Vikings in the East: From Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin – The Origins of a Contested Legacy in Russia and Ukraine

xiii

A note about spellings

Russian and Ukrainian are closely related languages. As a result, there are Russian and Ukrainian versions of place, river and personal names. So, Kiev is the Russian form of the city’s name, while Kyiv is the Ukrainian. Vladimir is the Russian form of the name of the ruler who accepted Christian baptism (into the Orthodox faith) in the late tenth century and Volodymyr is the Ukrainian form. Dnieper is the Russian form of this river’s name and will be found in many published and online sources; in Ukrainian it is Dnipro.

Until Ukrainian independence in 1991 – and for some time afterwards in many publications – it is usually the Russian form of names that one encounters. This was due to Russification across the lands ruled by the tsars from the seventeenth century and later by the Soviets. Consequently, it was these forms that entered common usage internationally and which were widely found in the English-speaking world.

What to do about spellings now? This has become particularly freighted with controversy as Russian pressure mounted against xivUkraine in the twenty-first century and especially so since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In the case of Kiev/Kyiv, Kiev was the generally accepted English-language spelling throughout the Soviet period and into the first years of this century. But it is now associated with the Russification of Ukraine. The same is true of a number of place, river and personal names. The transliteration Kyiv was legally mandated by the Ukrainian government in 1995. However, this new spelling only started gaining traction a few years ago, when the Ukrainian government mounted a campaign to secure international approval for the name of its capital city.¹

Due to the huge number of available published sources that use the Russian form of names, in this book the older (Russian) forms will generally be used to refer to rivers, places and personal names, unless these have traditionally appeared in their Ukrainian forms globally. This avoids changing spellings in published works which are quoted and because these forms have become very well known. So, the more familiar form of the river names Dnieper and Dniester will be used, because these are the forms most readers will encounter in other published works and online. Vladimir the Great will appear in this Russian form for the same reason and for its synchronicity with Vladimir Putin, who bears the same form of this personal name. The use of these Russian forms is for clarity and simplification and in no way conveys any disrespect for the Ukrainian language. Where Vladimir the Great is referred to in modern Ukrainian sources, the form Volodymyr will be used, while making it clear that readers are more likely to come across him as ‘Vladimir the Great’.xv

However, there is one notable exception. While the form Kievan Rus has traditionally been used to describe the Norse–Slav state that emerged in the tenth century – and is the form that will be encountered in most written sources that appeared in the English-speaking world before the last decade – I refer to them as the Kyivan Rus, as this form is now becoming the one more frequently found and it makes it clear that the place in question is the city now referred to, in most sources in the West, in its Ukrainian form. All of this is a reminder of the complexity of the area of culture and history that is the subject of this book.

In a less contentious area, where Old Norse terms are used, a simplification of letter forms (avoiding ones no longer used in modern English) will be deployed. For example, we will use the term Aesir to describe a family of Viking deities, rather than Æsir. The term Garthariki will be used to describe the mixed Norse–Slavic settlements of northern Russia, rather than the Old Norse form Garðaríki. This is because the letters used in the latter (and older) forms will be unfamiliar to many modern English-speaking readers. However, usually the Old Norse form will also be given, in brackets, as this form often also appears in published sources.xvi

NOTES

1 ‘Kyiv or Kiev – Here’s why the difference is political,’ https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/cbc-pronunciation-kyiv-ukraine-crisis-explainer-1.6371766 (accessed April 2024).

xvii

Introduction

‘Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.’ ¹

– US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, March 1994

‘Ukraine is the biggest European country and is rich in natural resources. Its capital, Kyiv, has long-held ideological meaning for Russia. It was where the population of the Kyivan Rus was consecrated by Volodymyr the Great in 988. In his article about the unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin wrote that these two nations and Belarusians spoke one language (Old Russian), had economic relations, and one religion: the Orthodox faith. Then he continued with pseudo-historical facts about Ukraine. One sentence said, Modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era.’²

– Lieutenant Colonel Denys Yurchenko, Ukrainian military cooperation officer specialising in NATO–Ukraine cooperation, July 2024 xviii

This book is about ‘deep stories’. I first came across this evocative phrase when researching a very different book on another modern political and cultural phenomenon, entitled Trump and the Puritans.³ That was in 2019 when it seemed that the worst that Vladimir Putin might do to Ukraine was the seizure of Crimea. Things have moved on since then.

It was while writing about the US and Trump that the phrase first caught my imagination. It was not that the concept was new to me. Anyone who studies history will know that it is constantly being quarried to define contemporary perceptions and identities. What was so striking was the way in which the phrase so powerfully conveyed both the process and the outcome of this interaction between the present and the past.

