The scholarly consensus holds that they were originally Norsemen, mainly originating from present-day Sweden, who settled and ruled along the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Seas from around the 8th to 11th centuries AD.
Russians are primarily descended from Slavs. However, Russia itself was created by a group of Vikings known as the Kievan Rus. Therefore, Russians have some Viking DNA in their ancestry. However, the original Vikings who founded Russia were absorbed into the native Slavic population.
The Russians were formed from East Slavic tribes, and their cultural ancestry is based in Kievan Rus'. Genetically, the majority of Russians are identical to their East and West Slavic counterparts; unlike northern Russians, who belong to the Northern European Baltic gene pool.
The historical people known as Vikings, who hailed from Scandinavia in Northern Europe, are well-known today for their exploits in the west. But the merchant-warriors also made their way into Eastern Europe, where they helped found a medieval federation in territory now known as Belarus, Ukraine and part of Russia.
Historians say that the Finno-Ugric people were the first inhabitants of Russia, with many of our customs and fairytales descending from their civilization: the cult of ancestors, the love of forests and villages, our patience and communality. But what remains of the ancient civilization is contested.
Soviet scholars traditionally maintained that a confederation of Slav tribes existed three centuries before the Vikings arrived. But many Western historians have maintained the first rulers of what is now Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus were Scandinavians.
The traditional start-date of specifically Russian history is the establishment of the Rus' state in the north in 862, ruled by Varangians. Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod became the first major cities of the new union of immigrants from Scandinavia with the Slavs and Finns.
Slavic tribes and Viking tribes were closely linked, fighting one another, intermixing and trading. “The presence of Slavic warriors in Denmark was more significant than previously thought; this image emerges from new research” Gardeła adds in the release.
The modern-day name for Russia (Rossiya) is derived from the Greek word for the Rus'. As the Kievan Rus' was evolving and separating into different states, what we now know as Russia was being called Rus' and Russkaya Zemlya (the land of the Rus').
The first modern state in Russia was founded in 862 by King Rurik of the Rus, who was made the ruler of Novgorod. Some years later, the Rus conquered the city of Kiev and started the kingdom of the Kievan Rus.
Haplogroup R1a (Y-DNA) – with an average of 53.4% Haplogroup I (Y-DNA) – with an average of 23.5% (Central and South Russia) Haplogroup N (Y-DNA) with an average of 17.3% Haplogroup R1b (Y-DNA) – with an average of 5.8%
Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family. It is a descendant of Old East Slavic, a language used in Kievan Rus', which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid 13th centuries.
The Russian language itself is not based on Greek, but its alphabet is. The Cyrillic alphabet is very closely based on the Greek alphabet, though it contains about a dozen additional letters, which were created in order to represent sounds found in Russian but not in Greek.
According to the traditional account presented in The Russian Primary Chronicle, it was founded by the Viking Oleg, ruler of Novgorod from about 879. In 882 he seized Smolensk and Kiev, and the latter city, owing to its strategic location on the Dnieper River, became the capital of Kievan Rus.
The first known people to set foot on Russian territory were called the Cimmerians. They ruled between 1000 and 700 BCE and were followed by the Scythians in 700 BCE. The Scythian nomads established a military state and defeated the Persians, but were nonetheless conquered by the Sarmatians in 3 BCE.
Occupied by Russian troops since the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav, Kyiv became a part of the Tsardom of Russia from 1667 on the Truce of Andrusovo and enjoyed a degree of autonomy. None of the Polish-Russian treaties concerning Kyiv have ever been ratified.
West Slavs originate from early Slavic tribes which settled in Central Europe after the East Germanic tribes had left this area during the migration period. They are noted as having mixed with Germanics, Hungarians, Celts (particularly the Boii), Old Prussians, and the Pannonian Avars.
“A lot of the Vikings are mixed individuals” with ancestry from both Southern Europe and Scandinavia, for example, or even a mix of Sami (Indigenous Scandinavian) and European ancestry.
If we are speaking ethnically, the closest people to a Viking in modern-day terms would be the Danish, Norwegians, Swedish, and Icelandic people. Interestingly though, it was common for their male Viking ancestors to intermarry with other nationalities, and so there is a lot of mixed heritage.
Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human to journey into outer space.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the term “White Russian” described ethnic Russians living in the area between Russia and Poland (today this includes Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia and Moldova).
Customarily, Slavs are subdivided into East Slavs (chiefly Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians), West Slavs (chiefly Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Wends, or Sorbs), and South Slavs (chiefly Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins).
The Liberation of Finnmark was a military operation, lasting from 23 October 1944 until 26 April 1945, in which Soviet and Norwegian forces wrested away control of Finnmark, the northernmost county of Norway, from Germany. It started with a Soviet offensive that liberated Kirkenes.
Russian has an alphabet quite similar to the Greek. This was intentional. Saints Methodius and Cyril used Greek as a basis to develop a written form of the Slavic languages, in order to facilitate the translation of religious texts. But Russian does not have Greek roots.
Genealogy of the Ukrainian People
Many historic documents prove that the Ukrainian language, and Ukrainian state, appeared earlier than the Russian ones.