Since the time of the notorious "perestroika", historical science has turned into a field of political battles, which are often waged not only by professional historians, but also by numerous "folk historians" who do not even have elementary knowledge. The purpose of information wars is to deform the consciousness of the nation, wreak havoc in the "fragile minds" of young Russians, overthrow national heroes and impose "new historical knowledge."
It is no coincidence that a few years ago, an outstanding Ukrainian historian, academician Pyotr Tolochko, absolutely correctly noted that “at the present time, when history has become largely the lot of amateurs who are not burdened with either historical knowledge, or methods of scientific criticism of sources, or responsibility for what has been said, the overthrow of scientific authorities and textbook provisions in historical science has become their most favorite occupation."
Moreover, as the well-known modern historian, Professor Boris Mironov, absolutely rightly noted, recently, on the basis of the modernist methodology that replaced the "notorious" history of history, a large-scale reflection on the "special tragedy" and "bloody drama" of the Russian historical process has already grown. its "cyclicality", endless "inversion turns", etc.
At the same time, along with the well-known Western Russophobes such as Alexander Yanov and Richard Pipes, homegrown Russophobes, clearly suffering from the complex of the famous "non-commissioned officer's widow", also hit this pseudoscientific game.
Suffice it to say that the fugitive Komsomol journalist, Mr. A. Yanov, suddenly turned to the authoritative professor of Russian history for a cordon, in a number of primitive forgeries - "Russia: at the origins of the tragedy of 1480-1584" (2001), "Russia against Russia: 1825-1921 "(2003)," Russia and Europe "(2007), replete with a huge number of factual errors, put forward an anti-scientific theory of the cyclical nature of Russian history.
The essence of this theoretical "masterpiece" so much admired by the behind-the-scenes architect of "Gorbachev's perestroika" and court academician Alexander Yakovlev is that the history of Russia is a history of alternating liberal and pro-Western reforms with reactionary and conservative nationalist counterreforms. And this new-born theorist has counted as many as 14 such "historical cycles" over the past 500 years.
In my book for teachers, which was published in the fall of this year, I was forced to repeatedly refer to numerous examples of this kind of "disputes", which are quite deliberately thrown into the scientific and especially pseudo-scientific environment with the sole purpose of deforming the consciousness of the nation, wreaking havoc " in the fragile minds "of young Russians, to overthrow national heroes and impose, including at the school desk and in the university auditorium," new historical knowledge ", which was" brilliantly "realized on the territory of perishing Ukraine.
In order not to be unfounded, we will cite several of the most striking and characteristic examples of this kind of discussions, which have long gone beyond the framework of pure science and turned into an element of broad public consciousness and ideological struggle on the historical front.
It is well known that since the late 1980s, amid the collapse of the communist system and the state Marxist ideology, the alleged Soviet anti-Normanists finally emerged from the trenches and began a desperate campaign to introduce their views into the wider public consciousness.
At the same time, according to the Normanists themselves, the "ultra-Normanism of the Schloetzer type" was adopted, which was aggressively implanted by Professor Lev Klein and his ideological followers, irreconcilable fighters against "great-power chauvinism" and "Russian nationalism."
Moreover, the pillars of modern Normanism preferred an obscenely untied tone to a strict scientific polemic with their opponents, which is replete with all sorts of, even obscene, insults and labeling of the lowest grade.
Moreover, it was the modern Normanists, not finding any new arguments, who put forward the Jesuit thesis that the Norman problem does not exist at all, since it is precisely proven that the “Varangians” are Normans, and therefore an end has been put in this discussion long ago. In other words, with their inherent modesty, they themselves planted the laurels of the winners and a priori reject any other opinion.
This cohort of the most active preachers of "European liberalism" was opposed and opposed by the school of Professor Apollo Kuzmin, his students, who, with facts in their hands, convincingly refuted many mossy "arguments" of their scientific and ideological opponents.
For almost three hundred years, Normanists and anti-Normanists have been arguing among themselves on a whole range of problems, among which the most significant are:
1) the question of the ethnic nature of the Varangians and the origin of the princely dynasty and
2) the problem of the origin of the term "Rus".
