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Pedigree

On the ninth of May, the sun always shines in Moscow. The Kremlin has made it so, dispersing the clouds to ensure that nothing can spoil the parade rumbling through Red Square. It shines on an array of tanks and rocket launchers, on soldiers in contemporary and period uniform marching alongside, and on an ever-shrinking group of elderly veterans, chests bristling with medals. It banks off the wings of jets soaring overhead as they release trails of white, blue, and red smoke. And then it shines on the Russian president as he informs the nation and the world that they are there because on that day in 1945 a darkness lifted with the surrender of Nazi Germany.
May Ninth is Russia’s greatest secular holiday, commemorating a war that itself is crowned with superlatives. In the deadliest conflict ever, Russia led the Soviet Union in crushing the largest army the world had yet seen and thereby saved humanity from the worst evil it has ever known. In so doing, no country has paid a higher price in human lives. The official number of dead in the war now stands at nearly twenty-seven million, or approximately one out of every seven Soviet citizens—man, woman, and child.
Victory Day, as the holiday is formally known, marks when Russians of all ages show unbounded pride in that generation’s triumphant sacrifice. They are encouraged to take to the streets bearing photographs of family members who served—and often perished—in the epic struggle against Hitler’s forces. Through the blood of the fallen, it is claimed, they share a “sacred kinship” that transcends politics and class, bringing Russians together across eleven time zones as one family united by the war. No other nation remembers World War II in such an elaborate, annual ritual, and no other has made it the centerpiece of a civic religion, a subject of veneration so strong that Russia’s role in that victory is often evoked as fulfilling providential destiny.
However it might be expressed on that day, this conviction also rests on the belief—often operating as an undeniable truth—that this chapter of Russian history is, in fact, not unique. World War II was not the first time Russia has been called to play a salvational role; not the first time its people and land have been sacrificed to protect others, indeed whole civilizations, from destruction. Instead, collective martyrdom, particularly for the sake of Europe, is a recurring chapter and, more importantly, is one embedded in the very saga of how Russia arose as a nation. Shared across the centers of authority—political, religious, military, academic—the narrative behind this conviction takes us back seven centuries before the Nazi invasion and reads roughly as follows.

A Nation Born of War

In the thirteenth century, Russia as we understand it now didn’t exist. The lands from Kiev to Moscow and then continuing northeast to where the Volga originates were dominated by East Slavs (in whose history Ukrainians and Belorussians can also see themselves). They shared a common language and faith, Orthodox Christianity, which created conditions for a common identity, but not as part of a single state. Instead a series of principalities made up what is collectively known as Rus, and much like Greek city-states, some might unite to face an outside foe. Too often, however, the enemy was to be found among their own, as internecine conflict was the norm. This virus, borne by princes’ egos and avarice, would plague Rus until a more devastating force caught it by surprise and crushed it: the Mongols.
While foreign attacks had been a constant threat to Russia’s ancestors, nothing matched the destruction wrought by the Mongols when they invaded in 1237. Medieval chroniclers describe them as a satanic whirlwind; resistance literally was futile. Every army fielded by a prince was destroyed; every city the Mongols attacked was left in ashes. The story of the first to fall, Riazan, offers a harrowing glimpse of “God’s scourge”: defenders slaughtered to the man, women raped and killed, children murdered, terrified survivors seeking refuge inside a church only to be burned alive.
Over the course of three years, most of the principalities of Rus suffered the same fate. A papal envoy who traveled through the region shortly afterward reported seeing “countless skulls and bones” strewn across the land. The invasion clearly carved a deep scar of trauma into the collective consciousness of those who survived it. Not only was the relative ease with which cities fell shocking, but equally terrifying was the seeming arbitrariness of destruction: what city would be razed, who would be slaughtered, who enslaved, who spared? Trauma even generated a legend, rendered centuries later, of Kitezh, a city that sank into a lake to escape destruction, thereby preserving its spiritual purity. It also led to accounts of attacks on cities that were spared, such as Smolensk, almost tempting one to classify Mongol assault as an expected rite of passage for any city of Rus.
