By Véronique Gazeau and Alexandre Musin

In May 15th 2009, the President of Russia instructed the founding of a ‘presidential commission of fight against attempts of falsification of history concerning Russia’. If this commission was primarily founded against attempts to re-read the history of the Second World War, it also bears some threats for the history of Middle Ages. Two months later one of the active members of this Commission, Director of the Institute of Russian History of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Andreï Sakharov, member by correspondence of the Academy of Sciences of Russia, in his interview on the Russian TV1 announced that, among the modern falsifications, one of the most threatening medieval untruths is Normannism, which ‘to-day is rearing its head again’. He thinks that a new wind of Normannism is blowing in Russia which is inspired by foreign organizations and institutions that finance the ‘destructive activities’ of some Russian scholars and centers of research.

There are two opposite concepts of the birth of the Russian state: Normannists and Anti-Normannists. Both refer to the relationship between Scandinavians and Slavs in the medieval past. The first section think that the Scandinavians, and more precisely the Varangians, were the creators of the Russian state, while the second privilege the Slav influence and consider the Varangians as Western Slavs, which stands in direct opposition to evidence from the historically accurate Russian Primary Chronicle. The thesis which states that Varangians – Scandinavians or Normans who settled in Russia – played a significant role in the beginning of the Russian state, is based on scientific evidence, including the historical sources and the archeological data. The excavations at Rjurikovo Gorodische near Novgorod, a site rich in Scandinavian artefacts, under the direction of Evgenij Nosov since 1975, as well as at Staraya Ladoga, the first residence of Rjurik, under the direction of Anatolij Kirpichnikov since 1984 and even excavations in Ukrainia and Belarus, revealed a Scandinavian settlement beginning in the ninth-tenth centuries and lasting for about two centuries. Among the most important evidence of Scandinavian presence in Eastern Europa, are discoveries of artefacts such as women’s costume, necropolises of a Norman type, amulets with runic inscriptions, Nordic idols that are indices of works and religious practices. An intensification of Scandinavian finds at sites within the North of Russia is notable in the second half of ninth century and corresponds to the “call of Varangians” and to the coming of the dynasty of Rjurikides in Russia related by the Russian Primary Chronicle. The archaeological context reveals the high position that the Varangians had in the autochthon society. The culture of the Scandinavian elite attracted local populations: we may see a complex process of assimilation of Scandinavians into Slav and Finnish societies and the formation of a new nation, the Rus. In return, traces of contacts with Slav tribes of the Baltic Sea remain small and have thin influence on the production of ceramics.

As a mater of fact, the debate between Normannists and Anti-Normannists has been recurrent from the eighteenth century onwards. Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer, a German historian member of the Academy of Sciences at St-Petersburg, may be considered as the first Normannist. In several papers of 1735-41 – before the war between Russia and Sweden in 1741 – he showed that the Varangians of Russian chronicles were, in fact Scandinavians who were the first rulers and nobles. Afterwards, another German, member of Academy, Gerhard-Friedrich Miller, Rector at the academic University of St-Petersburg (the first Russian University) wrote a treatise in 1749 ‘On the origins of the people and of the name of Russia’ in which he defends the same thesis of the Varangian origin of the Russian state. It was criticized by a specialist in the natural sciences Mikhailo Lomonosov who had no background in history. He declared in  c. 1760-66 that the Varangians – the enemies of 1741 – were Western Slavs  and that the name of the Russians came from Southern tribes of Roxolans (at that time the Iranian origin of these people were still unknown). Although he was married to a German woman, Lomonosov did not allow that foreigners may write the history of his country.

In the nineteenth century Russian historians took over. The Anti-Normannist Nicolaj Kostomarov, from St-Petersburg, and the Normannist Michel Pogodin from Moscow organized a public debate on the 19th March 1860 at the University of St-Petersburg in front of a dense crowd. The debate continued in the newspapers and writings of specialists. A century later, the works of a PhD student in the department of archaeology of the University of Leningrad, Leo Klejn, reopened the controversy. In 1960, his book The Debate on the Varangians which was a criticism of Anti-Normannism, might never have been printed. The very same year, a student in Moscow, Andrey Amalrik, was expelled from the University and later from Russia because he had defended the same thesis. Supported by the Rector of the University of Leningrad, the liberal Alexander Alexandrov, Leo Klejn became lecturer and could refine his thesis in his lessons and asked his students to read them. A new debate, a century later after that of the 19th of March 1860, took place on 24th December 1965, on the issues presented in Igor Shaskolsky’s book –The Normannist theory in the contemporary middle class science – which demonstrated the close links between Anti-Normannism and anti-Sovietism. In 1970, Klejn published an examination of  Scandinavian artefacts discovered in Russia. He had been running a seminar [on this topic?] until his arrest in 1981. Expelled from the University, he came back in 1994. Several brilliant scholars made efforts to study the role of Scandinavians in the formation of the Russian state and culture, and to advocate  their ideas: among them are Gleb Levedev, Vasily Bulkin, Igor Dubov, Evgenij Nosov, Serge Beletsky and Yurij Lesman.

Within three centuries, the approaches and arguments of each side have moved. The official soviet propaganda considered the Normannists as “enemies of the people” or “agents of the CIA”. But Anti-Normannism did not disappear in the twenty-first century. How could one explain the success of Anti-Normannism? There are several explanations; historiographical, social and political. The historian Klejn, who decided in 2009 to publish his adapted and completed thesis, The Debate on the Varagians, considers that the explanation is that national pride was insulted on several occasions within Russian history, from the Tatars to the end of communism, by Napoleon, by the defeat of 1905 and by Hitler’s troops in the suburbs of Moscow. Some popular works and the blogs on the internet  impose on less educated average Russian men and women that Normannists are foreigners, Russophobes, anti-patriots, and altogether immoral. Anti-Normannist appears as a form of racism, even as a racial theory. Another explanation for the strong feelings against anti-Normannists is rooted in   theories of “migrationnism” and “diffusionnism”. For the Anti-Normannist historians, the role of migration is implicitly dangerous, even during the communist period.

Normannism is not a theory:  it but exists as a construct of Anti-Normannists’ imagination. The Anti-Normannists do not hesitate to credit Normannists with far-fetched ideas, such as the Slavs would have been unable to create a state by themselves, or that the Germanic people should direct and the Slavs obey, and so on. One could think that the ‘presidential commission to fight against the attempts of the falsification of history concerning Russia’ has been commissioned to eradicate all European roots from Russian history when it denounces research into the process of acculturation of Scandinavians in medieval Russia by Russian scholars regarded as Normannists, as well as label them as ‘forgers of history’? It recommends the racial theory in which Varangians were Baltic Slavs who lived in the area of Kaliningrad; a theory which is used to-day to bind this enclave to Russia, and which entered the Soviet Union according to the ‘system of Yalta’ after the Second World War, and which is to-day surrounded by member states of the European union…

The accusations of the Anti-Normannists are unfounded: undoubtedly Scandinavians were present in Russia as in Western Europe.

Véronique Gazeau, Alexandre Musin.

Véronique Gazeau is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Caen Basse-Normandie, and member of  the Centre de recherches archéologiques et historiques anciennes et médiévales.

Alexandre Musin is Director of Research at the Institute for History of Material Culture of the Academy of Sciences of Russia, at St-Petersburg. He is specialist of Russian and European History and Archeology.