On 28 July, the “Day of the Baptism of Rus’” was celebrated in Russia, while on 15 July, the "Day of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus’" was celebrated in Ukraine.
This is the same holiday, but the dates and names are different, highlighting the historical myth lies at the heart of the eternal Russo-Ukrainian war, which can roughly be described as a dispute over the inheritance of Kyivan Rus’.
The “Day of the Baptism of Rus'” has been celebrated on 28 July across Russia since 2010 in accordance with the "Days of Military Glory and Memorable Dates in Russia Law”. The date in the ecclesiastical calendar corresponds to the death of Saint Prince Vladimir the Great, the baptiser of Kyiv in 988, who died in 1015.
This holiday has also been celebrated in Ukraine since 2008, when then President Viktor Yushchenko issued a decree to that effect. Due to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church's recent transition to the civil Gregorian calendar, the holiday in Ukraine falls on 15 July, which would be the 28 in the Julian calendar.
It is also known by a slightly different name, the “Day of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus' – Day of Ukrainian Statehood”.
This seemingly identical holiday, centred on a single historical event, has become an obstacle in the dispute between two historical concepts: the Muscovite and imperial one, and the Kyivan and national one, which Moscow at a certain point began to define as “separatist”.
This dispute has spilled over from the academic and religious spheres onto real battlefields, in the name of which rivers of blood have flowed over the past four years.
For several centuries, the Orthodox Church in Kyiv and Moscow dated the baptism of Rus' to 1 August 988, the feast of the Merciful Saviour and the Most Holy Theotokos, the day in which water was to be blessed in memory of the "Source of the Dnieper”.
The idea of linking the holiday to the memory of Vladimir arose in the context of the ecclesiastical and political intrigues of 2008, when, during the celebrations of the 1,020th anniversary of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus'-Ukraine, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, at Yushchenko's invitation, arrived in Kyiv to proclaim the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Ecclesiastical and canonical independence from Moscow was already considered by the government to be a crucial element for the country’s political and cultural independence and for overcoming Russia’s imperial legacy, but Moscow had sufficient political clout at the time to torpedo the project and maintain its ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Ukraine, something it failed to do ten years later, when autocephaly was proclaimed in 2018.
In the midst of this "battle for Ukraine" at the ecclesiastical and jurisdictional levels, the synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, still led by Patriarch Alexy II, appealed in the summer of 2008 to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to take the initiative and make it a national holiday in the Russian Federation as well, to highlight continuity between the Russian state and Saint Vladimir, and thus prevent this connection to appear to exist only in Ukraine.
For some reason, the fulfilment of the synod's call dragged on for a couple of years, and Ukraine eventually took the historic lead in establishing the holiday.
Naturally, the sacred centre of the holiday is Kyiv, which includes numerous sites associated with the Baptism of Rus': the confluence of the Pochaina River with the Dnieper, the monument to Vladimir on the steep slope of the Dnieper, the excavations of the Church of the Tithe built by the prince himself, and finally the Vydubychi Monastery, where, according to legend, statues of Perun and other ancient pagan deities, hurled from Mount Knyazha, floated to the shore.
It is obvious that Vladimir never visited Moscow since the city had not yet been founded in the 10th century, appearing only at the end of the 12th century.
At present, the leaders of the Moscow Patriarchate and Russia’s authorities celebrate the holiday in the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin, which they have proclaimed to be “the main church of Holy Rus'." This is followed by a religious procession to the monument to Saint Vladimir, unveiled in 2016 in Borovitskaya Square near the Kremlin.
At the monument's unveiling, Vladimir Putin presented himself as the continuator of the work of the baptiser of Rus', emphasising the "reunification of the Russian lands" and the "unity of the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus." Patriarch Kirill, author of the famous phrase "Russia, Ukraine, Belarus: this is Holy Rus'," echoed this rhetoric.
This year, however, no lavish celebration of the Day of the Baptism of Rus' was held in Russia in the fifth year of the SVO, the special military operation in Ukraine. In fact, all Russian holidays have made a vanishing act this year, for fear of Ukrainian drones, like the slimmed down parade on 9 May, the recent timid rally in front of Putin in a St Petersburg alley for Navy Day, or Russia’s Independence Day on 12 June, which was effectively cancelled.
