Language is the basis of any ethnic formation, including a nationality, but language is not the only sign that makes it possible to speak of a given ethnic formation as a nationality. Nationality is characterized not only by a common language, which no longer eliminates local dialects, but also by a single territory, common forms of economic life, common culture, material and spiritual, common traditions, way of life, peculiarities of the mental warehouse, the so-called “national character”. Nationality is characterized by a sense of national consciousness and self-knowledge.
Nationality takes shape at a certain stage of social development, in the era of class society. The folding of the Eastern Slavs into a special branch of Slavdom dates back to the 7th-9th centuries, i.e. It refers to the time when the language of the Eastern Slavs was formed, and the 9th-10th centuries should be considered the beginning of the formation of the Old Russian people.
Rus' of feudal relations and the formation of the Old Russian state.
In 8-9 centuries. in the history of Eastern Slavs were a time of decomposition of primitive communal relations. At the same time, the transition from one social system - a primitive communal, pre-class, to another, more progressive, namely a class, feudal society, was ultimately the result of the development of productive forces, the evolution of production, which in turn was mainly the result of change and development tools of labor, tools of production. 8th-9th centuries were a time of serious changes in the tools of agricultural labor and agriculture in general. A ralo appears with a skid and an improved tip, a plow with asymmetric iron coulters and a plow.
Along with the development of productive forces in the field of agricultural production and the improvement of agricultural technology, the social division of labor, the separation of handicraft activity from agriculture, played a huge role in the decomposition of primitive communal relations.
The development of handicraft as a result of a gradual improvement in production techniques and the emergence of new handicraft tools, the separation of handicraft from other types of economic activity - all this was the greatest stimulus for the collapse of primitive communal relations.
The growth of handicrafts and the development of trade undermined the foundations of primitive communal relations and contributed to the emergence and development of feudal relations. The basis of feudal society arises and develops - feudal ownership of land. Various groups of dependent people are formed. Among them are slaves - serfs, robes (slave women), servants.
A huge mass of the rural population was made up of free community members, taxed only by tribute. The tribute turned into a quitrent. Among the dependent population, there were many enslaved people who lost their freedom as a result of debt obligations. This bonded people appears in sources called ryadovichi and purchases.
In Rus', a class early feudal society began to form. Where there was a division into classes, the state was bound to arise. And it arose. The state is created where and when there are conditions for its appearance in the form of the division of society into classes. The formation of feudal relations among the Eastern Slavs could not but determine the formation of an early feudal state. Such in Eastern Europe was the Old Russian state with the capital city of Kiev.
The creation of the Old Russian state was primarily a consequence of those processes that characterized the development of the productive forces of the Eastern Slavs and the change in the relations of production that dominated them.
We do not know how large the territory of Rus' was at that time, to what extent it included East Slavic lands, but it is obvious that, in addition to the Middle Dnieper, Kiev center, it consisted of a number of loosely connected lands and tribal principalities.
The merger of Kyiv and Novgorod completes the formation of the Old Russian state. Kyiv became the capital of the Old Russian state. This happened because it was the oldest center of East Slavic culture, with deep historical traditions and connections.
The end of the 10th century was marked by the completion of the unification of all the Eastern Slavs within the state borders of Kievan Rus. This unification takes place during the reign of Vladimir Svyatoslavovich (980-1015).
In 981, the land of the Vyatichi joined the Old Russian state, although traces of its former independence remained here for a long time. Three years later, in 984, after the battle on the Pischan River, the power of Kyiv extended to the Radimichi. Thus, the unification of all Eastern Slavs in a single state was completed. The Russian lands were united under the rule of Kyiv, "the mother city of Russia." According to the chronicle, the adoption of Christianity by Russia dates back to 988. It had a very great importance, as it contributed to the spread of writing and literacy, brought Rus' closer to other Christian countries, enriched Russian culture.
The international position of Rus' was strengthened, which was greatly facilitated by the adoption of Christianity by Russia. Ties with Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary have strengthened. Relations with Georgia and Armenia began.
Russians lived permanently in Constantinople. In turn, the Greeks came to Rus'. In Kyiv one could meet Greeks, Norwegians, British, Irish, Danes, Bulgarians, Khazars, Hungarians, Swedes, Poles, Jews, Estonians.
Nationality is an ethnic formation characteristic of a class society. Although the commonality of the language is also decisive for the nationality, one cannot limit oneself to this commonality when defining the nationality, in this case the Old Russian nationality.
The Old Russian nationality was formed as a result of the merger of tribes, tribal unions and the population of certain regions and lands of the Eastern Slavs, “narodtsy”, and it united the entire East Slavic world.
Russian, or Great Russian, nationality of the 14th-16th centuries. was an ethnic community of only a part, albeit a larger one, of the Eastern Slavs. It was formed on a vast territory from Pskov to Nizhny Novgorod and from Pomorie to the border with the Wild Field. The ancient Russian nationality was the ethnic ancestor of all three East Slavic nationalities: Russians or Great Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, and it developed on the verge of primitive and feudal society, in the era of early feudalism. Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians were formed in the nationality during the period of high development of feudal relations.
Old Russian nationality and its historical destinies have been the subject of discussion in historical science for a long time. This discussion began in the 1950s, when between M.P. Pogodin and M.A. Maksimovich, a dispute arose about who should be considered true "Russians", southerners or northerners, and who, therefore, truly belongs to the Kiev period of Russian history, the merit of creating the Russian state and nationality. In the future, the opposition of the southerners ("Little Russians") to the northerners ("Great Russians") acquired a very sharp outline, resulting in the historical concept of N.I. Kostomarov, which was built on the opposition of two principles: democratic, federal, embodied in the "South Russian" or "Little Russian" people, and "monocracy", personified by the Great Russian people.
N.I. Kostomarov spoke about the profound difference in the psychology of a Ukrainian and a Great Russian. He saw this difference in hoary antiquity, going back to Kyiv times. According to N.I. Kostomarov, "Southern Russian" is the bearer of people's freedom: he is full of hatred for violence, we are tolerant, he has no sense of national arrogance; he is an anarchist by nature, in him "there was nothing forcing, leveling, there was no politics, there was no cold calculation, firmness on the way to the intended goal." As for the Great Russian, he allegedly had such mental properties as slavish obedience to autocratic, despotic power, "the desire to give strength and formality to the unity of his land." N.I. Kostomarov wrote: “In the Great Russian element there is something enormous, creative, the spirit of harmony, the consciousness of unity, the dominance of practical reason, able to withstand difficult circumstances, catch the time when one should act, and use it as much as necessary ... This was not shown by our South Russian tribe. His free element led either to the decomposition public relations, or to a whirlpool of motives that turned the people's historical life like a squirrel wheel. These two Russian peoples have been shown to us by our past.”
Subsequently, the theory of the contrast of two nationalities degenerated into a nationalist theory, the apostle of which was M.S. Grushevsky, who completely denied any connection between Kievan Rus and North-Eastern Rus, the Great Russian people with the Old Russian.
It must be said that the formation of such trends in historical thought was objectively facilitated by the works of the largest representatives of pre-revolutionary science, who opposed the development of Kievan, Dnieper and Southern Rus' to what was done in Vladimir-Suzdal, and later Muscovite Rus'. Among them were such authoritative researchers of Russian antiquity as S.M. Solovyov and V.O. Klyuchevsky, for whom North-Eastern Rus' became the cradle of new relations in the economic, social and political spheres. The view of North-Eastern Rus' as something original, unlike the previous history, has become the property of the general public, penetrating into publications intended for self-education. In one of them one could, for example, read: “The Dnieper Rus is the most ancient period of our history, not only chronologically, but also really very far from the subsequent history of Russia proper, which grew out of the specific principality of North-Eastern Rus'. Rus' Dnieper and Rus' North-Eastern - two completely different historical reality; the history of the one and the other is not equally created by two different departments of the Russian nationality.
To the credit of pre-revolutionary scientists, it must be said that among them there were historians who strongly objected to attempts to tear Muscovite Rus from Kievan Rus, the Great Russian people from the Old Russian. A.E. belonged to them. Presnyakov is a subtle and thoughtful researcher of Russian history. In 1915-1916. for students of the Faculty of History and Philology, he gave a course of lectures on Kievan Rus, where he said with all certainty that in historical reality “the past is up to the 11th-12th centuries. inclusive - and later - XVII-XIX centuries. - belong so closely equally to the history of both branches of the Russian people or both Russian nationalities - Great Russian and Ukrainian, that without prejudice to the completeness and correctness of scientific study, without betraying historical truth, it is impossible to break off the study of their destinies "A.E. Presnyakov proceeded from the concept of "the unity of the Russian people", that is, Great Russians and Ukrainians. Therefore, he insisted that "the Kiev period should be considered as a prologue not to South Russian, but to all-Russian history."
Revealing signs for distinguishing and defining nationality in general and the Old Russian nationality in particular, A.E. Presnyakov names anthropological signs, language, territory and state organization. However, he put cultural and psychological characteristics at the forefront, paying tribute to the bourgeois sociology of the early 20th century.
In Soviet historiography, the question of the Old Russian nationality occupied one of the central places. True, in the first years of its development, there was no scientific understanding of the term “nationality”. The theory of K. Marx, F. Engels and V.I. Lenin about the stages of the ethnic evolution of society did not immediately enter our science. This position is well traced in studies of the Eastern Slavs, Russians. Despite the fact that historians resorted to the term "nationality", they still did not put into it the scientific meaning that is accepted now. That is why a variety of names were used to designate the ethnic formation of the Eastern Slavs during the period of Kievan Rus: “Russian people”, “Russians”, “Russian Slavs”, “Slavs”, “Eastern Slavs”. A.A. Shakhmatov considered it possible to speak even of a "Russian tribe." How far scientists stood from the problem of the formation of the ancient Russian people is evidenced by the fact that the ancient Russian society of the 10th century. was portrayed by some authors not as an ethnically consolidating society, but as disintegrating into numerous tribes, mentioned in the Tale of Bygone Years.
The dominance of the doctrine of the language of N.Ya. Marr with his stages in the development of speech, four-term analysis and other things pushed back the solution of the question of the essence and nature of ethnic formations in the era of the decomposition of the primitive communal system. The Japhetic ancestors of the Eastern Slavs "Et-Rus-ki", "Ras-Ena", ascending to one of the four elements "Rosh", ethnic categories that have become social, and vice versa, that is, the concepts inherent in the "new teaching" about language."
Throughout the 1930s, this issue was still in the shadows. It was not even delivered in a direct and clear form. This was explained, in addition to the indicated influence of the teachings of N.Ya. Marr, also by the fact that the main efforts of our researchers were then concentrated on the study of the socio-economic and political system of Kievan Rus.
A good example of this is the work of B.D. Grekov, although in his writings, which appeared at the designated time and later, the term “Russian people” appears. B.D. Grekov noted that the “Russian people” appeared on the historical stage in the 6th century, that they were not separate tribes of the Slavs of Eastern Europe, but a wider association, although the author does not give a definition to it, emphasizing only the ethnic unity of the Russian people in the Kiev period of its history and pointing out that the Kievan state "contributed to the merging of the Slavic tribes into a single Russian people", and the concepts of "Eastern Slavs" and "Russian people" act as equivalent to him. Only in one place B.D. Grekov speaks of nationality, indicating that the ethnogenic process ended with the "formation of the Slavic nationality." He marks two ethnic units - a tribe and a people. The historian uses the term "Old Russian" but only in relation to the language. "The Old Russian language, - in his opinion, is the local Slavic language." B.D. Grekov emphasizes the unity of the Russian language of Kievan times, primarily the literary language, the feeling of the unity of Rus' and the Russian people, ending these considerations with a conclusion; "The Kiev state is the cradle of the Great Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples."
Thus, in relation to the Eastern Slavs of the Kievan times, B.D. Grekov used the term "Russian people". We meet the same in the works of N.S. Derzhavin, who titled one of his books “The Origin of the Russian People”. In it, he declares that the East Slavic tribes in fact constitute the "Russian people." In another book by N.S. Derzhavin also argued that the Eastern Slavs form "themselves as a whole the Russian people."
The first formulation of the question of the Old Russian nationality takes place in the works of V.V. Mavrodina. In the monograph "Formation of the Old Russian State" (1945), the author writes about the Old Russian people primarily in theoretical terms. He believes that social development, the result of which was the creation of the Old Russian state, was of great importance in the formation of the Old Russian nationality. The Kiev state politically united the East Slavic, Russian tribes, connected them with a common political life, culture, religion, a common struggle against external enemies and common interests in the international arena, historical traditions, contributed to the emergence and strengthening of the concept of the unity of Rus' and Russians. All these phenomena together led to the formation of the Old Russian nationality. At the heart of this process was not only the common origin of the Eastern Slavs and their way of life, but also the unity of the historically established forms of socio-political, state life, the unity of culture and religion, the commonality of traditions, state borders and interests. Therefore, about the Russians of the 9th-11th centuries. the author speaks not as a conglomerate of tribes, but as a single nationality, an ethnic community following the tribes and unions of tribes, which he calls the Old Russian nationality. He gives the same characteristic of the Eastern Slavs of the times of the Kievan state in the book "Ancient Rus'".
However, V.V. Mavrodin draws attention to the fact that at the time under consideration the process of folding a single ancient Russian people did not end. The ensuing feudal fragmentation divided the ancient Russian nationality into parts, predetermined the emergence of ethnic formations from the time of the “national regions” (V.I. Lenin). In this case, the author mixed two phenomena, namely, the formation of the ancient Russian nationality and its future fate. Subsequently, V.V. Mavrodin emphasized that the collapse of the ancient Russian people was not so much a consequence of the incompleteness of the process of its formation, but rather the result of the historical conditions that developed in Rus' as a result of the Batu invasion and the seizure of its lands by Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Golden Horde, the Order and Moldavia. Although he dwelled on this issue in his work “The Formation of the Old Russian State”, he still did not draw the necessary conclusions.
Developing the concept of B.D. Grekova, V.V. Mavrodin attaches great importance to the national consciousness and self-consciousness of the Russian people of the Kievan era, the consciousness of the unity of Rus' and the Russian people. Later, following B.D. Grekov and N.S. Derzhavin, he prefers to use the term "Russian people" in relation to the Eastern Slavs of the times of the Old Russian state. At the same time, V.V. Mavrodin points out that the concept of "people" should not be used in the social sense ("working masses"), but as an ethnic category. According to V.V. Mavrodin, the nationalities were the Great Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians of the XIV-XVI centuries, but they were ethnic formations that were not identical to the nationality that developed in Kievan Rus. Therefore, perhaps the term "Russian people" should be assigned to the latter.
At the beginning of 1950, V.V. Mavrodin presents the article "The main stages of the ethnic development of the Russian people." In it, he poses a number of fundamental theoretical problems. The author has no doubt that in the IX-XI centuries. “the Russian people formed”, and immediately raises the question of the scientific understanding of the very term “Russian people”. He writes: “Often the term “Russian people” is used to refer to both Russians, the times of Oleg and Igor, and Russians of our day. This is not true". Arguing with A.D. Udaltsov, V.V. Mavrodin emphasizes that the people are not some special ethnic category that arose after the union of tribes and the previous nationality, and believes that during the time of the Kievan state, the Eastern Slavs consolidated into a single Russian nationality. In order to eliminate the possibility of confusion of the concepts of "nationality" in relation to the Great Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples of the XIV-XVI centuries. and “nationality” of the Russian IX-XI centuries, he proposes “to recognize as legitimate, after the term “Old Russian language”, “Old Russian literature”, “Old Russian art” and the term “Old Russian nationality””.
In the same article, the author raises the question of the evolution of the East Slavic ethnos in a different way in the period following the collapse of the Old Russian state. He does not consider feudal fragmentation to be the main reason for the division of the Old Russian people into three later peoples of the Eastern Slavs. V.V. Mavrodin believes that the process of further consolidation and development of a single nationality of the Eastern Slavs was interrupted “mainly” (this factor played a decisive role) by the Batu invasion, the rejection of Russian lands, and the seizure of many Russian lands by neighboring states.
In his subsequent works, V.V. Mavrodin developed the views on the ancient Russian people expressed in 1945. About the Russian people of Kyiv times V.V. Mavrodin writes in the book "The Formation of a United Russian State". Noting the fact that all East Slavic tribes merged into the Old Russian people, he also singled out the unity of language, territory, culture, mental make-up, the consciousness of the unity of all Russians, characteristic of the Old Russian people. In the book on the Old Russian state, in which the whole chapter (VII) is called "Old Russian nationality", he wrote that one of the most important phenomena associated with Kievan Rus, with the formation and development of the Old Russian state, is the folding of the Eastern Slavs into the Old Russian nationality. The tribe, the ethnic category of primitive society, along with the establishment of feudal relations in Rus', is being replaced by another, more perfect ethnic category - nationality. Over time, all the tribes and territorial-ethnic associations of the Eastern Slavs merged into the Old Russian nationality. The same considerations were expressed by him in a lecture given in 1957 at the Leningrad Party School.
A significant impact on the study of the Old Russian people was made by the discussion open by Pravda on questions of linguistics and the publication of the work of I.V. Stalin "Marxism and questions of linguistics". The appearance of this work left a sharp imprint on the nature of the study by specialists of the problems of the history of the ancient Russian people. Dogmatic adherence to Stalin's provisions for some time paralyzed the creative study of the issue of ancient Russian nationality. Efforts were made to consider them in the light of the statements of I.V. Stalin on the development of language and the formation of nations.
First of all, it is necessary to mention the works of B.A. Rybakov. In one of them, the author defines nationality as an ethnic community of the era of the formation of a slave-owning or feudal society, which arose on the basis of a long-standing linguistic relationship. He considers the common language (in the presence of dialects), territory, culture, economic life and the presence of economic ties to be signs of nationality. The Old Russian nationality was preceded by a single Slavic nationality of the II-IV centuries. n. e., which belongs to the Chernyakhov culture. The Russian (Old Russian) nationality began to separate and form in the east of the Middle Dnieper region in the 1st-7th centuries. In the IX-X centuries. “The early period of the formation of the Old Russian nationality ended,” which was consolidated by the formation of the Old Russian state.
Then a new work by B.A. Rybakova “The problem of the formation of the Old Russian nationality in the light of the works of I.V. Stalin." In this article, the author repeated the definition of the Old Russian nationality, formulated by him earlier, clarifying it with the characteristics of economic ties, depicted in the form inherent in the feudal economy. He speaks about the formation of the Old Russian people in the X-XI centuries. only after the annalistic tribes finally disappeared. B.A. Rybakov also clarifies the very name of the nationality, recommending "in order to avoid confusion" that it be called not "Russian", but "Old Russian". Developing his idea about the transformation of the Eastern Slavs into a nationality in the east of the Middle Dnieper region in the 5th-7th centuries, the author suggests that the core of the Old Russian nationality of the 9th-10th centuries. was the union of the East Slavic "tribes of Rus'" VI-VII centuries. The further course of this thought took place in the article by B.A. Rybakov "Ancient Rus", published in 1953. It reproduces the previous definition of the concept of "nationality", emphasizes the role of the Old Russian state in strengthening the unity of the Old Russian nationality. According to B.A. Rybakov, the beginning of the formation of the ancient Russian nationality should be considered the 6th-7th centuries, and its design - the 9th-10th centuries. The beginnings of this process were deposited in the so-called "Antiquities of the Rus" ("antiquities of the Antes" by A.A. Spitsyn) in the east of the Middle Dnieper.
Simultaneously with B.A. Rybakov on the history of the ancient Russian people was made by A.N. Nasonov, who emphasized the huge role in the formation of the East Slavic or Old Russian nationality of the political factor - the emergence of the Old Russian state, which merged the northern and southern groups of East Slavic tribes. In a monographic study devoted to the study of the formation of the territory of the Old Russian state, A.N. Nasonov notes that in this study he does not consider the plot of the Old Russian people, which developed around the 6th-11th centuries, but the very wording expressed by him gives reason to believe that the author accepts the term "Old Russian people" to designate the Eastern Slavs of the era of Kievan Rus .
D.S. Likhachev, exploring the process of the emergence of Russian literature, touched upon some aspects related to the ancient Russian people. He believes that "with the development of the feudal system and the collapse of the relations of the tribal society, the transition from the East Slavic tribes to a single ancient Russian people was determined." At the same time, “the process of formation of the Old Russian nationality began, apparently, long before the appearance of the early feudal Old Russian state. An external manifestation of this process of folding the East Slavic tribes into the Old Russian nationality was the emergence of various political associations among them, such as, for example, the state association of the Dulebs and others. D.S. Likhachev speaks about the linguistic, economic, territorial, mental and cultural community of the ancient Russian people. But, unlike the nation, the listed elements of the community of the ancient Russian people were not stable. Noting the fact that Russian literature of the XI-XIII centuries. grew up “on a single basis of the Old Russian nationality”, D.S. Likhachev emphasizes that literature, in turn, "contributed to the formation of this nationality, creating that community of culture, which is one of the necessary signs of the formation of a nationality, and then a nation."
In 1954, our country celebrated the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia. The theses of the Central Committee of the CPSU were published for the celebration, which stated: "The Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples originate from a single root - the ancient Russian people that created the ancient Russian state - Kievan Rus." The interest of scientists to the problem of the ancient Russian nationality has intensified. Several works on this topic have been published, written by M.N. Tikhomirov, A.N. Kozachenko, V.I. Dovzhenko and others.
Article by M.N. Tikhomirov was entitled "The Significance of Ancient Rus' in the Development of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Peoples". Of great importance in the formation of the ancient Russian nationality M.N. Tikhomirov attached to economic ties and consciousness of the unity of Rus' and Russians. At the same time, he points to the commonality of language and territory as characteristic features of the Old Russian people.
As for V.I. Dovzhenko, already in 1953 he delivered a report “On the question of the formation of the ancient Russian nationality”, where he noted that the time of the formation of the nationality was the period of the decomposition of the primitive communal system and the transition to a class society. According to V.I. Dovzhenka, an ethnic community of the Eastern Slavs of the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e., i.e., the era of the Ants, "was not yet a nationality." The Kiev state played a certain role in the formation of the ancient Russian people, but it was based on a cultural and ethnic community. IN AND. Dovzhenok believes that the unity of the ancient Russian people was broken not by feudal fragmentation, but by the Tatar invasion. However, in a later article by V.I. Dovzhenok refers the beginning of the formation of the Old Russian people precisely to the time of the Ants.
The statement of V.I. Dovzhenko that “the question of the composition of the Old Russian nationality is new” and that “it became possible to raise it only after the publication of the work of I.V. Stalin in Linguistics. That the question of the ancient Russian nationality was by no means new and was raised in our Soviet historical science before 1950, is evidenced, albeit indirectly, by V.I. Dovzhenok, arguing with V.V. Mavrodin, whose works on the Old Russian people were published five years before the discussion about the language.
The first attempt to give a historiography of the ancient Russian people was undertaken by A.I. Kozachenko. He noted that V.V. Mavrodin belongs to the leadership in posing the question of the ancient Russian nationality. According to A.I. Kozachenko, the Old Russian nationality is characterized by a common language (at the same time, the language of writing played a large role in its formation), territory, which was largely due to the formation of the Old Russian state, as well as economic, religious and consciousness of the unity of all Russian people. A.I. Kozachenko divides the formation of the ancient Russian nationality into three stages: 1) VII-IX centuries. - the period of formation and the beginning of the development of the ancient Russian people; 2) X - the first half of the XIII century. - the heyday of the ancient Russian people; 3) the second half of the XIII century. - the collapse of the ancient Russian people.
