Rus' people


The Rus people ; Old Norse: Garðar; Ῥῶς ) are generally understood in English-language scholarship as people of Ruthenia. Of the two main origin theories, the "Normanist" places them ancestrally as ethnic Scandinavian people trading and raiding on the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Seas from around the eighth to eleventh centuries AD, while the "anti-Normanist" theory places their origins in the Slavic region around the Carpathians.
The Normanist theory considers Varangian and Vikings to be one and the same people, deriving the term "Rus" from Old Norse "Ruotsi". According to this theory, these Viking-like people basing themselves among Slavs and Volga Finns in the upper Volga region formed a diaspora of traders and raiders exchanging furs and slaves for silk, silver and other commodities available to the east and south. Around the 9th century, on the river routes to the Black Sea, they played an unclear but significant role in forming the principality of Kievan Rus, gradually assimilating with local Slavic populations. They also extended their operations much further east and south, among the Bulgars and Khazars, on the routes to the Caspian Sea. By around the 11th century, the word Rus was increasingly associated with the principality of Kiev, and the term Varangian was becoming more common as a term for Scandinavians traveling the river-routes.
Little, however, is certain about the Rus. This is to a significant extent because, although Rus people were active over a long period and vast distances, textual evidence for their activities is very sparse and almost never produced by contemporary Rus' people themselves. It is believed that writing was brought to the Rus by the Slavs for religious reasons, but this happened long after their early history. The word Rus in the primary sources does not always denote the same thing as it does when used by modern scholars. Meanwhile, archaeological evidence and researchers' understanding of it is accumulating only gradually. As a trading diaspora, Rus' people intermingled extensively with Finnic, Slavic, and Turkic peoples and their customs and identity seem correspondingly to have varied considerably over time and space.
The other key reason for dispute about the origins of Rus' people is the likelihood that they had a role in ninth- to 10th-century state formation in eastern Europe, making them relevant to what are today seen as the national histories of Russia, Ukraine, Sweden, Poland, Belarus, Finland and the Baltic states.

Key sources

Etymology

The etymology and semantic history of the word Rus has been a highly contentious topic, on which debate is ongoing. This is partly because of a widespread assumption that by identifying the linguistic origin of the name Rus, scholars can identify the origins of the people whom it described. This assumption has, however, been criticized in 21st-century scholarship.
According to the prevalent theory, the name Rus, like the Proto-Finnic name for Sweden, is derived from an Old Norse term for "the men who row" as rowing was the main method of navigating the rivers of Eastern Europe, and that it could be linked to the Swedish coastal area of Roslagen or Roden, as it was known in earlier times. The name Rus would then have the same origin as the Finnish and Estonian names for Sweden: Ruotsi and Rootsi.

Slavic sources

The earliest Slavonic-language narrative account of Rus' history is the Primary Chronicle, compiled and adapted from a wide range of sources in Kiev at the start of the 13th century. It has therefore been influential on modern history-writing, but it is also much later than the time it describes, and historians agree it primarily reflects the political and religious politics of the time of Mstislav I of Kiev.
However, the chronicle does include the texts of a series of Rus'–Byzantine Treaties from 911, 945, and 971. The Rus'–Byzantine Treaties give a valuable insight into the names of the Rus'. Of the fourteen Rus' signatories to the Rus'–Byzantine Treaty in 907, all had Norse names. By the Rus'–Byzantine Treaty in 945, some signatories of the Rus' had Slavic names while the vast majority had Norse names.
The Chronicle presents the following origin myth for the arrival of Rus' in the region of Novgorod: the Rus' were a group of Varangians 'who imposed tribute upon the Chuds, the Slavs, the Merians, the Ves', and the Krivichians'.
Later, the Primary Chronicle claims, they conquered Kiev and created the state of Kievan Rus'.

