The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Some of the most memorable figures depicted in the frescoes are the prophets and warrior krng amp;of the Old Testament. The very severity of their stylized, Byzantine presentation makes the compassionate figure of Mary

  ‹ccm a unique and welcome source of relief and deliverance. She was the protectress of Kiev and Novgorod as she had been of Constantinople. Russians were singing hymns to her presanctified state and dedicating • lunches to her assumption into heaven well before Western Christendom. She alone brought respite from damnation in the famous apocryphal tale of "Trie Virgin's Visit to Hell," which was brought from Byzantium in the twelfth century to new and enduring popularity in Russia.31 For the love of departed sinners, she had descended into the Inferno to win them annual i ? lease from their suffering during the period from Holy Thursday to

  I'rntecost.

  Much of the mythology that had gathered about the holy cities of curlier civilizations was transferred to Kiev and Novgorod; and the lore of ancient shrines and monasteries, to the new ones of the Orthodox Eastern Slavs. The legend that the apostle Andrew had brought Christianity directly to Kiev just as Peter had to Rortie was taken over from Constantinople. I egends resembling those about the catacombs at Rome were developed w amiujdjthe caves of Kiev, and the idea subtly grew that Kiev might be a "second Jerusalem."32

  TEe unity of Kievan Russia was above all that of a common religious fuilh. The forms of faith and worship were almost the only uniformities in this loosely structured civilization. Such economic strength and political cohesion as had existed began to break down with the internecine strife of the late twelfth century, the Latin occupation of Contantinople in 1204, and ihc subsequent assaults almost simultaneously launched against the Eastern Shivs by the Mongols from the east and the Teutonic Knights from the.west. The Mongols, who sacked Kiev in 1240, proved the more formidable Inc. They prowled at will across the exposed steppe, interdicted the lucrative river routes to the south, and left the "mother of Russian cities" in a state of continuing insecurity. Cultural independence and local self-government were maintained only by regular payment of tribute to the Mongol khan, Unlike the Islamic Arabs, who had brought Greek science and philosophy with (hem when they extended their power into the Christian world, the nomadic pagans of Genghis and Batu Khan brought almost nothing of intellectual or artistic worth. The clearest cultural legacy of the Mongols lay in the military and administrative sphere. Mongol terms for money and weapons filtered into the Russian language; and new habits of petitioning rulers through a form of prostration attd kowtow known as chelobitnaia (literally, "beating the forehead") were also taken over.83

  The period of Mongol domination-roughly from 1240 until the termination of tribute m 1480-was not so mucn one of "Oriental des-

  »i Viii -1I-.

  potism^34 as of decentralized localism among the Orthodox Eastern Slavs. This "appanage period" of Russian history was one of those when, in Spengler's words,

  . . . high history lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, clinging to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timefess village," the "eternal" peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in mother earth-a busy, not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows. . . . Men live from hand to mouth with petty thrifts and petty fortunes and endure. . . . Masses are trampled on, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on.35

  The "high history" of the period was that of warrior princes from the east whose enervating straggles further fit Spengler's characterization of "a drama noble in its aimlessness . . . like the course of the stars … the alternance of land and sea."36

  Like the Kievan princes before them, the Mongol conquerors adopted a religion (Islam), established a capital on the lower reaches of a great river (Sarai on the Volga), were initially weakened more by a new conqueror from the east (Tamerlane) than by virtually simultaneous assaults from the west (the Muscovite victory at Kulikovo in 1380), and were plagued by inner fragmentation» The khanate of Kypchak, or "Golden Horde," was but one of several dependent states within the far-flung empire of Genghis Khan; it was a racially conglomerate and ideologically permissive realm which gradually disintegrated in the course of the fifteenth century, becoming less important politically than its own "appanages": the separate Tatar khanates in the Crimea, on the upper Volga aTKazan, and at Astrakhan, the Caspian mouth of the Volga. Cunning diplomacy and daring raids enabled the Crimean Tatars and other lesser Tatar groups to maintain militarily menacing positions in the southern parts of European Russia until late in the

  .- » ¦ , ¦""'¦"¦ t..«-»^a^» «»«a«iu' »«¦ ' "**

  eighteenth century.

