Even at the dawn of his rule over the Soviet Union, Stalin, too, admired the ancient Vladimir. He considered Bulgakov’s The White Guard his favorite novel, presumably because it conveyed the grandiosity of the monarchical attributes of statues, state rituals, and military ceremonies. He read the book numerous times. When Bulgakov refashioned it into a play, the dictator frequented its performances at the Moscow Art Theater. In his later years, and especially after the war, Stalin paid a great deal of attention to the symbolism of the imperial Russian state and desired to root his own Soviet empire in Russia’s historical legacy. Vladimir the Great—Saint Vladimir, the Baptizer of Russia—served as his intermediary with Russia’s distant past. To cement the connection, the statue was renovated in 1953 for its one hundredth anniversary—ironically the year of Stalin’s death.
The Ukrainians now view Prince Vladimir differently, having begun, after the 1991 Soviet collapse, to claim him for themselves. For them, he is the Kiev-born prince Volodymyr, the medieval Ukrainian leader who established Kievan Rus a century before Moscow even existed. In The White Guard, Bulgakov wrote,
In winter the cross would glow through the dense black clouds, a frozen unmoving landmark towering above the gently sloping expanse of the eastern bank, whence two vast bridges were flung across the river. One, the ponderous Chain Bridge that led to the right-bank suburbs, the other high, slim and urgent as an arrow that carried the trains from where, far away, crouched another city, threatening and mysterious: Moscow.[17]
The author, in this and other passages, confirms the timeless dichotomy between the Russian center and its rebellious Ukrainian periphery. In the novel, the action unfolds in 1918 in Kiev, before the Bolsheviks took control, and where Saint Vladimir’s Christian legacy was still intact, as opposed to the soon-to-be-Stalinist Moscow, where another Vladimir, Lenin, would become the god of communism.
The themes with which Bulgakov dealt in his work resonated with us throughout our journeys around Russia. Bulgakov, once a journalist who covered politics and human interest news for the Moscow daily Gudok (The Whistle), famous for its satirical pages, in his later fiction addressed the relations between people and state power. How do they react to the sudden replacement of the monarchy with a dictatorship of the proletariat, which transforms them from being subjects of the czar into members of the proletarian masses?
A similar question concerned us: Russians, as a rule, adore leaders who flaunt their power—and even deploy it, as did Putin in annexing Crimea. Are Russian subjects subordinating their lives to the greatness of the state? Or are they citizens holding individual rights? Now more than ever, almost a hundred years after Bulgakov’s novel, the conflict between open-minded, liberal-spirited Kiev and imperial, autocratic Moscow rages on, both literally—as in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine—and figuratively, in the Russian mind-set.
Fittingly, the double-headed eagle inherited from Byzantium has been playing into the rivalry. One could say that the Ukrainian head wants to turn toward Western democracy, with Ukraine becoming an enlightened European state. The Russian head, however, remains as it has been for centuries, facing the empire in the east. After all, following the fall of Byzantium, Moscow, not Kiev, assumed the historic mantle of the Third Rome and bore the torch of Christian Orthodoxy. Moreover, since the monument was built for the Russian emperor Nicholas I, St. Vladimir is “ours,” they say, just as Krym nash (Crimea is ours).
In 2014 Putin, upon annexing Crimea, justified Russia’s claims to the peninsula in his address to the State Duma:
We are not simply close neighbors but, as I have said many times already, we are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other…. Crimea is our common historical legacy and a very important factor in regional stability. And this strategic territory should be part of a strong and stable sovereignty, which today can only be Russian.[18]
From this and similar declarations one may extrapolate the Kremlin’s reasoning: as the European Union supported the Euromaidan—and Germany, once the country of Nazism that the Soviets defeated, is the most powerful state in the Union—Russia and its historical space are essentially under assault from the West, from those bent on destroying Russian supranational identity.
Because Kiev had lurched westward with its protest movement, Putin argued that Ukrainians had betrayed their cultural roots and endangered Russia’s security. After all, a westward-looking Ukraine might join NATO; the alliance’s promise of eventual membership (made in the Bucharest Declaration of 2008) figured in his thinking.
In 2016 Putin, who happens to be Prince Vladimir’s namesake, had his own statue of Vladimir the Great built in Borovitskaya Square, just outside the Kremlin’s western corner walls. In doing so, he was implicitly calling for Russian national unity and the defiance of enemies at home and abroad, just as the prince did a millennium ago. This move dismayed Ukrainians commemorating the millennial of St. Vladimir’s death in 1015. They complained that Russia has misappropriated a key element of their spiritual heritage. After all, Vladimir the Great had no relation to Moscow.
The new monument in Moscow was originally to stand more than seventy feet higher than its prototype in Kiev. The authorities planned to locate it on the Russian capital’s most elevated terrain—Sparrow Hills (formerly Lenin Hills), similar to Vladimir overlooking Kiev. But ecological protests broke out, which prompted municipal authorities to move it to a more prominent—if lower—space a mere hundred yards from the Kremlin.
Another Vladimir, Lenin, is also now separating Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine once had the greatest number of Lenin statues in the former Soviet Union—more than five thousand, according to one count.[19] For the past twenty years it has struggled to take them down. During the Euromaidan protests, Leninopady, or “falling Lenins”—as the demolitions of Lenin statues came to be popularly known—proliferated. Often, Lenins that remained standing were “Ukrainianized”—that is, dressed up in vyshivanki, traditional Ukrainian embroidered blouses. For many Ukrainians, tearing down their granite-and-bronze Lenins symbolized their country’s right to determine its own future. Others opposed the demolitions—especially those who were aging and conservative and valued Russia’s close historical ties to Ukraine—and, most of all, pined for the more stable, if less free, Soviet decades.
Both of us had been to Kiev numerous times before. Jeff first visited in 1985 and kept going back to see his friends and relatives of his wife there. Most notably, though, he sojourned in Kiev after the Orange Revolution and witnessed the deep disillusionment that followed, as President Yushchenko and his prime minister Tymoshenko ignored Ukraine’s pressing problems and became adversaries. At least the Orange Revolution never lost its ability to inspire hope; for a time, people were able to confront Russian pressure and liberate themselves from it.
For Nina, the connection goes even deeper—all the way back to her great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev. Born in 1894 in the Russian village of Kalinovka on the Ukrainian border, he moved at age sixteen to the Ukrainian mining town of Yuzovka, which is now Donetsk, a hotbed of pro-Novorossiya sentiment following the ouster of Yanukovych and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In 1938, Stalin appointed Khrushchev, known for his expertise in agriculture, to be Communist Party Secretary in Kiev and tasked him with returning the republic to normalcy after the devastations of Holodomor. This man-made famine of 1932–1933 had taken between six million and seven million lives and involved state confiscation of grain from Ukrainian and Russian peasants for export, in return for heavy machinery needed for Stalin’s industrialization drive. Khrushchev argued against the Soviet Union’s reliance on Ukraine for a large part of its agricultural production and stressed the need to develop more effective farming elsewhere in the country.
4
Kim Kelly, “Decapitating Lenin Statues Is the Hottest New Trend in Ukraine,”