Chapter 5 The Keys to Kyiv

The term “Kyivan Rus’,” like “Byzantium,” is of later origin — contemporaries of those realms did not use these names. Nineteenth-century scholars came up with the name “Kyivan Rus’.” Today the term denotes the polity with its center in Kyiv that existed between the tenth and mid-thirteenth centuries, when it disintegrated under the onslaught of the Mongols.

Who is the legitimate heir to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’, and who holds the proverbial keys to Kyiv? These questions have preoccupied much of the historical writing about Rus’ for the last 250 years. Initially, the debate focused on the origins of the Rus’ princes — were they Scandinavians or Slavs? — and then, from the mid-nineteenth century, it broadened to include the Russo-Ukrainian contest for the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. The twentieth-century battle over the earthly remains of Yaroslav the Wise, whose rule the previous chapter discussed at length, highlights the intensity of that contest.

Yaroslav died on February 28, 1054, and was buried in the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which he had built. His earthly remains were placed in a white marble sarcophagus decorated with carvings of the Christian cross and Mediterranean plants, including palms, which were by no means native to Kyivan Rus’. According to one theory, the sarcophagus — a stone embodiment of Byzantine cultural imperialism — had once been the final resting place of a Byzantine notable but was brought to Kyiv either by marauding Vikings or by enterprising Greeks. The sarcophagus is still preserved in the cathedral, but the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1944, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn.

What could account for the transfer of Prince Yaroslav’s remains all the way to the Western Hemisphere? The answer has nothing to do with American cultural imperialism but is closely associated with the Ukrainian claim to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. Ukrainian clergymen leaving their homeland removed the relics so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army. Concern that if returned to Kyiv, they might end up in Russia explains enough the continuing refusal of the custodians of the Brooklyn church to discuss the issue of Yaroslav’s remains with representatives of the Ukrainian government.

Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.

Was Yaroslav a Russian or a Ukrainian ruler, or, if neither, then what could his “true” identity and that of his subjects possibly be? It is best to begin the discussion of these questions by focusing on the decades following his death. Yaroslav’s demise closed one era in the history of the Kyivan Rus’ — that of the consolidation of the realm — and opened another in which it followed in the footsteps of the Carolingian Empire. Less than a century after the death of its founder, Charlemagne (814), that empire disintegrated into a number of smaller states. The reasons for the decline and fall of the two empires were not very different. They included persistent problems of succession to the throne, struggles within the ruling dynasty, the rise of local political and economic centers, and inability to deal effectively with external threats and interventions.

Prince Yaroslav, wise man that he was, foresaw the troubles that would besiege his family after his demise. He probably remembered how long and bloody his own ascent to ultimate power had been. It began in 1015 with the death of his father, Volodymyr, and ended more than twenty years later, in 1036, when his brother Mstyslav, with whom he was forced to divide the realm, met his end. Between those two deaths there were many battles and conflicts, punctuated by the deaths of Yaroslav’s numerous brothers. Two of them, Borys and Hlib, were deprived of the Kyivan throne but attained sainthood instead and are celebrated today as martyred princes. Some historians suspect Yaroslav of arranging their murders. One way or another, closer to the end of his life, he apparently wanted to avoid fratricidal struggle among his sons.

According to the Primary Chronicle, Yaroslav left a will in which he divided his realm among his sons, giving each a principality of his own. The throne of Kyiv, which would come not only with Kyivan and Novgorodian lands but also with supreme power over the other princes, was to go to the eldest brother. The others would rule under his patronage and supervision in their separate realms. It was assumed that the Kyivan throne would pass from elder brothers to younger ones until one generation of princes died out. The new generation would start the cycle again, beginning with the eldest son of the eldest brother. Most scholars question the authenticity of Yaroslav’s will, but whether it existed or not, the text alleged to constitute such a will reflects the practice prevailing after Yaroslav’s death.

