I arrived in Novgorod before sunrise. I had slept for the first five hours of the overnight sleeper as it travelled north on the high-speed tracks of the Moscow–Petersburg mainline. But as soon as it turned off onto the Novgorod spur, the vibrations from the under-maintained branch line had shaken me awake. I was dressed long before the dezhurnaya arrived with my cup of black Russian tea. At 6 a.m. I walked out of Novgorod station into the crisp morning air.
The town was sleeping, so I asked the driver to take me to the far side of the Volkhov River. The city’s ancient trading district, the Yaroslavovo Dvorische, where generations of merchants had bartered then gathered to pray in the white-walled, blue-domed church, was silent and cold. My breath rose in the darkness. Across the water, the full moon floated above the walls of the Novgorod kremlin in one of Europe’s most perfect, unspoiled vistas – red medieval battlements planted on green riverbanks and, rising above them, the high golden dome of St Sophia’s Cathedral.
In the middle of the ninth century, before the name Russia had ever been spoken, Novgorod was a staging post on the trade route from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Byzantine Empire in the south. The area was populated by Slavic tribes, who vied for supremacy. But, just as fratricidal war seemed inevitable, the tribal leaders sought a negotiated settlement. In an era dominated by military aggression, it was a remarkable event.
‘There was no law among them1,’ the Russian Primary Chronicle tells us, ‘and tribe rose against tribe. Discord ensued and they began to make war, one against the other. But they said unto themselves, “Let us seek a prince who may rule over us, and judge us according to the law.”’ The chronicler’s record of events in ninth-century Novgorod gives an early hint of the conciliatory, law-based character the city would display in the centuries to come. Instead of civil war, the population chose to unite under the leadership of a neutral ruler summoned from outside:
So they went overseas2 to the Vikings who were known as the Rus, just as others were called Swedes and Normans and Angles, for thus were they named. The tribes of the Slavs and others said unto the Rus, ‘Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come reign as princes. Rule over us.’ Three brothers were selected and the oldest, Rurik of Rus, located himself in Novgorod. From him, the Russian land – Rus – received its name.
It is a great story. Russians were brought up on it. But as so often in Russian history, there’s disagreement over the details. The Primary Chronicle is the only source for the arrival of Prince Rurik and, indeed, for the whole period. It is part of a series of chronicles that were written considerably later by a succession of monks and, while they are evocative and poetic, their reliability is questionable. Rurik may have been real, or he may have been a mythical figure, possibly a composite of the Viking princes who went on to rule the Russian lands.
But Russian history is never just about the facts. Real history intertwines with romanticised history to form the myths had have shaped national identity. Like the rest of us, Russians have a pretty sketchy knowledge of their own past; even highly educated friends of mine struggle to name many key dates. But one they do all know is 862, the date Rurik allegedly arrived here to found the Rus-ian nation.fn1
Seven a.m. struck on the Novgorod clocks.
I could see the kremlin was stirring into life, so I took the footbridge over the river and strolled up the path to its tall wooden gates. Inside the walls, an immaculate ensemble of historic structures encircles the splendid eleventh-century cathedral, and in the centre of a grassy lawn is Novgorod’s Millennium Monument. Erected in 1862, another time of great change for Russia (see here), it is dominated by the bronze statue of a knight in armour with a Nordic-style helmet and the date 862. For centuries, schoolchildren have learned that this was what Rurik the Viking looked like. My unscientific poll of passers-by revealed that all those willing to talk believed that his arrival in Novgorod was the moment their nation was born.
‘I think that Rurik3 is a very important person in our history. He is the founder of the first Russian dynasty, the first monarchy of the tsars,’ said Svetlana, a languages student. ‘Yes, of course he was a very important figure, because he was the one who united the country, who was the founder of our country,’ agreed Alexei. ‘There were just some tribes before him, but after him there was a country!’ Masha went further: ‘Rurik created our state, our Russia. He laid the foundations of our whole system … He was the first of the dynasty that ruled in Rus for a long time. So he’s not just a ruler, he’s a symbol for us.’
Such claims are a perfect example of romantic history getting ahead of the facts. By no stretch of the imagination could the lands ruled by Rurik (if he existed) and his heirs be said to resemble a nation or a state. They remained little more than one grouping of clans among many, and they would stay that way for several centuries to come. But, fact or fiction, the invitation to Rurik to rule over the warring tribes with a silnaya ruka hints at a craving for strong centralised power to bring order and unity to a turbulent land. It’s a mindset that over the centuries would become ingrained in the Russian psyche. The very word for ‘state’, gosudarstvo, has different connotations from its English equivalent: it suggests not an impartial, representative government run by consent, with guaranteed rights and the rule of law, but something closer to a kingdom – literally, a ‘lord-dom’, dependent solely on the whim of its autocratic ruler. And it can be argued that it was this mindset that did, many years later, result in the birth of Russia.
