THE HISTORY OF THE GRAND DUCHY OF LITHUANIA

Of course, this is not the only view possible of the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the Russian Empire, it was normal to sympathize with Orthodox brethren who were allegedly being mistreated by the Catholic rulers of Lithuania and Poland after the final union of the two countries in 1569. As a result, the Russian tsar ‘came to the aid of his co-religionists’, literally snatching them out of the hands of the ‘heretics’. Everything else, as Alexander Pushkin said, like the partitions of Poland,iIn 1772, 1793, and 1795, Poland was partitioned among Prussia, Russia, and Austriawas ‘a quarrel of the Slavs among themselves, an ancient domestic quarrel’.

In turn, the Soviet schools taught that ‘Lithuanian feudal lords’, taking advantage of the Mongol invasion of 1237–40, seized traditional, ancestral Russian lands and ruthlessly exploited them until, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a strengthened Russia did not return its possessions to the Russian tsar, to the great joy of the ‘brotherly nations’.

In this context, let us try to understand what the state of things really was.

Historians are still arguing about how and why the Grand Duchy of Lithuania came into being. To begin with, these are scholars from Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, that is, from the countries that consider themselves the heirs of the duchy. The temptation is too great to present all this history as the project of one nation, the foundation of a much later nation-state despite the fact that modern Lithuania owes its name to that old state. In any case, it is certainly not correct to speak of nations in the modern sense when dealing with the events of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

It is difficult to argue about the reasons for the emergence of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It emerged in the mid-thirteenth century as a result of a power vacuum in the region, in response to the geopolitical challenges of the time. After the fragmentation of the good old Kievan Rus, and even more so after the burning of Kyiv by the Tatars in 1240, an important center, if not of decision-making then of legitimacy, disappeared from view.

In Europe at this time, there was a wave of colonization of sparsely populated lands, and the whole macro-region came into motion. The French moved into Spain, the Italians moved from the north to the south of Italy, and the Germans moved to the east. On the shores of the Baltic Sea, German crusaders established a bridgehead, which was first the Order of Brothers of the Sword in Livonia in 1202 and then the Teutonic Order.iThe first military orders of knighthood appeared in the Holy Land at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries to protect pilgrims and then Christian possessions. The brothers of these orders combined monastic vows of celibacy, poverty, and chastity with an oath to defend the Christian faith and fight its enemies. The Order of the Brothers of the Sword was founded in Livonia, and the Teutonic Order was founded in the Holy Land in the late twelfth century for German (Teutonic) knights.It came to Poland in 1226 at the invitation of the Polish prince to fight the Baltic pagan Prussians. At first, the Teutons were busy fighting the tribes of Prussians, Curonians, Semigallians, et cetera, on whose lands they were gradually building their new homeland, which we know as East Prussia. But very soon, the Teutons were also interested in pagan Lithuania.

Thus, the lands of the Intermarium—lands between the Baltic and the Black seas—were caught between two fires: from the north and the west, the Brothers of the Sword and the Teutonic Order, united in 1237, hovered over the region, while from the south, they were pressed by the Tatars, who had conquered the main Russian cities.

In this atmosphere, an interesting state construct was formed in the 1240s—Mindaugas Lithuania, named after its first ruler, crowned in 1253 at Novogrudok (Naugardukas) in present-day Belarus (although some historians dispute this). The heart of the new state was Panyamonne, a region along the Neman River inhabited by a mixed population of Balts and Slavs. This is largely the land of modern Belarus, which, unlike much of present-day Ukraine, was not conquered by the Tatars. However, nomadic raids were a daily reality here, and total conquest was a constant threat.

The military and political elite of Mindaugas Lithuania were mostly ethnic Balts, who were pagans. The cities were mainly Slavic, Orthodox, and founded in the times of Kievan Rus. It is interesting that the princes of Baltic origin themselves did not give any ideological meaning to the process of gradual gathering of Russian lands, which is to say that they did not declare that they were the successors of Kievan Rus, although they sometimes experimented with religion. For example, Prince Vaišvilkas, the son of Mindaugas (1264–67), adopted Orthodox Christianity, the religion of his Russian subjects.