A number of studies in the field of the history of the formation and development of the Old Russian people were written by L.V. Tcherepnin. In the chapter “The Emergence of the Old Russian Nationality”, prepared for the “Essays on the History of the USSR”, which appeared in 1953, L.V. Cherepnin speaks of those phenomena, as a result of which the ancient Russian nationality arose. He thinks that it was formed from separate Slavic tribes in the era of the decomposition of the primitive communal system and the emergence of a class society. According to L.V. Tcherepnin, we have grounds to speak of a certain commonality of territory, language, mental make-up of the ancient Russian people. At the same time, all these forms of community could take place "only on the basis of a well-known (albeit very relative in the era of early feudalism) economic community." L.V. Cherepnin attaches great importance to the linguistic community of the Old Russian people and especially to the feeling of unity of all Russian people and Rus', national consciousness, patriotism, which pervades the folklore, literary works and annals of Kievan Rus.
L.V. Tcherepnin owns a rather detailed work on the history of the Old Russian people of a generalizing nature, in which the results of what has been done in this area are summed up and tasks for further research are outlined. According to L.V. Tcherepnin, "nationality is a historical category following the clan and tribe and preceding the nation." He connects the formation of nationalities with the process of "decomposition of the primitive communal system, the transition from patriarchal-clan relations to territorial associations, the emergence of commodity production, the formation and development of new production relations" typical of class societies. Addressing the Russian people, L.V. Cherepnin believes that when considering it, one should proceed from the idea of it as a historically emerging and developing feudal mode of production on the economic basis, a community of people with their own language, territory and culture. Old Russian nationality performs at L.V. Cherepnin as a stage in the development of the Russian people. The author proposes the following periodization of the formation of the Russian nationality: “1) VI-IX centuries. - the period of decomposition of the primitive communal system and the genesis of feudalism among the Eastern Slavs, when the prerequisites for the emergence of the ancient Russian people are created; 2) IX - the beginning of the XII century. - the early feudal period in Rus', the time of the further development of the ancient Russian people; 3) XII-XIII centuries. - the period of feudal fragmentation, when the prerequisites are created for the formation of the Great Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities on the basis of the Old Russian people; 4) XIV-XV centuries. - the period of gradual overcoming of feudal fragmentation, the time of the formation of the Great Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities; 5) the end of the XV - the beginning of the XVII century. - the time of the formation and strengthening of the Russian centralized state, when the Great Russian nationality finally took shape.
Thus, VI-IX centuries. for L.V. Cherepnin is the first stage in the development of the Russian people and, at the same time, the initial stage in the formation of the Old Russian people, which was the result of the separation of the Eastern Slavs from their western and southern counterparts, as well as the result of the consolidation of the East Slavic tribes. In the course of the consolidation of the Eastern Slavs, the preconditions for the emergence of the Old Russian nationality were created, which was facilitated by the emergence of large tribal unions and territorial-political associations, constant movements and wars that undermined tribal foundations. L.V. Cherepnin emphasizes that the formation of the ancient Russian people during the VI-IX centuries. was associated with "new phenomena in the socio-economic life of the Eastern Slavs", which contributed to its rapprochement and merger. One of the main factors of the socio-economic order was the feudalization of the East Slavic society, during which the formation of the Old Russian people took place, accompanied by the formation of the Russian state. It was on feudalism that L.V. Cherepnin draws attention. The feudal mode of production, established by the 9th century. in the most developed socio-economic areas, served as the basis for the formation of the ancient Russian people.
Later, during the 9th - early 12th centuries, the development of the Old Russian people was, as before, associated with the growth of feudalism. IX-XI centuries - the era when the ancient Russian nationality took shape, which happened with the active influence of the state. The accelerating moment in the process of its folding was the "struggle against the steppe nomads." In general, military affairs contributed to the formation of the ancient Russian nationality: “During the campaigns in the militias, in which a large number of Russian warriors gathered, territorial and cultural ties were formed, the features of the future national state were formed.”
A certain role in the development of the ancient Russian nationality L.V. Cherepnin dismisses the adoption of Christianity in Rus'. “A very complex issue,” the author writes, “is the relationship between the problem of the formation of a nationality and the problem of the class struggle. During the IX - beginning of the XII century. class contradictions in ancient Rus' inherent in the feudal formation" became more and more aggravated, and this aggravation found its manifestation in anti-feudal movements. But in the course of these movements, the remnants of tribal ties were destroyed, and new relations were formed between the broad masses of the productive part of the population, based on territorial ties, in conditions of strengthening the feudal mode of production. And in this sense, when studying the process of the formation of the ancient Russian nationality, one cannot get rid of questions relating to the history of the class struggle.
Characterizing the ancient Russian nationality of the 9th - early 12th centuries, L.V. Cherepnin talks about the relative commonality of the language (with the presence and persistence of dialect differences), culture, and territory.
By the XII-XIII centuries. refers to the third stage of the history of the Russian people in general and Old Russian in particular. It was distinguished by the emergence of prerequisites "for the fragmentation of the ancient Russian nationality, as a result of which the Great Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities are subsequently formed." Revealing the reasons for the creation of three nationalities on a common basis, L.V. Cherepnin disagrees with those scientists who saw them in foreign policy upheavals (the Tatar-Mongol invasion), which caused the isolation of North-Eastern, North-Western and Southern Rus', as a result of which the hitherto united ancient Russian nationality fell apart. L.V. Cherepnin does not observe the collapse and disintegration of either the Old Russian state or the Old Russian people. Simply “there was a dismemberment of the early feudal state into a number of feudal lands and principalities as a result of the further process of feudalization. And the prerequisites were created for crushing ancient Russian people". L.V. Cherepnin is convinced that “to reduce the reasons for the emergence of the Great Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples on the basis of the ancient Russian nationality to the Tatar-Mongol invasion and conquest and to the transition of the territory of ancient Russia to different states, and not to take into account the significance of feudal fragmentation in this process, is to underestimate that feudal fragmentation is a natural stage in the development of peoples in the era of feudalism and clearly exaggerate the economic community in the period of the early feudal state. Hence L.V. Cherepnin concludes that the emergence of "the prerequisites for the formation of the Great Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities is not at all the result of the collapse or collapse of the Old Russian nationality, but a natural consequence of its development." L.V. Cherepnin for the period XII - early XIII century. states the relative unity of the ancient Russian people and the territory inhabited by this people. But at the same time, at the indicated time, the boundaries of the territories of the Great Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities were already outlined, that is, “the process of fragmentation of the ancient Russian nationality began, which much later led to the formation of three East Slavic nationalities.”
Of considerable interest is the book of P.N. Tretyakov "At the origins of the ancient Russian nationality", published in 1970. In this book, the author studies the process of formation of the ancient Russian nationality - one of the most important issues in the ancient and early medieval history of our country. He points out that the term "Old Russian nationality" makes it possible not to confuse the ethnic association of the Eastern Slavs of the times of Kievan Rus with the Russian nationality of the XIV-XVI centuries. Noting that the formation of a nationality is a natural phenomenon characteristic of the period of early class society, P.N. Tretyakov defines nationality as the forerunner of the nation, a historical community formed from various tribal groups based on economic ties in the era of the decomposition of primitive communal relations and the collapse of the tribal system, the emergence of class society and the state. The formation and development of the Old Russian state played a significant role in the formation of the Old Russian nationality. Speaking about the stages of the formation of the Old Russian nationality, P.N. Tretyakov refers the process of formation of the ancient Russian people to the turn of the 1st and 2nd millennium AD. e., but its beginning dates back to an earlier time. He considers the founders of the ancient Russian people the creators and bearers of the Zarubintsy culture, who dominated the forest-steppe Dnieper region and Polesie, on the Lower Desna and on the Seimas from the 2nd century BC. BC e. and up to the II century. n. e. From here they advanced into the Upper Dnieper. Having absorbed and assimilated the eastern Balts, they rushed from the Upper Dnieper region to the north, northeast and south, to the Middle Dnieper region. These were the ancestors of the annalistic tribes of the Polyans, Slovenes, Krivichi, Vyatichi, Severyans, in the formation of which the Balts played a significant role. Other, western origin Dregovichi, Drevlyans, Volhynians. Speaking about the tribes of the Tale of Bygone Years, P.N. Tretyakov defines them as "territorial-political unions", and not tribes in the proper sense of the word. They were "primitive peoples, or" people ", located at different levels of consolidation and little by little absorbed by the emerging ancient Russian people." Its primary core was formed in the Middle Dnieper, where the Slavic tribes, who assimilated the Balts, penetrated from the north, from the Upper Dnieper.
The work of M.Yu. Braichevsky, for whom the formula “Old Russian nationality is the common ancestor of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples” is unsuccessful and therefore unacceptable. Rus', according to his opinion, constituted an ethnic community not absolute, but relative. Without taking this circumstance into account, it is difficult to understand the very fact of the division of the Eastern Slavs into the three peoples mentioned. M.Yu. Braichevsky believes that the ancient Russian people had a complex structure based on deep genetic foundations. He proves that each of the specific chronicle tribes grew out of a special ethnic substrate: the Polans - from the tribes of the Chernyakhov culture, the Drevlyans - from the Milograd culture, the northerners - from the Yukhnov culture, etc. In the process of the formation of the Old Russian nationality, the linguistic and ethnographic features of the East Slavic tribes did not disappear. Consolidation of the Eastern Slavs is observed around three centers: southern, northeastern and northwestern. That is why the main core of the formation of the Ukrainian nationality was the Polyanskaya forest-steppe, the Russian one - the upper reaches of the Dnieper, Oka and Volga, and the Belarusian one - the region of the Dregovichi and Polochans. Rus' (Old Russian nationality) is a stage in the ethnic history of Eastern Slavs, when tribal division was basically overcome, and a new structure, characterized by the separate emergence of three East Slavic peoples (Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian) is not yet complete.
Interest in the problem of ancient Russian nationality has not waned in recent times. Again and again V.V. Mavrodin. In 1971, his book “The Formation of the Old Russian State and the Formation of the Old Russian Nationality” was published, which is a course of lectures given to students of the historical faculty of Leningrad State University. Here the author emphasizes that the term "Old Russian nationality" most accurately corresponds to the ethnic community of the era of Kievan Rus. According to V.V. Mavrodin, the ancient Russian nationality was preceded by ethnic communities that were no longer either tribes or unions of tribes, but had not yet formed into a nationality - these are, say, Volhynians, Polochans, Krivichi. Speaking about the ancient Russian nationality, V.V. Mavrodin points to the community of language, political and state life, territory, economy, material and spiritual culture, customs, life, traditions, and religion that is characteristic of it. He attaches an important role to the consciousness of the unity of Rus' and the Russian people, to national consciousness and self-knowledge, and the author uses the terms “nationality” and “nationality” alternatively.
"The Origin of the Russian People" - another book by V.V. Mavrodin, where the process of formation of the ancient Russian nationality is considered. As in the previous work, it is noted here that the term “Old Russian nationality” was adopted by Soviet historians due to its greatest correspondence with the ethnic community of the times of Kievan Rus: “The nationality of that time cannot be called Russian, because this would mean putting an equal sign between the nationality into which the Slavs in the IX-XI centuries, and that Russian people of the times of Dmitry Donskoy and Ivan the Terrible, which united only a part of the Eastern Slavs.
Once again V.V. Mavrodin reveals the signs of nationality as an ethnic entity. “Nationhood,” he writes, “is characterized not only by a common language, which by no means eliminates local dialects, but also by a single territory, common forms of economic life, a common culture, material and spiritual, common traditions, a way of life, peculiarities of the mental warehouse, the so-called “ national character." Nationality is characterized by a sense of national consciousness and self-knowledge. At the same time, the term "national consciousness" should be understood as the consciousness of the unity of people belonging to a given nationality. Finally, such factors as a single statehood and even belonging to a certain religion are of no small importance ... "
V.V. Mavrodin argues that nationality arises at a certain stage of social development, in the era of class society, since nationality is an ethnic formation that is characteristic of a class society. As for the ancient Russian nationality, the beginning of its formation “should be considered the 9th-10th centuries. - the time of the emergence of feudal relations in Rus' and the formation of the Old Russian state.
Ethnic development of Rus' in the era of "feudal fragmentation" of the XI-XIII centuries. became the subject of study by P.P. Tolochko. Having analyzed the opinions of his predecessors who dealt with this problem, he came to the conclusion that “the main conclusions of the researchers boil down to the following: 1) the ancient Russian people did not represent a completely stable ethnic community, and its decomposition was determined by the state disintegration of Rus' in the era of feudal fragmentation; 2) the ancient Russian nationality was a stable ethnic community and significantly outlived Kievan Rus; 3) Old Russian people of the XII-XIII centuries. experienced a period of further consolidation and was one of the main elements of the unity of the country until the Mongol-Tatar invasion. P.P. Tolochko asks which of the listed conclusions is most consistent with historical truth. And he leans towards the third of them. True, the author believes that this conclusion, although correct, needs further substantiation. P.P. Tolochko and tries to give him his own justification. First of all, the scientist turns to the language and establishes the linguistic unity of the ancient Russian lands of the XII-XIII centuries. “Created on the basis of the language of related East Slavic tribes and formed in the conditions of a single state, the Old Russian language,” notes P.P. Tolochko, - not only did not fall apart in the XII-XIII centuries, but significantly survived Kievan Rus. The activity of the socio-political life of Rus' in the era of feudal fragmentation not only did not contribute to regional linguistic isolation, but practically excluded it.
In addition to the linguistic community inherent in the consolidating Old Russian people of the 12th-13th centuries, P.P. Tolochko observes a territorial community, cultural unity, a well-known economic and state community.
To the problems of the history of the ancient Russian people P.P. Tolochko returns again in his recent book on the socio-political system of Ancient Rus'. Here he speaks of the need for further study of the ethnic development of Rus', both at the stage of the initial formation of the ancient Russian people, and in the era of feudal fragmentation of the 12th-13th centuries. Such a study, in the author's opinion, should be closely connected with the study of the political and state evolution of the East Slavic society, which had a profound impact on the process of formation of the ancient Russian nationality. In fact, ethnic and political phenomena were intertwined, mutually conditioning each other: “At a certain stage in the development of the East Slavic tribes (VI-VIII centuries), due to their internal consolidation - linguistic, cultural and economic - it became necessary and possible to create first several, and then and unified public education. Born on a territorial basis of kindred East Slavic tribes, the Old Russian state of the 9th-10th centuries. itself became a necessary condition for their further consolidation, their transformation into a single ancient Russian people”). In general, “the activation of the processes of social development, which led to the change of the primitive communal system in Rus' by the feudal one; the emergence of classes, the strengthening of trade ties, the emergence of writing, and then the literary language - all this led to the overcoming of tribal isolation and the formation of a single ancient Russian people.
The awakening of the consciousness of the unity of the Eastern Slavs is the main thing, according to P.P. Tolochko, achieving their ethnic development.
Speaking against the reassessment of the influence of feudal fragmentation on the historical fate of the ancient Russian people and arguing with historians, N.S. Derzhavin and V.V. Mavrodin, linguists L.A. Bulakhovsky and R.I. Avanesov, the author notes that these scientists do not have convincing arguments and most often refer to “the formula of feudal fragmentation, in which economic, cultural and political ties between individual lands seem to stall. The unproven thesis about the collapse of the Old Russian state, thus, turned into the main evidence of the decomposition of the Old Russian people.
P.P. Tolochko, as before, discovers in Rus' the XII-XIII centuries. ethnic, political and territorial community. He perceives the Old Russian nationality as one of the main factors of "the unity of the Russian lands of the era of feudal fragmentation." According to him, “Old Russian nationality was such a monolithic ethnic formation that even under the conditions of foreign domination - first by the Mongol-Tatar khans, and then by the Lithuanian princes, Polish and Hungarian kings - in different parts of the former territory of Ancient Rus', a lot of common language remained, culture, way of life, customs, traditions.
V.V. sees the mechanism of formation of the ancient Russian people somewhat differently. Sedov. The transformation of the Slavic tribes, which occupied the vast expanse of Eastern Europe, into the Old Russian (or East Slavic) people, he notices in the VIII-IX centuries. V.V. Sedov believes that the ancient Russian people at that time had “basically a Slavic population, united not on an ethno-dialect, but on a territorial basis”, since the settlement of the Eastern Slavs in the wide expanses of Central and Eastern Europe in the 6th-7th centuries “led to the disunity of the evolution of various language trends. This evolution began to bear not a general, but a local character. Of paramount importance in the formation of the ancient Russian nationality V.V. Sedov gives to the state. He writes: “The leading role in the formation of this nationality, apparently, belongs to the ancient Russian state. After all, it is not for nothing that the beginning of the formation of the ancient Russian nationality coincides in time with the process of the formation of the Russian state. The territory of the Old Russian state also coincides with the area of the East Slavic people. The emergence of an early feudal state with a center in Kyiv actively contributed to the consolidation of the Slavic tribes that made up the Old Russian nationality. The creative role of the state can also be traced in the 9th-12th centuries: "The Old Russian state united all the Eastern Slavs into a single organism, connected them with a common political life, and, of course, contributed to strengthening the concept of the unity of Rus'."
The formation of the Old Russian people in the Upper Volga region is the subject of research by I.V. Dubova. Ethnic changes observed in this region since the 9th century, as he believes, “follow from a general historical phenomenon - the formation of an early feudal society ... in the 9th century, the transition from the tribal system to the feudal system begins in this area, and the formation of the Old Russian people here is one of manifestations of feudalism.
I.V. Dubov emphasizes that not only Slavic settlers, but also local residents, the Finno-Ugric peoples, took part in the ethnic consolidation of North-Eastern Rus'. According to him, "the phenomenon of the formation of the ancient Russian nationality" in the Upper Volga region is extremely complex and multifaceted. Here there is the settlement of the Slavs, and their assimilation of the local Finno-Ugric peoples, and acculturation, thanks to which Finno-Ugric features clearly appear in the material and spiritual culture of the North-East of Rus'.
It should be noted that significant attention was paid to the issue of the ethnic components of the ancient Russian nationality in Soviet science. In the process of the formation of the ancient Russian nationality of the times of Kievan Rus, some researchers attached great importance to non-Slavic ethnic groups, in particular (and first of all) the Finno-Ugric peoples; others, on the contrary, denied the foreign-speaking population as an integral element of the Eastern Slavs. Speaking about the tribes of the Finno-Ugric languages absorbed by Russians, M.N. Pokrovsky claimed that "80% of their blood flows in the veins of the Great Russians." Speech by M.N. Pokrovsky, of course, is talking about the Great Russians as the descendants of the Russians of the Kyiv period of national history, who assimilated mery, all, muroma. A diametrically opposite point of view was held by D.K. Zelenin, who in the article “Did the Finns take part in the formation of the Great Russian nationality”, proved that the Finns did not take any part in the formation of the Russian nationality, nor in the development of its culture. Ideas D.K. Zelenin were criticized by S.P. Tolstov.
It must be said that Soviet researchers once paid tribute to N.Ya. Marr about ethnogenesis in general and the ethnogenesis of Russians in particular. N.Ya. Marr wrote: “What is meant by a tribe? Creatures of the same species, zoological type with congenital ab ovo breeding characteristics, like breeding horses, breeding cows? We don’t know such human tribes when it comes to language.” And language is the basis of an ethnic group. It is no coincidence that the fifth volume of selected works by N.Ya. Marra is called "Ethno- and glottogony of Eastern Europe", which emphasizes the commonality of the process of ethnogenesis and language development.
Applying this idea of his to the Eastern Slavs, N.Ya. Marr noted: “In the formation of a Slav, a specific Russian, as, indeed, by all appearances, and Finns, the actual historical population should be taken into account not as a source of influence, but as a creative material force of formation ...”
In the works of our scientists (V.V. Mavrodin, B.A. Rybakov, L.V. Cherepnin, V.T. Pashuto, P.N. Tretyakov), dedicated to the ancient Russian people, it is said that in the ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs, non-Slavic population, ethnic formations of the Finno-Ugric, Baltic, Iranian and Turkic languages took an active part in the formation of the ancient Russian nationality.
Finno-Ugric, Baltic, Iranian and Turkic elements of the Old Russian language were the subject of research by Soviet linguists F.P. Filina, P.Ya. Chernykha, A.M. Selishcheva, S.B. Bernstein, L.P. Yakubinsky, N.A. Meshchersky and Dr.
Traces of the material culture of the non-Slavic population in the culture of the Eastern Slavs of the era of the Old Russian people were studied by Soviet archaeologists (V.I. Ravdonikas, A.V. Artsikhovsky, H.A. Moora, L.A. Golubeva, A.P. Smirnov, E.I. Goryunova, P. N. Tretyakov, V. V. Sedov, F. D. Gurevich, J. V. Stankevich, T. N. Nikolskaya, M. I. Artamonov, S. A. Pletneva, M. V. Fekhner, I.V. Dubov).
Anthropologists (G.F. Debets, V.V. Bunak, T.A. Trofimova, N.N. Cheboksarov and others) have traced the ancient ethnosubstratum and the racial types introduced from outside into the Slavic environment, in particular moderately Mongoloid ones. Their research showed that in Eastern Europe the racial type was more stable than the language.
Recently, much attention has been paid to the question of the role of the Balts in the process of ethnic development of the Eastern Slavs, in the formation of the ancient Russian people (P.N. Tretyakov, V.V. Sedov, V.N. Toporov, O.N. Trubachev, A.G. . Mitrofanov). P.N. Tretyakov emphasizes the important role of the Balts in the formation of the Old Russian people, and V.V. Sedov gives them this role in the formation of the Belarusian nation. Opponents V.V. Sedov noted that he, in fact, speaks of the influence of the Balts on the ancient East Slavic population, on the Old Russian, and not just the Belarusian people.
As a result of lengthy research, Soviet scientists came to the conclusion that the Slavicization of the ancient Baltic and Finno-Ugric populations of Eastern Europe was a significant factor in the formation and development of the Old Russian state, which took shape as an economic, political and cultural unity of not only Slavic, but also non-Slavic tribes.
Of undoubted value are works that reveal the ethnic self-consciousness of the ancient Russian people.
So, the work of our researchers created the concept of the Old Russian people. To designate the ethnic formation of the Eastern Slavs of the era of Kievan Rus, the term "Old Russian nationality" was established in science.
The achievement of Soviet historians is their dynamic approach to the Old Russian people as an ethnic community undergoing a process of development. The role of non-Slavic ethnic elements in the formation of the Old Russian nationality is determined.
In the scientific literature, a view has developed on the Old Russian nationality, the fundamental criterion of which is, first of all, the commonality of the language, which, however, retains local dialects. For the ancient Russian people, a common territory is typical, which, according to scientists, coincides with the political community in the form of the Old Russian state, which united all the Eastern Slavs. It also recognizes a well-known economic community, the unity of material and spiritual culture, religion, which in ancient times acted as a universal, all-encompassing form of ideology. The same traditions, customs, mores, customary law, law and court, military structure contributed to the consolidation of the Eastern Slavs into a single nation. The commonality of interests in the struggle for the independence of Rus' also played a big role. All Soviet researchers attach very significant importance to the national consciousness of the unity of Rus', self-knowledge and a sense of patriotism.
Finally, the fact has been finally established that the ancient Russian nationality was the common ancestor of the three later Slavic nationalities - Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians ..
So, there are indisputable successes achieved by modern Soviet science in the field of studying the history of the ancient Russian people. But it would be a mistake to think that all problems have been solved exhaustively and definitively. Some of the most important questions relating to the Old Russian people need further research. It is impossible, for example, to overestimate the importance of territorial-communal ties among the Eastern Slavs in the 6th-9th centuries. as one of the essential conditions for the formation of the Old Russian nationality. The tribal system at the indicated time still dominated the East Slavic world. Recognition of this fact makes it necessary to make adjustments to the dating of the initial stage of the formation of the Old Russian people.
