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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In Western Europe, we typically associate Vikings with the storm-tossed waters of the North Sea and the North Atlantic, the deep Scandinavian fjords and the attacks on the monasteries and settlements of north-western Europe. This popular image rarely includes the river systems of Russia and Ukraine, the wide sweep of the Eurasian steppe, the far shores of the Caspian Sea, the incense and rituals of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the high walls and towers of the city of Constantinople. Yet for many Viking raiders, traders and settlers, it was the road to the East that beckoned. These Viking adventurers founded the Norse–Slavic dynasties of the Rus, which are entangled in the bitterly contested origin myths of Russia and Ukraine. The Rus were the first community in the region to convert to Christianity – in its Eastern Orthodox form – and so they are at the heart of the concept of 'Holy Russia'. Russian rulers have frequently referenced these Norse origins when trying to enhance their power and secure control over the Ukrainian lands, most recently demonstrated by Vladimir Putin as his justification for seizing Crimea and invading Ukraine. In this fascinating and timely book, historian Martyn Whittock explores the important but often misunderstood and manipulated role played by the Vikings in the origins of Russian power, the deadly consequences of which we are still living with today.
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To Steve Tamplin.
What a great person to have had as my first head of a history department. Thank you for that and for our ongoing friendship.
vi
Contents
MAP OF THE RUS LANDS
note: not all details shown were concurrent.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Robert Dudley, my agent, and James Stephens, Olivia Beattie, Ella Boardman and all the team at Biteback for their encouragement and assistance.
I would also like to record my thanks to Jessalynn Bird, at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, US, for permission to quote from her very accessible adaptation of the earlier translation of Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s account of Scandinavian merchants on the Volga in 922, by Albert Stanburrough Cook in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1923).
Peter Bull, of Peter Bull Art Studio, produced the map giving the context of the Rus lands.
I am grateful (as always) to my family for the interest they take in my work and for the support shown to me as I embarked on yet another ‘Viking journey’.
It goes without saying that all errors and interpretations are my own.xii
A note about spellings
Russian and Ukrainian are closely related languages. As a result, there are Russian and Ukrainian versions of place, river and personal names. So, Kievis the Russian form of the city’s name, while Kyivis the Ukrainian. Vladimiris the Russian form of the name of the ruler who accepted Christian baptism (into the Orthodox faith) in the late tenth century and Volodymyris the Ukrainian form. Dnieperis the Russian form of this river’s name and will be found in many published and online sources; in Ukrainian it is Dnipro.
Until Ukrainian independence in 1991 – and for some time afterwards in many publications – it is usually the Russian form of names that one encounters. This was due to Russification across the lands ruled by the tsars from the seventeenth century and later by the Soviets. Consequently, it was these forms that entered common usage internationally and which were widely found in the English-speaking world.
What to do about spellings now? This has become particularly freighted with controversy as Russian pressure mounted against xivUkraine in the twenty-first century and especially so since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In the case of Kiev/Kyiv, Kievwas the generally accepted English-language spelling throughout the Soviet period and into the first years of this century. But it is now associated with the Russification of Ukraine. The same is true of a number of place, river and personal names. The transliteration Kyiv was legally mandated by the Ukrainian government in 1995. However, this new spelling only started gaining traction a few years ago, when the Ukrainian government mounted a campaign to secure international approval for the name of its capital city.1
Due to the huge number of available published sources that use the Russian form of names, in this book the older (Russian) forms will generally be used to refer to rivers, places and personal names, unless these have traditionally appeared in their Ukrainian forms globally. This avoids changing spellings in published works which are quoted and because these forms have become very well known. So, the more familiar form of the river names Dnieperand Dniesterwill be used, because these are the forms most readers will encounter in other published works and online. Vladimirthe Great will appear in this Russian form for the same reason and for its synchronicity with VladimirPutin, who bears the same form of this personal name. The use of these Russian forms is for clarity and simplification and in no way conveys any disrespect for the Ukrainian language. Where Vladimir the Great is referred to in modern Ukrainian sources, the form Volodymyrwill be used, while making it clear that readers are more likely to come across him as ‘Vladimir the Great’.xv
However, there is one notable exception. While the form Kievan Rushas traditionally been used to describe the Norse–Slav state that emerged in the tenth century – and is the form that will be encountered in most written sources that appeared in the English-speaking world before the last decade – I refer to them as the KyivanRus, as this form is now becoming the one more frequently found and it makes it clear that the place in question is the city now referred to, in most sources in the West, in its Ukrainian form. All of this is a reminder of the complexity of the area of culture and history that is the subject of this book.
