The Saint and the Nation

A sober concluding assessment of Alexander Nevsky as a national-religious symbol, distinguishing the genuine object of Orthodox veneration from the political myth built around it. In turn a Muscovite legitimator (1547), a Petrine imperial patron (1724), a Soviet wartime hero (1938/1942), and a post-Soviet national symbol (2008), Alexander has been remade by each age; the Church venerates the Right-Believing Prince who, in its understanding, defended the Orthodox faith and people and died a monk, while the nation has built around him the flattened myth of the invincible warrior who saved Russia from the West. Following the scholarship of Schenk, Fennell, and Ostrowski, this file names the gap between veneration and myth even-handedly, respecting the one and identifying the other, and renders no political verdict.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Right-Believing Prince)

A Memory Remade in Every Age

No Russian saint has been so often refashioned to the needs of the moment as Alexander Nevsky, and the chief scholarly study of his afterlife — Frithjof Benjamin Schenk’s Aleksandr Nevskij — is, in its entirety, an account of exactly this: not the prince of the thirteenth century but the figure of memory (Erinnerungsfigur) that successive Russian regimes constructed and reconstructed from 1263 to 2000 (Schenk 2004). The layers are distinct and datable.

He was first a Muscovite legitimator. The formal glorification at the Moscow council of 1547, under Metropolitan Macarius and the young Ivan IV, gathered Alexander into the body of all-Russian saints at the very moment Muscovy was claiming the inheritance of Kievan and Vladimir Rus’ and the new dignity of the tsardom; the canonization served, among other things, to sanctify a dynasty and a state that traced itself to him (Schenk 2004; Martin 2007; on the canonization see Glorification 1547).

He was then a Petrine imperial patron. In 1724 Peter the Great translated his relics to the new capital on the Neva, fixed a feast to the anniversary of the peace with Sweden, and ordered him depicted as an armored prince rather than a monk — turning the medieval saint into a patron of the imperial army, the dynasty, and St Petersburg itself (Hughes 1998; Schenk 2004; see Peter the Great and the Lavra and Feasts and Iconography).

He became a Soviet wartime hero. The avowedly atheist state recovered the warrior-prince it could use: Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky (1938), with Prokofiev’s score, recast him as a popular national leader repelling Teutonic — and by transparent allegory, German — invaders; the Order of Alexander Nevsky was instituted as a Soviet military decoration in 1942, and the figure was mobilized for the war against Nazi Germany (Schenk 2004; on the Soviet image see Eisenstein and the Soviet Icon).

And he became a post-Soviet national symbol. In 2008 the television project Imya Rossii (“The Name of Russia”) culminated in a public vote that named Alexander Nevsky the greatest Russian of all time, and the figure has since served as a focus of national, military, and ecclesiastical-patriotic identity in the Russian Federation (Schenk 2004 for the framework; on the contemporary uses see The Post-Soviet Symbol). Each of these eras took the same name and made of it something its own purposes required.

What the Church Venerates

It is essential, and it is the first half of an honest account, to say clearly what the Church’s veneration actually is, distinct from any of these political constructions. The Russian Orthodox Church venerates Alexander as a Right-Believing Prince (blagovernyi knyaz’) — the category of the lay ruler glorified not for sanctity of the monastic or martyric kind but for having, in the Church’s understanding, defended the Orthodox faith and the Orthodox people and ruled as a Christian prince (Schenk 2004; and Warrior or Monk?). To this the cult joins the memory that he died a monk: the Life reports his reception of the great schema as Alexis on his deathbed, and the older strand of the veneration — the monastic icon, the burial-feast of 23 November — holds up precisely the prince who ended by renouncing the world (see The Life of Alexander Nevsky and Feasts and Iconography). The object of genuine veneration is, in the Church’s terms, this man: a ruler held to have shielded his people and their faith in a catastrophic age, and who made a Christian end. This is reported here respectfully, as the Church’s own account of why it keeps his memory (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

What the Nation Has Built

Distinct from this — overlapping with it, but not identical to it — is the national myth: the image of the invincible warrior-prince who single-handedly saved Russia from the West, the timeless embodiment of Russia’s defiance of Latin Europe and of national victory. This is the figure of the war poster, the film, the medal, and the patriotic poll. The distinction matters because the myth flattens and, at several points, departs from what the sources will bear, and the most exacting historians of the period have said so plainly.