It is also necessary to find out the degree of influence of the Old Russian statehood on the formation of the Old Russian nationality, since the latest ideas about this are based on the questionable thesis about the state unity of Rus', which allegedly already at the end of the 10th century. constituted an early feudal monarchy. As the analysis of sources shows, in the 10th century, under the hegemony of Kyiv in Eastern Europe, a grandiose intertribal alliance, and by no means an early feudal monarchy, was formed. The cohesion of this union was very relative. In addition, at the end of the X century. there are clear signs of degradation.
There are good reasons to object also to the too straightforward and rigid dependence of the emergence of the Old Russian people on the processes of class formation, which is proved by modern researchers. In Kievan Rus, classes had not yet taken shape, but the nationality already existed. Apparently, the beginning of the formation of the nationality refers to the period when tribal orders are replaced by territorial ones. And this happens as a result of the decomposition of tribal relations. The collapse of the tribal system falls at the end of the X - the beginning of the XI century. It was a time of deep "destruction of closed tribal cells", the irrepressible collapse of tribal ties, the transition "from the vervi-clan to the vervi-community ... from collective tribal agriculture to more progressive then - individual." It is no coincidence that in Kyiv during the reign of Vladimir Svyatoslavich, there are beggars and wretched people - a clear sign of the decomposition of tribal groups. These poor people served as the source of the emergence of such a variety of slavery as servility. The formation of servility, completed at the expense of fellow tribesmen, became a powerful factor in the collapse of tribal relations. Under the same Prince Vladimir, robberies, that is, all kinds of crimes, multiplied in Rus'. Traditional tribal protection, therefore, no longer provided inner peace, which also testifies to the crisis state of the tribal system. Ancient Rus' was entering a new, transitional era from a pre-class society to a class one, which A.I. Neusykhin, in relation to the Western European countries of the early Middle Ages, called the "pre-feudal period". The social organization that was taking shape during this period, with its inherent community without primitiveness (without tribal archaism), gave a powerful impetus to the process of formation of the ancient Russian people.
With such a formulation of the question, we must talk about the interdependence, interdependence of class formation and the subsequent development of the ancient Russian people. But this process took place outside the history of Ancient Rus' and proceeded in the XIV-XV centuries, when the ancient Russian people turned into the Great Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples.
The study aims to highlight the prehistory, the processes of formation, development and dialect division of the Old Russian people. Until now, archaeological materials have not been involved in a holistic solution of this problem. Linguists repeatedly turned to the questions of the history and dialectology of the Old Russian language, as a result of which the linguistic questions themselves turned out to be more developed than the historical ones. On the part of historians, attempts to illuminate the essence of the ancient Russian people were less productive, since historical science does not have a sufficient source base in solving ethnogenetic topics. The use of archeological data in the study of the origins and evolution of the Old Russian ethnos, taking into account all the results obtained so far by other sciences, seems to be very promising. This is the purpose of the proposed work.
The archaeological materials collected by many generations of researchers have now made up an enormous source fund, which is increasingly being used to study the complex historical processes that took place in Eastern Europe in antiquity and the Middle Ages. On the basis of archeological data, important results have already been obtained on a number of historical and ethnocultural topics that could not be resolved on the basis of information from historical sources that has come down to us. It seems that the time has come for the widest use of materials from archeology and in research on the complex problem of the formation of the Old Russian people, revealing its content and conditions for differentiation.
The book opens with a historiographical section that outlines the process of developing knowledge about this medieval ethnos. The research part consists of several sections. In order to understand the historical period preceding the formation of the ancient Russian nationality, it was necessary to shed light on its prehistory in the most detailed way. It turns out that the process of mastering the East European Plain by the Slavs was very complex and multi-act. Colonization was carried out from different sides and by various ethnographic Proto-Slavic groups. The heterogeneity of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe was aggravated by the fact that in different places the Slavs found multi-ethnic natives (various Finnish-speaking tribes in the forest belt, a heterogeneous Baltic population in the Upper Dnieper and adjacent lands, Iranian-speaking and Turkic tribes in the South). On the eve of the formation of the Old Russian people on the East European Plain, several large ethno-tribal groups of the Slavic ethnos are archaeologically recorded, some of which were represented by dialect formations of the Late Proto-Slavic era. These groups in some cases are not comparable with chronicle tribes.
Based on archaeological materials, powerful integration phenomena that took place on the East European Plain in the last centuries of the 1st millennium AD are revealed. e., which consolidated the heterogeneous Slavs, led to its cultural unity, and ultimately to the formation of an ethno-linguistic community - the Old Russian people. An independent section is devoted to the study of these integration phenomena, among which the wide infiltration of the Danube Slavs into Eastern European lands, which was first discovered on the basis of archeological data.
The heterogeneous ethno-tribal composition of the Old Russian people was reflected in its dialect structure, reconstructed on the basis of archaeological materials, and in the fragmentation of its territory into historical lands, which became separate political entities during the period of feudal fragmentation of Rus'. However, in this situation, the East Slavic ethno-linguistic community continued its unified development for some time, both culturally and ethnically.
Only Tatar-Mongol yoke and the inclusion of significant parts of the East Slavic territories into the state of Lithuania broke the unity of the ancient Russian people. A gradual process of formation of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnic groups began.
This is the essence of the proposed study.
In an effort to draw a holistic picture of the ethnic history of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe, the author had to develop a number of topics that have not yet received adequate coverage in the scientific literature. Thus, the work establishes that in the northern part of the East Slavic area, the Slavic population appeared not on the eve of the formation of the Old Russian state, as it seemed recently, but even during the Great Migration of Peoples. The problem of the Rus, one of the formations of the Proto-Slavic era, is also illuminated in a new way.
The history of the study of the problem of ancient Russian nationality
This problem attracted the attention of researchers already in the first half of the 19th century. At an early stage, it was considered mainly on the basis of linguistic materials, which is quite understandable, since language is the most important marker of any ethnic formation. Among Russian scientists, A. Kh. Vostokov was the first to try to highlight the topic under consideration. Having identified some of the distinctive features of the Old Russian dialects, the researcher argued that the Old Russian language stood out from the common Slavic. He dated the emergence of differences between the individual Slavic languages of the 12th-13th centuries, believing that at the time of Cyril and Methodius, all Slavs still understood each other relatively easily, that is, they used the common Slavic language.
This issue was studied somewhat more specifically by I. I. Sreznevsky, who believed that the common Slavic (proto-Slavic) language was initially divided into two branches - western and southeastern, and the latter, after some time, differentiated into Old Russian and South Slavic languages. The researcher attributed the beginning of the Old Russian language to the 9th–10th centuries. During this period it was still monolithic. Dialectal features in the Old Russian language, according to the research of I. I. Sreznevsky, appear in the XI-XIV centuries, and in the XV century. on its basis, the Great Russian (with division into the North Great Russian and South Great Russian groups, the latter with a Belarusian sub-dialect) and Little Russian (Ukrainian) dialects are formed.
P. A. Lavrovsky explained the division of the Old Russian language into the Great Russian and Little Russian dialects by the historical situation - the formation in the time of Andrei Bogolyubsky of a state independent of Kyiv in North-Eastern Rus'. This linguist first expressed the idea of the early, even before the appearance of writing in Rus', the formation of the Old Novgorod dialect, which, however, did not meet with support among scientists of the 19th century.
In the second half of the last century, the tradition of deriving the Old Russian language from Proto-Slavic took root in linguistic literature completely. Only a few scholars have sporadically taken a different view. So, the historian M.P. Pogodin expressed the idea that the Kievan land was originally “originally Great Russian”, and Galician Rus was “Little Russian”. The Tatar-Mongol invasion significantly devastated the Kyiv region, after which it was occupied by immigrants from Galicia and thus became Little Russian. A different opinion was held by M.A. Maksimovich, who believed that the population of Kievan Rus was Ukrainian. According to this researcher, the Ukrainian ethnos was preserved in the southern lands of Rus' in the subsequent time, right up to the present. There was no desolation of the territory of modern Ukraine either in the Tatar-Mongolian period or ever before.
Of the historical and dialectological studies of the Old Russian ethno-linguistic community of this period, the works of A. I. Sobolevsky are of the greatest importance. Based on the analysis of ancient Russian written monuments of the XI-XIV centuries. this researcher singled out and characterized the features of the Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk-Polotsk, Kyiv and Volyn-Galician dialects within the Old Russian language. He believed that the dialect division of the Old Russian language corresponded to the tribal division of the Eastern Slavs of the previous period.
The first serious historical and linguistic understanding of the beginning of the East Slavic ethno-linguistic community, the process of formation, development, dialect structure and decay of the Old Russian language belongs to A. A. Shakhmatov. Throughout his fruitful activity, this scientist somewhat changed and improved his views on this issue. I will confine myself here to a brief presentation of the essence of the constructions to which A. A. Shakhmatov came to in the last periods of his scientific work.
The first stage in the emergence of Russians (as the researcher called the Eastern Slavs), who separated from the southeastern branch of the Proto-Slavism, A. A. Shakhmatov dated the 5th-6th centuries. The "first ancestral home" of the emerging East Slavic ethnos was the lands in the interfluve of the lower reaches of the Prut and Dniester. These were the Antes, mentioned in historical sources of the 6th-7th centuries. and became the core of the Eastern Slavs. In the 6th century, fleeing the Avars, a significant part of the Ants moved to Volhynia and the Middle Dnieper region. A. A. Shakhmatov called this region “the cradle of the Russian tribe”, since the Eastern Slavs here constituted “one ethnographic whole”. In the IX-X centuries. from this area began a wide settlement of the East Slavic ethnic group, which mastered wide areas from the Black Sea to Ilmen and from the Carpathians to the Don.
The period from the 9th–10th to the 13th century, according to A. A. Shakhmatov, was the next stage in the history of the Eastern Slavs, which he calls Old Russian. As a result of settlement, the Eastern Slavs at that time differentiated into three large dialects - North Russian, East Russian (or Central Russian) and South Russian. The North Russians are that part of the Eastern Slavs who advanced to the upper reaches of the Dnieper and Western Dvina, to the basins of the Ilmensky and Peipsi lakes, and also settled the interfluve of the Volga and Oka. As a result, a political union was formed here, in which the Krivichi occupied a dominant position and into which the Finnish-speaking tribes were drawn - Merya, Ves, Chud and Muroma. To the east of the Dnieper and in the Don basin, an East Russian dialect was formed, in which akanye originally developed. The Ukrainian language and its dialects became the linguistic basis for the reconstruction of the South Russian dialect, in connection with which the South Russians A.A. The researcher's point of view in relation to the Croats was not firm - they were sometimes ranked among the South Russians, sometimes they were excluded from the environment of the East Slavic tribes.
The wide settlement of the Eastern Slavs on the East European Plain and their division into three groups did not violate their unified linguistic development. The decisive role in the unified development of the Old Russian language, as A. A. Shakhmatov believed, was played by the Kiev state. With its emergence, a “common Russian life” is formed, the process of common Russian linguistic integration develops. The leading role of Kyiv determined the unified all-Russian linguistic processes throughout the territory of Ancient Rus'.
In the XIII century. the Old Russian linguistic community is disintegrating. In the following centuries, on the basis of the North Russian, East Russian and South Russian dialects of the Old Russian language and as a result of their interaction, separate East Slavic languages \u200b\u200bare formed - Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.
The concept of A. A. Shakhmatov was a significant stimulus in the further study of the Old Russian language and nationality. It was adopted by a number of prominent linguists of that time, including D. N. Ushakov, E. F. Budde, B. M. Lyapunov. For a long time, the constructions of A. A. Shakhmatov were widespread among Russian scientists, and in some part they have not lost their significance to this day.
The Serbian linguist D.P. Dzhurovich, who made an interesting attempt to reconstruct the dialect division of the Proto-Slavic language, believed that it also included the Proto-Russian dialect, which became the basis of the Old Russian language, and localized it in the right-bank part of the Middle Dnieper, up to the basin of the upper Bug, inclusive .
Of undoubted interest are studies in the field of the origin of the East Slavic language of the Polish Slavist T. Ler-Splavinsky. He argued that the provision on the Proto-Russian (Old Russian) linguistic unity, formed during the division of the Proto-Slavic community, belongs to the indisputable. The researcher gave a detailed description of the "Proto-Russian language", describing the features that are unique to this language and alien to other Slavic languages. Until the end of the XI century. this language was divided not into three, as A. A. Shakhmatov believed, but only into two dialect groups: the northern and the more extensive southern, each of which had its own characteristic phonetic features. This division, according to T. Ler-Splavinsky, corresponded to the two cultural and political centers of Ancient Rus' - Kyiv and Novgorod. Kyiv united the southern tribes of the Eastern Slavs: Polyans, Drevlyans, Northerners, Radimichi, Vyatichi and, probably, others. Novgorod belonged to the lands of the Slovenian Ilmen and Krivichi.
The time of differentiation of the Old Russian language into the northern and southern branches, according to T. Ler-Splavinsky, cannot be determined from linguistic data. After the 11th century, during the period of political fragmentation of Rus', the process of gradual transformation of these dialect groups into three East Slavic languages begins. Thus, in the XIII-XIV centuries. Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian languages appear. The Russian language is formed on the basis of the consolidation of the North Russian group with a part of the South Russian. The Ukrainian language was formed entirely from the South Russian group, while the Belarusian language evolved from its northwestern part.
The constructions of T. Ler-Splavinsky were not widely used in linguistics and were accepted only by a few of its representatives.
The well-known linguist N. S. Trubetskoy tried to approach the coverage of the issues under consideration in a different way. The question of the existence of the Old Russian (Common East Slavic) language, in his opinion, should be considered firmly established. The researcher, like many of his predecessors, argued that the language development went from Proto-Slavic to Common East Slavic, and then as a result of the collapse of the latter, three independent East Slavic languages were formed. Following T. Ler-Splavinsky, N. S. Trubetskoy tried to substantiate the initial division of the common Russian language into two dialect groups, southern and northern, which differed markedly in basic phonetic features. He admitted the existence of such a division even in the pre-literate period. While the southern part of the Eastern Slavs, the scientist argued, developed in contact with the southern and western Slavs, the northern group became sharply isolated. Sound changes penetrating from the Slavic south and west did not reach the north of the eastern Slavs. Here development proceeded in contact interaction with the non-Slavic tribes of the Baltic region. This was realized later in the existence of two cultural centers in Ancient Rus': Kyiv and Novgorod. Thus, it turned out that the origin of elements of the North Russian and South Russian dialects is older than the formation of the Old Russian language.
N. S. Trubetskoy did not determine the time of formation of the common Russian language, but assumed that its two-term structure was preserved until the 60s of the XII century, when the process of the decline of the reduced ones began, dated by the researcher to 1164–1282. After 1282, the Old Russian language ceased to exist - the main phonetic changes now developed locally, not covering the East Slavic world as a whole.
N. S. Trubetskoy's research on the long-standing two-term structure of the East Slavic language caused a heated discussion. They were sharply criticized by A. M. Selishchev. N. N. Durnovo actively opposed the objections of A. M. Selishchev.
In many linguistic works of the first half of the XX century. studied (without ethnohistorical excursions) the characteristic features of the Old Russian (East Slavonic) language and its dialects, which left no doubt about the existence of a single ethno-linguistic community during the period of Kievan Rus. At the same time, research showed that the Old Russian language became the common basis for the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. In this regard, we can mention the work of N. N. Durnovo on the history of the Russian language. The researcher emphasized that the phonetic and morphological foundations of the pre-written Proto-Russian language were directly inherited from the common Slavic.
Meanwhile, in the first decades of the 20th century, other opinions were also expressed, denying the commonality of the Eastern Slavs. Thus, the historian M.S. Grushevsky attributed the origin of the Ukrainian ethnos to the Dnieper union of the tribes of the Antes, known to Byzantine authors of the 6th century. . Some linguists tried to deny the existence of a single Old Russian language. Thus, the Austrian Slavists S. Smal-Stotsky and T. Garter, determining the relationship of languages only by the number of groups of similar features, believed that the Ukrainian language has similarities with Serbian in ten groups, and with Great Russian only in nine. Consequently, they concluded, Ukrainians once had much closer association with Serbs than with Great Russians, and there is no closer relationship between Great Russians and Ukrainians than with other Slavic ethnic groups. As a result, the researchers argued that there was no common Russian language, and the Ukrainian language goes back directly to Proto-Slavic. A similar opinion was also held by E. K. Timchenko. The constructions and conclusions of S. Smal-Stotsky met with unanimous rejection and severe criticism from linguists.
In the 20s of the XX century. V. Yu. Lastovsky and A. Shlyubsky preached the so-called "Krivichi" theory of the origin of Belarusians. They proceeded from the position that the Belarusians were direct descendants of the Krivichi, who supposedly constituted an independent Slavic people. The researchers did not provide any factual data confirming this hypothesis, but they simply do not exist.
Very interesting provisions on the issues under consideration were put forward in the 30-40s of the XX century. B. M. Lyapunov. A monolithic common Slavic language that did not know dialects, in his opinion, never existed. Already in the era of the Proto-Slavic language, there were noticeable dialect differences. However, the common Russian (East Slavonic) language was not based on a single Proto-Slavic dialect, but was formed from several ancient Proto-Slavic dialects, the speakers of which settled in the eastern part of the Slavic world.
Naming the East Slavic phonetic and morphological features that distinguished the common Russian language from the rest of the Slavic languages, B. M. Lyapunov believed that there were many dialects on the common Russian territory, and not three or two, as A. A. Shakhmatov and T. Ler-Splavinsky believed. The researcher allowed the existence in the prehistoric period of the dialects of the Polyans, Drevlyans, Buzhans and other tribal formations of the Eastern Slavs, recorded in the annals. He believed that the Rostov-Suzdal land was inhabited by a special ancient Russian tribe, whose name has not come down to us. The common Russian language, according to B. M. Lyapunov, functioned in the era of Kievan Rus, that is, in the X-XII centuries. Around the 12th century features begin to form, which later formed the specifics of the Russian and Ukrainian languages.
By the end of the 40s of the XX century. include extensive studies of the Old Russian language and its dialects by R. I. Avanesov. The concept of A. A. Shakhmatov on the differentiation of a single Russian ethnos by the 9th century. into three dialects was criticized by this linguist and was rejected as "anti-historical". R. I. Avanesov had no doubt that the Eastern Slavs once constituted a linguistic community and stood out from the common Slavic array. The formation of the Old Russian people of the era of Kievan Rus, according to the ideas of this researcher, was supposedly preceded by the East Slavic linguistic community. During the tribal period, this community included many dialects that were unstable, and their isoglosses were constantly changing. In the IX-XI centuries. in the conditions of the formation of feudalism, the settled population increases, its stability in territorial terms. As a result, a single and monolithic in origin language of the Old Russian people is formed, which, however, received unequal local coloring in different regions. This is how territorial dialects are formed, which destroyed the old tribal ones. New regional dialect formations were more stable, they gravitated towards large urban centers. At the same time, the ancient tribal isoglosses turned out to be almost completely erased, which, as R.I. Avanesov believed, makes judgments about the dialect division of the Eastern Slavs of the prehistoric period controversial. We can only talk about certain dialectal features that divided the East Slavic area into northern and southern zones, as well as about narrow regional phenomena (Novgorod dialects, Pskov dialects, East Krivichi dialects of the Rostov-Suzdal land).
In the XII century. In connection with the decline of the Old Russian state, R. I. Avanesov wrote, regional trends are intensifying, which initiated the formation of linguistic features, which later became characteristic features of the three East Slavic languages. The final addition of the latter occurred several centuries later.
In the 1950s, B. A. Rybakov first attracted these archaeologists to the study of the problems under consideration. He proposed a hypothesis about the Middle Dnieper beginning of the Old Russian people. Its core, according to the ideas of the researcher, was a tribal union, formed in the 6th-7th centuries. in the Middle Dnieper (from the basins of Ros and Tyasmin on the right bank and the lower reaches of the Sula, Pel and Vorskla, as well as the Trubezh basin on the left bank, that is, parts of the future Kiev, Chernigov and Pereyaslav lands) under the leadership of one of the Slavic tribes - the Rus. The range of the latter was determined by the clothing treasures of the 6th-7th centuries. with specific metal decorations.
This territory in chronicles dating back to the 11th-12th centuries was usually called the Russian Land "in the narrow sense of this term." In the last quarter of the 1st millennium AD. e., argued B. A. Rybakov, other Slavic tribes of Eastern Europe, as well as part of the Slavicized Finnish tribes, joined the genesis of the East Slavic ethnos. However, the researcher did not consider how exactly the process of formation of the Old Russian people took place, and I believe it was impossible to do this on the basis of archeological materials.
The period of the Old Russian state with its capital in Kyiv, argued B. A. Rybakov, was the heyday of the East Slavic people. Its unity, despite the emergence of several principalities, was preserved in the era of the feudal fragmentation of Rus' in the 12th-13th centuries. This unity was realized by the East Slavic population itself, which was reflected in the geographical understanding - the entire Russian land (in the broad sense) until the 14th century. was opposed to isolated estates, with princes at war with each other.
It can be noted that the attempts of historians to get involved in the study of the process of formation of the Old Russian nationality did not give the desired results. There was too little historical evidence to shed light on this complex problem. In the middle of the XX century. in historical writings, the idea prevailed that the Eastern Slavs in the 6th-7th centuries. were antes. So, for example, considered Yu. V. Gauthier. V. I. Dovzhenok wrote that the Ant language differed little from Old Russian. The latter allegedly represented the same language as Ant, but at a higher level of development. According to V.I. Dovzhenko, the basis for the consolidation of the Eastern Slavs into the Old Russian nationality was the rapid pace of socio-economic development of the population of the East European Plain, but the main thing along the way of the final formation of the nationality was ethnic development during the period of Kievan Rus. The separation of a single ancient Russian people into separate parts, which led to the formation of three ethnic groups - Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian - should be sought in the historical setting of the XIII-XIV centuries.
A. I. Kozachenko also considered the Ants as the first nationality of the Eastern Slavs, which developed at the dawn of a class society. The flourishing of the Old Russian nationality was determined by this researcher by periods of Kievan Rus and feudal fragmentation (until the middle of the 13th century). Its consolidation was determined both by external danger and by the demand for national unity under conditions of strong princely power.
The idea of the Antes as early Eastern Slavs was not new. It goes back to the scientific works of the first half of the 19th century. So, already K. Zeiss argued that the division of the Slavic ethnic group of the VI-VII centuries. to s (k) Lven and Ants corresponds to the differentiation of the Slavic language into western and eastern branches. Ants were identified with the Eastern Slavs by many scientists, including L. Niederle, and among linguists, as noted above, A. A. Shakhmatov and some researchers of the 50-60s of the XX century.
The problem of the formation of the ancient Russian nationality was also of interest to A. N. Nasonov. According to the ideas of this historian, the initial stage of the ethnic consolidation of the Eastern Slavs is associated with the early public education"Russian land", formed at the end of the VIII - beginning of the IX century. in the Middle Dnieper with the center in Kyiv. Its territorial and ethnographic basis was the lands of the Polyans, Drevlyans and Northerners. At the end of the IX-X centuries. The Old Russian state spread to the entire area of the East Slavic tribes, uniting two of their branches - northern and southern - into a single ethno-linguistic array.
