Russian history borrowed from "Vikings" and Mongols?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

I often heard the maxims of young Normanists that the Slavs had nothing of their own, no traditions, no customs, everything was borrowed from the Vikings or Mongols.

And in this "verdict" the apotheosis merged with the apogee of the historical illiteracy into which the Russian society was plunged by the long stay in the Russian historical science of Western European utopias, in a concentrated expression known as Normanism.

But Normanism is not a science, therefore its supporters do not burden themselves with an objective analysis of the laws of development.

I will try to isolate what exactly is, in the opinion of young Normanists, the beneficial influence of the “Vikings” and Mongols on Russian history. The study of the history of the institution of supreme power in Russian history, which I have been doing for a long time, shows that it is this most important issue that is formed in the bosom of the concepts according to which this institution arises and develops in Russian history due to outside influence.

This interpretation marks: 1) the calling of Rurik into the reign of the Slovenes in the 9th century; 2) the creation of a centralized Russian state under Ivan III in the 15th century. This approach has the most negative impact not only on the study of these problems, but also on the study of ancient Russian political genesis, in general. I will briefly consider both the one and the other "concepts".

The call of the chronicler Rurik to the reign of the Slovenes is interpreted by Normanism as the arrival of Scandinavian troops led by the "Scandinavian" Rurik, either a mercenary or a conqueror from the Swedish Roslagen.

Since the 19th century. Russian historians, believing the authority of G. Z. Bayer, G. F. Miller and A. L. Schlötser, who broadcast the stereotypes of the Swedish political myth in Russia, began to assure that it was in the Swedish Roslagen "the beginning of the current Russian state", since from Roslagen, he dreamed of, came the Varangians-Rus, "to whom our fatherland was lent both in its name and its main happiness - monarchical power "and" … we want to know what people, especially calling themselves Rus, gave our fatherland and the first sovereigns …

The Nestorov Varangians-Rus lived in the Kingdom of Sweden, where one coastal region has long been called Rosskoy, Ros-lagen …"

(Kaidanov I. Inscription of the history of the Russian state. 2nd ed. SPb., 1830. S. VI; Karamzin N. M. History of the Russian state. Book. 1. T. I. M., 1988. S. 29-30, 67-68).

It is now well known that the Swedish Roslagen in the IX century. did not exist

According to another widespread concept, Russian history owes the influence of the Golden Horde to the formation of a centralized Russian state and the creation of an autocratic state power in the 15th century.

A similar view was expressed by N. M. Karamzin, who argued that under the Mongols: “… Autocracy was born … Batu's invasion, heaps of ashes and corpses, captivity, slavery only for a long time … however, the beneficial consequences of this are beyond doubt (issued by me - L. G.).

A hundred years or more could pass in the Princely feuds: what would they have been? Probably, the death of our fatherland … Moscow owes its greatness to the Khans (Karamzin NM History of the Russian State. Book. Second. T. V. M., 1989. S. 218-223). These views of N. M. Karamzin were mothballed in science. Many Russian historians of the XIX century. began to preach the idea that the Mongol despotism laid the foundations of imperial statehood.

The topic of the influence of the Golden Horde on the development of Russian statehood has received a new round of popularity since the 1990s, and interest in it has covered the widest spheres of Russian social thought (Shishkin I. G.(trends and trends in modern historical science) // Bulletin of the Tyumen State University. Tyumen: Publishing house of Tyumen State University, 2003. No. 3. S. 118-126).

In the works of professional historians, with various assessments of the Golden Horde domination, the idea that the conquest of the Russian principalities by the Chingizids interrupted the natural process of the development of the northeastern principalities and led to a new form of organization of political power - the monarchy (Kuchkin V. A.: How was it? M., 1991, 32 p.).

And the candidate of legal sciences from Khakassia Tyundeshev G. A. with revolutionary decisiveness, he freed the image of the Golden Horde influence from unnecessary details and entitled his book "Great Khan Baty - the founder of Russian statehood" (Tyundeshev G. A. Great Khan Baty - the founder of Russian statehood. Minusinsk, 2013).