Arabic sources

Arabic-language sources for Rus' people are relatively numerous, with over 30 relevant passages in roughly contemporaneous sources. It can be difficult to be sure that when Arabic sources talk about Rus they mean the same thing as modern scholars. Sometimes it seems to be a general term for Scandinavians: when Al-Yaqūbi recorded Rūs attacking Seville in 844, he was almost certainly talking about vikings based in Frankia. At other times, it might denote people other than or alongside Scandinavians: thus the Mujmal al-Tawarikh calls Khazars and Rus' "brothers"; later, Muhammad al-Idrisi, Al-Qazwini, and Ibn Khaldun all identified the Rus' as a sub-group of the Turks. These uncertainties have fed into debates about the origins of the Rus'.
Arabic sources for the Rus' had been collected, edited and translated for Western scholars by the mid-20th century. However, relatively little use was made of the Arabic sources in studies of the Rus' before the 21st century. This is partly because they mostly concern the region between the Black and the Caspian Seas, and from there north along the lower Volga and the Don. This made them less relevant than the Primary Chronicle to understanding European state formation further west. Moreover, imperialist ideologies in Russia and more widely discouraged research emphasising an ancient or distinctive history for Inner Eurasian peoples. Arabic sources portray Rus' people fairly clearly as a raiding and trading diaspora, or as mercenaries, under the Volga Bulghars or the Khazars, rather than taking a role in state formation.
The most extensive Arabic account of the Rus' is by the Muslim diplomat and traveller Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who visited Volga Bulgaria in 922, described people under the label Rūs/Rūsiyyah at length, beginning thus:
Apart from Ibn Fadlan's account, Normanist theory draws heavily on the evidence of the Persian traveler Ibn Rustah who, it is postulated, visited Novgorod and described how the Rus' exploited the Slavs.

Byzantine sources

When the Varangians first appeared in Constantinople, the Byzantines seem to have perceived the Rhos as a different people from the Slavs. At least no source says they are part of the Slavic race. Characteristically, pseudo-Symeon Magister and Theophanes Continuatus refer to the Rhos as dromitai, a word related to the Greek word meaning a run, suggesting the mobility of their movement by waterways.
In his treatise De Administrando Imperio, Constantine VII describes the Rhos as the neighbours of Pechenegs who buy from the latter cows, horses, and sheep "because none of these animals may be found in Rhosia". His description represents the Rus' as a warlike northern tribe. Constantine also enumerates the names of the Dnieper cataracts in both rhosisti and sklavisti. The Rus' names can most readily be etymologised as Old Norse, and have been argued to be older than the Slavic names:
of the SlavonicProposed Old Norse etymonsἘσσονπῆEssoupi"does not sleep"nes uppi "upper promontory"
súpandi "slurping"ΟὐλβορσίOulvorsi"island of the waterfall"Úlfarsey "Úlfar's island"
hólm-foss "island rapid"ΓελανδρίGelandri"the sound of the fall"gjallandi/gellandi "yelling, loudly ringing"ἈειφόρAeiforpelicans' nesting placeæ-fari/ey-færr "never passable"
æ-for/ey-forr "ever fierce"ΒαρονφόροςVarouforosit forms a great maelstromvara-foss "stony shore rapid"
báru-foss "wave rapid"ΛεάντιLeanti"surge of water"hlæjandi "laughing"ΣτρούκουνStroukoun"the little fall"strjúkandi "stroking, delicately touching"
strukum, "rapid current"

Western European sources

The first Western European source to mention the Rus' are the Annals of St. Bertin. These relate that Emperor Louis the Pious' court at Ingelheim, in 839, was visited by a delegation from the Byzantine emperor. In this delegation there were two men who called themselves Rhos. Louis enquired about their origins and learnt that they were Swedes. Fearing that they were spies for their allies, the Danes, he incarcerated them, before letting them proceed after receiving reassurances from Byzantium. Subsequently, in the 10th and 11th centuries, Latin sources routinely confused the Rus' with the extinct East Germanic tribe of Rugians. Olga of Kiev, for instance, was designated in one manuscript as a Rugian queen.
Another source comes from Liutprand of Cremona, a 10th-century Lombard bishop who in a report from Constantinople to Holy Roman Emperor Otto I wrote that he had met the Rus whom we know by the other name of Norsemen.

