth centuries, and even to a still more distant past.

  The East Slavs and later the Kievan Russians engaged in many other occupations as well. Cattle raising has existed since very ancient times in the steppe of southern Russia, and a Byzantine author of the sixth century a.D. wrote about the great number and variety of cattle possessed by the Antes. Forest environment on the other hand led to the acquisition of such skills as carpentry and woodworking in general, as well as apiculture, and the forests also served as enormous game preserves. Hunting for furs, hides, and meat, together with fishing in the many rivers and lakes, developed long before the formation of the state on the Dnieper and continued to be important in Kievan Russia. The Kievan people mined metal, primarily iron, and extracted salt. Their other industries included pottery, metalwork, furriery, tanning, preparation of textiles, and building in stone, not to mention many less widespread arts and crafts practiced at times with a consummate artistry. Rybakov and some other investigators have recently shed much light on this interesting aspect of Kievan life.

  Kievan Society

  Vernadsky's well-known and perhaps high estimate has placed the population of Kievan Russia in the twelfth century at seven or eight million.

  At the top stood the prince and the ever-increasing princely family with its numerous branches, followed by the retainers of the prince, the druzhina. The latter, divided according to their importance and function into the senior and the junior druzhina, together with the local aristocracy formed the upper class of the country, known in the Russian Justice and other documents of the time as the muzhi. With the evolution of the Kievan state the retainers of the prince and the regional nobility fused into a single group which was to play for centuries an important role in Russian history under the name of the boyars. After the muzhi came the liudi, who can be generally described as the Kievan middle class. Because of the great number and significance of towns in Kievan Russia, this class had considerable relative weight, more than its counterparts in other European countries at the time or in Russia in later periods, even though apparently it diminished with the decline of the state.

  The bulk of the population, the so-called smerdy, remained agricultural and rural. Kievan peasants, or at least the great majority of them, seem to have been free men at the dawn of Kievan history, and free peasantry remained an important element throughout the evolution of the Kievan state, although bondage gradually increased. Indeed several kinds of bondsmen emerged, their dependence often resulting from their inability to repay the landlord's loan which they had needed to establish or re-establish their economy in troubled times. The slaves occupied the bottom of the social pyramid. It may be added that the principal taxes in Kiev were levied on the "plough" or the "smoke," meaning a household, and were gathered only in the countryside and apparently exclusively from the peasants.

  A special group consisted of people connected with the Church, both the clergy who married and had families and the monks and nuns, together with others serving the huge ecclesiastical establishment in many different capacities. The Church operated hospitals and hostels, dispensed charity, and engaged in education, to mention only some of its activities, in addition to performing the fundamental religious functions. Still another classification, that of the izgoi, encompassed various displaced social elements, such as freed slaves.

  Soviet historians - and, for different reasons, Pavlov-Silvansky and a few other early scholars - considered the evolution of Kievan society in terms of the establishment of a full-fledged feudalism. But the prevalence of money economy in Kievan Russia, the importance of towns and trade, the unrestricted rather than feudal attitude to landed property, the limited and delegated authority of the local magnates, as well as certain other factors, indicate serious weaknesses of any such view and suggest that the issue of feudalism in Russia can be more profitably discussed when dealing with a later period of Russian history.

  Kievan Institutions

  The chief Kievan political institutions were the office of prince, the duma or council of the boyars, and the veche or town assembly, which have been linked, respectively, to the autocratic or monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic aspects of the Kievan state. While princes in Kievan Russia proliferated, the one in Kiev retained a special position. From the twelfth century he carried the title of the great, or grand, prince. Princely tasks included military leadership, the rendering of justice, and administration. In war the prince could rely first of all on his own druzhina, and after that on the regiments of important towns, and even, in case of need, on a mass levy. Kievan military history, as has already been mentioned, proved to be unusually rich, and the organization and experience of Kievan armies left a legacy for later ages.

  In both justice and administration the prince occupied the key position. Yet he had to work with elected as well as his own appointed officials and in general co-ordinate his efforts with the local elements. To repeat a point made earlier, princely government came relatively late and had to be superimposed on rather well-developed local institutions, notably so in towns. The customary law of the Kievan Russians, known to us best through the Russian Justice, a code associated with Iaroslav the Wise, indicates a relatively high development of Kievan society, especially in the fields of trade and finance. It has also attracted attention for the remarkable mildness of its punishments, including a reliance on fines in preference to the death penalty. Canon law came with Christianity from Byzantium. In addition to the direct taxes on the "smoke" and the "plough," state revenue accumulated from judicial fees and fines, as well as from tariffs and other imposts on commerce.

  The boyar duma developed, it would seem, from consultations and joint work of the prince and his immediate retinue, the senior druzhina. It expanded with the evolution of Kievan Russia, reflecting the rise of the boyar class and also such developments as the conversion of Russia to Christianity, for the higher clergy found a place in the duma. While it would be quite incorrect to consider the boyar duma as analogous to a parliament - although it might be compared to its immediate predecessor, the curia regis - or even to claim for it a definite legal limitation of princely power, it remained an extremely important institution in its customary capacity as the constant adviser and collaborator of the prince. We know of a few occasions when the senior druzhina refused to follow the prince because he had failed to consult it.

