Kartashev and the history of the Russian church. AV Kartashev Essays on the History of the Russian Church Volume II. Division into periods

KARTASHEV Anton Vladimirovich (1875-1960), Russian. orthodox historian, theologian and biblical scholar. It is he who closes the chain of church academic thought of the 19th - mid-20th centuries, because after him a new comprehensive work on church history has not yet been created, published under one author's name.

A. V. Kartashev

Essays on the history of the Russian Church

Preface. Introduction.

The pre-state era.

Was the Apostle Andrew the First-Called in Russia?

The beginnings of Christianity in the territory of the future Russia.

I. The beginning of the historical life of the Russian people.

II. The oldest evidence of the acquaintance of the Russians with Christianity.

The first baptism of the Kievan Rus.

Oleg (882-912). Igor (912-942). Princess Olga (945-969). Svyatoslav (945-972). Prince Vladimir. His conversion and baptism. Non-Russian, Greek and Arabic testimonies. Understanding the "Story". Baptism of Kievans. The transformation of Prince Vladimir himself. Western myth about the baptism of Russia. Relations of the Popes with Prince. Vladimir. Who was the first Russian metropolitan?

Division into periods.

Kievan or pre-Mongolian period.

The spread of Christianity. Church administration in the Kievan period.

Dioceses and Bishops. Diocesan authorities. Church laws. Means of maintenance of the higher hierarchy. Parish clergy. The relationship of authorities, church and state.

Monasticism in pre-Mongolian times. Christianization of the Russian people.

A) Βera. B) Morality (personal and public).

Education of state power. The planting of enlightenment. Separation from the West.

Moscow period.

A. From the invasion of the Mongols to the falling away of the southwestern metropolis. The fate of the Russian metropolis. The development of its relationship to the Greek Church, on the one hand, and to the Russian state power, on the other (XIII-XVI centuries).

M. Cyril (1249-1281). Maxim (1287-1305). Peter (1308-1326). Fegnost (1328-1353). Alexy (1353-1378). Struggle for the unity of the Russian Metropolis. Michael nicknamed (surname) Mityai. Pimen. Metropolitan Cyprian (1390-1406). Metropolitan Photius (1408-1431). Gerasim (1433-1435). Isidore (1436-1441). Church self-government of Moscow for the expulsion of m. Isidor. Metropolitan Jonah (1448-1461). The final division of the Russian metropolis (1458). Theodosius (1461-1464).

B. From the division of the metropolis to the establishment of the patriarchate (1496-1596).

Metropolitan Theodosius (1461-1464). Philip (I) (1464-1473). Gerontius (1473-1489). Zosima (1490-1494). Simon (1495-1511). Rev. Nil of Sorsk (1433-1508). historiosophical conclusion. Varlaam (1511-1521). Daniel (1521-1539). Joasaph (1539-1542). Macarius (1542-1563). Stoglav Cathedral. Athanasius (1564-1566). German. St. Philip (1566-1568). Cyril IV (1568-1572). Anthony (1572-1581). Dionysius (1581-1587). Job.

theological disputes. Possessiveness and non-possessiveness.

Journalism of Prince-Monk Vassin. Maxim Grek.

Heresy.

Forerunners of strigolnikov. Strigolniki. Heresy of the Judaizers. The heresy of Bashkin and Kosoy. The case of Abbot Artemy. The case of the clerk Viskovaty.

Southwestern metropolis from the division of the Russian Church in 1458 to the Union of Brest in 1596.

List of Western Russian Orthodox metropolitans who ruled from 1458 to 1596 The Grand Dukes of Lithuania, who since 1386 together became the Kings of Poland. 1569 united Poland. The general position of the Russian Church in the Lithuanian-Polish State. The state of church affairs under individual metropolitans.

Metropolitan Gregory the Bulgarian (1458-1473). Metropolitan Misail (1475-1480). Metropolitan Simenon (1480-1488). Iona Glezna (1488-1494). Metropolitan Macarius (1494-1497). Metropolitan Joseph I Bolgarinovich. Metropolitan Jonah II (1503-1507). Metropolitan Joseph II Soltan (1507-1522). Internal church relationships. The situation in the former Galician metropolis. Metropolitan Joseph III (1522-1534). Metropolitan Macarius II (1534-1555). The question of the Galician Metropolis. General characteristics of the position of the Orthodox Church in the first half of the 16th century: the reign of Sigismund I (1506-1548). Protestantism in Poland and Lithuania. Sigismund II Augustus Prince of Lithuania from 1544 and King of Poland from 1548-1572. Heretics. The positive side of the liberalism of Sigismund August for Orthodoxy. Metropolitan Sylvester Belkevich (1556-1567). Jonah III Protasevich (1568-1576). Lithuanian state union (1569). Roman Catholic reaction. Jesuits in Poland. Ilya Ioakimovich Heap. (1576-1579). Onesiphorus Devocha (Girl) (1579-1589).

Russian Orthodox education.

Ostroh Bible 1580-81 Ostroh school. Brotherhood. Vilna Holy Trinity Brotherhood. Fraternal Schools. Literary struggle of Russians. An episode of the struggle against the Gregorian calendar (1583-1586). Sigismund III (1587-1632). The beginnings of the union. Union. Arrival of Patriarch Jeremiah II. Metropolitan Michael Rogoza (1589-1596). Open struggle for the union and against it. Political union of the Orthodox with the Protestants. Action in Rome.

Brest-Litovsk Union of 1596

The cathedral. The beginning of the fight against the union. Opening of the cathedral. After the Brest Cathedral.

Foreword

Not one of the Christian European nations is not characterized by the temptations of such self-denial as the Russians. If this is not a total denial, as in Chaadaev, then it is a frank, on occasion, emphasizing our backwardness and weakness, as if our secondary quality by nature. This very old-fashioned “Europeanism” has not yet become obsolete in our generations already leaving the stage, nor in our youth growing up in an emigre isolation from Russia. And there, in the large and warped former USSR, the opposite extreme was imposed. There, both Europeanism and Russianism are denied and overlapped by an allegedly new and more perfect synthesis of so-called economic materialism.

In contrast to these two extremes, we, nurtured by the old normal Russia, continue to carry within ourselves an experienced sense of its spiritual values. Our presentiment of a new revival and the coming greatness of both the state and the Church is nourished by our national history. It's time to cling to it with a patriotically loving heart and mind, wiser from the tragic experience of the revolution.

Lomonosov, by the manifestation of his personality and the confession of his confidence, "that the Russian land can give birth to its own Platos and quick-witted Newtons," instilled in us the confidence that we would become what we instinctively, by unmistakable instinct, want to be. Namely: - we want to be in the first, leading ranks of builders of universal culture. For earthly humanity has not been given another worthy primacy.

And this, not thanks to the museum-preserved relics of the Monomakh's crown and the title of the Third Rome, and not thanks to the fanatical Avvakum devotion to the letter - all these were only noble forebodings - but through an impulse worthy of a great nation - to take an equal place on the world front of universal enlightenment.

The ancient consciousness bequeathed its heritage to us in two more variants of antithesis: I) Hellenes and barbarians and II) Israel and pagans (goyim). The Christian-European consciousness has merged this outdated bifurcation into one: into a single and higher, final cultural unification for the peoples of the whole world. In their racial, religious, national diversity, the inhabitants of the globe for boundless periods of time remain enclosed in different shells of their own, so dear to them, hereditary forms of life, recognized as national. But this is not an essential and not decisive historiosophical moment. Whether someone wants it or not, the objective fact of the exhaustion of the scheme of the global history of earthly humanity, as a whole, is evident. No revisions are possible here. We, Christians and Europeans, must accept this fact with gratitude for the honor and chosenness, as the holy will of Providence, and with prayer and reverence make our earthly procession towards the final good goals known only to the Creator One.

No matter how burningly aggravated, at times and in places, living, historically topical tasks, whether in our country or in other peoples of the universe, but we, once having overcome the self-sufficiency of national particularism, cannot and must not waste our strength without a trace on this , in principle, the phase of cultural service we have already overcome. National forms of culture, like languages ​​and religions, continue to function, but no one and nothing has the right to cancel and replace the qualitatively superior and commanding heights of his service that have already become clear and revealed to the advanced Christian humanity. In this limit of services there is an irrevocable moment of consecration and the right to leadership. Only on this path is the overcoming of the “flesh and blood” of nations, with their zoologically humiliating and inevitable wars, accomplished. Only on this path opens up a gap and hope - to overcome and defeat the great demonic deception of the godless international. Only in the universal Christian leadership is the promise of true human freedom and peace to the whole world. And on this path - a worthy, higher, holy place of service to Russia and the Russian Church, and not under the banner of "Old Testament", decaying nationalisms.

Introduction

The proposed Essays on the History of the Russian Church are precisely Essays, and not a complete collection of materials, not a complete system of the History of the Russian Church, not a reference book. This is an overview of the main aspects in the historical development of the Russian Church, for the reader to make a value judgment about the missionary role played by the Russian Church in the history of Russia, in the history of all Orthodoxy and, ultimately, in world history. These essays, conceived in Russia half a century ago, did not and do not aim to provide readers with elementary information on the history of the Russian Church, assuming that they are known from complete reference books, for example, from the "History of the Russian Church" archbishop. Filaret or a high-quality Textbook by prof. P. V. Znamensky. The essays seek, by involving the reader into the problems of characteristic moments and phenomena in the historical life of the Russian Church, to contribute to a vivid feeling of her experiences, her destinies, a loving understanding of her weaknesses, exhaustion, stumbling, but also her long-suffering, Christianizing feat and her slow, quiet, humble majestic , holy and glorious achievements.

The author of these historical lessons would not have considered himself entitled to clutter up either the book market or the shelves of libraries with real work if it were not for the anti-Christian revolution, which terribly lowered the scientific and theological level of the Russian Church. Even before the revolution, there was an unusual, almost thirty-year halt in the cultivation of our discipline. After the IV volume of the "Guide" prof. Dobroklonsky (1893) only new editions of the Textbook by prof. Znamensky was also reminded that the concern for updating the systematic exposition of the History of the Russian Church was not forgotten by those who should know about it. The revolution brought a new many years of paralysis. Thus, in place of this devastation, any repetitive and generalizing work on the History of the Russian Church, even if it does not pretend to be a new scientific development, becomes not superfluous and practically useful. Only to extend in this sense the hand of connection through the failure of the revolution from the old Russian generation of venerable giants of our specialty to the coming new giant of office work in our liberated fatherland and liberated church - such is the modest task of these Essays.

The pre-state era

Was the Apostle Andrew the First-Called in Russia?

Russia, as a whole state nation, was baptized by St. book. Vladimir. But this event had its roots in the centuries before. Therefore, let us turn back to the depths of centuries in order to trace the initial fate of the spread of Christianity in Russia, as the reason for its later universal baptism.

The terminus a quo of our search cannot be defined with mathematical precision, just as it cannot be indicated for the beginning of Rus itself. Only one thing was clear even to our ancestors of the 9th and early 12th centuries, that “from here (i.e., in the Russian land) the apostles did not teach”, that “the body of the apostles was not here”; so it is said in the annalistic story about the murder of the Christian Varangians under Vladimir. The same is repeated by Rev. Nestor in his life of Boris and Gleb. Nevertheless, in one of the tales included in The Tale of Bygone Years, its editor has already shown a tendency to connect Russian Christianity with the times of the apostles. Calling our primary teacher Methodius “Andronikov’s priest” (an apostle from among the 70), he continues: “the same teacher of the Slovenian language is Andronicus the apostle, he went to Moravia; and the apostle Paul taught that, that there is Ilyurik, but the apostle reached him. Pavel, that's the first thing about Slovenia. In the same way, the teacher of the Slovene language is Pavel, from the same language we are Russia, the same teacher of Russia is Paul. If such were the views of the Russian people on the question of the apostolic sowing in the Russian field until the beginning of the 12th century inclusive (the moment of the formation of the Tale of Bygone Years), then obviously, only after that time did they take the confident form that was communicated to them by the story of visiting the Russian country app. Andrew the First-Called.

This story is inserted in the Kiev chronicle among the story about the resettlement of Russian Slavs. When the name Polyan is mentioned, the speech immediately turns to the description of “the path from the Varangians to the Greeks” and vice versa “from the Greeks along the Dnieper to the Varangian sea, and along that sea to Rome.” “And the Dnieper will flow,” it says here, “into the Ponet Sea, the sea to catch the Russian, the apostle Ondrei, brother Petrov, taught from it, as if deciding.” Characteristic in the last words is the appearance of some skepticism on the part of the author in relation to the transmitted fact, in view of which he hurries to abdicate responsibility for its reliability by vaguely referring to some source. But immediately further on, he, or most likely someone else, his successor, already boldly develops a timidly thrown opinion into a whole legend, half touchingly poetic, half completely unaesthetic, even absurd. Ap. Andrei from the seaside town of Sinop, Asia Minor, comes to the Tauride Korsun. Here he learns that the Dnieper mouth is close and decides to go through it to Rome. By chance (“according to the adventure of God”) he stops for the night on a sandbank under the upland bank of the Dnieper at the site of the future Kyiv. “Rising in the morning”, he points out to his disciples the nearby mountains, predicts that there will be a great city and many churches, climbs the mountains, blesses them and puts up a cross, and then continues his way to Novgorod, where ... marvels at the bathing self-torture, oh which he tells upon his arrival in Rome.

To the question of the historical authenticity of the legend, the historical and literary information about its gradual development will serve as an answer. The book of the Acts of the Apostles, spreading mainly about one only ap. Paul, remains silent about the fate of the twelve. This circumstance gave rise to the development of a rich apocryphal literature of various “praxis, periodi, martyria, taumatas” in the ancient Christian world, which presented in detail the apostolic works and exploits of many of the 12th and 70th faces. A whole cycle of such legends has as its subject the preaching of the apostles Peter, Andrew and Matthew in the land of anthropophagi or Myrmidons and in the land of barbarians. Their antiquity is very respectable. The fact is that all such types of apocryphal literature were used as an instrument of insinuating propaganda by numerous Gnostic sects of the first centuries and later by the Manichaeans. And the analysis of the apocryphal legends of the cycle of interest to us from this point of view leads special researchers (Lipsius, Zoga, etc.) to the possibility of even referring their present edition to the 2nd century. Under this condition, the preservation of a grain of historical truth in them is easily permissible. But the question is: after separating the fantastic excesses of the narrative from these apocrypha, how to correctly interpret their extremely mysterious geographical and ethnic nomenclature? It is not easy to solve it. Any real terminological element of the apocrypha of the first formation in their further history underwent changes that were very unfavorable for historical truth. The abundant heretical filling of the first apocrypha opened the way for their intensified and frequent revision in the spirit of other creeds (in an earlier era) and in the spirit of the Orthodox Church (especially in the 5th and 6th centuries); there were also imitations without bias in the dogmatic sense. Examples show that during these alterations, very little care was taken about the rules of historical accuracy, and bizarre metamorphoses took place with proper names. S. Petrovsky (op. cit), unraveling, under the guidance of authoritative Germans, the meaning of the apocrypha related to our question, comes to the conclusion that they are talking about the preaching of St. Andrey, by the way, in the current Caucasian countries adjacent to the Black Sea, and even in the lands of the neighboring Azov region. However, it is quite risky to solve this problem without the data of Orientalism. When V. V. Bolotov, armed with these means, in his posthumous “Excursion E” (Christ. Reader, June 1901) touched on a part of the scientific pattern woven by a Russian researcher, he was hopelessly confused, if not completely disintegrated. It turns out that, according to the linguistic data of the Coptic and Abyssinian legends, the activities of the apostles Bartholomew and Andrew, instead of the imaginary Black Sea region, belong in the purest way to African territory. This example, of course, is not without significance for the future solution of the question posed.

In parallel with the lengthy tales of the missionary journeys of the apostles, the news also developed in short form in the form of lists, or catalogs, marked with names: Hippolytus of Rome (3rd century), Dorotheus of Tire (4th century), Sophronius, a friend of bl. Jerome († 475), and Epiphanius of Cyprus († 403). These catalogs in the surviving editions are undoubtedly of a later origin than the lifetime of their imaginary authors, and in relation to news about the missionary lot, in particular St. Andrew, go back to the original apocrypha and their later church alterations (V to VIII centuries), as their source. At the same time, the indefinite apocryphal countries of the barbarians and anthropophagi are here categorically localized in Scythia, although with a tendency to see Scythia in it not European, but Asian (Caspian).

They want to see an echo of an independent (non-apocryphal) church tradition in Eusebius. "When St. the apostles and disciples of Our Savior,” we read from him in III, 1, “scattered throughout the whole world, then Thomas, as the tradition ως ή παράδοσις περιέχει contains, received Parthia as a lot, Andrew - Scythia... Peter, as you know, preached in Pontus and Galatia ... This is said word for word (κατά λέξειν) by Origen in the third part of his interpretation of Genesis. This work of Origen has not survived to us, and to what extent and to what extent the quotation is a literal excerpt from it, researchers of church literature leave it in question. Some see in many authoritative manuscripts of the history of Eusebius a special sign before the word "Peter" and from this they conclude that the quotation from Origen begins only with the news about Peter, and the news about St. Andrew belongs to Eusebius himself and to the modern to him(and not Origen) church tradition. But the antiquity of the tradition of the 4th century is not so deep that it cannot be explained from the same source we have indicated. However, the letter of the text of Eusebius speaks for the fact that all the lines about the apostles, starting with θομας, must be attributed to the quotation from Origen. The particle δε at the word Πέτρος δ "έν Πόντφ clearly corresponds to the particle μεν at the word θομάς μεν, connecting these phrases in one period. transmitted") and Eucherius of Lyon († 449) ("as history tells").

In the VIII, IX and subsequent centuries, the material accumulated over the centuries in the form of apocryphal and church legends, brief news and sown everywhere by these and other local traditions served as a source for compiling new “acts”, “praises” and “lives” of the apostles. Here the missionary activity of St. Andrew breaks up into three whole preaching journeys, copied from the travels of ap. Paul, and the First-Called Apostle is already with complete certainty being led through European Scythia and along the northern and western coasts of the Black Sea goes to Byzantium, where he supplies the first bishop for this city - Stakhia. Of the narratives of the latter kind, the story of the monk Epiphanius should be noted, since it contains some elements that later became part of the Russian legend. Epiphanius lived at the end of the VIII and beginning. IX centuries, when the burning issue of our time was the question of icons. Influenced by this ecclesiastical interest, Epiphanius, like some other persons of that time, undertook a kind of scientific and archaeological journey through the coastal countries of Euxine Pontus, with the aim of studying local monuments and traditions relating to external worship in the time of the apostles. Therefore, in his story about St. Andrew, he carefully noted all the sacred images, altars, temples and crosses, leading their origin, according to the stories of local residents, from the time the named disciple of Christ preached to them. Here, by the way, more than once is mentioned "an iron rod with the image of a life-giving cross, on which the apostle always leaned." Not far from Nicaea in Bithynia, “Blessed St. Andrew, having overthrown the vile statue of Artemis, placed there the life-giving image of the saving Cross. Further east, in Paphlagonia, "he chose a place of prayer suitable for setting up an altar, and consecrated it, erecting the sign of the life-giving cross." This is where both the cross and the rod originate, appearing in two versions of the Russian legend. The monk Epiphanius, ap. Andrei from the Caucasian countries, not bypassing the Meotic Gulf (Sea of ​​Azov), through the strait (Kerch), comes directly to the Bosporus (Kerch); from here it passes to the Crimean cities of Feodosia and Chersonese; then sails by sea to Sinop and returns to Byzantium. The later Greeks express themselves much more boldly and have a broader idea of ​​the area of ​​missionary activity of St. Andrew in the north of the Black Sea. Nikita David Paflagonsky (late 9th and early 10th centuries), famous biographer of Patr. Ignatius, composed a series of rhetorical laudatory speeches in honor of the apostles. In praise app. To Andrew, he expresses himself as follows: “Having received the north as an inheritance, you bypassed the Iberians and Sarmatians, Tauris and Scythians, every country and city that lies in the north of the Euxine Pontus and which are located in its south” (col. 64). “So, having embraced all the countries of the north and the entire coastal region of Pontus with the gospel ... he approached that glorious Byzantium” (col. 68). From this point of view, the terminology of the ancient apocrypha was now resolutely applied to the spaces of southern Russia. Even in the chronicler John Malala (VI century), the name of the Myrmidons (“anthropophages” of the Apocrypha) is attached to the Bulgarians when they lived near Meotiki, that is, near the Sea of ​​Azov. For Leo the Deacon (X century), Myrmidonia was located there, and the Myrmidons were already considered the ancestors of the Russians, and the possessions of the Russians near the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov were called. Myrmidonia. “In any case,” says V. G. Vasilevsky, “there is not the slightest doubt that in the 11th century. the name of the Myrmidons, along with other names inherited from classical antiquity, served to designate Russians. Thus, in the Byzantine tradition and literature of the XI century. there was a lot of data for compiling the walking of ap. Andrew on Russian soil.

Byzantium itself needed a legend about St. Andrew in such full development. It was necessary, firstly, to protect their independence from Roman claims and prove their equal honor to Rome; secondly, to ensure for itself dominion over all possible churches of the East. Just as the power claims and successes of Rome were based on the fact that Rome is the seat of the supreme apostle, so also Byzantium, in order to achieve the first of these goals, wanted to convince the world that it was also a genuine Sedes apostolisa, no less, if not greater, than the Roman one, because which was founded by the elder brother of ap. Peter, the first time disciple of Christ. In Nikita Paflagonyanin we read such an appeal to St. Andrew: "Therefore, rejoice, first-called and primary of the apostles, in dignity directly following the brother, and by calling even older than he, by faith in the Savior and by teaching, the original not only for Peter, but for all the disciples" (col. 77). The legend claimed that Andrew appointed his disciple and successor Stachy as bishop of Byzantium. Someone's caring head also came up with a list of names of allegedly 18 successors of Stakhias, up to the historically known first bishop of Byzantium, Mitrofan (315-325). To achieve the second goal - to ensure dominance over the rest of the Eastern churches - Byzantium looked at ap. Andrew, as the apostle of the whole East. Characteristic in this regard is the episodic story in the narrative of the monk Epiphanius about how two apostle brothers shared power over the universe: Peter was given the lot to enlighten the western countries, Andrew the eastern ones. From this we can conclude that Byzantium willingly supported the legends about the preaching of St. Andrew in those countries where they existed (Armenia, Georgia) and even tried to instill similar traditions in the northern countries (Moravia, Russia), to which her influence extended. The fact that the Byzantines, on occasion, even directly inspired the Russians with the belief that St. Andrew, we have documentary evidence. This is a letter to the Russian prince Vsevolod Yaroslavich, written on behalf of the emperor Michael Duka (1072-1077) by his secretary, the famous scientist of his time, Mikhail Psellos, with the aim of courting the brother of the emperor's daughter Vsevolod. One of the arguments for the closest union of the two courts is the following: “Spiritual books and reliable stories teach me that our states both have one certain source and root, and that the same saving word is common in both, the same visionaries of the divine sacraments and its heralds proclaimed the word of the gospel in them. It is clear what these words mean.

So, Byzantium gave everything that was needed to create a Russian belief about the planting of Christianity in our country by ap. Andrey. And the Russian legend was not slow to appear. His internal inconsistencies - the journey from the Crimea to Rome through ... Ladoga, the humiliation of apostolic dignity, etc. are so great that Golubinsky's usually ironic criticism almost reaches sarcasm here. But we will not beat the lying. We will only try to find a possible range of ideas and materials that gave rise to the individual components of the legend. First of all, the author must have been vaguely aware of the desolate state of the Russian country at the beginning of our era; therefore he leads the apostle along it only in passing. But where could he send him along the great waterway, to what famous point in the ancient Christian world? From the Varangians, who lived all over the world, the writer could hear that, as all roads lead to Rome, so their fellow countrymen know the way to it from the Varangian sea. The very direction of the apostle in the Varangian sea seems to have a connection with the traditions of the Norman north: there is some kind of (unpublished) Icelandic saga about ap. Andrew; There is also news that in ancient times St. Andrew was considered Patron of Scotland. The influence of the Varangian tales is also likely to be noticed in the story of the Novgorod baths; the plot is typical for the Finnish-Scandinavian north. We mean one story of Baltic origin on the same topic and in the same style. It was entered by a certain Dionysius Fabricius (XVI-XVII centuries) in his "Livonicae histoirae compendiosa series". The story is like this. There was once a Dominican monastery Falkenau near Dorpat-Yuriev. The brethren, suffering from a lack of means of subsistence, decided to send a tearful letter to the pope. In it, the Dominicans draw their harsh, austere life in food and mortification. Every Sabbath they mortify their flesh in terribly heated baths, scourging themselves with rods and pouring cold water over them. The pope was surprised and sent his messenger to personally inquire about the affairs of the monastery. After a treat, he was led into a hotly heated bathhouse. When the time came to take a steam bath with brooms, the gentle Italian could not stand it: he jumped out of the bath, saying that such a way of life was impossible and unheard of among people. Returning to Rome, he told the pope about the wonder he had seen (“Reader in the Common Nest. Chronicle”, book I, p. 289). Humorously absurd story, very reminiscent of our chronicle. The Russian author-southerner obviously had a definite, not particularly lofty goal in the story about the Novgorod baths. Having glorified his native Kyiv so beautifully, he, according to the Russian custom - to mock anyone who is not from our village, decided to put the Novgorodians before the apostles in the most ridiculous form. Novgorodians understood this in this way, because, in response to the Kiev edition of the story, they created their own, in which, without rejecting the glorification of Kyiv and completely silent about the baths, they assure that Ap. Andrei “within the limits of this great Novagrad departs down the Volkhov and plunges his staff a little into the ground and from there it is nicknamed Gruzino” (Verstakh, 15 from the Volkhov station of the Nikol. railroad; Arakcheevsky estate). This miraculous wand “from an unknown tree” was kept, according to the writer of the life of Mikhail Klopsky, in his time (1537) in St. Andrew's Church in the village of Gruzina.

When determining the reason for compiling the Russian legend and the time of its inclusion in the chronicle, we will follow the instructions of the interesting hypothesis of prof. I. I. Malyshevsky (op. сіt). The aforementioned letter of the Greek Emperor Michael Doukas dated 1074, suggesting the idea of ​​the preaching of St. Andrei in Russia, found quite intelligent people at the Russian court. It was primarily self led. book. Vsevolod Yaroslavich, who, according to his son, Vladimir Monomakh, “sitting at home, knows five languages,” including, of course, Greek, especially since he was married for the first time to a Greek princess. Vsevolod's daughter, Yanka (Anna) - the alleged object of the matchmaking in 1074 - born of a Greek woman, also probably knew the Greek language, as can be seen from the subsequent. Get and read "reliable spiritual books and stories" that tell about St. Andrew, they thus had full opportunity. Remarkable after this is such a fact. In 1086 Yanka was tonsured a monk. Vsevolod builds for her a church and a monastery in honor of St. Andrew. In 1089, she travels to Constantinople to her royal relatives, where at that time the former emperor Michael Duka himself still lived in the Studian monastery; his namesake secretary Psellos, the author of the historical letter, was also alive. As abbess of St. Andrew's Monastery, Yanka had strong motives to obtain the most detailed information about the apostle from the supposed originators of her interest in his name. Another significant coincidence. Bishop of Pereyaslavl Ephraim, who came from a wealthy family, who had been in Greece and in particular in the Studian monastery, built in his cathedral city in 1089 a church in honor of ap. Andrew. Obviously, the transplantation of the idea of ​​apostolic preaching in Russia from Byzantine soil to Russian has already taken place. All that was needed was a certain period of time and, perhaps, the next occasion for investing the idea in plastic forms.

Such a moment and reason can be seen in the middle of the XII century. in disputes about the legitimacy of the appointment of Kliment Smolyatich, when Tsargrad and Novgorod stood up against Kyiv, which had to defend its authority and the right to appoint autocratic metropolitans by all possible means. True, during the disputes for the blessing of St. Andrew was not cited. But this legally weak idea, although consoling for the supporters of the defeated Russian party in the end, could interest one of them, so to speak, retroactively and prompt them to work out - perhaps even the very one, who since 1155 had been deprived of his chair and long after that lived, Clement, "the great scribe and philosopher." It is characteristic that Novgorod is ridiculed in the legend, and Tsargrad is stubbornly hushed up. Contrary to the Greek sources citing St. Andrew to Byzantium, in the Russian story he goes to Rome and from there, despite all the way, does not go to Constantinople, but returns directly to Sinopia. That the legend got into the annals maybe around this time, and not much later, is evidenced by the fact of its distribution in all annals (except Novgorod, for obvious reasons). And this means that it became an integral part of the annalistic narrative earlier than the moment when the Kievan chronicle, as all-Russian, was replaced by frequent chronicles from various ends of the Russian land, that is, in any case, before the middle of the 13th century. This forces us to reject Golubinsky's suggestion that the Russian legend was compiled only in the 14th century. The emergence of the legend before the XIV century. is also proved by the fact that it is already read in a separate form in Russian prologues of the XIV century. These are the parchment prologues: Imp. Pub. Bible No. 59 coll. weather; Moscow Synod. Libraries Nos. 244, 248 and 247.

One new researcher tends to date the entry into the annals of the legend to the time of the 1st (1164) "Archimandrite" of the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery Polycarp. Andrei Bogolyubsky, who was at enmity with Kiev, was, however, the patron of the Caves Monastery and bore the name of Andrei, honored in his family from time to time. book. Vsevolod (Slavia, t III, Prague 1924-25 Sedelnikov "Dr. Kyiv, leg. about the Apostle Andrew"). If Kliment Smolyatich had reason to be jealous of the prestige of Kyiv (against Novgorod and the Greeks), then his younger contemporary, the active compiler of the Pechersk Paterik, arch. Polycarp. It was necessary to protect the dignity of Kyiv in the eyes of Andrei Bogolyubsky, who was busy in Constantinople to establish a special metropolis in Suzdal.

There is one more detail. In false legends about St. Andrew has no mention of Rome at all. And in the chronicle story, it is somehow artificially tied to the face of the apostle, without any motive or content. Therefore, the hypothesis of the scientist just mentioned about the cultivation of this detail in the Latin circles of Kyiv, in particular in the Dominican ones, is not without interest. And disassembled prof. Malyshevsky legends about the missionary exploits in Kyiv of the Dominican Jacek (Iakinf) Ondrovonzh (Tr. Kiev Spirit. Academician 1867), and the facts of the expulsion of the Dominicans from Kyiv in 1233 led. book. Vladimir Rurikovich, and the preservation of the anecdote about bath washing among the Dominicans in the Baltics, can indirectly support the conjecture that it was they who were interested in the anti-Greek trend through the authority of ap. Andrew to connect Kyiv with the first, and not with the second Rome.

Prof. A. L. Pogodin (I. VII “Biz. - Slavia, Prague 1937-38) considers the mention of Rome to be a sign of a very early emergence and writing of the Russian legend, namely, before the separation of the churches in 1054. In his opinion, when Vasilevs Mikhail Duka (Mikhail Psellos) in his letter referred to the legend about Andrei, he already assumed his fame in Kyiv. Prof. Pogodin, using the hypothesis of Prof. Priselkov about the North Caucasian, Tmutarakan homeland of the Kiev Metropolitan. Hilarion, who was installed as metropolitan in 1051, he is credited with transplanting the legend to Kyiv (without the bath “move”, of course) from the Caucasus, where it was fully formed and served precisely in these centuries (VIII-XI centuries) as an ideological tool for Iberians (Georgians) in their struggle with the Greek (Antiochian) hierarchy for their ecclesiastical autocephaly. The Iverian legends tell of the crushing of St. Andrew of idols and erecting on a mountain near Pitsunda (Pitiunt) a cross with a blessing and a prediction of the flourishing of Christianity here is a clear parallel to the Kiev version.

Recorded in the annals, in the prologues and in some lives of Sts. (especially in the era of literary productivity under the All-Russian Metropolitan Macarius) the legend of the walk of ap. Andrew on Russian soil gradually became a common Russian belief. The Russians, according to the testimonies of foreigners, always expressed it with confidence in front of everyone who asked them about their faith. Ivan the Terrible, following the example of the Greeks, responded to the proposal of the Jesuit Anthony Possevin of the union: “The Greeks are not the gospel for us. We believe in Christ, not the Greeks. We received faith at the beginning of the Christian church, when Andrew, brother of the ap. Peter, came to these countries to go to Rome. Thus, we in Moscow accepted the Christian faith at the same time as you in Italy, and we maintain it inviolably.” Arseny Sukhanov (XVII century) defended the originality of Russian church rites before the Greeks with the same argument and with no less energy: Andrew, and we are also from Ap. Andrew". Although it should be noted that even at the beginning of the XVI century. there were Russian scribes who did not share this conviction. So, the well-known elder of the Pskov Eleazarov Monastery Philotheus, interpreting one place from the Apocalypse (12:14), wrote about the Russian land: them the grace of God." In one collection of the XVI century. we read: "and I have not been to any apostle in the Russian land, but truly to the Russian language the mercy of God has been revealed." And Rev. Joseph Volokolamsky in his Enlightener even raised the question: why ap. Andrey did not preach Christianity in the Russian land? and answered thus: “I was forbidden from the Holy Spirit. His fate is many, and for this reason the essence of this is inexpressible.

With the final strengthening in Muscovite Russia of the tradition of preaching in our country, ap. Andrew, it was revived in the 17th century. and in Kievan Rus. We meet him in the Palinodia of Zechariah Kopystensky, published in 1621. In the same year, the Kyiv Cathedral sanctioned this belief and decided to establish a feast in honor of the first-called apostle. “Because,” say the fathers of the cathedral, “St. app. Andrey is the first Archbishop of Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Apostle of Russia, and his feet stood on the Kiev mountains, and his eyes saw Russia, and he blessed his lips, and he planted the seeds of faith among us, then it will be a just and charitable deed to restore the triumph and deliberately celebrate his feast . Truly, Russia is no less than other Eastern nations, for the apostle preached in it. After that, among the South Russians, the legend of St. Andrew is repeated quite often, and there are attempts to determine the place of the apostolic standing and the cross erected by him. Peter the Great himself did not hesitate to share this belief of his subjects, having established the first order in Russia in honor of St. Andrew the First-Called with the inscription: “Sanstus Andreas Patronas Rossiae”. Empress Elizaveta Petrovna founded a church in honor of the Apostle in Kyiv on Andreevskaya Hill (1744), executed by the famous Rastrelli and representing a masterpiece of our church rococo. And in 1832, “one archaeologist-dreamer, who was excavating in Kyiv, thought not only to determine with complete accuracy the place where the cross of St. Andrei in the foundation of the former Exaltation Church, but also to find the remains of the cross itself” (Malyshevsky).

Meanwhile, science, represented by the Germans of the XVIII century. and Russian scientists of the 19th century, to the extreme suspected faith in the historical significance of the Russian legend. And indeed, as the literary history of the legend, which we have briefly cited, shows, it is not necessary to elevate it to the dignity of historical evidence. It is impossible to attribute historical value even to Greek sources, with the exception, strictly speaking, of the primary apocrypha alone, fraught with traditions of the 2nd and 1st centuries and the tradition written down by Origen. But here already we seem to be beyond the reach of historical skepticism. Having no direct data to completely reject the tradition of St. Andrew, coming from such a deep antiquity, and interpreting it geographically so far in accordance with the opinion prevailing in science, we can admit without the violence of a scientific conscience that the first-called apostle, if he was not in the countries north of the Black Sea, could be in Georgia and Abkhazia, and perhaps in the Crimea, to consecrate with their feet, therefore, part of the territory of the later Russian State, and therefore geographically became the closest witness of Christ to us, more than anyone else from the face of the twelve - our patron and apostle of the Russian land. But even if app. Andrew did not physically reach the borders of our land in his apostolic labors, this does not change the essence of the matter, the Apostles decided by lot (Acts 1:17.26) the main issues of their ministry. If, according to the most ancient tradition consistent with this, all the countries of the apostolic service were also distributed among the apostles by lot, and St. Paul even considered it indecent to preach the gospel where other apostles had already worked (Rom. 15:19), - that was the lot that fell to each apostle, and made up his, so to speak, geographical lot on the map of the spread of Christianity. Christ's commandment to the apostles - "to be his witnesses even to the last of the earth" (Acts 1:8) did not require anything impossible from them and did not tell them the gift of immortality. The limits of the earth are only the ideal maximum task, goal, direction. From Jerusalem, as it were, mentally drawn radii, and the sectors of the circle enclosed between them constituted the lot of the apostolate, exceeding in their universal dimensions the strength and life span of a person. The apostles, leaving to preach in the direction intended for each, could end their days with natural or martyrdom even relatively soon after leaving Palestine and relatively close to it, all the same, they were sent by the Holy Spirit precisely in this direction, to these countries, they are fundamentally and spiritually (and in the person of their successors and successors and specifically) became apostles of precisely these countries and the peoples living in them, their heavenly patrons in history forever. So, for example, App. Thaddeus went to Syria (Edessa) and through this he can be considered an apostle of the most distant countries of the Asian East, which at one time received Christianity through the missionaries of the Syrian language. These were the Turkic tribes - the Uighurs and the Mongol - Keraits. Ap. Thomas went to India. At that time, the regions of northern Arabia, located only at the beginning of the great Indian path, were already called India. Therefore, the Christians of distant Hindustan and Ceylon have the right to consider themselves the spiritual children of the Apostle Thomas. He already had them in his heart, walking in their direction. Ap. Andrei went to the countries of the north, through Lebanon - Anti-Lebanon to our Transcaucasia, the Black Sea and Scythia. At what stage he ended his earthly career, we do not know exactly. The so-called Epiphanius legend, for example, tells that St. Andrew was martyred in Patras Achaia. But this does not change our attitude towards him, as the apostle of our countries, and him towards us, as his desired baptismal children. Our ancestors were not mistaken in developing the legend of the blessing of the First-Called Apostle of Russian Christianity, but we, their descendants, are mistaken that we do not especially solemnly and consciously honor the day of church memory of St. Andrew, put on November 30 old. style. It is time for us to mature before this, as we have matured before the celebration of our Christian enlighteners: the faithful led. book. Vladimir and St. Thessalonica brothers - Cyril and Methodius.

