RUSSIA’S BYZANTINE HERITAGE

/Arnold J. Toynbee/

If this were a sermon, not an essay, the inevitable text would be a famous line of Horace’s: Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret: ‘You may throw Nature out with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back.’ The present regime in Russia claims to have made a clean cut with Russia’s past—not, perhaps, in all minor externals, but at any rate in most things that matter. And the West has taken it from the Bolsheviks that they have done what they say. We have believed and trembled. Yet reflexion suggests that it is not so easy to repudiate one’s heritage. When we do try to repudiate the past, it has, as Horace knew, a sly way of coming back on us in a thinly disguised form. Some familiar examples may bring the point home. In 1763 it looked as if the British conquest of Canada had revolutionized the political map of North America by putting an end to the partition of the continent which had followed from the competitive colonization of the St. Lawrence valley by the French and the Atlantic seaboard by the English; but the appearance of this revolutionary change turned out to be illusory. The two dominions that had been united in 1763 were sundered again in 1783. It is true that, in the once-again divided continent, it was the St. Lawrence valley, now, that was British, whereas it had been the Atlantic seaboard before. But this transposition of the British domain in North America was a minor variation compared to the re-emergence, after twenty years of unity, of the original division of the continent into two politically separate fractions.
In a similar way, it looked as though the Restoration of 1660 had revolutionized the religious life of England by reuniting an English Protestant Church which had split before the close of the sixteenth century into an Episcopalian and a Presbyterian faction. Appearances, however, were illusory here again; for the sixteenth-century breakaway from Episcopalianism reasserted itself in the eighteenth century in the emergence of the new Methodist type of non-conformity. In France, again, Roman Catholic orthodoxy has been disappointed, time and again, of the hope that it had succeeded in re-establishing religious uniformity once and for all by suppressing a heresy. The Albigenses were suppressed, only to break out again as Huguenots. When the Huguenots were suppressed in their turn, they broke out again as Jansenists, who were the nearest thing to Calvinists that Roman Catholics could be. When the Jansenists were quashed they broke out again as Deists; and to-day the division of the French into a clerical and an anti-clerical faction still reproduces the thirteenth-century division between Catholics and Adoptionists (or whatever the doctrine may have been that the Albigenses really held), in spite of repeated attempts, during the last seven centuries, to dragoon the French people into religious unity. In the light of these obvious historical illustrations of Horace’s theme, let us try to look into the relation of present-day Russia to Russia’s past. Marxism wears the appearance of being a new order in Russia because, like the new way of life introduced into Russia in an earlier chapter by Peter the Great, it came from the West. If these fits of Westernization have been spontaneous, it might be plausible to present them as genuine new departures. But has Russia been Westernizing herself voluntarily or under duress? On this point, the present writer’s personal beliefs are as follows: For nearly a thousand years past, the Russians have, as he sees it, been members, not of our Western civilization, but of the Byzantine—a sister society, of the same Graeco-Roman parentage as ours, but a distinct and different civilization from our own, nevertheless. The Russian members of this Byzantine family have always put up a strong resistance against threats of being overwhelmed by our Western world, and they are keeping up this resistance to-day. In order to save themselves from being conquered and forcibly assimilated by the West, they have repeatedly been constrained to make themselves masters of our Western technology. This tour de force has been achieved at least twice over in Russian history: first by Peter the Great, and then again by the Bolsheviks. The effort has had to be repeated, because Western technology has continued to advance. Peter the Great had to master the arts of the seventeenth-century Western shipwright and drill-sergeant. The Bolsheviks had to get even with our Western industrial revolution. And no sooner have they done that than the West gets ahead of Russia again by discovering the ‘know-how’ of the manufacture of the atom bomb. Ail this puts the Russians in a dilemma. In order to save themselves from being completely Westernized by force, they have to Westernize themselves partially, and in this