Archaeology

The archaeological excavations of 19th century conducted by Count Aleksey Uvarov in the area of Upper Volga and Oka has shown no Slavic-type evidences. For his studies in 1873 Uvarov was awarded the Golden Constantine Medal by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society.
The quantity of archaeological evidence for the regions where Rus people were active grew steadily through the 20th century, and beyond, and the end of the Cold War made the full range of material increasingly accessible to researchers. Key excavations have included those at Staraja Ladoga, Novgorod, Rurikovo Gorodischche, Gnëzdovo, Shestovitsa, numerous settlements between the Upper Volga and the Oka rivers. Twenty-first century research, therefore, is giving the synthesis of archaeological evidence an increasingly prominent place in understanding the Rus'. The distribution of coinage, including the early 9th-century Peterhof Hoard, has provided important ways to trace the flow and quantity of trade in areas where Rus were active, and even, through graffiti on the coins, the languages spoken by traders.

History

Having settled Aldeigja in the 750s, Scandinavian colonists played an important role in the early ethnogenesis of the Rus' people and in the formation of the Rus' Khaganate. The Varangians are first mentioned by the Primary Chronicle as having exacted tribute from the Slavic and Finnic tribes in 859. It was the time of rapid expansion of the Vikings in Northern Europe; England began to pay Danegeld in 859, and the Curonians of Grobin faced an invasion by the Swedes at about the same date.
It has been argued that the word Varangian, in its many forms, does not appear in primary sources until the 11th century. This suggests that the term Rus was used broadly to denote Scandinavians until it became too firmly associated with the now extensively Slavicised elite of Kievan Rus. At that point, the new term Varangian was increasingly preferred to name Scandinavians, probably mostly from what is currently Sweden, plying the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black/Caspian Seas.
Due largely to geographic considerations, it is often argued that most of the Varangians who traveled and settled in the lands of eastern Baltic, modern Russian Federation and lands to the south came from the area of modern Sweden.
The Varangians left a number of rune stones in their native Sweden that tell of their journeys to what is today Russia, Ukraine, Greece, and Belarus. Most of these rune stones can be seen today, and are a telling piece of historical evidence. The Varangian runestones tell of many notable Varangian expeditions, and even account for the fates of individual warriors and travelers.
In Russian history, two cities are used to describe the beginnings of the country: Kiev and Novgorod. In the first part of the 11th century the former was already a Slav metropolis, rich and powerful, a fast growing center of civilization adopted from Byzantium. The latter town, Novgorod, was another center of the same culture but founded in different surroundings, where some old local traditions molded this commercial city into a mighty oligarchic republic of a kind otherwise unknown in this part of Europe. These towns have tended to overshadow other places of a significance that they had acquired long before Kiev and Novgorod. The two original centers of Rus were Staraja Ladoga and Rurikovo Gorodishche, two points on the ends the Volkhov, a river running for 200 km between Lake Ilmen in the south to Lake Ladoga in the north. This was the territory that most probably was originally called by the Norsemen Gardar, a name that long after Viking Age was given much wider content and become Gardariki, denomination for whole Old Russian State. The area between the lakes was the original Rus, and it was from here its name was transferred to the Slav territories on the middle Dnieper, which eventually became Rus'.
The pre-history of the first territory of Rus has been sought in the developments around the mid-8th century, when Staraja Ladoga was founded as a trading place, serving the operations of Scandinavian hunters and dealers in furs obtained in the north-eastern forest zone of Eastern Europe. In the early period Norse presence is only visible at Staraja Ladoga, and to a much lesser degree at a few other sites in the northern parts of Eastern Europe. The objects that represent Norse material culture of this period are rare outside Ladoga and mostly known as single finds. This rarity continues through the 9th century until the whole situation changes radically during the next century, when historians meet, at many places and in relatively large quantities, the material remains of a thriving Scandinavian culture. For a short period of time, some areas of Eastern Europe became as much part of the Norse world as were Danish and Norwegian territories in the West. The culture of the Rus contained Norse elements used as a manifestation of their Scandinavian background. These elements, which were current in 10th-century Scandinavia, appear at various places in form of collections of many types of metal ornaments, mainly female but even male, such as weapons, decorated parts of horse bridle, and diverse objects embellished in current Norse art styles.