The beginnings of Christianity in the territory of the future Russia

I. The beginning of the historical life of the Russian people

Thick darkness hides from us the beginning of the historical life of the Russian people and, at the same time, the beginning of their acquaintance with the Christian religion. In uncovering this dark question, we need to take something known as a starting point. Let us first try to recall that ethnographic environment of the Russian territory, the oldest in terms of historical fame, which could serve and served our ancestors as an intermediary in rapprochement with Christianity. Then the boundaries of that wave of Christianity will be outlined before us, which, in its spread from the Greco-Roman world through the peoples closest to the most distant, reached our fatherland at a certain hour, “stretching out”, in the words of Metropolitan. Illarion, "and to our Russian language." This is all the more necessary because the old researchers, and the textbooks behind them, rooted quite a lot of inaccurate ideas here.

Let's go south. The ancient Byzantines distinguished two Scythia in Europe: Great - from Tanais (Don) to Istra (Danube) and Small, which constituted the inner province of the empire in the north-eastern Misia, between the lower reaches of the Danube and the Black Sea, with the main city of Tom (Τόμοι, Τόμις) , which can be dated to the current Bulgarian town of Mangalia. The acts of martyrdom testify to the spread of Christianity here already in the first centuries. The first mention of a Scythian bishop comes from the time of Diocletian. A number of then Scythian or Tomitan bishops are known until later times: the chair in Tom is still listed in the catalog of bishops, marked with the name of Leo the Emperor (beginning of the 10th century; in fact, this catalog represents the edition of the 12th century). The population of the Tomitan province consisted of Thracian tribes, and from the 6th century. and Slavic, the ancestors of today's Bulgarians. It is to this area that most of the ancient patristic testimonies about Christianity among the Scythians belong, which the old historians and compilers of textbooks hastily interpreted as applied to the Russian Slavs.

But it is also true that for the Russian Slavs the Christianity of Scythia Minor did not pass without a trace. Directly with Lesser Scythia, on the other side of the Danube, one of the varieties of Russian Slavs neighbored - the Uglichs, or Uluchi and Tivertsy, whose dwellings spread from the Danube to the Bug. If only in the Ptolemaic (II century) tiragetes we see precisely the Tivertsy, then their settlement here dates back to the II century BC. In the ants of the Gothic historian Iornand (VI century), who lived here, one should recognize the same our fellow tribesmen. Such a close and long-standing neighborhood of the Uglichs and Tivertsy with Christian peoples, partly even kindred (Mysian Slavs), could bring a new religion to them. The possibility of this was even closer. Christianity was in the very land of the Uglich-Tiver: among the Greek colonists who lived on the lower Dniester and along the seashore to the Danube. According to Constantine Porfirorodny, in his time (X century), the ruins of six cities were visible on the lower Dniester, and interurbium collapsarum fabricas esclesiarum indicia quaedam et cruses ex lapide tophino exculptae (Corp. Scrip. byz. Venet. XXIX, p. 87).

Only after what has been said, we have the right to relate some of the patristic testimonies about Scythia really to Great Scythia, which concerns us more. Such is the well-known expression of bliss. Jerome (IV-V centuries), that in his time "cold Scythia is warmed by the warmth of faith." Although it must be remembered that a sign of coldness in the mouth of a southerner does not yet authorize us to immediately leave Scythia Minor and move to the far north, because, for example, Ovid, exiled to Tom, in a place that we think is warm, found that in that country nihil est nisi nonhabitabile frigus. The missionary activity of the famous KP Archbishop John Chrysostom also extended to Great Scythia. According to Theodoret, he, “having learned that some nomadic Scythians who had their tents near the Danube, yearn for salvation, found people who were jealous of the apostolic labors, and sent them to them.” He, in a commendable word to Chrysostom, says: “You also have another similarity with the apostles: you were the first to erect altars at the Scythians living in carts.” Former historians understood this evidence very broadly, extending Chrysostom's mission to almost all South Russian tribes. Meanwhile, from the text of the testimonies it is clear that we are talking about areas immediately adjacent to the Danube, where only Tivertsy and Uglichs lived. But it is impossible to understand them in this case either, because history does not know the Slavs in a nomadic way of life, and already Tacitus (I century) distinguishes them, as having houses, from the Sarmatians living in wagons.

On the expanses of the same Great Scythia, so to speak, inside the settlements of the Tivertsy, Uglichs and our other ancestors, the history of Christianity among the Goths also begins. The latter came here at the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century. and settled on the Danube and throughout the north of the Black Sea, subduing their power and the future "Russian-Slavic" tribes. The first mass conversion to Christianity among the Western Goths followed around 323, after a decisive victory over them by Constantine the Great. The same city of Tom in Lesser Scythia, which served as a kind of missionary base in partibus infidelium, was appointed as the diocesan center for new converts. But the national Gothic ep. Wulfila, who converted to Arianism, had his cathedral residence somewhere in Great Scythia, because only in 348, as a result of the persecution of Christians, erected by the Gothic viceroy Atanarih, Wulfila moved with his co-religionists within the empire, to Nikopol (Bulgarian Nikup).

That's all the oldest episodes of Christianity known to us in Great Scythia. However, no remnants of this Christianity survived until the actual beginning of Russian church history. Assumed, thanks to all these circumstances, the beginnings of Christianity among our distant relatives naturally disappeared at the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th century, when their territory for a long time became a trail for wild eastern peoples, spontaneously stretching to the west: the Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Magyars.

A more stable and continuous stream of Christianity went to the future Russia through the Crimea, which served for Russia as a cultural bridge to Byzantium. Here Christianity was among the Greeks and the Goths. Among the Greeks, it dates back to the first centuries of our era. But the properly organized Chersonissian diocese (near Sevastopol) began only in the 4th century. Around the 8th century along with it, two more Greek dioceses arose: Sugdai Σουγδαία or Surozh (the current town of Sudak) and Fula Φούλλα (according to Professor Yu. Kulakovsky, now Eski Crimea). The remaining parts of the Crimea fell ecclesiastical under the influence of the Goths, who finally settled here after they did not want to follow their fellow tribesmen who left in the middle of the 5th century. with Theodoric to Italy (called Theodoric the Great; his grave is in Ravenna). The Crimean Goths, who received Christianity, as is believed, from Cappadocian captives, after a sea raid ready on the shores of Asia Minor at the end of the 2nd century, had their Gothic diocese at first only in the Bosporus (ancient Greek Panticapaeum, present-day Kerch), the sustainable existence of which is evidenced by catalogs of dioceses even in the 12th century. But in the seventh century we learn about the episcopal see in the very center of the Gothic settlements in the Crimea, in the city of Doros or Dori (maybe it was - ταΰρος - taurus in the Gothic pronunciation). This Gothic region overlooked the coast from Alushta to Balaklava. Prof. Yu. Kulakovsky (Journal of Min. N. Prosv. 1898 vol., part 315) identified Dori with Mankup-Kale. Prof. a. a. Vasiliev recommends (The Goths in the Crimea. Cambr. in Massach. 1936) Eski-Kermen. The Gothic archdiocese in Dori, which had from the 8th century. the title and rights of the metropolitanate, outlived even the very nation of the Goths, definitively turkified and turkified in the 18th century, and already with one title of “Gothian”, although with a Greek flock and hierarchy, passed into the jurisdiction of the Russian Holy Synod after the conquest of the Crimea by Catherine II.

Under Emperor Justinian I, a third, most interesting for us, Gothic see was established, depending on the metropolis of Doria.

Part of the Goths, who lived on the Kerch Peninsula, under the pressure of the invasion of the Huns (5th century), crossed the strait to the Caucasian coast and settled here on the Taman Peninsula. The Byzantine historian Orokopios (6th century) knows them there. It is known about their church structure that in 548 they sent to the emperor. An embassy to Justinian the Great, asking for the appointment of a bishop, following the example of the diocese just established in the neighborhood for the Lazians and Avazgians (i.e., Abkhazians) in Nikopsia (Pitsunda). Back in 518, Bishop was present at the council in the CP. Phanagorian (Taman. If from that moment the Greek Phanagorian pulpit was empty or closed, then in 548 it was about its restoration specifically for the ready. This pulpit is mentioned as existing, and at the beginning of the VIII century. But from the newly opened list of the dioceses of the Communist Party of the Patriarchate, also of the 8th century, published by the Belgian Byzantinist de Boor "om, it is clear that this department has lost its old name and acquired a new one: "Ταμχταρχα, in other hand. Τα Μεμάρχα, Τα Μεταρχα, Russian - Tmutarakan (now Taman and Temryuk).

The diocese of Tamatarkhan later became one of the first dioceses of the newborn Russian church and, as a titular (i.e., no longer existing), is found in Greek acts of the 12th and even 14th centuries. It may even seem strange at first if we say that here, in the Christian Tamatarkh, and even in the 8th century, that is, before the conditional "beginning" of the Russian state, we already came to Russia itself.

Where did the Russian land come from? This question, raised by our Kiev chronicler and renewed by Russian science in the first half of the 18th century, does not cease to occupy the minds and even the hearts of specialists up to the present time. Greek writers, when they wanted to call Russians not by a vulgar, but by a literary classical name, until later times (that is, even several centuries after the baptism of Russia) resorted to the term Tauro-Scythians, that is, the Scythians living in Taurus, the Taurian Scythians. When did the "Russians" live in Tauris? For Byzantine writers, this is an undeniable fact. Sometimes they call the people "Ρώς - Russia by the nickname" Ρώς Δρομΐται - Russia-Dromites, from δρόμος - running, as if Russia-Runners. And for example. Simeon Master or Logothete (Ed. Bonn, 707) even explains this epithet in the sense of the predatory and aggressive raids of the Rus on other peoples. The explanation is artificial. It may be easier to explain this topographically. For Ptolemy (c. 140), the Tauro-Scythians live in the vicinity of Άχιλλέως Δρόμος, so-called. "Achilles Run" between the mouth of the Dnieper and the Perekop Isthmus of Crimea, where the narrow island of Tender (Tendra) and the Dzharylgach spit. A firm geographical memory that not some kind of "Tauro-Scythians", but simply Russians-Russians lived in Taurida, was clearly reflected in the later documents of the XIV-XVII centuries, namely, on the geographical maps of the Genoese trading houses that led along the shores of the Black Sea trade in the 14th and 15th centuries. The current Fr. The tender on these cards is called Rossa. On the same maps for app. On the coast of the Crimean peninsula in the vicinity of present-day Evpatoria, the following areas appear: Rossofar, Rossosa. Another, more southerly point of residence of the Taurus Scythians (Russes) inside the peninsula is indicated by the expressions: 1) the life of John of Gotha (written in the first half of the 11th century), that “the land of the Taurus Scythians is under the country (power) of the Goths”, and 2) the life of Chersonissian martyrs (written earlier than the end of the 10th century), that Chersonis (Korsun) is in the diocese of the Tauro-Scythians.

Still, unfortunately, the testimonies of Arab historians about the Russians who lived on the Taman Peninsula remain not completely clear. The Russian Tmutarakan principality of the 11th century, completely cut off from the central Slavic-Russian lands near the Dnieper, and the strange Tmutarakan diocese of the same time have not yet ceased to be a nebula and a mystery for Russian historians. And yet this is a fact, unshakable, supported by a long series of testimonies from Arab writers of the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. One of them reports that Russia lives on some swampy and unhealthy island, the other says that she lives on seven islands. Looking at the map of the Taman Peninsula, one can assume that the characteristics of the area fit it. Ibn-Dasta, who wrote in the first years of the 10th century, defines the island on which the Russes lived as located not far from Khazeran (Khazaria) and the country of Bolgars (which was then approximately on the territory of the Don and Kuban regions). According to Ibn-Dasta, the Russians sold booty from their constant robberies to the Khazars and Bulgarians, as to their neighbors. This indication is consistent with the geographical position of the "Russian" Tamatarkha. None of the Russian scientists, like Shakhmatov himself, and after him S. F. Platonov, made an attempt to reinterpret these testimonies of the Arabs in application to the Novgorod region of the classical route “from the Varangians to the Greeks” (“Deeds and Days”, book I, Petrograd 1920). Platonov found a swampy area, supposedly strategically protected by a system of rivers to the southeast of Staraya Russa, between the Redya and Lovat rivers, a space of 3 days' journey in a circle. Of course, Arab merchants could also pass here in their wanderings to Scandinavia. But all the geographical and ethnographic surroundings, among which Arab writers mention the Russians, does not fit the Novgorod region in any way. We have to mention this strained hypothesis only for the sake of the big names of our scientists.

