The Rus

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In the year 971 the prince of Kiev set his seal to a treaty with the Greeks, and the scribes of Constantinople copied down the curse the Rus called upon themselves should they break their word. If we fail in our promises, the oath ran, may we be cursed by the god in whom we believe — by Perun and by Volos, the god of cattle — and may we become yellow as gold, and be slain by our own weapons. The prince who swore it was Svyatoslav, a warrior with a shaved head and a single lock, who slept on the ground with his saddle for a pillow and carried his meat seared on the coals. His grandfather had come down the rivers out of the north, a Norseman among Norsemen. His son would tear those same two gods down from the hill above the city and float them out past the rapids, and bind the Rus to a different heaven.

The Rus were a people made in motion, on the water, in the long reach between the Baltic ice and the warm sea under the walls of Byzantium. They began as foreigners and became the founders of the first great state of the eastern Slavs — a realm of rivers and portages, of furs and silver and slaves, ruled from Kiev by a line that traced itself to a half-legendary Scandinavian and held its thrones, in one branch or another, for more than seven hundred years. And at the center of their story stands a single princely choice, taken in one generation, that turned a pagan river-empire toward the Greek world and bound the eastern Slavs forever to Constantinople, to Orthodoxy, and to the Cyrillic letter.

Viktor Vasnetsov, The Invitation of the Varangians (before 1912), depicting the legendary arrival of Rurik and his brothers among the eastern Slavs. Public domain.

The men of the rowing-ways

The name itself is an argument, and the argument has run for nearly three centuries. Rus — the word that would become Russia and, by way of a southern city, Ruthenia and the river-land of Kiev — most likely began as a name the Slavs and the Finns gave to the Norsemen who came among them. The leading etymology traces it to an Old Norse root for rowing, the roths- of the men of the oar, the rowing-crews who worked the river-roads where a sail was useless and the boat had to be pulled and carried between the headwaters. The Finns took it as Ruotsi, the name they still use for Sweden; the Slavs took it from the Finns as Rus; and the word passed, at last, from the Scandinavian incomers to the Slavic land they came to rule. By that reading the Rus were, at the root of their name, the rowers — the men of the rowing-ways that ran the length of eastern Europe.

This is the Normanist reading, and it has been fought over since the eighteenth century, when German scholars in the service of the Russian court first proposed a Scandinavian founding and Russian patriots first recoiled from it. The quarrel has never been wholly antiquarian. To say the first Russian state was founded by Swedes touched a nerve that ran straight to questions of national pride, and under the Soviet state the anti-Normanist position — that the Rus were Slavs all along, the Norse role a foreign fiction — hardened into something close to orthodoxy. The archaeology has since settled most of it. Scandinavian goods, graves, and rune-marks lie thick along the northern rivers from the eighth century; the earliest Rus envoys to reach Constantinople and the Frankish court in 839 bore Norse names and were identified as Swedes; the names in the early treaties with the Greeks are overwhelmingly Norse. The modern consensus holds that the Rus were, in their origin, Scandinavian — and that this origin is the beginning of the story, not the whole of it.

For what makes the Rus the Rus is precisely that the Norsemen did not stay Norse. They came as a thin warrior-and-trading caste among a far more numerous Slavic population, and within a few generations they had been swallowed by it. The treaties tell the absorption in miniature: the signatories of 911 carry names like Karl, Ingjald, Farulf, Vermund — pure Old Norse — while those of 944 already show Slavic names mixed in among the Scandinavian. By the time of Vladimir, in the 980s, the prince and his children bore Slavic names; within a century more the dynasty’s own tongue was Old East Slavic, and the Norse language had drained out of the land. The Rus became Slavic in speech, in worship, and in self-understanding, keeping of their origin little more than a ruling house and a name. They are the rare case of a conquering people who dissolved, almost completely, into the conquered.

The river and the throne

The tradition the Rus told of themselves is preserved in the Primary Chronicle, the great compilation assembled at Kiev around 1113 and ascribed to the monk Nestor. By its account the Slavic and Finnic tribes of the north, weary of feud and disorder, sent across the sea to the Varangian Rus with a famous summons: our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it; come and rule and reign over us. Three brothers answered, and the eldest, Rurik, took the seat at Novgorod in the year 862. The story has the smoothed shape of legend — the invitation, the three brothers, the two who conveniently die — and historians read it as a founding myth laid over a messier reality of raiding, settlement, and seizure. But Rurik stands at the head of the line that history can follow, the founder of the dynasty that would rule the Rus and then the Russias until the death of the childless Tsar Feodor I in 1598 closed the male line after more than seven centuries.