they have to take the initiative if they are to make sure of both Westernizing in time and of keeping the repugnant process within bounds. The fateful question is, of course: Can one manage to adopt an alien civilization partially without being drawn on, step by step, into adopting it as a whole? We may feel our way towards an answer to this question by glancing back at the principal chapters in the history of Russia’s relations with the West. In the West we have a notion that Russia is the aggressor, as indeed she has all the appearance of being when looked at through Western eyes. We think of her as the devourer of the lion’s share in the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland; as the oppressor of both Poland and Finland in the nineteenth century; and as the arch-aggressor in the post-war world of to-day. To Russian eyes, appearances are just the contrary. The Russians see themselves as the perpetual victims of aggression from the West, and, on a longer historical perspective, there is perhaps a greater justification than we might suppose for the Russian point of view. A detached investigator, if such could be found, might report that the Russians’ eighteenth-century successes against Sweden and Poland were counter-offensives, and that their gains in territory in these counter-offensives are less characteristic of the relations between Russia and the West than the Russian losses of territory to the West both before and after. ‘ The Varangians,’ who founded the first rudiments of a Russian state by seizing command of the navigable inland waterways and thereby establishing their domination over the primitive Slav populations in the hinterland, seem to have been Scandinavian barbarians who had been stirred up and set moving—eastward as well as westward—by the northward march of Western Christendom under Charlemagne. Their descendants in their home country were converted to Western Christianity and appeared, in their turn, over Russia’s western horizon as the latter-day Swedes: heathens transformed into heretics without having been cured of being aggressors. Then again, in the fourteenth century, the best part of Russia’s original domain—almost the whole of White Russia and the Ukraine—was shorn away from Russian Orthodox Christendom and annexed to Western Christendom through being conquered by the Lithuanians and the Poles. (The fourteenth-century Polish conquests of originally Russian ground in Galicia were not recovered by Russia till the last phase of the War of 1939-45). In the seventeenth century, Polish invaders penetrated the hitherto unconquered part of Russia as far as Moscow and were driven out only by a supreme effort on the Russian side, while the Swedes shut Russia off from the Baltic by annexing the whole east coast down to the northern limits of the Polish dominions. In 1812 Napoleon repeated the Poles’ seventeenth-century exploit; and, after the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, blows from the West came raining down on Russia thick and fast. The Germans, invading her in the years 1915-18, overran the Ukraine and reached Transcaucasia. After the collapse of the Germans, it was the turn of the British, French, Americans, and Japanese to invade Russia from four different quarters in the years 1918-20. And then, in 1941, the Germans returned to the attack—more formidable and more ruthless than ever. It is true that, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russian armies also marched and fought on Western ground, but they came in always as allies of one Western power against another in some Western family quarrel. In the annals of the centuries-long warfare between the two Christendoms, it would seem to be the fact that the Russians have been the victims of aggression, and the Westerners the aggressors, more often than not. The Russians have incurred the hostility of the West through being obstinate adherents of an alien civilization, and, down to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, this Russian ‘mark of the beast’ was the Byzantine civilization of Eastern Orthodox Christendom. The Russians embraced Eastern Orthodox Christianity at the end of the tenth century, and it is significant that this was a deliberate choice on their part. Alternatively they might have followed the example of either their south-eastern neighbours, the Khazars, on the Steppes, who had been converted in the eighth century to Judaism, or their eastern neighbours the White Bulgarians, down the Volga, who had been converted in the tenth century to Islam. In spite of these precedents, the Russians made their own distinctive choice by adopting the Eastern Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantine world; and, after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 and the extinction of the last remnant of the East Roman Empire, the principality of