Black Sea (9 page)

But there is a sense in which Sevastopol can never be cut out of Russia. It is not just that Russia built it - a majestic stone city full of southern space and air, its blue creeks jammed with warships. Sevastopol also provided some of the inmost mental shrines of Russia. This is twice a 'Hero-City': once for its ten-month siege when it held out against the Nazis, once for its two-year defence against Britain, France, Sardinia and Turkey during the Crimean War. And Sevastopol has a still deeper sanctity. It was here, in legend and perhaps in fact, that Christianity entered Russia.

The ruins of Cherson (or Korsun, or Chersonesus) cover a cape on the edge of the city. In summer, families come to swim here, filing down among the tall Byzantine columns and round the honeycomb of excavated buildings to reach low cliffs, a beach of boulders, a green and transparent sea. In its life, as a Greek colony and then as the Byzantine Empire's biggest trading city on the Black Sea, Cherson was periodically wrecked by pagan attackers from the steppe (the Mongol-Tatars finally extinguished the town in the late thirteenth century). In its death, the site has been devastated by fortress-building and bombardment and above all by early Russian archaeologists, ploughing down through the substrata to find 'evidence' of the baptism of Vladimir of Kiev in 991.

The place is dominated by a gigantic basilica, with trees growing through its smashed cupola, which was put up in 1891 to celebrate the millennium of Russian Christianity. It is now agreed that the church is in the wrong place, and pious visitors are directed to the ruins of a small Byzantine baptistery a few hundred yards away. Within its walls there is a deep, circular pit or dry pool and a cross incised on the pool's floor. Here, possibly, it happened: this sacramental moment which re-invented an irritable tyrant as a saint and turned the Russian imagination for a thousand years towards the Black Sea and the city of Constantinople.

Russian state nationalism has always dreamed of parthenogenesis. It has always hankered after a myth of isolated origin in which the Russian people developed its own genius, as a huge seed unfolds its own predestined stem and leaves and fruit. The 'Varangian' interpretation, which emphasises the historical fact that the first Russo-Slav state was founded around Kiev on the Dnieper by Viking raiders and settlers, was roughly treated by Slavophil educators under the last tsars and by the intellectual policemen of Stalinism. The 'Byzantine' version, interpreting early Russian culture and institutions as foreign imports which arrived with Orthodox Christianity from Constantinople, has also had a hard time with those bureaucrats who draw up 'patriotic' or 'progressive' curricula and decide which scholar should be dismissed for unreliable views.

Under Stalin, the myth of parthenogenesis (or 'autochthony') was driven to an insane extreme. Soviet archaeology was purged of the very notion of migration. Cultural change, the new Party archaeological bureaucrats laid down, had come about by development within settled communities and not by the entry of new populations from east or west. The phrase 'Migration of Peoples'
[Völkerwanderungen)
to describe Eurasian population movements after the collapse of the western Roman Empire was banned. The Crimean Goths, for example, were declared to be not Germanic invaders but 'formed autochthonously and by stages from the tribes present here before them'. The Khazars ceased to be Turkic nomads from the east and became the ancient inhabitants of the Don country and the northern Caucasus: 'the results of autochthonous ethnogeny [sic] created by the intermarriage of local tribes'. The Tatars were rediscovered as Volga aboriginals. More ominously, the Scandinavian Varangians who had created the first 'Rus' state around Kiev were re-identified as Slavs.

From the early 1930s to the late 1950s, the Party officials in charge of Soviet archaeology designed and reared up a skyscraper of chauvinist imbecility. This was the assertion that the whole area of modern Russia, Ukraine, eastern and even central Europe had been inhabited by proto-Slav populations since the middle Iron Age: say, 900 BC. Stalin fired his revolver in the air and the entire past of the Black Sea steppes, which had been a history of ceaseless migrancy and ethnic mingling, froze terrified in its tracks and turned into a history of static social development.

And the shots were not only metaphorical. Mikhail Miller, a Russian archaeologist who took refuge in the West after the Second World War, recorded in his
Archaeology in the USSR
the fate of his colleagues when the new line was enforced between 1930 and 1934. Some 85 per cent of the profession fell victim to the purge. Most of them were deported to Siberian or Asian labour camps or exile. Some were shot or committed suicide when the NKVD came to arrest them. But most — including Miller's brilliant brother Alexander — died in the Gulag.

It was not until well after Stalin's death that the past of the southern steppe dared to move again; at first, only cautiously. A. L. Mongait was a Party loyalist under instructions to write a book for western consumption which would undo some of the damage done by Miller's revelations. Mongait's own
Archaeology in the USSR,
published in an English version in 1961, tiptoed up to what he delicately called 'the Scythian problem': the patent fact that the Scythians had entered the Dnieper-Don steppe from somewhere else. He let the Scythians migrate - but only a little. 'They would have thrust forward from the lower Volga area', where, Mongait implied, they had originated some time in the Bronze Age. The truth known to scholarship for nearly fifty years — that the Scythians were an Indo-Iranian-speaking confederation which had arrived from Central Asia - was still too much for him.

Today migration theory is securely back in Russian and Ukrainian archaeology, but it has returned with tatters of nineteenth-century nationalist historiography still flapping around it. Unpopular to this day remain those who argue that the whole balance of Russian history-writing about 'civilisation' and 'barbarism' is skewed, who ask why the steppe nomads and the non-Slav cultures, encountered by Kievan Rus and then by the mediaeval Russian state which arose around Novgorod and Moscow, must still be dismissed as backward and 'barbaric'. The centuries of Mongol-Tatar conquest, beginning in the early thirteenth century, remain for most Russians 'the Mongol Yoke': a time in which the leaders of Russia manned the outposts of Christian civilisation against a tide of ultimate savagery and disorder. But this traditional version now shows increasing symptoms of Russocentric myth.