  The real importance of the Tatars' protracted presence in the Eastern European steppelands lies not so much in their direct influence on Russian culture as in their indirect role in providing the Orthodox Eastern Slavs with a common enemy against whom they could unite and rediscover a sense of common purpose. Slowly but irresistibly, the Eastern Slavs emerged from the humiliation and fragmentation of the Mongol period to expand their power eastward-beyond the former realm of the Golden Horde, beyond that of the so-called"Bliie*H6'f3e^Ton meliTeppes of Central Asia, on to the Pacific? To understand how Russia emerged from its "dark ages" to such triumphant accomplishment, one must not look primarily either to Byzantium or to the Mongols: the Golden Horn or the Golden Horde. One must

  Itn.k Hither to the "primitive fertility" which began to, bring, an agricultural. •tu plus and a measure of prosperity; and, even more important, to "the ,. 1 unuilaiion of spiritual energies during long silence"37 in the monasteries kimI ItVth'c accumulation of political power by the new city which rosejo.

  dominate this region: Moscow.

  2. The Forest

  Ihe most important immediate consequence for Russia of the Mongol sweep across the Eurasian steppe in the thirteenth century was that the once-outlying forest regions of the north now became the main center of an j independent Orthodox culture. What the change of geographical focus from the central Dnieper to the upper Volga really meant can never be precisely ascertained. Pitifully few documentary or archeological materials have survived the fights, frosts, and fires of the north. Cultural historians are inclined to stress continuities with the Kievan age, pointing out that the principal cities of the northeast--Vladimir, Suzdal, Riazan, Rostov, and Yaroslavl- were almost as old as Kiev; that Vladimir had been the ruling seat of the leading Kievan princes for many years prior to the sack of Kiev; and that Novgorod, the second city of Kievan times, remained free of Mongol invasions and provided continuity with its steadily increasing prosperity. The characters, events, and artistic forms of Kievan times dominated the chronicles and epics "which assumed their final shape in the creative memory of the Russian north."1 The ritualized forms of art and worshipjmd the peculiar sensitivity to beauty and history-all remained constant features of Russian culture" ~

  Yet profound, if subtle, changes accompanied the transfer of power to the upper Volga: the coldest and most remote frontieFregion oTEyzantine-Slavic civilization. This region was increasingly cut off not just from declining Byzantium but also from a resurgent West, which was just rediscovering Greekr'phito5oph7~fflid~KinaffigTtF^M~lMv^ffie^"TTie mention of Russia that had been sd~E«cjuent'"iri early medieval French literature vanished altogether in the course of the fourteenth century.2 Russian no less than Western European writers realized that the Orthodox Eastern Slavs now comprised a congeries of principalities rather than a single political force. The chroniclers in the Russian north sensed that they

  •?- somewhat cut off, using the term "Rus'" primarily for the old jHilllico-cultural center on the Dnieper around Kiev.3

  ? sense of separation within the domain of the Eastern Slavs had llfeady been suggested by the tenth-century Byzantine distinction between ? u" and "distant" Rus'; and in the thirteenth century the distinction I •• i ween "great" Russia in the north and "little" Russia in the south was gi initially tr
ansplanted from Byzantium to Russia. What apparently began in 11 pure description of size eventually became a favored pseudo-imperial di ilgnation in the north. Individual towns like Novgorod and Rostov called llirmselves~**tfe"G¥eat." Details of the life of Alexander the Great-a favorite subject in the epic literature of the East-were blended by the chroniclers of the Russian north into the idealized life of Alexander Nrvsky4-whose victory over the Swedes in 1240 and the Teutonic Knights two years later was followed by a reign as Great Prince of Vladimir. His victorious exploits helped compensate for the simultaneous humiliation at the hands of the Mongols and made him seem no less "great" than the ruiier Alexander. By the late fifteenth century, Ivan III had brought great-BMI out of legend and into reality, subordinating most of the major cities of ihe Russian north to Moscow. The first grand duke of Muscovy to call himself tsar (Caesar), he also became the first of several imperial con-• |iicTors of modern Russia to be known as "the Great."

