Kiev at Its Zenith

Amidst these accounts of war and conquest, it is useful to comment on the extent of the power of the Kievan princes. The geographical limits of Kievan Rus’ can be established only approximately.

After the death of Sviatoslav, Kievan Rus’ experienced the first outbreak of what was to become a chronic, debilitating political malady: internecine struggle among members of the Riurikid dynasty for supreme power in the realm. In a conflict sparked by an argument over tribute-collecting rights, Iaropolk killed his brother, Oleh. Fearing that a similar fate awaited him, the young Volodymyr fled from Novgorod to Sweden.

When Volodymyr (Valdemar in Scandinavian, Vladimir in Russian) mounted the Kievan throne in 980 with complete and unchallenged power in his hands, he initiated a new epoch in the history of Kievan Rus’. No longer would restless Scandinavian princes view Rus’ merely as a staging area for their further conquests or as a land that could be exploited with no thought for its welfare. Volodymyr introduced a much more constructive approach to rulership. The focus of his attention rested primarily on the welfare of the realm rather than on the acquisition of territory and tribute, as had been the case with his predecessors. It was during his reign that Rus’ began to emerge as an integrated society and polity.

At the outset, however, it did not appear that Volodymyr’s reign would be appreciably different from those of his predecessors. He favored his numerous retinue, supported traditional pagan cults, campaigned against the rebellious Viatichians, and extended his control over the Radimichians. Just as his father had done, Volodymyr appointed his sons (he had twelve legitimate ones) to administer the major towns and regions of his realm. In the process, he removed local princes from power and concentrated it exclusively in the hands of his dynasty. When the Varangian retinue demanded an increase in the contributions from Kiev, Volodymyr arranged to have it transferred to Byzantine service.

Instead of launching the traditional long-range expeditions, Volodymyr concentrated on securing his borders. To deal with the threat of the Pechenegs, he built an extensive fortification system, as well as new towns, just south of Kiev. In another break with tradition, he turned his attention to the west, annexing what is Western Ukraine today to his realm and thereby setting the stage for an age-long struggle with the Poles for the region.

Undoubtedly, Volodymyr’s greatest achievement was the Christianization of his vast realm. Sensing that Kievan Rus’ had outlived its traditional animistic, pagan religion, he began to consider more sophisticated ways for his society to express its spiritual, social, and political values. By way of analogy with modern times, his position was that of a rising third-world leader who wishes to push forward the modernization of his country and consequently must adopt one of the two leading ideologies of the world’s most advanced societies – capitalism or socialism. In Volodymyr’s case, the two highly evolved systems of belief that came into consideration were Christianity and Islam, the religions of the lands with which Rus’ had and wanted to maintain the closest commercial and political contacts. Despite the entertaining tales in the “Chronicle of Bygone Years” about how the envoys of Rus’ rejected Islam because of its prohibition against alcoholic beverages and supposedly chose Byzantine Christianity because of the awe-inspiring splendor of its religious services, it was concrete political and historical factors that guided Volodymyr’s choice.

As Olha’s earlier conversion indicated, Christianity had already set down roots in Kiev. The proximity of Rus’ to the thoroughly Christianized Bulgarians as well as to the recently converted Poles and Hungarians only hastened this process. However, the immediate reason for accepting Christianity, specifically in its Byzantine variant, was a political one. In 987, as a price for helping the Byzantine co-emperors put down a rebellion, Volodymyr demanded the hand of their sister Anne.

Determined to Christianize his subjects as quickly as possible, in 988 Volodymyr ordered a large part of Kiev’s population to be herded into the Pochaino River, a tributary of the Dnieper, and baptized it en masse. Despite popular resistance, pagan idols were destroyed and Christian churches built in their place. Not only did the church, whose personnel and organizational structure were imported entirely from Constantinople, receive wide-ranging privileges and autonomy, but 10% of the princely revenues were assigned for its support. As a result of his great innovation, the political prestige of Volodymyr’s dynasty, now linked to the highly respected Byzantine ruling house, was greatly enhanced.

