Rus–Ukraine–Russia

Scenes from the Cultural History of Russian Religiosity

Martin C. Putna, Michael Dean

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9788024647395
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An outspoken opponent of pro-Russian, authoritarian, and far-right streams in contemporary Czech society, Martin C. Putna received a great deal of media attention when he ironically dedicated the Czech edition of Rus–Ukraine–Russia to Miloš Zeman—the pro-Russian president of the Czech Republic. This sense of irony, combined with an extraordinary breadth of scholarly knowledge, infuses Putna's book.Examining key points in Russian cultural and spiritual history, Rus–Ukraine–Russia is essential reading for those wishing to understand the current state of Russia and Ukraine—the so-called heir to an "alternative Russia." Putna uses literary and artistic works to offer a rich analysis of Russia as a cultural and religious phenomenon: tracing its development from the arrival of the Greeks in prehistoric Crimea to its invasion by "little green men" in 2014; explaining the cultural importance in Russ of the Vikings as well as Pussy Riot; exploring central Russian figures from St. Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin.Unique in its postcolonial perspective, this is not merely a history of Russia or of Russian religion. This book presents Russia as a complex mesh of national, religious, and cultural (especially countercultural) traditions—with strong German, Mongol, Jewish, Catholic, Polish, and Lithuanian influences—a force responsible for creating what we identify as Eastern Europe.

Scene 1
Russia before Russia: Antique Cultures along the Black Sea Coast

year:

422 B.C.

place:

Crimea

event:

Founding of the Greek colony Tauric Chersonesus

works:

The Histories by Herodotus (before 425 BC); Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides, Goethe, and Gluck (412 BC, 1779, 1787); “Who Knows the Land?” by Alexander Pushkin (1821); The Sun of the Dead by Ivan Shmelev (1926); The Island of Crimea by Vasily Aksenov (1981)

Narratives about the cultural history of Russia typically begin with Kievan Rus. But to comprehend the modern Russian, Ukrainian and, indirectly, Belarusian senses of identity and understand their historical place on the map of European civilization (or their absence from it), one must penetrate more deeply into the past. One must take account of Russia’s “prehistory,” of the ancient cultures which shaped a region critical to Russian and Ukrainian self-understandings—the area along the northern Black Sea coast and the territory of Crimea.

The Greeks sailed as far as the Black Sea in their massive effort to colonize every favorable piece of coastline—favorable, that is, because it possessed something of a Mediterranean climate and reminded the explorers of their Greek fatherland. A chain of Greek settlements emerged along the Black Sea coast as early as the seventh and sixth century before Christ: from Olbia near modern-day Odessa to Tanais near what is now Rostov-on-Don. One of the last settlements was founded in 422 BC, just as the great wave of colonization began to subside. It would go on to play a crucial role in the future Russia and Ukraine—as Tauric Chersonesus on the southern tip of the Crimean Peninsula.28

Neither here nor elsewhere did the Greeks set out to subjugate the “barbarian” peoples of the interior. It sufficed to turn them into objects of intellectual inquiry and thereby draw them into the Greek mental orbit. Herodotus performed this sort of intellectual subjugation in the fourth book of his Histories (before 425 BC), where he describes in detail the territory and inhabitants of the northern Black Sea region: the Scythians and their predecessors, the Cimmerians in present-day Ukraine, the Tauri of the Crimea, the Sauromatae (Sarmatians) along the Don.

In certain passages, Herodotus trades the role of historian for that of natural geographer, as when he describes the physical landscape of northeastern Europe, what would become Russia and Ukraine (the first author to do so). He calls attention to the landscape’s characteristic features: the open steppe, rivers teaming with fish (most remarkable are the sturgeon), and winters full of snow. Apparently confused by second-hand reports, Herodotus supposes snow to be made of feathers, which is not entirely incomprehensible since something of the sort could hardly have been imaginable to a blissful inhabitant of the Mediterranean: “It is said to be impossible to travel through the region which lies further north, or even to see it, because of falling feathers—both earth and air are thick with them and they shut out the view.”29

Herodotus elsewhere changes into a cultural anthropologist, describing the manners and habits of the peoples who inhabit the region. From the perspective of a Greek, these were clearly the customs of barbarians. The Scythians and others blind their slaves, use the skulls of their enemies as goblets, fashion handkerchiefs and overcoats from the flayed skin of humans, they drink mares’ milk and human blood. They don’t know civilization. On the other hand, they honor the same gods as the Greeks. Despite the bizarre details, Herodotus’ description all the while remains objective, detached, and free of prejudice or offense. What’s more, he integrates these northerly peoples into the Greek system of mythology. The Scythians, reports the historian, descend from Heracles. When the latter led the oxen of Geryon by a rather circuitous route from Spain to Greece via the Black Sea, he lay with the local viper-maiden and begot a son, Skythes. The Sauromatae, for their part, resulted from the union of local men with Amazons.

