injunjane

Yesterday I was (totally accidentally) listening to a lecture on the history of the early Mongol Empire. Don't know the author, it was a podcast on Spotify automatically going after some channel I'm regularly listening to.

The period covered in the lecture was the conquest of the Kyevan Rus by Mongols.

The lecture made me furious. I'm no historian but there are things Eastern European children learn at school. The more advanced version of those things I learned at the university during one-year course of Ukrainian history - and since I wasn't just a typical student passing the lectures in the local cafeteria and then copying the writings of the top students, I have spent hours at the central university scientific library reading original sources.

The authors of the podcast call Medieval Ukrainian people 'Russians'. Shame on you US Spotify podcasters.

WE ARE NOT RUSSIANS.

Not in the sens you know who Russians are.
We are proud daughters and sons of an ancient state that was first enslaved by a nation widely known as Vikings. You'd be surprised, but the modern research proves that the Medieval Scandinavians, known in our part of the world as Varyags, and in Western Europe as Vikings, were the one that were actually the true Rus. These warriors killed our leaders in 9th century and took their place in our capital, the city of Kyiv. They built the cities on the north known as Novgorod and Staraya Russa, unified them with Kyiv as a single state, and ruled this conglomerate of Slavic peoples for several centuries.

Some of their progeny later went to North-East and built the cities of Vladimir and Suzdal, and later Moscow. They were in fact a separate state even before the Mongol invasion. In September 1149 – April 1151, again in March 1155 – May 1157 their knyaz (konung, prince) Yuri Dolgorukiy ('George the Long Arms') sacked and destroyed the beautiful Kyiv. A century later his job was finished by the Mongol horde, and some sources say that the real reason the Mongols conquered Rus was that their forces were invited by some Eastern Rus knyazes and used as mercenaries to solve their own quests for power.

DO NOT mix us with them.
DO NOT call us Russians.

We are a free nation and that Eastern monster is a horrible half-Mongolian half-Viking bastard born of hatred and rape pregnancy.

The city of Suzdal which is now a small town with some 90 Orthodox Christian monasteries and churches is a beautiful and aetherial place. The monk Andrey Rublyov who painted the famous Trinity icon was probably one of the brightest people ever living on Earth.

But the state itself is a monster. And we Ukrainians are no part of it.
Do not call us 'Russians'.