Interest in the issue of the Golden Horde influence on the development of Russian statehood also affected wide circles of Russian society. I drew a curious example from the social and political life of Veliky Novgorod.

In Veliky Novgorod on April 5, 2017, at a rally dedicated to the Day of the Russian Nation, the organizers of the rally proclaimed themselves the heirs of the Mongols who united the lands of Eurasia (Day of the Russian Nation in Veliky Novgorod // APN). At the same time, the newly-minted heirs were clearly not embarrassed by the fact that the Mongols, who allegedly created the imperial foundations for the Russian people, could not preserve their own empire. Syndrome of Normanism: those who did not have their own are imposed on the founders of Russian history.

Therefore, in my opinion, both of these concepts: the Normanist interpretation of the emergence of the ancient Russian institution of princely power by the forces of immigrants from Scandinavia and the concept of the emergence of a centralized Russian state under the influence of the Golden Horde domination have a methodological relationship, which I would formulate as the idea of ousting Russians from my own history.

At the same time, this idea can be carried out consciously, or it can develop simply in the bosom of the generally accepted historiographic context. And Normanism here plays the role of a locomotive pulling other parts of the train, since it was Normanism that prepared the mental basis for the perception of the exaggerated, not to say, the leading role of an external factor in Russian history.

I was led to this conclusion by studies of Western European utopian historiosophy of the 16th-18th centuries. and its influence on the study of Russian history in the early period.

As a result of these studies, it was revealed that the Swedish political myth of the 17th-18th centuries became the matrix for the system of views known as Normanism. It began to be developed in Sweden during the Time of Troubles and was aimed at reformatting Russian history to serve its geopolitical tasks, specifically, to fictitiously justify the historical rights to the Russian lands conquered by the Swedish crown.

For this, Swedish political strategists began to create pseudoscientific works with stories that the Russians in Eastern Europe are the latest newcomers, and the ancestors of the Swedes played a fundamental role in the development of Eastern Europe from ancient times.

The key idea of these works was the stories about the Swedish origin of the chronicled Varangians, who brought statehood and princely power to the Eastern Slavs, and about the Finns as the first inhabitants of Eastern Europe up to the Don, who were subordinate to the Swedish kings (O. Rudbek, A. Skarin). Russians, according to these developments, appeared in Eastern Europe not earlier than the 5th-6th centuries. (Grot L. P. Stolbovsky Treaty and the Swedish political myth of the 17th-18th centuries).

The ideas of this political myth were received in the 18th century. great popularity in Western Europe, and since the beginning of the XIX century. were taken up by representatives of Russian liberal and leftist thought, which explains their longevity in Russia.

Nowadays, enough materials have accumulated that show that Russian history has more ancient roots in Eastern Europe than it is commonly believed and should be counted from the Bronze Age (as well as the beginning of the history of many peoples of Russia). These materials are collected, in particular, in a film shown relatively recently on the Kultura channel, to which I refer (What are the temples silent about?).

And the general conclusions from these materials are as follows: firstly, the beginning of Russian history should be counted from the period of settlement of the speakers of Indo-European languages (IE) on the Russian Plain, i.e. from the turn of the III-II millennium BC, and secondly, the Russians are inhabitants in Eastern Europe, and not the latest newcomers.

The rejection of Russian history for nearly three thousand years deprives us of the opportunity to present in its entirety the process of the formation of ancient Russian statehood and ancient Russian institutions of power. And this, in turn, creates a breeding ground for any fantasies on the themes of Russian history, which is demonstrated, in particular, by the above examples.

Thus, it is Normanism and other Western European utopias that have been preserved in Russian science that have an indirectly negative impact on the study of the history of Russian statehood in various periods.

Who were the first to deny the existence of the ancient Russian institution of princely power before the call of Rurik? They were G. F. Miller and A. L. Schlözer. But their conclusions were not the result of a scrupulous analysis of the materials of Russian history - for this, Miller and Schlözer lacked either the knowledge of Russian sources or the elementary knowledge of the Russian language.

