The Emergence of Rus 750-1200, by Franklin & Shepard
Axiomatic that Kiev-based polity was and is the proper yardstick by which success and failure, or virtue and skulduggery, are to be measured
Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard wrote:
INTRODUCTION
This book is and is not an account of the emergence of a thing called Russia. The further we pursue the thing into the past, the more misleading our modern vocabulary becomes. Only in nationalist fantasy can the word ‘Russia’ stand for a kind of Platonic form, immanent even when invisible, constant in essence though variable in its historical embodiments. If we picture Russia as a state with its focus of power in Moscow or St Petersburg, or as an area inhabited mainly by people who think of themselves as Russians – if, that is, our notion of Russia is coloured by current political or ethno-cultural geography – then most of this book is not about Russia at all, or at least not about Russia alone. Instead it is about russia in the original Latin sense: about a land ruled by people known as the Rus (pronounced rooss). The story of the land of the Rus could continue in one direction towards modern Russia, or in other directions towards, eventually, Ukraine or Belarus. The land of the Rus is none of these, or else it is a shared predecessor of all three. Modern state boundaries are irrelevant here, as are the distinctions between modern national identities. So as not to confuse the main plot with its divergent sequels, the subject is labelled ‘Russia’ neither in the title nor in the text.
Who were the Rus and what was their land? Visitors at different times would have produced dramatically different answers. Around the turn of the ninth century the Rus were barely visible: small bands of traders trekking along the rivers through the dense and sparsely populated northern forests between the Baltic and the Middle Volga, lured towards the silver of the east; faint specks on a vast landscape; transient Scandinavians among Finno-Ugrian tribes. Returning after a couple of centuries the visitor would have found the Rus firmly established in thriving fortified cities, fattened with trade and tribute; but based in a new place, hundreds of miles to the south, on the Middle Dnieper, near the frontiers of the steppes; speaking a new language, since significant numbers of the Scandinavian Rus had become assimilated to the Slavs among whom they had settled; and promoting a new culture, for their rulers had accepted Christianity, the faith of the ‘Greeks’ (i.e. of the Byzantines). Two centuries more, and the lands of the Rus stretched from the Carpathians almost to within sight of the Urals: centres of wealth and power had proliferated across a network of territories in many respects diverse, but lent coherence (if not always cohesion) through sharing a single dominant dynasty, a single dominant language and a single dominant faith.
These are large changes. The Rus and their lands are, so to speak, moving targets. The first task is to track the changes in sequence, to construct a framework of political or geopolitical narrative. The second and concurrent task, more interesting and important, is to explore the texture of change, the interlinked transformations in economic, social and cultural life which give substance and sense to the plain political chronology. The Rus therefore provide a convenient peg, but the theme of this book is not so much the people as the processes in which they participated.
To drape a history of the period around a history of the Rus is an old device. It was used by the Kievan compiler of the earliest surviving large-scale native narrative, the Povest’ vremennykh let, literally the ‘Tale of the Years of Time’, better known as the Primary Chronicle, which seeks to relate ‘whence the land of the Rus came into being’ and ‘who first began to be prince in it’. The Primary Chronicle is an immensely rich and colourful source, lively and varied, ambitious and informative. Nobody now would accept it as precise or adequate ‘fact’: the extant manuscripts date from much later than the work itself, the compiler was far removed from all but the most recent of the events described, his own sources of information were patchy and tendentious, and the whole was shaped to fit the political morality of a section of the Kievan elite in the early twelfth century. Yet despite the continual emergence of new material, and of new kinds of historical inquiry, the chronicle has in many ways proved remarkably resilient. Its uses are adapted rather than diminished, and the old device – to explore the age through an account of ‘whence the land of the Rus came into being’ – can still be effective in serving new purposes.
Over the past few decades specialized auxiliary studies have moved far ahead of general syntheses. There have been regional histories, economic histories, urban histories, church histories, social analyses, legal and diplomatic histories, textual reconstructions and deconstructions, theoretical ruminations, cultural interpretations and evaluations, plus enormously productive archaeological excavations. Yet there have been few attempts to draw the themes together, to reconsider the entire period, to re-integrate the particulars into a thorough reassessment of the whole: no extensive monograph in English for 50 years, and surprisingly little of the requisite scope even in Russian or Ukrainian. The gap that this book aims to fill is therefore not entirely parochial. While our main brief is to introduce the period to those who know little about it, the fresh synthesis may also be of some use to those who already know quite a lot.