As a member of the Christian “family of rulers,” Volodymyr’s contacts with other European monarchs became much closer. Internally, the conversion also produced positive results. Because the doctrines of the Byzantine church supported a monarch’s right to rule, the Kievan princes found in the church’s teachings an ideological support they did not have before. Moreover, being a relatively sophisticated organization, the church introduced the rulers of Kiev to organizational patterns from which they had much to learn. And Kievan society was enriched by a dynamic institution that not only provided it with unprecedented spiritual and cultural unity, but that exerted a tremendous influence on its social and economic life as well. In the broader sense, Volodymyr’s epochal choice aligned Rus’ with the Christian West rather than with the Islamic East, and exposed it to the enormous historical, political, and cultural ramifications that this assocation entailed.

The death of Volodymyr in 1015 led to another fratricidal war among the Riurikids. Aided by the Poles, Volodymyr’s eldest son, Sviatopolk (often referred to in the chronicles as “the Damned”), turned on his younger brothers, Sviatoslav, Borys, and Hlib, and had them murdered. Young and popular, the latter two were later canonized as saints of the Orthodox church. Following in the footsteps of his father, another brother, Iaroslav of Novgorod, called a large number of Varangians to his aid and defeated Sviatopolk in 1019. This victory did not give him complete control, however. Yet another brother, Mstyslav the Brave, challenged Iaroslav and, in order to avoid further bloodshed, the two agreed to split the realm between them. Remaining in Novgorod, Iaroslav received all the land west of the Dnieper, while Mstyslav, who moved to Chernihiv from Tmutorokan, acquired all the lands east of the river. Because it was too important to grant to one side or the other, Kiev remained unoccupied. Only at Mstyslav’s death in 1036 did Iaroslav mount the Kievan throne to become the sole ruler of Rus’.

Iaroslav’s long reign is usually considered the high point of the history of Kievan Rus’. Much of what Volodymyr had initiated was expanded and perfected by Iaroslav. Like his father, he continued to extend the boundaries of an already huge realm, winning back the western territories that had been lost to the Poles during the internecine fighting, conquering more Baltic and Finnish tribes, and finally destroying the Pechenegs. As a result of these victories, Iaroslav’s authority extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and from the Oka River basin to the Carpathians.

In medieval Europe, a mark of a dynasty’s prestige and power was the willingness with which other leading dynasties entered into matrimonial relations with it. Measured by this standard, Iaroslav’s prestige must have been great indeed. His wife was a Swedish princess; one of his sisters married a Polish king and another a Byzantine prince; three of his sons acquired European princesses as wives, while three of his daughters were married to the kings of France, Norway, and Hungary respectively. Little wonder that Iaroslav is often dubbed by historians as “the father-in-law of Europe.”

It was his achievements at home, however, that assured Iaroslav lasting fame. With his support, the church grew rapidly. Monasteries were established and became centers of learning for an increasingly urban and cultivated population. The construction of churches was of special interest to Iaroslav. During his reign, “golden domed” Kiev was studded with over 400 churches. Its crowning jewel was the Church of St Sophia, modeled on the splendid Hagia Sophia of Constantinople. The prince’s concern with ecclesiastical affairs is evident in his nomination in 1051 of the first native metropolitan of Rus’ – Ilarion. Some scholars have interpreted this action as Kiev’s rejection of the ecclesiastical overlordship of Constantinople. However, most specialists, while acknowledging the impressive growth of the Kievan church, contend that the patriarch of Constantinople still retained his superiority over the Kievan metropolitan.

The achievement with which Iaroslav’s name is perhaps most closely linked, and from which he gained his sobriquet “the Wise,” was his codification of customary laws that became the basic legal code of the land, the Ruska pravda (Rus’ Justice). Not only were existing laws systematized, but some were modified, thus reflecting the increasing involvement of the ruler in the lives of his subjects. For example, blood revenge was replaced by monetary payments that were established by the prince or his representatives. It is evident from these and other examples that the wealthy and increasingly urban and sophisticated society of Kievan Rus’ had come a long way from the days when the isolated, forest-bound tribes first came into contact with the rough Scandinavian warrior-merchants.

