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Moscow is the Third Rome

The expression “Moscow is the Third Rome” is well known, even to children in Russian elementary schools. This doctrine gave the Russian nation a sense of their unique destiny. Some Western political leaders have even found Putin’s policies to have roots in the concept of “the Third Rome.” Russian minister of foreign affairs Sergey Lavrov claimed in 2016 that Russia was " a single state, which subsequently both in the West and in the East began to be considered as a kind of heir to the Byzantine Empire that fell in 1453.... Russia can no longer be ignored, not a single serious European issue can be resolved without taking Russian opinion into account." Lavrovs's words echoed those of his predecessor Andrei Andreevich Gromyko, who asserted in 1971 that in international relations "today there is no question of any significance which can be resolved without the Soviet Union or in opposition to her."

Russian communism, as Nikolai Berdyaev put it, was the third form of Russian imperialism, the dominant preceding forms being the "Third Rome" ideology and pan-Slavism. “Instead of the Third Rome,” Nikolai Berdyaev reasoned, “Russia managed to implement the Third International, and many features of the Third Rome were transferred to the Third International. The Third International is also a sacred realm, and it is also based on orthodox faith. The Third International is not an international, but the Russian national idea. This is the transformation of Russian messianism.”

In each the Messianic elements of sacred mission, protection and liberation of other, the certain deliverance of the world, and the racist superiority of Russia to achieve these ends are present. They sanctify the conquest of nations and by pretext justify more conquests. This was so in the restricted civilized world of the 15th-18th centuries, in the more expanded world of the 19th and early 20th century, and by virtue of technology and science, the complete world now.

In 324 AD the first Christian emperor Constantine the Great united under his rule West and East. He was tasked with taking up the baton of the old Rome as the political center of the world. And almost immediately he commenced the construction of the new capital of the Roman empire - Constantinople – the New Rome. The Byzantines themselves would call themselves “Romans” and were firmly convinced that they still lived in the Roman empire. Which is to say, in the last worldly kingdom which would precede the Second Coming of Christ and the establishment of the eternal kingdom of God. This endowed the Christian empire with a “political program”: her earthly rulers were to prepare the people under them to meet Christ so that at the Last Judgment they should answer for the moral state of their subjects.

In 1453, Constantinople fell and was taken over by the Muslims. As a result, at that time the Muscovite state remained the only sovereign and independent Orthodox state. The fall of Byzantium was viewed in the eyes of contemporaries as a terrible event which nonetheless had its own logic and was long awaited.

In 1472 the Grand Prince of Moscow Ivan III Vasilievich entered into a marriage with Sophia (Zoya), the niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine Paleologos. And soon afterwards, in 1480 Muscovite Rus was finally free from paying tribute to the Golden Horde, and from 1493 Ivan III was titled the ‘sovereign of all Russia.’ The 7000th year since the creation of the world, which evoked so much fear, came and went and there began a new millennium dating from the creation of the world which would become an epoch of the rapid growth of a new Orthodox power in the form of the Russian state.

The ideology of the Third Rome commenced with Ivan III when he claimed the privileges of the Emperor of Constantinople, proclaimed Moscow the Third Rome, and adopted the double-headed eagle. The ideology was formulated by the Pakovian Monk Philoteus who in 1524 wrote: "All Christian empires ended and were absorbed by one empire-that of our autocrat, in accordance with the prophetical books, the Russian tsardom. Two Romes have fallen, and the third exists; but there will be no fourth." If the Church in Russia fails, the end of the world will come. The elder was worried about the growth of sinfulness in the Moscow principality. In the message to the Grand Duke, all this was in the context of, for example, the spread of sodomy, that is, sodomy, not only among the laity, but also among the priests.

Patriarch of Constantinople Jeremiah II, in the foundation document signed by him in 1589 on the establishment in Russia of a patriarchal throne, addressed the following words to Tsar Feodor Ioannovich: “Old Rome fell because of the heresy of Apollinaris; the second Rome, which is Constantinople fell as it was captured by the godless Turks and your Rome, O most pious Tsar is the realm of Russia, the Third Rome which has exceeded all in piety and all beneficent kingdoms have been gathered into one and you alone beneath the heavens are called a Christian emperor throughout out the whole world and Christendom” (Collection of State Documents and Treatises, vol. 2, p.97).

After Alexander II became Tsar in 1855, we see an uptick in interest in the doctrine of “the Third Rome.” These hopes of a future imperial greatness were harshly cut short by the Crimean War, even though in the latter the notion of the heritage of Byzantium excited the minds of many Russian commentators. The doctrine of the Third Rome, in this new interpretation, began to appear in historical textbooks in the late 19th century. The Pan-Slavic movement. Pan-Slavs openly used the idea of Moscow as “the Third Rome” in their calls to protect their “Slavic brothers” from the Ottomans. Under emperor Nicholas II there was awakened a lively interest in the Byzantine political tradition, but this was a last spark before the disaster of 1917 and the ensuing radical changes in political ideology.

Serving the expansionist interests of Russia, this Messianic belief lasted 500 years, even into the atheistic Communist Russian Empire. Peter the Great exploited it before he named, for the first time, his imperial realm "Russia." Fropaganda before the partitions of Poland by Catherine II claimed that her fellow orthodox had to be protected from Polish and Jesuit persecutions. "Protection of fellow Christians" and "protection of the Holy Places and the orthodox" in Jerusalem preceded and sanctified the wars against Turkey.

