Indo-European, Ural-Altaic, and diverse other peoples have occupied what is now the territory of Russia since the 2nd millennium BCE, but little is known about their ethnic identity, institutions, and activities. In ancient times, Greek and Iranian settlements appeared in the southernmost portions of what is now Ukraine. Trading empires of that era seem to have known and exploited the northern forests — particularly the vast triangular-shaped region west of the Urals between the Kama and Volga rivers — but these contacts seem to have had little lasting impact. Between the 4th and 9th centuries CE, the Huns, Avars, Goths, and Magyars passed briefly over the same terrain, but these transitory occupations also had little influence upon the East Slavs, who during this time were spreading south and east from an area between the Elbe River and the Pripet Marshes. In the 9th century, as a result of penetration into the area from the north and south by northern European and Middle Eastern merchant adventurers, their society was exposed to new economic, cultural, and political forces.

The scanty written records tell little of the processes that ensued, but archaeological evidence — notably, the Middle Eastern coins found in eastern Europe — indicates that the development of the East Slavs passed through several stages.

From about 770 to about 830, commercial explorers began an intensive penetration of the Volga region. From early bases in the estuaries of the rivers of the eastern Baltic region, Germanic commercial-military bands, probably in search of new routes to the east, began to penetrate territory populated by Finnic and Slavic tribes, where they found amber, furs, honey, wax, and timber products. The indigenous population offered little resistance to their incursions, and there was no significant local authority to negotiate the balance between trade, tribute, and plunder. From the south, trading organizations based in northern Iran and North Africa, seeking the same products, and particularly slaves, became active in the lower Volga, the Don, and, to a lesser extent, the Dnieper region. The history of the Khazar state is intimately connected with these activities.

About 830, commerce appears to have declined in the Don and Dnieper regions. There was increased activity in the north Volga, where Scandinavian traders who had previously operated from bases on Lakes Ladoga and Onega established a new centre, near present-day Ryazan. There, in this period, the first nominal ruler of Rus (called, like the Khazar emperor, khagan) is mentioned by Islamic and Western sources. This Volga Rus khagan state may be considered the first direct political antecedent of the Kievan state.

Within a few decades these Rus, together with other Scandinavian groups operating farther west, extended their raiding activities down the main river routes toward Baghdad and Constantinople, reaching the latter in 860. The Scandinavians involved in these exploits are known as Varangians; they were adventurers of diverse origins, often led by princes of warring dynastic clans. One of these princes, Rurik, is considered the progenitor of the dynasty that ruled in various portions of East Slavic territory until 1598 (see Rurik dynasty). Evidences of the Varangian expansion are particularly clear in the coin hoards of 900–930. The number of Middle Eastern coins reaching northern regions, especially Scandinavia, indicates a flourishing trade. Written records tell of Rus raids upon Constantinople and the northern Caucasus in the early 10th century.

In the period from about 930 to 1000, the region came under complete control by Varangians from Novgorod. This period saw the development of the trade route from the Baltic to the Black Sea, which established the basis of the economic life of the Kievan principality and determined its political and cultural development.

The degree to which the Varangians may be considered the founders of the Kievan state has been hotly debated since the 18th century. The debate has from the beginning borne nationalistic overtones. Recent works by Russians have generally minimized or ignored the role of the Varangians, while non-Russians have occasionally exaggerated it. Whatever the case, the lifeblood of the sprawling Kievan organism was the commerce organized by the princes. To be sure, these early princes were not “Swedes” or “Norwegians” or “Danes”; they thought in categories not of nation but of clan. But they certainly were not East Slavs. There is little reason to doubt the predominant role of the Varangian Rus in the creation of the state to which they gave their name.

The rise of Kiev

The consecutive history of the first East Slavic state begins with Prince Svyatoslav (died 972). His victorious campaigns against other Varangian centres, the Khazars, and the Volga Bulgars and his intervention in the Byzantine-Danube Bulgar conflicts of 968-971 mark the full hegemony of his clan in Rus and the emergence of a new political force in eastern Europe. But Svyatoslav was neither a lawgiver nor an organizer; the role of architect of the Kievan state fell to his son Vladimir (c. 980-1015), who established the dynastic seniority system of his clan as the political structure by which the scattered territories of Rus were to be ruled. He invited or permitted the patriarch of Constantinople to establish an episcopal see in Rus.

Kievan Rus in the 11th century.

