The legend begins with a little-known incident that, according to Putin, proves the existence and longevity of the Russian state.
Two and a half years ago, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, setting off the biggest war the world has seen since 1945.
Although Russian leaders offer various far-fetched justifications for their illegal war of aggression, Vladimir Putin's most consistent explanation is ideological: Russia is an ancient state and Ukraine is historically Russian land.
Let us use these two-and-a-half years of the war to examine this claim.
Anniversaries capture the imagination, especially round anniversaries. The fullness of years and the beauty of numbers seduce us with myths of eternity and goodness. But history, unlike legend, is made up of fragments, of bits and pieces, of things that we only partially understand and strive to understand even better.
This is one reason why few historians have tried to make sense of the gilded myths Putin has laid out about the ancient past, most famously in a long essay published in 2021 and another in a tedious interview with Tucker Carlson in 2024
Encountering the magical thinking of dictators, historians feel as out of place as a bridge player invited to evaluate circus tricks or, say, a surgeon hired to care for wax figures.
Putin is in love with a legend. From a historical perspective, this is all very familiar: new regimes like Putin's seek compensation in myths of ancient origin.
Putin's presentation of Russia, his justification for killing hundreds of thousands of people, his rationalization of his attempt to destroy Ukraine as a nation rests on an all-too-familiar tale: we were here first. These stories are usually complete fiction beginning with “we“ and ending with “we were“, “here“ and “first“. Just like in the case of Putin.
But these stories are repeated so often that they acquire a kind of “lead plausibility”, like a bad habit. It takes a bit of work to dismiss them. So let's get started!
The legend begins with a little-known incident that, according to Putin, proves the existence and longevity of the Russian state: a long time ago there was a city called Novgorod, inhabited by people who could not understand each other. These warring people, the Slavs, invited three Viking brothers known as Rus to come and rule them. The arrival of the Vikings marks the beginning of the continuous tradition of the Russian “centralized state”.
According to Putin himself, he took this story from the medieval chronicle "Tale of Bygone Times", probably from the beginning of the 12th century. The monk (or monks) in Kiev who composed this text had heard of the arrival of the Vikings, known as the Rus, from Scandinavia, and this happened about four hundred years ago. Over the centuries, various parts of the fragmented Scandinavian clans founded, captured and lost control of a number of cities in Eastern Europe. One or more monks tried to explain why the Kiev part of the ruling Scandinavian clan, still known as Rus, was more important than other clans in other cities.
„A Tale of Bygone Times“ is one of dozens of useful medieval sources on the subject of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe, with a mixture of fable and valuable information. These texts must be read critically and comprehensively and compared with the findings of archaeologists and numismatists who have worked on the sites in question. This is what I will do next.
Before analyzing Putin's favorite legend, it will be useful to list all the claims it contains and those he infers from it - some explicit and some implicit - and which the listener can believe even if were not stated anywhere.
1. When the Vikings, known as the Russians, came, there was a city called Novgorod.
2. There were three Viking brothers.
3. The Vikings accepted the invitation and ruled long and peacefully.
4. The inhabitants of this city were Russians in a certain sense, because they were Slavs.
5. These Vikings were also, in a sense, Russians, because they called themselves “Rus“.
6. The existence of an ethnic group in a city more than a thousand years ago means the right to be ruled today by a dictator who calls himself by a name that is also associated with that ethnic group.
7. The existence of rulers of this ethnic group more than a thousand years ago means the right to be ruled today by a dictator who calls himself by a name also associated with those rulers.
8. Events that took place in one place over a thousand years ago justify the existence and actions of a transcontinental empire waging an aggressive war against a neighboring country.
9. There is an algorithm by which we can justify repression and wars today based on vague, distant events.
10. This algorithm is known to the dictators who tell the story, carry out repression and start wars.
Presented in this way, the claims reveal their fairy-tale character. Even if statements 1-5 were absolutely true, the moral and political interpretations Putin offers in statements 6-10 are illogical and repulsive.