L. V. Cherepnin connected the process of the formation of the ancient Russian nationality with changes in socio-economic life, which allegedly took place in the 6th-9th centuries, which contributed to the rapprochement and merging of the heterogeneous Slavic population of Eastern Europe. This historian also attached significant importance to the formation of the Old Russian state, which proceeded in parallel with the formation of the nationality. However, the common language, territory, culture and economic life, as well as the struggle against external enemies, played a decisive role in this. Period X-XII centuries. L. V. Cherepnin defined it as the time of the merger of the East Slavic tribes into a “single Russian people”.
In the XII-XIII centuries, the researcher further argued, the prerequisites for the division of the Old Russian nationality were created, as a result of which strengthening and political fragmentation of the territory of the Eastern Slavs caused by the Tatar-Mongol conquest, Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities are formed.
From a historical point of view, V. V. Mavrodin also tried to show the process of formation of the ancient Russian people. He argued that the basis of the Old Russian language was the Kiev dialect - a kind of fusion of the dialects of the population of Kyiv, rather motley in ethnic and social terms. In the diversity of Kievan dialects, a linguistic unity is formed, which became the core of the language of Kievan Rus as a whole. The commonality of the political and state life of all the Eastern Slavs, according to V.V. Mavrodin, contributed to the rallying of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe into a single ancient Russian people.
Initially, this researcher believed that the process of the formation of a nationality in the era of Ancient Rus' was not completed and the ensuing feudal fragmentation predetermined its division and the emergence of new ethno-linguistic formations. Later, V.V. Mavrodin began to argue that the differentiation of the Old Russian people was due not to the incompleteness of the process of its folding, not to the feudal fragmentation of Ancient Rus', but to the historical conditions that prevailed in Rus' after the Batu invasion - its territorial division, the seizure of many Russian lands by neighboring states.
At present, all these constructions of historians are of purely historiographical interest.
Ethnographers also drew attention to the presence of significant elements of the commonality of the material and spiritual culture and life of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples, dating back to a single ancient Russian people. To the common East Slavic elements characteristic of the three East Slavic peoples, ethnographers usually refer to the “three-chamber” plan of residential buildings, their lack of a foundation, the presence of an oven in the huts, fixed benches along the walls; similar types of folk clothing (women's and men's shirts, men's coats, women's hats); wedding, birth and funeral rites; similarities in the tools and processes of spinning and weaving crafts; agricultural rituals and the proximity of arable implements. An unconditional historical community is revealed by oral creativity (epic epic and songs) of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples, as well as art- embroideries and wood carvings.
The original hypothesis about the prerequisites for the formation of the Old Russian nationality was proposed by P. N. Tretyakov. According to his ideas, the East Slavic ethno-linguistic community was the result of the miscegenation of a part of the Proto-Slavs - the bearers of the Zarubinets culture, who settled in the first centuries of our era throughout the Upper Dnieper, with the local Baltic population. The Upper Dnieper region, as the researcher believed, became the ancestral home of the Eastern Slavs. “During the subsequent settlement of the Eastern Slavs, which culminated in the creation of an ethnographic picture known from the Tale of Bygone Years, from the Upper Dnieper in the northern, northeastern and southern directions, in particular in the middle Dnieper river, it was by no means “pure” Slavs that moved, but a population that had assimilated Eastern Baltic groups in its composition. At the same time, P. N. Tretyakov mainly considered Zarubinets antiquities, which became widespread in the 2nd century. BC e. - II century. n. e. mainly in the Middle Dnieper and Pripyat Polissya, as well as late Zarubinets and post-Zarubinets antiquities of the Dnieper region. Other, more significant processes of the Slavic development of the East European Plain, and, consequently, the complex ethnogenetic situations that took place, remained outside the researcher's field of vision.
The constructions of P. N. Tretyakov about the formation of the Old Russian nationality in the conditions of the Slavic-Baltic intra-regional interaction in the Upper Dnieper region do not find confirmation either in archaeological or linguistic materials. East Slavic does not show any common Baltic substratum elements. What united in the Old Russian period all the Eastern Slavs in linguistic terms and at the same time separated them from other Slavic ethnic formations of that time cannot be considered as a product of the Baltic influence.
The idea of the origin of the East Slavic linguistic community in the area of Zarubinets culture was also expressed by the linguist F. P. Filin, however, without making any attempts to somehow support this thesis with linguistic materials. However, this is not the main thing in his important purely linguistic studies. The researcher argued that around the 7th century. n. e. The Slavs, who settled the lands east of the Carpathians and the Western Bug, are isolated from the rest of the Slavic world, which led to the emergence of a number of linguistic innovations that made up the specifics of the Old Russian language at the first stage of its development. In the works of F. P. Filin, all phonetic phenomena characteristic of the East Slavic linguistic community, and its special lexical development, received a detailed description.
The dialectal structure of the Old Russian language seemed to F.P. Filin to be difficult, having developed on the basis of both the dialect zones of the Proto-Slavic era inherited by the Eastern Slavs, and regional innovations that arose already in the process of the development of the East Slavic language. During the formation of the Old Russian state, the researcher argued, there were still no inclinations of the future Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. There was a single Old Russian language, which had dialectal features in different areas.
In the work of 1940, F. P. Filin paid some attention to the Kyiv dialect, which, in his opinion, was put forward as a common East Slavic language, that is, Old Russian. However, in subsequent studies, he no longer claimed this.
The fragmentation of Kievan Rus into many feudal principalities, according to F. P. Filin, led to an increase in dialect differences. The dialects of the Old Russian lands were now entering into a centripetal development. The turning point was the historical events of the 13th century. The Tatar-Mongol invasion and the Lithuanian conquests, which divided the East Slavic area for a long time, could not but affect the history of the language. Regional dialectisms arose in the phonetic system, phenomena developed that became specific to individual East Slavic languages. In the XIV-XV centuries, as F. P. Filin believed, one can speak of the initial stage of the formation of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, since at that time the features characteristic of them became widespread.
The process of the formation of the Old Russian language by the Ukrainian linguist G. P. Pivtorak is somewhat vaguely described. On the one hand, referring to the works of archaeologists, he writes about two directions of the Slavic development of the East European Plain: 1) from the Middle Dnieper, moving along the Dnieper and Desna, the Slavs settled the upper Dnieper lands, the Volga-Oka interfluve and the upper reaches of the Neman; 2) from the Venetian area in the South Baltic, by sea or land, another group of Slavs settled in the forest zone, where the Krivichi and Slovenes of Novgorod are recorded in chronicles and archeology. The East Slavic ethnos, according to the researcher, was formed gradually during the settlement of Slavic tribes on the Russian Plain. The initial core of the settlement of the Old Russian people from the first half of the 1st millennium AD. e. there were lands between the upper reaches of the Western Bug and the middle Dnieper. The unity of the Old Russian language, according to G.P. Pivtorak, in the era of Kievan Rus and feudal fragmentation was constantly reinforced by various extralinguistic factors.
O. N. Trubachev sees the ancient center of the common Eastern Slavic linguistic community on the Don and the Seversky Donets. These hypothetical constructions do not seem to be sufficiently elaborated. A number of historical and philological questions arise, the answers to which modern Slavic studies cannot give.
In recent decades, the Kiev archaeologist and historian P.P. Tolochko has also addressed the problem of the ancient Russian nationality. His constructions are based on the interpretation of individual places of written monuments with some references to archeological materials and come down to the following. Already in the VI-VIII centuries. Eastern Slavs were a single ethno-cultural array, consisting of a dozen related tribal formations. Period IX-X centuries. characterized by internal migrations that contributed to the integration of the East Slavic tribes. The process received a noticeable acceleration from the end of the 9th - the first decades of the 10th century, when the Old Russian state was formed with the capital in Kyiv and the ethnonym Rus approved for all Eastern Slavs.
During the IX-XII centuries. within the state territory of Kievan Rus there was a single East Slavic ethnic community. Its core, according to P.P. Tolochko, was Rus', or the Russian land “in the narrow sense”, or, in the terminology of foreign sources, “Inner Rus'”, that is, the territory that in the late Middle Ages was called Little Rus'.
The idea of the formation of the Old Russian language on the basis of the Proto-Russian dialect formation, traces of which cannot be identified in linguistic materials, forces researchers to look for other ways to resolve the issue of the formation of a common East Slavic ethno-linguistic unity, the existence of which in the first centuries of the 2nd millennium AD. e. is beyond doubt. Above, B. M. Lyapunov's concept of the composition of the Old Russian language on the basis of several Proto-Slavic dialect groups was outlined. Modern archaeological evidence of the Slavic development of the East European Plain also leads to this conclusion. The question of the formation of the ancient Russian people on the basis of archeological materials was thesisly considered in a number of my publications, which show that the formation of this ethno-linguistic unity was due to the leveling and integration of the Slavic tribal formations that inhabited the East European Plain, in the conditions of a single historical and cultural space formed on the territory Old Russian state. This will be discussed in more detail in the present study.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the linguist G. A. Khaburgaev also adhered to a similar point of view. He argued that a distinct Proto-Slavic dialect or Proto-Russian language never existed. East Slavic ethno-linguistic unity took shape on the basis of the spread of Slavic speech in Eastern Europe in a heterogeneous way from components that were heterogeneous in origin. On the eve of the formation of the Old Russian state, according to G. A. Khaburgaev, a process took place that actively destroyed the old tribal foundations. The political unification of various Slavic tribes led to the formation of a peculiar dialect-ethnographic East Slavic community. Archaeological monuments of the X-XII centuries. on the territory of Ancient Rus', this researcher argues, testify to a noticeable convergence of all the main cultural and ethnographic elements, to the process of consolidating the population into a single nationality.
A small discussion regarding the essence of the Old Russian people took place at the VI International Congress of Slavic Archeology, held in Novgorod in August 1996. The Belarusian archaeologist G.V. Shtykhov, using selective historical and archaeological data, argued that the Old Russian people had not yet formed in the era of Kievan Rus finally and broke up in connection with the fragmentation of the Old Russian state into many principalities. The researcher did not touch upon the linguistic materials characterizing the East Slavic community at all and concluded that “the process of the emergence of related East Slavic peoples - Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian (Great Russian) - can be consistently stated without using this controversial concept” (that is, the Old Russian nationality). Apparently, G. V. Shtykhov is not embarrassed by the fact that this idea comes into conflict with the achievements of linguistics. The researcher further notes that the Slavic population of Ancient Rus' spoke various dialects.
This is true, but this does not at all lead to the conclusion that there were no common phonetic, morphological and lexical phenomena in the 10th-12th centuries. affecting the entire East Slavic area.
A close position was recently taken by the Ukrainian archaeologist V. D. Baran. In a short article, mainly devoted to the culture of the Slavs of the period of the great migration of peoples according to archaeological data, he briefly concludes that the result of the Slavic migration and the interaction of the Slavs with the non-Slavic population was the formation of new ethnic formations, including the emergence of three East Slavic ethnic groups: Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian . The Kiev state, headed by the Rurik dynasty, did not stop the ethnic process of the formation of these peoples, but only slowed it down for a while. The period of the Tatar-Mongol ruin of Rus' was, according to V. D. Baran, not the beginning, but the final stage in the formation of three East Slavic peoples. No data confirming this concept can be found in archaeological materials. V. D. Baran did not even try to substantiate it in any way. It is said, however, that the ancestors of the Belarusians in the V-VII centuries. there were tribes of the Kolochin culture, but how exactly the process of the ethnogenesis of Belarusians proceeded remains absolutely unclear. After all, the East Slavic population of both the Polotsk land and the Turov volost, which formed the backbone of the emerging Belarusian nationality, was not genetically connected in any way with the carriers of the Kolochin antiquities.
A very important point in the issues under consideration is the question of the identity of the Eastern Slavs in the era of Ancient Rus' as a single ethnic entity. This topic was considered earlier by D. S. Likhachev, later an interesting section was devoted to it, written by A. I. Rogov and B. N. Florey in a monographic study of the formation of the self-consciousness of the Slavic peoples in the early Middle Ages. Based on the analysis of chronicle texts, hagiographic monuments and foreign evidence, researchers argue that already in the 11th century. an idea was formed about the Russian land as a single state, covering the entire territory of the Eastern Slavs, and about the population of this state as “Russian people”, constituting a special ethnic community.
Notes
- Vostokov A. Kh. Discourse on the Slavic language // Proceedings of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. Issue. XVII. M., 1820. S. 5–61; Philological observations of A. Kh. Vostokov. SPb., 1865. S. 2–15.
- Sreznevsky II Thoughts on the history of the Russian language. SPb., 1850.
- Lavrovsky P.A. On the language of the northern Russian chronicles. SPb., 1852.
- Pogodin M.P. Notes on the ancient Russian language // Izv. Academy of Sciences. T. 13. St. Petersburg, 1856.
- Maksimovich M.A. Collected Works. T. P. Kyiv, 1877.
- Sobolevsky A. I. Essays from the history of the Russian language. Kyiv, 1888; His own. Lectures on the history of the Russian language. Kyiv, 1888.
- Shakhmatov A. A. To the question of the formation of Russian dialects and Russian nationalities // ZhMNP. SPb., 1899. No. IV; His own. Essay on the most ancient period in the history of the Russian language: (Encyclopedia of Slavic Philology. Issue II). Pg., 1915; His own. Introduction to the course of the history of the Russian language. Part 1. The historical process of the formation of Russian tribes and Russian nationalities. Pg., 1916; His own. The most ancient fate of the Russian tribe. Pg., 1919.
- Ushakov D.N. Adverbs of the Russian language and Russian nationalities // Russian history in essays and articles / Ed. M. V. Dovnar-Zapolsky. T. 1. M., b. G.; Buddha E.F. Lectures on the history of the Russian language. Kazan, 1914; Lyapunov B.M. Unity of the Russian language in its dialects. Odessa, 1919.
- Dzhurovich D.P. Dialects of the common Slavic language. Warsaw, 1913.
- Lehr-Splawinski T. Stosunki pokrewienstwa jezykow rukich // Rocznik slawistyczny. IX–1. Poznan, 1921, pp. 23–71; Idem. Kilka uwag o wspolnosci jezykowej praruskiej // Collection of articles in honor of Academician Alexei Ivanovich Sobolevsky (Collection of the Department of Russian Language and Literature. 101:3). M., 1928. S. 371–377; Idem. Kilka uwag o wspolnosci jezykowej praruskiej // Studii i skize wybrane z jezykoznawstwa slowianskiego. Warzawa, 1957.
- Trubetzkoy N. Einige uber die russische Lautentwicklung und die Auflosung der gemeinrussischen Spracheinheit // Zeitschrift fur slavische Philologie. bd. 1:3/4. Leipzig, 1925, pp. 287–319. The article was translated into Russian and published in the book: Trubetskoy N.S. Selected Works in Philology. M., 1987. S. 143–167.
- Selishchev A. M. Critical remarks on the reconstruction of the ancient fate of Russian dialects // Slavia. VII: 1. Praha, 1928; Durnovo N. N. Several remarks on the issue of the formation of Russian languages // Izv. in Russian language and literature. T.P.L., 1929.
- Durnovo N. N. Essay on the history of the Russian language. M., 1924. Reissue: M., 1959.
- Hrushevsky M. History of Ukraine-Rus. Ki i v, 1904, pp. 1–211.
- Smal-Stocki St., Gartner T. Grammatik der ruthenischen (ukrainischen) Sprache. Vienna, 1913; Smal-Stotsky St. Rozvytok glancing about the sim "th words" of the yang mov i ix mutually opidnennya. Prague, 1927.
- Timchenko E.K. Words "Janian unity and the camp of the Ukrainian language in the words" Jansk homeland // Ukraine. Book. 3. Kiev, 1924; His own. A course of Ukrainian language history. Kiev, 1927.
- Galanov I. Rev. on the book: Grammatik der ruthenischen (ukrainischen) Sprache. Von Stephan v. Smal-Stockyj and Teodor Garther. Wien, 1913 // Izv. Department of the Russian language and literature of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. 1914. T. XIX. Book. 3. S. 297–306; Yagich V. Rets. // Archiv fur slavische Philologie. bd. XXXVII. Berlin, 1920. S. 211.
- Lastouski V. A short history of Belarus and Vilna, 1910. More consistently, the opinion of this researcher is presented in his articles published in the journal Kryvich, which was published in 1923–1927. in Kaunas.
- Lyapunov B. M. The most ancient mutual relations of the Russian and Ukrainian languages and some conclusions about the time of their emergence as separate linguistic groups // Russian Historical Lexicology. M., 1968. S. 163–202.
- Avanesov R. I. Questions of the formation of the Russian language in its dialects // Vestnik Mosk. university 1947. No. 9. S. 109–158; His own. Questions of the history of the Russian language in the era of the formation and further development of the Russian (Great Russian) nationality // Questions of the formation of the Russian nationality and nation. M.; L., 1958. S. 155–191.
- Rybakov B. A. On the question of the formation of the Old Russian nationality // Abstracts of reports and speeches by employees of the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the USSR Academy of Sciences, prepared for a meeting on the methodology of ethnogenetic research. M., 1951. S. 15–22; His own. The problem of the formation of ancient Russian nationality // Vopr. stories. 1952. No. 9. S. 42–51; His own. Ancient Rus // Sov. archeology. T. XVII. M., 1953. S. 23–104.
- Gotye Yu. V. The Iron Age in Eastern Europe. M., 1930. S. 42.
- Dovzhenok V. I. On the question of the composition of the Old Russian nationality // Reports of the VI Scientific Conference of the Institute of Archeology. Kyiv, 1953, pp. 40–59.
- Kozachenko A.I. Old Russian nationality - the common ethnic base of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples // Sov. ethnography. T. P. M., 1954. S. 3–20.
- Zeuss K. Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstamme. Munchen, 1837, pp. 602–604.
- Niederle L. Slavic Antiquities. M., 1956. S. 139–140.
- Yakubinsky A.P. History of the Old Russian language. M., 1941. (Reprint: M., 1953); Chernykh P. Ya. Historical grammar of the Russian language. M., 1954; Georgiev Vl. Veneti, anti, sklaveni and tridelenieto in Slavonic Yezitsi // Slavonic collection. Sofia, 1968, pp. 5–12.
- Nasonov A.N. To the question of the formation of the ancient Russian nationality // Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. 1951. No. 1. S. 69–70; His own. "Russian land" and the formation of the territory of the ancient Russian state. Moscow, 1951, pp. 41–42.
- Cherepnin L. V. Historical conditions for the formation of the Russian nationality until the end of the 15th century. // Issues of the formation of the Russian people and nation. M., 1958. S. 7–105.
- Mavrodin VV Formation of the Old Russian state. L., 1945, pp. 380–402; His own. Formation of a unified Russian state. L., 1951. S. 209–219; His own. The formation of the Old Russian state and the formation of the Old Russian nationality. M., 1971. S. 157–190; His own. Origin of the Russian people. L., 1978. S. 119–147.
- Tokarev S.A. On the cultural community of the East Slavic peoples // Sov. ethnography. 1954. No. 2. S. 21–31; His own. Ethnography of the peoples of the USSR. M., 1958; Maslova G.S. Historical and cultural ties between Russians and Ukrainians according to folk clothes // Ibid. pp. 42–59; Sukhobrus G. S. The main features of the commonality of Russian and Ukrainian folk poetic creativity // Ibid. pp. 60–68.
- Tretyakov P.N. Eastern Slavs and the Baltic Substratum // Sov. ethnography. 1967. No. 4. P. 110–118; His own. At the origins of the ancient Russian people. L., 1970.
- Sedov V.V. Once again about the origin of the Belarusian nationality // Sov. ethnography. 1968. No. 5. S. 105–120.
- Filin F.P. On the origin of the Proto-Slavic language and East Slavic languages // Vopr. linguistics. 1980. No. 4. S. 36–50.
- Filin F. P. Essay on the history of the Russian language until the XIV century // Uchenye zapiski Leningradskogo Pedagogical Institute them. A. I. Herzen. T. XXVII. L., 1940; His own. The formation of the language of the Eastern Slavs. M.; L., 1962; His own. The origin of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples: a historical and dialectological essay. L., 1972.
- Filin F.P. Essay on the history of the Russian language ... S. 89.
- Pivtorak G.P. Formation and dialect differentiation of old Russian language: (Historical and phonetic drawings). Kiev, 1988.
- Trubachev O. N. In search of unity. M., 1992. S. 96–98.
- Tolochko P.P. Ancient Rus': Essays on socio-political history. Kyiv, 1987, pp. 180–191; His own. Chi isnuvala old-Russian populism? // Archeology. Kiev, 1991. No. 3. S. 47–57.
- Sedov V.V. Eastern Slavs in the 6th–13th centuries. M., 1982. S. 269–273; His own. Slavs in the Early Middle Ages. M., 1995. S. 358–384.
- Khaburgaev G. A. Formation of the Russian language. M., 1980.
- Shtykhov G.V. Old Russian nationality: realities and myth // Ethnogenesis and ethnocultural contacts of the Slavs: Proceedings of the VI International Congress of Slavic Archeology. T. 3. M., 1997. S. 376–385. In the discussion on the report of G. V. Shtykhov, he was supported by I. A. Marzalyuk, A. I. Filyushkin, and O. N. Trusov (Ibid., pp. 386–388). Unfortunately, linguists did not take part in the dispute.
- Baran V. D. The great spread of words "yan" // Archeology. Kiev, 1998. No. 2. S. 30–37. In the book "Ancient Slavs" this researcher expressed a different idea. He believes that carriers were the basis of all East Slavic chronicle tribes. The collapse of the Kievan state after the death of Yaroslav the Wise led to the grouping of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe around three main cultural and economic centers: Polotsk on the Western Dvina, Vladimir on the Klyazma and Kiev with Galich in the Dnieper-Dniester These regions preserved the traditions of the era of the great migration of peoples and became the foundations of the three East Slavic peoples - Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian (Baran V. D. Davni slov "Yani. Kiev, 1998. S. 211–218).
- Likhachev D.S. National identity of Ancient Rus'. M.; L., 1945.
- The development of the ethnic identity of the Slavic peoples in the early Middle Ages. M., 1982. S. 96–120.
Slavic cultural and tribal formations in the southern regions of the East European Plain on the eve of the formation of the Old Russian people
In the first centuries of our era, the Slavs inhabited parts of the territories of two archaeological cultures: Przeworsk, occupying Central European lands from the Elbe to the Western Bug and the upper Dniester, and Chernyakhov, which spread in the Northern Black Sea region from the lower Danube in the west to the Seversky Donets in the east. These cultures were large polyethnic formations of a provincial-Roman appearance. The Slavs, called Wends by ancient authors, in the area of the Przeworsk culture belonged to the lands of the Middle and Upper Hanging with adjacent areas of the Oder basin and the Upper Dniester. This region was not closed, it was repeatedly invaded by various Germanic tribes. On the territory of the Chernyakhov culture, in the conditions of marginal mixing of the local late Scythian-Sarmatian population and the settled Slavs, a Slavic-Iranian symbiosis developed, as a result, a separate dialect-tribal formation of the Slavs, known in historical sources as antes, became isolated in Podolia and the Middle Dnieper region.
