Yet profound, if subtle, changes accompanied the transfer of power to the upper Volga: the coldest and most remote frontieFregion oTEyzantine-Slavic civilization. This region was increasingly cut off not just from declining Byzantium but also from a resurgent West, which was just rediscovering Greekr'phito5oph7~fflid~KinaffigTtF^M~lMv^ffie^"TTie mention of Russia that had been sd~E«cjuent'"iri early medieval French literature vanished altogether in the course of the fourteenth century.2 Russian no less than Western European writers realized that the Orthodox Eastern Slavs now comprised a congeries of principalities rather than a single political force. The chroniclers in the Russian north sensed that they
•?- somewhat cut off, using the term "Rus'" primarily for the old jHilllico-cultural center on the Dnieper around Kiev.3
? sense of separation within the domain of the Eastern Slavs had llfeady been suggested by the tenth-century Byzantine distinction between ? u" and "distant" Rus'; and in the thirteenth century the distinction I •• i ween "great" Russia in the north and "little" Russia in the south was gi initially transplanted from Byzantium to Russia. What apparently began in 11 pure description of size eventually became a favored pseudo-imperial di ilgnation in the north. Individual towns like Novgorod and Rostov called llirmselves~**tfe"G¥eat." Details of the life of Alexander the Great-a favorite subject in the epic literature of the East-were blended by the chroniclers of the Russian north into the idealized life of Alexander Nrvsky4-whose victory over the Swedes in 1240 and the Teutonic Knights two years later was followed by a reign as Great Prince of Vladimir. His victorious exploits helped compensate for the simultaneous humiliation at the hands of the Mongols and made him seem no less "great" than the ruiier Alexander. By the late fifteenth century, Ivan III had brought great-BMI out of legend and into reality, subordinating most of the major cities of ihe Russian north to Moscow. The first grand duke of Muscovy to call himself tsar (Caesar), he also became the first of several imperial con-• |iicTors of modern Russia to be known as "the Great."
There was, however, nothing great, or even impressive, about Great Russia in the thirteenth and the early fourteenth century. It must have Mimed highly unlikely that the Eastern Slavs in the bleak Volga-Oka region would in any way recapture-let alone surpass-the glories of the Kievan past. Kiev and the original region of Rus' along the Dnieper had been despoiled by the still-menacing Mongols. The Volga was frozen for much ni ihe year and blocked to the south by Mongol fortresses. Flat terrain and wooden"fortifications offered little natural protection from eastern invaders. Shivic co-religioniststo"the west were preoccupied with other problems. To
IIic northwest, Novgorod had carved out an economic empire of its own and
moved increasingly into the orbit of the expanding Hanseatic League.
Further north, the rugged Finns were being converted to Christianity, not
by Ihe once-active Orthodox missionaries of Novgorod and Ladoga, but by
1 Ik- Westernized Swedes. Directly to the west, the Teutonic and Livonian
knights provided a continuing military threat; while Galicia and Volhynia
IIIthe southwest were drifting into alignment with the Roman Church. Most
of what is now White (or West) Russia was loosely ruled by the Lithuanians,
anil much of Little Russia (or the Ukraine) by the Poles. These two
western neighbors were, moreover, moving toward an alliance that was
sealed by marriage and the establishment of the Jagellonian dynasty in 1386.
The surviving centers of Byzantine-Kievan civilization in Great Russia were relatively isolated from these alien forces. As a result, it is difficult to explain the changes in Russian cultural life that accompanied the move from "little" to "great" Russia simply in terms of new contact with other civilizations. There was, to be sure, increased borrowing from the Tatars and from pre-Christian pagan animism in the north. But there are great risks in suggesting that either of these elements provides some simple "key" to the understanding of Russian character. The famed aphorism "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar" and the ingenious hypothesis that there was in Russia an enduring dvoeverie (or duality of belief between official Christianity and popular paganism) tell us more about the patronizing attitude of Western observers and the romantic imagination of Russian ethnographers respectively than about Russian reality as such.
Of these two theories, that of continuing animistic influences takes us
perhaps deeper into the formative processes of Russian thought.5 The Tatars
provided a fairly clear-cut imaginative symbol for the people arid an
administrative example for the leaders, but were an external force whose
contact with the Russian people was largely episodic or indirect. Pre-
existent j›agan practices, on the other hand, were a continuing force,
' absorbed from within"by broad segments of the populace and reflecting a
? direct response to inescapable natural forces. If the fragmentary surviving
'; materials cannot prove any coherent, continuing pagan tradition, there can
no doubt that the cold, dark environment of Great Russia played a
decisive role in the culture which slowly emerged from these, the silent
centuries of Russian history. As in the other wooded regions of Northern
Europe-Scandinavia, Prussia, and Lithuania-brooding pagan naturalism
seemed to stand in periodic opposition to a Christianity that had been
brought in relatively late from more sunlit southerly regions. Far more,
however, than her forest neighbors to the west, Great "Russia thrust
monasteries forth into the wooded wastes during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Thus, in Great Russia, there was not so much a duality of belief as
a continuing influx of primitive animism into an ever-expanding Christian
culture.
The animistic feeling for nature blended harmoniously with an Orthodox sense of history in the springtime festival of Easter, which acquired a special intensity in the Russian north. The traditional Easter greeting was not the bland "Happy Easter" of the modern West, but a direct affirmation of the central fact of sacred history, "Christ is risen!"' The standard answer "In truth, risen!" seemed to apply to nature as well as man;
fin ihc resurrection feast came at the end not just of the long Lenten fast, hill nl iliu dark, cold winter. Easter sermons were among the most carefully I'M rived and frequently recopied documents from the Kievan period. To 1I1. ? Uy/antine elegance was added in the north the simple assertion that ilir goodness hidden in the hearts of the holy shall be revealed in their risen I'i.'Iiis" just as trees long veiled in snow "put out their leaves in the iptlng.""
I lie weakening of central authority and the presence of new enemies- 1 Hi natural and human-forced a deepening of family and communal
1Is within the widely scattered communities of the Russian north.