Lomonosov insisted that the Russians were not Vikings but Baltic Slavs, descendants of the Iranian Roxolani tribe, whose history went back to the Trojan Wars. A rival in the academy, Mikhail Lomonosov, accused Müller of denigrating the Slavs by portraying them as savages, incapable of organising their own state. After Russia’s recent victory in a war against Sweden, this was not the moment to suggest that Russia was created by the Swedes. Nothing in it can be taken as fact.īut in the first half of the 18th century, when history writing in Russia was in its infancy, a German scholar called Gerhard Friedrich Müller scandalised the newly founded St Petersburg Academy of Sciences by concluding, based on his readings of the chronicle, that the Russians owed their origins to the Vikings. The chronicle was a patchwork of narrative poems, epic songs, Norse sagas, Slav folklore, old Byzantine annals and religious texts. The Primary Chronicle – compiled in the 1110s by monks in Kyiv – tells of a concordat reached in 862 between warring Slavic tribes and a group of Viking princes. And how the Russians came to tell their story – and to reinvent it as they went along – is a vital aspect of their history, their culture, and beliefs. But as Orlando Figes argues in this excellent survey of Russian history over 1,200 years, no other country has been so divided over its own beginnings. A timely reminder of the malign uses to which history can be put, Orlando Figes examines the origins of modern Russia and the myths Vladimir Putin is using to shape the present as an excuse for conquestĪll countries have foundation myths.
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