The name Kyivan Rus cannot fail to bring to mind two associations. The first is the capital of Ukraine, and the second is the first and last syllable, respectively, of Russia and Belarus. Cutting across ever more divergent entities, the name thus speaks to just one of the numerous ways that the medieval state of Rus left its impact on eastern Europe. The Ruling Families of Rus, a new book by Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski, examines the history of Rus’s people and their land through a unique lens: dynastic succession. The authors look almost exclusively at the ruling families of the kingdom of Kyivan Rus and the areas these families influenced, but the reader will see that when it comes to an early medieval state like Rus this approach isn’t always fruitful.
Before the formation of Rus, disparate Slavic tribes occupied large swaths of land in eastern Europe. These tribes were neither unified nor centrally governed, but they did share a common language. Situated between the Baltic-Norse lands to the north and the Byzantine Empire to the south, these tribes benefited from the exchange between such diverse cultures.
The first people to set up a political center in Kyiv were the descendants of a semi-mythical Norse ruler, Rurik, a figure that the leaders of Moscow claimed their lineage from nearly a thousand years later. Riurik’s kin ruled the towns and cities that made up Rus and passed those seats of power onto their brothers and sons. He who ruled Kyiv ruled all of Rus, but the various princes outside of Kyiv retained a degree of power over their own lands, power they sometimes used to challenge the ruler of Kyiv. The Ruling Families of Rus surveys these interrelated families and clans, collectively called the Rusians.
Volodimer Sviatoslavych, also known as Vladimir the Great, gives his name to the book’s primary family, the Volodimerovichi. In 980, Volodimer unified and began his reign over the region’s many Slavic tribes. It was he who first centered the kingdom in Kyiv. His descendents ruled throughout Rus and married the offspring of many European monarchs. He was also responsible for adopting Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
As Kyiv grew and expanded, Rus grew and expanded—until the conflict of its princes fractured the system of succession. Princes began to focus more on their own realms, and when the Mongols invaded in the thirteenth century, the survival of each clan rested on its ability to deal with the invaders.
The book’s approach to telling this history is detailed and nuanced, but it can also be convoluted. Each of the twelve chapters selects a different family and examines the wives and children of that family’s head. This provides an interesting perspective as it gives shape to the different polities within Rus and explores the often violent process of succession. It lacks, however, cohesion and continuity. In comparison to the study of its contemporary polities, an evaluation of Rus poses two major problems: The first is that the succession of Rus’s rulers wasn’t nearly as orderly as that of the British or Habsburg Empires (neither of which was all that orderly to begin with). Many different families came to rule Rus, and the very notion of being the ruler of Rus changed as new polities grew in power. The second problem—and it is a monster that rears its ugly head in almost every chapter—is that there is a noticeable and damaging lack of reliable firsthand material from which to draw historical conclusions.
The history of Rus has been laid down in several monastic chronicles. These provide explanations for important events in the different polities, but they must be read with a critical eye. The Primary Chronicle, which relates the kingdom’s rise from the ninth to the twelfth century, is one of the only sources for this early period and was compiled circa 1113. Later chronicles provide details about the political machinations and crucial events of the time, but as Rus was so fractured, each individual chronicle was written with a clear bias towards the polity of the author. Many details can be verified by investigating the sources of those with whom the denizens of Rus interacted, but warnings of the scarcity of reliable information are abundant in the pages of The Ruling Families. One such caveat reads: “An added layer of consideration is that we are dealing with clergy who tended to have their own ‘take’ on things. In other words, we have little evidence from the rulers or members of the ruling elite themselves, except as reported by the monastic writers.”
Raffensperger and Ostrowski work hard to combat the received opinion among some Russian historians that the founding of Kyivan Rus was merely another step on the path toward Muscovite dominance of the entire region. And in this, the authors do a fair job: the history of the transfer of power from Kyiv to Moscow is neither as complete nor as inevitable as those Russian historians make it seem. Only three of the twelve chapters deal directly with the rulers of the Vladimir-Moscow region, although they are always players in the broader history. Unfortunately, the authors’ approach of focusing on all these different families fails to allow a cohesive narrative to arise. The book sometimes feels like a collection of interesting but only loosely connected stories.
The authors state from the beginning that their goal is to study Rus as Rus and not to myopically look for any retroactive justification for the primacy of either Russia or Ukraine. This Wildean l’histoire pour l’histoire approach is an attempt to neutralize the abuses of history by states interested only in asserting their own preeminence. As happens in many countries, the Muscovite nobles claimed their descent from an ancient, almost mythical, ancestor as justification for rule. But the founders of Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and many other states have a claim to this Slavic progenitor as well. The Ruling Families of Rus tries to show that all these descendants share a part of the rich and sometimes messy history of their ancestors, thus demythologizing the past for all involved. Although this book does not provide a comprehensive introduction to Kyivan Rus, the enthusiast will find many interesting details in its well-researched pages.