Kievan Rus'

“ At the same time, both the nobility and the common people perceived Rus as a common territory, as their homeland.
The fragmentation intensified after Batu Khan’s devastating invasion, which ravaged many cities, including Kiev. The northeastern part of Rus fell under the control of the Golden Horde but retained limited sovereignty. The southern and western Russian lands largely became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which – most significantly – was referred to in historical records as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Russia. ”

“ The Ukrainian historical tradition has its roots in the ancient Kingdom of Kiev. Altho the historians of Eastern Europe are still undecided as to whether the so-called Old Russian Kingdom was founded by the Varangians in the present Northern Russia, or by the Eastern Slavic tribes of the south in Kiev, I have no doubt that the latter view should be approved. Anthropogeography knows no instance of a pirate band, at most a few thousand strong, which, within a few decades, could constitute a kingdom embracing half a continent. ”

“ Kiev on the Dnieper was the mother of Russian culture; Moscow and St. Petersburg became afterwards the heirs of Kiev.
Another factor of vital historical importance which had an indirect effect on the history of Russian literature was the coming of the Norsemen into Russia at the beginning of [Pg 11] the ninth century. They came as armed merchants from Scandinavia; they founded and organized principalities; they took Novgorod and Kiev. The Scandinavian Viking became the Russian Kniaz, and the Varanger principality of Kiev became the kernel of the Russian State. ”

“ The mingling of nations and races has important bearings upon the origins of Kiev and Novgorod. It is unquestionable that Finnish and other European and Asiatic racial elements enter into the composition of the Russian people, but it is today impossible to ascertain with anything approaching precision, when, whence, and how these interminglings and Russifications occurred. In the present state of research it is extremely hazardous to make extensive use of theories of race and nationality to explain the characteristics of Kievic Old Russia. ”

“ Kievic territory, however, was detached from Muscovite Great Russia, and was not reunited until the seventeenth century. Thenceforward the south again made its influence felt, politically, socially, and nationally.
§ 3.
"TWO Romes have fallen and have passed away, the western and the eastern: destiny has prescribed for Moscow the position of the third Rome; there will never be a fourth." Such were the words wherein, after the fall of Constantinople, the Russian monk glorified and characterised the historical position of Moscow, which had now replaced Kiev as mistress of Russia. ”

“ In Kiev, though there is every sign of its being in the minds of all, materially the war is hardly felt. It is in fact wonderful how little effect of this kind it seems to have made on the body of Russia. On the other hand, the atmosphere of nervous tension begins to disappear the moment one begins to get really near to the front. ”

“ In Russia the sunflower is queen of the flowers, and as the sunflower is among the flowers so is the Great Russian among32 the Russian peoples. He is the true “tsarkiya Rus.” The Tsar is the sun, the heart of the realm, and the Muscovite people are the “podsolnushki.” Each individual is only one among many, a particle, a seed for the propagation and glorification of his own race. Probably, the Great Russian has no equal in the world as regards idyllic simplicity. ”

“ In the north, along their native shores, the Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes had attained a notable degree of political development and a high level of civilisation. On the Black Sea lay the outposts of the Byzantine empire; all the great rivers of Russia led southward, and across the Black Sea was the route to Constantinople.
The political organisation of Novgorod dates from the ninth century, but at the close of this century Kiev became the capital of the Russian realm. ”

“ How strange it will be to have no longer a Russian army between the Germans and Kiev. No more a wall of flesh to protect us. Poor soldiers, without a round of ammunition, fighting with naked hands. They will cross the Dnieper to one side of the city, crowding, fighting, falling together. And the German cannon driving them on, and crashing into the city, sometimes, wiping out whole streets of townspeople. And then, the gray lines of the Germans running into Kiev. The thousands of blue-eyed Germans and their pointed helmets and guttural speech taking possession of everything. ”

“ We have been in Kiev several days. Our passports have been handed in to the police station to be viséed and put in order for our return trip to Bucharest. They say a human being in Russia is made of body and passport.
Kiev is full of color. It is framed in green trees that hide the ugliness of modern buildings and seem to lift the gold and silver domes of the churches up into the air. And how many churches there are! Kiev is in truth a holy city. Late afternoon, when the sun shines through the dust of the day and envelops the city in golden powder ”

“ Vitoft, no longer checked by Cyprian's influence, determined to free the Orthodox Church within his dominions from the control of a foreign prelate. The see of Kiev was declared independent of that of Moscow in 1415; rejoined to it a few years later, its independence was again and finally established in 1433.
Under Vassili III. the fortunes of Russia sank to their lowest ebb. Civil wars, foreign invasion, and Tatar tyranny brought the country to the verge of ruin. The metropolitan see remained vacant after the death of Photius, and anarchy reigned supreme in Church and State. ”

“ Since July war has come nearer Kiev. The hospitals are full of maimed and wounded soldiers who fought to defend Russia. They made a bulwark of their breasts. It was as though one single giant breast, hundreds of versts broad, thrust itself between the Germans and home.
And it is winter now. The days are short with an icy, gray mist from the Dnieper, and flurries of snow. There is a shortage of coal, and we sit shivering in our apartment. We drag the covers off the beds and wrap ourselves up in them while we read books from the circulating library or play three-handed bridge. ”

“ The Russian historico-political traditions are quite as different from and as opposed to those of the Ukrainians as the Polish, but in another direction. The Muscovite State was created out of the petty principalities which the ancient Kiev dynasty had founded among the Eastern Slavic races and the Finnish tribes of the north. From the blending of the Slavs and the Finns came the foundation of the present Russian or Great Russian (Muscovite) Nation. ”

