The Construction of the Katehon : Memory of the Kievan Fragmentation and the Growth of Monarchical Institutions under Moscow until (original) (raw)

is a curious time for Russia and for historians specializing in the area because it is a fragile manifestation of what is undoubtedly a strong and unified linguistic, religion and ethnic world. There was little religious persecution, tyranny or mass warfare. Wars were, as always for the era, small scale and done among elites and their servitors. There was no serfdom and few, if any, taxes. To oversimplify, the philosophical conception was based around the price as the unifying principle of the society. There was no "state" in any sense of the term. Each of the regions of Rus' had their own history, and these were incorporated into a common history of the Russian land as a single community was a fact, while fragmentation was a perversion rather than an inherent tendency. Kiev was summarized largely by the thought and actions of the Caves Monastery: there, the philosophy of the Kievan realm was manifest and articulated. The ontology of the realm was that matter,always permeable by spirit, was brought to its terminus-its goal-through the spirit. The state, the crown and social life are granted its final telos by the church. Spiritual life is the striving for inner freedom. Logos, the very presence of Christ in His own creation, is the Trinity functional in natural law. The Father is the source, Logos the pattern and the Spirit its manifestation and grace. In the thought of St. Euphrosyne of Polotsk (1173) centers around the ontological conception that any object, if perceived without the passions of life, sin and desire, appear as form. In the Chronicles, the person is revealed in the unfolding of events; the substance of all things shows itself historically. Nations are this substance. While it is fashionable in the age of immense profits from multinational conglomerates to deny the existence of historical nations, the empirical record shows a very different story. The Chronicles of both Kiev and Polotsk show nations to be essential actors manifesting the design of Substance over time. In Kiev, there existed two parallel forms of political power: the landed estate and the prince. These did not always coincide. The Retinue (or the druzhina) were the old tribal leaders of the Slavic peoples who saw their relevance fade as the state developed. At the same time, the veche, or the assembly, was the forum for the old tribal landowners. Again, these two did not always coincide. Fragmentation occurred when the estates grew in power while the opposite occurred when the prince was a strong military figure with great authority. The fragmentation of the Kievan realm is the result of numerous economic forces. The strengthening of the feudal estates is of immense importance as an oligarchy developed which led to substantial class struggle. Local nobles and their private armies no longer needed Kiev, the church nor moral scruples. Local strongmen took advantage of advances in agriculture such as the three field rotational system which led to increases the production. The oligarchs then took this excess product and turned it into an important source of income. Their private armies grew. This was manifest in the strengthening of cities, all of which served as the capital of local regions and soon, the presence of oligarchical rule. When the route to Byzantium was closed off due to the Crusaders and the earlier monopolization of trade in Venice, this weakened the economic foundation of unity, diminished the flow of trade duties and of course, undermined the economic power of the prince of Kiev. The main source of wealth became the control over the peasants. This, added to the wars for the Kievan throne and the raids of the Polovtsian nomads, Kiev was rapidly weakening. In the thought of St. Cyril of Turov and Clement (Smolyatich), "fragmentation" was the chaotic appearance of the world under the control of passion. Centrifugal tendencies in ancient Russia were stopped temporarily due to the Polovtsian danger which demanded joint efforts among local princes. After the death of the great St. Vladimir II Monomakh, Mstyslav the Great (1125-1132) continued his father's policy of centralization. Upon his death, there were about 14 of these principalities in Russia: