Andrey Vitalievich Korenevskiy,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Ideologeme of Deferred Demand, or How Many Times the Theory of “Moscow as the Third Rome” Was “Invented”? Part 2
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-4-18
The second part of the article, devoted to the circumstances of the genesis and doctrinal formation of the idea “Moscow as the Third Rome”, examines the process of this concept going beyond the Filofei’s Cycle and its grasp by Russian scholarship at the end of the Middle Ages. It is shown that despite the categorical rejection of the idea of the Third Rome by Vasily III and Ivan the Terrible, it met with a sympathetic response among the intellectual elite and clergy. The consequence of this was, on the one hand, the widespread dissemination of the Filofei’s works and their transformation into precedent texts, and on the other hand, the inclusion of the verbal image of the Third Rome into other works unrelated to its authentic semantic context. The analysis of these circumstances allows us to conclude that Filofei’s theory was inextricably linked with both the previous and subsequent stages of the development of social mind. The fact that it was claimed by the ruling elite later than by the intellectual one does not indicate the marginal status of this idea or its foreignness to the religious-political tradition of Muscovite Russia, but only that the theory of the Third Rome, like many groundbreaking ideas, was ahead of its time – it was formulated before it became politically urgent. Accordingly, attempts to present the fate of this ideologeme as a validation of the concept of the invention of tradition should be recognized as groundless: primary sources do not allow us to talk about either the randomness of its emergence, or about multiple “forgetfulness” and “new discoveries”. An alternative concept of selective reactualization of tradition seems to be a more relevant explanatory scheme of fluctuations in the perception of the idea of the Third Rome by society and the authorities.
Publishing: 28/08/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 17/05/2022
How to cite: Korenevskiy A.V. The Ideologeme of Deferred Demand, or How Many Times the Theory of “Moscow as the Third Rome” Was “Invented”? Part 2 // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 4 (24), pp. 214–233. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-4-18.pdf]
Previous part: Korenevskiy A.V. The Ideologeme of Deferred Demand, or How Many Times the Theory of “Moscow as the Third Rome” Was “Invented”? // Historical Courier, 2021, No. 6 (20), pp. 9–28. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2021/ISTKURIER-2021-6-01.pdf]
Links: Issue 4 2022
Keywords: Moscow as the Third Rome; Filofei; the establishment of patriarchate; Kazan History; The Tale of the White Cowl; the invention of tradition; selective reactualization of tradition