"You Get the Answers You Ask For" — a debate about pre-Mongol Rus' (18.07.2026)

A street debate between Vitaliy Dribnytsya and a Russian “layman” who is puzzled that so little is supposedly “known” about the era “before the baptism of Rus’.” Dribnytsya explains that written sources on these lands appear only from the 10th century, yet archaeologically there existed dozens of cultures here; he touches on the fact that pre-Slavic Kyiv paid tribute to the Khazar Khaganate (the tribute ended after Svyatoslav’s campaigns), and on the Chernyakhiv culture as a polyethnic formation that took shape with the arrival of the Goths.