SPQR Senātus Populus que Rōmānus.Translated, the Senate and People of Rome. The motto of the Roman Empire, whose legions marched under that banner in service of its Emperors.
"I will burn other people's villages with a cheerful smile."
"It ain’t a war crime if you had fun."
"Behind us, there is a house on fire. Well, let it burn. One more, one less."
Russian wall scribbling in liberated Ukrainian territory.
What's wrong with Russia?
People have been asking that question for years, maybe centuries.
Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Winston Churchill
No, it's really not.
What it is, is something it isn't. It was never part of the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire was the most extensive expression of the Greco-Roman world and their culture. The Greeks had commenced the work that Rome would end up finishing, or rather the Catholic Church would end up finishing, well prior to Rome's rise, however. The great Greek philosophers came into being prior to even the expansion of the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great, infusing its culture with the outlook of the Western world. Under Alexander the Greeks spread throughout the Mediterranean region, but the Romans picked it up, and the Greek world view, and massively expanded it.
Indeed, the influence of the Greeks and the Romans was so extensive that a student of early Christianity can't help but be impressed by the extent to which Christ and his disciples lived in a Judea that had been heavily impacted by the Greeks. The version of the Old Testament that is quoted in the New Testament pretty clear is the Septuagint, the Greek version. Most, maybe all, of the New Testament was originally written in Greek. Thoughts expressed in the New Testament are such that there have been those who have speculated that they could not have been expressed in Hebrew, had Hebrew remained the language of the Israelites, and that therefore Divine Providence was at work. Early Christian Church fathers applied Greek philosophy to their understanding of Theology.1
The Romans built on what they obtained from the Greeks, and they built the concept of a multicultural empire. Rome started off a city state monarchy but in the end, it was a multicultural empire in which anyone within it could become a Roman citizen under certain circumstances. Its unifying features was a uniform legal code and two languages, Latin and Greek. You could be a cultural German, but if you could learn Latin and adhere to Rome's legal code, you had a chance to be as Roman as an Italian born in Rome.
The Church, and there was only one, came in and added the concept that there was only one moral code for everyone in the world, and your status and culture didn't trump that. It also came in with a strong ethos of support for the plight of the poor and the equality of everyone before God. Real women's rights came in with the Church, and the end of slavery was made inevitable by it as well. The supremacy in religious matters of the Roman pontiff pointed out that even the government was subject to the Natural Law, and that it didn't create it.
We are all Romans.
The influence of Rome spread well beyond the Empire, even during the Roman age, and that was through Christianity. Rome made it all the way up to the Teutoburg, but not beyond that. Christianity did, however. It may have taken the Northern Crusades to bring the Poles in, but brave missionaries to bring in the Scandinavians, but they did.
In the East, the Baltic was part of the Greek world, and hence the Roman world. St. Andrew the apostle travelled into what is the southern Ukraine, via the Black Sea, and preached at least in Scythia. Some maintain that he saild the Dneiper and preached in Kyiv.
Ukraine was the subject of missionary work in the 800s. St. Cyril and Methodius, brothers, passed through Ukraine during their missionary work. Western Ukraine, which is where the Ukrainian Catholic Church has its presence today, was Christianized first.
Under St. Vladimir The Great, a Kyivan king claimed by both the Ukrainians and the Russians, the Kyivan Rus were firmly brought into the Church. But of note, Vladimir had been born a pagan and converted to the Church (again, there was only one) in 988 after traveling to the West and studying the non-pagan religions. He died in 1015 at age 57.
Now, 1015 is a very late date. St. Andrew had been in the region in 55AD. St. Cyril and Methodius in the late 800s. But as late as 988 paganism still existed in the lands of the Rus.
And in 1054, the Great Schism commenced.
Now, the Rus did take to Christianity, of that there can be no doubt. But the Great Schism put their Church outside the Latin world to some degree. Islam was already on the rise, and the Byzantine Empire would fall in 1453. In 1448 the Russian Church obtained de facto independence, although in 1439 history nearly took a different course with Russian Orthodox representatives recognized Rome as the head of the Church at the Council of Florence. Sadly, their union was prevented from taking effect.
So basically, the Russians were on the edge of the world. The Great Schism, the collapse of the Roman Empire, and then the collapse of the Byzantine kept them there. Ukraine had been part of the Greco-Roman world, and to some degree, it remains so, especially the further west in Ukraine you go.
And this matters.
Outside of the Moscow elite and a very small urban elite, Russia is one great big blue-collar country.
Fiona Hill
Russia definitely has a cultured development and the Russians are a great people. But they're a people where western concepts have never taken root, including the concept that power devolves from the people, and not the other way around. Even those who have attempted, and there have been many, to change that, have uniformly failed.
It's a culture that has developed great works of art and literature, while remaining insular and focused on itself. Outside of Russia, everyone is some sort of odd stranger, and the Russians have, from time to time, imagined themselves as the archetype of Slavs. The culture has a hard time not accepting that to some degree.
And it's a rough place to live in part because of this. People die young, often due to conditions and alcoholism. Male deaths outstrip women's by quite some margin.2 Brutality and acceptance of horrible conditions exists where it has departed elsewhere. Russia's military retains an ethos of cruelty that stems back to ancient times and manifests itself in horrific ancient behaviors.
And hence, there's really no mystery.
Russia wasn't part of the Greco-Roman world.
Ukraine, however, was.
Footnotes.
1. There's a common myth that Islam preserved the works of the Greek philosophers, and Christians got them from them.
In reality, Islam got the texts of the Greek philosophers from Chaldean Christians, who had preserved them. Latin Christians did get them from Islamic Arabs, but it is important to note that Islamic Arabs got them from Chaldean Christians.
As it happened, Hellenized Islamist theologians were later dismissed and regarded as heretical in Islam.
2. As an odd expression of this, it's often frequently noted that younger Russian women are disproportionately beautiful, before age and conditions change this at a rate not experienced in the West. It's been seriously suggested that this is due to natural selection, as the population of women always exceeds that of men, thereby giving physically attractive women a heightened competitive genetic advantage.
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