But they knew well the Swedish pseudo-scientific works of the 17th-18th centuries. In addition, their views can be traced to other utopian theories that were formed in Western European social thought of the 16th-18th centuries. Some of them were born in the bosom of the ideological trend of Gothicism, the German founders of which proclaimed the Germans the legitimate heirs of the Roman Empire, and the German conquests - the source of the creation of European statehood and monarchical power (F. Irenik, V. Pirkheimer).

Representatives of German Gothicism also developed ideas about the absence of monarchic power among the Slavic peoples, which belonged to the supporters of Gothicism, and later by the philosophers-enlighteners, to the signs of statehood (H. Hartknoch). Thus, Bayer, Miller, and Schlözer all grew up with these views, which were part of the German education of the time.

And since one of the theorists of German Gothicism, W. Pirkheimer, also included the Swedes among the Gothic-Germanic peoples, the fantasies of the Swedish political myth about the Swedish-Varangians as the founders of the ancient Russian statehood were for Miller and Schlözer (as well as for Bayer) a scientific truth, which does not require proof, since they fit well into the stereotypes they learned from school

(Grot L. P. The path of Normanism from fantasy to utopia // Varyago-Russian question in historiography / Series “Expulsion of the Normans from Russian history.” Issue 2. M., 2010. S. 103-202; Fomin V. V. Varyago-Russian question and some aspects of its historiography / Expulsion of the Normans from Russian history / Series “Expulsion of the Normans from Russian history. Issue 1. Moscow, 2010. S. 339-511).

As the well-known researcher of the Varangian problem V. V. Fomin, Schlötser argued that "before the arrival of the Scandinavians, Eastern Europe was" a desert in which small peoples lived separately "," without government … like beasts and birds that filled their forests ", … that" Russian history begins with the advent of Rurik … "And" that the founders of the Russian kingdom are Swedes "" (Fomin V. V. Word to the reader // Scandinavomania and its fables about Russian history. Collection of articles and monographs. Series "Expulsion of the Normans from Russian history". Issue 4. M., 2015. S. 13).

By the way, Gothicism is practically not studied by Russian historical science. And this is surprising, since Gothicism was the ideology on which Western European nation states grew up. Since the time of Miller and Schlözer, Russian historical science in Normanist works in the study of ancient Russian political genesis has not advanced a single step.

Modern Normanists associate the emergence of an early state formation in the Ladoga-Ilmensky region, as before, with certain Viking detachments, the overwhelming majority of which allegedly came from Svealand, i.e. from Central Sweden, and whose leader was the "Scandinavian" Rurik.

It was allegedly with the arrival of these "detachments" that the ancient Russian institute of the supreme princely power arose

(Melnikova E. A. The emergence of the Old Russian state and the Scandinavian political formations in Western Europe // The formation of Russian statehood in the context of the early medieval history of the Old World. SPb., 2009. pp. 89, 91, 96; her. Scandinavians in the formation of the Old Russian state // Ancient Russia and Scandinavia. Selected works. M., 2011. S. 53, 64).

But if for more than three centuries representatives of the Russian higher educational and academic system have been assuring that the Viking detachments from Sweden laid the foundation of Russian statehood, then why should the detachments of Khan Batu not give up the palm in the creation of a centralized Russian state?

It is no coincidence that it is Karamzin who owns the words both about the Russians from the Swedish Roslagen, and the words about the "beneficial consequences" of Batu's invasion, which gave birth to autocracy.

However, if we turn to the results of modern studies of political genesis in Sweden and in the state of Genghis Khan, we will learn that the named countries did not have their own primary experience in creating statehood and institutions of supreme power.

Natives of Svejaland could not in the IX century. to form detachments that would act as organizers of the institution of central power in the gigantic expanses of the Ladoga-Ilmensky lands and the Dnieper region.

The reason is simple: among the Svei themselves, the level of socio-political evolution in the 9th century, according to Swedish scholars, did not ensure the development of their own statehood, where one of the important features is the unification of territories historically related to each other under the rule of one ruler.

