A Russian army blasting Kyiv into ruins is like a Catholic force burning Rome to ashes. Vladimir Putin sees Kyiv as the cradle of Russian culture. In the much-discussed essay he wrote last summer about the ‘spiritual unity’ between Russia and Ukraine, he called Kyiv ‘the mother of all Russian cities’.
Now a column of Russian troops and equipment 40 miles long is moving towards this city. The main television tower there has already been attacked. How will the Russians proceed? Will they blast Kyiv from afar like Grozny in Chechnya? Will they opt for bloody street battles with major material damage or will the city be surrounded and the inhabitants starving?
Kyiv is one of the great cultural cities of Europe. A place of 2.9 million inhabitants on the Dnieper, with palaces, parks and Orthodox churches with characteristic golden domes. ‘My favorite place was the Mariinski Park near the Lipki Palace. It overlooked the Dnieper. Walls, three men high, of white and lilac lilacs buzzed and rocked by the many bees’, the Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky (1892-1968) recalled his childhood in Kyiv. ‘Along the red clayey steep banks of the Dnieper stretched a broad belt of gardens. A symphony orchestra played in the Koopmanstuin all summer long.’
Now graphic designer Danilo is making Molotov cocktails in a basement in his Kyiv neighborhood, writes Le Monde† Like the rest of the world, he is surprised by the war. He believed that the Russians would strike in the muddy trenches of the Donbas, far away, not in his city, the fashionable, European-hungry Kyiv with its lively club scene.
Cave Monastery
Kyiv is “our common Jerusalem,” Moscow Patriarch Kirill said in 2009, a holy place for Russians and Ukrainians. In the 11th century, a monk from the Greek mountain Athos dug a cave for himself on the steep bank of the Dnieper, historian Marc Jansen writes in his book border country† Other hermits followed his example, which gave rise to the Cave Monastery, a labyrinth of catacombs, chapels and tombs. In the 17th century, a baroque-style monastery with golden domes was built over it.
The Cave Monastery is today one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Russian world. Here the monk Nestor, according to tradition, wrote in the 12th century The Story of the Years Past, the most important early source of Russian and Ukrainian history. Putin referred to it in his essay: “The Story of the Years Past records for posterity the words of Oleg the Prophet about Kyiv: let her be the mother of all Russian cities.’
In the center of Kyiv stands the neo-Byzantine Vladimir Cathedral, named after the Grand Prince Vladimir (Russian) or Volodymyr (Ukrainian) the Holy, who reigned from 980 to 1015. Vladimir/Volodymyr made Christianity the official religion. According to Nestor, he still hesitated between Western Christianity (‘too gloomy’), Islam (forbidden ‘the joy of intoxication’, alcohol), Judaism (the loss of Jerusalem clearly showed that God was not in favor of the Jews. was) and Eastern Christianity. The splendor of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople won him over. The Kiev Rus, as the area was called at the time, chose Eastern Christianity. “The spiritual choice Saint Vladimir made still largely determines our affinity,” Putin wrote. In short, in Kyiv the foundations were laid for the eternal, holy and Christian Russia that Putin invariably claims to defend.
Millennial Kingdom
In the centuries that followed, Kyiv was eclipsed by Moscow, sealed by the fact that the metropolitan (archbishop) moved his seat to Moscow in 1328. According to an old historical myth, Russian history is a straight line from the Kiev Rus to modern-day Russia, writes historian Marc Jansen. A Millennium from Saint Vladimir to Vladimir Putin. With an atheistic episode in the Soviet Union, when Kyiv was an important industrial city and from 1934 capital of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine.
Ukrainian historians, on the other hand, see a serpentine line, with Kyiv being ruled from Lithuania and Poland for a long time and only being annexed to the Russian tsarist empire in 1667. As a result, Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine are more ‘European’ than Russia, they believe. Either way, Kyiv is a decidedly pro-European city these days. In 2014, only 5.3 percent of residents said they thought a union of Russia and Ukraine was a good idea.
In the ‘common Jerusalem’, residents are now ready to welcome the Russians with Molotov cocktails. “We don’t have an option. We don’t have the mentality of the Russians and we don’t want anyone to rule over us. If we don’t resist, we’ll know we’ll be suppressed forever with arrests, repression, prisons,” artist Vasily Bondarenko said in a statement. The Economist† The Mongols destroyed Kyiv in the 13th century, the Nazis in World War II. Now the Russians are standing in front of the gate. The question is, are they trying to bomb or starve Kyiv for brotherhood?