Winston Churchill said: "Russia is a puzzle, wrapped in mystery, wrapped in a riddle." We cannot but agree. Russian history is full of mysteries. We have selected 24 key ones.
1. What does the word "Rus" mean?
Yes, we still do not know for certain where the word "Rus" came from. According to one version, from the toponym "Ros" (the name of the river), according to the other - from the words Ruotsi, Roots, Rotsi (as the Finnish tribes called the Swedes). Lomonosov believed that the Rus were the descendants of the Sarmatians, who called themselves Roksolans or Rosoman (these words were allegedly modified to the word "Rus"). The Byzantines also called the tribes that raided Constantinople "ross" (red, red). Ibn-Fadlan, who met the Varangians in 922, said about them: "They are like palms, blush, red."
There are many opinions, but there is no order in them.
2. Who was Rurik?
As for who Rurik was, historians also have no consensus. Some associate him with Rorik of Jutland, the Danish king from the Skjoldung dynasty. Other historians believe that Rurik is the Swedish king Eirik Emundarson. There is also a version that Rurik was the leader of the Obodrit Slavs (Polabian Slavs), and a version that Rurik came from the Baltic island of Ruyan, which today is called Rugen. There is an opinion that there was no Rurik at all.
Promotional video:
Until the 15th century, none of the Russian princes called themselves "Rurikovich", and the dispute about the personality of Rurik began in the 18th century. It never ended.
3. Was there a Mongol-Tatar yoke?
Here you can start with the fact that there have never been any Monglo Tatars. This is an artificial term coined in the 18th century. The definition of "yoke" appeared in the 15th century. It is first encountered in the Kiev synopsis, as the Polish historian Jan Dlugosh translated the Latin term jugum. Only after that did they start talking about standing on the Ugra as about liberation from the yoke. Later this term was "mastered" by Karamzin.
Historians have not yet come to a consensus about the yoke. Lev Gumilev considered the relationship between Russia and the Horde to be a mutually beneficial alliance. The role of the Horde in the rise of Moscow is undoubted, as even Karamzin noted. Nosovsky and Fomenko, in their research, even reach the point that Russia and the Horde are one and the same. They correlate Baty with Yaroslav the Wise, Tokhtamysh with Dmitry Donskoy … let's leave it on their conscience.
4. How did the two-headed eagle appear in Russia?
How did the two-headed eagle "flew" to Russia? It first appeared on the state seal during the reign of Ivan III, so it is believed that it was "brought" to Russia by Sophia Palaeologus. However, it is unclear why he became a state symbol only 20 years after the wedding of Ivan III in Byzantine. In addition, the double-headed eagle was not used by the Byzantines on their seals.
But it was used by the Habsburgs, even half a century before the appearance of the Russian seal, and was also on some coins of the Golden Horde, and was also one of the alchemical symbols. At the court of Ivan III, there was no shortage of visiting expatriate alchemists.
5. Where did the Cossacks come from?
This question is unlikely when anyone will sort it out, it is with who the Cossacks are. The homeland of the Cossacks is found in the North Caucasus, in the Azov region, and in Western Turkestan. The pedigree of the Cossacks is traced back to the Scythians, to the Alans, to the Circassians, to the Khazars, to the Goths, to the roamers. Supporters of all versions have their own arguments. Today the Cossacks are a multiethnic community, which includes representatives of several dozen nationalities, among which there are quite unexpected ones - Moldovans, Turks, Estonians, and Tajiks. The question of who the first Cossacks were is still unresolved.
6. Did Grozny kill his son?
Did Grozny kill his son? The question is open. In 1963, when the tombs of Ivan the Terrible and his son were opened, the content of the poison in the remains of the tsarevich was incompatible with life. Long before this examination, Konstantin Pobedonostsev called the depicted in Repin's painting fantasy. The version of the murder was based on the stories of the papal legate Antonio Possevino, who can hardly be called an uninterested person.
7. Why did Grozny abdicate the throne?
In 1575, Ivan the Terrible abdicated the throne and put on the throne the serving Tatar Khan Simeon Bekbulatovich. Contemporaries did not understand the meaning of the monarch's venture. They said that the tsar was afraid of the predictions of the Magi that the Moscow tsar would die this year. Modern historians do not understand the meaning of this act either. There is a version that Grozny feared an uprising in the former Kazan Khanate, where, by the way, he remained tsar as before. For almost a year, Ivan the Terrible conducted his experiment.