In a less contentious area, where Old Norse terms are used, a simplification of letter forms (avoiding ones no longer used in modern English) will be deployed. For example, we will use the term Aesirto describe a family of Viking deities, rather than Æsir. The term Gartharikiwill be used to describe the mixed Norse–Slavic settlements of northern Russia, rather than the Old Norse form Garðaríki. This is because the letters used in the latter (and older) forms will be unfamiliar to many modern English-speaking readers. However, usually the Old Norse form will also be given, in brackets, as this form often also appears in published sources.xvi
NOTES
1 ‘“Kyiv” or “Kiev” – Here’s why the difference is political,’ https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/cbc-pronunciation-kyiv-ukraine-crisis-explainer-1.6371766 (accessed April 2024).
Introduction
‘Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.’1
– US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, March 1994
‘Ukraine is the biggest European country and is rich in natural resources. Its capital, Kyiv, has long-held ideological meaning for Russia. It was where the population of the Kyivan Rus was consecrated by Volodymyr the Great in 988. In his article about the unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin wrote that these two nations and Belarusians spoke one language (Old Russian), had economic relations, and one religion: the Orthodox faith. Then he continued with pseudo-historical facts about Ukraine. One sentence said, “Modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era.”’2
– Lieutenant Colonel Denys Yurchenko, Ukrainian military cooperation officer specialising in NATO–Ukraine cooperation, July 2024 xviii
This book is about ‘deep stories’. I first came across this evocative phrase when researching a very different book on another modern political and cultural phenomenon, entitled Trumpandthe Puritans.3 That was in 2019 when it seemed that the worst that Vladimir Putin might do to Ukraine was the seizure of Crimea. Things have moved on since then.
It was while writing about the US and Trump that the phrase first caught my imagination. It was not that the concept was new to me. Anyone who studies history will know that it is constantly being quarried to define contemporary perceptions and identities. What was so striking was the way in which the phrase so powerfully conveyed both the process and the outcome of this interaction between the present and the past.
The context within which the phrase crossed my radar was an examination of the extent to which the US Tea Party ideology and programme had captured the imaginations and loyalties of Louisianan Republicans, well before the rise to prominence of Donald Trump. This Tea Party support later morphed into support for Trump in 2016 (and later in 2024). The support for the Tea Party – and later for Trump – was largely centred on a small-state, anti-federal government, anti-National-Environment-Agency-intervention stance. This was despite the poverty, pollution and poor health troubling the state, its dependence on federal assistance and its apparent need of federal protection to safeguard its natural resources. The question of why so many Louisianans embraced an ideology whose outcomes undermined the physical well-being of its supporters was sensitively documented in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2018 study, xixentitled Strangers inTheir Own Land: Anger and Mourning on theAmericanRight.4
What emerged was the conclusion that both the Tea Party and Trump appeared to speak to the ‘deep story’ of these voters, as they lived in a bewildering US that was changing around them and in which they increasingly felt marginalised and cut-in-on by others as they queued for access to the ‘American Dream’. That the policies of the radical right, arguably, were little inclined to assist such people – who were often damaged by the actions of the oil industry and inadequately served by private sector health provision – was as nothing compared to the right’s ability to articulate their anxieties and engage with their ‘story’ (regardless of its inaccuracies) of what the US used to be like, currently was like and what it might become again. In short, such stories appeared to make sense of complicated issues, reassured its adherents of their identities and the rightness of their hopes and promised a way forward which would validate them.
Such an outlook is rooted in the history, society, traditions, values and perceptions of any given group. And it may or may not accord with hard facts. But being rooted in the pastis the key to the attraction of the phenomenon. It is seen in slogans produced as part of the process: ‘Make America Great Again’ in the US; ‘Take BackControl’ in Brexit Britain; appeals to historicalHindu culture in opposition to ‘foreign invaders’ in Bharatiya Janata Party strategies apparent in India; backward-lookingreferences to Great Patriotic War tropes and anti-Nazism as justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The present is framed in the context of a perceived past. That is a ‘deep story’. xx
Deep stories will prove crucial in explaining many of the phenomena explored in this book. And deep stories exist on both sides of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, as they do on both sides of the polarised US and in all other nations seeking satisfying (even if misleadingly incomplete or at times delusional) history-based clarity and affirmation in a turbulent present. Different deep stories can produce different outcomes.