Precisely because of such “reasonings“ few historians will address the Putin legend directly. It has nothing to do with history—the gathering of evidence, the testing of hypotheses, the making of reasonable arguments based on sources and traditions of interpretation. It is a claim to power whose only meaning derives from power itself. Actually, that's all that needs to be said.
Once they realize this, historians can go further and point out that the factual statements (1-5) are nonsense. But it makes sense to do so not in a destructive but in a constructive spirit, in an attempt to reveal something about what we really know about early medieval Scandinavia and Eastern Europe and how we know it. It is in this spirit that I will continue. Let's look at each statement in turn.
1. At the time of the arrival of the Vikings, known as Rus, there was a city called Novgorod.
No, there was no such city. At the time of the Rus' arrival in present-day Northeastern Russia, Novgorod had not yet been founded. It was founded about a quarter of a millennium later. (It was also not yet founded when the Vikings began claiming Kiev, which already existed and was probably controlled by the Khazars).
Novgorod is attractive to Russian myth because it exists now and existed at the time the monks wrote. But he did not exist at the time of the events the monks recount. But this is only the beginning of the deep untruth of this story.
Here's what we know. In the sixth century, merchants from Scandinavia appeared in the area of the water basin that we now call Lake Ladoga. Around the middle of the 8th century, the Vikings, who called themselves Rus, founded a trading empire in a place that Russian archaeologists call Ladoga, but the Vikings themselves called Aldeigia.
The Hermitage in St. Petersburg houses a bronze figurine from Aldeigia from the early period: the god Odin with two ravens. This contemporary testimony, like other figurines from Scandinavia and one of thousands, tells us more about the time, place and people than later chronicles.
The center of power associated with Aldeigia was probably called the Russian Khaganate. We believe that it was named so because of contemporary evidence - a recorded meeting between envoys of Rus and the king of the Franks.
About a century after the founding of Aldeigia, the Vikings, known as Rus, founded another trading center, which they called Holmgard, and "Russian" later called Gorodishte.
In turn, the city of Novgorod was founded more than a hundred years later and about a kilometer away. It has nothing to do with the first meeting of Russians and local residents. Yes, and he couldn't have, since he didn't exist then.
2. There were three Viking brothers.
This statement is of a different kind. On the basis of archaeological data, one can say with a high degree of confidence when such cities of Scandinavian Rus as Aldeiga and Holmgard were founded, and quite accurately imagine who lived there and what they did.
Of course, on this basis we cannot disprove the claim that three Viking brothers once lived there. Reasons for disbelieving this claim are of another kind, arising from the study of political myth and its structures.
The number 3 has a deep meaning in Indo-European stories about the origin of the world. According to Tacitus, the ancient Germans (whose culture preceded that of the Germanic Vikings) believed that the god of the earth had a son, that son had three sons, and these three sons founded all other nations. Odin himself was one of the three brothers. In Viking times, the settlement of new (from the Vikings' point of view) lands was systematically justified by the story of the arrival of three brothers, usually Odin's sons or grandsons.
In this way, the ruling Viking clan substantiates its position and right to control the lands (and the indigenous population). A Tale of Bygone Times, which is actually one saga among many others, reproduces this technique standard for Norse sagas.
It is worth emphasizing that the story of the three brothers is always a story about why the Scandinavians get the right to rule other peoples. The vitality of the image of the “three brothers” is a reminder of Scandinavian dominance. That is its meaning.
3. The Vikings accepted the invitation and ruled peacefully and sustainably.
In the case of this nonsense both literary and archaeological methods are useful. You don't need to be a connoisseur of early legends to understand that the “invitation“ is suspicious. Even to this day the invading armies claim that they came only at the invitation of the people whose lands they now occupy.
Modern Russians should be especially sensitive to this, since the Bolshevik invasion of Poland in 1919, the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 were justified by alleged invitations from the conquered country.
The ancient Scandinavians also knew this trick, and the story of how they were “invited“ in the region of Aldeigia and Holmgard in present-day Northwestern Russia is an obvious colonial tale. Not only is it clearly fabricated, but its purpose was to deny (not assert) the autonomy of local residents.
