Christian Moral Tradition & National Identity in Ukraine and Russia

Christian Moral Tradition & the Civilizational Divide Between Ukrainians and Russians

A Western response to points raised at the Kyiv seminar and requested for wider English circulation

At Kyiv National University named after Taras Shevchenko (the Red Building), a seminar was recently held under the theme:
“Christian morality and traditionalism among Ukrainians and Russians — where exactly lies the difference between the two peoples?”

While I do not attempt to represent the full range of discussion or commentary from the recent Kyiv seminar, this response addresses several of the points publicly highlighted beneath the published summary of the event (linked below). Since many readers requested that the topic be more widely circulated in English for a Western audience, I offer here a contribution toward that aim — together with what, in our ongoing research series, we have proposed as the only viable path in this sphere: a True Restoration.

Some of the interventions from that event – including key remarks by Olena Semenyaka and other participants – were later summarized and partially quoted on the Mesoeurasia website. In the comment section below that report, several readers explicitly asked that these ideas be made available in English and that Western voices engage the issues: above all, the definition of conservatism and the question “where exactly lies the difference between the two peoples?”

This article is offered as a Western response to those publicly shared points and to that request. I am not attempting to reconstruct or judge the entire closed-door seminar. Instead, I am engaging the themes as they were presented on the Mesoeurasia page and in its comments: to clarify what genuine Christian conservatism means, to explain the deeper historical differences between Ukrainians and Russians, and to propose a constructive path of renewal rather than destruction.

A defining characteristic of historic Rus’ governance — particularly visible under figures such as Ivan IV — was the organic unity of Christian monarchy and ecclesial authority. The Tsar did not operate apart from the Church; state decrees and ecclesiastical canons were mutually reinforcing, frequently co-signed and implemented through the noble estates, who bore real executive and pastoral responsibility in their regions. This model reflects both Biblical royal-priesthood synergy (Exodus 19:6; 1 Peter 2:9) and the older continental pattern later preserved most clearly in the Summus Episcopus model of German and Scandinavian Lutheran monarchies, wherein rulers served as defenders and governors of the Church, not merely ceremonial heads. Elements of this earlier Orthodox structure continue today in the Church of Gothia / Catacomb tradition and the True Orthodox (TCO/RTOC) communities, who reject the post-Soviet state-constructed hierarchy and maintain fidelity to pre-Sergianist canonical norms.
Reference: https://celticorthodoxy.com/2025/04/the-orthodox-church-of-gothia-canonical-continuity-in-crimea-under-the-catacomb-and-rtoc-tradition/

Original article on Mesoeurasia and discussion:
https://mesoeurasia.blogspot.com/2025/11/blog-post_30.html

The seminar rightly emphasized that modern Russia’s claim to represent Christian conservatism is fraudulent. The contemporary Kremlin exploits external symbols of faith while inheriting its episcopate not through confessors and martyrs but from collaborators installed by the Bolshevik state. Whatever the Kremlin promotes today as “traditionalism” is a theatrical instrument of geopolitical leverage, not organic Christian civilization. To point that out is not anti-Russian; it is simply truthful.

Yet in rejecting hypocrisy, we must not destroy the meaning of tradition itself. Authentic Christian moral tradition cannot be replaced with mythic nationalism, civilizational metaphysics, or reconstructed post-religious narratives. The Christian inheritance either exists as lived continuity—or it is not tradition at all.

At one point in the discussion, a 19th-century Galician-Volhynian author is cited who argued that Europe was already spiritually dead and that “there is nothing left to preserve—everything must be destroyed to the roots.” His despair is understandable: he was writing after Napoleon’s destruction of the old monarchic order, amid the collapse of traditional European structures, and long before Bolshevism slaughtered more than 66 million Orthodox Christians and burned over 30,000 churches. He accurately observed decay. But he erred in believing that annihilation is cure. Renewal is not achieved by torching the orchard, but by restoring its roots.

That distinction leads directly into the central question raised in the seminar: where exactly lies the difference between the two peoples — Ukrainians and Russians — and why does it matter?

The divide is not linguistic or purely political but civilizational and ecclesial. It reaches back to the bifurcation of Rus’ between two different centers of gravity: the Western-facing Galicia–Volhynia world and the north-eastern Muscovite formation under Mongol suzerainty. The two worlds produced different kinds of social and political anthropology.

Galicia–Volhynia developed as a dynastic, monastic, and Christian-legal society embedded in Central European trade, governance, and ecclesial life. Its ruling houses integrated through the Piast network of Silesia and Oleśnica. Its monasteries and bishoprics participated in a continental Christian system. Its culture operated within literate, sacramental order, and its elites interacted constantly with other Christian monarchies and noble houses.

Muscovy, by contrast, was forged under Mongol tribute, shaped by military-bureaucratic autocracy, and developed a caesaropapist fusion of throne and altar. Instead of balancing crown and altar as co-stewards, the Muscovite model subordinated Church to state. That model later rationalized imperial expansion, imperial messianism, and finally Bolshevik destruction.

These divergent genealogies produced divergent conceptions of the human person, moral responsibility, authority, governance, community, and civilization.

The civilizational heart of Rus’ was not in Moscow, which did not yet exist, but in Kyiv and the southwestern corridors of Galicia–Volhynia. The Western orientation of those lands lasted centuries longer than any Eastern association. Lviv spent more of its existence under Central European Christian polities than under Moscow. The dynastic web linking Brandenburg, Piast, Pomeranian Griffin, and Brunswick houses structured a Christian noble republic of responsibility and legal accountability—not imperial absolutism.

