Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus, was the first East Slavic state and, later, an amalgam of principalities, in Eastern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, Penguin Historical Atlas of Russia (Penguin, 1995), p.14–16. Encompassing a variety of polities and peoples, including East Slavic, Norse, and Finnic, it was ruled by the Rurik dynasty, founded by the Varangian prince Rurik.Kievan Rus , Encyclopædia Britannica Online. The name was coined by Russian historians in the 19th century to describe the period when Kiev was preeminent. At its greatest extent in the mid-11th century, Kievan Rus' stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Taman Peninsula in the east,Kyivan Rus' , Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.See Historical map of Kievan Rus' from 980 to 1054 . uniting the East Slavic tribes.
According to the Primary Chronicle, the first ruler to unite East Slavic lands into what would become Kievan Rus' was Varangian prince Oleg the Wise (). He extended his control from Novgorod south along the Dnieper river valley to protect trade from Khazar incursions from the east, and took control of the city of Kiev, laying the foundation of the state and becoming prince of Kiev. Sviatoslav I () achieved the first major territorial expansion of the state, fighting a war of conquest against the Khazars. Vladimir the Great () spread Christianity with his own baptism and, by decree, extended it to all inhabitants of Kiev and beyond. Kievan Rus' reached its greatest extent under Yaroslav the Wise (); his sons assembled and issued its first written legal code, the Russkaya Pravda, shortly after his death.
The state began to decline in the late 11th century, gradually disintegrating into various rival regional powers throughout the 12th century.Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (1993), p.15. It was further weakened by external factors, such as the decline of the Byzantine Empire, its major economic partner, and the accompanying diminution of trade routes through its territory. It finally fell to the Mongol invasion in the mid-13th century, though the Rurik dynasty would continue to rule until the death of Feodor I of Russia in 1598.Picková, Dana, O počátcích státu Rusů, in: Historický obzor 18, 2007, č.11/12, s. 253–261 The modern nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all claim Kievan Rus' as their cultural ancestor, with Belarus and Russia deriving their names from it.
Names
During its existence, Kievan Rus' was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus'", or the "Rus' land" (), with Rus being derived from the ethnonym (; ), in Greek as , in Old French as , in Latin as or (with local German spelling variants Ruscia and Ruzzia), and from the 12th century also as or . Назаренко А. В. Глава I // Древняя Русь на международных путях: Междисциплинарные очерки культурных, торговых, политических связей IX—XII вв. — М.: Языки русской культуры, 2001. — c. 40, 42—45, 49—50. — . Various etymologies have been proposed, including , the Finnish designation for Sweden or Ros, a tribe from the middle Dnieper valley region.
According to the prevalent theory, the name Rus, like the Proto-Finnic name for Sweden (*rootsi), is derived from an Old Norse term for 'men who row' (rods-) because rowing was the main method of navigating the rivers of Eastern Europe, and could be linked to the Swedish coastal area of Roden, later known as Roslagen.Stefan Brink, 'Who were the Vikings?', in The Viking World , ed. by Stefan Brink and Neil Price (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 4–10 (pp. 6–7). The name Rus would then have the same origin as the Finnish and Estonian names for Sweden: Ruotsi and Rootsi."Russ, adj. and n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/169069. Accessed 12 January 2021.
When the Varangian princes arrived, the name Rus was associated with them and came to be associated with the territories they controlled. Initially the cities of Kiev, Chernigov, and Pereyaslavl and their surroundings came under Varangian control. From the late tenth century, Vladimir the Great and Yaroslav the Wise tried to associate the name with all of the extended princely domains. Both meanings persisted in sources until the Mongol conquest: the narrower one, referring to the triangular territory east of the middle Dnieper, and the broader one, encompassing all the lands under the hegemony of Kiev's grand princes.
The Russian term () was coined in the 19th century in Russian historiography to refer to the period when the centre was in Kiev. This term, translated as Kievan Rus (and alternatively as Kievan Russia) is often used to refer to the period spanning from the 9th century to the mid-13th century. In the 19th century it also appeared in Ukrainian as (). Later, the Russian term was rendered into Belarusian as or () and into Rusyn as ().
In English, the term was introduced in the early 20th century, when it was found in the 1913 English translation of Vasily Klyuchevsky's A History of Russia,Vasily Klyuchevsky, A History of Russia, vol. 3, pp. 98, 104 to distinguish the early polity from successor states, which were also named Rus. The Varangian Rus' from Scandinavia used the Old Norse name , which, according to a common interpretation, means "land of towns". The territories of Staraya Ladoga and Rurikovo Gorodische were initially called Garðar, before Garðaríki was used as a denomination for the entire state after the Varangians moved to the Middle Dnieper.