‘The period’ is a chronological abstraction, to which historians try to give shape. Shape is inevitably a product of hindsight: one picks the beginning which fits the end. The Rus of the early ninth century would be a very minor footnote were it not for the Rus of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Nevertheless, to focus on a particular people (the Rus) as narrative device remains justifiable, so long as one remembers that the end is not necessarily implicit in the beginning. But the Primary Chronicle employs another shaping device which has proved equally durable, although in more recent retrospect it ought to be more questionable. This is its focus on a particular place: on the city of Kiev. Political assessments of ‘the period’ take as almost axiomatic the view that the Kiev-based polity of the eleventh century – preferably ruled by a monarch – was and is the proper yardstick by which success and failure, or virtue and skulduggery, are to be measured; that it was the necessary culmination of all that went before and the proper aspiration for all that followed afterwards. Hence the catch-all label ‘Kievan Rus’ (or ‘Kievan Russia’) – not, as it happens, a medieval term – frequently applied to the entire span of some 400 years from the legendary origins of the ruling dynasty to the Mongol conquests of 1237–41. Hence also, from a ‘Great Russian’ perspective, the common division of Russian history into three parts, as a tale of three cities: Kiev, Moscow, St Petersburg.
The city of Kiev was enormously important to the economic, political and cultural life of the Rus, and must figure prominently in any narrative or analysis. The problem with using Kiev as an emblem for the period is that the story of the land(s) of the Rus and the story of the Kievan Rus are different: though they overlap significantly in the middle, they do not coincide either at the beginning or at the end. An acceptance of normative, kievocentric values has led historians from the twelfth century to the twentieth to shape the politics of the period in terms of rise and fall, triumph and decline: first the prehistory of Kievan dominance, then the Golden Age, then political decay and the erosion of Kievan authority. But this leads to a paradox: the time of Kiev’s political ‘decline’ was also a time of economic and cultural expansion for the Rus as a whole. If one abandons the Kiev-based, centralist schema, then there was no rise and fall, but rather a rise and rise, a continual growth and expansion. The paradox disappears: the lands of the Rus flourished economically and culturally not in spite of political decay but in part because of political flexibility.
The adaptability of the Rus is a leitmotif throughout the present book. We do not see the Rus at any stage as implementing a single grand plan or as operating according to a fixed system. They explored and exploited opportunities, improvised, probed for alternatives. They adapted and modified their own conventions, both in order to initiate change and, increasingly, in order to cope with its effects: in order to stay abreast of the social and political consequences of their own economic and territorial success. It was a kind of success that implied continual ‘failures’: false starts, paths tried and abandoned. Such ‘failures’ are as necessary to an explanation of the ‘rise’ as they are deceptive as an indication of a ‘decline’. The dynamic adaptability of the Rus should be obvious even from the brief summary of their transmutations. But in the writing of their history it has tended to be overshadowed by schematic structures, whether of medieval providentialism, or of Soviet determinism, or of nostalgic nationalism.
To stress that the Rus were flexible is not, of course, to argue that change was random or amorphous. Rather the opposite: it is simply to emphasize that patterns of political behaviour among the Rus were closely tied to shifting patterns of circumstance and development around them. …
… We have concentrated more on the variables than on the constants, more on processes than on events, more on the dynamics of change than on the description of routine. The result is elitist, in that we devote relatively little space to what most of the people through most of the lands were doing most of the time. Worse still, we virtually ignore the huge quantities of scholarly debate as to the precise status of various groups among the rural population, or on the precise meanings of social terminology relating to dependent or semi-dependent or semi-free categories of people: when or where or whether one might or might not detect what features of what stage of feudalism, or of the predominance of slave-ownership, or of democracy. Indeed, most of our remarks on social structures are deliberately approximate. For this we are only slightly apologetic, since the majority of the debates lie on the wrong side of the line between hypothesis and guesswork. Systematic reconstructions, so high on the agenda for Soviet historians, tend to push the available evidence a long way beyond what it can persuasively be made to show; which is why different historians have been able to produce radically different versions of the most basic sets of social relationships.
Other conventionally major questions likewise loom small. In setting priorities we have been acutely aware of Ševčenko’s Law of the Dog and the Forest. A dog approaches a virgin forest, goes up to a tree, and does what dogs do against trees. The tree is chosen at random. It is neither more nor less significant than any other tree. Yet one may reasonably predict that future dogs approaching the same forest will focus their own attentions on that particular tree. Such is often the case in scholarship: the scent of an argument on one issue draws scholars into more arguments on the same issue. We have not felt obliged to linger at all the traditional landmarks.