This heritage and its evidences—dynastic, genealogical, cartographic, monastic, and ecclesial—are laid out in detail here:

The Celtic–Piast Royal Continuum: The Western Heart of Rus’ and Why It Matters Today
https://celticorthodoxy.com/2025/12/the-celtic-piast-royal-continuum/

That work outlines why Galicia–Volhynia was not a marginal borderland but a civilizational axis linking Baltic, Black Sea, and Central Europe; why rivers served as the first highways of civilization; why monastic networks shaped markets and law; and why dynastic continuity, not ideology, formed real political legitimacy.

For these reasons, the modern Kremlin claim to represent Christian traditionalism must be rejected. But equally rejected must be the temptation to respond with post-Christian invention or civilizational self-erasure disguised as progress. Ukraine must resist both imperial nostalgia and philosophical abstraction. Tradition is not myth to be rewritten; it is a living inheritance requiring restoration.

A serious conversation about restoration requires reviving the structures that historically sustained Christian civilization. The Western model—visible in Galicia–Volhynia and later in the Summus Episcopus principle exemplified in Lutheran and earlier pre-Lutheran Christian monarchy—did not treat rulers as absolute sovereigns or divine tyrants, but as noble protectors of the Church, responsible to God, canon law, and the people. Unlike Muscovite caesaropapism, this model never placed the Church under the state, nor crowned the state as the arbiter of salvation. Instead, it upheld the ancient Christian equilibrium: altar and crown as co-stewards, neither consuming the other.

This was the tradition visible in medieval Galicia–Volhynia, in the Piast–Brunswick succession lattice, and in the Germanic–Celtic ecclesiastical framework: nobility serving as guarantors of law, order, property, and faith, not as mystic autocrats. Bishops were elected; nobles bore legal responsibility for enforcing canon and civil order; governance was covenantal, not imperial. That is the Christian conservative model—real, historical, and proven—rather than the theatrical nationalism or ideological absolutism now marketed from Moscow or the post-religious abstractions tempting parts of the Ukrainian intellectual scene.

If a true restoration is sought, then neither Bolshevik-formed pseudo-church structures nor neo-pagan romanticism can suffice. Ukraine’s future strength lies in returning to the tested model that worked: lawful noble stewardship and ecclesial cooperation rooted in historic Christian monarchy—not demolition masquerading as freedom.

To illustrate what a real Christian conservative order looked like in practice, consider the Russian monarchy before its violent interruption. The line of the Ivans—culminating legally in Emperor Ivan VI Antonovich, whose mother Anna Leopoldovna was of the House of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel—represented not mystical despotism, but the same Western Christian model of Summus Episcopus noble stewardship described above.

Ivan VI was recognized under three independent bodies of law (dynastic, state, and ecclesiastical), and his deposition was not lawful but an act of naked force. The murder of Ivan VI and his immediate Brunswick family destroyed not only a legitimate Christian monarchy, but also the legal bridge binding Russia to the Western tradition. That vacuum later allowed the rise of absolutism and the ease with which the Bolsheviks could seize power, executing or exiling nearly every noble house and burning an estimated 66,000 churches while murdering tens of millions of Christians in the Revolution’s aftermath.

Rather than inventing new ideological models, any authentic restoration must acknowledge the long-standing legal and hereditary frameworks that shaped Christian statehood in Eastern Europe. Among the historical continuities involved is the fact that the House of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel became a cadet branch related to the Romanov line through lawful dynastic unions, and therefore stands as one of the historically recognized successor branches in the classical juridical sense, should legitimate senior lines be extinct. This is not a political claim, but a matter of archival record, heraldic law, and historical documentation — recognized even in modern legal references such as the 1935 Swiss court acknowledgment that related inheritance titles remained unresolved among surviving heirs. Such precedents illustrate that restoration, if ever sought by a people, proceeds through continuity rather than improvisation.

If Ukraine or any Slavic people ever pursue a true restoration of Christian monarchy, the model is already proven and historically native to these lands: nobles and clergy cooperating under law, not tyranny or revolution.

Links:
Lutheran Structure of Noble Heads of Church, enforcing local rules
https://watchman.news/2024/07/german-princes-as-head-of-church-gods-sword/

Ivan VI von Braunschweig-Romanov Dynastic and National Laws
https://watchman.news/2025/02/succession-in-the-kingdom-of-galicia-lodomeira-and-lviv-in-the-house-of-brunswick/

The Celtic–Piast Royal Continuum: The Western Heart of Rus’ and Why It Matters Today
https://celticorthodoxy.com/2025/12/the-celtic-piast-royal-continuum/

The solution is not destruction but reconstruction. The path forward is the recovery of Galicia’s Christian civilizational DNA: lawful noble governance, sacramental community, ecclesial continuity, moral responsibility, and rooted identity—rather than reactionary ideology or hollow symbolism.

Europe is not dead. She is wounded. And wounded bodies heal when the bones are set.

If Ukraine chooses this path, she may become the center of a true Christian revival for Europe—not through invention, but through remembrance.

This response is offered with respect for all scholars and participants continuing the dialogue, and in the hope that Christian civilization may yet be restored, not replaced.

Dr. Stephen M. B. Brunswick-Knott, PhD (Rel. Ed.), ThD
Christian Minister · Historian & Cultural Researcher
Publisher & Senior Columnist — Watchman News / Watchman.Report
Educator — St. Andrew’s Institute