An Outline of Ukrainian History
1993
PREFACE
One of the most distressing aspects of the present day is the “white” and “black” spots inherited from the past. The former are gaps in our knowledge — those historical realities that during the era of Stalin’s cult of personality and the Brezhnev-era stagnation fell under prohibition, were rendered taboo, and for several decades were totally suppressed. The latter are the consequence of brazen falsification, the distortion of historical progress, the shameless tailoring of reality to fit a desired and “most graciously” approved schema.
The elimination of these spots is a painstaking, protracted, and at times acutely painful affair. To accomplish it, one must construct a credible historiosophical conception — above all, identify the factors that de facto govern the historical process, demonstrating not only the direction of development but also the concrete course of events and phenomena. We consider the central problem to be the determination of the place of Ukrainian history within the system of universal human progress. For centuries, our consciousness has been subjected to the imposition of viewing the history of Ukraine as a direct component not of world history, but of Russian history. Without overcoming this tendency, the construction of a new conception of our past will scarcely yield the expected results.
Ukrainian scholarly historiosophy arose and took shape in the second half of the nineteenth century. We regard Volodymyr Antonovych — one of the most outstanding European scholars of that era — as its first representative. Yet it does not follow from this that historians of earlier times failed to understand the regularities of the historical process or were indifferent to the question of the factors that determine social progress. They did, however, see these factors outside the bounds of objective processes, seeking the cause of each phenomenon in the sphere of subjective impulses.
The Middle Ages bequeathed to us the theory of divine providentialism — according to which the historical process is governed by the will of a Supreme Intelligence (God). During the Romantic era, the way to overcome this conception was seen in the grounding and representativeness of that supreme will. God acts not by His own powers, but through the conduct of specific persons who serve as agents of abstract forces (good and evil). The dialectic of these concepts, embodied in mythologized (anthropomorphic) images of God and the Devil, led to the situation in which the real activity of every individual — a maker of history (just as the activity of the popular masses, which are composed of those same specific persons) — was viewed within the gravitational pull of one of the confronting sides, and hence as being under the dominion of its higher bearers.
As a result of this, the historical process in the consciousness of the ideologists of Romanticism was transformed into an arena of permanent contest between the representatives of the fundamental ethical categories, and thereby into a kaleidoscope of subjective manifestations of human psychology; the problematic shifted from the sphere of pure cognition to the sphere of moral schemas and precepts.
To this was quite logically added the problem of the determinacy of human will. Indeed, at first glance, every individual acts (or at the very least strives to act) entirely freely, at his own discretion, guided solely by his own interests, desires, aspirations, and so forth.
The philosophy of positivism introduced substantial shifts into this problematic. The historical process received an objectivist foundation: the thesis of laws of social development was formulated, laws whose operation is not subject to subjective factors. The idea of the determinacy of human behavior received an affirmative answer in principle.
The specific interpretations varied. The principal factor of the historical process was taken to be, say, the social division of labor. Or the development of forms of property — that is, the mastery of the human being over the material world of things. Or the growth of demographic potential. Or the evolution of family relations. Or even the action of natural forces, and so on. What they had in common was the conviction that the action of all these factors was objective, and this was regarded as the key to one of the most complex and most pressing mysteries of existence.
The middle of the nineteenth century was marked by the emergence of Marxism, which claimed to have created a complete and all-encompassing system of historical determinism. In essence, this was the carrying of the positivist conception to its logical extreme.
Without doubt, the works of Karl Marx constitute an important stage in the development of social thought. The present-day tendency (a consequence of the revision of discredited ideological dogmas) to reject Marxism altogether as a scientific theory hardly deserves support or approval. The task of criticism is merely to purify genuine Marxism of those excesses and metaphysical rigidities that its fanatical followers and admirers introduced into Marx’s theory — those excesses and dogmatic precepts that ultimately led to the distortion of the rational core of the teaching as well, transforming it into its own opposite.
The trouble did not begin when the founders of Marxism were elaborating their theory. The trouble came when Marxism was proclaimed a “revolutionary upheaval in the consciousness of society,” a peculiar point of departure in the realm of humanity’s intellectual progress.
Every science and every scientific achievement presupposes a clearly defined formulation of the problem — the posing of a question to which one proposes to give an answer. The immortal contribution of Copernicus, for instance, is the heliocentric system of the universe; of Charles Darwin, the theory of evolutionary development of the organic world; of Dmitri Mendeleev, the periodic table of elements. Every such achievement requires the determination not only of the limits within which it manifests and affirms itself, but also of the informational space beyond which it loses its relevance. There can be no Darwinian astronomy, for example, or Copernican sociology — the competence of Darwin or Copernicus does not extend to these fields of knowledge.
The fundamental flaw of Marxism lay in the fact that its competence, according to the opinion of its orthodox adherents, in principle knew no limits whatsoever, and the teaching itself was proclaimed a universal theory meant to encompass all scholarly disciplines — natural as well as social — and moreover to constitute in each of them a foundational threshold.
But what could the phrase “Marxist astronomy” mean? Or “Marxist botany”? Or “Marxist linguistics”? What sense is there in seeking Marxist precepts in mathematics, chemistry, or medicine?
The concept of Marxism bifurcated. There arose, as it were, two “Marxisms” — on the one hand, a scientific theory offering a realistic and thoroughly substantiated resolution of concrete, clearly formulated sociological problems; on the other, a religious teaching of a sectarian type, hostile to any scholarly rigor, based on a Dominican concept of coercion in the sphere of spiritual life with strict observance of cultic ritual.
Within the bounds of science, all was well. Every science has at its disposal a reliable method of cognition that serves as the guarantor of the truth of its propositions. Matters were worse with the religion. Here, essentially, the sole criterion of truth was faith, resting upon authority. Hence the tendency toward quotation-mongering — the searching of the literary legacy of the classics of Marxism-Leninism for even passing utterances on one subject or another, capable of certifying its loyalty with respect to Marxist virtue. And yet, for the most part, such searches proved fruitless: the founders of the teaching were unable to furnish all scholarly disciplines with the necessary precepts — least of all for centuries to come.
After the October coup, Marxism was established in the role of the sole theoretical foundation — the most advanced in the world — of “Soviet science,” obligatory for all ideologists without any exception. Departure from the officially approved doctrine threatened serious consequences, up to and including physical reprisal. Yet the sacramental question remained: what was to be considered Marxism, and what a departure from it — especially in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics, where the search for quotations proves fruitless? Who could assume the function of an infallible judge?
In the 1930s, in direct connection with the cult of personality, the problem of the bearer of “truth in the last instance” was also “resolved.” He turned out, of course, to be “the great leader of all times and peoples.” And Stalin became the supreme arbiter and monopolist of interpretations and glosses, whose directives were considered inviolable, unconditional, unqualified — not subject to either criticism or substantive discussion. One was only permitted to study them and apply them in the course of practical activity.
But let us return to science. What, then, constitutes the genuine essence of Marxism, long recognized by the entire world of scholarship? Friedrich Engels, delivering his speech at the graveside of Karl Marx, clearly formulated the idea of his friend’s principal theoretical contributions. First, Marx understood that in order to pursue science, religion, politics, or art, a person must eat, drink, have a roof over his head — in a word, satisfy his material needs. Second, he created a scientific theory of the capitalism of his time, elucidating and explaining the mystery of surplus value. It is precisely in this (and not in the theory of proletarian revolution, not in the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat) that the contribution of the founders of Marxism lies.
Thus, in speaking of Marxist historiosophy, we note above all the affirmation of the priority of material production (that is, economics) over all other forms of social activity. Accordingly, spiritual life, inter-ethnic relations, and in some cases even the legislative activity of the state were relegated to a secondary plane.
Marxism became not only a theoretical platform but also a purely practical teaching, called upon to blaze for humanity the path to a “bright future.” The claims to the function of guiding action (recall Marx’s aphorism: “hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it”) constituted one of the most alluring and at the same time most illusory components of “scientific socialism.” The founders of the theory and its neophytes, sincerely convinced that they had succeeded in discerning the laws of historical development, actively drew up prognoses for the future, predicting the triumph of the communist order and the corresponding collapse of the capitalist system. As is well known, these prognoses fundamentally failed to materialize.
Marx and Engels believed that socialism was to replace capitalism as a result of a world proletarian revolution. This did not happen. What is now called “socialism” was proclaimed in “individual countries taken separately.”
Marx and Engels believed that the chain of capitalism was to be broken in the most economically developed countries (England, France, Germany, the United States, and so forth). This did not happen. Social upheavals under socialist slogans triumphed predominantly in backward countries — in Russia, China, Mongolia, Cuba, and so on.
Marx and Engels maintained that the victory of socialist forces was to lead to the withering away of the state. This did not happen. On the contrary, under proclaimed socialism the state expanded its competence without limit, usurping virtually all levers of public life (including the economy).
Marx and Engels believed that the victory of socialism would bring about an unprecedented rise in all aspects of social existence, while the capitalist order, having exhausted its progressive potential, was capable only of decay and decomposition. Reality showed the opposite: “decaying and decomposing,” capitalism continued to progress normally, while the solemnly proclaimed socialism led the peoples who had made the “socialist choice” into the dead end of a comprehensive social crisis.
Marx and Engels supposed that the triumph of the new order would ensure for humanity an incomparably higher level of material and spiritual life. The opposite occurred: the socialist revolution everywhere led to a sharp decline in the standard of living, material impoverishment, a fall in spiritual culture, moral degradation, and the reign of lies and deception. According to the predictions of Marx and Engels, socialism was to become the kingdom of social justice and universal well-being, in which there would be no place for crime, for prisons, or for shackles. This did not happen. Instead, corruption, abuse of office, embezzlement, nepotism and cronyism, and the estate privileges of the elite proliferated on an unprecedented scale — privileges before which those of bygone potentates pale.
Marx and Engels asserted that socialism would be the kingdom of freedom and the all-round development of the free individual as creator. The opposite occurred. Under the conditions of the socialism that was built, the country was transformed into one vast concentration camp, a kingdom of fear and terror.
