Kyiv's ancient normality (redux) A little history can help us see through the myths Timothy Snyder Feb 21, 2022 Note to subscribers: today has been an unusually busy day for me, chiefly thanks to Ukrainian matters. Rather than keep everyone in the breathless present, I wanted to share a longer reflection about the past. In my haste, though, I made some typos, which I hope to have corrected in this version. Thanks for your patience. Another article from today, about the history of provocations, is here. And now for the essay, “Kyiv’s ancient normality.”… More than a thousand years ago, Viking slavers found a route they were seeking to the south. It followed the Dnipro River through a trading post called Kyiv, then down through rapids even they could not master. They had slaves carry the boats, and left runes on the riverbank to mark their dead. These Vikings called themselves the Rus. The ancient domain of Khazaria was breaking up. The Khazars had stopped the advance of Islam in the Caucasus in the eighth century, at around the same time as the Battle of Tours. Some or all of the Khazar elite converted to Judaism. The Vikings supplanted the Khazars as the tribute collectors of Kyiv, merging customs and vocabulary. They called their leaders "khagans." As the Vikings came to understand, conversion to a monotheistic religion could mean control of territory. The pagan Rus apparently considered Judaism and Islam before converting to Christianity. The ruler believed to have converted, Valdemar (or Volodymyr, who Russians, much later, called Vladimir), had first ruled Kyiv as a pagan. According to Arab sources, he had earlier ruled another city as a Muslim. Colorful this is, but normal. Vikings contributed to state formation throughout Europe, at the cusp of millennial conversions. Kyivan Rus was normal in its marital politics, sending a princess to marry the king of France. Its succession struggles were typical of the region, as was the inability to resist the Mongols in the early 1240s. Thereafter most lands of Rus were gathered by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This was in a certain sense also normal: Lithuania was the biggest country in Europe. Kyiv then passed a civilizational package to Vilnius. Christianity had brought Church Slavonic to Kyiv. Created in Byzantium to convert Slavs in Moravia, Church Slavonic was then adopted in Bulgaria and in Kyivan Rus. In Rus it provided the basis for a legal language, now borrowed by Lithuania. Lithuania merged with Poland. Ruled from Vilnius and then Warsaw in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Kyiv remained a center of