The Baptism of Rus’ in Memory

What Vladimir’s baptism founded, and how the founding has been remembered. The baptism of 988 is the spiritual nativity of three Christian peoples — Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian — the event from which all three Churches date their origin, and one of the great hinges of European history. This file traces the place of 988 in the long memory of the Eastern Slavs and dwells on the millennium of 1988, when the thousand-year jubilee of the Baptism of Rus’ became a turning point in the relations of Church and state in the dying Soviet Union — and a moment when the contested ownership of Vladimir’s memory came to the surface.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles)

The Spiritual Nativity of Three Peoples

The baptism of Rus’ in 988 is the founding event of East Slavic Christianity, and its consequences are hard to overstate. From Vladimir’s font in the Dnieper descend the three great Orthodox Churches of the Eastern Slavs — the Russian, the Ukrainian, and the Belarusian — and the whole civilization those Churches carried: the liturgy and the icons, the monasteries and the saints, the chronicles and the sermons, the Cyrillic letters and the Church Slavonic tongue. When Vladimir brought his people to the river, he set the religious and cultural course of a vast portion of Europe for the next thousand years, binding the Eastern Slavs to Byzantium and to Orthodox Christianity rather than to Rome and the Latin West (see Why Byzantium). It is no exaggeration to say that the modern religious map of Eastern Europe was drawn in 988. The Church has always remembered the day as a spiritual nativity — the birth of a Christian people — and Vladimir as its father in Christ.

The Place of 988 in the Memory of Rus’

The memory of the baptism was, from early on, the founding charter of Rus’ Christian identity. Hilarion’s Sermon on Law and Grace, within two generations of Vladimir, already read the conversion as the entry of the Rus’ into the grace of the Gospel and the company of Christian nations, and praised Vladimir as the apostle of his people (see The New Constantine). The Primary Chronicle gave the event its enduring narrative shape — the testing of the faiths, the Korsun campaign, the toppling of Perun, the baptism in the Dnieper — and that narrative became the master story of how the Rus’ became Christian, retold in chronicles, sermons, icons, and, in the modern age, in paintings, monuments, and national histories. Across all the changes of the East Slavic world — the rise and fall of Kyiv, the Mongol conquest, the rise of Moscow, the divisions of the early modern centuries — 988 remained the fixed point of origin, the moment to which all three peoples traced their Christianity. To remember Vladimir was to remember the beginning.

The Millennium of 1988

The thousandth anniversary of the Baptism of Rus’, in 1988, became one of the most consequential commemorations in the modern history of the Orthodox Church — not for its scholarship but for its timing. It fell in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, at the moment when the long Soviet persecution of religion was beginning to relax, and the millennium became the occasion and the symbol of that change.

In April 1988, in a meeting widely seen as a turning point, Gorbachev received the senior bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Kremlin and signaled a new openness toward the Church. The millennium was then celebrated with a public prominence unimaginable a few years before: a Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church (which canonized a number of saints, including several treated elsewhere in this repository), great liturgical celebrations in Moscow, Kyiv, and Leningrad, and a flood of public attention to the Church and its history. The jubilee is widely read as the watershed after which the Russian Orthodox Church re-emerged into Soviet public life — the beginning of the great revival of the years that followed, with the reopening of monasteries and parishes and the return of the Church to the center of national life. The millennium of Vladimir’s baptism thus became, by an accident of timing, a hinge of late-Soviet history: the moment the Church stepped back into the open, under the banner of the prince who had founded it a thousand years before.

The Founder Claimed

Yet the 1988 millennium also brought to the surface the tension that would dominate the memory of Vladimir in the decades after. The jubilee was staged largely as a Moscow Patriarchate, all-Russian celebration — a millennium of Russian Christianity — even though the event it commemorated had taken place at Kyiv, the historical seat of Vladimir’s realm and the cradle of the Church, a city that would within three years lie in an independent Ukraine. The framing of 988 as the founding of Russian Orthodoxy, natural enough within the Soviet and Russian-Church tradition, sat uneasily with the Kyivan locus of the event itself. The question of whose founder Vladimir is — Russia’s, Ukraine’s, Belarus’s, or all three together — was implicit in the 1988 celebrations and would become explicit, and contested, in the years after the Soviet collapse (see The Contested Memory and Scholarship).

The Enduring Meaning

The Baptism in Art and Letters

The memory of 988 has been carried not only in liturgy and chronicle but in the art and literature of the East Slavic peoples. The conversion of Vladimir and the baptism of Rus’ became favored subjects of Russian and Ukrainian historical painting in the nineteenth century, when both peoples were elaborating their national pasts: the great academic canvases of the baptism, with the prince presiding over his people’s immersion, hung in churches and academies as visual catechisms of the founding event. The mosaicist and the icon-painter returned again and again to Vladimir and Olga, grandmother and grandson, the enlighteners of the Rus’. The thousand-year span from the conversion to the modern age gave the East Slavic imagination a fixed origin to which painters, poets, historians, and, in the Soviet and post-Soviet decades, filmmakers could return — sometimes in piety, sometimes in nationalism, sometimes in the contest of nationalisms (see The Contested Memory and Scholarship). The event itself, half-historical and half-legendary, proved endlessly available to reinterpretation, precisely because it stood at the origin of so much. To paint the baptism of Rus’ was to make a claim about who the painter’s people were and where they had come from — which is why the same scene could serve both reverence and rivalry.

The Common Origin

Beneath the modern contests, the founding meaning of Vladimir’s baptism endures, and it is shared by all who keep it. For the Orthodox Churches of the Eastern Slavs, 988 is the day a pagan people was reborn in water — the spiritual nativity from which everything else in their Christian history flows. The icon of the Baptism of Rus’, Vladimir on the bank and his people in the river, holds the meaning in a single image: a whole nation entering the Church. Whatever the disputes over the prince’s modern memory, the event he accomplished remains the common origin of three Christian peoples and one of the great turning points of Christian history. The baptism of Rus’ is remembered, a thousand years and more on, as the day the Eastern Slavs became a Christian people — and Vladimir as the prince through whom, in the conviction of the Church, the grace of God came to the Rus’. That the three peoples descended from that baptism now contest its memory is a grief of the present age; that they share it is the deeper and older truth, and the one the Church, across its divisions, continues to keep.

References

Hilarion of Kiev. Sermon on Law and Grace, c. 1037–1050. Trans. in Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus’, 1991. The earliest reading of 988 as the founding of Rus’ Christianity.
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. On the historical consequences of the conversion.
On the 1988 millennium and the April 1988 Gorbachev–hierarchs meeting as a turning point in Soviet church-state relations: the standard accounts of the late-Soviet Church (e.g., Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History, 1986, and its sequels) and the OrthoChristian.com coverage of the millennium.
Holy Great Prince Vladimir, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 15. For the founding meaning of the baptism.