A city of some three million, Kiev shares a time zone with Moscow from March to October (during daylight savings time, which, since 2014, Russia has not observed). This one-hour time difference lasting just half a year connotes both the connection between these once brotherly nations and Ukraine’s revolt against control by the dominant imperial Russia. Spring is the best time to visit Kiev, so we chose to arrive in April—and pay our respects. And respects were due: Kiev is, after all, mat gorodov russkikh—the mother of all Russian cities. Given the critical role Ukraine has played in Russia’s history—and especially the dilemmas with which it presents Russia in the present—it cannot be ignored.
One needs to be fit to make even an unhurried ascent to the summit of Vladimir’s Hill from Khreshchatyk, Kiev’s broad, chestnut-tree-lined central avenue, which the Soviet authorities—under the direction of Nikita Khrushchev—transformed into the capital’s main thoroughfare after the Great Patriotic War. From Khreshchatyk’s Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti—the famed Maidan from which Ukrainians launched their Euromaidan protest movement in late 2013—it takes thirty minutes to mount the hill to the station from which an oft-crowded funicular car spirits passengers up to Kiev’s highest terrain. Once having disembarked atop Vladimir’s Hill, though, visitors may survey the Dnieper River bisecting the city below and enjoy a magnificent view of the age-old waterway so vital to Ukraine’s history.
Fresh off the funicular, we walked out onto Mikhailov Square, noting the tony restaurants and posh hotels that have sprung up around it in recent years. The square, dating from the twelfth century—even if known by several other names since then—was once the site of demonstrations and uprisings. It is a host of contradictions: it has both the gray, imposing, oddly concave Soviet-style Ministry of Foreign Affairs; an incongruous, ornately decorated, yet entirely empty children’s carousel; an angel-shaped monument to the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (Kiev has a number of these sculptures); and Saint Michael’s Monastery, with its white-trimmed lapis lazuli facades and soaring, cross-topped golden domes.
Just outside the monastery’s portals, along its western wall, a long, glass-encased pictorial memorial stands honoring the Ukrainians who have died fighting for their country in its east against the rebel troops of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk—officially, the single Confederate Republic of Novorossiya (“New Russia”). The Confederate Republic’s founders resurrected the czarist-era name Novorossiya for these territories, which have ethnic Russian majorities and a strong sense of Russian, as opposed to Ukrainian, identity.
In Moscow, one hears a good deal about the war for Novorossiya, which has allied itself with the Kremlin. However, so far away in the Russian capital, the conflict seems almost imagined—little more than conjured-up fodder for patriotic propaganda. Ukraine’s break with Russia in 2014 has been, nevertheless, very real and wrenching both for those in the Kremlin nostalgic for control over the large Slavic state on Russia’s southern flank, and also for a good number of ordinary Russians, who view Ukraine as Malorossiya (“Little Russia,” a subordinate Slavic “little brother”). All Russians, though, understand that the land Ukraine occupies was the wellspring of Russian civilization, the hallowed locus of the Kreshcheniye Rusi (the Baptism of Rus) that Prince Vladimir brought about more than a thousand years ago.
The Orange Revolution of 2004, which after rigged presidential elections overturned the victory of the Kremlin-compliant Viktor Yanukovych (who hailed from the Donetsk Oblast, now part of Novorossiya), ended with installing in power two pro-Western politicians: President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Although eventually doubts grew about the two leaders’ commitment to democracy, the pro-European Union Euromaidan uprising still proved that the independent Ukraine is no longer Malorossiya.
We walked along the memorial wall surveying the faces and names of men and women who went to eastern Ukraine to defend their homeland, and the reality sank in: Ukraine is at war, and with Russia—a once-inconceivable notion.
Our stroll eventually led us away from Mikhailov Square, down a path to a headland overlooking the Dnieper, where a daunting, sixty-seven-foot-high statue of Prince Vladimir (Volodymyr, in Ukrainian) surveys the island-studded river and the parks and apartment blocks on the right bank. The statue dates from 1853, the era of the Russian Empire under Nicholas I. Constructed of iron and bronze in neo-Byzantine style for the four hundredth anniversary of Byzantium’s fall to the Turks, Prince Vladimir holds aloft a fifteen-foot cross, as though baptizing the land anew. The monument was meant to both highlight Russia’s spiritual ties to the Eastern Roman Empire and to establish continuity between Emperor Nicholas I and Vladimir the Great. Though what is less advertised is that following his conversion to Christianity, Vladimir led a less than pious lifestyle that induced one medieval chronicler to dub him fornicator maximus. One version of history has it that the still-pagan Vladimir seized the Crimean town of Chersonesus from the Greeks and agreed to return it only if the Byzantine emperor Basil II would grant him the hand in marriage of the emperor’s sister, Anna Porphyrogenita. The Greeks acceded to this demand, on the condition that Vladimir convert to Christianity, which he did, with some historians placing his baptism in Chersonesus, others in Kiev, and with the instatement thereafter of Christianity as Kievan Rus’s religion. For having inducted Rus into Christendom, the church canonized him.
Some medieval Russian sources put it differently: the Russians sent envoys to neighboring lands to assess their faiths for possible adoption. Vladimir rejected both Judaism and Islam—the latter because of its prohibition against alcohol. (“Veseliye Rusi piti est [drinking is the joy of Rus],” purportedly declared Vladimir.) Yet, it was the ethereal, spiritual beauty of the Greek Orthodox liturgy that won over the Russians. Conversion ensued.
In fact, Byzantine Christianity was already making inroads into Kievan Rus and its adoption would have made eminent sense, given Kiev’s trade contacts with Byzantium. However it came about, the acceptance of Christianity by Kievan Rus from the Byzantine Greeks and not the Roman Catholics would have momentous consequences for world history. Ultimately, it placed Russia, spiritually, if not civilizationally, outside Western Europe and fostered a faith-based isolationism, which included the rise of the messianic notion of Moscow as the Third Rome and of Russia as the country destined by God to determine the fate of mankind.
Admiring the pugnacious Vladimir the Great, the atheist Soviets left the statue that Nicholas I erected to him in Kiev, sparing it the fate they reserved for most other monuments glorifying the monarchy or religion. Gazing up at Vladimir’s weathered bronze grandeur, we could not help thinking that the statue looked remarkably Stalinesque. Its baroque laurel wreaths and the bas-reliefs on its pedestal recall Stalinist classicism, which itself derived from Byzantine models. Some have speculated that the bas-relief—just beneath Vladimir’s feet—of a meat cleaver crossed with a torch signifies power and truth, a tribute to Masonic fashions of the nineteenth century.[16] In fact, the meat cleaver and torch bear an eerie resemblance to the Soviet hammer and sickle, which also stood, in their own way, for power and truth. Even Vladimir’s hand, raised to grip the majestic cross blessing the city, conjures up the thousands of statues of another Vladimir—Vladimir Lenin—whose giant marble, iron, or bronze right hands all reached out toward the bright communist future across the Soviet Union. In many places in Russia, they still do. Ever inclined to humor, Russians often joke that what Lenin was really trying to do was hail a cab.
1
Mikhail Kalnitsky, “Na Pamyatnike Svyatomu Knyazyu Vladimiru Nekotorye Usmatrivayut Prisutstvie Masonskoi Simvoliki” [Some See Masonic Symbolism in St. Vladimir’s Statue in Kiev],