History of Russia/Chapter 3
Primitive Russia: the Slavs
[edit]Religion of the Slavs—Funeral rites
[edit]The religion of the Russian Slavs, like that of all Aryan races, was founded on nature and its phenomena. It was a pantheism which, as its original meaning was lost, necessarily became a polytheism. Just as the Homeric deities were preceded by the gods of Hesiod, Ouranos and Demeter, or Heaven and Earth, so the most ancient gods of the Russian Slavs seem to have been Svarog, the heaven, and “our mother, the dank earth.” Then new conceptions appeared in the first rank in the historic period. 1. Ancient poets and chroniclers (see the Song of Igor, and Nestor) have preserved to us the names of Dagh-Bog, god of the sun, father of nature; Voloss, a solar deity, and, like the Greek Apollo, inspirer of poets and protector of flocks; Perun, god of thunder, another personification of the Sun at war with the Cloud; Stribog, the Russian Æolus, father of winds, protector of warriors; Khors, a solar god; Semargl and Mokoch, whose attributes are unknown. 2. In some of the early hymns they sing of Koupalo or Iarilo, god of the summer sun, and Did-Lado, goddess of fecundity. 3. In the epic songs are celebrated Sviatogor, the giant-hero, whose weight the earth can scarcely bear; Mikoula Selianinovitch, the good laborer, a kind of Slav Triptolemus, the divine personification of the race's passionate love of agriculture, striking with the iron share of his plough the stones of the furrow, with a noise that is heard three days' journey off; Volga Vseslavitch, a Proteus who can take all manner of shapes; Polkan, a centaur; Dounai, Don Ivanovitch, Dnieper Korolevitch, who are rivers; then a series of heroes, conquerors of dragons like Ilia of Mourom, who seem to be solar gods degraded to the rank of paladins. 4. In the stories which beguile the village evening assemblies, appear Morena, goddess of death; Kochtchei and Moroz, personifications of the bitter winter weather; Baba-Yaga, an ogress who lives on the edge of the forest, in a hut built on the foot of a fowl, and swayed by the winds; and the King of the Sea, who entices sailors to his watery palaces. 5. Popular superstition continues to people nature with good and bad spirits: the Russalki, water sprites; Vodianoi, river genii; the Liechii and the Liesnik, forest demons; the Domovoi (dom, house), the brownie of the domestic hearth; and the Vampires, ghosts who steal by night from their tombs, and suck the blood of the living during their sleep.
Since Mythology reproduces under so many forms the struggle of the heroes of the light with the monsters of darkness, it is possible that she may have admitted a bad principle at variance with a good principle, an ill-doing god, of whom Morena, Kochtchei, Baba-Yaga, the dragon, the mountain-serpent, are only types. We cannot find any positive confirmation of this hypothesis, as far as the Russian Slavs are concerned, but Helmold asserts that the Baltic Slavs recognize Bielibog, the White God, and Tchernobog, the Black God.
The Russians do not seem to have had either temples or priests in the proper sense of the word. They erected rude idols on the hills, and venerated the oak consecrated to Perun; the leaders of the people offered the sacrifices. They also had sorcerers, or magicians, analogous to the Tatar Shamans, whose counsels appear to have had great weight.
It has been the study of the Russian Church to combat paganism by purifying the superstitions she cannot uproot. She has turned to account any similarity in names or symbols. She has been able to honor Saint Dmitri and Saint George, the slayers of dragons; Saint John, who thunders in the spring; Saint Elias, who recalls Ilia of Mourom; Saint Blaise or Vlaise, who has succeeded to Voloss as guardian of the flocks; Saint Nicholas, or Mikoula, patron of laborers, like Mikoula Selianinovitch; Saint Cosmas, or Kouzma, protector of blacksmiths, who has taken the place of kouznets, the mysterious blacksmith forger of the destinies of man in the mountains of the north. In some popular songs the Virgin Mary replaces Did-Lado, and then Saint John succeeds to Perun or Iarilo. Who can fail to recognize the myth of the spring and the fruitful rains accompanied by thunder, in this White Russian song that is repeated at the festival of St. John? “John and Mary—bathed on the hill—while John bathed—the earth shook—while Mary bathed—the earth germinated.” The Church has taken care to consecrate to the Saints of her calendar or to purify by holy rites the sacred trees and mysterious wells to which crowds of pilgrims continued to flock.