However, he seems to have been the only Orthodox prince of Lithuania. Much more often, the mothers and wives of the grand dukes were Orthodox Christians. In time, it became customary to give daughters to the princes of Tver, Pskov, Novgorod, and even Moscow. And the daughters of pagan fathers, and later Catholics, accepted Orthodox Christianity and became a living diplomatic bridge between countries, wielders of ‘soft power’.

As we have already noted, Soviet historians portrayed Lithuanian history through a very specific lens: ‘Lithuanian feudal lords have conquered…’ However, there are no grounds for such conclusions; the clashes were not recorded either in chronicles or by archeologists. Most likely, it was an alliance between the Lithuanians and Russians on mutually beneficial terms. The Baltic retainers—leičiai, from which the word ‘Lithuania’ is probably derived—defended themselves against the expansion of both the Germans and the Tatars. The Slavic townspeople and merchants took care of the economy. The situation is similar to the formation of Rus in the eighth and ninth centuries, when Slavic and Finno-Ugric tribes invited Swedish warrior princes to their lands to found a dynasty known in history as Rurikids.iThis was a princely dynasty dating back to the Norman Rurik and ruled Russia from 862 to 1598And this was only the beginning.

All of the fourteenth century was a period of spectacular territorial growth of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The new state filled the empty spaces formed during the crisis of Kievan Rus, where ‘power was underfoot’ or rather, was in the hands of local elites, appanage princes. In fact, the old Russian lands were being reassembled under a new brand name—Lithuania.

The year 1362 can be considered a turning point: the army under the command of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Algirdas (1345–1377) defeated the Tatars for the first time in the Battle of Blue Waters. The process of incorporating what are Ukrainian lands today —the Principality of Kyiv, Podoliaб and a part of the so-called Wild Fields—into Lithuania’s orbit began, which created an interesting situation. Suddenly a huge empire appeared in the east of Europe, of which the exclusively Baltic territories were barely a tenth part. The rest was Rus— or what later became Belarus and Ukraine, that is, Slavic-speaking countries of the Orthodox faith and cultural background.

Gradually, the elite of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was Slavicized and ‘Russified’, and the language of documents and correspondence became Russian.iHere and below I sometimes put the word ‘Russian’ in quotes because the Russian of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is not identical to the modern concept of ‘Russian’Even Grand Duke Jogaila (1377–82, 1382–92), who became king of Poland in 1386, did not master Latin and wrote ‘in Russian’, which his mother, Uliana, the princess of Tver, taught him. In the sixteenth century, when the rulers of Lithuania had long been Catholics, all three versions of the state constitution—the Statutes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania of 1529, 1566, and 1588—were written not in Latin, but in Russian, the business language of the grand ducal chancellery. The Bible of Francysk Skaryna (1517–19), perhaps the most famous intellectual of the Grand Duchy, was also printed in ‘Russian’.

Nevertheless, the Lithuanian elite, who remained pagan as late as the fourteenth century, was in no hurry to embrace Orthodox Christianity, the religion of the vast majority of its subjects, as they preferred Catholicism. In general, Lithuanian princes were often baptized, and beginning with Vytenis (1295–1316), every Lithuanian prince periodically sent a declaration of his baptism to the West. The purpose, however, was not at all pious, but pragmatic. The promise of being baptized could stop the attacks of the Teutonic Order, which according to the ‘statutes’ was only authorized to fight against pagans. When the crusader onslaught subsided, the Lithuanian elite successfully forgot their promises and altars to the old gods were burned again in the capital Wilno.

