Republic Against Empire: Why Ukraine is Not an Heir to the "Moscow Startup"

An empire is a hierarchy in which a center rules over conquered peripheries, drains them of resources and legitimacy, and holds them together by force and a supranational myth of its own mission. A republic is a community of equal citizens who are themselves the source of power, a community with borders rather than a boundless hunger to absorb what belongs to others. Ukraine emerged from a Cossack tradition of elective government, and its entire history is a stubborn refusal to be anyone's periphery. It has no metropolitan machine, no subject peoples, and no need to subjugate anyone. So the talk that Ukraine could become an empire, or that it once "built" someone else's, is not a question of desire or pride. It is a confusion of basic concepts.

It is precisely this confusion that troubles me about an elegant idea I hear more and more often: that Ukrainians founded Russia, built the Russians their greatness, and therefore hold a right to historical compensation. Let me say it plainly: no. We need neither a foreign myth nor one of our own. We do not need an empire rewritten in our name. And least of all do we need to turn our own history into a weapon in someone else's game.

The occasion for this conversation was a post by Pavlo Sebastianovych, a man I deeply respect. His line of argument is wittily built: the Ukrainian Yuri Dolgoruky, grandson of Monomakh, founded Moscow; the Ukrainian Metropolitan Peter, a Volhynian, raised its church status; Ivan the Terrible, son of the Ukrainian Elena Glinskaya, proclaimed the tsardom. So the entire "Russia project" was assembled by people from our lands, and we have rights to it. Striking. And for exactly that reason, a trap.

Because to demand compensation for the "Muscovite Principality startup," you first have to quietly agree that the startup existed at all, that there was an unbroken line from Kyiv to Moscow, that Kyiv bequeathed and handed something down to Moscow. But that is the very core of the Moscow myth, the same "one people" and "shared cradle" that I take apart in "Myths of the Third Rome." The Ukrainian version differs from the Kremlin's only in the direction of the arrow: not "we are one people, so Ukraine is Russian," but "we are one people, so Russia is Ukrainian." They reversed the arrow and left the myth intact. And when everything comes down to the arrow, the winner is not the one with the wittier genealogy but the one with more tanks.

So let us do what no one in this dispute has yet done honestly. If we are going to look for those who truly worked for Moscow and built it with their own hands, let us name them. And we will have to begin not with the mythical Kalita but with the man who gave Moscow the most precious thing of all: a ready-made myth about itself.

This was Innokentiy Gizel, archimandrite of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. It was in his Lavra printing house that the Synopsis appeared in 1674, the first printed history textbook, the first to argue systematically that the history of Great, Little, and White Russia was a single, indivisible inheritance of the Moscow tsars. Moscow did not invent its own pedigree from Kyiv; a Kyiv archimandrite presented it to her. The Synopsis was reprinted dozens of times and for more than a century was practically the only textbook from which both Russians and Ukrainians learned that they were "one people." Here is the real brick in the foundation of imperial identity, and it was laid by one of ours.

Next, Feofan Prokopovych, a Kyivan, a graduate of the Mohyla Academy, chief ideologue of Peter I. He wrote "The Justice of the Monarch's Will," the theological justification of unlimited autocracy, and drafted the Spiritual Regulation, which abolished the patriarchate and turned the church into a department of the empire. There was Stefan Yavorsky, who headed the Russian church as locum tenens of the patriarchal throne. There was Hetman Ivan Samoylovych, with whose help the Kyiv Metropolitanate was subordinated to Moscow in 1686, severing the Ukrainian church from Constantinople. There was Oleksandr Bezborodko of Hlukhiv, descended from Cossack officer stock, who rose to chancellor of the Russian Empire and shaped its foreign policy, the very policy that swallowed its neighbors. There was Viktor Kochubey, the empire's first minister of internal affairs, builder of the police machine on which Ukraine herself would later choke. There was Hetman Ivan Briukhovetsky, who with the Moscow Articles of 1665 personally let the tsar's voivodes and the tsar's taxes into the Hetmanate.

And it did not end in the eighteenth century. The Soviet empire was raised by the same tens of thousands of Ukrainian minds and military men: engineers, designers, marshals. The rockets that made Moscow a superpower were drafted by Sergei Korolev, born in Zhytomyr. Moscow always had a fist, but rarely a head. Its head was lent to her again and again by others, and most often by ours.

And here is the most important observation, without which the whole picture falls apart. Moscow almost never wrote its own mythology. It was written by outsiders. The Synopsis was compiled by Gizel, a man of Prussian origin who settled in Kyiv. The first scholarly histories of Russia were composed in the eighteenth century by the Germans of the St. Petersburg Academy: Bayer, Müller, Schlözer, the very men who produced the Norman theory, according to which even statehood had supposedly been brought to the Rus by the Varangians. The regalia and the very idea of continuity from Rome were carried in by Greeks and Venetians together with Zoe Palaiologina. Dig anywhere into the foundation of Russian greatness and everywhere you strike a foreign hand. Only one thing in this building is its own: the stubborn wish to treat the borrowed as one's own.

For Moscow's greatness is borrowed from the first stone. The title "tsar," the yarlyk, and the model of power came from the Horde and from Sarai. The regalia from Byzantium by way of Venice. And the very idea that an Orthodox Slavic kingdom could inherit Rome was first voiced not in Moscow and not even under the monk Filofei. It was proclaimed by the Bulgarians back in Preslav, where Tsar Simeon styled himself tsar of the Bulgarians and the Romans six hundred years before Moscow's "Third Rome." As for Kyiv, it bequeathed nothing to Moscow, because Kyiv is not Moscow's testator but its victim. Moscow did not inherit the sacredness of Kyiv; it appropriated it, awarding itself the rank of Rus, exactly as Constantinople once awarded itself the title of the New Rome.

Hence the answer to Mr. Alferov, who proposes to write history as if Russia had never existed. That cannot be done either. To say that Moscow did not exist is to lie in the mirror direction and to lose a second time. Moscow existed and exists; it is simply that almost nothing in it is its own. Look at what all three participants in this dispute are doing. Medinsky defends the building and touches up the facade. Alferov proposes to demolish it and write a clean page in its place. Sebastianovych proposes to transfer the building into our name. One clings to the myth, the second fights the myth, the third appropriates the myth, yet all three are certain that the building is real. That is their shared mistake.

And the conclusion is simple and unsentimental. History is not a weapon, not a trophy, and not a pedigree to boast of. History is knowledge. To know that the continuity of Kyiv and Moscow was invented by a Kyiv archimandrite, that the scholarly history of Russia was written by Germans, and that its imperial administration was built in large part by Ukrainians, is worth more than any slogan, because this knowledge exalts no one and flatters no one, ourselves included.

We do not need to fight the Moscow myth by molding our own in answer, because our own myth lies just as readily, only more gently toward us. We do not need a foreign empire repainted in our colors. We do not need any empire at all. And we most certainly do not need to take pride in those who built someone else's. A traitor, even the most gifted one, remains a traitor, and his place is not in the nation's pantheon but in the ledger of its losses. A republic does not measure itself against an empire by who founded whom. A republic simply knows the truth about itself and about its neighbor, and that is quite enough.