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Kiev Post, 27 March 2016

Russian President Vladimir Putin, accompanied by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (C), speaks as he meets with Secretary of State John Kerry at the Kremlin in Moscow, on March 24.

Photo by AFP

The heritage of Kievan Rus is a touchy subject for most Russians. Official Russian history positions Moscow as a direct descendant and the only heir of the first Eastern Slavic state, whose princes founded Moscow some time around the middle of the 12th century - just in time for the Mongol invasion.

As long as the city of Kyiv remained part of the Russian state - whether an empire or a communist union of national republics - Russia’s self-identification with historic Kyiv presented no problems. But once Ukraine became independent, it was suddenly a very different matter, for Russia was now deriving its identity from the history of a foreign country.

This is why Russians have a schizophrenic attitude toward Ukraine. They can talk about brotherhood of their nations and then in the same breath assert that no Ukrainians exist, that the Ukrainian language was invented by the Austrian General Staff and the country of Ukraine by Lenin and his Bolsheviks, that Ukrainians are in reality “little Russians” and that the whole project of their nationhood has been designed to weaken the great Russian nation.

As matters now stand, Russia doesn’t have a legitimate claim to being a successor to Kievan Rus - just the United Kingdom does not derive its identity from Rome, Copenhagen or Rouen - even though the Romans, the Danes and the Normans played an important role in forming the British, developing their language and building their cities.

Nevertheless, Muscovy carries the legacy of Kievan Rus in its DNA and in one very important aspect Russia remains wedded to this legacy more than 850 years later - much to its own detriment.

Kievan Rus, founded in late 9th century, was essentially a Viking state. The Vikings played an important, if not always positive, part in early medieval Europe. Starting by attacking and plundering richer, more civilized settlements located on sea shores and along major rivers, they eventually began settling on some of those territories.

For all their barbaric ways, the Scandinavians proved fairly flexible, adapting to local conditions as circumstances demanded. In north-eastern France, for instance, they became French feudal lords, melting into the Frankish and late Roman populations. whereas in Britain, where they encountered stiff resistance, Viking settlements continued to exist alongside Anglo-Saxon ones for a long time.

Viking clans who raided lands to the south-east of Scandinavia also established local settlements, but there they encountered a different set of circumstances. Local Slav tribes were even less civilized than the Norsemen, as well as disorganized and fractious. They had only primitive settlements and few institutions of statehood. The Vikings probably started their engagement with the region by prospecting for slaves, gradually becoming interested in trading and raiding cities along southern and eastern routes. They started to set up military outposts and establish towns, first around Novgorod in north and moving south.

Even though Nordic rulers, once they started to live among much more numerous Slavs quickly assimilated and adopted the local language, the division between foreign masters and indigenous masses was never overcome. Worse, this colonial pattern became transplanted to other city-states founded by Varangian princes, most notably to Moscow.

Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian tsar and the next-to-last direct descendant of the Varangian chieftain Rurik to sit on the Russian throne, was the prime example of a Russian ruler treating his own country like an occupier. In fact, much like one of his ancestors who used to come down from the North at the head of a raiding party, Ivan formed gangs of oprichniki who laid waste to Russia and terrorized its population.

The havoc Ivan wreaked was not much different from what a brutal invasion by a foreign army would have done. His reign prepared the ground for the devastating Time of Troubles that ensued fourteen years after his death.

Even though the next ruling dynasty, the Romanovs, was drawn from the ranks of Russian nobility, they soon began to act much like the descendants of the Vikings, proving that it was political culture that determined the style of government, and not blood lines.

In fact, ordinary Russians expect their rulers to be like foreigners. They see them as an alien presence. The infamous Russian fatalism with regard to the country’s governance derives from the deeply ingrained sense that there is an insurmountable chasm between “them” and “us”.

Russians even seem to like their rulers all the more if they are actually foreign. Look at the two Emperors given the moniker the Great. Peter I hated things Russian and spent many years abroad. When he returned, he wanted Russians to emulate the Europeans. Perhaps subconsciously, he himself ended up emulating the original Scandinavian rulers of Rus, building a fleet and conquering some of the territories from which the original Varangians had come to govern Rus.

Catherine the Great, meanwhile, was a German princess.

The Bolshevik Revolution was carried out by Lenin and his buddies who, like the Vikings, descended upon Russia from abroad. And even though the claimed to hold power in the name of the masses and promised to make the life of the people happier and more prosperous, in reality they behaved very much like barbarian raiders, destroying monuments, robbing churches and murdering prominent citizens who could have resisted them. There was absolutely no difference in the way the Soviet government confiscated food and livestock from peasants, making them starve to death, and the way it had been done by foreign invaders in the Middle Ages.

Stalin - another non-Russian and another ardently admired ruler - turned millions of his subjects into slaves and literally waged a war on his own people. In fact, the losses he inflicted on the country in blood and treasure - not to mention future prospects - far exceeded anything the real invader, Hitler, was able to do to the Soviet Union in the course of the bloodiest military conflict the world has ever known.

On the other hand, rulers who appeared more authentically “Russian” and refused to act like invaders were often despised. Especially if they, like Khrushchev and Gorbachev, attempted to alleviate the plight of the population.

You would expect that over a period of hundreds of years, with different political systems and a bunch of written and rewritten constitutions, the Varangian pattern of Russian government would start to wear out. But it still persists - albeit in a perverse and transmogrified form.

Vladimir Putin had a completely ordinary Russian upbringing on the mean outskirts of Leningrad, but he has been acting like a classical Viking ruler since becoming Russia's president. He brought his clan over from his native city in the North and has since presided over a historically unprecedented rape of the country’s resources. Like any occupiers, members of his elite send their families abroad, which is where they have stashed their loot, as well.

Putin is even behaving like a medieval warlord. When he snatched Crimea or sent his thugs to Donbas, he may have thought that he was restituting Russia’s unfairly lost territories. In reality, he’s been merely raiding a neighboring country. Two years after the annexation of Crimea, no economic development has been achieved there and the peninsula remains vitally reliant on Ukraine; in Donbass, the thugs openly live off the fat of the land, robbing the local population.

Viktor Yanukovych, a small-time Donetsk gangster, imitated Putin’s modus operandi, stealing everything that was not nailed down. Unlike their Russian neighbors, who characteristically like their Viking ruler, Ukrainians eventually sent him packing.

But Ukrainian oligarchs and government officials continue to suck the juices out of the Ukrainian economy very much the way an invader would do. This is not a way to build a modern nation. While glorying in their history, Ukrainians need to shake off this part of their Viking legacy, which they still share with Russia.