Debate on the origins of the Rus'

The historiography of the origins of the Rus' is infamously contentious, due to its perceived importance for the legitimation of nation-building, imperialism, and independence movements within the Slavonic-speaking world, and for legitimating different political relationships between eastern and western European countries. The Rus' feature prominently in the history of the Baltic states, Scandinavia, Poland, and the Byzantine Empire. They are particularly important in the historiography and cultural history of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine but have also featured prominently for Poland. Added to these ideological forces is a scarcity of contemporary evidence for the emergence of a Rus' polity, and the great ethnic diversity and complexity of the wide area where Rus' people were active. Notwithstanding the existence of a diverse range of historical debates, contention has crystallized around whether the development of Kievan Rus' was influenced by non-Slavic, Viking migrants, or whether Rus' emerged from autochthonous Slavic political development.

Normanism

Whereas the term Normans in English usually refers to the Scandinavian-descended ruling dynasty of Normandy in France from the 10th century onwards, and their scions elsewhere in Western Europe, in the context of the Rus', 'Normanism' refers to the idea that the Rus' had their origins in Scandinavia. However, the term is used to cover a diverse range of opinions, not all of which are held by all Normanists. As outlined by Leo Klejn, these are, in decreasing order of plausibility:
  1. That Scandinavians migrated to the Ancient East-Slavic area.
  2. That Kiev’s ruling dynasty was established by Scandinavians.
  3. That the name Rus’ is etymologically Old Norse.
  4. That Scandinavian migrants influenced the development of the East-Slavic state.
  5. That Scandinavian migrants created the first East-Slavic state.
  6. That the Scandinavians succeeded because of their racial superiority.
  7. That the past shapes current politics: specifically, that descendants of Scandinavians are natural rulers, whereas Slavs are natural subordinates.

    Early proponents

The Normanist theory gained prominence in Russia through the German historian Gerhardt Friedrich Müller, who was invited to work in the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1725. Müller built on arguments made by his predecessor Gottlieb-Siegfried Bayer in the papers De Varagis and Origines russicae, and on the Russian Primary Chronicle, written in the 12th century, and covering the years 852 to 1110. At the beginning of an important speech in 1749, later published as Origines gentis et nominis Russorum, Müller argued that Russia owed its name and early ruling dynasty to ethnically Scandinavian Varangians. This statement caused anger in his Russian audience, and earned him much animosity during his professional career in Russia. Scathing criticism from Lomonosov, Krasheninnikov, and other Russian historians led to Müller being forced to suspend his work on the issue until Lomonosov's death. It was even thought during the 20th century that much of his research was destroyed, but recent research suggests that this is not the case: Müller managed to rework it and had it reprinted as Origines Rossicae in 1768.
Despite the negative reception in the mid-18th century, by the end of the century, Müller's views were the consensus in Russian historiography, and this remained largely the case through the 19th century and early twentieth centuries. Russian historians who accepted this historical account included Nikolai Karamzin and his disciple Mikhail Pogodin, who gave credit to the claims of the Primary Chronicle that the Varangians were invited by East Slavs to rule over them and bring order.
The theory was not without political implications. For some, it fitted with embracing and celebrating the multiethnic character of the Russian Empire. However, it was also consistent with the racial theory widespread at the time that Normans were naturally suited to government, whereas Slavs were not. According to Karamzin the Norse migration formed the basis and justification for Russian autocracy, and Pogodin used the theory to advance his view that Russia was immune to social upheavals and revolutions, because the Russian state originated from a voluntary treaty between the people of Novgorod and Varangian rulers.

