Class 6: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1)
- As we try to figure out what Ukraine is,
we're also trying to figure out
what the countries around Ukraine are.
And so over the course of this semester,
you'll have occasion to think about what Russia is.
That's not our main subject, but I assume
it's come to mind already that Russia
is also not simple, and that the history of Russia
is also not straightforward.
And that indeed this war that's going on now
may have more to do with uncertainty about what Russia is
than it does with uncertainty about what Ukraine is.
Just something to think about.
Professor Bushkovitch, our outstanding historian
of early modern Russia, was going to lecture
on the formation of the Russian state on Tuesday,
but he can't.
So I'm gonna do it instead.
The lecture is going to happen.
You're going to see, in this lecture,
that something like the beginning of a Russian state
will start to appear.
And I want you to track that,
because the chronology of all this is very important.
This is partly on my mind because of where we are,
in fact, where we are in the war, which is that,
as I'm sure most of you know,
the Russian Federation has begun a mobilization
under the heading partial mobilization,
whatever that might mean.
But the edict in question essentially allows
any Russian male to be mobilized for war.
And now people in Russia are being mobilized for war
all over the country, but notably, and not surprisingly,
in Asian Russia and in Southern Russia,
in places where people are poor,
or also in places where people are ethnically,
as we say today, not Russian.
Which is a reminder that one of the things that Russia is,
is an Asian state.
Most of the territory of Russia is in fact in Asia, right?
And so, when Russia invaded Ukraine,
many of the soldiers who were invaded,
many of the casualties were themselves Asians.
I just mentioned that because it's gonna be helpful
in the next lecture when we try to think about
what Russia is and how it is or isn't like Ukraine.
Okay.
The first point I wanted to make today,
as we move from Rus' to Lithuania, is again about language.
I want you to remember that languages and peoples
are not exactly the same thing.
There's a modern fantasy which says that
there's one language, and there's one people,
and it's all the same thing.
That often goes under the heading of nationalism,
or ethnic nationalism, or ethnicity,
but languages are there for you, and you can move
in and out of languages, especially when you are young.
Hey, multilingual guys, stop making jokes, stop whispering.
They're all like, we speak a lot of languages.
I'm sure your TFs have been like that.
They've probably been like,
what languages do you guys speak?
Right, have they done that in section?
They have in fact done that in section.
I'm not surprised.
Okay, but actually, you know, I mean,
for Wiktor and for Maksimas,
the language that they're teaching you in
is a language that they've moved into, right?
It's not their language of birth.
It's a language that they've moved into.
And the capacity for of humans to do this
is very important in politics,
especially in non-modern politics.
So when we're talking about this fellow,
Volodymyr or Vladimir, or Valdemar, as his Scandinavian was,
we're talking about the fellow who converted to Christianity
and in some sense began the whole statehood project
that we're concerned with.
He's a Scandinavian prince, right?
He's from Scandinavia, his family's from Scandinavia.
His successors even will still be Scandinavian princes.
And his name is Waldemar.
And then he had, but there are these nice Slavic
versions of his name.
Today we say Volodymyr and Vladimir,
but those names in turn seem to come from Bulgaria, right?
So there's a Bulgarian Vladimir.
So is he a Scandinavian prince?
Is he a Bulgarian prince?
And this gets us thinking in the right directions,
because he's not any one thing, right?
The way to come to power,
and very often the way to stay in power, again,
especially in the earlier periods,
is to be more than one thing,
to speak more than one language.
So if we think about Valdemar, or Vladimir, or Volodymyr,
we're right to think about the Vikings,
but we're also right to think about the Bulgarians,
and we're right to think about the Byzantines.
When he converted the Christianity, he took another name,
which is Basil, that was his baptismal name, Basil.
It's notable that he didn't make that his main name,
that he stated his main name remained Volodymyr.
So people come into languages.
Languages are there, you can move through them,
you can do things with them.
So when I was in Ukraine the last time,
which is a couple of weeks ago,
I was speaking to someone who was called Volodymyr.
And you know, that Volodymyr Zelenskyy,
he's also someone who's coming into a language, right?
Ukrainian was not his best language
when he was elected president of Ukraine.
But now of course it's his public language.
And just even I can tell that his Ukrainian
is much better now than it was a couple of years ago.
And when I spoke to his wife, Elena Zelenskyy,
she's also, we spoke Ukrainian.
And I think I made her feel good because my Ukrainian
was just, you know, I made mistakes.
And I think that put her at ease.
But you know it's cute, I made mistakes.
Mistakes are cute.
An old guy making mistakes is cute.
It's like one of the many advantages we have.
But she was coming into a language,
like I was coming into a language, right?
Ukrainian is not, I was speaking Ukrainian with her.
Ukrainian is not my language of birth, right?
It's like fourth or fifth best language.
I was coming into a language in a different way
she's coming into a language, right?
You can come into languages.
Another related theme is that Volodymyr,
Waldemar, is coming into a religion.
