Christian Russia in the Making (review)

This second volume of articles by the well-known historian of medieval Rus’ contains twelve articles, three of which appear here for the first time in English (with no indication where two of them first appeared).

Sources for the history of Rus’ are far scarcer than for any western land; hence Rus’ historiography is that much more replete with flights of fancy. In his introduction Poppe writes that he has “succeeded in filling in several small and a few medium-sized gaps in our knowledge of medieval Rus’.” He has indeed offered new interpretations of several much-discussed topics; whether he has succeeded in filling in the gaps for which there is no direct documentation is another matter.

Some of Poppe’s most controversial interpretations regard the history of Boris and Gleb. This has been a subject of his articles in the past; to it is devoted “Losers on Earth, Winners from Heaven,” no. VII in the present volume, and the author’s conclusions figure in one way or another in other articles in the same volume. Since the topic gives a fair idea of Poppe’s methodology and has ramifications for our understanding of Kievan Rus’, I will concentrate on it here, although a review cannot follow his argument step by step.

Sources written close to the events call Boris and Gleb sons of Vladimir and a Bulgarian woman. Poppe presents them as the sons of Vladimir’s Christian wife, Anna Porphyrogenita, and begins by saying that “there are no grounds for supposing the marriage was childless, even if direct evidence of children is lacking” (p. 137). He considers her age, as if sterility was never found among young women, and wonders at the “strange silence about Anna in the Chronicle,” the main historic source, as if that source was ever profuse about princes’ consorts. Nothing is easier than to build up a theory from silence, with a string of “could-haves” and “must-haves,” and that is how Poppe proceeds. He presents as indubitable facts things for which there is no evidence and which, moreover, are highly improbable, such as that Anna’s sarcophagus once stood in the middle of the Tithe church under the cupola, an impossibility as anyone acquainted with Orthodox liturgy should know. Boris’s Christian name was David, which Poppe explains as referring to King David and having “prophylactic powers, protecting [Anna’s] son from harm” (p. 139), and he goes on to speak of the ambition of queen mothers for their sons. The prophylactic value of the name I leave for readers to decide; as for ambition, mistresses had as much of it as lawful wives, and if Boris indeed was destined by Vladimir to succeed him (by no means a certain fact), it was not necessarily due to Anna’s stratagem. Poppe cannot ignore the Bulgarian mother of the sources; so he goes through a contorted argumentation (Anna “no doubt” mingled with Bulgarian princesses and “could have” picked up Bulgarian) to make it fit his theory. Poppe then connects the cult of Boris and Gleb with pre-Christian ancestor worship (by the ruling dynasty) and, contrary to what eleventh-century writings tell us, moves their canonization from the 1020s to 1072. His long chain of unproven assumptions cannot be followed here, and I shall examine only one link. Since the sources write that Boris was killed by a Varangian, this was to show, according to Poppe, disdain toward the Latin faith to which the Varangian belonged, hence these writings could come only from after 1054 (see pp. 147, 162). Why the mention of a Varangian assassin should imply that he was a Latin and be meant as a slur on the Latin faith escapes me. Even if this were true, the argument from 1054 is nonsense, as if only warm feelings prevailed between Greeks and Latins (I use the terms in the religious, not ethnic sense) before 1054, and began...