Real Fellowship — More Slavic, Less Varangian
Let the Ukrainians be your guides
In 2013, I went to Kosovo. I was there to talk about health programs with the government. In the course of the meetings, when there was a lag in the schedule, my contacts invited me to spend a day with them. We drove to the most marvelous town of Istog, where there is a famous trout farm and restaurant. We were eating there in a public space when I learned something I had not known. More to the point, I experienced something I had not previously imagined.
I don’t suppose I had followed the Kosovo story more than most people. It could not be rightly avoided in its time, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine now. When studying international relations in 1989/1991, I was told that when the Iron Curtain came down as was occurring at that time, there would be war in the Balkans. Yugoslavia, we were taught, was held together by the force of one man, Marshal Tito, and international expectations, particularly with respect to the Soviet system. He was gone, having died in 1980. When the Soviet “glue” was gone, longstanding animosities would break through. That was the given wisdom in the international community at that time. That conventional wisdom turned out to be prescient.
Not recounting the details, the Kosovars dealt with a war much as the Ukrainians are now. One retired American general likened the Ukrainian situation to the American Revolution, with the scruffy Americans working their way against a professional army with overwhelming resources but little personal investment.
As with the Ukrainians, the Kosovars had been ‘all in’ as were the American colonists whose rights and identities had been held in question.
We can read about this. We can discuss it. We can come to appreciate it and honor it. We who have not experienced it directly do not know it.
In that restaurant that day, I witnessed it, at least, a glint of it. The manifestations were very subtle. Someone would walk into the room, typically in a company of people. One of my hosts would react. There may or may not have been movement. There was definitely energy, then a slight nod or other gesture. Sometimes they would get up.
There were deep feelings behind these glances and acknowledgements. I could tell that these were real. The point was, these people had been at war together, an existential matter. I learned later through conversation with my hosts that the war, in fact, was not a congealing factor in the creation of this, but rather was a manifestation of this. The roots of conviviality run deep. Further study reinforced that along with relationships with more in the region.
Later that day, they invited me to a funeral in a cemetery outside of town. A young married couple had been in an automobile accident in Switzerland on their honeymoon the day prior and the husband had died. True to tradition, the funeral took place the next day.
This was instructive, as well. The cemetery was not groomed with grass and neo-European landscaping as in the English model. It was an unkempt field. On the other hand, the headstones of the graves were large and elaborate and artistically-framed. Furthermore, they each had an extensive written area with what looked like pretty comprehensive obituaries. They disclosed a commitment to the fact of how the person had lived in each case, not simply that they had lived.
Probably in the neighborhood of a thousand people came to the funeral in the field, filling a large space. As luck would have it, the imam in charged kind of brushed by me on the way in. He seemed very young.
My companions said to me (paraphrasing), “Whatever you do or do not do during the prayer and the service, it is OK. We represent all traditions and we honor all traditions.”
It makes me think that perhaps the torrid history of the Balkans has more ethnic roots than religious ones. Also, I am suspicious of outsiders coming and going in the region, caught up in the “Great Game” that has more to do with their own questions and perceived needs than those of the Kosovos and Ukraines of the world.
There are people that reminisce about their histories in terms of millennia, if not major proportions thereof. Their families have inhabited their places for untold generations. In many cases, they live in ancestral homes from very ancient times. Their identities date back to the most ancient of sources, such as the Bible.
This whole experiment in modernism, begun just a few hundred years ago, flies in the face of the long history of human civilization.
When I was young, I was an orchestral trumpeter. Our conductor was an old-school taskmaster. One piece we played often was Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. A representation of the main theme of the piece is below, an example of melody, unexpected rhythm, and exoticism.
The piece by Mussorgsky was a programmatic effort, simulating reactions of a visitor to an art gallery to paintings encountered there. Here is the painting in question, “Plan for a City Gate”, created by Victor Hartmann. A modern commemorative representation of the gate can be seen in the title image.
Apart from the gate itself — or at least the concept behind it — is the culture behind it. It is obvious upon hearing that there there are rich underpinnings to the cultures in question.
If you can read music, you will sense the power of this piece. Otherwise, you can look it up and listen. It is indeed a revelation in listening. There is depth there, not even equaled in much of Western European music of the times, which is imbued with less angst
In a sense, Russian music represents the history of the soul of music, this being one example. Interestingly, as it becoming more evident, Russian history is largely Ukrainian history. This is not to be confused with the convoluted variation of this as offered up by the current Russian president.
