Kievan Rus Quotes

Ukraine, in contrast, had deep ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia—and to Putin. It was the historical root of Russia itself: Kievan Rus, the medieval fief whose leader, Vladimir the Great, adopted Christianity in 988, and the frontier of the tsarist empires that followed—its name translated literally as the Ukraine, or “the border.” Its borders had shifted over time: Parts of its western territory had belonged to Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Stalin seized some of it with his secret pact with Hitler in 1939 and the rest after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine’s modern shape took form, but it seemed ephemeral, subject to the larger forces of geopolitics, as most borderlands have been throughout history. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that Crimea, conquered by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and heroically defended against the Nazis, would be governed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kiev, not from Moscow. No

For over three hundred years, the period of the Renaissance in the West, Russia was cut off from European civilization. The country which emerged from the Mongol period was far more inward-looking than it had been at the start of the thirteenth century, when Kievan Rus’, the loose confederation of principalities which constituted the first Russian state, had been intimately linked with Byzantium.

In the Russian Revolution, for example, we could expect to see mainly the reaction of the patriarchal feudal society to the challenges of modernization. However, the victory of the countryside and the peasant masses over the westernized city turned out to be a Pyrrhic one, since it threw the already backward country into the backwoods of civilization. Petlyura-style nationalism differs from European nationalism in that the latter aimed to strengthen the national state in the name of modernization and progress, while the Petlyura (and later Soviet) variety fulfilled directly opposite functions and had no constructive, civilizing content, being instead a particularly destructive phenomenon — the expression of a nation's frustration at having failed to come together. This failure, in Bulgakov's opinion, was also due to the fact that this nation did not exist (he saw nothing in it but comical rustic bandura players and petty bourgeois who suddenly "remembered" their Ukrainian-ness and began to speak in broken Ukrainian); or else because the nation was not ready for statehood (which offered nothing except bloody pogroms); or else because its aspirations to statehood were historically and politically unjustified. Ultimately, Kiev was for Bulgakov a Russian city. Historically, it was in fact the "mother of Russian cities," the cradle of Russian state-hood, and the capital of ancient Kievan Rus. Bulgakov's refusal to recognize the rights of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian aspirations in Kiev was even demographically justified: in 1917, more than half the population of Kiev was Russian, followed by Jews (about twenty per-cent), and only then Ukrainians (a little more than sixteen percent), with a significant Polish minority (almost a tenth of the population). But who remembers today that even Prague, for instance, was at that time a German-speaking city? In the newly proclaimed Ukrainian state, many eastern and southern cities (among them such first-rate cultural and industrial centers as Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Kharkov, Iuzovka, Ekaterinoslav, and Lugansk) had never been Ukrainian at all. One should also consider that western Ukraine (the primary base of present-day Ukrainian nationalism) was once part of Poland. All of this made the aspirations toward Ukrainian "independence" highly questionable. Ukraine began where the city ended, and Bulgakov considered the city the basis of culture and civilization. Ukraine in Bulgakov's world is "the steppe" — culturally barren, not creating anything, and capable only of barbarian destruction. The Ukrainian national elites understood this perfectly when, as early as the 1920s, they demanded that Stalin ban The Days of the Turbins because, ostensibly, "the Whites movement is praised" in it. But in fact it was because the attempt to create a Ukrainian "state" was depicted by Bulgakov as a bloody operetta.

In the east the Swedes settled along the rivers flowing down to the Black Sea where they created the first states in the region; the locals called them ‘rowers’ or Rus, and so their kingdom was named Kievan Rus, and later Russia.

it is widely regarded that the formation of Kievan Rus, the first true state of the region, resulted in what we today know as Russia.

Kievan Rus was undoubtedly the foundation of Russia as we know it today,

Kievan Rus Before Kiev

The Norman theory is based on the Primary Chronicle, a series of writings from the formative years of Kievan Rus

Prince Igor was ambushed by the Drevlians, a faction under the control of Kievan Rus.

With the murder of Prince Igor, Kievan Rus was left without a ruler,

All in all, she was one of the high points of the early years of Kievan Rus,

As the Mongols, or the Tatars as the Russians would come to call them, overran towns all throughout Kievan Rus,

and marks the highpoint of the history of Kievan Rus. The Decline of Kiev

death of Yaroslav the Wise in 1054 marks the start of the great decline of Kievan Rus.

(the northeasternmost province of Kievan Rus), who would land the final blow to Kiev’s position

sacking and plundering the capital for two days before declaring Vladimir the new capital of Kievan Rus.

His attack on Kiev was the final nail in the coffin of Kievan Rus.

the second part of the 12th century, Kievan Rus had lost almost all of the glory and power that it had enjoyed

Kievan Rus. Their rule would last more than a century, as the Russians were not ready to face a challenge of this magnitude.

For millennia Ukraine had been the crucible of mighty political conglomerates such as the Scythian, Sarmatian, and Kievan realms. Its inhabitants controlled their own destinies and influenced, sometimes decisively, those of their neighbors. The civilizations that were based in Ukraine stood in the forefront of the cultural and socioeconomic developments in all of Eastern Europe. But after the decline of Galicia-Volhynia, an epochal transformation occurred. Henceforth, Ukrainian lands would no longer form the core of important political entities and, except for a few brief moments of self-assertion, the fate of Ukraine's inhabitants would be decided in far-off capitals such as Warsaw, Moscow, or Vienna.* In cultural and economic terms as well, the status of Ukraine would decline to that of an important but peripheral province whose elites identified with foreign cultures and political systems. No longer dominant but dominated, the natives of Ukraine would have to struggle not only for their political selfdetermination but also for their existence as a separate ethnic and national entity. This effort became - and remains to this day - one of the major themes of Ukrainian history. * During the Polish-Lithuanian period, Ukrainians called themselves Ruthenians (Rusyny), a name derived from Rus'. Belorussians were also called by this name. At this time, Russians were generally called Muscovites.

