One of Russia's great rulers, a founder of the Russian state,
King Vladimir II Monomakh and his battle against Jewish usury and
slave trading.
It appears that Jewish money being sent from abroad to destabilize
Russia has a very long tradition.
The parallels to what Vladimir Putin did with the oligarchs is
striking.
This article from our archives was first
published in February 2019
"The Jews were forwarding money to separatist princes
in an effort to permanently divide Russia. ... Jewish usury was a
revolutionary development that required rapid intervention."
"... the Jews had been given permission to enslave the
Russians in exchange for a regular subsidy. Very soon, Jewish usury
had much of the country in debt ..."
" ... the Jewish moneylenders received protection from
Kiev and shared their cash with the prince. In turn, he would use this to
maintain the army and keep all anti-Jewish forces at bay ..."
"Jewish slave dealers had a special hatred for Slavic
slaves. St. Eustratii (was) sold to a “ferocious Jew” on Korsun.
Trying to force him to renounce Orthodoxy, he was tortured to death by the
Jewish slave traders. All told, 50 Russians died this way from this same
raid."
In Old Kiev, prince Sviatopolk II Izyaslavich ruled the city
through his dependence on Jewish usury. It was proof of illegitimacy in
that this was his major prop of financial support. The Chronicles state
that the invasion of the Polovtsy from the south were God's punishment on
this excoriable policy.
Upon the death of Yaroslav the Wise in 1054, his successor was
Izyaslav. The prince of the powerful and increasingly independent Turov,
Vyslav, challenged him and drove him from the city. Kiev was pillaged
while the population demanded the return of Izyaslav. In the meantime, the
city had disintegrated. Izyaslav was then challenged by Sviatoslav, who in the
meantime had gone to the Germans. In response, Izyaslav went to Rome in
1076.
Detail from one of the most extraordinary monuments in Russia, "The
Millenium of Russia" (1862), in Novgorod. For more details see this excellent Wikipedia entry)
Once Sviatoslav died, four princes vied for power: Vsevolod,
Sviatopolk II, Vladimir Monomakh and Izyaslav. The coalition of Vsevolod
and Sviatopolk II defeated the endlessly embattled Izyaslav, who died soon
afterwards. Vsevolod and Sviatopolk II then ruled the state. The context
then was an era of constant violence from local princes and several
foreign powers, including the steppe nomads (the Polovtsy), Germans and
Poles. The formerly strong, law-bound economy was gone and the rule of the
strongest was the norm. Society was demoralized. This gave rise to the
dominance of money lending.
Given that this prince gave the usurers free rein, a powerful
oligarchy developed on the backs of rural communes. Slavery resurfaced as
debt-bondage was the only recourse for many. As more and more land became
forfeit due to debt, this oligarchy grew fangs. One manifestation of this
was salty speculation during the embargo created by Galicia, the major salt
exporter of Central Europe. The Caves Monastery released its stores,
thereby reducing the price to manageable levels. The result was that
Sviatopolk ordered the confiscation of all salt held by monastic
institutions. The population had other plans, and a mob quickly reversed that
policy. The mob was not stupid – they marched straight to the Jewish
quarter where the salt was found.
Vladimir II (Monomakh)
Both the Caves Paterikon and the Chronicles state clearly that
the oligarchy was aware of its illegitimacy and that it ruled solely by
deceit and usury. It also stated baldly that they were very nervous. The
death of the prince unleashed a revolt of the population explicitly and
clearly dedicated to ending usury and debt bondage in 1113. It was an
agrarian revolt against rentier income: income that is unearned, based on
one's commanding position economically or politically. It was not directed
against the “feudal elite” as most history books in both English
and Russian will state. It was aimed at oligarchy. Soviet era historian MN
Tikhomirov writes:
It was directed against exploitation in all its forms, and
clearly usury and the resultant bankruptcy and forfeiture of its victims.