“ There is no wonder, therefore, that the State of Kiev never attained a power in keeping with its great territory and population. The people ostensibly supported everything which tended to weaken the power of the government. Thru the entire existence of the ancient Kingdom of Kiev, its Great Princes were forced to wrestle with the Boyar nobility and the people for absolute power. This limitation of the monarchic power turned out to be a disaster for the Kingdom of Kiev. ”

“ In the second cycle the legends group themselves round the celebrated Prince Vladimir of Kiev. The chief hero is Ilya Muromets, who performs prodigies of valour, and is of gigantic stature and superhuman strength. The cycle of Novgorod deals with the stories of Vasilii Buslaevich and Sadko, the rich merchant. The fourth cycle deals with the autocracy; already Moscow has become the capital of the future empire. We are told of the taking of Kazan, of the conquest of Siberia by Yermak, of Ivan the Terrible and his confidant Maliuta Skurlatovich. ”

“ In Kiev the Byzantine princes of the church constituted a state within the state. The metropolitan of Kiev was appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople, whereas in Byzantium the bishops were elected by their own colleagues. Kiev was no more than a dependency of Byzantium, and among the Greek bishops the Kievic metropolitan occupied the, seventy-first place. The Russian hierarchy always remained Greek. Among the three-and-twenty metropolitans of Kiev in the days before the Tatar dominion; three only were Russians, and three southern Slavs, the remaining seventeen being Byzantines. ”

“ Without loss of time Diuk saddled Rough-Coat and rode far out across the open plain with Churilo by his side, riding step by step but not too near. Behind them flocked a great crowd of mighty heroes of Holy Russia, as well as of the townsfolk of Kiev, who had come to watch the manly contest, which was much more to their taste than an exhibition of clothing and decoration, however ingenious and splendid they might be. ”

“ Oldtime commerce, that of Russia at any rate, must not be thought of as sharply contrasted with militarism. Trade, or to be concrete, the traders, proceeding by land in caravans and by water in fleets of river-going or seaworthy vessels, travelled on a warlike footing, and were organised for war. The trader was also a conqueror, and on occasions a robber or a pirate. Kiev was certainly occupied by such warlike "traders" from Novgorod, and thus became the capital of the realm.
The first development of the state and of civilisation in general took place in fortified towns. ”

“ Whitelaw Reid has declared Kiev to be one of the four picturesque cities in Europe; certainly it lies in a heavenly place, all up and down hills, with such vistas down the streets to where a mosque raises its gilded dome, or where an historic bronze statue stands out against the horizon. If Kiev had been planned by the French, it could not be more utterly beautiful. The domes of the cathedrals are blue, studded with gold stars; or else pale green or all gold, and the most exquisite churches in all Russia are in Kiev. ”

“ As we walked in the Nevski, people, mostly women, would rush to him and kiss his dirty hand, or raise the hem of his greasy kaftan to their lips, asking for the Father's blessing. By the enlightened Western peoples the ignorance and superstitions of our great Russian people cannot be understood. You, who have travelled in our Holy Russia, know our trackless country where settlements are to distances, as one of our writers has put it, as fly-specks upon window-panes, where whole villages are the prey of disease, and where seventy-nine people out of every hundred cannot read or write. ”

“ In Paris this background and the whole scene was accepted as a part of the pageant of that city, but in Kiev it was different. There we got the other side of the picture; the man and the woman who are really Russia, the element that finds an outlet in the folk music, for its age-old rebellious submission. One hears the soul of the Russian pulsating in the continued reiteration of the same theme; it is like the endless treadmill of a life without vistas. We were looking at the Russia of Maxim Gorky, the Russia that made Tolstoy a reformer; that has now forced its Czar to abdicate. ”

“ Can any one have sympathy with the once-Imperial, afterwards exiled to Siberia—that same zone of that illimitable tundra to which the Tsar of all the Russias had exiled so many of his innocent and patriotic subjects, men and women who fought for Russia’s right to live, to expand, and to prosper? Let us remember that in Siberia to-day lie the bones of a hundred thousand Russian patriots, persecuted under the evil régimes of Alexander and of Nicholas. In the days of the ex-Tsar’s father I went to Siberia, and I visited the convict prisons there. ”

“ In the Kievan period, whoever became prince of Kiev, removed to Kiev, and named someone of his own family as ruler in his own principality, so that if Kiev were lost and it should pass into another family, he would not lose his own patrimony.
During the Tatar period we note a new phenomenon: the princes did not merely separate themselves from their patrimonial lands, but even from their capitals; for instance: Iaroslav lived in Tver, Basil in Kostroma, Andrew in Gorodeza, Dmitri in Pereiaslavl, and so on. ”

“ Russia has become an extremely loose federation of principalities. The central [654] authority has been reduced to a nullity, and the period is filled with wars among the petty princes. This, of course, weakened the power of Russia for resisting foreign invaders, and made it an easy prey to the eastern nomadic tribes, from the Polovtsi to the Tatars. The chief events during this period are the foundation of Moscow (1147) , the rise of Suzdal in Vladimir, and the pillaging of Kiev (1169) by Prince Andrew Bogoliubski of Suzdal. The hegemony of Kiev comes to an end for all time. ”

“ At Kiev people still remember that the earliest Russian civilization had its beginnings in the Ukraine. There Christianity first took root, and there were the first Russian Princes.
Before Shevchenko’s arrival there was organized at Kiev the Society of Cyril and Methodius, called after the great apostles of Russia, and the leading spirits of the Society were professors in the University of Kiev.
Into this brilliant company Shevchenko was welcomed. Its leaders became his devoted friends. A chair of painting in the University was to be established for him. ”