How "Rus'" Became "Russia"

The myth

The question is posed bluntly by the author’s interlocutor: why did the Muscovite tsardom decide that Ukraine, and specifically Kyiv, was a part of it^[1]? Behind this everyday phrasing lies a core Kremlin myth: that Russia is supposedly the natural continuation of Kyivan Rus’, so that Kyiv is the “mother of Russian cities,” and Ukrainians and Russians are “one people.” If that were so, then a separate Ukrainian history would be a misunderstanding.

A name, not a state

The weak point of the myth lies in confusing the name with the state. The fact that modern Russia bears a name derived from “Rus’” does not make it the heir of Rus’ — any more than a name travels along with the fugitive who pronounces it.

The sharpest acknowledgement of this comes from official Russian scholarship itself. The newest multivolume academic edition “История России” (in publication since 2024, a project of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Historical Society) states outright in the introduction to volume 4 (“Россия в X веке,” p. 28) that the tenth-century state “называют как русским, так и московским государством, а также российским,” because “в источниках встречаются и те, и другие наименования,” and adds: “мы используем их как синонимы, не вкладывая никакого иного смысла”^[30]. In other words, the state’s own Russian academics themselves attest that there is no continuous name “Russia” descending from Rus’: they use “Rusian,” “Muscovite,” and “Russian” as interchangeable labels for one and the same entity. If “Rus’” and “Russia” are synonyms by the choice of a modern editor, then there is no unbroken name inherited from Kyiv; there is a later, agreed-upon usage.

The same substitution hides in this edition’s finer formulation as well — “Russian medieval statehood.” Earlier, Dribnytsia notes, specialist Russian articles invariably appended a footnote after this phrase: “Russian” here is not in the ethnic sense, because medieval Rus’ and modern Russia are different states. In the new academic course this caveat is gone — the “Russian” statehood of the sixth to eleventh centuries is presented as if it were simply an early form of modern Russia^[33]. The disappearance of the footnote is precisely the point where scholarship imperceptibly slips into ideologeme.

That “Rus’” pointed from the outset to the Ukrainian lands is already visible from the chronicles themselves. The Soviet archaeologist Borys Rybakov, in his classic 1972 work “Rus’ in the Narrow and Broad Sense of the Word,” analysed the full text of the chronicles and showed that “Rus’” in the narrow, properly chronicle sense is only the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and part of the Volhynia regions — that is, the territory of modern Northern Ukraine^[18]. This is evident from the chronicle formula itself: when a prince travels from Kyiv to Novgorod, the chronicler simply writes “set out,” but when he goes from Novgorod to Kyiv, the chronicler adds “set out for Rus’“^[18]. More than 700 uses of the term “Rus’” in the pre-Mongol period localize to the territory of modern Ukraine — and do not overlap with the lands of modern Russia; the name only begins to “creep over” into the Zalissia region after the Mongol period^[19]. In other words, for contemporaries themselves “Rus’” was above all the Dnipro region, not Moscow.

The distinction lived on in people’s self-designations as well. Dribnytsia reminds us: every people changes its names over the course of its history, and the old self-designation of the population of Ukraine-Rus’ was precisely the Rusians (ruski), whereas contemporaries called the inhabitants of the northeastern principalities after their lands — Muscovites, Novgorodians^[34]. Where the Kremlin myth sees one unbroken “Russian” people, the usage of the era saw Rusians — and, separately, Muscovites.

The princes themselves felt this distinction. Dribnytsia points out that Vladimir Monomakh styled himself not “archon of all Rus’” but “archon of all the Rusian land”: “Rus’” is Kyiv with its nearest surroundings, whereas the “Rusian land” is all the lands under the control of Rus’; the terms are close but not identical^[41]. Thus, already in the titulature of the pre-Mongol era, “Rus’” in the narrow sense did not coincide with the whole expanse of Kyivan control — and still less did it reach the future Moscow.

Tellingly, the very origin of the word “Rus’” does not lead north, to Moscow. There is no single answer: Dribnytsia offers two main versions. According to the “northern” (Norman) one, the word “rus’” entered the Slavic languages from Old Swedish — via Finnic and Estonian intermediaries — and originally meant “rowers,” that is, it was an analogue of the words “Normans,” “Vikings,” “Varangians”^[56]. According to the “autochthonous” one, the name is local, from the numerous hydronyms and toponyms with the root rus- in the Middle Dnipro region (such as the river Ros)^[56]. Whichever version is closer to the truth, both anchor the core of “Rus’” to the Baltic-Scandinavian trade route and to the Dnipro region — not to the future Zalissia interfluve.

