Basic Features of Political Organization and Social Structure of Rurikid Polity in the 10th Century

Ch. 11. P. 283–292.

Щавелев А. С.

The key goal of the chapter is to summaries the most promising ideas and approaches to to the social organization of the people named the Rus’ of the 9th – 10th centuries and to the history of the Rurikid polity created by one of such groups around Kiev in the 10th century. This Rurikid local polity appeared circa 900. It was not a long process of “maturing” of its political structure from deep antiquity, but it was a fast outburst, that required risky experiments from this Rus’ Kiev’s community. This community in Kiev underwent rapid identical and cultural transformations. The Rurikid polity on the Dnieper in the middle of 10th century was a compact polity with the center in Kiev, around which other fortified settlements of the Rus’ people have been grouped along the radius. This basic territory around Kiev was surrounded on almost all sides by the territories of subordinated Slavic communities. It was a typical chiefdom with two (later three) levels of political control and the leading kin (lineage) of the princes (“chiefs”) Rurikids in the head of it. All attempts to prove that this polity was a “state” were inspired only by wishful thinking of different recearches and by their attempts of retrospective projection of the realities of the 11th century on the previous 10th century.

Keywords: Древняя Русь, history of Old Russia, political anthropology, политическая антропология, Раннее Средневековье, Восточная Европа в древности и средневековье и, Complex Chiefdom, Problems of Russian medieval history, вождество, chiefdoms, Early medieval Europe, medieval history

Publication based on the results of: Evolution of the Social Institutes: Historical and Anthropological Contexts (2020)

In book

The Evolution of Social Institutions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Bondarenko D. M., Kowalewski S., Birch J., Claessen H. M., Kradin N., Nemirovsky A., Korotayev A., Hui V. T., Kim N., Small D., Shchavelev A., Marey A. V., Baskin K., Pozdnyakova A., Denisova T., Harris L., Dye D., Aleksandrov G., Beekman C., Stanish C., Roscoe P., Davletshin A. Springer, 2020.