Quick Take: Kiev was the First Russian Capital

A look at the sordid system through which new countries like Palestine and the Ukraine are invented

(This Quick Take is free. About two-thirds of my posts, those of the History of Mankind series, are for paying subscribers only. Don’t hesitate to comment and let me know what you think I got wrong, or right or whatever: the chance to get that kind of feedback from a larger audience precisely is one of the main reasons why most of my Quick Takes are free.)

The Russo-Ukrainian war that started in 2022 has resulted in many explainers purporting to give readers the background for the centuries-old conflict between Asiatic(ish) Russians and Europeanized(ish) Ukrainians.

The problem with those explainers is that the whole idea of a conflict with long roots is bogus because the idea of the Ukraine as a country, like Palestine’s, is a 20th century invention.

Kiev, the Ukrainian capital that some insist now on spelling Kyiv¹, was the very first capital of Russia. It was there that Norsemen often called “Varangians” ( a name that referred to Scandinavian trader-raiders) settled around the 9th century, following over a century of exploration and looting along the Baltic coast as well as much of modern Belarus, Ukraine and Western Russia.

These were people originally from the Swedish coast, pagans accustomed to violence, whose narrow boats were perfectly designed to travel down the rivers flowing south to the Black Sea and even the Caspian Sea, and yet light enough to be carried aloft when there was no available waterway along the intended route.

The Varangians were very soon called “Russians,” a name that may refer to one of their regions of origin, Rosher or Roshin on the Swedish Baltic coast, a coastal district behind the modern Finnish term for Sweden, “Ruotsi.” The name probably stuck because, after a few generations traveling across Slavic lands, many of the Varangians married Slavic women and accepted Slavic men within their ranks, so they were distinct enough from other Norsemen to require a different moniker.

Slavicized Varangians were identified as Russians in Constantinople’s documents of the second half of the 9^th century; by the Iranian writer Khordadbeh (d. 913), who calls the “Russians” from “Al-Rusiyyah ”a type of “sakaliba” (Slavs/northern Europeans); and by the Arab traveler Al-Masudi, who set them clearly apart from other Nordics, in the early-to-mid 10^th century.

This was established usage. The best and most complete manual of Constantinople’s court ceremonial, “De ceremoniis” (often called “Book of Ceremonies”), also from the mid-10th century, refers — in Book XXX — to a letter from the “Christ-loving emperor of the Romans to the archon [governor]of Rosia [Ρωσία].” The same Greek word, still in use for modern Russia, Ρωσία, is repeated several times, twelve in fact, to refer to the land with a capital in Kiev, in Constantinople’s contemporary imperial manual “De Administrando Imperio.”

By around 855, the Russians had taken control of the central Dnieper region and were ensconced in Kiev, conveniently situated to favor riverine travel to the Black Sea and beyond from the Dnieper basin, with tributaries flowing north to south from modern Belarus and Ukraine and the western provinces of Russia: all these territories, as far as the Varangians/Russians were concerned, were their land, a territory that future historians anxious to avoid drowning in political controversies called “Kievan Rus” and now, in a new post-2022 twist, “Kyivan Rus.”

Nobody ever called that land “Kievan Rus” at the time. Like “Byzantine Empire,” Kievan Rus is a Western European 19^th century coinage, specifically a coinage made by fairly racist German historians anxious to put down the historical claims of “oriental” peoples widely seen as racially degraded and fundamentally inferior — Greeks and Russians — to millenarian empires they were seen as unworthy of.

To such educated Germans, who for centuries had appropriated Rome’s imperial ideal to maintain their Holy Roman Empire², the Greeks who called their own empire, until its destruction in 1453, “Roman” were mere interlopers within a glorious historical continuum to which they didn’t belong: thus, even though the Greeks kept a Roman empire under Roman law, the Germans were so successful with their propaganda that everybody now calls that (Eastern) Roman Empire based in Constantinople “Byzantine,” a word that nobody ever used in that state’s long history.

Much the same happened with Russia. When German historiography in the 19th century confronted the reality that the racially-mixed hordes coming out of the savage East were one of the world’s biggest powers, the professors reacted with appropriate disgust.

The idea that such people could have deep roots in medieval European history was so upsetting that they came up with “Kievan Rus,” to make a clean break between that European state, somewhat wild but well integrated within European politics, and the Russian Empire of autocracy and barbarism they were familiar with. A new concept took root, and became extremely successful particularly in Germanic (and, later, Anglo-Saxon) scholarship that Russia was not descended from the “Kievan Rus,” but from “Muscovy,” another name invented by idle German professors — this time to describe the Russian state between the 15th and 18th centuries.

One extra way to undermine Russia’s claim to a long European history is even more subtle: Western historians made sure to call the rulers of that “Kievan Rus,” perhaps the largest Christian state of the time, not “kings” — a title regularly conceded, for example, to the rulers of tiny insignificant chunks of Western European territory like Navarre and Mercia — but “princes.”

This also requires important contortions of language and history. “Kings” is of course the word used in Russian sources, including the Primary Chronicle (a fascinating early chronicle of Russian history for which there is no parallel, for example, in Germany), and — very importantly — contemporary Western ones: “Knyaz,” an old Slavic title from the same Indo-European root as Kuningaz and King. One that obviously means the ruler of a state.

When Anna, daughter of Yaroslav I “the Wise,” married King Henry I of France, she was referred to in chronicles as a “princess” and the daughter of the “king” of Russia — and, being the mother of four children who survived her including Henry’s heir Philip “the Amorous,” became the ancestor of all later French kings and, in all certainty, most of the French aristocracy to this day.

In modern Western works, Anna is referred as the daughter of some “archduke” or “grand prince” of that imaginary land, the “Kievan Rus.” In reality, she was so influential that the name Philip that her firstborn was given and later became very common among Capetian rulers of France and many related by blood to them — like the current Spanish King Felipe VI, a Bourbon, or the last king of France, Louis Philippe — probably entered the lineage via Anna’s Russian connections: since Anna’s grandmother had been of a Macedonian dynasty that claimed descent from Philip of Macedon³, Alexander’s famous father whose amazing life and exploits I discussed here:

That “Kievan Rus” was no isolated wasteland of primitive Slavs drinking themselves to oblivion, mind you. Russia’s first attested ruler, Rurik (d. 879), unified the lands between his own domain of Novgorod and Kiev, under a sort of unstable kingship and almost certainly ordered in around 860 a surprise attack on distant, but rich, Constantinople, probably launched by ships sailing down the Dnieper and then across the Black Sea, that absolutely terrified the “Byzantine” court.

The half-Norse, half-Slavic horde didn’t breach the city’s walls, although it ransacked its suburbs, giving an impression of strength and military competence that drove the “Byzantines” to reinforce their Crimean province by rebuilding fortifications there, and to send Christian missionaries to the Kievan Russians to try and tame the wild men of the north and, if possible, bring them into an alliance with the oldest state of Christendom.

A tentative, first Christianization of Russia, as well as a first peace treaty with “Byzantium” signed in 874, resulted from these efforts. However, the rise of Rurik’s relative Oleg, a northern Varangian with no interest in the weak deities of soft peoples of the south, resulted in a severe setback to the Byzantine plans, with the destruction of churches and murder of priests. Oleg’s power expanded eastwards, extending over much of the Don River basin, and he also secured access to the Volga River basin further to the east, controlled by the Volga Bulgars, distant relatives of the Slavicized Bulgars living to the west and south of Russia.

Russia was as much as commercial power as it was a military one. Northern products like furs, honey and amber were traded by southern manufactured products. Like other early Slavic powers, the Russians also sold the prisoners they took, and sometimes their families, as slaves, who often ended up in Muslims markets down in the Levant via the intermediation of Khazar traders.

The reign of Igor (r. 912-945), probably a son of Rurik who spent some time in exile among Norsemen before he led military forces down south to take the throne in Kiev, was decisive for Russia’s growth into the dominant power of the European steppes. It coincided with a marked decline of the Khazar Empire, and led to two more failed Russian attacks against Constantinople, that convinced many in Kiev that negotiations would be a better way to handle the Greeks.

Seeking to reestablish peace with the dangerous Russians, “Byzantine” Emperor Constantine then married his daughter Anastasia to a son of Russian King Yaroslav (a brother of Anna) in the early 11th century. The diplomatic arrangement was a great success and Yaroslav focused his attention on civilized pursuits such as the construction of Kiev’s Cathedral of Saint Sophia and the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra monastery complex – two of the most symbolic example of Russo-Ukrainian architecture, particularly after multiple renovations in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

It’s unfashionable to state these obvious points now but — although the Cathedral of Saint Sophia has been repeatedly altered since as to its details — the main structure is still substantially the same. Yaroslav in the 1030s also completed Mstislav's cathedral at Chernigov (Spaso-Preobrazhenski sobor), a magnificent work still largely intact, and built the Golden Gate in Kiev with the Church of the Assumption above it, all inspired on “Byzantine” models.

Kiev's Cathedral was followed by Novgorod’s Church of Holy Wisdom (1045-52), founded by Yaroslav's son Vladimir, and by that of Polotsk at the end of the 11^th century. In all these cathedrals the gradual emergence of a specifically Russian style can be observed: Novgorod's Sofia is a simplified version of Kiev's, with three apses instead of five.

Russia was so deeply intertwined with the broader sweep of European history that it’s possible that the first Christian king of Sweden, Olof Eriksson Skotkonung (r. 995-1022), was baptized with his family and much of his court under the influence of Russian missionaries.

Decades later, Gytha of Wessex, a runaway daughter of English king Harold Godwinson – killed at the Battle of Hastings – ended up marrying Vladimir II Monomakh, “Grand Prince” of Kiev, and begetting a remarkable list of people: this included a daughter who became queen of Hungary, a grand-daughter who became “Byzantine” Empress Irene, another who became queen of both Norway and Denmark and a grandson who became King Valdemar I of Denmark.

Yes, Russia would soon fall prey to invasions and the presence of the Russian state in its Ukrainian homeland would vanish for centuries. Russian principates only slowly emerged from such disasters in the 15th century, and the state that eventually was formed there was one with a capital in Moscow, rather than Kiev.

Still, Russia gradually expanded back to its former domains, now called “Ukraine” or “Borderland,” after the same Slavic root that gave us the “Krajina” region of Croatia from which Serbs were ethnically cleansed in 1995. The Battle of Poltava (1709) that marked the end of long attempts to build a Swedish Empire, and the start of the Swedish turn towards peaceful pursuits that finally gave us Ikea and ABBA, was fought in the “Borderland”: in fact, less than 200 kilometers southeast of the town of Sudzha near Kursk that the Russians liberated from Ukrainian occupation a few weeks ago.

Throughout this period and following centuries, natives of that region were not called “Border-people” but “Malorusians” or “Little Russians,” much like “Belarusians” are “White Russians.” The words Ukraine and Ukrainian became increasingly common over the 19th century, but it was only in the early 20th century that the Soviet Union came up with a plan to weaken Russian nationalism by establishing an Ukrainian Republic that was gradually engorged by adding it Russian lands, in a process easily understood by looking at this map:

For those interested, I described that process further here:

Now, like I said in the very first paragraph of this post, the idea of the Ukraine (“Borderland”) as a country is very modern, just like that of Palestine as a country. No Arabs believed Palestine was a country even as relatively late as 1949. But they do now, as I do.

The same happens with the Ukraine: the fact that Ukrainian nationalism is very modern doesn’t mean that it’s not real, or legitimate. That’s not my concern. My concern is with historical facts. The facts are that the creation of “Palestine” was very much motivated by the urge to have a country that would oppose Jewish claims to the Holy Land. So we now have Palestine.

Much the same urge, this time to oppose Russian expansion into Eastern Europe, motivated the creation of the Ukraine, first mooted as a separate country, destined to become a German satellite, under the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The purpose of a system is what it does. So congratulations to both, I guess. Good luck in all your future endeavors: life as a nationality that was only designed as a battering ram against a much more powerful enemy can be real hard.

Or not! Don ‘t hesitate to let me know in the comments.

1. Are you spelling “Spain” as “España,” its official name for centuries? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

2. This empire was a medieval concoction that has been the butt of jokes for ever because it was never holy or Roman, and it always a bit of stretch to call it “empire.”

3. For more details, see "The Kingdom of the Franks to 1108," by Constance Brittain Bouchard, in "The New Cambridge Medieval History," Vol. IV, 1024-c.1198, Part II, p. 125.