So a conversion is a kind of sideways move.
You don't really stop being a pagan
when you become a Christian,
it's not that your whole past disappears,
it's that you're moving into something which already exists
and brings with it certain features.
In this case, it brings with it priests,
it brings with it another language, of church Slavonic.
It brings with it a tradition.
It brings with it a heritage,
because the moment that you convert into Christianity,
you're inheriting the Bible,
and so hence the history of the Jews,
a very ancient history.
Like you're not putting yourself into that timeline as well.
Because you're going into Greek,
you're also going into the tradition
of the ancient Mediterranean world that way.
Suddenly you're in all of these vertical traditions
that you weren't in before.
Okay, so we're gonna get from, in this lecture,
we're gonna get from Volodymyr to Yaroslav,
and then we're gonna get from Yaroslav to Lithuania.
We're gonna end in Lithuania, much the joy of our,
I'm counting them, three Lithuanians in this group.
So the two great leaders of Rus',
if you just read like a textbook about early Rus',
are going to be Volodymyr and Yaroslav.
And we have, so first we have to get to Yaroslav.
It's complicated.
Okay, I mean, I could say Volodymyr was Yaroslav's son,
and that would make it sound very simple,
but it's not really simple at all.
As you remember last time,
when Volodymyr took Ana, the Byzantine princess Ana,
as his wife, he already had about six others and, you know,
a harem of hundreds of women.
When he died, so his relationship with his sons
was not straightforward.
When he died in 1015, he had one of his sons,
and I tried to write all these down this time.
He had one of his son's, Sviatopolk, in prison, as one does,
he was making war against another one of his sons, Yaroslav,
as one does.
So when Volodymyr dies, Sviatopolk is freed.
Sviatopolk then arranges for, it seems,
the death of three of his brothers,
probably with the help of Scandinavian allies.
Sviatopolk then goes to war against Yaroslav.
Yaroslav initially wins, with the help of some
Scandinavian allies, at least that's according to
the tale of Evalynd, which is an Icelandic saga,
which reminds you how this is all this,
this could all be Nordic history, by the way.
We could be in a Nordic history class at this point,
the history of Rus' at this point
fits in with the history of what's,
as Rus' is becoming a state,
so simultaneously are Norway and Sweden becoming states.
It's a simultaneous, and it's an intermingled, process.
So Sviatopolk is freed, but then he's defeated by Yaroslav.
Then Sviatopolk goes to Poland, and gets an army,
and brings it back.
He's married to a Polish princess.
He brings a Polish army back,
he defeats Yaroslav, Yaroslav goes east,
recruits an army of Pechenegs, comes back,
defeats Sviatopolk.
Seems that Yaroslav is now in charge,
but then yet another brother, there were at least 10.
I'm sure there were many, many more,
but there are 10 that come down to us.
And then another brother was called Mstislav,
which means something like glory to revenge, beautifully.
Mstislav marches on Kyiv and defeats Yaroslav.
As a result of this in the end,
Mstislav and Yaroslav rule Kyiv together for a while.
Mstislav about a decade.
Mstislav dies in 1036, and from 1036 Yaroslav rules alone.
Okay, I give you those details because
the colorful details from all of the Scandinavian sagas
in the early Kyiv of sources are very interesting,
but also because I want you to see a problem,
which is the problem of succession,
how you get from one ruler to another,
how you keep a state going.
This is a key problem in political theory,
in political practice, which you wanna mark.
Because even if you're just thinking about
contemporary politics, like why, for example,
are things so chaotic in the Russian Federation right now?
One of the first things that you should try out is,
what's the succession principle?
How do they know who the next ruler is going to be?
That's it.
So in early Rus', there was a big problem with succession.
If you count it the way we're counting it,
from one ruler to another single ruler,
from Volodymyr to Yaroslav, it took 21 years.
And along the way, at least
10 of the other children of of Volodymyr were killed.
Okay, also I want you to mark succession as an issue
because when we get into other kinds of regimes
in a couple of weeks,
the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth,
the Russian empire, succession is also going to be
a very important issue there.
This brings us to Yaroslav and what is regarded
as the golden age of Kyivan Rus'.
His rule, which is the 1020s, 1030s, 1040s.
He rules by himself from 1036 until his death in 1054.
So Yaroslav is also a Scandinavian prince.
I wanna make sure this is clear.
The fact that he's a Scandinavian prince
doesn't mean that he's not the prince of Rus', right?
But he is a Scandinavian prince.
He's in the saga of Harald Hardrada,
who is the king of Norway.
And he marries off one of his daughters
to that same king of Norway.
He himself is married to a daughter of the king of Sweden.
As I've already said, some of the sources about him
are Icelandic sagas.
And by the way, Iceland sagas are the earliest
significant European literature.
They're quite extraordinary,
but they're also interesting historical sources
because they record events that are only about
one or 200 years before when they were recorded,