Marx and Engels believed that with the elimination of the exploitation of man by man and class inequality, the problem of inter-ethnic relations would disappear, and in its place would be established an unrestricted internationalism that in the distant future would bring about the merging of peoples into a single universal human nation with a single universal human language. This did not happen. On the contrary, the twentieth century is passing under the sign of nationalism and national-liberation wars, the disintegration of great colonial empires, and the attainment by peoples (great and small) of state independence. The glaring discrepancy between the decreed ideological dogma and the actual course of history could not, of course, remain beyond the attention of domestic historiosophy. The normal consequence of that awareness should have been a revision of the armchair schema and a renunciation of the solemnly proclaimed postulates that proved erroneous and failed to withstand the test of time. But what would then have remained of the very essence of the “fundamental upheaval in consciousness”? One of the most conspicuous manifestations of pseudo-Marxism is mythology and myth-making — the conviction that the historical past can be constructed at one’s own taste and discretion. A taboo was placed on those historical realities (events, persons, institutions, processes, and so forth) that were not to the liking of the authorities. And conversely, what did not actually exist but was deemed desirable by the leadership was proclaimed as sacred truth. In place of historical truth, a mythological dogma was decreed.
Thus was formed the situation with which Ukrainian historiography arrived at the mid-1980s — a situation whose essence was a “most graciously approved” fiction and falsehood, and in which the historical process itself was delineated as a continuous chain of white holes and variously colored falsifications. It is clear that the present state of our discipline is unacceptable and requires a fundamental overhaul. The task of correcting and adjusting the situation, as always, has two mutually related aspects: a destructive one and a constructive one. On the one hand, it is necessary to verify the fruits of more than half a century of creative labor by historians in order to eliminate erroneous conceptions, unscholarly and extra-scholarly assertions, deliberate and inadvertent insinuations, forced and intentional falsifications. On the other hand, in place of what has been overcome and discarded, we must put something new, credible, and precisely weighed by means of genuinely scholarly analysis. Both of these aspects must be realized simultaneously and in parallel. The slogan once proclaimed — “to the foundations, and then…” — has led to nothing good and will not do so.
The task is no easy one. It will require a long time and considerable effort. To hope for a cardinal and instantaneous resolution of all (or even the principal) problems would be exceedingly naive. Ukrainian historical scholarship — if it wishes to be a science — must develop a new conception (above all a methodological and philosophical one). The term “new” that we have used does not at all mean that we must indiscriminately reject the achievements of past ages, from the chronicler Nestor to the Soviet academician Skaba. Not in the least. Our historiography, represented by such names as Mykhailo Maksymovych, Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Dmytro Bahalii, Ivan Krypyakevych, and others, has considerable achievements that could do credit to any national school. In their works we find much that retains its relevance in our own time and is therefore subject to unconditional preservation. And no exploits of any Malanchuks or Bilodids can obliterate that body of work.
The development of such a conception by means of collective labor inevitably leads to theoretical incompatibility, to disputes that time and again threaten to escalate into conflicts, since the opinions of specialists by no means always coincide. And this causes a lack of proper depth and a diminution of the originality of the exposition offered. The aspiration to ensure the highest measure of competence comes into conflict with the general situation just described — the absence of a reliably worked-out system that, with a clear conscience, could be placed at the foundation of serious courses, leaving to the authors only the literary shell. In our time it is difficult to be a specialist in the Stone Age, and in antiquity, and in feudal Ukraine-Rus, and in the Khmelnytsky era, and in the age of capitalism, and in the Soviet period. And an exaggerated professionalism, beyond a certain point, threatens dilettantism. Then arises the dilemma of the initial (starting) stage: either immersion in the boundless sea of concrete problems, processes, facts, and interpretations — with the risk of being led along on someone else’s leash — or the creation, by one’s own efforts, of the most general schema at the historiosophical level, capable of serving as a reliable instrument of historical investigation based on a deep study of the available sources. What promises better prospects: synthesis — that is, the elaboration of a historiosophical schema upon which we are subsequently to superimpose real historical knowledge — or analysis — the thorough working out of a factological base, the outcome of which would be the construction of a general system? The dialectic of investigation demands an organic combination of both, but the present state of historiographic affairs brings the first alternative to the fore.
Today we do not possess a developed general-historical conception. The former one has burst, although there was much that was sound in it. Now we find ourselves between two stools, suspended in mid-air. Of course, such a state of affairs can hardly satisfy anyone. But it is easier said than done. In this direction, something is already being done. Ukrainian historiography that was until recently forbidden is being returned to the people. The works of Kostomarov, Antonovych, Hrushevsky, and others are being published. But this is not enough. Kostomarov belongs to the middle of the nineteenth century, Antonovych to the second half, Hrushevsky and Yavornitsky to the end of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century. And what then? After all, scholarship has not stood still. New sources have appeared, new ideas, new conceptions. All of this must be generalized, investigated, systematized. Ahead lie numerous discussions, clashes of different views. Without this, scholarship cannot develop and progress.
Positive shifts are already noticeable, in particular in the development of a general (historiosophical) conception of the history of Ukraine. A number of generalizing works and courses, mostly collaborative, are being prepared for publication. But in scholarship, collective works are for the most part an evil. The divergence of opinions and convictions among specialists gives rise to disputes that at times threaten to escalate into theoretical conflicts. These must be overcome through mutual concessions. But in scholarship, concessions are impermissible. Scholarship is not the Sorochyntsi fair, where one can haggle; concessions lead to the suppression of matters of principle, and hence to new white spots.
For this reason, the idea occurred to me to develop (at least for myself) a continuous conception that would encompass the entire historical path of Ukraine from the Paleolithic to perestroika. Of course, what is meant is not “truth in the last instance” (no such thing exists), but the construction of a schema free from subjective contradictions, inconsistencies, and misunderstandings — the creation of a work written from beginning to end by a single hand.
I. THE EARLIEST BEGINNINGS OF HUMAN LIFE IN UKRAINE
The human being appeared on the territory of Ukraine over a million years ago. Human society, properly speaking, was only then taking shape. Even the physical type of Homo sapiens (modern man) formed later.
The most ancient remains of human life in our land belong to the epoch of the Lower Paleolithic (the Old Stone Age). They have been discovered in the Dnieper Rapids region and in the Middle Dniester region. This era (in archaeological terminology, the Acheulean) corresponds to the physical type of Sinanthropus — the first step that we recognize as properly human.
Ukraine did not belong to the area of anthropogenesis — the region where the initial process of the humanization of the ape took place. Here (at least to date) there have been found neither the ancestral biological forms — those ape-like creatures that might lay claim to the role of our forebears — nor the material remains that characterize earlier periods (the Chellean and pre-Chellean). Consequently, the human being appeared in our country at the third or fourth stage of anthropogenesis, which according to present-day understanding began in Equatorial Africa.
The path of the initial peopling of present-day Ukraine lay through the Near East and the Caucasus. There, in Abkhazia, the most ancient remains of human life have been found.
The natural conditions of the time differed substantially from those of the present. The climate was comparatively warm and humid. Broad expanses were covered by deciduous forests and meadows. The animal world was characterized by such forms as the archaic elephant and the elephant-trogontherium, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the saber-toothed lion and tiger, the cave bear, and others.
The Lower Paleolithic era corresponds to the initial stage of universal human civilization, when our ancestor first took into his hands an artificially fashioned tool. History begins where the humanoid creature resorts to the working of stone and other natural materials. Thanks to this, the archaeologist discovers an incontrovertible trace in the form of the direct remains of a primeval industry — what modern scholarship calls artifacts. The first primitive tools — pieces of flint, quartzite, obsidian, and other rocks suitable for plastic working — together with unutilized production waste, reliably attest to an activity that we have every reason to regard as fundamentally human.
True, some researchers believe that the Stone Age was preceded by a “Wooden Age,” during which our ancestors made use of roughly worked tools of wood (a sharpened stick, a club, wicker made of willow, and so forth). However, wood is a material that is practically not preserved in the ground, and therefore no articles made from it have come down to us. Thus, of a “Wooden Age” one can speak only in terms of an abstract conjecture — one that is, to be sure, not without a logical basis and entirely admissible. As is well known, labor created the human being. Yet not every purposeful action requiring a certain effort can be recognized as labor. Otherwise, animals too would have to be proclaimed toilers, since the search for food, hunting, and the construction of shelter (nests, burrows, and so on) are all purposeful actions of the same kind. True labor begins with the manufacture of tools. And this, in its turn, presupposes a certain level of intellectual development — the capacity to comprehend the causal connection between phenomena. It is precisely here that the process of thought begins — that which distinguishes the human being from the most highly developed animals. Indeed, in order to undertake the manufacture of tools, our shaggy ancestor had, on the one hand, to comprehend the real connection between the expenditure of energy required for working stone or a stick and the advantages that the use of instruments promised, and on the other, to understand what actions were needed to achieve the desired results. In other words, he had to master at least an initial, however primitive, method. These two concepts — causal connection and method — became the cornerstone of primeval philosophy and of the earliest worldview. The use of artificially created tools brought about a genuine revolution in the course of universal human progress. Previously, the success of every concrete creature’s practical activity depended on the degree of perfection of its physical structure. Thus, the law of evolution discovered by Darwin was in operation: in the struggle for existence, the most perfected organism survives. Now other laws began to operate, since the success of practical activity depended henceforth on the degree of perfection of the technical means at the disposal of one or another individual. Consequently, biological evolution had to yield before social evolution with its own specific regularities.
The predominant form of productive activity during the Lower Paleolithic era was gathering. Our ancestors fed on roots, berries, and other fruits; they gathered snails, edible insects, and bird eggs. Gradually, hunting came to play an ever-greater role, particularly the hunting of large game. The people of that time knew neither clothing nor specially constructed dwellings. They lived in large groups of blood relatives, which gradually coalesced into tribes.