If you are to assign more viable pivots to history in that region, Moscow was an after-thought to Kiev, which was to be the seat of power of the church after Rome and Constantinople, were it not for the raids from the Golden Horde, the Mongols from the east. Moscow was simply too cold to be a viable target for the horsemen.
In short, if you open up the Russian nesting dolls, you will find a Ukrainian doll in your hand at the last. There is grandeur in this. As can be seen in the original piano scoring of the last movement of the Pictures at an Exhibition, “The Great Gate of Kiev”, this is a powerful statement:
Leading out on the trumpet, this was one of my most favorite pieces of music to play. This is the case the world over. This represents a shoutout from one of the main heartlands of the world.
This comes to the fellowship question. In the fog of rational action and invisible hand thinking, the benefits of cooperation are lost. There is a false sense, for example, that since China is on the rise and the United States is challenged in the process, there must be war. Where does this come from? Well, from conquerors and colonials in the first place. The really wizened ones refer to the Peloponnesian Wars between Sparta and Athens.
The logic behind it? This is the “unvarnished truth” of geopolitics. It is basically as follows:
“Get over it! Humans are greedy, jealous so-and-sos. There is simply no way that they can get along when one group is doing better than another. This will ultimately end in violence [and presumed theft]. You either learn this or you lose.”
This is a farcical presumption when brought to bear in academic circles. Where is the rigor? At least, aren’t there counterfactual examples?
It is difficult rigorously study the question because it is a part of a modern “bubble” that exists. There is no reason for this. As data collection and archeological findings have coalesced in the last hundred years or so, it can be seen that many of the presumptions of the Enlightenment were not well-founded. As can be seen, the best source for understanding the underpinnings of culture and civilization was not Greece — certainly not Rome — but in earlier cultures and civilizations. This is true of the longstanding culture of Sumer in Mesopotamia in particular. There are also documented examples in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and with scattered sea peoples and isolated cultures, such as in Australia.
Other old cultures also come into view from the works of key historians, including Fernand Braudel, Karl Polanyi, Mark Nathan Cohen. What emerged from translating and reading of ancient texts and evaluation of ever-greater stores of evidence are pictures of highly-nuanced, mixed systems of governance and adaptation to changing natural and social conditions. Evidence now demonstrates that over the long history, there were far more people in question to have lived and learned than had been assumed. According to the US Population Research Bureau (https://tinyurl.com/2p8stsh7), 117 billion people have lived on the earth, half of whom lived before the “meridian” date of 0 CE. This is to say that 55 billion people had lived before that time, that pivot point in history.
This is to say that there was a lot going on besides people wandering in semi-isolation. Evidence shows that for the last 100,000 years or so, human capacities have been stable and roughly equivalent. Despite evidence that persistent written languages do not seem to have existed before early Sumer in about 4,000 BCE, cognition has nonetheless existed at levels equivalent to ours for some time. Occasionally and provocatively, findings disclose a very old world with remarkable, persistent projects. Gobekli Tepe, for example, demonstrates commitment and sophistication that would have required commitments and cooperation for centuries to create, and evidence supports it existence to approximately 9,000 years ago.
It is not always clear why ancient ancestors cooperated as they did, but it is undeniable that they did get along by means of fellowship and cooperation. In the great cities of Sumer — Uruk and Ur in particular — there is now evidence of highly-nuanced and flexible social conditions that allowed for personal protections and public accomplishments. A lot of this centered on water works and water management, similar to the formulas and traditions that underscored the long success of the Chinese, that extends to the present.
For example, we were taught in the late 1980s that the Chinese would never be able to successfully build the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. It was simply too complex in scope, with too many conflicting agendas and interests among the people, the institutions in question, and the many governmental units. I learned that under the auspices of the Chinese People’s Political Consultancy Conference they had over 60 large-scale conference programs to consider the issues in the early 1990s, providing grounds to build the dam and implement related plans.
Vestiges of the old cultures of cooperation persist. Sometimes, they are forced into the margins, as colonials and neo-colonials have demonstrated enmity toward such projects. A couple of summers ago, I visited a national monument in the American West where the exploits of John Wesley Powell, who brought the Grand Canyon to light to modern society. He records that a native tribe helped his exploration camp survive by finding water on plants and other otherwise obscure locations. These had adapted to the exigencies of nature in the harsh environment of Western North America.