As early as 862, we can already discern in embryo two tendencies that would compete for dominance over the next 11 centuries: on the one hand, the yearning for order through autocracy; on the other, the consultation and voluntary submission to a selected ruler and an impulse towards participatory compromise, a whiff of the democratic ethos that was to find expression in a quite astounding form in the Novgorod (but not Moscow) of later years.
As the only record of the times is contained in the ancient Chronicles, I travelled to the Russian National Library in St Petersburg, where the earliest surviving copies are now kept. I found the place had changed little from when I first went there as a student 30 years earlier, but this was the first time I had been given access to these precious documents normally kept under lock and key. The Chronicles are the life’s work of usually anonymous monks, one after another down the centuries, toiling in their silent candlelit cells to inscribe the history of their land. A librarian in white gloves showed me pages of illuminated manuscript from the Novgorod Chronicle, another of the prized sources of information that, together with the Primary Chronicle, make up our knowledge of the early years.
I read how the Viking incomers, Varangians as the chronicler calls them, stayed and ruled and intermarried with the Slavs. Rurik’s descendants adopted Russian names – I found Olegs, Igors, Sviatoslavs – but they evidently didn’t lose the Viking penchant for military conquest. On Rus’s southern border lay the Byzantine Empire, Greek-speaking and Christian, with its capital in Constantinople, today’s Istanbul. The chronicler says two of Rurik’s men, Askold and Dir, led an expedition to lay siege to the city and ‘upon arriving in the Bosporus strait4, the Rus killed many Christians’.
In a later section of the manuscript, I saw exactly why the Rus acquired such a reputation for great ferocity. ‘Of the prisoners they captured5,’ it reads, ‘some they beheaded, some they tortured, some they shot and still others they drowned in the sea.’ In a throwaway remark, it concludes that, ‘The Rus inflicted many woes upon the Greeks in the usual manner of their soldiers.’
But, according to the chronicler, the pagan Rus failed to reckon with the one force that could deprive them of victory:
For lo, the Byzantine Emperor prayed6 all night at the Church of the Holy Virgin, sang hymns and carried the sacred vestment of the Virgin and dipped its hem into the sea. The weather had been still and the sea calm, but suddenly a windstorm arose and great waves scattered the boats of the pagan Rus. The storm dashed them upon the shore and broke them in pieces. Very few of them escaped the destruction.
By the late ninth century, two leitmotifs of Russian history were beginning to emerge – the tendency towards autocracy, and the urge for aggressive military expansionism. But the divinely aided defeat at Constantinople introduced a third. From initially trying to pillage Constantinople, the Rus-ians were exposed to its religion, and they were intrigued by it, an event that would ultimately have far-reaching implications.
A final consequence of Askold and Dir’s expedition from Novgorod to Byzantium was that it led them to discover en route the city that would soon become the capital of the Rus-ian lands:
They sailed along the Dnieper river7, and in the course of their journey they saw a small burg on a hill. They asked, ‘Whose town is this?’ The inhabitants answered, ‘There were three brothers, Kii, Shchek and Khoriv, who built this city, but they have since died. We who are their descendants dwell here and pay tribute to the tribe of the Khazars.’ Askold and Dir remained in this city, and after gathering together many Varangians, they established their dominion over the area …
That ‘small burg’ was Kiev, possibly taking its name from the above-mentioned Kii. And while the story of its foundation may have been as mythical as the legend of England’s King Alfred burning his cakes just a few years later, its strategic location on the Dnieper at the heart of the north–south trade routes persuaded the Rus-ians to make it their headquarters. In 882, Grand Prince Oleg, the heir of Rurik, seized the city and declared it would henceforth be his capital, an event that has inspired composers and writers down the centuries. Russian schoolchildren learn their classics by heart – their ability to recite screeds of great poetry puts us to shame – and Pushkin’s ‘Song of Oleg the Wise’ is one of the works they can recite with unnerving assurance:fn2
So then did Oleg the Wise ride out8,
At the head of his troops, on his charger true.
Oh warrior bold, honour and happiness wait on you!
… Forth Oleg rode with his Court and his friends,
High on the hill, where the river bank bends,
Where the rains on them beat, where the dust rises high,
Where ripples the sand when the storm passes by.
