HISTORY •• Vikings & Kyivan Rus 35
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© Lonely Planet Publications 34 www.lonelyplanet.com HISTORY •• Vikings & Kyivan Rus 35 The Slavs’ conversion to Christianity in the 9th and 10th centuries was accompanied by the introduction of an alphabet devised by Cyril, History a Greek missionary (later St Cyril), which was simplified a few decades later by a fellow missionary, Methodius. The forerunner of Cyrillic, it was Epic is the only word for Russia’s history, which within the last century based on the Greek alphabet, with a dozen or so additional characters. alone has packed in an indecent amount of world-shaking events and The Bible was translated into the Southern Slav dialect, which became spawned larger-than-life characters from Rasputin to Boris Yeltsin. Even known as Church Slavonic and is the language of the Russian Orthodox now, over a decade since the end of the Soviet Union, the official record Church’s liturgy to this day. is still in flux as long-secret documents come to light and then, just as Until 30 January 1918 the mysteriously, become classified again. What is clear is that from its very VIKINGS & KYIVAN RUS Russian calendar was beginnings Russia has been a multiethnic country, its inhabitants a col- The first Russian state developed out of the trade on river routes across 12 days behind that used ourful and exhausting list of native peoples and invaders, the descendants Eastern Slavic areas – between the Baltic and Black Seas and, to a lesser in the West in the of whom are still around today. extent, between the Baltic Sea and the Volga River. Vikings from Scan- 19th century, and dinavia, called Varyagi by the Slavs, had been nosing east from the Baltic Predslava’s Russian 13 days behind in the EARLY HISTORY since the 6th century AD, trading and raiding for furs, slaves and amber, History Trivia page 20th century. Human activity in Russia stretches back a million years, with evidence of and coming into conflict with the Khazars and with Byzantium, the Stone Age hunting communities in the region from Moscow to the Altai eastern centre of Christianity. To secure their hold on the trade routes, (members.aol.com and Lake Baikal. By 2000 BC a basic agriculture, relying on hardy cereals, the Vikings made themselves masters of settlements in key areas – places /Predslava/RussianHistory had penetrated from the Danube region as far east as the Moscow area such as Novgorod, Smolensk, Staraya Ladoga and Kyiv (Kiev) in Ukraine. TriviaPage.html) abounds and the southern Ural Mountains. At about the same time, peoples in Though by no means united themselves, they created a loose confedera- with intriguing details, Ukraine and southern areas of European Russia domesticated the horse tion of city-states in the Eastern Slavic areas. such as the fact that and developed a nomadic, pastoral lifestyle. The founding of Novgorod in 862 by Rurik of Jutland is traditionally surnames didn’t exist in Russia for most of the Ex-diplomat Sir Fitzroy While central and northern European Russia remained a complete taken as the birth of the Russian state. Rurik’s successor, Oleg, became Middle Ages. Maclean has written backwater for almost 3000 years, the south was subject to a succession Kyiv’s ruler two decades later, and the Rurikid dynasty, though soon several entertaining, of invasions by nomads from the east. The first written records, by the Slavicised, maintained its hold, and produced the dominant rulers in intelligent books on the 5th-century-BC Greek historian Herodotus, concern a people called the Eastern Slavic areas until the end of the 16th century. country. Holy Russia is Scythians, who probably originated in the Altai region of Siberia and Mon- The name Rus may have been that of the dominant Kyivan Viking clan, a good, short Russian golia and were feared for their riding and battle skills. They spread as far but it wasn’t until the 18th century that the term Russian or Great Russian history, while All the west as southern Russia and Ukraine by the 7th century BC. The Scythian came to be used exclusively for Eastern Slavs in the north, while those to Russias: The End of an empire, which stretched south as far as Egypt, ended with the arrival of the south or west were identified as Ukrainians or Belarusians. Empire covers the whole another people from the east, the Sarmatians, in the 3rd century BC. Prince Svyatoslav made Kyiv the dominant regional power by cam- Geoffrey Hosking’s Russia of the former USSR. In the 4th century AD, came the Huns of the Altai region, followed paigning against quarrelling Varangian princes and dealing the Khazars by their relations the Avars, then by the Khazars, a grouping of Turkic a series of fatal blows. After his death, his son Vladimir made further and the Russians is a and Iranian tribes from the Caucasus, who