Moscow, which by then had become the rallying point of Russian Orthodox Christendom against both Muslims and Latins, self-consciously took over the Byzantine heritage from the Greeks. In 1472 the Grand Duke of Moscow, Ivan III, married Zoe Palaeologos, a niece of the last Greek wearer, at Constantinople, of the East Roman Imperial Crown. In 1547 Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) had himself crowned Czar or East Roman Emperor; and, though the office was vacant, his assumption of it was audacious, considering that, in the past, Russian princes had been ecclesiastical subjects of a Metropolitan of Kiev or Moscow who had been a subordinate of the Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople—a prelate who, in his turn, was a political subject of the Greek Emperor at Constantinople, whose style, title, and prerogative were now being assumed by the Muscovite Grand Duke Ivan. The last and decisive step was taken in 1589, when the reigning Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, now a servant of the Turks, was induced or coerced, during a visit to Moscow, to raise his former subordinate the Metropolitan of Moscow to the status of an independent Patriarch. Though the Greek Oecumenical Patriarch has continued, down to this day, to be recognised as primus inter pares among the heads of the Orthodox churches—which, though united in doctrine and liturgy, are independent of each either in government—the Russian Orthodox Church, from the moment when its independence was conceded to it, became the most important of all the Orthodox Churches de facto, since it was then by far the strongest in numbers and was also the only one that enjoyed the backing of a powerful sovereign state. From 1453 onwards Russia was the only Orthodox Christian country of any account that was not under Muslim rule, and the capture of Constantinople by the Turks was dramatically avenged by Ivan the Terrible when he captured Qazan from the Tatars a century later. This was another step in Russia’s assumption of the Byzantine heritage, and Russia was not just being cast for this role by the blind working of impersonal historical forces. The Russians knew well what they were about: in the sixteenth century, the policy was expounded with arresting clarity and confidence in a celebrated passage of an open letter addressed to the Grand Duke Basil III of Moscow, whose reign intervened between those of the third and the fourth Ivan, by the monk Theophilus of Pskov: The Church of Old Rome fell because of its heresy; the gates of the Second Rome, Constantinople, have been hewn down by the axes of the infidel Turks; but the Church of Moscow, the Church of the New Rome, shines brighter than the Sun in the whole Universe. . . Two Romes have fallen, but the Third stands fast; a fourth there cannot be. In thus assuming the Byzantine heritage deliberately and self-consciously, the Russians were taking over, among other things, the traditional Byzantine attitude towards the West; and this has had a profound effect on Russia’s own attitude towards the West, not only before the Revolution of 1917 but after it. The Byzantine attitude towards the West is a simple one, and it ought not to be difficult for Westerners to understand. Indeed, we ought to be able to sympathize with it, because it springs from the same extravagantly improbable belief that we happen to hold about ourselves. We ‘Franks’ (as the Byzantines and the Muslims call us) sincerely believe that we are the chosen heirs of Israel, Greece, and Rome—the Heirs of the Promise, with whom, in consequence, the future lies. We have not been shaken out of this belief by the recent geological and astronomical discoveries that have pushed out the bounds of our universe so immensely far in time as well as in space. From the primal nebula through the protozoon, and from the prototzoon through primitive man, we stili trace a divinely appointed genealogy which culminates’ teleologically in ourselves. The Byzantines do just thq*;same, except that they award themselves the improbable birthright that, on our Western scheme, is ours. The Heirs of the Promise, the people with the unique future, are not the Franks but the Byzantines—so runs the Byzantine version of the myth. And this article of faith has, of course, one very practical corollary. When Byzantium and the West are at odds, Byzantium is always right and the West is always wrong. It will be evident that this sense of orthodoxy and sense of destiny, which have been taken over by the Russians from the Byzantine Greeks, are just as characteristic of the present Communist regime in Russia as they were of the previous Eastern Orthodox Christian dispensation there. Marxism is, no doubt, a Western creed, but it is a Western creed which puts the Western civilization ‘on the spot’; and it was, therefore, possible for a twentieth-century Russian