Martyn Whittock, a prolific and eclectic British historian, author of several books on Vikings and the old Norse world, focuses here on a lesser-known aspect of Viking history. He examines the eastward expeditions of Swedish warrior-traders, known as Varangians, in the ninth and tenth centuries that ultimately led to the establishment of the Kievan Rus in Kyiv in 988, with the coronation of Vladimir the Great.
Vladimir was in the line of the Rurikid dynasty, which would rule Russia until it died out with Ivan the Terrible’s childless son Feodor I in 1598.
The Kievan Rus underpins the claims by Russian nationalists, including Vladimir Putin, on Ukraine, even though Kyiv and Muscovy developed in largely separate ways when Kyiv went into decline after being sacked by the Mongols in 1240. At various times in Russian history, under the tsars and especially under Soviet rule, the Viking origins have been either championed or rejected, depending on the powers-that-be’s attitude to Russia’s Germanic neighbours to the west.
Whittock offers a brisk and well-documented account of the early Viking settlements that used the network of rivers in the Volga basin to trade as far afield as Constantinople and Abbasid Baghdad, bringing amber, furs and slaves east in exchange for silver, large hordes of which have been discovered in Sweden, particularly on the Baltic island of Gotland.
Much of the second half of the book is given over to the ideological battles fought over the Viking influence in establishing the first Russian state.
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The book’s major flaw, however, is the centrality given to these ideological battles as a rationale for the invasion of Ukraine, which seems rather beside the point. Vladimir Putin’s succession of intellectual justifications – including smearing Ukrainians as Nazis – have been so patently untrue that any attempt to place them in a discursive lineage is rather pointless, no matter how deep a story, in Whittock’s words, it might be.
If the origins of the Kievan Rus weren’t up to the task for Putin, he would just invent another excuse. Vikings in the East, engaging as it is as an account of the common origins of Russia and Ukraine, is far less interesting as an analysis of contemporary Russian imperialist ambitions.
