"Kyivan Rus' Never Existed" — Anatomy of a Myth

The myth

In a street debate a Russian interlocutor advances a common claim: “Kyivan Rus’” is an artificial name for a period of time, invented by historians at the start of the nineteenth century, and therefore no state by that name ever existed^[1]. It sounds like the exposure of a “Ukrainian invention,” but in fact three different assertions have been packed together here, each of which must be examined separately.

First conflation: the term versus the state

That the term “Kyivan Rus’” is a late coinage is entirely true. Contemporaries called their state simply “Rus’”, and it was nineteenth-century historians who began calling it “Kyivan” to distinguish it from later political centres. One can even point to the very person responsible: the term was introduced by Mykhailo Maksymovych — the first rector of Kyiv University — in a work of 1837, who used it for the period from the ninth to the thirteenth century on the grounds that the centre of decision-making was in Kyiv, while contemporaries and documents themselves called the state simply “Rus’“^[8][9]. So “Kyivan Rus’” was from the outset a conventional name for a period, not a self-designation of the state. But a name and the object it names are different things: the fact that a classificatory term appeared in the nineteenth century does not mean that the medieval state centred on Kyiv did not exist^[2]. By that logic one would have to “abolish” both Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire — both terms are likewise later coinages.

Second conflation: the founding legend versus the existence of the state

The second move is to reduce the whole history of Rus’ to the legend of its founding. The account of the calling of Rurik does indeed come from a single source — the Primary Chronicle — and is not corroborated by parallel sources; similar “summons to power” motifs occur among many European peoples, so historians have good reason to regard it as a chronicle legend^[3].

But this is a statement about method, not about the existence of the state. An event becomes a historical fact only when independent parallel sources confirm it; a single chronicle legend is not such confirmation^[4]. Acknowledging that the Rurik legend is a legend does not render the state of Rus’ non-existent: it is attested by entirely different testimonies independent of the Chronicle — Byzantine, Arabic and Western European. The threshold of verification here is quite concrete: parallel sources reliably attest only Ihor and his successors (Olha, Sviatoslav), whereas everything the Chronicle relates before Ihor remains legendary^[7]. The opponent, by contrast, does the opposite: he declares the state itself a legend, exploiting the fact that his interlocutor fails to distinguish these levels.

”The Rurikid dynasty” — also a late name

Bound up with the Rurik legend is another familiar cliché — “the Rurikid dynasty.” Here the same confusion of name and object is at work as with “Kyivan Rus’.” That a princely dynasty did indeed exist is beyond doubt: the chronicle clearly traces who was whose father and son. But that this dynasty called itself “Rurikids” is a later construction. The very phrase “Rurikid dynasty” does not appear in the Primary Chronicle at all^[10][11].

This is pointed to by an indirect but telling piece of evidence — the statistics of names within the princely line itself. If the line had traced itself to Rurik, the founder’s name ought to have been honorific and frequent. Instead, princes named Rurik over the whole of its history number only three or four, five at most, whereas the Volodymyrs, Olehs and Ihors are countless^[10][11]. The unpopularity of the founder’s name is an argument against the line’s having understood itself as “Rurikids”; the name itself was ascribed to it much later^[10]. So here too the opponent passes off a late label as an ancient self-designation — exactly as with “Kyivan Rus’.”

The “five Rus’es” and the invented “Novgorodian Rus’”

The mirror side of the “Kyivan Rus’ never existed” myth is the attempt, conversely, to multiply Rus’es: supposedly there was a Novgorodian Rus’, a Kyivan, a Muscovite, and “coloured” ones too — White, Red and Black. Hence the typical question from a Russian: why then, in this or that chronicle, is Novgorod or Volodymyr-on-the-Kliazma called “Rus’”?

The scheme of “five Rus’es” was constructed by Vasilii Tatishchev in the eighteenth century: there supposedly existed a Novgorodian Rus’ with its capital at Veliky Novgorod, a Lesser one with its capital at Kyiv, a White one at Rostov, a Red one at Cherven and a Black one^[12]. But Tatishchev himself wrote this not from the chronicles but from late German and Polish geographers — and even noted that “Black Rus’,” for instance, is not mentioned in Old Rus’ sources. Of these five, only Red Rus’ is a real historical name: it referred to towns now in south-eastern Poland (Kholm, Belz)^[17]. But “Novgorodian Rus’” is entirely absent from the sources: the phrase appears in no chronicle — it is an armchair term, invented by historians after the fact^[17]. The same device is at work here as with “Kyivan Rus’”: a late classificatory name is passed off as medieval reality.

What “Rus’” actually meant: an analysis of the chronicles

Rather than argue at random, it is worth turning to how the word “Rus’” is actually used in the chronicles themselves — and this was done by Russian historians, whom the opponent by definition trusts more. Volodymyr Kuchkin (Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences) analysed the work of scholars from Tatishchev to the present and showed: since chronicle-writing was conducted in different centres — the Laurentian, Hypatian, Trinity and Novgorod copies — the understanding of Rus’ varied both with place (spatial dynamics) and with the time of writing (temporal dynamics)^[13].

