Kievan Rus

The state that Russia, Ukraine and Belarus all claim as their origin, founded by Scandinavians on a river route to Constantinople. The Rus were Norse traders and raiders who worked the rivers running south from the Baltic, and by the ninth century they controlled a chain of towns from Novgorod to Kiev along the route the chronicles call the way from the Varangians to the Greeks. What moved along it was furs, wax, honey and slaves going south and silver, silk and wine coming north. Kiev became the centre under Oleg. The decisive moment was Vladimir's conversion in 988: having reportedly investigated the alternatives, he chose Byzantine Christianity, which brought Cyrillic letters, Slavonic liturgy, Byzantine law and church architecture, and permanently aligned the eastern Slavs with Constantinople rather than Rome. Yaroslav the Wise issued the first written law code, built Saint Sophia in Kiev, and married his daughters into half the royal houses of Europe. The state was never centralised: succession passed laterally among brothers rather than to sons, which guaranteed disputes, and it broke into competing principalities during the twelfth century. Novgorod developed a republican assembly and its own commercial empire in the north. The Mongols destroyed Kiev in 1240. The northeastern principalities became Russia and the southwestern ones passed to Lithuania and Poland. Saint Sophia in Kiev is a World Heritage site. The state ran from around 882 to 1240. Kiev was its capital and Novgorod its northern pole. Its law code was called the Russkaya Pravda. Old East Slavic is the common ancestor of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.

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