The invasion of the Huns significantly disrupted the historical situation that had developed in Roman times in Eastern and Central Europe. The Huns, originating from Central Asia, in the II century. n. e., as evidenced by Dionysius and Ptolemy, appeared in the Caspian steppes, where they lived until the 70s of the 4th century. Having defeated the Alano-Sarmatians, who roamed the steppes between the Volga and the Don, in 375 the Huns invaded the northern Black Sea lands in powerful hordes, crushing everything in their path, robbing dwellings and burning villages of the Chernyakhov culture, devastating fields and killing people. Archeology shows that a significant number of Chernyakhiv settlements at the end of the 4th c. ceased to exist, the craft centers that functioned here, supplying the surrounding population with various products, were completely destroyed. Eunapius, a contemporary of the Hun invasion, wrote: “The defeated Scythians (as the ancient authors called the population of the former Scythia) were exterminated by the Huns and most of them died ...” By the end of the 4th century. the entire Chernyakhov culture ceased to function, only in certain areas of the forest-steppe zone relatively small islands of its settlements were preserved. Separate groups of the Chernyakhov population fled, as evidenced by archeological data, to the north to the southern regions of the Oka basin and to the Crimea. At the same time, other hordes of the Huns headed for Taman and the Crimea - the rich cities of the Bosporus were subjected to devastating pogroms, and their inhabitants were massacred.
Having defeated the Visigoths somewhere on the lower Dniester, the Huns invaded the Danube lands and at the beginning of the 5th century. mastered the steppe expanses of the Middle Danube, where, having subjugated the surrounding tribes, they soon created a powerful Hun state. Having settled in Central Europe, the Huns also kept the northern Black Sea tribes in their power.
The invasion of the Huns significantly affected the Przeworsk culture. The main part of its craft centers and workshops, which supplied the agricultural population with their products, ceased to function, and many villages were deserted. At the same time, there was an outflow of significant masses of the population from the area of the Przeworsk culture. Thus, the Germanic tribes, recorded by Roman authors in the Vistula-Oder region, went south to the borders of the Roman Empire. The Slavs also joined the whirlpool of the great migration of peoples. In the first decades of the 5th c. Przeworsk culture ceased to function.
The situation was aggravated by a significant deterioration in the climate. The first centuries of our era were climatically very favorable for the life and management of the agricultural population, which formed the basis of the bearers of the Przeworsk culture. Archeology clearly records in the III-IV centuries. and a significant increase in the number of settlements, and a noticeable increase in population, and the active development of agricultural technology.
From the end of the 4th century in Europe, a sharp cooling sets in, the 5th century was especially cold. It was a period of maximum cooling not only for the 1st millennium AD. e., at this time the lowest temperatures in the last 2000 years were observed. Soil moisture increases sharply, which was due to both an increase in precipitation and the transgression of the Baltic Sea. The levels of rivers and lakes are noticeably rising, groundwater is rising, swamps are growing. As a result, many settlements of the Roman period were flooded or severely flooded, and arable land was unsuitable for agricultural activities. Archaeological surveys in northern Germany have shown that the level of rivers and lakes here has risen so much that the population was forced to leave most of the villages that functioned in Roman times. As a result, the Teutons abandoned the lands of Jutland and adjacent regions of mainland Germany. From floods and waterlogging, the Middle Vistula, which is distinguished by low relief, was seriously affected. Here, almost all the settlements of the Roman period by the beginning of the 5th century BC. abandoned by the agricultural population. As shown below, significant masses of the inhabitants of this region migrated to the northeast, moving along the elevated lacustrine-glacial ridges from the Masurian Lakes to Valdai.
The Hun conquests in Europe were interrupted in 451, when the Hun troops invading Gaul were defeated in the battle on the Catalan fields. A year later, the well-known Hun leader Attila (445-454), having gathered a powerful army, again moved to Gaul, but could not conquer it, and after his death the Hun state collapsed. The life of the agricultural population preserved in more or less large islands in the areas of the Przeworsk and Chernyakhov cultures, and these were mostly Slavs, gradually stabilized. Deprived of the products of the provincial Roman crafts, the population was forced to create life and culture anew. At first, the early medieval Slavs in terms of development turned out to be lower than in the Roman period.
The Slavs entered the Middle Ages as a far from monolithic mass. Geographically, they were scattered over a wide area of Central and Eastern Europe. Communications between individual regions were often absent. The historical situation in each of them was peculiar; in a number of places, more or less large groups of Slavs settled among other ethnic aborigines. As a result, in the V-VII centuries. there were several different Slavic cultures recorded by modern archeology (Fig. 1).
rice. 1. The resettlement of the Slavs during the Great Migration of Peoples
(a) area of the Sukovsko-Dziedzitsa culture;
b - Prague-Korchak culture;
c – Penkovskaya culture;
d – hyposhty-Kyndeshti antiquities;
e - Imenko culture;
(f) cultures of the Pskov long mounds;
g - Tushemla culture;
h - "Meryanskaya" culture;
and – antiquities of the Udomel type;
j - regions of residence of the Slavs in Roman times;
l - the main directions of the beginning process of development by the Slavs of the Balkan Peninsula
Notes
- For more on this, see: Sedov V.V. Origin and early history of the Slavs. M., 1979. S. 119-133; His own. Slavs in antiquity. M., 1994. S. 233-286.
- Latyshev VV News of ancient writers about Scythia and the Caucasus. T. I. Greek writers. SPb., 1893. S. 726.
Anty
During the 5th century in the Podolsk-Dnieper region of the territory of the former Chernyakhov culture, the Penkovo culture is being formed (Fig. 2). Its creators were the descendants of the population of the forest-steppe strip of the Chernyakhovsky area, that part of it, where in Roman times, under the conditions of the Slavic-Iranian symbiosis, Antes were formed. In addition, during the formation of Penkov antiquities, there was an influx of migrants from the Dnieper left-bank lands, as evidenced by elements of Kievan culture, manifested in house building and in ceramic materials.
rice. 2. Areas of the Prague-Korchakov and Penkov cultures
a - monuments of the Prague-Korchak culture (Duleb group);
b – monuments of the Penkovo culture (Antskaya group);
c - the direction of migration of the carriers of the Prague-Korchak antiquities to the lower Danube;
(d) area of the Tushemla culture;
(e) area of the Kolochin culture;
(f) area of the Moshchin culture;
Monuments of the initial stage of the Penkovo culture were studied in the Middle Dnieper and on the Southern Bug. Such, in particular, are the settlements of Kunya, Goliki and Parkhomovka, excavated by P. I. Khavlyuk in the Bug region, on which semi-dugout dwellings heated by heaters or hearths were discovered, and characteristic stucco pottery was found. At the settlement of Kunya, an iron two-membered fibula with a long shackle and a solid flat receiver, dating from the end of the 4th-5th centuries, was found; In the semi-dugout dwellings at the settlement of Kochubeevka, along with Penkovo utensils, fragments of Chernyakhov pottery were also found. Such utensils were also found in some other Penkovo settlements, apparently survivingly used at the beginning of the Middle Ages.
In the Middle Dnieper region, one of the studied monuments with cultural layers of the 5th century. is the settlement of Hittsi. The bulk of the pottery here was typically Pennovsky hand-made utensils. Some vessels combined the features of Penkovo and Kyiv ceramics in form. Fragments of Chernyakhov pottery were also found. The dating find here is a bone comb from the 5th century BC.
To the early stage of the Penkovo culture belongs one of the ground burial grounds near the village. Velikaya Andrusovka on the river. Tyasmin. His excavations revealed burials according to the rite of cremation on the side. The remains of the cremation were poured into small pits. In one of these burials, a cast bronze buckle dating back to the 5th century was found.
In the next century, the population of the Penkovo culture is actively growing and developing new territories. The culture is characterized by a number of features, among which the most striking is ceramics (Fig. 3: 4–6). Its leading form was pots with a slightly profiled upper edge and an oval-rounded body. The greatest expansion of these pots falls on the middle part, the neck and bottom are narrowed and approximately equal in diameter. The second common type of vessels are biconical pots with a sharp or slightly smoothed edge. In addition, flat clay discs and frying pans, characteristic of most Slavic cultures of the early Middle Ages, and occasionally bowls are common at Penkovo sites. All these dishes were made without a potter's wheel. Ornamentation on the vessels, as a rule, is absent, only a few pots have notches along the edge of the rim, a molded roller or moldings in the form of knobs on the body.
rice. 3. Ceramics of the Prague-Korchak (1-3) and Penkovo (4-6) cultures
1-3 – from the Korchak IX settlement and the Korchak burial ground;
4-6 - from the village of Semenki
The main type of settlements were unfortified settlements with an area of no more than 2-3 hectares. In most villages, there were from 7 to 15 households at the same time. Unsystematic building dominated, only a few settlements had a row type of building. The dwellings were sub-square semi-dugouts with an area of 12 to 20 square meters. m. The depth of the pits ranges from 0.4 to 1 m. The walls of the buildings had a log or pillar construction, log dwellings predominated. Log cabins were cut "in the cloud" or "in the paw". Their ground parts rose by 1.5-2m. With a pillar structure, the blocks were laid horizontally along the walls of the pit and fastened with stakes or by letting their ends into the grooves of the risers. The roofs of the dwellings had wooden frames, which were covered with straw, reeds or poles smeared with a layer of clay.
Dwellings were heated by stoves or hearths. At the early stage of the Penkovo culture, hearths predominated, later stove-heaters dominated, usually occupying one of the corners of buildings. In rare cases, clay ovens have also been recorded. The floors of the dwellings were rammed, mainland; only in a few buildings the floor was lined with wooden planks. In many buildings opposite the stoves, recesses were cut out for descending a wooden staircase, sometimes steps were cut into the mainland soil. The interior of the Penkovsky dwelling is unpretentious - only wall benches were arranged.
Dwellings in the Penkovsky settlements were accompanied by outbuildings. These were either above-ground log or column structures, or, more often, cylindrical, bell-shaped or barrel-shaped pits-cellars from 0.3 to 2 m in diameter and up to 2 m deep. They stored grain and other food supplies.
In the southern regions of the Dnieper region, where the population of the Penkovo culture was in close contact with the nomadic world, in a number of settlements, recessed dwellings of a round or oval shape were discovered, reminiscent of nomad yurts and indicating the infiltration of the Alan-Bulgarian population into the environment of the Slavs.
In the area of the Penkovo culture, there are also isolated fortified villages. Among them is the well-studied ancient settlement of Selishte in Moldavia, 130 x 60 m in size, arranged at the confluence of the Vatich stream into the river. Reut. From the floor side, it was reinforced with a wooden wall and a deep canyon. Excavations revealed 16 semi-dugout dwellings and 81 utility pits. In four semi-dugouts, the remains of handicraft activities related to jewelry and pottery were recorded. Researchers of the monument believe that the ancient settlement was one of the administrative and economic centers of the Penkovsky area.
One of the most interesting monuments of the Penkovo culture is the Pastirskoye settlement with stratifications of the 6th-7th centuries, located in the Tyasmina basin. It occupied an area of about 3.5 hectares and was protected by ramparts and ditches built back in the Scythian time. Excavations have explored about two dozen dwellings, semi-dugouts with stoves, heaters, typically of Penkovo appearance. In addition, workshops for iron processing, a forge and pottery kilns for firing pottery are open. Collected abundant and varied clothing material. Stucco pottery of the Penkovo types was predominant in the settlement. At the same time, vessels of a nomadic appearance and pottery of the so-called pastoral type, convex-sided gray-glazed pots, were found here. In all likelihood, this ceramics goes back to the Chernyakhov pottery.
The pastoral settlement was a large trade and craft and, most likely, an administrative center, in which a diverse population lived. In addition to Slavic dwellings, the remains of yurt-like buildings of nomads were discovered here.
On the territory of the Penkovo culture, the Gaivoron iron-making complex, located on the island of the Southern Bug, was studied. On an area of 3000 sq. m, excavations revealed 25 industrial furnaces, of which 4 were sintering furnaces (for enrichment of iron ore), in the rest iron smelting was carried out.
Funeral monuments of the Penkovo culture are exclusively ground burial grounds. Its bearers and direct descendants of the Ants did not know the kurgan rite at all. The Penkovsky area was characterized by biritualism, most likely inherited from the Chernyakhov culture.
The most studied cemeteries of the Penkovo culture are the above-mentioned monument near the village. Velikaya Andrusovka and the Selishte necropolis in Moldavia. Burials according to the rite of cremation of the dead on the side, followed by the placement of calcined bones in shallow pits with a diameter of 0.4–0.6 m and a depth of 0.3–0.5 m, were recorded everywhere, burials according to the rite of inhumation are more rare.
The fertile lands occupied by the bearers of the Penkovo culture, finds of agricultural tools (iron spears, sickles, hoes), grain pits, typical for all settlements, and osteological materials definitely indicate that agriculture and animal husbandry were the basis of the economy. Among the crafts, ironworking and bronze casting were the most actively developed. Technological analyzes of iron products reveal the inheritance of the production achievements of the Roman period by the Penkovsky population.
A series of treasures and random finds of various jewelry is associated with the Penkovo culture. Among the treasures stands out Martynovsky, found in 1909 in the basin of the river. Rosi and containing up to a hundred silver items - forehead rims, earrings, temporal rings, a neck torc, bracelets, a fibula, belt accessories (plaques, tips and onlays), as well as two silver bowls with Byzantine hallmarks, a fragment of a dish, a spoon and nine stylized figures people and animals.
A very interesting and widespread category of finds are finger fibulae, which had semicircular shields with five to seven protrusions (Fig. 4). They were found as part of hoards, at several Penkovo settlements and in burials. At the settlement of Barnashevka in the Vinnitsa region. the production complex of the third quarter of the 1st millennium AD was opened. e., in which a casting mold for the manufacture of finger fibulae was found.
rice. 4. Finger brooches with a mask-like head from the Antian sites of the Northern Black Sea region
A large amount of literature is devoted to finger fibulae with mask-like heads and their derivatives, usually called brooches of the Ant type. In particular, I performed a generalization with distribution maps. Such brooches were an integral part of the women's clothing of the Slavic ethno-tribal group, represented by the Penkovo culture. In addition, these adornments are known in those regions of the early medieval Slavic world (the Danube region, the Balkan Peninsula and part of the South-Eastern Baltic), in the settlement of which, as evidenced by other archeological data, people from the northern Black Sea lands participated.
The ethnonym of the Slavic group represented by the culture in question is defined. These are the Antes, known from the historical writings of the 6th-7th centuries. Jordan, who completed his work "Getica" in 551, reports that the Antes were part of the Venedian Slavs and lived in the territory "from Danastra to Danapra". The researchers of this monument claim that Jordanes borrowed this information from Cassiodorus, who wrote at the end of the 5th - beginning of the 6th century. Therefore, the specified geographical coordinates should refer to the initial phase of the Penkovo culture and correspond to the Podolsk-Dnieper region of the Chernyakhov culture.
Procopius of Caesarea, a Byzantine historian of the middle of the 6th century, reports on a wider settlement of the Antes. Their western limit at that time was the northern bank of the Danube (Istra), and in the east the Ant settlements extended to the land of the Utigurs, who lived in the steppes of the Sea of Azov, which corresponds to the general territory of the Penkov culture.
Thus, according to archaeological data, the Antes, according to archaeological data, are a large tribal group of Slavs that formed in the interfluve of the Dniester and Dnieper in late Roman times with the participation of the local Iranian-speaking population and settled at the beginning of the Middle Ages in the area from the lower Danube to the Seversky Donets. According to paleoanthropological data, a significant part of the population of the 10th–12th centuries. Southern Rus', characterized by mesocrania with relative narrowness, goes back to that group of bearers of the Chernyakhov culture, which developed under the conditions of assimilation of the Scythian-Sarmatian tribes.
Procopius of Caesarea reports that the Antes, like the rest of the Slavs, used the same language, they had the same way of life, common customs and beliefs, and earlier they were called by the same name - Wends. At the same time, it is obvious from historical sources that the Antes somehow stood out among other Slavs, since they are called on a par with such ethnic groups of that time as the Huns, Utigurs, Medes, etc. The Byzantines somehow distinguished the Antes from the Slavs even among mercenaries of the Empire.
The peculiarity of the Penkovo culture speaks of some ethnographic specificity of the Ants. There is reason to believe that the Antes constituted a special dialect group of the Late Proto-Slavic language. A complete characterization of the Ant dialect is difficult, but it is possible to think that it stood out from the rest of the Proto-Slavic dialect formations, primarily by the presence of a large number of Iranian words.
According to V. I. Abaev, the change of the explosive g characteristic of the Proto-Slavic language into the posterior palatal fricative g (h), which is recorded in a number of Slavic languages, is due to the Scythian-Sarmatian influence. Since phonetics, as a rule, is not borrowed from neighbors, the researcher argued that the Scytho-Sarmatian substratum should have participated in the formation of the southeastern Slavs (in particular, future Ukrainian and South Russian dialects). Comparison of the area of the fricative g in the Slavic languages with the regions inhabited by the Antes and their direct descendants definitely speaks in favor of this position. V. I. Abaev also admitted that the result of the Scythian-Sarmatian influence was the appearance of the genitive-accusative in the East Slavic language and the proximity of East Slavic with the Ossetian language in the perfective function of preverbs. V. N. Toporov explains the origin of the unprepositional locative-dative by the influence of the Iranians. These phonetic and grammatical features in the Slavic world are regional. Their geographical distribution allows the idea of their origin in the Ant dialect of the Proto-Slavic language.
The penetration into the Slavic pagan pantheon of the gods Khors and Simargl, recorded in the Russian chronicles, is also connected with the Iranian world of the Northern Black Sea region. V. I. Abaev wrote about the etymological and semantic parallels between the Ukrainian Viy and the Iranian god of the wind, war, revenge and death (Scythian Vauhka-sura), between the East Slavic Rod and the Ossetian Naf.
In the Slavic ethnonymicon, indisputable Iranianisms are also known. These are, in particular, the tribal names of Croats and Serbs. The appearance of these tribal groups in the Danube basin and on the Elbe, as archeological evidence shows, was the result of the great Slavic migration of the early Middle Ages. Their ancestors in Roman times lived somewhere in the Chernyakhovsky area of the Northern Black Sea region. The ethnonym itself antes also has a Scythian-Sarmatian origin. “Of all the existing hypotheses, it seems to be more probable,” F. P. Filin wrote in this regard, “is the hypothesis about the Iranian origin of the word antes: ancient. Indian antas "end, edge", anteas "located on the edge", Ossetian. att "iya "rear, behind". This point of view is shared by many scientists, including O. N. Trubachev. That is, the Antes are outlying inhabitants. And indeed they inhabited the southeastern outlying territory of the Slavic world both in Roman times and in at the beginning of the medieval period Full semantic correspondence is observed with the name of the region of Ukraine, whence the modern ethnonym Ukrainians. The group of Slavs under consideration, apparently, was called Ants by the Scythian-Sarmatians of the Northern Black Sea region.
There is very little historical evidence to study the socio-political structure of the Ants. At the end of the IV century. in the conditions of enmity between the Goths and the Antes, the existence of a tribal formation of the latter seems undoubted. Jordan reports that initially the Antes repulsed the attack of the Gothic army, but after a while the Gothic king Vinitary still managed to defeat the Antes and executed their prince Bozh (Boz) with seventy elders. This event, judging by indirect data, took place somewhere in the region of the Erak River, usually identified with the Dnieper.
At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Antes, as can be assumed on the basis of historical data, did not create a common political association - a single tribal union headed by archon princes. Archaeological materials say nothing about this either. From the text of Jordanes' work, one can guess that in the 6th century, apparently, there were several Antian tribal formations, each of which had its own prince. Procopius of Caesarea reports that the Antes "... are not controlled by one person, but since ancient times they have lived in democracy, and therefore they have profitable and unprofitable business always carried out together." In other words, the Antes, according to Procopius, did not know the sovereign power, similar to the Byzantine one, and lived on the basis of self-government, discussing all common issues at tribal gatherings.
The relationship between the Ants and the Slavs in different periods were uneven. In a number of cases, they undertook joint actions; sources also record enmity between them. During the reign of Justin I (518–527), as Procopius testifies, the Antes attacked Thrace. From the 40s of the VI century. a period of peaceful relations between the Antes and Byzantium began. Around 545 the Antic-Byzantine alliance was concluded. Since that time, the sources do not record a single attack of the Antes on the Byzantine Empire. Obviously, thanks to this alliance, the Antes are increasingly penetrating into Byzantium and participating in separate detachments in the imperial wars in Italy. Thus, it is known that the Antes detachment constituted a significant part of the troops of the Byzantine commander John during the campaigns against Rome and the conquest of southern Italy. Procopius reports about three hundred ants guarding the region of Lucania, while noting that "... these barbarians are the most skilled at fighting in hard-to-reach areas." It is further noted that “the Antes, with their inherent valor, together with the peasants from the Tullian detachment, overthrew the enemies ...” The Byzantine-Antian alliance probably did not concern all the Antes. According to Mauritius, who wrote at the same time, the Antes were enemies of Byzantium. It has been suggested that the information of Mauritius refers to the Danubian Antes, who threatened the neighboring fortresses of the Byzantine Empire and its Balkan possessions, and the Antes tribal union of the Middle Dniester was its ally. These same Antes may have helped Byzantium in the fight against the Dacian Slavs. In 602, the Avar Khagan, having learned about the attack of the Romans on the Dacian Slavs, at that time the allies of the Avars, sent a punitive expedition led by Apsikha, "... to destroy the Antes tribe, which was an ally of the Romans." According to G. G. Litavrin, Apsykh's campaign was not completed, since at that time several formations of the Avars rebelled and went over to the side of Byzantium. The anti-Byzantine alliance remained in force, apparently, until 612, when the epithet disappeared from the title of Emperor Heraclius antsky .
In the Dnieper lands, most likely, another tribal group of Ants arose. From the information of the Byzantine historian Menander Protector (80s of the 6th century), it follows that around 560 there was an alliance of several Antic archon leaders. In connection with the invasion of the Avars on the Antian lands, the historian reports: “... when the rulers of the Antes were put in a distressed situation and fell into misfortune against their hopes, the Avars immediately began to devastate (their) land and rob (their) country” . Obviously, the Antes were deceived in their hopes of victory over the Avars. The embassy sent by the Ants to the Avar Khagan was not successful, and Mezamer, who led it, was killed by the Avars.
Ethnonym antes remained, presumably, for the bearers of the Penkovo culture. So they were called by the Byzantines and the neighboring non-Slavic population. However, it was not the self-name of the North Black Sea Slavs. The Ants called themselves Slavs or, perhaps, tribal ethnonyms like Croats, Tivertsy, street and others. It is possible that some of them are named in the source of the 9th century. - "Geographer of Bavaria", which will be discussed in more detail below, as well as in the essay "On the Management of the Empire" by Constantine Porphyrogenitus.
The wide settlement of the Antes and the lack of a single political entity led to the fact that their ethnonym was forgotten over time. This was obviously facilitated by the design of the VIII-IX centuries. East Slavic tribal groups that emerged from the Antian cultural and tribal formation.
The Penkovskaya culture as a whole dates back to the 5th–7th centuries. Later, it evolves into the Sakhnov culture and related antiquities of the 8th–9th centuries. No significant transformations are observed. The appearance of the settlements, their topography, layout and dimensions, housing construction, and funeral rites are preserved. Only earthenware is somewhat modified. Many settlements of the Penkovo culture continued to function in the 8th–9th centuries.
At that time, the range of the Antian tribes was limited to the lands to the west of the Dnieper - the forest-steppe regions of Ukraine and Moldova. To the east of the Dnieper near the turn of the 7th and 8th centuries. there was a resettlement of the Slavs of a different dialect-tribal grouping, to which a special section is devoted below. The descendants of the Antes mixed here with the newcomer Slavs.