In terms of its political organization, it is simpler to establish what Kievan Rus was not rather than what it was. Kievan Rus' was not a state in the modern sense of the word. To view it as such would be to ascribe to it a much higher degree of political organization than it actually possessed. There was no centralized government, no encompassing specialized bureaucracy. The only contact that existed between rulers and ruled, especially as far as the nonurban population was concerned, was the revenue-collecting process. Personal or dynastic interests motivated princely politics, while institutional or societal concerns were often ignored. Political relationships were loose, fluid, and ill defined. And political problems were often dealt with by means of force. Nonetheless, there was a growing degree of political, social, and economic order and cultural achievement in the society of Kievan Rus' and the goal of this chapter is to survey its major features.

The territory controlled by the Varangians became known as Kievan Rus and the people who lived there as the Rus.

Under Vladimir the Great (who ruled from 980-1015), Kievan Rus converted from paganism to Christianity

Kievan Rus was finally conquered by the Mongols in the thirteenth century,

The unspoken rule of magic in Zmeyreka— and maybe all of Kievan Rus’— was that if you were going to use it, make sure no one saw you.

But Kievan Rus’s glory days were short-lived. Lying on his deathbed in 1054 Yaroslav had pleaded with his offspring to ‘love one another’ for ‘If ye dwell in envy and dissension, quarrelling with one another, then ye will perish yourselves and bring to ruin the land of your ancestors . . .’11

The official Soviet line on the dispute emphasised harmony, homogeneity, Brotherhood. Kievan Rus was inhabited by a single monolithic ‘ancient Rus’ nationality, from which Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians all descended; for them to argue over Volodymyr and Yaroslav made no more sense than for the English and French to squabble over Charlemagne. The languages of all three nations descend from the ancient Slavs’, and all three inherited Orthodoxy.

But the past that gives Kiev unique glamour, that made it ‘the City’ to the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and the ‘Joy of the World’ to the medieval chroniclers, is not the brash boom town of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago. From the tenth century to the thirteenth it was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. And here Ukraine’s fight for an identity commences. Generations of scholars have bandied insults about how Rus began, how it was governed, even about how it got its name. But the biggest argument of all is over who Rus belongs to. Did Kievan Rus civilisation pass eastward, to Muscovy and the Russians, or did it stay put, in Ukraine? ‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’ Ukrainians, of course, say Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia – if she mothered anybody, it was the Ukrainians themselves.

modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, parts of Russia, and stretched all the way up to Finland. Lasting until the middle of the 13th century, at its peak the Kievan Rus spanned the land

Both Ukrainian and Russian historians treat Kievan Rus' as an integral part of their respective national histories. As might be expected, the question of who has the greater right to claim its heritage often arises. Traditional Russian historians, especially those influenced by the 19th-century Juridical School, argued that because Russians were the only East Slavs to create a state in modern times (the evolution of statehood was viewed by them as the pinnacle of the historical process), the Muscovite-Russian state's link with the earliest East Slavic state was the most consistent and significant. By implication, because Ukrainians and Belorussians had no modern state of their own, their histories had no institutional bonds with the Kievan period. The influential 19th-century Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin went even further and claimed that Russian ties with Kiev were not only institutional, but also ethnic.3 According to his theory, after the Mongol destruction of Kiev in 1240, much of the surviving populace migrated from the south to the northeast, the heartland of modern Russia. Although this theory has long since been discredited, it still enjoys support among many Russian and non-Russian historians. As the national consciousness of Ukrainians grew in the 19th century, so too did their resentment of Russian monopolization of the "glory that was Kiev." The most forceful argument against the "traditional scheme of Russian history" was advanced in 1906 by Hrushevsky, Ukraine's most eminent historian. Thoroughgoing populist that he was, Hrushevsky questioned the study of history primarily in terms of the state-building process… Just as Gaul, once a Roman province and now modern-day France, borrowed much of its sociopolitical organization, laws, and culture from Rome, so too did Moscow with regard to Kiev. But Moscow was not a continuation, or a second stage in the historical process begun in Kiev… Soviet historians take what appears to be a compromise position on the issue of the Kievan legacy. They argue that Kiev was the creation of all three East Slavic peoples - the Ukrainians, Russians, and Belorussians.

Russian civilization was a product of its indigenous roots in Kievan Rus and Moscovy, substantial Byzantine impact, and prolonged Mongol rule.

The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years.

Say the word, Gosudar, and I will gladly show these empresses just how powerful the prince of Kievan Rus’ is, Boris said with a mad grin. You’re a fool, Ivan said in a growl. Be silent, that’s how you’ll help us best.

It was time I accepted the truth: my power could make all the difference in this war and I would gladly make myself into a weapon if it meant saving the people of Kievan Rus’.

THE CHRISTIANIZATION OF THE KIEVAN RUS

Russia traces its history to the medieval state known as Kievan Rus, whose capital was Kiev, and much of Ukraine was under Moscow’s rule for over three hundred years.