Kievan Russia (882−1242): The Original National State of Russians
According to the official historiographical traditions (mainly of Western origin), Kievan Russia was established and governed by the Nordic Vikings (“Varyagi/Varangians/Rus’”) with the Dnieper as its axis with Kiev as capital and later received Christianity of the Eastern (Greek) type from the Byzantium in the south and was finally conquered by the barbaric Mongol Tartars from the east [...]
In the years from 882 to 1242 the first and original national state organization of the Russians – the Kievan Russia (not Kyivan Rusia or Kyiv Rus’!) became directly and indirectly subject to external political influences by several external political units of the time. According to the official historiographical traditions (mainly of Western origin), Kievan Russia was established and governed by the Nordic Vikings (“Varyagi/Varangians/Rus’”) with the Dnieper as its axis with Kiev as capital and later received Christianity of the Eastern (Greek) type from the Byzantium in the south and was finally conquered by the barbaric Mongol Tartars from the east.
The origin of the term “rus’” is, actually, still not scientifically investigated and, therefore, clear (due to the lack of proper historical sources). However, in the early period of the state’s emergence, the Eastern Slavs did not use the term “rus’” to refer to themselves. The term is, in fact, related to the Old Norse word “rōþr”, which means a rower or a campaign by boats propelled by oars. In the 9th and 10th centuries, “rus’” referred to the ducal inner circle and his confidants, the army – an elite social group. In Byzantine written historical sources circulating until the 11th century, “rus’” (“Rhōs”) referred to the Scandinavians or the Nordic Vikings. Around that time another name, “Varangians” (“Varangoi”), also appeared. Varangians were primarily Nordic-Scandinavian mercenaries in the Byzantine Imperial army. They were elite warriors valued for their valor and loyalty and even formed the Emperor’s personal bodyguard. The terms “rus’” and “Varangians” have been used synonymously since the 11th century.
From the very point of geography, concerning the formation and functioning of the first state of the Eastern Slavs, on the territory of Kievan Russia, there was a contrast between seven types of land being of significant importance at the time: northern coniferous forest, tundra, mixed and deciduous forest, wooden steppe, steppes, desert, and mountain vegetation. The Nordic Vikings arrived in this region in the 9th century as merchants and conquerors but before that, the Slavic tribes living there were pushing eastwards from Central Europe toward the woodlands of present-day European Central Russia. However, at the same time, different types of Asiatic hordes belonging to nomadic horsemen have been constantly moving westwards across Russian southern steppes.
Nevertheless, when the Nordic Vikings arrived, the rivers in a north-south direction (not steppes in the eastern-western direction) became the focal routes of importance. The militant Vikings established, dominated, and consequently exploited chief waterways trade lines along the main rivers of the region populated by the Eastern Slavs from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea including the Dnieper River as the focal waterway for the Viking-led trade with the Byzantine Empire. In fact, the first national state of Russians – Kievan Russia, originated in the Viking’s attempt to impose trade control over the territories around the main watersheds from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The chief trading potential between the Baltic and Byzantium comes from the fact that the rivers of the land populated by the Eastern Slavs have in general north-south and south-to-north directions of navigation.
As a matter of fact, in Kievan Russia, both the focal trade lines and coming state organization have been going from north to south, based upon the rivers, across the west-east belt of forest and steppe used by the Russian enemies in their invasion attempts from Asia to Europe. Actually, the whole history of Kievan Russia as the first national state of Russians, was politically dominated by the constant fight and ultimate failure of the Russians to protect their steppe land from the Asiatic migrating nomadic-warrior invaders. However, instead, Russians resumed the historic eastward colonization of the northern forest belt, which the Asiatic nomads did not dare to enter until the mid-13th century.
The focal river route that the Scandinavian Vikings used ran from the Gulf of Finland up the Neva River, via Lake Ladoga, the Volkhov and Dnieper Rivers, and across the Black Sea to the Byzantine Empire which had developed trade links with Asia. This trade line was known in historical sources of the time as the “route from the Varyagi to the Greeks” (i.e., from Scandinavia to Byzantium). The Vikings succeeded in imposing their military-political and economic control southwards and consequently, the towns of Smolensk, Novgorod, and Kiev (in 882) became controlled by them as the main trade outposts. Among all other towns, Kiev grew fast for the very reasons it was the capital of the state and it established strong economic links with the Byzantine Empire – its most important trading partner. In addition, Kievan Russia received the Orthodox Christian denomination at the time of the rule by Vladimir Svyatoslavich (980−1015).