The decline of Kiev led to regional developments so striking that the subsequent period has often been called the “ Period of Feudal Partition.” This phrase is misleading: feudal is hardly more applicable to the widely varying institutions of this time than to those of the Kievan period, and partition implies a former unity of which there is insufficient evidence. The distinctiveness of the character and historical fortunes of each of the major East Slavic regions, discussed briefly below, is clear even in the Kievan period and has persisted into the 21st century.

Novgorod arose in the 9th century as one of the earliest centres of the exploitation of the forest hinterland and remained the most important commercial centre of the Kievan period. The changes of the latter Kievan period did not diminish the town’s importance, for it benefited both from the increased activity of the Hanseatic League and from the development of the upper Volga region, for which it was a major trade outlet. Although Novgorod was an early base for the Rurikids, the princely traditions characteristic of Kiev and other post-Kievan centres never developed there. When Kiev declined, Novgorod soon (1136) declared its independence from princely power, and, although it accepted princely protectors from various neighbouring dynasties, it remained a sovereign city until conquered by Muscovy (Moscow).

During the 13th century, Novgorod’s burghers easily found an accommodation with the invading Mongols. In the Mongol period its energetic river pirates pushed farther north and east toward the Urals and even down the Volga, and Novgorod’s prosperity was generally unbroken until the commercial revolution of the 16th century. Its absorption by the growing principality of Muscovy in 1478 ended its political independence and changed its social structure, but Novgorod’s characteristic economic and cultural life did not end with that catastrophe.

Novgorod was governed by an oligarchy of great trading boyar families who controlled the exploitation of the hinterland. They chose (from among themselves) a mayor, a military commander, and a council of aldermen, who controlled the affairs of the city and its territories. The town itself was divided into five “ends,” which seem to have corresponded to the “fifths” into which the hinterland was divided. There was in addition a veche (council), apparently a kind of town meeting of broad but indeterminate composition whose decisions, it would appear, were most often controlled by the oligarchy. A major role in politics was played by the archbishop, who after 1156 controlled the lands and incomes previously owned by the Kievan princes and who appears throughout Novgorod’s history as a powerful, often independent figure.

The northwest

During this period, much of the territory of the principalities of Smolensk, Polotsk, Turov, and Pinsk was controlled by the grand duchy of Lithuania, which was essentially an international or nonnational formation led by a foreign dynasty (of eastern Lithuanian pagan origins) ruling over predominantly Belarusian and Ukrainian populations. By the 15th century the dynasty had become Slavic in culture (a version of Belarusian was the official language of the realm), and at its height under Vytautas (1392–1430) it controlled all the old Kievan territory outside Russia proper—that is, most of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. In 1385 the grand duchy joined the kingdom of Poland, and the union was sealed shortly thereafter by the marriage of Grand Prince Jogaila (see Władysław II Jagiełło) to Jadwiga, the Polish queen.

The northeast

The region bounded by the Oka and Volga rivers, later to be the heartland of the Grand Principality of Moscow, was settled before the arrival of Slavs from Novgorod and the Baltic area by a Finnic tribe. Rostov, the earliest princely centre, was from Vladimir’s time included in the princely rotation system. In the 12th century it became the patrimony of the younger branch of Vladimir II Monomakh’s family (who founded the new princely centre Vladimir in 1108). Under his son Yury Dolgoruky (1125-57) and grandson Andrew I (1157-74), the principality reached a high political and cultural development, which it retained through much of the succeeding century. Early in the 13th century the principality of Moscow was created as an appanage (royal grant) within the grand principality of Vladimir, and this new seat grew in importance when Michael Khorobrit, brother of Alexander Nevsky, conquered Vladimir (1248) and made himself prince of both centres. Daniel, Nevsky’s son and the progenitor of all the later Rurikid princes of Moscow, had a long and successful reign (1276–1303), but at his death the principality still embraced little more than the territory of the present Moscow province (an area of 140 miles [225 km] in length and width). The beginning of Moscow’s rise to its later preeminence came during the reign of Daniel’s son Ivan (1328–41), who, by cooperating with Öz Beg, khan of the Golden Horde, and also by his shrewd purchases (probably of tax-farming rights), greatly expanded the influence of his principality.

The southwest

The lands of Galicia and Volhynia were always ethnically and economically distinct from the Kievan region proper, as well as from more distant regions. Agriculture was highly developed, and trade, particularly in the valuable local salt, tended to take westward and overland routes. Galicia, already a separate principality by 1100, grew as Kiev declined. Later, Roman Mstislavich of Volhynia (ruled 1199-1205) conquered Galicia and united the two principalities. Under his son Daniel (1201–64), difficulties with the Galician landed magnates and the interference of the Hungarians weakened the principality, and it was subjugated in 1240 by the Mongol invasion. Eventually this region came under the domination of Lithuania (Volhynia) and Poland (Galicia).