The church detail is telling too. The graffiti of St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv mention a “rusian prince,” and the liturgical texts of that era were written not in some “Old Russian” but in Church Slavonic — in essence, in Dribnytsia’s words, the Macedonian dialect of Old Bulgarian (the language of the Thessalonican brothers Cyril and Methodius)^[57]. That is, even the written language of the early “Rusian” church came from the Balkans, and the “Rusianness” of these inscriptions is a Kyivan political marker, not evidence of any “Russianness” of the North.

The very diversity of the external names of Rus’ is telling too: neighbours called one and the same country differently — and this again shows that the matter is one of a name, not of some continuous “eternal” state. In Latin, the Rus’ lands were called Ruthenia (“Ruthenia,” with a “u”): this is exactly how the papal Vatican wrote of Rus’ — in particular Innocent IV in his charters to Daniel of Galicia, whom in 1253 a papal legate crowned as “King of Rus’” (Lat. Rex Russiae)^[61]. In Greek, that same state was called Rusia (Ῥωσία) — and it was precisely this Greek form that Moscow later adopted^[61]. And in Latvian, Russia is to this day called Krievija — from the Krivichi tribe, the neighbours of the ancient Latgalians^[60]. (In the video this name is described as a shared “Estonian-Latvian” one; in fact “Krievi”/Krievija is specifically Latvian, from the Krivichi, whereas in Estonian Russia is called Venemaa, from an entirely different root — the name of the Wends. But the substance of the observation is accurate: neighbours called and still call one and the same country by at least several different names.) That is, “Rus’,” “Ruthenia,” “Rusia,” “Krievija” are different external labels for lands whose core lay in the south; none of them is evidence of a continuous “Russianness.”

The mechanism of this transfer is entirely concrete. After the Mongol invasion the Kyivan metropolitan, together with his entourage, moved his seat from Kyiv to the territory of the Vladimir-Suzdal principality^[2] — historically this happened around 1299 under Metropolitan Maxim. The Church was then the chief bearer of “Rusian” identity, and all the correspondence of the Kyivan metropolitanate with Constantinople was conducted in Greek. And the Greek equivalent of the word “Rus’” is precisely Ῥωσία, that is, “Russia”^[3]. The name, which from the outset referred to the Kyivan, that is, Ukrainian lands, gradually spread along with the metropolitanate to the Zalissia region — the Vladimir-Suzdal, Tver, and Moscow principalities — and over time the rulers there began to call themselves by it^[4].

”One state from Rurik to Putin” — a substitution of continuity

Beneath the confusion of names lies a deeper methodological error — the notion of an unbroken statehood that supposedly runs in a single line from the chronicle summoning of the Varangians down to today. Dribnytsia breaks this down into two distinct philosophical stances: “continuity” (one state through the ages) and “discreteness” (each state arises in its own time, has its own forms of power and borders, and then yields to a new one)^[51]. A succession of different polities on a common territory is not one “eternal” state; to compress the history from the ninth to the twenty-first century into a single continuity is the same oversimplification as reducing the history of France to the Frankish state merely because the names are similar. For the Frankish state was an early-medieval multi-tribal entity, while France is the national state of the French; a mere similarity of name does not make them one country^[51].

The changing of a state’s name is, in general, an ordinary matter, not proof of a “rupture” or a “forgery.” Dribnytsia cites obvious examples: Italy was not called Italy before the rise of the Kingdom of Italy, and Romania grew out of separate principalities — Wallachia and the Principality of Moldavia^[62]. (For the sake of precision: the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, while the 1871 named in the video is already the annexation of Rome as the capital; Romania, meanwhile, was formed by Wallachia and Moldavia, united in 1859, whereas Transylvania, mentioned alongside them in the video, joined it only in 1918.) However one refines the dates, the point holds: the names of states change, and the mere fact that a modern name differs from a medieval one “refutes” nothing — just as, conversely, the similarity of the names “Rus’” → “Russia” “proves” nothing.

Nor does an appeal to the dynasty save the myth. That the princely (and later tsarist) line formally traces back to the Rurikids does not, in itself, prove the continuity of the state. Dribnytsia illustrates this with a British example: the now-reigning House of Windsor is in fact German in origin, and only in 1917, during World War I, did it rename itself in order to shed its German associations^[52]. (In the video this old name is called “Hanover”; in fact, in 1917 King George V changed the family name from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to “Windsor” — the Hanover line proper had reigned earlier, until 1901. But whatever the former German name, the point of the example is accurate: changing a dynasty’s label does not make the state “different,” and a shared dynastic line does not make different states one.)

Another trap is to project the modern concept of “state” onto the ninth century. What we call a state today — with clear borders, an apparatus, and citizenship — is, Dribnytsia stresses, a construct of the jurists of the nineteenth century; for the ninth century “state” meant rather a prince with his closest retinue, an entirely different phenomenon^[53]. Hence the notorious year 862 is not a “date of Russia’s birth” but merely a chronicle chronological marker (set down by Nestor in the “Tale of Bygone Years”), which cannot be read as testimony to the birth of a modern state^[53].

