Ukraine and the West: A Medieval Legacy

Samuel Huntington’s well-known “clash of civilizations” paradigm divides the world into eight distinctive and mutually exclusive cultural zones and predicts that the wars of the future will break out along the fault lines between them. One of Huntington’s fault lines runs between central and eastern Europe marking the boundary between two civilizations: “Western Civilization” and “Orthodox Civilization.” If we attend to this map we note how Poland, Czechia, and Hungary belong to the former category; Ukraine belongs to the latter. Without intending to disparage the utility of Huntington’s model considered as a whole, its boundary in at least this respect would seem to lend support to Vladimir Putin’s contention that Western involvement in Ukraine represents foreign occupation of the unique cultural zone over which Russia is the rightful hegemon. 

But the history of Ukraine and the West utterly complicates this tidy vision.

Even consideration of that history in its general contours suggests that Huntington’s fault-line may be misplaced and that there is substance behind the placement of Ukraine, or at least parts of the Ukraine, in “the West.” We need not detain ourselves for long with the observation–acknowledged by Putin himself–that the emergence of the polity between the Dniester and Volga rivers from which Russia and Ukraine trace their origin was brought about by the conquest and settlement of Viking Swedes (“Varangians”).

It is perhaps less well known that this polity, after it had accepted baptism through Byzantine agency in the late tenth century, was connected by marriage to the royal houses of Sweden, France, Germany, England, Hungary, and Poland. 

It was the Mongol invasions of the mid-thirteenth century that shattered the (already politically fragmented) Kievan Rus’ polity and set its western and eastern ends on divergent paths that would eventuate in Ukraine and Russia respectively. After the brutal Mongol sack of Kiev, the Rus’ capital, in 1240, the political initiative in the land of Rus transferred to cities on the periphery under very different circumstances: in the east, the cities of Vladimir and (eventually) backwater Moscow rose to prominence through dutiful service to the Khan of the Golden Horde. In the extreme West, in Volynia and Galicia, Prince Danylo received a crown from Pope Innocent IV in 1245 and married into the Lithuanian royal family.

While the Muscovites waxed strong as the Khan’s reliable tax-collectors until they eventually shrugged off the decrepit Mongol yoke in the fifteenth century and laid claim to the fallen crown of imperial Byzantium, the Rus’ peoples of Galicia, Volynia, and Kiev abided in the shadow of a united Poland-Lithuania without losing their East Slavic tongue or Byzantine religion.

But before the Fall of Constantinople (1453) or the final breaking of the Mongol yoke (1480), an event had already transpired that would ultimately prove to be a decisive factor in the emergence of Russia and Ukraine. Ironically, the occasion for this divergence was a council of religious union: the Council of Florence, which joyously proclaimed that the Byzantine Church, headquartered in beleaguered Constantinople, and the Roman Church, so long divided by schism, were once more united.

This union involved the Rus’ too: after all, since the late tenth century the Rus’ had looked to the patriarchate of Constantinople as their Mother Church, and the archbishop of Kiev, a man named Isidore, was a key figure in the negotiations at the Council of Florence. Isidore, by birth a Greek-speaker and appointed to his see by the patriarchate of Constantinople, was responsible for a flock of believers stretching from Galicia and Volynia in the west toward the Dniester–now under Polish-Lithuanian suzerainty–all the way to Suzdal and Riazan’ on the Volga in the east, where the Rus’ looked to Vasilii II of Moscow as their prince.

In 1437, Isidore had left Moscow (the residence of the archbishop of Kiev since that city was under the control of Lithuania) with a retinue of Rus’ clergy and the prince’s cautious consent, had gone on to play a leading role in the union negotiations at Florence, and then returned eastward to bring the glad tidings of union. But upon Isidore’s return and his announcement of the glad tidings of union with Rome, the Grand Prince had him incarcerated on charges of heresy. Hence union with the Western Church, for which the archbishop of Kiev had labored, was flatly rejected by the Grand Prince of Moscow.

This rejection led to a schism in the Kievan Church. In Moscow, Vasilii II oversaw in 1448 the enthronement of a new, anti-union “metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia” without any reference to Constantinople. (Isidore had been allowed to escape back to Italy). The union of Florence thus became the occasion for Moscow’s declaration of ecclesiastical independence, a case that would only be strengthened by the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

Meanwhile, Kiev itself was incorporated into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1471 and maintained a line of pro-union archbishops of Kiev between 1458 and 1502. In other words, the question of union with Western Europe had put Kiev and Moscow at odds as early as the mid-fifteenth century.

What happened in the next century only confirmed the diverging trajectory of these two cities and the peoples they claimed.

In 1588, Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople agreed, under compulsion, to grant Moscow–now greatly expanded by the campaigns of Ivan the Terrible–a patriarch of its own. Thenceforth a patriarch of Moscow could take the place vacated by heretical Rome within the pentarchy–the five great Orthodox Sees–along with Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem–and with the privileged position of being the only one of these sees independent of Muslim overlordship.

To the West, the metropolitan of Kiev and his suffragan bishops, bristling at the heavy-handed attempts of the Patriarch of Constantinople to intervene in their Church, appealed to the papacy for a renewal of the union according to the terms of the Council of Florence. This request was accepted at Rome and culminated, ultimately, in the Synod of Brest on October 9th, 1596. (This union endured until it was forcibly liquidated in 1946, at a “synod” orchestrated by the Soviets).

To be sure, this renewal of union with the West did not go down without controversy and by 1620 a rival anti-unionist hierarchy had emerged in the Kievan Church. But the legacy of union, even if contested, endured. Even after the Muscovite conquest of 1654, when the historic mother church of Kiev became, in an ironic reversal, subjected as a daughter to the patriarchate of Moscow, the legacy of union persisted still in those lands that had since become defined (by a Muscovite hegemony that had once been a mere periphery) as “Ukraine”: the borderland–particularly in the western regions of historic Galicia and the Carpathian Mountains.

Contrary to the impressions conveyed by tidy maps and self-serving narratives, a closer attendance of history reveals just how very deeply connected the destiny of Ukraine has been to the greater West and how that connection has been a bone of contention between Kiev and Moscow for the past half millennium.