The Mongol invasion

In 1223, when the first Mongol reconnaissance into former Kievan territory led to the disastrous defeat of a Volhynian-Galician-Polovtsian army on the Kalka River, the Rurikid principalities had for generations been intermittently at war. Kiev was in ruins, Novgorod was preoccupied with commerce and with its northern neighbours, Galicia was being torn internally and drawn increasingly into Polish and Hungarian dynastic affairs, and Vladimir-Suzdal, apparently the leading principality, was unable to resist the finely organized and skillful mounted bowmen of the steppe, the greatest military force of the age.

Pious tradition, born of the works of monkish annalists and court panegyrists, has exaggerated both the destructiveness of the first Mongol conquests and the strength of the resistance. The Mongols aimed to revive, under a unified political system, the trade that had traditionally crossed the Central Asian steppe and vitalized the economy of the pastoral nomads. As they moved westward, they gained the collaboration of groups of Turkic nomads and the predominantly Iranian and Muslim traders in the towns of the old Silk Road; they encountered the greatest resistance in sedentary political centres and among landowning elites. The lands of the Rus presented numerous similarities with the Central Asian areas that the Mongols had already conquered. There too, a former commercial empire had fallen apart into an aggregation of warring principalities. There too, ready recruits were to be found—in the Polovtsians, who controlled the lower Dnieper and Volga and Don, and in the Muslim merchants, who dealt in the towns on the Crimean Peninsula and the upper Volga. These merchants showed the way, first (1223) to the Crimean Peninsula and up the Volga to the old centre of Bulgar, later to Ryazan, Rostov, and the Suzdalian towns, and still later (1240) to Kiev and Galicia.

Many of the conquered cities made a striking recovery and adjustment to the new relationships. Some towns, such as Kiev, never fully recovered in Mongol times, but the cities of the Vladimir-Suzdal region clearly prospered. New centres, such as Moscow and Tver, hardly mentioned in any source before the Mongol period, arose and flourished in Mongol times.

Thus, the Mongol invasion was not everywhere a catastrophe. The local princely dynasties continued unchanged in their traditional seats; some princes resisted the new authority and were killed in battle, but no alien princes ever became established in Slavic territory. Few Mongols remained west of the Urals after the conquest; political and fiscal administration was entrusted to the same Turkic clan leaders and Islamic merchants who had for generations operated in the area. The whole of the Novgorodian north remained outside the sphere of direct Tatar control, although the perspicacious burghers maintained correct relations with the khans.

After a brief attempt to revive the ancient centres of Bulgar and Crimea, the Jucids (the family of Jöchi, son of Genghis Khan, who inherited the western portion of his empire) established a new capital, Itil. (It was moved to New Sarai, near the site of Tsaritsyn, modern Volgograd, about 1260.) These towns became the commercial and administrative centres of what was later to be called the “ Golden Horde” (the term is probably a Western invention). Its East Slavic territories were tributaries of an extensive empire, including, at its height, Crimea, the Polovtsian steppe from the Danube to the Ural River, the former territories of the Bulgar empire (including the fur-rich Mordvinian forests and parts of western Siberia), and in Asia the former kingdom of Khwārezm, including Urgench, the cultural capital of the Jucids. Control of the Slavic lands was exercised through the native princes, some of whom spent much of their time at the Mongol capital, and through agents charged with overseeing the activities of the princes and particularly the fiscal levies.

This multinational commercial empire was unstable. Early in the history of the Golden Horde, the khans of Sarai, who tended to reflect the interests of the Volga tribes, were challenged by the tribal princes of the west, whose control of the Danube, Bug, and Dnieper routes and of the access to Crimea gave them considerable political and economic power. As early as 1260, Nokhai, one of these western chieftains, showed his independence of Sarai by establishing his own foreign policy, and toward the end of the 13th century he seized control of Sarai itself. At his death the eastern tribes reestablished their control in Sarai, but, in the reign of the great Öz Beg (1313-41), the high point of Golden Horde power, the west was again ascendant. Öz Beg based his power upon firm control of Crimea and had extensive relations with the Genoese and Venetians, who controlled the main ports there. After the death of Öz Beg’s son Jani Beg in 1357, however, the empire began to reveal serious internal strains. The tribes of the west paid little heed to the khans who appeared in dizzying succession in Sarai; the northern Russian princes fell to quarreling and to maneuvering for their own advantage in the internecine politics of the Golden Horde; the Volga Bulgar region was detached by a dissident Tatar prince; and the lands of the east were drawn into the orbit of the Turkic conqueror Timur (Tamerlane).

