The economy of Kievan Rus' was one of the most powerful economies in medieval Europe during its heyday, second only to Byzantium. The basic components of the Kievan Rus' economy were formed by agriculture, craft production, and domestic and intercontinental trade.
The heyday of Kyivan Rus' in the 9th11th centuries was mainly due to its favourable geographical position at the crossroads of trade routes and its connections with the countries of Western Europe, the North and the South. In the 12th century, after nomads blocked the trade route along the Dnieper River, the "route from the Varangians to the Greeks", Kievan Rus' disintegrated into independent Rus' principalities. Exhausted by internal strife and attacks by the Polovtsians, Mongols, Tatars, Poles and Lithuanians, they became the outlying lands of other, more powerful states.
Overview of socio-economic development
In the 9th–12th centuries, the economy of the Kievan Rus' state can be characterised as a period of early feudalism. The emergence and development of feudalism is manifested primarily in the formation and growth of feudal land ownership. Feudal land ownership was the economic basis for the domination of the feudal class, as evidenced by written sources from the early 9th century and archaeological finds.Економіка Київської Русі (ІХ - ХII ст.) According to the historian Alex M. Feldman, because the early laws governing legal access to land ownership were commensurate with early laws governing legal access to bullion, early feudalism in Kievan Rus' was coefficient with early versions of the Political economy of Mercantilism.
In the 9th century, a ruling class of feudal lords emerged, which included the princes of Kiev, local princes, and boyars. In the 9th century, the state and personal princely authority were not yet sufficiently differentiated. The formation of the grand prince's domain and the domains of individual princes intensified in the 10th century. The princely domain was an estate that belonged not to the state, but to the prince himself as a feudal lord. Alongside the grand princely domain and the estates of local princes, boyar and druzhina landholdings also appeared. The question of when boyar landholdings first appeared in Kievan Rus' has not yet been resolved by historians due to the incompleteness of the sources. With the introduction of Christianity in Kievan Rus', the church (the Metropolis of Kiev and all Rus') became a major feudal lord. The practice of donating land to monasteries and churches gradually spread, turning them into large landowners.
The main feature of the early stage of Eastern European feudalism was the dominance of the tribute form of exploitation, the so-called "poliudia" (court session). During the poliudia, the prince or officials held court and carried out punishments based on the complaints that the population had brought to the prince. In addition to poliudia, there was also a "" ("transportation fee" or "cart tax"): the population of those lands where the prince and his governors could not or did not want to go, had to bring tribute to Kiev themselves. This tribute usually took the form of agricultural products in carts, delivered to the prince's court, market, or field camp during a military campaign.
This form of tribute collection dates back to the 6th-8th centuries. It was also preserved in the state of Kievan Rus'. The amount of tribute, place and time of collection were not determined in advance, but depended on the occasion. Later, in response to protests from the population, Princess Olga established "lessons" in 946, i.e. fixed rates of tribute, time and place of collection. The unit of tribute was the "dym" (yard, family) or "plough" ("ralo"). As princes and nobles seized communal lands, feudal estates were formed, which gave rise to such forms of exploitation as labour.
The vast majority of people employed in labour were feudal dependents: the smerdy, singular smerd (), translatable as "peasant farmers". They had their own households, but for a certain period of time they had to work for the feudal lord for giving them land. The fragmentary and unclear nature of the sources on smerdy led to the emergence of different points of view on this category of the population of Kievan Rus' in the pre-Soviet period. The term smerdy may be variously translated as "peasants" or "serfs", depending on how their status is interpreted.
In Kievan Rus', the term zakup (закуп) was used to describe the feudal dependent peasantry. A zakup was a person who has fallen into debt bondage and is obliged to repay the kupa (купа; "heap" or "pile") received from the master by his labour in the household. A zakup was supposed to do agricultural work. He had to look after the owner's cattle. The feudal lord gave the zakup a plot of land, as well as agricultural tools and working cattle, in order to work to pay off the debt. Close in position to the zakups were the rjadovychi (рядовичі): peasants who worked for the feudal lord under a contract (ряд rjad). Rjadovychi literally means "sons of the contract". All rjadovychi and zakups were economically dependent on the landowner, and legally dependent on him as well. If a debtor evaded payment of the debt, he could become a slave.
In the rural community, there was a category of people called izgoi ("outcasts"). An izgoi is a person who has been "outlived", knocked out of the ordinary, deprived of his or her previous state. There were two types of izgoi: free and dependent. A significant contingent of feudal dependent izgoi was formed by serfs who had been redeemed into freedom.
In Kievan Rus', the non-free population included slaves. One of the sources of slavery was captivity. In the 11th–12th centuries, the term "chelyad" (челядь) was used to refer to captive slaves. According to Ruska Pravda, a chelyadyn is a slave under the rule of his master, a beaten and completely disenfranchised creature. Unlike the serfs (челяді), slaves (раби)-kholops (холопи)-are members of a tribe, a product of the social processes that took place in the society of Kievan Rus'. The Ruska Pravda also mentions such sources of serfdom as self-sale, marriage to a slave "without a contract", and becoming a tiun or a keyman "without a contract. A procurer who ran away or committed a crime automatically became a serf.