And recalling shared dangers of days long gone
They spoke of the battles they’d fought and won …
I have climbed ‘the hill where the river bank bends’ and it’s easy to see why Oleg the Wise chose Kiev. The Berestov Mount is now crowned with a towering Soviet memorial to the soldiers of the Second World War, but it’s not hard to imagine Oleg’s thoughts as he rode up it. Looking down on the wooded banks of the stately Dnieper, the site’s geographical advantages are clear: an easily defended location with good visibility on all sides, endless acres of fertile soil, forests to provide timber for houses and boats, and, most importantly, direct access to the Dnieper and its tributaries, which spread like a network of highways across the land.
For its first four centuries it was Kiev, now in Ukraine, and not Moscow that stood at the centre of the lands of Rus, and in many respects it was a golden age. Prince Oleg moved his court and retinue down from Novgorod. He fortified Kiev and sent military expeditions to neutralise the potentially dangerous nomadic tribes that surrounded it.
Then, in 911, Oleg set off9 with, according to later accounts, 80,000 men in 2,000 boats, to sail down the Dnieper and besiege Constantinople once again. This time the result was more successful. Terrified by the arrival of the Rus-ian hordes, the Greeks offered to negotiate. Oleg demanded the payment of tribute, not only to himself but to all the princes who had accompanied him, and to all their followers. When the Greeks meekly agreed, Oleg sealed his victory by nailing his shield to the wooden walls of the city. The impertinent Rus-ians agreed to leave only in return for an extremely favourable trade treaty, including a provision for Kievan merchants to reside in Constantinople for six months of every year.
Trade rather than conquest was almost certainly Oleg’s aim all along, and the treaty laid the foundations of Kiev’s future prosperity. From then on, a vast flotilla of Kievan boats sailed south every June, bearing furs and wax, honey and slaves, as a later Byzantine emperor recorded with a mixture of awe and bemusement:
In the month of June10 the Russians gather in their dugout boats, each hewn from a mighty tree trunk, to descend the river from Kiev. They must cross the seething cataracts where great rocks bar their way and the water wells up and dashes down with a mighty din. But the Russians disembark and carry their boats around the falls, taking up the goods they have brought with them and leading the slaves in chains for six miles until the rapids are passed. This is where the Pecheneg tribesmen come to attack them. So their voyage is fraught with travail and terror, difficulty and danger. At the island called St Gregory, the Russians perform their pagan ceremonies around a giant oak which they call sacred, sacrificing live cockerels and casting lots to see how best to appease their gods.
On the return journey, the Rus-ians would bring back manufactured goods, such as wine, silks, jewellery and glassware. It is a seemingly idyllic picture of an entrepreneurial nation trading peacefully with its neighbours. But there are hints of more disturbing aspects in their life: the attacks by the Pechenegs and other nomadic tribes were a constant danger for a state surrounded by the wild steppes, with no natural defences against hostile incursions; the slaves the Rus-ians brought to sell in Constantinople would most likely be prisoners captured in these skirmishes, and it’s safe to assume that equal numbers of Rus-ians were also captured or killed. Their exotic paganism, too, implies the threat of natural disaster and reliance on the bounty of nature, prompting the worship of sacred trees, and a compulsive need to placate the mysterious Dazhbog and Stribog, gods of sun and wind, and Perun, god of thunder. Rus-ian society existed in unsettled, potentially dangerous times but, remarkably, it survived and thrived.
With its merchants travelling the world and its warriors seeking out new territory to conquer, Kiev was at the origin of what would centuries later become the greatest contiguous empire on Earth, stretching from the Baltic Sea in the west, to the Pacific in the east, to oases of Central Asia in the south and the Arctic Ocean in the north. Today, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia still spans nine time zones and is home to a hundred nationalities speaking 150 languages.
But for most of its history, Russia has been an unwieldy giant threatened by invasion from abroad and divisions at home. From the very early days of Kievan Rus, the struggle for the unity of the Rus-ian lands and the forging of competing fiefdoms into a new single authority would be the most essential task if the state were to survive.
fn1 Rus would be formed from an assemblage of individual princely fiefdoms with its centre in Kiev. These were the lands that later became the countries we know as Russia and Ukraine. Russians and Ukrainians still dispute which of their countries is the true inheritor of early Rus. It would undoubtedly be wrong to refer at this early stage to Russia, Russians, or a Russian identity. The adjective ‘Rus-ian’ is artificial and clumsy, but it is the best way of indicating the entity to which we are referring.
fn2 As Vladimir Putin did, to great effect, in a press conference shortly after he became prime minister in 2008.