Increasingly, I have become fascinated by the concept of such deep stories and the way in which they are deployed. This was a feature of my book MayflowerLives(2019);5 the co-written TrumpandthePuritans(2020);6 has become a lethal feature of Putin’s Russia (as I explored in the last chapter of TheSecretHistoryofSovietRussia’sPoliceState, 2020)7 and has accelerated since February 2022; is seen in the political use of end-times beliefs, as I explored in TheEndTimes,Again?(2021)8 and ApocalypticPolitics(2022);9 and is highlighted in the use of the Norse in areas of modern radicalised politics in the turbulent US, as I explored in AmericanVikings:HowtheNorseSailedintotheLandsandImaginationsofAmerica(2023).10
In VikingsintheEast, the Norse adventurers are once more being deployed to justify modern outlooks and actions – but this time in the East rather than in the West. This is hardly surprising, because Vikings have an ability to stir the imagination through their combination of heroic exploration and muscular free enterprise. For they could be both state-destroyers and state-builders. And it is in that latter capacity that they play such an important role in the bitterly contested origin myths of both Russia and Ukraine. The Vikings are a historical unifying factor that has – paradoxically – become deeply divisive.xxi
As we shall shortly see, over a millennium ago, Viking adventurers founded the Norse–Slavic dynasties of the Rus, which are entangled in the origin stories of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Furthermore, because the Rus were the first community in the region to convert to Christianity – in its Eastern Orthodox form – this confers sacred significance on what could, otherwise, be an origin myth simply of medieval trade and violence. They are at the heart of the concept of ‘Holy Russia’. That affords a special profundity and significance to the history of which they are part. This hugely affects how they and their formative actions are perceived.
In the middle of a savage contemporary argument over whether Russians and Ukrainians are two distinct people or constitute one historical community lies a common origin story and the beginnings of Orthodox faith that can be both a unifying and a divisive phenomenon, depending on how it is deployed. And deployed it certainly has been! That is why the full title of this book is: VikingsintheEast:FromVladimirtheGreattoVladimirPutin–TheOriginsofaContestedLegacyinRussiaandUkraine. It is a place where history collides with the present.
This is not a detailed history of Ukraine and Russia. Many other excellent books provide that. While an outline of Ukrainian and Russian history will give structure and context to the flow of this book, what follows is primarily an exploration of how the actions of Viking – and then Viking–Slav – people played a formative role in the history of the national communities which later emerged. And how this role has been understood and disputed in later times; none more so than in the present. History can have ‘attitude’. That is clear in recent, and ongoing, events.xxii
The use – and the abuse – of history is an ever-present reality in the modern world. It was ever thus. As someone once said of the outlook of confident ideologues: ‘Only the future is certain; the past is always changing.’
MartynWhittock
NOTES
1 Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘The Premature Partnership’, Foreign Affairs (1 March 1994). See also: Mykola Bielieskov, ‘Russian victory in Ukraine would leave Europe at Putin’s mercy’, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russian-victory-in-ukraine-would-leave-europe-at-putins-mercy/ (accessed August 2024).
2 Denys Yurchenko, ‘Russian Strategic Culture and the War in Ukraine’, https://www.fpri.org/article/2024/07/russian-strategic-culture-and-the-war-in-ukraine/ (accessed August 2024).
3 James Roberts and Martyn Whittock, Trump and the Puritans: How the Evangelical Religious Right Put Donald Trump in the White House (London: Biteback, 2020).
4 Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York and London: New Press, 2018).
5 Martyn Whittock, Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience (New York: Pegasus Books, 2019).
6 Roberts and Whittock, Trump and the Puritans.
7 Martyn Whittock, The Secret History of Soviet Russia’s Police State (London: Robinson, 2020).
8 Martyn Whittock, The End Times, Again? (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021).
9 Martyn Whittock, Apocalyptic Politics (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022).
10 Martyn Whittock, American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America (New York: Pegasus Books, 2023).
Chapter 1
Go East!
READING THE RUNES…
An enigmatic Viking Age runestone in Sweden signposts a story which unites the ancient past with the turbulent present, the early medieval period with the twenty-first century, tenth-century Vikings with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Vladimir the Great of the Rus with Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation. It points towards a ‘deep story’ concerning the contested origins and myths of both Ukraine and Russia. The runestone in question reads: ‘Tóla had this stone raised in memory of her son Haraldr, Ingvarr’s brother. They travelled valiantly far for gold, and in the east gave (food) to the eagle. (They) died in the south in Serkland.’1
Understanding the significance of the story behind this Viking Age memorial takes us into more than simply an extraordinary period of medieval history. It also opens a window into a past that continues to reverberate in modern mythmaking and in bitterly 2conflicted national identities. It is history with attitude; it has a legacy that is lethal…
THE VIEW TO THE EAST
Popular culture commonly views the Viking Age as being fundamentally a Western European phenomenon. This is not surprising, given the Viking impact on communities either side of the North Sea and the English Channel and across the British Isles. From here, the story extends westward to Iceland, Greenland and even to North America. In all these areas, the Viking story has become deeply entangled with the cultural DNA of modern communities.2 However, it also had a crucial eastern aspect.
