Four Perspectives on “Old Russia” (Rus′)

Contemporary English lacks satisfactory terms to denote the regions that have since become Belarus′, Russia, and Ukraine and to denote the peoples that inhabited these regions before the development of the Russian empire. The standard “Russia” or even “Old Russia” may (however wrongly) bring to a nonspecialist’s mind a region ruled from Moscow or St. Petersburg, whereas the earliest major political center in these territories was Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine. Many scholars now prefer to make the distinction between “Russia” and “Rus′” that exists in contemporary standard Russian, though this distinction may baffle the uninitiated.¹ For this reason I have used the inaccurate “Old Russia” (albeit in quotation marks) in the title of this review and supplied the more accurate “Rus′” in parentheses. The first term is directed towards the uninitiated (and a few of the initiated who refuse to adopt “Rus′”); the second is intended to inform the initiated that I am aware of the terminological difficulty. (In a similar fashion, Andrzej Poppe has entitled his book Christian Russia in the Making but has tended to prefer “Rus′” in the articles that the book contains.) Adjectives present a further problem: if “Rus′” is not “Old Russia,” then how can its language be “Old Russian” or its territory be “Russian”? Here scholars divide, with some preferring “Rusian” or “Rus′ian” (forms that have no equivalent in modern Russian) and some preferring “East Slavic,” a term that may (among other things) gloss over the significance of Scandinavian culture in Rus′. In spite of such problems, I shall here take the latter option.

Publication on the history of Rus′ is off to a good start as the first decade of the 21st century ends. The four books reviewed here reflect two trends within that broader pattern. Two of them, collections of mostly previously published articles in English, are both linked to a strong tradition of scholarship that has existed outside the Soviet Union and Russia in the latter half of the 20th century; the appearance of the other two reflects scholarly and cultural developments within post-Soviet Russia.²

The Expansion of Orthodox Europe, edited by Jonathan Shepard, is a collection of articles, almost all reprinted, dealing with what Dimitri Obolensky has called “the Byzantine Commonwealth.”³ Yet Shepard has deliberately and wisely forgone recovering the ground covered by Obolensky; instead he has chosen some studies of phenomena in the Orthodox lands that have largely been ignored and some that approach frequently studied phenomena from unusual perspectives.⁴ Although some of the articles date to several decades ago (one as far back as 1949), more than half were first published between 1990 and 2004. Because of the breadth of the collection, this review will focus on 9 (out of 22) articles that relate largely or exclusively to East Slavic territory. Two of these articles deal with trade between Byzantium and the East Slavs; one provides a wonderful synthetic discussion of the nature and boundaries of Rus′; three discuss relations between the East Slavs and the Mongols; two focus on intellectual developments in Byzantium and among the Slavs (South and East) in the 14th and 15th centuries; and one attempts to fit East Slavic hagiography into a broader early Christian context.

Two closely related studies by the late Thomas S. Noonan and his energetic protégé Roman K. Kovalev point to what were probably only some aspects of the almost unexamined commercial...