by James Millar
Commerce, however, provided the economic foundation for Kievan Rus. The tenth-century Rurikid princes, accompanied by their military retinues, made annual rounds among their subjects and collected tribute. Igor met his death in 945 during such an excursion, when he and his men attempted to take more than the standard payment from the Drevlyane. After collecting the tribute of fur pelts, honey, and wax, the Kievan princes loaded their goods and captives in boats, also supplied by the local population, and made their way down the Dnieper River to the Byzantine market of Cherson. Oleg in 907 and Igor, less successfully, in 944 conducted military campaigns against Constantinople. The resulting treaties allowed the Rus to trade not only at Cherson, but also at Constantinople, where they had access to goods from virtually every corner of the known world. From their vantage point at Kiev the Rurikid princes controlled all traffic moving from towns to their north toward the Black Sea and its adjacent markets.
The Dnieper River route “from the Varangians to the Greeks” led back northward to Novgorod, which controlled commercial traffic with traders from the Baltic Sea. From Novgorod commercial goods also were carried eastward along the upper Volga River through the region of Rostov-Suzdal to Bulgar. At this market center on the mid-Volga River, which formed a nexus between the Rus and the markets of Central Asia and the Caspian Sea, the Rus exchanged their goods for oriental silver coins or dirhams (until the early eleventh century) and luxury goods including silks, glassware, and fine pottery.
The establishment of Rurikid political dominance contributed to changes in the social composition of the region. To the agricultural peasant population were added the princes themselves, their military retainers, servants, and slaves. The introduction of Christianity by Prince Vladimir brought a layer of clergy to the social mix. It also transformed the cultural face of Kievan Rus, especially in its urban centers. In Kiev Vladimir constructed the Church of the Holy Virgin (also known as the Church of the Tithe), built of stone and flanked by two other palatial structures. The ensemble formed the centerpiece of “Vladimir’s city,” which was surrounded by new fortifications. Yaroslav expanded “Vladimir’s city” by building new fortifications that encompassed the battlefield on which he defeated the Pechenegs in 1036. Set in the southern wall was the Golden Gate of Kiev. Within the protected area Vladimir constructed a new complex of churches and palaces, the most imposing of which was the masonry Cathedral of St. Sophia, which was the church of the metropolitan and became the symbolic center of Christianity in Kievan.
The introduction of Christianity met resistance in some parts of Kievan Rus. In Novgorod a popular uprising took place when representatives of the new church threw the idol of the god Perun into the Volkhov River. But Novgorod’s landscape was also quickly altered by the construction of wooden churches and, in the middle of the eleventh century, by its own stone Cathedral of St. Sophia. In Chernigov Prince Mstislav constructed the Church of the Transfiguration of Our Savior in 1035.
By agreement with the Rurikids the church became legally responsible for a range of social practices and family affairs, including birth, marriage, and death. Ecclesiastical courts had jurisdiction over church personnel and were charged with enforcing Christian norms and rituals in the larger community. Although the church received revenue from its courts, the clergy were only partially successful in their efforts to convince the populace to abandon pagan customs. But to the degree that they were accepted, Christian social and cultural standards provided a common identity for the diverse tribes comprising Kievan Rus society.
The spread of Christianity and the associated construction projects intensified and broadened commercial relations between Kiev and Byzantium. Kiev also attracted Byzantine artists and artisans, who designed and decorated the early Rus churches and taught their techniques and skills to local apprentices. Kiev correspondingly became the center of craft production in Kievan Rus during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
While architectural design and the decorative arts of mosaics, frescoes, and icon painting were the most visible aspects of the Christian cultural transformation, Kievan Rus also received chronicles, saints’ lives, sermons, and other literature from the Greeks. The outstanding literary works from this era were the Primary Chronicle or Tale of Bygone Years, compiled by monks of the Monastery of the Caves, and the “Sermon on Law and Grace,” composed (c. 1050) by Metropolitan Hilarion, the first native of Kievan Rus to head the church.
During the twelfth century, despite the emergence of competing political centers within Kievan Rus and repeated sacks of it (1169, 1203, 1235), the city of Kiev continued to thrive economically.
