"Kyivan Rus' Never Existed" — Anatomy of a Myth

The myth

In a street debate a Russian interlocutor advances a common claim: “Kyivan Rus’” is an artificial name for a period of time, invented by historians at the start of the nineteenth century, and therefore no state by that name ever existed^[1]. It sounds like the exposure of a “Ukrainian invention,” but in fact three different assertions have been packed together here, each of which must be examined separately.

First conflation: the term versus the state

That the term “Kyivan Rus’” is a late coinage is entirely true. Contemporaries called their state simply “Rus’”, and it was nineteenth-century historians who began calling it “Kyivan” to distinguish it from later political centres. One can even point to the very person responsible: the term was introduced by Mykhailo Maksymovych — the first rector of Kyiv University — in a work of 1837, who used it for the period from the ninth to the thirteenth century on the grounds that the centre of decision-making was in Kyiv, while contemporaries and documents themselves called the state simply “Rus’“^[8][9]. So “Kyivan Rus’” was from the outset a conventional name for a period, not a self-designation of the state. But a name and the object it names are different things: the fact that a classificatory term appeared in the nineteenth century does not mean that the medieval state centred on Kyiv did not exist^[2]. By that logic one would have to “abolish” both Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire — both terms are likewise later coinages.

Second conflation: the founding legend versus the existence of the state

The second move is to reduce the whole history of Rus’ to the legend of its founding. The account of the calling of Rurik does indeed come from a single source — the Primary Chronicle — and is not corroborated by parallel sources; similar “summons to power” motifs occur among many European peoples, so historians have good reason to regard it as a chronicle legend^[3].

But this is a statement about method, not about the existence of the state. An event becomes a historical fact only when independent parallel sources confirm it; a single chronicle legend is not such confirmation^[4]. Acknowledging that the Rurik legend is a legend does not render the state of Rus’ non-existent: it is attested by entirely different testimonies independent of the Chronicle — Byzantine, Arabic and Western European. The threshold of verification here is quite concrete: parallel sources reliably attest only Ihor and his successors (Olha, Sviatoslav), whereas everything the Chronicle relates before Ihor remains legendary^[7]. The opponent, by contrast, does the opposite: he declares the state itself a legend, exploiting the fact that his interlocutor fails to distinguish these levels.

The same method on another example: Yuriev (Tartu)

Just how the demand for parallel sources works is clearly seen in a side-topic brought up by another subscriber — one from Estonia. He retold, from the Great Russian Encyclopedia, the article on the city of Tartu: supposedly it was founded by Yaroslav the Wise in 1030, the town lasted some thirty or forty years and then vanished — and he himself noted that neither Scandinavian nor Estonian historiography has any confirmation of this^[25]. Dribnytsia agrees with the methodological core: parallel sources are silent about the “city of Yuriy,” archaeologically only a Viking waystation on one of the Varangian routes is traceable (via Lake Peipus onto the lands of present-day Ukraine and on to Constantinople), and the founding story itself he is inclined to regard as an invention of Nestor, presented in the encyclopedia as a fact^[25].

Here a correction is in order — and it works for the same thesis. Yaroslav’s founding of Yuriev in 1030 belongs already to the reliably attested period (after Ihor), so historians on the whole accept it: during a campaign against the Chud the prince seized and rebuilt the local fortification, naming it Yuriev after his baptismal name Yuriy (George). But “founded a city on an empty site” is the chronicle’s imperial framing: on that hill an Estonian hillfort, Tarbatu, already stood (traces of permanent settlement go back to the fifth century), and the Rus’ outpost did not last long — around 1061 the Estonians (the Sosols) retook and burned Yuriev. So what we have is not a “clean founding” but the rebuilding of an already existing settlement, wrapped in the customary chronicle formula — the same pattern as with the “summons” to power. Either way, the main point stands: even an attested event must be checked against independent sources, not against a single line of a chronicle.