It was Rurik’s kinsman Oleg who, around 882, took Kiev on the middle Dnieper and made it the seat of the Rus, declaring it, in the chronicle’s phrase, the mother of Rus cities. The choice was geography made into a state. Kiev sat on the great river that ran from the northern forests down to the Black Sea, and the Rus built their power on the road that the Norse called the way from the Varangians to the Greeks — north from the Baltic up the Neva and the Volkhov, by portage to the headwaters of the Dnieper, and then the long descent to Byzantium. A second road ran east down the Volga to the Caspian and the markets of the Caliphate, where Rus furs and slaves were paid for in the silver dirhams that have been dug by the tens of thousands from hoards across the north. The Rus dealt in furs and wax and honey, in amber and in walrus ivory, and above all in slaves — the Slav of the western tongues and the slave of the marketplace share a root, and the Rus were among the great slavers of the early medieval world, moving captives down the rivers to the buyers of Byzantium and Baghdad.

This was a river-empire in the most literal sense: a spine of fortified trading-towns strung along the waterways, holding the portages and the rapids, taxing the flow of goods between three civilizations. The Rus were the middlemen of a continent — the channel through which the silver of Islam and the silks and liturgy of Byzantium reached the Baltic, and through which the produce of the northern forests reached the south. Their wealth was the wealth of a toll-gate on the rivers, and their wars were, more often than not, wars to keep the rivers open.

Perun upon the hill

Against this commercial world stood a hard warrior-religion, and at its head stood the thunderer. The early Rus worshiped the gods of the Slavs among whom they had settled, with their own Scandinavian gods fading as their language did. The treaties with Byzantium swear by two: by Perun, the god of the storm and the prince’s drawn sword, and by Veles — Volos in the older form — the god of cattle, wealth, and the dead. The pairing is itself the theology of a trading state. Perun is the god of the druzhina, the armed retinue, of oaths kept on the edge of the weapon; Veles is the god of the herds and the slow gold of commerce, of the substance that war exists to protect. The Rus swore by both because they lived by both.

The high point of Rus paganism, and the prelude to its fall, was the reform of 980. The Primary Chronicle records that Vladimir — Volodymyr in the Ukrainian form, the prince who had won Kiev in a war against his brother — set up on the hill outside his hall a company of idols: Perun with a head of silver and a mustache of gold, and about him Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, and Mokosh, the one goddess among them, patroness of women’s work and the moist earth. It was less an ancient survival than a deliberate construction — a state pantheon raised by a new ruler to gather the gods of his scattered subjects around the god of his own war-band, with Perun raised above the rest as the prince was raised above his men. The arrangement of these idols, the prince’s Kiev pantheon, is the single best attested moment of organized Slavic paganism, and it lasted eight years.

Ivan Eggink, Grand Prince Vladimir Listens to the Greek Orthodox Priests (1822). Public domain.

We knew not whether we were in heaven

The story the Rus told of their conversion is one of the great set-pieces of medieval literature, and like the invitation of Rurik it should be read as a tale the Christian Rus told themselves about their own beginning rather than a transcript of fact. By the Primary Chronicle’s account, Vladimir — having raised his idols only a few years before — grew dissatisfied and resolved to examine the faiths. He received, the chronicle says, missions from each: from the Muslim Bulgars of the Volga, whom he turned away because their faith forbade wine, and drinking, he declared, is the joy of the Rus; from the Jews of the Khazars, whom he dismissed with the question of why, if their God loved them, they had lost Jerusalem and been scattered; and from the Latin Christians of the Germans, in whose worship he found no beauty. Then he sent his own envoys out to see the faiths at home, and it was the envoys returned from Constantinople who settled the matter.

What they had seen in the great church of Hagia Sophia overwhelmed them. The chronicle gives their report in words that have echoed down the whole history of the Orthodox east:

Then we went to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.