KIREYEVSKY, IVAN VASILIEVICH
Its diverse population, which is estimated to have reached between 36,000 and 50,000 persons by the end of the twelfth century, included princes, soldiers, clergy, merchants, artisans, unskilled workers, and slaves. Its expanding handicraft sector produced glassware, glazed pottery, jewelry, religious items, and other goods that were exported throughout the lands of Rus. Kiev also remained a center of foreign commerce, and increasingly re-exported imported goods, exemplified by Byzantine amphorae used as containers for oil and wine, to other Rus towns as well.
The proliferation of political centers within Kievan Rus was accompanied by a diffusion of the economic dynamism and increasing social complexity that characterized Kiev. Novgorod’s economy also continued to be centered on its trade with the Baltic region and with Bulgar. By the twelfth century artisans in Novgorod were also engaging in new crafts, such as enameling and fresco painting. Novgorod’s flourishing economy supported a population of twenty to thirty thousand by the early thirteenth century. Volynia and Galicia, Rostov-Suzdal, and Smolensk, whose princes vied politically and military for Kiev, gained their economic vitality from their locations on trade routes. The construction of the masonry Church of the Mother of God in Smolensk (1136-1137) and of the Cathedral of the Dormition (1158) and the Golden Gate in Vladimir reflected the wealth concentrated in these centers. Andrei Bogolyubsky also constructed his own palace complex of Bogolyubovo outside Vladimir and celebrated a victory over the Volga Bulgars in 1165 by building the Church of the Intercession nearby on the Nerl River. In each of these principalities the princes’ boyars, officials, and retainers were forming local, landowning aristocracies and were also becoming consumers of luxury items produced abroad, in Kiev, and in their own towns.
In 1223 the armies of Chingis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire, first reached the steppe south of Kievan Rus. At the Battle of Kalka they defeated a combined force of Polovtsy and Rus drawn from Kiev, Chernigov, and Volynia. The Mongols returned in 1236, when they attacked Bulgar. In 1237-1238 they mounted an offensive against Ryazan and then Vladimir-Suzdal. In 1239 they devastated the southern towns of Pereyaslavl and Chernigov, and in 1240 conquered Kiev.
The state of Kievan Rus is considered to have collapsed with the fall of Kiev. But the Mongols went on to subordinate Galicia and Volynia before invading both Hungary and Poland. In the aftermath of their conquest, the invaders settled in the vicinity of the lower Volga River, forming the portion of the Mongol Empire commonly known as the Golden Horde. Surviving Rurikid princes made their way to the horde to pay homage to the Mongol khan. With the exception of Prince Michael of Chernigov, who was executed, the khan confirmed each of the princes as the ruler in his respective principality. He thus confirmed the disintegration of Kievan Rus. See also: OLGA; PRIMARY CHRONICLE; ROUTE TO GREEKS; VIKINGS; YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471, tr. Robert Michell and Nevill Forbes. (1914). London: Royal Historical Society. Dimnik, Martin. (1994). The Dynasty of Chernigov 1054-1146. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Fennell, John. (1983). The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200-1304. London: Longman. Franklin, Simon, and Shepard, Jonathan. (1996). The Emergence of Rus 750-1200. London: Longman. Kaiser, Daniel H. (1980) The Growth of Law in Medieval Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Martin, Janet. (19
95). Medieval Russia 980-1584. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Poppe, Andrzej. (1982). The Rise of Christian Russia. London: Variorum Reprints. The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, tr. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. (1953). Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America. Shchapov, Yaroslav Nikolaevich. (1993). State and Church in Early Russia, Tenth-Thirteenth Centuries. New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas. Vernadsky, George. (1948). Kievan Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
JANET MARTIN
KIPCHAKS See POLOVTSY.
KIREYEVSKY, IVAN VASILIEVICH
(1806-1856), the most important ideologist of Russian Slavophilism, along with Alexei Khomyakov.
KIREYEVSKY, IVAN VASILIEVICH
The promulgation of Slavophilism in the middle third of the nineteenth century marked the turn from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to the fixation on national identity that has dominated much of Russian culture since that time. No life better suggests that crucial change in Russian cultural consciousness than Kireyevsky’s. He first ventured into publicism as the editor of a journal that he called The European. The journal appeared in 1830, but was suppressed by the government after only two issues, almost entirely on the basis of a fanciful reading of Kireyevsky’s important essay, The Nineteenth Century, in the inflamed atmosphere created by the European revolutions of that year. This traumatic event helped to end the Western orientation of Kireyevsky’s earlier career and led to a series of new relationships, which, taken together, constituted a conversion to romantic nationalism.