The Golden Horde’s last cycle of integration and dismemberment was closely linked with events in Timur’s domains. Tokhtamysh, son of a minor Tatar prince, had been unsuccessfully involved in the skirmishes around the throne of Sarai in the 1370s and had fled to the court of Timur, with whose aid he returned to Sarai and vanquished the tribal leaders who had opposed him. Having defeated and made peace with them, he now turned to defeat Mamai (1381), who had the previous year been defeated by Prince Dmitry Donskoy (grand prince of Moscow, 1359–89). Mamai’s western tribal allies went over to Tokhtamysh, and, for a brief time, the major components of the tribal structure of the Golden Horde were reunited. Tokhtamysh successfully attacked Moscow (just as Mamai had hoped to do) and set about consolidating his gains. As his power grew, however, Tokhtamysh was drawn into a struggle with Timur, who had conquered much of Iran, the south Caucasus, and eastern Anatolia. After a number of encounters in the northern Caucasus, Timur, who apparently was intent upon diversion of east-west trade through his own Transoxanian and north Iranian territories, set out to destroy Tokhtamysh and the latter’s commercial centres. In 1395–96 Timur’s armies systematically annihilated Sarai, Azov, and Kaffa. The Golden Horde never recovered; its subsequent history is a record of struggles among its erstwhile subjects for supremacy and attempts to restore political and commercial stability to the steppe.

From the beginning of the Tatar period, the Rurikid princes displayed much disunity. During the reign of Öz Beg there was a shift of alignments. The princes of Moscow and their allies, together with Öz Beg and his Crimean supporters, generally opposed the princes of Tver, Pskov, and, intermittently, Novgorod. The major punitive measures directed by Öz Beg against Tver with Muscovite support were a part of this pattern.

The links forged in the 14th century between Moscow and Crimea (and Sarai, while Öz Beg controlled it) were crucial to Moscow’s later preeminence. They not only afforded Moscow a steady and profitable export trade for its furs but, because of contacts between Crimean merchants and Byzantium, also led quite naturally to close relations between the Muscovite hierarchy and the patriarchate of Constantinople. This special relationship was but one of the reasons for the eventual rise of Moscow as leader of the Russian lands. Admirably situated in the northeast, linked with all of the major navigable river systems and with the steppe, close to the major fur-producing regions and to the most intensely settled agricultural lands, served by a succession of shrewd and long-lived princes, Moscow came naturally to a position of preeminence during the 14th century and was best equipped to enter the struggle for the political inheritance of the Golden Horde that followed the destruction of its capitals by Timur.

Cultural life and the “Tatar influence”

Most traditional scholarship has accepted the notions that (1) the Mongol invasion “destroyed” Kievan culture, (2) the Tatar period was one of “stultification” and “isolation from the West,” and (3) “Russian” culture was deeply influenced by Golden Horde culture, in particular by “Oriental” conceptions of despotism. These views do not accord with the evidence and should probably be discarded.

In the first place, it seems incorrect to say that Kievan culture was destroyed. In the shift of the cultural centre of gravity to the numerous regional centres, Kievan traditions were in the main continued and in some cases (i.e., Galician literature, Novgorodian icon painting, Suzdalian architecture) enjoyed remarkable development.

Similarly, the notions of stultification and isolation from the West cannot be supported. The enormous Novgorodian culture sphere, the upper Dnieper territories that eventually came under Lithuanian control, and the principalities of Volhynia and Galicia all had, if anything, closer contacts with western and central Europe than in the previous period.

As to “Tatar influence,” in the areas of religion and intellectual life, it was practically nonexistent. Control of formal culture by the Orthodox clergy and Muslim divines and limited contact between the Slavic and Turkic populations prevented it. There is no evidence that any single Turkic or Islamic text of religious, philosophical, literary or scholarly content was translated directly into Slavonic or any East Slavic vernacular during the period.

Concerning the secular culture of the court and counting house, the situation was radically different. These spheres were controlled by very pragmatic princes, merchants, and diplomats. There, Slavs and Tatars elaborated together an international subculture whose language was Turkic and whose administrative techniques and chancellery culture were essentially those of the Golden Horde. Slavic merchants took full part in this culture, and the princes of Muscovy in particular developed their original court culture and chancellery practices within its context. These borrowings, however, were not of a theoretical or ideological nature, and to ascribe later despotism—and its theoretical basis—to “Oriental” influence is to misunderstand the development of Muscovite absolutism.