The center of the Tmutarakan Russ was, according to the Arabs, the city of Rusia at the mouth of the Russian River. This city "Ρωσία" is then mentioned in Greek documents in the second half of the 12th century and on Italian maps of subsequent times it is called Rossi, Rosso, and the river flowing near it - according to all the signs of the Don - fiume Rosso. Where is this city located? At the archaeological congress in Kyiv in 1899, Prof. Y. Kulakovsky supported the opinion of Prof. Brun that "Ρωσία is identical with Vospor (Kerch), because the Arab geographer Edrizi, whose work was compiled in Sicily in 1163, the city of Rusia is listed 20 miles to west of Matarkha. The mouth of the "Russian River" Edrizi also lies between Soldadiya (Sugdeya) and Matarkha, obviously identifying the Kerch Strait with it. In this identification, he is not alone: ​​already the chronicler Theophanes (beginning of the 9th century). considers this strait to be the mouth of the Don. The Italian cartographers fell into the same mistake. Thus, the current Kerch and Taman-Temryuk played the role of a political center for the eastern part of the Black Sea Russes. Of course, this should be understood not in the sense of a single center of a single state nation, but only one of the "curls" - the embryos of a still wandering, emerging, potential nation, looking for a place for itself.

A joint discussion of two different questions brings into the problem of the beginning of Russia a profound ambiguity. One question about the tribe and the language of the people is a predominantly archaeological question. And another about the name of the people - mainly philological. Clarifying the first question does not mean solving the second, and vice versa. The race, the blood of the people is its most essential and stable property, the language is less stable, and the name is already a completely external label, sometimes accidentally, adhering to the people from the outside. Both intertwined questions can now be considered satisfactorily elucidated mainly with the help of the so-called Norman theory. Without having to delve into the wilds of the problem, we refer the reader to two useful guides. An old guide on the subject is Lectures Danish. prof. V. Thomson (1876), published in 1891 (I book. "Reader in the Imperial General. East. and Dr. Ross."), and the new one is an exhaustive bibliographic study by prof. V. A. Moshin "The Varyago-Russian Question" (Slavia, Prague, 1931).

Although the name Rus is the easiest to explain, as a Slavic rendering of the name given by the Baltic Finns to the neighboring Scandinavian newcomers-Swedes, whom they still call RUOTSI (dialectic Rotsi Eston Rot "s). In the Slavic pronunciation, the sound "uo" merges into y: Suomi (the name of the Finns themselves) in the Russian chronicle - Sum. Therefore, "Ruotsi-Ruossi, Rots, Ros" in Slavic was pronounced "Russi-Rus". The Byzantine ear accentuated the vowel "o" in this name and pronounced 'Ρώς - Ros. Maybe This was also influenced by the biblical reminiscence of the Scythian people "Rosh", who, according to the testimony of the prophet Ezekiel (VI century BC), broke through from the Caucasus to northern Syria. In the Greek translation LXX, the Hebrew "Rosh" is written and sounds like " Ρώς. The Byzantines liked to call the new peoples by old, classical, bookish-stilted names.

But the new Russian-historical and archaeological science has already accumulated a lot of material, which does not allow to calm down on this one explanation of the origin of the Russian name. The Scandinavian-Finnish composition of the word Rus, while remaining unshaken, may not exclude its other roots, which met and merged with the Scandinavian name. And they merged and united because the vast parts of the future great Russian plain, inhabited by heterogeneous ethnic groups, eventually fell under the spontaneous unifying influence of the tribe that prevailed over them in the Slavic language, the future Russian people. This tribe, scattered from the Volkhov, Dvina, Neman, San, Dniester and Danube to the Don, Volga and Kuban, also absorbed local ethnographic and geographical nicknames, among which the root "ros" and "rus" apparently were not foreign sides, but autochthonous.

If the geographical nomenclature in our northern Baltic space is replete with names with the root “rus” (Staraya Russa, the Porusya River, the village of Rusino, the Russian River, the Village of Ruska; in the north of Ladoga Lake, the village of Ruskyalya; in the south of Finland, Lake Rutsalyainen, i.e. "Swedes", etc.), this is also explained by the inclusion of such names here through wandering Normans (according to their Finnish nickname).

But this genesis of the name "Rus" is no longer so convincing when applied to the geography of the middle and southern Baltic states, where there are no Finns. On the lower reaches of the Neman, the village of Russ; in Courland, the city of Rossien; Masurian Lake - Rosh; the village of Rosinsko; on the lower Vistula - Roussenaya; near the Ivangorod fortress - Rosoch, Rusets. And further - through Galicia and the Carpathians in Transylvania: Rava Russka, Ruska Ushitsa; on the app. stop. Carpathians - the river Rushkovo, the village of Rushlolyana; to the east Bukovina side: Rus-Moldvitsa; in the center of the Transylvania. Alp Russ village, Rushka mountain, Rushka river, villages: Rushkichi and Rusberg. The river Rusova owns the Dniester approx. Yampol; the village of Ruska Banilla in Bukovina near the Prut; a number of villages near the Danube in Wallachia; Ruschuk on the Danube. Let the Norman vagrants make their way here to the Neman and Vistula, but their settlement here was so weak and rare that it does not explain the topographic abundance of “Russian” names.

The late academician N. Ya. Marr, our largest linguist of the Caucasian languages, claims the existence of the ethnic terms "Rush, Ros, Rosh" in the Caucasus, Sev. Caucasus and Black Sea. The Syrian church historian Zechariah Rhetor (VI century) names among the peoples of the North. Caucasus some "Ros and Rus". Belamy, translator of the 10th century. into the Persian language of the Arabic chronicle of the 7th century. Tabari among the peoples of the north. Caucasus names Khazars, Alan and Russ. From here it becomes more understandable, as it were, the sudden appearance in the 9th century on the stage of the history of the Azov-Black Sea or Tmutarakan Rus. Some kind of "Rus", replenished, and perhaps headed, by new elements that poured into it from the north, here to the north. Caucasus already existed. Our outstanding Byzantinists F. I. Uspensky and after him A. A. Vasiliev see indications of this Black Sea "Rus" - "Ρώς among Byzantine writers under their favorite term Scythians as applied to events even earlier centuries. For example, Byzantine and Georgian chroniclers, talking about the attack of the Avars on the KPl in 626, both from land and from the sea, point to the presence of Bulgarians and Scythians in the Avar troops as their allies. them: φλώρος - the sound of the last syllable resembles "a proud haughty pagan tribe"; χήρος also - "the haughty pride of the barbarian - Scythian". Both the Ancient Hellene and the Byzantine under the Scythians used to understand the tribes living in the Black Sea and Caucasus regions, and not further than the northern Normans or northwestern Franks. Later in the 7th-8th centuries there was a rapid change in the semasiology of the term ρώς. The Byzantines clearly attached it to the barbarians of the Germanic tribe, to the Normans-Varangians. x also came with the name ρώς. If such a merger under one name of two peoples, one long known and the other newly appeared, did not raise any question and did not give rise to any reservations and explanations in Byzantine writing, then it became a self-understandable and obvious fact. This means that these two peoples united, mixed up, and neither kidnapped nor imposed on the other a name alien to her. The happy historical accident of the consonance of names born from different roots only facilitated the process of also an accidental meeting of different peoples in the common destiny that opened up before them: in the construction of a single national life, Slavic in territory and language, and Russian in name.

Indirect witnesses of such a meeting and the merging of the two parts of Russia are the rather numerous references to Russians among contemporary Arab historians and memoirists of that era.

Ibn Khordadbeh, who wrote no later than 846 (that is, before the fictitious date of 862 of the beginning of the Russian state), informs us: “As for Russians(merchants) - and they are a tribe Slavic- then they go from the farthest ends of Saklab to the Russian Sea and sell beaver furs, mountain foxes, and swords there. The king of Rum takes a tithe from their goods."

Or: “They go down the Tanais (Don), the river of the Slavs (saklaba), passing through Kamlij (Itil), the capital of the Khazars, and the ruler of the country takes a tithe from them. And from there they go down on ships along the Dzhurdzhan (Caspian) sea and go ashore, wherever they like. Sometimes they carry their goods on camels from the city of Jurjan to Baghdad. And eunuchs Slavic serve as guides for them. They pretend to be Christians and, as such, pay a universal tax.”

Here the name "Russ" is thought of as belonging, as a proper name, to the people according to the tribe and the Slavic language. And the author calls the very country of the Russians due to its ethnic nature "Slavic" - Saklaba. He thinks of it as vast and distant, northern and wooded, according to the fur raw materials that it trades. The caravan routes of Russian merchants are not only overland, but also seafaring, and so firmly conquered by them that the Arab writer calls the sea the Russian Sea, without any reservations, as a generally accepted fact. In this Black Sea sphere (the northern coast and the Crimea), Russian merchants pay customs duties to the "Roman", i.e., Byzantine authorities.

But next to this caravan voyage, there is another, also a land-sea voyage of the Russians, which can be called eastern. From the upper reaches of the Don, obviously by means of transshipment or dragging, the caravan descends along the lower Volga to the Caspian Sea to its south, from where it is on camels to Baghdad. There, in Muslim Persia, he was accompanied by his countrymen, Russian Slavs, either as sold into slavery, or as captives converted into eunuchs. Russians are still portrayed as pagans, and only for the sake of passport conveniences are those who call themselves Christians.

Arabic writer also half of the 9th century. Al-Bekri emphasizes the dominant national influence on the southern Russian plain of the Slavic population, saying: "the chief of the tribes of the north speak in Slavic because they mixed with the Slavs: Badzhinaki (Pechenegs), Russians and the Khazars. Al-Bekri, in the mess of peoples, cemented by the Slavic language, also distinguishes the "Rus" as Slavic, but foreigners. Aliens from afar, or local? Rather the latter. Ibn Fodlan considers Russ as if one of the eastern peoples. About the Volga, he says: "Itil flows to the Khazars from Rus and Bolgar." If, as we know, the Bulgarians settled on the middle Volga, then the Russians in the neighborhood are thought to be somewhere near the center of the Russian plain. And one more detail: "the food of the Khazars is brought to them from Rus, Bulgar and Kuyaba (Kyiv)" Here the Rus do not coincide with the people of Kiev and are closer to the peoples of the East. Ibn-Dasta calls the prince of the Russ "khakan - rus", i.e., the Khazar princely title (kagan - Jewish cohen). All this is more like signs of an oriental people and tempts the latest researchers to build even a hypothesis of the Turkic origin of the name "Rus" (K. Fritzler).

From Greek chronography, Slavic chronicle writing was passed on the tradition of the identity of Russia with the Turks. The Serbian translation of the XIV century additions to the chronography of Zonara, apparently mentioning the attack of the Russians on the Communist Party of 860, is expressed as follows: “give birth to the named Rus, Kumane, living in Evksin, and begin to captivate the Rymian country.” Echoing this, Nikon Let. (876) and Degree. Book. I, 50, formulate as follows: “give birth, names of Russia, like Kuman, live in Euxinopont ...”

So, by now it can be recognized that there were some tribes in the Ciscaucasian Black Sea region, not pseudonymously, but originally called Rus, glorified in language and joined the general flow of invasions of the Byzantine Empire and invested in the process of building the Russian state. But in the last construction, nevertheless, the leading role fell to the lot of another Russia - Norman. Such was the conviction of the Byzantines, who, through bitter experience, personally familiarized themselves with its positive and negative qualities. The Byzantines tell us distinctly that these "Ρώς" were Scandinavians who commanded the Slavic masses.

The most interesting evidence of the initial stage of acquaintance of Byzantium with a new people for her "Pώς at the beginning of the 9th century was preserved in the Annals of Bertinsk by Prudentius Galindo († 861) under 839, i.e. before the appearance on the stage of the Kievan Russian state.