How “Rus’” entered the Muscovite title

The appropriation of the name was not instantaneous — it stretched over centuries and proceeded through the titulature of the rulers. Ivan III was the first to write himself in as “prince of Rus’,” in the second half of the fifteenth century^[5]. The grounds were not factual but legendary: at that time historical Rus’ (the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian lands) was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but Moscow laid claim to these territories on the basis of a legend that all the princes there were descendants of Rurik^[5].

The name then took hold step by step: Ivan IV (the Terrible) was crowned as “tsar of all Rus’,” in the title of Alexei Mikhailovich the form “tsar of Russia,” Greek in origin, appeared, and in 1721 Peter I assumed the title of all-Russian emperor — and the state officially became the Russian Empire^[6]. Thus “Russia” as Moscow’s self-designation is not an ancient continuity from Kyiv but a late political construct that took final shape only at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Moscow borrowed the justification for its no-longer-princely but tsarist dignity from Byzantium. In 1472 Ivan III married Sophia (Zoe) Palaiologina — the niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI (the daughter of his brother Thomas Palaiologos) — and, in Dribnytsia’s words, “adopted the tradition of Byzantinism” in order to justify his claim to the tsarist title^[58]. Here it is important not to confuse the titles: Ivan III himself was not yet a tsar — he remained a grand prince; it was only his grandson Ivan IV who proclaimed himself tsar (and was crowned in 1547)^[58]. That is, the “Byzantine” lustre of the Muscovite monarchy is a deliberate late borrowing for the sake of prestige, not a continuity inherited from Kyiv.

Nor does the very legend of the “descendants of Rurik” withstand scrutiny — even on Muscovite ground. The Rurikid dynastic line on the Muscovite throne broke off already at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: after the Time of Troubles there reigned in turn Boris Godunov, Vasily Shuisky, the False Dmitry, and even the Polish prince Władysław, summoned to the throne — and only then did the Romanovs take power, a dynasty without direct Rurikid roots^[54]. Statehood did not disappear anywhere, but, as Dribnytsia puts it, “was it Rusian?” is an open question^[54]. That is, even the thin thread of dynastic continuity on which the Muscovite claim to the legacy of Rus’ relied had in fact been severed.

”Russia” — a late European brand

That “Russia” is not an ancient continuity from Rus’ but a consciously Europeanized self-designation is clearly visible from when and why Europe began to notice this country at all. Before Peter I, Dribnytsia notes, “no one” in Europe knew of the Muscovite tsardom except its nearest neighbours — the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, the Ottoman Empire, and the Crimean Khanate^[37]. And only after Peter I was no European question any longer settled without Russia^[37].

The reason for this turn was not an “awakening of ancient Rus’” but Europeanization. Russia became interesting to Europe only once it Europeanized — under Peter I, who in 1721 proclaimed Muscovy the Russian Empire, and under Catherine II^[38]. Dribnytsia recalls the symbolic side of this rapprochement: Catherine corresponded with the French Enlightenment thinkers, and one of them served as her “librarian”^[38]. Here the video contains a slip — Rousseau is named; in fact it was Diderot: in 1765 Catherine II purchased the library of Denis Diderot, left the books in his keeping in Paris, and appointed the philosopher himself their custodian on a salary, while with Voltaire the empress corresponded in 1763–1778. Whatever the particular “librarian’s” name, the substance of Dribnytsia’s observation is accurate: “Russia” entered European politics already as a ready-made, Europeanized eighteenth-century project, not as an heir of Kyiv.

In other words, the very Peter I who wrote “Russia” into the imperial title simultaneously made that name recognizable in Europe — and did so precisely as a new, “Western” brand of Muscovy. The “Russia” identity is late and constructed from above, not an inherited continuity from Rus’.

The title as claim, not mirror

It is worth separately distinguishing title from reality. Titulature was drawn up at the ruler’s court — it is a formula by which one was to address him; it recorded not so much existing possessions as claims and aspirations. When “prince of all Rus’” appeared in Ivan III’s title at the end of the fifteenth century, this was not a reflection of reality but a territorial claim to the Rusian lands that then belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — asserted during the war over the Smolensk region^[10]. Tellingly, Kyiv was not in the list of “Rusian” cities in the title until a letter of 1490: first there was “Rus’,” and Kyiv was not in it.

Dribnytsia sharpens this detail with specifics. In Ivan III’s title itself (around 1481) the cities enumerated under “Rus’” are mostly the lands of modern Belarus, and Kyiv is not among them at all; Kyiv first appears alongside the formula “prince of all Rus’” only in the letter to Emperor Maximilian I Habsburg^[49]. That is, “Rusianness” was written into the Muscovite title gradually, city by city — and Kyiv got there not as an “originally” belonging part but as a later diplomatic claim, one asserted before a European monarch at that (the Muscovite-Habsburg rapprochement against the Jagiellonians falls precisely in 1489–1491).