The Kievan Letter: a mention of Kyiv independent of the chronicle

A vivid example of just such parallel testimony was supplied by the opponent himself. In one of the street conversations a subscriber told Dribnytsia about the “Kievan Letter”: in his words, it is a letter by a certain Jew from the time of Kyivan Rus’, found in Cairo and “published in London in 1982 by Omeljan Pritsak and some British historian,” in which the writer asked for money to be raised in order to ransom someone^[24]. The details, recalled from memory, need correcting — and the corrected details show that the document works not against the case for the reality of Rus’ but for it.

What it actually is. The Kievan Letter is a Hebrew letter of recommendation drawn up by the Jewish community of Kyiv for one Jacob bar Hanukkah: his brother had run into debt and been killed, the debt passed to Jacob, the community had already partly ransomed him from debt-bondage, and with the letter he travelled among other communities to raise the remainder. The document belongs to the Cairo Genizah — the vast store of Hebrew manuscripts at the synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), which Solomon Schechter brought out to Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth century. Among thousands of fragments the letter (Cambridge University Library shelfmark T-S 12.122) was spotted in 1962 by the American Hebraist Norman Golb of the University of Chicago, and it was published by Golb and the Ukrainian-American historian Omeljan Pritsak in Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (Cornell University Press, 1982). So there was neither a “British historian” nor London: the co-author was an American, and the publisher was Cornell University Press in Ithaca, New York.

Why this is an argument for Rus’, not against it. Golb dated the letter to roughly the 930s — making it one of the earliest (and often cited as the earliest) documentary mentions of the name “Kyiv” itself. What matters most is where it comes from: not from the Primary Chronicle the opponent has just dismissed, but from a wholly independent source — a community’s business letter that ended up in an Egyptian archive thousands of kilometres from the Dnipro. This is precisely the kind of parallel, extra-chronicle testimony the opponent demanded for Rus’: it records both the name of the city and the fact that in early-tenth-century Kyiv there already existed an organised urban community with its own self-government and ties across the whole of the then-known world. The source the Russian brought as a puzzle in fact confirms the antiquity of Kyiv.

There is a scholarly debate around the letter — but not about the existence of Kyiv. Golb and Pritsak read Turkic runes and an endorsement at the foot of the letter and concluded that the community was made up of Khazar Jews; more recent work (notably the reassessment by Susana Torres Prieto and Benjamin Outhwaite, 2026) argues that the letter’s linguistic and onomastic background is Slavic rather than Turkic. But wherever the community came from, for our theme the point is different: the document independently attests Kyiv as a real tenth-century city — and hence the state of which it was the core.

”The Rurikid dynasty” — also a late name

Bound up with the Rurik legend is another familiar cliché — “the Rurikid dynasty.” Here the same confusion of name and object is at work as with “Kyivan Rus’.” That a princely dynasty did indeed exist is beyond doubt: the chronicle clearly traces who was whose father and son. But that this dynasty called itself “Rurikids” is a later construction. The very phrase “Rurikid dynasty” does not appear in the Primary Chronicle at all^[10][11].

This is pointed to by an indirect but telling piece of evidence — the statistics of names within the princely line itself. If the line had traced itself to Rurik, the founder’s name ought to have been honorific and frequent. Instead, princes named Rurik over the whole of its history number only three or four, five at most, whereas the Volodymyrs, Olehs and Ihors are countless^[10][11]. The unpopularity of the founder’s name is an argument against the line’s having understood itself as “Rurikids”; the name itself was ascribed to it much later^[10]. So here too the opponent passes off a late label as an ancient self-designation — exactly as with “Kyivan Rus’.”

The “five Rus’es” and the invented “Novgorodian Rus’”

The mirror side of the “Kyivan Rus’ never existed” myth is the attempt, conversely, to multiply Rus’es: supposedly there was a Novgorodian Rus’, a Kyivan, a Muscovite, and “coloured” ones too — White, Red and Black. Hence the typical question from a Russian: why then, in this or that chronicle, is Novgorod or Volodymyr-on-the-Kliazma called “Rus’”?