The formation Putin is referring to is the Russian Khaganate. The name “Rus“ refers to a Scandinavian clan; the Scandinavians borrowed the term “kagan“ for a ruler from the Khazars, their partners in the slave trade. The Vikings were in the area to facilitate the trade of Arabian silver to the south. The main commodity they traded with was first skins and then slaves.
During the period in question, the Vikings, known as the Rus, made systematic raids to enslave the natives by killing old men and selling women, boys and girls into slavery. The center of power around Aldeigia and Holmgard had its ups and downs. It was either attacked by other Scandinavians, or opposed by local uprisings of peoples raided for slaves, or perhaps both. The Russian Khaganate apparently collapsed around 870. The Rus and other Scandinavian merchants continued to trade actively, trade empires were restored, new cities were founded, but the first state of the Rus seems to have ceased to exist.
4. The inhabitants of this city were in a certain sense "Russian" because they were Slavs.
Literary criticism here should be applied not to “A Tale of Bygone Times”, but to Putin himself. He never says that the inhabitants of Aldeiga and Holmgard were blond; he wrongly assumed they were Slavs and implied a Russian identity by claiming that their actions laid the foundations of the “centralized Russian state”. This, of course, is a fallacy.
It is absurd to imagine that Russians existed 1200 or 1300 years ago, and Putin avoids the absurdity by inserting his imaginary Russians by tacit implication. Therefore, it is necessary to state explicitly: 1200 or 1300 years ago there were no Russians in the world. There was no concept of a Russian people.
„The spare“ position consists in the fact that these people were Slavs and therefore in some sense proto-Russians [protorusskie - my note].
History is structured differently: there is no natural, inevitable transition from people who spoke a language 1,200 or 1,300 years ago to today's cultural identities or political regimes.
But even if one believes this political magic, and even if one believes that the people who spoke a Slavic language 1200 or 1300 years ago were somehow proto-Russians, there is still a big problem. The people living in this area at the time generally did not speak Slavic languages. They were mostly Finns, not Slavs.
In this sense, the Finns seem to have been the most important group not only in Aldeige and Holmgard, but also in all of present-day North-Eastern Russia, including present-day Moscow Oblast. (At that time, of course, there was no city of Moscow).
5. These Vikings were also in a sense Russian, as they called themselves “Rus“.
Here again we are faced with an implied statement that is supported by a semantic trick. Now there is the state of the Russian Federation, which is named after an earlier state called the Russian Empire, which was named after the Vikings who called themselves Rus, or after the medieval centers of power established by the Rus, the first of which was the Russian Khaganate.
Names have their power, as do memorable dates and round numbers. If these people called themselves Russians, shouldn't they be Russians? Not really. The blondes appeared first. The Russian Empire was named in their honor about a thousand years after their appearance. This name confuses things, but it shouldn't confuse us.
In this period, the other European rulers had no problem defining who the Russians were: they were Swedes. In the poems and tales they sang and composed, and in the traces they left in their burials, the Rus were unmistakably Scandinavian. Of course, they were influenced by the peoples with whom they were in contact: Finns, Baltics, Arabs, Bulgarians, Khazars, Slavs. It is a period of globalization in Scandinavia and the Russians become part of the research impulse that spans four continents.
During the 8th and 9th centuries, the Russians were Scandinavian trading and ancestral clans. Later, when some Russians settled further south, for example in Gnezdov, Chernihiv and Kiev, Scandinavians strengthened their elite status by intermarrying with Scandinavians from Scandinavia, treating them as allies and friends, and developing and sharing Scandinavian culture.
After the collapse of the Russian Khaganate, other representatives of Rus much later managed to create another center of power - in Kiev. Now instead of cooperating with the Khazars, they are seizing their lands and tax collection centers. The Russians (or other Scandinavians) also built the first cities in other parts of Eastern Europe, for example in the vicinity of Moscow (which, of course, did not yet exist at the time).
After recounting his deeply implausible legend of Novgorod, Putin moves on to quoting “A Tale of Bygone Times” for Kyiv. The person or people who wrote this saga tried to show that the ruler of Kiev was the most important prince in the region. By the time the chronicle was written, Novgorod already existed, and so a story arose that connected the two places and showed the superiority of Kiev.
