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In the west and east of Kiev Rus the boundaries were those of political control and ethnicity. In the south the ethnic and political boundary was at its basis an ecological boundary. South of the Kievan lands to the Black and Caspian Seas lay the great steppe – flat grasslands with few trees and the “black earth” – dry but not arid. The long grass concealed enormous numbers of animals, including antelopes, wild horses, and even panthers, while the rivers supported myriad ducks and wild geese as well as sturgeon and other fish. Centuries later, the Russian writer Gogol wrote of the steppe: “The farther along in the steppe the more beautiful it became…The plow had never touched the infinite waves of wild growth. Only the horses that hid in the grass as in a forest had stamped it down. Nothing in nature could have been better. The whole surface of the earth was like a green and gold ocean, on which millions of various flowers splashed” (Taras Bulba). This steppe was actually the western extension of the great Eurasian steppe that extended all the way to Manchuria, which covers today’s Mongolia, northern China, Xinjiang, and Kazakstan. From time immemorial it was the land of the nomads and the great nomadic empires – first the Iranian Scythians and Sarmatians of classical antiquity, who were then later replaced by the fearsome Huns and then wave after wave of Turkic peoples. These nomads did not wander aimlessly over the landscape, but instead they followed a regular annual migration over a greater or lesser area. They kept close to the valleys of the great rivers – the Danube, Dniepr, Don, and Volga – where they found winter and summer pastures for their animals. The nomads did not try to settle in the forests, but they used them as a source of booty and slaves, and when they could, they also laid tribute on the settled peoples. For centuries this had been the relationship of nomad and farmer throughout northern Asia and beyond. The steppe and its nomads were to form a crucial element in the history of Kiev Rus, and later Russia, into the eighteenth century.

Archeology tells us a great deal about the settlement and life of the early Eastern Slavs. They were certainly the predominant group along the central axis of Rus from Kiev to Novgorod by at least AD 800, and were still moving north and east, settling new lands. They had built many villages and fortifications of earth with wooden palisades, and they buried their dead with the tools and weapons necessary for life in the next world. From other sources we have some idea of their gods: Perun, the god of thunder and the sky, was apparently the chief god, but there was also Veles, the god of cattle; Stribog, the wind god; and the more shadowy fertility gods, Rod and Rozhanitsa. Around Kiev there were round spaces formed of stones that seem to have been sites of the cult, but Slavic paganism never had any written texts (or none that survived) to give us a glimpse of their actual beliefs.

Reconstructing the political history of the early Slavs is equally complicated. Legend says that the Viking Rurik came from over the sea with two brothers to rule Novgorod in AD 862. This is a classic foundation legend found in many cultures and as such was crucial to the self-consciousness of the subsequent ruling dynasty. The text, the Kievan Primary Chronicle of 1116, which recounts the legend, is vague about the establishment of Rurik’s descendants in Kiev. Supposedly the Viking Oleg went down the rivers and took the city in 882, but his relationship to Rurik was not specified. Did either of them even exist? Prince Igor, allegedly Rurik’s son, was a real person who did rule from Kiev (913–945), until a rebellious tribe killed him. The clan ancestor remained Rurik, who thus gave his name to the ruling dynasty, the Rurikovichi.

The Rurikovich dynasty was originally Scandinavian, as legend and the early names suggest: Oleg from Norse Helge and Igor from Ingvar. Our unique written source, the Primary Chronicle, called them Varangians, one of the names for Scandinavians used in Byzantium. In other places it said they were called Rus, not Varangians. Further on, the text localized Rus in the Kiev area, but most it often called the whole state and people Rus. The author was serving his rulers, identifying princes and people, and leaving the historian with a muddle virtually impossible to sort out. In any case the first Rurikovichi were undoubtedly Scandinavian and their appearance in Rus was part of the expansion of the Scandinavian peoples in the Viking age. Unfortunately the archeological evidence does not fit the legends in the Primary Chronicle very well. Viking finds are concentrated for these early centuries around the southern rim of Lake Ladoga and in the town of Old Ladoga. The chronicle stories tried to place them in Novgorod, but Novgorod did not even come into existence until about AD 950, after the dynasty of Rurik was already established in Kiev. And in Scandinavia itself there were no sagas of Viking triumphs and wars in Russia to match those recounting the conquest of Iceland and the British Isles. In the lands that were once part of Kiev Rus, there are no runestones memorializing the great warriors and their deaths, such as those that cover Scandinavia and the western islands where the Vikings roamed. All we can say for sure is that a group of warriors whose base was probably Ladoga, with its Scando-Slavic-Finnish community, came to Kiev around AD 900 and began to rule that area, quickly establishing their authority over the whole vast area of Kiev Rus.