Emergence of Western scholarly consensus

During the historical debates of the 20th century, the key evidence for the Normanist view that Scandinavian migrants had an important role in the formation of Kievan Rus' emerged as the following:
In the 21st century, analyses of the rapidly growing range of archaeological evidence further noted that high-status ninth- to 10th-century burials of both men and women in the vicinity of the Upper Volga exhibit material culture largely consistent with that of Scandinavia. This has been seen as further demonstrating the Scandinavian character of elites in "Old Rus'".
It is also agreed, however, that ancestrally Scandinavian Rus' aristocrats, like Normans elsewhere, swiftly assimilated culturally to a Slavic identity: in the words of F. Donald Logan, "in 839, the Rus were Swedes; in 1043 the Rus were Slavs". This near absence of cultural traces, is noteworthy, and the processes of cultural assimilation in Rus' are an important area of research.
There is uncertainty as to how small the Scandinavian migration to Rus' was, but some recent archaeological work has argued for a substantial number of 'free peasants' settling in the upper Volga region.
It is important to note that a number of Anglophone scholars remain equivocal about whether the question of Rus' origins can really be solved, however, either because the evidence is not good enough or because the Rus' were never an ethnic group with a clear point of origin.

Use of Normanism in Western Europe

In the earlier 20th century, Nazi Germany promoted the idea that Russia owed its statehood to a Germanic, racially superior, elite. During the Second World War, the German government promised the Fascist Quisling government of Norway territory on the historic Austrvegr, reflecting Quisling's ambition to reenact his Normanist view of Viking history.
Normanism was widely used in Third Reich to prove the superiority of the Germans over the Russians. Adolf Hitler in his work Mein Kampf states that
Later Heinrich Himmler asserted that Russians are sub-race:

Anti-Normanism

A Scandinavian origin of the Rus' has been bitterly contested by Slavic nationalists. Starting with Lomonosov, East Slavic scholars have criticized the idea of Norse invaders. By the early 20th century, the traditional anti-Normanist doctrine seemed to have lost currency, but in Stalinist Russia, the anti-Normanist arguments were revived and adopted in official Soviet historiography, partly in response to Nazi propaganda, which posited that Russia owed its existence to a Germanic ruling elite. Mikhail Artamonov ranks among those who attempted to reconcile both theories by hypothesizing that the Kievan state united the southern Rus' and the northern Rus' into a single nation.
The staunchest advocate of the anti-Normanist views in the period following the Second World War was Boris Rybakov, who argued that the cultural level of the Varangians could not have warranted an invitation from the culturally advanced Slavs. This conclusion leads Slavicists to deny the Primary Chronicle, which writes that the Varangian Rus' were invited by the native Slavs. Rybakov assumed that Nestor, putative author of the Chronicle, was biased against the pro-Greek party of Vladimir Monomakh and supported the pro-Scandinavian party of the ruling prince Svyatopolk. He cites Nestor as a pro-Scandinavian manipulator and compares his account of Rurik's invitation with numerous similar stories found in folklore around the world.
By the twenty-first century, most professional scholars, in both Anglophone and Slavonic-language scholarship, had reached a consensus that the origins of the Rus' people lay in Scandinavia and that this originally Scandinavian elite had a significant role in forming the polity of Kievan Rus'. Indeed, in 1995, the Russian archaeologist Leo Klejn "gave a paper entitled ‘The End of the Discussion’, in the belief that anti-Normanism ‘was dead and buried’". However, Klejn soon had to revise this opinion as anti-Normanist ideas gained a new prominence in both public and academic discourse in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Anglophone scholarship has identified the continued commitment to anti-Normanism in these countries since the collapse of the Soviet Union as being motivated by present-day ethno-nationalism and state-formation. One prominent Russian example occurred with an anti-Normanist conference in 2002, which was followed by publications on the same theme, and which appears to have been promoted by Russian government policy of the time. Accordingly, anti-Normanist accounts are prominent in some 21st century Russian school textbooks. Meanwhile, in Ukraine and to a lesser extent Belarus, post-Soviet nation-building opposed to a history of Russian imperialism has promoted anti-Normanist views in academia and, to a greater extent, popular culture.