Unfortunately, by the time Powell returned to the area — a matter of some few years later — the tribe had not survived. Attuned to the intricacies of nature as they found it, they had not been able to survive changes brought on by the new people even for a few years.
Astonishing things can happen when hearts and minds are brought together in common cause. An interesting aspect of Sumerian culture was that while arrangements were in place through the “Great Organizations” of palaces and temples to meet basic needs for food and shelter, the people could exert initiative on top of these to realize further gains. The point of the matter, though, was to keep the water flowing and the grains growing to meet basic needs. The following graphic outlines many of the concepts and developments from Uruk alone among others that can be traced to the city-states of ancient Sumer.
It is most interesting to note that, while there were walls in and around cities as they grew, there were no borders between them. Influence acted more like gravity in that distances between the cities were not militarized during Sumer’s long existence. Uruk in particular had regional influence for a long period, which extended through trade, art, and culture. Collaborations and relationships existed in the times of Uruk influence to the far reaches of their known world. Did Uruk’s influence exist as it was pushed onto others from the center or was it the far-reaching cities that came to Uruk for mutual benefit? It is likely that it was more a matter of Uruk leadership, but the longstanding, non-militant nature of those relationships that stands out, evidence that it had proved satisfying.
Where did this idea of destruction being “cool” if not “necessary” come from? It is a perception that permeates to all levels of contemporary personal and social existence. Plato wrote of this in The Republic. There he notes that a child raised under combative conditions will likely not trust anyone else, where another raised in loving and caring environments may become battered and confused when entering the adult world of competition because of a naïve sense of goodness in all people. Ultimately, such a person could learn to deduce difference between the two means of living.
Such a person, in Plato’s mind, would thus have the capacity to serve in a judicial role. Regardless, we can say with confidence that this would be a form of useful wisdom in both private and public affairs.
I once had a university colleague, an artist, who drew small caricatures of pirates on his whiteboard as a visual reminder of the question of raw power in the face of cooperation. The visual, as seen in the depiction below was in his telling protection in case he was “tempted” to behave always in full fellowship. This was stated in a lighthearted way, but the message was grim: When called upon by his leaders to “use his dagger”, he would do so without question.
Certainly, there are short-term gains to be had from piracy. That is the point. But is history truly then a story of “suckers and pirates”? Are goodness and stupidity roughly equivalent to one another?
There is a fun example of benefits to be had through cooperation in the popular American film “Silverado”. In that story, one of the protagonists is found lying in his underwear in the desert, apparently on the edge of death. In recounting his story to his savior, he had been riding with others under harmonious circumstances when all of a sudden “everyone was pointing a gun but me”, as he said. They then stole his horse and everything but his underwear and left him to presumably die — laughing as they rode away.
The story develops into an example of fraternity and fellowship between him and three others. Together, they were able to right the wrongs and extinguish a ‘den of pirates’ who had taken over an isolated town and its immediate environs. This is a fun and entertaining example of what we would wish to see generally, hopefully, without the shootout parts.
If piracy is to be the way, the pirates would be well-served to find some way to engender a sort of ‘integrity farm’, something on the side so that there is something to fight over. For one thing, without boundaries, the pirates themselves would go down in an instant — from poisonous grog or murders in their sleep.
This is an important aspect of the history of Europe — both eastern and western. This has to do with the Ukrainian situation now, the juxtaposition between Russia’s tradition of rule and similar activities to the west. To understand this development, let us return for a brief review of the history.
As is generally understood, with the fall of the Roman Empire, prospects for safety and prosperity in Europe were particularly galling in the west. It was more than the lack of Rome as a settling influence, there was lack of knowledge of Greece and its enlightenment before that. Not much was known about what had gone in ancient times, pre-Biblical in particular. It was presumed that there had simply been wandering nomads and oppressive kings that had forced people to carry out their will under conditions of servitude. What evidence we now know of Sumer, for example, was lying in prior times in the dust of what is now Southern Iraq.