God knows how long this not-too-divine comedy would have lasted if not for the unique opportunity that presented itself to Grand Duke Jogaila, the son of Grand Duke Algirdas. Jogaila’s mother, Uliana of Tver, advocated her son’s marriage with Sophia of Moscow from the Rurik clan, which would mean an alliance with the Muscovites and the ‘Eastern Vector’ in general. But Jogaila chose to marry the thirteen-year-old Polish queen Jadwiga. Surprisingly, the Polish nobility accepted the barbarian (we’ll find out more about the motives of the alliance between Kyiv and Poland in the third lecture). The marriage was followed by a political manifesto—the Catholic baptism of Lithuania in 1387. This was a very important event: we are talking about the baptism of the pagan territories of today’s Lithuania, as well as Grodno and Panyamonne lands. No one converted the Orthodox Christians to Catholicism, and the vast possessions of Kyiv, Smolensk, Polotsk, Chernigov, Brest, et cetera, remained Orthodox. Not only the bourgeoisie and the clergy, but also the elite, the former appanage princes, continued to be called ‘Rus’, which did not mean the state, but the language and religious community. However, all the great princes after Jogaila firmly adhered to Catholicism.

Jogaila’s choice can hardly be called ‘European’ as opposed to an alliance with ‘Asian’ Muscovy. In those dark times, of course, Jogaila could not be concerned with ‘European values’. Rather, he was interested in an alliance with Poland in the interest of the eternal struggle against the Teutonic Order and for a number of other issues more relevant than values. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, this alliance would be fully justified when the Polish-Lithuanian army would inflict a decisive defeat on the Teutonic Order at the Battle of Grunwald (and we’ll discover more about this in the third lecture).

Considering the relations of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with northwestern Russia—the Vladimir–Suzdalian principality and then Moscow—it is difficult to draw a line between where there was competition with Russian princes for influence and where there were conflicts with the Horde since the princes of Vladimir and then Moscow were vassals of the Horde until almost the end of the fifteenth century. In addition, the ideas of the ‘Third Rome’ and the ‘assembly point of the Russian lands’ were not yet accepted in Moscow at that time.

In the fourteenth century, Lithuania was interested in the frontier of Tver as a counterweight to Moscow. Not only war but diplomacy was also used as a weapon. Thus, the wedding of the daughter of Grand Duke Gediminas (1316–41) to Dmitry Mikhailovich of Tver in the winter of 1319–20 was a gesture of support from the Grand Duchy to one of the leaders in the struggle for supremacy in the region. Then there was the political asylum provided to Prince Alexander Mikhailovich of Tver in 1329. However, in the future, he was able to come to an agreement with the khan: in 1337, he came to the Horde, apologized, and Özbeg Khan (1313–41) returned the principality of Tver to him.

A year later, the Moscow prince Ivan Kalita (1322–40) went to the Horde, met with Özbeg, and ‘solved the problem’—the Tver prince and his son were executed by the khan in 1339. According to historians, the fate of Alexander Mikhailovich and his son was predetermined by their ‘Lithuanian connections’, which Kalita used as an argument with the khan. The example is illustrative: it seemed that the Muscovite prince cared about the khan’s interests and did not allow important lands to be taken out of his sphere of influence.

The powerful merchant republic of Novgorod, in turn, maneuvered more or less successfully between the Livonian Order, an offshoot of the Teutonic Order, Lithuania, and Moscow. The nature of the merchant republic differed greatly from its expansive neighbors as the Novgorodians had no interest in active land grabbing. The priority was to maintain the status quo for large-scale trade with the West. Diplomacy and dynastic marriages were Novgorod’s weapons.

Signs of changes in Lithuania’s eastern policy can be seen only in the reign of Vytautas, Jogaila’s cousin and an independent prince, from 1392 to 1430. Despite the fact that all the important events in Vytautas’s time revolved around the triangle of Lithuania, Poland, and the Teutonic Order, the grand duke was clearly interested in Moscow as well. It was Vytautas who annexed the principality of Smolensk, the easternmost territory of the Grand Duchy through its history. There was even an ambitious plan to divide the spheres of influence: the Order would get the trading republic of Pskov and Lithuania would get Novgorod.