The scheme of “five Rus’es” was constructed by Vasilii Tatishchev in the eighteenth century: there supposedly existed a Novgorodian Rus’ with its capital at Veliky Novgorod, a Lesser one with its capital at Kyiv, a White one at Rostov, a Red one at Cherven and a Black one^[12]. But Tatishchev himself wrote this not from the chronicles but from late German and Polish geographers — and even noted that “Black Rus’,” for instance, is not mentioned in Old Rus’ sources. Of these five, only Red Rus’ is a real historical name: it referred to towns now in south-eastern Poland (Kholm, Belz)^[17]. But “Novgorodian Rus’” is entirely absent from the sources: the phrase appears in no chronicle — it is an armchair term, invented by historians after the fact^[17]. The same device is at work here as with “Kyivan Rus’”: a late classificatory name is passed off as medieval reality.

What “Rus’” actually meant: an analysis of the chronicles

Rather than argue at random, it is worth turning to how the word “Rus’” is actually used in the chronicles themselves — and this was done by Russian historians, whom the opponent by definition trusts more. Volodymyr Kuchkin (Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences) analysed the work of scholars from Tatishchev to the present and showed: since chronicle-writing was conducted in different centres — the Laurentian, Hypatian, Trinity and Novgorod copies — the understanding of Rus’ varied both with place (spatial dynamics) and with the time of writing (temporal dynamics)^[13].

Combining the two dynamics, Russian scholars reached a conclusion opposite to imperial mythology: the understanding of Rus’ did not expand over time but contracted. In the ninth to twelfth centuries “Rus’” meant the territory of present-day Northern Ukraine (the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Pereiaslav regions), and by the twelfth to thirteenth centuries it meant chiefly the Kyiv region alone^[14]. Another scholar, who tried to find a “broad” understanding of Rus’ in the sources, counted: the three main copies use the word “Rus’” 717 times, and only four of those instances are interpreted broadly^[15]. So the isolated citations in which Novgorod or Zalissia is called “Rus’” are a statistical exception, which the layman tears out of context while the specialist sees it as a rare deviation from the norm^[15]. The myth that “we are all Rus’” itself has a concrete origin — the Synopsis of Innokentii Gizel of the second half of the seventeenth century, from which all later imperial and Soviet historiography reproduced it^[16].

The pre-scientific age: why Tatishchev and Karamzin cannot be taken at their word

Behind this lies a methodological observation as well. History as a science arose only in the first half of the nineteenth century — after the work of the German Leopold von Ranke, who established source criticism and archival work as the foundation of the craft. Everything written before that — by Tatishchev, Lomonosov, Karamzin — belongs to the pre-scientific age: the author took documents, pieced them together and drew his own conclusions, without critical verification^[18]. So to cite Tatishchev’s “five Rus’es” in the twenty-first century is the same as consulting an alchemist instead of a chemist.

Before Rus’: not an “empty field,” but the Chernyakhiv culture and Khazar tribute

Another typical Russian reproach runs like this: why is so little known about the era “before the baptism of Rus’” — “as if there were an empty field here”? Supposedly we know even the names of slave-owners from Rome two thousand years ago, yet before Prince Volodymyr there is nothing but a void. Dribnytsya’s reply drives a wedge into the premise itself: written sources really are scarce, because writing as such is attested on these lands only from the 10th century, and the local material culture was mostly wooden, which does not survive the centuries — but archaeologically there existed dozens of cultures of various kinds here, and the academic literature is full of them^[29]. “Little in the school textbook” does not mean “little in scholarship.”