  Finally, the democratic element in the Kievan state found a certain ex-

  pression in the veche or town meeting similar to the assemblies of freemen in the barbarian kingdoms of the West. All heads of households could participate in these gath
erings, held usually in the market place and called to decide such basic issues as war and peace, emergency legislation, and conflicts with the prince or between princes. The frequently unruly veche practice of decision by unanimity, can be described as an application of direct democracy, ignoring such principles as representation and majority rule. The veche derived from prehistoric times and thus preceded princely authority with which it never became fully co-ordinated. In the Kievan period, the veche in Kiev itself played an especially significant role, but there were other vecha in action all over Russia. In fact, the most far-reaching development of this institution was to occur a little later in Novgorod.

  The economic and social development of Kievan Russia, and in particular its institutions, deserve study not only in themselves but also as the heritage of the subsequent periods of Russian history. For example, we shall time and again be concerned with the prince, the duma, and the veche as they evolved differently under changing circumstances in various parts of what used to be the Kievan state.

  VI

  KIEVAN RUSSIA: RELIGION AND CULTURE

  Old customs and beliefs have left but the slightest trace in the documents of the earlier period, and no systematic attempt to record the national epic was made until the middle of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it is generally admitted that the survival of folklore has suffered important modifications in the course of time. Under these conditions any attempt to present a comprehensive survey of Russian cultural developments previous to the seventeenth century meets with insurmountable obstacles and is necessarily incomplete and one-sided. The sources have preserved merely the Christian literature, while the bulk of the national epic has been irretrievably lost… The early literary efforts of native origin were hardly more than slavish imitations of the Byzantine patterns.

  FLORINSKY

  Yet, Kievan Russia, like the golden days of childhood, was never dimmed in the memory of the Russian nation. In the pure fountain of her literary works anyone who wills can quench his religious thirst; in her venerable authors he can find his guide through the complexities of the modern world. Kievan Christianity has the same value for the Russian religious mind as Pushkin for the artistic sense: that of a standard, a golden measure, a royal way.

  FEDOTOV

  THE Kievan Russians, as we have seen, had two religions in succession: paganism and Christianity. The heathen faith of the East Slavs included a deification of the forces of nature, animism in general, and a worship of ancestral spirits. Of the many gods, Perun, the deity of thunder and lightning, claimed special respect. East Slavic paganism lacked elaborate organization or institutional development. Vladimir's efforts to strengthen it proved to be short-lived, and the conversion to Christianity came quickly and relatively painlessly, although we know of some instances of the use of force by the government, and of certain rebellions. But the effectiveness of the baptism of Russia represents a more controversial matter. Some historians, including Golubinsky and other Church historians, have declared that the new religion for centuries retained only a superficial hold on the masses, which remained stubbornly heathen in their true convictions and daily practices, incorporating many of their old superstitions into Christianity. Some scholars speak of dvoeverie, meaning a double faith, a term used originally by such religious leaders of the time as St. Theodosius to designate this troublesome phenomenon.

  Kievan Christianity presents its own problems to the historian. Rich in content and relatively well known, it revealed the tremendous impact of its Byzantine origin and model as well as changes to fit Russian circumstances. The resulting product has been both unduly praised as an organically Russian and generally superior type of Christianity and excessively blamed for its superficiality and derivative nature. In drawing a balance it should be made clear that in certain important respects Kievan Christianity could not even copy that of Byzantium, let alone surpass it. Thus theology and philosophy found little ground on which to grow in Kievan Russia and produced no major fruits. In fact, Kievan religious writings in general closely followed their Byzantine originals and made a minimal independent contribution to the Christian heritage. Mysticism too remained alien to Kievan soil. Yet in another sense Kievan Christianity did grow and develop on its own. It represented, after all, the religion of an entire, newly baptized people with its special attitudes, demands, and ethical and esthetic traditions. This Russification, so to speak, of Byzantine Christianity became gradually apparent in the emergence of Kievan saints, in the creative growth of church architecture and art, in the daily life of the Kievan Orthodox Church, and in its total influence on Russian society and culture.