In 1391, Vytautas gave his daughter Sophia to the son of Dmitry Donskoy, Prince Vasily I of Moscow. She accepted Orthodoxy and gave birth to five sons and at least four daughters. One of the daughters, Anastasia, married the Slutsk Orthodox Prince Olelkoin in 1417. The marriage was, once again, the work of Vytautas to build bridges between the Grand Duchy and Muscovy. At the same time, Vytautas was trying to get Constantinople to recognize Gregory Tsamblak as the Metropolitan of Kyiv and Lithuania, which would create an Orthodox center in his lands. Moscow was very jealous of the appearance of an independent Metropolitan of Kyiv, or as it was officially advertised, the Metropolitan of Lithuania and All Russia, in the Russian lands of Lithuania in 1415.i It is unclear whether this was sanctioned by Constantinople

After the death of Vasily I in 1425, Vytautas’s Moscow solitaire could have worked in principle. His grandson, the son of Sophia, was to take the throne in the Kremlin. In 1427, Sophia visited her father in Minsk, while he went to his ‘Russian lands’, and the princes of Ryazan and Novosilsk and Odoyevsk swore fealty to him. He was supposed to reach Moscow, but he took a diversion through Volynia and went to a meeting with Jogaila.

Vytautas died in 1430, his desire for many achievements unfulfilled. In particular, the crown from the pope never reached him (there is a version of the story that says the ambassadors were deliberately delayed by the Poles), and so he died a grand duke and not the king of Lithuania. The very realistic project of Lithuania’s unification with Muscovy did not materialize either. Today, we can only wonder about the probable fate of a Eurasia in which Wilno and Moscow would have come together to form one state. Vytautas’s grandson Vasily II, son of Sophia, ascended the throne of Moscow after his grandfather’s death. Khan Ulugh Muhammad gave him a jarlig (decree) to rule, and the enthronement was carried out by the khan’s ambassador in Vladimir in 1432.

In the 1430s, both Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were plunged into civil war (if the term ‘civil’ is appropriate for the feudal lords’ war for power), and claims to the ‘Russian inheritance’ had to be forgotten for a while.

The first clashes between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Muscovy date back to the thirteenth century. Algirdas’s campaigns against Moscow, with his spear rattling against the walls of the Kremlin, date back to 1368–71. It was not yet a war of annihilation, only conflicts for influence over Tver, Bryansk, Smolensk, and other still disputed lands. These conflicts alternated with periods of not simply peace but dynastic marriages. Some 200 years later, it would be hard to imagine such a thing.

The situation was quite different under Ivan III (1462–1505), the ‘collector of Russian lands’. The oldest tradition of chronicles, preserved in the form of manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, began the history of Muscovy with Novgorod and Kievan Rus. This is how the idea of a single country and a single history was preserved and constantly reproduced. All this would one day become a ‘license’ to expand the territories that were supposedly the Moscow prince’s ‘fathers’ and grandfathers’ lands’. Ivan was the first to attempt to use the title Grand Prince of All Russia. Given that, at the time, the entire territory of present-day Belarus and almost all of present-day Ukraine belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, such a declaration could mean only one thing: war.

From the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the conflicts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with Muscovy became routine. The First Border War of 1492–94, the war of 1500–03, 1507–08, 1512–22, et cetera, continued for more than a century and a half. People were born during one war and died (or were killed) during another. Moreover, as time went on, the ideology and the emphasis on faith and Russianness only became stronger and stronger. As early as the seventeenth century, when the policy of Latinization in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth intensified, this kind of propaganda often found grateful listeners and was successful. In 1651, the inhabitants of Mogilev opened the gates to the Muscovites on their own, although ten years later, they slaughtered the garrison of Streltsy and the Cossacks.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, the situation was fundamentally different. The ‘Russian’ elite of the Grand Duchy Lithuania did not disappear: they were incorporated into the state mechanism and fought for its rights. From 1492 to 1569, about 40 per cent of the highest positions in the state, even in ethnic Lithuania and Samogitia, were occupied by representatives of ‘Russian’ clans. The Sapiehas, Wołłowiczs, Holszańskis, or Patzes had Baltic roots but adhered to Orthodoxy, and thus, they were also nominally Russians.