The human being is a collective, even a gregarious creature. He is too poorly adapted to the physical conditions of existence. He possesses neither the claws and fangs of the tiger, nor the swift legs of the hare, nor the extraordinarily developed sense of smell of the dog. Alone, he could not have survived. Each primitive horde constituted an isolated world that had no relations with other collectives and was therefore compelled to rely only upon itself. The great dispersal of the population made even chance contacts episodic.
The sole type of stone tool of the Lower Paleolithic era was the hand-axe — a stone core to which a purposeful flaking process gave an almond-like shape. This universal tool performed the functions of an axe, a pick, a throwing stone, and so on. It exhausted the entire arsenal of technical means of the epoch. With it one worked wood, dug earth, split bones, and when necessary used it as a weapon. This was the modest seed from which gradually grew and developed the magnificent tree of modern civilization.
Technical progress in the early stages of development proceeded very slowly. The emergence of the human being, according to present-day understanding, falls in an era approximately one million years removed from our own. The first step along that path was the mastering of fire, which occurred approximately 100,000 years ago. Thus, nine-tenths of the entirety of human history was spent on that first achievement of the human intellect; for everything else, only one-tenth remained — including not only the bow and arrow or the iron axe, but also nuclear reactors, and spacecraft, and lasers, and computers, and all the other marvels of modern technology.
The Middle Paleolithic era begins with the conquest of fire. In archaeology, it bears the conventional designation Mousterian. In Ukraine, monuments of this period have been discovered in various regions — on the Dnieper (in particular in the Rapids region), in Volhynia, Transcarpathia, the Dniester region, and the Donbas. In some places the remains of the human being itself have been found, in particular in certain cave sites of Crimea (Kiik-Koba, Starosillia, Fatma-Koba). These remains belong to the Neanderthal type, which constitutes an intermediate link between the earlier, more primitive forms (Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus) and modern man.
At that time, profound changes in the natural-geographic landscape took place in Europe. The climate grew colder; forests disappeared; only in river valleys did arboreal vegetation survive; the warmth-loving fauna gave way to cold-adapted species, whose representatives were the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the reindeer. All of this affected the conditions of human life. The first dwellings were built. Where the opportunity existed, caves were inhabited. Clothing made of animal hides appeared as a means of protecting the body from the cold. A very pressing problem under these conditions was the use of fire. It was the beginning of a long epic of the subjugation of natural elements. Paradoxical as it may seem, the first element to yield to human mastery was the most destructive and capricious of all. Water was placed in the service of primitive society during the Neolithic, when the first dugout canoes appeared. The earth our ancestors began to cultivate in the times of the Neolithic Revolution, while the gentlest element — air — resisted the longest and was conquered only in historical times, with the advent of aeronautics. The methods of obtaining fire in the early stages of history were various. One of the most widespread was striking with two flints. In addition, the friction of two pieces of wood was employed, as was drilling with a stick using a bow-driven mechanism, scraping, and so forth. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of fire in the life of primitive man. Thanks to it, our ancestors were able to cook or roast food, which significantly improved the quality of nutrition. They gained a reliable defense against wild beasts. Fire made it possible to combat the cold effectively. Finally, artificial illumination extended the working day and thereby opened new creative possibilities. All of this had an active influence on further progress. The technical achievement of the Middle Paleolithic lies in the functional differentiation of tools. In place of the universal hand-axe came specialized instruments — the point and the side-scraper. The first had a sharp working tip; the second, an elongated and rounded edge. In addition, flakes that previously went to waste were now utilized. Cores (so-called nuclei) — those pieces of flint from which blanks were struck — were also employed. The next stage — the Upper Paleolithic — is the era when the modern type of human being takes shape and the clan system arises. Monuments from this period are known by the hundreds in all regions of Ukraine. The most celebrated are the Kyrylivska site in Kyiv, the Hintsivska site in the Poltava region, the Mezynska site in the Chernihiv region, the Dobranichivska and Mezhyritska sites in the Cherkasy region, and others. At that time, humanity again underwent substantial shifts. The predominant form of economic activity became the hunting of large herding animals. The numerous bones of mammoths, rhinoceroses, bison, and other animals (great quantities of which are invariably encountered during excavations at settlement sites) are the trophies of primeval hunters.
Collective forms of hunting required a greater cohesion of human collectives. Settlements changed their character. They were now long-term encampments consisting of several dwellings resembling northern chums or Native American tipis. They were built from large wooden poles covered with animal hides; large bones — mammoth skulls, tusks, and limb bones — were also used as building material.
The technique of working stone was perfected. Previously, it was mainly the core that was used, to which a certain shape was given by means of flaking. Now, on the contrary, the principal blanks became the flakes, from which various instruments were made; these acquired further specialization — points, burins, end-scrapers, planes, and so forth. Alongside stone, bone began to be widely used as a material.
The clan system was the first completed system of social relations in history. By “clan” we mean an exogamous group of relatives, within which sexual relations were strictly forbidden — in this way, society protected itself from incest and physical degeneration. Kinship was reckoned through the female, maternal line. This also determined the nature of marriage: it was not the woman who went to the clan of her husband, but on the contrary, the man who became a member of the woman’s community.
The exogamy of the clan determined the impossibility of its isolated existence. At least two clans were needed in order for them to reproduce themselves. In practice, there were usually more — 8, 10, 12, and so on. Thus, clan and tribe are inextricably linked, and the existence of a clan commune outside the tribe is in principle impossible. Therefore, the view of certain scholars that clans gradually united into tribes is erroneous. In reality, on the contrary, tribes divided into clans.
This process was prolonged and complex. The linear schema proposed by Lewis Morgan over a hundred years ago, which set out to arrange in a single genetic chain all the varieties of clan organization known to us, oversimplifies the problem. In reality, such phenomena as the Australian system of marriage classes, the Polynesian punaluan family, the Ganowanian system of kinship, early manifestations of polygyny (plural marriage) and polyandry (plural husbandhood), and so forth, are rather ossified deviations from the normal path of development than consecutive stages of evolution.
Under the conditions of primitive society, the clan was essentially the sole form of social organization. Thus, the clan constituted a universal collective, performing not only marital but also economic, religious, and later military and protective functions. The ideology of Paleolithic man had a syncretic character. Science (or, more precisely, positive knowledge), religion, art, and morality — all of this was fused in a single system in which, however, religion predominated. And this, beyond doubt, was entirely natural.
The notion of a “pre-religious” period in the history of humanity, which was decreed in Soviet scholarship and actively propagated by devotees and adepts of quasi-atheism, is an obvious absurdity. Religion is a distorted, fantastic conception of the surrounding world, in which natural forces and processes acquire the character of the supernatural. It arises from the inability of primitive man to comprehend the world correctly. If one accepts the thesis of a pre-religious period, it follows that Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, or Neanderthal man, unlike, say, the Greeks of the classical era or the ideologists of the Renaissance, possessed an undistorted, undeformed conception of the world in which natural forces and phenomena did not take on a fantastic coloring. The utter absurdity of such a view requires no special proof. The earliest system in the history of humanity’s intellectual progress was animism. The development of thought proceeded in the direction of abstraction, the generalization of life impressions. Initially, every process, every event received its own individual cause, which could not be conceived otherwise than as a manifestation of an imperfectly comprehended will akin to the human. Every natural phenomenon acquired its own spiritual double, its own soul (Latin anima, hence the name). In terms of historical stages, this ideology corresponds precisely to the Paleolithic era.
Gradually, however, the human being learned to generalize his experience. Similar phenomena received a common cause — thus primordial polytheism (the worship of many gods) took shape. The god of lightning was understood as the generalized cause of all lightning. The god of the wind as the abstracted idea of all air currents, and so forth. The earliest totems symbolized the animal world, which played an especially significant role in the life of ancient hunters.
At the same time, the human being strives toward active intervention in natural processes. The most primitive and very naive expression of that striving was magic, which rested upon two foundational principles: (1) the part substitutes for the whole, and (2) like produces like. By means of a system of symbolic actions, our ancestors attempted to influence the objective course of events. For example, by striking an image of an animal with a spear, they hoped that this would help them hunt down the desired quarry.
The beginnings of abstract thought find their reflection in the rudiments of mathematical ideas recorded in certain Paleolithic images (the idea of quantity and counting, the idea of rhythm, the idea of measure and measurement, the idea of angle and inclination, and so on), as well as representations of geometric forms (a line segment, a point, a square, a triangle, and the like).
With the earliest ideological systems was associated the birth of art. Ukrainian sites have yielded a whole series of very interesting finds — graphic images, small-scale sculpture, works of painting. Unfortunately, Ukraine does not possess such ensembles of cave (mural) painting as those of which France and Spain are justly proud (the celebrated caves of Font-de-Gaume, Altamira, and others). But what does exist represents enormous artistic and historical value. All of these images undoubtedly had a cultic character and symbolic content, which is quite difficult for a modern person to decipher.
Music was born. During the excavations of the Mezhyritska site, a whole orchestra of percussion instruments fashioned from the bones of large animals was found. It is not excluded that wind instruments made from tubular bones (of the flute type) also existed, but thus far they have not been encountered by archaeologists.
At the end of the Old Stone Age (the Epipaleolithic era), human society took a new step along the path of progress. The signal achievement of the epoch was the invention of the bow and arrow, thanks to which primeval hunters gained a reliable means of striking their quarry from a distance. This prompted fundamental changes in the methods of the principal branch of production of the time, and thereby determined the transition of society to a new stage of development.
Collective hunting of large herding animals gave way to individual hunting with the use of the newly invented weapon. The large permanent encampments disappeared. In their place appeared small temporary camps of small and mobile family groups. The character of the material inventory was also renewed. The extraordinary care in the working of flint artifacts was combined with their small dimensions (so-called microliths). A great achievement of the Epipaleolithic era was the domestication of the dog, the first domestic animal in history and a faithful friend of humanity. Yet this cannot be regarded as the beginning of animal husbandry. The dog was above all the assistant of the hunter, capable of tracking and in some cases even bringing down game.
