The chronicles brought to us the name of one of the peoples who participated in the legendary vocation of the Varangian princes - Merya. The ethnonyms of the other two - Meschera and Murom - have come down to our days in place names. During the times of Kievan Rus, these peoples inhabited the east and north of the present Central region of Russia - Ryazan, Vladimir, Ivanovsk, Yaroslavl regions, as well as a significant part of Moscow. What happened to them then?
When the Slavs came to the land of Mary and other chuds
The names of these tribes are obviously based on the same root as in the name of the people of Mari (Mari) - "man". These were the peoples of the Finnish language group who settled here at least from the 7th century BC. e., since the days of the Dyakovskaya archaeological culture. The penetration of the Slavic population here began somewhere in the 5th century AD. e. Academician V. V. Sedov believed that the annalistic measure was already mainly Slavic, only its self-name remained Finnish. True, his assumptions were based only on one single circumstance, that women of Mary wore Slavic jewelry - finger brooches. It is unlikely that this feature alone can be considered sufficient evidence of the "Slavization" of Mary - a certain type of jewelry could easily spread thanks to the fashion that arose as soon as the exchange of goods began in mankind.
A more reliable argument is probably a special funeral rite - burial in barrows. This rite appeared with the Mary somewhere in the 10th century, and, apparently, came to them from the Novgorodians. At the same time, paleoanthropological studies have shown that, to a large extent, the territories of North-Eastern and Rostov-Suzdal Rus were inhabited by people from South, Kievan and Galician Rus. This is also indicated by toponymy. The names of the cities of Pereyaslavl, Galich, Zvenigorod and the Irpen and Lybed rivers near Vladimir clearly indicate that they were given precisely by immigrants from Southern Russia. It is especially characteristic that two Pereyaslavl - Ryazan (present Ryazan) and Zalessk - were based on the rivers, which the settlers gave the name Trubezh, the same as the river on which Pereyaslavl stood in Kievan Rus (present Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky). ApparentlyMary's lands were settled by people from both Northern and Southern Russia.
Is there a Finnish substratum in the Russian people?
The living of the Meri people in the territories that later became the nucleus of the Vladimir-Suzdal state has long served as a reason for some historians to argue that modern Russians are in fact mostly descendants of the Finno-Ugric Meri (as well as Chudi, Meshchera, Muroma and other peoples)), who adopted the Slavic language. At one time, the masters of Russian historiography also contributed to this theory. So, V. O. Klyuchevsky wrote:
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“Our Great Russian physiognomy does not quite accurately reproduce the common Slavic features. Other Slavs, recognizing these features in her, however, notice some foreign impurity: it is the whine of the Great Russian, the predominance of a swarthy complexion and hair, and especially the typical Great Russian nose, resting on a broad base, are most likely to be attributed to Finnish influence.
However, at the time of Klyuchevsky there was still no comprehensive anthropological research. When they appeared (in the twentieth century, thanks, for example, to the works of V. P. Alekseev), it became clear that many previous theories about the Finnish and, moreover, the Turkic substratum among the Russians are pseudoscientific (political) and do not have a factual foundation. The anthropological type of the Great Russians turned out to be even closer to that of the Western and Southern Slavs than that of the Ukrainians and Belarusians. This is also confirmed by paleogenetic studies begun in the 21st century.
How can this paradox be explained? Apparently, the Eastern Slavs, who settled in the territories of present-day Central Russia a thousand years ago, to a greater extent retained their original Slavic appearance than the Ukrainians and Belarusians could later retain. Slavic colonists on the lands of the Meri, Meshcher, Murom were much more numerous than the indigenous population, as a result of which these tribes left few traces in the appearance of the Russians.
But still they left. Of course, mixing has occurred over the centuries, as indicated by the gradual change in anthropological parameters over time. However, neither written sources nor archeology have preserved evidence of significant armed clashes between Slavic colonists and aborigines or a mass exodus of the latter from their places of residence. If the chronicles say a lot about the wars of the Russians with the Mordovians and Cheremis (Mari), then they do not say anything about the wars with the Meray and other "Chud" peoples who lived in the region of present-day Central Russia. Apparently, their assimilation took place quite peacefully.
What did Merya leave to the Russians?
Rich toponymy speaks of the population of Central Russia in the distant past by Finnish peoples. The names of the rivers Nerl, Nerskaya, Nerekhta (with the city of the same name), Lake Nero can testify to the presence of a particular people of Merya (or Nerya). Rostov-Veliky stands on the latter, and it is located on the site of the most ancient capital of the Mery people, which existed at least since the 7th century. At that time it was a very large and wealthy settlement.
Apparently, Meryan (Meshchera, Murom) are the names of rivers with the suffix -ksha / -ksa: Peksha, Koloksha, Kideksha, etc. The hydronym Veksa is interesting: it designates four rivers on the Russian Plain, each of which flows from a lake - Pleshcheev, Nero, Galich, Chukhlomsky. Apparently, the word "veksa" in Meryan meant generally a source from the lake. Over time, this common noun became a proper noun among Russians for several rivers.
Many linguists believe that the pronunciation characteristic of some folk Russian dialects has developed under the influence of the Finnish linguistic substrate, for example, the okanie among the residents of the Vladimir, Ivanovo and Nizhny Novgorod regions, the transition from "h" to "c" among the population of Ryazan Meshchera. According to some experts, profanity in the Russian language is a borrowing from the languages of Meri and other "Chudi". True, academician O. N. Trubachev refuted this hypothesis, providing evidence of the presence in the Proto-Slavic language of abusive words that have survived to this day.
Thus, the Finnish-speaking tribes of Merya, Meschera and Murom joined the Russian people, being completely assimilated by Slavic settlers due to their comparative small number.