The eastern aspect provided a key factor prompting the start of Viking raids in the first place. Changes taking place in the distant Islamic caliphate, in the Middle East, in the 740s and 750s, led to the centre of political power shifting from Damascus to Baghdad. This turbulence disrupted the flow of silver to Scandinavia. For years, Islamic merchants and their middlemen had carried silver to northern Europe. There they traded it for slaves, furs and amber. Political conflict and changes in the caliphate disrupted this trade. The flow of silver northwards dried up; Scandinavian economies were destabilised. Silver, which had allowed Scandinavian elites to engage in traditional gift-giving to cement social relationships, became scarce. Facing this change, raiding (going ‘viking’) offered an alternative way to get their hands on precious metals and slaves.
So it was then that changes, emanating from as far from Scandinavia as Baghdad, rippled out like a stone thrown into a pond. 3These changes triggered the expansion now known as the ‘Viking Age’. It was an extraordinary example of the law of unintended consequences – and it started in the East.
At the same time, the forest products of the eastern Baltic and the supply of slaves from there drew Swedish Viking adventurers eastward on the austrvegr(the Eastern Way), as it was known in Old Norse. For several reasons, the Viking phenomenon always had an Eastern Front. This is their history and an exploration of why its legacy still features in the turbulent and contested deep stories of both Russia and Ukraine in the twenty-first century.
THE ‘LITTLE GREEN MEN’ AND A STRANGE CLAIM BY VLADIMIR PUTIN
In 2014, the pro-Russian Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, finally accepted the inevitable, when months of popular protests toppled his government. During 2013 and 2014, these protests in Kyiv (Russian: Kiev), now frequently referred to as the Euromaidan, leading to the Revolution of Dignity, had eventually culminated in the overthrow of this pro-Russian Ukrainian President, who had halted the Ukrainian development of closer ties with Western Europe – primarily the ‘association agreement’ with the EU – after intense pressure from Moscow. At the culmination of the uprising, Yanukovych fled to Moscow. Prior to this, Yanukovych’s riot police had brutally dispersed protesters, and its snipers shot dead seventy-six people in three days in February 2014.
It seemed that Ukraine was now ready to resume its development of Western connections. Membership of the EU might be possible 4in time, once some significant issues in the areas of governance and civic society had been dealt with. Beyond that – and even more contentious – there might yet be some kind of relationship with (maybe one day even membership of) the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
It was following the Euromaidan that Russian special forces – euphemistically referred to as the ‘little green men’ (Russian: zelyonyechelovechki) or ‘the polite people’ (Russian: vezhlivyelyudi) – led the way in a Russian seizure of the peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine. Although their kit lacked unit insignia, everyone knew that they were there on the orders of the Kremlin. The deniability was of the kind familiar from other acts of Russian aggression, such as the Salisbury Novichok poisonings and a myriad other examples.
While the linguistic issues are a little complex, basically Russian has two words for truth. These are: istinaand pravda. And it has two words for lies, which are: lozh and vranyo. Of the two latter words, it is the second that is most interesting. Vranyomeans ‘to lie’, but it often conveys a rather more nuanced and dismissive tone. A fairly recent comment on Reddit summed up the potential meaning of vranyorather well: ‘You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.’3
The initial Kremlin narrative – as embodied in the ‘little green men’ – was a classic example of the use of vranyoas statecraft. As we explore more of the tangled history of Ukraine and Russia, especially in its latest form, we will come across a lot more vranyo.
But back to 2014. The Russian action in Crimea was an open act of aggression against another sovereign state. As recently as 1997, 5when the Russian Federation had been granted an extended lease on the port facilities at Sevastopol for its Black Sea Fleet, it had affirmed Crimea as Ukrainian territory. That ‘guarantee’ clearly had a much shorter shelf life than anyone had imagined in 1997. A lot has happened since then.
As we shall see, Crimea has a complex history. Written references and archaeology reveal Greek settlers there. In the tenth century, it was the place where Norse–Slav rulers (central to our exploration) accepted Christian baptism. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, it was divided between the Khanate of Crimea, Genoese coastal colonies and the Byzantine Principality of Theodoro. For three centuries after this, it was a protectorate of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Russia invaded Crimea in 1783 as part of the expansionist policies of Catherine the Great. Crimean Tatar communities were several times forcibly expelled by Russia in 1783, 1856 and 1944.4 The last mass expulsion was for alleged collaboration with the Germans.
Crimea has also had a rather complicated history since 1945. It was transferred to the Soviet republic of Ukraine (within the then USSR) in 1954. In 1991, as the USSR imploded, Crimea was (once again) made an autonomous republic within the Soviet Union, but with the formal dissolution of the USSR in December of that year, Crimea was eventually incorporated into the newly independent Ukrainian state as the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (ARC), the only self-governing region within Ukraine. It is significant that in the referendum of 1991, on Ukraine’s independence from the USSR, 54 per cent of Crimea’s population voted for an independent Ukraine.5 This was perhaps not surprising, since it had been part of 6the Ukrainian republic since 1954. The ARC had its own constitution, Prime Minister and Parliament; its constitution protected the special status of the Russian language. From the mid-1990s, strong pro-Russian tendencies within some areas of the Crimean population led to political tensions and this was a situation encouraged by some Russian nationalist politicians before the presidency of Putin.