What was poorly understood is that there were two dark ages in play. First, there had been the recent failure of states in the North Mediterranean. Prior to this was a dark age — mediated partially by aspects of the Hebrew record — that resulted from the fall of Sumer in Mesopotamia and the fall of other ancient states in Africa, India, etc. The Greeks and others were trying to learn of and incorporate aspects of these. This is to say that Greek vision — crippled by the fact that the Romans had destroyed Greek libraries to obscure that culture — was itself a reflection, a shadow of what had gone on before.
In the east of Europe to the extent of Western Asia, neither of the dark ages had the same effect as in the west. As to eastern Christianity, it had continued from Rome to Constantinople, to Kiev, and then to Moscow. Similarly, Islam benefitted from its proximity to the old cultures of the Middle East and was not affected by the second, European dark age.
One thing was shared by all Europeans. Their lives were unstable. There were village programs that brought some prosperity, but these were routinely interrupted by raiders, mostly from the north. To the west, the raiders were called Vikings. To the east, they were called Varangians. A thousand years of raids on both counts — and in the east, the people also had to deal with the Golden Hoard of mounted Mongol raiders that came like wildfires and stripped the people of their goods and their pride.
It is little wonder that European-centered cultures have some inherent mistrust of governments’ ability to protect them. A thousand years lacking protection, and more, surely has taken a toll. It is no surprise, then, to know that in the east and in the west, a similar compromise was achieved in the early stages of the first millennium CE. As seen in the graphic below, in both cases, raiders themselves were brought in to govern the people.
In the west, Viking tribes merged with ruling families, supported by the common people under the understanding they they would stop raiding and start protecting. Governance concepts that came of this retained much of the Viking mindset. In the East, the primary deal was with the eastern raiders, the Varangians. These came in to rule; they understood more about fighting and controlling than their Slavic sponsors and/or constituents, who were best known for their productive, peaceful ways. This was the principal culture of the Tsars of Russia, who did look to Rome to a degree, Caesar in particular, as a model. It has been noted that Slavic cultures, which largely began near the marshes of Northern Ukraine, favor cultivation, but Slavs can become fierce warriors when called on to do so.
In Poland, a similar protectorate arrangement was made by the local Slavs with the szlachta, a group designated as nobility recognized as coming from the south, possibly Sarmatians from the Middle East. One point was that they were soldiers, not farmers, and their aristocratic demands were put up with as long as they would and could protect the people.
As to the relationship between Ukraine and Russia, we can see even now an intertwining between Slavic and Varangian influences. After the fall of Constantinoble in 1453, a number of influences converged within the northern Slavic region. The Slavic culture and important aspects of Slavic history originated in the Pripyat River area, where they could live peaceably in semi-obscurity as other forces and groups came and went.
Perhaps Ukraine represents more of the Slav and Russia more of the Varangian. Nonetheless, as indicated in a prior work, what existed in Kiev in terms of political leadership in particular, was transferred to Moscow specifically for protective purposes.
Russia is very cold, a condition which speaks for itself. Russia’s strength in large part resulted from resignation to this fact, given agricultural and military advantages from establishing the seat of power to the northeast, as opposed to in Kiev, where Eastern Slavic leadership, coupled with Varangian, or Viking companionship, had established itself in the 9th century. In Kiev, there were problems to the east from the Tatars and to the west from the Poles, who had established primacy in the area. The Slavs left fertile soils and a longer growing season in the Kiev region behind in the 13th and 14th centuries, but they gained autonomy, power, and a chance to grow — as we would say now, “off the grid” near Moscow. Mother Russia: Earth’s puzzle, Tingey and Manicki, 2017
So, in the east as well as the west, there is lacking an understanding of cooperation, fellowship, and the groundings for stability. There have been periods of peace in the centuries of enlightenment, but these have been partial. The question of the perennial need for piracy as implied in geopolitics and the Great Game lies unanswered — at least hopefully so.
Is it settled wisdom that might makes right, as the raiders would say? If so, who is going to provide the meal after the fight — and at what cost to the warriors? Of course, perhaps the course of history can be rewritten to codify the need to cajole the “suckers” to keep plodding along while the pirates extract their portion off the top.
Fortunately, we do have the record of those who have gone before. As indicated by Anthony Wallace, they have left “mazeways” for us to follow, to help us to know what to do. Look to the corners of the world and the seams of society where cooperation has gone unnoticed or has otherwise survived the Great Game raids.
Sources for this essay can be found in “Mother Russia: Earth’s Puzzle”, which can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/2p8nc32c.