Old Russians Erotic

The Old Russians were the East Slavic population of Kievan Rus', the medieval state strung along the rivers between Novgorod and Kyiv from roughly the ninth century until the Mongol conquest of 1237 to 1240. No living community goes by the name, but they were the common ancestors of modern Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Rusyns. The label itself is modern and disputed. Soviet historians described an Old Russian nationality that fused the region's tribes into one people. Ukrainian historians from Mykhailo Hrushevsky onward traced separate lines of descent, and many Western scholars say Rus' to avoid reading today's borders backward. Politics, trade and eventually faith held them together more than common origin did. They began as tribal unions with their own territories: the Polans around Kyiv, the Drevlians in the forests to the west, and the Krivichs, Radimichs, Vyatichs and Ilmen Slovenes to the north and east. A Varangian ruling dynasty, the Rurikids, and the river road from the Baltic to Byzantium drew them into one orbit. Their speech, Old East Slavic, was close enough to other Slavic languages that Church Slavonic, which arrived largely by way of Bulgaria, became their language of scripture and learning. The decisive turn came around 988, when Prince Vladimir accepted baptism from Constantinople. As the chronicle tells it, he had the idol of Perun dragged into the Dnieper before the people of Kyiv were baptized in the same river. Orthodoxy remade their art, law and literacy, but older habits held on. Church sermons of the period still scold believers for making offerings to Rod and the rozhanitsy.

The clearest view of ordinary life comes from the birch bark letters dug out of Novgorod's waterlogged soil since 1951. Scratched with a stylus, they record debts, orders, family quarrels and a marriage proposal, and they show that merchants, artisans, women and children could read and write. A boy named Onfim left alphabet drills next to drawings of himself as a warrior on horseback. Novgorod's town assembly, the veche, could invite and expel princes, and the law code Russkaya Pravda punished killings and injuries with fines rather than execution. The chronicle even preserves a legend of the apostle Andrew marveling at northerners who beat themselves with twigs in scalding bathhouses, then poured cold water over themselves, and did it every day by choice. In the centuries after the Mongol conquest, the lands of Rus' were split between principalities under the Golden Horde in the northeast and Lithuania and Poland in the west. The dialects drifted apart into the languages of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and each nation still claims a share of that Kyivan inheritance.