The collection of compounding interest became a tool for the enrichment of
the boyars, merchants and upper clergy. Although religious canons always
insisted that “rezoimanie” (usury) is a sinful thing, all church decisions
in this regard were of a purely declaratory nature. During the second half of
the 12th century, Ilya, the bishop of Novgorod bishop threatened
severe punishment for clergy engaging in this practice. Monastic usury was
widespread and carried out under various pretexts. . .(Tikhomirov, 2013)
This historical analysis is deeply flawed. There is little
evidence of systematic usury among clergy and monasteries in an economy
largely non-monetized. Jews controlled banking in the country and hence,
made themselves easy targets of the riots they engendered.
Church prohibitions against usury are well known, but since no such
concept as “centralized, bureaucratic power” existed at the time (nor
could it have), there is no organized way to haul sinners into court. All
canons are “declaratory” in this sense.
A monument to Vladimir II (Monomakh) in
the city of Vladimir, which he founded.
In Novgorod, the boyar class was deeply
usurious and so were all who functioned within her walls. Her “republican”
government was like all others of its ilk, a shoddy cover for
oligarchy that would (and was) ditched at the moment it ceased to assist
them. The entire economy was based on usury, the merchant class and
exploitation. When a power threatened her elite no value was too sacred to
be thrown overboard. The elite maintained regular ties with Poland, the
Grand Duchy and elsewhere so their political allegiances could be altered
at a moment's notice. This is why Moscow needed to act so quickly against
them. It was from Novgorod that the Strigolniki and Judaizer heresies
spread, both of which justified and ritualized usury.
Further, the problem with Tikhomirov's view is that these were
never systematic. Only the Jewish banking regime was a system of relations
that had global connections. The later network spanning the great capitals
of Europe was far into the future, but its outlines could clearly be seen.
While the system's text-books speak of the “rebellion against feudalism,” the
fact remains that Jews had monopolized usury by the 12th century.
Tikhomirov is simply incorrect.
Sviatopolk tolerated the Jewish trade
in Russian slaves. The governor of Crimea was a Jew at the time of severe
weakness in the Byzantine empire. While formally a Christian, this
ma immediately permitted Jewish trade in slaves. While the Khazar state
had been smashed a century prior, the domination of Jewish traders in the
area had not abated. In this case, Sviatopolk brought them into Kiev as a
means to ensure an income against his relatives.
The Jews used the Polovtsian raiders to obtain slaves. The Turkic
hordes now had Jewish patronage. By 1092 or so, these raids increased
markedly. They were then sold to the Jews on Crimea. By all accounts,
Jewish slave dealers had a special hatred for Slavic slaves. St.
Eustratii the Faster of the Kiev Caves, according to the Paterik of the
Kiev Caves, was taken in a Polovtsy raid along with 20 or 30 others and
sold to a “ferocious Jew” on Korsun. Trying to force him to renounce
Orthodoxy, he was tortured to death by the Jewish slave traders. All told, 50 Russians died
this way from this same raid.
St. Vladimir had five sons. Upon his death, Sviatoslav attempted
to form his own state with Turov. Yaroslav fought against this and the
former was killed in the fighting. In Novgorod, Yaroslav then had to fight
Sviatopolk, seeking to take Kiev. Soon, outmatched at home, he went to
Poland. The rape of Kiev with Polish soldiers made their paymaster very
unpopular. With broad support, Yaroslav defeated Sviatopolk, but the
resulting power was too much for Mstislav, a grandson of Vladimir.
The next generation saw Izyaslav, son of Yaroslav the Wise,
defeated for Kiev by Vesvolod of Polotsk. Izyaslav went to Rome and
converted to the Roman church in Poland. At Sviatoslav's death, Vsevolod
and Izyaslav mad peace, but this was not to last: a coalition of Vsevolod
and Monomakh defeated him, and he died in 1078, Vsevolod died in 1093.
The Liubech Code was partly the result of this chaos.
