The Contested Memory and Scholarship

The modern contest over Vladimir’s memory, and the scholarship that has reconstructed his conversion. Volodymyr/Vladimir is claimed as a founding figure by Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus alike — a shared founder divided by a name — and that shared claim has become, since 2014, a charged site of national contest, played out in rival monuments and rival readings of the baptism at Korsun. This file treats the dispute even-handedly per the repository methodology §4, naming the positions of Moscow and Kyiv with sourcing from more than one side and dated notes on the live jurisdictional rupture; and it sets out the modern scholarship — Franklin & Shepard, Poppe, Obolensky, and the Primary Chronicle critics — on which this whole collection rests.

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

A Shared Founder, a Divided Name

The deepest fact about Vladimir’s modern memory is that he belongs to three nations at once. The baptism of 988 is the founding event of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian Christianity alike; all three peoples trace their faith, and in large part their identity, to the prince of Kyiv who brought the Rus’ to the font (see The Baptism of Rus’ in Memory). The very name divides along with the peoples: Russian Vladimir, Ukrainian Volodymyr, the same prince in two tongues. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine knows him as Volodymyr the Great; the Russian tradition as Vladimir the Great; and both call him the baptizer of Rus’. This shared inheritance was, for centuries, uncontested in any sharp way — a common origin held in common. In the modern age, and especially since 2014, it has become a contest.

The collection treats this contest under the repository methodology §4: the positions are named, sourced from more than one side, and dated; polemical framing is avoided; and the collection does not adjudicate the national claims. Vladimir is, in plain historical fact, a ruler of Kyiv — that is where his realm was centered and where the baptism took place — and he is, in plain historical fact, the common ancestor of the religious traditions of all three modern East Slavic nations. Both of these facts are true, and the contest arises from the ways they are emphasized and deployed.

The Competing Monuments

The contest has taken visible form in rival monuments. The oldest is the St. Vladimir monument at Kyiv, erected in 1853 on the heights above the Dnieper — one of the oldest monuments in the city, showing the prince with a cross uplifted over the river of the baptism. For more than a century and a half it stood as the principal public image of Vladimir, in the city of his reign.

In 2016, a large new statue of Vladimir the Great was unveiled in Moscow, on Borovitskaya Square near the Kremlin, by President Vladimir Putin, with state and Russian Orthodox Church officials present. The Moscow statue drew controversy from several directions. Historians and conservationists noted that Moscow did not exist in Vladimir’s lifetime — it is first mentioned in 1147, well over a century after his death — and that his realm was centered on Kyiv, so that a monument to him in Moscow implied a continuity from Kyivan Rus’ to the modern Russian state that Ukrainian voices in particular disputed. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the Moscow statue “yet another attempt of a hybrid appropriation of history” (RFE/RL and other coverage, 2015–2016). Russian officials and Church figures, for their part, presented the statue as honoring the shared baptizer of the Rus’ and the founder of Russian Orthodoxy. Two nations thus came to hold rival statues of the same prince — the contest over his memory cast, quite literally, in bronze.

The Crimea and Chersonesus Rhetoric

The memory of Vladimir entered the sharpest political arena in the rhetoric surrounding Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Because the Primary Chronicle‘s main narrative places Vladimir’s baptism at Chersonesus (Korsun) in the Crimea (see Korsun and Anna), the peninsula could be invoked as the sacred site of the conversion of Rus’. In his address of December 2014, President Putin stated that it was at ancient Chersonesus that “Grand Prince Vladimir was baptized and then baptized all of Rus,” and likened the “civilizational and sacral importance” of Crimea and Korsun for Russia to that of the Temple Mount for Judaism and Islam (Putin, address of 4 December 2014; analyzed in Wilson Center commentary and contemporary press). Critics characterized this as the political deployment of the conversion narrative to sacralize a territorial claim — building a modern state argument on a medieval and partly legendary event whose very place and date are, as this collection has shown, genuinely disputed among historians (see Korsun and Anna). The Ukrainian position holds, simply, that Volodymyr was a Kyivan ruler foundational to Ukrainian statehood and identity, and that his seat was Kyiv, not Crimea or Moscow.

The collection reports this even-handedly and notes its own limits. The historical record does not settle the modern contest in either side’s favor: it establishes that Vladimir ruled from Kyiv and baptized his people there, and that the place of his own baptism (Cherson, Kyiv, or Vasilev) is disputed in the sources themselves. Both the Russian emphasis on Chersonesus and the Ukrainian emphasis on Kyiv select from a record that is genuinely mixed. The dispute sharpened further after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with both states continuing to claim Volodymyr/Vladimir as a national founder (NPR, “Volodymyr vs. Vladimir,” 2 June 2022).