For the most part, the Mongol overlords did not mix with those who survived. Tribute was regularly demanded by their khan, who resided in a city built on the Volga and to which princes regularly traveled to salute him as sovereign. Khans controlled the distribution of titles and land and played on that to ensure princes’ obedience or, if tighter control was needed, summarily executed them. Cities continued to suffer from seemingly arbitrary assault, whether to punish or gain additional loot. (Riazan itself would be sacked and rebuilt several times.)
Rus in the thirteenth century
For the people of Rus, subjugation and humiliation by the infidel came to be their shared experience, in which, consonant with the mind-set of the medieval Christian world, one could see only God’s wrath. Decades after the invasion, a bishop produced a series of sermons still lamenting the bodies “thrown to the birds as food” and blood “drenching the land.” Equally punishing, though, was the blow to their collective ego. “Our greatness has sank, our magnificence has rotted, our wealth has become the enemy’s spoils, our labor passed on as the unbeliever’s inheritance, for our land has fallen into the hands of foreigners.” Such was the Mongol Yoke, as it later became called, and it strangled Rus for almost two and half centuries.1
How did Christian neighbors, albeit Catholic, respond? With a stab in the back. Close upon the heels of the Mongol invasion, first Swedes, then Teutonic knights marched on Novgorod, in the northwest corner of Rus and one of the few principalities spared by the Mongols. This betrayal, however, produced the first rays of light, since it triggered the appearance of a hero who would become one of Russia’s most enduring, virtually alone in his class: Prince Alexander Nevsky. He earned his sobriquet by defeating the Swedes at the Neva River in 1240; he cemented his legacy two years later by defeating the knights at Lake Peipus, known forever as the famous Battle on the Ice as captured by Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 cinematic masterpiece, Alexander Nevsky, made on the eve of yet another invasion from the West.
Nevsky never challenged the Mongols. Instead he paid obeisance and served as their agent and enforcer among his own, making sure to curb any rebellious inclinations. Yet for this service, far from tarnishing him with the title of collaborator, Russians have rewarded him with the gift of prescience, crediting him with understanding that it was too soon to strike back. Time was needed for Rus to regain its strength and for the princes to forgo their differences.
The first positive sign in this direction came in 1380 when Nevsky’s descendant, Prince Dmitry of Moscow, led an army onto Kulikovo Field and, after a long, close fight, defeated a large Mongol force. Such a victory was unprecedented and earned Dmitry the title “Donskoy,” or “of the Don,” referring to the river he crossed to give battle. Equally significant was the constitution of his army; the list alone of fallen nobles is a veritable roll call of principalities in Rus, suggesting that a relatively unified fighting front was taking shape.
Though Donskoy’s victory was not enough to deliver Rus from the Yoke—only two years after Kulikovo another Mongol force ravaged Moscow, and he was back in his vassal role—that period represents a new phase in the political evolution of Rus, signifying Moscow’s increased dominance among sibling principalities. Such an outcome is not without irony because it was precisely the Mongol invasion that provided much of the circumstance by which the city, located in the geographic heart of Rus, also became its political, religious, and economic center.
Like so many other cities, Moscow was destroyed and made part of the Mongol Empire, but its princes, over time, turned out to be supreme opportunists. Misfortune opened the doors for them to make a fortune by serving their Mongol overlords as tax collectors and policy enforcers. Along with its position at intersecting trade routes, such servitude helped make the city rich—so much so that one prince during its rise was nicknamed “Moneybags.” This wealth translated into land purchases, and power also accrued through no small supply of ruthlessness, such as when Moneybags joined with Mongol forces in order to crush Tver, a rival principality, in the early fourteenth century.
At the same time, Moscow’s authority increased when the head of the church transferred there, making it the seat of Russian Orthodoxy. Victory at Kulikovo Field, several decades later, brought more prestige and, though the Yoke continued, it became clear that the tide was shifting. Torn from within by its own internecine fighting, the Mongol hold diminished just as Moscow rose higher by annexing, buying, or conquering other principalities—a process now called, as if it were inevitable, “the gathering of the Russian lands.”
