RURIK AND HIS DESCENDANTS
The Russian Slavs were an agricultural, not a warlike, people. They
fought bravely, but naked to the waist, and with no idea of military
organization, so were of course no match for the Turks, well skilled in
the arts of war, nor for the armed bands of Scandinavian merchants, who
made their territory a highway by which to reach the Greek provinces.
All the Slav asked was to be permitted to gather his harvests, and
dwell in his wooden towns and villages in peace. But this he could not
do. Not only was he under tribute to the Khazarui (a powerful tribe of
mingled Finnish and Turkish blood), and harried by the Turks, in the
South; overrun by the Finns and Lithuanians in the North; but in his
imperfect political condition he was broken up into minute divisions,
canton incessantly at war with canton, and there could be no peace.
The roving bands of Scandinavian traders and freebooters were
alternately his persecutors and protectors. After burning his villages
for some fancied offense, and appropriating his cattle and corn, they
would sell their service for the protection of Kief, Novgorod, and
Pskof as freely as they did the same thing to Constantinople and the
Greek cities. In other words, these brilliant, masterful intruders
were _Northmen_, and can undoubtedly be identified with those roving
sea-kings who terrorized Western Europe for a long and dreary period.
The disheartened Slavs of Novgorod came to a momentous decision. They
invited these Varangians--as they are called--to come and administer
their government. They said: "Our land is great and fruitful, but it
lacks order and justice. Come--take possession, and govern us." With
the arrival from Sweden of the three Vikings, Rurik and his two
brothers Sineus and Truvor, the true history of Russia begins, and the
one thousandth anniversary of that event was commemorated at Novgorod
in the year 1862.
Rurik was the Clovis of Russia. When with his band of followers he was
established at Novgorod the name of Russia came into existence,
supposedly from the Finnish word _ruotsi_, meaning rowers or
sea-farers. Slavonia was not only christened but regenerated at this
period, and infused into it were the new elements of martial order,
discipline, and the habit of implicit obedience to a chosen or
hereditary chief; and as Rurik's brothers soon conveniently died, their
territory also passed to him, and he assumed the title of Grand Prince.
Upon the death of Rurik in 879, his younger brother Oleg succeeded him
as regent during the minority of his son Igor; and when two more
Varangian brothers--Askold and Dir--in the same manner--except that
they were not invited--took possession of Kief on the Dnieper and set
up a rival principality in the South with ambitious designs upon
Byzantium, Oleg promptly had them assassinated, added their territory
to the dominion of Igor, and removed the capital from Novgorod to
Kief--saying, "Let Kief be the mother of Russian cities!" Then after
selecting a wife named Olga for the young Igor, he turned his attention
toward Byzantium, the powerful magnet about which Russian policy was
going to revolve for many centuries.
So invincible and so wise was this Oleg that he was believed to be a
sorcerer. When the Greek emperor blockaded the passage of the
Bosphorus in 907, he placed his two thousand boats (!) upon wheels, and
let the sails carry them overland to the gates of Constantinople. The
Russian poet Pushkin has made this the subject of a poem which tells
how Oleg, after exacting tribute from the frightened Emperor Leo VI.,
in true Norse fashion, hung his shield upon the golden gates as a
parting insult.
Again and again were the Greeks compelled to pay for immunity from
these invasions of the Varangian princes. After the death of Oleg,
Igor reigned, and in 941 led another expedition against Constantinople
which we are told was driven back by "Greek-fire." Then enlisting the
aid of the Pechenegs, a ferocious Tatar tribe, he returned with such
fury, and inflicted such atrocities, that the Greek Emperor begged for
mercy and offered to pay any price to be left alone. The invaders
said: "If Caesar speaks thus, what more do we want than to have gold
and silver and silks without fighting." A treaty of peace was signed
(945), the Russians swearing by their god Perun, and the Greeks by the
Gospels; and the victorious Igor turned his face toward Kief. But he
was never to reach that place.
The Drevlians, the most savage of the Tatar tribes, had been forced to
pay him a large tribute, and were meditating upon their revenge. They
said: "Let us kill the wolf or we will lose the flock." They watched
their opportunity, seized him, tied him to two young trees bent
forcibly together; then, letting them spring apart, the son of Rurik
was torn to pieces.