History Origin Prior to the emergence of Kievan Rus' in the 9th century, most of the area north of the Black Sea was primarily populated by eastern Slavic tribes. In the northern region around Novgorod were the Ilmen SlavsCarl Waldman & Catherine Mason, Encyclopedia of European Peoples (2006) , p.415. and neighboring Krivichi, who occupied territories surrounding the headwaters of the West Dvina, Dnieper and Volga rivers. To their north, in the Ladoga and Karelia regions, were the Chud: various Baltic Finnic peoples. In the south, in the area around Kiev, were the Poliane, the Drevliane to the west of the Dnieper, and the Severiane to the east. To their north and east were the Vyatichi, and to their south was forested land settled by Slav farmers, giving way to steppelands populated by nomadic herdsmen. Some of the East Slavic tribes belonged to the Luka-Raikovetska culture, while others to the Volyntsevo culture.
There was once controversy over whether the Rus' were Varangians or Slavs (see anti-Normanism); however, more recently, scholarly attention has focused more on debating how quickly an ancestrally Norse people assimilated into Slavic culture. This uncertainty is due largely to a paucity of contemporary sources. Attempts to address this question instead rely on archaeological evidence, the accounts of foreign observers, and legends and literature from centuries later. To some extent the controversy is related to the foundation myths of modern states in the region. This often unfruitful debate over origins has periodically devolved into competing nationalist narratives of dubious scholarly value being promoted directly by various government bodies in a number of states. This was seen in the Stalinist period, when Soviet historiography sought to distance the Rus' from any connection to Germanic tribes, in an effort to dispel Nazi propaganda claiming the Russian state owed its existence and origins to the supposedly racially superior Norse tribes.Elena Melnikova, 'The "Varangian Problem": Science in the Grip of Ideology and Politics', in Russia's Identity in International Relations: Images, Perceptions, Misperceptions, ed. by Ray Taras (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 42–52. More recently, in the context of resurgent nationalism in post-Soviet states, Anglophone scholarship has analyzed renewed efforts to use this debate to create ethno-nationalist foundation stories, with governments sometimes directly involved in the project.Jonathan Shepard, "Review Article: Back in Old Rus and the USSR: Archaeology, History and Politics", English Historical Review, vol. 131 (no. 549) (2016), 384–405 (p. 387), citing Leo S. Klejn, Soviet Archaeology: Trends, Schools, and History, trans. by Rosh Ireland and Kevin Windle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 119. Conferences and publications questioning the Norse origins of the Rus' have been supported directly by state policy in some cases, and the resultant foundation myths have been included in some school textbooks in Russia.Artem Istranin and Alexander Drono, "Competing historical Narratives in Russian Textbooks", in Mutual Images: Textbook Representations of Historical Neighbours in the East of Europe, ed. by János M. Bak and Robert Maier, Eckert. Dossiers, 10 ([Braunschweig]: Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, 2017), 31–43 (pp. 35–36).
While Varangians were Norse traders and Vikings, many Russian and Ukrainian nationalist historians argue that the Rus' were themselves Slavs.Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, pp. 23–28 (Oxford Press, 1984).Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine Normanist theory Normanist theories focus on the earliest written source for the East Slavs, the Primary Chronicle, which was produced in the 12th century.Riasanovsky, p. 25. Nationalist accounts on the other hand have suggested that the Rus' were present before the arrival of the Varangians,Riasanovsky, pp. 25–27. noting that only a handful of Scandinavian words can be found in Russian and that Scandinavian names in the early chronicles were soon replaced by Slavic names.David R. Stone, A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the war in Chechnya (2006), pp. 2–3.
Nevertheless, the close connection between the Rus' and the Norse is confirmed both by extensive Scandinavian settlement in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine and by Slavic influences in the Swedish language. Though the debate over the origin of the Rus' remains politically charged, there is broad agreement that if the proto-Rus' were indeed originally Norse, they were quickly nativized, adopting Slavic languages and other cultural practices. This position, roughly representing a scholarly consensus (at least outside nationalist historiography), was summarized by the historian, F. Donald Logan, "in 839, the Rus were Swedes; in 1043 the Rus were Slavs".