When I began writing the Old Rus series, I knew only that I wanted to work with what I thought of as Russian folklore. Vasilisa drew largely on the folk canon of Russian lore, but with Elena the Brave, I dipped into another canon altogether — the byliny, oral ballads based on an idealized 10th century Kievan Rus. At the time, I thought of Kiev as the cradle of Russia, although in my research, I did peruse books like the one pictured above, which I highly recommend. But it was not until the invasion of Ukraine that I really began to grapple with the nature of Kievan Rus’ history, and it’s relationship to the Russian and Ukrainian identities — and as it turns out, the Polish too.

History is written by the victors, and the victors aren’t just the ones that win the wars. They are those who rule the citadels of academia too. The history of Ukraine, and the nature (and even existence) of a distinctly Ukrainian identity, has been shaped by four distinct historical perspectives. The dominant one, taught in the Western world until recently, is the Russian version, but there are three other narratives as well — the Ukrainian, the Soviet, and the Polish.

The first scholarly histories of Eastern Europe were not begun until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rather late in the game. At that time, the only East Slavic state in existence was the Russian Empire, headed by a dynastic tsar from Moscow, and later St. Petersburg. The historical scheme that supported the tsarist state featured a Muscovite tsardom that delivered Russia from internecine wars among the lesser princes, and from the Mongol yoke, in the fourteenth century — as only an all-powerful leader could. To establish a proper lineage for the dynasty, fourteenth century monks recopied earlier chronicles, “improving” them to trace the descent of the Muscovite rulers to the princes of Kievan Rus, who could in turn be traced back to the semi-legendary, Varangian (Viking) ruler of Novgorod, Riuryk. This created a kind of “manifest destiny” for Russia, deemed to be the central identity of a great, pan-Slavic state — the cradle of which was Kiev. In this narrative, after the Mongol invasion of the mid-thirteenth century and the destruction of Kiev, the political center of Russia, and its noble counterparts, migrated northwards, eventually to Moscow. This nineteenth century narrative emphasized the duty of the “mother country” to reunify Veliko-Rus (Great Russia), Belo-Rus (White Russia), and Malo-Rus (Little Russia) — an idea still employed in the current conflict of today.

The beginning of a distinctly Ukrainian awareness coincided with the appearance of the first general histories of Ukraine in the eighteenth century. Styled as histories of “Little Russia,” the first histories centered around accounts of the Zaporozhian Cossacks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and later culminated in a mid-nineteenth century work of uncertain authorship, the first to treat Ukraine not as a province of Russia or Poland, but as an independent country deriving from Kievan times. Ukraine attained the height of its powers during the Cossack era in this narrative, and began to decline only in the eighteenth century after coming increasingly under Muscovite, and later Russian, rule. This sparked a kind of national revival, not only among historians, but in the popular imagination as realized by Ukrainian poets, folklorists, and linguists. The idealized Ukrainian state, and the essential nature of its people, was not crafted in the image of the strong, central state beholden to an absolute ruler, but rather the egalitarian ideals of the Cossacks, who were “equal among themselves,” and who consistently resisted Polish rule through a series of uprisings, particularly in the seventeenth century. While these uprisings were considered the height of Ukrainian national identity, they were seen as the turning point in the Polish historical narrative, the beginning of Poland’s decline as a geopolitical power.

The Polish have their own perception of Ukrainian history, influenced by pre-World War I histories that depicted the Poles as discovering an uncivilized frontier when they annexed Ukraine in the sixteenth century, into which they brought culture and the bases for state formation. Because of the intermarriage of certain princely families, the Kieven inheritance was deemed to belong to the Poles. As for the fourth perspective, with the creation of the Soviet state after the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian narrative was progressively tweaked to conform to Marxist ideals, especially after Stalin came to power in the 1930s and most members of the Ukrainian historical school were exiled or imprisoned. In the Great Russian Bolshevik version of Marxism, the problem of national identities was solved with typically Marxist pragmatism — through the theory of the “lesser evil,” which posited that while the annexation of non-Russian peoples was an evil, being annexed to another, dominant state would prove a greater evil to states unable to maintain their own independence.

Which version is the real one? Obviously, there are no absolute answers in the domain of history, which is in turn the domain of story. This insight is perhaps the most useful — that it is how history is used, and abused, that most marks a narrative as “correct” or “incorrect.” Clearly, facts underlie historical narratives, and facts must be supported by real scholarship to stand the best chance of validating a narrative. Yet, it is the narrative itself that is most subject to corruption, for history is the most often a chronicle of power.

For my part, as I begin preparations to write The Alatyr Stone, concluding my Old Rus series, I find myself mindful of trying to get it right, at least in my small way. You can tell me how I’ve done when the book comes out next year. In the meantime, I will continue to be a student of this extraordinary part of the world, exemplified, for me, by the resilience and indomitable spirit of its people.