The Mission in Northeastern Russia.

By the end of the eleventh century the territory of the East Slavs had been Christianized, though not completely so, from Novgorod in the north to beyond Kiev in the south — what the Russians called “the land along the road from the Varangians to the Greeks.” The princes of Rus, as the Duchy of Kiev was called, had actively encouraged this movement. The populations of other racial stock in the area had been only sketchily won for Christianity. This was true, for example, of the territory around Rostov, on the upper reaches of the Volga, known to Russian traders as the “way to the Saracens.” The direction of future Christian expansion was decided by political conditions; it had to be toward the northeast. The division of the land under the sons of Yaroslav (1019-54) led to a waning of the power of Kiev; the center of power shifted toward the north. The Polovtsians, pressing against the southern border of the steppes, were more than a match for the Russian princes, even when the latter met them with their combined forces. The second half of the eleventh and almost the entire twelfth centuries were filled with these struggles. The population of the southern parts of Rus left their homes in despair and sought a new and more peaceful life farther to the north, “beyond the forests.”

This displacement of the center of power toward the north was decisively influenced by the Crusades, which changed the whole nature of trade and economic life in the Orient. The newly opened Levantine trade on the Mediterranean dealt a deathblow to commerce on the longer road “from the Varangians to the Greeks,” and also put a stop to the clumsy and difficult caravan traffic from central Europe to the Orient. Kiev, hitherto the center of European commerce between North and South and West and East, became unimportant. Novgorod, on the other hand, developed into an important transshipment site and the link between the West and the Russian East. The hinterland of Novgorod was more thickly settled. In Vladimiron-the-Klyazma a new political center arose, whose heritage was later taken over by Moscow.

Russian missionary work went hand in hand with Russian colonization. The early colonization was by no means a military conquest. It was a matter of peaceful but continuous infiltration which resulted in a fraternal mingling of new settlers and the native population rather than suppression of the latter by the former. The history of the colonization of northern Russia as far as Arkhangelsk to the north and along the Volga and Kama to the Urals in the east is a story of slow, peaceful expansion, with hunters, traders and monks leading the way, penetrating ever deeper into the northeastern forests, and gradually followed by peasant settlers who cleared the land. Religious penetration of these areas accompanied the colonization. The Orthodox religion of the Russian settlers became established not only as a set of religious ideas, but also as a way of life. The calendar and the customs of the Orthodox Church operated as a cultural and civilizing force. The Mongol invasions of eastern Europe interrupted this development, but on the other hand, the menace of the Mongols gave greater urgency to the need to colonize and carry on missionary work.

Russian monks on missions had partly followed, partly preceded the Russian colonizers in the northeast some time before the Tatar hordes swept across the steppes. Throughout this period in which Christianity was taking hold “wherever scythe and ax were swung,” missionary activity was in the hands of individual monks exclusively. By the twelfth century, Christianity had penetrated into the region of Vyatka, west of Perm; from 1159 on, the monk Avraamy spread the gospel among the Votyaks and Cheremisses there. Yet up to the beginning of the thirteenth century, Russian monasteries were to be found only within the territory of cities; the monasteries were “satellites,” not advance posts and disseminators of Christian life.

This situation changed completely after the Mongols came. The first Mongol incursion into Russia (1222-23) was followed by an almost immediate withdrawal of the invaders to central Asia. But after the death of Genghis Khan (1227), his grandson Batu settled permanently along the lower Volga with his horde. From this center his mounted bands struck up river in 1238, taking by storm all the cities that lay in their path. Only Novgorod was not conquered, thanks to a thaw that forced the Mongols to turn back. In 1240 Batu turned westward. His Mongols captured and plundered Kiev, poured over southern Europe as far as the Adriatic Sea and invaded upper Italy. Hearing that Ogadai, the Great Khan, had just died, Batu did not exploit his victory over the Christian armies of the West at Liegnitz in 1241; he returned to the lower Volga and there set up the “Kingdom of the Golden Horde” of Kipchak, with Sarai on the river Akhtuba as its capital. Henceforth the Russian princes had to pay homage to their new masters there and in far Karakorum, the residence of the Great Khan. Russia had become a province of the Tatar Empire.

The Mongol scourge produced a penitential mood in the Russian people, a state of mind which found expression in a strong anchorite movement. Many monasteries in the conquered cities were destroyed, many monks killed, and the survivors poured northward with the throngs of refugees. In these turbulent times the entire Russian people were gripped with a profound longing to escape from the world. Many simple folk resolved upon a monastic life in order to save their souls. Whereas previously the monks had followed the settlers, henceforth they preceded the settlers into the wilderness of the northern forests. The converse process now took place: the hermitages in the hitherto inaccessible wastelands attracted farmers, who settled in their vicinity, seeking simultaneously religious and economic support.

The monastic reform of St. Sergei of Radonesh (131493) stimulated still further monastic colonization and resulted in a network of monasteries scattered over the whole of north and northeast Russia. The Troitzkaya Laura in the forests northeast of Moscow became the starting point for the two main lines of future mission and colonization by monks. One of these lines ran along the Kostroma toward the Vychegda; the other followed the Zeksna to the White Lake (Beloye Ozero). The monasteries thus founded in the fourteenth century became the most important missionary centers for that era and for future centuries also. Thus, for example, there was the famous monastery of Valamo on a group of islands in Lake Ladoga, founded in 1329 by the monks Sergei and German. It subsequently became the center for missionary work among the East Karelians. The mission to the Lapps was centered in the monastery founded by Lazar († 1391), a monk born in Constantinople, upon the island of Murmansk in Lake Onega. Among the many daughter monasteries of the Troitzkaya Laura, the most prominent were the monastery of St. Cyril (named after its founder) and that of Ferapontov, a friend of the saint, which was established nearby in 1397-98. During the following century the monks of the Belozersk group founded no less than nineteen additional monasteries, including (in 1426) the noted one on Solovetski Island in the White Sea, which was to achieve a terrible notoriety in the Soviet Union as a place of banishment.

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