In the lands to the west of the Dnieper in the VIII-IX centuries. there is some leveling of the Slavic antiquities of the forest zone and forest-steppe regions. The same type of house-building is taking shape, molded pottery appears in the settlements of the Penkovsky area, continuing the traditions of the Prague-Korchak. However, it is impossible to speak about the complete identity of the forest-steppe and forest areas, since they differ significantly in the development of the funeral ritual. In the Prague-Korchak region, kurgan ritualism is gaining ground, in the former Antian region, soil necropolises dominated undividedly, in which the rite of inhumation gradually supplanted cremations. The cartography of the latter (Fig. 5) indicates a wide infiltration of the descendants of the Ants into more northern regions, which was due to the constant pressure of the Turkic-speaking nomadic tribes. Another significant difference between the Penkovsky area and the Prague-Korchak area is the absence of temporal rings in the female attire of the Antes and their descendants.
rice. 5. Ground burials of the 10th–12th centuries. of the ancient Russian population that emerged from the Antes environment
a - ground burials;
b - the area of the Prague-Korchak culture;
c - the area of the Penkovo culture
On Antian territory, the Tale of Bygone Years localizes three tribal formations recorded in Russian chronicles - Croats, Tivertsy and Ulichi.
The Croats of Eastern Europe are part of the once large Proto-Slavic tribe. The great Slavic migration shattered this tribal formation. It is known that around the turn of the VI and VII centuries. a large group of Croats settled in Dalmatia. Another group of them settled in the Czech Republic, where it was recorded by the charter of the Prague bishopric in 1086. In the charter of Henry II in 1108, the Croats who lived on the river were named. Saale. Croats are also known somewhere near the river. Moravia.
In the area of the Penkovskaya culture, the following local groups are distinguished by geographical reasons: Upper Dniester, Middle Dniester, South Bug, Dnieper-Tyasma and Dnieper-Orel, which are separated from each other by more or less wide uninhabited territories. East Slavic Croats on the Basis of Historical Data, Materials of Archeology and Toponymy in the 10th-12th Centuries. localized in the North-Eastern Carpathian region, mainly in the basin of the upper reaches of the Dniester. Consequently, the Upper Dniester group of Penkovo antiquities can be attributed to this tribe. The Middle Dniester region coordinates them with the Tivertsy, the South Buzh region - presumably with the Buzhans, the Dnieper-Tyasma and Dnieper-Orelsky regions - with the early streets. In the Antian period, these were territorial formations (no ethnographic differences between the regions have yet been identified), which eventually took shape in separate tribal groups.
Under-slab graves became an ethnographic feature of the Croatian area of the Upper Dniester region in ancient Russian times. These are burials according to the rite of inhumation, in soil pits marked on the surface with large stone slabs. The Carpathian Croats formed the backbone of the population of the Galician land.
The Tale of Bygone Years reports that “... Tivertsi sityahu bo along the Dniester, squat to Dunaev. Be a multitude of them; sedyahu bo along the Dniester to the sea, and the essence of their cities is to this day. Ethnonym Tivertsy, most likely, goes back to the ancient name of the Dniester - Tiras. If this is so, then Tivertsy literally means "Dniester" - the inhabitants of the Dniester region. hydronym Tiras formed from the Iranian turas - "quick". Starting with Herodotus, it is repeatedly found in the writings of ancient authors and at the beginning of the Middle Ages it was replaced by the name Dniester (Danaster - near the Jordan), which also has an Iranian origin.
According to archaeological materials, the Tivertsy are one of the groups of Antes that lived in the Dniester basin (except for its upper reaches). The settlements and soil burial grounds of the second half of the 1st millennium AD are quite well studied. e. this region. However, no specific features of the Tivertese culture of this time can be identified.
From the end of the ninth century Turkic nomads penetrate into the steppe regions of the range of the Tivertsy. As a result, in the southern part of the Dniester region in the X century. Tivertsy Slavs leave their settlements. In this regard, we can agree with the hypothesis developed by L. Niederle about the resettlement of some part of the Tivertsy under the onslaught of the Pechenegs, and then the Polovtsians to Ukrainian Transcarpathia and Semigrad Rus.
Until the middle of the X century. streets inhabited the Dnieper lands south of the Polyansky area. In the oldest chronicle code, fragments of which have been preserved in the Novgorod chronicle, it says: “And besha sit down down the Dnieper, and by seven go over between Bg and Dnestr, and sedosha tamo” . Based on the analysis of chronicle data, B. A. Rybakov showed that the migration of streets from the Dnieper to the Bug region and to the Dniester is quite real, and localized the street city of Peresechen in the Southern Dnieper. According to Konstantin Porphyrogenitus, the streets were neighbors with the Pecheneg tribes. Linguists believe that the name of this tribe is derived from the Slavic lexeme corner(corner > uglichi; Russian chronicles contain several different spellings of this ethnonym, including uglichi). Form convict appeared, in all likelihood, under the influence of the Turkic languages. Between the Dnieper and Orel, where the streets lived in the second half of the 1st millennium AD. e., there is a historical area Angle. From this toponym, obviously, the ethnonym was formed uglichi > convict.
The early streets are the Antian local group, which, as already mentioned, inhabited the Dnieper-Orel and Dnieper-Tyasma regions of the Penkovskaya, then Sakhnovskaya culture. In the X century. these lands were occupied by Turkic-speaking nomads. The streets were forced to move to the forest-steppe regions of the Southern Bug basin, where a large number of fortified settlements appeared just at that time.
Notes
- Khavlyuk P. I. Early Slavic settlements in the basin of the Southern Bug // Early medieval East Slavic antiquities. L., 1974. S. 181-215.
- Goryunov E. A. Early stages of the history of the Slavs of the Dnieper Left Bank. L., 1981. S. 66-79.
- Berezovets D. T. Burial grounds near the valley of the river. Tyasmin // Words "Jano-Russian Old Life". Kiev, 1969. S. 67-68.
- Rafalovich I. A. The study of early Slavic settlements in Moldova // Archaeological research in Moldova 1970-1971. Kishinev, 1973, pp. 134-144; Rafalovich I. A., Lapushnyan V. L. Works of the Reut archaeological expedition // Archaeological research in Moldova 1972. Kishinev, 1974. P. 110-147; Them. The burial ground and the early Slavic settlement near the village. Selishte // Archaeological research in Moldova 1973. Chisinau, 1974. P. 104–140.
- Braychevsky M.Yu. Works on the Pastirsky settlement in 1949 // KSIIMK. Issue. XXXVI. 1951, pp. 155-164; His own. New finds of the 7th–8th centuries n. e. on the Shepherd settlement // KSIAU. Issue. 10. 1960. S. 106-108; Braychevsky M. Yu. Pastirsky belongings born in 1949 // Archeology. T. VII. Kiev, 1952. S. 163-173; He is. New excavations at the Pastirsky settlement // Archaeological memorials of the URSR. T. V. Kiev, 1955. S. 67-76; Braichevskaya A. T. Smithy at the Pastirsky settlement // KSIAU. Vip. 103.
- Bidzilya V.I. Cold-smelting furnaces of the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e. on Pivdenny Buzi // Archeology. Vip. 14. Kiev, 1963. S. 123-144.
- Berezovets D. T. Burial grounds of streets ... S. 58-70; Rafalovich I. A. Research of early Slavonic settlements... P. 141-143; Rafalovich I. A., Lapushnyan V. L. Works of the Reut Archaeological Expedition... P. 136-141; Them. A burial ground and an early Slavic settlement ... S. 104-140.
- Rybakov B. A. Ancient Rus // SA. T. XVII. 1953. S. 76-89.
- Vinokur I. S., Megey V. P. Jewelery maisterna of early-middle words "yan" // Archeology. Kiev, 1992. No. 3. S. 82-95; Ukraini, Kiev, 1994, pp. 23-27. His words "Janian jewelers of Podnistrov": For materials, the Bernashivsky complex of the middle of the 1st millennium AD Kam "yanets-Podilsky, 1997. pp. 53-56; Vinokur I. S. Bernashevsky jewelry complex of the Anti-Slavinian frontier // Society, economy, culture and art of the Slavs: Proceedings of the VI International Congress of Slavic Archeology. T. 4. M., 1998. S. 223-232.
- Sedov V.V. Slavs in the Early Middle Ages. M., 1995. S. 84-90.
- Jordan. On the origin and deeds of the Getae. Getica. M., 1960. S. 72.
- Procopius of Caesarea. War with the Goths. M., 1950. S. 156, 298, 384; Collection of the oldest written news about the Slavs. T. 1. M., 1991. S. 170-250.
- Sedov V.V. Slavs of the Middle Dnieper region (according to paleoanthropology data) // Sov. ethnography. 1974. No. 1. S. 16-31.
- Abaev V.I. On the origin of the phoneme g (h) in the Slavic language // Problems of Indo-European linguistics. M., 1964. S. 115-121.
- Abaev V. I. Preverbs and perfectivity: On one Scythian-Slavic isogloss // Problems of Indo-European linguistics. M., 1964. S. 90-99.
- Toporov V. N. About one Iranian-Slavic parallel from the field of syntax // Brief reports of the Institute of Slavic Studies. Issue. 28. M., 1960. S. 3-11; His own. On the Iranian element in Russian spiritual culture // Slavic and Balkan folklore. M., 1989. S. 23-60.
- Sedov V. V. Dialect-tribal differentiation of the Slavs at the beginning of the Middle Ages according to archeology // History, culture, ethnography and folklore of the Slavic peoples. X International Congress of Slavists: Reports of the Soviet Delegation. M., 1988. S. 173-175.
- Abaev V. I. Scythian-European isoglosses: At the junction of East and West. M., 1965. S. 115-117.
- Abaev V. I. Scythian-European isoglosses... P. 110-111; His own. Pre-Christian Religion of the Alans // XXV International Congress of Orientalists: Reports of the USSR Delegation. M., 1960. S. 5-7.
- Ivanov Vyach. Vs., Toporov V.N. About ancient Slavic ethnonyms: main problems and prospects // Slavic antiquities: Ethnogenesis, material culture of Ancient Rus'. Kyiv, 1980; Khaburgaev G. A. The ethnonymy of The Tale of Bygone Years in connection with the tasks of reconstructing the East Slavic glottogenesis. M., 1979. S. 98. According to O. N. Trubachev, the Serbs are an Indo-Aryan ethnonym that entered the Proto-Slavic environment somewhere in the Southern Bug region (Etymological Dictionary of Slavic Languages. Proto-Slavic Lexical Fund. Issue 8. M., 1981. S. 181).
- Filin F. P. Education of the language of the Eastern Slavs. M., 1962. P.60.
- Trubachev O.N. Linguistic periphery of the ancient Slavs: Indo-Aryans in the Northern Black Sea region // Vopr. linguistics. 1977. No. 6. P. 25. On the non-Slavic origin of the ethnonym antes and about the periodic enmity of the Antes with other Slavs, see: Schreiner P. Studia Byzantino-Bulgarica. Vienna, 1986. S. 357; Kramar I. Antskat of a corpse in Slavic and svetlinata in datireneto, localization and etymology in the name “anti” // Historical Pregled. Sofia, 1988. 6. S. 19-33). However, this circumstance cannot in any way be used to deny the Slavic affiliation of the Antes. Information from Procopius and Mauritius, and mainly archaeological materials, reliably indicate that the Ants belonged to the early medieval Slavs.
- Jordan. On the origin and deeds of the Getae... S. 115.
- Code of ancient written news... T. 1. S. 183.
- There. S. 197.
- Duychev I. Attacks and settling on the Slavs on the Balkan Peninsula // Military Historical Collection. T. 26. Issue. 1. Sofia, 1977. S. 73.
- Code of ancient written news... T. 1. S. 187.
- Litavrin G. G. On the campaign of the Avars in 602 against the Ants // Slavs and their neighbors. M., 1989. S. 22-27.
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
URAL STATE UNIVERSITY IM. A. M. GORKY.
Department of Archeology, Ethnology and Special Historical Disciplines.
HISTORICAL FACULTY
Course work
FORMATION OF THE OLD RUSSIAN ETHNOS
Student, c. I-202
Kolmakov Roman Petrovich
Scientific director
Minenko Nina Adamovna
Yekaterinburg 2007
Introduction
Chapter 1. Ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs
Chapter 2. Eastern Slavs within the Old Russian State
Conclusion
List of used literature
Introduction
Russia occupies an important place in world history and culture. Now it is difficult to imagine world development without Peter I, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Zhukov. But the history of the country cannot be considered without the history of the people. And the Russian people, or rather the Old Russian people, certainly played a major role in shaping Russian state. The ancient Russian ethnos played an equally important role in the formation of the Belarusian and Ukrainian people.
The purpose of this work is to consider the issue of the emergence of the Old Russian ethnos, to trace the processes of ethnogenesis. For the study of Old Russian unity, the data of linguistics and archeology are the most important. The works of linguists allow us to talk about the Old Russian linguistic unity. Such a statement does not reject dialectal diversity. Unfortunately, the picture of the dialect division of the Old Russian linguistic community cannot be reconstructed from written sources. Thanks to the finds of birch bark letters, only the Old Novgorod dialect is quite definitely characterized. The use of archeological data in the study of the origins and evolution of the Old Russian ethnos, taking into account all the results obtained so far by other sciences, seems to be very promising. Archaeological materials testify to the ethnocultural unity of the Old Russian population, which is manifested in the unity of urban life and life, in the commonality of funeral rituals and everyday culture of the rural population, in the convergence of life and life of the city and the countryside, and most importantly, in the same trends of cultural development. In this paper, the processes of formation of the Old Russian ethnos in the Old Russian state of the 9th - 11th centuries will be considered.
Work on this topic has been going on for a long time. A number of Russian and foreign authors addressed this problem. And I must say that sometimes their conclusions were diametrically opposed. Ancient Rus' was primarily an ethnic territory. It was a vast region of the East European Plain, inhabited by the Slavs, who originally spoke a single common Slavic (proto-Slavic) language. The Old Russian territory covered in the X-XI centuries all the lands mastered by that time by the Eastern Slavs, including those in which they lived interspersed with the remnants of the local Finnish-speaking, Leto-Lithuanian and Western Baltic populations. There is no doubt that already in the first half of the 11th century, the ethnonym of the East Slavic ethno-linguistic community was "Rus". In the Tale of Bygone Years, Rus' is an ethnic community that included the entire Slavic population of the East European Plain. One of the criteria for distinguishing Rus is linguistic: all the tribes of Eastern Europe have one language - Russian. At the same time, Ancient Rus' was also a state entity. The territory of the state at the end of the 10th - 11th centuries basically corresponded to the ethno-linguistic one, and the ethnonym Rus for the Eastern Slavs in the 10th - 13th centuries was at the same time a polytonym.
The Old Russian ethnos existed within the framework of the Old Russian state in the 10th-13th centuries.
Of the Russian researchers, who was the first to address this topic can rightfully be called Lomonosov. In the 18th century, when German scientists began to make attempts to write the initial Russian history, and the first conclusions about the Russian people were made, Lomonosov then presented his arguments in which he opposed the conclusions of German scientists. But still, Lomonosov became famous not in the historical field.
Known for the work of Boris Florya. In particular, he entered into a dispute with Academician Sedov about the chronological framework for the formation of the Old Russian ethnos, attributing its appearance to the Middle Ages. Boris Florya, based on written sources, argued that the Old Russian ethnos was finally formed only by the 13th century.
Sedov did not agree with him, who, relying on archeological data, attributed the time of the appearance of the Old Russian ethnos to the 9th - 11th centuries. Sedov, on the basis of archaeological data, gives a broad picture of the settlement of the Eastern Slavs, and the formation of the Old Russian ethnos on their basis.
The source base is extremely poorly represented. There are few written sources of Ancient Rus' left. Frequent fires, invasions of nomads, internecine warfare and other disasters left little hope for the preservation of these sources. However, there are still notes by foreign authors who talk about Rus'.
Arab writers and travelers Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Ruste tell about the period of the initial stage of the formation of the ancient Russian state, and also talk about Russian merchants in the east. Their works are extremely important, as they reveal a picture of Russian life in the 10th century.
Russian sources include the Tale of Bygone Years, which, however, at times conflicts with some data of foreign authors.
Chapter 1. Ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs
The ancestors of the Slavs have long lived in Central and Eastern Europe. Archaeologists believe that the Slavic tribes can be traced according to excavations from the middle of the second millennium BC. The ancestors of the Slavs (in the scientific literature they are called Proto-Slavs) are supposedly found among the tribes that inhabited the basin of the Odra, Vistula and Dnieper. Slavic tribes appeared in the Danube basin and in the Balkans only at the beginning of our era.
Soviet historical science recognized that the formation and development of the Slavic tribes took place on the territory of Central and Eastern Europe. By origin, the Eastern Slavs are closely related to the Western and Southern Slavs. All these three groups of kindred peoples had one root.
At the beginning of our era, the Slavic tribes were known under the name of Venets, or Wends. Venedi, or "vento", without a doubt - the ancient self-name of the Slavs. The words of this root (which in ancient times included the nasal sound "e", which later became pronounced as "I") have been preserved for a number of centuries, in some places to the present day. The later name of the large Slavic tribal union "Vyatichi" goes back to this common ancient ethnonym. The medieval German name for the Slavic regions is Wenland, and the modern Finnish name for Russia is Vana. The ethnonym "Wends", it must be assumed, goes back to the ancient European community. From it came the Venets of the Northern Adriatic, as well as the Celtic tribe of the Venets of Brittany, conquered by Caesar during campaigns in Gaul in the 50s of the 1st century. BC e., and Venedi (Veneti) - Slavs. For the first time, Wends (Slavs) are found in the encyclopedic work "Natural History" written by Plin the Elder (23/24-79 AD). In the section on the geographical description of Europe, he reports that Eningia (some region of Europe, the correspondence of which is not on the maps) “is inhabited up to the Visula River by Sarmatians, Wends, Skirs ...” . Skiry - a tribe of Germans, localized somewhere north of the Carpathians. Obviously, their neighbors (as well as the Sarmatians) were the Wends.
Somewhat more specifically, the place of residence of the Wends is noted in the work of the Greek geographer and astronomer Ptolemy "Geographical Guide". The scientist names the Wends among the "big peoples" of Sarmatia and definitely connects the places of their settlements with the Vistula basin. Ptolemy names the Galinds and Sudins as the eastern neighbors of the Wends - these are quite well-known Western Baltic tribes localized in the interfluve of the Vistula and the Neman. On a Roman geographical map of the 3rd century. n. e., known in historical literature as "Peutinger Tables", the Venedi-Sarmatians are designated south of the Baltic Sea and north of the Carpathians.
There is reason to believe that by the middle of the 1st millennium AD. refers to the division of the Slavic tribes into two parts - northern and southern. The writers of the 6th century - Jordan, Procopius and Mauritius - mention the southern Slavs - Sclavens and Antes, emphasizing, however, that these are tribes related to each other and to the Wends. So, Jordan writes: “... Starting from the deposit of the Vistula (Vistula) River, a populous tribe of Venets settled down in the boundless spaces. Although their names are now changing according to different clans and localities, they are still mainly called Slavs and Ants. Etymologically, both of these names go back to the ancient common self-name of Venedi, or Vento. The Antes are repeatedly mentioned in the historical works of the 6th-7th centuries. According to Jordanes, the Antes inhabited the regions between the Dniester and the Dnieper. Using the writings of his predecessors, this historian also covers earlier events when the Antes were at enmity with the Goths. At first, the Antes managed to repel the attack of the Gothic army, but after a while the Gothic king Vinitary still defeated the Antes and executed their prince God and 70 elders.
The main direction of Slavic colonization in the first half of the 1st millennium AD. was northwest. The settlement of the Slavs in the upper reaches of the Volga, Dnieper and Western Dvina, occupied mainly by Finno-Ugric tribes, apparently led to some mixing of the Slavs with the Finno-Ugric peoples, which was also reflected in the nature of cultural monuments.
After the fall of the Scythian state and the weakening of the Sarmatians, Slavic settlements also moved south, where a population belonging to various tribes lived on the territory of a vast area from the banks of the Danube to the middle Dnieper.
Slavic settlements of the middle and second half of the 1st millennium AD in the south, in the steppe and forest-steppe zone, they were mainly open villages of farmers with adobe dwellings, semi-dugouts with stone ovens. There were also small fortified "towns", where, along with agricultural implements, the remains of metallurgical production were found (for example, crucibles for melting non-ferrous metals). Burials at that time were carried out, as before, by burning a corpse, but along with barrowless burial grounds, there were also burials of ashes under barrows, and in the 9th - 10th centuries. the rite of burial by cadaverization is spreading more and more.
In the VI - VII centuries. AD Slavic tribes in the north and north-west occupied the entire eastern and central parts of modern Belarus, previously inhabited by Letto-Lithuanian tribes, and new large areas in the upper reaches of the Dnieper and Volga. In the northeast, they also advanced along the Lovat to Lake Ilmen and further up to Ladoga.
In the same period, another wave of Slavic colonization is heading south. After a stubborn struggle with Byzantium, the Slavs managed to occupy the right bank of the Danube and settle in the vast territories of the Balkan Peninsula. Apparently by the second half of the 1st millennium AD. refers to the division of the Slavs into eastern, western and southern, which has survived to this day.
In the middle and second half of the 1st millennium AD. the socio-economic development of the Slavs reached a level at which their political organization outgrew the limits of the tribe. In the struggle against Byzantium, with the invasion of the Avars and other opponents, alliances of tribes were formed, often representing a large military force and usually received names according to the main of the tribes that were part of this union. Written sources contain information, for example, about the union that united the Duleb-Volyn tribes (VI century), about the union of the Carpathian tribes of Croats - Czech, Vislan and White (VI-VII centuries), about the Serbo-Lusatian union (VII century BC). ). Apparently, the Russ (or Ross) were such a union of tribes. Researchers associate this name itself with the name of the river Ros, where the dews lived, with their main city, Rodnya, and with the cult of the god Rod, which preceded the cult of Perun. Back in the VI century. Jordan mentions "Rosomon", which, according to B. A. Rybakov, may mean "people of the Ros tribe". Until the end of the 9th century, sources mention Ross, or Russ, and from the 10th century the name "Rus", "Russian" already prevails. The territory of the Rus in the VI - VIII centuries. there was, apparently, a forest-steppe region of the middle Dnieper region, which for a long time was called by the people proper Rus even when this name spread to the entire East Slavic state.
Some archaeological sites suggest the existence of other East Slavic tribal unions. Various types of mounds - family burials with corpses - belonged, according to most researchers, to various unions of tribes. The so-called "long mounds" - rampart-shaped burial mounds up to 50 meters long - are common south of Lake Peipus and in the upper reaches of the Dvina, Dnieper and Volga, that is, in the territory of the Krivichi. It can be thought that the tribes that left these mounds (both Slavs and Leto-Lithuanian) were part of a once extensive union, which was headed by the Krivichi. High round mounds - “hills”, common along the Volkhov and Msta rivers (Priilmenye up to Sheksna), belong, in all likelihood, to an alliance of tribes led by the Slavs. Large mounds of the 6th-10th centuries, hiding a whole palisade in the embankment, and a rough box with urns containing the ashes of the dead, could belong to the Vyatichi people. These mounds are found in the upper reaches of the Don and in the middle reaches of the Oka. It is possible that the common features found in the later monuments of the Radimichi (who lived along the Sozha River) and the Vyatichi are explained by the existence in antiquity of the Radimich-Vyatichi union of tribes, which could partially include northerners who lived on the banks of the Desna, Seim, Sula and Worksla. After all, it is not for nothing that later the Tale of Bygone Years tells us the legend about the origin of the Vyatichi and Radimichi from two brothers.