In ancient Russian and foreign written sources, there are completely different ideas about the origin and ethnicity of the Varangians. As the leading specialist in the history of ancient Russian annals, Professor Kuzmin, established, in the Tale of Bygone Years alone there are three different and different versions of the origin of the Varangians.
Thus, the Kiev chroniclers called all the inhabitants of the Volga-Baltic trade route "Varangians". The Novgorod chroniclers called "Varangians" both a certain tribe and all the Baltic tribes, highlighting especially "Varangians-Rus". At the same time, both those and other chroniclers understood by the name "Varangians" simply Pomorians, that is, the tribes that lived on the southeastern coast of the Baltic (Varangian) Sea.
Bargaining in the country of the Eastern Slavs. Hood. Sergey Ivanov. Illustration from the book "Pictures on Russian History" by Joseph Knebel. 1909 year
Nevertheless, for all Normanists, the Varangians are, without a doubt, the Normans-Vikings, that is, the inhabitants of ancient Scandinavia. And for the anti-Normanists, the Varangians are one of the Slavic, Baltic or Celtic, but Slavicized tribes for a long time, inhabiting the southeastern coast of the Baltic (Varangian) Sea. At the same time, there is the original hypothesis of Professor Lev Gumilyov that "Varangians" is just a term denoting the professional, not ethnicity of its carriers to the military craft, but this version of the now very popular "Eurasian" is not taken into account by serious experts. Although a number of modern Normanists (for example, Vladimir Petrukhin) also tried to present the Varangians as “mercenaries who took an oath of allegiance,” it is only still not clear to whom.
To prove their point, modern anti-Normanists cite a number of fairly compelling arguments of an archaeological, historical and religious nature:
ARCHAEOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS
1) Among the burial grounds of the squad mounds in Kiev, Ladoga, Gnezdovo and other graveyards and cities, which L. Klein and Co. constantly refer to, the Scandinavian burials themselves make up less than 1% of the total number of burials found.
Even a number of decent Normanists (Anatoly Kirpichnikov) had to admit that the famous chamber burial grounds, which were declared Norman with the light hand of the famous Swedish archaeologist T. Arne, turned out to be a very common form of burial throughout continental Europe, and not only in Sweden. The tags he discovered in the 1930s.
2) All found Scandinavian burial grounds are dated not earlier than the second half. X century, that is, when the princes from the Rurik dynasty ruled the Old Russian state for at least several decades.
3) According to the largest Soviet anthropologist, Academician Tatyana Alekseeva, who studied in detail the craniological series of the Kiev and Gnezdovsky burial grounds, all local burials are strikingly different from the German anthropological type.
4) Among all the Scandinavian burial grounds, no graves of any significant decoration have been found, which convincingly suggests that the warriors buried in them could not constitute the ruling elite of ancient Russian society.
5) Based on the rather scarce Scandinavian artifacts found on the territory of our country, it is rather difficult to determine how they ended up with the Eastern Slavs - either as a result of trade exchange, or as war booty, or together with their owners, etc.
By the way, many foreign experts speak about this, in particular, the largest English archaeologist Peter Sawyer and the Norwegian researcher Anne Stalsberg.
HISTORICAL ARGUMENTS
1) All the authors of the Byzantine chronicles have always distinguished the Varangians and Normans as different ethnic groups.
2) Judging by the written sources, the Varangians appeared in Russia and Byzantium only at the beginning - the middle of the 9th century, and the Normans did not recognize Russia and its southern neighbor until the second half. X century, since the Scandinavian sagas do not know the earlier rulers of Byzantium and Ancient Russia than the Byzantine emperor John Tzimiskes (969-976) and the great Kiev prince Vladimir the Holy (978-1015).
3) The Scandinavian sagas are well aware of the founder of the Norman dynasty, the Duke of Rollon (860-932), who conquered Normandy and became a vassal of the French king Charles III the Simple (898-922).
However, they are stubbornly silent about the "Norman" king Rurik (820–879), which causes legitimate surprise, since, according to our homegrown science fiction writers, he was the founder of a huge state in the lands of the Eastern Slavs.
4) The Varangians who came to the lands of the Eastern Slavs were already (or always) Slavonic, since the cities of Novgorod, Ladoga, Izborsk and others founded by them had a Slavic etymology.