Russian Slavs certainly had visions of another life, but, like all primitive peoples, they looked forward to a life which was gross and material. In the 7th century among the Wends, German Slavs, women refused to survive their husbands, and burned themselves on their funeral pile. This ancient Aryan custom must have been in vigor among the Russian Slavs at an equally early epoch. The Arabic writer, Ibn-Foszlan, gives an account of the Russian funeral rites which he himself witnessed in the 9th century. For ten days the friends of the deceased bewailed him, and intoxicated themselves over his corpse. Then the men-servants were asked, which of them would be buried with his master? One of them replied in the affirmative, and was instantly strangled. The same question was also put to the women-servants, one of whom likewise devoted herself. She was then washed, adorned, and treated like a princess, and did nothing but drink and sing. On the appointed day the dead man was laid in a boat, with part of his arms and his garments. The man-servant was slain with the favorite horse and other domestic animals and was laid in the boat, to which the young girl was then led. She took off her jewels, and with a glass of kvass in her hand sang a song that she would only too willingly have prolonged. “All at once,” says the eye-witness, “the old woman who accompanied her, and whom they called the angel of death, ordered her to drink quickly, and to enter into the cabin of the boat, where lay the dead body of her master. At these words she changed color, and as she made some difficulties about entering, the old woman seized her by the hair, dragged her in, and entered with her. The men immediately began to beat their shields with clubs to prevent the other girls from hearing the cries of their companion, which might prevent them from one day dying for their masters.” While the funeral pile blazed, one of the Russians said to our narrator, “You Arabs are fools: you hide in the earth the man you have loved best, and there he becomes the prey of worms. We, on the contrary, burn him up in the twinkling of an eye, that he may the quicker enter paradise.” Nestor found the rite among the Russian Slavs. The excavations made in a great number of kourgans (barrows) confirm his testimony. The discoveries recently made in the tombs of Novgorod by M. Ivanouski, prove that the Slavs of Ilmen had preserved or adopted the custom of burying their dead. In these tombs are found a great quantity of arms, instruments, jewels, animals, bones, and grains of wheat; from which we may conclude that the Russian Slavs expected the future life to be an exact continuation of the present one, and that they surrounded the dead with all the objects that here contributed to his happiness. The examination of the human bones preserved in the kourgans also confirms the historical accounts, and proves that servants and female slaves were sacrificed over the corpse.
Domestic and political customs: the family; the mir or commune; the volost or canton; the tribe
[edit]The Slav family was founded on the patriarchal principle. The father was the absolute head, and after his death the power passed to the eldest of the members composing it: first, to the brothers of the deceased, if he had any under his care, then successively to his sons, beginning with the eldest. The chief had the same rights over the women who entered his family by marriage, as over its natural members.
Their domestic manners seemed to have been very barbarous. The monk Nestor may be suspected of exaggeration wherever he describes the condition of pagan Russia, which baptism was to regenerate. There is no exception to this exaggerated censure but in the case of the Polians. “The Drevlians,” he tells us, “lived after the manner of wild beasts. They cut each other's throats, ate impure food, declined all marriage-ties; they ravished and stole young girls who came for water to the fountains. … The Radimitches, the Viatitches, the Severians lived like wild animals in the forests, were fed on all sorts of horrors, and spoke of all kinds of shameful things in the presence of their sisters-in-law and relatives. … They captured women, who were willing parties to the transaction, often two or three at a time.”
The charges which Nestor chiefly urges against the Slavs, are the capture of women and polygamy. This latter charge is completely established; as to the capture, it might be symbolical. In the text quoted above we see the women “came” to the fountain, and that they were parties to the transaction. This capture, if we take it for a simple ceremony, may imply, in very early times, the existence of abduction by violence. To-day, the marriage-customs of Russia still preserve traces of these ancient usages. There is still a pretended capture of the woman; a custom to be found in the Germany of the 8th century, where the very name of marriage has a pointed signification—Brautlauft, the flight of the bride. The songs at Russian weddings also imply the existence of a time when the maiden was bought. One of these songs accuses the kindred of avarice: “Thy brother—the accursed Tatar—has sold his sister for a piece of silver.”
Some historians have thought, with Karamsin, that the Slavs held women in less consideration than the Germans did, and in fact “treated them as slaves.” We may doubt if there was so great a difference between the two nations. The chronicles speak of Lybed, sister of Kii, the fabulous founder of Kief, dividing her paternal inheritance with her brothers, and of Princess Olga becoming heir and avenger of her husband and guardian of his son. The epic songs show us many bold heroines side by side with the heroes of the Kievian cycle, and mothers of heroes surrounded with wonderful luxury and extraordinary honors. The excavations of the kourgans show us skeletons of women richly ornamented with jewels.
The commune, or mir, was only the expansion of the family, it was subject to the authority of the elders of each household, who assembled in a council or vetche. The village lands were held in common by all the members of the association; the individual only possessed his harvest, and the dvor or enclosure immediately surrounding his house. This primitive condition of property, existing in Russia up to the present day, was once common to all European peoples.