8. Was False Dmitry I an impostor?
We have already accepted that False Dmitry I is a fugitive monk Grishka Otrepiev. But this whole story looks very surreal. At first, Dmitry (with the prefix "false") was recognized by his own mother, princes, boyars in front of all honest people, and after a while everyone suddenly saw the light.
The pathological situation is added by the fact that the prince himself was completely convinced of his naturalness, as his contemporaries wrote about.
By the way, the idea that “it was easier to save than to forge Dimitri” was expressed by Nikolai Kostomarov. But we are unlikely to ever find out the truth.
9. Why did the Zemsky Sobor choose the "impassable candidate" for the role of the tsar?
When the Zemsky Sobor in 1613 elected Mikhail Romanov to the kingdom, he was 16 years old. Moreover, he was not even in Moscow during the heated debates that flared up there. The main argument was that the allegedly late Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, before his death, wanted to transfer the throne to his relative Fyodor Romanov (Patriarch Filaret). And since he was in Polish captivity, the crown passed to his only son, Mikhail. As the historian Klyuchevsky wrote later, "they wanted to choose not the most capable, but the most convenient."
10. Why did Alexei Mikhailovich decide to reform the church?
The split in the Russian Church was one of the most difficult turning points in Russian history. Alexei Mikhailovich, a Greekophile, wished to change the church rituals "so that it was like the Greeks," and not who is in that much. " This "upgrade" led to the largest spiritual confrontation in Russian history. Scientists are still arguing about the reasons for the split. Not the last place here, apparently, was played by the ambitions of the Russian tsar to the Byzantine throne. In 1649, at a reception with the tsar, Patriarch Paisy directly expressed his wish that Alexei Mikhailovich became tsar in Constantinople: "May the New Moses be, may free us from captivity."
11. Why did Peter I Europeanize Russia?
During the years of his reign, Peter the Great changed Russia beyond recognition. After returning from the Grand Embassy, the king changed so much that the people began to talk that he had been replaced. According to one version, Peter was "thrown into the wall", and instead of him they sent to Russia a similar-faced impostor. According to the other - "the tsar in the Germans was laid in a barrel and launched into the sea." Fuel to the fire was added by the fact that Peter, who had returned from Europe, began a large-scale destruction of "ancient Russian antiquity." Why? There is no definite answer.
12. Was Paul the son of Peter III?
One of the main mysteries of Russian history - was Paul the son of Peter III? Was the Romanov dynasty interrupted? Catherine and Peter III did not have children for a long time, the empress herself wrote that her husband suffered from phimosis. The empress also mentioned in her diaries that she was fascinated by Sergei Saltykov, the alleged father of Paul the First: "I did not give in all spring and part of summer …".
There is also a popular legend of the birth of Paul I: according to it, Catherine gave birth to a dead child from Peter, and he was replaced by a certain "Chukhonsky" boy.
13. Was Fyodor Kuzmich Alexander I?
The son of Paul I, Alexander, also left a complex mystery to historians. There is a legend that he left the royal throne, falsifying his own death, and went to wander around Russia under the name of Fyodor Kuzmich.
There are several indirect confirmations of this legend. So, the witnesses concluded that on his deathbed Alexander was totally different from himself. In addition, for unclear reasons, Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna, the Tsar's wife, did not participate in the funeral ceremony. The famous Russian lawyer Anatoly Koni conducted a thorough comparative study of the handwritings of the emperor and Fyodor Kuzmich and came to the conclusion that "the emperor's letters and the wanderer's notes were written by the hand of the same person."
14. Where did the money from the sale of Alaska go?
Where the money went from the sale of Alaska is still unknown. Gold bars were brought from London on the Orkney barge, but it sank. Whether gold was actually there is unknown. But a document is known that says that most of the money was spent abroad on equipment for railways: Kursk-Kiev, Ryazan-Kozlov, Moscow-Ryazan, etc. Is this so, we are unlikely to ever know.
15. Why was the royal family shot?
Historians still do not have a consensus about who exactly authorized the shooting of the royal family and the Romanovs near Alapaevsk. The names of Sverdlov and Lenin are named, but investigator Vladimir Soloviev, who has been involved in the execution of the Romanovs since 1993, has repeatedly argued that neither Lenin had given sanctions for execution. nor Sverdlov. According to the recollections of another investigator, Nikolai Sokolov, whom Admiral Kolchak entrusted with the investigation, the Yekaterinburg and Alapaevsk murders are "a product of the will of some persons." The only question remains, whose will it was.