occupied the lower Volga and conquests, and persuaded the Patriarch of Constantinople to establish definitive one-volume Don Basins and the steppes to the east and west between the 7th and 10th an episcopal see – a Church ‘branch’ – in Kyiv in 988, marking the birth trot through 1000 years centuries. The crafty and talented Khazars brought stability and religious of the Russian Orthodox Church. He also introduced the beginnings of a of Russian history by a tolerance to areas under their control. Their capital was Itil, near the feudal structure to replace clan allegiances, though some principalities – top scholar. mouth of the Volga. In the 9th century they converted to Judaism, and by including Novgorod, Pskov and Vyatka (north of Kazan) – were ruled A History of Russia, by the 10th century they had mostly settled down to farming and trade. democratically by popular vechi (assemblies). Nicholas Riasanovsky, Kyiv’s supremacy was broken by new invaders from the east – first is one of the best SLAVS the Pechenegs, then in 1093 the Polovtsy sacked the city – and by the single-volume versions of The migrants who were to give Russia its predominant character were the effects of European crusades from the late 11th century onwards, which the whole Russian story Slavs. There is some disagreement about where the Slavs originated, but broke the Arab hold on southern Europe and the Mediterranean, reviving through to the end of the in the first few centuries AD they expanded rapidly to the east, west and west–east trade routes and making Rus a commercial backwater. Soviet Union. south from the vicinity of present-day northern Ukraine and southern Belarus. The Eastern Slavs were the ancestors of the Russians; they were NOVGOROD & ROSTOV-SUZDAL still spreading eastward across the central Russian woodland belt in the The northern Rus principalities began breaking from Kyiv after about 9th century. From the Western Slavs came the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks 1050. The merchants of Novgorod joined the emerging Hanseatic League, and others. The Southern Slavs became the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and a federation of city-states that controlled Baltic and North Sea trade. Bulgarians. Novgorod became the league’s gateway to the lands east and southeast. TIMELINE c 20,000 BC AD 862 988 1108 Humans settle in Don River basin Rurik of Jutland founds Novgorod Russian Orthodox Church established in Kyiv Vladimir Monomakh of Kyiv founds Vladimir 36 HISTORY •• Tatars & the Golden Horde www.lonelyplanet.com www.lonelyplanet.com HISTORY •• Moscow vs Lithuania 37 NAMING RUSSIAN RULERS THE COSSACKS In line with common usage, names of pre-1700 rulers are directly transliterated, anglicised from The word ‘ Cossack’ (from the Turkic kazak, meaning free man, adventurer or horseman) was Peter the Great until 1917, and again transliterated after that – thus Andrei Bogolyubov not An- originally applied to residual Tatar groups and later to serfs, paupers and dropouts who fled drew, Vasily III not Basil; but Peter the Great not Pyotr, Catherine the Great not Yekaterina etc. south from Russia, Poland and Lithuania in the 15th century. They organised themselves into Ivan the Great was the first ruler to have himself formally called tsar. Peter the Great began self-governing communities in the Don Basin, on the Dnipro (Dnepr in Russian) River in Ukraine, using emperor, though tsar remained in use. In this book we use empress for a female ruler; a and in western Kazakhstan. Those in a given region, eg the Don Cossacks, were not just a tribe; tsar’s wife who does not become ruler is a tsaritsa (in English, tsarina). A tsar’s son is a tsarevitch its men constituted a voysko (army), within which each stanitsa (village-regiment) elected an and his daughter a tsarevna. ataman, or leader. Mindful of their skill as fighters, the Russian government treated the Cossacks carefully, of- fering autonomy in return for military service. Cossacks were the wedge that opened Siberia in As Kyiv declined, the Russian population shifted northwards and the the 17th century. By the 19th century there were a dozen Cossack armies from Ukraine to the fertile Rostov-Suzdal region northeast of Moscow began to be developed. Russian Far East. Vladimir Monomakh of Kyiv founded the town of Vladimir there in 1108 But they still raised hell when things didn’t suit them. Three peasant uprisings in the Volga- and gave the Rostov-Suzdal principality to his son Yury Dolgoruky, who Don region – 1670, 1707 and 1773 – were Cossack-led. After 1917 the Bolsheviks abolished Cossack is credited with founding the little settlement of Moscow in 1147. institutions, though some cavalry units were revived in WWII. Since 1991 there has been a major Rostov-Suzdal grew so rich and strong that Yury’s son Andrei Bogolyu- Cossack revival.