Yaroslav had five surviving sons, four of whom are mentioned in the “will.” Only three would taste supreme power after their father’s demise. The Kyivan throne went to the eldest surviving son, Iziaslav, but he shared power with two of his brothers, who ruled in Chernihiv and Pereiaslav, two cities in close proximity to Kyiv.

The term was not entirely new. It had appeared in Metropolitan Ilarion’s “Sermon on Law and Grace” and can thus be attributed to the times of Yaroslav the Wise. It attained its peak of popularity in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, when the triumvirs had already left the scene and their sons and nephews were trying to settle accounts between different branches of the family while fending off aggression from the south. Volodymyr Monomakh, a grandson of Yaroslav the Wise and the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachus, made a career of professing and manifesting loyalty to the Rus’ Land. A son of one of the triumvirs, he became the prince of Pereiaslav, a huge territory extending from the steppe borderlands in the south to the northeastern forests around Moscow settled by the rebellious tribe of Viatichians.

Monomakh’s main concern was not the Viatichians, who resisted Christianization and occasionally killed Kyivan monks sent to enlighten them, but increased nomadic activity on the southern border of the principality. The moment the Rus’ princes were able to curtail the Pechenegs (Yaroslav defeated them in 1036), new, more aggressive tribes appeared on the borders of the Kyivan realm. These were the Polovtsians, or Cumans, and by the end of the eleventh century they controlled a good part of the Eurasian steppe, from the Irtysh River in the east to the Danube in the west. The Rus’ principalities could not deal with Polovtsian attacks on their own. They needed to join forces, and no one insisted on that more than the prince of Pereiaslav, Volodymyr Monomakh, whom a chronicler credited with organizing a number of successful expeditions against the Polovtsians.

Monomakh, a great promoter of the unity of the Rus’ Land, initiated the reform of the system of princely succession. At a congress organized with Monomakh’s help in the town of Liubech in 1097, the princes decided to get rid of the cumbersome, conflict-prone lateral (horizontal) system of succession introduced by Yaroslav the Wise. Instead of the sons and grandsons of the triumvirs rotating princely seats, trying eventually to get to Kyiv, each would rule in his own domain. Only descendants of Yaroslav’s eldest son, Iziaslav, would succeed to the Kyivan throne. But the system failed to work in practice. Monomakh himself did not abide by it when he claimed the throne of Kyiv in 1113; nor did his successors. In less than forty years, between 1132 and 1169, eighteen rulers succeeded one another in the capital, four more than during the entire previous history of the Kyivan realm.

Most of the new princes appeared in Kyiv as a result of coups or hostile takeovers. Everyone seemed to want Kyiv, and those who had a chance tried their luck. In 1169, however, the pattern was broken. That year, the army of one of the most powerful and ambitious Rus’ princes, Andrei Bogoliubsky of the Vladimir-Suzdal principality in what is now Russia, took Kyiv. He did not show up himself, sending his son to fight the battle instead. Once they had captured the city, the victors plundered it for three days in succession. The prince refused to move to Kyiv and establish his capital there.

Bogoliubsky’s preference for his own capital of Vladimir on the Kliazma River reflected changes taking place in twelfth-century Rus’ politics, economics, and society. The major principalities on the periphery of the Kyivan world were growing richer and stronger at a time when constant internal strife beset Kyiv and the middle Dnieper region. The Halych principality in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, in what is now western Ukraine, engaged in trade with the Balkans along the Danube, conducted with the blessing of Constantinople. The princes there did not need the Dnieper route to prosper.