  There was, however, nothing great, or even impressive, about Great Russia in the thirteenth and the early fourteenth century. It must have Mimed highly unlikely that the Eastern Slavs in the bleak Volga-Oka region would in any way recapture-let alone surpass-the glories of the Kievan past. Kiev and the original region of Rus' along the Dnieper had been despoiled by the still-menacing Mongols. The Volga was frozen for much ni ihe year and blocked to the south by Mongol fortresses. Flat terrain and wooden"fortifications offered little natural protection from eastern invaders. Shivic co-religioniststo"the west were preoccupied with other problems. To

  IIic northwest, Novgorod had carved out an economic empire of its own and

  moved increasingly into the orbit of the expanding Hanseatic League.

  Further north, the rugged Finns were being converted to Christianity, not

  by Ihe once-active Orthodox missionaries of Novgorod and Ladoga, but by

  1 Ik- Westernized Swedes. Directly to the west, the Teutonic and Livonian

  knights provided a continuing military threat; while Galicia and Volhynia

  IIIthe southwest were drifting into alignment with the Roman Church. Most

  of what is now White (or West) Russia was loosely ruled by the Lithuanians,

  anil much of Little Russia (or the Ukraine) by the Poles. These two

  western neighbors were, moreover, moving toward an alliance that was

  sealed by marriage and the establishment of the Jagellonian dynasty in 1386.

  The surviving centers of Byzantine-Kievan civilization in Great Russia were relatively isolated from these alien forces. As a result, it is difficult to explain the changes in Russian cultural life that accompanied the move from "little" to "great" Russia simply in terms of new contact with other civilizations. There was, to be sure, increased borrowing from the Tatars and from pre-Christian pagan animism in the north. But there are great risks in suggesting that either of these elements provides some simple "key" to the understanding of Russian character. The famed aphorism "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar" and the ingenious hypothesis that there was in Russia an enduring dvoeverie (or duality of belief between official Christianity and popular paganism) tell us more about the patronizing attitude of Western observers and the romantic imagination of Russian ethnographers respectively than about Russian reality as such.

  Of these two theories, that of continuing animistic influences takes us

  perhaps deeper into the formative processes of Russian thought.5 The Tatars

  provided a fairly clear-cut imaginative symbol for the people arid an

  administrative example for the leaders, but were an external force whose

  contact with the Russian people was largely episodic or indirect. Pre-

  existent j›agan practices, on the other hand, were a continuing force,

  ' absorbed from within"by broad segments of the populace and reflecting a

  ? direct response to inescapable natural forces. If the fragmentary surviving

  '; materials cannot prove any coherent, continuing pagan tradition, there can

  no doubt that the cold, dark environment of Great Russia played a

  decisive role in the culture which slowly emerged from these, the silent

  centuries of Russian history. As in the other wooded regions of Northern

  Europe-Scandinavia, Prussia, and Lithuania-brooding pagan naturalism

  seemed to stand in periodic opposition to a Christianity that had been

  brought in relatively late from more sunlit southerly regions. Far more,

  however, than her forest neighbors to the west, Great "Russia thrust

  monasteries forth into the wooded wastes during the fourteenth and fifteenth

  centuries. Thus, in Great Russia, there was not so much a duality of belief as

  a continuing influx of primitive animism into an ever-expanding Christian

  culture.

