(...) The border line between the GDL’s metropole and periphery remained sufficiently clearly expressed during all the existence of the GDL. The metropole comprised the areas with paganism, and later – Catholicism, as dominating religion (not only among elite). (...) Religion drew a clear line
between the Catholic elite of the metropole and the local Orthodox elite of the periphery, including, from the middle of the 16th century, the Protestant Livonian elite. The precise localization of the metropole area of the GDL is the object of discussions. No wonder that Belarusian historians tend to move its eastern and western boundaries further to the East and to search for the nucleus of Mindaugas’ Lithuania in the Black Rus’. A similar tendency could be found in the works by Matvei Liubavski, who claimed that ‘Lithuanian dukes could get more support and instruments for their rule from Russian society than from Lithuanian society’.52 Writing about post-Vytautian Lithuania, the author identifies its metropolian area with the territories of Vilnius, Grodno, Minsk, Mogilev guberniyas of tsarist Russia as well as with the eastern part of the Kaunas guberniya. ‘This area was in a dominating position in the Lithuanian-Russian state. It was most densely populated and had the largest population. (...) The ruling Lithuanian elite did not assimilate the local elite, but was assimilated itself, which is characteristic of both barbarian kingdoms and ‘vulture empires’. This trend took an opposite direction after the Christianization of Lithuania, which initiated the Polonization of local Orthodox believers in the imperial periphery. The Polonization took place among Lithuanians as well, both in the periphery and the metropole (...) On the eve of the Union of Lublin, the Lithuanian magnates were more Polonized than the GDL’s nobility (...) In the case under consideration, the periphery, informal empire and hegemony sphere of the confederative Polish-Lithuanian state included at the end of the 16th century – 17th century Livonia, Eastern Prussia, and Ukraine. Political problems, which had been created by the Polish colonization of Ukraine, and the inability of the Republic of Two Nations to solve them, caused political and military catastrophe of the middle of the 17th century, after which the Republic was just an object of imperial expansion of neighboring countries, instead of being a self-assertive empire itself. The solution of Ukraine’s problem was complicated by the interpretation of the idea of ‘Antemurale Christianitatis’ (Bastion of Christianity), which became dominant in the Polish-Lithuanian state from the beginning of the 17th century. This idea was a united imperial project of the Polish-Lithuanian state which had to embody shared values, able to overcome the differences between peripheries and metropole. After the victory of the Counter-Reformation, ‘Christianity’ was identified with the Catholicism, and such interpretation of the imperial idea transformed it into a barrier to integrate the Orthodox periphery in the southeast. If the Reformation in the GDL had ended with the victory of Protestantism, the geopolitics of Eastern Europe could have acquired a different shape and the Republic of Two Nations could have to stand the attacks of Russia only. Now it had to fight Russia and Sweden, the Protestant Empire of Northern Europe in the 17th century. The Swedish attacks were caused not only by the conflict of interests in Livonia but also by the claims of the representatives of the Catholic branch of the Vasa dynasty, ruling as elected kings of the Polish-Lithuanian state, to the throne of Sweden, realization of which would have meant the arrival of Jesuits to Scandinavia. ‘Antemurale Christianitatis’ was the imperial project of the united Polish-Lithuanian state. Had the Gediminds’ or Jagiellonians’ Lithuania any similar project? The absence of such project makes the historians speak about the imperial character of the GDL with certain reservations. ‘It is true that we usually tend to think of empires as states with concentrated central power of monarch, which are able to impose their language, religion and even way of life on subordinated countries. This is not the feature of Lithuania during the reign of Gediminas and Algirdas. On the contrary, the Gediminds on thrones of annexed principalities tended to accept the Orthodox faith and even the language of the land’.76 We mentioned already the claims of the Gediminids to rule over all the territories inhabited by the Baltic tribes. But even if such ‘pan-Baltic’ imperial project had ever existed, it was already forgotten in the 15th century and remembered as ‘pure history’. The evidence, supporting such diagnosis, is the fact that the Lithuanian ruling elite never showed any attempts to exploit favorable conditions and to annex Prussian lands. When Lithuania annexed Livonia, this last victory of Lithuanian imperial expansion had nothing in common with the ‘pan-Baltic’ idea. ‘Lithuania annexed Livonia and not Latvia’.77 The idea of subordination of all Russian lands (testified by the historical documents from the reign of Algirdas) was more operative in practice. Suzerainty over these lands was claimed by the Golden Horde and Tatar political entities, therefore the GDL rulers thought that the necessary condition to subordinate Russian lands is to