| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
| Contents | ||
Culture and heritage is what is ultimately at stake in this controversy. The question is whether East Slavic civilisation owes an element of its cultural origin to the Scandinavian rulers of the 9th to 11th centuries, as suggested by the Normanist theory, or whether that heritage can excusively attributed to the Slavs, as held by the Slavists.
The question is emotionally charged. In the 1700s, one imperial Russian historian presenting the Normanist theory in St. Petersburg was forced to curtail his lecture by shouts from the audience and forced to cease his work on the issue. His work was destroyed (Source: Davies).
This theory is called the Normanist theory, as it suggests that Kievan Rus' may have been named after its Scandinavian overlords just as Normandy. According to the Primary Chronicle, Rus was a group of Varangians who lived on the other side of the Baltic sea, in Scandinavia. The Varangians were first expelled, then invited to rule the warring Slavic and Fennic tribes of Novgorod:
Later, the Primary Chronicle tells us, they conquered Kiev and created Kievan Rus'. The territory they conquered was named after them (see Etymology of Rus and derivatives) as were, eventually, the local people (cf. Normans).
The Normanist theory is also based on Ibn Fadlan who uses the name Rusiyyah for a group of people who are usually interpreted as Vikings near Astrakhan, and on Ibn Rustah who visited Novgorod and described how the Rus' exploited the Slavs.
When the Varangians arrived in Constantinople, the Byzantines considered and described the Rhos ( Greek Ρωσ) as a different people from the Slavs. In De Administrando Imperio[1] is given the names of the Dniepr cataracts in both Rhos and in Slavic. The Rhos names:
It is also due to the annals of Saint Bertan which relate that Emperor Louis II' court in Ingelheim, 839 (the same year as the first appearance of Varangians in Constantinople), was visited by a delegation from the Byzantine emperor. In this delegation there were two men who called themselves Rhos (Rhos vocari dicebant). Louis enquired about their origins and learnt that they were Swedes. Fearing that they were spies for their brothers, the Danes, he incarcerated them.
This theory claims that the name Rus, like the Finnish name for Sweden, is derived from an Old Norse term for "the men who row" (rods-) as rowing was the main method of navigating the Russian rivers, and that it is linked to the Swedish province of Roslagen (Rus-law) or Roden, from which most Varangians came. The name Rus would then have the same origin as the Finnish and Estonian names for Sweden: Ruotsi and Rootsi.
In contemporary Scandinavian sources Eastern Europe was called Greater Sweden or Sweden the Cold beside the name Gardarike (the land of cities). A similar way of naming an area of colonies has been used for southern Italy, Magna Graeca (Greater Greece).
It has been suggested that the Vikings had some enduring influence in Rus, as testified by loan words, such as yabeda "complaining person" (from aembetsman "official"), gospodin "lord" (from husbondi "master") and knout (from knutpiska a kind of whip with knots). Moreover certain Nordic names also became popularized, such as Oleg (Helgi), Olga (Helga) and Igor (Ingvar).
The proponents of the so-called "Normanist theory" of the Russian state - including Nikolai Karamzin and, later, Sergey Pogodin - wrote about the claims of the Primary Chronicle that the Varangians were invited by East Slavs to rule over them and bring order. The theory was not without political implications. In Karamzin's writing the normanist theory formed the basis and justification for Russian autocracy, and Pogodin used the theory to claim that the Russian state was immune to social upheavals and revolutions, because people's submission to their rulers was voluntary from the very beginning.