The context within which the phrase crossed my radar was an examination of the extent to which the US Tea Party ideology and programme had captured the imaginations and loyalties of Louisianan Republicans, well before the rise to prominence of Donald Trump. This Tea Party support later morphed into support for Trump in 2016 (and later in 2024). The support for the Tea Party – and later for Trump – was largely centred on a small-state, anti-federal government, anti-National-Environment-Agency-intervention stance. This was despite the poverty, pollution and poor health troubling the state, its dependence on federal assistance and its apparent need of federal protection to safeguard its natural resources. The question of why so many Louisianans embraced an ideology whose outcomes undermined the physical well-being of its supporters was sensitively documented in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2018 study, xixentitled Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.⁴

What emerged was the conclusion that both the Tea Party and Trump appeared to speak to the ‘deep story’ of these voters, as they lived in a bewildering US that was changing around them and in which they increasingly felt marginalised and cut-in-on by others as they queued for access to the ‘American Dream’. That the policies of the radical right, arguably, were little inclined to assist such people – who were often damaged by the actions of the oil industry and inadequately served by private sector health provision – was as nothing compared to the right’s ability to articulate their anxieties and engage with their ‘story’ (regardless of its inaccuracies) of what the US used to be like, currently was like and what it might become again. In short, such stories appeared to make sense of complicated issues, reassured its adherents of their identities and the rightness of their hopes and promised a way forward which would validate them.

Such an outlook is rooted in the history, society, traditions, values and perceptions of any given group. And it may or may not accord with hard facts. But being rooted in the past is the key to the attraction of the phenomenon. It is seen in slogans produced as part of the process: ‘Make America Great Again’ in the US; ‘Take Back Control’ in Brexit Britain; appeals to historical Hindu culture in opposition to ‘foreign invaders’ in Bharatiya Janata Party strategies apparent in India; backward-looking references to Great Patriotic War tropes and anti-Nazism as justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The present is framed in the context of a perceived past. That is a ‘deep story’. xx

Deep stories will prove crucial in explaining many of the phenomena explored in this book. And deep stories exist on both sides of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, as they do on both sides of the polarised US and in all other nations seeking satisfying (even if misleadingly incomplete or at times delusional) history-based clarity and affirmation in a turbulent present. Different deep stories can produce different outcomes.

Increasingly, I have become fascinated by the concept of such deep stories and the way in which they are deployed. This was a feature of my book Mayflower Lives (2019);⁵ the co-written Trump and the Puritans (2020);⁶ has become a lethal feature of Putin’s Russia (as I explored in the last chapter of The Secret History of Soviet Russia’s Police State, 2020)⁷ and has accelerated since February 2022; is seen in the political use of end-times beliefs, as I explored in The End Times, Again? (2021)⁸ and Apocalyptic Politics (2022);⁹ and is highlighted in the use of the Norse in areas of modern radicalised politics in the turbulent US, as I explored in American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America (2023).¹⁰

In Vikings in the East, the Norse adventurers are once more being deployed to justify modern outlooks and actions – but this time in the East rather than in the West. This is hardly surprising, because Vikings have an ability to stir the imagination through their combination of heroic exploration and muscular free enterprise. For they could be both state-destroyers and state-builders. And it is in that latter capacity that they play such an important role in the bitterly contested origin myths of both Russia and Ukraine. The Vikings are a historical unifying factor that has – paradoxically – become deeply divisive.xxi

As we shall shortly see, over a millennium ago, Viking adventurers founded the Norse–Slavic dynasties of the Rus, which are entangled in the origin stories of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Furthermore, because the Rus were the first community in the region to convert to Christianity – in its Eastern Orthodox form – this confers sacred significance on what could, otherwise, be an origin myth simply of medieval trade and violence. They are at the heart of the concept of ‘Holy Russia’. That affords a special profundity and significance to the history of which they are part. This hugely affects how they and their formative actions are perceived.

In the middle of a savage contemporary argument over whether Russians and Ukrainians are two distinct people or constitute one historical community lies a common origin story and the beginnings of Orthodox faith that can be both a unifying and a divisive phenomenon, depending on how it is deployed. And deployed it certainly has been! That is why the full title of this book is: Vikings in the East: From Vladimir the Great to Vladimir Putin – The Origins of a Contested Legacy in Russia and Ukraine. It is a place where history collides with the present.