whose father had been a nineteenth-century ‘Slavophil’ and his grandfather a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian to become a devoted Marxian without being required to make any reorientation of his inherited attitude towards the West. For the Russian Marxian, Russian Slavophil, and Russian Orthodox Christian alike, Russia is ‘Holy Russia,’ and the Western world of the Borgias and Queen Victoria, Smiles’ Self-Help and Tammany Hall, is uniformly heretical, corrupt, and decadent. A creed which allows the Russian people to preserve this traditional Russian condemnation of the West intact, while at the same time serving the Russian government as an instrument ‘for industrializing Russia in order to save her from being conquered by an already industrialized West, is one of those providentially convenient gifts of the gods that naturally fall into the lap of the Chosen People. Let us look a little further into this Byzantine heritage of Russia’s which does not seem to have lost its hold on the Marxian Russia of to-day. When we turn back to the Greek first chapter of Byzantine history in Asia Minor and Constantinople in the early Middle Ages, what are our sister society’s salient features? Two stand out above the rest: the conviction (mentioned already) that Byzantium is always right, and the institution of the totalitarian state. The germ of the conviction of being always right first sprouted in the souls of the Greeks at a moment when, so far from feeling superior to the West, they were at a disadvantage that was intensely humiliating. After having made a mess of their political life for centuries, the Greeks at last had peace imposed on them by the Romans. For the Greeks, the Roman Empire was a necessity of life and, at the same time, an intolerable affront to their pride. This was, for them, a formidable psychological dilemma. They found their way out of it by making the Roman Empire a Greek affair. In the age of the Antonines, Greek men of letters took possession of the idea of the Roman Empire by presenting it as a practical realization of the ideal kingdom of Plato’s philosopher king, while Greek men of action gained admission to the Roman public service. In the fourth century after Christ, the Roman Emperor Constantine planted his New Rome at Byzantium, on the site of an ancient Greek city. Constantinople was intended by its Latin-speaking founder to be as Latin as Rome itself, but by the time of Justinian, only two hundred years later, Byzantium had become Greek again—though Justinian was a zealous champion of the Latin language that was his, as well as Constantine’s, mother tongue. In the fifth century, the Roman Empire survived in its Greek and semi-Hellenized Oriental provinces when it collapsed in the West, including Italy itself. At the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries, in the time of Pope Gregory the Great, the Latin Old Rome was a derelict, neglected outpost of an Empire of which the Greek New Rome was now the centre and seat of power. Down to this day, if you ask a Greek peasant what he is, and he forgets for a moment that he was taught at school to say ‘Hellene,’ he will tell you that he is ‘Romyos,’ meaning a Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Christian subject of an ideally eternal Roman Empire with its capital at Constantinople. The use of the name ‘Hellene’ to mean ‘Modern Greek’ is an archaistic revival; in popular usage since the sixth century of the Christian era, the antithesis between ‘Roman’ (now meaning Greek-speaking adherent of the Orthodox Christian Church) and ‘Hellene’ (meaning pagan) has replaced the classical antithesis between ‘Hellene’ (meaning civilized man) and ‘Barbarian.’ That may look like a revolutionary change, yet nature ‘will keep coming back,’ for the one thing which, for the Greek, is of supreme importance has remained constant in spite of this change. The Greek is always right. So long as the pagan Greek culture is the hall-mark of superiority, the Greek glories in being a Elellene. But when the tables are turned and Hellenism in its turn is cast out to become barbarism’s bedfellow in the outer darkness, the Greek changes his tune and now proclaims himself a subject of the Christian Roman Empire. Hellenism may lose caste, so long as the Greek does not. Having thus adroidy vindicated his title to be the true Heir of the Kingdom, whatever kingdom it might be, the Greek Orthodox Christian went on to put Latin Christendom ‘on the spot.’ In the ninth century, the Greek Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius, pointed out that the Western Christians had become schismatics. They had tampered with the Creed. They had inserted an unauthorized filioque. Byzantium is always right, but she had a particular reason, at that moment, for putting Western Christendom in the wrong. Photius made his damaging theological discovery about the Latins during the first round of a political contest between Byzantine Christendom and Western Christendom in which Photius himself was a leading combatant. This contest, like that between the United States and the Soviet Union to-day, was for the allegiance of a political and ideological no-man’s-Iand lying between the two rival powers. In the ninth century the heathen, who, during ‘the Wandering of the Nations,’ had occupied South-Eastern Europe from the gates of Constantinople to the gates of Vienna, began to feel attracted by the Christian civilization of their neighbours. To which of the two Christendoms should they turn for light? To the Greek Orthodox Christendom of the Byzantines? Or to the Latin Catholic Christendom of the Franks? Prudence suggested approaching whichever of the two Christian powers was geographically the more remote and therefore politically the less dangerous; so the Moravian heathen, who were ‘up against’ the Franks, turned to Constantinople, while the Bulgarian heathen, who were ‘up against’ the Byzantines, turned to Rome—as Greece and Turkey to-day, lying, as they do, on Russia’s and not on America’s threshold, have turned to Washington, not to Moscow. When once these overtures had been made and had not been rejected, the competition between the West and Byzantium for the prize of South-Eastern Europe had begun, and the stakes were so high that the rivalry was almost bound to end in rupture. The crisis which Photius had brought to a head was unexpectedly postponed by the irruption of the Hungarians. When this fresh horde of heathen established itself astride the Danube towards the close of the ninth century, Eastern Orthodox Christendom and Catholic Christendom were opportunely insulated from one another again. But, upon the conversion of the Hungarians to Western Christianity at the end of the tenth century, the quarrel between therival Christendoms burst out again and quickly festered into the definitive schism of 1054.

Thereafter, Byzantine pride suffered a terrible series of reverses. Frankish Christians from the west and Turkish Muslims from the east now fell upon the Byzantine world simultaneously. The interior of Russia, around Moscow, was the only part of Eastern Orthodox Christendom that did not eventually lose its political independence. The homelands of the Byzantine civilization in Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula were completely submerged, and, in the last phase of their discomfiture, on the eve of the second and final fall of Constantinople in 1453, the only freedom of manoeuvre that was left to the Greeks was to choose between two odious alien yokes. Faced with this grievous choice, the mediaeval Greek Orthodox Christians passionately rejected the yoke of their schismatic Western fellow Christians and with open eyes elected, as the lesser evil, the yoke of the Muslim Turks. They would ‘rather behold in Constantinople the turban of Muhammad than the Pope’s tiara or a cardinal’s hat.’ The feelings that determined this significant choice are on record in works of literature. During the Middle Ages, as to-day, the antipathy between the two rival heirs of Rome was mutual. Read the Lombard Bishop Liutprand’s report to the Saxon Emperors Otto I and II of his diplomatic mission, in their service, to the Byzantine Court of Constantinople in the year 968. If you were sensitive solely to the tone and temper, and momentarily forgot the date, you might fancy that the author was an American visitor to Moscow in any year since 1917. Read the Byzantine Princess Imperial Anna Comnena’s history of the reign of her father the Emperor Alexius, who had to cope with the First Crusade. You might fancy that the authoress was a cultivated twentieth-century Frenchwoman describing the invasion of Paris by a wave of Middle-Western American tourists—at least, that is what you might fancy till you lighted on her description of the cross-bow, that deadly new weapon of which the Westerners (in spite of being always wrong) had inexplicably discovered the ‘knowhow.’ If only it had been discovered by the Byzantines, whose destiny is to be always right! This passage of Anna Comnena’s history might be a Russian complaint in 1947 about America’s monopoly of the atom bomb. Why did Byzantine Constantinople come to grief? And why, on the other hand, has Byzantine Moscow survived? The key to both these historical riddles is the Byzantine institution of the totalitarian state. Empires like the Roman or Chinese, which bestow peace for centuries on once war-ridden worlds, win so powerful a hold on the affections and imaginations of their subjects that these cannot imagine living without them, and, consequently, cannot believe that these supposedly indispensable institutions can ever really cease to exist. When the Roman Empire perished, neither contemporaries nor