Tretii Rim: Istoki i evoliutsiia russkoi srednevekovoi kontseptsii (XV–XVI vv.) (review)

In 1882 the Kiev historian Vasilii N. Malinin published the first edition of his publication and study of the epistles of the 16th-century monk Filofei of Pskov, the author of the idea of the Third Rome.¹ The work did not meet with much attention right away, but by the time of the second edition, Russian culture had changed so much that Filofei's work had left the studies of scholars for bigger world of the Russian Silver Age. Vladimir Solov'ev's famous poem "Panmongolizm" of 1894, which Aleksandr Blok later quoted as an epigraph to his Skify, ensured the fame of the Third Rome. The nationalist and apocalyptic implications of the idea enjoyed great vogue in the Silver Age and the emigration, and in the 1920s evoked a response among Slavists in Weimar Germany, another civilization obsessed with the empires of the last days.² The early years of the Cold War kept it alive in the West, but since then Western historians of Russia have not been able to accept the centrality of the idea of the Third Rome to Russian consciousness in the 16th century.³ There are too few references to the idea in Russian texts of the times to award it that sort of significance. Western scholarship still requires evidence in order to draw conclusions, as indeed does Russian scholarship when it deals with normal issues.

The idea of the Third Rome is scarcely a normal issue. What are we to make of a notion which the first major student of the issue admitted to be virtually unknown in the 16th century, and then went on to assert that it was present anyway? For that is what Malinin said of the doctrine: "Although it was completely exceptional, it faithfully reproduced the general sense of the epoch." Malinin then went on to assert that the doctrine entered "documents of state," but that is not in fact the case.⁴ The actual fate of Filofei's remarks does not seem to have had much effect on the perception of their importance in recent historiography. In the late 1980s, the Third Rome reentered Russian historical studies with a vengeance. Essentially absent in Russia since the Revolution, it now peppers the pages of scholarly works in the most unlikely places.⁵ The words "Third Rome" do not need to appear in the text, the assumption is that the idea is present, perhaps mystically, even when there is no evidence of such words or even of distant allusions.

Nina V. Sinitsyna has now turned to the topic with actual empirical evidence, or at least most of the time with empirical evidence. Sinitsyna is an experienced scholar, best known for her studies of Maksim Grek, and not surprisingly her present work eliminates some of the ideological and presentist notions that have encumbered the modest edifice of the brief epistles of Filofei of Pskov. She is very aware of the modern over-interpretation of Filofei and her opening remarks on the subject are entirely correct, even if she does not always follow her own advice. Beginning with a discussion of the Russian attitude to the Greek church after 1453, she goes on to treat some Russian texts and ideas related to notions of the Third Rome (or alleged to be related), presents a detailed discussion of the texts and manuscripts of Filofei and an analysis of their contents, and closes with some account of the fate of the idea in the 17th century. The result is essential material for the history of ideas in the entire period under discussion, whatever the reader may think of her particular notions of Filofei.

Reading Sinitsyna is hard work and not for the faint-hearted, but at its basis lie two basic conclusions which depend to a large extent on each other. The first is that she accepts much of the Aleksandr L. Gol'dberg's critique of the received attribution of the...