Decline of Kievan Rus

After the death of Yaroslav the Wise (1054) Kievan Rus slowly started to decline and disintegrate. Kievan prince Vladimir Monomakh (1113-1125) reunited the state again. But after the death of his son Mstislav (1132), disintegration started again and was not postponed anymore. Vladimir Monomakh and his son Mstislav have been often considered the last effective Kievan rulers.¹⁴

The reasons for decline and disintegration were several. First, the famous trading route “from the Varangians (Vikings) to the Greeks” («из варяг в греки») which united the country declined, because the powerful Polovtsians took control over the lower Dnieper, and Constantinople lost its major commercial functions after being captured and sacked by the Crusaders in 1204. Second, it was too difficult to control huge territories of Kievan Rus where numerous and ethnically diverse peoples lived. Third, constant wars between princes who often invited nomads to help in their struggle for power seriously weakened the once powerful political entity. For example, between 1139 and 1169 Kiev changed hands seventeen times. Finally in 1237-1240 the Mongols, under the leadership of Batu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, inflicted a heavy blow at Rus principalities which buried all hopes for restoration of the former grandeur. In 1246 Italian monk Plano Carpini, who was an ambassador of Pope Innocent IV to Khan Batu, visited Kiev on his way to Sarai (the capital of the Golden Horde¹⁵). Although the siege of Kiev had taken place 6 years earlier, the Italian monk was shocked to see bones and skulls still lying along the road as he approached the desolate city. Later, the Italian monk would include this scene in his book: The History of the Mongols.

The Problem of Kievan Rus’ Legacy

Both Ukrainian and Russian historians consider Kievan Rus as the motherland of their national histories. Russian historians try to show that Moscow is a lawful heir of Kievan Rus. They say that there was the so-called Old Rus People (Древнерусский народ) which inhabited Kievan Rus. In the 13^th and 14^th centuries the Mongol and Lithuanian-Polish invasions caused the division of this Old Rus People into three brotherly branches: Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. These three brotherly branches were successfully and quite naturally reunited by Russian tsars in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The political idea of this concept is quite clear: if these brotherly peoples were once a single people why should not they be reunited again in a form of some union under Russian leadership after another “artificial” split in 1991? The Russian president Vladimir Putin said that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was one of the most tragic events in Russia’s history. (Ukrainians and many other peoples became independent as a result of this disintegration).

Many Ukrainian historians, beginning from M. Hrushevsky, have been trying to prove that there was not any single Old Rus People which disintegrated into three branches. They say that Ukrainians as a distinct nation had already lived on the territory of present-day Ukraine in the Kievan Rus times. According to them, the Russians at this time were also a distinct people who populated the territory of present-day Russia. Hrushevsky even wrote that Russians could hardly be called a Slavic people, since Slavic element was not significant in their national composition. Such famous Russian place-names as Moskva, Oka, Tver, Ryazan are not Slavic in origin; their origin is Finno-Ugric. So, according to these historians, there was not any natural reunification of these peoples by Russian tsars, but, rather, it was an artificial attachment of Ukraine to Russia. The idea of that concept is also politically motivated. It indicates that the Ukrainians as a distinct people should live independently from the Russians and should not form any close unions like ЄЕП or other with them.