The first Kievan synagogue was built under Sviatopolk. His
father Izyaslav, during one of the many civil wars that plagued old Kiev,
fled to Poland for assistance. While living there, he became quite the
Judeophile. Later, he ran to the Germans, promising to make Kiev a tributary
of the German state if an army were given him. He was even willing to
accept papal rule over Kiev as well. It is from the Jewish influx under
Izyaslav that Jews first penetrated Russia.
Both rulers knew the Jews had been given permission to enslave
the Russians in exchange for a regular subsidy. They quickly became
unpopular, but Svyatopolk's police protected them diligently. As always,
the synagogue, contrary to popular belief, was never meant as a prayer
house. It was a fortress for protection and a center for military and
ideological mobilization. While protected, the Jews never quite needed it.
They had a martial tradition of their own. Very soon, Jewish usury had
much of the country in debt, and, especially when facing unrest among
princes, foreign occupation and defeats from the Polovtsy, the population
had enough.
The mob looted the Jewish quarter in
that same year of unrest. Since it was an urban movement, it could not
have been a rebellion against “feudal exploitation” but, since no
such conceptual objected existed at the time, it was directed against
those that did: merchants, Jews and those profiting from them. These were
foreigners, those who had no connection to the soil and hence, used human
material as the “soil” to grow their profit.
The power of the boyar class at the time was as obnoxious as
ever. Its faction fighting destroyed the property of Galicia as nobles,
caring only for property and profit, used Turks, Cumans, Poles, Hungarians
or Tartars to invade the territory of their rivals. The surplus of
the promising Galician economy was decimated. The Jews were singled out,
again, because of the systematic and deceitful means used that set them
apart.1 Importantly, it
was under the rule of Sviatopolk where the Jews, invited and encouraged,
first made their agenda obnoxiously known.
Thus, it was a fairly new phenomenon.
The riot in 1113 was very popular, aimed at Jews and the
gentiles that had business relationships with them. These were well known
and were anything but arbitrary. It was the nobility, fearing for their
money, that sent for Monomakh to restore “law and order.” They
stated that, if left unchecked, they might even “rape your daughter and family.”
This was a lie, since the targets of the mob were very clear. They wrote
to Vladimir saying: “Come, prince, to Kiev so as to stop the violence; the
Jews will attack the nobles, the monasteries and even the royal
family itself. They will plunder if you do not come.” A meeting of princes
concluded that Jews needed to be expelled from Kiev. He did so, and
anti-usury legislation was immediately drawn up.
First, interest could not be
compounded. He did make a distinction between the charge for the use of
money and usury. The interest charged could not be more than the principle. If
the lender tried to charge more than the principle over time, the debtor
was freed from the obligation of paying the principle at all. The maximum
rate of interest could not exceed 20% a year. The Bankrutsky Statute
protected the property of smallholders and artisans from confiscation.
Debt slavery was outlawed. Repayment could be done on a
installment plan of up to five years if the debtor had a regular income.
Interest could not be collected for longer than two years. After that, the
loan was no longer interest bearing. When a debtor had to work off a loan, he
had the rights of any Russian and was not a slave. The only time slavery
was permitted is if the debtor tried to defraud the creditor.
The Testament of the metropolitan of Kiev Nikifor states that
“if you take the wealth of your brother though usury, it will do you no
good and provide no security or virtue. If you eat meat, you are not
eating the meat of sheep or other animals, but the flesh of your brothers,
cutting into his flesh though the evil methods of extortion, bribery and
unjust debt collections.” This shows that the practices of the Khazars
were well known and that many were aware that the mind of that empire has not
gone away.
Ancient Khazaria is essential to
understanding the Jewish mind. By the early 8th century, it reached
from the west Caucasus to the Sea of Azov and took most of the Crimean steppe.
To show its commercial nature, its capital lay at the mouth of the Volga.