The official Ukrainian census of 2001 revealed that 60 per cent of the population of Crimea consisted of ethnic Russians, 24 per cent were Ukrainians and 10 per cent were Crimean Tatars.6
Despite these historical complications, and the size of the ethnic Russian population, Crimea constituted a part of the new state of Ukraine, whose territorial integrity was guaranteed by the Russian Federation. In 1994–96, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 – signed by Russia, Ukraine, Britain and the US – promised that none of these nations would use force or threats against Ukraine.7 All would respect its sovereignty and existing borders. That guarantee, like that integral to the 1997 port-lease, had a shelf life that did not last beyond twenty years.
To return to 2014. Russia seized most of the Ukrainian fleet while it was in port, and the HQ of Ukraine’s navy was relocated from Sevastopol to Odesa (Russian: Odessa). Although some of the Ukrainian ships were later returned to Ukraine, others – including the Ukrainian navy’s only submarine – were absorbed into the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
This illegal Russian action was followed by a vote (not recognised internationally) by which Crimea seceded from Ukraine and joined the Russian Federation. It is hard to say, due to Russian control of 7the vote, but there may have been a majority in favour of this. This is open to question, though, as opinion polling in May 2013 revealed that 53 per cent of respondents wished to keep the peninsula as part of Ukraine. In this polling, only 23 per cent wanted Crimea to be united with Russia.8
What is clear is that the 2014 vote was on a low turnout and certainly not the 82 per cent turnout – with 97 per cent in favour of unification with Russia – as claimed by the Kremlin. There is reason for believing that the turnout was in the region of 30 to 50 per cent.9
The West imposed (limited) sanctions and Putin’s domestic popularity soared. Even Alexei Navalny, who was a strong critic of Putin and died in an arctic labour camp in February 2024, was initially favourably inclined towards the return of Crimea to the Russian Federation. A lot of Russians viewed it this way at the time, not just the ultra-nationalists.
It was, though, of huge and worrying significance as it constituted an act of territorial aggression deployed to change the borders of an internationally recognised state by force. It had echoes of nineteenth-century geo-politics or the reordering of Eastern European frontiers in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was certainly not what was expected of a 21st-century European state. If the end of the Cold War had seemed to indicate the ‘end of history’ (to quote the title of Francis Fukuyama’s over-optimistic 1992 book), in 2014 ‘history’ had returned! And there was more of this ‘history’ to come – a lot more. History was back with a vengeance.
All of this provocative behaviour by Russia was consistent with an increasingly bitter narrative from the Kremlin which deeply resented the eastward movement of both NATO and the EU since 8the end of the Cold War. The Kremlin felt this contravened verbal guarantees that this would not occur (commentators disagree over whether these were given) and was determined to prevent Ukraine becoming part of either the military alliance or the political and economic union. This was also complicated by Putin and his allies making their own contribution to 21st-century ‘culture wars’, as they promoted what were termed ‘traditional Russian values’ in opposition to ‘Western liberal values’. So far, the Russian action in Crimea can be viewed as a predictable outcome of an increasingly fractious relationship between Putin’s Russia and the West. It was a relationship which had gone steadily downhill since the halcyon days at the beginning of the millennium, when it really had seemed that a new relationship between the West and Russia was possible.
However, there was more to it than that. Something a lot older was also in the mix. Something a lot more visceral and fundamental. Something that the West had never understood and even now views with puzzlement. In 2015, when Putin justified his recent annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, he asserted that Crimea has ‘sacred meaning for Russia, like the Temple Mount for Jews and Muslims’, and, furthermore, that Crimea is ‘the spiritual source of the formation of the multifaceted but monolithic Russian nation’. He added: ‘It was on this spiritual soil that our ancestors first and forever recognized their nationhood.’10
This statement will have left many Western commentators scratching their heads and wondering what Putin was talking about. Like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? What was that all about? The answer lies in a heady and toxic fusion of nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy which had clearly occurred by 2014, along 9with a very particular (and highly questionable) interpretation of the arc of Russian history.
It sounds like the kind of cynical pseudo-history beloved of authoritarian rulers. But in this case, there is more to it than this. Whatever the genuineness of Putin’s commitment to this reading of Russian history, his determination to make a connection with ancient roots (however unconvincing) was, and is, very real. Tucker Carlson discovered this, in February 2024, when he was treated to a half-hour-long ‘history’ lesson by Putin.11 The Putinist history in question reaches back to a very ancient past – an ancient past which forms the contested origin myths of both Russia and Ukraine. And in this quest, his 2015 statement was not an isolated example.