Kireyevsky’s childhood was spent in Moscow and on the family estate (Dolbino) in the vicinity of Tula and Orel, where the Kireyevsky family had been based since the sixteenth century. His father died of cholera during the French invasion of 1812, and he, his brother Peter, and their sisters were raised by their beautiful and intelligent mother, A. P. Elagina, who was the hostess of one of Moscow’s most influential salons during the 1830s and 1840s. The poet Vasily Zhukovsky, her close friend, played some role in Kireyevsky’s early education and he had at least a nodding acquaintance with other major figures in Russian culture, including Pushkin.
Kireyevsky studied with Moscow University professors in the 1820s, although he did not actually attend the university. There, under the influence of Professor Mikhail Grigorevich Pavlov, his interests shifted from enlightenment thinkers to the metaphysics of Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling. After graduation he became one of the so-called archive youth, to whom Pushkin refers in Eugene Onegin; he also frequented an informal grouping known as the Raich Circle, as well as a kind of inner circle drawn from it, called the Lovers of Wisdom (Ob-shchestvo Liubomudriya), devoted to romantic and esoteric knowledge.
After producing some literary criticism for the Moscow Messenger, Kireyevsky spent ten months in Germany, cultivating his new intellectual interest in German philosophy. He was entertained by Hegel in Berlin and attended some of Schelling’s lectures in Munich, but, like many a Russian traveler, he was homesick for Russia and returned earlier than he had planned. The outbreak of cholera in Moscow was the official reason for his hasty return.
After the fiasco of the European, Kireyevsky underwent an intellectual and spiritual crisis from which he emerged, at the end of the 1830s, a considerably changed man: married, converted to Orthodoxy, and purged of many Western aspects of his former outlook. His wife’s religiosity; his brother’s interest in Russian peasant culture, and his new friend Alexei Khomyakov’s belief in the superiority of Orthodox practice over the Western confessions all worked on him profoundly.
The immediate catalyst for the first Slavophile writings, however, was the famous “First Philosophical Letter” of Peter Chaadayev, which appeared in a Moscow journal in 1836. Chaadayev famously found Russia’s past and present stagnant, sterile, and ahistorical, largely because Russia had severed itself from the Roman and Catholic West. The discussion between Kireyevsky, Khomyakov, and their younger followers over the next several decades constituted a collective “answer to Chaa-dayev.” Orthodox Christianity, according to the Slavophiles, actually benefited from its separation from pagan and Christian Rome. Orthodoxy had been spared the rationalism and legalism which had been taken into the Roman Catholic Church, from Aristotle, through Roman legalism, to scholasticism and Papal hierarchy. Russian society had thus been able to develop harmoniously and communally. Although, since Peter the Great, the Russian elite had been seduced by the external power and glamor of secular Europe, the Russian peasants had preserved much of the old, pre-Petrine Russian culture in their social forms, especially in the peasant communal structure. Kireyevsky and the other Slavophiles hoped that these popular survivals, combined with an Orthodox revival in the present, could restore Russian culture to its proper bases. Kireyevsky expressed these ideas in a series of shortlived journals, which appeared under the editorship of various Slavophile individuals and groups. The Slavophile sketch of the patrimonial and traditional monarchy of the pre-Petrine period is largely fanciful, as is that of the social and political life dominated by a variety of communal forms, but such sketches constituted a highly effective indirect attack on the Russia of Nicholas I and on the development of European industrialism. Kireyevsky’s Slavophilism, with its curious blend of traditionalism, libertarianism, and communalism, has left unmistakable marks on virtually all variants of Russian nationalism and social romanticism since
KIRILL-BELOOZERO MONASTERY
his time. Although his written legacy was limited to a few articles, Ivan Kireyevsky was the philosopher of Slavophilism, just as Khomyakov was its theologian. See also: KHOMYAKOV, ALEXEI STEPANOVICH; SLAVOPHILES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Christoff, Peter. (1972). An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism: A Study in Ideas, Vol. 2: I. V. Kireevsky. The Hague: Mouton. Gleason, Abbott. (1972). European and Muscovite: Ivan Kireevsky and the Origins of Slavophilism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1975). The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought. Oxford: Clarendon.