The post-Sarai period

The collapse of the Golden Horde saw a growth in the political power of the old sedentary centres—Muscovy, Lithuania, the Volga Bulgar region (which became the khanate of Kazan), and Crimea. This growth was accompanied by dynastic struggles. This period of recovery also saw cooperation among the emerging dynasties against their internal enemies and toward the stabilization of the steppe.

Even by the end of the 14th century, Moscow’s position was by no means as dominating as the cartographers’ conventions or the historians’ hindsight makes it seem. Other centres—Lithuania, Tver, Novgorod—were as rich and powerful as Moscow; many of the areas nominally subject to the Muscovite princes retained their own dynasties, whose members often broke away and sided with one of Moscow’s rivals. Only after a series of dynastic conflicts in the early 15th century did Moscow emerge as the leader of the Russian territory.

The struggle began at the death of Vasily I, a son of Dmitry Donskoy, in 1425. The succession of his 10-year-old son Vasily II was challenged by his uncle Yury, prince of the important upper Volga commercial town of Galich. After many turns of fortune, Vasily II succeeded, with the help of Lithuanian and Tatar allies, in establishing his house permanently as the rulers of Muscovy.

The Grand Duchy of Moscow, or Grand Principality of Moscow (Russian: Великое Княжество Московское, Velikoye Knyazhestvo Moskovskoye, also known in English simply as Muscovy from the Latin: Moscoviae) was a Rus' principality of the Late Middle Ages centered around Moscow, and the predecessor state of the Tsardom of Russia in the early modern period.

The state originated with the Mongol invasion of Rus’, at which point Daniel I was appointed to the newly-created Moscow in 1283 as effectively a puppet to the Mongol Empire (under the “Tatar Yoke”), the latter of which had eclipsed and eventually absorbed its parent duchy of Vladimir-Suzdal by the 1320s. It later annexed the Novgorod Republic in 1478 and conquered the Grand Duchy of Tver in 1485, and ultimately remained ruled by the Mongols for most of its history until 1480.

Muscovites, Suzdalians and other inhabitants of the Rus' principality were able to maintain their Slavic, Pagan and Orthodox traditions for the most part under the Tatar Yoke. Ivan III further consolidated the state during his 43-year reign, campaigning against his major remaining rival power, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and by 1503 he had tripled the territory of his realm, adopting the title of tsar and claiming the title of “Ruler of all Rus’.” By his marriage to the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, he claimed Muscovy to be the successor state of the Roman Empire, the “Third Rome.” The emigration of the Byzantine people influenced and strengthened Moscow's identity as the heir of the Orthodox traditions. Ivan's successor Vasili III also enjoyed military success, gaining Smolensk from Lithuania in 1512, pushing Muscovy's borders to the Dniepr River. Vasili's son Ivan IV (later known as Ivan the Terrible) was an infant at his father's death in 1533. He was crowned in 1547, assuming the title of tsar together with the proclamation of Tsardom of Russia (Russian: Царство Русcкое, Tsarstvo Russkoye).

Growth of Grand Duchy of Moscow in 1300-1462 in Russian.

Ivan IV Vasilyevich (/ˈaɪvən/; Russian: Ива́н Васи́льевич, tr. Ivan Vasilyevich; 25 August 1530 – 28 March [O.S. 18 March] 1584), commonly known as Ivan the Terrible (Russian: Ива́н Гро́зный​ (help·info), Ivan Grozny; "Ivan the Formidable" or "Ivan the Fearsome", Latin: Ioannes Severus,) was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and the first Tsar of Russia from 1547 to 1584.

Ivan was the son of Vasili III, the Rurikid ruler of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, and was appointed Grand Prince at three years old after his father's death. A group of reformers, united around the young Ivan and known as the "Chosen Council", declared him Tsar (Emperor) of All Rus' in 1547 at the age of sixteen, establishing the Tsardom of Russia with Moscow as the predominant state. Ivan's reign was characterized by Russia's transformation from a medieval state into an empire under the Tsar, though at immense cost to its people and its broader, long-term economy. In the young years of Ivan, there was a conquest of the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. After consolidating his power, Ivan got rid of the advisers from the "Chosen Council" and triggered the Livonian War, which ravaged Russia and resulted in the loss of Livonia and Ingria, but allowed him to establish greater autocratic control over Russia’s nobility, whom he violently purged in the Oprichnina. The later years of Ivan's reign were also marked by the Massacre of Novgorod and the burning of Moscow by Tatars. Ivan was a patron of trade (he gave monopoly to Muscovy Company), and the founder of Russia’s first publishing house, the Moscow Print Yard.