ENTER THE VIKINGS…
In Borovitskaya Square, in central Moscow, stands a monument 17.5 metres (57.4 feet) high to St Vladimir the Great (Grand Prince of Kyiv/Kiev from ad 980 until his death in 1015). He is credited with the introduction of Orthodox Christianity to Russia and his life and achievements form part of the deep story of both Russia and Ukraine and their common historic Orthodox Christian faith. The figure, holding a giant cross, was erected in 2016 on the initiative of the Russian Military Historical Society and the city government of Moscow. It was unveiled by his namesake: Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation.
The erection of the statue was immensely controversial because St Vladimir – called St Volodymyr in Ukrainian – is claimed by both Russia and Ukraine as a founding father and many Ukrainians 10considered it a provocative gesture. It was highly significant that the statue was unveiled on National Unity Day in Russia – a national holiday revived by Putin in 2005. At the time, many Ukrainians felt that the action was a deliberate attempt to challenge the idea of Ukrainian sovereignty and cultural independence. This was being done by weaponising the saint in the cause of Russian nationalist claims regarding the Ukrainian state, which Russian nationalists traditionally describe as ‘Little Russia’.
The deep division between these two Orthodox nations was further revealed in 2019 when the Ukrainian Orthodox Church became independent from the Russian Orthodox Church, much to the anger of both the religious and political authorities in Moscow. Until as late as 1448, the Russian Orthodox Church was headed by the ‘Metropolitans of Kiev’ (since 1328 these church leaders had been based in Moscow). However, in 1448 the Russian bishops first elected their own metropolitan without reference to the authority of Constantinople and from this point, the Russian church was autocephalous (effectively independent). In 1589, the Metropolitan of Moscow was elevated to the position of patriarch. This elevation occurred with the approval of Constantinople. Moscow then stood fifth in line of honour after the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. And within the domain of the Russian patriarch lay the Ukrainian lands, from which Russian Orthodoxy had first emerged in the tenth century. In 2019, that Moscow-based dominance, which had been in place since 1328, was broken. For the Ukrainians, it must have seemed a logical step given that Kyiv had been the original seat of the Russian Orthodox 11Church and the extent to which (by 2019) the Orthodox patriarch in Moscow – Kirill – had bought into the whole Putinist nationalist outlook. This had meant that the official head of Orthodoxy in Ukraine was part of a movement bent on subjugating Ukraine. Hence the Ukrainian move towards church independence from Moscow in 2019. But for the Russians, what the Ukrainians had done was a spiritual red rag. And it was interwoven with the same deep history of which Vladmir the Great (he of the 17.5-metre monument) was an integral part. But there was more to come on the subject of ancient history and its use by Putin.
In July 2021, Putin published a lengthy article entitled ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, which made it clear that reunification was on his agenda, whatever the Ukrainians felt about it. Finally, in 2022, the full extent of that Putinist weaponising of history was seen in the Russian military columns, bombers and missiles descending on Ukraine in an attempt to abolish its independence.
Which raises the question of who was St Vladimir/Volodymyr and how did he come to occupy such a contested place in the hearts and minds of two nations that became locked in bitter warfare in 2022? The answer involves Vikings far from home, a reluctant Byzantine princess, the creation of a hybrid national identity and conversion to Christianity. In short: the creation of the original hybrid Norse–Slavic state of ‘Holy Rus’. And that – and its echoes down the centuries – is what this book will be exploring. It is a very contested legacy; a millennium-old deep story that led to conflict using 21st-century weapons.12
It is a story that begins with Vikings. And that takes us back to Haraldr, Ingvarr’s brother, the one whose body had fed the eagles a very long way from Sweden, far away in Serkland…
SOME UNUSUAL SWEDISH RUNESTONES AND A VERY LONG JOURNEY…
The evidence for Viking actions on what we might call the ‘Eastern Front’ comes in many forms. One of these is in the field (literally, in terms of their original location) of runestones.
At this point, it may be helpful to briefly explain what these objects are. Viking Age Norse communities left written records on a range of different objects using the runic alphabet. This was originally derived from the Latin alphabet of the Late Roman Empire. In the runic alphabet, the angular letters, known as runes, were designed for easy carving on objects made from metal, bone or stone. They appear on objects from as early as the year ad 200 and continued in use well into the Middle Ages. As a result, they were still being used centuries after the Scandinavian communities – both in the northern homelands and in the wider Norse diaspora – converted to Christianity. This runic alphabet is often referred to as the Futhark. There is, what is termed, an ‘Elder’ and a ‘Younger’ version of it.
Many runic inscriptions were simple statements denoting ownership, such as: ‘Nithijo made this’ (on a shield found near Skanderborg in Denmark).12 Some were thought to have magical powers, such as ‘I give good luck’ (on a gold disc found in Denmark).13 Many were grave markers and some of these (especially in Sweden) could 13be quite extensive in their information. It is these that are most revealing when it comes to noting eastward Viking exploration.
