19. The Birth of Russia
Rurik’s descendants divided the dynasty’s conquests amongst themselves into states that came to be known collectively as Kievan Rus – Russia’s historic heartland. Our knowledge of Rurik comes from a twelfth century Rus history, The Russian Primary Chronicle, written by a monk named Nestor. It states that Novgorod’s Eastern Slavs had warred with invading Vikings and defeated them. However, the Slavs then fought amongst themselves, and to end their civil strife, they changed their minds about the Vikings, and decided to invite a Viking chieftain named Rurik to rule them. So Rurik showed up with two brothers and a Viking entourage, to rule Novgorod and its environs. At least that is how early Russians liked to imagine how they came to be ruled by Vikings.
Few serious scholars believe the story that the Slavs had “invited” Rurik to rule them, or accept it at face value. It is viewed instead as a face saving invention by Slavs who came to live under Viking domination. The natives preferred to imagine that they had voluntarily invited their foreign rulers, instead of the more bitter reality that they had been conquered and subjugated by them. After he conquered Ladoga around 855, Rurik pushed southwards, and by 862, he had mastered Novgorod and its vicinity.
Rurik fortified Novgorod – whose name means “New City” in modern Russian, but meant “New Fortification” in Medieval Russian – and used it as a base of operations and expansion. He ruled his new realm until his death in 879. Rurik bequeathed his realm to his kinsman Orvar of Holmgard – later Russified into Oleg of Novgorod – and entrusted to him the care of his young son, Igor. Oleg continued Rurik’s expansionist policies, and eventually seized Kiev from his brother Askold, who himself had only recently seized it from the local Slavs, and solidified the Rurikid Dynasty’s control over what became Russia.
