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Feb 20, 2008

Byzance Apres Byzance


by Cliopatria


The Economist has an article on quasi-official modern Russian uses of Byzantium that caught my attention. The article describes the efforts of certain reputed Putin loyalists to marshal Byzantine history in support of the Kremlin, which is hardly the first time a head of state in Russia and his hangers-on have drawn on the legacy of the empire to bolster their own stature. Of course, the Putin supporters have adopted elements in Byzantine history that appear to justify Putin's regime, and these are necessarily oversimplified and selective examples. Nonetheless, there are certain older lines of interpretation in Byzantine studies that have made it possible for the Putin loyalists to appropriate Byzantine history in the service of the Russian government.

In recent decades, these interpretations have come under attack precisely because of their implications for modern politics. Where strong emperors were once lauded as scourges of"feudalism" and fragmentation, some see their concentration of power, their deployment of propaganda and their exercise of control over public life in a more sinister light. Comparisons with the Soviet Union, while overwrought, appear from time to time in important monographs.

The article says:

The television film seems to be in that genre. In it, Father Tikhon is transported in full attire from a snow-swept church to Istanbul and Venice, where he exposes the West as a “genetic” hater of both Byzantium and its spiritual heir: Russia. The Byzantine empire's rich and cultured capital, Constantinople, was the envy of dark and aggressive barbarians from the West, who looted it during the fourth crusade in 1204. Modern Western capitalism, argues Father Tikhon, is built on Byzantine loot and Jewish usury.

In this version, Byzantium's first mistake was to trust the West (represented in the film by a cloaked figure in a sinister, long-nosed Venetian mask) and surrender the commanding heights of the economy—trading and customs collection—to Western entrepreneurs and greedy oligarchs. Using a term from today's Russia, Father Tikhon talks of some “stabilisation fund” when describing the achievements of one Byzantine emperor, Basil II, godfather to Russia's Prince Vladimir, who crushed separatists and sent oligarchs to prison. But even great emperors could have weak successors. (The film was made before Mr Putin chose Dmitry Medvedev as his successor, to be endorsed by voters in the election on March 2nd.)

The film's usage of modern words and imagery is so conspicuous that the moral cannot escape a Russian viewer. Instead of sticking to its traditions, Byzantium tried to reform and modernise, as the West demanded, and it paid the price. Worst of all, the West infiltrated Byzantium with harmful, individualistic ideas, which destroyed the core values of the empire—so the people lost faith in their rulers.

The image of Byzantium presented here is, of course, distorted in important ways, but still draws on classic interpretations that can be found in The History of the Byzantine State by Ostrogorsky. In Ostrogorsky's view, Basil II combated the"powerful" (dynatoi) on behalf of the"poor" (ptochoi) and punished the alienation of revenue-bearing lands to these powerful aristocratic landlords, and he ruled as a military and expansionist emperor. This has a certain obvious appeal to a nationalist authoritarian government that has made a show of reining in its wealthy oligarchs (along with everyone else).

When Ostrogorsky was developing his general theory of the decline of the empire, which he identified as the result of decentralization, loss of lands and revenues to the aristocracy (which he dubbed feudalism), the predominance of Italian mercantile powers and the disappearance of the Byzantine army, consolidating power in the hands of the emperor appeared to be the way to stabilize state institutions. As others have noted since, Ostrogorsky's was a history of the Byzantine state, which led him, as it can lead historians with a focus on institutional history, to valorize the institution-builders and damn those who neglect or undermine institutions. There has since been a backlash against this, and it is perhaps ironic that it was the great Russian Byzantinist Kazhdan, coming out of the Soviet Union, who promoted the critique of this latent admiration for strong emperors and a strong state apparatus. To summarize rather crudely, what Ostrogorsky judged to be prudent reforms of economic and social abuses by the aristocracy could be seen in recent times as the source of arbitrary and repressive government from the center.