During the Epipaleolithic, Eastern Europe finally acquired a climate close to the modern one. River valleys assumed their definitive form; flora and fauna took on shapes familiar to us. The mammoth, the rhinoceros, the reindeer, and other cold-loving animals disappeared. In their place there formed the so-called meadow fauna, whose representatives include the hare, wolf, fox, red deer, wild boar, and others. From that era onward, our country possesses the natural landscape under whose conditions the process of developing grain cultivation and stockbreeding – the principal branches of economic activity that determined subsequent social progress – took place.
II. THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION
The epoch of the Neolithic (the New Stone Age) was a turning point in the history of humankind, which we call the Neolithic Revolution. Its essence lay in the transition of society from appropriating forms of economy (hunting, fishing, gathering) to productive ones (agriculture and animal husbandry). The period of savagery came to an end; a new period began – that of barbarism – though the process unfolded differently in different lands, depending on natural conditions.
Humans learned to till the soil and cultivate certain plants as early as the initial phase of the Neolithic era. These were garden crops, above all onions and garlic. They played an auxiliary role in the overall balance of consumption. Agriculture moved to the forefront only when our ancestors mastered field crops, particularly cereals: barley, millet, wheat, and somewhat later, rye. From this point begins grain cultivation proper, which truly constituted a revolutionary transformation in the economy of sedentary peoples.
The homeland of cereal grains was the Near East. The earliest traces of their cultivation have been found in Mesopotamia and Egypt. From there they spread quite rapidly to all lands where conditions were favorable for agriculture. On the territory of Ukraine, the most ancient find is a potsherd bearing the imprint of a cultivated barley grain, discovered during excavations of a Neolithic settlement on the southern outskirts of Kyiv (the former village of Chapaivka). This find is six to seven thousand years old.
Simultaneously with the mastery of cereal grains, the second principal form of productive economy – animal husbandry – was also developing. Just as agriculture could advance to the forefront of a society’s economy only with the advent of grain cultivation, so too animal husbandry became a leading element in economic activity only with the emergence of stockbreeding, that is, with the domestication of herd animals – cattle, small livestock, and the horse.
Unlike grain cultivation, the process of domesticating animals was spontaneous in character and proceeded in parallel across various regions of the Oecumene; on the territory of Ukraine, ancestral forms of all species of livestock have been found, including the horse – the tarpan, whose bones have been discovered in ancient strata. A single chronological hierarchy of this process cannot be established, since cattle, small livestock, the horse, and the pig were domesticated at approximately the same epoch (the Middle Neolithic); certain deviations in specific cases do not alter the general picture.
The beginnings of productive forms of economy led to different consequences under different conditions. In the valleys of great rivers (the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Amu Darya, the Syr Darya, the Indus, the Huang He, the Yangtze), grain cultivation ensured high productivity but required the execution of major irrigation works (the construction of dams, the digging of canals). This presupposed colossal expenditures of labor (predominantly slave labor), and in order to secure it, a certain form of social organization was needed. It arose in the form of a primitive slave-owning state of the type of Central Asian despotisms (predynastic and early dynastic Egypt, Sumero-Akkadian Mesopotamia, the Yangshao culture in China, Mohenjo-Daro in India, and others).
Three principal institutions characterized this first state structure in history: the department of great public works, the military department, and the department of finance. The first was charged with the direct organization of construction. The second was responsible for securing new contingents of slave labor in the form of tens and hundreds of thousands of captives. The third had to finance the operations of both the first and the second through taxes levied on the free laboring population.
Thus, these countries (which followed the path of slavery) bypassed the second stage of the primitive communal system, which we call barbarism.
- In localities where natural conditions generally precluded an agricultural economy, given the technical means then available to people (the hoe), the principal form of production became nomadic stockbreeding. This was the case in the semi-arid lands of the Near East (in particular, the Arabian Peninsula) or in the broad zone of the Eurasian steppes.
In Ukraine, on the territory of the forest-steppe belt, on the contrary, conditions for hoe-based tillage were very favorable. There was no need for irrigation works, and consequently the stimulus for premature emergence of state organization was also absent.
The local tribes here developed successfully under the conditions of the primitive communal system, passing through all three stages of barbarism.
The development of agriculture presupposed, of course, a sedentary way of life. This inevitably led to the weakening of clan ties and the beginning of the formation of a territorial (village or neighborhood) commune. Its emergence falls in the Chalcolithic (Copper-Stone Age), when field-based grain cultivation definitively established itself as the leading form of economic activity.
On the territory of modern Ukraine, this era is marked by the existence of the so-called Trypillia culture (the name derives from the village of Trypillia in the Kyiv region, where monuments of this type were first extensively investigated). The formation of this culture dates to the end of the fifth – beginning of the fourth millennium BCE. Its territory encompassed the Lower Danubian region, the Dniester region, the basin of the Southern Buh, and partly the Middle Dnieper region. The bearers of this culture were grain-cultivating tribes that had consolidated into a larger ethnic formation – a people – one of the predecessors (perhaps even the principal one) of the Indo-European ethnic family, and of the Slavs in particular.
The Trypillia culture bears a distinctly agricultural character. Its bearers cultivated all the principal cereal grains – barley, wheat, millet, and rye. They also grew certain garden crops and fiber plants (hemp). The primary tool for tilling the soil was the hoe with a stone or antler working tip. The harvest was gathered with flint sickles, and grain was processed using stone querns.
Animal husbandry played a significant role in the economic complex and was of a homestead character. The livestock consisted of cattle, small ruminants, the horse, and the pig – the last being a reliable indicator of sedentary life. Hunting and other appropriating forms of economy were of lesser importance and played an auxiliary role. Weaving developed intensively, and pottery reached a high level. Trypillia clay vessels still evoke admiration today for the quality of their manufacture, the richness and refinement of their forms, and their vivid ornamentation – predominantly incised (scored lines and fluting) and painted (in red, black, and white pigment on a light pink ground).
Settlements of the Trypillia culture are a classic example of communal construction. They astonish us with their dimensions, which often surpass the scale of modern villages and even towns. They were built up with large structures that had a wooden frame and walls daubed with clay. This building model survived in Ukraine up to the middle of our century (the typical Ukrainian cottage built “with a forked post”).
The ideological conceptions of the Trypillia tribes underwent substantial changes compared with the worldview of Paleolithic-era humans. The gaze of gatherers and hunters was directed downward, toward the earth, because their physical existence depended upon it. Therefore the gods they worshipped lived in trees, in stone, in bodies of water. The grain cultivator, by contrast, raised his gaze to the sky, with which the fate of the harvest was bound up. The sky could bestow abundant rains and solar warmth upon the fields, but it could also destroy the harvest with hail or annihilate it utterly through prolonged drought.
And so the pantheon of deities changed as well: its denizens migrated to the heavens. In place of the Water Spirit, the Forest Spirit, and the rusalkas, there appeared gods of thunder, sun, sky, and wind…
The monuments of the visual arts of the Chalcolithic era include the celebrated Trypillia figurative art – clay statuettes depicting humans (predominantly women, more rarely men) and animals. An important series of works consists of thematic painting on pottery – here too we find depictions of humans and animals, as well as symbolic motifs whose meaning is not always possible to decipher. All these works possess a sacral character and reflect a certain system of ideological conceptions of early agricultural society.
After the Copper-Stone Age came the Bronze Age, when the tendencies engendered by the Neolithic Revolution reached their highest degree and ultimately exhausted themselves. This period in the history of our country is marked by an extraordinary turbulence in its course, by the breakdown of seemingly well-established social structures – and by the formation of new ones.
The social stability characteristic of Chalcolithic cultures, including the Trypillia culture, came to an end. In place of an enormous ethnic massif that across the entire expanse of its settlement exhibited a remarkable unity and preserved its well-defined characteristics throughout the entire duration of the culture, there arose, as in a kaleidoscope, numerous variegated cultural manifestations and types, diverse in origin and ethnic affiliation. Masses of people set out from their long-settled places on distant migrations, mastered new territories, displacing their predecessors, clashing with them, merging with them, diverging, and so on.
The mere enumeration of the contemporary cultural (and ethnic) formations traceable in Ukraine constitutes a genuine problem. The Yamnaya and Catacomb cultures of the Lower Dnieper region and the Azov region, the so-called Multi-cordoned Ware culture of the Middle Dnieper region, the Corded Ware culture in the western oblasts, the Megalithic culture of western Volhynia, the Noua culture and the so-called Thracian Hallstatt in the Upper Dniester region, the Kushtanovytsia culture of Transcarpathia, the Komarivka culture of the Western Forest-Steppe, which on one side comes into contact and merges with the Trzciniec culture of southern Poland while its eastern wing extends onto the left bank of the Dnieper, the Bondarykha or Marianivka culture in the basin of the Siverskyi Donets, the Srubnaya culture of the eastern part of the Steppe, elements of the Lusatian culture in the far west, the Vysotsko culture on the Volhynia-Podillia borderland, the Sabatynivka, Bilohrudivka, and Chornolis cultures in the southern part of the Right-Bank Forest-Steppe, the Kizil-Koba culture of the Crimean Mountains, and so on and so forth – to reduce all these materials to a single system, to elucidate fully their interaction in space and time, is a formidable task.
The most important technical achievement of the era was the beginning of metallurgy, humankind’s acquaintance with metal. First of all, our ancestors mastered copper, and somewhat later gold and silver. At first, native copper was probably used, worked by cold hammering. Later, people learned to smelt metal from ore, and then casting replaced the cold methods of working.
The beginning of metallurgy was an important milestone in the history of society. But progress was protracted. Since copper is too soft a metal, unsuitable for making tools, at the first stage objects of adornment and sacral articles were manufactured from it (for example, sacrificial knives). Only after mastering the art of alloying, adding other metals to it (tin, zinc, antimony, and so on), did our ancestors obtain bronze – a material from which they produced axes, sickles, small implements (needles, awls, punches, and the like), and weapons: swords, spear points and arrowheads, daggers, and so forth. And yet even bronze could not entirely displace stone from use; throughout the entire era, implements made of flint and non-metallic rock functioned alongside metal ones. Only iron definitively vanquished stone as the principal type of raw material.