posterity acknowledged its demise, and, since their eyes refused to face the facts, they sought, at the first opportunity, to bring these facts into conformity with their fancy by conjuring the Roman Empire back into existence. In the eighth century of the Christian era, there were determined attempts to revive the Roman Empire in both East and West. In the West, Charlemagne’s attempt was a fortunate failure; but the attempt made by Leo the Syrian at Constantinople, two generations earlier, was a fatal success. The crucial consequence of this successful establishment of a mediaeval East Roman Empire in the homelands of the Byzantine civilization was that the Eastern Orthodox Church fell back into subjection to the State. In the pagan Graeco-Roman world, religion had been part and parcel of secular public life. Christianity, springing up without the Roman Empire’s leave, defended its freedom at the price of outlawry and persecution. When the Imperial Government came to terms with the Church, it seems to have expected that Christianity would slip into the dependent and subordinate position that an official paganism had previously occupied vis-a-vis the Roman State; and, in the Greek heart of the Empire, where the Empire continued to be a going concern for nearly three centuries after the conversion of Constantine, this expectation was more or less realized—as witness what happened to St. John Chrysostom when he fell foul of the Empress Eudoxia, and to Pope Vigilius when he incurred the displeasure of the Emperor Justinian. Fortunately, however, for the Church, it was freed from its official cage by the Empire’s collapse. Even at Constantinople, the Oecumenical Patriarch Sergius dealt with the Emperor Heraclius on equal terms in the supreme crisis of the seventh century, and in the West, where the Empire had broken down two hundred years earlier and was never successfully restored, the Church not only recovered its freedom but preserved it. In our Western world, for the most part, the Church has maintained its independence of the state and has sometimes even exercised an ascendency over it. The modern free churches in Protestant countries and the mediaeval Catholic Church in a not yet divided Western Christendom are, alike, in the main line of our Western tradition, while the modern established churches in Protestant countries have been, on the whole, something exceptional in Western history. Moreover, even where the Church has been re-sub jected to the secular power in a Western state, this unWestern relation between Church and State has been tempered by the climate of ecclesiastical independence which has been prevalent in Western Christendom on the whole. In the Byzantine world, on the other hand, the successful re-establishment of the Empire in the eighth century deprived the Eastern Orthodox Church of the freedom that she, too, had momentarily regained. She did not re-enter the prison house without a struggle. The battle went on for about two hundred years, but it ended in the Church’s becoming virtually a department of the mediaeval East Roman state; and a state that has reduced the Church to this position has thereby made itself ‘totalitarian’—if our latter-day term ‘totalitarian state’ means a state that has established its control over every side of the life of its subjects. The mediaeval Byzantine totalitarian state conjured up by the successful resuscitation, at Constantinople, of the Roman Empire had a disastrous effect on the development of the Byzantine civilization. It was an incubus that overshadowed, crushed, and stunted the society that had conjured it up. The rich potentialities of the Byzantine civilization, which the Byzantine state nipped in the bud, are revealed in flashes of originality that burst out in regions beyond the range of the East Roman Empire’s effective power, or in centuries subsequent to the Empire’s demise: the spiritual genius of the tenth-century Sicilian monk, Saint Nilus, who made a new Magna Graecia in Calabria out of Christian Greek refugees from his native island, or the artistic genius of the sixteenth-century Cretan painter, Theotokopoulos, whom the West admires as ‘El Greco.’ The ‘peculiar institution’ of the Byzantine society not only blighted these brilliant capacities for creation; it brought the mediaeval Byzantine civilization itself to the premature downfall that has been mentioned above, by making it impossible for the Byzantine world to expand without precipitating a war to the death between the Greek apostles of Byzantine culture and their principal non-Greek proselytes. The subjection of the Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople to the East Roman Emperor created an insoluble dilemma when a heathen prince embraced Eastern Orthodox Christianity. If the convert became the Oecumenical Patriarch’s ecclesiastical subject he would be recognizing, by implication, the political sovereignty of the East Roman Emperor, which would be an intolerable consequence for the convert. On the other hand, if he vindicated his political independence by setting up a tame Patriarch of his own, he would be claiming, by implication, to be the East Roman Emperor’s peer, which would be an intolerable consequence for the Emperor. This dilemma did not worry the Russian convert-prince, Vladimir, and his successors, because the remoteness of Russia from Constantinople made the theoretical political overlordship of the East Roman Emperor innocuous there. But it did worry the princes of Bulgaria, whose dominions lay at the East Roman Empire’s European threshold; and, when Bulgaria finally opted for Byzantium after a preliminary flirtation with Rome, there turned out not to be room for both a Greek Orthodox Christian East Roman Empire and a Slav Orthodox Christian Bulgaria in the same Byzantine world. The result was a Graeco-Bulgarian hundred years’ war which ended in the destruction of Bulgaria by the East Roman Empire in 1019 and which inflicted such deadly wounds on the victor that he succumbed, in his turn, to Frankish and Turkish attacks before the eleventh century was over. Russia alone in the Byzantine world of the day was saved by her remoteness from being engulfed in this cataclysm; and thus it was the latest convert to Byzantine Christianity that survived to become the Heir of the Promise—the destiny which, as the Byzantines believe, is not our Western birthright, but theirs. Russia’s life, however, has not been an easy one on the whole. Though she owed her survival in the early Middle Ages to a happy geographical accident, she has had, since then, as we have seen, to save herself by her own exertions. In the thirteenth century she was attacked on two fronts by the Tatars and the Lithuanians, as the Greek homelands of the Byzantine civilization had been attacked by the Turks and the Crusaders some two hundred years before; and, though she eventually got the upper hand, once for all, over her adversaries on the east, she is still having to run her arduous race against the ever-advancing technological ‘know-how’ of the Western world. In this long and grim struggle to preserve their independence, the Russians have sought salvation in the political institution that was the bane of the mediaeval Byzantine world. They felt that their one hope of survival lay in a ruthless concentration of political power and worked out for themselves a Russian version of the Byzantine totalitarian state. The Grand Duchy of Moscow was the laboratory of this political experiment, and Moscow’s service, and reward, was the consolidation, under her rule, of a cluster of weak principalities into a single great power. This Muscovite political edifice has twice been given a new fagade—first by Peter the Great and then again by Lenin—but the essence of the structure has remained unaltered, and the Soviet Union of to-day, like the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the fourteenth century, reproduces the salient features of the mediaeval East Roman Empire. In this Byzantine totalitarian state, the church may be Christian or Marxian so long as it submits to being the secular government’s tool. The issue between Trotsky, who wanted to make the Soviet Union an instrument for furthering the cause of the Communist world revolution, and Stalin, who wanted to make Communism an instrument for furthering the interests of the Soviet Union, is the old issue on which battle was once joined between Saint John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia and between Theodore of Studium and the Emperor Constantine VI. In the modern, as in the mediaeval, Byzantine world the victory has fallen to the champion of the secular power—in consistent contrast to the course of history in the West, where it was the ecclesiastical power that won the day in the trials of strength between Gregory VII and Henry IV and between Innocent IV and Frederick II. The Byzantine institution of the totalitarian state has not so far had the same fatal consequences for Russian Orthodox Christendom that it had in the homelands of the Byzantine civilization when it precipitated a war to the death between the mediaeval Greeks and Bulgars. But we do not know what effect this political heirloom in Russia’s Byzantine heritage is going to have on Russia’s fortunes now that she has to make the momentous choice between taking her place in a Western world or holding aloof and trying to build up an anti-Western counter world of her own. We may guess that Russia’s ultimate decision will be deeply influenced by the sense of orthodoxy and sense of destiny which she has also inherited from her Byzantine past. Under the Hammer and Sickle, as under the Cross, Russia is still ‘Holy Russia’ and Moscow still ‘The Third Rome.’ Tamen usque recunet.