The video names one of these cultures directly. The question “what was on the territory of present-day Kyiv in the first centuries AD” leads to the Chernyakhiv culture (roughly the 2nd–5th centuries) — and here the Russian, without noticing it, confirms the thesis of ancient, pre-state life in the region. As described in the debate, it is a mix of Germanic (Gothic) and Slavic tribes, closely tied to Rome: a provincial-Roman culture that traded actively with the empire^[28]. Dribnytsya also mentions a source — Jordanes’s Getica (6th century), which describes a Gothic realm — as well as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, noting that all these names are “fairly conventional”: behind them stood dozens of different tribes lumped under a single label in the literature^[28]. He locates the Slavs’ ancestral homeland in the Pripyat marshes (present-day northern Ukraine, south-eastern Poland, southern Belarus), from where the Slavs gradually spread out and, “mixing with the Goths,” produced the Chernyakhiv culture^[28]. The same account — “firm statehood appeared when the Goths came here; they mixed with the Slavs, and that is the Chernyakhiv culture” — is retold by an interlocutor in another debate^[30].

Two corrections are needed here, ones that do not break but refine the picture. First, the ethnic makeup of the Chernyakhiv culture is broader than “Goths + Slavs”: it also included Scytho-Sarmatians, Geto-Dacians, and Thracians, while the provincial-Roman skills (the potter’s wheel, high-quality pottery) came rather through contact with Rome and the settled southern population than were “brought by the Germanic peoples” as such — the version “the Goths brought the plough and the potter’s wheel” remains one interpretation, not the sole fact. The Goths in this culture are known above all as the military-political elite (with which Jordanes’s “realm of Ermanaric” is associated), while the settled population supplied the craftsmanship itself. Second, the fibulae (cloak brooches) and wheel-thrown pottery are markers of the era’s material culture, not a “Rus’” attribution: Rus’ would arise here much later. But the main point only gains from these refinements: long before the “baptism of Rus’,” this region was part of the Roman civilizational world, not an “empty field.”

Nor was Kyiv itself empty on the eve of the age of Rus’. The debate voices a perfectly correct thesis: until the 10th century the local Slavs (the Polianians) paid tribute to the Khazar Khaganate, into whose “orbit” Kyiv also fell^[29]. This accords with the Tale of Bygone Years, in which the Khazars take tribute from the Polianians, and with the fact that this dependence ended only after Svyatoslav’s campaigns against the Khazars (around 965), when the khaganate was crushed^[29]. In other words, 10th-century Kyiv is not a “sudden appearance out of nowhere,” but a city with a prehistory of tributary and trade ties attested both by the chronicle and by external sources. As for the dismissive “a primitive culture, of wood that rots away,” this is no argument against a developed life but merely an explanation of why there are fewer stone ruins here than in the Mediterranean — a difference in the preservation of the material, not in the presence of a civilization.

Before the state: when archaeology does not confirm the chronicle

It is useful to see the lower boundary too — what came before Rus’. The Primary Chronicle lists fourteen tribal unions (seven of them on the territory of present-day Ukraine), but this list does not map onto the archaeology: only two cultures are traceable here — the Romny and the Volyntseve — into which the chronicle Polianians, Derevlianians, Volhynians and Ulichians fit together, while the Siverianians fit separately^[19]. What came before Rus’ is reconstructed by historians through the notion of the “chiefdom” — a twentieth-century sociological construct, an intermediate link between the tribe and the early state, transferred from studies of Pacific island peoples^[20]. This shows once again that both “Rus’” and its prehistory are an object of reconstruction from the sources, not a ready-made label to be simply stuck onto present-day Russia.

The Norman theory today: from the “incapacity of the Slavs” to the word “Rus’”

Another subscriber asked Dribnytsia which conception of the origin of the Old Rus’ state he holds — and the answer shows well how far modern scholarship has moved from the imperial clichés. The classic opposition of “Normanists” and “anti-Normanists” effectively no longer exists. Of the Norman theory in the form in which it was laid down in the eighteenth century by Germans in Russian service — Gottlieb Bayer, Gerhard Müller, August Schlözer — only one live question remains: the origin of the word “Rus’” itself, and nothing more^[26]. And its substance — that the Slavic peoples were supposedly incapable of creating a state, whereas the Germanic peoples (the Normans) were capable — is today regarded as an obsolete doctrine a century out of date^[26].