Patriarchal slavery also existed on the territory of Kievan Rus', but it did not become the dominant form of economic activity. Slaves, mostly from prisoners of war, eventually received land plots and were "adopted" by the community, as the use of slave labour was inefficient. Many pious people let some of their slaves go free or bequeathed them to the church before they died.
The gradual assault on the community, the enslavement of the smerdy, and the seizure (enclosure) of common land, all led to growing resistance to landowners. The smerdy would flee from the feudal lords to the "wastelands", i.e. to free lands, raised spontaneous riots, kill representatives of the fiefdom administration, and organise massive thefts of the feudal lords' property. This forced the Kievan princes to pay attention to the development of legal norms of internal state life. Thus, in 1016, under Yaroslav the Wise, the Ruska Pravda appeared, which became an important collection of Kievan Rus' law.
Agriculture, husbandry, hunting and fishing Agriculture was the leading sector of the economy of Kievan Rus', and it reached a high level of development. Ancient traditions, natural conditions and large amounts of land owned by peasants contributed to the development of agriculture and animal husbandry.Господарське життя та економіка Київської Русі Kievan society was dependent on food production by the rural peasantry.
Agriculture
The main cereal grain crops in Kievan Rus' were rye in the north, millet in the south, supplemented by barley, wheat, buckwheat, and oats. Peas, lentils, flax, and hemp were also grown.
The lands of Kievan Rus' were primarily located in two climatic zones: the Eurasian Steppe (including parts of the East European forest steppe and Ponto-Caspian steppe) with the highly fertile black soils south and west of Kiev (encompassing most of present-day Ukraine), and the forest zone in the northwest (including the Novgorod Republic and present-day Belarus) and the northeast (including the region known as Zalesye, or "area beyond the forest", which became the core of Vladimir-Suzdal). Unlike the forest-steppes in the southwest, the northern forestlands (covered with cedar and birch trees, and more to the south oak trees) were generally well-watered, with adequate precipitation and extensive river systems to sustain agriculture. However, the lands north of the 50th parallel (above Kiev) had short growing seasons, and lacked the highly fertile black soils of the southwest.
The northern climate always made agriculture precarious, never allowed for abundant production, and sometimes the farming system broke down. Several famines have been recorded in written sources, such as the 1024 famine in Suzdalia caused by a drought, prompting the inhabitants to buy grain from Volga Bulgaria. Another famine took place in the Rostov region and Yaroslavl in 1071. Throughout the year 1092, there was a drought in southern Kievan Rus', after which a late frost destroyed young crops and ruined the harvest, causing another famine.
In the forest-steppe zone, the steam farming system with two- and three-land crop rotations was used, in the forest zone the slash-and-burn agriculture system and shifting cultivation (long fallowing) system. Woods were cut down and burnt, thus freeing up arable land and fertilising the soil at the same time. In forest-steppe and steppe regions, the most common farming system was fallowing (crop rotation), in which the fertility of the land was restored naturally.
High labour productivity made it possible to produce more grain than was necessary to meet the biological needs of the population. This, as well as the availability of excellent pastures and hayfields, allowed feudal households to keep large numbers of livestock. For tilling the soil and growing crops, the most advanced tools of the time were used: scythes (for mowing hay), sickles (for reaping), hoes, spades, ards, ploughs, sokhas, harrows, mattocks, and others for digging or ploughing, which were sophisticated enough to ensure high yields – on average, slightly less than 8 centners of grain per hectare. A flail was used to thresh the grain. Sometimes peasants formed collectives to share equipment and help each other with farm work.
Livestock breeding
The availability of pastures and hayfields supported the breeding of livestock, which provided the population with meat, dairy products, and raw materials for clothing and footwear. Princes and wealthy boyars owned flocks of sheep, and herds of cattle, goats, and horses. They grazed their livestock from spring to autumn in meadows, floodplains, forests, fallow land, and steppes. Hay and grain were stored as winter feed.
Hunting and fishing Hunting forest and steppe animals provided meat and furs. Marten, fox, beaver, and squirrel pelts ere among the principal exports of Kievan Rus'. The production of beeswax and honey was economically important These goods were sold in the markets of the Byzantine Empire, the Middle East, and Western Europe, where merchants could obtain jewellery, fabrics, wine, fruit, and weapons in exchange for their produce.
Urban development
East Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, and Baltic cities were created from small craft and trade settlements even before the formation of the state. The remains of these towns, the hillforts, remain in large numbers in the northern lands of present-day Ukraine: 400 in Kyiv Oblast, 150 in Chernihiv Oblast, 350 in Volyn Oblast, 250 in Polissia, and more than 100 in Halychyna.