The Linguistic Divide: How Philological Decisions Shaped Markets and Economies
In My Russia (Romanian language edition at Curtea Veche, 2024, in translation of Adriana Dănilă), Mikhail Shishkin argues that one of the defining moments in Russian history was the choice of the “Old Church” language for Kievan Rus instead of Latin. This decision, which had major consequences for the cultural, scientific, and geopolitical development of the Russian sphere, cannot be attributed to a single ruler. Rather, it was a long historical process linked to the influence of Byzantium and the Christianization of Kievan Rus. It is true that the seeds were sown by Vladimir I of Kiev (978–1015), who decided to Christianize Kievan Rus in 988, adopting Byzantine Orthodoxy as the official religion. Through this decision, the path of the Slavic liturgical tradition, introduced by Saints Cyril and Methodius, was chosen, making Old Slavonic the liturgical and administrative language of the emerging Russian state. The decision was consolidated during the reigns of Yaroslav the Wise (1019-1054) and Ivan III (1462-1505), the latter’s rule coinciding with the period when, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia proclaimed itself the heir to the Byzantine Empire, and Moscow began to be regarded as the “Third Rome”. By choosing a language within the Byzantine sphere of influence, Kievan Rus distanced itself from Latin (the language of the Catholic world) in favour of the Orthodox model. The choice belonged to Vladimir I, who had to decide between Orthodoxy, Catholic Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
The long-term consequences of choosing Orthodoxy and Slavonic were Russia’s isolation from the West and, consequently, scientific and social stagnation. Over time, this historical gap only widened. In the West, Latin moved beyond the church and became a vehicle of knowledge, supporting the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, leading to the development of science, medicine, philosophy, and even laying the foundations of the market economy. In Russia, however, Old Slavonic remained isolated from the Enlightenment currents spreading through Europe and maintained a conservative worldview.
The use of Latin in the West fostered a critical spirit and challenged absolute authority, leading to the replacement of absolute monarchies with republics, where intellectual elites and rule-of-law institutions flourished, enabling rapid progress and modernization.
Moreover, Latin, through its connection to Roman law, laid the foundation for market economy development, based on private property rights and the separation of powers, which allowed the emergence of the entrepreneur as an innovator in the economy, with the ultimate goal of profit maximization. Essential institutions of the “free market” appeared, without which entrepreneurial activity could not have reached its full potential. The Florentine and Venetian merchants of Renaissance Italy developed the banking system with its financial and accounting innovations, a system that played a crucial role in European trade. This, in turn, led to modern capitalism, facilitating the emergence of the Amsterdam stock exchange (1602, the world’s first stock exchange) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which propelled the Dutch Golden Age and a revolution in global trade. Critics might argue that this also led to the first major global financial crisis – the tulip mania –, but such crises are an inherent part of free market economies.
This early capitalism led to the emergence of a strong bourgeois class that could own property and develop businesses without being entirely dependent on the state. In this system, the entrepreneur was seen as an independent economic agent, with decisions guided by the ideal of profit maximization. This gave rise to the concept of homo economicus (in Latin, sic!), with its rational behaviour aimed at maximizing profit.
In contrast, in the Slavic sphere, the economy remained under central control, meaning that private property as an institution was weakly developed. Where it was the tsar—not the entrepreneur—who controlled capital, the emergence of a free market was impossible. While entrepreneurship in the West led to capitalism, state-controlled capital in Russia meant the consolidation of a centralized economy, an agrarian society, dependence on the exploitation of a few natural resources, and economic stagnation that persisted over time. If Western entrepreneurship meant risk-taking in the hope of economic growth (hence an innovative spirit), Eastern entrepreneurship aimed at minimizing risks in the hope of reducing suffering or losses.
In the Byzantine Orthodox space, a conservative vision of society reinforced centralized power, and the idea of maximizing well-being or profit was subordinated to the state, which controlled capital and resources and, implicitly, set the rules of the economic game. These rules, in Latin and Western Europe, naturally emerged at the intersection of supply and demand. With individual initiative restricted by the state and a feudal economy, entrepreneurs in the Byzantine-Orthodox sphere had to wait centuries for timid attempts at thawing the market economy, and even these were short-lived and suppressed by a recurring historical course. After 1922, for nearly a century, private entrepreneurship was even completely eliminated.
If Latin allowed for economic rationality, private initiative, and the development of liberal economic models (all centred around homo economicus), Old Slavonic was synonymous with economic restriction through centralized power.