Here lies the boundary between layman and specialist: the layman sees the inscription “tsar of all Rus’” in a source and believes it literally; the historian, who has analysed hundreds of such formulas, recognizes in it a diplomatic claim. And the Hellenized form “Russia” itself took hold even later — under Alexei Mikhailovich in the second half of the seventeenth century, and that under the influence of the Kyiv-Mohyla scholars: during the reforms of Patriarch Nikon, church texts were collated against the Greek model, and the model was taken from Ukraine, where the scholarly centre of the time was located. The “high style” required writing in the Greek manner — “Russia”^[10].

The Ukrainian tradition knew this Greek form long before its Muscovite use — and applied it to itself. A telling example is Bohdan Khmelnytsky: in letters to the Muscovite tsar the hetman could style himself rossiiskyi, but this, Dribnytsia stresses, is merely the Hellenized form of the word “Rus’” — a “learned” name for the same Rusian people, not a mark of belonging to Moscow: no state named “Russia” existed at the time, and for the hetman’s contemporaries the inhabitants of the Muscovite tsardom remained Muscovites^[35]. In an era when the names of peoples had not yet been standardized, “Rusian,” rossiiskyi, and “Ukrainian” coexisted as names for one and the same people — and none of them meant a subject of the Muscovite tsar^[35].

What that Rus’ meant to the hetman himself is visible in his reply to the envoys of Jan Kazimierz. When the embassy headed by Adam Kysil brought Khmelnytsky the terms of an armistice, he, according to the well-known account, retorted: sit, Poles, and be silent — beyond the Vistula you will have your Poland, “and I will have my Rus’ here”^[36]. This echoes the hetman’s documented declarations before the Polish commissioners in February 1649: “I will free the whole Rusian people from Polish bondage,” it is enough for him to hold “the land and principality of mine up to Lviv, Kholm, and Halych,” and “standing on the Vistula, I will say to the further Poles: sit and be silent, Poles.” Khmelnytsky’s Rus’ stretched to Lviv and Halych — not to the Oka and the Volga: in the mid-seventeenth century the memory of the Old Rus’ state lived precisely in the Ukrainian lands^[36].

Why Moscow writes Rus’ into its own history

Why, then, does Moscow consistently present the history of Rus’ as “its own”? A methodological substitution is at work here. The history of each country is conventionally written within the borders of the existing state: from the settlement of ancient peoples on its territory and onward. Russian historiography violates this principle — it writes the territory of modern Ukraine and annexed Crimea into its own history, beginning practically from the Neanderthals^[7].

The consequences of this substitution are visible even in the most ancient sections. In a street conversation, Dribnytsia’s interlocutor, who studied history back in Russia, acknowledges a characteristic detail: Russian university history textbooks, in the chapter on the Scythians and the Greek city-states, describe mostly those that were on the territory of modern Ukraine — Chersonesus, Olbia, Tyras — rather than on the territory of modern Russia, even though the Black Sea coast became part of the Russian Empire only at the end of the eighteenth century^[24]. The same “imperial principle” that stretches back from the fifteenth century compels Russian historiography to appropriate the antiquity of the Ukrainian coast — just as it appropriates Rus’.

The same appropriation is visible at the most ancient stratum — in the history of the Slavs themselves, and once again on the material of a Russian academic edition. In volume 2 of “История России” the authors honestly record: the Slavs appear in written sources only from the sixth century — the earliest mentions are in Jordanes and Procopius of Caesarea, authors of the mid-sixth century — and their ancestral homeland lies in the southeast of modern Poland, the north and west of modern Ukraine, in the Pripyat basin up to the middle Dnipro; whereas the territory of the modern Russian Federation was then inhabited by Baltic and Finno-Ugric tribes^[31]. Moreover, when modern borders are overlaid onto the edition’s own maps, 90–95% of the Slavic archaeological cultures turn out to be on the territory of modern Ukraine, a portion in Belarus, and only a tiny patch of the Romny culture in the Oka-Volga interfluve on the territory of Russia^[32]. And the volume’s concluding statement (p. 135) nonetheless proclaims that it was precisely these lands that “set the contours of the future state of Rus’“^[32] — that is, it contradicts its own 130 pages of description. This is the mechanism in miniature: to describe honestly that there were almost no Slavs on the future Russian lands — and all the same to declare the whole of Eastern Europe the Slavic cradle of “Russia.”