This power dynamic continued to tilt in Moscow’s favor as more and more tribute began to flow in its direction. When in 1480, during the reign of Ivan III, a Mongol force attempted to reassert supremacy, a climactic showdown between infidel and Orthodox was in the making. It was not to be, however, as the confrontation sputtered into a skirmish across a river. The Mongols nevertheless retreated and the Yoke, as it is traditionally dated, was over.
With good reason Ivan is remembered as “the Great.” Rus was free from foreign dominion and, simultaneously, under Moscow’s fist had emerged as a unified state no longer beset with squabbling principalities. Though not every one of them was, as of yet, under its direct control, none could pose a serious threat to its hegemony. These two achievements alone would have been sufficient for Ivan to win his appellation, yet what cast Moscow’s ascendancy in an even more special light happened offstage, as it were, even before he took the throne.
In the eleventh century, when Christianity split into Western Latinate and Eastern Orthodox wings, Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, became the spiritual capital of Eastern Orthodoxy. It controlled the eastern Mediterranean and southeastern Europe, and with that power, it also exercised ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Rus. With time, however, that grip weakened. By the mid-fifteenth century, when Moscow became ascendant, the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to a fraction of its former size under the unrelenting assault of Ottoman Turks. Desperate for help, Constantinople turned to the Vatican, offering to submit to its authority. This decision met with a furious backlash in Moscow. Surrender to the heretic in order to save oneself from the infidel? There was no salvation in that, only a betrayal of spiritual purity. Moscow broke its bond with Constantinople and took sovereign control of its own church.
Was that bold action the right one? The answer came shortly after, when the Turks overran Constantinople in 1453, which, when combined with the lifting of the Mongol Yoke in 1480, changed forever how Russia could see itself. Precisely when—with hindsight—one could say the origins of modern Russia were coming together, God seemingly blessed it by elevating it to be the sole protector of the true faith. All other Orthodox realms were now in the hands of the infidels or the heretics save for this one with Moscow as its capital. Had not the Lord spoken definitively that now it was his chosen city, that only this land, free of spiritual contamination, was where salvation could be had, and that the Russian people themselves were his elect?
The idea that resulted is most famously known as the “Third Rome,” following the logic that if the first, the Vatican, was controlled by Catholics and now the second, Constantinople, by Muslims, then Moscow was the new capital of Christendom itself. Other iterations of exceptionalism were that of the city as the “New Jerusalem” or Russia as the “New Israel,” but under any name what occurred by the end of the fifteenth century constituted a watershed for Russian identity.2 What Russians did in the world and in world history could be seen as nothing less than issuing from God’s grace, and nowhere else was that idea more important than when it came to war. His elect had the formidable responsibility of defending the faith, but they also had a spiritually unassailable license to spread it—as was to be seen quite dramatically during the reign of Ivan’s grandson, Ivan IV, known better to us as “the Terrible.”
If the picture produced so far is that of Rus becoming Russia while under trial of invasion, it is equally true that Rus became Russia as an expanding power, itself attacking and invading neighbors. Under Ivan the Terrible, who ruled from 1547 to 1584, Russia grew to become one of the largest states in Europe. Spearheading that drive was the 1552 conquest of Kazan, the capital of a Muslim successor state to the former Mongol Empire, on the Volga some 450 miles east of Moscow.
The calls issued by the church to launch this campaign paint it as an Orthodox crusade inseparable from Russia’s newly construed identity. Addressed directly to Ivan, they fold defense of the faith in with attacking the enemy and expressly compare him to Alexander Nevsky, who “defeated the Latins,” and Dmitry Donskoy, who “defeated the barbarians,” as if they were all part of an ongoing conflict of the one true religion against false ones.3 The resulting siege of Kazan, the most famous in which Russians were the besiegers, ended with God’s army savaging the city, where for seven days after, it is said, one could not ...