As the local princes grew richer and more powerful, they sought to assert their autonomy or outright independence from Kyiv. They had every reason to treat the lands inherited from their fathers and grandfathers — not the mythical Rus’ Land around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav — as the main objects of their loyalty. Andrei Bogoliubsky was among the first to do so. While his sack of Kyiv in 1169 left very deep scars in the memory of its inhabitants, he demonstrated other, no less obvious attempts to make himself an independent ruler. It all began with Andrei leaving Vyshhorod near Kyiv against the wishes of his father, Yurii Dolgoruky, and going to the northeast. Yurii, who had founded Moscow in 1147, represented an old way of thinking. A son of Monomakh, he carved the principality of Suzdal out of his patrimony and proceeded to expand and strengthen it. But his ultimate goal was the Kyivan throne, which he obtained by using his powers as prince of Suzdal. He died in office and was buried in a Kyivan church.

Dolgoruky’s rebellious son wanted none of that. He moved the capital of his principality from Suzdal to Vladimir and did his best to turn it into Kyiv on the Kliazma. Andrei did not leave Vyshhorod empty-handed. He took with him a local icon of the Mother of God (Theotokos) that later gained fame as the Vladimir Mother of God. The removal of a religious relic from the Kyiv region to Vladimir is a perfect metaphor for Bogoliubsky’s transfer of the symbolic power of the Rus’ capital from south to north. That Kyiv served as the seat of the metropolitan of all Rus’ enhanced its importance. Andrei, who had never considered his realm part of the Rus’ Land, wanted a metropolitanate of his own. Around 1162, seven years before the sack of Kyiv, he sent an embassy to Constantinople asking permission to install his own candidate as a new metropolitan. He was rebuffed — a major disappointment for the ambitious ruler, who had already made all the necessary preparations for the establishment of a metropolitan see. The newly built Golden-Domed Dormition Cathedral, not unlike the Golden-Domed Cathedral of St. Michael in Kyiv, was intended for a metropolitan but eventually housed a bishop.

Andrei Bogoliubsky’s other project with unquestionable Kyivan roots was the building of a Golden Gate. Both the cathedral and the Golden Gate are still standing and serve as reminders of the Vladimir prince’s ambitions. Like Yaroslav the Wise before him, Andrei emulated the existing imperial capital so as to assert his independence of it. Interestingly enough, Andrei’s emulation went further than Yaroslav’s: he not only transferred icons, ideas, and names for his architectural projects from Kyiv to Vladimir but also gave Kyivan names to local landmarks. That accounts for the naming of rivers in the environs of Vladimir after their Kyivan prototypes: Lybid, Pochaina, and Irpin.

Yaroslav the Wise and Andrei Bogoliubsky were both Rus’ princes and probably shared a similar ethnocultural identity, but their construction projects show that they had different loyalties when it came to the Rus’ lands. Yaroslav had a clear loyalty to Kyiv and to his vast realm extending from that city to Novgorod, which set him apart from Sviatoslav, who had no such bond, and Volodymyr Monomakh, whose primary allegiance was to the Rus’ Land around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav. Andrei differed from his predecessors in his attachment to his own patrimony within the larger Rus’ realm. We should consider these changing loyalties of the Rus’ princes in the context of the development of multiple Rus’ identities as they emerge from the pages of the Rus’ chronicles and legal texts.

The authors of the Primary Chronicle (the laborious task of recording events and commenting on them passed from one generation of monks to another) had to reconcile three different historical identities in their narrative: the Rus’ identity of the Scandinavian rulers of Kyiv, the Slavic identity of the educated elites, and local tribal identity. While the Kyivan rulers and their subjects adopted the name Rus’, the Slavic identity associated with that name, not the Scandinavian one, became the basis of their self-identification. Most subjects of the Rurikids, who ruled their realm from the Slavic heartland, were Slavs. More importantly, the dissemination of Slavic identity beyond the Kyiv region was closely associated with the acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium and the introduction of Church Slavonic as the language of the liturgy, sermons, and intellectual discourse of Rus’. Christianity appeared in both the Slavic and non-Slavic parts of the Kyivan realm in the garb of Slavic languages and Slavic culture. The more Rus’ became Christian, the more it turned Slavic as well. The Kyivan chroniclers incorporated local history into the broader context of the development of the Balkan Slavs and, more broadly still, into the history of Byzantium and world Christendom.