The root lies in the origin of this tradition. The conceptualization of its own history began in Russia in the middle of the eighteenth century (from Tatishchev), when Kyiv and the Ukrainian lands were part of the empire — so to describe Ukraine as a part of Russia seemed natural then. A purely source-based circumstance also pushed in this direction: the oldest copies of the Rusian chronicles survived on the territory of Russia, not Ukraine^[25]. The Laurentian copy (1377) was transcribed in the Zalissia region, the Hypatian (1420s) was preserved in the Ipatiev Monastery near Kostroma — so when Russian scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries set out to search for “the origins of their own statehood,” the very manuscripts at hand led to Kyiv, and beginning Russia’s history there seemed natural^[25]. The circumstance was accidental (where the parchments physically survived), but a programmatic conclusion was drawn from it — that Kyiv is the beginning of specifically Russian history. This view was continued by Karamzin, Solovyov, Klyuchevsky. After the collapse of the empire and the USSR, history ought to have been rewritten along the new borders, excluding the Ukrainian narratives — and this is precisely what the Petersburg school argued for. But the Moscow school won, the heir of the imperial tradition, which Putin ultimately backed^[8]. How this imperial project was built around the legacy of Rus’ from the time of Ivan III is shown in detail by Serhii Plokhy in “Lost Kingdom.”

Why this narrative took root in the West

There remains the question of why the Russian version is accepted by Western academia as well. The cause is institutional rather than scholarly. The systematic study of Eastern Europe in the West began after World War II — corresponding departments opened in the universities of Europe and North America. They were staffed mostly by émigrés from the former Russian Empire and the USSR — professional historians, but raised in the imperial outlook, which they carried over into the new environment. A Ukrainian state that might have promoted its own vision did not exist then, and the Soviet Union was perceived as “Russia”^[9]. The exceptions were literally a few chairs of Ukrainian studies (Harvard, Alberta), headed at the time by historians of Ukrainian origin. So for a long time the world looked at the history of Eastern Europe through the eyes of Russian historians.

Russian academia against the Russian textbook

The sharpest proof of the substitution is provided by Russian scholarship itself. In a street conversation Dribnytsia’s interlocutor proposes that they jointly open the “Большая российская энциклопедия” — an academic edition prepared by the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, not by anonymous contributors. And there Kyivan Rus’ and the “Russian State” are two separate entries: the history of the “Russian State” begins with Ivan III, that is, with a state that arose only in the second half of the fifteenth century^[11]. And when one opens the entry on Kyivan Rus’ (the Old Rus’ state), it states outright that this was a multiethnic state in which there were as yet no Russians, no Ukrainians, no Belarusians — the nations had not yet formed^[12].

This is confirmed by the encyclopedia itself: the dedicated article on the “Russian State” dates its formation to the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries (from Ivan III), and describes Kyivan Rus’ (the “Old Rus’ state”) separately as a polyethnic entity of the ninth to early twelfth centuries, which, besides Slavic, also included non-Slavic tribes. That is, Russian academia does not merge these two states into a single continuity.

And then comes the key rupture: Russian society, through school textbooks and the media, tells exactly the opposite — that Kyivan Rus’ is the “first stage” of Russian statehood^[13]. The result is a paradox: professional Russian historians write one thing in encyclopedic articles, while the mass myth, on which state propaganda also rests, says another. The continuity of Rus’ holds not on Russian scholarship but in spite of it.

Nor is the conflation of three peoples into one anything new. As early as the second half of the nineteenth century, imperial policy declared Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians “one people” — and it is precisely this formula that Putin repeated in his programmatic article of 2021, before the full-scale invasion^[14]. The argument about “one people” is not a discovery but a resuscitation of an imperial thesis a century and a half old.

Tellingly, Dribnytsia derives from this a broader criterion: “an official viewpoint on history exists only in a totalitarian state”^[55]. In living scholarship — even Russian scholarship — different schools and approaches coexist: the Petersburg school against the Moscow one, debate in specialist journals such as “Voprosy istorii.” And when, instead, a single version of the past, obligatory for all, is imposed, that is a sign not of scholarship but of a state that has made history an instrument of ideology. That is precisely why the gap between the Russian encyclopedias and the school myth is not an academic trifle but a symptom of the nationalization of history.

A detail about the northeastern dynasty itself is worth adding. The princes there held the grand principality not as an inheritance “from Kyiv” but as a yarlyk (patent) from the Horde khan: the Muscovite house received the yarlyk for its principality from Khan Uzbek^[15] (Ivan Kalita — in the 1320s–1330s). The legitimacy of early Moscow rested on the Horde, not on the Kyivan continuity that was attributed to it later.

The Horde-Muscovite dynastic entanglement echoed a century later, too. Dribnytsia recalls a little-known episode: around 1575 Ivan IV the Terrible installed Simeon Bekbulatovich — a baptized khan of Kasimov, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan (a Chinggisid) — as the nominal “Grand Prince of all Rus’,” while he himself withdrew, for appearances, into the rank of “prince of Moscow”; a year later the tsar’s “combination” was wound up^[50]. Whatever Ivan’s purpose — to shift responsibility onto a stand-in — the fact itself is telling: the title “Grand Prince of all Rus’” was so much a movable formula, rather than a reflection of real “Rusian” roots, that a Chinggisid could be seated on it without difficulty. (Academically this is September 1575 – September 1576; Bekbulatovich was a nominal, puppet ruler, while real power was held by Ivan IV — see the study by Donald Ostrowski.)

”History within borders”: how a single narrative is split in two

There is also a purely methodological device. Russian historiography presents the past of Rus’ as one continuous history of its own state, artificially cut in two halves: first the state centred on Kyiv (up to the Mongol invasion), and then, after the arrival of the Mongols, the narrative “leaps” without transition to the Vladimir-Suzdal principality and Moscow, as if it were the same state^[16]. In reality these are different polities; stitching them into a single continuity is a narrative trick, not a conclusion drawn from the sources.

The same logic compels Russia to ascribe to itself even what in no way belongs to it. A telling example is Novgorod: from the time of the disintegration of Rus’ it was a separate independent republic (“Lord Novgorod the Great”), which Moscow captured only in 1471, but which the Russian narrative also retroactively counts as part of “Russia”^[17]. Yet historically Novgorod had a chance to become a separate, fourth East Slavic subject — alongside those from whom the Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians later arose. In other words, the “single history” is a projection of later borders into the past, not what actually was.

Novgorod itself was not “Russian” in its structure either. Kyiv had controlled it since the time of Princess Olga — it was she who first installed her posadnik (governor) there — but this control did not make Novgorod “Rus’”: the city was commercially oriented toward the Baltic and the Hanseatic League and sought to free itself from Kyivan control. Having freed itself, it became a trading republic in which the prince was invited as if on a salary, and power was held by the veche (assembly); Novgorod became part of Russia as a statehood only from the second half of the fifteenth century — that is, with the annexation of 1471, not “from time immemorial”^[22]. The very cradle of the future Moscow likewise became “Rusian” late: the interfluve of the Oka and the Volga, where the Muscovite principality later arose, was inhabited up to the second half of the tenth century by Baltic, Finno-Ugric, and Turkic tribes, and came under Kyivan control only with the appearance of Slavic settlements there^[23]. That is, both Novgorod and the Muscovite core entered the orbit of Rus’ late and from the outside — they were not its native heartland, as the imperial scheme requires.

This conclusion rests not only on political history but also on linguistics. Valentin Yanin, the longtime head of the Novgorod archaeological expedition, pointed out: everyone was taught that there once existed a “single Rus’” with a single language, which later split into separate branches. But the analysis of the birch-bark documents gave the opposite result — the older the documents, the more divergent the dialects on different territories were, and the language of the Novgorod documents turned out to be closest to the Lechitic (Polish) group, not to a “common Rusian” one^[21]. That is, there was no “single Old Rus’ language” from which all three (plus the Novgorodians) supposedly emerged in equal measure; the East Slavic space was diverse, and the annexation of Novgorod to Moscow in 1471 cut short the formation of yet another separate people^[21].

”Rus’ went north” — a refuted theory of the nineteenth century

To explain how “Rusianness” ended up in Moscow, the Kremlin narrative sometimes reaches for an even older argument: that after the Mongol invasion the population of the Dnipro region “girded itself with the sword and went north,” into the Zalissia region, while the emptied south was settled by people who were no longer Rusians but “newcomers.” In this scheme, modern Ukrainians are supposedly late aliens on the Kyivan land, while the true descendants of Rus’ are the Russians.

This is not a folk fabrication but a specific academic theory of the Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin of the early nineteenth century — formulated at a time when there was almost no archaeological and linguistic material^[20]. Tellingly, it was refuted even then precisely by Mykhailo Maksymovych — the very man who introduced the term “Kyivan Rus’”: in his polemic with Pogodin he upheld the continuity of the Kyivan population and the Ukrainians’ right to consider Rus’ their history. Over the following century and a half scholarship has given a definitive answer: neither archaeology nor genetics knows of any mass migration from south to north in the second half of the thirteenth century^[20]. On the contrary, the settlement of the Slavs is traced back to the era of the Great Migration (fifth to seventh centuries) from the Pripyat basin — onto the lands of modern Poland, Belarus, Russia, and Northern Ukraine^[20]. Kyiv after 1240 did indeed become depopulated and fell into decline, but this is a consequence of destruction and tribute, not of an organized “evacuation of the people.” Pogodin’s theory has long belonged to the history of scholarship, not to scholarship; clinging to it in the twenty-first century is the same as consulting Karamzin’s “History” instead of modern research.

