Basic Features of Political Organization and Social Structure of Rurikid Polity in the Tenth Century

Abstract

The key goal of the chapter is to summarize the most promising ideas about, and approaches to the history of the people named Rus’ of the ninth to tenth centuries and to Rurikid polity created by one of Rus’ groups around Kiev circa 900. It was not a long process of its political structure’s “maturing” from deep antiquity, but rather a fast outburst that required risky experiments from this Rus’ Kiev community. This was the process of their rapid transformation. Rurikid polity on the Dnieper River in the mid-tenth century was a compact polity with the center in Kiev around which other fortified settlements of the Rus’ people were grouped along the radius. This nuclear territory around Kiev was surrounded from almost all sides by the limitrophic territories of subordinated Slavic communities. The structure of the territory was vividly “segmentary”. It was a typical chiefdom with two (later three) levels of political control and a leading kin (lineage) of the Rurikids at its head. All attempts made by now to prove that this polity had been a “state” were inspired by wishful thinking and by attempts of retrospective projection of the realities of the eleventh century on the previous tenth century.