Rurik

Scandinavian-born politician

• Born: Ninth century
• Birthplace: Scandinavia
• Died: 879
• Place of death: Probably in the vicinity of Novgorod, Russia

According to tradition, Rurik established Kiev Rus, the first Russian state, and founded the ruling House of Rurik, which endured until 1598. He is still politically significant, both as the creator of an exemplary nondespotic government and as the inspiration for the controversial Norman Theory, which claims that Russia’s very existence as a nation is the result of the political and military activities of Germanic peoples.

Early Life

The specific circumstances of the childhood of Rurik (ROOR-ihk) are not clear, and much has to be inferred from the earliest surviving Russian annalistic literature, Povest vremennykh let (c. 1113; The Russian Primary Chronicle, 1930). The Russian Primary Chronicle and the Nestor Chronicle describe him as a Varangian “rus” (“beyond the sea”). Furthermore, The Russian Primary Chronicle calls the Rus a particular kind of Varangian; identifies Varangians with Swedes, Northmen, Angles, and Goths; and describes a failed attempt by the Varangian Rus from 859 to 862 to control Slavic tribes and trade routes in northwestern Russia. Finally, it notes that when Rurik entered Russia (sometime after 862), he brought in a large retinue of fellow Russes. This information places him in the broad context of the Viking expansionism of the early Middle Ages and suggests that he was a prominent Scandinavian war leader.

The Carolingian government had dealings with a Rorik of Jutland (b. 800) who may have been Rurik. If that conjecture is correct, he was born in Friesland of Danish parents; served as a vassal of Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious; was baptized, perhaps as a requirement of that vassalage; and lost his lands in 843 at the Treaty of Verdun, when the Carolingian Empire was partitioned among Louis’s three sons. In evident response to his loss of status, Rorik then became a Viking adventurer, leading large-scale raids into England, the Rhineland, and northern France, and along the Elbe.

Within a few years, his disruptive tactics were rewarded; in order to exert some control over him and raise a barrier against other Vikings, the Carolingian emperor Lothair I offered him successive fiefs in Friesland and Jutland. Rorik then disappeared from Western view for a time and, given the inexact nature of contemporary evidence, could have transferred his attentions to the eastern Baltic during the 860’.

The argument that Rurik was indeed Rorik of Jutland is disputable, for it is based on inconclusive evidence such as the similarity of names; the prominence, successes, and large followings of both personages; and the fact that Rorik became inactive in Western affairs at roughly the same time that Rurik appeared in Eastern records. Yet the parallels are instructive, even though the issue is unlikely to be resolved satisfactorily; the fluctuations in their fortunes would have been quite similar, and they both typified the restless, aggressive Viking war leaders of the 800’s to the 1000’.

Life’s Work

The Russian Primary Chronicle is both clear and succinct about Rurik’s role in Russian history. After the Varangian incursion of 859-862 was repelled, the mostly Slavic tribes in the region were unable to establish peaceful relations with one another. Accordingly, they appealed to their former opponents for help: “Our whole land is great and rich,” they are reported to have said, “and there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.” They then selected Rurik and his younger brothers, Truvor and Sineus, who migrated to Russia with their relatives and “all the Russes.” Initially, Rurik ruled only in Novgorod (which previously had been Slavic but which became a Varangian city), while his brothers controlled Izborsk to the west and Beloozero to the east. On their deaths, however, he assumed sole authority and assigned cities to his followers. Finally, within his lifetime, subordinates of Rurik campaigned down the Dnieper River and broke the control of the Volga-based nomadic Khazars over Kiev, the embryonic state’s future capital. Thus, to the authors of The Russian Primary Chronicle, Rurik stands as the maker of the original Russian state and the founder of its earliest dynastic family, the Rurikides.

Modern scholarship has demonstrated that the traditional accounts of Russia’s origins are chronologically unreliable and heavily propagandistic. In the first place, even the earliest authors of the texts that compose The Russian Primary Chronicle were far removed in time from the described events. Second, the texts were repeatedly reworked during the copying process, producing multiple variants. Finally, their authors were always obliged to advance the political interests of the ruling family and their immediate rulers were always Rurikides.

Nevertheless, when these texts are bolstered by supplementary information from Carolingian, Byzantine, and ՙAbbāsid sources, much can be gleaned from them. By the ninth century, evidently, the Slavic and Finnish tribes along the Dvina, the Volkhov, and the Dnieper Rivers had developed a network of fortified posts to facilitate trade with Byzantium. The wealth generated by that expanded trade in furs and slaves attracted unwelcome attention; Asiatic Khazars from the Volga region and Vikings from the Baltic both tried to dominate the riverine trade routes of western and northwestern Russia. The Vikings under Rurik and his fellow Russes won that competition. They probably first came as raiders (the “expulsion” of 862), then as mercenaries (the later “invitation”), and finally as conquerors and settlers (the transformation of Novgorod into a Varangian city, the assigning of other cities to Varangian supporters, and the securing of the Dnieper trade route as far south as Kiev).

Numerous Viking chieftains of the age followed those opportunistic tactics, winning control of a shifting hodgepodge of territories from the Netherlands to southern Italy. Few, though, were as fortunate as Rurik and his successors, who rapidly became accepted as native rulers, transferred their ethnic identity as Russes to the whole of their subject population, and presided over the flowering of a remarkably advanced and prosperous state, the Confederation of Kievan Rus.

That success was the result of extremely shrewd political choices made by Rurik and his immediate successors in the transition period before their political legitimacy was generally accepted. Because they were a minority in their newly conquered lands, the first Rurikides cooperated with one another, forming a hierarchic network of intercity alliances. An individual Rurikide ruled over his city as a prince (knigz) but acknowledged the overlordship of the grand duke (the velikii knigz literally, the “high prince”), who was, after Rurik’s death, supposed to be his closest male descendant.

Moreover, the Rurikides were able to defuse potential opposition within those cities by developing a system of shared power. Although they represented the monarchical principle, they also consulted their armed retainers through an institution known as the boyar dunia and the general population through a popular assembly known as the veche. Thus, by admitting aristocratic and democratic elements into policy making, the Rurikides gave every important segment of their society a sense of participation and involvement. Eventually, that politically inspired solidarity replaced the tribal divisions that made Russia susceptible to outside conquest in the first place. It also promoted increased trade with Byzantium and, through Scandinavian connections, expanded that trade into Northern and Western Europe.

Rurik’s successes attracted intense interest throughout Scandinavia and as far west as Iceland, and early Rurikide armies were frequently bolstered by the influx of immigrant Viking war bands. That additional manpower, combined with the effective integration of native forces into the military and the large accumulations of gold and silver generated by intensifying trade connections between the Baltic and Black Seas, allowed them to expand their political base throughout the northwestern river systems and down the Dnieper into the Russian steppe. Within Rurik’s own lifetime, the emerging state of Kiev Rus promised to replace the declining Carolingian Empire as the most powerful and prosperous European state after the Byzantine Empire. Before the next century was over, his successors had accomplished that feat.

Significance

Over the general course of Russian history, Rurik was best known as the creator of the earliest Russian state and the founder of its ruling dynasty. Since the eighteenth century, however, his historical importance has transcended that traditional role. In the first place, the Rurikides of the Kievan period served as Russia’s outstanding example of nondespotic rulers of a dynamic, prosperous state; increasingly, nationalist historians could cite Rurikide policies in order to condemn retrograde characteristics of later rulers in succeeding historical periods. This had a telling effect; when compared to the oppression of the Mongol khans in the 1300’s and 1400’s or the arbitrary rule of Muscovite czars such as Ivan IV, the era of Kiev Rus took on the aura of a golden age. The democratic role of the veche and the interclass cooperation typical of city governance in Kiev Rus were also used for political purposes because they stood in stark contrast to the dictatorial behavior of the later Romanovs and their authoritarian communist successors.

