Disputes about what Russia is and who should be considered Slavs in the historical sense have been going on for more than one hundred years. In the second half of the 9th century, a new state was formed in Eastern Europe - Kievan Rus, which was a union of East Slavic and Finno-Ugric tribes under the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty. But what came before that? Where did the Slavs, Russes come from, and how did they colonize vast uninhabited territories? Let's figure it out.
Source: mglin-krai.ru
Lyrical digression
Modern science is not yet able to give an exact answer to the question of when and where the Slavic people arose. But one should not think that the reason for this is some kind of exclusivity of the Slavs. It is almost impossible to trace the exact history of any individual ancient ethnos. As a result, only in official academic science there are several directions at once working on various versions of the separation of the Slavs from the Indo-European community of tribes. All this suggests that writing about history today is a very thankless task. If even the official science does not know how it really was, then how much we mortals … So it turns out that no matter how you write, as a result you will side with only one of the many theories. But the topic is interesting, so why not give it a try.
Source: upload.wikimedia.org
Promotional video:
Do you remember how it all began…
It is generally accepted that the Slavic ethnos separated from the Indo-European community around the 5th century BC. e. that is, at a time when the legendary 300 Spartans fought in the Thermopylae Gorge, and Sophocles, Socrates and Hippacrates were not great men, but only children. However, the earliest written evidence of the Slavs belongs to Byzantine authors and dates back to the 6th century AD. e. One can only guess about what has happened to the people over this thousand years, and this is a topic for a separate article. We will focus on what happened next. And like the Slavs, at that time already divided into Sklavins and Antes, they lived and migrated later.
Source: cdn-s-static.arzamas.academy
"Cradle" of the Slavic people
Gothic and Byzantine written sources of the 6th century identified three large Slavic peoples - these are the Antes, Sklavins and Wends. According to the Gothic historian Jordan, the territory of the Sklavins extended from the lower Danube and Mursyan Lake to the Dniester and Vilsa. The Antes, in turn, were localized from the Dniester to the Dnieper estuary. And the Vendians lived in the "immense expanses" from the sources of the Vistula and the foothills of the Carpathians to the east and north. Life and customs of the Antes and Sklavins, according to the Byzantine historian, if they differed, then insignificantly. Basically, the differences concerned funeral rites and women's clothing.
Source: shsamara.ru
Resettlement start
Then, in the VI century, the Sklavins began to move to the right bank of the middle Dnieper and populate these lands, making them fully Slavic. In the 530s, the Slavs moved across the territory of modern Bohemia to the upper Elbe, displacing the remnants of the German population from there. In parallel with this, other rather numerous groups of the Slavic population, skirting the Carpathians from the south, move to the lower Danube and between the Dunya and Dniester rivers. It was there that, faced with the Byzantine Empire, the Slavs from then on will constantly appear in the texts of Byzantine historians.
Source: picshare.ru
Further and further in all directions
In 556-560 the Avars invaded the North Caucasus and the eastern Azov region. By 561, they reached the lands of the Antes, ruining but not conquering them. Many Antes then fled to the west, to Pannonia, later giving birth to such ethnonyms as Croats and Serbs. Many Slavic tribes were under the rule of the Avar Kaganate, as indicated in the Tale of Bygone Years, which indicates that the people's memory of this time was very strong. The Slavic component in the Avar Kaganate turned out to be so much that many Byzantine historians of the Middle Ages already directly identified the Avars and the Slavs. The invasion of the Avars was the beginning of the end of the history of the Antes, but it also gave a new impetus to the resettlement of the Slavs to new lands. In the 6th century, the Slavs were already active in the Caucasian direction, migrating to the north-east of modern Poland in the Masurian Lake District,settled in the Crimea in the 7th century.
Source: blogspot.com
Formation and spread of culture
Moving further and further east, at the beginning of the 8th century, Slavic culture appeared on the left bank of the Dnieper. Further, together with large masses of the Slavic population, it moves to the upper Dnieper, from there to Priilmenye and Volkhovye. By the end of the VIII century, the Slavs appear in Ladoga. Having occupied the territories from the Danube to the Baltic, the Slavs created a single linguistic and cultural space on these lands, which made it possible to form the famous trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks, which played an important role in the subsequent formation of the Russian state.
Source: 3.bp.blogspot.com
Colonization of North-Eastern Russia
Before the arrival of the Slavs, the lands of North-Eastern Russia were inhabited by various Finno-Ugric tribes, such as the Meria, Muroma, Meschera, all, Chud Zavolochskaya. Their culture was formed on these lands, presumably at the beginning to the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e. However, as many historians point out, in comparison with the Slavs, the local tribes had a lower level of social and material culture. In addition, the density of settlement of the Finno-Ugric tribes on their lands was extremely low. These tribes practically did not engage in agriculture, preferring hunting, gathering, fishing and cattle breeding as the main forms of life support. Local tribes settled mainly on the banks of rivers and lakes, while vast tracts of land far from water bodies were practically deserted.
Source: nnm.me
However, there is no talk of any seizure of land by the Slavs. Meryans, for example, in 882, together with Prophetic Oleg, participated in military campaigns to Smolensk, Lyubech and Kiev. And even in the annals of 907, the Meryans are mentioned as a separate people. However, the mass of the Slavic population that came to North-Eastern Russia was very numerous and active. That is why the assimilation of the local population proceeded rather quickly. By the 10th – 11th centuries, most of the Finno-Ugric lands became Russian principalities under the rule of the Rurikovichs. This is how, peacefully and without any military action, the main part of the colonization of the Slavs of Russia ended.
Source: fjcdn.com