When we say "Kievan Rus", we imagine a centralized state with the capital in Kiev, but to this day historians cannot say unequivocally whether Kievan Rus can be considered a state.
The inhabitants of Kievan Rus did not call the place where they live Kievan Rus. Ivan IV, Ivan III and other kings were not named with numerical designations by their contemporaries. And the term "Kievan Rus", and much more in history, to which we are accustomed to treat as a ready-made formula, came up with historians.
Until the beginning of the 19th century, the term "Kievan Rus" simply did not exist. Mikhail Maksimovich was the first to use it in his work "Where Does the Russian Land Come From", written by him in the year of Pushkin's death.
It is important to clarify here that he used it not in the meaning of "state", but in a number of other "Rus" - Chervonnaya, Suzdal, and so on. That is, only the geographic factor was taken into account, not the state-forming factor. The same meaning was used by both Soloviev and Kostomarov.
The term “Kievan Rus” in the 19th century did not receive its usual meaning today. Even nationalist Ukrainian historians led by Mykhailo Hrushevsky shunned him, as he implied that apart from Kievan Rus, there are other Rus. Hrushevsky designated the ancient Russian state as "Kiev state" or "Ruska power", placing it in opposition to the "Moscow state".
The state "Kievan Rus" became already during the reign of Joseph Stalin. The story of how Academician Grekov worked on his "Kievan Rus" and "Culture of Kievan Rus" is preserved. One of his charges recalled that Boris Dmitrievich asked him: "You are a party member, advise, you should know which concept he will like."
Having used the term “Kievan Rus”, the historian considers it useful to clarify that “… in my work I deal with Kievan Rus not in the narrow-territorial sense of this term (Ukraine), but in that broad sense of the“empire of Rurikovich”corresponding to the Western European empire of Charlemagne, - which includes a huge territory on which several independent state units were subsequently formed”.
Even the theorist of the statehood of Kievan Rus does not directly call Kievan Rus a state. Was it a state, let alone an empire?
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