Two chronicle traditions: Kyiv, which resists, and Zalissia, which submits

The appropriation of Rus’ is visible even in how it was written about in different centres. An important methodological caveat: the originals of the chronicles do not exist — only later copies survive, the oldest of which dates to as late as the 1420s (the fifteenth century), two centuries after the events described^[26]. These are four main compilations, and each reflects the viewpoint of its centre: two Novgorodian chronicles convey the standpoint of the northwest, the Laurentian that of the northeast (the Vladimir-Suzdal principality), and the Hypatian that of the south of Rus’, that is, of Kyiv, where the oldest chronicle writing was conducted^[27].

And these views are opposed — which is clearly visible in their assessment of the Mongol invasion. The Russian historian V. Rudakov (Russian Academy of Sciences) showed: in the “Kyivan” Hypatian chronicle, the invasion is the wiles of the devil, which must be resisted even at the cost of death. While in the “northern” Laurentian and Novgorodian chronicles the same invasion is a punishment from God, an instrument of chastisement for sins, against which armed resistance is meaningless; the only way is humility and repentance^[28]. The Kyivan chronicle is also richer in facts: it writes in detail about the Kyivan princes — Mykhailo of Chernihiv (who perished) and Danylo of Halych, who fled not out of fear but in order to organize resistance to the Mongols, and who, precisely for the sake of this, entered into an alliance with the Pope^[29]. The two traditions — of resistance and of submission — diverged already in the thirteenth century, long before Moscow declared itself the sole heir of Rus’.

The northeastern frontier: the Vyatichi, the Merya, and a late baptism

How late and how much from the outside the northeast entered the “Rusian” orbit is visible even in the ethnography of its population. It was with the Vyatichi — an East Slavic tribal union on the Oka — that this street conversation began. Dribnytsia draws attention to a telling detail: Christianization here stretched over four centuries, and the Vyatichi themselves were baptized only under the son of Dmitry Donskoy at the end of the fourteenth century — two or three generations later than Kyiv^[39]. Archaeology confirms this: the pagan rite of cremation with low burial mounds persisted in these lands until the fourteenth century. And the burials here differ sharply — in the west of the Moscow region there are pockets of Krivichi, the majority are Vyatichi, and in the northeast it is already the Finno-Ugric Merya^[40].

That is, the lands that would later become the core of Moscow were, in the pre-Mongol era, a Slavic-Finno-Ugric frontier rather than the “heart of Rus’.” This accords with the fact that the Oka-Volga interfluve entered the orbit of Rus’ late and from the outside (see ^[23]): Christianity, the Slavic population, and the very name “Rusian” came here not as a native inheritance but as a later influx from the south.

Why Zalissia rose: soils, the Horde, and Kalita

A separate question is why the centre of power became Zalissia (Suzdal, Rostov, later Moscow) rather than Kyiv or Novgorod. The name “Zalissia” itself, Dribnytsia notes, is bookish: it is attested in the Zadonshchina, a literary work of the late fourteenth century, and denotes Pereslavl-Zalessky and the lands by the Oka-Volga interfluve^[42]. It literally means “the land beyond the forest” — beyond the Bryansk forests, as seen from Kyiv and Chernihiv.

Dribnytsia explains the rise of this region in down-to-earth terms, without any mysticism of a “transfer of the capital.” Yury Dolgoruky and his son Andrei Bogolyubsky deliberately encouraged migration: the Dnipro region was plagued by Cuman raids, Novgorod had poor soils and a Varangian threat, while Zalissia was protected by forests — and, moreover, it had a patch of fertile black earth, the Vladimir Opolye. Rostov, for its part, was a trading post for collecting tribute from the Finno-Ugric peoples^[46]. Then the Horde factor came into play: Ivan Kalita became the sole collector of taxes from all the “Rusian lands” of the northeast, since it was more convenient for the Mongols to deal with a single collector — and on this Moscow accumulated wealth and rose^[47].

The same mechanism of “gathering the lands” was completed by Kalita’s descendants. When in 1485 Ivan III’s men intercepted a letter from the Tver prince Mikhail Borisovich to the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Ivan III annexed the Tver grand principality without a battle; and in the course of the ensuing Muscovite-Lithuanian war, Chernihiv too passed under his hand, in 1500. As Dribnytsia notes, it was Ivan III, not his grandson Ivan IV the Terrible, who was the most outstanding “gatherer of the Rusian lands”^[48]. Tellingly, this “gathering” proceeded not from the Kyivan centre but around a new, northeastern core.