John Fennell is the sharpest skeptic of the deeds on which the warrior-myth rests. In The Crisis of Medieval Russia he argues that the two famous victories were, on the evidence of the contemporary chronicles, comparatively minor engagements magnified by the later Life and by national memory — the Neva (1240) a skirmish, the Battle on the Ice (1242) a real but limited frontier clash, neither the world-historical salvation of Russia the myth proclaims (Fennell 1983; see The Scale and the Legend). For Fennell the gap between the modest events of the annals and the grandeur of the legend is itself the historical fact most in need of stating.

Donald Ostrowski unsettles a different pillar of the myth — the framing of Alexander as the heroic champion of Russia against the West. He stresses that Alexander’s defining political choice was the opposite of resistance: submission to the Mongol Horde, with whose overlordship he cooperated, against the option of alliance with the Latin West (Ostrowski 1998; and his source-critical work on the Life; see The Strategic Debate). The myth of the anti-Western warrior thus rests on a man who made his peace with the Eastern conqueror, and Ostrowski’s source criticism further questions how much of the heroic portrait belongs to the events and how much to the later hagiographic redactions.

Schenk, finally, supplies the governing category for the whole. His study is built on the premise that the “Alexander Nevsky” of national memory is not a recovered historical person but a construction, layered and re-layered by Muscovy, the empire, the Soviet state, and the Russian Federation, each projecting its needs onto the medieval name (Schenk 2004). To trace the myth is to trace a history of Russian self-understanding, not of the thirteenth century.

The Sober Point

The distinction these scholars draw is not a debunking of the saint, and it is not offered here as one. The Church venerates a saint; the nation has built a myth; the two overlap — both honor a Christian prince who, in a ruinous time, is held to have defended his people — but they are not identical. The genuine veneration of the blagovernyi knyaz’ who died the monk Alexis can stand entirely apart from the claim that he was an invincible warrior who saved Russia from the West, a claim the most careful historians regard as the work of later memory rather than of the events (Fennell 1983; Ostrowski 1998; Schenk 2004). Seeing the difference does not harm honest veneration; it helps it, by freeing the saint of the Church from the uses to which the symbol of the nation has been put.

This collection renders no verdict on those uses — on whether Alexander’s submission to the Horde was wise or craven, on whether the modern myth serves Russia well or ill, on the politics of his invocation in any era (METHODOLOGY §4). Those are questions on which the scholarship is itself divided and on which a reference of this kind has no business pronouncing. What can be said, and is the note on which the study closes, is the modest and exact one: there is a saint, and there is a myth; they are related but distinct; and to keep them distinct is the beginning of both good history and honest veneration.

References

Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin. Aleksandr Nevskij: Heiliger – Fürst – Nationalheld. Eine Erinnerungsfigur im russischen kulturellen Gedächtnis (1263–2000). Cologne: Böhlau, 2004. (The central study; Alexander as a constructed figure of memory layered by Muscovy 1547, the Petrine empire 1724, the Soviet state 1938/1942, and post-Soviet Russia, including the 2008 Imya Rossii poll.)
Fennell, John. The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200–1304. London: Longman, 1983. (The skeptical reading of the deeds: the Neva and the Battle on the Ice as comparatively minor engagements magnified by later tradition.)
Ostrowski, Donald. Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; and his source-critical studies of the Life of Alexander Nevsky. (Alexander’s submission to the Horde and the questioning of the anti-Western heroic frame.)
Hughes, Lindsey. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. (The Petrine translation of 1724 and the refashioning of the saint as an imperial patron.)
Martin, Janet. Medieval Russia 980–1584. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. (The Muscovite context of the 1547 glorification.)
The Life of Alexander Nevsky, in Serge A. Zenkovsky, ed. and trans. Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales. Rev. ed. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974. (The deathbed schema and the blagovernyi knyaz’ the Church venerates.)