RELIGIOUS ARGUMENTS
1) Thanks to the work of many Soviet scientists (Boris Rybakov, Apollon Kuzmin, Vladimir Toporov, Oleg Trubachev, Alexander Ishutin) it is well known that all Rus, Slavs and Finns, who became the core of the ancient Russian people, had their own pantheons of pagan gods of Indo-European, Hittite, Iranian or actually of Slavic and Finnish origin, which included Perun, Horos, Veles, Svarog, Stribog, Dazhdbog, Mokosh and other deities.
However, none of the thirteen Scandinavian deities, including the supreme god Odin and his sons Thor, Vidar or Balder, never existed in Slavic, Russian or Finnish theonymy and could not be by definition.
2) In numerous written sources of different origins, the term "Rus" is used extremely contradictory and ambiguous. In some sources we will find direct indications that the Rus are Varangians, in others their direct connection with the Slavs will be asserted, and in others they are called a distinctive ethnic community.
According to the fair opinion of the same professor Kuzmin, in the Tale of Bygone Years alone there are two different concepts of the beginning of Russia: the Polyan-Slavic, which was directly connected with Norik-Rugiland, and the Varangian, oriented towards Baltic Russia. It is this circumstance that has become one of the main reasons for the split among past and present historians, archaeologists and linguists.
Some authors (Serafim Yushkov, Vladimir Petrukhin, Elena Melnikova, Ruslan Skrynnikov, Igor Danilevsky) believe that the term “Rus” was originally of a social nature and, most likely, was used to designate a specific social stratum of the Old Russian state, most likely for the princely squad …
At the same time, all orthodox Normanists, with the exception of Professor S. Yushkov, insist on the Scandinavian origin of this term, equating the concepts of “Rus” and “Norman squad”, which they call “rowers” or “sailors”. Moreover, a completely absurd hypothesis was put forward that this social term was later transformed into an ethnonym, which has never happened in all of human history.
Other historians, who are the absolute majority, believe that the term "Rus" was of a purely ethnic nature and that some ethnos, tribe or tribal union was hidden under this name. Proponents of this approach, in turn, are divided into several currents.
Funeral of a noble Rus. Hood. Henryk Siemiradzki
Most foreign and Russian Normanists (T. Arne, Richard Pipes, Lev Klein, Alexander Kan, Gleb Lebedev) believe that the term "Rus" had a purely Scandinavian etymology and came from the Finnish word ruotsi, which means Sweden.
However, as the leading Russian linguist, Academician Andrei Zaliznyak, correctly noted, modern Normanists in their linguistic constructions are guided by the methods of “amateur linguistics,” which base their conclusions “on the accidental similarity of words,” do not take into account the fact that “the external similarity of two words (or two roots) in itself is not yet evidence of any historical connection between them."
Moreover, the renowned German Norman philologist Gottfried Schramm in his latest work Altrusslands Anfang (The Beginning of Ancient Rus, 2002) called this interpretation of the term ruotsi “the Achilles heel of Normanism” and suggested throwing off this ballast, from which the Norman theory would only benefit.
A similar position was taken by a number of prominent Russian scientists (Oleg Trubachev, Alexander Nazarenko), who, while remaining convinced Normanists, still put the interests of science above the clan interests of Lev Klein and Co.
Realizing all the flawedness of their previous interpretation of the origin of the term "Rus", some researchers have gone to the other extreme, trying to find the origins of this term on the territory of Sweden itself in the coastal province of Ruden (Roden) or Ruslagen (Roslagen).
However, as convincingly proved by a number of Russian and Swedish scientists (Lydia Groth, Karin Kalissendorf), modern Ruslagen appeared on the geographical map of the Kingdom of Sweden only in the 13th century, and until then this coastal territory was still under water, since the level of the Baltic Sea in this area was then 5-7 m higher than the modern one.
A number of major modern scholars, including among the Normanists themselves (Oleg Trubachev, Valentin Sedov), are looking for the origins of the term "Rus" either in the Iranian language, which was spoken by the Scythians or Sarmatians, or even sees in it a common Indo-Aryan basis.
The largest anti-Normanists of the Soviet type (Boris Rybakov, Mikhail Tikhomirov, Arseny Nasonov, Henrik Lovmyansky) believed that the term "Rus" was of local, Slavic origin and under this name was hidden one of the East Slavic tribes that lived in the middle reaches of the Dnieper, on the banks of the small river Ros, as was said in the "Tale of Bygone Years" itself.