When the Day of the Baptism of Rus' was first incorporated into the Russian calendar and ideology in 2008, great imperial hopes were pinned on it. The pro-Russian Kyiv-based rock musician Oleg Karamazov headed the international "Day of the Baptism" organisation and arranged large concerts in Kyiv's Maidan Square, with the aforementioned slogan "Russia, Ukraine, Belarus..."
The organisation included representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate, and Yuri Shevchuk, founder of the wildly popular rock band DDT, attended the event as well. Today, he plays in exile against the war. During Yanukovych's rule in Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill visited Kyiv several times under the auspices of the celebration of the baptism, and several holy relics were brought from Russia “for veneration”.
The central idea behind that holiday was formulated by pre-revolutionary historians and reinforced by Soviet historians, according to whom, after the Mongol-Tatar invasion, "the centre of Rus' shifted from Kyiv to Moscow”, and therefore modern Kyiv and Ukraine, as a whole, are part of the Muscovite "Russian world”, the katekhon, or guarantor of the preservation of intact Orthodoxy and the universal Christian faith.
The military action of 24 February 2022 subsequently demonstrated the price of these ideologies, and the current historical perspectives in Russia and Ukraine are almost entirely at odds with each other.
Even Viktor Yushchenko’s speech on Baptism Day in 2009 proclaimed Saint Vladimir as "one of the founders and patrons of our state," and the fundamental meanings of the holiday were formulated as "the continuity of Ukraine's thousand-year history," "the indivisibility of the Ukrainian people and their unity around the idea of a strong state," "the unity of the Ukrainian lands around Kiev," its "civilising influence on neighbouring lands and peoples," and "the unity of the state and spiritual principles."
In other words, the state and its people never moved from Kyiv – simply, between the 13th and 17th centuries (and partly also in the 20th) they developed in a different direction, more European and pro-Western, compared to the principality-kingdom-empire of Moscow and St Petersburg, heir to the Tatar-Mongol Golden Horde rather than the archetype of ancient Rus'.
Due to the war, the label "Russian" has acquired an exclusively negative connotation in everyday Ukrainian usage. Scholars recognise that, like the name of the country Rus', it was "intercepted" and "stolen" by Muscovy. A classic representative of Ukrainian historiography, Academician Mykhailo Hrushevsky, stated that Ukrainians are “a people whose historical name has been stolen.”
Significantly, until the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 18th century, the territories of present-day Western Ukraine that were part of the Polish state were called the “Rus' (Ruthenian) Voivodeship”, and the Carpathian Ukrainians retained this same root in their ethnonym, Rusyns” (Ruthenians).
Present-day "Great Russians" were traditionally known as "Muscovites" in Ukrainian and more generally in Western languages. From the moment the powerful empire, with its new capital in St Petersburg, officially proclaimed itself “Russian”, the Ukrainians gradually adopted a self-definition that more clearly stressed their distinction from "Big Brother" who sought to subjugate and assimilate them.
Nonetheless, the Church's particularly archaic liturgical language preserves the memory of Ukrainians' special rights to the toponym Rus: the primate of the Kyiv Patriarchate, Filaret (Denisenko), not recognised by the Russian Orthodox Church, held the title of "Patriarch of Kyiv and All Rus’-Ukraine" until his death in March of this year.
Ahead of this holiday, Boris Tarasyuk, founder of the Kyiv-based Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation and a former Ukrainian Foreign Minister, once again reiterated Ukraine's right to reclaim its historical name Rus, perhaps in the form of “Rus'-Ukraine”.
Russian propaganda, which has invested much effort in promoting the doctrine of the "one people," reacted with great anger at such a statement, and Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, as usual, made sarcastic remarks, while State Duma MP and former Odesa resident Anatoly Wasserman called the concept of Rus'-Ukraine “a false lie”.
Disputes over historical heritage and the "right to a name" are a recurring theme among many countries today. Consider the recent forced name change of Macedonia, because “the real Macedonia is Greece”, or the dispute between China and Taiwan over the “right to a Chinese identity”.
Blaming mass attacks against peaceful cities on disputes of this kind is pure medieval barbarism. As religious historian Lera Furman put it, “Rus' was baptised for this purpose”, so that those who proclaim themselves heirs of this Baptism would kill the other heirs.
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