Among the changes that human society underwent during the Bronze Age, the most important was the first social division of labor – the grain-cultivating tribes separated from the stockbreeding ones. This differentiation corresponds to a certain stage in the development of both forms of production. On the one hand, we see the transition from hoe-based tillage to plough-based cultivation, employing the first, most primitive forked plough (sokha-rozsokha). It was made entirely of wood and therefore has not survived to our day – wood, as is well known, does not long endure in the ground. Only in peat bogs have several finds turned up (in the village of Tokari in the Sumy region, in Zhabychi in the Cherkasy region, and in Serhiivske in the Starodub region). The appearance of the plough contributed to a fundamental increase in labor productivity and opened up entirely new economic horizons for grain cultivators.
On the other hand, the development of animal husbandry brought about the definitive crystallization of stockbreeding. The demarcation of these types of economic activity had a natural-geographic basis. The forest-steppe developed on an agricultural foundation. The steppe – on a stockbreeding one. The division of labor between ploughmen and herders presupposed the emergence of a more or less permanent intertribal exchange, which gradually expanded its range of goods. To the products of grain cultivation and animal husbandry were added salt and metal – “the two claws with which commodity production sinks into the body of the natural economy.”
Deposits of salt and ore do not exist everywhere. The salt industry in Ukraine developed predominantly in the Precarpathian region, although the salt of the Pontic and Azov littorals was no doubt also extracted. Deposits of copper in our country are practically nonexistent, if we disregard the low-yield deposits in the Bakhmut area (which were also exploited during the Bronze Age). Consequently, the ancient population of Ukraine relied primarily on imported metal – Caucasian in the east, and Transylvanian in the west and south.
The development of production and exchange gave rise to new conditions and new tendencies. Labor productivity reached a level at which the volume of the product produced substantially exceeded the minimum of a person’s vital needs. The economy was already capable of ensuring the receipt of a guaranteed surplus product, and consequently the accumulation of material resources in the hands of specific collectives, or even individual persons. This in turn entailed property differentiation and correspondingly fundamental changes in the social organization of society – the beginning of the formation of a ruling elite.
The clan system was disintegrating. Among the cultivators, as already noted, the territorial commune replaced the clan commune – this was conditioned by sedentary life and attachment to particular tracts of land. Among the herders the situation was different. They were by no means bound to the land. The nomadic character of their economy made the problem of mastering ever new expanses permanently acute. Therefore a territorial commune could not arise here; it lacked an economic foundation. In place of the matrilineal clan commune came the patrilineal, or patriarchal, one.
What is at issue is not the loss by women of their dominant position in the primitive collective (they never held one). What is at issue is the loss by women of any rights whatsoever, their transformation into a thing, into the property of father and husband, and their deprivation of even the slightest initiative in determining their own fate.
Patriarchal despotism, which surpassed the worst forms of early slave-owning despotism, left its mark on all aspects of life, leading to the spiritual enslavement and impoverishment of society as a whole. All peoples that took this path were doomed to mark time, ossifying at the patriarchal stage of development. No nomadic society was able by its own forces to join civilization and take the next step along the road of progress – for this it had sooner or later to turn (at least partially) to agriculture and settle on the land, or else avail itself of others’ historical experience. Such was the fate of the Jews, Arabs, Scythians, and other peoples who began their path as nomads and subsequently became sedentary cultivators.
The disintegration of the clan system had as one of its aspects social differentiation and the germination of class antagonism. The presence of social coercion (the state) limited the rate of exploitation and the number of slaves, which could not exceed the number of free persons. Otherwise, the slaves would have found themselves in the position of masters of the situation.
The accumulation of wealth gave rise to yet another aspect: military organization and combat weaponry, which had not existed before (swords, spears, arrows, daggers, shields, helmets, armor, and so on). Thus was formed the classic type of the shepherd-warrior, with a whip in one hand and a sword in the other.
This situation also left its mark on the character of settlements (where they existed). Their inhabitants began to concern themselves with the interests of defense, erecting primitive fortifications. Society stood on the threshold of the class and state order.
Under the turbulent conditions of the Bronze Age, the process of ethnogenesis – that is, the formation of peoples – proceeded actively. This is one of the most complex problems of ancient history.
For a long time the so-called Indo-European theory was widely held, with its notion of a proto-language, a proto-people, and an ancestral homeland (Urheimat). The process of ethnogony was conceived as the successive division of a proto-people – the bearers of a certain proto-language – as a consequence of their dispersal beyond the bounds of their original homeland. In Soviet historiography, the Indo-European theory was countered by the “new doctrine of language” of Academician Marr, which, however, was subjected to devastating criticism in 1950. Its essence lay in the assertion that, instead of a movement from original unity to multiplicity, there was an oppositely directed movement from primordial multiplicity to consolidation through the method of fusion, hybridization, and integration.
The common error of both conceptions was the identification of the process of glottogenesis (the origin of languages) with that of ethnogenesis (the formation of peoples). These two processes, though closely linked to one another, almost never coincide. Hence the need to distinguish clearly between the concepts of linguistic and ethnic communities. Thus, the linguistic ancestors of the French were the Romans (bearers of the Latin language), while their ethnic ancestors were the Celtic population and certain Germanic tribes (the Franks). As for the general course of development, in the ethnogonic process differentiation and integration were dialectically combined; for that reason, reducing the entire complexity of development to any single line is dangerous. It is necessary to speak of this in connection with the numerous attempts to resolve the problem of the Indo-Europeans using precisely the materials of the Bronze Age.
The Chalcolithic epoch, and especially the Bronze Age, does indeed reveal large, fully formed ethnic formations of the intertribal type. The Trypillia culture, the Yamnaya, the Catacomb, the Lusatian, and other clearly delineated cultures of the fourth through second millennia BCE are unquestionably the archaeological equivalents of large ethnic groups crystallized into peoples. However, to attach to them the modern ethnonymic nomenclature, to seek some “pure and direct” genetic lines, is a hopeless endeavor. One will probably have to reconcile oneself to the fact that we shall never learn either the name of the creators of those numerous cultures or their language, and therefore must content ourselves with a conventional nomenclature (“Trypillia tribes,” “Komarivka tribes,” “Yamnaya tribes,” and so on). Yet this in no way prevents us from reconstructing the historical, including the ethnogonic, process with full adequacy.
III. THE SCYTHIANS
The first millennium BCE bears the name of the Early Iron Age. The appearance of ferrous metallurgy constituted an enormous technical achievement that had a decisive influence on all aspects of cultural progress. Iron was a material of such strength that neither the excessively soft bronze nor the insufficiently plastic stone could compete with it.
The most ancient find of an iron artifact (an amulet) was discovered in the coffin of Tutankhamun – an Egyptian pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty (fourteenth century BCE). The origin of that iron has not been established to this day; it is not excluded that it was meteoric metal.
The homeland of ferrous metallurgy is considered to be Asia Minor. The ancient population of the peninsula – the Hittites – knew how to smelt iron as early as the mid-second millennium BCE but kept their craft in strict secrecy. The true spread of the new metal begins somewhere around the eleventh–tenth centuries BCE. From that time we reckon the Iron Age, including in Ukraine. From the eleventh–tenth centuries we already possess indisputable traces of local production of wrought iron.
The beginning of the Iron Age coincides with the first reports from written sources about our country and its population. We have in mind the works of ancient authors – Homer, Hesiod, Hecataeus, Aeschylus, Pindar, and others. Particularly detailed information is provided by Herodotus (fifth century BCE), who personally visited the northern Pontic region.
The first people on the territory of Ukraine whose name we know were the Cimmerians, who lived in the south of our country until the seventh century BCE. Of them we have laconic mentions in cuneiform texts and early ancient authors. They were tribes of the Thracian-Phrygian group (to which modern Armenians belong). Their archaeological remains are represented by monuments of the Late Bronze Age in the Azov region and the Lower Dnieper region. The Cimmerians were predominantly herders (raising mainly horses), although agriculture was not unknown to them either.
In the eighth–seventh centuries BCE, the Cimmerians experienced their heroic period and displayed remarkable military-political activity. They created a fairly powerful military structure in which cavalry held a prominent place, and they mounted campaigns against Assyria and other Near Eastern states.
In the seventh century, the Cimmerian confederation was dealt a decisive blow by the Scythians, who began their expansion from the North Caucasus westward. From that time the very name of the Cimmerians vanishes from the sources – they were partly annihilated, partly driven out of the Pontic region, and partly absorbed by the conquerors.
The Scythians are customarily regarded as a people of Iranian origin. This is incorrect. Iranians were, in all probability, only the so-called “Royal” Scythians, while the overwhelming majority constituted a distinct ethnic group, related to the Iranians, Thracians, Slavs, Balts, and Alarodians, but not identical with any of them.
Territorially, Scythia encompassed the entire steppe and partly the forest-steppe Pontic region – from the Danube to the Don and from the sea coast to Kyiv. A detailed description of it is found in Herodotus. It was divided into two parts: the agricultural Forest-Steppe and the pastoral Steppe. Correspondingly, the population consisted of two groups – an agricultural one (the Scythian ploughmen and Scythian cultivators) and a pastoral one (the Scythian nomads and the “Royal” Scythians). In addition, non-Scythian peoples also lived in Scythia, who presumably acknowledged the authority of the Scythian king.
In the southwest were situated the tribes of the Alazones and Callipidae; the Precarpathian region was occupied by the Agathyrsi. In the northwest, the neighbors of the Scythian ploughmen were the Neuri, whose territory encompassed the Volhynia-Podillia borderland, western Volhynia, and part of the Right-Bank Polissia. The territories farther east were inhabited by the Budini – their country was the Kyiv Polissia; the northeastern periphery of Scythia was occupied by the Androphagi and Melanchlaeni, the southeastern by the Sauromatians. Among these ethnic groups there were, without question, ancestors of the eastern Slavs.
The Scythians emerged onto the stage of European history in the sixth century BCE in connection with the campaign of the Persian king Darius Hystaspes against Scythia during the Greco-Persian Wars. This campaign ended in ignominious failure, and the Scythians won the reputation of being invincible. At that time Scythian society had reached the stage of the final disintegration of the primitive communal system and the maturation of class relations.
