East Slavs

• 1. Introduction

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  The East Slavs are a subgroup of the Slavic peoples. Today their descendants stretch from Eastern Europe across northern Asia to the Pacific Ocean. Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians all descend from this same branch of Slavic speakers. All three still look back to the medieval state of Kievan Rus' as their shared cultural ancestor. Two more groups sit at the edges of that family tree, the Rusyns and the Don Cossacks. Some scholars call them separate nations. Others treat them as subgroups of the Ukrainians and Russians they emerged from. How does one language branch end up spread across a continent? Why do the Rusyns and Don Cossacks resist easy classification? And what happened to the state this whole family claims as its origin? Chronicles, buried settlements and DNA each hold a piece of the answer.

• 2. A Late-Arriving Record

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  Researchers know relatively little about the Eastern Slavs before roughly 859. That is the year of the first events recorded in the Primary Chronicle. Before that point, the Eastern Slavs appear to have had no written language of their own. Almost everything known about them earlier comes from elsewhere. Archaeological digs supply some of it. Accounts written by foreign travelers who passed through the Rus' land supply more. Comparative analysis of Slavic languages fills in the rest. Very few native Rus' documents survive from before the 11th century, and none survive from before the 10th. The Primary Chronicle itself is the earliest major manuscript to describe Rus' history. It was written in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, generations after the events it describes.

  That chronicle names twelve Slavic tribal unions. By the 10th century they had settled in the land between the Western Bug, the Dniepr and the Black Sea. That territory became Kievan Rus'. The list runs Polans, Drevlyans, Dregovichs, Radimichs, Vyatichs, Krivichs, Slovens, Dulebes, White Croats, Severians, Ulichs and Tivertsi. The chronicle adds that the Dulebes were later known as the Volhynians and Buzhans. Where these tribes came from before they reached that stretch of land is a separate question. That question leads somewhere the sources cannot follow, into a migration across the plain centuries before anyone wrote a word down.

• 3. Two Streams Across The Plain

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  No consensus exists among scholars about the urheimat, or original homeland, of the Slavs. In the first millennium AD, Slavic settlers likely came into contact with other ethnic groups moving across the Eastern European Plain during the Migration Period. Between the 1st and 9th centuries, the Sarmatians, Huns, Alans, Avars, Bulgars and Magyars all passed through the Pontic steppe on their way west. Some of them may have subjugated the Slavs already living there. Even so, these passing tribes left little trace in the Slavic lands. The Early Middle Ages instead saw Slavic expansion driven by agriculture, beekeeping, hunting, fishing, herding and trapping. By the 8th century, the Slavs had become the dominant ethnic group on the East European Plain. By 600 AD they had already split linguistically into southern, western and eastern branches.

  Slash-and-burn agriculture was the East Slavs' method of choice, suited to the extensive forests where they settled. It meant clearing a tract of forest with fire, cultivating the ground, and then moving on after a few years. Soil treated this way only yields good harvests for a short stretch before it is exhausted. That constant need for fresh ground drove the East Slavs' rapid spread through eastern Europe.

  The spread happened in two streams. One group of tribes settled along the Dnieper river, in what is now Ukraine and northern Belarus. From there they pushed north to the upper Volga valley east of modern Moscow. They also pushed west, into the basins of the northern Dniester and the Southern Buh rivers in present-day Ukraine.

  The other group of East Slavs moved northeast instead, where they met the Varangians of the Rus' Khaganate. For protection they built a fortified center, the settlement of Novgorod, which a later chronicle would date to the year 862. The same population settled the present-day Tver Oblast and the region of Beloozero. After reaching the lands of the Merya near Rostov, they linked up with the Dnieper group of migrants. That link tied the two streams together, long before either left behind the fortified cities that archaeologists would later dig up.

• 4. Cities Before Kiev

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  Archaeologists classify five cultures as early Slavic, the Prague, Korchak, Penkova, Kolochin and Kyiv cultures. The Kyiv culture is the earliest, dating from the 2nd-3rd centuries AD. It sat as the northern neighbor of the more developed, multi-ethnic Chernyakhov culture, associated with another early Slavic group sometimes called the Veneti or Venedi. Early Slavic settlements were rare, few and short-lived, often built in low ground that floods could reach.

  Slavic migrants who reached the basins of Lake Chudskoye and Lake Ilmen during the 4th-5th centuries formed the culture known as the Pskov long barrows. Contact with the local Finno-Ugric and Baltic peoples shaped that culture's burial rites and some of its pottery. Even so, the broader way of life among these Eastern Slavs changed little. By the 5th century, related cultures such as Korchak and Kolochin had spread out from the old Kyiv culture's territory in every direction.

