THE MYTHS THAT MADE PUTIN’S WAR
The remains of a burnt-out Russian tank in a vegetable garden in Velyka Dymerka, Kyiv
[My A Short History of Russia was first written for President Reagan and his National Security Council in January 1985, first published on TTP in March 2004, and as an Archive in February 2024 to expose Putin’s myth of Russia’s history in his interview with Tucker Carlson. Here is distinguished historian Timothy Snyder exposing that myth on a much deeper level.]
Vladimir Putin, the author of the worst war of our century, believes that an ancient priestly chronicle sanctifies the endless bloodshed. The truth about that work of art, The Tale of Bygone Years, helps us to see the truth about Russia’s war.
Its hero, the Danish chieftain Rørek, leads us to another work of art, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. We will need the art to get at the tragedy. Putin is a cynical man, a master of post-truth politics. But at the bottom of the deepest cynicism can often be found one very naive idea.
Putin’s is that Russia has an ancient, unbroken and holy past that includes Ukraine.
The Tale, a hodgepodge assembled by medieval Kyiv monks in the early 1100s, became for him a kind of prophecy. In a pre-invasion text of his own and in a long interview with Tucker Carlson last year, Putin presents the life of Rørek as the starting point of a sacred history in which Russia, 900 years later, must invade Ukraine.
Last week in Alaska, Putin described Ukrainians as “a brotherly nation” with “the same roots” — which must be liberated by violence from their own mistaken belief that they constitute a separate people. What the Tale really offers is an account of the appearance of Scandinavians in the east Baltic region in the early Middle Ages.
An early protagonist is the ninth-century Rørek, whose name in the Tale is spelled “Rurik”. In the Tale’s entry for the year 862, we find Slavs asking to be ruled by Scandinavians. This unlikely twist seems borrowed from a Scandinavian saga, since Danes and Swedes liked to justify plunder with “invitations” from local people.
A Dane called Rørek probably did pacify lands in the east Baltic region. But he was never in Kyiv, a thousand miles away from where he would have landed, nor were his people. It would be another century before Scandinavians began to settle in Kyiv.
Regardless, nothing that happened in medieval eastern Europe bound future states to make war against each other a thousand years later — any more than, say, Carolingian history now requires France to invade Belgium or the past of the Maya requires a Mexican invasion of Guatemala.
The Rørek story is important for a different reason: for its instruction about the mythical politics of imagined dynasties. Monks in Kyiv, writing centuries later in a state we know as Kyivan Rus, wanted to establish that their own patrons were heirs of a glorious tradition.
So they made Rørek a hero, had him stay in the Baltic region, provided him with a biblically long life, had him produce a baby on his deathbed, and then had that baby smuggled into Kyiv as his heir. We can be confident that this did not, in fact, happen.
The maths do not work, and the archaeological evidence is clear. The monks were using a very distant past to support their present rulers, to say that they were more important than their rivals in the Baltic region. Nine hundred years later, Putin is using their text, the Tale, to do the same thing on a far more extravagant scale.
It supposedly means that Moscow must rule Kyiv — although Moscow did not even exist at the time of the ninth-century events recorded. Moscow became a power center under the Mongols in the fourteenth-century.
After Rørek’s time, other Scandinavians took control of Kyiv. Their monks wrote a Tale to try to justify their pre-eminence. That state, the Kyivan Rus kingdom, collapsed after the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Most of it was incorporated by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
The new city of Moscow, which had been in a north-eastern province of Rus, fell under the khans, who chose local leaders to collect their tribute. After a couple of hundred years of this, the rulers of Moscow, shaking off Mongol rule, decided they wanted a prouder story of their past.
So they reached back about 700 years, snatched Rørek from the Tale, and invented a Rurikid dynasty. Peter the Great, when he founded his Russian empire in 1721, reached back even further to appropriate the Scandinavian name Rus.
New states demand myths of ancient origins, as Peter (and now Putin) demonstrate. The Danish chieftain Rørek did not found Kyivan Rus or any other state; even if he had, it would be absurd to imagine that its medieval history justifies bombs over Ukrainian cities today.
His legend teaches us about fictions of power, and leads us to another legend about the mechanisms of power. We learn much more about a similar Rørek in the medieval compendium Gesta Danorum (“Deeds of the Danes”), written by Saxo Grammaticus in the late 1100s.
Here, Rørek the Dane is a pagan Viking, “the bane of Christendom.” Whereas the Tale keeps him in the Baltic region in order to produce a useful son from his deathbed, the Gesta Danorum has him back in Denmark with a daughter named Gerutha.
As a prince in Denmark, says Saxo, Rørek watched over the rivalry of two chieftain brothers, Feng and Orvendil. Impressed by Orvendil’s conquests, Rørek gave him Gerutha to marry. Feng then murdered his brother from jealousy and married Gerutha himself. This was all witnessed by Orvendil’s son — Rørek’s grandson.
The young man feigned madness to avoid being murdered by his uncle and plotted revenge. His name was Amleth. Shakespeare called him Hamlet.
Rørek stands behind the curtain of the greatest of the Shakespearean dramas. But he does not stand at the beginning of Russian statehood.
Putin does seem to be invested in his account of the east European past, and in the notion that war is needed to make it true. One can believe in something unreal and then perform it, bringing others along into a violent transformation. Hannah Arendt called this totalitarianism.
It might seem like madness to claim that a land must be conquered because of a non-existent ethnos misread from a faltering story in an ancient Tale in which cities are taken by babies, wars are decided by wrestling matches and a ruler dies because of a horse prophecy.
Or perhaps it is politics remaking the world, in death and destruction, to correspond to art.
A century and more ago, a time when the Russian empire was canonizing the Rørek story, Ukrainian thinkers were taking a different tack. They were inventing social history (Mykhaïlo Hrushevsky), explaining the necessity of intercultural encounter for self-awareness (Ivan Franko) and state-building (Viacheslav Lypynsky), and appropriating elements of the classical past of Scythia and Greece (Lesya Ukraïnka).
These writers are now enjoying a renaissance. As the humanities flourish in war-torn Ukraine, as Ukrainians publish innovative global histories, the aggressor state implements extreme forms of history politics, enforcing the official view of eternal, pristine Russia.
If a dictator such as Putin can claim that the past froze at a certain point, then everything that happened at any other point becomes metaphysically wrong, subject to violent punishment.
If it were true that Ukraine belongs to Russia in the 2020s because a Russian dictator knows a legend about a Viking in the 860s, then the tens of millions of people who actually live there would have no voice in their own identity: no choice but to accept the executions, the torture, the kidnapping of children.
Medieval myths merge with modern-day post-truth propaganda. Neither justify attempting the genocide of a people and extinction of their freedom.
Timothy Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe. Formerly the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, he now holds the Chair in Modern European History at the University of Toronto.