Academician Boris Rybakov
Later, this name became associated with the entire Polyan tribal union, which stood at the origins of the ancient Russian statehood at the southern tip of the East Slavic lands. Other Soviet "anti-Normanists" (Pyotr Tretyakov) also leaned towards the southern ancestral home of the Rus, but correlated them not with the Eastern Slavs, but with the Chernyakhovites or their descendants. At the same time, these historians did not exclude the fact that it was these Russes that were somehow connected with the Germanic or West Slavic tribes.
Finally, modern and true anti-Normanists (Apollon Kuzmin, Vyacheslav Fomin, Elena Galkina) believe that the origins of the term "Rus" should be sought among various ethnic "Rus" who lived at least on the territory of Baltic, Dnieper, Podonskaya, Danube and Black Sea Rus.
At the same time, by the time the Old Russian state arose, these Rus had long been Slavicized, although initially:
1) glade-rus - the descendants of the northern Illyrians who lived on the middle Danube, on the territory of Norik-Rugiland;
2) the Varangians-Rus were one of the Celtic tribes that lived on the southern coast of the Baltic (Varangian) Sea and nearby islands (Rügen);
3) Alans-Rus were descendants of the Iranian-speaking Roksolans, who acted as bearers of the famous Saltov-Mayatsk archaeological culture. By the end of the 9th century, it was from the representatives of these three branches of the Rus that the so-called Russian clan was formed, which then made up the ruling elite of the Old Russian state.
Thus, the question of the origin of the term "Rus" is connected not so much with the "Norman" or "Varangian" problems, but with the so-called Khazar problem, where all sorts of speculations and speculations are even greater than that of the Normanists.
At the end of the 19th century, the famous Kiev lawyer Herman Barats in several of his articles came out with a sensational statement that the "Tale of Bygone Years" is a remake of the Khazar-Jewish writing, and the first Russian princes were Khazar Jews.
Then this topic faded into the background for a long time, but from the end of the 1950s an active study of the archaeological monuments of the famous Saltovo-Mayatsk culture began, which a number of archaeologists of that time, primarily Mikhail Artamonov and Svetlana Pletneva, did not quite rightly refer to the entire Khazar Kaganate, artificially expanding the very territory of this state to enormous proportions.
Although even then, within the framework of this archaeological culture, two local variants were clearly identified: the forest-steppe, in anthropological terms, represented by the dolichocephalic population, and the steppe with the brachycephalic population, which, in turn, also consisted of several territorial variants.
Even then, a number of prominent Soviet archaeologists, in particular Ivan Lyapushkin and Dmitry Berezovets, questioned many of the conclusions of their Moscow colleagues and stated that the forest-steppe version of the Saltovo-Mayatsk archaeological culture belonged to the Alanian population of the Don region, which had never been part of the Khazar Kaganate.
Soon these quite reasonable conclusions were supported by prominent Soviet historians (Boris Rybakov, Apollon Kuzmin), and now this promising hypothesis has received its further development in the works of Doctor of Historical Sciences Elena Galkina, who identifies the Don Alan version of the Saltovo-Mayatsk culture with the central part of the Russian Kaganate, mentioned in Byzantine, Western and Muslim written sources of the 8th – 9th centuries.
At the same time, the moss-covered hypothesis of the prevailing influence of the huge Khazar Kaganate in all of Eastern Europe is being actively developed by home-grown Normanists, Israeli Zionists (N. Gottlieb), and Ukrainian nationalists (Omelyan Pritsak), and even “Eurasian patriots” (Lev Gumilyov, Vadim Kozhinov), who really want to find among the founders of the Old Russian state not only Swedes, but also Khazar Jews.
In recent years, this issue has acquired not only an acute, but extremely painful and topical character for various political forces.
In particular, the "frostbitten" Zionists began to declare their claims to the possession of the "primordial historical ancestral home" of the Jewish people, and our "patriots-Eurasians", not appreciating the very essence of these "scientific" discoveries, went to the other extreme and began to talk about a special period " Khazar-Jewish yoke "in the history of Ancient Russia.
