Russia under the Old regime

30

conflicts over cities. Scholars have long debated whether Kievan Russia in fact had any system of succession and, if so, what were its guiding principles. Those writing in the nineteenth century, when Hegel's influence on historical thinking was paramount, assumed that the early Russian state was at the pre-governmental stage of social development, under which the kingdom and its constituent cities belonged to the entire dynastic clan. In their view, succession followed the principle of clan seniority, according to which the princes 'rotated' the cities among them in a kind of game of musical chairs, with the eldest taking Kiev, and the younger ones settling down in order in the provincial cities. This traditional interpretation was challenged in the early years of the present century by the historian A.E.Presniakov who maintained that the Kievan princes treated the state as an entity, and fought among themselves for control not of the individual cities but of the state as a whole. Some modern scholars adhere to a modified version of the old clan theory which holds that the Kievan princes adopted the practices of the nomadic Turkic tribes like the Pechenegs, with whom they were in constant contact, for whom seniority descended along lateral lines, i.e. from brother to brother rather than from father to son. However, no matter which system the Russian Normans and their successors may have adopted in theory, they adhered to none in practice, with the result that the Kievan state was constantly shaken by internal conflicts of a kind which later were to destroy the empire of Genghis Khan. As Henry Maine has shown, the absence of primogeniture is a characteristic quality of authority and ownership in the pre-individualistic and pre-public phase of society's development. The fact that the Normans considered Russia their common dynastic property, rather than that of a single member or branch of the family, howsoever they thought proper to apportion it, suggests that they lacked any clear notion of political authority and viewed their power not so much in public as in private terms. The Normans nowhere displayed much resistance to assimilation, and at least in this one respect their Russian branch was no exception. A nation of crude freebooters, originating in a backward region on the periphery of the civilized world, they tended everywhere to succumb to the culture of the people whom they subjugated by force of arms. The Kievan Normans were Slavicized by the middle of the eleventh century, which is about the same time that the Normans in France became Gallic. An important factor in their assimilation was conversion to Orthodox Christianity. One of the consequences of this act was the adoption of Church Slavonic, a literary language devised by Byzantine missionaries. The use of this language in all written documents, lay and clerical, undoubtedly contributed greatly to the loss by the Norman elite of their ethnic identity. Another factor promoting assimilation was intermarriage with Slavic women and the gradual infiltration of indigenous warriors into the ranks of the once solidly Scandinavian dru-zhiny. In the treaty concluded between Kievan princes and Byzantium in 912, all the Kievan signatories bore Scandinavian names (e.g. Ingjald, Farulf, Vermund, Gunnar). Subsequently, these names were either Slavicized or replaced by Slavic names, and in the chronicle narratives (the earliest complete text of which dates from n 16), the Norman names appear already in their Slavic form; thus Helgi becomes Oleg, Helga turns into Olga, Ingwarr into Igor, and Waldemar into Vladimir. By a related linguistic process, the ethnic name which the Normans of eastern Europe had originally applied to themselves was transferred on to the Eastern Slavs and their land. In Byzantine, western and Arabic sources of the ninth and tenth centuries, Rus' - the root ot'Rossiia' and 'Russia' - always referred to people of Scandinavian ancestry. Thus, Constantine Porphyrogenitus in be Administrando Imperio provides two parallel sets of names for the Dnieper cataracts, one of which, that labelled 'Russian', turns out to be Scandinavian, while the other is Slavic. According to the Bertinian Annals, a Byzantine delegation which came in 839 to the court of Emperor Louis the Pious at Ingelheim brought along a body of men called 'Rhos'; on being questioned about their nationality, they identified themselves as Swedes. 'Quos alios nos nomine Nordmannos appellamus'('whom by another name we call Northmen') is how the tenth-century historian, Liutprand of Cremona, defines 'Rusios'. We have mentioned already the description of the burial of a 'Russian' prince by Ibn Fadlan, which fully conforms to what is known of Norse practices, the contents of tombs, and the signatures of Kievans on treaties with Byzantium. All these facts require emphasis because in the past two hundred years hyper-patriotic Russian historians have often thought it incumbent on them to deny what to third parties seems incontrovertible, namely that the founders of the Kievan state and the first bearers of the name 'Russians' were men of Scandinavian origin. The source of the name Rus' is by no means certain, however. One possibility is Roslagen, the Swedish coast north of Stockholm, whose inhabitants to this day are known as Rospiggar (pronounced Ruspiggar). Another is the Nordic 'Ropsmenn' or 'Ropskarlar', meaning 'men of the rudder'. The Finns, with whom the Norman settlers at Ladoga first came in contact, called them Ruotsi - a name which survives in the modern Finnish for Sweden. (As noted above, the Finnish word for Russia is Venaja.) Following the standard linguistic rule by which the Slavs assimilate Finnic ethnic names, Ruotsi became Rus'. Originally, Rus' designated the Normans and their country. IbnRusta.an Arab geographer writing around the year 900, spoke of Rus' (which he distinguished from Slavs) as living in a country of lakes and forests, probably meaning the region