Annalist reports that ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor Theophilus came to Ingelheim (on the Rhine), the capital of the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious, and with them “some people who called themselves, that is, their people (qui se, id est gentem suam , Rhos vocari disebant) Ροs. They came to Byzantium from their own king named Chaсanus (i.e. obviously “Kagan”), but they did not want to go back the same way, being afraid of one cruel and barbaric people.” Therefore, Theophilus asked Louis to let them go home through his state. However, despite the solid recommendation, the newcomers were treated very suspiciously, and the emperor, “having diligently tested the reasons for their arrival, discovered that they were from the Suebi,” that is, the Swedes (comperuit cos gentis esse sueonum). No matter how superficial the examination may be, in any case, the very direction of these dews home through the heart of Europe (to Sweden, and then by water, Varangian routes to Tamatarkha?) speaks for the fact that their nationality is generally guessed correctly and is distinguished even from well-known in the west Norwegian and Danish Normans.

The conclusion from this is that Russia is the Eastern Scandinavians, who have not even forgotten their northern homeland, but are so closely connected with the new life in Ciscaucasia that their prince is called in Khazar Khakan. We now understand what elements formed the ethnic and political mystery for the Byzantines at the beginning of the 9th century. But this is not yet a clue for us to the root of the name ‘Ρώς. Only Eastern European soil christened this name of wandering Scandinavians; throughout its expanse from the Baltic Sea and the Carpathians to the Black and Caspian Seas. And if the name Ruotsi - Russia, which did not exist as a tribal name in Scandinavia, stuck on the new soil from the outside to the Norman wanderers, it still remains unclear why it, in its, so to speak, Finnish form, was so easily assimilated in all ends of the great Russian plain. Here the hypothesis about the meeting of two consonant names, of northern and southern origin, retains its strength.

However, the voice of the ancient primary sources is indisputable. In them, Russia is attached to the military commander, Norman-Varangian, in the tribal sense, North Germanic Russia. This is attested with perfect clarity by all Byzantine sources and our Russian chronicles. Our local, Slavic and even "Russian" (in the double sense of name and blood), Russia entered the stage of history under the dominant command of Russia of Scandinavian origin. The fates of both Russias, political, cultural, spiritual, domestic, inextricably merged into a single "Russian sea", and the Scandinavian-Varangian stream dried up, was lost in it quickly and without a trace. This unity was accomplished and completed mainly by the spiritual power of the new Christian faith, which defeated wretched paganism in the souls of the two tribes. Therefore, some supposedly patriotic and ecclesiastical fear is inappropriate - to recognize, within legal limits, the correctness of the so-called. Norman theory of the beginning of Russia as a nation, as a state, and as a church.

Over the past half century, Russian archeology has firmly established that the military-trade route for the Scandinavians "from the Varangians to the Greeks" along the Dnieper is a relatively new route, established already in the 9th century. Previously, they practiced it for a long time for military trade purposes by another, more distant route: along the Volga, the Caspian Sea and through the Transcaucasus. He led Scandinavians to the Near East East and from there led Arab merchants back to Scandinavia. One northern branch of this path went to the Kama basin. In the hoards of Sweden VIII-IX centuries. Arab coins are twice as large as Byzantine coins. This explains the glory of Biarmia (i.e. Perm, Perm. Territory), which sounds in the Scandinavian sagas. The latest archaeologists (P. Smirnov. Sbirnik East. Phil. Vidd. No. 75 Ukr. Ak. N.), judging by the Scandinavian mounds of Yarosl. and Vlad. lips., tend to attribute the beginnings here to the Varangian-Russian. statehood even by the 6th century. In any case, the turn of the Scandinavians from this eastern and long route to Baghdad to shorter and western routes to the Black Sea and Byzantium is a new phenomenon, not earlier than the end of the 8th century. This western route had options: not only the well-known Volkhovsky, but also another - the Zapadno-Dvinskaya through the San to the Dniester, and the third - along the Neman to the same Dnieper. Shakhmatov and Moshin even guess that opened by the 9th century. the craving for Byzantium also tempted the Volga Scandinavians to cross by drag to the Don and from there to the Black Sea. And their competitors - the Vikings of the Dnieper route, cut off their path to return from Byzantium. And this is the meaning of the mysterious episode of 839, when the Rhos of the eastern path, avoiding the trap set by him, returned by a detour through Scandinavia to the East to their khakan.

This Russia of the end of the VIII beginning. 9th century - a mobile mess of peoples: Slavic, Norman and maybe partly Scythian-Iranian, or even Turkic, wandered and was scattered along all the northern shores of the Black Sea, already long since Christianized by Byzantium. The Goths were of the same tribe and similar in language to the Scandinavians from the 4th century BC. Christians. There were Gothic episcopal sees both in Tamatarkh and in the city of Russia (Kerch). Christianity conquered nation after nation between the Black and Caspian Seas. The aforementioned list of chairs of the KP of the patriarchate of the 8th century names, under the authority of the Gothic Metropolitan of Doria, the bishops: Onogur (Όνογούρων Hungarian - Ugric?) - the people who lived in the upper basin of the Kuban, Itil (Αστήλ), that is, the capital Khazar and Khvalis (Χουάλης) - probably The North Caucasian Alans (ancestors of the Ossetians), as probably now known, adopted Christianity together with their prince at the very beginning of the 10th century. at times devastating raids on the neighboring shores of the Crimea and Asia Minor. Still, in the end, it was from them, like the Goths, that the enlightenment of the light of the Christian faith of the entire Russian world began. who were unaware of the beneficial consequences of their barbaric undertakings.

II. The oldest evidence of the acquaintance of the Russians with Christianity

The oldest evidence of the acquaintance of the Russians with Byzantine Christianity and even of being baptized, as unexpected results of their military excursions, has been preserved in the lives of two Greek bishops, Stefan of Surozh or Sugdai, and George of Amastrid. More than 100 years have passed since, in 1844, A. B. Gorsky drew the attention of the scientific world to these two sources until an end was put to the extremely confused judgments of various scientists about their historical significance by the exemplary works of Β. G. Vasilevsky, who subjected these monuments to study in their entire composition and connected them with certain moments of Byzantine history. Therefore, without repeating old opinions, we have the opportunity to state the matter in a positive form.

In Russian collections, starting from the 15th century, there is often a life of St. Stephen, Ep. Surozhsky. Old Russian Surozh, Greek. Sugdeya, this is the current place of Sudak on the southern coast of Crimea, between Alushta and Feodosia. Stefan is represented in his life as a native of Cappadocia, who was educated in the KPl, where he accepted monasticism and episcopal rank from the Orthodox Patriarch Herman. In the midst of the iconoclasm of Leo the Isaurian (717-741) and Constantine Copronymus (741-775), he acts as a confessor, already being the Bishop of Sourozh. As a good shepherd, he is glorified by the gift of miracles during life and after death. Of interest to us is one of his two posthumous miracles, attributed at the end of the Life under special titles. It is the following: “After the death of the saint, it’s been a few years for a mine, the great Russian from Novagrad is coming, Prince Bravlin (var. Bravalin) is very strong,” who overcame the entire coastal Crimean strip from Korsun to Kerch and approached Surozh. After a ten-day siege, he broke into the city and entered, breaking the doors, into the church of St. Sofia. There on the tomb of St. Stephen had a precious cover and a lot of golden utensils. As soon as all this was plundered, the prince “fell ill; turning his face back and lying foam more often; cry out, saying, great is the holy man who is here.” The prince ordered the boyars to bring the stolen goods back to the tomb, but he could not get up. All the sacred vessels taken from Korsun to Kerch were also demolished here - the prince remained in the same position. St. Stephen appeared before him in a vision (“in horror”) and said: “If you are not baptized in my church, then you will not leave here.” The prince agreed. Priests appeared, led by Archbishop Philaret, and baptized the healed prince together with all his boyars, taking a promise from them - to release all Christian captives.

According to the chronology of the life of St. Stephen, entirely related to the 8th century, in the described incident, which took place “a few years after the death of the saint”, we are dealing with the oldest fact of “Russian” history. The whole question is: what is the degree of reliability of the life and the Slavic postscript about miracles, the original for which is not available in the Greek text? An analysis of the life reveals in it lengthy extracts from the Slavic translation of the biography of John Chrysostom, attributed to George of Alexandria, from the Slavic translation of the Spiritual Meadow by John Mosch, and even from the life of the Russian Metropolitan Peter, written by Metropolitan Cyprian († 1406) Clear signs that it compiled by a Russian person not earlier than the first half of the 15th century. and no later than the capture of Surozh by the Turks in 1475, which life does not yet know. In our holy calendar, the name of Stefan of Surozh appears only from the 16th century. But, despite such a late origin and some internal inconsistencies, the life being analyzed retains in its composition a very ancient basis, traces of which are visible in a number of accurate historical details that favorably distinguish the Russian edition in places even from the only known Greek text of the life. These are, for example: an indication of the name of the homeland of the saint - Morivas (there is a parallel to this in the Greek text in the genus pad: Βοριβάσου); mention of the wife of Konstantin Kopronym Irina, “the daughter of the Kerch king” (she was the daughter of the Khazar kagan). Prince Yury Tarkhan is mentioned in the story about miracles. The feature is deeply true for the history of Surozh in the 8th century, when he was in tributary dependence on the Khazars and privileged persons, free from tribute, - in Turkic "tarkhans" should have lived in it. Stephen's successor in the archbishopric is the cleric Filaret. It is possible that we have indirect confirmation of this in a letter from Theodore the Studite († 826) to the archmandrite of Gothia, neighboring Surozh: there Ven. Theodore mentions some bishop Philaret. The temple of Sourozh is called St. Sofia. This exactly corresponds to historical reality and can be seen from one ancient Greek postscript on the field of the synaxarion, which belonged to a Greek Surozhan, about the renovation in the city of Sugdey in 793 of the church of St. Sofia. The role of the baptizer of the Russian prince is played by Archbishop Philaret, for whom it was appropriate to still be alive, “a few years later” after the death of St. Stephen; and the death of the latter can be assumed at the end of the 8th century, if we identify with him Stefan Bishop of Sugdai, who signed the definition of the seventh ecumenical council (787). In a word, everything leads us to the conviction that the compiler of the Russian Life of St. Stephen in the 15th century drew a story about the baptism of the Russian rati from the same old Greek original, written in the spirit of full compliance with the depicted era of the 8th and early 9th centuries.

The interest of the Russian scribe in the personality of Stefan of Surozh and the possibility of referring to the Greek original are explained by long-standing and long-term trade relations between Russians and Surozh. We can notice their beginning already in the XII century. The mentioned author of the postscript on the Greek synaxar on July 24 made a note about the celebration “on this day of memory of the holy newly-appeared νεοφανέντων martyrs in the Russian countries, David and Roman (Boris and Gleb), killed by their own brother, the accursed Svyatopolk (του τάλανος Ζφαντων) On the trade of Russian merchants in Sourozh in the XIII century. there are Arabic and European evidence. The Hypatian chronicle under 1288 notes the presence of Surozh merchants in Vladimir Volynsky. South Russian epics also know some heroes of the Surozhans, or Surovs. From the 14th century there are already frequent indications of the presence of Surozh merchants in Russia and, in particular, in Moscow. But at the same time, natural Russian people, who only traveled to the Crimea and traded in imported Surozh, or, as they said, Surov goods, began to be called Surozhians. (Here is the clue to one of the Russian commercial terms). According to letters of the XV century. several merchant families, or Moscow trading houses, are known to have had regular business with Surozh. About one of these merchants, Stepan Vasilyevich Surozhsky, the genealogical books report that he arrived in 1403 to lead. book. Vasily Dmitrievich "from his patrimony from Surozh" and that the Golovins and the Tretyakovs descended from him. A patriot of the city of Surozh, who bore the name of a local saint and honored him not only by analogy with the merchant veneration of saints - patrons of fairs, but also as his personal patron, who no doubt practically knew the Greek language, such a person as Stepan Vasilyevich Surozhsky had all the motives and opportunities to be the author of the Russian edition of the life of St. Stephen. One of his closest relatives could do this for the glory of the heavenly patron of his family, who moved to Moscow.