The Live Jurisdictional Backdrop

This contest of memory plays out against a live and unhealed jurisdictional rupture within the Orthodox Church itself, and the two are connected. The Church Vladimir founded was a metropolitanate of Kyiv under the Patriarchate of Constantinople (see The Church of Rus); the modern dispute over Ukrainian autocephaly turns in part on the long history of that see’s dependence and its later administration from Moscow. In 2018–2019, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople granted autocephaly to a newly unified Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU); the Russian Orthodox Church regarded the process as an uncanonical invasion of its territory and severed communion with Constantinople on 15 October 2018; Patriarch Bartholomew signed the Tomos of autocephaly on 5 January 2019. As of 2026 this rupture — the most serious division in modern Orthodoxy — remains unhealed, with the recognitions and the parish allegiances still contested. The full dispute, sourced from both sides per the methodology, is treated at Orthodoxy: Ukraine Autocephaly and the 2018 Schism, the repository’s anchor account; the collection refers the reader there rather than recapitulating it. What matters here is the link: the same Vladimir invoked by Moscow as the root of a unified Russian Orthodoxy is invoked at Kyiv as the founder of a distinctly Kyivan and Ukrainian Christianity, and the contest over his memory is inseparable from the contest over the Church he founded. (These are live and evolving facts; the statements here are dated as of 2026 per methodology §4.)

The Scholarship

Beneath the contested memory lies the scholarship that has reconstructed Vladimir’s conversion, and on which this whole collection rests. The standard English account is Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (Longman, 1996), whose conversion chapter, “U-Turns and Conversion,” reads Vladimir as a state-builder centered on Kyiv, treats his pagan pantheon of 980 as a failed attempt at a unitary cult, presents the Christianization as gradual rather than instantaneous, and insists that the baptism was Vladimir’s own initiative rather than an act forced by Byzantium. The chronology of the Korsun campaign and the Anna marriage was sharply debated between Andrzej Poppe (“The Political Background to the Baptism of Rus’,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 30, 1976), who argued the revisionist reconstruction — baptism at Kyiv early in 988, Cherson taken in 989 as Basil’s ally or to coerce delivery of the bride — and Dimitri Obolensky (“Cherson and the Conversion of Rus’: an Anti-Revisionist View,” BMGS 13, 1989), who defended the traditional Cherson sequence; that debate is treated in full at Korsun and Anna. Obolensky’s larger framework, the Byzantine Commonwealth (1971), set Rus’ within the family of states sharing Byzantine religion and culture (see Why Byzantium).

Underlying all of this is the source-critical scholarship on the Primary Chronicle itself — the work of A. A. Shakhmatov on the Chronicle’s layered, composite origin, and of more recent critics such as Donald Ostrowski on the literary, composed character of the testing-of-faiths narrative (see The Sources and The Testing of the Religions). It is this scholarship that makes possible the discipline of the whole collection: the steady distinction between what the Chronicle says, what the independent witnesses corroborate, and what can be securely reconstructed. The contested modern memory of Vladimir is, in part, a contest over a figure known mainly from a single, late, legend-laden source — which is one reason the source discipline matters, and one reason the collection has kept it throughout.

The Saint Beneath the Contest

Beneath the monuments and the rhetoric and the jurisdictional rupture, the saint endures, and he is venerated in common by the very Churches that contest his memory. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine — divided in communion, divided over autocephaly, divided in their reading of his political legacy — both keep the feast of St. Vladimir on 15 July, both honor him as Equal-to-the-Apostles, and both trace their Christianity to his baptism. That shared veneration is itself a fact worth holding onto: whatever the nations make of him, the Church across its divisions venerates one Vladimir, the prince through whom the Eastern Slavs became a Christian people. The collection ends where it began, with the source discipline and the even-handedness the methodology requires — reporting the contest faithfully, adjudicating none of the national claims, and returning, beneath them, to the saint whom three Churches still hold in common.

References

Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. The standard English account of the conversion and its political logic.
Poppe, Andrzej. “The Political Background to the Baptism of Rus’: Byzantine-Russian Relations between 986–89.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 30 (1976): 195–244; and The Rise of Christian Russia (Variorum), 1982. The revisionist chronology and the early church history.
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971; and “Cherson and the Conversion of Rus’: an Anti-Revisionist View,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 13 (1989).
Ostrowski, Donald. “The Account of Volodimer’s Conversion in the Povest’ vremennykh let: A Chiasmus of Stories.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 28 (2006). On the literary character of the conversion narrative.
“Volodymyr the Great.” Encyclopedia of Ukraine (encyclopediaofukraine.com). For the Ukrainian framing of the prince.
On the 2016 Moscow statue and Poroshenko’s response: RFE/RL, “Russia Unveils Huge Statue Of Prince Vladimir” (2015–2016); OrthoChristian.com coverage. On the Crimea/Chersonesus rhetoric: Putin’s address of 4 December 2014; Wilson Center, “Putin’s Crimea Mythmaking.” On the rival-statues framing after 2022: NPR, “Volodymyr vs. Vladimir,” 2 June 2022. (Both-side sourcing per methodology §4.)
On the 2018–2019 autocephaly and schism: see the repository anchor file Orthodoxy: Ukraine Autocephaly and the 2018 Schism, which sources every contested claim from both Moscow and Constantinople.