During the Viking military and trading expeditions throughout the lands populated by the Eastern Slavs within the boundaries of Kievan Russia, the Khazars and Magyars (vassals of the Khazars) occupied the southern steppes north of the Black Sea, Sea of Azov, and the Caspian Sea. The Khazars, originally nomadic tribes, by the 10th century, became farmers and merchants who settled between the River Dnieper and the River Volga where they established powerful state organization. The Slavic Russians succeeded in controlling the territory north of the southern steppes of the lower rivers of Pruth, Southern Bug, and Dniester, and to keep control of the Dnieper route with the exit to the Black Sea. A Russian Grand Duke Svyatoslav (962−972) took an obligation to defeat the Khazars in order to expand the southern territory of its state and to neutralize the Khazar’s pressure on the borders of Kievan Russia. His army defeated Khazars and occupied their capital city of Sarkel in 965 continuing military expeditions in the next two years along the rivers of Volga, Terek, and Kuban between the Caspian Sea and Sea of Azov. In 966, the Volga Bulgars have been defeated as well. However, the crushing Khazars was a kind of trap as now it opened the way to the wild Pechenegi who consequently controlled the southern steppes between Dniester and Dnieper. However, in 1054 warlike Polovtsy living between Volga and Ural rivers started to move eastward crossing Volga and subordinated Pechenegi who sacked the city of Kiev in 1093. Grand Duke Vladimir I of Kiev (980−1015) was forced to organize some defensive actions against fierce Pechenegi.
Kievan Russia was always in trouble with the nomadic peoples in the southern steppes being weakened in constant conflicts with them – the problem was never solved till the end of the state independence in the mid-13th century. From 1054 up to its final dissolution in 1242, Kievan Russia was broken up into several autonomous and even, in fact, independent principalities which in many cases were in conflicts between themselves. The southern parts of Kievan Russia were suffering from cruel raids of plundering by Polovtsy and attacks by other nomadic peoples, while northern principalities (like Novgorod and Vladimir-Suzdal with Moscow) enjoyed their geographic positions of several watersheds trade lines in the security of the forests and marshes. Especially Novgorod on the River Volkov near Lake Ilmen became economically prosperous and established a vast fur-trading empire stretching to the Artic and the Ural Mt. Steady colonization of the forests in central and northern parts of Kievan Russia, giving them enough power to effectively get rid of the rule from Kiev. After the Novgorod trading empire, among all forest principalities, the most important was Vladimir-Suzdal with the fast-growing city of Moscow (first mentioned in historical sources in 1147).
The Vladimir-Suzdal principality on the eve of the final Mongol incursion into central Russian lands in 1237 was preparing to attack the Volga Bulgars (of Mongol origin) as their position in the mid-Volga region was a barrier for further Russian expansion toward the East. For that purpose was built Nizhniy Novgorod as a military stronghold (fortress) on the way of the campaign against the Volga Bulgars and their capital Bolgar on the Volga River. However, in 1237 started the Mongol invasion which was one of the most (if not the most) traumatic events in Russian history. Firstly, the Asiatic Mongols made an exploratory incursion into the southern Russian steppes in 1221 when they defeated the joined army of Russian and Polovtsy detachments at the Battle of the River of Kalka on May 31st, 1223. However, the Mongols as more powerful returned to Russian steppes in 1236 and first attacked the regions of middle and upper Volga against Volga Bulgars continuing in the next winter of 1237/1238 their incursions in central Russian principalities when the protective marshes, lakes, and rivers were frozen. Consequently, the Mongols destroyed prosperous towns in the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal, especially after the Battle of the River Sit on March 4th, 1238 when they defeated the Russian forces. The territory of Novgorod, including the city of Novgorod itself, was saved only due to the approach of spring weather when the snow and ice started to melt and, therefore, the Mongols dared not be caught by the thaw among Novgorod’s surrounding marshes. Nevertheless, the next year (1239) southwest portions of Kievan Russia suffered annihilation by the Mongols. The city of Kiev itself became sacked in 1240 followed by numerous other settlements.
The territory of Novgorod escaped the Mongol barbaric invasion and looting of the settlements but on the other hand at the same time had to refute constant military attacks from Nordic Swedes and Baltic German Livonian Order of Crusaders who wanted to drive Russia from the Baltic. Novgorod’s Duke Alexander (“Nevsky”) succeeded in beating both of them: first the Swedes on the River of Neva in 1240, and the German Crusaders on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242 but he had to recognize the Mongol overlordship in the same year of 1242 that was marked as the final ending of the independent Kievan Russia. Nonetheless, the Mongol incursions on the Russian land and the final subjugation of Kievan Russia had serious and lasting multi-effects of economic, political, social, and cultural consequences which in some aspects can be visible even today. First, the peasants were oppressed by the heavy tribute paid to the Mongol masters and lost any hope of changing their social status for a long time. Second, the destruction of the most important urban settlements, where handicrafts had been developed, reduced national life to, in fact, an uncivilized level of existence. Third, the cancelation of the urban class paved the proper way to the later emergence of political Russian autocracy which in many patterns imitated its Asiatic-Mongolic-Tatarian masters.