In the work of Lev Gumilev and Tatiana Gradev, the Khazar civil war of
810-820 led to the total Judaization of the elites. The war was between
Islam and Judaism, two social views very similar, but ultimately, it
concerned the orientation of this commercial parasite.
The empire was a “chimera” in Gumilev's view defined as any x
having two distinct rhythms or functions, creating a cacophony understood
only subconsciously. This consists of a state without any real ethnic or
racial basis, merely a gaggle of people held together by force. The ethnic
mix was chaotic, maintaining the Jewish ruling class secure. From this
time forward, “Gog and Magog” were exclusively used in reference
to Khazaria. Only during the Crimean war did the English propaganda machine
equate “Ros” or “Rosh” with “Rus.” In reality, it refers to the chief
prince rather than a people. In a letter from Hisday ibn Sharput in
9th century Spain, the Khazar king is referred to as “Prince of
Rosh, Meshech and Tubal.” The testimony of the church fathers of both east
and west was that Antichrist is Khazaria.
The Pecheneg and Polovtsy forces that harassed Kiev through much
of its existence were popularly associated with the Jewish control over
the slave trade. The profit for the nomads was to sell the Slavs to the
Jews. Klyuchevskii argues that short-term loans were extremely
expensive and not regulated by law at all. He further suggests that the
real agenda of Jewish moneylenders at the time was not so much the quick
payoff, but the destruction of Russian capital. Default meant that the
property went to the Jews and its debtors became slaves.
Once the Khazar Khanate was destroyed, the Jews moved to
Tmutarakan, from which they orchestrated the nomadic attacks on Russia.
From there, they moved north to Kiev. Since the Jews had great experience
in banking, they were easily able to dominate their gentile competitors.
This served as a convenient midpoint between Byzantium and Kiev and was at
one time the capital of St. Vladimir himself.
Rather than making war on the nomads, rulers such as Izyaslav
would much rather hire them out than fight them. For the first time –
specifically in 1068, the veche became a powerful voice in Russia. If the
ruling class and pagan aristocracy were planning on working with
the Poles, Jews and nomads, then the most patriotic of the elite organized
into the veche. Izyaslav took his revenge on the urban poor the veche were
advocating for.
Similarly for 1113, Sviatopolk II, rather than go to the nomads,
made an alliance with the Jews. Each ruler and faction was trying to
discover which alien group would give them the best advantage over the
others. At the end of the 11th century, there were three factions in Kiev:
the old nobility, the pro-western associates of Sviatopolk II and the
veche. Sviatopolk threw in his lot with the Jews. The result was that Jews
were able to rule at will.
The westernized nobles along with the
prince and Jews eased out both the church and the old nobles, permitting
the Jews to absorb the capital of the area in exchange for financial
support. Lev Gumilev writes:
The control mechanism was extremely simple: the Jewish
moneylenders received protection from Kiev and shared their cash with the
prince. In turn, he would use this to maintain the army and keep all
anti-Jewish forces at bay (Gumilev, 2014).
It was the death of this prince that permitted the old nobles
and the people to fight back. The collapse of the older tribal system and
the rise of the state separated the people from the traditional sources of
morals. The church was not as yet firmly in control, so chaos
demoralized most people. As the factions fought it out for control of the
state, money and finance became very important. Hence, the Jews were as
well.
The destruction of Jewish usury and their removal from power by
Vladimir Monomakh was significant largely because it restored the power of
the church and assisted greatly in the Christianization of the country.
The importance of this cannot be overstated: The Russian empire was to be
the very opposite of the Khazar mind and this was made explicit in document
after document.
Vladimir Monomakh was the first “gatherer of the Russian lands.”
The Jews were forwarding money to separatist princes in an effort to
permanently divide Russia. The warfare among princes had debased the
population. Jewish usury was a revolutionary development that required the
rapid intervention of a legitimate prince.
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2 Richard Pipes. Russia Under the Old Regime. NY, 1974. P.
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