“The more things change, the more they remain the same.” That time-honored adage has a contemporary application with respect to the current Russo-Ukrainian War. What is happening in Ukraine is nothing new, but rather a current manifestation of the myth of Moscow being the Third Rome.
M III R, as the myth is written, has been the guiding principle of Russian social and political existence for the past five centuries. First articulated in a letter written by Philotheus, a 16th-century Orthodox monk from a monastery in Pskoff, to the Muscovite Tsar, Basil III, the son of Ivan III, the Great, and the father of Ivan IV, the Terrible, the message has undergone numerous iterations, but the underlying theme has remained the same.
Philotheus considered Rome to have fallen to the heathen barbarians and Constantinople to the Muslim Turks because both empires had abandoned the true Orthodox religion.
In the beginning of the fourth century A.D., the Emperor Constantine had divided the Roman Empire into two parts to make it more governable, establishing the city of Byzantium, renamed for himself as Constantinople, as the capital of the Eastern Empire.
In 476, Rome fell to the invading Germanic hordes, but the Eastern Empire remained for nearly a thousand more years, gradually losing territories until the 15th century, when all that remained was a Greek city state on the Bosporus. In the beginning of the 15th century, fearful that collapse and Turkish conquest was imminent, the Eastern Empire sought help from Western Europe.
In 1415, a church council was held at Florence, which briefly united the Roman Catholic West and the Greek Orthodox East, in the hope that the Western powers would send military aid to Constantinople to ward off the Turks. The two clerics who had come to the Council from Moscow refused to submit to the Union of Florence and returned home. In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks.
The two Muscovite clerics’ action was critically important to Philotheus in developing his theory of Moscow being the Third Rome. He interpreted their behavior as demonstrating that Moscow was the sole remaining bastion of religious Orthodoxy. Given the medieval belief that 3 was the perfect number, as the Trinity consists of One God with Three Divine Persons, and Christ died at the age of 33, Philotheus concluded that Moscow was the Third Rome and a Fourth there could not be.
Across the centuries that view has guided and directed Russian foreign policy, from the Tsarist period, through the Soviet decades and now into the post-Soviet years. With the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the coming to power of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the myth of Moscow being the Third Rome shed its religious cloak, but retained its underlying psychological thrust, namely that Moscow, now having broadened over the centuries to have become Russia, has the right and the duty to spread its hegemony over other peoples, particularly over their fellow Slavs.
In 2014, a first step in the process of Russian re-aggrandizement occurred with the re-annexation of Crimea and now the larger exploit of re-taking Ukraine is in its fourth year. Russia does not recognize Ukraine as a separate nation, nor does it consider Ukrainian to be a distinct language.
In 1964, when American Ukrainians erected a monument in Washington to Taras Shevchenko, the Bard of Ukraine, the Soviet Union erected one in Moscow, another affirmation that Russia denies any difference between being Ukrainian and being Russian.
Ukraine’s long history of domination by Russia seemingly came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. That event ushered in the longest span of years of Ukrainian independence in modern times. Today, Russia’s goal is to absorb Ukraine back into the Russian fold, exploiting its vast grain-producing plains, mining its important mineral deposits and destroying Ukraine’s language, culture and past.
Indeed, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
