Russia (5 page)

The first evidence of social associations larger than the tribe points to tribal unions. The names of some of these have reached us thanks to the earliest Greek and Roman sources on eastern Europe. Among these were the Krivichie tribes of what is now west Russia; the Slovenie and the Viatichi to the north and east of them respectively; and the Derevlians (or ‘old settlers’). The Severiane and the Poliane lived in the territory we now know as Ukraine, the last-mentioned in the neighbourhood of what was to become its chief city, Kiev. These tribes all shared the same Slavonic language. Nevertheless, they did not constitute a state, even though centuries later their descendants were to speak differentiated, albeit similar, languages and populate three different nation states: Ukraine and Belarus, as well as Russia. Nor were the tribes to remain settled in the same areas. Archaeologists have traced significant movements. The Slovenie moved east and south in the late 8oos, while some northward movement by the southern tribes has been noted.
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Cities in Russia owed their origins to two very different developments. On the
one
hand there was the headquarters of the super-chief, head of a tribal confederation, its organizer, defender and (insofar as he extracted income from it) oppressor too. This sort of city was a military and administrative centre which acted as a magnet for people simply because men who took decisions and exercised power were to be found there. The other kind of city was in origin a commercial centre, a defensible point along a route which joined two or more emporia. This helps to explain the different settlement pattern in northern Russia, where strongholds were established without a populated hinterland capable of supporting them, by contrast to Russian settlement in the south.

Archaeologists argue that strongholds — most of them positioned by important river crossings and often on a periphery of any settled region in order to control trade routes and tax the value passing through — preceded settlements in northern Russia. But the distinction soon became theoretical rather than practical, because the surplus goods the super-chiefs had to sell attracted merchants, and the commercial centres needed both craftsmen and protection. The functions of the city-in the-making soon became mixed. And the creation of cities and the advent of merchants operating
over long distances implied the end of isolated, tribal life. It also indicated some exposure to outside influences, heralding a new kind of life with a potential for civilization. However, it also implied the loss of that self-contained, self-supporting realm of blood-related family rooted in a place (the mythic realm of which all nationalists dream), and threatened the old beliefs associated with the old ways of life.

Russia’s famous store of fairy tales includes some that date from ancient times, and these provide our only evidence of the spiritual world of the Russians before it was influenced by outside agencies, including Christianity. Unfortunately, the provenance of these traditions is inextricably bound up with the early history of the Christian Church in Russia, which was intent on eradicating them and the magic beliefs many of them reflected. Some dimly reflect real historical heroes and events and must be relatively late inventions, but others are more ancient, and it is reasonable to infer that some, at least, have pre-Christian origins. Such tales reflect the natural world the early Russians inhabited. They stress the importance of water to life and death to a greater extent than the folklore of other peoples, and purport to explain such mysteries as the placid river which hides dangerous rapids, the sudden, death-dealing storm, the relative who becomes a burden or who turns nasty (as Little Red Riding Hood’s nice grandmama turns into an all-devouring wolf).

In doing so they created a magic realm for children and for us, conjuring up a world of forest sprites which appear as wolves, bears or even whirlwinds; of girls called
rusalki,
water-spirits that float on streams or lakes decked out in wreaths and garlands like live Ophelias; of tree- and spring-spirits; of wild animals which talk, and water-demons who are the spirits of people who died by drowning and who, by beckoning watchers on the bank, cause more young men to drown. And, the most powerful and fundamental of them all, Perun the Thunder God, bringer of rain, fertility and hence prosperity.
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This magic world of early Russia was not only to inspire literature and the theatre; it also helped form the Russian national character itself. However charmingly presented, these tales reflect an essential realism rooted in the land of Russia and in all the peculiarities of that land. They acknowledge both nature’s bounty and the price in hard labour and risk that nature often demanded for it. They recognize the dangerous streaks of unpredictability both in weather and in humankind; and they teach the importance of going with nature, not against it.

But though the original, isolated, magic Russia was to leave its imprint on the people, it was not to survive the impact of the outside world. As
those caches of Islamic coins demonstrate, the outside world had discovered Russia even as early as the 6oos. From then on commercial pressures were to play an important role in moulding Russia’s development. And the first such important influence seems to have been the Khazars.

Starting in the seventh to eighth century, the Khazars formed a commercial state. With their capital first at Itil on the Volga (not far from the present-day city of Tsaritsyn, once Stalingrad), and later at Sarkel on the river Don, Khazar warriors commanded all the routes between Russia, Central Asia, Persia and the eastern Mediterranean. They both taxed and protected all the trade that passed through. In this period the Roman Empire was in decline, the Arab Empire on the rise. At the same time Russia was becoming more important as a European trade route, now that the Mediterranean was no longer the safe Roman lake it had been. The Khazars found themselves poised between two worlds aside from the pagan Russians - the world of Christendom and the world of Islam. The two worlds were locked in combat, yet Khazar prosperity depended on trade with both. In order, therefore, to preserve their ideological integrity and discourage missionaries from both Christian Byzantium and the Muslim Caliphate (Ummayad and later Abbasid), the Khazar elite chose to become Jews. The fact that Jewish traders were among the most enterprising and well connected in the wider commercial world was another reason for this apparently eccentric decision. And the decision proved sound.