There is no denying the ferocity of the Mongols at war, or the devastation created in a subsistence-peasant society by the arrival of perhaps half a million horses with a single nomad army. And yet the Mongols had access to literacy, and their political, military and administrative institutions were in some ways more sophisticated than those of Novgorod Russia. When Russian cultural pessimists blame their nation's lack of democracy on 'the Mongol inheritance', as they always have, they ignore the tradition of the
quriltai
- the assembly of Mongol-Tatar nobles and clan chiefs who gathered to elect a new khan. This was a limited, oligarchic dispersing of power, but mediaeval Russia did not even have that. (The Poles, whose kings were elected by a mass assembly of aristocrats gathering in a field outside Warsaw, have always brought up this custom to prove their attachment to 'Western democracy'. The practice was introduced into Poland only in the late sixteenth century, and the precedent then advanced for it was the oligarchy of the Roman Republic, but this was also plainly a form of
quriltai)
probably borrowed from the Crimean Tatars.)

Under Stalin, equally hostile to religion and to any suggestion that the Russian state had foreign origins, Byzantinologists had become an endangered species. (Doom was more certain only for 'Varangian
¹
historians, who were accused of inventing Germanic origins for the nation.) But at length, during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, a sort of corrupt relaxation set in as Jews sacked from other university departments were resettled - whatever their original academic backgrounds - in obscure seminars of Byzantine history. From total suppression, the subject crawled up to the status of an intellectual internment camp.

Now, after the fall of the Soviet state, Byzantine studies are hugely fashionable in Russia. This was why the World Congress of Byzantinology met in Moscow in August 1991, two weeks before the coup d'etat, and why it was opened by the Patriarch Alexei with a theatrical obeisance to the heritage of Byzantium. Russia was looking westwards for a new politics and inaugurating a cargo cult to bring Western prosperity and the market economy. But in their search for a new identity, the Russians had gone down to the Black Sea shore and were staring towards Constantinople.

This meant that there were really two Congresses going on. One was the intricate mating and challenging display of Western Byzantinologists who come on heat only once every four years; at this Congress, factions gathered behind the terrifying Professor Armin Hohlweg of Munich, editor of the
Byzantinische Zeitschrift,
or behind Professor Vladimir Vavfinek of Prague, editor of the rival
Byzantinoslavica.
Funny as this was, nobody in the Great Auditorium of Moscow University dared to satirise it in public. These are solemn occasions. As a translated Georgian paper on hagiography remarked: 'in Christianity it is the death that laughs, the devil, the mermaids laugh their hands off, but the Christian deity never laughs.'

The other Congress was the mass of young Russians, some of them in the black robes of priesthood, who pressed into the seminar rooms determined to find nothing less than their souls, their roots, their own Russian path to revelation and holiness. I found my way to one of their meetings, in a small fifth-floor room so crowded that I had to clamber over listeners sitting on the floor in order to lean against a wall. This is what I wrote in a notebook:

Marina is sitting reading in rusty French, the sleeves of her white shirt rolled up. Each sheet of notes is tattered and creased, and she throws each down on the pile as she comes to the end of it.

Her hair is long and tangled, greasy. She has big hands, like a man. The room is absolutely rapt. Out of the window, beyond a belt of dark-green woods, I can see the black wall of a storm-cloud and, against it, the rampart-blocks of the Moscow suburbs glittering silver.

She is talking about Russia's Christological conflicts with the West. WTien she finishes, there is violent applause. Now comes Father Ilarion, young, his smooth hair parted in the middle, grave. He asks: 'Shall I speak in English or Russian?' These audiences are normally so respectful, so considerate to the foreigners among them. But now the whole room is imploring together: 'Po
Russki! Po Russki!
¹

Father Ilarion begins. He is reading poetry, his own verse translation from Greek into Russian of the 'Hymns of Divine Love' by Symeon the New Theologian (an eleventh-century Byzantine mystic and saint). Again, these boys and girls are seized. Some are staring at the floor. Some are biting their fists.

WTien Father Ilarion finishes, there is silence and then clumsy clapping. Marina, drowsy as if she had just woken from a dream, stares at him. Then she turns her head and looks out of the window, where there is a rainbow.

Many months later, back in Western Europe, I was able to find texts of the 'Hymns of Divine Love'. They are entirely extraordinary. Concerned not with man in the image of God but with God in the image of man, they have something in common with the mystical poetry of the seventeenth-century German poet
'Ángelus
Silesius' (Johann Scheffler). But for young Russians, the 'Hymns' are rain on a parched, forbidden and almost forgotten part of their sensibility:

We who live with God becoming / in our natures living gods, Finding in our mortal bodies / nothing to provoke our shame, Every organ, every member / is identical with Christ's, Who, composed of many Members, / indivisible, unique, Shows that each part of his body / is the whole perfected Christ. Now you recognise my finger / as the whole of Christ Himself, And my testicle. . . you shudder? / Are you blushing and aghast? God was not ashamed to wear a / flesh identical to yours; Why should you see shame in wearing / flesh identical to His?

No, I feel no shame, created / in the image of my God. 'Yet to name him in that organ, / in that very part of shame, Blasphemy you have committed / blasphemy in such a trope!'

Do not tremble, for my verses / nothing shameful introduce. For these parts, Christ's hidden members, / covered up and veiled from sight,

Are thereby more fit to honour, / more divine than all the rest, Parts invisible, like members / of the Hidden One's elect, Whence he gives the sperm of blessing / in the wedding-rite divine...

Chapter Two