16. Where did Kolchak's gold disappear?
The fate of "Kolchak's gold", most of the gold reserves of tsarist Russia, is still unknown. It was about 490 tons of pure gold bullion and coins worth 650 million. According to one version, it was stolen by the Czechoslovak corps, according to another, it was hidden by order of Kolchak himself. Prospective burial sites: Maryina Griva sluice in the Ob-Yenisei canal, Sikhote-Alin mountains, Baikal, Irtysh. Gold has never been found anywhere. There is also a version that gold "settled" in European banks.
17. What was the Tunguska meteorite?
Whether the Tunguska meteorite was a meteorite is still unclear. Search expeditions at the supposed place of the fall of the meteorite fragments did not find, and there was no crater there either. There are many versions of what happened: the explosion of a nuclear reactor of an interplanetary spacecraft, an ice comet, the collision of the Earth with antimatter, Nikola Tesla's wave experiment. There are more than a dozen versions, but none has yet been scientifically recognized.
18. Why did the Bolsheviks take power so easily?
Back in February 1917, the Bolshevik party had 5,000 people, in October of the same year there were already 350,000. How did it happen that the Bolsheviks, who until the last moment were not considered a serious force, came to power? This can be explained by the sum of logical factors, from German money to propaganda, but it cannot be denied that the 1917 revolution was an unprecedented phenomenon in world history. And the irrational factor was no less important than the calculation.
19. Why did Stalin decide on repression?
There is no consensus among historians about the reasons for the Stalinist repressions. According to one version, Stalin was fighting the regional party bodies that hinder the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. According to the other, repression was a means of "social engineering", a continuation of collectivization and dispossession. Finally, there is a version that Stalin was preparing the USSR for war and eliminating the "fifth column" in the country.
20. Why did Stalin return services in the church?
Historians cannot explain the sharp change in Stalin's attitude to the church after the outbreak of the war. Some say that this was a pragmatic move by the leader, who needed "braces" for mobilization. According to another version, Stalin was secretly religious, his bodyguard Yuri Soloviev recalled that Stalin prayed and even confessed, and Artem Sergeev recalled in an interview that Stalin never said anything bad about the church at home, and even chided his son Vasily for disrespecting praying.
21. Why Khrushchev condemned the personality cult of Stalin?
Nikita Khrushchev's speech at the XX Party Congress, where he condemned the personality cult of Stalin, became a sensation. Why did he decide to do this? In the opinion of some, Khrushchev thereby "whitewashed" himself for participation in the repressions, in the opinion of others, he was preparing the reorganization of the state apparatus. There is even a version that in this way he "avenged" Stalin for the death of his son. Given the long-term implications of this move, some historians even see the "hand of the West" here. The decline in the prestige of the USSR after the XX Congress was enormous. Interesting and lively participation in the preparation of the report of Otto Kuusinen, according to some information, collaborated with the British and American intelligence services.
22. Where did Raoul Wallenberg disappear to?
The mystery of the disappearance of the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in the USSR has not yet been solved. He, who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, was last seen on January 18, 1945. Later there was evidence that he was seen in the Lefortovo prison. According to the version described in the memoirs of KGB General Sudoplatov, Wallenberg was arrested on the personal order of Bulganin, and in 1947 he was killed on the orders of Molotov. There is also a version that Wallenberg survived. He was seen by former prisoners of Ozerlag, Poles Tsikhotsky and Kovalsky, at one of the transit points. According to other testimonies, he was also seen in other camps and in the Vladimir Central. The Poles also claimed that he was still alive in October 1959.
23. Was there "party gold"?
There is a version that the hypothetical gold and foreign exchange funds of the Communist Party of the USSR in the early years of the 1990s "went" to European and American banks. Many public and political figures were looking for the "party gold". According to journalist Yevgeny Dodolev, the writer Yulian Semenov was eliminated due to the fact that he was able to "reveal the schemes of the conclusions of the party millions." However, there is also an assumption that the notorious "gold of the party" is nothing more than a myth.
24. Did Gorbachev know about the conspiracy?
On August 20, 1991, Gorbachev planned to sign the Union Treaty, in which the new position of the Soviet republics was to be designated. But the event was disrupted by the putsch. Did Gorbachev know about the conspiracy? There is still no definite answer to this question, but the fact that the State Emergency Committee and the putsch are Gorbachev's own project is a fairly widespread version. Back in March 1991, he instructed the future participants of the State Emergency Committee to develop a draft law "On the introduction of a state of emergency." Former member of the RF Government Mikhail Poltoranin also claims that "the 1991 coup was played by Boris Yeltsin together with Mikhail Gorbachev." The official version is as follows: Gorbachev knew nothing.