  Kievan saints, who, it might be added, were sometimes canonized with considerable delay and over pronounced opposition from Byzantium, which was apparently unwilling to accord too much luster to the young Russian Church, included, of course, Vladimir the baptizer of Russia, Olga the first Christian ruler of Kiev, and certain princes and religious leaders. Of these princes, Boris and Gleb deserve special notice as reflecting both Kievan politics and in a sense - in their lives and canonization - Kievan mentality. As mentioned before, the brothers, sons of St. Vladimir and his Bulgarian wife, were murdered, allegedly, by their half-brother Sviatopolk, in the fratricidal struggles preceding Iaroslav the Wise's accession to power. They were elevated to sainthood as innocent victims of civil war, but also, at least in the case of Boris, because they preferred death to active participation in the deplorable conflict. St. Anthony, who lived approximately from 982 to 1073, and St. Theodosius, who died in 1074, stand out among the canonized churchmen. Both were monks and both are associated with the establishment of monasticism in Russia and with the creation and organization of the Monastery of the Caves near Kiev. Yet they possessed unlike personalities, represented dissimilar religious types, and left different impacts on Russian Christianity. Anthony, who took his monastic vows on Mount Athos, and whose very name recalled that of the founder of all monasticism, St. Anthony the Great, followed the classic path of asceticism and struggle for the salvation of one's soul. His disciple, Theodosius, while extremely ascetic in his own life, made his major contribution in developing the monastic community and in stressing the social ideal of service to

  the needy, be they princes who required advice or the hungry poor. The advice, if need be, could become an admonition or even a denunciation. A number of St. Theodosius' writings on different subjects have been preserved. Following the lead and the organizational pattern of the Monastery of the Caves near Kiev, monasteries spread throughout the land, although in Kievan Russia, in contrast to later periods of Russian history, they clustered in and near towns.

  At the end of the Kievan period the Russian Church, headed by the metropolitan in Kiev, encompassed sixteen dioceses, a doubling from St. Vladimir's original eight. Two of them had the status of archbishoprics. The Russian metropolitan and Church remained under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople. In the days of Kiev only two metropolitans are known to have been Russians, Hilarion in the eleventh century and Clement in the twelfth; especially at first, many bishops also came from Byzantium. The link with Byzantium contributed to the strength and independence of the Russian Church in its relations with the State. But in general the period witnessed a remarkable co-operation, rather than conflict, between Church and State.

  As already mentioned, the Church in Kievan Russia obtained vast holdings of land and pre-empted such fields as charity, healing the sick, and sheltering travelers, in addition to its specifically religious functions. Canon law extended not only to those connected with the ecclesiastical establishment but, especially on issues of morality and proper religious observance, to the people at large. The Church also occupied a central position, as we shall see, in Kievan education, literature, and the arts. The over-all impact of religion on Kievan society and life is much more difficult to determine. Kievan Christianity has been described, often in glowing terms, as peculiarly associated with a certain joyousness and affirmation of
man and his works; as possessing a powerful cosmic sense and emphasizing the transfiguration of the entire universe, perhaps under the influence of the closeness to nature of the pagan East Slavs; or as expressing in particular the kenotic element in Christianity, that is, the belief in the humble Christ and His sacrifice, in contrast to the Byzantine stress on God the Father, the ruler of heaven and earth. Whatever the validity of these and other similar evaluations of Kievan Christianity - and they seem to contain some truth in spite of the complexity of the issues involved and the limited and at times biased nature of our sources - Christian principles did affect life in Kievan Russia. Their influence can be richly illustrated from Kievan literature and especially its ethical norms, such as the striking concept of the good prince which emerges from Vladimir Monomakh's Testament, the constant emphasis on almsgiving in the writings of the period, and the sweeping endorsement of Christian standards of behavior.

  Language and Literature

  The language of the Russians too was affected by their conversion to Christianity. The emergence among the Russians of a written language, using the Cyrillic alphabet, has been associated with the baptism of the country, the writing itself having been originally devised by St. Cyril and St. Methodius, the apostles to the Slavs, in the second half of the ninth century for the benefit of the Moravians. More precisely, the dominant view today is that St. Cyril invented the older Glagolithic alphabet and that the Cyrillic was a somewhat later development carried out by one of his disciples, probably in Bulgaria. While there exists some evidence, notably in the early treaties with Byzantium and in the fact that these treaties were translated into Slavic, that the Russians had been acquainted with writing before 988, the conversion firmly and permanently established the written language in Russia. To repeat, the liturgy itself, as well as the lesser services of the Church and its other activities, were conducted in Church Slavonic, readily understandable to the people, not in Greek, nor in Latin as in the West. A written literature based on the religious observances grew quickly and before long embraced other fields as well. The language of this Kievan written literature has traditionally been considered to be the same as Church Slavonic, a literary language based on an eastern South Slavic dialect which became the tongue of Slavic Christianity. Recently, however, certain scholars, and especially Obnorsky, advanced the highly questionable argument that the basic written, as well as spoken, language of Kievan society had been and remained essentially Russian, although it experienced strong Church Slavonic influences. Perhaps it would be best to say that many written works of the Kievan period were written in Church Slavonic, others in Russian - Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian, to be more exact - and still others in a mixture or blend of both. In any case, the Kievan Russians possessed a rather rich and well-developed literary language; one comparison of an eleventh-century Russian translation with the original Byzantine chronicle indicates that the Russian version had the exact equivalents of eighty per cent of the Greek vocabulary. The conversion to Christianity had meant not only an influx of Greek terms, dominant in the sphere of religion and present in many other areas, but also certain borrowings from the Balkan Slavs, notably the Bulgarians, who had accepted Christianity earlier and who helped its dissemination in Russia.