Over the course of the seventh through fifth centuries BCE, it evolved, crossing the threshold of statehood.
The basic cell of agricultural Scythia was the territorial commune. The classic monument to it is the great Scythian hillforts of the type of Bilsk or Nemyriv. All arable lands constituted communal property but were divided among individual families for cultivation; in this connection, annual redistributions were practiced with the aim of social-property equalization.
Under the condition of individual land use, the entire product of agricultural production becomes the private property of individual persons or families and becomes a source of enrichment. Thus, within the womb of the primitive communal system, conditions are created for the property stratification of society; a division into rich and poor arises, and therewith the exploitation of person by person.
An important factor that accelerated the formation of a class structure among the Scythians was the Greek colonization of the northern Pontic region. The first penetration of the Hellenes to the shores of the Pontus is lost in the depths of the ages. Already the most ancient myths are geographically linked with the Caucasus and Crimea (the legends of the Golden Fleece, Prometheus, Iphigenia, and others). However, colonization – that is, the settlement of migrants in the south of our country – begins only in the seventh century BCE (the settlement on the island of Berezan). In the sixth century the largest colonies were founded – Olbia (on the shore of the Dnieper-Buh estuary), Tyras (at the mouth of the Dniester), and the Bosporan Kingdom (on both sides of the Kerch Strait); in the fifth century Chersonesus Taurica arose.
The Greek colonies were poleis, that is, city-states – self-contained socio-political organizations. To the newly settled lands the colonists brought the institutions that existed in the metropolis, above all slavery.
Ancient colonization had an enormous influence on the development of Scythia. Ancient Greece became a capacious market for the sale of products that the Scythian economy could offer (grain, livestock, timber, products of stockbreeding, and so on). This actively stimulated the expansion of production; it compelled the barbarians to increase the scale of their economy and raised its commodity character. And since what went for sale was the surplus of the aggregate product, the inevitable consequence was the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a certain segment of society. This in turn heightened the structuredness and stratification of Scythian society.
Under the influence of the Greeks, the nomadic Scythians began to settle on the land. A manifestation of this was the formation of the periphery of the largest poleis – Olbia, Chersonesus, Panticapaeum – which created additional stimuli for the definitive crystallization of Scythian statehood.
Written sources attest to the existence among the Scythians of the public authority of kings as early as the eighth–sixth centuries (in particular, in connection with the campaign of Darius); hence, the process of state formation had already begun at that time. However, it reached its completion in the fourth century BCE, in the era of King Ateas, under whose suzerainty fell the vast territory of the Pontic region – from the Danube to the Don. Scholars consider the Kamianka hillfort in the Nikopol area to have been the capital of that kingdom.
The social foundation of the Scythian kingdom was slavery, which, however, did not attain the finished form it assumed in the ancient world. It had an externally oriented character: the Scythians did not so much keep slaves in their own economy as sell them abroad, deriving from this considerable material profit. Archaeology convincingly demonstrates the process of the formation of a noble estate in Scythian society: the artifacts from the world-renowned royal kurgans of the fourth century BCE – such as Solokha, Kul-Oba, Haimanova Mohyla, Tovsta Mohyla, and others – vividly reflect the emergence of a local aristocracy.
Ancient civilization also exerted an active influence in the sphere of spiritual life. Individual members of Scythian society traveled to Greece, received an education there – often a rather advanced one – and themselves left a notable mark in the sphere of intellectual life. For instance, Anacharsis, who lived in the sixth century BCE, was a personal friend of the Athenian reformer Solon, wrote several philosophical works that enjoyed wide popularity among the Greeks, and thanks to them this Scythian philosopher entered the circle of the most outstanding sages of antiquity.
Scythian culture constitutes a distinctive blend of local traditions with components of ancient civilization. This applies to religious cult – the pagan pantheon of Scythia corresponds fairly precisely to the Hellenic pantheon. Zeus is matched here by Papaeus, Demeter by Api, Apollo by Goetosyrus, Aphrodite by Argimpasa, Poseidon by Thagimasadas, while the god of war Ares even retained his name.
An honored place on the Scythian Olympus also belonged to certain heroes of Greek mythology, in particular Heracles, who figures as a character in Scythian legends.
The combination of local, properly Scythian, and ancient traditions is also visible in the sphere of the visual arts. The so-called “Animal Style” – one of the most striking artistic phenomena of classical antiquity – is combined with the realism characteristic of Greek art. A concrete manifestation of such contamination is Scythian toreutics – the depictions on the celebrated vases from the Chortomlyk kurgan, from Kul-Oba, from Haimanova Mohyla, on the comb from Solokha, or the pectoral from Tovsta Mohyla.
The realistic character of these depictions leads scholars to regard them as works by Greek masters from Chersonesus or the Bosporan Kingdom, and consequently as monuments not of Scythian but of ancient art. We cannot agree with this. We must rather affirm the dependence of the peripheral-Greek style on barbarian traditions and tastes. Evidently, the will of the patron in each specific case was the decisive factor that determined the subject, style, and imagery.
The fourth century BCE in the history of Scythia was the period of its highest ascent. However, a crisis was gradually maturing that engulfed all of Greece and the countries dependent upon it, among them the Pontic region. After the brilliant “Age of Pericles” there came a complex and troubled epoch marked by profound social cataclysms. The Peloponnesian War, which ended with the dissolution of the Athenian League, graphically demonstrated social destruction. The rise of Macedon signified a fundamental change in political orientation. All this had repercussions for the situation in the Pontic region – up to and including the campaign of the Macedonian army under the command of General Zopyrion into Scythia. To be sure, it was an episode of little significance, noteworthy for us only through its direct connection to the epic of Alexander the Great.
The crisis manifested itself above all in the disintegration of the slave-owning system, which the slave-owning states were no longer able to resist. In the third–second centuries BCE, the Greek poleis in Scythia were afflicted by severe calamity, well described in the decree in honor of Protogenes – an Olbian citizen who rendered distinguished services to the city. This monument dates to the end of the third – beginning of the second century BCE and faithfully depicts the contemporary situation both in Olbia itself and in the Pontic region in general.
The economic condition of the city was dire, and shortages (especially of grain) were severe; this in turn intensified social strife. Olbia was threatened by numerous barbarian tribes, from whom it had to buy itself off with gifts and tribute. In the mid-first century BCE, this polis fell under the authority of the Scythian kings, and a century later suffered a devastating sack at the hands of the Getae army of King Burebista. After that invasion, the territory of the city shrank by nearly half. Accordingly, archaeologists clearly distinguish pre-Getae Olbia from post-Getae Olbia.
Difficult times were also experienced in the third–second centuries BCE by the Bosporan Kingdom, Chersonesus, and other ancient centers of the Pontic region.
The crisis reached its apogee in connection with the irruption of the Sarmatians.
This was a people of the Iranian family who, prior to the beginning of their migration westward, populated the steppe expanses of the Lower Volga region. There they were already known to Herodotus. The largest tribal groups were the Maeotians, Iazyges, Alans, Aorsi, Roxolani, and above all the Sauromatians, who gave their name to the entire people.
In the third century BCE, the Sarmatians created a sufficiently powerful military organization, capable of delivering a devastating blow to such mighty social formations as the Scythian Kingdom. At that time they were experiencing their heroic period, lagging one step behind the Scythians in their level of historical development – the Scythians having passed through that stage in the eighth–fourth centuries BCE. The principal economic base of the Sarmatians was nomadic stockbreeding, but finding themselves among the cultivators of Eastern Europe, they too began to settle on the land.
The main consequences of the Sarmatian onslaught were primarily of political significance. The Scythian Kingdom was dealt a heavy blow, followed by demographic upheavals: the newcomers mixed with the aboriginal population, forming a new ethnic blend (later called the Goths). As a social organization, the Scythian state withstood the ordeal, but its territory shrank considerably. Dominion over the Forest-Steppe with its agricultural population was lost. Even part of the Steppe passed out from under the authority of the Scythian kings. The territory of the kingdom was now limited to the Lower Dnieper region and Taurica. The capital of the new polity became the city of Neapolis in Crimea (present-day Simferopol).
And yet the situation of Scythia gradually stabilized, albeit for a short time. At the turn of the third and second centuries BCE, it once again began to exhibit expansionist tendencies. In particular, the Scythians aspired to establish (more precisely, to restore) dominion over the Greek cities. In the second century, Olbia was forced to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Scythian state and even minted coins bearing images of their kings.
Its highest ascent during the Crimean period of its history Scythia achieved in the second century BCE, under Kings Skilurus and Palacus. It was precisely at this time that the active offensive against Chersonesus and the Bosporan Kingdom began, which was to concentrate in the hands of Neapolis authority over the whole of Taurica. But it was precisely this attempt that proved fatal.
The alarmed citizens of Chersonesus turned with a plea for assistance to the Pontic Kingdom, which had arisen on the territory of Asia Minor and was then at the height of its power. The intervention of the Pontic king Mithridates Eupator, who in 110 BCE dispatched his army to Crimea, saved Chersonesus from immediate seizure by the Scythians. However, the situation in the Bosporan Kingdom remained critical, and so the Pontic intervention extended to eastern Taurica as well. But here events were complicated by a revolt under the leadership of Saumacus. In the literature it has been evaluated variously: it has been regarded as a palace coup aimed at removing King Perisades from the throne, as a manifestation of the class struggle of slaves against slave-owners, and as a national-liberation movement of the local Scythian-Sarmatian population against Bosporan suzerainty. In reality, different tendencies were evidently intertwined here, which is why the “State of the Sun” created by the rebels proved unviable and was liquidated in 107 BCE by the Pontic army under Diophantus.
