La casa Russia. Bisanzio e la Terza Roma

This paper examines the persistence of the imperial ideology of the Third Rome in the modern and contemporary era. Beginning with the dynastic legitimation offered in 1472 by the marriage of Ivan III of Moscow to Zoe/Sof’ja Paleologina, the fruit of Bessarion’s Realpolitik, and the political agenda set a century later by Ivan IV Groznij, the doctrine of the translatio ad Russiam of the imperial title of the Caesars of the First Rome, which was transferred by Constantine to the Second Rome, will have a revival under Stalin. The ideological revisitation of the statist model of Byzantium will activate in the Soviet intelligencija a transference between autocratic past and totalitarian present, evident in Sergei Ejzenštejn’s Ivan Grozniy, but also in the work of the great Russian Byzantinists of the second half of the 20th century.