On the contrary, the modern consensus recognises that Slavic communities are perfectly capable of their own state formation. This process was unfolding at the latest from the sixth century AD, and by the ninth century it had reached its peak; the Normans, at most, could have played the role of a catalyst — as in a chemical reaction — rather than of the creators of the state (a telling example is the state among the Czechs, which took shape without their participation)^[27]. Hence the debate has narrowed to etymology: the word “Rus’” is derived variously from the Scandinavian languages, from Iranian (a “southern” origin), or from local, autochthonous soil^[27]. And the pre-state formations themselves (the Polianians, the Derevlianians and others) are described by the now-familiar term “chiefdom” — a union headed by a chief, in which power was gradually separating from the ordinary members of the community^[27].

One detail the video leaves open is worth clarifying: in linguistics the most substantiated view now is precisely the “northern,” Scandinavian etymology of the word “Rus’” (via the Finnic *ruotsi, “rowers, seafarers”). But — and this is decisive — the question of the origin of the name has long been detached from the question of the creator of the state. Even a Scandinavian origin of the word “Rus’” does not resurrect the old Normanism: the statehood itself was built by local Slavic communities, for whom the Normans were merely one external factor, not demiurges. Tellingly, it is a Russian historian who formulates this in conversation with a Russian — that is, it is not a “Ukrainian version” but the current professional mainstream on both sides of the border.

”The first capital of Rus’” — a wrongly posed question

A separate trap lurks in the very formulation “what was the first capital of Rus’.” The notion of a “capital” is a phenomenon of the early modern period: before the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries no such notion existed in Europe at all, and an early-medieval state was not described in terms of a “capital” (Madrid, for instance, became the capital of Spain only under Philip II)^[6][23]. So to demand a “first capital” of a state of the ninth and tenth centuries is to impose a late category on an era to which it is alien. A wrongly posed question does not prove the “non-existence” of Rus’ — it merely betrays the anachronism of the opponent himself.

This is not only a polemical argument but the position of Ukrainian academic scholarship. The latest multivolume edition “Ukraine. Essays in History” (Institute of History of the NAS of Ukraine, from 2023) records directly, in a footnote on page 301: Old Rus’ sources — neither the chronicles nor any others — have no term for “capital”^[21]. The same was shown by the Russian medievalist Alexander Nazarenko in his paper “Was There a Capital in Old Rus’?” at the Moscow conference “Capital and Peripheral Towns of Rus’ and Russia…” (December 1996): the only close expression is Hilarion’s designation of Kyiv as the “first-throned mother-city,” but even that merely calques the Greek ecclesiastical formula for principal (“primatial”) sees, rather than describing a political capital^[22]. Kyiv, then, was not a “capital” but a centre of decision-making and a spiritual core — the seat of the metropolitan; it was over this status, not over abstract “capitalness,” that the princes fought. Kyiv lost this status only after the Mongol invasion, when the metropolitan left the city^[23].

The mirror: the St Andrew’s flag

The double standard is seen most clearly when the same “source-based” criterion is turned back on the opponent. Asked to explain the St Andrew’s flag behind his back — why it is named after the Apostle Andrew the First-Called and what Andrew has to do with Russia — the interlocutor has no answer^[5].

And the answer is telling: the connection of the Apostle Andrew with Rus’ comes from exactly the same Primary Chronicle that the opponent has just dismissed — from the legend of Andrew’s journey up the Dnipro and his blessing of the hills on which Kyiv would arise. The Russian Empire made the cross of St Andrew the basis of its naval flag, relying on this very chronicle legend. So it turns out that the one demanding “bookish” confirmation for Kyivan Rus’ himself clings to a legend — as soon as it serves the desired narrative.

Conclusion

The claim that “Kyivan Rus’ never existed” rests not on sources but on three successive conflations: a late term is passed off as the absence of a state, the founding legend as the whole history of Rus’, while one’s own legendary symbolism is left exempt from criticism. Once the term, the legend and the state are distinguished, it becomes clear that there is no “exposure” at all — only a rhetorical device.