Combining the two dynamics, Russian scholars reached a conclusion opposite to imperial mythology: the understanding of Rus’ did not expand over time but contracted. In the ninth to twelfth centuries “Rus’” meant the territory of present-day Northern Ukraine (the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Pereiaslav regions), and by the twelfth to thirteenth centuries it meant chiefly the Kyiv region alone^[14]. Another scholar, who tried to find a “broad” understanding of Rus’ in the sources, counted: the three main copies use the word “Rus’” 717 times, and only four of those instances are interpreted broadly^[15]. So the isolated citations in which Novgorod or Zalissia is called “Rus’” are a statistical exception, which the layman tears out of context while the specialist sees it as a rare deviation from the norm^[15]. The myth that “we are all Rus’” itself has a concrete origin — the Synopsis of Innokentii Gizel of the second half of the seventeenth century, from which all later imperial and Soviet historiography reproduced it^[16].

The pre-scientific age: why Tatishchev and Karamzin cannot be taken at their word

Behind this lies a methodological observation as well. History as a science arose only in the first half of the nineteenth century — after the work of the German Leopold von Ranke, who established source criticism and archival work as the foundation of the craft. Everything written before that — by Tatishchev, Lomonosov, Karamzin — belongs to the pre-scientific age: the author took documents, pieced them together and drew his own conclusions, without critical verification^[18]. So to cite Tatishchev’s “five Rus’es” in the twenty-first century is the same as consulting an alchemist instead of a chemist.

Before the state: when archaeology does not confirm the chronicle

It is useful to see the lower boundary too — what came before Rus’. The Primary Chronicle lists fourteen tribal unions (seven of them on the territory of present-day Ukraine), but this list does not map onto the archaeology: only two cultures are traceable here — the Romny and the Volyntseve — into which the chronicle Polianians, Derevlianians, Volhynians and Ulichians fit together, while the Siverianians fit separately^[19]. What came before Rus’ is reconstructed by historians through the notion of the “chiefdom” — a twentieth-century sociological construct, an intermediate link between the tribe and the early state, transferred from studies of Pacific island peoples^[20]. This shows once again that both “Rus’” and its prehistory are an object of reconstruction from the sources, not a ready-made label to be simply stuck onto present-day Russia.

”The first capital of Rus’” — a wrongly posed question

A separate trap lurks in the very formulation “what was the first capital of Rus’.” The notion of a “capital” is a phenomenon of the early modern period: before the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries no such notion existed in Europe at all, and an early-medieval state was not described in terms of a “capital” (Madrid, for instance, became the capital of Spain only under Philip II)^[6][23]. So to demand a “first capital” of a state of the ninth and tenth centuries is to impose a late category on an era to which it is alien. A wrongly posed question does not prove the “non-existence” of Rus’ — it merely betrays the anachronism of the opponent himself.

This is not only a polemical argument but the position of Ukrainian academic scholarship. The latest multivolume edition “Ukraine. Essays in History” (Institute of History of the NAS of Ukraine, from 2023) records directly, in a footnote on page 301: Old Rus’ sources — neither the chronicles nor any others — have no term for “capital”^[21]. The same was shown by the Russian medievalist Alexander Nazarenko in his paper “Was There a Capital in Old Rus’?” at the Moscow conference “Capital and Peripheral Towns of Rus’ and Russia…” (December 1996): the only close expression is Hilarion’s designation of Kyiv as the “first-throned mother-city,” but even that merely calques the Greek ecclesiastical formula for principal (“primatial”) sees, rather than describing a political capital^[22]. Kyiv, then, was not a “capital” but a centre of decision-making and a spiritual core — the seat of the metropolitan; it was over this status, not over abstract “capitalness,” that the princes fought. Kyiv lost this status only after the Mongol invasion, when the metropolitan left the city^[23].

The mirror: the St Andrew’s flag

The double standard is seen most clearly when the same “source-based” criterion is turned back on the opponent. Asked to explain the St Andrew’s flag behind his back — why it is named after the Apostle Andrew the First-Called and what Andrew has to do with Russia — the interlocutor has no answer^[5].

And the answer is telling: the connection of the Apostle Andrew with Rus’ comes from exactly the same Primary Chronicle that the opponent has just dismissed — from the legend of Andrew’s journey up the Dnipro and his blessing of the hills on which Kyiv would arise. The Russian Empire made the cross of St Andrew the basis of its naval flag, relying on this very chronicle legend. So it turns out that the one demanding “bookish” confirmation for Kyivan Rus’ himself clings to a legend — as soon as it serves the desired narrative.

Conclusion

The claim that “Kyivan Rus’ never existed” rests not on sources but on three successive conflations: a late term is passed off as the absence of a state, the founding legend as the whole history of Rus’, while one’s own legendary symbolism is left exempt from criticism. Once the term, the legend and the state are distinguished, it becomes clear that there is no “exposure” at all — only a rhetorical device.