A very important runestone is located beside the driveway of Gripsholm Castle, in Sweden. The object in question is an eleventh-century runestone. It was discovered in the early 1820s, built into the floor of a cellar and covered in tar, and had clearly once been used as part of the fabric in an earlier building. This was before being reused yet again to make a threshold in the cellar. Originally, it would have been a free-standing monument, placed in the open air in a prominent position. However, its fame lies not in its mixed history as a building component but in the inscription discovered on it when it was finally removed from the cellar and cleaned, about a century after its discovery. When translated, it bears witness to an adventure that went terribly wrong, a very long way from home. The runes in question were carved within the body of a snake that follows the edge of the stone and then curls into the centre. This runic inscription, as we saw earlier, reads: ‘Tóla had this stone raised in memory of her son Haraldr, Ingvarr’s brother. They travelled valiantly far for gold, and in the east gave (food) to the eagle. (They) died in the south in Serkland.’14
This runestone is known today as Sö 179 and is one of about twenty-six so-called ‘Ingvar runestones’. Most of these are found in the Lake Mälaren region of southern Sweden; specifically in the provinces of Södermanland, Uppland and Östergötland. They are named after a Swedish Viking named Ingvar the Far-Travelled, who led an expedition to the Caspian Sea.
This single expedition is mentioned on more runestones than 14any another event in Swedish Viking history, which points to its importance to contemporary society in the eleventh century. Other evidence indicates that Ingvar and most of his companions died in 1041. Some of them died in a fierce battle fought at Sasireti in Georgia, to the west of the Caspian Sea. This battle involved Byzantines (from the Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital in Constantinople), Georgians and Scandinavian mercenaries. The battle was fought in a Georgian civil war. Those who did not die in the battle itself later succumbed to disease far from Scandinavia. These included Ingvar himself.
The Georgian chronicler who compiled an account of the expedition, in a fourteenth-century addition to the chronicle known as the LifeofKartli(KartlisTskhovreba), Kartli being a core area of Georgia, added that Ingvar and his men were given slave women in Georgia. A twelfth-century Icelandic saga called Saga ofIngvartheFar-Travelled(Yngvarssagavíðförla) claims they died from disease contracted through sex with these slaves. While this may have been true, with the Norse in question encountering sexually transmitted diseases that they had not previously gained immunity from, it is more likely that this followed the age-old trope of blaming women for problems. Whether we should read this as part of the history of epidemiology or (more likely) the predictable history of misogyny, it was a disaster for most of those who embarked on this expedition to the distant East.
According to that later Icelandic saga (which claimed to tell the story of the expedition in detail, including the sexual health information), some survivors made it back to Russia. Others travelled 15on to Miklagarth(Old Norse: Miklagarðr), the Scandinavian name for Constantinople. This was the capital of the Eastern Roman – or Byzantine – Empire. Of these survivors, some it seems eventually got back to Sweden and, as news spread of what had occurred, the runestones were carved by remaining family members to commemorate the dead who had not made it home. For our exploration, the most striking point is the geography of the expedition.
The ‘Serkland’ that is referred to on this and on four other runestones was the name used by Scandinavians for the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate and other Muslim areas of the East. The term was either derived from the word ‘Saracen’ (so meaning ‘Saracen-land) or from ‘serkr’ (gown), referring to the distinctive robes worn by the Muslims living in the East. Either way, it was a long way from home, back in Scandinavia.
Despite the emphasis on battle, there is evidence that the expedition that was led by Ingvar the Far-Travelled was as much about trade and diplomacy as it was about fearless and testosterone-driven adventure and battle. Regarding one of those who died in far-off Serkland and who was also commemorated back in Sweden on a runestone, his sons wrote of him: ‘knaristur’ (‘He could steer a cargo ship well’).15 The reference on this stone is to a knarr, a spacious sea-going cargo ship, not the dragon-prowed longships of Hollywood films, TV and popular expectations. In addition, the blessing on the dead found on this runestone – ‘May God help their spirits’16 – is a formula associated with Christians, so it seems the men in question were not pagans. To underscore this, another of the Ingvar runestones (U 1143, from Tierp, in Uppsala County) specifically 16prays that ‘Guðdrottinnhialpiand[ald]rakristinna’ (‘May Lord God help the spirits of all Christians’).17 So that makes the point very clearly, at least regarding some of those who died in the East.
