Rurik
Rurik was the Varangian chief whom, the Primary Chronicle says, the Slav and Finnic tribes of the Novgorod country invited in 862 to rule over them, because their land was great and rich and had no order in it, and who came with his brothers and his kin and took Novgorod. Every prince of Rus and every tsar of Russia to 1598 claimed descent from him, and the dynasty is called Rurikid after him, so that a man about whom nothing else is known is the founder of the Russian state. The chronicle, written in Kyiv in the early twelfth century, gives the story in a few lines. The tribes had driven the Varangians, meaning the Scandinavians, back across the sea and stopped paying them tribute, and then fought among themselves, and sent to the Varangians called Rus for a prince. Three brothers came, Rurik to Novgorod, Sineus to Beloozero and Truvor to Izborsk, and when the two younger died within two years Rurik took the whole. The invitation is the part historians have argued over for three centuries, since it makes the Russian state a Scandinavian foundation, which the eighteenth-century German academicians at St Petersburg liked and Lomonosov did not, and the argument between Normanists and anti-Normanists is still alive. What archaeology shows is a Scandinavian trading settlement at Ladoga from the 750s and a fortified one at the Rurikovo Gorodishche outside Novgorod from the middle of the ninth century, which is where a Rurik would have sat. Some scholars identify him with Rorik of Dorestad, a Danish chief who held a fief on the Rhine from the Carolingians and disappears from the Frankish annals about the right time. He sent two of his men, Askold and Dir, south, and they took Kyiv and raided Constantinople in 860 without him. He died in 879, the chronicle says, leaving a young son Igor in the care of his kinsman Oleg, who took Kyiv three years later and made it the capital. The line ran through Igor, and Novgorod, which had invited him, spent the next six centuries choosing and expelling his descendants as princes.
- Lived: 830 CE – 879 CE
- Nationality: Varangian
- Roles: prince, ruler, founder