So, we are faced with the fact of the baptism of Russians at the beginning of the 9th century, that is, approximately half a century before the moment from which our initial chronicle traces the dynastic history of the Russian state and the Russian name. The miraculous form of the story should not exacerbate our skepticism, because it is in the department of miracles in hagiographic literature that historians find the greatest number of real everyday features for the history of individual regions and cities. Indirectly, the veracity of the fact of the Russian invasion of Surozh is also confirmed by one place in the so-called Italian legend about the transfer of the relics of St. Clement. To the questions of Constantine the Philosopher regarding the ancient temple of Clement, addressed to the inhabitants of Korsun, the latter answered him that due to the frequent raids of the barbarians, not only the surroundings of Korsun were destroyed here, but it was devastated and even made uninhabited and most of that country - about multitudinеm incursantium barbarorum loсus ille desertus est et templum neglectum et magna pars regionis illius fere desolata et inhabitabilis reddita. This was said in 861. The message that the army came "from Novagrad" aroused the distrust of historians in the whole story. It seemed incredible the arrival of an army from such a distance, if we mean our old Novgorod on the Volkhov. However, for Russia, which traveled from Scandinavia to Baghdad and Tsaregrad, such a distance was not unusual. If the enigmatic expression "from Novagrad" does not point to a northern Russian city, then there is another explanation for it. On the Italian maps of the Genoese and Venetians, who traded in their Crimean trading post - Cafe, we find Neapolis (New City) near the present Simferopol, and nearby the Varangian harbor - Varangolimen and the town of Rossofar. This Novgorod could also be more remote for Russia only as the nearest assembly point, from which it fell upon Surozh. The name of the Russian prince "Bravlin" (in less serviceable lists, converted into a "quarrelsome" prince, obviously in order to comprehend incomprehensible sounds), our Europeanized ear is ready to take for the first time for Slavic, which comes from the word brave. But after all, this word is Greek, and then Latin and French, in Russian it is very recent. Yes, and for a name ending in in we can’t find an analogy either among worlds, glories, regiments, or among Dobryn, Putyat, etc., while among the Varangian names known according to Igor’s treaty with the Greeks of 944, we meet three with the following ending: Ustin - runic AUSTIN , Ustin; Frasten - Rune. frustin; Fursten - Rune. Thurstin. In medieval Germany, we find enough such names as Butilik, Bernovin, and Isidore of Spain, a famous writer of the 7th century, even had an acquaintance of the Visigothic bishop Braulinon. Therefore, we can still not rush to climb up the Dnieper in search of Russia, which was baptized in Sourozh. Our brilliant Varangian scholar N. T. Belyaev gives grounds to almost exactly explain the name Bravalin (as it is transmitted in one manuscript) from the city of Bravalla in eastern Gotland. There, in 770, a glorious liberation battle took place for the Swedes, throwing off the hegemony of the Danes. Its heroes were adorned with the names of "Bravaltsev" for life, like our soldiers - Suvorov, Sevastopol, Kornilov, Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel. This name alone chronologically determines the event being parsed. A Bravallian could live and act at the most during the period from 770 to 810. Consequently, under Surozh, the Norman-robber avant-garde of Russia acted in its rapprochement with Byzantium and the perception of the Christian influence of the latter, Black Sea Russia, wandering, diverse tribes, but unconsciously paving the way for the Christian mission in settled Russia.

Evidence of the humbling influence of Byzantine shrines on violent warlike Russians has been preserved in the life of St. George, archbishop Amastridian. At the end of the life, it is told as a posthumous miracle: “There was an invasion of barbarians - Russia, a people, as everyone knows, in the highest degree wild and rude, not bearing any traces of philanthropy. Beastly in morals, inhuman deeds, revealing their bloodthirstiness by their very appearance, in nothing else that is characteristic of people, not finding such pleasure as in murder, they are this destructive people both in deed and in name, having begun ruin from Propontis and having visited the rest of the coast, they finally reached the holy fatherland, cutting mercilessly every sex and every age. When the Russians entered the temple and saw the tomb of St. George, then rushed to her, imagining to find treasures there. But suddenly their limbs became numb, and they were unable to move from their place. Then their leader, in fear, called one of the Christian captives and interrogated: what is this terrible punishing force and what kind of sacrifice does it require? After these explanations, he promised freedom to all Christians and their offering to God. And now, through the prayers of Christians, “the barbarians are freed from divine wrath, some reconciliation and a deal is arranged for them with Christians, and they no longer offended the shrines.”

Amastrida or Amastra, in Turkish Amassera, is located on the Asia Minor coast of the Black Sea, approximately half the distance between Sinop and KPl. The flourishing state of this city in ancient times was determined by trade relations with the opposite bank of Pontus. Nikita the Paphlagagonian (IX-X century) praises his Amastra in this way: “Amastra is the eye of Paphlagonia, and it is better to say - almost the entire universe. The Scythians who live on the north side of Euxinus, as well as those who are located to the south, flock to it, as to a common marketplace ... There is no shortage of everything that is brought by land or sea. The city is generously supplied with all conveniences, etc. ... It is clear why it was Amastrida who became the victim of the raid.

The time of the raid is determined by the internal signs of life. Patriarch Tarasius (784-806) appoints George as a bishop, and undoubtedly no later than 790, because at the VII Council of 787 Gregory of Amastrid is also present, and in 790 he receives John of Gotha, who fled from the Crimea, in Amastris, as can be seen from the life the latter, already our George of Amastrid. George died, probably in the reign of Nikephoros Logothetes (802-811), because this is the last emperor who appears in the life. Thus terminus post quern for the raids of the Russians is planned. Terminus ante quern is the time of writing the life. When was it written? The life is captured by a characteristic sign of one of the moments of the iconoclastic era. There is a deep silence about icons in the life, although the author had dozens of reasons to talk about them. In such cases, he resorts to the most obscure and allegorical expressions. And this is what it says. When the worst enemy of icons, Leo the Armenian, fell victim to a conspiracy in 820, his successor, Michael Travl (tongue-tied), issued a strict decree so that “no one dared set his tongue in motion either against icons or for icons; but let the cathedral of Tarasius (787) perish and perish as well as the cathedral of Constantine (734) or recently reassembled under Leo (813), and let deep silence be the rule in everything that reminds of icons. This state of affairs continued until his death. Theophilus, before 842. Consequently, our life was written no later than this year. As can be seen from its content, it was delivered in the form of a speech at a church celebration in honor of the saint. This means that the author could not resort to perfect fiction when depicting the miraculous setting, since in the person of the older generation of his listeners he had living witnesses of the barbarian invasion. This reinforces the reliability of the last event and shows, moreover, that for 842 (the deadline for writing the life) - it was already a fact of the relatively distant past. So, before us is a new example of acquaintance with Christianity in pre-Rurik Russia at the beginning of the 9th century. There is a hint at the homeland of this Russia in the life when describing its barbaric exploits: “Temples are overthrown, the shrine is defiled; in their place are altars, lawless libations and sacrifices, then the ancient Taurian beating of foreigners (ξενοκτονία), which retains its power (νεάζουσα), the murder of virgin husbands and wives. Recalling the very common legend associated with the history of Iphigenia that the inhabitants of Taurida sacrificed foreigners who molested their shore, the author, apparently, is convinced that the Russians are the direct descendants of the ancient Taurians, who until modern times (νεάζουσα) have retained their ancestral bloody custom. The Russians, in his opinion, are the inhabitants of the Crimea.

The next case of a collision between Russians and Byzantine Christianity will lead us to Russia, which is no longer so wandering, but state-settled in the territory it has mastered.

The first baptism of the Kievan Rus

Unfortunately, our chronicler does not speak directly about him. Under 852, he writes: “In the summer of 6360, indicta (?), On the 15th day, I will begin to reign for Michael, beginning to call the Russian land. About this, I’ve been informed, as if under this tsars Russia came to Tsargorod, as it is written in the annals (chronography) in Greek. The same place we will start and put the numbers.

Under 866 a more transparent message. "In the summer of 6374, Askold and Dir went to the Greeks and came to the 14th year of Michael the Tsar (Michael III 842-867)." And then comes with slight changes in the letter of the text a quote from G. Amartol's Continuer or (according to Vasilevsky) from Simeon Logofet according to the ancient Slavic translation: , like Russia to go to Kostyantingrad. Temzhe king away go. Russia is inside” (here a few missing words are happily restored according to the Serbian manuscript of the Moscow Synod. Library No. 148, l. 386v.): “Rus hastened to be inside the church.” It is clear that the Greek expression here is ένδον του ίεροΰ. Here ιερόν is not a “sanctuary-church”, but a “holy” (a place reserved for the capital, i.e. the Bosphorus with the Golden Horn, fenced off by a chain) ... “having entered many murders by the peasant, and stepped into the two hundred people of Konstantin city. The king, however, reached, into the city, inside. And with Patriarch Photius, in the Church of the Holy Mother of God in Blachernae, you performed the all-night prayer. The same divine robe of the Holy Mother of God with songs wears out in the sea more wet (τη θαλασσή άκρος προσέβαψαν), but the silence of the being and the sea tamed, a storm with the wind rose, and the great waves that rose up against (i.e., against each other), the godless boats of Russia take it. And adhere to the shore and beaten, as if it were not enough to avoid such misfortunes from them, returning in their own way with the escape ”(M. Synod. Bib. No. 732, l. 330). Copying the same thing, Leo the Grammatik introduces small variants: “Basileus, returning (from the Saracen campaign), stayed with Patriarch Photius in the Blachernae Church of the Mother of God, where they begged and propitiated God. Then, having taken out the holy omophorion of the Mother of God with psalmody, they applied it to the surface of the sea. Meanwhile, as before this there was silence and the sea was calm, a breath of winds suddenly arose and a continuous heaving of waves, and the ships of the godless Russes were broken. And only a few escaped the danger. Other chroniclers say briefly that "God's wrath overtook the Russians." Patr himself. Photius in his church sermon reports that the robe of the Mother of God was carried around the walls of the city. About the details of immersing her in the water Patr. Photius does not mention how this detail is by no means excluded. In one of his two ecclesiastical discourses on this subject, the patriarch, with his usual Byzantine eloquence, gives us many specific details for a vivid presentation of the disturbing experiences of the Byzantines caused by this siege of the Russian barbarians:

“Do you remember that gloomy and terrible night when the life of all of us was ready to go down with the sunset and the light of our existence was swallowed up by the deep darkness of death? Do you remember that unbearably sad hour when the barbarian ships sailed towards us, breathing something ferocious, wild and murderous. When the sea quietly and serenely spread its backbone, delivering them a pleasant and longed-for voyage, and raising fierce waves of battle against us. When they passed in front of the city, carrying and pushing swimmers who raised their swords and, as it were, threatening the city with death from the sword ...

When, raising our hands to God, all night long we asked Him for mercy, placing all our hopes on Him, then we got rid of misfortune, then we were honored to cancel the disasters that surrounded us. Then we saw the dissipation of the storm and beheld the retreat of the wrath of the Lord from us. For we saw our enemies retreating, and the city, which was threatened with plunder, delivered from ruin ... ”And in another conversation, St. Photius paints the same picture.

“When we, left without any protection and without help from people, were inspired by hopes for the Mother of the Word and our God, they asked her to beg the Son and have mercy for our sins ... Her robe to repel the besiegers and protect the besieged was worn with me by the whole city, and we they diligently offered up prayers and made litias. From this, out of indescribable love for mankind, the Lord had mercy on His heritage. Truly, this most honorable robe is the garment of the Mother of God. She flowed around the walls, and the enemies showed their rear in an inexplicable way. She fenced the city, and the embankment of the enemy fell apart, as it were, according to a given sign. She covered the city, and the enemies were naked from the hope that inspired them. For as soon as this virginal robe was walled up, the barbarians began to raise the siege of the city, and we got rid of the expected captivity and were honored with unexpected fear. Unintentionally there was an invasion of enemies, and their removal unexpectedly took place. God's indignation is excessive, but mercy is inexpressible. The fear from them was inexpressible, but their flight was contemptible.

From the same conversations Patr. Photius, we learn about the many wild cruelties against the population that remained outside the walls of the city, and about the merciless pogrom of the landed barbarians. Academician Lamansky says that “the conversations of Patr. Photius have the meaning of a snapshot photograph and constitute one of the darkest documents and at the same time the most reliable sources of our original history.

In his second conversation, Patr. Photius gives extremely curious details for us about the Russian people, who suddenly, as if from political non-existence, formed into a state and military force, capable of suddenly delivering such a dangerous blow to the very capital of the world empire. Photius writes: “A people without a name, a people not considered for anything (άνάριθμον) a people standing on a par with slaves, unknown, but having received a name since the time of the campaign against us, insignificant, but having received significance, humiliated and poor, but having reached a brilliant height and innumerable wealth. The people, living somewhere far away from us, barbaric, nomadic, proud of their weapons, unexpected, unnoticed, without military art, so menacingly and so quickly rushed over our borders, like a sea wave.

Who are these Russians who attacked Tsargrad under Patr. Photius? The previous episodes of Russian raids on the Byzantine borders gave us the right to see in them military groups coming from the coastal regions of the northern Black Sea. In this case, the Chronicle itself, though taken with all its extensions already by the 16th century, connects this campaign with the princes Askold and Dir, who around that time headed the Kiev region, the core center of the emerging Russian state. But the whole sum of the data of the late chronicle text, speaking of Askold's campaign, still says nothing about the baptism that followed him. From the annals we learn only about the death of Askold and Dir at the hands of the new leader, Oleg, who came from the north (according to the chronicle chronology, about 882).

