How many contemporary political leaders invoke early medieval history to justify their policies? My hunch is only one.

In a much cited but, I suspect, little read essay of 2021, available on the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library website, Vladimir Putin asserts that his view of the historical unity of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians is ‘not driven by some short-term considerations or prompted by the current political context’. On the contrary, he contends, it is grounded in the descent of all three from ‘Ancient Rus’’, and is manifest in their allegedly shared language and, above all, their Orthodox faith: ‘The spiritual choice made by St Vladimir, who was both Prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kiev, still largely determines our affinity today.’

Vladimir’s (or Volodymyr’s) (c.958-1015) forced baptism of his subjects in the Dnieper in 988 is, therefore, the key event. It took place in Kyiv (or Kiev), which had in the ninth century been ordained by Prince Oleg, characterised as a prophet by Putin, as ‘the mother of all Russian cities’. Exceptionally, Putin cites a source for this quotation: the Tale of Bygone Years, an annalistic chronicle analogous to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but compiled over a vastly longer timescale, and much more varied in content. Begun in the 12th century, but incorporating material from as early as the tenth, the first extant copy dates from the 14th. Its opening sentence is not quoted by Putin, but underlines why it is so important to him: it promises to tell ‘of the origin of the land of Rus’, the first princes of Kiev, and from what source the land of Rus’ had its beginning’. Kiev is the fount as well as the font of Russia.

The Tale’s account of the conversion of the Rus’ is its greatest set piece. Vladimir, a pagan, is said to have considered converting to Judaism, Islam and Latin Christianity, before eventually opting for Orthodoxy. The main reason given for his choice – not repeated by Putin – is the incomparable splendour of religious observance in Byzantium: Vladimir’s envoys report that in Hagia Sophia, ‘we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth’. In Putin’s view, the baptism determined that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, termed a ‘triune people’, would share one common ‘spiritual and historical space’. It was often threatened – and intermittently in part overrun – by Latin Christendom. But because of its Orthodox origin, it remained distinct from, and defined in opposition to, that external Western threat.

As the Soviet Union entered its death throes, the Russian Orthodox Church emerged from the shadows of the preceding 70 years; there were elaborate celebrations of its millennium in 1988. The 19th-century bronze statue of St Vladimir which looms over the bank of the Dnieper in Kyiv became almost a logo for those celebrations. The statue was commissioned by that diehard of traditional autocracy and Orthodoxy, Nicholas I (1796-1855). Its ultimate inspiration was the Tale’s account of collective, compulsory baptism. The intervening centuries, during most of which the rulers of Moscow had not controlled Kyiv, let alone territory to its west, were glossed over. Moscow is so modern a city that it is not even mentioned in the Tale. Ukraine means, literally, ‘borderland’, because from Moscow’s perspective that is what it is.

Putin’s essay takes its place in this 19th-century nationalist tradition; in his view Ukraine as a distinct entity is an artificial, modern creation, an unanticipated consequence of the confederate Soviet constitution. Not for nothing did he unveil, in 2016, an even bigger statue of Vladimir outside the walls of the Moscow Kremlin. In the early modern period, it was often claimed that Moscow was the third Rome, successor to the second Rome, Byzantium. In Putin’s view Moscow is, rather, the second Kyiv, a fulfilment of Prince Oleg’s prophecy.

The best way to understand this is to listen to two 19th-century operas. The first Russian opera which was anything other than Italian pastiche was Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836), so titled to persuade Nicholas I to accept its dedication to him. The main plot involves a Russian peasant sacrificing his life to save the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail (1596-1645), from an invading band of (Catholic) Polish-Lithuanian troops. In the Soviet period the opera was drastically revised to eliminate all reference to Mikhail. Unsurprisingly, the original version has now been restored. The last big production in Russia was at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in April 2023.

The greatest of the nationalist historical operas which followed is Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1874). But it is much more ambivalent than Glinka’s. Its eponymous leading character has become tsar because Dmitri, the infant son of Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’ (1530-84), has been assassinated at Boris’ instigation. Boris’ reign is thus doomed from the start; the catastrophic events which engulf Russia are chronicled by Pimen, a monk-historian. A young novice, Grigoriy, has no interest in a monastic vocation, but learns from Pimen not only the truth about Dmitri’s death, but also that he is the same age Dmitri would have been. Grigoriy assumes the persona of Dmitri, flees across the Polish-Lithuanian frontier and, with the assistance of a sinister Jesuit, secures backing for an invasion of Russia, bent on its conversion to Catholicism. The false Dmitri’s army advances on Moscow through scenes of anarchy. The opera concludes with a plaintive lament for the fate of Russia:

‘Weep, weep, O soul of the Orthodox. The enemy will soon be here, and darkness approaches.’

Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former cook rather than an ex-monk, recently turned back from a march on Moscow. His failure to follow through with usurpation means that he has shared the ultimate fate of the false Dmitri. The opera’s chronicler Pimen begins his great aria: ‘Just one more chapter [of my history] to go…’ All writers know how he feels. But if a latter-day successor ever came to chronicle recent events, aspects would seem familiar. While Mussorgsky is far more nuanced than Glinka in his treatment of the tsar, both agree on the existential threat from the West. The resonances of a particular interpretation of 988 persist, and not just in the mind of Putin. But he shows the attendant risks when a ruler aspires to be a Pimen.

George Garnett is Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University, Fellow of St Hugh’s College and the author of The Norman Conquest in English History: Volume I: A Broken Chain? (Oxford University Press, 2021).