Historic sources present disparate accounts of Ivan's complex personality: he was described as intelligent and devout, but also prone to paranoia, rages, and episodic outbreaks of mental instability that increased with age. Ivan is popularly believed to have killed his eldest son and heir Ivan Ivanovich and the latter’s unborn son during his outbursts, which left the politically ineffectual Feodor Ivanovich to inherit the throne, a man whose rule directly led to the end of the Rurikid dynasty and the beginning of the Time of Troubles.

Birth of Ivan Ivanovich, son of Ivan the Terrible and Anastasia Romanovna, from Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible.

The Varangians (Old Norse: Væringjar; Greek: Βάραγγοι, Várangoi, Βαριάγοι, Variágoi) was the name given by Greeks, Rus' people, and others to Vikings, who between the 9th and 11th centuries ruled the medieval state of Kievan Rus’, settled among many territories of modern Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, and formed the Byzantine Varangian Guard. According to the 12th century Kievan Primary Chronicle, a group of Varangians known as the Rus’ settled in Novgorod in 862 under the leadership of Rurik. Before Rurik, the Rus' might have ruled an earlier hypothetical polity. Rurik's relative Oleg conquered Kiev in 882 and established the state of Kievan Rus', which was later ruled by Rurik's descendants.

Engaging in trade, piracy, and mercenary activities, Varangians roamed the river systems and portages of Gardariki, as the areas north of the Black Sea were known in the Norse sagas. They controlled the Volga trade route (between the Varangians and the Arabs), connecting the Baltic to the Caspian Sea, and the Dnieper and Dniester trade route (between Varangians and the Greeks) leading to the Black Sea and Constantinople. Those were the critically important trade links at that time, connecting Medieval Europe with Arab Caliphates and the Byzantine Empire; Most of the silver coinage in the West came from the East via those routes.

Attracted by the riches of Constantinople, the Varangian Rus' initiated a number of Rus’-Byzantine Wars, some of which resulted in advantageous trade treaties. At least from the early 10th century many Varangians served as mercenaries in the Byzantine Army, constituting the elite Varangian Guard (the personal bodyguards of Byzantine Emperors). Eventually most of them, both in Byzantium and in Eastern Europe, were converted from paganism to Orthodox Christianity, culminating in the Christianization of Kievan Rus' in 988. Coinciding with the general decline of the Viking Age, the influx of Scandinavians to Rus' stopped, and Varangians were gradually assimilated by East Slavs by the late 11th century.

Realm of Kievan Rus' at its height (with dependent lands)

Kievan Rus' (Old East Slavic: Рѹсь (Rus' ), Рѹсьскаѧ землѧ (Rus’skaya zemlya); Latin: Rus(s)ia, Ruscia, Ruzzia, Rut(h)enia) was a loose federation of East Slavic and Finnic peoples in Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century, under the reign of the Varangian Rurik dynasty. The modern nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all claim Kievan Rus’ as their cultural ancestors.

At its greatest extent, in the mid-11th century, it stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and from the headwaters of the Vistula in the west to the Taman Peninsula in the east,[7][8] uniting the majority of East Slavic tribes.

According to Russian historiography, the first ruler to start uniting East Slavic lands into what has become known as Kievan Rus' was Prince Oleg (882-912). He extended his control from Novgorod south along the Dnieper river valley to protect trade from Khazar incursions from the east, and he moved his capital to the more strategic Kiev. Sviatoslav I (died 972) achieved the first major expansion of Kievan Rus' territorial control, fighting a war of conquest against the Khazars. Vladimir the Great (980-1015) introduced Christianity with his own baptism and, by decree, extended it to all inhabitants of Kiev and beyond. Kievan Rus' reached its greatest extent under Yaroslav the Wise (1019-1054); his sons assembled and issued its first written legal code, the Rus' Justice, shortly after his death.

The state declined beginning in the late 11th century and during the 12th century, disintegrating into various rival regional powers. It was further weakened by economic factors, such as the collapse of Rus' commercial ties to the Byzantine Empire due to the decline of Constantinople and the accompanying diminution of trade routes through its territory. The state finally fell to the Mongol invasion of the 1240s.