Nonetheless, the Mongolian Tatars themselves after 1242 soon withdrew to the southern steppes. They limited their direct military interventions against Russian lands to punitive expeditions if it was necessary followed by the policy of appointment of local powerful tax-collectors. Such a situation existed till the mid-15th century when Russians started to liberate their lands against Mongol lords.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović
Ex-University Professor
Vilnius, Lithuania
Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies
Personal disclaimer: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter (X), Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
The Chinese have a genius for pithy expressions and few are more packed with meaning, while immediately understandable, than "paper tiger". NATO is one, but paper tigers that overestimate their powers can be dangerous.Some Russians are concerned that there are today more hostile troops at the Russian border than at any time since 1941. While this is true, it is not, at the moment, very significant. The Germans invaded the USSR with nearly 150 divisions in 1941. Which, as it turned out, were not enough.Today NATO has – or claims to have – a battle group in each of the three ...
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in the face of a rising secular nationalism in the late 1800s, that culminated in the Young Turk movement, tried to restore the influence of the Ottoman Empire among Islamic nations and the Empire’s many peoples by stressing the importance of Islam and the Ottoman Caliphate, of the role of the Ottomans as the protectors of Islam and, in the modern world, a bulwark against western colonialism.Over a hundred years after he left power, after the Empire was broken up by the western powers after the First World War, after the Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal, ...
For the Serbs as Christians, their loss of state independence and fall to the Ottoman Empire’s kind of theocratic state, was a terrible misfortune. With the advent of the Turks and establishment of their rule, the lands of Serbs were forcibly excluded from the circle of progressive European states wherein they occupied a prominent place precisely owing to the Byzantine civilization, which was enhanced by local qualities and strong influences of the neighboring Mediterranean states. Being Christians, the Serbs became second-class citizens in Islamic state. Apart from religious discrimination, which was evident in all spheres of everyday life, this status ...
The media is currently in the midst of an anti-Russian hysteria that many have dubbed Cold War 2.0. Of course the first cold war never really ended as the wars in Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and even Afghanistan were aimed at Russia as was the relentless NATO expansion. This manufactured panic is a form of psychological warfare that went into high gear during the Sochi Olympics in 2014 as the US was working to launch a fascist coup in Ukraine. Since most ordinary people would be shocked to discover that Nazis had been installed in power in Ukraine an anti-Russian hysteria was ...
IntroductionThe article deals with the Great Economic Depression of 1929-1933 and its negative consequences on the economy of the German Weimar Republic. The aim of the article is to present the main causes and consequences of the global economic and financial crises known as the Great Economic Depression and to investigate how this depression influences the economy and finance of the newly democratic post-war German state called the Weimar Republic. The particular importance of this research subject is the fact that among all European states at the time it was exactly the Weimar Republic to be mostly affected by the ...
Over the past several years, analysts and commentators have noticed a rising tide of domestic support for the Croatian homegrown Nazi movement of the Second World War, the Ustashe, which actively exterminated Serbs, Jews, and Roma in the territory it controlled from 1941-45. Far from condemning this alarming development, the Croatian government, the European Union, and non-state actors within it have tacitly and actively supported the rising tide of sympathy towards the Ustashe.This disconnect between the ostensible “European values” of human rights and tolerance that the European Union claims to represent, and its tacit support of trends towards extremist politics ...
The EU and NATO are evil institutions. These two institutions are mechanisms created by Washington in order to destroy the sovereignty of European peoples. These two institutions give Washington control over the Western world and serve both as cover and enabler of Washington’s aggression. Without the EU and NATO, Washington could not force Europe and the UK into conflict with Russia, and Washington could not have destroyed seven Muslim countries in 15 years without being isolated as a hated war criminal government, no member of whom could have travelled abroad without being arrested and put on trial.Clearly, the presstitute media ...
Americans are outraged by allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an intelligence service to hack email accounts of the Democratic National Committee. How inexpressibly heinous that one country, Russia, would try to influence elections in another sovereign country, in this case the United States! How unprecedented! How diabolical! How uniquely Russian!In response, the Obama administration has expelled Russian diplomats, hinted at economic sanctions, and promised further retaliation using America’s “world-class arsenal of cyber weapons.” (NYT Dec. 16, 2016) Obama’s Republican opponents, for their part, have demanded “rocks” instead of Obama’s “pebbles.”But does the USA meddle in the presidential elections ...