No act of the wise regent Oleg was more fruitful in consequences than
the choice of a wife for the young Igor. Olga, who acted as regent
during the minority of her son, was destined to be not only the heroine
of the Epic Cycle in Russia, but the first apostle of Christianity in
that heathen land; canonized by the Church, and remembered as "the
first Russian who mounted to the Heavenly Kingdom."
When the Drevlians sent gifts to appease her wrath at the murder of
Igor, and offered her the hand of their prince, she had the messengers
buried alive. All she asked was three pigeons and three sparrows from
every house in their capital town. Lighted tow was tied to the tails
of the birds, which were then permitted to fly back to their homes
under the eaves of the thatched houses. In the conflagration which
followed, the inhabitants were massacred in a pleasing variety of ways;
some strangled, some smothered in vapor, some buried alive, and those
remaining reduced to slavery.
But an extraordinary transformation was at hand; and this vindictive
heathen woman was going to be changed to an ardent convert to the
Christian faith. Nestor, who is the Russian Herodotus, relates that
she went to Constantinople in 955, to inquire into the mysteries of the
Christian Church. The emperor was astonished, it is said, at the
strength and adroitness of her mind. She was baptized by the Greek
Patriarch, under the new name of Helen, the emperor acting as her
godfather.
There were already a few Christians in Kief, but so unpopular was the
new religion that Olga's son Sviatoslaf, upon reaching his majority,
absolutely refused to make himself ridiculous by adopting his mother's
faith. "My men will mock me," was his reply to Olga's entreaties, and
Nestor adds "that he often became furious with her" for her importunity.
Sviatoslaf, the son of Igor and Olga, although the first prince to bear
a Russian name, was the very type of the cunning, ambitious, and
intrepid Northman, and his brief reign (964-972) displayed all these
qualities. He defeated the Khazarui, the most civilized of all those
Oriental people, and once the most powerful. He subjugated the
Pechenegs, perhaps the most brutal and least civilized of all the
barbarians. But these were only incidental to his real purpose.
The Bulgarian Empire was large, and had played an important part in the
past. It had a Tsar, while Russia had only a Grand Prince, and,
although now declining in strength, was a troublesome neighbor to the
Greek Empire. The oft-repeated mistake of inviting the aid of another
people was committed. Nothing could have better pleased Sviatoslaf
than to assist the Greek Empire, and when he captured the Bulgarian
capital city on the Danube, and even talked of making it his own
capital instead of Kief, it looked as if a great Slav Empire was
forming with its center almost within sight of Constantinople. The
Greeks were dismayed. With the Russians in the Balkan Peninsula, the
center of their dominions upon the Danube--with the Scythian hordes in
the South ready to do their bidding--and with scattered Slavonic tribes
from Macedon to the Peloponnesos gravitating toward them, what might
they not do? No more serious danger had ever threatened the Empire of
the East. They rushed to rescue Bulgaria from the very enemy they had
invited to overthrow it. After a prolonged struggle, and in spite of
the wild courage displayed by Sviatoslaf, he was driven back, and
compelled to swear by Perun and Volos never again to invade Bulgaria.
If they broke their vows, might they become "as yellow as gold, and
perish by their own arms." But this was for Sviatoslaf the last
invasion of any land. The avenging Pechenegs were waiting in ambush
for his return. They cut off his head and presented his skull to their
Prince as a drinking cup (972).
It seems scarcely necessary to call attention to the fact that the
transforming energy in this early period of Russian history was not in
the native people; but that the Slav, in the hands of his Norse rulers,
was as clay in the hands of the potter. In the treaty of peace signed
at Kief (945) by the victorious Igor, of the fifty names recorded by
Nestor only three were Slavonic and the rest Scandinavian. There can
be no doubt which was the dominant race in this the heroic age of
Russia.
So we have seen a weaker people submitting to the rule of a stronger,
not by conquest, like Spain under the Visigoths; not overrun and
overridden as Britain by the Angles and Saxons and Gaul by the Franks;
but, in recognition of its own helplessness, voluntarily becoming
subject to the control of strangers.
And we see at the same time the brilliant, restless Norseman, with no
plan of establishing a racial dominion, but simply in the temporary
enjoyment of his own warlike and robber instincts, engrafting himself
upon a less gifted people, and then adopting its language and customs,
letting himself be absorbed into the nationality he has helped to
create, and becoming a Russian, with the same facility as Rollo and his
sons at the very same period were becoming Frenchmen.