- East Slavs
The East Slavs are a Slavic ethnic group, the speakers of
East Slavic languages . Formerly the main population of the medieval state ofKievan Rus , by theseventeenth century they evolved into the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples.History
ources
Relatively little is known about the East Slavs prior to approximately 859 AD, the date from which the account in the
Primary Chronicle starts. The reasons are the apparent absence of a written language (Cyrillic script, created about 863 was specifically for Slavic adoption) and the remoteness of East Slavic lands. What little is known comes from archaeological digs, foreign traveller accounts of the Rus land, and linguistic comparative analyses of Slavic languages.Very few native Russian documents dating before the 11th century (none ante-dating the 10th century) have been discovered. The earliest major manuscript with information on Rus' history is the
Primary Chronicle , written in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. It lists the twelve Slavic tribal unions who, by the 9th century settled between theBaltic Sea and theBlack Sea . These tribal unions were "Polans ", "Drevlyans ", "Dregovichs ", "Radimich s", "Vyatichs ", "Krivich s", "Slovens ", "Dulebes " (later known asVolhynians andBuzhans ), "White Khorvats", "Severians ", "Ulichs ", "Tivertsi ".Migration
There is no consensus among scholars as to the
urheimat of the Slavs. In the first millennium AD, Slavic settlers are likely to have been in contact with other ethnic groups who moved across the East European Plain during theMigration Period . Between the first and ninth centuries, theSarmatians ,Goths ,Bulgarians ,Huns ,Alans , Avars,Bulgars , andMagyars passed through thePontic steppe in their westward migrations. Although some of them could have subjugated the region's Slavs, these foreign tribes left little trace in the Slavic lands. TheEarly Middle Ages also saw Slavic expansion as an agriculturist andbeekeeper , hunter, fisher, herder, and trapper people. By the8th century , the Slavs were the dominant ethnic group on the East European Plain.By 600 AD, the Slavs had split linguistically into southern, western, and eastern branches. The East Slavs flooded Eastern Europe in two streams. One group of tribes settled along the
Dnieper river in what is nowUkraine ; they then spread northward to the northernVolga valley, east of modern-dayMoscow and westward to the basins of the northernDniester and theSouthern Buh rivers in present-dayMoldova and southern Ukraine.Another group of East Slavs moved from
Pomerania to the northeast, where they encountered theVarangians of theRus' Khaganate and established an important regional centre ofNovgorod . The same Slavic population also settled the present-dayTver Oblast and the region ofBeloozero . Having reached the lands of theMerya nearRostov , they linked up with the Dnieper group of Slavic migrants.Pre-Kievan period
In the eighth and ninth centuries, the south branches of East Slavic tribes had to pay tribute to the Khazars, a Turkic-speaking people who adopted
Judaism in the late eighth or ninth century and lived in the southern Volga andCaucasus regions. Roughly in the same period, theIlmen Slavs andKrivichs were dominated by the Varangians of the Rus' Khaganate, who controlled the trade route between theBaltic Sea and theByzantine Empire .The earliest tribal centres of the East Slavs included
Novgorod ,Izborsk ,Polotsk ,Gnezdovo ,Sarskoe Gorodishche , andKiev . Archaeology indicates that they appeared at the turn of the tenth century, soon after the Slavs and Finns of Novgorod had rebelled against the Norsemen and forced them to withdraw to Scandinavia. The reign ofOleg of Novgorod in the early tenth century witnessed the return of the Varangians to Novgorod and relocation of their capital to Kiev on theDnieper . From this base, the mixed Varangian-Slavic population (known asthe Rus ) launched several expeditions against Constantinople.At first the ruling elite was primarily Norse, but it was rapidly Slavicized by the mid-century.
Sviatoslav I of Kiev (who reigned in the 960s) was the first Rus ruler with a Slavonic name.Modern East Slavs
Modern East Slavic peoples and ethnic groups include:
*Russians
**Pomors
**Lipovan Russians
**Cossacks
*Ukrainians
**Bojko
**Hutsuls
**Lemkos
**Poleszuk s
**Rusyns 1
*Belarusians
**Poleszuk s
*Rusyns 1
**Lemkos 1There is an ongoing debate whether Rusyns are a separate East Slavic group rather than a sub-group of Ukrainians.
Gallery
ee also
*
List of early East Slavic states References
*loc - [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/rutoc.html Russia]
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