The Heresy of Medieval Kiev: An Unsought Doomsday

In Medieval times, there was not "Russia" but "The Russias". These were a loose confederation of city-centered regional states originally founded by Swedish Vikings, who set up trading towns on the riparian routes connecting the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. The most successful of these Swedes in terms of commercial power founded princely dynasties, ruling from these trading towns , which by the High Middle Ages had become cities. The colonizing Swedes, both high and low, intermarried with the native Slavic population, and soon ceased to speak their Norse dialect, though they did give their name to the people of the new hybrid culture that emerged: the "Russians" (from an Old Swedish word, "rus", meaning "rower"; i.e., a crewman of a Viking longship). The Russian states that evolved from these Viking river towns were largely connected by a common regional network of trade, similar language and dynastic intermarriage between the leading families of the different cities. Their interconnection strengthened when they all converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, wherein they collectively pledged ultimate religious allegiance to the Patriarch of Constantinople, and with whose secular political entity, the Byzantine Empire, they formed political and economic alliances. By the 13th century, CE, one of the brightest stars to emerge among this constellation of Russian states was the city and province of Kiev. At this time, it had evolved three distinctive qualities: (1) it had become one of the key cities in the overland trade route between Europe and Asia, as well as a key trading link between Scandinavia and the Mediterranean World; (2) it had thrown off monarchy and created an elected republican form of government; (3) its clergy had gone renegade from the doctrinal strictures of the Orthodox Church. While the first two traits are utterly fascinating in and of themselves, it is the last trait that concerns us here. So in what way had the Kievan presbyters gone astray? The Patriarch of Moscow, in the neighboring Russian state of Muscovy, deemed that they were engaged in a heresy called "Judaization". The government and citizenry of Kiev not only accorded equal rights and friendship toward the Jewish population in their midst, but the Church of Kiev was preaching and practicing reforms of the Christian faith that partook of Jewish perspectives on holy scripture and expressions of spirituality. What these exactly were, we are not able to know, for these general accusations were enough to spell disaster for the Republic of Kiev. One must understand that at this time in history, the Czarist regime of the Russian city and province of Moscow had a serious ambition to throw off the Confederation of the Russias and politically (and culturally) cannibalize the other Russian city states. Kiev was a city that Muscovy had long envied. The interdict of their Patriarch was all the excuse they needed to lead a holy war against their "heretical neighbor". Kiev, having derived most of its success and stability from good civil government and prospering economic liberties, had not bothered to develop a strong military. Consequently, the Muscovites crushed them in a swift war in which the city of Kiev was burned to the ground, its clergy tried and executed for heresy, and its surviving population bonded into serfdom. When Kiev was rebuilt as an annexed portion of the Greater State of Muscovy, its resurrected Church was made to be conservatively orthodox in its ritual and dogma, and the natives were made to speak and write in the Muscovite dialect rather than their Kievan one. It was all a form of ethnic cleansing without actual total extermination, and ironically exercised by one Russian Slavic group against another. It was also the last time that a true democracy would exist on Russian soil until the fall of Communism at the end of the 20th century. Moreover, it is proof that not all Russians at all times were anti-Semitic. It is too bad that peaceful, egalitarian, Jewish-friendly Kiev had not obtained the reins of a united Russia's destiny over the long and painful centuries that followed. Perhaps those good qualities, lamentably lost when such a bright future lay ahead, were why in the Middle Ages, until its untimely doom, it was known throughout the Eurasian World as "Kiev the Great".