In 1818, having read what was the newest version of the Rurik story, General Mikhail Orlov, a hero of the war with Napoleon and a future rebel and exile, wrote to a friend:
I am reading Karamzin. His first volume is not to my liking. . . . Why no passion for the Fatherland? Why does he want to be an impassionate cosmopolite rather than a citizen? . . . Why does he say that Rurik was a foreigner? That Varangians were not Slavs? What does he find
praiseworthy in the call to the foreigner to take the seat of Novgorod?
(Cited in Maiofis 2008: 344)
Like the building of the Russian Empire, the writing of its history was an international project, frequently contested by the emerging Russian nationalism. Nationalisms embodied themselves in history books as well as in novels and newspapers. Part of "print capitalism" but perceived as truth rather than fiction, history books shaped the body of the nation despite the permanent revisions of them and contradictions among them (Anderson 1991; Hroch 1985). Generations of Russians read about Rurik while Russia was fighting with its enemies. In times of peace, they pursued historical studies because of their patriotic desire to learn more about their country. In their classes or textbooks, there was no place to start but with Rurik the Varangian. Who was he, who were they? The ethnicity of Rurik was discussed fervently, while other aspects of his story were largely ignored.
Figure 3: Viktor Vasnetsov, Rurik's Arrival at Ladoga, 1909. Three brothers, Rurik, Truvor, and Sineus (which in Russian means the blue moustaches) are receiving "gifts" of fur from a Slavic tribe. Source: http://www.vasnecov.ru/
The first Russian author to publish the Primary Chronicle was Vasilii Tatishchev (1686-1750), a lay historian and high official of the emerging empire, a fascinating and unreliable author (Tolochko 2005). Peter the Great asked him to map his imperial domains, but Tatishchev slipped from geography to history. He created mines in the Urals and suppressed the Old-Believers there, "tamed" the Kalmyks on the Volga and the Kyrgyzes in the southern steppes, and governed the crucial province of Astrakhan, the gateway to the east. Digging in archives was like digging in mines, and writing history was like forging metal; both industries were instrumental for the Empire. Almost 200 years later, Pavel Miliukov, an academic historian who helped to dethrone the second dynasty and set himself up as Foreign Minister during World War I, admitted that this eighteenth-century way of doing history was closer to him than the posi- tivist tradition that lay in between (Miliukov 2006: 35).
Tatishchev's life and work were parallel to those of his French contemporary, a royal historian Henri de Boulainvilliers, who received a focused attention from both Arendt (1970) and Foucault (2003). Like Boulainvilliers, Tatishchev lived in a time of wars and served his monarch in many ways, including history writing. Three major wars between Sweden and Russia punctuated his lifetime, one a failure and two ending in Russian victories. During the truce, Tatishchev went for two years to Sweden, where he explored the mining industry and carried out intelligence work. Tatishchev's rule in the Urals, where he had to enserf the local peasants to make them work in his factories, was notoriously violent. Like Boulainvilliers, who is credited with the scholarly elaboration of the right of conquest, Tatishchev liked the idea that the Russian state was founded by conquest. However, the idea that the conquerors were the ancestors of Russia's current enemy made him uncomfortable: "The arrival of Rurik with his Varangians humiliated the kinship and language of Slavs" (Tatishchev 1994: 1/344). Some consolation was found in the idea that the incoming Vikings were all male and therefore, their descendants were "quickly" Slavonized. It might be true with the Rurikides but the Romanovs invariably married into the Baltic peoples, undoing the previous Russification. After much doubt, Tatishchev concluded that the Vikings came to northern Russia from Finland rather than Sweden. Since parts of Finland had been annexed by the Russian Empire in 1721 and again in 1743, locating Rurik's point of departure in Finland domesticated him into a Russian subject. In response, Tatishchev's nemesis, the German historian August Schlozer who worked in St. Petersburg and Gottingen, said plainly but a little maliciously that the Varangians were Swedes (1809: 2/430).
For Russian readers of the Primary Chronicle, it was no easier to accept the idea that Rurik was a Swede than for the readers of the Bible to agree that Moses was an Egyptian. During the early years of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, an unusual debate on this issue animated its halls (Rogger 1960; Obolensky 1982). Starting with the Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, Russian scholars derived the Varangians from the Prussians, Lithuanians, Baltic Slavs, and even the Judaic Khazars. Catherine the Great wrote a play in the style of Shakespeare, "A Historical Scene from the Life of Rurik," and also the monumental Notes on Russian History, which showed Rurik as a Finnish Prince, a son of the King of Finland, though no such royalty existed, as Catherine well knew (Ekaterina II 1990: 145; 2008: 44). The Slavic elders summon Rurik after he has returned from a successful expedition to France: those who created France and those who created Russia were of one kin, states Catherine. But she also imagines a Slav rebel who does not recognize Rurik as the ruler (Wachtel 1994: 26).
In the early nineteenth century, Nikolai Karamzin found a semantic solution to the question of the Varangians in calling them Normans. An early source identified visitors to Constantinople, who came from "Rus," as the Normans (Vasil'ev 1946; Franklin and Shepard 1996). More importantly, by equating the Varangians with the Normans, Karamzin equated Russians with other Europeans who had also been dominated by the Normans in the past. A competing school of thought called itself "anti-Normanist." Schlozer wrote, early and prophetically:
I do not know of another example among the educated nations in which the science of national history would have such a strange pace. Everywhere it has been moving ahead .. . but here [in Russia] it has been returning to the very start, and more than once. (Schlozer 1809: 2/391)
Tatishchev and the Amazons
But the story of Rurik is gentle, even "idyllic" (Kliuchevsky 1956: 1/140). It does read as if the Vikings and the Slavic-Finnish tribes struck some kind of voluntary agreement. One part said to another, come and reign over us. The other part surely asked, is your land rich enough? But Rurik is a foreigner, someone in the crowd must have said. Retelling the story for the first time, Tatishchev had to believe that, first, in order to establish civil peace, a tribe needs a sovereign, and second, that it does not really matter where this sovereign comes from: from within the tribe or from the outside. While the former idea was espoused by Thomas Hobbes and in the eighteenth century had become the mainstream philosophical wisdom, the latter was unusual.
For Tatishchev as much as for us (or even more so), the Primary Chronicle's story of the Varangians reads like a paraphrase from Hobbes's Leviathtan: "There was no law among them, but . . . they began to war one against another," until they said to themselves, "Let us seek a prince who may rule over us" (Laurentian Text 1953: 61). In Tatishchev's time, Hobbes's ideas reached Russia through the work of Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-94), a prominent German philosopher who worked most of his life for Russia's enemy, Sweden. But the nature of his teachings made them fit for import. Writing after the peace of Westphalia, Pufendorf made state security central among political values, the common measure for the ruler and the ruled. Only that sovereign who promises and delivers protection to his subjects can be legitimate. Only those subjects who are loyal to the sovereign are worthy of protection.