The events of 110–107 BCE in the Bosporan Kingdom definitively put an end to Scythian expansion. To be sure, the Scythian Kingdom itself continued to exist during the first two centuries CE. After the fall of the Pontic Kingdom, which was destroyed in the first century BCE by the Romans, it even managed a certain revival. In particular, it formally restored its dominion over Olbia, which had been ravaged by the Getae. In the first–second centuries CE, coins were again minted here bearing the names of Scythian kings. In Dobruja (the so-called “Lesser Scythia”), a new Scythian polity was formed whose territory encompassed the lower reaches of the Danube and the Dniester, together with the cities of Tyras, Odessos, and Tomis.
However, this was already a death agony. Slavery, which constituted the social foundation of the Scythian state, had outlived itself on the scale of the entire Oecumene. It no longer corresponded to the needs of the age and had to yield its place to the new, more progressive feudal order. Together with slavery, the political superstructure it had created was also doomed to perish. The mighty state-bureaucratic machine of the Roman Empire could still retard and for a time delay the inevitable demise of the condemned system. But Scythia did not outlive the social system to which it owed its emergence, flourishing, and decline. On the threshold stood a new era – the Middle Ages, with its characteristic features.
Somewhere around the turn of the second–third centuries CE, the Scythian Kingdom definitively ceased to exist. The Scythians themselves, of course, did not vanish from the historical stage. Nor did the regularities that had engendered Scythian statehood disappear. However, they changed their social nature. Over the course of the third–fourth centuries, a new state formation took shape in the northern Pontic region, far more powerful than Scythia in its Crimean and Dobrujan periods – the Gothic Kingdom, whose principal demiurge was the Scythians. But this polity belongs already to another era – the era of feudalism.
IV. THE ANTES KINGDOM
The problem of the origin of the Slavs has generated an enormous body of literature. For a long time it was debated within the framework of classical Indo-Europeanism: scholars sought the ancestral homeland (Urheimat) of the proto-Slavic people, the bearers of the proto-Slavic proto-language – the homeland from which our ancestors supposedly dispersed across the vast expanses of Central and Eastern Europe. A significant step forward was the autochthonist theory, according to which the process of Slavic ethnogenesis unfolded over an immense territory stretching from the middle Elbe to the middle Dnieper region and from the Baltic to the Black Sea; within this area the Slavs were regarded as autochthonous. In particular, scholars discerned a Slavic ethnic element among the population of Scythia (the Neuri, the Budini, and the agricultural Scythian tribes proper).
From around the turn of the Common Era, the Slavs appear in written sources under the name Venedi. They correspond to the archaeological remains of the Zarubyntsi and Przeworsk cultures (first century BCE – first century CE), which encompass the upper part of the Oder basin, nearly the entire Vistula region, the middle and upper Dnieper region, and the upper Buh region. In the Dniester basin at that time lived the tribes of the Lypytsia culture, with which the earliest mentions of the ethnonym “Slavs” are associated (in Ptolemy, an author of the first century CE).
The epoch around the turn of the Common Era was marked by Roman expansion toward the northeast – that is, into the territory of present-day Ukraine. This advance proceeded along two routes: through the Pontic Kingdom (Asia Minor) toward the Azov region and the Caucasus, and through the lower Danubian region and the Dniester region into the lower Dnieper area.
Gradually all the ancient centers of the Pontic region fell under Roman control – Tyras, Olbia, Histria, Chersonesus, Odessos, and others.
In 106 CE the Roman emperor Trajan conquered Dacia (present-day Romania), and the borders of the empire thus shifted to the immediate vicinity of the territories occupied by the eastern Slavs. This had far-reaching consequences for our ancestors.
In the third century CE, a large eastern Slavic group of tribes took shape in the southern (forest-steppe) part of Eastern Europe; in late-antique sources it bears the name “Antes.” Together with the kindred Sclaveni, they occupied enormous expanses from the Hron and the upper Oder in the west to the Seim in the east. Across this territory, from the second to the early fifth century, there existed the Chernyakhiv culture, whose remains reflect a remarkably high level of social development for their time. This culture formed on the basis of three principal components: the southern part of the Zarubyntsi culture in the middle Dnieper region and in the Southern Buh basin; the southern part of the Przeworsk culture in the Vistula region and the upper reaches of the Oder; and the Lypytsia culture in the Dniester region. In addition, a certain contribution to its crystallization was made by Scytho-Sarmatian tribes in the east and Celtic tribes in the west (chiefly in Transcarpathia).
The ethnic attribution of the Chernyakhiv culture has provoked a lively debate that continues to this day; yet, in essence, the only conception that can lay claim to persuasiveness remains the Slavic one. The coincidence of chronology and territorial definition provides grounds for identifying the bearers of the Chernyakhiv culture with the Antes and Sclaveni.
As early as the end of the last century, M. Hrushevsky advanced the hypothesis that the term “Antes” was the contemporary designation for Ukrainians. This idea appears entirely plausible, but it requires a certain qualification. In particular, the direct ancestors of Ukrainians included not only the tribes of the Chernyakhiv culture but also the population of Polissia – the later Derevlianians and Siverianians. Therefore, one cannot place an equals sign between the Antes and the modern Ukrainian people: to do so would mean oversimplifying the actual ethnogenetic process.
Chernyakhiv sites display an extraordinary typological consistency and similarity; in this respect they recall the Trypillia sites. The absolute majority of settlements existed throughout the entire period in which the culture functioned, and their appearance changed almost not at all. And although detailed interpretation of these sites is a matter of dispute, those controversies are not of fundamental significance. The same applies to funerary complexes and the assemblage of artifact finds. We are dealing, then, with a period of social stasis, during which newly formed systems of relations demonstrate relative stability and settled living conditions.
The foundation of the economy of the Antes tribes was arable agriculture. For tilling the land they employed a scratch-plow (sokha) with an iron point and a heavy plow with an iron ploughshare and coulter. The latter not only loosened the ploughed layer of soil but also turned it over. The appearance of the iron plow actively contributed to raising the productivity of agricultural labor.
The harvest was gathered with sickles and scythes; grain was milled with the aid of rotary querns fashioned from hard stone. The Antes cultivated all the principal cereal crops, both spring-sown and winter-sown. We should note in particular the presence of buckwheat – a very important crop that until recently was considered a comparatively late achievement of farming (thirteenth-fourteenth centuries).
Alongside agriculture, animal husbandry developed in the form of a village herd. Bone finds make it possible to determine its composition. Cattle held first place, followed by small livestock, swine, and horses. On one occasion the bones of a donkey were found.
The principal branches of craft production attained a high level – the extraction and working of iron, pottery, glassmaking, jewelry, and the working of wood, bone and antler, and stone. Archaeologists know of numerous workshops – ironworks, smithies, jewelers’ shops, potteries, and others. Around the turn of the Common Era, the second social division of labor occurred: craft separated from agriculture. From the ranks of undifferentiated producers there began to emerge specialists in a particular sphere of production – smelters, smiths, potters, jewelers, and so forth. They worked for the market, exchanging their wares for the products of other branches of craft, of agriculture, and of animal husbandry. Thus commodity production arose, oriented toward the market, and simultaneously more or less regular trade, which rather quickly assumed a monetary character.
The material evidence of this trade consists of numerous finds of Roman coins, predominantly silver denarii of the second half of the first and of the second centuries. The principal influx of these coins coincides with the period of Roman rule in Dacia. From the end of the second century, in connection with the crisis that engulfed the empire and its loss of the trans-Danubian lands, the inflow of Roman silver declines sharply and eventually ceases altogether. Yet the full-weight denarius of the Antonine dynasty remained in circulation for a long time afterward (at least into the third through fifth centuries).
Our ancestors received these coins as payment for the products of local manufacture, above all for grain, since it was grain that the empire most needed. But Roman silver was used to serve not only foreign but also domestic trade. It was precisely the separation of craft from agriculture and the emergence of a permanent internal market that brought about the influx of foreign coinage into the Antes lands; without this, trade between the Slavs and the ancient world would have remained of a barter character, as it had been in the preceding Scythian era.
Economic progress also entailed serious changes in the social structure of Slavic society. It was precisely at this time that our ancestors took the decisive step toward a class-based order – but one altogether different from that of Scythia. What was taking shape was not a slave-owning formation but a feudal one. The last bastion of slavery – the Roman Empire – had entered a period of profound decay that ultimately led it to catastrophe.
Social stratification within the Antes society, under conditions in which the individual household predominated, proceeded at a rapid pace. The communal system was breaking down. Redistributions of arable land occurred irregularly, or were ignored altogether. Certain families – the most economically powerful – withdrew from the system of redistribution, agreeing to inferior plots on the condition of permanent tenure. They left the large communal villages and established farmsteads near their own fields. This farmstead (or myz-based) form of landholding logically led to the emergence of private property in land.
A characteristic example of a farmstead (or farm-type) estate is provided by the homestead excavated in the village of Lesky in the Cherkasy region. This complex comprised a large four-room dwelling, a cellar, three structures for large and small livestock, two production facilities, a manure pit, and a barn.
Progress in production deepened property stratification. Numerous hoards of Roman coins (numbering in the hundreds and thousands of specimens) are vivid testimony to this process. Here was surplus product that was neither consumed nor invested in expanded reproduction but was converted into money and stored as a manifestation of wealth. In the middle of the first millennium CE, an aesthetic form of hoards began to appear on our lands – hoards composed of jewelry.
The social stratification of Antes society had as one of its foundations the deepening exploitation of man by man. Greek authors attest that in the course of the Balkan wars of the sixth century, the Antes and Sclaveni captured tens and hundreds of thousands of prisoners, whom they turned into slaves. According to some evidence, our ancestors engaged in the slave trade at that time. However, slave-owning here did not assume a fully developed character. Another form of dependence prevailed, milder than slavery. These were the embryonic forms of the feudal system.
The social differentiation of early Slavic society gave rise to the emergence of state structures and the formation of the first political unions of the type of primitive empires. Around the second century CE, two great unions of this type were formed – the Antes union in the east and the Sclaveni union in the west. At the head of these formations stood overlords – kings, surrounded by magnates. Some of them are known to us by name (kings Boz, Ardagast, Musokii; the diplomat Mezhamir; the military commanders Dobragast, Vsehord, Pyrohast, and others).
