Ancient Russia: 1500 BC – 9th Century From about 1500 BC a group of people called the Slavs settled into the area which is now Poland and Western Russia. Although they were often under threat from other groups who wanted their land, they held their ground there until the arrival of the Vikings in the 9th century.
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.
During the ninth and tenth centuries, a massive state grew to dominate much of Eastern Europe. Ancestors to Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, the Kievan Rus were a combination of Slavic and Viking influences.
Ancient history
The ancestors of modern Russians are the Slavic tribes, whose original home is thought by some scholars to have been the wooded areas of the Pinsk Marshes, one of the largest wetlands in Europe.
“On account of these Varangians, the district of Novgorod became known as the land of Rus.” (“Rus,” which is where the name “Russia” comes from, purportedly derives from an old Nordic word for “men who row.”)
Their origin and identity are much in dispute. Traditional Western scholars believe them to be Scandinavian Vikings, an offshoot of the Varangians, who moved southward from the Baltic coast and founded the first consolidated state among the eastern Slavs, centring on Kiev.
From about 1500 BC a group of people called the Slavs settled into the area which is now Poland and Western Russia. Although they were often under threat from other groups who wanted their land, they held their ground there until the arrival of the Vikings in the 9th century.
Once the preeminent republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.; commonly known as the Soviet Union), Russia became an independent country after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Russia is a land of superlatives.
In the Russian Tsardom, the word Russia replaced the old name Rus' in official documents, though the names Rus' and Russian land were still common and synonymous to it, and often appeared in the form Great Russia (Russian: Великая Россия), which is more typical of the 17th century, whereas the state was also known as ...
Ethno-cultural subdivisions. 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.
The events of 1066 in England effectively marked the end of the Viking Age. By that time, all of the Scandinavian kingdoms were Christian, and what remained of Viking “culture” was being absorbed into the culture of Christian Europe.
Swedish Vikings and the Eastern World – Vikings in Russia
There are evidence for that a East Slavic empire was created by Vikings in Russia. A Viking called Oleg in Russian. This information comes from the “The Russian Primary Chronicle” that tells about Oleg and the foundation of Kievan Rus.
The history of Ukrainian nationality can be traced back to the kingdom of Kievan Rus' of the 9th to 12th centuries. It was the predecessor state to what would eventually become the Eastern Slavic nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.
Roughly 80 percent of Russians trace their ancestry to the Slavs who settled in the country 1,500 years ago. Other major groups include Tatars, who came with the Mongol invaders, and Ukrainians.
From 1956 until its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union consisted of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics.
The eastern empire, referred to as Byzantine Empire, knew of traders from the north, refered to as Rus, and later on as the Grand Duchy of Moscow.
In Greek mythology, various contacts with the part of the world that was later named Russia or the Soviet Union are recorded. The area was vaguely described as the Hyperborea ("beyond the North wind") and its mythical inhabitants, the Hyperboreans, were said to have blissfully lived under eternal sunshine.
Heading east from the ninth century onwards, these Vikings became known as the Rus, a moniker that lives on in the names of two countries, Russia and Belarus.
Mongol invasion and vassalage (1223–1480)
In 1237–1238 the Mongols burnt down the city of Vladimir (4 February 1238) and other major cities of northeast Russia, routed the Russians at the Sit' River, and then moved west into Poland and Hungary. By then they had conquered most of the Russian principalities.
By the early 18th century, Russia had vastly expanded through conquest, annexation, and the efforts of Russian explorers, developing into the Russian Empire, which remains the third-largest empire in history.
The first modern state in Russia was founded in 862 by King Rurik of the Rus, who was made the ruler of Novgorod.
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 Swedish Vikings in particular travelled eastwards. From the trading town of Birka and from Gotland they sailed across the Baltic, then along the East European and Russian rivers, reaching as far as the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
It both begins and ends with an invasion: the first Roman invasion in 55 BC and the Norman invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066. Add 'in between were the Anglo-Saxons and then the Vikings'.