This is not a detailed history of Ukraine and Russia. Many other excellent books provide that. While an outline of Ukrainian and Russian history will give structure and context to the flow of this book, what follows is primarily an exploration of how the actions of Viking – and then Viking–Slav – people played a formative role in the history of the national communities which later emerged. And how this role has been understood and disputed in later times; none more so than in the present. History can have ‘attitude’. That is clear in recent, and ongoing, events.xxii

The use – and the abuse – of history is an ever-present reality in the modern world. It was ever thus. As someone once said of the outlook of confident ideologues: ‘Only the future is certain; the past is always changing.’

Martyn Whittock

NOTES

1 Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘The Premature Partnership’, Foreign Affairs (1 March 1994). See also: Mykola Bielieskov, ‘Russian victory in Ukraine would leave Europe at Putin’s mercy’, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russian-victory-in-ukraine-would-leave-europe-at-putins-mercy/ (accessed August 2024).

2 Denys Yurchenko, ‘Russian Strategic Culture and the War in Ukraine’, https://www.fpri.org/article/2024/07/russian-strategic-culture-and-the-war-in-ukraine/ (accessed August 2024).

3 James Roberts and Martyn Whittock, Trump and the Puritans: How the Evangelical Religious Right Put Donald Trump in the White House (London: Biteback, 2020).

4 Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York and London: New Press, 2018).

5 Martyn Whittock, Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience (New York: Pegasus Books, 2019).

6 Roberts and Whittock, Trump and the Puritans.

7 Martyn Whittock, The Secret History of Soviet Russia’s Police State (London: Robinson, 2020).

8 Martyn Whittock, The End Times, Again? (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021).

9 Martyn Whittock, Apocalyptic Politics (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022).

10 Martyn Whittock, American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America (New York: Pegasus Books, 2023).

1

Chapter 1

Go East!

READING THE RUNES…

An enigmatic Viking Age runestone in Sweden signposts a story which unites the ancient past with the turbulent present, the early medieval period with the twenty-first century, tenth-century Vikings with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Vladimir the Great of the Rus with Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation. It points towards a ‘deep story’ concerning the contested origins and myths of both Ukraine and Russia. The runestone in question reads: ‘Tóla had this stone raised in memory of her son Haraldr, Ingvarr’s brother. They travelled valiantly far for gold, and in the east gave (food) to the eagle. (They) died in the south in Serkland.’¹

Understanding the significance of the story behind this Viking Age memorial takes us into more than simply an extraordinary period of medieval history. It also opens a window into a past that continues to reverberate in modern mythmaking and in bitterly 2conflicted national identities. It is history with attitude; it has a legacy that is lethal…

THE VIEW TO THE EAST

Popular culture commonly views the Viking Age as being fundamentally a Western European phenomenon. This is not surprising, given the Viking impact on communities either side of the North Sea and the English Channel and across the British Isles. From here, the story extends westward to Iceland, Greenland and even to North America. In all these areas, the Viking story has become deeply entangled with the cultural DNA of modern communities.² However, it also had a crucial eastern aspect.

The eastern aspect provided a key factor prompting the start of Viking raids in the first place. Changes taking place in the distant Islamic caliphate, in the Middle East, in the 740s and 750s, led to the centre of political power shifting from Damascus to Baghdad. This turbulence disrupted the flow of silver to Scandinavia. For years, Islamic merchants and their middlemen had carried silver to northern Europe. There they traded it for slaves, furs and amber. Political conflict and changes in the caliphate disrupted this trade. The flow of silver northwards dried up; Scandinavian economies were destabilised. Silver, which had allowed Scandinavian elites to engage in traditional gift-giving to cement social relationships, became scarce. Facing this change, raiding (going ‘viking’) offered an alternative way to get their hands on precious metals and slaves.

So it was then that changes, emanating from as far from Scandinavia as Baghdad, rippled out like a stone thrown into a pond. 3These changes triggered the expansion now known as the ‘Viking Age’. It was an extraordinary example of the law of unintended consequences – and it started in the East.

At the same time, the forest products of the eastern Baltic and the supply of slaves from there drew Swedish Viking adventurers eastward on the austrvegr (the Eastern Way), as it was known in Old Norse. For several reasons, the Viking phenomenon always had an Eastern Front. This is their history and an exploration of why its legacy still features in the turbulent and contested deep stories of both Russia and Ukraine in the twenty-first century.

