The two great revolutions of the eighteenth century—the American and the French had each in turn and in its own way a profound influence not only on the history of the United States and of France, but directly or indirectly on the history of the whole world.

These two powerful currents had a common source in the French ideological movement before the Revolution. The development of American revolutionary thought was of course more closely linked to the English ideology, but there was much contact and cross influence between the English and the French philosophers. Further, the French political and philosophical literature was directly accessible to Americans without intermediary English works. We have only to mention Montesquieu and his principle of the separation of powers which serves as the basis of the Constitution of the United States. Also, the American Revolution influenced in turn political developments in France. One finds the roots of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen not only in France but in America as well.

In 1954 the Ossete Dzambulat Dzanty, an emigré living in France, communicated to me the text of the Ossetic tale (kadaeg) "Iry Dada." It is an historical tale describing the conflict between the Russians and the Ossetes, which had occurred in 1022. It also contains elements of heroic dirge. As Dzambulat Dzanty stated in the "Foreword" to "Iry Dada," he had heard this tale from an old Ossete reciter, Khulyx, in the village Bolshoe Osetinskoe in Mozdok area in 1910.

Constantinople—“the Imperial City” (Tsargrad), as the Russians used to call it—with its riches and splendor, its churches and palaces, fired the imagination of many a “Barbaric people of the North,” and following in the wake of the Huns, the Avars, and the Bulgars, the Russians in their turn were eventually attracted by her. Out of their wars and commerce with the Byzantines there gradually developed a deeper cultural intercourse between the two nations, and it is the Byzantine form of Christianity which became the foundation of the Russian Church.

The first Russian attack on Constantinople took place in 860. Both the fact itself and the date are firmly established by evidence available in which Patriarch Photius's two homilies occupy a prominent place.

The question before us is to what stage of social and economic development—or, to borrow a term from geology, to what socio-political formation—Kievan Russia belongs.

Chronologically, as we know, the Kievan period included the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Those three centuries witnessed the rise and blossoming of feudal institutions in western and central Europe; they represent what may be called the feudal age par excellence. It seems only natural that one should be inclined to place Kievan Russia in the same category and characterize its sociopolitical regime as feudal. Yet until recently Russian historians have been reluctant to do so. They did not raise any definite objections to the study of feudalism in Russia: they simply ignored the problem.

The So-Called Expanded Version of the Russian Law (Lex Russica, Pravda Russkaya) consists of three parts: the revised Pravda of Yaroslav's Sons; Vladimir Monomach's Statute; and some supplementary enactments. It is at the end of the third part that clauses dealing with slaves and grantees are placed (Sections 110–121). Some students of Russian legal history call this collection of articles a special “Statute on Slavery” to correspond to Vladimir Monomach's “Statue on indentured laborers” (Zakup). It may be dated in the second half of the 12th century, possibly in the reign of Prince Rostislav of Smolensk and Kiev (1160–67).

Prince Vladimir of Kiev was baptized in A.D. 988, but it was not before fifty years later than the church of Kievan Russia assumed any definite shape. The first metropolitan of Russia, Theopemptus, a Greek by origin, was ordained by the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1037, and it was in the same year that Prince Yaroslav, Vladimir's son, started building the cathedral of St Sophia at Kiev. There are discrepancies in the lists of the primates of the Russian church prior to Theopemptus's appointment. In some manuscripts Michael is mentioned as the first Russian “metropolitan,” and Leon as the second, while other manuscripts omit the name of Michael and start with Leon. Leon's successor was John, who officiated at the discovery of the relics of SS Boris and Gleb in 1026. His title was that of archbishop, not of metropolitan. There is no contemporary information about the location of the see of the primate. The Nikon Chronicle, compiled in the sixteenth century, states that prior to 1037 Pereyaslavl and not Kiev was the metropolis. As we shall see later on, this statement is subject to reservations.