Not that we imagine our own agenda to be in every respect beyond question. In a field where evidence is notoriously sparse even by normal medieval standards, the very simplest facts are often extremely fragile. The modern criterion of forensic proof – beyond reasonable doubt – can rarely be applied. There are only grades of hypothesis, from the almost certain to the probable to the plausible to the just conceivable. For purists, all statements should be recast as investigations, and narrative should dissolve into source-annotation. As far as possible we attempt to convey the flavour of the evidence, but in a single volume it is not practicable to remain constantly in the investigative mode or to spend much time discussing the received opinions. Where there is a legacy of major dispute, notes can guide readers towards it. However, we cannot requisition extra space so as to justify or qualify in detail every judgement which may happen not to coincide with received opinion. To do so would be to distort the balance of narrative by making a fetish of innovation; and to repeat the word ‘perhaps’ every other sentence would be tedious. However responsible one may try to be, no account of the Rus is definitive. …
CHAPTER TEN [final chapter]
Prospect and Retrospect: 1185 and After
Hear, you princes who oppose your elder brethren and stir up war and incite the pagans against your brethren - lest God should reprove you at the Last Judgement - how saints Boris and Gleb endured from their brother not only the taking away of their domains but also the taking away of their lives. Yet you cannot endure even one word from your brother, and for the merest slight you stir up mortal enmity and receive aid from the pagans against your brethren.
All you grandsons of Iaroslav and Vseslav! Lower your banners now and sheathe your blemished swords! For you have relinquished the glory of your grandfathers! In your seditiousness you began to incite the pagans against the land of the Rus. Violence from the land of the Polovtsy came about because of [your] strife.
These and other such laments over the decline of the dynastic ethos around the turn of the thirteenth century - these nostalgic dirges over the decay of former glories - still resonate through much historical writing. The nostalgia stems from a double illusion. The first illusion relates to the writers’ past: there had never been a Golden Age when brother had cooperated with brother throughout the lands, or when at least some princes had not tried to recruit outside help to put pressure on their kin. … The second illusion relates to the writers’ present. A glance around the regions in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries shows that the pattern of growth was being maintained. …
… Kiev remained immensely wealthy. Even its political succession became for a while quite stable. The literary laments emerge out of the occasional anxieties in the south. Yet their nostalgia has turned out to be remarkably infectious over the centuries, as historians have lingered on the themes of disunity, decline and internecine strife. The themes have gained poignancy in hindsight because of the knowledge, not shared by the Rus, that the Mongols were soon to attack. Modern laments come in several varieties: out of a general sense that well-run states ought to progress towards monarchy, or at least towards an integrated administration and a coordinated foreign policy; or out of pragmatic calculations as to the military and economic cost of division in the dynasty. The lands of the Rus were ‘afflicted by the decay of feudal disunity’, which led to ‘catastrophic’ disintegration; they were ‘enfeebled by lack of unity’, and their military capacity was ‘exhausted by internecine war’.
None of this is persuasive. In the first place, there is no evidence whatever that dynastic rivalry was harmful either to economic growth or to the princes’ capacity to recruit. Rather the opposite was the case: dynastic flexibility, in which rivalry was a constant and probably essential component, was a positive advantage in the exploration and exploitation of new opportunities. If it had been otherwise, then two centuries of sustained expansion - first on the Middle Dnieper, then around the regions - would be inexplicable. Secondly, to lay an eleventh-century political template on late twelfth-century affairs, though tempting and understandable even for contemporaries, leads to distortion. … Thirdly, if the criterion for success is the ability to keep outsiders in check, then the family’s conventional practice of forming ad hoc partial alliances proved perfectly adequate for all known contingencies, perhaps with the sole exception of Galich in the 1210s and 1220s. Indeed the record on this score was rather better in the twelfth century than in the eleventh: the only occasion on which Kiev itself had actually been occupied by outsiders was, as we recall, in the eleventh century.
It may be comforting to imagine that the Rus would have repelled the Mongols if only they had behaved in the manner of their grandfathers. But the Rus, for good reason, had not abandoned their traditional ways. The problem was that the Mongols were a non-traditional enemy. Ultimately there is little point in looking for specific local reasons for the defeat by the Mongols, since Mongol victories were not just a local phenomenon. The Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century showed themselves capable of defeating anyone from China to Croatia. Their successes cannot be ascribed merely to routine squabbling among the princes of the Rus.