Finally, Rurik became the center of a bitter nationalistic dispute between Germans and Russians known as the Norman Controversy. Initially inspired by information provided by The Russian Primary Chronicle, German Normanist historians maintained that the Russian state owed its existence, and its very name, to the presence and activities of Germanic peoples. Russian anti-Normanists claimed that Rurik’s influence was vastly inflated in the annalistic texts, that the word Rus (or Rhos) was of indigenous origin, and that Kiev Rus was an exclusively Slavic creation.

The issue is not completely resolved; archaeological excavations corroborate textual evidence of a Scandinavian presence in northwestern Russia in the 800’, but further work is needed to establish its full extent. Nevertheless, current scholarly opinion has accepted the historic importance of Rurik, despite his semilegendary status. Recent works on early Russia have gravitated toward a modified Normanist position, holding that in creating Kiev Rus, Rurik and his successors accelerated, named, and put a distinctive stamp on a process that had, in a tentative fashion, already begun.

Rulers of Kievan Rus, c. 862-1167

Reign

• Ruler

c. 862-879

• Rurik

879-912

• Oleg

912-945

• Igor

945-964

• Saint Olga (regent)

964-972

• Svyatoslav I

972-980

• Yaropolk

980-1015

• Vladimir I (with Anna)

1015-1019

• Sviatopolk I

1019-1054

• Yaroslav

1054-1073

• Iziaslav

1073-1076

• Svyatoslav II

1076-1078

• Iziaslav (restored)

1078-1093

• Vsevolod

1093-1113

• Sviatopolk II

1113-1125

• Vladimir II Monomakh

1125-1132

• Mstislav

1132-1139

• Yaropolk

1139-1146

• Vyacheslav

1146-1154

• Iziaslav

1149-1157

• Yuri I Dolgoruky

1154-1167

• Rostislav

Bibliography

Davidson, H. R. Ellis. The Viking Road to Byzantium. London: Allen and Unwin, 1976. A work that covers the founding and growth of Kiev Rus, its economic bases, and its cultural characteristics. Illustrations, bibliography, and index.

Duffy, James P., and Vincent L. Ricci. Czars: Russia’s Rulers for More than One Thousand Years. New York: Facts On File, 1995. A bibliographical account of the history of Russian rulers, including Rurik. Two chapters explore Rurik and “the birth of a nation,” and the “end” of Rurik and troubled times. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index.

Dukes, Paul. A History of Russia: Medieval, Modern, Contemporary, Circa 882-1996. 3d ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Part 1 introduces medieval Russia and the construction and then collapse of Kiev (882-1240). Extensive bibliography and an index.

Evans, John L. The Kievan Russian Principality, 860-1240. Gaithersburg, Md.: Associated Faculty Press, 1981. A short overview of Kiev Rus, with a useful discussion of Soviet historiography. Includes an index and a short bibliography.

Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750-1200. New York: Longman, 1996. A comprehensive work on Kiev Rus. Places Rurik and his successors in the general context of the Viking eastward expansion. Maps, extensive bibliography, list of genealogies, and excellent index.

Mazour, Anatole G. Modern Russian Historiography. Rev. ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975. Contains an excellent discussion of the origins of the Norman Controversy, a good bibliography, and a comprehensive index.

Obolensky, Dimitri. Byzantium and the Slavs. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994. Surveys Slavic relations with the Byzantine Empire in the Middle Ages. Includes a chapter on “Russia’s Byzantine Heritage.” Bibliography, map, index.

Roesdahl, Else. The Vikings. 2d ed. Translated by Susan M. Margeson and Kirsten Williams. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Provides a solid, meticulous survey of Viking activities, with a chapter on Kiev Rus and its relations with Byzantium. Includes maps, illustrations, an extensive bibliography, and indexes.

Zenkovsky, Serge A., ed. and trans. Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales. 2d ed. New York: Dutton, 1974. Contains key excerpts from the Chronicle along with an excellent analysis of Kiev Rus documentary material. Includes illustrations, a glossary, and a brief chronology.