Other ancient authors relate other legends drawn from Greek mythology taking place along the Black Sea. Prometheus was chained to a rock in the Caucasus. The Argonauts sailed to Colchis, or Georgia, in their quest for the Golden Fleece. Thetis carried the ashes of her son Achilles to the island of Leuke, today the Ukrainian island Zmiinyi near the Danube delta, thereby founding an enduring local cult of Achilles. The Crimean Peninsula, or Tauris, provided the setting for Euripides’ play, Iphigenia in Tauris (412 BC), which more than any other work is responsible for associating Greece with the Black Sea. Iphigenia was to be sacrificed for the benefit of the Trojan expedition, but Artemis intervened and swept her off to Tauris. She was found there by her brother, Orestes, and brought back to Greece along with a sacred statue of Artemis. They stopped in Attica, at the sanctuary Brauron, where Iphigenia was made priestess of the “Crimean” cult of Artemis (and where today one finds remarkable evidence of the veneration of Artemis as patron of childbirth and traces of local female initiation ceremonies). Athens and Crimea thus hosted the same cult, for, as related again by Herodotus, “the Tauri themselves claim that the goddess to whom these offerings are made is Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia.”30

There is thus a local dimension to Euripides’ play, as it relates the origin of one of the most important cults in Athens. The play also features an existential dimension, describing the ordeal of siblings lost in the wide world, afflicted by an indifferent fate, offering a meditation on the human condition. It isn’t surprising that the story provided material for many later adaptions, including the opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, Iphigenia in Tauris (1779), and a play of the same name by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1779–1787). There is also an intercultural dimension to the play: confrontation between Greeks and barbarians, the latter represented by the Thoas, king of the Tauri. None of these variations—neither in Euripides, nor in Gluck, nor in Goethe—would satisfy adherents of Edward Said31 who define as “Orientalism” Western perceptions of the East as inferior, populated by barbarians and cruel, unmanly cowards. Thoas is an adversary—but a noble adversary who in the end releases Iphigenia and her brother, along with the sacred statue, and allows them to go in peace. He does so, according to Euripides and Gluck, in order to submit piously to the will of Artemis. In Goethe’s version, he acts out of pure benevolence.

The life of the Greek cities along the Black Sea coast drew from more than references to “creation myths.” The Greek-speaking Bosporan Kingdom arose in Crimea and parts of the adjacent mainland. It was controlled first by Athens then fell under the sway of various Hellenic empires until finally coming under the authority of Rome. The fourth century saw the migration of peoples, decline of the Bosporan Kingdom, and alternating dominance of various “barbarian nations” (Goths, Huns, Khazars). A small strip of land on the southern Crimean coast around the city of Chersonesus, however, survived the period’s upheavals and remained in the possession of the Byzantium, the “second Rome” or “Christian Greece.”

Christianity arrived to Crimea during the Roman period—and gave rise to new “creation myths.” The fate of three early Christian heroes is associated with the region. The first church historian, Eusebius, reported that when “the holy apostles and disciples of our Savior were scattered over the whole world” Andrew was chosen for Scythia.32 Tradition has it that the pagan emperor Traianus banished the fourth Bishop of Rome, Clement (or Pope Clement, to use his later title), to Crimea, where he was then drowned in the Black Sea. One of his successors, Martin I, was banished to the same location in the seventh century, but this time by the Christian Byzantine emperor, Constans II.

These early Christian heroes provided models for the early Christian martyrs among eastern Slavs more generally. Cyril and Methodius allegedly found the remains of Clement in Crimea while undertaking their political and religious mission to the Khazar Khanate in 860, which at the time stretched along the territory of the earlier Scythians. The remains served them as the “armor of God” during subsequent journeys to Greater Moravia and Rome (where Clement’s remains rest today in the Basilica of San Clement, known for its splendid collection of twelfth-century mosaics and the tomb of Saint Cyril). When the Kievan prince Vladimir had himself baptized in 988, he did so precisely in Crimean Chersonesus, which still belonged to the Byzantines. And when the chronicler Nestor assembled his collection of ancient chronicles in the beginning of the twelfth century, he dated the beginning of Kievan Christianity from the blessing given to the region by the apostle Andrew.

That, then, is the “Greece” from which Kievan and Muscovite Rus arose. Not the Greece of the Amazons and Iphigenia—but instead the Greece of Andrew the apostle, of the Crimean martyr Clement, of the missionaries Cyril and Methodius, and of St. Prince...

Table of contents

• Introduction — Czech Perspectives on the Cultural and Spiritual Roots of Russia
• Scene 1 — Russia before Russia: Antique Cultures along the Black Sea Coast
• Scene 2 — Viking Rus and Germanic Culture
• Scene 3 — Slavic Rus and Paganism
• Scene 4 — Kievan Rus and Byzantine Christianity
• Scene 5 — Mongolian Rus and Eurasianism
• Scene 6 — Muscovite Rus and “Third Rome”
• Scene 7 — Muscovite Spiritual Counterculture I: Nonpossessors, Orthodox Humanists, and Holy Fools
• Scene 8 — Red Rus, Novgorodian Rus, and the “Window to Europe”
• Scene 9 — Lithuanian Rus, the Russian Reformation, and the Russian Baroque
• Scene 10 — Muscovite Spiritual Counterculture II: The Old Believers
• Scene 11 — Petersburg Rus and Russian Secularization
• Scene 12 — Ukrainian Rus and White Rus
• Scene 13 — Jewish Rus
• Scene 14 — Catholic Rus
• Scene 15 — The Orthodox Restoration
• Scene 16 — Orthodox Romanticism and Pan-Slavism
• Scene 17 — Orthodox Reformism
• Scene 18 — Revolutionary Rus and the Piety of the Godless
• Scene 19 — Soviet Rus and the Renewal of the Orthodox Trinity
• Conclusion: New Struggles Over Old Rus
• Bibliography
• Index