A National traumaA national trauma which the Serbs after the fall of the Serbian national state and the Ottoman occupation experienced after June 20th, 1459[i] can be compared with that felt by Judea’s Jews after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.[ii] Since Serbia soon found herself well within the Ottoman Sultanate and the European Christian states were on defense from the victorious Muslim Ottoman Turks, no light at the end of the historical tunnel was seen and the whole nation sank into deep despair for the next four centuries. In a sense, the ...
The public denunciation by thousands of women and a few men that they had been victims of sexual abuse by their economic bosses raises fundamental issues about the social relations of American capitalism.The moral offenses are in essence economic and social crimes. Sexual abuse is only one aspect of the social dynamics facilitating the increase in inequality and concentration of wealth, which define the practices and values of the American political and economic system.Billionaires and mega-millionaires are themselves the products of intense exploitation of tens of millions of isolated and unorganized wage and salaried workers. Capitalist exploitation is based on ...
Kosovo Albanian Muslims and their unthinking and duped supporters in the US are denying the Holocaust when they claim that Albanians rescued 100% of the Jews in Kosovo and in Albania. Albanian Muslims are Holocaust deniers like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, yet Albanians are not ostracized. Why? Why are Albanian Muslims and their lackeys and stooges in the US allowed to get away with denying the Holocaust, with falsifying their role in the destruction of European Jews?The ignorance of the Albanian lobby is appalling. Albanian Muslims played a role in the Holocaust. Who claims this?Raul Hilberg, the founder of Holocaust studies and ...
The UK Parliament just confirmed what the alternative media has been saying for years.Specifically, a new report from the bipartisan House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee – based on interviews with all of the key British decision-makers, review of documents, and on-the-ground investigations in Africa – found that the Libyan war was based on lies, that it destroyed the country, and that it spread terrorism far and wide.The War Based On Bogus Intelligence … Like the Iraq WarInitially, the report finds that the threat to civilians from Libyan government forces was dramatically overstated:Former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, who introduced ...
The details are supplied in an exhaustive 1,000-page biography of Jean Monnet by Éric Roussel, which was published only in France in 1996, and which seems to have been successfully suppressed. It has never been translated, and has no reviews even at Amazon. However, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of UK's Telegraph newspaper has provided some of the core information from it. Furthermore, Richard J. Aldrich's 2003 The Hidden Hand also provides key details, such as by Aldrich's saying, on page 366, about the American Committee for a United Europe: ACUE, more than any other American front organization of the Cold War, was a ...
Paris vs. DonbassOrigins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
At the dawn of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, diplomats, politicians, and intellectuals debated a fresh question: what role can Islamist political parties play in a fledgling democracy?It wasn’t an esoteric or academic debating point. In the tumult that followed the collapse of dictatorial governments in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia, groups of radical Islamists had organized themselves into political parties and attempting to use the ballot box to get them to where the cartridge box could never take them—control of national governments. This was a new strategy on the part of Islamists. Ever since their emergence in the 1940s and their ...
As 10,000 people took to the streets of Brussels on Sunday (7 June 2020) to protest as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, there was one landmark which drew their ire more than any other: the equestrian statue of King Leopold II outside Belgium’s royal palace.“Murderer!” the protesters cried as they climbed the statue and waved the flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Had the statue been flimsy enough to pull down they would have done it, just as fellow BLM protesters toppled Edward Colston’s statue across the channel in Bristol. Estimates vary, but the consensus figure is ...
The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking at a conference entitled the “The Spirit of Turkey’s New Security,” referring to the Treaty of Lausanne, said:“The Turkish Republic is the last state that we founded with whatever was left over from all the self-sacrifices we were able to make... We are heirs of a nation that saw its territory expand to 22 million kilometers. Shortly before the Republic was founded, we had 3 million kilometers which kept diminishing until all we had left was 780,000 kilometers. Some may be offended at my mention of Lausanne. But why does it bother ...
In one of the largest, if not the largest, Neo-Nazi demonstration in Europe since WW2, 20,000 facists marched through the streets of Ukraine’s capital Kiev last weekend under the silent gaze of the western media. Other than Russian state media RT and Sputnik News facists throwing Nazi salutes and parading in their tens of thousands in a European capital didn’t concern any of the major western news outlet. Nothing on BBC, France24, CNN, New York Times, The Guardian…the silence of the media lambs when it comes to a growing facists movement in Ukraine is deafening.The Ukrainian Nazis were honoring their ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović
