Russia

By the ninth century, however, they had encountered, and begun to intermarry with, Finns and Baits as well as Vikings in the north-west; with Chuds and Cheremis (or Maris) in the north-east; and in the south with Khazars and a variety of other incomers from the Caucasus and the steppes of Central Asia. These circumstances seem to have encouraged an open-mindedness about strangers and a surprising absence of xenophobia compared to other European peoples (the Russians’ latter-day prejudice against blacks constitutes a glaring exception). A readiness to accept strangers into one’s ranks was to remain characteristic of them. In this respect Russian expansionism was to differ from that of the English, Dutch or pre-revolutionary French, and this attitude was to give Russia a certain advantage in empire-building. However, an empire presupposes a state, and a state had yet to be constructed.

This earliest Russia is visible only darkly. Our history so far has been a reconstruction by inference from disciplines other than history. The proto-Russians who inhabited the world we have described left no records that survived. In time they were to be encountered by other peoples, who did leave accounts of them, though these were scrappy at first, mostly based on hearsay, and often inconsistent with more reliable evidence.

Then, suddenly, in the ninth century, a Russian state burst on to the historical stage. Its emergence was due to a symbiosis of the agricultural elites who controlled the tribal confederations and the Viking traders from the north, but a third factor was to be of immense importance: Constantinople, capital of the later Roman Empire and the greatest city in the world. The Vikings had established themselves in Russia partly in order to gain better access than they already had to Constantinople and its riches. And when these two elements — the Vikings and Constantinople — came into contact, an electric charge was created which was to shake historical Russia into existence.

2The First Russian State

FROM THE NINTH CENTURY onward written sources on Russia and the Russians become more plentiful. They come mostly from Imperial Constantinople, which, despite the rise of the Arabs and the appearance of a rival emperor, Charlemagne, in the West, was still the great power of eastern Europe and Asia Minor. But Icelandic sagas, the writings of Arab and Jewish merchants, and the first Russian chronicle also yield information. Together they allow us to reconstruct the process by which Russians became Christian (a term most of their descendants used to describe themselves a thousand years later) and the political implications of their conversion. They also describe the people who helped construct the first Russian state - the shrewd and vengeful widow Olga; Vladimir the sainted slave trader; the vain, resentful Sviatoslav; and Iaroslav the Wise.

The first Russian state - often referred as Kievan Rus - was essentially a commercial undertaking. It developed out of the mutual needs of Russians in the neighbourhood of what became the city of Novgorod and a band of Vikings in search of employment and plunder. The traders of Novgorod had been prospering and the population of their settlements had been growing, so a bigger food supply had to be assured. Since the soil of the area was poor, however, they had to take control of food producers over a large enough area to ensure an adequate supply They also needed to protect their settlements and their growing commercial interests from predators. It made sense, then, to retain the services of a band of Viking military specialists. ¹ From such a beginning, it seems, these Vikings in conjunction with the local Russian elite groups soon gained control of the transcontinental trade between Scandinavia, Constantinople (capital of the Roman Empire now that Rome itself had fallen to the barbarians) and the Orient. Until the middle of the ninth century their operations were confined to the northern part of the complex network of rivers that crossed the vast expanses of Russia. The southern part, already discovered by Arab traders in the seventh century, was controlled by the Khazars, a Turkic-speaking people whose territory centred on the Volga estuary and the northern Caucasus and whose rulers were to convert to Judaism in the 86os. ² Yet emergent Russia was not fated to be part of a Jewish empire. It was the Vikings who eventually gained control of the long river route with all its portages, and who, intermarrying with women of the Russian tribes with whom they dealt, were to become rulers of the Russian lands.