And in 1948, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the independence of the Russian Church, Bishop Hermogen, rector of the Moscow Theological Academy, let it be known that the present Patriarchate of Moscow alone preserved the true Christian faith, not shared by either the Catholic or Protestant worlds. Clearly, this Messianistic expansionism not only continued yet in the third Rome form but also, and more importantly, had been channeled into the materialistic millenarianism known as Russian communism.

Belief in the Greek apostasy and the fall of the Byzantine empire served to create the idea of Moscow as the third Rome, the importance of which in Russian life can hardly be exaggerated. Muscovy was the only orthodox country in the world. The prince of Moscow was thus the legitimate successor of the Byzantine emperor. By God's unchangeable decree the Roman emperor was still the defender of the orthodox imperial Church. But by reason of Rome's unfaithfulness the headship of God's kingdom upon earth had passed over to 'the second Rome,' Byzantium, and, in turn, to the princes of Moscow.

Thus these princes (and later the tsars) laid claim to the hegemony of the world. Nor was this merely the overweening belief of politicians and ecclesiastics; it came to be a conviction of the whole people. It was largely fostered by an apocalyptic conception then prevalent in Russia, viz. that Moscow was not merely the third but the final Rome. Should Moscow fall away, as Rome and Byzantium had done, then the dread end of all things would be at hand; Moscow's constancy and faithfulness protected the world against the irruption of the divine judgment.

It was under the dominance of the idea of Moscow as the third Rome that Ivan IV (the Terrible) adopted in 1547 the title of tsar; and on the same ground was established the patriarchate of Moscow, since the orthodox emperor must by divine decree have at his side the imperial patriarch. It remains merely to emphasize the fact that this idea, besides enormously intensifying the national self-esteem, added powerfully also to the Church's sense of its importance. It also greatly strengthened the impression that only by rigid adherence to perfect orthodoxy - in especial, absolute ritualistic purity - could the empire maintain its sovereign claims. Heresy of every kind, even the slightest liturgical departure from the faith of the fathers, was not only a blow at the Church, but also a menace to the supremacy of Moscow as the third Rome.

Deep anti-European imperialism had its root in the idea that Moscow is the "Third Rome," that only in Muscovy is preserved true Christianity, that therefore the Russians had a "mission" in the world to convert all other peoples to Orthodoxy. This Russian Messianism createdv a master race complex later deepened by Panslavism and Slavophilism, with their contempt for Western European democracy, culture, and civilization.

Something actualized during the time of Catherine II, who had a Greek project, the revival of the Byzantine Empire, so she named her first son Constantine. If the Russian troops reached Constantinople-Istanbul, the Byzantine Empire would be revived, it would be headed by the Romanovs and, for example, the son of Catherine. Then it was republished during the time of Alexander II in the middle of the 19th century, when there was another phase of the activity of the Russian Empire. The Crimean War was actually Eastern because of Russia's claims to the holy places - Palestine.

The Russian people had not realized their Messianic idea of Moscow the Third Rome. The Old Believers ecclesiastical schism of the 17th century revealed that the Muscovite Tsardom was not the Third Rome; still less, of course, was the Petersburg Empire a realization of the idea of the Third Rome. In it a final cleavage took place. The Messianic idea of the Russian people assumed either an apocalyptic form or a revolutionary.

Then there occurred an amazing event in the destiny of the Russian people. Instead of the Third Rome in Russia, the Third International was achieved and many of the features of the Third Rome pass over to the Third International. The Third International is also a consecrated realm, and it also is founded on an orthodox faith. The fact that the Third International is not international but a Russian national idea is very poorly understood in the West. Here we have the transformation of Russian messianism.

Bolshevism made use of everything for its own triumph. It made use of Russian traditions of government by imposition, and it proclaimed a dictatorship which was more like the old rule of the Tsar. It made use of the characteristics of the Russian spirit in all its incompatibility with a secularized bourgeois society. It made use of its religious instinct, its dogmatism and maximalism and also of its manifestations of coarseness and cruelty; it made use of Russian messianism, which still remained though in an unconscious form, and of the Russian faith in Russia's own development. It absorbed also the sectarian spirit of the Russian intelligentia, it fitted in with Russian collectivism. It proclaimed the necessity of the integral totalitarian outlook of a dominant creed, which corresponded with the habits, experience and requirements of the Russian people in faith and in the dominating principles of life.

Even the old Slavophils' dream of transferring the capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow, to the Kremlin, was realized by the Red Communists, and Russian communism proclaimed anew the old idea of the Slavophils and Dostoyewsky—ex oriente lux. Light proceeds from Moscow, from the Kremlin, a light to lighten the bourgeois darkness of the West. At the same time communism creates a despotic and bureaucratic state, called into being to dominate the whole life of the people not only in body but also in soul, in accord with the traditions of Ivan the Terrible and the rule of the Tsars.

After 1991, there is nothing to offer, because America and the West can manipulate such words as the struggle for democracy, human rights, freedom, and so on, having certain recipes for this. And the Russian ideology has become very impoverished, because there is nothing to offer, except for the expansion of Russia's borders, based on some historical claims. But what to give to those people who will be joined is unknown. Therefore, now the ideology of the Third Rome is designed primarily for the Russians. No one is surprised by the synthesis of Orthodoxy and Stalinism.