The Khazars made subjects of the Russian tribal confederations known as the Poliane, Severiane and Krivichie, requiring each household to pay them a silver coin and a squirrel pelt each year. They exacted tolls on Russian traders passing through their territory, developed their own system of weights and measures, minted their own coins, and provided other models that were to serve the first Russian state (or kaganate). Thanks to Khazar influence and protection, Russian merchants were soon ranging as far afield as Baghdad. A contemporary Arab writer, Ibn Khurdadhbih, reported in a geographical handbook for merchants he wrote around the 840s that Russians were taking black-fox pelts, beaver furs and swords from the north lands to the Black Sea, paying tolls there to Byzantium. They also went through Sarkel in Khazar territory to the Caspian, and sometimes they brought their goods thence ‘by camel … to Baghdad, where Slavic eunuchs serve as interpreters for them’.
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But these Russian traders in the south brought with them swords that had been forged in the north by a quite different people, the Vikings.

The Vikings — sometimes referred to as Varangians or Norsemen — acted as a commercial catalyst for the Russian tribes in the north just as the Khazars did for those in the south. They lived by trade and plunder. Active in the Baltic, they had come into contact with the Finns and Slavs of northwest Russia. From them they learned about the river routes to other Slav communities far to the south and to the Khazars’ territory beyond. Through forays into the Mediterranean they already knew that the Khazars held the gateway to the riches of both the Orient and the Mediterranean world. It was in order to capture some of this trade that they decided to build a base at Ladoga, and then another close to what was to become the city of Novgorod.

This was a bleak region with very poor soil and very sparse settlement, inhabited by Finno-Ugrian fishermen, themselves not very long established, and by a few Russians who had come in later. It was here that the classic trading city was developed. The Vikings who made a base at the site now known as Old Ladoga in the 750s were trader-warriors dealing in furs, beads and blood. They built a fort there to protect themselves, their craftsmen and their wares. Archaeologists who have carefully investigated the remains of the settlement have found and dated wickerwork walls and conclude that the building of such a fort required labour in the form of slaves. The Vikings either brought these with them or found them locally. But if there was an initial labour shortage, it did not last long.

Once the fort was in existence people came from afar to marvel and to sell fish or other food or a few pelts gathered in the forests, and so an emporium of sorts arose, which became something of a magnet for Slavs migrating from the south.
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But the Viking settlers were interested in more than petty local trade. Their eyes were set on the long-distance trade in more valuable commodities — honey, weapons and above all slaves to trade in Byzantine markets for the silks, spices and precious stone of the Orient. It is likely that, in time, traders came from as far afield as the Caucasus and Caspian.

The archaeologists’ finds are puzzling, because they comprise the remains of not one settlement but two. Like the first scraps of information found in the Latin and Arabic sources of the period, these have been seized on by scholars, who like few things better than a good dispute. The result has been a sizeable literature on the origins of towns in Russia, and an impressive variety of theories. Did towns develop from tribal centres or from fortified strong-points? Or were they created from scratch because of a sudden need? Were they formed by nobles, or by traders and artisans? The consensus seems to be that most of these elements played a part. Still, the fact that Novgorod boasted two such settlements within a mile or so
of each other by the river Volkhov is intriguing, and excavations at Kiev and Smolensk have revealed that these cities also grew from two distinct but associated settlements. Perhaps the two settlements had different functions. At any rate ‘Riurik’s town’ or hill settlement
(gorodishche
in Russian, or
holmgarthr
in Scandinavian), sited close to the point where the river Volkhov flows out of Lake Ilmen, was much the more important of the two. Twenty-five acres in area, Riurik’s town was the more easily defensible site and stood clear of the spring floodwaters (which persuaded an Arab visitor that it was in fact an island in the river).
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If the cities of the Russian south originated as tribal headquarters and agricultural centres, the city of Novgorod owed its origins to trade and was associated with the Vikings. The Vikings had been trained in a hard school. They knew that they must expand their trade, their settlements and their conquests or perish. And they represented the commercial world at its most ruthless and greedy. ‘Even the man who has only modest wealth,’ remarked the tenth-century Arab writer Ibn Rusta, ‘is…envied by his brother, who would not hesitate to do away with him in order to steal it.’
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Their intelligence system was well developed. They had learned of the Khazars and of the Russians who were taking their cue as traders from them. And they had soon found their way to both.

Since their natural element was water, they searched for — and found — water routes to where they wanted to go. Since they now wanted to cross the great land mass of Russia, they followed the rivers. Their first important settlement in Russia, at what was to become known as Novgorod, provided access to the river Volkhov, and this eventually gave them access to other rivers. Local knowledge and information extracted from men who had made the journey, or part of it, served as their maps. They also knew how to build the boats they needed — boats capable of negotiating shoals and rapids, or of construction light enough to be hauled on to the shore and dragged around the obstacle or over portages, those hopefully short stretches of land which separated the headwaters of one river from another that flowed in a different direction.

At first such journeys tended to be slow and hazardous, but, as the commercial tempo picked up and the traffic became somewhat heavier, settlements appeared at the more popular landing points; people offered the venturers food, and sold them their services as guides, carriers and hauliers. By such means a trading system was established, and the country began to be opened up to the international commerce of the day. The most important axis was between Kiev and Novgorod. According to legend, the first Vikings to rule there were the adventurers Askold and Dir, though they
were soon dispatched by local Russians. In fact co-operation, not conflict, was to be the mark of Viking—Russian relations. Mutual interest and dependence evidently outweighed natural caution and resentment of outsiders. The Vikings were to leave their imprint on Russia. Yet, rather than replacing or absorbing the Russian elites, within a very few generations they themselves were to be absorbed by them. Perhaps the Russians were already developing the capacity to control and integrate peoples of different language and culture which was to help them build empires in later ages.

The Russians themselves had already acquired definition. Fundamentally European in their genetic structure, they had been shaped by climatic and ecological conditions in their wooded steppe and forest habitat. These conditions helped to feed the Russian imagination and religious sensibility, and the dependence on agriculture in seasonally demanding, harsh conditions also contributed to the Russians’ distinctive ‘national’ profile.
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