subordinate under Lithuanian hegemony part occupied by the Tatars. In the situation of threat from Lithuania, the princes of Moscow sought the assistance of the Tatar Khans. Lithuanian rulers concluded that the best way to subordinate Moscow was to have control over its suzerains. Such idea underscored the ‘grand strategy’ of Vytautian Eastern politics. It could even seem during the reign of Vytautas that the subordination of Russia was very close – with Vytautas’ grandson (Basil II) on the throne of Moscow it remained only to put under Lithuanian control the Tatar steppe, because otherwise the control of north-east Russia could be neither long-term nor stable. Subordination of all Russian lands is an imperial idea, which is typical of a ‘vulture empire’ and of certain species of ‘shadow empires’. They lack ‘soft’ power, i.e. power of cultural attraction. The aspirations of their ruling elites do not go beyond claims to be legitimate successors to certain political (imperial) or civilization tradition. The Gediminids claimed the inheritance of Kiev Russia. The success of their project would have meant that the inheritance of Kiev Russia is not divided among three nations of eastern Slavs, which emerged out of the Ruthenians because of the failure of the GDL’s imperial project. The differentiation of Belarus and Ukrainian ethnos is the most significant long term outcome of the GDL’s imperial expansion to the east. Such outcome was possible because Algirdas did not succeeded in crushing Moscow and Vytautas did not win at Vorskla. If the results of these fights had been different, Moscow would not have had the chance to become ‘the third Rome’, but Vilnius would have become ‘the second Kiev’. ‘Unification of western Russian lands around Lithuania was essentially the re-building of destroyed political unity of the Kiev epoch, the rediscovery of the lost political centre. The difference was only that because of the historical circumstances such centre was established at the Vilija river, and not at river of Dnepr, as it was in the end of the 9th century’.78 But the new centre did not become the ‘second Kiev’. Vilnius did not become the centre of rebuilt political unity of the Ruthenians but caused the division of the latter into separate nations of Belarusians and Ukrainians. Samuel Adrian M. Adshead gives a similar picture of geopolitical consequences of the possible success of imperial the GDL’s project: ‘Yet the Vorskla may have made a difference. If it had gone the other way, Vytautas might have separated from his cousin Wladyslaw of Poland, undone the union of Krevo, and reunited the Russians round Vilnius or Kiev rather than round Moscow’79 But the idea of S.A.M. Adshead that liquidation of Kreva Union was an inevitable result of Vorskla victory is untenable. Rus’ of the “Second Kiev” could have been different from the factual Muscovite Russia and from its predecessor Byzantine Russia of ‘the first Kiev’. To change Catholicism into Orthodox faith was not politically beneficial to Vytautas, because this would have provided the Teutonic Order with the necessary justification to continue the war against Lithuania. What is even more important, after the Christianization of the metropole, the subordination of all Russian lands did not exhaust the imperial project of the GDL. After Christianization, the latter could be described by the words which S.N. Eisenstadt wrote of empires, that ‘they have often embraced some wider, potentially universal political and cultural orientation that went beyond that of any of their component parts’80 The episode of Grigoryi Tsamblak during the second half of the reign of Vytautas, when the grand duke took care to both establish a separate province of the Lithuanian Orthodox Church and to unite it by the bonds of Church Union to the Roman Catholic Church, was not accidental. The success of such Unite Church was a key to the cohesion of the state during the existence of the Grand Duchy, and later – of the united Polish-Lithuanian state. In the 16-17th centuries, for representatives of local Ruthenian elite, to belong to Unite Orthodox meant the half-way on the way to Catholicism and the membership in Lithuanian nation of noblemen, which was a part of Polish macronation.81 The areas of the Polish Lithuanian state, where church union did not take roots, remained not-integrated into its political organism. The potential of the Union to perform such role was limited by Muscovite support to those Orthodox, who opposed the Union. Therefore the Union did not become a reservoir of resources of “soft power”. The Lithuanian dependence on Polish support to defend against Moscow was pre-determined by the failure of the GDL to subordinate the whole Rus’ under its political control. The success at this could have lead to the different role of the Union: something more than just a half-station for Orthodox Ruthenian nobles under way to become Polish speaking Catholic Lithuanians. Such Union of Orthodox and Catholic churches, and potentially – the synthesis of two cultural traditions (Byzantine-Russian and Western-Latin), could became the distinctive idea of the GDL empire. However, this idea was viable only if the GDL had submitted all Russian lands under its rule and had eliminated the forces, which had political interest in preservation of distinction of Orthodoxy. (...)