Shortly before his death, Iaroslav attempted to resolve a problem that had bedeviled him and his father, Volodymyr – namely, how to prevent the internecine fighting for control of Kiev that usually broke out among a ruler’s sons at his death. His approach was to apply the principle of seniority within the family to the distribution of land and political power. To his eldest son, Iziaslav, Iaroslav assigned Kiev and Novgorod along with their surrounding territories; to the second eldest, Sviatoslav, he gave Chernihiv; to the third, Vsevolod, Pereiaslav; to the fourth, Viacheslav, Smolensk; and to the youngest, Ihor, he gave Volodymyr-in-Volhynia. Whenever a vacancy occurred in any one of these principalities, each brother would, according to Iaroslav’s plan, move up a step until each in his turn reached Kiev, which represented the pinnacle of the system. Thus, by providing all his sons with lands and with a chance to rule in Kiev, Iaroslav hoped to avoid the bitter family feuds in which he himself had been embroiled.

Although this system of rotation worked for a time, thanks largely to the cooperation of the three senior sons, Iziaslav, Sviatoslav, and Vsevolod, it soon encountered several obstacles. The most serious of these was the fact that the rotation idea ran counter to another deeply entrenched principle, that of hereditary succession from father to son. It was not long before the sons of some princes demanded to move into their deceased fathers’ places rather than stand aside in favor of their uncles. As a result, bitter conflicts between nephews and their uncles became a characteristic feature of the post-Iaroslav era. Moreover, as the number of princes increased, so too did their feuds.

To add to the spreading civil strife, the citizens of Kiev, dissatisfied with the rule of Iziaslav, drove him out and installed his nephew Vseslav in his place in 1068. Although Iziaslav returned and, with Polish aid, put down the rebels, the events of 1068 were noteworthy because they marked the first recorded “revolution” on Ukrainian soil. In addition, an ancient menace from the steppe reappeared on Ukraine’s frontiers at this time to afflict Rus’. The nomadic Polovtsians (Cumans), more powerful than the earlier Pechenegs, launched a series of attacks that came perilously close to Kiev and made it difficult to keep the Dnieper trade route open. For some of these incursions, the princes themselves were to blame. Unable to assemble a viable force on their own, many of the younger princes, who had been deprived of their patrimony in the system of rotation (these displaced princes were called izhoi) invited the Polovtsians into Rus’ as allies in their struggles against their rivals. Volodymyr Monomakh (1113–25)

Despite these troubles, Rus’ could still muster the resources to cope. Another outstanding leader, Volodymyr Monomakh, the son of the Grand Prince Vsevolod (Kievan rulers had assumed the title of Grand Prince in the 11th century), emerged and even before he ascended the grand princely throne, he played a prominent role in restoring order in the land. In 1097, he was one of the organizers of a conference of leading princes held in Liubech, near Kiev, that sought to resolve, albeit unsuccessfully, the fratricidal conflicts by proposing a system of hereditary succession in most principalities. However, with regard to Kiev itself, no agreement could be reached and it remained a bone of contention. Volodymyr Monomakh’s great fame and popularity stemmed from his inspiring leadership against the Polovtsians. Uniting the princes and mobilizing the populace, Monomakh was said to have conducted eighty-three campaigns against them and to have killed 200 of their chieftains. Especially successful were the campaigns of 1103, 1107, and 1111. They marked Kiev’s most glorious hour in its long struggle against the steppe nomads.

An indication of Volodymyr Monomakh’s popularity was that when his father died in 1113 and there were other princes in line before him for the Kievan throne, the citizens of the city, erupting in another bout of social unrest, calmed down only after the 60-year-old Monomakh had agreed to become grand prince. By force of his enormous prestige, the new ruler succeeded in uniting most of fragmented Rus’. Never again would the land enjoy the unity and harmony that he was able to impose on it. Monomakh was also concerned with the growing social tensions among his subjects. By restoring order to riot-torn Kiev, he gained the support of the boyars and wealthy merchants. He addressed the grievances of the lower classes – his ustav or law code systematized the rights and obligations of freemen and indentured servitors – and his popularity with the masses reached even greater heights. The words of counsel that he left his sons just before his death reflect how seriously Monomakh treated social problems: “Above all, do not forget the poor… and do not let the mighty oppress the people… I did not allow the mighty to oppress the most lowly peasant or one poor widow.”⁶ Volodymyr Monomakh’s son Mstyslav still managed to hold the regions of Rus’ together and to maintain his authority over the increasingly more numerous princes. But he was the last Kievan ruler to do so. His death in 1132 marked the end of Kiev’s role as the dominant center of Rus’ and inaugurated the period of political fragmentation.