The Great Historical Game for Supremacy over Orthodoxy in the East

Abstract

The fall of Kievan Rus sparked a great historical struggle - between Lithuania and Poland, and then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Moscow - also for control over faith. Thus, it was not only a question of who would become the dominant subject of "gathering the Russian lands", but also of who would create the ‘holy’ orthodox dominion in the East. As is commonly known, Moscow achieved a triumph over Vilnius and Warsaw by making Orthodoxy the instrument of its idea of ​​the "Third Rome" and its expansion to the West, to the eastern territories of the Republic of Poland. However, another aspect of this instrumentalization is less noticeable - namely that the structures and cadres of the Orthodox Church of Poland became a kind of ‘reservoir’ that allowed Russia and its characteristic “Tsartodoxy" (tsarskoslaviye)  (in its struggle with the Chinese Empire, Islam and local forms of faith) to the extension of imperial rule, both in its political and civilizational dimensions (spiritual or intellectual), far beyond the Urals, to Siberia and the Far East. Today, however, we are dramatically and violently experiencing, along with the regaining by Orthodoxy in Ukraine of its original, autonomous ecclesiastical identity, the disintegration of this essentially imperial religious project as an essential element of unification and sacralization of the "Russian world" (russkiy mir).