  Fortified cities began appearing among the East Slavs in northern Ukraine, southern Belarus and southwest Russia. The Ilmen Slovenes and the Krivichs, by contrast, did not reach Lake Ladoga and the northern Baltic Sea until the 7th century. That dating rests on archaeological evidence from a settlement on the Mayat river. Settlements near the Polans and Severians, close to Kyiv and Chernigov, appeared as early as the 7th-8th centuries. That timing marks at least a partial break from the older pattern of scattered, hidden living in the forest. In the 8th-9th centuries, no more than two dozen cities stood across the rest of the East Slavic lands. Roughly a hundred stood on the Left Bank of the Dnieper alone.

  Farther south, the northerners lived in what is now the Voronezh, Belgorod and Kursk regions. They built fortified settlements of their own in the 9th-10th centuries, typically where large rivers met. Archaeologists call this the Romensko-Borshchiv culture. A fortress rose near the future site of Smolensk in the 10th century too, a site known today as the Gnezdovsky archaeological complex.

  Some of the earliest East Slavic settlements are credited to the Dulebs and Antes tribal unions. Archaeology links them to the Prague-Korchak and Penkov cultures. Sites including Zimino, Lezhnitsa, Khotomel, Babka, Khilchitsy and Tusheml belonged to the Prague-Korchak culture. Selishte and Pastyrskoe belonged to the Penkovo culture. Both existed in the 6th-7th centuries, across a stretch of land running from modern Poland and Romania to the Dnieper. A Prague-Korchak settlement was typically a walled site holding a single building that formed part of the wall itself. These sites held no farming tools, suggesting they existed to gather and shelter a military detachment rather than to farm. Penkovsky settlements were larger, with up to two dozen buildings inside their walls, functioning as trade, craft and administrative centers. The Dulebs' territory centered on the Western Bug basin, around Zimino and Lezhnitsa. The Penkovo culture centered on the Dnieper region. Its main Antes fortress, at Selishte, sat farther west near the Byzantine Empire in what is now Moldova. From there, the Antes launched military campaigns. The Avars destroyed these early settlements in the 7th century. That destruction closed the gap in the record for good. When building resumed in the 10th century, it was under a single Rus' state that had only just begun to take shape.

• 5. One Rus Splits Three Ways

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  Kievan Rus' as a single polity disintegrated in the 11th century, parceled out through population shifts and a wholesale political, social and economic regrouping. Out of that upheaval, new peoples took shape. These processes had already been underway before Kiev's fall. The fall sped them along though, into a real linguistic and ethnic split among the Rus' people, dividing them into Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians.

  Southwestern and western Rus', where Ruthenian and later Ukrainian and Belarusian identities took shape, fell first under Lithuanian influence and later under Polish influence. The Russian ethnic identity, by contrast, formed in the Muscovite northeast and the Novgorodian north, outside that Lithuanian and Polish reach. Those diverging paths are the reason the modern East Slavic family carries so many separate names within it. That alone is a list long enough to fill its own chapter.

• 6. Names Within The Family

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  Modern Belarusians include the Litvins as a named subgroup. Cossack communities within that population include the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the Tavria Zaporozhians and the Black Sea Zaporozhians, plus the Podlashuks and the Poleshuks.

  Russians encompass a long roster of named groups: the Albazinians, Doukhobors, Goryuns, Kamchadals, Kamenschiks, Lipovans, Polekhs, Pomors, Semeiskie, Siberians and Starozhily.

  The Rusyns divide into the Boyko, the Hutsuls, the Lemkos and the Pannonian Rusyns.

  Ukrainians include their own Cossack lineages: the Galicians, Podolyans, Slobozhanians and Zaporozhian Cossacks. Each of these names marks a distinct regional or historical thread woven into the same East Slavic family. What ties that whole web together, it turns out, sits at the molecular level, in the DNA these populations carry.

• 7. One Shared Gene Pool

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  Y chromosome studies, mDNA and the autosomal marker CCR5de132 all show that East Slavs and West Slavs are genetically very similar. That closeness lines up with how closely their languages relate to one another. It also stands in sharp contrast to the clear genetic differences separating both groups from neighboring Finno-Ugric, Turkic and North Caucasian peoples. That contrast holds all the way from west to east. That level of genetic uniformity is unusual given how widely Slavic populations, Russians especially, have spread.

  Together, East and West Slavs form the core of what geneticists call the East European gene cluster. That cluster also includes the Balts and some Balkan peoples. Genetic research further shows that East Slavic genomes are homogenous and, contrary to popular belief, show no trace of Turkic or Mongol influence.

  Northern Russians are the one exception among the East and West Slavs. They belong instead to a separate Northern European genetic cluster, shared with the Balts, Germanic peoples and Baltic Finnic peoples. Their populations resemble the Balts most closely of all, a genetic echo of neighbors who never spoke a Slavic language at all.