Timothy Snyder, The Making of Modern Ukraine, Lecture #5: Vikings, Slavers, Lawgivers: The Kyiv State
I’ve just finished watching Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s fifth lecture for his course “The Making of Modern Ukraine.” This lecture was titled, “Vikings, Slavers, Lawgivers: The Kyiv State.”
Snyder’s focus in this lecture was establishing the various rivalries that dominated Europe and Eastern Europe in the 9th century AD. Toward the west, in the territory of the Franks (France), western Christianity dominated. In the east, Byzantine Christianity was dominant, with its center in the city of Constantinople, the largest city in Europe. The south was increasingly dominated by Islam. All were challenged by the Vikings, who came down from the north into Europe via rivers, looking for slaves and Byzantine silver. And in the middle of everything were the Khazars, who were a combination of Jews, Muslims, and Christians, but mostly pagans, and who played against — and sometimes for — all sides.
Amidst all this competition, Kyiv (Kiev) emerged first as a trading post, and later, when the Vikings (Rus) settled there, as a state. (The Vikings settled in Kyiv because they could not get their boats down the Dnieper River’s treacherous rapids.) Eventually, the head of the Kievan Rus, Volodymyr (a Bulgarian name, as it turns out, not Ukrainian), supported Byzantium and converted to Christianity in exchange for the hand in marriage of the sister of the Byzantine emperor.
Presto! Now Kievan Rus is Christian! Not quite. Though the state expanded, covering an increasing amount of territory, from Poland to the west, and to Russia to the east, encompassing Belarus and all the way up to Scandinavia, it remained a conglomeration of different traditions and cultures. As Snyder pointed out, religious conversion by rulers was usually a pragmatic act, enabling them to ally themselves with other states, and thus avoid being enslaved by them.
Which brings us to Snyder’s major question: What is a state? Snyder dismisses all origin stories for states as myths — especially the one involving Volodymyr’s conversion — drawing our attention instead to the practical advantages conferred by statehood, which in the 9th century meant not losing valuable manpower to slavers. Once a state was nominally Christian, other Christian states would not enslave the population, which could then be taxed.
Another point, which Snyder repeatedly stresses, is that states copy other states. The existence of Moravia, the first Slavic state, allowed the formation of Kievan Rus, and subsequently Ukraine. Most interestingly, and surely a monkey wrench in Putin’s oft-repeated origin story, is that Russia was initially part of Ukraine, not the other way around.
You can watch the fifth lecture for The Making of Modern Ukraine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36XiKhamtQo
The syllabus for the course is here: https://snyder.substack.com/p/syllabus-of-my-ukraine-lecture-class
You can watch all of Timothy Snyder’s lectures for The Making of Modern Ukraine here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_
You can read all of my summaries here: https://ericaverr.medium.com/
Erica Verrillo is the author of three MG fantasies (Random House). Her short work has appeared in over a dozen publications. She is also the author of the definitive reference guide for treating myalgic encephalomyelitis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide, now in its second edition (first edition, St. Martin’s). She holds degrees from Tufts University (BA — History) and Syracuse University (MA — Linguistics) as well as doctoral work in Anthropology and Speech Communication. Her professional life includes working as Spanish language editor for Mesoamerica, linguistics instructor (Dartmouth), classical musician (Oxford Symphony Orchestra), director of a non-profit NGO for Mayan refugees, and Mayan linguist (SUNY Albany). She is the president of the American Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Society, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to to serving the needs of patients and caregivers through support, advocacy, and education. Her blog, Publishing … and Other Forms of Insanity has received nearly 8 million page views. You are welcome to visit.