Basil II has long been a favorite of modern nationalists and empire-builders. At the time of the Macedonian Struggle and the Balkan Wars, Greek irredentists deployed Basil II ("the Bulgar-slayer") as the exemplar of Greek leadership and victorious military struggle over the Bulgars/Bulgarians. Kostis Palamas, the great demoticist Greek poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, included Basil II in the conclusion of his important work, The king's flute, and Penelope Delta authored a popular history of Basil's reign that identified Basil's victory and the legendary atrocities he carried out against the Bulgar army after Kleidion with the modern Greek cause in Macedonia. In their flight of fancy, some Greek propaganda posters even depicted Constantine I as Bulgaroktonos. By comparison, the current Russian uses of the emperor and Byzantine history more generally are frustrating for those who are trying to emphasize Byzantium's connections with western Europe, but they are also somewhat less threatening.

The greatest irony of the Russian deployment of Byzantine political history is that Russia's period of modern absolutist, centralist rule began with the advent of Westernization in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and has literally nothing to do with Byzantium. The"Caesaropapism" of which Byzantium is sometimes still accused did not exist in the Orthodox world--the closest thing to the caricature of Byzantine church-state relations was the post-Petrine position of the Synod as effectively an arm of the Russian state. It is quite remarkable that the most eloquent proponents of a starkly pro-Orthodox, anti-Western, romantic Russian nationalism of the kind hinted at in the description of the film in question were the Slavophiles of the mid-19th century, who deplored the introduction of absolutist rule and desired the return of a weaker, pre-Petrine monarchy that respected the power of the boyars. Putinism has made a weird fusion of the anti-Western critique of the Slavophiles with a post-Petrine Westernizing centralism, masking the contradiction with the references to the Byzantine past.


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david maclaren mcdonald - 2/20/2008

I can't resist two cavils/addenda to the thoughtful and well-observed comments by Larison. First, I would restate the Slavophiles' view of the Byzantine heritage and the powers of the monarch. They were less concerned about the monarch's power than about what they lauded as the unifying symphonia of Orthodox Christianity, rooted in a shared faith that bound a community of believers equal in their faith, over against Roman Christianity's over-emphasis on reason and syllogisms as entrees to faith. The latter, in their view, led to division in society--not just in the form of individualism, but also in concepts like rights or contract theory, which presupposed a mutual opposition of individuals in society, as well as between subjects and states. The result was a hierarchy that dictated faith coercively, through the exercise of power,most vividly demonstrated by papal supremacy, or their reading of it. Their critique extended to reason's offspring, materialism, which had engendered the gathering social divisions they saw in contemporary France and Great Britain.

Thus, their objection to Peter and the form taken by the state he created stemmed from the introduction of false doctrines into a previously harmonious community of faith, with the consequences that westernized elites were now divided and alienated from the rest of the nation, whose prior unity was vestigially manifest in the peasant commune. It also deplored the intrusion of the state into the spiritual realm it was meant to protect, especially, as Larison rightly notes, in Peter's creation of the Most Holy Synod under a state-appointed Ober-Prokurator. [Interestingly, the defence of the spiritual realm as necessarily private formed the basis for a Russian style of constitutionalism, as demonstrated in an excellent recent dissertation by my doctoral student Patrick Michelson].

It's also worth noting that Byzantium enjoyed a rather spotty reputation among Russian rulers and churchmen, beginning with the Council of Florence in the mid-fifteenth century and culminating in the Nikonian reform--and concomitant Schism--of the mid-seventeenth century. In this view, Byzantine lost its lustre through the flirtation with Rome in the former instance and the conquest of 1453. This played out in the over-vaunted "Third Rome" theory, but also in the defiance of Avvakum, one of the leaders of the so-called Schismatics at a Church Council in Moscow in 1666-7.

Second, [with apologies for logorrhea], the Economist and other commentators on present-day Russia, including the article under discussion, miss one of the major points in play--the revived Orthodox Church under Patriarch Aleksii II, is arguably the biggest winner of the last two decades in Russia and has formed an alliance with the post-1996 state that places it on better terms with the latter than perhaps any time since Peter's reforms of the 1720's. In this context, an alternative reading of the documentary analyzed by the Economist's correspondent might place it in the framework of the fractious relations between Moscow/Sergiev Posad and Rome, itself nested in the more familiar tensions/misunderstandings between Russia and the west. The fallacies latent within that last-named and pervasive binary would take several more screens to debunk.