Sean Griffin

The chroniclers of medieval Rus were monks, who celebrated the divine services of the Byzantine church throughout every day. This study is the first to analyze how these rituals shaped their writing of the Rus Primary Chronicle, the first written history of the East Slavs. During the eleventh century, chroniclers in Kiev learned about the conversion of the Roman Empire by celebrating a series of distinctively Byzantine liturgical feasts. When the services concluded, and the clerics sought to compose a native history for their own people, they instinctively drew on the sacred stories that they sang at church. The result was a myth of Christian origins for Rus - a myth promulgated even today by the Russian government - which reproduced the Christian origins myth of the Byzantine Empire. The book uncovers this ritual subtext and reconstructs the intricate web of liturgical narratives that underlie this foundational text of pre-modern Slavic civilization.

In mid-2020, Patriarch Kirill (Gundiaev) consecrated a new church known as the Main Cathedral of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The cathedral was dedicated to the Soviet Union’s “Great Victory” over Nazi Germany, and its interior was covered with grandiose mosaics depicting Soviet glory on the battlefields of World War II. In this version of the past, however, Soviet soldiers were shown to have supernatural help from Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. This merging of Orthodoxy and Communism shocked many observers, who viewed the two ideologies as bitter enemies, dating back the Russian Civil War. Yet on the walls of the new military shrine, the lions and the lambs had laid down together. Angels shielded Orthodox Whites and atheist Reds alike, and the Virgin gazed down on both tsars and commissars. Two implacable foes, on different sides of the greatest rupture in Russian history, had been sutured together into a single and uncontradictory version of the past. But where had this sacred synthesis come from? Who was responsible for the politics of memory preached on the walls of the Main Cathedral? And what role did these sacred memory politics later play in the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Every year on July 28, citizens in contemporary Russia turn on the television news and hear extensive reports about a federal holiday known as “The Day of the Baptism of Rus.”  Viewers watch as Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow stand side-by-side and repeat an ancient story about the Conversion in 988 and the sacred bonds which even today unite the nations of “Holy Rus”: Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.  But what, exactly, is the political and ecclesiastical backstory behind the staging of these yearly media spectacles?  Why and when had the Day of the Baptism of Rus begun to play such a visible role in post-Soviet politics?  In the study, Griffin reconstructs the development of this propaganda campaign, in the years between 1991 and 2018.  Special attention is given, above all, to the events that unfolded in Ukraine following the Orange Revolution, when the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church began to fear that they were in danger of losing their traditional status as the only canonical Orthodox church in Ukraine.  Ultimately, Griffin argues that the contemporary commemorations of the Day of the Baptism of Rus have less to do with the Vladimir who ruled in the late tenth century than they do with the Vladimir who currently rules in the twenty first.