In the south, in the interfluve of the Dniester and the Danube, from the second half, VI - early VII century. there are Slavic settlements that belonged to the tribal union of Tivertsy.
To the north and northeast up to Lake Ladoga, in a remote forest region inhabited by Finno-Ugric tribes, the Krivichi and Slovenes at that time penetrated up the large rivers and their tributaries.
To the south and southeast, to the Black Sea steppes, the Slavic tribes advanced in an unceasing struggle against the nomads. The process of promotion, which began as early as the 6th-7th centuries, proceeded with varying degrees of success. Slavs to the X century. reached the shores of the Sea of Azov. The basis of the later Tmutarakan principality, in all likelihood, was the Slavic population, which penetrated into these places in a much earlier period.
In the middle of the tenth millennium, the main occupation of the Eastern Slavs was agriculture, the development of which, however, was not the same in the south, in the steppe and forest-steppe zones and in the forests of the north. In the south, plow farming has had centuries-old traditions. The finds of the iron parts of the plow (more precisely, the ral) here date back to the 2nd, 3rd and 5th centuries. The developed agricultural economy of the Eastern Slavs of the steppe zone had a considerable influence on their neighbors in the second half of the 10th millennium. This explains, for example, the existence of the Slavic names of many agricultural implements among the Moldavians until now: plow, secure (axe - ax), shovel, tesle (adze) and others.
In the forest belt, only by the end of the 10th millennium, arable farming became the dominant form of economy. The oldest iron opener in these places was found in Staraya Ladoga in layers dating back to the 8th century. Arable agriculture, both plow and ploughshare, already required the use of the draft power of livestock (horses, oxen) and fertilization of the land. Therefore, along with agriculture, cattle breeding played an important role. Fishing and hunting were important secondary occupations. The widespread transition of the East Slavic captives to arable farming as the main occupation was accompanied by serious changes in their social system. Arable farming did not require the joint work of large tribal groups. In the VIII - X centuries. in the steppe in the forest-steppe belts of the south of the European part of Russia, there were settlements of the so-called Roman-Borshchi culture, which researchers consider characteristic of the neighboring community. Among them were small villages fortified by a rampart, consisting of 20-30 houses, ground or several deepened into the ground, and large villages in which only the central part was fortified, and most of the houses (there are up to 250 in total) were outside it. No more than 70 - 80 people lived in small settlements; in large villages - sometimes over a thousand inhabitants. Each dwelling (16 - 22 sq.m. with a separate stove and closet) had its own outbuildings (barn, cellars, various kinds of sheds) and belonged to one family. In some places (for example, on the settlement of Blagoveshchenskaya Gora), larger buildings were discovered, possibly serving as meetings of members of the neighboring community - bratchin, which, according to B. A. Rybakov, was accompanied by some kind of religious rites.
The settlements of the Roman-Borshchevsky type are very different in character from the settlements located in the north, in Staraya Ladoga, where, in the layers of the 8th century, V.I. with a small porch and a stove-heater, located in the center of the dwelling. Probably, a large family (from 15 to 25 people) lived in each such house; food was prepared in the oven for everyone, and food was taken from collective stocks. Outbuildings were located separately, next to the dwelling. The settlement of Staraya Ladoga also belonged to the neighboring community, in which the remnants of tribal life were still strong, and the dwellings belonged to even larger families. Already in the 9th century, here these houses were replaced by small huts (16 - 25 sq.m.) with a stove-heater in the corner, the same as in the south, the dwellings of one relatively small family.
Natural conditions contributed to the formation of the East Slavic population in the forest and steppe belts already in the 1st millennium AD. e. two types of housing, the differences between which further deepened. In the forest zone, ground log houses with a stove-heater dominated, in the steppe - adobe (often on a wooden frame) somewhat recessed into the ground with an adobe stove and an earthen floor.
In the process of the disintegration of patriarchal relations from quite distant times, the remnants of more ancient social forms described in the Tale of Bygone Years were preserved in some places - marriage by kidnapping, the remains of a group marriage, which the chronicler mistook for polygamy, traces of an avunculate, who said in the custom of feeding, burning the dead.
Based on the ancient alliances of Slavic tribes, territorial political associations (principalities) were formed. In general, they experienced a “semi-patriarchal-semi-feudal” period of development, during which, with increasing property inequality, local nobility stood out, gradually seizing communal lands and turning into feudal owners. The chronicles also mention representatives of this nobility - Mala among the Drevlyans, Khodota and his son among the Vyatichi. Mala they even call the prince. I considered the legendary Kyi, the founder of Kyiv, to be the same prince.
The territories of the East Slavic principalities are described in the Tale of Bygone Years. Some features of the life of their population (in particular, differences in the details of the funeral rite, local women's wedding dress) were very stable and persisted for several centuries even when the reigns themselves ceased to exist. Thanks to this, archaeologists managed, starting from chronicle data, to significantly clarify the boundaries of these areas. The East Slavic territory at the time of the formation of the Kievan state was a single massif, stretching from the shores of the Black Sea to Lake Ladoga and from the upper reaches of the Western Bug to the middle reaches of the Oka and Klyazma. The southern part of this massif was formed by the territories of the Tivertsy and Ulich, covering the middle and southern reaches of the Prut Dniester and the Southern Bug. To the north-west of them, in the upper reaches of the Dniester and Prut in Transcarpathia, white Croats lived. To the north of them, in the upper reaches of the Western Bug - Volynians, to the east and northeast of the White Croats, on the banks of the Pripyat, Sluch and Irsha - the Drevlyans, to the southeast of the Drevlyans, in the middle reaches of the Dnieper, in the Kiev region - a clearing, on the left on the banks of the Dnieper, along the course of the Desna and the Seim - northerners, to the north of them, along the Sozh - radimichi. The neighbors of the Radimichi from the west were the Dregovichi, who occupied the lands along the Berezina and in the upper reaches of the Neman, from the east, the Vyatichi, who inhabited the upper and middle parts of the Oka basin (including the Moscow River) and the upper reaches of the Don, bordered the northerners and Radimichi. To the north of the Moskva River, a vast territory in the upper reaches of the Volga, Dnieper and western Dvina, extending in the northwest to the eastern shore of Lake Peipus, was occupied by the Krivichi. Finally, in the north and northeast of the Slavic territory, on Lovat and Volkhov lived Ilmen Slovenes.
Within the East Slavic principalities, smaller divisions can be traced from archaeological materials. So, the Krivichi mounds include three large groups of monuments, differing in details in the funeral rite - Pskov Smolensk and Polotsk (the chronicler also singled out a special group of Polochans among the Krivichi). The Smolensk and Polotsk groups apparently formed later than the Pskov one, which allows us to think about the colonization by the Krivichi, newcomers from the southwest, from Prinemaniya or the Buzh-Vistula interfluve, first Pskov (in the 4th - 6th centuries), and then - Smolensk and Polotsk lands. Among the Vyatichi burial mounds, several local groups are also distinguished.
In the IX - XI centuries. a continuous territory of the ancient Russian state of the Russian land is being formed, the concept of which as a homeland was highly characteristic of the Eastern Slavs of that time. Until that time, the coexisting consciousness of the commonality of the East Slavic tribes rested on tribal ties. Russian land occupied vast expanses from the left tributaries of the Vistula to the foothills of the Caucasus from the Taman and the lower reaches of the Danube to the shores of the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga. Numerous people who lived on this territory called themselves "Rus", having adopted, as mentioned above, a self-name that was previously only inherent in the population of a relatively small area in the Middle Dnieper. Rus was called this country, and other peoples of that time. The territory of the Old Russian state included not only the East Slavic population, but also parts of neighboring tribes.
The colonization of non-Slavic lands (in the Volga region, Ladoga region, in the North) was initially peaceful. First of all, Slavic peasants and artisans penetrated into these territories. New settlers lived even in unfortified settlements, without fear, apparently, of attacks by the local population. Peasants developed new lands, artisans supplied the district with their products. In the future, Slavic feudal lords came there with their squads. They set up fortresses, imposing tribute on the Slavic and non-Slavic population of the region, seized the best plots of land.
In the course of the economic development of these lands by the Russian population, the complex process of mutual cultural influence of the Slavs and the Finno-Ugric population intensified. Many Chud tribes even lost their language and culture, but in turn influenced the material and spiritual culture of the ancient Russian people.
In the ninth and especially in the tenth century. The common self-name of the Eastern Slavs manifested itself with much greater force and depth in the spread of the term "Rus" to all East Slavic lands, in the recognition of the ethnic unity of all living in this territory, in the consciousness of a common destiny and in the common struggle for the integrity and independence of Rus'.
The replacement of old tribal ties with new, territorial ones took place gradually. So, in the field of military organization, one can trace the presence of independent militias in the ancient principalities until the end of the 10th century. Militias of Slovenes, Krivichi, Drevlyans, Radimichis, Polyans, Northerners, Croats, Dulebs, Tivertsy (and even non-Slavic tribes - Chuds, etc.) participated in the campaigns of the Kyiv princes. From the beginning of the XI century. They began to be forced out in the central regions by the militias of the cities of Novgorod, the Kievans (Kyivians), although the military independence of individual principalities continued to exist in the 10th and 11th centuries.
On the basis of ancient related tribal dialects, the Old Russian language was created, which had local dialect differences. By the end of the ninth - beginning of the tenth century. The addition of the Old Russian written language and the appearance of the first monuments of writing should be attributed.
The further growth of the territories of Rus', the development of the Old Russian language and culture went hand in hand with the strengthening of the Old Russian people and the gradual elimination of the remnants of tribal isolation. An important role here was played by the isolation of the classes of feudal lords and peasants, the strengthening of the state.
Written and archaeological sources relating to the 9th - 10th and early 11th centuries clearly depict the process of class formation, the separation of senior and junior squads.
By IX - XI centuries. include large burial mounds, where mostly warriors are buried, burned at the stake along with weapons, various luxury items, sometimes with slaves (more often with slaves), who were supposed to serve their master in the "other world", as they served in this. Such burial grounds were located near the large feudal centers of Kievan Rus (the largest of them is Gnezdovsky, where there are more than 2 thousand burial mounds, near Smolensk; Mikhailovsky near Yaroslavl). In Kiev itself, soldiers were buried according to a different rite - they were not burned, but often laid with women and always with horses and weapons in a specially buried log house (domovina) with a floor and a ceiling. A study of weapons and other things found in the burials of combatants convincingly showed that the vast majority of combatants are Slavs. In the Gnezdovsky burial ground, only a small minority of burials belong to the Normans - "Varangians". Along with the burials of combatants in the tenth century. There were magnificent burials of the feudal nobility - princes or boyars. A noble Slav was burned in a boat or a specially built building - a domino - with slaves, a slave, horses and other domestic animals, weapons and a lot of precious utensils that belonged to him during his lifetime. First, a small mound was arranged over the funeral pyre, on which a feast was performed, possibly accompanied by a feast, ritual competitions and war games, and only then a large mound was poured.
The economic and political development of the Eastern Slavs naturally led to the creation among them, on a local basis, of a feudal state headed by Kievan princes. The Varangian conquest, reflected in the legend about the "calling" of the Varangians to the Novgorod land and the capture of Kiev in the 9th century, had no more, and most likely less influence on the development of the Eastern Slavs than on the population of medieval France or England. The case was limited to a change of dynasty and the penetration of a certain number of Normans into the nobility. But the new dynasty was under the strongest influence of Slavic culture and "Russified" after a few decades. The grandson of the legendary founder of the Varangian dynasty, Rurik, bore a purely Slavic name - Svyatoslav, and in all likelihood, the manner of dressing and holding was no different from any representative of the Slavic nobility.
Thus, it is clear that at the time of the formation of the Old Russian state on the territory of the East Slavic tribes, there were ethnic characteristics common to all that preceded the formation of the Old Russian nationality. This is confirmed by archeological data: a uniform material culture can be traced. Also in this territory a single language has developed, with minor local dialect features.
Chapter 2. Eastern Slavs within the Old Russian State
Existence in the X-XI centuries. Old Russian (East Slavonic) ethno-linguistic community is reliably confirmed by the data of linguistics and archeology. In the 10th century, on the East European Plain, within the Slavic settlement, several cultures reflecting the former dialect-ethnographic division of the Proto-Slavic ethnos were replaced by a uniform Old Russian culture. Its general development was due to the formation of urban life with an actively evolving handicraft activity, the addition of a military retinue and administrative classes. The population of cities, the Russian squad and the state administration were formed from representatives of various Proto-Slavic formations, which led to the leveling of their dialectal and other features. Items of urban life and weapons become monotonous characteristic of all Eastern Slavs.
This process also affected the rural inhabitants of Rus', as evidenced by funerary monuments. To replace the diverse types of burial mounds - the Korchak and Upper Oka types, the rampart-shaped (long) mounds of the Krivichi and the Ilmensky hills - the Old Russian ones are spreading in their structure, rituals and the direction of evolution, the same type throughout the territory of ancient Rus'. The burial mounds of the Drevlyans or Dregovichi become identical with the synchronous cemeteries of the Krivichi or Vyatichi. Tribal (ethnographic) differences in these mounds are manifested only in unequal temporal rings, the rest of the finds (bracelets, rings, earrings, crescents, household items, etc.) are of an all-Russian character.
In the ethno-linguistic consolidation of the Slavic population of the Old Russian state, immigrants from the Danube played a huge role. The infiltration of the latter is felt in the archaeological materials of Eastern Europe since the 7th century. At this time, it affected mainly the Dnieper lands.
However, after the defeat of the Great Moravian state, numerous groups of Slavs, leaving the inhabited Danubian lands, settled along the East European Plain. This migration, as shown by numerous finds of Danubian origin, is to one degree or another characteristic of all areas previously mastered by the Slavs. The Danube Slavs became the most active part of the Eastern Slavs. Among them were many highly skilled artisans. There is reason to believe that the rapid spread of pottery among the Slavic population of Eastern Europe was due to the infiltration of the Danube potters in its environment. The Danube craftsmen gave impetus to the development of jewelry, and possibly other crafts of ancient Rus'.
Under the influence of the Danube settlers, the previously dominant pagan custom of cremation of the dead in the tenth century. began to be supplanted by burial mounds of pit corpses. In the Kiev Dnieper region in the tenth century. inhumations already dominated the Slavic burial mounds, necropolises, that is, a century before the official adoption of Christianity by Rus. To the north, in the forest zone up to Ilmen, the process of changing rituals took place in the second half of the 10th century.
The materials of linguistics also testify that the Slavs of the East European Plain survived the common ancient Russian era. Linguistic researches of scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to this conclusion. Their results were summed up by the outstanding Slavic philologist, dialectologist and historian of the Russian language N. N. Durnovo in the book "Introduction to the History of the Russian Language", published in 1927 in Brno.
This conclusion follows from a comprehensive analysis of the written monuments of ancient Rus'. Although most of them, including chronicles, are written in Church Slavonic, a number of these documents often describe episodes whose language deviates from the norms of Church Slavonic and is Old Russian. There are also monuments written in Old Russian. Such are the “Russian Truth”, compiled in the 11th century. (came down to us in the list of the 10th century), many letters, free from elements of Church Slavonic, “The Tale of Igor's Campaign”, the language of which approaches the living speech of the then urban population of South Rus'; some Lives of the Saints.
An analysis of written monuments allowed researchers to assert that in the history of the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe there was a period when, throughout the entire space of the settlement of Eastern Slavs, new linguistic phenomena and at the same time some of the former Proto-Slavic processes developed.
A single East Slavic ethno-linguistic space does not exclude dialectal diversity. Its complete picture cannot be restored from written monuments. Judging by the materials of archeology, the dialectal division of the Old Russian community was quite deep and was due to the settlement of the Slavs of very different tribal groups on the East European Plain and their interaction with a heterogeneous and ethnically subtractive population.
The ethnic unity of the Slavic population of the 11th - 17th centuries, settled in the spaces of the Eastern Plain and called Rus, is also quite clearly spoken by historical sources. In The Tale of Bygone Years, Rus' is ethnographically, linguistically and politically contrasted with the Poles, Byzantine Greeks, Hungarians, Polovtsy and other ethnic groups of that time. Based on the analysis of written monuments, A.V. Solovyov showed that for two centuries (911-1132) the concept of "Rus" and "Russian land" meant the entire Eastern Slavs, the entire country inhabited by them.
In the second half of the 12th - the first third of the 13th centuries, when Ancient Rus' broke up into a number of feudal principalities that pursued or tried to pursue an independent policy, the unity of the ancient Russian people continued to be realized: the entire Russian land was opposed to isolated estates, often at enmity with each other. The idea of the unity of Rus' is imbued with many works of art of that time and epics. The bright ancient Russian culture at that time continued its progressive development throughout the entire territory of the Eastern Slavs.
From the middle of the XIII century. The East Slavic area turned out to be dissected in political, cultural and economic terms. Former integration processes were suspended. Old Russian culture, the level of development of which was largely determined by cities with highly developed crafts, ceased to function. Many cities of Rus' were ruined, life in others fell into decay for some time. In the situation that developed in the second half of the 13th - 14th centuries, the further development of common language processes throughout the vast East Slavic space became impossible. Local linguistic features appeared in different regions, the Old Russian ethnic group ceased to exist.
The basis of the linguistic development of various regions of the Eastern Slavs was not the political, economic and cultural differentiation of the area. The formation of individual languages was largely due to the historical situation that took place in Eastern Europe in the middle and second half of the 1st millennium AD. e.
It can be stated quite definitely that the Belarusians and their language were the result of the Balto-Slavic symbiosis that began in the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e., when the first groups of Slavs appeared on the ancient Baltic territory, and ended in the X-XII centuries. The bulk of the Balts did not leave their habitats and, as a result of Slavicization, merged into the Slavic ethnos. This Western Russian population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania gradually transformed into the Belarusian ethnic group.
The descendants of the Ants became the basis of the Ukrainian nationality. However, it would not be correct to direct Ukrainians to them. Anty - one of the dialect-cultural groups of the Slavs, formed in late Roman times in the conditions of the Slavic-Iranian symbiosis. During the period of the migration of peoples, a significant part of the Ant tribes migrated to the Balkan-Danube lands, where they participated in the ethnogenesis of the Danube Serbs and Croats, Poelbe Sorbs, Bulgarians, etc. At the same time, a large array of Ants moved to the middle Volga, where they created the Imenkovskaya culture.
In the Dnieper-Dniester region, the direct descendants of the Ants were the annalistic Croats, Tivertsy and Ulichi. In the 7th - 9th centuries. there is some mixing of the Slavs, who came out of the Ants community, with the Slavs of the Duleb group, and during the period of Old Russian statehood, obviously, under the onslaught of the steppe nomads, the descendants of the Ants infiltrated in a northerly direction.
The originality of the culture of the descendants of the Ants in the Old Russian period is manifested primarily in the funeral rituals - the burial rite of burial was not widespread among them. In this area, the main Ukrainian dialects developed.
More complex was the process of formation of the Russian nationality. In general, the North Great Russians are the descendants of those Slavic tribes who, leaving the Venedian group of the Proto-Slavic community (Hanging), settled in the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e. in the forest lands of the East European Plain. The history of these settlers was ambiguous. Those Slavs who settled in the Upper Dnieper and Podvinye, i.e., the ancient Baltic area, after the collapse of the Old Russian people, became part of the emerging Belarusians. Separate dialect regions were Novgorod, Pskov lands and North-Eastern Rus'. In the X - XII centuries. these were dialects of the Old Russian language, which later, in all likelihood, acquired an independent meaning. All these territories before the Slavic development belonged to various Finnish tribes, whose influence on the Old Russian language was insignificant.
The core of the South Great Russians was the Slavs, who returned from the Middle Volga region (also descendants of acts) and settled in the interfluve of the Dnieper and Don (Volyn, Romny, Borshchev cultures and Oka antiquities synchronous to them).
Cementing in the development of the Russian language were the Middle Great Russian dialects, the beginning of which, presumably, dates back to the 10th - 12th centuries, when there was a territorial mixing of the Krivichi (future North Great Russians) with the Vyatichi (South Great Russian group). Over time, the formation of Middle Great Russian dialects expanded. Moscow occupied the central position in it. In the context of the formation of a single statehood and the creation of the culture of the Moscow State, the Middle Great Russian dialects became a consolidating moment in the gradual formation of a single ethno-linguistic whole. The annexation of Novgorod and Pskov to Moscow expanded the territory of the formation of the Russian ethnos.
Old Russian nationality - a historical fact. It fully complies with the requirements and features that are inherent in this type of historical and ethnic community. At the same time, it was not a unique historical phenomenon, inherent only to the East Slavic peoples. Certain patterns and factors determine the forms of ethnic processes, the emergence of ethno-social societies with their inherent mandatory features. Modern science considers nationality as a special type of ethnic community that occupies a historical niche between a tribe and a nation.
The transition from primitive to statehood was accompanied everywhere
ethnic transformation of previous ethnic groups and the emergence of nationalities formed on the basis of primitive tribes. Nationality, therefore, is not only an ethnic, but also a social historical community of people, characteristic of a new and higher state of society compared to the primitive (tribal) state. All Slavic nationalities correspond to the mode of production and social relations.
The political system of Rus' also determined the nature of the ethnic state. Tribes are gone, and nationality has taken their place. Like any other historical category, it has its own characteristics. The most important of them: language, culture, ethnic identity, territory. All this was also inherent in the population of Rus' in the 9th - 13th centuries.
Various written sources that have come down to us (chronicles, literary works, individual inscriptions) testify to the common language of the Eastern Slavs. It is an axiom that the languages of the modern East Slavic peoples developed on a common Old Russian basis.
Separate facts that do not fit into this scheme cannot refute the idea of the existence of the Old Russian language as a whole. And in the western lands of Rus', despite the scarcity of linguistic material that has come down to us, the language was the same - Old Russian. An idea of it is given by fragments that were included in the all-Russian codes from local Western Russian chronicles. Especially indicative is direct speech, adequate to the living spoken language of this region of Rus'.
The language of Western Rus' is also represented in the inscriptions on whorls, fragments of dishes, "Borisov" and "Rogvolod" stones, birch bark letters. Of particular interest is a birch-bark letter from Vitebsk, on which the text has been preserved in full.
Rus' occupied the vast expanses of Eastern Europe, and it would be naive to believe that the Old Russian language did not have dialects, local features. But they did not go beyond dialects, from which modern East Slavic languages are not free either. Differences in language could also have social roots. The language of the educated princely environment differed from the language of a simple city dweller. The latter was different from the language of the villager. The unity of the language was realized by the population of Rus' and was repeatedly emphasized by the chroniclers.
Uniformity is also inherent in the material culture of Rus'. It is practically impossible to distinguish most of the objects of material culture made, for example, in Kyiv, from similar objects from Novgorod or Minsk. The ego convincingly proves the existence of a single ancient Russian ethnos.
Ethnic self-consciousness, self-name, people's idea of their homeland, its geographical spaces should be especially attributed to the number of signs of nationality.
It is the formation of ethnic self-consciousness that completes the process of the formation of an ethnic community. The Slavic population of Rus', including its western lands, had a common self-name ("Rus", "Russian people", "Rusichs", "Rusyns") and realized themselves as one people living in the same geographical area. Awareness of a single Motherland persisted even during the period of feudal fragmentation of Rus'.
A common ethnic identity was fixed in Rus' early and very quickly. Already the first written sources that have come down to us speak convincingly about this (see, for example, the “treaty of Rus' with the Greeks” of 944, concluded from “all the people of the Russian land”).