The power of the kings was not absolute. Ancient authors emphasize the democratism of the Antes, who, according to their testimony, “live under popular government.” What is meant here are popular assemblies – the veche – which limited the royal prerogatives. Warfare ceased to be a function of the entire adult population: in place of the universal arming of all those capable of bearing a sword, there emerged a professional druzhyna – the prototype of a knightly estate.
We may therefore affirm that the beginnings of Ukrainian statehood lead us precisely to the Antes era.
The middle of the first millennium CE was an exceedingly turbulent epoch, one that not without reason received the name of the Great Migration of Peoples. Concurrently with the formation of the Antes Kingdom, another great state-type union arose in the steppe Pontic region – the Gothic kingdom. The population of Gothia constituted a complex conglomerate of ethnic groups differing in origin and ethnic affiliation, among which the foremost place belonged to the descendants of the Scythians. Owing to this, the ethnonyms “Scythian” and “Goth” function as synonyms in ancient sources.
Accordingly, the Gothic kingdom might be regarded as the successor of the Scythian kingdom, yet it is impossible to equate these two formations, since they had an entirely different social nature – slave-owning in the one case and feudal in the other.
From the historical point of view, the Gothic union was a system entirely analogous to the Antes alliance. Both played the role of the leading political force in Eastern Europe and determined the principal directions of social development. Relations between them were entirely normal and at times even those of alliance. Already in the third and fourth centuries the Antes began to advance southward, toward the Pontic steppes, a movement registered by the appearance there of Chernyakhiv-type remains. This movement had the character of peaceful settlement: the newcomers took up residence predominantly in villages that already existed at the time.
In the third century, the so-called Gothic (or Scythian) wars against Roman rule began, which led to the final loss of Dacia by the conquerors. The principal driving force was the Goths, but the Slavs also took an active part. The archaeological manifestation of this movement consists of Chernyakhiv remains in the lower Danubian region: the left bank of the river was settled during the third and fourth centuries predominantly by our ancestors.
The situation in Eastern Europe changed fundamentally at the end of the fourth century in connection with the Hunnic invasion. The homeland of the Huns was Central Asia – Transbaikalia and the adjoining regions. From there they began their extraordinary migration, which culminated on the plains of northeastern France. During the first stage of the migration, the Hunnic wave swept up numerous Turkic tribes, which assimilated the original, properly Hunnic core. And in the final stage, which began in Eastern Europe, the Hunnic horde included Slavs as well.
In the northern Pontic region the Huns appeared in 375 and dealt a devastating blow to the Gothic kingdom. Over the following decade it was crushed and disintegrated. Under pressure from the invaders, the Goths abandoned the Pontic region and moved westward. A part of them, under the leadership of Athanaric, withdrew to Transylvania; another group, led by Fritigern, crossed to the other side of the Danube and, with the consent of Emperor Valens, settled there.
The relations of the Antes with the Huns developed differently. The Slavic lands in the forest-steppe and forest zones lay away from the path of the Hunnic onslaught and therefore suffered little from it. We have the best grounds for affirming that the Antes were allies of the Huns, and this explains the armed conflict between the Antes king Boz and the Gothic king Vinitharius. This clash led to a tragic outcome for both sides. Boz, who suffered defeat, was captured by the Goths and executed together with his sons and the greatest magnates; but this victory proved Pyrrhic: the Hunnic king Balamber immediately marched against the Goths and dealt them a decisive blow.
This was the beginning of the end. The Gothic kingdom ceased to exist. In the Pontic region there remained a small remnant of a once-great people, pressed back into mountainous Crimea (known as the Crimean Goths). Following the defeated Goths, the Huns too moved westward, striking terror in European peoples – until in 451 the combined army of European states, led by the Roman general Aetius and the Gothic king Theodoric the Great, put an end to the expansion on the Catalaunian Fields in Champagne. After that defeat, the Hunnic empire disintegrated, and the Huns themselves scattered across Central and Eastern Europe, where they mingled with the second wave of Turkic nomads – the Bulgars.
The Hunnic invasion and the destruction of the Gothic state had an unexpectedly positive effect on the condition of the Antes Kingdom, which remained the sole leading force in Eastern Europe. For this reason, the highest flourishing of the eastern Slavic state falls precisely in the post-Hunnic period. Many authors of that era wrote about the Antes and the Sclaveni (Procopius, Agathias, Menander, Pseudo-Maurice, Theophylact, Jordanes, Theophanes, John of Ephesus, and others).
In European history, the fifth century was one of the most dramatic periods. It was then that the Western Roman Empire perished under the onslaught of barbarian peoples. The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, however, survived and, having transformed its social nature, was reborn in the sixth century as a feudal state. After the liquidation of the heterogeneous Hunnic empire, Byzantium became the principal counterpart of the Antes Kingdom, which from the beginning of the sixth century displayed remarkable military-political activity.
The Antes and the Sclaveni, for their part, launched a broad offensive against the Balkan possessions of the empire – the so-called Balkan wars, which began with the complete Slavicization of the lower Danubian region and the northern Balkans. This movement passed through two stages. In the first half of the sixth century, the Slavic offensive took the form of seasonal campaigns. Our ancestors crossed the Danube, invaded Byzantine territories, seized booty and captives, and in autumn returned home. Until the war of 550-551, they never once wintered on the right bank of the Danube.
The war of 550-551 marked a turning point. From that time the character of the Slavic incursion changed – a mass Slavic resettlement on the right bank of the Danube began, along with the colonization of the Balkans. Over the course of the next several decades, the northern part of the Balkan Peninsula was completely Slavicized (present-day Bulgaria and Yugoslavia). Individual Slavic colonies arose on the Peloponnese and even in Asia Minor.
The Byzantine administration soon recognized the advantages of this expansion. The Slavic resettlement helped to resolve one of the most pressing problems confronting the empire – the demographic one. The settlers took up residence on lands devastated and depopulated by the turbulent events of the preceding century and contributed to the economic revival of the state. It was precisely because Byzantium showed the wisdom of not opposing barbarian colonization (not only Slavic) but, on the contrary, facilitating it, that it managed to survive the Great Migration of Peoples, overcome its internal crisis, and emerge from it as a renewed feudal society.
At the end of the 550s, a new wave of nomads descended upon Eastern Europe – the Avars. They were a people of Uyghur origin who had set out from Central Asia and in 558 appeared in the northern Caucasus. There the new conquerors inflicted a severe defeat on the Antes, after which they burst into the Pontic steppes. Over the course of ten years (558-568), their hordes passed through the steppe corridor of the lower Danube to Transylvania, where they founded their state – the khaganate.
The appearance of this new, third force complicated the general situation in Eastern Europe. The Avars laid claim to supremacy over the Slavs. A protracted period of Slavic-Avar wars began, which bore heavily upon the condition of our ancestors. The Sclaveni did fall under Avar rule; the Antes, who acted in alliance with the Greeks, defended their independence, but this came at a heavy price.
The Antes union could not withstand the hostile onslaught and disintegrated.
As a result, the very name of the Antes disappeared from the pages of ancient sources (the last mention dates to 602). Of course, an entire people could not vanish from the face of the earth without a trace. But for a time the Antes lost their significance as the leading political force in Eastern Europe. Byzantine writers therefore ceased to take interest in them, all the more so as the empire itself was entering a period of profound social upheavals.
With this, the Antes period in the history of the eastern Slavs comes to a close.
The disintegration of the first eastern Slavic state did not, of course, signify the elimination of the historical conditions that had given rise to it. The process of class formation in early Slavic society continued, and in place of the Antes Kingdom, upon its ruins, a new political formation arose rather quickly – one considerably larger and more powerful – Kyivan Rus.
V. KYIVAN RUS
The first problem that confronts us in connection with this subject is the origin of Rus. For a long time it generated sharp controversies. The debate arose as early as the eighteenth century, when the concept of Normanism was advanced within the walls of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Its originator should be considered G. S. Bayer, although the clearest formulation was proposed by G. F. Muller in his dissertation. As is well known, this position was subjected to resolute criticism by M. Lomonosov.
In its initial stage, the debate revolved around the secondary question of the origin of the name “Rus.” Subsequently, however, a far more important problem came to the fore – the origin of the Kyivan state, which was proclaimed to be a creation of Scandinavian adventurers.
Indeed, at the end of the first millennium CE, the Scandinavians displayed remarkable military-political activity that extended to virtually the entire European coastline – France, Germany, England, Spain, Italy, and so on. Our country did not remain apart from this process.
The ideological foundation of developed Normanism became the “Theory of the Clan System” (S. Solovyov, K. Kavelin, and others). Its adherents contrasted the clan system with the state, supposing that the state had been brought to Rus in the mid-ninth century as a result of Norman conquest, and that the ruling stratum there consisted, if not exclusively, then predominantly of Varangians. Today this conception may be considered refuted. There is no doubt that the Normans played an active political role in Rus during the ninth through eleventh centuries. The Scandinavian origin of the Rurikid dynasty is likewise beyond dispute. But the tendency to regard Norman adventurers as the demiurges of the Old Rus state is absolutely erroneous.
In reality, this state arose long before the ninth century, as a result of the organic development of the eastern Slavs – the formation among them of a class-based order. It was a complex and protracted process that developed within the framework of the general European tradition.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Foreword
- I. The Earliest Beginnings of Human Life in Ukraine
- The Neolithic Revolution
- The Scythians
- The Antes Kingdom
- V. Kyivan Rus
- Feudal Fragmentation
- The First Ukrainian Kingdom
- The Second Ukrainian Kingdom
- The Cossacks
- X. The National Liberation Struggle
- The Hetmanate
- The Ruin
- The Liquidation of Autonomy
- Ukraine as a Colony of the Tsarate
- The Abolition of Serfdom
- The Industrial Era
- The Central Rada
- The Civil War
- Socialist Construction
- The Cultural Revolution
- The Second World War
- The Post-Industrial Epoch
- The Full-Scale Construction of Communism
- The Period of Stagnation
- Perestroika