Other anti-Normanist interpretations

There have been quite a few alternative, non-Normanist origins for the word Rus', although none was endorsed in the Western academic mainstream:
Scholars such as Omeljan Pritsak and Horace G. Lunt offer explanations that go beyond simplistic attempts to attribute 'ethnicity' on first glance interpretation of literary, philological, and archaeological evidence. They view the Rus' as disparate, and often mutually antagonistic, clans of charismatic warriors and traders who formed wide-ranging networks across the North and Baltic Seas. They were a "multi-ethnic, multilingual and non-territorial community of sea nomads and trading settlements" that contained numerous Norsemen—but equally Slavs, Balts, and Finns.
Evidence provided by the Primary Chronicle, written some three centuries later, cannot be taken as an accurate ethnographic account; as tales of 'migration' from distant lands were common literary tropes used by rulers to legitimise their contemporary rule whilst at the same time differentiating themselves from their "Baltic" and "Slavic" subject tribes. Tolochko argues "the story of the royal clan's journey is a device with its own function within the narrative of the chronicle.... Yet if we take it for what it actually is, if we accept that it is not a documentary ethnographic description of the 10th century, but a medieval origo gentis masterfully constructed by a Christian cleric of the early 12th century, then we have to reconsider the established scholarly narrative of the earliest phase of East European history, which owes so much to the Primary Chronicle.
Archaeological research, synthesizing a wide range of 20th-century excavations, has begun to develop what Jonathan Shepard has called a 'bottom up' vision of the formation of the Rus' polity, in which, during the ninth and 10th century increasingly intensive trade networks criss-crossed linguistically and ethnically diverse groups around rivers like the Volga, the Don, the Dnieper. This may have produced 'an essentially voluntary convergence of groupings in common pursuit of primary produce exchangeable for artifacts from afar'. This fits well with the image of Rus' that dominates the Arabic sources, focusing further south and east, around the Black and Caspian Seas, the Caucasus and the Volga Bulghars. Yet this narrative, though plausible, contends with the 'top-down' image of state development implied by the Primary Chronicle, archaeological assemblages indicating Scandinavian-style weapon-bearing elites on the Upper Volga, and evidence for slave-trading and violent destruction of fortified settlements.
Numerous artefacts of Scandinavian affinity have been found in northern Russia. However, exchange between the north and southern shores of the Baltic had occurred since the Iron Age. Northern Russia and adjacent Finnic lands had become a profitable meeting ground for peoples of diverse origins, especially for the trade of furs, and attracted by the presence of oriental silver from the mid-8th century AD. There is an undeniable presence of goods and people of Scandinavian origin; however, the predominant people remained the local peoples.
The increasing volume of trade and internal competition necessitated higher forms of organization. The Rus' appeared to emulate aspects of Khazar political organization—hence the mention of a Rus' chaganus in the Carolingian court in 839. Legitimization was sought by way of adopting a Christian and linguistically Slavic high culture that became the Kieven Rus'. The burials attributed to the Kievan Rus' have only a superficial resemblance to supposed Scandinavian prototypes—only the grave construction was similar, whilst the range of accompanying artefacts, the inclusion of weapons, horses and slave girls have no parallels in Scandinavia. Moreover, there is doubt if the emerging Kievan Rus' were the same clan as the "Rus" who visited the Carolingians in 839 or who attacked Constantinople in 860 AD.
The rise of Kiev itself is mysterious. Devoid of any silver dirham finds in the 8th century AD, it was situated west of the profitable fur and silver trade networks that spanned from the Baltic to the Muslim lands, via the Volga-Kama basins. At the prime hill in Kiev, fortifications and other symbols of consolidation and power appear from the 9th century, thus preceding the literary appearance of 'Rus' in the middle Dnieper region. By the 10th century, the lowlands around Kiev had extensive 'Slavic' styled settlements, and there is evidence of growing trade with the Byzantine lands. This might have attracted Rus' movements, and a shift in power, from the north to Kiev. Thus, Kiev does not appear to have evolved from the infrastructure of the Scandinavian trade networks, but rather it forcibly took them over, as evidenced by the destruction of numerous earlier trade settlements in the north, including the famous Staraja Ladoga.