Only from the second half of the XIII - early XIV centuries. royal power in Sweden, according to Swedish historians, began to act "as a form of relatively fine political organization, as state power." At the same time, Swedish historians emphasize the secondary nature of these processes and, above all, ideas about the functions and significance of royal power, which were borrowed from outside.

(Gahrn L. Sveariket i källor och historieskrivning. Göteborg, 1988. S. 25, 110-111; Harrison D. Sveriges Historia. Stockholm, 2009. S. 26-36; Lindkvist Th. Plundring, skatter och den feodala statens framväxt. Organisatoriska tendenser i Sverige under övergången till tidig medeltid. Uppsala, 1995. S. 4-10; Lindkvist Th., Sjöberg M. Det svenska samhället 800-1720. Klerkernas och adelns tid. Studetnlitteratur. 2008.ull S. 23-33; C. Källkritik och historia: Norden under äldre medeltiden. Stockholm, 1964, pp. 42-43).

But the same is said by modern researchers about the level of sociopolitical evolution in the state of Genghis Khan and his successors.

Leading Russian experts in the field of political genesis among the Mongolian peoples T. D. Skrynnikova and N. N. Kradin attribute the Mongol nomadic empire to a pre-state form of political integration, according to their formulation, to a supercomplex chiefdom.

The research of these authors is especially valuable because they consider the Mongolian nomadic empire as an integral part of the nomadic world, highlighting the specifics common to nomadic empires. Outside, nomadic empires, they emphasize, look like real conquering states (the presence of a military hierarchical structure, international sovereignty, a specific ceremonial in foreign policy relations).

However, from the inside, they are presented as confederations (unions) based on a fragile balance of tribal ties and redistribution of external sources of income without taxation of pastoralists.

For this article, of particular interest is the conclusion of these authors that the formation of state institutions in nomadic empires was carried out under the great influence of sedentary agricultural societies. Political genesis among the nomads, they emphasize, was necessarily accompanied by the conquest of an agricultural society, the adoption of the norms and values of the agricultural ruling classes.

Over time, this led to a split in the camp of the conquerors, which ended either with internal conflicts and the death of the dynasty, or pushing the nomads to the periphery (Kradin N. N., Skrynnikova T. D. Empire of Chinggis Khan. M., 2006, p. 12 -55, 490-508).

At the same time N. N. Kradin, considering the specifics of political genesis in the Khitan empire of Liao and the Jurchen empire of Jin, shows that even the early state formations in these societies belong to the so-called secondary states, i.e. formed in the neighborhood and under a certain influence of civilizational centers (in this case, China).

For these states, N. N. Kradin, was characterized not only by the borrowing of certain components of medieval Chinese political culture and or even structural copying of the bureaucratic Chinese system, but also the influence of more developed Far Eastern societies on less developed ones.

The Kidani had a significant impact on the political genesis of the Jurchens, and the Zhuzhen - on the political genesis of the Mongols (Kradin N. N. The paths of formation and evolution of early statehood in the Far East // Early forms of potestarny systems. SPb., 2013. S. 65-82).

Thus, the power of Genghis Khan, proclaimed in 1206, carried both features that were traditional for nomadic peoples - a special world, different from the world of agricultural societies, and features of the political culture of their predecessors - secondary ethnopolitical / early state formations that arose on the territory of the future Mongol nomadic empire.

And with such a specificity, what could the Genghisides give to the potestarno-political culture of the Russian principalities? On the contrary, in accordance with the noted dependence of nomadic societies on the political culture of agricultural societies, the top of the Jochi ulus should have been influenced by the political culture of the Russian principalities.

And she probably felt this influence, however, from this perspective, Russian-Horde relations, as far as I know, were not considered.

Namely, with this approach, it would be possible to explain why the khan of the ulus Jochi began to be called tsar in Russia - a title that was applied in pre-Mongol times to Russian princes. Historian A. A. Gorsky identified about a dozen cases of its application to Russian princes, but expressed confidence that the "tsar" in the pre-Mongol era was nothing more than a designation of the prince "high style" (Gorsky A. A. Russian Middle Ages. M., 2009. p. 85).