And the Byzantine historians, in contrast to this mysterious silence of the Kiev Chronicle about the baptism of leaders, although briefly, but repeatedly repeat the message about the peace negotiations of the Russians who had just fought with the Byzantines, about their acceptance of baptism, a bishop and the conclusion of an alliance with Byzantium. The names of the leaders are again not mentioned. And the Kyiv chronicler does not know at all these brief but clear reports of the Greek chroniclers about the baptism of the Russians. Our old historian E.E. Golubinsky therefore claims that the Russian raid under Patr. Photius did not yet, following the example of previous cases, have a direct connection with the principality of Kiev. Golubinsky finds unnatural the absence of a direct Kievan tradition about Christianity by Askold and Dir. The fact that on the mound, nicknamed Askold's grave, after St. Vladimir, the pious boyar Olma (obviously from the Varangians) built a church named after St. Nicholas. Historians usually assume that this testifies to Askold's Christianity and even to the fact that his baptismal name was Nikolai. Here is the testimony of the chronicle: “And I killed Askold and Dir. And carrying it to the mountain, and burying it, and on the mountain, now (that is, already at the end of the 11th century) call Ugorskoye, where Olmin’s court is now. On that grave he erected the church of St. Nicholas. A Dir's grave behind St. Orina. Why did the boyar Olma, already a Christian at the end of the 11th century. (time of compiling the chronicle) put the church? Not to shame the paganism of Askold, which after 100 years was practically of no interest to the already baptized people of Kiev. Of course, for the respectful memory of Askold as a Christian. Also, finding the grave of Dir at the back of the church of St. Irina speaks of a favorite burial place for honorary Christians. Golubinsky’s interpretation in the opposite sense, “which is just at the direction of Prince. Vladimir, for missionary purposes, churches were built exactly on the sites of former pagan altars in order to obscure paganism in the memory of the people,” it seems to us one of the hypercritical “excesses” in Golubinsky’s conjectures.

Golubinsky's cavils are artificial and strained, but this is where his correctness and critical merit lie, this is in establishing the exact date of this campaign of the Russians against Tsargrad, regardless of the name of its leaders. The placement of the campaign under 866 is a mistake in our Chronicle. Golubinsky proved this brilliantly. His evidence was then just as brilliantly confirmed by one discovery by the Belgian Byzantologist Franz Cumont. Golubinsky's arguments are as follows: 1) Simeon Logofet writes that the Russians attacked Constantinople in the 10th year of Michael's reign. Therefore: in 860 2) Nikita the Paflagonian in the life of Patr. Ignatius tells about the invasion of the Russians between 859 and 861. Reporting on the cathedral in the month of May 861, he says that the cathedral was "a little after the invasion." 3) In the Chronicle of John the Deacon of Venice, the story of the attack of the Russians is placed between 860 and 863: “By that time, hordes of the Normans with 360 ships dared to attack the Cpl. But since they could not harm the invincible city, then, indulging in violent robbery of the suburbs and mercilessly beating very many, they retreated with the booty in their own way.

Α here are the details from Nikita Paflagonian. Informing about the placement of the prisoner, Patr. Ignatius, on the island of Terevint, Nikita continues: “Another misfortune immediately befell the holy man. At that time, the vicious Scythian people, called the Russ ρώς, broke through the Euxine Sea into the bay, devastated all populated areas and monasteries, plundered all utensils and money. They killed all the people they captured. They broke into the patriarchal monasteries with barbaric ardor and passion. They took away all the property found in them and, having captured the nearest servants, including 22, at the stern of one ship, they all chopped them to pieces with axes. They also saw Ignatius himself, short, frail, eunuch and therefore pale, wrinkled, generally having an appearance not of this world. And they didn't touch him.

The old academician Kunik stubbornly disagreed with Golubinsky in his chronological conclusions, but was disgraced by the actual discovery of fragments of a new Greek chronicle, where the date of the campaign is indicated exactly: June 18, 860: τφ έτει της επιкρατείας αύτοΰ (i.e. June 18, 860). fr. Custom. Anecdota Bruxelliana. Chron byzant. K. De Boor. Der Angriff der Rhos an Byzanz. Bys. Ztshr. 1894.

"But", "says in the Greek chronicle," According to the prayers of the Virgin of the Virgin ... (Russa) by force "were defeated and disappeared" (οι Δια πρεσβειών της πάνυ μνητου θετοςόόήσθησαν τε καΐ ήφανίσθησαν).

However, Golubinsky, having clearly unraveled the chronological question, did not clarify the question of the Russ themselves. Like Academician Kunik, whom he defeated, Golubinsky proceeded from the false premise of the exaggerated value of the chronological system in our initial annals. Meanwhile, after the capital studies of Academician Shakhmatov, we now consider our initial chronicle as a layering of many documents and the work of many authors, and the system of its chronology in its first parts, as completely artificial ..

Taking chronicle chronology as obligatory, Golubinsky reasoned that in 860 Askold (and Dir) had not yet come to Russia, and therefore in 860 Constantinople was attacked not by Kiev Russians, but by Azov-Black Sea. This means that the subsequent episode of the baptism of the Russians does not apply to Kiev. We do not agree with this. Consider the Byzantine evidence of the fact of the baptism of the Russians.

The same Patriarch Photius, in his famous District Letter of 866-867, speaking about the baptism of the Bulgarians, writes: “And not only this people (Bulgarians) exchanged“ the former wickedness for faith in Christ, but even many many times glorified (notorious) and in cruelty and foul murder of all, leaving behind the so-called. Russians (το ... "Ρώς) who, having enslaved those around them and from here thinking of themselves highly, raised their hands against the Roman state. genuine Christian faith, lovingly placing themselves in the rank of our subjects and friends, instead of robbing us and the great audacity against us, which they had shortly before. Christians with great zeal and zeal."

About the same fact of the baptism of the very Russ who attacked Tsargrad, Kedrin's chronograph briefly reports that after the unsuccessful siege of the Greek capital, "an embassy came from the Russ to the reigning city, asking to be made participants in the divine baptism, which was." Constantine Porphyrogenite speaks more extensively about baptism: “And the people of the Russians, warlike and most godless, the emperor, with generous gifts of gold, silver and silk clothes, attracted them to negotiations and, having concluded a peace treaty with them, convinced them to become participants in divine baptism and arranged it so that they accepted bishop." Then it is told how the prince of the Russ gathered the people and invited them to accept the Greek faith. The elders of the people agreed, but demanded a miracle so that the book of the Gospel would be thrown into the fire and not burn. The experience was made, the miracle happened, and the people were baptized.

Indirect confirmation of the fact that peace and alliance with the Greeks, as a result of this deal, were known to the Russians in Kyiv, is the formula of the Oleg Treaty with the Greeks of 911, written "to keep and to notify the former love between Christians and Russia for many years." A clear allusion to the treaty of 860.

That the Kiev princes were also involved in this is indirectly confirmed by an excerpt from some ancient chronicle, taken into the late Moscow edition of the chronicle (the so-called Nikonovskaya): But they went to Tsargrad, but their vain princes Askold (and Dir) turned. It is characteristic here to refer to the Russes living in the Black Sea-Azov region together with the Cumans, that is, the Turkic peoples who lived in the Kuban region. The association of the latter with the Kiev princes is also characteristic. So it could be. The military mass was a national team, and the team belonged to the "Varangians", in this case the Kiev ones.

So, a lot of things become clear in this event: 1) Date - 18, VI, 860 (before the beginning of the annalistic date of the birth of the Russian state). 2) The people - Russia, that Varangian-Slavic, Black Sea, and together South Russian complex nationality, which in these years came out of the power of the Khazars and was given under the leadership of the Varangians. 3) The circumstances of the peace deal and some intimate experiences (the miracle of the defeat at the KPl), which prompted Russia to be baptized. 4) The possible relation of all this to Kiev.

But still, it is not easy to connect this so important event in the initial history of Russian Christianity with the well-known history of the baptism of Russia. As if everything that the Greeks tell us took place somewhere outside of time and space and does not enter into our Kievan-Russian history. So thinks, for example, prof. Moshin.

Unexpected light on these events may be shed from a well-known source, in which the former scholars, not Russians in particular, still do not see anything concerning our Russian history. We understand the classic

A. V. Kartashev

Essays on the history of the Russian Church

Patriarchal Period (1586-1700)

Introduction.

Establishment of the Patriarchate.

Job - Patriarch (1589-1605). The political role of Patr. Job. The Religious Politics of the Pretender. Patriarch Ignatius (1605-1606). Tsar Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky. Patriarch Hermogenes (1606-1612). State-church ministry of St. Hermogenes. Influence of the feat of Patriarch Hermogenes.

7 years of interpatriarchy. State role of the Church.

The hardships and sufferings of the Church from turmoil.

The inner life of the Church.

Attempts to correct liturgical books. Patriarch Filaret (1619-1634). Church wickedness of the day under Patr. Filarete. Church and book business under Filaret. School start. To the characteristics of Patr. Filaret. Joasaph I (1634-1640).

Patriarch Joseph (1642-1652). Book business under Patr. Joseph. school question. ideological revival. Internal conflict in ideology. "Moscow - III Rome". The influence of a new idea on book and ritual corrections. Death of Patriarch Joseph († 15.III.1662). Patriarch Nikon (1652-1658). Correction of books and rites. The perversity of the method of correcting books. The emergence of a split. Orthodox dissatisfaction. Judgment of the Council of Russian Bishops of 1666 on book and ritual corrections. Trial of the Old Believers of the New Cathedral of 1666–1667. Lawsuit between Nikon and the Tsar. Ideology of Patriarch Nikon. Trial of Patriarch Nikon (1660). The arrival of the patriarchs (1666). Court. Judgments of the Council of 1667 on the relationship between church and state. End of Nikon. The beginning of a special history of the Old Believer schism. Solovetsky rebellion. Patriarch Joasaph II (1687-1672). Patriarch Pitirim (1672-1673). Patriarch Joachim (1674-1690). Cathedral of 1682. Shooter riot. Attempts to create a school. School-theological differences. Attempts to create a Higher Theological School in Moscow. Patriarch Adrian (1690-1700).

Implementation of the Union of Brest and self-defense Orthodoxy.

Imperious and violent methods of introducing a union. Basiliana. Self-preservation of the Orthodox side. The role of fraternities. Fight against union. Literary struggle. School fight. Merits of the monasteries. Restoration of the Orthodox hierarchy Patr. Feofan. Legalization of the Orthodox Church after the death of Sigismund III (1633).

Metropolitan Peter Mogila (1632-1647).

Scientific and theological creativity of the Kiev Mogilin school.

The fruits of the Orthodox school and literature.

The reunification of Kievan Rus with Moscow Rus and the accession of the Kiev Metropolis to Moscow.

Synodal period.

Introduction.

The main character and evaluation of the synodal period.

Church under Peter the Great.

Personal religiosity of Peter I. The birth of the Protestant reform. The beginning of the domination of the Little Russian episcopate. The secret beginning of church reform. Open autocratic reform. Manifesto and Oath. Reform of the Reform itself. "Home" reform of Peter and the criterion of universality. Recognition of the Synod by the Orthodox Patriarchs. Reflection of the reform in the state sense of justice. Reaction to the reform in the church consciousness.

Higher Church administration and the relationship of the Church to the state. Holy Synod after Peter the Great.

Time of Catherine I (1725-1727). Time of Peter II (1727-1730). The reign of Anna Ioannovna (1730-1740). Organization of the apparatus of the highest church authority

during the reign of Anna Ioannovna. "Bironovshchina" in the church. Bishop processes. Case of Voronezh Archbishop Lev (Yurlov). The case of George and Ignatius. The case of the archbishop Theophylact (Lopatinsky). Accession of John IV Antonovich (1740-1741). The reign of Elizabeth Petrovna (XI 25, 1741-1760). The beginning of the secularization procedure. Emperor Peter III Fedorovich (1761-1762). Accession of Catherine II (1792 - 1796). Secularization of church lands. Personality of Catherine II. secularization process. The case of Arseniy Matsievich. Synod Court. Arseniy in exile. Pavel (Kanyuchkevich), Metropolitan of Tobolsk and Siberia. after secularization. Hierarchs of Catherine's time.

Parish clergy.

From the time of the reforms of Peter the Great. The heredity of the places of service of the clergy. Regular frames and parsing. Parish clergy under Catherine II. Tests of Pugachev.

spiritual school.

The reign of Paul I (1796-1801).