Anti-Normanism

Normanism and anti-Normanism are competing groups of theories about the origin of Kievan Rus' that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries concerning the narrative of the Viking Age in Eastern Europe.

The Norsemen that ventured from what is now Sweden, into the waterways of Eastern Europe feature prominently in the history of the Baltic states, Scandinavia, Poland, and the Byzantine Empire.

[16][19] Russian historians who accepted this historical account included Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826) and his disciple Mikhail Pogodin (1800–1875), who gave credit to the claims of the Primary Chronicle that the Varangians were invited by East Slavs to rule over them and bring order.

The German-born Moscow academician August Ludwig von Schlözer said in 1802 that the Slavs had been living like "savage beasts and birds" before the advent of the civilizing Norsemen, a view later adopted by several scholars as well as non-scholars such as Adolf Hitler in the 20th-century, who saw in Russia "a wonderful instance of the state-organizing capability of the Germans among an inferior race".

[23] During the historical debates of the 20th century, the key evidence for the mainstream view that Scandinavian migrants had an important role in the formation of Kievan Rus' emerged as the following: In the 21st century, analyses of the rapidly growing range of archaeological evidence further noted that high-status 9th- to 10th-century burials of both men and women in the vicinity of the Upper Volga exhibit material culture largely consistent with that of Scandinavia (though this is less the case away from the river, or further downstream).

[23] In addition, the Norsemen married local women, had their weapons made by Slavs, and only a relatively small number of Norse loanwords in Russian have been established.

[23] There is uncertainty as to how large the Scandinavian migration to Rus' was, but some archaeological work in the years around 2000 argued for a substantial number of free farmers settling in the upper Volga region.

[23] The anti-Normanist arguments were revived and adopted in official Soviet historiography,[38][6][37] partly in response to Nazi propaganda, which posited that Russia owed its existence to a Germanic ruling elite.

[40] In light of evidence, theories – most of them proposed by Soviet scholars with nationalistic agendas – of a Slav state in the Baltic region attacked by and ultimately absorbing Viking invaders are more likely the product of wishful thinking than of fact.

The debate over this issue – futile, embittered, tendentious, doctrinaire – served to obscure the most serious and genuine historical problem which remains: the assimilation of these Viking Rus into the Slavic people among whom they lived.

[1][50][51][52] Scholars such as Omeljan Pritsak and Horace G. Lunt offer explanations that go beyond simplistic attempts to attribute "ethnicity" on first glance interpretation of literary, philological, and archaeological evidence.

They view the Rus' as disparate, and often mutually antagonistic, clans of charismatic warriors and traders who formed wide-ranging networks across the North and Baltic Seas.

[55] Archaeological research, synthesizing a wide range of 20th-century excavations, has begun to develop what Jonathan Shepard has called a "bottom up" vision of the formation of the Rus' polity, in which, during the ninth and 10th century increasingly intensive trade networks criss-crossed linguistically and ethnically diverse groups around rivers like the Volga, the Don, the Dnieper.

[56] This fits well with the image of Rus' that dominates the Arabic sources, focusing further south and east, around the Black and Caspian Seas, the Caucasus and the Volga Bulgars.

[57] Yet this narrative, though plausible, contends with the "top-down" image of state development implied by the Primary Chronicle, archaeological assemblages indicating Scandinavian-style weapon-bearing elites on the Upper Volga, and evidence for slave-trading and violent destruction of fortified settlements.

[60] Northern Russia and adjacent Finnic lands had become a profitable meeting ground for peoples of diverse origins, especially for the trade of furs, and attracted by the presence of oriental silver from the mid-8th century AD.