It is unlikely that this explanation adequately reflects the medieval Russian potestarno-political tradition and the meaning of Russian titles, but such is the price for the fact that, according to the figurative expression of V. V. Fomina, we have been paying tribute to Normanism for 400 years. For Normanism has absorbed Western European historical utopias, where the core is the idea of bringing ancient Russian statehood and princely power "from the outside." By time, V. V. Fomin, this is much more than our ancestors had to pay tribute to the Golden Horde (Fomin V. V. Decree, op. Pp. 7-8).

Today the payment of "tribute" to the Golden Horde has returned, but this is already a historical tribute. And I see in this the unconditional influence of the same Swedish political myth that gave birth to Normanism. Therefore, now, in my opinion, Russian historical science faces two urgent tasks: the restoration of the lost principles of Russian history and the return of the study of these principles to a scientific basis, freed from the myths of Normanism.

In a separate publication I will give a list of myths of Normanism or a set of arguments demonstrating the unscientific nature of this system of stereotypes. Here I will remind you of just one example from the Icelandic sagas, telling about the Scandinavian settlers in America. A number of Icelandic sagas tell how Icelandic settlers from the island of Greenland reached the North American coast somewhere between the end of the 10th and the first years of the 11th centuries.

But they could not settle there for a long time, tk. were expelled by the local population - the Inuit. What is the result of the Scandinavian stay in America? Did they act there as the creators of statehood, mastered the river routes, created trade and craft settlements? No. The result of their stay there was close to zero. Therefore, the Indians drove them out - as unnecessary.

Ascribing a special role to the natives of Scandinavia in the organization of dynasties and states in Western Europe runs counter to the fact that both the history of dynasties and the history of statehood in these countries have very ancient origins.

Therefore, coming to the ready-made is one alignment, settling on relatively small, almost deserted islands and organizing your social life there in the form of simple self-governing peasant communities - this is a different alignment, and creating a complex socio-political system with the institution of central hereditary power and urban life is already a completely separate resource project.

On the American continents, this project began to be implemented when states, not Scandinavian ones, stood behind immigrants from Europe.

Neither the Scandinavians nor the Scandinavian traditions had anything to do with the development of Russian statehood and the Russian institution of princely power. Therefore, having saved the chronicle Varangians and Prince Rurik from the unscientific crust of Normanism, it will be possible to begin to restore the most ancient period of Russian statehood.

This work will be assisted by the attraction to research of sources that have preserved information about the most ancient times of Russian history. Such sources include, for example, the legends about Tidrek of Berne or Tidreksag.

This source is known to convey an epic legacy dating back to the events of the 5th century. - the wars of the Huns led by Attila and the Goths led by Theodoric. But in addition to the Hunnic and Gothic rulers, Ilya the Russian and the Russian king Vladimir appear in it, who ruled, according to Tidreksag, in the 5th century.

The famous Russian historian S. N. Azbelev, exploring the epic prehistory of the Novgorod land, brilliantly proved that this Vladimir coincides with the image of the epic prince Vladimir from Russian epics, the former ruler of Russia during the period when it was subjected to the invasions of the Huns. The territory ruled by the epic Vladimir included land from sea to sea, stretching far to the east and exceeding the size of the later Kiev state of the 10th century.

This explains the interest in Vladimir and Russia in Tidreksag, the main theme of which, it would seem, made it possible not to mention them (Azbelev S. N. Oral history in the monuments of Novgorod and the Novgorod land. SPb., 2007. S. 38-56).

It was this Vladimir (S. N. Azbelev established that in the epics his full name was Vladimir Vseslavich), was nicknamed Vladimir the Red Sun, which meant not a manifestation of the affectionate attitude of the people towards him (they say, you are our sun, a golden fish!), But marked his confessional characteristic is sun worship, i.e. the system of ancient Russian pre-Christian beliefs. And Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavovich entered Russian history as a Saint, i.e. as a conductor of Christianity.

It is quite obvious that these were two different historical figures who belonged to different eras. It's time to return the Russian history of Prince Vladimir Vseslavich - Red Sun.