The ethnonyms "Rusyn", "Rusich", not to mention the name "Russian", functioned during the time of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Commonwealth. The Belarusian printing pioneer Francysk Skaryna (XVI century) in the diploma he received from the University of Padua is called “Rusyn from Polotsk”. The name "Russian" is the common self-name of the Eastern Slavs, an indicator of a single East Slavic ethnic group, an expression of its self-consciousness.
The Russian people's awareness of the unity of their territory (not the state), which they had to protect from foreigners, is especially strongly expressed in the "Word of Igor's Campaign" and "The Word of the Destruction of the Russian Land."
A single language, one culture, a name, a common ethnic identity - this is how we see Rus' and its population. This is a single ancient Russian people. Awareness of a common origin, common roots is a characteristic feature of the mentality of the three fraternal East Slavic peoples, which they carried through the centuries, and which we, the heirs of ancient Rus', should never forget.
The undoubted fact of the real existence of the Old Russian nationality does not mean at all that there are no unexplored aspects in this issue.
In Soviet historiography, the idea became widespread that the formation of the Old Russian nationality took place during the period of the existence of the Old Russian state on the basis of East Slavic groupings (“annalistic tribes”), united within the framework of one state. As a result of the strengthening of internal ties (economic, political, cultural), tribal characteristics were gradually leveled and common features characteristic of a single nationality were affirmed. The completion of the process of formation of the nationality was attributed to the XI - XII centuries. Such an idea, as it now turns out, was generated by an erroneous idea of the autochthonous nature of the Slavic population throughout the entire space of the ancient Russian state. This made it possible to assume that the Slavs went from the primary tribes to tribal unions, and after the unification of the unions, they evolved within the framework of the Old Russian state.
From the point of view of modern ideas about the mechanism of ethno-formation, such a way of forming the ancient Russian people looks paradoxical, raises questions and even doubts. Indeed, in the conditions of the settlement of the East Slavic ethnos over large areas in those historical times, when there were not yet sufficient economic prerequisites for deep integration, regular intra-ethnic contacts covering the entire vast territory occupied by the Eastern Slavs, it is difficult to imagine the reasons for the leveling of local ethno-cultural features and approval of common features in language, culture and self-consciousness, all that is inherent in the nationality. It is difficult to agree with such an explanation, when the fact of the formation of Kievan Rus is put forward as the main theoretical argument. After all, the political subordination of individual lands to the Kyiv prince could not become the leading factor in new ethno-forming processes and intra-ethnic consolidation. Of course, there were other factors that contributed to the integration processes. But there is one very important theoretical point that does not allow accepting the traditional explanation of the mechanism for the formation of the ancient Russian people.
It is known that a large area of ethnic settlement in the conditions of dominance of subsistence farming and weak development of economic ties not only complicates intra-ethnic contacts, but is also one of the reasons for the emergence of local cultural and ethnic characteristics. It was as a result of settlement in large areas that the Proto-Iondo-European community broke up and the Indo-European family of peoples arose. Also, the exit of the Slavs beyond the boundaries of their ancestral home and their settlement over a large territory led to their division into separate branches. This is the general pattern of the ethnogenesis of peoples. Most scientists have come to the conclusion that new ethnic groups arise and initially live in a small area. Therefore, it is difficult to agree with the statements that the formation of the Old Russian people took place throughout the vast territory of Rus' in the 11th - 12th centuries.
Another powerful "destructive factor" leading to the disintegration of ethnic groups is the action of the ethnic substratum. No one doubts the fact that the Eastern Slavs in the territory of their settlement were preceded by various non-Slavic peoples (Baltic, Finougorian, etc.), with whom the Slavs maintained active interethnic relations. This also did not contribute to the consolidation of the East Slavic ethnic group. The Slavs undoubtedly experienced the destructive effect of various substrates. In other words, from the point of view of the territory of ethnogenesis, the traditional explanation of the mechanism for the formation of the Old Russian people looks vulnerable. Other explanations are needed, and they are.
Of course, the history of the Eastern Slavs developed according to a different scenario, and the foundations of the Old Russian nationality matured much earlier and far from all over the territory of the future Rus'. The most likely center of East Slavic settlement was a relatively small area, including southern Belarus and northern Ukraine, where approximately in the 6th century. Part of the tribes with a culture of the Prague type migrated. Here, its original version gradually developed, which received the name Korczak. Before the arrival of the Slavs, archaeological sites close to the Bantser-Kolochivsky ones were widespread in this region, which did not go beyond the Baltic hydronymic area, and therefore can be correlated with the Baltic tribes.
In the archaeological complexes of Korczak, there are objects related to the named monuments or related to them by origin. This is evidence of the mixing of the Slavs with the remnants of the local Baltic population. There is an opinion that the Baltic population here was relatively rare. When in the VIII - IX centuries. on the basis of the Korczak culture, a culture of the type of Luka Raikowiecka will develop, it will no longer trace elements that could be correlated with the Balts.
Therefore, by the 7th c. The assimilation of the Balts was completed here. The Slavs of this area, including part of the local population, could experience the impact of the Baltic substrate, perhaps insignificant, but affecting their cultural and ethnic nature. This circumstance could initiate their separation as a special (eastern) group of Slavs.
Perhaps it was here that the foundations of the East Slavic language were laid.
Only in this territory of Eastern Europe did early Slavic hydronymy survive. There is none north of Pripyat. There, Slavic hydronymy belongs to the East Slavic linguistic type. From this we can conclude that when later the Slavs began to settle in the spaces of Eastern Europe, they can no longer be identified with the all-Slavic ethnos. It was a group of Eastern Slavs that emerged from the early Slavic world with a specific culture and a special (East Slavic) type of speech. In this regard, it is worth recalling the conjecture expressed by A. Shakhmatov about the formation of the East Slavic language in a relatively small territory of Ukrainian Volyn and about the migration of Eastern Slavs from here in a northerly direction. This region, together with southern Belarus, can be considered the ancestral home of the Eastern Slavs.
During the stay of the Slavs in this territory, they experienced important changes: some tribal features that could have been in the initial period of migration from their ancestral home were leveled; the foundations of the East Slavic system of speech were formed; the type of archaeological culture inherent in them took shape. There is reason to believe that it was at this time that the common self-name "Rus" was assigned to them and the first East Slavic state association with the Kiya dynasty arose. Thus, it was here that the main features of the Old Russian nationality were formed.
In such a new ethnic quality, the Eastern Slavs in the 9th - 10th centuries. began to populate the lands north of Pripyat, which Konstantin Porphyrogenitus calls "Outer Russia". Probably, this migration began after the approval of Oleg in Kyiv. The Slavs settled as one people with an established culture, which predetermined the unity of the ancient Russian people for a long time. Archaeological evidence of this process is the widespread distribution of spherical mounds, with single cremations of the 9th-10th centuries. and the emergence of the first cities.
The historical situation contributed to the rapid and successful settlement of the Eastern Slavs, since this region was already controlled by Oleg and his successors.
The Slavs were distinguished by a higher level of economic and social development, which also contributed to the success of settlement.
The relatively late migration of the Eastern Slavs outside their ancestral home, as a fairly monolithic community, calls into question the existence of the so-called tribal unions among those who settled north of Pripyat (Krivichi, Dregovichi, Vyatichi, etc.). The Slavs have already managed to go beyond the tribal system and create a stronger ethnic and political organization. However, having settled in large areas, the Old Russian ethnos found itself in a difficult situation. Continued to remain in this area different groups local non-Slavic population. On the lands of modern Belarus and the Smolensk region, the Eastern Balts lived; Finno-Ugric peoples lived in the northeast of Rus'; in the south - the remnants of the Iranian-speaking and Turkic peoples.
The Slavs did not exterminate and did not oust the local population. For several centuries, a symbiosis took place here, accompanied by a gradual displacement of the Slavs with various non-Slavic peoples.
The East Slavic ethnos experienced the impact of various forces. Some of them contributed to the establishment of common principles inherent in the nationality, others, on the contrary, to the emergence of local features in them, both in language and in culture.
Despite the complex dynamics of development, the Old Russian ethnos found itself under the influence of integration forces and processes that cemented it and created favorable conditions not only for the preservation, but also for the deepening of common ethnic principles. A powerful factor in the preservation of the ethnos and ethnic self-consciousness was the institution of state power, the single princely dynasty of Rurikovich. Wars and joint campaigns against common enemies, which were characteristic of that time, to a large extent strengthened the overall solidarity and contributed to the rallying of the ethnos.
In the era of ancient Rus', undoubtedly, economic ties between individual Russian lands intensified. A huge role in the formation and preservation of a single ethnic identity belonged to the church. Having adopted Christianity according to the Greek model, the country turned out to be, as it were, an oasis among peoples who professed either another religion (pagans: nomads in the south, Lithuania and Finougrians in the north and east), or belonged to another Christian denomination. This formed and supported the idea of the identity of the people, its difference from others. The feeling of belonging to a certain faith is such a strong and unifying factor that it often replaces ethnic identity.
The Church had a strong influence on political life countries and shaped public opinion. She consecrated princely power, strengthened the ancient Russian statehood, purposefully supported the idea of the unity of the country and people, condemned civil strife and division. The ideas of a single country, a single people, its common historical destinies, responsibility for its well-being and security greatly contributed to the formation of ancient Russian ethnic identity. The spread of writing and literacy preserved the unity of the language. All these factors contributed to the strengthening of the Old Russian people.
Thus, the foundations of the ancient Russian nationality were laid in the VI - XI centuries. after the settlement of part of the Slavs on the relatively compact territory of southern Belarus and northern Ukraine. Having settled from here in the 9th - 10th centuries. as one people, they were able to maintain their integrity for a long time in the conditions of ancient Russian statehood, develop the economy, culture, and strengthen ethnic self-consciousness.
At the same time, the Old Russian people fell into the zone of action of destructive forces: the territorial factor, different ethnic substrates, the deepening of feudal fragmentation, and later political demarcation. The Eastern Slavs found themselves in the same situation as the early Slavs after their settlement outside their ancestral home. The laws of ethnogenesis worked. The evolution of the ancient Russian ethnos tended to accumulate elements leading to differentiation, which was the reason for its gradual division into three peoples - Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians.
Conclusion
Finishing this work, I consider it possible to draw some conclusions. The Slavs have come a long way of ethnogenesis. Moreover, certain signs by which one can accurately state the appearance of the Slavs belong to a rather early period (we can definitely talk about the second quarter of the 1st millennium). The Slavs occupied vast areas of Eastern Europe, contacted many peoples and left a memory of themselves among these peoples. True, some ancient authors did not call the Slavs by their own name for a long time, confusing them with other peoples. But, nevertheless, one cannot deny the great importance of the Slavs on the fate of Eastern Europe. The Slavic element still remains the main one in most Eastern European states.
The division of the Slavs into three branches did not lead to the immediate destruction of their ethno-cultural characteristics, but, of course, led to the identification of their bright features. Although the millennia-old development of closely related peoples has led them to such discord that it is now impossible to unravel this tangle of contradictions and mutual claims.
The Eastern Slavs created their own state later than others, but this does not mean that they are somehow backward or underdeveloped. The Eastern Slavs went their way to the state, a difficult path of interaction with nature and the local population, struggle with nomads and proved their right to exist. Having broken up, the ancient Russian ethnos gave life to three, completely independent, but extremely close to each other, peoples: Russian Ukrainian and Belarusian. Today, some not entirely competent and rather highly politicized historians, both in Ukraine and in Belarus, are trying to deny the Old Russian unity and are trying to deduce their peoples from some kind of mythical roots. At the same time, they even manage to deny belonging to the Slavic world. For example, in Ukraine they came up with a completely unthinkable version that the Ukrainian people de descended from some kind of "ukrov". Of course, such an approach to history cannot bring about any positive aspects in the perception of reality. And it is not surprising that such "versions" spread precisely in the light of anti-Russian sentiments, primarily among political leaders in Ukraine. The construction of such "historical" concepts cannot be durable and can only be explained by the current political course of these countries.
It is difficult to deny the existence of the Old Russian ethnos. The presence of the main ethnic features among the Eastern Slavs (single language, common cultural space) suggests that at the time of the formation of the ancient Russian state there was a single ethnic group, albeit with its own local characteristics. The feeling of unity was preserved even during the feudal fragmentation, however, with the Tatar-Mongol invasion, new processes of ethnic formation were caused, which after several decades led to the division of the Eastern Slavs into three peoples.
List of used sources and literature
Sources
1. Geographical guidance. Ptolemy.
2. Natural history. Pliny the Elder.
3. Notes on the Gallic War. Caesar
4. On the management of the empire. Konstantin Porphyrogenitus. M., 1991.
5. On the origin and deeds of the Getae (Getika). Jordan. M., 1960.
6. The Tale of Bygone Years. M., 1950. T. 1.
Literature
1. The introduction of Christianity in Rus'. M., 1987.
2. Vernadsky G.V. Ancient Rus'. Tver - M. 1996.
3. Old Russian unity: paradoxes of perception. Sedov V.V. // RIIZH Motherland. 2002.11\12
4. Zabelin I.E. The history of Russian life since ancient times. Part 1. - M., 1908.
5. Zagorulsky E. About the time and conditions of the formation of the ancient Russian nationality.
6. Ilovaisky D.I. Beginning of Rus'. Moscow, Smolensk. 1996.
7. How Rus' was baptized. M., 1989.
8. Kostomarov N.I. Russian republic. M., Smolensk. 1994.
9. Peoples of the European part of the USSR. T. 1 / Ed. V.A. Aleksandrova M.: Nauka, 1964.
10. Petrukhin V.Ya. The beginning of the ethno-cultural history of Rus' in the 9th - 11th centuries. Smolensk - M., 1995.
11. Petrukhin V.Ya. Slavs. M 1997.
12. Prozorov L.R. Once again about the beginning of Russia.//State and Society. 1999. No. 3, No. 4.
13. Rybakov B.A. Kievan Rus and Russian principalities of the 12th–13th centuries. M., 1993.
14. Rybakov B.A. Prerequisites for the formation of the ancient Russian state. Essays on the history of the USSR III-IX centuries, M., 1958.
There. C.8
Petrukhin V.Ya. The beginning of the ethno-cultural history of Rus' in the 9th - 11th centuries. Smolensk - M., 1995.
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How was the ancient Russian people formed? The development of feudal relations takes place in the process of transforming tribal unions into principalities, that is, separate state associations. The history of the ancient Russian state and the formation of the ancient Russian nationality begin with this process - processes are interconnected.
What preceded the foundation of Kievan Rus? What factors contributed to the formation of the Old Russian people?
Founding of the state
In the ninth century, Slavic society reached a level where it was necessary to create a legal framework that would regulate conflicts. Civil strife arose as a result of inequality. The state is the legal field capable of resolving many conflict situations. Without it, such a historical phenomenon as the ancient Russian nationality could not exist. In addition, the unification of the tribes was necessary, because the state is always stronger than unrelated principalities.
About when the state arose that united historians argue to this day. At the beginning of the 9th century, the Ilmen Slovenes and Finno-Ugric tribes started such a feud that the local leaders decided on a desperate step: to invite experienced rulers, preferably from Scandinavia.
Varangian rulers
According to the chronicle, the wise leaders sent a message to Rurik and his brothers, which said that their land was rich, fruitful, but there was no peace on it, only strife and civil strife. The authors of the letter invited the Scandinavians to reign and restore order. There was nothing shameful in this proposal for local rulers. Notable foreigners were often invited for this purpose.
The foundation of Kievan Rus contributed to the unification of almost all the East Slavic tribes mentioned in the annals. Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians are the descendants of the inhabitants of feudal principalities, united in a state that has become one of the most powerful in the Middle Ages.
Legend
This city was the capital of the Slavic tribe of the Polans. They were once led, according to legend, by Kiy. Helped him manage Shchek and Khoriv. Kyiv stood at the crossroads, in a very convenient location. Here they exchanged and bought grain, weapons, livestock, jewelry, fabrics. Over time, Kiy, Khoriv and Shchek disappeared somewhere. The Slavs paid tribute to the Khazars. The Varangians passing by occupied the "homeless" city. The origin of Kyiv is shrouded in secrets. But the creation of the city is one of the prerequisites for the formation of the Old Russian people.
However, the version that Shchek was the founder of Kyiv is subject to great doubts. Rather, it is a myth, part of the folk epic.
Why exactly Kyiv?
This city arose in the center of the territory inhabited by the Eastern Slavs. The location of Kyiv, as already mentioned, is very convenient. Wide steppes, fertile lands and dense forests. The cities had all the conditions for cattle breeding, agriculture, hunting, and most importantly - for the defense of an enemy invasion.
What historical sources speak about the birth of Kievan Rus? About the emergence of the East Slavic state, and therefore - the ancient Russian people, reports the "Tale of Bygone Years". After Rurik, who came to power at the invitation of local leaders, Oleg began to rule Novgorod. Igor could not manage due to his young age.
Oleg managed to concentrate power over Kiev and Novgorod.
Historical concepts
Old Russian nationality - an ethnic community, which united with the formation of the early feudal state. A few words should be said about what is hidden under this historical term.
Nationality is a historical phenomenon characteristic of the early feudal period. This is a community of people who are not members of the tribe. But they are not yet residents of a state with strong economic ties. How is a people different from a nation? Modern historians today have not come to a consensus. There are still discussions regarding this issue. But we can say with confidence that nationality is what unites people who have a common territory, culture, customs and traditions.
periodization
The topic of the article is the Old Russian nationality. Therefore, it is worth giving a periodization of the development of Kievan Rus:
- Emergence.
- Rise.
- feudal division.
The first period refers to the ninth to tenth centuries. And it was then that the East Slavic tribes began to transform into a single community. Of course, the differences between them disappeared gradually. As a result of active communication and rapprochement, the Old Russian language was formed from many dialects. An original material and spiritual culture was created.
Rapprochement of tribes
East Slavic tribes lived in the territory, which was subject to a single authority. Except for the constant civil strife that took place at the last stage of the development of Kievan Rus. But they led to the emergence of common traditions and customs.
Old Russian nationality is a definition that implies not only a common economic life, language, culture and territory. This concept means a community consisting of the main, but irreconcilable classes - feudal lords and peasants.
The formation of the ancient Russian nationality was a long process. Features in the culture and language of the people inhabiting different areas of the state have been preserved. Differences have not been erased, despite the rapprochement. Later, this served as the basis for the formation of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities.
The concept of "Old Russian nationality" does not lose its relevance, because this community is the single root of the fraternal peoples. The inhabitants of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus carried through the centuries an understanding of the proximity of culture and language. The historical significance of the ancient Russian nationality is great, regardless of the current political and economic situation. In order to verify this, it is worth considering the components of this community, namely: language, customs, culture.
History of the Old Russian language
Representatives of the East Slavic tribes understood each other even before the founding of Kievan Rus.
The Old Russian language is the speech of the inhabitants who inhabited the territory of this feudal state from the sixth to the fourteenth century. A huge role in the development of culture is played by the emergence of writing. If, speaking of the time of the birth of the Old Russian language, historians call the seventh century, then the appearance of the first literary monuments can be attributed to the tenth century. With the creation of the Cyrillic alphabet, the development of writing begins. So-called chronicles appear, which are also important historical documents.
The Old Russian ethnos began its development in the seventh century, but by the fourteenth, due to severe feudal fragmentation, changes in the speech of the inhabitants inhabiting the west, south, east of Kievan Rus began to be observed. It was then that dialects appeared, later formed into separate languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian.
culture
Reflection of the life experience of the people - oral creativity. In the festive rituals of the inhabitants of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and today there are many similarities. How did oral poetry appear?
Street musicians, itinerant actors and singers roamed the streets of the ancient Russian state. All of them had a common name - buffoons. The motives of folk art formed the basis of many literary and musical works created much later.
The epic epic received special development. Folk singers idealized the unity of Kievan Rus. The characters of epics (for example, the hero Mikula Selyanovich) are depicted in epic works as rich, strong and independent. Despite the fact that this hero was a peasant.
Folk art influenced the legends and tales that have developed in the church and secular environment. And this influence is noticeable in the culture of later periods. Another source for the creation of literary works for the authors of Kievan Rus was military stories.
Economy development
With the formation of the Old Russian people, representatives of the East Slavic tribes began to improve tools. The economy, however, remained natural. In the main industry - agriculture - widely used rales, spades, hoes, scythes, wheeled plows.
Craftsmen achieved significant success with the formation of the Old Russian state. Blacksmiths learned to harden, grind, polish. Representatives of this ancient craft made about one hundred and fifty types of iron products. The swords of ancient Russian blacksmiths were especially famous. Pottery and woodworking were also actively developed. Products of ancient Russian masters were known far beyond the borders of the state.
The formation of the nationality contributed to the development of crafts and agriculture, which subsequently led to an increase in the development of trade relations. Kievan Rus developed economic relations with foreign countries. The trade route "from the Varangians to the Greeks" passed through the ancient Russian state.
Feudal relations
The formation of the Old Russian nationality took place during the period of the establishment of feudalism. What was this system of social relations? The feudal lords, whose cruelty was so much talked about Soviet historians, indeed, concentrated power and wealth in their hands. They used the labor of urban artisans and dependent peasants. Feudalism contributed to the formation of complex vassal relations, known from the history of the Middle Ages. The great Kiev prince personified the state power.
class strife
Smerd peasants cultivated the estates of the feudal lords. Artisans paid tribute. The hardest life was for serfs and servants. As in others medieval states, in Kievan Rus, over time, feudal exploitation became so aggravated that uprisings began. The first took place in 994. The story of the death of Igor, who, together with his squad, once decided to collect tribute for the second time, is known to everyone. Popular anger is a terrible phenomenon in history, entailing inciting strife, excesses, and sometimes even war.
Fight with aliens
The Norman Scandinavian tribes continued their predatory attacks even when the East Slavic tribes already constituted an ethnic community. In addition, Kievan Rus waged an uninterrupted struggle against the hordes. The inhabitants of the ancient Russian state bravely repelled enemy invasions. And they themselves did not wait for the next attack from the enemy, but, without thinking twice, set off. Old Russian troops often equipped campaigns in enemy states. Their glorious deeds are reflected in chronicles, epics.
Paganism
Territorial unity was significantly strengthened during the reign of Vladimir Svyatoslavovich. Kievan Rus achieved significant development, waged a fairly successful struggle against the aggressive actions of the Lithuanian and Polish princes.
Paganism had a negative impact on the formation of ethnic unity. There was a need for a new religion, which, of course, was to be Christianity. Askold began to distribute it on the territory of Rus'. But then Kyiv was captured by the Novgorod prince and destroyed not so long ago built Christian churches.
Introduction of a new faith
Vladimir took over the mission of introducing a new religion. However, there were many fans of paganism in Rus'. They have been fighting for many years. Even before the adoption of Christianity, attempts were made to renew the pagan religion. Vladimir Svyatoslavovich, for example, in 980 approved the existence of a group of gods headed by Perun. What was needed was an idea common to the entire state. And its center was bound to be in Kyiv.
Paganism, nevertheless, has become obsolete. And therefore, Vladimir, after lengthy deliberation, chose Orthodoxy. In his choice, he was guided, first of all, by practical interests.
Tough choice
According to one version, the prince listened to the opinion of several priests before making a choice. Everyone, as you know, has his own truth. The Muslim world attracted Vladimir, but he was frightened by circumcision. In addition, the Russian table cannot be without pork and wine. The faith of the Jews in the prince did not at all inspire confidence. Greek was colorful, spectacular. And political interests finally predetermined the choice of Vladimir.
Religion, traditions, culture - all this unites the population of the countries where the tribes once lived, united in the ancient Russian ethnic union. And even after centuries, the connection between such peoples as Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian is inextricable.