So much for the decline and decay. The issue of ‘disunity’ is more serious, for it affects the basic terms in which the lands of the Rus can be described and conceived. Should we be talking of an entity, or of a plurality? Of ‘it’ or of ‘them’ ? The obvious answer is: both, depending on the criteria one chooses to apply. On the one hand there was no unitary ‘state’ by any reasonable definition. Galich, Chernigov, Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma and the rest looked after most of their internal affairs and external relations without necessary reference to one another, except when forming alliances based on self-interest.
There was no fixed hierarchy of power, no central structure of administration, no institutional atrophy to stunt local economic initiatives. On the other hand there were clearly affinities between the dynastic lands which set them apart - collectively - from their neighbours.
However, to announce the obvious is not yet to solve the problem. In modern historical writings a great deal of effort and thought has been spent on trying to find more precise terms, on trying to transpose the lands of the Rus into a conceptual framework which can accommodate both their affinities and their diffuseness, both entity and plurality. The terminology is usually taken from other times and other places. Such definitions by analogy can be useful and suggestive in a study of comparative history, but as labels in context they tend to obscure as much as they reveal. For example, many would like the lands of the Rus to be a ‘federation’, but even the most distinguished proponent of the term, Vasilii Kliuchevskii, spent less time justifying it than pointing out its inaccuracy. For Soviet historians in particular, the transposition of the Rus onto a standard historiographical grid was of paramount importance. The eventual consensus was that the original ‘Kievan State’ underwent a process of ‘feudal disintegration’ characterized by the emergence of vassalage and fiefs. Debate then focused on the subsidiary issues of when and how which ‘stage’ of feudalism was reached. …
… While not banning extraneous vocabulary, we have for the most part preferred not to push the Rus into any fixed conceptual model derived from elsewhere. However, one fundamental point seems to emerge from almost all accounts of the period, regardless of the specific terms in which it is conceived: virtually all seem to agree that in the eleventh century (give or take a decade or three) there was relative unity (or a unity of relatives), which over the course of the twelfth century broke up into a relative plurality. This standard picture has from time to time been recoated in different colours, but the basic shape tends to remain the same. Indeed, if one is constructing a linear political narrative, no other shape seems possible. However, the consensus is in important respects misleading and should be revised.
In the first place, the dynasty’s propensity for unity and cooperation and centralization was certainly no greater in the eleventh century than in the twelfth or thirteenth. There just happened to be fewer members of the family, who ‘sat’ in far fewer towns feeding off a less dense spider’s-web of routes, and whose culture of legitimacy was shared by a far narrower band of the population: a golden age of unity only in its relative simplicity. Even then the linear narrative is more strained than the kievocentric ideologues tended to allow: strained, for example, by Sviatoslav’s attempted relocation to the Danube in 969-71, or by Mstislav’s Chernigov in the 1020s and 1030s, or throughout the eleventh century by Polotsk. The difference which emerged over the twelfth century was not so much in substance as in scale.
Secondly, the ways in which the lands of the Rus grew together are at least as significant as the ways in which they appear to have grown apart. Over the twelfth century the political ‘story’ becomes complex to the point of incoherence, but coalescence does not have to take place in straight lines. Integration - rather than disintegration - took place on several levels: through the development of regional economic zones linked by intricate trading networks; through the way in which the princes exploited the expanding economy and established themselves far more widely and densely across the territories which had previously been theirs in rhetoric and desire more than in tribute-gathering, church-building, troop-levying practicalities; through the seepage of the dominant culture - in all essentials a single dominant culture - from the urban elites of a few major cities out across the lands and down the social scale.
The earliest known native writers, in trying to locate and define themselves, devised a synthetic identity based on kinship, language and faith: the kinship of the Rus, the language of the Slavs, the faith of the ‘Greeks’ ; the legitimacy of a single dynasty (albeit with many branches), cultural expression in a single language (albeit with variants), spiritual authority and observance from a single source. By means of this characteristic synthesis the Rus elite distinguished insiders from outsiders, who they were from who they were not, ‘us’ from ‘them’. Far from being biown away by the passing political winds, these hopeful assertions became ever more widely and securely embedded as basic assumptions. The new regional loyalties incorporated, rather than displaced, the shared acceptance of a common dynasty, language and faith. By this measure, far more of the inhabitants of the lands of the Rus were far closer to a common identity in the late twelfth century than in any previous age. To revert to extraneous vocabulary: there was no ‘state’, but perhaps there were the beginnings of a nation. [END]
The Source:
Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750-1200, Routledge 1998, 2013
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