There was always a hint of one-upmanship in Russia's vision for the planned statue of Grand Prince Vladimir that, rising 24 metres from a hilltop in Moscow, would be even taller than the monument to the very same medieval monarch that has towered over Ukraine's capital, Kiev, for more than 160 years.
Russia’s Military Historical Society has championed the project that, timed to coincide with the 1,000th anniversary of Prince Vladimir’s death, will pay tribute to the ruler who brought Christianity to the Slavs and laid the spiritual foundations of the future Russian state.
However, it appears that organisers erred when choosing, without public consultation, the site for the Prince Vladimir monument at an elevated spot on Moscow’s Sparrows Hills that critics warn is dangerously prone to landslides.
After being bombarded with protests from civic activists, the Russian Military History Society backed down early this week and asked the Moscow parliament to propose an alternative location. A decision is expected next month.
Sun Prince
Grand Prince Vladimir looms large in
Russia
and Ukraine’s shared history as the sainted warrior who unified the peoples of his medieval Kiev Rus kingdom under the banner of Orthodox Christianity.
Chroniclers tell how the “Sun Prince” ordered his troops to ditch all pagan paraphernalia in the waters of the river Dnieper in Kiev before forcing city folk to wade in for mass baptisms.
In its heyday Kiev Rus encompassed a large territory between the Black Sea and the Baltic that is now part of modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
The kingdom disintegrated after the Mongol Golden Horde invaded in the 13th century and although Kiev held out as the Christian Orthodox ecclesiastical centre for a while, the Holy See eventually moved on, finding a permanent home in Moscow in 1332.
From Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church still sees Ukraine as its canonical territory and, although loyal to the Kremlin, is wary of stoking conflict that could drive its Ukrainian flock to defect to the Kiev Patriarchate that emerged after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Rising tensions
As tensions built over Ukraine’s European aspirations in July 2013, Patriarch Kirill accompanied Russia’s president,
Vladimir Putin
, on a visit to Kiev to attend celebrations commemorating the Dnieper river baptisms and paid tribute to the historic role of Russian Christian Orthodoxy in cementing ties between the two countries.
But that was before the Maidan revolution in Kiev unleashed a chain of turbulent events that culminated in Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year and the outbreak of violent conflict in east Ukraine where pro-Moscow rebels are still fighting government troops.
Against this overwhelmingly hostile backdrop, an information and ideological confrontation has emerged with Russia and Ukraine competing over their shared past – including the defining legacy of Grand Prince Vladimir.
“The fabric of the history of Kievan Rus looks very much like a blanket, with each country trying to pull all of it to one side,” wrote Ekaterina Chimiris, a political scientist at the Russian International Affairs Council.
Putin has invoked the memory of his namesake Prince Vladimir’s baptism in Crimea to bolster Russia’s claim to the “sacred land” of the Black Sea peninsula.
Defining statement
Ukraine’s president,
Petro Poroshenko
, has called for the commemoration of Prince Volodymer – as the saint is known there – as the founder not of Kiev Rus but Rus-Ukraine.)
In a city with few religious statues the installation of a Prince Vladimir monument in Moscow would make a defining statement about Russia’s national and religious identity.
With the future of the statue hanging in the balance this week, civic activists were still flocking to sign a petition slamming the planned site on Sparrow hills as “unlawful” and “dangerous”.
Critics of the project say the monument would sit uncomfortably with the Moscow State University building nearby and spoil the panoramic view from the Sparrow Hills promenade that is a magnet for tourists and wedding parties.
Vladimir Kononov, the deputy director of the Russian Historical Society, struck a conciliatory note this week saying the monument could be reduced in size to fit with a more constricted downtown environment by removing its seven-metre plinth.
But it’s not lost on anyone who can do arithmetic that a truncated Moscow Saint Vladimir would be shorter than the 18-metre Kiev version that already has a locational edge looking over the ancient baptismal font of the Dnieper river.
It was “obvious”, wrote Alexei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of the Echo Moskvy radio station, last week that the debate over the monument “was not being driven by aesthetics or culture, but by politics with a whistle to the capital of Ukraine: Saint Vladimir is not yours but ours.”