The very ways in which Lithuania and Moscow expanded over the Rusian lands also differed — and this difference too undermines the myth of “reclaiming one’s own.” The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Dribnytsia notes, for the most part incorporated the Rusian lands rather than conquering them: the Lithuanian princes married local princesses, and the lands passed as dowry or through dynastic arrangements (this is how Black Rus’ and White Rus’ entered Lithuania)^[59]. Moscow, by contrast, acted differently — it “conquered”: it acquired the Chernihiv-Siverian lands when the princes there, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, defected from Lithuania to the hand of the Muscovite prince, while the Muscovite-Lithuanian wars over these lands lasted, by Dribnytsia’s estimate, more than eighty years^[59]. The very vocabulary of the Muscovite sources — “reconquered,” “returned” — is telling: it betrays the imperial frame, as if the lands “were once ours” and are therefore being “returned,” whereas what was involved was an ordinary conquest of neighbouring principalities.

And here lies what is key for our theme: exactly what nourished this northeastern statehood. The Horde’s imprint on it was acknowledged not only by Ukrainian polemicists. Dribnytsia recalls that even Karl Marx — who, in the historian’s words, was no specialist and held Slavophobic views — derived the Muscovite order not from Kyiv but from the Horde: in Dribnytsia’s paraphrase, Marx said that the history of Muscovy is “loosely stitched onto Rus’,” whereas in reality these are the traditions of the Horde, onto which Muscovite historians only later “stitched” the history of Rus’^[43]. The idiomatic turn of phrase belongs to the paraphrase rather than to Marx; but Marx’s thesis is well known — in his “Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century” (1856–57) he did indeed trace Muscovite customs to the “school of Mongol slavery” rather than to the Kyivan legacy. The same line was pursued by the Eurasianist historian George Vernadsky, son of the academician Vladimir Vernadsky: in his view, the Muscovite tsardom took over the traditions of the Horde^[44]. A more recent, cautious view, cited by Dribnytsia himself, speaks not of direct inheritance but of a symbiosis of Byzantine-Christian and Horde traditions — of record-keeping, subordination, the decimal division (into tens, hundreds, thousands); this, however, is an interpretation of the available facts rather than a proven certainty^[45]. However one weighs this influence, the conclusion itself matters: the statehood of Zalissia was nourished by Horde and Byzantine roots — not by “continuity from Kyiv.”

Where the dynasty lies: graves in Kyiv, not in Zalissia

One more vivid piece of evidence of where the centre of Rus’ actually was is the burial places of the dynasty itself. In the street dispute the interlocutor demands “specifics,” and Dribnytsia supplies them precisely through the graves^[63]. Yaroslav the Wise is buried in St Sophia of Kyiv — his white-stone sarcophagus still stands in the cathedral’s northern gallery (it was from remains taken from it that the anthropologist-sculptor Mikhail Gerasimov produced his well-known facial reconstruction of the prince back in 1939)^[63]. An honest caveat is due here: the bones from the sarcophagus have had a turbulent fate — it was opened in 1936, 1939 and 1964, its contents were disturbed, and in 2009 the surviving remains turned out to be rather female, so whether Yaroslav himself lies there is still debated. But the essential point for our theme is beyond dispute: the burial place of the Kyivan prince is St Sophia of Kyiv, built by him, and not some northern cathedral.

Still more telling is Yury Dolgoruky, the very prince to whom Russian tradition ascribes the founding of Moscow. He died in Kyiv in 1157 (by the chronicle, poisoned at a Kyivan boyar’s feast) and was buried, according to Dribnytsia, in the Church of the Saviour at Berestove in Kyiv^[63]. That is, the “founder of Moscow” lies not in Zalissia but in Kyiv. Dribnytsia also recalls the Soviet excavations of the 1960s by the church, which supposedly “confirmed” the attribution of a skeleton to Dolgoruky by its somewhat longer-than-average arms^[63]. This detail is worth refining: the “long arms” argument is folk etymology (historians derive the nickname “Dolgoruky” not from the length of his arms but from his “grasping” ambition to seize others’ lands), and more recent study of the sarcophagi found there casts the attribution into doubt altogether. Whoever the particular bones belong to, one thing is beyond doubt: those sarcophagi are in Kyiv — and it was to Kyiv, not to Vladimir or Moscow, that even the prince made into the “founding father” of the future Russian capital was brought for burial. Rurik, meanwhile, from whom the Kremlin narrative derives the whole “continuous” dynasty, is a legendary figure with no grave anywhere^[63]. The dynastic chain on which the myth leans thus begins with a figure without a grave and ends — at least in its best-known Kyivan and “Muscovite” links — with sarcophagi in Kyiv.

What this means

The myth of Russia as the heir of Rus’ rests on a single word, which is deliberately not distinguished in its two meanings: “Rus’” as the real state centred on Kyiv (which did indeed exist) and “Russia” as a name that Moscow took over through the Greek church tradition and its own titulature. The first is the history of the Ukrainian lands; the second is the history of how that history was subsequently appropriated. Continuity of the name is not continuity of the state: otherwise one would have to recognize as an heir of Rus’ everyone who ever wrote this word in Greek.