There is ample evidence that the representatives of the Orthodox ‘Russian’ elite fully identified themselves with the Grand Duchy and saw Muscovy and the Crimean khanate as an existential enemy. The most characteristic example is Konstanty Ostrogski, the richest magnate from Volhynia, who became the victor of the Muscovites at the Battle of Orsha in 1514. Ostrogski was not only of Orthodox origin but also a patron of Orthodox culture, a defender of Russian identity, and one of the leaders of the ‘Russian party’ in the Grand Duchy. The same ideology was consistently continued by his son and heir, who was also called Constantine (they are often confused). The senior Ostrogski was not only the Grand Hetman of the Grand Duchy but also the Voivode of Trok. Thus, at that time, he occupied the highest posts in the state after the grand duke, which was the ultimate career ceiling in terms of secular power.

However, there were increasing restrictions on Orthodox Ruthenians in politics. Catholicism was dominant, and an Orthodox identity was already considered suspect, if not toxic, in terms of potential ties to Muscovy (which were thought to be necessary for intrigues and power struggles). The dominant families of Lithuanian origin—the Radziwiłłs, Goštautai, Zabrzezińskis, Kęsgailas, et cetera—were not eager to share their power with the Ruthenians and often used denomination-based rhetoric to keep ahead.

The identity situation became even more complicated during the Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century. Both Lithuanian and Ruthenian magnate families often adopted the new Protestant faith. As a result, the criterion of Ruthenian equalling Orthodox and Lithuanian equalling Catholic was questioned, if not multiplied by zero. At the Wilno Sejm of 1563, Grand Duke Sigismund II Augustus lifted the restrictions on Orthodox access to the highest offices. The Lithuanian nobility did not object in principle because the Radziwiłłs were Protestants at the time, and they were happy with anything that could hurt Catholics.

At the same time, the process of changing the elite’s identity from Ruthenian to Catholic-Lithuanian was in full swing. Adopting the new ideology was a good investment as it provided opportunities for growth not only in the Grand Duchy, but also for the crown of the Kingdom of Poland. The West was politically and culturally attractive. It was a relatively unified cultural and political space, one with Renaissance art, universities, economy, fashion, gallant manners, stone palaces, and majestic churches—simply everything attractive seemed to be concentrated there.

The Union of Lublin in 1569 between Livonia and Poland, which resulted in the formation of the ‘union state’, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, can be considered an important crossroads. Magnates with ‘Russian’ backgrounds treated the union with caution, but did not make any sudden moves. The ‘Russian’ magnates hoped to equalize their rights with the Poles, and it worked. The Ostrogskis, Zbarskis, Wiśniowieckis, Zaslawskis, Czartoryskis, Sapiehas, Chodkiewiczes, et cetera, soon became the top politicians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, thus they hardly regretted their choice.

One should not accuse members of the Ruthenian nobility, especially the oligarchy like the Sapiehas, of any ‘betrayal’ of their Orthodox faith and traditions. These people lived in a completely different system and were guided by the interests of their families, considerations of profit, and security in the region. In any case, the ‘Russian project’ in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and in the broader context of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, came to an end.

In the long historical perspective, all the trump cards for claiming ‘Russian heritage’ remained in Moscow’s hands. Polonization and the adoption of Catholicism became a clear prospect. After the Union of Lublin in 1569, the lands of Ukraine and Podlachia went directly to Poland, and the lands of modern Belarus remained in Lithuania. Thus, the Lithuanian Rus was divided in an administrative manner. Then there was Polonization, the religious Union of Brest of 1596, which subordinated a number of Orthodox bishoprics to the pope, ‘local overreactions’ in Ukraine, which led to the rebellion of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his alliance with Muscovy. But that is another story.