The communes nearest together formed a group called volost or pagost (canton, parish). The volost was governed by a council formed of the elders of the communes: one of these elders, either by hereditary right, age, or election, was recognized as more powerful than the rest, and became chief of the canton. His authority seems much to have resembled that of Ulysses over the numerous kings of little Ithaca. In times of danger, the volosts of the same tribe could elect a temporary head, but decline to submit to a general and permanent ruler. The Emperor Maurice had already observed that passion for liberty among the Slavs, which made them detest all sovereignty. The Russian Slavs easily rose from the idea of a commune to that of a canton, with a chief chosen from the elders of the family; in an emergency they might permit a temporary confederation of all the cantons of one tribe (dlemia), but we never find that there was a prince of the Severians, Polians, or Radimitches. Only princes of the volost could exist among them, like the prince of Korosthenes in the legend of Olga. The idea of the unity of a tribe, and a fortiori the unity of a Russian nation, was absolutely foreign to the race. The ideas of government and of the State had to come to them from without.
Towns—Trade—Agriculture
[edit]Nestor declares that the Russian Slavs, for the most part, “lived in forests like the wild beast.” Karamsin and Schloezer have concluded from this that they had no towns. Now there exist a number of monuments in Russia which have for long puzzled archæologists. There are the gorodichtches (from gorod, town), enclosures formed by the earth being thrown up, and these we find invariably on the steep bank of a watercourse, or on a small hill. M. Samokvassof, who has explored this very country of the Severians, described by Nestor as living wholly in forests, has been able to prove that these gorodichtches are the oppida, the primitive towns of Russia. In the government of Tchernigof alone, M. Samokvassof has reckoned 160; in that of Koursk, 50. We may calculate from this that numbers exist in Russia, and that every volost had at least one. About these earth-enclosures, which were capped by wooden palisades or hedges of osier, and were the common means of defence for each group of families, we usually find grouped, as in a cemetery, the kourgans or tumuli of the dead.
The excavations made, either in the kourgans or in the soil of the gorodichtches, have shown us the Slavs were more civilized than Nestor supposed. Vessels of pottery, tolerably well designed, iron and bronze, gold and silver objects, glass, false pearls, rattles, prove that they had a certain amount of trade, and a fairly extensive commerce, particularly with Asia. Oriental coins have been dug up, dating from 699, or near two hundred years before the arrival of the Varangians. There are a great number of these coins in the country. Near Novgorod a vase was discovered, containing about 7000 roubles' worth of this early money. The fame of the swords made by the Russian Slavs extended to Arabia. Nestor relates that the Khazars imposed a tribute of swords on the Polians. When the latter brought the arms to the Khazars, they were afraid, and said to their princes, “Our swords have only one edge—these have two. We tremble lest one day this people should levy a tribute on us and other tribes.”
Agriculture was the favorite occupation of the Slavs. Nearly all their deities are of an agricultural character. The favorite heroes of their epic cycle, Mikoula and Ilia, were the sons of laborers. They had the more liking for field life, as the serfage of the glebe was still unknown amongst them. It has been said that the Germans borrowed the plough from the Slavs, and that the German name of pflug is derived from the Slav ploug. With the wax and honey of their hives, the corn of the Tchernoziom, and the furs of the north, the Russians carried on a great trade. Their need of strangers, together with a sociable instinct, natural to primitive races, made them very hospitable, it was even permitted to steal for the benefit of the unexpected guest. A peaceful race, devoted to liberty, music, and dancing, appears in the idyllic picture painted for us of the early Slavs. The Emperor Maurice, on the contrary, who had had dealings with all kinds of adventurous tribes, assures us that they were war-like, cruel in battle, full of savage wiles, able to conceal themselves in places where it seemed impossible their bodies could be hidden, or to lie in ambush in streams for hours together, the water over their heads, breathing by means of a reed. Their armor was defective, they had no breast-plates, they fought on foot, were naked to the waist, and had for weapons, pikes, large shields, wooden bows, poisoned arrows, and lassoes to catch their victims. This sketch specially applies to the invaders of the Roman provinces of the Danube. It is probable that these agricultural races had in general a military organization inferior to that of their Turkish and Scandinavian neighbors who lived by plunder. The imperfection of their political condition, their minute division into clans and volosts, the incessant warfare of canton with canton, delivered them up, defenceless, to their invaders. Whilst the Slavs of the south paid tribute to the Khazars, the Slavs of Ilmen, exhausted by their divisions, decided on calling in the Varangians. “‘Let us see,’ they said, ‘a prince who will govern us and reason with us justly.’ Then,” continues Nestor, “the Tchouds,{[anchor1}} the Slavs (Novgorod), the Krivitches, and other confederate races, said to the princes of Varangia, ‘Our land is great and fruitful, but it lacks order and justice; come and take possession, and govern us.’”
Footnotes
[edit]1 The Tchouds here mentioned are rather Slavs who had colonized the Tchoud country about Pskof and Izborsk.