It is a conversion not by argument but by glory — by the gold and the candlelight and the chant under the great dome, the liturgy as a window opened onto the heavens. The story compresses a more tangled history. Vladimir’s turn to Byzantium was bound up with a marriage and a war: he had sent troops to rescue the emperor Basil II from rebellion, and in return demanded the emperor’s sister Anna, an imperial princess of the purple, a bride no barbarian king had ever been granted. When Constantinople delayed, Vladimir seized the Byzantine city of Cherson in the Crimea and held it as a pledge, and there, in 988, he was baptized and took the Christian name Basil after his new brother-in-law, and married Anna, and turned the city back to the Greeks as a wedding-gift. The diplomacy and the vision are two faces of one event. The Rus took the faith of the empire whose markets and silks and silver they had coveted for a century, and the marriage made their prince a kinsman of the Caesars.

The baptism of Rus

Returned to Kiev, Vladimir destroyed what he had built. The Primary Chronicle describes the toppling of the idols on the hill with a vividness that has fixed the scene forever: Perun, the silver-headed thunderer, was bound to a horse’s tail and dragged down the slope, beaten with rods as he went, and thrust out into the Dnieper, while men were set along the bank to push him on with poles past the rapids so that he could not come ashore, and the pagans who had wept for their god watched him carried down toward the sea. Then Vladimir commanded the people of Kiev to come to the river and be baptized, and they went down into the Dnieper in their multitudes, the old men and the children together, while the priests stood on the bank and prayed. The chronicler dates the great baptism to 988, and from that year the Rus reckon themselves a Christian people.

Klavdiy Lebedev, The Baptism of the Kievans (c. 1900), the people of Kiev baptized in the Dnieper. Public domain.

The consequences of the choice ran far beyond the river. By taking Christianity from Constantinople rather than Rome, the Rus joined the Greek and not the Latin world. They received the liturgy in the Slavonic tongue and the Cyrillic alphabet that the missionaries of the southern Slavs had devised, and so were given a written language and a scripture in a speech close to their own — a gift that Rome, with its insistence on Latin, did not offer. They took the Byzantine forms of church and icon and chant, the cult of the saints, the architecture of the dome. The conversion of 988 set the eastern Slavs on the Orthodox and Cyrillic side of the line that would later divide Christendom, and it is no exaggeration to say that the whole subsequent shape of eastern Europe — its alphabet, its church, its long estrangement from the Latin West — descends from a decision taken on the Dnieper in the lifetime of one prince.

The century that followed was the flowering of Kievan Rus. Under Vladimir’s son Yaroslav the Wise, who died in 1054, Kiev raised its own Cathedral of Hagia Sophia in deliberate echo of the mother church, issued a written law, gathered books, and married its daughters to the kings of France, Hungary, and Norway. It was, for a time, one of the larger and richer realms of Europe, a state of stone churches and river-cities at the meeting of the steppe and the forest. It did not last. The succession fractured the realm among quarrelling princes, the trade-roads shifted, and in 1240 the Mongols of Batu Khan stormed Kiev and burned it, ending the unity of the Rus and scattering their inheritance among the principalities of the north and west.

The contested inheritance

What the Rus left behind is claimed today by three nations, and the claiming has become a matter of war. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all trace their descent to Kievan Rus; two of the three carry its name still. Each tells the story to a different end. The Russian telling runs the line of inheritance north and east, through Vladimir-Suzdal and Muscovy to the Tsars and beyond, making Kiev the cradle of a single Russian people of which Ukrainians and Belarusians are branches. The Ukrainian telling holds that Kiev was and is the Ukrainian capital, that the Rus state was Ukrainian in its heart, and that Moscow, a later upstart on the forest periphery, has no better right to the name than a borrower. Belarus finds in the western principalities of Polatsk a thread of its own. The argument is not idle antiquarianism. It has been pressed into the service of empire and resistance alike, and in the twenty-first century the legacy of a tenth-century river-state has been invoked to justify and to resist invasion. A people who dissolved into the Slavs eight hundred years before any of these nations existed are made, again and again, to speak for the quarrels of the living.

That is the strangest afterlife of the Rus: that a realm so thoroughly vanished — its dynasty extinct, its language transformed, its very name shared out among heirs who fight over it — should remain so charged a thing to own. The river-empire of the rowers became Slavic and then Christian and then a memory, and the memory became a battlefield. Of the gods who were sworn in the treaties, Perun fell into the Dnieper and Veles passed quietly into a Christian saint; of the prince who chose the Greeks, both Russia and Ukraine keep the feast and dispute the name. The choice taken on the hill above Kiev outlasted the people who took it, and goes on dividing their inheritors a thousand years downstream.

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