  The animistic feeling for nature blended harmoniously with an Orthodox sense of history in the springtime festival of Easter, which acquired a special intensity in the Russian north. The traditional Easter greeting was not the bland "Happy Easter" of the modern West, but a direct affirmation of the central fact of sacred history, "Christ is risen!"' The standard answer "In truth, risen!" seemed to apply to nature as well as man;

  fin ihc resurrection feast came at the end not just of the long Lenten fast, hill nl iliu dark, cold winter. Easter sermons were among the most carefully I'M rived and frequently recopied documents from the Kievan period. To 1I1. ? Uy/antine elegance was added in the north the simple assertion that ilir goodness hidden in the hearts of the holy shall be revealed in their risen I'i.'Iiis" just as trees long veiled in snow "put out their leaves in the iptlng.""

  I lie weakening of central authority and the presence of new enemies- 1 Hi natural and human-forced a deepening of family and communal

  1Is within the widely scattered communities of the Russian north.

  Vlilhority in most areas was naturally invested in "elders" and exercised through extended family relationships. Within.,Jhe Christian name of each Kiissiiiu is included even today the name of his father. The prevailing 1 1 i;tu worJsToF^cSnfifry" andwpeoplevr*have the~same root as "birth"; native land" and "land ownership," the same as "father."7 The individual h id in subordinate himself to group interests to accomplish his daily tasks: tin* communal clearing of land, building of fortifications and churches, and • hunting of group prayers and offices. Later attempts to find in the "Russian »uiil" an innate strtving""toward communality {sobornost') and "family happiness" may often represent little more than romantic flights from l'ir i-iil realities. But the practical necessity for communal action is hard to deny for the early period; and already in the fourteenth century the word "communal" (sobornaid) apparently began to be substituted for the word "1 ntholic" (kafolicheskaia) in the Slavic version of the Nicene Creed.s

  For better or worse, the sense of sharing experience almost as members "I .1 common family was an Important element in forming the cultural tradi-1114i ol modern Russia. Intensified by common suffering and glorified memo-rlcit of Kievan times, this feeling was perhaps even deeper in the interior Hi.in in the more prosperous and cosmopolitan centers of Novgorod, Smolensk, and Polotskto ffie west.It was in this inner region that the cult of iln Mother of GolTwai~c!evSI6ped with the greatest intensity. Feasts like thai of the intercession (Pokrov) of the Virgin-unknown to Kiev-were liitioduced in this region; and a cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of iln Virgin (Uspensky Sobor) enjoyed in Vladimir and Moscow the central role played by the more purely Byzantine Santa Sophia in Kiev and Novgorod. Although this cult of the Virgin was also growing concurrently m Byzantium and even in the West, it appears to have generated a special primitive intensity and sense of familial intimacy in the Russian interior.

  Within the family the mother seems to have been the binding force. in a society whose riclrandlmaginative epic literature contains few refer-1 in cs to romantic love and no idealized pair of lovers, the mother tended tor />
  become an unusually important focus of reverence and affection.9 If the father's role in the family was likened in the household guide of the mid-sixteenth century (Domostroy) to that of the head of a monastery, the mother's role might well have been compared to that of its saint or spiritual "elder." She was a kind of living version of the omnipresent icons of the "Mother of God"-the "joy of all sorrows" and "lady of loving kindness," as the Russians were particularly prone to call Mary. Men monopolized the active conduct of war and affairs, whereas women cultivated the passive spiritual virtues of endurance and healing love. Women quietly encouraged the trend in Russian spirituality which glorified non-resistance to evil and voluntary suffering, as if in compensation for the militant official ethos of the men. Women played a decisive role in launching and keeping alive the last passionate effort to preserve the organic religious civilization of medieval Russia: the famed Old Believer movement of the seventeenth century.10 Even in later years great emphasis was placed on the strong mother figure, who bears up under suffering to hold the family together; and to the grandmother (babushka), who passes on to the next generation the mixture of faith and folklore, piety and proverb, that comprised Russian popular culture.11 Russia itself came to be thought of less as a geographical or political entity than as a common mother (matushka) and its ruler less as prince or lawmaker than a common father (batiushka). The term "Russian land" was feminine both in gender and allegorical significance, related to the older pagan cult of a "damp mother earth" among the pre-Christian Eastern Slavs.