THE ‘LITTLE GREEN MEN’ AND A STRANGE CLAIM BY VLADIMIR PUTIN

In 2014, the pro-Russian Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, finally accepted the inevitable, when months of popular protests toppled his government. During 2013 and 2014, these protests in Kyiv (Russian: Kiev), now frequently referred to as the Euromaidan, leading to the Revolution of Dignity, had eventually culminated in the overthrow of this pro-Russian Ukrainian President, who had halted the Ukrainian development of closer ties with Western Europe – primarily the ‘association agreement’ with the EU – after intense pressure from Moscow. At the culmination of the uprising, Yanukovych fled to Moscow. Prior to this, Yanukovych’s riot police had brutally dispersed protesters, and its snipers shot dead seventy-six people in three days in February 2014.

It seemed that Ukraine was now ready to resume its development of Western connections. Membership of the EU might be possible 4in time, once some significant issues in the areas of governance and civic society had been dealt with. Beyond that – and even more contentious – there might yet be some kind of relationship with (maybe one day even membership of) the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

It was following the Euromaidan that Russian special forces – euphemistically referred to as the ‘little green men’ (Russian: zelyonye chelovechki) or ‘the polite people’ (Russian: vezhlivye lyudi) – led the way in a Russian seizure of the peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine. Although their kit lacked unit insignia, everyone knew that they were there on the orders of the Kremlin. The deniability was of the kind familiar from other acts of Russian aggression, such as the Salisbury Novichok poisonings and a myriad other examples.

While the linguistic issues are a little complex, basically Russian has two words for truth. These are: istina and pravda. And it has two words for lies, which are: lozh and vranyo. Of the two latter words, it is the second that is most interesting. Vranyo means ‘to lie’, but it often conveys a rather more nuanced and dismissive tone. A fairly recent comment on Reddit summed up the potential meaning of vranyo rather well: ‘You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.’³

The initial Kremlin narrative – as embodied in the ‘little green men’ – was a classic example of the use of vranyo as statecraft. As we explore more of the tangled history of Ukraine and Russia, especially in its latest form, we will come across a lot more vranyo.

But back to 2014. The Russian action in Crimea was an open act of aggression against another sovereign state. As recently as 1997, 5when the Russian Federation had been granted an extended lease on the port facilities at Sevastopol for its Black Sea Fleet, it had affirmed Crimea as Ukrainian territory. That ‘guarantee’ clearly had a much shorter shelf life than anyone had imagined in 1997. A lot has happened since then.

As we shall see, Crimea has a complex history. Written references and archaeology reveal Greek settlers there. In the tenth century, it was the place where Norse–Slav rulers (central to our exploration) accepted Christian baptism. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, it was divided between the Khanate of Crimea, Genoese coastal colonies and the Byzantine Principality of Theodoro. For three centuries after this, it was a protectorate of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Russia invaded Crimea in 1783 as part of the expansionist policies of Catherine the Great. Crimean Tatar communities were several times forcibly expelled by Russia in 1783, 1856 and 1944.⁴ The last mass expulsion was for alleged collaboration with the Germans.

Crimea has also had a rather complicated history since 1945. It was transferred to the Soviet republic of Ukraine (within the then USSR) in 1954. In 1991, as the USSR imploded, Crimea was (once again) made an autonomous republic within the Soviet Union, but with the formal dissolution of the USSR in December of that year, Crimea was eventually incorporated into the newly independent Ukrainian state as the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (ARC), the only self-governing region within Ukraine. It is significant that in the referendum of 1991, on Ukraine’s independence from the USSR, 54 per cent of Crimea’s population voted for an independent Ukraine.⁵ This was perhaps not surprising, since it had been part of 6the Ukrainian republic since 1954. The ARC had its own constitution, Prime Minister and Parliament; its constitution protected the special status of the Russian language. From the mid-1990s, strong pro-Russian tendencies within some areas of the Crimean population led to political tensions and this was a situation encouraged by some Russian nationalist politicians before the presidency of Putin.

The official Ukrainian census of 2001 revealed that 60 per cent of the population of Crimea consisted of ethnic Russians, 24 per cent were Ukrainians and 10 per cent were Crimean Tatars.⁶

Despite these historical complications, and the size of the ethnic Russian population, Crimea constituted a part of the new state of Ukraine, whose territorial integrity was guaranteed by the Russian Federation. In 1994–96, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 – signed by Russia, Ukraine, Britain and the US – promised that none of these nations would use force or threats against Ukraine.⁷ All would respect its sovereignty and existing borders. That guarantee, like that integral to the 1997 port-lease, had a shelf life that did not last beyond twenty years.

To return to 2014. Russia seized most of the Ukrainian fleet while it was in port, and the HQ of Ukraine’s navy was relocated from Sevastopol to Odesa (Russian: Odessa). Although some of the Ukrainian ships were later returned to Ukraine, others – including the Ukrainian navy’s only submarine – were absorbed