ABBOTT GLEASON
KIRILL-BELOOZERO MONASTERY
The Kirill-Beloozero Monastery was founded in 1397 in the far Russian north as a hermitage dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin. Its founder was Cyril of Belozersk, conversant of Sergius of Radonezh, hesychast (mystical hermit), and former abbot of Simonov Monastery. It rapidly gained brethren, land, and renown. At Cyril’s death in 1427, its patron was the prince of Belozersk-Mozhaisk, and its titular head was the Archbishop of Rostov, to whom Kirillov was administratively subordinated by 1478.
Social and administrative reforms occurred under Abbot Trifon, who lived from about 1434 to about 1517. Trifon was a monk of the Athos-linked St. Savior Monastery on the Rock, and later became Archbishop of Rostov (1462-1467). At this point the monastery gained the name “Kirillov” and, probably, its strict cenobitic (communal-disciplinarian) rule. It entered a relationship with the Moscow authorities. During the civil wars, Trifon loosed Basil II from his cross oath to Dmitry Shemyaka (1446); Cyril was canonized in 1448 and his vita (life) was written by Pachomius the Logothete in 1462. Tri-fon’s successor and fellow St. Savior monk, Abbot Cassian, who lived from about 1447 until about 1469, went on a Moscow embassy to the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople.
During Trifon’s abbacy, a Byzantine-influenced school flourished, where basic texts of grammar, logic, cosmology, and history circulated. Its legacy was a bibliographical trend whose representatives (such as Efrosin, fl. 1463-1491) compiled and catalogued much of the literary inheritance of Bulgaria, Kievan Rus, and Serbia, and edited important works of Muscovite literature (such as the epic Zadonshchina) and chronography (the First Sophia Chronicle). Kirillov’s great library (1,304 books by 1621) has survived almost intact.
From 1484 to 1514, Kirillov was a focal point for the Non-Possessors, abbots and monks- including Gury Tushin, Nilus Sorsky, and Vassian Patrikeev-who rejected monastic estates and promoted hesychast
ideals of mental prayer and her-mitism. After 1515, Kirillov followed the Possessor trend, whose first leader, Joseph of Volok, had praised the cenobitic discipline of several of its early abbots. Kirillov’s sixteenth-century abbots achieved high rank, such as Afanasy (1539-1551), later bishop of Suzdal, whom Andrew Kurbsky called “silver-loving,” and from 1530 to 1570 their land-holdings expanded terrifically (at mid-seventeenth century Kirillov was the fifth-largest landowner in Muscovy).
Attracting wealth, privileges, and pilgrims from the central government as well as the boyar aristocracy, Kirillov lost self-governance to Moscow. Ivan IV, whose birth was ascribed to St. Cyril’s intervention and who expressed a wish to join Kir-illov’s brethren in 1567, took over its administration, lecturing its abbot and boyar monks (such as Ivan-Jonah Sheremetev) on piety in a letter of 1573. (Boris Godunov later selected Kirillov’s abbot, and the False Dmitry chose its monks.) By the mid-sixteenth century, Kirillov had become fiscally subject to the bishop of Vologda, and by century’s end to the patriarch.
In the 1590s Kirillov was transformed from a cultural center into a fortress, with stone towers and walls that withstood Polish-Lithuanian attacks during the Time of Troubles. Its infirmary treated monks and laymen, and its icon-painting and stonemasonry workshops sold their wares to Muscovites. Kirillov was also used as a prison. Its most illustrious detainee, Patriarch Nikon, was held in solitary confinement from 1676 to 1681 without access to his library, paper, or ink.
From the eighteenth century, Kirillov lost its military importance, and an economic and spiritual decline began. It was closed by Soviet authorities in 1924 and transformed into a museum. In 1998 monastic life at Kirillov was partly restored.
KIRIYENKO, SERGEI VLADILENOVICH
See also: CAVES MONASTERY; SIMONOV MONASTERY; TRINITY ST. SERGIUS MONASTERY
