0) Before Russia

Hello and welcome to Rate My Tsar !

Before actually rating the rulers of Russia, I think it would make sense to take a look at the situation before the first (semi-)historical ruler, Rurik, took power in 862. The traditional story of the foundation of the Russian state was written down by a monk called Nestor in a chronicle called Povest’ Vremmenykh Let (Повесть временных лет / PVL) which means the Chronicle of Past Years. Nestor claimed that the inhabitants of three northern tribes drove out Norsemen (Varyagi / Варяги) who had been oppressing them, then called in another viking called Rurik (Рюрик), and his brothers, to rule. His brothers died suspiciously soon after, leaving Rurik to build up the Russian state.

However, there had been references to Russians implying the existence of some kind of organisation or state before 862. In 839, the Holy Roman Emperor Louis I had been visited by a diplomatic mission from the “chacanus” of the “Rhos”. Chacanus is thought to be the Latinised form of Khagan, the title of the rulers of the Khazars – an empire of Turkic nomads centred on the North Caucasus, but these Rhos were claiming to be Swedes. In 860, Constantinople was raided by a fleet of the Rhos – the sort of thing you might expect from Vikings, especially if they had acquired bases on the Dnieper they could use to build and launch a fleet, and something that implies organisation, if not necessarily a state. The term “Rhos” continued to be used by the Eastern Roman Empire to describe the later Russian people, and “Rhosía” their state. The PVL gets the dates wrong, but states that the Rhos who attacked Constantinople had, at one point, been Rurik’s men. So it is entirely likely that the pre-862 sources refer to essentially the same people.

The area that became the Russian state was a lot smaller than Russia today, but still a huge section of land. Although there is high land in the south west towards the Carpathians, much of the landscape is fairly flat, like Belgium, Northern Germany or most of Poland away from the Tatra mountains.

Here is a map of the areas believed to be inhabited by Eastern Slavs (tribal names in black) at the end of the 10th century. To the North West are the ancestors of the Estonians (here Ests and Chud’ / Чудь), the Latvians and Lithuanians. To the West lies the early Polish kingdom, the ancestors of the Romanians live to the South West, much as today. It is to the South and East that we see real differences. Much of the steppe to the south of Kiev is occupied by nomadic Turkic speaking Pechenegs who were moving into the area and driving out the previous inhabitants, the Magyars (Hungarians) as the Khazar Khaganate between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea collapsed. To the East and North East, the forested land bordering the Eastern Slavs was inhabited by Finnic speaking peoples (tribal names in red).

The steppe to the south of proto-Russia was part of a far larger strip of grassland that reaches from the Danube almost to the Yellow Sea. Aside from the Carpathians, the lower reaches of the Volga river and the Tien Shan mountains, with a good horse, one could ride almost the width of Eurasia without too much trouble. The steppe was too dry for forests to grow, but it was excellent pasture for nomadic groups, who could use their skills on horseback to raid their agricultural neighbours to the north. The steppe nomads remained a threat to Russia right up until the end of the 18th century, when Catherine the Great’s armies finally managed to conquer the successors to the Mongol hordes. A similar thing was happening in the East at the same time, as Chinese armies finally brought inhabitants of the steppe to the north of their country under control.

Going back a few more centuries, Slavs were believed to have originated as a culture around the Pripet or Pinsk Marshes (the area between the Dregovichi and Drevlyane on the map above) and had expanded outwards from there. The agricultural technologies of the Slavs were well adapted to the soils and climate of the Eastern European Plain and so their populations outnumbered and eventually assimilated many of those Finnish populations. Donald Mackenzie Wallace gave an interesting description of how that process was still happening in the 19th Century in his imaginatively titled “Russia” (Kindle version FREE on Amazon – I recommend it: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004TP1IZI/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1).

The proto-Russians had opened up large areas of the landscape for agriculture – initially slashing-and-burning areas of forest. However, the land would have been considerably more heavily forested than most of Western Europe. In a flat, widely forested landscape with few easily quarried hills, wood was the primary building material for housing and defence, while the forests also provided many sources of wealth for trade: furs, wild honey and wax were major exports. In a country inhabited by a number of rival tribal groups, warfare and the sale of captives as slaves was another major source of income.

Agriculture was made more difficult by the climate. Russia is relatively far north and has a cold climate, long winters and relatively short growing seasons. Pereyaslav was a 10th century southern border fortress and it was on a similar latitude to Prague and Normandy. Ladoga in the north is on a similar latitude to the Shetland Islands and the south coast of Alaska.

www.weatherspark.com allows you to compare the climates of cities and I have made a couple of graphs comparing the growing seasons: the maximum (0%) and minimum (100%) period of non-freezing temperatures; and the growing degree days – the cumulative integral of warmth over 10°C – to show how much or little sunlight or warmth was available to grow plants for food.

Growing Season in Novgorod, Kiev and Vladimir (major centres in medieval Russia) compared to Lyons in France and Wichita in the USA to give an idea of “typical” values for Western Europe and North America.

Growing degree days in the same cities.

As you can see, Northern Russia in particular is a lot colder and has a considerably shorter growing season than the south, but even the climate around Kiev makes agriculture a lot more precarious than in Western Europe at that time. There is a possibility that frost might still bite well into May. In a situation where the vast majority of the population relies on agriculture, this climate is a significant handicap to the ability of the people and the elites to acquire wealth and develop economically.

However, the river network enabled trading, even in winter, when the sheet ice made for a far faster surface for travelling on, compared to Spring’s or Autumn’s muddy tracks. The ability to sail up-river to the centre of Russia, drag ones cargo over a relatively short land bridge, then down the Dnieper to the Black Sea and the riches of Constantinople had been attracting Viking traders for some time. As I mentioned above, according to the Povest’ Vremmenykh Let, in 862, the Slovenes, Krivichi (Russians) and the Finnic Chud’ and Merya had driven out the Vikings who had been extracting tribute from them, and called in another group of Vikings to rule. Their leader was Rurik…