According to the plot, the Viking from Novgorod manages to capture Kiev by disguising himself as a merchant and fooling the naive local rulers. In his moment of triumph, the Viking shows a baby and declares that this child by blood is the true ruler of the country. After this incredible series of events, the Viking from the fairy tale declared Kiev the “mother of Russian cities” - wording intended to assure the people of the 12th century that the current rulers of Kiev should dominate other representatives of Rus in other cities.
A similar analysis can be made of this story. At the time "A Tale of Bygone Years" was written, Russia did not exist. There were no Russians. There were clans of Scandinavians called the Rus who fought for supremacy, with cities and empires rising and falling. Part of this struggle is a history recorded at the beginning of the 12th century, describing the appearance of the Russians in Kiev - a historical event from the beginning of the 10th century.
The Russians do arrive in Kiev, but not in the way described in the story. The Vikings mentioned in the story could not have come from Novgorod, because at the time when the Russians began to settle in the Kiev region, Novgorod had not yet been founded. Already much later, when both cities existed, at the time of the chronicles, the Scandinavians in Kiev wanted to substantiate both their origin and their dominance. History can only be understood in these terms. Otherwise, she's just comical.
The baby story in general is just ridiculous: no Viking went to war with a baby in his arms, and no Viking ever thought of creating a royal dynasty whose heir was a baby. The game of disguise is a fictional stratagem known from Norse sagas and contemporary Byzantine war stories. Even if we ignore the mythology and ridiculousness of it all, the chronology of events is challenged by the recorded birth and death dates of the clever disguised Viking and the carried Viking baby.
The hero of the Kiev story, the clever Viking in disguise known as Helgi (or Oleg, in Ukrainian or Russian), is a semi-mythical character. There is no reason to believe that he represented the dynasty descended from Novgorod, because Novgorod did not yet exist, and the Russian Khaganate had ceased to exist. Most likely, Helgi, if he existed at all, came from Gnezdovo, which at the time was a rival of Chernigov and Kiev. Helgi means “hero“ and this Helgi is one of dozens that populate medieval Norse lore. This Helgi is supposed to have died fulfilling an elaborate prophecy involving his horse, and this story is found in many northern European tales.
The incident in Kiev cannot happen, it did not happen, and even if it had happened, it would have nothing to do with the current war. It is not really worth continuing the discussion about Kiev, not least because the credibility of the Kiev story, which is zero, will depend on the credibility of the Novgorod story that preceded it, which is zero.
You can understand why historians are hesitant to get involved in all this. What Putin is doing has nothing to do with history as a discipline. It deals with the creation of a legend that is based on other legends. And every sentence of his is so full of all sorts of errors that it would take hundreds of words to explain all the falsehoods!
And by taking the legend seriously, the historian fears he makes it even more serious. This is what in his book “Rebuilding the Nations” I called “skeleton dancing“ , and which I do not recommend. I'm only doing it now because both the myth and the war continue to exist, and people (even outside of Russia) continue to justify the war with a myth.
By focusing on the main legend on which all others depend, I hope to show that the structure itself is empty.
The rules that Putin sets for interpreting the past cannot be accepted. It is nothing more than fantasy that follows power. And this is the most important point. If we accept that tyrants have the right to start wars over fables about brothers and children, over stories that aren't even wrong, then every corner of the world can be invaded and the entire international legal order invalidated.
Even if we were to assume that Putin is reflecting on the past, which we absolutely shouldn't, that would lead us to a completely different conclusion than the one he thinks. The musings of long-dead monks are not a solid foundation for modern statehood. “A Tale of Bygone Times” cannot do what Putin demands of him.
If, in order to exist today, states must prove their ancient lineage and solid ethnic and political history, then Putin will have to admit that there is no basis for the existence of today's Russian Federation.
If Putin had followed his own logic, he would not have invaded Ukraine, but would have handed over the European part of Russia to Finland or Sweden.
translation: Nick Iliev