Marc Miles Vaughn - The History of Ukraine and Russia: The Tangled History That Led to Crisis

The History of Ukraine and Russia

The Tangled History That Led to Crisis

Marc Miles Vaughn

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Table of Contents

Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponents mind. Bobby Fisher

Clambering around the bombed ruins and smoking carcasses of Russian tanks in Lukyanivka, UN officials and global media reporters are trying to make sense of Russias four-day special military operation in Ukraine. As I write, the Russian forces have been driven back from Kyiv, and are consolidating for a push to gain full control of the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. Its a messy war in the springtime slush and snow. Why?

The history of wars in Ukraine is (sort of) like the playing of a chess game. Queens invade and knights defend. Pawns are sacrificed and Bishops swoop like black ravens over the fields of the dead. Kings plot and mutter in their castles, while enemies besiege their walls. The great difference is that in wars, the victors take away with them parts of the chess board itself, and assemble their own patch-worked boards for others to challenge them on.

The world watches on anxiously. Is this the start of World War III? Why are the Russians fighting to gain control of Ukraine, and why are Ukrainians fighting to keep control? Nobody wants things taken from them by force, as any mugging victim can tell you. But what is the value of this small region to Russia?

The journalists task is reporting events as they unfold. As Ive gone along, though, I have become more and more captivated by that elusive why question. Its easy to photograph and describe a burned out tank that is still glowing hotits much harder to explain why it got here.

Once you ask the why question, you have to go digging for answers. Over the last 30 years or so, I have honed my investigative skills in both the present and the past. This book is my attempt to break into the vault of history and find the explanations that you need to understand why Vladimir Putin is now sending his ill-fated tanks to their fiery doom around Kyiv. I hope to weave a story, like the Bayeux Tapestry, but telling a narrative of a longer series of invasions and wars. If you follow me on this raid into the past, you will emerge with a heightened awareness of the dynamics of this little patch of land that armies have fought over across the millennia.

Pawn to kings fourth. Our game starts, strangely, with Viking longboats.

(Monticelli, 2020)

(Fazzeri, 2021)

The world of the Vikings was extensive. It stretched round the whole of Europe: from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, along both easterly and westerly routes, and to the north-west to Iceland, Greenland and America. Throughout the Viking Age many sought their fortune in distant lands. Some remained there. Else Roesdahl (The Vikings)

The Vikings did not just raid the jeweled gold crosses and grain from fat abbeys in England. They also rowed their shallow-hulled pirate ships into the maze of European rivers, worming their way down the Dnieper River to the Black Sea. The pickings were thinner here, though, than in the European hinterland, with no cities or monasteries to conveniently amass treasure to make raids worthwhile. So, in the East, instead of taking treasure and going home, they took the land and stayed.

In this chapter, well watch the kingdoms of the Northmen rise and fall, up until the brink of the great communist commonwealth, and see what shadows of memory lie across the plains of Ukraine.

I have occasionally gone looking for the original meaning of a name. The results vary in credibility. My name, Marc is said to variously derive from words meaning warlike, polite, horse, or virile! The most credible sources seem to agree on a derivation from Mars, and a meaning of warlike.

The word Russian poses similar issues: Are they the Red people (which would fit the Norsethink of our term rosy and put it together with the frost-nipped face of a pale Norseman framed by a shock of ginger hair)? Or are they The people who live on the Ros river (Or is it called the Ros river because the Ros/Rus established a base there)? Or does the name derive from the Finnish word roets/ruotsi which roughly means rower (Vasnetsov, 2019). Given the menace of the longboat emerging from the mist and reeds propelled by large warriors using long oars, I suspect this is the real origin of the word.

By about 750 CE, there were Scandinavian trading posts on the Dnieper River, close to the Black Sea in the Ukraine region, and Arab silver was making its way back to the Baltic nations, with Baltic furs traveling the other way. Those Scandinavian people were called The Rus. It is not a small jump to see how that could become The Russians over time.

At around the same time, the enterprising Norsemen had also portaged their longboats into the great Volga Riveron which four of Russias great cities, including Moscow, were later to be establishedand began to trade with the Arabs. The Islamic missionary, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, called these dangerous trading partners the Rusiya. The name had stuck, and so have the Russians!

The first great pirate city of Rus' was centered at the great trading hub of Kyiv. The Dnieper and Desna river systems flow into it, and it was a short portage way via the Desna River to the Volga. To the south lay the Black Sea; the back door to Constantinople with its fabled wealth. Constantinoplenow Istanbulwas the capital city of the vast Eastern Christian empire (the Byzantine Empire). It dominated the Eastern Mediterranean until 1453, when the forces of Sultan Mehmed II besieged it and broke its resistance.

As the Scandinavian settlements around Ukraine became prosperous from the usual method of gaining and maintaining a stranglehold on trade routes, the Riurikid clan started to gain power. We must be a little skeptical about the main source of information on those early days, the so-called Russian Primary Chronicle. This document appears to be some abbots hobby historiography, and is described as historical fictionbut its the earliest source we have, dating from about 1100. The story Nestor the Chronicler' tells is that Hroerek the Norseman was invited to be king of the Northwestern Russia Scandinavian settlements in 862. The rule by invitation theme has continued down the years, and has now become an important plank in Vladimir Putins rationale for his dealings with Ukraine. The voluntary subjects of Hroerek became known as the Riurik, and became a force to be reckoned with. They were reinforced by a stream of Swedish and Finnish mercenaries coming to seek their fortunes from the Northwho meshed into a professional fighting class known as the Varangians. Hroerek died in about 879, and was succeeded by Helgi, who swept down and overran the prosperous city of the Jewish Khazars, Kyiv. Vikings will do what Vikings do.