Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [20]
Dogma and ritual from Byzantium fossilized in spiritual isolation and distrust of inquiry; so did the political and social structure rigidify, with sacred and temporal power vested in the tsar, supported by a subservient church. Inheriting the Byzantine conviction of her destiny to rule, and suspicious of the heretical and corrupt West, Russia grew to a giant with Orthodoxy in her veins, whether she worshiped at the shrines of the Mother of God or Marx. She knew no middle ground between autocracy and anarchy.
The tsars are gone; the Revolution of 1917 homogenized Russian society. But even the “new” Russian, embracing a Western ideology and Western technology, cannot escape his Byzantine roots. Ubiquitous party leaders’ portraits are the icons of today. And the living iconostasis of officials at a review of armaments in Red Square is as precisely ordered as the ranks of saints flanking the image of Christ in Zagorsk’s cathedral.
“There can be no change. It is a terrible thing. The program is the idol. If one link in the chain is broken, we will not be able to grasp the end.” As he said this, shock showed on the face of the young Novosti Press agent with whom I would travel thousands of miles in the Soviet Union.
Involved was not the writ of God, but an itinerary prepared by bureaucrats. Yet the suggestion that it be altered to my objectives stirred the same visceral response that impelled thousands of Old Believers to choose death rather than change.
Since claiming the Byzantine birthright, Russia has looked possessively, obsessively south. In the 1770s she wrested from the Turks that ancient Byzantine frontier land, the Crimea. A treaty empowered her to build and protect a church in Istanbul. She interpreted this as a protectorate over the Balkan Orthodox, many of whom saw Holy Russia as a savior. Russian Pan-Slavism influenced Russian expansionism in the push toward the Mediterranean. “Economic and political motives figure as well,” Soviet scholars told me in Moscow. “But yes, there was a Russian crusade to put the cross back on top of Hagia Sophia.”
Like the Greeks, Catherine the Great had her own Great Idea—a restored Byzantine Empire in the Balkans, to be ruled from a reconquered Constantinople by her grandson Constantine. She even hired John Paul Jones, unemployed naval hero, to command a Russian flotilla fighting in that cause in the Black Sea. Ironically, Russia came within a hairbreadth of gaining Constantinople and the Straits in World War I. The Allies promised them to her upon Turkey’s defeat. Then her revolution knocked Russia out of the war, scuttling that prospect.
Neither Britain nor France had wanted Russia in the Mediterranean. Six decades earlier both had supported Turkey against Russia in the Crimean War, which put Tennyson’s stirring “into the valley of Death rode the six hundred” on every tongue.
While in the Crimea I sought Soviet permission to visit that valley where the Light Brigade, those cavalrymen who were unquestioningly but to do and die, had charged. But I was not allowed to go. Nor was I told the reason why.
“The Crimean War really began in Bethlehem,” Yosef Uziely, then treasurer of Jerusalem, told me on the garden terrace of his home near the Israel Museum. The Ottomans, he said, had trouble keeping peace among Christian sects, who bloodied the shrines with their strife. In 1853 Russia’s dispute with France over guardianship of Holy Land shrines came to a head. The Russians based their claims on the Byzantine establishment of these shrines; the French, on their reconquest by Latin crusaders.
Riot broke out in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. Several Orthodox monks were killed. Tsar Nicholas, accusing the Turkish police of complicity,