Russia under the Old regime

32

Ladoga-Novgorod. But as the Normans assimilated and the ranks of their retainers filled with Slavs, Rus' lost its ethnic connotation and came to designate all the peoplemanning the fortress-cities and involved in the annual expeditions to Constantinople. From such usage, it required only a minor shift for 'Rus'' to be extended to the country where these people lived, and, finally, to all of this country's inhabitants, regardless of ancestry and occupation. Examples of such name transfers from conqueror to the conquered are not uncommon, the case of France, a name adopted for Gaul from the invading German Franks, being the one that most readily comes to mind.

The Normans gave the Eastern Slavs several elements essential to forging out of their disparate tribes and tribal associations a national entity: a rudimentary state organization headed by one dynasty, a common religion and an ethnic name. How much national unity the East Slavs actually perceived during the tenth and eleventh centuries no one knows, because the only indigenous documents bearing on this period, the chronicles, are of a later provenance.

One more legacy bequeathed by the Normans to the Eastern Slavs deserves mention - it is a legacy of a negative kind to which allusion has been made already and will continue to be made on the pages of this book. The Kievan state which they had founded and which their Slavicized and Slavic descendants had inherited did not emerge out of the society over which it ruled. Neither the princes nor their retainers, the raw material of a future nobility, issued from the Slavic communities. The same, of course, holds true of England after the Norman Conquest. But in England, where land is fertile and valuable, the Norman elite promptly divided it among themselves and turned into a landowning aristocracy. In Russia, the Norman elite retained all along a semi-colonial character: its principal interest lay not in exploiting land but in extracting tribute. Its local roots were extremely shallow. We have here a type of political formation characterized by an unusually sharp gulf between rulers and ruled. The Kievan state and Kievan society lacked a common interest capable of binding them: state and society coexisted, retaining their separate identities and barely conscious of a sense of commitment to one another.*

* Just how little the Normans cared for their Russian kingdom may be gathered from an incident in the life of Great Prince Sviatoslav. Having in 968 seized the Bulgarian city of Pereieslavets (the Roman Martianopol) he announced the following year to his mother and boyars: 'I do not care to remain in Kiev, but should prefer to live in Pereieslavets on the Danube, since that is the centre of my realm, where all riches are concentrated; gold, silks, wine, and various fruits from Greece, silver and horses from Hungary and Bohemia, and from Rus* furs, wax, honey, and slaves' (The Russian Primary Chronicle; Laurentian Text, edited by S.H.Cross and O.P.Sherbowitz-Wetzor, Cambridge, Mass. [1953], p. 86). The intention was frustrated by a Pecheneg attack on Kiev; but the sentiments speak for themselves.