The Icelandic saga version of the Ingvar expedition claims that the Viking fleet was attacked by enemy ships armed with flamethrowers. This is a very real possibility and suggests that these were probably Muslim vessels equipped with a version of the flammable ‘Greek fire’ employed by the Byzantine navy and copied by its enemies.18
Taken together, these are thought-provoking clues which remind us of a very different ‘Viking Age’ to the one we usually envisage. In Western Europe, we associate Vikings with the storm-tossed waters of the North Sea and the North Atlantic, the deep Scandinavian fjords, the cold of Iceland and Greenland and the attacks on the monasteries and settlements of north-western Europe. This popular image rarely includes the river systems of Russia and Ukraine, the wide sweep of the Eurasian steppe, the far shores of the Caspian Sea, eastern slave markets and Arab traders, flamethrowing ships, the incense and rituals of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the high walls and towers of the city of Constantinople. Yet for many Swedish Viking raiders, traders and settlers, it was the road to the East that beckoned. And the society that they helped forge there was the one referred to by Vladimir Putin in his musings on the ‘sacred soil’ of Crimea and the foundational activities of St Vladimir the Great, which gave rise to the provocative statue in Moscow’s Borovitskaya Square. This is because St Vladimir was directly descended from the kinds of Norse explorers whose exploits were recorded on the Ingvar runestones.17
VIKING: WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Before we go further in this exploration of the Eastern Vikings and their legacy, it would help to briefly explain who and what Vikings were.
From the eighth century of the Christian era, raiders exploded out of Scandinavia. They did so in a way that both shocked and astonished their contemporaries in Western Europe.
Those at the receiving end of attacks from the north used various names for those responsible for them. In Anglo-Saxon (Old English) written sources the terms ‘Danes’, ‘Northmen’ and ‘pagans’ or ‘heathens’ were the ones most often used. Confusingly, the term ‘Danes’ did not carry much geographical accuracy in these records. As a result, when we find ‘Danes’ appearing in the accounts, we cannot be sure that those responsible actually came from Denmark. For example, after reporting a raid on Portland, Dorset, in 789, the same entry in the Anglo-SaxonChroniclesays that those responsible were Danes and that they came from Norway! Clearly, the label was sometimes detached from the geography,19 which is rather confusing.
Other ‘labels’ were also used to describe these feared northern raiders. The Franks (in what is now France and western Germany) called them the ‘Nordmanni’ (Northmen).20 As a result, an area ceded to them in the tenth century would become Normandy (land of the Northmen). Within a century – while they kept up connections with communities in Scandinavia – they so assimilated to the local culture that Anglo-Saxon sources frequently referred to them as ‘French’. This chameleon-like ability to blend into local cultures will feature in our eastern exploration too.18
In the East, it has been suggested that the Slavic term for them was derived from their ruddy complexions, hence ‘Rus’ (red).21 Or the name may have been derived from an Old Norse word for ‘rowers’ (i.e. seamen). Or it may have been connected to a coastal area of Sweden called Roslagen.22 The Rus had a huge impact on the culture and later history of Russia and Ukraine, and it is this group of Vikings who will feature most in this examination of Eastern Vikings. The reference to Old Norse is a reminder that it is an umbrella term to describe languages spoken in Scandinavia in the early medieval period.
A related word to Rus– Rhos– was used in the Byzantine Empire (ruled from Constantinople).23 There the rulers came to employ them as mercenaries and also met Scandinavians who had travelled down the rivers leading from the Baltic. From these river systems, they eventually sailed into the Black Sea and from there travelled into the eastern Mediterranean and the Byzantine Empire. Others reached the Caspian Sea. The word (in the form Rus) would eventually give rise to the national name of Russia (and Belarus). This is due to the fact that the roots of the historical Russian nation started as a mixed Viking–Slav state centred on Kyiv/Kiev, in Ukraine.24 It is these tangled and contested roots of nationhood that lie behind Russian nationalist claims about Ukraine not being a truly independent nation. It is not the only time the Viking legacy has been seized on by modern nationalists and those seeking to carve out cultural identities. The same has occurred in the US, based on saga and archaeological evidence for Norse explorers reaching the North American continent in the early eleventh century.2519
The Byzantines also called them ‘Varangians’ (those who swear loyalty) and the mercenaries of the Varangian Guard served the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. They have left some surprising pieces of evidence behind. In the church of Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), one of them carved a runic inscription into the white marble parapet surrounding the balcony of the upper gallery of the church. It reads ‘Halfdan carved these runes’ or ‘Halfdan was here’.26
In Ireland, they were the ‘Northmen’ again (or ‘Lochlannach’ in Irish).27 It was a designation similar to the one used by the Franks. The Irish went on to differentiate the Norwegians as ‘Finn-gaill’ (white foreigners) and the Danes as ‘Dubb-gaill’ (black foreigners). The reasoning behind this is not clear and subject to some debate.28
Far from Scandinavia, Islamic writers called them ‘al-madjus’ (heathens).29 It was a religiously derived label, similar to that used by Anglo-Saxons. One Islamic source added: ‘May Allah curse them.’30