The world of AD 950 looked very different from how we might imagine it today. Western Europe was an impoverished collection of weak petty kingdoms and local dynasties. The great Carolingian Empire was now a century in the past and the classic feudal society of medieval Europe was just coming into being. In France the great regional lords and barons owed only the most theoretical obedience to their king. The greatest power in the north for the moment was Denmark, as the Danish kings controlled much of England and the Vikings had small kingdoms in Ireland and Scotland. The Emperor still reigned in Germany, and in Italy the papacy was still under his thumb, while the regional rulers of Germany and Italy grew more and more independent. Most of the Iberian Peninsula was under Arab rule, with a few tiny Christian principalities hanging on in the north.

The great powers and centers of civilization were the Arab Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire. Only a few centuries earlier the Arabs had taken Islam to the far corners of western Eurasia, to Central Asia and Spain, and the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad was now the center of that world. These were the great centuries of medieval Arab culture – the time of the translations of Aristotle and other works of Greek learning and of the Islamic commentary and development of Greek ideas and Greek science. The Caliphate was immensely rich, and the many coin hoards found on the Rus lands testify to its trade with northern neighbors. Even more important to Kiev Rus was Byzantium. The Greeks had recovered from the immense shock of the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, and by AD 900, a revived Byzantium was master of Anatolia and the southern Balkans. Theirs was a complex civilization, a Christian society with a rich monastic culture and at the same time the heir of classical antiquity. While monks spent their days in liturgy and contemplation, their relatives and patrons were reading Homer and Thucydides, Plato and Demosthenes. Laymen wrote the empire’s history not as monkish chronicles in simplified language like those of Western Europe, but in pure Attic Greek following the models of the ancients. The Byzantine Empire was also a bureaucratic state on the late Roman model, dependent on written Roman law and paper documentation. Boys were set to learn all this material from a young age, following the sequence of subjects and texts already laid down in Roman times. For the Byzantines did not call themselves Greeks but Romans, Rhomaioi, and their country was to them still Rome.

The Byzantines were not the immediate neighbors of Kiev Rus and communication was difficult. The most intimate contact was with the Turkic nomads of the great steppe. From about AD 750, the steppe was ruled by the Khazars, a nomadic people whose center was on the lower Volga and who laid tribute on the southern Rus tribes. The Khazars were a unique people, for their rulers, their kagans, had converted from Turkic paganism to Judaism and had copies of the Hebrew Bible. Nomadic empires were short-lived, and in the middle of the tenth century the Turkic Pechenegs replaced the Khazars, only to be supplanted about a century later by another Turkic people, the Kipchaks – or Polovtsy, as the Rus called them. In the steppe the Kipchaks lived in a series of large groups, each on one of the main rivers, the most important to Rus being those on the Dniepr, Northern Donets, and Don. Their annual migration between winter and summer pastures involved great herds of horses, cattle, sheep, and even camels, with the Kipchaks following them in felt tents mounted on carts. Their religion was the ancient Turkic paganism centered on the sky and the ancestors. Farther east the Kipchaks spread to the lower Volga and the Caucasus and traded with the Byzantine cities in the Crimea. For long periods the Rus and the Kipchaks raided one another’s lands almost annually, each group seizing animals, slaves, and hostages from the other. Relations were not only hostile, for the Rus princes took wives among the daughters of the Kipchak chiefs, who in turn took an active part in the internal feuds of the Rurikovich dynasty. Some of the Kipchaks eventually adopted Christianity, apparently from Rus or the Greeks.