On the local level, tribal identity gave way slowly but surely to identification with local principalities — the centers of military, political, and economic power associated with Kyiv. Chronicle references to the lands surrounding princely towns replaced references to indigenous tribes. Thus, the chronicler refers to the army that sacked Kyiv in 1169 as consisting of people from Smolensk instead of Radimichians, residents of Suzdal instead of Viatichians or Meria, and natives of Chernihiv instead of Siverians. There was a sense of the unity of all the lands under the rule of the Kyivan rulers, and despite conflicts and wars between Rurikid princes, the inhabitants of those lands were considered “ours,” as opposed to foreigners and pagans. The key issue was recognition of the authority of the Rus’ princes, and when some of the Turkic steppe nomads accepted that authority, they became referred to as “our pagans.”

The political and administrative unification of the diverse tribal territories entailed the standardization of their social structure. At its very top were the princes of the Rurikid dynasty, more specifically the descendants of Yaroslav the Wise. Under them were members of the princely retinue — originally Vikings but also increasing numbers of Slavs who merged with local tribal elites to form the aristocratic stratum called the boyars. They were warriors, but in times of peace they administered the realm. The boyars were the main landholding class, and depending on the principality, they had greater or lesser influence on the actions of the prince. Church hierarchs and their servants were also among the privileged.

The rest of the population paid taxes to the princes. The townspeople, who included merchants and artisans, had some political power that they exercised at town meetings, where they decided matters of local governance. Occasionally, as in Kyiv, or quite regularly, as in Novgorod, such meetings influenced the succession of local princes. The peasants, who accounted for most of the population, had no political power. They were divided into free peasants and semifree serfs. The latter could lose their freedom, usually because of debts, and reclaim it once they had paid their debts off or after a certain period. Then there were the slaves — warriors or peasants captured in the course of military campaigns. The enslavement of warriors could be temporary, but that of peasants was permanent.

The penalties for different crimes set forth in the Rus’ Justice, the legal code, best demonstrate the hierarchical structure of Kyivan Rus’ society. As the lawgivers sought to abolish or limit blood feuds and fill princely coffers, they introduced monetary penalties to be paid to the princely treasury for killing different categories of people. The penalty for killing a member of the princely retinue or household (boyars) was eighty hryvnias; a freeman in the princely service, forty hryvnias; a tradesman, twelve hryvnias; a serf or a slave, five hryvnias; but it was quite legal to kill a slave if he had hit a free man. While different regions of Kyivan Rus’ had diverse customary laws, the introduction of a common legal code helped make the realm more homogeneous, as did the spread of Christianity and Church Slavonic culture emanating from Kyiv. It would appear that this process was gaining ground just as the political fragmentation of the Kyivan realm was becoming all but inevitable: the explosion in the number of Rurikid princes who wanted their own principalities, the vastness of Kyivan realm, and the diverse geostrategic and economic interests of its regions all undermined a polity that managed, for a period, to unite the lands between the Baltic and Black Seas.

The change in the geopolitical aims of the Kyivan princes, from Yaroslav the Wise to Andrei Bogoliubsky, reflects the reduction of their political loyalties from the entire realm of Kyivan Rus’ to a number of principalities defined by the term “Rus’ Land” and eventually to peripheral principalities that grew strong enough to rival Kyiv in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Historians look to those principality-based identities for the origins of the modern East Slavic nations. The Vladimir-Suzdal principality served as a forerunner of early modern Muscovy and, eventually, of modern Russia. Belarusian historians look to the Polatsk principality for their roots. And Ukrainian historians study the principality of Galicia-Volhynia to uncover the foundations of Ukrainian nation-building projects. But all those identities ultimately lead back to Kyiv, which gives Ukrainians a singular advantage: they can search for their origins without ever leaving their capital.