page_title: Rus' people
section_title: Anti-Normanism
hierarchical_section_title: Rus' people / Debate on the origins of the Rus' / Anti-Normanism
caption_attribution_description: Монета Банка России — 1150-летие зарождения российской государственности. 50 рублей, золото, реверс. Художник: С.А. Козлов. Скульптор: А.А. Долгополова. Чеканка: ru:Санкт-Петербургский монетный двор (СПМД). В центре диска монеты — поясной портрет мужчины в воинских доспехах, держащего в левой руке чекан — вид древнего оружия, справа от него — надпись в две строки «князь Рюрик», на широкой полосе, образованной кантом и концентрической круговой линией — надпись, идущая слева вниз направо: «1150-ЛЕТИЕ ЗАРОЖДЕНИЯ РОССИЙСКОЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОСТИ», в верхней части полосы — орнамент из извилистых линий.
context_page_description: The Rus' people are generally understood in English-language scholarship as people of Ruthenia. Of the two main origin theories, the "Normanist" places them ancestrally as ethnic Scandinavian people trading and raiding on the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Seas from around the eighth to eleventh centuries AD, while the "anti-Normanist" theory places their origins in the Slavic region around the Carpathians.
  According to the most prevalent theory, the name Rus', like the Proto-Finnic name for Sweden, is derived from an Old Norse term for "the men who row". According to this theory, these Viking-like people basing themselves among Slavs and Volga people in the upper Volga region formed a diaspora of traders and raiders exchanging furs and slaves for silk, silver and other commodities available to the east and south. Around the 9th century, on the river routes to the Black Sea, they played an unclear but significant role in forming the principality of Kievan Rus, gradually assimilating with local Slavic populations. They also extended their operations much further east and south, among the Bulgars and Khazars, on the routes to the Caspian Sea.
context_section_description: A Scandinavian origin of the Rus' has been bitterly contested by Slavic nationalists. Starting with Lomonosov (1711–1765), East Slavic scholars have criticized the idea of Norse invaders. By the early 20th century, the traditional anti-Normanist doctrine (as articulated by Dmitry Ilovaisky) seemed to have lost currency, but in Stalinist Russia, the anti-Normanist arguments were revived and adopted in official Soviet historiography, partly in response to Nazi propaganda, which posited that Russia owed its existence to a Germanic ruling elite. Mikhail Artamonov ranks among those who attempted to reconcile both theories by hypothesizing that the Kievan state united the southern Rus' (of Slavic stock) and the northern Rus' (of Germanic stock) into a single nation.
  The staunchest advocate of the anti-Normanist views in the period following the Second World War was Boris Rybakov, who argued that the cultural level of the Varangians could not have warranted an invitation from the culturally advanced Slavs. This conclusion leads Slavicists to deny the Primary Chronicle, which writes that the Varangian Rus' were invited by the native Slavs. Rybakov assumed that Nestor, putative author of the Chronicle, was biased against the pro-Greek party of Vladimir Monomakh and supported the pro-Scandinavian party of the ruling prince Svyatopolk. He cites Nestor as a pro-Scandinavian manipulator and compares his account of Rurik's invitation with numerous similar stories found in folklore around the world.
  By the twenty-first century, most professional scholars, in both Anglophone and Slavonic-language scholarship, had reached a consensus that the origins of the Rus' people lay in Scandinavia and that this originally Scandinavian elite had a significant role in forming the polity of Kievan Rus'. Indeed, in 1995, the Russian archaeologist Leo Klejn "gave a paper entitled ‘The End of the Discussion’, in the belief that anti-Normanism ‘was dead and buried’". However, Klejn soon had to revise this opinion as anti-Normanist ideas gained a new prominence in both public and academic discourse in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Anglophone scholarship has identified the continued commitment to anti-Normanism in these countries since the collapse of the Soviet Union as being motivated by present-day ethno-nationalism and state-formation. One prominent Russian example occurred with an anti-Normanist conference in 2002, which was followed by publications on the same theme, and which appears to have been promoted by Russian government policy of the time. Accordingly, anti-Normanist accounts are prominent in some 21st century Russian school textbooks. Meanwhile, in Ukraine and to a lesser extent Belarus, post-Soviet nation-building opposed to a history of Russian imperialism has promoted anti-Normanist views in academia and, to a greater extent, popular culture.
caption: Golden rouble depicting Rurik, issued to mark the 1150th anniversary of the birth of the Russian state.
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